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Letters 2
Promised Land A Mychal]olmson and Monxo Lopez
Editor's Desk 4
Fighting Words Christopher Beha
Easy Chair 7
Which Side Are You On? Kevin Baker
Harper's Index 11
Readings 13
Disappearing Ink Claire Messud
Vanishing Cream easy, breezy, beautiful covert girl
After Midnight Wolf Wondratschek
And ... Ga)• Block, Dominic Chambers, Walid Raad,
and all the blues that's fit to print
Report 26
THE BIG TECH EXTORTION R ACKET Barry C. Lynn
How Google, Amazon, and Facebook control our lives
From the Archive 33
Who ls the Tyrant? Herbert Best
Annotation 34
THE HAUNTED HOUSE Sophie Haigney
What privacy looks like on Google Street View
Memoir 36
A LITANY FOR SURV IVAL Naomi Jackson
Giving birth as a black woman in America
Letter from Washington 43
ELDER ABUSE Andrew Cockburn
Nursing homes, the coronavirus, and the bottom line
Poetry 50
THREE POEMS Jonah Mixon-Webster
Letter from Tor House 52
BRIGHT POWER, DARK PEACE Erik Reece
Robinson Jeffers and the hope of human extinction
Essay 61
NONCONFORMING Laurent Dubreuil
Against the erosion of academic freedom by identity politics
Story 69
THE WORK OF ART Namwali Serpell
79
Reviews
BIGTECH
111 111
NEW BOOKS Lidija Haas
CAGE OF GOLD Rachel Nolan
The corrupt business of deportation
COETZEE'S RADICAL MASTERPIECE
On the Jesus trilogy
Christian Lorentzen RACKET
Puzzle 95 Richard E. Maltby Jr.
Findings 96 Cover: lllustrarion b)· Nick Misani
 HARPERS LETTERS
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Lrn1A CHoOOSH Promised Land Building on a deep legacy of orga­
Assisrnm Editors
WILL AUGEROT, JOSEPH FRISCH MUTH,
nizing, we developed our community
ADRIAN KNEUBUHL, SHIRLEY Ncoz1 NwANGWA, As organizers mentioned in Au­ land trust, the Mott Haven-Port Mor­
JOHN S1-1ERMAN
Editorial lmerns
drea Urn's essay on community land ris Community Land Stewards, to en­
KvENDE K1NOTI, ALEX KoNG, trusts ["We Shall Not Be Moved," sure that community members could
PAUL SULLIVAN, ANI \X/11.CENSKI
Report, July], we wanted to expand preserve a stake in this neighbor­
Arr Intern
AIDAN CHISHOLM on why we have pursued this model. hood. We have identified several va­
Co111rib11cing Editors Mott Haven-Port Morris, where we cant and underutilized buildings and
J.
ANDREW BACEVICH, KEVIN BAKER, DAN BAUM,
ToM B1ssELL, JosHUA Crn-1EN, JoHN CROWLEl'i live, is a vibrant neighborhood in the lots, and have held dozens of sessions
WEs ENz1NNA, TANYA GoLo, GARY GREENBERG,
JACK HITT, EowARD HoAGLAND, ScoTT Hon.TON,
South Bronx, both a cradle of arts to reimagine their uses. Most notably,
FREDERICK KAUFM;\N, GARRET KEIZER, and culture and a survivor of decades we aim to acquire and repurpose a
MARK K1NCWELL, \VALTER K1RN,
RAFIL Kn.ou.•ZA1rn, G10EoN LEw1s•KRAus,
of neglect, environmental injustice, 25,000-square-foot building, currently
RICHARD MANNING, CLANCY MARTIN, and insidious, top-down decisions vacant and owned by the city, as a
DUNCAN MURRELL, VtNCE PASS,,RO,
FRANCINE Pn.osE, ELLEN RosENBus1-1, involving public land use. Under the center for health, education, and the
JEFF SHARLET, CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD, premise of economic development, arts. This is a building that the Black
ZADIE St--tJTH, REBECCA SOLNIT,
MA'ITHE\V STEVENSON, JOHN EDGAR \'(/10EMAN public land in our community has Panthers and Young Lords used to
Concributing Artiscs been zoned for noxious waste­ serve the needs of the community
OuvE AYHENS, L1SA ELMALEH, LENA HERZOG,
AARON Hu
EV, SAMUEL JAMES, STEVE MuMFORO, treatment facilities and fossil-fuel nearly fifty years ago.
R,cHARD Ross, ToMAS VAN HouTRYVE, power plants, while a highway system As Lim's essay makes clear, there is
DANIJEI. ZE!ELJ
has callously divided neighbors. Fol­ an intimate connection between land
Vice Presidem and Geneml. Manager
LYNN CARLSON lowing decades of planned shrinkage, control, systemic racism, and the
Vice Prcsidem, Circ11lt1tio11 the community is now fending off carceral state. Community land trusts
SHAWN D. GREEN
Vice President, Marketing and Communications real estate speculation. New market­ can help address the historic harm sus­
GIULIA MELUCCI rate developments are bringing thou­ tained by communities of color. As we
Vice Presidem, Adver1ising
JOCELYN D. G1ANNINI sands of luxury residential units into steward local green spaces, we also paint
VIRGINIA NAVARRO, Assisw,u w the Publisher a community where nearly half the BLACK LIVES MATTER on our streets and
K1M LAU, Senior Accountant
EvE BRANT, Office Manager
children live in poverty and where protest the NYPD for its egregious as­
CoURTNEY CARLSON, Marketing Assistant the pre-pandemic unemployment rate saults on peaceful protesters. We are
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HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020

begun acquiring Palestinian land and
leasing it to Jewish settlers in the
1900s." This glosses over the methods
of acquisition. By the time Charles
Sherrod and his delegation visited Is­
rael in 1968, the ]NF had "acquired"
the ruins of more than four hundred
Palestinian villages whose residents
had been made refugees in 1948 or, in
some cases, had been executed by the
Israeli military.
To this day, anyone can buy a
tree for the JNF, which will then
be planted in Israel-expanding for­
ests planted on the ruins of Palestin­
ian villages, obscuring destroyed
homes, mosques, churches, and
schools, all sites of murder and exile.
In an article that so clearly details the
ways in which landownership enforces
racist oppression, I was disappointed
to see Israel's kibbutzim mentioned in
the same breath as "a system of land
ownership that prevents foreclosure
and loss of land." The very existence
of these kibbutzim was predicated, in
many cases, on the violent seizure of
Palestinian land.
Alia Persico-Shammas
Brooklyn, N.Y.
The Old, Weird Germany
Contrary to Ian Buruma's account
["Teutomania," Review, July], the or­
igins of German nationalism extend
much further back than Napoleon.
The Thirty Years' War, which, as he
writes, reduced the German lands to
a "ruin, physically and culturally,"
was so disastrous in large part be­
cause the great powers of Europe
knew they could use them as a bat­
tleground. None of the individual
German states had the military
strength to resist, and the Holy Ro­
man Empire was certainly not pre­
pared, militarily or constitutionally,
to come to their rescue. It wasn't
merely "failure and humiliation," in
other words, but a legitimate concern
for their safety that inspired a sense
of unified German identity.
Buruma argues that, "unable to
match French military might, Ger­
man national feeling turned inward"
in the first half of the nineteenth
century. In fact, this turn can be at-
tributed to the Congress of Vienna, r<utfvBadtr
G� �
which determined that, despite their
clear yearning for a state of their own,
the German people would be denied
OISSENT (OLLAR
nationhood under the pretext of
greater European stability.
Lastly, I would point out that Prus­
sia was not militarized by Frederick the
Great, as Buruma claims, but rather by
his father, the so-called Soldier King.
dissentpins.com
Frederick II simply rook what his fa­ Use the code harp20
ther had created and built on it.
at checkout to get 20% off
Nelson Smith
Toronto
Buruma quotes Helmut Walser
Smith's argument that "the birth of
German nationalism was from the be­
ginning tied in complex ways to anti­
Jewish sentiment." The idea that a
notional ethnic purity was endemic to
German identity-that it was a "spe­
cifically German disease"-is an under­
standable but, for many, self-serving
one. It allows Americans, for instance,
to overlook the specifically Ameri­
can disease that is being challenged
today in the country's streets.
As Confederate statues are finally
being toppled en masse, Germany
faces its own monumental reckon­
ing. The so-called Judensau (or "Jews'
sow") is a virulently anti-Semitic
image dating to the medieval period.
Stone gargoyle or bas-relief depic­
tions are preserved on about twenty
churches today, including Cologne
Cathedral and the Wittenberg
Stadtkirche, where Martin Luther,
himself an infamous anti-Semite, is
said to have posted his ninety-five
theses. Somehow these marks of
shame have survived for centuries,
through the post-Nazi years and into
the present.
As recently as February, a regional
court rejected a request that the
Wittenberg relief be relocated to a
museum. T he pastor said that its re­
moval would be an unjustified erasure
of history, that it is "embedded in a
culture of remembrance." In a way,
this is so. The survival of the Juden­
sau is a testament to the persistence
of a subcultural Teutomania of the
most dangerous sort.
G. W Stephen Brodsky
Sidney, British Columbia
LETTERS
 EDITOR'S DESI{
E ver since a New Yori< Times
newsroom revolt over a con­
troversial op-ed, American
media-if not American society at
large-has been engaged in another
round of debate about the limits of free
expression. The Times has long main­
tained a firewall between its news op­
eration and its editorial page, as well
as a strict social-media policy barring
reporters from expressing partisan
opinions or taking positions on issues
the Times is covering. But after the
paper published Republican senator
Tom Cotton's call for the military to
descend on protesters in American cit­
ies in an "overwhelming show of force,"
dozens of Times staffers took to Twitter
to condemn it. The column was pulled
from the print edition, and editorial­
page editor James Bennet was ulti­
mately forced to resign. Some saw in all
this a rare moment of accountability for
the purveyors of dangerous and dehu­
manizing ideas; others worried that the
paper of record was becoming a place
of ideological conformity.
In the past, the mainstream re­
sponse to charges of creeping illiber­
alism on the left was to deny that the
problem existed beyond a few cherry­
picked cases, mostly from college
campuses. This denial has become
untenable. That the boundaries of ac­
ceptable discourse have narrowed,
that more and more people make it
their job to patrol those boundaries,
and that the consequences for trans-
4 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
Fighting Words
By Christopher Beha
gressing them have increased-these
facts can no longer be plausibly re­
futed. So the response has shifted to
acknowledging and even lamenting
the change while insisting that it
pales in seriousness beside such prob­
lems as racial injustice or right-wing
authoritarianism. Those who obsess
over free speech, the thinking goes,
are missing the point.
There is some truth to that. The
United States is facing a once-in-a­
century pandemic while being governed
by perhaps the least competent and
least trustworthy presidential adminis­
tration in our history. At the same time,
we are experiencing a moment of racial
awakening that is a source of both great
pain and great promise. Amid all of
this, it might seem obtuse to worry
about the silencing of a few voices or the
loss of a few media jobs. Certainly those
who view ideological intolerance as a
greater threat to the liberal order than
a president who writes fan letters to
dictators and denounces the press as the
"enemy of the people" have lost perspec­
ti ve. And there do seem to be a surpris­
ing number of commentators whose
urgent concern over First Amendment
rights extends to members of the press
who have been fired for bad editorial
decisions but not to those who have
been arrested for covering protests. (Or,
for that matter, to the protesters them­
selves.) Some of these commentators are
simply professional contrarians, people
who are not just willing to offend when
intellectual honesty requires it, but ea­
ger to offend for the thrill of riling up
those who disagree. They know there is
profit in provocation. In the end, they
just wind up signing on to a different
brand of orthodoxy.
And now that Donald Trump has
signaled his intention to campaign not
on his record or against his opponent
but as a bulwark against statue­
toppling radicals, it is more tempting
than ever to dismiss the trend as a
right-wing talking point. But we are
not faced with a choice between
Trump and left-wing censoriousness,
and we should not let Trump make
this our choice. It is possible-indeed
it is necessary-to attend to more than
one problem at a time. T hat is not
moral equivalence; it is multitasking.
And our decreasing tolerance for dis­
senting views is a real problem.
One of my aims as editor of Harper's
Magazine is to give readers a diverse
range of viewpoints on a variety of
topics. Our commitment to challeng­
ing readers is not a cynical reaction to
the rise of "cancel culture"; it is written
into the magazine's design. Features
such as the Forum and Readings are
explicitly aimed at bringing together a
multiplicity of views, many of which
our editors don't share. In the past, this
has meant setting Susan Faludi and
Norma McCorvey (aka Jane Roe) be­
side William F. Buckley Jr. and Peggy
Noonan for a Forum about abortion
rights. It also meant publishing Emma

Goldman at a time when most main­
stream American publications anathe­
matized her as a terrorist. A magazine
given to ideological purity tests could
not have done any of this. And it
would be a lesser magazine for it.
S
everal years ago, I helped organize
a Harper's Forum that brought
together Israelis and Palestinians
from across the political spectrum to
talk about the future of the region.
Some participants enthusiastically em­
braced a two-state solution; others in­
sisted that abandoning the project of
Zionism and welcoming Palestinians
into full citizenship in a secular state
was the only way forward; and one­
Dani Dayan, a leader of the Israeli set­
tlement movement-advocated for a
distinctly Jewish nation that metched
from the Jordan River to the Mediter­
ranean, which would require Israel's
Arab neighbors to take responsibility
for the Palestinians living in the area.
Many of the arguments commonly
made by those who favor excluding of­
fensive views-that people are being
asked to debate their very right to exist,
that a straight line can be drawn be­
tween certain ideas and concrete acts
of violence-unquestionably applied in
this case, but the participants spoke
eloquently of the need for dialogue.
Indeed, some of them had risked quite
a bit to be there.
Days before the conversation was set
to take place, in June 2014, three Is­
raeli teenagers disappeared in the West
Bank. They were believed to have been
abducted by Hamas. In response, Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insti­
tuted a security crackdown in the area.
At our event in Jerusalem, a liberal
member of the Knesset took a seat fac­
ing the window, his back against the
wall. He explained that his willingness
to sit down with Palestinians had made
him subject to death threats, which no
Israeli politician could take lightly after
the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
At first, I took this for hyperbole, but
everyone else at the table seemed to
accept it on its face, and they acknowl­
edged similar pressures from within
their own communities.
Here it's worth stating clearly that
we in the United States do not need
to worry about getting shot in the back
for holding unpopular opinions, while
POR
LOS TUYOS.
many Americans do worry about getting
shot in the back by agents of the state
POR TODOS.
for the color of their skin. But the people
in that room in Jerusalem were not there
POR Tl.
to celebrate an abstract Enlightenment
principle about the free exchange of
ideas at the cost of addressing more
pressing political problems. They were
JAIME CAMIL
there precisely because their problems EmboJodor de
were so pressing, and because they be­ Unldos Contra
El C6neer
lieved that the free exchange of ideas
was their best hope of solving them.
What exactly did they think this
conversation could achieve? At a dinner
after the event, I posed that question.
One participant, a Palestinian Chris­
tian businessman named B assim
Khoury, noted that shifting American
opinion could be decisive for the re­
gion's fate. More than anything, he
wanted-Americans to know that people
like him existed. His family had been
removed from land that they had oc­
cupied, he said, since the time of Christ.
But he did not hate Israelis, and he did
not want them gone from the area. He
didn't even hope to return to his family
home. He wanted economic develop­
ment for his people; he wanted an end
to the squalid conditions in which so
many of them were living. In the Amer­
ican media, he said, all Palestinians
were portrayed as religious fanatics who
dreamed of wiping Israel off the map. Porque nos lmporta, debemos lnformamos
He appreciated the fact that Harper's e lnformar a nueslros seres quericlos sob!e
might show otherwise. He didn't much los ensayos cHnlcos,
like sitting across a table from Dani Queremos lo meJor para nosahos v para
Dayan, I could tell, but he knew that if los nuestros. SI tu o uno de tus seres querldos
any voice was going to be silenced, it ha sldo dlognosflcado con c6nc�
would be his own, not Dayan's. consldera lodas las opclones, lncluyendo
los ensayos cllnlcos. para encontrar el
I am not suggesting that our Forum meJor lratamlento.
made a difference in the conflict.
En Unldos Contra el Cancer estomos
Shortly after we left, the three teen­ convencldos que Henes que ester blen
agers were found dead, a Palestinian lnformado sob!e todas las opclones de
teenager in East Jerusalem was mur­ tratarnlentos dlsponibles. Con m6s v meJor
dered in revenge, and another round lnlormocl6n, acerca de los ensavos clinlcos,
of asym metrical warfare began. podras tomor las rlendas de tu lralomlento V
eleglr el meJor camlno para obfener
Hamas lobbed its $800 sugar-and­ los meJores resullados.
fertilizer-powered rockets at . Israel,
which responded with a campaign of Vlsitanos en
state-of-the-art bombs that killed more
than two thousand people in Gaza.
Given all this, perhaps the risk of sit­ para aprender m6s sob!e los ensayos clinlcos
dlsponlbles para comballr el cancer.
ting across the cable from a man who
denied his humanity had not been
worth it for Khoury. But he knew far
better than most Americans that the
alternative to such conversations is a
fight of a different kind, one that he
would be far less likely to win. ■ Folos por
ANDREW MACPHERSON
,on_..
UniClos Coma 8 care,, 5'ald lJo lo co-c
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EDITOR'S DESK
 THE U.S. IS AT A
TURNING POINT
IN RACE RELATIONS
The life and presidency of Jimmy Carter
offers unique lessons for the way forward.

Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat's definitive and universally well­

reviewed book on the 39th president, President Carter: The
White House Years, is out now in paperback. It documents
how a child of the Jim Crow South, who witnessed firsthand
the brutality of racism and segregation, partnered with civil
rights leaders to unlock unprecedented opportunities for
African-Americans, Hispanics, and women in government,
the judiciary, academia and business. The spirit of
Carter's work as president and the ethics and morality
he brought to the Oval Office, and beyond, is ripe for
being reawakened in the American consciousness.

Pictured with President Carter from left to right: Martin Luther King Sr., Andrew Young, Coretta Scott King, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK

"Eizenstat's account is fascinating:
detailed, intimate, even page-turning.
He tells little-known stories, in all sorts
of areas. From Stuart Eizenstat, you
can learn a great deal-about Carter,
sure, but also about the presidency at
large. That Eizenstat has contributed
something valuable to literature on
the presidency is certain."
-National Review
"Eizenstat has produced a
thoughtful, measured and
compelling account that bemoans
Carter's weaknesses even as it extols
his strengths. It fills a gaping void on
the presidential bookshelf. Until now,
there has never been a satisfying
full-length history of his presidency.
Eizenstat closes that gap."
-The New York Times Book Review
"A comprehensive and persuasive account
of Carter's presidency that stands far above
the familiar confessional and reveal-all
accounts by former White House officials
we are accustomed to reading...Political
junkies and presidential-history buffs will
love this book. Eizenstat has succeeded in
showing that the Carter presidency had a
huge impact on American political life."
-The Washington Post
 EASY CHAIR
Which Side Are You On?
0 n D ecember 20, 2014, a
twenty-eight-year-old man
named Ismaaiyl Brinsley
walked up to a parked patrol car in
the Bedford-Stuy vesant neighbor­
hood of Brooklyn, pulled out a semi­
automatic handgun, and fired several
shots at the officers sitting inside,
Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, kill­
ing them both before either could
draw his own gun. Brinsley then ran
down into a subway station and killed
himself. He had written on social me­
dia that he wanted revenge for Michael
Brown and Eric Garner, two unarmed
African-American men who had been
killed by the police that summer. Brin­
sley was a troubled individual who
earlier that day had expressed a desire
to commit suicide, and had shot and
wounded his ex-girlfriend before pub­
lishing an Instagram post expressing
his plans to put "wings on pigs" and
hopping on a bus from Baltimore to
New York. Baltimore County authori­
ties had tried to warn the NYPD, but
word got through only as Brinsley was
approaching the officers' car.
The killings were a tragedy. But for
Patrick Lynch, the longtime head of
New York's Police Benevolent Associ­
ation (PBA), they were also a political
opportunity. Like many in the NYPD,
Lynch had been infuriated by marches
protesting the killings of Brown, who
was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, and
Garner, whom NYPD officer Daniel
Pantaleo put in a fatal choke hold for
the grave crime of selling "loosies"-
By Kevin Baker
individual cigarettes-on Staten Is­
land. A grand jury's decision to let
Pantaleo walk had prompted a fresh
wave of protests, with the support of
Mayor Bill de Blasio. For the PBA,
it scarcely mattered that the protests
in New York had been peaceful, or
that there were serious questions
about the Brooklyn shooter's motiva­
tions. "There's blood on many hands
tonight," Lynch announced from the
scene of the crime on the evening of
the officers' killing. "Those that in­
cited violence on this street under the
guise of protest, that tried to tear
down what New York City police offi­
cers did everyday. We tried to warn
it must not go on, it cannot be toler­
ated. That blood on the hands starts
on the steps of city hall in the office
of the mayor."
A plainly shaken de Blasio tried to
defuse the situation, calling for the
protests to be suspended until the of­
ficers' funerals, and asking all New
Yorkers "to think about families
that just lost their father, their hus­
band, their son." Even so, many cops
sought to humiliate the new mayor,
turning their backs to him when he
attended the officers' funerals. The
PBA went on to encourage a de facto
work stoppage throughout the city,
making no arrests "unless absolutely
necessary." CRIME WAVE, read a glee­
ful anticipatory headline in Rupert
Murdoch's New York Post.
The cops carried out their threat.
Over a seven-week period, arrests for
non-major crimes fell by 18 percent
from the same period the previous
year; the use of stop-and-frisk fell by
45 percent; and criminal summonses
fell by 53 percent. But much to the
chagrin of the police, chaos did not
engulf the city they had sworn to pro­
tect. Instead, crime continued to
drop, just as it would through the cur­
tailment of stop-and-frisk and the de­
criminalization of marijuana-both
of which were vehemently opposed by
the police and their unions-and just
as it had for decades, in New York
City and around the country, despite
all the changes that the police
warned would bring on the apoca­
lypse. "If the NYPD can safely cut ar­
rests by two-thirds," asked Matt Ford
in The Atlantic, "why haven't they
done it before?"
There is no worse move in power
politics than to bluff and get caught
out. Yet the cops kept up the heat, re­
lentlessly excoriating the mayor and
his police commissioner at every op­
portunity. W hen a man shot and
wounded two police officers in the
Bronx this February, the Sergeants
Benevolent Association (SBA), the
other large police union in New York,
tweeted, "Mayor DeBlasio, the mem­
bers of the NYPD are declaring war on
you!" Apparently, this tactic worked.
W hen the demonstrations over
George Floyd's killing in Minneapo­
lis began in late May, de Blasio stood
by the cops even as they were caught
on video beating and pepper-spraying
EASY CHAIR 7
protesters, shoving them into the gut­
ter, and ramming into them with pa­
trol cars and bicycles.
"I'm not going to blame officers
who were trying to deal with an ab­
solutely impossible situation," the
mayor insisted, until his advisers
publicly criticized him and city hall
staff held their own demonstration.
The police, for their part, responded
to the mayor's support by demand­
ing permission to be even more vi­
olent, and rushing to inform the
media that the mayor's daughter,
Chiara, had been arrested at a pro­
test and charged with "failure to
disperse." "Is that why you're tying
our hands, because your daughter is
H
out there?" taunted Ed Mullins, the
head of the SBA.
ow did we get here? How has
the power of the police in
the country's biggest city
eclipsed that of its mayor? It's been
widely noted as of late that police
forces in the South began as slave
patrols. But in Northern cities, the
evolution of the police was a more
complicated story, in which the force
became a socia 1 wedge for Irish­
Catholic immigrants. As they began
to build America's first great political
machines in the 1840s, Irish Catholics
took over city departments, including
the police. But within the machine,
cops didn't become cops without kick­
ing back a large portion of their mea­
ger salaries to the bosses or their
precinct captains. The only way they
could recoup that money was by
shaking down brothels, gambling
rooms, illegal prizefights, counter­
feiters, and drug dens.
In o ther words, cops in many
American cities were made into
criminals the moment they put on
the uniform. They served as the vi­
tal link between politics, commerce,
and crime, and were expected, as
Luc Sance put it, to be "stern with
the poor and benevolent to what
was held as the respectable part of
society." Police extorted legitimate
businesses as well as rackets, and
clubbed ·honest citizens as well as
criminals. They brutally quashed
strikes. And when black people be­
gan to arrive in Northern cities in
large numbers, the police upheld the
8 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
color line, openly aiding and even
instigating attacks by white mobs in
black communities.
With the advent of the New Deal
and the social-welfare state, the ma­
chines began to die off, and the po­
lice were on their own. They began
selling themselves to white America
as the "thin blue line" between order
and chaos in the nation's cities.
There was a measure of truth to this:
by the 1960s, cities shed industrial
jobs and were transformed into un­
derfunded dumping grounds for the
mentally ill, homeless, and addicted,
leaving cops, firefighters, and hospi­
tal and social workers to pick up the
pieces. But as people of color saw it,
the police were a force that hypocrit­
ically accepted bribes from organized
crime to bring drugs into the city
and allowed their squads to rampage
through poor black and brown
neighborhoods, arresting low-level
dealers and users who would then
serve major prison time under the
infamous Rockefeller drug laws.
All the while, laws permitting
collective bargaining among public
employees were leading to the for­
mation of police unions across the
country. From the first, they staged
massive, fearmongering media cam­
paigns to derail attempts to create ci­
vilian review boards that might
monitor their actions. "I am sick and
tired of giving in to minority groups,
with their whims and their gripes
and shouting," shouted John Cassese,
head of the PBA, in 1966. While
most of New York's municipal work­
ers were and are required to live
within city limits, the same is not
true of the police, having won an ex­
emption in 1962 largely because they
kept flouting the residency rules with
false addresses. White Americans
had not only fled the cities, but had
taken their cops with them.
During New York City's fiscal cri­
sis in 1975, police who were under­
standably upset about job and wage
cuts complained and protested but
also joined firefighters in an attempt
to distribute pamphlets reading WEL­
COME TO FEAR CITY at New York's
airports. Complete with a cowled
skull on the cover, the brochure
warned visitors that, thanks to bud­
get cuts, there was little that police
could do to save people from robbery,
rape, fire, or murder. Two years. later,
when widespread riots broke out dur­
ing the 1977 blackout, some 40 per­
cent of the police force, still upset
about the budget cuts, did not report
for duty. When they received praise
for not killing a single rioter, the
NYPD went a step further, claiming
that only two cops had so much as
fired their guns during the riots. This
was a lie-and one that Ed Koch,
taking the right-hand lane in the
city's mayoral election, used to suggest
that the National Guard should have
been called in to prevent looting.
The NYPD's reaction to the tur­
moil of the 1960s and 1970s soon
became standard among police ev­
erywhere: professional victimhood,
laced with a threat. If we do not let
police do as they want, they will
stand back and let our cities-not
their cities, all too often-bum to
the ground. This was the reality in
places like Detroit, where a great
American metropolis was all but de­
stroyed by police whose crackdown
on a black-owned, unlicensed bar
set off the 1967 riots that made the
city's very name shorthand for ur­
ban collapse. Meanwhile, any and
all civilian supervision is cast as an
existential threat, one that would
leave officers too demoralized to do
their jobs. When Pantaleo, who has
still managed to dodge criminal
charges, was finally fired from the
NYPD in 2019 after a five-year disci­
plinary process, Lynch lamented
like an opera diva: "The job is dead.
Our police officers are in distress.
Not because they have a difficult
job, not because they put them­
selves in danger, but because they
realize they're abandoned."
I
nevitably, perhaps, police will feel
the need to have one another's
backs and develop a certain esprit
de corps. But their unions have taken
this to dangerous extremes. In 1992,
for example, New York cops held a
drunken rally around city hall, stop­
ping traffic, vandalizing cars, and
spewing racial epithets at people of
color. More recently, they have in­
sisted on their members' First Amend­
ment right to attend classes such as
Dave Grossman's "The Bulletproof
Mind" and "The Bulletproof War­
rior," which offer training in what he
calls "killology." Grossman, who insists
that "we are at war," preaches in these
sessions that cops should fear immi­
nent death at all times, but that, for
the properly prepared "warrior," kill­
ing another human being is "just not
that big a deal," and can lead to
"some very intense sex." According
to a police watchdog group, Gross­
man's course also teaches police to
"question any previous training
they've undergone."
At the same time, police unions
seek to carve big salary and benefit
packages out of city budgets and in­
f luence policy decisions by cam­
paigning for political allies-since
2015, New York's PBA alone has
spent $1.4 million on lobbying and
campaign contributions. They have
also continued to oppose efforts to
legalize marijuana, end random stops
and searches, and eliminate bail for
petty, nonviolent offenses.
P ushing agendas on behalf of
themselves at the expense of those
they ostensibly work for, the police
have become so politicized that a
movement has begun pushing for the
abolition of their unions. "Ultimately,
police unions protect their own, and
the contracts they bargain keep kill­
ers, domestic abusers, and white su­
premacists in positions of deadly
power-or provide them wit_h gener­
ous pensions should they leave,"
wrote Kim Kelly in the New Repub­
lic. Veena Dubai, a professor at the
University of California Hastings
College of Law, told The Intercept
that the police "aren't workers even
in the way that firemen are workers.
Police defend property. They have
historically defended white property.
We're not in a place where that is go­
ing to change."
But no American worker should
be denied the right to organize,
and getting rid of police unions
would likely simply push their ac­
tivities underground, even further
from public scru tiny. Abolishing
police unions would also contribute
to the nose-under-the-tent, long­
term right-wing project to eliminate
all public-employe e unions. How
long after abolishing police unions
do we hear the Murdoch media ask-
ing, If the police can't have a union,
why should teachers have one? Or
hospital workers?
Perhaps the better course of action
is to disassociate police unions from
larger union organizations, such as
the AFL- CIO, which may or may
not convince police unions to recon­
sider what they are doing, but which
would at least have the liberating ef­
fect of allowing labor to say, without
equivocation, which side it is on. Just
this June, the Writers Guild of
America, East (to which I belong)
called on the AFL-CIO to disaffiliate
from the International Union of Po­
lice Associations: ''As long as police
unions continue to wield their col­
lective bargaining power as a cudgel,
preventing reforms and accountabi­
lity, no one is safe."
M
any municipal unions vo­
ciferously defend their
members' rights. But the
head of the teachers' union does not
go around insulting the mayor and
his children. Nor does the head of
the nurses' union declare that work­
ers are at war when members of the
SUBSCRIBE TO
union die on the job, and the head of The Weekly Archive
the transit workers' union doesn't in­
sist that subway operators have the Newsletter from
right to ignore their official training
and take external courses that in­ Harper's Magazine
struct them to drive their trains any
damned way they please. If the po­
lice deserve the right to a union, and
to have their say in public debate, a curated selection
then they must exhibit the same lev­
els of respect, goodwill, and decency of excellent writing
toward the people they serve as other
unions do. that helps put the
The fight to reform police depart­
ments and their unions will not be week's events into
easy. For decades now, these unions
have balked not just at ending stop­
greater context,
and-frisk or legalizing marijuana but
at nearly every progressive societal
delivered to
change. In 1973, New York's PBA your inbox
tried to stop female officers from join­
ing street patrols. In 1978, the cops * free of charge *
warned us that letting gay and les­
bian officers serve openly would be
"catastrophic." Now they cannot op­
erate without choke holds, with
body-camera surveillance, or with ef­
fective civilian review boards. The
sky is still up there, but they keep
telling us it is falling. ■
EASY CHAIR 9
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 HARPER'S INDEX
Minimum amount the U.S. government spent funding anti-Hugo Chavez rock songs while he led Venezuela: $22,970
Rank of 2019 among years with the highest worldwide spending on nuclear weapons : 1
Percentage by which the United States spent more than the second-highest spender: 70
Number of National Guard members on active duty in the United States on June 1, 2020: 66,700
On active duty abroad on the same day : 28,300
Minimum number of cities in which the Department of Homeland Security has used aerial surveillance at protests this year: 15
Minimum hours of surveillance footage that it has logged: 270
Number of police departments in the twenty largest U.S. cities whose use-of-force policies meet UN human-rights standards: 0
Total value of surplus military equipment distributed to U.S. police departments under the Trump Administration: $964,962,803
Of bayonets: $19,761
Of "extreme cold-weather parkas" distributed to the LAPD: $27,161
Minimum number of police killings since 2010 in which restrained victims told officers they couldn't breathe : 32
Number of those incidents that resulted in criminal charges against the officers: 5
Number of those cases in which charges were not eventually dropped : 2
Percentage of time on duty that U.S. police officers devote to violent crime : 4
To noncriminal complaints : 35
Number of leading U.S. state health officials who have resigned, retired, or been fired during the COVID-19 pandemic: 34
Number of coronavirus-related academic studies that have been retracted since the outbreak: 22
Estimated months of education progress, on average, expected to be lost by K-12 students who began remote learning this year: 7
Percentage of U.S. rural school districts that did not require any instruction after schools closed: 53
Percentage of city-dwelling Americans who have considered moving somewhere less dense since the pandemic began : 39
Portion of Americans aged 18 to 29 who have moved because of the coronavirus: 1/10
Percentage increase since February in the number of American Jews who have applied to emigrate to Israel : 64
Chance that a Canadian sees the United States as "unfriendly" or "an enemy": 1 in 5
Estimated amount that the United States will lose this year in tourism revenue: $550,000,000,000
That the United States will lose even if all Americans' tourist dollars are spent domestically : $52,000,000,000
T hat China will gain if its tourist dollars are spent domestically : $238,000,000,000
Amount per traveler by which Japan plans on subsidizing domestic vacations as part of economic recovery efforts: $187
Amount that a tourist to Iceland can pay to skip a government-mandated COVID-19 quarantine protocol: $65
Minimum number of U.S. climate-change infrastructure projects that have been delayed or canceled because of COVID-19: 13
Portion of Europeans aged 16 to 29 who think authoritarian states are better equipped to handle climate change than democracies: 1/2
Portion of people living in democracies who believe their governments are not democratic : 2/5
Percentage of transgender Americans who don't have the identification required to vote: 42
Percentage of registered Democrats who believe that voting by mail increases the risk of voter fraud: 21
Of registered Republicans: 69
Average number of times per day that Donald Trump tweeted in 2017: 7
In 2020: 32
Percentage of Americans who want Trump to tweet more frequently : 3
Rank of May 29-June 4 among weeks that researchers determined to be the "saddest" on Twitter: 1
Minimum number of seafarers who have been stranded offshore since pandemic lockdow n measures began: 200,000

Figures cited are the latest available as of July 2020. Sources are listed on page 66.
"Harper's Index" is a registered trademark.

