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RAJA SHEHADEH

What Are the Book

Banners Afraid Of?
Some notes on the politics of reading.
JANE SMILEY

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F E AT U R E S EDITORIAL

B&A
4 scuttle his bid for the
The Real Republican nomination.
16 The Takeover
SASHA ABRAMSKY
Border Chaos
G A B Y D E L VA L L E
CHRIS LEHMANN
B O O K S the
A R T S

In California, extremists have infil- 5 COMMENT 41

trated Shasta County’s government.
Biden for President? 34 Body and Soul
His Rose Garden Anton Shammas and the
Is it a new blueprint for the right? campaign strategy is lost hope of Arabesques.
dangerously misguided. RAJA SHEHADEH

24 What Are the Book

Banners Afraid Of?
JOHN NICHOLS AND
D.D. GUTTENPLAN 37 Better Than Reality
T H E D E B AT E What makes special
JANE SMILEY 6 COMMENT 13
Climate of Fear Should We Bring effects work?
Some notes on the politics of reading. Species Back From MALCOLM HARRIS
Texas’s abortion and
gun laws leave abuse Extinction?
28 ELIZABETH A. HADLY, ERIONA 41 A World Inside Out
survivors vulnerable. HYSOLLI, AND DEBORAH A. SIVAS
MARY TUMA
The countercultural
C O L U M N S fiction of Katherine Dunn.
TOW N C A L L E D M A L I C E
11 7 Back Talk NORA CAPLAN-BRICKER
Ron’s Résumé
DeSantis’s zeal to prove The left lacks male 44 Everyday Divides
his credentials may feminist leaders. Kelly Reichardt’s cinema
TOP: MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES; COVER: PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ADRIANA GEORGOPULOS

ALEXIS GRENELL
of class conflict.
8 Morbid Symptoms A L E X KO N G

Democrats need to fight

entrenched reactionary
judges.
JEET HEER
DEADLINE POET
12
The Other Race
28 The Right to Live
SARA LUTERMAN
16 C A LV I N T R I L L I N

Can disabled Americans really make a

free choice about dying when they’re “ The Democrats’ attempt to appease
the right on immigration has had disastrous
34

VOLUME
treated like expensive burdens? consequences for migrants. 4
”
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 E D I T O R I A L / G A B Y D E L VA L L E FOR T H E N AT I O N

The Real Border Chaos

fter more than three years, title 42—a policy that allowed immigra-
tion officers to return migrants they encountered at the border with Mexico
without a hearing, thereby shutting hundreds of thousands out of the asy-
lum system—has ended. The Biden administration didn’t rescind Title 42
because of a desire to rebuild the asylum process, but because it had to. The
statute authorizing the border closure is part of the Public Health Service
Act. Once Biden lifted the Covid-related emergency declarations, the pretext for Title 42
disappeared. Instead of a return to the pre-pandemic status quo,
however, the end of Title 42 has ushered in a labyrinthine set of projections of up to 14,000 daily. In Title 42’s fi-
new regulations, many of which are right out of Trump’s playbook. nal days, more than 10,000 migrants crossed the
In order to qualify for asylum, migrants must now make an ap- border each day. Reports from the border sug-
pointment with Customs and Border Protection via the CBP One gest that apprehension numbers are low because
app. That sounds easy enough, but the app is notoriously prone to migrants are aware of the new rules.
crashes. Migrants report rushing to enter their information in the But this is not to say there isn’t chaos at the
app to secure one of the limited slots available each day—there border—there is, and much of it is by design.
are only 1,000—during a very short window each morning. Most On the Mexican side, people who have fled dan-
asylum seekers who arrive at the border without having made an gerous conditions in their home countries are
appointment through the app will be deemed ineligible for asy- subjected to similar dangers in Mexico, where
lum unless they first applied for protection in Mexico and were they’re forced to wait in limbo, pursuing the
denied. Anyone deemed ineligible for asylum is now subject to extremely limited pathways to asylum eligibility.
expedited removal, a process that allows people to be deported On the US side, there’s chaos too. At the behest
without going before an immigration judge. of Florida’s attorney gener-
And those who are deported face a five-year al, a Trump-appointed fed-
bar on reentry. eral judge recently blocked
As a presidential candidate in 2020, Biden In 2020, Biden CBP from releasing some
criticized Trump for “drastically restrict[ing] criticized Trump’s migrants from its custo-
access to asylum” by “imposing additional re- “drastic” restrictions dy without hearing dates.
strictions on anyone traveling through Mex- on asylum. Now he’s This has led to dangerous
ico or Guatemala” and lambasted Trump’s overcrowding: As of May
“disastrous policy of ‘metering,’” which “cre- doing the same thing. 14, there were 22,000 peo-
ated a horrifying ecosystem of violence and ple in Border Patrol custo-
exploitation.” Now Biden is doing both. The CBP One app has dy, including an 8-year-old girl who died on May
systematized metering, and Trump’s third-country transit ban is 17. Democrats decried these human rights abuses
back with a few tweaks. when they happened under Trump. Now some
Rather than enact policies that will alleviate the situation at the Democratic senators have proposed reinstating
border, the administration appears to have developed its stance Title 42 for two years so Congress can “send
on immigration almost entirely in response to criticism from the more resources to the border.”
right. But the right will accuse Biden of being soft on immigration For now, the administration views the low
no matter what he does; for example, his critics have called CBP apprehension numbers as a win. “The deter-
One a “concierge service” for unauthorized immigrants even rence message is working,” one official told the
though it is actually a streamlined version of Trump-era meter- Los Angeles Times. But this success comes at the
ing. By attempting to appease the right, Democrats have ceded expense of tens of thousands of asylum seekers
ground, and the consequences for migrants have been disastrous. who find themselves stranded in Mexico, waiting
“It’s going to be chaotic for a while,” Biden said two days before for appointments they may never get. N
Title 42 ended. But immigration officers stationed at the border
4 encountered just an average of 4,400 migrants each day in the first Gaby Del Valle writes BORDER/LINES, a weekly
week after Title 42 was lifted—far fewer than the administration’s newsletter about immigration policy.
  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

C O M M E N T / J O H N N I C H O L S Hampshire, where a narrow Democratic loss in

A N D D . D . G U T T E N P L A N 2000 allowed the contest to be decided by schem-
ing Florida Republicans and a conservative major-
Biden for President? ity on the Supreme Court. When Representative
Ro Khanna addressed a Democratic Party dinner
The White House’s Rose Garden campaign strategy is in Manchester last month, he rallied the crowd
with a call for Biden to “come to New Hampshire”
misguided—and dangerous. next year. Concerned by reports that scheduling
oe biden’s reelection campaign isn’t going disputes might lead the president to skip the state’s
contest—leaving voters to choose between Ken-
well. Since announcing his bid for a second nedy and Williamson—Khanna told The Nation,
term in April, the president’s poll numbers have “I have no doubt that if the president campaigns
remained dismal. RealClearPolitics’ average of here, he’ll win…. He’ll also be doing what’s neces-
recent polls gives him a 41.4 percent approval sary to win New Hampshire in November.” Biden
rating among likely voters, while 53.8 percent disapprove. should mount a full-scale primary campaign in
And it won’t necessarily get better when Biden is in a two- New Hampshire and other battleground states to
person race against a MAGA Republican. The overall RCP average mobilize voters for his own candidacy—and for the
of recent polls currently has Biden trailing former president Donald races that will decide control of Congress.
Trump by 1.4 points, while a mid-May Harvard CAPS/Harris survey That broader focus is essential. Unless Demo-
put the incumbent down by seven points against the indicted Re- crats control Congress, a reelected Biden will spend
publican. An early May ABC News/Washington Post poll had Florida his final four years in office compromising with
Governor Ron DeSantis leading Biden by five points. MAGA Republicans—a scenario
These numbers should be a clear wake-up call. that would have catastrophic conse-
Biden’s been a better president than most progressives quences for everything from climate
expected, and he’s clearly preferable to Trump, DeSan- Unless Democrats change to Social Security, dooming
tis, and the lesser Republicans of 2024. But grassroots control Congress, any hopes of taxing the rich or break-
Democrats aren’t exactly embracing their president’s a reelected ing up corporate monopolies. To
repeat candidacy. After he announced, 52 percent of Biden will spend avoid that disaster, Biden must mo-
Democrats surveyed for an Associated Press/NORC tivate the base with an economic and
poll still said they’d prefer Biden didn’t run, while his final four social and racial justice vision that
just 25 percent of Democrats under age 45 said they years in office excites young people and brings out
would definitely back him in 2024. That doesn’t mean compromising voters in record numbers in Novem-
prospective Democratic primary voters are rushing to with MAGA ber 2024. That won’t happen if the
back the president’s announced challengers—Robert F. president cedes the primary-season
Kennedy Jr., whose vaccine skepticism disqualifies him Republicans. spotlight to the Republicans.
in the eyes of many Democrats, and author Marianne There will be those who say
Williamson—who draw a combined average total of roughly 25 per- Biden is best served by focusing on governing
cent in nationwide polls. But it does mean Biden’s candidacy suffers in the months to come. That’s only half right. A
from a dangerous enthusiasm gap. sitting president can’t spend all his time campaign-
That’s got to change. If Biden won’t step aside—and no one imag- ing. But Biden should recognize the link between
ines that a man who has been campaigning for the Oval Office since bold governance and bold campaigning. Instead of
the 1980s will drop out due to shaky poll numbers—he must remake wasting months negotiating with House Speaker
his candidacy. Right now, Biden’s bid is long on avoidance and pain- Kevin McCarthy and Republicans happy to keep
fully short on vision. The Democratic National Committee is pre- him pinned down in D.C., Biden should follow
paring a coronation, holding the first primary in reliably Republican the advice of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and
South Carolina—a move that favors Biden and flatters his ally James override the Republicans—beginning by deploying
Clyburn, but does nothing to excite the base in states he must win in his 14th Amendment powers to end the debt-ceiling
November. The DNC isn’t scheduling primary debates either, making charade once and for all. Then Biden should hit the
the GOP nomination fight the primary season’s main political story. campaign trail with a bold, progressive message that
And the party’s 2024 convention will be in safely Democratic Illinois, he needs a second-term mandate to vanquish the
rather than a battleground state such as Wisconsin or Georgia. MAGA Republicans and transform America.
This coronation—like Biden’s Rose Garden strategy of spurn- If Biden’s not prepared to govern and campaign
ing campaign events—is dangerously misguided. Instead, Biden as boldly as the times require, he should
should be mounting a year-long campaign that energizes Democrats think seriously about clearing the way for a
and progressive independents in battleground states such as New Democrat who’s ready to do so. N
5
  T H E N AT I O N
C O M M E N T / M A R Y T U M A
Climate of Fear
Texas’s extreme abortion and gun laws have left
survivors of domestic abuse more vulnerable than ever.
n early may, texas resident gabriella gonza-
lez traveled to Colorado for abortion care. The
journey out of state is a familiar one for Texans,
who have lived under a draconian six-week abor-
tion ban since 2021, well before the Supreme
Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, as well as a criminal
“trigger law” that imposes up to life in prison for providers
since last August. Like so many before her, the 26-year-old mother
of three was forced to leave her home state for health care. Upon her
return, Gonzalez’s 22-year-old ex-boyfriend Harold Thompson—who
is believed to have impregnated her and did not approve of her abor-
tion—sought revenge. During an argument at a gas station in Dallas
the morning after she returned, Thompson placed her in a choke hold
and then fatally shot her once in the head and several times thereafter.
Court records show that Thompson, who now faces a murder
charge, had a history of abusive behavior toward Gonzalez: He had
“violently” beaten her several times during the pregnancy, including an
attempt to strangle her and another incident that left her with a black
eye. Thompson had also threatened to harm her family and children,
leading her to be “very fearful” of him. Dallas police had issued a war-
rant for Thompson’s arrest for domestic assault before the shooting,
but Gonzalez’s mother says her family never heard back after multiple
attempts to contact the authorities. Gonzalez was working to end the
tumultuous relationship before her death, and her choice to seek an
abortion was part of that. “He was so angry that she wanted to get
away from him,” her sister, Mileny Rubio, told a local news outlet. “She
would always tell me that she wanted to leave, but that she couldn’t.”
Gonzalez’s killing reminds us of what many reproductive health
advocates have long warned when it comes to the intersection of preg-
nancy, abortion bans, and intimate partner violence: Homicide is the
leading cause of pregnancy-related death in the United States, and like
other causes of maternal mortality and morbidity, it disproportionately
affects women of color. Pregnant people are more likely to face inti-
mate partner violence (IPV), and those who have experienced violence
are more likely to have an unintended pregnancy and to seek an abor-
tion. According to the landmark Turnaway Study, led by Diana Greene
Foster at the University of California, San Francisco, those who are
denied abortion care are more likely to stay tethered to violent partners
than those who are successful at terminating their pregnancies.
What this tells us is that amid the post-Roe wave of extreme abor-
tion bans, victims of IPV are more vulnerable than ever. In Texas, this
problem is acute: Survivors of IPV experience reproductive coercion
at a rate three times greater than the national average. The state also
does not provide exceptions for rape or incest in its abortion law.
A recent example of how abortion bans with “bounty hunter”
6 provisions can be weaponized by abusers also comes out of the Lone
Star State. In March, Marcus Silva, a Galveston County man, filed a
6.12–19.2023
wrongful-death lawsuit against his ex-wife’s friends
for allegedly helping her obtain a medication abor-
tion, seeking more than $1 million from each
woman. The lawsuit, which is riddled with flagrant
accusations of murder, will have a chilling effect on
anyone who wishes to help a friend or loved one
access care. It was later revealed that Brittni Silva,
like Gonzalez, was seeking to escape an abusive
partner: In their countersuit, Brittni’s friends accuse
Marcus of subjecting his ex-wife to “serial” verbal
and emotional abuse, which culminated in police
involvement and an eventual divorce; they also al-
lege that he sought to conceal the fact that he knew
of his ex-wife’s abortion in an attempt to extort,
control, and inflict harm on her.
The increased dangers to pregnant and abor-
tion-seeking people
post-Roe don’t stop
at intimate partner
The threat to violence. Each week
bodily safety seems to bring a new,
has never horrific story on how
felt greater wary doctors in Texas
are choosing to err on
for pregnant the side of extreme
and abortion- caution to protect their
seeking own livelihoods in the
Texans. face of lawsuits and jail
time. Despite vows to
do so, Republican law-
makers have failed to clarify the vague emergency
medical exceptions in abortion laws—forcing high-
risk patients to approach the brink of death before a
physician will intervene.
As a longtime reproductive rights reporter in
Texas, I often find it difficult to reconcile our Re-
publican leadership’s “pro-life” values with their
actual failure to protect the lives of people whom
they have forced into pregnancy and childbirth.
Witnessing deadly mass shootings—which tragi-
cally include young children—exacerbates this dis-
connect. Republican lawmakers have not made any
progress on curbing access to guns; in Texas, it’s still
legal to carry a gun without a permit.
Texans are left with a perfect storm of lax gun
laws, an extreme abortion ban, and the threat of
escalated partner violence—a vortex of antithetical
and dangerous policies that contribute to a climate of
fear. Whether it is state-sanctioned abuse in medical
settings or abuse from a controlling, vengeful part-
ner, the threat to bodily safety has never felt greater
for pregnant and abortion-seeking Texans. N
Mary Tuma is a Texas-based freelance journalist who
covers reproductive rights.
  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

in the race who had more in common ideologically

Back Talk with their first choice. I wonder why?
Of course, that excludes those who refused
Alexis Grenell to vote for anyone but Bernie, to which Sanders
responded—correctly—that his supporters should
vote for the man he often called “my friend Joe.”
But he didn’t lift a finger to shut down the sexist
vitriol on social media directed at Warren and her
supporters on his behalf, barely and half-heartedly
Sexism on the Left even acknowledging it, and admitting only after
she dropped out that “I think women have obsta-
We lack a national figure who can plausibly be held up cles placed in front of them that men do not have.”
I wrote about this at the time, suggesting that
as an example of male feminist leadership.
Sanders’s tepid response cost him support from po-
he drumbeat for senator dianne feinstein to litically aligned women, and offered up a script for
why he needed to affirmatively reject the misogyny
resign has reached a kind of dull fever pitch. being floated in his name. This might all seem like
Aside from the open secret of her cognitive old news, but I’m still hung over from the whole
decline, the California Democrat was “working ordeal (and I suspect many other women are too).
from home” for three months straight due to Most recently, he has yet to acknowledge that
shingles, holding up President Biden’s judicial nominees in his advice to Democrats in the 2022 midterms to
Washington, D.C., at a time when women are dying like it’s lay off abortion and talk more about the economy
1973 all over again. Now Feinstein is back in the Senate, looking turned out to be demonstrably wrong. Sanders’s
and sounding completely decrepit. There’s absolutely nothing fem- policies may be feminist, but in terms of leader-
inist about defending her nonexistent “right” to remain in office, no ship, he’s the floor—possibly the basement—of
matter what Kirsten Gillibrand tries to argue on CNN. Yet there is a what similarly minded men should aspire to.
double standard at work here, and leftist men in particular would do Sexism on the left isn’t a new problem, but it’s
well to check themselves. a stunning one considering that leftists often take
At 89, Feinstein is the oldest sitting US senator, first elected to feminist convictions for granted. Perhaps that
local office before women could even open a bank account on their explains the lack of a national figure we can hold
own. Watching her decline into the long goodbye is a sad coda to a up as an example of male feminist leadership, or
career of historic significance: first female mayor of San Francisco, the fact that the D.C. branch of the Democrat-
first female US senator from California, first female member of the ic Socialists of America is predominantly male.
Senate Judiciary Committee. She’s a lodestar for every woman in pol- It’s a huge problem for leftist women forced to
itics still fighting for just a shred of the respect that’s automatically fight these battles on their own, and who often
afforded to their male peers, who do precious little to acknowledge find their work overlooked amid the Bernie Bro
the sexism they benefit from. discourse (although if you piled on Warren by
That includes men who identify as feminists, like Bernie Sanders tweeting “#womenforbernie” in response to the
and his minions on the “dirtbag left,” who are happy to swarm Fein- CNN report detailing their private 2018 con-
stein on social media. This is not some fringe group, but the drivers versation about women’s viability as presidential
of multimillion-dollar podcasts like Chapo Trap House, which preach candidates, you have some reflecting to do). And
vulgarity as a politics in itself. These are the guys proclaiming their it raises the hackles of women outside the move-
socialist bona fides the loudest while shitting all over progressive ment when these same bros spread bile about the
giants like Elizabeth Warren for failing to endorse Sanders in 2020, undeniable achievements of women they oppose.
filling her Twitter timeline with snakes, and making crass jokes about As one podcaster said about Hillary Clinton:
women they disagree with. They claim that of “She never really cracked the
course they’d vote for a woman, just never that glass ceiling. She more like
woman. They have more in common with the fell down the glass staircase.”
plurality of Sanders voters who consistently Sanders’s policies may This is what Democrats like
cited Biden as their second choice than they’d be feminist, but in terms Nancy Pelosi are responding
like to admit. That’s a fact that bears repeating: of leadership, he is the to when they dismiss calls for
With some exceptions, polling in 2019 and 2020
floor—and possibly the Feinstein to step aside as sex-
repeatedly showed that way too many male ist. That’s not femi-
basement—of what
ANDY FRIEDMAN

