ANNE FADIMAN ON THE GREAT PRONOUN DEBATE

HARPER'S MAGAZINE/AUGUST 2020 $7.99

THE CHALLENGE OF THE RUST BELT

Can Biden pry it from Trump's grip?

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GHTS
 EDITOR'S DESK
0 n the morning of May 26,
Donald Trump posted a pair
of tweets about voting by
mail. "There is NO WAY (ZERO!)
that Mail-In Ballots will be anything
less than substantially fraudulent,"
Trump wrote. "This will be a Rigged
Election." Soon after, a monitor
flagged the tweets for violating Twit­
ter's "civic integrity policy," which
reads, in part, "You may not use Twit­
ter's services for the purpose of manip­
ulating or interfering in elections or
other civic processes." In response,
Twitter appended to the tweets an
unobtrusive link that read "Get the
facts about mail-in ballots" and brought
users to a page noting: "Trump's claims
are unsubstantiated, according to
CNN, Washington Post and other
fact checkers."
Outraged by this rather mild
clarification, Trump issued an ex­
ecutive order threatening protec­
tions contained within Section 230
of the Communications Decency
Act, the 1996 law that gives "interac­
tive computer services" like Twitter
immunity from legal responsibility
for user-generated content. (There
was a certain irony to this response,
4 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
Reality Check
By Christopher Beha
since it is precisely Twitter's status as a
"platform" rather than a "publisher"
that has allowed it to host Trump's
defamatory statements with impu­
nity.) The day after Trump issued
this order, he posted a tweet calling
black Americans protesting police
brutality "THUGS," adding that
"when the looting starts, the shooting
starts," a threat that was judged­
quite correctly-to have violated the
site's policy against glorifying or in­
citing violence. This time, Twitter
went a step further. The company
hid the tweet from view, forcing us­
ers to click through in order to read
it and preventing them from replying
to it. But they did not take it down,
as they likely would have if any other
user had posted it.
Trump has violated one or another
of Twiner's policies on a near-daily
basis in the decade since he joined
the site. But until now, the platform
has taken a laissez-faire approach, al­
lowing him to communicate with­
out editorial oversight to his eighty
million followers, not to mention the
readers of the countless media out­
lets that treat his tweets as inherently
newsworthy and breathlessly amplify
them. So even these minor interven­
tions represented a major policy
shift, as Trump himself obviously
recognized. While many users be­
lieved that the site had not gone far
enough-Trump's account should
have been suspended, they said­
there was a widespread belief that
this was a step in the right direc­
tion. Finally, Trump's tweets would
be fact-checked.
F
act-checking is often identified
as one of the features that dis­
tinguish so-called legacy publi­
cations such as Harper's Magazine from
the "publish first, ask questions later"
world of new media. And it's true that
we consider getting things right to be
an essential part of what we do. But
I'm skeptical that Twitter's apparent
embrace of this ethos will amount to
much. While Trump is not the first se­
rial liar to occupy the White House, he
is the most aggressively "fact-checked"
president in history. The Duke Re­
porters' Lab, which conducts an an­
nual "fact-checking census," has found
that since Trump took office the num­
ber of outlets that "actively assess
claims from politicians and social
 media" has more than doubled. Over
the years, the New York Times has at­
tempted to keep a "definitive list" of
Trump's lies. The Washington Post even
encourages the public to get in on the
fun, with its interactive FACT OR FIC­
TION game, which invites readers to
guess whether various Trump state­
ments "pass the Pinocchio test." Need­
less to say, none of this work has been
particularly effective in changing any­
one's mind about Trump, and it's tough
to see how the occasional Twitter alert
about "unsubstantiated" claims will do
any better.
One thing that years of work as a
fact-checker teaches is the limits of
what can be checked. The prevailing
philosophy of Silicon Valley-not just
of its social-media platforms, but of
such data-driven, explainer-journalism
sites as Fi.veThirtyEight and Vox, and
of the rapidly proliferating online
fact-checking projects-is a kind of
positivism that treats arriving at the
truth as a simple matter of data col­
lection: the more facts we have, the
closer we are to a complete picture
of reality.
This philosophy has also made its
way to mainstream outlets like the
Times. When a recent op-ed by Sen­
ator Tom Cotton, headlined SEND IN
THE TROOPS, caused widespread out­
rage both inside and outside the
Times, the paper responded with a
statement acknowledging that the
op-eel "did not meet [its] standards"­
because it contained a handful of
factual errors. As a corrective, the
Times committed to expanding its
checking operations.
Like so many effective ideologies,
this elision of information and truth
persuades precisely by presenting it­
self as the absence of ideology, the
neutral view that is laid bare once the
facts are allowed to speak for them­
selves. But facts cannot speak for
themselves. Even if they could, they
could not speak all at once-the re­
sult would just be noise. The truth
can't be arrived at by accumulating
atomized data points, no matter how
scrupulously they have· been vetted.
Truth requires a shared context with­
in which the relative meaning and
importance of various facts can be
judged. It is this sort of context that
magazines like Harper's seek to pro-
vide, and getting our facts straight is a
necessary but not sufficient part of
that work.
Social media-by design-strips
this context away. On Twitter, an an­
guished lament about police brutality
follows an absurclist riff on the
distracted-boyfriend meme follows an
CONGRATULATIONS
invitation to a friend's book reading
follows an engagement announce­
ment. None of these tweets is "false,"
but what is the truth to which they to the winners of the 2020
acid up? Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards
This lack of context is what makes
Trump such a natural fit for the plat­
form. Not because he is the master of
the impulsive non sequitur, but be­
KINGSLEY TUFTS
cause he brings his own context-his POETRY AWARD
own values and worldview-with Ariana Reines • A Sand Book
him. wherever he goes. While that
context has been painfully manifest
in recent weeks, he has carried it with
him for his entire public life. It is the
context of a man whose first appear­
ance in a major newspaper was as a
defendant in a Justice Department
suit for housing discrimination
against black tenants, a man whose
transition from tabloid clown to com­
mander in chief b egan with his Can you take
championing of the birther conspir­ Seriously one at once
acy. Trump's supporters know that so arch and so
every tweet carries this context with Strange, so frank and
it, but the structure of social media yet so withholding?
allows him to deny it when politically I'll wager that you can.
expedient. If this feels dispiriting,
never fear: both the Times and the
Post recently fact-checked Trump's KATE TUFTS
claim to have clone more for black DISCOVERY AWARD
people than any president since Lin­ Tiana Clark • / Can't Talk About
coln, with the Post awarding it a rare the Trees Without the Blood
"Four-Pinocchio" rating.
This checking obsession recently
reached a kind of apotheosis after the
U.S. Park Police cleared peaceful pro­
testers from Lafayette Square, near
the White House, for a Tru,np photo
op. Protesters said the police had used
tear gas against them; the govern­
ment insisted it had merely used pep­
per spray. Luckily, the Associated
Press stepped in to fact-check the
matter. Is pepper spray a tear gas? It I've been standing by water
turns out this depends on whether my whole damn life
the term was used in a "common or trying to get saved.
formal" way. This was as clear a pic­
ture as one could have of where we've
arrived: the president is gassing his Learn more at cgu.edu/tufts
own people, and the media is fact­
KINGSLEY & KATE TUFTS
checking the gas. ■ POETRY AWARDS
8 Claremont Graduate University
EDITOR'S DESK
HARPER'S sent conflicting messages, shuttering
schools, restaurants, and cafes while
WEEl(LY simultaneously urging citizens to mass
together and vote in local elections.
REVIEW
Dozens of lawsuits and criminal com­
plaints have been filed against the ad­
ministration for its negligence. Other
problems predate Macron. For a wealthy
Enjoying the issue? nation with a world-class health care
system, there has been a surprising
shortage of test kits and ventilators.
Check out our weekly 'The government's flip-flopping policies
take on the news, on past pandemics had left a once for­
delivered to your inbox midable national stockpile of face
masks nearly depleted," the New York
FREE every Tuesday. Times reported.
Officials had also outsourced the man­
VISIT HARPERS.ORG ufacturing capacity to replenish that
TO SIGN UP TODAY! stockpile to suppliers overseas, despite
warnings since the early 2000s about
the rising risks of global pandemics.
As many Trump apologists are quick
to point out, France's death rate has
been higher than that of the United
States. Yet France enacted one of the
strictest lockdowns in the world, one
that not just flattened but nearly
crushed the curve of new infections,
·from a high-water mark of 7,578 new
cases on March 31 to just 240 on May
23. (The number of new U.S. cases on
May 24 was 20,286.)
Although the French value their
liberty as much as Americans, France
is a country still able to recall what
collective sacrifice entails, and this no
doubt helped the nation accept the
lockdown. T he seventy-fifth commem­
oration of V-E Day has made it impos­
sible not to glance next door and make
comparisons with Europe's other power
center. With a population that is larger
than France's by sixteen million, and a
nearly identical number of total cases,
hovering around 180,000, Germany has
experienced some 20,000 fewer deaths
(100 per million) and has administered
three times as many tests. Chancellor
Angela Merkel has been the model of
executive poise and leadership, while
allowing regional officials to guide the
country's rapid testing program. And
in contrast to the United States, there
have been no desperate scenes of Ger­
many's Ministerprasidenten taking to
Twitter or television to plead with their
chancellor for medical supplies.
Yet it would be too easy to paint
Germany as the anti-United States,
8 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
a blessed and orderly society where
science, reason, and a politics of co­
operation and goodwill prevail. As
Germany has reopened, a loony and
cynical hodgepodge of anti-vaxxers,
neo-Nazis, and anti-capitalists have
united in a nationwide protest move­
ment, drawing thousands into the
streets, and the right-wing Alternative
fur Deutschland party has sought to
capitalize on the discontent. Heiko
Maas, Germany's fo reign minister,
joked that the public should "keep a lot
more than just a LS-meter distance"
from conspiracy theorists, but the fact
remains that the coronavirus has
sparked a transatlantic rallying cry for
extremists. Scenes of protest are play­
ing out in cities from Zurich to Los
Angeles, one of the firmer indications
that the occidental body politic re­
mains vulnerable to an even more
threatening contagion-Trumpism is
but the most ostentatious symptom­
for which we have yet to find a cure.
F
or a period in April and May,
during the eight-week national
quarantine to which the French
population pragmatically, untheatri­
cally adhered, I became mildly obsessed
with the White House's coronavirus
press briefings-a grotesquely transfix­
ing spectacle. Clips of the president
speaking about COVID-19 were spliced
up and disseminated around the globe
for giggles and likes on social media. I
have a small, uninfluential lnstagram
account that my wife insists be private
since I share pictures of our children,
but I found myself nonetheless laboring
to record and comment on my own
highlight reels of Donald Trump be­
hind the lectern, a snake-oil salesman
formulating undiagrammable sen­
tences, extolling the virtues of un­
proven and lethal substances in one
breath, lamenting the epistemological
consequences of widespread testing in
the next. 1 would post these clips as
lnstagram Stories for my thousand or
so followers to watch.
These posts were, in part, an ex­
pression of schadenfreude at my home
country's travails, but I think they
were also a sincere expression of em­
pathy and concern during a terribly
confusing global crisis. I was under no
illusion that I was somehow affect­
ing the discourse in any important
 fashion, yet this gratuitous, restricted
drop in the bucket of disapproving
resistance somehow felt more mean­
ingful to me than the times l a t­
tempted to join the chorus inveighing
against the president more publicly
on Twitter.
lt has been a jarring ordeal over the
past three and a half years to witness
the debasement of the United States
from across the Atlantic. When l first
moved to Paris, nearly a decade ago, the
French admiration for Barack Obama­
and, by extension, all of America-felt
ennobling. People seemed to believe
that in at least one important sense
American exceptionalism was real;
flawed as the United States might have
been, it really did possess a singular­
and singularly inspiring-ability to rise
above and correct its most heinous and
dehumanizing chapters. The French
equivalent of an Obama-a brilliant
and charismatic Algerian politician
assuming the presidency, for example­
was a total impossibility, my French
friends would say.
The way these same friends and oth­
ers speak to me about my native country
today is different. There is none of that
admiration and wistful longing capable
of provoking critical self-reflection.
There is not even the spiteful fear of an
unpredictable superpower, as in the
George W. Bush era. All that has been
replaced by bafflement, repulsion, exas­
peration, anger, amazement, and now­
during the novel coronavirus outbreak,
an event that has made country-by­
country comparisons not just tempting
but inevitable-something that feels
very much like pity. And then there is a
whole lot of mockery too.
It's not just Trump. American soci­
ety, as glimpsed from afar, has revealed
itself to be ailing and fragile and per­
haps even ii1eapable o{ coalescing to
meet such large-scale challenges.
T here have been extraordinary acts of
courage and self-sacrifice in the United
States, as there have been everywhere
during the pandemic, and there has
been exemplary leadership at the state
and local levels, if not from the fed­
eral government. But these rays of
light have only stood in contrast to
something much darker: a warped and
disintegrating notion of individualis­
tic freedom, the liberty to abstain
from contributing to the common
good, which amounts to a sadomas­
ochistic obsession with refusing to be
told what to do.
On Sunday, May 24, under the
headline u.s. DEATHS NEAR 100,000,
AN INCALCULABLE LOSS, the New York
Times devoted its entire front page to
listing the names of a thousand vic­
tims of COVlD-19, culled from death
notices across the country, just 1 per­
cent of the exorbitant death toll.
That same weekend, a two-minute
video montage compiled by a Twitter
account calling itself Colombian Prince
circulated widely. In the video, a variety
of customers at restaurants and shops
across the United States-they are all
white, mostly women, sometimes calm
and methodical but sometimes vibrat­
ing with animalistic rage-cough,
sneeze, and spit in the faces of waiters,
cashiers, and other service workers
(mostly these men and women are
also white, but not always). Some of
the assailants refer to a kind of birth­
right "freedom" as a justification for
their violence: they cannot accept
being told to wear a mask. Their in­
dignation at being asked to make the
most minimal effort to help protect
their fellow countrymen is as astonish­
ing as it is appalling.
None of this-not the abysmal
magnitude of life lost to COVlD-19 or
the despicable smallness that has so
often defined the reaction-has set­
tled in properly, because our attention
has shifted to the open-air, daytime
murder of an unarmed forty-six-year­
old named George Floyd, in Minne­
apolis. Another morbid spectacle,
another video gone viral, this time of
a handcuffed black man begging for
his life for nearly ten minutes as a
white police officer buries a knee in
his neck in front of uniformed col­
leagues, who remain silent, and civil­
ian onlookers, who plead with the
officer to relent.
Days later, as a result of severe un­
derlying conditions, American cities
were burning and Trump was tweeting.
"W hen the looting starts, the shooting
starts," he threatened. Meanwhile, the
coronavirus continues its indefatigable
onslaught, with infection rates rising
in more than a dozen states. In a host
of varied and interconnected ways, the
United States appears to be anything
but healthy. ■
EASY CHAIR 9
 HARPER'S INDEX
Percentage by which streaming ofN.W.A's "Fuck tha Police" increased in the week following George Floyd's death: 272
Factor by which the Minneapolis police used force more often against black people than white people over the past five years: 7
Percentage of Minneapolis police officers who live in Minneapolis: 7
Percentage of white Americans who had an unfavorable view of the police before police brutality protests began in May: 18
Who did a week later: 31
Portion of Americans who would be comfortable with the military being deployed to their community in response to protests: 2/5
Estimated cost of outfitting a police officer with riot-control gear: $790
Of outfitting a hospital worker with standard personal protective equipment: $11
Number of the ten largest U.S. novel coronavirus clusters that are linked to correctional facilities: 7
Percentage decrease since 2006 in the incarceration rate of black Americans: 34
Factor by which this rate remains higher than that of white Americans: 5
Percentage of unemployed workers in Massachusetts who receive unemployment benefits: 66
Of unemployed workers in Florida who do : 8
Percentage of jobs that require close contact and cannot be done remotely that are done by women: 77
Portion of fathers assisting with remote learning who believe they are doing most of the instruction: 1/2
Of mothers assisting with remote learning who agree : 1/33
Factor by which the number of accounts on Facebook's messenger app for children under 13 has increased since March: 3.5
Portion of remote-learning children in households making under $25,000 a year who log on once a week or less: 2/5
Of those in households making over $100,000 a year who log on every day: 4/5
Percentage of Americans who view the coronavirus as a major threat to their finances: 41
To their health: 38
Percentage of U.S. adults who say they would refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine: 19
Of Republicans who say so: 28
Percentage of U.S. coronavirus cases that have occurred in counties that Donald Trump won in 2016 : 27
Percentage change since last year in the number of Democrats who have a "great deal" of trust in medical scientists: +43
In the number of Republicans who do: -3
Number of Doctors Without Borders medical staff who have been assigned to the U.S. coronavirus response : 21
Estimated number of U.S. lives that could have been saved if social distancing had been implemented a week earlier: 35, 287
If social distancing had been implemented two weeks earlier: 5 8,32 2
Number of U.S. governors whose favorability ratings related to the pandemic have been higher than Trump's: 49
Estimated portion of New Yorkers who left the city as the pandemic hit: 1/20
Of New Yorkers living on the Upper East Side who did: 2/5
Percentage of U.S. adults working from home during lockdowns who have napped while on the clock: 59
Who have been late to work: 44
Chance that an American always wears pants when working from home: 1 in 2
Portion of Americans who say an ex reached out to them during lockdown : 1/4
Portion who responded : 4/5
Average number of times per week that an American forgot what day it was this spring: 5
Percentage of respondents to a recent survey who did not know what day it was when they responded: 59

Figures cited are the latest available as of June 2020. Sources are listed on page 94.
"Harper's Index" is a 1·egistered trademark.

HARPER'S INDEX II
 READINGS
[Essay]
AFTER THE FIRES
By Calvin Baker, from A More Perfect Reunion,
which was published in June by Bole! Type Books.
Even before Martin Luther King Jr. was
killed, many were debating the utility of pacifist
resistance. After Malcolm X was killed, after
Martin was killed, after Medgar Evers was killed,
all hell broke loose. The summers of 1968 and
1969 saw mass uprisings in every major city in
America. The police responded with violence:
shooting dissenters, busting heads, filling hospi­
tals and prisons.
After the fires, people were no longer simply
calling for desegregation. The limits of rhetoric
had been crossed. They were in the street fighting
for what white Americans and the U.S. government
feared would become a full-blown revolution. It
almost did. King and earlier civil-rights advo­
cates had taught people the power of mass mo­
bilization. Malcolm had taught black America
a language of self-determination. The Black
Panthers took it to the streets and pulled the
national political conversation to the left, with
the effect of making less radical liberal goals
more achievable.
Since 1956, the FBI had run a counterintelli­
gence program called COINTELPRO, aimed at
disrupting domestic political operations on the
left. Among the groups deemed a threat were
socialists, anti-Vietnam organizers, and the
civil-rights movement. The Panthers were all of
the above.
Violent white resistance to equal rights led
the black left, and with it much of the Ameri­
can left, to an unnatural demise, underscoring
the fact that as recently as fifty years ago the
government was willing to use deadly force to
suppress political speech. It was as chilling as
it was effective. This violent resistance of lo­
cal, state, and federal governments to Martin
Luther King's doctrine of nonviolence, meted
out in every corner of this country, had radi­
calized the younger members of that move­
ment in.the first place. The violence deployed
against the Panthers was not as immediately
apparent as police batons and water cannons
(to cite only the abuse that was broadcast and
irrefutable), but it was just as effective, dem­
onstrating that resistance to black power was
not simply the province of rogue Southern
w: sheriffs and vigilante mobs. It was
national policy.
1iteness and blackness are not static op­
posites, as the crudest understandings of race
would have us believe. They are dialectically en­
twined concepts and conditions. Whiteness
wishes to reserve for itself the power to arbitrate
the meaning of both whiteness and blackness,
each of which has a range of values. But whatever
their shifting meanings and relationships, white­
ness requires blackness (a priori) ro define it­
self. Equally crucial: all states described within
the system are actually composed of two com­
ponents. The first part is the actual thing or
condition under consideration. The second
component is its symbolic representation (the
words, images, and social poses we use ro de­
scribe it). The symbols sometimes mirror and
sometimes distort the true underlying condition.
READINGS 13
 Even before they walked onto the floor of the
California legislature brandishing rifles and
shotguns, lobbying for their right to bear arms,
the Panthers posed an existential threat to white
power. What made black power so threatening
was not the leather jackets and military drills,
but that it offered one of the few possible paths
out of race's labyrinth: by wresting from white­
ness the power to define what blackness means,
it undermined and threatened to unravel a core
principle of the system.
The definition of the white self may change,
but it always exists in relation to blackness and
the power to define that relationship. Without
blackness, and power over blackness, whiteness
becomes a null set. Society must look elsewhere
for a philosophy of being. Just as a nation defin­
ing itself as leader of the free, home of the brave
was revealed to the world as a racial state, in-
[Poem]
I WON'T BEG
By francine j. harris, from Here Is the Sweet Hand, a po­
etry collection, which will be published this month by Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
I have before. I took off a skin. I put it
in paint. I tried to make it better with me
than doing it alone. I won't fall off. The escape
is shaky. It looks out over boys driving
cars with toy black remotes. They are actually
· men. They are men in the wide zoom of street.
Engine makes them hug. They trade the remotes
loud over bright green skins. I won't panic.
The plastic so fat and wide, it can get in a lane.
It can do a 180. I won't sick. It's a lump
in the throat. When the dirt bikes head out in a rip
to twilight, they hop off. I won't jump. As they tilt
a ruddy thing and hand it over to the next.
The chest is sore, right there. I won't beg. The blast
of generators spits out dirty white light.
A white man on the train with enormous eyes put
his fingers in the shape of a gun and shot another
white man twice, in the face. Before he deboarded
he said fuck white supremacy, you're all
gonna pay and I won't body. I won't block.
I am putting the'tip of his finger to my forehead. I won't
yank. When 1 open the door, I am the whole
brick wall. Its impossible angle. I am looking out
the window at night against the glare of light.
I can only see the men who ground in voices.
14 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
debted to the social and economic practices of
the British Empire and European colonialism, so
were a people who regarded themselves as edu­
cated, well-to-do, civilized, indeed the rightful
heirs and stewards of "civilization" appalled by
the brutality of force deployed on behalf of
whiteness: purple-faced adults spitting at chil­
dren exercising their right to an education. If
one was not truly appalled, the idea of oneself as
civilized nonetheless required that one perform
indignation. Or at least empathy. The distinc­
tion between real belief and performance does
not matter so long as the acts under scrutiny are
visible and public. When they are private or de­
niable, the difference matters a great deal.
American whiteness, with its new role in the
world, and new pretentions, had an image prob­
lem. The problem for those whose belief in justice
was authentic: how to alter the racial state. For
others, it was how to maintain white
supremacy without being seen as a pa­
riah in a world where the new watch­
word was freedom. Lynchings and water
cannons are too much. Ghettos, ex­
ploited workers, and social death are
acceptable. Appearing racist was verbo­
ten, but not racism itself.
The brilliance of race as a technol­
ogy of oppression is that even being
progressive does not mean being com­
mitted to deconstructing the racial
state. It is enough to modify the perfor­
mance of whiteness: in this case, a vari­
ation of the white savior, with 'desires
---
operating apart, not in partnership, in
order to maintain the centrality and al­
leged specialness of whiteness.
The Civil War generation went to
war against slavery. The civil-rights
generation practiced civil disobedi­
ence, registered voters, and sued the
state to put forth concrete, systemic
demands for equality-not partial,
symbolic ones. As race morphs and
hides like a virus inside the psyche, it
requires a practical focus on the mate­
rial substance of inequality, not simply
symbolic performances, which often
mask at least as much as they reveal.
The resilience of institutional rac­
ism and the incredible number of
strategies that individuals deploy to
absolve themselves of responsibility
led the Panthers to renew the call for
mass collective action. As Fred Hamp­
ton and the Panthers realized, that
meant active and concrete demands.
The pain of race is difficult to dis­
cuss and easy to dismiss. The anger
of race is frightening. The competing
Untitled Mask Collage, a mixed-media artwork (vinyl, spray enamel, oil stick, black soap, and wax on panel) by Rashid Johnson, whose ivork was on view
in January at Hauser & Wirch, in New York Cicy.
feelings-shame at profiting from a system
that oppresses others and pride in being part
of the institutions that provide a sense of
security-is the crux of the liberal compro­
mise: accepting an easing of the conditions
that have stolen people's rights and celebrat­
ing that partial relief as progress soothes the
national conscience but allows the core condi­
tions of racism to continue. Or, as Malcolm
said, "If you stick a knife in my back nine
inches and pull it out six inches, there's no
progress. If you pull it all the way out that's
not progress. Progress is healing the
I
wound that the blow made."
n business as in politics, what has been added
to the comfort of whiteness, after the civil­
rights movement was shot in its sleep, is the
vanity of demonstrating one's bona fides as a
supporter of racial justice. This performance is
culturally inculcated. By demonstrating aware­
ness or "wokeness," one is demonstrating a
badge of belonging, that you are a member of
a group that cares about such things and went
to a school or read a book or were raised in a
milieu that taught you genteel behaviors and
buzzwords. Yet any change to the existing
structure is perceived as a threat because the
system has also taught that blackness repre­
sents a unique threat, so you repeat your jar­
gon from within the safety of the institutions
and geo graphy of whiteness. Integration
threatens any self that takes whiteness as its
most salient identity (without knowing it),
across political lines, because it addresses the
material, not the symbolic.
This is why the advocates of true justice and
not merely of symbols of hope continue to face
an uphill battle. They are calling for change. The
center merely asks us to stand by the compromise
READINGS 15
A photograp/1 of white coats hanging along a street in Paris, installed to honor medical wo,·l<ers during the COVID-19 pandemic, by Jean-Claude Coutausse.
that Rutherford B. Hayes made, in which North­
ern liberals stay in their place, passively aligned
with Southern racists. So while one of the
major parties is always actively opposed to civil
rights, the other party is passively opposed, fly­
ing low, under the banner of political realism
but really concerned only with the preservation
of its own power.
[Reflection]
NEW WHIRLED ORDER
By Kent Russell, from In the Land of Good Living,
a memoir, which was published last month by Knopf
At my Miami Catholic school, we didn't
have snow days, naturally. We had hurricane
days. A lot of them. Tropical storm clays, too, and
flash-flood days. Days on which the cancellation
16 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
of class did not mean "where shall we sled?" but
"will we have a place to sleep after this?"
W hich is not to say that these days were
gloomy. Oh, no. A strange glee arises through­
out the peninsula on these worst days of the
Mean Season. A kind of swaggering, both­
hands-beckoning, devil-may-care attitude. This
attitude filtered down to kids like me. I came to
understand that, every year, Mother Nature
would try to tee me up, knock me out-and
there was honor in not flinching.
I knew little about hurricanes. For example, I
did not know that the Spaniards had appropri­
ated el huracan from the Tafno of the Caribbean.
They did so because el huracan was a force with
which the Spaniards had never before reckoned.
The phenomenon was much more powerful
than Mediterranean storms-seemingly pur­
poseful and directed. Each acted as if it were an
agent carrying out orders from on high, settling
debts and relaying messages like a Mob enforcer,
or the accuser who toyed with Job.
The colonists learned to identify the signs of
its approach: aching bones, severe headaches, pre­
mature births, ants climbing up the walls, saw­
grass blooming like crazy. Such were the results
 of plunging barometric pressure. I wonder now:
Maybe that's where our giddy bluster came from?
The hydrostatic mass rushes out to sea, and ev­
erything in nature runs, hides-but not us. Even
when the mandatory evacuation siren sounded­
not us. We hunkered down, painted phrases on
our plywood as if el huracan could read. We
jutted our chins and pointed at them.
And we threw parties. Outside: A monster
whirlwind born from a vacuum. Inside: Life! Rol­
licking hubris! The candles and the booze were
brought out as soon as the bathtub and washing
machine had been filled with water. The best
part, for a kid like me, was when the eye passed
over us. An eerie, jaundiced truce in the middle
of the tempest. If the adults were shithoused
enough to go with us (or shithoused enough not
to care), we kids would tour the damage. We
weren't property owners! It was fun! Like seeing
Santa's list made manifest: who's been naughty
and who's been nice.
I got a lot of muddled theology at my Cath­
olic school. Some of the nuns held peculiar
heterodoxies regarding limbo and the pres­
ence of aborted babies therein. As to the ques­
tion of theodicy, or why God allows bad things
to happen to good people, it was rarely if ever
broached. So, imperfect in my understanding, I'd
race around the destruction to see for myself the
divine hand of Providence. Our neighbor, Ar­
nold the barber, was spared! That made sense.
The mean abuela who every Halloween preten­
ded she wasn't home? A tree fell on her car! The
world added up. El huracan shook down wrong­
doers for things owed, penances gone unsaid. It
was apocalyptic, this understanding of mine.
Apocalyptic in the true sense of the word: apo­
lwlypsis, from apo, meaning "un-," and kalyptein,
meaning "to cover." I thought hurricanes un­
covered what had been lying beneath all
along. My brashness in the face of such storms
flowed from this belief, too, I think. My family
and I were fine people. What did we
have to worry about?
�
_l hen came Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
Peak winds: 175 miles per hour. Storm surge: 17
feet. Death toll: 51. Homes destroyed: 80,000.
Total damages: $30 billion. M y neighbor
Arnold-wiped out. The rectory across the
street from my grandfather's house-a shambles.
The farming folk of Homestead, as well as the
Air Force base there-sayonara. Homes built by
a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company-as
good and pure an enterprise to my young eyes as
Holy Mother Church-folded so fast under An­
drew's strain that the builders were sued for
fraud. My own house was halved in the storm.
Before I could process this, I was bundled off to
live with some relatives out of state. My parents
repaired the house. When I returned to Miami,
my school placed me in a kind of group therapy
for kids who'd lost everything. Here, they finally
taught us about theodicy, albeit in a roundabout
[Inventory]
WORST RESPONDERS
From a 2017 complaint filed by David and Gretchen
Jessen against Fresno County and the city of Clovis,
California, for damages incurred during a police raid
on their home. In June 2016, construction workers
called the police after they witnessed a homeless man
break into the lessens' house. The lessens returned to
find their home surrounded by law enforcement. The
Jessens argue that damage to their home was "unrea­
sonable and unjustified." In April, the Ninth Circuit
Court ofAp/Jeals ruled in favor of Fresno County and
the city of Clovis.
The Clovis Police Department and the Fresno County
Sheriff's Office deployed the following:
Fifty-five vehicles
A K-9 unit
Two helicopters
Two ambulances
A fire truck
A crisis negotiation team in a motor home
A SWAT team
A backup SWAT team
A robot
Law enforcement officers did the following to the
lessens' home:
Broke six windows
Ripped out the front door and an interior door
Pulled an office wall off the foundation
Used a flash bomb in the office
Ripped off the door to the laundry room
Used a flash bomb in the laundry room
Teargassed the laundry room
Teargassed the kitchen
Teargassed the master bathroom
Teargassed the guest bedroom
Teargassed the office bathroom
Teargassed the sewing room
Destroyed more than ninety feet of fencing with a
SWAT vehicle
Shattered a sliding glass door for robot entry
The homeless man did the following:
Broke a window
Stole milk, an ice cream bar, and half a tomato
READINGS 17
 way. We were made to understand that we were
not bad people, or even half-bad. Nor was this im­
becilic chance. The counselors did not want us to
think of Andrew as an accident. God was here,
they told us. His hand was in this. But we can't
know how till Judgment Day, since
we are but humans.
�
_I_ hus did a crack appear on the surface of my
childish faith. This crack widened into a fissure and
finally a break when I was teenaged. I refused to
read into Hurricane Andrew's wreckage. I would
not divine it as if it were tea leaves. Find the small
voice of God in the storm? No. W hat happened to
us was an accident within the economy of dumb
matter. Nothing less, and certainly nothing more.
I was hoping that, for all the "natural" evil
wrought-the blasted homes, lost lives, swamped
hopes and dreams-el huracan might clear out
some overgrowth and uncover a bedrock truth.
We cannot estrange ourselves from this world, no
matter how hard we try. We are and always will be
dependent, contingent creatures. To delude our­
selves about this is destructive. Believing ourselves
exempt from nature is the kind of misperception
that leads to a ruthlessly utilitarian vision of the
earth. Seen through this lens, Mother Nature
appears distinct from us. More than that, she looks
like she was made to serve. From her we take raw
material and shape it into whatever we wish. We
can, say, uproot mangrove swamps, fill them in,
build luxury condominiums along the ersatz
shoreline, pressure-cook the atmosphere by flying
back and forth to those condominiums every
winter-and then we can act surprised when a
naturally occurring phenomenon emerges out of
that warmed water to knock it all down. We can
rebuild in the exact same spot, just as willfully, just
as unsustainably, certain in our delusion that the
storm won't be back, at least no time soon, and
anyway there's honor in the chin-jutting.
[Minutes]
TROUBLESHOOTINGS
From a Los Angeles Police Commission meeting held
on June 2 using Zoom, a videoconferencing plat­
form, which lasted seven hours. Richard Tefank is
the executive director of the commission, Mike Feuer
is the city attorney, Eileen Decker is president of the
commission, Steve Soboroff is a commissioner, and
Michel Moore is the /Jolice chief.
RICHARD TEFANK: The issue is that the Zoom ac­
count is full, it's at capacity. We're receiving
18 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
inquiries from the media that they cannot lis­
ten to the meeting.
MIKE FEUER: It is obviously a problem, but l
don't know if there's a remedy.
EILEEN DECKER: So is it the opinion of the city
attorney that we move forward?
FEUER: I'm not sure what else can be clone.
STEVE SOBOROFF: It's time for self-reflection.
Every one of us has a kid that could solve
this technical problem in five minutes. l
apologize that only five hundred people can
get on.
DECKER: You're right, Mr. Soboroff. It's ridicu­
lous that we can't get everybody on. The
chief of police's screen has gone dark. Chief,
are you there?
SOBOROFF: l just googled "Zoom conferences over
five hLmdred." This was not rocket science.
CALLER r: Hi. I am a member of W hite People
for Black Lives. The fact that you did not fore­
see more than five hundred people coming to
this meeting is emblematic of the larger prob­
lem, which is that I don't think you want to
hear from us.
DECKER: Your time is up.
CALLER 2: I want to thank the chief of police
for wasting everybody's time. This man can't
even look at us while we're talking. He's
looking down at his fuckin' phone, texting­
yeah, look at me, motherfucker, I'm talking
to you, we're all talking to you, we're tired of
your shit. You're out here hit-and-running
protesters, we got it all on tape, you're over
here shooting at media. We got it all, baby,
and we're still recording. Stop wasting our
time, and stop killing us.
CALLER 3: W hen the department can't even set
up an adequate IT interface for a meeting,
with the staggering amount of funding you
have, how is anyone supposed to trust you to
solve the infinitely more complex problem of
systemic racism?
CALLER 4: This department has failed so misera­
bly that you've mobilized a movement to de­
fund yourselves. You've mobilized me-a lazy
white person.
CALLER 5: I just want to invite folks on the
commission to indicate you can hear me by
finding a piece of paper next to you or show­
ing on your fingers how many more black
people need to die for you to understand
what your department does. So you can write
down if you feel like it's one more person
that needs to die, if you feel like we need to
get to another six hundred this year, to indi­
cate you're listening. As soon as you all do
that, l'll yield my time.
DECKER: It's not time for the commissioners
to act.
CALLER 5: That speaks volumes.
�
Q
z
<
l;;
E<
""
:r:
I-

�
I.

§..__________;__________________________�__________....,
A photograph by Txema Salvans from Perfect Day, which was publish_ed in May by MACK.

CALLER 6: For those of you playing with your [Fiction]

cell phones during this call, stop.
CALLER T Chief Moore, you're fucking smil­
ing right now. You fucking asshole. l am
so mad right now. I'm sorry that I'm saying so
many bad words, but this is crazy.
CALLER 8: You're laughing, chief of police. These
people are sitting through hours of this meet­
ing to tell you how they feel. l cannot believe
how many of you are on your phone. Stop
looking down!
CALLER 9: What is your idea of what black peo­
ple should do to stop all these cops from kill­
ing us? No answer?
DECKER: This is the time that we listen.
CALLER 10: You only react when folks use pro­
fanity. If you think curse words are bad, wait
until you hear about the six-hundred-plus
murders your department has committed
over the past seven years. Your cute Zoom
backgrounds of the city won't trick us. Black
lives matter. Act like it.
DECKER: l do not want to cut the speaking
time, but I will have to unless speakers start
yielding more time.
CALLER II: Commission, upgrade your Zomn
account. l yield my time.
THE REPORT
By Lina Wolff, from "No Man's Land," a story from
her collection Many People Die Like You, which
will be published this month by And Other Stories.
Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel.
L1e report is bizarre. It's not matter-of-fact,
and the photographs are out of focus.
"Text," I'd specified when commissioning the
assignment. "I want only text. Is that clear?"
"Yes," he'd replied.
l meet his gaze. He looks away. There's no
mistaking what underlies the writing of this re­
port. Pity, and also the pleasure of presenting a
certain kind of fact.
I go to the liquor cabinet and pour myself a
glass. I sit on the couch and take him in. He is
tall, corpulent. He could be my type.
He sits down and says: "I usually start off
my case presentations with a brief account of
the subject's life. Much of what I'm about to
say will already be familiar to you, of course."

