Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 133

A Bill for the South African President

South Africa’s National Treasury ordered President Jacob Zuma to repay $510,074 of state funds he used to upgrade one of his estates, Reuters reported Monday.

In March, after a protracted investigation, the Constitutional Court found Zuma used $16 million for non-security upgrades to his Nkandla home. From March:

In 2014, South Africa’s public protector, Thuli Madonsela, issued a report that found funds were used for non-security renovations and recommended that Zuma repay the money. But Zuma said the public protector’s recommendation was advice, not an order, and claimed other officials authorized the upgrades without his knowledge. He then ordered his own investigations conducted by the police and public-works ministries. One report described Zuma’s swimming pool as a reservoir to fight fire and, therefore, a security measure. Two opposition parties—Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the Democratic Alliance (DA)—appealed to the Constitutional Court.

On Wednesday, the Constitutional Court unanimously found Zuma’s actions unconstitutional. The chief justice, Mogoeng Mogoeng, said by “failing to comply with the remedial action, the president thus failed to uphold, comply, and respect the constitution.” He described Zuma’s denials and investigations as “substantial disregard” for Madonsela.

But Monday’s decision is unlikely to placate the opposition, which condemned Zuma after March’s ruling and called for his impeachment. In a statement, Mmusu Maimane, leader of the Democratic Alliance, praised the Treasury’s decision but demanded more.

The fact that President Zuma is now legally obliged to pay back a portion of the money spent at Nkandla is to be welcomed. President Zuma must pay this amount without delay, and he must pay it personally. However, paying back the money does not mean the original corruption is forgotten. This is not the end of the road for Jacob Zuma and his corrupt cronies; it has only just begun.

A Weekend of Pride

Two weeks after the Orlando shooting, the LGBTQ communities in San Francisco and New York held their annual parades. Tight security and memorials made this year more somber than years’ past, as marchers made sure Pulse victims were remembered with signs, photographs, and chants. Barbara Poma, the owner of Pulse, attended the New York City event. “Orlando and the world's gay community are strong and united,” she said. “We will not allow evil to prevail.”

The First Vessel Through the New Panama Canal

A Chinese ship carrying more than 9,000 containers became the first to travel through the Panama Canal’s newly expanded locks, which are meant to double its capacity.

On Sunday, the 158-foot-wide and 984-foot-long ship, owned by Cosco Shipping Panama, was towed by tugboats into the locks. The ship represented a new type of boat, sometimes called mega vessels, that are seen as the future of the international shipping industry. Before the new expansion, a boat of that size could not have fit. More than 30,000 people came to watch the historic moment.

An aerial view of COSCO Shipping Panama in the upper chamber of the Cocoli Locks. #PanamaCanalExpansion pic.twitter.com/Hht0gxbgdK

— Panama Canal (@thepanamacanal) June 26, 2016

COSCO Shipping Panama completes its transit through the Cocoli Locks, marking the end of the Expansion Inauguration. pic.twitter.com/5SdO4quVdI

— Panama Canal (@thepanamacanal) June 27, 2016

The original canal was completed in 1914. It was built by the U.S., and handed to Panama’s control in 1999. Construction on the new expansion began in 2007, and was scheduled for completion in 2014, but delays and labor strikes had prolonged the inauguration date.

It cost $5.25 billion to expand the canal. About 40 ships use it every day and it is the quickest way to move goods by ship around the Americas. But it could face competition soon. A Chinese company has proposed to build a 172-mile canal through Nicaragua, and it would be both deeper and wider than the Panama Canal.

Game of Thrones: The Head That Wears the Crown

Every week for the sixth season of Game of Thrones, Christopher Orr, Spencer Kornhaber, and Lenika Cruz discussed the new episodes of the HBO drama. Because no screeners were made available to critics in advance this year, we'll be posting our thoughts in installments. (David Sims is filling in for Christopher Orr for this week’s finale.)

David Sims: For six seasons, Game of Thrones has been promising the future: Daenerys the conqueror, glorious Stark revenge, Cersei’s cup of madness running over. Well, it took its time, but the future is finally here, in all its grim glory. “How about the fact that this is actually happening?” Tyrion asked Daenerys midway through this super-long finale episode, and I, for one, appreciated the reminder. After many false starts and narrative detours, there was a tremendous sense of momentum to “The Winds of Winter,” a feeling of bows being tied up, of story threads dovetailing in satisfying fashion (with plenty of murder and darkness mixed in, of course). I loved it.

Part of the appeal of George R. R. Martin’s series has been his efficient subversion of every fantasy trope and his unwillingness to navigate toward easy, heroic conclusions for his characters. That conundrum has seemingly tripped him up as he tries to write the end of his book saga, but make no mistake: Game of Thrones is coming to an end, with the long-awaited sight of Daenerys’ fleet of warriors (Dothraki, Unsullied, and Westerosi among them) serving as an epic punctuation to an episode filled with closure. For all the misery of “The Winds of Winter” (and there was plenty), there were also healthy soupçons of wonder, from Sam beholding the glorious Citadel of the maesters (a solid Hogwarts knock-off) to the multi-colored banners of Daenerys’s new navy.

