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Letters 2 Rules for Radicals Claudia Koonz, Tenney Ford Easy Chair 5 You Can Run . . . Walter Kirn Harper’s Index 9 Readings 11 Jane Does the history of an underground abortion service Animal House a Texas town capitulates to cat memes Ways of Seeing Michael Clune’s aversion to eye contact Grim Sleeper the many deaths of Michel Leiris And . . . Olaf Breuning, Dapper Bruce Lafitte, Deana Lawson, and procrastinators tax the U.K. revenue agency’s patience Folio 25 THE MARCH ON EVERYWHERE Leslie Jamison The ragged glory of female activism From the Archive 38 Nice Girls Mary Gaitskill Report 41 DEFENDER OF THE COMMUNITY Alan Feuer Bill de Blasio gambles on doing the right thing Photo Essay 50 ASPHALT GARDENS Samuel James Letter from Germany 66 ECHT DEUTSCH Yascha Mounk How the refugee crisis is changing a nation’s identity Letter from Japan 73 THE BOY WITHOUT A COUNTRY Jessica Weisberg Tokyo’s painful exclusion of immigrants Story 79 NECESSARY DRIVING SKILLS Nat Segnit Reviews 91 NEW BOOKS Christine Smallwood BEHIND THE FIG LEAF Elaine Blair Mary McCarthy’s sexual revolution DOOR TO DOOR Francine Prose Mohsin Hamid’s displaced persons

Puzzle 103 Richard E. Maltby Jr. Cover: At the Women’s March on Washington, January 21, 2017 Findings 104 © Benedict Evans/Redux

LETTERS magazine

John R. MacArthur, President and Publisher Editor James Marcus Managing Editor Hasan Altaf Senior Editors Katia Bachko, Emily Cooke, Giles Harvey, Betsy Morais Editor Emeritus Lewis H. Lapham Editor-at-Large Ellen Rosenbush Washington Editor Andrew Cockburn Art Director Stacey Clarkson James Deputy Art Director Sam Finn Cate-Gumpert Poetry Editor Ben Lerner Web Editor Joe Kloc Associate Editors Camille Bromley, Matthew Sherrill Assistant Editors Winston Choi-Schagrin, Matthew Hickey, Ava Kofman, Stephanie McFeeters, Rachel Poser Assistant to the Editor Rules for Radicals clarity before testing their efficacy. Adrian Kneubuhl Voters in North Carolina’s newly Editorial Interns Gabriella Dunn, Emma Hitchcock, “Resistance” derives from the drawn Congressional districts will Kendrick McDonald, Natalie Simone Meade Latin verb resistere, literally “to go to the polls this year. As we Art Intern Lydia Chodosh stand against.” A call to action—to wade into uncharted political wa- Contributing Editors stand up—is embedded in the very ters, “resistance” means using the Andrew J. Bacevich, Kevin Baker, Dan Baum, Tom Bissell, Joshua Cohen, John Crowley, etymology of the word. But the re- tried-and-true tools of democracy to Rivka Galchen, William H. Gass, flections in the recent issue tell us make our system work again. Gary Greenberg, Jack Hitt, Edward Hoagland, Scott Horton, Frederick Kaufman, more about how to think than how Garret Keizer, Mark Kingwell, Walter Kirn, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, to act [“Trump: A Resister’s Guide,” Claudia Koonz Clancy Martin, Duncan Murrell, Forum, February]. Vince Passaro, Francine Prose, Professor Emeritus, Duke University Christine Smallwood, Zadie Smith, Our most urgent priority is to act Durham, N.C. Rebecca Solnit, Matthew Stevenson, now and think later. Corey Robin John Edgar Wideman, Tom Wolfe Contributing Artists and other contributors offer new Olive Ayhens, Lisa Elmaleh, Lena Herzog, ways to understand the nature of Wesley Yang hits the nail on the Aaron Huey, Samuel James, Steve Mumford, Richard Ross, Tomas van Houtryve, the menace we face, but the strate- head in his essay for the February Fo- Danijel Žeželj gies to resist that menace do not rum. “Four decades of neoliberal glo- Vice President and General Manager Lynn Carlson need much rethinking. A group of balization,” he writes, “have cleaved Vice President, Circulation former congressional staffers recent- our country into two hostile classes.” I Shawn D. Green ly created a website called Indivisi- used to argue about this with my pro- Vice President, Public Relations Giulia Melucci ble: A Practical Guide for Resisting NAFTA Democratic friends during Vice President, Advertising the Trump Agenda, which encour- the Clinton Administration, when Jocelyn D. Giannini Virginia Navarro, Assistant to the Publisher ages people to organize locally, free trade was embraced by both par- Kim Lau, Senior Accountant bombard elected representatives ties as a way to make America more Eve Brant, Office Manager Courtney Joyal, Staff with calls, and turn Republicans’ prosperous. At that time, nobody Advertising Sales: misdeeds into media buzz. These seemed to be thinking about the (212) 420-5760; Fax: (212) 260-1096 tasks are as unoriginal as they are Americans in aging factories and fray- Natalie C. Holly, Advertising Sales Representative Marisa Nakasone, Production and Advertising mundane—and, to be honest, we ing communities. Services Manager don’t have time to wait for analytic What economists don’t seem to Sales Representatives Chicago: Tauster Media Resources, Inc. understand is that a country cannot (630) 858-1558; [email protected] Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response. export good jobs overseas for three Detroit: Maiorana & Partners, Ltd. Please address mail to Letters, Harper’s (248) 546-2222; [email protected] decades without causing huge prob- Canada: JMB Media International Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. lems at home. They seem to have (450) 538-2468; [email protected] 10012, or email us at [email protected]. Direct Mail: Special Aditions Advertising, LLC Short letters are more likely to be published, no concern for the losers in their [email protected] For subscription queries and orders please call: and all letters are subject to editing. Volume models. And now the losers think 800-444-4653 precludes individual acknowledgment. they have found a champion in

2 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 GROWING YOUR OWN Trump. So we find ourselves with support—particularly intelligence VEGETABLES IS no jobs, no prospects, and an unsta- resources, close air support, and ble demagogue in the White House. medevac assistance—in order to re- duce the shockingly high numbers Tenn ey Ford of casualties experienced by Af- SMART. San Rafael, Calif. ghan forces. Our objective should not be to de- feat the Taliban, since no senior BUYING BOOKS Somehow, the articles in the re- official—Afghan or American, civil- sisters’ guide to Trump missed the ian or military—thinks that force AT HUGE DISCOUNTS IS crucial point. Our federal govern- alone can achieve our strategic goals. ment is the institution that has the But increased military assistance daedabundant best chance of solving income in- from the United States could pres- equality, extricating us from our re- sure the Taliban to come to the ne- liance on fossil fuels, providing gotiating table. We would, of course, health care to all Americans re- have to pair that effort with diploma- gardless of their ability to pay, dis- cy. We should strongly encourage mantling the military-industrial Pakistan to play a more constructive complex, and helping disadvan- regional role and pressure the Na- taged people acquire the skills and tional Unity Government in Kabul knowledge necessary for jobs that to reduce the rampant corruption pay family-sustaining wages. The that delegitimizes it and fuels the in- Trump Administration has neither surgency. Ultimately, the key to a the desire nor the ability to use the successful policy in Afghanistan is to federal government for those pur- shift the focus from winning the war poses. That is the point that needs to winning the peace. to be addressed. Andrew Wilder Al Galves United States Institute of Peace Las Cruces, N.M. Washington

War and Peace Conspiracy Weary

May Jeong’s article makes clear Walter Kirn warns Trump oppo- that it will be challenging to find a nents not to fall victim to conspira- viable path to peace in Afghani- cy theories about his win [“A Grim stan [“The Patient War,” Letter Fairy Tale,” Easy Chair, February]. from Kabul, February]. More than From the wide-open spaces of Mon- fifteen years after invading the tana, he says, this election looked country, the United States still like nothing more than your average lacks a strategy for bringing about a “anticlerical” populist revolt. Kirn negotiated end to the Taliban-led neglects to mention that, thanks to insurgency. While President Trump “river-bound New York” and “grid- has thus far given few signals as to locked L.A.”—places he doesn’t his stance on the issue, the admin- seem to count as real America— istration has an opportunity to take Hillary Clinton beat the supposed a fresh look at how best to fight, populist by nearly 3 million votes. and hopefully end, the longest war Typically, anticlerical revolutions Daedalus in American history. have the numbers to back them up. First, Trump needs to reassure In any event, it’s no conspiracy theo- Books Afghans that the United States is ry to believe that for a candidate as not abandoning them—a destabi- weak as Trump to eke out a win de- lizing narrative that resulted from spite losing the popular vote, an or- STILL THE BEST BROWSE IN the Obama Administration’s deci- ganized campaign of disinformation BARGAIN BOOKS sion to announce deadlines for by a foreign adversary may have withdrawing U.S. troops. Trump played a part. should send a strong message in For a free catalog call the opposite direction by approv- Idan Ivri 1.800.395.2665 ing a modest increase in military Los Angeles salebooks.com

LETTERS 3

EASY CHAIR You Can Run . . . By Walter Kirn

have a theory—not a very good How could it not? Farther on, I see highway tops a rise and runs for a I one—that the reason Google is some sheep. They don’t look quite so stretch along the Madison River, so hot to develop self-driving cars dispirited as cattle, just grumpy and swerving around a blind curve where, is that time behind the wheel is the annoyed; perhaps the ancient con- several years ago, I came upon a log- last significant part of our waking tract they struck with humans—we ging truck that had crashed and over- lives in which it’s inconvenient to use let you shear us, you keep away the turned, its tires still spinning. The the internet. But that’s exactly why I wolves—feels one-sided to them now. driver was trapped in the cab, and prize long road trips, especially lately, The wolves are gone. there was blood. I freed him by prying in this era of gruesome political news I drive into Bozeman, Montana’s the windshield from its frame using and ceaseless social-media conflict: am- new boomtown, which is flush with an iron bar lashed to the truck. He bitious drives are a good excuse for be- the wealth of transplants from con- couldn’t walk, so he sat down on the ing disconnected. Though it’s funny gested California. Surrounding its asphalt while my passenger drove to a that “disconnected” is the word we use, center, hemming in the old farms, spot where cell phones worked and since paying attention to what’s in are big-box stores the size of airplane summoned an ambulance. I never front of you in the here and now used hangars and malls built to look like found out what happened to the man. to be thought of as enlightening. Platonic small-town Main Streets, In the 1970s, when I was a kid, A few weeks back it fell to me to de- with irregular rooflines and old-timey truck drivers enjoyed a curious vogue. liver a carful of books and household facades¸ and sidewalks on which no The last American cowboys, with reb- items to my wife, who was teaching in one ever strolls. Nearby are subdivi- el hearts. Their outlaw-flavored CB Las Vegas. From our home in western sions with noodle-shaped roads and radio slang (“We have bears in the air, Montana, it’s a journey of almost nine the sort of new houses inhabited by Rubber Ducky—do you copy?”) was hundred miles, most of them on I-15, a people who move to the area to build celebrated in movies and hit songs, thinly populated north–south route new houses. I’m amazed by all the including the chart-topping “Convoy,” that passes through only one major ur- huge banks that have sprung up. by C. W. McCall, a name that sounds ban area, Salt Lake City. I’ve done the Who financed them—other banks? like it belongs to a crusty loner but ac- drive at least a dozen times, usually Then comes a zone of mattress fran- tually refers to a duo of former jingle with my satellite radio playing and my chises, tire shops, self-storage units, writers, one of whom was responsible phone turned on, but this time I de- and half-finished steel-frame struc- for Mannheim Steamroller, the act cided to banish all distractions. “Read tures on concrete slabs, which might behind those bombastic electronic- not the Times, Read the Eternities,” become churches or auto dealers, it’s instrumental Christmas albums. That wrote Thoreau. Look around, I think hard to tell. Such fly-by-night archi- Reagan would soon be elected presi- he meant. tecture gives me vertigo, and I think I dent should have been obvious. I set out on a Saturday morning. know why: no basements. The build- Truckers kicked major ass. Blue sky, dark pines, snow on the ings just float. hills, and two lonely mules silhouetted Back in the country, a mountain ntering Idaho, I reflect on the in a hayfield. They have a peculiar range of sail-shaped peaks seems to Esuggestive power of political posture, mules. Their hips are higher keep receding, maintaining its pictur- boundaries. State borders are than their shoulders, their eyes stare esque distance from me. On my left is nothing but arbitrary lines, yet my down their long noses at the ground, a ranch of many thousands of acres. It perceptions change when I know I’ve and they always look embarrassed, in belongs to the billionaire Ted Turner, crossed one. In keeping with its repu- disgrace. Cows, on the other hand, who raises bison on the land. I visited tation as a haven for white separatists appear merely inert, as if bred for a his house once, invited by the novelist and other crackpot isolationists, Ida- hopeless, soulless fugue state. Passing Amy Tan, who was celebrating her ho has always felt meaner and harsher a vast herd, I wonder if eating beef birthday there along with several than Montana. The mountains seem transmits their boredom to people. guests from out of state. The two-lane steeper, the valleys narrower, the air

EASY CHAIR 5 somehow depleted of wholesome ions. Shoppers comport themselves in which I try to remember, in case it North of Idaho Falls I spot a rusty the same way no matter what they’re ever should again. Subaru with a black-and-white bum- shopping for, I notice, flat-footed, When I get back on the road, the per sticker: i stand with scott walk- their chins tucked into their necks. I built-up corridor south of Salt Lake er. On what? Nothing dates faster adopt the same stance as I scan a City is crazily dense and exploding than last year’s zealotry. I pull into shelf of books whose inside covers with new growth, driven in part by Rexburg, a big small town with a dusty bear the stamp of an Air Force base tech conglomerates. To the west, the business district. There’s a Family Cri- library in New Mexico. I pick one NSA’s huge new Data Center reveals sis Center with a thrift shop, a martial- out: Cults of Unreason, published in itself, a complex of blind-looking arts academy, and an outfit where you the early 1970s. Its subject, I gather bunkers on a ridge. We’re all inside can sell your plasma. transform your from the jacket copy, is the appeal of its servers, quite probably, like debt, shouts a billboard for a bank. primitive belief systems in times of chained-up digital ghosts. The locals Even in tumbledown places ham- bewildering technological change. are so patriotic they might approve mered by Amazon and Walmart, there That our Air Force offered pilots such of this. Along the freeway, American are so many new banks. an edgy treatise at the height of the flags of mythic size fly from great I’m hungry. I don’t want junk Cold War surprises me a little and masts in car lots and other enterpris- food from a chain but something stirs my pride. Our fighters weren’t es. Undermining their glory some- homemade, prepared from scratch, just indoctrinated robots, unlike the what are the giant billboards, one af- which in the rural West tends to Russian troops, as I imagine them. ter the other, proclaiming concern mean Mexican. At Ramirez, a chilly In a gas station near the Utah for the opioid epidemic that seems to restaurant with plastic tables bolted border, I glimpse a local paper whose be ravaging the region. Similarly ti- to the walls, I order three tacos from headlines describe mounting anxiety tanic signs allude to other ills, from a man whom I profile as a possible in Ogden’s immigrant community high blood pressure to diabetes. immigrant—though “profile” may and opposition to a planned Verizon Then there are the personal-injury not be the word, since that would cell tower that will be disguised as a lawyers, cocky and ghoulish, promis- suggest a systematic procedure rath- pine tree, complete with artificial ing big payouts to the afflicted and er than a barely conscious reflex. I boughs. I saw one of these fake trees aggrieved. I’m still four hundred have trouble looking him in the eye, a few hours back. It presented an im- miles from Las Vegas, but I can feel and though I’m cramped and stiff provement over that War of the its greedy force field. Love thy neigh- from driving, I take my meal to go. Worlds look of normal towers, but I bor if you can, otherwise sue him. The last news I heard before I hit doubt it would fool a bird. Ferocious semis hurtle past as the the road was about an executive order dry Utah landscape, big and biblical, on immigration. I try not to think of he streets are unusually wide swallows up my car. I feel bad for it as I eat and steer. Up ahead is a sign Tin Salt Lake City, their impe- truckers who work for fleets that slap for a museum show in Idaho Falls. rial dimensions decreed long how am i driving? stickers on their rome: military genius and mighty ago by Brigham Young, who fancied rigs and give a number to call if there’s machines. Strange, but that’s not how himself an enlightened urban planner a problem. By-the-book types and I think of Rome. I reach for the radio and ruled like a king over his Mor- busybodies irk me. For me, the code of dial out of habit, then stop myself, re- mon flock. He had his own secret po- the West is “live and let live.” When membering my pledge. Shreds of wet lice force, historians tell us, and, for my daughter came home to Montana taco meat spill onto my lap. his wives, a few cavernous houses. I for Christmas from her proper New A few miles later I turn off to visit walk out to see one on Sunday morn- En gland college, we talked geography Army Surplus Warehouse, “Idaho’s ing, passing the temple with its gold- and culture as a way of digesting the largest surplus store.” There’s an aston- en angel trumpeting from a granite election, whose results appalled and ishing range of goods inside, every- spire. In Utah, the Sabbath is a big scared her. I had similar feelings, but I thing you might need to face the deal, and the streets are so empty I hid them. When a child has a night- apocalypse: a bin of parachutes, the cross against the red lights. mare, I thought, a father should re- fabric slippery; a glass case of Ka-Bar I was a Mormon myself for a few mind her that dreams aren’t real— knives; a selection of ghillie suits, of years during my teens; my family an- even if he, too, just woke up screaming. the type that snipers wear, white for swered the door to two missionaries. The problem was that Trump’s win winter, green for summer. From the At the top of the Church’s hierarchy was not a dream, so I couldn’t dismiss rafters of the barnlike building hang was the owlish, bespectacled Spen- my daughter’s fears as groundless. I an assortment of militaristic flags. A cer W. Kimball, “prophet, seer, and had to move us to new ground. Higher Vietnam-themed banner reads our revelator.” One day he made a big ground. I burbled out American Stud- cause was just. Others feature stars- doctrinal announcement, opening ies truisms about rural–urban differ- and-bars motifs. Families pushing carts what was called “the priesthood” to ences and the off-my-back mind-set of are roaming the overflowing aisles, black men. They’d been shut out be- the interior. I described Trump as a kids with their parents out to kill a fore. Shamefully, I took all this in classic populist in a line that included Saturday comparing deals on ammo stride—the ban and then its lifting. Teddy Roosevelt, William Jennings boxes and weighted diving boots. Obedience came easily to me then, Bryan, and Andrew Jackson. I was

6 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 trying to sound wise but I heard in Working people rarely retire now. I or- my presentation twangy notes from der a black coffee and she asks me, bad Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristof- “Large or medium?” This makes me ferson movies about running road- smirk. In many American chain res- blocks at ninety per. I’d made similar taurants, I’ve noticed, a medium is the comments on Twitter late one night, smallest drink size there is. Even fun- and I was scourged for them, even nier is when it’s the smaller size of called a nihilist. My daughter was two, because you need three items, kinder. She just yawned. minimum, for one to be a medium. In Beaver, Utah, I take a booth in a “A medium,” I say. sunny old linoleum diner and sample She asks me whether I want what a highway sign claims is Ameri- cream or sugar and I say neither, but ca’s #1 water. It’s no great shakes but it she adds both. No worries. No wor- lured me into town. I eat enough of ries for me, that is. Her, I don’t know. my humdrum patty melt to mollify the In my car, I break my pledge and hovering waitress, who then suggests turn on my phone and read the the house dessert: Grape Nuts pud- headlines. My resistance to the pres- ding. It’s supermarket vanilla custard sure of current events on my little clogged with soggy cereal, a quintes- bubble of watchfulness suddenly sentially Caucasian dish that com- seems wrongheaded, even perverse. bines two packaged foods in a way The stories mostly relate to the im- that leaches flavor from both. Forget migration restrictions. Good luck to the consolidation of agriculture, the all. I think of the bleeding trucker I weakening of organized religion, and helped that day and how the E.M.T.’s the decline of manufacturing—the lifted him into the ambulance and reason our nation’s small towns can’t drove off and reality branched and hold their young is glop like this. that was it. Divergence. Departure. Disconnection. That is the fate of all n hour from Las Vegas, near networks, let’s not be fooled. All St. George, Utah, I realize I’ve roads lead away from Rome and fade Acrossed into the desert. It’s not to paths and, ultimately, to lines of Ride a Beautiful Bike the thorny plant life or reddish sand lonesome footprints. that signals the change, it’s the gar- I crest a hill an hour after sundown We can’t force MLB to make baseballs bage everywhere. Disposable diapers. and there it is, luminous Las Vegas, in Haiti like it used to, although Haiti Soda jugs. Men’s briefs. The desert and strobing and sizzling from miles away. could use the work. We can’t force civic-mindedness don’t seem to mix, And high on its skyline of great ho- children to read Winnie-the-Pooh and while the fear of God may grow tels, in stern gold capital letters suit- Book of Nonsense sharper out here, the fear of society, of able for a temple or a tomb, is the or Edward Lear’s ; one’s fellow man, wanes drastically. presidential name. How much strang- and we can’t make the radio stations This may be why I was briefly jailed er it looks since I last saw it. How his- play “The Death of Emmett Till,” even here once, the only incarceration of toric, both post- and pre-. And how during Black History Month. Frankly, my life. When a cop pulled me over odd that I’d forgotten it was there. they aren’t into it. We can’t help that, for speeding, a warrant surfaced in- In “Life Without Principle,” Tho- because we aren’t the boss of radio. volving an unpaid ticket from years reau argued that withdrawal and re- We are the boss of our bikes, though. before. I shared my cell in the marvel- treat should be a way of life. “I would ously named Purgatory Correctional not run round a corner to see the And our bikes are boss. They’re Facility with a pain-pill addict in with- world blow up,” he wrote—the very untrendy bicycles for everything drawal, who told me how drug bundles same thinker who authored the trea- except racing. They’re affordable yet weighted with small stones were lofted tise “Civil Disobedience.” Which is gorgeous, comfortable beyond belief, into the jail yard from the outside and it? Disengage or disobey? Both, I be- and much safer than carbon fiber stashed in a certain trash can. lieve. It’s why mules look so absent bikes. They’re 2017 anachronisms, Some things you can only learn in when standing still; they’re quietly hard to find, and sometimes you have person. Two days with no news and filling up on life force before going no devices has reminded me of this back to work. In a supposedly post- to wait a few months. That may be OK. truth. I drive past some banks and an- factual time, deep attention to the Rivendell Bicycle Works other plasma center (they’re every- passing scene is a radical act, reviv- 2040 N. Main #19 where) and stop at a McDonald’s to ing one’s sense that the world is real, Walnut Creek, CA 94596 use the bathroom. To reach it, howev- worth fighting for, and that politics (800) 345-3918 er, I must pass the counter and a Lati- is a material phenomenon, its conse- na cashier who looks to be seventy. quences embedded in things seen. Q ------rivbike.com/harpers

EASY CHAIR 7

HARPER’S INDEX

Minimum number of college students who have raised money for expenses on GoFundMe, a crowdfunding site : 140,000 Number of Americans aged 60 and older who have outstanding student loans : 2,800,000 Portion of those borrowers who have taken on debt to pay for a child or grandchild’s education : 3/4 Minimum number of American colleges that have programs to study their past reliance on slavery : 28 That have changed their financial-aid or admissions policies to make amends: 1 Date on which the University of Cape Town agreed to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes after anticolonial protests : 4/8/2015 On which one of the student protesters was granted a Rhodes scholarship : 12/4/2016 Amount an English university was fined for giving students in an exercise-science experiment too much caffeine : $500,000 Estimated number of cups of coffee to which each dose was equivalent : 300 Value of prizes NASA awarded this year to inventors who designed new ways to dispose of bodily waste in space : $30,000 Gallons of diesel fuel that leaked from an Iowa pipeline one day after Donald Trump pledged to build two new pipelines : 46,830 Factor by which more Americans work in the solar industry than work in fossil fuels : 2 Percentage of Asian cities that fail to meet the World Health Organization’s air-quality standards : 86 Number of days in January on which air-pollution levels in London were higher than those in Beijing : 2 Percentage of children’s toys available in Sweden that contain banned chemicals : 15 Of sex toys available in Sweden : 2 Percentage increase in IUD prescriptions and procedures in the two months following Donald Trump’s election : 19 Number of U.S. states in which women would be at risk of losing their abortion rights were Roe v. Wade overturned : 33 Number of days for which the British Army used a Military Makeup stand as a strategy to recruit female soldiers : 3 Percentage by which the British Army missed its recruitment targets last year : 28 Number of rows that Air India designated as female-only on domestic flights after reports of sexual harassment and assault: 1 Price per person of a Survival Systems USA team-building exercise that guides clients through a simulated plane crash : $950 Average number of people who die in avalanches in the United States each year : 27 Portion of deadly U.S. avalanches that are triggered by the victim or a member of the victim’s party : 9/10 Ratio of the average annual number of deaths in the United States caused by drowning to those caused by gun violence : 1:8 Of federal research funding for drowning to funding for gun violence : 1:1 Percentage by which the average amount of gun violence in popular PG-13 movies exceeds that in popular R movies : 23 Percentage change since 2010 in the number of firearm silencers registered in the United States: +217 Number of days in the past two years during which there were no reported homicides in El Salvador : 1 Portion of U.S. police officers who believe that fatal encounters between police and black Americans are isolated incidents : 2/3 Who believe protests over black victims of police violence are driven by anti-law-enforcement bias : 9/10 Number of times a painting displayed on Capitol Hill depicting police as animals was stolen by Republican congressmen : 3 Minimum number of states in which laws to criminalize political protest have been introduced this year : 9 Number of FBI confidential informants who worked for Best Buy’s Geek Squad between 2008 and 2012: 8 Percentage of Trump voters who believe he should be allowed to have a private email server : 42 Who believe he should not : 39 Factor by which sales of George Orwell’s 1984 increased during the three weeks after the presidential inauguration : 96 Rank of Nebraska among states with the least liked state flags : 1 Number of days in January that the flag at the state capitol flew upside down before anyone noticed : 7

Figures cited are the latest available as of February 2017. Sources are listed on page 48. “Harper’s Index” is a registered trademark.

HARPER’S INDEX 9 A BATCH from the MIT Press Political Women

© Cody Williams, Women’s March, Los Angeles 2017

Ten articles spanning centuries’ worth of women and their influence in politics, legislature, activism, and more. May the voices of the past inform and inspire those of the present.

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[Oral History] That went on until 1968, when I got pregnant with my first child and realized JANE DOES that I needed to recruit other people to take on the work. I would go to political meet- From conversations between Madeleine Schwartz, a ings and at the end I would say, “If anyone journalist, and members of the Abortion Counseling wants to work on this issue and provide Service of Women’s Liberation, later known as Jane, counseling for women, come see me.” I re- an underground railroad for reproductive care that cruited a number of women and trained was started in Chicago in 1969. According to The them in the process I had set up for the Story of Jane, by Laura Kaplan, the service provided counseling. I turned it over to them and 11,000 abortions before it was shut down in 1973. they became “Jane.” laura kaplan: We are often called a collective. But we weren’t really a collective. The group heather booth: In 1965, I was a college stu- was organized as a series of concentric circles: dent at the University of Chicago. My the closer you were to the center, the more friend’s sister was pregnant and not prepared you knew, the more responsibility you had. to have a child. She was nearly suicidal, jeanne galatzer-levy: Everybody counseled. didn’t know what to do. My friend asked if I It was the backbone of the service. could help. judith arcana: When I started, I was assigned I turned to the Medical Committee for Hu- to an experienced Jane and sat with her man Rights, which was the medical arm of the through a couple of counseling sessions. civil-rights movement, and was directed to galatzer-levy: We had an ad in various little Dr. T.R.M. Howard. I called him up and dis- underground newspapers that said, “Preg- cussed the situation. My friend’s sister was nant? Worried? Call Jane.” treated. It worked out well. I didn’t think arcana: I became the person who would pick about it again. Then someone else called. up the phone messages and call women back Word must have spread. I made the next ar- and ask them crucial medical questions. We rangement too. And then someone else called. kept all their information on index cards. At that point I realized, well, there really must galatzer-levy: We met every two weeks or so. be a problem. So I called Dr. Howard and set We rotated through people’s apartments. up a system. I was living in a dormitory, so I kaplan: We always had lots of food at meet- told people to call and ask for Jane. ings. There was a social quality to it. I asked Dr. Howard for detailed descrip- galatzer-levy: You would sit on the floor or tions of what was involved, how the proce- on chairs, if there were chairs. There gener- dure went—I had never had the experience ally weren’t enough. When I was in the myself—what I should do to advise the wom- group, at its height, there were about thirty en in advance, what I should do as a follow- women. We would pass around index cards up, what signs I should look for, if there was with information on them about the women trouble that might develop. seeking abortions.

READINGS 11 arcana: Some of them had terrible stories. There And the person at the Front would talk to was a fifteen-year-old, for example, who had them. Some of the women would be nervous. been raped and was in her second trimester. arcana: We were working from people’s galatzer-levy: You’d usually set up an evening homes, usually an apartment. So if you were appointment. You’d give everybody a cup of a friend of the service, but not a Jane, and if tea, talk for a half hour or so. We would ex- you were willing to let us use your place, you plain exactly what the procedure was, how it would take your cats or your kid and you worked, what the instruments were that would leave for eight or nine hours. would be used, and what they could expect. kaplan: One of the women in the group was in arcana: People would come to what we called her forties, so to us she seemed much older— the Front and then be taken from there to we were mostly in our twenties and early what we called the Place, where the proce- thirties. She lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright dure would be performed. house in Oak Park. We loved that. galatzer-levy: I worked the Front a good deal. galatzer-levy: We had our own sheets, which We’d give people an address, and there would were very pretty. We were into Marimekko. be someone there to greet them. We always We wanted it to be comfortable and not feel had snacks—pretzels, cookies, coffee, tea, like a medical setting. soda. People could bring a sister, brother, boy- booth: Dr. Howard died when I was still in- friend. Sometimes they brought their kids. volved. I found another person. He was do- ing the procedures in a northwestern suburb. arcana: When I met him at the end of ’70 or ’71, he had already, under pressure from the Janes, sacrificed his original m.o., which was to blindfold women throughout the proce- [Propaganda] dure. He didn’t wish to be recognized. With abortionists, these guys either had to PRO-LIFE COACHING pay off the mob or hide from the mob. Our guy was in that latter category. From misinformation that was communicated in galatzer-levy: He and one of the women be- promotional materials or in person to women at came quite close, and she discovered that he crisis pregnancy centers, nonprofit organizations es- wasn’t a doctor. In fact, somebody had just tablished to counsel women against having abortions. trained him to do the procedure. The incidents were documented in reports published arcana: I had heard that he learned when he by NARAL Pro-Choice America and the House was in the medical corps in the Korean War. Government Reform Committee. That was the going tale. galatzer-levy: She thought, “Well, if he can do it, I can do it.” And she talked him into train- Abortion is legal throughout all nine months of ing her. And then she trained a different pregnancy. woman. And then they stopped using him. The cervix can become stretched out following kaplan: There was a point—nobody remem- an abortion. bers exactly what happened—when someone Abortion causes birth defects in later pregnancies. decided to let the group at large know that Abortion increases the risk of breast cancer be- he wasn’t a doctor. Of course, once she did, fore age forty-five by 800 percent. people flipped out. Women were crying and Women who have an abortion are four times saying, “We’re just like the back alleys. We more likely to die in the following year than have to fold!” women who give birth. Calmer heads prevailed and people said, Abortion clinics are dirty and spattered with “We’ve been using this guy for a year and a blood. half. We only get the most fabulous feedback Many women bleed to death on the operating from ob-gyns who see the women for post- table. abortion exams. So clearly you don’t have to Many women commit suicide after having an be a doctor to do this.” At that meeting one abortion. woman said, “If he can do it and he’s not a Abortion can cause eating disorders. doctor, then we can do it, too.” Abortion can cause “permanent damage.” galatzer-levy: You were gradually trained. Abortion can cause “a downward spiral.” There was an assistant and an abortionist. You might react negatively every time you hear The assistant would sit next to the woman a vacuum. and hold her hand if she wanted us to, which she often did. We talked to them. We would be at their head while the person who actu-

12 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 COURTESY THE ARTIST AND CATHERINE CHICAGO EDELMAN GALLERY, “Reflection,” a photograph by Ysabel LeMay, whose work was on view in June at Catherine Edelman Gallery, in Chicago.

ally did the abortion finished it up. Some- with that doc. If not, we had a backup. times people would squeeze your hand so There were a few guys who knew they might hard—you’d be amazed. You were there to get a call from a Jane. talk to them and get them through it. It’s not kaplan: We were all annoyed at the medical pro- a particularly pleasant procedure, but it’s not fession for not being more willing to help. We’d particularly long either. And it was—I know ask women how they heard about us. And if we this sounds weird—but it was quite festive. got a particular doctor’s name from a few of kaplan: I don’t think you can underplay the them, one of us would call that doctor up and sense of personal power that the members of say, “Hi, this is Jane, you’ve been referring Jane felt. We were doing something so radi- women to us and we wanted to talk to you cal, breaking so many taboos, and changing about how you can help us.” Nine times out of women’s lives as a result. ten they would say, “Don’t ever call me again.” galatzer-levy: Most political work is very, booth: Once there was a police raid at one of very slow. You have to keep telling yourself the homes. Seven women were arrested, but that things will get better. It’s one step for- no one would testify against them. ward and half a step back. This was not like galatzer-levy: I was working that day. One that. We could just do it. There was a prob- of the women in the service had come by lem and we could solve it. the Front to check on something. It was one arcana: Of course, we recommended to all the of those apartments with a long hallway. women that if they got a fever, if they had Everybody was in the back and there were a any unusual bleeding, if anything happened, lot of kids that day, which made it fairly if they had a doctor they trusted, go deal chaotic. The woman who had visited the

READINGS 13 apartment had just left when I heard a ing back, that she had forgotten her scarf or knock at the door. I thought she was com- whatever. So I walked back to the door. There were two homicide detectives. They were enormous—these two really tall men. I’m five feet two inches. I looked at them. I turned around. I walked in front of them into the living room [Record] and said to everyone, “These are the police, you do not have to say anything.” The police THE UNTOUCHABLES were angry about that and I was arrested. We were smart enough to know that you don’t From incidents since 2011 in which the use of force by have to talk to the police and that police- Chicago police officers was deemed reasonable or men are not your friends. justifiable by supervisors or the city’s Independent We were arrested in May 1972. The Su- Police Review Authority. The incidents are included preme Court decision came down in January in a Department of Justice report on the Chicago Police 1973. Everybody knew that the Supreme Department that was published in January. Court was debating the case. It was then a question of waiting to hear the verdict. After the Roe decision, the courts cut a Officers allowed a canine to bite two unarmed deal with us that if we didn’t ask for our in- seventeen-year-old boys who had broken into struments back—they had grabbed all the an elementary school. stuff—they would not charge us for practic- ing medicine without a license. We said A man died after hitting his head while fleeing okay—we didn’t need the instruments from an officer who shot him with a Taser. The anymore—and that was it. man was suspected of petty theft. kaplan: The first clinics opened in early spring. A few months later, we had a party. An officer pushed an eighteen-year-old student Everybody who had been involved was in- onto his police car, chipping her tooth, because vited. The guy who wasn’t a doctor—he was she screamed profanities and flailed her arms. there. All of us were there. By then we were The officer reported “an emergency takedown fed up with one another. I think we were maneuver to regain control.” The woman was mostly burned out and happy to step back 5'4" and weighed 120 pounds; the officer was from the project. So we had our end-of-Jane 6'1" and weighed 186 pounds. party. And we all went our separate ways.

A man was walking down a residential street when officers drove up and ordered him to freeze because he had been fidgeting with his waist- band. The man ran. Three officers gave chase and fired forty-five rounds, killing him. Officers [Memoir] found no gun on the man, but recovered a hand- gun one block away. The gun was later deter- FIGHTING DIRTY mined to be inoperable. By Anne Garréta, from Not One Day, which was Officers arrested a woman for prostitution, published this month by Deep Vellum. Garréta is a threw her to the ground, and surrounded her. French novelist and a member of the Oulipo. Not One One officer told another to “tase her ten fuck- Day chronicles her sexual encounters with women. ing times.” Officers called her an animal, Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan. threatened to kill her and her family, and screamed, “I’ll put you in a UPS box and send you back to wherever the fuck you came from,” while hitting her. X had a story to tell you. She had found herself one night in a car with a half dozen stu- During a foot pursuit, an officer fired eleven dents. One among them recounted that in the shots at a suspect. His partner fired five shots. women’s self-defense class at her gym there was The partner stated that the suspect did not turn a professor, and this professor was incredibly his body or raise his weapon. He explained that cool, exciting, and French. the first officer began shooting, so he did as well. You asked the name of your admirer. X didn’t know. It had been a chance meeting. She of- fered to dig up a name for you. To what end,

14 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 you said. Such affairs go against professorial [Town Meeting] honor. X thought you were being rather severe. This unknown woman was silently burning ANIMAL HOUSE with passion! You protested. What impression would it give, in the middle of a simulated as- From a city-council meeting in White Settlement, sault, possibly the simulation of a rape attempt, Texas, in July 2016. The previous month, the council to whisper in her ear: “So you think I’m cool? had voted to evict Browser, a cat who had lived in the Shall we do it for real?” local library for six years, because a city worker was In the class, the women dissected the various not allowed to house her dog at City Hall. situations of aggression they might encounter— analyzed them, invented ways to avoid them. Sometimes they simulated the confrontation. mayor ron white: The next item is discussion In turns, each woman played the victim and of the relocation of the library cat. This last the aggressor. The hand-to-hand strategy was week I have received messages from around thoughtful and careful, but firm. At the end of the world over this issue. The count right the semester, in order to have the class confront now is 1,394 messages, from the United more muscular and less considerate adversaries, States as well as Germany, Australia, Malay- the sensei invited the university’s football team sia, Guam, and England. Once this got onto in to act as the aggressors. social media it just took over. I’ve not read That night in bed, before going to sleep, you all the messages, but I’ve been able to scan mentally reviewed the participants in the class. them, and they’re all in support of the cat. The sensei was a woman born and living in city councilman: As most of you know, there the Bronx, a black belt in jujitsu, marvelously was a puppy in City Hall. I spoke to Amy capable of inspiring combativeness and cour- about the puppy. I told her that I was fixing age in the most timid of her students. to tell her something that no one else had After X’s story, you went to train with added the guts to tell her: that the puppy had to trepidation and redoubled awareness. Each leave. She said, “Yes, sir, I understand.” She woman who approached you to offer herself as loaded the puppy up immediately, all of its a victim to your acts of violence you considered as the possible unknown woman—perhaps she would betray herself with a gesture that was a bit too emphatic or a bit too soft. You were conscious in a way you never were before of the weight of bodies, the proximity of faces, the [Epithets] pressure of hands, of limbs, of the abandon or resistance of these women to your efforts. CAT CALLING In your mission to discern which among these bodies felt desire for you, each gesture, From a list of names for lions compiled in the tenth movement, contact became eroticized. You century by Ibn Khalawayh, an Arabic lexicographer. assaulted these successive bodies with ten- Names of the Lion will be published next month derness, you volunteered your sternum or by Wave Books. Translated from the Arabic by your pubis to their strikes with curiosity. You David Larsen. walked to class as one goes on a date, with a sensation of physical lightness, a touch of vertigo. And yet the unknown woman did Whose Coat Is Yellow, Stained with Red not give herself away. One classmate, taking Whose Head and Neck Are Big for His Body hold of your head and slamming your face Whose Face Expresses Great Displeasure against the tatami, suspended the gesture Whose Eyes Are Bloodshot with incredible gentleness, holding your skull Whose Speech Is Uncouth cautiously before dealing the fatal thrust— Whose Gut Sloshes When He Walks but then later on, another woman, while you Whose Food Has Bones in It bore down on her with all your weight, didn’t Who Eats Until He’s Sick of Food she hesitate, stretch out her resistance, pro- Who Looks for Trouble in the Night long your embrace? Whose Foe Is Outraged in the Dust You never discovered who the unknown Whose Prey Is Turned Inside Out woman was. The mystery of her identity made Who Disregards the Rights of Others that semester of self-defense the most arousing Who Hates Frustration experience of your life. You were driven to pay Who Doesn’t Care What Happens intense attention not to any one body, but to them all. They were all yours.