READINGS 19
The Collector, a mixed-media drawing by Toyin Ojih Odutola, whose work is on view this month at the Barbican, in London.
"I understand."
"So, I shadowed your husband, Joan Roca
Pujol. He works as an architect at an office in
Barcelona. At present, he's working on a project
for the town of Sitges. His brief is to restructure
the town center in response to the large influx of
homosexual tourists with serious spending power.
ls this accurate?"
"Yes."
"Your husband is spending a lot of time in
Madrid. Which, taking into account his profes­
sional situation, he shouldn't be. Your suspicion
stems from these long stays in the capital. You
suspect there's another reason. A woman."
"Or man."
"In that case, I can confirm that this is about a
woman." The comer of his mouth twitches. It could
be interpreted as a smile. I remember the fish I put
in the oven just before he arrived. It should bake
for exactly an hour. The table is already set; I set it
right after lunch, as always. I am loyal as a dog.
20 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
A woman, then. Hair color, teeth, chest size.
What else? A city. Every person is a city, Joan
says-occupational hazard. In his world, I'm
Verona. I'm a balcony he can look up at, hoping
some feeling might yet sprout inside him. Some
he describes as Detroit, or Bonn. Perfect infra­
structure but dull. Others are like Venice. The
other woman may well be Venice. As sticky as
ice cream and hot. Flaking fa�ades. Decadence
that knocks you senseless.
"Would you like to know her name?"
"No."
"Well, it's in the report. They meet every
Thursday and Friday. Every other week, he spends
the weekend at her place."
"I understand."
He shuts the report. "May I speak from the
heart?"
"Yes."
"Then I'll begin by saying-and I hope it will
be of some comfort-that when they meet, your
husband turns off the light as soon as he
can. Her face frightens him."
"Frightens him?"
"Yellow teeth. Smoking and obscene
living. Her skin is ruined."
"Details, please."
"She lives in Madrid, on Calle del
Calvario-thinks mostly of her debts
nowadays. She believes Joan should toss
her a few bills from time to time. Not
large sums, but he does eat there and
sometimes spends days in a row with her.
T here's his bad habit of taking long
showers after their ... well, after their
lovemaking. He must use upwards of
three hundred liters, according to the
woman's own calculations, which are
probably incorrect."
"May I see it?"
He hands me the report. Beads of
sweat have formed around his nose. I flip
through the pages.
"Is it typical of the detectives' guild to
shoot out-of-focus images?"
"Typical of the guild? Do you have a
lot of experience with detectives? Other
than me?"
"I hear things."
"We have to keep a certain distance."
"l understand."
"She is not a beautiful woman."
"W hich makes everything much
worse."
He gets up. Walks around the room.
Stops by the shelf of family photos, and
says: "There are solutions."
"Solutions?"
"Yes. We know how to get rid of people."
Joan and I are smiling at each other in
our wedding photo. Behind us is a wealth
of happy people, and a bouquet of roses
flying through a sky of white petals. I look
out the window. You can see for miles
today. It's a beautiful night.
"Would you like to eat?Dinner's ready."
"No, thank you. But I'd love something
to drink."
"Let's go back to 'solutions.' How
would that work exactly? Would 1 get
photographic evidence?"
"Oh yes, we can arrange all of that.
And you can choose the murder weapon."
"What a macabre term."
"Macabre acts require macabre term.i­
nology. It doesn't take much getting used
to, and then it really is enjoyable. I have
other examples-"
"That's not necessary.I'm not interested."
''Aren't you?"
"Not at all."
[Drama]
KNIFE PLAY
By Franz Kafka, from The Lost Writings, a collection of
fragments, which will be published next month by New Direc­
tions. Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann.
I
was sitting in the box next to my wife. We were
watching a rather exciting play, all about jealousy, in
a hall of gleaming pillars, a man was just raising a
dagger to stab his wife as she was walking off. Tensely
I leaned over the parapet; against my temple I could
feel a lock of my wife's hair. Just then we both shrank
back; what we had taken for the velvet-upholstered
parapet was the back of a long, thin man, who, slen­
der as the parapet, had till that point been lying on
his front and now turned around to shift his position.
My wife clutched me in shock. His face was very near
mine, no larger than the palm of my hand, pure and
clean as wax, and with a black chin beard. "Why are
you alarming us?" I demanded, "what are you doing
here?" "Forgive me!" said the man, "I am an admirer
of your wife's; the sensation of her elbows in my ribs
made me happy." "Emil, please, protect me," cried my
wife. "My name is Emil as well," said the man, prop­
ping his head on one hand and lying there as on a
chaise: "Come here, little wifey." "You vagabond," I
said, "one more word out of you, and you'll be down
in the stalls," and, certain this word would be forth­
coming, 1 made to push him down, but it wasn't so
easy; he seemed to be part of the parapet, built into it
in some way. 1 wanted to roll him down, but he
laughed and said: "Forget it, you silly fool, don't waste
your strength, the fight is only just beginning and it
won't end until your wife gratifies my desires." "Never!"
exclaimed my wife, and turning to me: "Please push
him off!" "I can't," 1 cried, "you can see how hard I'm
trying, but there's some trick here and I can't." "Oh
dear, oh dear," wailed my wife, "what will become of
me?" "Calm yourself, please," I said, "your getting ex­
cited just makes things worse. I have a new plan: I
will take my knife and cut through the velvet uphol­
stery, and tip the whole thing down, along with this
man." But then I couldn't find my knife. "Do you
know where I put my knife?" I asked. "Do you think I
left it in my coat pocket?" I was on the point of run­
ning down to the cloakroom when my wife brought
me to reason. "You're not about to leave me on my
own now are you, Emil?" she cried. "But if I don't
have my knife- " I shouted back. "Take mine," she
said, and with trembling fingers groped through her
little handbag, of course to produce a tiny mother-of­
pearl-handled thing.
READINGS 21
 "So why the questions?"
"Female jealousy. Wouldn't that justify explor­
ing a hypothetical extermination?"
"You're being glib," he says. "As if you don't un­
derstand how serious I am. If you want, we can
continue. Otherwise we drop it right now. When it
comes to revenge, you have to make a
I
choice. You can't stay in no-ma.n's-land."
go to the kitchen. Take the fish out and light
the candles. I hear his voice.
''A phallus!"
He's walked into the office and is at the drafting
table. "W hat a fantastic drawing! ls it yours?"
"No, it's Joa.n's."
''Aha, I've watched him work, but you never see
the finished product through the window."
"It's the best thing that's been drawn on Sitges's
dime to date."
There's something a.bout that picture. It makes
everyone who sees it happy, exactly as it's sup­
posed to. I'm no exception.
"It's a proposal for a fountain."
The idea: stiff and straight, water spraying
from its tip. A towering urban orgasm, you could
say, to take place day and night, thirty meters
above people's heads.
I decide to show him the clay miniature. I have
one in iron too, which I cast and threaded a hose
through so you can watch it gush.
l'm laughing. But he looks grave.
I hurry to the kitchen. Salt-encrusted fish, luke­
warm and still edible, and various salads.
''Are you sure you don't want a bite?"
"What about him? Are you sure he won't be
coming home?"
"He never comes home on Fridays." I had to
stop myself from adding that he has meetings.
"So who did you cook for today? For me?"
"No, for him."
"But you said he doesn't come home on Fridays."
"You never know."
"I'm sorry, but this is hilarious. You're sitting
there with dinner cooling on the stove while he's
pleasuring himself with another woman. You're
unbearable. He must hate you."
"We work together. We have a lot in common."
He's getting drunk. 'Tell me a.bout you. How
you do it."
"What?"
"Don't be coy. Tell me how you fuck."
"I think it's time for you to go. I'll get the
checkbook."
'That can wait."
"You seem like a simple man. Drab and simple.
You should leave."
"I don't think so."
"I'll call the police."
"Whore."
"John."
2Z HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
We la.ugh. We're drunk now. So drunk I knock
over the wine bottle. The wine spills a.cross the
table and stains his pants.
"You can borrow a pair of my husband's trou­
sers. I'll go get them."
"I'll come with you. I haven't seen
I
the view from the bedroom yet."
like him. I feel like telling him how I do it,
and then asking him to tell me how he and his
wife do it. Or he and his whoever. But he's ear­
nest. He's suddenly not in the mood anymore.
"I have to show you the fountain in action."
I open the closet and take out the iron model,
get a bottle of cava from the refrigerator, go into the
bathroom and uncork the bottle, stick in the hose,
and push the button. The cava sprays the entire
bathroom. "Look!" I shout. Now he's laughing, too.
I raise the bottle, put it to his mouth. I drink.
I wind the hose a.round his wrists. His lips look
kissable. He says no one has ever put him in
bondage before. He doesn't have a lot of hair, is
mostly bald. His breath is sour. He is disgusting.
I tug at him.
"Let's play a game. Come on. Lie on your belly.
Bend your knees. Hands tied behind your back,
then a hose around your ankles and your neck. It's
a fun game. Lie still."
He obeys. He must be q uite drunk. He was
nice while he was letting me talk about no­
man's-land. But now the niceness has vanished
and has been replaced with the quality I didn't
like from the start.
I sit on the toilet, flipping through the report.
"There's a lot that disturbs me here."
"Sure, let's talk about it. But take the rope off."
"You mean the hose."
"I thought this was a game."
'This is a game."
"Yes, but when does it start?"
"It's not one of those games. Let's talk about
the report."
"You have to take the hose off. It's strangling
me every time I relax."
"Yes. That's the game."
"Take it off. I can't handle it anymore. I have to
vomit. I'm drunk."
"I think the report is bizarre."
"It's just a normal report, for Christ's sake."
"There are too many pictures. I think it
j puts my husband and his lover in a
bad light."
oa.n's steps on the stairs wake me. The no­
man's-land is gone, and I feel a lightness. The
bathroom door opens and I see his shoes. He's
sta11ding there, silent.
Then he puts his hand on my head, and it is
large and hot and caressing.
"Darling," he says. "Not a.gain."
1992 (Worst Nightmare), a mixed-media painting (acrylic, spray paint, feather, coin, pendant, foil, chain, lighter, duct cape, and blunc on
canvas) by Lavar Munroe, whose work will be on view next month at]aclc Bell Gallery, in Lone/on.

© The artist. Courtesy Jack Bell Gallery, London READINGS 23

 I
24 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
l
 L E T T E R F R O M
THE ART
OFLOSING
Can Democrats win back
postindustrial America?
By James Pogue
I t was cruelly cold the night I got
to Wisconsin, but I'd been ex­
pecting that. It was the sound of
the lake that surprised me. From
blocks away, you could hear waves
thudding against the crags of ice that
limned the shore-partly a function
of the total silence that had descended
on the streets of Kenosha that eve­
ning. I took this at first for the silence
of desolation, which I'd also been
expecting, but it turned out to be
only the mundane quiet of a city
whose residents had someplace in­
doors to be after dark. On this par­
ticular night, that place was anywhere
showing the divisional playoff game
between the Packers and the Sea­
hiwks. I had nowhere better to be
myself, so I bundled up in my favorite
winter coat, which I normally have
little use for, and settled in at the first
corner bar I found.
By the second quarter, the Packers
were up 21-3, each touchdown punc-
James Pogue's most recent article for Harper's
Magazine, "Good Guys with Guns," ap­
peared in the April 2020 issue.
Illustrations by Barry Falls
K E N O S H A
tuated by free shots of green liquor
and a burst of almost unbelievable ex­
uberance. Everyone danced along to
Todd Rundgren's "Bang the Drum All
Day," a song that for reasons no one
there could explain had become the
unofficial anthem of the Packers­
the only nonprofit, fan-owned major
sports franchise in the country, a
great example of Wis.consin's public­
minded tendencies. "This is what this
state is like," a drunk man in an or­
ange zip-up sweater told me. "We
have all our weird traditions we do to­
gether." Everybody seemed to be
smoking, so I bought a pack of ciga­
rettes from the bar and gambled in a
back room with a trio of young guys
from nearby Racine while watching
Aaron Rodgers close out the game.
Having recently finished an electri­
cian training course, the guys were
complaining about how little practi­
cal utility their new credential of­
fered, as recent graduates in any field
are inclined to do. I commiserated,
saying it was tough everywhere. "Not
if you're in Kenosha," one of them
LETTER FROM KENOSHA 25
said. "Kenosha is kind of where it's at
these days."
The city of Kenosha is a gray, ex­
urban strip of Lake Michigan front­
age with barely a hundred thousand
residents. Until this magazine offered
to send me there, I had never heard
of it. But Kenosha was once an iconic
union town-home to a massive
United Auto Workers local, to say
nothing of the Jockey, Snap-on, and
American Brass plants that had, not
too long ago, made it one the world's
great manufacturing centers. You can
probably guess that most of this has
pa&sed into history. And you can
also probably guess why this maga­
zine might send me there: In 2016,
after having supported Democrats in
almost every election for almost
every office for forty-four straight
years, Kenosha County broke for
Donald Trump. This was by a mar­
gin of only 238 votes, in a state
that he won by only 22,748 votes,
despite statewide polls days before
the election that showed Hillary
Clinton leading by at least five per­
centage points. Kenosha County
and neighboring Racine County
were among only a small fraction of
counties in the country that voted
for Trump after voting for Obama in
both 2008 and 2012.
By December, when I made my
travel arrangements, it appeared as
though Wisconsin would be the site
of several crucial political battles in
the weeks and months to come. It
seemed likely that Democrats would
have to win both Kenosha and Ra­
cine in 2020 to carry Wisconsin,
and certain that they would have to
win Wisconsin to beat Trump na­
tionally. More immediately, the
Wis consin prima ry, coming in
April, looked like it would be cru­
cial in determining the Democratic
nominee. And the Democratic Na­
tional Convention was scheduled to
take place in August in nearby Mil­
waukee. "People understand," Dem­
ocratic National Committee chair
Tom Perez told a Milwaukee TV sta­
tion in January, "that this is the
tipping-point state."
I was slightly reluctant to accept
the assignment-no one could possi­
bly think there was anything left to
learn from a reporter flying in to a
26 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
largely white Midwestern town, relit­
igating the 2016 election, and flying
out again. But I was taken with the
plan we'd worked out: I'd rent a house
and live in Kenosha for a month. I'd
go to churches and social clubs and
bars, maybe make some friends. I
wasn't going to focus on 2016, to
give the millionth explanation for
Trump's appeal. He was already the
president, and had been for what
felt like eons. Instead I'd talk to
Kenoshans about what kind of poli­
tics might inspire or excite them, or
at least seem palatable, in a world
where Trump was no longer a myste­
rious anomaly but a fact of life. I
thought that describing a politics
that could win in Kenosha might
IN SOUTHEASTERN WISCONSIN,
COLLECTIVE ACTION HAD M ADE IT
POSSIBLE FOR ORDINARY PEOPLE
TO LIVE PRETTY DAMN WELL
point a way for Democrats to take
back the presidency.
In January, I sublet my studio
apartment in Los Angeles, flew to
O'Hare, rented a purring silver Audi
A4 from an unmarked garage miles
from the airport (this was somehow
the cheapest option), and headed
north to begin my winter in a little
lakefront house. The night after the
Packers game the weather warmed
up slightly, and I went for a long walk
along the crashing shore. While I
was out someone broke into the
Audi and stole my prized winter coat.
There was plenty else in the car to
steal, but only the coat was missing,
which I took as a sign of a basic de­
cent Midwestern impulse to take just
what you need. I didn't bother call­
ing the police, and got to settling
into my new home.
S
oon after I arrived, I met Rick
Gallo, a genial retired postal
worker and the president of
Kenosha's AFL-CIO labor council.
His office was located in a drab build­
ing that houses a dozen or so local
union offices, though hardly anyone
else seemed to be around. When Gallo
took over in 2017, the council had
only a few thousand dollars in its
bank account and about a thousand
members. Back in the 1960s, it had
twenty thousand. I expected him to
be nostalgic about labor's heyday, but
at the time we spoke, just before the
economy started to collapse again, he
told me that Kenoshans had adapted
to a new era. "People do have jobs,"
he said. "They may need two or three
jobs to make what they had, but they
have them."
Four years of news stories about
white working-class voters looking
to Trump in a fit of desperation had
primed me to expect streets lined
with boarded-up houses and vacant
lots, so it took me a few days to real-
ize that Kenosha was actually do­
ing pretty well. When Trump
took office, the area's job growth
was two-and-a-half times the na­
tional average. The city was a
landscape of orderly blocks of
small houses with well-kept lawns
stretching west toward the new
expanses of fenced-off Uline,
Meijer, and Amazon distribution
center·s. In its relative prosperity,
Kenosha resembled many of the 205
other counties that had swung to
Trump, very few of which looked
like the devastated towns that had
become popular getaway destina­
tions for political reporters. Keno­
sha's downtown was grim and icy,
and the deepwater harbor was fro­
zen solid, but it was easy to imagine
how delightful it all would be in the
summer, with sailboats on the water
and windows of the downtown's
many bars and restaurants thrown
open to the lake air. "When you
think of all of the issues we've gone
through as a community," the Dem­
ocratic mayor, John Antaramian,
told the Kenosha News as he kicked
off his unopposed reelection cam­
paign the week I arrived, "It's a pretty
good place."
The pensions and paid-off homes
that still exist in Kenosha are rem­
nants of a union culture that devel­
oped on the shores of Lake Michigan
almost a century ago. The UAW
Local 72, which represented workers
at the lakefront American Motors
Corporation plant, was once the larg­
est local in Wisconsin. The unions
 were both social hubs and vehicles
for political engagement. They ran
campaigns co educate their members
on the political issues most per ti­
nent co their lives, and published
their own fat weeklies as counter­
weights to business-friendly newspa­
pers and TV channels. In the annual
Labor Day parade, workers marched
seven abreast, in columns
half a mile long.
Kenosha was a place
where solidarity had a
concrete public mean­
ing, one formed in large
part by the power of the
local. "When they went
on strike, you know, the
whole community was
on it," Gallo said. "So if
they were picketing out
at the plant, or say out at
Ame rican Brass, we
would go pick up ham­
burgers or something at
their local places and
bring them over and give
them to the strikers,
bring them wood to
burn to keep warm." By
the 1960s, southeastern
Wisconsin had one of
the highest per capita
incomes in America,
and hence the world­
not because it was home
co a handful of rich peo-
ple, but because collec-
tive action had made it
possible for ordinary
people to live pretty
damn well. "People
joined things," said Gal-
·L
lo, be it a union, a frater-
nal organization, or a church. "You
would join groups much more readily
than today."
The erosion of this lifestyle is a fa­
miliar story. It began with manufac­
turers moving South in the 1980s,
looking for cheap labor in states with
right-to-work laws and weak unions.
By the 1990s, when Democrats and
Republicans had reached a consensus
that what was good for the board­
room was good for America, corpora­
tions had begun looking abroad. In
1993, President Bill Clinton ratified
the North American Free Trade
Agreemem over the desperate oppo-
sition of labor groups and Midwestern
Democrats such as House majority
leader Dick Gephardt, who called the
treaty "a threat to our wages and our
standard of living."
That standard of living in the
working-class Midwest fell away. In­
comes stagnated, life expectancies
began to fall, and suicide rates began
to rise. Gallo thought that Clinton
hadn't understood what NAFTA
would do, and had signed it because
advisers and business leaders told him
that global free markets were the in­
evitable future. "In hindsight, I would
call it a betrayal," Gallo said. "But at
the time I don't think that we foresaw
how much of a difference it would
make-on the entire sector, on the
union movement itself. And, you know,
on this area."
In much of the Midwest, auto­
assembly plants were the last to leave,
allowing automakers to sell cars as
"American-made" even as the produc-
tion of parts shifted to Ontario, then
Mexico, then China. But factory clo­
sure came early in Kenosha: Chrysler
bought AMC in 1987 and shut down
the lakefront plant. The county began
rebuilding with non-union warehouse
jobs, eventually attracting the Ama­
zon and Uline distribution centers by
offering tax breaks and free land. In
2009, Chrysler received
$12.5 billion in govern­
ment bailouts, then
promptly announced
that it would be shutter­
ing its only remaining
factory in the region, an
engine plant a mile in­
land that employed some
eight hundred people.
Activists distributed
postcards to the workers
to be sent to Obama,
who had just won indus­
trial counties in Wiscon­
sin by margins a Demo­
crat hadn't achieved in
a generation-in part
by promising the first
sweeping legislative ex­
pansion of labor's orga­
nizing power in decades
in the form of the Em­
ployee Free Choice Act
(EFCA). "Dear President
Obama," the cards read,
"It would be a betrayal of
your goal of investing in
America if Chrysler is
allowed to close the
Kenosha plant and im­
port the very same en­
gine from Mexico." By
October 2010, the plant
had closed, and two
years later it was demolished. The
EFCA was never passed.
I mentioned co Gallo that, despite
decades of apparent deception from
the Democratic Par ty, people in
Kenosha didn't seem very angry. "Af­
ter forty years of filing grievances
and screaming and yelling at peo­
ple," he said, "I probably have gotten
to a point where I'm not jumping up
on the table anymore."
A
fter a week or so I started to
settle into a routine: every
night I would either try out a
new bar or stop by the Family Video
LETTER FROM KENOSHA 27
to pick up a DVD and a pack of CBD
gummies, since it turned out my
house didn't have Wi-Fi. I bought a new
suit, in case I got to meet Mayor Anta­
ramian, who had not been returning
my calls. I took up snowshoeing, and
fished for winter-run steelhead behind
an abandoned motel in Racine where
gruff old anglers in waders rubbed
elbows with homeless people and
teenage potheads. I couldn't recall
reporting from any place where poli­
tics was less on display, from the lack
of yard signs to bar conversations
that tended to avoid the subject en­
tirely. (The chief exception was a
single group of retirees holding anti­
Trump signs on Main Street in Ra­
cine. ) This invisibility was partly a
product of Trump supporters looking
to avoid offending their more union­
sympathetic friends and neighbors.
But it was also the result of a broader
Midwestern reticence, a reluctance to
discuss subjects on which opinion
might be split.
Shortly into my stay, the D emo­
cratic primary race had sharpened
into a choice between Bernie Sand­
ers and everyone else, as he began to
take on the role his devotees had al­
ways hoped he would: running not
only as the farthest-left option but as
a candidate who rejected outright
the political consensus of the past
fifty years. In Wisconsin, the Sanders
campaign was cochaired by Mark
Pocan, a congressman who had
grown up in Kenosha and paid his
way through the University of Wis­
consin by doing magic shows at the
Local 72 union hall downtown. He
was as disillusioned about the state
of our politics as anyone: "There's
fifteen hundred pharmaceutical
lobbyists in Washington, D.C.," he
said when I visited his Madison of­
fice. "That's three for every member
of the House and the Senate. I
don't know who my three are, but
that's fucked-up."
Pocan's diagnmis was simple: peo­
ple would be won away from Trump
only when they recognized that he
was never going to change the fun­
damental economic structures that
had wrecked their way of life. "Peo­
ple thought at first, 'Oh he's going
to fight China, this'll help, '" he said.
"They thought, 'Yeah, I don't see
28 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
anyone talking about my interests.
I'll just stay home.'" He believed
that talking about guaranteeing
health care, keeping jobs in Wis­
consin, and reclaiming some of the
power that corporations wield over
our daily lives were the keys to get­
ting out the vote, and to winning.
"Folks are realizing that no matter
how much they thought chat Trump
was going to support them, it hasn't
turned out better," Pocan told me.
At the time, this sounded to me like
a persuasive pitch.
Pocan was one of a few people who
mentioned the weekly newspapers
that Kenosha's unions once pub­
lished. Curious, I went to the down­
town l ibrary to check out the
archives. In the course of my (ulti­
mately failed) search, I stumbled
upon something more recent: the
January issue of a cheery little paper
called the Labor Times. It was clearly
a passion· project, with helpful no­
tices about benefits, meetings for
union retirees, and local political
happenings. I called the contact
number listed and found myself in­
vited into the cozy ranch house of a
woman named Mary Modder, a re­
tired special-education teacher and
mother of five who had been elected
president of the local teachers' union
in 2009. "It's the biggest union left in
Kenosha now," she said.
The year after Modder took over
the union, Wisconsin elected as
governor Scott Walker, a square­
jawed, dourly religious career poli­
tician then known as the mostly
uncontroversial executive of Milwau­
kee County. "Teachers didn't really
get out to vote," Modder said. "The
union people didn't really get out
the vote." They hadn't known what
to expect. Wisconsin had a home­
grown tradition of political congeni­
ality and soft egalitarianism that
traced its origins to the days of Rob­
ert La Follette and the Progressives.
Even in 1948, when Joseph McCarthy
was a Wisconsin senator, Milwaukee
had a Socialist mayor (Frank Zeidler,
who served until 1960). The state's
earnest belief in cooperative good
government had a name, the Wis­
consin Idea: a "deep conviction that
the role of government was not to
stumble along like a drunkard in the
dark," as Adlai Stevenson put it, "but
to light its way by the best torches of
knowledge and understanding it
could find."
Wisconsin was still far from para­
dise.Despite the friendly trappings of
state politics, the southeastern part
of the state was-and remains­
harshly segregated,like many heavily
unionized industrial areas. According
to one analysis of recent census data,
the quality of life for black residents
in Milwaukee and Racine is among
the worst in the country. But many
still believed that the Wisconsin Idea
offered a framework to address some
of these issues, and its long history
meant that Madder was caught by
surprise when Walker set out not
only to depart from the state's col­
laborative traditions, but to kill
them off entirely. Almost immedi­
ately after taking office, Walker
shocked even his fellow Republi­
cans by pushing through a law that
outlawed collective bargaining for
public-sector workers. The legisla­
tion,known as Act 10,represented
a push to dismantle workers' rights,
but also signaled a war on the Demo­
cratic Party's capacity to maintain a
political base in Wisconsin."If Act 10
is enacted in a dozen more states,"
Grover Norquist wrote in 2017, "the
Democratic Party would cease to be a
power in this country. It's that big
a deal."
The state was torn apart by
months of protests, but Walker re­
mained resolute. He wanted to di­
vide the state, a fact that many
Wisconsinites found hard to believe
at first. Madder had been used to
seeing the governorship swap par­
ties. "Either way there wasn't a huge
difference," she said. " You have a
Republican for a few years, you have
a Democrat for a few years. Noth­
ing really changes." That compla­
cency was a key factor in Walker's
victory-voters were excited that
someone was changing something.
He signed a right-to-work bill that
cut union membership in half over
three years, and oversaw a redis­
tricting effort so extreme that in
2018 Democrats won 53 percent of
the votes for state assembly candi­
dates but ended up with only 36 per­
cent of the seats.
Democrats were stuck complain­
ing about Walker while lacking a
clear alternative vision, and ended
up losing gubernatorial elections in
both 2012 and 2014. Finally, in 2018,
amid the broader sweep of the mid­
terms, Wisconsin Democrats man­
aged to beat him. Gallo, who turned
out to be a friend of Madder's, had
told me he knew a lot of union voters
who stuck with Walker even after
Act 10 . " You've got hundreds of
. thousands of people protesting, and
still ... some of those folks continued
to support the other side," he said.
"Doesn't make sense."
"It was divide and conquer," said
Madder. She seemed truly sad to see
ScoTT WALKER SET ouT NOT ONLY
TO DEPART FROM THE STATE'S
COLLABORATIVE TRADITIONS, BUT
TO KILL THEM OFF ENTIRELY
how quickly the state's political tradi­
tions had fallen apart. "There were
such hateful comments about teach­
ers," she told me, remembering the
wars over Act 10. "I had never heard
people talk that way about teachers,
unions, or the public sector." She gave
me a back issue of the Labor Times
that she thought I'd be interested in,
about a workshop she had attended
with her husband, Marvin, called
"How to Disagree Without Being Dis­
agreeable," part of a national dialogue­
building project. "It was fine," she said,
but it was hard to find Republican
voters who wanted to participate.
"The red side here doesn't seem real
interested in engaging," Marvin inter­
jected. "Well,they've been called a lot
of names," she said charitably. "And
they're feeling a little defensive."
This defensiveness helped to solid­
ify Walker's support: as Democrats
spent the better part of a decade at­
tacking Walker's actions as outra­
geous or beyond the political pale,the
governor's voters only grew more
committed. Twenty-four of the state's
seventy-two counties flipped Republi­
can in 2012 after voting for Obama
four years earlier. Every single one of
these counties went strongly for
Trump in 2016,some of them by thirty
points or more.
After my visit with Madder, 1 tried
the mayor again, having already
called him a dozen or so times with­
out a response. When I didn't get an
answer I headed off to the local
Swedish-American club, where they
held weekly games of euchre, which
I'd grown up playing in Ohio. I ar­
rived too late to join, but I sat down
at the bar and was invited to play
trivia by a letter carrier in her fifties
named Debbie Whitefoot. She knew
Gallo, too, from their years working
for the Postal Service. Everyone
seemed to know everyone. She had
grown up on a dairy farm out in the
rural reaches of the county. "It
was all stern old Germans," she
said. "They liked hard work and
they liked beer." She was not what
anyone would call conservative,
but she liked the traditions and rou­
tines that living in the same place
all her life had imparted, which
she thought everyone needed.She
hadn't voted for Tru mp-she
thought he was rude-but she didn't
understand the frenzy that he pro­
voked in Democrats: "It seems like
they always just want to jump up and
complain about whatever he says." If
anything, the reactions he induced
had only endeared him to her. ''I'd
probably vote for him, but I'm wor­
ried he'll privatize the Postal Ser­
vice," she said. "I don't think he's
perfect. But I don't think he's doing
such a bad job."
We dominated trivia,thanks to my
ability to identify the six states that
border Nebraska and Whitefoot's to
correctly name-in order-the six
most popular breakfast cereals in
America.We won a $15 gift certificate.
S
pending time in Kenosha led
me to notice a lazy tic in Amer­
ican political writing, one that
I was as guilty of as anyone: the ten­
dency to assume that the driving
force in our politics is rage. Trump
voters, in this conception of things,
are angry at elites and immigrants,
Bernie diehards are angry at bil­
lionaires and landlords, MSNBC­
watching liberals are outraged that
Trump's presidency is a Russian in­
telligence operation.
LETTER FROM KENOSHA 29
 Many people these days do have
political views that are shaped by
indignation-especially the sort of
people who spend too much time
watching cable news or reading Twit­
ter, as most journalists do. But I hadn't
met anyone in Kenosha who seemed
nearly as angry as I constantly felt, my
brain whipped into a fizz of hyper­
stimulation every morning as I
scanned Twitter before heading off for
a day of reporting. One evening, I
went to an evangelical church to hear
a talk given to a thousand or so pa­
rishioners on how to vote one's Chris­
tian conscience in the age of Trump.
I had been invited to the event by
Crystal Miller, a young mother of
three who was a co-organizer of the
Southeastern Wisconsin Republi­
can Women's Association. She
considered herself a pro-life, pro­
business conservative who was left
with Trump as her only option. Her
son, she told me, was a different
story. He had taken a bus up to
Milwaukee to attend a Trump rally,
and had a giant poster of a shirtless
Trump firing an automatic rifle on
his wall-a gift from his grandparents.
At the church, he was dressed in a
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hoodie.
I asked if everyone at his school was a
big Trump fan, and he smirked. " No,"
he said. "It's just what I'm into."
While it was likely that the major­
ity of attendees were going to vote
for Trump, they mostly seemed com­
fortable and middle class, which
made sense given that the Trump re­
volt was fundamentally a bourgeois
one-the median household income
of his primary voters was $72,000,
compared with a nationwide median
of $56,000. T his was as true in
Kenosha as it was nationally, and
hinted at something that liberals
would find even more frightening
than working-class rage: the notion
that even the relatively comfortable
feel dissatisfied, alienated, anxious
about the future-that they, too,
might doubt that the economic,
technological, and social upheavals
that have marked modern American
life have actually been for the better.
No one in Kenosha thought
Trump was going to resurrect the
glory days of American industry, but
everyone, no matter which side they
30 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
were on, shared a sense that some­
thing had been lost-that not so
long ago life in Kenosha had been
defined by security and stability, that
one could have invested time in a
church or a social organization with
the expectation that one's children
would someday invest time and care
of their own.
I decided to change tactics, to stop
talking with the sorts of people who
followed politics or were directly in­
volved in it, and instead seek out.
people whose opinions I couldn't an­
ticipate before turning on the recorder.
T his meant talking to people in their
thirties or younger. Almost none of
the younger people I met in Kenosha
cared about party politics. "My dad
EVERYONE FELT THAT SOME THING
HAD BEEN LOST-THAT NO T LONG
AGO LIFE IN KENOSHA HAD BEEN
DEFINED BY SECUR ITY AND STABILITY
used to tell me about the Eighties," a
thirtysomething sheet-metal worker
named Britton told me when we
started talking downtown at an Irish
dive that served $5 hamburgers. He
wore a long, black beard and huge
gauges in his ears, the kind favored
by Midwestern punks in the early
2000s. "You come into a bar, they
already know your order. You sit in
that same seat, they already set out
your change because they know what
you're gonna pay with." He gestured
to indicate some empty stools. "You
get twenty guys lined up after work,
they're all relaxed because they know
the money's good. T hink about it­
you're making eighteen, twenty dol­
lars an hour back then. Everyone was
a king."
Britton, the son of a sheriff's deputy,
was a member of the tin-workers'
union. He told me about the punk
shows he used to attend at the
Swedish-American club, which I fig­
ured would make him a natural
Sanders supporter, but Britton had
little interest in politics. He found
his own union useful for landing
jobs, but he took no particular pride
in being a union member and seemed
faintly puzzled by the idea of a union
as a vehicle for politics or community
engagement. " T he union reps are
mostly, like, egotistical kinds of peo­
ple," he said.
He knew a lot of Trump guys from
high school, and he saw aspects of the
appeal: the flag-waving, the camara­
derie, the thrill of losing yourself in
loyalty to a distant figure, all of which
had more to do with why anyone I
talked to in Kenosha voted for Trump
than his promises to restore lost jobs.
Britton offered to introduce me to
some of these Trump supporters, but
then thought better of it. "You gotta
understand," he said. "Some of these
guys are really racist." I realized I had
been detaining him somewhat-he
had to hustle off to make a pizza for
his girlfriend and their child. "I
just don't follow the politics," he
said before leaving. "I try to make
little changes around here. I really
think that's the only thing that
makes a difference."
A few days later, I stopped into
a storefront social-services center
across from the closed brass
foundry. My parents were both so­
cial workers, and I had an idea that
members of the profession were as
likely as anyone to understand the
effects of politics on the lives of
Kenoshans. A fatherhood support
group was just wrapping up, and the
office administrator suggested I talk
to the meeting leader, a tall, deep­
voiced, black thirty-one-year-old
named Sharmain Harris. Harris had
started selling drugs after he gradu­
ated high school, becoming a dealer
of some renown in the majority­
black Uptown neighborhood before
he was set up by an informant and
sent to prison for two and a half
years. After his release, and the
birth of his first child, Harris joined
the support group and began volun­
teering as a recruiter of new mem­
bers. After successfully growing the
program, he was offered a full-time
position as a group coordinator.
Harris's appealing redemption story
had since made him into something
of a local celebrity.
While Harris had little sympathy
for Trump supporters, he didn't
think Trump's presidency had been
quite the calamity that others made it
out to be, mostly because the Demo­
cratic alternative no longer seemed
very different. "Obama wasn't perfect
either," he said. "It's like, an agenda
gets talked about, and then histori­
cally we've seen them get in and do
some Bill Clinton shit." Harris, like
Britton, seemed to miss a kind of life
that he had never actually known.
Plenty of the fathers in his group
had jobs at Meijer or Amazon distri­
bution centers, but they weren't ca­
reer jobs like his grandfather's union
job at AMC. His father was a pas­
tor, and Harris was religious, but he
thought a lot of pastors had abdicated
their roles as social and political
leaders and were more concerned
with money than with the issues
that affected their parishioners' lives.
"The church has become a feel-good
type of place," he said. And the
NAACP in Kenosha, he told me, "is
out for themselves."
He asked me whether I knew the
names of any of my great-grandfathers,
and seemed surprised when I said I
did. People of our generation, both
black and white, were living without
a sense of community or history, he
thought. He told me about a conver­
sation he'd had with Bob Wirch,
Kenosha's longtime Democratic state
senator. "I told him who my dad was,
and he said, 'Oh, you come from
good stock.'" Harris laughed. "I was
like, 'What the fuck you mean
stock-like I'm a slave?' But then I
asked my dad and I understood what
he meant."
Harris's words echoed much of
what I had heard from other
Kenoshans: that money and self­
interest drive even the few non­
commercial social institutions-trade
unions and churches-that we have
left, that neither politicians nor poli­
tics are to be trusted. This isn't to say
that Trump's supporters aren't moti­
vated by factors like racism or xeno­
phobia, which is m.anifestly the case.
But narratives of Trumpism's rise of­
ten gloss over a reality of American
life that Democrats, with few excep­
tions, have refused to admit: many
people in the country no longer be-
lieve that the ideals of America are
worth buying into.
If only a small fraction of the
people in Kenosha County who dis­
liked Trump and his diehards but
saw no other reason to care about
politics could be persuaded to vote,
a Democrat would win there in a
landslide. But to win them over, the
Democratic Party would have to ac­
knowledge that something much
bigger than Trump has gone wrong
in our society. It would take letting
go of the mythical American story of
steady, forward progress. And this is a
myth that Democrats don't seem
ready to abandon.
T
he night after I met Harris, I
stopped in at Kenosha's unof­
ficial gay bar, which I liked
because it was cheap and raucous,
and because the owner had once
brandished a liquor bottle at me for
talking politics; ever since, I had
gone there when I needed a night
off But this particular evening, the
bartender surprised me by launching
LETTER FROM KENOSHA 31
 "One helluva team of
writers has produced a
book you'll be dipping
into for years."
- JIM BOUTON, AUTHOR OF BALL FOUR
RIJLES OF THE GAME
THE BEST SPOUTS
WIUTINC l;HOM
1/Alll'Ell'S MAG1lZINE
PREFACE BY ROY BLOUNT JR.
Rules of the Game: The
Best Sports Writing from
Harper's Magazine uncovers
funny, touching, exciting, in­
triguing stories of the sport­
ing life, both professional and
amateur. These essays show
that how we play and write
about sports reflects and cele­
brates our nation's character.
This collection includes some
of the most well-known and re­
spected writers of the past cen­
tury, including Mark Twain,
Tom Wolfe, Shirley Jackson,
Lewis H. Lapham, Gary
Cartwright, A. Bartlett Gia­
matti, Pete Axthelm, George
Plimpton, and Rich Cohen.
EDITED BY MATTHEW STEVENSON
AND MICHA EL MARTIN
FRANKLIN
,QllARE
l'I\ESS
PUBLISHED BY FRANKLIN SQUARE PRESS
DISTRIBUTED BY MIDPOINT TRADE BOOKS,
A DIVISION OF IPG
into what I took at first to be a rant
about Trump, but was actually about
one of his customers, an old man sit­
ting alone in the dark back room,
watching Tucker Carlson and drink­
ing a glass of ice water. "He thinks I
give a fuck about Trump," the bar­
tender said, "but what I care about is
that he makes me put on that TV and
he sits back there and drives away
business." I invited myself to sit down
next to the man, who. introdt.1ced
himself as Bob Watring. He was
seventy-six, a former UAW member
who'd done maintenance work at the
AMC plant back in the 1970s, and he
seemed glad for the company. Wa­
tring turned out to be something of
a dean of local Republicanism and
had made a good living as what the
Kenosha News had once called a
"rogue developer," transforming corn­
fields into subdivisions during the
slow collapse of Midwestern family
farms, a process that had hit Wiscon­
sin harder than almost any other
state. He lived down the street from
the bar, in a luxury condo tower he'd
built on land reclaimed from the old
American Motors plant. "I worked my
ass off," he said, "gambling and taking
chances on real estate. And it paid
off." He'd been a Republican since
the Nixon era, but he told me he was
a great lover of unions, a fact that
he didn't regard as contradictory.
"T hey did NAFTA, and they crushed
our unions," he said. "Can you show
me a Democrat that's out for the little
guy? I like Trump because he's for the
little guy." -
I ended up spending a lot of time
with Watring. He took me around to
the Moose Lodge, and out to a three­
dollar dinner at Bob's on Sheridan,
where he introduced me to a dance
teacher from the YMCA who was so
fond of Trump that she once got hypo­
thermia standing in line for a rally.
Watring also brought me to see John
Pence, Mike Pence's nephew, give a talk
to a packed room of Trump volunteers,
already in full campaign mode two
weeks before the Iowa caucuses.
Given Wisconsin's key role in the
election, I had assumed that locals
were going to be paying close atten­
tion to the caucuses. On the evening
of the contest, I set off early to find a
bar showing the returns. Having no
32 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
luck in Kenosha-at one bar I tried,
the bartender asked me what "caucu­
ses" meant-I headed up to Racine.
Soon I'd been to six places, every sin­
gle one of which had been showing a
basketball game between North Car­
olina and North Carolina State. I fi­
nally convinced a bartender on Main
Street in Racine to put on the Iowa
coverage, which she routed through
the bar's sound system because I
was the only patron. As the results
came in, it was apparent that Bernie
would not, as I had expected, storm to
an early win. I glumly got drunk.
Two men walked in and sat down
while Elizabeth Warren was giving
her speech. "Turn that off. I can't
stand her voice," one yapped at the
bartender. " W hat's happening, an
election?" We watched in silence as
the coverage shifted to Pete Butti­
gieg. "I heard that faggot was in the
army," the same man said. The other
shook his head. "T hat's crazy." 'The
Democrats are funny," said the first.
"If you hate Trump so much, why are
you always talking about him?"
I
was beginning to get sick of talk­
ing about him, too, and was get­
ting ready to leave Wisconsin. But
before I did, I went to a bar in down­
town Kenosha on a Saturday morning
for its monthly all-you-can-eat Labor
Breakfast. Gallo and Madder were
both there, and they introduced me to
a bewildering array of elected officials
and union figures. It turned out that a
number of people had heard that there
was a reporter in town and knew who
I was. I had never been in a place
where so many people were so excited
to talk to me. For much of the break­
fast, I spoke with a small, elderly man
with a gray ponytail who'd been in the
UAW and for whom the custom of the
breakfast was a point of great pride.
" We never had less than thirty people
here," he said. "Not once."
I was still standing with him when 1
was pulled aside by a richly mustachioed
figure. This was Mayor Antaramian,
who had served two nonconsecutive
stints in office, spanning three decades.
I reproached him for ignoring my in­
terview requests. "I fi g ured we'd run
into each other eventually," he said.
I had been struggling with how to
write a piece of political analysis about
a place that wasn't doing so badly by
the measures that we typically take
as objective standards-employment,
per capita income-but that was
nonetheless suffused with a sense of
powerlessness and rumbling dissatis­
faction. I thought that the mayor
would find this vague and insubstan­
tial, but when I asked him why he
thought Trump had won the county,
he surprised me by more or less echo­
ing my own thoughts. "You've got a
lot of these older folks," he said, "who
don't feel involved anymore." I said I
didn't think it was just older folks,
and he nodded.
"You've got a group of people out
there, and a fairly large group of peo­
ple, that are angry, and they feel like
they've been left behind," said Anca­
ramian. "I don't know ifNAITA was
reversed they would come back. I
think it's not policy but root policy."
By root policy, Antaramian was
talking about offering ordinary peo­
ple a sense of meaningful participa­
tion in public life. And even though
I hadn't seen much outright anger, 1
thought I knew what he meant­
that the anger he saw wasn't so much
rage against elites or ethnic resent­
ment or a hankering for lost indus­
trial glory as it was a desire for an
America that was actually responsive
to their voices and input. At the
time, 1 believed that Sanders was
offering such a root policy-an ag­
gressive vision of a more equal and
caring country, of American life as a
cooperative, public project-and I
thought that if he ended up losing
the nomination, the Trump move­
ment would end up being the only
force left with any political vitality,
making the idea of flipping a county
like Kenosha unthinkable. But it
turned out that the mayor spoke for
most Democrats when he told me
that his chief political purpose was
getting rid of Trump, and that he
didn't know what exactly would
come afterward. "That's sort of a
great question in American politics
right now," he said. "W hat is the
political vision that energizes people
across.... " He trailed off. ''And clearly
no one knows the answer."
He got up to give his monthly
speech to the breakfast attendees.
The topic was the lakefront. Keno-
sha is built right up against the
water-lake shipping was the cheap­
est and easiest way to move heavy
goods when the city was developed.
On windy days, the waves carry such
force that they surge over the sea­
walls and jetties and toss ice and
boulders through windows and onto
the streets. The old AMC plant was
built so close to the water that an
owner once threatened to lock strik­
ing workers out and toss the keys
over the fence and into the lake. The
mayor explained that water levels in
the Great Lakes had historically risen
and fallen predictably, but that the
pattern was starting to shift as cli­
mate change led to increased precipi­
tation. Water levels were at a record
high, and were expected to keep ris­
ing, threatening to overwhelm the
seawalls that protected downtown.
W hat they'd thought was a simple
swell now looked like it might turn
into a flood.
I
left Wisconsin in mid-February,
telling everyone I'd see them
soon, when I returned for the
convention. I followed the Sanders
campaign to New Hampshire and
was at a Trump rally in Manchester
the day before the primary, where 1
witnessed his infamous theorizing
about the novel coronavirus: "When
it gets a little warmer it miraculously
goes away." And I was there the next
day, when Sanders won. In the days
that followed, the coronavirus began
to spread across the country and
mainline Democrats seemingly made
an unofficial pact to unite behind
Biden. By April 7, when Wisconsin
was to hold its primary, Biden and
Sanders were the only candidates
left in the race.
Despite the worsening pandemic,
Republicans insisted on in-person
voting, seemingly because they
thought it would help their chances
in a state Supreme Court race the
same day. (The Republican-backed
candidate went on to lose.) "The
Wisconsin coal mine is knee-deep in
dead canaries," the state's Democratic
chairman said ahead of the vote.
"Every possible alarm bell about a
partisan divide so extreme as to be
potentially lethal in a literal sense
has been rung."
Watring, unworried despite his age,
voted in person. "I was in and out in
fifteen minutes," he said. "I told the
TV station my mind, that the gover­
nor can't just change an election at the
last minute. You can go to a liquor
store and get beer-why can't you
have an election?"
Biden won the primary, of course,
and Sanders dropped out the follow­
ing day. Over the next few weeks,
Kenosha and Racine quietly became
pandemic hot spots, but on May 13,
following a lawsuit from state assem­
bly leader and former Walker ally
Robin Vos, the state Supreme Court
struck down the Democratic gover­
nor's stay-at-home order. Bars across
much of the state promptly reopened
and filled up. "The place is bustling,"
Trump said of the state. Coins, a
sports bar on 52nd Street in Kenosha
where I had once lost five dollars in
a game of darts, was packed as soon as
the order was lifted. Most of the other
bars in town stayed closed at first,
not wanting to risk public health
just to serve drinks. But there was
money to be made, and soon after,
bar owners along 1-94 were doing a
lively trade, serving partiers driving
up from locked-down Chicago.
A few weeks earlier, I had called
Modeler to check in. She had just
finished a new issue of the Labor
Times. "Good gracious, we've got the
big yard and the hot tub, so we're
okay," she said. "Sorry if that's too
much information." She'd been able
to get her quadriplegic son-in-law out
of an assisted-living facility, and had
mostly stayed at home, occasionally
leaving the keys in her truck so that
volunteers from her church could use
it to pick up supplies in Milwaukee
for the local food bank. She'd voted
early. "I posted a picture of Robin
Vos on my Facebook," she said.
"Man, there were people wanting to
kill him! I had to take it down, be­
cause I don't need death and destruc­
tion on my Facebook." She said she
was happy about Biden. "He's an old
guy like us," she said. "And regardless
of whether he's as progressive as one
might hope, we like him well
enough. What I'm excited about is
that we might get a woman vice pres­
ident," she added. "So if Biden, you
know, were to step down, we might
LETTER FROM KENOSHA JJ
 get a woman president. And wouldn't
that be exciting?"
She was relieved to finally have a
nominee to get behind, and that the
process hadn't been nearly as long or
ugly as most people had ex pected.
But I had trouble imagining most
ordinary Kenoshans sharing that
enthusiasm. In early May, there were
reports about safety conditions at
MKEl and MKE5, two of the big
Amazon distribution centers that had
been such a large part of Kenosha's
rebirth. The facilities hadn't started
requiring masks until April 16, but no
one knew how many people were get­
ting sick, because Amazon had
barred the county from conducting
inspections. By May 21, at l east
thirty-two workers at Kenosha's Am­
azon facilities had fallen ill, and the
head of the county health depart­
ment floated the idea of using the
National Guard to force Amazon to
allow inspectors inside. The employ­
ees themselves had little recourse.
"There's talk of it all the time," one
worker at MKE5 told the Milwaukee
SUBSCRIBE TO Journal Sentinel, with regard to col­
lective organizing. "The problem is
The Weekly Archive we're all strung out, pushed to the
limit, there's just no energy left. They
Newsletter from wear people out, wreck their knees,
shoulders, backs, and replace them."
Harper's Magazine These struggles far predated the
Trump presidency, and it was going
to take much more than a change in
political scenery to fix them.
a curated selection Meanwhile, as police brutality
protests spread across the country af­
of excellent writing ter the murder of George Floyd-less
an uprising over a single killing than
that helps put the a public reexamination of the stories
this nation has always told itself
week's events into about justice and progress-it be­
came even more evident that many
greater context, Americans weren't interested in
delivered to steadiness or incrementalism. They
were ready for a radical overhaul,
your inbox whether or not our politicians were
on the same page. The protests made
* free of charge * it impossible for Biden to credibly ap­
peal to an imagined center. The di­
vide was clear: you either believed
that it was reasonable to call in the
military to stop people from busting
windows in strip malls, or you saw in
the passion of the protests the poten­
tial for a new and better country.
Biden thus made a show of embrac-
34 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
ing the energy of the streets, visiting
a protest and taking a knee in front
of a young black protester.
A few days later, the Biden cam­
paign announced that it rejected
the idea of defunding police depart­
ments, one of the demonstrators'
central demands. The Democrats
had returned to their guiding prin­
ciple of moderation, even though
the only forces with the political
energy to match Trumpism-the
protesters so fed up that they were
willing to physically challenge po­
lice, or the legions that Sanders
mobilized for his campaign-are al­
most as disdainful of this style of
politics as they are of Trump's.
Still, the Democrats' strategy might
work out this November. Trump's
response to the pandemic and the
protests has been so wanton and
self-serving that enough Americans
might be convinced to vote for a
candidate offering steadiness. But
tacking toward the middle will do
nothing to sway the Kenoshans I
met, among the many Americans
who have decided that voting changes
very little, and that both parties are
more beholden to the elite than to
ordinary citizens.
In the long run, a Democratic
Party that wants to govern is going
to have to respond to this feeling,
not by offering incremental reforms
in policing, or tweaks to existing
health care laws, but by beginning a
real transformation. It will require
new structures-we have not yet
tried to govern a metropolis without
a police force, but we soon might-as
well as a recommitment to things
that the Democrats have abandoned,
like organized labor. It will take ad­
mitting that the morass we've ended
up in was not created by accident. It
will take naming the people who
brought us to this point, and it will
take a willingness to confront them
and to make enemies-something
Republicans have long been happy to
do. It will, finally, take a political
project that can match the feeling of
participation and excitement that the
Trump movement has offered. Demo­
crats picked a candidate who has
promised to return the country to
normal. That may end up being the
most dangerous choice of all. ■
 F R O M
THE IDEAL STATE
P eople in Chicago wi II tell you that
there is a happy land not far away.
Sitting on the ash heap of their own
miseries, they mournfully explain that
just over the Wisconsin border every­
thing is different. There public offi­
cials do not steal and banks do not
fail; there criminals are not only ar­
rested but mercilessly and swiftly con­
victed; there, believe it or not, an
afterglow of prosperity still lingers. It
sounds too good to be true.
If you cross the state line and in­
spect this earthly paradise, you may
begin to think it isn't true. As I went
around the state, people told me fa­
mi liar stories of idle factories and
farm foreclosures, of mounting num­
bers of unemployed and relief funds
reduced to the vanishing point.
An old proverb has it that cheese,
peas, and Germans made Wisconsin
prosperous. The great forests have
been largely swept away by the rapa­
cious lumbermen of the past, but
there is still some lumber business,
and the paper mills that were built
when the raw material was close at
hand are mostly still going. Two or
three big automobile factories are
getting along, but Wisconsin industry
is largely small-scale. The Progres­
sives claim credit for its comparative
stability; their opponents claim that
current policies will drive all indus­
try, large and small, out of the state.
Wisconsin unemployment may not
look like much of a problem from
Chicago, but it looks pretty tough
in Wisconsin.
From "Wisconsin Is Different," which appeared in the October 1932 issue of Harper's Magazine. The complete article-along with the magazine's
entire 170-year archive-is available online at harpers.org/archive.
T H E A R C
1 9 3 2
By Elmer Davis
T here are other states, both urban
and rural, where a public official
can be caught in all kinds of skulldug­
gery and still be reelected by a record
l in his old home state, or to write suc­
�� '
"(
majority. Apparently not in Wisconsin;
politicians have to be good, whether
they want to or not. It was not always
so. In the old days, when politics all
over the country was more flagrantly
corrupt than it is today, Wisconsin was
just as flagrant as anybody. If it is dif­
ferent now, that is because the people
have been taught to take an interest in
their government-a continuing inter­
est, not merely at election time. Every­
body in the state is continually excited
over the need to save the common­
wealth from a gang of scoundrels, yet
Wisconsin goes on being governed
pretty honestly whichever side wins.
H V E
However, one must take note of the
remarks of the most articulate of re­
cent Wisconsin expatriates, the nov­
elist and poet Glenway Wescott, who
apparently finds it impossible to live
cessfully about anything else. He
observes: "One would think of Wis­
consin as the ideal state to live in, a
paragon of civic success, but for the
fact that the young people dream
only of getting away."
I distrust the neo-agrarian philos­
ophy because the virtues of the soil
are usually hymned by somebody
who knows the soil only from play­
ing golf on it. Anybody who gets up
i n the icy darkness of a winter
morning to feed the stock, or spends
torrid summer afternoons stooping
over tobacco plants to pick off the
worms, is likely to feel by the time
he is twenty that he has had enough
of the soil. Still, there is this about
the soil-on it, you can eat. And a
great many of the bright young peo­
ple are going back to it now for that
reason alone.
Some day, perhaps, we may be
able to strike a balance; now that the
last frontier, the cit y, has been
worked out like all the other fron­
tiers, people may realize that in the
main it will pay them to try to be
satisfied where they are, rather than
to pull up stakes and go somewhere
else. W hen or if that day of sanity
and disillusionment ever comes, it
ought to be a little easier to be satis­
fied in Wisconsin. ■
ARCHIVE 35
 M S C E L L A N Y

