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WILL
TRUMPISM
OUTLIVE
TRUMP?

THOMAS
CHATTERTON
WILLIAMS:
ON POLITICAL
INCOHERENCE
ESSENTIAL READING
for 2020
“A BRILLIANT
ACCOUNT . . .
As clear-headed as always,
as honest as usual, Andrew
“SKILLFULLY
Bacevich [explains] how the WRITTEN AND
collapse of the Soviet Union SCRUPULOUSLY
and the end of the Cold War
brought on not the end of RESEARCHED . . .
history, but an explosion of Black Wave is an essential
American hubris and an era book in understanding
of excess that blinded our the origins of the modern
political class to reality.” conflicts in the Middle East.”
—BILL MOYERS —LAWRENCE WRIGHT,
Pulitzer Prize-winning
author of The Looming Tower

“FOCUSED
ON THE
PALESTINIANS’
LIVED “A SUPERB AND
EXPERIENCE SOPHISTICATED
of a century of war, CONTRIBUTION
never losing sight of the to the debate over work in the
geo-political forces that age of artificial intelligence....
fostered it, Rashid Khalidi This is the book to read
has written a book of to understand how digital
comprehensive scholarship technologies and artificial
with the delicacy and intelligence in particular are
intensity of a novel.” reshaping the economy
—AHDAF SOUEIF, and labor market.”
author of The Map of Love —JEFFREY SACHS,
author of The End of Poverty

HENRY HOLT Also available as ebooks METROPOLITAN BOOKS

 m a g a z i n e
FOUNDED IN 1850 / VOL. 340, NO. 2037
FEBRUARY 2020
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Letters 2
A Shack of One’s Own Judith Wilson-Pates, Sharon O’Dair
Easy Chair 5
An Incoherent Truth Thomas Chatterton Williams
Harper’s Index 9
Readings 11
Search and Destroy Joanne McNeil
As You Wish capitalists go red to get green
Baby Boomers expecting parents throw killer parties
Invisible Man a brewery boss doesn’t see color
Free Bird Sierra Crane Murdoch
Spit Take Ludvík Vaculík
Here and There Colum McCann
Farther Away Srikanth Reddy
And . . . Sarah Amos, Mimi Lauter, Michael Lundgren,
and an American horror story
Report 23
TRUMPISM AFTER TRUMP Thomas Meaney
Will the movement outlive the man?
From the Archive 35
The Radical Right John Lukacs
Letter from Rio de Janeiro 37
“MY GANG IS JESUS” Alex Cuadros
Brazil’s evangelicals face the temptations of the drug trade
Memoir 51
THE CANCER CHAIR Christian Wiman
Is suffering meaningless?
Annotation 58
THE BIRDS Jake Bittle
Amazon dreams of a drone-filled sky
Letter from Lusk 60
THE SKINNING TREE Jennifer Percy
America’s redface problem onstage
Story 71
THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS Stephen O’Connor
Reviews 81
NEW BOOKS Lidija Haas
DEAREST LIZZIE Helen Vendler
The end of a literary marriage
SELECTIVE HEARING Hugh Eakin
On the specious new history podcasts
Cover: Illustration by Lincoln
Puzzle 95 Richard E. Maltby Jr. Agnew. Source photographs: Don-
ald Trump © Chip Somodevilla/
Findings 96 Getty Images
 m a g a z i n e
LETTERS
John R. MacArthur, President and Publisher
Editor
Christopher Beha
Managing Editor
Katherine Ryder
Senior Editors
Christopher Carroll, Rachel Poser,
Matthew Sherrill
Art Director
Kathryn Humphries
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Andrew Cockburn
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Will Augerot, Joseph Frischmuth,
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Art Researcher
Alyssa Coppelman A Shack of One’s Own compared to my brief stint of home-
Editorial Interns
Teddy Burnette, Claudia Crook, lessness (and subsequent tenement
Laurel McCaull, Daniel Rathburn Thanks to Wes Enzinna [“Gimme life) after Manhattan housing prices
Art Intern
Clara von Turkovich Shelter,” Letter from California, De- blew up in the 1980s.
Contributing Editors cember], I finally understand why mil- It took another thirty years, a Ph.D.,
Andrew J. Bacevich, Kevin Baker, Dan Baum,
Tom Bissell, Joshua Cohen, John Crowley, lennials hate baby boomers. In many two marriages, and sojourns in several
Wes Enzinna, Tanya Gold, Gary Greenberg, ways, my own experience has been other cities before I wound up where I
Jack Hitt, Edward Hoagland, Scott Horton,
Frederick Kaufman, Garret Keizer, not entirely unlike the one he de- am today, in a cramped but cozy condo
Mark Kingwell, Walter Kirn, scribes. In 1980, after ditching a job at near the base of San Francisco’s Tele-
Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Gideon Lewis-Kraus,
Richard Manning, Clancy Martin, Ms. magazine to go freelance (and graph Hill. Given the wide gap be-
Duncan Murrell, Vince Passaro,
Francine Prose, Jeff Sharlet, having left a boyfriend who occupied tween my Greatest Generation parents’
Christine Smallwood, Zadie Smith, his loft illegally), I spent six months income and my own—they were in
Rebecca Solnit, Matthew Stevenson,
John Edgar Wideman on friends’ couches and floors before their twenties when they bought their
Contributing Artists landing a 280-square-foot apartment first house; my first husband and I
Olive Ayhens, Lisa Elmaleh, Lena Herzog,
Aaron Huey, Samuel James, Steve Mumford, in Alphabet City. couldn’t afford a condo until I was
Richard Ross, Tomas van Houtryve, A third of the block’s buildings fifty—I’ve always found it difficult to
Danijel Žeželj
were burned out, some of them occu- feel guilty about being a boomer, and I
Vice President and General Manager
Lynn Carlson pied by squatters. A building next to still don’t feel personally responsible for
Vice President, Circulation mine served as a shooting gallery, the plight of younger generations. But
Shawn D. Green
Vice President, Marketing and Communications
carefully policed by dealers who kept Enzinna has helped me to see just how
Giulia Melucci the block free of the violent offenses much worse things have gotten since
Vice President, Advertising that might have attracted law enforce- my own darkest days and how desper-
Jocelyn D. Giannini
Virginia Navarro, Assistant to the Publisher ment. My earlier postgrad years, in ately we all need to find our way out of
Kim Lau, Senior Accountant 1970s Manhattan, were a far cry from this nightmare.
Eve Brant, Office Manager
Courtney Joyal, Marketing Assistant my sheltered childhood and adoles-
Lydia Chodosh, Production Manager and Designer cence as a member of Oakland’s black Judith Wilson-Pates
Cameron French, Advertising Operations Coordinator middle class. But nothing I faced then San Francisco
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2 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020

the tents that grace the cover of the
December issue. Which is to say that
I’ve thought quite a bit about the topics
Enzinna discusses.
One under-acknowledged source of
California’s housing, infrastructural,
and educational woes— something
not mentioned in the essay—is the
state’s unjust property-tax system,
commonly known as Proposition 13.
This law sets a property-tax rate at
1 percent of the purchase price; once
established, the rate can only be in-
creased by a maximum of 2  percent
per year, even if the property’s value
has risen at a much faster pace. In the
1970s, the law was sold as a way to
enable retirees to remain in their
homes, but the principal beneficiaries
today are white professionals and
businesspeople. And as a result of
more recent amendments to the code,
these people can pass on their prop-
erties to their children, who can re-
tain the favorable tax rate.
Now that California is a majority-
minority state, it has become clear
that Proposition 13 is effectively racist.
Most Californians looking to purchase
homes are people of color. And yet the
white people who have pocketed hun-
dreds of thousands of dollars as a result
of the tax system, many of whom are
nominally liberals or progressives,
wonder why a racial wealth gap still
exists in this state. There are hypo-
crites everywhere, I suppose.
Sharon O’Dair
Berkeley, Calif.
Not so long ago, a water leak in the
ceiling of my apartment in Potrero
Hill caused me to leave San Francisco
for Oakland, where more water—this
time from the fire department, which
was extinguishing a blaze in the
apartment above mine—forced me to
move again. My Potrero Hill apart-
where poor artists or intellectuals have
had to carve out space for themselves,
unable or unwilling to prioritize mak-
ing money. Were I still in my youth, I
might have known the Ghost Ship
and some of the people who died
there. There have always been such
places in the Bay Area. I have often
wondered whether census takers can
count everyone in the tent cities and
the repurposed abandoned buildings.
In retrospect, I am glad I was part of
the so-called lower class when I was
that age, still a stranger to the Bay
Area. I and so many other readers
could write you the stories of our des-
perate years, but you would have more
accounts than you have pages to fill.
The Genealogical Sublime
James Eilers JULIA CREET
Oakland, Calif. $24.95 paper
ISBN 978-1-62534-480-9
Genealogy has become a lucrative
The Rustle of Language business, a massive data mining
project, and fodder for reality televi-
Lionel Shriver unintentionally vali- sion in recent years, as traced by this
dates the imperative to develop and essential history of the industry.
deploy progressive language [“Lefty
Lingo,” Easy Chair, December], espe-
cially language that works to describe
or reverse the tone-deaf perspective of
white privilege that we have inherited.
She mocks those who choose not to
use the term “slave” as a noun (prefer-
ring, for instance, “enslaved people”),
writing that this gesture “taints any
noun that refers to a person” and argu-
ing that, by this logic, bakers would be
called “baking people.” In drawing this
comparison, she seems to assume a
universality of experience that many
would reject. She appears to feel no
obligation to understand or accommo-
date those who have been disadvan-
taged by slavery’s legacy. Black Lives, Native Lands,
To many of us, the phrase “check White Worlds
your privilege” is a straightforward
call to think outside of ourselves. To JARED ROSS HARDESTY
Shriver, the phrase translates, she says, $22.95 paper
to “shut the fuck up.” She feels victim- ISBN 978-1-62534-457-1

ment had been an odd place, with
dead rats and worms and no heat, but
it was cheap enough for a struggling
writer. I try to keep in mind that my
life will always be this way, marked by
abrupt changes, never with sufficient
time or resources to choose a new res-
idence very carefully.
At eighty-two, I have known many
places like those Enzinna describes,
ized and baffled by contemporary ter-
minology. In her mind, antiracism is
just posturing, and those who ac-
knowledge their privilege are only do-
ing so cynically. Her column brings to
mind another new term unexplored in
her piece: “white fragility.”
August Baumer
Brooklyn, N.Y.
LETTERS
“Arresting and enlightening . . .[t]he
book looks at the origins of slavery
in the region, the kinds of labor
enslaved people did, as well as their
private lives and their modes of
resisting slavery.”—Boston Globe
Amherst & Boston
www.umass.edu/umpress
(800) 537-5487
3
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We’ve seen it all —
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 EASY CHAIR
An Incoherent Truth
By Thomas Chatterton Williams
L
ast fall, Tobi Haslett, a young
writer and critic with Marxist
leanings, noticed a shift in the
contours of popular intellectual debate.
“Something is happening out there in
the dark fields of ‘the discourse,’ ” Has-
lett wrote in Bookforum. “Incoherence
is now a virtue.”
By incoherence I don’t mean an “ex-
treme” position or the shriek of the pro-
vocateur, but a specific genre of chin-
stroking, brow-furrowing, “eye opening”
sophistry that’s now robustly represent-
ed in mainstream newspapers and mag-
azines. Fluttering near the political cen-
ter (they refuse to be pinned down!), the
exponents of the new incoherence look
at the Right’s mushrooming despotism,
then at the enfeebled, regrouping
Left—and, with theatrical exasperation,
declare that both are a bit tyrannical.
These pundits are the opposite of ad-
herents; all hail the Incoherents!
In the interest of full disclosure, I
should note that the sentences under
consideration appeared in a review of
my latest book, Self-Portrait in Black
and White (an autobiographical argu-
ment against race), in which Haslett
identifies me (along with two New York
Times columnists, David Brooks and
Bari Weiss) as an exemplar of this
trend. To respond to a pan is a fool’s
errand. Yet to be designated a standard-
bearer for an alarming new problem in
public thought makes one want to
think through its implications.
One of the outgrowths of the fren-
zied, justifiably Trump-panicked mo-
ment in which we find ourselves is a
profound unease with ambiguity or mul-
tidimensionality of any sort—moral,
intellectual, ideological, political, artis-
tic. Clarity is what’s most yearned for in
times of emergency. Late in his essay,
Haslett objects to the practice of draw-
ing on a range of thinkers for reference—
what he dismisses as “a kind of ideo-
logical dim sum”—when bolstering a
given point. That there is weakness
instead of strength in viewpoint diver-
sity is presented matter-of-factly, as self-
evident truth. Under these terms, it
becomes impossible to express a coher-
ent argument—about race, in this
instance—“from the sundry platters of
politics Left and Right,” since “these
positions are profoundly incompatible,
largely due to their clashing views of the
distribution of wealth.”
Without ever explaining why, Haslett
offers unanimity of opinion on one
subject—wealth distribution—as a pre-
requisite for mining wisdom or insight
about something else entirely. Here Has-
lett has stated outright what many oth-
ers have been implying for some time:
in a Manichaean world such as ours, the
degree to which one refuses to become
not just a partisan but an ideologue—or,
just as likely, a recycler of ideological
talking points—is the extent to which
one descends into “incoherence.”
Lest one get the wrong impression:
correct views about the distribution
of wealth alone will not suffice. A
similar sensibility was on display on
The New Yorker’s website last Novem-
ber, in Emily Witt’s review of Meghan
Daum’s liberal—though heretical—
engagement with fourth-wave feminism,
The Problem with Everything: “I suppose
[Daum] can still say she is ‘of the left,’ ”
Witt begrudgingly concedes (Daum iden-
tifies herself as a life-long Democrat), but
being “of the left” is not a purely ma-
terialist position. Right now, it also
indicates a set of values, most obvi-
ously fairness, in which political cor-
rectness is a form of good etiquette
practiced by well-intentioned people.
Here, Witt echoes Haslett’s assump-
tion that people who express a mix of
views are by default incoherent and
politically homeless, as if there were
some intrinsic logic to the “left” and
“right” binary that obtains today.
In fact, there is no reason why a
particular position on, say, access to
abortion or gay marriage must track
with a particular view on economics.
One of the more intriguing recent po-
litical developments in France, for in-
stance, has been the far-right National
Rally’s swift and increasingly successful
move to outflank the leftist Green
Party on ecological concerns. The xe-
nophobes deduced quite shrewdly that
there’s nothing fundamentally contra-
dictory about anti-immigrant “blood
and soil” rhetoric and decreasing reli-
ance on fossil fuels. Things can always
be otherwise, and there is a myopia that
stems from examining all political
questions through a strictly American
lens. In a hyperpolarized system such as
ours (as opposed to a European parlia-
mentary government), what seem to be
inevitable political coalitions are just as
often post hoc frameworks grafted on
top of marriages of convenience.
To what degree then do these critics
genuinely believe in the intrinsic har-
mony of their views? Haslett himself
gives the game away: while he seems to
suggest that centrism, heterodoxy, and
moderation inherently don’t make sense,
the thing he actually contrasts with
“incoherence” is not coherence at all but
rather adherence to some party line.
What he and Witt leave us with is a
set of opinions, and signifiers of such, that
EASY CHAIR 5
are meant to be paired together. These
are just book reviews, but both are ex-
emplary of an ascendant segment of
the left that secures and wields its
power and influence in the media,
academia, and even the political sphere
itself precisely by denying that it pos-
sesses any power to begin with. This is
why Haslett insists on describing the left
as “enfeebled” and “regrouping,” and
why Witt claims to be exercising nothing
more potent or ambitious than a sense of
“fairness.” Who could be against that?
When one is “well intentioned” and
striving for a better society—however
fuzzily that goal may be defined—and
when there really is a nihilistic author-
itarian holding the polity hostage, mod-
eration and magnanimity toward the
opposition can look a lot like delusion
and betrayal. But this is shortsighted. In
The Return of the Political, the leftist
political theorist Chantal Mouffe has
cautioned against dismissing ideological
adversaries out of hand. In her work, she
quotes generously from the Nazi legal
theorist Carl Schmitt. “It is by facing up
to the challenge posed by such a rigor-
ous and perspicacious opponent,” she
has written of Schmitt, “that we shall
succeed in grasping the weak points” of
our own views. Schmitt himself had
argued that the primary liberal principle
on which all else rests is the idea that
truth is only achieved through an un-
impeded “competition of opinions,”
since there is no final truth in liberal-
ism, no single common good. This is
the parliamentary ideal—it demands
compromise and debate.
The dysfunctional nature of the two-
party, winner-take-all system that dom-
inates American political culture is only
magnified by the crisis of our social-
media-driven journalism. Those “dark
fields of ‘the discourse’ ”—on which we
are expected to suit up and join our re-
spective teams—have become ever
more dependent on unreported “takes”
by underpaid commentators and polem-
ics by ever more ideologically rigid
voices contending for virality (or at least
visibility) through “likes” and retweets.
None of this lends itself to nuance or
self-doubt. This, in part, explains how
we’ve arrived—far faster than I’d have
ever imagined—at the dizzying place
where even Barack Obama’s heterodoxy
has become a topic of serious complaint
on the left.
6 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
“This idea of purity and you’re never
compromised and you’re always politi-
cally ‘woke’ and all that stuff,” Obama
observed last October, “you should get
over that quickly. The world is messy.
There are ambiguities.” The statement
drew widespread condemnation. “I
gasped at what I heard,” Ernest Owens
wrote in the New York Times.
“Barack Obama is a conservative,”
David Swerdlick argued several weeks
later in the Washington Post. Of course,
his “perspectives don’t line up with every
position now seen as right-of-center,”
Swerdlick acknowledged, listing Obama’s
policies on climate, Dodd–Frank regula-
tions, and same-sex marriage—as well as
his tripling of the number of women on
the Supreme Court, antidiscrimination
efforts, and protections for young un-
documented immigrants—as evidence
of liberal credentials. “But his constant
search for consensus, for ways to bring
Blue America and Red America togeth-
er,” was more revealing: None of these
changes “revolutionized governance or
structurally reordered American life.
None of them were meant to.”
A
rguments about purity are
nothing new. Writing about
Machiavelli in The New York
Review of Books in 1971, Isaiah Berlin
observed that the lingering power of
the man’s five-hundred-year-old ideas
stems from his de facto recognition
that ends equally ultimate, equally sa-
cred, may contradict each other, that
entire systems of value may come into
collision without possibility of ratio-
nal arbitration, and that not merely in
exceptional circumstances, as a result
of abnormality or accident or error—
the clash of Antigone and Creon or
in the story of Tristan—but . . . as part
of the normal human situation.
The insight cuts against a stubborn
assumption we seem too eager to
embrace—and not for the first time—in
parts of the intersectional, socialist-
inflected left:
Namely, that somewhere in the past or
the future, in this world or the next, in
the church or the laboratory, in the
speculations of the metaphysician or
the findings of the social scientist or in
the uncorrupted heart of the simple
good man, there is to be found the fi-
nal solution of the question of how
men should live.
For Berlin, such a state of affairs is
frankly impossible. “If this is false,”
he continues,
(and if more than one equally valid
answer to the question can be re-
turned, then it is false) the idea of the
sole true, objective, universal human
ideal crumbles. The very search for it
becomes not merely utopian in prac-
tice, but conceptually incoherent.
It is not heterodoxy or lack of ideo-
logical consistency that undermines
coherence, but the reverse.
In the world of Machiavelli that Ber-
lin channels for us, “the conviction
that the fragments constituted by our
beliefs and habits are all pieces of a
jigsaw puzzle” and that this puzzle can,
in theory, be solved, is a seductive mis-
take leading in turn to the false conclu-
sion that it is “only because of lack of
skill or stupidity or bad fortune that we
have not so far succeeded in discover-
ing the solution whereby all interests
will be brought into harmony.”
So long as only one ideal—whether it
be social justice, wealth redistribution, or
anti-racism in the quasi-religious formu-
lation of an Ibram X. Kendi—is the over-
arching objective, nothing will ever be
too much in service of achieving that end.
This is why Kendi can recommend, for
example, and in all apparent seriousness,
the creation of a totalitarian “Depart-
ment of Anti-racism (DOA)” to preclear
“all local, state and federal public policies
to ensure they won’t yield racial inequi-
ty,” and to “monitor those policies, inves-
tigate private racist policies when racial
inequity surfaces, and monitor public
officials for expressions of racist ideas.”
This unelected body would also be “em-
powered with disciplinary tools to wield
over and against policymakers and pub-
lic officials who do not voluntarily
change their racist policy and ideas.” We
know that our society is ailing and that
the constellation of ills gathered and
amplified under Trumpism is vile. Yet the
fanaticism that this specific constellation
of ills inspires and excuses is a form of
fanaticism all the same.
O
ne of the more baffling claims
that Haslett makes in ad-
dressing my argument against
race—which is of interest here only
insofar as it touches on the larger
topic of “coherence”—is that
 any effective challenge to white hege-
mony would have to take place not in
the perfumed realm of private choices
and elective affinities, but on the
harsh terrain of real life: where collec-
tive struggle is waged, and wealth is
made and spread.
This is a false distinction, of course,
prompted by a misperception of a single
solution and a single, all-encompassing
truth. What Berlin also knew was that
public and private life “could not . . . be
genuinely kept distinct.” Real life—and
the incompatible choices and compro-
mises it imposes—bleeds into “the per-
fumed realm.” The world of the indi-
vidual is also an end.
Consider the 58  percent of black
Virginians who opposed the calls for
their governor, Ralph Northam, to
resign after the emergence of photo-
graphs in which he wore blackface.
Their reluctance to see Northam step
down “is not so much support for him,”
Theodore R. Johnson of the Brennan
Center explained, “as it is a rejection of
the alternate scenarios that would fol-
low his resignation.” In other words,
these black voters calculated that, given
“the harsh terrain of real life,” to use
Haslett’s phrase, they didn’t have time
for pointless purity tests. The country
is not a graduate program, and such
pragmatism should surprise no one who
interacts with men and women outside
of academia and social media, espe-
cially ethnic minorities.
In applying the conservative label
to Obama, Swerdlick cited a definition
offered by the English theorist Mi-
chael Oakeshott. “To be conserva-
tive,” Oakeshott argued in the 1950s,
is to prefer the familiar to the unknown,
to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to
mystery, the actual to the possible, the
limited to the unbounded, the near to
the distant, the sufficient to the super-
abundant, the convenient to the perfect,
present laughter to utopian bliss.
Regardless of what progressives would
like to think, by this ostensibly com-
monsensical measure, most black and
Latino Americans can be safely de-
fined as conservative. In which case,
perhaps we should not be surprised
that the vast majority of blacks—
almost all of whom vote Democratic—
describe themselves as either moderate
(40 percent) or outright conservative
(30 percent), while only about a quar-
ter call themselves liberal.
Like Nietzsche (and Schmitt), Han-
nah Arendt argued forcefully that life
is perspectival: reality appears different
from different angles. It is made most
legible through an abundance of views.
It is only “guaranteed by the presence
of others.” Depending on one’s stand-
point, progress can seem like regress
just as stasis can look like motion. The
rapid demographic shifts of our
society—and the increasing visibility
and audibility of many identities and
voices—may appear to one American
as a threat, while to another they are a
form of hope and even deliverance.
This is to be expected, and it is the duty
of the thoughtful person not to pro-
scribe, ignore, or “cancel,” but to take
measure, persuade, and engage. Of
course, edifying sermons about a mod-
erate and compromising consensus will
never pierce as deep as the primal and
particular certainties and grievances
that animate our politics.
An inconvenient fact of human life
is that we cannot and never have been
able to neatly add it up. To do so would
be a distortion of what it means to be
alive. “Something in the soul . . . seeks
release in transgression or transcen-
dence,” wrote Mark Lilla about the life
and work of Daniel Bell, himself an
erstwhile adherent who demonstrated
that modern societies could never be
interpreted through a single set of laws.
“Every orthodoxy brings in its train
heterodoxies and heresies that would
destroy it. The more rigid the ortho-
doxy, the more likely they are to pre-
vail.” What our society sorely misses
now is not some sterling ideological
consistency but rather a genuine liberal-
ism that is strong and supple enough to
look for ways to build on who we are, in
all our human incongruity. Yet we must
also acknowledge that one of the more
frightening lessons of the Trump vic-
tory has to do with the implacability of
tribalism and extremism in our society.
A total reconciliation may never come
about, and this lamentable enmity may
be a permanent fact of our lives.
And so we are going to need a lib-
eralism that, while pushing America
to equal its ideals, soberly recognizes
the harsh and irreducible realities of
who we are. If this is a form of incoher-
ence, there are worse things. Q
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 HARPER’S INDEX
Portion of South Koreans who say they would support North Korea in a war with Japan : 1/2
Estimated number of drones that governments worldwide will purchase in the next decade for combat use : 1,800
For surveillance use : 75,000
Percentage of nonmilitary drones for sale in the United States that were manufactured in China : 80
Minimum number of products that are available for purchase on Amazon : 500,000,000
Estimated percentage of New York City apartments that receive at least one package every day : 15
Minimum number of contractors employed by Google to evaluate the usefulness of search results : 10,000
Number of changes that Google made to its search algorithm and interface in 2018 : 3,234
Portion of U.S. voting precincts that rely on electronic voting machines that leave no paper trail : 1/10
Number of U.S. states that use a mobile voting app : 1
Percentage of American men who say they would not feel “very comfortable” with a woman as president : 51
Of American women who say so : 41
Estimated number of Americans who have lost a friend or family member since 2014 because health care was too costly : 34,000,000
Factor by which this is more likely to be true of a Democrat than a Republican : 3
Factor by which the amount a U.S. insurer pays for a flu shot can vary depending on where it is administered : 3
Factor by which an American adult is more likely to go out of network for mental health care than for medical care : 5
Estimated percentage of Americans who have an autoimmune disease : 15
Who can name an autoimmune disease : 15
Percentage of unemployed Americans receiving unemployment benefits in 2000 : 37
In 2018 : 28
Estimated value of extra expenses that an average American household incurs as a result of oligopolies : $5,000
Percentage of civil defendants in U.S. general-jurisdiction courts who had lawyers in 1992 : 95
Who have lawyers today : 46
Rank of the United States among countries with the highest rates of immigrant children in detention : 1
Of Mexico : 2
Number of refugees resettled in the United States in October : 0
Number of countries in which the annual number of tourists outnumbers residents : 41
In which this ratio is at least 2 to 1 : 23
Percentage of Americans aged 13 to 38 who would be willing to post sponsored content to their social-media accounts : 86
Who would become a social-media influencer if given the opportunity : 54
Factor by which the number of social-media influencers using the word “anxiety” increased from 2016 to 2019 : 3
Minimum number of apps that promise to help people find friends : 22
Amount per hour that the company People Walker charges for an “on-demand walking partner” : $14
Percentage of Americans with siblings who think their mother has a favorite child : 33
Percentage of those Americans who believe they are the favorite : 30
Factor by which men are more likely than women to believe they are the favorite : 2
Percentage of Americans aged 18 to 34 who say they have witnessed ageism in the workplace : 52
Of Americans aged 55 and older : 39
Number of pending patent applications for variations of the phrase “OK, Boomer” : 6

Figures cited are the latest available as of December 2019. Sources are listed on page 49.
“Harper’s Index” is a registered trademark.

HARPER’S INDEX 9
Kovačič skillfully depicts a tough, no-
madic, hand-to-mouth existence in a
city gripped by ethnic tension, rampant
nationalism, and the threat of war.
—Malcolm Forbes
There is a truly scheherazadian power
in Pey’s voice that makes each of these
stories, be they tragic, pathetic, or even
just every-day dramatic, a true delight
to read. —Pierre Joris
Cross J.M. Coetzee with Gabriel García
Márquez and you’ve got José Eduardo
Agualusa . . . candidate for the Nobel
Prize. —Alan Kaufman

Jean Giono

OCCUPATION JOURNAL

Translated from the French by Jody Gladding

a r c h i p e l a g o b o o k s

Jody Gladding has beautifully rendered
Giono’s inner voice, in all its moods and
registers, lyrical, cynical, and reflective.
—Paul Eprile
Difficult Light was hailed as a quiet
masterpiece at the time of its publication
in Colombia.
—Juan Gabriel Vásquez
An outstanding example of children's
literature, full of wisdom and of a
brilliance that calls out for calm, quiet
moments to enjoy it.
—German Youth Literature Prize

archipelago books
www.archipelagobooks.org • www.elsewhereeditions.org
Distributed to the trade by Penguin Random House
 READINGS
[Essay]
SEARCH AND
DESTROY
By Joanne McNeil, from Lurking: How a Person
Became a User, published this month by Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
A
user of Google products might be put
off by the company’s cheerfulness and believe
that its old byword, “Don’t Be Evil,” was al-
ways bunk. But its steady dominance over in-
ternet infrastructure leaves skeptics with few
alternative products. With consumers in this
bind, Google released boggling ventures. At
Gmail’s launch, users complained about the
ads—they’re creepy and it feels like a robot is
reading my email! Google Street View ap-
peared, at first, as an obvious invasion of pri-
vacy, not to mention an act of hubris with an
undercurrent of colonialism. But a person can
hardly rail against a ubiquitous technology
forever. It wouldn’t be easy to give up search-
ing and, above all, Google is easy. All you
have to do is wonder about something.
Not so long ago, the company articulated
its fundamental purpose as providing access to
all possible online information. Google even
assumed responsibility for the absence of in-
formation. “We’re trying to build a virtual mir-
ror of the world at all times,” Marissa Mayer,
then Google’s vice president of geographic
and local services, said at a conference in
2010. The comment was made when internet
companies were thought to be quicksilver en-
tities rather than institutions building lega-
cies. “Mirroring the world,” while impossible,
was a coherent vision, fitting with the compa-
ny’s story and execution thus far.
In the Aughts, Google seemed determined
to create a digital copy of everything. It was
photographing all the streets and scanning all
the books in the world, or so they wished you
to believe. But one of its projects was an
outlier—and in retrospect it signaled where
Google was heading. In 2007, when most of
the phones in people’s pockets were still dumb
ones, the company launched a service called
GOOG-411. If a user dialed 1-800-GOOG-411,
provided a city, and made a request (“Miami,”
“Thai food delivery”), the service would con-
nect them, like a more personalized Yellow
Pages. But then, after three years, the service
shut down. It turned out that the point of the
project had been to collect audio samples of
accents and pitches and voices for artificial-
intelligence research. “We need to build a
great speech-to-text model,” Mayer had said in
2007. “So we need a lot of people talking, say-
ing things so that we can ultimately train off
of that.” All the data it indexed and represented
would be thrown in the bin when it
T
wasn’t necessary.
he following decade saw the quieter deacti-
vation of services and deletion of some of the
same archives Google once boasted about acquir-
ing. Jessamyn West, a librarian and writer in Ver-
mont, told me that part of the issue with the
READINGS 11
 company is that Google has nothing like a sup-
port line. Even Comcast lets you call in and ask a
human a question. Comcast has customers.
Google has users. If a Google user has a question
about Google, well, Google wants them to google
it. The company’s approach is to give a user tools
to find things, which is, as West puts it, the “op-
posite of what I do. One of the things that is re-
ally important to libraries is the concept of insti-
tutional memory,” she explained. “It’s not just that
you’ve got this building full of information in
[Revocations]
AS YOU WISH
From actions since 2006 taken by American com-
panies and institutions to appease China.
Censored music that refers to the Tiananmen
Square massacre
Canceled a lecture on women’s rights
Removed an app that allowed protesters in Hong
Kong to track the location of police officers
Barred discussion of Hong Kong politics on
news shows
Removed any reference to Taiwan’s status as a
country from the corporate website
Apologized for a T-shirt design with a map of
China that did not include Taiwan
Removed the Taiwanese flag from emoji key-
boards in Hong Kong and Macao
Canceled a campus visit from the Dalai Lama
Ejected a researcher from campus for investigat-
ing the Chinese government’s influence on
the school
Suspended a professional video-game player and
forced him to return prize money after he ex-
pressed support for Hong Kong protesters
Fired a hotel employee in Omaha, Nebraska, for
liking a pro-Tibet tweet
Removed a submission to a sneaker-design con-
test that depicted Hong Kong protesters in
goggles, gas masks, and hard hats
Removed an advertisement for a Tiffany & Co.
ring showing a model with her right hand cov-
ering her right eye for its resemblance to a pose
adopted by Hong Kong protesters
Rewrote a Tibetan Marvel character as a white
woman
Cut a movie scene shot in Shanghai in which
Tom Cruise walks past a clothesline strung
with underwear
12 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
whatever form it is in, but that you’ve got human
beings who understand the corpus of what’s in
your buildings or what’s in your collections.” Li-
braries are designed to serve their communities.
Someone’s ability to use the library is a “factor
in whether you are doing a good job as a librar-
ian,” West said. “That’s not true with Google.
They’re not answerable to people.”
Google had once tried to ingratiate itself to
the librarian community. Representatives
went to conferences like that of the American
Library Association (ALA) with great enthusi-
asm, eager to partner with various groups, and
especially to find librarians who might help
scan books. In 2007, Google started a blog
called Librarian Center. They hired a “Library
Partnership Manager,” who sent out the
Google Librarian Newsletter. But by the end
of that year, the newsletters were sent less fre-
quently, and they finally came to a stop in
2009. Later, the Librarian Center page was
taken offline.
So much had changed in those few years
since Google’s ALA debut. In the Aughts,
Google was deliberate about identifying itself
with book culture. Now there was more
knowledge spread digitally over different for-
mats and platforms than ever. An individual
might turn to the web before visiting a library
to research a subject. With this shift, Google
no longer had to associate with
I
libraries—or librarians.
f Google had ever been sincere in its de-
sire to mirror the world, the company’s care-
lessness and lack of archival standards hin-
dered its execution. In 2014, I was part of a
panel discussion organized by the Institute of
Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London and
hosted remotely over Google Hangouts, as a
collaboration between the museum and the
Google Art Project. Recently, I went back to
the video to verify something another panelist
had said. I found the video on the website for
the ICA, with the familiar black rectangle. But
when I pressed play, there was a notice on a
blank screen that read, “This video is unavail-
able.” I contacted the museum first. The devel-
oper, who was new to the position, explained
that it was a direct-to-YouTube recording and
no separate file existed. I wrote to several con-
tacts at the Google Art Project, but no one
could help. It could be that someone switched
jobs and had a new email account and now
there was no one who could log in to update
the settings so that the YouTube video might
be made public once again. That’s what comes
from rapid growth: Google prioritized scaling
up over the maintenance and continuity of its
archive and older products.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND CHRISTOPHE GUYE GALERIE, ZURICH
“Usine Alstom Belfort Photo No. 5 Halle Alternateurs,” a photograph by Stéphane Couturier, whose work was on view in January at Galerie Kornfeld,
in Berlin.
The hidden implication of “mirroring the
world” was that Google could replicate infor-
mation on its own terms, and with no further
commitment to maintaining data; any infor-
mation erased or lost could be interpreted as
something the world itself was missing. The
company coasted on user trust garnered from
its robust appearance. Why use products other
than Google Docs or Gmail, if a startup’s
competing offerings are more likely to break
down or get hacked? Why bother uploading
videos to any service other than YouTube,
where it will be stored on Google servers,
which are reasonably secure?
You—a user—or a school, or an institution,
or any other body smaller than Google, now
have habits shaped by Google’s influence. The
ICA is a museum, which has standards and
practices of archiving, collecting, and preserv-
ing objects and information. If Google had
never had a hand in the event, the video
would probably be available today. One conse-
quence of Google’s dominance is that public in-
stitutions have relaxed certain functions and
services that they believe Google’s
I
tools provide for free.
wonder how often Google strips its archives
for parts, as it did with GOOG-411, before bury-
ing the data. How about the search itself? Are
your queries nothing more than raw material to
assemble into something else? There are reports
that Google will eventually do away with
search—do away with googling. The company
hopes that you will talk to it like a maid in the
kitchen, rather than search it like an archive. It
would like to predict what you want to know with
the data it has collected from you and about you.
When he was the company’s CEO, Eric
Schmidt called multiple search results a “bug.”
READINGS 13
 Google “should be able to give you the right
answer just once. We should know what you
meant.” When a YouTube video ends and an
algorithm selects another, that’s Google’s at-
tempt at a “right answer.” Today, YouTube’s
“autoplay” is notorious for pushing users toward
men’s rights and conspiracy theory videos, as
a consequence of the most common user choices
on the site and how the platform’s predictive
algorithms are written. The company also has
the power to invent what it does not know.
Errors on Google Maps have resulted in the
renaming of neighborhoods. Fiskhorn in Detroit
is now known as “Fishkorn.” Google posted this
typo years ago; now some local businesses,
published advertising, and other services have
codified it.
Google harvests inquisitiveness: something
so fundamental to being human. It has so
firmly embedded itself in the experience of
learning new things that “search”—once a
word that signified quest, yearning—is now
[Mishaps]
BABY BOOMERS
From actions of hosts and attendees at gender-reveal
parties since 2017.
Struck a grandfather in the face with a base-
ball filled with blue powder
Broke an ankle kicking a football filled with
pink powder
Shot the father in the groin with a blue-smoke
air cannon
Exploded confetti poppers at the entrance to
an Applebee’s and pelted a hostess with
menus after being asked to clean up the blue
confetti
Set a car on fire after attaching a “burnout kit”
to its tires, performing doughnuts, and cov-
ering the street in blue fog
Set a lawn on fire and burned party attendees
after launching pink fireworks horizontally
Crashed a crop duster in a field after releasing
350 gallons of pink water
Ignited a 47,000-acre wildfire by shooting a
Tannerite target filled with blue powder
Detonated a pipe bomb filled with colored
powder, blasting shrapnel that killed a
grandmother of the baby, whose gender the
family has declined to reveal
14 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
synonymous with “googling.” Google has mo-
nopolized the act of asking a question as it
whittles down possible answers and influences
to determine which is the “right” one.
More than search or connection, or even arti-
ficial intelligence, Google should be remembered
for its ceaseless practice of secret deletion and
careless disorderliness. In the end, the company’s
branding of itself as a fun-loving, ski-bum-in-a-
ball-pit workplace is a fitting image: Google is a
burnout, a flake. It bails on people.
[Testimony]
INVISIBLE MAN
From a deposition given last year by Dominic Ryan,
the general manager of Founders Brewing Company,
to Jack Schulz, a lawyer for Tracy Evans. In 2018,
Evans, an employee at the Michigan brewery, sued
the company for racial discrimination, alleging that
his co-workers used slurs in his presence, and that he
was denied a promotion because of his race and fired
after complaining to human resources. The lawsuit
was settled in October. Patrick Edsenga is a lawyer
for Founders. Kwame Kilpatrick is the former mayor
of Detroit.
jack schulz: When did you first meet Tracy
Evans?
dominic ryan: 2011, 2012. We had mutual
friends before working there.
schulz: So you knew Tracy prior to his em-
ployment at Founders?
ryan: Met a few times, yes.
schulz: Are you aware that Tracy is black?
ryan: What do you mean by that?
schulz: Were you aware that Tracy is
African-American?
ryan: I’m not sure of his lineage, so I can’t an-
swer that.
schulz: All right. Are you aware Tracy’s a
man of color?
ryan: What do you mean by that?
schulz: Do you know what a white person is
versus a black person?
ryan: Can you clarify that for me?
schulz: No. You don’t know what it means for
someone to be a white person or a black person?
ryan: I’m asking for clarification.
schulz: You don’t need any, I can promise you
that. Someone’s skin color, a white—
ryan: So that’s what you’re referring to?
schulz: Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.
ryan: Okay. Yes, I know the difference in
skin tone.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HEATHER GAUDIO FINE ART, NEW CANAAN, CONNECTICUT

Blue Isabelle and I Stop, I Look, mixed-media artworks by Sarah Amos, whose work will be on view in March at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, in New
Canaan, Connecticut.

schulz: Are you able to identify individuals schulz: Have you ever met black people who
by their skin color? aren’t from Africa?
ryan: What do you mean identify? ryan: Excuse me?
schulz: I mean that have you ever looked at schulz: Have you ever met a black person
Tracy Evans in your entire life? Have you? born in America?
That’s a genuine question. ryan: Yes.
ryan: Yes. schulz: Have you ever met a black person who
schulz: And did you ever realize that Tracy’s didn’t tell you they were black?
skin color is black? ryan: Can you rephrase that?
ryan: Is his skin different from mine? Yes. schulz: Is Barack Obama black?
schulz: How? edsenga: Objection.
ryan: What do you mean how? It’s a different schulz: To your knowledge?
color. ryan: I’ve never met Barack Obama, so I
schulz: Correct. And what is the difference don’t—
of that color? schulz: So you don’t know if Barack Obama
ryan: It’s darker. is black? What about Michael Jordan? Do
schulz: And that means? you know if Michael Jordan is black?
patrick edsenga: Objection. Vague question. edsenga: Objection.
schulz: This could be a one-sentence answer, ryan: I’ve never met him.
you know. I guess your testimony is you schulz: So you don’t know? What about
have no idea if Tracy is a minority, if he’s Kwame Kilpatrick?
African-American? ryan: Never met him.
ryan: I don’t know Tracy’s lineage, so I can’t schulz: To your knowledge, was Kwame Kil-
speculate on whether he’s—if he’s from Af- patrick black?
rica or not. ryan: I—
schulz: What do you mean lineage, from Africa? schulz: You don’t know?
ryan: I mean I don’t know his DNA. ryan: I don’t know.