Biden and Sanders voters would sooner vote for

the other male candidate than any of the women
nist leadership either,
men should aspire to. but it’s grounded in a 7
  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

historical reality that’s very much alive to-

day, especially when leftist men feel overly
entitled to police women in public life.
So what does actual leadership look
like for men on the left who consider
themselves feminists? For one thing, sit
out the Feinstein pile-on if you threw
snakes at Warren. This is not your fight.
More broadly, understand that the test
for whether something is sexist isn’t just
if you’d say or think or apply the same
standard to a man—it’s the gendered ef-
fect. When Pelosi et al. wrongly bemoan
the fact that they never hear the kind
of criticism about Feinstein directed to-
ward their male colleagues ( John Fet-
terman, anyone?),
what they’re really
speaking to is the
If you declare idea that frailty and
what isn’t illness in women
sexist more leaders are received
often than differently than they
are in men. Remem-
calling out ber when Sanders
what is, actually had a heart
you are doing attack in the middle
of his last presiden-
it wrong. tial campaign, and
Alexandra Ocasio-
Cortez resuscitated it by endorsing him?
There’s ample research on the public
perception of aging in women, and femi-
nist men should acquaint themselves with
it. In the meantime, if your feminism
manifests itself in declaring what isn’t
sexist more often than calling out what is,
you’re doing it wrong. N three Supreme Court justices, 54 judges on the courts of appeals, and 174
MORE ONLINE
Th e N a t i on . com/hig h l ig h ts
Morbid Symptoms
Jeet Heer
The Courts’ Legitimacy
Crisis Is an Opportunity
Democrats need the courage to fight entrenched reactionary judges.
hen liberals worry about the future of democ-
racy, they have Technicolor nightmares: the orange
oaf inciting an attack on the Capitol by his red-cap-
wearing MAGA minions, including the QAnon
shaman with his ridiculous stars-and-stripes facial
makeup. But the threat to democracy is multipronged and doesn’t
always come in vibrant hues.
Trump’s most thuggish supporters represent the street-fighting wing
of the right. But as much as the goons unleashed a level of violence unseen
in national politics in decades, they also proved politically ineffectual.
The January 6, 2021, insurrection was successfully thwarted; Joe Biden
was duly inaugurated; the majority of the public was horrified by Donald
Trump’s antics; the January 6 committee provided a narrative that blamed
Trump and cemented the popular consensus; and the Democrats have
successfully used the memory of the clownish coup attempt to trounce
MAGA candidates in special elections and the midterms.
In contrast to that abject failure, Trump’s greatest success has been
in cementing reactionary power over the commanding heights of the
American political system: the federal judiciary. The project to make
the judiciary a bulwark of right-wing power long predates Trump. But
Trump’s crucial four years in the White House allowed him to appoint
judges on the district courts—pushing the judiciary far to the right.
Unlike the MAGA mob, reactionary judges don’t present a visual spec-
tacle. They wear the black robes of respectability and exert their power
in decisions full of arcane jargon. But the reactionary courts—precisely
because they embody institutional power—pose a more serious threat to
FROM TOP: LLUSTRATION: JOE CIARDIELLO; SHABIR BHAT; ROSE SILVA AND

i Holding G20 American democracy than even the largest mob of MAGA ruffians.
Meetings in
EVELYN GUTIERREZ / COURTESY OF THE ALBUQUERQUE MUSEUM

In striking contrast to the successful deployment of January 6 by

Kashmir Fuels Democrats and “Never Trump” Republicans as a cudgel to delegitimize
Ecocide MAGA, political opposition to the right-wing courts is still coalescing—
N AZ IS H QU R ES H I
and remains deeply divided. The national leadership of the Democratic
Party—notably Biden’s White House and Illinois Senator Dick Durbin,
i The Curious chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee—has little appetite for a fight
Case of the with the right-wing courts.
Transcendental The timidity of the Democratic Party leadership stands in stark
Painting Group contrast to the actions of the Republican-appointed judges themselves,
MAX PE A R L 8 who increasingly display the impudence of those who know they enjoy
near-absolute impunity. Federal judges have lifetime appointments. They
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  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

can only be removed if they are impeached in (That decision is currently stayed and will like-
the House by a majority vote and convicted ly be settled by a higher court.)
in the Senate by a two-thirds vote. This very Democrats Beyond these displays of judicial power,
high hurdle has been cleared only in the could turn several justices are increasingly lawless in their
rarest of cases.
Judicial power derives not just from life-
checking our personal conduct. Clarence Thomas and Neil
Gorsuch are both entangled in potentially se-
time appointments but also from the grid- lawless courts rious conflict-of-interest violations for not dis-
lock that has overtaken American politics. from a problem closing lavish financial benefits from wealthy
Over the past few decades, the courts have into a golden individuals who have business before the court.
filled the policy-making vacuum created by
Congress’s inability to pass laws and the
opportunity for A robust and unified Democratic Party could
successfully push back against the reactionary
increasing reliance on executive authority real change. and lawless courts. Activists have suggested a
by successive presidents. In effect, judicial raft of policies congressional Democrats could
review, rather than congressional oversight, has become the embrace, such as enacting ethics reforms (including setting
preferred way to thwart or check presidential actions. guidelines for Supreme Court justices) and investigating
Now dominated by extreme ideologues appointed by judges. As Molly Coleman of the People’s Parity Project
Trump and earlier Republicans, the courts haven’t been shy notes, Congress could strip “the judiciary’s power to hear
about flaunting their power. The Dobbs decision, overturn- cases related to specific pieces of legislation, or by routing
ing a constitutional right to abortion that had been affirmed all challenges to a given statute to a court of its choosing. It
for nearly five decades, is the most far-reaching instance of can eliminate the power of a single judge, like Kacsmaryk, to
the Supreme Court’s right-wing activism. But Dobbs stands issue nationwide injunctions, a power invented by judges but
alongside decisions that erode the separation of church and well within the authority of Congress to modify or eliminate.”
state, curtail environmental laws, and limit the government’s Unfortunately, the current leadership of the Democratic
power to implement gun control. Lower courts, particularly Party doesn’t have the stomach for these fights. It’s telling
in red states like Texas, are coming up with even more radical that Clarence Thomas currently cannot be subpoenaed
opinions, notably US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s because Senator Dianne Feinstein, who sits on the Judiciary
decision to end access to a widely available abortion drug. Committee, hasn’t been able to perform her duties due to
various health problems.
Taking on the courts is good
O P P A R T / W A R D S U T T O N politics, since they are rapid-
ly losing legitimacy because of
their widely hated decisions.
Last September, Gallup report-
ed that approval of the courts
was at a “historic” low. In late
April, Justice Samuel Alito gave
a bitter interview to The Wall
Street Journal in which he be-
moaned the fact that the “legit-
imacy of the courts” was being
undermined by those saying,
“They’re illegitimate. They’re
engaging in all sorts of uneth-
ical conduct.”
Though Alito blames the
messenger, the media has sim-
ply been reporting on what the
courts are doing—and Amer-
icans have taken note. But if
the Democrats made checking
these lawless courts a rallying
cry, such sentiment could move
from a problem to decry to a
golden opportunity for real
change. N
  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

more evidence that he’s come under the relentless

persecution of the deep state as punishment for his
commitment to rescuing the republic. That line of
argument, opportunistic and bankrupt though it is,
has held up through the Mueller investigation, two
impeachment proceedings, an arraignment in Man-
hattan criminal court, a Georgia election-fraud in-

Ron’s Résumé quiry, and two pending investigations by the Justice

Department. It has now hardened into dogma, since
GOP leaders have long relinquished any claim to
The Florida governor’s eagerness to prove his credentials advancing any higher civic mandate than the capture
may scuttle his prospects in the GOP primaries. of power by any means necessary.
That’s why, even as DeSantis was gearing up for
lorida governor ron desantis, who was his campaign announcement, he had already begun
planning to launch his presidential campaign as to lose his grasp on the GOP’s organizing base.
this issue of The Nation went to press, is accru- University of Denver political scientist Seth Masket
ing leadership credentials in a party that no lon- has been querying Republican county chairs across
ger exists. DeSantis has used his supermajority the country about their emerging presidential pref-
in the Florida Legislature to launch a head-spinning array erences. The responses to one of his early canvasses,
of salvos in the right-wing culture wars—from an anti-trans in March, suggested that Trump’s death grip on local
surveillance regime in public schools and rolling book bans to an party organizations seemed to be giving way amid re-
improbable assault on Disney as the avatar of all things woke. newed concerns about how his legal troubles would
But even as DeSantis has been polishing up his inquisitorial affect his electability, with Trump and DeSantis
résumé, he’s been hemorrhaging support among the conservative virtually tied for the critical support of county-level
movement faithful. Some of that slippage may be due to DeSantis’s GOP leaders. That trend has effectively reversed,
defiantly anti-charismatic stump performances, or a reaction to the with Trump now claiming 24 percent support in the
sort of executive overreach that comes with a state government’s Republican field, and DeSantis’s earlier 18 percent
steady transformation into an ideological plaything. In the main, share declining to 13 percent. The chief cause,
however, DeSantis can’t overcome the stubborn fact that today’s Masket explains in his Substack newsletter, was a
Republican Party remains a wholly owned subsidiary of the Donald spike in Trump’s support at the expense of DeSantis’s
Trump image-marketing empire. emerging base in the wake of
This point was driven home with unmis- Trump’s criminal indictment.
takable authority in the run-up to DeSantis’s It’s hard to imagine a more
announcement, when a Manhattan jury found Today’s Republican Party thorough repudiation of De-
Trump liable for $5 million in damages for remains a wholly owned Santis’s lovingly cultivated,
sexual abuse and defamation in E. Jean Carroll’s subsidiary of the résumé-based pitch for the
lawsuit against the former president. Having the Donald Trump image- presidency. Apparently, his
court system belatedly acknowledge Trump’s erstwhile supporters were
well-documented standing as a serial sexual as- marketing empire. more impressed by his chief
saulter would, in any remotely reality-based po- rival’s indictment on fraud
litical order, create a massive opening for anyone challenging his hold charges relating to hush-money payments for a li-
on his party. Instead, during his CNN town hall appearance, Trump aison with a well-known porn actress. It’s as though
claimed that his polled support increased in the wake of the Carroll the final reel of Scarface were spliced onto Alexander
verdict. That was a typically unsourced and premature claim, but opin- Payne’s 1999 political satire Election as an epilogue.
ion surveys in the run-up to the verdict bore out the trend. One Yahoo DeSantis’s waning appeal is a more focused re-
News/YouGov poll conducted during the trial found that 42 percent prise of the dominant motif of the 2016 GOP pri-
of respondents who supported Trump in 2020 said that “Trump mary, which mustered a widely hailed (if dubiously
should still be allowed to serve as president if the jury determines he successful) crew of A-list political talent for an open
raped Carroll,” and just 6 percent thought that Carroll was telling presidential cycle. One by one, these credentialed
the truth. A post-verdict Morning Consult poll showed that Trump’s and experienced leaders all succumbed to the rising
support among potential Republican primary voters had increased to Trump cult of personality, in a bald rejection of the
61 percent, up from 59 percent on the day the verdict was reached. meritocratic catechism of conventional political suc-
If any of this came as a shock to GOP insiders, it shouldn’t have. Ever cess. Since Trump’s elevation to the presiden-
since the release of the Access Hollywood tapes, Trump has cannily repack- cy, the GOP has frantically rebranded itself as
aged every new revelation about his corruption and illegal activity as just the party that spurns establishment pedigrees
11
  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

of all kinds—leading to absurdities such as Yale-matriculated ven-
ture capitalist J.D. Vance’s makeover as a horny-handed son of toil.
Instead of boasting of legislative accomplishments or ambitious
policy agendas, rising leaders in Trump’s GOP clamor to one-up
each other in election conspiracy-mongering and prophecies of a
violent comeuppance for the lords of the deep state.
This ongoing realignment also helps explain why DeSantis has
so far been at a total loss to land on an effective message for the
GOP primary base. He even made an empty show of announcing
a blockade of any extradition of Florida resident Trump to the
courthouse in Manhattan where he would face charges in the
Stormy Daniels case—while Trump and his allies were so keen to
get their hands on mug shots from the arraignment as fundraising
swag that they eventually went ahead and made some of their
own. For the vast majority of right-wingers who’ve emerged from
the mystic spell of meritocratic cant, the moral here was obvious:
These days, the Republican Party is the kind of place where a guy
like Ron DeSantis can’t get arrested. N

SNAPSHOT Betting Against Erdoğan

Burak Kara Supporters of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the Republican People’s Party challenger to Turkey’s
longtime president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, rally in Istanbul days before the May 14 election.
But neither candidate passed the threshold required to avoid a runoff, to be held on May 28.

IN OUR ORBIT A joint initiative of the Insti-

Congratulations! tute for Policy Studies—a pro-
gressive organization dedicated C A LV I N T R I L L I N
Congratulations to The Nation’s to building a more equitable,
editorial director and publisher, ecologically sustainable, and
Katrina vanden Heuvel, the peaceful society—and the
DeadlinePoet
recipient of the Second Annual Raskin family, the award hon-
Marcus Raskin Award for Civic ors Marc’s legacy of speaking
and Intellectual Courage. The truth to power. Vanden Heuvel The Other Race
award recognizes “an outstand- was chosen by a committee of
ing and brave leader in the fields Raskin family members and IPS Among the gamblers there’s excitement:
Marc was passionate about, staff, who said in their nominat-
TOP: GETTY IMAGES; ILLUSTRATION: JOE CIARDIELLO

including peace, social ing note: “For decades, Just who will face the next indictment?
reconstruction, art, she has displayed
and politics.” Raskin civic and intellectual Will it be Trump, will it be Rudy
was a valued member courage both in bat-
of The Nation’s edito- tling right-wing forces Who finds himself in deeper doody?
rial board, and his son, in the mainstream
Jamie Raskin, the US media and as a fierce
representative from defender of vigorous
Maryland’s Eighth yet respectful debates
District, is a longtime within the progressive
contributor. movement.” N
  T H E N AT I O N
Should We Bring Species
Back From Extinction?
Yes!
E R I O N A H Y S O L L I
f you had a chance to save a spe-
cies from extinction, would you
take it? I would—and I am.
There are numerous arguments
in favor of de-extinction science,
but I want to focus on the most pressing one:
conservation. Experts predict that the earth could
soon lose at least 40 percent of its biodiversity. My colleagues
and I often cite a stat from the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson:
that around 30,000 species are disappearing every year, or
The Debate
nearly three per hour. And yet we have the capacity not only to
stop extinction but to reverse it. To save the planet’s biodiversi-
ty, de-extinction must become Conservation 2.0.
My team and I at Colossal, a de-extinction company and
lab, are establishing protocols, partnerships, and programs
to create reproducible, affordable, and efficient processes to
bring back marsupial, mammal, and avian species. To do this,
we have built relationships with researchers with expertise in
genomics, artificial intelligence, stem cell and assisted repro-
ductive technologies, ex-utero development, animal wellness
The Debate
programs, and rewilding models. Together we are learning
how to protect species from permanent extinction.
In the future, our processes could be used to track threat-
ened species in the wild, build a biobank of their cells, and
then transport and store those cells. The procedures that
we’re developing will allow scientists to turn the cells into
animals using genomics, ex-utero gestation, genome editing,
and trait engineering. From there, we can introduce these
animals into the environment. This will not happen over-
night, but we are making progress on every step.
Until recently, conservation efforts have been our best
approach to protecting biodiversity. And with some species,
conservationists have been successful. They have raised
awareness about species loss, developed captive breeding
and release programs, and created species and habitat pro-
tections. They have stabilized the population of the Amer-
ican alligator, bald eagle, gray wolf, panda, and more. We
should celebrate these victories, but we must also acknowl-
edge that there are even more conservation failures.
The current efforts of conservation organizations are not
enough. In 2019, 70 academics, professionals, and research-
ers at the Luc Hoffmann Institute, a research body set up
by the World Wildlife Foundation, concluded that a new
6.12–19.2023
No!
E L I Z A B E T H A . H A D LY A N D
D E B O R A H A . S I VA S
e-extinction is not conserva-
tion. It does not heal the wounds
of the present, and it is not the
way to steward the future. In some
ways, it’s an appealing idea: Who
hasn’t dreamed of meeting a species from the
past? Imagine watching a pterodactyl soar, a
saber-toothed cat hunt, or a terror bird run. How cool
would that be?
But here’s the thing about species: They are the product
of a particular time and place. Species coevolve and are
entwined with their living and nonliving habitats—whether
that’s the Cretaceous swamp, the mosaic Pleistocene steppe,
or the flooded Sahara. The environment builds and sustains
species—until it doesn’t. And when those habitats disappear,
so do the species that relied on them.
Over the last 4.5 billion years, countless species have come
and gone. The habitats that made them are gone, too. Even
now-extinct species that were with us a century ago would
find today’s world a very different place. But biotechnology
may soon allow us to bring look-alikes of long-vanished spe-
cies into the present. Proponents of de-extinction argue that
tinkering with the genomes of these chimeras can be done in
service to the conservation of today’s imperiled species. Or
that a particular resurrected species, such as the woolly mam-
moth, could serve as an ecosystem engineer to help re-create
old habitats, increase carbon capture, and mitigate climate
change. These are false promises.
Not surprisingly, charismatic animals are the seductive
marketing hook for de-extinction enthusiasts—think of the
dodo, the Tasmanian tiger, or the passenger pigeon. But even
if we could replicate such species and find a potentially suitable
habitat to release one, 10, or 10,000 of them, we can’t bring
back the accumulated millennia of their learned behaviors,
diets, predators, or microbiomes that made these species what
they were and allowed them to be part of a complex ecosystem.
So beyond the “gee whiz” factor, what is the real pur-
pose and benefit of de-extinction? What are its costs and
consequences? And are we prepared for the myriad ethical
and practical challenges posed by unleashing these living
technologies from the laboratory?
The answer to this last question is a resounding
“no.” The technology is far ahead of any regulatory
13
  T H E N AT I O N
i i
generation of conservation techniques is needed to address
H Y S O L L I
the mounting challenges.
De-extinction is that new generation of science that will
prove to be the greatest ally of conservation. And it is already
happening. In our efforts to de-extinct the woolly mam-
moth, we have brought together prominent conservation
experts, committed funding to end a deadly elephant herpes
virus, and supported assisted reproductive technologies for
species outside of our immediate purview. The development
of a de-extinction pipeline brings with it other scientific
advancements that further help conservation. We believe
conservation and de-extinction are inseparable.
De-extinction is not at odds with conservationism; rather,
it is turbocharging the field. When our efforts succeed, we
will be able to rewild ecosystems as a way to help reverse
climate change, combat invasive species, mitigate diseases,
and bring back habitats. The woolly mammoth, for example,
The Debate
used to be vital in sustaining the Arctic steppe. In the past 40
years, the Arctic has warmed four times faster than the rest of
the globe. Reintroducing woolly mammoths can help bring
back a similar ecosystem, trapping more organic matter in the
permafrost and thus reducing
the release of greenhouse gases.
We are providing the conserva-
De-extinction is tion world with a suite of tools
not at odds with and technologies that will allow
conservation; us to move conversation from
rather, it is preservation to restoration.
The Debate
Standing idly by in the face
turbocharging of human-driven extinction is
the field. the wrong strategy. Why the
urgency? When keystone spe-
cies disappear, ecosystems may diminish or disappear too.
Rapid climate change can also wipe out habitats. When that
happens, bringing back a species becomes more challenging:
The environment is not welcoming for the species to thrive.
We must also contend with finite resources: time, capi-
tal, labor hours. It is essential to capture genomic diversity,
biobank the results, and use healthy surrogates to maintain
reproductive fitness. Healthy surrogates, for example, are
missing from the rescue project for the northern white rhino,
and scientists are exploring using reproductive technologies
in related species instead. It will work, but it will take longer
and require more resources.
Finally, to de-extinct a species, we need DNA. And it is
easiest and best to gather that DNA from a living species.
The longer we wait, the harder it will be to get the genomic
material needed to bring back species.
We must take advantage of innovations. We cannot settle
for an out-of-date philosophy of protecting what remains; we
must begin to restore what’s been lost. Today, we’re doing that
by developing processes to bring species back from extinction.
My biggest worry is that we’re not doing it fast enough. N
Eriona Hysolli is the head of biological sciences at Colossal Biosciences.
14
6.12–19.2023
framework that could provide the guardrails to minimize
S I VA S
unintended consequences. Our smattering of federal and state
laws on this are targeted to address specific present-day con-
cerns, such as preventing the import of agricultural pests or
the trade in body parts like ivory tusks or pangolin scales. They
A N D
do not provide a structure for managing the introduction of
untested simulations of extinct wildlife. And given our political
gridlock, we can’t count on lawmakers to take up these issues
H A D LY
in a timely way, let alone find consensus. That leaves us relying
on the integrity of individual scientists and, perhaps more im-
portant, the businesses that fund de-extinction work.
Legal questions abound: Will we classify these new “old”
species as “endangered” and try to protect them, or are they
destined to supply us with food and curiosities? Will they be
owned by the companies that created them, and who will ben-
efit from their revival? And if the goal is “reintroduction” to
some place, how do we decide which place and why? Who is
responsible for whatever impacts emerge from their introduc-
tion? And the impacts would be dramatic: Witness the con-
troversies over wild horses in North America’s Great Basin,
a prime example of a species returned to a place it evolved in
after an absence of 10,000 years.
Even more fundamental are
an array of ethical questions.
Foundational to our responsi- Even the best-
bility as scientists and citizens intentioned
is the ethical treatment of oth- introductions can
er beings. What do we owe to disrupt delicately
those individuals we conjure up
to live without the ecological balanced
bonds that nurtured them? And ecosystems.
what do we owe to existing life in
the ecosystems into which we would introduce them? Extinct
species are pieces that do not fit into the puzzle of life today.
There is a reason we don’t shuffle species around the plan-
et: We know that such introductions often result in cascading
ecological consequences. Conservation biologists do not
advocate transporting penguins to the Arctic or polar bears
to Antarctica. We don’t hear calls for introducing imperiled
tigers to the Amazon. Why? Because we know from long
experience that even the best-intentioned introductions can
disrupt delicately balanced ecosystems. What hubris makes us
think we would do any better introducing the woolly mam-
moth where it has not walked for more than 10,000 years, in a
place that in no way resembles what it was at that time?
We are woefully unprepared—legally, morally, and sci-
entifically—to “play God” by resurrecting extinct species.
Although the “gee whiz” factor (and the financial incentives)
might push us in that direction, the better use of society’s
resources would be to work on saving what we still have. N
Elizabeth A. Hadly is a professor of biology and earth system science at
Stanford University. Deborah A. Sivas is a professor of environmental
law at Stanford Law School, with a joint appointment in the Stanford
Doerr School of Sustainability.
 HISTORIC
JORDAN AND THE FUTURE OF
PALESTINE AND SYRIA
OCTOBER 15–25, 2023

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lively discussions with top academics and local leaders. We’ll visit
unparalleled ancient sites, learn firsthand about the essential
work being done with refugee populations, and immerse ourselves
in the country’s dramatic natural landscapes, unique cultures,
and vibrant communities.