HARPER'S INDEX 11
 Winner of
the J. Anthony
Lukas Award
 READINGS
[Essay]
DISAPPEARING INK
By Claire Messud, from Kant's Little Prussian
Head and Other Reasons Why l Write, a collec­
tion of essays, which will be JJUblished next month
by W W. Norton.
W. live in an era crippled by our devotion
to capitalism. We are beleaguered by hopelessness
(what is the opioid epidemic if not the symptom
of a people duped by false dreams?) and by rigor­
ous utilitarianism (formed by a late-capitalist
mindset, we ask always: What's in it for me?). We
inhabit a time and place in which falsehood and
truth are fatally commingled; in which our ideals
appear shattered and abandoned by leaders and
priests and coaches who are unmasked as preda­
tors; and in which any sense of self is assaulted
and abused by advertisers. ln short, recent years
have been a dark maelstrom, a Hieronymus
Bosch hellscape, in which, under the guise of the
pursuit of pleasure, individuals are tortured, de­
humanized, discarded, destroyed.
We had come to see this ominous hurtling as
inevitable. But in the past few months, at the
mercy of a ravaging virus, we have discovered
that in other ways we aren't disempowered. Cri­
sis and extremity are by no means desirable. But
these extraordinary times have forced us to slow
down, to think collectively, to seek hope, to value
the truth, and to celebrate resilience
'' T
and faith in our fellow human beings.
ff
e may look to the past, to the vast com­
pendium of recorded human experience, for
. wisdom, solace, or at least a sense of recogni­
tion. W hen our abiding principles seem up­
ended, l remember an Enid Blyton story l loved
as a child, about a little girl who loves lying un­
til she gets trapped in the Land of Lies, where
untruths are praised and the truth disregarded.
Considering the opioid epidemic, l recall Odys­
seus and his men in the land of the lotus-eat­
ers, or Tennyson's poem of the same name:
"What pleasure can we have/To war with evil?
ls there any peace/ ln ever climbing up the
climbing wave?" Meanwhile, our political fias­
coes call to mind a line from King Lear: "A
dog's obeyed in office." lf we pause and listen to
history and literature, we'll find, as Louise
Gluck puts it in "October," "you are not
alone,/the poem said/in the dark tunnel."
Language makes this possible. lt enables us
not only to ask for a glass of milk, or to say
that we feel sick, but to speak of our sorrows
and ecstasies, of our philosophical musings and
our memories. l am constantly amazed at this
extraordinary medium-created by our dis­
tant ancestors out of nothing, still evolving.
The wr itten or printed word enables the
transm ission of thoughts and experiences
across centuries and cultures. Our passion for
storytelling-not simply for sharing informa­
tion, but for giving meaning and shape to
events-has motivated individuals and armies.
The dissemination of the written word, from
the time of Gutenberg, has enabled us to tell
stories of great depth and complexity, and to
share our analyses of these stories. I don't just
mean literature: history, too, is the analysis of
human stories; as are psychology, anthropology,
law, and philosophy. T he dramatic preva­
lence of the image over the written word in
our present moment is akin to a return to the
READINGS 13
 Lascaux caves: immediacy has its advantages,
but nuance isn't one of them.
Just as we are called to be active custodians of
our planet, we must also be custodians of human
knowledge and of our own minds. We need not
be alone in our experiences, nor passive: the
riches of all human thought and imagination are
available to us. If we were to ensure, as a society,
that people's basic needs were met, then we
might recognize that a richer life doesn't require
money, or access, or things: each of us can be
nourished by the life of the mind. Frederick
Douglass was born into slavery, and yet when we
read his writings, we encounter a mind pro­
foundly free, a mind able to articulate itself in
language both urgent and lucid, that serves as a
reminder that power over language
'' T is power tout court.
ll
hen you read fiction or encounter a
work of art you are invited into an open-ended
[Closure]
THE LONG GOODBYE
From sign-offs in the correspondence of the philoso­
pher Gilles Deleuze, collected in Letters and Other
Texts, which was published in July by Semiotext(e).
Wishes, wishes, wishes
Friendship and wishes
Thinking of your future
You are among the greatest poets
Let me express the strong effect our mel:!tings,
both recent and upcoming, have on me
Have a good conference, impose your talk, and
stroke the good doctor
Forgive me for troubling you in this way, as I hope
you will see it as proof of my great admiration
I need some type of long sleep at present but
cannot
I am somewhat ill-suited for travel
I am not furious, as you say, but very annoyed
With all my heart, you are a terrible battlefield,
from which friendship can extract joy and
complicity
I have pushed back my departure for Paris, no
way to sell this fucking disgusting apartment
I find all that I am saying to you grotesque and
pitifully intellectual
There, I've. done all I could to satisfy you
Forgive my inadequacy
14 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2020
conversation. You're engaged in an experience
that is simultaneously private and universal.
Your encounter with a work of fiction is yours
alone. And yet in words, our encounters can be
shared, our experiences thereby expanded and
deepened. Reading opinions that differ from
our own, we are challenged to articulate our
own experiences, and through the articulation
we live more deeply. The hurtling slows.
I advocate for the actual, irreducible, and
irreplaceable animal record-outside the age of
mechanical reproduction. The movement of the
hand that holds the pen; the imprint of ink
upon paper; the dignity and inti1nacy of the in­
dividual letter, written for a particular ad­
dressee (and hence so different from a blog or
social-media post), without thought of other
readers. The loss of what that represents
philosophically is enormous: my grandpar­
ents, my parents, even my friends and I in
youth, spent hours writing letters about what
we were doing and thinking, where we were
going and what we noticed, as a gesture of
intimate communication. It signified that
each of us mattered, that the person to whom
I wrote mattered, and that our communica­
tion. was important-often precisely because
it wasn't widely shared. Privacy, intimacy,
dignity, and with them, depth and richness
of thought-all were a readily available part
of daily life, for even the most
M
modest among us.
y paternal grandfather spent the bet­
ter part of a decade in his retirement writing a
1,500-page family memoir for my sister and
me. He did not expect anyone else to read it.
He titled it "Everything That We Believed
In." His undertaking was a gesture of faith in
himself, in us, in language and the transmissi­
bility of experience. The result was an extraor­
dinary and life-changing document; nobody
else need think so, but for me and for my sis­
ter, it was. My father, on the other hand, of
more melancholic temperament, a business­
man during the day, spent a lifetime of eve­
nings, weekends, and holidays as a scholar and
thinker who, as in Bernhard's account of Witt­
genstein's nephew, was a philosopher only in
his head, committing nothing to paper. My
abiding memory of him in old age is of a man
in his library, sitting in his leather chair in a
pool of light surrounded by darkness, wearing
half-moon glasses, with a book in his lap and
a Scotch on the table beside him. He had no­
body to talk to, nobody with whom to share
his considerable erudition; he lived in the
splendid and terrible isolation of one who,
while still retaining faith in the life of the mind
and the power of books to speak to him, had
All This Life in Us, a painting by Dominic Chambers, whose work is on view this month at Anna Zorina Gallery, in New York City.
renounced the possibility of being understood
and the value of passing on his knowledge.
Both figures have their Beckettian absurdity­
my grandfather toiling at his desk, for what?
My father, reading voraciously, for what?-but
also represent hope of a kind, and inspire me
to persist.
So many stories remain untold; so much
that we have to learn, and to experience, is
still hidden from the world. To attend to these
stories is to slow our current hurtling, to calm
the chaos, to return to what makes us human.
It is to find the past and the present restored,
as well as the possibility of the future. We
can't go on, we must go on: in this period of trial
and transition, those of us for whom the power
of the word is paramount must keep the flame
alive. Nothing matters more.
[Memoir]
REBORN TO RUN
By Betsy Bonner, from The Book of Atlantis Black,
which tvas published last month by Tin House Books.
1.
Once, when my older sister Nancy was twelve,
she told me she'd decided to run away by hopping
a freight train. Her best friend, Jen, had done it.
When she invited me to join her, I refused, and
threatened to tell our father.
"Don't be a wuss," she said. She stared me
down and ordered me not to say anything to any­
one, even if she never came back.
READINGS 15
"Clair de Lune," a phocograph by Paul Cu/1ido, whose iuork is on view this month at Photo Basel, in Berlin.
She was gone for several hours. Mom had a
doctor's appointment that day but wasn't leaving
her room. I was about to wake her when Nancy
came in the front door and breezed past me into
the kitchen.
"Did you do it?" I called.
"Wouldn't you like to know."
"You couldn't have gone that far, or you
wouldn't be back," I said.
That night, she came into my room. She said
that she never intended to go all the way to
Harrisburg, or wherever that train was head­
ing. She rode it for a few minutes, and then
jumped off to spend the remainder of the af­
ternoon in the woods with Jen. I knew, then,
that she could disappear whenever she wanted,
whether to scare me or to feel alive or to imag­
ine herself gone.
2.
When Nancy was thirteen, she climbed out
her window in the middle of the night and
walked the nine miles to our school, through
woods and fields and across Highway l. The
next day, she showed up on time for her envi-
16 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
ronmental science class and took her seat near
where a buck's head hung on the wall. She told
me that night-walking was a beautiful and
tranquilizing experience.
3.
When we were teenagers, my sister would come
into my bedroom, lie down on the floor, and
start talking. She told me she believed in rein­
carnation, and that she was attracted to the des­
ert because her spirit was a coyote. She asked
whether I had ever experienced astral projec­
tion, and when I said I hadn't she told me I'd
have to be lying down and hovering at the edge
of a dream.
4.
In 1994, my seventeen-year-old sister gave birth
to a new self. For Atlantis Black to exist, she
had to get rid of Eunice Anne Bonner. Two lo­
cal newspapers printed the legal notice, and
the people of Chadds Ford had a month to
present objections. There were none. Eunice
Anne Bonner drove herself to the hearing
and emerged Eunice Anne Black. Later on,
she forged a document to make Atlantis her
middle name.
5.
In 360 BC, when Plato invented the lost is­
land of Atlantis in his dialogues Timaeus and
Critias, most readers understood that it was
not a real place. But in 1882, Ignatius Don­
nelly, a politician from Philadelphia, pub­
lished Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, a
pseudoscientiftc account of the flora, fauna,
and history of Atlantis. The Theosophists
Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf S teiner ex­
panded on the mythology and wrote about
Atlanteans as a "root race" that had existed
ten thousand years earlier. Blavatsky's The
Secret Doctrine described Atlanteans as god­
like beings who had bec ome human and
thereby destroyed themselves. Steiner's At­
lantis and Lemuria claimed that Atlanteans
existed in a kind of "dream consciousness"
and valued personal experience over tradi­
tional learning: an Atlantean "did not think,
he remembered."
6.
On June 25, 2008, a young woman with my
sister's IDs was found dead on the floor of a
hotel room in Tijuana. Her body had needle
marks in the left arm, a wound on the right
middle finger, and a bruised cranium. She
wore blue jeans and a brown T-shirt that read
cooo KARMA. Two syringes were in the room:
one on the nightstand, one in her purse. The
police report said that the IDs-including an
American passport and a California driver's li­
cense issued to "Eunice Atlantis Black"-did
not appear to match the body, which was cre­
mated without taking fingerprints or checking
dental records. The autopsy report said the
woman had green eyes and weighed less than
one hundred pounds. It estimated that she
had been twenty to twenty-five years old. My
sister had hazel eyes, like my mother. She was
thirty-one and running from felony charges in
a prescription-drug case in California when
she disappeared.
7.
The story I told to myself, to my therapist,
and to my friends, was that Atlantis was
dead, and that she'd killed herself in protest
against the DEA. The story I kept to myself
was that even if Atlantis hadn't really died in
Tijuana, she couldn't have managed to live
much longer on the run.
[Escalation]
APPLE WATCH
From surveillance measures taken by governments
and institutions around the world in response to the
novel coronavirus pandemic.
Connected patient case numbers with loca­
tion data
Deployed drones to scold pedestrians for not
wearing masks
Deployed drones to instruct people to disperse
with a recorded message from the mayor
Deployed drones to peer into windows to check
whether residents were obeying quarantine
Aggregated data from Google and Facebook to
track how the virus spreads among friends
Accessed the cell phones of citizens who tested
positive and sent text messages to people
whom they had possibly infected
Required citizens to download an app that as­
sesses their health, labels them green, yellow,
or red, sends this information to the police,
and grants them access to public spaces on
the basis of their color grade
Launched a platform to track the movement of
confirmed cases using credit card transac­
tions and CCTV footage
Installed CCTV cameras in front of the homes
of people under mandated quarantine
[Denomination]
CALL ME BY YOUR
PAIN
From first names given to babies born around the
world during the early months of the novel corona­
virus pandemic.
Corona
Corona Kumar
Corona Kumari
Covid
Covid Marie
Covid Rose
Coviduvidapdap
Lockdown
Sanitizer
Covid Bryant
READINGS 17
 Installed heat-detection cameras outside hos­ Required students to wear electronic tracking
pitals devices
Integrated Al technology with surveillance cam­ Forced undocumented immigrants to wear elec­
eras in the subway system to assess whether tronic tracking bracelets
passengers were wearing masks Required individuals who tested positive to
Introduced a robot to track when employees download an app that notifies the police
came within six feet of one another when they leave their homes
Used RFID technology co determine whether Introduced a police helmet with facial­
employees were washing their hands recognition technology that uses thermal
Required arriving travelers to wear electronic cameras to measure body temperature
tracking wristbands Assigned citizens QR codes that contain per­
sonal data
Required people in quarantine
to submi.t one selfie per hour
between 7 AM and 9 PM
Secretly registered users for a
[Instructions] game show called Are You at
VANISHING CREAM Home? in which the host calls
random users to check whether
they are obeying quarantine
From CV Dazzle, a project by Adam Harvey that demonstrates how
makeup, hair styling, and accessories can be used to foil facial recog­
nition technology. Harvey ran the below looks through a neural
network that evaluates the similarities between two faces. Each face
is given a score between O and I, with scores below 0.8 interpreted as
likely not a match. \Xlhen compared with a makeup-free image of the [Personal Growth]
same subject, the looks below (clockwise from top left) received scores
of 1.0, 0.73, 0.56, and 0.53, showing the extent to which contouring EMPATHY,MY
and asymmetrical designs can be used to confuse the sJftware by
altering the spatial and textural re!ationshi/)s between key feauires DEAR WATSON
such as the eyes, eyebrows, and nose. These are considered more
identifiable than features in the bottom half of a face, ,which is dy­
namic and easily obscured by collars, masks, or other gannents. From a lawsuit filed in June by the
estate of Arthur Conan Doyle al­
leging that an upcoming Netflix
film about Enola Holmes, the
younger siste1· of She1·lock Holmes,
depicts Sherlock in an empathetic
manner distinct to Doyle's later
short stories, which are not yet in
the public domain. The following
is taken from allegations in the
lawsuit describing Sherlock's emo­
tional evolution over the course of
Doyle's career.

Sherlock Holmes was famous

for his great powers of observa­
tion and logic. He was famous for
being aloof and unemotional.
His closest companion, Watson,
revered Holmes and was gener­
ous in his admiration. But to
Holmes, Watson was utilitarian­
to be employed when useful, then
set aside. Holmes did not treat
Watson with warmth. Holmes
told him, "You have a grand gift
for silence, Watson. It makes you
quite invaluable as a companion."

3-D design hy Adam Harvey and Josh Evans; 3-D scan by Taylor
18 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020 L. Absher; modeling by Lajune McMillian © Adam Han·cy/CV Daz:le
Holmes did not even congratulate Watson when
Watson told Holmes he was going to marry. "I
feared as much," said Holmes. "I really cannot
congratulate you." "I felt a little hurt," said
Watson. Then all of this changed. The
Great War happened. It was no longer
enough that Holmes was the most bril-
liant rational and analytical mind.
Holmes needed to be human. Holmes
became warmer. He became capable
of friendship. He could express emo-
tion. He developed a knowledge of
medicine. He embraced modem tech­
nologies. He changed from one who
cared little for dogs to someone who had
great interest in them. He began to
respect wo men. He reacted with
warmth and emotion to a woman-
quite unlike his famous aversion to
women. His relationship to Watson
changed from that of master and as-
sistant to one of genuine friendship.
Watson became more than just a tool
for Holmes to use. When Watson mar-
ried for a second time and moved out
of Baker Street, Holmes described the
emotional impact this had on him,
calling Watson's remarriage "the only
selfish action which I can recall in our
association. I was alone." Holmes be-
came a partner. When a villain fired a
gun and Watson was hit, Holmes said:
"You're not hurt, Watson? For God's
sake, say that you are not hurt!" "I
caught a glimpse of a great heart," said
Watson. "All my years of humble but
single-minded service culminated in
that moment of revelation."
[Lecture]
INTELLECTUAL
PROPERTY
By Eileen Myles, from For Now, which
will be published this month by Yale Uni­
versity P1·ess as part of the Why I Write
series. A version of the essay was delivered
at Yale last year.
In 2015, I had a conversation with a
man named Chris. He was an agent
for archives and he sa id, well what
do you got, and I told him about the notebooks
dating back to 1960 and all the posters from
readings and performances and the videotapes.
Any pictures. Well. Yeah, though it's kind of
[How-To]
EXTRA EXTRA
From the headlines of advice columns published in the New York
Times since the onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
If You've Got Lemons, Make Limoncello
How to Raise a Happy, Carefree Butterfly
How to Make Your Own Coronavirus Pifiata
How to Make a Frozen Margarita
Go Ahead, Blow Out the Candles on Zoom
It's Not Too Late to Get a Virtual Internship
How to Go on a First Date During Quarantine
Be Your Own Spin Class
Give Yourself a Buzz Cut Now
It's Robes and Slippers All Day Now
How to Hug During a Pandemic
Masks, No Kissing and 'a Little Kinky'
Turn Your Demanding Child Into a Productive Co-Worker
How to Create Screen-Life Balance
Make Stress Work for You
Silver Lining to the Mask? Not Having to Smile
You're Stronger Than Your Quarantine Fatigue
It's OK to Not Be a Perfect Quarantine Employee
You Don't Have to Emerge From Quarantine a
Beautiful Butterfly
Maskne Is the New Acne
What Is All of That Screen Time Doing to Your Skin?
How to Politely Decline a Call
How to Write a Condolence Note
Emotional Eating in Quarantined Kids
Please Do Not Eat Disinfectant
Does Online Babysitting Work?
Oh, Good, the Kids Are Fighting Again
I Left My Husband Before the Pandemic. Can I Go Back to
Him Now?
How to Rethink Your Wedding
Is It OK to Dump Him Because of His Medical Condition?
How to Reduce Your Risk of PTSD in a Post-Covid-19
World
Nature Deficit Disorder Is Really a Thing
Hoping to Buy an Aboveground Pool to Salvage Summer?
It May Be Too Late
How to Entertain Your Kids This Summer? Maybe Don't
You and Your Kids Can't Stand Each Other. Now What?
Should You Renew Your Lease If You've Lost Your Job?
Should We Be More Pessimistic?
READINGS 19
 weird and I told him how I had a collection of
archival photographs of myself and Andrei
Voznesensky on a couch as he was putting the
moves on me; Adrienne Rich and I hugging at
some reading; captioned photos of me by Allen
Ginsberg; and even outtakes from the Map­
plethorpe shoot. But I don't know where they
are. There's this box and then I described the
poems in binders in the milk crate. It's weird I
[Expert Opinion]
SYSTEM OF A CLOWN
From an interview of Larry Kudlow, the director of
the National Economic Council, by Sara Eisen, the
coliost of Closing Bell on CNBC, conducted in]une.
SARA EISEN: Larry, I just wanted to follow up on
something you told reporters last week. You
said, "I don't believe there's systemic racism
in the U.S.," which I found surprising given
the moment that we're in.
LARRY KUDLOW: Well, I don't believe in systemic
racism. I think the American system is the
best system ever devised for mankind. Here's a
thought: the first black president was elected
twice and he got seventy-nine million white
votes. Therefore I find it hard to understand
something called "systemic racism." You
know, I'm old enough to remember the Fifties.
EISEN: Larry-
KUDLOW: You gotta watch this PBS documentary
about the great black jurist and Supreme
Court justice-um, uh-whose name I've
forgotten. Sorry, I've forgotten him. My point
is this: we can learn from our history.
EISEN: Larry-
KUDLOW: ls this a systemic problem? No. Systemic
means America is bad. America is wrong.
EISEN: Larry, l think you have to look at the ex­
planations for why the net worth of a white
family is ten times more than the net worth of
a black family. Or why a black family led by a
household with an advanced degree doesn't
make as much as a white family led by a
household member with a high school degree.
The statistics are endless. That's what people
are referring to when they talk about systemic
racism in society.
KUDLOW: Number one, I'm not sure what sys­
temic means. But I do not believe in whatever
it may mean.
20 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
said but I'm not sure where those two things
are. I mean I've got to have them. I think they
are either in my New York storage space or I
guess I still have one storage unit in San Diego.
A place called Big Box. I smirked. He was not
interested in the details.
He paused for a moment, sipping his drink. He
was thinking about the box with the binders. Or
maybe it was the photos. Now he looked up at
me. In my business, he said, we call a box like
that the gusher.
I talked on the phohe with a psychic tarot
reader from Tucson. She said the box was very
close. I just had to write a letter and send it to
everyone who ever came in contact with the
box in the time it was traveling with me. Peo­
ple were heartbroken. Are you sure it wasn't in
your apartment. Are you sure it isn't in hers.
My girlfriend had a big old apartment she
grew up in. It was kind of a railroad. There
was this hall she called the closet, but it was
more like a long clothes rack with very high
shelves. I went to a psychic in New York and
he told me she had it. She may not have
known she had it. I asked her and she said she
was very sorry but she would never lie about
something like that.
I talked to a hypnotist who said she saw
something green like a lamp, something high.
No, actually she led me into a hypnotic state,
and l looked around up there and that's what l
saw. There was that apartment I took in
L.A. before I left. I had it for about three days
and then I asked for my check back.' I was mov­
ing to New York. They had this weird storage
space that was actually right on the street and I
remembered locking and unlocking it and l am
pretty sure the box was right in there. I remem­
ber talking to some comedian who lived there
after me and he said I'm sorry I don't have it.
I have so many theories.
Bedbugs. My girlfriend had had them a cou­
ple of times in her building so when she saw
the bloodstains on the side of the mattress she
freaked. It was our blood. We did a giant purge
of the apartment. Putting things in trash bags,
getting the place sprayed, and then throwing
out a ton of stuff. Her building had one of
those cement dungeons right below the street
where you dropped your trash and we filled that
entire dungeon with black bags. She had this
extra mom because her own mom had been ir­
responsible and this woman named Sally
helped us clean and lug the mess down. I
mean if you date a significantly younger per­
son, especially if you are the same age as her
parents and her parents' friends, it's like you're
John Wayne Gacy. So I find it very easy to
imagine Sally sliding my box into a trash bag
and throwing it out. And why not the second
':!\nton{n Kalina, Czechoslovakia, 1988," and "Zofia Baniecka, Poland, 1986," photographs by Gay Block, from Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage
in the Holocaust, which was reissued last mont/1 by Radius Books.
one too. This is the kind of thing that makes
you entirely paranoid. She was a nice woman.
She wouldn't do that. Who knows. Few people
really care that much.
The second psychic said he didn't find things
but he knew somebody who did and would give
me their number. But then he got cancer. And
then he got better. He was pretty good. By then
I was as much asking about the woman I was
dating as anything else. And this was some­
body else. I wrote a pilot about the box because
she said if I didn't, she would. So I did and I
showed it to her and she said the format was
wrong. l got busy and the next time I talked to
psychics and astrologers they didn't think the
box was close anymore.
It became my thing and it's been my thing
now for probably ten years. I mostly don't tell
people. I went to Palestine in 2017 on a tour of
five cities with American and British writers,
several of Middle Eastern extraction and a few
Jews. In Palestine I met writers and lawyers and
human-rights people and every night we read
our work. I was at this party one night in Ra­
mallah and I just spontaneously started telling
this filmmaker, a woman about my age-I fig­
ured she'd get it and she laughed and said it's
gone and it's wonderful. Somebody else will
find it. It's not your problem anymore.
[Fiction]
AFTER MIDNIGHT
By Wolf Wondratschei<, from Self-Portrait with
Russian Piano, a novel, which will be published this
month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Translated
from the German by Marshall Yarbrough.
Yu ask me whether I still keep up with my
piano playing. I'll tell you, I don't, not anymore, not
for many years now, and it's not just the piano I've
stopped keeping up with. Life isn't easy. My hands
are bored, my heart's worn out, to say nothing about
how my legs feel. When I go to the kitchen to make
myself some coffee, I forget that I've gone to the
kitchen to make myself some coffee. But by that
time I'm already standing in the kitchen, which
hasn't smelled very pleasant for quite some time
now. At my age nothing smells very pleasant
anymore. My bed. I'm ashamed to sleep in this bed,
but at night I get tired. What am I supposed to do
if not lie down in this bed to sleep? It is a joy, a
small one, to get out of my clothes, which have
the smell on them of long, arduous days, of en­
tire weeks. Even if I've made it through the day
not in a bad mood, my pants smell of despair,
READINGS 21
 --
A photograph from the series LLmd/s by Gohar Oashri, whose work was on view in]u!y at Intersect Aspen, in Aspen, Colorado.
my shirt smells like my socks, like the hallway
where the smell starts and then pours out into
the other ro oms, and the kitchen as well, of
course. So long as I'm here there's little use in
opening the windows. If the sun is shining, the
warm air just pushes the smell back through the
window into the apartment. If it's raining, I get to
hope that things will be made fresh again. Or I tell
myself I do. Rain washes the world clean, that's
what they said in the villages where I grew up.
Even the old would pour themselves a glass when
the sky turned dark and the wind and the rain
started in. We were all quiet, because that's how it
always was. Everyone listened, even me, even the
boys. No one would have dared say a single word.
A holy silence, which I only ever found again
in music-later, much later, when I began to
love music. I won't say when I began to under­
stand music. Even today I don't think I have any
idea what music is. I sit at the piano, I play, I love
what I'm playing, but I understand nothing. After
midnight, when I'd had enough to drink, I some­
times played like someone who'd been allowed to
22 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
trick himself into believing he understood what
he was doing. I was at my best at these times. I
liked to drink. We all liked to drink. All musicians
drank. Even if we had wanted to sober up, we
couldn't stop drinking. These rare hours, they were
what mattered. The hours before sunrise, when I
was alone with my hands on the piano and the
music that I played. I don't know whether I was
happy. I was concerned with more important
things than being happy. Even today I have no
interest in the answer to that question. Some­
times I think the whole of a person's happiness
rests on his wanting neither to seek nor to find it.
Still happier the person who doesn't make a fuss
about it, whether happy or unhappy. Not ques­
tioning whatever judgment is imposed upon us.
Showing the same equanimity in remembering
and in forgetting. I've told myself for a long time:
nothing can happen to you, whatever God might
do. I hear His angels in the apartment. I hear them
listening when I sit at the piano. I hear the quiet
of their presence. Maybe that's what I wanted
when I played: to make angels sing, to make their
invisibility, their silence, ring out. Angels are a big. I live on a diet of medication-very expensive
good audience, the best a musician can ask for. medication. I don't have a choice. I am old. I am
The young and old women who
bathed me as a child believed in
all that. None of them played an
instrument. When I started
playing, they felt guilty. A piano
in a village. A child who doesn't [Poem)
sleep. What had they done,
where had they gone wrong WALKING TOUR OF AN
with this child who didn't stare
up at the sky or into the pots in
IMAGINARY HOMELAND
the kitchen or at the books that
were lying around, but at his By Chris Martin, from Things to Do in Hell, a poetTy collection, which
hands, at how they f luttered will be published next month by Coffee House Press.
when he moved his fingers, how
they galloped? Was this their
handiwork? Artists only existed The airplane inside us was running out of pretzels
in cheap novels, so easy to pass
from hand to hand, wherever We took the drugs in the morning so we could see at night
you were in the world. That far
away from Moscow, artists were All day clinging to ghastly seaweed on the naked internet ocean
a figment of the imagination.
The horse that drew the plow We thought, okay, neglect equals geography
was not, neither was poverty,
nor the ground in which so little As our habits grew unrecognizable so far from the strobe
grew. What was supposed to
happen? I kept still, if only out­ And cold menace of a quivering if
wardly, when in the parlor the
old people, the whole family, sat What I didn't say was I was worried you might think
around the table, silent, eyes
closed. I did not have to risk I was fine but insufficient
much for my pleasure, I stuck my
hands in my pants pockets and A total dick with wet cuffs like Zebulon Pike
moved my fingers in secret. I still
think of all those people who In the vacuum of night
pray in silence when I think of
music. When I listen to music; I I can almost smell all these leases expire
still hear the rain in every note.
And so, depending on how you Leashes?
look at it, I never really left my
village, not in London, not in Softening in the efflorescent decay tenure
Paris or Vienna. And I never
took my hands out of my pockets. And crippled in near-attainment
I played like I practiced. Even
onstage I had the feeling that But less here already
what I did, I did in secret. I was
at home. I was in my childhood. We sipped unlegislated self-light like half-sour breast milk
How long ago that was. Too long
to try to trick myself about it. Midlife is a drop ceiling
Nowadays I'll say that, where
I'm concerned, playing the piano The future like a lake of cooling bacon fat
no longer makes sense. I lack
the necessary strength. The Computers do it for us anyways
strength of the night, the burn­
ing clarity in my head, there Unless we tell them not to
only in the deepest exhaustion.
Today I'm a smelly old person in Which we won't
a dark apartment, which now
that my wife is dead is far too

READINGS 23
 trapped in a body, without hope. Even if I haven't
managed to get rid of you, I don't receive visitors
anymore. Well, with the exception of a young
violinist who whenever she comes to my door I
ask inside, a violinist who despite her youth has
had a lot of success all over the world, whose
father was a friend of mine and whose mother in
her youth was considered one of the most beauti­
ful but also one of the most stubborn women in
all of Moldavia, an object of temptation for every
one of us. Everything you need to make music on
a violin the daughter inherited fr01n her mother,
plus her temperament and her beauty, which she
considers a nuisance. She's hard on herself, which
I like. l don't hold back either. It's not about beat­
ing your rivals. And careful, don't burn yourself
up before the first note. You're not going for a
record! Everything develops slowly. Play the dead
like they're your contemporaries, and play your
[Accusations]
WHEN LIFE GIVES
YOU LEMON
From FCC com/Jlaints filed between 2016 and
2017 that allege inappropriate behavior by CNN
host Don Lemon. The documents were obtained
through a Freedom of Information Act request and
published by Muckrock.com.
Don Lemon has been cutting people off on
purpose
Don Lemon flipped off Larry Wilmore
Don Lemon showed a clip of the assassination
attempt on Ronald Reagan
Don Lemon said that anyone who supports
Donald Trump is complicit in his racism
Don Lemon said that taking a knee is protected
by the Constitution
Don Lemon depicted protests live with signs
saying FUCK all over the place
Don Lemon used the word "bullshit" two or
three times
Don Lemon said "cojones," which means
testicles
Don Lemon had on a CNN employee who
intentionally said another word for "vagina"
Don Lemon had on a so-called expert woman
Don Lemon drank tequila from a Jose Cuervo
bottle
Don Lemon spoke his feelings
24 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
contemporaries like classics. She listens, doe-eyed.
The audience isn't in charge, especially not the
lords and ladies in the orchestra seats. Don't look
at them! And don't let them love you! We speak
in our language. I serve tap water. A way of pass­
ing the time. I enjoy it, but I feel myself getting
tired. I can't keep up the concentration the young
thing demands of me for long, and soon I'm no
longer even capable of thanking her for the com­
pliments she pays me, and for the gift of a diver­
sion, a change of pace, which she has given me
with her excitement for music and her innate
recklessness, at least where her conception of the
violin and a career without compromises are
concerned. I can't even prevent her from taking
me in her arms when she says goodbye. This is
always embarrassing for me. Doesn't she smell it?
Doesn't she see the pile of unwashed dishes in the
sink, the dust on the letters that are lying around
everywhere? No, she doesn't-or she acts like she
doesn't. She wants to save me, to get me back
onstage, wants to appear alongside me, the old
man and the girl, she says, and laughs. It'd make
me happy, she says, I want to. You've still got it,
even now. There's no one who plays like you. You'll
get yourself back into shape. I trust you. Do it, she
begs, do it for me. We'll make it happen. We'll
travel together. My God, she's about to burst into
tears. Somehow we both keep standing there like
that for a while, both ashamed, both helpless,
but, we know, lost to each other. It's better if you
go now, I say. Well before midnight I'm finished
as a human being and fall into bed.
At what would be the right time for making
music, I'm snoring. I miss those hours, oh how I
miss them! The hours that decided every truth,
the hours that were good to me, that brought
order to my mind. Brought the requisite disorder,
to put it better. Or better still, a kind of higher
order. The late Schumann. The Russian alcoholics.
Czechs who didn't sleep at night. This time was
everything, the time ofhyperactive weariness. Even
for Sibelius, who tormented himself with his music
and with alcohol.' Who, driven to despair by lone­
liness and isolation, listened to the night. No, said
Suvorin, with the photograph of his wife on the
wall over the table, whatever is played before mid­
night sounds like nothing. Even in the concerts
that I myself played, it sounded like nothing. But
who would dare take the risk of allowing a concert
to begin after midnight? Even with free admission
it wouldn't work. Oh night, sing the poets, and it's
not just the romantics among them who are sing­
ing. There are good arguments to be made against
sobriety. The soul opens up in darkness. It is capri­
cious, as we know. It is an owl. It hides in the light.
And, like me, it wants to be alone.
I didn't notice that she was still standing there.
And only now, after these last words, which I had
spoken to myself, did she go.
Appendix 137_120 (derail), an archival inkjet p1·int from the series Scratching on Things / Could Disavow by Walid Raad, whose work was on view last
month at Paula Cooper Gallery, in New York City.

© The artist. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York City READINGS 25
 .

...
'