READINGS 15 COURTESY THE ARTIST AND RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY, CHICAGO HOFFMAN RHONA AND ARTIST THE COURTESY

“Cowboys,” a photograph by Deana Lawson, whose work was on view last month at the Studio Museum in Harlem, in New York City.

belongings; she walked out the door; the white: The discussion is to consider relocation puppy hasn’t been back. of the library cat. How that story got out I don’t know, but councilman: The city has experienced many I’ve got my suspicions. If we would just get events in the past weeks. A councilman people in this city to stay off of this media, it who had been a public servant here for wouldn’t have been this way. But we got peo- many years, raised his family here, has ple who get on this media, and they don’t tell passed away. Another council member suf- you the whole truth, the whole story, they fered a stroke and has been hospitalized. A just tell you enough to puff your chest up. volunteer fireman lost his life. He was run townspeople: No, no, no . . . into by a pickup truck. Yet with all this go- councilman: I can say anything I want to say. ing on, the focus of a small group of com- white: We’re on an agenda. Let’s not distract munity activists and their political support- from the agenda item— ers is whether a cat can survive in the townspeople: Shhhh. public library. We have received com- councilman: Brother Mayor, you control the plaints. Staff and elected officials have been people there, I’ll control myself. needlessly called names and ridiculed. The white: Listen— entire town has been made a mockery of. councilman: You listen! No mention has been made over real mat- white: We’re not going to have this, now. ters at hand: tragic death, illness, the open- councilman: I know we’re not. ing of the new water park. However, since I

16 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 recognize that there are matters that re- On Saturday, I abstained from eye contact. I quire our attention more than this, I would looked just to the side of his head. like to make a motion to reinstate the cat “Lauren and I are planning to go to Hocking to the library. Hills next week,” I said. white: Browser is reinstated to the library. “I love Hocking Hills,” he replied. “Have you townspeople: [Cheers] been before? It’s wonderful. You must go to Old Man’s Cave, it’s really something.” We stood and talked for five minutes, the conversation circling the topic of caves—I’ve never been to a cave but I’m fascinated, Have you ever seen that Herzog documentary about [Encounter] the cave paintings, Oh my God, I love that, don’t tell me Hocking Hills is like that, laughter, No, WAYS OF SEEING no, now if you want to see real caves . . . I was participating in Howard’s words, it was real By Michael Clune, from the Spring 2017 issue of Tin communication! Our experiences mixed, we House. Clune is the author, most recently, of Gamelife, discovered parts of the other inside ourselves. a memoir. It was fantastic. I love Howard, I thought. And then I thought: One glance at his eyes would cut the line. I won’t do it. Never again. Yesterday I resolved to stop looking people Just don’t do it. There’s no pressure. The only in the eyes. I intended to begin a period of ocu- people who are bothered by your failure to look lar abstinence, to refrain from eye contact for as them in the eyes are people who want to assert long as I could—a week, perhaps, or twelve days. their brute dominance over you, pummel you “Eyes are made to be looked from, not at.” How with the secret source of their vision. many times have I heard this proverb, acknowl- edging its good sense, only to violate it at the first opportunity? I resolved to try again. Things got off to a good start, as they usually do. When you have a conversation with someone [Excuses] without looking at their eyes, real empathy becomes possible. You participate in their words. It’s the clos- NEAR-DEATH AND est thing to reading a book. Everyone knows how TAXES much easier it is to empathize while reading a novel than it is in real life, staring at someone who’s staring back at you with an alien and inexplicable From reasons submitted to Her Majesty’s Revenue hunger. What are eyes but signals constantly broad- and Customs, the United Kingdom’s tax-collection casting the slow emergency of human social life? agency, for missing or tardy returns. Just don’t do it. Look at their cheek, or just to the left of their left arm. I’m not saying you have to close your eyes. Be safe. People can attack for no reason. My tax return was on my yacht, which caught fire. Avoiding eye contact is in many ways a safety My papers were in the shed and the rat ate them. measure. Most assaults happen as a direct result of A wasp in my car caused me to have an accident. eye contact. Eye contact itself is a kind of assault. My husband ran over my laptop. The first conversation I had after my resolution My husband left me and took our accountant was with my neighbor Howard. It was a Saturday. with him. I’d walked out in the morning to get the paper. I relied on my sister to complete my returns but “How’s it going, Michael?” we have now fallen out. Howard asked me this question two to three My niece made the house so untidy I could not times per week. Normally, when we made eye find my log-in details. contact, I was transfixed by the mesmerizing force A colleague borrowed my tax return and lost it. with which his eyes hissed, I’m the thing in How- My child scribbled over the tax return. ard’s face, I’m looking at you, I’m different from you, My wife had a headache for ten days. I don’t speak, I look, look at me. I’d mumble some- The postman doesn’t deliver to my house. thing inane about the weather, and then How- My internet connection failed. ard’s friendly voice would reply, a voice whose I had a cold. warm human tone bore no relation whatsoever to the mute thing gazing out from his eyes.

READINGS 17 “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” He was turning to leave. It was almost over, I’d The glass barriers smashed, our thoughts almost won. What made me look? I’ve been asking running on speech-lines in and out of each myself that ever since. It wasn’t anything he said. other’s head. I’ll never forget you, Howard! The And it wasn’t what you might think, that I want- real you, the true, eyeless Howard. ed to see what his eyes looked like. No. Every eye “Well, I should get going,” Howard said. is basically the same. People who tell other people that their eyes are beautiful mean . . . I don’t know what they mean. As an aesthetic object, as some- thing to look at, eyes are nothing special. I looked at Howard’s eyes to find out whether he was looking at mine. [Apophasis] The fear had grown in me the entire time we were talking. It started with a small, nearly sub- NEVER WOULD I EVER conscious spark—I wonder whether he’s wonder- ing what I’m looking at—that gradually became From statements Donald Trump has made in a conflagration of panic. By the end I couldn’t speeches and on Twitter over the past two years. resist. The idea that he was looking at my eyes, that he could have been looking at my eyes when I couldn’t see his eyes— I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because Intolerable. Totally fucking intolerable, I that would not be politically correct. Instead I thought. I envisioned his eyes standing on my will only call her a lightweight reporter! vision, stomping on it. Stop it, I told myself. He’s not looking at me. I never attacked dopey Jon Stewart for his pho- Let it go. ny last name. Would never do that! But the fact that I didn’t feel his gaze was the worst part. The devil’s greatest trick is to con- I was going to say that de Blasio is the worst vince people he doesn’t exist. I looked. mayor in the history of this city, but I wouldn’t. Our eyes met. Howard’s face flushed. I could He’s a terrible mayor, he’s got problems like you feel mine flushing. Right away I knew I’d made wouldn’t believe. I was going to say that but a terrible mistake. now I won’t say it.

I promised I would not say that [Carly Fiorina] ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground. That her stock value tanked. That she laid off tens of thousands of people. I said I will not say that. [Correspondence] And that she ran against Barbara Boxer for the United States Senate in California. She lost in SILVER LININGS a landslide. I am not going to say it. DAYBOOK I’m going to be nice today. I’m not going to call Jeb Bush low energy. I’m not going to say that From letters sent by Arsenii Formakov to his family, Marco Rubio is a lightweight. I will not say that in Riga. Formakov was a Latvian poet, novelist, and for Ben Carson last week was a bad week be- journalist. In 1940, he was arrested for anti-Soviet cause his top consultant said he’s incapable of activities and sentenced to eight years at Krasnoiarskii learning about foreign policy. I won’t say that Labor Camp. Two years after his release, he was sentenced to another ten years. Gulag Letters will he suffers from pathological disease. I’m not be published next month by Yale University Press. saying he went after his mother and wanted to Translated from the Russian by Emily D. Johnson. hit her over the head with a hammer. And that he tried to stab somebody but the belt got in the way. And the knife fell to the ground, bro- august 10, 1944 ken. And that he hit his friend in the face with My sweet, unforgettable, one and only Niushenka! a padlock. I’m not saying any of those things My dear children, Dimochka and Zhenichka! about any of those people. We have the day off today. The sun is out, but it does not burn too hot during this short The recount vote has come back. I refuse to say Siberian summer. By October it is already win- it was a scam. This way they can’t report that I ter here. It lasts until April or May with tem- said it. peratures to minus forty or forty-five. Last win- ter I worked loading and hauling logs to the lumber works. I spent the whole workday in the

18 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 COURTESY THE ARTIST AND FIERMAN, NEW CITY YORK Exodus, a drawing by Dapper Bruce Lafitte, whose work is on view at FIERMAN, in New York City.

open air with the exception of the lunch break, october 1, 1944 when I would go to the watchman’s booth and Dear Aunt Mania: sleep there in the warmth. In other words, ev- Yesterday evening I received your postcard erything is just fine. and laughed and wept with joy when I learned that my precious Niushenka was alive and well. september 20, 1944 That my son is literate and my daughter is a My dear, long-suffering Niushenka! My sweet high-spirited little girl is the most precious children, Dimochka and Zhenichka! news for me. It’s too bad that our house burned I am alive and well (my myocardial ischemia down, but that is a minor thing. does not count!), and through all these terrible years have lived only in hope of the possibility of november 9, 1944 correspondence with you. Everyone calls me “the Niushenka, my sunshine! old man” or “father”—even those who are two or I remember that on November 19, 1941, I three years younger than me. I weigh seventy-five held a real celebration. I managed to buy a kilos, shave twice a week, and wear my hair handheld pie from someone on special rations, grown out. I haven’t lost a single tooth. My eye- got a cube of sugar from someone else, skipped sight is fine. I have not become mentally decrepit. lunch and supper, and got a small onion. As a I work in the wire shop, where I use a special result, my guests found, on a clean white hand- machine to punch eyes in sewing-machine nee- kerchief, a pie with six matches stuck into it, dles. The norm is 900 per day, but I systemati- and then a piece of bread with a piece of salm- cally fulfill double that, which gets me a ration on and small slices of onion, and a fourth of of bread, soup, and hot cereal. the cube of sugar.

READINGS 19 COURTESY THE ARTIST; METRO PICTURES, NEW YORK CITY; AND SILENT SOUND SILENT YORK CITY; NEW AND ARTIST; THE PICTURES, METRO COURTESY

“Cat,” a photograph by Olaf Breuning, whose eponymous monograph was published last year by Silent Sound.

I am healthy and look better than I did last your visor raised, single-handedly do battle with year, when I was trying to cope with abscesses life all alone. I just stand off to the side in awe. on my fingers. Finally they all healed! may 20, 1945 january 1, 1945 My darling Niushenka! Happy New Year’s, my dear Niushenka! The camp shop has been unusually lively. Yes- I am sitting quietly at the table all alone. terday I bought five onions and three heads of Ever since I got in contact with you, I have garlic for ten rubles, and they were giving out been in a remarkably cheerful mood. I am more canned fish at three rubles a can, allowing a can good-humored than I have ever been. I pay no for every two men. We’re living it up here! heed to all the surrounding trivialities and rub- bish. Physically I now feel my condition is com- january 6, 1946 pletely satisfactory: recently we had our quar- Happy holiday, dear Niushenka! terly medical inspection, and they found Now that everything is in the past, I can confess absolutely nothing wrong with my health (ex- that four months last year were very hard for me cept for my heart). physically. Sometimes you drag yourself along the On my sleeping spot, I have a mattress, which path to the train car with a crosstie on your shoulder, is stuffed with hay, a sheet, a wool blanket, and particularly one that is heavy, damp, made of larch my old quilted jacket for softness. On my little (which is like oak). You are drenched in sweat, your nightstand, I have a glass jar with rendered fat, heart beats as if it is about to jump out of your chest, which should last me until Christmas. And soon you breathe so heavily you start to wheeze, like an I will get my pay for December! In other words, I overheated horse, and you begin to think: let my leg am in clover! Really, by God, Niushenka, with- buckle. You’ll fall and the crosstie will come crashing out the slightest irony, I feel guilty for leading down on you from above, and that will be the end: such a quiet, old-fashioned life while you, with no more suffering, everything will end forever!

20 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 april 7, 1946 hind me: I am a prisoner. The American woman My dearest wife Niushenka, my splendid son laughs. I notice a window, open it, and prepare to Dimochka, and my sweet daughter Zhenichka: leap. Just at that moment the American woman Today my mood is very sunny. Of course, whistles: a groom in livery hurls himself at me, there are also unpleasant things: jibes, legs seizes me around the waist, slams me against a wall, stuck out to trip you, dirty tricks, but in com- and claps me into irons that tightly bind my arms, parison with what I have survived, nothing wrists, and ankles. He pushes the button of a hid- now gets me too upset. den mechanism: the section of the floor that I am Physically, I am not in bad shape. I am scarcely standing on begins to sink slowly. Anticipating starting to go bald. The days are flying by. I have ghastly tortures, I want to wake up. Normally when twenty-two months left until the end of my term! I want to put an end to a dream that’s turning nightmarish, I throw myself off a cliff or out a january 19, 1947 window. But in this case, to what avail, since I am For the past six days we have been experienc- bound hand and foot? After several atrocious mo- ing a particularly sharp cold snap: in the morn- ments of anxiety, the idea occurs to me that if I ings the mercury drops below minus fifty. All day jerk my right leg, I will be able to hurt myself on long a thick fog hangs over us. You can’t see the the ankle-iron that is binding me. I give myself a sun. The air is like molten steel. It feels as though swift kick, scream out in pain, and wake up. it will burn your whole insides, almost like ex- II ploding gasoline, if you swallow it in more deep- ly. But in general, it’s nothing too dreadful! The I am to be executed because I am a member of room where we live could be warmer, but I pull the resistance or a hostage or because of some my coat over myself on top of my blanket. entirely different reason, and this fact occasions a sort of fiesta on the part of my friends. I say my january 23, 1947 goodbyes to Z. I also say farewell to one of our I ask you not to get the wrong idea about the friends of whom I am very fond—Simone de cold weather. People manage just fine: logs get Beauvoir. No guards around me; I appear to be hauled and trains still run. Magpies fly—although completely free. My friends are lined up in front less often than usual. The sparrows have com- of me two deep, like a crowd at the finish line of pletely hidden themselves. Today one flew after the Tour de France, and through them Z escorts some crumbs, but he couldn’t make it back. Ap- parently, his feet had gotten frostbitten. I gave him a push, and he flew . . . back home . . . to his family.

[Flight Risks] TRAVEL CLEARANCES [Premonitions] GRIM SLEEPER From descriptions of incidents in which U.S. and U.K. airlines removed Muslims or passengers who were perceived to be Muslim from their flights. By Michel Leiris (1901–90), from Nights as Day, Days as Night, a chronicle of the author’s dreams between 1923 and 1961. The book was published Asked for a glass of water last month by Spurl Editions. Translated from the Asked for a second Diet Coke French by Richard Sieburth. Saved seats for friends Requested a strap for a child’s booster seat Upgraded to business class I Read a book A beautiful American woman, a writer or an Read an article titled “What ISIS Really Wants” artist, makes an appointment to meet me in a huge, Looked at a flight attendant ultramodern luxury hotel. I suspect she is affiliated Looked at an Arabic text message with some secret society that is out to get me but Appeared scary to another passenger I decide to meet her nonetheless. I am shown into Watched the news a sitting room that connects to a smaller room Solved an algebraic equation through two open doors. I wait for a while. The Sweated American woman arrives and invites me into the Prayed for a safe flight adjoining room. As soon as we cross the threshold, two men suddenly appear and lock the doors be-

READINGS 21 me as though I were a child that needed reassur- Ranelagh, a trip on an ocean liner during which ance. We arrive at a wall of rock, irregular in shape there are thieves masquerading as detectives—I and pocked by bullets, where the execution is to find myself with Z (now my wife) in a sordid fur- take place; I place my back against it with Z to my nished room, making love to her while looking at right, I believe, squeezing my hand. I jam my back a picture painted by our friend Georges Bataille. hard against the wall, as if I were trying to embed Rectangular, wider than it is tall, the painting myself in it, not so much in order to disappear into is cut in half by the line of the horizon. Above, it as to muster in myself some of its rigidity; in the sky; below, the sea. In the upper-right-hand other words, courage. I hear horses and perhaps corner, a winged horse falls down—at a small the sound of marching troops. I feel all my bra- distance above this, as if borne along by the vado melt away. Then I grow furious and tell Z same movement, there is a piece of seaweed cov- that I’m not going to let myself be killed like this. ered with blood. I scurry off and plunge headlong into a sunken alley that runs parallel to the row of our spectator IV friends. The fall awakens me, or rather takes me My father has made himself an armband insig- into another dream. nia of his profession as a stockbroker. It is a sleeve This second dream features a rectangle of white of black fabric toward the top of which he has paper that is given to those who are about to be embroidered in gold the image of a coat hanger shot to death. They are allowed to write their last whose shoulders are sloped like two parentheses. words on it, and when the time comes for them to He loads people into this armband in order to be executed, the piece of paper is placed not over transport them to the stock exchange. their eyes but over their mouth, like a gag. V III Condemned to death by the Germans, I take After a protracted series of adventures— the thing manfully enough until I am told that escaping from nighttime assaults in the gardens of they are going to come give me a shave in the early afternoon—a final grooming before my execution. Having concentrated all my attention on this grooming, I had lost sight of the ultimate fact of my execution. But now that I know the hour at which it will take place, my mind can [Poem] move beyond it, and the screen that had been placed between death and myself by this detail of CORRESPONDENCES protocol now disappears. As there is no longer anything separating me from my execution, my By Charles Baudelaire. Translated from the French courage gives way to indescribable anguish. I feel by Ariana Reines, for Delirium: The Art of the I will not be able to face up to the ordeal, that I Symbolist Book, an exhibition currently on view at will be led to the stake kicking and screaming. the Morgan Library and Museum, in New York City. I subsequently dream about the publication of the memoirs of my colleague Anatole Lewitsky (who was in fact shot by the Germans Nature is a temple where living pillars on February 23 of this year). Noting all the last- Sometimes let out confused lyrics minute impressions of a man condemned to Man passes through, across forests of symbols death, he tells how the execution took place on Each one observing him with a familiar gaze some abandoned fairgrounds at the foot of Mont Valérien. He was lined up with his Like long echoes, from afar confounding friends with his back against a reconstructed In a dark and profound unity African roundhouse made of dried clay. Vast like night and like clarity Lewitsky reports that in front of the door of the Fragrance, color, and sound all resounding hut that was serving as an execution stake, there was a chicken or the skeleton of a chick- Fresh perfumes like the fleshes of children en on the ground. He closes with a political Tender as oboes, green as prairies, testament or credo: rallying cries, confident —And others too, corrupt, rich, and triumphant, predictions as to the outcome of the war.

VI Expansive, like all infinite things Amber, musk, benzoin, and incense On a tomb (mine?) someone has affixed a All singing the transcendence of spirit and sense. sign providing an epitaph that condenses the life of the deceased into a few lines. The sign is entitled argument. Q

22 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 The MIT Press

The Vanishing Middle Class The Strip Is the Universe a Hologram? Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy Las Vegas and the Architecture Scientists Answer the Most Peter Temin of the American Dream Provocative Questions “A book for our unsettled times. . . Part Stefan Al Adolfo Plasencia foreword by Tim O’Reilly social commentary, part history, part aca- “The Strip takes a high-speed transect demic inquiry, Temin’s book tells us how down one of the world’s most important Questions about the physical world, the the two parts of the modern dual economy streets as it evolved. . . a tour which yields mind, and technology in conversations that can be glued back together.” essential insights into larger American reveal a rich seam of interacting ideas. —Claudia Goldin, Harvard University social dynamics.” —William L. Fox, Director, Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art

Communism for Kids On Hitler’s Mein Kampf The Agony of Eros Bini Adamczak The Poetics of National Socialism Byung-Chul Han translated by Jacob Blumenfeld Albrecht Koschorke foreword by Alain Badiou and Sophie Lewis translated by Erik Butler translated by Erik Butler “Communism for Kids is in fact for every- “Koschorke shows the contemporality of “This remarkable essay, an intellectual one, an inspired and necessary book. . .” Hitler’s fanatic strategy to gain power. His experience of the fi rst order, affords one —Rachel Kushner, author of The creative reading of Mein Kampf can help of the best ways to gain full awareness Flamethrowers us to understand how political bodies are of and join in one of the most pressing damaged by ideas, which are invented only struggles of the day: the defense, that to perpetuate this damage. Such an inter- is to say—as Rimbaud desired it—the pretation is needed in times like ours.” ‘reinvention’ of love.” —Peter Trawny, author of Heidegger and —from the foreword by Alain Badiou the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy Untimely Meditations series mitpress.mit.edu Untimely Meditations series

FOLIO

THE MARCH ON EVERYWHERE The ragged glory of female activism By Leslie Jamison

I was at a Maryland travel plaza just off I-95 licorice and chips, we didn’t yet know the statis- when I finally saw them, en masse and outfitted: tics of our surge. There would be half a million the women. They were emerging from the fog like people in Washington, three times the size of visions, their bodies spectral and streetlamp-lit, Donald Trump’s inaugural crowd, and more than walking alone 800 demonstra- and with friends, tions on seven with canes, with continents, with glowing ciga- an estimated rettes between 4.2 million peo- their fingers; ple marching with boots over in this country their jeans, with alone: probably their daughters the largest pro- and mothers, test in American with paper cups history. But al- of coffee in their ready, we were hands. They were made of nerves headed into the and excitement. rest stop, its verti- We were buzzed cal windows ris- on coffee. We ing from the were breastfeed- mist like church ing babies. We spires. They were holding doors for one another, were part of a creature with 4 million faces. We asking, “Did I just cut you in line?” They were were a bunch of strangers intoxicated by our buying sodas and bananas. They were going to shared purpose, which is to say: we the bathroom. They were letting pregnant wom- were a we. en go first. They were in utero, they were in wheelchairs, and they were all headed where I The D.C. Metro was jam-packed at eight was headed: to the corner of 3rd Street and In- the next morning. People were practically dependence Avenue. embracing strangers to make room for other When I arrived at that travel plaza—with my strangers. Trump and Putin were French- friends Rachel and Joe and their eleven-week-old kissing on five different pins. One hat said baby, Luke—it felt like a mythical village of make racists afraid again. One pair of Amazon women had been transplanted from the sneakers showed a uterus painted in pink glit- jungle to the harsh fluorescent lighting of a high- ter glue. The left foot said pussy. The right foot way rest stop. That night on I-95, arms full of said power. A voice over the loudspeaker said:

Leslie Jamison is the author of The Empathy Exams (Graywolf Press). Her essay “Giving Up the Ghost” appeared in the March 2015 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

At the Women’s March on Washington © Lucas Jackson/Reuters Page borders: Demonstrators gather on the National Mall during the Women’s March on Washington (detail). Photograph by Bryan Thomas FOLIO FOLIO 25 25 “Women’s-rights fighters from all over the world, As for my own mom, I have always understood welcome to your Red Line!” her commitment to social justice in worshipful, We marched past the Capitol—which I barely often cinematic terms. She fell in love with her recognized at first, because we were marching first husband while they were protesting the Viet- past the back—and then down to Independence. nam War in Portland, Oregon, at a liberal-arts We did not need directions. We just followed the college where the students figured out ways to make their sex lives count toward the P.E. require- ment. At one demonstration in San Francisco, where federal agents started photographing the crowd from nearby buildings, she and everyone held up their driver’s licenses. I grew up hearing stories about the season she spent picking crops in the south of France, with the woman I eventually realized had been her lover—which only made these tales more intoxi- cating, their days spent harvesting olives and Roma tomatoes, staying in a small cottage in the woods, getting paid in jugs of wine, stacking the fireplace with roots at night and watching their knotted, whirling patterns burn. My mom told me about a strike she had led among the olive pickers, who were forced to work long hours in the brutal cold wearing only cotton socks as gloves. As I saw it, my mother had repeatedly shown up for something larger than her own life. She’d been desperate to join the Peace Corps. She worked as a precinct leader for the McGovern campaign, in 1972, while she was pregnant with my oldest brother. (She called him George while human stream. Our friend Erin, five months preg- he was still in the womb.) She brought my broth- nant, put a sign around her neck that said feminist ers, just five and six years old, to rural Brazil when future, with an arrow pointing down at her belly. she was doing her doctoral research on infant I saw a sign that said viva vulva. I saw a sign that malnutrition. She spent decades working on said fight like a girl. I saw a sign that said i’m maternal-health research and advocacy in West with her. It had arrows pointing everywhere. Africa, and I carried in my mind’s eye a vivid A woman my age wore a sign that said fourth- memory that wasn’t mine: the night in Togo when generation feminist. It made me wonder who she accompanied a woman in obstructed labor to counted, whether feminists existed before the the hospital in Sokodé, driving along muddy, rut- phrase itself was invented. My grandmother was ted roads while the rain pelted down. raised on a farm in rural Saskatchewan, bathing It wasn’t just the things she had done that I ad- once a week in kettle-heated water, and grew up mired but the spirit in which I imagined her doing to work in a university laboratory. She was one of them: selflessly, putting her own comfort aside, the founding members of the Shattuck Neighbor- choosing the path of most resistance. Her life in hood Action Coalition, in Oakland, California, a social justice was always intertwined with her life community where she put down roots decades as a primary parent. She was committed to her before it started to gentrify. She led cleanup mis- children—and to children who weren’t her children. sions around Bushrod Park, collecting piles of In her early seventies now, she is still at it. As a garbage for trucks to haul away, and had everyone deacon in the Episcopal Church, she recently pro- over afterward for soup and homemade bread. tested unjust immigration policies by giving com- Until her diabetes made it impossible, she deliv- munion through the mesh of the border fence in ered voters-alliance newsletters to eighty homes Tijuana. She was also arrested with unionized ho- in her neighborhood. She wore bright flowing tel workers in downtown Los Angeles, wearing skirts and we took walks together pretending to her clerical collar as she was handcuffed. As I be aliens from the planet Algernon, trying to construct the story of her life, it shimmers with figure out the purposes of all these mysterious valor, with purity of motivation, and objects: garden hose, fire hydrant, wind chime. She with endless, altruistic work. believed in the latent magic of the proximate, and in community as something actively built, not I have always found a kind of mission statement passively inherited. She put her body and her in the story of her very first protest, a march around time—her self—into work she felt was important. Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square against the

At the Women’s March on Washington (detail) © Shannon Stapleton/Reuters Page borders: Demonstrators on Pennsylvania Avenue during the Women’s 26 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 March on Washington (details) © Michael Reynolds/EPA/Redux House Un-American Activities Committee. My point. Eventually we realized we were marching mom was handing out flyers, and one woman toward the wrong side of the stage, along with handed hers back, looked my mom straight in the probably 20,000 other people. I hadn’t imagined eye, and said, “I hope your children grow up to hate the rally like this, with this abiding uncertainty you.” It was a female curse, a way of saying: I hope about where the thing itself was. the gods of motherhood punish you. But ever since We inched up C Street to see if we could hit my mother told me that story, I have believed that Independence further back. We walked over hay loving her as much as I do is a political act. and flattened horseshit, perhaps left over from I have also seen myself as a disappointing in- the inaugural parade, though we weren’t directly heritor of her legacy. My own commitment to social on its route. We passed circular black tanks la- action—while durable—has felt more like a series beled horse control. A woman stood in the of do-gooder missteps and awkward incursions into back of a pickup truck hawking get your hands activism: mixing concrete (badly) in a small Costa off my vajayjay pins at the top of her lungs. A Rican village to build a footpath to the local church, few blocks away, bras dangled from the trees. A as a naïvely well-intentioned fifteen-year-old whose woman dressed in bright orange was looking for parents could afford to fund her exercises in con- a group of other women dressed in bright orange. science; or tutoring mothers in a minimum-security The buildings of our government felt vast and prison to help them pass their G.E.D. exams, feeling indifferent on either side of us, made of cold pale so shy—so convinced I was doing a terrible job— marble. We flooded their inhuman scale with that my stomach knotted up with anxiety. our human bodies. The crowd often stopped in My attempts at direct political action have been its tracks, because there were so many of us and shot through with apathy and bumbling. When because so many of us were taking selfies. This I canvass, there is the perpetual nervousness did not seem like vanity so much as a useful mo- before each buzzer-ring, and an tivating impulse, the desire to ongoing record of startling in- say: I was part of this. We all eloquence. (“I’m not voting.” “But wanted our presence docu- you should!”) My days organizing mented. If activism had to be with my graduate-student union entirely selfless—no affective always felt grudging and full of payoff, no emotional or digital discomfort: town hall meetings I souvenirs—it would never didn’t want to attend, follow-up happen at all. emails I didn’t want to type. For the first few hours, I Whenever I compared my couldn’t hear or see the rally. history of social engagement Gloria Steinem was speaking with my mother’s, it felt mea- somewhere, but at a certain ger and disheveled. I was a point I couldn’t have even told lurker, always ducking around you which direction the stage the edges of the crowd, hover- was in. I tried to check on my ing near the snack table, phone, but I wasn’t getting re- drinking too much coffee. I ception. No one was. There was both too insecure and too were too many of us. Our tech- egotistical to fully join group nology was blocked by the more efforts, convinced I had bet- ancient technology of so many ter ways to spend my time bodies gathering together. than being one body among many. I was too We weren’t on the official route of any- obsessed with singular expression, with my thing. We weren’t even sure where we were go- own voice, to lend myself to the humbler ing. But this didn’t mean we weren’t at the chorus of collective action. This was the ego march. We were the march—in our mistakes investment—the stubborn sense of my own and our rerouting, in our circling back, trying identity—that kept me from being use- again, taking the long way around. We were ful, from being subsumed into already part of what we had been the whole. searching for.

When we got close to Independence and 3rd When Alice Walker arrived home from Street, and found no stage in sight, we wondered: the March on Washington in 1963 after tak- Are we in the right place? We were definitely ing a night bus back to Boston, her relatives someplace, with more people than I’d ever seen in were sure they’d seen her on TV. They insisted my life. Every time we looked down a street, we they had spotted her “among those milling saw endless bodies. We were looking for the core about just to the left of Martin Luther King Jr.” of it: the epicenter of the gathering, the departure But they had seen what they wanted to see.

At the Women’s March on Washington (detail) © Stephen J. Boitano/LightRocket via Getty Images FOLIO FOLIO 2727 She wasn’t anywhere near him. “The crowds mitment to anything larger than your own life would not allow it,” she wrote later. “I was, often looks mythic in retrospect. But on the ground, it’s all inbox pileup and childcare guilt; it’s a lot of wondering if you’re having the right feelings or the wrong ones, or confusion about which is which. It’s messy and chaotic and imperfect—which isn’t the flaw of it but the glory of it. It trades the perfect for the neces- sary, for the something, for the beginning and the spark. My mother may have led olive pickers on a strike in France, or been cursed out by an an- gry housewife in Pioneer Square, but her life isn’t myth. It’s a life. Over the years, I’ve learned the counter-history of whatever glori- ous legend I wrote for her—not its cancella- tion, but its supplement: the fuller version. Her life in activism was fraught with apathy, de- spair, an urgent sense of inadequacy. In other words, it was full of humanity. There were other truths, other parts of the story. She couldn’t fulfill her Peace Corps assignment be- cause her marriage fell apart and she wasn’t al- lowed to report to Botswana without her husband. After the first flush of her antiwar activism, she fell away from the movement and into depression. She was working as a telephone operator in Oakland, trying to connect calls across the Pacific, hearing instead, perched on the limb of a tree far from wives and mothers crying as they failed to reach the Lincoln Memorial.” soldiers they hadn’t heard from in months. I liked this lineage, this tradition of the partial The whole arc of her story was punctuated by and obstructed view: the marginal experience as moments of doubt and disillusionment. When authentic experience. It was permissive. You felt McGovern was crushed in a landslide, losing what you felt. You saw what you saw. You took every state but Massachusetts, she felt as what you could get. The only thing you could though she had been personally rejected by her say for sure was that you had shown up. country. Her career in public health didn’t grow At the Women’s March, I saw people perched seamlessly or instantaneously from her days of in the trees all around me, straining to hear. I early motherhood; it took her years to figure out thought of their aching legs and wondered how that she didn’t want to spend two decades at long they would last up there. I wondered if home caring for her children. She almost they had remembered to bring snacks. dropped out of grad school on her first day be- Activism isn’t an oil painting. It’s real life: a cause she was afraid it would take her too fully box of tampons, a forgotten cell-phone charger, a late-night car ride. It’s many hours standing on concrete. It’s not just the glorious surge, or the giddy feeling in your stomach when you’re on the move, tucked into the thick of the crowd, voice hoarse from shouting. It’s also everything it takes to get there. It’s dealing with the low- tire-pressure indicator light, flat on your stomach in a Bed-Stuy parking lot, losing the little metal cap somewhere on the oil-pocked asphalt. It’s getting stuck in bumper-to-bumper on the Ver- razano, with barges chugging through the gloom below. It’s a post-quesadilla stomachache in Jer- sey. It’s changing the baby in the back seat be- cause the changing table in the restaurant bath- away from her sons. In retrospect, she felt guilty room is covered in mouse shit. about bringing them to Brazil, especially my There is no activism that isn’t full of logis- middle brother, who didn’t like his preschool tics and resentments and boring details. Com- and had trouble learning the language. Left: At the Women’s March on Washington (detail) © Nima Taradji/Polaris. Right: At the Women’s March in Montreal © Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press via AP Images Page borders: Demonstrators on 42nd Street during the Women’s March 28 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 in New York City (details) © Nicole Craine/New York Times/Redux Not long ago, she met a Vietnam vet who ness can be part of authentic presence, the same had also become an Episcopal deacon, and she way doubt is part of faith. One guy’s sign said i hate told him about heckling a train of returning crowds, but i hate trump more. Another said so soldiers, how much she’d always regretted doing bad even introverts are out. it. She told him that she was sorry. He said she We passed a cluster of pro-life women standing was the first person who had ever apologized to on a traffic island. One held up a rosary and a him for doing that. poster of a dead baby. The baby in the photograph— My mother recently confessed to me that she the idea of the dead baby, the visual rhetoric of had never liked canvassing. This was years after shame-mongering—was less real to me than the I’d written an internal script baby my friend was pushing that imagined her knocking in his stroller: the child of a on doors with full-throated pro-choice mother, sur- eloquence and confidence, the rounded by the children of way I never could. She didn’t pro-choice mothers. The knock on doors because she women on the island held enjoyed it, she told me, or even posters that said women do because she felt she was good regret abortions. at it. She did it because it Did we? Speaking for my- was the work that self, I knew I was grateful that needed to be done. I’d been able to make a choice, that I hadn’t had to drive The point of participat- thirty-six hours across state ing in large-scale collective lines or feel a wire inside my action isn’t glory. It’s some- body. I couldn’t speak for the thing close to the opposite: thousands of women around being a body among bodies. me who had also gotten abor- It’s about submerging yourself, tions. Perhaps some regretted becoming part of something them. They still had the right too large to see the edges of. Over chiles rellenos in to get them. I could see one poster showing South Jersey, at a strip-mall Mexican restaurant a crude clothes hanger drawn next to on our drive down, Rachel told me: “My goal is the scrawled words never again. just to be a body in Washington.” We were bodies among bodies. We were with I saw more uteruses that Saturday than I had an old man with a silver beard and a green vest ever seen before, more than I’ll ever see again. I and a sign around his neck that said this is saw them painted on cardboard and scribbled on what a feminist looks like. Feminists looked paper. I saw them in handcuffs. I saw them made like many things. A woman in a coat covered of snakes. I realized I had never known whether with tissue-paper flowers had a sign that said the plural of uterus was uteruses or uteri—and the frida choose. Another woman was dressed up question had never felt more urgent. One sign like a giant vagina, with plumes of purple and said there’s an elephant in the womb and beige felt. We had our tampons and our ciga- featured a little G.O.P. mascot lurking at the top rettes and our breast pumps. We were ready to of a fallopian tube. Our mascots were the ovaries, rewrite Mailer’s Armies of the Night. We wore the Statue of Liberty, and the pussy cat. American flags as miniskirts, as bandannas, as I’d always thought signs were for external eyes: hijabs. The transparent backpacks mandated by for the media, or for the president I imagined peer- the organizers showed Luna bars and sunflower ing down at us from the Truman Balcony. During seeds: the comet trails of preparation behind ev- the march, I realized that the posters were also for erybody’s presence. You saw the internal organs of us, a way to keep from getting bored. When you’re cell phones and city maps, little confessions standing on concrete with no cell reception and strapped to everyone’s backs. A first-time protester thousands of bodies packed all around you, and told me she brought home-made cookies, but no- the crowd hasn’t moved for hours and you’re not ticed that the veterans brought throat lozenges. sure if it’s ever going to move again, the signs are I felt awkward chanting—I often do—but chant- a saving grace: a live-action Twitter feed with its ed anyway. If everyone felt too self-conscious to own endless taxonomy. chant, then we would make no noise at all. I want- There were the anatomy signs, internal organs ed to reframe my own awkwardness as part of the made external and external organs on parade. process going right, or getting started, rather than pussy grabs back was its own genre, its own little a sign that it had always been going wrong. I want- zoo: vagina dentata, fluffy kitten, big cat baring its ed to believe that submission to awkwardness is one teeth. There were the grandma signs, like ninety, of the ways you can show up for a cause. Awkward- nasty, and not giving up. Or the elderly Japanese