FALSE DAWN
A zuihitsu from the early months of the pandemic
By Khadijah Queen

1. sleep? Did I make a mistake leaving it writing desk in my bedroom. The

I
collect living things at the end of
their lives. Faint, failed. Gift of a
rose half-bloomed before having
enough. Dried lilac pressed between
high-shelved Lispeccor volume and
Alejandra Pizarnik's Extmcting the
Stone of Madness. Late-summer pine
cone brushing the spine of Lucille Clif­
ton's Collected. Snapped from the vine
to save the others-a yellowed philo­
dendron leaf. Was it the lavender in­
cense I burned the nights I couldn't
Khadijah Queen is a poet, professor, and
li cerary scholar. Her newest poetry collec­
tion, Anodyne, will be published this month
by Tin House Books.
in water so long? It thrived all year
until now. I brought it home from my
office when campus closed. Watched
the roots deepen their tangle as they
lengthened. Maybe I just need to find
the right soil for rescue. Rescue, the
action, as opposed to miracle, a noun
received, which shifts responsibility to
some mysterious else. I want to behave
responsibly in preserving any life, or
honoring its end. Hands moving not in
sleight, but service.
♦ sured recovery, the health of beloveds.
I place the second philodendron
leaf to lose all of its dark onto the
yellow-an almost-sick yellow-green,
makes me want to paint. I keep saying
that, to myself, out loud, on lnsta­
gram, trying to make it real. Brushes
and watercolors-ochre, alizarin,
quinacridone gold, viridian, car­
mine, lampblack, Payne's gray, Prus­
sian blue tucked in a fabric box. Un­
used, have they lost their power?
W hat are we made to do? News of
empty meat shelves and workers de­
nied protection and whiny Orange
County surfers threatening a mea­
And aren't strangers, too, beloveds. Do
we not call each other brother, sister,
in certain gatherings?

Photographs by Janna Ireland© The arcist MISCELLANY 37

 The virus doesn't choose who is a I think of joy as well as loss-missed 6.

stranger; we do. Moon through curtain
crack: a thin, ambient light.
taste, lighter texture. I think about the
poems I wrote out of rage and despair,
bound in a book with a beautiful cover,
wonder if I crafted them to fall apart.
4.
M
arch and April event cancel­
lations come fraught, swift. I
cancel my trip to San Anto­
nio, to appear on scholarly panels and
meet up with poet friends I only see
once a year. I cancel a vacation in

I
n New York, my younger sister has
a fever.
She doesn't often get sick, and she
is so tired she cannot get up without
vertigo spinning her back down. On
FaceTime, her children climb all over
her, pull her arms, snuggle into her neck,
touch the outside of her mask. She is too
weak and out of breath to stop them.
She coughs. I beg her to get the test. I
beg her to rest. I beg my brother-in-law
to stop working and help her with the
kids. He won't. My sister gave up a career
in real estate so he could build his. My
mother wants to bring the kids here, but
she and my sister aren't even speaking. I
yell at my mother to fix it, beg her to
apologize. She won't.
Charleston with my sister, her first
since the kids were born. I postpone a
weekend getaway to Santa Fe with new
friends-not writers, business owners­
fellow fans of spas and French food.
Took my whole life to allow such plea­
sures. Rescheduling? Indefinite. Then
May, June, July events-poof. Thou­
sands in summer honoraria blink into
2021 or full disappearance. I return
clothes I bought for performances while
I still can. The line at Nordstrom Rack
stretches so far they rope us off in an L
shape from the front of the store all the
way to the back. Fourth of March. I am
the only one wearing gloves and a
mask. The cashier has a pump bottle of
sanitizer next to the register, but he
doesn't use it.

A
I bought a hooded Tyvek suit in
2. early March, after Naomi Campbell
posted a video wearing one. It takes 7.

rtichokes, asparagus, aspens,
autumn. I list what I appreciate.
Stray notes to triangulate out of
haze. On the first day of quarantine, my
mother stood next to the patio doors
all my strength not to pack it up and
drive across six states to the epicenter.
5.
M
y people are dying at expo­
nential rates. My people are
dying. My people. I think
about access, influence, screening, sep­

without opening them. Our apartment
building, in suburban Colorado, is
shaped almost like a honeycomb, with a
courtyard in the center. We overlook a
fountain, brilliant sky. She said: The sun
got nerve enough to shine.
She'll be eighty-two this year. Rare,
now-a hug, smoothing hair in pass­
ing, clasping hands.
L
aration. The Rona is a monster. An­
emon balm tea, raw honey, vegan other invisible force that wants to use
toast, blackberries. us up until we die.
White bean soup with carrots,
parsley, white pepper and black pepper.
End of week, May 3, 2020: 843
deaths in Colorado. In my county,
+20.4 percent from last week.
Legionnaires' disease can travel
through air-conditioning vents, my

T
3.
he times I made banana bread
before the pandemic, I fo rgot to
separate wet and dry ingredients
before mixing. I'd read the directions
once and think I remembered correctly.
This time, I read them again because it
has been a while, and realize that, as
usual, moving too fast leads to mis­
takes. To slow down: a daily decision,
moment by moment. What else could
I have saved from ruin? I exaggerate.
What else could I have done correctly.
son discovers. He is a gamer, and likes
to keep track of rules and facts. The
largest outbreak of Legionnaires' in
New York City's history, in the South
Bronx in 2015, was spread by cooling
towers. The warmer it gets, the less
use these ceiling fans will be.
Masked up, glasses on, hair covered
by hood or the black Goorin Brothers
hat I bought in California with my
friend Ariel-I drive to Firestone,
Frederick, Longmont, Erie; bring pa­
per booties, gloves, sanitizer, wipes. In
the middle of this chaos, I am trying
to buy a house.

38 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020

 A history I spent a lifetime learn­
ing flashes through me every time I
hear that, as usual, our rate of death
is out of proportion with our num­
bers in the population. I think about
the commoditized spectacle of Black
suffering that Dr. Saidiya Hartman
describes in Scenes of Subjection:
Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America, and I
refuse to contribute. I think about
♦ unwelcome in shops, and plenty of
A story blinks nonstop in my Twit­
ter feed in May: a man in Flint, a se­
curity guard at a Family Dollar, killed
in anger. The rage source: the killer's
sister being told to wear a mask. His
nickname was Duper, short for Super
Duper. His eight children, his mother,
his wife and family and friends shat­
tered into mourning, embracing in
masks, weeping. There's a sea of My­
lar balloons and lit candles. Every
loss: incalculable.
unexpected kindness.
We planned to go back in winter,
spill into crisp Cote d�zur light again.
I wanted to visit Baldwin's home in
Saint-Paul-de-Vence and go inside, not
just touch the wooden door. But we
don't know any when or where any­
more. My anxiety infuses tweets,
texts, calls, trips to the store for more
food and supplies. I can't worry about
how I look to my colleagues-that
would make it worse. More panic at­
tacks in a month than I've had over
the past four years. I worry about peo­

A
8.
sthma and other chronic health
issues keep both my son and
my mother at risk; my mother
takes so much medication we have an
Excel spreadsheet to keep track.
They've sheltered in place for eight
ple being tired of me, but worry more
about the risk of disconnection. Early
in lockdown, back to back, three writ­
ers lost to suicide.
One text thread with friends is
called Hol)' fuck.
10.

the irony of Debord's The Society of
the Spectacle. I chin k about the
Barthes essay "The World of Wres­
tling" and how much I used to love
the old WWF, the days of Junkyard
Dog and Hulk Hogan and Rowdy
Roddy Piper. I think about Piper's
1988 film They Live, a sci-fi fable
about class conflict. I want people to
do their own work of understanding,
because otherwise they won't under­
stand, ever, and nothing we say or
A
weeks. I'm at risk, tao, but I try not to
think about it. I have to be the one fternoon palimpsest of
going out. I have to be the one who thought-feels foolish to
works, even if I work at home. I record think about what I make,
lectures for my students, answer their when I can't help my baby sister. A
emails, respond to their poems and es­ text from Emily, whose husband
says and questions, try to remain a sta­ works in a hospital, confirms my sis­
ble and generous presence for them as ter's doing everything right: sleeps on
the world shuts down. her side, eats healthy, cakes vitamin
C. One new thing she shares: move
♦ as much as you can. On CNN, virus­
caught anchor Chris Cuomo said
One of my nieces calls to ask about from his basement: The virus wants us
our heritage-names, places, and to lie down. He said, The beast comes
dates of birth and death. My mother
tells me a story. Fighting snow, look­
ing for a job in Detroit, my grand­
mother's mother contracted the flu,
then pneumonia. A hundred years
ago, she died.
9.

make or do or survive or don't will
change it. Absurdly, Jennifer Anis­
ton's line in the movie The Break-Up
pops into my head: "I want you to
want to do the dishes."
I cannot write about the police and
vigilances killing us, headlines repeat­
ing carceral absurdities that say it's
our fault for running, eating, driving,
talking, sleeping, existing.
Ver y tiresome things: victim­
blaming; absence of reparations; the
constant surprise.
M
arch 31: the peak day for
deaths in France. 7,578 souls
counted. I vault into mem­
ories of our summer last year in Paris,
Lyon, Aries, Rauen. My son and I
have become chose people who talk
about France all the time, missing the
luxe contrast of traveling during an
unprecedented heat wave, the ease of
our existence there-no suspicion
during our exploratory walks and
Kapten rides, no feeling of being

MISCELLANY 39
 Around the world: 228,504 people. I I'm in meeting after meeting trying
hate when reports round up or down. not to count faces in squares, track
Count every one. Keep counting. who disappears, each avatar switch,
institutional tics. Evening light dom­

at night. Before the pandemic, his
corny catchphrases made me roll my
eyes. I didn't watch his show. All of
April, his segments riveted-human
stories that left me weeping. I couldn't
write a word.
Pieces of my dissertation got pub­
lished in futurefeed, but it felt strange
to share them. A piece of my Navy
memoir, from my time as a sailor in the
1990s. Travel diary excerpts-outraged
observations of empire in Europe, bal­
anced with rhapsodic musings about
the food. And an academic essay.
When I wrote that essay, about the
value of studying Muriel Rukeyser
even though, like Whitman and
Melville-writers she identifies as
American literature's light and dark
forces, respectively-she operated
from a baseline assumption of white
supremacy, I meant to provide prac­
tical guidelines for analyzing older
American literature, for understand­
ing it with greater accuracy, for trac­
ing its cultural influence and mining
its prescience. I meant to offer an
alternative solution to throwing it all
away. I meant to create a means of
redefining the canon. Even the inten­
tion behind the effort feels like fail­
ure. We already live the truth of what
and who gets tossed aside.
R
aise the blinds to let in sun.
Group texts and Zoom meet­
ings and emails, the endless
electronic scroll zapping my fingers
and wrists into a soft curve, tense
knuckle peaks, pushing my shoulders
tight. My mother writes a note in cur­
sive, for me to pass along to my sister:
Another option:
the children can
come here, and
lrshaad's the weekend
Just a thought
lrshaad is my brother-in-law's
brother, and he moved here to Colo­
rado last fall. My sister wanted to
come, too, after they visited last sum­
mer and loved it, but her husband's
businesses are on the East Coast.
He refused.
♦ repeat after her: moan, bone, gon'.
Used to be I could rest through fi­
bromyalgia flares, recover. Now I de­
pend on balms and pills to keep going
through the pain. Dr. Bob's, vapor
rub, Papa Rozier balm, Aleve PM,
Benadryl, charcoal bath salts, laven­
der oil. Make a pleasure of coffee or
espresso for the fatigue. Bless Nes­
presso machines. Elvazio, Melozio,
Hazelino, Voltesso. Solelio for some­
thing lighter, if I have to wake up but
know I'll need sleep later.
LOL sleep. For the first two weeks
of lockdown, I dream about nothing
but death. Six nights of scorpions,
six of snakes, two of sheer bloody
violence-both mass and intimate.
Then 1 wake to press conferences as
propaganda, terrifyingly absurd.
All my limbs stiffen overnight.
How I wake: slow, scrolling.
12.
inates the room. I like to keep the
windows open, but my son fears the vi­
rus could travel in on a cough or sneeze.
I've avoided my spring-dusted patio for
days, and my sister has tested negative.
She tested negative, but she's still sick.
Negative for flu A, negative for flu B,
negative for COVID. The coronavirus
is a lethal fog of unknowns. Act like
you have it, advised the doctor. Twenty
percent error rate. False negative. Mild
case. Or is it something else, not the
virus-Google says her symptoms
match Meniere's, but I worry about
slippery self-diagnoses and informed
assumptions. And even if she does
feel better soon, if it is the virus,
what if it comes back?
For mood lifts, I watch the video
my sister sent of the kids singing
Kendrick Lamar's "Alright." She's
teaching them to say gon'. In their
sweet and tiny voices, they keep say­
ing We're going. We're going to be al­
right. I smile. My sister has them
They laugh. We're gonna be alright.
Her husband is from Suriname. He
says We're gonna whaaat? They can't
say it until the end. I laugh every
time. I sing it, too.
A few weeks later, I text a haiku that
makes my sister press the HAHA reaction:

♦
1:10 PM, 5/3/2020-a time of reck­
oning. And 68,040 Americans dead.
P utting on a face is not difficult,
because I know who I am.
Let me clarify. I know who I
am, but I know how to mask up, too.

40 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020

 In my sister's yard,
Great horned owls perch in w/io-song
Soon, murder hornets
♦ and pop! Lay that chicken on a stump
We share the living room by sitting
in separate places, at least six feet
apart-my mother, my son, and me.
Today I notice we are lined up, as if
next to each other. One, two, three.
M
13.
y extended family in Mich­
igan: lab techs, nurses,
cleaners. My niece is an
LPN at a senior care home where two
patients have died of COVID-19. No
hazard pay, no PPE. She takes care of
her mom-my oldest sister, who had a
heart attack last summer, the sister
who listens to me read my poems in
early drafts, the one who said, when I
explained the zuihitsu form: It sounds
like a theater of the mind. l beg her not
to go out; she says she's protected­
mask, gloves, hat, glasses. Bur no one
else at the laundromat or grocery store
does the same. They cough, and don't
care who inhales it.
♦ laundry in Black Bottom to feed
April 30: Men in masks line up on
the steps of the Michigan capitol,
armed with assault weapons and
whiteness, scream about their free­
dom and call it a protest.
I could preach myself out of breath.
I think about Brecht and Beckett.
l think about Fanon and Baudrillard.
I think about bell hooks: "There can
be no love without justice."
14.
B
etween cooking and checking
on her cousin Nita in Detroit,
my mother remembers and cor­
rects memory, talking through Alzhei­
mer's and time collapse. I remember the
Depression. We had these little red to­
kens, had to stand in a line w get food.
Papa didn't even try to work. He just
gave up. Papa was her grandfather, not
her father, who shoveled coal in Ford's
furnace rooms.
Since 2016, I've been writing fa­
bles based on my family's history in
America, the South and the North,
the many violences underneath the
various ways of giving up; the riddles
my grandfather was known for, how
he could play the piano by ear, any
song; how his mother escape d a
sharecropper's life in Georgia, board­
ing a train to Detroit with her seven
sons, running numbers and taking in
them; the silences of mothers and
aunts broken only by my persistent
digging. The reimagining is slow be­
cause of the pain. I want it honored,
but I don't want to make it a parade.
♦ of home and work feels endless. Then
My mother interrupts me with sto­
ries while I write and grade papers.
She talks so much l have to hole up in
my room if I want quiet. On days I lis­
ten, I never know if it'll be a story I've
heard a million times or something
entirely new to me. I love hearing the
ones about the garden she had as a
child. She tells me what she planted
with her father's mother, Rosa, behind
the little brick house her father built
with his six brothers. Mom stands in
the doorway in the one-size-fits-all
linen dress I bought for her in Flor­
ence, sun on her white hair, and lists a
bounty-corn, tomatoes, cucumbers,
carrots, cabbage, mustards and turnips
and collard greens, okra, string beans
and hot peppers. I ask about the ani­
mals. She likes to tell the story of why
her sister Evelyn hates chicken: Gram­
ma would catch a chicken by the neck
and chop that head right off. Poor thing
kept running till it fell in the dirt. Then
we had to boil it and pluck the feathers.
Evelyn hated the blood, hated that boiled
chicken smell. My mom chuckles.
Didn't bother me none. Evelyn became
a nurse.
I think of all the families now
without parents, siblings, aunts, un­
cles, grandparents, children, cousins:
the devastation will carry over gener­
ations. I think of them dying alone,
mediated by electronics, and left on a
reefer truck until ... when? What is
the signal for unending grief?
A friend who lives near Elmhurst
Hospital describes the ambulance
wails as nonstop. Central Park on
the first Sunday in May: a Seurat
painting, virus-pixelated air, whitely
surreal, a false dawn.
15.
W
h;t do we face now? What
if we fail to protect each
other? Miscellaneous ques­
tions bombard me. I did so much work
to ease my rage, then to rectify a trau­
matized passivity; what if either
comes back? Did I ever believe I was
free? Did I ever believe I could pre­
tend not to be?
My uselessness outside the cocoons
I return to The Source of Self-Regard­
the only Toni Morrison work I have
yet to finish. One chapter and I'm
unfooled again.
Deceptive things: healing, archives,
talk of inclusion, literary theories,
second-dinner hunger, the interrup­
tions of children, trending Twitter
topics, the virus.
♦
One Thursday the robins flooded
my morning. American, orange­
breasted on bare branches, aiming for
the light behind thin clouds.
I find out philodendrons need in­
direct sun. I move this living thing
closer to shadow. ■
MISCELLANY 41
 L E T T
IN PLAIN SIGHT
The search for Syrian war criminals in Europe
By Annie Hylton
A nwar al-Bunni, who fled Syria
in 2014, was at the time one of
the country's leading human­
rights lawyers. Born into a prominent
family of leftists, al-Bunni had spent his
days drinking coffee and smoking cig­
arettes on the steps of the Palace of
Justice, the seat of the high court in
Damascus, where the families of im­
prisoned dissidents and activists knew
they could find him. Al-Bunni himself
had been jailed twice, for speaking out
about torture in Syria's prisons and
Annie Hylton is a writer based in Paris.
42 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
E R F R O M G E
n l
calling for democratic reform. His de­
votion to his work left little room for
his family or life's other pleasures. Da­
mascus lies only fifty miles from the
Mediterranean coast, but al-Bunni
hadn't seen the sea in more than a
decade. He lived with the knowledge
that at any moment one of his clients
could die in detention.
Al-Bunni had contemplated leaving
Syria many times, but he had always
been dissuaded by the belief that Presi­
dent Bashar al-Assad's government
would topple-that things would im­
prove. But in the summer of 2014,
Illustrations by George Butler. Source phmograph © John MacDougall/AFP/Gcrty Images
R M A N Y
al-Bunni teamed that two warrants had
been put out for his arrest, and he
decided it had become too dangerous to
stay. His wife, Raghida Issa, and two
adult children left first, taking separate
cars to Beirut. Then, one afternoon that
August, al-Bunni disguised his russet
eyes with blue contact lenses and
bleached his dark hair. He brought noth­
ing but the clothes he was wearing and
another man's ID-if stopped at a check­
point, he would say he was leaving to
avoid the mandatory military draft. A
friend drove him past barren fields to the
Lebanese border. He was dropped off at
 a mountain pass, and waited until dusk
to climb down into Lebanon's Bekaa
Valley. From there, he hired a taxi to
Beirut, and continued on with his family
to Germany.
Al-Bunni, Issa, and their children
were placed in a temporary housing
facility for refugees and asylum seekers
in west Berhn. During the Cold War,
the facility had welcomed more than a
million people fleeing East Germany,
becoming known as "the gateway to
freedom." The complex now housed
some six hundred people from Syria,
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe.
Between the apartment buildings, the
courtyard of the complex had the feel
of a small village: women in head­
scarves pushed strollers, children played
ball games, and groups of teenage girls
laughed together as they headed to the
nearby Turkish supermarket.
Al-Bunni found it difficult to grasp
that he was no longer in Syria. When
speaking on the phone with a colleague
or former client, he'd find himself want­
ing to ask, "Will you come visit us in
Damascus?" He often thought of Cafe
Havana, in the center of the city, a spot
popular with artists and intellectuals
where al-Bunni would gather his lawyer
friends to work through the cool winter
days. Spring brought to mind the floral
scent that infused eastern Ghouta, a
swath of countryside near the capital, as
the season's first pale-pink roses bloomed
on its hills.
Berlin, by contrast, felt foreign and
cold. Al-Bunni mostly kept to himself.
He knew only a handful of Syrians in
the city, all distant acquaintances from
Damascus. But one winter morning,
when al-Bunni and Issa were walking
in the courtyard, al-Bunni noticed a
man whose gaze was fixed on him.
The man was slim, with chinning hair,
a mustache, chick eyebrows, and a mole
under his left eye. T he man walked
past them and entered the building
next to theirs. Al-Bunni turned to Issa.
"I know that guy," he said. Issa replied
that she'd never seen him before. Al­
Bunni felt sure that he'd encountered
the man in Syria, but it took a couple
of days for him to remember when and
where. Though the man had aged-his
hairline had receded, and his hair was
grayer-al-Bunni was certain that he
was Anwar Raslan, a colonel in the
Assad regime.
R aslan had been an officer in
Assad's General Intelligence
Directorate, one of Syria's four
main intelligence agencies, collectively
known as the Mukhabarat, which over­
see the country's detention facilities.
The General Intelligence Directorate,
often referred to as state security, is the
oldest of the four and is tasked with
suppressing dissent. Although it is os­
tensibly a civilian agency under the ju­
risdiction of the Ministry of Interior, in
practice it answers only to the president.
State security has, over the years, been
headed by Assad's most trusted advisers,
including Ali Mamlouk, a powerful
Ba'ath official who is the subject of sanc­
tions in Europe and the United States
for alleged war crimes.
Within the regime, Raslan had a
reputation as a highly intelligent man
who served Assad faithfully. Born to a
Sunni family outside Homs, he had
placed near the top of his class in the
police academy and quickly rose
through the ranks in the security ser­
vices, becoming a colonel in early 2011,
just before the civil war began.
Al-Bunni had witnessed Raslan's in­
fluence firsthand. Raslan was one of
several men who, in 2006, abducted
al-Bunni from the street outside his
home in Damascus. That year, al-Bunni,
along with hundreds of others, had
signed a petition that called for an over­
haul of Syria's relationship with Leba­
non. (Assad saw Lebanon as a depen­
dent state, and the petition sought, in
part, for Syria to recognize Lebanon as
a sovereign nation.) A few days later,
al-Bunni was walking to his car when a
group of men in civilian clothing ap­
proached him. He shouted for Issa, who
ran to the window of their third-floor
apartment. She watched as the men
blindfolded al-Bunni and shoved him
facedown onto the floor of a car. As they
drove away, he pleaded with his captors
to tell him what he had done. Raslan,
who seemed to be the leader of the
group, replied: "You don't know what
you did?"
Al-Bunni was taken to a state security
branch in Damascus, where he was in­
terrogated. "You're a criminal spreading
false information about Syria," Raslan
said. Al-Bunni was no stranger to such
interrogations. His most harrowing ar­
rest had occurred in 1978, when he was
just nineteen; he was held for a week in
an underground cell at Branch 251, an
infamous facility run by state security.
Interrogators at Branch 251 would ring
a bell each time they brought a detainee
out to be questioned. "When we heard
the bell, that meant all of us had to be
ready," al-Bunni told me. Guards elec­
trocuted him and whipped his feet with
a cable. Even today, al-Bunni jolts when
he hears a bell.
After his 2006 arrest, al-Bunni was
placed in a crowded cell along with
dozens of men who had been sentenced
to death for murder. He did not see or
hear from Raslan again after his initial
interrogation about the petition.
Al-Bunni was later charged with
three offenses, among them "dissem­
inating false information likely to
undermine the morale of the nation
in wartime," but his court dace kept
being postponed. Issa and Lilas, al­
Bunni's daughter, attended one of his
hearings. "He was taken out from the
cell, and he walked through, hand­
cuffed, with the policeman dragging
him," Lilas told me. "I'll never forget
how he was dragged, how my mother
and I followed him, begging the police­
man to let us talk to him." Nearly a year
later, in April 2007, al-Bunni was sen­
tenced to five years in prison.
Guards occasionally beat al-Bunni in
prison, but he describes the experience
as one of ma;tly psychological torture.
Every week, Issa would enter the prison
and walk down a long corridor, along
which dozens of families were visiting
loved ones, and touch al-Bunni's fingers
through a wire barrier. Lilas and her
brothers visited when they felt strong
enough to see their father in a prison
uniform, his muscle atrophying. "I re­
member how weak he would look," Lilas
told me. Al-Bunni was denied medical
treatment for the rheumatism in his legs.
When he was released, in May 2011, he
was slight, his face had aged, and his
rheumatism caused near-constant dis­
comfort. By then, Syria had plunged
into civil war, and despite his family's
objections, al-Bunni returned to work.
N
ow exiled in Europe, al-Bunni
was consumed by hopeless­
ness. What could he do for the
Syrian people from more than two
thousand miles away? He didn't have a
license to practice law in Germany, and
by the time his family left the refugee
LETTER FROM GERMANY 43
 transit center and moved into an apart­
ment in southern Berlin, in the spring
of 2015, he had come to terms with the
fact that the Assad regime was not ap­
proaching imminent collapse. The con­
flict had become a multifront war. The
Islamic State controlled large chunks of
territory, and opposition groups, Islamist
militias, and pro-regime forces fought
over the rest. Russia was expected co
intervene and provide direct military
support to the regime, which would
likely tip the balance in Assad's favor.
According to the Syrian Network for
Human Rights, by the summer of chat
year, Assad's forces had detained or
disappeared more than 117,000 people.
At lease 11,000 had been tortured to
death, and as many as 11 million
had been internally displaced or
forced co flee the country.
Al-BLU111i decided to reach out co
lawyers at the European Center for
Constitutional and Human Rights
(ECCHR), who had been working to
amass evidence against senior regime
officials accused of murder, torture,
and sexual violence. Since Syria is
not a party co the Rome Statute, the
International Criminal Court's found­
,' ing treaty, only the United Nations Se­
curity Council has the power to refer
Syrian war crimes to the ICC. Thus far,
because they experienced a crisis of
conscience as they witnessed or partic­
ipated in atrocities. Others simply took try, which in 2014 provided Raslan and
the opportunity co build a future with
their families in Europe. Independent
watchdog organizations have estimated
that hundr eds of former Assad
officials-mid- to high-level members
of the country's military and security
apparatus-have absconded to places
in the Middle East and across Europe.
Mohammad Al Abdallah, the execu­
tive director of the Syria Justice and
Accountability Center, a nonprofit
based in Washington, believes that
several hundred Syrian military and
intelligence officers have made it co
EuRoPEAN GOVERNMENTS DON'T
KNOW HOW MANY ALLEGED SYRIAN
WAR CRIMINALS HAVE SOUGHT
REFUGE WITHIN THEIR BORDERS
Europe. "I think that's one of the rea­
sons why lots of Syrian refugees are very 2011 and S e ptember 2012, while
paranoid about each other," Muham­
mad Fares, a Syrian journalist who now
lives in Europe, told me.
of his defection. Seif shared Raslan's
name with the German foreign minis­
his family with a visa.
That year, Raslan participated in
UN-backed negotiations, held in Ge­
neva, as an adviser to Ahmad al-Jarba,
who was then the president of the
Syrian National Coalition, at the time
the main opposition group in exile.
Soon afterward, Raslan walked into a
police station in Berlin, where he told
officers that he feared he was being
followed by Syrian intelligence agents.
"I know these methods from my own
work," he said. "I know how the Syrian
intelligence services operate. My life
is in danger." Although German
authorities had been aware of
Raslan's past in the regime, his po­
lice report prompted them to begin
an investigation into the details of
his career and defection. In July
2018, federal prosecutors opened
their own investigation. Through
his contacts at the ECCHR, al­
Bunni heard that prosecutors were
looking for witnesses who had been
held at Branch 251 between April
Raslan was in charge of the prison.
Al-Bunni thought back through the
dissidents he had represented in Syria.