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The In California’s Shasta County, extremists
have infiltrated local government. Is it a
new blueprint for the right? B Y S A S H A A B R A M S K Y

ary rickert opens her ipad, clicks on her hate-mail
folder, and shows me some of the screeds she has received
over the past three years. One begins: “I’d like to fuck Mary
Rickert in the face with a brick.” Another has the subject
line “Going, going, gone, dead woman walking.” She closes
the folder, shudders, and says, “I have PTSD because of this, just from the insan-
ity of it all. I have nightmares all the time. Watching the county just crumble is
absolutely devastating for me… watching it being taken over by a far-right group.”
Rickert is a member of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors. Last year, she
narrowly survived a recall effort, as did a colleague, Joe Chimenti. But another
supervisor, board chair Leonard Moty—a former police chief of Redding, Calif.,
and, like Rickert, a reliable Reagan Republican—wasn’t so lucky, losing by a consid-
erable margin to an extremist candidate. The three supervisors targeted for recall,
who had formed a stable majority on the five-person board, were blamed by many
residents for not going to war with the state over the emergency pandemic man-
dates Governor Gavin Newsom put in place in the spring of 2020—even though,
compared with most other counties in California, Shasta went light on its lockdown
enforcement. For the past three years, Rickert has been derided as a RINO (or
“Republican in name only”), routinely subjected to death threats and other harass-
ment, and frequently denounced as a “communist” during overheated meetings.
It’s hard to imagine someone less likely to be a revolutionary Marxist. Rickert
is 70 years old and has a long and colorful history in Redding, a city situated at the
northern tip of California’s Central Valley. A prize-winning rancher, she has served
on the state Board of Forestry Fire Protection and on the local Mental Health,
Alcohol & Drug Advisory Board. Until recently, Rickert’s colleagues considered
her a rock-solid conservative, a woman who had cut her polit-
ical teeth in the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, voted for
Donald Trump twice, and was a proud gun owner. With her
curly mouse-brown hair, colorful plaid jacket, and almost thea-
trically large spectacles, everything about Rickert seems over-
the-top. Yet these days, she sees herself as the sober personality
in the room, a voice of reason in a county that has gone crazy.
Shasta County, home of the small Gold Rush–era city
of Redding, links the picturesque
orchards and farmlands of the
450-mile-long Central Valley to the
wild mountains in the northern part
of the state, exclamation-pointed by
Shasta County has the vastness of Mount Shasta. The
become ultraconserva- county has become ultraconserva-
tive, its Democratic and tive, its Democratic and trade union
heritage buried, in recent decades, by
trade union heritage a blizzard of God-and-guns politics.
buried by a blizzard of Often, “God” and “guns” overlap,
with Second Amendment absolutists
God-and-guns politics. defending their “God-given” right
to carry any weapon they damn well
The new boss: please—and arguing that the rights delineated in the country’s
Shasta County founding documents originate, quite literally, from God him-
Board of Supervisors self. One can almost picture St. Peter, AK-47 strapped over his
chair and gun store
manager Patrick shoulder, patrolling the Pearly Gates to make sure that only
Jones. the armed faithful get admitted.
The center of Redding is undergoing something of a renais-
sance, with hip new cafes and galleries opening up, new condos
being built, and new health care facilities in the works. But the
modernizing impulse has its limits: Redding remains at a great
distance from California’s big cities, both in terms of miles and
ILLUSTRATION BY ADRIANA GEORGOPULOS
worldviews—a place where conserva-
tives cluster to avoid the interference of
big-city bureaucrats. Libertarians, back-
to-the-landers, gun freaks, and Bible
thumpers (many belonging to the hyper-
conservative Bethel mega-church) all
settle in to live their vision of the “State
of Jefferson,” a right-wing promised land
far removed from the hippie-liberal-
communist wing nuts down in Sacra-
mento and the Bay Area. For decades,
they, along with the residents of many
other rural counties in Northern Cal-
ifornia and eastern Oregon, have em-
braced a utopian dream of seceding and
forming a rural idyll of a state more to
their liking, to be named Jefferson—a
mythical place that seems suspiciously
like a larger version of Idaho.
These days, the secessionists are
running the show in Shasta County.
In addition to capturing the Board
of Supervisors, the hard right has
taken over a number of local school
boards, driven out public health
workers who crafted the region’s re-
sponse to Covid, and pushed to make
the county what they call a “Second
Amendment sanctuary,” where no
gun control measures they view as
unconstitutional would be enforced
and where county employees would
be required to swear allegiance to
the Second Amendment. Some lo-
cals are still struggling to understand
how it happened. Others believe it’s a
“blueprint” for the rest of the nation
to follow.
A
t the corner of olive
and Main in Cottonwood,
about 16 miles from Red-
ding, is a tiny wooden bar-
bershop owned by Woody
Clendenen, a 56-year-old with salt-and-
pepper hair and a gray goatee. Orig-
inally from the little Central Valley
town of Turlock, about 240 miles to
the south, the businessman-cum-activ-
ist is the cofounder of the Cottonwood
Militia, established in 2010, early in
Barack Obama’s presidency. Clendenen
offers his services across the street from
the headquarters of the California State
Militia, the door of which is adorned
with a poster declaring: “Socialism has
no home here.” When I visit, the bar-
bershop’s floor is covered with a carpet
of what appears to be weeks’ worth of
shorn hair. On the wall to the left of
the entrance hangs a large rifle, and be-
17
  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

hind the two barber chairs is a price “They were pissed with the governor and
list reading: his executive orders. But we were in an un-
precedented event, and his priority was to keep
“We’re a hotbed for men/boys haircut: $20 people safe,” Ramstrom says. “There was this
seniors: $15 whole evolution of lack of trust in government.
the ‘State of Jefferson’ veterans: $2 discount It made it very difficult. These groups with their
thing. It became an family rate: $18 issues kind of coalesced: State of Jefferson peo-
buzz: $10 ple, constitutionalists, anti-vaxxers.”
easy rallying point.” liberals: $100 Moty says that at first he supported “volun-
—Leonard Moty, former Shasta County supervisor
vaccinated: additional $5 tary compliance” with the mandates, favoring
such measures as outdoor dining at restaurants,
Clendenen makes no bones and when businesses refused to shut down, the
about his worldview. America has county generally didn’t issue citations. Even-
swung too far left, he says, empowering faux-conservatives like tually, when infection rates spiked in late 2020
former county supervisor Moty—a man who “really needed a and hospitals were overwhelmed, Moty and his
butt-stomping most of his life”—to treat ordinary Joes with colleagues embraced the state restrictions, in-
grievous disrespect and push a “woke” agenda down Amer- cluding taking board meetings online. Still, he
icans’ throats. “We’re not going to put up with that here,” wasn’t comfortable with many of the lockdown
Clendenen says. “Critical race theory, talking about 70 gen- requirements. He was at times angered by the
ders. We’re not going to lie to our kids. The middle ground shifting goalposts on whether businesses could
up here is probably between conservatives and RINOs. The stay open—thinking it unfair, for example, that
far left really has no say up here.” restaurants had invested a huge amount of mon-
In the era of a rising far right and the echo chambers of so- ey in plexiglass dividers, outdoor seating, and
cial media, Shasta County has embraced vitriol with at least as outdoor heating equipment, only to run into
much gusto as any other place in the country. In 2016, Donald a blanket shutdown order when infection rates
Trump won Shasta County with 63.9 percent of the vote. In went up several months into that first pandemic
Against the tide:
Shasta County 2020, after months of protests against Covid lockdowns, he year. But even the measures Moty reluctantly
Supervisor Mary upped his share of the vote to 65.4 percent. agreed to were poorly received.

W
Rickert. The schisms exposed by Trump and Trumpism laid the

“
groundwork. But without Covid, the county wouldn’t have hen the lockdowns hap-
erupted in the way that it did. Three years after Governor pened, we expected our
Newsom’s somewhat heavy-handed, one-size-fits-all lockdown kicked in across supervisors to interpose
California, the long political tail of the pandemic is still unfurling. The state’s themselves between the
improvised rules—its color-coded grading system for county infection rates and state government, to not
for risk factors in the further spread of the disease, as well as its sweeping, at obey them,” says Woody Clendenen. “There
times myopic precautionary measures—created confusion and triggered anger, were a bunch of idiotic mandates. The shop
particularly regarding the school closures. Had Newsom been more flexible, across the street with drug paraphernalia was an
and had the public health mandates been more differentiated between large, ‘essential business,’ but mine wasn’t. The nudie
densely populated cities and smaller, more rural bars were left open, but churches
counties, it’s possible that Shasta County’s crisis had to close.”
would never have come to a head. As Covid spread, and as county
“Covid, when it came out, was a very distant health officials desperately tried to
thing,” Moty tells me. “We were like six months craft regulations to keep the pop-
behind. So a lot of people round here saw it as ulace safe, local talk-radio hosts
Sacramento and the Democratic governor try- began telling their audiences that
ing to tell us what to do, big government trying it was time for blood to flow in the
to take over, the New World Order. We’re a streets. “Communists only rec-
hotbed for the ‘State of Jefferson’ thing. It be- ognize the limits of their power
came an easy rallying point. There was a lot of when their necks are stretched,”
resistance to taking preventative steps: masking, said Matt Nimmo, who rented
social distancing, shutting businesses down.” time on KCNR for his biweek-
Dr. Karen Ramstrom, who had become the ly rants. A post on a Facebook
county’s public health officer in October 2018, group called RE-OPEN Shasta
found herself between a rock and a hard place. declared an intention to “take out
“Like everywhere else in the world, at the beginning of 2020 we were watching Dr. Ramstrom.” A flood of other online threats
to see what would happen, having our own internal conversations about what soon followed. Anti-vaxxers and anti-lockdown
that means for us,” she recalls. By early March, it was clear that California was activists picketed the public health offices. Fear-
KRISTY JOHNSTON

heading into a lockdown. When locals demanded to know how long the disrup- ing violence, the Redding Police Department
tions would last—how long their businesses would be closed, their children out ramped up patrols of Ramstrom’s neighbor-
of school, their friends and relatives separated from them by social-distancing hood. For a few days, she had a private security
requirements—she had to tell them that no one knew. team stationed outside her house.
18
  T H E N AT I O N
“I needed to keep the community safe,”
Ramstrom remembers thinking. “I didn’t have
time to feel scared or threatened or fearful.” But
things were becoming so dysfunctional nation-
ally, with so much disinformation being thrown
into the ether, from Washington, D.C., down to
the local level, that it was getting ever harder to
navigate the crosscurrents. There were far-right
“citizen journalists” such as the provocateur
Rich Gallardo, who attempted to carry out citi-
zen’s arrests of the moderate supervisors during
the lockdowns. (When I contacted Gallardo
for an interview, he wrote back: “Your writings
show as an extreme leftist, almost statist, and
facistic [sic]. I don’t think anything I would have
to say would be fairly reported by someone of
your mindset.”) There were anti-vax activists
too, such as the nurse Authur Gorman, a John
Birch Society supporter who argued that the
state’s vaccine requirements for medical person-
nel represented an intolerable intrusion of big
government into private lives.
The scariest part of it all was that Shasta
County was awash in weaponry. It reported-
ly had more concealed-weapons permits per
capita than any other county in the state. It
had an active militia, Clendenen’s Cottonwood
Militia—though its members and supporters
claim it is simply a chapter of the California
State Militia. Its members, with help from
heavily armed local bikers, cowboys, and mis-
cellaneous self-described “patriots,” patrolled
the region’s towns and hamlets during the pro-
tests that erupted after George Floyd’s murder
in May 2020. On podcasts, militia members
joked about doling out “Cottonwood Justice”
to vagrants, criminals, and other undesirables.
In the summer of 2020, a local agitator
named Carlos Zapata, an ex-Marine with a
street-fighting swagger, stood up at a Board of
Supervisors meeting and vowed there would
be blood in the streets if the lockdowns and
other restrictions weren’t immediately lifted.
His screed went viral, with millions of people
watching as he promised a second American rev-
olution unless things opened up again, and fast.
Since most of those who supported the mask
mandates and other public health measures had
stopped going to these meetings, unwilling to be
exposed to the unmasked attendees, Zapata and
MELINA MARA / THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
his crowd were able to take center stage. When
Moty, as the board’s chair, refused to listen to
the extremists’ demands that the county flout
state public health requirements, Zapata called
his reasons “bullshit.” Later, when the meetings
moved online, Zapata and his fellow right-wing
activists used Zoom to continue their vocal,
at times inflammatory opposition. Discontent
mounted in Redding as well as in many out-
of-the-way rural communities with names like
Happy Valley, Igo, and French Gulch, where
6.12–19.2023
residents wanted nothing so much as to be left alone by big government. From
then on, the attacks against Moty, Rickert, and Chimenti came fast and furious.
C
arlos zapata claims to be generally progressive on economic
issues. In public, he likes to distance himself from the “crazy
fuckers” who, he says, want to destroy everything. He didn’t seem
shocked, however, when the Proud Boys demonstrated on his be-
half outside the courtroom where he was being charged with battery
and disturbing the peace last year, after he and two friends got into a fracas with
a liberal YouTuber and TikToker named Nathan Pinkney, who had mocked some
of Zapata’s public speeches.
Pinkney had created a parody character of Zapata named Buford White, who
wore plaid shirts and a big floppy hat, talked like a Southern yokel, and explained
why it was a good thing not to wear masks during a respi-
ratory disease pandemic. Days after the first Buford White The draftsman:
videos hit Facebook, Zapata and two friends visited Pinkney Carlos Zapata at
at the downtown restaurant where he worked as a sous-chef his restaurant in
Red Bluff, Calif.
and proceeded to beat him up. None of the three attackers
went to jail—Zapata was convicted of disturbing the peace
by fighting, but acquitted on the battery and simple assault
charges. They were, however, put on probation and, Pinkney
says, required to attend anger management classes.
For Zapata, the Pinkney episode is merely a footnote.
What he wants to focus on, in his
many interviews with the media,
is how Covid triggered a reawak-
ening about the way government
overreach is endangering the con- “Covid’s what kicked
stitutional order. “Covid’s what
kicked off the entire movement,”
off the entire move-
he says. “Nobody was very politi- ment. Nobody was very
cal or interested till the shutdown political or interested till
came.” But when businesses had to
close, schools were shuttered, and the shutdown came.”
the public was barred from public —Carlos Zapata, right-wing activist
meetings, he continues, “there was
just a boiling point. Everybody was fed up with being lied
to, not being able to run your business, not being able to see
your friends.”
Once Covid lit the fuse, other issues began to fall into place
in Zapata’s mind: Black Lives Matter, the purported presence
19
 of antifa, abortion, gender fluidity. “Our kids started coming home and saying
what was happening in the schools: boys in girls’ bathrooms and vice versa,” he
says. “Our kids were being taught things we didn’t think were appropriate.” They
were also being pressured to get vaccinated—a red line for Zapata. At one point,
during an interview for a Vice documentary, Zapata threatened to shoot in the face
anyone who would dare to vaccinate his children. It was time, a growing number
of people in Zapata’s camp had decided, “to elect people who would represent us
and be constitutionalists. Uphold the Constitution and leave us alone.”
After his star turn at the Board of Supervisors meeting, Zapata cofounded a
YouTube channel called Red, White
and Blueprint. He generated several
hours’ worth of a slickly produced
local “docuseries,” later made avail-
able on Amazon Prime, as well as
“This place has been an ongoing series of podcasts. In
taken over. Right now the channel’s video podcasts, talking
heads sit around a table and shoot
I feel like the building the shit, preaching right-wing rev-
is on fire.” olution and badmouthing their
—Doni Chamberlain, local journalist enemies. They hawk T-shirts and
baseball caps. And they claim to have
found a secret sauce: a set of politi-
cal priorities and campaign methods
Militia man: that will enable them to take over the county, electoral office
Woody Clendenen
by electoral office, and that will inspire viewers elsewhere to
(right) cutting hair at
set up copycat movements and wrest control of their local
his barbershop in
Cottonwood, Calif. governments from the liberals and the public health “experts,”
the wokesters and the gender-benders.
Zapata’s nemesis in the local media was Doni Chamberlain,
the publisher of a liberal online magazine called A News Cafe.
Chamberlain agrees that while Trump and Trumpism had
gotten this circus going, it was Covid that served as the fuse for
a broader upheaval. “It’s changed everything,” Chamberlain
says. But unlike Zapata, she does feel that the lunatics are now
running the asylum. “I wish I had another word besides ‘crazy’
or ‘insane,’” she says. “This place has been taken over. Right
20
now I feel like the building is on fire.”
Because A News Cafe was sympathetic to the
public health officials and the members of the
Board of Supervisors who were upholding state
law, Chamberlain was routinely targeted by alt-
right media barkers. A group called Thought
You Should Know–Shasta County, which was
monitoring the uptick of local right-wing ex-
tremism, recorded a rant broadcast on KCNR
by a man that station owner Carl Bott identified
as Matt Nimmo. Nimmo called on his listeners
to try the publisher of “the communist cock-
roach paper” under “the Nuremberg trials”
and “publicly execute her.” Then he escalated.
“When our country collapses and you force
armed conflict, you get absolutely what you
deserve,” Nimmo screamed, his voice crescen-
doing. “If that’s hooked up to a car and you get
dragged down the road…then you get what you
deserve. You truly have to understand our gov-
ernment has been seized by communist trash.
Propped up by trash.” He punched the table in
the broadcast booth. “They don’t care why ev-
eryone’s dying, because they support population
ROBERT GAUTHIER / LOS ANGELES TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES
control. These little Nazis within government,
and communist trash…. They’re going to con-
tinue to shove that mask and the vaccine down
your throat. That’s why she should be tried un-
der the Nuremberg Code and hung in the end,
because it’s for the greater good.”
With the airwaves saturated with calls to
violence and noncooperation, Shasta County’s
residents resisted the vaccinations, just as they
had the lockdowns. Only 48 percent got the first
two doses, and only 55 percent of those went on
to get booster shots; the number of children in
  T H E N AT I O N
the county who were fully vaccinated was van-
ishingly small. As the spikes in the pandemic hit
the county, in the late autumn of 2020, the sum-
mer and early autumn of 2021, and the winter of
2022, the deaths there mounted. By the autumn
of 2022—which was when the county website
stopped posting updates on the pandemic—the
little county of 185,000 residents had recorded
nearly 700 deaths. That made for a death rate of
0.37 percent of the population. By contrast, the
death rate in California as a whole, which had a
much higher vaccination rate, was just over 0.25
percent by early 2023. While that difference
might not look large, another way to under-
stand these numbers is that three Shasta County
residents were dying for every two Californians
out of a comparable population sample.
In November 2020, the mood produced a
seismic political shift. Patrick Jones, a gun store
manager and onetime Redding mayor who is as
hard right as hard right can get, won a seat on
the Board of Supervisors and began using his
newfound position to rally the right against his
moderate colleagues. A domino effect would
soon follow: first the recall of Moty; then the
resignation of two other moderates and their re-
placement by right-wing candidates; and, finally,
Jones’s ascent to the position of board chair.
P
atrick jones sits in his family-
owned gun store under a huge buf-
falo head and an
almost equally im-
pressive stag’s head
mounted beside a cardboard
cutout of a man pocked with
target-practice bullet holes.
He speaks with pride about
how he hews to a Southern
Baptist “fire and brimstone”
worldview, one that won’t let
him accept homosexuality, for
example, as anything other
than sinful, and one that be-
lieves in the corrective power
of the rod. He speaks nostal-
gically of how his father “whooped” him with
a leather strap when he was a boy, engendering
in him a respect for law and order that, since
the 1960s, has been in increasingly short supply.
For Jones, the world is black and white, the gray
LUIS SINCO / LOS ANGELES TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES
zones of ambiguity places to shy away from.
“There’s right and wrong. When you do wrong,
you will be punished. I believe in a very simple
world: You try to be honest, be fair, be respectful.
And you gotta believe in Jesus Christ.”
Deep into our conversation, Jones proud-
ly stated that he never reads newspapers, that
they “aren’t worth new piss,” and that he gets
his news mainly from the “search engines I do
use—won’t name any names.” Then he started
6.12–19.2023
talking about LGBTQ rights, which
the previous board had, on a yearly
basis, passed a symbolic resolution
supporting. Jones said that under The recall effort
his chairmanship, that would stop.
“Their lifestyle, I don’t believe in against Moty, Rickert,
that,” he said. “I don’t think it’s ac- and Chimenti picked
ceptable.” Then he pivoted to Black
Lives Matter—no surprise, he wasn’t up steam in 2021,
a fan—and more generally to civil boosted by a huge
rights. “BLM is a form of racism,” he
said. “Everybody should be treated infusion of cash.
equal and the same.” He expanded
his critique to eminently moderate and mainstream civil rights
organizations: “I don’t believe in the NAACP. Most people
here didn’t appreciate any of that.”
In the wake of Jones’s election, the recall effort against
Moty, Rickert, and Chimenti picked up steam in 2021,
boosted by a huge infusion of cash from Reverge Anselmo,
an eccentric, Connecticut-based, right-wing heir to a billion-
aire’s fortune who was nursing a grudge against the Board of
Supervisors after the county sued him for constructing sever-
al buildings, without zoning permission, on a local vineyard
that he owned. (Anselmo did not return repeated phone calls
for this article.) The hundreds of thousands of dollars that he The local press:
donated to local activists and political action committees— Journalist and blogger
and, according to the Los Angeles Times, to Red, White and Doni Chamberlain.
Blueprint—turned what could have been a sleepy local race
into a spectacle that, for the alt-right, assumed global impli-
cations. In the spring and summer of 2021, as the pandemic
death toll mounted and as forest fires blanketed the region
in thick smoke, events were
held in local churches, gun
stores, and restaurants to gather the required
number of signatures to qualify the recall for
the ballot. There were increasingly acrimo-
nious confrontations at board meetings, as
well as ugly Internet campaigns designed to
intimidate Moty, Rickert, and Chimenti and
to galvanize their opponents.
Once the recall made the ballot, the mod-
erate supervisors faced months of relentless
attacks. Moty was vilified for having acted in
his official capacity to go behind firefighting
lines during the horrifying Carr Fire of 2018
to refill his evacuated home’s generator. Online
trolls threatened to tar and feather him, accused him of being a pedophile, called
for him to be guillotined, and urged the formation of lynch mobs against him.
On February 1, 2022, Moty was booted from the Board of Supervisors, with
56 percent voting to recall him. After an election so mean-spirited, so filled with
bile and fantasies of death and destruction, he and his wife started to think about
leaving the county for more tolerant climes. To Jones, however, the threats were
simply people letting off steam. “I think they’re inflating their death threats,” he
says. “Moty’s an ex–police chief. He can take care of himself. They overplayed the
death threats to try to make their point that recall people were violent.”
Moty’s replacement, Tim Garman, a MAGA loyalist and anti-vaxxer, was more
to Jones’s taste. The two then worked to move their colleague Les Baugh, who
had been a swing vote on many issues in recent months, into their camp after the
recall vote. In early May 2022, with a new right-wing majority, the board voted,
by a 3-to-2 margin, to fire Dr. Ramstrom, without cause. Jones and his hard-right
colleagues—none of whom had ever accepted the need for mask mandates, social
21
  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