At the Women’s March on Washington (detail) © John Middlebrook/Cal Sport Media via AP Images FOLIO FOLIO 2929 woman with a sign sticking up from the back of her By now its creation myth has become familiar: wheelchair: locked up by us prez 1942–1946 nev- two women posting on Facebook just after Trump’s er again. One woman’s cross-stitch read i’m so election. In New York City, Bob Bland proposed a angry i stitched this just so i could stab some- Million Pussy March. In Hawaii, Teresa Shook put thing 3,000 times. The Trump signs were endless. out a call to organize a women’s march just after the One showed the president grabbing the Statue of inauguration. She went to bed with forty replies, Liberty between her legs, creasing the folds of her and woke up to 10,000. robe. Another told the straight truth: you ruined By the end of that week, Bland had responded home alone 2. I thought of the public service to the criticism leveled at the prospect of a Women’s performed by that sign, how many people it must March led by two white women. She invited three women of color to take the helm, all promi- nent organizers: Tamika Mallory, a civil-rights gun-violence activist; Carmen Perez, a prison- reform advocate focused on incarcerated youth; and Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian- American racial-justice advocate and mother of three, who had successfully campaigned for New York City’s public schools to designate two of Islam’s holy days as holidays. In their official platform, released a week before the march, these organizers purposefully high- lighted certain issues—racial injustice, mass incarceration, police accountability, the per- secution of undocumented migrants—that moved pointedly beyond the standard second- wave fare of reproductive rights and equal pay. have made smile over the course of an hour, a morn- Nearly two weeks before the march, the New ing, a day. York Times ran a front-page story quoting a white Our signs were joyous. We were united. We woman from South Carolina who had decided to were glorious. We were uteri. We were a crowd- cancel her trip to D.C. because she had been sourced poem! A scrolling song! offended by a Facebook post from a black volun- A group of men standing outside the National teer advising “white allies” to listen more and talk Museum of African American History and Cul- less. She said it made her feel unwelcome. “This ture held up a sign that asked who else is a women’s march,” she said. “We’re supposed will you march for? to be allies in equal pay, marriage, adoption. Why is it now about, ‘White women don’t understand At the Women’s March, our “we” was not black women’?” uncomplicated. I never wanted to pretend it Feminism has always been about white women was. “Community must not mean a shedding of not understanding black women. But at its best, it our differences,” said the writer and activist Au- has also been about women recognizing the shifting dre Lorde in 1984, “nor the pathetic pretense contours of their own ignorance, and trying to lis- that these differences do not exist.” Her belief ten harder. That awareness of limited knowledge in difference as a creative force felt like the and past mistakes can be a source of strength, right kind of optimism for this moment, full of rather than the movement’s shameful underbelly. faith that did not depend on naïveté. Decades ago, Audre Lorde told white feminists Feminism, after all, had evolved by way of self- who were offended by her outrage: “I cannot hide critique. There were the first-wave suffragists, my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings.” She who abandoned the prospect of cross-racial soli- wanted shared oppression to enable vision rather darity when it threatened their campaign, fol- than obstruct it. She wanted women to recognize lowed by the second-wave feminists of the 1960s what wasn’t shared, to fight the perils of conflation, and 1970s, who fought internalized patriarchy in to acknowledge their own complicity. “What consciousness-raising groups and crusaded for re- woman here is so enamored of her own oppres- productive rights and economic equality. They sion,” she wondered, “that she cannot see her heel were followed in turn by the third wave, who print upon another woman’s face?” This felt just criticized the second as myopically attuned to the as relevant three decades later. The trick was see- struggles of privileged white women. From its in- ing the patriarchal footprints everywhere, even ception, the Women’s March offered itself as a under our own feet. Intersectional feminism wasn’t vexed and imperfect manifestation of the third just an abstraction, and it wasn’t about getting wave—not its resolution or consummation, but a paralyzed by the shame of privilege. It was about continuation of its necessary reckonings. owning it. When my mom led the olive pickers on At the Women’s March on Washington (detail) © John Middlebrook/Cal Sport Media via AP Images Page borders: Demonstrators on the National Mall wait for the Women’s March on 30 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 Washington to begin (details) © Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/TNS via Getty Images strike, she was aware that she could afford to lose the vaginas everywhere—made her uneasy. “First,” her job more easily than most of them, that she she told me, “all the ‘pussies’ were pink, which could afford the risk. doesn’t reflect what many vaginas look like for I wanted to send every white woman offended women of color.” Because “women of color are hy- by the Women’s March a copy of Sister Outsider, persexualized by popular culture in ways that white with a bookmark tucked into Lorde’s observations women are not,” she found that “putting so much about the role of guilt in the feminist community. emphasis on ‘pussies’ felt uncomfortable.” Her ob- “All too often, guilt is just another name for impo- servations made me aware of my own blind spots, tence, for defensiveness,” she wrote. But this guilt, which felt less like an argument against the possibil- if it led to change, could become useful as the ity of solidarity and more like another argument for “beginning of knowledge.” trying to understand how much I didn’t understand. At the Women’s March, a black woman carried When we chanted “Black Lives Matter!” on a sign that said white women voted for trump. Constitution Avenue, I could feel our whiteness so A white woman carried a sign that said white acutely, the pale average of our collected bodies. I women voted for trump. When Jasiri X, a rapper thought of the Suffrage Parade of 1913, our inspir- I’d never heard of, came onstage, he said, “My ing but deeply tainted lineage: a march led by a mother raised me all by herself. . . . As a man, I can white woman on a white horse, with columns of never understand how she felt.” He said: “Fuck black women in the back. white silence is vio- white supremacy, white privilege, and white wealth.” lence, said one sign, twenty signs, a thousand signs. I could not see the woman in the pussy hat beside But a thousand white people holding signs saying him, translating his message into sign language, but white silence is violence didn’t I could hear his words through the speakers. I felt mean the violence was over. implicated. I was implicated. My discomfort was the point: my discomfort and everyone’s. There was We hit the central vein, the jugular of something useful in gathering to feel powerfully the rally, at 7th Street. Catching sight of a Jum- uncomfortable together, rather than simply cele- botron felt like arrival. The National Mall was brating our numbers. Humility was as important as a sea of bodies with the Smithsonian Castle solidarity. Jasiri X admitted that too: “I can never rising behind them, all red brick and turrets, understand how she felt.” iconic and occupied. Our crowd was articulated When I attended my first Black Lives Matter by dabs of pink, not homogeneous but shaded march, in Portland, I felt un- into hues—rose, salmon, wa- comfortable. Was I wanted? termelon, lemonade, bubble- Was I intruding? I stayed quiet gum, fuchsia—and broken and followed in the footsteps of by rainbows and parkas. others. But I’m glad I was there. We found a spot where we My discomfort wasn’t particu- could see the screen but larly profound. It was just a couldn’t hear anything. Then small down payment against we found a spot where we could the kind of collectivity I be- hear the speeches but couldn’t lieved in—a collectivity in see anything. It felt so right to which we weren’t cloistered by have the event blocked by the the silos of our backgrounds, other bodies watching the but still didn’t assume that soli- event: they were the event. darity would be easy, that its Somewhere out there, on a declaration would mean it had stage I’d never see, Gloria been fully realized. Steinem uttered the words I At the Women’s March, the would read online the next day: leadership was largely women of “I wish you could see yourselves. color, but the attendance wasn’t It’s like an ocean.” diverse. I could see this for myself, and during the From the middle of the ocean, we couldn’t weeks that followed, other women testified to it as see the ocean. But we could see one another’s well. “Simply put,” a woman named Brittany Mar- faces, squinting and hungry. My friend Heath- tinez told me, “the march was very white.”* Brittany er had written to me beforehand, “I’ll be some- explicitly identifies herself as a queer feminist of where in that sea of women, looking for a color, to distinguish herself from the “pervasive and bathroom.” I thought of her frequently, and it popular brand of default white feminism.” At the became a kind of mantra: Heather was out Women’s March, certain celebratory totems—like there somewhere, looking for a bathroom. It * Brittany Martinez’s name has been changed, as have was a reminder that our collectivity was pow- the names of two other interview subjects, Vaeme erfully visceral: we were bodies that needed to Tambour and Andrea Chen. eat and pee.

At the Women’s March on Washington (detail) © Q. Sakamaki/Redux FOLIO FOLIO 3131 A union leader stood in front of our end- that was what it took to stop the deportations. less columns and addressed Trump directly. Nadia had grown up the daughter of Bangla- “I don’t know what kind of president you’ll deshi immigrants, spending much of her be,” he said, “but you’re a hell of childhood in public housing, one of the only an organizer.” kids of color in her high school. She married a Salvadoran man whose mother had brought As I looked over that sea of bodies, I kept him across the border at the age of five; he be- feeling the urge to specify them. I wanted them came a U.S. Marine, and they were raising a not in their plenitude but in their particularity, twenty-two-month-old Muslim Latino son. their fine-grained humanity. So I spent the weeks Nadia knew it was important not just to show following the march talking to other women who up for the march but also for the work that had been there. Almost every woman described would need to be done every day after it. She the sheer mass of the crowds as the defining part wanted to keep putting her body on the line. of her experience. Monica Melton found herself “That’s why we remember the civil-rights moved by the blunt force of accumulated body movement,” she told me. “They put their bod- heat. “In the thickest part of the crowd,” she said, ies on the line.” “it was literally hot.” Amy Lewis, a mother of two and therapist from Pittsburgh, wanted to put her body on the line as well. “I wanted to break through the paralysis of racial shame I’ve grown up with,” she told me, which came from “the privilege of our white skin.” She still remembers the thrill of her first protest, taking the bus with her mother to a feminist rally in downtown Pittsburgh. “I was small and exhila- rated,” she recalled, “looking up past the faces of the adults surrounding me, to the tops of the office buildings I thought of as skyscrapers, and beyond to the night sky, feeling strangely safe in the loud crowd.” When Amy brought her own twelve- year-old daughter to D.C., she felt pro- tective. The most extreme bodily sensa- tions she remembered were sensations of vigilance: “The strain of constantly watching for exit points, assessing the danger when we were on a bridge or in Anika Rahman, who had fled the Bangladeshi a contained space, amplified enormously by my War of Independence and was marching with concern for my kid.” She described her initial re- Amani, her thirteen-year-old daughter, realized at sponse to the sheer volume of the crowd as one of a certain point that there was “no correct route.” panic: thoughts sluggish, limbs heavy, words slow Which meant that every route was the correct and disorganized. She was supposed to meet her route. She told me she was marching to resist an mother but started to panic when she realized that administration that threatened every part of her it might not be possible. Cell phones weren’t work- identity, every part of her life’s work: “I’m brown, ing. The route on the map was jammed with I’m an immigrant, I’m a woman, I’m a Muslim.” thousands of strangers. When Amy finally made After coming to the United States at the age of her way to their meeting point, via side streets and eighteen, she obtained a law degree, devoted her- force of will, and found her mother waiting there, self to fighting for human rights and social justice, she felt “strong” and “complete.” She said, “The and watched the rising tide of anti-Islamic senti- sludge in my veins turned liquid, I felt cheerful, ment in her adopted country. She also raised and we looked around with excitement and won- Amani, who wanted to be president and was car- der as we walked into the thick of rying a banner that said rise against the preda- the crowd.” tor in chief, her arms aching from its weight. Nadia Hussain was also deeply moved by all The physical act of marching wasn’t simple. those bodies in the streets. She was brought to The plain truth was this: the Mall was packed all tears when Michael Moore called on the the way back to the Washington Monument. The crowds to fill the George Washington Bridge if march couldn’t happen because the route was al-

At the Women’s March in Los Angeles (detail) © Mike Nelson/EPA/Redux Page borders: Demonstrators at the Women’s March 32 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 in Los Angeles (details) © Mike Nelson/EPA/Redux ready occupied by half a million bodies. “When read the news. We were helping to write the the word moved through the crowd that we had story we wanted to live. But we would need filled the entire route, we roared,” Amy told me. to read about it afterward, to understand “The irony of such numbers equaling physical what we had been part of. Leaving the march, we passed hundreds of signs piled against a fence on Pennsylvania Avenue. They didn’t look discarded. They looked defiant. Joe and Rachel changed Luke’s diaper on a cold marble bench at the Ellipse Visitor Pavilion. We passed weary protesters resting on the bleachers that had been empty for Trump’s inauguration parade. It felt good to think of them serving this purpose. We needed to rest, because we weren’t done. It wasn’t just Washington, and it wasn’t over. It was everywhere. It was ongo- ing. It was people singing with can- dles in the Budapest night, spilling through the streets of Atlanta, Oak- paralysis struck us. We were many, we were pow- land, Jackson, and Macau. It was people in Cal- erful, we were unable to move.” At one point, a cutta wearing sandals in the sunlight and holding rumor spread that the march was being canceled, a banner that said resistance is fertile. It was a victim of its own success, but Tamika Mallory people in Fairbanks marching in full winter parkas came over the speakers to assure us that it wasn’t under tree branches covered in snow, with the so. We were going to take Constitution Avenue temperature nearly twenty degrees below zero, a girl all the way to the Ellipse. in red ski pants, maybe eleven or twelve, holding Of course I didn’t end up on the correct up her own sign: i survived cancer. trump made route. As Anika pointed out, there was no me uninsurable. correct route. I ended up somewhere else—on My husband spent two and a half years fighting Independence, I think, insurance companies while up to 14th Street, then his first wife battled a com- left on Constitution up plicated form of leukemia— to 17th. The truth is, I the disease she died of. can only tell you where I When she was diagnosed, marched because I looked their baby was six months it up afterward. While I old. Eight years later, that was marching, it was baby held a love trumps more like a dream, with hate sign on a cold after- no street signs or Google noon in Prospect Park. Maps. I was just following Which is all to say that the flow of bodies. I was this election is personal noticing how little trash for everyone. Day One of there was on the streets, the new administration and how much glitter. I was personal for everyone. was listening to an old Also true: It’s been per- black man shout, “Mike sonal for years. It’s been Pence has got to go!” as he personal for centuries. sold photographs of the A woman named Adi- Obama family to weeping white people. ti Khorana later told me about crying jags after Each time the march was stopped, which was the election, feeling her lifelong sense of often, I imagined the traffic had gotten clogged marginalization—as a woman of color, as the because of courteous marchers ceding the inter- daughter of Indian immigrants—sharpening into section to one another, manners manifest as almost unbearable acuity. Why did this country gridlock: “You first!” “No, you!” hate her so much? In the shadow of the Washington Monu- Aditi loved watching the march flood her city: ment, my friend Joe said that for the first the Los Angeles subways were packed instead of time since the election, he was excited to empty, Pershing Square turned into an ocean.

Top: At the Women’s March on Washington © William B. Plowman/Redux Bottom: At the Women’s March in London (detail) © Neil Hall/Reuters FOLIO FOLIO 3333 She lives just a few blocks from the knitting shop lesbian mother from La Crosse, Wisconsin, it where the pussy hat was first conceived. When meant marching on Washington with her teenage the conductor announced that they were rerout- daughter, Annie—full of maternal guilt because ing her train that morning, because everyone on she hadn’t brought enough water or snacks—as it was headed to the same place downtown, all the continuation of a lineage that began when she the passengers started cheering. “It felt like a tiny was young. She’d grown up with little sense of victory,” Aditi said. “Like you’ve separation between politics and got to accommodate the will of the rhythms of daily life. “I the masses.” have clear memories of conver- She had begun her adult life sations about political issues in the aftermath of George being mixed with ordinary life,” W. Bush’s election, and under she told me, “my mother iron- the shadow of his wars. She ing and talking about the protested the invasion of Iraq Prague Spring and our right to as often as she could, with “this free speech and a free press, sense that the world we were drying dishes while talking inheriting was being created by about the importance of legal old, rich, white men for them- abortion.” Laurie learned her selves and their kids.” After first chant at the age of four: Obama was elected, she felt Humphrey, Humphrey, he’s our safer, which enabled her to man! Nixon belongs in the gar- turn inward, toward her own bage can! As for Annie, she life and career. had grown up looking at pic- Trump’s election brought tures of her mother marching Aditi back to the streets. She at rallies—and in D.C., she fi- felt proud to share the Women’s nally got to march beside her. March with her parents, who But feminist lineage isn’t had told her stories about living always a simple inheritance. under Indira Gandhi’s auto- Brittany, who marched in New cratic regime, and had commit- York, told me that the second ted their lives to fighting for the oppressed: her time she ever protested—at a demonstration mother as a sociologist, her father at UNICEF. supporting H.I.V. education, when she was in Trump’s victory hit them “on all levels,” she high school—she was arrested in front of the said—as immigrants, people of color, parents who White House for civil disobedience. Her father, had raised two daughters. who had been the president of his local NAACP She was struck by the kindness people showed youth chapter and a 1960s civil-rights activist, them that day: giving up subway seats, catching was proud. He said activism ran in her blood. But her mother’s arm when the train lurched. Her her mother was furious. mother said the march felt like a collective ex- Andrea Chen, a second-generation Chinese- halation. Sikhs passed out bowls of chana and American raised in Queens, told me her mother reminded Aditi of her grandmother, a Sikh, who disapproved when she found out she was march- had passed away years before. Afterward, she ing. Andrea grew up in a “noisy, mercurial, dra- and her parents went to one of their favorite matic matriarchy” of a family, with a single mom spots in the city—a hole-in-the-wall run by a who worked full-time while raising her kids. She Mexican couple—and had Cokes and ceviche. feels strongly that her liberal-arts education—an It felt good to support an immigrant business, education her mother and female relatives never Aditi said, and it felt good to see her elderly got to have—was both their gift to her and a force parents “light up with excitement that threatened to distance her from them. The as they spoke about the resistance.” women in her family didn’t grow up thinking about identity politics, eventually preferring to What does feminist inheritance mean? For define themselves as “taxpayers and as people who Amy, it meant going to a Chicago Seven protest made it.” Many of them voted for Trump, and see in utero, and then finding her mother, decades Andrea as “this somewhat radical naïve bleeding later, amid thousands-strong throngs of women in heart.” But as Andrea told me, “Everything I am D.C. For Vaeme Tambour, a former Hillary cam- has been a straight line from these women.” paign staffer, it meant going to the march with the Andrea loves the urgency of marches, their women in her family—ages sixteen to ninety- powerful alchemy of compassion and righteous three—and walking in a tight circle around her anger. But she found the Women’s March more great aunt, who marched with a walker, to protect mixed, clearly full of first-time marchers—many her. For Laurie Logan, a family physician and nervous, hesitant to chant anything besides the

At the Women’s March in London (detail) © Jenny Matthews/Panos Pictures Page borders: Demonstrators in front of the National Gallery of Art during the 34 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 Women’s March on Washington (details). Photograph by Brendan Bullock most familiar anthems—and driven by diffuse out over social media, and hundreds, then thou- objectives. It also felt disorganized. “I don’t think sands, of people began flooding JFK and other you necessarily felt the history of the moment,” she airports throughout the country: LAX, Dulles, said, “while standing there silently in ten-minute Houston, Sea-Tac. stretches, waiting for the march to move along.” My husband and I took the A train to JFK But she also felt the joy of spending the night be- from Manhattan after we bought posters and fore Inauguration Day with friends, “making post- markers from a downtown drugstore and scrib- ers and thinking of slogans while eating takeout bled phrases from Emma Lazarus’s Statue of and watching Star Wars.” At the march, she felt Liberty poem: give me your tired, your poor. she was witnessing the “birth of something massive The protest began before we got to the pro- and collective that didn’t quite know test, at the Howard Beach AirTrain station. As how to articulate itself yet.” we were waiting to buy our tickets, we saw a line of cops forming on the other side of the turn- “We know that we gather this afternoon on stiles. “Only ticketed air travelers and airport indigenous land,” Angela Davis told us as we employees allowed to board!” they said. There stood in the shadow of the Smithsonian. “This is were so many of them, so quickly. a country anchored in slavery and colonialism.” My husband asked one of them, “Is there a A middle-aged black woman standing beside regulation allowing you to do this?” me said, “Yes, yes, yes!” She said, “This is awesome. He asked my husband, “Are you a ticketed I haven’t seen this lady since 1986.” traveler?” Angela Davis said, “The next one thousand “I don’t know,” my husband said. “Am I?” four hundred and fifty-nine days of the Trump I could feel the molecules of the room vi- Administration will be one thousand four hun- brating and rearranging. The cops were multi- dred and fifty-nine days of resistance.” plying. The protesters—mostly strangers, all of The seven days that followed the march were a them intent on boarding the same train—were nightmare of presidential orders. Trump reinstated gathering into a sudden, spontaneous collective. the oil pipeline that would run near sacred Sioux “What you are doing is wrong!” a woman land in North Dakota. He mandated a gag on said. And then the chants began: “If we don’t federal funding to global health providers that of- get it? Shut it down!” I’d been in this station fered abortion counseling, and issued orders to start countless times—running late for a flight, check- building a wall along the Mexican border. He an- ing email on my phone—and it was strange to see nounced his plans to publish a weekly list of crimes it as the site of such fervent desire, such heated committed by undocumented migrants. On January conflict. The turnstiles were the obstacles keeping 27, just a week after the us from the protest, march, he issued a ban which meant they had on refugees coming into become the protest. the country, and on all I wish I could say I citizens of seven pre- stormed the barri- dominantly Muslim na- cades, or cajoled the tions, which meant that conscience of a Metro passengers in the air Transit Authority em- when he signed the or- ployee. The truth is, I der were detained in just started thinking airports upon arrival. of another way to get These executive orders to Terminal 4. We are offensive to repro- ended up catching an duce in summary. Every unmarked cab from a part of me fights the pizza place across the possibility of their nor- street, sharing a ride malcy, fights the neutral with an immigration tone of reportorial lawyer who was trying prose, fears what will to link up with a group happen between the of immigration lawyers writing of these words and their publication. already there. “They say they’re in the diner,” she The morning after the Muslim ban (a term the said. “Where’s the diner?” We saw more cops ap- president and his advisers have vehemently re- proaching the AirTrain station, putting on their sisted), protesters started gathering at JFK’s Ter- N.Y.P.D. vests, heading upstairs to the show- minal 4, where two Iraqi men were being de- down at the turnstiles. Were we making our way tained. One had worked as a translator for the to the protest, or were we fleeing it? How could U.S. Army for more than a decade. Word went we tell?

At the Women’s March on Washington (detail) © John Middlebrook/Cal Sport Media via AP Images FOLIO FOLIO 3535 When we finally got to Terminal 4, the mix and backup onesies. She was talking about crowds went all the way back to the parking lots. ongoingness: showing up past the first flush of in- It was cold. Someone had projected the word dignation and sticking with it. She was talking resist on the concrete wall of the parking about the daily tedium of tutoring, voter registra- structure, and then the tion, helping people fill out words let them in. People food-stamp applications. She had filled the structure, said that one of the great were standing at the edges— achievements of her life was in rows, dangling their taking a bag of oranges to banners—looking out. Langston Hughes when he had This was protest. Not just the flu. the perilous electricity of the “Militancy no longer means AirTrain station, bodies guns at high noon, if it ever blocking other bodies by did,” Audre Lorde wrote in the force, voices crying out in re- 1980s. “It means doing the un- sponse; and not just the stark romantic and tedious work.” beauty of those luminous This will never be the stuff of words across concrete; but cinematic grandeur. It’s never also the tedium of an hour- satisfying, in part because it’s long subway ride, the uncer- not enough. It should never tainty of what to do or where feel like enough. But invoking to go when the protest did insufficiency as an alibi is just not go as planned. It was the as dangerous as self-righteous immigration lawyer wonder- satisfaction or comfortable ing, “Where’s the diner?” despair—the very things Lorde “Mic check!” someone warned us against. called, and then proceeded A week after that chilly day to warn anyone undocu- in D.C., I sat with my friends mented that they should Greg and Ginger in their Bed- leave, in brief parcels of Stuy kitchen, along with their language that turned into communal chants: daughters—Sara, twelve, and Fita, nine, who had “The police may be coming! If you think you marched with them—and their pet rabbit, Oliver, are in danger! Protect yourself!” Then another who had not. Ginger had never marched before. call-and-response began, its force only deep- When I asked her about her activist history, her ened by its familiarity. “Show me what democ- first instinct was to say she had none. Zero. But racy looks like!” And the response: “This is then she started recalling things that might have what democracy looks like!” counted as activism all along: tutoring students in That answer gave me chills, in to- her class who were falling behind, back when she tal earnest, every time. was a student herself, or working with kids in her local community garden. Ginger called this Like my mother, the old mythic marches “lowercase a activism.” Alice Walker would have weren’t myth; they were life. They were full of called it revolutionary work. flawed people and bored bodies. But it matters that Ginger said that for her, the march itself hadn’t they happened. What would our collective story been about sacrifice or service, it had been about look like if they hadn’t? What would our collective sustenance. “It’s going to be a long four years,” story look like if it didn’t include a massive gather- she said. Her family was from El Salvador, and ing after Trump’s inauguration, if it held instead a she felt the potential breakdown of civil liberties vacancy—thousands of people in despairing, iso- as a real peril. lated, private disbelief? What if the ban on refugees As for Greg, his earliest memories of collective came down and no one marched at all? action involved marching on the picket lines A few days after the election, Greenpeace hi- outside Newark International Airport when his jacked a construction crane near the White House dad was part of an air-traffic-controller strike. and hung a rainbow banner that said resist. The Greg was twelve. He and his father marched banner thrilled me, but I also knew that thrilling along the highway, and Greg remembered the work wasn’t the only kind that mattered. When chants, the union-hall meetings, the thrill of Alice Walker said that the “real revolution is always fighting Ronald Reagan as their personal enemy. concerned with the least glamorous stuff,” she Years later, he went to the Million Man March wasn’t talking about flying giant flags from giant with his father and grandfather, and it made him cranes. She wasn’t even talking about the logistics feel connected to the black community in a more of 500,000 people marching, bringing enough trail tangible way than he ever had before. This was

At the Women’s March on Washington (detail) © William B. Plowman/Redux Page borders: Demonstrators on Independence Avenue during the Women’s March 36 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 on Washington (details) © Drew Angerer/Getty Images part of what communal action could do: it could about the olive pickers, their hands covered in introduce you to collective identity in a way that socks, and how good it had felt to stand with didn’t feel forced or conceptual, that felt bodily, them by a blazing fire, when they got emotional, palpable. inside, after they finally said: Enough. Greg described a moment during the Women’s March when he started chanting because he That Saturday, before the march-too-crowded- heard Sara chanting beside him. This captured to-become-a-march became a march, when the something true about chanting, and about in- multitudes were already tired of standing—hungry, heritance: Both work like contagion. Both work shoulder to shoulder, antsy—the singer Janelle in multiple directions. You never knew who might Monáe took the stage. She said her mother had start chanting simply because your voice gives been a janitor, her grandmother a sharecropper. them prompt or permission. Ginger wasn’t a “We birthed this nation,” she said. “It was a woman chanter—she was firm on that point—but she gave you Martin Luther King. It was a woman gave described one part of the Women’s March when you Malcolm X.” she found herself chanting. It had been outside She introduced five mothers who had lost their the Trump Hotel, the historic post office that sons to police violence. Each woman said the name Trump had converted and bragged about— of her son, and we called back, “Say his name.” ceaselessly, it seemed, in lieu of policy arguments— We heard “Jordan Davis,” and we said, “Say during the presidential debates. his name.” As they marched past the hotel, Ginger told We heard “Eric Garner,” and we said, “Say me, police cars drove through the crowds with his name.” their sirens blaring. “If they wanted to make us We heard “Trayvon Martin,” and we said, “Say disperse,” she said, “they had just the opposite his name.” effect.” The sirens got her riled up, made her We heard “Mohamed Bah,” and we said, “Say want to resist, to keep moving, to raise her his name.” voice. This was activism as generative friction, We heard “Dontre Hamilton,” and we said, “Say activism as diversion from plan, off-roading his name.” away from script: a protest at the turnstiles, When you are talking about half a million people, saying something is more like a roar. You feel it in your body, in your bones. It vibrates the air. This wasn’t intersectionality as the heading on a college syllabus, it was the sound of primal, indisput- able truth. Each time Monáe passed the micro- phone to one of these mothers, she said: “This isn’t about me.” We heard the name of Sandra Bland. We heard the names of Mya Hall and Deonna Mason, two trans women of color killed by the police. Many of the mothers’ voices cracked as they said the names of their sons. To hear and feel the crowd around me saying “Say his name” and to feel my own voice as AirTrain as flash point, sirens as tuning fork. one small fraction of that crowd: it filled my whole This was guilt—or awkwardness, or showing up body. It made me feel large and small at once. for uncertainty—as the beginning of knowledge. This was one of the most important things a My mom texted me photos from her march crowd of half a million people could do: stand in at LAX while I texted her photos from my the capital of our country and listen to these march at JFK. She shared the news of her resis- mothers say the names of their sons. It wasn’t tance, as she had always shared the news of her about me. I mattered only insofar as the we would resistance, which wasn’t the ticker tape of be impossible without 500,000 individual voices. myth but the stumbling notation of the actual. The we: pink-hatted and extending beyond our She recounted the pain of McGovern’s loss, range of vision. Our mouths were parched and our the weeping voices on the other end of tele- voices hoarse. We were fidgeting. We were loud. phone calls, the protests she felt proud of, and What mattered? The surge and force of us: the one she apologized for—decades later—to half a million strong, nameless, calling for a veteran who hadn’t been there. She told me their names. Q

At the Women’s March on Washington © Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images FOLIO FOLIO 3737 FROM THE ARCHIVE

1994

NICE GIRLS By Mary Gaitskill

hen I was growing up in the but it didn’t occur to her to define for me boys aren’t all that interested in their W1960s, I was taught by the adult what she meant by “nice,” what “nice” own dignity. But these are things that world that good girls never had sex and had to do with skirt length, and how the children learn more easily by example bad girls did. This rule had clarity going two definitions might relate to what I than by words, and learning by exam- for it but little else; as it was presented to had observed to be nice or not nice— ple runs deep. me, it allowed no room for what I actu- and then let me decide for myself. It’s ally might feel. Within the confines of true that most thirteen-year-olds aren’t few years ago I invited to dinner at this rule, I didn’t count for much, and I interested in, or much capable of, philo- Amy home a man I’d known casu- quite vigorously rejected it. Then came sophical discourse, but that doesn’t mean ally for two years. I didn’t have any in- the less clear “rules” of cultural trend that adults can’t explain themselves tention of becoming sexual with him, and peer example that said that if you more completely to children. Part of but after dinner we slowly got drunk were cool you wanted to have sex as becoming responsible is learning how to and were soon floundering on the much as possible with as many people as make a choice about where you stand in couch. I was ambivalent not only be- possible. This message was never stated respect to the social code and then hold- cause I was drunk but because I realized as a rule, but, considering how abso- ing yourself accountable for your choice. that although part of me was up for it, lutely it was woven into the social eti- the rest of me was not. So I began to quette of the day (at least in the circles I was a strong-willed child with a lot of say no. He parried each “no” with cared about), it may as well have been. It Iaggressive impulses, which, for various charming banter and became more suited me better than the adults’ rule—it reasons, I was actively discouraged from aggressive. I went along with it for a allowed me my sexuality, at least—but developing. My early attraction to ag- time because I was amused and even again it didn’t take into account what I gressive boys and men was in part a need somewhat seduced by the sweet, junior- might actually want or not want. to see somebody act out the distorted high spirit of his manner. But at some Many middle-class people—both feelings I didn’t know what to do with, point I began to be alarmed, and then men and women—were brought up, like whether it was destructive or not. I sus- he did and said some things that turned I was, to equate responsibility with obey- pect that boys who treat girls with dis- my alarm into fright. I don’t remember ing external rules. And when the rules respectful aggression have failed to de- the exact sequence of words or events, no longer work, they don’t know what velop their more tender, sensitive side but I do remember taking one of his to do. If I had been brought up to reach and futilely try to regain it by “possess- hands in both of mine, looking him in my own conclusions about which rules ing” a woman. Lists of instructions the eyes, and saying, “If this comes to a were congruent with my internal experi- about what’s nice and what isn’t will not fight you would win, but it would be ence of the world, those rules would help people in such a muddled state. very ugly for both of us. Is that really have had more meaning for me. Instead, I think men and women will always what you want?” I was usually given a series of static pro- have to struggle to behave responsibly. His expression changed and he nouncements. For example, when I was But I think we could make the struggle dropped his eyes; shortly afterward thirteen, I was told by my mother that I less difficult by changing the way we he left. couldn’t wear a short skirt because “nice teach responsibility and social conduct. It is not hard for me to make such girls don’t wear skirts above the knee.” I To teach a boy that rape is “bad” is not decisions now, but it took me a long countered, of course, by saying that my as effective as making him see that rape time to get to this point. I only regret friend Patty wore skirts above the knee. is a violation of his own masculine that it took so long, both for my young “Patty is not a nice girl,” returned my dignity as well as a violation of the self and for the boys I was with, under mother. But Patty was nice. My mother raped woman. It’s true that children circumstances that I now consider dis- is a very intelligent and sensitive person, don’t know big words and that teenage respectful to all concerned. Q

From “On Not Being a Victim,” which appeared in the March 1994 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete essay—along with the magazine’s entire 166-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/fromthearchive.