READINGS 15

“Thief of the Tree,” a photograph by Michael Lundgren, whose monograph Geomancy was published in September by Stanley/Barker.
[Reflection]
FREE BIRD
By Sierra Crane Murdoch, from Yellow Bird,
published this month by Random House. The
book investigates a disappearance on the Fort Bert-
hold Indian Reservation in North Dakota and
explores how the Yellow Bird family has dealt with
the trauma of colonialization.
A
t times in her life, Lissa Yellow Bird had
felt proud of her relatives’ successes and their
piety. But now, suddenly, she found herself re-
senting it all. The rosary beads. The university
titles. The fancy words used to describe the Indi-
an Condition. These seemed to her like props in
16 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
© THE ARTIST. COURTESY STANLEY/BARKER AND EUQINOM GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO
a performance meant to trick an audience into
believing everything was okay. But everything
was not okay. What was wrong with plain suf-
fering, with showing the world how much you
hurt? This, Lissa decided, was why she had drawn
so close to her uncle Chucky. While others hid
their shame under glossy exteriors, Chucky had
not tried to hide his anymore. Chucky had suf-
fered in the open.
In the final year of his life, his slip toward
death had become more determined. He had
begun to pass out standing up. Lissa saw him in
this state only a few times, but her relatives told
her it happened often. Some no longer seemed
to notice when Chucky fell, numbed by the
regularity of his drinking.
The last time it happened, Lissa had been
in Fargo. Her relatives told her their versions
of the story—how Chucky had been drinking it made sense to her, as if Chucky had at last
when an acquaintance pushed him out of a car confronted the spirit that possessed him. She
not far from his mother’s house. His sisters hoped he had. She hoped he had

N
Madeleine and Irene had gone out, and when broken free of it.
they returned to the house, they found
Chucky inside, still drunk. He lunged at Irene, ow two years had passed since Chucky
pulling on her perm, as Madeleine yelled for had died, and still Lissa recalled the night be-
him to stop. He spent that night in a mental- fore his death so clearly that it was as if she
health clinic in Minot, where Lissa reached had lived it not just once.
him by phone. She often thought of what her uncle had said
“I pulled your mom’s wig out,” he said. to her that night. He had said a lot of things,
“I heard,” Lissa said. “That’s fucked up, Un- but one thing he kept coming back to. He had
cle, but kind of funny.” been reading about human DNA, about the
Chucky did not remember the fight. way our family histories are imprinted on our
“Come down here to Fargo,” Lissa said. nucleotides. He said that our bodies remember.
“No, you’re sober. I don’t want to do that Some scientists believed that our genes could
to you.” be turned on or off by the things our ances-
“I tell you what, they opened a wet house tors had seen or done or the things we our-
here,” she said—a place where he could drink selves had seen or done, so it was possible that
but still have shelter. “Let’s get you a room.
That way we know you’re safe. It’s too cold for
you to be just running around anyway.”
“All right.”
“Seriously, Uncle. If you want to die, go
ahead. You’re grown. You said that before, and [Taxonomy]
that’s your decision, but I just want to be there
with you.” SMOTE LIKE A
Chucky did not call Lissa when he arrived in
Fargo. She heard he was there from an aunt.
BUTTERFLY
Finally, Chucky called her from a hotel bar.
He would not tell her which hotel. From names of military drones used by countries
“I’m drinking,” he said. “I don’t want you to around the world, as compiled in The Drone
come over here.” Databook, by Dan Gettinger, published last year
“I’ll come sit with you,” said Lissa. by the Center for the Study of the Drone at
“You’re on probation.” Bard College.
“Fuck probation. I want to know where
you’re at,” she said, but still Chucky refused. Reaper
After he left the bar, he called Lissa again Stalker
from his hotel room. She pleaded with him to Scout
tell her where he was, but he would not. He Desert Hawk
told her he would die that night, so Lissa bor- Global Hawk
rowed a phone and kept her uncle on one line MicroFalcon
while she dialed relatives on the other. It was Raven
late; no one answered. Skylark
At five in the morning, her phone shut off. Sparrow
She had made Chucky promise to call her Cardinal
again, to meet her for breakfast, but he did Phoenix
not call. Just after eleven o’clock, Lissa re- Harpy
ceived a call from a relative she had tried to Tucan
contact the previous night. Chucky had been Penguin
found in his hotel room. Stingray
Two days after her uncle’s body had been Tiger Shark
returned to the reservation, Lissa went by the Blowfish
hotel where her relative said Chucky had Black Hornet
died. She stood at the door, thinking of her Wasp
uncle’s body. She had been told that the belt Mosquito
left no marks. The ceiling was low, so he had Gnat
landed on a knee, kneeling as if before a Improved Gnat
woman, or God, his arms lifted slightly and
stiffened by his side. It was an odd pose, but

READINGS 17
 our fates were decided by former lives and
that our lives, in turn, decided the fates of our
grandchildren.
Imagine that, Chucky had said. No such
thing as innocence at birth. Violence, like milk,
passed from grandmother to mother to son.
Imagine that. Imagine how impossible it is
to stop something like that.
[Diary]
SPIT TAKE
By Ludvík Vaculík, from A Czech Dreambook,
published last month by Karolinum. Vaculík, a
Czech dissident, was the author of “Two Thousand
Words,” a June 1968 manifesto that called for the
democratization of Communist Czechoslovakia. It
was cited by the Soviet Union as a pretext for its
invasion of the country. A decade later, Vaculík
began A Czech Dreambook as a diary, but soon
incorporated fiction and accounts of his dreams. It
was published in Czech in 1981. Translated by
Gerald Turner.
TUESDAY, 13TH FEBRUARY 1979
Today I resumed dealings with the dentist after
a two-year break. I had bumped into him before
Christmas. “I have a bottle at home for you,” I
said, “and it won’t be a bribe, because I haven’t
needed you once this year.” He replied: “Then
it will be a normal fee, as in ancient China.
There they used to pay the doctor when he
wasn’t needed.” Mind you, there is always some-
one from our family visiting Dr. Kurka
throughout the year.
He ordered me to climb onto the horizon-
tal chair and pumped it in such a way that
my feet ended up almost higher than my
head. He gave everything a good poke and
asked me when we would finally take out
those three dead incisors at the bottom,
which were already wobbly anyway. And at
the top left it was perfect for a bridge: we’ll
do an X-ray. I reminded him that we had al-
ready X-rayed it. But, Mrs. Krumphanzlová
read from the card, that was two years ago. I
said that nothing was hurting me and I had
come for the sake of good relations. Dr. Kurka
scraped away at something or other of mine
and said to the assistant: “Get me a tempo-
rary dressing ready.” Then he said: “Rinse.”
But as I had my feet higher than my head,
this was impossible. First he had to lower me
to a more suitable position. “There you are,”
18 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
he said. “That’s what happens when patients
have to rinse out for themselves.” I expressed
surprise that someone else was supposed to
rinse out my mouth for me. The nurse said:
“It’s supposed to be the assistant’s job.” Dr.
Kurka said: “What’s supposed to happen is
this—” crossing round the back of my head
and standing on my left. “The assistant is
supposed to stand here, and here, as you can
see, is a sort of hose. While I’m working in
the patient’s mouth, the assistant is supposed
to suck it all out straight away. It has quite
some suction.” He pushed a button and the
hose started to hiss. “And when the patient
needs to spit, a funnel is pushed into the end
of the hose and he spits into that. But we are
unable to achieve that standard here, as the
personnel is lazy.” “And it’s the same all
over,” the assistant said. We went to do
the X-ray.
In 1969, I received a summons over the
“Ten Points” manifesto and was expecting to
go to court. I was terrified at the thought of all
my teeth starting to ache in the cold concrete
surroundings. The dentist we had before Dr.
Kurka was not very well known to me. When
he read my record card he asked: “Are you
that Vaculík?”
“Yes.”
He gazed at me for a moment and then said:
“Forgive me, I know it’s not the time or place,
but such things interest me. How old were you
when you joined the party?”
“Twenty.”
“Open wide. So, from the age of twenty you
worked for us to have the Russians here today.
Now let’s have a look at you and make sure we
deliver you to your jailers in good shape.”
[Fiction]
HERE AND THERE
By Colum McCann, from Apeirogon, published
this month by Random House. The book is a fic-
tionalized account of the lives of Bassam Aramin,
a Palestinian, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli. Ara-
min’s ten-year-old daughter, Abir, was killed by an
Israeli soldier, and Elhanan’s thirteen-year-old
daughter, Smadar, was killed by a Palestinian
suicide bomber.
W
hen they slid Smadar out on the metal
tray, Rami noticed her grandfather’s watch
on her wrist: it was still running.
After Smadar was born, her grandfather Matti ish grin. Her front teeth are prominent, her
Peled sat with her in the garden and taught eyes pellucid.
her English and Arabic both. The General —Grandpa, she says, Nine years you have
liked the role of grandfather. It softened some- raised me, fourteen years Guy, sixteen years
thing in him. He brought her to meetings of Elik, and ten months Yigal. You have raised
community boards, activists, human-rights all of us with warmth and love.
groups. Until she was eight, he carried her She then smiles again.
around on his shoulders. —You have taught us all chess, except for
Yigal! Thanks to you, we know more about
They worked on their cars together, Rami and politics, about Israel, and about all the wars
his father-in-law. Peled was tall, taciturn, silver- you fought. I am proud of you that you strug-
haired. He talked more when he leaned over an gle for peace, she says. And that you are the
engine block: it was as if he found it easier to leader, I think.
address something ordered and logical. Here, in the video, the listeners, including
He fumbled around under the hood. His fin- Peled, erupt in laughter. The I think hangs in
gers were thick and clumsy. He cursed as he the air as Smadar plays with her hair and smiles.
unscrewed the carburetor. —I am proud of you that you write in the
Peled said to Rami that he was not one to
suffer fools gladly, least of all himself.
He had been an architect of the Six-Day
War. Lightning strikes. Bombing raids. The
aura of surprise. He had become a general,
revered all over the country—one of the [Survey]
original Jewish idealists: socialist, Zionist,
democratic, but after ’68 he grew almost im- FEAR FACTORS
mediately wary of the Occupation. It jeopar-
dized, he said, the moral weight of the cause. From the 2018 Chapman University Survey of
It took away from the sense that Israel was a American Fears. The list is included in Fear Itself,
guiding global light. He went to meetings at by Christopher D. Bader, Joseph O. Baker, L. Edward
the Knesset wearing a pin showcasing a Star Day, and Ann Gordon, published this month by NYU
of David alongside a Palestinian flag. He was Press. Each phenomenon below is followed by the
no Lamed Vavnik, he did not want to carry percentage of people who said it made them afraid
the sorrows of his country. He had fought for or very afraid.
Israel, he said, from ’48 onward, and he knew
a thing or two about military might. Holding Sexual harassment in the workplace 7.5
on to the Territories was a mistake, contrary Whites no longer being the U.S. majority 9.4
to a secure Jewish democracy. They needed to Sharing a restroom with a transgender person 9.5
disengage. Get out. Extreme animal-rights activists 11.3
Rami enjoyed the diatribes: there was some- Extreme environmentalists 16.4
thing maverick about them. He sat on the Being fooled by fake news 17.5
bumper and listened while Peled tinkered with Unfamiliar technology 17.8
the engine. Antifa 20.7
Peled raised himself up and banged his head Illegal immigration 21.5
on the open hood. Police brutality 26.6
—Go ahead, Peled told Rami, crank the Computers replacing people in
engine. the workforce 30.7
Government use of drones in the U.S. 32.3
Matti Peled died of natural causes eighteen Government restrictions on firearms 37.8
months before his granddaughter was killed. It Random mass shootings 41.5
was the only thing, in either death, that Rami Extreme anti-immigration groups 41.6
and his wife, Nurit, were thankful for. Government tracking of personal data 46
Corporate tracking of personal data 46.3
On Peled’s seventieth birthday—in a green Je- White supremacists 49.3
rusalem garden—Smadar was videotaped in a Islamic extremists 49.3
light purple flowered dress and white head- U.S. involvement in another world war 51.6
band reading a toast to her grandfather. High medical bills 52.9
—L’chaim, l’chaim, she says in Hebrew, Global warming and climate change 53.2
brushing back a strand of hair from her neck. Corrupt government officials 73.6
Then, in Arabic, she says, Ahlan wa sah-
lan, glancing up at the camera with an imp-

READINGS 19
 newspapers. You were always handsome. And
don’t say you were not, because I saw pictures!
She tucks her hair behind her ears again, be-
fore Peled leans down to kiss her cheek.
—Till you are one hundred and twenty years
old. From Guy, me, Yigal, and Elik.
Smadar and her grandfather were buried side
by side under a grove of knotted carob trees.
The wall along the back side of the graveyard
was made of limestone but had been rein-
forced with steel rebar, some of which was hol-
low. Gliding over the wall, the wind echoed as
it caught in the lips of steel.
After the death of Matti Peled, Smadar got in
the habit of winding his watch at bedtime.
She didn’t want it to stop while she was
asleep, lest it signal that her other grandfa-
ther, Yitzak, had died during the night too.
Once she climbed into the pool still wearing the
timepiece on her wrist. The second hand froze.
She insisted that Rami take her to a jewelry
store to get it fixed. He bundled her in the car to
the house of a clockmaker, an elderly Armenian
woman who lived in the Mea Shearim district.
Rami had heard about the Jewish woman
from a colleague in the advertising industry.
[Poem]
FARTHER AWAY
By Srikanth Reddy, from his prose poem, Underworld Lit, which will
be published in August by Wave Books.
Though my catalog search under “postpartum depression”
turns up everything from Euripides’ Medea to the historical
archives of Salem Village Church to the latest report in the
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, I cannot, for the life of me,
find any good books about sad dads. In the weeks and months
after Mira’s birth, my wife would occasionally observe that I
seemed rather more distant than usual. She was right, but
not in the way she supposed. It wasn’t only other people. All
manner of things seemed farther away from me—flowers, fire,
the day after tomorrow. There must be a word in some other
language for this dim sense of misplacement. “Sadness” is
darkness in motion. “Depression” is darkness at rest. I felt
neither here nor there, like a passenger quietly seated on a
departing ferry who studies each fleck and flaw in the
window’s glass, without looking through it, for the duration
of the crossing.
20 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
While the clockmaker dried out the inside of
the watch, Smadar walked around the house
among the hundreds of working clocks.
Before they left, she nudged up against Rami
and tugged his sleeve. Why, she asked, were all
the clocks in the back rooms of the house ex-
actly one hour off?
It bothered Rami, too, until he remembered
that there was a one-hour time difference be-
tween Israel and Armenia.
Perhaps, he told her, the clockmaker wanted
to dwell in her original time. Or maybe the
clocks just reminded her of her homeland. Or
maybe—he thought later—the clockmaker
didn’t want to dwell in that time at all, and she
was, in the back of her house, always an hour
ahead, so that the things that had happened
there might not yet have happened here.
Peled had worn the Timex all through the ’48
war, his days in the Knesset, the Six-Day War,
the Yom Kippur War, the agreement with Sadat,
the withdrawal from Sinai, the invasion of Leba-
non, and the First Intifada. The timepiece was a
talisman of sorts. In his personal diary, in the
summer of 1994, he wrote that the only time he
had not wanted to wear it or consult it at all was
at the conclusion of the Oslo negotiations.
The agreement, he wrote, was like a piece
of chamber music disguised as
a symphony, a temporary salve
for the Palestinian ear but de-
signed, in the end, only for the
Israeli violin.
After he left the morgue, Rami
had to go to his father’s house to
tell him what had happened
to Smadar. His father was in
the small living room, watch-
ing the news. Yitzak did not yet
know: none of the names of the
dead had been announced.
Rami switched off the televi-
sion, pulled a chair close. His fa-
ther, almost eighty years old—a
thin blanket across his knees—
stared at a point beyond Rami’s
shoulder. He moved his mouth
but didn’t say a word. It was as if
he needed to figure out what
new taste this might be.
Yitzak put his hand to the
bridge of his nose, then rose
slowly and said: I’m awfully tired,
son, I have to go to bed now.
As if things that had happened
t here might not yet have
happened here.
Stages of Life and Death within the Landscape and Still Life, a painting by Mimi Lauter, whose work will be on view in March at Blum & Poe, in
New York City.

© The artist. Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York City/Tokyo READINGS 21
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TRUMPISM AFTER TRUMP
Will the movement outlive the man?
By Thomas Meaney
DAY ONE
The course of true nationalism never did
run smooth.
—Ernest Gellner
T
he city was not beautiful; no
one made that claim for it. At
the height of summer,
people in suits, shellacked by the
sun, moved like harassed insects
to avoid the concentrated light.
There was a civil war–like frac-
ture in America—the president
had said so—but little of it
showed in the capital. Everyone
was polite and smooth in their
exchanges. The corridor between
Dupont Circle and Georgetown
was like the dream of Yugoslav
planners: long blocks of uniform
earth-toned buildings that made
the classical edifices of the Hill
seem the residue of ancestors
straining for pedigree. Bunting,
starched and perfectly ruffled in
red-white-and-blue fans, hung
everywhere—from air condition-
ers, from gutters, from statues of
dead revolutionaries. Coming
from Berlin, where the manual labor-
ers are white, I felt as though I was
entering the heart of a caste civiliza-
tion. Untouchables in hard hats drilled
Thomas Meaney is a fellow at the Max
Planck Society in Göttingen, Germany.
Illustrations by Mark Weaver. Source photograph: Donald Trump © Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images
R E P O R T
into sidewalks, carried pylons, and ate
lunch from metal boxes, while waiters
in restaurants complimented old re-
spectable bobbing heads on how well
they were progressing with their rib
eyes and iceberg wedges.
I had come to Washington to wit-
ness either the birth of an ideology or
what may turn out to be the passing
of a kidney stone through the Repub-
lican Party. There was a new move-
ment afoot: National Conservatives,
they called themselves, and they were
gathering here, at the Ritz-Carlton, at
22nd Street and M. Disparate tribes
had posted up for the potlatch: refor-
macons, blood-and-soilers, curious
liberal nationalists, “Austrians,” repen-
tant neocons, evangelical Christians,
corporate raiders, cattle ranchers,
Silicon Valley dissidents, Buck-
leyites, Straussians, Orthodox
Jews, Catholics, Mormons, To-
ries, dark-web spiders, tradcons,
Lone Conservatives, Fed-Socs,
Young Republicans, Reaganites
in amber. Most straddled more
than one category.
They were here because of one
undeniable fact: Donald Trump
was going to die. Trump might
be ejected from office or lose the
election or win the election—
but he was, also, definitely going
to die. And Trumpism needed to
survive. It was just getting started.
If Trumpism were snuffed out
with Trump, Republicans would
fall back into march with the
party lemmings in hock to their
donors (hardly any Republican
voters agreed with the donors about
anything, as Trump had intuited),
who would connive with liberals to
contaminate the country with more
immigration, more Big Tech trea-
son, more “free” trade, more endless
wars, more slouching toward nihilism.
REPORT 23
The ancien régime was threatening to
reconstitute itself.
Someone had to stand up for Trump-
ism in the noble abstract. Someone
philosophical, who knew how to ex-
tract timelessness from the tawdriness.
Trump the Man might be crude and
venal, but Trump the Spirit had opened
a trapdoor in history. Some political-
theological exegesis would be required
to unspool the nature of the accom-
plishment. The old world of the Cold
War and the American Empire was
over; an older world of nations—a com-
munity of nations! A brotherhood!—was
struggling to be reborn. Orbán, Bol-
sanaro, Bibi, Boris—all were wise to it,
while liberal professors sat on panels
about “Hungary’s Wrong Turn” or
“Israel’s Self-Implosion” or “The
Brexit Backwash,” as if History were
a hedgerow only they were privileged
to prune. Had they no eyes? China
was about to decide whether it pre-
ferred curtailing its exports or eating
grass. Germany was primed to be
pastoralized at last, once Detroit
patented the right car battery. It was
house-hunting season in the West
Bank—did you know a good broker?
American industry was at a halftime
pause, waiting for Clint Eastwood’s
voice-over to resume. Was there room
at Guantánamo for the executive board
of Google? The drugs needed to flow
back out—a new Opium War!—and
the jobs needed to flow back in—full
employment! A few good NatCons
could keep the Republican zombie-ar-
chy at bay. Fox News might well fall
into conniptions at the notion, but
what was needed was “class warfare”—
or perhaps more precisely, a war within
the elites—to ensure that the future
remained Trumpian and did not revert
to the globalist highway to nowhere.
“I’m from the lesbian armpit of
Australia!” said a buoyant young
blond man, fresh off the plane from
his woke-infected hometown of Mel-
bourne. We were thick in the melee
of the hotel’s bowels. People were
collecting their National Conserva-
tism folders and pens, adjusting their
name tags. Lounging in plush chairs
and couches were all manner of pro-
fessional and amateur right-wingers—
lawyers, radio hosts, professors, and
journalists, all thrilled to find them-
selves in public so unspurned. In the
24 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
faux-silk-lined hallway leading into
the main ballroom, I watched a Tex-
an’s cowboy hat get within kissing
range of a rabbi’s Borsalino.
The Australian was named Jack. He
was there with the blessing of his MP
boss to make contact with allies and
convey the warmest greetings. “It’s
exciting to be among so many intelli-
gent people!” Jack was addressing a
dour undergraduate from the Univer-
sity of Texas, who was scanning the
crowd for luminaries and idly fielding
Jack’s questions. “How did you get
here?” “I was sort of sick of the liber-
tarian choke hold on campus. I’ve
read Carlyle and Evola. And Hazony,
TRUMP THE MAN MIGHT BE CRUDE
AND VENAL, BUT TRUMP THE
SPIRIT HAD OPENED A
TRAPDOOR IN HISTORY
obviously. But the College Republi-
cans are still pretty captured by liber-
tarian dogma. Like, no interest in
political economy, or a national indus-
trial policy, or anything. I found these
folks online. These guys, these are the
guys I like.”
The high degree of bonhomie in
the ballroom was hard to deny. Con-
servatives in their comfort zones can
establish an instant rapport. Aloofness
is rapidly abandoned as a hindrance to
the assembly of a highly charged emo-
tional grid. The speed of social fusion
exceeds its own object, so that every-
one already seems prepared to bleed
for they know not yet what.
W
e ambled toward the dinner
tables just as the Russia
jokes began. “I’d call this
stage the presidium, but I don’t want
to be accused of collusion with Rus-
sia,” announced the stony moderator
Christopher DeMuth, Reagan’s first-
term “deregulation czar.” He handed
over the reins to David Brog, a more
treacly specimen. Brog had worked for
the end-times televangelist John Ha-
gee’s Christians United for Israel be-
fore heading up Sheldon Adelson’s
Maccabee Task Force to fight the BDS
movement. He was one of about a half
a dozen organizers of the National
Conservatism Conference. “We are
not alone anymore,” Brog bleated. “We
want to be connected, connected to
one another, connected to our descen-
dants. . . . Our American brothers and
sisters are crying out.”
His voice floated higher in register
until it was full eighteenth-century
oracular, the Great Awakening re-
turned. “We’ve read Burke and our
Bibles.” It was very heaven to be alive
now, Brog observed. Brexit was a sign.
“The British people literally stood
astride history and yelled ‘stop!’ They
refused to sell the birthright of their
sovereignty for the shiny coins of higher
GDP.” And then came a line that
seemed lobbed over the assembled
guests directly at Jennifer Schuessler,
cultural correspondent for the New
York Times, who was sitting in the
far back of the ballroom. “We are
nationalists, not white nationalists!
But no screening system is perfect,
so if there’s anyone here tonight who
believes being an American has any-
thing whatsoever to do with the color
of someone’s skin, there is the door.” No
one stood up to leave; therefore let it be
known that there were no racists break-
ing bread among us.
Brog next lanced various simulacra
of common sense. “We give no aid to
our immigrants when we promote the
erosion of the reason they moved here
in the first place.” Only by denying im-
migrants’ dreams could those dreams
be fulfilled. . . . He ended with pure
singsong sweetness, chirping out some
Whitman to the congregants: “Cam-
erado, I give you my hand! I give you
love more precious than money!”
But money could not altogether be
expelled from the temple. One of the
conference’s backers was Colin Mo-
ran, a New York hedge funder, who
got up and told the audience that he
liked every damn thing about Na-
tional Conservatism. He didn’t think
it was antimarket at all—hell it would
probably be better for the market, or
at least his market. “It’s sometimes
said that the new National Conserva-
tism is hostile to capitalism,” DeMuth
added. He smiled. “To rebut these
scurrilous allegations, we will now
hear from one of the titans of Ameri-
can finance. Ladies and gentlemen,
Peter Thiel!”
 Thiel was a possible prototype of
the new elite the NatCons wanted to
propagate. He came equipped with a
blowtorch to illuminate the merito-
cratic conspiracy among corporations
and government and media. Yes,
Thiel was a destroyer-entrepreneur
straight out of the pages of Schum-
peter. In the fairy-tale world of Silicon
Valley startups—most of which were
coquettishly waiting for a Wall Street
manager to take them public or for
Facebook to acquire them—Thiel was
a swashbuckling privateer. He
could take a machete to the
hedgerow view of history. Like
the most effective reactionaries,
he was all-in on technology—but
on his own terms. He had co-
founded PayPal, a venture that
might at first seem too prosaic,
even beneath him, until you re-
member that PayPal’s original
mission was to become a global
currency. Thiel was going to
make great stuff again, not just
new iterations of phones. He was
going to reconnect technological
advancement with political revo-
lution. He was going to colonize
the moon. He was going to extin-
guish enemies with vengeance.
Any American journalist of my
generation had to treat that last
ambition with a touch of respect:
after a gratuitous violation of his
privacy, Thiel had, in an act of twenty-
first-century lèse-majesté, singlehand-
edly eviscerated one of the breeding
grounds of New York journalism—
Gawker. There were more habitats out
there he could scorch to the ground.
Thiel was a seasoned speaker. He’d
stumped at the Republican National
Convention; he’d given Trump a mil-
lion dollars and counseled him to be-
come disrupter-in-chief. Thiel claimed
to have received little grief from
Trump-endorsing evangelicals for being
gay, nor, it seemed, would he get much
from NatCons, who mostly held fast to
the Walt Whitman position on homo-
sexuality and nationalism. Though
Thiel’s delivery was constipated and
robotic, he came across as someone
who could beam himself somewhere
else at any given moment, and so his
sheer presence and attention flattered
the audience. He announced his inten-
tion to stick to “the spirit of what I
Source photograph: Peter Thiel © Daniel Acker/Bloomberg/Getty Images
think we’re trying to accomplish, which
is widening the Overton window of
discourse.” Then his mouth dropped
open like a torpedo bay, and out pro-
pelled a series of questions:
Is Big Tech good for the United States
of America?
Is free trade good for the U.S. of A.?
Is college good for the U.S.?
Is war good for us?
Thiel was going to “drill down into
some of the particulars” of these
matters. Google? It had lost any at-
tachment to the American nation,
and it was in bed with Chinese intelli-
gence. Its executives should be inter-
rogated “in a not excessively gentle
way.” Then came an interesting twist:
China was dirtying up the whole
globe, Thiel said. He suggested that
the 25  percent tariff on Chinese
goods be “reframed” as a carbon tax,
“and maybe the twenty-five percent is
a floor and not a ceiling.” The audi-
ence loved the way he was co-opting
a left-wing cause (climate change) for
NatCon ends (American greatness).
It was even perhaps more subtle than
that: co-opting a left-wing policy pro-
gram (carbon-taxing a country in or-
der to encourage it to green its econo-
my) and just insisting that its content
was populist protectionist. The
Trump team, according to Thiel, al-
ready had the correct instincts on
trade: “You don’t want people negoti-
ating trade treaties who dogmatically
believe in free trade, because the
worse they are at negotiating, the bet-
ter job they think they do.”
But where Thiel really hit his stride—
where he began to kill—was on the
composition of the American elite. The
factories that produce this elite were
the universities, and that was the
place to train the bomb sights. The
thousands of third-rate colleges
should be destroyed with criminal
investigations while the Ivies and
other elite universities were
taxed into oblivion. For there
was nothing so big as the self-
flattering lies told in America
about education: that there were
so many good schools and that
these institutions were the best
place for selecting and training
elites rather than just confirm-
ing and credentialing them. He
quoted Michelle Obama talking
about her daughters’ applications
to college:
The one thing I’ve been telling
my daughters is that I don’t want
them to choose a name. I don’t
want them to think, “Oh, I
should go to these top schools.”
We live in a country where there
are thousands of amazing univer-
sities. So the question is: What’s
going to work for you?
“In their defense, they don’t actually
believe it,” Thiel said. “And I would
worry about them even more if they
actually did.” Shortly after Obama’s
remarks, her elder daughter went off to
Harvard. Thiel would have been “very
disturbed” if they’d sent her to the one-
thousandth ranked school instead.
This was genuinely funny. Rolling the
Obamas over the coals of their own
utterances never got old. But Thiel had
done more than his duty to National
Conservatism by intimating that a new
elite could still come into being. It
would be a techy elite, and a very small
one, but one that served the homeland,
whose normal citizens would graze
among the infinite pleasures provided
them. The coming elite would recog-
nize the con of mass education and
spare millions the dunce hat of the
community college or the online uni-
versity. Thiel himself had already tried
to buy out promising young coders
REPORT 25
from going to college in the first place:
the Thiel Fellowship accepted applica-
tions on a rolling basis and paid grant-
ees six figures not to go to school. A
picture of the Thielian version of the
NatCon future was coming into focus:
rooms of talented fifteen-year-olds find-
ing new ways to drill into the earth’s
core and lower temperatures through
sublime acts of geologic engineering.
Children were our future, if they could
avoid college. Our savior was not the
tech- abstinence-preaching Greta
Thunberg, but some as yet unknown
prodigy, funded by Thiel, who would
figure out how to recode the physical
processes of the planet.
Thiel’s private effort to siphon
off a natural aristocracy of talent
from the doomed universities by
plying them with cash and lab
time was part of the larger field of
NatCon thought. Trump had
won the election by feeding the
insatiable anti-elitist hunger in
the nation. The Clintons had
cooperated perfectly. But nation-
alists and populists have as much
need for elites as anyone else. In
the first flush of European nation-
alism, members of the Napole-
onic generation found themselves
promoted from cannoneers to
princes of freshly conquered
states. The Third World nation-
alists who came to power in de-
colonizing nations in the 1960s
had only recently formed a stratum
of colonial rule: lawyers, doctors,
poets, and soldiers. The trouble now
in the United States was that the
would-have-been regional ruling class
had been sucked out of every corner of
the heartland to join the ranks of the
global meritocracy, leaving the ranks of
the local elite nearly empty. Anyone
visiting an Ivy League classroom could
encounter twenty bright teenagers
from all over the world—a few of
them vacuumed out of obscure corners
of the U.S.A.—who all spoke the
same gradient of English, streamed
the same TV series, and believed that
they represented diversity. The clever
sell of the Pete Buttigiegs and Rory
Stewarts of the moment was to at least
simulate the return-to-Ithaca drama
of a globalist come home to pay re-
gional amends. But what if merito-
cratic elites in general were the prob-
26 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
lem? Edmund Burke himself had been
notoriously skeptical of them, espe-
cially those like himself: better to be
governed by half-demented aristocrats
with long-standing claims to land and
title than by intellectual hustlers who
misconstrue their own rocketing so-
cial ascent with the lift-off of human-
ity in general.
A
s Thiel was escorted off the
stage through a parted sea of
fans, I moved to the center
of the ballroom. Something curious
was happening. There was a young
man in a vintage tan Nehru jacket
speaking to a group of a dozen younger
people in suits and dresses. The sub-
ject appeared to be poetry. “And so
Dickinson’s editor, this guy Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, is actually in
contact with John Brown.” It was too
propitious—to have the chance this
early in the conference to put in a
word for John Brown. “What’s the
problem with John Brown?” I asked
him. The young man in the Nehru
jacket blinked slowly, tortoiselike, and
a knowing smile arrived. “Only that
he was a terrorist, only that he’s the
equivalent of a pro-life activist today
who blows up abortion clinics because
of the evil inside them.”
“Doesn’t it depend on what your
cause is, though?”
“Are you a communist or some-
thing?” he asked, in a friendly, sparring
way. “I mean, it’s okay if you are; I’m so
far right that I’m in Maoist territory.”
The speaker was Curtis Yarvin, a Sili-
con Valley star of the neo-reactionary
web, whose Thiel-backed technology,
Urbit, was meant to reinvent comput-
ing (everyone would have access to
their own fiercely sovereign servers and
would not have to bow to Big Tech).
Yarvin the Dark Knight had written a
series of texts under the name Mencius
Moldbug, making him a revered “alt-
right” pamphleteer.
I walked outside with the Dark
Knight and two Stanford undergradu-
ates to the corner of M and 22nd. “This
guy is kind of famous,” said Un-
dergrad One. The undergrads had
both recently taken a course
taught by Thiel. “He made us read
Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea,” said
Undergrad Two. “It was awe-
some.” The pair worked as assis-
tants to Niall Ferguson, the con-
servative historian who had
gotten himself into trouble at
Stanford’s Hoover Institution for
encouraging “oppo research” on a
liberal student. “Oh man, it was
bullshit. They only got Ferguson
because Susan Rice’s son acciden-
tally forwarded a whole email
chain to some unreliable student.”
“Wait, you mean Susan Rice—”
“Totally conservative, her son,
yeah,” said Undergrad One.
The Dark Knight was in a gre-
garious mood. “I just wanted to
get out and see what’s going on
with the official conservatives these
days,” he told the group. “It’s cool that
they let me come.” Undergrad One said
he was intrigued by the anti-imperial
tenor at the conference. “We should just
dismantle the empire,” the Dark Knight
said. “It could be done so quickly if you
really wanted to. All our embassies
could be wrapped up right away.
There’s nothing in the Constitution
that says we have to have embassies.
All of those staffs could come home.
We can conduct diplomatic relations
via Skype. This idea that we need
people over there is so ridiculous, such
an anachronism.” “What about Israel?”
asked Undergrad Two. “Do you know
how much we contribute to the Is-
raeli defense budget?” said the Dark
Knight. “It’s something like three or
four percent—peanuts. I think we
Source photograph: James Burnham
should let them loose. Is anybody re-
ally going to want to fuck with Israel?
I’d say you’d see Israel picking up new
territory in no time if we just let them
go. We could roll in our empire, and let
them give empire a shot. Theirs could
stretch from Beirut to Rabat. I mean,
they’re Jews—they’ll figure it out.”
The Dark Knight overflowed with
antiquarian theories and gleanings.
His thoughts kept circling back to the
midcentury right-winger James Burn-
ham, a hallowed figure among the
NatCons. Burnham’s trajectory per-
fectly matched the moment. He’d be-
gun his career as a mild-mannered
professor of philosophy, a genteel
Princetonian whom one student de-
scribed as having walked out of a
T.  S.  Eliot poem, but some vision
amid the Great Depression had
changed him. Though he was daz-
zled by his Marxist colleague Sid-
ney Hook, and by his encounter
with Leon Trotsky’s History of the
Russian Revolution, which he inter-
preted as a coming attraction for
America, it still took a car ride
through Detroit, the epicenter of
the Depression, to clinch Burnham’s
conversion. “The class struggle, the
starvation and terror in act” that he
witnessed among the city’s autowork-
ers convinced him that capitalism was
ruined forever; he wanted to be a part
of what came next.
At NYU, Burnham still lectured on
Aquinas and Dante, but he was in-
creasingly occupied with drafting strat-
egies for Communist Party discipline.
His attacks on Franklin Roosevelt,
whom he accused of being an incipient
totalitarian, were even more vitriolic
than the conservative attacks on the
New Deal. Trotsky, in exile on the is-
land of Büyükada off Istanbul, was so
taken with Comrade Burnham’s agit-
prop that he marked him as a protégé.
Some organizers around Burnham were
put off by his tailored suits, his taste for
champagne and baccarat, and his dry
patrician monotone, but this was also
part of what made him useful; he lent
American Marxism a dignified patina.
Burnham broke with the Trotskyites
over the question of whether the So-
viet Union was in fact a worker’s state.
Trotsky thought it still qualified despite
the corruptions of Stalinism; Burnham
thought it did not. From his reading of
New Deal critics of the modern corpo-
ration, such as Adolf Berle and Gar-
diner Means, Burnham came to believe
that the Soviet Union and the United
States were converging on a kind of
managerialism: two only marginally
different planned economies, with little
place for individual freedom. He started
drifting to the right, and eventually
wound up as the in-house guru of Wil-
liam F. Buckley’s National Review. But
his professional life did have some co-
herence over the decades. It was spent
taking up positions from various crum-
bling ideological ramparts to get a bet-
ter shot in at his lifelong enemy: the
liberal elite. Burnham could summon
a good word for the Black Panthers,
LSD, and Woodstock, which had at
BURNHAM COUNSELED A KIND OF
EQUANIMITY IN THE FACE OF THE
TECHNOCRATIC ELITE; YARVIN WAS
INTENT ON DESTROYING IT
least sent some shockwaves to Vital
Center Command Control.
Refreshingly, the NatCons and the
Dark Knight were interested not in
Burnham’s avowedly right-wing phase—
when brittle treatises such as The Suicide
of the West (1964) appeared—but in his
earlier, more ambivalent wartime out-
put, The Managerial Revolution (1941)
and The Machiavellians (1943), which
were written in an era when Burnham
was still contending with “remnants of
Marxism.” These books, invoked by
NatCons throughout my days in Wash-
ington, worked like a back door through
which they could smuggle materialism
into their program. Other phrases that
I did not associate with conservatives
were brought out like worn old pieces of
family furniture, each brokered by trust-
worthy conservative middlemen. “The
ruling class” was often cited at the Ritz,
or, just as commonly, “the ruling class,
as Angelo Codevilla calls it”—a refer-
ence to the intelligence analyst, conser-
vative professor, and writer for the Clare-
mont Review of Books.
Burnham’s chief idea—adopted by
Yarvin—was that the American elite
had become a managerial class that
acted as guardians over institutions, the
academy, and the professions. They were
not aristocrats, nor were they capitalist
tycoons, but rather an office-bound spe-
cies that merely understood the tech-
niques of governance and as a class no
longer bothered with questions of their
own legitimacy. Burnham had coun-
seled a kind of equanimity in the face of
this technocratic elite—the best you
could do was to pit elites against one
another in order to create space for con-
cessionary freedoms. But Yarvin was
more intent on destroying it. He be-
lieved that the United States was simply
a more advanced form of totalitarianism
than China. It had decentralized its
despotism, spread it among different
sectors, but the totalitarian imprint was
still there: Americans who watched Fox
News were captive to one narrative,
and those who watched MSNBC
were captive to another. But for
Yarvin the trouble was that the orig-
inal mythology of American democ-
racy was breaking down. One could
keep believing in it for only so long,
just as it had required herculean
myopia to continue to believe in
Third World liberation long after its
expiration date. Did anyone really still
believe in American postwar inno-
cence? Yarvin played at drawing the
stench of the firebombing of Dresden
into his nostrils. Did anyone still believe
that liberal elites wanted equality in
education? And so Yarvin had identified
a groaning gap in the conference. “It will
be interesting to see what kind of elite
they come up with,” he said.
DAY TWO
God’s used imperfect people all through
history. King David wasn’t perfect, Saul
wasn’t perfect, Solomon wasn’t perfect.
And I actually gave the president a little
one-pager on those Old Testament
kings . . . I said, “Mr. President, I know
there are people that say, y’know, ‘You said
you were the chosen one.’ ” And, I said:
“You were.”
—Rick Perry
T
he second day of the National
Conservatism Conference was
a day of myth maintenance.
The men of God were gearing up. Peter
Thiel had worried that the American
right was still in thrall to the myth of
American exceptionalism when what
REPORT 27
was needed was the opposite: more
comparisons of America with other
countries to see where it fell short, more
competition fueled by the intimation
that we might not be special at all.
Yarvin had wondered late into the night
where the new myths could come from.
The Silicon Valley contingent, Pro-
methean in outlook, did not have much
time for God.
It was the moment for a Christian
nationalist to ascend the mount. They
were hardly endangered. Over the sum-
mer, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán had given
a speech in a small Romanian village
proclaiming the blooming of a re-Chris-
tianized Europe. R. R. “Rusty” Reno,
another conference organizer and the
editor of the ecumenical, Catholic-
inflected journal First Things, was in
the strange position of having to
reconcile nationalism and Christian-
ity all over again for a twenty-first-
century audience. He took to the
task with a weary sense of duty, the
creep of melancholy in his voice, as
he bore his burden in plain sight of
his congregants. “The anti-elite,
populist sentiments that are abroad
at the moment,” Reno told us, “are best
understood as expressions of the Amer-
ican love for self-government. Faced
with a liberal empire, overseen by a
technocratic elite, the American people
have become truculent. This is true on
the left and the right. Count me as no
fan of socialism, but I interpret its rhe-
torical return in the Democratic Party
as a sign that Democratic voters want
to recover their political agency. . . . I
dread the triumph of these loveless vi-
sions of our political future; for they
mean the end of the democratic age,
and its supersession by a managerial,
therapeutic empire run by central bank-
ers and diversity consultants.”
For Reno, the particularities of the
nation were not only reconcilable with
Christianity, they furthered its cause.
Scripture was unmistakable: “If anyone
does not provide for his own people, and
especially his own family, he has dis-
owned his faith and is worse than an
infidel” (1 Timothy 5:8). The nation was
no false idol for Reno. God in His be-
nevolence had provided it “as a further
remedy for our sinful self-regard.” Cath-
olics could excuse passionate love of
your mate if it brought you closer to
God; the nation was a much higher ver-
28 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
sion of that. It would be a twisted act to
try to take patriotic love away from our
fellow citizens. “Many of our fellow
Americans have made a mess of their
lives in various ways, and they haven’t
accomplished very much—unlike many
of us in the room—and for many of
them their citizenship is their most
precious possession, from which they
draw the greatest honor. It’s not enough
that we take away the functional fam-
ily life—we even have to take away
their own citizenship, or their love
of their own citizenship.” Reno was prof-
fering a peculiar notion of worldly suc-
cess, and one could sense some self-
flattery working within him. But
elsewhere his speech took a wilder turn.
“There is a potential for a great deal of
FOR R. R. RENO, THE NATION
WAS NOT ONLY RECONCILABLE
WITH CHRISTIANITY BUT
FURTHERED ITS CAUSE
mischief if we fuse church with nation,”
he said. “There are bishops in the Cath-
olic Church in the United States and
Europe and Protestant pastors who judge
prudent restrictions on immigration to
be violations of biblical ideals of univer-
sal welcome and universal hospitality,
but these ideals apply to the people of
God, to the Church, not to the United
States of America.”
What was meant by this? That border
crossing was permissible for people in
their capacity as Christians but not
in their capacity as Mexicans? I had a
vision of El Paso, of trucks of Mexican
Christians arriving at a megachurch.
Old white Texan gentlemen help the
elderly Mexican gentlewomen down
the stairs, leading them arm in arm
into the church where in booming En-
glish with Spanish subtitles a minister
preaches the bounty of Christian union,
and baptisms are performed on small
Mexican babies. At the tea and biscuits
session after the service, one of the el-
derly Texans notices a bulge under the
loose clothing of a young Mexican
woman. “Get ’em out of here!” The
bonds of Christian fellowship having
been observed, it is now time to sound
the alarm of national solidarity: the
visiting worshippers are dispatched in
black vans with papered-over windows
to the deepest reaches of the Yucatán.
“Next time we’ll do the service over
Skype. That will be better for everyone,”
says the minister, hat in his hands. “No
need to have them on the soil when we
already coexist on a spiritual plane.”
While it had fallen to Reno to square
Christian universalism with nationalist
particularism, Yoram Hazony made
bolder claims for his faith. Launching
out against a hundred years of histori-
ography, Hazony claimed that, no, na-
tionalism was not about forgetting
things in common or sharing a mis-
taken view of the past; it was about
keeping a covenant with God. For
Hazony—founder of the Princeton Tory,
onetime confidant of Netanyahu,
and chief Talmudist of National
Conservatism—nationalism began
with the Hebrews. Donald Trump
might speak in slogans, but he was
also speaking the Torah. The He-
brew God “doesn’t say go out and
conquer all the nations of the world.
He says, You stay behind your bor-
der.” You can have this patch of land
for your people, and it will become
great; other peoples can do the same on
their patches. And so, after a break of a
few thousand years, the Dutch, the En-
glish, and finally the Americans all
copied the original.
Hazony’s lecture stuck to the wagon
ruts of traditional nationalist thought.
There had been Jewish nationalists—
Zionists after all—going back to the
nineteenth century. Earlier, the Ameri-
can Founders and their English forerun-
ners had borrowed the ideas of a chosen
state from Jewish thinkers. The trouble
was not merely that Hazony swept under
the carpet all the difficulties of actually
existing nationalism—Where does it
begin? Where does it end? Who is in and
who is out?—but that he was sacralizing
a political compromise as a God-directed
project. With the borders sacred, and the
exact mixture of people within them
sacred, considerable subterfuge and vio-
lence were now justifiable in defending
the frozen state of this order.
I
t would have been mete and right
for such somber tones to be fol-
lowed by organ music. Instead, af-
ter a coffee break, there came National
Conservatism’s long-awaited jester.