distancing, or business closures—had
repeatedly refused to meet with her.
Nine months after the recall,
By early 2023, Jones the rightward shift accelerated:
Chimenti and Baugh decided that
was attempting to running for reelection in such an
declare Shasta County environment was more trouble than
it was worth, and in the wake of their
a Second Amendment retirements, two more supervisors
sanctuary. aligned with Jones and Garman won
seats in last November’s elections.
What had been a 4-to-1 moderate
conservative majority on the Board
of Supervisors in 2020 was now a 4-to-1 hard-right majority.
At the first meeting of the new board, in January 2023, Jones
was elected chair. To celebrate their power, several of the new
members would often come to work carrying firearms.
around the country. “It’s all totally ridiculous
bunk,” Grimmer says. “But he’s an incredible
organizer. He gives these talks, then recruits
people to knock on doors.” Grimmer’s group
contacted the Board of Supervisors in an effort
to advise them against giving Frank a platform.
They had no success.
Sure enough, around the same time, right-
wing vigilantes wearing orange vests and “Voter
Taskforce” badges could be seen banging on
doors in Shasta County and asking residents
about their voting history, in a menacing effort
to root out the supposedly rampant electoral
fraud—presumably among the one-third of the
electorate who didn’t cast ballots for Donald
Trump when presented with the opportunity
to do so. In the June 7 primaries last year—the

F
first local elections held after the recall—men
ifty-four-year-old chris kelstrom is one of the and women in the heavily armed county forced
two newly elected supervisors. Like most conser- their way into the electoral count as “observers,”
vatives in town, he carries weapons. He worked as setting off a flurry of concern among elections
a grocery store manager for many years, then as a officials and ordinary citizens in the county.
bread delivery driver for more than a decade. Over By early 2023, Jones was attempting to declare
those years, he became increasingly disenchanted with the Shasta County a Second Amendment sanctuary
The old guard: local and state governments. He doesn’t trust the integrity of and to make county employees swear an oath
Former Shasta the voter rolls and, notwithstanding his own electoral victory, specifically to defend the Second Amendment.
County Board of is convinced that fraud has run rampant. Kelstrom particularly He was also pushing to expand local open-carry
Supervisors chair
Leonard Moty. disliked the lockdowns and virtual meetings that accompanied ordinances and to raise money for a lawsuit chal-
Covid. He feels that Covid relief money was “laundered,” via lenging the state’s open-carry restrictions. The
the Redding Chamber of new board was committing
Commerce, to fund Moty’s the county to a multi-hun-
efforts to beat back the recall. He also objects to dred-million-dollar project
the direction California’s schools are heading to build a huge new county
in. “The boys’ and girls’ bathrooms thing is not jail, even though it was strug-
very popular here. They recently put tampon gling to staff its existing jail
machines in the boys’ bathrooms,” he says. He and, in consequence, at least
believes critical race theory is spreading insidi- one of the jail’s four floors
ously into classrooms. had been closed in recent
The same year Kelstrom won a seat on the months. The board had also
Board of Supervisors, many of the county’s set about banning Dominion
school boards were also seized by men and Voting Systems’ machines—
women that Kelstrom describes as “conserva- an effort that garnered praise,
tive patriots”—people willing, at long last, to in February 2023, from pil-
go toe-to-toe with the woke crowd that Kel- low merchant Mike Lindell,
strom sees as having taken over the education who attended a board meet-
system in recent years. People like local fundamentalist preacher Patty Plumb and ing in person and promised to help defray legal
her husband, Ronald, who believe that Karl Marx successfully took over the edu- expenses should the county be sued by the state.
cation system in 1848, along with many other pillars of American society, and that The board went on to push out the county CEO
school boards in America have been dominated by Marxists ever since. and attorney and to fire, without cause, the di-
To make matters worse, more than a year after Trump’s November 2020 rector of the Department of Housing and Com-
defeat in the presidential election, many residents were now in thrall to election munity Action Programs. The majority was, it
denialism. The hysteria surrounding the purported endemic fraud committed seemed, looking to remake the entire county in
by Democrats, RINOs, and other ne’er-do-wells intensified when one of the the image of Zapata’s Red, White and Blueprint.

D
country’s leading election conspiracists, the Ohio math teacher Doug Frank, was
invited to Redding to whip up the crowds. He appeared at a Board of Supervisors oni chamberlain had spent years
meeting and then gave a sold-out lecture at a local church, claiming that election speaking truth to power, frequent-
officials and other bureaucrats around the country had manipulated voter rolls ly criticizing the militias and
and altered vote counts to ensure the defeat of conservative candidates. other right-wing groups. But by
Frank’s ideas, says Stanford political science professor and Hoover Institute early 2023, even she was scared.
PACIFIC SKY

fellow Justin Grimmer, who studies conspiracy theorists in the United States, re- She largely retreated behind the security sys-
volve around the idea of “a network of unnamed elites” manipulating vote totals tems in her house, holding meetings in private.
22
  T H E N AT I O N
When she walked to her car, she looked around
nervously, doing a quick security calculus to see
if anything looked out of the ordinary.
For Carl Bott, a 74-year-old libertarian-
leaning military veteran who ran the KCNR
radio station, and whose airwaves had provided
space for Nimmo, the cascading coarseness had
been nothing to cheer about. Sure, it created
a ready audience for his firebrand hosts, but
Bott’s heart was no longer in the game. He
seemed, instead, almost nostalgic for a calmer,
quieter past. Once Nimmo’s rant was pointed
out to him, Bott sent him packing and deleted
his old shows from the station’s website. “I
didn’t want to give him any more publicity.
What he said was wrong. We pulled him off the
air,” Bott says. An old-school gentleman who
took pride in his community and sought out
consensus when he could find it, Bott seemed
genuinely upset that Chamberlain wouldn’t
accept his apologies.
The saving grace, in Bott’s understanding,
is that none of this, looked at historically, is
that abnormal; hotheads have always come and
gone in American politics. Covid and Trump
had magnified all of the community’s divides,
had made people angrier, coarser, and cruder,
but soon things would quiet down again. It was
just part of the push and pull, the flamboyant
spectacle of American politics, he says: “Like
anything, if the waters roil up, it settles. In the
long run, things will settle down again. Like
they always do.”
That may be too pat. Shasta County’s slide
into political chaos was anything but typical,
and the consequences are likely to reverberate
there for years to come. There remains an
omnipresent background hum of extremism,
disinformation, and paranoia in everyday life.
Most residents aren’t political fanatics, but too
many have chosen to sit this fight out. And
with too few people voting in local elections to
counter the militias, the QAnoners, the Chris-
tian nationalists, and the Second Amendment
absolutists, the far right is steering the ship.
“It’s a constant barrage of intimidation,”
Mary Rickert says. “It’s wearing. It’s hard on staff.
We’ve lost a lot of employees. Our county coun-
sel is leaving in April. For three years, it’s just
ROBERT GAUTHIER / LOS ANGELES TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES
been nothing but insanity. I’ve had people stand-
ing in our driveway, stalking our place. They’ve
intimidated and bullied enough that people are
afraid that they can do anything they want.”
Not surprisingly, Chairman Jones disagrees.
“You have to understand real Northern Califor-
nia,” he says. “These are smaller, conservative
counties. People are conservative, self-reliant.
We believe in strict constitutional government.
Over the last two years, a lot of people rose up
and said they’re tired of what’s happening in
local government. That’s what’s happening in
6.12–19.2023
Shasta County today. It’s a course correction. It’s long overdue.” In other words,
move along, nothing to see here.
In the end, however, no matter how much they attempt to sanitize their beliefs
and accuse the media of distorting their positions, the Joneses and Zapatas of
the county keep undermining their own efforts at appearing moderate. During
the week when I was in touch with him, Zapata texted me messages about how
we would agree on an array of economic issues, such as the scandal of poverty
in the United States or of people being denied health care because they lacked
resources. He stressed how these issues transcended ideology and were a symp-
tom of a deeper societal malaise. Then, late one night, apropos of nothing, a
series of anti-Semitic messages popped up on my phone from the number he had
been using. Those messages informed me that “many Latinos
complain that the Jews are horrible people,” adding that “they Fighting city hall:
don’t tip worth a shit.” The messages concluded, “I was raised Benji Thompson of
not to trust a Jew but I’m open to hear what you have to say Red, White and Blue-
print records a Shasta
since you’re one of them.” County Board of Su-
That “you’re one of them” sums it all up. In the minds of pervisors meeting.
the people who orchestrated a political revolution in Shasta
County and who, now that they are in power, are pushing
to limit the role of public health officers, to freeze out dis-
cussions of diversity in school classrooms, to roll back social
services, and, perhaps above all, to make it easier to own guns,
you are either with them or against
them. You are either one of them or
forever an untrusted, unwanted out-
sider. The word “Jews,” it seemed to
me, was almost an afterthought. “They’ve intimidated
With the political pendulum
swinging rightward in many coun- and bullied enough that
ties and states around the country— people are afraid that
from the sweeping culture wars of
Ron DeSantis’s Florida to Jones’s they can do anything
Second Amendment sanctuary cam- they want.”
paign in Shasta County—it could —Mary Rickert, Shasta County supervisor
just as well have been “gays” or
“public health officers,” “transgen-
der people” or “liberals.” It could have been anyone, in
short, who didn’t agree with the Red, White and Blueprint,
anyone who, in 2023, isn’t entirely on board with the efforts
to reshape picturesque Shasta County in its my-way-or-the-
highway image. N
23
 Some notes on the politics of reading.
BY JANE SMILEY

ot long ago, i watched the movie QUILLS—a fictionalized depic- to occur? The only book of mine that
tion (or maybe a contemplation) of the Marquis de Sade. Sade, has been banned is A Thousand Acres,
played by Geoffrey Rush, is a complicated, obsessive writer living in and it hasn’t been very widely banned,
a madhouse/prison, who must write, can’t stop writing (I can relate), but the problem appears to have been
and also is compelled to reveal the details of his sexuality through “sexual content.” The sexual content
his work. At one point, Sade says (perhaps about the official who is determined to in A Thousand Acres is the fact that the
prevent him from writing—and also to prevent his books from being read): “We two older daughters, Ginny and Rose,
merely held up a mirror; apparently, he didn’t like what he saw.” have been sexually molest-
Quills is maybe the best representation of the complexities of ed by their father, Larry.
book banning I’ve ever seen or read, and it reminded me of when Rose remembers it clearly
I actually dared to read Sade’s Justine in the early 2000s, when I and uses it as her reason
was writing Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. What I expected for resisting Larry’s efforts

 T H E N AT I O N
when I started it was not only unmitigated cruelty on the part of the to pass the farm to the
author toward Justine, but also her reduction to youngest daughter, Caro-
Sharpened Quills: In an object. What surprised me was that Sade was line, while Ginny has put
the film, the Marquis eager to explore Justine’s torment from her point it so far out of her mind
de Sade uses writing
to investigate himself
of view. He made her a sympathetic character that she only remembers
and society, no matter and gave her a much more complex inner life the episodes late in the
than many of the female characters who were novel. (Caroline hasn’t

how shocking such an
investigation might be. being depicted around the time that Sade wrote
his frequently banned book. What he seemed to be showing us
was that society itself was promoting
cruelty toward women, both sexual
and personal, and all he was doing
was describing it.
I am guessing most I am guessing that Justine was
banned because Sade’s depiction of
books are banned the world around him was truthful
because they tell the and uncomfortable for those in charge
(not only in the government but also
truth—and the truth in the church). And I am guessing that
is that humans are this is why most books are banned—
because they tell the truth, and the
complicated. truth is that humans are complicated
and often cruel, and the more pow-
er they have, the more they are tempted to use it. Quills is
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: ADRIANA GEORGOPULOS
6.12–19.2023
been molested and takes
her father’s side.) The best compliment
I’ve ever gotten for A Thousand Acres
was from a psychologist I encountered
at a reading, who told me that Rose’s
vivid memory of the molestations
compared with Ginny’s dissociative
amnesia was the most realistic depic-
tion of what happens after incest and
rape that he had read in fiction.
In 2013, Mia Fontaine wrote in The
Atlantic: “Child sexual abuse impacts
more Americans annually than cancer,
AIDS, gun violence, LGBTQ inequal-
ity, and the mortgage crisis combined.”
And more recent studies agree. But
there are a lot of people who want to

explicit about this very thing—the cruelest character is Dr. ban a book that depicts not the incest
Royer-Collard (played by Michael Caine), the official who is itself but the memory of it.
determined to shred all the copies of Justine that have been Books about sex aren’t the only
Jane Smiley’s
printed, and who is also determined to force himself on his ones being banned these days. At the
most recent collec-
tion of essays, The very young wife. In the film, Sade uses writing to investigate top of the list are books about slavery
Questions That himself and society, no matter how shocking such an investi- (The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison),
Matter Most gation might be. His antagonist is willing to do anything to sexuality (Gender Queer: A Memoir, by
(Heyday Books), is prevent that investigation. Maia Kobabe), personal crises (Thir-
due out on June 6. What happens when we don’t allow those investigations teen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher), and
25
  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

the effects of historical American cruelty on various subcultures (The Absolutely concern about what readers might learn from a
True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie). What are the book ban- book, a Band-Aid (“banned aid”) that attempts
ners afraid of? Well, we all know: They are afraid of readers—especially young to cover up the failure of the medical and
readers—learning the truth about humans, about American history, about, educational systems to perceive and attend to
perhaps, their own lives. As Royer-Collard in Quills would tell you, “My cruelty the psychological problems, family problems,
isn’t your business.” And then he would whisper, “Try and stop me.” and socioeconomic problems that are push-
What would I do if my sons were still in their early teens and I found them ing readers—and, in our day, especially teen
browsing pornographic websites (or reading old copies of Playboy)? I would talk to readers—into resentment and violence.
them about it—ask what they were looking for, what it felt like, and how it made Everyone knows that book banning can ac-
them feel about themselves. There’s no certainty about how they would respond, tually increase sales. Maybe that’s why authors
but I would rather open the conversation than shut it down. And what about my laugh at being banned. But not all teens have
daughters? They might have different reasons for doing the same enough money to defy the ban and
thing, but it would be good to talk about those, too. We all know get a copy of the book. What the
that by their late teens, our children are going to be surrounded book banners (from schools and
by temptations—not only drugs, booze, and sex but also bullying, libraries) refuse to acknowledge
racism, and sexism. Better to recognize these sources of fear and is that reading books is a process
anger in our society in an open way rather than in a secret way. of development. In a novel, every
And, yes, we can’t be certain how our children will react. Quills bit of shocking material has to be
addresses this issue, too: The main female character is a young surrounded by personality, setting,
woman who delivers laundry to the asylum’s theory, psychological analysis, con-
Two of a kind: occupants and secretly takes Sade’s manuscripts trasting events and points of view.
Florida Governor Ron away to be printed. Toward the end (spoiler A young person reading a book un-
DeSantis (above left)
alert), Royer-Collard has stopped her from derstands this bit, and then that bit,
and Texas Governor
Greg Abbott (above interacting with Sade, and so she and her quill and then more. Eventually, what is
right) use anxieties and her piece of paper are at the end of a gossip going on in the book coalesces into
over human com- trail: Sade tells a fellow patient what the next a larger picture that puts the shock-