� � ;�

Ii �

..... ......
�I

THE BIG TECH
EXTORTION RACKET
How Google, Amazon, and Facebook control our lives
By Barry C. Lynn
P opular histories present the
Boston Tea Party as a rebellion
against taxes. Yet what the
colonists objected to more than any­
thing was the idea of an all-powerful
corporate middleman regulating com­
merce. They viewed the 1773 protest
in Boston Harbor as a victory for lib­
erty and a blow against the British East
India Company's trade monopoly.
That corporation owed its domi­
nance not to any proprietary advantage
but to an exclusive British govern­
ment charter. The artificial nature of
this power was made clear soon after
the Congress of the new United
States signed a peace treaty with Brit­
a in. Six weeks later, the American
ship Empress of China sailed from New
York, bound for Canton. When the
ship returned, its traders old tea and
porcelain on the open market. With­
out the active backing of the British
Barry C. Lynn is che execucive director of
the Open Markets /nsritute and the amhor
of rhe forthcoming book Liberty from All
Masters: The New American Autocracy
vs. the Will of the People,from which chis
report is adapted.
Illustrations by Doug Charka. Source images© iSrock
R E P O R T
state, the East India Company could
not stop the sale-let alone determine
who sold what, or where and how they
sold it, in America.
But around the m iddle of the
nineteenth century, Americans be­
gan to develop technologies that
could not be broken into component
pieces. This was especially true of
the railroad and the telegraph. These
expensive and complex networks
were built across vast areas of land
and required large teams of people
to operate. This made the earlier
solution to monopolies-di olution­
impossible. If Americans planned to
take full advantage of these techno­
logical advances, they would have to
regulate the actions of the corpora­
tions that controlled them.
Such corporations po ed one over­
arching challenge: they charged some
people more than others to get to
market. They exploited their control
over an essential service in order to
extort money, and sometimes political
favors. The system of "discriminations
made between individuals ... is the
most serious evil connected with our
present methods of railroad manage­
ment," the Yale professor Arthur
T. Hadley explained in 1885. "Differ­
ences are made which are sufficient to
cripple all smaller competitor ... and
concentrate industry in a few hands."
Americans found the answer to
this problem in common law. For
centuries, the owners of ferries, stage­
coaches, and inns had been required
to serve all customers for the same
price and in the order in which they
arrived. In the late nineteenth cen­
tury, versions of such "common car­
rier " rules were applied to the new
middleman corporations.
Today we rightly celebrate the Sher­
man Antitrust Act of 1890, which gave
Americans the power to break apart
private corporations. But in many re­
spects,the lntersrate Commerce Act of
1887 was the more important docu­
ment. This act wa based on the under­
standing that monopoly networks like
the railroad and the telegraph could be
used to influence the actions of people
who depend on them, and hence their
power must be carefully restricted, in
much the same way that we restrict the
REPORT 27
power of government. As Senator
Sherman himself put it,
It is the right of every man to work,
labor, and produce in any lawful vo­
cation and to transport his produc­
tion on equal terms and conditions
and under like circumstances. This is
industrial liberty, and lies at the
foundation of the equality of all
rights and privileges.
For a century and a half, Americans
used common carrier policies to ensure
the rule of law in activities chat de­
pended on privately held monopolies.
These rules served as a pillar of Ameri­
can prosperity through much of the
twentieth century. By neutralizing
the power of all essential transport
and communications systems, the
regulations freed Americans to take
full advantage of every im.porcant
network technology introduced
during these years, including tele­
phones, water and electrical ser­
vices, energy pipelines, and even
large, logistics-powered retailers.
Citizens did not have to worry chat the
men who controlled the technologies
involved would exploit their middle­
man position co steal other people's
business or disrupt balances of power.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Robert
Bork, Richard Posner, and ocher neo­
liberal Chicago School legal scholars
set out to overturn America's antimo­
nopoly regime, targeting the tradi­
tional prohibitions on discrimination
that common carrier laws had estab­
lished. Their scholarship later played
a major role in the writing of Section
230 of the Communications Decency
Act of 1996. In chat bill, Congress si­
mulcaneously exempted internet plat­
forms from any responsibility co police
the content on their sites, and failed
entirely to impose on chem any require­
ment to provide equal and just service
co all who depend on their networks.
As a result, Amazon, Google,
Facebook, and other platforms were
free to develop business models that
treated every seller and buyer-every
citizen-differently. These corpora­
tions exploited chis license to the
fullest, and have used their power to
reorganize entire realms of human
activity. Amazon, Google, and Face­
book match individuals to specific
shoes and clothes, specific restaurants
28 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
and hotels, specific movies and music,
specific jobs and schools, specific
drugs and hospitals, specific sexual
partners, and even specific books, ar­
ticles, speakers, and sources of news.
These companies are the most pow­
erful middlemen in history. Each
guards the gate to innumerable sources
of essential information, services, and
products. Yet thus far no governmental
entity in the United Scates has signaled
any intention of limiting the license
these corporations enjoy to serve only
the customers they choose to, at what­
ever price they decide.
This means that Jeff Bezos, Sergey
Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg
IN THE SEVENTIES AND EIGHTIES,
CHICAGO SCHOOL LEGAL
THEORISTS SET OUT TO OVERTURN
A MERICA'S ANTIMONOPOLY REGIME
enjoy much the same power as God did
in Babel. We live in the world they
manufacture for us. Their vision for
what we should do, where we should go,
how we should think, and who we
should be is now our vision, too. As
their manipulation machines increas­
ingly deliver different information to
each member of the public, it becomes
harder for people to engage in debate
and have any chance at bringing these
companies under control.
THE MANIPULATION OF THE SELLER
T
radicionally, retailers operate by
purchasing someone else's
product and reselling it to con­
sumers. Amazon calls this its first-party
business, and it remains a large driver
of revenue. But as Bezos detailed in his
2018 letter to investors, Amazon in
recent years has focused more on con­
necting companies that want to sell a
particular product with people who
want to buy that product, then charg­
ing a fee for chis service. After noting
that annual first-party sales had grown
from $1.6 billion in 1999 to $117 billion
in 2018, Bezos added chat during chat
same period, third-party sales grew
from $0.1 billion to $160 billion.
This new model was so successful,
Bezos claimed, because Amazon had
done such "a great job" of helping in­
dependent sellers "compete against"
the company's own business. Ama­
zon, he wrote, adding his own italics,
had provided ocher sellers with "the
very best selling tools we could imagine
and build." "To put it bluntly," he
went on, adding more italics, "Third­
party sellers are kicking our first party
butt. Badly."
But to the third-party sellers, the
arrangement looks somewhat different.
These companies sell on Amazon be­
cause there are few other places to find
customers online. According to data
collected last year, 66 percent of all
online shoppers start cheir search on
Amazon. Of those looking for a spe­
cific product, the figure is 74 percent.
In short, when it comes to com­
merce in c011sumer goods, if you are
not on Amazon, you are not really
in the marker.
Sellers who come to depend
on Amazon soon find that the
corporation can manipulate their
sales in seemingly infinite ways.
That's because Amazon controls
how information is presented to the
potential buyer, down to the price of
every good-including, of course,
whether that information is ever pre­
sented at all. The resulc is that Ama­
zon has been able to carve out a big­
ger and bigger share of each deal
made on its website. Last year, the
company's average cut of a given sale
on its platform was more than
40 percent-roughly triple what it
was only a few years before.
What's more, these sellers don't have
the ability to raise their prices, even
if they spot an opportunity to do so.
Amazon has long controlled pricing
decisions on goods it buys and re­
sells, and has long manipulated the
prices of other people's products for
its own purposes. But it used to allow
third-par ty vendors to manage their
own pricing. As Amazon's power has
grown, however, it has begun to ma­
nipu lace these merchants' prices as
well. Just before Christmas in 2017, for
instance, Amazon arbitrarily slashed a
number of third-party vendors' prices
by up to 9 percent.
There's a reason these vendors
don't complain. lf they did, there's
a goo d chance Amazon would sim­
ply kick them off the platform. In
2014, in the midst of a fight over pric­
ing with the book publisher Ha­
chette, Amazon vanished Hachette's
titles from its website for six months.
This was costly for Hachette and dev­
astating for many authors. Despite
loud complaints from
writers, editors, publish­
ers, and readers, the
agencies charged with
enforcing America's an­
timonopoly laws barely
raised an eyebrow. So
Amazon continues to ex­
ercise the same license to
shut down whomever it
will whenever it will, be
that a writer of books or
a seller of shirts.
Amazon a l s o rou­
tinely ignores the sale
of counterfeit items on
its website, even when
sellers harmed by such
c o u n terfeiting c o m ­
plain-as Birkenstock
has repeatedly-and
t h e c o m p a n y 1nu s t
know the items are bo­
gus. So far, not a single
U.S. law-enfo rcement
agency has acted to
protect citizen s f rom
Amazon's abuse.
The government's lack
of response has made
clear to these companies
that Amazon's wishes­
Jeff Bezos's wishes-are
the law of the land, no
matter how arbitrary. As
one seller put it in a recent news arti­
cle, "Amazon is the judge, the. jury,
and the executioner."
One of the best measures of Ama­
zon's power is the phenomenal surge in
advertising sales on the site, which
went from a tiny line item in 2017 to
$10 billion in 2018. In an open market,
in which there are many sellers and
many buyers, advertising is a way to
attract attention. In a closed system, in
which a single corporation controls
access to the market and enjoys a li­
cense to open and close the gate as it
sees fit, advertising is just another tool
of the extortionist. If you want Amazon
to carry your goods, you must pay what-
ever Amazon demands to handle them,
as well as whatever it demands to "ad­
vertise" them to buyers.
Back in the day, Walmart's goal was
simply to force manufacturers to offer
it lower prices in order to undersell
and bankrupt rival retailers. Now that
Amazon has effectively killed off all
its online rivals, its model is to pit
every seller and trader on its website
against one another in a carefully
orchestrated scramble to be placed first
before the eyeballs of the busy buyer.
Amazon gets to sell both access to the
market and protection from its own
thuggish behavior.
THE MANIPULATION OF THE BUYER
T
hus far, Amazon has profited
mainly from the same model
used by the railroads in the
nineteenth century, during those pe­
riods when their bosses were able to
skirt common carrier rules. Bezos's
message to sellers is simple: I control
the road to the market. If you want to
ride, you pay what I demand.
Under such a system, the consumer
is manipulated in ways that enable
Amazon to charge the seller more.
The harms to the consumer-such
as being steered to buy
an inferior product or a
less interesting book­
are byproducts of a sys­
tem designed to exploit
the seller.
But Amazon's license
to discriminate is fast
moving into something
else, a system where each
consumer is charged the
maximum amount that
he or she can pay.
Many businesses have
long dreamed of charg­
ing individual buyers
different prices, or deliv­
ering different levels of
service for the same
price. But until the ad­
vent of the internet and
the ability to spy on the
most intimate thoughts
and actions of individu­
als, businesses could not
do so effectively. And
more to the point, for
much of the twentieth
century such discrimina­
tion was illegal.
Two decades ago, how­
ever, not long after Con­
gress lifted restrictions on
online corporations with
Section 230, a few vision­
aries started devising ways to exploit
their new license.
One of the first to uriderstand its
promise was a Berkeley economics
professor named Hal Varian. In 2001 ,
Varian cowrote a paper titled "Condi­
tioning Prices on Purchase History,"
which explained that the "rapid ad­
vance in information technology now
makes it feasible for sellers to concli­
tion their price offers on consumers'
prior purchase behavior."
Varian then offered a suggestion to
online businesses: "if enough customers
are myopic, or the costs of anonymizing
technologies are too high, sellers will
want to condition pricing on purchase
REPORT 29
history." The paper included a warning
to the buyer: "purchasing at a high
price is not the best strategy, since it
guarantees that [you, the consumer]
will face a high price in the future."
In short, online sellers are free to
provide you with prices, terms of
service, and information tailored to
exploit your weaknesses.
And there's nothing you
can do about it.
Today this practice is
normal. The OECD de­
scribed the problem in a
paper last fall:
The current evidence ...
shows that the techno­
logical means for online
personalisation and price
discrimination are exten­
sive and developing rap­
id ly, and difficult to
detect in market moni­
toring research by au­
thorities. It also shows
that online market places,
platforms, and social me­
dia use or can use data
analytics and profiling
tech niques ... to rank
and target offers on the
basis of estimated maxi­
mum willingness to pay.
To understand this
power and its implica­
tions, consider Uber,
whose service was de­
signed to manipulate
both buyer and seller us­
ing persona Ii zed price
discrimination, as the
company has admitted.
The corporation's ini-
tial expansion strategy resembled
those of earlier monopolists. In 1901,
it was J. P. Morgan who engineered a
near monopoly in steel production in
the United States. In 2011, it was Ja­
pan's SoftBank and Saudi Arabia's
sovereign wealth fund that armed
Uber with enough money to price its
service below cost for years.
But Uber differs from older mo­
nopolists in at least two key respects:
it enjoys the ability to capture and
make sense of vast amounts of data
about individuals, and it enjoys a li­
cense to discriminate.
Absent common car rier rules,
Uber's bosses are free to favor some
30 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
drivers with more rides and disfavor
others with fewer, for whatever reason
they choose. They are free to pay some
drivers more per mile than others, for
whatever reason they choose. They can
make some drivers travel farther than
others to _earn the same fare. And they
can pay a particular driver a certain rate
one day and a different rate the next.
They have even adopted techniques
typically used in video games to more
effectively manipulate their drivers.
Uber's bosses are also free to do the
same thing to riders. In a statement
admitting to price discrimination,
Uber implied that its goal is to
charge richer people more for the
same level of service. The corpora­
tion's pricing system is designed to
determine how much the people in a
particular region are willing to pay,
then charge accordingly. But people
agree to pay more for a particular
service for many reasons other than
a higher disposable income, includ-
ing lack of economic sophistication,
or just plain desperation.
Although what you see on your
screen has been designed to look a lot
like a market system, in which the price
of each particular ride you take is regu­
lated by supply and demand-with
prices, for example, "surging" during
rush hour-what is actu­
ally happening is much
different. Fluctuations in
pricing have nothing to
do with demand; prices go
up during rush hours and
during off-hours. Uber's
system is designed to care­
fully study your travel and
shopping habits so it can
figure out how to charge
you the maximum amount
for any particular ride,
without leading you to
decide to take the bus or
walk instead.
Uber's vast cache of
data about where people
go and when provides an
ever more perfect map of
traffic to and from a
community's bookstores
and coffee shops and
churches-and to its
backroom casinos and
drug dealers and sex clubs.
All this information
gives the corporation
the ability to understand
just how badly you need a
ride. Do you rush off ev­
ery Thursday at 8 PM to
see your boyfriend? Do
you like to squeeze your
Sunday visit to mom in
between a morning round of golf and
the afternoon NFL game? Every Tues­
day and Thursday at 3 PM, do you have
to get to your psychiatrist and back
without your boss knowing?
Well, your boss may not know, but
Uber does. And it exploits this
knowledge to extract more money.
Nowhere has Uber demonstrated
its capacity to deliver different ser­
vice to different people more perfectly
than in its treatment of officials
charged with ensuring the provision
of safe and affordable taxi services.
The corporation has repeatedly been
caught providing false information
to regulators around the world.
 Uber has developed a system that
enables it to gather intimate informa­
tion about you, your habits, and your
needs, then jack up the price you pay
for its service whenever and however
it chooses. This system also allows the
corporation to cut you off, for what­
ever reason, whenever it wishes.
THE MANIPULATION OF PERCEPTION
G
oogle appears highly complex,
but the corporation's business
model can be boiled down to
three simple steps.
First, Google assembled a cluster of
information-manipulation plat­
forms and tied them together. In­
house engineers created a better
search engine and a slicker email
service. But after the corporation
went public in 2004, it promptly set
out on the greatest acquisition spree
in history, buying up more than two
hundred other companies.
These deals made Google the
dominant player in mobile phones,
operating systems, web browsers, arti­
ficial intelligence, online advertising,
word processing, and maps, as well as
a major power in managing electricity
flows on the grid, undersea cables,
even educational publishing. And
these efforts continue. In June, Google
confirmed plans to buy the wearable­
technology company Fitbit.
Second, Google learned how to
organize, study, and wield all the se­
crets it gathers. Soon after Hal Varian
published his paper, Google hired
him as a consultant. In 2007, the
corporation named him chief econo­
mist. It was a classic variation on
vertical integration: hire the expert
and lock him inside so he can help
you-and only you-master the tech­
niques he identified.
In 2018, an Irish technologist named
Dylan Curran downloaded the infor­
mation Google had collected about
him. All in all, Curran found, the cor­
poration had gathered 5.5 GB of data
on his life, or the equivalent of more
than three million Word documents.
In an article for the Guardian, Curran
wrote that within this trove he found
every Google Ad I've ever viewed or
clicked on, every app I've ever launched
or used and when I did it, every website
I've ever visited and what time I did it.
They also have every image I've ever
searched for and saved, every location
I've ever searched for or clicked on, ev­
ery news article I've ever searched for or
read, and every single Google searcli I've
made since 2009. And . . . every
Yo uTube video I've ever searched for or
viewed, since 2008.
In addition, Curran discovered
that Google keeps a detailed record
of what events he attends and when
he arrives, what photos he takes and
when he takes them, what exercises
he does and when he does them. And
it has kept every email he has ever
GooGLE BUILT A BUSINESS ON
ITS ABILITY TO MANIPULATE
INDIVIDUALS' THOUGHTS,
PERCEPTIONS, FEARS, AND DESIRES
sent or received, including those he
has deleted.
Third, Google built a business rent­
ing its technology and data, allowing
anyone to steer individuals to buy a
particular product, read a particular
article, vote for a particular person, or
hold racist beliefs about a particular
group. Put another way, Google built
a business on its ability to manipulate
individuals' thoughts and perceptions
and fears and desires.
The model has proven phenome­
nally successful. In 2019, Google
earned almost $135 billion from such
"advertising." The only other corpo­
ration that comes close is Facebook,
which last year earned more than
$70 billion by renting out its manipula­
tion machine. Together these two cor­
porations captured some two thirds of
online ad revenue, and the total is
growing fast.
There's little evidence that Google's
founders imagined, in the early days,
that the corporation would gain such
power. When Google engineers first
began to assemble its manipulation
machine, they expected that Procter
& Gamble might use it to steer buyers
to, say, a more expensive version of
Tide. Or that American Airlines
might use it to steer buyers to a last-
minute ticket to CancCm. Or that
Exxon or Subway might use it to steer
buyers to a particular gas station or
sandwich shop.
But while Google might not have
set out to cause harm, every time its
business model has posed political,
social, or economic threats to the
American people, the corporation
has opted to press on. The same is
true of Facebook. Even after it be­
came clear that Vladimir Putin and
Alex Jones were using Google and
Facebook to spread the lies and mis­
information that have so disrupted
our society in recent years, the com­
panies accepted their money. When
America's newspapers, magazines,
and online news publications laid
off tens of thousands of reporters
and editors because Google and
Facebook were diverting so much
advertising revenue into their own
pockets, those checks kept getting
cashed. When even the most pow­
erful corporate executives and pub­
lishers dared not speak out against
Google or Facebook, the bosses
smiled and raised the rent.
M
ost people who drive have
become accustomed to be­
ing steered through the
world by Google. Even those who
don't drive follow the corporation's
directions whenever we get in an Uber
or a taxi. We simply surrender our­
selves to the blue line on the map. As
it directs us down particular streets, we
zone out, oblivious to the fact that
Google has the power to steer some of
us along better routes, to offer us swifter
ways of reaching our destinations.
And conversely, that Google has the
power to steer others toward side
streets and dead ends.
Does Google discriminate in map­
ping? Frankly, we h:ave no idea. What
we do know is that it can, that there
are many ways for the company to
profit by doing so, and that no gov­
ernment agency in the free world is
watching to prevent such blatant
abuses of the power that comes with
providing an essential service.
Our failure to apply common carri­
er rules to Google, to prevent the cor­
poration from discriminating in the
pricing and services it provides, has
left the corporation free to build a
REPORT 31
system that micromanages the move­
ment and actions of millions and
millions of people, moment after mo­
ment after moment, perhaps forever.
THE PUBLIC ATOMIZED
D
uring his 1912 campaign for
president, Woodrow Wilson
spoke of the political dangers
that come from allowing a few corpo­
rations to control access to the market.
I cannot tell you how many men of
business, how many important men
of business, have communicated their
real opinions about the situation in
the United States to me privately and
confidentially. They are afraid of
somebody. They are afraid to make
their real opinions known publicly; they
tell them to me behind their hand.
That means we are not masters of our
own opinions.
Today we see a similar pyramiding
of power. Great corporate lords who
only five years ago ranked among the
top tier of economic predators, who
could alter the fates of tens of thou­
sands with the wave of a hand, now
themselves fawn and fuss, flattering
the real bosses. Who makes the laws
in America today? Who chooses who
wins and who loses? Increasingly it is
the masters of Google and Amazon
and Facebook.
And it's not only businesspeople
who understand that their professional
lives are in the hands of these corpo­
rations. Journalists know that to upset
Google or Facebook is to risk online
vanishment. "Every publisher knows
that, at best, they are sharecroppers
on Facebook's massive industrial
farm," Nicholas Thompson, the editor
of Wired, wrote in 2018.
And journalists know chat the man
who owns the farm has the leverage. If
Facebook wanted to, it could quietly
turn any number of dials that would
harm a publisher-by manipulating its
traffic, its ad network, or its readers.
So, too, do politicians. Reporters
at The Markup recently detailed how
Google's email platform sorts cam­
paign advertisements in ways that
can arbitrarily promote one candi­
date and disappear another. Major
32 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
politicians from both parties have
accused Google and Facebook of ma­
nipulating campaign advertising.
This has yet to be proven, but that's
not what matters. What matters is
that a growing number of politicians
believe that the companies do this,
and hence are tempted to trim their
speech accordingly.
Yet something more dangerous
than a simple cowing of the once
powerful is taking place.
T
o understand, let's look at The
Wealth of Nations. Lik e
America's revolutionaries,
Adam Smith was inspired to act by
the spoliation of the British East In­
dia Company. But instead of tossing
tea into salt water, he responded by
writing a great treatise against the
evils of monopoly.
In The Wealth of Nations, Smith
developed a theory of market struc­
tures, and of the role that prices play
in transmitting political information.
Market prices, he believed, communi­
cate vital information, such as a
shortage of tomatoes or a bumper
crop of corn, so that individual buyers
and sellers can alter their economic
behavior accordingly, such as by buy­
ing fewer tomatoes and more corn.
On the surface, the theory ap­
pears almost simplistic. When a
price is too low, Smith wrote, suppli­
ers turn to other lines of trade. When
a price is too high, new suppliers will
bring goods to market.
But Smith's theory implies a vi­
sion of the individual as a sophisti­
cated political actor, someone who
is competing against and cooperat­
ing with others in the community.
The market price does something
else as well. It allows citizens to take
political action to address the reason
for a shortage or surplus of a particu­
lar good. If the price of shoes goes up
and stays up, this may indicate that a
monopolist has captured control of
shoe manufacturing and the time has
come for the public to break up the mo­
nopoly. If the price of wheat goes up
and stays up, then maybe the time
has come to irwestigate whether
some trader has amassed a dangerous
hold over the supply of wheat or the
capacity to process it. And if that
proves not to be the case, perhaps
the time has come to open a new
line of trade with a wheat-growing
land across the sea.
In other words, prices play a major
role in making the public the public.
It is one of the main factors that allow
people to stand together in a town
hall-or Congress-and compare
personal experiences with one an­
other in ways that allow us to identify
patterns and structural problems so
that we can make decisions as a com­
munity. Markets are not only where
we exchange goods and services.
Well-structured markets are also one
of the primary institutions providing
that most basic stuff of democracy:
trustworthy information about po­
tentially dangerous concentrations of
economic and political power.
From the perspective of a political
economy micromanaged by Amazon
and Google, the harms that Smith
feared seem innocuous. Yes, mercan­
tilism and monopolism, just as he
warned, have warped commercial ac­
tivities toward wasteful and unneces­
sary ends. But when the prices of
goods and services are out in the open,
and the public is able to identify fluc­
tuations, then we the people can take
action to fix structural problems.
The danger of price discrimina­
tion is not merely that it grants a
monopolist the ability to pick and
choose winners and losers. It is not
merely that it grants a monopolist
the ability to manipulate commer­
cial interactions to extort money
and political favor from those who
rely on them to get to market. The
problem with personalized discrimi­
nation is that even as it empowers
the masters of these corporations to
atomize prices, it atomizes society at
the same time.
In the world of Amazon, Google,
and Facebook, not only are we subject
to the will of a few private companies,
manipulated moment to moment by
unseen forces that rule our com­
merce, track our movement, and re­
cord our every thought. Each of us
must now suffer alone, with less and
less ability to commiserate with oth­
ers about our common problems. The
power of the middleman has become
so great as to make each of our prob­
lems unique, solely a matter between
us and the master. ■
 F R
WHO IS THE TYRANT?
R evolver shoes at three in the
morning. As I stuck my head out
the window, lights flared up and
down the darkened block. More heads
craned from open windows. Below
me, across the street, a man lay
writhing on the sidewalk while two
policemen bent over him. One of
the policemen was beating the man
with a nightstick.
Immediately, as though they had
sprung from the sidewalk, an addi­
tional audience-well-dressed and
well-behaved-gathered from the
nearby nightclubs and speakeasies.
After a pause the policeman bent
over and laid into the man again.
I listened to the sickening thuck,
thuck, thuck, in regular repetition,
as when the club meets no defense,
when the victim is incapable of
dodging. It had a steady rhythm, like
that of beating carpets, quite differ­
ent from the irregular jabs and
smacks of a fight. Presently the crowd
began to disapprove. From a window
a man shouted, "Lay off, can't you?" A
woman's voice cried, "Oh, stop that,
stop it!"-sympathy for the victim, dis­
gust for the policeman, in her tone.
But the thuck, thuck, thuck began
again, for the third or fourth time. The
crowd had grown, and now I could see
only the shoulders of the policeman as
he bent intently to his task. By this
time there were several other police ­
men about; surely there was no chance
for the man to escape. This beating was
revolting. I found myself shouting, "Go
easy!" l heard a woman in the crowd
remark cautiously but viciously to a
man beside her, "Hope he killed a cop!"
From "W/1y the Pol.ice Fail," which appea.red in the January 1933 issue of Harper's Magazine. The complete article-along with the magazine's
entire 170-year archive-is available online at liarpers.org/arcl1ive.
Relic.< (Sf,eakeasy Corner), 1928, by Martin Lewis ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art/
Art Resource, New York City. Originally published in the March 1929 issue of Harper's Magazine
O M T H E A R C
9 3 3
By Herbert Best
I f exhibitions such as this are the po­
liceman's idea of endearing himself
to the public, it is idle to expect liberty­
loving people to "glorify the cop and
not the gangster." That steady, calcu­
lated beating up of a defenseless man
had swung sympathy to the victim.
The accused will, I hope, get their
deserts. But the patrolman who did the
carpet-beating and his superiors who
stood by, will they be punished? Will
they receive even a fine for lowering the
prestige of the department in the eyes
of the public?
Everyone who lives in a big Ameri­
can cit y appears to have heard of
similar cases of police brutality. There
are innumerable other stories, true or
false, of abominable third-degree cru­
elties which have not found their way
H V E
into print but are widely circulated.
Whether some of the stories are exag­
gerated or not matters little. What is
important is that the public has seen
enough brutality by police to be­
lieve all sorts of discreditable tales
about them, and the reputation of
the force suffers accordingly.
l have come to the conclusion
that one underlying reason for police
brutality is the absence of discipline
in American police forces. A soldier
recovering from fright is under the
same temptation as a policeman to
bully and mistreat his victim; a ju­
nior intelligence officer in the Army
is under the same temptation as a
lieutenant or captain of police to
apply torture to secure valuable
information from tight-mouthed
prisoners. But the discipline of the
Army is superior.
Newspaper reports, the conversa­
tion of friends, even the way in
which people step hastily aside to
avoid contact with a cop, offer proof
of a suppressed resentment or hostility
which cannot be wholly explained
by the reputation of the police for
brutality. The public attitude toward
law-enforcement in general is that of a
liberty-loving people in passive revolt
against tyranny. The attitude of the
police is that of an armed force using
brutality, torture, and all the other
methods of agents of a tyrant, with
contempt for the constitutional liber­
ties of the citizen.
Yet no foreign tyrant reigns from the
White House. No alien army camps
on these shores. Who is the tyrant?
Whence comes the tyranny? ■
ARCHIVE 33
 A N N O 1

THE HAUN
What privacy looks lik
By Sophi

The house at 2207 Seymour Avenue in Cleveland was a white four-bedroom

with a detached garage. For more than a decade, it was also a prison. Between
2002 and 2004, the property owner, Ariel Castro, kidnapped a woman and
two teenage girls-Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gina Dejesus. He
kept them locked in the basement, and later in a barricaded room upstairs,
feeding them only once a day. Berry gave birth to Castro's daughter in captiv­
ity. In 2013, Berry's screams attracted the attention of a neighbor, who kicked
in the door; she crawled out and called the police, who freed the others.
Early news reports about the crime focused on the house itself. The BBC
claimed that it had "yet to give up many of its secrets," as though the structure
were animate. At a press conference, one of the prosecutors said, "This house
represented evil incarnate." Neighbors offered conflicting impressions. One
told a reporter, "The house did not look right." On the other hand, a mailman
said, "It looked like a normal house."

The house is no longer there. Castro was sentenced to life in prison

plus a thousand years without parole. His house was seized by the city,
which demolished the structure in the summer of 2013 in a kind of
public exorcism. One of the victims handed out yellow balloons, and
another victim's aunt was reportedly allowed a turn with the excava­
tor. Christmas decorations tumbled out of the attic. The city an­
nounced plans to convert the lot into a park, but seven years later it
remains etnpty. On Google Street View, however, the house still
stands-in a sense. The most recent images of Seymour Avenue were
taken in 2009, and in them, 2207 is blurred so completely that it's hard
to discern the building's outline. Street View allows users to approach
from all sides, and to zoom in and out; but wherever you click, the blur
remains impenetrable, an impossibly dense fog. Amid the neighboring
homes, it looks like a glitch, or a wound.

Google launched Street View in 2007 with the stated ambition of capturing the
entire world on camera. It has now documented at least ten million miles-"a
distance that could circle the globe more than 400 times!" the company boasts.
The images are captured mostly by contract workers driving cars equipped with
nine high-resolution cameras and lidar sensors. Google developed the blur in
an attempt to address privacy concerns. A set of algorithms are used to conduct
large-scale facial and license-plate detection on images, and then automati­
cally scramble the pixels. A button also allows users to "report a problem"-a
misplaced blur, an unblurred face. But the company makes decisions about
whether to blur buildings and other geographic sites on a case-by-case basis.
Some are likely obscured at a government's request: the Marcoule Nuclear Site
in France, the NATO headquarters in Brussels, certain stretches of the US.­
Mexico border. We don't know precisely why or by whom the house on Seymour
Avenue was targeted for erasure. Google declined to comment, except to say
that the blurring is permanent and irreversible.

34 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER Z020

I. T 0 N

�ED HOUSE
n Google Street View
iaigney

To the right of the blur, a sign on a chain-link fence reads PRIVATE PROPERTY. The
house behind the fence is blue with red trim and boarded-up windows. But this,
too, was more than ten years ago. In Street View's digital museum, the whole
block remains frozen in the summer of 2009. Google regularly sends drivers to
recapture imagery in major cities, including Cleveland. Indeed, if you click around
the corner onto Scranton Road, you are suddenly looking at the world as it ex­
isted in September 2019. It's a metaphor for what can happen to a crime scene, the
way these spaces often become fossilized in the popular imagination. The house
where Sharon Tate was murdered, on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, has become one
such gruesome drive-by tourist destination. Residents have complained that Sey­
mour Avenue has become another. Years and renovations later, these addresses
remain bizarrely marked, stuck in the enduring present of the crimes.

A few houses down, a group of people congregate around another house,

their eyes striped with blurring like strange sunglasses. Their bodies are
otherwise intact, digitally preserved in the arbitrary poses they assumed for
an instant one day in August 2009. A little girl is perpetually swinging open
a gate. It would be relatively easy to make educated guesses about their
identities-property records, Facebook. In many ways, the house at 2207 has
more privacy than they do. This is one of the arguments marshaled by those
who claim blurring doesn't offer much in the way of real protection. Serge
Belongie, a computer-vision researcher and professor of computer science at
Cornell Tech, has posited an alternative method of removing pedestrians
from Street View that would erase them altogether. He told me that while
the blur obscures primary biometric traits such as faces and eyes, it doesn't
obscure secondary traits-posture, skin tone, hair color, clothing. He cited
the example of Jersey City mayor Steven Fulop, one of the many unwit­
tingly trapped in Google's amber: "He was standing outside in front of his
house when the Street View van went by. His face is blurred out, and if you
don't know who you're looking for, you wouldn't be able to get it from the
photo," Belongie said. "But based on the posture, the hair, the watch he's
wearing, the outfit, it's unmistakably the mayor of Jersey City."

Sophie Haigney lives in London.
The arrows and zoom buttons that allow you to navigate Street View's photographed
universe make clear that we're looking at the world from Google's point of view. The
company presents itself as all-seeing, and indeed, it has seen a lot: Street View now
contains portions of the Great Barrier Reef, the interior of the British Museum, and
vistas from the world's tallest buildings. It has captured houses on fire and crimes
in progress. Like all documentary efforts, it records a surplus of information. The
blur represents a last-ditch effort to exert some measure of control over the surplus.
But it is a clumsy and mostly futile effort, one that doesn't so much excise private
material as deform it. In August 2009, a passing car captured images of a house in
which horrific things were taking place. The day these photographs were taken,
Castro's victims were still trapped inside. It probably looked like a normal house­
the normalcy is part of the horror. In attempting to erase the record, Google has
created something new in its place: a haunted house. ■

ANNOTATION 35

A LITANY
FOR SURVIVAL
Giving birth as a black wo1nan in America
W hen I was a girl, my Bajan
grandmother insisted that
my older sister and I recite
Psalm 23 ever y night before bed. I
didn't yet know what death was, but
I knew that there was something sin­
ister and brave about repeating the
words "Yea, though I walk through
the valley of the shadow of death, I will
fear no evil." I learned that Christians
were foot soldiers in an army helmed by
an almighty God, and that their faith
would shield them from danger. Fear­
lessness wasn't a bad idea to instill in
two black girls growing up in 1980s
Brooklyn, where the threat of violence
was palpable, a lump you felt in your
throat every time you passed the police
or a group of guys who could quickly
tum from admirers into assaulters.
My parents emigrated to the United
States from Barbados and Antigua in
the late 1970s. They were determined
to cloak their children in an armor of
education, etiquette, and religion-to
protect us from a world that, in the
words of Audre Larde, "we were never
meant to survive." I was ten when Gavin
Naomi Jacl<son's fint novel, The Star Side
of Bird Hill, was published by Penguin
Press in 2015. She lives in New York City.
Illustrations by Diana Ejaita
M E M O R
By Naomi Jackson
Cato, a seven-year-old black boy born
in Guyana, was hit and killed by a Ha­
sidic Jewish driver in Crown Heights,
two miles from our home. I was old
enough to know that the rebellion
that followed was connected to the
suspicion that characterized relations
between the Hasidic Jews and West
Indians who lived alongside one an­
other in that corner of Brooklyn. The
riots interrupted the regular rhythms of
my life. White reporters came to Sun­
day services at our all-black Episcopal
church; adults' voices lowered to a
whisper when we entered the room. For
the first time, I understood that there
was something hated and precarious
about being a black child in America.
Psalm 23 came back to me when I
became pregnant last summer, at the age
of thirty-eight. I'd long stopped repeat­
ing it before bed, but I hadn't forgotten
it. Five years after my granny's passing,
I'd realized what faith was for: it was
meant to be a balm in times when cer­
tainty was our of reach. I'd been praying
for a baby for years, though the intensity
of my wish to be a mother waxed and
waned. My desire was mostly a secret. I
had friends who talked about basal body
temperatures and dieted to prepare for
pregnancy, but that approach felt un­
comfortable to me-too ostentatious
and too confident. I knew women who
had struggled to conceive and others
who had lost babies. Assuming that you
could get pregnant at my age and that
your child would survive seemed like
laughing in the face of God.
I met the man who would become my
husband in the winter of 2017. By that
summer, we'd married, and within eigh­
teen months, we had begun trying to
conceive. We told almost no one what
we were up to. Last June, I started tex­
ting a friend for weight-loss secrets, con­
vinced that my jeans were tight because
I had been. eating too much cafeteria
food at my new job. String by string, all
my waist beads popped off, then my
breasts ached, and 1 was often nauseous.
My husband pointed out the obvious,
but I was in denial until I took a preg­
nancy test that came back positive. Over
the Fourth of July weekend, we told our
families that we were expecting.
H
aving a black child in America
has always been an act of faith.
In the antebellum South, one
in every two children born to an en­
slaved woman was stillborn or died
MEMOIR 37
 within a year. If they lived, the babies
were often sold away from their moth­
ers. Black women in the Jim Crow era
feared that their children would be
sexually assaulted or lynched, and that
the crimes would go unreported, un­
solved, and unpunished. Still today, we
worry that our children will not sur­
vive. The gap between infant mortal­
ity rates for black and white babies is
wider now than it was during slavery.
And the lives that follow hold many
dangers. Images of black mothers
mourning their murdered sons and
daughters-from Mamie Till to Ka­
diatou Diallo to Samaria Rice and
Tamika Palmer-are achingly familiar.
George Floyd's pleas for his mother in
his final moments drove home what
we already knew: despite our best
efforts and fiercest love, we may not
be able to keep our children safe.
But our children are not the
only ones in danger. As I began
seriously consideri ng having a
child, I started to read more about
the risks that pregnancy poses to
black women in the United States.
American worn.en are more likely to
die in childbirth than women in the
rest of the developed world, and black
women are three to four times more
likely to die than white women, re­
gardless of income or education. In
New York City, black women are
nearly twelve times as likely as white
women to die during childbirth or in
the postpartum months. We have
higher rates of infertility, fibroids,
preeclampsia and postpartum health
problems. I read testimonies from Be­
yonce, Serena Williams, Tatyana Ali,
and Allyson Felix, all of whom had
traumatic birth experiences, including
preeclampsia, pulmonary embolisms,
and emergency C-sections. If a doctor
doubted Serena Williams when she
recognized the symptoms of blood
clots, which she had experienced be­
fore, how would a black woman with­
out the protection of celebrity fare?
And I was no one's ideal patient. My
medical chart was littered with prob­
lems, including Graves' disease, thyroid
nodules, and an increased risk of thy­
roid cancer. I had been diagnosed with
uterine fibroids in 2014, and an MRI in
February 2019 showed multiple leio­
myomas. The obstetrician-gynecologist
I consulted warned me that I could
38 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
experience pain and other complica­
tions if I got pregnant, if I was able to
get pregnant at all. I had also been di­
agnosed with bipolar disorder. My re­
covery from a particularly bad episode
in 2018 included a two-week stay on the
psychiatric ward at Mount Sinai Hos­
pital in Manhattan. I knew that the
risk of relapse for people with bipolar
disorder is considerable during preg­
nancy and the postpartum period; I
had read the grim data about postpar­
tum psychosis and suicidal ideation. My
psychiatrist, a black woman whom I
credit with aiding my recovery, was
alarmed when I told her that I was
pregnant. She quickly cycled me off di­
valproex sodium, a medication proven
THE GAP BETWEEN INFANT
MORTALITY RATES FOR BLACK ANO
WHITE BABIES IS WIDER NOW THAN
IT WAS DURING SLAVERY
to cause birth defects, and thankfully
none of my symptoms returned.
On top of my very real risk factors,
the statistics on black maternal mor­
tality amplified my anxiety and dis­
tress. Well-meaning friends shared
anecdotes and offered unsolicited ad­
vice. One friend told me about the
death of a mutual acquaintance's baby.
Another told me about her friend's
miscarriage. A third, concerned about
how the stress I was under was affect­
ing the baby, predicted that I would
have a preterm birth. A fourth in­
sisted that I ask my doctor for a steroid
shot to strengthen the baby's lungs in
case he came early. I tried my best to
shield myself from their fears and
projections, but I felt overwhelmed. I
held my breath, waiting for the worst
to happen.
D
uring my pregnancy, I worked
as a staff writer at a philan­
thropic foundation that pro­
vides grants to social science researchers,
including several studying the benefits
of paid family leave policies. I felt lucky
to get the job just as a visiting profes­
sorship I'd had at Queens College was
ending. But the human resources de­
partment said I was ineligible for the
foundation's own three-month paid
childcare leave because I hadn't been
an employee long enough, despite hav­
ing also worked there for more than a
year in my twenties. Instead, I had to
hope that the baby would wait to be
born until I qualified, after twenty-six
weeks of full-time employment, for
New York State Paid Family Leave,
which would pay 60 percent of my sal­
ary for ten weeks. I whispered Janu­
ary 29 like a mantra. I told the baby to
hold on, and had a few friends pray on
it, too.
Meanwhile, I planned for my deliv­
ery. I dreamed of a home birth with a
midwife. My stepmother's great­
grandmother, known as Cousin Lou,
had been a midwife who rode on
horseback through the Jamaican
countryside at all hours of the night
to deliver babies. She accepted pay­
ment in whatever form families
had-soap, fabric, food-and
sometimes worked for free. But a
home birth was out of the question
because of my age and other risk
factors. Even if it had been an op-
tion, I learned that these days less than
2 percent of the nation's fifteen thou­
sand licensed midwives are African­
American. Until the mid-twentieth
century, most black women gave birth
at home with the aid of black mid­
wives, but that tradition was stigma­
tized and erased as black people gained
access to hospitals and midwives who
lacked formal training were barred
from the profession. The low number
of black midwives today makes it hard
for black women to receive culturally
responsive care in their own commu­
nities, a privilege that many white
women take for granted.
It took me a month after my posi­
tive pregnancy test to find an ob-gyn.
I wanted to work with a black woman.
Research supports what I already
knew from experience-that African
Americans being cared for by black
doctors are more satisfied with their
treatment; they have better health
outcomes and longer life expectan­
cies. My primary care physician, psy­
chiatrist, dentist, and dermatologist
are all black women, but I couldn't
find a black female ob-gyn who would
take me on as a patient. According to
the Association of American Medical
Colleges, about 5 percent of physi-
cians in the United States are black,
including about 11 percent of the
nation's ob-gyns.
I ended up back at Mount Sinai, the
site of my acute psychiatric care the year
before. I settled into a comfortable
rapport with a white female doctor, a
maternal-fetal medicine specialist.
My husband came with me to my first
appointment, on August 1, 2019. We
were stunned to find that I
was already twelve weeks
along and carrying not one
but two fetuses. A blood
test and ultrasound later
confirmed that they were
identical twin boys. I was
overjoyed. I spent much of
the next month on the
phone with family members,
trying to figure out where
these twins had come from.
T
he trouble began
two weeks later,
when I went in for a
follow-up appointment with
another doctor in the same
practice. One of the fe­
tuses I was carrying was
smaller than the other due
to a rare disorder known as
twin-twin transfusion syn­
drome, in which twins un­
evenly share blood. I asked
the doctor whether I should
come back in a few days to
check on the struggling
fetus. She replied that it
didn't matter-he would
probably die anyway. I was
stunned by her callous­
ness. I went home and
prayed for a sign to tell me
what was happening, but I felt noth­
ing. W hen I returned to the hospital
the following week, the heart of the
smaller fetus had stopped beating.
My grief was intense and compli­
cated. This summer, I spoke with
Dorothy Roberts, a legal scholar of race
and reproduction and a mother of
four, and she reminded me that "there
is still a very prominent belief that
there is something wrong with black
women's bodies, and every poor out­
come is because of us." We shouldn't be
having babies, the thinking goes, be­
cause our wombs are "harmful and
defective." Even though I knew better,
I found it hard not to blame myself for
the loss of my second son.
Our doctor warned us that the
surviving twin might also have suf­
fered brain damage and could have
developmental delays. She reminded
us that terminating the pregnancy
was an option. New York State re­
quires doctors to inform patients with
pregnancy complications of their
right to an abortion, but I still bris­
tled, thinking of the history of forced
sterilization among black women in
the United States.
My husband and I knew that we
would see the pregnancy through. But
I was unsure how to process the strange
fact of carrying one living and one dead
fetus. My beloved niece kept referring
to Auntie's twins long after the co-twin
had passed; I found myself both want­
ing to tell her to stop and happy that
the idea lived on with her.
I asked the doctor what it would be
like to deliver the deceased co-twin.
She described the fetus as a "pressed
rose" that would come out along with
the placenta. I thought of the white
rosebush in my late granny's garden in
Barbados, and the rosebushes outside
our house in the Bronx that always
reminded me of her. I thought of Our
Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of
Mexico, who is revered as a protector
of pregnant women, infants, and the
unborn. In devotional images, she often
stands with the sun behind
her and the moon at her
feet, encircled by a wreath
of red and pink roses.
The doctor said that if I
made it to the six-month
mark without further prob­
lems, I'd likely carry the sur­
viving fetus to term. Midway
through my sixth month, I
had a dream that a surgeon
was removing my uterus. I
woke up moaning and hy­
perventilating, convinced
that all that was left of the
baby was a bloody sheet. As
my due date neared, I wor­
ried less about qualifying for
paid family leave and more
about making it out of the
delivery room alive.
M
y doctor wanted
to schedule an in­
duction. I heard
her concerns about avoid­
ing a stillbirth, the risk of
which increases signifi­
cantly after thirty-nine
weeks for women over forty.
Still, I wanted to aim for an
unmedicated childbirth.
W hen I was twelve, I had a
seizure that left me afraid
of sleeping alone and inspired a lasting
need to remain in control and aware
of my surroundings. During a hospital
stay after I was diagnosed with bipolar
disorder, I was sedated with psychiatric
meds and was unconscious for several
hours. I woke up groggy and afraid in
an unfamiliar hospital room. For weeks
afterward, I was unable to write my
name clearly and developed a stutter
whenever I was nervous or overly tired.
I vowed I would never again take med­
ications that compromised my sense
of autonomy.
At my thirty-eight-week appoint­
ment, my blood pressure tested above
MEMOIR 39
 the acceptable range, meaning that l
could have preeclampsia, a condition
that can result in seizures that are life­
threatening for both mother and baby.
Preeclampsia is 60 percent more prev­
alent in black women and more likely
to affect women above thirty-five. My
doctor wanted me to go to the labor­
and-deli very floor for monitoring. l
knew that she was trying to ensure
that I didn't become another statistic,
but l resented what felt like her efforts
to control me. I declined further mon­
itoring that day, agreeing only to
come back for my appointment the
following week.
Over the weekend, my husband
cleaned, painted, and organized the
baby's bedroom and tried to keep me
calm. I spoke with my doula, Nicole
Jean Baptiste of Sese Doula Services
in the Bronx, about my birth plan.
Nicole's services were a gift from an
ob-gyn friend of mine who told me
that continuous support from doulas
during childbirth is associated with
decreased caesarean section rates
and less frequent use of epidural an­
esthesia. Years ago, in Boston, my
friend had helped deliver the baby of
a black woman who died from com­
plications after she left the hospital.
She wanted to ensure the same thing
didn't happen to me.
When I returned to the hospital
the following Monday for a blood­
pressure screening, my reading was
high again. I agreed to the induction.
l knew that I'd never forgive myself if
my stubbornness led me to lose the
baby or endanger my health. I was
relieved to be introduced to a black
female doctor who would be part of
my care team.
The day before the induction, the
black ob-gyn discussed possible plans
with me. She suggested I take the
drug misoprostol to induce contrac­
tions. I hesitated. I'd just read about
Tatia Oden French, a thirty-two-year­
old black woman from Oakland, Cal­
ifornia, who developed an amniotic
fluid embolism (AFE) after being given
misoprostol; both she and her daugh­
ter died after she gave birth via C­
section. French, a psychologist who
had written her dissertation on trau­
matic brain injuries among black
women who had suffered domestic
violence, questioned the use of miso-
40 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
prostol, but ultimately gave in after a
nurse reportedly asked her, "You don't
want to go home with a dead baby, do
you?" There is no proven link between
misoprostol and AFE, and the drug is
widely used to induce labor, but my
distrust of the medical establishment
was so thorough that I refused to take
it. One of racism's subtlest legacies is
to make it harder for black people to
know when our fears are rational.
T
he induction was scheduled for
early evening on February 4.
I tried to stay cairn, but inside
I prepared for a fight. I knew that my
medical chart, which lists my bipolar
diagnosis, was readily available to ev­
ery nurse and doctor who interacted
with me. So, in addition to the routine
threat of being labeled a stereotypical
angry black woman, I worried that 1
would be dismissed as a "crazy" person.
But I told myself I would rather be
seen as belligerent than be dead.
I wasn't wheeled down to the labor­
and-delivery floor until around three
o'clock the next morning. From the
beginning, I was at odds with the hos­
pital staff. After having to wait nearly
twelve hours, now I was being rushed.
A Foley balloon was inserted in my
cervix to encourage dilation. When I
told the resident who inserted it that
she was hurting me, she said that if I
couldn't handle that pain, I wouldn't
be able to make it through my labor
without medication. I had to repeat
over and over again that I didn't want
an epidural-I was terrified of being
unable to move.
T hree and a half hours into my
labor, the resident offered to break
my water, which I knew would in­
tensify my contractions to such an
extent that 1 might be in too much
pain to refuse the epidural. When 1
asked why she was in such a hurry,
she admitted that she wanted to
complete the task before her shift
ended. I was livid and asked her to
leave my room. Later that morning,
I sparred with the nurse, who pres­
sured me to increase my intake of
Pitocin-a synthetic hormone that
causes contractions-every hour to
keep my labor going at a healthy
clip. My doula, Nicole, later no­
ticed that, despite my request that
the nurse stop upping the Pitocin,
she had increased the dose when
we weren't looking.*
My sister, Shari, arrived around
nine o'clock that morning, and my
husband went home to rest. Shari and
I did squats, led by Nicole, to encour­
age the baby down the birth canal.
We listened to Mahalia Jackson and
Kendrick Lamar. As the day wore on,
the doctors and nurses stopped com­
ing to my room regularly. I couldn't
help but wonder whether it was be­
cause they didn't want to hear my
mouth. I lumbered around, dragging
my IV behind me, because standing
was more comfortable than sitting or
lying down. At around 2:45 PM, the
black ob-gyn came to check on me
because she could see on the monitors
outside my room that I was pushing;
she warned me to stop before I tore
·myself. I insisted that the baby was
coming soon and begged her not to
leave. She assured me that the baby
was still a ways away and promised
she'd be back in twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes later, she was no­
where in sight. I swayed between Ni­
cole and my sister, and asked them if
they were ready to catch a baby.
Shari ran to the nurse's station to
tell them that the baby was coming.
The staff promised her they would
page the doctor, but they seemed un­
concerned and made no move to
come check on me. When Shari re­
turned to the room, Nicole told me
to reach down and see if I could feel
the baby's head. I could. Shari went
to the doorway and started yelling
for help, but the baby couldn't wait
any longer. After one push, my son
was born into Nicole's hands.
I wept as I held my son to my chest
and fed him for the first time. I mar­
veled at his full head of hair and im­
possibly bright brown eyes. He put one
tiny finger to his chin like an infant
philosopher. I was shocked to finally
touch him, as I had never really al­
lowed myself to believe that things
would turn out okay. f was at Mount
Sinai, one of the leading hospitals in
the country, and I had just delivered a
baby without a doctor or nurse present.
I was both enraged and comforted
• A spokesperson for Mount Sinai told
Harper's Magazine that the nurse was
following induction protocol.