“You gotta love Tucker,” as Stanford
Undergraduate One had put it. Tucker
Carlson was the leading propagandist
of the cause. He had his own show on
Fox News. He did daily battle with the
enemy. And not only battle; Tucker
even extracted what he liked from the
Jacobin-magazine left, twisted it around,
and sold it at a discount to his follow-
ers. He hated liberals, but he resented
the left for leaving his hypocrisy fla-
grantly exposed. And so he seesawed
between this hatred and this resent-
ment. In the resentment there was a
kind of respect; in the hatred there
was mirthful righteousness.
“I actually have contact with the
people the rest of us complain about,”
he began his speech—and, lo, it was
true. Not only did he have his makeup
done by liberals and communists five
days a week, but nearly everyone in the
media wanted to stop him. They didn’t
succeed because, even within the nar-
row constraints of monopoly capital-
ism, Tucker, like a Christian among the
Romans, was able to get the word out,
and his virtuous flock heeded the call.
The NatCons were in awe of the
great deflection service Tucker pro-
vided for the American ruling class:
identifying actual material grievances
and laboriously laundering them into
petty insecurities familiar from the
Nineties culture wars. Tucker preached
the National Conservatism Gospel
even without quite understanding it.
The organizers believed he contained
a wisdom he himself did not fully rec-
ognize, like a fool in Shakespeare. His
demeanor was bouncy and cheerful:
the vibe was part Groton lacrosse
cheerleader, part finance frat boy. His
face was ruddied from his summer in
Maine, where he’d been communing
with his ethnos. His pace was a bit
stop-and-start at the beginning—he’d
just given up nicotine—but his signa-
ture tic was there: the planted joke,
followed by the waterfall, throw-back-
the-head, court-of-Versailles laugh. He
was like a man who looked down at
his mouth amazed that it had been
transformed into a giant conveyor belt
dispensing perfect modules of com-
mon sense. His trust in his subjective
experience was immense.
Tucker had some tough news for the
assembled faithful. “Big Business Hates
Your Family” was the title of his talk.
Because she doesn’t necessarily
need jewelry for Valentine’s Day,
Monopoly capitalism was real. “The a quality felt hat for your collection.
main threat to your ability to live your
life as you choose does not come from
the government, but comes from the
private sector,” Tucker said. “I was
trained from the youngest age, from a
pup, to believe that the threats to lib-
erty came from government. . . . And so
it really took a huge amount of evidence
wagging right in my face—not being
the brightest person in D.C.—to realize Made in Australia
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brazen act of propaganda aimed at your
kids, and the message is that the binary
gender scheme which we were taught in
biology class in seventh grade is no
longer operative.” In fighting this, the
libertarians would be worse than use-
less. Their response was, Yeah, well, if
you don’t like it, start your own Oreo
company. “But that’s not really an op-
erative option in a world of monopoly
power. . . . You can’t create your own Hummingbird Heart Earrings in Bronze
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in fewer hands than at any time in
American history. And that itself is
ominous and should make all of us cast
aside any thread of ideology or theology
or whatever, just look at that straight in
the face. Are you comfortable with
that? You shouldn’t be. Of course you’re
not. . . . They can make whole ideas
disappear. And there’s some evidence
that they’re working to do that.” Lovebirds: Raven and Eagle in Sterling Silver
For Tucker, Trump was a galactic #N32080N Necklet w/18" sterling chain... $88
tear in the universe, setting the terms
of a new reality. Anything was possi- Jewelry shown full size, made in USA
ble. “If the Loch Ness monster exists, $9 handling per order
what about the yeti!” (Versailles laugh-
ter.) “The Trump election spurred in Shop davidmorgancom
me a kind of reassessment of UFOs.
I’m serious. And it turns out, like, or request our catalog
they’re real.” (Laughter again.)
Tucker riled his audience a bit when #KB-336-SSC
he exposed his knowledge of the Amer-
ican left. He found bits to admire in
Warren’s “economic patriotism,” and as N22080E #1746
long as the left kept quiet about the
minorities and the migrants, some of
them were promising candidates for a Pacific Northwest Jewelry
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REPORT 29
good to boost American wages. The
trouble with the left was that it wanted
to do these things on behalf of an
amorphous citizenry with no sense of
boundaries for where American bounty
should stop. We already knew who
Americans were, Tucker implied; the
definition was settled: Americans were
people who watched and believed
Tucker Carlson.
It did all raise a question. What if
Trump had dialed down the white na-
tionalism after taking the White House
and, instead of betraying nearly every
word of his campaign rhetoric of eco-
nomic populism, had ruthlessly enacted
populist policies, passing gargantuan
infrastructure bills, shredding
NAFTA instead of remodeling it,
giving a tax cut to the lower middle
class instead of the rich, and con-
spiring to raise the wages of Ameri-
can workers? It doesn’t take much to
imagine how that would play against
a Democratic challenger with mc-
kinsey or harvard law school
imprinted on his or her forehead.
There seemed to be two futures for
Trumpism as a distinctive strain of
populism: one in which the last re-
serves of white identity politics were
mined until the cave collapsed and one
in which the coalition was expanded
to include working Americans, enlist-
ing blacks and Hispanics and Asians in
the cause of conquering the conde-
scending citadels of Wokistan. Was it
predestined that Trump would choose
the former? Steve Bannon was already
audience-testing Trumpism 2.0, wrong-
footing the crowd at the Oxford Union
with complaints about the lack of black
technicians in Silicon Valley. Why
couldn’t Trumpism go in this direction
in reality? The shrewdest move for the
NatCons would surely have been to at-
tract as many non-whites as possible to
the Ritz and strike fear into the hearts
of the globalists with a multiracial
populist carnival—a new post-Trump
pan-ethnic coalition that would some-
day consider it quaint that it had once
needed to begin conferences with the
profession: We are not actually racist.
F
or the rest of the afternoon, I
wandered into talks and panels
and discussions and cocktail
chatter. On the floor I saw Daniel
Pipes, the old right-winger and son of
30 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
the historian of the Russian Revolu-
tion Richard Pipes. “I think in the end
my father was a social democrat,” Pipes
confessed to me in the tone of com-
ing to terms with one’s father having
served in the Waffen-SS. He was
scowly and solemn, and appeared
like an Orthodox priest who had
misplaced his thurible. He spent the
afternoon on a panel defending East-
ern European right-wing movements
as “civilizationist” paladins, regard-
ing their anti-Semitism more as
growing pains than as an inherent
feature of their ideology.
Among the other revelers in infamy
was Amy Wax. Accompanying the Dark
THIS WAS TUCKER’S GREAT
INSIGHT: THE SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC
LEFT WAS ESSENTIALLY
RIGHT ABOUT ECONOMICS
Knight, I entered her talk in a small
conference room, which she opened
with a defense of Enoch Powell— a
“prophet without honor in the last
century.” Yarvin was getting giddy off
of Wax’s denunciation of the “magic
dirt” idea, which purports that im-
migrants are transformed by the U.S.
soil into better people. “Oh my God,
she’s going for it—she’s talking about
‘magic dirt.’ You know Powell was a
brigadier in the army, right? Dude was
super fucking tough!” Then Wax de-
scended into a diatribe, calling out
immigrants as littering noise polluters
who did not meet the conditions of
our society—in her own way repeat-
ing, in degraded English, the kind of
view Henry James had once given
voice to in a description of the Jewish
ghetto of the Lower East Side: “Some
vast sallow aquarium in which innu-
merable fish, of overdeveloped probos-
cis, were to bump together, forever,
amid heaped soils of the sea.”
Wax presented more than just a PR
problem for the NatCons. In her en-
comium to the Berkshires and other
clean, white places in America where
she likes to spend time, she exposed
one of the contradictions of the Nat-
Cons, setting their anti-elitist rhetoric
against their elitist behavior. Of the
speakers at the conference, it was
only the Notre Dame professor Pat-
rick Deneen who argued with some
cogency that the NatCons needed to
foster new, local mini-aristocracies
that would both keep the “c” of “con-
servatism” small—and not court big
government all over again, as some of
the NatCons clamoring for an indus-
trial policy seemed to want. Awk-
wardly for Deneen’s reputation, but
less awkwardly for his bank account,
Obama had read and liked his book
Why Liberalism Failed.
In the bar, the Dark Knight and I
found a table of older conservatives.
There was Daniel Oliver, the one-
time executive editor of National
Review and a friend of Buckley
and Burnham. We ordered a
round of gin and tonics. The Dark
Knight wanted to know about
Burnham. “The most charming
man,” said Oliver. The American
Revolution was the topic on the
table. “You know, when the queen
of England came for the Bicenten-
nial to Boston, my great-uncle re-
ceived her, since he was descended
from the last line of Tory governors.”
Yarvin launched into his Loyalist
account of the American Revolu-
tion. He was incensed that the Whig
interpretation had infected all of the
historiography. “It’s so sad that peo-
ple believe that America won the
war militarily, or that if the British
had just conciliated more, they could
have kept the colonies. I mean, the
Whigs in England wanted to lose.
They sent General Howe—a total
radical—to fight the war. That’s like
sending Bill Ayers to lead the re-
sponse to the Tet Offensive.”
We discussed the coming attrac-
tions of the conference. “I’m thinking
of organizing a boycott of John
Bolton,” joked William Ruger, the vice
president for research at the Charles
Koch Institute. Bolton was a persona
not very grata among the NatCons.
Recently anointed national security
adviser, he was the sort of old guard
Republican loyalist that many people
at the conference loathed. “Bolton
just loves war too much,” said Ruger.
“Never saw a war he didn’t like.”
In the corner of the Ritz bar, I saw
Jennifer Schuessler of the New York
Times. Trump was firing out tweets
against Ilhan Omar and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, telling them to go back
to their countries. The mediasphere
was saturated with outrage and glee.
Schuessler was asking conference par-
ticipants about the tweets, but no one
was taking the bait. The NatCons
treated her like a poor, uninitiated
innocent. They performed looks of
pity when she asked about the admin-
istration’s actual record. Pushed on the
Trump question, Hazony gave a super-
cilious smile that seemed to say, If you
have to ask about tweets, you’re never
going to be ready for conversion.
In the evening there was a floor
debate that pitted a representative of
the pure free-market creed against the
NatCon mutation. Richard Reinsch, a
hale Indianan who worked for the Lib-
erty Fund, which subsidizes the reprint-
ing of Friedrich Hayek’s works, faced
off against Oren Cass, a young policy
wonk from the Manhattan Institute.
The question at hand: “Should
America adopt an industrial policy?”
Reinsch was perfectly orthodox in his
defense of the status quo: “In real
terms, growth in manufacturing has
kept up with the growth of the econ-
omy over the previous seventy years,”
he told the ballroom. Its declining
employment share was the result of
increased productivity. “In 1980? Ten
man-hours to make a ton of steel,”
Reinsch said. “In 2015? Two man-
hours. . . . Even if manufacturing wages
are on average higher than service-
sector wages, it doesn’t follow that
tariffs will make more jobs that pay at
the current manufacturing wage.” The
implication was politically clear: good
luck trying to wean American workers
off cheap products at Walmart. Oren
Cass wanted to do something close to
that. “We see slowing productivity
growth,” he said. “We see slow to non-
existent wage growth. A male with a
high school degree in 1970 could have
supported a family of four at more than
twice the poverty line; in 2016, he’s
only about thirty-five percent above it.”
Libertarians were trying to tie the gov-
ernment’s hands too much, which was
preventing U.S.  participation in the
wordwide competition of each nation
protecting its own workers. “You can
have free trade or you can have free
markets, but you can’t have both,” said
Cass, to the audience’s delight.
In support of Cass, further speeches
came from the floor. A voice from the
South, J.  D.  Vance’s, made a searing
“ DAVID HOLDRIDGE
describes humanitarian aid
2>;9@413>;A:0A< -05Ŋ1>1:@
appeal in emotional tones. The au-
thor of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance was the and fascinating perspective.”
bard of the NatCons, the most gifted — JOSEPH S. NYE, former dean of the
lyricist of Trumpism. He was from Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Appalachia and had climbed his way
into the elite hive of Yale Law School.
“I’m a venture capitalist,” he said. “If
you’re in the Peninsula, right off high-
way 101 there’s an exit called Willow
Road. And on Willow Road you’ll
find the Facebook headquarters. And
at Facebook, there are neuroscientists
currently being paid a lot of money
quite literally to addict our children
to their applications. And not far
from the Facebook headquarters,
there are neuroscientists working on
how to cure dementia, and how to
cure some of the most intractable
diseases that affect our society. The
people who are working at Facebook
addicting our children to their appli-
cations make much more money than
the people who are attempting to
cure our society of its worst diseases,
and I think this question about A MEMOIR BY DAVID HOLDRIDGE
whether we should have an industrial
policy ultimately reduces to the ques- WINNER OF THE PRIZE AMERICANA
tion of, Do you think our politics
should have an answer about whether
it is more valuable to cure our grand- THE AVANT GARDE
children than to addict them to terri-
ble applications? And I think the an- OF WESTERN CIV
swer is obviously yes.”
There was mighty applause. Vance
was followed by mini-Vances. A Young “David and his team in
Republican from Texas spoke of the the Shia heartland of Iraq
loss he feels in the west of his state,
covered, he said, in “these beautiful represented the best values
storefronts that are empty.” If Texas and hopes of his country . . .
Republicans did not purge themselves in pursuit of leaving some
of neoliberal tendencies, they’d eventu- lasting good behind within
ally lose the state to Democrats, who
were already refining the rhetoric of the larger Iraqi context of
economic populism. A floor vote was dismay and disintegration.”
taken, and Cass’s side easily won. It
was 99 in favor of a national industrial — CHRISTOPHER SHAYS,
policy, 51 against. former congressman, R. Conn.
In the hot dark, walking back to my
hotel, I nodded to Julius Krein, the
thirty-three-year-old editor of Ameri-
can Affairs, the NatCon house jour-
nal. He was among the more serious
of the instant intellectuals whom AVAILABLE ONLINE AT
Trump’s political arrival had spewed www.avantgardeofwesternciv.com
forth. Michael Anton, the most well-
known “Trumpist intellectual,” was a OR FOR PURCHASE FROM
AMAZON + BARNES & NOBLE
REPORT 31
caricature of academic Straussianism
by comparison: a man who rambled
about Xenophon and whose speech at
the NatCon conference sounded like
a preface to a preface of a preface to a
commentary on a commentary on a
classical text. No, with his suit, neatly
parted hair, and his flat Midwestern
vowels, Krein appeared like a whiz kid
from the Kennedy Administration.
But in his style of argument, he was
the closest thing that the NatCons
had to a re-embodied James Burnham.
Like Burnham, Krein believed that
both the left and the right had misiden-
tified the radical agent in recent Amer-
ican history. It was not the devastated
working class, as the left believed,
which could barely find its feet politi-
cally; nor was it the 401(k)-holding
American masses who kept the faith of
market fundamentalism more than
socialist-curious elites. For Krein, the
war to win was within the elite. It was a
question of who would exploit the
amour propre of the professional-
managerial class and enlist it in a battle
against the top 1 percent—or top
.1 percent. Up until this point, the bil-
lionaire class had operated in near per-
fect conditions, with a Democratic
Party that swooned over them and a
Republican Party that was so conve-
niently repulsive to the top 10 percent
that it drew their energy away from
revolutionary rumbles. Much as the
Bernie Sanders strategists wondered
about how many Warrenites they could
attract to socialism before she em-
barked on an inevitable voyage back to
the center, so Krein and his cadre
wanted to make National Conserva-
tism a viable alternative for a new, more
politically responsible elite that would
not shy from war with the globalists.
DAY THREE
When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of
dignity to an ambition without a distinct
object, and work with low instruments
and for low ends, the whole composition
becomes low and base.
—Edmund Burke, Reflections on the
Revolution in France
J
ohn Bolton arrived to a room of
skeptics, but there was no walk-
out. Civility persisted in the ball-
room of the Ritz. In the face of at least
32 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
a few holdout enemies and a press
corps visibly uncomfortable in his
presence, Bolton showed that he was,
after all, a professional operator. Here
was a man who in law school had
stayed up into the wee hours convert-
ing Clarence Thomas to conservatism
(or so the rumor went).
One audience member tried to
bait Bolton with a question about
immigration in Europe: “Should we
be worried about European birth lev-
els?” But Bolton, sensing a trap, re-
sisted this. He did not want to tell
Europeans how many children they
should have, nor Africans either. He
wasn’t going to perform any symbolic
allegiance to Trumpist themes. In-
stead, he bore down on the points he
wanted to make to an audience that
viewed him as oil in the water of
Trump’s foreign policy. Venezuela
might have to be occupied by the
United States. Why? Well, it was al-
ready occupied by the Cubans. “If
the 20,000 or more Cubans in Ven-
ezuela left tomorrow, the Ma duro
government would fall by mid-
night.” NATO nations needed to
pay their fair share, just as Obama
had said, though Trump had said it
more forcefully. There was more
continuity between the two admin-
istrations than the NatCons might
like to acknowledge. Bolton was al-
lergic to pandering and made no at-
tempt to hide his addiction to Amer-
ican global supremacy and wars of
choice. He was honest about his
wish never to get clean.
In the coming months, the irony
of Trump’s militarism would exceed
the media’s capacity to comprehend
it: Bolton, like James Mattis before
him, was fired or resigned in view of
what he thought of as an unaccept-
able troop withdrawal that Trump
had committed to but did not actu-
ally undertake. In fact, Trump had
doubled down on nearly every mili-
tary theater in which the United
States had troops.
At the back of the ballroom I
spotted Keith Gessen, jotting down
notes on Bolton’s remarks. It was
strange to see him there, a literary
figure of major standing in Brook-
lyn, a co founder of n+1, the most
successful leftist magazine of his
generation. There was nothing doc-
trinaire about him; he was curious
about the proceedings around him
and ready to score the performances.
“It’s impressive how Bolton just
won’t let them get to him—he’s too
experienced,” he said. “Some of
these guys seem reasonable enough.
J.  D.  Vance’s stuff about supporting
working families—I mean, it’s not
exactly bad what he’s saying.” Ges-
sen was from Russian intelligentsia
stock. When he read histories of the
Revolution, he rooted for the Men-
sheviks, who lost every time. He
had a natural affinity for the under-
dog, but he was put off by the
NatCons’ pretensions, by their ab-
surd miming of learnedness and by
their you-must-break-eggs justifica-
tions of the Trump approach. “Must
say that it remains one of the chief
regrets of the time I spent in Wash-
ington D.C. this summer,” he would
later write, “that I shook Michael
Anton’s hand.”
T
here were a few people at the
National Conservatism Con-
ference of whom it was whis-
pered: “Future president, right there.”
It had been said of J. D. Vance, who
managed to conjure a world that was
almost palatable to liberals. Vance
was careful about his gender roles,
and even gave evidence that sug-
gested he had experience changing
diapers. It had been said of Tucker
Carlson that he would be even better
than Trump as a White House per-
sonality. But it was Josh Hawley over
whom the crown most plausibly hov-
ered. He was thirty-nine years old,
the youngest man in the Senate, a
former clerk for Justice John Roberts
on the Supreme Court, and biogra-
pher (when in his twenties) of Teddy
Roosevelt. Hawley was a scholar-
warrior out of NatCon heaven. In
presentation and style, he reminded
me of the young Austrian leader Se-
bastian Kurz, who had made his name
as the shiny new bridge to the au-
thoritarians in Eastern Europe but
who was still suave enough to appeal
to Carinthian grandmothers.
I took my seat early at the dinner
for Hawley. A recent convert to
Mormonism was bad-mouthing the
Supreme Court justices: Trump had
to do better. “You really don’t like
Kavanaugh?” I asked her. “No, I
mean Gorsuch. Have you read his
decisions on Indians? He wants to
give it all back to the Indians. Insidi-
ous rulings.” Another law clerk was
speculating about Ginsburg’s physi-
cal health: “Amy Wax is a doctor
and says that Ginsburg, even with all
her exercise, will still be dead within
two years, so it’s looking good.” The
Dark Knight was trying to convince
the table that the most important
book to understand the moment was
The Final Pagan Generation by Ed-
ward J.  Watts, which is about how
the last pagans in the Roman Em-
pire had managed their lives in the
upsurge of Christianity and how
quickly their millennia-old culture
had been pulverized by a small cadre
of young, zealous Christian elite.
This was the Dark Knight’s persis-
tent worry: Who were the true be-
lievers at the conference, and who
were the opportunists?
Roosevelt could be an opportun-
ist, Hawley writes in his biography of
Teddy. “But he was no crass intellec-
tual opportunist.” But what was
Hawley? He came onto the stage in a
more powerful thrust than had any-
one at the conference so far, and his
speech would be a summa of all that
had come before. Like Thiel, he
wanted to go to war on Big Tech
(and he had introduced bills that
showed he was serious); like Patrick
Deneen, he was worried about how
to create communities led by aristo-
populists; like Tucker, he was fast on
his feet and projected smiley confi-
dence; but he could also compete
wit h Ha zony’s boyish rocking
back and forth between solemnity
and mischief.
“The great divide of our time is not
between Trump supporters and
Trump opponents,” Hawley intoned
in a kind of grand-old-man oratory
that seemed to conjure its own pulpit.
“Or between suburban voters and ru-
ral ones, or between red America and
blue America. No, the great divide of
our time is between the political
agenda of the leadership elite and the
great and broad middle of our society.
And to answer the discontent of our
time, we must end that divide. We
must forge a new consensus. We must
recover and renew the dream of the
republic.” He was getting more Ro-
man every minute. Then he rounded
on his enemy. “Call it the cosmopoli-
tan consensus. On economics, this
consensus favors globalization—
closer and closer economic union,
more immigration, more movement
of capital, more trade, on whatever
terms. The boundaries between
America and the rest of the world
should fade and eventually vanish.
The goal is to build a global consumer
economy, one that will provide an
endless supply of cheap goods, most of
them made with cheap labor overseas
but funded by American dollars.”
According to the cosmopolitan
consensus, globalization was a moral
imperative. The elites distrusted pa-
triotism and “the common culture
that was left to us by our forebears.”
What’s more, they were happy to say
as much for the record. A roll call of
enemies of the people followed. MIT’s
 A PORTRAIT OF
VALOR
FROM A LION OF
THE LEFT
BEFORE HE BECAME A CELEBRATED
POLITICIAN, GEORGE MƜGOVERN
SERVED IN WORLD WAR II AS A
B-24 BOMBER PILOT. HE FLEW IN
THIRTY-FIVE COMBAT MISSIONS AND
EARNED THE DISTINGUISHED FLYING
CROSS FOR HIS INGENUITY IN THE
FACE OF ADVERSITY. MY LIFE IN THE
SERVICE, A FACSIMILE OF THE DIARY
MƜGOVERN KEPT BETWEEN 1944
AND 1945, VISUALLY EVOKES THE
ERA AND PROVIDES A FIRSTHAND
ACCOUNT OF THE ALLIED BOMBING
OF NAZI-OCCUPIED EUROPE.
INTRODUCTION BY
ANDREW J. BACEVICH,
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF
HARPER’S MAGAZINE
STORE.HARPERS.ORG
FRANKLIN
SQUARE
PRESS
Distributed by Midpoint Trade Books,
a division of IPG
Richard Sennett had denounced “the
evil of shared national identity.” Ac-
cording to Martha Nussbaum, it was
morally dangerous to teach students
that they are “above all citizens of the
United States.”
You would have never known from
Hawley’s speech that there are cos-
mopolitans working at Starbucks and
people who believe in socialism rid-
ing bikes for Grubhub. Yet it was still
extraordinary to listen to the feat of
rhetoric: a conservative slipping
seamlessly back and forth between
class-based attacks and cultural ti-
rades, bashing the elite on class
grounds, claiming again—as in the
days of T.R.  (and of Reagan)—that
Republicans were on the side of the
common man against a sequestered
elite that had transformed the ivory
tower into a great turret of the re-
newed culture war. My table was
smitten with Hawley’s embroideries.
Then Hawley dropped into the kind
of national-unity speech that Obama
used to do in his sleep.
For in the heart of our country,
American strength has not failed.
The kind of people who built this na-
tion are here still, waking early and
working late, manning the fire de-
partment and coaching the Little
League, helping the neighbor who
just lost a spouse, donating their gas
money to a needy family halfway
around the world.
And then the theme did become ac-
tually Roman. “I wonder if you re-
member the story of Horatius at the
bridge,” Hawley said. “It happened in
the early days of the Roman republic,
sometime around 500 b.c. The Etrus-
can army, the story goes, marched on
Rome to invade, and the Roman de-
fenses were caught off guard. Eventu-
ally the fighting coalesced around a
bridge leading across the Tiber into
the city. All was chaos. The Roman
generals, surprised and unsure, were
falling back. The city seemed in great
peril. But a junior officer named
Horatius thought otherwise. He saw
that if the Roman army could simply
hold the bridge long enough for the
city to reset its defenses, the republic
could be saved. So as the senior offi-
cers retreated, he advanced. Macaulay
tells us that as he charged to the front
34 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
line, Horatius glanced over his shoul-
der to the Roman hills and caught a
glimpse of his own home there, and
knew that it was worth defending.
And so he took his stand. We know,
with the benefit of history, that the
Roman republic was still then quite
young. Its most glorious days were
still ahead. But Horatius didn’t—
couldn’t—know that as he took up his
position. He only knew that
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods.
“Now we, too, need courage in our
nation’s moment of need. Now we too
need bravery born of love for the
place we call home. For our republic
is yet young, and our greatest days are
yet unwritten—if we will stand.
“So let us stand together, let us
stand for love of country and hearth
and home, let us stand with the con-
viction of Horatius. For—
In yon strait path a thousand
May well be stopped by three:
Now who will stand on either hand,
And keep the bridge with me?
When Hawley had finished, every-
one in the Ritz ballroom stood up. We
were unified and collected. At my ta-
ble there was still the lingering ques-
tion of whether Hawley was an ideo-
logical freeloader—or the real deal.
The truth was that it was the
wrong question. For Trump was do-
ing tricky ideological lifting that
went all but unappreciated by the
NatCons. He fed the richest in soci-
ety in the currency they prefer—
dollars—and he fed his fans lower
down with a temporarily effective
substitute—recognition. It takes a cer-
tain talent to keep so much in the air.
The Trumpists will survive the end
of Trump, but they will also inherit
Trump’s circus act. The dimmer
NatCons aspire to sustain the perfor-
mance; the more earnest want to slip
an actual popular agenda into the mix.
But when the time is ripe, the Grand
Old Party will treat Trumpian ideal-
ism like any debt-ridden entity, sell-
ing it for what they can, once they’ve
stripped it of its parts. Q
 F R O M
THE RADICAL RIGHT
I n tracing the pedigree of the
American conservative move-
ment we must note that from, say,
1935 to 1955 (from the rise of Father
Coughlin to the demise of Joseph
McCarthy), the emergence of a
powerful radical “right” in America
was a possibility. This followed a de-
velopment in Europe, though with
the usual time lag. There, 1920 to
1945 was a quarter-century during
which radicalism was no longer the
monopoly of the left; when neither
Communism nor capitalism but what
is—inadequately and imprecisely—
called “fascism” was the rising and dy-
namic political phenomenon, eventu-
ally leading to the Second World War,
when men such as Hitler and Musso-
lini proved to be the dynamic world
statesmen once Wilson and Lenin
were gone. In the United States, too,
the Depression was followed by the
rise of the popular appeal of radical
nationalists. When in 1941 Senator
Robert A. Taft said that the danger
to America was not Hitlerism but
Communism—for fascism appeals
but to a few, and Communism to the
many—his diagnosis was entirely
wrong; yet less than a decade later
most Americans agreed, having con-
vinced themselves that Communism
was a far greater danger than fascism
had ever been.
It was then, shortly after 1950, that
the American conservative move-
ment made its appearance, and the
great majority of its early proponents
and supporters shared these ideologi-
cal sentiments. In 1950, the designa-
tion “conservative” was still shunned
From “The American Conservatives,” which appeared in the January 1984 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete essay—along with the
magazine’s entire 169-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.
T H E A R C
1 9 8 4
By John Lukacs
by every American politician. Yet by
1950 the opposition to liberalism and
to the Democratic Party and even to
the philosophy of the New Deal was
not restricted to wealthy Republicans.
The development of the Cold War
and the successive revelations about
domestic Communists seemed to have
vindicated Franklin Roosevelt’s na-
tionalist opponents in the minds of
many people. The consequent opinion
that the American alliance with Brit-
ain and Russia against Germany may
have been a mistake altogether was
held by a minority among that major-
ity, mostly by German Americans and
Midwestern populists, but the realign-
ment of American politics that took
shape twenty-five years later was al-
ready in the making.
T he first national magazine of the
conscious conservative move-
ment, William F. Buckley’s National
Review, appeared in 1955, a few
months after McCarthy’s meteoric
fall from political grace had begun.
Many of its subscribers were isola-
tionists, resentful of the American
participation in the Second World
War. When in November 1956 Na-
H I V E
tional Review approved of the Israeli-
British-French attack on Egypt at
Suez (only because Egypt seemed to
have had the support of the Soviet
Union), the magazine lost thousands
of (presumably anti-Jewish) subscrib-
ers. But thereafter a dual development
took place.
On the one hand, most of the isola-
tionism, a fair amount of the Anglo-
phobe nationalism, and a considerable
portion of the religious conservatism
among Irish Americans and many oth-
er American Catholics melted away.
On the other, the American conserva-
tive movement was widening. Its ranks
were no longer composed mainly of
the isolationist remnant but of all
kinds: disillusioned old radicals, ex-
liberals, individualist libertarians, and
ideological anti-Communists—the lat-
ter being the common denominator of
the conservative movement to this
day. As late as 1950, the isolationist
Taft—Eisenhower’s opponent within
the Republican Party—refused the la-
bel “conservative.” By 1960, Eisenhow-
er, the broad-smiling democratic sol-
dier handpicked by Roosevelt for the
command of the crusade against fas-
cism, said that he was a conservative.
In 1941, Charles A. Lindbergh, the
leading figure of American isolation-
ism, said that among his principal
opponents were intellectuals, Anglo-
philes, and Jews. Less than thirty-five
years later a fair number of Ameri-
can intellectuals and American Jews
had opted for neoconservatism. This
was a revolution in American politi-
cal and intellectual history that still
awaits its judicious historian. Q
ARCHIVE 35
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 L E T T E R F R O M R I O D E J A N E I R O

“MY GANG IS JESUS”

Brazil’s evangelicals face the temptations of the drug trade
By Alex Cuadros

W
hen Demétrio Martins was
ready to preach, he pushed a
joystick that angled the seat
of his wheelchair forward, slowly lifting
him to a standing position. Restraints
held his body upright. His atrophied
right arm lay on an armrest, and with
his left hand, he put a microphone to his
Alex Cuadros is the author of Brazillion-
aires. He is working on a book about a tribe
in the Amazon. This article was supported
by the Pulitzer Center.
lips. “Proverbs, chapter fourteen, verse
twelve,” he said. “ ‘There is a way which
seems right to a man, but its end is . . .’ ”
The congregation finished: “ ‘Death.’ ”
The Assembly of God True Grape-
vine was little more than a fluorescent-
lit room wedged between a bar and an
empty lot in Jacaré, a poor neighbor-
hood on Rio de Janeiro’s north side. A
few dozen people sat in the rows of
plastic lawn chairs that served as pews,
while shuddering wall fans circulated
hot air. The congregation was largely
female; of the few men in attendance,
most wore collared shirts and old
leather shoes. Now and then, Martins
veered from Portuguese into celestial
tongues. People rose from their seats,
thrust their hands into the air, and
shouted, “Hallelujah!”
Martins had come to bring three
soldiers of the Comando Vermelho,
Rio’s most powerful drug gang, to
Jesus. “I served in the Comando