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DEFENDER OF THE COMMUNITY Bill de Blasio gambles on doing the right thing By Alan Feuer

ust before the holi- an almost tragicomic ge- Jdays, as many of us nius for finding political here in New York injury in well-intentioned City wanted nothing more policies. When he took than a brief reprieve from over City Hall three years politics, our mayor, Bill ago as the first progressive de Blasio, killed a deer. It mayor in a generation, was a small, furry, single- there were apocalyptic antlered, white-tailed buck whispers that New Yorkers that had appeared in Har- would soon be hunting lem. For much of Decem- game in Central Park to ber, the deer became a kind feed their children. But so of mascot for the neighbor- far at least, the city’s pi- hood, spreading Christmas geon population is all cheer—until it hopped a right—and so are many of fence into a local public- us. Our economy is hum- housing project and de Bla- ming, our tourist industry sio, citing safety issues, is booming, stop-and-frisk sentenced it to death. is all but gone, and crime Although this was an ul- is at historic lows. De Bla- timately rational deci- sio has meanwhile estab- sion, the image of a pow- lished free preschool for erful official euthanizing tens of thousands of four- a lost animal had miser- year-olds, made available able optics. Making mat- municipal-I.D. cards for ters worse, our governor, thousands of undocument- Andrew Cuomo, who is ed immigrants, passed a always eager to humiliate the mayor, In the end, the sad affair was blamed paid-sick-leave law for city workers, and seized the pro-deer high ground and on the dispute between the two politi- developed a groundbreaking plan to issued an immediate stay of execu- cians, which would have been an ac- combat mental illness. Even the disaster tion. But even as a team of state of- curate assessment were it not perhaps of his fellow New Yorker Donald Trump ficials was sent to save the deer, the more accurate to say that the mayor had moving from Fifth to Pennsylvania Av- little creature died from stress, fright- allowed his more conniving rival to enue has played into his hands. The ened and alone, at a city shelter on turn what should have been a harsh but mayor has spoken out against the pres- East 110th Street. good decision into murder. If Cuomo’s ident, needled him persistently on social curse as a leader is to frequently be re- media, and threatened to sue if the Alan Feuer is a staff writer at the New York warded for his Machiavellian ways, de White House cuts off funding to New Times and the author of Over There: From Blasio’s is to often suffer the conse- York because it is a sanctuary city— the Bronx to Baghdad (Counterpoint). quences of doing the right thing. He has which is to say, he has succeeded in

41 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 Illustration by Katherine Streeter using Trump as a whetstone on which Foods. Public-housing residents were vision is that the government inter- to sharpen his positions. living without heat; some had to pee venes to the maximum extent possi- Given de Blasio’s record of success into umbrellas because of shoddy ble to create balance.” and a resurgent climate of liberal dis- plumbing. These were the mayor’s sent, you would think he would be people, his natural constituents— ot long after this event, I sailing gracefully and without much blacks, Latinos, white liberals—but Ncaught up with another wom- competition toward reelection in No- they didn’t want to hear about “af- an who was critical of the vember. But that is not the case. Sev- fordable” apartments when many in mayor’s plan. Her name was Carmen eral challengers have already de- the neighborhood could not in fact Quinones and she was a fifty-nine-year- clared that they will run against him, afford them. “This is your moment of old activist who ran the tenants’ as- and an ever-growing army of more se- truth,” one woman told the mayor. sociation at the Frederick Douglass rious opponents—among them Scott “You’re going to have to demonstrate Houses, a public-housing project on Stringer, the city’s comptroller, and who is your constituency. Is your con- Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I Ruben Diaz Jr., the Bronx borough stituency the people who put you into found her in a state of mild confusion. president—is waiting in the wings. In the office you now hold? Or is your Here, she said, was this nice progres- January, a Quinnipiac University poll loyalty to the developers?” sive mayor whom she had known for found that while de Blasio would beat De Blasio tends to do well in real- more than twenty years, but when it both Stringer and Diaz, he would be folks situations like this. Unlike his came to housing issues, it seemed he trounced by Hillary Clinton, whose press conferences, which are famously didn’t realize that his policy was only chief weakness is not having declared contentious, the town hall forum lets going to exacerbate the very problem that she is even running. him chew through complicated issues he was trying to fix. As part of his ini- without appearing testy or overly pe- tiative de Blasio has called for leasing was thinking of the mystery of dantic. By now, he has his housing vacant lots in the projects to private Ithe mayor’s popularity when he speech down pat. The city, he likes to developers to build affordable units and appeared at a December 15 town say, is facing an unprecedented crisis: raise money for housing repairs. Qui- hall meeting in a high-school gym on it has become such an attractive place nones wanted to know, affordable for West 102nd Street. It was, as it hap- in which to live, both a rich man’s ae- whom? “The people in public housing pened, the deer’s last night alive. The rie and a mecca for millennials, that won’t be able to afford what he’s build- gathering was one of several similar its success has led to a catastrophic ing,” she said. “You can’t serve two mas- events that de Blasio has held in the rise in rents. “For the twenty years ters, the developers and the residents. past year to reconnect with his base, before I came in,” he told the crowd Either you’re with us or you’re not.” but it quickly turned into a quarrel- that night, “City Hall had a very She wanted to meet with de Blasio some debate about the most difficult pro-development, pro-free-enterprise and talk the issue out like the old part of his agenda: his desire to make worldview. They saw gentrification as friends they were. And she didn’t un- New York more affordable for those of an unmitigated good.” Although he derstand why he had so far refused. us who aren’t Russian oligarchs or em- acknowledged that his approach, too, Was he busy? Was he just being stub- ployees of Goldman Sachs. On a street was pro-development, he said that it born? Was he hung up on achieving outside the school, local TV stations took care of the little guy by forcing his 200,000-unit promise? Or was it were interviewing angry residents; in- developers to couple their most profit- something else? Coincidentally, on side, de Blasio was being chased across able projects with a subsidized per- the morning of the town hall event, a basketball court by their endless, anx- centage of less expensive units. the mayor awoke to some bad news ious questions. Although the mayor’s Casting himself as a kind of urban about an ongoing story that threat- housing plan is the most robust attempt Robin Hood, the mayor gave his lis- ened to derail his reelection. Reports in decades to scale back gentrification, teners a choice. He could, of course, had emerged that two grand juries it has also caused enormous apprehen- sit back and do nothing as the mar- were investigating the ways in which sion, not least because its operating ket did to them what it had already he had raised money, much of it from mechanism is a public-private partner- done to hyper-gentrified neighbor- real-estate developers. Like many of ship in which the city is seeking to hoods like Williamsburg, in Brook- us, including the mayor’s challengers- build or preserve 200,000 affordable lyn: bury them in glass condomini- in-waiting, Quinones had seen the apartments by working with develop- ums and artisanal pizzerias. Or he reports and wondered about the in- ers and harnessing the power of the could use his right hand to welcome vestigations’ import. real-estate market. builders to the area while employing Taking turns with a microphone, his left to pick their pockets of apart- f anything, the inquiries exist in the school-gym questioners besieged ments people could afford. “I have a Ithat legally equivocal and morally de Blasio with concerns about his huge critique of the free-enterprise ambiguous nexus of money and model. Luxury buildings were pop- system, but it’s not going anywhere,” power that defines American politics ping up everywhere, they said, chas- he said. “There’s plenty of places in these days. No one is claiming that ing out the poor, increasing crowds the city where someone can build a bricks of cash were discovered in a on the sidewalks, and bringing in building in any way they want. That’s Gracie Mansion freezer or that deputy amenities like Trader Joe’s and Whole the reality of a capitalist system. My commissioners took duffel bags of

42 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 hundreds into the stalls of public rest- gating the mayor, nineteen tenant proposal to cap its fleet), the munici- rooms. Nothing even connects the groups and labor unions sent a let- pal police unions (which every mayor scandals to one another: the Riving- ter accusing him of taking “dirty fights), and the Rent Stabilization As- ton House mess (in which a former developer money.” “It’s unconscio- sociation (a landlord group that pre- AIDS hospice was flipped into luxury nable,” they wrote, “that your polit- sented a threat to his affordable- housing) to the carriage-horse debacle ical operation is using real-estate housing plan). (in which the mayor tried to save the money to wage a campaign against When our conversation turned to horses after animal-rights activists low-income people.” A few months the housing plan and whether it had gave him lots of cash) to the mint- later, after the news emerged that been affected by the influx of devel- scented, rat-repellent trash-bag fiasco the United States attorney in Man- oper donations, Hyers said the narra- (in which a no-bid city contract went hattan and the Manhattan district tive of a business-friendly mayor in the to a major donor)—unless, of course, attorney were also looking into de pocket of the real-estate industry would it’s the overarching concern about Blasio’s money tactics, a coalition of have existed without the fund-raising. whether donations flowing into City land-use groups, New Yorkers for a “That would happen no matter what. Hall resulted in favors flowing out. Human-Scale City, held a rally on The alternative is not to fund-raise. . . . If there is a center to the investiga- the steps of City Hall to complain The fact of the matter is, when you go tions, it may be the mayor’s former about a welter of unseemly deals, into fund-raising you are going to be fund-raising vehicle, Campaign for many of them featured in a paper attacked, period. If you don’t have to One New York, which was estab- fund-raise, you don’t have to do it.” lished in 2013 to solicit money for a I took that last bit as a jab against media blitz to promote his plan for DE BLASIO HAD THE MISFORTUNE de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael free prekindergarten. Over the sum- Bloomberg. Much of the uproar, mer, the city’s Campaign Finance OF BEING JUDGED AGAINST both in terms of the pay-to-play Board issued a report about the BILLIONAIRE BLOOMBERG, WHO complaints and the furor over hous- group. The ruling, stripped of jar- ing, stems from the ways in which gon, found that de Blasio had tip- DIDN’T HAVE TO SUCK UP FOR MONEY de Blasio gets compared with toed up to the line of what was legal Bloomberg. Paradoxically, the for- when it came to raising money, had mer mayor has emerged as both the not crossed it, but that his practice of that the coalition published under best and the worst thing to have hap- accepting funds from donors who had the conspiratorial title: “Possible pened to the current one. Bloomberg business before the city and using Pay-to-Play Links Between Develop- left behind a powerful legacy of divi- those funds to tout his platform raised ers and City Administration.” A few sion. If you were white, relatively “serious policy and perception issues.” weeks after the paper was released, a wealthy, and lived in Manhattan or Almost all the money CONY took survey found that more than half of certain parts of Brooklyn, Bloomberg’s would have been criminal if it had those it polled believed that the reign provided you with a gleaming been taken during an election cam- mayor did “favors for developers utopia of Citi Bikes, physical safety, paign. That instead it was taken to who make political contributions.” Parisian-style pedestrian malls, lush advance the mayor’s agenda between These, of course, were the “percep- new public parks, and ample opportu- his entering office and his run for re- tion issues” about which the cam- nities in the tech sector. If, however, election was, as the board politely put paign board had warned. you were not white, relatively poor, it, a “solicitation loophole.” Lawful and lived in the outer boroughs, your though they were, among the gifts ot long after the scandals New York experience was more likely CONY received were several that en- Nbroke, I shared a meal with to include asthma, homelessness, raged those already inclined to believe Bill Hyers, de Blasio’s former sewage-treatment plants, invasive po- that de Blasio had cozy ties to city campaign manager. In the way of these lice stops, and harassment by your builders—like, say, the $100,000 from things, Hyers was also the founder of landlord. Even within the gleaming Two Trees Management, a firm that Campaign for One New York. He city, there was, toward the end of the negotiated with City Hall to redevelop showed up for our meeting in jeans and Bloomberg era, a restless sense that a factory in Brooklyn and joined a a T-shirt. We talked about the fund- it was all too much: brutal rent-to- coalition that was working to get per- raising. Hyers told me that the mayor income ratios, chain stores every- mission for a publicly financed street- needed the money, not only to per- where, Billionaires’ Row. car that would pass near the project’s suade the public and lawmakers in De Blasio campaigned against that front door. Albany to get behind universal pre-K legacy. But once elected, he had the Legalities aside, the investiga- but also to defend City Hall against misfortune of being judged against tions have worsened the antagonis- an array of dark forces hell-bent on the standards of a man who not only tic battles over the mayor’s land-use destroying his progressive agenda. He ran the city like a managerial robot policies for the simple reason that mentioned charter schools (which but who, being a billionaire, didn’t CONY took in more than $1 mil- the mayor had attacked during his have to go around sucking up for lion from real-estate interests. As campaign), Uber (which he subse- money. Whenever I spoke to the the campaign board began investi- quently tried to squash with a botched mayor’s aides, they would tell me

REPORT 43 how unfair it was that de Blasio, an residents who worked for an anti- build whatever it wants. The neigh- ordinary guy without a private for- gentrification group called the Coali- borhood’s zoning allows massive, out- tune, was being tarred as a money tion to Protect Chinatown and the of-scale construction, and zoning has hog when all that Bloomberg had to Lower East Side. I expected to find also allowed City Hall to claim its do was open his wallet to get what them angry. For months, they had hands are tied. This is true, to a point. he wanted, and every other non-self- been fighting against an eighty-story Several years ago, with money from funding politician used the same, to- condo that was going up near the East Mayor Bloomberg, the coalition hired tally normal fund-raising tools. River on the site of what had once a nonprofit development firm to help While that may be true, it is also been their community’s main grocery design new zoning for the Lower East true that most New Yorkers had never store. The neighborhood has been a Side, which included both height re- before had such a revealing peek at a hotbed of development, with rents strictions and a plan for affordable mayor’s money sausage being made. reaching an average of $3,895 for a housing that would not displace exist- This was de Blasio’s own fault: for argu- one-bedroom in a doorman building; ing residents. In 2015, it sent a draft to ably noble reasons, he insisted on dis- thousands of rent-stabilized apartments de Blasio’s city-planning department. closing CONY’s contributor list, a deci- have been lost to deregulation. The The letter it got back said the plan sion that his sharpest aides discouraged, anxieties they expressed were similar was “not feasible.” not least because it made it easy for to those I had heard at the town hall “We were commissioned and given enterprising journalists to connect the on the Upper West Side. Although funds by the Bloomberg Administra- quids of donations to the supposed tion,” said David Tieu, one of the quos of official dispensations. There group’s leaders. “But the so-called was also the mayor’s history of hav- IT’S THE DEER SYNDROME AGAIN: progressive, elected on a platform ing once fought ardently against to end the Tale of Two Cities, re- money in politics. In his previous job HAVING MADE A SERIES OF WELL- fuses to do what’s right.” as public advocate, de Blasio had It seemed like Tieu and the rest MEANING DECISIONS, DE BLASIO HAS launched a national effort to stop were just upset and engaged in con- corporate cash from washing into YET TO REAP THE POLITICAL REWARD spiratorial venting. But then I real- elections after the Supreme Court’s ized it was more than mere venting. ruling in Citizens United. Although As I stood to leave, Louise Velez the mayor’s aides point out that money One Manhattan Square, the condo reached into her purse and pulled out from CONY was never used in an elec- project, is geared toward the wealthy, it a postcard. On the front of the card tion, the whole thing seemed confus- also includes a sister building of less was this: ing: we, as a city, were being asked to expensive units. But even those units, Mayor Bill de Blasio figure out how comfortable we were the residents said, were too expensive City Hall with a man who had spent much of his for many in the area. New York, NY 10007 career fighting big money suddenly What I didn’t expect to find was bringing the new, steroidal fund-raising such a rabid level of de Blasio hatred; On the back was a message to the model to City Hall. it was tinged with disillusionment mayor: and a sense of betrayal that seemed I stand with my fellow New Yorkers to uch of the bad feeling has fed immune to any appeal to good faith, tell you we will not put up with your Minto a belief in many New rationality, or fact. As soon as I sat corrupt dealings with developers. You York neighborhoods that de down, Louise Velez, a retired school- are selling our nursing homes, public Blasio hasn’t done much to change bus driver who lives in public housing housing and libraries to real estate Bloomberg’s laissez-faire model of de- in the East Village, said, “A lot of groups with ties to your administra- velopment. Although this belief is people who voted for the mayor, like tion. Your policies benefit developers widespread and entrenched, it happens me, felt like he was going to be a that donate to your campaign while to run counter to the facts—in 2016 good change, but he turned out to be destroying our community. Enough of alone, the city built or preserved al- more corrupt than anyone. It’s like he this corruption! most 22,000 units of affordable hous- has an agenda he didn’t tell us about.” ing (as the mayor proudly announced Before she could finish her sentence, I asked if they were really going to in January), the most in a single calen- the man beside her, Tony Queylin, a mail the cards to City Hall. Of dar year since the Koch Administra- doorman who lives next to the condo course, Tieu told me, adding that in tion. But even this achievement hasn’t project, cut her off to say: “He ran the past few weeks alone they had quelled suspicions about his housing under the banner of change, but he collected hundreds. plan. It’s the deer syndrome again: does the same stuff Bloomberg did, having made a series of tough, well- even worse. You hear about this pay- e Blasio has said that the meaning decisions, de Blasio has yet to to-play thing, like if there’s money for Dhousing crisis will define his reap their political reward. his campaign or charity, the builders time in office, and he is keen- I saw this phenomenon firsthand can build whatever they want.” ly aware that his plan to fix it is facing when I went down to Grand Street, in In the case of One Manhattan opposition. That’s not surprising, his Lower Manhattan, to meet with some Square, the builder, Extell, can indeed advisers say: housing issues literally

44 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 hit people where they live. A central affordable buildings in innocuous “in- plank of the mayor’s strategy, formally fill” spaces throughout the city. He Peggy’s Cove known as Housing New York, was has also ensured two year-long rent Join the smart shoppers and experienced initially rejected by most of the city’s freezes for many New York residents travelers who have chosen Caravan since 1952 fifty-nine community boards before it living in rent-stabilized apartments, passed the City Council last year with and in February announced that support from labor unions and the $93 million would be set aside to pro- NovaScotia AARP—right around the time the vide free lawyers to tenants facing 10-Day Tour $1395 campaign-finance inquiries emerged. eviction. But the method that gets One aide I spoke to described the plan’s the most attention involves enormous with New Brunswick & Prince Edward. opponents as a loose network of preser- Haussmann-like rezonings of entire Fully guided from start to finish. vationists, critics of gentrification, and neighborhoods such as East New community-board types, all with differ- York, in Brooklyn, or along Jerome Nova Scotia Tour Itinerary: ent grievances—tall buildings, tenant Avenue, in the Bronx. Last year, the Day 1. Your Caravan Tour displacement, overcrowded schools, the mayor passed a pair of zoning laws starts in Halifax, Nova Scotia. TM disappearance of quirky mom-and-pop that would permit developers to put stores—but united by a general “anti- up bigger, denser, more profitable Day 2. Visit Hopewell Cape Flowerpot growth gestalt.” buildings, provided they included a Rocks. Observe the Bay of Fundy tides. That gestalt is not exclusively a percentage of below-market units. Day 3. Explore Prince Edward Island, New York phenomenon. The urban The rezonings work a bit like a vac- and enter the enchanting world of the renaissance of the past few decades cine. Having decided that the disease literary classic, Anne of Green Gables. has lowered crime and poverty in of gentrification is inevitable, the the world’s cities, but the transfor- mayor has chosen to encourage lots of Day 4. Continue on to Cape Breton and mation of those cities into foodie new construction, preemptively in- your French-speaking Acadian village. citadels and hubs of global capital jecting a dose of the virus into certain Day 5. Enjoy a whale watching cruise. has prompted a backlash. San Fran- threatened areas. He hopes to control cisco has its battle over Google bus- its spread and its most damaging ef- < Day 6. Breathtaking es. Londoners are struggling with fects by compelling developers to em- ocean scenery and a the fact that local housing prices bed within their projects the antidote grand adventure await have risen to fourteen times the of cheaper homes. on the Cabot Trail, in average salary. The question is: Will the gambit Cape Breton Highlands In his attempts to solve these prob- work? Although the total number of National Park. lems, de Blasio has made it clear that affordable housing starts announced Day 7. Explore Fortress of Louisbourg. he likes big buildings—both eco- this year has put de Blasio ahead of nomically and philosophically. He schedule in meeting his ambitious Day 8. Meet with First Nation People sees in their height and density an goal of 200,000 units, the income of Nova Scotia, and visit Peggy’s Cove. answer not only to the city’s housing distribution of those units doesn’t Day 9. Free time today in Halifax. scarcity but also to its problems with really fit the city’s needs. According Day 10. You return with great memories integration and environmental to the Citizens Budget Commission, of the Canadian Maritimes. health. “The Jane Jacobs worldview— there are about 250,000 New York neighborhood character, eyes on the families at the poorest end of the Detailed Itinerary at Caravan.com street, buildings all the same height— spectrum who pay more than half was an antidote to the big urban their income in rent but only about Choose An Affordable Tour+tax,fees problems of the last century,” said Wi- 5,000 in the middle-income bracket Guatemala with Tikal 10 days $1295 ley Norvell, a City Hall spokesman who are similarly burdened. The Costa Rica 8 days $1195 who works on housing issues. “But chief incentive to correct the imbal- Panama Canal Tour 8 days $1195 we’re confronting a problem now Jane ance between what is needed and Nova Scotia, P.E.I. 10 days $1395 Jacobs couldn’t foresee. It’s the prob- what is being built is a public subsi- lem of communities that become vic- dy to offset the losses that develop- Canadian Rockies 9 days $1695 tims of their own success. It’s so desir- ers incur from building affordable Grand Canyon, Zion 8 days $1495 able to live in Greenwich Village that homes that can’t be financed by California Coast 8 days $1595 the diversity Jacobs prized—the car- their rents alone. The mayor has set Mount Rushmore 8 days $1395 penter, checkout clerk, and pensioner aside unprecedented billions to do New England, Foliage 8 days $1395 living side by side—is disappearing this, but his war chest isn’t bottom- right before our eyes. How is the city less. And though his administration Brilliant, Affordable Pricing supposed to respond to that?” is on pace to create nearly ten times —Arthur“ Frommer, Travel Editor ” Under de Blasio’s plan, there are a more housing for the very poor than few main methods. One is the largely Bloomberg’s, de Blasio still faces a FREE Brochure invisible process of using public mon- trade-off that has aggravated com- ey to help developers erect or preserve plaints about his coziness with the Call (800) CARAVAN Caravan⅁com The #1 In Value

REPORT 45 ® Guided Tours Since 1952 city’s builders: underwriting the building affordably. It’s an argument deal was struck, de Blasio, now mayor, cheapest and most needed apart- in realpolitik: our goals are noble, got behind the project. The library ments naturally costs more (the but ultimately things must get done, chose a firm called Hudson Compa- rents are lower, thus the subsidies even if it means a philosophical nies for the job. The firm was run by are higher); conversely, while it’s compromise. The sense I got from David Kramer, the mayor’s friend and less expensive to guarantee the bot- City Hall was that none of it was fund-raiser. Although Kramer’s bid tom line of developers putting up ideal; it was simply the best possible was less than his competitor’s, he more profitable middle-income option in the constrained climate of promised to include more affordable homes with higher rents, there’s a twenty-first-century liberalism. housing. Once he got the contract, less urgent need for them. “La Guardia had Roosevelt, Lind- Kramer made a $10,000 donation to Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, de Blasio’s say had Johnson—and we don’t have Campaign for One New York, a fact former deputy mayor for health and either,” said Anthony Shorris, de that probably wasn’t missed by Preet human services, said the plan doesn’t Blasio’s first deputy mayor. “The Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Man- reach the neediest people. In 2015, question is: How do you be a progres- hattan, who is reported to be investi- Barrios-Paoli left City Hall after sive when you don’t have the re- gating the deal. (A spokesperson for fighting with the mayor over how to sources behind you?” Hudson said the firm had not been handle the city’s rising homeless pop- subpoenaed, and a spokesman for the ulation, which has reached historic ne way is the mayor’s third U.S. attorney declined to comment.) highs during his tenure. “It’s about Oand perhaps most problemat- A man with ambitions of his own, affordability that isn’t actually afford- ic approach to the housing Bharara has developed an aggressive able. Their solution isn’t congruent crisis: what could be called an ongo- interest in the mayor’s relations with with the problem.” ing, citywide squeeze play. the real-estate industry. Two months At a press conference on his hous- New York’s real-estate market is after the news got out that he was ing plan in January, de Blasio ad- always churning. And led by Alicia looking into the library deal, it also dressed this income mix, saying that Glen, the deputy mayor for housing, emerged that he was investigating an- “certain operating realities” con- City Hall has been studying the other de Blasio squeeze play: the fiasco strained what went up and what did churn, looking for opportunities to that swirled around the death of Long not. “If the financing doesn’t work in cajole developers into adding afford- Island College Hospital. The 500-bed the eyes of the people who have to able components to their projects. medical center was for decades the build the building, they won’t build Sometimes this works out well. In best emergency facility for a large the building,” he said, adding, “We’re 2015, Glen stepped into a deal by the swath of Brooklyn, serving tony Cob- trying for people who are poor, for Wall Street giant Blackstone to buy ble Hill as well as the high-rise public- people who are working class, for peo- Stuyvesant Town, Manhattan’s big- housing projects in Red Hook. Eighty ple who are middle class—they all gest housing complex. In a multi- thousand people depended on LICH need to be able to live here.” As com- billion-dollar deal, she used tax for care. When the State University of mitted ideological progressives, no one breaks to persuade Blackstone to New York, which owned the hospital, on de Blasio’s team enjoys hearing a keep almost half the project’s apart- voted to shut it down in 2013 (it was phrase like “market-based incentives” ments affordable for the teachers and reportedly losing nearly $1 million a connected to their housing efforts. firefighters who have traditionally week), a monumental battle ensued The mayor’s aides finesse the issue lived there. between community residents, who by saying that the city is “leveraging” But in other, less successful cases, didn’t want to travel twenty minutes if the market or “channeling” its forces the mayor has found himself in the they happened to have a heart attack, for the greater good. The local hous- uncomfortable position of supporting and state officials, who wanted to fi- ing market, they contend, is being projects he might have otherwise nance a smaller urgent-care clinic by inundated. Immigrants are pouring opposed—or actually did oppose. letting developers build on the site. into the city to work in construction; Among such plans was one that The conflict made its way into the college graduates are streaming in to called for building a condo tower on mayoral race. De Blasio had been work- work in tech. Meanwhile, couples top of a public library in Brooklyn ing with local activists to save LICH, with children, who might have left Heights. When the idea was floated and in the midst of his campaign, he New York twenty years ago, are de- during the Bloomberg years as part of sued the state to stop the development ciding to stay. At the same time, the a proposal to modernize the city’s li- plan and preserve the full hospital. At already crowded suburbs are discour- brary system, de Blasio attacked it as a that point, he was languishing in the aging new construction, and Wash- venal corporate plot to transform polls. He also got himself arrested—on ington, especially under Trump, is places of “knowledge and learning” camera—while protesting the hospital’s likely to continue cutting back on into profit centers for Big Real Estate. closure at SUNY’s office in Manhattan. funding for public housing. There “Once again,” he said, “we see lurk- Although hardly inauthentic, it was a aren’t many players left to meet this ing, right behind the curtain, real- nifty bit of community-pleasing theater. rising tide of demand aside from pri- estate developers who are very anx- (de blasio arrested, just as he want- vate developers, who, the city says, ious to get their hands on these ed, read the headline in the Times.) can be either coaxed or coerced into valuable properties.” But after the Along with the TV ad that featured his

46 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 available at bookstores and online washington.edu/uwpress

A YEAR RIGHT HERE Adventures with Food and Family in the Great Nearby by jess thomson $28.95 hc

Thomson spends a year exploring the food of the Pacific Northwest with her family. Planning to revel in the culi- nary riches of the region and hoping to break her son of his childhood pickiness, she eventually learns that letting go can be just as important as holding on.

“Jess is a smart, funny, straight-shooting writer with a great sense for food, and her A Year Right Here is no exception.” —molly wizenberg, author of a homemade life and delancey

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Also of Interest THE PROPELLER UNDER THE BED A Personal History of Homebuilt Aircraft by eileen a. bjorkman $29.95 hc

Bjorkman offers a moving and funny take on the history of homebuilt aircraft as well as how these personal projects contributed to aviation and innovation in America. son, Dante, sporting a giant Afro, the dropped into the mailboxes of local won here,” a spokeswoman for the much-covered hospital bust helped pro- residents. “A Letter to My Brooklyn mayor said in a statement. She added pel de Blasio into City Hall. Neighbors” had been written by one of that de Blasio would nonetheless During the mayor’s second month in the neighborhood activists, Gary Reil- “keep fighting to build a fairer, more office, his suit was settled under terms ly. Speaking now in support of Fortis’s just and inclusive New York.” designed to find a developer who would proposal, Reilly wrote: “I was asked by At its heart, our city is like many a come as close as possible to keeping the Mayor de Blasio to share my views on republic of small provincial villages, and entire hospital open. Feeling trium- what this means for families,” and what for several months and throughout those phant, de Blasio convened a meeting for it meant, by Reilly’s lights, was that the different villages, I heard versions of the reporters at which he declared that the deal with Fortis was “a lot better than same complaint. Everyone agreed that settlement was a “transcendent moment we had reason to think one year ago.” the republic was in crisis, that affordable for health care” in New York. (“We have If it seemed a little strange that the housing was essential, but many people kept the wolf from the door,” he said.) mayor was having someone else tout for their own parochial reasons were But when the new bids started coming the latest version of a plan he had once skeptical about the ways in which de in, his community allies were disheart- opposed, it was stranger still that Reil- Blasio was building such housing. He ened to discover that the state had by- ly’s letter had been mass-mailed from was building it either for those who passed two proposals to save the hospital the office of CONY. didn’t need it, they said, or without suf- and had gone back to the clinic-and- “There are no fans of de Blasio in ficiently consulting local residents, or in apartment-tower plan. They were fur- this neighborhood, because of what a manner that threatened to destroy ther discouraged when the mayor, who seemed like a duplicitous act,” said Amy established neighborhoods. Whether had fought beside them, started to sug- Breedlove, the president of the Cobble they are right or not remains to be seen: gest that this deal was the best they Hill Association, which fought for de Blasio’s plan is at base a Hobson’s could expect. “My clients thought they years to save the hospital. “He was ar- choice, a risky bet that doing something had finally found a politician with integ- rested and then got in, and Fortis got is better than doing nothing. His bet has rity,” said Jim Walden, a lawyer who the development. Then he stepped in not been called yet, but for a mayor who represented de Blasio and the commu- with his agenda for affordable housing. has spent more energy making it than nity. “But three months after the elec- He used us like a campaign platform, any other in recent memory this was a tion, the new administration wanted us like, ‘Hey, look at me. I’m a defender strange place to find himself: as a target to drop our case so they could work with of the community.’ ” of his own ambitious gamble. Q a luxury developer in exchange for an That was the sort of thing I heard for urgent-care center and a few affordable more than an hour when I sat down April Index Sources housing units. . . . We all realized we with Breedlove and her group. They had 1 GoFundMe (Redwood City, Calif.); 2,3 made a terrible mistake.” Norvell, the all given up on getting the hospital back Consumer Financial Protection Bureau mayor’s spokesman, pointed out that and were chiefly interested in working (Washington); 4,5 Kirt von Daacke, without de Blasio’s intervention the with Fortis and the mayor to introduce University of Virginia (Charlottesville); 6 University of Cape Town (South Africa); 7 hospital’s emergency room would have some rational planning into the huge Rhodes Trust (Oxford, England); 8,9 No5 shut down altogether and that, as he put development. Breedlove wasn’t sure if Chambers (Birmingham, England); 10 it, “a lot of the time, we were the only anyone had thought about how all this NASA (Houston); 11 Iowa Department of folks around the negotiating table fight- construction would affect the neighbor- Natural Resources (Mason City); 12 U.S. Department of Energy; 13 World Health ing for” affordable housing. hood. What about parking or crowding Organization (Geneva); 14 Clean Air in But what few knew at the time on the F train? What about congestion London; 15,16 Swedish Chemicals Agency was that during the negotiations, a on the streets and sidewalks? “We don’t (Stockholm); 17 athenahealth (Watertown, fund-raiser for an early iteration of think the Jane Jacobs model is out- Mass.); 18 Center for Reproductive Rights Campaign for One New York report- dated,” she said. “When you look at the (N.Y.C.); 19,20 U.K. Ministry of Defence (London); 21 Air India (N.Y.C.); 22 Survival edly was calling the project develop- best cities in the world, it’s about walk- Systems USA (Groton, Conn.); 23 Colorado er, Don Peebles, asking for money. In able green spaces, places for people to Avalanche Information Center (Boulder); an interview last spring, Peebles said congregate, housing that is nice and 24 Bruce Tremper (Salt Lake City); 25,26 that a month after the fund-raiser feels good on the human scale. That’s David Stark, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (N.Y.C.); 27 Annenberg Public reached out to him, de Blasio got on what Brooklyn is, that’s what we’re try- Policy Center (Philadelphia); 28 Bureau of the phone himself and asked for ing to defend. To hear that it’s outdat- Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives money. “It’s hard for a businessper- ed . . . ” She paused, then said, “I’m start- (Washington); 29 Center for Democracy son who has business interests in ing to get angry now.” in the Americas (Los Angeles); 30,31 New York City to tell the mayor no,” Early in November, after all the Pew Research Center (Washington); 32 Office of Representative William Lacy Clay Peebles said. So he sent a check, anger—and the interminable efforts— (Washington); 33 National Conference of which was later returned at his re- the LICH deal fell apart when the State Legislatures (Denver); 34 Bienert, Miller quest. (Peebles has flirted with run- Fortis Property Group suddenly an- & Katzman, PLC (San Clemente, Calif.); ning against de Blasio this year.) nounced that it was done negotiating 35,36 Public Policy Polling (Raleigh, N.C.); 37 Signet Classics (N.Y.C.); 38 Ted Kaye, A few months later, after Peebles and would likely build its project with- North American Vexillological Association lost the bid to another developer, the out affordable housing at all. “This is (Portland, Ore.); 39 Office of Nebraska State Fortis Property Group, an odd note not the plan we wanted, and nobody Senator Burke Harr (Lincoln).

48 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017

50 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 PHOTO ESSAY

ASPHALT GARDENS Photographs by Samuel James

The New York City Housing Authority is by far the largest public-housing agency in the United States. A vast archipelago of steel and brick across the five boroughs, NYCHA’s 326 developments are home to 396,582 authorized residents, along with an unknown number of off-lease tenants. In a city that is rapidly pricing out the poor, NYCHA’s housing projects are a last bastion of affordable shelter, with an av- erage monthly rent of $509. However, they remain beset by endemic crime, decaying infrastructure, and institu- tional neglect. Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, citywide crime has fallen to record lows, but in NYCHA developments, there were 190 shootings and forty-eight murders last year. Despite desperately needed structural repairs, the agency’s capital-improvement budget faces a $17 billion deficit. Meanwhile, there are 258,880 families still on the NYCHA waiting list.

This page: The Butler Houses, in the South Bronx

Samuel James is a photographer based in New York City. All images from the summer and fall of 2016 © Samuel James

PHOTO ESSAY 51 52 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 A summer night in a courtyard of the Butler Houses PHOTO ESSAY 53 Friends gather to mourn the death of Ackeem Davis, seventeen, outside the Pelham Park- way Houses, in the Bronx, where he was accidentally shot and killed by a friend last May

Dust clouds after routine NYCHA maintenance work outside the But- ler Houses A fifteen-year-old resident of the Butler Houses who is recovering from multiple gunshot wounds

PHOTO ESSAY 55 An afternoon at the basketball courts of the Butler Houses Teenagers inside an apartment at the Butler Houses 56 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 Children ride bi- cycles outside the Butler Houses

Friends of Ack- eem Davis take a break during the filming of a rap video in his hon- or, at the Pelham Parkway Houses

PHOTO ESSAY 57 58 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 Yanique Berkley at home in the Surf- side Gardens Hous- es, in Coney Island, Brooklyn. When Hurricane Sandy struck, in 2012, she had limited op- tions, and stayed in her second-floor apartment as water rose nearly to her windows. Five years later, the city hasn’t finished repairing the damage caused by the storm.

Pit-bull puppies bred inside an apartment in the Butler Houses

Opposite page: Halloween at the Castle Hill Houses, in the Bronx

PHOTO ESSAY 59 Top: Police floodlights illuminate the Pink Houses, in East New York, Brooklyn Bottom left: A flooded basement in the Castle Hill Houses Bottom center: A New York City Police Department watchtower between the Mott Haven and Patterson Houses, in the South Bronx

60 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 Bottom right: Graffiti in a stairwell of the Wald Houses, in Lower Manhattan

PHOTO ESSAY 61 Top: A bullet hole in a window of the Pink Houses, where Salaya Figueroa, a twenty- seven-year-old mother of three, was killed last November. Bottom: A squirrel attracted to the warmth of the candles in a memorial to Kevin Thomas, twenty-eight, who was 62 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 fatally shot several steps away, in the lobby of the Mott Haven Houses, last October Top: A child wears a mask during the filming of a video to honor Ackeem Davis Bottom: A memorial to Tyrone Stewart, thirty-one, who was killed in the lobby of the Cypress Hills Houses, in East New York, last September. There were five shoot- ings at the Cypress Hills Houses last year PHOTO ESSAY 63

An elderly resident of the Gravesend Hous- es, in Brooklyn. Near- ly 80,000 NYCHA residents are sixty-two or older

PHOTO ESSAY 65 LETTER FROM GERMANY

ECHT DEUTSCH How the refugee crisis is changing a nation’s identity By Yascha Mounk

n a starry The dinghy con- Onight in tinued to flood. Ali August was desperate to 2015, Ranim Al- save the family’s sous and her three most important children set out possession: a bag across one of the containing their deadliest straits of vital documents the Aegean Sea. and diplomas. But Alongside fifty then he saw the in- other refugees of fant son of a Kurd- many ethnicities ish family sinking and sects, Sunni below the surface. and Shia, Arab Letting go of the and Kurdish, they bag, he held the climbed into a boy afloat. “In that small dinghy— boat,” Ali, whose really nothing family is Arab, told more than an oval of inflatable plastic Then the trouble started. The motor me, “all of Syria was finally one.” with a motor attached—near Bodrum, stalled. Water began seeping into the A few minutes later, the Coast off the southwestern tip of Turkey, and boat. After several long minutes, the Guard appeared. Had the dinghy headed for the Greek island of Kos. motor came back to life, but it quickly drifted into Greek waters? Or had the The journey started smoothly. stalled again, this time for good. The sailors broken the rules? Ranim didn’t Turkish authorities were nowhere to refugees had to stand upright in the know. What she did know was that be seen, the waters calm, the air dinghy as the water rose higher. her first contact with European offi- warm. In less than an hour, the family Ranim’s oldest son, Ali, a sensi- cialdom was a painful one: the Greeks would reach firm ground; in a few tive fifteen-year-old, found himself welcomed the men and older boys days, Athens; in a few weeks, Berlin. abruptly forced into the role of with a blow to the head. There, they would be reunited with family patriarch. He had been the Thankful to be alive, Ranim, Ali, Ranim’s husband, Mousa Alzaeem, only passenger to keep his cell Maya, and Amr were taken to Kos, who had traveled the same route a phone dry, raised high above his where they applied for permission to few months before. head. He alone now managed to continue to Athens. They purchased dial the Greek Coast Guard and a tent in which to spend the week they Yascha Mounk is a lecturer on government at plead for salvation. expected to wait for the necessary Harvard University, a senior fellow at New They said there was nothing they papers, and huddled together for their America, and a columnist at Slate. The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the could do. Unless the dinghy reached first night in the European Union. Welfare State will be published by Harvard Greek waters, its passengers would be Some evenings, as soon as Ranim University Press in May. on their own. closed her eyes, the nightmares began.