TOP FROM LEFT: DANIEL A. VARELA / MIAMI HERALD; SHELBY TAUBER / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
plexity to push the line is, and he passes it on to another, who passes it on in turn. ing parts into context (as I discovered when I
politics of fear.
But the fellow whose job it is to pass it on to the young wom- read Justine). It is the context that is revealing,
an is full of easily triggered violence, and when the last line because it creates a logical sense of why some-
comes to him, he wants to do to the young woman what Sade thing is taking place. That’s what young readers
is writing about in the story. As a result, he kills her. learn from reading. If shocking material draws
I am sure the book banners watching this movie (“Warn- them in, keeps them off their cell phones or the
ing: Explicit Content”) would jump in the air to exclaim Internet for a while, and shows them something
that, yes, they were right all along; more complex, then the result will be a more
but it is evident in the film from thoughtful young adult, spouse, and parent.
the beginning that this fellow I wouldn’t mind if books had warnings, as
is a bomb waiting to go off, and movies do—indicating that they are for an adult
What would I do if that Sade—the perp, according to audience, say—but it is important for our chil-
Royer-Collard—has always been dren to learn all the complexities of the truth
I found my sons kind toward the young woman, about human nature when they are young. Many
browsing pornographic while no one in the asylum has of them can’t be protected by circumstances, and
websites—or reading paid a bit of attention to the violent the more they know and understand, the better
propensities of the killer. In other they can handle what happens to them and their
old copies of Playboy? words, the theory the film presents loved ones, and the better they can empathize and
I would talk to them. is that book banning is a publicity sympathize with the people they come to know
stunt—a performance of supposed who have been damaged or traumatized. N
26
  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

The

In a country that treats disabled people as

expensive burdens, can Americans really
make a free choice about dying?
BY SARA LUTERMAN

n april 25, four disability rights organizations sued
California state agencies and officials in an attempt to over-
turn the End of Life Option Act, a seven-year-old law that
allows doctors to prescribe lethal medication to people who
have six months or less to live.
The plaintiffs assert that the law violates the Americans With Disabilities Act
and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which form the foundation for disability
rights law in the United States. “We’re alleging that the law is inherently discrim-
inatory,” said Michael Bien, the chief counsel and a primary author of the com-
plaint. “It excludes or discriminates against people with disabilities, by depriving
them of suicide prevention services.”
The disability rights activists are currently waiting to find
out if their case has standing. The groups and individuals
involved are not especially religious; nor are they historically
aligned with the political right. United Spinal Association, for
example, which represents people with spinal cord injuries, fo-
cuses on issues like insurance coverage for medical equipment
and accessible housing. It is not an organization that would
traditionally be thought of as “pro-life.”
In the United States, there is a long-standing tradition of
secular opposition to medical aid in dying that is deeply en-
twined with disability rights advocacy, but you wouldn’t know
that from much of the news coverage. A 2016 article in USA
Today, for instance, broke down the issue and made Pope Fran-
cis the sole public figure against medical aid in dying. In reality,
the largest and most established disability rights organizations
in the country—the Disability Rights Education and Defense
Fund, the American Association of People With Disabilities,
and the National Council on Independent Living—have all
staked positions against medical aid in dying.
Advocates for medical aid in dying in many states present
their cause as an issue of bodily autonomy. In March, for exam-
ple, supporters of Maryland’s medical-aid-in-dying law used
Sara Luterman the rallying cry “My body, my choice.”
is the caregiving But some disability rights advocates contend that true bodi-
reporter at The ly autonomy is not possible in the world we live in. Instead, they
19th. argue, we live in a society where disabled lives are devalued.
Disability is something people are
taught to hate and fear. Disabled bod-
ies are regarded with a sort of fetish-
istic curiosity at best and revulsion at
worst. And people with disabilities are
frequently not given the resources they
need to live or the assistance they need
to participate fully in society. The pov-
erty rate for disabled people is more
than double that of nondisabled peo-
“It’s not religious, nor
is it pro-life. It’s about
going up against a
‘better dead than
disabled’ mindset.”
—Diane Coleman, president of Not Dead Yet
ple, and the unemployment rate for
disabled people is more than double
that of nondisabled people. The re-
sponsibility for care that is shirked by
the state frequently falls on families,
who are overwhelmed. Instead of being
given the resources they need to thrive,
many, if not most, people with disabili-
ties are treated like expensive burdens.
Considering all of that, advocates
ask, how could a disabled person’s deci-
sion to die be considered a free choice?
It is not the disabilities that ruin lives,
they say; it is the system and society

ILLUSTRATION BY ADRIÀ FRUITÓS

29
  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

that fails to support disabled people. on respirators, because the insurance reimburse-
“It’s not religious, nor is it pro-life,” ment rate was too low and unprofitable.
said Diane Coleman, the president “When I met McAfee, I found a man angry
“The media said, of Not Dead Yet, speaking of the about his loss of control over his body but more
advocacy movement. “It’s about go- angry still about his loss of control over his life,”
‘Well, of course she ing up against a ‘better dead than Joseph Shapiro wrote in No Pity, his history of
wants to die. Look at disabled’ mindset.” the American disability rights movement. “He
Coleman has made opposition to was living in a gloomy Alabama nursing home
her condition. She’s in medical aid in dying her life’s work. room, his bed separated by a pink curtain from
a wheelchair.’” She founded Not Dead Yet in 1996. the next bed, which had been home to a succes-
—Diane Coleman, president of Not Dead Yet Coleman, 70, has a form of muscu- sion of elderly men on respirators…. He had no
lar dystrophy and uses a wheelchair shirt on, and his body was covered by a white
and a respirator. Like many people blanket. Nurses had not bothered to shave him,
with disabilities, she says medical professionals have devalued and there was three-day-old stubble on his face.
her life. She knows many other people with disabilities who Out the window next to his bed, he could see
have experienced the same thing. One member of her staff only sky and desolate trees.”
was told by his father that it would have been better if he’d McAfee went to court in 1989, asserting
died in the accident that made him a quadriplegic. “Those that he would rather die than continue to live
experiences are so well-known in the community,” she said. in nursing homes. He wanted his respirator
Not Dead Yet takes its name from a scene in Monty Python turned off. The judge determined that McAfee
and the Holy Grail in which a character played by John Cleese would not be dying by suicide if that happened,
Death on demand? attempts to leave an elderly man (still very much alive) with because his injury would merely be taking “its
Elizabeth Bouvia, a a corpse collector. Coleman and others attribute the idea for natural course.” There was no consideration
26-year-old woman the name to Bob Kafka, a longtime organizer for the disability given to how the circumstances of McAfee’s life
with cerebral palsy, rights protest group ADAPT. She said that it’s been easy to get might be affecting his mental health.
wanted medical help
in dying in 1983.
other disability groups to sign on to her campaign: “My sense Mark Johnson, 71, is a lifelong disability
of things is that it’s because people have experienced devalu- rights advocate and the former director of advo-
ation from the medical field when they’ve become disabled.” cacy for the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, which
Coleman also dismissed the idea that medical aid in dying is specializes in spinal cord injuries. He is quadri-
an issue of bodily autonomy. “If it was really about bodily autonomy, suicidal people plegic and describes himself as “semi-retired.”
[without disabilities or other illnesses] would be able to get assisted suicide,” she said. At the time of McAfee’s case, Johnson and
To Coleman and other disabled opponents of medical aid in dying, the laws another disability rights activist, Eleanor Smith,
allowing it, even in limited circumstances, create a two-tiered system in which non- assembled about a dozen fellow activists to
disabled people are deemed mentally ill for wanting to die, while disabled people loudly protest the decision. “Here comes Larry,
are seen as rational actors. and what does the media do?
Coleman cited the case of Elizabeth Bou- They focus on disability as the
via. In 1983, Bouvia was a 26-year-old woman problem,” Johnson told me.
with cerebral palsy who wanted to die because The media and the justice
she felt that her disability had rendered her system, Johnson continued,
life intolerable. Cerebral palsy is not generally didn’t ask the relevant ques-
considered a terminal diagnosis, and people tions about McAfee’s quality
with cerebral palsy can lead full lives. But of life and mental health, such
Coleman did not see that reflected in news as “Why is he forced to live
coverage of the case: “Bouvia had a miscar- where he lives?” and “Why
riage and a marriage breakup. She couldn’t are his choices so limited?”
finish her graduate program. [The state gov- “Do we blame him for feel-
ernment] took away her wheelchair van. So ing the way he did?” Johnson
she found a lawyer through the ACLU so added. “No. But we weren’t
she could be allowed to receive morphine going to tolerate the narrative.
and comfort care, while she refused food and We have lives worth living.”
fluids…. The media said, ‘Well, of course she wants to die. Look at her condition. McAfee won his case, but after moving
She’s in a wheelchair.’ That was a real wake-up call for the community.” Bouvia into a more suitable living situation closer to
eventually changed her mind, and she is alive today. his family, he decided to live. “Turning off the

A
nother such case was that of larry james mcafee, a young man
with quadriplegia. McAfee had been an “avid outdoorsman, hunter
and fledgling parachutist,” according to People magazine, before he
was injured in a motorcycle crash in 1985.
Paralyzed from the neck down, McAfee was bounced from
ventilator still remains a very viable option to
me…. But I want to look into the possibilities
to see what’s available first. I want to give it a
try,” he told The New York Times in 1990.
McAfee never made the decision to turn off
his ventilator. He died of pneumonia in 1995.
BETTMANN

nursing home to nursing home outside of his home state of Georgia, far from his McAfee’s choice to continue living was due
family and friends. At the time, Georgia nursing homes would not accept patients at least in part to the activism of Johnson and
30
  T H E N AT I O N
other disability rights advocates. They oc-
cupied Georgia Medicaid offices, demanding
in-home care for McAfee and others like him.
When that failed to achieve the desired out-
come, Johnson and another group of protesters
occupied the governor’s office. This time, they
got what they wanted.
“Larry became one of the first recipients of
the attendant-care-waiver program,” Johnson
said. The program, spearheaded by disabili-
ty rights advocates including Johnson, allows
disabled people to receive state-funded care
in their places of residence, rather than just in
nursing homes. McAfee was able to move into
a group home, where he had his own private
bedroom and a round-the-clock attendant.
“There were several cases through the late
’80s involving men with quadriplegia, men on
ventilators who said, ‘Get me out of this nursing
home or pull the plug.’ And, of course, society
was totally ready to pull the plug with a little
bit of legal wrangling. But all of that involved
withholding treatment, which is different than
assisted suicide, legally,” Coleman said. “What
Kevorkian did was different.”
It was opposition to Jack Kevorkian that led
to the formation of Not Dead Yet. Kevorkian
was a Michigan doctor who assisted in the
suicides of over 100 people. Unlike earlier cas-
es, in which people with disabilities asked to
stop treatment and die of relatively natural
causes, Kevorkian actively administered drugs
that caused their deaths. Only 25 percent of
Kevorkian’s patients were terminally ill, as de-
fined by current medical consensus.
In a 1999 article in The BMJ, the prominent
British medical journal, bioethicist Howard
Brody—who supports medical aid in dying—
described Kevorkian as a “master at manipulat-
ing the American media.”
“Early on,” Brody wrote, “some defenders
of assisted suicide complained that Kevorkian’s
personality and methods had been allowed to
obscure the pros and cons of the issue itself. But
in the end Kevorkian apparently fell victim to
the need to continually increase the shock factor
in order to draw repeated media attention.”
It worked. A Washington Post article from
the same year described Kevorkian as a “tireless
assisted suicide advocate.” A 1994 article in
Vanity Fair said that people found him “warm
and witty” and noted the “genuine tenderness”
that he showed his victims’ families. Mouth
JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Magazine, a disability rights publication with
a much smaller circulation, labeled Kevorkian
something else entirely: a “serial killer.”
Coleman explained the origins of her orga-
nization. “We had a small gathering of about
a dozen people who were concerned about
Kevorkian and who had paid attention to the
earlier cases: Carol Gill; her husband, Larry
6.12–19.2023
Voss; Eleanor Smith and Nancy Moulton of Life Worthy of Life, a group that
was based in Georgia at the time [and was a precursor to Not Dead Yet]. So this
group and a couple others, we just talked about the Kevorkian situation.”
Since then, Not Dead Yet has filed about a dozen amicus briefs in cases
involving medical aid in dying and has done extensive legislative advocacy to
oppose it at the state and federal levels. The group has lost many of those battles.
Currently, medical aid in dying is legal in 10 states and the District of Colum-
bia, available to competent adults who have been deemed terminally ill with six
months or fewer to live.
It is worth noting that people like McAfee and Bouvia
would not qualify for medical aid in dying under current laws At Dr. Death’s door:
Diane Coleman and
anywhere in the United States today. And the US groups that others protesting
support medical aid in dying have largely distanced them- outside the Oakland
selves from Kevorkian and his methods. Compassion and County Courthouse in
Choices, one of the largest, mentions Kevorkian only once on 1999 against Jack
its website, in the context of an interview with a member, and Kevorkian.
then only in passing. “I won’t speak to what happened 30 or
40 years ago within the movement,” Kim Callinan, the pres-
ident of the organization, said. “What I can speak to is what
I stand for as the leader of Compassion and Choices now,
and what our values are now. We
are advocating for people who are
terminally ill, mentally competent,
who have access to hospice care and
with a six-month prognosis.” “A determination of
In other countries, by contrast,
medical aid in dying has signifi-
whether a person is
cantly expanded its scope. The terminally ill may come
Netherlands, for example, allows
euthanasia for nonterminal disabil-
down to the biases of
ities, including mental illness, and the physician.”
developmental disabilities like au- —Haben Girma, a deafblind disability rights advocate
tism. The option is available for
terminally ill infants before their
first birthday and anyone 12 years of age or older, although
patients 12 to 16 years old require parental consent.
The 2013 case of the Belgian twins Marc and Eddy
Verbessem was particularly disturbing to Haben Girma, a
deafblind disability rights advocate and one of the lawyers
31
  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

oppose medical aid in dying, but there has been

little polling on the issue. Larger pollsters like
Gallup have not tracked disabled people’s atti-
tudes on the topic.
Callinan said she believes that the organized
disability movement is changing, or at least
that it will change, because the issues that its
members have warned about have largely not
come to pass in the US. States have not moved
to expand medical aid in dying to a wider
number of people with disabilities. “From my
conversations with disability leaders, I think
there’s a different generation coming up within
the disability movement. I think you might see
a change take place with this in 10 or 20 years,”
she said. “The generation of leaders now—
sometimes when you’re advocating with such a
strong position [against medical aid in dying],
it’s hard to acknowledge that you were wrong.”

A
behind the recent challenge in California. The Verbessems were born deaf. nita cameron, 57, joined adapt,
When they were in their 40s, they learned that they would also go blind. The the disability rights protest group,
twins chose to die using the country’s medical-aid-in-dying law. The conserva- in 1986, when she was in her early
tive British newspaper The Telegraph called it a “mercy killing.” 20s. Cameron is low-vision and
“I can’t stop thinking about Marc and Eddy,” Girma says in a video posted on has a mobility disability from be-
her website. “I wish they could have been told about all the different ways deaf- ing born prematurely. She has worked as the
blind people connect and communicate, from tactile sign language, to Braille, director of minority outreach for Not Dead Yet
to cane travel. But I know so many different communities don’t have access to since 2017 and had previously been involved as
this information.” a member of its board.
Marc and Eddy Verbessem would not have qualified under California’s Cameron is an out and proud Black lesbian.
current medical-aid-in-dying law or any other similar statute in the United She shared her thoughts on the “strange bed-
States. Girma, however, sees the California law as dangerously vague, especially fellows” that the disability rights movement
with regard to the difficulty of predicting life expectancy. has made with the religious
“Defenders of [California’s law] allege the law can’t hurt right on the subject of med-
people when it only applies to those ical aid in dying. “The peo-
with less than six months to live. But ple I work with on a regular
physicians are not seers, and countless basis on this issue? A lot of
Fighting for life:
Diane Coleman disabled people have lived well beyond them would not have me
(right) helped found their doctors’ predictions. Given the in their home,” Cameron
Not Dead Yet in staggering evidence of medical ableism said. “They would not eat
1996 to campaign and racism, a determination of wheth- dinner with me. They are
against Jack
Kevorkian (above).
er a person is terminally ill may come diametrically opposed to
down to the biases of the physician,” my very existence. And yet
she wrote in an e-mail. somehow, we have managed
States that have legalized medical to put that aside.”
aid in dying track the conditions of those who use it. In The alliance is not without tension, but
California in 2021, the most recent year of available data, Cameron said that she feels the issue is import-
66 percent of people who used medical aid in dying had ant enough to warrant working with people
cancer. No one in the state has been who otherwise hate her. In fact, she sees it as
granted medical aid in dying for be- part of a fight for survival: “We know how the
ing deaf, blind, or deafblind. medical community mistreats us. They want to
“I understand and respect the get rid of us. If you’re sick, you can be pushed
“I understand and concern around a slippery slope, into assisted suicide…. As marginalized people,
respect the concern but we are not the same as Canada we see the discrimination we go through at the
or Switzerland or Belgium. We are hands of the medical establishment.”
around a slippery in a really different place in this Jules Good, 23, is the assistant director of
slope, but we are not country, and our advocacy remains Not Dead Yet. They are autistic, deaf, and
FROM TOP: AP; C-SPAN

for those who are already going to
the same as Canada.” die,” Callinan said.
—Kim Callinan, president of Compassion and Choices
Callinan contends that only a
minority of people with disabilities
32
have a complex chronic illness. They were not
born when Bouvia and McAfee asked to die or
when Kevorkian went on trial. But like many
other disabled people, they have been told by
  T H E N AT I O N
medical professionals that their life is not worth
living. “When I was 18, I got a pretty rough
diagnosis. I was super depressed and attempted
suicide. And when I went to my first counseling
appointment with a new therapist after that
happened, I explained my whole deal. And she
looked me in the eye and said, ‘Yeah, I’d prob-
ably kill myself if I were you,’” Good told me.
Like Callinan, Good has noticed that many
younger people in the disability community
are less set in their opposition to medical aid
in dying or may even support it, but Good
has drawn different conclusions about what
that means: “I think when you’re young, you
feel like your body and experiences are out of
your control. The idea of being able to control
your death can be really comforting to a lot of
people. I empathize with the desire for control.
But…that can’t be what’s guiding our policies.”
Like Cameron, Good is uncomfortable with
the alliance that the movement has built with
the pro-life movement. When asked if it was
difficult to work with these groups as a trans
person, Good said it was, “on a personal level.”
“In any policy work, especially when you’re
an organization that works on a narrow set of
issues, you’re always going to have to work with
people you disagree with. At the end of the day,
we’ve got to get the votes to make sure that the
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IMPERIAL MOROCCO
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US CIVIL RIGHTS: ON THE ROAD
TO FREEDOM
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For more information on these and other destinations, go to TheNation.com/ TRAVELS ,
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6.12–19.2023
bills don’t pass. As much as I struggle sometimes with people
who would probably prefer I wasn’t around, the goal of pro-
tecting people from dangerous legislation outweighs that for
me, personally,” Good said.
In terms of the future of the
movement, Good noted the limit-
ed resources that Not Dead Yet has
compared with conservative pro-life For 24/7 mental health support
groups and medical-aid-in-dying
in English or Spanish, call the
groups like Compassion and Choices.
Substance Abuse and Mental Health
“There’s a dominant narrative
that is pushed by organizations like Services Administration’s free help
Compassion and Choices,” Good line at 800-662-4357. You can also
said. “They have a lot of money to reach a trained crisis counselor
spend on communication and ads, through the Suicide and Crisis
[so] that’s the default perspective on Lifeline by calling or texting 988.
assisted suicide. And what they say
is, ‘This has nothing to do with dis-
ability.’ And then the people who oppose [medical aid in dy-
ing] are highly funded Christian and Catholic organizations. I
think they very intentionally try and squash our perspective.”
What Good and Not Dead Yet want to do is make sure
that people with disabilities are heard. Not Dead Yet believes
that because people with disabilities are on the front lines of
the medical system, they can alert society to the dangers that
others cannot yet see. N
This story is a collaboration with The 19th, an independent news-
room covering gender, politics, and policy.
MEXICO CITY: POLITICS, CULTURE,
AND CUISINE
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October 31–Novemer 5, 2023
CUBA: HAVANA TO VIÑALES
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SOUTH AFRICA: BEYOND APARTHEID
April 12–23, 2024
33
 RABESQUES, the first and only novel