A mural commissioned by a member of the Comando Vermelho. All photographs from Brazil,
December 2019, except where noted, by Nadia Shira Cohen for Harper’s Magazine © The artist LETTER FROM RIO DE JANEIRO 37
Vermelho for eight years,” he told the
assembly. “I saw things and I was in-
volved in things that I can’t talk
about. First of all, for legal reasons.
Second, because it would glorify that
which should be thrown in the trash.
But there are a few things I can tell
you to show how God is true and how
God is faithful.”
He described himself as he had been
in the early Nineties, when he could still
walk. At twenty-two, he was a “general
manager” for the gang, overseeing
twenty-five drug-distribution points.
Before snorting cocaine, he used to
scrape it into lines that formed the let-
ters C and V. He made $12,000 a week.
He kept his hair long and kinky, and
he wore gold chains and rings. Women
flocked to him. Yet it was not enough.
“Do you know why a lot of people end
up dead?” Martins asked now. “Be-
cause the more money they make, the
more they want. The more power they
get, the more they want.”
38 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
Late one night, he was walking
down an alleyway with his entourage
when a stranger approached. Martins
and his men raised their rifles, but the
stranger didn’t turn back. “Young man,
God has a plan for you,” the stranger
said, speaking directly to Martins.
“This gun in your hands”—it was a
7.62-mm—“can only take a life if God
allows it. And let me tell you some-
thing: if you keep on like this, you’ll
end up preaching the word of God
from a wheelchair.” The man was a
crente—a born-again Christian, liter-
ally a “believer”— still a curiosity in
the favelas back then.
Martins failed to heed the stranger’s
words, but one day, in July of 1992, they
proved to be prophetic. He was walking
through the favela alone when he was
ambushed by the police. They opened
fire and hit him once in the arm, once
in the torso; the impact spun him
around, and another two bullets lodged
in his back. A sensation of cold flooded
Churchgoers at the Assembleia de Deus Vivendo para Cristo,
in Morro da Pedreira, a favela in the north of Rio de Janeiro
his body. He felt that he briefly rose
outside of himself before returning. He
would never move his legs again, but he
found Jesus. “Look at me,” Martins told
the assembly. “It’s better to lose your
rings and keep your fingers.”
As the service drew to a close, the
wife of another pastor took the micro-
phone and asked someone I’ll call An-
tônio to come to the front. Holding an
infant on his lap, he slouched in shorts
and flip-flops. Later I would learn that
his fellow gang members called him
’Belão—“big hair.” He passed the child
to his pregnant wife, shyly rose from his
seat, and shuffled forward. “I was watch-
ing you, and God showed me a chain
around your feet,” the pastor’s wife told
him. “The devil was plotting against
you. It’s in your hands which path you’re
going to choose. Do you want to accept
Jesus today as your savior?”
Antônio nodded, and the congrega-
tion thundered with applause. He got
down on his knees, and Martins placed
a hand on his head. “My Father,” Mar-
tins said, “God of miracles, God of
mercy.” Antônio smiled. “Forgive his
sins, oh Lord. Write his name in the
Book of Life.”
L
ong the country with the world’s
largest Catholic population,
Brazil now has the second-largest
evangelical population as well, behind
only the United States. In the space of
a generation, the country has seen the
emergence of an entirely new power
structure. In Congress, the evangelical
caucus holds one in three seats. The
mayor of Rio, despite the city’s libertine
image, is a pastor and gospel singer.
Evangelicals helped to elect the coun-
try’s ultra-conservative president, Jair
Bolsonaro, a Catholic who was rebap-
tized by a Pentecostal pastor in the
River Jordan. The movement seeks to
bring biblical morality to a nominally
secular nation: teaching creationism in
schools, limiting LGBTQ rights, ensur-
Demétrio Martins preaching at the Igreja Pentecostal Marchando pela Fé in Belford Roxo, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro
ing that drugs and abortion remain
criminalized. But the work of spreading
the Gospel in Brazil presents unusual
challenges. Reaching the poor means
contending with drug gangs, which are
not mere agents of violence and addic-
tion but major employers and the de
facto authorities on their turf. To preach
in these areas, a pastor needs the local
boss’s blessing.
For centuries, Catholicism was Bra-
zil’s official religion, but the Church
tolerated a popular form of syncretism
born when enslaved Africans dis-
guised their deities as Christian saints.
Evangelical Christianity was all but
unheard of in the country until Pente-
costalism was introduced in 1910.
Four years earlier, the one-eyed son of
former slaves had started the move-
ment in Los Angeles. When two Pen-
tecostal missionaries heard the voice
of God saying “para, para,” they
searched an atlas, discovered the state
of Pará, in northern Brazil, and
bought one-way steamship tickets. In
Belém, the capital city at the mouth
of the Amazon River, their promise of
miracle cures drew legions of the poor
and dispossessed. Self-styled pastors
soon founded churches of their own,
importing new American ideas such
as the prosperity gospel. Exorcising
demons with Yoruban names like
Exú, they also found a way to accom-
modate the Afro-Brazilian tradition
even while branding it as unholy.
As Brazil’s cities swelled over the
course of the twentieth century, this
new strain of Pentecostalism took root
in the favelas—the informal neighbor-
hoods built by migrants from the
countryside. Meanwhile, the same
governmental failures that proved
conducive to an ecstatic faith move-
ment also gave rise to organized crime.
The Comando Vermelho, or Red
Command, emerged in the 1970s, dur-
ing the military dictatorship, when
left-wing insurgents were locked up
LETTER FROM RIO DE JANEIRO 39
with drug dealers, bank robbers, and
murderers at a maximum-security
penitentiary on an island near Rio.
The leftists taught their fellow inmates
the discipline and tactics of urban
guerrillas, and a new kind of gang was
born—one that would thrive far be-
yond prison walls.
Rio’s favelas were an ideal base for
the drug trade. Blanketing steep
hills throughout the city, some em-
bedded among wealthy beachside
neighborhoods, they formed dense
labyrinths with natural choke points
at their entrances. To win over resi-
dents, the Comando Vermelho paid
for food and medicine, and punished
crimes like robbery and rape. Soon,
though, rival gangs emerged, copying
the Comando Vermelho model.
Rogue police officers also created milí-
cias that extorted “taxes” for gas and
electricity. The result was a shifting
archipelago of criminal fiefdoms per-
petually at war with one another.
40 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
Martins grew up far from the beach,
in a patchwork of favelas known as the
Complexo do Alemão, on Rio’s sprawl-
ing north side. As a kid in the 1970s, he
flew kites and played soccer. When
he was fourteen, he started smoking
marijuana and huffing cheirinho da loló,
a cocktail of chloroform and ether. He
went to baile funk parties—all-night
sprees of Miami Bass–inspired rap—and
fell in with the gang members who
funded them. They lent him guns to
carry out robberies. Eventually, he grew
close to a rising star in the Comando
Vermelho, Orlando the Player (so nick-
named for his soccer prowess). In 1990,
Orlando took control of Alemão in a
bloody raid, with Martins fighting
alongside him.
In those days, gang members sought
protection from the spirits of Afro-
Brazilian syncretism—like Zé Pilintra,
the zoot-suit-wearing entity tradition-
ally honored by hustlers and bohemi-
ans, or St. George, the Catholic stand-
Martins and his wife, Marta, praying for two traficantes
in for the Yoruban god of war. On
Alemão’s highest hill, Orlando had an
altar built to honor them. Every night,
powerful lights flickered on, and the
altar became visible from the bridge
across Rio’s bay, making it a kind of
gangland variant of the city’s Christ
the Redeemer statue. Martins himself
frequented a pai de santo, an Afro-
Brazilian priest, who gave him a neck-
lace of black and red beads to “seal” his
body. When he went to war, he needed
only to wrap the necklace around his
wrist; he would always hit his target,
and no bullet would touch him.
Martins’s violent encounter with
the police occurred as the evangelical
wave in Brazil was becoming a main-
stream force. Pastors now gave ser-
mons on the radio and television.
Born-again politicians were starting to
win elections. And in the favelas, too,
the nature of power was changing. In
1994, Orlando’s altar was destroyed
by a crente, and Orlando was shot to
death by a rival gang. The altar would
never be rebuilt. The new boss of the
Comando Vermelho was only seven-
teen, but a Pentecostal pastor already
had his ear.
A year ago, I flew to Rio and fol-
lowed Martins around for a few weeks
as he preached. I hoped to reconcile
two competing narratives of the evan-
gelical church’s role in the favelas. For
the country’s poor, all but neglected
by the state, churches serve not only as
a source of spiritual salvation but as a
haven of last resort—a place to find
community, job tips, and counseling,
or simply to gather and sing without
fear of violence. Yet stories of crooked
pastors abound in the new Brazil; in
recent years, several have been caught
transporting weapons for the drug
trade. While many gang members find
in Jesus the courage to quit this life,
others seem to have internalized a
skewed set of biblical lessons, even
committing acts of violence in Jesus’
Congregants at the Igreja Pentecostal Terra de Embaixadores de
Jesus Cristo, in Vila Kennedy, a favela in the west of Rio de Janeiro
name. The new evangelical elite, in
turn, proffer a version of this misread-
ing on a larger scale.
Martins claimed to be waging a
“war” for gang members’ souls. He
seemed sincere in his mission, yet he
was anything but antagonistic to Rio’s
drug bosses, whom he still greeted with
a smile on the streets of Alemão. I
wondered whether he was doomed to
be misunderstood by such people—or,
worse, co-opted. To me, his efforts
hinted at another war being fought in
the favelas, one for the soul of the
church itself.
E
ntering Chapadão, a Comando
Vermelho area, Martins’s taxi
driver rolled down the win-
dows, letting in the sticky Rio air, so
the local sentries could see our faces.
We weaved around cement barricades
meant to slow down the police. Dull
red cinder-block shacks sat one atop
the other, and I caught whiffs of raw
sewage. Power lines hung in low, an-
archic bundles—informal hookups to
the grid. The favelas have changed
quite a bit in recent decades, not least
in the profusion of evangelical chur-
ches. On many of the winding, narrow
streets, bright signs advertised various
Assemblies of God.
Cresting a hill, we parked at a church
across the street from what looked
like a lone stall at a farmers market.
“That’s a boca de fumo,” Martins said,
meaning a point of sale for drugs (liter-
ally, a “mouth of smoke”). Two teen-
agers manned a table displaying baggies
of various substances. One played with
his phone, a Kalashnikov slung care-
lessly across his chest. Just before the
service was about to start, a member of
the church invited the dealers to at-
tend. The kids said they couldn’t aban-
don their post, but maybe next time.
As an itinerant preacher, Martins
brought gang members to Jesus in
favelas across Rio. I wondered how he
LETTER FROM RIO DE JANEIRO 41
could hope to overcome the logic and
allure of gang life in an area like this.
I wondered, too, whether he felt any
fear. “The Bible says that where sin
abounds, the grace of God abounds
even more,” he told me. “What’s dan-
gerous is if the police show up, and
there’s a confrontation, and you’re
caught in the middle. But there’s no
risk from the gangs themselves. On
the contrary, they call us. They re-
quest the presence of the church.”
The gangs see the church as neutral,
Martins said. Pastors often preach in the
communities where they grew up, and
they would never report a local trafi-
cante to the police. This allows them to
mediate conflicts with a unique sort of
authority. He told me about a pastor
who’d saved someone from a gang’s
death sentence by citing Matthew 5:7, to
the executioner: “Blessed are the merci-
ful, for they shall obtain mercy.”
Still, Martins insisted that no one
who sells drugs can truly call himself
42 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
evangelical. “To convert means to
change one’s path,” he said. A gang
member might have faith, might fre-
quent church, but to be born again—
and to gain access to heaven—he has
to repent and quit. In Martins’s view,
this makes the evangelical church
Brazil’s most important social institu-
tion. Every time someone in the fave-
las converts, “that’s one less drug
dealer, one less kidnapper, one less
murderer, one less drug addict, one
less robber.” In a country with sixty
thousand murders a year, this is a wor-
thy mission. The government provides
few alternatives for wayward young
men. All the gangs see of the state is
the police and the prison system.
Pastors also offer concrete help to
former gang members, providing law-
yers for those who might serve time and
even distributing donations to their
families. One day, Martins took me to
a free drug-rehabilitation center run by
the True Grapevine, the church where
I had watched Antônio accept Jesus.
The rehab center was on a plot of land
in Rio’s northwestern outskirts, with a
soccer field, a chapel, a kitchen, and
several rooms containing bunk beds.
Men in sweat-stained clothes per-
formed yard work or read the Bible.
Martins told me that Antônio would
have to be interned here, far from the
temptations of home, to get clean as he
prepared for baptism. Gang members
use drugs as well as sell them—cocaine
to stay alert for late-night invasions,
marijuana to take the edge off.
The center’s head counselor, Fel-
lipe Santos, was thirty and had deep
acne scars. He himself had been in
the Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP),
or Pure Third Command, a Comando
Vermelho rival, but converted in
prison. From his cell, he’d carried
out fake kidnappings, calling num-
bers at random, and crying to the
person who answered, “Oh Daddy,
oh Daddy,” or, “Mother, help me!”
A corner in Vila Kennedy
until someone let slip a name. Then
he would switch voices and tell the
person to deposit money in an ac-
count or their “son” would die. One
day, he tried to scam a born-again
Christian, who said he had been sent
by God to help him. The call changed
Santos’s life.
A Brazilian prison guard’s job is
mostly preventing escape. On the
inside, the gangs each have their own
tacitly recognized territories where
they dominate almost every other
aspect of inmate life. But evangelicals
also control an area where drugs, al-
cohol, cigarettes, and pornography are
prohibited, and visiting pastors bap-
tize converts in plastic kiddie pools. If
you break a gang’s rules, which en-
compass everything from bathroom
schedules to prohibitions on sexual
violence, the only way to avoid a beat-
ing is to join the “believers.” Unsur-
prisingly, many inmates make a show
of conversion, only to abandon the
Patients at the Assembly of God True Grapevine’s drug-rehabilitation center during a morning devotional sermon
church upon release. In the mean-
time, they must pray multiple times a
day, and the gangs will be watching
to see that they’re sincere.
Santos was sincere. He’d aban-
doned favela slang and traded in his
shorts and flip-flops for button-downs
and ties. On top of his duties as a
counselor, he now helps to spread the
word of God. Even his former enemies
respect his change of heart. The oth-
er day, he told me, he was getting off
a bus when a group of kids with auto-
matic rifles called out to him. The
area was controlled by the Amigos
dos Amigos, or Friends of Friends, a
TCP rival.
“Remember me?” one of them asked.
“I don’t remember you, blessed
one,” Santos replied.
“I remember you, but I can see
you’re a man of God now.”
“Amen,” Santos said.
“No worries, brother,” the kid said.
“No need to be afraid.”
“Now that you’ve stopped me, let
me pray for your life,” Santos re-
sponded. Then the soldiers laid their
guns on the ground, and he told them
about Christ’s love.
I
n one favela that I visited, mu-
rals of biblical scenes— the Last
Supper, Moses parting the Red
Sea—covered the walls. Between
them, cursive quotations stretched
across a background of bright clouds.
There was Psalm 91:7, promising
protection from disease and death:
“A thousand may fall at your side, ten
thousand at your right hand, but it
will not come near you.” There was
Isaiah 40:31: “But those who trust in
the Lord will find new strength.”
And Deuteronomy 17:12: “Anyone
who shows contempt for the judge or
for the priest who stands ministering
there to the Lord your God is to be
put to death.” Shirtless young men,
pistols in their waistbands, smoked
LETTER FROM RIO DE JANEIRO 43
joints next to graffiti reading, “Jesus
is the dono”— the owner—“of this
place.” Dono is also the term for a
favela’s drug boss.
Some gang members, Martins con-
ceded, simply want to appease born-
again girlfriends or mothers with these
sorts of homages. Others are seeking
the same kind of supernatural protec-
tion Martins once found in Afro-
Brazilian syncretism. In the favela of
Acari, the sociologist Christina Vital
da Cunha has recorded what she calls
oração de traficante—the gang mem-
ber’s prayer. Ever y mor ning at
five-thirty, one soldier addresses the
others by walkie-talkie, asking God to
watch over the favela’s workers, its
children, and the gang itself: “Lord, I
ask you protection not for myself but
for my friends. Free them from death,
Lord, and may they not be treacher-
ously killed, and may they not kill any
police officer or enemy who attacks
our favela.”
44 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
The church also offers solace that
can make gang life more tolerable.
After a service in a favela one night, I
followed a young man I’ll call João to
his car. He sat in the driver’s seat,
holding an AR-15 on his lap; when he
spoke, I noticed braces on his teeth.
He was only twenty-two but had been
in the TCP for five years. His family
was Catholic, and he had found the
inflamed Pentecostal style frightening
at first, but no Catholic priest had ever
approached him at a boca de fumo, as
the local pastors did. Explaining why
he had accepted their invitations, he
said, “I started having bad dreams, just
death stuff and prison. I would feel my
heart being squeezed and annoying
jolts in my body.”
Just a few nights earlier, the police
had set up an unexpected blockade in
the favela. João was driving through
when they ordered him to stop and
get out of the vehicle. He was stalling,
claiming to be an ordinary favela res-
The Vila Cruzeiro favela, a stronghold of the Comando Vermelho, in May 2010
ident, when a couple of friends in an-
other car sped through without stop-
ping. The police opened fire. João
took the opportunity to drive away,
but one of his friends was killed.
Though he hadn’t been to church for
a while, he returned the very next
day. “There are times when you go
heavy and come back calm,” he said.
He didn’t understand everything the
pastor preached, but sometimes he got
goose bumps.
“There are days I wake up crying,”
he went on, flicking the safety back
and forth on his gun. He knew the
drug trade was wrong in God’s eyes.
His pastor wasn’t shy about telling
him this. But some weeks he earned
the equivalent of $500—around eight
times the country’s minimum wage—
and he had no idea how else to sup-
port his wife and three children. “Not
all gang members want to be in the
drug trade to do bad things,” he said.
The way he saw it, the gang didn’t
just sell drugs; it helped the commu-
nity by doling out food, medicine,
cooking gas. The local boss also paid
for gospel singers to perform at con-
certs in the favela.
The boss, João said, was very de-
vout. He always tried to avoid “the
trunk,” which is to say, killing people.
Even when someone committed theft
or rape— capital crimes in other
favelas—he preferred merely to have
them beaten.
A
month after Martins’s sermon
at the True Grapevine, An-
tônio had yet to move into
the rehab center. I returned to the
church on my own to speak to him.
Throughout the service, he occasion-
ally buried his head in his hands;
when the congregation sang, he did
not mouth the words. He had yet to
adopt the dressed-up look of evangeli-
cal men in the favelas. He wore a tank
top, his hair gelled into shiny curls.
Afterward, he told me he had been a
A patient reading the Bible at the rehabilitation center
“slave” to the drug trade for fifteen
years—half his life. “But now I’m go-
ing to be coming every week without
fail,” he said. “I’m not going back.”
Antônio’s pastor also sought to “free”
young men from Afro-Brazilian faiths
such as Candomblé and Umbanda.
Their spirits, he said, were manifesta-
tions of the Enemy. The pastor was far
from alone in his denunciation. The
decline of Afro-Brazilian faiths is not
just the result of changing preferences.
Some gang members yearn to express
their devotion to God but are so ac-
customed to the language of force that
they hear this talk of an Enemy as a
declaration of holy war. In recent years,
the so-called narcopentecostais have
mounted escalating attacks on Afro-
Brazilian temples, sometimes posting
videos as warnings to others. One shows
a man in a T-shirt printed with Jesus’
face, ripping apart sacred necklaces,
while another tells the temple’s priest,
“Don’t you know that the boss doesn’t
want your superstition here? I belong to
the honor and glory of Jesus.” He waves
a baseball bat that reads dialogo in
front of the camera. “It’s just a dialogue
I’m having with you,” he says. “If I catch
you again or you try to rebuild this shit,
I’ll kill you.”
The victims of such attacks were
afraid to speak to me, even though I
promised not to print their names.
While I was in Rio, an Afro-Brazilian
priest named Leandro Souza de Jesus
was murdered inside his temple. But
one Candomblé priestess, a mãe de
santo I’ll call Xica, agreed to receive
me in a sitting room decorated with
statues of Jesus, the Wise Men, and
Oyá, a spirit from the Niger River.
She told me some of her disciples
lived in Cidade Alta, a favela re-
cently taken over by the TCP. Men
in suits went door-to-door to deliver
letters announcing that it was now
forbidden to practice macumba—a
derogatory term for Afro-Brazilian
LETTER FROM RIO DE JANEIRO 45
faiths—or even to wear all white, as
required for their rituals. “Jesus has
ordained that the community of Ci-
dade Alta be freed from this evil,”
the letter said.
One of Xica’s disciples, herself a mãe
de santo, shut down her temple and
moved away, but another decided to
continue practicing in secret. Some-
one alerted the gang, and she was or-
dered to stop, but she didn’t. Early one
morning, in the middle of a ceremony,
a convoy of motorcycles showed up.
Four men broke in, shooting into the
air to scare off worshippers. They
threw the elderly woman to the
ground, beat her, and smashed her
altars to pieces.
As we spoke, Xica called out for a
disciple who still lived in Cidade
Alta. A young woman walked in,
kneeled, and kissed the priestess’s
hand before taking a seat. She wore a
white head wrap; her body looked
tense, her expression shy.
46 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
“How is your saint?” Xica asked,
referring to the spirit her disciple
worshipped.
“He’s on top of a wardrobe, hidden.”
“Hidden why?” asked Xica, prod-
ding her forward.
“Because if they find something
they’ll break it and kick us out.”
“Kicked out of your house, and
then they put—”
“—other people to live in your
house,” the disciple finished. “Their
people.”
Xica said there were pastors who
blessed the TCP’s weapons, who blessed
its drugs. This seemed a stretch to
me at the time, but Martins later
told me that he had himself seen a
woman from an evangelical church
anointing a gang’s rifles with holy
olive oil. Martins did not agree with
this practice. He condemned the
gangs’ attacks on Afro-Brazilian tem-
ples. “They think that they’re pleas-
ing God and that God will protect
Candomblé worshippers pray at the Parque Ecológico dos Orixás, outside Rio
de Janeiro, during celebrations of Oxum, the Yoruban spirit of freshwater.
them,” he told me. “But this is wrong.”
Even he, though, called these religions
“witchcraft.” My first night at the True
Grapevine, Martins had blamed a
spirit known as Pomba Gira, who takes
the form of a voluptuous woman in a
red dress, for leading young men into
the drug trade.
M
artins told me he never took
drug money, even when he
was hospitalized with Fourni-
er’s gangrene a few years ago. The doc-
tor said that Martins could no longer
sit for extended periods and that to
continue preaching he would need a
five-thousand-dollar wheelchair that
could support him in a standing posi-
tion. A drug boss offered to buy it for
him, but he refused. It was in part a
practical matter: “I’d be giving them the
right to frequent my home, to stash
things there,” he said. He also felt he
would lose the moral authority to per-
suade them to quit their lives of sin.
Fortunately, he said, a group of evan-
gelicals in Switzerland purchased the
wheelchair for him.
Martins did not lead a life of luxury.
He didn’t even own a car. He accepted
whatever donation a church might offer
him to preach, and after every sermon
he sold DVDs of his conversion story
for ten reais (around $2.50), along with
bonbons made by his wife—Marta,
whom he met in church—for two reais.
Still, he acknowledged that some pas-
tors commit “bad testimony.”
After Orlando the Player was killed
in 1994, seventeen-year-old Márcio dos
Santos Nepomuceno—better known
as Marcinho VP— became boss of
Alemão. Marcos Pereira da Silva is the
pastor who taught him about Jesus.
Though Marcinho went to prison just
three years later, he continued to rise
within the Comando Vermelho, and
Pereira continued to visit him, becom-
ing a trusted ally. In 2004, a riot
broke out at a different prison. In-
mates from the Comando Vermelho
Members of Ilê Omon Oyá Legi, a Candomblé temple, during a celebration of three female
deities: Oxum; Lemanjá, the spirit of salt water; and Yansa, the spirit of wind and storms
tied up the guards and took their
weapons. One guard and thirty-four
inmates from rival gangs were killed,
their bodies mutilated and set on fire.
The leaders of the uprising said they
would negotiate only with Pereira, so
police flew him in by helicopter and
the uprising was quelled.
One night, I went to Pereira’s
church, the Assembly of God of the
Final Days, in Rio’s rough northern
suburbs, for a celebration of his sixty-
second birthday. A few hundred peo-
ple stood in front of a brightly lit
stage in the parking lot, rapt before a
lineup of gospel singers and born-
again politicians. After the 2004 up-
rising, Pereira was often called in to
mediate prison riots, and he became
a kind of celebrity, growing close to
evangelical power brokers. Police sus-
pected that he was more than just a
pastor to his gangland flock; he had
started sporting Rolexes and driving
vintage cars, and his church had
somehow acquired the title to a
$2  million apartment on Copaca-
bana Beach. In 2013, a former Co-
mando Vermelho soldier told investi-
gators that Pereira was laundering
drug money in the form of tithes to
his church. Prosecutors accused
Pereira of acting as a “carrier pigeon”
for Marcinho, helping to coordinate
attacks on the police and even or-
chestrating prison riots himself to
raise his profile.
Pereira did not hide his easy transit
with gangs. In videos uploaded by his
church, he descends on baile funk par-
ties, commandeers the sound system,
and turns the gang-run revels into re-
vival scenes. After managing to get
backstage at his birthday celebration, I
met the daughter of an imprisoned drug
lord from Penha known as F.B. Like all
of Pereira’s female disciples, she wore a
billowy pastel robe. She showed me pic-
tures on her phone of how she used to
dress—short shorts, high heels—before
LETTER FROM RIO DE JANEIRO 47
she’d accepted Jesus. Now she was mar-
ried to Pereira’s son, also a pastor, who
ministered to gang members in the
northeast of Brazil.
Pereira was ultimately acquitted
of drug charges for lack of evidence,
but during the investigation several
women—members of his church—
said that he had sexually assaulted
them. One of the victims was fourteen
when Pereira told her to stop shav-
ing her legs and wear the full-body
robe. When her family protested, he
claimed the devil was influencing
them and moved her into a church
residence with thirty other women.
According to her testimony, he told
her she was possessed by a “lesbian
spirit” and the cure was to have sex
with him. Some of the women said he
threw orgies in the residence, order-
ing them to confess their sins at the
end. They also said his private doctor
had carried out abortions. In 2008,
one woman intended to go to the po-
48 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
lice; she was murdered before she had
the chance.
In September 2013, Pereira was sen-
tenced to fifteen years in prison for
rape, but by then his power reached far
beyond the favelas. In Brasília, the
evangelical caucus sprang to action.
Calling him a victim of religious
persecution, several congressmen—
including Brazil’s future president,
Bolsonaro—lobbied for his release. On
Christmas Eve of 2014, a Supreme
Court justice freed him on a technical-
ity. (Pereira has always denied the ac-
cusations against him, and he was
never charged in connection with the
2008 murder.)
Before visiting Pereira’s church, I
spoke with him by phone. He asked
whether my magazine could get him
into the United States; he had been
turned back at the Dallas airport a few
years earlier. “I want to prove to the
American authorities,” he explained,
“that what makes a man rape, steal,
Letícia Souza prays during a sermon by Martins in Morro da Pedreira.
and snort is a satanic force.” When I
arrived in Rio, though, he refused to
speak in person. At his birthday party
I found him in a blinding-white three-
piece suit, holding forth in a VIP room
hung with Brazilian and Israeli flags. I
approached, and he grasped my hand,
but when I told him who I was he
abruptly walked away. I returned to
the crowd to watch him preach as a
balloon printed with his smiling face
floated overhead.*
O
ne day, Martins took me to
meet Marcinho VP’s wife,
Márcia Gama. She lives in a
middle-class neighborhood on Rio’s west
side, on a large property hidden behind
vine-covered walls. Passing through a
wooden gate, I was surprised not to see
any guards. Kids ran in and out of
lavender-painted buildings with clay-tile
roofs. Palm trees rose from closely
*
When contacted later by Harper’s Maga-
zine, Pereira said that my account was “all
lies” and that I was possessed by the devil.
trimmed lawns; out back were a small
pool and a cement soccer court. It
hardly compared to the estates of Pablo
Escobar, but it was a big improvement
for Gama, who grew up poor in Alemão.
Sitting on a wicker chair on her
front porch, Gama wore sweatpants
and a T-shirt, with a discreet gold
chain around her neck. She referred to
her husband as “the person the media
claims to be one of the biggest drug
lords of Rio de Janeiro, boss of the Co-
mando Vermelho.” But the man she
knew was “God-fearing.” He taught
others in the gang to pray. He even
wrote lyrics for their daughter Débora,
a gospel singer. Still, he had not yet
been born again, she said: “He still has
too much outrage inside him.” The
state, she explained, unjustly blamed
him for every crime committed by the
Comando Vermelho. In 2007, for in-
stance, he was convicted of having two
of his rivals murdered, cut into pieces,
and stuffed into a manhole.
Gama herself was arrested in 2010,
after the city of Rio announced a plan
to kick out the drug gangs and install
a permanent police presence in the
favelas. The gangs responded by set-
ting fire to buses, attacking police
stations with heavy weaponry, and
stopping traffic on freeways to rob
drivers. Gama was accused of using
conjugal visits to help coordinate the
assault. She was also accused of laun-
dering drug money, and she spent six
months in jail. She compared herself
to the apostle Peter, who was freed
from prison by an angel. “I don’t have
anything to do with gangs,” she told
me. “My gang is Jesus.”
Gama, too, was evangelized by
Pereira. She’d been born again after
her husband went to prison. “I can talk
to anyone in the drug trade about Je-
sus,” she said. She pulled out her
phone, opened WhatsApp, and
showed me emoji-laden messages with
the wife of Menor P., one of the im-
prisoned leaders of the TCP. “He’s the
enemy of my husband, but she loves
me,” Gama said. The two women be-
came friends after Marcinho asked
Débora to sing at the prison where he
and Menor P. were both serving time.
Menor P. was so impressed that he in-
vited Débora to perform at his birth-
day celebration, held in his absence in
his home favela of Maré.
Martins used to administer a private
service every week at Gama’s home, but
after he came down with gangrene, a
rail-thin pastor named Cléber Gil, also
from Alemão, took over. When I at-
tended a few days later, Gil stood on a
back patio and gave an unusual sermon
about Joseph in Egypt. Having been
sold as a slave to Potiphar, the captain
of Pharaoh’s guard, Joseph was falsely
accused of attempting to rape Poti-
phar’s wife. And yet, Gil pointed out,
Potiphar put Joseph not in just any
prison, but in the one that held Pha-
raoh’s prisoners: “Potiphar could have
put Joseph in state prison, but he put
Joseph in federal prison.”
Gil repeated this analogy a few more
times. While it might have seemed
strange to another congregation, he
didn’t need to remind Gama that her
husband had been transferred from a
state prison in Rio to a federal prison
hundreds of miles away, to limit his
communications with the rest of the
gang. Now Gama could visit him only
once every other week. Conjugal visits
were forbidden—even after an evan-
gelical congressman brought her to
Brasília to lobby the country’s justice
minister for a reprieve.
“But God has his purposes,” Gil
went on. Because Joseph was impris-
oned with Pharaoh’s cup bearer, he
would later be summoned to inter-
pret Pharaoh’s dreams, and Pharaoh
would name Joseph vizier of Egypt.
“God had to take Joseph to federal
prison so that he could arrive in the
place that He wanted,” Gil said. The
implication was clear: God had a
plan for Marcinho.
“That is our God,” Gil said.
“Glory to God,” Gama said.
T
oward the end of my time in
Rio, I went to see Martins
preach at a tiny, sweltering
church in a favela on the city’s west
side. Afterward, as two young church-
goers helped him sell DVDs and bon-
bons, the head pastor told us that the
local drug boss had been in attendance.
He had started coming to her services
after being wounded in a shoot-out.
“Pray for me, pray for me,” he begged
her. “I don’t want to die.”
“Do you expect God to give you
another chance?” she asked him.
“This is your last one.”
The pastor’s son said she shouldn’t
associate with such people. But she al-
ways welcomed the local boss, always
gave him a blessing when he asked for
one. “He’s very feared here, you know?”
she said to Martins. “What he says
becomes law. If we have someone like
that coming to Jesus . . . ”
“He has credibility,” Martins said.
“He can influence people. Someone
like that, converted—his word is like
a gunshot.”
From the church patio, high on a hill,
we could see the lights of the city extin-
guishing themselves in the sea. A few
doors down, a baile funk beat erupted,
making our rib cages thrum. Justifying
his outreach to Rio’s criminal element,
Martins liked to say that only the Truth
could set them free. It was a conscious
symbiosis, and it often bore fruit. But the
Truth is open to interpretation. Even as
they have acquired a newfound respect
for Jesus, the gangs have grown, expand-
ing far beyond Rio, into just about every
city in the country.
Conversion is not always binary;
redemption is not always permanent.
Back at the True Grapevine, Antônio
had said he wanted “a new life.” The
church worked hard to help him
achieve it. Pastors visited his home to
keep him on his path. But after attend-
ing a handful of services, he hadn’t
been seen in months. It appeared he
had slipped back into his old life in the
drug trade, a soldier with his own take
on what it means to have faith. Q
February Index Sources
1 Korea Institute for National Unification
(Seoul); 2,3 IHS Markit (London); 4 Drone
Industry Insights (Hamburg, Germany); 5
Marketplace Pulse (NYC); 6 José Holguín-
Veras, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy,
N.Y.); 7,8 Google (Mountain View, Calif.); 9
Verified Voting (Philadelphia); 10 National
Conference of State Legislatures (Denver);
11,12 Kantar Public (London); 13,14 Gallup
(Atlanta); 15 Kaiser Family Foundation
(Washington); 16 Milliman (Denver); 17,18
American Autoimmune Related Diseases
Association (Eastpointe, Mich.); 19,20 Bureau
of Labor Statistics (Washington); 21 Thomas
Philippon, New York University; 22,23
National Center for State Courts (Williamsburg,
Va.); 24,25 Global Detention Project (Geneva);
26 U.S. Department of State; 27,28 World
Tourism Organization (Madrid); 29,30
Morning Consult (Washington); 31 Captiv8
(San Francisco); 32,33 Harper’s research; 34–
36 YouGov (NYC); 37,38 Glassdoor (Mill
Valley, Calif.); 39 U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office (Alexandria, Va.).
LETTER FROM RIO DE JANEIRO 49
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THE CANCER CHAIR
Is suffering meaningless?
By Christian Wiman
T
he second-worst thing about
cancer chairs is that they are
attached to televisions. Some-
one somewhere is always at war with
silence. It’s impossible to read, so I an-
swer email, or watch some cop drama on
my computer, or, if it seems unavoidable,
explore the lives of my
nurses. A trip to Cozumel
with old girlfriends, a cos-
tume party with political
overtones, an advanced de-
gree on the internet: they’re
all the same, these lives,
which is to say that the
nurses tell me nothing, per-
haps because amid the din
and pain it’s impossible to
say anything of substance, or
perhaps because they know
that nothing is precisely
what we both expect. It’s the
very currency of the place.
Perhaps they are being ex-
cruciatingly candid.
There is a cancer cama-
raderie I’ve never felt. That
I find inimical, in fact.
Along with the official optimism that
percolates out of pamphlets, the mile-
stone celebrations that seem aimed at
children, the lemonade people squeeze
out of their tumors. My stoniness has
not always served me well. Among the
cancer staff, there is special affection
for the jocular sufferer, the one who
makes light of lousy bowel movements
and extols the spiritual tonic of neu-
ropathy. And why not? Spend your
waking life in hell, and you too might
Christian Wiman’s new book, Survival Is a
Style, will be published this month by Far-
rar, Straus and Giroux. He teaches at Yale
Divinity School.
Photograph by Jessica Bruah from the series The Course © The artist
M E M O I R
cherish the soul who’d learned to praise
the flames. I can’t do it. I’m not chipper
by nature, and just hearing the word
cancer makes me feel like I’m wearing
a welder’s mask.
In the cancer chair there is always a
pillow and a blanket. I’ve never used
either, though on two occasions (2007,
2013) my spastic reactions to my cure led
nurses to hurriedly pile blankets on my
feverish form in the way I pile blankets
on my twin girls when they are cold.
Now why did I have to think of that.
The comparison, I mean. It is wildly
inapt: the nurses’ ministrations are effi-
cient and mirthless, and not once have
they concluded with a good tickle. Why
must the mind—my mind—make these
errant excavations into pure pain? I was
just digging along like a dog, chats and
chairs, a pillow and a blanket.
My children have never seen a can-
cer chair. They’ve visited me during
extended hospital stays, but that’s dif-
ferent, and the last one is just far back
enough in their consciousnesses to be,
for now, benign. They remember the
brightly colored fish in the tank down-
stairs, the nice view from my “hotel
room,” and that every night I ordered
an extra pudding and let
them have both. All in all,
great fun.
Often I see a dire child
between the elevators and
the blood-cancer corner.
The children’s hospital is
on the same floor. They are
not all the same, these chil-
dren. Not that I have ever
spoken to one of them, or
learned one detail of their
lives, or even, for one in-
stant, met their or their par-
ents’ eyes. Yet each sighting
shocks the soul like a mo-
ment of negative grace, a
kind of anti-inspiration, a
little shard in the mind that
there is no way to absorb or
dislodge. There is nothing
to remember, except the nothing I’m
unable to forget.
Today it was a bald boy of five or so
poised at the door to the outdoor gar-
den, one hand attached by tubes to his
towering cancer tree, the other held by
his young mother, who was in a kind of
distress that seemed incomprehensible
by its very banality. The boy couldn’t
decide whether to go out to the garden
or not, and the moment had escalated
to a crisis. Nietzsche says that not only
is there no point to pity but that it is
actively malign. To feel your heart
breaking at the sight of a tiny gray-faced
boy whimpering in front of a door—
MEMOIR 51
what does this do but secrete a little
more misery into the atmosphere? I had
my parking validated and my wrist
banded and took a seat where I could
not see them, the young mother and
the old child. They went back into the
children’s hospital. (Are there minia-
ture cancer chairs?) Or they stood out-
side staring at the red cliffs of East
Rock. I looked at my phone. I got a
drink of water I did not want. Then the
next name called was mine.
A
group of cancer chairs is called
a pod. There are four pods in
this corner of my floor (which
is one of fifteen), and all of them, near
as I can tell, are occupied every hour of
every day. Sperm whales, nineteenth-
century accounts say, were once so
numerous a ship could sail all day along
a line of them and never reach the end.
They are intelligent, musical, perhaps
moral. In 2011, a pod adopted a de-
formed bottlenose dolphin, which had
been spurned. Moby Dick was a sperm
whale. “That inscrutable thing is
chiefly what I hate,” says Ahab, “and
be the white whale agent, or be the
white whale principal, I will wreak
that hate upon him.” Whaling was a
dangerous trade. Voyages could last
52 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
years, and hunts often took place in bad
weather, at night, or both. A whaler
could lean to forty-five degrees in the
chase, and sometimes, racing a fierce
wind and with its upper rigging shining
ice, the scales tilted and the whole
crystal ship—and all the bright lives
aboard—went dark.
Whales evolved from land mam-
mals. In essence, evolution reversed
itself, and the creature that had once
crawled out of the sea to survive finally,
and for the same reason, flopped back
in. This is the sort of information that
passes through the brain without leav-
ing a trace, like the fact that there are
forty-six billion light-years between the
edge of my cancer chair and the edge
of the universe, or that a newborn in-
fant contains more information than
all of cyberspace, or that in the time it
takes you to read this sentence, there
will have been seventeen million suc-
cessful cell divisions within your be-
loved body. Or not. I’ve known two
apparently healthy people who died
within a month of their diagnoses. One
minute they were planning dinner,
tending children, stalking holidays.
Then the crystal ship.
Each cancer chair has two folding
trays, one for the nurse’s paraphernalia
“Phases,” by Kellie Klein, from the series Meditations on Water © The artist
and one for the patient’s. Today I need
both sides to accommodate the materi-
als I’ve accumulated for my lecture on
Job in a class I’m teaching called “Suf-
fering.” Have a hammer, use a hammer.
Not that this rote, monthly infusion for
my immune system constitutes suffer-
ing, unless you count the weak coffee,
and the noise seeping into my noise-
canceling earphones, and the fact that
I don’t know how to talk about suffer-
ing without talking about God, and I
am tired of talking about God. “Is it a
how-to course?” a gently skewering wit
asked me when I described the reading
list. I laughed, but when I told the
story to my teaching partner, the theo-
logian Miroslav Volf, he said soberly,
“Damn right it is.” Recently I compiled
an anthology of poems about joy, and
in thinking about suffering it has oc-
curred to me the two abstractions are
alike in at least four ways:
1. They are never abstract.
2. They are inevitable. (I don’t believe
any life is entirely devoid of joy.)
3. They cannot be willed or instru-
mentalized. (Thus I am excluding
any pain that is initiated to serve
an end.)
4. There is something sacred in them,
or at least there can be.
 It’s that last assertion that sticks in
the modern throat. Suffering is simply
something to avoid thinking about for
as long as possible, and then, because
to avoid it forever is impossible, to ex-
punge from the mind the minute one
is beyond the scald. Think of our cul-
ture’s almost Talmudic attention to
physical health or—adjusting the dial
on Oblivion slightly—our national ad-
diction to opiates. Think of the hours
we feed our brains to screens, the numb
way we move from one month’s mass
shooting to the next. Think of the way
we separate the very old from society as
if they were being culled, the stifled,
baffled air of the modern funeral. The
proximate causes for these condi-
tions are many, but the ultimate one,
I suspect, is the same: evasion.
It wasn’t always thus. “Pain that
cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon
the heart, and in our own despite,
against our will, comes wisdom
to us by the awful grace of God.”
That’s Aeschylus twenty-five hundred
years ago. Jump forward half a cen-
tury and you have St. Peter: “But rejoice
in so far as you share Christ’s sufferings,
that you may also rejoice and be glad
when his glory is revealed.” Spin the
globe and skip a millennium and there’s
Rumi: “Keep looking at the bandaged
place. That’s where the light enters you.”
Montaigne: “He who fears he shall suffer,
already suffers what he fears.” Still too far
back? Proust: “We are healed of a suffer-
ing only by experiencing it to the full.”
Dickinson: “He deposes Doom / Who
hath suffered him.” Nietzsche: “The
discipline of suffering, of great
suffering—know ye not that it is only
this discipline that has produced all of
the elevations of humanity hitherto?”
But what if circumstances— and
humanity—really have changed? This
is Yuval Noah Harari’s thesis in Homo
Deus, which argues that we are on the
verge of eliminating suffering from the
existential equation altogether.
Having reduced mortality from starva-
tion, disease and violence, we will now
aim to overcome old age and even
death itself. Having saved people from
abject misery, we will now aim to
make them positively happy. And hav-
ing raised humanity above the beastly
level of survival struggles, we will now
aim to upgrade humans into gods, and
turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.
I hear Satan himself hissing these
sentences (“Here grows the Cure of
all, this Fruit Divine. . . . ”), but my
strenuous revulsion surprised some of
my students, who viewed Harari’s ar-
gument not as a prediction but as an
accurate description of current reality.
We are at Yale, I suppose, and not in
Syria, Honduras, or some other part of
the planet inhabited by the Have-nots.
But never mind the substance of the
argument. That it is an argument, one
taken seriously by people running the
world—Barack Obama and Bill Gates
are both big fans of Harari—is the sa-
lient point. Let’s assume Harari is
right. What might that mean for us?
SOME DAYS FURY COURSES
THROUGH ME WITH THE
CHEMICALS AND ALL I WANT
TO DO IS DESECRATE
Death, I think. One less literal, but
ultimately more fatal, than the one we
fear. This is the world of Nietzsche’s
“Last Men,” who have triumphed over
the traditional agonies of existence
and now bask in neutered happiness.
For Nietzsche, there can be no creativ-
ity without suffering, and there can be
no life without creativity. Nor can one
winnow out the highs and lows of life
like wheat from tares. There is no
(true) joy without suffering and there
is no (meaningful) suffering without
joy. “Joy wants eternity,” Nietzsche
says, and eternity is not escape from
time but all time redeemed. To say yes
to one moment in life is to say yes to
all of them. To feel the joy of kissing
your child on the cheek at night is to
sanction, even to praise, the riot of
cells rotting out the gray-faced boy
outside the cancer garden.
M
y lines are obstructed. This
happens fairly often, espe-
cially if I’m trying to type.
First there is a modest beeping from the
cancer tree, which grows louder if no
nurse comes, finally rising to a shrill
alarm that sends a current of articulate
irritation around the pod. I fiddle with
the controls, but even after all these
years I am helpless. Where the hell is
she, the prettiest nurse in the cancer
pageant? What a stupid thing to say.
Some days fury courses through me
with the chemicals and all I want to do
is desecrate.
In fact, I’m always relieved when I’m
assigned to her station. It seems impos-
sible, but at times I’ve felt nothing when
she inserted the line into my forearm.
I like her placid manner, her Con-
necticut accent (“mittns”), her ambigu-
ous glitter. (Her standard nurses’ clogs
are decorated with polka dots.) I like
the impersonal way she calls me “my
friend,” and the gentle gibes she’ll
sometimes let fall like relics of ordinary
life. What’s it like to carry a face like
hers (and “pretty” is not the right
word) into misery like this? Why
does she have no children? I know
she has a partner and must be ap-
proaching forty. In another environ-
ment, I might learn these things, but
as I say, that’s not the way of the pod.
She comes in and swiftly charms
the alarm (and me) with a curse. And
before I can ask what she thinks
about the meaning of suffering, she’s off
to eliminate another instance of it.
Nietzsche was last week and is still
on my mind. Miroslav said if he
weren’t a Christian he’d be a Nietz-
schean. I’m a Christian and may be a
Nietz schean. Not the whole over-
wrought overman stuff, and not the
conflation of pity and weakness. But I
feel in my bones (literally, alas) the
truth of Nietzsche’s insistence upon
confronting reality as it is, the iron law
of cause and effect that in some in-
stances, as even the most faithful must
admit, God either cannot or will not
break. Nietzsche believed one could fit
oneself to, and thereby conquer, neces-
sity by saying, “Thus I willed it,” as if
the only thing not subject to necessity
were the will of the one who recog-
nized it. This seems a step too far. But
the burn of being I feel in my bones,
which makes life seem so joyful, and
the burn of unbeing that rages right
alongside, which makes that joy so
tragic, seem, ultimately, one thing. As
does the need to align my will with it.
Perhaps the question, with regard to
suffering and what it will mean in your
life, comes down to this: What will be
the object of your faith, and what will
your act of faith look like? Nietzsche
placed great faith both in existence and
MEMOIR 53
 in himself. For forty-four years and thir-
teen books this worked well enough
(though the loneliness of his soul is obvi-
ous). Then, as legend goes, one morning
he saw a horse being beaten and all his
Übermensch armor disintegrated into
madness. He became the thing he’d
warned against: pitying, and thus pitiful.
There’s no obvious allegory here.
Nietzsche changed modern thought
because of the way his mind was made.
He went mad for the same reason. Being
and unbeing shared the same vital, fatal
fuse. His life might have been different
had he been more focused on fully in-
habiting his first faith (life) rather than
shoring up his second one (self), but his
death, which lasted eleven long years,
was a matter of molecules clicking into
place like an elegant proof.
It’s that first faith that remains potent,
a prod and tonic for the tendency to see
human existence and existence itself as
at war with each other. In Albert Ca-
mus’s The Plague, the main character,
Dr. Rieux, tries to explain why he con-
tinues battling the disease that has de-
stroyed his city when his efforts have
made no difference. He is, he admits,
simply “fighting against creation as he
found it.” Rieux’s struggle is both heroic
and quixotic—heroic because quixotic,
I think Camus would say—but it leaves
him lonely and somewhat dead at the
heart. Rieux is beyond Christianity but
still breathing its metaphysical fumes
(his use of the word “creation” is a tell),
one of the most persistent of which is
the idea that we are fundamentally at
odds with the world we inhabit. In this
he differs from Nietzsche. What they
share (along with Camus himself) is the
ancient intuition that suffering and soul
are mysterious cognates.
T
he man in the chair next to me
is in distress. I noticed this when
he hobbled in a while ago, but it
has grown worse. There are no secrets
in a cancer chair, except the one secret
that’s not so much a secret as a silence
everyone has agreed not to name. He’s
naming it. He doesn’t want to die. He
also doesn’t want another cycle of
Bendamustine, or to get the transfusion
that he obviously needs, or to have one
more goddamn appointment with the
E.N.T. for his mouth sores. It’s an im-
passe, but, like all impasses in this place,
momentary: one of those things, and
54 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
probably all of them, will occur. The
man knows this, I can tell, just as he
knows that to suggest a connection be-
tween suffering and soul can be an ob-
scenity to someone in the midst of it.
And not simply an obscenity, but a lie.
This is where Job comes in. Do you
remember the story? Here’s Wisława
Szymborska’s helpful prose poem
“Summary” (translated by Sharon Olds
and Grazyna
˙ Drabik):
Job, tested severely in body and proper-
ty, curses human fate. It is grand poetry.
Friends arrive. Tearing their robes,
they examine Job’s guilt before the
Lord. Job cries that he has been a just
man. Job does not want to talk with
them. Job wants to talk with the Lord.
The Lord appears riding on a gale. In
front of this man torn open to the bone,
the Lord praises His works: heaven,
seas, earth and animals. And especially
Behemoth, and in particular Leviathan,
beasts which fill one with pride. It is
grand poetry. Job listens—the Lord
does not speak to the subject, because
the Lord does not want to speak to the
subject. Promptly then, Job humbles
himself before the Lord. Now things
happen quickly. Job recovers his don-
keys and camels, his mules and sheep,
doubled in number. His skin grows back
on his bared skull. And Job accepts it.
Job is reconciled. Job does not want to
spoil the masterpiece.
The irony is typical of modern re-
sponses to Job. How else to reckon with
this disturbing tale in which God and
Satan wager over one man’s life like
Mob bosses betting on dogs? Job doesn’t
love you for who you are, Satan says, but
for what you’ve given him; take away his
blessings and he will curse you. God,
whose omniscience apparently ends at
the edge of Job’s brain, disagrees. Into
oblivion goes everything and everyone
Job loves. Job is steadfast. Up come the
boils all over his body. This all happens
in a preface, in prose as practical as a
drug pamphlet. Then comes the scream.
The Book of Job is usually read as a
theodicy. If God is all-powerful and all-
loving, as Scripture claims, whence the
bald boy? Job never stops insisting that
he’s innocent. His first speech is a piece
of pure rage cursing his birth, demand-
ing that his entire existence be ex-
punged from the mind of God. I think
Satan actually wins the bet. I don’t
think it’s possible to love God without
loving creation, and I don’t think it’s
possible to love creation without loving
one’s own created being. Thus a curse
of one’s own being is a curse of God’s as
well. There’s no “explanation” of human
suffering in the Book of Job. I’m not
even sure suffering is its real subject, but
rather how—and indeed whether—a
human being can relate to God at all.
Job’s deepest question is not “Why is this
happening to me?” No, his deepest ques-
tion, even in the worst of his curses, is
“Where are you, Lord?”
It takes a while, but eventually God
does respond. With a blast of beauty.
Hath the rain a father? or who hath
begotten the drops of dew?
Out of whose womb came the ice? and
the hoary frost of heaven, who
hath gendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone,
and the face of the deep is frozen.
Canst thou bind the sweet influences
of Pleiades, or loose the bands of
Orion?
Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in
his season? or canst thou guide
Arcturus with his sons?
These are real questions, in the way
the Grand Canyon is a real question,
or King Lear. The only medium for an
answer is a life. I can’t remember the
last time I’ve been so exhilarated and
appalled by a work of art. I have right
here on my cancer chair an essay that
praises Job as a work of profound theol-
ogy adorned with poetry, which is so
spectacularly wrong I have not yet
been able to finish it. As if the poetry
were beside the point. The poetry is
the point. When Job needs to scream
his being to God, it’s poetry he turns
to. When God finally answers, his
voice is verse so overwhelming that Job
is said to “see” it. The speech is a rep-
rimand, yes, but God also allows that
Job has spoken “the thing that is right.”
It’s not obvious what God is referring
to here. Job has said a lot of things. But
the one thing that he’s truly hammered
home is that cry of dereliction, destruc-
tion, and profane (yet not faithless)
rage. Whether Job has torn a rift in the
relation of man and God, or simply
pointed out one that was always there,
it now can never be altogether repaired
or ignored. The destruction, though, is
also a resurrection. God’s being, which
extends from the center of the atom to
the burning edge of the universe and
beyond beyond, is what Job must ac-