Mousa Alzaeem waters a small olive tree that his family received from Berlin acquaintances after moving into a new apartment, at the edge of the city. When he lived in Idlib, Syria, he 66 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 and his brother owned around 2,000 olive trees. All photographs by Kaveh Rostamkhani She dreamed of Syria, of death and (“Better to let your population shrink take in, more and more Germans be- destruction, of Bashar al-Assad’s heli- than to let a lot of foreigners in”). gan demanding an end to it all. copters dropping bombs on her family. The homemade signs were even more In the many conversations I had Once, startled awake, she realized forthright. One declared that Angela across the country in the past year, a that the helicopters were real. They Merkel and her government were ene- visceral fear of change was palpable. On were looking for survivors of another mies of the german people who were a sunny Saturday morning, a well- voyage from Bodrum to Kos, likely waging a war of annihilation dressed couple in their early seventies arranged by the same smugglers, against us!!! Another said hey, yankee, quietly told me that they were not which had ended as hers so nearly get the shit out of here and take against the refugees; they just couldn’t might have. The next morning, a pho- your puppets with you. A third sign understand why “our pension gets small- tographer discovered the lifeless body showed a Crusader on horseback, using er and smaller while those refugees are of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old boy, his spear to repel a pair of Kalashnikov- given everything for free.” A muscular washed up on the beach, back on the wielding terrorists, the man wearing locksmith in his thirties told me the Turkish side of the Aegean. His pic- traditional dress, the woman covered by next day that he wasn’t worried about ture has since come to embody the a niqab. islamists not welcome, it an- the refugees: “When something hap- suffering of the Syrian refugees. nounced in big letters. pens around here, I’ll make a couple of When the rapid influx of refugees Molotov cocktails. That’ll take care of n the fall of 1989, East Germans began, in the fall of 2015, there was a the problem.” In all those conversations, Iflocked to the central squares of huge outpouring of support. Around the civil or aggressive, replete with bashful cities such as Dresden and Leipzig time that Ranim and her children were allusions or full of open threats, the core every Monday night to oppose the setting off across the Aegean, Merkel anxiety was the same: Germans, people Communist regime. Their trade- kept telling me, were being asked to mark slogan had a hopeful dignity: give up their identity in favor of a “Wir sind das Volk,” the crowd THE UNCONDITIONAL WELCOME bunch of strangers who would never would chant. We—not the secret belong. police, not the Communist elites— THAT GERMANS GAVE THE Nowhere was that anxiety more Are the People. REFUGEES IN 2015 NOW FEELS LIKE A evident, and nowhere did it seem For the past few years, a group more foreboding, than in the beauti- that calls itself the Patriotic Europe- RELIC FROM A DISTANT PAST ful streets of Dresden. All those outra- ans Against the Islamization of the geous banners and flags, it suddenly West (PEGIDA) has been assem- occurred to me as the protest wound bling on Monday nights in those same made a clear commitment to provide down, were a sideshow. The protest’s cities. Staking its claim as the spiritual safe harbor to any Syrian or Iraqi refugee emotional center—its core message and successor of that historic revolt, who arrived in Germany. Integrating so its insidious refrain—was a slogan that PEGIDA centers on opposition to the many refugees would pose a significant had not changed in a quarter century. refugees who are making their way to challenge, she conceded at a press con- “Wir sind das Volk,” the crowd chanted, Germany in their hundreds of thou- ference in Berlin. But, she vowed, in a over and over, each rendition a little sands. When I joined thousands of sentence that came to define her atti- more aggressive. We—not those foreign- angry citizens in the center of Dresden tude in the imagination of the German ers flooding Germany, not the politicians for their weekly protest last spring, public, “Wir schaffen das!” We can do it! in cahoots with them—Are the People. there was a distinct whiff of counter- In those days, activists thronged the revolution in the air. Few protesters railway stations of major cities to greet, number of countries, like the were waving the black, red, and gold feed, and clothe the new arrivals. Many AUnited States, have been mul- flag of the Federal Republic, whose waved white flags that bore the outline tiethnic and multireligious since tricolor design invokes the universalist of a small family, the man running in their founding. In the Hapsburg Empire values of the French Revolution. In- front, a woman behind him dragging or the Roman Empire or the Ottoman stead they favored the “Wirmer flag,” a along a small girl. refugees welcome, Empire, different cultures coexisted un- black Nordic cross bordered in gold its black lettering proudly proclaimed. der the rule of a tolerant monarch, yet against a red background, which has That unconditional welcome now people mostly ate, lived, and married become popular in far-right circles be- feels like a relic from the distant past. among those of the same ilk. What cause it is taken to symbolize the coun- As estimates of the number of new much of Europe is currently attempting try’s Christian roots, and also because arrivals continued to grow, as a crowd is historically unique. Never before has it resembles the forbidden war flag of of mostly immigrant men sexually as- a democracy that defined itself by its the Third Reich. saulted hundreds of women near Co- ethnic or religious homogeneity man- What the iconography of resistance logne’s Central Station on New Year’s aged to broaden its self-conception and lacked in subtlety, it made up for in Eve, as terrorist attacks rocked Brus- recognize millions of immigrants as variety. I spotted Russian flags (“Putin sels and Nice and finally Berlin, and members of the nation. No precedent puts his people first,” its bearer ex- as Merkel steadfastly refused to name suggests that it can be done. plained), a Confederate flag (“They an upper limit to the number of refu- Germany has become the most were true rebels”), and a Japanese flag gees her government was willing to important test site in this grand

LETTER FROM GERMANY 67 experiment. For decades, the condi- now insist, they have nothing in com- As a reward for making things so easy tions for membership in the German mon with today’s Syrian newcomers. on them, Germans have treated her very nation were clear and rigid. A true Can Germany overcome such deep- well. A decade ago, when Kaddor was a German was a descendant of those rooted ideas about who gets to belong? little-known graduate student in her brave warriors who roamed the Teu- If native Germans finally accept that a mid-twenties, she proposed a children’s tonic woods and intimidated Julius liberal society defines belonging by citi- edition of the Koran to her favorite pub- Caesar’s legions—or somebody who zenship rather than by blood, and that lishing house, and was quickly offered a could at least pass for one. today’s refugees might turn into tomor- book contract. Soon, news producers There are some signs of change. Im- row’s Germans, the country will manage were asking for her views on any number migrants and their children, mostly in- to master the current crisis—and prove of issues related to Islam and immigra- visible in the public sphere a few decades that the dream of a multiethnic, multi- tion. These days, she frequently defends ago, are starting to find success in busi- religious democracy is still achievable. her liberal interpretation of Islam against ness, sports, music, journalism, and even But if they refuse to let go of their exclu- a radical cleric or argues for her religion’s politics. In the most mixed neighbor- sive conception of the nation, the coun- compatibility with German culture on hoods of the country’s biggest cities, it is try will continue to treat its immigrants one of the Sunday talk shows. starting to seem obvious that a true and refugees as second-class citizens, and The battle Kaddor fights on TV is German might be Asian or African. will eventually succumb to the same the same as the one she wages as a part- And yet the older, ethnic definition rebellion against pluralism that has re- time teacher of Islamic religion in un- of citizenship remains. It explains why cently spread across North America and glamorous Dinslaken, a working-class those protesters in Dresden claim ev- Western Europe. If that happens, the town in the deindustrializing Ruhr area ery Monday that “We Are the People.” experiment of the past fifty years will that isn’t known for anything in par- It explains why so many people see end in disaster. ticular, except perhaps for bordering immigration not as an economic or what was once Europe’s largest sewage- social problem but as an existential amya Kaddor is the model of treatment plant. As part of their nor- threat to the German nation. And it Lhow to be a minority in mal curriculum, public schools in Ger- also explains why so many immigrants Germany—the kind of Muslim many have long offered separate, from the former Soviet Union who are that German critics of Islam always faith-based religious instruction for of Germanic descent—more than say they wish for. Born in Ahlen, in Catholics, Protestants, and, in a few big cities, Jews. But Germany has been slow to grant its more than 4 million Muslims the same right. Kaddor wants to change that— and simultaneously ensure that her students are exposed to a mod- erate version of Islam. When I sat in on one of her les- sons, about different forms of prayer, it soon became clear that something about her colloquial yet direct language, delivered in the singsongy cadences of Germany’s northwest, made her students trust her blindly. Her sixth graders asked for advice on everything from how to handle a devout grandmother who pressured girls to cover their heads to dealing with a man on Chatroulette who claimed to be killing a woman live on camera. Kaddor, whose round face is framed by long black hair, an- swered all the questions with im- perturbable patience (“You should only wear a headscarf if that’s what you want to do”; “No, I don’t 2 million have arrived since 1991— northwest Germany, to Syrian par- think he really was killing her”), even don’t spot the irony in resenting refu- ents, she is charming, educated, and as she gently steered the conversation gees. Centuries ago, their ancestors successful. She is an outspoken de- back to religion. When one student left Germany for the East. Because fender of Israel’s right to exist. She nervously told the class that his moth- they remain “German by blood,” they doesn’t wear a headscarf. er didn’t want him to reveal that he was

A demonstration by the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization 68 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 of the West (PEGIDA), in Dresden, December 22, 2014 Shia, Kaddor pounced on the oc- casion to emphasize that all reli- gious beliefs were worthy of the same respect. “It doesn’t matter whether you are Shia, Sunni, Alawi, or something else. A hu- man being is a human being. It doesn’t matter one bit whether he is a Muslim or not.” “That’s right,” shouted Fed- erico, a big-eyed, overenthusias- tic boy who kept interrupting class to tell some story or anoth- er.* “I have a German friend!” “Do you think the other people around us are worth less?” Kaddor asked. “Or do you think that Ya- scha Mounk—I don’t know his religion, but I suspect he’s Jewish— do you think that he’s worth less than us?” “No,” everyone muttered. “A human being is a human being,” one of the children added since. Was I simply unlucky to be born Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, and Aus- eagerly. before the new millennium? tria, finally arriving in Berlin months “That’s right,” Kaddor said. “We judge Perhaps. But then I started to think after they set off from Idlib. people by their actions. By how they about small details whose significance On a beautiful fall day, Mousa was treat us.” had, at first, passed me by. How much reunited with his wife and children at As she expounded on the theme of could Federico feel like he belonged to the city’s shabby bus depot. He had religious tolerance, Federico turned his native country if he considered it asked a friend to record the joyous occa- around to me. “That’s cool,” he stage- noteworthy to have “a German sion. But in the video he showed me, the whispered, and gave me a big thumbs-up. friend”? And didn’t even Kaddor men- camera steadfastly rests on the face of For a moment, I was tempted to see tion far-reaching limits on her reli- his technically inept volunteer. the lesson as a good sign. If there were gious freedom casually, as though they The Alzaeem family was put up in an teachers like Kaddor, and curious, open- were facts of nature? abandoned government building that minded students like Federico, perhaps At one point, an earnest boy named had once served as the borough hall of German identity was less immutable Kheder told her, with a mix of embar- an affluent neighborhood in the city’s than the pessimists said. Perhaps the rassment and pride, that he got up at west. Hastily converted to house 1,200 country had changed since I lived there. five in the morning on summer week- refugees, the Rathaus Wilmersdorf still Born in Munich in 1982 to Jewish ends to pray. “Whoa, Kheder! At five exuded the spirit of German bureau- parents from Eastern Europe, I had a lot in the morning?” Kaddor asked. She cracy from every nook and cranny. An of advantages over most immigrants. I gently explained that, on religious old sign announced the name of the spoke the language without a foreign grounds, it was perfectly acceptable to office their room had once housed: abt. accent. Unlike many of Kaddor’s stu- make up for a missed prayer later in the stadtentwicklung und ordnung- dents, I didn’t “look foreign.” And day. As for herself, she told the class, sangelegenheiten/strassen- und though anti-Semitism was hardly ex- she generally prayed five times a day. grünflächenamt/schadensfallbear- tinct, it was not nearly as virulent as “But of course,” she said offhandedly, “I beitung. You don’t want to know. today’s Islamophobia; in fact, on the rare can’t pray in school.” Their living conditions were cramped: occasions when I revealed that I was “Why not?” a student asked. Mousa and Ranim shared a twin bed by Jewish, most people were keen to prove “I don’t want to pray in front of all my the left wall, Ali and Maya had bunk to me how much they loved the Jews. colleagues. Perhaps they wouldn’t under- beds along the right, and Amr, the lit- Even so, I came to feel less and less Ger- stand. They’d think I’m a fundamental- tlest one, slept on a tiny mattress just man as I got older. Whenever I men- ist or something like that. They might long enough to connect the opposite tioned that I was Jewish, I became a start being afraid of me.” sides of the room. They had been living curiosity, an outsider, a stranger. Ger- there for six months when I went to many gave me opportunities, but it fter a long, expensive wait for the meet them in March 2016. Despite the never quite felt like home. When I Anecessary documents, Ranim spartan surroundings, Ranim rustled up turned eighteen, I left for college, and and her children took a boat to a feast: coffee, water, pears, tangerines, have mostly lived outside the country Athens. From there, they traveled—by sunflower seeds, and a corn cake with * Some names have been changed. train, by bus, and on foot—through chocolate muffins placed atop it.

The Alzaeem family in their living room LETTER FROM GERMANY 69 German police to avert illegal bor- der crossings by any means neces- sary, even shooting at refugees. She urged native families to have at least three children to ensure that “Germany, as a population and as a nation, does not disap- pear entirely.” With public opin- ion turning in her favor, Petry—a well-spoken East German chemist in her early forties, with a square face, short black hair, and lively gray eyes—has become less and less guarded about her worldview: “It is a fact,” she declared last June, “that the tenets of Islam directly violate the German Constitution.” Since the end of World War II, no far-right party has managed to get 5 percent of the vote and en- ter the Bundestag. Polls for the upcoming national elections, scheduled for this fall, suggest Ranim and Mousa met in 1993 at whose German remained thin, he that this is about to change. Under the University of Aleppo, where they knew very well that his art was un- Petry’s leadership, the AfD is on were both studying Arabic literature. likely to feed his family. course to garner more than 10 percent He was immediately taken with her, The language barrier was a problem of the vote, becoming the nation’s and started to sit in on her classes in for Ranim as well. She was on the wait- third-largest party and casting into the hope of striking up a conversa- ing list to enroll in a German course but doubt Angela Merkel’s ability to cob- tion. She was skeptical, but fell for was trying to learn on her own. With no ble together a governing coalition. him after a few months. Their mar- active vocabulary, it was difficult for her When I first attended an AfD cam- ried life in Syria was comfortable. to participate in German society; for paign event, it instantly reminded me Both worked as Arabic teachers, now, her life remained restricted to stay- of my youth. Everything about it making a decent salary, but Mousa ing in their apartment and looking after seemed to be inspired by the provin- dreamed of becoming a writer. His the children. cial German towns in which I lived in aspirations, though, were hampered Ali and Maya were enrolled in an the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was by his opposition to Assad; a pub- integration class, which effectively held in a dreary all-purpose event lisher declined to pay for his second shielded them from German children. space in a middle-class suburb of story collection to be printed and Progress was slow. Many of the students Offenburg—the kind of place made up instead offered to cover the expenses in his class, Ali complained, came from of family homes that are not identical, for a book in praise of the Syrian Afghanistan and were functionally il- exactly, but whose walls all have the army. Mousa refused the offer. Then literate. And so eight-year-old Amr, who same color and whose roofs are all at the war started, and with it the con- went to a normal school a few days a the same angle. Including the predict- stant fear of injury, torture, and death. week, was the only member of the fam- able fact that it skewed old, the audi- When the high schools in Idlib began ily who regularly interacted with Ger- ence, too, was unremarkable. Looking to shut their doors, in March 2015, mans. As is so often the case in immi- for seats, old acquaintances were de- the family decided to leave their grant families, it was the youngest child lighted to spot each other in the hometown for Eretz Almanya. who spoke the language most fluently crowd; others seemed to make fast Since arriving in Berlin, Mousa had and had the keenest understanding of friends amid a general spirit of solidar- tried to focus on his writing. He start- his new surroundings—and probably ity. If a manufacturer of orthopedic ed to publish short stories in Almadi- the best chance to succeed. products had assembled an unusually na, a local Arabic-language magazine, large focus group, the scene might and hoped to finish a novel based on s anger against migrants has have looked much the same. his family’s escape from Syria. But his Arisen, so have the fortunes of When the speeches started, the productivity suffered from having to the Alternative for Germany friendly mood quickly turned angry. share a room with his wife and chil- (AfD). Frauke Petry, the party’s leader, Frequently accused of stoking the fire of dren, and also from a nagging feeling is known for her fierce anti-immigrant prejudice, Petry insisted that “fear and of helplessness as he waited for the rhetoric, and has advocated using “ver- envy are an important part of politics.” papers his family needed to remain in bal provocations” as a P.R. strategy. Germans, she said over a massive round Germany. As a writer in exile, and one True to her word, she has called on the of applause, should no longer refrain

Frauke Petry, the leader of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) 70 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 party, giving a speech at an anti-refugee rally in Berlin, November 7, 2015 from invoking historically charged terms heading out once more to argue for the who could better bear witness to that like “das Volk” with pride. ideal of a multiethnic society. transformation than she? Wasn’t her After her speech, Petry fielded Twenty miles to the east, in the cen- face smiling on posters all over town? questions from her audience. I joined ter of Stuttgart, that society already Weren’t her constituents brimming the line to ask whether she was wor- seemed within reach. Muhterem Aras, with good vibes when she went can- ried that some of the party’s support- a fifty-year-old immigrant from a re- vassing door-to-door? And didn’t it ers had advocated setting refugees’ mote part of the Turkish countryside, seem inevitable that the rest of the homes on fire. “People should protest was running for reelection to the state country would soon follow suit? against the government’s refugee parliament. Aras, a charismatic woman Two days later, on election night, policy in front of town halls and min- with dark hair, a broad nose, and big, Aras saw her optimism vindicated. The istries, not in front of the homes of smiling eyes, might be seen as the em- people of Stuttgart reelected her with asylum seekers,” she insisted. Then bodiment of the German dream. After the highest vote share of any politician she pivoted, garnering raucous ap- all, Germany—a country she loves in the state. plause: “The resentment and the vio- proudly, unabashedly, infectiously—has “What will Germany look like in lence we now see in the population afforded her the opportunity to achieve twenty or thirty years?” I asked her at only shows that the government has everything an immigrant might hope the Green Party’s election celebration left people alone with their prob- lems. The things we are seeing are terrible symptoms—but they are symptoms, not the cause.”

ith crucial regional elec- Wtions in Baden- Württemberg, Germa- ny’s third-most-populous state, only days away, Freddy Stiegler—a childhood friend of mine who now heads up the Social Democratic Party’s chapter in the southwestern city of Pforzheim—was doing his best to fight back against Petry. On a freezing spring morning, he set up a little stall at the local farmers’ market and began defending the government’s open-door policy to the people of his city. The public was unreceptive. There was the man who thought that things were better in the G.D.R. The man who blamed America for all the evil in the world. And, inevitably, the man who did not understand why Social Democrats like Freddy cared more about refugees than they did about for. She got a good education, started a that night. “More like Stuttgart or more native Germans. family, became financially secure, won like Pforzheim?” Pforzheim, a town of 120,000, is not elected office, and made a lot of friends “Stuttgart,” Aras answered with- economically depressed. And yet, Fred- along the way. out hesitation. dy told me, it is troubled. Long known Aras told me that her position was When I called Freddy to see how the for its jewelry—an industry that con- owed not to some unique personal night had gone for him, he was walking tinues to net profits yet provides fewer quality or to some special providence home from a desolate election party. and fewer jobs—the city boasts its fair but to an environment in which any His wife had been driving him home, share of the superrich, and attracted immigrant should thrive. Sure, back but he made her stop the car at the high immigration in the postwar boom in 1978, when she had just arrived in bottom of the steep hill on which they years, but now has the highest unem- Germany from a small village in East- lived. He needed the fresh air. He need- ployment rate in the state. As a result, ern Anatolia, locals refused to believe ed to be alone. tensions are high: between rich and that a twelve-year-old with her name In Pforzheim, he told me, the election poor, natives and immigrants, left and and complexion could ever come to be had gone worse than he could have right. But Freddy remained optimistic. German. But that was a different time, imagined. Support for the Social Demo- “In the end we’ll at least manage to stay Aras insisted. Today, immigrants have crats had halved since the last election. ahead of the AfD,” he said, before a place in the heart of Stuttgart. And The AfD had not just overtaken the

Mousa and his thirteen-year-old daughter, Maya, on their way to pick up Amr, his nine-year-old son LETTER FROM GERMANY 71 S.P.D.; it drew more than twice as the stance that won her admirers For now, a real hope remains that the much support, winning a plurality of around the world. Speaking at the backlash against the refugees will one the vote for the first time in its history. Christian Democrats’ party confer- day come to look like the last rearguard I asked Freddy the same question I ence in December, she promised that battle in a doomed rebellion against had put to Aras. a return to the period of open borders pluralism. But it is just as possible that “Pforzheim,” he said. for refugees “cannot, must not, and historians will look on these two years should not happen.” At times, Merkel and conclude the opposite. The attempt lthough Merkel has kept to the even seems to emulate the populists— to establish liberal, multiethnic democ- Aletter of her promise not to in- as when, calling on immigrants to racies in the heart of Europe, they may troduce an upper limit to the “show your face,” she advocated for a write, was doomed all along. number of refugees that Germany will burka ban. As a cruel year slouched toward win- accept, she has struck a series of deals to It is not only Germans who are torn ter, even the most infectious optimists I subvert its spirit. Because Macedonia, as to whether they can ever come to met last spring started to sound despair- Croatia, Hungary, and Austria have accept Syrian refugees as members of ing. Debating Frauke Petry on Germa- fortified their borders to stop refugees the nation. Many Syrians are just as ny’s most watched talk show, Lamya from entering, and because Germany torn, between their desire to build a Kaddor lost her friendly demeanor for a has agreed to pay Turkey billions of eu- decent life in Germany and their hope moment. “If we didn’t have any mosques, ros to take back Syrian refugees who that they might one day be able to re- if we didn’t teach Islam in schools, if we made it to Greece and stop the cross- turn home. were no longer allowed to perform ritu- ings, the flow of people has slowed sig- In Maya’s family’s tiny room back in al slaughter, would you finally consider nificantly. In 2015, 890,000 refugees the Berlin refugee home, I asked her us sufficiently integrated? Would you?” arrived in Germany. In 2016, the num- what she liked best about Germany. “You know, Frau Kaddor,” Petry respond- ber was 280,000. Her answer took me by surprise: “The ed with palpable disdain, “people who The most acute phase of the migrant Brandenburg Gate,” she said. “And actually want to integrate just do it. crisis has ended, at least for now. But the Schloss Charlottenburg.” They don’t need to be told by the law.” political and cultural fallout is still “You’re interested in architecture?” In her latest book, Kaddor worries spreading. Germany’s courageous deci- I asked. that “our democracy is in danger.” To sion to provide safe harbor to hundreds “Yes,” she said quietly. “When I grow survive this difficult moment, Germany of thousands is one of the great up, I want to become an architect. And needs to adopt an expanded understand- achievements of its postwar transfor- then I want to go back home and rebuild ing of what it means to be a true mation. Even the tens of thousands of my country.” German—and the creation of that new Germans who helped to house and Ranim, Mousa, and their kids re- collective, she argues, requires efforts by clothe the refugees in those chaotic cently moved from the crammed quar- the long-standing majority as well as the first months, when the state was strug- ters in which I first met them to a mod- recently arrived minority. gling to provide necessary services to est apartment in the Neuköln section of For much of her career, Kaddor new arrivals, couldn’t have imagined the Berlin. As ever, they are keen to count had criticized right-wing extremists can-do spirit it mobilized. The qualities their blessings. “My family’s doing well,” or trained her sights on the failings for which so many people outside the Ali told me. “Maya is at the top of her of Germany’s Muslim community. country admire Germany—its moderate class. Amr speaks German like the lo- Once she dared to write about the government, its booming economy, its cal kids.” Ali, too, is happy with the life steps that ordinary Germans would vibrant civil society—had suddenly he’s built for himself. Finally placed in have to take to make integration served a larger purpose. a normal class, he is on the path to work, many reacted with fury. Lead- But if Merkel’s decision to welcome college and has started an internship ing AfD politicians went on the of- the refugees was a moving embodi- in electrical engineering. fensive. So did a host of far-right ment of the belief, deeply ingrained in And yet his thoughts keep returning sites. One author falsely accused her a certain generation of German politi- to the wider world. Last November, at of lacking both “a theological edu- cians, that the country’s moral obliga- the height of the siege on Aleppo, he cation and the necessary qualifica- tions can at times trump its self- messaged me in the middle of the night. tion to teach.” Another was even interest, it may also turn out to be its “I can’t sleep,” he wrote. “I’m thinking blunter: the “self-enamored Mrs. apotheosis. Over the course of the past about my life, and about Syria.” A few Kaddor,” a well-known journalist year, there have been hundreds of at- days later, after the U.S. presidential wrote, “is genuinely dumb.” tacks on refugee homes. The AfD has election, he messaged me again: “Hello,” Faced with a mountain of death established itself as a major political he wrote. “I am shocked. Trump as the threats, Kaddor decided it was no longer force. Once seemingly unassailable by president of the United States! May you safe to teach her class. Publicly, she re- her opponents, Merkel is now hated by choose the right policies.” mains as combative as ever. But pri- a large number of Germans, both Does Germany’s future lie with Stutt- vately, she admitted that the past year across the nation and among the base gart or with Pforzheim, with Merkel or had left her downcast. “I’ve lost some of of her own party. with Petry, with Kaddor or with the my fighting spirit,” she told me at the In her fight for political survival, protesters in Dresden claiming that “We beginning of 2017. “It’s sobering what Merkel has slowly begun to disavow Are the People”? strangers can do to you.” Q

72 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 LETTER FROM JAPAN

THE BOY WITHOUT A COUNTRY Tokyo’s painful exclusion of immigrants By Jessica Weisberg

hen Utinan Won passport and took her to a Wwas twelve, he brothel. She worked there for liked to sprawl out two years, until she paid back on the floor of his living her debts and fled to Kofu, room and read manga. His where a friend of hers lived. favorite series was Naruto, Later she heard that the broth- the story of a lonely orphan. el was raided by police, but no Naruto, who also happens to one came looking for her. be twelve, has spiky yellow Lonsan was free, but she hair and dreams of becoming lacked both the legal documen- a ninja, but he is forced from tation to remain in the country his village after his neighbors and the money to return home. learn that he has a mystical In Kofu, she met a Thai man fox inside him—a source of who had also overstayed his ominous power. visa. The two of them briefly In those days, Utinan and dated, and she became preg- his mother, Lonsan Phaphak- nant. Weeks after Utinan was dee, lived just outside Kofu, a born, the man was discovered small but bustling city two by the police and deported hours west of Tokyo, where back to Thailand. Lonsan neon billboards flash against never heard from him again. a backdrop of green hills. Uti- Citizenship in Japan is jus nan rarely went outside, but sanguinis—determined by on weekends, the kids from blood, rather than by place of his neighborhood would tell birth. Though Utinan quali- him about their classes, fied for Thai citizenship, Lon- school plays, and soccer san didn’t know how to regis- games. He was envious. He ter his birth from abroad, so had never been allowed to he was rendered stateless. join them in school, because he was an money or property, and the recruiter Until 2012, immigrants in Japan ap- undocumented immigrant. offered to pay for her plane ticket. When plied to their regional government for Lonsan had come to Japan from she arrived at the airport in Tokyo, she identification cards, which allowed Thailand in 1995, after a chatty re- was given a visa that allowed her to stay them to access public resources, in- cruiter showed up in her village and in the country for seventy-two hours. cluding schools, and local authorities offered her a job at a restaurant. She was Then she was met by a different re- sometimes turned a blind eye toward living with her parents, who had no cruiter, who informed her that she owed undocumented residents. Lonsan, how- him 3.8 million yen—nearly $40,000— ever, was too scared to get I.D.’s for Jessica Weisberg is a writer and producer. This and that she’d have to start paying off herself and Utinan—the risk of being story was supported by the Abe Fellowship her debt. Lonsan was terrified, but fol- reported to the same officers who had for Journalists. lowed him to his car. He confiscated her deported her boyfriend loomed too

Illustration by Shonagh Rae LETTER FROM JAPAN 73 great. Five years ago, Japan created a san couldn’t read Japanese, but Utinan demands, many of his countrymen new residency-management system that had learned it quickly—he cannot viewed the acquiescence as a humiliat- centralized oversight of foreigners, re- read or write Thai—and any judge, ing defeat. A movement, backed by quiring all immigrants to procure a Yamazaki thought, would surely sym- samurai leaders, quickly rose to oust national I.D. card. For people without pathize with Lonsan’s plight as a victim him. Its slogan, “Sonnǀ jǀi” (“Revere the right papers, any encounter in a of human trafficking. After they ap- the emperor, expel the barbarians”), hospital, school, or government office plied for residency, they could stop expressed the idea that outsiders un- became perilous. living in hiding while they awaited the dermine Japanese strength and be- Before Utinan turned twelve, he and government’s decision. Utinan could came a catalyzing philosophy of the Lonsan changed apartments frequent- register for junior high at a regular new Japanese Empire. In 1863, Em- ly, so immigration officers couldn’t find school, and Lonsan, who had a sea- peror Komei¯ passed the Order to Expel them. They moved between suburbs, sonal job picking fruit, would have an Barbarians, which inspired a spree of went to Nagano—a larger city to the alibi if immigration police ever raided attacks on foreigners. north—and then back to Kofu. Shun- the orchard where she worked. Modern Japanese politicians echo ji Yamazaki, a longtime immigration In July 2013, Lonsan and Utinan, sonnǀ jǀi by advocating racial purity. activist, had friends in the area’s Thai then thirteen, borrowed a friend’s car “There are things Americans have not community and heard rumors about a and traveled eighty miles east to the been able to achieve because of mul- child who had never gone to school. tiple nationalities,” Prime Minister Shortly after Utinan’s twelfth birth- Yasuhiro Nakasone declared in day, Yamazaki tracked him down FOR PEOPLE WITHOUT THE RIGHT 1986. “On the contrary, things are and invited him to take courses at easier in Japan because we are a Oasis, a nonprofit he’d founded to PAPERS, ANY ENCOUNTER IN homogeneous society.” Shinzo Abe, provide tutoring, legal services, and A HOSPITAL OR SCHOOL the current prime minister, backs meeting spaces to local immigrants. tough restrictions on immigration, There were six other children in COULD BE PERILOUS because he considers it to be desta- Utinan’s class. They all needed help bilizing. “In countries that have with their Japanese, but their accepted immigration, there has parents—who came from China, Korea, Immigration Bureau in Tokyo, to sur- been a lot of friction, a lot of unhap- Indonesia, and Brazil—had visas, and render. At ten in the morning, they piness both for the newcomers and the the kids had grown up attending Japa- arrived at a tall steel-and-glass building people who already lived there,” he nese schools. Utinan was the only un- and found seats in an empty waiting said in a 2014 television interview. documented student. He was gangly and room facing an array of intimidating This is likely the only time that Abe shy, with shaggy hair that he was always signs. Utinan tried to translate the has even uttered the word “immigra- brushing away from his eyes. He couldn’t Japanese for his mother, but the mes- tion” in public since he was elected in figure out what to talk about with his sages had too much bureaucratic jar- 2012. When asked about the subject, peers. He wasn’t even sure how to intro- gon he didn’t understand. Hours he usually responds with a discussion duce himself. His mother called him by passed. They didn’t know when their of “foreign workers,” as though immi- the nickname Sifa, but he wanted some- names might be called, so they were gration’s only conceivable form were a thing that seemed more Japanese. His afraid to use the bathroom or buy a temporary labor arrangement. complexion, lighter than Lonsan’s, snack from the 7-Eleven downstairs. About 2 percent of Japan’s residents might let him pass. He knew that his Late in the afternoon, they were sum- are foreign-born, which is extremely father’s last name was Wuthipang, so he moned into separate interrogation few for an industrialized country. (In landed on a Japanese-sounding version: rooms, where, Utinan recalled, an the United States, by comparison, im- Utinan, a name of his own making. official explained to him that the Jus- migrants make up 14 percent of the To help Utinan socialize, Yamazaki tice Ministry would make a decision population.) The paucity of foreign arranged for him to eat lunch at a local about their deportation within a year. citizens was ensured by law: after World junior-high school. There were assigned The official also said other things, but War II, the country ratified a new, seats in the cafeteria. “I had to sit in Utinan was too nervous to listen. By American-drafted constitution, and front of a girl,” Utinan told me. “I the time he and his mother were dis- shortly after, the Nationality Act le- couldn’t look at her face.” For the first missed it was nearly ten, and they gally mandated citizenship by blood, week, he sat in complete silence as he didn’t get home until after midnight. stripping all colonial subjects of their picked at his rice. Eventually he lifted Japanese status. A person could be a his eyes to meet hers, and managed to n 1853, during a period of Western citizen only if his or her father was blurt out, “Can I borrow your eraser?” Iconquest of new markets, Mat- Japanese—mothers didn’t count. Yamazaki urged Utinan and his thew Perry, a U.S. naval commo- At the time, more than 2 million mother to apply for legal status. If they dore, sailed into Tokyo’s harbor with a Koreans who had been forced at the were denied, he’d find them a top- fleet of warships, expecting a trade start of the war to work in Japan’s coal notch lawyer to appeal the decision. It treaty. Japan had no navy of its own, mines, shipyards, and factories lived was a big gamble, but Yamazaki be- and when the shogun —the general— on the mainland; they constituted the lieved that their case was strong. Lon- was forced to concede to American country’s largest foreign group. Under

74 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 the Nationality Act, they had no vot- and real-estate markets collapsed. HARPER’S ing rights, they could not hold gov- Desperation and bitterness gave way ernment jobs, and police were in- to a proliferation of angry nationalist structed to closely monitor their rallies, which have continued to the WEEKLY communities. “They are not included present day. Protesters took to gath- in the term ‘Japanese’ as used in this ering in the streets and harassing REVIEW directive,” a law-enforcement memo ethnic minorities, whom they accuse from 1945 explains, “but they have of taking away their jobs. Koichi Na- been Japanese subjects and may be kano, a political scientist who studies Enjoying the issue? treated by you, in case of necessity, as these groups at Sophia University, in enemy nationals.” More than 600,000 Tokyo, told me, “These are basically Koreans remained in Japan, stranded spontaneous, rather fluid networks of Check out our weekly in a second-class existence. They and haters.” Most are working-age men take on the news, their children are now, in the words who have never managed to find se- delivered to your inbox of Erin Aeran Chung, the director of cure employment; Nakano said that the Racism, Immigration, and Citi- 37 percent of Japanese workers today FREE every Tuesday. zenship Program at Johns Hopkins have sporadic, temporary positions. University, a “highly assimilated, le- When I was in Tokyo, not long VISIT HARPERS.ORG gally foreign community.” ago, on any given day I would see In 1985, following international dozens of people carrying Japanese TO SIGN UP TODAY! pressure, the Nationality Act was re- flags and shouting vague, violent vised to allow Japanese mothers to threats in minority neighborhoods or pass citizenship to their children. A outside foreign embassies. Nakano few years later, the country’s manufac- estimates that there are more than a turing sector was experiencing a labor hundred nationalist groups that con- shortage, and the government decided vene across the country. They are to fill the empty jobs by further loos- not on the fringe: A leader of the ening its restrictions, this time for group Zaitokukai, which has called members of the diaspora. The grand- for a large-scale massacre of Korean children or great-grandchildren of residents, has been photographed Japanese farmers who had gone in the hobnobbing with a senior member of late nineteenth century to search for the Liberal Democratic Party, the gold in Peru or left a few decades later current ruling party. Several L.D.P. to work on coffee plantations in Brazil officials have been photographed pos- were invited to return as permanent ing with the head of a neo-Nazi group residents. Many settled in cities along in front of a Japanese flag. Even the Japan’s industrial corridor, like Hama- more centrist members of the L.D.P. matsu and Toyota. “There were sud- proudly refer to their country’s ethnic denly large groups of foreigners in the makeup as “homogeneous”—an im- streets,” Yasuyuki Kitawaki, a former possible claim to make of a former mayor of Hamamatsu, told me. To this colonial empire. Nearly half of Abe’s day, these residents are still not count- cabinet belongs to a group known as ed as citizens in the national census. the League for Going to Worship To- As this population was arriving, a gether at Yasukuni, a shrine in Tokyo literary cottage industry called ni- that commemorates Japanese soldiers, honjinron (“the theory of Japanese- including a number of convicted war ness”) began to flourish. The genre, a criminals. Abe’s wife makes pilgrim- blend of anthropology, pop psycholo- ages to Yasukuni, and Abe sends of- gy, and management theory, attribut- ferings on holidays. ed the superiority of the Japanese One afternoon, I attended a festival people to a national character of col- at the Yasukuni Shrine. The entrance lectivism, a strong work ethic, and a was lined with tens of thousands of pa- minimalist aesthetic. Doing things per lanterns emitting a warm, golden the “Japanese way,” these books ar- light. Visitors wandered around eating gued, was always best. And their suc- vanilla soft serve. I asked a man why cess was ultimately based on race— the festival was so important to him. literally, “Japanese blood.” “Koreans!” he said, and thrust his Yet not even Japanese excellence middle finger into the air. “Fuck Chi- could insulate the country from eco- nese!” He wore a shirt with a Japanese nomic disaster. In 1990, the stock flag and text that read japanese! be