Body and by the acclaimed Palestinian writ-

er Anton Shammas, was originally
translated into English 35 years ago,
Soul in 1988. It was a time of great tur-
moil and hope, with the Palestinian
Anton Shammas and the lost hope Intifada entering its second year, and it was also a time
of Arabesques when the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian solidarity
BY RAJA SHEHADEH seemed to show more promise than they had at any
other time. As though in confirmation, Shammas’s
novel appeared, with its array of Israeli and Pales-
tinian characters reflecting on one another and their
relations in a wide range of locales. Perhaps most im-
34 portant, the novel managed to narrate the story of the
Nakba in Hebrew to a Jewish Israeli public. When I
ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREA VENTURA
  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

read it back then, it represented a bold and promising departure suitable to the revolu- feeling of porous ground waiting
tionary times that Palestine was going through. to touch the soles of my feet as
Now reissued by New York Review Books in an excellent translation by Vivian Eden I am dropped farther and farther
and with an afterword by Elias Khoury, the novel has found its way into my hands once down…. Now the light dims in the
again. My second reading confirms what I thought in my first: that Arabesques is one of square and I see the silhouette of my
the finest novels about the 1948 Nakba, when an estimated three-quarters of a million brother’s head looking down from
Palestinians were forced out of their homes and off their land to make way for the Jewish above me and asking whether I have
state. Not only did Shammas powerfully describe these tragic events, but he did so in arrived safely and can I untie the
Hebrew instead of Arabic so that an Israeli public could finally confront this story too. rope…. Then I begin to be aware of

P
alestinians attempting to
write about the Nakba
have always faced a quan-
dary when it comes to con-
veying the trauma: If they
tell too much, or tell it too compellingly—
let alone advocate for the right of return
for the refugees of 1948—they may en-
counter not a few difficulties in publishing.
In Arabesques, Shammas steers away
from politics outright, and yet his novel,
lyrical and subtle in its humor, is ultimately
very political. Narrated in the voice of the
young (and somewhat fictionalized) Sham-
mas, a scene from the chapter “The Tale
Continued” offers a good example of how
he handles the predicament of the Pales-
tinians who were driven from their villages
and turned into refugees. Referring to
the ever-looming fear and possibility of
another Nakba, Shammas describes the
cobbling of shoes by his father:
For a man to be able to walk a
long way he needs a sturdy sole
sewn correctly to the upper of his
shoe. Though my father was not to
attain full refugeehood, ever since
then he took care that every pair of
shoes that came out of his workshop
would serve its owner for many long
years of walking, in rain and in heat,
over stones and through mud, in
their going farther and their coming
hither, for if the decree of wander-
ing passed over you the first time,
no one will swear to you, upon the
head of your little daughter Cather-
ine, that it will the second time.
Earlier, Shammas describes stopping at
a West Bank checkpoint that had been set
up in 1980s, during the 13th year of the
Israeli occupation:
Arabesques
By Anton Shammas
Translated by Vivian
Eden. Afterword by
Elias Khoury
New York Review
Books.
280 pp. $17.95
face of my mind on the outskirts
of the village of Beitin, near the
military checkpoint, to the accom-
paniment of the stonecutters’ saws
and the beat of the masons’ mallets.
They swathe the scene in a myste-
rious veil of primal rhythm as they
rise from either side of the road,
pitching a canopy of sorts over its
length, and the line of cars creep-
ing towards the checkpoint goes
under the canopy and blends into
the pacing of the sentries and the
rhythm dictated by the blows of the
stonemasons’ mallets.
Throughout the novel, Shammas uses a
mix of fact and fiction entwined in a struc-
ture reminiscent of A Thousand and One
Nights, and thus the narrative meanders
like an arabesque. The section he calls
“The Tale” presents, via quasi-magical in-
cidents, the story of the author’s extended
family in their Upper Galilee village of
Fassuta, in Haifa and Ramallah, in Syria
and Lebanon. (The novel’s epigraph reads:
“Most first novels are disguised autobiog-
raphies. This autobiography is a disguised
novel.”) This part of Arabesques contains
one of my favorite passages, the sensuous
description of a young Anton being low-
ered into a cistern to clean it:
the enchanted presence surround-
ing me, and the bliss of solitude
permeates my anxiety.
As in A Thousand and One Nights, there
is the main tale and then many subsidi-
ary tales. After Arabesques’ first section,
a family memoir covering the author’s
youth, we arrive at a section called “The
Teller,” which is narrated by Shammas and
a fictional Jewish Israeli novelist named
Yehoshua Bar-On. Later on the “tale” is
picked up and continued. In this section,
we move from the world of Palestinians
in the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon to
Paris and then Iowa, focusing on Sham-
mas’s relationship with Bar-On and with
several Jewish and Arab women.
Shammas is now a literary editor at-
tending the International Writing Pro-
gram at the University of Iowa; meanwhile,
Bar-On arrives in Iowa City for the sole
purpose of observing Shammas, whom he
fondly calls “my Jew” and wants to use as
a model for the character of an “educated
Arab” in his next novel.
The two strike up a relationship of
sorts, even as Bar-On continues to aston-
ish Shammas, explaining: “I don’t think
I’ll ever have this kind of opportunity
again—to be under the same roof with
a person like that in ideal conditions of
isolation.” When Shammas replies wry-
ly, “I’m just another ‘intellectual,’ as you
call your educated Jews,” Bar-On laughs
and then apologizes: “All I want is to get
to know you from up close, while at the
same time preserving a certain amount
of aesthetic distance between us, for the
sake of objectivity, you know.” “I shall try
my best not to disappoint you,” Shammas
answers. “This time I’m going to sculpt a
well-rounded character,” Bar-On muses.
“A nice hefty Arab, human and warm.” He
goes on to elaborate:

All these thoughts rise to the sur-
Raja Shehadeh’s latest book is We Could Have
Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestin-
ian Memoir.
I breathe in the chill of the mildew
and the ancient odor of the stones
and the dark scent of the silt rising
from the bottom of the cistern, suf-
fusing the space around me with the
My Jew will be an educated Arab.
But not an intellectual. He does
not gallop on the back of a
thoroughbred mare, as was the
custom at the turn of the cen-
35

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tury, nor is he a prisoner of the IDF,
as was the custom at the turn of the
state…. He speaks and writes excel-
lent Hebrew, but within the bounds
of the permissible. For there must
be some areas that are out of bounds
for him, so nobody will accuse me of
producing the stereotype in reverse.
Later, Bar-On writes, “I’m thinking
about a motto for the whole thing…. I’ll
write about the loneliness of the Pales-
tinian Arab Israeli, which is the greatest
loneliness of all.” He thinks of the open-
ing line for his projected novel: “Having
come to Jerusalem from his village in the
Galilee, he learned that, like the coffin, the
loneliness of the Arab has room enough in
it for only one person.”
The scenes between Bar-On and the
fictionalized Shammas are deftly illustra-
tive of the discourse of power relations
between the Jewish majority and the Arab
minority in 1980s Israel as it manifested
itself in the treatment of Arabs in Hebrew
fiction. What Shammas (the nov-
36 elist) is doing here is reflecting
on two things: first, the control
B&A
B O O K S
over the representation of Palestinians
the
A R T S
When he wrote Arabesques in Hebrew,
that the hegemonic Israeli culture exerts, Shammas said, he was trying “to un-Jew
and second, the continual attempts by the the Hebrew language, to make it more
Arab-affairs “experts” who work in or with Israeli and less Jewish, thus bringing it back
the Israeli security apparatus that controls to its Semitic origins, to its place…. As En-
the Palestinian population to define the glish is the language of those who speak it,”
Arabs living in Israel. he added, “so is Hebrew.” But in the end, it
At the end of the novel, the fiction- didn’t work; his effort proved to be in vain.
alized Shammas asks himself how he For Palestinians, Hebrew remains what
“would have responded if Bar-On had Shammas described in that 2017 essay:
not been breathing down my neck, and “the language of the occupier, whose im-
whether the situation of Bar-On not plicit objective over some one hundred
breathing down my neck is at all possible, and twenty years of Zionism, has always
for better or for worse.” been to suppress, delegitimize, outlaw, and
R
annihilate the Palestinian Arabic. Hebrew,
ereading Arabesques more for the Palestinians, has always been the
than three decades after violent language of occupation and dispos-
it first appeared threw me session, the violent language of destruc-
back to that more hope- tion used as a weapon for the unmaking of
ful time in 1988 when it the body and soul of Palestinian subjects.”
seemed natural for Shammas to use He- A recent publication titled Hebrew–
brew, the language of the enemy, to write Arabic Phrase Book for Army and Security:
his novel. And when Conversational Arabic
such questions as the Dialect Using Hebrew
identity of the Israeli Transliteration, sup-
state could still be de- Three decades later, ports this. The book is
bated, before the take- the hope of the era in full of commands and
over by Israel’s right has chapters on such
wing and the pass- which Arabesques was topics as “Arresting,”
ing of the Basic Law, published is now gone. “En Route to a Target,”
which defined Israel as “Questioning Passers-
the nation-state of the Jewish people. The by,” “Violent Entry Into a House,” “Inter-
absence of hope and the drastic deteriora- rogation,” “Curfew Announcements,” and
tion in relations between the two nations “Entering a Village.” The book does not
that have since ensued are also reflective of have a single Arabic script.
the course that the two languages, Arabic The divergence between the two lan-
and Hebrew, have taken. guages, both in pronunciation and vocab-
When Arabesques was first published, ulary, went hand in hand with the effort to
Shammas wrote that it was “an Arab story create a new geography for the West Bank
in Hebrew letters.” The fact is that Hebrew by replacing the names of land features
and Arabic are so similar that at one point with ancient biblical names and establish-
Hebrew was written using Arabic script ing new towns and cities populated exclu-
and Arabic using Hebrew script. Now sively by Israeli Jews—an effort driven by
the two languages are farther apart than the infusion of large amounts of capital,
ever, reflecting the distance that has arisen mainly from the United States. It also
between the two nations. Writing in 2017 went hand in hand with the rise of a Jewish
about translating into Hebrew the poems state that used Hebrew to suppress Pal-
of Taha Muhammad Ali, whose village of estinians in the Occupied Territories, to
Saffuriyya was destroyed in the 1948 war, control every aspect of their lives and issue
Shammas noted: “The main challenge for orders demolishing their homes.
me…was in making the language that had What happened to the two languages
turned the life of Taha Muhammad Ali and reflects the larger picture. With the de-
the lives of more than eight hundred thou- mise of the two-state solution, and with
sand Palestinians, in 1948, the year of the the Israeli government in de facto control
Nakbah, into a trauma; in making it pause of the entire area of Greater Israel, the
and listen to the voice of his trauma.” Was gulf between Hebrew and Arabic has only
this also what Shammas had tried to do in widened. The hope reflected in Sham-
his novel almost three decades earlier? If mas’s experiment of writing a Palestinian
so, it appears that by now he has given up novel in Hebrew now seems to have van-
hope that this will ever happen. ished almost entirely; certainly there are
  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

no similar experiments happening in the

other direction. As the Israeli columnist
Yossi Klein noted in a 2013 article in
Haaretz, “Being raised on a certain image
of the Arab did something to us: Today
it is hard to find Arabic speakers in Israel
who are not Arabs or who were not born
in a Muslim country. Ninety percent of
the Arabs in Israel speak Hebrew, while
only 3 percent of Israeli-born Jews speak
Arabic. Last year only some 2,000 Jewish
high-school students took the matricula-
tion exam in the language of 20 percent
of their country’s residents. The teenagers
who took that test in Arabic did not see it
as a bridge: They saw it as a weapon, and
most of them, presumably, were inducted
into Unit 8200.” (This is the Israeli Intel-
ligence Corps unit, established in 1952, re-
sponsible for signal intelligence collection
and code decryption.)
In the same 2017 essay, Shammas con-
fessed that by 2005 he was already a tired,
retired, and beat-up translator who had
spent several decades of his life translating
texts to and from Arabic, Hebrew, and
English. “It wasn’t just that my translator’s
energies were depleted,” he wrote, “but
rather that my personal attitude toward
Hebrew, as a writer and translator, had
been totally reconfigured, to say the least.
Disillusionment is a nice word, but I’m
afraid it doesn’t even start to describe my
state of mind. It wasn’t only a feeling of an
outsider or an outcast but probably some-
thing close to what an alienated tourist
Better Than Reality
feels in a foreign land.” What makes special effects work?
As I read this, I thought it also captures
BY MALCOLM HARRIS
how I often feel in the West Bank, where
I’ve lived my entire life, as Israel persists in
making changes to the geography of the ver since i read media scholar julie turnock’s
territory by building Jewish settlements The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light & Magic and
and alternate roads that are turning us Pal- the Rendering of Realism, I haven’t been able to watch
estinians into strangers in our own land. a movie or TV show that contains special effects
Shortly after writing Arabesques, Sham-
without focusing on the wrong things. Instead of
GEORGE LUCAS LOOKS AT THE DEATH STAR (SUNSET BOULEVARD / GETTY IMAGES)

mas left Israel and emigrated to the United

States. He has published a number of bril-
liant essays but never another novel—and
his only novel has never been translated
into Arabic. One of Israel’s greatest suc-
cesses was in the revival of the Hebrew
language. And yet today it has enshrined
this achievement in proclamations like the
Basic Law, which declares that “Hebrew is
the language of the State” and thus adds
insult to injury by refusing to recognize
Arabic—the language spoken by 21 per-
cent of the population (roughly 2 million
people)—as another legitimate language
of the state.
dragons or landscapes from the past, I see particles
everywhere: fog and dust and mist and dirt and shrapnel and rain.
These digital details are meant to provide the texture of reality, but
now I see them as a constant blanket of
static coating the action. Sometimes ig- book is enlightening. But it’s also about far
norance is bliss, so if you enjoy admiring more: Turnock chronicles the rise of the
the realism of elven villages, don’t read contemporary effects industry in the 1970s
this book. and ’80s, the emergence of an oligopoly of
The Empire of Effects is ostensibly about studios based in California, and the way
Industrial Light & Magic, the special ef- that mega-budget franchises like The Lord
fects company that George Lucas started of the Rings and Harry Potter came to shape
in the 1970s to work on Star Wars and that the effects industry of today. By
N
ended up defining the look of big-bud-
get movies. As a close study of ILM, the
grafting her account of ILM onto
an incisive critique of popular
37
 B&A
B O O K S the
A R T S

image-making, Turnock also seeks to write a different kind of history, one that explains from Badlands that Turnock reproduces,
not only how ’70s-era special effects created a sense of reality in films, but how this par- except that Tatooine has two suns.
ticular historical sense ossified into something like reality itself. The motion-control realism that Lucas
What does it mean to say that the special effects in a movie or TV show—forgive me and the ILM team innovated became the
for including “streaming content” under these anachronistic but aesthetically preferable basis for the special effects films of the
categories—are “bad” or “good”? The question isn’t about whether they’re cool to look 1980s, transforming an experiment into
at or not; instead, it hints at some objective standards to which practitioners aspire, a a successful formula. This included hand-
“real” realism. But Turnock historicizes our realism, contextualizing its origins in a way held cameras (or the simulation thereof),
that allows for a deep critique of something we tend to take for granted. “There is no backlighting, and lens flares, all signature
transhistorical ultimate realism that effects aesthetics or cinema more broadly are evolv- elements of the decade’s filmmaking—
ing toward,” she explains. “Instead, different industrial and cultural historical contexts from Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan to
mold standards of realism at a given time.” Cocoon and Back to the Future.

G
eorge Lucas wasn’t trying
to permanently define vi-
sual realism when he made
Star Wars in the mid-1970s,
any more than mid-century
Christmas song authors were trying to rule
the holidays forever; but he was in the right
place at the right time, and he had the right
look, too. At the time he turned to Star
Wars, Lucas was still at the beginning of a
more traditional directorial career: His first
movie, THX 1138, was a dystopian science
fiction film starring Robert Duvall. His
second, American Graffiti, came out in 1973
and was a surprise nostalgic blockbuster—
a portrait of a handful of young people on
a single summer’s night in Modesto, Calif.,
in 1962. But for Star Wars, Lucas decided
to do something a bit odd: He would make
a retro film about the future. Harking back
to a previous generation’s optimistic sci-fi
futurism, Lucas wrapped his classic hero’s
journey narrative in New Age spiritualism
for a younger audience. The producers
at 20th Century Fox had closed their in-
house special effects studio, so Lucas had
another opportunity too: He would be able
to create a new effects style.
The production of Star Wars was in-
auspicious—over budget and behind
schedule—and few expected it to become
the cultural phenomenon it became. But
whether it was the clichéd narrative, the
fun robots, the Freudian subtext, or just
Harrison Ford and Darth Vader, Star Wars
pumped America’s pleasure centers full
of proton torpedoes. Part of the appeal
was found in its effects style—futuristic
but retro and gritty. Developed by the ad
hoc team that became Industrial Light &
Magic, this new style of special effects took
the film industry by storm. Lucas’s “effects
team created a composite mise-en-scène,”
Turnock writes, “that combined the New
Hollywood cinematographic
38 aesthetic with the flexibility of
animation (often drawing from
The Empire of
Effects
Industrial Light
& Magic and the
Rendering of Realism
By Julie A. Turnock
Texas University
Press.
368 pp. $55
experimental animation) to create a his-
torically determined style of photorealism
that aligned with 1970s cinematographic
styles.” This combination wasn’t just suc-
cessful; it was the original sin of today’s
special effects, with corporate culture and
counterculture merging into one.
Working at a time when “cool”
meant “rough”—think handheld shaky
cameras and natural lighting—the Star
Wars team found an innovative approach
to sci-fi. Their “motion-control” cam-
era rigs allowed Lucas to digitally pro-
gram shots for perfect repetition, which
allowed him to compose sequences out
of independently filmed elements with
relative ease. This was a major advance
over special effects teams just trying
their best, but it also entailed a smooth-
ness that was out of style. And so cou-
pled with this new smoothness was a
purposeful roughness: The aesthetic of
Star Wars was not to replicate reality
but to recognize the rough-and-ready
way that films imitated it. The Star
Wars synthesis meant mussing up the
cutting-edge effects, lest an outer-space
dogfight look too serenely artificial. Lu-
cas and his team developed this into a
renegade style that Turnock convincing-
ly compares to that of the so-called New
Hollywood classics Badlands and Easy
Rider. One hazy, contemplative evening
landscape shot of Luke Skywalker on
Tatooine is almost identical to a shot
Lucas also expanded his own empire.
Working with his buddy Steven Spiel-
berg, he improbably turned Harrison Ford
into the swashbuckling professor Indiana
Jones in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark and
1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Industrial Light & Magic, now firmly es-
tablished, handled the flares and melting
Nazis and continued to develop its own
approach to special effects. Following in
Lucas’s footsteps, Spielberg did too. As a
director and producer, he helped make the
ILM synthesis into a mainstream affair.
Moderating New Hollywood’s experimen-
tal gestures and sanding down its thematic
rough edges, Spielberg tapped ILM for
its style in a set of films that were full of
comparatively sanitized, sentimental, and
family-friendly stories: Close Encounters of
the Third Kind, E.T., The Goonies, Back to the
Future, Jurassic Park. Just as these movies
came to represent the medium in general,
their specific ILM realism became cine-
matic realism tout court.
Perhaps the best example of this is
the artificial lens flare. An anachronistic
“mistake” now frequently edited into
footage, the flare has become a common
bugaboo for cinephiles, many of whom
can rant for hours on the topic, but
the discussion in The Empire of Effects is
particularly good. “A lens flare cannot
be considered a feature of perceptual
realism,” Turnock writes, “because, gen-
erally speaking, one needs a camera lens
to ‘see’ a lens flare.” But “realistic,” again,
does not mean looking like reality; it
means looking like a cool movie from
1970, when things were “real.” Thus, a
jerky camera balances the too-smooth
effects of a pod race scene in The Phantom
Menace, a turn-of-the-21st-century Star
Wars prequel. In the pod-racing comput-
er game released with the movie, players
Malcolm Harris is the author, most recently, of
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capital-
ism, and the World.
even had the option to toggle lens flare
effects on and off.