A
Russia and China have used their vetoes
co block any action. With international
litigation stalled for the time being,
authorities across Europe have instead
turned to the principle of universal
jurisdiction, which permits national
courts to investigate and prosecute seri­
ous crimes-such as genocide, the use
of chemical weapons, and torture-that
have been committed abroad by foreign
nationals. Initially, al-Bunni and the
ECCl-IR lawyers thought they would
have to wait for a resolution co the
Syrian conflict to see any cases go co
court. But then, in 2015, nearly half a
million Syrians arrived in Germany.
Al-Bunni started hearing about Syrian
officials who had escaped with the ref­
ugee flow and could be subject to crim­
inal prosecution in Europe.
European governments don't know
how many alleged Syrian war criminals
have sought refuge within their borders.
Early on in the war, when it looked as
though Assad would quickly be defeated,
many members of the Syrian regime
defected out of fear. Lacer, some left
Had he defended anyone held at
l-Bunni began receiving calls Branch 251 during that time? There
from Syrian friends and strang­ had been one, he realized, an outspo­
ers about criminals they recog­ ken blogger named Hussein Ghrer
nized in Germany. He had not forgotten who wrote about human rights in
about Anwar Raslan. Since they had Syria. Ghrer had been arrested and
crossed paths in the winter of 2014, taken to Branch 251 in October 2011.
al-Bunni had learned more about Al-Bunni discovered that Ghrer had
Raslan's role in the Assad regime. fled Syria in 2015 and now lived with
For more than a year, at the start of his wife and children in a sleepy town
the war, Raslan supervised Branch 251, outside Hannover.
the facility where al-Bunni had been Last year, I went to visit Ghrer. His
held and tortured at the age of nineteen. wife, who is now fluent in German and
Although the building was unassuming, studying to become a social worker, was
with a small garden out front where in the kitchen preparing toasted
children often played, Branch 251 had a freekeh and a spread of mezes. On the
long-standing reputation among Syrians wall of their living room hung a Syrian
as a fortress of brutality. revolutionary flag and a tapestry from
But in 2012, Raslan fled his post. He Damascus. Gluer drank yerba mate and
went into hiding in Syria, then escaped smoked a pipe as he cold me the story
to Jordan with his wife and children. of his detention. At Branch 251, he
While living in Jordan, Raslan got in said, he was brought to a small, over­
touch "'ith Riad Seif, a prominent mem­ crowded cell with some twenty other
ber of the Syrian opposition movement men. They had to sleep in shifts. Food
who had ties to the German govern­ was scarce, if it came at all. Every cou­
ment. Raslan claimed that he and his ple of days, Ghrer was blindfolded and
family were in clanger in Jordan because taken to an interrogation room, where

44 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020

he was asked about his political activi­
ties. It didn't seem to matter what he
said. His back was whipped with elec­
tric cables, and the soles of his feet were
pummeled with a plastic pipe, a torture
technique known as falaqa. One day,
he was brought to a room where torture
instruments were displayed on a table,
including an electric-shock device and
a tool for removing fingernails. "They
can kill anybody without being held
accountable," Ghrer told me. Some­
times, he said, "the guard just loses his
mind." Ghrer's case was eventually
transferred to a civilian court, where he
met al-Bunni for the first time. "He
came to me at the court, and he com­
forted me," Ghrer recalled. Al-Bunni
helped get him released after another
two weeks in prison.
Al-Bunni connected Ghrer with
German prosecutors and identified
eight more people who had been held
at Branch 251, all of whom became
witnesses in the growing case against
Raslan. They told German authorities
that guards had sexually assaulted
women and children during Raslan's
time running the prison. Female de­
tainees had been stripped naked and
paraded around. Some contracted skin
diseases. Others recalled arriving at
Branch 251 to the sound of screams. I
spoke with one man, Taha Alzoubi, a
fifty-nine-year-old filmmaker now liv­
ing in Berlin, who was picked up in
Damascus in August 2012 for giving
food to protesters. One of the first things
he saw when he entered Branch 251
was a man, hung naked against a wall,
who had clearly endured severe torture.
Guards were playing music and asking
the man to dance; when the man's
body failed him, a guard gouged his eyes
out with a knife.
Using such testimony, Germany's
federal prosecutor filed charges against
Raslan for crimes against humanity,
murder, rape, and serious sexual assault.
The prosecutor alleges that more than
four thousand people were tortured at
Raslan's direction, and that fifty-eight
people died as a result. (Through his
lawyer, Raslan declined to comment for
this story.) "Several people that I talked
to were tortured until they lost con-
sciousness," Patrick Kroker, one of the
ECCHR lawyers on the case, told me.
Raslan's trial, which began in April,
is the first prosecution anywhere in the
world for state-sponsored torture in
Syria. It is also the first case to adjudi­
cate whether the Syrian government's
use of torture against its civilian pop­
ulation amounts to crimes against
humanity, a finding that could serve as
precedent in future cases. If Raslan is
found guilty, he will face life in prison.
A
s German prosecutors prepared
for trial, al-Bunni turned his
attention to building other
cases against suspected Assad regime
officials who arrived in Europe as refu­
gees. He now spends much of his day
fielding tips from Syrians across the
continent. While I was with him last
year, al-Bunni heard about a doctor in
Germany who had allegedly tortured
patients at a military hospital in Homs
and a former aid worker in western Eu­
rope who had allegedly smuggled weap­
ons into Syria and handed activists over
to the regime. He met with one witness
LETTER FROM GERMANY 45
whose skull had been perforated during
an interrogation at the age of sixteen, to
update him about the whereabouts of his
torturer, and he listened to another man
testify that one of his relatives, who now
lived in Germany, had been a member
of the shabiha, a state-sponsored militia
responsible for killing thousands of in­
nocent protesters. "Investigators can't go
to Syria to get proof, so in essence, the
crime scene must come here," al-Bunni
told me. "I can prepare all the evidence;
I can contact all the Syrian victims;
and I deliver it to the prosecutor."
Al-Bunni works with a volunteer net­
work of Syrian lawyers across Europe to
gather evidence from wirnesses to pre­
pare for the day when they will be able
to bring cases against high-level perpe­
trators in Syria. Al-Bu1rni's goal is not to
go after small fish-it's to reach Assad.
In the meantime, though, fragmented
efforts will have to do. Nerma Jelacic,
head of communications for the Com­
mission for International Justice and
Accountability (CIJA), a nonprofit
that investigates serious crimes com­
mitted during conflicts, said her group
is currently working on twelve cases
involving mid-level Syrian officials like
Raslan. "When the war started, [defec­
tors] issued YouTube statements all over
social media," Jelacic told me. "The
question is locating them, understand­
ing their role, and gathering evidence
sufficient in a court of law." CIJA re­
ceives requests for investigative support
from law enforcement agencies that are
looking into former regime officials and
members of the Islamic State. Last year,
the organization provided information
about five hundred people. "It's an in­
dication of how much checking is going
on," Jelacic said.
Mazen Darwish, a lawyer and jour­
nalist who runs the Syrian Center for
Media and Freedom of Expression, a
nonprofit that tracks suspected war
criminals, frequently collaborates with
al-Bunni and ECCHR attorneys. Since
2011, six of his employees have been
disappeared or killed in Syria. In 2018,
after the team's intelligence gathering
led French prosecutors to issue interna­
tional arrest warrants for three
high-level officials in Syria, Syrian state
TV broadcast a segment about Darwish,
accusing him of attacking the country
and working with Mossad and the CIA.
Last spring, I visited his group's un-
46 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
marked offices in an apartment building
in the center of Paris. The shutters were
closed, and inside, cigarette smoke filled
the air as the young team, most of whom
are Syrian refugees themselves, worked
at computers.
Once the team locates a possible
suspect or receives a tip from a victim,
they clig through Twitter, Face book,
YouTube, and other public sites to cor­
roborate the account. They also rely on
intel from defectors, leaked documents,
and informants who are still working
in official positions in Syria. That af­
ternoon, their search led them to an
alleged member of the Assad regime
who had recently been photographed
posing in front of a popular European
landmark. "They are here right now,"
one said, pulling up the picture.
The team planned to archive the pho­
to and conduct an investigation.
Darwish's group is currently pursuing
criminal cases throughout Europe
against members of the Assad regime,
opposition groups, various militias,
and the Islamic State. They are wary of
what they see as the EU's peace-at-all­
cos ts approach, which could absolve
those responsible for mass atrocities in
Syria. "The international community's
goal is to make peace between all the
players ... even if they're criminals,"
Almoutassim al-Kilani, a lawyer with
the group, told me. "We are trying to
fight against that. These people can't
be part of our future."
W
hether Raslan deserves to
be part of Syria's future is
a question that has created
discord in the Syrian diaspora. Ras­
Ian claims that he left Syria with
noble intentions-that in exchange for
safe passage he gave the Syrian opposi­
tion information about the regime's
crimes. According to Foreign Policy,
Raslan agreed to provide opposition
leaders with more than twenty thou­
sand files describing the treatment of
detainees. Wael al-Khalid, an opposition
activist who says he helped Raslan de­
fect, told the magazine that Raslan "did
not deliver us the promised documents"
after safely arriving in Germany. "Every
time I insisted, he said he will deliver
the files to the United Nations, or to the
CIA. I knew he was bluffing."
But Raslan's defenders say he was a
cog in a system from which he evemu-
ally broke free.One regime defector told
me that Raslan was an "unfortunate
man" who was sent to a branch "with a
lot of monsters inside," one with "a very
bad reputation even before the revolu­
tion." Some of those who knew him at
the time described Raslan as respected,
pious, and cultured. During family gath­
erings, his wry humor often led his rela­
tives to erupt in laughter.
Last spring, I met Abdulnasser
al-Ayed, a Syrian novelist and self­
described leftist who served as a captain
in the Syrian Air Force until he was
discharged in 2009. It was a cool, breezy
afternoon in Paris, and we sat on the
terrace of a cafe. Al-Ayed told me that
Raslan had treated him with kindness
when he was detained for attending a
protest in 2011. D uring an intense
interrogation, he said, a new voice
introduced itself as Colonel Anwar
Rislan. Raslan removed al-Aye d's
blindfold and handcuffs, and returned
his shoes and socks. Al-Ayed remem­
bered Raslan wearing a civilian suit and
tie. They shared a Kent cigarette. Since
leaving Syria, the two men have become
close friends. W hen I asked al-Ayed
what he thought of the fact that Raslan
had been accused of some of the gravest
crimes under international law, he said,
"I'm a writer, so I know people are ca­
pable of almost anything-but I'm a
writer, not a judge."
Even some human-rights activists
who support Raslan's prosecution cau­
tion that European governments are
likely to oversell the impact of such tri­
als. "Governments are tmder pressure for
not doing enough for Syria, not doing
enough for justice," said Al Abdallah, of
the Syria Justice and Accountability
Center. He explained that it's easy for
Western officials to say, "There's five
cases here and there-check, justice is
done," but that it's not enough. Raslan
and others like him are "small people,"
one defector told me. The highest-level
perpetrators of state-sponsored torture,
most of whom remain in Syria, contin­
ue to enjoy impunity. Kraker, Ghrer's
lawyer, is careful to acknowledge that
Raslan was just one of many involved in
Syria's torture apparatus: 'This is one
prison, and one intelligence service,
and the guy is alleged to have con­
trolled it for one and a half years," Kro­
ker said. "If we do a simple calculation
to apply the torture and murder that

occurred in this one facility across the
country, to all intelligence services, one
begins to imagine the amount of injus­
tice and cruelty."
Others worry that the case could send
the wrong message to defectors. Khaled
Khoja, a Syrian opposition figure of
Turkmen origin, said that the case is a
threat to those who defected from the
regime and tried to "change the bal­
ance." "If it's a case of such individuals
committing torture and other grave
crimes, they have to be responsible, for
sure." But, he continued, "We should be
very fair toward those people. If we ac­
cuse every person, whether from the
opposition or from the regime side, we
cannot reach any reconciliation." There
are hundreds of thousands of people
who have committed atrocities for the
regime, Khoja explained. "We cannot
punish everyone." He feared that
Raslan's fate would discourage other
defectors who have valuable infonnation
from coming forward.
To al-Bunni, however, the potential
chilling effect is immaterial. "It's my
responsibility to follow everybody-in
the opposition or not," he told me. "A
change in the position or attitude of a
person does not exempt him from pros­
0
ecution for crimes he has committed­
especially crimes against humanity."
n the morning of April 23,
journa I ists, activists, and
members of the public lined
up outside the Higher Regional Court
in Koblenz, an hour south of Bonn, to
secure a place in the courtroom for
Raslan's trial. Because of the novel coro­
nav irus pandemic, capacity had been
reduced to twenty-nine spots. People
were directed to sit in every third or
fourth seat. The plaintiffs, the accused,
and their lawyers were placed behind
plexiglass. Gluer, sitting among the
plaintiffs, was overwhelmed with emo­
tion. He hugged his tan trench coat
tightly around his waist.
Just before ten o'clock, Raslan entered
the courtroom escorted by police offi­
cers. He wore rectangular-framed glasses
and a brown knit sweater, with a white
crew-neck shirt peeking out at the collar.
Eyad al-Gharib, who allegedly reported
to Raslan at Branch 251 and was being
tried alongside him, wore a mask and a
a jacket with a hood that he had pulled
down to conceal his face. As they en-
Summer or Fall?
tered, several Syrians in the audience
turned their backs to the accused. Jasper
Klinge, the prosecutor, then read out the
indictment and described the experienc­
es of twenty-four people who had been
imprisoned at Branch 251: A man sex­
ually assaulted with a broomstick. A
man beaten while hanging from the
ceiling by his wrists. Klinge alleged that
Raslan had known the extent of the
torture happening on his watch. The Balmoral is at home in the city or
Through a forty-five-page statement country, made from sturdy and cool
read aloud in court by his lawyers, Manila hemp. Roan leather sweatband,
Raslan denied torturing anyone, denied 4 ½" crown, 2 ¾" brim.
ordering torture, and denied that tor­ Sizes: 6½ - 7¾
ture was used at Branch 251 when he
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was in charge. He said that he had
never "acted inhumanely" and that he
Ol\11:jif,i
felt "regret and compassion" for the
victims. Raslan claimed that he had
helped free so many people from the
Over a century of manufacturing
prison that he was stripped of many
responsibilities in June 2011, and was experience ensures your made in
therefore not in a position to oversee Australia A.kubra will provide long
what had transpired in the year that lasting protection from the elements.
followed. But prosecutors provided the
court with documents, some of which
carry Raslan's signature, that confirm
he was running Branch 251 through
September 2012. They also plan to offer
testimony from witnesses who saw
Raslan giving orders to guards during
those months, including orders to tor­
ture. "We do not believe he played a
minor role," said Wolfgang Kaleck, the
general secretary of the ECCHR. The Banjo Paterson is rhe same perfect
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LETTER FROM GERMANY 47
 P O E T R Y

BASEMENT SUITE
By Karen Solie

Left to our use are the fixtures and appliances Beyond it, heartbeats and adjustments
Repented of by the homeowners Attenuated through the half-space, lo-fi
Who don't realize this is a way to know them. The light is radio light.

In the basement one is closer to God The house tries to forget we are here
Because closer to consequence Yet there are bars on the windows
To the creatures no one loves but the specialists. In some places, like childhood.

Rice weevil, bean weevil, rose weevil, pea weevil, A slight clinging smell is associated.
Flour, black vine, and strawberry weevils, Every living situation has one.
A weevil to every purpose under heaven. It's not the Underworld, for Christ's sake

The basement is a tree house in the roots Which is everywhere, without depth
Think of it that way But the gaze does learn to creep along the baseboards
And cold on five sides, like childhood And sharpen its knives on them.

When water in the pipes was a talking animal Walking on the surface again
And it was advertised that soil neutralized If we can bear it
The toxins applied to it, that After so long sheltering in place, we may appreciate

Our bodies did, and that the sea More than anyone a bit of natural warmth
Carried poison on its back into the hills. Though money flows no more freely up here
Our faces to the wall, to radial domestic passages Look around you. ■

Karen Solie lives in Toronto. Her most recent collection, The Caiplie Caves,
was publislied last mom/1 by Farrnr, Strnus and Giroux.

Photograph by Ann Weathersby for Harper's Magazine© The artist POETRY 49

 E S S A Y

ALL MY PRONOUNS
How I learned to live with the singular they
By Anne Fadiman

,..._,

B ack in the day s

before Yale's fresh­
men became "first­
come Mae. They/them be­
came she/her. At the end of
her senior year, on Class
years," one of my freshman Day, Mae won a major prize
advisees was a gay man for her writing. Wearing a
who translated Tang Dy­ long yellow dress with slits

I
nasty poetry; planned to t::1 up the sides, she walked
learn Portuguese in order tb onstage to receive an enve­
to read Clarice Lispector, lope containing a large
his favorite author, in the check and then curtsied to
original; and often got so ;: the audience, hammily but
caught up in books, as- "' ig
;;
� expertly, right in front of
,.. !
0
signed or unassigned, that I> I Hillary Clinton, who had
he missed meals. > just delivered the Class
0
As a junior, while taking -a Day address.
;;
my advanced non-fiction The following afternoon,
writing class, my advisee after commencement, Mae
began using they/them pro­ rushed up to give me a fare­
nouns and announced a well hug and exclaimed,
new name-or, rather, a new initial­ Much of M's writing that semester ex­ "Anne! You've known me through all
on Facebook: "So I'll be going by M, plored issues of gender and identity, my pronouns!"

because inside the letter M is a boy &
a woman, the two of us together." M
grew longer hair and started wearing
makeup and sometimes a skirt and a
bra-not an overstated bra, a modest
athletic bra-stuffed first with socks,
then with rice-filled tights, and finally
with silicone mastectomy prostheses.
Anne Fadiman is the Francis Writer in Resi­
dence ar Yale. Her books include The Wine
Lover's Daughter and Ex Libris.
culminating in a profile of a local drag
performer who was he when out of
drag and she when in: for the per­
former, drag was a costume, whereas for
M, women's clothes were neither drag
nor a costume but a tentative step into
a potential new identity.
M started taking estrogen, worked
with a voice coach, moved progressively
further from the boy and closer to the
woman, and by the next year had be-
L
ast year, the New York Times
published the results of an on­
line study conducted by its
"research-and-analytics department"
in which 4,151 subscribers answered
the question "Do you separate your
M&Ms and eat them by color?" Eigh­
teen percent responded, "Yes, it's
great." Eighty-two percent responded,
"No, that's weird."

Illustrations by Matt Chase. Source photographs courtesy the Library of

Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, C. M. Bell Studio Collection ESSAY
 I haven't eaten M&Ms for decades,
but when I was ten or so, I belonged
not only to the 18 percent but to a
subset within it-for all I know, it was
a subset of one-who not only sepa­
rated by color but arranged the piles in
descending order of quantity. Dark
browns were always the most plentiful
and therefore the least valuable; light
browns (which, I'm sad to say, were re­
placed by blues in the mid-Nineties)
were the least plentiful and therefore
the mo.st valuable. I'd eat the dark
browns until their quantity was reduced
to precisely that of the next most plen­
tiful color (always red or yellow), con­
tinue in that vein until all the piles
were the same size, and encl with the
last remaining light brown.
You might conclude any number
of things from this little case his­
tory. One of the less pathological is
that in the lumper-vs.-splitter di­
chotomy (incidentally, a potentially
promising topic for the New Yori<
Times' research-and-analytics de­
partment), I am a splitter. That is, I
am the sort of person who tends to
make distinctions rather than find
commonalities. Splitters enjoy taxon­
omy. Why say merely that you've seen
a bird? How about a hawk? How about a
red-shouldered hawk? Splitters enjoy
organization. Before I wrote this piece,
I sorted all my source materials into
thirty-four folders and arranged them
alphabetically by topic. Gosh, that was
fun. And splitters enjoy grammar.
When it comes to language, splitters
are almost always prescriptivists, who
favor rules and standards (this is how
people should talk) rather than de­
scriptivists, who favor popular usage
(this is how people actually talk). Pre­
scriptivists and descriptivists have
doubtless been fighting since words
were invented, but they've gone at it
with particular ferocity since the publi­
cation in 1961 of Webster's Third New
International Dictionary, a three-volume,
sixteen-pound-six-ounce descriptiv­
ist pronunciamento that eliminated
"colloquial," "correct," and "incorrect,"
among many other labels, and declared
that "like" could be a conjunction, a
usage already enshrined in a cigarette
jingle that made prescriptivists foam at
the mouth: "Winston tastes good like
a cigarette should." The ruckus stirred
up by W3, as it came to be known, was
52 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
covered by nearly every major periodi­
cal in the country.
There is little love lost between the
two camps. Prescriptivists have been
called (usually by descriptivists, but
sometimes, as a preemptive strike, by
themselves) elitists, killjoys, curmud­
geons, cops, cranks, peevers, fussbud­
gets, intransigents, old farts, linguistic
nitpickers, usage nerds, compulsive
pedants, logobullies, syntax snobs, and
grammar fascists. Descriptivists have
been called style smashers, corrupters,
miscreants, barbarians, vulgarians,
vandals, Neanderthals, and (by Kurt
Vonnegut) boozed-up war buddies
from Mobile, Alabama.
PRESCRIPTIVISTS HAVE
BEEN CALLED KILLJOYS,
CRANKS, LOGOBULLIES, AND
GRAMMAR FASCISTS
There's some truth in each set of
insults. Even David Foster Wallace,
the most famously ardent prescriptivist
I can think of, admitted, in ''Authority
and American Usage" (a revised ver­
sion of a 2001 Harper's essay), that his
camp, whom his unrepentantly lingua­
philic family called SNOOTS (Syntax
Nudniks of Our Time), could be, well,
snooty, not to mention arrogant, self­
righteous, and inclined to circular
reasoning ("It's the truth because we
say so, and we say so because it's the
truth"). But Wallace also mounted a
defense of prescriptivism that still
rings true for its devotees. He argued
that language serves its community
best when it is meaningful and clear;
that the conventions of standard En­
glish aid clarity; that when we fail to
honor those conventions, we place an
"extra interpretive burden" on the re­
cipient; that refraining from placing
that burden is considerate, just as it's
considerate "to de-slob your home be­
fore entertaining guests or to brush
your teeth before picking up a date";
that it's "not just more considerate but
more respectful somehow-both of
your listener/reader and of what you're
trying to get across"; and that aban­
doning the rules of grammar and usage
would make language impossible. "As
in Genesis 11:1-10-grade impossible,
a literal Babel. There have to be some
rules and conventions, no?"
0
Yes. At least that's what people
like me have always thought.
n the current prescriptivist/
descriptivist battlefront, noth­
ing has occasioned more
bloodshed than the humble pronoun,
in par ticular the singular they.
Although its evolution is still in its
early stages, they has already proved as
contentious as W3.
Lumpers sometimes glom all singular
theys into one big hunk, to be loved or
hated depending on one's temperamen­
tal or grammatical or political dru­
thers, but in fact there are two usages,
quite different from each other.
The first is M's they/them: an iden­
tifier for a person whose gender does
not fall into the he/him or she/her
binary. That's the usage Goldman
Sachs had in mind last year when it
invited its employees to a panel on
supporting "the transgender and
gender-nonconforming community"
(part of its Bringing Your Whole Self
to Work initiative), where the company
passed out four- by six-inch laminated
cards headed TIPS FOR BEING AN INCLU­
SIVE ALLY, with a list of feminine, mas­
culine, and gender-neutral singular
pronouns, complete with examples:
"They went to the store," "I spoke with
them." (The card also noted that some
nonbinary people use ze/zir: "Ze went
to the store," "I spoke with zir.") Last
fall, Merriam-Webster (the publisher of
W3) added a new definition to the
entry for they ("used to refer to a single
person whose gender identity is non­
binary"}, and the Oxford English Dic­
tionaTy followed suit, with an online
example from The Cut ("In 2016, they
got a role on Orange Is the New Black
as a wisecracking white supremacist").
Early this year, the American Dialect
Society named the singular they, "par­
ticularly as a nonbinary identifier," as
its Word of the Decade. (In 2000, the
Word of the Decade was "web," and in
2010, "google," used as a verb: conse­
quential cultural markers.)
The second usage of they is as a ge­
neric pronoun for an individual whose
gender isn't specified or relevant, as in
"Every reader of this essay undoubtedly
thinks they are a grammar expert."
 In 2016, when M was in my class,
the first usage was already widespread
at our university. Students were be­
ginning to append their pronouns to
their email signatures, as Elizabeth
Warren (she/her) and Pete Buttigieg
(he/him), among other Democratic
politicians, now do in their Twitter
bios; for those who used conventional
pronouns, the choice was often a ges­
ture of destigmatizing solidarity with
those who used the)•/them.
M was the first student I'd
taught who said, "My pro-
nouns are they/them," but I
was surprised the moment
hadn't come earlier. Yale
has many students who
identify as nonbinary, gen­
derq ueer, gender-flu id,
gender-nonconforming, or
transgender. (I'd originally
assumed that all trans peo­
ple would be eager to adopt
the pronoun associated
with their "new" gender­ L I
that is, he or she-but soon
learned that the trapped­
in-the-wrong-body model
wasn't always quite so neat,
and that many trans people
identify outside the gender
binary.) M permitted me a
relatively easy crossing of
the singular-they Rubicon
because they actually felt
plural to me: as they wrote
on Facebook, at that time
they were both "a boy & a
woman." (Note that they said boy, not
man, and woman, not girl: boy was their
past, woman their future.) I remember
telling my husband, "M really is a they!
They contain multitudes!"
Also, I k new M. They weren't a
topic in a cranky letter to the editor
from someone who doesn't believe
gender can be nonbinary or to whom
the whole thing is a novel concept.
(Apparently there are still such some­
ones. In A Quiel< & Easy Guicle to
They/Them Pronouns, an etiquette
book in comic-strip form, one frame
shows two people, their hair standing
on end and their mouths huge Os,
over the caption JUST DISCOVERED
THEYtrHEM PRONOUNS EXIST.) But even
if I'd never met M, I would have used
the pronouns they'd requested. Of
course I would have. (And if you
wouldn't, you probably haven't spent
much time on a campus lately.) M's
pronouns were not just a preference
but part of who they were, not an in­
solent flouting of grammatical conven­
tion but a widely accepted code that
filled a hole in the English language.
(As Goldman Sachs noted, there are
other codes. But ze/zir, ze/hir, xe/xem,
and similar neologisms have achieved
much less traction than they/them.)
...:c�
I
I tivists, I like rules because
I I
11
"-.._ I f
--[ �{,,;-
� g
8 �
2 �i
A � �
ti �
H l:!:i �
� w. �
8 �
The experience of being misgendered
is not some newfangled ultra-thin­
skinned, special-snowflake conceit; it's
painful. Students have told me that
being called by the wrong pronoun
inspires responses that can range from
"niggling unease" to "discomfort" to
"incredible wrongness" to "rage" to the
sensation of being "split in two." The
infraction is usually but not always
deemed less serious when it's acciden­
tal. When M started using they/them
pronouns, I was worried that I'd call
them he, and on occasion I did, be­
cause their previous maleness was so
thoroughly embedded in my mind.
But M forgave me. "Don't worr y
about slip-ups," they wrote m e i n an
email. "These processes are always
gradual, & I've learned to be patient."
It was more often other students,
serving as well-intentioned but occa­
sionally doctrinaire protectors, who
ran short on patience. An online
evaluation of one of my classes men­
tioned the time I invited a former
student to discuss an essay they'd writ­
ten on their nonbinary experience:
I found it offensive ... that you intro­
duced [the student] as "they/them"
when they came to class (and didn't al-
low them the space to do
that for themselves) but
then turned around and
used "he" in [a later] class.
The first part of that com­
ment taught me something
useful. I hadn't k nown
there was a rule, but now I
did-and like all prescrip­
they make me feel safe.
This was part of a new so­
cial code into which I was
being initiated: a matter of
courtesy, like thanking a
host or not interrupting.
But the second part seemed
a little unfair. Like M, this
nonbinary student had used
masculine pronouns when
we'd originally met, and I
sometimes stumbled.
I wasn't alone. When
the poet Eileen Myles, who
uses they/them pronouns,
spoke on campus, the pres­
i::lent of Yale used she in
his introduction. The student who told
me this, as an example of "an older
cis-man flubbing pronouns," started off
calling Myles they, but then, a minute
or two into our conversation, realized
that he was saying she himself. Later,
when I recounted this to an alum
who uses the),fthem , they told me they
viewed these two instances of mis­
gendering as significantly different in
scale: in the second case, the student
was trying hard but slipping up dur­
ing an informal private conversation,
whereas in the first, the president was
"disrespecting" an esteemed guest at
a public event and should have
known better.
I've taught two students, Nat and
Mara, who were already they when they
applied to my classes, and although I
wasn't infallible, I was therefore less
ESSAY 53
THE
SIXTIES
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE DECADE
likely co get their pronouns wrong. In
fact, both told me they'd gone through
a transitional period during which they/
them sounded strange co them too.
rather than she/her. Wren views they/
them not as a third category but as a
way of resisting categories. In a recent
email, they remarked on "the mislead­

GEORGE
FROM HARPER'S MAGAZINE
Their new pronouns took practice. ing tic that sees some people as 'he's,'
Nat had had cop surgery, and they some as 'she's,' and others as 'they's.' "

PLIMPTON
gave themselves a weekly testosterone (Uh oh, I thought. Guilty.)
shot-or, rather, gave themself a shot.

WALKER
("I am a singular person who is gender I hear this kind of speech all the time

PERCY
neutral," they explained to me, "so I use around my parents and their progres­
sive friends, and it's frustrating because
'themself.' ") In high school, Nat had
it effectively creates a 'trinary,' which
taken three years of Greek and four
is to say a binary, plus an added di­

JOE
years of Latin. I once asked them if
their knowledge of classical grammar
made adopting the singular they more
difficult. They said it was the opposite:
"Homeric Greek doesn't even use the
same third-person pronoun that Attic
Greek does!" And thus they were al­
MCGINNISS
DAVID
ready accustomed to what they called
"linguistic flexibility."
Mara cold me in an email that she/
her started to sound wrong before they/
mension that effectively defeats, or at
least misunderstands, the essence of
nonbinaryness altogether.
Wren now works as an editorial as­
sistant at an LGBTQ magazine called
them-I was touched when they gave
me a fanny pack that said THEM on
one side and QUEERO, as in "queer
hero," on the other-and has pub­
lished an essay there explaining that

HALBERSTAM them sounded completely right, but

also that when they were referred co
some nonbinary people don't use they/
them pronouns, that some binary peo­

RICHARD as they/them, "it felt like putting on a

pair of shoes that fit really well (great
ple do, and that "allowing for this sort
of complexity, in the end, ought to be

HOFSTADTER arch support! room for my toes!) after the bedrock of progressive gender

C.VANN
years of wearing a size way too small." politics." They say that when they
One of Mara's favorite garments was a walk into a room, they want to disrupt
sweater they had borrowed from the everyone's assumptions about gender.

WOODWARD Qloset, an actual closet in Yale's

LGBTQ office to which trans and
You may have noticed that I haven't
mentioned what Mae, Nat, and Wren

PRISCILLA nonbinary students donate clothes used to be called. (Mara hasn't

JOHNSON
that aligned with their old gender and changed their name.) All three of
borrow clothes that align with their them asked me not to include their
new one: a student-conceived solution "deadnames" (a term for former names

MCMILLAN to the problem of having co pay for a that have been changed to reflect a

SARA
whole new wardrobe. Yale's bureau­
cracy was trying to get things right but
didn't quite have its act together. The
health-center computer system had
person's true gender identity). Al­
though some trans and nonbinary
people deem their former names an
important part of their history, many

DAVIDSON
somehow managed to confuse Mara's consider deadnaming a particularly
pronouns with their name, and they hurtful form of misgendering, since it's

LOUIS
regularly received messages that began almost always deliberate and often the
"Dear Pronouns: They Them." result of bias or misunderstanding
When M announced their pronouns (That person isn't really a woman).