LETTER FROM JAPAN 75 proud! you are the descendants of In the courthouse lobby, the group relief. Kodama was encouraged. “Two the yamato race. stood in a huddle, waiting for their at- or three years ago the general trend torney to arrive. (I had been permitted would be that judges wouldn’t even n August 2014, a year after Utinan to join them only after passing a writ- bother listening to what foreigners had Iand Lonsan surrendered, they re- ten test on Japanese immigration law, to say,” he told me as we walked out. ceived a call from the Justice Minis- courtesy of Yamazaki.) Utinan wore a “Usually the court doesn’t care.” try. At last, they thought. Utinan had white shirt and black slacks that hung The group headed to a nearby Ital- spent the past year at a regular school loose over his narrow frame. He fiddled ian restaurant to celebrate over spa- and was about to graduate from eighth with his shirt buttons, but his eyes ghetti. I asked Yamazaki why he was so grade. He played on the basketball looked hopeful, and he had a wide, insistent that Utinan seek community team and was a member of the drama distracted smile fixed on his face. He support, why having his classmates club—in the latest production he’d kept giggling nervously, though he told behind the case was central to their been cast as a man who travels through me that he was ready for the hearing to strategy. “This is a human-rights issue,” time to find his lover. He was doing begin. Yamazaki, bald and brittle- he said. “Maybe in the States if there well in all his classes, particularly looking, with an arched spine, stood were a similar issue you would have math. He felt Japanese. with his hand on the boy’s shoulder. institutions supporting his rights. In Utinan answered the phone. The Utinan’s lawyer, Koichi Kodama, Japan, it doesn’t work that way. You official on the other end—Utinan was running late. He hurried over to have to have the community protect never caught his name—said that he Utinan.” They had to show the and his mother were being deported. judges that their own countrymen He was brief, matter-of-fact: they had HE ASKED TO ADDRESS HIS wanted an outsider to stay—that he to go. Utinan was stunned. He really was one of them. called Yamazaki, who told him that CLASSMATES. “I WANTED TO TELL they’d have to file a lawsuit to appeal THE TRUTH TO EVERYBODY, WHAT- n May, while Kodama was pre- the decision. “Are you ready to fight Iparing his case, an organization the authorities?” Yamazaki asked. EVER THE OUTCOME MIGHT BE” called the Movement for Elimi- “Yes,” Utinan replied. nating Crimes by Foreigners staged First, Yamazaki advised, “You a protest in northern Tokyo in op- need the community’s support.” greet us, tucking away his iPhone into position to Utinan. On its blog, the At school, Utinan dutifully asked his suit pocket, and bowed to his cli- group posted, “The fact that foreign- for permission to address his class- ents; Utinan and Lonsan bowed back, ers who should be deported straight mates. One Wednesday at the end of noticeably deeper than Kodama had. away for staying in Japan illegally a choir rehearsal, his teacher sum- Yamazaki handed Kodama a hefty pile could be legalized is outrageous and moned him to the front. He took a of documents—letters of support from horrifying.” A hundred protesters, al- deep breath and began to tell everyone Utinan’s classmates and a copy of an most all of them middle-aged men, his story, of his desire to belong. When article announcing a writing award marched down a wide avenue that I asked Utinan how he felt coming out that Utinan had won. Then we head- had been closed to traffic, chanting, to his peers, he said, “I wanted to tell ed up to the courtroom. “Get out of Japan!” Many held the na- the truth to everybody, whatever the Three judges were waiting. Ko- tional flag above their heads. On the outcome might be.” dama, Utinan, and Lonsan settled sidewalk were even more people, The other children were shocked. behind a prosecution table. One of the counterprotesters, who carried signs A few girls cried. They hadn’t heard of judges motioned to a young female of their own: no hate, no human be- a situation like Utinan’s before; there attendant, who collected written ing is illegal—a refrain borrowed weren’t many foreigners at their school. statements from the prosecution and from pro-immigration rallies in Amer- Some in the class had simply assumed the defense and delivered them to the ica. They outnumbered the national- that everyone in Japan was Japanese. front. For what felt like hours but was ist protesters by hundreds. On a rainy morning in July 2015, really only a few minutes, the judges I later met one of the counterpro- Utinan, Lonsan, Yamazaki, and twen- flipped silently through the thick stack testers, Noma Yasumichi, at a sparsely ty supporters—mostly class moms— of papers. Utinan stared at his lap; decorated coffee shop in west Tokyo, caught a bus at five in the morning to Lonsan bit her lip, her hands clasped where skinny, tattooed waitresses attend a hearing at the Tokyo District atop the table. I scribbled notes, my served drinks in mason jars and all the Court. School was still in session, pen on paper the only sound in the male customers, including Yasumichi, which meant that Utinan’s peers impossible quiet. wore oversize beanies. Yasumichi, who weren’t able to attend themselves. Finally, one of the judges opened up is fifty and has a disarming earnest- Lonsan, unlike her son, didn’t feel a leather-bound calendar to set a trial ness, is a former editor of Music Maga- comfortable soliciting the commu- date. Kodama stood up. He requested zine. Now he is the leader of the nity’s support or speaking to journal- that the proceedings be held in No- Counter-Racist Action Collective, a ists (including me), so it became— vember, when school was out and Uti- group of activists who show up at on Facebook, and in the Japanese nan’s friends could attend. The judge right-wing demonstrations and create press—“Utinan’s case.” agreed. The class moms sighed with a human barrier between immigrants

76 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 “One helluva team of and fist-pumping nationalists. “The Solidarity Network is the linchpin of writers has produced a criterion for us is when it’s close to a a small but growing collection of book you’ll be dipping foreigner’s residence, or maybe a NGOs, lawyers, and trade unions into for years.” school,” he told me. When he founded that have tried to correct what they C.R.A.C., he spent hours on YouTube see as a masochistic immigration —Jim Bouton, author of Ball Four watching videos of antiracism pro- policy. Their goal is to “create a mul- tests in Europe and the United States tiethnic and multicultural society in to see how it was done—how activists Japan,” Omagari said, but she admit- RULES OF THE GAME surrounded the original protesters but ted that it’s a distant possibility. The never touched them, what they wore, government’s policies are designed to THE BEST SPORTS the slogans they yelled. He talked keep immigrants from staying long, with the Tokyo police and tried to she explained. “They want to get WRITING FROM explain his motives, but law enforce- them out after they’ve worked.” ment, he said, still sees C.R.A.C as When the Abe Administration HARPER’S MAGAZINE chaos-makers; the nationalists, at has attempted to expand temporary Preface by Roy Blount Jr. least, register their events in advance work opportunities for foreigners, the and don’t block pedestrian pathways. efforts have been troubled. Last year, The Tokyo police are known to ha- the government enlarged the Techni- rangue foreign-looking people on the cal Intern Training Program, which Rules of the Game: The street or commuter trains, and ask for offers five-year internships to foreign- Best Sports Writing from their papers. Before Utinan surren- ers at below-market wages. There are dered, Yamazaki advised him not to now 200,000 such interns, many of Harper’s Magazine uncov- take a bicycle to school, as it was too them Chinese, who have been placed ers funny, touching, excit- likely that he’d get stopped for riding at farms and factories. There are “ter- ing, intriguing stories of the on the sidewalk or against traffic. rible violations” of human rights, The irony of Japan’s crackdown Shoichi Ibusuki, a Tokyo-based im- sporting life, both profes- on undocumented immigrants, as migration attorney, told me. “I can’t sional and amateur. These Yasumichi and others pointed out believe a system as bad as it is can essays show that how we to me, is that the country has a continue.” An investigation by Japa- play and write about sports dire shortage of people. The na- nese labor inspectors found that tional birth rate, at 1.4 children per 79 percent of the participating com- reflects and celebrates our woman, is among the lowest in the panies had denied interns pay, re- nation’s character. world. In 2013, Prime Minister Abe quired them to work long hours, and This collection includes convened a twenty-person panel to confiscated their passports. A U.N. discuss ways of encouraging fertili- official declared that the program some of the most well-known ty; they came up with a list of rec- “may well amount to slavery.” and respected writers of ommendations that included as- I visited the office of Heizo Take- the past century, including signing gynecologists for life and naka, an economic adviser to Abe providing loans to unmarried people and the chairman of the board at Mark Twain, Tom Wolfe, for “spouse hunting.” Rural towns Pasona, one of Japan’s largest employ- Shirley Jackson, Lewis H. have emptied out, and more than ment agencies. In the Pasona lobby, Lapham, Gary Cartwright, 13 percent of the country’s housing an irrigated rice paddy encircled the stock is vacant. The Japanese econo- reception desk like a moat, and the A. Bartlett Giamatti, Pete my has fallen into a recession five receptionists, all dressed in short- Axthelm, George Plimpton, times since 2008, and by 2050, ac- sleeved navy dresses with pink carna- and Rich Cohen. cording to U.N. projections, the pop- tions pinned to their chests, looked ulation is expected to shrink by more like bridesmaids at a Disney-themed than 15 percent. Soon the country wedding. Takenaka told me that he Edited by Matthew Stevenson will have more elderly dependents had been working for years on a plan and Michael Martin than citizens of working age, slowing that would increase the number of growth even further. career opportunities for women, in Order today through Immigration would seem to offer order to decrease the dependence on store.harpers.org an obvious, immediate solution. immigrants. Sixty percent of Japa- Published by Franklin Square Press “Abe wants to benefit the economy nese women in the workforce quit ISBN 978-1-879957-58-9 and fill the labor shortage, especially after giving birth to their first child; Softcover $14.95 in construction, but he is very con- women are paid, on average, 30 per- FRANKLIN servative about them staying longer cent less than their male colleagues; SQUARE term,” Yukiko Omagari, who helped and they frequently report being bul- PRESS run the Solidarity Network with Mi- lied at work. Abe has stated that, by grants, said of foreign laborers. The 2020, he’d like to see 15 percent of

Distributed through Midpoint Trade Books LETTER FROM JAPAN 77 managerial and senior positions at tinan’s case was assigned to a less, he planned to fight the ruling. private companies filled by women, Unew judge, and his trial, twice Utinan kept his eyes downcast, avoid- and Takenaka believes that if this postponed, was held in June. ing questions. Later that day, at a happens, Japan could avoid easing up The sky was overcast, typical for a To- press conference, as several more re- on its citizenship laws. Either that, or kyo summer. Yamazaki was ill and un- porters arrived, he was compelled to industries could simply make greater able to travel, but about twenty-five make a statement. “We are shaken by use of robots. “In some European supporters accompanied Utinan and this decision,” he said. Lonsan stayed countries, like Germany and some Lonsan by bus. Utinan looked dap- out of view of the cameras, crying others, immigration provides some per in a black suit with a brown tie. into her palms. serious problems, social problems,” he He seemed calm as he waited outside A few weeks later, Lonsan decided said. “The Japanese people are very the courtroom to be called, his arms that she would return to Thailand. nervous about the kinds of problems hanging loosely at his sides. Lonsan She had saved enough money, and the caused by immigration.” appeared more nervous, her eyes fixed judge’s written verdict had suggested In 2015, Takenaka introduced a new on the floor. that her son’s case would be stronger short-term visa for foreigners to be- At exactly half past one, Utinan, without her: she did not have any come domestic workers—considered a Lonsan, and their supporters followed documentation to prove that she was dirty, low-status position—which, he Kodama into the courtroom. There a victim of human trafficking, and she hopes, will allow more Japanese wom- were five members of the press in had routinely broken the law for en to remain in prestige jobs. The attendance—three with TV cameras, more than a decade by working with- visa, which is being tried out in which were turned off when the hear- out a permit. Utinan appealed alone Kanagawa and Osaka, is modeled af- ing began. Everyone settled into their to a higher court, and would remain ter a program that launched in 2008 seats. Utinan stared at the door, wait- safe from deportation for as long as it to attract elder-care aides from the ing for the judge to enter. The room took to process his case. Philippines and Indonesia. Through was as still as a photograph, as if all During the months before Lonsan that arrangement, participants work had ceased breathing. had to depart, he did little but spend in a nursing home for three years, at The judge arrived and faced the time with her. In September, she flew which point they’re given an exam group. In my time in Japan, I had away, and Utinan moved into a spare to determine whether they will be found that everything seems to take a room at a friend’s house. He was devas- invited to stay in the country. But lot longer to say in Japanese. During tated to be without his mother, he told Noriko Tsukada, a business professor interviews, my translator would often me, but certain that he had made the at Nihon University’s College of summarize minutes-long soliloquies right decision. His hope is to become a Commerce, told me that managers into a simple “yes” or “no.” But in this citizen, finish school, find a well-paying have recurring complaints of culture- instance, the judge delivered the ver- job, and visit her all the time. clashing: foreign employees take too dict as swiftly as one could imagine. In December, Utinan’s appeal was long to learn Japanese, Muslim nurses “Kikyaku,” he declared. Mother and rejected by a high court. Kodama spend too much time praying. A few son had been rejected. appealed again, to the Supreme supervisors told Tsukada that they “Hidoi!” a man in the back of the Court, but dropped it when other had banned prayer during the work- room, a supporter of Utinan’s, said: immigration attorneys told him not day and prohibited employees from “heartless.” He didn’t shout—the civil- to bother. Instead, in late January, wearing hijabs. “We are really— ity of Japan was not to be disrupted— Utinan made his final petition for including myself—not good at living but his voice reverberated. Everyone permanent residency to the Minis- together,” she said. gathered their things and left; the ter of Justice, through a process out- Last May, a year after people trial had lasted all of fifteen seconds. side the court system intended for railed against Utinan in the streets, Outside, Utinan and Lonsan stood rejected immigrants whose life cir- Japan’s legislature passed the coun- motionless. He was taller than he had cumstances had changed—they try’s first law against hate speech. been when they’d begun this process, married, had a Japanese child—or Abe supported the bill. “It is totally and he had his arm wrapped around who would face persecution in their wrong to slander and defame people her shoulder. He had recently applied native country. Utinan explained in of other nations and hold the feel- for and received a Thai passport— his application that his mother had ing that we are somehow superior,” Yamazaki thought it wise for Utinan left, he was living with a good Japa- he said in 2013, during early discus- to have citizenship somewhere—but nese family, and his grades were sions. “That would only lead to dis- he had no interest in moving to a among the top in his class. He’s still honoring ourselves.” Yet the law is country that he’d never known. Two of waiting to hear back. essentially gestural. There’s shame their supporters broke into tears. A “Japan is my home country,” Utinan attached to hate speech now, but no class mom called Yamazaki to leave a said at the press conference following real penalties, and only legal resi- message. “We lost—both,” she said, the trial in June. “Please let me stay dents such as Japanese Brazilians and hung up. here.” His voice was shaky, but he re- are protected. For someone like Uti- “If we can’t win a case like this, mained composed. Afterward, one of nan, no accommodations are re- with these two, I don’t see how we the reporters would note, with some quired, and anything goes. can win,” Kodama told me. Neverthe- surprise, how well he spoke Japanese. Q

78 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 STORY

NECESSARY DRIVING SKILLS By Nat Segnit

his is the story. Kim had worked out T Kim Le his notice and set Bouedec and I up the Mint in the run the Finchley garage of his mews Mint. And I’ve just house in Finchley. kissed his wife. Now, Kim is one of We sell die-cast those omnivorous model cars by mail and preternaturally order. Don’t laugh, it’s retentive sports fans a serious business. We whose knowledge always knew, Kim extends not only be- and I, in the years he yond rugby and foot- was at Credit Suisse ball and cricket to and I was bumping volleyball and real around the Home tennis and pelota Counties in a maroon and pro mah-jongg, Vauxhall Insignia, for all I know, but urging skeptical Paki- also into the most stani pharmacists to abstruse and abysmal stock Dr. Schoepke’s detail, the tactical Dynamic Night Con- peculiarities of the ditioner, that we’d end South Korean Olym- up working together. pic curling team, Our kind of friendship, that sort of thing, so a perpetual suspension naturally he knew a of unctuous love and thing or two about vinegar, has always made for fun, and Suisse, Kim had lunch with Eric saloon-stock-car racing. First, that for efficiently nuanced exchanges, es- Fennema, a fellow Harrovian and it is, in fact, arguably no longer a pecially when agitated. And here we colleague specializing in the phar- minority sport, with fans in this are, almost ten years out of college, just maceutical industry. Eric had got country ranging from 90,000 to on the brink of really disliking each wind that one of his clients, a 150,000, and upwards of 2 million other, with a little business to call our health-care multinational, had want- worldwide. And second, that the own. Stock-Car Superstars at the ed to reward its 10,000 reps world- world champion, the U.K.’s own Finchley Mint: “You can almost hear wide with a scale model of the stan- Willie Webster, drives an electric- the engine rumble.” dard fleet Mondeo, 1:18 on a blue Mondeo Zetec, number 608, The idea is simple. Back in Feb- lacquered plinth, with a tiny box of gold-roofed to crown him king. ruary, when he was still at Credit nonprescription drugs inside the The numbers augured well. Oval working boot. But the die-cast fac- stadiums like Billericay RaceWorld, Nat Segnit is the author of Pub Walks in Underhill Country (Penguin), a novel. His tory stipulated a minimum run of in Essex, can seat, what, eleven, article “Good Plain English” appeared in the 20,000, and now the surplus was go- twelve thousand, and when the Tex- March 2017 issue of Harper’s Magazine. ing for a song. Within six weeks, aco Racewall in Canning Town is

Illustrations by Matthew Richardson STORY 79 finished next spring it’ll have a the Hampshire title and hotly end. There have been problems, with paying-punter capacity of nineteen tipped by Oval Racer to be this the product, and with Jason Skoyles, thousand, plus fifteen hundred more year’s national points champion, but things have taken a turn for the in the corporate boxes. Because what winner of the silver roof and a place better. And besides, it’s problems— do people want to see, when five days in next year’s World Championship. resistance, the pinpoint proximity to a week they’re stung for tolls to crawl Besides, Skoyles is a looker, the lit- getting it wrong—that goad the will past speed cameras into twenty-mile- tle bastard, six foot three, blond on to surmount them. Perhaps I mean an-hour zones, ringed by the new curls, bright tenantless smile, the that it’s problems that goad on the London orbital of congestion-charge sort of creamy kid to whom you’d will to do anything. A sort of feed- avoiders, lulled in their air-conditioned hesitate to ascribe star quality, for back loop driven by its own difficulty. cells by the weather report or an fear of souring him, but who has it, With a bit of push, and the kind of audiobook? What’s the flip side of helplessly, in spades. God forbid he luck we had last night, you can out- their tailback trance? A good burn. A ever meet Jill. Or Sasha, for that maneuver anybody. And, in any case, crunchy pileup. The popularity of matter. Plus, his Mondeo is yellow, a Kim and I have evolved a working stock-car racing is the natural expres- cheaper paint than electric blue, and method, based as I say on our special sion of the average driver’s unmet need when his sponsor, Mr. Grippit Pow- Anglo-French, best-enemy relationship, for speed. I mean, I can’t say I’m a ertools, agreed to cover the cost of that allows us to share the responsibili- great fan, but then I’m not an average the decals, the decision was kind of ties of, for instance, maintaining the driver. These stock-car guys, they’re made for us. systems for order fulfillment, Kim to not interested in precision. It’s not like We had our stock-car superstar. take a clear strategic lead, and I to flirt Formula One. They’re not interested And you know, I was glad. Be- as much as I like with his wife when in driving—but then neither’s the av- cause things hadn’t been going so he’s not looking. erage driver. So I could understand well for me. I hadn’t thought hitting I know what you’re thinking. the appeal, and that it’s an ever- thirty, a nonevent, celebrated in my But I know what I’m doing. We expanding market to exploit. friends’ cases with equal parts reso- won’t get caught, not if we’re precise Which Kim saw straight off, sit- lution and dread, would have any about it. Sasha and I go back a long ting at lunch talking money. effect on me whatsoever. And yet way, we know each other’s ins and So we signed Willie Webster. At there I was, thirty-and-a-bit, disin- outs. From back when everyone some conurbation-size factory in Kow- terestedly promiscuous, underpaid, as was . . . I mean, one night, after two loon, our Mondeos could be resprayed, ever, by undynamic Dr. Schoepke, E’s and a gram of coke, I almost stenciled, dented, fitted with custom but feeling it all of a sudden, the fucked Kim. Of course things are dif- bumpers, and the brass plaque saluting shame of slow progress, of lagging ferent now. Of course now my friends the Concura sales force replaced with behind. And then two things hap- are married, there are kids at stake, one bearing Willie’s battle cry, “Who pened. One, I met Jill, who, it has to the borders are properly policed. Al- do you think you are, Willie Web- be said, did a lot to restore my confi- though that’s half the point. And lis- ster?” And then, two weeks later, two dence, if nothing else by her persis- ten. Kim’s good brain is distinguished days after the decal designs had gone tence in me, and to help me respond more by its storage capacity than its off to Chris the Printers, Webster in the right way to the second thing, processing speed. You only have to was forced to renege by his sponsor, a Kim calling out of the blue to offer watch him talking business, with well-known lubricating-oil company me the job as his partner and mar- Eric, or with Nagesh at the bank, tak- I’m bound by law not to name. They keting manager of the fledgling ing in their data, to see what a sponge said it wasn’t their policy to endorse Finchley Mint. So with Jill’s encour- he is. A great porous monolith of lin- products at one remove, i.e., our rep- agement I said Auf Wiedersehen to en suit and pockmarked skin, topped lica 608s. A complete and unexpect- Dr. Schoepke and Oui, s’il te plaît to by the lintel of a frown of profound ed U-turn, in other words, and if not Kim the very next day. Not least be- interest: Kimhenge. Absorbing and an outright lie then at least a fuzzy cause I could see right then that, storing as thoughtlessly as stone. area of policy, but which given their over time and handled right, this That’s what Kim’s love for Sasha is: corporate muscle was just not worth was an idea that could make us stored warmth, slowly released. And getting litigious over. So we cut our some money, real money, different meanwhile, out in the quick cold, losses and started looking for some- from the scraps that in my twenties Sash and I have been having it off for one else. had shot soaplike through my scrab- years, in squirreled looks, foxy com- An anxious flick through Oval bling hands, money that might sit ments, swift collisions. In a hushed Racer identified just two other and grow and give me the heft to but persistent promise: one day. Mondeo drivers on the saloon cir- contend with bigger things than But I have to say what happened cuit: Mick Parrott and Jason Skoyles. rent and bills and whose round next. on Friday night I was not expecting. Mick won the Welsh in 2012 but we And business is fine.Gli affari non opted for Jason—a red roof with vanno male. With the retail price set ’m not an adulterer yet. But I will flashing amber lights, two grades at £49.99 (or three monthly install- Ibe, and soon. I can feel it coming down from Webster—who at nine- ments of £17.99), sales are projected to on like autumn. Can’t you? Ever so teen was already three-time holder of reach just under half a mill by year- slowly, a chill in the bones, and then

80 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 suddenly, snap, you’re huddled against cause I was the appointed singleton, discovery? How old are you? You see, the exception that proved their lives, this is the paradoxical thing about my lived by new rules, might be viable. peer group (and yours—if it hasn’t “You don’t want me to come,” Jill happened yet, it will). The more we had said. settle, the more opportunities there “Yes I do.” are for disruption. Because adultery’s “No you don’t. They’re your friends.” just not adultery when you’re still “Yours too, now.” fucking around (adultery’s not adul- “Not in the same way.” tery when nobody’s married). My Lon- “What’s that meant to mean?” Darwin Panama don was once a network of coupled We’d done this several times be- A warm weather hat with Australian places; I was aware, driving around, of fore. I knew what it was meant to styling, handwoven in Ecuador from tenuous cords, like strands of semen, mean. I also knew what it really toquilla fiber. Water resistant coating, connecting Clapham with Kentish meant—what Jill meant by mean- braided kangaroo leather band. Town, Maida Vale with Barnes, Not- ing to mean it. She wanted to be ting Hill with Whitechapel. A bus pleaded with, prioritized. Who Reinforced 4½" crown, 3" brim. map, a Knowledge of coupling: a knew if I wanted her to come? Finished in USA. transport system. Now Simon and Could I enter into the cozy new S (6¾-6⅞) M (7-7⅛) L (7¼-7⅜) Maxine are married with a ten- conspiracy of separate together- XL (7½-7⅝) XXL (7¾) month-old daughter. Luke, a partner ness, for a few days at least? Would #1649 Darwin Panama ...... $130 at his law firm and earning a packet, it be fun? Good training? Would it is married to Helen, a fellow market- make me more or less visible to Sa- ing manager of Jill’s at L’Oréal. The sha? Two options. Either placate strands have dried and disintegrated, Jill—“Please, darling”—and hope been replaced—for now at least—by she might happily say no. Or affect the much flimsier filaments of friend- offense at the aspersion—“Because I ship. We don’t see one another any- slept with Maxine?” (Jill doesn’t know more, we keep in touch. Football’s about Sasha)—confront her with her still played some Sundays, but guilty jealousy, dissolve her with a drop of stability’s put paid to the after-match anger, and accept her No, you go as drink—other halves to get home to. conciliatory proof of her trust in me. Panama Fedora Friday nights, by default, are for box “Look, come if you want to, don’t Classic sun protection handwoven in sets and takeaways, or, when we do if you don’t.” make it to a bar or a club or a party “I’m not sure.” Ecuador from toquilla fiber. Water past midnight, are cast in the faint but “Well, I’d really like you to. And resistant coating, grosgrain ribbon band. unmistakable gloom of occasion and Helen will be disappointed.” Reinforced 4½" crown, 2½" brim. achievement. Drugs are now either a “I might just do some things at Finished in USA. habit or only for Christmas. My circle home.” S (6¾-6⅞) M (7-7⅛) L (7¼-7⅜) of friends, turning square. “No pressure either way. But it’s XL (7½-7⅝) XXL (7¾)

Take the other weekend. okay if I take the car?” #1648 Panama Fedora ...... $105 Luke and Helen had rented a cot- “I’ll come.” tage near Stow-on-the-Wold for a “Really? Good.” Add $9 handling per order. fortnight, to see, Hel said, what liv- “As long as we’re not back too late Satisfaction guaranteed. ing in the country might be like. Be- on Sunday. I’ve got to go to work the ing a salesman-veteran of motorway next day.” turnoff, I could have told her: it’s like So the six of us set off that Satur- Shop davidmorgan.com the town, only lonelier. The laugh- day morning, two by fuel-uneconomical ably pretty village was called Lower two. Of course within half a mile of or request a catalog Slaughter, which from the hints the lifted restriction past R.A.F. Nor- #KB-65-2BN Luke’s dropped about their sex life tholt I’d left them far behind—Kim’s was either a cosmic joke or Helen try- bad enough, but Simon drives like an ing to tell him something. Anyway, old lady, like Pnin, pulling down on out of horror at chastity in the heri- the wheel like it’s the ladder out of a #4002 #1622 tage belt or nostalgia for the good old swimming pool. We arrived at days of substance abuse and casual Glebe or Glib Cottage or whatever Tilley® Hats from Canada congress, Luke invited six of us up for it was called forty-five minutes Northwest Jewelry Designs the weekend—“Plenty of room, dou- ahead of Kim and Sasha, twenty ble bed, single mattress, two bunks, minutes earlier than expected, to be Akubra® Hats from Australia and the sofa for you, Neil.” No one’s met by Luke at the wisteria-wigged ^ quite got used to me going steady. Be- doorway, holding a pitcher of mojitos 800-324-4934 davidmorgan.com 11812 N Creek Pkwy N, Ste 103•Bothell, WA 98011 STORY 81 with the liminally hostile awkward- ter of tiny tubular bells, gonged on knowledge of our habits, hang-ups, ness of a man who knows, Now I’ll corners and gear changes by a dol- likes and dislikes, and so on. I got: have to behave in certain ways. In the phin on a string. background towel-turbaned Helen “It’s funny,” she said, as we crunched 1. Is Jill more scared of (a) plane crashes; steamed past unpublicly. out of the car park, too slow behind (b) car crashes; (c) spiders? “You’re here,” he said. “Helen’s just Jill, “how all of a sudden we mind our 2. Which would give Jill the greatest having a bath.” own business. I mean as a group. We satisfaction: getting (a) a gay man; (b) a straight woman; (c) a celibate And that kind of set the tone for used to be so—into one another.” into bed? the weekend. Of it never being quite Now this was more like it. It’s 3. Does Jill prefer (a) giving head; (b) the right time for anything. Oh, we like the intimacy of the car interi- receiving head; (c) Radiohead? had a laugh, of course, traded in the or, with its cans on the floor, its cool thin currency of quips and rep- CD selection (trance-driving stan- The correct answers were (b), (c), artee, but don’t you think sometimes dards: Portishead, Massive Attack, (c). I answered (c), (b), (c). One out that having a laugh is the last thing Boards of Canada), its whiffs of of 3. left, or, rather, an essentially anxious warm vinyl and baby sick, unno- Jill got: response to the feeling that there’s ticed till an alien enters, had eased nothing left, that no one has any- Maxine into candor. And looking 1. Would Neil prefer to be cuckolded by (a) Nico Rosberg; (b) Jenson thing to say to one another? I don’t over I thought how easy, how right Button; (c) Jason Skoyles? want to come the misery guts, but it’s it would be to direct her into a lay- 2. Would Neil prefer to operate (a) not like it used to be, kidding around by, lift up her T-shirt, and run my the robotic arm of a submersible being one of a number of tones avail- tongue down her stomach, still sampling extremophiles in a able to our careering improvisations, ruched from her caesarean, I imag- deep-sea hydrothermal vent; (b) a taking in music and gossip and books ined, like the inside pocket of an mini-rover exploring ancient and personal histories, stoned riffs old-fashioned suitcase. Martian lakebeds; (c) a femtosec- starting funny then grading, some- “I’m so glad you said that.” ond laser pulse performing intra- times, into serious avowal or point of “You know? It’s like this living-in- cellular brain nanosurgery? view, then, sometimes, back to funny the-country bullshit. Why? What’s 3. Does Neil prefer (a) driving; (b) sex; (c) talking about himself? again. The thing was, it didn’t matter wrong with living close to your friends? what you said. Now it’s narrower. They don’t even have kids. And as if The correct answers were (b), (c), Now it’s gag or be gagged. you could find out in a fortnight.” (b). Jill answered (c), (b), and (b) af- After an insufficiently drunken “Well, I don’t think the experi- ter half an hour of (c). Two and a lunch we went for a walk. A round ment’s been a success.” half out of 3. trip of miles from Burford, along “Whatever, it’s the impulse. A kind When Sasha was asked, Which the trickling Windrush and back, of elective provincialism. I mean, I would you run back to save if the up muddy wold and down ankle- love Luke, but . . . I’m twenty-nine, for Mews were on fire—your cello, spraining scree, seven of us (Sasha fuck’s sake.” your wedding dress, or Bizet (their napped) strung out along the skyline “You don’t want to live in the spaniel)—she said the cello with- like the dance of death at the end of sticks. Third.” out hesitation, Kim having deco- The Seventh Seal. Walking. Not talk- “What?” rously predicted Bizet. Which would ing. Me to Luke: Everything all right “You want to be in third gear.” have seemed a tease had Kim not with Hel? Luke to me: I’ll tell you “Fuck off, Neil. I don’t want any of looked so hurt, so pulled taut by later. (He didn’t.) That chat con- us to live in the sticks. I don’t know. what was obviously an unexpectedly stantly deferred. On the way back to Maybe things aren’t good between restive yank on whatever bond still the cottage, perhaps out of an un- Luke and Hel and the mood is catch- held them together. And although spoken sense of communal guilt at ing. It’s just, I love my husband, I love the silence that grew from Kim’s not having mixed, drivers and pas- my kid, like I can only hope Sasha wretchedness was quickly broken by sengers played musical chairs: Max- loves Kim, and vice versa, and yet Luke’s call for a spliff to be rolled, ine drove me; Jill drove Simon; Kim, we’re all acting like marriage is this all the quicker perhaps for Sasha’s Helen; and so on. That’s as far as it fragile state that mustn’t be corrupted steady smile being generally taken goes these days. We used to see one by our past.” Ahead, framed in the for obliviousness, I think I knew the another’s bedrooms—now it’s the back window of the Beemer, Simon smile for what it really was: a mark inside of our cars. Maxine, I remem- and Jill sat in silent silhouette. We of quiet victory. ber, had a bedroom full of chimes, a rode a bump, the wind chimes jan- The final scores were: Neil and Jill, furtive lover’s nightmare of dangling gled, and Maxine laughed. “Like Si- 3½; Luke and Helen, 5; Simon and steel tubes and dopey-sounding mon minds that you and I shagged.” Maxine, 6; Kim and Sasha, 4. scooped-out bamboo stalks that rang and jangled and clonked if you n the evening we played Mr. and he kiss happened like this. so much as sat on the bed, and sure IMrs. One by one we were sent to T Friday night Kim and I de- enough, here in her Golf, suspended the kitchen while the others de- cided to finish boxing up the from the rearview mirror, was a clus- vised questions to test our partner’s week’s orders over a few Budvars in the

82 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 living room. Sasha was upstairs practic- Sasha clicked her fingers for Bizet. turned on by the ambiguity to ask for ing her cello, and as Kim and I sat “That’s wonderful, Neil,” she said. an explanation. I still didn’t know an wordlessly nestling and taping and “You’re always saying what no one hour or so later, after Kim had gone squeakingly penning addresses, the else is thinking.” to bed and Sasha and I had sunk a sweet constricted complaint of some Now what did she mean by that? couple of glasses of Kim’s “special” Brahms suite squeezed through the That I was demeaning her other eau-de-vie, when she put my glass floorboards and swelled down the stairs achievements by touching on a wife- down, led me to the door, gazed past like overheard carnal moans. Kim, ly one? That we were still meant to my shoulder, and kissed me, a warm, absorbed in his task, didn’t seem to be pondering Kim’s (low) estimation wet, sliding, exploratory kiss, tasting notice, but to me, of pears, which, brow tightened by the whatever she’d meant evening’s first beer, my earlier, could only eavesdropping felt mean intent. profane, and I didn’t Then she pushed trust myself not to me out into the thrill- show it. ing night air. “Kimble,” I said— perhaps a little too hy do driv- loud. “Shall we go for Wers and cy- a pint?” clists hate “Mnah. Trop fa- each other so much? tigué. Stay for supper Because each flaunts if you like.” freedoms the other All I’d be missing decreasingly enjoys. was Jill, The Good The driver to move, Wife, and a take- the cyclist to occupy out Thai. space. Such hatred. So I stuck around Because one considers while Sasha, airy in the other an alien, an cream linen trousers, arrogator, an incorri- breasts belied by a gible cheat. I mean loose-fitting white look at him. Oh, the shirt, knocked up a piety of the Lycra-clad cinnamony chicken- and walnut-bonneted. and-chickpea tagine Look at that preemp- and Kim showered. tively indignant scowl. We talked, rather He’s hanging back in desultorily—I found I my blind spot so I can didn’t have much to cut him off at the turn say on the subject—about Helen and of Skoyles’s chances on Monday, and and fulfill his self-mortifying street- Luke, who, after their test fortnight in I’d broken some solemn ruminative reclaimer’s prophecy. You see there’s no the sticks, had resolved on another ex- spell? That, as seemed unlikely from hope of conciliation, because there’s no periment: living apart for a month. the near-spotless plates, Kim and Sa- language in common. I can’t call him “When I think of Luke,” said Sa- sha had thought the tagine was dis- a wanker for cycling dangerously be- sha, “I think of him looking ap- gusting? Or that I’d missed some deli- cause that’s what cyclists do. That’s palled at the door. Which is why he cate dynamic, some infinitesimal what bicycles are for: cycling danger- chose an impossible career bitch like twang on the couple’s connecting fil- ously. I mean bicycles: get serious. What Helen. He knew he’d end up alone. ament, perhaps to the effect that my the fuck are they doing on the road? We get what we want, whether we desire for Sasha was a little less hid- Cyclists. I could kill them. know it or not.” den than I meant it to be, and was Well, your time has not yet come, Supper was delicious. Kim and I now being neutralized by open ac- my son. See, even now that I’ve let talked about Monday’s big race. Sa- knowledgment? Or did she just want him pass he can’t resist a look over his sha ate a small portion, then sat tink- to fuck me, and was risking an out- shoulder. To let me know that he sees ing a rhythm on her wineglass with right come-on in the knowledge that me, that the struggle continues, that her fingernail, uncomplainingly Kim, abstracted at the best of times, one day Christ will arrive on a bike. bored. Under the table, Bizet slalom- was exhausted in the run-up to Mon- It’s 7:26, and I’ve just turned left ed my calves and emerged by my day’s big race? onto the Upper Richmond Road. The chair, begging for bones. I didn’t know. I was too taken aback left lane is inching forward but the “Sash,” I said, setting down my at first, and then, as the possible inter- right is moving much faster. In the fork, “you’re a genius cook.” pretations budded and branched, too mirror a white Transit is bearing down

STORY 83 hard, but I decide to risk it. I wrench Summer Stock-Car Pile-Up.” The ships, but he can race as a wild card the wheel and ram the shift into Aficionado is half an inch thick and in the national final, since the cham- second. Shrug off the howl of his horn nine-tenths classifieds and so relent- pionship is won on points. So for as a loser’s boo-hoo. Beat the lights lessly, perfunctorily upbeat in its mea- Skoyles the coming Monday was not and brake, late and hard, on the turn, ger few pages of editorial that a only a close call for the silver roof wait till the front suspension dips, thumbs-up—literal, in the case of his but his first chance to race against down to second, release the brake, byline picture—from editor Jim Webster, who, under pressure from wait till the suspension rises (absorb- “Smokey” Turedo is praise in a pretty his sponsor, had decided to compete. ing momentum), brake again, release, disastrously devalued critical curren- Kim and Sasha would be tuned and off down Putney Hill at forty. cy. Observations like “It’s even got an to Sky Sports and serving beers Check the mirror: white van’s still awesome working boot” just wouldn’t and burgers. behind me. wash at the Enthusiast, where a work- In fact he’s so far up my arse I could ing glove compartment is the very n Sunday Jill and I drove to use his bumper for a mouthguard. least that might warrant a mention. OHenley for one of her intermi- I brake a little to piss him off. Detail. It’s what the die-cast mar- nable rambles. Ten miles of Seven-twenty-seven. ket’s all about. It’s what these get-a- trudge and riverine sighs and pledges In this traffic, eight, nine minutes life guys like: being true to life. And to learn more about trees. This is the to Wimbledon tube. I’ve made up at this, unfortunately, is where the idea: to take our ideal selves for a walk. least three minutes (nice driving) but Webster Mondeo left us standing. Our most tender, constant selves, I’m still late, late, late. I see the road Our product is an executive toy. fresh-aired and fit, happy and in love, from above, the linked lights, the Theirs is a replica. Turn over our stumbling over melons into a future as smooth flow, and the sliding yellow Mondeo and what do you see? A flat fixed as the path in herTime Out book rectangles of Sasha’s train, converg- piece of crosshatched black plastic. of country walks. ing on the same point in space but Turn over the Webster Mondeo and What a joke. not in time. I press down on the ac- you see a chrome-plated plastic chas- Since Friday night we hadn’t spo- celerator and the Transit recedes in sis with exhaust, front suspension, ken much. On Saturday we went for a the mirror but ah, camera, squeeze and differential faithfully rendered. drink in Barnet and Jill kept apologiz- the brake. The Transit gets big again. The Webster Mondeo has a usable ing for my brusqueness. “Are you I see Sasha in her shuddering train, textured-plastic steering wheel, up- bored?” “No.” “Sorry, darling, I’m not dressed in black for a dinner to cele- holstered seats with belts, a remov- much fun tonight.” This is one of Jill’s brate her husband’s, and her lover’s, able steel dipstick, and door handles most maddening skills, her ability to success (and mourn her marriage). that you can operate with a pen or a take the blame for everything. Her The Mint had been in trouble. We long fingernail. Ours has an awesome negative culpability. You have to feel needed to sell 833 units a month, working boot. Kim has always main- sorry for her. Next to Sasha’s dry mind and in the three months following tained that we can beat Small Mira- and sharp tongue, her pushiness, the website going fully order-enabled, cles on price, and on branding, that prickliness, resistance; her high reso- we shifted a monthly average of 490. it’s the sports fans we’re selling to, not lute breasts, her tight brown skin, her This was down to two factors. Small the die-cast collectors. That, in any bony shoulders, wide as a crossbow; Miracles, and Jason Skoyles. case, advances in injection-molding her faint lemony smell; the fact that Two months after Willie Webster technology have made the most intri- she’d married the son of a French mil- reneged on his deal with us he signed cate designs easy to manufacture in lionaire and kissed me; next to these with Small Miracles. So much for no vast quantities, so the question of irresistible acuities Jill, to be frank, endorsements at one remove. In July what constitutes craftsmanship is looks a bit of a lump. And all the the Small Miracles 2016 Official Wil- more vexed than it was, and what re- more infuriatingly stolid for not find- lie Webster Mondeo Zetec die-cast ally matters is brand salience through ing me out, for not guessing. So why replica went on sale at the special celebrity endorsement. haven’t I told her? Why did I go for price of £60. Naturally it got a lot of Which would have been fine if Ja- the walk? Out of pity? For the drive? noise. Who was on the cover of Au- son Skoyles were a celebrity. I didn’t even get to enjoy that. gust’s Oval Racer? Willie Webster, Over the past three races he had So my second-favorite stretch of holding up a Mondeo, with his arm squandered a six-point lead and was the M40, the plunging, sweeping around Nigel Mansell. Model Car En- now tied for first place with Pip Tin- chicane short of Junction 4 (bested thusiast said that the Small Miracles niswood. Andy Craske in the Prim- only by the—uncontroversial, I’ll Mondeo was “up there with the im- era was running a disconcertingly allow—classic hurtle through the mortal 1:24 Dale Earnhardt ’81 close third. In the world champion- Chiltern scarp at Junction 6) into Wrangler Pontiac.” And us? We got a ships, Webster had won five races in the pupil-shrinking plain of Oxford- mention in Miniature Car Aficionado, a row and looked a shoo-in for a sec- shire. And there I was, arms locked published in Ahoskie, North Caroli- ond title. Once a driver’s won his sil- against the crosswinds, needle lust- na, and available in selected U.K. ver roof, he automatically qualifies ing for the ton. newsagents at the think-twice price for the world heats and tends not to And Jill said: “Darling, you’re go- of £11.95: “Tiny Limeys Shine in compete in the national champion- ing too fast.”