cept. But Job’s being, and the rage that
now ramifies through the centuries (“I
will wreak that hate upon him”), is
part of that creation and thus a part of
what God must accept. Jack Miles
points out that in the Hebrew Bible
this speech of God’s is the last word
God utters. God hasn’t silenced Job.
Job has silenced God.
I
stare out the window at East Rock.
It has begun to snow. To speak of
artistic greatness and suffering in
the same breath is another potential
obscenity. That’s what Szymborska is
saying. Yet no real artist ever made a
thing some deep wound didn’t first
demand. East Rock was formed
two hundred million years ago when the
Yale grounds were swamp and a
thousand-pound piece of fury called the
Dilophosaurus waded down Chapel
Street. It’s made of diabase traprock,
which contains iron that causes the
cliffs to look lumpen and rusty in
the wrong light, precise and resplendent
in the right one. This is the wrong one.
Many buildings in New Haven are made
of traprock, including some of the mar-
velous churches that grow older and
emptier every year as God blinks out
brain by brain like the species of flora
and fauna that go extinct every day as
ecosystems implode. Much of that first
rock came from a quarry owned by Eli
Whitney, who went to Yale and in-
vented the cotton gin, an ambiguous
accomplishment both for himself and
for humanity. The design was poorly
patented, easily replicable, and spread
rapidly through the South with little
remuneration for Whitney. Slavery, in
1793, was on the wane because of a de-
crease in the profitability of tobacco
farming, but suddenly cotton production
was accelerated beyond any capacity to
keep up unless there were—in what far-
seeing and no doubt God-fearing brain
did this inspiration first occur?—more
slaves. Many, many more slaves.
I k now a ll t h i s b ec au s e of
Connecticut-in-a-Box, a months-long
research project assigned to local third
graders. I have dug a bit deeper than my
daughters, though. I know, for example,
that Eli Whitney died of cancer a mile
from the edge of my cancer chair. He was
fifty-nine years old and had married for
the first time just eight years earlier. The
bride was Henrietta Edwards, the grand-
THE
daughter of Jonathan Edwards, who is
famous for viewing suffering as appropri-
ate and necessary punishment for “Sin-
ners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
SIXTIES
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE DECADE
FROM HARPER’S MAGAZINE
But Edwards had a mystical side, and not
only preached that Jesus could enter and
ease our greatest griefs but actually ex-
perienced moments of such ecstatic
transport that he wanted only “to lie in
the dust, and to be full of Christ alone.”
Twaddle, Whitney would have
called this. Whitney was indifferent
to religion. He was also indifferent to
poetry, slavery, and pretty much any-
thing that didn’t have a wood screw or
interlocking teeth, but in that realm
he was supremely gifted. One of Whit-
ney’s biographers argues that he an-
ticipated us, who value self-reliance
over piety, technology over poetry,
know-how over knowledge. He never
MCGINNISS
wavered. Near death and suffering
intensely, he ignored the entreaties of
friends anxious about his soul and
spent his time designing a device that
might ease the pain, which he com-
pared to “the rack of the Inquisition.”
It’s hard to describe extreme pain, and
the pain of cancer has an otherworldly
intimacy that makes it almost imper-
vious to words. It feels like existence
itself is eating you.
Anyway, Connecticut’s first flexible
catheter—for that’s what it probably
was, the device Whitney fashioned out
of misery and metal. It brought him
immense relief and might have brought
him and his family abundant money
had they patented the device. By that
point it didn’t matter: they’d all become
wealthy by manufacturing guns. Better
to cause, rather than ease, pain. A true
Last Man, old Eli.
Whitney left behind three young
children. The second of these, Eliza-
beth Fay, was named after Whitney’s
mother, who took to bed when Eli was
six and stayed there until her death
seven years later. She was worn out “by
bearing four children within five years
and by the numberless tasks of the
eighteenth-century farm household.”
LOMAX
Hard not to hear a cry inside that si-
lence. Hard not to think, when Whit-
ney called his daughter’s name, that he
wasn’t sounding a sorrow that every- ORDER TODAY FROM
thing else in his life had been designed
to eradicate. Little Elizabeth survived STORE.HARPERS.ORG
her father by twenty-nine years and FRANKLIN
died at thirty-four. Of her life I know SQUARE
PRESS
Distributed by Midpoint Trade Books,
a division of IPG
MEMOIR 55
only (from a church record) that she
was admitted to the covenant in her
sickroom and “on profession.” Perhaps
she inherited her father’s religious indif-
ference but panicked at the end. Or
perhaps faith, like a gene that skipped
a generation, lay latent within her, and
it took pain to turn it on. Or perhaps
every single day of her short life was a
war of meaning and meaninglessness,
and the way the coin landed at the last
was pure chance.
One human face is as opaque as the
point where time began. And we live
in an age of hordes, numberless floods
of lives. In 2005, newly diagnosed but
not yet ill, I went to Moscow for a
literary festival. It was a mistake. I
couldn’t focus on a sentence, much less
a city. On the last day, numbly wan-
dering the streets, I found myself
standing at a memorial for the Soviets
killed in World War II. All twenty-six
million of them. I felt sickened, not
from moral revulsion but from
vertigo—the steep meaninglessness of
that number. One of those twenty-six
million was the newborn daughter of
a young female radio operator who
went with her unit into a swamp to
hide from approaching Germans. The
baby began to cry from hunger, but
the woman, who was half-starved her-
self, could produce no milk. The Ger-
mans and their dogs came closer. They
were not known for their pity, the
Germans. Can you see her? Thirtyish,
up to her waist in water, her breasts
exposed, trying to muffle the child’s
cries. Where are you, Lord?
GOD’S JUSTICE
In the beginning there were days set
aside for various tasks.
On the day He was to create justice
God got involved in making a dragonfly
and lost track of time.
It was about two inches long
with turquoise dots all down its back
like Lauren Bacall.
God watched it bend its tiny wire
elbows
as it set about cleaning the transparent
case of its head.
The eye globes mounted on the case
rotated this way and that
as it polished every angle.
Inside the case
56 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
which was glassy black like the
windows of a downtown bank
God could see the machinery
humming
and He watched the hum
travel all the way down turquoise dots
to the end of the tail
and breathe off as light.
Its black wings vibrated in and out.
This poem by Anne Carson is basi-
cally the Book of Job in eighteen lines.
On the day that “make justice” appears
in God’s planner, he starts doodling in
the margin and, God’s being being what
it is, raptures into time the world’s first
dragonfly. God, like any artist, prefers
things to themes, prizes the individual
instance over the abstract category.
Thus the sun went down on the day of
justice, and God, if human history is any
indication, never got back to the task.
Twenty-six million Soviets in one war,
sixty million Africans dead in the slave
trade, every single face as replete and
obscure as some holy book in a language
there’s no one left alive to read.
Yet note how that insect is de-
scribed. The universe is 13.8  billion
years old. The first insects emerged
about 412  million years ago, but the
biblical language puts that dragonfly—
along with Adam and Eve—in the
primordial soup. Especially Eve. The
comparison with Lauren Bacall sug-
gests a connection between kinds of
beauty, or suggests, rather, that there’s
always and only one beauty, which is
coextensive with the life of God. Ba-
call, along with the bank windows,
brings us into the present too. If all
beauty is contained in one instance of
it, all time is contained in this (any?)
moment of creation. Humans are not
separate or different from nature, our
existence not fundamentally distinct
from existence itself. And what is the
“nature” of that existence? God sees
the machinery humming. “The beauty
of the world,” says Simone Weil, “gives
us an intimation of its claim to a place
in our heart. In the beauty of the
world brute necessity becomes an ob-
ject of love.”
Of course this means nothing when
confronted with the slaughterhouse of
history. Of course it means nothing
when some pain is tearing your heart in
two. Of course, of course, of course. One
considers the meaning of suffering only
when one is not actually suffering—
again, like joy. Frustrated with the line
between life and literature, Svetlana
Alexievich sought a form that fused the
two. From interviews, letters, bits of his-
tory that History did not want, she com-
piled The Unwomanly Face of War: An
Oral History of Women in World War II,
which I once picked off a library cart
while my daughters searched for graphic
novels. That’s where I learned about the
radio operator drowning her own infant.
And the “sniper girls” who, as they be-
came more expert at death, found them-
selves more susceptible to love. And the
woman who, among all the atrocities,
thought nothing so awful as the neigh-
ing of wounded horses (“They’re not
guilty of anything, they don’t answer for
human deeds”).
One has the fair hair and skin of her
mother, the other the olive skin and
dark eyes of mine. One absorbs the
poems I recite, occasionally saying one
back to me suddenly, without ever hav-
ing seen it. The other, alone among us,
can sing, and sometimes in the midst
of some banal activity will thought-
lessly tear the top of the house off with
a high C. Beauty is not compensatory for
the lack of justice in this life. That’s not
what “God’s Justice” is saying. It’s saying
that God’s justice and the beauty of the
world are—to the eye that will rise to
the sight, or to the eye that grace gives
access—one thing. One day God loses
himself designing a dragonfly. The
next day, who knows, he might have
become equally involved in the design
of a cancer cell.
Miroslav says some thinkers believe
all existence is intertwined and some
believe there’s a crack that runs through
creation. For the first group the task is
to match one’s mind to that original
unity. For the latter the task is one of
repair, resistance, and/or rescue.
Predictably, I find myself in both
camps. I think all creation is unified;
the expression of this feeling is called
faith. And I think a crack runs through
all creation; that crack is called con-
sciousness. So many ways to say this. I
know in my bones there’s no escape
from necessity, and know in my bones
that God’s love reaches into and re-
deems every atom that I am. I believe
the right response to reality is to bow
down, and I believe the right response
to reality is to scream. Life is tragic and
faith is comic. Life is necessity and love
is grace. (Reality’s conjunction is always
and.) I have never felt quite at home in
this world, and never wanted a home
altogether beyond it.
Does that make sense? Of course it
doesn’t. Perhaps it’s not all that different
from Camus’s sense of the absurd,
though it doesn’t leave one (I hope), like
Dr. Rieux, alone and dead at heart. But
we are alone, someone might argue
(Nietzsche: “Our personal and pro-
foundest suffering is incomprehensible
and inaccessible to almost everyone”),
and eventually every heart does go dead
(Weil: “Each second which passes
brings some being in the world nearer
to something he cannot bear”). The first
assertion seems debatable, and not sim-
ply for the religious. We are not as atom-
ized as that. Atoms are not as atomized
as that. Even trees, scientists have
learned, communicate sympathetically
through the soil and air. Surely such
communions are ours as well. But the
second assertion, Weil’s drip drip of
the instants, seems ineluctable. The
Soviet radio operator slowly lowering
her infant under the water, Nietzsche
crumbling into insanity at the sight of
a suffering animal, Eli Whitney with his
burning bowels, the young mother and
the old child outside the cancer garden,
paralyzed before a door.
G
od wears himself out through the
infinite thickness of time and
space in order to reach the soul
and to captivate it. If it allows a pure and
utter consent (though brief as a lightning
flash) to be torn from it, then God con-
quers the soul. And when it has become
entirely his he abandons it. He leaves it
completely alone and it has in its turn,
but gropingly, to cross the infinite thick-
ness of time and space in search of him
whom it loves. It is thus that the soul,
starting from the opposite end, makes the
same journey that God made towards it.
And that is the cross.
—Simone Weil
The cross. Of course I end up here.
These are, after all, divinity students
I’m preparing to teach, though these
days many of them seem to me half
atheist. Weil herself was half atheist.
Camus seems to me half Christian.
Anne Carson describes herself as some-
thing like an atheist but can’t stop writ-
ing about God and for years attended
The Cordless
Catholic mass because “a kind of
thinking takes place there that doesn’t
Reading Lamp
take place anywhere else.” Thinking or
feeling? Weil believed a mystical expe-
rience was the only possible knowledge
of God. She herself had such an experi-
ence and spent the rest of her life cross-
ing “the infinite thickness of time and
space” to find its source. Job’s vision of
God is a mystical experience that
doesn’t make sense of suffering but
renders the question not irrelevant,
exactly, but relevant only to one whose
entire orientation to reality has been
tried and transformed. “Wilt thou hunt
the prey for the lion?” asks God (not
without irony) and “Who provideth for
the raven his food?” By which God
means to say that this marvel of cre-
ation, this infinite flood of love, is
steeped in gore; that “the whole cre-
ation groaneth and travaileth in pain
together” (St. Paul); that “beauty is but
the beginning of terror we’re still just
able to bear” (Rilke); that “I think of
suffering as the highest form of infor-
mation, having a direct connection This is the rechargeable reading
with mystery” (Alexievich); that “the lamp that provides bright light
soul has to go on loving in the empti- anywhere without requiring
ness, or at least go on wanting to love” a power outlet. An internal
(Weil); that “there’s no way not to suf- rechargeable battery powers
fer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep the lamp for up to 10 hours.
from drowning in it, to keep on top of The lamp has 48 LEDs that
it, and to make it seem—well, like you” cast bright white illumination
(Baldwin); that “to be afraid of this without the glare and distortion
death he was staring at with animal produced by an incandescent
terror meant to be afraid of life” (Ca- bulb. A flexible gooseneck can
mus); and “life was dearer to me than be raised, lowered, or twisted
all my wisdom ever was” (Nietzsche). for optimal positioning.
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 A N N O T

THE B
Amazon dreams o
By Jake
On December 7, 2016, a drone departed from an Amazon warehouse in the
United Kingdom, ascended to an altitude of four hundred feet, and flew to a
nearby farm. There it glided down to the front lawn and released from its
clutches a small box containing an Amazon streaming device and a bag of
popcorn. This was the first successful flight of Prime Air, Amazon’s drone
delivery program. If instituted as a regular service, it would slash the costs of
“last-mile delivery,” the shortest and most expensive leg of a package’s journey
from warehouse to doorstep. Drones don’t get into fender benders, don’t hit
rush-hour traffic, and don’t need humans to accompany them, all of which,
Amazon says, could enable it to offer thirty-minute delivery for up to 90 per-
cent of domestic shipments while also reducing carbon emissions. After years
of testing, Amazon wrote to the Federal Aviation Administration last sum-
mer to ask for permission to conduct limited commercial deliveries with its
drones, attaching this diagram to show how the system would work. (Amazon
insisted that we note that the diagram is not to scale.) Amazon is not the
only company working toward such an automated future—UPS, FedEx, Uber,
and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, have similar programs—but its plans
offer the most detailed vision of what seems to be an impending reality, one
in which parcel-toting drones are a constant presence in the sky, doing much
more than just delivering popcorn.

One of the first things Amazon’s growing flock of drones will need is
a central hub, the aerial equivalent of a rail yard. Amazon already
has dozens of warehouses across the country, but in a number of re-
cent patents, the company has also proposed building “multi-level
fulfillment centers” in “densely populated areas.” One of these hypo-
thetical drone hubs resembles an enormous beehive, a conical high-
rise with dozens of drone portholes instead of regular windows, like
something out of a Pixar film. Trucks would arrive from other ware-
houses, human and robot workers would shuttle packages through
the hive, and “pods or other mechanisms may transport [drones] to-
ward a top of the fulfillment center,” onto a kind of launchpad where
“a lift assist mechanism” would apply a burst of “external force” to
help the drones take off, like a mother pushing baby birds out of the
nest. This shift in the company’s delivery infrastructure could cause
a steep reduction in its reliance on Postal Service carriers and inde-
pendent contractors, though Amazon denies this, citing projected
growth in consumer demand.

Amazon’s latest drone model has six propellers, can fly for up to fifteen miles at a stretch,
and can carry packages weighing up to five pounds (which would accommodate up to
90 percent of its shipments), but a company spokesperson said that the tech giant will
keep developing different kinds of drones. So far, they have submitted at least four differ-
ent models for FAA consideration and have filed hundreds of other patents for drone
bodies, motors, and sensors. The final model will almost certainly have both a set of
propellers to enable vertical takeoff (like a helicopter) and a set of fixed wings to speed
lateral flight (like a jet). It’s this design that would allow Prime Air drones to zip over a
cityscape at more than fifty miles an hour before lowering themselves just-so between
trees and telephone wires.

58 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020

 A T I O N

BIRDS
f a drone-filled sky
e Bittle
The drones’ nervous systems, however—rather than their skeletons—are what should
really command our attention. To navigate a city, Prime Air drones will be outfitted
with a suite of visual, thermal, and ultrasonic sensors. Together these sensors will cre-
ate what the company says is a “fail-safe” navigation system, which in theory would
help the drones avoid collisions—particularly important given the crashes that have
afflicted human delivery contractors. The drones will interact with one another using
what company patents call a “mesh communication network” routed through a central
database that will negotiate “individual missions” to try to cut down flight times. One
patent suggests that if drones need to recharge their batteries, they might be able to
dip down to rest on charging stations Amazon could install on “cell towers, church
steeples, office buildings, parking decks, [or] telephone poles.” Another suggests that
drones could use phone location data to pinpoint drop-offs. The drones will cruise
at an altitude of around four hundred feet, where the regulatory pecking order is some-
what cloudy: the Amazon-friendly FAA considers itself the sole regulator of dronedom,
but dozens of states and cities have weighed legislation restricting drone use that could
prove contradictory.

At some point, a Prime Air drone will descend from the air and onto
somebody’s lawn, where it will need a safe way to deposit its payload. In
early deliveries like the one in the United Kingdom, drones have simply
lowered themselves down to the grass, but since such a landing could
attract thieves, Amazon has also patented a variety of tools to help de-
liver packages while aboveground, including winched cables and retract-
able tube slides. Whether they land or not, the drones will get a fairly
close look at the space around them. Prime Air customers will likely sign
consent forms allowing drones to grace their property, but what if their
neighbors don’t want sensor-laden aircraft swooping around their homes?
The sensors on Amazon’s current drones are designed to help them avoid
hazardous objects, not to record visual detail, but multiple company
patents suggest that the drones might one day come equipped with full-
fledged cameras and microphones. According to Rebecca Scharf, a law
professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, such drone videography
would be legal in most of the country, because the devices would only
record surfaces already exposed to the public eye, much like the photog-
raphy used to create Google Maps Street View.

Jake Bittle is a writer in Brooklyn.
An Amazon drone, however, could get a more detailed look at customers’ property than
a Street View car. And Arthur Holland Michel, the co-director of the Center for the Study
of the Drone at Bard College, says there would be a market for the information such drones
collect. Just as Starbucks uses cellular data to send ads to passersby, Michel says Amazon
could use drone footage to suggest future purchases. One patent demonstrates how this
might work: a drone, it says, “may capture video data that includes brown and dying trees
located near the user’s home.” The company could then recommend arborist services or
fertilizers. Amazon’s patents suggest that drones could also analyze “smoke coming from
a building . . . structural integrity issues, and/or audio data that indicates gun shots, cries
for help, [or] breaking glass.” What happens if a drone captures a crime—would that foot-
age be admissible in court? Scharf says legal precedent protects those who have a “reason-
able expectation of privacy,” but expectations can change, and so can ideas about what
is reasonable. This data could make Amazon a new kind of merchant, one that collects
information not just about what we purchase but about the spaces we inhabit.

Diagram courtesy Amazon ANNOTATION 59

 L E T T
THE SKINNING TREE
America’s redface problem onstage
By Jennifer Percy
E
very year in Lusk, Wyo-
ming, during the second
week of July, locals gather
to reenact a day in 1849 when
members of a nearby band of
Sioux are said to have skinned a
white man alive. None of the ac-
tors are Native American. The
white participants dress up like
Indians and redden their skin with
body paint made from iron ore.
The town prepares all year,
and the performance, The Leg-
end of Rawhide, has a cast and
crew of hundreds, almost all lo-
cal volunteers, including elemen-
tary school children. There are
six generations of Rawhide actors
in one family; three or four gen-
erations seems to be the average.
The show is performed twice, on Fri-
day and Saturday night.
The plot is based on an event that,
as local legend has it, occurred fifteen
miles south of Lusk, in Rawhide
Buttes. It goes like this: Clyde Pickett
is traveling with a wagon train to
California. He tells the other Pioneers:
Jennifer Percy is a National Magazine
Award–winning writer. Her most recent ar-
ticle for Harper’s Magazine, “Escape from
the Caliphate,” appeared in the November
2016 issue.
60 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
E R F R O M
“The only good Injun’s a dead Injun.”
Clyde loves Kate Farley, and to impress
her, he shoots the first Indian he sees,
who happens to be an Indian Princess.
The Indians approach the Pioneers
and ask that the murderer give himself
up. Clyde won’t admit he did it. The
Indians attack the wagon train and,
eventually, Clyde surrenders. The In-
dians tie Clyde to the Skinning Tree
and flay him alive. Later, Kate retrieves
her dead lover’s body and the wagon
train continues west.
Dan Henry Hanson in the role of the Indian Chief during a performance of The
Legend of Rawhide. Opposite page: A scene from the play. All photographs from
Lusk, Wyoming, July 2019, by Balazs Gardi for Harper’s Magazine © The artist
L U S K
At the Friday show, the man
who plays Clyde is blood-soaked
and a little embarrassed. He let a
smile slip during the skinning
scene. He must have been thinking
about something else, he tells me
later. The man’s name is Weldon
Tschacher, and when he’s not play-
ing Clyde he works at an auto shop.
He lives about ten minutes away,
in Manville. When I ask what it
means to him to play the role of the
white man getting skinned alive
by Indians, he says he’s never re-
ally thought about it. Rawhide, he
tells me, is “pretty much a history
of this territory. Just a history.” But
aside from a few trace mentions in
old frontier journals, there is no
historical evidence that the Raw-
hide story is true. “Like many legends,”
wrote James E. Potter, a research histo-
rian for the Nebraska State Historical
Society, the Rawhide tale “achieved be-
lievability through frequent repetition,
publication, and testimony, by persons
who claimed to know the facts.”
L
usk is a desolate place, a high-
plains town of about fifteen
hundred people in Niobrara
County, the least populous county in
Wyoming, America’s least populous
state. The town was once a trading
center for ranching, dry farming, and
oil production. An outdated electro-
mechanical switch in the local tele-
phone system meant that residents
could not make direct international
phone calls until 1993. The closest big
city is Denver, a four-hour drive away.
Cheyenne, the capital, is more than a
hundred miles south. Lost Springs,
population four, is right up the road.
In July, when I arrive, the air is
sweet with the smell of clover and
pine, and the sky is a pale dome.
Downtown Lusk is made up of a scat-
tering of low buildings on Main
Street—the Family Dollar, the Silver
Dollar Bar, Lickety Stitch Quilts, Lusk
Game Processing—all of it quite di-
minutive in the vast prairie. Lusk feels
less like a place to live than a monu-
ment to the frontier. The town is sur-
rounded by the former routes of white
settlers: the Oregon Trail, the Mor-
mon Pioneer Trail, and the California
Trail. Tourism sites in and around
Lusk celebrate obsessively preserved
Western origin stories. There are wag-
ons everywhere: in the parking lot of
the Best Western, on the roof of the
Covered Wagon Motel, along Main
Street, and in the yard of the Stage-
coach Museum. At the Spirits Liquor
Lounge, where the cowboys who play
Indians in Rawhide like to drink after
rehearsal, the walls showcase framed
jigsaw puzzles that depict famous Na-
tive American chiefs. Ten miles south,
off the old Cheyenne– Deadwood
62 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
stagecoach route, is one of the few
monuments in the country that is
dedicated to a saloon’s madam.
The Rawhide performance is staged
at the Niobrara County Fairgrounds,
an easy walk from Main Street. The
grounds are small, consisting of a ro-
deo arena, a livestock barn, and a
community building, all surrounded
by about two acres of green pasture.
It’s the day before the first perfor-
mance, and the arena has been trans-
formed into a theater; bleachers over-
look the dirt stage. On one side of the
stage is what the script calls the “In-
dian Village,” which includes the
Skinning Tree and three large canvas
tepees that are painted with colorful
symbols. On the other side, there is a
forest of pine trees—real trees—next
to Styrofoam boulders and a fishing
hole. Behind the stage is a small hill.
This is where the Indians perform
their attack on the Pioneers.
All day Thursday before the dress
rehearsal, RVs, horse trailers, pickup
trucks, and covered wagons drive over
to the pasture adjacent to the arena,
where horses are feeding on grass. Res-
idents claim that visitors from Ger-
many, Norway, and Italy have attended
the show. Today I see no foreigners,
only people who seem like they’re from
the same county and voted for the same
president. I meet five or six residents
who have played Clyde, including Dean
Nelson, who met his wife on the set of
Rawhide. She was playing Kate opposite
his Clyde. They had a mock wedding
Left: Andrew Wasserburger (center) and Ben Hanson (right) at the Spirits
Liquor Lounge. Right: A performer watches others apply iron-ore face paint.
in the arena. A few years ago, a man
proposed to Dean’s niece on set.
Dean shows me the Skinning Tree,
which is dead and leafless. “It’s the
only tree we use, year after year,” Dean
says. Decades worth of fake blood
darkens the trunk. The performers use
a mixture of red food dye and Ivory
soap for blood; they paint Clyde with
it, cover him with a type of tape to
mimic skin, and peel it off to reveal
the blood.
Dean’s mother, Holly, is observing
us from nearby. She wanders over and
introduces herself. She is a volunteer
cook for the cast and crew and tonight
she’s making enough beef noodles to
feed everyone—about three hundred
people. Holly has light red hair and
small glasses. She’s a retired elemen-
tary school teacher who wrote her own
third grade textbook, Niobrara County
History, which begins with the pri-
mordial seas and ends with photos of
crumbling frontier sites. It’s about
twenty pages long, printed on com-
puter paper and held together with a
plastic spiral binding. The book in-
cludes a few brief mentions of Native
Americans of the Plains, but it skips
over their destruction, and jumps to
when Wyoming became a state on July
10, 1890. Page thirteen memorializes
George Lathrop—“Pioneer of the
West, Indian Fighter, Veteran Stage
Driver”—who played the role of In-
dian Chief in the Fifties.
“I get goose bumps when the wagon
train comes around the hill,” Holly
says. “It just gives you the chills.
Then you see the Indians, from one
side to the other side. Well, they
don’t like to be called ‘Indians.’ But
the reason we don’t have any real In-
dians in the roles is because there
aren’t any in this county.”*
I
first heard about Lusk from a
man who was from eastern Wyo-
ming. He mentioned Rawhide
after a mutual friend told us a story
about a dream his girlfriend had. He
recounted how she would wake up in
the middle of the night and there
would be a Native American man
with long black hair standing next to
her. He taught her things, medicinal
things, and he also wouldn’t leave her
alone, even when she asked him to go.
The only way to get rid of him was
to throw him in a river. The dream
and its telling were not subtle in
their colonialist perspective, and
both exemplified the ways that non-
Natives think and talk about Na-
tives. In this case, the Native is fe-
tishized, exotic, and mysterious; he
is extinct but able to be used when
desired, and then discarded.
If you grew up white in America,
you probably either played Indian or
were witness to it in some way. Philip
*
According to the U.S.  Census Bureau,
around twenty thousand Native Americans
live in Wyoming, making it the state with
the eighth highest proportion of Native peo-
ple. In Niobrara County, the population is
94.6 percent white and 1.2 percent Native.
Left: Kade Clark, in redface. Right: Children performing in the dress rehearsal
Deloria, a history professor at Har-
vard and author of the book Playing
Indian, argues that white Americans
have always articulated their identity
through Indianness. In each histori-
cal moment, he writes, “Americans
have returned to the Indian, reinter-
preting the intuitive dilemmas sur-
rounding Indianness to meet the
circumstances of their times.”
Colonists throughout history often
exaggerated the differences between
themselves and the people they en-
countered in new territories. In early
America, however, colonists also ap-
propriated Native culture in order to
distance themselves from the places
they had left behind. “Indianness,”
Deloria and other historians have ar-
gued, helped colonists define them-
selves as separate from their Anglo-
Saxon roots and allowed them to
fantasize about a connection to the
continent’s history. In the eighteenth
century, American colonists didn’t
think that they needed the British
anymore; they chafed at British at-
tempts to control trade and to keep
them near the coast for the sake of
collecting taxes. “Indian” costume was
adopted by militias and other groups
of white men throughout the colonies
to protest land-use laws and intimidate
British officials. Native imagery ap-
peared in colonial newspaper mast-
heads, military flags, and patriotic
songs. In 1772, colonists pretended to
be Native Americans and set a British
ship called Gaspee on fire. In 1773,
most famously, white men dressed up
as Mohawks for the Boston Tea Party.
After the Revolutionary War,
America’s relationship to Indianness
changed. The “Indian problem,” as it
was popularly called, was seen as an
obstacle to western expansion, and
enthusiastic performances of Indian-
ness became a kind of neurotic re-
sponse to the mass extermination of
Native people. “Ironically, as the as-
sault on Native religions and lifeways
continued,” Angela R. Riley and Kris-
ten A. Carpenter wrote in the Texas
Law Review, “Americans increasingly
fetishized the Indian.” Indian-inspired
men’s clubs and societies proliferated
in the mid-nineteenth century. In
cities, fraternities gathered in dark
halls to initiate white people into
the mysteries of “Indianness,” and in
rural areas they gathered around
fires deep in the woods. The Tam-
many Society burned an effigy of
“The Old Chief”—a make-believe
“Indian saint”—in a fake wigwam
to celebrate American abundance.
The Improved Order of Red Men
met throughout New England for
monthly campfires where they
dressed like Natives and called one
another by what they believed were
Native names. Out of the order grew
an auxiliary group for women called
the Degree of Pocahontas. The Boy
Scouts of America grew out of a
youth group called the Woodcraft In-
dians, which promoted “Indianness”
as a way to teach Americanness to
LETTER FROM LUSK 63
white boys. (Until last year, Boy
Scouts were still allowed to dress up
as Indians at official events.)
In the early nineteenth century,
Americans wrote and staged dozens of
so-called Indian dramas that romanti-
cized the precipitous decline of the Na-
tive population. These performances
popularized the tradition of the “stage
Indian,” a term for the portrayal of
Native Americans by white actors.
The 1829 play Metamora; or, The Last
of the Wampanoags—which tells the
story of the tragic defeat of an Indian
chief during King Philip’s War in
seventeenth-century New England—
was the most popular Indian drama of
the time. Edwin Forrest, the white
man who played Metamora, was the
era’s most famous stage Indian.
Metamora opened the year before An-
drew Jackson signed the Indian Re-
moval Act, ordering tribes to migrate
to territory west of the Mississippi
River and causing the deaths of thou-
sands along the Trail of Tears. Histori-
ans have argued that Indian dramas
were a device for white Americans to
work out anxieties about the genocide
of Native Americans. “There was,”
Deloria writes, “quite simply, no way to
conceive an American identity with-
out Indians. At the same time, there
64 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
was no way to make a complete iden-
tity while they remained.”
In both Indian dramas and min-
strel shows, which were popular
around the same time, the use of red-
face and blackface were often justi-
fied as necessary stage devices, re-
quired to make the show more
realistic. Yet at the same time, plays
needed to reassure audiences that un-
derneath the red paint or shoe polish
the performers were actually white.
“The risk of playing Indian to be-
come American was playing Indian
too convincingly,” Jill Lepore writes
in The Name of War: King Philip’s
War and the Origins of American Iden-
tity. “If spectators were seduced by
the tragedian’s seamless acting into
believing that he really was an Indi-
an then they were applauding a
‘bloody barbarian.’ ”
I
n The Legend of Rawhide, there
are lots of Indians: maybe forty or
fifty white people in redface.
About twenty of them play the role
of “Brave.” Offstage and out of cos-
tume, they travel around in a pack,
wearing ranch gear, muscle tanks,
and iridescent Oakleys. One has a big
tattoo of an “Indian chief” on his
arm. I meet most of them by the horse
Left: Performers playing the Pioneers arrive at the arena. Right: Children in their costumes
trailers. When I arrive the animals
whinny and stamp in the heat. Among
the men playing Braves, there’s Cody,
Cuinton, and Colt, who wears a shirt
that’s torn and bloodstained at the
elbow from a cattle-branding acci-
dent. J.V. Bolden is a blue-eyed, long-
lashed white man in his thirties who
plays the Indian Smoke Signaler. He
wears a buckskin shirt decorated
with animal bones. Another cowboy
playing Indian, Shawn Thompson,
is a redhead who works on his dad’s
cattle ranch. “Only time the hordes
come down to Lusk is for this event,”
he says.
“Why do you do this?” I ask.
“Adrenaline rush,” Shawn says.
They had all either grown up
ranching in Lusk or had come here
to find work. Some ride every day in
the spring, summer, and fall, and
when the day ends they take the sad-
dles off their horses to practice riding
bareback. Rawhide is often on their
minds, and most have been in the
show since they were kids. This year,
there’s a woman playing a Brave.
“Might as well,” she tells me.
O.W. is a high school student; it’s
his first year playing an Indian.
“Some people say it’s fun,” he says.
“Others say it’s the worst feeling of
their life.” He’s with Bryce Sturman,
a college student and steer wrestler
with the wet eyes of a kitten. Bryce’s
nephew, an infant, will also be in the
show. “If you see a baby,” Bryce says,
“in fifteen years that baby will be an
Indian Brave.” About five years ago,
Bryce went unconscious on set. “You
fell right on your noggin,” another
cowboy recounts, “and we were like,
Holy shit, that’s what a dead guy
looks like.” Bryce turns and spits.
The men rein up to ride bareback.
One of the bigger boys tries to
mount but gets stuck with one leg
over a pinto’s rear.
Closer to the arena I find Weldon,
the man who plays Clyde, drinking
beer with Rex Beuler, who plays the
frontiersman Kit Carson. Weldon
wears a lacy purple garter on his arm
because the high school girls are sell-
ing them for a fund-raiser. “Five
bucks,” he says. “Why not. I buy one
every year.”
“What’s the best part about play-
ing Clyde?”
“I’m the only one who gets to
shoot an Indian,” he says.
Some look nervous when I tell
them I’m a writer. Others ask whether
I’m on the good side or the bad side,
and I say the good side, even though
Left: Katie Bennett in costume as a Brave. Right: Cameron Carpenter applies iron-ore paint to his skin.
I know we mean the opposite. In
2017, Wyoming Public Media ran a
story on Rawhide with the headline
legend of rawhide reenactment
r aises questions over native
american stereotypes, and the resi-
dents of Lusk were not pleased.
“They’ll shut us down one day,” says
Dan Hanson, who played the Indian
Chief for sixteen years but now plays
the Drunk. This year, his son Dan
Henry plays the Indian Chief and
his son Ben plays a Brave. “They’ll
do it because they want to make a
splash in the news and be a big shot.
Some people try to make it a racial
thing, but people are pretending to
be someone else in Hollywood all
the time.”
The man who plays Old George
the Indian Scout, Joe McDaniel,
says Rawhide is about having a good
time. “They are just actors. Do they
get mad at people on TV for dress-
ing up like a transvestite? As far as I
know, they don’t,” he says. “It’s actu-
ally depicting the white people as
the bad people. They’re the ones
who started the conflict. So if we’re
being racist, I guess we’re being rac-
ist against the pioneers.”
“They are good,” J.V., the Indian
Smoke Signaler, says about the
Braves. “They bring justice. The
white guys pick the fight and the In-
dians finish it.”
But they seem to misunderstand
the real critiques: that white people
shouldn’t take on someone else’s nar-
rative without asking, and that they
shouldn’t benefit in any way from the
injuries done to another group.
“Indian death is never private,”
writes David Treuer in his book Na-
tive American Fiction, “it is always at-
tended by larger meanings.” In Raw-
hide, the death of the Indian serves
to stage the killing of the white man,
which gives the settlers (and thereby
the white audience) an opportunity
to perform a false penance. The
death of the white man conjures im-
ages of Christ’s resurrection and ab-
solution for white sins. The white
man’s death is staged to make the In-
dians look like barbarians. But in
fact, the Lakota never skinned peo-
ple alive. “Yes, it is all too safe to
practice on us,” Treuer writes, “to ex-
press oneself through us and our pre-
dicament. It is not necessary (and
this is the root of our appeal) to be
informed, actually informed, about
our realities.”
“It’s cool to us more than anything,”
says Brian Clark, the Medicine Man.
LETTER FROM LUSK 65
“This is one of the best adrenaline
rushes I’ve ever experienced. I’ve seen
fans climb over people to get away
from us.”
“And with the utmost respect,” his
friend says, holding two cans of Key-
stone Light. “Literally. I mean, we
know we aren’t Indians.”
T
he Rawhide script was written
by a college student in 1946
at the request of the town
doctor, Walter Reckling, who wanted
to give World War II veterans a spe-
cial homecoming. It was performed
pageant-style, outdoors, in the fair-
grounds. Back then, all the costumes
were made from materials and with
tools that would have been available
in 1849. The men playing Indian
wore loincloths and rode bareback
either without reins or with their
reins in their teeth so they could still
string a bow. Before the premiere,
Reckling made a papier mâché body
cast of the actor playing Clyde, and
painted it red. He fitted it with flesh-
colored long johns that Braves would
then peel off as if skinning him.
The script hasn’t changed much
since 1946, except for an edit chang-
ing “savages” to “hostiles” and re-
moving the word “squaw.” The play
doesn’t grapple with any real concep-
tion of Native Americans or any
consideration of their plight in the
new nation. Rather, it relies on imag-
es of the “noble savage” and stereo-
types from popular culture. The Indi-
66 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
ans are not given any interiority or
dialogue. They speak in grunts and
hand gestures. They say “how” for
hello, in what Barbra A. Meek, a pro-
fessor of anthropology and linguistics
at the University of Michigan, has
termed “Hollywood Injun English.”
An omniscient narrator describes the
Sioux as “godless and primitive people
with their different skin” and calls
them “redskins.” The narrator also
talks about an Indian “who bet his
own scalp and lost,” adding that later
the scalp “was won back and restored
to its original owner,” as if he were a
mythological creature who might sur-
vive this process unharmed. The In-
dian Princess, who is not given a
name, appears in a single scene, the
scene of her murder. She walks on-
stage only to die.
The participants I met were not
mean-spirited, but they were uncriti-
cally handing down racist narratives.
When I spoke with Rebecca Tsosie, a
O
Regents Professor of Law at the Uni-
versity of Arizona, she reminded me
that Native people have to deal with
America’s frontier mentality everyday.
“We see it in the Sauvage perfume
advertisement, at fashion shows, sport-
ing events, Halloween—Americans
are playing out this mythology and it’s
seen as an American thing to do.
They say they are celebrating the past,
but the past is still present for many
Native Americans. These are images
that are replete with physical and cul-
tural genocide, and there is no good
Left: Dan Henry Hanson, as the Indian Chief, and Brian Clark, as the
Medicine Man, during a performance. Right: The Skinning Tree
way to celebrate genocide.” She men-
tioned a case that took place not far
from Lusk, in South Dakota, where
Lakota schoolchildren attended a
sporting event where they were
sprayed with beer and called disparag-
ing names. More recently, at a high
school volleyball game in Arizona,
members of the audience chanted
racial slurs and referred to Native
players as “savages.” “It’s important
that the history of Native Americans
and the contemporary experience are
not delinked,” she said.
Redface, like blackface, is a sin of
white supremacy: it assumes other
cultures are there for the taking. To
wear face paint and a headdress,
smoke from a “peace pipe,” perform
the so-called “tomahawk chop” of the
Atlanta Braves, or speak broken
English—these are examples of racist
appropriation. But many Americans
don’t want to recognize it.
n Friday, there’s a station set
up behind the tepees where
the performers put on red-
face. It’s a disturbing scene. The sta-
tion is stocked with supplies the orga-
nizers think will help white people
look like Native Americans: buckets
of iron-ore paint, brushes, towels, a
plastic bin that holds what cast mem-
bers call “Indian wigs.” The ground is
covered with red puddles. A girl
smooths the paint onto a boy’s back.
“So gross,” she says. “This shit is so
fucking gross.”
 The cowboys also paint the
horses— circles around the eyes, a
lightning bolt on the rear. They swap
their boots for moccasins, tank tops
for rawhide tunics and vests, and
Wrangler jeans for dirty khaki pants.
They brush their hair into Mohawks
or slip on ratty black wigs with loose
braids. One boy wears a leather top hat
from a garage sale, and another ties a
rag across his forehead, Rambo-style.
They fuss with their wigs. “Does it
look ridiculous?” one asks. “Should I
get another?”
They practice being Indian. They
bellow imitation war cries and ride
horses bareback in loops around the
arena. In the daylight, the dark paint
makes blue eyes shine brighter.
Blond hair pokes out from under
crooked wigs and patches of skin still
need covering. They are all galloping
by, their horses’ hooves tossing dirt.
A group of them surrounds a man
taking photos; he calls them wild,
and they take it as a compliment.
The man who plays the Medicine
Man, Brian, sips from a can of Arnold
Palmer, and his friend, a Brave, drinks
Keystone Light. The Medicine Man
wears big buffalo horns on his head.
“They are old,” he says. “I don’t know
where they came from originally, but
they’re real. Heavy and hot.” He points
to the arena. “Someday my kids are go-
ing to be there and maybe my son will
have these horns one day.”
The Indian Chief, Dan Henry, is
off by himself, over by the arena. He
Left: The Pioneers at camp. Right: Courtney Rowley in the role of the Indian Princess
stands with his legs apart and his
arms crossed. He says being the chief
is a big responsibility and he’d rather
just play a Brave. He wears high-top
moccasins, a fringed rawhide shirt,
and khaki pants stained with fake
blood. “It’s a little greasy,” Dan Hen-
ry says, touching the paint on his
skin. “It’s really hard to wash off, but
the Natives used it as sunblock and I
thought that was really cool.” He
also wears a faux eagle-feather head-
dress, an imitation of a sacred item
worn by Lakota warriors such as
Chief Sitting Bull and Chief Red
Cloud. Each feather represents an
honor. (Under federal law, only Na-
tive Americans are allowed to han-
dle or possess headdresses with real
eagle feathers.) “We used to have
one that came from the Sioux,” he
says. “It had real eagle feathers. I or-
dered this one online.” There’s a
headdress at the Stagecoach Muse-
um in town, in the small area on the
second f loor devoted to Native
Americans. The plaque in front of
the plexiglass display doesn’t say
anything about the importance of
the headdress to the Native Ameri-
cans, only that it was a “Headdress
worn by Chief Sitting Bull given to
Honorary Lakota Chief George Earl
Peet by Sitting Bull’s daughter,
Standing Holy, sometime in the
1920s.” Nearby is a photo of Peet, a
white man, wearing the headdress as
Indian Chief in the 1955 production
of Rawhide.
An hour before Friday’s show, a
thunderstorm brings rain to the are-
na. Everyone ducks for shelter, and I
follow the cowboys to the trailers.
Girlfriends and wives frantically
spray flaccid Mohawks, touch up face
paint, and adjust wigs. I find Cuinton
with his feet dangling off the back of
a horse trailer. He’s a blond, blue-
eyed teenager with freckles, and to-
day he’s wearing a fringed suede vest
and a black wig with two long braids.
He looks like he’s dressed for the
wrong show—more like a kid trying
to be a hippie than an Indian. He’s
from Oklahoma, and he’s been man-
aging ranches since he was fourteen.
He talks for a while about the Dust
Bowl and then asks if I’m from PETA.
I say I’m not, and he says he’s had it
with them. We stare out at the rain.
“I got a bright-red Make America
Great Again sweatshirt I should totally
put on when I ride,” he says. “This is
the only thing Lusk does all year, and
it’s fucking fun as hell. It’s where we
all get to cut loose even when we are
on probation.” He takes a big, gur-
gling sip of his drink. “Last year was
my first year riding in it. If you’re our
age and you’re not an Indian Brave,
you’re a pussy.”
T
o the west of Lusk is the Wind
River Reservation, home to
Wyoming’s Shoshone and
Arapaho tribes, and to the northeast,
across the border in South Dakota, is
the Pine Ridge Reservation, home to
LETTER FROM LUSK 67
Unterberg the Oglala Sioux. While on my trip
out West, I visited the Pine Ridge
Reservation and the site of the 1890