LOMAX
in my class, they/them seemed a rela­
tively simple matter. The former stu­
dent whom I preemptively introduced
INTRODUCTION BY to my class as they/them has done their
Some people go to great lengths to
remove their deadnames from the in­
ternet. Nat told me that their blood
boiled when colleagues at a summer

EUGENE J.
best to complicate it. After they gradu­ internship referred to them as "Nat,
ated, they changed their name to FKA [formerly known as) N---,"

MCCARTHY
ORDER TODAY FROM
Wren. Unlike M, Wren considers their
gender not as both/and but as neither/
nor (my they-contain-multitudes
their obsolete female name.
In the preceding nine paragraphs,
there are forty-three instances in which

STORE.HARPERS.ORG theory may have been a little too gee­

whizzy in the first place and was defi­
I used they, them, their, themselves, or
themself with a singular antecedent.
nitely not, as they say, scalable); unlike Don't they bother me? Yes, but no. Of

II
FRANt;LIN
�QU,\llf
rRF:-S Mae, Wren continues co use they/them course, when I read "Nat told me that
Distributed by Midpoint Trade Books,
a division of IPG

54 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020

their blood boiled," I hear what gram­
marians call "disagreement," an apt
word, as if it might occasion a tiny
fistfight, right there on the page, be­
tween"Nat" and"their." But I also hear
a louder voice, reminding me of two
things: that "her blood boiled" would
be inaccurate-Nat isn't a she-and
that whether it's their names or their
pronouns, people should get to choose
what they're called.
As for the second kind of singular
they-well, that's a more difficult matter.
I
was raised by the sort of parents
who substituted prescriptivism for
religion (agnostic in the latter,
fanatical in the former). My mother,
the daughter of a librarian and a
banker, regarded people who spoke
what she called "bad English" as
slovenly and unintelligent: anyone
who said "between you and I" de­
served to be disliked. My father, the
son of lower-middle-class Russian
Jewish immigrants who spoke with
accents and made frequent gram­
matical errors, embraced standard,
which is to say Waspy, English with a
convert's zeal. He was grateful to his
teachers at Boys High in Brooklyn,
whose extracurricular offerings in­
cluded the Correct English Club, for
providing him with such a useful tool;
he never felt they had put him down,
only lifted him up, by implicitly (and
perhaps explicitly) disparaging the way
he spoke when he entered the school.
As an adult, he viewed twentieth­
century America as a postapocalyptic
wasteland, smoke still rising from the
destruction wreaked by W3, strewn
with adverbs used instead of predicate
adjectives and obscenities used instead
of pretty much everything. After his
death, I found a despondent entry in
his journal on the rise of the word
fucl<in', which he called "the coital in­
tensifier," as"an all-purpose preceder of
innocuous nouns."
When I was in the sixth grade, I
learned the rules of grammar from a
small brown textbook called Easy En­
glish Exercises, by A da Riddlesbarger
and Nell Stillwagon. (Those were re­
ally their names. I recently found a
copy on eBay.) Mss. Riddlesbarger and
Stillwagon informed us that pronouns
were "pinch hitters for nouns" whose
purpose was to help us relieve the
"overworked" nouns in such sentences
as "Herbert and James's mother had
promised Herbert and James that Her­
bert and James might go to camp in
August if Herbert and James could earn
the necessary money." They closed the
deal by appealing to our vanity: "A
baby might say: Baby wants a drink.
An adult says: I want a drink." They
also explained that pronouns always
agree in number and gender with their
antecedents, and that the "personal
pronouns" include I, me, we (first per­
son), you (second person), and he, him,
she, her, they, them (third person). Fi­
nally, we were introduced to sentence
MARA REGULARLY RECEIVED
MESSAGES FROM THE UNIVERSITY
HEALTH CENTER THAT BEGAN
"DEAR PRONOUNS: THEY THEM"
diagramming, which hacked away at
the unruly jungle of English syntax
until it became a tidy French garden
with its topiary sorted and arranged by
function. The subject of a sentence,
which could be either a noun or a pro­
noun, always came first, as in:
He ran
<"'4,..0
�4 forest
<"',1(:>
(W hen I showed that to my hus­
band, he stared at it with a furrowed
brow and said, "WTF?")
No lumper could understand the
intense joy I felt when I first saw
that diagram.
And that's pretty much how things
were till I got to college, except that Mss.
Riddlesbarger and Stillwagon ceded
their position of scriptural authority to
William Strunk Jr., E. B. White, and
H. W. Fowler. I came to understand that
good grammar and good writing were
not synonymous, but I believed (and to
some extent still believe) that the first
was a necessary if not sufficient condi­
tion for the latter. It provided a swift,
well-functioning, certifiecl-by-Consumer­
Reports vehicle for its glorious passenger.
Why would anyone who cared about
words settle for less?
There was just one problem. Our
language was sexist.
The fall of my sophomore year at
Harvard, there was a second-wave­
feminist insurrection in a divinity­
school class taught by a li beral,
Godspell-endorsing minister named
Harvey Cox. In an article headlined
TWO WOMEN LIBERATE CHURCH COURSE,
the Crimson reported that two divinity
students, Linda Barufaldi and Emily
Culpepper, had introduced a resolution
in Cox's class calling for a two-week
ban on the use of "man," "men," and
masculine pronouns "to refer to all
people." They also proposed that
masculine pronouns not be used to
refer to Goel. Cox approved a vote,
the resolutions were passed, and
Culpepper brought in an armful of
party-store noisemakers (the kind
with lizardlike paper tongues that
make flatulent bleats when you blow
them on New Year's Eve), for which
she and Barufaldi submitted a reim-
bursement request to Harvard that
called their purchases "devices to im­
pede the use of sexist language." Every
time anyone said"mankind" instead of
"humankind" or called God "He," out
went the paper tongues. (Barufaldi and
Culpepper were occasional offenders
themselves.) Calvert Watkins, the
chair (or, at the time, "chairman") of
Harvard's linguistics depar tment,
wrote a letter to the Crimson, cosigned
by sixteen colleagues, explaining the
concept of"markedness," in which one
word in a pair of "lexical opposites" is
used as the default; hence we say,
"Each student shall discuss his paper
with his section man." (Watkins, of
course, made no mention of section
women.) He continued:
For people and pronouns in English
the masculine is the unmarked and
hence is used as a neutra 1 or unspeci­
fied term. This reflects the ancient
pattern of the Inda-European lan­
guages .... The fact that the masculine
is the unmarked gender in English (or
that the feminine is unmarked in the
language of the Tunica Indians) is
simply a feature of grammar. It is un­
likely to be an impediment to any
change in the patterns of the sexual
division of labor toward which our
society may wish to evolve . There is
ESSAY 55
 really no cause for anxiety or pronoun­
envy on the part of those seeking
such changes.
Newsweek covered the brouhaha,
referring to Barufaldi and CLtlpepper as
"distaff theologians." Four decades
later, Culpepper told the journalist
Mike Vuolo that several male divinity
students-future ministers-had asked
her, "Do you just need a good fuck?"
In those days, the issue
was that women felt ex­
cluded by men. It would
have surprised us to hear
that a half-century later, the
issue would be that nonbi-
nary people felt excluded
by binary people.. In my
twenties and thirties, I si­
multaneously railed at the
misogyny of English and
was obliviously complicit.
In an article about visiting
the Grand Canyon, l de­
scribed a frog as "sitting in
a perfect frog-sized niche
in the rock wall, his throat
palpitating and his eyes
beady with frog curiosity." I
felt that "its" would fail to
convey the ineffable mar­
velousness of this frog, and
"her" never occurred to me.
In the mid-Nineties, I
wrote an essay on the con­
flict between my two op-
posing semantic selves, one
feminist and one reaction-
ary. It was called "The His'er Problem."
I've heard that "The His'er Problem" is
assigned reading in some college En­
glish classes, whose studerns must find
it baffling. It was mostly about what
Calvert Watkins called the unmarked
pronoun, a topic that has been dead,
or at least cmnatose, for at least a de­
cade; today only a troglodyte would
think, as nearly every usage manual
maintained twenty-five years ago, that
using he to mean he or she was stan­
dard. His'er (pronounced "hizzer") was
an invented pronoun, a precursor to ze,
that had been proposed by the Chi­
cago schools superintendent Ella
Young in 1912 in a one-woman revolt
against the linguistic convention that
Easy English Exercises would later ex­
plain thusly, in Lesson 38, "Gender of_
Nouns and Pronouns": "It is customary
56 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
to use he, him, his in referring to a noun
that may be either masculine or femi­
nine." (Examples: "A child takes his
play seriously." "Every person in the bus
jumped to his feet.") Instead of "to
each his own," Young suggested we say
"to each his'er own." I averred in my
essay that I could never say "his'er"
(hideous) but that I disliked "to each his
or her own" (ungainly). I also disliked "to
all their own" (off pitch), though I
.;.:���
J.llCTH
·=·�11
·- I
-· ,
.........
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-· ..
.(U
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·t· I
grudgingly endorsed the conventional
work-around of casting sentences in
the plural as worthwhile, because gen­
der equality was so important, but
costly, because plurals turned indi­
viduals into faceless throngs.
Here's the thing that today's stu­
dents must find not only baffling but
incomprehensible: I rejected "to each
their own" without even seriously
considering it (unbearable). It would
have been ungrammatical.
The search for a gender-neutral sin­
gular third-person pronoun in English
has spawned numerous neologisms,
both before and after his'er. In his recent
book What's Your Pronoun?, the linguist
Dennis Baron includes a chronological
list of more than two hundred, from E
(1841) to than (1884) to hor (1890) to
hem (1903) to vey (1920) to shim (1929)
to ha (1932) to hse (1945) to co (1970) to
ghaH (1984; that one was Klingon) to fe
(1990) to het (2003) to ee (2014), many
of them with subjective, objective, and
possessive forms.
Baron also mentions neologisms in
several other languages, the most
successful of which is hen, a Swedish
substitute for han ("he") and lion ("she")
that was introduced by a progressive
linguist in 1966. At first it met the same
fate as every invented pro­
noun in the above list : fail­
ure. But after it was revived
in 1994, it began to catch
on in gay and feminist cir­
cles, though it is still used
by only a small minority of
Swedes. Some conser vative
media outlets have banned
I hen; some liberal ones have
I banned han and lion. At
Egalia, a public preschool in
Stockholm, everyone is en­
couraged to play with both
..
.J·"
,._
trucks and (gender-neutral)
dolls, and everyone is called
hen: all part of a larger so­
cial experiment to change
gender norms not only
through what people do but
through what they say.
According to Baron,
there are twenty-one terms
for gender-neutral pronmms,
including "duo-personal,"
"epicene," "hermaphro-
ditic," and "masculor fem­
inine." He prefers "the miss­
ing word," and concludes that in English,
"It turns out that the missing word isn't
missing at all. It's singular they."
C
ollege students are
bellwethers-or, if you're a
prescriptivist, canaries in the
coal mine. Once a new usage becomes
widespread on campus, in a few years
it's widespread everywhere. No new
usage has been advancing with greater
speed than the singular they. Ten years
ago, I might have heard examples in the
classroom but rarely in the statements of
interest my department requires in ap­
plications for its creative-writing courses.
These tend to be stiffly correct, be­
cause students don't know whether the
instructors are prescriptivists or de­
scriptivists but fear the worst since,
after all, we're English teachers. Here
are some sentences from the applica­
tions I received last fall:
If I'm asking a person to read some­
thing, it's because I want to hear what
they have to say.
Ir's rare to get to ask an author ques­
tions about what they've written.
I don't want to be that student who
can't stop talking about how their
summer abroad changed them.
It's an intimate experience to look
someone in the eye and tell them how
you're struggling.
These applicants were neither more
careless nor less deferential than their
predecessors. They had undoubt­
edly proofread their applications
with meticulous attention, but it's a
good thing that Mss. Riddlesbarger
and Stillwagon weren't reading
them. (From Exercise 88, on mnn­
ber, person, and gender: "Choose
the proper word in parentheses: One
of the cooks (has, have) given me
(his, their) recipe for cherry pie.")
The students' sentences, of course, all
contained the second kind of singular
the)', the all-purpose generic pronoun.
And they all made me wince.
W hy did this kind of singular they
make me want to put my hands over
my ears when I'd been instantly will­
ing to use the other kind of singular
they with nonbinary students? Besides
the fact that the nonbinary they had
far higher stakes-fairness, courtesy,
accuracy-there were two reasons.
The first was that the nonbinary they
was an example of splitting (into ei­
ther the "trinary" of which Wren took
a dim view or something more fluid,
but at the very least, more than just he
and she), whereas the other they is an
example of lumping (he and she
smooshed into a single pronoun). No
one who separated her M&Ms into
piles would like it. The second reason
was that when I used the nonbinary
they, I imagined a neon sign lighting
up above my head, visible to all, that
read THAT WAS INTENTIONAL .
And then, in smaller letters, SHE'S
MAKING A HUGE SACRIFICE. SHE'S PUT­
TING HER PROGRESSIVE PRINCIPLES
AHEAD OF HER GRAMMAR TORYISM,
AND UNLESS YOU GREW UP IN A FAMILY
LIKE HERS, YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW
MUCH THAT HURTS. If I were to say,
"One of the cooks has given me their
recipe for cherry pie," no such sign
would light up.
A college classmate of mine has
likened a deliberate violation of lin­
guistic convention to a blue note in
jazz, which is sometimes intentionally
off-pitch. The only problem is that
when Miles Davis made an E-flat even
flatter in "Summertime," everyone
knew he intended to do it, whereas
only a telepath could divine the true
motive behind a generic gender­
neutral singular they.
My classes don't officially cover
grammar, but like David Foster Wal­
lace, who wanted to make sure that
MY STUDENTS KNOW THAT
BENEATH MY MILD-MANNERED
EXTERIOR BEATS A STRICT­
CONSTRU CTIONIST HEART
none of his writing students would
have to face the adult world without
knowing the proper placement of a
limiting modifier, I include an occa­
sional lesson on dangling participles
or comma splices or restrictive and
nonrestrictive clauses, with examples
of errors from student work, newspa­
per stories, and-an inexhaustible
mother lode-President Trump's
tweets. I like to think of my tone as
gently hortatory; unlike Wallace, I
don't pretend to have a coughing fit
when my students-all of whom are
good, and in some cases exceptional,
writers, but few of whom learned
grammar in high school-make usage
errors. I try not to sound too bossy or
judgmental, distinguishing carefully
(in good splitter fashion) among
felonies (subject-verb disagreement),
misdemeanors (split infinitives), and
things I just happen to like (Oxford
commas). I try to remember that al­
though I am grateful for Easy English
Exercises, there is a fine line between
the mentee who becomes a mentor
and the bullied who becomes a bully.
Still, my students all know that be­
neath my mild-mannered exterior
beats a strict-constructionist heart.
Three years ago, I distributed a
grammar handout whose topics in-
eluded the singular they. I said that it
was useful in the case of nonbinary
people (I approvingly quoted the New
Yorker contributor bio of Eileen Myles,
the poet whom Yale's president mis­
gendered: no older cis-female pronoun­
flubber I!), but that in most other cases,
gender neutrality was best achieved
by using plural forms throughout the
sentence: my grudging recommenda­
tion in "The His'er Problem." This was
the class's final handout, eight single­
spaced pages, a proud lineal descen­
dant of Easy English Exercises, and we
read it aloud, with the students cor­
recting each error in turn, at an end­
of-term dinner. There was laughter,
bonhomie, and pizza. In a nerdish
sort of way, you could almost have
called it a party.
We arrived at the singular they
about two thirds of the way through
the evening. The example on the
handout, from a student ·piece
about the campus computer-science
lab, otherwise known as the Zoo,
was "Why would anyone ever sub-
ject themselves to four years in the
Zoo, if not for the promise of a Silicon
Valley paycheck upon graduation?"
I asked my students if "themselves"
sounded wrong to their ears-in fact,
if the all-purpose singular they soun­
ded wrong in general.
There was a long silence, and then
Luna, an excellent writer who had
lived in several countries and spoke
three lang uages, said, "No." She
went on to say-in a voice that,
when we discussed the evening later,
we both recalled as testy-that the
insistence on pronoun/antecedent
agreement was an example of pre­
scriptive grammar (a term I hadn't
mentioned in my class); that pre­
scriptivism was linguistically void,
since linguistics as a discipline was
entirely descriptive; and that, histori­
cally, prescriptivism was part of an
apparatus of oppression, because it
codified and valorized one dialect
while declaring others wrong (uned­
ucated, lower class, "other").
The other students looked at me,
or perhaps tried not to look at me,
as my face reddened. These argu­
ments were not unfamiliar. I'd read
about them in books. But I'd never
expected them to be applied to me.
The party atmosphere left the room
ESSAY 57
like air from a balloon. I felt dissed,
awkward, and old.
I said, "But you'll never say 'they
is.' You'll always say 'they are.' So
won't 'they' always sound plural?"
Luna responded, "Language changes."
Let me ask: Do you think Luna
sounded annoyingly Thought Police­
ish? That's not how I feel about my
students. At all. I love them for their
wit, their intelligence, their sweet­
ness, and their social consciences. I
respected Luna. Nonetheless, at that
moment I felt that much of what I
held dear about the English language
had been damned as immoral and
tossed out the window.
I lay in bed that night, unable to
sleep. Do all teachers have nights like
this, in which they worry that they've
metamorphosed from lovable curmud­
geons into oppressors, though they're
not quite sure how? I wish I could say
that as I tossed and turned I was pon­
dering what I would later come to see
as the eloquence and cogency of Luna's
arguments, but I was just feeling shitty.
And then two words floated into
my mind: "You are."
You are.
If I've ever been tempted to shout
"Eureka!" it was then. "Eureka!" is
supposed to be reserved for Archi­
medean breakthroughs, which, alas,
this did not turn out to be. I later
discovered that many others had had
exactly the same idea. At that mo­
ment, however, I thought I was the
first. A genius, basically. The mortify­
ing pizza party faded.
This was my idea: I'd spent my
whole life saying "you are," whether I
was talking to one person or fifty.
When I was talking to one person,
the plural verb didn't sound wrong. It
just was.
Had you once been exclusively
plural? And had it evolved to be sin­
gular as well, though retaining its
original plural verb 7 Might you, in
fact, be a lot like they?
The answers turned out to be yes,
yes, and yes.
H
ere's the short version of what
I learned about you.
Most other lndo-European
languages have two versions of you,
one singular and one plural. English
used to as well. In Old and Middle
58 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
English, the second person singular
was thou (subject) and thee (object), as use of thou may have hastened its exit:
in "Thou lovest me, and I love thee";
the plural was ye (subject) and you
(object), as in "Ye all love me, and I
love all of you." Around the thirteenth
century, English speakers added a
French-influenced fillip by starting to
use you (like vous) with their social
superiors, both singular and plural, and to Learn Singular & Plural. The argu­
thou (like tu) with intimates, children, ments in this curious volume are
and social inferiors. (The use of plural based not only on the Quakers' dis­
pronouns for nobility lives on in the
royal we, as in "We are not amused."
Queen Victoria-who may or may not
have said that-really did contain mul­
titudes.) When knights were knights
and peasants were peasants, it was
hard to screw up your pronouns, but by
the sixteenth century, with the rise of
a prosperous middle class, it was alarm­ when addressing more than one.
ingly easy to put your foot in your
mouth. What if the fellow you were
talking to sounded lower class because
he'd started out that way, but he'd
made a killing in the cotton trade and
expected to be addressed with respect?
If you called him thou, he might be at
least as offended as a nonbinary per­
son in the twenty-first century whom
you'd called he or she. In fact, there
were few more efficient ways to dis­
honor a man than to "thou" him.
When Sir Walter Raleigh was tried for
treason in 1603, the prosecutor ut­
tered the worst insult he could think
of: "I thou thee, thou traitor."
In such a climate, the safest course
was to call everyone you.
By the end of the seventeenth cen­
tury, you had pretty much supplanted ''
thee and thou, at least in London,
which was always on the cutting edge
of social change. (Ye had fallen by
the wayside as well.) The Quakers
were a notable exception. Just as
they refused to doff their hats or bow
to those who considered themselves
socially superior, they insisted on ad­
dressing both princes and paupers as
thou (that was the singular; they re­
tained you for the plural) in order to
emphasize everyone's spiritual equality, time when "yourself" undoubtedly
which was one of the reasons they
were stoned, beaten, kicked, smeared
with excrement, and imprisoned.
George Fox, the founder of the
Quakers, wrote that when he called a
person of rank thou, it was "a fearful
cut to proud flesh." And because the
Quakers were so roundly hated, their
Who wants to sound like a member of
a reviled out-group?
In 1660, two of Fox's followers, with
input from their leader, wrote an en­
ti re book devoted to rectifying the
problem of the singular you, titled A
Battle-Door for Teachers and Pmfessors
like of social deference but on their
high regard for truth telling. If it
would be a lie to say "books" when
there was just one book, would it not
also be a lie to use a plural word­
you-to address a singular person?
Ergo, everyone should use thou and
thee when addressing one person, you
Battle-Door sounded an awful lot like
the 2019 letter to the New York Times
that said, "Singular 'they' is an oxy­
moron. They' has a meaning, and it
means two or more of something."
By the nineteenth century, aside
from the Quakers and a few obstinate
geographic pockets, mostly in north­
ern England, thou was all but gone.
You, still trailing its plural verb, had
won the battle, which had been all
about evening out power and status,
or at least pretending to-with the
all-purpose, fancier you raising every­
one up to the same level, just as the
Quakers' humble thou reduced every­
one to the same level.
As Luna said, language changes.
ou are" made me feel entirely
Y different about the singular
they as a generic gender­
neutral pronoun. I could see that they
was undergoing exactly the same evo­
lution as you had, from exclusively
plural to both singular and plural-an
evolution that in both instances was
driven by social change. (And it oc­
curred to me that "themself," which
Nat preferred to "themselves," was no
different from "yourself." There was a
sounded strange, too, to ears that had
heard only "yourselves.") It was all just
happening a lot faster with they.
Which is not to say that I immedi­
ately jumped on the bandwagon. Two
years passed between the pizza party
and the course applications that made

me wince. But I winced from habit,
not from principle. "I don't want to be
that student who can't stop talking
about how thei r summer abroad
changed them" still sounded wrong, but
I no longer thought it was wrong.
Nevertheless, obstacles remained.
My parents. Easy English Exercises. My
favorite writers in my own genre,
John McPhee and Ian Frazier and Joan
Didion and E. B. White, whom I'd
never caught using the singular they.
Ambiguity. (My brother told me, "If
someone said, 'They killed them,'
how would I know whether one per­
son killed a hundred people or a
hundred people killed one person?")
Loss of stylistic grace. Loss of the
ease that comes from writing and
speaking in the way to which one has
become accustomed.
But I've been considerably swayed by
the many reasonable arguments in fa­
vor of the singular they. Here are a few.
It's been used by w riters from
Chaucer ("And whoso fyndeth hym
out of swich blame, /They wol come
up and offre in Goddes name") to
Shakespeare ("God send everyone
their heart's desire!") to Fielding ("Ev­
ery body fell a laughing, as how could
they help it") to Shaw ("It's enough to
drive anyone out of their senses"). A
friend of mine mentioned that Jane
Austen used it routinely. She did? She
did. I found an Austen website that
lists thirty-six instances in Mansfield
Park alone.
It was used in the King James Bible
( Philippians 2:3: "Let nothing bee
done through strife, or vaine glory, but
in lowlinesse of minde let each es­
teeme other better then themselues").
Many languages-including Turk­
ish, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian,
Basque, Armenian, B engali, and
Tagalog-have no gendered pronouns.
English needs a gender-neutral sin­
gular pronoun, and as Winston
Churchill said about democracy as a
form of government, they is the worst
option, except for all the others. I used
to fi11d they so grating, and I worried that
it would cause so much confusion,
that I said I'd prefer a neologism. But I
now realize that if I were working at
Goldman Sachs-an unlikely pros­
pect, for more reasons than I care to
name-and, upon being queried about
a colleague's whereabouts, were ex-
CHALLENGE
peered to say, "Ze went to the store,"
I'd try to comply but would have a far
AUTHORITY!
harder time than I've had with they,
and also might feel railroaded into an BOOKS FOR THE SKEPTICAL:
alternate universe in which my lan­ R. C. GIBSON - THE ANCIENT
guage didn't sound like my language ATHEIST - HAS WRITTEN
(which I understand, of course, is ex­
actly how many people feel about they). HIS LITTLE RED BOOKS
It's generational. The young are WHICH CHALLENGE THE
more likely to use they than the old. AUTHORITY AND NECESSITY
The eighty-five-year-old former tennis OF RELIGION, NATIONALISM,
player Renee Richards, a transgender THE MILITARY AND
woman who uses she, has said that she
CAPITALISM:
is almost as bewildered by current
discussions of pronouns as her father NONBELIEVERS LITTLE
was when his new telephone didn't RED BOOK
have a cord attached to it. I am much
closer in age to Richards than to my LIBERALS LITTLE RED
students, but I feel I should learn how BOOK
to use the phone.
It's political, but in a good way. My
THE LITTLE RED BOOK
students endorse the singular they FOR CURMUDGEONS
not because they're snowflakes but
THE ANCIENT ATHEIST'S
because they're activists. The nonbi­
nary they appeals to them because LITTLE RED BOOK
even if they're not nonbinary them­ ON HAPPINESS
selves, they wish to support those
who are; the generic they appeals to THE ANCIENT ATHEIST'S
them because they wish to be inclu­ LITTLE RED BOOK OF
sive: Why would you say "If some­
one has a question, he or she should ESSAYS
stand up" when there might be a AND, MOST RELEVANT IN THE
they in the room? As long as my stu­ TIME OF PANDEMIC:
dents don't completely w rite off THE LITTLE RED BOOK
those who fail to fall in line, that's
an admirable thing. It's what the ON THE DEMISE OF
Harvard Divinity School students HUMANITY AND THE
did with their noisemakers and what
the Swedes are doing with hen. In the LITTLE BLUE PLANET
late Sixties, Wilma Scott Heide, R. C. Gibson uses quotes from
the president of the National Orga­ great minds made through
nization for Women, wrote,
recorded time along with his
In any social movement, when changes
are effected, the language sooner or
own caustic commentary to
later reflects the change. Our approach question some of the most
is different. Instead of passively noting
the change, we are changing language
basic institutions humanity has
patterns to actively effect the changes. created over the centuries.
I might not have split that last in- While religion and nationalism
finitive, but Heide reminds me of a are his favorite targets, the
late friend of mine, a disability-rights common theme of the quotes
activist who told me I should never
say that someone was "confined to a and caustic commentary is the
wheelchair" unless I also said "con­ challenge to all authority.
fined to a pair of eyeglasses." I never
said it again.
I already say plenty of things that
aren't grammatical just because every­
AVAILABLE AT
body does and I'm used to them. I KINDLE AND
AMAZON BOOKS
ESSAY 59
wouldn't say "I aren't," but I say "Aren't
I?" I wouldn't say "Me is it," but I say
"It's me" even though-as per Easy
English Exercises, Lesson 60, "Case
Forms of Pronouns"-"me" should be
"I" because it's a predicate nominative,
not a direct object.
Sometimes they just sounds better.
If, instead of "If you love someone, set
them free," Sting had sung, "If you
love someone, set him or her free" or
(following the suggestion in my
grammar handout to make the whole
sentence plural) "If you love people,
set them free," fans worldwide would
have torn up their concert tickets.
They can be useful when anonym­
ity is important. The whistleblower
who set off President Trump's im­
peachment inquiry might have been
even harder to identify if reporters had
referred to him as they instead of he.
Following the principle that says
the enemy of my enemy is my friend,
I feel favorably disposed toward the
singular they because a lot of people
with whom I disagree about other
things dislike it. The conservative
computer scientist David Gelernter,
whose other peculiarities include his
denial of Darwin's theory of evolu­
tion, believes chat feminist ideo­
logues have "proceeded to shoot the
legs out from under grammar-which
collapsed in a heap after agreement
between subject and pronoun was
declared to be optional." (Actually, he
meant "antecedent," not "subject," but
never mind.) The Canadian psychol­
ogist Jordan Peterson, who has also
said that white privilege is "a Marxist
lie" and Islamophobia is "a word cre­
ated by fascists and used by cowards
to manipulate morons," has stated
that he does not recognize the right
of other people to tell him what pro­
nouns he should use to address them.
Why should I agree with those guys
about anything?
The most powerful foes of the sin­
gular they aren't prescriptive grammar­
ians, who, like me, have a hard time
with the generic gender-neLitral pro­
noun, but leaders of the Christian
right, who have a hard time with its
use by nonbinary people because they
believe chat God made human beings
either male or female. For them, it's
not a grammatical issue; it's a religious
issue. I beg to differ.
60 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
T he most important argument
for the singular they is that En­
glish is just too damn gendered.
Twenty-four years ago, when I
wrote "The His'er Problem," I thought
the goal was to change the way we
spoke so that the genders could be
linguistically equal. I was willing to
sacrifice a modicum of stylistic felic­
ity in order to achieve that goal, but
I wasn't willing to break any gram­
matical rules. Now I'm wondering
why it's so important to mention gen­
der at all.
For more than six decades, I've ac­
cepted without thinking that when
we say that someone went to the
store, we don't have to specify whether
that someone was old or young, rich or
poor, fat or thin, tall or short, but we do
have to specify whether the someone
was a "he" or a "she." Now I'm starting
to think that's a I ittle weird. Gender is
so ingrained in our heads. In his later
years, when he was referring to his
youngest son, my father-in-law would
often cycle through as many as five
names-Harry, Georgie, Neddy, Blue,
Teddy-before arriving at Mark. The
first three were his other sons. The last
two were long-deceased male clogs. He
never named any women. Gender was
more essential even than species.
That just doesn't make sense. So I'm
in favor of changes that take gender
off the table, or at least make it less
central. I welcomed my university's
adoption of "first-year" instead of
"freshman." I used to think the point
of the change was to make the term
less male; l now think it's to make it less
anything. Similarly, I approve of
"chair" instead of "chairman" (even
the Fed made the switch last year), "an­
cestors" instead of "forefathers," "work­
force" instead of "manpower," "actor"
and "host" and "server" for everybody.
I'm partway there with they.
In M&M fashion, l have sorted
the use of the singular they into a hi­
erarchy of five categories, from most
conservative to most revolutionary:
1. Refusing to use it in any way, shape,
or form.
2. Using it only for nonbinary people.
3. Using it with indefinite pronouns,
like anyone and everybody ("Does
everybody have their mittens?"}.
4. Using it in other situations in
which gender isn't known or rele-
vane ("A driver should know how
to park their car").
5. Using it for everyone, an idea pro­
posed last summer in a New York
Times column by Farhad Manjoo, a
self-described "cisgender, middle­
aged suburban dad" who wrote,
"Call me 'they,' and I'll call you
'them.' I won't mind, and I hope you
won't, either." (Manjoo's column re­
ceived 2,251 comments, most of
chem negative, including "Non­
sense,'' "Grow up," "How far have
we fallen," and "Are you kidding?"}
used to be in the second cate­
gory. I've now moved cautiously into
the third, at least sometimes, though
only in conversation.
Am l on a slippery slope? As I slide
down the pronoun hill, trailing a hand
behind me to make sure l don't go too
fast, I wonder whether I'll start to
bend on other linguistic matters be­
yond pronouns. Maybe. I used to spell
"email" "e-mail," and now l don't. I
can see a lowercase gin "to Google"
looming in my future. But chat's just
spelling. It's not grammar, which­
even though I know I'm wrong-I still
like to think of as resting on principles
as trustworthy and immutable as the
law of gravity.
I wrote most of this essay in a rented
one-room cabin without internet, a
landline, cell service, television, radio,
or hot water. (I mention these not to
solicit props for my Thoreauvian as­
ceticism but to emphasize how retro­
grade I am.) On my birthday, I was
sitting alone at the writing table,
which faces a large window. It was
early evening. l glanced up from my
work and saw a large, dark shape. 1
switched from this essay to my journal,
and wrote:
A black bear just walked across the
meadow from left to right and is now
snuffling around by the edge of the
woods. Are they eating something?
Yes, they have something in their
mouth! Now they're climbing up the
bank. Now they're in the woods. Wow.
Not exactly deathless prose, but a
milestone: my first Category 4. It was
the training-wheels version of the
singular they. I wasn't even talking
about a person. No one was listen­
ing, so I didn't have to worry about
the neon sign. Still. ■
 A N N O 1

THECOUNTEJ
Dise1npowering a 1
By Z�
In the northern Italian city of Balzano, the local tax office is housed in a former headquarters
of the National Fascist Party. Its far; ade features a monumental frieze the length of a basketball
court that has come to be known as The Triumph of Fascism. Every day, government employees
pass beneath Mussolini on horseback, raising his right arm in the Roman salute. The fifty-seven
panels depict party leaders swearing allegiance to the dictator and weary soldiers returning
from battle, having slaughtered lions and Bolsheviks. In the center, the words BELIEVE, OBEY,
FIGHT are inscribed below Mussolini's horse. The frieze was completed in 1942, a few decades
after Italy had annexed South Tyrol, the province in which Balzano is located, from the Austro­
Hungarian Empire. It was part of the Fascist government's attempt to italianize the area: German
speakers were excluded from public life, and Italians from elsewhere were invited to take their
places. In Balzano, which had resembled a typical Austrian town, with baroque layer-cake
far;ades and onion domes, the conquest was also architectural. The new structures, from a tri­
umphal marble arch to an austere concrete pool, remade the city along the rationalist lines
favored by the ruling party. At a time when most German speakers were anti-Fascist but pro­
Nazi, the project was meant to brand the city as Italian, not just as Fascist.

The frieze remained after the fall of the regime, like most Fascist structures
across the country. Although the Allied powers had instructed the Italian
government to remove the "unaesthetic" remnants of Fascism, the policy
was enforced irregularly. Some sculptures were destroyed; another eques­
trian Mussolini, in bronze, was melted and recast as a monument to parti­
sans. But in the absence of the resources needed to raze and rebuild,
Fascist Party headquarters became town halls and police stations. Starting
in the 1990s, the state awarded protected heritage status to most public
buildings from the Fascist period. They were seen as expressions of a style
rather than an ideology. In a country where Renaissance cloisters coexist
with ancient thermal baths, this attitude is not entirely unexpected. As the
historian Jeffrey Schnapp told me, "People are used to living in a palimp­
sest." When, less than a decade ago, Fendi moved its headquarters to a
palazzo in Rome that had been commissioned by Mussolini in 1935, its
CEO proclaimed, "It is completely de-loaded, empty of any significance."

In South Tyrol, however, The Triumph of Fascism has been particularly divisive. The
frieze is a marker of annexation: it was designed to make the Italian-speaking popula­
tion feel welcome. "There is a strange sort of identification with this monument,"
Arno Kompatsch�r, the current governor of the province, told me, "even for people
who don't have Fascist ideas." To German speakers, it's a memento of a regime
that denied them basic human rights. Its significance is also complicated by the
fact that the artist was a German-speaking South Tyrolean sculptor, and that col­
laboration with the Fascist regime remains taboo. But while other monuments from
this period have been debated intensely, even violently, the frieze escaped public
scrutiny until recently. In 2011, then-provincial governor Luis Durnwalder an­
nounced a plan to remove it. Many people hoped that the gesture-a collective act
of forgetting-would mitigate the region's divisions. The German- and Italian-speaking
communities are now represented proportionally in the government, but live remark­
ably separate lives; children often play on different playgrounds and enter schools
through separate doorways. "We don't yet have a shared history," Patrick Rina, a local
journalist, told me. "You'll find a German truth and an Italian truth."

62 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2020

,A T 0 N

l-MONUMENT
�morial to Fascism
y Poll

"In Germany, a Hitler monument in the form of this Mussolini frieze would be
unthinkable, not to mention displaying it on a public building," Durnwalder went
on to argue. "Poor Italians, I say, if this is the only thing that constitutes their
identity." He was predictably criticized by those on the far right; the announcement
prompted neofascist marches at which protesters chanted "Balzano is Italy." The
plan also met with resistance from local historians. "The removal of the frieze,"
they wrote in an open letter, "would only add to its weight in the public debate."
The historians acknow1edged that the monument was "an obstacle to peaceful
coexistence," but advocated for some sort of educational intervention instead. "[Its]
totalitarian, inhumane character should be explained with detailed information."
A month later, the municipal, provincial, and national governments responded by
authorizing a commission of historians to "disempower" the momiment themselves.
The new commission asked politicians to sign a noninterference agreement and
issued a public call for ideas.

Most responses to the call focused on concealing the frieze: one sug­
gested a theatrical red curtain; another proposed a grove of trees. But the
commission decided that censorship would be counterproductive. "A
covering would have contributed even more to the mystification of the
frieze," one historian explained. Instead, the commission selected an
approach that "took away the potential explosive power of the monu­
ment" by challenging it in a different way. In 2017, they superimposed
the phrase NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO OBEY across the fai;ade in block
letters lit from behind. The quotation, based on a remark by the German
philosopher Hannah Arendt, appears in German, Italian, and Ladin, a
language spoken in the region, and counters the frieze's authoritarian
directive. A sign in the square addresses the frieze's imagery, explaining,
for example, why a Fascist martyr is being thrown into a river and why
an African man appears in stocks. Passersby are no longer left "alone in
front of these remnants," Hannes Obermair, a historian on the commis­
sion, told me.

Monuments to shameful historical legacies, like Confederate statues in the

Zoey Poll is a writer based in Paris.
United States, are often caught between demands for preservation and calls for
destruction. In Balzano, the commission managed to avoid that binary by de­
signing a kind of counter-monument. The approach is not without its critics,
many of whom worry that contextualization looks too much like acceptance:
"Such monuments are not to be explained, but ought to be abolished," one
South Tyrolean separatist politician argued. Others contend that the frieze
should have been left untouched. To prevent history from repeating itself, "We
need all the signs of the past to be protected from any form of concealment," a
member of one cultural heritage society wrote. Stilt, the city has in large
part welcomed, or at least accepted, the Deni<mal-a German word for
"memorial" that means, roughly, "time to think." Most residents of Balzano
acknowledge that the conservation of a Fascist monument need not be
equated with support for neofascism. "We're mature enough," the mayor told
me, "to read the historical facts with a neutral and scientific perspective." ■

Top: The Tri11111f,/1 of Fascism (detail). Bottom: A crowd outsicle the former National Fascist Party headquarters
in Bolzano, South Tyrol, Italy© Oskar Da Riz. Courresy Autonomous Province of Balzano-South Tyrol ANNOTATION 63

ON NIORAL INJURY
Can a new diagnosis help heal our souls?
I n May 1999, Anthony Feinstein, a
quiet South African psychiatrist
working in Toronto, received a dis­
traught patient at his office. The
woman-Patient X-was a war reporter
who worked exclusively in conflict
zones. She had just returned from a
particularly gruesome assignment,
which had left her depressed and lethar­
gic. Feinstein noted at the time that she
appeared to be suffering from deep and
sustained trauma.
During one session, after Patient X
described her state of mind, Fein­
stein asked whether she'd spoken to
her employers about her condition.
She recoiled.
"If I told my bosses I was emotion­
ally distressed, I would never get back
in the field again," she explained in
tears. She'd lose her job. Whatever she
felt had to stay hidden.
Feinstein is a research psychiatrist
who primarily focuses on patients with
Janine di Giovanni is a senior fellow at Yale's
Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Her neiv
book, based on a report in the December
2018 issue of Harper's Magazine, about the
persecution of Christians in the Middle East,
will be p11blished next year.
Opposite page: A police station in Freetown, Sierra Leone, destroyed by
the Revolutionary United Front, 1999 © Riccardo Vencuri/Conrrnsto/Redux
R E P O R T
By Janine di Giovanni
multiple sclerosis, studying how they
respond to the disease. "I look at behav­
ioral changes," he told me. "Their de­
pression, their anxiety, how a change
in patterns occurs. Basically I'm trying
to understand their brains."
But the journalist with clear symp­
toms of post-traumatic stress disorder
weighed heavily on Feinstein. He won­
dered whether her suffering might have
been prevented if she'd had the right
training before her assignment or if
she'd been treated immediately after
returning. Could early intervention
alleviate stress-induced depression?
This was the late Nineties, and
PTSD was not as widely researched as
it is now. Most reporters and humani­
tarian workers had not heard of it.
Feinstein's knowledge of the affliction
came partly from his background: he'd
grown up during apartheid and wit­
nessed extreme violence. He knew
that soldiers returning from active
combat suffered from PTSD, but he'd
never heard of a conflict reporter suf­
fering similar symptoms. He asked his
research team to compile studies that
might provide precedents, but they
came back empty-handed.
"They told me there was nothing
published on the topic," Feinstein re­
called. "l didn't believe them. Because
in medicine, there is always something
that comes before you."
But the University of Toronto's
medical library did not have a single
study on the subject. Feinstein was
baffled: there was extensive scientific
data on firelighters, police officers, sol­
diers, and victims of sexual assault,
but a void when it came to reporters.
T
hough sometimes remembered
as a more peaceful time, the
Nineties were full of blood­
shed and misery. The decade was
marked by wars in Africa, the Bal­
kans, and the Middle East, often in­
volving extreme violence carried out
by paramilitary groups with little re­
gard for international law. In the days
before journalists started embedding
with troops, those of us who reported
on these conflicts were free agents.
There were no precautions in place to
protect us. Few reporters wore flak
jackets or helmets; fewer had insur­
ance or security guards. When we
heard news of a war, we jumped on a
REPORT 65
plane and arrived cold, notebooks or
cameras in hand.
Most of my colleagues were freelanc­
ers with no conflict training, and the
violence in Bosnia, Chechnya, Soma­
lia, Rwanda, Liberia, Sudan, the Congo,
and other places was harrowing. Many
reporters were killed, many others per­
manently injured. Several of my friends
took their own lives. I was in Somalia
in 2002 when I got a call on my satellite
phone and was told that Juan Carlos
Gumucio, a much-loved Bolivian re­
porter for El Pa(s, had killed himself
with a shotgun. Years later, Gumucio's
third wife, Marie Colvin, my colleague
and friend, died during a rocket attack
in Homs, Syria.
In 2000, I was working in Sierra
Leone during a particularly bloody
conflict. In mid-May, as Freetown was
about to fall to the Revolutionary
United Front-a brutal paramilitar y
group whose signature was to cut civil­
ians' arms off at the wrist or elbow-I
ran into my old friend Kurt Schork,
who was on assignment for Reuters. It's
hard, even now, for me to explain how
iconic Schork was to his colleagues. He
was often described as the greatest war
reporter of our time.
Schork came late to journalism­
he had been the chief of staff of New
York's Metropolitan Transportation
Authority and a Rhodes scholar
alongside Bill Clinton-and he was in
his forties when he made his name
photographing Kurdish atrocities dur­
ing the first Gulf War. He was later
sent to Bosnia, where I met him dur­
ing the siege of Sarajevo; he remained
in the city for five years.
On Wednesday, May 23, I had din­
ner with Schork in Freetown, and I
handed him a VHS tape that showed
RUF members committing atrocities
against United Nations peacekeepers.
He told me that the next morning he
planned to drive to Rogberi Junction,
a rebel-held crossroads town northeast
of the capital, along with two other
reporters and Miguel Gil Moreno de
Mora, an Associated Press cameraman
and producer who was also among the
finest in his field.
I had breakfast with Moreno before
they left. We joked about frogs mating
in the abandoned hotel where we were
staying. Though there were reports
that the road to Rogberi Junction was
66 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
especially dangerous, the group went
ahead. Schork and Moreno never
came back.
T
heir murder sent an earth­
quake through our small tribe
of reporters. The event also
motivated Feinstein to pursue his study
of war reporters and PTSD. He got the
names of one hundred and seventy war
reporters, one hundred and forty of
whom agreed to be interviewed, in­
cluding me. Our responses to Fein­
stein's questionnaires were compared
with those of a control group.
Feinstein was alarmed by the results.
"I do not believe there is another profes­
sion that has more exposure to war than
your group," he told me. While soldiers
often served one or two tours, he said,
"You go back year after year after year
to war." Feinstein compiled a database
of more than a thousand frontline
journalists and
concluded that
the mean time
spent in war
zones for career
war repor ters
was nearly fifteen
years. "You and
your colleagues
created a bubble
around y o u r­
selves," Feinstein
told me at the
time. "You be­
lieved you were
neutral observ­
e r s , and you
were immune
to harm. Even
though youknew more than one­
often many-who had been killed.
You created this bubble by saying,
'We are okay. We are fine."'
I was relieved to find out that I
did not have PTSD; but it turned
out that most of my colleagues did.
It showed: alcoholism, depression,
an inability to commit to partner­
ships, and suicide were all symp­
toms of untreated PTSD.
Feinstein's study was published
to much acclaim in the September
2002 issue of the American Journal
of Psyc/1iatry. Aided by former
CNN London bureau chief John
Owen, Feinstein shared his results
with newsrooms around the world
Top to bottom: Kurt Schork helps a boy after a mortar attack in Sarnjevo, 1992 © Reuters.
Phot0<Jmpher James Nachtwey offers water to a man in Rwnnda, 1994 © Scott Peterson/Liaison/
Getty lmngcs. Kummu and Abu Bakarr Kargbo, who were attacked by the Revolucion,1ry
United Front, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, 2005 © Yannis Kontos/Polaris/Panos Pictures
to persuade editors to pay attention to
their war correspondents' trauma. Most
of them did. His work became a refer­
ence point for CNN, the Associated
Press, the Neiu York Times, the BBC,
and many other news organizations to
develop conflict-reporting protocols.
refugee crisis. The flow of people es­
caping wars in the Middle East, in
particular the civil war in Syria, was
the largest such displacement ever
documented. More than one million
women, men, and children attempted
to cross the Mediterranean to get to
Feinstein built on Shay's work,
studying moral injury among conflict
reporters. In 2016, he began an initial
report with the journalist Hannah
Storm for the Reuters Institute, inter­
viewing eighty reporters on the mi­
gration beat. He found that