T
oward the end of the
20th century, Hollywood
had grown dependent on
a diluted ILM aesthetic
that offered gritty realism
paired with family-friendly fun. This hap-
pened not just because directors uncon-
sciously reproduced the qualities of movies
they admired, but because the strategies
that scrappy filmmakers had made use
of to work around their low budgets also
enabled studios to get away with shoddy
effects work, even on their biggest proj-
ects. Dim lighting punctuated by bright
spots reduces the level of detail required,
whether the object is a latex E.T. pup-
pet illuminated by flashlights or a glow-
ing-eyed Iron Man riding a hovercraft in
the dark. A monster kept off-screen except
for glimpses is a good way to get the most “A provocative piece of scholarship “Carlson’s study will be welcomed
out of a cumbersome animatronic shark… that uncovers the misunderstood by anyone angered, conflicted
or a computer-generated one produced (and/or generally ignored) about, or interested in gun control
on a limited budget and within a short relationship between anti-Black and devotion to the right to bear
time frame. Environmental haze gives racism and antisemitism.” arms in the U.S.”
depth and texture to computer-generated —Andrew S. Curran, coeditor of —Library Journal
elements while reducing the need for finer Who’s Black and Why?
details. This common grammar allows
cost-cutting film producers to contract out
discrete tasks to a variety of effects studios
based on their perceived importance, with
the margin for jankiness extending as the
visual cliches become fully entrenched.
Similar to many things in the ’90s, movies
tended to get bigger and worse.
At a certain point, however, the ILM
approach went too far. The special effects
industry began to combine the prevail-
ing imitation-janky aesthetics with even
newer computer-generated imagery. The
results were impressive at first—think
Terminator 2’s liquid-metal assassin—but
just as American consumers came to re-
ject the high-fructose corn syrup they
swilled in the 1980s and ’90s, so too did
they begin to reject “CGI,” a term that
developed bad connotations.
One of the first signs was the chilly
reception Star Wars fans gave the trilo-
gy’s 20th-anniversary rerelease. With a “[Martin] focuses not just on “A definitive microsociology
bulked-up ILM approach and a couple Hoover’s notorious racism of undocumented life in the
decades’ worth of technological progress, but also on his promotion of a United States.”
Lucas returned to his movies to correct distinct brand of conservative —Douglas S. Massey,
errors, align them with the forthcoming evangelicalism.” Princeton University
prequels, and complete effects he could —Adam Hochschild, The Nation
only dream of in the ’70s. The rerelease
of the original Star Wars trilogy was a con-
trolled test for 20 years of the film indus-
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try’s Star Wars–ification, and the results quotes from Favreau and his effects collab- bouncing prequel Yoda and his whirling
weren’t great. Most notoriously, Lucas orators that make his agenda clear: Rather lightsaber drew jeers for their lack of re-
changed a scene to make Harrison Ford’s than feature flashy CGI kaiju battling to alism, though the computer effects were
Han Solo shoot the alien bounty hunter destroy simulated cities, Iron Man would cutting-edge.
Greedo in self-defense rather than in cold hark back to the ILM-defined ’70s and The Mandalorian’s puppet choice was
blood, sanding off one of the few rough ’80s. Favreau wanted his heroes to feel as acclaimed in the press, though the ef-
edges left in his polished, family-friendly much human as super and for the effects fects team confessed that there were shots
flick. But it was too much of a presump- to follow suit, and the approach paid off: where they wanted more than the puppet
tively good thing, and this small change Iron Man and its sequel were critical and would offer. In those cases, they used
spawned the conspir- commercial hits—for CGI with the puppet as an imagined set
atorial anti-revisionist adults, teens, kids, and, of restraints. Describing a scene in which
credo “Han shot first.” most of all, for the new Baby Yoda uses “the Force,” animation su-
It was a classic case The Empire of Effects owner of Marvel, Dis- pervisor Hal Hickel told Variety, “We were
of fans suing a cre- shows how today’s use ney. Favreau was soon trying to make sure we didn’t do more than
ator on behalf of his tasked with heading the puppet could do, and that we didn’t
creations, but Lucas of gritty special effects high-stakes photore- break what’s awesome and charming and
had simply reapplied has a long history. alistic remakes of the perfect about the puppet.” As Turnock
his sentimentalizing animated Disney clas- notes, the goal is no longer to find out
filter—except this time he was working sics The Jungle Book and The Lion King, what technology can accomplish at its
from his own, diluted product, not Easy both of which he directed to box office bleeding edge, the way the effects makers
Rider, and the lens flare wasn’t hitting success. ILM didn’t work on these films, did in 2003, but rather to see just how well
hard enough anymore. but once you’ve read Turnock’s book, the it can ape an aesthetic that is now almost
Even so, the Star Wars prequels were company’s style is unmistakable in the new five decades old.

T
a box office triumph and marked a strong remakes. The next time you watch a “real-
advance in visual effects, though they were istic” Disney movie that contains a bunch he Empire of Effects shows
a mixed blessing for those who had long of effects, take note whenever a beam of how today’s return to pre-
hoped for a new Star Wars trilogy. The light pierces the darkness of a cave or a CGI effects is part of a
prequels were formally an ILM affair, but ruin or something like that; it will drive longer history—one de-
one full of slick new toys: CGI is used you nuts. fined by a realism that
nearly nonstop in the three movies. Even Favreau had his heart set, though, on never wanted to appear truly real. Against
if kids enjoyed the bouncy, pseudo-Rasta the ILM original: Star Wars. And like two the floaty Yoda of Attack of the Clones and
CGI alien Jar Jar Binks, he didn’t win in-laws who happen to have already met, Revenge of the Sith, the new ILM aesthetic
over many adults. The prequels also set he started working on Star Wars projects is gravity-bound, even if the characters do
up a number of pop-culture punch lines when they both joined the mouse fami- spend a lot of time flying around. Picking
that didn’t really land. Bad dialogue and ly. While finishing work on Iron Man at up on Favreau’s rhetoric, Turnock calls this
goofy albeit groundbreaking effects were ILM, Favreau met Dave Filoni, a Lucas formula “grounded” realism, both because
key elements in the original movies, too, deputy leading the work on Star Wars’s the elements are expected to conform to
but the new ones lacked their charming Clone Wars, and offered himself as a voice gravity and because the digital effects are
upstart quality. As the kind of mass-market actor. After his success with The Lion King, grounded in their practical predecessors.
entertainment IP that invites a 10-figure Favreau pitched a Star Wars series to Filo- The approach, “modeled on ILM’s 1980s
acquisition offer from Disney—the con- ni for Disney’s new streaming service. style of highlighting the effect of the hu-
glomerate purchased Lucasfilm in 2012 The bounty-hunter story The Mandalorian man camera operator’s mistakes,” Turnock
for more than $4 billion in a cash/stock would do for this franchise what Favreau writes, “is designed to provide that analog
split—the new Star Wars movies delivered. had done for Iron Man, taking it back to feeling to a largely CGI production.” The
They no longer represented a renegade the “realistic” 20th century and the orig- unconscious nostalgic gestures of the ’80s
vision but rather the status quo. inal gunslinging space westerns—a move, and ’90s were combined with the con-

L
it’s worth noting, that Joss Whedon al- scious nostalgic commercial program of
ucasfilm and ILM weren’t ready accomplished with the series Firefly. the 2010s to produce a field of Disney
yet Disney properties The Mandalorian was a huge success, content that openly aspires to visual and
when Jon Favreau made led by the breakthrough character Baby emotional regression rather than experi-
Iron Man in 2008, but the Yoda. To bring Baby Yoda to life (though mentation, adventure, or progress.
nerdy Favreau anticipat- the character’s name is not actually Yoda, And yet there’s always a gap between
ed the IP turn. And rather than use the and the “baby” is supposed to be some- the expectations of grounded realism and
schlocky effects that defined 1990s and thing like 50 years old), Favreau and the the threadbare corporate products; a dev-
early-2000s CGI, he sought to restore ILM team used a puppet, as in the original il-may-care visual attitude can camouflage
the earlier era’s gritty realism, to revive series. This contrasts with 2002’s Attack only so much cost-cutting carelessness.
the original ILM style he’d grown up of the Clones, which featured a fully CGI Since Turnock wrote The Empire of Effects,
with. This was to be ILM’s sec- Yoda battling Count Dooku (Christo- the tensions she explores have become
40 ond bite at the apple. pher Lee) amid floating rocks and digital
Turnock cites a number of “force lightning.” Immune to gravity, the
a subject of media discussion. During a
video feature for Vanity Fair, Taika Waititi,
  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

the director of Thor: Love and Thunder,

and star Tessa Thompson talk over a scene
from the movie. “Does that look real?”
Waititi smirks about a bluish-gray CGI
rock man named Korg. “In that particular
shot? No, actually,” Thompson answers,
as both of them laugh. “It doesn’t really,
right? When you look close?” Putting
aside what it would mean for Korg to
appear “real” to adult viewers when they
“look close,” the flippant distance with
which the Hollywood A-listers addressed
the effects kicked up a dust storm in the
VFX community, which escalated from
Reddit threads to the mainstream press.
“To get work, the houses bid on a
project; they are all trying to come in
right under one another’s bids,” one ef-
fects worker explained to Vulture. “With
Marvel, the bids will typically come in
quite a bit under, and Marvel is happy
with that relationship, because it saves
it money. But what ends up happening
is that all Marvel projects tend to be un-
derstaffed.” That, combined with decen-
tralized production, inflexible deadlines,
and micromanaging so severe that indus-
try professionals call it “pixel-fucking,”
makes Disney’s aesthetic an investment
in divestment, a bet against labor at
film’s most atomic level. The bigger the
production, the more leverage Disney
has over its contractors; the more the
company can get away with, the less care
and holistic attention can be seen in the
ultimate product. This “less” is a growth
A World Inside Out
industry, and it shows. The countercultural fiction of Katherine Dunn
By tracing the history of special ef-
BY NORA CAPLAN-BRICKER
fects since the 1970s, Turnock shows
readers how the tools that shaped the
counterculture’s alternative visions lent efore katherine dunn published her celebrated
themselves to a new set of labor relations novel Geek Love in 1989, she was a struggling sin-
in which a stronger, more concentrated gle parent in Portland, Ore., paying rent by serving
corporate bloc took more and allowed hash browns, painting houses, and pouring beers at
less. Technical and aesthetic innovation
a biker bar, where she became adept at breaking up
blended seamlessly into workplace in-
novation: regional arbitrage, deunion- knife fights. If this lean time was a prelude of sorts,
ization, and the general empowerment it also came after an important chapter in her life had ended: the
of capital vis-à-vis labor. On second wide-open years of the late 1960s and early ’70s, when Dunn had
thought, perhaps “seamlessly” is too dropped out of Reed College to go vaga-
strong a word: If you look closely, the bonding around the world. More an ob- movements had largely dissipated, as had
seams are often painfully visible. As in server of the era’s revolutionary energies interest in her first literary efforts. Her
the Waititi example, even the ostensible than a participant, she had also become relationship with her son’s father had
creators can’t always bear to look at a writer during this period, penning two ended around the same time that the
their own work frame by frame. But in a slim, savage novels about recalcitrant mis- new novel she was working on—set at a
Disney world, where the narratives and fits—Attic and Truck—that were snapped fictional version of Reed in the ’60s—was
visuals are both clichéd, we are relieved up by a publishing industry seeking voic- rejected by her publisher. In the late ’70s,
of even the most minimal expectations es who could speak for a generation of the sum of these disappointments
of critical viewership. Thank God—we
have to get back to work anyway. N
dropouts. But by the time Dunn had
moved back to Portland, the era’s youth
left Dunn living in a tiny stu-
dio apartment, where her young
41
ILLUSTRATION BY LIAM EISENBERG
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son slept in the closet. It was in these years that she started working on Geek Love. her in jail for passing a bad check—before
On the surface, Geek Love had little in common with Dunn’s previous fiction, all enrolling at Portland State and then Reed.
of which had been loosely autobiographical. The story of a family carnival whose pa- There, she took courses in creative writ-
triarch begets a brood of ready-made attractions, it offered its readers an electrifying ing, mixed with the bohemian offspring
countercultural allegory about a world that—until its spectacular implosion—spurns of the East Coast professional class, and
the normative and celebrates the strange. Al Binewski and his clan live in their own, began work on her novel Attic, inspired by
wild universe, where the air flashes with colored lights and smells like “popcorn and her experience of being incarcerated. After
hot sugar,” and the biggest “freaks”—in the family’s proud terminology—are the big- falling in love with a poet during a trip to
gest stars. But if, in rejecting the values of the straight world, the characters present a the hippie district of Haight-Ashbury, she
fun-house-mirror reflection of certain ’60s impulses, the novel views their utopianism dropped out of college in 1967 and spent
with an undercurrent of cynicism: The freewheeling carnival turns out to conceal an years on the move with her boyfriend
all-too-familiar set of power structures, and the Binewskis’ dazzling world is undone by through Central America and Europe,
the garden-variety scourges of patriarchal violence, envy, and greed. giving birth to a son and publishing two
Geek Love made Dunn a literary celebrity and won her an avid following. Though it novels by the age of 26.
has sometimes been criticized for using Though Attic and Truck established the
disability as a metaphor, the novel became spiky rhythms Dunn would refine in later
“a totem for outcasts,” in the words of prose, they were also narrow, claustropho-
Molly Crabapple, a book “likely to be Toad bic experiments. Reading them feels like
referenced in a tattoo, an illegal mural, a By Katherine Dunn getting lost in a maze where surreal out-
strip club dressing room, or the smokers’ Foreword by Molly bursts of violence and scatological reveries
parking lot outside a home for troubled Crabapple rear up from nowhere to confound the
girls.” Yet Dunn’s most famous novel was Farrar, Straus and reader’s sense of orientation. But Dunn’s
also the last she ever published. Afterward, Giroux. distrust of the social realm is already ap-
she wrote countless columns about boxing 352 pp. $28 parent in both books. The protagonist of
for local and national outlets—eventually Attic—a girl who has been imprisoned for
collecting some of her pieces in the 2009 trying to cash a fraudulent check—is an
volume One Ring Circus: Dispatches from outsider among outsiders, observing from
the World of Boxing—and tried for many Dunn considers the problem of freedom the outskirts of the fraught society that
years to produce a work of fiction set in the from a zero-sum perspective: Her charac- coheres among inmates. She finds that the
same subculture. That novel, Cut Man, re- ters seek the latitude to follow their every recourse to violence usually supersedes the
mained unfinished when she died in 2016. impulse, but they learn in the process how impulse for solidarity: “We are so afraid of
We finally have a new Dunn novel— one person’s self-sovereignty can infringe eating each other,” she realizes. “Sharks
not Cut Man, but Toad, the book she failed on another’s—how, as Dunn once said in do—wolves do—it is irresistible.” Truck,
to publish in the ’70s. The story of Sally an interview, “within any kind of social the story of two misanthropic adolescent
Gunnar, a working-class college student structure…freedom becomes defined as runaways, also depicts a misfit confronting
who falls in with a circle of campus hippies, power.” In Toad, this realization propels the inherent cruelty of others. As its teen-
it paints a slapstick and ultimately scathing her protagonist into a self-imposed her- age protagonist, Dutch, submits herself to
picture of the 1960s counterculture. Sally’s mitage. For Sally, the only true escape the schemes of her megalomaniacal best
friends try on Eastern philosophy and from the tyranny of other people is a total friend, the novel sketches out the themes of
back-to-the-land self-sufficiency, leaving retreat into what she describes as the cult Dunn’s later work, showing how the social
campus first for a farm where they be- of one’s own comforts and whims. worlds created by dropouts and “freaks”

L
come hapless homesteaders, and then for are built on their own forms of subordina-
a monkish retreat where they meditate in ike Toad’s protagonist, tion. “I’d rather be his sucker than theirs,”
the mountain air. The more radical their Dunn sought to liber- Dutch thinks, choosing the cult she’s con-
ideas become, however, the more regres- ate herself by fleeing the structed around her companion over the
sive are the results of their experiments: If working-class world of pieties of the conventional world.
Sally’s friend Sam achieves some freedom, her origins. She grew up Although Dunn’s early success stemmed
it’s only by conscripting his girlfriend Car- in a family of mechanics and tenant from her association with a countercultural
lotta into a wifely servitude that is tradi- farmers “so poor that they once ate their milieu, in truth, Attic and Truck scorned the
tional in all but name. pet rabbit for dinner,” according to a social movements of the ’60s. In the notes
Dunn’s books are often described as biographer. Dunn’s mother, an aspiring for her second novel, Dunn wrote that
cult classics, which fits not only in the artist whose talent was never given the its characters were “not hippies, yippies,
sense that they inspire devotion but also in space to bloom, sometimes raged vio- liberals, radicals or representatives of any
the sense that cults of personality always lently at her life’s limitations: She was other group,” but loners seeking to get
appear in them. This was a natural subject known to chase Dunn with a broomstick free on their own terms. Of herself and her
for a writer obsessed with the itch to es- and once threw a screwdriver at her that boyfriend, she wrote elsewhere, “we were
cape convention but alert to the ways that lodged, upright, in her calf.
the flight from social constraint Dunn left her family’s home in Port- Nora Caplan-Bricker is executive editor of Jew-
42 can ensnare us in new structures land when she was 17, joining a traveling
of domination. In all her novels, magazine-sales crew—a job that landed
ish Currents. She has also written for The New
Yorker, The New Republic, and Harper’s.