that, after the battles over admission
and induction and medication, I'd
had something akin to a home birth,
with my healthy baby boy born into
the loving arms of the family I'd cre­
ated to receive him.
I remember asking Shari to search
the placenta for the little pressed
rose the doctor had promised me. I
worried that if I saw it myself, I would
never be able to forget it, and the
happy occasion of my son's birth
would be imprinted with sorrow. My
sister held my hand and told me that
the co-twin looked as if he were
asleep. Nicole stroked my hair and
reminded me that I would always be
a mother of two.
T lt·H\ihMI
hese past few months, I've
often wondered why I'm still
here in the United States.
I've always imagined what my life
would have been like if my parents
had never emigrated, or if I were to
move back to the Caribbean, which
I also consider home. Five years ago, I
applied for and received Antiguan
and Barbudan citizenship. But I
haven't left. As much as I think about
living elsewhere, for better or worse,
I've thrown in my lot with black peo­
ple in America.
This spring, while I cared for my
newborn, at least three more black
women in the United States died dur­
ing or after giving birth. In April,
Amber Rose Isaac, twenty-six years
old, died at Montefiore Medical Cen­
ter in the Bronx after delivering her
son, Elias, via C-section. She had
requested in-person doctor's visits for
several weeks before she was finally
admitted to the hospital and diag­
nosed with HELLP syndrome, a
complication of preeclampsia in which
the red blood cells that carry oxygen
to the body start to break down. Wo­
gene Debele, an Ethiopian mother of
four in Takoma Park, Maryland, died
on the same day, before she was able
to hold her son, Levi. Unique Clay, a
postal worker and mother of three in
Chicago, died of COVID-19 just days
after being released from the hospital
where she had given birth.
I am grateful to have a healthy
baby, because I know it could have
easily gone another way for him, or
me, or both of us. I appreciate bed-
Summer or Fall?
time, diaper, and feeding routines,
which help take the edge off the
awful and infuriating news: the pan­
demic that has disproportionately
affected black communities, the po­
lice killings of black people, and the
brutal response to the attendant re­
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 L E T T E R F R O M W A S H N G T O N

ELDER ABUSE
Nursing ho1nes, the coronavirus, and the bottom line
By Andrew Cockburn

A t the beginning
of this year, Can­
terbury Rehabili­
tation and Healthcare
Center, a nursing home
nurse was convicted of at­
tempting to rape a seventy­
two-year-old Alzheimer's
patient. In October 2019, a
report from the Centers for
in Richmond, Virginia, Medicare and Medicaid
housed 160 elderly resi­ Services (CMS) cited ma­
dents, roughly half of jor staffing shortages and
whom were A f rican­ almost three times the
American. Most of them number of "health defi­
were there courtesy of ciencies" as the national
Medicaid, the government average. By Ronald's ac­
program that finances count, Canterbury was "a
health care for those with bad place, a very bad
little or no mon ey. By place." On his weekly vis­
mid-May, 80 percent of its, his mother told him of
Canterbury's residents had "people going to the bath­
been infected with the room on the floor in the
novel coronavirus. A third hallways" and described
of them were dead. Alzheimer's patients wan­
Sharon Mitchell, a dering into her room at
sixty-two-year-old former night. "Her clothes were
dental receptionist, was one of the ca­ have poststroke rehabilitation therapy stolen; her jewelry was stolen," he told
sualties. She had been at Canterbury at home, but therapists refused to travel me. The therapy, it turned out, con­
for two years, following a stroke brought to the public housing project where she sisted of biweekly sessions in which she
on by the shock of losing her longtime lived, deeming it too dangerous. So, after was asked to spin a wheel with her
receptionist job, her son Ronald told much discussion, the family elected to hand for fifteen minutes. He was
me. She had been healthy enough to send her to Canterbury (then known as shocked when his mother told him she
Lexington Court), where Medicaid was given a shower just once a week:
Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor would cover poststroke treatment. "'Thursday's my shower day,' she told
of Harper's Magazine and the author, most
recently, of Kill Chain: The Rise of the Even before the pandemic, the facil­ me. Otherwise they gave her a wipe­
High-Tech Assassins. ity had a poor reputation. In 2018, a staff down with a baby wipe every two days."

Illustrations by Najeebah A 1-Ghadban. Source photographs© Getty

Images, iStock, Jean Mohr/World Health Organization, and Ala my LETTER FROM WASHINGTON 43
 Unsurprisingly, Sharon routinely was only sixty-two. She was capable of lated nursing homes, not assisted­
contracted hygiene-related urinary getting better. She didn't deserve to I iving communities. The homes,
tract infections, which led to seizures die like that." moreover, were not required to report

M
that sent her to nearby St. Mary's Hos­ deaths that occurred before May 8,
pital. During one of these hospital­ onths into the pandemic, it although the agency said it was confi­
izations, a year into his mother's stay, has become clear that dent that "the vast majority" did so.
Ronald spotted blood on one of her the majority of people in­ One in five nursing homes didn't
socks. Pulling it off, he found that fected by the coronavirus suffer mild or bother to report their numbers at all.
her big toe was infected-it had been no symptoms and recover quickly. De­ A New York Times study in late June
neglected by the staff for so long that spite the panic and economic devasta­ put the number of deaths in U.S. nurs­
"the flesh was all eaten away; I could tion, the risk of death or serious illness ing homes at a staggering 55,000, but
see the bone." Gangrene had invaded from the virus for most people is rela­ even this figure did not necessarily
her leg, which eventually had to be tively small. For people of color, it is include all of those who became in­
amputated above the knee. Immobi­ worse. According to one study, black fected in a home but died in a hospital,
lized thereafter, Sharon spent most of Americans were more than twice as as was the case for Sharon Mitchell.
her time in bed. She was often
dehydrated because she could not
hold a cup, Ronald said, "but they
wouldn't help her drink, or put
her on an IV"
Ronald saw his mother for the
last time in February, before visi­
tors were barred as a precaution
against the coronavirus, which
had already attacked a nursing
home outsideSeattle. Two months
earlier, Canterbury had been ac­
quired by Tryko Partners, a fast­
growing private equity concern,
which operated it through an af­
filiate, Marquis Health Services.
A Marquis spokesperson told me
that by the time of the COVID-19
outbreak, "in-house staffing was
at its highest point in years,"
and that wages had been tem­
porarily doubled. But so far as
Ronald was concerned, "Nothing
had changed. Nothing." On March
18, a Canterbury patient was diag­
nosed with the virus. Sharorr also
tested positive soon after, and was
moved into a quarantine unit the
center had set up. When Ronald
called her after the move, she told him likely as white Americans to die of In some states, the vast majority of
she needed a drink of water. "I stayed COVID-19 complications. But it is COVID-19 deaths were in homes:
on the line for an hour and a half while worst of all among those with health 64 percent in Massachusetts, 68 per­
she pressed the bell for a nurse, but no issues, particularly the elderly. At the cent in Pennsylvania, 77 percent in
one ever came," he said. When he height of the pandemic in New York Minnesota. In New Jersey, one in every
complained, Canterbury staff told City, for example, fewer than 1 percent ten people housed in nursing homes or
him they had just two nurses looking of people who died while infected with assisted-living centers died. This was a
after forty patients. (A Canterbury COVID-19 were confirmed to have helpless population, helpless because so
spokesperson excused the inadequate lacked an underlying illness. often confined in a state of neglect and
staffing on grounds that it met CMS Inevitably, then, the virus has squalor. But despite or perhaps because
guidelines.) Three weeks later, Sha­ found its most ideal conditions in the of their conditions, they were worth a
ron was dead. "My morn died all warehouses storing America's elderly lot of money. In effect, they were being
alone," Ronald told me, bitter at the population. No one knows the cur­ harvested for profit.
neglect-the dehydration, the pro rent death toll. As of early July, CMS The business model is simple. It
forma therapy, the gangrene-that he put the number at 33, 509, but the depends in part on the personal
is convinced led to her death. "She count covered only federally regu- funds-including insurance policies-

44 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020

of patients or their families, but
in larger part on the government
programs dedicated to caring for the
elderly, Medicare and Medicaid. "It's a
shell game," explained Doris Gelbman,
a Charlottesville, Virginia, attorney
who specializes in elder law. "In the
first go-round, a patient is covered by
Medicare, which pays for treatment
and rehabilitation-but only for a lim­
ited time. When the Medicare runs
out, the patient can either go home, or
pay for long-term care." This can drain
away a lifetime of savings in short or­
der, and once it does, Medicaid starts
picking up the bill. But Medicaid will
only spend a limited amount per pa­
tient. (In most of Virginia, including
Richmond, the cap is $6,422 a month.)
"The only way the home can make it
worthwhile and meet their profit target
is to cut corners," said Gelbman. "And
that's why you have low-paid, un­
trained, and overworked staff."
Like a flash of lightning, the virus
has illuminated a corner of society and
the economy that normally festers in
obscurity. I asked Mary Evans, a former
senior consultant for several leading
nursing-home chains, whether she was
surprised at the havoc that COVID-19
had wrought in the industry. "It's not
surprising at all," she said. "It was only
a matter of time until something like
this happened." Evans recounted a lit­
any of horror stories, including a Mary­
land home where unattended patients
had uncut toenails "curling around and
growing into their feet." "It's a night­
mare," she said. "You see why I don't do
this anymore."
T
he practice of segregating the
e lderly in profit-making
old-age homes was born in the
mid-twentieth century. There were
also homes for the elderly in Victorian
times, but they were not yet seen as a
financial opportunity. The hugely
popular nineteenth-century American
poet Will Carleton (a frequent Harp­
er's Magazine contributor) became fa­
mous with his 1872 poem "Over the
Hill to the Poor House," which relates
the story of a widow left without prop­
erty and abandoned by ungrateful
children who consign her to the mis­
eries of institutional care: "Over the
hill to the poor house, I'm trudgin' my
weary way/ 1, a woman of seventy, and
only a trifle gray." As with the British
poorhouses described by Dickens, the
grim conditions of their American
counterparts reflected the prevailing
belief that poverty was in itself a
moral failure, and thereby merited
appropriately austere treatment. In­
vestigation of one notorious Massa­
chusetts facilit y revealed, among
other atrocities, the deliberate starva­
tion of inmates and the sale of their
corpses to medical schools. Most ag­
ing Americans avoided this fate by
relying on their children to care for
them, often sealing the deal with a
promise of inheritance. Gelbman sum­
marized this common arrangement: "A
daughter would stay home, not get
married, and look after the par­
ents as they got old and infirm
while her siblings went off and
raised families of their own. But in
return, she got the house."
As the Princeton historian
Hendrik Hartog explained in his
book Someday All This Will Be
Yours, this custom persisted into
the 1940s, at which point Social
Security began replacing the fam­
ily in providing care and shelter
for the elderly. In 1950, an amend­
ment to the 1935 Social Security
Act established direct federal pay­
ments to privately owned homes,
which until then were mostly
charities or mom-and-pop opera­
tions. (Owing to searing memories
of the poorhouses, government
aid to any "inmate of a public
institution" was explicitly barred.)
A for-profit industry was born.
Initially the federal subsidies were
small, though still enough, ac­
cording to Mary Mendelson's 1974
muckraking expose, Tender Lov­
ing Greed, to "whet the appetite"
of hustlers who perceived "the exciting
profit potential in the nursing home."
These opportunities would expand
dramatically in 1965, when the cre­
ation of Medicare and Medicaid
turned a trickle of federal largesse into
a torrent. Medicare financed health
care for anyone over sixty-five, and
would pay for up to a hundred days in
a nursing home for patients recovering
from hospital treatment. Medicaid, in
addition to providing medical aid to
the poor of any age, also provided for
unlimited stays in nursing homes.
Naturally, hustlers were poised to take
full advantage of the near limitless
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON 45
 supply of taxpayer money. An Ortho­
dox rabbi named Bernard Bergman
built up a nursing-home empire worth
some $25 million (while employing
Rocco Scarfone, a senior member of
the Columbo Mafia family to supervise
his flagship nursing home) before being
tried and jailed in 1976 for siphoning
off Medicaid payments into his own
private accounts.
Such examples notwithstanding, the
arrival of Ronald Reagan's business­
sponsored administration in 1981 saw
a determined effort to dismantle
nursing-home regulations deemed irk­
some by the industry, such as require­
ments that patients be adequately fed.
Retreating in the face of public outcry,
his administration adopted the alter­
native and equally effective course of
failing to enforce said regulations.
By the following year, according to a
report by Kathleen Hughes of Ralph
Nader's Center for Study of Respon­
sive Law, the inspection budget for
the agency that oversaw Medicare
and Medicaid was so diminished
chat nursing-home inspections had
essentially ceased.
The terms of trade established in
the years after 1965-in which cutting
costs was favored over improving
service-appear to be more or less
unchanged. The industry has "no pric­
ing power," O motayo Okusanya, a
managing director for equity research
at Mizuho Securities, explained. "It
lives on whatever the government opts
to pay." The art of successful manage­
ment is thus: "one, control costs, and
two, control the patient mix," meaning
ensure that a facility optimizes its ratio
of Medicare to Medicaid patients.
"Medicare pays more," said Okusanya­
sometimes more than it should. Life
Care, a large chain of nursing homes
whose Kirkland, Washington, facility
saw the first major COVID-19 out­
break, was fined $145 million by the
Justice Department in 2016 for "reha­
bilitation therapy services that were
not reasonable, necessary, or skilled."
Such practices are not uncommon.
Genesis HealthCare, the largest chain
in the United States, paid more than
$53 million in 2017 to settle lawsuits
by federal law enforcement alleging
that its subsidiaries "submitted false
claims for services that were grossly
substandard and/or worthless."
46 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER Z020
I n an arrangement that is fairly
typical for the industry, Genesis
op erates homes and manages
their services, such as therapy or hos­
pice, but does not necessarily own the
buildings or the land they occupy.
Until recently, many of the company's
properties belonged to Sabra Health
Care REIT, a $3 billion real estate in­
vestment trust. Created to facilitate
investments in property in the same
way mutual funds enable investment in
stocks, these companies are relieved of
all corporate tax liability provided that
at least 90 percent of their income is
paid out in dividends. Initially, REITs
were only permitted to own businesses
that passively collect rent, such as office
buildings. Health care facilities, includ­
ing nursing homes, were excluded from
THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC
HAS DONE LITTLE TO DISTURB
THE NURSING-HOME
INDUSTRY'S BUSINESS MODEL
REIT ownership. That changed in
2008, thanks to an intervention by
Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, a trust­
worthy friend of the nursing-home in­
dustry. In July of that year, as financial
tremors began to shake Wall Street,
Congress passed the Housing and Eco­
nomic Recovery Act. This measure did
little to stem the impending crisis, but
buried deep in the legislation was a
provision inserted by Hatch, at the ur­
gent request of the REIT industry, per­
mitting them to buy up nursing homes
and other health care properties. De­
mand was brisk, given the growing pool
of elderly Americans-known in the
industry as the "silver tsunami"-and
has remained so. REITs now own over
two thousand of the nation's fifteen
thousand nursing-home and assisted­
living properties, and their interest in
larger properties means their percent­
age of the total beds is even larger.
This makes them especially powerful
players in the industry, with returns
running significantly ahead of those
in other areas of the property market.
RE!Ts lease their homes to operating
companies such as Sabra and Genesis
that are, in theory, entirely indepen-
dent. Should the operator fall on hard
times or into bankruptcy, their losses
do not affect the property owner. As
Charlene Harrington, a professor of
sociology and nursing at the Univer­
sity of California, San Francisco, told
me, "It's all about real estate."
Genesis itself is under the ownership
of private equity, the twenty-first­
century answer to Rocco Scarfone.
Private equity is the mechanism by
which financiers take over a firm using
borrowed money and extract as much
cash from the purchase as possible­
under the guise of "restructuring" it in
the form of dividends and fees-before
finally discarding the remains either to
another buyer or in bankruptcy court.
Mitt Romney's Bain Capital, for ex­
ample, applied this technique to the
once-flourishing Toys "R" Us, de­
stroying the business in a few short
years. Beginning around 2004, pri­
vate equity firms began devouring
nursing homes at an accelerated
pace. Today, these unregulated
groups own or operate one in every
ten senior facilities in the country.
The consequences for residents
have not been happy. A study pub­
lished just before the coronavirus on­
slaught under the auspices of New
York University's Stern School of
Business asked, "Does Private Equity
Investment in Healthcare Benefit
Patients?" In studiously guarded lan­
guage, the answer was no. Patients, on
the other hand, certainly benefit inves­
tors. Delving into Medicare data, the
researchers found that private equity
firms had discovered a variety of ways
to recruit more patients, thereby bump­
ing up revenue by 8 percent, which,
together with staff cuts, boosted the
annual take from an average 110-bed
home by more than three quarters of a
million dollars. W hile the average
profit margin before taxes for a publicly
traded company prior to the 2020 crash
was around 10 percent, Evans, the for­
mer nursing-home consultant, recalled
that the figures for nursing-home firms
had more often been between 18 and
25 percent. "They're very cagey about
disclosing this, but that's what they
were shooting for," said Evans. "They'll
say, 'Oh, we care about medical care
and medical quality,' but when push
comes to shove, they'll say, 'We're los­
ing money hand over fist,' which means
they're not making their projections.
They cry poor so they don't have to give
their employees raises. They operate
with barely enough staff. But they make
a lot of money."
One of the principal monsters in the
private equity world is the Carlyle
Group. In 2007, Carlyle acquired HCR
ManorCare, a nationwide nursing­
home chain. Four years later, after
ManorCare's debt load had grown from
$1 billion to $5 billion, Carlyle hived
the company's real estate holdings off
into a separate company,
which it sold to a health
care REIT called HCP
for $6.l billion, earning
its investors $1.3 billion.
Under the deal, Carlyle
leased the homes back
from HCP and continued
to extract hefty manage­
ment and consulting fees
from ManorCare, ulti­
mately garnering at least
$80 million.
The conseqoences for
the aged and infirm pa­
tients subjected· to this
exercise in financial engi­
neering were sickeningly
predictable: crushed by
payments on the debt that
Carlyle had piled on, as
well as $39.5 million in
monthly lease payments
to the REIT, ManorCare
vigorously slashed costs by
cutting care for its 25,000
residents. A 2018 Wash­
ington Post investigation
of the whole sorry saga
found that health-code violations re­
ported by Medicare inspectors at
ManorCare facilities jumped by at least
26 percent in the years after Carlyle's
purchase. Its debt having climbed to
$7.l billion, ManorCare went bank­
rupt. (CEO Paul Ormond managed to
get away with a compensation package
worth $117 million.) Welltower, a $21
billion REIT, bought the real estate at
a cost that worked out to $57,000 per
bed, a profitable investment given that
less than two years later it sold three of
the nursing homes for $67 million, or
$156,000 per bed. Today, the analyst
Okusanya rates Welltower a "buy."
The strategy employed by Tryko
Partners, the private equity operation
that runs Canterbury Rehabilitation
and Healthcare Center, where Sharon
Mitchell spent her last years, appears to
be similar to Carlyle's. Among the
thirty other homes it owns is Brent­
wood Rehabilitation and Healthcare
Center, in Danvers, Massachuset ts,
which it bought for $3.8 million in
2013. By 2015, according to a detailed
investigation by Paul Leighton in the
Salem News, the facility had been rated
"much below average"-the lowest pos­
sible category-by Medicare inspectors,
who described filthy conditions, over­
worked staff, and neglected patients.
Norman Rokeach, the CEO of Mar­
quis Health Services, Tryko Partners'
health care affiliate, told Leighton that
understaffing was due to employees
calling in sick or being otherwise un­
able to work. The $400,000 loss that
Brentwood posted in 2015 might have
excused the staffing problem but for
the fact that Brentwood was mean­
while paying $1.3 million in rent to
companies owned by Rokeach and
other Tryko principals-effectively
draining the struggling facility of re­
sources. (A spokesman at the time
claimed, "We're moving in the right
direction. We're proud of what we're
doing here.") Four years later, Brentwood
is still rated "much below average." As
of mid-June, thirty of its residents were
reported to have contracted COVID-19,
twenty-two of whom had died.
T
he pandemic has apparently
done little to disturb the indus­
try's business model. As media
reports this spring chronicled soaring
numbers of deaths in nursing homes,
ano ther ascending graph denoted
booming stock prices for nursing-home
corporations. After hav­
ing bottomed out just after
mid-March, around the
time Sharon Mitchell was
diagnosed with the coro­
navirus, they had been on
an upward trajectory ever
since. On April 15, the
day Mitchell died, the Ja­
nus Long:ferm Care ETF
(market symbol OLD),
which reflects the market
performance of companies
involved in long-tenn care,
was up 38 percent from its
low. By June, it had climbed
almost 70 percent. Clearly,
the crisis was by no means
bad for nursing homes, at
least not for the 70 percent
that are for-profit.
As Okusanya told me,
success in the nursing­
home business lies in
"get ting the Medicare­
Medicaid mix right." In
March, nursing homes
suddenly got a significant
boost in Medicare patients.
Owing to (another) miscalculation by
modelers overestimating the severity of
the pandemic and the consequent
shortage of hospital beds, New York,
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and other
states ordered hospitals to offload med­
ically stable patients to nursing homes,
including people who had been diag­
nosed with and treated for COVID-19.
The nursing homes were required to
accept them, and in New York, Gover­
nor Andrew Cuomo forbade homes from
testing new arrivals. The results were
disastrous, as carriers broadcast the
virus throughout overcrowded facilities.
Once this was publicized, Cuomo and
other state executives came in for well­
deserved abuse. But for nursing-home
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON 47
owners, there was a silver lining. In
October 2019, Medicare instituted a
change to its payment systems that
made it more profitable for nursing
homes to accept Medicare patients
from hospitals. According to one anal­
ysis, data from April "clearly shows
COVID-positive patients generated
h igher rates t h a n non- COVID
patients"-$699 per patient per day, an
increase of 9 percent over February's
numbers. Patients were evicted to make
room, the New York Times reported,
many of whom wound up in "homeless
shelters, rundown motels, and other
unsafe facilities," though this has long
been a common practice in the industry.
Some homes turned into coronavirus­
only facilities, including Country Villa
South, an eighty-seven-bed Los Angeles
home. Well before the pandemic's ar­
rival, its owner, Rockport Healthcare
Services, was sued for allegedly dump­
ing patients without notice to make
way for more lucrative replacements.
All part of getting the mix right.
As the rising number of nursing­
home deaths began generating ugly
headlines, industry officials were quick
to adopt the roles of both victim and
supplicant. "The truth is that nursing
homes have not failed America. The
public health system has failed nursing
homes," announced Mark Parkinson,
the former nursing-home entrepreneur
and governor of Kansas who com­
mands the industry's chief lobbying
operation, the American Health Care
Association. "Long-term care facilities
are doing everything possible to stop the
spread of this virus. But we need help."
That help was soon on the way in the
form of the $2 trillion CARES Act.
"Here Comes the COVID-19 Cash,"
Okusanya wrote in a note to his clients.
Nursing homes initially stood to receive
$1.5 billion, and further bailout assis­
tance boosted that sum to $5 billion by
the end of May. "There are no strings
attached," Seema Verma, the CMS ad­
ministrator, confirmed at a W hite
House press conference. "So the health
care providers that are receiving these
dollars can essentially spend that in any
way that they see fit." This was in addi­
tion to help provided to the industry in
the form of dismantled oversight and
regulations. Toby Edelman, an attorney
with the Center for Medicare Advocacy,
described how CMS had "waived the
48 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
rule [stating] that homes cannot dis­
charge a patient without notice,"
thereby making it easier for nursing
homes to dump low-paying Medicaid
residents in favor of Medicare patients
requiring treatment for COVID-19 at
the recently boosted rates. Indignantly,
Edelman dismissed recent CMS data
indicating that only 3 percent of nursing
homes have infection problems (such as
the urinary tract infections that sent
Sharon Mitchell to the hospital), even
as figures from a Government Account­
ability Office report had revealed dan­
gerous rates of infection at four out of
every five homes between 2013 and 2017.
''Are we supposed to believe that infec­
tions have suddenly almost disap­
peared?" Edelman asked. Normally,
nursing homes are monitored by om­
budsmen, licensing agencies, and, most
importantly, patients' relatives. Under
lockdown, all that went away. "There's
no oversight," concluded Edelman. "No
infection surveys, no ombudsmen, and
no families visiting. I'm really frightened
about what's going on."
Free from outside scrutiny, the
nursing-home industry has been work­
ing hard to ward off any future penal­
ties for its treatment of patients during
the crisis. This effort has already been
handsomely rewarded in a number of
states, most notably New York. Deep
in Cuomo's 2020-21 budget is a para­
graph providing that, for the length of
the COVID-19 crisis,
any health care facility or health care
professional shall have immunity from
any liability, civil or criminal, for any
harm or damages alleged to have been
sustained as a result of an act or omis­
sion in the course of arranging for or
providing health care services.
This neatly lets corporate owners and
executives off the hook for any and all
mistreatment of their patients. (As re­
ported by David Sirota in Jacobin,
Cuomo and the New York State Dem­
ocratic Committee received no less
than $2.3 million from the hospital and
nursing-home industries in his frantic
effort to ward off an electoral challenge
from Cynthia Nixon in 2018. Their
faith was apparently not misplaced.)
These immunity provisions, or "get­
out-of-jail-free cards," as Gelbman de­
scribed them to me, soon spread far
beyond New York. As of early July,
twenty-one states had adopted immu­
nity laws, each identical to Cuomo's
decree. Uncoincidentally, governors in
those states had been in grateful receipt
of a total of $44 million in campaign
contributions from the nursing-home
and hospital business since 2017.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Senate
majority leader Mitch McConnell was
pressing for corporate immunity from
coronavirus-related federal lawsuits.
Aghast at the prospect of the nursing­
home industry escaping accountabil­
ity, advocates for the elderly rose in
protest: ''The magnitude of the crisis
in nursing homes is directly related to
years of cost cutting and understaffing,
in an effort to maximize profits for
nursing home owners and operators,"
a coalition of 250 advocacy organiza­
tions wrote Senate leaders. "To allow
facilities to face no repercussions for
these actions, while asking nursing
home residents to pay with their lives,
is a perverse outcome that cannot be
tolerated." Nevertheless, as of late
June, McConnell remained unmoved,
promising a "hard line" and "strong
legal protections" for corporations
against COVID-19 lawsuits.
T
he wreckage wrought by the
pandemic among the elderly in
the United States has by no
means been unique. At least half the
deaths attributed to COVID-19 across
Europe have occurred in nursing homes.
In some countries the toll has been far
higher-as much as 75 percent in the
United Kingdom and 64 percent in
Norway. A Dutch nursing-home worker
posted a video of himself walking past
empty room after empty room, ex­
claiming, "All the people here died of
corona. This whole corridor is dead.
Dead." The same pattern has persisted
in Sweden, where the deceased have
been almost all elderly. The high death
rate in Sweden has been eagerly cited
as evidence that the country's failure to
lock down brought inevitably lethal
consequences. But Swedes in general
escaped relatively lightly, while at least
half of those who died were in nursing
homes. Another 26 percent were el­
derly Swedes being attended to at home
by overextended care workers shuttling
between clients without proper protec­
tive equipment, inexorably spreading
infection. All of this, though financed
by government and local authorities,
was managed by for-profit companies.
This was true across much of the con­
tinent, including in Britain, where
nursing homes were privatized by Mar­
garet Thatcher in 1990 and where
many have since fallen into the hands
of private equity. This pattern suggests
that the heavy death toll among the
elderly might be traced to one main
source: the neoliberal privatization
craze that has swept the Western world
over the past forty years.
However, an arid statistical table
published last year by the World Health
Organization suggests a more funda­
mental truth. It tabulates the number
of nursing-home beds per hundred thou­
sand people in each European country.
Sweden scores very high-1,276 per
hundred thousand. Britain is also
high, at 847. The same computation
puts the United States at 515. Greece,
on the other hand, whose citizens tend
not to put their elderly relatives in
homes and still regard their care as a
family responsibility, scores a mere 15.
The disparities in casualty rates are
equally striking. In terms of deaths per
hundred thousand, Sweden's rate is 53;
the United Kingdom comes in at 66;
and the United States has 39. Greece,
meanwhile, despite having the largest
proportion of elderly people in Europe,
has so far escaped with a mere 2 deaths
per hundred thousand. One might al­
most conclude that the death toll that
has so traumatized and destabilized
much of Western society in 2020 was
not wrought principally by the corona­
virus, but by nursing homes.
Ideally, we might emulate Greek
family relationships and arrangements
(or move to Greece to grow old) and
abandon the institutional-care ap­
proach in favor of a model where the
bottom line is not the driving priority.
Cedars Healthcare Center is a 141-bed
home in Charlottesville, Virginia. It
shares many characteristics with the
hardest-hit facilities-a population av­
eraging about eighty years old, many of
whom are African-American and al­
most all of whom are on Medicaid. Yet
as of mid-June, it had not had a single
COVID-19 infection. When I asked
how this could be, chief nurse Amy
Ryan took me through the relatively
straightforward measures the facility
adopted in early March, following
news of the initial nursing-home out­
break in Kirkland. Cedars discouraged
staff from working shifts at other homes,
correctly anticipating that such move­
ment would spread the infection. It
stockpiled sufficient supplies of protec­
tive equipment such as masks. Crucially,
it also adjusted the air-conditioning
system to prevent circulation through­
out the buildings. I asked whether any
of these measures had required much
labor or investment. "Not really," she
replied. "It was all pretry straightforward.
Just getting ready in good time."
It was hard to see why these precau­ AMERICAN INDIAN
tions could not have been more widely COLLEGE FUND
adopted. But there was another factor
involved, one less likely to be duplicated. 42% of Native Americans
Cedars is part of CommuniCare, a com­ are 24 years old and younger.
pany still owned and run by its founder,
Stephen Rosedale, together with his Their future is full of potential.
sons, in Cincinnati. Many of the mea­ Now is the time to act.
sures adopted by Cedars, such as modify­
collegefund.org
ing the air-conditioning, were instituted
by headquarters early in March. So far,
the chain has largely been successful in
curbing COVID-19. Twelve of its
eighty-seven homes escaped infection
entirely, including some in poor, high­
risk neighborhoods. However, it seemed
to me that the most important factor
was that Rosedale believes that it is
important to see things from the per­
spective of residents and the staff who
care for them. Rosedale and his sons
have all spent time working as certified
nursing assistants, the bottom of the
chain of command, very far removed
from the financial engineering back­
ground of industry supremos.
Of course, nursing-home residents
and workers have not been the only
vulnerable groups affected by the pan­
demic. Prisoners, obviously at risk but
confined nonetheless, have suffered
greatly, as have meatpacking workers,
chained to the assembly lines thanks to
Trump's endorsement of greedy corpo­
rate pleas that the country would oth­
erwise face a meat shortage (even as
exports to China soared). Such are the
routinely callous effects of our econom­
ic system. But the treatment of the aged
stands out. As Simone de Beauvoir once
wrote: "By the way in which a society
behaves toward its old people, it uncov­
ers the naked and often carefully hidden
truths about its real principles and aims."
The virus, it could be said, has made
these truths self-evident. ■
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON 49
 L E T T
BRIGHT POWER,
DARK PEACE
Robinson Jeffers and the hope of human extinction
0 n a clear October day, I walked
tb the continent's edge. I had
arrived in Carmel-by-the-Sea,
California, encased in metal, first in a
plane that brought me across the coun­
try, then in a rental car that trans­
ported me through Silicon Valley and
its canyons of mirrored glass. Now I was
bipedal again, and making my way
along a narrow trail to a granite prom­
ontory called Point Lobos. I passed
under a grove of ancient cedars, their
twisted, wind-haunted limbs rising
into an emerald canopy that seemed
to float in the sky. A kingfisher darted
through the understory as I emerged
from the trees onto the jagged preci­
pice of the point. Huge masses of con­
glomerate rock jutted out down below.
Pelicans, cormorants, and gulls swirled
around this harsh coast while the kelp­
filled surf crashed against the shore,
turning from gray to white to green as
the water drifted into shallow tide pools.
Erik Reece is the author offive books of non­
fiction, including Lost Mountain and Uto­
pia Drive. He teaches w1iting and liternture
at the University of Kentucky.
52 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
E R F R O M T O
By Erik Reece
In his poem "De Rerum Virtute,"
the poet Robinson Jeffers described
standing where I stood and watching
these same rocks, "with foam flying at
their fl anks, and the long sea­
lions/Couching on chem." He called
the scene an "intrinsic glory" that
"means the world is sound,/Whatever
the sick microbe does." What exactly
is the "sick microbe"? It is us. And Jef­
fers didn't stop there. In other poems,
the human race is a "civil war on
two legs," a "walking farce," a "dena­
tured ape, this-citizen."
To consider the poetry of Robinson
Jeffers, one must go to a dark place,
which is to say, one must look in the
mirror. I've made passing glances at
that glass for the past thirty years. On
hiking trips, I have often kept a copy
of Jeffers's slim Selected Poems in my
back pocket. I've loved what he has to
say about hawks and rivers and moun­
tains. But in the end, Jeffers's darkness,
his contempt for his own century
and his own kind, always scared me
off, sent me back to that more san­
guine American poet, Walt Whitman.
Embroidered photographs by Adriene Hughes for Har/ier's Magaiine © The artist
R H O U S E
Since the election of Donald Trump,
however, I've turned away from Whit­
man and have begun to take Jeffers's
grave warnings more seriously.
Whitman imagined setting off
from Long Island, the "fish-shape
Paumanok," and striding across the
countr y in the name of brotherly
love, equality, and democracy. When
the Democratic Review editor John
L. O'Sullivan coined the term "mani­
fest destiny" in 1845, he conceived of
a huge blank canvas on which "the
great experiment of liberty and fed­
erated self-government" would play
out. The country was making prog­
ress, and promise lay in the West.
For Whitman, the transcontinental
railroad signified a spiritual ad­
vancement that would ultimately
unify the West and the East. Peace
in our time.
Jeffers didn't quite see it that way.
By the time he settled near Point Lo­
bos at the beginning of the First
World War, Jeffers had appointed him­
self the poet-prophet of the Ameri­
can West. He had come to Northern
Source photograph: Robinson Jeffers, 1948 © Nat Farbman/LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images LETTER FROM TOR HOUSE 53