Poetry Center massacre at Wounded Knee, where

U.S. troops opened fire on a gathering
of Lakota, killing as many as three
hundred men, women, and children.
The memorial was hardly visible—it
would have been easy to drive by and
miss it. It was not busy with tourists,
“Toni Morrison’s words ring with clarity, like the nearby Mount Rushmore. A
wisdom, compassion, and beauty. It is small graveyard sits atop a hill, and
across the road there is a small turn-
an honor to speak them aloud.” —Phylicia Rashad around next to a historical marker. In
the grass nearby, Native women were
selling handmade souvenirs on fold-
ing tables. The first woman I ap-
proached was in her twenties. I told
her about Rawhide and showed her
photographs of the performance.
“No, we don’t know about this,” she
said. “It’s extremely offensive.” When
I described the plot of the play, she
shook her head. “That’s a bad story,”
she said.
At the next table I met Valerie
Brown Eyes and Germaine Red Cloud,
a descendant of Chief Red Cloud. A
relative of hers had survived the mas-
sacre. She works at this table every day
making jewelry.
Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard Again, I asked about Rawhide. “No,”
Brown Eyes said. “No one told us
A Literary Performance with André Holland about this. No one asked our permis-
and Phylicia Rashad | TUE, FEB 18, 8 PM sion. There are laws about this. You
know, I used to get really mad when
white people pretended to be black.”
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” a
man sitting nearby told me. “We know
Sayed Kashua Maira Kalman’s how they are in Lusk and we try not to
David Treuer The Autobiography stop anywhere near there. We keep on
TUE, FEB 11, 8 PM of Alice B. Toklas moving through.”
“You know,” Germaine said, “the
THU, MAR 5, 8 PM true meaning of ‘Indian’ is godless,
Hanif Abdurraqib savage heathen. That’s how they
Timothy Donnelly 1HUL/PYZOÄLSK viewed us—godless, savage heathens.
MON, FEB 24, 8 PM Patricia Smith Because we didn’t look like them or
MON, MAR 9, 8 PM talk like them. That’s why they have
Daniel Kehlmann done what they have done to our an-
with Zadie Smith Hilary Mantel cestors. They killed us like we were
THU, FEB 27, 8 PM WED, MAR 18, 8 PM nothing. But we are healing all the
time, we are healing when we get to
Louise Erdrich share our stories.”

T
Colum McCann he final performance of Raw-
MON, MAR 2, 7:30 PM Information & tickets hide is Saturday night. The
92Y.org/Readings flaps of the set’s tepees are
212.415.5500 smeared red from all the people enter-
ing and exiting. The Pioneer Women
lift up their long prairie dresses to step

The voice of literature 68 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020

over deep red puddles while Braves
paint themselves. O.W.  is trying to
spread iron-ore paint over his back.
“Did I get my butt crack?” another
says. A teenager standing to the side
jeers at the cowboys, “Hey, this is
blackface—this is racist!” I stop him
to ask about his comment, wondering
if he’s serious. He backs away sheep-
ishly. “Just kidding,” he says.
At twilight, hundreds of people
fill the stadium seats. The light is
soft and purple, and the insects sing.
There are two ambulances parked by
the bleachers because every year
someone gets hurt. Actors fall off
their horses, get trampled by hooves,
crack a skull or break a bone. One
year a man caught on fire. So far, no
one has died.
After I sit down, I overhear a girl
say to her friend, “Let’s sit up high in
the stands. I’m scared of the Indi-
ans.” The performance starts out like
a football game. Most of the per-
formers gather on either side of the
stage. The Braves and residents of
the Indian Village stand by the te-
pees while the white settlers stand by
a fake waterfall. A voice over the
loudspeaker asks everyone to observe
a moment of silence for veterans of
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Then a song by Toby Keith called
“American Soldier” plays while wom-
en march by carrying flags and ride
by on horses. Then it’s time for the
national anthem. The crowd stands
at solemn attention. Onstage, all the
Left: Performers in redface. Right: Weldon Tschacher in the role of Clyde
white people dressed like Indians put
their hands on their hearts.
After the anthem ends, the actors
disperse and find their places. There’s
no more chatter of politics, no talk of
the news of the world— only the
bright stadium lights, the costumes,
and the anticipation of the night’s re-
turn to that time in America’s past
from which the fantasies on display
originate. “So come with me,” the
narrator says, “back to those long
gone days some eight score and ten
years ago. Come with me . . . into your
imagination. See the West as it was.”
The play begins with residents of
the Indian Village hunting ante-
lope, starting fires, relaxing, bet-
ting on horse races, playing games,
and throwing spears. The white
settlers soon arrive, coming around
the hill in covered wagons, and form
a circle in the dirt onstage. There’s
square dancing, gambling, and some
prayers for Jesus. There are fires. A
Brave steals a goat. The Drunk falls
in a water hole. There are encoun-
ters with the Mountain Men, the Je-
suit Priest, Kit Carson, the Cavalry,
and Shady Ladies.
The Indian Princess is shot in the
dark. Howling women drag her away.
In the morning, a Brave confronts
the wagon train and tells the Pio-
neers about the murdered woman.
He requests that the killer give him-
self up, and says that if he doesn’t,
they’ll go to war. Clyde is nowhere to
be seen.
Braves gather on the hill behind
the stage, and I can only see their
silhouettes, backlit by real fires that
have been set in the distance. They
follow the Chief down the hill, and
when they reach the stage they bring
the horses to a sprint. They run cir-
cles around the wagons while the Pi-
oneers take them out with blank
guns. The air fills with the smell of
gasoline and smoke. In an un-
scripted moment, a Brave falls off
his horse and hits the ground. His
girlfriend runs across the stage,
screaming. An Indian wig is on the
ground beside him. The emergency
workers run to his side; give him ox-
ygen; strap a brace to his neck; lift
him onto a stretcher and into the
ambulance, and speed away.
The show goes on. Clyde surren-
ders and the stage goes dark but for
an orangish glow that illuminates
the Skinning Tree. The Braves re-
move his shirt and tie him to the
trunk. The Chief starts skinning
Clyde while the performers make
strange animal sounds and pump
their fists. When they finish, Clyde is
alone, stuck there on the Skinning
Tree, dripping with blood, the purple
garter still tight around his arm. Un-
der the white stadium lights, he
looks delicate, like a teenage Christ
martyred in a school play. When
the show ends, the Braves raid the
bleachers and the crowd screams.
“To make it more realistic,” one of
the organizers explains. Q
LETTER FROM LUSK 69
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THE INTERPRETATION
OF DREAMS
I
t is 1924. Günter Zeitz is
thirty-three years old. His
hair is black, unruly. And, in
the manner of certain very tall
men, he habitually hunches his
shoulders and lets his head hang
forward. He is standing on a street
corner in Vienna, where he has
just bid good day to Professor
Freud and introduced himself.
“Perhaps you remember me?”
Günter says. “I wrote to you sev-
eral months ago. I was working
with Dr. Mohr.”
This encounter is not an ac-
cident. Günter has come to Vi-
enna from Coblenz specifically to
meet the Professor, and a friend
told him that Freud passes the
corner of Hörlgasse and Liech-
tensteinstrasse every day after lunch.
At the name Mohr, the Professor’s lip
twitches impatiently under his
yellow-stained mustache. “Did you not
get my response?” His speech is impeded,
as if he has a walnut in his mouth.
“Yes. I appreciated your prompt—”
“Then why are you here? Mohr is
not a psychoanalyst.” The Professor
lisps. He has to work to pronounce his
Stephen O’Connor is the author of the
novel Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally
Hemings and the forthcoming poetry
collection Quasimode.
The Reckless Sleeper, by René Magritte © 2019 C. Herscovici/Artists Rights
Society, New York City/Tate, London/Art Resource, New York City
S T O R Y
By Stephen O’Connor
s’s and r’s. “There is nothing I can do
to help you.” Freud is carrying an um-
brella, the point of which he lifts
from the sidewalk as if to strike Gün-
ter on the shin. Just over his shoulder
the black spires of the Votivkirche
rise like a pair of demonic spruces.
“I entirely agree!” Günter says.
The Professor lowers his umbrella
and tilts his head back to an angle
that could make it seem as if he were
looking down on the younger man. In
fact, he is looking up. Freud is short,
and skeletal inside his rumpled tweed
suit. His eyes are gelatinous
pools of amber and white within
the black rings of his glasses.
“He is superficial,” says Günter,
his voice trembling, his mind
whirling. “He has the best inten-
tions, but . . . You are right: super-
ficial. Intellectually. I knew that I
had nothing to learn from him.”
“His distinction between my
work and Ferenczi’s is absurd!”
“Yes,” says Günter. “Absolutely.”
In fact, Günter has no idea what
Mohr has said about Freud and
Ferenczi. “When I read your Inter-
pretation of Dreams, I felt that I
understood the working of my own
mind for the first time—how ev-
erything is connected, I mean. Our
perceptions, thoughts, instincts,
memories, fantasies. The past and pres-
ent. And language, of course—puns!
Everything is connected to everything
else. All my life, I have had the sense
that nothing is really what it is—from a
linguistic point of view, I mean.”
“Linguistic?” The Professor has taken
a cigar out of his breast pocket and is
searching his other pockets for a match.
“I mean that language and logic
oversimplify reality. The dictionary in
conjunction with the grammar book
make it seem that a stone is nothing
but a stone. Whereas a stone is always
STORY 71
also something to kick or climb or
walk upon; a weapon, the founda-
tion of faith, the image of courage,
fidelity, coldness of heart. A thou-
sand other things! And all of them
at once! The poets know this, espe-
cially the French poets. Rimbaud, of
course. And Reverdy. But not the
philosophers. Wittgenstein. Do you
know Wittgenstein? You must know
Wittgenstein—he’s from here. A bril-
liant man. But also stupid. But my
point is that you defy him. You speak
what he consigns to silence.”
Günter hardly knows what he is
saying, and wonders if the Professor
thinks he is insane.
Freud grips the cigar between his
teeth. He holds a lit match up to it
and sucks. Ragged wreaths of smoke
obscure his face.
“Excuse me,” says Günter, “I’m bab-
bling. It’s just that I’ve always felt—
instinctively, I mean—that the world
is a massive tangle of actualities.
And your book helped me see clearly
what I had never been able to articu-
late for myself.”
“Young man,” the Professor says
between one long puff and the next.
“What did you say your name is?”
“Zeitz. Günter Zeitz.”
“And what is it that you want, Zeitz?”
Günter’s mouth is entirely dry. His
palms are wet. “I want to be a psy-
choanalyst, and I am hoping you will
train me.”
“You understand that your training
will consist primarily of your own
analysis? Five days a week, an hour a
day. Is that agreeable to you?”
“Of course.”
“Do you have the money?”
Günter hesitates a half-second.
“Yes, of course.”
The Professor looks up at him with
a wry smile and releases a long plume
of smoke that, intentionally or not,
blows into Günter’s eyes. The Professor
then quotes his hourly fee. Günter
blanches. The Professor laughs.
After a long silence Günter asks in
a low voice, not meeting the Profes-
sor’s eye, “Would my analysis be with
you, Professor?”
“Of course!”
There follows another long silence
that Günter ends with a forced smile
and the words, “Nothing would make
me happier.”
72 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
He knows that what he has just
said is the absolute truth. He has
been dreaming of being analyzed by
Freud practically since he arrived in
Heidelberg to start university. But as
they shake hands, he can’t help but
feel that everything about their ex-
change has been utterly false.
G
ünter Zeitz is playing tennis
on a sandy beach, but the net
is composed of ripped shreds
of corrugated steel, rusted pipes, tan-
gled bridge cables, a gutted furnace.
He cannot see his opponent, and he
cannot hit the tennis ball over the
net. Someone is shouting at him,
urgently—warning him, perhaps—but
in a language he cannot understand.
“What?” he keeps saying. “What are
you talking about?” Now he is no lon-
ger playing tennis. He is hanging from
a kite high in the sky, or perhaps he is
the kite, and a rope descends from him
to a tiny figure on the beach—so tiny
that Günter has no idea who that per-
son is. And, in fact, the rope whips and
swirls as if it were adrift in empty air.
But Günter does not fall. He watches
the foam of silent waves sliding up the
sand, and the streak of the sun’s reflec-
tion on the rippling water. Where that
reflection collides with the horizon,
the sky breaks away from the sea. In-
side the widening gap, Günter sees
enormous machines—but not clearly.
It is too dark. The darkness inside the
gap is like a thick, brownish gas.
G
ünter smells something burn-
ing. When he cranes around
on the couch, he sees the Pro-
fessor, eyes closed, resting his head
against the wall, his chin cupped in the
palm of his left hand. His right hand
dangles limply off the arm of the chair
and a cigar lies on the carpet, where it
is burning a hole. “Professor Freud!”
Günter calls. The Professor sits up sud-
denly, apologizes, then bends to pick
up his cigar, as if he has placed it there
intentionally. He looks at it, grips it
between his teeth, and takes a medita-
tive drag. Smoke pours out of his
mouth in a yellow-gray wave.
T
he Professor is dying, but he
does not know he is dying, or
he does not believe it, or he
will not allow himself to know every-
thing that death actually is. Six
months before his sidewalk encounter
with Günter, the Professor had his
palate and the right half of his upper
jaw removed to halt the progress of his
cancer. An ill-fitting prosthesis of hard
rubber edged with false teeth was in-
serted into the resulting cavity so that
he might eat and talk.
I
nvariably when Günter steps into
the foyer of Freud’s apartment, the
previous patient, a slender, dark-
haired girl of twenty, is standing in
front of the coat hooks getting ready
to go down to the street. Her face is
long and her chin is off-kilter, as if she
fell when she was a child and it was
knocked slightly to the left. But there
is a dart of tension at the center of her
brow that makes her impossible to
ignore. Günter always says “Hello”
when he first sees her and “Excuse me”
as he reaches past her to hang up his
coat. While she is careful to move out
of the way of his arm, she never says
a word or meets his gaze. Only when
she is actually stepping through the
door does she turn and look him in
the eye, her thin lips a tight, straight
line, her black eyes radiating an emo-
tion that sometimes seems to be ir-
ritation, sometimes uncertainty, and
sometimes abject fear.
S
igmund freud: God has made
them in the image of His own
perfection; nobody wants to be
reminded how hard it is to reconcile the
undeniable existence of evil . . . with His
all-powerfulness or His all-goodness.
The Devil would be the best way out
as an excuse for God; in that way he
would be playing the same part as an
agent of economic discharge as the Jew
in the world of the Aryan ideal. But
even so, one can hold God responsible
for the existence of the Devil as well as
for the existence of the wickedness
which the Devil embodies.
G
ünter is standing on the side-
walk talking to Anna Freud,
whom he finds pretty in a
humble and entirely unstudied way.
She is four years his junior and he some-
times thinks he should be attracted to
her. But he is not. “He refuses to go
back to his doctor!” she says. “He seems
to feel that this one operation has cured
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the rims of her dark brown eyes. Her
mouth is open, lozenge-shaped, as if she
can’t get enough air. “My mother lives
in constant fear,” she says. “We’re all in
despair!” At this instant, the door to
the Freuds’ building clanks and the
slender, dark-haired girl steps out, stops
dead, and stares at Günter. No sooner
does she see that he has noticed her
than she turns and hurries off down the
sidewalk, stopping twice to look back
and stare at him again. The fact that
she is on the street means Günter is late
for his appointment. He apologizes to
Anna and hurries into the building,
taking the stairs two at a time.
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analyst looking right at him from be- Open 7 days
neath a cloud of liver-colored smoke
and has to suffer a gentle rebuke. The
first time, Freud merely shakes his
head and finger reprovingly. The sec-
ond time, he smiles and says, “Oh, ye
of little faith!” The third time, after
U N T H E O R E T I C A L L Y
the Professor says, “I’m always listen- SOLUTION TO THE S I R I N G O D I N H I J A B
ing, and I hear your every word,” Gün- JANUARY PUZZLE A C O D F L O U N D E R I N G
ter asks, “Why are you playing God?” G O D E L E S C H E R B A C H
At first Freud seems taken aback; E L W O O D T A M E I R P E E
then he smiles. “Why do you say I NOTES FOR “THEME AND R E P U D I A T E D L A U E R
am playing God?” VARI-VARIATIONS”: E S R S G I S O L A Y K S L E
“Because you are! It’s obvious.” S C E N E R Y R A M N E S I A
Günter’s heart is pounding. He is sur- The Theme Words are GÖDEL (variations: T H A S S A L U T E S S Y A M
prised at the intensity of his anger. OGLED and LODGE, anagrams), L E G S T A U T O C A A C R E
“On what evidence do you base ESCHER (variations: NICOLE SCHERZ- E R R S T B M I N O R M A S S
INGER, a PUSSYCAT DOLL; and HER
this judgment?” NAME’S CHER, née CHERILYN SARKI-
S Z E C H U A N I N K O T I C
Günter sits up and swings his feet SIAN, hidden), and BACH (variations: B E I E M E T H R N V I A D U H
to the floor so that he can see the MINOR MASS and [The] ART OF U N M A R R I E D E S N O R E
Professor without straining his neck. FUGUE, famous compositions). M G E C E O N P T R I F L E R
P E N H O L D E R S A I L E D
Freud stirs his finger in a counter-
A R T O F F U G U E N E L L E
clockwise direction. “It would be best Note: * indicates an anagram.
if you were to lie back down.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking ACROSS: 1. *; 12. si(rev.)-ring; 13. hidden; 14. first letters; 15. two mngs.; 19. el-wood; 22. *;
about!” says Günter. “You’re always 25. homophone; 26. is-0-L.A.; 28. s[eismi]c-ener[g]y; 29. *; 30. sa(rev.)-lutes; 33. l-e.g.-s[oviet];
giving me commands— or com- 34. homophone; 38. ac(r)e; 39. homophone pun; 42. homophone pun; 43. homophone; 44. hid-
mandments!” He meant the last two den; 48. VI-A 49. first letters; 50. [h]u(nma*)rried; 52. hidden; 54. *; 56. pen-holder; 57. s[omeone]-
ailed; 59. hidden.
words as a minor joke, but Freud nei-
ther laughs nor speaks. There is a DOWN: 1. *; 3. do-rt (rev.); 4. hideou[t]s-Ness; 6. *; 7. *; 8. *; 10. homophone; 11. *; 20. *;
long moment during which Günter 22. hidden; 23. p-reagreement*; 24. asyl*-um; 26. two mngs.; 27. *; 31. S.A.-moan; 35. a-but; 36. rev.;
is afraid to meet Freud’s eyes, and 37. two mngs.; 40. the-REO-f[ront] ; 41. two mngs.; 45. Ma(C-h[e])o; 46. hind-u; 47. re-Peg;
when he finally does, the Professor 50. [j]ump; 51. Rolf*; 53. two mngs.; 55. fi(rev.)-E.

STORY 73
looks profoundly bored. “Tell me
more,” he says.
Günter lifts his feet back onto the
couch and lies down, both ashamed
and relieved at his capitulation.
“You accuse me of not having ‘faith.’
You tell me that you can hear my ev-
ery word, which conveys the distinct
implication that you can also hear
my thoughts, even those inaccessible
to me. And you are so silent. When I
am lying here, I can’t even see you.
You’re a perfect Deus absconditus!
And you are terrifying! You know
everything—you sit in judgment and
you hold my life in your hands. If
that doesn’t sound like God, I don’t
know what does.”
“Very interesting,” says Freud. “But
I am wondering to what extent my
God-like qualities are actually the re-
sult of anything I, myself, do.”
F
rom twelve-thirty to seven-
thirty every weekday, Günter
dissects the nervous systems of
octopuses at the Physiological Insti-
tute of the University of Vienna. He
has just finished work, and his hands
smell of formaldehyde as he steps out
onto Schwartzspanierstrasse. Shreds
of gold and rose drift across a teal sky,
and blackbirds in the scattered lindens
of the park behind the Votivkirche
conduct their pensive evening impro-
visations. A young woman in a forest-
green cloche hat is sitting on a
wrought-iron bench under one of the
trees with an open book in her lap. In
the granular dimness of the gathering
dusk, Günter doesn’t realize she is the
slender, dark-haired girl from Professor
Freud’s office until he is directly in
front of her.
He stops.
At first she seems entirely oblivi-
ous to his presence. Then her eyes
rise slowly, as if in contemplation.
When she spots Günter, her mouth
falls open: “Oh!”
“Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to
startle you.”
“What are you doing here?”
He gestures behind him. “I work
at the Physiological Institute.”
She closes her book. “How amaz-
ing!” She smiles, but in the semi-
uncomfortable way a woman might
smile at someone who has just
squeezed in beside her on a streetcar.
74 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
“What about you?” he says.
She doesn’t seem to understand.
“Why are you here?”
“I live near here—on Glasergasse. I
come here every afternoon to read. It’s
so quiet. Relaxing.”
He grunts in surprise. “I walk this way
every evening, but I’ve never seen you.”
“Well  . . . ” She smiles again, but
this time the smile is ironic. “No
doubt you have much more important
things to think about.”
“Not likely!”
He laughs. She doesn’t.
He wonders if she is telling the
truth. His first thought when he rec-
ognized her was that she had fol-
lowed him from Freud’s building.
There is a brief moment during
which they both seem unable to
think of anything to say. Then she
lifts her hand as if to shake on a deal:
“Josine Rosenthal.”
“Pleased to meet you!” Günter
shakes her hand. “Officially, I mean.”
Her skin is cool and soft, her fingers
so slender they seem to melt away in
his grasp. He starts to speak: “I’m—”
“Günter Zeitz!” she announces.
“Doctor Günter Zeitz!”
He laughs. “How did you know?”
“The old man told me.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes, he talks about you all
the time!”
Günter is more than a little sur-
prised to hear that Professor Freud
deems him worthy of discussion.
“Nothing terrible, I hope.”
She doesn’t answer, only looks up
smiling, watching his face.
“Uh-oh,” he says.
She laughs. “You don’t have any-
thing to worry about! In fact—” She
cuts herself off. “Well, never mind.”
“What?”
“It’s nothing.” She freezes for a
moment, her mouth open, her eyes
vaguely mirthful.
Günter waits, but the topic has
been concluded.
W
hen Gün ter was four or
five years old, he asked his
mother what the phrase “I
give up” means. They were in the
kitchen. His mother was having cof-
fee at the table. The world outside
the windows was filled with sunshine.
Crows called to one another from the
trees. “Sometimes,” his mother said, “you
want something to happen. You work
very hard to make it happen, and maybe
it is the only thing you can think about
for a very long time. But then, one day,
you realize that it is not going to happen,
that there is nothing you can do to make
it happen, and so you say, ‘I give up,’
which means that you are going to stop
trying. You stop trying even if you still
want that thing very, very much. ‘I give
up,’ you say.”
This explanation brought a terrible
fear into Günter’s life, because what he
thought his mother was saying was
that when you “give up” on something
you have decided to die. And there
was something in the tone of her voice
that made him think she herself might
decide to die, that one day she would
realize she was never going to get
something she wanted dearly, and so
she would give up on life—and thus
abandon him absolutely and forever.
Günter does not remember what
made the notion that she would end
her life seem so likely, or even why
he would think anyone could possi-
bly want to end their life. Nor does
he remember where he first heard
the phrase, or what made it stand
out for him.
He lived with this fear for many years.
G
ünter is just taking a seat when
the door to Professor Freud’s
chambers opens and Fräulein
Rosenthal dashes out. Günter instantly
straightens up and steps toward her,
smiling, preparing to wish her good day.
A look of horror crosses her face. She
waves her arm back and forth in the air
between them, as if to erase him, then
dashes into the foyer, grabs her coat and
hat, and is out the door before she has
even put them on. A few minutes later,
the Professor opens the door to the wait-
ing room, and Günter is still standing,
looking at the front door.
“Fräulein Rosenthal seemed up-
set,” he says.
The Professor makes a non-
committal noise. “She told me she
ran into you on the street and you
had a conversation. Is this something
you’d like to discuss?”
Günter suddenly feels a fierce aver-
sion to telling the Professor anything
at all about this strange woman. “Not
particularly,” he says.
 “Very well then.” The Professor
stands aside to let him into his office.
F
räulein Rosenthal is sitting on
the bench. “Hello,” she says,
looking up and only half meet-
ing Günter’s eye, as if she expects to
be scolded.
“It’s good to see you,” he says, anx-
iously running his fingers through his
tangled hair. “I was worried about you.”
She casts him a sharp glance.
There is an open book in her lap—a
collection of Jung’s essays. She seems
mere pages from the end. Placing a slip
of paper between the pages, she closes
the book, holds it with both hands
atop her knees, and looks up, her ex-
pression tense, though not angry.
“I’m sorry.” She attempts a smile.
“Things have not been going well for
me lately.”
“Professor Freud said you were ill.”
“Did he?” She sighs heavily.
“Well, you shouldn’t believe any-
thing he says.”
“Did something happen?”
“He’s a charlatan and a fool!”
Shocked by both the accusation
and the ferocity with which it is
made, Günter sits down beside her
on the bench. “There must be some
kind of misunderstanding.”
“There’s no misunderstanding. He
won’t listen to me, and he says things
that are not true. And anyway, no
man has the right to say such things
to any woman.”
She is echoing Günter’s own uncer-
tainty about Professor Freud, but even
so, he suspects there is something de-
fensive in her rage, perhaps as a result
of a prematurely rendered insight. “Do
you want to tell me what happened?”
Her eyes fall to the book in her
lap. “No.” She looks over at him and
attempts another smile. “It’s all so
boring. I’d rather not think about it.”
A
dolf hitler: All this was in-
spired by the principle—which
is quite true in itself—that in
the big lie there is always a certain
force of credibility; because the broad
masses of a nation are always more
easily corrupted in the deeper strata of
their emotional nature than con-
sciously or voluntarily; and thus in the
primitive simplicity of their minds
they more readily fall victims to the
big lie than the small lie, since they
themselves often tell small lies in lit-
tle matters but would be ashamed to
resort to large-scale falsehoods. It
would never come into their heads to
fabricate colossal untruths, and they
would not believe that others could
have the impudence to distort the truth
so infamously. Even though the facts
which prove this to be so may be
brought clearly to their minds, they
will still doubt and waver and will
continue to think that there may be
some other explanation.
G
ünter Zeitz and Josine Rosen-
thal are sitting in a noisy res-
taurant. At the center of their
table stands a squat Chianti bottle in
a straw bodice, with a candle stuck
into its mouth. On the menu they find
veal rollatini next to Wiener schnitzel
and osso buco next to goulash. The
waiter tells them the cook is Italian.
They talk about Italy, where neither
have ever been and both want to go.
“Rome,” says Günter. “Florence,” says
Josine. “Venice,” says Günter. “Yes,
Venice,” says Josine. They laugh. They
talk about oysters, garlic, the Sistine
Chapel, Pompeii. They talk about the
man across the room with the bright
red face, whose eyes seem about to pop
from his head. Their feet touch under
the table. They apologize simulta-
neously. They laugh. They order oys-
ters to share, and a bottle of Chianti.
Josine orders the veal rollatini and
Günter the osso buco. He thinks this
meal will cost him a month’s rent,
then decides not to think about it.
They agree that Italians are much
more alive than Austrians, Germans,
or Swiss. They agree that the reserve
of German-speaking people is due to
the weather: the gray skies, the winters
that kill off children, old people, live-
stock. Neither admits to being anxious
or to hardly being able to wait for the
wine to come. They agree that Jung’s
idea of an inherited unconscious is un-
comfortably close to National Socialist
ideology. Are the National Socialists an
actual threat? “Who knows!” says
Günter. They both laugh. Günter asks
and Josine answers, “Jewish  . . . And
you?” “I am nothing,” Günter says.
“Religion makes no sense to me. I
can’t believe in God.” “Then we are
the same,” she says. The wine comes.
STORY 75
They exchange bright glances and
small smiles. They clink glasses. After
her first sip, Josine says, “Now I have
arrived in Italy!” “Where are you?” says
Günter. “I’ve just gotten off a train in
Rome.” “And where will you be when
the bottle is finished?” “Venice!” They
laugh. They toast. “To Venice!” The
oysters arrive. Josine picks one up and
holds it in front of her mouth. “This
always feels like something people
shouldn’t do in public. You mustn’t
look at me!” But never once, as she
touches her lip to the ragged shell
edge, sucks the glistening gray glob
onto her pink tongue and swallows,
does she cease to stare into his eyes.
“You didn’t do what I said!” she says.
He lifts an oyster to his mouth and
says, “Now you mustn’t look at me!”
Their eyes never part.
G
ünter swings his feet off the
couch and sits up. “Do you
mind?” The Professor shakes
his head. “There is something I have
been wanting to talk to you about for
a long time,” says Günter.
The Professor is silent.
Günter continues: “I don’t see why
you define aggression as a manifestation
of the death drive. When a man fights
for his life, or to protect his family, or to
ensure his access to food, how is that not
a manifestation of his desire to live and
to preserve life, which is to say of
the life drive and the pleasure principle?”
Günter stops talking.
Freud shakes his head and smiles.
“My dear Zeitz, you will never be-
come a true psychoanalyst unless you
realize that the terrible force of our ad-
versary, the unconscious, arises entire-
ly from its profound and relentless irra-
tionality. Look at the last war. In what
way was that moral catastrophe a
struggle to protect and propagate hu-
man life? And the same might be
asked of these brown-shirted thugs in
Bavaria. Our job as psychoanalysts is
to defend our species from the worst
effects of its ingrown perversity.”
G
ünter emerges from Freud’s
building and notices Josine
standing two paces down
from the door. She is looking at an
old man on the sidewalk opposite
pulling a child’s wagon loaded with
candlesticks and rattling plates. Her
76 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
brow is pinched, her mouth crinkled
and white, and both her hands are
balled into fists beneath the elbows
of her tightly crossed arms. As Gün-
ter steps toward her, his shoe scrapes
on the pavement, causing her to look
his way. “Thank God!” she cries, but
doesn’t move.
“What’s the matter?” he says.
“I wasn’t sure I could wait any lon-
ger!” She is shivering— even though
the sun is out, the breeze is silky and
warm, and she is wearing a coat.
“Is something wrong?” he asks.
“Are you ill?”
Her laugh is hollow. “No, no. I just
want you to do me a favor.”
“What? I don’t have much time. I
have to get to the laboratory.”
“I want you to take me to your
apartment.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you.” She laughs again.
She rubs his shoulder. “I’ll tell you
when we get there.”
“But I can’t! I have to be at work
in fifteen minutes.”
“Tell them you’re sick. There was
something rotten in your lunch.”
“But why? What’s going on?”
At this question, she places the
knuckles of her fist against her lips.
Then her hand falls, she stands on
her toes, brings her lips to his ear,
and whispers, “I want you to make
love to me.”
They walk with their arms around
each other. Several times he stops to
kiss her, half experimentally, half be-
cause it just seems something he
should do. Once, on a vacant street,
he slips his hand between the but-
tons of her coat and cups her breast
through her blouse. She whispers in
his ear, “Wait. Just wait.” Otherwise,
they hardly talk. He mentions that
he is becoming angry at Freud; she is
not listening.
Once they are inside Günter’s
apartment, he becomes ashamed. His
bed is unmade. His dishes from
breakfast and last night are piled in
the sink. His only window, curtain-
less, looks out into a grate-covered
light well. The air smells of liver-
wurst and unwashed socks.
Josine walks to the center of the
room, turns, and says, “Here we are!”
After that she just stands, blank-
faced and listless, like a patient wait-
ing in an examining room. He kisses
her, and her lips are like spongy rub-
ber across her teeth.
J
osine is sitting beside the table
in her kitchen, elbows resting on
her knees, hands on her temples,
fingers in her hair. She is speaking in
a low voice. “The next time was when
my parents went to live in New York
for six months and I stayed in his
house so that I wouldn’t miss school.
I was thirteen. He came to me every
night. He told me he was teaching
me how to be a woman. He told me
I should be grateful. That my hus-
band would be grateful. His wife
knew. She wouldn’t even look at me
at breakfast. And she wouldn’t talk to
him. One day when we were passing
in the hallway, she grabbed me by the
shoulder and slapped my cheek. She
told me I was a disgusting whore. I did
tell my mother that she’d slapped
me—though I said I had no idea
why. When I told my parents I never
wanted to see him or his wife again,
that slap was my excuse. No one ever
asked questions.”
T
he Professor invites Günter to
have dinner with his family.
The pocket doors to the din-
ing room are shut. Everyone waits in
the parlor, sipping glasses of amontil-
lado. Frau Freud and her sister, Fräu-
lein Bernays, sit side by side on a
leather couch, the one wearing a black
shawl, the other white. They speak
like a single brain in conversation with
itself. When Frau Freud tells Günter,
“We had been hoping our son—”
Fräulein Bernays interjects: “Oliver,
the famous counter—”
“Minna!” cries Frau Freud. “What
are you saying!”
“He’s a counter,” Fräulein Bernays
tells Günter. “He counts everything. If
you asked, he could tell you exactly
how many cigarettes there are in that
bowl.” She points to a silver bowl at
the center of the coffee table. “He
would also know how many buttons
there are on your shirt and how many
eyelets in your shoes.”
“It’s just that he’s mathematically
inclined,” insists Frau Freud. “He’s
an engineer.”
“A civil engineer,” says Fräulein
Bernays. “In Berlin.”
 “In Berlin,” affirms her sister. “We
had been hoping that he would be
visiting us now—”
“—but his wife is pregnant.”
“A difficult pregnancy—”
“—so he doesn’t dare travel.”
Günter is sitting on a chair directly
opposite the sisters. Anna is just be-
side him. She plays no role in the
conversation, though she does keep
casting him glances and smiling in a
way that makes her look as if she is
gasping. She is expressing her own
embarrassment, perhaps—or trying to
ease his.
No sooner had he walked into the
apartment than he realized, from
the glances exchanged between the
sisters and the Professor’s uneasy
frown, that he had been invited in
the hope that an affinity might arise
between him and Anna.
The Professor hasn’t taken a seat.
He is pacing along the wall, fidgeting,
taking his hands in and out of his
pockets, making querulous noises
deep in his throat. “Oliver shows
signs of obsessional neurosis,” he says.
“I have been encouraging him to go
into analysis with Eitingon, but he
won’t listen to anything I say. He is a
great disappointment.”
The room falls silent.
When the maid opens the doors to
the dining room, everyone who has
been seated rises. The Professor gives
Günter a curt quarter-bow from the
waist and says, “I will see you tomor-
row!” There is a door just behind him.
He opens it and leaves.
Anna leans over and whispers, “Ever
since his operation, he hasn’t eaten in
front of anyone but the family. He wants,
above all else, to retain his dignity.”
and the muffling of sound that it is a
coat closet. The next door is to the
KEVIN BAKER’S
bathroom, so the one just after must be LYRICAL ELEGY FOR
to the toilet.
But no. NEW YORK CITY,
Sigmund Freud, in a sleeveless under- A HARPER’S MAGAZINE
shirt and rumpled trousers, is standing
in the middle of a bedroom, holding a COVER STORY
dress shirt by its collar and one tail, ap-
parently checking for stains. The skin of IN JULY 2018,
his outstretched arms is crinkled and IS NOW EXPANDED
pallid, his muscles atrophied. A bush of
gray-brown hair fans from his armpit. IN BOOK FORM
“Oh, sorry!” says Günter.
Freud, startled, looks straight into
Günter’s eyes.
“Sorry,” Günter repeats, backing
out the door.
Freud is waving his shirt in the air,
making off-key yawps and groans,
the expression on his face desperate.
Günter doesn’t know whether to
pull the door all the way shut or step
back into the room.
More yawps. A seal-like bellow.
On the table, beside the single
bed, there is a plate, and on the plate,
there is an object that looks like a
lump of meat and teeth.
Freud flings his shirt onto the bed
and holds up one finger. As he makes
his way toward the bedside table, he
gives Günter a significant glance
and, once more, holds his finger up.
Günter remains motionless in the VISIT HARPERS.ORG/CITY
doorway. TO RECEIVE 20% OFF
The Professor picks the object up
off the plate and puts it into his
mouth. After some adjustments re-
quiring fingers from both hands, as The Fall of a Great
well as much loud hacking and suck- American City
ing that sounds like nothing so much examines the urban
as strangulation, Freud lowers his
hands and says, “Ah, Zeitz! I was just />5?5?;2-Œ
A1:/1
thinking of you.” how money is