84 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 THE Can you believe it? On one of my Downstairs the Mews is divided into an favorite stretches? For which you office garage, a kitchen, and, at the foot might as well substitute the, I don’t of the blond-wood spiral staircase lead- SIXTIES RECOLLECTIONS OF THE DECADE know, A4130 from Maidenhead, if ing to two bedrooms, a large, light, FROM HARPER’S MAGAZINE you’re not going to take it at speed? largely empty living room, with white- It’s a BMW, for fuck’s sake. Have you washed brick walls and shuttered French felt, against your foot, at ninety-five windows that open onto the cobbles in sixth, the sphincteral resistance of outside. It was odd to see this airy space, torque in store? I’m a good driver. through which I often imagine that on And you want me to slow down? solitary afternoons Sasha moves like a “Am I? Why?” crisp shadow shifted by the sun, busy “Because I’m scared.” with people. Three walls are hung with “Why weren’t you scared at ninety?” abstract seascapes (I suppose), rendered “Because we’re on a bend.” in hard-edged gray and white, and the “There was a bend at Beaconsfield. fourth with Kim’s fifty-inch wide-screen I took that at eighty. Do you think TV, almost flush with the bricks. Once we would have survived an eighty- everyone had a burger we settled down mile-an-hour crash?” on the sofa, the floor, and the pair of “I don’t know, Neil. I’m just 1950s red-vinyl barber’s chairs I’ve never scared. Please.” quite had the nerve to disparage. MCGINNISS “But the road is clear.” The TV showed a long shot of “Please, darling.” the cars, revving on the floodlit grid “It’s safe.” under the dark dome of Billericay “Neil.” RaceWorld. Kim turned up the vol- “Fucking hell.” ume, and what had been an undif- I wanted to say to her: It should be ferentiated din split into the snarl of a pleasure to be driven by a talented the cars and the cheers and jeers of the driver. But I couldn’t say that, could crowd. Obscuring three or four rows of I? You can’t say that sort of thing. twenty seats each was a crudely “It should be a pleasure to be driv- daubed banner proclaiming willie en by a talented driver.” power. We all booed. Then the cam- No answer. era cut to a mid-shot; Lewis, crouched What was I doing with her in the closest to the screen, spotted a placard first place? marked skoyles is sex on wheels, and we all cheered, Sasha, thin arms pis- n a way, yesterday’s, Monday’s, gath- toning, inserting a game I agree. Iered crowd presented an awful, al- Suddenly, like a shock you’re ex- luring opportunity to tell everyone pecting, there came a swelling frenzy that Sasha and I were about to embark of revs. My stomach thundered, and on an affair. All the old friends in one feeling oddly queasy I put down my room, with only one notable exception. burger, a once-bitten U, unwanted. Luke had come without Helen. More “Come on Skoylezayyy,” said Lewis, than ever he looked awkward, empty, through a mouthful of his. full of nothing to say, I guessed less out Later, after Luke had slunk off sober, of marital grief than that, abandoned, Alice had been put to bed in the spare he’d had a few weeks on his own and room, and Kim had opened a bottle of grown used to it. And of course without never-to-be-opened Krug, to celebrate Helen to drive him home plastered he Skoyles’s silver roof, Lewis produced couldn’t seek his usual refuge. Still, the the damp remnant of a gram he’d had rest of us were relieved not to endure in his wallet for three weeks. To the LOMAX Helen’s stultifying shoptalk, her smug eight of us who didn’t abstain he meted pronouncements on branding, her con- out a line scarcely longer than the sort descension to Jill (which Jill is too meek code on his debit card. I sniffed mine to admit). Simon sat with little Alice on up, and as a grinning, matted Jason his knee, and, jigging her into giggles, Skoyles appeared on the screen, I felt held Jill and pregnant Lara hypnotized. the old sad bitter taste of cokey snot ORDER TODAY FROM Everyone (but Luke) seemed unusually slide from my sinuses into my throat. calm, voluble, humorous; despite the Skoyles had come second. Between STORE.HARPERS.ORG wedding rings and baby gurgles it felt, you and me I had experienced most FRANKLIN SQUARE for a while, a bit like the old days. of the race as a close to intolerable PRESS

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STORY 85 Turning commotion of color and sound. At to do something, say something, take times I wondered, not without a lick of off their clothes or tell a good joke, envy, if Kim’s sports-drilled brain was pledge their intense friendship, an itch Toward able to perceive pattern and advantage for stimulation no one could relieve, where all I could see was thirty-two cars least of all me, especially when I began pounding one another to scrap. Only to pour red wine into the gap coke had toward the end did something distinct broached between expectation and re- Home seem to happen. Skoyles had swerved ality. I remember not being entirely in right, unexpectedly, clipping Webster’s control of my smile, and having white REFLECTIONS back end and sending him slamming stuff, halfway between craft glue and into the inside wall just as Tinniswood feta cheese, in the corners of my ON THE FAMILY was attempting a pass. Whereupon mouth. I remember sitting Sasha on FROM HARPER'S Andy Craske had whipped past on my knee, and later telling Jill in the MAGAZINE the outside and taken the race, fol- corridor that it didn’t mean anything, lowed, a little more than three sec- we were friends. And then, embar- onds later, by our boy Skoyles. rassed, indignant, succorless, seeking Some of our most loving—and Thankfully the look of commisera- out Sasha again. I remember Lewis most difficult—relationships are tion I’d offered the room seemed to telling me more than once to be care- go unnoticed by the others, who, ful. And at the end of the evening, or with our parents, children, quicker on the league-table arithme- rather, when Jill wanted to go home, I siblings, and extended families. tic, had twigged what I hadn’t: that two remember this fuss, this herd hysteria, points for second place had won Skoyles this frenziedly embraced idea that I These complicated relationships the championship. Tinniswood was was too drunk to drive. are the foundation of our society uninjured, but unconfirmed reports “Bollocks.” suggested Skoyles’s shunt had forced “It’s not bollocks, Neil.” This was and our lives: they define our Webster’s driver’s-side front wheel Kim. “You’re shit-faced.” past, give us hope for the future, into the footwell and shattered his “I’m a good driver.” kneecap. Which would put him out “I’ll order an Uber.” This was Sasha. teach us to get along with of the final two world-championship Then Kim again: “You can leave the others, and, often, provide races. How did Skoyles feel about Beemer here overnight.” jeopardizing Britain’s international “I’m safer drunk than she is sober.” excellent examples of how not to chances? He stepped up to the inter- “Neil, you are not driving my car in behave. The moving essays in viewer’s microphone. that state.” “Isn’t he handsome?” said Sasha. Now, most of the time, swaying on Turning Toward Home, all of “He’s a bit boyish for me,” said Jill. the way out of a party, you get the which were originally published “Girlish.” sense: It’s okay. Whatever I’ve done, “Rubbish, Jill,” I said. My top lip had whatever anyone’s said, I’ve gotten in Harper’s Magazine, gracefully gone numb. “He’s incredibly hand- away with it. Allowances have explore these dynamics. Authors some. Anyway shh.” been made. And then, just occa- “Obviously gutted but even if he sionally, something will happen, include David Mamet, Donna doesn’t compete Willie can still win. and you’ll think: Ah. This will have Tartt, Richard Ford, Sallie Matsuyama’s a good driver but you’ve consequences. When I wake up to- got to fancy Tullio Ganassi to beat him morrow this will still be a problem. Tisdale, Louise Erdrich, and at Saarbrücken. At the end of the day, Lewis: “Your car, Jill? I thought it injuries are all part of the game. It’s the was Neil’s.” many more. Introduction by results that matter, I got one tonight, At least Sasha didn’t hear it. Or I Verlyn Klinkenborg. and hopefully both Willie and I will be hope she didn’t. representing our country next year.” “Yeah, he is quite proprietorial Order today through My memory of the rest of the eve- about it, isn’t he? No, it’s mine. I don’t ning is both crowded and unclear. I re- think Neil’s ever owned a car, have store.harpers.org member, during an upbeat but I think you, darling?” Published by Franklin Square Press inconclusive conversation with Kim I can’t remember what I said in the ISBN 1-879957-08-6 about capitalizing on Skoyles’s success, cab home to make Jill cry. Softcover $14.95 feeling a sudden heart-leap of shared history, and pressing a big wet kiss into even-thirty-nine and there she is. FRANKLIN SQUARE his cheek. I remember a generalized Far right in the frame, the car PRESS S and inane feeling of extreme happiness a dollying camera. Not in black, to be back with all my old friends. but dark red, a long sweeping velvet Then, as the coke began to wear off, I coat like a curtain, gathered about the remember an urgent wish for someone mouth, nose poised to part the soft Distributed through Midpoint Trade Books

86 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 material. Her cheeks, untanned by afternoon, talking to some South Ko- the streetlight, teased by sharp licks rean die-cast guys about manufactur- of her hair, black-scratched silver. ing another 50,000 Mondeos now that She looks left, right, hasn’t seen me Skoyles is a silver-roofed celebrity, and yet. Approaching Sasha by stealth will meet us at the restaurant. He’s like this it strikes me that the guilt booked us a table partly to celebrate in the pleasure of seeing a beautiful and partly because he wants the four- woman comes from the sense of get- strong Revvin’ Racers chain (M1, M3, ting one over—of seeing what they’ll M5, M6) to flog our Mondeos. At never see. It’s a problem, if you want Raynes Park station I kink left onto to love them. Coombe Lane heading for Kingston A space: I’ll take it. The trick with Bridge. From there it’s a short run parking is to look both ways. Say through Bushy Park to join the river you’re backing into a space on your again at Hampton Court, then up past left, you naturally look over your left the reservoirs to Sunbury and the M3. shoulder, così. Hand in the small of I begin to relax into the drive, ab- the passenger-seat’s back like you’re solved from unease by the emptyish chaperoning a lover. But then roads, the purr of the tarmac, the sea- straightaway you should look over shell hiss past parked cars. I feel for the your right, like this, and when your blower and twist it red. Sasha says rear corner on the driver’s side is Mmm and rubs her hands in the noisy aligned with the front driver’s-side warmth. I look across. In the gloom of corner of the car behind, see, you the car, her black hair and brown skin, start straightening up. So you’re us- her red coat and lips, are all one shade, ing an imaginary line between the a sharp dark profile cut against the midpoints of your boot and his bon- light outside. net as a pivotal axis. Slots it in every “How’re you feeling today?” I say. time. You’d be surprised how much “Fine. I didn’t drink much. And we girls like it. I mean not to be crass hardly overdid it on the charlie. How but it’s got to spark certain associa- are you feeling?” tions, hasn’t it? Of aggression held “Bit green around the gills. Tou- within deftness and control. jours vivant.” There’s a rap on the passenger window. “You were very drunk.” I unchunk the locks. I find my “Was I?” smile is playing up again. (I must get “Very.” it fixed.) Sasha gets in, kisses my “I’m sorry. I think the relief must cheek. Quite near my ear. have lowered my tolerance.” Well, it’s only hello. “Relief? Oh, the race. Yes, you must “Guduguh. Cold. Why did you be pleased.” park?” “Have you taken a look at Twitter “It’s a busy road.” today? The pic of Skoyles looking an- “But you only had to stop and let gelic with the trophy. Twelve thou- me in.” sand retweets by ten this morning. “Okay. Does it matter?” Closely followed by that clip of the I think: our fi rst row. Promising? crash. Our public can’t decide if he’s a New York Revisited “Sorry I’m late.” hero or a villain. So they’re going “That’s okay. Where’s Jill?” with both. Either way, Kim reckons BY HENRY JAMES “Sends her apologies. Hungover, we’ll be sold out by Christmas. We wrapped up on the sofa.” got an order this morning from Japan First published in Harper’s Monthly I double back around the one-way for twelve hundred.” Magazine in 1906 system and swing a left onto Worple “He told me.” Road. Neither of us seems to have any- As we take the bend by the Kemp- With an introduction by thing to say for the moment, so I drive ton Park grandstand the motorway Lewis H. Lapham on in silence, my index fi ngers hooked veers into view ahead of us, curved on the wheel in the unrecommended like a cello’s hip over the Sunbury FRANKLIN SQUARE but insouciant position of twenty-fi ve Cross roundabout. I change down to PRESS to fi ve. We’re on our way to Revvin’ third and, glancing right, roll onto Racers, a motorsports-themed restau- the roundabout ahead of a Porsche rant near the junction of the M3 and indicating right for a later exit. His the M25. Kim’s been in Reading this lights search my rearview, and the Order online at store.harpers.org

STORY 87 MY LIFE IN THE thrill of a graceful pass—of working fast lane. I fl ash him three times, and with a nother good driver—sends me when he fails to budge, I check the SERVICE gunning up the ramp to the overpass mirror, change down to fourth, and with an extra push of speed. I think: yank past him in the middle lane. I driving now. slap the indicators on, begin my drift THE WORLD WAR II DIARY OF Like an instructor prompting an back into the fast lane, and, touching GEORGE MCGOVERN emergency stop, Sasha slaps the dash. her lightly on the thigh, turn to Sasha. “I forgot to tell you. I spoke to Luke to- “Let’s just enjoy ourselves to- day. He and Helen are giving it anoth- night, okay?” er go.” “Neil.” “You’re kidding.” “What?” “No. She’s moving back this week- There’s a fl ash and the scream of a end. She’d been sleeping with some horn but it’s too late. cardiologist, apparently. And the other morning she woke up in his bed, saw think about crashes all the time. him in the en suite washing his hands, IAny good driver does. Because to and it was exactly like coming round be good is to be safe, right? To be from anesthesia, she said. Rang Luke good is to be smooth. And so naturally, from the car to work and begged his with every near miss, with every eluded forgiveness.” other future, I think about the serrated “Good news, I suppose.” crunch, the jolt that would have con- “I think it is. Maybe she’s not such a summated the frictionlessness. bitch after all.” And how it didn’t happen. “I’ll reserve judgment on that.” Of course I’ve had my fair share of “You know you told me that you scrapes: the bumps, the prangs, the loved me last night?” kiddie crashes. At college I backed A rich bulge of fear and joy pops Kim’s Peugeot 307 into a bollard and and spreads in my belly. Did I tell her? cracked a taillight. But I’d never had a MY LIFE IN THE SERVICE I don’t remember. But that doesn’t crash before. FEATURES A FACSIMILE OF matter—I’ve been telling her for seven I cannot believe it. years. Listen, if it rankled, me fl ashing and THE DIARY GEORGE MCGOVERN “I did? When?” passing on the inside, I can’t say I KEPT FROM HIS FIRST DAYS OF “When I was sitting on your knee. blame you. If I’d been you . . . well, it BASIC TRAINING TO THE END OF Several times, in fact. You squeezed me would have pissed me off. But it’s the really tight and said, ‘I love you, I love road, you know. It’s the motorway. THE WAR. HASTILY JOTTED IN you, I love you.’ ” There’s no room for error. You have to HIS EXACTING HAND (A TYPED “Well, I do, a bit.” stay calm. I feel, flying over the Shepperton But you didn’t, did you? TRANSCRIPTION IS INCLUDED), reservoirs, the still black water lit silver You wanker. THE PAGES CONVEY THE like Sasha’s hair, the overpass incorpo- Your temper got the better of you. IMMEDIACY OF MCGOVERN’S rating car into sky, the same delightful Your name is Richard Ellacott. shock of nothing-under-you, the same You’re forty-one. You’re married with WARTIME EXPERIENCES. heart-squeezing happiness as replaces an eleven-year-old son. You were re- mortal fear in planes, when the alarm cently promoted to the board of a civil- INTRODUCTION BY (the relief) goes ding and the reaching engineering firm based in Maiden- up is over. Sasha sighs. head. The new BMW was part of the ANDREW J. BACEVICH “Our kiss.” package. They found a bunch of fl ow- CONTRIBUTING EDITOR “Yes.” ers on the back seat, under your suit- OF HARPER’S MAGAZINE “I liked it.” case. For your wife, or your girlfriend. “So did I.” We’re coming to see you, once we’ve “But I wish we hadn’t.” picked up the Beemer (Jill’s Beemer). STORE.HARPERS.ORG “Why? Because of Kim?” Which you may not like, but tough. “Partly, yes. And partly because if I We’re coming. After all, we were close, kiss you it makes everything pointless. once. And it’s not as if you’ll know FRANKLIN Don’t you think? It makes me feel diz- we’re there. SQUARE PRESS zy, it’s so loose, so wasteful.” When we collided you had nowhere I smile to myself. We’re gaining on to go but right. I steered left, back into another BMW, a newer, faster 5 Series, the middle lane, into the path of an dawdling at seventy ahead, doggedly oncoming Astra, which, thank Christ, Distributed by denying the social Darwinism of the braked in time. Sasha suffered mild Midpoint Trade Books

88 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 WALTER KARP whiplash, which may affect her cello- But the fact is, I crashed. playing for a few weeks, but on the How can I admit it to Jill? That I whole we’re fine. You hit the railings of made a mistake? How can I admit it to the central reservation and your off-side myself? I’m a good driver. But how can I front tire blew out. You lost control. drive her anywhere now? It’s like hav- You swerved back into the fast lane, ing an affair, holding back on an ad- then, taking a violent right, smashed mission I’m not sure my dignity, or the through the central reservation, missed relationship, could survive. an onrushing truck by a matter of feet, Jill and I sit for a while in the pastel and struck the concrete stanchion of a waiting room of Barry’s Garage, flick- gantry sign (M25 Heathrow) so hard ing through magazines (she Elle, me the front end of your Beemer was “oblit- Car). Then Barry takes us through erated,” according to the police report. to the oil-stink and clank out back, On impact your head hit the wind- where, with a postoperative groan, the screen and your knees crumpled into Beemer is being lowered on hydraulic the steering column. Later, in hospital, crutches. Hands plunged in blackened you were diagnosed with, among other pockets, Barry gives us a wordless tour less serious things, the fracture of both of the bodywork, pointing with his knees and stress possible mild traumatic toe. It’s a good job. You can’t see the brain injury. join. I pay Barry in cash and he hands Which may mean: You’ll suffer some me the keys. short-term memory loss, and/or diffi- Without thinking I toss my jacket culty with decision-making. The exog- in the back and lean to lower my- enous depression you may suffer may or self into the driver’s seat. Jill clears may not be distinguishable from the her throat. An unsparing analysis of endogenous depression you suffered, or “It’s okay, Neil,” she says. Her face is the way the Democratic and didn’t suffer, as a result of the affair you darkly doubled in the gleam of the were or weren’t having, before the roof. She holds out her hand for the Republican Parties collude crash. Stress may. The doctor also says keys. “I’ll drive.” Q you may well make a full recovery. to stay in power. Whether But what about me? the winner of an election is It’s not like I haven’t suffered a shock. You know, there’s plenty to be SUBSCRIBER ALERT a Republican or a Democrat glad about. I’m glad the crash wasn’t Dear Harper’s Magazine Readers, is not important to either worse, I’m glad I’m okay. I’m glad Sa- sha’s okay. I’m glad you may be, too. It has come to our attention that party. What is important is I’m glad that the Beemer’s held up several of our subscribers have that the power of the party (new door, new front fender) and that UHFHLYHG UHQHZDO QRWL¿FDWLRQV my bonus from Kim covers the excess from an independent magazine machine is retained—at all and loss of the no-claims. I’m glad nei- clearinghouse doing business costs. Walter Karp’s acute in- ther the police nor the insurance under the names Magazine Bill- sight reveals the sorry state wants to bring suit, and that Martin, ing Services, Publishers Process- Kim’s lawyer, thinks that when you ing Services Inc., and American of party politics and where wake up, we’ll come to the same conclusion—that neither of us was Consumer Publish Assoc. These power actually lies in twenty- looking ahead. companies have not been autho- I’m glad Sasha’s forgiven me (“It was rized to sell subscriptions on be- first-century America. nobody’s fault. You arsehole”). In a way, half of Harper’s Magazine. we’ve never had a more perfect oppor- tunity. What better cover than post- If you receive a renewal notice Order today through traumatic solemnity? We need to talk it and are unsure of its authenticity, store.harpers.org through. It’s best if I go alone. Innocence please call our subscriber ser- Published by Franklin Square Press rarely so feignable. If I want to leave it vices department and order your ISBN 978-1-879957-13-8 for a while, it’s only because, for the renewal through them. You may Softcover $14.95 moment, I can’t think ahead—it’s like contact subscriber services by the seconds after the first impact, not calling our toll-free number, FRANKLIN SQUARE knowing, no control, the stillness of (800) 444-4653, or via the web free fall. And then, sooner or later, PRESS at www.harpers.org. things will come to rest. Things will settle. And we’ll start again.

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For more books like these, visit Beacon.org/NowMoreThanEver BEACONPRESS BEACONPRESSBKS BEACONPRESS REVIEWS

it, reject it, use it, or manipulate it,” she writes. She had hoped it would be easier to love an animal than a person. It wasn’t. At one point, after she has consulted a pet psychic and scattered her dirty clothes on the bushes to attract long-gone Gattino with her scent, she wonders if she has turned into someone who can- NEW BOOKS not be satisfied by life, someone who is “unable to accept what is given.” By Christine Smallwood Then she thinks of the cat. A lost cat would not ask itself if food and shelter were too much to expect, or try to figure out how much food and shelter were enough or who was the right person to give those things. It would just keep trying to get those things until the moment it died.

SOMEBODY WITH A LITTLE HAMMER (Pantheon, $25.95), a col- lection of twenty years of Gaitskill’s reviews and essays, is strewn with such pearls. “People tend to treat oth- ers as they treat themselves,” she re- marks in a review of Gone Girl. From an article about the many book jack- ets that have wrapped Lolita: “Purity of feeling must live and breathe in the impure gardens of our confused, com- promised, corrupt, and broken hearts.” Readers of Gaitskill’s novels and short stories will recognize the shrewd- ness, and the themes. She gives depth to marginal female characters, the kind of women who are so thin or hunched over that you look right through them, if you see them at all. She is impatient with moral pi- ety and despises the contempt that wears a mask of sympathy; an essay on Linda Lovelace takes aim at those who degrade the actress by simplifying her story of degradation, masochism, de- sire, and “enormous loneliness” into n acquaintance once asked Mary “Lost Cat,” the essay from which a moral fable. Simplification is an AGaitskill and her then husband this scene is taken, is an account of aesthetic as well as an ethical lapse: about their house, which sat at several traumas—Gaitskill braids to- Gaitskill criticizes John Updike for the edge of a college campus, surrounded gether her desperate grief over sickly, putting a character into an interest- by woods. spunky Gattino, who ran away, with ing situation and giving him no recollections of hosting children complex thoughts about it. She of- I said it was nice but that it had been partly spoiled for me by the loss through the Fresh Air Fund and the ten stages judgments as disagree- of our cat. I told him the story and death of her father—but the real ments with family members or he said, “Oh, that was your trauma, trauma is love itself. “Human love is friends, who are made to play the was it?” grossly flawed, and even when it fool, or, sometimes, with herself. “I I said yes. Yes, it was a trauma. isn’t, people routinely misunderstand rolled my eyes at this piece of clumsy

“Misthaven #4,” by Amy Kanka Valadarsky. Courtesy the artist REVIEWS 91 cleverness,” she writes in a review of based on her short story of the same a canopy of pink roses, gazing at Dubravka Ugrešic’s´ novel Baba Yaga name, “cloaks an opposing dread”: matching walls, like the gardening Laid an Egg, “and then got so en- expert Gabrielle van Zuylen. Or un- gaged by it, I couldn’t stop reading.” Americans are in truth profoundly, der a canopy of Porthault’s Pansy “The Trouble with Following the neurotically terrified of being victims, linens printed with blue butterflies, Rules,” an essay first published in ever, in any way. . . . To be human is fi- like the landscape designer and phi- nally to be a loser, for we are all fated this magazine in 1994, looks back on to lose our carefully constructed sense lanthropist Bunny Mellon. Why do * two violent sexual encounters. The of self, our physical strength, our wealthy women sleep with their heads second, in which Gaitskill was raped health, our precious dignity, and final- covered? What horrors might befall by a stranger who threatened her ly our lives. them if they were forced to gaze di- life, was “relatively easy to dismiss”; rectly at the ceiling? Such were my the first, which she no longer consid- Now that our bully in chief has questions after perusing photograph ers rape, haunted her for years. “I turned the word “loser” into a punch after photograph of the dream castles had, in a sense, done violence to my- line and his targets into punching inhabited by Lady Diana Cooper, self,” she concludes of the sex she bags, we would do well to keep our Pauline de Rothschild, Babe Paley, didn’t refuse while high on LSD. collective loserdom in mind—the Elsa Schiaparelli, Fleur Cowles, and Gaitskill insists on taking responsi- inherent, unavoidable frailty that co- Georgia O’Keeffe. bility for her feelings and experienc- exists with vigor and love. “A refusal Come for the spreads, but try not es. But, as always, she is sensitive to to tolerate this reality is a refusal to to dwell on the insipid text. (“Ro- vulnerability—her own and every- tolerate life.” chas was passionate about cutting- one else’s. “If thousands of Ameri- edge style; more than making it cans say they are in psychic pain, I ou may find an hour of respite plausible, she made it credible.”) The would not be so quick to write them Yfrom the waking nightmare of book is divided into four chapters— off as self-indulgent fools,” she writes, American political life in the dusted heirlooms of Legacy Style, a sentence that reverberates with P. Gaye Tapp’s HOW THEY DECO- the pricey dramatics of the Grand new meaning in the context of our R ATED: INSPIR ATION FROM Manner, the bricolage of the Fash- current social-justice movements, GREAT WOMEN OF THE TWENTI- ionably Chic, and Unconventional which have been dismissed by some ETH CENTURY (Rizzoli, $55). It’s a Eye, a category that (you guessed it) as whiny self-victimization. coffee-table book that makes for defies categorization. Inspiring wom- So-called victim culture is not pleasant bedtime reading—even if en take risks that are just so: Schia- new, but it has rarely found a more you don’t sleep in a lit à la polonaise, parelli is commended for balancing a thoughtful analyst. “This apparent de- with satin curtains cascading from a television on a stack of eighteenth- sire to be a victim,” she wrote in a dome like streams of light falling century dictionaries, Evangeline 2003 reflection on the movieSecretary, from a fringed chandelier, as the per- Bruce for hanging paintings with rib- fume empress Hélène Rochas did. bon. Thank goodness for Lesley * The essay is excerpted in this month’s (Louis XV’s Polish queen gave this Blanch’s mad orientalist fantasia, From the Archive section. hypnoconfection its name.) Or under cluttered with tapestries and rugs and

Left: Elsa Schiaparelli’s library, painted by Jeremiah Goodman. Courtesy Rizzoli 92 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 Right: The bedroom of Marcel and Hélène Rochas © André Kertész/Condé Nast via Getty Images brocaded pillows and topped off with and the German critic Wolfgang a soft, tacky leopard throw. Menzel, as well as Balzac, Flaubert, How They Decorated is fi lled with Robert Louis Stevenson, and the “pieces” that would look lovely piled Dreyfus Affair. Each “slide” is liber- atop a barricade. I admit it: I have no ally adorned with references and feeling for décor. Where others admire apercus,¸ and Kalka pays the reader dapples of light on the eighteenth- the respect of expecting her to keep century Italian parquet, I see only dol- up. He darts from a discussion of lar signs. But try to be less vulgar than dirty jokes to dynamite to anarchists I. As Tapp reminds us, to P. G. Wodehouse; in an essay on the engineer Max Eyth, who popu- While wealth afforded Mrs. Mellon larized the steam plow, he makes Bringing the the ability to buy anything she want- space for Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Independent ed, it was her innate ability to fuse Kalka is interested in the nine- disparate design periods, objects, and Bookstore works of art into an incomparable aes- teenth century as the last moment thetic that made her unrivaled among that technological progress could be Experience her peers. conceived of as an unalloyed to your door. good—and the first moment that The book also reproduces a few technology began to elude our at- paintings, and the spacious, gracious tempts to harness it, which intro- Each month rooms of the ruling class are trans- duced a “discrepancy between our formed by the medium: blurred into inventiveness and our moral imagi- receive a fantasy, softened into art history. Jer- nation.” Fair enough, though the emiah Goodman’s smudgy painting jahrhundert conceit is an arbitrary curated book, of Rothschild’s living room makes way to tie up an essay collection, as her collection of chairs look positive- his introduction freely confesses. gift-wrapped, ly inviting; Cecil Beaton’s rendering Nor do his essays bother to cohere. of Mona Williams’s Palm Beach liv- More memorable than any theme or and delivered ing room turns cool glamour into argument are his clever observa- charming hominess. The photo- tions. “We are already beginning to graphs, though, which are spookily gaze back yearningly at the industri- with a emptied of inhabitants, do their al labor that was seen for so long as best to help you forget that anyone the epitome of alienation.” “Balzac, handwritten lives like this. Just one bathroom is the great diner, never provides a de- featured—Lady Diana’s, “done” in tailed description of a grand dinner letter about the the Chinese style. The walls were with all its accessories.” painted with white trees and butter- Sometimes Kalka skims too book from a fl ies and hung with gilded mirrors. It quickly over an interesting tidbit; in was as big as most New York apart- his investigation into “bucolic anti- bookseller! ments, with room for a sofa, Regency Semitism,” I would have liked to chairs, a fi replace, and a lidded bath- hear more about the cheerfully anti- bookculture.com tub. Presumably she also had a toilet, Semitic postcards sold in German but nothing that undignified, or spa towns. The title essay shifts /selects grossly human, is in the picture. from remarks on the London fog and the relatively recent phenome- professor of mine used to de- non of urban light and blossoms Ascribe books as “mental fur- into an erudite reading of Lulu, niture”; he quipped that it’s Berg’s opera based on the Wedekind worth making an interesting room plays. Kalka fixes on the moment to spend your life in. But in what that Jack the Ripper, having done period to upholster the ideational away with our savage heroine and chaises? The mind of the German her lover, washes his hands of the writer Joachim Kalka, it seems, is bloody deed. “I’m such a lucky dev- furnished in retro European style. il, damn it!” he says, gloating over In GASLIGHT: LANTERN SLIDES his victims, whom he has dismem- FROM THE NINETEENTH CEN- bered offstage. But though he can TURY (New York Review Books, wash his hands of his psychopathic $15.95), translated by Isabel Fargo predations, he cannot dry them. Cole, he writes about Schiller, Wag- “These people don’t even have March’s ner, Frank Wedekind, Alban Berg, towels!” he exclaims. Q New & Noteworthy Non-Fiction Selection

REVIEWS 93 self through her writing and happily BEHIND THE FIG LEAF sleeping around. She started writing fiction in her late twenties at the urging of her second husband, Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy’s sexual revolution and discovered herself to be, among other things, a comedian of manners. By Elaine Blair Her friends, and especially the writers and editors who worked on Partisan Review—Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Discussed in this essay: and Diana Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Wil- liam Philips, and Philip Rahv, with The Complete Fiction, by Mary McCarthy. Library of America. 2,066 pages. $90. whom she lived openly (still unusual at the time) until abruptly leaving him for onsidering the prevalence of excellent health and his secret pride in Wilson—were McCarthy’s unwilling Cpsychoanalysis in the twenti- his small feet. muses. Some are the subjects of comic eth century, there are surpris- “What makes you so sure of all this?” sketches in The Company She Keeps. ingly few stories set in shrinks’ offices. Dr. James asks when she finally pauses. (The high-handed husband is Wilson, But Mary McCarthy published one in “I’ve got a good eye for social types,” Meg who appears even more memorably as 1942, “Ghostly Father, I Confess.” On answers. But she quickly realizes that the main character Martha Sinnott’s the couch is Meg Sargent, a young she’s made a tactical error: he would self-regarding ex-husband in the 1955 editor and critic, white, left-wing, never tell if she was wrong. “It was like novel A Charmed Life.) In The Oasis bohemian. She’s been sent to Dr. doing an algebra problem and finding (1949), the whole Partisan Review crowd James by her high-handed husband, that the answers were missing from the is caricatured as the founders of a uto- in whose company, over the several back of the book.” pian left-wing colony in New England. years of their marriage, she has be- The doctor had warned her about Rahv threatened to sue. come subdued, compliant, and so- this: “ ‘Your picture of me is very impor- “What fools McCarthy made of her cially isolated. tant,’ he said, in his pedagogical manner, men!” wrote Vivian Gornick, referring Meg has her doubts about these ‘Not for what it says about me, but for to the male characters in the early visits. At one point, Dr. James sees what it says about you.’ ” Meg has left stories. Her real-life men seemed to her smirking (she’s taking note of his herself exposed. She begins to cry. acknowledge as much when they de- office décor), and asks her what she “Ghostly Father” became a chapter in scribed McCarthy with metaphors of finds so funny. She answers by McCarthy’s first and best work of fiction, bloodlust and predation. “She had, I launching into a little sketch—based The Company She Keeps, which is being thought, a wholly destructive critical on his clothes, his furniture, his republished alongside her six other nov- mind,” Kazin wrote of McCarthy, Newsweek subscription—of how she els and a selection of short stories in a imagines him spending his time: new two-volume Library of America shown in her unerring ability to spot edition. McCarthy always said that Meg the hidden weakness or inconsisten- You see about six plays a year. Your wife Sargent was an alter ego, but we don’t cy in any literary effort and every makes a list of things that are really person. To this weakness she instinc- worthwhile, and you check them off need her to tell us this: Meg’s eye for tively leaped with cries of pleasure— one by one. You get the tickets well in social markers and sardonic wit are surprised that her victim, as he lay advance, and you generally take anoth- clearly shared by her creator. In her es- torn and bleeding, did not applaud er couple with you. You never go on the says and criticism as well as her fiction, her perspicacity. spur of the moment; you never take McCarthy was known for unsparing standing room. send-ups of people she knew. She won a Macdonald spoke of her “sharkish” place for herself in a mostly male literary smile: “When most pretty girls smile at She’s warming up now, really getting world through caustic observations, de- you, you feel terrific. When Mary smiles into it. “You like the movies, and you ployed at cocktail parties as well as in at you, you look to see if your fly is never miss one the New Yorker recom- her writing. To her readers she was a open.” In Pictures from an Institution, a mends.” Come summer, “You commute glamorous figure, beautiful and appar- satirical roman à clef in which a to your mother-in-law’s place in Larch- ently fearless. She began her career in McCarthy-like satirical novelist is the mont or Riverside” and socialize with the 1930s with book reviews for The chief villain, Randall Jarrell joked that the other nice young doctors. She con- Nation and The New Republic, then “torn animals were removed at sunset jures his spouse—“Your wife has a went on to be the scourge of contempo- from that smile.” It was perhaps not just three-quarter-length silver-fox coat and rary theater as a critic for the political wounded pride that inflamed her critics several very dear girl friends”—then and cultural journal Partisan Review. (A but the sense that she was going after heads into a breathless finale about his Streetcar Named Desire “reeks of literary small game, morally speaking, with a ambition as the apartment reeks of big gun. Who could help having foi- Elaine Blair lives in Los Angeles. Her essay cheap perfume”; Eugene O’Neill “can- bles? It was only when she wrote Mem- “Note to Self” appeared in the May 2016 not write.”) She married and divorced ories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), her issue of Harper’s Magazine. early, then lived alone, supporting her- great memoir about growing up with a