California's ragged coast to turn his
back on the country. He had come
here to play Cassandra and warn his
tribe of its dismal future, though "truly
men hate the truth."
I had come here to see whether he
was right.
I
n 1932, when Jeffers appeared on
the cover of Time magazine look­
ing like a windswept Robert Mit­
chum, he was among the nation's
most celebrated poets. But over the
next two decades, modernism largely
pushed his more formal verse aside.
"Why does such deep silence sur­
round the name of Robinson Jeffers?"
the critic Horace Gregory asked in
54 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
1953. When I was an English major
in the Eighties, you could still find a
handful of Jeffers's poems in the Nor­
ton Anthology of American Literature,
but even that's no longer the case.
Jeffers was born in 1887 in Alle­
gheny, Pennsylvania. His father, a
Presbyterian minister and a professor
of biblical literature and ancient lan­
guages, dispatched the family to
Switzerland so his son would be
spared a mediocre American educa­
tion. By age twelve, Jeffers was fluent
in five languages, including Greek
and Latin. T he family moved back to
the United States in 1902; three
years later, Jeffers graduated from
Occidental College at age eighteen.
Source photograph: Robinson and Una Jeffers in Hawk Tower,
1948 © Nat Farbman/LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
After that, he began to floun­
der. He tried graduate work in
Romance languages at the
University of Southern Cali­
fornia, then medical school, then
forestry school. Nothing stuck. "If
he had a little less cleverness and
a little better capacity for work,"
his exasperated mother wrote
to a friend, "his future would
look brighter."
Jeffers was drinking heavily
and had fallen in love with a
married woman. He'd met Una
Kuster back at Southern Cal in
a German literature course. She
was the wife of Edward "Teddie"
Kuster, a powerful Los Angeles
lawyer who came from money.
In an attempt to flee her hus­
band's gilded social circle, Una
had gone back to school, where
she soon found herself having
long, extracurricular conversa­
tions about Faust with the
young Jeffers. When Una told
Teddie that she was leaving
him, the story made the Los An­
geles Times under the headline,
TWO POINTS OF THE ETERNAL
TRIANGLE. Teddie lashed out at
the "vile poetaster," but Jeffers
and Una were married in 1913,
the day after Teddie granted her
a divorce.
With a modest inheritance
from Jeffers's parents, the couple
planned to move to a town on
the English coast. But the begin­
ning of war in Europe scuttled
that idea, and a friend suggested
they visit Carmel-by-the-Sea,
because its shoreline resembled that
of Cornwall. Traveling by stagecoach,
Jeffers was amazed at what he found:
"For the first time in my life I could
see people living-amid magnificent
unspoiled scenery-essentially as
they did in the Idyls or the Sagas, or
in Homer's Ithaca."
He and Una had twin sons, Garth
and Donnan, and rented a cabin in
Carmel. At Una's urging, and under
no financial pressure to find a job,
Jeffers became serious about writing
and publishing poetry, but the po­
ems were derivative and he knew it.
In 1919, he bought a tract of land at
Carmel Point and hired stonemasons
to build a house based on a Tudor
barn Una had seen in England. T hey
called the structure Tor House be­
cause it sat up on a rocky peak-a
tor in Gaelic. Jeffers decided to ap­
prentice himself to the masons and
soon found, as he wrote in a poem
named for the house, that "my fingers
had the art/To make stone love
stone." With that recognition, said
Una, Jeffers " became aware of
strengths in himself unknown be­
fore." His poetry suddenly changed as
well, shedding its gentle, Georgian
sentimentality to become grounded,
austere, stonelike.
His view of the human condition
also hardened. In "Shine, Perishing
Republic," a poem he wrote shortly
after moving into Tor House, Jef­
fers averred that "America settles
in the mould of its vulgarity,
heavily thickening to empire." He
asked that his sons "keep their
distance from the thickening
center," because while "cities lie at
the monster's feet there are left the
mountains." Specifically, the Santa
Lucia Range that stretches like a
spine down the Central Coast. Ad­
dressing Garth and Donnan directly
at the end o f the poem, Jeffers
wrote, "Boys, be in nothing so mod­
erate as in love of man, a clever ser­
vant, insufferable master."
By then, Jeffers had lived through
one world war and was about to live
through another. To him, words like
"civilization" and "progress" were poor
cover for the "stark violence [that] is
still the sire of all the world's values,"
as he wrote in "The Bloody Sire."
Modern men were anthill-dwelling,
enervated creatures who, he wrote
S
elsewhere, "have choked/Their na­
tures until the souls die in them."
hortly after I arrived in Carmel,
I went looking for Tor House.
W hen I found myself winding
through a neighborhood of densely
spaced, magazine-ready bungalows, I
assumed the GPS had misled me, but
suddenly there it was. In all of the old
pictures I had seen, Tor House stood
alone on a barren bluff. Now it al­
most disappears b ehind multi­
million-dollar vacation homes, and I
thought of Jeffers's line, "T his beau­
tiful place defaced with a crop of
suburban houses."
Waiting at the garden gate was El­
liot Ruchowitz-Roberts, a local poet
who had agreed to show me around.
He explained that after Jeffers died
in 1962, the family had to sell off
much of the surrounding land to
cover the inheritance taxes. During
the forty years Jeffers lived here, he
planted more than two thousand cy­
press and eucalyptus trees. Now they
tower over the surrounding homes,
and I wonder how many of the in­
habitants have any idea who set
them here as saplings.
We walked through the garden
along a stone wall inlaid with fossils,
pieces of local obsidian and jade, and
a shard of stone from Thoor Ballylee,
LoNG BEFORE ANYONE EXCEPT A
FEW PALEOCUMATOLOGIST S WERE
TALKING ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING,
JEFFERS COULD SEE IT COMING
the tower William Butler Yeats built
in County Galway, Ireland. Gesturing
toward the sea that crashed beyond
the wall, Elliot quoted Jeffers: "We
had come without knowing it to our
inevitable place." For decades here,
Jeffers wrote poetry in the morning,
set stone and planted trees in the af­
ternoon, and read to his family at
night by the fireplace.
With an ancient iron key, Elliot
let us inside. Tor House was smaller
than I expected, just three rooms
downstairs and one bedroom up­
stairs, where the whole family slept.
At one end of the main living room
was a small nook furnished with a
sea captain's table where Una sat
during the day and carried on a vo­
luminous correspondence. Elliot
pointed to some markings on the
redwood ceiling above her chair.
"Robinson's writing desk was on the
second floor right above hers," he ex­
plained. "He measured out his long
poetic lines by walking back and
forth, and if Una didn't hear him
pacing, she rapped on the ceiling
with a broom." Elliot, a retired col­
lege professor with an Abe Lincoln
beard and long dark hair pulled back
with a clip, grinned broadly.
At the other end of the room
stood Una's 1904 Steinway grand pi­
ano. George Gershwin-an acquain­
tance of the family-played some of
his final songs at it. Above the piano
hung a portrait of Jeffers's grand­
daughter Una, about whom he wrote
one of his last poems. Elliot (who, I
had begun to realize, knows reams of
Jeffers's poetry by heart) quoted it in
full. "I hope she will find her natural
elements," the poem concludes, "The
beauty of things-the beauty of
transhuman things,/Without which
we are all lost."
In essence, that line presented Jef­
fers's alternative to the horrors of hu­
man civilization. Our great sin as a
race, he believed, was detachment,
a self-imposed exile from the natu­
ral world that led to ugliness and
demented violence. The only an­
tidote was to turn away from the
detritus, back toward something
larger and more sublime. "One light
is left us: the beauty of things, not
men," he wrote in "De Rerum Vir­
tute." So Jeffers invented the anti-
anthropocentric philosophy that he
provocatively called inhumanism.
The coinage was probably intention­
ally misleading. From Jeffers's point of
view, to be "inhuman" wasn't to be
sadistic or even indifferent, but simply
to develop an ethos that reached be­
yond man as the measure of all things.
Inhumanism entailed "the rejection
of human solipsism and recognition of
the transhuman magnificence."
Elliot mentioned a late poem,
unpublished in Jeffers's lifetime, in
which the poet begins by describing
melting polar ice caps and moun­
tain glaciers, and then imagines a
future in which "little fish will
flicker in and out of the windows"
of Tor House. This poem was writ­
ten sixty years ago, long before any­
one except a few paleoclimatologists
were talking about global warming.
And yet Jeffers could see it coming.
In 1958, when much of American
poetry had dissolved into self­
absorption, Jeffers was foretelling a
climate crisis.
F
rom where Elliot and I stood, we
could see and hear the promon­
tory that became the site and
the title of Jeffers's best-known poem,
LETTER FROM TOR HOUSE 55
"Carmel Point," at the end of which
he wrote,
We must uncenrer our minds from
ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a
little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were
made from.
By coming to the continent's end,
Jeffers had made the long journey back
to our evolutionary home-the sea.
Unlike the hawks and other birds, his
species had abandoned the sea and
was now paying the price for self­
consciousness, for ego, for hubris.
Gazing seaward, Jeffers rejected the
historical time that so preoccupied
Ezra Pound and the modernists, and
he pondered instead ·what geolo­
gists call "deep time." In recogniz­
ing that "the tides are in our veins,"
that "we still mirror the stars," Jef­
fers crossed over the great schism
that divided the human mind from
the world and from itself.
Elliot grabbed another key and
led me back outside toward what I
had really come to see: Hawk Tower.
Set across the flower garden from Tor
House, the tower is constructed with
what Jeffers called "heavy sea-orphaned
stone," and stands forty feet tall. Jeffers
built it himself, rolling rocks (some
weighing four hundred pounds) up
from the coast. "I hung/Stones in the
sky," he wrote, and he did, first using
ramps, later hoisting them into place
with block and tackle. We tend to
think of poets as effete, tweedy, imprac­
tical. But Jeffers, a former wrestler, de­
signed one of the West Coast's great
architectural eccentricities, then spent
live years building it. "My back hurts
just looking at it," Elliot said as we
looked up from the tower's base.
Hawk Tower was sup p osedly
named for a lone raptor that super­
vised Jeffers's work from above. In
the poem "Rock and Hawk," Jeffers
gazes out at a falcon and thinks,
Here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,
But this; bright power, dark peace.
Jeffers rejected both the cross of
Christianity and the bustling hive
of modernity for what he called a
56 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
"mysticism of stone." It was this
hard, cold religion that he adopted
for himself.
In Jeffers's lexicon, another word
for inhumanism was pantheism.
W hen Sister Mary James Power, a
nun from the School Sisters of Notre
Dame, wrote Jeffers about his religious
beliefs, he replied in a kind letter that
is such a powerful distillation of his
theology it is worth quoting at length:
I believe that the universe is one being,
all its parts are different expressions of
the same energy, and they are all in
communication with each other, influ­
encing each other, therefore parts of
one organic whole .... This whole is in
all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by
JEFFERS REJECTED BOTH
CHRISTIANITY AND MODERNITY
FOR WHAT HE CALLED A
"MYSTICISM OF STONE"
me to be so intensely in earnest, that I
am compelled to love it, and to think
of it as divine. It seems to me that this
whole alone is worthy of the deeper
sort of love; and that here is peace, -
freedom, I might say a kind of salvation,
in turning one's affection outward to­
ward th.is one God, rather than inward
on one's self, or on humanity.... I think
that it is our privilege and felicity to
love God for his beauty, without claim­
ing or expecting love from him. We are
not important to him, but he is to us.
Jeffers's God seems very close to
the deity of another great pantheist,
Baruch Spinoza, who wrote of Deus
sive Natura: God, or nature. For Spi­
noza and Jeffers, there is no distinc­
tion between the Creator and the
creation. But for Jeffers, thinking of
the Creator as an entity that inter­
feres in human history, then demands
love and obedience, is a colossal fail­
ure of the imagination, the worst
kind of fear-based anthropomor­
phism. So Jeffers invented a much
freakier, "self-hanged God." T his
deity believed that peace is dull
oblivion; so instead it said, in "At
the Birth of an Age," "I have cho­
sen/ Being. . . . I tortur e myself/ To
discover myself."
With Hawk Tower, Jeffers reached
beyond the story of human history to a
primordial, expansive mysticism. When
Jeffers rewrote "The Oresteia " for the
modern stage, he called it The Tower
Beyond 'fraged)', because the tower rep­
resented for him the place Orestes
turned after he abandoned the epic
violence of his family. "Orestes has
'fallen in love outward,' " Jeffers wrote,
"not with a human creature, nor a
limited cause, but with the universal
God." Or with nature.
A
s one might expect, the tower
is a bit cramped inside. It
has a secret staircase bui It
into the front wall that reminded me
of a narrow passage of Mammoth
Cave called Fat Man's Misery.
Halfway up the stairs, I regretted
my decision.
On the lower floor sits a chair and
desk at which Jeffers worked (though
probably never here in the tower).
According to Elliot, the chair was
one hundred and fifty years old and
had been carved from the timber
of a nearby Carmelite mission.
A less daunting staircase wraps
around the tower. T he second-story
room, paneled in mahogany, was de­
signed as a sitting room for Una. On
one wall hangs a portrait of Jeffers
taken by Edward Weston. As Weston
and others have remarked, the poet
had granite features, a face that
looked as if it had been chiseled by
the wind and waves. Yet there was
also a tenderness in Jeffers's eyes. It
reminded me of Weston's defense of
his friend: "Despite his writing I can­
not feel him misanthropic: his is the
bitterness of despair over humanity
he really loves."
T he stairs lead up to a marble­
floor battlement, and then Hawk
Tower resolves into an open turret.
Into one comer, Jeffers set a flat
stone that func tioned as a small
bench. Once the family was in bed,
Elliot told me, Jeffers would perch
here with a cigarette and a glass of
wine, stargazing and listening to the
endless beat of the ocean.
Jeffers's poetry is as relentless as
the sea. W hat he heard the waves
saying over and over was: You are
nothing. Your cities are nothing. Your
history is nothing.
I thanked Elliot for his generosity
and headed south along the Pa­
cific Coast Highway. The sky
was as blue as the sea was green.
And the cliffs seemed to be diving
back down into the waters from
which they rose. You could almost
hear the tectonic plates crashing
into the jagged upthrust of its con­
glomerate rock. I understood imme­
diately why this is one of the most
famous stretches of highway in the
world, hugging mountains and leap­
ing over gorges. With every glimpse
of the sea and its granite headlands,
I wanted to pull over and have a
look. And when I did, what I kept
thinking about was my smallness. I
felt like a tiny figure surrounded by
sheer, vaulting precipices in an an­
cient Chinese painting. Jeffers must
have felt this, too.
It is, of course, on some level ab­
surd for me to think about High-
Source photograph: Robinson Jeffers at the top of Hawk Tower, 1926 © Bcttmann/Getty Images
way 1 as the end of the American
dream. It looks more like the apo­
theosis, a full flowering. But when I
pulled off the road to hike in An­
drew Molera State Park, I found
that almost all the trails had been
closed because of recent fires. And as
Jeffers would tell us, we have no one
to blame but ourselves. The writer
Guy Davenport once described the
car as a "bionic roach," and here we
all were, eating our way through a
state where everyone drives every­
where and where all of that driving
has lit a climate fire that is now blaz­
ing out of control.
I headed back north to Soberanes
Point, the site of a classic Jeffers
poem, "The Place for No Story."
Parking on the side of the road, I
pocketed the Selected Poems and fol­
lowed Soberanes Creek down a trail
that led to a narrow wooden bridge
and a deep gorge of falling water.
White succulents bloomed on the rock
walls, and steeper parts of the cliff
face had eroded into gnomic spires
and buttresses. The creek, pouring
out of the mountains, had carved a
narrow trough into the pale granite,
depositing at its mouth rounded
stones like the ones Jeffers used to
build his tower. It's a harsh, crushing
kind of beauty. Jeffers wrote that
"the gray air [is] haunted with
hawks," and for the first time since
coming here, I spotted a red-tailed
hawk, hovering just above me, wings
tilted against the wind, waiting to
dive. But finding no prey in the
sedge, it swept away in a swift, regal
glide. That was the spirit of Robin­
son Jeffers, I told myself, and I didn't
feel mawkish thinking it.
I pulled the poems from my pocket.
"This place is the noblest thing I
have ever seen," wrote Jeffers at the
end of "The Place for No Story":
LETTER FROM TOR HOUSE 57
 No imaginable
Human presence here could do
anything
But dilute the lonely self-watchful
passion.
Here was Jeffers's metaphysic of
transhuman beauty. It was, I think,
the beauty of this coast that in many
ways informed Jeffers's darkness. The
human race was "a spreading fungus,"
he wrote, "my own coast's obscene fu­
ture." And here we all were, still
spreading, still belching fossil fuels,
still drying out the forest floors and
extending the fire season. Indeed, I
was beginning to feel that nowhere
do Jeffers's predictions about the de­
mise of mankind seem more prescient
than in this ravaged state.
I
n the agonizing poem "Hurt
Hawks," Jeffers wrote of a raptor
that dragged its broken wing for
weeks around Carmel Point until,
with a "lead gift," Jeffers put the hawk
out of its misery. "I'd sooner, except
58 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
the penalties, kill a man than a hawk,"
he wrote. For a long time, I'd thought
of Jeffers's fatalism about humanity as
a kind of callousness. But now I think
it was his sensitivity to all life-the
injured hawks, the lab animals he
witnessed "cowering in cages"-that
fueled his anger at his own species, his
feeling chat the world would be better
off without us.
It's a sentiment to which I have
become deeply sympathetic. Not
long ago, I read about the case of a
man who tied a pit bull to the fender
of his truck and dragged the dog for
two blocks before bystanders forced
him to stop. I would just as soon turn
off that man's light as I would a light
in my own house. Which is another
way of saying that it wouldn't bother
me in the least if the entire human
race vanished from the face of the
earth, along with its architecture
and literature and military gunships.
Good riddance to us all.
The other ten million species on
the planet would be relieved to see
Source photograph: Carmel-by-the-Sea, California© Bridgeman Images
us go. Bue still the going would be
tragic. Tragic in the Greek sense of
hubris-that we would deserve it­
but also tragic in that it would be
accompanied by appalling human
suffering: water wars, famines, heat
death, refugees turned away from
closed borders. But that is the future
toward which our species is hurtling,
unable as we are to "uncenter our
minds from ourselves."
In 1941, near the height of Jeffers's
popularity, the Library of Congress
invited him to Washington to give
the inaugural address at a conference
called "The Poet in a Democracy."
The audience included Supreme
Court justices and Cabinet officials,
and was so large that loudspeakers
were installed for chose crowded out­
side the auditorium. In his speecl1,
Jeffers offered a new way to read his
poems. "I have heard myself called a
pessimist," he said, "and perhaps I
have written some words of ill omen
in my books of verses .. . but they
are not words of despair." He said a
poetry that fixates on death is also
a poetry that dreams of resurrec­
tion: "If we conjecture the decline
and fall of this civilization, it is be­
cause we hope for a better one." At
first I was drawn to Jeffers's notion
of rising from the ashes. But the
more I thought about it, the more
disingenuous his speech felt. Per­
haps he was trying to soften his vi­
sion for the D.C. luminaries, but it
flew in the face of his oeuvre. After
all, didn't he write in "De Rerum
Virtute," "One light is left us: the
beauty of things, not men; /The im­
mense beauty of the world, not the
human world"? Jeffers was, as he
wanted to be, our Cassandra. He pre­
dicted that rapacity and ego would
lead us to our demise, to the brink of
extinction, and here we are.
What's more, I believe that the fat­
uous notion of hope must itself go ex­
tinct. There is nothing left to hope
for. No better human civilization is
going to gracefully rise from our mis­
takes. It's simply too late in the grind
of the capitalist machine for that.
We will not voluntarily do what we
should: abandon industrial agricul­
ture, move to small-scale economies,
and power self-reliant, Jeffersonian
cantons with clean energy.
If we do, as a species, survive the
coming catastrophe, I suspect it will
only be as the small bands of re­
sourcefu 1, food-sharing generalists
that Paul Shepard described in his
classic plea, Coming Home ro the
Pleistocene. Heat-absorbing concrete
and heat-induced violence will
make densely crowded cities unliv­
able, and the desk-based skills of
urban dwellers will prove useless.
Instead, we will return to the way
we lived for half a million years be­
fore a griculture brought on the
modern world and all of its maladies.
That wiII be the resmrection of hu­
man civilization that Jeffers imag­
0
ined-a return to our true place in
the matrix of life.
n my last day in California, I
headed away from the water,
down through Carmel Valley
and the center of the Coastal Range.
I traveled several shaky miles on dirt
switchbacks before the road opened up
to reveal jagged ridgelines and canyons
filled with live oaks, ponderosa pines,
and the rare Santa Lucia fir.
Under an eight-hundred-year-old
oak, I pulled up alongside Greg Sher­
man, an octogenarian sporting an
impressive handlebar mustache and a
felt fedora. A former Marine, jewelry
maker, and leader of vision quests,
Greg has lived in these mountains for
almost forty years. He offered to guide
me to the place that had inspired one
of my favorite Jeffers poems, "Hands."
In it, he visits a remote cave and finds
hundreds of native petroglyphs, all
drawings of hands.
Greg drove over the ridgeline in his
old pickup, and I followed. Boulders
and pine cones the size of footballs
filled the one-lane dirt road, which
was badly washed out. We crept care­
fully down into a canyon somewhere
in the Ventana Wilderness. Trees
along the road were charred from re­
cent fires. We came to an old home­
stead built beside a beautiful trout
stream called Church Creek.
"When I was younger," Greg said,
selecting two walking sticks from his
truck, "I used to fish down this creek
from here to the hot springs at Tassa­
jara." Greg had bad knees, but he
told me he wanted to see the place
one more time. We crossed the creek
and started a steep climb through a
meadow of madrones and manzanita.
Jeffers and Una had wandered here
sometime in the late Twenties, fol­
lowing the same path. When we
reached the base of a cliff, Greg
said he wanted to offer a prayer to
those he called "the Grandfathers."
His invocation ended, "We are the
fruit of all those generations that
went before us. Ike! Ike! It is good!"
Those generations included mem­
bers of the small Esselen tribe, a mi­
gratory people who are believed to
have spent summers fishing on the
coast and winters grinding acorns in
these canyons. About one hundred
feet above us, a number of rock shel­
ters lined the sandstone outcrops.
Slowly, Greg and I found footholds
and crevices that led us up to the cave
Jeffers had explored and that archae­
ologists estimate was inhabited by the
Esselen for 3,400 years. There, they
painted on the black, soot-stained
wall pictographs of nearly 250
hands-white, skeletal, and highly
stylized. They looked like something
out of a Gerrp.an Expressionist paint­
ing. What did they mean? Archaeolo­
gist don't know. And even today, who
knows why humans make art? The
answer eludes us. But we do know
this: of all the primates, only Homo
sa/Jiens have the complex hand struc­
ture and fine motor skills needed to
make art. It seems fitting, then, that
one of the first images we as a species
created was a hand.
Greg told me a theory about these
petroglyphs: "The Esselen believed
that if you see a handprint in a ·sa­
cred place, and you touch that print,
you will come into connection with
the sacred place." Greg paused, then
added, "I believe that."
"What happened to them?" I asked
rather obtusely.
"The white man happened to them!"
he shot back.
They were enslaved by the Spanish
to build missions. They were ravaged
by disease. An old Spanish rancher told
the anthropologist John Coulter that
he remembered, as a boy in the mid-
1800s, seeing Esselen corpses hanging
in the trees of what is now Indian Val­
ley. In the end, the tribe may have re­
mained so long in these rock shelters
simply to escape genocide.
Greg argued that the Esselen had
no words for "war" or "killing," and
that they thought everything had a
spirit. That certainly would have ap­
pealed to Jeffers, who called them a
"shy quiet people." But at the end of
"Hands," Jeffers gave his own inter­
pretation of the petroglyphs. The
images announced:
Look: we also were human; we had
hands, not paws. All hail
You people with the cleverer hands,
our supplanters
In the beautifu I country; enjoy her a
season, her beauty, and come down
And be supplanted; for you also are
human.
The Esselen, it seemed to me, rep­
resent not only our past but our
future-a future in which we have
gone extinct, or exist only in small,
radically deindustrialized, egalitarian
communities. Neither possibility trou­
bled me. I stepped toward the wall and
pressed my palm against one of those
ancient, vanquished hands. ■
LETTER FROM TOR HOUSE 59
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 E S S A Y

NONCONFORNIING
Against the erosion of acade1nic freedom by identity politics
By Laurent Dubreuil

I n August 2017, a few

weeks before the fall se­
French, pur­
sued post­
tional campaign-was pushing a new
social identity: "first-gen."

mester began at Cornell
University, I received an email
inviting me to participate in a
campaign called "I'm First!''
The idea was to encourage
"faculty and staff on cam-
pus to identify themselves,
via T-shirt or button, as the
sim�
secondary The next fall, a long article in the
education. Cornell magazine Ezra featured ad­
My father ministrators attesting to the remark­
• finished high able progress of this new identity.
s c h o o l ; my Judging by their comments, first-gen
t-..,'l>'t\0/1 � mother learned persons would no longer need a but-
Jg
tJ>
stenography at a vocational
school and got her first job
ton: their nature was now
self-evident. One ad­

�'.::J �f)
first in their family to grad- JIJ\ at sixteen. I guess this made ministrator spoke of
uate from a four-year institu- me an ideal candidate to the difficulty for
tion." The rationale for this wear the nice T-shirt pro- first-generation
themed costume party was the vided by the administration. students of "walk­
following: "This visual campaign will But I declined. I'm not ing onto a college
allow first-generation students to ashamed of my back­ campus and maybe
clearly identify (and connect with) ground, and I don't not seeing someone
faculty and professional staff that underestimate the who looks like you."
have had similar experiences as challenges students Another suggested
them!" Though I have been a ten­ face when they are that the same stu­
ured professor at Cornell for eleven the first in their family dents "benefit from
years, neither of my parents, who are to attend college. But having spaces in
the two occurrences of the which to be them­
Laurent Dubreuil is a professor of compar­ verb "to identify" in one eight-line selves; to see lead­
ative literature, Romance studies, and cog­ paragraph were clear hints that the ership staff, other
nitive science at Cornell University. I'm First! initiative-part of a na- students and even
"l'1n First!" button© Strive for College. "I \Vas First to Go" button courtesy Kennesaw Seate University Department of FirstNem and Tra nsition
Studies. Additional buttons from Bzmon Power: 125 Years of Saying 1z wizlz 81111011s, by Christen Carter and Ted Hake, which will be published in
October by Princeton Architectural Press. Courtesy the Busy Beaver Burton Museum, Chicago, and Hake's Auctions, York, Pennsylvania ESSAY 61
 artworks that look like them." I won­
dered: Do I look first-gen enough? ls it
okay if I wear a bow tie or a skirt?
Should I speak loudly or be shy? More
seriously, what if art or education are,
in my view, valuable precisely as a way
of becoming other? If I defy expecta­
tions, am I untrue to myself, or to the
manufactured self that others think I
should reclaim? The collection of pre­
sumed tastes, behaviors, desires, aspi­
rations, and appearances that come
with an externally defined identity
rejects in advance anyone who doesn't
conform. "lntersectionality"-or bear­
ing several identities simultaneously­
does not change this conundrum; it
simply adds additional prescriptions.
It goes without saying that what
happens on my campus• is in no
way unique and that being a first­
gen is only one relatively novel op­
tion in a continuously growing list
of what every one of us is supposed
to be. American academia is a hot­
bed of proliferating identities sup­
ported and largely shaped by the
higher ranks of administrators, fac­
ulty, student groups, alumni, and
trustees. Not all identities are equal in
dignity, history, or weight. Race, gender,
and sexual orientation were the three
main dimensions of what in the 1970s
began to be called identity politics.
These traits continue to be key today.
But affirmed identities are mushroom­
ing. The slightest shared characteris­
tic, once anchored in a narrative of
pain, can give rise to a new group.
There is now a rural identity, a peanut­
allergic identity, a fat identity, an
ADHD identity, and so on. Each comes
with stories of humiliation or of life­
threatening experiences, with de­
mands for official recognition, with
products specifically targeted to the
group, and with the sort of people
the writer Toure called, in Who's
Afraid of Post-Blackness?, "the self­
appointed identity cops." Whereas
identity politics, as theorized four
decades ago, aimed to liberate the
oppressed and to oppose American
capitalism, its main form today is more
invested in changing the direction of
domination and in multiplying restric-
• I'm speaking on behalf of myself, not Cor­
nell, of course, though I support whole­
heartedly the school's motto, "Any person,
any study." A person is not an identity.
62 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
tions. It is the social order of the day,
its rhetoric ubiquitous in the neurotic
centers of the American economy (uni­
versities, the media, the tech sector).
Under this regime, identities, once
affirmed, are indisputable. If I say, "As
an x, I think ... ," I am no longer voic­
ing an opinion that can be evaluated
or critiqued within a shared space of
discourse; I am merely saying what I
am. If you disagree with me, you may
trace everything I say back to my
identity before availing yourself of
corresponding counterarguments:
you say a because you are an x, but I
am a y and I therefore believe in b.
Such identities, I insist, are not
emancipatory, neither at the psycho­
logical nor at the political level. We
WE SHOULD ALWAYS BE
READY TO BE TOUCHED,
CHALLENGED, OR CHANGED
BY WHAT WE STUDY
all should have the right to evade
identification, individually and col­
lectively. What's more, identity poli­
tics as now practiced does not put an
end to racism, sexism, or other sorts
of exclusion or exploitation. Ready­
made identities imprison us in stereo­
typed narratives of trauma. In short,
identity determinism has become an
additional layer of oppression, one
that fails to address the problems it
clumsily articulates.
T
he driving force behind the
new rise of identity determin­
ism is trivial: social media.
Our willing accommodation of the
flattening logic that makes complex
social life tractable to computer algo ­
rithms, the constant mental reshap­
ing to which we subject ourselves
through instant communication and
individualized mass media, and the
profitability of selling data generated
by internet users have all contributed
to the success of identity politics.
Rigid, constantly reenacted identities
have become a new law of the mar­
ket, one whose grip extends offline.
The most powerful digital platforms
are made for monologues or rants that
elicit mechanical expressions of ap­
proval or disapproval. This type of
electronic elocution is fundamen­
tally self-centered, but the I seeking
to grab attention must connect to a
we in order to survive and thrive.
This we is formed of the crudest
commonalities, and it is, so to speak,
automatic: sustained by knee-jerk re­
actions, memes, and viral behaviors
driven by the basest stimuli. These
responses are personal in the way one
"personalizes" a phone or a computer,
by selecting one of the few options
that engineers have allowed you.
The most powerful instrument of so­
cial prescription is in the hands of
every soliloquist who posts on Face­
book or Twitter a demand for silenc-
ing some other we. The ability for
· each mechanized soul to exert a
miniature tyranny is daunting
enough online. Offline, it has un­
dermined institutions and given
us President Donald Trump. More
and more, the political realm
transcribes social media's logic of
identity. This goes for the white
supremacy at the core ofTrumpism
as well as for the identity-based clien­
telism of mainstream Democrats.
With their official emphasis on
open-ended scholarly discussion, uni­
versities should offer a counterpoint.
But American academia tends to align
itself with the business world, and cor­
porations cater to the perceived needs
of their customers. In colleges, such
accommodations may begin with the
exclusion of dissenting voices under
the pretext of protecting certain iden­
tity groups-such as by passing over
works that run counter to their sup­
posed interests. The next step is to
prevent dialogue in the classroom by
forbidding students to talk (this is the
traditional, magisterial approach) or
avoiding all conflicts and contradic­
tions among participants, thereby con­
fusing a college seminar with an AA
meeting. ( The move toward online
instruction during the pandemic has
encouraged professorial monologues,
since the technology isn't conducive
to spontaneous discussion.) The last
stage involves censoring the name of
censorship. When an NYU graduate
launched a petition in 2017 titled "Met­
ropolitan Museum of Art: Remove
Balthus' Suggestive Painting of a