G
ünter has no need of the toi- driving away all the

let. All he wants is to escape
the tedium of the polite din-
ner conversation he, Anna, her moth-
er, and her aunt are working so hard
to maintain. When he asks where he
might find the water closet, Frau Freud
nods toward the door through which
her husband disappeared. “On the
left,” she says.
Günter finds himself in a dark hall-
way, with no discernible apertures along
its left wall. He opens the first door on
the right. While the interior is entirely
lightless, he can tell from the smell of fur
T
he night before coming to din- things we love about
ner at the Freuds’, Günter was
eating at the Hotel Imperial metropolitan life and
with Josine; her brother, Josef; and her how we can, and must,
sister-in-law, Herta. get them back.
“But he’s a laughable anachronism!”
said Günter, a fork in one hand, a
knife in the other, and a half-chewed
bite of potato lodged in his cheek.
“Not so laughable,” said Herta. HARDCOVER • $19.95
“And not so anachronistic,” said Josef.
Günter tongued the potato into
the center of his mouth, chewed, took
a sip of his wine.

STORY 77
 “He fills the streets with passionate
Bavarians,” said Josef. “I wish they
were anachronisms, but as far as I can
tell, they are very much of our era.”
Josine had hardly said a word all
evening, but had been drinking wine
at such a rate that her eyes no longer
focused on any one point in space.
Her elbows rested on the table, and
she was holding her wineglass with
both hands in front of her face, but
so loosely it seemed in danger of fall-
ing onto her plate.
“He’s a troglodyte!” said Günter. “His
economic program is based entirely on
an anti-Semitic fantasy, so it is guaran-
teed to fail. He may appeal to the cred-
ulous Protestant petite bourgeoisie, but
all people really want are jobs. If he ever
actually follows through on his prom-
ises, there’ll be rioting in the streets,
the stock market will plunge—people
won’t stand for it!”
G
ünter is sitting on the corner
of the Professor’s bed. Freud,
still in his sleeveless under-
shirt, is sitting on a wooden desk chair,
one hand on each of his knees, fingers
spread, clutching the knobby bones
underneath. “I was once like you,” he
says, “believing there was a nobility to
certain ideas—or a veracity—that al-
lowed them to transcend the minds in
which they were conceived and
through which they passed.”
Günter is filled with a frantic rest-
lessness. All he wants is to make his
excuses and leave, but he is incapable
of resisting the Professor.
“You know Rilke, of course,” says
Freud.
“Yes,” says Günter. “Not personally,
but . . . ” He doesn’t finish.
“One afternoon,” says Freud, “I was
walking with him through the coun-
tryside. It was a summery day in early
September. The sun was golden, the
fields filled with flowers. But he de-
nied that any of it was beautiful. The
fact that it would wither in mere
weeks filled him with despair. ‘There
is no beauty apart from the eternal,’
he said. I thought that the most juve-
nile of affectations and had to restrain
my irritation as I argued that the very
transience of the beauty around us
only made it more precious—”
“Even its transience is transient,”
says Günter, hoping to anticipate
78 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
Freud’s points and thereby hasten the
end of this interview.
The Professor waves away the in-
terruption.
He is standing now, pacing in front
of the bed, his feet bare and veiny, his
toenails thick, in need of clipping.
“Yes. Of course,” he says. “I made
that point too. But my main argu-
ment was that beauty is intrinsic to
the beautiful object, to its particular
configuration of color, form, structure,
and so beauty is independent of con-
text. Thus, if an object is beautiful in
a particular instant, it is always beau-
tiful, and in that way eternal.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, he was as contemptuous of me
as I was of him. He thought I was
naïve, blinded by scientific pragma-
tism. I came away from that conversa-
tion thinking I had wasted my time.
But I have been arguing with Rilke in
my mind ever since: every time I con-
template a beautiful idea, whenever I
think there might be something re-
demptive in the life drive, or even in
aggression, insofar as it is the force of
conscience, I wonder if Rilke would
think me vacuous, self-deceived. And
tonight, it came to me in a flash: Rilke
was right! I am vacuous! I’ve been liv-
ing in a fantasy!”
Freud stops pacing, his emaciated
arms stiff at his sides, his hands in
tight fists, his old man’s face constrict-
ed, yellowed, insect-like.
“There is, in fact, no beauty apart
from the eternal—which is the oppo-
site of existence: a void, a nothingness,
airless, endless, dark and dead, in the
midst of which existence—especially
human existence—is a senseless acci-
dent. And when we encounter the eter-
nal, we encounter only its absolute and
implacable indifference to us, which
our flesh-bound minds can conceive of
only as cruelty. And this is the most
important thing, because as cruelty, the
eternal seems so magnificently heedless
that it feels like pure freedom to us, and
so it is awe-inspiring and profoundly
beautiful: the only thing in all of cre-
ation that we can truly love. And in
most people, such love takes one of
two forms: either we make ourselves
abject before the eternal in the hope
that it will not destroy us, which is to
say that we worship it; or we attempt
to take the eternal into ourselves,
which is to say that we make ourselves
the agents of its cruelty.”
Freud has stopped speaking. His eyes
inside the round lenses of his glasses are
fixed on Günter. They glitter. They do
not move.
Günter looks away. His mouth has
gone dry.
When at last he draws a breath to
speak, Freud’s arm flies out, palm flat,
upraised. “Stop! No words!”
G
ünter is at a party in a palace
ballroom. The women are
dressed in ankle-length gowns
of muted floral colors. Most of the men
wear tuxedos with silk waistcoats,
though some are in military uniforms
with chin-high collars and heavy med-
als arrayed across their chests. A string
quartet is playing, while overhead na-
ked men and women float amid the
gold-tinged clouds of a summer sky.
Günter holds a glass of wine and is
talking to a woman who looks like a
little girl in her mother’s clothing.
The sleeves of her green satin gown
are rolled up at her wrists, and its
skirt rumples against the polished
floor. She too holds a glass of wine,
but she is weeping. When Günter
asks what is wrong, she tells him,
“You shouldn’t be here.” “Why?” he
asks. “Because you are dead.” And
now it seems that he is walking be-
neath an umber sky, the palace a
heap of smoldering rubble behind
him. He crosses its ruined terrace and
descends a set of steps into a gully,
where a gray dog lies on its belly in
long grass—it is Schatzi, the Weima-
raner mutt Günter’s family owned
when he was a child. “Hey, girl!” Gün-
ter crouches and holds out his hand.
The dog stands. It slinks toward him,
sniffs his fingers, then bares its fangs
and lunges. Günter leaps back and
kicks, feeling the impact of his foot
against the dog’s skull. The dog yelps,
reels, and runs. It has something in its
mouth: a piece of bloody meat. Günter
looks at his sleeve, which seems to
have been brushed with red paint. He
wonders if the sleeve has been ripped
but cannot tell. Another dog is slink-
ing out of the grass, head lowered,
fangs bared, and now another, then
several more. Günter is surrounded.
The dogs are closing in. He has no
choice but to fight. Q
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 Introducing

THE BEST FOOD WRITING

from
HARPER’S MAGAZINE
This collection of
essays from the
archives of Harper’s
Magazine features
such celebrated writers
as M.F.K. Fisher,
Upton Sinclair, Ford
Madox Ford, Tanya
Gold, Wendell Berry,
David Foster Wallace,
and Michael Pollan.

“This satisfying spread of essays, while an excellent tasting menu of the many-faceted
relations between Americans and their foodstuffs, serves as a clear journal of ways in which
we have done our eating right, and of course, how we have burnt the toast to a crisp.”
— Nick Offerman, actor, Parks and Recreation

AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE AT STORE.HARPERS.ORG

DISTRIBUTED BY MIDPOINT TRADE BOOKS, A DIVISION OF IPG


NEW BOOKS
By Lidija Haas
T
here’s much to be said for being
maladjusted. More and more,
perhaps, as the environment to
which one is expected to adjust be-
comes more ruinous. The climate activ-
ist Greta Thunberg has flung back at
her enemies (Donald Trump included)
their attempts to shame her for her ex-
periences with depression and for being
on the autism spectrum. Her differ-
ences, she has pointed out, have helped
her to remain focused on a problem
many find too large, too painful, too
intractable—and to keep saying what
people don’t like to hear. It’s one thing
to be willing to burn the world for prof-
it; to allow it to happen out of embar-
rassment (as so many citizens, uncom-
The Lost King, by Thomas Broomé © The artist. Courtesy Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm
R E V I E W S
fortable disrupting the status quo, could
be accused of doing) is another. A feel-
ing of social dislocation, of norms that
can’t be upheld or that have ceased to
make sense, pervades Jenny Offill’s slen-
der novel, WEATHER (Knopf, $23.95).
Like its best-selling 2014 predecessor,
Dept. of Speculation, it also addresses
disconnection formally, unfolding in
isolated paragraphs and sentences, leav-
ing out much of the flesh that would
often cover a narrative’s bones. “Young
person worry: What if nothing I do
matters?” Offill writes. “Old person
worry: What if everything I do does?”
The narrator, in middle age, having
dropped out of grad school years earlier
to help her brother, Henry, deal with
his drug addiction, is now an under-
qualified college librarian, meaning
she’s surrounded by people even less
secure than she is. As well as propping
up her husband, Ben; son, Eli; and
Henry—now mostly clean and a father,
which if anything has made him more
dependent on his sister—the narrator
attracts strangers and is moved to listen
to them all, witnessing unmet need and
disintegration everywhere. A library,
theoretically the flower of civilization, is
of course also a space symptomatic of its
failings: Narcan is on hand to tackle the
frequent overdoses, and all around
are those with nowhere else to go.
“At first it was unnerving,” the nar-
rator learns from a man she calls
“the doomed adjunct,”
to work somewhere where no one
remembers your name, where you
have to call security to get into your
own room, but as regular life be-
comes more fragmented and bewil-
dering, it bothers him less and less.
Offill chases this nugget with a
joke about “the philosophy of late
capitalism”: “You can’t outrun a
bear,” one hiker warns another,
who’s swiftly changing into
sneakers after spotting the crea-
ture nearby. “I just have to outrun
you,” the other replies.
The novel’s warm yet depressive,
gently apocalyptic tone—just like
its sinewy form—is similar to that
of Dept. of Speculation, but the new
book carries with it an additional,
grim implication that the world outside
may be catching up with its sensibility.
The narrator of the earlier novel, at
home with her infant daughter, observes
that “The Long Now,” the title of a
lecture series her unfaithful husband
listens to, should refer to “the feeling of
daily life” rather than to “topics such as
Climate Change and Peak Oil.” In
Weather, the entire texture of everyday
living is infused with the mood of po-
litical and ecological disaster. The nar-
rator manages the deranged and derang-
ing correspondence of her onetime
mentor, Sylvia, whose version of “The
Long Now” is the more bluntly titled
podcast Hell and High Water, and col-
lects alarming or weirdly soothing tidbits
REVIEWS 81
about disaster preparedness. The most
practical is Sylvia’s tart advice to get
“rich, very, very rich.” A guest expert on
the podcast says that, far from the cliché
of mass panic, 80 percent of people will
have the fatal “incredulity response” and
“just freeze.” Offill doesn’t add that we’re
all participating in a vast slo-mo experi-
ment on reactions to emergency, though
by closing the novel with a link to a
website that recommends “collective
action [as] the antidote to fear and
dread,” she hints at an awareness that
some readers might prefer to inhabit the
mind of a Greta Thunberg rather than
that of a climate pessimist closer to the
Jonathan Franzen mode.
Offill’s frequent jokes about depres-
sion, featured in both works, here un-
mask themselves as what they maybe
always were: reminders of how nearly
impossible it is to learn to live with
things as they are. “Instead of saying
that life is suffering,” the narrator’s
meditation teacher says, referring to
alternative translations of the Tibetan
Buddhist term dukkha, “they might
say that life is tolerable. As in just
barely.” Like a song in which riffs
keep returning and shifting, the book
sends this idea back to us in a few
different contexts—“It’s barely bear-
able,” characters say; “You can barely
bear it.” Yet light seeps through. The
narrator’s propensity
for tending to oth-
ers is almost univer-
sally discouraged—
her concern for her
brother is an un-
healthy “enmesh-
ment”; not having
dependents is recom-
mended as the top
technique for emer-
gency survival—and
still she carries on
as before. Disparate
people share mo-
ments of makeshift
solidarity, especially
in the library, that remaining bit of
public space, in which there is some
hope of being given what you need
rather than what you can afford.
T
he equivalent place in Amina
Cain’s elliptical debut novel,
INDELICACY (Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, $25), is more refined than
82 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
the library: a museum, where the hero-
ine, Vitória, starts out working as a
cleaner while longing, as waves of
wealthy visitors flow in and out of the
galleries, for the freedom to write. The
museum provides: the book is narrated
from a later time in which she has ob-
tained what she wants via a lucrative
marriage that’s now also behind her.
“Sitting at my desk,” she writes at the
close of the first chapter, “I feel loving
toward my wrists. I’ve made
them do too much.” Direct
and elusive at once, this is
an economical encapsula-
tion of the limited options for
advancement—while each
has its particular trials and
compromises, scrubbing floors
and keeping a rich man happy
both involve long hours and
physical labor.
Where Offill’s narrator
navigates a world growing un-
fit to house her or anyone else,
Cain’s is a more familiar misfit, reluctant
to occupy the social space provided and
suspicious of emotional ties that will
confine her further. Her problems re-
semble those of women in the
mid-twentieth century and earlier,
though the book resists evoking any
fixed period or place. Old-world mark-
ers abound—horses and candlelight,
embroider y a nd
feathered hats—but
the atmosphere is
that of a parable, as
if Vitória is writing
herself into existence
outside historical
time, an effect en-
hanced by the snip-
pets of other books
that weave in and
out of the text. One
acquainta nce of
Vitória’s, Antoinette,
T
is named after Jean
Rhys’s reinvention of
Charlotte Brontë’s
madwoman in the attic in Wide Sar-
gasso Sea. Then there’s Solange,
Vitória’s husband’s maid, whose frosty
reserve increases the mistress’s dis-
comfort at now employing a woman
in a role she herself hated. Her name is
shared with one of the young women
in Jean Genet’s play The Maids, who
take turns dressing up as their mis-
Top: Static Image Painting/Orange/Candle/Medicine Hat, by Martin Bennett © The artist.
Courtesy Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles. Bottom: Photograph of a mop © Bridgeman Images
tress and acting out rebellions against
her, eventually plotting to kill her in
real life.
These references, though they im-
part the odd frisson, invite unflatter-
ing comparisons. Cain’s sentences are
elegant and often suspenseful, but the
narrative can’t fulfill the promise of
their strangeness. Vitória lacks the
stark self-pity of Jean Rhys’s heroines
or the swooning, spiritual intensity of
Clarice Lispector’s, and Cain doesn’t
manage the magic trick accomplished
by those predecessors, in which a
mind becomes the world and all out-
side it vanishes. Meanwhile the social
constraints that serve here as Cain’s
artistic ones also feel too filmy and
indistinct to sustain the requisite ten-
sion. Indelicacy makes a tacit claim as
a feminist fable, in which Vitória at-
tempts to carve out room for herself
without either submitting to or being
complicit in exploitation— but the
book’s very ease makes it slight against
its much darker lineage. It couldn’t
have been written in the past it’s set
in, yet it also doesn’t draw much from
the time in which it appears. Genet
spawned The Maids out of a true and
violent story—it’s intriguing to con-
sider what Cain might make from
sturdier material.
he twentieth-century British
writer Anna Kavan, best
known for her last, dystopian
novel, Ice, published the year before
her death in 1968, could easily be
mistaken for a Jean Rhys figure, with
the heroin Kavan depended on for
decades standing in for booze and the
intermittent falls out of public favor.
Both writers created bleak moods of
alienation and mistrust, and depicted
the inevitable, mechanistic crushing
of the sensitive and powerless. That
bleak sensibility, combined with the
mysterious, featureless protagonists
and indeterminate plotting that ap-
pear in Kavan’s mature work, may
make her vulnerable to charges of so-
lipsism, of being, as Mary-Kay Wilmers
memorably wrote of Rhys, “always in-
credibly lonely because in her own
mind no one else existed” (though the
aloneness of Kavan’s protagonists
evokes Kafka far more than Rhys).
Most of all, perhaps, a reading of in-
wardness could be prompted by her
own layered self-invention, exemplified
in her decision to become Anna Ka-
van in the first place. Born Helen
Woods, she wrote several relatively
conventional novels under her married
name of Ferguson before she began to
produce markedly stranger work in
the Forties using the name of the pro-
tagonist of her 1930 book, Let Me
Alone. M ACHINES IN THE HEAD
(NYRB Classics, $15.95), a selection of
stories (one previously unpublished)
written during her career as “Anna
Kavan,” declares up front its intent to
banish any suggestion that Kavan’s
work retreated from engagement with
the world. “One reacts to the environ-
ment and atmosphere one lives in,” she
writes in a 1966 letter, quoted as an
epigraph to Victoria Walker’s foreword,
“and my writing changes with
the conditions outside.”
Walker goes on to emphasize
that “little has been said about
[Kavan’s] politics . . . political she
most certainly was in her singu-
lar way,” and the sampling of
work here— including stories
f rom A sylum Piece (1940)
through A Bright Green Field
(1957), to the posthumously pub-
lished Julia and the Bazooka and
My Soul in China—makes a con-
vincing case for that, as well as
offering a seductive initiation
for new readers. Kavan’s narra-
tors often experience social per-
secution or emotional isolation
in climatic terms—fog and ice
a nd other forces threaten
destruction—making that time
of world war, mass displacement,
and imminent nuclear winter
feel intimately connected to our
own, in which looming environ-
mental catastrophe provides an
Nemora I, by Jaco van Schalkwyk © The artist. Courtesy Barnard Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
ever-available metaphor for societal
and psychological ills. Meanwhile the
increasingly anomic autonomy of Ka-
van’s stories only enhances their preci-
sion as reflections of the twentieth
century, with its bomb shelters and
mental institutions, its traumatized
soldiers and alienated workers, its to-
talitarian bureaucrats and rioting stu-
dents. The eponymous story from A
Bright Green Field describes a steep
meadow of monstrous, fast-growing,
phosphorescent grass mowed by un-
skilled workers drawn across its surface
by ropes and pulleys. Yes, the narrator
learns, “unfortunately the limbs, and
even the lives, of the men up there
were in danger,” but she says
I should not pay too much attention to
the spasms and convulsions I was ob-
serving, as these were mainly just mim-
icry, a traditional miming of the suffer-
ings endured by earlier generations of
workers before the introduction of the
present system. The work was now
much less arduous than it looked and
performed under the most humane
conditions that had as yet been de-
vised. It might interest me to know
that it was not at all unpopular; on the
contrary, there was considerable com-
petition for this form of employment.
In Kavan, sardonic, absurdist humor
shoots through the dark, finding its
fullest expression in the late story “Five
More Days to Countdown,” the narra-
tor of which, “in [his] straightforward,
manly way,” keeps trying to get a han-
dle on the deteriorating situation at
an educational establishment in an
unnamed country that is besieged by
unrest along the lines of the 1968 up-
risings. (The story was actually pub-
lished that year in Encounter.) The
narrator must contend with students
“equipped with Lugers, an enlarged vo-
cabulary, aerosols and slinky stretch-
pants in glittering fabric,” “a khaki
character (communist?) on the all-kill
wavelength” who affirms that “my gun
has real bullets in it!,” and a nattily
dressed love object named Esmerelda,
a “dedicated idealist” and “inventor
of a revolutionary system of educa-
tion,” who keeps foiling the narrator’s
plan to escape with her by helicopter
to “some lost Antipodean island” im-
mune to the fate facing everywhere
else. Within the story’s nine pages, re-
alist literary conventions go the way
of social ones, and Esmerelda gets a
happy ending just as untenable as the
one she’d conceived for her society
through liberal education: “In a cen-
tury which has exalted war to unprec-
edented heights,” the narrator notes,
regarding it as the finest flower of hu-
man endeavor and scientific progress,
subordinating everything else in
life to it as a matter of course,
she sees the all-powerful giant
mushroom shape menacing us as
a mere bogey to be eliminated
simply by depriving children of
warlike toys.
The prospects in Kavan’s
world look at least as dire as
those in Offill’s. Yet just as the
form of Weather conjures a con-
tradictory optimism—the author
trusts that in the leap across
white space from one thought,
one incident, to the next, you’ll
stay with her—so Kavan’s work,
read in this form, spanning de-
cades, is heartening in its will-
ingness to strike out alone, grow-
ing only bolder, stranger, more
adventurous. That tendency cost
her many times, but readers
eventually met her where she
was, and now the things she de-
picted look more eerily recogniz-
able than ever. Q
REVIEWS 83

DEAREST LIZZIE
The end of a literary marriage
By Helen Vendler
Discussed in this essay:
The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their
Circle, edited by Saskia Hamilton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 560 pages. $50.
The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972–1973, by Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia
Hamilton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 224 pages. $18.
I
n 1970, Robert Lowell moved to
England to take up a brief residence
at Oxford’s All Souls College, leav-
ing his wife, the brilliant writer Eliza-
beth Hardwick, and their adolescent
daughter, Harriet, in New York City. To
Hardwick’s increasing uneasiness and
fear, he stayed on in England: eventu-
ally she learned that he had begun an
affair with the writer Caroline Black-
wood, a member of the wealthy Anglo-
Irish Guinness family. In The Dolphin
(1973), his penultimate volume of po-
ems, Lowell relates, in a series of sonnets,
his affair with and eventual marriage to
Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter Uni-
versity Professor Emerita at Harvard Univer-
sity. Her most recent book is the essay collec-
tion The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar.
84 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
Blackwood, by whom, as the titular Dol-
phin, the poet was “swallowed up alive.”
Within his sonnets, Lowell embedded
sentences and phrases from Hardwick’s
letters to him, written after she learned
of the affair, including her initial indig-
nant and distressed responses.
The Dolphin caused a stir both be-
fore publication and after. Some of the
friends to whom Lowell sent the draft
(including Adrienne Rich and Eliza-
beth Bishop) replied with instant ob-
jections: “Art just isn’t worth that much,”
Bishop wrote in her letter. Bishop was
shocked not only by Lowell’s quoting
Hardwick’s letters without her knowl-
edge or permission, but also by his
mingling of fact with fiction. In re-
sponse to those criticisms, Lowell
Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Photograph courtesy
the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin
made some attempt in revision to ren-
der the quotations more anonymous
and to rearrange the sequence, but to
no great effect. While The Dolphin
basically remains a nakedly autobio-
graphical document (“one man, two
women, the common novel plot,” as
its author ironically described it), it is
written in an ambitious style: tradi-
tional in its use of a fourteen-line unit,
relatively unconventional in its un-
rhymed form, and most original in its
rapid shifts in registers of language—
now colloquial, now densely allusive.
Most of the letters Hardwick wrote
to Lowell between their marital sepa-
ration, in 1970, and his death at sixty,
in 1977, disappeared from Lowell’s
papers, leaving a conspicuous gap in
the record of those years, a tumultuous
and crucial period. But two new and
unexpected volumes—expertly edited
and with wonderfully informative
footnotes by the poet and scholar
Saskia Hamilton, who also provides an
alert and balanced introduction to
each—have now been published.
The first—The Dolphin Letters,
1970–1979—contains Hardwick’s 102
“missing” letters and explains their
disappearance. At Lowell’s death,
they remained in the possession of
Caroline Blackwood Lowell, who sub-
sequently entrusted them to Lowell’s
close friend the poet Frank Bidart,
with the proviso that they were not to
be published until after Hardwick’s
death. Bidart eventually deposited
them in Harvard’s Houghton Library,
and with the permission of Lowell’s
children from both relationships,
Harriet and Sheridan, they have now
appeared. The book also includes
Lowell’s responses to Hardwick and
some of his letters to friends concern-
ing the poems.
The second of the new books—
The Dolphin: Two Versions—contains
the 1973 published version as well
as the original 1972 draft Lowell had
sent to friends, reproduced from a
typescript made by Bidart (who
had gone to England to assist Low-
ell in editing and sequencing the
poems). The typescript is accompa-
nied, en face, by the intermediate
changes Lowell dictated to Bidart
and Blackwood as he reviewed the
draft before circulating it, an excel-
lent source for any reader interested
in Lowell’s stylistic evolution between see her father on
1972 and 1973. both sides of the
At l a ntic a nd

T
he Dolphin letters illuminate
Lowell’s life and aesthetic per-
plexities in his later years, but
they are equally useful in unveiling
Elizabeth Hardwick’s unforgettable role
during that era. Lowell’s and Hard-
wick’s letters are supplemented in this
volume by others written by members
of their circle of friends, including
Bishop, Rich, and Mary McCarthy
(Hardwick’s principal confidante),
which flesh out the New York life of
Lowell, Hardwick, and their daughter,
Harriet, in the Seventies, as well as the
life in England of Lowell, Blackwood,
and their son, Sheridan. The collec-
tion, as the publicity notice from Farrar,
Straus and Giroux says, “has the nar-
rative sweep of a novel.” (I once asked
Lowell why he so liked the poems of
Thomas Hardy: he said, “Because
they’re about real men and women,
and the relations between them.” Both
he and Hardwick, in this late corre-
spondence, refer to Hardy’s remorseful
poems to his first wife after her death.)
Although I knew Lowell during the
last three years of his life, I did not know
Hardwick, except for our having been a
few times at the same event; we never
had a conversation. When I asked Low-
ell why he appropriated Hardwick’s own
words, he said that, to represent her
fairly, he thought she should speak for
herself, rather than his speaking
about her. For me, the “lost” letters
testify to Hardwick’s extraordinary
depth of character and faithfulness to
the past years of love between herself
and Lowell: though not without faults
(she was jealous of Bidart’s instinct for
Lowell’s poetry, for instance, and she
could lose her temper), she must have
been one of the sanest and most gener-
ous women who ever lived. After the
initial blow of learning from friends
about her husband’s affair and writing
letters that Lowell characterized as ones
that “veer from frantic affection to fran-
tic abuse,” she regained her equilibrium
and for the remaining several years of
Lowell’s life made every effort to pre-
serve their daughter’s good relations
with him. She insisted to Lowell on
Harriet’s right to her father’s regard and
interest, and her forceful representation
of that right meant that Harriet could
correspond with
him, wit hout
fearing objec-
tions or hostility
from her mother.
Lizzie (as Lowell
always called her)
went so far as to
write Caroline in
anticipation of
one of Harriet’s
visits to England,
so that all should
go smoothly.
But these are
not the most im-
pressive aspects
of the Hardwick
correspondence:
what strikes the
reader is how
Lizzie, after the
first shock, wrote steadily and benevo-
lently to Cal himself letters of both love
and friendship. (Lowell was called Cal
by those close to him.) After an initial
stiffness of address (“Dear Cal”), the
letters revert to their usual “Dearest
Cal” and “Darling,” and Hardwick’s
early pained and painful reproaches are
not repeated. Although Hardwick con-
fesses to loneliness while in their house
in Castine, Maine, when Harriet is at
summer camp, in New York she occu-
pies herself with caring for Harriet and
making their joint life as happy as pos-
sible. (Later she would also teach, work
that included tiring commutes from
New York to Smith and the University
of Connecticut, as well as a regular stint
at Barnard.) During the separation from
Lowell, when no clear arrangement for
their finances existed, she worried about
money, but after the division of goods in
their 1972 divorce agreement, she was
reassured. The old friendship between
herself and Lowell even survived a heat-
ed exchange over rights to the house in
Castine, begun when Blackwood inter-
vened, asking (with no legal basis)
whether it should not go in part to her
son Sheridan.
One cannot but admire Hardwick’s
insight into her daughter’s sensibility
and gifts. Because of Harriet’s uneven
high school performance at Dalton,
Hardwick expended time and effort
in looking into other schools, both in
the United States and in En gland
(where it seemed possible, before she
learned of her husband’s affair, that
she and Harriet would join him). She
came quite rapidly to realize that
criticizing her adolescent daughter’s
indifference to (or rebellion against)
school was an error, and relied rather
on her sympathy for Harriet in her
sadness (with her father absent, and
with no siblings or close relatives at
hand). Lizzie’s wisdom in allowing
Harriet freedom from the frenetic cul-
tural pressure for children to excel in
secondary school was (and remains) a
rare parental kindness.
W hen L owell’s ma r r iage to
Blackwood—made disastrous by Caro-
line’s inability to cope with his manic-
depressive illness and her own worsen-
ing alcoholism—reached its final,
catastrophic phase, it was to Hardwick
that Lowell turned. She agreed to let
him come back to live with her—not
as a husband but as a companion and
friend. In 1977, they spent an agreeable
summer together in Castine. When
Lowell flew to Ireland to visit his young
son, the tempestuous interaction with
Blackwood became intolerable, and
he flew back early to New York, dying
of a heart attack in the taxi that
was taking him from the airport to
Hardwick’s apartment.