I
n the two decades since Feinstein
began studying trauma, PTSD
has transformed from a relatively
obscure diagnosis into a cultural
touchstone. People who don't know
the disorder's actual symptoms confi­
dently state that they are suffering
from PTSD after any number of un­
pleasant experiences. The widespread
embrace of post-traumatic stress as a
concept reflects its power not just as
a clinical tool but as a framework for
how human beings process-or fail to
process-trauma.
In 2015, Feinstein began interview­
ing reporters who were covering the
Top to bor tom: A para.trooper hit by a mortm shell near Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in an attack
that also injured Don McCullin, 1970© Don McCullin/Concact Press Images. Migrants land
on the island of Lesbos, Greece, after crossing from Turkey, 2016 © AP Phoco/Sami Palacios
Europe-and more than 3,700 are
estimated to have died in the effort­ moral injury rather than PTSD or
in that year alone. depression emerged as the biggest
Unlike Feinstein's earlier subjects, psychological challenge confronted
the reporters covering this humanitar- by journalists covering the migration
crisis .... Good journalists will of
ian catastro­ course feel moved by the migration
phe were not crisis, but they cannot fix it and
themselves at should not attempt to do so. Guilt,
risk; they were which is often misplaced, can be a
not getting faulty motivator of behaviour.So too
shot on the can moral injury.
front lines.
But he found Moral injury and PTSD can occur
that a sense of together-this is not infrequent­
helplessness­ but they are two separate phenom­
the inability ena. When we spoke recently, Fein­
to save people stein described moral injury as "a
from drown­ wound on the soul, an affront to
ing, let alone your moral compass based on your
alter the tragic own behavior and the things you
c onditions have failed to do." In other words,
chasing them rather than being triggered by exter­
from t h e i r nal actions, moral injury comes from
homes-was the feeling that one has failed to live
causing an­ up to one's own ethical standards. Of
other kind of men­ course, guilt and shame are common
tal health crisis. responses to such failings, but moral
He believed that injury occurs "only when symptoms
these journalists get to a point of impeding a person's
were suffering from ability to function."
moral injury. One example of moral injury that
Moral injury is Feinstein comes across frequently is
not a new psycho­ that of photographers feeling that
logical concept. they benefited from the suffering of
Jonathan Shay 's ocher people. He told me to picture a
1994 book Achilles lone photographer on a Greek beach
in Vietnam: Combat focusing his lens on a boat full of ref­
Timima and the Un­ ugees in the distance. Suddenly the
doing of Character is boat capsizes. The photographer sees
a classic study in the that most of the passengers cannot
field. Shay began his swim and are beginning to drown.
career researching neuropathy, then "Do you wade in or do you call for
shifted to working with veterans who help?" He decides to do the latter. He
had PTSD, devoting his life to helping calls for help on his cell phone, and
them adjust to returning home. He continues to photograph the tragedy
argued that PTSD was not an illness, in front of him. But his plea for help
but an injury: the "persistence of adap­ is too late; many people die in the
tive behavior needed to survive a stress­ sea. Later he is lauded for his compas­
ful environment." He compared the sionate work. But guilt and shame
homecomings of soldiers in the Iliad gnaw at him for years.
with those of Vietnam vets, their dev­ "The photographer who believes
astated lives a result of fighting a war he built a successful career on the
they did not believe in. back of others' suffering is suffering
REPORT 67
misplaced guilt," Feinstein told me. pressed ... without
"You can dissect the reasons you are phone . . . money
there, but essentially you are there for rent ... money
bearing witness. In a sense, you are a for child support ...
contemporary historian." money for debts ...
money!!! ... I am
Over the years, I have come to
haunted by the vi­
know many war photographers, and I vid memories of
have witnessed this phenomenon. killings & c orpses
The legendary British photojournalist & anger & pain ...
Don McCullin, now in his eighties, of starving or woun­
has told me repeatedly about his dis­ ded children, of
comfort with the times he chose to trigger-happy mad­
continue taking photographs when men, often police, of
he felt he should have been helping. killer executioners.
In May 1999, I was in Kosovo with
the photojournalist Alex Majoli re­ "We are not social
p orting on the Kosovo Liberation workers," the pho-
A r my when NATO accidentally tographer Corinne Dufka told me
bombed the unit we were with. While during the siege ofSarajevo, when
I pulled injured and dead bodies from 1 found myself emotionally drained
the trench where we had been shelter­ by the misery that confronted us
ing, Majoli continued to photograph daily. "You are a reporter," she said.
the bombs falling from the sky and the "It is different." But Dufka even­
wounded soldiers. tually came to feel that the
"You can always write about this moral responsibility that accom­
later," he shouted at me over the cries panied her war reporting was
of pain and the roar of bombs. "I only too great. She walked away from
have one chance to get the evidence." her distinguished career at Re­
Majoli's work from that day is some uters to work for Human Rights
of the finest war photography 1 have Watch, where she now runs the
ever seen. And we've since talked West Africa division.
about that question: Are we in the "It is a question of, How much
field to bear witness to atrocities, to do you do?" Feinstein told me.
document history, or to help p eople? "When you confront these ex­
Schork was one of the few reporters 1 quisite dilemmas, you also ask
knew who saw his role as a protector yourself: Why did 1 help this per­
of civilians. When a shell landed in son and not that person?"
Sarajevo, he would haul broken bodies Another aggravating factor of
to his car and drive, through the ex­ moral injury might be believing
plosions, to the hospital. "It is what that your government-one you
human beings do," he told me once. were brought up to trust-is con­
"Help each other stay alive." tributing to the suffering you
I often thought about Kevin Carter, witness. Many of the journalists
a member of the Bang Bang Club, a reporting from the
legendary group of four South African Mediterranean and
photographers. One of Carter's most the U.S.-Mexico
famous photographs depicts a starving border are working
Sudanese child collapsed on the in their native coun­
ground while a vulture hovers nearby. tries. An American
Carter chased the vulture away, but he reporting on ICE of­
was left shocked and full of sorrow. ficials separating
The photo appeared in the New York desperate families at
Times in March 1993. Carter won a the border may feel

0
Pulitzer for the image. He killed him­ doubly responsible­
self four months after winning the and doubly helpless.
prize, on July 27, 1994, at age thirty­
three, leaving a note: f course,
moral in­
The pain of life overrides the joy to the jury does
point that joy does not exist. ... de- not affect only war

Top to bottom: Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers, 1999 ©Alex Majoli/Magnum Photos. Photographer Don
McCullin in Hue, South Vietnam, <luring the Tct Offensive, 1968 © Nik Wheeler/Corbis/Getty Images. Kevin Carter
68 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020 photographing police firing on a protest in Soweto, Johannesburg, 1993 © Ken 0os(erbroek. Courtesy Monica Zwolsman
reporters. Soldiers who have wit­
nessed torture, including at Abu
Ghraib, have written abo ut their
moral injury. Doctors in Syria who
were unable to save the lives of thou­
sands of people while working under
bombardment have also suffered from
Feinstein believes that under­
standing moral injury will be par­
ticularly important in the aftermath
of the pandemic, not just because of
the number of people who are dying,
but because people are separate d
from their loved ones and unable to
Another question is how we, as a
society, come to terms with Donald
Trump. What will be the long-term
effect of feeling moral revulsion to­
ward our president's behavior?
When I asked Feinstein this, he
answered by first quoting FDR:
"'The presidency is not merely an
administrative office ... it is preemi­
nently a place of moral leadership.'
This just highlights how far the
presidency has fallen over the last
eighty years."

F einstein's moral-injury study is

properly grieve.
"They can devel­
op a whole host of
mental difficul­
ties," he said. He
speculated that
medical person­
nel might be es­
pecially suscepti­
ble."A position in
which you can
decide life-or­
death issues like
this is an acutely
uncomfortable
0;1e to endure."
And what
it. Survivors of school shootings, pros­ about the community at large? Will we
ecutors trying cases that they know all suffer from moral injury given what
will not see justice, and witnesses of we have witnessed during the pan­
police brutality can all experience demic? Feinstein thinks the predomi­
moral injury. After the COVID-19 nant emotion will be anxiety, but that
pandemic is brought under control, people will experience degrees of
moral injury may be among the prob­ moral injury. He told me to think of a
lems facing frontline health care hierarchy of suffering.Those who have
workers. These people have risked lost people they loved place at the top,
their lives to save others, but they and below them are those who lost a
have been unable to save many oth­ business or a chance to celebrate a life
ers. In some cases, they have had to milestone such as a wedding or a grad­
make decisions about who receives uation. "These too will leave their
ventilators, who lives and who dies. mark," he said.
Top to bottom: Joao Silva, a member of the Bang Bang Club, phorographing a car bombing
in Baghdad. 2003 © Michael Kamber/New York Times/Redux. U.S. Border Patrol agents
taking undocumented immigranL'i into custody in Texas, 2016 © John Moore/Getty Images
still in its early stages: he has
interviewed a new set of report­
ers and that data is being analyzed. As
in 1999, I am a participant. I recently
completed my first questionnaire, and
in doing so, thought back on my
thirty-year career in war zones. l
thought of the people I helped, the
ones I got out of cities under siege and
burning villages, but also of the many
I did not.
I often felt like a vulture. But
there are ways of protecting oneself.
At Yale, where I teach a course about
reporting on war and other catastro­
phes (including pandemics), I begin
by introducing my students to the
concept of trauma. We simulate
working in war zones, but I also
teach them that those who spend
hours looking at devastated cities
through a viewfinder, or interview­
ing victims of sexual violence during
wartime, or even those watching or
reading about it from a distance, are
susceptible to the evil and darkness
that surround conflict.
Is it possible to repair a soul?
Feinstein is looking at cognitive beha­
vioral therapy as one potential treat­
ment for moral injury. In CBT, pa­
tients seek to identify and alter
irrational thought patterns. He be­
lieves it might be helpful for war re­
porters who continue to agonize over
moments they can t' change.
"I believe that we are a very resil­
ient species," Feinstein told me. "We
have come through world wars and
previous pandemics, and we will of
course endure here."
We have witnessed much tragedy
over the past year. It has been historic,
vast, overwhelming. Yes, we are resil­
ient. But our souls are scarred. ■
REPORT 69
 S T O R Y

NOBODY GETS OUT ALIVE

By Leigh Newman

G
et ting past the on, as the mastodon well
m a stodon ro ok knew. Both its empty
planning. The sockets were as expressive
great plated skull was as eyes-huge, s oulful,
wedged between the fire­ slightly depressed.No doubt
place and the credenza, due to the elephant lurking
leaving the two ivory tusks in its genetics. You never
splayed across the carpet saw an upbeat elephant.
where a coffee table be­ They were like donkeys:
longed. To exit the wed­ charismatically morose.
ding party, guests either The idea of owning such
stepped over one tusk, an animal had never oc­
then the other-a choice curred to Carter, and his
that required skillful foot­ failure of imagination felt
work and a certain level of more and more as it should
sobriety-or jumped over have-like a failure. What
both with an awkward, did a three-piece sectional
last-minute leap. really say about your under­
This late in the evening, standing of the universe?
the leaping had become He and Katrina had a three­
more frequent. And more piece sectional, plus a
flamboyant. Guest after matching ottoman that she
guest soared over the mast- called a "poof."
odon tusks-feet first, faces joyful, ing. Though no one seemed to notice, "Carter!" said Neil by the fireplace,
landing in the foyer without the slight­ Katrina had not spoken to or even holding up an empty glass.
est injury to their ankles. At which looked at him since the start of the Carter held up a bag of almonds.
point they hugged Carter. And asked party. Save during the cake-cutting Cheers!
him how he had met the bride. Or what ceremony, when she had fed him a Several times, he had been tempted
he loved about her. Or if the two of forkful of frosting that had the same to tell Neil about his argument with
them had considered ... well ... little cold, white, dead-flavored consistency Katrina. Neil was her oldest friend
Carters and Katrinas! as her smile. from childhood. He would know what
Carter improvised a light, evasive At this point, she was no longer in to do. Or how to make her less upset.
laugh, handed them a bag of candied the living room. Or anywhere in sight. He had a swashbuckling kind of gen­
almonds, and thanked them for com- Carter had said so many things he erosity, a way of walking through the
now regretted, things he would go crowd that inspired laughter or a fresh
Leigh Newman is the author of the Alaskan back and change if only that were round of clinking glasses in every
memoir Still Points North. possible.Which it wasn't.Time slogged group of guests he passed. It was Neil

\\'li 111er Solsrice 2012 Dinner Parr)', by Nicole Eisenman© The artist. Courtesy Anton Kem Gallery, New York City STORY 71
who had dug the mastodon out of the
permafrost with a pick and shovel. And
Neil who had built his log-cabin
mansion-by himself, after work and on
the weekends. When he found out that
Katrina and Carter had been married in
New York-at city hall-he insisted
they let him throw a party. In Alaska.
With all of Katrina's hometown friends
and neighbors.
Now he was heading in Carter's di­
rection. Carter gave the mastodon a
little pat. The skull was polished and
warm to the touch. Except where a
few chunks of missing bone had been
patched with soldered bronze.
"Buddy," said Neil. "Let's blow the
stink off."
"I'm good," said Carter. "I'm saying
our goodbyes."
"Katrina's ice-skating," said Neil.
"Right in back."
Carter smiled, as if he knew this
already. Then followed Neil across the
living room, trying to keep up with his
discussion about his stepdaughters:
Both were towheads. Twins. Com­
petitive figure skaters.
Neil stopped at a glass door, slid it
open, ushered Carter out to a snowy
deck. The cold was soul blasting, fan­
tastical, a gasp of winter in each breath.
Neither of them were wearing shoes.
Not that Carter mentioned this.
"The two of you need to move
up here!" said Neil. "We could be
neighbors!"
Carter noclclecl-ancl, for a mo­
ment, almost agreed. The lake at the
back of the house was glazed with
moonlight, the sky a dream astrono­
my of stars.
"Lake ice is too bumpy to skate on,"
said Neil. "Even if you flood it and re­
freeze. Plus you have the air traffic." He
pointed to the tiny planes on skis that
were parked along the shoreline, their
noses wrapped in paclclecl blankets. "I
put in a practice rink for the girls.
Moved the helicopter into a hangar."
Which was pricey. Inconvenient. But
better vis-a-vis the homeowners' asso­
ciation. Landing pads in the backyard
always upset the neighbors.
Carter's feet were finally numb
enough to move. He inched closer to
the railing-and could not believe for
a moment what he was seeing. Katrina
was clown on the rink. But skating the
way that someone from the tropics
72 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
might, someone who had never seen
a snowflake.
Around the wall she went, shuffling
and hunched and hesitant, her arms
outstretched. The look on her face was
unmistakable. Carter knew it well: she
hated ice-skating and hated being aw­
ful at it but hated quitting more. She
would go around and around that rink,
miserable and forcing herself on for
reasons he could only assume had to
do with marching up mountains as a
child, and conquering foreign equity
markets, and believing, above all else,
in pointless personal accomplishment.
A belief that he did not share, but did
make him feel so tenderly toward her.
She was. unlike anyone he had ever
met. And he had ruined their wedding
party. "Katrina?" he said.
She looked up, squinting through
the floodlights.
"Katrina!" said Carter. "I'm ... " But
before he could apologize for what he
had said and how he had said it-her
eyes widened, her skates suddenly
kicking out in front of her. Down she
went, in a flurry of cocktail dress and
flailing limbs.
"Are you okay?" said Neil. The way
Carter should have, if only he had
moved faster, if he could think when
his wife was l,:ing on the ice like a
blond broken puppet.
She sat up. She rubbed the back of
her head. "Who makes ice this slippery?"
she shouted. "I demand a hot toddy."
A
laska had been Carter's idea
from the start. He had never
met Katrina's father or seert
where she'd grown up. Anchorage had
s ounded exotic-a city with five
mountain rang es and a reindeer
named Star who lived in a pen down­
town. Her father owned a floatplane!
Which she knew how to fly!
"Let's wait for summer," she said,
"when we can go fishing. This late in
winter, all anybody does is ski and
watch TV."
He might have agreed. Except for his
job. Back in New York, Carter taught
sixth-grade social studies at an all-boys
prep school. He loved his co-workers.
He loved his kids. And yet, one too
many Monday mornings, they had
revealed the stunning number of Sty­
rofoam ammo packets they had pur­
chased for their Nerf-gun arsenals over
the weekend-a total that when re­
searched and multiplied by unit cost
(in secret, on Amazon) surpassed his
monthly paycheck.
They were clumsy to the point of
falling off their stools, these boys­
goofy and entitled and egotistical, yet
despite the smartphone porn, astonish­
ingly nafve. When Carter had told
them he was taking a few weeks off for
his honeymoon, they had whacked
each other on the arms and rolled their
eyes, unable to imagine a future that
did not involve marrying your best
friend from kindergarten and moving
to the desert to invent rocket launchers
out of tinfoil and string cheese.
On such dreams hydrogen bombs are
built-and tested. Thinking back, he
might have tried to teach the boys some­
thing useful, for once, and explained
what had made him fall so thunder­
ously in love. Except he couldn't. No­
body could. Love was clumbifying. lt had
no articulation except sex, happiness,
and befuddlement. If he had been forced
to tell his kids anything, he would have
said that Katrina smelled of blackberries
from his grandmother's long-sold house
in Connecticut, which wasn't possible.
And yet she did smell of blackberries,
dark and heady and warm. He knew the
smell, and he couldn't stop smelling her,
touching her, doing things like poking
her in the ribs when she was trying to
brush her teeth.
Add to this: She ate fast-food chicken
from the bucket, and flung her drum­
stick bones on the bedroom floor. She
made fantastical amounts of money
trading futures for cuntbag asstoys
whom she called cuntbag asstoys on the
phone, and to their faces. Then turned
around and wept over obscure Italian
cinema. Or bought him a bunch of
violets-violets!-ancl left them on his
pillow while he slept.
"Jesus," said his friends when they
found out about the wedding. Cart­
er's previous girlfriend of five years
had been a yoga teacher. A vegan.
Katrina, OIY the other hand, had
shot into his life like a blond, carnivo­
rous meteor, and he had married her
two months later. She was eleven
years older. A few days after they met,
she took him swimming at her club, a
place with failed teenage models as
doormen and a rooftop pool like a
chip of fallen sky. She sat on the edge
 and watched him da laps. When he
got out, she said, "You passed."
"Of course I did," he said. "l graduated
summa from Williams." Then he
laughed. But she was serious. She had
wanted to see if he put his face in the
water. She could not sleep with a man
who didn't, and she couldn't or wouldn't
explain why.
The outrageousness, the bravado­
he had thought this was the Alaskan in
her. But her father, who actually lived
there, was not this way, not at all. They
had spent the past three days in An­
chorage with him. He lived in a ranch
house that had not been updated-as
he had mentioned more than once­
since 1983. Each morning at 6 AM, he
ironed his jeans in the kitchen. Each
night at 6 PM, he barbecued a chicken
on the deck wearing a parka patched
with duct tape on the elbows.
He served the chicken at the kitchen
counter, the only vegetable a bottle
of chardonnay. The wine was creamy,
French, expensive. The meat was
slightly pink with fire-blasted skin. Her
father bought both at Costco, which he
seemed to frequent hourly. They ate on
stools with paper towels for napkins­
two half glasses of wine per person and
as much chicken as he could load onto
your plate.
Dinner conversation followed cer­
tain rules. They didn't talk about the
ministroke he had had two years ear­
lier, which had cost him his pilot's li­
cense. They didn't talk about how he
continued to fly in secret. Most of all,
they didn't talk about Katrina's mother
and whether or not he had tried to
contact her to inform her of her
daughter's marriage.
Once or twice, Carter had consid­
ered bringing up the subject himself.
Katrina's mother had had a coke prob­
lem. She had not solved it. Which was
how Katrina had phrased it to Carter
in her carefully gray apartment. Her
mother had been in and out of the
house for most her childhood. There­
and then not. A week, a year, an oc­
casional Christmas. The words came
out of Katrina in a monotone, the voice
of a government form. And for a min­
ute, Carter thought there might be
something wrong with her, until sud­
denly, as if against her will, a small,
terrible smile had flitted across her
face-a butterfly of heartbreak.
He had waited a few moments, then
held her, knowing in that instant that
he was going to ask her-fragile and
teetering-to marry him, though right
then had not been the right time. He
asked anyway. While still on his feet,
his arms around her, no ring.
T
onight, just before Neil's party,
the two topics at dinner had
been her father's use of soy sauce
as a marinade and his need to put in a
beach. Diamond Lake was a man-made
lake, basically a liquid runway, and yet
the EPA guys were sniffing around now,
requiring homeowners to create "natural
habitats" for the salmon, to the tune of
ten grand in gravel and plants. "l tell you
what," said her father. "It's enough to
make you want to leave the state." He
shook his head.
"Move to New York," said Katrina,
her adoration radiating across the
kitchen. "I'll buy the condo next do or,
break down the wall."
"We could do that," he said, shaking
his head. "We sure could." Then he
laughed and she laughed and Carter got
it: the idea of leaving Alaska was pre­
posterous. Talk like this was just a way
of painting the air with the last thing
you wanted to do on earth, to ward it off
He served himself another blackened
thigh. He thought about the comfort of
articulating those kinds of scarecrows­
and the danger of them rebelling against
your intentions and coming to life. He
pictured his father-in-law in a sad, vel­
vet bathrobe, looking out their apart­
ment window at the streets ofTriBeCa.
It was spring. Dogs in raincoats paraded
down the sidewalks, followed by women
speaking to invisible cell phones with
such intimacy you almost hoped they
were talking to themselves.
"We should get g oing," Carter
said. "Right? The party."
Katrina glanced at him. Her father
started scraping plates into the com­
pactor. The metal te eth crunched
through bottles and bones. Katrina
hopped off her stool. Her father wiped
his hands on a dish towel-slowly.
''Aren't you coming?" she said, in a
shy voice, almost hopeful.
Her father lo oked up, startled.
"Oh," he said. "l didn't know l was
supposed to."
She looked confused. Then Carter
was confused. Neil's party wasn't a
STORY 73
reception, but it was in their honor. An
ice sculpture of a. leaping king salmon
had been ordered. As well as some kind
of punch made with blueberries or
birch sap. All of which promised to be
more exciting, if not more joy filled,
than the lunch in Manhattan they had
had with Carter's parents. Both of
whom had been too stunned to touch
their Cobb salads. His mother had a
thing f or family weddings, family
Christmas cards, family aprons embroi­
dered with each person's name.
"Don't you want to come?" said
Katrina.
"It's just with Neil," said her fa­
ther. "And his . . . however you call
them . . . extravaganzas. I wasn't plan­
ning on it." The expression on his
face was kind, but vague, almost
presidential, as if they were talking
about parking the car or buying gro­
ceries, things he didn't do anymore
and had trouble understanding.
Katrina picked up a spoon. She
picked up a saltshaker. Carter winced.
She could be spectacularly articulate
when angry-and inventive. Once,
when her boss had failed to back her
on the purchase of some unorthodox
Russian bonds, she had stapled his suit
pants to his chair while he napped off
a hangover. An act for which she had
been rewarded with the title "vindic­
tive fucktard" and a promotion of two
bonus levels.
"Here's what I think," she said. And
then she just stopped, mid-sentence,
as if chopping off the idea behind it.
She hugged her father. "It's not like it's
a wedding wedding. It's just some peo­
ple getting together to celebrate."
Carter looked at her, but there was
nothing in her eyes that conflicted
w ith her expression. He sat for a
minute. Then said, at a loud volume,
"I think you should come."
There was a long, disconcerting
silence-save for the grinding of
the trash compactor. He washed it
away with a gulp of chardonnay. Nei­
ther Katrina nor her father looked in
his direction.
"It's fine, Dad," she finally said.
"Besides, isn't the girl from Nebraska
singing Phantom?"
"'Angel of Music,' " her father said,
his eyes whisking over to the television.
"She came in second place last week."
Carter could not prove it, but if he had
74 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
to guess, Katrina's father spent every
night just how they left him-sitting at
his desk, watching America's Got Talent
and tying flies for trout he was going to
catch when they weren't there. Big
ones. Rainbows. Monsters.
E
nter the log-cabin mansion, a
five-minute walk down the
shoreline through the snow. Just
past the mastodon, people lingered by
the fireplace with sushi hand rolls and
one-bite spoons of risotto, people Carter
didn't know. He always reacted a beat too
slowly, and tonight was no exception.
"About the girl from Nebraska," he said.
"Ugh," said Katrina. "I hate a pre-
teen prodigy."
'Tm so proud of you."
She looked at him. "For what?"
"For not reacting when your father
blew us off." And yes, he could see by her
suddenly cool face, her calm, flat stare,
that he should just stop talking. Still he
went on, announcing with such easy
outrage: Katrina's father was a grown
man. So his own marriage had im­
ploded. Was he afraid that Katrina's
would, too? His staying home from their
wedding party-the only one they
would ever have-was, if you thought
about it, 1uanipulative, selfish. A less­
than-obvious control tactic.
"Or maybe," she said, "he's an intro­
vert who doesn't like parties." Then she
zipped off her boots-with a sound as
brisk and dismissive as her expression­
and strode off to the kitchen.
Long ago, Carter had understood
that some people grasped the power of
timing better than others. One of those
people was Neil, who swept in at that
exact moment, bearing a pint glass
filled with single-malt Scotch. "On the
house," he said. "Felicitations."
Carter examined his drink. Three
maraschino cherries floated in the
potent-smelling liquor-baubles in
amber. "My father-in-law has a tab
started. Let's put it on that."
"An amazing man," said Neil. "A
giant outdoorsman. Though slightly
rigid." He was studying Carter, though
more smoothly than Katrina's Man­
hattan friends, all of whom seemed to
flip through his possible ages before
speaking: Forty? Thirty-five? Thirty­
three? No, no, (no way!), younger.
Neil held up his glass, clinked. "He's
still a little emotional with me, I sus-
pect. About last New Year's." This past
January, he continued, he had been
feeling a little down, a little existential.
He had buzzed over to Houston, Alas­
ka, in his helicopter and loaded up on
cherry bombs and mortars. Then
buzzed back home and set them up in
a hole on the lake ice, a tad too close
to Katrina's dad's backyard. Regrettable.
As was the single fuse he had used.
"What happened?" said Carter.
He shook his head, as if implying
police, a lost eyeball, a forest fire. Then
grabbed Carter by the shoulder, and
whispered, "It went boom."
Carter laughed. But Neil only sighed
with contentment, the way you might
after eating a slice of warm pie. His
features were crooked, almost mis­
shapen, his nose a kind of farm potato
in the middle of his face. He was not a
handsome man, not at all, but you
wanted him to be; you were rooting for
him in some cosmic way-the cause of
which was probably his expression, each
freckle a bedazzled star that seemed to
convey that he too was knocked out
daily by his own good fortune.
Carter had a hard time connect­
ing this Neil with the Neil that Ka­
trina had described on their walk to
the party. Neil sometimes got wound
up, she said. Too wound up.
"Like a toddler?" said Carter.
"Like someone on an ass-ton of
mood stabilizers."
Ten years earlier, Neil's dad-her
dad's closest friend-had shot himself.
In the face. At his fifty-fifth. birthday
party. It was Neil who found him in
the laundry room. And Neil who had
tried to clean it up, by himself, to keep
his mom from seeing.
She had a theory about this, a
theory that seemed to apply to every­
one except herself and her father:
Your average happy person didn't last
in Alaska. It was too much work not
to die all the time.
About this, Carter only nodded. The
Anchorage that he had seen was mostly
strip malls and bowling alleys, Denny's
diners and icy boulevards-the moun­
tains looming in the distance, but not
exactly putting anyone in the position
where they had to crawl around looking
for food and a warm cave.
And regarding happy people, there
were bipolar twelve-year-olds in his
classes, billionaire parents on crack,
a fellow teacher who had spent six
months at B ellevue b ecause he
thought a brown recluse lived in his
back molar. It was almost relieving
that Alaska was similar, that spruce
forests and sunsets that looked as if
the entire solar system was melting
didn't quite fix the human condition­
the way he had believed that nature
might during certain, darker periods
of his life. Periods he had also not
mentioned to Katrina.
Ta-da! Neil had made him yet an­
other Scotch with maraschino cherries.
"Next time, buddy," he said, "you'll come
up and stay with us." He waved to a
woman sitting in a leather armchair,
knitting a striped, soft-looking blue
blanket. "Right, Janice?" he said. "We
love to host young lovers. We'll take you
out to the Wrangells. Go scout some
wild sheep."
A giddy feeling was swelling in
Carter, one that dated back to second
grade, when you wanted to ask some­
they would puzzle over for years to come.
At that moment, however, Neil was
back behind the log bar. He was serious
about Katrina and Carter moving up to
Alaska. Intellectually speaking, the
state was underemployed. There was
a need for people like themselves,
go-getters. Now, while the price of oil
was high.
Carter sat down on the sofa beside
his wife. She didn't move. He put his
hand over hers. She let him. Was
their fight finally over? Or was she just
distracted by the idea of moving
back home? A n image f l o a ted
through his mind: him with a bow
and arrow, a sheepskin slung over
one shoulder, a glacier in the back­
ground, a whole bubble life that
would melt into nothing, he realized,
when he woke up in the morning
with a Scotch-and-cherry hangover.
Neil continued: He had some ven­
tures on the horizon, some opportu­
nities. His first thought for Carter?

body in your class to be your friend­
but knew that to do so would destroy
any chance of it happening-and so
spent your lonesome, sleepless nights
nursing that tender balloon of happi­
ness, trying to figure out how to place
yourself in the other boy's general vi­
cinity, where if you were standoffish
enough, he'd pick you to be on his
team at recess. This was the secret to
Neil, maybe; you didn't have to feel
any of this. He put you on his team the
moment he met you.
His wife perhaps did not. She
smiled-warm but with the guarded
eyes Carter often saw in his fellow
teachers, who understood that chil­
dren waltzed off to the next grade and
never came back. She was older than
Neil, or looked it, her face weathered,
her hair a chopped blondish-grayish
afterthought. Neil, he had assumed,
would be married to someone else,
someone tan and ripe and plastic. It
was relieving that he wasn't. Carter
raised his pint glass. Janice nodded. It
occurred to Carter that she had knit­
ted her way through a lot of parties like
this, .including ones that went boom.
Central AC. Sure, it was negative
three outside, but you had to under­
stand, he said: in the summers, Alaska
now saw eighty-plus temps. He had
been working with a young engineer
in town on an eco-friendly cooling
system that was powered by biofuel
made from the byproducts of com-
1nercial fishing. Salmon guts, crab
shells, etc.
"Uh," Carter said. "I'm not sure
that dovetails with my resume."
Neil filled more pint glasses.
"Stem cells, then. I have a doc in
town regrowing cartilage for blown
knees. Not quite legal, as of now. But
promising." He had other ideas: his
chain of adult-care facilities, his IT
operation, his health-club franchise,
the small-dog grooming business.
T he profit in small dogs was not to
be believed.
Carter lay back on the sofa and
looked up. Heads and antlers stag­
gered up the log walls to the ceiling,
each identified with a brass trophy
tag: Dall sheep, mountain goat, ga­
zelle, blesbok. What was a blesbok?
And if Carter had been back in New
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B
y the time Katrina had pulled
off her skates and hobbled in­
side, all the guests had left-a
course that Carter and she could have
also followed but didn't, for reasons
York, wouldn't he have found it upset­
ting to see one slapped up on a wall?
He couldn't say. There was something
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STORY 75
 What would Carter have been like
if he had grown up with the belief that
it was natural-and enjoyable-to go
after what he wanted, however off­
putting or seemingly imposfible? "Stem
cells?" he said. "l thought you were a
hunting guide."
"The lodge?" said Neil. "Strictly a
hobby." He guided one or two guys a
summer�tech kids, mostly, who paid
five grand a day to pop a black bear. "It's
a dying industry. But it does cull the
numbers in terms of overpopulation."
"Right," said Carter.
"Gross," said Katrina. "You know
how I feel about trophy hunting."
Neil balled up a cocktail napkin,
threw it at her. "And yet you still eat
chicken. Do you know what goes on
in a poultry death camp? I've got the
YouTube videos."
"Honey," said Janice. "How many
cherries did you just put in that drink?"
He looked down. "Nine," he said,
and laughed. "I like them."
"Neil," said Katrina. "Car ter
teaches social studies. Like politics.
Like government."
"I think of it more as a course in
historical-cultural ethics," said Carter.
"What the past can teach us about who
we are-and who we want to be." He
paused. "By now most public school
curriculums have cut it." The bitterness
in his tone was there, but he was unable
to remove it.
"Well," said Janice, back to her
knitting. "Both our girls know all the
state capitals."
"You can always go back to teaching
that mud class," said Katrina. She slid
clown the sofa, turned to Janice. "Carter
makes a mean coil pot."
He willed himself to look calm,
unaffected. The mud class referred to
a steaming, impoverished summer
three years ago when, out of despera­
tion, he had stooped to working at a
day care, crafting projects for toddlers
out of a chemical substitute for clay
called "magic mud." Apparently, she
was still mad and needed an apology.
Which Carter now had zero desire to
give her.
Then again, the only helpful point
he made about her father was that
you had to do things for love that you
didn't want to do. So he would then.
At the very least, he would earn him­
self a few minutes of smug moral supe-
76 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST ZOZO
riority. "Look," he whispered, "I was
out of line about your dad."
"Don't worry about it," she said.
"He doesn't like you either."
The next thing to say was that he
didn't give a crap what her father
thought; her father was self-centered
and dogmatic and would not let any­
body touch his trash compactor but­
tons; her mother probably did coke
just to escape his god-on-high com­
plex. A complex that, by the way, his
daughter had not escaped, huddled
down on the ground as she was, in
daughterly worship.
Neil, however, was presenting their
drinks on a tray lined with twinkling
white doilies. Carter wondered how he
would handle this. But Carter knew.
He held himself back for a moment.
Then flung himself onto the floor at
Katrina's feet and cried out loudly, with
great theatrical anguish. "I'm sorry. I was
a cuntbag asstoy! Your dad's a giant."
They all looked at him. Even Jan­
ice ceased knitting for a few stitches.
"How much exactly," said Katrina,
"did you and Neil drink?" But the fight
was over. She had folded. He sat up
and kissed her on one bare, waxed,
blackberry-smelling knee; her knee
always made him think of the inside
of her elbow, which always made him
think of the inside of her thigh-the
soft downy upper reaches.
"Now that's how you run a mar­
riage," said Neil. "Minus the language.
We have growing girls upstairs. This
house is strictly rated G."
"It's Katrina's expression. She uses
it on clients."
"I should have known," said Neil,
shaking his head.
A
nd then it happened-Carter
saw it happen while still nes­
tled on the lush, creamy wall­
to-wall carpet, thinking how wonderful
wall-to-wall carpet was, so comfortable
on the knees, so cozy, why did no one
in New York have it? Neil looked at
Katrina and his face went soft and
dazed, as if his brain had turned to
maple syrup. "You remember that time
when you snuck out of the house and
jumped off the roof and my brother
caught you?" said Neil.
"You were supposed to catch me."
"He was older. He pushed me out
of the way."
Janice krntted on, briskly, efficiently.
"I was fourteen," said Katrina.
"What an arrogant shit I was. My poor
old dad."
"You were wearing that skirt," he said.
"With the flowers." The flowers drifted
through his eyes, even Carter could see
them-light springtime blooms, pink
petals, her feet bare in the grass.
All night, Neil had hardly talked to
Katrina, save to give the congratula­
tory toast. He had stayed by Carter.
He had introduced him. He had
hugged him. He had showed him his
archery range in the basement.
Which, Carter realized, is exactly
what you do when you plan on sleep­
ing with someone else's wife. You se­
duce her husband.
"I don't remember," she said, but
in a way that implied she did.
Something-the skirt? a summer?
a night? a lifetime?-was glistening
in the air between them. They were
both looking at it, together, the rest
of the world on mute.
"Oh shoot," said Janice. "I need
more blue. It's in the basket. Will you?"
Neil got up to get the yarn, but
Carter was on the floor, closer. He
reached in, cutting Neil off. Then he
held up the ball and rolled it slowly
to Janice's feet. She had toenails that
did not go with the rest of her-a
glossy black, chipped.
"Did I ever tell you how Janice
and I met?" said Neil.
"Neil," she pretend-frowned.
"I pulled her out of a ditch. No ex­
aggeration. There she was stuck in the
mud in a Ford Fiesta. Her two girls in
back. I just happened to be the one
lucky guy at Fred Meyer's. I towed
them out. Escorted them home."
"I made you lemonade," she said.
" The lemonade," he said, his eyes
turning to her. Then to Katrina. "I re­
member standing in that tiny kitchen,
thinking how if I could marry a kind,
loving woman like her, everything
else would be all right." His voice was
husky with feeling.
Carter could not believe it. Did
she not see that Neil was showing
her his tender side? Heroic, sensitive
Neil, so emotionally in touch. "You
know how we met?" asked Carter.
"At a party. We left in a taxi. Ten
minutes later we went at it, right in
the back seat."