ti
Pubescent Girl,
Therese Dreaming,"
she insisted she was not demanding
censorship (as if the latter were only a
synonym for physical destruction). Dur­
ing the Q&A after a talk I gave last
November, a university lecturer told me
that "there is no cancel culture," there­
by attempting to cancel "cancel."
I
t is hard to determine whether
most professors, students, and ad­
ministrators sincerely subscribe to
current identity politics. It varies by
campus, discipline, and professional
role (administrators certainly tend to
express their support for the new order
of things). But I do know that, at
Cornell and elsewhere, only a negli­
gible minority dares to dissent pub­
licly. This stands in sharp contrast
with the initial wave of political cor­
rectness, in the mid to late 1990s,
when dozens of books written by aca­
demics critiqued identity policies from
Marxist, conservative, liberal, and
queer perspectives. W hen four Co­
lumbia undergraduates wrote an op-ed
in 2015 titled OUR IDENTITIES MATTER
IN COR E CLASSROOMS, they were sim­
ply spelling out the majority opinion
on campus. Identities matter in the
classroom, and to many they are what
should matter most. The students
made the case for trigger warnings
by pointing out chat "transgressions
concerning student identities are
common" in the core curriculum.
The Metamorphoses, with a touch of old-fashioned puritan­
they explained,
ism. Third, the students assert that "so
many texts in the Western canon" are
like so many texts in "offensive." This is a baffling claim. In
the Western canon ...
all the textual traditions I know, vio­
contains triggering and
lence is expressed and emotions are
offensive material that mar­
ginalizes stu dent identities triggered, one way or the other. A
in the classroom. These little more intellectual hu mility
texts, wrought with might be useful for a small group of
histories and narra- Ivy League students in the twenty-first
tives of exclusion century presuming to determine what
and oppression, is acceptable in an ancient Greek
can be difficult tragedy, a Tang poem, or a traditional
to read and dis­ izibongo. It's striking also that, of all
cuss as a survi­
the "Western" authors studied in
vor, a person of
Columbia's core curriculum, Ovid
color, or a stu dent
from a low-income was the center of such attacks. The
background. Metamorphoses unfolds a theoretical
argument alongside its mythological
There are three in­ content: it insists on the crucial role
terlinked ideas here. of transformation. This was not ex­
The first is that, de­ actly a majority opinion in an empire
pending on one's own obsessed with fostering stability and
identity, one should be what would later be named Romanitas
coddled when encountering (or "Roman identity," if you like).
texts (or more generally, artworks or Appearing as a character in Ovid's
experiences) that could be harmful. (I poem, the philosopher Pythagoras
particularly appreciate the absolutely asserts that "all things change."
condescending suggestion that a low­ Ovid's point is precisely that this
income student is going to be hurt by principle of metamorphosis shatters
classical literature.) The logical culmi­ any rule of identity, which makes his
nation of trigger warnings is a right to writings incompatible with the cur­
opt out before having any contact with rent reverence for reified quiddities.
the work, which undermines the In 2016, English majors at Yale asked
whole project of education. Second, that a course on "major poets" such as
the students seem to suppose that they Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot,
are asked to "read and discuss as" and Louise Gli.ick no
members of a group. This might unfor­
tunately be the case in more and more
classes, but it is incompatible with the
task of interpretation in the humani­
ties, where we should always remain
capable of being touched, chal­
lenged, and above all changed
by the object of study. A cardi-
nal error when dealing with
works of art or thought is to
suppose that they are mono­
lithic and in one (ideologi­
cal) piece. Some are,
but they're usually the
uninteresting ones,
relics often of a tradi­
tion force-fed to stu­
dents in the name of
some correctness. For a
long time, the goal was the
fostering of national identities;
our era is more attuned to social
engineering and moral piety,
ESSAY 63
longer be mandatory. Their petition
stated that
a year spent around a seminar table
where the I iterary contributions of
women, people of color and queer
folks are absent actively harms all
students, regardless of their identity,
[but is] especially hostile to students
of color.
Beyond the dubious equation of bod­
ies of texts with the bodies of their
authors and what they did with
them, Shakespeare's sonnets are any­
thing but a promotion of male
heteronormativity, T. S. Eliot's absti­
nence looks quite close to the
asexual label included in the ac­
ronym LGBTQlA+, and Louise
Gluck is a woman.
This January, a
revamping of
survey classes in
a r t history was
presented by the Yale
Daily News as
the latest response to student uneasi­
ness over an idealized Western
'canon'-a product of an overwhelm­
ingly white, straight, European and
male cadre of artists.
(The department's faculty later dis­
puted this characterization.)
In a comic mode, you may remem­
ber the 2015 banh mi affair, when
there was a brief controversy over
whether a version of the Vietnamese
sandwich served at Oberlin College
was a symptom of cultural appropria­
tion and a dire blow to the integrity of
Asian identities on campus. (Like vir­
tually every other national food staple,
64 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
such as "Japanese" sushi, "American"
hamburgers, or "Italian" pasta in to­
mato sauce, the banh mi, whose name
derives from the French pain de mie, is
itself the result of culinary and cul­
tural mixing.) A less laughable inci­
dent was the formal complaint filed
against Laurie Sheck in 2019 by some
of her students at the New School,
after she focused in class on the dis­
crepancy between the title I Am Not
Your Negro, used by Raoul Peck for his
documentary about James Baldwin,
and Baldwin's original wording of the
sentence. That Sheck would herself
read t h e so-called N-word
aloud-that she would jus­
tify it as pedagogi­
cally useful-was
l'M FROM
BERKELEY
ANO,,,,,
Nor
REVOLTING
Time. shar n
ig
can be fun.
enough to
prompt an
i nquiry that
could have led to
her dismissal. (The New School
cleared her of wrongdoing.)
Less prominent cases abound. In a
literature class at Stanford, a col­
league who wished to devote a session
to Toni Morrison was challenged by
several undergraduates who argued
that a white faculty member should
refrain from teaching work by an
African-American writer. Having
noticed a few years ago that most
students in my classes stopped partic­
ipating when we covered the history
of slavery in eighteenth-century
Saint-Domingue and the origins of
the Haitian Revolution, I was cold in
private by white students that they felt
they shouldn't speak on such issues in
front of black students. I pointed out
to them that it was no more moral to
remain silent and let the black stu­
dents bear the burden of discussion.
A Cornell colleague used the word
"blow job" in a guest lecture he gave
for a seminar on the subject of plea­
sure last spring; he learned in January
that a now-dismissed complaint had
been lodged against him by a student
who considered the term derogatory
to women (who, by the way, are not
the only people who perform fellatio).
Formal complaints of this sort rarely
have spectacular consequences, though
the anxiety of being called out, the stress
of public shaming, even over frivolous
grievances, at best wastes one's time and
at worst leaves a permanent stain on
one's reputation. But I don't believe that
the goal is actually the removal of
professors. The objective is to
reach a system of self-censorship
that would bind ev­
eryone in the
room, eroding
academic free­
dom. If the
choice of our words,
ideas, positions,
and texts is con­
ditioned by
volatile mobs, if
entire sets of
questions are
now off-limits in
our class r o o m s ,
books, or labs, then we will no longer
have the capacity to create or contest.
I
n many of these cases, naturally, the
villain is a dead or old white,
straight, cisgender male. Yet, a few
months after the Ovid affair, a freshman
at Duke University explained that he
would not read Alison B echdel's
graphic memoir Fun Home, which had
been assigned to all first-year students,
because he considered its depictions
of same-sex relations "pornography"
and contradictory to his Christian
"beliefs and identity." He quoted a
thank-you note from a Muslim sopho­
more who told him, "I've seen a lot of
people who just throw away their iden­
tity in college in the name of secular­
ism, open-mindedness, or liberalism."
Modern partisans of subaltern identi­
ties might be upset to see their favorite
maneuver deployed by a white male
Christian student in the South. Such
turnabout should not come as a surprise.
Stormfront, the largest English-language
online forum for neo-Nazis and white
supremacists, promotes "true diversity"
and the interests of the "new, embattled,
W hite minority." W hite straight males
are already a minority in the United
States (though one that enjoys dispro­
portionate representation in power).
For many voters, Trump's affirmation
of a wounded white identity is central
to his appeal, and, unfortunately, to
that of his likely successors.
It should be obvious that identity
determinism is by no means a pre­
rogative of the left, for two main
reasons. First, a truly leftist position
cannot subordinate the goal of col­
lective and individual emancipation
to the unconditional affirmation of a
set commonality. The identities on of­
fer often resemble varieties of what
Marxists used to call "alienation," in
which individuals internalize premade
representations of themselves that
limit their freedom. Second, many
pleas for the protection and promotion
of harmed identities now emanate from
the right. The two camps may be op­
posed on policy, but, more and more,
they agree that identities should anchor
politics. In her book Uncivil Agreement,
the political scientist Lilliana Mason
argues that Democrat and Republican
are no longer ideological positions
but rather identities. This is hardly
democratic progress. Coupled with
ubiquitous surveillance, heightened
censorship, digital conformism, and
educational failure, the monomania of
political identity leaves the people pow­
erless by making cooperation impossi­
ble. In such a regime, the shredding of
the social fabric is inevitable.
It is worth noting that the manifesto
signed in 1977 by the Combahee River
Collective-the text that launched the
initial theory and practice of identity
politics-warned against both "sepa­
ratism" and "fractionalization." This
year, Barbara Smith, one of the mem-
bers of the collective, reflected on her
early years of activism, saying: "We
absolutely did not mean that we would
woik with people who were only identi­
cal to ourselves. We did not mean that."
She added that, in this respect, the way
identity politics has "been used in the
last couple of decades is very different
than what we intended." Back in 1989,
Shai:ie Phelan wrote the first book with
the phrase "identity politics" in its title.
The book ended with the following:
Identity politics must be based not
only on identity, but on the appreci­
ation of politics as the art of living
together. Politics that ignores our iden­
tities, that makes them "private," is
useless, bL_lt non-negotiable identities
DEMOCRAT AND REPUBLICAN
ARE NO LONGER
IDEOLOGICAL POSITIONS
BUT IDENTITIES
will enslave us whether they are im­
posed from within or without.
Are such warnings still audible? Or do
we prefer the compa rtmentaliz ed
world of identity mongers preaching to
their own crowds and censoring their
"natural" adversaries?
T
here is a tired objection to what
I've written so far: that only
people enjoying a dominant
position could imagine escaping
identity-that only they have that
luxury, not the powerless people who
endure daily suffering and microaggres­
sions, especially at the hands of
heteronormative, cisgender, structur­
ally racist, and ableist men. Not quite.
Let us remember, for instance, how
Ralph Ellison, in Invisible Man (1952),
Percival Everett, in Erasure (2001), or
Reginald Shepherd, in a 2003 essay
satirizing "identity poetics," are critical,
in different ways, of identity determin­
ism without ever trying to efface their
social, racial, political, or sexual in­
scriptions. At the end of Ellison's novel,
the narrator comes to understand "the
beautiful absurdity of . . . American
identity," which leaves few other op­
tions to members of this society beyond
being "blind" (as virtually all characters
are portrayed, whatever their race or
sex might be) or being "invisible" (like
the protagonist). Erasure centers on a
writer who, throughout his life, has
been considered "not black enough"
and rejects the very expressio11s "my
people" and "your people." Shepherd
writes that "the impulse to explain
poetry as a symptom of its author" is "a
form of self-imprisonment."
We are now so used to the associa­
tion of identity claims with descriptions
of harm that any questioning of the
reigning ideology is assumed to come
from a place of immense privilege. Yet
if I wished to portray myself as disad­
vantaged by current standards, I could
do so on at least five counts. But
don't expect me to play the scripted
role of the victim. Those of us who
have suffered socially for conditions
we had no control over-that is, the
majority of us-should not be en­
trapped a second time and forced to
think of ourselves as defined by
harm. I have been ridiculed, derided,
insulted, injured, and beaten, and all
that forms part of my life history. But I
also have, much as any of us has, the
choice of being neither defined nor
contained by idiotic brutality. Have I,
since childhood, been insulted with
epithets such as faggot, cocksucker, and
girl? Yes-though French vocabulary is
even more colorful. Have I been ridi­
culed for being too white, owing to the
paleness caused by my chronic asthma?
Yes, and incidentally this abuse always
came from white people, including far­
right extremists. Was I bullied in ele­
mentary and middle school by other
kids for being fat? Yes, I gained weight
after recovering from a near-fatal case
of hepatitis at age eight, and the hassle
lasted for five years. Have I been bullied
for other reasons? Oh yes, many: be­
cause I sucked at sports, because my
parents were poor, because I did well in
school, and so on. In my fifteen years
in the United States, I have never gone
a week without someone frowning
when reading my name or asking me to
repeat what I just said, as if I were un­
able to order a single-shot espresso in
English. I have lost track of the number
of times colleagues have complained
that I am a weirdo, decidedly not
American, not visible enough as an
LGBT person. I am fine with all these
ESSAY 65
statements (1 am weird, I don't hold
U.S. citizenship, I don't want to look a
certain way), but they weren't intended
as words of praise. Such aggressions
were real, and they were tied to a whole
array of political oppressions based on
gender, class, sexual orientation, skin
color, mental and physical ability. None
of them were fortuitous or unrelated to
social circumstances. But even in ele­
mentary school, I understood that I did
not have to swallow the venom or
waste my life spitting it back in the face
of others. My reactions have varied, but
my line is simple: lam not looking for
external validation. I simply refuse to
identify. I am not going to dispute
wrongful characterizations, and I will
not apologize either. This method pro­
tects more against microaggressions
than separatism or celebrations of iden­
tity ever could.
Nothing programmed me to be­
come who I am. In fact, nothing is
programming any of us. True, many
things constrain us. All systems of po­
litical inequality narrow the choices of
those who lie at the bottom. We
HARPERS
should work tirelessly to overcome such
limitations. But as soon as we believe
that social circumstances are absolute
determinations-or, worse, "what we
are"-we condemn ourselves to the end­
less repetition of the past and to the
methodical destruction of new possi­
bilities. While emancipation cannot be
achieved only through education, the
latter is, quite clearly, indispensable.
The free pursuit of knowledge cannot
be an afterthought: neither teaching
nor research should be defined a priori
by the twenty-first-century catechism
of political identities. Freeing oneself
from the given is an unending process
that lies at the core of higher education.
This task concerns students and profes­
sors alike, who should constantly allow
themselves to be altered by different
concepts, poems, people, and events. In
contrast, today's identity politics is a
false promise that is imposed on us,
often in spaces of relative intellectual
freedom. No university worthy of that
name, and indeed no democracy wor­
thy of that name, should urge people to
retreat within the brackets of their
identities. Living, thinking, dreaming,
and creating are not about what we are,
but who we might become. ■
September Index Sources
1 Timothy Gill, University of North Carolina
Wilmington; 2,3 International Campaign
to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Geneva); 4,5
National Guard Bureau (Arlington, Va.); 6,7
U.S. Customs and Border Protection; 8 Claudia
Flores, University of Chicago Law School; 9-11
Law Enforcement Support Office (Battle Creek,
Mich.); 12-14 USA Today (McLean, Va.); 15,16
AH Datalytics (New Orleans); 17 Kaiser Health
News (San Francisco); 18 Retraction Watch
(NYC); 19 McKinsey & Company (NYC);
20 Travis Pillow, University of Washington
Bothell; 21 The Harris Poll (Chicago); 22 Pew
Research Center (Washington); 23 Nefesh
B'Nefesh (Jerusalem); 24 YouOov (NYC);
25 U.S. Travel Association (Washington);
26,27 Bernstein Research (London); 28 Japan
Tourism Agency (Tokyo); 29 Icelandic Ministry
of Health {Reykjavik); 30 U.S. Depamnem of
Housing and Urban Development; 31 Timothy
Garton Ash, University of Oxford (England);
32 Dalia R�search (Berlin); 33 .The Williams
Institute {Los Angeles); 34,35 YouGov; 36,37
Trump Twitter Archive (Boston); 38 YouGov;
39 Chris Danforth, University of Vermont
{Burlington); 40 International Chamber of
Shipping {London).
=============== Introducing ===============

THE BEST FOOD WRITING

ji·om H
ARPER'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,
INTRODUCTION BY NICK OFFERMAN

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE and Michael Pollan.

UPTON SINCLAIR

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FRA�KLI�
MICHAEL POLLAN & MORE SQl,ARE
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EDITED BY ELLEN ROSENBUSH AND GIULIA MELUCCI

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 S T O R Y

THE WORK OF ART

By Namwali Serpell

,�-
·:i�:tfl'.

•
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■

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fl -:,

T he exhibit had been up for three

weeks when the trouble started.
As soon as Cliff arrived at the
gallery that afternoon, Georgina got up
from the stool where they were allowed
to rest during their shifts and stepped
toward him. Her bronze dreadlocks were
in an architectural bun. She cocked it
at the woman in front of the painting.
Namwali Se1'J1ell is a Zambian writer. Her
first novel, The Old Drift, was published by
Hogarth in March 2019.
"Been here all morning," Georgina
whispered, her eyebrows curving up,
her lips down.
The draped figure stood before the
painting with her head at an angle, her
hip kinked to one side. A stance of
interest. While groups or pairs of visi­
tors clustered briefly, murmuring and
pointing, before moving on to the next
piece, individual visitors often paused
this way to take in a painting. But this
one persisted. She stayed staring at just
that one work of art until the gallery
closed three hours later.
Cliff sat on the stool, facing her. At
one point, he subtly pulled out his
phone to confirm he was thinking of
the right word for what she was wear­
ing. Yes, it was a burqa. This one
looked cheap, the color and texture
of the black tablecloths they used for
the gallery openings. That wasn't
what made Cliff suspicious, though.
lt was her eye>, tick-tocking to and fro

Illuslrarion by H.innah Buck1n.-H1 STORY 69

 behind the mesh like one of those vin­
tage cat clocks.
Before each opening, Cliff liked to
walk around the exhibits in case a pa­
tron should ask him later for the loca­
tion of a work of art, or for his opinion
of one. (Only white men ever asked his
opinion, but he loved seeing them
squint with confusion when he gave it.)
Cliff would take his time, shifting from
artwork to artwork. Then he read, let­
ting the names and dates and details of
each placard seep into the sketch of his
first impression, as if filling it in. He'd
already done that initial meander with
this exhibit, which was called Black
Matt(h)er. He remembered only that
the painting the woman stood in front
of all day was titled Thomas Sliipp and
Abram Smith-the names rang a bell,
but only a faint one-and that it com­
memorated their deaths.
When the burqa woman left at 6 PM,
Cliff stepped over to the painting again
and reread the placard. The artist, So­
nia Middleton, was South African.
Cliff nodded at the word "intersection­
ality," which he'd heard enough about
on gallery tours to connect to his moth­
er's favorite saying: "The nigger woman
is the mule of the world." He reread the
word "chiaroscuro," the definition of
which Cliff had heard plenty too, from
the art history students who worked as
docents; it meant light and dark, white
and black. Middleton's painting fit
the label, and it was big, running
from a couple feet above the floor to
a couple feet below the ceiling. Cliff's
feeling, on this second close viewing,
was that it was pretty-it reminded
him of willow trees or the end of a sad
song-but nothing special.
The burqa woman returned the
next day.
"She's baaack," Georgina buzzed in
Cliff's ear as she passed, dreads in ba­
nana bunches today.
The woman was again in front of the
painting, but instead of standing, she
was sitting on the floor. This offended
Cliff. It looked primitive or maybe just
dirty. That floor got a professional
cleaning only every other week, alleg­
edly because the gallery couldn't afford
a janitor. Sitting on the floor seemed at
odds with all that the burqa implied.
But there were no rules against it, tech­
nically, so Cliff just stayed on his stool
and monitored the situation.
70 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
From a certain angle, it looked like
the woman was part of the painting, a
short black shadow watching the long
black shadows streaking the field of
white. Camouflaged as she was, she
still drew more attention sitting down.
Other visitors to the gallery stared or
whispered or exaggeratedly skirted her
on the floor. At one point, a woman
with red hair-dyed badly on purpose,
Cliff thought, and cut unevenly, an old­
school New York chic-leaned down
and spoke to her. Cliff was too far away
to hear what was said. But the burqa
woman tilted her head up, and he saw
the cloth bulge, her cheekbone lifting
as she replied. The redhead started back
with disgust and walked off, her trans­
parent heels hoofing loudly.
The burqa woman again stayed in
front of the painting all day, without
even a break to use the bathroom. Cliff
planned to ask Georgina about it­
should they tell management?-but
when he arrived for his shift the next
day, Georgina wasn't sitting on the
stool. Her dreads were in curly-fry ring­
lets, and she was standing over the
burqa woman, and they were yelling at
each other.
C
liff told me and Mike all of this
later. Cliff and Mike had met at
the opening of Black Matt(h)er.
Basically, Mike had tried to do his
usual thing-get into a work situation
sideways-which, in this case, had
involved meeting this new ga'llerist,
who, Mike had heard, was looking for
a curator for a show in Prague called
Dada Africa, Black Dada, Blada Blada.
Mike had pitched up at the gallery in
Chinatown, glanced briefly at the art,
flirted platonically with everyone,
downed a lot of free cava, and ended
up at a bar down the street with Cliff,
after they literally shut down the party
together, pulling the shutter closed and
padlocking it to the sidewalk.
Cliff looked like he was in his for­
ties and was actually fifty-three; Mike,
the reverse. They drank whiskey and
Cokes, and chatted about the cost of
rent. Cliff had lived all over Manhattan
but had recently moved back into his
childhood home in the Bronx with
his mother, who had been a librarian
back in the day and was now just "like,
the flesh part of a breathing machine"
(Mike's words to me). The conversa-
tion got a little sad. Mike had a great
time, though. He always does. He didn't
get the Prague gig and he forgot all
about it until the furor hit.
S omeone had tweeted a photo
of the burqa woman, with the
h ashtags # A r t OfProtest and
#AppreciationOrAppropriation. This
was when her presence first got called a
"protest." Think pieces sprouted like
mushrooms overnight. A Moroccan­
American artist named Christianne
LaBlanc put up a petition titled
"STOLEN [IM]PROPERTY," stating
that her "SISTER IN HIJAB" was
right: the painting should be "DE­
MOLISHED." It was not only the
g ro tesqu e commodi fication of a
horrifically violent event-the lynch­
ing of the titular Shipp and Smith in
Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930-
but also the neo-imperial art-world
theft of a traumatic history that didn't
"BELONG" to a white South African
woman at all.
Some people signed LaBlanc's peti­
tion, but for the most part it just got
dissected, line by line, on various media,
both news and social. Artists and pun­
dits took LaBlanc to task for her na'ivete.
C'mon now. Art didn't belong to anyone.
The painting's abstraction, which
LaBlanc had called "A PRETTIFICA­
TION OF BLOOD TER ROR," couldn't
really be faulted; a realist depiction of
lynching could easily have been con­
sidered worse. And to call for the de­
struction of art in an era like this was
particularly tone-deaf, conjuring the
specter of Nazis and Fascists. This was
not the time for us to attack one an­
other. The Arts were already under at­
tack. As was Civility. And Democracy.
People coolly criticized LaBlanc, but
no one felt comfortable criticizing the
burqa woman whocl sparked the whole
controversy and who kept asserting, to
Georgina and later to the police, that
she had a First Amendment right to be
there. She wasn't breaking any rules.
She wasn't bothering anyone or instigat­
ing violence. She was just sitting in a
gallery. This is, I think, where Cliff
picked up the word "interesting," which
the woman kept using in her arguments,
e.g., "I'rn just expressing my interest in
this work of art. I just fi n d it inte1·esting."
Fair enough. Blocking the painting
from view seemed insufficient grounds
for people to drag her. What if she got
arrested for this, or even deported? This
last fear, of course, presumed she wasn't
a U.S. citizen. But who knew? She had
an American accent, invoked the
American Constitution. She could
have been a white convert, or a mem­
ber of the Nation of Islam. But no one
had asked. Nor had anyone asked
whether there was any relationship
between her veil and her protest. It
seemed impolite to bring it up.
T
he painting wasn't just a paint­
ing. It was a painting of a post­
card of a photograph. I thought
about the first time I saw Andy War­
hol's Green Coca-Cola Bottles projected
on a screen during an Art and
Thought of the Cold War class. In
1962, Warhol wasn't yet sending his
images through his proto-Instagram
color filters, turning them garish green
or blue or red, so the Duchampian
gesture-an ordinary object framed by
the museum effect-still had a certain
clarity and simplicity. I hummed with
pleasure before the image of those
stalwart bottles, with their distinctive
bishop-piece shape, greenish, blackish,
stacked high and wide. I thought of a
military battery and also, oddly, of the
famous slave ship blueprint.
In "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction," Walter
Benjamin wrote about "the presence of
the original" work of art, which was
essential to what he called its "aura," a
kind of glow: "the earliest artworks
originated in the service of a ritual­
first the magical, then the religious
kind." For Benjamin, mechanical re­
production such as photography creates
copies of the original that don't require
us to be present before it. This depletes
its aura, wearing it away like the nose
of a statue that we rub for luck.
Warhol parodied mechanical repro­
duction by painting racks of a com­
mercial product on a canvas. But the
duplication, I think, actually gives aura
back to the painting, lends it a new
kind of glow. This isn't even the be­
atific glow of the grocery store refrig­
erator, though. It's the warehouse at
the back, the area behind the grimy
plastic blinds, the fluorescent lights
stark overhead, where the crates of
empties are collected before being re­
turned to the factory to be refilled. Or,
at least that's what they did in Zambia
in the Eighties. I don't know what they
did in America in the Sixties.
I know what I know about the aura
of a Coke bottle because I've seen The
Gods Must Be Crazy six or seven times
on VHS. The film, like me, was born
in 1980, and, like the painter Sonia
Middleton, is South African. It begins
when an empty Coca-Cola bottle gets
thrown out of an airplane and lands,
unbroken, in the Kalahari at the feet of
Xi, a San man. His tribe decides it must
be a gift from the gods; it cannot be
shared; it breeds conflict. Xi decides to
walk to the edge of the world and dis­
pose of it. The film becomes a buffoon­
ish picaresque through the desert,
bouncing along with antic slapstick
and racism. It's as if the bottle had been
tossed from the peak of Coca-Cola's
1971 "Hilltop" advertisement-with its
multicultural confetti of faces, its offer
to "buy the world a Coke"-all the way
down to the bathetic valley of what the
world really thinks about black people.
That Coke bottle still became iconic
for us, a joke my Zambian friends and I
riffed on, despite the condescension in
the idea that an African tribe would
treat it as sacred. The thing is, a Coke
bottle does have aura. It is like an orig­
inal work of art, with its swooping lines
and shapely anthropomorphic figure.
In the world of the film, its double
s" i ngularity-it is both unique and
alone-is in fact what makes it sacred.
Another way to put it is that there
would have been no movie if another
Coke bottle had fallen from the sky.
U
nder pressure, the white South
African artist Sonia Middleton
released a semi-conciliatory
statement on the homepage of her spar­
tan website. The statement was short, a
little impersonal. She said that she had
never planned to sell the painting. She
gestured vaguely toward parallels be­
tween apartheid and Jim Crow. She a1�
gued for art's role as "instigation." She
asked that her work stay up in the gal­
lery "to keep the conversation going."
Then, her website got hacked. The
background f lashed red behind big
white block letters:
I DRINK BLACK BLOOD
FOR MY BREAKFAST'
That "my" in the second line seemed
less than idiomatic. I was peering at my
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laptop screen, wondering whether the
hackers were American,when I heard
a soft chime. Mike was gchatting me:
what do you think of this gallery
conflagratio?
I see Le Blanc's general point but to
stage a protest slash petition slash
reputational gofundme seems stupid
and boring to me
I am myself put off by the framing
if LaBlanc's move hadn't been "you,
power structure, should destroy this
painting," I would be straightforwardly
and comfortably ambivalent, what with
my temperamental post-Jesuit leeriness
of grandstanding, which is in turn
already heightened by the expansion of
opportunities to grandstand provided by
mass social media bandstandery and also
by my advancing age
·omg shut up you are not old mike!
of course what I would most prefer is
that she or her likest-minded would have
just gone into the show and destroyed or
defaced the painting themselves
Nazi
JK! JK!
No no no I know
I'm just saying we can't really
advocate for the destruction of
paintings in this day and age
I mean it's not CENSORship
it's not NOT censorship
I just think destroying it would mean
putting herself on the hook
defacing the defaced over effacement
the shock, charge, horror of it
the ... sacred terrorism of it?
you are once again losing yourself in
the battle
hey don't you know that security
guard at the gallery? shouId we go
down there and see what's up?
of course!
The ellipsis in the chat window
pulsed.
plus I heard there's even more burqa
now. burqas? burqae?
woot!
72 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
Three more protesters had indeed
joined the sit-in. Tourists were visiting
the gallery in droves to see them,not the
painting. Journalists waited to pick off
selfie-takers for interviews.We showed
up in the midst of this circus of rub­
berneckers: short brown me and tall
white Mike, who is Mexican and
shaped like a candle flame and looks
like Jesus,if Jesus had lived long enough
to go gray. A few patrons were pretend­
ing to ignore the chaos but most milled
unabashedly close to the protest. Their
smartphones made clicking, scything
sounds, as if someone had amplified a
fleet of butterflies.
My stomach whimpered-we'd had
dumplings for lunch a couple of
blocks over-and I covered it with
my hand. I peered between bystand­
ers, trying to suss out the protesters,
who had stopped speaking to anyone
at all. There they were, an assembly
of dark figures, a parliament of ravens,
a ... bouquet of burqas?The very fact
of there being more than one lent the
whole situation a dubious air. It felt
stagy, in a community-theater kind of
way. The tints of their black cover­
ings differed slightly. They sat with
their backs to the room, ostensibly
looking at the painting, though they
must have memorized every paint
streak by now.
Cliff stood in parade rest position
between them and the crowd. He looked
a bit like Method Man. His uniform
consisted of navy pants, a navy tie, a
spiky silver badge, and a shirt in that
shade of periwinkle that screams "not
a real cop." His elbows made wings.
'"Sup, man." Mike walked up and
introduced me.
" 'Sup." Cliff nodded languidly in
my direction and shuffled his heels.
"How's Ma?"
Cliff's brow softened. "Not bad,
not bad. My cousin Gloria been
helping out."
"Amazing!" Mike smiled and they
nodded. "So ... what's the deal with
all this?"
"Free speech,I guess." Cliff shrugged.
"What do you think of it, Cliff?"
I leaned in. "Do you find the paint­
ing offensive?"
Cliff thought. "It's interesting," he
said, not for the last time. The creases
around his forehead and mouth rippled
as he tried to explain."I ain't think much
of it, you know, when I first saw it but I aura, drains it like a punctured vessel,
been looking at it, you know," he said, can the work of art get a refill?

glancing over his shoulder at the paint­
ing, the protesters, "when all y'all are
gone for the day? And it is interesting."
My belly mewled quietly.
"I mean ... " Cliff frowned, then
leaned in to speak confidentially.
"We got a lotta black folk dying right
now, you know? Out there."
"Uh, yeah," said Mike, waving his El
Greco hands. "It's a fucking genocide."
"It's k inda messed up in that
sense to picture the dead, maybe?
But. It is interesting."
This, l thought, was the exact op­
posite of what Kant had said about the
correct approach to art. I was quiet as
they continued their conversation
though. Melanin is a kind of aura that
fades in reproduction. Cliff had the
most, mulatta me the next, Mexican
Mike the least. My brownness had
validated Mike. You can be real with us,
my skin had said to Cliff. But if l
opened my mouth now and started
holding forth about Kant or Benjamin,
I'd seem show-offy or condescending,
and that would disturb the balmy vibe
of solidarity.
So while the guys palavered about
police brutality, I stood there think­
ing about Kant on my own-the idea
that the pleasure we take in beauty
ought to b e disinterested, that it
shouldn't result from the satisfaction
of a desire. I had always disliked the
puritanical bent to this as a philo­
sophical dictum: How do you explain
taste then, Kant? W hat about money,
Kant? W hat about pleasure?
I stared past Cliffs nodding head at
the painting, trying to sense whether it
had any aura left. It was difficult in the
crowded gallery, with the other art and
people competing for my attention. I
shifted focus, making my vision blur
like it was a Magic Eye poster, like it
NI
ike and I went back to the
gallery a few weeks later. We
had started our day at the
Rose Reading Room at the New York
Public Library to work. As usual, we
sat across from each other with our
laptops at one of the long tables. Un­
daunted by the trompe l'oeil ceilings
and arched windows and walls of
leather-bound books, indifferent to the
echoey hush and the tapping of keys
like a spring shower of diligence around
us, we proceeded to have a full-blown
conversation over gchat. We typed
replies in tandem, muffling our laugh­
ter, which just grew worse for the muf­
fling, like catching the giggles in a
lecture. Eyes flashed and rolled around
us. We are truly insufferable people. l
started keeping track of when our
LOLs onscreen matched our real ones.
Finally, we succumbed to the peer
pressure and started "working." Except
I c ouldn't stop reading about the
painting and the protest and the peti­
tion. A Facebook post here, a Twitter
rant there, semi-autobiographical es­
sayistic digressions about art and cap­
ital, this or that polished writer, black
or brown or white, weighing in on this
tiny, enormous debate, this teacup
storm for the ages. The think pieces
all felt solidly constructed but huddled
around their blind spots, like buildings
with hidden courtyards.
Feeling an irritable deja vu, I closed
the overlapping cascade of open tabs in
my browser and landed on the window
for the bare-bones eBay auction for
Sonia Middleton's painting. Someone
had posted it a couple of days earlier: "'
... MINSTRELSY FOR SALE*** over a blurry
cell-phone picture of the painting.T he
Partnership
for Drug-Free Kids
bidding had now reached the mid-six
figures and was steadily ticking up. I Where families find answers

would somehow crystallize into a clear
image. I was looking for the postcard in
the painting, seeking the true horror of
its pale, murky background-the white
people's faces brimming with ... desire?
Satisfaction? Interest? My eyes kept
bouncing between the two black figures
hanging like rag dolls in the painting
and the hunched protesters on the
floor, near-identical in their black
burqas. I felt more dizzy than awed. If
mechanical reproduction empties out
gchatted the link to Mike.
holy shit:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lynching­
Postcard-Abstract-Painting-Original­
Sonia-Middleton/I 12778552326?hash
=item la3a9d86
Across the table, I saw his eyes
goggle cartoonishly,then narrow as he
skittered out a flurry of keystrokes
punctuated with Return-the telltale
sound of googling. I interrupted him:
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73
 the problem with this whole auction
isn't even the aura
it's the indexicality
right
wait what?
Primed qy my online reading, I be­
gan to discourse. The photo of the
lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram
Smith, I explained in jerky gchat
rhythm, had been an index of an ac­
tual event. Those men had been bru­
ralized and hung and burnt (had they
been burnt? I googled: yes), and that
violence had left its mark on a strip of
film-real light had hit real people,
then a real chemical composition of
silver halide. That photograph had
then been reproduced in the form of a
postcard. Nearly a century later, Sonia
Middleton had rendered that repro­
duction in an elite, organic medium:
oil paint. Did this reversal of reproduc­
tion sanctify the event or displace it?
The paint on her canvas had not
couched those bodies, not even transi­
tively. Worse, this lynching postcard
had already been reproduced in art
several times over now, by Abel
Meeropol in his poem "Bitter Fruit,"
which became Billie Holida y's
"Strange Fruit"; by Claudia Rankine
in Citizen; by David Powers, whose
2007 mural, American Nocturne,
which omitted the lynched bodies,
had been protested and taken down,
though you could still see it online, in
digital photos, another form of me­
chanical reproduction, whose aura,
because of JPEG degradation, is also
always already fading . . .
A new link popped up in my gchat
window. Mike had been ignoring my
treatise and his googling had turned
up a news story about an incident at
the gallery. I clicked. Someone had
lit the painting on fire! We looked up
at each other at the same time, mouth­
ing our mutual WTFs?!
The library was closing soon any­
way, so we snapped our laptops shut.
We headed out with the crowd, mak­
ing our way down the marble steps,
scooped in their centers from the cu­
mulative rub of a million feet.
"We have to go, right?"
"Of course," Mike scoffed. "Cliff
hasn't responded to my text yet, though."
"You have his number?"
74 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
"Oh yeah. l got it at the opening.
Also I got drinks with him in Dumbo
last week."
"What?! Without me?"
The end-of-day murmur echoed in
the massive foyer, people already gath­
ering in a curly queue by the exit
where the security guard, Sam, was
lackadaisically checking bags.
"Do you think Cliff was there
when it happened?"
N
ot only had Cliff been there,
but it turned out that he was
the security guard who'd tack­
led the protester setting fire to the paint­
ing! This was, l have co admit, totally
thrilling. le was like we had conjured it.
First, we had gchacced about how the
destruction of the painting would have
been the Platonic ideal of protest.
Then we had actually gone to the ex­
hibit and seen the burqa bouquet. And
then we had been the ones who got
Cliff talking about art and value and
interest. Not chat those conversations
were why he'd tackled the protester.
That was just his job.
le had been two days since the
incident-we were outraged chat it
hadn't been front-page news-but
luckily the painting was still up in its
new, compromised condition. A brief
announcement concerning the deci­
sion co leave it up was posted on the
gallery's website-and caped to its glass
front door-but it remained unclear
whether this decision was primarily
political, artistic, or financial. (The
auction continued on eBay.)
Mike and I shuffled in with the
crowd-fifty or so people, each caking
a giggling, shocked tum co witness the
burnt work of art. The painting was
cordoned off now by short white poles
with thin black ropes between them,
giving it an air of exclusivity. Even
from the distance these ropes imposed,
you could see where the bottom right
corner of the painting had been
torched. It looked like crumbling scabs
or a honeycomb of black bubbles in the
white paint, surrounded by gray wisps
like when an outlet short-circuits. The
burn matched the chiaroscuro aes­
thetic and could easily have been part
of Middleton's original design.
Mike and I shuffled off past it and
went co stand in front of another, right­
fully neglected, painting: an American
flag with Beyonce's face for stars. We
discussed the implications.
"With the erased de Kooning, it
was at least, like, between friends."
"Didn't some lady kiss a Rausch­
enberg?"
"That was a Twombly. She said
she couldn't help it. An act of love."
"Ugh. Did Twombly even care?''
"Twombly was dead."
"'Twombly' is starting co sound
weird. Ta-wom-ba-lee."
"It's not not Seussian."
"Superseussian."
"Someone threw acid on the Mona
Lisa in the Fifties." Mike was on his
phone, scrolling through the Wikipedia
entry on "Vandalism of art." "I'm look­
ing for my favorite: KILL KILL KILL on
the Guernica . . . Ah, it is in fact KILL
LIES ALL. Huh! A suffragette knifed
a Velazquez!"
"Las Meninas?"
"No, a Venus. The Rokeby."
"That's rad. This," I sent a thumb
over my shoulder, "is a tad deflating."
"Like popping a Koons."
My eyes widened. "Or pooping on
an Ofili?"
"You mean, doubling down on
the . . . extant poop?"
"Band name," I said absently.
"Let's find Cliff!" Mike said brightly.
But Cliff wasn't there. He'd been
told to stay away from the gallery until
the civil suits closed. We learned chis
from Georgina, who was sitting with
one butt cheek on the kitchen stool,
the other leg stretched out before her.
I'd never met her before. She was beau­
tiful, Badu-esque, her chin bronze locks
in rose-shaped cupcakes. She struck
me as more "authentic" than Cliff.
When we explained who we were and
how we knew him, she was more than
happy to tell us what had happened.
Two clays ago, Cliff had been stand­
ing in his usual spot, protecting the
protesters behind him, when he smelled
something burning. He turned and
noticed the original protester-by now
he could recognize the cut and shade
of her burqa-standing close to the
painting, a little too close for just look­
ing. As he approached, he saw that she
was holding a lighter to the bottom
right corner of it.
"Hey!" he shouted and grabbed at
her, buc she ducked him and ran off. By
the time he started to give chase, she
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was down, Cliff managed to restrain
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"l am a Muslim, and Muslims do not
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C H A N s 0 N T s T R & s
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with a piece of timber, the police gave replaced by an ampersand, the & I R 0 N s z u L y L & 0
up. Once she was on the ground, the answer to lOA. s C & A L I z E D B L E D
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E K R s & M A N & R E A s
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her. They slammed rocks on her body, Note: * indicates an anagram. T s E T s E G E E & R N T
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shawls onto her for kindling. 22. strands, two mngs.; 23. squa(n) der*; 26. john-doe; 27. odd letters; 29. Andalusian*;
Sitting in the 3 AM rumple of my 3 I. andirons*; 32. Zululand, hidden in reverse; 34. s[ocial]-candalize*-d[istancing]; 38. [disa]blcd;
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screen, a packet of chips glinting among DOWN: I. da(is)y; 2. *; 3. lw]anders-on; 4. grandiose*; 5. man-darin[g]; 7. homophone; 8. pun;
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STORY 75
 watched a video that the New York
Times had patched together from cell­
phone footage taken (cynically? guilt­
ily?) by the men in the crowd. I watched
the staggered collapse of Farkhunda's
covered form, its disintegration to a
puddled mass, the satisfaction of the
men's desire, the eyes of those smiling
lynchers sparkling and spent.
The part of the footage that stuck in
my mind-and is now forever patched
into my ongoing reel of internal
despair-is from early in the video. Far­
khunda is still alive and surrounded by
police. The crowd throngs around
them. A man from the mob approaches
a policeman. He cups the policeman's
beard tenderly with both hands, as if to
kiss him.
"Let us take her, please," the man
says, according to the translated closed­
captioning. "Brother, let us have her.
Why not let us near her?"
The ache in his gesture, the word
"brother," the desperate longing to
harm her-this is what I can't shake.
You could never paint this: a man
clutching another man's beard, separate
yet bound by the shared understanding
that would lead a civilian to touch an
armed officer in such a presumptive,
intimate way, to plead not for mercy,
but for the gift of murder. Or, you could
paint it, but what would you say in the
caption? What frame could possibly
help us understand it?
A
t first, the burqa protester had
made a big fuss over Cliff's
unveiling-it was an "inde­
cency," a "violation"-but this was
obviated by the fact chat she and her
fellow protesters weren't even Muslim.
They were white kids from Brooklyn,
young artist types. They had been us­
ing the burqa as a disguise. Even be­
fore that revelation, it was obvious
Cliff had done nothing wrong-the
veil had slipped off by accident.
With no legal grounds for criminal
charges, the protester filed a civil suit
against the gallery instead. She claimed
that setting fire to the painting had
been a First Amendment act of protest
in defiance of its racism, akin to burn­
ing the U.S. flag. She also sued for
rights to the painting, claiming that by
lighting it on fire, she had "co-created
�
City Poinl Press
�
HARPERS
M A. 0 A 2 1 N fl
it in its current exhibited condition."
The gallery filed a retaliatory suit for
76 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
damage to the painting-not only
against the protester, but also against
Christianne LaBlanc, whose petition
was deemed to have incited violence.
The painting, of course, was now expo­
nentially more valuable.
A month later, Mike texted me to
meet him in the Bronx. I thought it was
another place on the map that he'd
been painstakingly constructing of the
best Szechuan in all five boroughs. I
clambered out of the subway station
into the late-summer heat. We grinned
but didn't hug-he was in his all-black
sweat camouflage-and that's when he
told me we were going to visit Cliff
"Cliff?!" I shouted, skipping with de­
light. "Where the fuck does Cliff live?"
I repeated my question in a different
tone when Cliff buzzed us in to his build­
ing. The linoleum tiles were cracked like
an archaeological site. The elevator
jolted down violently before it shimmied
us up. Cliff greeted us at the door in his
civilian clothes. His braided leather belt
and tucked-in T-shirt turned his jeans
into dad-jeans. He and Mike clapped and
l gave him an inappropriately warm hug.
He gestured around at the aromas of
neighborly cooking in the hallway: "The
real melting pot of America," he grinned
half-apologetically. "Goat curry."
We all stepped inside. The curtains
were closed, the AC on high. Piles of
old magazines lined the foyer. A cat
sashayed toward us, cut warning eyes,
then twined possessively around Cliff's
calves. He pointed at a door and whis­
pered around his index finger.
"Ma's asleep."
Now I heard the hoarse waves, the
crest of beeps. We followed Cliff into
the living room: a low glass table,
opaque with scratches, and a black sofa,
gray with creases. Mike and I sat on the
sofa and found ourselves looking at
Sonia Middleton's painting. It was pre­
cariously balanced on the mantle of a
blocked-up fireplace, extending beyond
the bricks on both sides.
"Whoa!" Mike said.
Cliff went and stood next to it. He
grinned and posed for us, one arm across
his torso, the other elbow propped on it
to pinch his chin musingly. The Thinker
on His Feet. "It's nice, right?"
Was it? The table lamp beside me
was on, but didn't glow golden-the
eco-friendly bulb was visible under
the shade, a tangle of mean white