Robert Lowell with his daughter, Harriet. Photograph courtesy the Harry Ransom Center REVIEWS 85
 Then, in another act of selflessness,
Hardwick allowed Blackwood, after the
Boston funeral and the New Hamp-
shire burial, to stay with her in her New
York apartment to await the memorial
service. Hardwick reported on the fu-
neral and burial to Mary McCarthy:
That was the end. But it was the begin-
ning of a nightmare here for me. Caro-
line somehow moved in with me for 8
days and nights to prepare for the Me-
morial Service. I don’t think any single
night I slept for more than two hours.
Her poor drunken theatricality hour af-
ter hour, day after day, night after night
was unrelieved torture for me and I am
sure for herself much more. Somehow
she has put herself beyond help and sad-
ly for her all help begins at the same
spot—to stop drinking, at least for to-
day, tomorrow, for a week, an evening.
During all these burdened and dis-
rupted years, Hardwick was writing. The
emotions generated by the Blackwood
affair and subsequent marriage prompt-
ed deeply disenchanted reflections on
modern relations between men and
women. Hardwick published the result-
ing essays in The New York Review of
Books (collected in 1974 under the title
Seduction and Betrayal), and Lowell felt
that they were revelatory, in part, of
their mutual suffering: “Liked and im-
mensely admired your Ibsen, maybe
rawly near home. Or is it? . . . I think you
should be vain of having put so much of
yourself into the classic plots; I’m envi-
ous.” Hardwick’s essay “The Rosmer-
sholm Triangle” combines psychological
description with fraught expression, and
is even more intense than other essays
in the volume:
It is Ibsen’s genius to place the ruth-
lessness of women beside the vanity
and self-love of men. In a love triangle,
brutality on one side and vanity on the
other must be present; both are neces-
sary as the conditions, the grounds
upon which the battle will be fought.
Without the heightened sense of im-
portance a man naturally acquires
when he is the object of the possessive
determinations of two women, nothing
interesting could happen. . . . The tri-
angle demands the cooperation of two
in the humiliation of one, along with
some period of pretense, suffering, in-
sincerity, or self-delusion.
“Rawly near home”—Lowell’s
judgment—betrays his own hurt. And
86 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
his comment that Hardwick “put so
much of [herself] into the classic plots”
points to her force as a critic. She so
enters into the psychology of literary
characters that she draws the reader
pell-mell into their erratic orbits and
irrational decisions. She is less inter-
ested than some literary critics in an
analysis of authorial technique; what
she is after is creating for her reader an
immersive plunge into the imaginative
results of that technique on the page.
She never doubts the genius of her
authors, and her attention to their
power transfers itself into the reader’s
mind and heart.
I
n “Epilogue,” the poem that closes
Lowell’s last book, Day by Day
(1977), the poet asks the tragic (and
defiant) question: “Yet why not say what
happened?” Through all these letters,
both he and Hardwick puzzle over “what
happened” to break their long marriage.
To understand the unwise episode with
Caroline, it must be remembered that
Lowell had suffered since youth from
bipolar disorder, which recurred—
almost yearly—as a destructive elation
followed by a desolate depression. Dur-
ing their twenty-one years of marriage
(1949–70), Hardwick had seen Lowell
through all his instances of illness,
coping with the onslaughts of mania
(including a frequent conviction that
he had found a new beloved) and en-
during with him his gradual, saddened
recovery. Her earlier description of her
life with Lowell (written to Lowell’s first
biographer, Ian Hamilton, and repro-
duced by Saskia Hamilton in The Dol-
phin Letters) conveys the pattern of
their married existence:
Cal’s recuperative powers were almost
as much of a jolt as his breakdowns;
[that] is, knowing him in the chains of
illness you could, for a time, not imag-
ine him otherwise. And when he was
well, it seemed so miraculous that the
old gifts of person and art were still
there . . . Then it did not seem possible
that the dread assault could return to
hammer him into bits once more.
He “came to,” sad, worried, always
ashamed and fearful; and yet there he
was, this unique soul for whom one
felt great pity.
Their happiness between his mental
collapses had many sources: their mu-
tual vocation as writers; their joy from
daily conversations in which Lowell’s
poetic intelligence met her critical wit;
their similar political convictions and
activism; and, after Harriet’s birth,
their love for their daughter. At a time
when lithium was thought to be a po-
tential cure for manic-depressive ill-
ness, it must have seemed to Lowell,
who began taking it in 1967, that he
might at last be able to have a “normal”
marriage, one that would not require
his wife to be nurse and keeper.
Lowell had met Blackwood in the
Fifties in New York through the edi-
tor Robert Silvers, who suggested in
1970, as Lowell was leaving for En-
gland, that he might like to get in
touch with her. According to the
closing poem in The Dolphin, at their
first meeting in London as guests at
the same party, Blackwood (then
married to the composer Israel Cit-
kowitz and the mother of three
daughters) “made for [his] body,”
bringing him back to her house:
When I was troubled in mind, you
made for my body
caught in its hangman’s-knot of
sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my
will. . . .
And so the affair began and pro-
gressed, with Lizzie knowing nothing
for some months. Yet their correspon-
dence persisted, on through the af-
fair; Blackwood’s pregnancy; the sub-
sequent marriage; the birth of
Sheridan; and the years of his early
childhood. From En gland, Lowell
addresses Hardwick (as he usually
did) as “Dearest Lizzie,” and affirms
his inability to do without her, even
in absence:
I yearn for your letters, and hope you
won’t give up the habit. I have always
prayed I were two people (one soul)
one here, one with you.
I miss you always to joke with, rea-
son with, unreason with . . .
Hardwick’s ability to maintain her
care and compassion (and letters)
while Lowell was with Caroline is
matter for admiration. She even vis-
ited them in England, in 1976: Lowell
comments, “It was so strange seeing
you and Caroline easily (?) together,
that I almost feel I shouldn’t refer to
it.” During Lowell’s time in England,
Hardwick was a single mother, main-
taining a complex New York literary,
political, and familial life even while
overwhelmed with financial uncer-
tainty. She was filled with anxiety at
Lowell’s long silence at the outset of
the affair, and angry and heartsick
when she learned of it. And even more
admiration rises in the reader as
Hardwick—on hearing that Lowell is
hospitalized for mania in London and
that Blackwood, frightened, has fled—
flies to England together with their
friend Bill Alfred to take care of her
isolated, ill ex-husband, who had
ceased to take his lithium. There is
scarcely a virtue that Hardwick is not
seen to exemplify in these years, as
witnessed in her description to Mary
McCarthy of the hospitalized Lowell:
He has given up lithium, of his own
will . . . It has always seemed improper
to me that he should appear so old,
walk so slowly, when lithium is not
supposed to be a downer in that
sense. . . . I feel nothing but a ground-
less hope for him at the moment.
These letters don’t match the inven-
tiveness of those exchanged by Lowell
and Bishop, when each had only to
entertain the other and sympathize
with troubles from afar. And, at first
glance, the voyeuristic interest offered
by the living drama of the messages
between Lowell and Hardwick almost
outweighs their nature as letters. But
Postcard written by Elizabeth Hardwick and Harriet Lowell, from the Robert Lowell Papers
at the Harry Ransom Center © Elizabeth Hardwick. Courtesy the Wylie Agency LLC
neither can put a foot wrong in writing
a sentence; each has the instinctive
cadence of a born writer, the sophistica-
tion of an adult who has seen and felt
almost too much, the directness and
candor of an intimate acquaintance,
and the steady capacity for irony even in
sadness. Hardwick’s loyalty is so great
that one reads with some surprise her
self-description to the absent Lowell: “I
look back on my own life of intense
anxieties whose cause I have no mem-
ory of mostly. And yet one is given his
own quivering self, at birth I suppose.”
These letters, written as they were in
the stormy Seventies of social unrest,
show both Lowell and Hardwick re-
sponding with outrage and anguish to
the war in Vietnam, the invasion of
Cambodia, and the shooting of un-
armed students at Kent State by the
National Guard. “The unbearable and
brutal news” (as Lowell characterized it
in a letter to Peter Taylor) also included
Watergate. But the fairly predictable
political comments are less interesting,
to my mind, than the personal ones.
Learning that the manuscript of The
Dolphin has been sent out to friends,
who are writing to Lowell criticizing his
quoting of “Lizzie’s” letters, Hardwick
unexpectedly tells Mary McCarthy that
she is annoyed at the friends:
I cannot imagine anyone else of Cal’s
gift and thirty years of writing and pub-
lishing being sent telegrams, letters of
plea about his work. . . . I can’t see that I
can be hurt . . . I truly feel indifferent to
it all. Credit or discredit is entirely his. I
have written him that I don’t care a fig.
This may be too defensive (the gam-
ut of feelings is part of the appeal of the
correspondence), but at least it reveals
Hardwick’s immediate response to Low-
ell’s circulating the manuscript; later, on
actually reading The Dolphin herself, she
felt, understandably, that Lowell’s selec-
tive quoting misrepresented her. She
wrote a stiff letter to his publisher Rob-
ert Giroux objecting to his not obtain-
ing her permission in advance.
T
he Dolphin itself—though
uneven—conveys Lowell’s
astonishment that in his
mid-fifties he has fallen passionately in
love with Blackwood, a woman fifteen
years younger. He chose to forsake his
earlier aspiration to religious or aes-
thetic transcendence in favor of the
sensual and earthly sort—a choice al-
ready voiced in “Obit,” a sonnet ad-
dressed to Lizzie that had closed the
1970 Notebook, quoted here in a later,
revised version:
Our love will not come back on
fortune’s wheel—
...
Before the final coming to rest, comes
the rest
of all transcendence in a mode of
being, hushing
all becoming. I’m for and with myself
in my otherness,
in the eternal return of earth’s fairer
children,
the lily, the rose, the sun on brick at
dusk,
the loved, the lover, and their fear of
life,
their unconquered flux, insensate
oneness, painful “It was. . . . ”
After loving you so much, can I forget
you for eternity, and have no other
choice?
The opening of the first sonnet,
“Fishnet,” in the published version of
The Dolphin emphasizes the poet’s sur-
prise at the entrance of a new and
seductive woman:
Any clear thing that blinds us with
surprise,
your wandering silences and bright
trouvailles,
dolphin let loose to catch the flashing
fish. . . .
REVIEWS 87
Lowell’s original version of “Fishnet”
had opened ineptly, in a rush of un-
coordinated images:
Any clear thing that holds up the
reader—
the line must terminate, the bright
trouvaille,
the glitter of the Viking in the icecap.
As the sonnet flounders further, the
Viking becomes a gold “colossus,” with
“archetypal girth.” At last, the poem
finds its way to its conclusive, published
form, ending with a self-elegy that soft-
ens its modernized Horatian “bronze”
with a touching gratitude:
The line must terminate.
Yet my heart rises, I know I’ve
gladdened a lifetime
knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred
rope;
the net will hang on the wall when
the fish are eaten,
nailed like illegible bronze on the
futureless future.
“I have made a monument more last-
ing than bronze,” Horace had said of
his own writing, but Lowell, correcting
him, sees the eventual unintelligibility
of all cultures, all bronze monuments.
Yet even unreadable texts—cuneiforms,
hieroglyphics, glyphs—declare (even
before they are decoded) the solid ex-
istence of the past.
Poem by poem, the revisions of 1972
into 1973 vary in interest, but since each
revision of language intimates a revision
of thought, none are without signifi-
cance. The language of vacillation,
which dominates the sequence, con-
tinually reconstitutes itself from joy to
self-reproach, from choice to indecision.
Sometimes almost the whole sonnet is
scratched out, when details become inert
or too revealing. I quote the following
“realistic” lines, with Lowell’s intermedi-
ate edits in brackets, from the 1972 draft;
they are altered in publication precisely
for their surplus of realism—too nearly
resembling Blackwood and Lowell:
We totter off the painter’s platform,
the naked departure of the artist’s
model
is cloaked by her Anglo-Irish elevation.
White rum is undetectable from tears.
We’re done, my clothes fly into your
borrowed suitcase,
the good months are [day is] flown,
and this [it] too goes
88 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
in my ragbag of private whim and
illusion
dubiously flung together on
my single self-dramatizing character.
Like a cat painfully backing down a
tree,
unalterably divorced from choice by
choice,
I come on walking off-stage backwards.
The artist’s Anglo-Irish model and
her rum disappear in revision (Low-
ell’s revisions were almost always for
the better), and man and wife are
transformed into actors on a stage:
And we totter off the strewn stage,
knowing tomorrow’s migraine will
remind us
how drink heightened the brutal flow
of elocution. . . .
We follow our script as timorously as
actors,
unalterably divorced from choice by
choice.
...
It’s over, my clothes fly into your
borrowed suitcase,
the good day is gone, the broken
champagne glass
crashes in the ashcan . . . private
whims, and illusions,
too messy for our character to survive.
I come on walking off-stage backwards.
S
ome of Lowell’s revisions are made
for sound (“glass / crashes in the
ashcan”), some for visual drama
(as “the painter’s platform” becomes
“the strewn stage,” inhabited by “ac-
tors,” serving to connect this sonnet
to “Plotted,” in which “Cal” sees him-
self as Hamlet: “I feel how Hamlet,
stuck with the Revenge Play / his father
wrote him, went scatological / under
this clotted London sky”). And some
revisions correct absurdities of the pre-
vious self-portrait—the cat “painfully
backing down a tree.”
One wonders, reading The Dolphin
afresh, whether the agitation over the
quoting of personal letters without
the consent of the writer will persist
into the future. In the long view, no; the
passing of time makes the personal ir-
relevant (Who was Shakespeare’s Young
Man? Who was the Dark Lady?). But if
we substitute ourselves for Hardwick in
the moments of grief and desperation,
we cannot take the long view. The vir-
tue of her intelligence is that it does
examine both views, short and long.
When I asked Lowell why he didn’t
simply keep The Dolphin to himself,
letting it be published on his death, he
said that if he kept it, he would have
had to continue to compulsively revise
it and would not have been able to
write new poems. To Bishop, he wrote:
“I couldn’t bear to have my book (my
life) wait hidden inside me like a
dead child.” (“Hidden” is then struck
through.) Throughout the sequence,
Lowell castigates himself, questions
him self, debates himself, condemns
himself, excuses himself: there is no
end to self-revision during his years
of “the water-torture of vacillation.”
But does an acceptance of midlife
stasis in a long marriage implicitly
constitute a way of being dead? He
answers his own quandar y: “I
too, / because I / waver, am counted
with the living.”
A few years later, in the free-verse
poems of Day by Day (1977), the whole
divagation into Caroline’s world is
described more elegiacally, mytholo-
gized into a fable of Ulysses and
Circe, and loosened into taking no-
tice of the everyday, no longer sub-
jected to the strict compression that
dominated (not always happily) Low-
ell’s sonnet writing between 1967 and
1972. “Epilogue,” closing Day by Day,
stands up for the inclusion of the brute
factuality of “a snapshot” in the mod-
ern lyric, even though Lowell—like
everyone else in his generation—had
been educated in taste by the “caress”
of the painter’s hand on canvas rather
than by the haphazard grouping of the
photographer. “Rough Slitherer in
your grotto of haphazard” was one of
“Cal’s” descriptions of “Caroline” in
The Dolphin, the general disorder of
her decaying sixteenth-century manor
house in Kent seeming to stand for her
refusal of bourgeois convention. Low-
ell’s eventual return to Hardwick, and
his almost shamed gratitude to her for
permitting him to come back to a life
led in common, put a post hoc frame
around the dramatic vicissitudes and
fantasies of the flight to Blackwood. In
Day by Day, which appeared in the
year of his death, Lowell published a
critique-by-hindsight of the midlife
passion recorded in The Dolphin and
the letters surrounding it—a passion
that he both regretted and was unwill-
ing to lose. Q

SELECTIVE HEARING
On the specious new history podcasts
By Hugh Eakin
Discussed in this essay:
Crime Junkie, hosted by Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat. Audiochuck
Productions.
Revisionist History, hosted by Malcolm Gladwell. Pushkin Industries.
Uncivil, hosted by Jack Hitt and Chenjerai Kumanyika. Gimlet Media.
Nice Try!, hosted by Avery Trufelman. Curbed.
The Secret History of the Future, hosted by Tom Standage and Seth Stevenson.
Slate/The Economist.
The History of English Podcast, hosted by Kevin Stroud.
The British History Podcast, hosted by Jamie Jeffers.
L
ast August, one of the coun-
try’s most successful podcasts
was accused of multiple inci-
dents of plagiarism. Called Crime
Junkie, the weekly show has used what
seems to be an irresistible formula to
rocket to number-one status in numer-
ous rankings: In each episode, cohosts
Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat give
an intrigue-laced account of a serial
Hugh Eakin is working on a book about Pi-
casso in America.
Illustration by Joanna Neborsky. Source image: Elizabeth Thompson © Hilary Morgan/Alamy
killing, kidnapping, or other unre-
solved crime story. Exploring forensics,
motives, and police reports, they de-
velop new theories about what actu-
ally happened. For all their obsession
with evidence, however, it turned out
that Flowers and Prawat had at times
been remarkably lax in explaining
where t hei r ow n i n for m ation
had come from. According to allega-
tions made by a newspaper journalist,
the hosts’ retelling of a case in one
episode had matched almost verbatim
the text of a series of investigative
articles she had written for the Arkan-
sas Democrat-Gazette; other episodes
were said to have recycled material
from a television program hosted by
Paula Zahn, from other podcasts, and
from a post on Reddit.
At the time the accusations sur-
faced, Crime Junkie was being down-
loaded more than twenty million
times a month, giving it one of the
largest audiences of any podcast; it
was also earning millions of dollars in
advertising and other revenue. In tra-
ditional print and broadcast media,
when a journalist for an outlet of this
prominence is caught plagiarizing, it
can be career-ending. But this case
was different. The controversy was
briefly covered in the New York Times
and on BuzzFeed, and the hosts tem-
porarily removed several episodes
from the show’s website. Crime Junkie
fans, however, were apparently un-
moved, and, with no parent company
to mete out consequences, the show
almost immediately regained its dom-
inance. It has since held steady as one
of the top five podcasts on the iTunes
chart, out of hundreds of thousands
now available; in November, Flowers
also launched Red Ball, a new podcast
collaboration with the Indiana State
Police that follows the reinvestigation
of an unsolved murder case, which
debuted at number one. Meanwhile,
Crime Junkie was short-listed for
iHeartRadio’s Best Crime Podcast
for 2019.
Largely overlooked in this curious
sequence of events was what it re-
vealed about the podcast industry it-
self. Nearly all of the most popular
shows are non-fiction and based on
actual events. They also reach audi-
ences that now rival or exceed the
print circulation of newspapers like
the New York Times and the Washing-
ton Post. Yet, in an era in which fact-
checking has become a national pas-
time, podcasts have largely evaded
serious scrutiny. In many magazines
and newspapers, podcast coverage is
limited to top-ten lists of favorite
shows. To the extent that main-
stream critics have taken them on,
they have tended to offer aesthetic
appraisals rather than assessments of
their uses of sources or evidence.
The inattention is striking, since
REVIEWS 89
 *
podcasts themselves operate in an en-
vironment in which few traditional
rules apply. Narrative liberties may be
freely taken, as storytelling takes pri-
ority over fidelity to facts; the voice of
* a convincing “expert” or artful use of
an audio clip or sound bite may stand
in for original reporting. One of the
few journalists who has looked at the
Not sure where freewheeling ethics of the industry in
a sustained way is Vulture’s Nicholas
to start with Quah, who observed recently, “Pod-
casting is still the Digital Wild West.”
169 years of The lack of rules—and critical
policing— is especially noteworthy
archives? now that the medium is suddenly con-
quering large swaths of the main-
stream entertainment industry. Quah,
who also edits the podcasting newslet-
ter Hot Pod, has argued that 2019 is
likely to be seen as the year in which
“Big Podcasting” began, the advent
of a kind of market-driven show-
making that is, as he puts it, “farther
away than ever from the medium’s
makeshift and slow-but-steady ori-
gins,” and characterized instead by “a
rapid acceleration of money—and  . . .
SUBSCRIBE TO corporate interest.” This transforma-
tion has been led by narrative shows
The Weekly Archive that make a point of stressing their
veracity—and not just regarding cold
Newsletter from murder cases or current affairs. One
particularly dynamic area of growth
Harper’s Magazine has been in history-themed podcasts,
a genre that by definition depends on
facts and their careful interpretation.
The market-research company Edison
a curated selection Research recently found that listener
interest in history outranks sports,
of excellent writing food, and even true crime, and that
the most common reason people give
that helps put the for listening to a podcast is “to learn
new things.”
week’s events into We are in the midst of an unprec-
edented flowering of artfully scripted,
greater context, crisply edited, long-form history
delivered to podcasts: from More Perfect, on the
Supreme Court, to Slow Burn, on
your inbox the Nixon White House, to The
Chernobyl Podcast, on Cher nobyl, to
* free of charge * This Land, on the Cherokee Nation.
Many of these shows are ambitiously
high-minded. But many of them are
also up to something else. Frequent-
ly, they emphasize extravagant con-
TO SIGN UP TODAY, nections between the distant past
and our own era: a 1960 plane
VISIT HARPERS.ORG/ crash, say, is blamed on a line in
Shakespeare’s Henry IV; the rise of
FROMTHEARCHIVE/
90 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
online dating apps is traced to the
advent of the bicycle in the 1890s.
Some of the new shows are pointed-
ly aimed at contemporary America.
Rachel Maddow’s Bag Man, about
the largely forgotten investigation of
Spiro Agnew, explores the question
of whether a sitting president or
vice president can be indicted; Un-
civil, Jack Hitt and Chenjerai Ku-
manyika’s highly praised Civil War
podcast, begins with the 2017
Charlottesville riots.
A number of shows, like Gimlet
Media’s Undone (“How big stories we
thought were over were actually the
beginning of something else”) or
Stuff Media’s Unobscured (“To dig
deep and shed light on some of histo-
ry’s darkest moments”), have explicitly
set out to unravel falsehoods, unearth
previously ignored events, or expose
continuing historical misconceptions.
(“Un-” has become a popular history-
podcast prefix.) In doing so, they fol-
low on the wild success of Malcolm
Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History,
in which, the show tells us, “every ep-
isode reexamines something from the
past—an event, a person, an idea,
even a song—and asks whether we
got it right the first time.”
Since its inception in 2016, Revi-
sionist History has been credited with
spurring on “its own podcast micro-
genre,” as the New York Times put it,
noting that “seemingly every podcast
company [is] starting or partnering
with its own history-bending show.”
At the height of its fourth season last
summer, the show ranked just behind
Serial, the true-crime series widely
considered to be the most popular and
influential podcast ever, on the iTunes
charts. And yet, as in the case of so
many of its peers, the show’s methods
have been left largely unexamined.
That Revisionist History’s use of
source material might be less than re-
liable first came to public attention in
November, when it emerged that
Gladwell was in a dispute with the
families of victims of the serial child
molester Larry Nassar. The controver-
sy concerned the audio version of
Gladwell’s new book, Talking to
Strangers, which discusses the Nassar
scandal and which, as Gladwell has
highlighted, introduces many of the
same audio techniques he has em-
ployed throughout Revisionist History,
including live interviews, archival
sound clips, theme music, and re-
enactments. According to the Detroit
Free Press, Gladwell had strong-armed
Michigan Radio into providing him
interview tape with some of the vic-
tims’ parents, which he used in the
audiobook to support his thesis about
our weakness for trusting people we
don’t know. But the parents had not
been informed of his use of their voic-
es, and the Free Press reported that
many found basic factual errors in the
section; in an email, one of them told
Gladwell that “many of your state-
ments are wrong! Not distorted,
wrong!” Michigan Radio also lodged
its ow n complaint, in for ming
Gladwell that “we feel betrayed by the
use of audio clips in the out of con-
text manner in which they were pre-
sented.” Gladwell defended his work,
but the interview clips have since
been removed from the audiobook.
As podcasts occupy an ever-
increasing share of our information
diet, such controversies over meth-
ods and sourcing raise the question:
Is the advent of Big Podcasting mak-
ing the industry more reliable? And
who is checking?
T
he transformation of podcast-
ing into a mass entertainment
business has been accom-
plished with remarkable speed. Fol-
lowing years of relative stasis, the in-
dustry was shaken by Serial’s breakout
success in 2014. Since then, fast-paced
shows about crime, politics, and his-
tory have proliferated while the num-
ber of monthly podcast listeners has
more than doubled, encompassing
nearly one third of the total U.S. pop-
ulation. But the real explosion has
been much more recent. Some sixty-
two million Americans now hear at
least one podcast a week—an increase
of fourteen million listeners over just
a year ago—and the rate of growth
seems to be increasing. Confronted
with such irresistible numbers, Big
Media has spent much of the past year
muscling in. Spotify, which recently
acquired the podcast startup Gimlet
Media, has been talking about pouring
as much as $500 million into its pod-
cast business, and Luminary Media
has rolled out its own subscription-
based podcast service, which is backed
by nearly $100  million in capital. M A G A Z I N E
Meanwhile, corporate sponsors have
ramped up their ad buys. One study
estimates that the industry as a whole BOOKSTORE
could generate as much as $1 billion T-shirts • Books • Tote Bags
in annual ad revenue by 2021.
That significant sums are now be-
ing spent on programs ostensibly
aimed at improving our historical
understanding is a remarkable de-
velopment. At a time when the hu-
manities are in retreat on campuses
around the country, issues and events
that used to be relegated to sterile ac-
ademic discussions are being dug up
and presented in dramatic form to
broad audiences; instead of taking in
another dreary newscast, commuters
can learn about U.S.–Soviet cultural
exchanges during the late Cold War
(Radiotopia’s Spacebridge) or the
strange history of utopian communi-
ties (Curbed’s Nice Try!). It is no lon-
ger a stretch to imagine a point
when, for a sizable segment of the
American population, much of our
historical literacy could be shaped by
what comes through our earbuds.
This emerging genre has little to
do with the old-fashioned history
that has long existed in the DIY pod-
casting world. For years, there have
been a number of rigorous amateur
history podcasts that aim to provide
an exhaustive investigation of a sin-
gle theme or subject: The History of
English Podcast, which begins with
the Indo-Europeans and has accumu-
lated some 130 episodes; The British
History Podcast, with 335 episodes
and counting; American Revolution
Podcast, with 125 episodes to date. In
style and sound, these shows are kin-
dred to those of the early, open-
source days of podcasting. Generally,
the hosts do all the narration, with-
out interviews, and the shows rely on
listener donations for financial sup-
port. The reputations of these pod-
casts depend in significant measure TO ORDER MERCHANDISE ,
on their reliability and accuracy, and VISIT STORE.HARPERS.ORG
the hosts are apt to air corrections OR CALL (212) 420-5754
whenever issues are raised.
The slick history shows that have
emerged since Serial are driven by
quite different priorities. Episodes do
not accumulate indefinitely, but tend
to be packaged in TV-drama-like sea-
sons of ten or twelve installments.
REVIEWS 91
Drawing on techniques pioneered by
public-radio programs such as This
American Life and Radiolab, storytell-
ing is carefully interposed with first-
person recollections, ambient sound,
participatory scenes, and theme mu-
sic; there are commercial breaks at
cliff-hanger moments. Serial (which
began as a spinoff of This American
Life) demonstrated that making use
of a suspenseful narrative to try to get
to the bottom of a complicated set of
bygone events—in its case, a decade-
old murder—was an approach that
could have almost universal appeal. It
has been equally potent in telling
histories. And as writers, journalists,
and even television personalities who
have created narrative podcasts have
discovered, the format also offers
unique powers of persuasion. Mi-
chael Lewis, who recently took a
break from non-fiction writing to
produce the podcast Against the
Rules, has emphasized the emotive
force of simply hearing characters’
voices. “If I just told the story, you
might think I had my thumb on the
scale. You wouldn’t quite believe it.
You would think I was exaggerating,”
he said in a conversation with
Gladwell at the 92nd Street Y last
spring. “But when [the protagonist]
just tells it straight, you’re weep-
ing. . . . The sincerity just jumps off
the tape in a way that I would have
to try to persuade the reader of. And
I don’t. You just let her speak and it’s
magnificent. Incredibly moving.”
At the same time, narrative pod-
casts tend to attract audiences that
are ready to be moved. People who are
prepared to invest the substantial time
required to hear them are self-
selecting, and those who find them
unconvincing are—in the absence of
a critical culture of podcast debate—
apt to simply stop li steni ng.
Gladwell’s show is a case in point.
For nearly two decades, reviewers
have chewed over his bestselling
books, often subjecting them to
withering criticism for their cherry-
picking of social science and history.
Yet Revisionist History, despite its out-
sized influence in the podcast indus-
try, has rarely been reviewed on the
merits. Like other acclaimed shows,
its reputation has been forged almost
exclusively by fans.
92 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
In the new world of Big Podcasting,
commercial backing is predicated on
being able to reach a very large num-
ber of people, and it is often the
shows with the boldest arguments—
the shows willing to take the greatest
narrative risks—that receive the most
downloads. Among the many dozens
of history podcasts currently in circu-
lation, only a handful have access to
venture capital, ad revenue, highly
professionalized editing, and large-
scale promotion. To compete, shows
have to be strategic in their choice of
themes and events. And they need to
present them in ways that will hold
our attention for a thirty- or forty-
minute stretch—no mean feat in an
age of constant distraction. To para-
phrase the hosts of Uncivil, the new
history shows have set out not merely
to retell the past but to “ransack” it
for maximum effect.
C
onsider the strange story of
the Victorian artist Elizabeth
Thompson as told in the first
episode of the first season of Revi-
sionist History. If you’ve never heard
of Thompson, you’re not alone. At
the prime of her career, she was re-
garded as one of the nineteenth cen-
tury’s greatest painters; today, she is
virtually forgotten. For Gladwell,
Thompson is a perfect example of
how societies prevent outsiders from
entering the Establishment. The
story begins in 1874, when her mon-
umental Crimean War painting, The
Roll Call, was given the most coveted
spot in the Royal Academy’s summer
exhibition. At the age of twenty-
seven, Thompson was a superstar.
The painting went on a national tour
and tens of thousands of people clam-
ored to see it. (“The only contempo-
rary equivalent I can think of,”
Gladwell tells us, “is people camping
out in line for two days to buy Beyon-
cé tickets.”) The Roll Call even caught
the attention of Queen Victoria, who
acquired it for the Royal Collection.
Soon, Thompson seemed destined to
gain the ultimate prize: membership
in the Royal Academy itself. But the
all-male institution was horrified by
the prospect of a woman in its ranks.
Her nomination was defeated and she
never stood for election again—
effectively banished into obscurity.
No woman would join the Academy
until well into the twentieth century.
As a parable about glass ceilings,
the tale is searing, and it is clearly in-
tended to establish the narrative tem-
plate for the whole series: the story of
a forgotten or unknown person is re-
counted to prove some general socio-
logical truth. It is also dangerously in-
accurate. Far from an “unknown
outsider,” as Gladwell describes her,
Thompson came from a well-known
family (her parents were introduced
by Dickens); by the time that The Roll
Call was introduced to the public, she
could get hundreds of royal troops in
full uniform to stage military tableaux
at her request. As for membership in
the Royal Academy, she was only de-
feated by the narrowest of margins—
she had twenty-five out of a needed
twenty-seven votes; history very nearly
went the other way. In any case, for
years after, the Academy continued to
exhibit her paintings. Still more glar-
ing are the omissions about the Acad-
emy itself: unmentioned by Gladwell,
not one but two of the institution’s
founders were women. So Thompson
was neither an “outsider” nor the first
to try to “break through”—the premise
of the whole episode. Art historians
concur that her obscurity today owes
simply to the eclipse of military paint-
ing as a genre. And yet there has been
no public criticism of this highly mis-
leading account of Thompson’s career
and of the Academy itself, which has
been downloaded millions of times.
While Revisionist History may be
especially prone to bending material
to serve a particular argument, it is
hardly alone. Take the episode of Un-
civil devoted to the Civil War hero
Mary Bowser, a former slave who the
show claims became a Union spy in
the household of Jefferson Davis.
Like Elizabeth Thompson, Bowser
has, appa rently, been erased from
popular memory. “It’s almost impossi-
ble to find anyone who’s heard of
her,” one of the cohosts tells us. In
the brisk, half-hour episode, we are
given vivid glimpses of Bowser’s ex-
ploits; we are also told about the
Richmond society woman and secret
abolitionist Elizabeth “Bet” Van Lew,
who became Bowser’s “partner in
crime.” As presented, it is a tale of in-
visible ink, messages hidden among

loaves of bread, and a freedwoman
with a photographic memory who,
furnished naval intelligence to
Union forces in early 1864. Richards
European Beret $18
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www.johnhelmer.com
while impersonating a dull-witted
servant, is daringly memorizing war
plans in the Confederate White
House. Thanks to Bowser’s efforts, as
Uncivil tells it, Union forces received
military intelligence almost in real
time; Jefferson Davis himself com-
plained about the leaks. According
to a descendant of Van Lew who is
interviewed on the show, “Mary
Bowser probably contributed more to
the Union cause in that espionage . . .
than anybody else.”
Unfortunately, little of this thrill-
ing story holds water. Far from for-
gotten, the former slave once identi-
fied as Mary Elizabeth Bowser has
been a celebrated, if shadowy, figure
since William Gilmore Beymer
wrote about her in the pages of this
magazine in 1911. In subsequent de-
cades, the Harper’s Monthly account
was repeated and freely embellished.
There was a made-for-TV movie
about Van Lew and Bowser in the
Eighties and, more recently, a novel
based on Bowser’s life. Yet no known
nineteenth-century document places
a Mary Bowser in the Confederate
White House at all. “Very little hard
evidence exists to corroborate the stir-
ring stories of her heroism,” the Uni-
versity of Virginia historian Eliza-
beth R.  Varon concluded, in her
2003 biography of Van Lew.
Over the past few years, a differ-
ent story has emerged. As Varon es-
tablished, Van Lew had a slave
named Mary Jane Richards, who
was educated in the North and was
in Richmond during the war. Varon
also showed that numerous Van Lew
slaves in Richmond helped the
Union cause. More recently, a post-
war newspaper account has been
discovered in which Richards men-
tions having gone “into President
Davis’s house while he was absent,”
herself, in speaking of her wartime John Helmer(VW
6:%URDGZD\'HSW33RUWODQG25
exploits, apparently placed greater
emphasis on other covert activities,
such as helping Union prisoners of
war escape and eavesdropping on
the Confederate Senate.
In omitting these details, Uncivil
misses the chance to unpack what
Varon calls the “irresistible legend of
‘Mary Bowser,’ ” and explore the larg-
er network of informants—including
slaves and former slaves such as
Richards—who advanced Union in-
terests from the heart of the Confed-
eracy. But this would have required
discarding the high drama of tide- FINEFINEFINE.BIGCARTEL .COM
turning espionage—just as an accu-
rate discussion of Elizabeth Thomp-
son would have undercut Gladwell’s Search 25 years of the
argument about glass ceilings. HARPER'S INDEX
It is tempting to view these cases
as aberrations. Certainly, it is possi- Online
ble to serve the interests of narrative http://www.harpers.org/index
drama and historical rigor at the
same time, and many shows, includ-
ing these two, often do. Yet errors
and omissions can be startlingly fre-
quent. Nice Try!, for instance, kicked
Chance that an
off its entertaining look at utopian American would
communities with the story of James-
town and its legacy. Though this epi- rather be mugged
sode is pointedly titled “Utopia for
Whom,” it fails to mention that
than audited :
American slavery began in the colo-
ny. (The show is mainly fixated on 1 in 2
the colony’s lurid descent into canni-
balism.) This is not a small oversight;
the embrace of slave-owning is one THE
of the most important ways that
Ja mestow n shaped subsequent
U.S. history, as The New York Times
Magazine has recently underscored
INDEX BOOK
V O L U M E 3
in its multipart series “The 1619
Project.” To her credit, the host of Order online at www.harpers.org/store
Nice Try! has since posted an adden-
dum, but it was listeners, not critics, DISCLAIMER: Harper’s Magazine assumes no
who pointed out the omission. liability for the content of or reply to any personal

on the pretext of retrieving washing,
to look for papers related to the war.
But we don’t know whether this
foray was part of a regular position
in the household or if it yielded
any intelligence. Civil War docu-
ments make no mention of a female
informant living in the Confederate
White House, but there is evidence
that a male “table servant” to Davis
O
ne of the ironies of long-form
narrative podcasts, surely, is
that the qualities that make
them prone to historical inaccuracy are
also in large part what make them so
appealing. For many listeners, the pres-
ent writer included, there is an undeni-
able pleasure in the extent to which the
genre gleefully jettisons the staid jour-
nalistic practices of the New York Times
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caused by the publication placed by the advertiser

REVIEWS 93 or any reply to any such advertisement.

 INCREASE AFFECTION or All Things Considered. Rather than likely to present a loaded reading of
Created by taking shape around a set of dry facts, complicated events, one that serves
Winnifred Cutler, narrative podcasts are driven by con- a sweeping argument or provides a
Ph.D. in biology from
U. of Penn, post-doc
trarian plotlines and compelling char- particular connection to the pres-
Stanford. acters, sometimes from vastly different ent age. In the podcast The Secret
Co-discovered human time periods and settings. History of the Future, which is copro-
pheromones in 1986 Of course, this formula derives in duced by Slate and The Economist,
(Time 12/1/86; and significant part from the public-radio we are told that selfies are changing
Newsweek 1/12/87)
world itself. In devising and perfect- us in much the same way as did the
Effective for 74% in
two 8-week studies ing the art of long-form audio narra- introduction of Polaroids to isolated
tive, shows such as This American Papuan villages on New Guinea in
PROVEN EFFECTIVE IN 3 DOUBLE BLIND Life demonstrated that almost any- the 1960s. Connecting the predica-
STUDIES IN PEER REVIEW JOURNALS thing, given the right characters and ment of advanced civilization to a
Athena Pheromones increase scenes and plotlines and argument, radical experiment on a stone-age
your attractiveness. Worn daily
lasts 4-6 mos, or use straight. could be woven into a convincing culture, the episode grabs our inter-
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noticed a difference in women’s more Audio Media Revolution. “So there is in the Papua New Guinea story—in
immediate attentiveness, touching, affection,
that kind of thing. I’ve had some really affec- some  . . . fundamental distortion we which a maverick anthropologist
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♥ Julie (CAN) “I tried the 10:13 for the first time
it’s a necessary one.”) Indeed, the in- unlike us, had never seen their own
last night. My husband professed his love for fluence of public radio looms large in images before. The aim here seems
me 4 times in 30 minutes! Let’s just say this the podcasting world today: quite a not so much to investigate the past,
result is way above baseline, shall we?” few of the leading producers, includ- but to use it to provide an entertain-
Not in stores 610-827-2200 ing the host of Serial and the founder ing new riff on the present.
tm
www.Athenainstitute.com of Gimlet Media, are alumni of In the novel ways they are resur-
Athena Institute, 1211 Braefield Rd., Chester Spgs, PA 19425 HP these shows. recting poorly understood events and
And yet there are crucial differ- developments, the new history pod-
FOR CLASSIFIED RATES AND INFORMATION, ences. For one thing, grant-funded casts have given millions of listeners
PLEASE CONTACT:
public-radio shows do not face the much to think about. But it is time to
Cameron French
same audience-chasing pressures as recognize that, for all their storytell-
cameron@harpers.org
commercially backed podcasts. But ing power, their ingenious splicing of
more significantly, Radiolab and This voices, anecdotes, and arguments,
(212) 420-5773
American Life generally use uncer- many of the new podcasts have come
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94 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
 PUZZLE
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11

12 13

14 15 16
GROANING BOARD 17 18
By Richard E. Maltby Jr.
19 20 21 22

23 24 25

T he eight italicized clues are not normal clues.

They are each, instead, an invitation to a feast—for
28

31
26

29

32 33
27

30

those with an appetite for such things.

Clue answers include thirteen proper nouns and 34 35 36 37 38 39
two foreign words. Profound apologies for 48A.
What can you do? As always, mental repunctuation 40 41
of a clue is the key to its solution. The solution to
42 43
last month’s puzzle appears on page 73.
44 45 46

47 48

49

across 2. International group gets ten new members in a

1. Chef’s imaginative chicken dish? (8,5) brotherhood (5)
11. Old Smith and Wesson originally got into snit with two 3. Nova’s apocryphal origin story? (9)
queens (8) 4. Fish in an aquarium died, then three more, total! (6)
12. A hooker? Bed one around nine? Quite the reverse! (8) 5. Touring biz weak—take in $100, make a toast (8)
13. Damage—half of it goes in shop (4) 6. Free swimming and diving spot (4)
14. Big hitter? To Kermit, it’s an opening (5) 7. Top-notch umpire replaced Mets’ starter (7)
16. Low Church bum (5) 8. Distant result of meteor shower? (6)
17. Inability to cross street? Shaky situation (11) 9. Gem Catholic found in a national park (6)
19. Celebrated a medicine you failed to start (5) 10. Chinese sprouts, e.g.? (10)
20. Contend with a loveless rogue (5) 15. The fattest knight at the Round Table? (13)
22. A new name for a woman (3) 18. False teeth, right, made from lead (6)
23. French chef’s full Greek cheese dinner? (4,8) 21. Doctor ogled Tevya’s wife (5)
26. Exercising pull, asks about Conservative yarmulkes (9) 22. Warning not quite needed for banned chemical (4)
28. Article is seen in morning? God, no! (7) 24. AA endpoint: working to get on exact opposite
30. Star Trek character, part human, part Castro impersonator (4) sides (10)
31. Car starts to kick in, accelerates (3) 25. Music in hand, Wall Street debut receives poor mark (4)
32. Polls are changing involving fender bender (9) 27. In days gone by, Latin conjured up a man’s name (5)
34. Things like raspberries, from an unhappy crowd? (11) 28. Philip Glass hater’s plaint: “I got plenty ?” (8)
40. Standard choice of letters in the middle of the alphabet? (4) 29. Decreases in bonds? (5)
41. Onerous part for a fiddle player (4) 30. Sounds like four thousand pounds, in German! (6)
42. Chopping things—before finishing, add zest (5) 33. N.Y. driver passes English loony like a holy man (7)
43. One starting computing and getting a kick out of it? (6) 35. Mad at Rome? This’ll shut you up! (6)
44. Trainer’s training ground (7) 36. Begin bar mitzvah with Torah portions covering
47. La Mer, for example—oh, just listen! (3) low capital (6)
48. It can come from erections! (9) 37. Fur fanatic has a song coming up (6)
49. Aspect of voting that can make you throw up? (11) 38. Guardian spirit moaned eerily (6)
39. Composed love song with no notice (6)
down 45. Polish hang-up (3)
1. See men soft on fighting (8) 46. Sign name of thirteen 1 Downs (3)

Contest Rules: Send completed diagram with name and address to “Groaning Board,” 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 February 7. The sender
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 April issue. The winner of the December puzzle, “Present Tense,” is Barbara Tomlinson, Seattle.
PUZZLE 95
 FINDINGS
S cientists confirmed that toddlers have temper tan-
trums when they do not use their words and that the
practice of limiting oyster consumption to months ending
in r has been observed for thousands of years, though
climate change will further reduce safe oyster season.
Many U.S. coastal homeowners accept the reality of
climate change but have taken no action to prepare for
it. Climatologists corrected earlier estimates of coastal
flooding that used treetops and buildings, rather than
landmass, for elevation data, and concluded that several
major cities will suffer severe inundation by 2050, includ-
ing Jakarta, which the Indonesian government plans to
abandon at a projected cost of $33 billion, and the re-
placement for which, to be built in Borneo, risks releasing
nearly 50 million tons of carbon through habitat destruc-
tion. Scientists who identified major climate tipping
points a decade ago have now ruled half of them to be
“active.” The Arctic may now emit more carbon than it
stores, and its lower reflectivity was found to be due to
ice loss, rather than the addition of soot. As the atmo-
sphere warms, bacteria are producing more CO2, and
drought-stricken plants squeal in distress. Astronomers
continued to search for neutral hydrogen signals from the
universe’s pre-galactic dark age.
A study of the Y chromosomes of present-day inhabit-
ants of Belgium and the Netherlands found that the
nineteenth-century urban poor were six times as likely
as well-off farmers to have unexpected paternity. Maxil-
lofacial surgeons scored the jaw deformations of inbred
Hapsburgs, and a test of 6,300 participants in eighty-five
countries found that women are likelier than men to
accurately read feline facial expressions. Engineers at-
tempted to make internet memes comprehensible to the
visually impaired. Researchers concluded that the grow-
ing cross-sectioned despair among Americans cur-
rently approaching midlife may be a realistic reflection
of rising mortality rates. In the past three years, Ver-
“Bonsai #4028” and “Bonsai #4026,” photographs by Yamamoto Masao © The artist. Courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York City.
An exhibition of Yamamoto’s work is on view this month at Yancey Richardson Gallery, in New York City.
96 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2020
mont has experienced a 640 percent rise in the number
of kindergartners claiming religious exemptions from
vaccines. Japanese scientists studying live mice and dead
humans associated high levels of hydrogen sulfide with
schizophrenia. Biomedical engineers reported success
in breeding E. coli to produce psilocybin. Hospital-
acquired infections can be reduced by copper beds, and
early deaths can be reduced by the presence of irregu-
larly shaped parks.
T okyo scientists identified, apart from DNA, at least one
million forms of stable nucleic acid–like polymers that
would be capable of storing genetic information, and four
chromosomes of the Eurasian skylark were found to have
fused together, giving the bird the largest recorded avian
sex chromosome. Female fish will mate outside their spe-
cies if a male is attractive enough or if the female can’t see
clearly. A nineteen-year-old Margarita Island capuchin
monkey in a Chinese zoo with a humanlike face has re-
mained unable to find a mate, which zookeepers attribute
not to his appearance but to his bad personality. The heart
of a blue whale beats as infrequently as twice a minute.
The carbon-isotope ratio in tuna has shifted significantly
since 2000. Pumas in the Santa Cruz Mountains were
being poisoned by mercury in coastal fog. Deer remains
from the Lower Paleolithic indicate that hunters saved
marrow bones for later snacking. The mitochondrial DNA
of mummified sacrificial ibises indicated that the ancient
demand for Egyptian ibis was met not through centralized
farms but through short-term husbandry projects run by
priests, who wrote of feeding the birds bread and clover.
Genetic testing could not determine whether an
18,000-year-old puppy that emerged from Siberian perma-
frost was a dog or a wolf. School in a village in the Chu-
kotka Autonomous Okrug was canceled when thinning
sea ice caused an invasion of fifty-six polar bears. A Ten-
nessee electric eel was switching the lights of a Christmas
tree on and off. Q
 The world’s best
travel jeans?
Jeans may be great for just about any social situation,
but in the heat, the rain or for long distance travel,
weaknesses soon become apparent.

Rohan Jeans look and feel like traditional denim but

what sets them apart is the latest fabric technology.
They’re softer, lighter, stretchier, quicker drying
and pack away smaller. And critically they are
much more comfortable for the long-haul.
They also wash easily and dry so quickly that
they’ll be ready to go again the next day without
needing to be ironed. A smart detail is a hidden
security pocket under the rear waistband.

They’re available for men and women

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versions for the coldest days.

Jeans, just cleverer.

Free
shipping
on orders of $75 or over

See below
for details
How to buy
Visit rohandesigns.com
or call 800 334 3750
Jeans Tapered Leg
shown worn. The price you see is the price you pay.
Rohan pays the duty, and shipping is free on
orders of $75 or over. Your new Rohan Jeans
will be shipped from the UK, and should be
with you within 7-10 business days. Imported.