The silence that resulted was ma­
jestic, velvety, absolute.
"Well," said Janice, coming to the
rescue. "Sex can bring two people to­
gether." Carter was not sure if she
was dumb or simply possessed an al­
most inhuman ability to forgive any­
one, himself included.
"It's not like it's a secret, I guess,"
said Katrina. "I've always been easy."
"No," said Neil, with gravitas.
"You've never been that."
A light came down from on high,
a light that Katrina basked in like a
Dutch girl from the seventeenth cen­
tury with a basket of apples. Every­
thing was quiet, except for the pleas­
ant clicking of knitting needles, the
soft creak of the house as it shifted
against the cold outside. Carter sat
there carefully. His hands looked
odd to him, as if they belonged to
somebody else.
''I'll tell you what we didn't do," said
Neil. "Give you two a wedding present."
"Absolutely not," said Katrina, still
aglow. "That was the rule, no gifts."
Carter looked back down at his
hands. He wondered what his face was
doing. He felt as if he were sitting on
the rink while they raced around him
on diamond ice skates, faster and faster.
G oing home was not an option.
Should Carter suggest it, Katrina
might just tell him to go ahead, she'd
meet him, later. Ditto to Janice. She
had surrendered to her knitting coma
years ago. An understandable deci­
sion. She had been a single mom with
two kids and a compact car to get her
through Alaskan winters, a life that
was long behind her.
"I bet," said Neil, "you don't have
one Alaskan thing in that fancy
New York apartment."
"I bet," said Katrina, "my apart­
ment is tasteful and understated."
He pointed to a fluffy white skin
on the back of the sofa.
"It's yours," she said.
"Correct. And it's still mine to give."
"Don't be silly. Besides, they shed."
"I already ordered them something,"
said Janice. "Williams Sonoma."
"A waffle maker," said Neil. He threw
back his Scotch. He pulled a leather
armchair over to his trophy wall. He
took down some antlers-thin, crooked
ones. He looked at them as if they were
cheap, diseased. He set them on the top
A PORTRAIT OF
VALOR
of a bookcase. Then pushed the chair
over to a set of horns, twisted into
thick, lavish curls. They were too high
up on the wall. He jumped, as if to swat
FROM A LION OF
them down with one hand.
"Stop!" said Janice. "Please?"
THE LEFT
"A waffle maker," said Neil. But
his face was red, his voice agitated.
Janice looked over at Carter. There
was nothing in her expression. Not a
plea for help, not an acknowledgment Witls •• �,,,. AJlbtwJ. Boumcl-
MY LIFE IN
of their crappy circumstances. "It's
heart-shaped," she said to the whole
room. "Nonstick."
Carter walked over to the mast­
odon, ran his hand over the front
plate of the skull. It was comforting
THE SERVICE
almost, how bone warmed under
your fingers, as if a vestige of life still
beat inside. "What about the mast­
odon?" he said.
All three of them swiveled their
heads-and burst out laughing.
"Just a tusk, then," he said. "The
left one maybe. It's shorter." I Diary of
More laughs.
"And there I was thinking you
VERN
were relaxed," said Neil. "You're a
go-getter, Carter. An alpha where
it counts."
Carter smiled-kind of-and
started picking up plates. Katrina fol­
lowed, targeting napkins. It was
strange how suddenly a moment
could bloom, then just as quickly
shrivel up and vanish, poof. So Neil
and his wife had possibly screwed
their heads off for a teenage summer.
Or for a year after college. So it
hadn't washed off. Everyone had
their young misguided loves, bronzed
by the memory of sex on the family
sofa. Every now and then, sometimes
even while he was with Katrina, he
slipped back in time to Jennifer
Larchmont from sophomore year and
the hand she used to keep in her lap
when she drove him to band prac­
tice, the slender possibilities of those
fingers, so fluent in clarinet.
The kitchen was a blinding ar­
rangement of stainless steel and
granite. He placed the dishes on the
counter, then stopped at a window
over the sink that opened onto the
living room. Katrina had a garbage bag
out. She tossed in a plastic glass, a
smashed bit of cake. Neil bumped into
her. Obviously not by accident.
"Cut it out," she said.
STORY 77
 "Katrina brought a boy home," he
said, in a teasing voice.
"Shut up," she said. Then paused­
for a beanoo long. "It's not like he's a
teenager," she said, finally. "He's al­
most twenty-nine."
"He's an odd one. Dark. I like him."
"I want you to."
Neil tossed in a handful of used
napkins. And stopped. "He'll never
leave you, Trina," he said. "You know
that, right?"
Katrina nodded, as if not only did
she know this, but she also thought it
was a wondrous thing, even when she
also knew-or should have known, as
Neil so clearly did-that there was no
love between anyone without the
slight, unspoken fear that that love
might vanish, or be snatched away by
someone else.
Carter was younger. He was taller.
And stronger. All of which would
only work against him if he gave in
to the impulse to punch Neil in his
supportive, caring face.
A door ·stood next to the refrigera­
tor. It did not look as if it led to the
pantry. Carter yanked it open. He
walked down a long hallway, opening
door after door until he found a bath­
room. He sat down on the toilet. He
didn't have to go, but just sitting there
with his pants down, cold porcelain
on skin, was calming. Underneath
every toilet was an invisible river. You
just had to focus on it and float away.
He reached over for the toilet paper.
A baboon stood in his way. It was
stuffed and upright and dressed in a
loincloth-holding the roll in its
leathery, humanish fingers. Of course
Neil shot monkeys. He flew over Afri­
can savannas in his death chopper,
lions running from him like deer.
The door opened. Carter jerked and
clapped his thighs shut. It was Janice.
His pants were on the flo or. "I'm in
here!" he said. But she already knew
that. She was in the bathroom. She
slid up on the edge of the sink. In the
opening of her blouse, the bones on
her chest were visible, the skin flecked
with sunspots.
"Car ter?" she said. "What are
you doing?"
"I'm on the toilet?"
She cocked her head. She might not
recognize his identifiers: prep-school
hair, thrift-store sweater, scholarship
78 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
parents, younger (anorexic) sister en­
rolled in grad school for life-but she
suddenly seemed well equipped at
flicking off a person's packaging with
her eyes. "Neil isn't well," she said.
"And Katrina isn't helping."
"He's trying to fuck her."
"He doesn't know what fucking is,"
she said. She said this without emo­
tion, as if reading a prescription bot­
tle. She got down on her knees. She
wedged her hands between his thighs
and pried them open. She looked at
him-clinically, expressionless-and
moved closer. He almost shoved her
back into the baboon, but worried
about the noise, Katrina hearing, how
to explain. Her hands were cold and
she was cold and there was something
horrible in her, something musky and
calculated and mesmerizing and au­
thoritarian. His hard-on arrived with­
out his desire-or consent. He pulled
her hands off his legs, held her by the
wrists. "I feel sorry for you," he said.
"What you've had to do to survive."
"Please," she said. "Don't play grown­
up." She whisked his hands away. He
let her. She turned and looked at her­
self in the mirror, fluffed her dull, prac­
tical hair. "You know the sad thing
about weak people?" she said. "They fall
in love with strong ones, thinking
they'll get stronger."
"Get out," he said. "I mean it."
"But it's weakness that rubs off,"
she said. "On everybody." Then she
smiled-not at him, but at herself, in
the mirror, with such hatred. From her
pocket, she pulled out a tube of lipstick
and smoothed it over the contours of
her lips.
"Get out, I said. Get out right
fucking now."
Janice however, was already at the
door. "I guess you've already looked
underneath the loincloth." She slid
into the hall with a quiet click of the
knob. Carter stood up, zipped, tucked
in his shirt. Then went over to the
baboon, lifted the loincloth. There
was nothing there, whatever had been
there-male or female-had been
chopped off or patched up and you'd
have to dig around to tell.
"See?" said her voice from the other
side of the door. "It's just that easy."
"There's something wrong with
you," he shouted. The vomit slid out
of him softly into the toilet. When it
was over, he rubbed soap on his finger
and brushed his tongue. It tasted
both awful-blackened chicken­
and better.
C
arter stopped in the doorway
to the living room. In the vast
cathedral of windows that led
up to the log ceiling, the mountains
slept on-contented giants, their
faces slashed with ice and moonlight.
Katrina sat on the sofa, her feet stuck
in a bowl of water. Neil held up a
mask. It was leather of some kind, with
two round eyeholes and a circular trim
of feathery white fur. The mouth,
however, gave it all its sadness­
curved downward with the sucked-in
look that old people have when
they've lost their teeth. "It's Yupik,"
said Neil. "Old school. Dael got it from
a Native buddy."
He knelt, actually knelt, at her
feet. "Here," he said. "You take it."
Carter willed himself not to charge
into the room. Was this weakness? Or
strength? Or some cockroach longing
to see how far Katrina would go when
she thought he wasn't there to see?
"I'm fucking married," she said.
"I'm fucking happy."
Neil stared up at her, his expression
softening until it looked strange,
molded, as if smeared across his skin.
"It's a son-of-a-bitch world," he said, in
a quiet voice, a broken voice. "And
nobody gets out alive."
She shook her head. "Your clad
was sick. He didn't mean it."
"I think about that night," said
Neil. "That's what he said, in his toast.
Remember?" He picked up the mask
from the sofa, tucked it under his arm.
"You could have stayed to help me
clean up."
Neil was crying by now. Carter
didn't exactly want her to comfort
him. Then again, he didn't expect her ,fl
to do what she did next. Which was
to stare past him, out the window, her
face a blank, as if Neil no longer ex­
isted. And she were far, far away.
Carter stood there, so very aware
that he should not move. He had nev­
er seen her afraid before. If this was
fear as she knew it-or something
more terrible. He gave himself a min­
ute. Then another. Though perhaps it
was his stillness that caused Katrina
to finally glance over.
 World's Finest Eye Cream
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"Buddy!" said Neil, his voice snap­
ping back to jovial. "Your wife has
blisters. The ice skates. We made her
an oatmeal bath."
His wife, the woman he had mar­
ried in less time than it took to learn / Airbrush eye cream reduces
to drive or recover from mono as a
teenager, looked down at the carpet puffiness right away, especially
so as not to meet his eyes. when cold. Promotes new collagen
"You don't have to go," said Neil. which reduces fine lines and
"Unless you want to."
"Not without our gift," said Carter.
wrinkles. Reduces dark circles, is
He walked over to the mastodon, soothing, hydrating and promotes a
slowly, and yanked on the closest tusk. Compare to: youthful healthy glow!
It didn't move. It was soldered on, La Mer Eye Balm @ $200 Hypo-allergenic and natural containing
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"Carter!" said Katrina. "Stop." La Prairie Swiss @ $240
emu oil serum, green tea extract, aloe vera,
"Buddy," said Neil. "If you want a collagen and elastin.
tusk, take one." He flung open a door Reg$68 Use am & pm for best results and the jar
beside the bar. There was a long walk­
in closet behind it, piled high with Now only $54.40 will last about 3 months!
ivory. "What's mine is yours," said
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"Most are mammoths," said Neil.
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to a tusk at the back-deeply curved Open 7 days
and thick as a human thigh. Carter
picked it up. It was lighter than ex­
pected. Slick with polish. He dragged
it across the carpet. Stopping only at
the mastodon. There was no way
around it, not alone. SOLUTION TO THE
He waited. Then waited a little JULY PUZZLE
longer-not looking back, even when sC H 0 L A R p s y C H I C
Katrina finally grabbed the other end E E Q u A R T E T A L I B I
of their wedding present and lifted it NOTES FOR "SHAKY T R I s K A I D E K A F s T
up. They cleared the first tusk. Then GROUND": s T E T E C H I E Q u I T y
the second. Gracefully. As if they had H I T E C H M C L A s s I C
planned their steps. Was this mar­ The entries are PHOBIAS, clued by E F A R A N A L E K T 0 R 0
riage, he wondered, how well the the source of the fear: TRISKAlD­ A I L u R 0 X E D E R A T u
worst in you worked with the worst in EKA- (the number 13); ALEK­ p A N 0 p T I C A R 0 N I N
the other person? Or was it some­ TORO- (chickens); A ILU RO­ T B G p T K M A G N E T I C
thing else? He and Katrina had years (cats); APHENPHOSM- (touching, A I R H E A D L A K s H M I
to find out, a lifetime, once they i n tim a c y ) ; CYN O - ( d o g s ) ; R L A I X R E M I X T R p L
staggered home through the snow to­ ARACHNO- (spiders); CLAUS­ M I N D A p H E N p H 0 S M
gether. There was no stopping for TRO- (enclosure); ANTHROPO­ A T T I C 0 L D s T E p p E
boots, no time to grab coats. Even as (people); OPHIDIO- (snakes). C y N 0 0 V E R T H R ow N
Neil called out from the doorway that
they .could take another tusk, a better Note: ,:, indicates an anagram.
one. They could have as many as they
wanted. The glaciers were melting, ACROSS: I. s(ch)olar; 6. psy*-C(h)IC; 11. quart-et; 12. A li-bi; 13. the clue number; 15. *; 17. hid­
buddy, bones and ivory surfacing. It den; 18. two mngs.; 19. H(i-tec*)H; 21. c-(Lassi[e])-c; 22. chic-Kens; 24. cats'"; 25. *; 27. pan(opt)ic;
was almost a little too easy. Every­ 30. Ron-in; 35. mag(net)ic; 38. air-head; 39. *; 40. R(em(rev.)-l)x; 42. M-in-D; 43. touching, two
thing was right there, lying on the mngs.; 44. two mngs.: 45. step(rev.)-[dee)p-[troubl)e; 46. do-G&S; 47. over-thrown(homophone).
ice. Exposed. Ready for the taking.
DOWN: I. two mngs. 2. *; 3. *; 4. la[w)-ke carp*; 5. spiders, dispers[e]*; 6. ped-ic(l)e; 7. hidden;
You didn't need a shovel. You didn't 8. enclosure*; 9. h(if)is; 10. '"; 14. two mngs.; 16. rev.; 19. hidden; 20. m-ax-l'm; 23. pun, colonel;
need a pickaxe. You didn't even need 26. p-eople*; 28. snakes''; 29. C[hopin)-almed*; 31. t(a-rm)ac(rev.); 32. hidden; 33. T(ex)aco;
to d� ■ 34. K-arpov*; 36. *; 37. [ch)imps; 41. '''.

STORY 79

By Julian Lucas
I f it weren't for the black death, the
fourteenth-century merchant Fran­
cesco di Marco Datini might have
left no trace in history. A workaholic
Tuscan with offices from Bruges to
Barcelona, he spent most of his time
scribbling letters, often boasting that
he slept only four hours a night. He
kept his wife busy distilling vinegar,
entertaining visitors, and sewing hel­
mets for the arms trade; Datini him­
self, meanwhile, was married to the
game of late-medieval commerce. At
the time, it was considered a perilously
sinful hustle. One friend warned the
merchant that he was "a man who
kept women and lived only on par­
tridges, adoring art and money, and
forgetting his Creator and himself."
Luckily for scholarship (and his own
immortal soul) a
plague prompted
Datini to organize
his papers and be­
queath his small
fortune to "God's
Poor." His palazzo
in the Italian city of
Prato became the
office of a charita­
ble foundation,
still in operation.
There, his letters and ledgers sat forgot­
ten in the cupboards for nearly half a
millennium-awaiting, in lieu of the
Last Judgment, the arch assessment of
Iris Origo. An English-American writer
turned Italian aristocrat, Origo is now
largely remembered for her diaries of
life under Mussolini. But she was first
of all a biographer, with a talent for
inhabiting the outlook of subjects that
Top: A depiction of the 1350 Bartle of Calais, from an edition of Jean Froissart's C/ironicles, circa 1475.
Courtesy Bibliorh&1ue nationalc Jc France. Bottom: Cacsarar ,he Rubicon. by Wilhelm Triibner© akg-images
R E V E W S
I
I
ranged from anti­
fascist fighters to
me dieval sa ints.
Her newly reissued
1957 study THE
MERCHANT OF
PRATO (New York
Review Books Clas­
sics, $19.95) is a styl­
ishly written and
startlingly immer­
sive portrait of Da­
tini as a trecento trader on the make. Ambitious, exacting, and exceed­
Born in Prato around 1335, Datini set ingly stressed out, Datini cuts a cranky
out for Avignon at fifteen, orphaned by yet companionable figure in correspon­
the same plague-the first of six in his dence with loved ones and far-flung
lifetime-that inspired Boccaccio's De­ subordinates. He fumes at absentminded
cameron. He made a fortune selling ar­ underlings-"You cannot see a crow in
mor and weaponry, as well as splendid a bowlful of milk!"-nitpicks in rela­
vestments for the clotheshorses of tives' kitchens-"Do not place garlic
France's short-lived before me, nor leeks nor roots"-and
papal court. Later, frets over the delivery of an expensive
he married and re­ mule from Spain. Animals are a recur­
turne d to Prato, rent extravagance; one approach to
establishing a tex­ fourteenth-century social climbing,
tile company with it seems, was to buy your cardinal a
dealings across Eu­ fancy dog. Datini gave Bologna's
rope. Origo evokes a Catalonian mastiff, which came
a precarious trade equipped with a scarlet coat "to wear
beset by schisms, upon the mountains."
bandits, and other A worldly striver in a walled coun­
dark-age externali­ try town where "leeks and beans grew
ties, where merchants routinely fall vic­ at the foot of the battlements," Datini
tim to marauding condottieri: struggled to reconcile his prematurely
modern vocation with the norms of
[Dacini] lived in daily dread of war, pesti­ his rustic society. This moral drama
lence, famine, and insurrection, in daily
vividly unfolds in his private letters,
expectation of bad news. He believed
neither in the stability of any govern­ which are among the most detailed
ment, nor the honesty of any man.... surviving records of medieval marriage
And it was by chis caution, chis unceas­ and friendship. Datini constantly
ing vigilance, that he made his fortune. quarreled with his wife, Monna Mar­
Bue it was a weary life. gherita, about housekeeping, which he
REVIEWS 81
micromanaged by mail while traveling
for work. "Remember to wash the
mule's feet," was a typical command.
"Would God you treated me as well as
you do her!" was a typical rejoinder.
He also wrote to Ser Lapo Mazzei,
a devout friend who encouraged the
merchant to aban-
don the vexations
of commerce for
a simpler, more
charitable life.
Mazzei's tough­
love letters remain
moving-and, as
global ties tear, sur­
prisingly relevant.
Datini may have
been an outlier in
his era, but the
precarious webs of
exchange that ob­
sessed him have
since ensnared us all. Mazzei's advice to
rely less on the world and more on one's
neighbors has rarely seemed wiser.
M
azzei prescribed philan­
thropy for his friend's meta­
physical distress; for bodily
illness, he recommended theriaca, an
ancient mystery medicine that doctors
distributed from cauldrons during
plagues. Another panacea was a
round, jewel-like stone formed in the
stomachs of some ruminant animals,
called a bezoar. It's an apt title for the
Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel's
grotesque and beguiling collection of
stories. BEZOAR ($15.95, Seven Stories
Press) is a pocket bestiary of compul­
sives and fetishists, from an "olfaction­
ist" who scours restaurant bathrooms
for the scent of an elusive woman to a
medical photographer aroused by im­
ages of patients' irregular eyelids:
The photographer has to avoid blink­
ing at the same time as his subject
and capture the moment when the
eye closes like a teasing oyster. I've
come to believe that this work re­
quires a special intuition, like an in­
sect collector's, that there's not much
difference between the flutter of a
wing and the batting of an eyelash.
The photographer's kink mirrors
Nettel's fascination with oddity and
inwardness. A recipient of Spain's Pre­
mio Herralde, Nette! is best known for
82 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
The Body Where I Was Born-an auto­ surrender at least some of their selves
biographical novel about growing up to supporters. It may even have played
in a family that wanted to "fix" her a role in the rise of modern democracy,
own congenital eye deformity. She has as the spread of newspapers and liter­
described the early stories collected in acy gave ordinary citizens an unprece­
Bezoar as reflections on "the beauty of dented opportunity to peer into their
anomaly." They are just as much medi­ leaders' personal lives. Names like
tations on prying Washington and Bolivar elicited love
and privacy. from millions, whose devotion ushered
In an excellent in the hero-worshipping Age of Revo­
translation by Su­ lution. Monarchies grounded in tradi­
zanne Jill Levine­ tion yielded to republics founded on
editor of Penguin's principle and led by "exceptional" mil­
c ollected vol­ itary men. In MEN ON HORSEBACK
umes of Jorge Luis ($30, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the
Borges-Bezoar historian David A. Bell investigates
offers a disconcert­ the intertwined origins of charismatic
ing pleasure, akin authority and modern democracy
to the uncanny in­ through the careers of four great
timacies of Edgar equestrian saviors: George Washing­
Allan Poe and Di­ ton, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint
ane Arbus. Perhaps Louverture, and Simon Bolivar.
the strongest story Many have written about these
is "Bonsai," whose narrator frequents a men, but few have asked why their
botanical garden for the sheer pleasure type emerged when it did. Bell finds
of keeping a secret from his wife. His the Ur-man on horseback in James
innocent conversations with an elderly Boswell's 1768 travelogue An Account
gardener lead to the dissolution of his of Corsica, which included an ecstatic
marriage, as he fixates on the idea description of meeting Pasquale Paoli,
that he is a spiny cactus, and his wife then leader of the island's struggle for
a rapacious climbing vine. In another independence. It made Paoli an inter­
confessional vignette, a woman de­ national celebrity. "I saw my highest
lights in watching her neighbor mas­ ideal realized," Boswell wrote, gush­
turbate in front of his kitchen window ing about the Corsican's courage,
while his unsuspecting date, visible in intellect, and physique, which he'd
another room, waits wearing a "little had a chance to admire while watch­
black dress she now wouldn't need to ing Paoli dress. Before Boswell de­
take off." parted, Paoli gave him a fancy scarlet
Bezoar's narrow, dreamlike atten­ suit and a dog. The writer nearly col­
tion invites unconscious complicity: lapsed from emotion.
caught up in dramas of curiosity and We may live in an age of book-length
concealment, one forgets, momentar­ political fan fiction, but in the eigh­
ily, that the narrator is a man who teenth century, close attachments be­
interprets toilet-bowl skid marks or a tween leaders and the public were
woman who can't stop highly unusual. Mon­
eating her own hair. archs shunned ap­
Nette! makes it im­ plause and cultivated
possible not to notice an authority based
the latent voyeurism on the mystique of
of short fiction, a the throne. By con­
genre that fixates, trast, Boswell fash­
much like a fetish, on ioned his Paoli after
fragments of strang­ classical heroes and
ers' inner lives. the protagonists of
A
sentimental novels.
dose of voy­ Readers could follow
eurism is in­ his battlefield ex­
d is pe nsa ble ploits in newspapers
to political charisma, like a serial fiction,
whose adepts always or contemplate his
Top: \Vondcring E)· e , by Mar ina Font© The artist. Cou rtesy Dina Mitrani G a llery, Miami. Bottom: "H ong
Kong Flora," by Michael Wolf© The Esrnce of Michael Wolf. Courtesy Flowers Gallery, London/Hong Kong
 enlightened visage on cheaply printed
portraits. His rebellion was ultimately
defeated, but another, younger Corsi­
can was taking notes.
One of Bell's insights is to see the
man on horseback as a genre. His
engaging survey of the four major
early-modern revolutions traces the
way their messianic leaders learned
from and imitated one another, as did
the chroniclers who gilded their
names. Napoleon had the comte de
Las Cases, who recorded his exile on
St. Helena; Washington had Mason
Locke Weems, who invented the
cherry-tree myth; and Toussaint
Louverture had Etienne Laveaux, the
governor of Saint-Domingue, whom
he'd rescued from a massacre during
the Haitian Revolution.
For all except Washington, celebrity
nourished dictatorial dreams. But it
was also indispensable in shaping frac­
tious kingdoms and colonies into
modern republics. "It is easier to love
a person than to love a constitution,"
Bell writes. "But the love for one can
help promote love for the other." He
leaves a yet more provocative argu­
ment for the epilogue. If historians
once narrowly construed their disci­
pline as the study of major leaders, Bell
suggests that the pendulum has since
swung too far in the other direction,
with even the most consequential fig­
ures seen as little more than fleshy
embodiments of social forces. He calls
on historians to write charisma back
into their scholarship.
Not that Bell wants a reactionary
return to the great-man school of Car­
lyle and Plutarch. Rather, he advocates
for the cultural study of leadership, of
the way that shifts in technology, reli­
gious belief, and literary taste shape the
exercise of personality-driven power.
Charismatic leadership may depend as
much on cultural savvy as on strategic
brilliance. Bolfvar lost many battles,
but he knew what a Mosaic liberator
should look like. After climbing Ecua­
dor's highest mountain, he wrote "My
Delirium on Chimborazo," a Romantic
prose poem in which he vaunts his
accomplishments to an ancient moun­
tain spirit who accuses him of vanity.
"I have surpassed all men in good for­
tune, as I have risen above the heads of
all," Bolivar, undaunted, replies. "I dom­
inate the earth."
An untitled photograph from the series Hallucinations by Justin James Reed
© The artist. Courtesy Candela Gallery, Richmond, Virginia
T he powerful may etch their
names in marble-or, like Jeff
Bezos, furnish their private
mountains with clocks designed to tick
for ten thousand years-but even gods
aren't safe from natural and man-made
weathering. Orkney, an archipelago off
the northeastern coast of Scotland,
once had a Neolithic monument called
the Odin Stone with a perfectly round
hole in its center, where generations
of Orcadians swore solemn oaths.
In 1814, an oblivious farmer clearing
land destroyed the
stone with black
po wder charges.
Oth er standing
stones had been
destroyed more sys­
tematically over
the previous five
centuries, burned
and buried by vil­
lagers who in some
cases believed that
megaliths, returned
to the earth, could
take root and grow.
In THE BOOK
OF UN CON FOR­
MITIES ($30, Pan­
theon), Hugh Raffles contemplates the
curious lives of stones from the Bronx
to Iceland, demonstrating that "even
the most solid, ancient, and elemental
materials are as lively, capricious, will­
ful, and indifferent as time itself." The
author, an anthropologist, has written
books about insects and the Amazon,
but The Book of Unconformities has a
more personal origin: the deaths of
two of Raffles's sisters, one of whom
lived on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer
Hebrides. A pilgrimage to the nearby
standing stones of Callanish leads
Raffles to visit other stone circles and
to develop a preoccupation with what
geologists call unconformities-divides
between sedimentary strata that sig­
nify breaks in geological time.
The result is a spellbinding time
travelogue. Raffles winds his way
from New York to the Arctic Circle,
and from the breakup of Laurasia to
the World War II internment of his
grandmother, who sliced mica for
Nazi warplanes at a factory in There­
sienstadt. Each chapter begins with
a stone and carves out the history of a
place. "Marble" traces the strange mi-
gration of New York's Marble Hill,
which was severed from Manhattan
and later attached to the Bronx.
"Blubberstone," named after a word
for concreted whale fat, recounts the
story of Svalbard, a sparsely inhabited
Arctic archipelago strewn with ves­
tiges of extractive industry:
Blubberstone at Smeerenburg, walrus
skulls at Kapp Lee ... expressive objects
surfacing from the deep quiet and severe
beauty of a landscape that has the qua-
lity of a theater
from which the ac­
tors, audience, and
even the ushers
have long departed.
Raffles's dense,
associative, essay­
istic style mirrors
geological transfor­
mation, compress­
ing and folding
chronologies like
strata in metamor­
phic rock. The most
mesmerizing sec­
tion is "Iron," which
tells the history of
Greenland's far north through one me­
teorite. It struck Earth sometime in the
Pleistocene; provided millem1ia of Inu­
ghuit hunters with their only source of
iron; and, in 1894, was finally prized
from its crater by the opportunistic ad­
venturer Robert Edwin Peary.
Now housed in New York's Ameri­
can Museum of Natural History, the
lnnaanganeq meteorite is a testament
to the many lives a single stone can
live-and also to the callous thefts of
Arctic exploration. Back in Green­
land, Raffles meets lnughuit who are
calling for the meteorite's repatriation.
It wouldn't be the most miraculous
return in their history. That would be
the remarkable odyssey of Qitdlars­
suaq, an Inuit shaman from Baffin Is­
land in Canada, who restored the
forgotten arts of kayaking, archery,
and snowhouse building to a faraway
Inughuit settlement whose elders had
succumbed to a European disease. He
began his ten-year journey across the
ice to Greenland with two invitations
to his companions: "Do you know the
desire for new countries? Do you know
the desire for new people?" ■
REVIEWS 83
DESER'I' BLUES
Charles Bowden's borderlands
By Wes Enzinna
Discussed in this essay:
America's Most Alarming Writer: Essays on the Life and Work of Charles Bowden,
edited by Bill Broyles and Bruce J. Dinges. University of Texas Press.
352 pages. $29.95.
Dakotah: The Return of the Future, by Charles Bowden. University of Texas Press.
184 pages. $24.95.
Jericho, by Charles Bowden. University of Texas Press. 240 pages. $24.95.
Blue Desert, by Charles Bowden. University of Arizona Press. 224 pages. $19.95.
The Red Caddy: Into the Unknown with Edward Abbey, by Charles Bowden.
University of Texas Press. 120 pages. $16.95.
T
he journalist Charles Bowden
first heard about the sicario, a
member of the Chihuahua
State Police who moonlighted as an
assassin for a Ciudad Juarez drug cartel,
in 2008. An acquaintance of Bowden's
had been harboring the killer after he
found God and fled the cartel. T he si­
cario's former jefes had put a $250,000
hit out on him, and he was ready to
c onfess everything he had done.
Bowden, then in his early sixties,
leaped at the opportunity to meet him.
He had been reporting on the brutality
along the U.S.-Mexico border since the
early 1980s, and had been waiting for a
moment like this for decades. Though
he had interviewed countless victims
over the years, he had never encoun­
tered a murderer who was willing to
speak in detail about his crimes.
When the sicario and Bowden fi­
nally met, in a border-town motel
room, the assassin spoke of the con­
tract killings he'd committed, in
plain but disturbing detail-the bod­
ies boiled alive, sliced up, pumped
full of amphetamine to prolong their
suffering. His right arm had grown
muscled from years of strangling vic­
tims. But as the assassin described
his disillusionment with a life of vio­
lence, Bowden came to admire him,
and even to recognize, in the arc of
\,'v'es Enzinna, a contributing editor to
Harper's Magazine, is writing a book about
California's housing crisis for Penguin Press.
84 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
the killer's career, some part of his
own trajectory as a reporter:
We are both trying to return to some
person we i magine we once were,
the person before the killings, be­
fore the torture, before the fear. He
wants to live without the power of life
and death, and wonders if he can en­
dure being without the money. I want
to obliterate memory, to be in a world
where I do not know of sicarios and
think of dinner and not of fresh corpses
decorating the calles. We have followed
different paths and wound up in the
same plaza, and now we sit and talk
and wonder how we will ever get home.
Bowden had started out in his late
twenties writing about the Southwest's
aquifers and orchids and turtles, but
ended up as one of the premier non­
fiction chroniclers of drug mules and
gangland executions in the Arizona
and Texas borderlands. In more than a
hundred magazine articles and twenty­
eight books, he developed a distinctive
style that combined investigative re­
porting and nature writing, confes­
sional essay and muckraking expose.
He confronted a blithely uninterested
American public with the despoliation
of the deserts, the dehumanizing hor­
rors of migration, and the brutal busi­
ness of the drug market. He wrote
about the Sonoran Desert from both
sides of the Rio Grande, a landscape,
as the writer William deBuys puts it in
a new book, America's Most Alarming
Writer: Essays on the Life and Work of
Charles Bowden, "straddling the life­
warping division of the international
border, a place inhabited by campesi­
nos, artists, drug runners, fat cats, hunt­
ers, and hustlers: el clesierco."
Bowden's attitude toward nature
was dystopian and irreverent, a tonic
for what he thought was the sancti­
mony of the Sierra Club crowd. ("En­
vironmentalism," he once said, "is an
upper-middle-class, white movement
aimed at absolution and preserving a
lifestyle with a Volvo.") He was at­
tuned not to the beauty of biology but
rather to its ugliness, which served as
a reminder that all life is caught up in
the same web of desires-hunger,
pain, fear. Just as he would later insist
Americans look unflinchingly at the
reality of the drug war, in his ecologi­
cal writing he insisted readers look
more intently at the war modernity
had waged against the nonhuman
world, particularly in the vast expanses
of the Southwest.
Bowden affected a hippie-cowboy
persona, carrying a pistol and wearing
huarache sandals. To suss out a story,
he would drive into town in his beat-up
blue Ford Ranger and ask, "Who's the
most fucked-up person here? I gotta go
talk to him." But he was a disciplined
investigator, and he spent years culti­
vating a broad range of sources-sex
workers, cartel jefes, and undercover
DEA agents, among many others­
who told him their stories, because they
too wanted, as Bowden wrote in his
2002 book Down by the River, "some
record made of this war that goes on
silently with no one the wiser."
His antics, both on and off the
page, were sometimes troubling. His
female characters are almost always
victims, his men always killers, and
his depictions of women are often
cringeworthy-dead or alive, there's
usually mention of their breasts. In
1989, Bowden drunkenly assaulted a
female journalist for asking him about
his just-deceased friend, the novelist
Edward Abbey. "I will not make ex­
cuses for violence," he writes in The
Red Caddy, a memoir of his friendship
with. Abbey. "Especially my own."
Bowden has also been criticized, fairly,
for conjuring an excessively dark vi­
sion of Mexico, and being "in love
with the abyss" of violence, as a critic
once put it.
 But years after his death from a
heart attack in 2014, at age sixt y-nine,
his work continues to inspire scores
of reporters and essayists dedicated
to documenting life in el desierto­
Francisco Cant(1, Reyna Grande, Lau­
ren Markham, Jean Guerrero-all of
whom, in writing about the people who
exist on America's margins, push for­
ward the journalistic project Bowden
helped initiate. "I think he moved the
conversation," the author Luis Alberto
Urrea said after Bowden died. "He was
able to get the conversation to people
who didn't think about it. I don't know
that he thought you could change any­
thing. He kept saying that [U.S.-Mexico
migration] was the greatest tragedy and
human movement in history and being
completely ignored, being erased. He
wanted it on the record."
To create this record, Bowden woke
at 3 or 4 AM each day and, fueled by
coffee or red wine and cigarettes, wrote
for as many as sixteen hours, producing
fifteen thousand words a week. When
he died, he left behind eight unpub­
lished manuscripts, the first three of
which, Dalwtah, Jericho, and The Red
Caddy, were recently published by the
University of Texas Press, to be followed
in coming years by the remaining five.
These three new volumes are accom­
panied by the reissue of six of his out­
of-print works, and America's Most
Alarming Writer, an essay collection by
his friends and admirers, including Jim
Harrison and William Langewiesche.
Together, these books present an op­
portunity to get to know an author in intellectual history at the University another of Bowden's co-workers re­
whose work helped change our image of Wisconsin-Madison. But he aban­ counts in Most Alarming, "I realized how
of the Mexican borderlands from a doned academia in his mid-twenties, much better a journalist Chuck was
place where disaster touches only im­ after his dissertation-an unwieldy, than any of the rest of us at the Citizen."
poverished migrants to a place where Faulknerian mess about groundwater­ When no one else would, Bowden took
disaster touches, and incriminates, was rejected, and rather than revise it over the sex-crime beat . In 1984,
nearly all North Americans. he returned to Tucson, where he Bowden was nominated for a Pulitzer

A
s Bowden recounts in the au­
tobiographical Dakotah, he
was born in 1945, and spent his
early years living on a 160-acre farm
near Joliet, Illinois, until his family
moved into an apartment in Chicago.
When Bowden was twelve, his father,
an alcoholic, uprooted the family again
and-seemingly on a whim-took
them to Tucson, Arizona. In college
Bowden became obsessed with the
Southwest's rapidly depleting aquifers,
a subject he pursued in a PhD program
worked as a reporter for one of the city's
two big dailies, the Tucson Citizen.
The Citizen was known as "a haven
for drinkers and smokers and pseudo­
cowboys," and it was there that Bowden
began constructing his persona as a
gunslinging tough guy. According to
Norma Coile, a colleague at the Citi­
zen, Bowden bragged that he'd "bedded
every woman he'd written about." He
also liked to boast that "someday all
Arizona civilization would collapse."
In spite of all this, he eventually
won over his colleagues. "Over time,"
Prize in feature writing, and the selec­
tion committee named him the winner.
He was recognized for two articles, one
on child abuse, the other on migrants,
for which he'd gone undercover and
hiked across the border in one-hundred­
plus-degree heat. His reporting preceded
much of the country's attention on im­
migration; his article appeared three
years before Ted Conover's extraordi­
nary account of a similar journey, Coy­
otes, was published to much acclaim,
and a decade before Urrea's 1993 Across
the Wire. (When Urrea's book came out,

Tocino fresco (detail), a sgrnf1ico portrait of Charles Bowden, by Alice Leora Briggs© ll1e artist. Courtesy Evoke
Con temporary, Santa Fe, N ew M ex icoi Etherton Gallel")'t Tucson, Arizona; and th e Un iversity of Texas Press REVIEWS 85
Bowden bought forty copies and gave
them to his friends.) But the prize deci­
sion was overruled by the Pulitzer family
without explanation and Bowden was
demoted to finalist, a snub that estab­
lished a pattern for the type of this-close
success that would define his career.
To help deal with some of the trauma
he'd suffered from covering the "kiddie
fuck" beat, as he called it, he began
undertaking masochistic hundred-mile
solo treks through the desert, and after
three years he quit the paper. "I would
write up these flights from myself,"
Bowden later recalled, "and people be­
gan to talk about me as a nature writer."
The resulting books are deep explora­
tions of bat caves and border towns and
the wilderness of his own psyche. Pei­
haps the best of them is Blue Desert,
published in 1986. In discursive chap­
ters on antelope, minnows, Earth First!,
the Glen Canyon Dam, smugglers'
routes, and strip-dub murders, Bowden
details the effects of American mass
migration to the Sunbelt in the 1970s
and 1980s. "There is not much differ­
ence between the proud new Sunbelt
cities and the old mining camps,"
Bowden writes. "T hey will exhaust the
place and then move on. I should say:
we will exhaust the place and then
move on." In a chapter about an endan­
gered bat colony-its population had
been decimated by DDT, dwindling
from fifty million to fewer than twenty­
five thousand-Bowden immerses him­
self in the muck of existence. Upon
entering the cave, he writes:
We climb. The hills of feces roll like
trackless dunes... . Something is crawl-
86 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
ing up our bare legs, across our bellies,
down our arms, past our necks and on­
ward into the curious contours of our
faces. Mites move up from the dunes of
feces and explore us like a new country.
When we pause and look up, our eyes
peer into a mist, a steady drizzle of urine
and feces cascading from the ceiling.
I have no desire to leave.
Bowden used the same keen eye for
ecology to illuminate the often invisi­
ble journeys of migrants. In Red Line
(1989), his first book with a major pub­
lisher, he set out to meet an assassin
named Nacho, who kills people with a
screwdriver. He wanted to understand
what transformed Nacho into a killer.
To find him, Bowden walked across the
desert, with just a backpack and a note­
book, sleeping on the sand. He doesn't
find the killer, but he does find the
crumb trails of migrants, and unearths
their exodus with an archaeologist's
attention to the soil.
The culverts under the big road are
rich with artifacts: hundreds of human
footprints heading north, big empty
cups of 7-ll's Super Big Gulp. Here and
there erupt the tire tracks of the 13or­
der Patrol, then the machine stops,
and huge American footprints briefly
join the legion of feet walking into El
Norte. The American impressions
stand for the rules, black coffee, and
endless forms. The Mexicans stand for
the appetites.
In the desert, Bowden had found
the perfect theater for his interests and
his persona, a stage upon which to
watch unfold the drama of man versus
nature, civilization versus wild instincts,
Left: Vans full of migrants in Sasabe, a town along the U.S.-Mcxico border, 2003
Right: Migrants being questioned by an irnmigration officer in H ermos illo,
Mexico, 2004 © Julian Cardona. Courtesy the Universiry of Texas Press
a place defined by scarcity and
stinginess, where dark ten­
sions came into stark relief. In
a talk Bowden gave at Tuc­
son's Pima County Public Li­
brary, he explained that he'd
reached "certain conclusions"
after years of writing and liv­
ing in Arizona, one of which
was that the best way to un­
derstand something was to go
to its margin:
This desert was the edge of
natural resources as Ameri­
cans understand the term, and
here in its heat and persistent
droughts I could make sense of
all those dull terms like the
"environment" or "ecology." I
believed, and still believe with every bit
of my being, that the future is going to
be a collision between limited resources
and unlimited human appetites.
I
n the mid-1990s, Bowden's interest
in the destruction of the desert led
him to Juarez, where he discovered
an ecological and humanitarian ca­
tastrophe far more dramatic than any­
thing he'd seen on the American side
of the Rio Grande. He first learned of
a spate of unsolved rapes and mur­
ders in the city when he was reading
a crime tabloid and saw a photo of a
young maquiladora worker who'd been
killed, Adriana Avila Gress.
She was smiling at me and wore a strap­
less gown riding on breasts powered by
an uplift bra, and a pair of fancy gloves
reached above her elbows almost to her
 armpits. The story said she'd dis­
appeared, all 1.6 meters of her.
By that point Bowden had
been out of the newspaper game
for two decades, but the femi­
cides in Juarez-the spike in
unsolved rapes and murders of
hundreds of women, especially
young workers at the maquilado­
ras that had sprung up all along
the border since the enactment
ofNAITA-must have felt like
deja vu. He kept Avila Gress's
photo in his desk drawer, as if
she were his muse, and carried
it with him as he poked around
Juarez, reporting on the crimes and
economic policies that had trans­
formed the city. Cheap U.S. corn had
flooded southern Mexico, ruining two
million farmers' livelihoods and forc­
ing many to migrate north to the
border zone in search of poorly paid
manufacturing jobs at foreign-owned
companies such as General Electric
and Walmarr. Wages dropped by 12
percent, and union membership was
halved. It was the beginning of our
present migration crisis, and Bowden
saw the United States as a quasi­
colonial power exploiting Mexico.
"Juarez stares at our imperial state," he
once said, "and demands that we ex­
plain its destruction at the hands of
our drug policy, our economic policy,
and our immigration policy."
In "While You Were Sleeping," an
article that first appeared in these
Left: M ar fa Esther Garcia visiting the Ciudad Juilrez morgue in 2004, rwo years after her brother
disappeared. Right: The so-called House ci Death in Ciudad Juarez, where in 2004 the police discovered
rwcl vc bodies buried under the patio© Julian Cardona. Courtesy chc University of Texas Press
pages, Bowden tells the story of Juarez's
apocalyptic transformation from the
perspective of the street photographers
chasing ambulances and documenting
mutilated cor pses. What they cap­
tured, he said, was
the look of the future. This future is
based on the rich getting richer, the
poor getting poorer, and industrial
growth producing poverty faster than
it distributes wealth. We have models
in our heads about growth, develop­
ment, infrastructure. Juarez doesn't
look like any of these images and so our
ability to see this city comes and goes,
mainly goes .... These photographs
literally give people a picture of an eco­
nomic world they cannot comprehend.
Juarez is not a backwater, but the new
City on the 1-lill, beckoning us all to a
grisly state of things.
His newfound focus on the drug war
earned him plum magazine assignments
for Esquire and National Geogra/Jhic, and
like many gringo reporters before him,
it also provided a backdrop for a roguish
personal mythology. Most Alarming
helps separate some of the facts from
fantasy. It even confirms a few of his
wilder tales, though it offers an incom­
plete and anecdotal accounting of
Bowden's biography. We hear firsthand
recollections from his second wife, Mary
Martha Miles-also Bowden's literary
executor-seeming to confirm stories
he told for years that many doubted,
such as how, in retaliation for an expose
Bowden had published in GQ, the head
of a Juarez cartel paid a local newspaper
to publish Bowden's home address on its
front page. On two separate trips to
Juarez, Miles claims, somewhat aston­
ishingly, "I was with him in Mexico
[and] he evaded cartel men who were
chasing us toward the border with their
guns drawn."
A
s Bowden's reporting on the
drug war consumed his writing,
his personal life increasingly
mirrored the lives of the people he
wrote about. He drank jugs of Gallo
wine for lunch. Miles says he was abu­
sive. In the spring of 2009, after she'd
worked as his secretary and editor for
nearly a decade, revising his work and
typing up his manuscripts, Bowden left
her, only to return six months later,
begging for permission to come back to
their Tucson home. She agreed, but
only if he entered rehab to deal with his
drinking and "the abuse he had exhib­
ited toward me during the last few years
we were together." Bowden refused.
From then until his death in 2014, he
split his time living in Jim and Linda
Harrison's place in Patagonia, Arizona,
and with a new girlfriend in Las Cru­
ces, New Mexico.
As Bowden lived more and more
like a hard-boiled DEA agent, he be­
gan to think like one. His book Down
by the River, a story about the murder
of the brother of a DEA agent named
Phil Jordan, was widely praised for the
depth of its reporting. Bowden spent
years crisscrossing Mexico and the
Southwest trying to solve the case.
REVIEWS 87