glass. In that harsh light, the painting
looked stripped-down, like part of the
wall, barely there, barely art. The streaks
meant to be bodies could have been
stains or rips in the canvas, the burnt
corner a mere shadow. Mike stood and
approached to examine it. He looked
like a bishop to Cliff's castle.
"How did you buy it?"
"Get the fuck outta here!" Cliff
scoffed. "You think I could afford
that? With my ma's bills?"
I felt both better and worse for
having thought the same thing.
"Nah, man," Cliff said, grinning.
"She gave it to me."
I piped up from the audience.
"Middleton?"
"Yeah." Cliff turned to me. "Oh, my
bad. Y'all want a drink?" He stepped into
the kitchen, still calling out his story.
"Yeah, so she came up to me outside the
courthouse and she was like, 'Look, you
saved my work. You took that risk.
You put yourself on the line for me."'
"Wow 1" Mike said genuinely.
"Were there cameras?" I asked
skeptically.
"Yeah, but she didn't just do it for
the publicity or whatever. It was, like,
a real present."
Cliff came back into the living
room holding three glasses of milk,
balancing them by pressing them to­
gether like a squat white posy.
"So, are you gonna keep it here?"
Mike was pointing at the mantle but
Cliff didn't notice.
"Nah, man," he chuckled as he
handed us each a glass. "I'm selling
that shit on eBay."
We laughed. The sound of Ma's
breathing machine scraped around us.
Cliff apologized for the milk, which was
all he had. Tap water would have been
better but we didn't say so. We toasted.
The milk tasted old-not sour, but
sweet and slightly dusty.
I
woke up this morning to an email
on my phone from someone I've
been having sex with. No subject
line, just a link to an essay about Damien
Hirst's use of an Ife sculpture without
attribution in his Venice show. I'd al­
ready read the essay, so I replied with the
dream I had last night instead. I typed
it on my iPhone, lying on my side, my
screen smeared with hairy-looking
smudges. The autocorrect function filled
A PORTRAIT OF
VALOR
in for my haste and my drowse, translat­
ing my typos into malapropisms, which
I fixed, my finger skidding staccato to get
the cursor in the right spot.
FROIIUONOF
A dream, I wrote, is like art. It is an
event and a memory both, it is experi­
THE LEFT
enced and then recalled. So I want you
to read this twice. Once to get a sense of
the details and again to feel them all at
once. If each detail is a point in a poin­
tillist painting, pretend you're an ant
MY LIFE IN
moving from point to point. Then step
back to take in the full effect, or better
yet, smack the canvas so the points
scatter into the air and form a cloud of
particles-ashes of event around you.
Also, I wrote, I want you to feel the sleepy
THE SERVICE
chattiness and intimate funk of having
just woken up beside me. So imagine my
voice whispering this to you, your eyes
closed, my lips brushing your ear:
There's a white field, or rather a field
of whiteness-sweet, dusty milk­
within which a thin black line appears
Diary of
VERN
from above, like a drip of bird shit. The
line trickles down, tracing the figure
of a hanging thing, a man. Cliff hands
me a small heavy object made of
glass and gold-opera glasses or an­
tique binoculars-and when l look
through them, the painting becomes
TV fuzz, like sugar falling through wa­
ter, or like the spritz above a glass of
Coke in the sun, or like those smoky
bubbles trapped inside the surface of an
old mirror. The deck pitches and I drop
the opera glasses and I realize that
where we are, the gallery, is a ship. (I'm
pretty sure that this is my mi�d pun­
ning on the word "galley.") I cast my
eyes over the edge. The water down
there is black as ink and the waves
drown themselves. One wave tilts into
being, shapes itself into a pitchblack
arm-a tar baby arm with a fist on its
end. A flat silhouette emerges, white
eyes surface only to recede again, like
Kara Walker is cutting the sea's planes
into paper dolls. A woman behind me
on the deck steps forward and asks me
to empty my pockets to make sure I
haven't stolen anything. She wears a
burqa but it's not cloth, it's soot, implic­
itly it's built into her skin, and it might
be dried blood, a moonscape of scabs, or
it might be a brittle weave of mascaraed
eyelashes. Farkhunda speaks into my ear
but her script carves the air into shapes
I can't read. In despair, she points out at
the sea, and so I look. ■
STORY 77
 IGI 10 Uoo TARCHITTI

l\uitastic Tales

Ivan Vladislavic is one of the most Beautifully translated by Lawrence This book will give you 'a momentary
significant writers working in English Venuti, these capture Tarcherri's unique stay against confusion: It is a beautiful
today. Everyone should read him. and peculiar flavor. gift. -Tlya Kaminsky
-Karie Kitamura -Brian Evenson

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Mukasonga rescues a million souls from
the collective noun 'genocide; returning
them to us as individual human beings,
who lived, laughed, told stories.
-Zadie Smith
.,_,_,.,.b,loU,.-
I
.
An unblinking meditation on pain Slowly, page after page, the black pencil
which actually manages to say new things illustrations on milky white paper tell a
about the way we feel. Difficult Ligl,t is restrained, eloquently poetic universal
wise, moving and true. story.
-Juan Gabriel Vasquez -Bologna Ragazzi Award Jury

NE"1 B00l(S
By Lidija Haas
�,
D
on't say that he's hypocriti­
cal/ Say rather that he's apo­
litical," Tom Lehrer sang, in
1965, of the former Nazi engineer then
serving as director of NASA's space
flight center in Huntsville, Alabama.
"'Once the rockets are up, who cares
where they come down? That's not my
department!' says Wernher von Braun."
Von Braun makes a surprise cameo
early in the composer John Luther Ad­
ams's memoir, SILENCES SO DEEP
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26), as the
disapproving father of Adams's first wife,
Margrit. The couple met as pupils at an
all-white boarding school in Atlanta
where, one night in 1970, they snuck out
to attend a vigil for the anniversary of
Top: Elegy IV (detail), from the series Arctic Elegy, hy DM Witman© The artist. Courtesy Klompching Gallery,
Brooklyn, New York. Bottom: Okefenokee, by DeeJra Ludwig© The artisr. Courtesy LeMicux Galleries. New Orleans
R E V E W
Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.
And though Adams doesn't mention
the Lehrer number, his book offers a
more meditative treatment of its cen­
tral concern: How can people best use
their gifts, and what are their larger
responsibilities in doing so? The mem­
oir charts Adams's decades living in
Alaska (he professes an "almost erotic"
attachment to the place), his youth as
a full-time environmental activist, and
the lifelong development of his music,
for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in
2014. It begins by setting out the verdict
he reached in his thirties: "I decided
that someone else could take my place
in politics; and no one else could make
the music I imagined but me." That
S
music-experimental and designed to
evoke natural forms, from the Okefeno­
kee Swamp at night to the white ex­
panses of the Arctic-would follow
only its internal dictates, since "more
often than not political art fails as poli­
tics, and all too often it fails as art."
Yet the memoir is ambiguous as to
whether there's such a thing as true
autonomy, for art or individuals. Adams
is laconic about his unhappy family
("Both my parents were alcoholics"); it
seems he might prefer to have sprung
straight from the landscape. He gets
another chance, at age twenty-two,
when he arrives in Alaska, a state sev­
eral years younger than he is, ideal for
self-invention. He embraces Thoreau­
vian ruggedness. His cold, dark, inac­
cessible cabin in a permafrost spruce
bog is appraised as "Functionally Ob­
solete"; a neighbor whose propane tank
explodes leaves frozen blood on the
trail. But this is where he forges his
deepest communal bonds, including a
second marriage-to Cynthia, an en­
vironmentalist comrade-that has
continued into his sixties. He often
expresses a yearning to draw music
"directly from the earth"-the grind of
icebergs, the drip of meltwater, the call
of the hermit thrush, the onomato­
poeic duck that sings its own name-as
if he could bypass human cultures alto­
gether and sound like no one else. Still,
he's nourished by the misfit clan of
twentieth-century American composers
who have also experimented with the
boundaries of noise and silence, by
the sonic traditions of Alaska's lnupiat
and Yupik peoples, and by collabora­
tions with local writers such as the
REVIEWS 79
poet John Haines, whose work pro­
vides his title ('There are silences so
deep/you can hear/the journeys of the
soul,/enormous footsteps/ downward in
a freezing earth."). Late in the book, he
even contradicts himself, defending
Haines from a conservative columnist
who recommends he retreat from po­
litical engagemenr and stick to ingrati­
ating nature poems.
Of course, Adams's work does not
actually avoid politics, either, in that it
shares what he describes as Haines's
"unabashedly ecocentric perspective."
The outside world has provided an un­
usual dramatic structure for his study of
art and activism. W hereas artists get to
impose order, create beginnings and
endings, political work can be a long,
slow struggle, its victories and defeats
contingent, uncertain. Bue Adams's
career as an environmentalist began at
an invigorating moment, soon after the
high-water mark of green legislation in
the early 1970s. The Fairbanks Daily
News-Miner attacked him as a Com­
munist and "a carpetbagger with no
roots in the community," but he and his
colleagues were able to change laws and
protect the wilderness, pushing back on
plans for land disposals, dams, and oil
and gas drilling across the state. They
also got to watch their hopes collapse at
nightmarish speed. Adams bears wit­
ness as the very texture of life-air,
light, seasons, fauna-warps in Alaska,
ground zero for climate change. Fair­
banks has long been more polluted than
Los Angeles, and the Arctic is warming
twice as fast as the rest of the planet. He
recalls how he and Cynthia, one "lovely
summer evening under the midnight
sun," after a baseball game in which the
home team prevailed, looked at each
80 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
other and agreed, "We lost." In this
context, immersive music that alters
and renews one's sense of time and place
A
has a special urgency, making real to the
listener what might still be preserved.
comparable high-stakes lyri­
cism infuses WHITE HOT
LIGHT (Harper Perennial,
$16.99), a collection of vignettes from
the physician Frank Huyler's twenty-five
years spent work­
ing in an emer­
gency room in
New Mexico. As
material for art,
emergency medi­
cine, like the cli­
mate crisis, wou Id
seem, given its
tendency toward
unrel ieved cre­
scendo, both appealing and treacher­
ous. Huyler, though, is an old hand,
having published both poetry and fic­
tion, as well as an earlier volume of
memoir, Tlie Blood of Strangers (1999).
The mood of this one is shaped by the
accumulation of years of clinical prac­
tice, accustomed disappointments,
strokes of luck and grace. '.'So much of
what we do is ritual,"
he writes.
The minor illnesses
of Iife get better on
their own. The ter­
rible ones get worse.
There are only a few
moments, and a few
conditions, where
medicine earns the
faith we want to
place in it.
At times his style
owes something co
the rapturous econ­
omy of Denis Johnson, and the people
drifting in and out could well find a
home in a Johnson story. Like Adams's,
Huyler's work is implicitly political-he
lays bare the cruelties and humiliations
of poverty, and of for-profit health care
in particular-but maintains an ele­
mental tone. "Even now you cannot
accept an irregular line," Huyler writes
of his own story, which we glimpse in
flashes among the case histories, "one
chat simply starts and scops, as if with­
out significance." His job is a constant
Top: Phorogr.iph of jcll -fish © Trent Farke/Magnum Photos. Bottom: Phocogr.iph
from Al buqucrquc, New Mexico© Larry Towell/Mllgnum Phoros
reminder that life has no narrative
logic. He observes mindless catastrophe:
a cherry picker tips over in the wind,
killing a group of children; a man chugs
his pills right there in the hospital, in­
tending a casually dramatic gesture, but
misjudges it and can't be saved.
Although there have been many
writer-doctors, you still have to wonder
what the nature of such a double calling
might be, to spend a life in the attempt
to cure or rescue,
and at the same
time save your
notes, garnished
with simile: the
heart "dumb and
brutal, charging
itself up again and
again like a firefly";
an exposed brain
"like a jellyfish un­
folding in the water." There's the risk of
romanticizing the miseries of others,
turning people into wretched arche­
types. The staff laughs together after
saving a drunk, unconscious, platinum­
haired woman who had been aspirat­
ing vomit: she's the height of a child,
and had fallen off the bar she was
dancing on. "Suturing a wound can be
a meditation," Huyler writes of a young
Native American woman whose boy­
friend has slashed her face open with
a broken bottle.
You roll your wrist again to follow the
curve as you pull the needle free, trail­
ing its blue filament. You tie the knot.
You cut the thread. You pick up the
needle again. Blood rises in little points.
There is a reverence to the description.
He has taken over for his intern, in
recognition that the stitches will be a
kind of legacy: "The scar is waiting for
her. She will have it for the rest of her
life. . . . The scar will be there long after
I am gone and forgotten."
A
s Huyler gathers the injured and
the saved, Eliot Weinberger, in
ANGELS&SAINTS (Christine
Burgin/New Directions, $26.95), col­
lects records and rumors of messengers
and martyrs the world over-the results
are just as bloody, and a lot more comi­
cal. A luminous book, it is illustrated
with elaborate gilded grid poems by the
ninth-century monk Hrabanus Maurus.
(The scholar Mary Wellesley proffers a
set of instructions for decoding Maurus'
verse, though she warns that doing so
might be its own form of punishment:
"devotion often requires labor to reach
enlightenment.") The first section offers
a chef's reduction of centuries of
thought about angels, those liminal
creatures via whom, it turns out, human
beings have worked through their
ideas-from the sublime to the ab­
surd-on mortality, consciousness, in­
dividuality, memory, hierarchy, ethics,
reason, and free will. Even the gorier
details have beauty in them: in human
bodies, laid out after death,
the pressure of the weight of the
corpse pushes the blood from the tis­
sue, forming areas that are much
1 ighter than the rest. One of those ar­
eas is across the shoulder blades and
upper back, and it takes the form of
perfectly symmetrical wings.
The saints, though, provide the
book's funnier and more alarming in­
sights into human nature. Weinberger
sometimes groups them by name (Hy­
acinths, Teresas) or by theme ("Dogs
and Cats and a Trout"). He quotes
them at length, or gives each a one­
liner. Placid of Rodi "slept standing
for thirty-seven years, for to lie down
was to submit to carnality." As for the
anti-iconoclast brothers and monks
Theodore and Theophanes Graptus:
"The emperor Theophilus ordered
that a twelve-line insulting poem be
tattooed on their faces." Some seem
startlingly impious. Angela of Foligno
wrote of living with her husband in
the thirteenth century:
It was bitter for me co put up with all
the slanders and injustices.... Then it
came to pass that my mother, who
had been a great obstacle to me, died.
In like manner my husband died, as
did all my sons, in a short space of
time. Because I .. . had pra);ed to Goel
for their deaths, I felt a great consola­
tion when it happened.
On the other hand, excessive piety
can be a liability. Juan Garfn, a cave­
dwelling ninth-century hermit, was so
assiduous in performing his ascetic
rituals that Satan grew "jealous";
when the Count of Barcelona sent his
teenage daughter to be exorcised,
Garfn, egged on by Satan in disguise,
"raped her, then cut off her head and
Swan, rhe Spirit ofrhe Deceased, and Hi, Guardian Angd, an illumination from The Three
l'iliirimages, by Guillaume de Dcguilevillc, circa 1355 © akg,images/Jean-Cbudc Varga
hid her bo dy." Gangulphus of Va­
rennes caught his wife having an af­
fair with a priest and secluded himself
to begin austerities; the priest then
murdered him. Priests themselves are
often killed: one bites the dust for re­
fusing to tell King Wenceslaus IV
what Queen Sophie said during con­
fession; another is p oisoned for
preaching against extramarital sex by
a woman whose lover has repented
and dumped her. Weinberger wears
his erudition with an understated ele­
gance, and anyone who has read his
political essays (which use the same
wry method of collage) should find in
these further-off horrors and follies a
source of light relief.
A
more reverent impulse ani­
mates the poet Jorie Graham's
RUNAWAY (Ecco, $26.99),
which, picking up where her previous
collection, Fast, left off, envisions a fu­
ture after our current, fatal accelerations:
Must I put down
here chat this is long ago. That the
sky has been invisible for years
now. That the ash
of our fires has covered the sun. That
the fruit is stunted yellow mold
when it appears
at all
Graham doesn't allow herself the rev­
eling in ruin and despair that some­
times tempts those who write about
apocalypse. To keep a mind open and
steady on a planet that is being de­
stroyed, whether or not you deem that
a political act, is surely an artist's task.
"Vastness played all over us, slippery,
&/slid off like a ring into the sea."
Just because the destruction is hap­
pening now, and swiftly, doesn't mean
it's easy to imagine. But we have an
obligation to imagine it.
Graham has long been breaking open
the lyric voice, seeing how much of the
vast, fractured, overwhelming present it
can contain. Often she explores a self
that won't hold together but must stilt
be held accountable-as a political en­
tity, a citizen. "My Skin Is" moves
through this permeable, unstable self to
examine whiteness ("brutal no-color
color ... this spandex over a void"), and
the racist violence that underpins every­
day life and polices borders:
please help me here as I can't tell­
the trees don't know-the wind
won' t speak-the gods should but
their names are being withheld­
because some of us
are murdered, and some of us have
mouths that keep saying yes, do
that to me
again, I know it hurts but yes, I am an
American and I like it harder than
. you 'll ever
know, this is Tuesclay, the day rises
with its fist over the harbor saying
give it to me
and the day obliges, saying more,
more, do you want more, and the
torch of dawn
says more, yes more, ask for my
identificatjon, my little pool of
identification, here
on the only road, arrested again
among the monuments.
Her most thrilling poems hurtle
through long, unpredictable lines that
devour and spit out ancient echoes
and internet detritus as they go, re­
turning to unpoetic words such as
normal till you feel the hideous adjust­
ments they are hiding ("What is it we
mean by/ok"). She can cram the hu­
man condition into a description of a
toddler taking a step, looking first at
an air conditioner and then out the
window. T here are halting efforts to
begin again, yoked to permanent
losses ("right through our throats/as
fish used to be hooked when there
were fish"). Graham's work dissents
from Adams's explicit verdict on po­
litical art, but the two share a deeper
feeling of responsibility. As he does in
his music, she in her poems remakes a
world you can inhabit, one in which
you sense what it is we're letting go of,
now, before it's gone. ■
REVIEWS 81
CAGE OF GOLD
The corrupt business of deportation
By Rachel Nolan
Discussed in this essay:
The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants,
W
by Adam Goodman. Princeton University Press. 336 pages. $29.95.
hat we imagine when we
think of deportation pro­
ceedings, if we stop co
imagine them at all, is an immigration
hearing. The judge presides in her
black robes. The migrants appear
without lawyers, since the right to
counsel does not apply. Toddlers as
young as three "represent themselves,"
whatever that combination of words is
supposed to mean. The hearing may
take as long as four hours or as little as
a few minutes. An attorney with Im­
migration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) presents the evidence-an ar­
rest in the desert, an expired visa-and
the judge considers whether the per­
son in front of her will be deported or
allowed to remain. She rules. But this
is not what actually occurs in the vast
majority of deportation cases adjudi­
cated in the United States.
Over the past hundred years, a
stunning 90 percent of deportations
from this country were "voluntary
departures," as the historian Adam
Goodman shows in his new book,
The Deportation Machine. It is as in­
accurate to imagine an immigration
hearing for most deportees, Good­
man writes, as it is to imagine a jury
trial for most criminal suspects. Pros­
ecutors in the United States today
use plea bargains to reach convic­
tions in 90 percent of federal cases.
Plea bargains make the question of
innocence secondary, if not irrele­
vant. They are the criminal justice
system's trump card. Voluntary de­
parture, throughout the twentieth
Rachel Nolan is an assistant professor at the
Pardee School of Global Studies at Boscon
University. Her most recent arricle for Harp­
er's Magazine, "A Jagged Scrap of Hiswry,"
appeared in the July 2019 issue.
82 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
century, was the immigration sys­
tem's trump card-yet most people
have never heard of it.
Voluntary departure is one of
those euphemistic legal terms that
mean the opposite of what they
sound like. It is a formal adminis­
trative process, not an autonomous
decision made by a migrant. It
works like this: People in the cus­
tody of immigration authorities
have the right to ask for a hearing,
but if the judge rules against them
they are automatically barred from
ever legally reentering the United
States. If, instead, they sign forms
agreeing to leave the country vol­
untarily, the record of their removal
order can be expunged, and they
remain theoretically free to return.
They can also avoid extended peri­
ods of detention. Given the long
o dds of prevailing at a hearing,
most people decide not to take the
chance. Those who sign voluntary
departure forms often pledge to
pay, in part or in whole, for the trip
back to their country of origin.
Goodman writes that immigration
authorities sometimes cajole or co­
erce people into voluntary depar­
ture, "making it seem like the best
of all the bad options facing people
who have been apprehended."
Goodman breaks deportations
down into three categories: forced
removal, voluntary departure, and
"self-deportation"-terrorizing people
into leaving of their own accord by
announcing raids in advance, a tactic
known as "scareheading." He sets for
himself the ambitious task of tracing
all three deportation techniques
from the nineteenth century to the
present-how they developed, how
they were challenged by immigrants
and their families, and, importantly,
how they were paid for. Formal de­
portation, hearing and all, has until
recently been relatively infrequent
because it is time-consuming and
expensive. It was Goodman's keen
attention to the economics of depor­
tation that led him to focus on vol­
untary departures. Without that
mechanism, he notes, we could
never have achieved such industrial
capacities for kicking people out of
the country.
H istories take a long time to
write, and much of Good­
man's extensive and exuber­
antly footnoted study predates the
election of Donald Trump. It must
have been strange to spend years
researching deportation history in
archives across the United States
and Mexico-writing an academic
book often feels like a private
obsession-only to see it all burst into
the open in 2015, when Trump began
raving about Mexican rapists and
promising to deport the millions of
people living in this country with­
out papers. What had previously
been a question for historians like
Goodman-and for the w1documented
and their families, who are so rarely
listened to-became a matter of public
urgency. Are we, or were we ever, a
"nation of immigrants"?
The view that the United States
is a nation of immigrants was pop­
ularized in the Fifties by Oscar
Handlin, who is credited with in­
venting the field of immigration
history. For the next half century,
immigration historians largely
played into the happy melting pot
myth of assimilation, focusing on
the experiences of immigrants from
Europe. But in the early Aughts, a
group of scholars calling them­
selves historians of migration be­
gan writing the history of racism,
exclusion, and "illegal aliens" in­
stead. Considering the United States
as a nation of migrants, rather
than of immigrants, pulls in the
forced or coerced migrations in our
history: Native Am ericans corn
from their land, Asian contract la­
borers, Mexican guest workers, and
enslaved Africans.
 Goodman is part of this newer co­
hort of migration historians who see
the United States as a "deportation
nation"-to borrow the title of a
2010 book by the law professor Dan­
iel Kanstroom, the only other
full-length national study of depor­
tation history. In The Deportation
Machine, Goodman calculates the
total number of deportations from
the United States over the past
hundred years-and the result is
staggering. Between 1920 and 2018,
the latest year for which data was
available, the country deported
56.3 million people, more than the
51.7 million who were granted law­
ful status. Roughly nine out of ten
deportees were Mexican. (Goodman
does not include self-deportations in
this number, since he acknowledges
that they are "unquantifiable.")
This darker view of U.S. history
is less controversial than it once
was, thanks in large part to Trump's
willingness to say out loud that
Braceros, by Domingo Ulloti C) Smithsonian American Art Museum/Art Resource, New York Ciry
which was once tacit. In February
2018, U.S. Citizenship and Immi­
gration Services (USCIS) removed
the phrase "nation of immigrants"
from its mission statement. Last
year, the Trump Administration in­
troduced a new policy that allows
for the denial of green cards to im­
migrants who have used fo od
stamps or other forms of public as­
sistance. Ken Cuccinelli, then act­
ing head of USCIS, was asked on
NPR whether Emma Lazarus's words
inscribed at the base of the Statue
of Liberty were "part of the Ameri­
can ethos." "They certainly are,"
Cuccinelli said. "Give me your tired
and your poor who can stand on
their own two feet and who will not
become a public charge."
R
emovals were common even
before the United States
gained independence. In Co­
lonial New England, the practice
was called "warning out," and the
first recorded case in Plymouth
County was a man named Robert
Titus, who in 1654 was called to the
town court and told to take his fam­
ily elsewhere because he had allowed
"persons of evil fame" to live in his
house. It is possible that the persons
in question were accused witches,
though most warnings out were of
indigents considered likely to be­
come a drain on the public purse.
The majority of people left "volun­
tarily," but those who didn't could
be chased out by the town consta­
ble. Between 1751 and 1800, more
than 20 percent of those warned out
were people of color, many of them
recently manumitted.
In 1788, Massachusetts began re­
quiring foreigners to register with
the local government and prohibit­
ing people who were likely to re­
quire public relief from coming
ashore. Six years later, the state
passed one of the country's first de­
portation laws, which authorized
REVIEWS 83
 e
1/'f'f/Z-.
the forcible removal of the poor to
"any place beyond the sea, where he
belongs." Goodman is very good on
the windup of the country's depor­
tation machine: how immigration
officials came to wield broad discre­
tionary power, how the "immigrants
are taking our jobs" narrative spread
during anti-Chinese agitating and
lynchings in the 1890s, and how
successive Supreme Court cases lim­
ited the rights of noncitizens and
denied them due process.
People sometimes say that, before
1924, America's borders were open.
Goodman notes that that's not
quite right. If you arrived at a port
of entry, paid a "head tax," demon­
strated that you were literate, passed
an often intrusive and humiliating
medical inspection, proved that you
were unlikely to become a public
charge, and-after the 1882 exclu­
sion act-were not Chinese, then you
could come on in. But it is true that
the 1924 Immigration Act, which
first introduced national-origin quo­
tas, marked the beginning of the
country's broader effort to restrict
entry on the basis of race. It was an
attempt to choke off large-scale im­
migration from Southern Europe
and Asia, but there were no restric­
tions whatsoever on countries in
the Western Hemisphere, including
Mexico. America's agricultural
bosses did not want to lose access to
cheap labor.
Prohibition started the first wave
of panic about Mexicans crossing
the border, loaded down with whis-
84 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
key and rum to meet U.S. demand.
The B order Patrol, which was
founded in 1924, was so focused on
Mexicans that it had a term for ev­
eryone else-OTMs, "other than
Mexicans"-which is still in use to­
day. During the 1920s and 1930s,
there was no official policy of releas­
ing migrants if they agreed to pay
their own way out of the country,
but individual agents began facili­
tating voluntary departures on an
ad hoc basis. As one border agent
wrote, "If the alien does not want
his day in court, why not let him re­
turn to Mexico instead of holding
him anywhere from two or three
weeks to a month or more?"
Voluntary departures became rou­
tine during the Great Depression,
enabling the country to carry out its
first mass deportation of Mexicans.
Raids throughout California, the
Southwest, the Midwest, and even
Alaska marked a turn in deporta­
tion history: expulsion as spectacle.
Herbert Hoover's secretary of labor
authorized immigration agents to
monitor strikes involving foreigners
and to deport radicals. Announce­
men ts were published in the
Spanish- and English-language press
ahead of raids on businesses. Fran­
cisco E. Balderrama and Raymond
Rodrfguez, authors of the authorita­
tive history of this period, Decade of
Betrayal, estimate the number of de­
ported Mexicans at between five
hundred thousand and one million,
which includes people who were ex­
pelled through formal removals and
Left: A photograph (derail) from immigration files in Sierra County, California, 1890-1930.
CourteS\' Cnlifornia Historical Socier}', San Francisco. Right: Asian women and children
detained at Angel Island lmmigrarion Station, California, circa 1910. Courresy the Library of Congress
voluntary departures as well as those
who were terrorized into leaving.
The first of these mass raids was
conducted on February 26, 1931.
That afternoon, about four hundred
people were out sunning themselves
in a park that was then called La
Placita, a center of Mexican and
Mexican-American life in Los Ange­
les. At three o'clock, six immigration
agents in khaki uniforms entered the
park, accompanied by a cadre of po­
lice. Two policemen stationed them­
selves at each entrance to prevent
people from leaving. They forced ev­
eryone to remain seated, which
"caused tremendous panic," accord­
ing to a newspaper story the next
day. For over an hour, agents from
the Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS), ICE's predecessor, in­
terrogated people one by qne, as a
crowd gathered outside the park to
watch. Those who didn't have pass­
ports or evidence of legal entry with
them were detained.
Moises Gonzalez, a legal resident,
happened by the park while the raid
was under way, so the immigration
agents questioned him too. Gonzalez
produced his papers, which showed
he had been living legally in the
United States since crossing the bor­
der eight years prior through a port
of entry in El Paso. Nevertheless,
an immigration agent pocketed
Gonzalez's paperwork and told him
to wait with the ochers. Balderrama
and Rodrfguez estimate chat as many
as 60 percent of chose caught up in
raids in this era were in the United
States legally. California formally
apologized for its Depression-era de­
portations in 20 05, noting that Mex­
ican and Mexican-American families
had been "forced to abandon, or
were defrauded of, personal and real
property, which often was sold by lo­
cal authorities as 'payment' for the
transportation expenses incurred in
their removal." The federal govern­
ment has never apologized.
A
fter deporting hundreds of
thousands of Mexicans during
the Depression, the United
States had the little problem of need­
ing them back to solve the labor
shortage created by the Second
World War. From 1942 to 1964, the
United States and Mexico came to a
series of agreements to issue more
than 4.6 million short-term contracts
to Mexican agricultural guest workers.
The deal became known as the Bra­
cero Program, from brazo, the Spanish
word for "arm." Labor abuses were
common, and medical examinations
at the border were extremely inva­
sive. Incoming workers were fumigated
with toxic chemicals, among them
Braceros being sprayed wirh DDT bl' Department of Agriculture personnel, 1956. Phorograph bl' Leonard Nadel. CourtcS)'
Leonard Nadel Photographs and Scrapbooks, Notional Museum of American I listor)', Smirhsonian lnsrirution
DDT, a carcinogenic insecticide that
is now banned. A photograph from
1956, in the Smithsonian's collection,
shows a U.S. official in a white face
mask spraying a shirtless bracero in
the face with DDT while a long line
of people behind him wait their turn.
At the end of the war, Gis returned,
but the pattern of Mexican migra­
t ion had been set. Hundreds of
thousands of Mexicans-with and
without bracero contracts, including
undocumented women and children
accompanying men with contracts­
continued to travel to the United
States. Some U.S. citizens called the
migrants by the derogatory term "wet­
back," because many of them waded or
swam across the Rio Grande to enter
the country. The largest deportation
campaign in U.S. history, and not co­
incidentally the first since voluntary
departure was made official policy in
1940, was named after this racial slur:
Operation Wetback. Trump referred to
the operation approvingly at a debate
in 2015. "Moved them way south," he
said. "They never came back."
Operation Wetback officially began
on June 17, 1954, with a burst of
military-style roundups mostly along
the border, but also in Los Angeles,
San Francisco, and Chicago. Good­
man found that in Los Angeles, the
INS leased a recreation center from
the city for $1 25 a day in Elysian Park,
near where Dodger Stadium stands
today, and converted it into an
open-air detention facility. That year,
the government recorded thirty thou­
sand formal deportations and more
than one million voluntary depar­
tures. When a district director of the
INS suggested that every migrant be
given a hearing, another official wrote
in the margins of his memo: "Costly
detention point not necessary if pro­
cessing is streamlined" and "Hearings
not necessary if idea is co clean out
volume-not make records."
Operation Wetback separated fam­
ilies. Parents were deported while
their children were at school. Workers
were deported before they could gather
their belongings. Some American cit­
izens were critical of the raids for hu­
manitarian reasons, others because
they stood to lose money. When Oper­
ation Wetback swept through Texas, a
local newspaper offered a solution to
REVIEWS 85
the coming shortage of people willing
to do certain kinds of work: "putting
700-800 invading Border patrol­
men into the cotton fields picking."
A candy store in Harlingen, Texas,
hung a sign: PRICES DOUBLE TO BOR­
DER PATROLMEN UNTIL COTTON IS
PICKED. INS officers found it hard to
rent a room in some towns, but they
did their work one way or another.
One South Texas resident wrote to
the U.S. attorney general, "I have
seen mothers deport[ed) and leave on
this side their nursing babies. What
is wrong with chis country any way?"
D
eporcacion policy in "t he
United States is nonsensical
because it is determined by
two opposing impulses: racist hate
and greed. We want immigrants be­
cause they do cheap work we won't
86 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
do ourselves, but we don't want them
because they represent, in the eyes
of some Americans, a threat to our
way of life. Ac the start of the novel
coronavirus pandemic, undocumented
people who pick strawberries and
lettuce in California's Central Valley
received official letters from their
employers designating chem "essen­
tial workers." Still, ICE conducted a
raid on the very first day of California's
lockdown in March. A reporter from
the Los Angeles Times noted chat it
was "business as usual," except that
"the agents had N95 respirator masks
in their vehicles, just in case." Mi­
grant farmworkers are essential, but
ICE is essential, too.
Goodman is sharp on this concra­
diction. He demonstrates chat the
federal government's immigration
policy emerges from a desire both to
Braccros at a detention center in McAlien, Texas, early I 950s.
Courtesy Special Collecrions, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries
control the borders and to cater to
employers, who want to maintain a
"well-regulated, exploitable migrant la­
bor force." Recruiting Mexican workers
to migrate to the United States was
good business. So was getting govern­
ment contracts to deport them. Those
contracts were paid for, at least in
part, by migrants who had signed
forms agreeing to voluntary depar­
tures, making the process almost as
cheap as scareheading.
Long before private companies
built the detention facilities that now
imprison migrants near our borders,
deportation was a public-private
business. Safety was not a priority, to
put it mildly. In 1948, a deportation
flight operated by a private contrac­
tor crashed in California, killing
everyone on board. Wo ody Guthrie
memorialized the accident in his
song "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos
(Deportee)." That same year, INS of­
ficials investigated what kind of
charter airlines it would be legal for
the agency to hire for deportation
flights and concluded that the only
requirement was for businesses to ac­
quire a "permit for the transporta­
tion of non common carrier goods
such as personal property." In the
opinion of one of the INS officials in
charge of airlifts, "Our contention is
that the Mexican aliens are, in a
sense, personal property in that they
make no decisions as to the means of
transportation or destination."
Contracts for deportation planes,
boats, and trains were a corrupt busi­
ness. Operation Wetback involved a
series of seventy-six boatlifts that
hauled more than fifty thousand
Mexicans south between 1954 and
1956. The Mexican official who made
this agreement with the United
States was a member and stock­
holder of one of the Mexican ship­
ping companies that got a contract.
His company was already shipping
bananas north; why not ship de­
portees south on return trips? In INS
records, Go odman found that the
company installed air-conditioning
below the main deck "not for the de­
portees, but to ensure that the ba­
nanas arrived in good condition."
These ships, including one called
Emancipaci6n, were vessels designed
to carry cargo, and Mexicans were
forced down into crowded holds for
the duration of the forty-eight-hour
trip. Those who weren't seasick trav­
eled in the vomit of those who were.
The conditions were so bad that
Goodman convincingly poses the
boatlifts as a predecessor to later "pre­
vention through deterrence" policies,
which, beginning in the 1990s, tried
to dissuade Mexicans from crossing
the border by making the trip harder
and more dangerous, often deadly.
"They hate the boat trip like a devil
hates holy water," crowed Lieutenant
General Joseph Swing, the commis­
sioner of the INS who planned and
executed Operation Wetback, while
testifying before Congress in 1955.
"The boatlift is the most salutary
thing that we have hit on yet."
Deportation bo atlifts ended in
1956 when deportees mutinied off
the coast of Tampico in northeast­
\! -\ (' -\ /
ERS I ' f: I
I
ern Mexico, forcing the captain to
bring the ship clo ser to l and.
Around forty deportees then jumped
BOOKSTORE I
T-sh rts • Books • Tote Bags
II
overboard and tried to swim to
shore. Two men who drowned were I
later identified as deportees by their
Levi's jeans.
Operation Wetback was sup­
posed to increase the number of
bracero workers and decrease the
number of undocumented workers,
but the distinction was often lost in
roundups. It is impossible to know
how many documented immigrants
and U.S. citizens were deported, or
how many deportees were later re­
cruited to join the Bracero Program.
In 1954, one of the pilots who
worked for an INS contractor re­
marked: "This Mexican business
mystifies me. We just hauled a load
of contract laborers from Mexico to
Michigan. Now we're hauling a load
S
of other Mexicans back to Mexico.
Well, I just fly the plane." IXTIES
The Bracero Program ended in
1964, a year before Lyndon John­
[ti 10 tt,1.•La'I""
son signed the Immigration and
Nationality Act during a ceremony
at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
The act, which laid the foundation
for today's immigration law, called for
immigrants to be admitted not on
the basis of their race or national
origin, but on the basis of special­
ized skills, refugee status, or family
reunification. It opened the door for
a huge increase in immigration from
places other than Europe, much
larger even than its backers had
anticipated, but it also capped im­
migration from the Western Hemi­
sphere for the first time.
In her excellent bo ok Undocu­
mented Lives, the historian Ana
Raquel Minian shows that between
1965 and 1986, a permanent class of
Mexican workers cycled seasonally
between the two countries. The rise
in arrivals in the United States was TO ORDER MERCHANDISE,
86 percent offset by departures. This VISIT STORE.HARPERS.ORG
pattern of circular migration ended OR CALL (212) 420-5754
only because of harsher new policies
at the border. In 1986, Ronald Rea­
gan granted amnesty to three mil­
lion undocumented people, and in
exchange, Congress agreed to milita­
rize the border, allo cate more HARPERS
M A C A Z l ' l
funding to Border Patrol, sanction
REVIEWS 87
HARPER'S employers who hired undocumented
people, and pass deportation laws
WEEl(LY that were more insulated from judi­
cial review. The stakes of deporta­
REVIE,V
tion rose. Mexicans who wanted to
earn a wage in U.S. dollars, Minian
writes, "found themselves trapped in
the United States, which they re­
Enjoying the issue? ferred to as the Jaula de Oro, or Cage
of Gold."
W
Check out our weekly hat finally moved the
take on the news, United States away from
voluntary departures was
delivered to your inbox
another punitive change in the law.
FREE every Tuesday. Democrats were the ones who over­
saw the shift to formal deportations,
VISIT HARPERS.ORG in an effort to appear tough on crime.
In 1996, Congress passed a new set
TO SIGN UP TODAY! of immigration laws that provided for
"expedited removals" and "reinstate­
ment of removal," allowing immigra­
tion officers to arrest, charge, and
formally deport people without any
investigation or the participation of
a judge. As a result, formal deporta­
tion came to look more and more like
voluntary departure-speedy and
unprotected by due process. Conse­
quences were serious: formal deporta­
tion resulted in a ban on reentry
from five years to life, and possible
felony criminal charges if caught
again in the United States. Kan­
stroom, the legal historian, calls 1996
"the year in which the rule of depor­
tation law died."
Goodman's book covers so much
ground that he can hardly be faulted
for not giving more space to asylum.
But because the formal deportation
process has sped up so much, seeking
asylum is now the primary and
sometimes the only way that people
can slow down the system enough to
claim rights. Over the past decade,
the most pronounced change at the
border has been that more people are
seeking refuge rather than just work.
In 2008, only one in a hundred bor­
der crossers applied for asylum or hu­
manitarian relief. By 2018, it was one
in three.
The development is a result of
changing conditions in Latin Amer­
ica. Due to the improving economic
outlook in Mexico and the Great Re­
cession in the United States, Mexi­
cans are leaving in larger numbers
than they are entering. For the first
88 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
time in almost a hundred years, our
immigration system is now concerned
primarily with deporting what the
government still calls OTMs-people
mostly from the Northern Triangle
countries of El Salvador, Guatemala,
and Honduras. Central Americans are
fleeing gangs, anti-indigenous vio­
lence, domestic violence, poverty, po­
litical corruption, and instability-a
whole host of overlapping problems
that the United States helped create
by funding military dictatorships in
the 1970s and 1980s.
Asylum seekers allege that they are
being tricked and coerced into sign­
ing ICE Form 1-210, a version of the
same voluntary departure paperwork
that the country has used since Op­
eration Wetback. Some parents who
were separated from their children
at the border said they were told
they had to agree to voluntary depar­
ture before they could be reunited.
And now, during the pandemic, the
Trump Administration has moved
to shut down the asylum process for
the first time since it was created af­
ter the Second World War. Thou­
sands of asylum seekers are waiting
in squalid and dangerous camps in
Mexico for their asylum claims to be
heard-when, they do not know.
As the pandemic stretches on, un­
documented people are risking expo­
sure to COVID-19 while picking fruit,
cleaning homes, and delivering food
and packages all over the United
States. Such workers are always "es­
sential," but it is never so clear as
during a national crisis-a point
underlined in Tlie Undocumented
Americans, by Karla Cornejo Vil­
lavicencio, a writer who is herself
undocumented. Of 9/11 she writes:
"The first responders were firemen
and EMT workers. The second re­
sponders were undocumented immi­
grants." New York City hired contrac­
tors to clean up the holes where the
twin towers used to be. The contrac­
tors hired subcontractors, who hired
day laborers who were mostly Eastern
European and Latin American.
"Many of the women knew the area
well," Villavicencio writes, "having
cleaned offices and apartments in
Lower Manhattan for years. They
knew they'd be called to dust. There
was so much dust." ■
COETZEE'S RADICAL
is scorned; workers on a dock reject a
crane that would make their tasks
more efficient. Politics goes unmen­
NIASTERPIECE tioned, despite the ubiquitous pres­
ence, mostly benevolent, of the state:
there's a census, a public school sys­
On the Jesus trilogy tem, and a social safety net, but no
mention of leaders, wars, or interna­
By Christian Lorentzen tional rivalries. History is only pres­
ent in echoes, such as a pet dog
named Bolfvar. There is talk of film
Discussed in this essay:
and music and dance, but few recog­
nizable artworks, among them Don
The Childhood ofJesus, by]. M. Coetzee. Penguin Books. 288 pages. $16. Quixote, a song of Goethe's, and a
The Schooldays ofJesus, by]. M. Coetzee. Penguin Books. 272 pages. $16. Mickey Mouse cartoon. We hear
The Death of Jesus, by]. M. Coetzee. Viking. 208 pages. $27. nothing of the major religions, but
everyone seems to believe in reincar­