94 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 cruel aunt and uncle after being or- contemporary John O’Hara, when she With “waves of shame,” she recalls phaned by the 1918 flu epidemic, that wrote from a female character’s per- the night before: McCarthy found the objects appropri- spective, she had a novelty and au- ately scaled to her satirical gifts. thority that no male could match. They had sung songs . . . and there She did not spare her own fictional In “The Man in the Brooks Brothers had been some question of disturbing the other passengers, and so the door stand-ins, like the vulnerable, daring, Shirt,” a story that won McCarthy an had been shut. After that the man bright, foolish Meg herself. How tell- admiring following when it was pub- had come around to her side of the ta- ing the analogy of the algebra book: lished in Partisan Review in 1941, Meg ble and kissed her rather greedily. She the would-be satirist as a student who Sargent is on a train from New York to had fought him off for a long time, but wants to have found the right answer Sacramento. She’s in her mid-twenties at length her will had softened. She and be acknowledged for her had felt tired and kind, and cleverness. Poor Meg, caught thought, why not? up short trying to ridicule her impassive shrink. From now Readers today might view on, we can imagine her resolv- this as sexual assault, but the ing, she will satirize only the possibility that the man has people she knows intimately. done something wrong doesn’t enter the story; Meg questions ost of McCarthy’s only her own morality, for hav- Mvictims have long ing slept with someone even since died (of natural when she wasn’t really attracted causes), and there are few read- to him. Carol Brightman, one ers alive who could have known of McCarthy’s biographers, ar- her Thirties and Forties social gues that it was not until the types personally. But while sexual revolution that sex came McCarthy’s social and political to seem “like something men satire has dated (the Larchmont do to women, and that women summer retreat and the three- are henceforth free to ‘do’ to quarter-length fur coat now men.” In contrast, McCarthy’s signify weakly, if at all), her de- female characters would never piction of sexual manners feels think of themselves as less current; aspiring young female than fully culpable partici- professionals still live more or pants in their sexual escapades. less in McCarthy’s world of McCarthy “is the doyenne of boozy dates and ill-considered pre-revolutionary sex,” Bright- flings with colleagues. Her real man writes admiringly. “There subject was a new independent is no fear of flying in her bed- way of life. She draws out the rooms, only of getting caught.” pleasures and the risks, emo- It’s true that Meg has no fear, tional and financial, of free- but Brightman’s phrase makes dom, of leaving home, of di- the sex sound more fun than it vorcing, of living alone. ever actually is in McCarthy’s But it was McCarthy’s frank fiction. McCarthy’s specialty writing on sex that made her was not lust or love but the reputation. She was not a particularly and divorced from her first husband. mixed motives that lead women to sex sensitive reader as a teenager, she tells She’s headed out West to tell her aunt in the absence of lust or love. In her life, us in the memoir How I Grew (1987): that she plans to marry again. A new McCarthy not only did a fair share of “To be truthful, what I was hoping for fiancé is waiting for her in New York, sexual adventuring—which she de- from books described as modern or but she’s hoping for a final fling. scribes in How I Grew and Intellectual daring (and from classical sculpture) When the man in the shirt, middle- Memoirs (1992)—but fell in love several was to see the figleaf stripped off sex.” aged and porcine, first walks into the times, most enduringly with her fourth She is obviously not the only young club car, she dismisses him as “Out of (and last) husband, to whom she was person who read for the dirty parts, the Question.” But he’s clearly aware married for nearly thirty years. However, but she kept faith with this teenage of her, and she’s not completely insen- her writing cuts against any romantic reader even as an adult writer. The sible to his flattering interest. They exaltation of sex, and perhaps this, too, stories and books most beloved by talk, they go to his compartment for is what makes it seem current. There McCarthy’s readers also do away lunch, she finds herself liking his remains an abiding interest in female with the fig leaf. And while she was company, they drink, they talk more, writers taking on female sexuality (Chris no more explicit in her descriptions they drink more, and then she wakes Kraus, Rachel Cusk, Lena Dunham), but of sex than, for instance, her near- up the next morning in his berth. a great deal of the storytelling energy

Mary McCarthy, 1956 © Inge Morath/The Inge Morath Foundation/Magnum Photos REVIEWS 95 goes not into stories of lust but into think it would be indecent to trading the risks of separation for a more stories of sex that women didn’t particu- “I write about happy sex,” McCarthy comfortable and familiar war of passive larly want, didn’t like, or decided not to told Jack Paar in 1963. By then, resistance at home. have. In McCarthy’s fiction, sex is nei- McCarthy was the best-selling author In these early stories, the sense of ther ecstatic nor expressive of deep feel- of The Group, a novel that follows entrapment and passivity is psychologi- ing. If you read her books without know- eight members of Vassar’s class of 1933 cal; Meg’s shrink speculates that she has ing anything about the society in which from graduation to the beginning of unconsciously chosen an overbearing they were written, it would be hard to the Second World War and spares no husband to re-create the conditions of figure out why these characters have sex details of their sex lives along the way. her childhood under the care of a cruel at all. “You have always found sex comical,” aunt. But with The Group, McCarthy There’s something obscure in Meg’s Paar observed. McCarthy explained seemed to suggest that timidity and account of the night before. What does that it might not be funny to the par- vagueness are part of the bourgeois fe- it mean to say that she “felt tired and ticipants, “but imagine being on the male condition. In her application for a kind”? Which was it, a practical capitu- other side of a hotel partition. Sex is Guggenheim grant, she described The lation or an act of generosity? In the either disgusting or comical to people Group’s prose as a deliberately “crazy morning, Meg is desperate to sneak out who are not participating.” quilt of clichés, platitudes, and idées re- of the man’s berth and back to her own In her fiction, the distinction be- ¸cues.” The aim was to capture the pre- seat, but it’s not to be. He wakes up and tween participant and observer is not vailing “ideas of the period concerning sees her, and declares his love and desire so clear. Her female characters often sex, politics, economics, architecture, all over again. Soon, she is seem to be watching sex as if from be- city-planning, house-keeping, child- hind a partition, amused or puzzled or bearing, interior decoration, and art” hugging the man with an air of warmth that was not quite spurious and not worried, even while they are having it. from the ingenuous perspectives of her quite sincere (for the distaste could not In fact, given her reputation as a scath- young graduates. It’s a Flaubertian proj- be smothered but only ignored); she ing know-it-all, it’s surprising how of- ect that seems like it should have been pressed her ten fingers into his back and ten McCarthy writes about women in a natural extension of McCarthy’s range for the first time kissed him carefully on moments of irresolution and insecuri- at a time when she was looking beyond the mouth. ty, women who feel trapped in infan- the little world of the literati for subjects. The glow of self-sacrifice illuminated tilizing relationships with more power- But The Group didn’t come easily; her. This, she thought decidedly, is go- ful men, like Meg in “Ghostly Father,” beginning in the early Fifties, McCarthy ing to be the only real act of charity I or women under the sway of stronger struggled with it on and off for more have ever performed in my life; it will personalities or merely conventional than ten years, scrapping the project be the only time I have ever given any- thing when it honestly hurt me to do so. thought. “The Weeds,” published in several times in frustration. In 1961, she The New Yorker in 1944 and collected spoke with surprising openness about An act of charity? Do we accept it? in Cast a Cold Eye (1950), is about a her troubles. “These girls are all essen- Saul Bellow wrote that he remembered wife who’s been trying for months to tially comic figures, and it’s awfully hard reading the story and “coming across gather the will to leave her husband. to make anything happen to them,” she those sentences that say in effect: She told The Paris Review. Maybe the prob- lay like a piece of white lamb on a She remembered all the times she had lem was time: sacrificial altar. ‘Bullshit,’ I said.” Meg thought of leaving him before. But there had always been something— How’re they ever going to progress must have had some desire of her own, the party Saturday night that she did Bellow suggests, even if not a specifi- through the twenty years between the not want to miss, the grapes blue on inauguration of Roosevelt and the inau- cally sexual one. Why, really, does she the vines waiting to be made into jel- do it? Because she doesn’t like the idea guration of Eisenhower? This has been ly, the new sofa for the living room that the great problem, and here I haven’t of herself as being, as she puts it, “hard Macy’s would deliver next week, the had a form for it. I mean, all I know is as nails”? Because the man’s strong feel- man to see about the hot-water heater. that they’re supposed to be middle-aged ings make sex the ethical choice? Be- And by the time the sofa had come, the at the end. cause it’s nice to be wanted and ad- man had gone, the jelly had been made, mired? Because it’s easier to just go she would no longer be angry with him, She ended up compressing the scope through with sex than to make an or at any rate her anger would have lost to just eight years. Finally, with prod- its cutting edge and she would have awkward, contentious exit? Because it only the dull stone of discontent to turn ding from her publisher, she wrote her gives her a form of power over him? over and over in her palm. way to an ending, and published the McCarthy doesn’t quite get to the bot- book in 1963. tom of Meg’s motives, one feels, but the When she finally checks into a hotel It stayed on the New York Times best- description of her reasoning seems spot in New York, she finds herself overcome seller list for two years. The Group was a on: Meg finds a half dozen reasons— by lassitude, unable to go to an employ- novel that actually brought the news to some plausible, others more like ment agency or call a friend who might its readers. In her essay “Fact in Fiction,” rationalizations—to spend more than help her find a job. She spends days and from 1961, McCarthy writes approv- twenty-four hours in the man’s berth. nights reading the Bible until her hus- ingly of the “blocks and lumps of fact” Not one of those reasons is that the band comes to fetch her in her room. that define the novel as a form—like man turns her on. Then she goes back home with him, Melville’s chapters on the whale and on

96 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 whiteness in Moby Dick, or Balzac’s fish corporation lawyer, like so many in America’s Longest Running Catalog chapter in Lost Illusions on how paper is Mother’s generation.”) They rarely for- made: “The novel, like newspaper boil- mulate an openly critical thought— Hammacher erplate, contains not only a miscellany much less a mordant observation— of odd facts but household hints and about the men in their lives. They’re for Schlemmer how-to-do-it instructions.” You could, Roosevelt and the New Deal, but even she pointed out, “learn how to make their politics are a punch line. Priss Offering the Best, the Only and the strawberry jam from Anna Karenina.” Crockett, a society girl from a liberal Unexpected for 169 years. From The Group, readers learned family, marries an overbearing pediatri- how to get fitted for a diaphragm: the cian, Sloan. After the birth of their son, chapter in which one of the girls does Stephen, she begins to see that so was published as a stand-alone sto- ry in Partisan Review in 1954, at a time she might have to defend Stephen when it was still hard for many to find against Sloan, and the more so because information about birth control, much Sloan was a doctor and therefore had a less a psychologically nuanced account double authority. She found that she of the process from a female charac- was checking what Sloan said against what the nurses said, against what the ter’s perspective. Department of Labor pamphlet said, against Parents’ Magazine. When Sloan he book is still a page-turner, a declared that the baby should sleep in Tgossipy satirical melodrama an unheated room, she was amazed to told in the voice of collective find that the Department of Labor college-girl wisdom. It opens with a agreed with him; the nursery in the wedding one week after graduation: hospital, of course, was heated. There Kay Petersen, the most bravely bohe- was a side of Sloan, she had decided, mian member of the clique, is marry- that she mistrusted, a side that could ing the man she’s been living with: be summed up by saying that he was a Republican. Up to now this had not According to Helena Davison, Kay’s mattered; most men she knew were roommate junior year, the two of them Republicans—it was almost part of be- had moved right into a summer sublet, ing a man. But she did not like the in a nice block in the East Fifties, with- thought of a Republican controlling out a single piece of linen or silver of the destiny of a helpless baby. Th e Neck and Shoulder their own, and had spent the last week, ever since graduation (Helena had just There’s something downright pruri- Heat Wrap been there and seen it), on the regular ent about so closely inspecting the tenant’s sublet sheets! inner lives, including the sex lives, of This is the How like Kay, they concluded fondly, such naïve and muzzy characters. Dot- heated wrap that as the tale passed along the pews. She tie Renfrew, a pragmatist who has simultaneously had been amazingly altered, they felt, by little knowledge about sex, decides to soothes sore a course in Animal Behavior she had lose her virginity to a handsome rake muscles in the taken with old Miss Washburn (who she meets at Kay’s wedding. But she’s neck and had left her brain in her will to Science) shoulders. Unlike typical rectangular during their junior year. puzzled and embarrassed by the pro- ceedings, until the rake—who’s taken heating pads that do not provide ideal Actually, McCarthy wasn’t sure that to calling her “Boston” after her home coverage or contact, this wrap reaches the novel was a satire. “The book is not city—fills her in on some crucial in- from the front of the shoulders to the meant to be a joke or even a satire, ex- formation the following morning. middle of the back. A tethered controller actly,” she told the Guggenheim com- adjusts the temperature and the wrap’s mittee. An odd assertion on the face of “You came, Boston,” he remarked, polyester microplush is soft against skin. it—The Group, at its best, certainly reads with an air of a satisfied instructor. Magnetic front closure. Plugs into AC. like satire—but it does point to some- Dottie glanced uncertainly at him; thing ambiguous in the book’s attitude could he mean that thing she had 84437 $69.95 toward its characters: they seem caught done that she did not like to think between McCarthy’s sympathy and con- about? “I beg your pardon,” she mur- mured. “I mean you had an orgasm.” descension. None of them has anything Dottie made a vague, still-inquiring Use code #600926 for like the intelligence or the seditious wit noise in her throat; she was pretty of Meg Sargent. They rebel against so- sure, now she understood, but the new FREE SHIPPING cial convention only if it has already word discombobulated her. by 5/31/17 become fashionable to do so. (“Not one of them, if she could help it, was going Is it “ ‘I beg your pardon,’ she mur- 1-800-543-3366 to marry a broker or a banker or a cold- mured”? Or the stealth obscenity of hammacher.com/wrap

REVIEWS 97 “discombobulated”? Something about nibals and Missionaries (about a group of today might regret that McCarthy’s the episode seems perilously close to the airline passengers whose plane gets hi- characters didn’t age with her, that she giddy sexual initiation of pornography. jacked by a terrorist), have a faded topi- didn’t go deeper inward; it seems, some- Is this an intentional effect, or did the cality; their social observations and sa- how, a near miss. We could say of her dark forces of literary cliché slip out of tirical barbs are depressingly inert. what she observed, in “Fact in Fiction,” McCarthy’s grasp? McCarthy’s life and novels diverged at of some of the great writers of the first The saddest of the group turns out to just the time that writers such as John half of the twentieth century: that in be Kay, the character whose biography Updike and Philip Roth were discover- spite of their achievement, in the middle most closely resembles McCarthy’s. Kay ing the uses of serial fictional avatars, of their work there seems to be “a void, is an outsider from a Western state enlarging a single autobiographical a blank space reserved for the novel they (McCarthy was born in Seattle), a character over many novels. A reader failed to write.” Q stranger to the other women’s upper- class social circles. Like McCarthy, she has married an older man, an aspiring DOOR TO DOOR playwright, and the relationship starts to deteriorate almost immediately. Her Mohsin Hamid’s displaced persons husband, Harald, loses his job as a stage- hand, becomes depressed and violent, has an affair with one of her friends, By Francine Prose and, after an argument, checks her into a mental ward without her consent. He has by now pretty thoroughly gaslit Kay, Discussed in this essay: and her response to being locked in the ward is to fear that “the thing she had Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid. Riverhead Books. 240 pages. $26. been dreading for five years had hap- pened: he had left her.” Kay’s story about to break out. (which ends with her dying in a mysteri- The streets and parks ous fall that may be a suicide) is harrow- are crowded with ing. Despite the novel’s chatty surface stunned and dying and its reputation for gossipy fun, The refugees, but so far the Group is an unsettling tableau of female unrest has been limited accommodation and self-effacement, of to “some shootings and the mysterious pliancy of ruling-class the odd car bombing, wives and daughters. Though it’s set in felt in one’s chest cav- the 1930s, it may be better understood ity as a subsonic vibra- as speaking to the conservatism and the tion like those emitted exaggerated cult of domesticity of the by large loudspeakers 1950s. McCarthy never embraced femi- at music concerts.” De- nism, but she did say that the one femi- spite the distant crack- nist she approved of was Betty Friedan. le of gunfire, Saeed and The Feminine Mystique came out the Nadia, who meet in an same year as The Group, and it, too, evening class on cor- portrayed educated young women’s con- porate branding, do sciousness as infiltrated and dulled by what humans so often the voices of experts, women’s glossies, do in such circum- and social convention. stances: they act as The Group stands as the last of though they have all McCarthy’s books to be inspired by her the time in the world. circle of friends or drawn closely from One moment we are pot- her own experience. There were no tering about our errands more Meg Sargents or Martha Sinnotts as usual and the next we or even Kay Petersens in McCarthy’s are dying, and our eter- fiction. Novelists are of course not re- nally impending ending quired to have autobiographical charac- arly in Mohsin Hamid’s re- does not put a stop to our transient be- ters, but McCarthy did not find solid markable new novel, Exit ginnings and middles until the instant E when it does. footing in any other approach; her last West, a young couple fall in two novels, Birds of America (about an love in an unnamed city where war is intellectually precocious male college Francine Prose is the author, most recently, Saeed, an employee of a billboard- student who becomes concerned with of Mister Monkey (Harper). She is a con- advertising company, has been trying environmental conservation) and Can- tributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. to design a campaign for a soap com-

98 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 Illustration by Simon Pemberton WALTER KARP pany. Having liberated herself, at sofa—have become too great, and great emotional cost, from her tradi- she worries about Saeed, traveling tional family, Nadia lives alone in a back and forth to see her. rented apartment, works for an insur- Even though Hamid has warned ance company, rides a motorcycle, us about what is about to occur, it and wears a full-length black robe not still comes as a shock to the reader— THE POLITICS as a sign of religious devotion but as as it does to Saeed and Nadia— a way of dealing with “aggressive men when the city turns into a war zone. OF WAR and with the police, and with aggres- Or perhaps what’s startling is how sive men who were the police.” She is quickly a modern society can be re- far less religious than Saeed, we learn duced to almost medieval chaos. in their first after-class conversation, Firefights erupt in disputed neighbor- a difference that will become divisive hoods. Nadia’s cousin is blown “liter- as the novel progresses. ally to bits” by a truck bomb. The Over the course of a few weeks, ponytailed entrepreneur who sold Saeed and Nadia flirt, have dinner, her the shrooms is beheaded “with a smoke weed, take psychedelic mush- serrated knife to enhance discom- rooms. Early on, he suggests they ab- fort.” The militants occupy strategic stain from sex until they are married. territory; people vanish, leaving their THE STORY OF TWO WARS She is intrigued by her attractive class- loved ones with no idea whether WHICH ALTERED FOREVER mate but determined to preserve her they are alive or dead; drones and THE POLITICAL LIFE OF hard-won independence. The tenta- helicopters hover overhead; Saeed’s tive advances and inevitable stallings father sees some boys playing soccer THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC of their courtship might seem more with a human head; an upstairs (1890–1920) familiar and less urgent if we weren’t neighbor is killed at home, and his so regularly reminded of how doomed blood seeps through the ceiling. their world is. One by one, the ordinary comforts Our awareness of that doom is in- and conveniences—cell-phone service, tensified by an authorial voice that plumbing, electricity—disappear. “There is an important connection is simultaneously ironic and elegiac, There are endless public and private as Hamid contrasts the relative pla- executions, with bodies hanging between clarity of prose and cidity of his characters’ lives with “from streetlamps and billboards like political honesty, and it doesn’t monitory glimpses of the hell into a form of festive seasonal decora- occur often enough for us to pass which they are about to descend. tion.” The purges come in waves; af- up the chance of celebrating it. I The view from the comfortable ter each, there is a brief respite, “un- hereby celebrate Walter Karp.” apartment that Saeed shares with til someone committed an infraction his parents, for example, of some kind, because infractions, al- —Christopher Hitchens, Newsday though often alleged with a degree of might command a slight premium during gentler, more prosperous randomness, were inevitably pun- times, but would be most undesir- ished without mercy.” “Eloquent, even elegiac . . . and we able in times of conflict, when it close [The Politics of War] with a n this new reality, windows be- would be squarely in the path of sigh for ‘that old America that was heavy machine-gun and rocket fire as come apertures “through which I free and is now dead.’” fighters advanced into this part of death was possibly most likely to town. . . . Location, location, location, come,” and doors take on an en- —The Washington Post the realtors say. Geography is destiny, tirely new meaning: “Rumors had respond the historians. begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere, often to The historians prove to be the places far away, well removed from Order today through more prescient. As the worsening this death trap of a country.” When store.harpers.org conflict between the government Saeed and Nadia realize that they and the fundamentalist rebels makes can’t survive much longer in their ISBN 978-1-879957-55-8 it increasingly dangerous for the cou- embattled homeland and decide to Softcover $16.95 ple to meet, Saeed invites Nadia to leave, we learn that these “special” move in (and live chastely) with him doors are in fact magic portals FRANKLIN and his parents. Nadia hesitates, through which refugees can pass— SQUARE until the matter is decided for her; and miraculously find themselves PRESS the risks she faces living alone— somewhere else. frightened by the sound of explo- These doors are in part a clever sions, she barricades her door with a literary device that allows Hamid

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REVIEWS 99 to skip over transitional passages and bypass strict chronology, but they also signal a turn away from scrupulous realism toward some- thing more mythic. It is as though the most basic natural laws—the limitations imposed by time and distance, our notions of causality and probability—have been eradi- cated along with the social order. As the lovers fail to find a haven, it seems Hamid is suggesting that the dream of liberation, of escape from a global refugee crisis, may be as fantastical as the notion of the doors themselves. In today’s inter- connected world, there is no exit. Saeed and Nadia first wind up on the Greek island of Mykonos, where they live at the edges of vast camps crowded with people like themselves. Passing through a sec- ond door, they reach London, where squatters are occupying the palatial homes of wealthy absentee owners. But London is facing its own crisis. The influx of refugees has destabilized society and set off more violence—riots and attacks sparked by nativist rage at the city’s swelling migrant population. To Nadia, it doesn’t seem that differ- ent from the disorder she left be- SOLUTION TO THE FRGUBIQ hind. “She wondered whether she MARCH PUZZLE MILIEULBS RIC TUS and Saeed had done anything by NILMNYA W ACOZO moving, whether the faces and VIOLASMNAIGNATZ buildings had changed but the ba- sic reality of their predicament had NOTES FOR TNS VEP GML NS RE not.” By now, the refugee popula- “DIAMETRICODE”: KENNELHIP L O UVRE tion in the U.K. has grown larger Y A MRSA JESSAY and is becoming difficult to man- ACETYLCSOREFLEX age. The assaults on migrants— ASANAQPUEMSEX who have been restricted to hold- Note: * indicates an JUSTLYUISHOLLOW ing camps, fenced off from society anagram. Encoded an- at large, and given strict instruc- S LET INTAS I A T swers are capitalized. M tions about beginning the process P E Y O TETASSUMM I T of assimilation—taper off, and an D O NLHYC uneasy accord is reached. After they leave London via yet another door, Saeed and Nadia end up in California, where the influx of ACROSS: 8. mil(i)e-U; 10. odd letters; 12. *; 14. (a)-BOUT; 15. B(REV.)E; 16. FIJI (homo- the desperate and homeless has phone); 17. viola[t.e.]s; 18. Ignat*-z; 19. WAS-H-TUB(rev.); 21. ke(n.-n.)el; 23. two mngs.; 24. *; 26. RET([cop]Y)PE*; 28. Z(APP)ER[o]; 29. *; 34. re(fle, rev.)x; 36. BED SLAT*; transformed whole areas, such as 38. just-l[a]y; 40. LOP[e]; 41. ho(ll-0)w; 43. PU(rev.)-MA(rev.); 44. two mngs.; 45. POEM, Marin County, from bucolic exurbs hidden; 46. peyot*-[departure]e; 47. tas[k]; 48. su(m-m)it. into sprawls of squatters’ shacks. Despite the immigrants’ poverty, a spirit of “intermittent optimism” DOWN: 1. fin(it)e; 2. [d]rills; 3. g-unsels*; 4. Uban(G)i; 5. *; 6. i(con)s; 7. *; 9. [mil]lion; 10. l-Y-mph; 11. S-W-amp*; 13. hidden; 19. [bra]very; 20. *; 22. homophone; 25. two mngs.; prevails, “perhaps because Marin 27. ac(qui)t; 28. *; 30. *; 31. two mngs.; 32. *; 33. *; 34. re-H-as-H; 35. e-xotic*; 37. slim-Y; was less violent than most of the 39. sl[I’m]y; 42. hidden. places its residents had fled.” But

100 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2017 Hike, Bike & Write even as Nadia and Saeed find a It’s striking how swiftly we come A Program for Nonfiction Writers measure of peace in their new to care about the people in his fic- Week One —July 2–8, 2017 home, their love is tested by the cu- tional world. The death of Saeed’s and Week Two—July 9–15, 2017 mulative stress of what they’ve en- mother, for example, is wrenching, College of the Atlantic, dured, and by the divergent ways in especially given that it’s narrated en Bar Harbor Maine which they have come to under- passant, a few dozen pages after we’re For more information and to register, visit: stand and define their religious, cul- introduced to her. Already hesitant tural, and sexual identities. Saeed about moving in with Saeed, Nadia www.coa.edu/summerprograms/adult- grows more devout and dependent workshops/hike-bike-write on the consolation of faith. In Cali- might have waited much longer had 1-800-597-9500 [email protected] fornia, he prays Saeed’s mother not been killed, a stray heavy-caliber round passing DATE ACCOMPLISHED PEOPLE. several times a day, and he prayed through the windshield of her fami- Join the introduction network exclusively ly’s car and taking with it a quarter fundamentally as a gesture of love for for graduates, students, and faculty of of Saeed’s mother’s head, not while what had gone and would go and the Ivies, Seven Sisters, Stanford, U of could be loved in no other way. When she was driving, for she had not driv- Chicago, and others. All ages. he prayed he touched his parents, who en in months, but while she was could not otherwise be touched, and checking inside for an earring she The Right Stuff (800) 988-5288 he touched a feeling that we are all thought she had misplaced. www.rightstuffdating.com children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy It’s the specificity (the lost earring, and girl, and we too will all be lost by the fact that the old woman had those who come after us and love us, stopped driving) and the unflinch- and this loss unites humanity, unites ing attentiveness with which the every human being . . . and out of carnage is registered (“a quarter of this Saeed felt it might be possible, Saeed’s mother’s head”) that make in the face of death, to believe in hu- the sentence so moving. The preci- manity’s potential for building a bet- ter world, and so he prayed as a la- sion also contributes to our sense ment, as a consolation, and as a that the death was random, of no hope, but he felt that he could not importance to anyone save her be- express this to Nadia. reaved survivors. Chance that an Hamid’s unflappable prose is even American would As he grows increasingly es- more impressive in the scene in tranged from his partner, Saeed be- which Nadia is assaulted by a strang- rather be mugged comes attracted to the daughter of a er while waiting in a panicked crowd local black Muslim preacher who is of people trying to withdraw money than audited : committed to feeding and sheltering from a bank: his congregants, and to teaching 1 in 2 them En glish. But it’s Nadia who de- There in the unruly crowd she was cides that they should separate, and groped from behind, someone push- after she goes to work at the local ing his hand down her buttocks and THE food cooperative, she falls in love between her legs, and trying to pene- with a female colleague. trate her with his finger, failing be- cause he was outside the multiple amid, who was born in La- fabrics of her robe and her jeans and INDEX BOOK hore, Pakistan, and has lived her underclothes, but coming as close VOLUME 3 H to succeeding as possible under the in London, New York, and Order online at www.harpers.org/store circumstances, applying incredible California, has undertaken a project force, as she was pinned by the bod- of considerable ambition: a novel ies around her, unable to move or DISCLAIMER: Harper’s Magazine assumes no about the daunting subject of the even raise her hands, and so stunned liability for the content of or reply to any personal global refugee crisis, with a nervy and that she could not shout, or speak, original structure, nuanced charac- reduced to clamping her thighs to- advertisement. The advertiser assumes complete ters, a fast-moving plot, and prose gether and her jaws together. liability for the content of and all replies to any that is consistently poised and pre- advertisement and for any claims made against cise. It is a mark of his success that Passages such as this remind us the book never makes us feel that we of what fiction can do that even Harper’s Magazine as a result thereof. The are listening to a lecture about an im- the best reportage can’t—of its advertiser agrees to indemnify and hold Harper’s portant sociopolitical phenomenon, a ability to render history from the Magazine and its employees harmless from all feature that has much to do with the inside. Even as Hamid describes force of the language and the depth the deteriorating global situation, costs, expenses (including reasonable attorney of its characterization. he never lets us forget that these fees), liabilities, and damages resulting from or caused by the publication placed by the advertiser

REVIEWS 101 or any reply to any such advertisement. events are happening to individu- streets of Vienna. The next week, a als whom we have come to know, young Austrian woman who works and whose fates move us deeply. in an art gallery hears that her countrymen are planning to attack xit West is punctuated with a refugee encampment located near Ebrief, self-contained narra- the zoo. Heading across town, wear- tives, seemingly unrelated to ing a peace pin, a rainbow pride the story of Saeed and Nadia, that pin, and a migrant-compassion pin, are so cinematic they seem like she is terrified to find herself in the treatments for short film noirs. They midst of a bloodthirsty mob of men Dr. Winnifred Cutler enhance the steadily building inti- who look like “her brother and her mations of menace—the feeling cousins and her father and her un- BIOLOGIST'S FORMULAS that the global can suddenly be- cles,” who stare at her with “undis- come local. In the first of these, guised hostility, and the rancor of INCREASE AFFECTION which takes place in Sydney, Aus- perceived betrayal.” The men shout tralia, a woman is asleep at home; at her, push her. She escapes un- her husband is away, her house alarm harmed, though, and continues to- deactivated, and her window slightly ward the zoo to join the “human ajar. A stranger enters the bedroom, cordon to separate the two sides”: looks around, thinks about how lit- tle it would take to kill someone, And all this happened as the sun then slips through the window, dipped lower in the sky, as it was doing “dropping silkily to the street be- above Mykonos as well, which though south and east of Vienna, was after all for women tm for men low.” In the next, set in Tokyo, a sinister man follows two Filipina in planetary terms not far away, and unscented fragrance additives there in Mykonos Saeed and Nadia ♥ Florence (AL) 54 orders “I am 57 and I have girls leaving a bar, a gun in his were reading about the riot, which was just gotten married. I think Athena 10:13 pocket. In another, an old man in starting in Vienna, and which pan- pheromones just made a difference. That San Diego finds his house surround- icked people originally from their positive attitude. Oh Dr. Cutler, am I speaking ed by men in uniform. “The old to you? I want to thank you for your books… country were discussing online how especially the hormones book. It has made man asked the officer whether it best to endure or flee. such a difference!” was Mexicans who had been com- ♥ Jack (MA) 11 orders “This 10X product is ing through, or was it Muslims, be- As we in the West read Hamid’s amazing! People are closer, more friendly. cause he couldn’t be sure, and the novel, it’s difficult not to imagine Is this Dr. Cutler? I thought so. I think you are officer said he couldn’t answer, sir.” that we may be standing on the amazing. And the Athena Pheromone 10X is stunning. I wear it in my long time cologne, but The most sustained and dazzling brink of an abyss like the one that with the 10X in it, the difference is stunning!” of these apparent digressions begins threatens to swallow Saeed and Na- when militants from Saeed and Na- dia. Despite the brutality of their cir- PROVEN EFFECTIVE IN 3 dia’s country, hoping perhaps “to cumstances and their magical transit DOUBLE BLIND STUDIES provoke a reaction against migrants through one door after another, they from their own part of the world,” are, after all, “in planetary terms not Created by Winnifred Cutler, Ph.D. in biology massacre innocent people in the far away.” Q from U. of Penn, post-doc at Stanford. Co-discovered human pheromones in 1986 (Time 12/1/86; and Newsweek 1/12/87). Call (610) 827-2200 or order online athenainstitute.com Harper’s Magazine is owned and published monthly by the Harper’s Magazine Foundation, 666 Broadway, Vial of 1/6 oz. added to 2-4 oz. of your fragrance New York, N.Y. 10012. Tel: 212-420-5720. Robert Volante, Chairman; John R. MacArthur, President; An- lasts 4 to 6 months, or use straight. Effective drew J. Bacevich, Rosa Brooks, Eric Foner, and Jim Webb, Board Members. 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ARMED TO THE TEETH 17 18

By Richard E. Maltby Jr. 19 20

2122 23 24 25 S 26 27 28 29 30 eventeen clue answers cannot be entered in 31 32 the diagram until they receive 1A. Answer lengths are therefore omitted. 33 34 35 36 Clue answers include ten proper nouns. One al- tered word is a proper noun. 32A and 33A are un- 37 38 39 40 41 42 common words. As always, mental repunctuation of a clue is the key to its solution. The solution to last 43 44 45 month’s puzzle appears on page 100. 46

47 48 across 48. Surely, if going from left to right, and changing, it may 1. (see instructions) (two words) have fringe benefits! 10. As affront is limitless, it’s something to savor down 11. Low parts in Valse Fantastique 1. Wind up with, initially, Eric Idle 13. Romeo’s leader on the road in final face-off 2. Football team not running, seen as a disaster 14. Country parents holding an area in straitened 3. Medical man, one who does imitations—it’s curtains circumstances? for him! 15. Like some mothers except, after an exchange of letters 4. Ref’s set for curing sores with a family member, talking 5. Cable’s hookup makes you turn tail 17. Hemingway and Che Guevara, to friends, hearing 6. Man on a talk show brings up Ogden Nash’s other llama! ideas evenly 7. Individual fights for Harvard and Yale, e.g. 18. Is “kiddo” only partly accepted? Get outta here! 8. In Japan, goodbye at the end for an old city 19. Taking five letters in “string,” adding one from each, 9. Instinctive gradual erosion takes in a bit of land and the anagramming end of rain 20. Sound, according to a Siamese? 10. Rig bears south—they might make short cuts 21. Ship’s helm in the morning? Just the opposite! 12. Diesel in the actors’ union appears in Deliverance 25. During negotiations, a legitimate sign of a bargain 16. Chest protectors for exotic animals picked up by (two words) the ears? 26. How to indicate Pennsylvania when there’s little room 18. One who patronizes up-and-coming goods in Paris? for an animal? 20. Stuff that leaves you flat in London 29. Sound barrier blasted 22. A-list’s membership ends 31. Doctors put back soldier in senior housing 23. No average parades provide drinks 32. Preserver finds first page missing from hymnal 24. Mahler’s First fools a lot of people 33. Muralist represented extremist belief 26. Jimmy welcomes boorish puritanical element 34. Heading for disaster, entering so the wrong way, takes 27. Tight-lipped group claims one is not wanted in it too much 28. Drinks out in streets 37. Do nag at someone who calls games 30. A lot of Hair, they say, takes place in America 41. Music, after I went at wine 35. Oh, you singer and actress—so earthy in your makeup! 43. Previous to this place, after initial takeoff 36. Not a nice place for satay—no first-class ratings 44. And, also, as well—they all come back with dirt 38. Place of pure enchantment? 45. State a word of welcome, wearing glasses? 39. Carry a child? Easy at first 46. Gives out in so-called sporting events 40. Coverage for retro holding—none at all 47. Solver’s true nature is elusory, puzzling (and female) 42. Fly with only a pair of socks and a last piece of underwear

Contest Rules: Send completed diagram with name and address to “Armed to the Teeth,” Harper’s Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012. If you already subscribe to Harper’s, please include a copy of your latest mailing label. Entries must be received by April 7. Senders of the first correct solution opened at random will receive a one-year subscription to Harper’s Magazine (limit one winner per household per year). The winner’s name will be printed in the June issue. The winner of the February puzzle, “By the Numbers,” is Sean Cooper, Santa Fe, N.M.

PUZZLE 103 FINDINGS

Nursing researchers advanced a theory of “post- other people think the correct answer is, then averaging traumatic slave syndrome” in the African-American those two answers, yields the right answer. Totalitarian population. Maternal fear of immigration raids shrinks regimes use psychiatric science as a justification when Latino babies in Iowa. Media coverage of unauthorized their unfair treatment of a group might otherwise offend Mexican immigration drives white Americans to the the public. Buddhists can suppress reactions to terrifying G.O.P. American labs were worried about their Iranian stimuli by chanting the name of Amitobha¯ but not by grad students. Hundreds of thousands of red Skittles chanting the name of Santa Claus. Scientists found that escaped onto a Wisconsin highway before they could be the idea of implanting beneficial false memories evokes fed to cattle. Honeybee guards accept drifting migrant responses “ranging from abject horror to unqualified bees but repel hostile raider bees. Predators force guppies enthusiasm.” A review of eighty-eight years of clinical to bond. Reef fish will conquer their fear of sharks if the literature concluded that masochism is “a way of avoid- rewards are sufficiently enticing. Reports emerged that a ing uncontrollable suffering by willingly undertaking group of chimpanzees attacked a deposed tyrannical al- other, milder, more controllable suffering.” Depression pha male, beat him with rocks and sticks, tore his anus makes it easier to abandon unattainable goals. Chinese and throat, stomped on him, bit his genitals, and ate him. teenagers who believe in free will are happier. Facebook A moth that spins in circles and has a pompadour of users are motivated primarily by entertainment when whitish-yellow scales was named Neopalpa donaldtrumpi. they post on the walls of the dead. A species of crypt wasp that burrows inside gall wasps and takes over their minds—forcing them to dig tiny Paleontologists investigated whether complex life on hatchery exit holes in which they then become trapped Earth may have had a false start during the Loma- while the crypt wasp consumes them from the inside gundi Event, 1.5 billion years before succeeding. Hu- before escaping—was named for the Egyptian god of mans have 170 times the effect on climate that nature disorder, violence, and foreigners. does. The freshening of Antarctic bottom waters is accelerating sea-level rise, litter on the floor of the It now seems more likely that the universe is a holo- Arctic Ocean has increased twentyfold in the past gram. The authors of “The Selfie Paradox: Nobody Seems fifteen years, and the East China Sea is being choked to Like Them yet Everyone Has Reasons to Take Them” by nitrogen. Rangers in Western Australia observed a noted that irony and half-hearted commitment allow 3,000-foot-tall fire tornado. The genomes of the death selfie-takers to achieve self-promotional goals without cap and the destroying angel have been sequenced. feeling narcissistic, even as they worry that they are Most primates risk going extinct, and a bioethicist helping to create an “illusionary world.” Alerting people argued that humans should engineer their own extinc- to the ubiquity and unreality of certain pervasive im- tion by creating artificially intelligent beings who will ages does not lessen their effect. Cognitive scientists live lives better than ours. Technology will not allow were looking into a fake-news vaccine. Liberal news humanity to dematerialize. The Bulletin of the Atomic satires make Democrats feel more able to effect change, Scientists’ Science and Security Board moved the whereas conservative news satires make Republicans feel Doomsday Clock thirty seconds closer to midnight. The powerless. Asking large groups of people what they think guardian of the thousand-year-old windmills of Nashti- the correct answer to a question is and what they think fan was expected to die with no successor. Q

“Volcanic Light #2,” a chromogenic photogram by Klea McKenna, whose work was on view in January at Von Lintel Gallery, in Los Angeles. Courtesy the artist and Von Lintel Gallery, Los Angeles

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