fundamentally selfish—convinced that the
world couldn’t be ‘saved’ and even if it could
be, we had enough to do to keep our heads
above water, and weren’t the ones to do it.”
Geek Love, too, resisted easy identification
with any existing political vision, even as it
levied a trenchant critique of power. The
novel featured another outsider protag-
onist witnessing the rise of another het-
erodox tyrant. Olympia “Oly” Binewski,
a “bald albino hunchback dwarf,” is the
least spectacular product of her parents’
experiments, granting her liminal status in
a family that values the unusual. Her “more
gifted” siblings struggle against one anoth-
er, competing to outearn each other. Even-
tually, her brother Arty—known as “Aqua
Boy” because he was born with flippers for
limbs—develops a cult following to expand
his audience, urging his acolytes to free
themselves from conformity by self-muti-
lating to look more like him. He also uses
his position as the eldest son and presumed
heir to best his rivals, the conjoined twins
Electra and Iphigenia, with a brutality that
ultimately blows up the family carnival. In
the aftermath of this final conflagration,
Oly chooses to live alone, seeking safety in
solitude and anonymity.
Like Attic and Truck, Geek Love stood
in the tradition of the grotesque, full not
only of bodies that shock but of the shock-
ing things that bodies do. Its pages pulsed
with blood, steamed with excrement, and
burned with destructive forms of devo-
tion. Mikhail Bakhtin, in Rabelais and His
World, once identified the grotesque as
an aesthetic intended for the leveling of
hierarchies—a characteristic of carnivals,
where the mighty mix with the masses—
but in Dunn’s hands it was a means to
document them instead. Bakhtin called the
carnival “a world inside out”; Dunn twists
its signature aesthetic to a subtler purpose,
using it to reveal the contortions that come
of claiming to be liberated from what one
has in fact internalized.
T
oad takes the struggle to
escape social convention as
its theme as well. Like her
predecessors, Sally Gun-
nar begins her story bent
on a ruthless independence. She lives in
a barely furnished attic room in Portland,
where she plans to write plays and enter-
tain no old lovers in order to keep her
domain “free of emotional associations.”
But she finds herself inadequate to her
own idyll. “All those hours, alone in my
 T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023
peaked room, were spent in the grave,” their delusions while soaking up their
she tells us: radical ambiance. At other moments, it’s
her doubt that wounds her friends most
I have an insidious conviction that deeply. Carlotta resents Sally’s repeated
between the onset of puberty and insistence that she should give birth in a
the age of thirty, people…do not hospital instead of at home—hearing it,
exist without someone looking at perhaps correctly, as less an expression of
them. I didn’t. After thirty, I suppose care than of skepticism. In moments like
we become a corporeal composite of this, the subtle dangers of being mutually
what all our viewers have witnessed, constituted—“a community gelatin”—
a kind of community gelatin. begin to reveal themselves. Collectivity is
a circuit, as Sally realizes: Mutuality can
Searching for a witness to her exis- lead to mutual harm. If Sally’s cynicism
tence, Sally finds Sam, whose romanti- sends a crack through Carlotta’s self-im-
cism would seem to suit him for the part. age, then Carlotta’s hurt fury maims Sally
“His way of liking someone was to glorify in turn. By the time Sam and Carlotta
them past recognition,” Sally recalls. In move off the grid to a cabin where their
fact, Sam’s gaze transforms everything it countercultural dream dies along with
falls upon, turning his home—a derelict their infant son, Sally has largely with-
rental where stray cats shit in the hall- drawn from their lives.
way—into an intellectual salon and Sam But while Sally is pained by the absur-
himself, according to his ever-shifting fix- dity of the pair’s self-delusion, it is only af-
ations, into a bold frontiersman or a Zen ter she loses touch with them that her story
sage. At first, it seems that even he has no takes its most grotesque turn. In an other-
cause to change Carlotta, a dream girl who wise tautly structured novel, which uses
waltzes barefoot into the novel and em- Sally’s present-day seclusion to frame her
braces his every far-fetched idea. But his ’60s memories, the interweaving of a third
form of attention does strand about the years
transform Sally, from in between introduc-
a proto-punk in big es a comparatively
boots into a conduit Toad takes as its shapeless element.
for a working-class subject the struggle It is in these sections
wisdom that her new that the hypocrisy of
friends find exotic and to escape social her bohemian milieu
appealing, even if most convention. finally pushes her over
of it is sourced from a the brink. She realizes
homesteading sister-in-law and a mother that the upshot of women’s liberation, at
who bakes her own bread. least in her case, is the willingness of her
When Sam and Carlotta pursue their poet lover to live off the money she makes
hippie fantasy by moving to a farm out- at a doughnut shop—even as he disdains
side Portland, eventually dropping out of her need for sexual pleasure and despises
school, Sally makes regular visits, serving her doughnut-padded physique. After he
as a third leg for their dysfunctional dyad. leaves her, Sally has a breakdown that is
She injects a note of practicality into also a break with society: She runs naked
their insouciant nirvana, delivering gro- through the wintry streets of Boston, rev-
ceries to supplement their scant crops and eling in her unruly body, unleashing her
bringing a manual for expecting parents anomie on a shop window, and taking a
after Carlotta discovers she’s pregnant. literal piss on the unfairness of it all.
In setting up house, the pair morph from In rejecting the agonies of love and
coliberationists to—functionally and then companionship, Sally finds a pocket of
legally—husband and wife, meaning that freedom: For her mental distress, she is
Carlotta milks the goat, cooks the meals, granted a permanent disability pension,
and tends the vegetable patch, while Sam which becomes the basis of her lonely
gets stoned and goes skinny-dipping retreat. She moves back to Oregon and
with friends. lives by the belief that true independence
Throughout the novel, Sally seems entails a refusal not only to fall under
torn about what kind of witness she ought the power of others but to be witnessed
to be. At times, she blends into the mass by them at all—to participate
of dope-smoking poseurs who throw par- in the economy of perception
ties at Sam and Carlotta’s place, abetting that makes us into one another’s
43
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creations. There’s a bittersweetness to

the
A R T S

Dunn’s description of Sally’s hermitage:

Her narrow life is full of small compen-
sations, including “a diet of ice cream and
murder mysteries” and the latitude “to
move and sleep and fling my arms out no
matter how the soft undersides swing.”
If this is the best one can hope for, it’s
humble in the extreme—a tiny ambit of
freedom inhabited by someone who has
lost faith that even liberty could be good
for much of anything.

D
unn’s son has said that
when his mother looked
back on Toad, she found it
too unremittingly cynical.
But if its vision of libera-
tion struck her as unsatisfying, that raises
the question of whether she ever arrived
at another one. Though an individualistic
concept of freedom predominates in our
political order, it is possible to understand
liberty as a collective project: “a longing
to share in power rather than be protect-
ed from its excesses,” as Wendy Brown
writes in States of Injury, her seminal cri-
tique of modern liberalism, “to generate
futures together rather than navigate or
survive them.” What would it look like,
we might ask, to be free with one another
instead of alone?
Dunn seems most alive to the pos-
sibility of this kind of freedom in her
later writings on boxing. In the gym, “the
violence is ritualized and contained in the
Everyday Divides
ring,” she writes in a 2005 piece collected Kelly Reichardt’s cinema of class conflict
in One Ring Circus. “The deliberate, arti-
BY ALEX KONG
ficial crisis of the ring reveals your spinal
identity—who you are in the fire, in pain,
in fear, in defeat, and more dangerously, nimals abound in the films of kelly reichardt.
in triumph.” And yet outside the ring, Some are loyal companions, such as the titular
the boxers are expected to embrace an canine of Wendy and Lucy. Others are kept in servi-
ethic of mutual respect and even kindness: tude by their human owners, like the oxen that pull
“Outside the ring, nobody is hard on
a wagon train in Meek’s Cutoff. Usually they occupy
you.” People who can’t restrict their thirst
a more ambiguous place, like the horses cared for
MICHELLE WILLIAMS AND HONG CHAU IN SHOWING UP (ALLYSON RIGGS / A24)

for domination to its sanctioned space are

ejected from the social world of the gym.
Here, at last, Dunn seems to have found
a glimmer of the kind of collectivity that
evaded the characters in her fiction: a place
where, in her experience, the assumption
of shared risk secures total membership,
and tenderness—expressed as care for one
another’s bruised and bloodied bodies—is
the norm. Most of all, a place where, by
mutual agreement, people make room
for the ugliness they carry inside
44 them, guarding a zone in which
to hold nothing back. N
by a ranch hand in Certain Women: They are both a commodity
she manages and her only source of companionship in the barren
isolation of rural Montana.
In her latest film, Showing Up, Reichardt next morning, her landlord, a more
introduces two new members to this unruly successful artist named Jo (Hong Chau),
menagerie: a house cat and a pigeon. The discovers the pigeon and insists on nurs-
cat belongs to Lizzy (Michelle Williams), ing it back to health. Jo leaves to work
a sculptor who has a day job as an admin- on her sculptures after bandaging it up,
istrative assistant at a small college. In the blithely foisting the bird onto a reluc-
middle of the night, it mauls a pigeon that tant Lizzy, who’s taken a day off from
has somehow gotten into the bathroom, work to finish up her own art. For her
after which Lizzy unceremoniously dumps
the injured bird out of the window. The
part, Jo seems to think of all this as a
wholesome bonding exercise, but as a
  T H E N AT I O N 6.12–19.2023

celebrated artist who enjoys the luxury of working on her sculptures full-time—not it clandestinely, under cover of nightfall,
to mention the rent payments she collects from Lizzy—she fails to register why to make “oily cakes,” which they sell to
it might be an imposition on Lizzy’s time. Good intentions are irrelevant to the huge success. Briefly, Cookie and King
power differentials striating their relationship, which exert a quiet but constricting Lu appear poised to get away with it.
pressure on Lizzy’s options. “History isn’t here yet. It’s coming, but
Last year saw a spate of films, from Triangle of Sadness to The Menu, that took we got here early this time,” King Lu
up the topic of class conflict and the bitter resentments produced by inequality. says, explaining why they need to act fast
Reichardt’s work, however, couldn’t be more different from those sensationalist to seize their fortune. But he and Cookie
exercises in wish fulfillment. Rather than indulging in Manichaean fantasies about are far from immune to the misalignments
heroes and villains, Showing Up depicts how capitalism’s hierarchies poison even that haunt Reichardt’s characters. To begin
minor, everyday interactions between people who more or less mean well. By set- with, their very mode of existing is out of
ting in motion a chain of events that highlight those hierarchies, the pigeon and the sync with the world around them. The
cat mirror the condition of Reichardt’s easy intimacy they fall into, living together
human characters, who also find them- danger, one in which she painstakingly in the same home and bound by a fierce
selves swept up by forces beyond their records the money she spends in a note- loyalty, is strikingly alien to what goes on in
control and comprehension. book: “HOT DOG: $1.50,” “TRAIL their surroundings.

K
MIX: $3.00.” Cookie, in particular, is a man out of
elly Reichardt’s work can The ruthlessness of such accounting his time in a frontier setting defined by
be divided into two dis- hangs over Reichardt’s vision of contem- a brutal masculinity. The first thing we
tinct categories: period porary America, which is governed by see him do is set an upside-down sala-
pieces that unearth the numbers on the scale of populations, too; mander right, for no reason other than
roads not taken in Amer- as Wendy puts it, she is making her way his inherent kindness. That core of be-
ican history and films set in the present to Alaska because “they atific goodness remains
that dwell on the devastation left in the need people.” There are miraculously unsullied
wake of those foreclosed possibilities. simply not enough de- by the constant cruelty
While the former films sometimes em- cent jobs in too many ar- Showing Up depicts meted out both around
brace a more sanguine hopefulness, the eas of the United States; how capitalism’s him and on him; Cook-
latter partake in a gritty realism that the surplus workforce ie seems to enjoy an
refuses to shy away from the cruelties produced by deindus- hierarchies almost magical exemp-
of the modern economy. Wendy and trialization and recur- poison even minor tion from the gravita-
Lucy follows a drifter named Wendy rent financial crises is interactions. tional pull that drags
on her way to Alaska in search of a too large for a strained everyone else into the
seasonal job at a fishery, and her dog, economy to support. gutters of abasement.
Lucy, who goes missing after Wendy is What Reichardt’s contemporary characters And those rare occasions when Cook-
arrested for shoplifting dog food. Night are up against, in other words, is nothing ie’s kindness is reciprocated—such as
Moves dials up the despair over moder- less than the imperious indifference of cap- the moment when he is sheltered by a
nity’s barbarism even further, depicting italism’s arithmetic. This is why Wendy’s stranger while being pursued by the cow
a group of activists who conclude that only option to secure a livelihood is to seek owner’s men—are even more striking:
eco-terrorism is their only option in the new frontiers in Alaska, as a world with no Reichardt leaves their mystery intact, as
face of environmental destruction. room to accommodate her moves on. Her if this antiquarian fantasy world were
In these contemporary films, Re- misfortune is in being in the wrong place governed by a set of laws no less impene-
ichardt’s characters struggle in vain to at the wrong time, arriving at the party trable and bizarre than those of a Studio
carve out a place in a country that has after the spoils of progress have already Ghibli film.
no use for them. In Certain Women, a been reaped. For Reichardt, the cataclysm Meek’s Cutoff also attends to the strange
lawyer deals with a difficult client who’s of history spreads unevenly, ravaging some saplings that struggled to take root in the
trying to sue his former employer after areas while leaving others untouched, and early days of the United States. The film
being injured on the job. Skilled at his her characters’ fates are determined largely fictionalizes a real incident from 1845: A
work but quick to anger, this client by whether they can elude its reach. wagon train of settlers, led by a hapless

I
embodies the archetype of a certain guide named Stephen Meek, gets lost in
kind of blue-collar masculinity, thrash- f Reichardt’s present-day a barren stretch of Oregon. In this beau-
ing against the market’s devaluing of characters suffer from a tiful but hostile frontier, where even the
his abilities. He shares with Wendy this kind of belatedness, then water turns out to be poisonous, the men
condition of being excluded from the those in her historical films and women of the caravan negotiate the
benefits of economic progress, although arrive unseasonably early. hierarchies that underpin their nascent
her situation seems even worse: The First Cow tells the story of a pair of male community. As if a solvent has eaten
need for work pushes her into a life friends, Cookie and King Lu, who meet through the veneer of civilization, the
on the road fraught with precarity and by chance in the lush wilderness of the building blocks of their incipient social
Oregon Territory. When they learn that order stand revealed—and look
Alex Kong is an associate editor at Harper’s a rich businessman has imported the first momentarily, thrillingly open to
Magazine. cow into the area, they hatch a plan to milk being reconstructed in a more
45
 B&A
B O O K S

egalitarian configuration. As the women

the
A R T S

Meanwhile, Jo fails at her basic duties ness is both its status and its subject, as
attempt to exert some agency over their as a landlord, constantly procrastinating if the women they depict were begging
fate, a bubbling conflict over the wagon on having Lizzy’s broken water heater forgiveness for the space they take up.
train’s direction eventually explodes into repaired; by way of an excuse, she points As Lizzy stands, still unshowered, in the
a confrontation charged with the prom- out that “I have two shows, which is in- shadow of Jo’s commanding sculptures,
ise of revolutionary violence. sane!” And when Lizzy must forfeit a rare these frighteningly concrete validations
But like First Cow’s Cookie and King day off to take care of the injured pigeon, of her own perceived unworthiness
Lu, the women on this ill-begotten jour- the disparity between them takes on an bring on a paroxysm of humiliation.

I
ney have come too early. The possibility even sharper cast. While Lizzy attends to
of freedom they glimpse is only a tem- the bird, Jo is preparing her installations n Showing Up’s final scenes,
porary aberration. Meek’s solemn pro- for one of her upcoming shows. When the competing strains of
nouncement toward Lizzy tries to call her defeat and possibility that
the film’s end suggests after the pigeon’s con- unspool across Reichardt’s
something even dark- dition worsens, Jo de- films are left suspended
er: that the story of In Showing Up, liberately ignores her in a delicate counterpoint, as they are
the caravan, and also Reichardt’s competing to continue working. throughout her work. After a series of
the civilization that Lizzy’s time is taken escalating conflicts between Lizzy and
will spring from it, strains of defeat and up by a trip to the vet, Jo, the gallery show that Lizzy has been
“was written long be- possibility finally meet. which also costs her working on over the course of the film
fore we got here.” The money. Jo tells Lizzy is finally set to open. The opening party
fear that society’s course has been fixed in she can deduct it from her next rent pay- brings together the people from the var-
advance becomes even more pronounced ment, but for Lizzy, finding herself at the ious strands of Lizzy’s life, including her
in Reichardt’s contemporary films, which mercy of her landlord’s whims only makes divorced parents and troubled brother,
reverberate unceasingly with the sound of matters worse. who threaten to upend the event with
individual agency shattering against the The mismatch between Lizzy and Jo is their bickering. Lizzy begins to spin out
indifference of world-historical forces. mirrored by their different personalities. with anxiety—fretting over her family,
The fate of the dazed exiles and discarded Lizzy is sullen and withdrawn; when a over a cheese plate, over the damage that
castoffs who stumble through Reichardt’s student asks her for some coffee from one of her pieces suffered in the kiln—
films, whether they inhabit the past or her office’s supply, Lizzy replies curtly, before Jo shows up in a gesture of support
the present, is to be shipwrecked on the “This isn’t a cafeteria.” Jo’s magnetic ex- for Lizzy’s big moment. She has brought
shoals of an inhospitable historical mo- uberance, on the other hand, is easy to the pigeon with her—now healed and
ment, when the environments in which love, attracting the college faculty and comfortably nestled in its shoebox—as a
they might have flourished either no lon- her fellow artists to a party that Lizzy is token of goodwill. But when the pigeon
ger exist or have yet to come into being. conspicuously left out of. It’s hard to tell is set loose in the gallery, Lizzy’s brother
Like arriving on a subway platform just whether Jo’s greater success is a product manages to grab it and set it free outside.
as the train is pulling away, the miasma of that exuberance or vice versa—and Jo and Lizzy watch as the bird takes off
of futility that pervades Reichardt’s work that ambiguity infuses the film with an into the sky and then decide to walk to a
stems from the disjunction between the undercurrent of angst. Like First Cow’s nearby store to get some cigarettes.
world’s forward momentum and an indi- Cookie, Lizzy is propelled by an inner The contrivances required to bring
vidual’s inability to arrest it. drive that is admirably impervious to about this sudden and not entirely con-

S
the signals (or lack thereof) she receives vincing reconciliation raise the unset-
howing Up deepens Reich- from the external world; she makes art tling prospect that Reichardt decided to
ardt’s portrait of the calci- not in pursuit of recognition but because engineer a happy ending. The pigeon’s
fied inequalities that took expressing herself is a necessity. But when return to nature is like a miraculous pris-
hold after the alternative her subordination to Jo is ratified at ev- on break from the inescapable antago-
possibilities depicted in her ery turn, it becomes progressively more nisms of everyday life. This suspiciously
historical films were extinguished. As an difficult to ignore the suspicion that Jo’s neat conclusion only underscores how
administrative assistant, Lizzy is near the superior position is simply the expression foreign the prospect of harmony and
bottom of the rigid hierarchies that struc- of some natural order. equality is to the world we in fact inhab-
ture academia, with her skills wasted on These simmering resentments burst it, whose obstacles do not dissolve quite
designing flyers for more celebrated artists into the open after Lizzy, in search of a so easily. Even if Lizzy and Jo have been
and her wages redirected in the form of bathroom at the college equipped with brought together by the bird, their new-
rent back to one of those artists. Jo peers a shower—because Jo still hasn’t fixed found reconciliation seems temporary.
down at her from atop the pyramid of so- her hot water—stumbles onto Jo’s ex- In the film’s concluding shot, a gently
cial status and class. While Lizzy rushes to hibit and its towering, brightly colored soaring camera puts them on the same
prepare her new work for a modest gallery installations. Their vivacity blooms ef- visual plane as they walk away. They fi-
showing, Jo is working on a set of bigger fortlessly, in contrast to the decidedly nally appear to be on an equal footing—
and more prestigious exhibits, one unobtrusive figurines that we see Lizzy but only for the duration of the shot.
46 of which will take place at the col- toil over painstakingly. Lizzy’s work is
lege where Lizzy works. beautiful, but delicate and fragile; small-
In the end, perhaps only the pigeon is
truly free. N
 E S T. 1 8 6 5
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