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Jordan writes in Most Alarming that
Bowden "single-handedly did more in
solving my brother's murder than the
El Paso Police Department, or any
other agency." But in his pursuit of the
killer, Bowden was increasingly ob­
sessed with violence, his views coming
to resemble those of the detectives who
were his friends and sources. Like these
men who had never set foot in Mexico
without a weapon, who saw crime and
violence everywhere because it was
their job to look for it, Bowden too
took it as his job to look for crime and
violence. Often, that was all he could
see, and in later books, such as 2010's
Murder City-a portrait of Juarez told
largely through the stories of the resi­
dents of a local mental hospital-his
characters lost the humanity he once
imputed to them, becoming mere ob­
jects for suffering, harbingers of horror.
"I have not entered the country of
death, but rather the c;ountry of kill­
ing," he wrote in Murder City. "And I
have learned in this country that kill­
ing is good."
Passages like this led critics to ac­
cuse Bowden of peddling a lurid, sin­
ister image of Mexico, of seeing the
country through "shit-stained glasses,"
as one of his acquaintances put it _.
Toward the end of Bowden's life his
cynicism threatened to engulf him.
("Once l was hungry for any glimpse
inside [the] secret world" of murder
and drug violence, he explains in Jer­
icho, written a few years before his
death. "I am no longer hungry.") Of
course, maybe he saw shit everywhere
simply because, like the Juarez photog­
raphers he'd once profiled, he had seen
the future. In his work, Bowden proph­
esied many of the bleakest forces that
For all his cynicism, Bowden's re­
sponse to this crisis was never a desire
to strengthen the border, but rather to
destroy it. "There aren't any Mexican
stars or American stars," he once said
in a radio profile, as he hiked with the
correspondent through the Buenos Ai­
res wildlife refuge in southern Arizona,
a popular route for migrants sneaking
into the United States. "It's like a great
biological unity with a meat cleaver of
law cutting it in half." His work was an
attempt to heal this cleavage, and to
remind us how our hunger, pollution,
and violence connected us all, espe­
cially in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan
Deserts, where nature was a stingy
mother and death ruled over every­
thing. "We are becoming more and
more aware that our civilization de­
stroys the foundations that support it
by devouring the earth and the things
of the earth," he wrote in Blue Desert.
"But we don't have the courage to back
away, to stop, to restrain ourselves. I
know I don't."
Like the beasts and criminals he
admired, Bowden was a complicated,
contradictory creature. He loved dogs,
dirt, wine, worms, Cadillacs, cacti. He
held backyard parties to watch sum­
mer cereus flowers bloom at midnight,
and owned scores of guns but was re­
luctant to shoot them lest they scare
the birds. Iri Most Alarming, a priest
named Gary Paul Nabhan reports that
the last time he saw Bowden the surly
old tough guy was weeping for a cot­
tonwood tree that had died. Bowden's
teeth were falling out. He was poor
and owned little more than a laptop,
a Le Creuset pot, a sleeping bag, a
Honda Fit, and a pair of binoculars. If
in life he sometimes failed to be a

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88
the fear and demagoguery, the eco­
nomic desperation, the official lies, the
indifference to suffering. He may have
believed Mexico was hell, but only
because he believed America was hell,
too, a country where he predicted a
charlatan politician might one day try
to "create a country so repellent that
no one will sneak into it." Bowden's
obsessive focus on darkness was at
least in part an attempt to warn read­
ers of this impending disaster. "We
either find a way to make their world
better," he once wrote, "or they will
come to our better world."
HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
decent man, in his writing he tried to
be a better animal. "The whippoor­
will's name reflects the sounds we hear
it make," he once wrote in a letter to
a friend.
But studies show there are two more
notes to its song beyond the range of
human hearing. Scholars wondered if
ocher birds heard these notes, and re­
cordings of mockingbirds, a species
that mimics the songs of other birds,
revealed that they did .... I w ant to
hear these missing notes about the
border and the ground about us when
I write and bring the full song to the
attention of others. ■
NUNS, FaLL\IRIES, AND
REVOLUTIONARIES
On Sylvia Townsend Warner
By Hermione Haby
Discussed in this essay:
Lolly Willowes, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. New York Review Books Classics.
230 pages. $16.95.
Mr. Fortune, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. New York Review Books Classics.
248 pages. $14.95.
Summer Will Show, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. New York Review Books
Classics. 352 pages. $17.95.
The Corner That Held Them, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. New York Review
Books Classics. 424 pages. $16.95.
in bed, thinking
only, idly, "What
would have been
the use of mov­
ing?" Alianor's
husband, Brian de
Retteville, can't
be bothered to
kiII his faithless
wife, or to heed a
l outish friend's
suggestion to send
her to a convent.
But when Alianor
dies ten years later
during childbirth,
he astonishes ev­
eryone by found­
ing a nunnery "in
commemoration
of her soul." This
is the book's set­
ting: the incom­
modious convent,
S
Oby-damp and
ylvia Townsend Warner's novel flood-prone and shoddily conceived by
The Corner That Held Them an improvident cuckold called Brian.
(1948) begins with a murder. It What follows is a novel that, lacking
is the twelfth century in rural Norfolk, anything like a main character-or,for
England. A young woman named that matter, a plot-pays more or less
Alianor regards the bloodied face of equal attention to a cast of dozens.
her lover-freshly slain by her Spanning more than two hundred
husband-as she lies next to his body years in the life of the abbey, this
strange chronicle is more concerned
Hermione Haby is a novelist and cultural
critic. She is the author of the 2018 novel with the petty travails of a small com­
Neon in Daylight. Her second no1Je!, Vir­ munity than with the great events of
tue, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. the plague, the Peasants' Revolt,or any
SL Cmlterinc of Siena and the Beggar (detail). circa 1460, by Giovanni di Paolo© Heritage lmages/akg-images
other historical convulsion. The black
death itself, an "extravaganza of death,"
suggests to the nuns "no changes ...
except the change from being alive to
dead." They make a point of remaining
punctual at mealtimes as well as holy
sacraments. Woman cannot live by
bread alone, but a reader might suspect
that between the two, dinner and holy
rule, the former is more important.
Like the Waxle Stream, which runs by
the nunnery, "full of loops and turn­
ings, and constantly revising its
course," the narrative meanders. What
lends the novel vitality and inestima­
ble charm is the fullness of Warner's
love for characters as unholy as us all.
Her attention alights completely on a
single character, granting them a rich
interiority usually only reserved for a
book's heroine, then she leaves them,
on to the next.
Warner, who lived from the 18 90s
to the 197 0s, undertook her extraor­
dinary work with mildness. Despite
being a Communist who defended
Stalin long past his show trials of the
1930s, and despite considering herself
married to a woman for forty years­
the short-haired, trouser-wearing Val­
entine Ackland, whom fellow villagers
sometimes mistook for a handsome
young man-Warner was not one for
flouting, subverting, or defying. It
seems truer, instead, to say that she
simply ignored convention. She pro­
duced poetry, more than a hundred
short stories, a translation of Proust's
On Art and Literature, and a highly
praised biography of T. H. White.
Her greatest achievement, however,
is her corpus of seven novels.
Modestly famous for most of her life,
Warner had a genial indifference to her
readers that did much for her art and
little for her career; John Updike lav­
ished praise on her first novel, Lolly
\Villowes-"witty, eerie, tender but
firm "-while lamenting that her "bril­
liantly varied and self-possessed literary
production never quite won her the
flaming place in the heavens of reputa­
tion that she deserved." For one thing,
her novels lacked the overt formal ex­
perimentation of her more famous
modernist contemporaries. She also
wrote historical fiction and fantasy
(including a collection of tales about
anarchic and amoral elfin kingdoms)
at a time when both were considered
REVIEWS 89
outmoded. But perhaps the greatest
cause of her neglect, as Updike's "var­
ied" implies, is that no two of her books
were sufficiently alike-as her biogra­
pher Claire Harman puts it in her in­
troduction to The Corner That Held
Them-to "produce the impression of
coherence upon which a loud reputa­
tion demands." The crucial word here
is "impression," for though setting and
subject matter vary (including,
r
but not
limited to, witchcraf in rural England,
m.issionary work in the tropics, revo­
lution in nineteenth-century Paris),
Warner's novels do share a striking
coherence: a distinguishing blend of
radical politics and mild sensibility.
W
arner was born on Decem­
ber 6, 1893, the only child
of Nora Hudleston and
George Townsend Warner, headmas­
ter of Harrow, one of England's poshest
boys' schools. She was "abnormally
intelligent . . . even at an early age," in
her aunt's words, and "solitary and
agnostic as a little cat" in her own. A
teacher at Harrow described the teen­
age Warner as "the cleverest fellow we
had." Another, the school's music
master, Sir Percy Buck, later became
her lover. She was nineteen, he was
forty-one and married with five chil­
dren, and they kept the affair secret
90 HARPER"S MAGAZINE/ P.UGUST 2020
for seventeen years. Buck also encour­
aged her talents as a musicologist, a
skill that enabled Warner to secure
her first proper job, in 1917, as one of
the editors of Tudor Church Music, an
acclaimed ten-volume compendium
published in installments throughout
the 1920s.
By 1923, aged thirty, Warner had
given up on marriage and was living
alone in a small apartment in Lon­
don, where she began to write a novel,
astonished to find that it was "as easy
as whistling." This was Lo!ly Willowes
(1926), her lone bestseller, in which
the author's casual disregard of con­
vention has already begun. The novel
follows forty-eight-year-old spinster
Laura Willowes ("Aunt Lolly " to her
nieces and nephews), who after twenty
years of living with her patrician
brother and his family, cramped by the
drudgery of their respectable lives,
finds herself "groping after something
that eluded her experience." This
"something" is both "menacing, and
yet in some way congenial," an "un­
godly hallowedness." After an epiph­
any in a flower shop, she ditches her
extended family and moves to rural
Dorset. There, in the ostensibly unre­
markable village of Great Mop (more
broomstick than mop, it turns out), she
becomes a witch.
Left: Photograph of Sylvia Townsend Wamer by Howard Coster©National
Portrait Gallery, Lon<lun. Right: Photograph by Alexey Bednij ©The artist
Finding herself closer to that "un­
godly hallowedness," Laura flourishes.
That is, until her nephew visits, pre­
senting an insupportable reminder of
the past. She's particularly enraged
by his response to the countryside,
his "reasonable appreciative appetite,
a possessive and masculine love." In a
state of simmering fury, her latent
powers begin to manifest, driving
away the unnerved nephew. First,
Laura finds a blood-lapping kitten in
her kitchen and intuits this creature
to be her familiar. Soon she meets Sa­
tan, who takes the form of a chatty
gamekeeper, then she joins a coven.
We understand that Laura has been
"a witch by vocation" all along. Sit­
ting in her cottage, stroking her dia­
bolical kitten, she acknowledges her
contentment: "Room, house, village,
hills encircled her like the rings of a
fortification. This was her domain,
and it was to keep this inviolate that
she had made her compact with the
Devil." After Laura's first demonic
Sabbath, a well-attended baccha­
nalia of music, masked dancing,
and sorcery, she simply observes:
"It had been a surprising night."
The fine English understatement is
enhanced by the peckish thought
that follows: making her way home,
Laur a anticipates "cutting large,
crumbling slices from the loaf in the
cupboard, and spreading them with a
great deal of butter and the remains
of the shrimp paste."
This transmogrification of a middle­
aged, middle-class Englishwoman into
a witch is presented as the most natu­
ral thing in the world-and also the
most joyful. "One doesn't become a
witch to run round being harmful, or
to run round being helpful either,"
Laura reflects. "It's to escape all that­
to have a life of one's own, not an
existence doled out to you by others."
A life of one's own was of course a
fantasy for most of Warner's female
readers. Among them was Virginia
Woolf, who, three years away from
writing A Room of One's Own, was so
taken by this tale of a woman claiming
her own space that she summoned
Warner to dinner.
Lolly \Villowes is more than sympa­
thetic to queer readings, but in her
next novel, gayness is explicit. Set on
the imaginary South Pacific island of
Fanua, Mr. Fortune's Maggot (1927)
concerns a luckless Protestant mis­
sionary, the eponymous Timothy For­
tune, who begins to fall hopelessly in
love with a young and beautiful boy,
Lueli, his only convert-a develop­
ment as obvious to the reader as it is
surprising to Mr. Fortune. In her
mode of arch despair, Warner de­
scribed her hero to a fri end, the
novelist David Garnett, as " fatally
sodomitic." She added: "I love him
with a dreadful uneasy passion which
in itself denotes him a cripple." Love,
both Warner's for Mr. Fortune, and
his in turn for Lueli, shades this story
of a ludicrously failed missionary (one
is supposed to teach the natives love
of God, not fall in love with the na­
tives) with melancholy. So it is that
the book registers less as a mordant
satire than as an indulgent character
portrait. Something like a fourth wall
is splintered by Warner's own heart­
rent cry of a final line: "My poor Tim­
othy, good-bye! I do not know what
will become of you."
By the mid-Twenties, financially
secure from the sales of these novels,
and courted by the fashionable and
literary, Warner emerged as one of
London's bright young things. Her
friends included the photographer
Cecil Beaton, who made several por-
traits of her. In the best of these, she
smiles with mild imperiousness, as if
acknowledging but in no way dis­
avowing the eccentricity of her outfit:
crimson tights, embroidered coat with
extravagant fur cuffs, cloche hat,
round, black-rimmed spectacles. By
the end of the decade, however, as her
relationship with Buck came to an
end, Warner began to feel despondent
and unattractive. On a weekend visit
to the village of Chaldon, in Dorset, a
friend pointed out a cottage for sale,
which the surveyor's report described
as "a small, undesirable property situ­
ated in an out of the way place and
with no attractions whatsoever." War­
ner bought it for a song.
Through a mutual friend she met
Ackland, and an uncertain acquain­
tance began-neither Warner nor
Ackland was particularly taken by the
other. Nonetheless, knowing that
Ackland's mar riage had been an­
nulled, Warner thought it only de­
cent to offer an essentially homeless
twenty-four-year-old woman one of
the cottage's two bedrooms. A little
over a week into their cohabitation,
Warner heard Ackland say through
the partition wall, "I sometimes think
I am utterly unloved." Ackland's
voice, as Warner wrote in her diary,
"had me up, through the door, and at
her bedside." By the morning, already
calamitously in love, Warner wrote a
farewell to "this death I have sat so
snugly in for so long, sheltering myself
against joy, respectable in my mourn­
ing, harrowed and dull and insincere
to myself."
Ackland had a hand in "converting"
her partner to Communism; they
joined the party together, in 1935, the
same year that Warner began writing
her fourth novel, Summer Will Show. So
robust was their mutual revolutionary
fervor that in 1936 the two undertook
a trip to Spain, where they volunteered
with a British medical unit supporting
the Republican army. Upon returning,
Warner wrote to a friend about the
beauty of anarchism. She sighed: "The
world is not yet worthy of it, but it
ought to be the political theory of
heaven." Communism, Harman writes
in her biography of Warner,
underlined the sense of ostracism she
and Valentine had been made to feel
REVIEWS 91
 ---- ---- --------

M A G A z
ERS N E

FOUNDED IN 1850 / VOL. 341, NO. 2043

AUGUST 2020
WWW.HARPERS.ORO

Letters 2
I Is Another Rafael Castillo, Padma Visiuanathan
Editor's Desk 4
Reality Check Christopher Beha
Easy Chair 7
Triangulation Thomas Chatterton Williams
Harper's Index 11
Readings 13
After the Fires Calvin Baker
Worst Responders police officers execute an extreme home makeover
T he Report Lina Wolff
And ... Rashid Johnson, Lavar Munroe, Toyin Ojih Odutola,
and the LAPD generates user enragement
Letter from Kenosha 24
THE ART OF LOSING James Pogue
Can Democrats win back postindustrial America?
From the Archive 35
The Ideal State Elmer Davis
Miscellany 37
FALSE DAW N Khadijah Queen
A zuihitsu from the early months of the pandemic
Letter from Germany 42
IN PLAIN SIGHT Annie Hylton
The search for Syrian war criminals in Europe
Poetry 48
BASEMENT SUITE Karen Solie
Essay 51
ALL MY PRONOUNS Anne Fadiman
How I learned to live with the singular they
Annotation 62
THE COUNTER-MONUMENT Zoey Poll
Disempowering a memorial to Fascism
Report 64
ON MORAL INJURY Janine cli Giovanni
Can a new diagnosis help heal our souls?
Story 71
NOBODY GETS OUT ALIVE Leigh Newman
Reviews 81
NE W BOOKS Julian Lucas
DESERT BLUES Wes Enzinna
Charles Bowden's borderlands
NUNS, FAIRIES, AND REVOLUTIONARIES Hermione Haby
On Sylvia Townsend Warner
Cover: /111t1mirion by Rodrigo Cmi-al.
Puzzle 95 Richard E. Maltby Jr. Source image: Postcard of Kenoslw,
\X/isconsin. CoiirteS)' rile \X/isconsin
Findings 96 Hisrurical Society, \'//HS-355 I 6
 because they were lesbians. Rather
than being slightly outcast, they
could move themselves beyond the
conventional altogether. Thus Com­
munism conferred a blessing on their
marriage and, because it was so closely
tied up with their love for each other,
became sacrosanct.
Summer Will Show was published
that same year. It follows the stolidly
Tory Sophia, a member of the En­
glish gentry, as she sets off for Paris
to confront her feckless husband,
planning to demand another child,
having lost her son and daughter to
tuberculosis. Both children have died
while Frederick (the feckless) has
been gadding about on the Left Bank
with his demimondaine-the charis­
matic storyteller, Minn.a. Sophia en­
viously observes that Minna "lives
on her own applause." "Yes, she is an
artist, what they call a Bohemian.
T H And I, in this strange holiday from
S
my natural self, am being a Bohemian
IXTIES too, she thought with pride." Dis­
armed, Sophia finds herself drawn to
llOID 1141.ll lHI
Minna; soon her "strange holiday"
begins to feel like home, and her
"natural self" emerges.
When Warner's cherished editor at
The New Yorker, William Maxwell,
ventured that Summer Will Show was
"the least cautious and most prodigal
of your novels," he no doubt meant
both the most explicitly lesbian, as
well as the most Communist. In one
sense, however, it is the most conven­
tional, certifiably a bildungsroman:
radical content is given traditional
form and treatment. Its heroine must
confront the truth about herself, in
much the same way Laura (albeit
more fantastically) did before her.
Early in her correspondence with
Maxwell, Warner confessed, "I fancy
we must be made out of much the
same clay-quiet characters, with a
simple savage delight in cataclysms."
Sophia's transformation is such a cat­
TO ORDER MERCHANDISE, aclysm, but one as slow and quiet as
VISIT STORE.HARPERS.ORG that of Laura's before her. Sophia is at
OR CALL (212) 420-5754 first profoundly unconvinced by the
high-flown idealism of the 1848 rev­
olution. We find her captious after
being dragged about by Minna to
places "where the Revolution might
HARPERS
M A C A Z I S I:
be expected to make a good show­
ing." Wearily, Sophia suggests they
try the Champs-Elysees because at
92 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
least there she might find somewhere
to sit. In a later scene, after she's col­
lected some 111011.ey-"twenty five good
golden English pounds-a reassuring
weight, a comfortable gravity"­
Sophia takes a stroll, fortified. '"I love
money,' she told herself, walking obliv­
iously past shop windows. 'There, per­
haps, the true unexplored passion of
my life awaits me.' "
Her true passion is not, as it turns
out, money. The story turns on a scene
in which we understand our heroine
to be renouncing her old life and com­
mitting herself politically and roman­
tically to Minna. The two discoveries,
love and revolution, are inextricable
and sacrosanct. Poor old Frederick,
the nu gatory husband, has been
ditched. ("Instantly forgetting his
existence, save as a character in her
narrative, Sophia went on talking.")
Seeing Minn.a in the Luxembourg
Gardens, Sophia steels herself: "Yet
perhaps to accost her under those
trees, and within the spell of the
fountain's melancholy voice, would
have been too elegiac. For this was
real life . . . " The phrase "real life"
has recurred with increasing fre­
quency as we approach this moment.
Nothing is as real as money, and
when Sophia offers the destitute
Minna those twenty-five solid En­
glish pounds, she accepts them,
walks to a collection box marked FOR
THE POLISH PATRIOTS, and "when the
last coin had fallen through the slit,"
turns to Sophia with "a look of bril­
liant happiness." Minna cries, "Vive
la liberte!" and when Sophia answers
in kind, we sense an exchange of
vows. Their ensuing romance is ren­
dered matter-of-factly. The women's
conjugal intimacy is suggested by So­
phia sitting up in bed beside Minna
and eating a biscuit in order to mar­
shal her thoughts. Minna encourages
her to have another. It all feels
very English.
T
hroughout her relationship
with Warner, Ackland suf­
fered from alcoholism, poor
health, and crises of self-esteem. By
1952, she was hungering for a differ­
ent, or at least supplementary, belief
system from Communism, a quest that
culminated in her conversion to Ca­
tholicism. This was one of the great

trials of their relationship. Before her
conversion, Ackland wrote of Warner:
She bears most patiently with my ex­
cursions into various Faiths, and is in­
terested in many of them, and some­
times charme d by the outward
trappings: but always because of their
association with Man as a creative art­
ist ... the imagination that conceived
the idea, the fancy that contrived the
ritual, the social forces of the time,
which conditioned chis or that form of
Faith or worship.
Here, Ackland illuminates one of
the most remarkable qualities of her
partner's fiction-Warner's surprising
sy mpathy for religion. Despite her
Marxism, her preoccupation with
faith had no satirical animus; she
didn't so much excoriate religion as
an opiate of the masses as instrumen­
talize it as an indication of human
fallibility. It is, she implies, a forgiv­
able delusion-we all need a little
Tired of clueless
penses. Spirituality is something of a educationists?
luxury in a world where things always
need repairing and disasters strike Visit" Education Fads versus
with frequency. Half a deplorable cen­ I ndiviclual Rights" on die web.
tury is briskly dealt with thus:
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It's not until 1345-"when Prioress
Isabella choked on a plum-stone"­
that "peace and quiet returned, fol­ WALTE R K AR P
lowed by four ambling years of having
no history, save for a plague of cater­
pillars." As a succession of abbesses
shuffle off their mortal coils, Warner's
Buried Alive
E"a�, 011 Our Enclan�ered Republic
tone remains one of dry forbearance.
Death, in its accretion, takes on a A collection of Walter Karp's essays
comic quality. At one point, a pair of on American politics, the presidency,
nuns enter into amiable bickering as the press, censorship, education, and
they count the dead in the same man­ the lessons of liberty. Many were orig­
ner that they might conduct an inven­ inally published in Harper's Magazine.
Preface by Lewis H. Lapham.
tory of the larder:
Order online at www.harpers.org/store

consolation, after all. They began to reckon again, and had

Nonetheless, like any good Marx­
ist, she believes in history. The Corner
That Held Them is Warner's master­
piece and her favorite of her novels,
perhaps because it is the work which,
in doing away with plot, most bla­
tantly disregards convention. She
seems to have become free to experi­
ment, as Harman puts it, "purely for
herself." Warner writes, with great
wryness, in The Corner That Held
Them: ''A good convent should have
brought the count to eight when Dame
Beatrix recollected old Dame Roesia
who died before the pestilence and
Dame Helen recollected Dame Joan.
Chance that an
Things fall, among them nuns par-
American would
ticipating in a dubiously holy game of rather be mugged
levitation, one of the funniest epi­
sodes of the book. In the case of a than audited :
misbegotten spire, hope collapses
even before the structure itself. The
abbess who conceived of this archi­
1 1n 2
tectural addition, having long been

no history. Its life is hid with Christ
who is above. History is of the world,
costly and deadly, and the events it
records are usually deplorable." The
book is concerned very much with
the costly-in the nonmetaphorical,
HARPERS
monomaniacal about her project,
did not try to hide from herself the
sense of anticlimax which accompa­
nied the completion of her spire .... It
was her life-work; but her life persisted,
INDEX BOOK
a life filled with beef and mutton,
-VOLU ME J-

economic sense; the nuns struggle to
keep their minds on the superlunary
when there are so many earthly ag­
gravations. The novel was a project
begun, she wrote, with "the purest
Marxist principles." Specifically:
I was convinced that if you were go­
ing to give an accurate picture of the
monastic life, you'd have to put in all
their finances; how they made their
money, how they dodged about from
one thing to another and how very
precarious it all was.
The impecunious nuns fret end­
lessly over dowries, lawsuits, and ex-
clothing and firing, cavils and quarrels.
Even the potentially lurid is swiftly
worn down to the shabbily banal. In­
sanity itself, for example, soon proves
humdrum: "A mad priest became part
of the routine of the house, an accus­
tomed nuisance, like the washhouse
door which for so long had been
warped and would not close properly."
This is fat, old, going-to-seed Ralph,
who comes to the convent of Oby for
want of a good breakfast; even he, how­
ever, is granted moments of grace.
(Warner had a special tenderness for
her male characters, especially the
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Created by
Winnifred Cutler,
P h.D. in bi ology from
U. of Penn, post-d oc
Stanf ord.
C o-disc overed human
pherom ones in 1986
middle-aged and gormless.) We find
Ralph strolling in the benediction of
springtime and landing on an edible
metaphor: "Life was durably sweet, it
improved like a keeping apple."
Warner is careful to honor the hu­
man needs for beauty, kinship, and
fulfillment. You sense her sincerity, in
The Corner That Held Them, when she
all others. Through a bunch of bum­
bling nuns, then, Warner upends our
experience of the form.
E. M. Forster, seeking to distin­
guish between story and plot in As­
pects of the Novel, referred to the
former as "the chopped-off length of
the tapeworm of time." "Story," in oth­
er words, is a matter of mere duration,

'.
writes, "Every nonentity must have a whereas "plot" is time made meaning­
moment when it flashes into some­ ful through an ordered sequence of
thing positive, the immortal soul is not events. Forster's image-somewhat
housed in flesh for nothing." It is clear grisly, certainly banal-seems chopped
Athena Pheromones increase enough as we watch a young clerk straight out of the lice-riddled world of
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called Henry Yellowlees lying awake
after hearing ars nova, a new style of
The Comer That Held Them. The book
has no ending; it just ends. An equally
polyphony. He's at the leper house that conclusive ending could be found by
is his lodging for the night, dwelling closing your eyes, riffling back any
on a moment earlier that day, when he number of pages, and designating a
and the house chaplain sang the new spot with your finger. Just as death so
music with a leper. The experience often does, the end comes abruptly,
leaves him feeling "astray, bewildered without fanfare. ■
by the unexpected progressions, con­
cords so sweet that they seemed to
melt the flesh off his bones." But as August Index Sources
always in Warner, the unlovely and 1 Alpha Data (NYC); 2 Open Minneapolis;
3 Star Tribune (Minneapolis); 4,5 Democracy
Fund (Washington); 6 YouGov Direct (NYC);
.. ·
nous. There Henry is, "with half of his 7 Sirchie (Youngsville, N.C.); 8 Society
mind in a rapture and the other half for Healthcare Organization Procurement
wishing that there were not so many Professionals (Suffern, N.Y.); 9 New York Times;
and such ferocious bugs." The book's 10-13 Pew Research Center (Washington); 14
Stefania Albanesi, University of Pittsburgh;
dramatis personae consist of charac­ 15,16 Morning Consult (NYC); 17 Facebook
ters like Henry. There are no minor (Menlo Park, Calif.);· 18,19 ParentsTogether
characters, however trifling their lives (Washington); 20,21 Pew Research Center;
appear, since there is no hierarchy. 22,23 Morning Consult (Washington); 24
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center
There's a communistic bent to all this:
(Balcimore)/MIT Election Data and Science
individuals matter, but only as part of Lab (Cambridge, Mass.); 25,26 Pew Research
society. The novel, as its foundational Center; 27 Doctors Without Borders (NYC);
instantiations show, is the arch form 28,29 Jeffrey Shwian, Columbia University
of individualism, a bourgeois and anti- (NYC); 30 SurveyMonkey (San Mateo, Calif.);
31,32 New Yori< Times; 33,34 SWNS Media
. communal form, in which a single Group (Brooklyn, N.Y.); 35 YouGov (NYC);
consciousness-Madame Bovary's, 36,37 Kinsey Institute (Bloomington, Ind.);
say, or Jane Eyre's-is elevated above 38,39 OnePoll (London).
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94 HARPER' S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
■
PUZZLE ■

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

l0ACROSS 14 15
By Richard E. Maltby Jr.
16

17 18

19 20 21 22

More than half of the clue answers will 23 24 25 26

not fit into the diagram; these answers will have
to be adjusted before entry. To keep those clues 27 28 29 30
a mystery, word lengths are omitted.
A sign of the change is provided by lOA, which 31 32 33
happens to be a classic Harper's puzzle clue.
Clue answers include fourteen proper nouns. 34 35 36 37 38
The entries at llA, 21D, and 22D are uncommon
words. As always, mental repunccuation of a clue is 39 40 41 42
the key to its solution. The solution to last month's
puzzle appears on page 79. 43

44 45

ACROSS DOWN
I. Order can be reordered? I'll be damned! I. Flower is seen in between dawn and sunset
4. Fellow can be heard in a school class 2. One connecting all over the map, all over the map
6. Laugh! All right! Feels so good! It can be highly 3. Storyteller wanders on, leader being absent
satisfying! 4. Oversized dresses: organdies
10. Sign for and take $100 off vacation vehicle on beach 5. One of the elite staff, a little less than brave
11. After starting rehearsals, Candida is reviewed-chis 7. Oh! Ah! Who hears ukulele sounds here?
gets to the root of things 8. Diane von Furstenberg and her husband-they're
14. Supporter with Gandhi's heart and stamp formidable! (hyphenated)
15. Composer takes part in play-back, making one single 9. Has dinner out, being manually clean (two words)
16. For starters, some avocado, some squash in every 11. Old TVs in souped-up cars
recipe is fresher! 12. Boundless ideal: to have given people a hand
17. Hot cuisine makes an entrance in it retroactively 13. This mark, Don, is ridiculous without underwear!
18. I'm made from lemons or melons-I'm serious! 20. Mischa, the old film Russian, listened to for an hour
19. Nice tune in a noncash swap 21. Liquid solute includes not quite new ingredients in TNT
22. Abandons some pearls 22. School where backwards students might do \\1ell?
23. Squared off about a bit of nastiness and blow 24. Pound cakes, snack bits, a major sucker
26. Unnamed person produces deer head first (two ivords) 25. Queen ignored errands to get African bread
27. House is oddly housing rainbows 26. Taking year off, Jay-Z fixed gaze for a time, in
29. A sundial, an improvement from the south of Spain America (two words)
31. Tumultuous rains, Don-they support log entries! 27. Phone gear has to stay outside-tends to gee broken
32. Edna, Lulu, Zachary, quarantined returning from part 28. Take a tip from a northern country that's away from
of Africa the shore
34. During the first appearances of social distancing, 30. Don, it's the wrong way to say yes
seeing Liza dance wildly raised eyebrows 33. What's in a name? Edna, surprisingly, means
38. Ran, half-disabled mountainous
39. Smooth guy who leaves children out? 35. Could be warden warned chis guy?
41. 35D in Greece? T hat's partly the fault of California! 36. Somewhat tastier wine
43. Set to travel, sec off, fly over Africa 37. You'll be angry if you get it up, and darned silly
44. Squashes might cause achiness around extremities of 38. Husky food? Coming down to party for a movie, Don?
hand and elbow 4 0. Clothing line set up, not very interesting
45. Who's playing with darts-no playwright 42. Bear stall

Contest Rules: Send completed diagram with name and address to "LO Across," HarjJer's Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012. If you
already subscribe to Harper's, please include a copy of your latest mailing label. Entries must be received by August 3. The sender of the first correct
solution opened at random will receive a one-year subscription to Harper's Magazine (limit one winner per household per year). The winner's name
will be printed in the October issue. The winner of the June puzzle, "Perfect Settings," is Richard L. Clark, Roanoke, Va.
PUZZLE 95
 FINDINGS
Researchers who reviewed data from 95 million
U.S. traffic stops found that black drivers are pulled
over less frequently at night, when a "veil of darkness"
obscures their skin color. People are bad at identifying
others' false memories. The Sans Forgetica typeface
does not make text easier to remember. A longitudinal
study of adolescent Arizonans found that successful
psychopaths develop more pronounced conscientious­
ness as an impulse-control mechanism. Prospect theory
was found to be sound, scarcity makes consumers less
price-sensitive, and women are likelier than men to be
jealous of a partner's realistic sex robot. Australian
psychologists linked social isolation and emotional
deprivation among fe1nale university students to drunk­
orexia. Virus particles from the feces of non-obese mice
decrease obesity in obese mice. Baloxavir keeps ferrets
with influenza from infecting healthy ones. Vampire
bats who are strangers will groom one another before
sharing blood via regurgitation. Six new coronaviruses
were discovered in bats. Falling levels of tourist trash
during pandemic lockdowns was found to have caused
rat infighting, and macaques were reported to have
attacked a lab assistant in Delhi and stolen vials of
COVID-19-infected blood, which at least one monkey
then tried to eat. In Maine, a loon stabbed a bald eagle
through the heart.
Rising population density, poor hygiene, and cold,
moist weather led to a spike in ear infections in the
Levant around 4000 BC, and postwar atmospheric
nuclear testing led to increased cloud thickness and
rainfall in the Shetland Islands. A period of global
coolness 4,200 years ago accelerated the diversification
of japonica rice. Ostrich-shell beads indicating the
onset of the Initial Upper Paleolithic were found to
have reached Shuidonggou by 39000 BC, and strontium
isotope levels revealed the social exchange of
Black Gum, a phowgraphic triptych by Christian T/iompson AO,
from the series Australian Graffiti. Courtesy the artist and Michael Reid, Sydney
96 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ AUGUST 2020
ostrich-shell beads during the Late Quaternary in the
Karoo Supergroup. Interviews with reptile poachers
in southwestern Balochistan indicated that the Cas­
pian cobra, the desert monitor, the Iranian mastigure,
Maynard's longnose sand snake, the Persian spider
gecko, and the Tartar sand boa were being captured
for use by snake charmers. Herpetologists inventoried
the scars of snakes found in the Danube Gorge. Half
of Algeria's marine turtle strandings are inexplicable.
Hemotoxic snakebite may be treatable with a heavy­
metal chelator. The mating calls of male Panama
cross-banded tree frogs are synchronized to confuse
bats and midges. Arson dogs' noses remain better than
lab equipment at detecting certain accelerants. CBD
improves quality of life in arthritic elderly dogs. Finn­
ish scientists identified the genomic region associated
with fearfulness in Great Danes.
L1e decreasing transpiration of plants, a result of
rising carbon dioxide levels, was partly to blame for
recent heat waves in northern latitudes. Peatlands,
which now store roughly as much carbon as Earth's
forests or its atmosphere, can hold more carbon if ex­
posed to low-intensity fires. Inland waters are emitting
previously unaccounted-for levels of carbon dioxide, and
freshwater insects are flourishing even as terrestrial
insects are dying off. Ocean acidity can now be pre­
dicted five years ahead of time. Green snow is spread­
ing across Antarctica. The deepest octopus observed
to date was photographed in the Java Trench. Terres­
trial bacteria can grow on extraterrestrial nutrients;
the black hole nearest Earth was discovered in the
constellation Telescopium; and X-ray experiments
conducted at the European Synchrotron indicated that
moisture is destroying The ScTeam. A fungal parasite
that afflicts the reproductive organs of millipedes was
named in honor of Twitter. ■