T
nation. No one has a sense of irony
he novels of J. M. Coetzee's refrigerators, televisions, and auto­ or sees "any doubleness in the world."
Jesus trilogy take place in a mobiles but no computers. Medical There are shops and even advertising
purer world than our own science is a matter of injections and circulars, but the effulgences of capi­
and, on the surface, a simpler one. In blood transfusions, not X-rays, CAT talism are absent, as are the trap­
this world, which might be an afterlife scans, and arthroscopes. Progress itself pings of bourgeois society. Hardly
or a waystation in the transmigration
of souls, no one, except newborns, is
native, and everyone speaks the same
language, "beginner's Spanish." Ar­
rivals in this land have been "washed
clean" of their memories, given new
names, and assigned ages by their
looks. Ample state services-housing,
education, medicine-and jobs are
available to all. The climate seems to
be temperate: sometimes it's hot,
sometimes it isn't, and once in a
while it rains. There are seals by the
shore, and a mild infestation of rats
in the warehouses that store the grain
that arrives every day by ship. The
diet is mostly vegetarian-crackers,
spaghetti, bean paste; meat is hard to
come by, as are spices. The world
Coetzee has constructed bears resem­
blance to his prose style. "I do believe
in spareness," he once remarked.
"Spare prose and a spare, thrifty
world: it's an unattractive part of my
makeup that has exasperated people
who have had to share their lives
with me." It's hard not to conclude
that he has imagined a world in the
shape of his own mind.
What is missing from this world?
Technology is stuck at the level of the
1950s, not coincidentally the era of
Coetzee's youth. There are ne;spapers,

Christian Lorentzen lives in Brooklyn. His

last essay for Harper's Magazine, "Like This
or Die," appeared in the April 2019 issue.

Reading from a blank book, by Hernan Bas. Courtesy rhc artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York City REVIEWS 89
any differences in class can be de­
tected in this land of migrants, and
tbe only reference to race is men­
tion of "Red Indians" in the Disney
cartoon. There is 110 oppressor and no
oppressed, no one victorious and
no one defeated, no legacies of guilt
or victimization. We are a long way
from the South Africa where Coet­
zee was born in 1940, and the post­
apartheid South Africa he left in
2002 for Australia.
Into this welcoming but austere and
culturally blank world come Simon
and David, a man and a motherless
boy who met on the ship that brought
them from the life they no longer re­
member. T/ie Childhood of Jesus (2013)
traces their arrival in the city of No­
villa. Sim6n assumes guardianship of
the boy and searches for his mother.
Following the advice of "the voice
that speaks inside us," Simon recruits
a woman named Ines to fill the role
after seeing her playing tennis with
her brothers. Their adjustments to life
in a new land are uneasy, and there's
something out of the ordinary, even
supernatural, about the boy. At the
least, be resists socialization. After
municipal authorities try to put him in
a remote reform school, Sim6n, Ines,
and David escape Novilla by car. The
Schooldays of Jesus (2016) follows the
makeshift family's assimilation to life
in the inland city of Estrella. David
enrolls in its dance academy, where
he is recognized as a gifted child. A
scandal ensues when the school's jani­
tor, Dmitri, murders David's beautiful
dance instructor, Senora Arroyo; he
is tried, confesses, and is sentenced
to confinement in a psychiatric ward.
In The Death of Jesus, David aban­
dons Sim6n and Ines to live in an or­
phanage. He then falls mysteriously
ill, becomes an object of notoriety
from his hospital bed, and speaks
gnomically of delivering his "mes­
sage" to the world before he leaves it.
At last, he dies.
I
f the setting of these novels is
minimalist and ahistorical, and
their action the stuff of melodrama
and pulp, their texture is philosophical
conversation. In one of the trilogy's
many allusive jokes, David refers to
Mickey Mouse's dog Pluto as "Plato."
The residents ofNovilla tend to speak
90 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
as if they've been plucked from one of
Plato's dialogues, debating such basic
questions as the nature of love, the
purpose of work, and the chairness of
chairs. Simon finds this exasperating
at times, but more and more be en­
gages, and the conversations ease his
adjustment to a land where both pas­
sion and irony are mostly absent. In
Childhood, the largest question is
whether the characters are living in
the best of all possible worlds or the
only world, whatever "shadows of
memories" linger in Sim6n's mind.
The problems of justice and redemp­
tion follow from the murder at the
center of Schooldays. Mortality looms
over the final volume. The conflict
between passion and rationality, the
disparity between appearance and re­
ality, and the nature of numbers and
words are turned over throughout the
trilogy. None of these issues becomes
any simpler as David asserts himself as
a kind of half-pint oracle: a boy who
resists systems of thought like arith­
metic, teaches himself to read, and
writes on the classroom blackboard, "I
am the truth."
The novels' titles are at once literal
(in that they name the stages of one
character's life) and a puzzle (in that
they invite the reader to identify the
character with someone whose fa­
mous story is altogether different). Is
David a redemptive figure? A savant?
In 2012, in Cape Town, before read­
ing from the first novel, as yet unpub­
lished, Coetzee told the audience: "I
had hoped that the book would ap­
pear with a blank cover and a blank
title page, so that only after the last
page had been read would the reader
meet the title, namely The Childhood
of Jesus. But in the publishing indus­
try as it is at present, that is not al­
lowed." Such an unconventional
placement of the title would no doubt
alter the experience of readers disci­
plined enough not to peek. In a book
with plenty of allusions to Christian
scripture but no characters who prac­
tice the religion, David would come
across less like a possibly divine sav­
ior than a bright but obnoxious and
delusional child, and Simon, who
has a vision of David in a loincloth
riding aloft in a chariot pulled by
two white horses, would himself be
a candidate for psychiatric counsel-
ing. The title on the last page would
come as a retroactive shock.
The David of The Death of Jesus is
different from the boy we encounter
in the first two novels. He is ten
years old (four years older than in
Schooldays), tall, and athletic, a star
on the soccer field and the leader of
the boys in his neighborhood and at
his school. There he has a special,
quasi-teacher status, showing up on
his own schedule to perform dances
of his own invention. His attitudes
about numbers-a kind of nominal­
ism according to which each has its
own special qualities beyond the
rules of arithmetic-have hardened
into casual dogma, such that he dis­
dains a watch Simon and Ines have
given him for his birthday because its
face arranges the digits in an ordered
circle against their true natures. The
makeshift family's life has been stable
until the arrival at a pickup game of
Dr. Julio Fabricante, head of a local
orphanage of two hundred children.
He tempts David away from his adop­
tive parents with the promise of play­
ing for an organized team. Beyond
their wish to keep him, Simon and
j
Ines fear that the boy will be cor­
rupted: one night he comes home in
muddied clothes after hanging out
with teenage orphans, having broken
and abandoned his bicycle, and
smelling of cigarettes. As a pretext for
moving into the orphanage, David
claims that, besides not being his
"real parents," Simon and Ines have
mistreated him, an accusation that
hurts Simon profoundly and that the
boy admits to fabricating: 'Things
don't have to be true to be true," David
says. He and Simon argue similarly
about the story of Don Quixote. No­
tably, David knows that story­
which he understands as "veritable
history" rather than fiction-not
from Cervantes but from an illus­
trated children's edition adapted by
"a man named Benengeli." He is not
privy to the authentic version of the
novel, just as Coetzee's readers don't
know what his characters sound like
in beginner's Spanish.
Each of the novels rehearses Da­
vid's separation from, and possible be­
trayal of, Simon. Ines is the first to
take David away, in Childhood, until
she and Simon come to an uneasy

and chaste way of being together af­
ter he fixes her toilet (leading to his
contemplation of the "po oness of
poo" and the realization that the boy
he thinks might be divine also defe­
cates). After getting lost on the
street, David spends time in the com­
pany of a reprobate Simon knows
from the docks named Senor Daga,
who shows him cartoons on televi­
sion and a novelty pen with a lady
inside it whose clothes fall off when
you turn it upside down. He also
gives David a jar of magnesium pow­
der that causes a small explosion and
temporarily blinds the boy when he
dips a candle in it ("Am I inside the
mirror?" he asks in his oracular way).
At last the authorities send him to
reform school, but he escapes, and
the family flees Novilla. There, the
teachers of the dance academy
seem suspicious to Simon and Ines,
especially after David petitions to
move into the school as a boarder.
Simon goes looking for him one
weekend and finds him at a nude
beach with his teachers. Simon
comes to view the school as a benev­
olent cult and the best place for Da­
vid to study, even after the murder
committed by the Daga-like caretaker
Dmitri, who had shown David dirty
pictures that, along with the sight of
his victim's body, had given the boy
nightmares. When the census threat­
ens to expose his flight from reform
school, Simon hides him in a cup­
board. Throughout, Simon's yearning
for paternal affection is as persistent
and strong as his protective feelings to­
ward the boy. David's affinity for sleazy
men like Daga and Dmitri is the in­
verse of Simon's drift away from mostly
unquenched sexual desire and passion
toward a way of living governed by
reason, moderation, and self-denial.
David has a softening effect on
these men, as he has on Ines, who
seems a coldhearted snob when we
first meet her on the tennis court. Da­
vid's illness, its symptoms, and its var­
ious misdiagnoses, including one
called Sap o r ta syndrome, are a
MacGuffin designed to deliver him to
a death beyond simple explanation;
he describes his condition only as
"falling." Dmitri returns to the story
as an orderly in the hospital where he
is supposed to be confined to the psy-
"One helluva team of
chiatric ward. ("I am cured," he ex­ writers has produced a
plains.) He calls David his "master" book you'll be dipping
and sits at his bed awaiting the deliv­
ery of his "message." From his bed, the
into for years."
boy tells stories to Dmitri and other - JIM BOUTON, AUTHOR OF BALL FOUR
young visitors, among them children
from the dance academy and the or­
phanage, about Don Quixote. These
stories are Quixote fan fiction with a
biblical flair, but they tend to take RIJlES OF THE GAME
wrong turns or simply trail off. In one, THE BEST SPORTS
confronted by a "virgin" with a baby
and two men she has slept with WRITING FROM
(Simon thinks but doesn't say that /JA/ll'Ell'S JJt/AGAZINE
David doesn't know the meaning of
PREFACE BY ROY BLOUNT JR.
the word "virgin"), Quixote places the
infant in a tub full of water and de­
mands that the father step forward.
When neither man does, he lets the
baby die. David tells this story the day Rules of the Game: The
after demanding he be allowed to Best Sports Writing from
have his pet dog Bolfvar and a lamb Harper's Magazine uncovers
called Jeremiah that belongs to the
dance academy spend the night in his
funny, touching, exciting, in­
room. By morning, Bolfvar has triguing stories of the sport­
mauled Jeremiah. ing life, both professional and
David the boy was indulged and amateur. These essays show
obnoxious; David the dying preteen
is a moody and confused crank, but that how we play and write
his charisma is undeniable. After his about sports reflects and cele­
death, the orphans of Fabricante's brates our nation's character.
institution go on a lo oting spree.
Alyosha, a serene employee of the This collection includes some
dance academy, explains the events of the most well-known and re­
to Simon:
spected writers of the past cen­
Bands of them have been racing from tury, including Mark Twain,
shop to shop, overturning displays, Tom Wolfe, Shirley Jackson,
haranguing shopkeepers for charging
too much. The just price! That is their Lewis H. Lapham, Gary
cry. In one of the pet shops they broke
Cartwright, A. Bartlett Gia­
open the cages and set the animals
loose-dogs, cats, rabbits, snakes, tor­ matti, Pete Axthelm, George
roises. Set the birds loose too. Left Plimpton, and Rich Cohen.
only the goldfish. The police had to
be called in. All in the cause of the
EDITED BY MATTHEW STEVENSON
just price, all in the name of David.
Some of them claim they have had AND MICHAEL MARTIN
mystic visions, visions in which David
appeared to them and told them his
bidding. He has left a huge mark be­
hind. None of which surprises me.
You know how David was.
It's clear that David's appeal lies in
his disregard for mathematics and his
attitude toward animals, which he
sees as close to human. (Earlier in the
novel, he disavows meat and expresses
a desire not to eat fruit or vegetables
because they are living.) So if David is
a prophet of sorts, his message lies in
REVIEWS 91
 THE
SIXTIES
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE DECADE
protest against the rational order of
things and a hierarchy of nature with
human beings at the top. Even in No­
villa and Estrella, where everyone
quires an immediate p osthumous
mystique among the orphans, Dmitri,
and his classmates at the dance acad­
emy, who put on a memorial show

GEORGE
FROM HARPER'S MAGAZINE
seems to be a new arrival, these sys­ dramatizing episodes from his life in a
tems are cast as novel developments. comic manner (including the one of

PLIMPTON
Near the end of Schooldays, we get a the dog eating the lamb, which can
glimpse of the only bit of mythology also be seen as a replay of Dmitri's

WALKER
in the trilogy that is unique to their murder of Senora Arroyo). But it may

PERCY
world. Senor Moreno, a guest lecturer be Simon who is the proper recipient
at the dance academy, gives a talk on of David's message. Dmitri says as
"Metros the measurer": much to him in a letter at the end of

JOE
the novel:
"A shadowy figure, Metros," Moreno
is saying. "And like his comrade Pro­
The fact is, authentic sinners like old
metheus, bringer of fire, perhaps only
Omit1i were too easy for him. It was t)'Pes
a figure of legend. Nevertheless, the
like you that he wanted to save, types who
arrival of Metros marks a turning
presented him with more of a challenge.
point in human history: the moment
Here is old Simon, with his more or less
when we collectively gave up the old
MCGINNISS way of apprehending the world, the
unblemished record, a good fellow

DAVID
though not excessively good, with no
unthinking, animal way, when we
great hankering after another life-let's
abandoned as futile the quest to
see what we can do with him.
know things in themselves, and be­
gan instead to see the world through

HALBERSTAM its metra. By concentrating our gaze

''Another life"-the phrase recurs
in these novels over and over. There

RICHARD
upon fluctuations in the metra we
enabled ourselves to discover new are a few dissenters, among them ste­
laws, laws that even the heavenly vedores in Novilla who debate the

HOFSTADTER bodies have to obey. idea idly. In Death, Simon asks one

C.VANN
"Similarly on earth, where in the of David's nurses, "Do you not be­
spirit of the new metric science we lieve in a life to come?''
measured mankind and, finding that

WOODWARD
all men are equal, concluded that men I do. I do. But the life to come will be
should fall equally under the law. here on earth, not among the dead

PRISCILLA
No more slaves, no more kings, no stars. We will die, all of us, and disin­
more exceptions. tegrate, and become material for a

JOHNSON
"Was Metros the measurer a bad new generation to rise up from. There
man? Were he and his heirs guilty of will be a life after this one, but I, the
abolishing reality and putting a simu­ one I call I, will not be here to live it.

MCMILLAN lacrum in its place, as some critics Nor will you. Nor will David. Now

SARA
claim? Would we be better off if Met­
ros had never been born? As we look
around us at this splendid Institute,
designed by architects and built by
please let me go.
The concept of another life allows
Simon to understand his own life

DAVIDSON
engineers schooled in the metra of
and its limits, allowing for the possi­
statics and dynamics, that position
bility that things have been different

LOUIS
seems hard to maintain."
Of course, "that position" is the
one espoused by David, who rejects
before and might be again. The les­
son of David's life and death are
about the limits of understanding.

LOMAX
mathematics and the hierarchy of liv­
ing things, and in a milder sense by
his music teacher, Juan Sebastian Ar­
royo, who says that just because ev­
INTRODUCTION BY
After the boy dies, Bolivar goes miss­
ing and Simon considers adopting a
dog called Pablo that is taken by
other owners. He ponders a dog's no­

EUGENE J.
erything can be measured doesn't tion of death:
mean it should be. David rejects the

MCCARTHY tyranny of rationality and the idea
that there are no exceptions: to him
ORDER TODAY FROM everything has a singular essential na­
STORE.HARPERS.ORG ture. The mystery of his death-the
rioting orphans blame it on a conspir­
acy of doctors-shows the limits of
Dogs do not understand death, do not
understand how a being can cease to
be. But perhaps the reason (the deeper
reason) why they do not under­
stand death is that they do not un­
derstand understanding. I Bolivar
breathe my last in a gutter in - the

II
I
FRANKLIN
SQUARE
rR ESS scientific explanations. David ac- rain-lashed city and at the same mo-
Distributed by Midpoint Trade Books,
a division of IPG

92 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020


ment I Pablo find myself in a wire cage
in a stranger's backyard. What is there
that demands to be understood in that?
Yet understanding death and why
he is where he is have been Simon's
questions throughout the novels. In
this he is little different from animals,
he realizes. In the final scene of the
trilogy he pages through David's Don
Quixote, a used copy discarded from a
Novilla library, and finds notes from
two previous borrowers answering a
librarian's question about the message
of the book-one reads, "listen to San­
cho because he is not the crazy one,"
and the other, "Don Quixote died so he
could not marry Dulcania"-but noth­
ing from David. "A pity," Simon
thinks. "Now it will never be known
what, in David's eyes, the message of
the book was or what most of all he
remembered from it."
W
e could say something sim­
ilar about the Jesus trilogy,
and many critics have,
calling the novels "utterly cryptic,"
"unfathomable," or "allegorical" but
lacking in "a clear correlative" outside
themselves. To say that the message of
these novels is something about the
limits of human understanding, or
that they dramatize the conflict be­
tween two different ways of seeing and
being in the world, broadly represented
by passion and reason-and that the
contest comes to a draw-may be un­
satisfying, but only if you are expect­
ing to find a pat message. W hat the
reader will remember will be the plea­
sures available to anyone: the deadpan
humor, the swoons of their melodra­
matic thriller plots, and the beguiling
weirdness of the world Coetzee has
constructed. These are not merely
surface pleasures. The novels teach
you how to read them without re­
course to reading or rereading Plato,
Wittgenstein, Cervantes, Dostoevsky,
or the Gospels. The reader's experi­
ence mirrors Simon's comic educa­
tion. The novels' philosophy lives in
an autonomous zone.
At the same time, a substantial ac­
ademic literature has grown up
around Coetzee's life and career that
demonstrates the trilogy's layers of
meaning. A defining aspect of Coet­
zee's early life and his writings about
it is the shame he felt as he came to
understand the racial hierarchy of
apartheid South Africa. The emo­
tion pervades Boyhood (1997), the
first volume of his autobiographical
trilogy. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
has argued that the absence of racial
difference in Childhood of Jesus, de­
spite Spanish as the lingua franca,
represents Coetzee's attempt to imag­
ine "pre-colonial Africa." There is a
story that recurs in Boyhood and
Childlwod that lends this idea some
credence: the story of the three
brothers. In the tale, which John of
Boyhood hears from his mother and
David hears from Ines, there are two
brothers who arrogantly ignore those
in need while the third "helps the
old woman to carry her heavy load
or draws the thorn from the lion's
paw." In Boyhood, John interprets the
story in racial terms:
There are white people and Co­
loured people and Natives, of whom
the Natives are the lowest and most
derided. The parallel is inescapable:
the Natives are the third brother.
In his book of memoir and criticism
on Coetzee, In the Middle of No­
where, Jonathan Crewe, a South Af­
rican scholar of English who taught
beside Coetzee at the University of
Cape Town in the 1970s, writes:
The parable's simple inversion of ra­
cial hierarchy may be taken as the
boy's first, benevolent step towards re­
je cting the dominant ideology of
white racial purity and supremacy, but it
hardly represents an escape from racial
thinking. Perhaps there is no subjective
escape, ever, in so heavily racialized a
society as South Africa.
In Childhood, no such escape is neces­
sary. David, an essentialist, wants to be
the third brother himself. Simon ex­
plains to him that even if Ines had two
more sons, David would always be the
first brother. But because the boy re­
jects the idea of numeric order, he
rejects the very concept of hierarchy.
In the fictional world Coetzee has con­
structed for David, no escape is neces­
sary. He need nor be born third to be
the third brother: it's already his na­
ture. He is immune to shame.
Crewe's affectionate portrait of
Coetzee includes several details that
REVIEWS 93
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• Bob (FL) 1 OX reorder "Your scientific
magic trick does seem to work. I give
1 OX credit as one of the things I did
that helped save my marriage.
Thanks Dr. Cutler"
• Sara, PhD (CO)"I find 10:13 has
major positive effects on my profes­
sionaI work in my contacts with
people. My interviews, or important
meetings. It's like the Red Sea parts. I don't
think think its all my charm! Thank you Dr.
Cutler. This product is shocking!"
suggest autobiographical readings of
the Jesus trilogy. He writes of "a genre
of Coetzee anecdotes, in which John
was the man to whom bad things
happened." In one such story, rabbits
that he bought for his children as
pets "turned feral and began to
cannibalize each other"-perhaps
the source of the dog mauling the
lamb in David's hospital room. In a
broader sense, Crewe writes that
Coetzee was part of a wave of profes­
sors who brought professionalization
and knowledge of French theory to
the South African academy. Having
studied mathematics as an under­
graduate and worked as a computer
programmer for IBM in London
during his twenties, Coetzee did
his early work on Beckett in "stylo­
metrics," the use of computers to
study literary text s, and w rote
computer-generated poetry before
turning to fiction. But he soon re­
nounced these methods and by the
end of his academic career it's clear
he believed the study of literature it­
self had been devalued in a process
of "rationalism," a situation he dra­
matized in earlier novels, among
them Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello.
He uses the word in his obituary for
Nelson Mandela: "he was blindsided
by the collapse of socialism world­
wide; the party had no philosophi­
cal resistance to put up against a
new, predatory economic rational­
ism." He seems to mean neoliber­
alism, and in the Jesus trilogy it is
the tyranny of Metros the measurer
that David rebels against.
There are other elements of Coet­
zee's life and work that appear in the
Jesus trilogy. You could add the 2010
death of his brother David, dedica­
tee of Childhood, and the death by
falling of Coetzee's son Nicolas in
1989. They are fragments Coetzee
has picked up and transfor med
within a painstakingly imagined
world. ln his 2016 study of the au­
thor's archive at the University of
Texas at Austin, J. M. Coetzee and
the Life of Writing, David Attwell ar­
gues that "Coetzee's w riting is a
huge existential enterprise, grounded
in fictionalized autobiography. In
this enterprise the texts marked as
autobiography are continuous with
those marked as fiction-only the
degree of fictionalization varies."
Coetzee, Attwell writes, begins his
work "personally and circumstantially"
and his drafts pass through many
stages of "self-masking." "Twelve,
thirteen, fourteen versions of a work
are not unusual." The books that
emerge are neither strictly realist nor
traditionally allegorical. Plot is an
unstable element throughout, and
though Coetzee starts with a genre
and perhaps a specific model in
mind, the allusions in his work are
usually late additions. Attwell calls
the process "deliteralization." He
uses the term in reference to Life &
Times of Michael K, another book in
which race is both present and ab­
sent in a world that is like our own
but is not, a South Africa of the near
future torn apart by a violent revolu­
tion. It was Coetzee's first master­
piece. His late trilogy (Coetzee is
eighty this year), displaying marks of
the same process pursued to more
radical ends, is another. ■

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94 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
■
PUZZLE ■

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

SAME DIFFERENCE
14 15

16
By Richard E. Maltby Jr.
17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24

25 26 27
'[1e four unclued across entries each con­
sist of three words that have something in com­ 28 29 30
mon. Or don't.
Clue answers include six proper nouns, one for­ 31 32 33 34
eign word, and one abbreviation. The entries at
35 36 37 38
28A, 41A, 60, 90, and 170 are uncommon. As
always, mental repunctuarion of a clue is the key 39 40
to its solution. The solution to last month's puzzle
appears on page 75. 41 42 43

44

ACROSS 3. Name given to breeze blown around Northeast (8)

I. See instructions 4. Goes wandering-large numbers died off (5)
14. One might slip into a slip, with diamonds, neckpiece, 5. Lead a meeting when the leader's not there-that's a
and a hint ofTabu (7) lock (4)
15. About that first man-me, I'm a lady (6) 6. Curious note: it's the start of this decade, colloqui-
16. Saint (and namesakes) turns four the night before- ally (1-3)
it's in the genes! (10) 7. Cut up while living in '66 cult (8)
18. Rabble covering one mile without moving? Just the 8. 0, H, C, e.g.-LMN, TIT? (8)
opposite! (8) 9. I'm a tree branch! (I may go crazy taking heroin) (8, 5)
19. See instructions 10. Eccentric, uneven dance (7)
22. Person catching a few z's, or actor catching one! (5) 11. Ravel dance holds one in grip (6)
23. Condition nailed? I didn't do it (6) 12. Zola sent a message without finishing, article having
25. Part of the body, head to toe, aches (5) been cut (5)
27. West of Hollywood, east of Maine, east of Massa- 13. Set back, like an interrupted meeting (8)
chusetts (3) 17. Spanish-speaking Native American boy in Oaxaca,
28. Rerouted, train #lO returns-it has restricted access (8) initially (6)
30. Up, down, after South Kentucky battle (7) 20. C flat, in choral arrangement of passage for winds (9)
31. See instrnctions 21. Depressions coming from silly hokiness receiving a bit
36. Intoxicating Agent-disheartening study of peoples, of laughter (9)
for short (6) 24. Knitted argyle stocking-leave one hanging around a
38. Cool girl's housing, possibly, and in retrospect, it is! (5) church (8)
39. Let USA Live broadcast what's good to be broadcast (lO) 26. Persons clearing out empty rooms?They work hard (5)
41. Age set for recycling-waste matters! (6) 27. Fighters like Dempsey, possibly-mostly male, sure (7)
42. Filling: sweet reason to be Parisian (4) 29. Nets from manufacturing: tell us (6)
43. Place to view models endlessly: Charles of Italy (5) 32. Foolish people in Southeast, first tO turn right (5)
44. See instructions 33. Large misinterpreted look (5)
34. Tramps off (oh, sob!) (5)
DOWN 35. Block Organization member has nothing to stand on (4)
l. Cheerful, I'd ship glitter all over the place (5-8) 37. Exposes what pitchers want (4)
2. Oven is on, nothing's missing-what's cooking? (7) 40. The way to raise grain (3)

Contest Rules: Send completed diagram with name and address to "Same Difference," Har/Jer's Magm:ine, 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 September 11. 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 primed in the November issue. The winner of the July puzzle, "Shaky Ground," is Nancy Haydu kc, Pittsburgh.
PUZZLE 95
 FINDINGS
Neuropsychologists developed a shorter IQ test
for children with shorter attention spans. The de­
pression-prone are less attracted to the political
right. The nocturnal heart rate of young men can
be predicted by their female partners' daytime feel­
ings of intimacy or annoyance. Men who pose for
photos with cats are seen as less datable. Men can
rate the facial attractiveness of women without
paying attention, but women cannot do the same
for men; gay men find the faces of purportedly fer­
tile women and men more attractive; adolescents
and adults both rare the faces of children younger
than 4.6 years old as more appealing than those of
older children; and body odors associated with fear
quicken the visual processing of others' facial ex­
pressions of fear. Beak covering and nape-feather
ruffling indicate calmness in sulfur-crested cocka­
toos. Repetitive negative thinking was associated
with an increased risk of dementia, and self-harm in
female adolescents may prevent suicide. Psychopaths
recommend harsher punishments for homicides,
whether accidental or motivated by profit, but ex­
hibit relatively low concern about killing in general.
Online murder-for-hire advertisements seek to con­
vey p�ofessionalism yet tend not to provide refer-
ences up front.
Convalescent plasma helps Syrian hamsters fight
SARS-CoV-2. Plastic surgeons suggested chat Botox
could reduce the expression of negative emotions by
masked faces. The presence of a professional sports
team increases a city's seasonal flu deaths. A psy­
cholinguistic analysis of posts on Twitter and Weibo
during COVID-19 lockdowns found that residents
of Lombardy grew increasingly focused on leisure
and residents of Wuhan grew increasingly focused
"Ernie and Leela," and "Ernie Under My Desk," photographs by Tony Mendoza from his book Ernie: A Photographer's Memoir,
published by Chronicle Books. Co1trtesy the artist and Lee Marks Fine Art, Shelbyville, Indiana
96 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ SEPTEMBER 2020
on religion. Recent toilet-paper hoarding was more
prevalent among Americans than Europeans and
more prevalent among the old than the young. Ger­
ontologists cautioned that it would be difficult to
predict individual Holocaust survivors' trauma or
resilience in response to the pandemic, which was
expected to strengthen the market for laboratory
mouse-suffocation chambers. Researchers proposed
replacing the paradigm of extinction with that of
evanescence. Climate change was expected to drive
American lobsters to seek deeper waters, beavers to
colonize new parts of Canada, and wolf spiders in
the high Arctic to produce a second annual brood.
Humboldt penguins who nest in the open have
more pollutant metabolites in their blood than do
penguins who nest in guano-rich burrows. The tiger
snakes of Perth have heavy metals in their livers. Sat­
ellite imagery captured ecosystem damage from fog
loss, and aerial photography confirmed the existence
of Roman military camps revealed by the 2018 Welsh
drought. A young woman in a Vilnius plague pit was
found to have been coinfected with yaws. A man bur­
ied at Newgrange passage tomb was found to be the
product of first-degree incest, indicating that he was a
member of the elite.
Scientists trained subjects to exercise control over
a single neuron, linked the hippocampus to regret,
and concluded that humans smell in stereo. Straight
Slovakians assume that a woman in high heels will
inspire more intense mate-guarding. Women who re­
ceive continuous rather than interrupted sutures for
perinea! repair after vaginal delivery report higher
sexual levels of arousal and orgasmic function. Pink­
ness predicts aggression in flamingos. Chimpanzees
have a bone in their hearts. ■
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