How about that misery, though? There was a haunted quality to Ramin Djawadi’s piano score in the opening montage, as many crucial characters dressed for the final time, but once Cersei donned that scaly leather armor (looking straight out of Dune), I steeled myself for the worst. Cersei’s story has always been two-fold: She’s a political chess player who wrongly thinks she’s one move ahead of everyone else, and she’s a fearsome mother who wants to protect her children while not quite knowing how. Her wildfire plan was perfectly simple—how else to rid yourself of your enemies (RIP, Margaery) than by blowing them all up at once? But it sealed her fate as a Mad Queen worthy of the vacated title, and the price she paid (Tommen’s artfully shot, silent suicide) felt dreadfully appropriate.

No wonder there was a funereal sense to that coronation scene, with Cersei still clad in black—she finally has the power back, but talk about a poisoned chalice. Her kids are all dead (she couldn’t even bother with a proper burial for Tommen), Jaime looks ready to turn against her, and her seat of power is a smoldering wreck. A side note: Why do any nobles still bother to live in King’s Landing at this point? You’d think when the ruling queen blows up one of the landmarks and roasts half the royal court inside it, that’d nudge you into hunting for real estate in sunnier shores. Perhaps Oldtown? Things seem peaceful over there, even if the Citadel desk clerks are a bit persnickety.

A much more enjoyable bloodbath came up at The Twins, where Walder Frey met an end just as awful as the one he provided for Robb and Catelyn Stark, munching on his own sons (in pie form) before getting his throat cut by Arya. Yes, it was a little clean from a storytelling perspective, but why else would you have the viewer suffer through two years of assassin camp? Seeing the Starks begin to reunite on the same continent had the same heft as seeing Daenerys’s fleet—Arya may still lurk in the shadows, and Bran might stick to hanging out by the weirwood trees, but there’s just something reassuring about having them all (minus Robb and Rickon) be closer together.

For all the misery of “The Winds of Winter” (and there was plenty), there were also healthy soupçons of wonder.

Then again, the finale also brought a quiet coup at Winterfell as Jon Snow was seemingly legitimized by popular demand, crowned the new King in the North simply for his military prowess. The ambiguous note of that triumph was thudding, but necessary. I maybe didn’t need the knowing glances from Littlefinger (he’ll never stop scheming, no matter how many times Sansa politely declines his hand in marriage), but I did tense up at the idea that Jon should ride to glory mostly thanks to his gender after he mostly blew his grand battle with the Boltons. Also, part of his appeal as a great hero in Martin’s narrative is his experience with the Free Folk, and the great empathy it gives him for the people of Westeros beyond their family allegiances—I don’t want him to lose that once he’s swaddled in the robes of a king.

But perhaps it’s inevitable, because “The Winds of Winter” also canonically sealed the long-running theory about Jon’s parentage by finally revealing just what happened at the Tower of Joy. Young Ned, indeed, found his sister Lyanna near death, bleeding out after what seemed like a medieval Caesarean section, and made her brother promise not to tell Robert that the child was fathered by Rhaegar Targaryen, the oldest son of the Mad King. “The Winds of Winter” was already wrapping things up, so it made sense for David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to make it official by acknowledging the truth of the long-running R+L=J theory. I appreciated the artfulness of the info-dump—Lyanna’s repeated “Promise me, Ned,” and the cut from that baby’s black eyes to Jon’s haunted stare—but more than anything, the scene felt like a gleeful thumbs-up to the audience.

That’s fine. The sixth season of Game of Thrones has sometimes struggled to justify the existence of its weird side-plots as it barrels toward a conclusion, and there were some threads that will feel incomplete forever (again, RIP Margaery). Others may get picked up again next season (the Hound is still floating around). But the trade-off is the sheer glee that comes from watching the big puzzle pieces finally fall into place. Lenika and Spencer, were you similarly pleased customers?  

Entries from Lenika Cruz and Spencer Kornhaber to come

Gay Marriage in the United States, One Year Later

It’s been a year since the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in the United States. But for Julie Goodridge, who sued Massachusetts in 2001 for that right, there’s more work to be done in the LGBT-rights movement.

“One of the things that’s been really interesting is realizing that so many people think that we’re done, that we’ve got all the rights we need now that we can marry one another,” Goodridge said in a recent interview. “And of course, that’s not true. And it’s actually sort of distorting to have marriage in states where you can be kicked out of your home, where you can be refused service, where you might be ejected from the bathroom of your choice, and where you could lose your state job. It’s a tricky patchwork of protection depending on what state you live in.”

She pointed to Orlando, Florida, where this month dozens of people were shot and killed at a gay nightclub, a place of refuge for LGBT people. She was concerned that some political figures have described the massacre only as a terrorist act, and not as a hate crime.

She paused.

“You probably wanted me to say something like, ‘Oh, it feels so great, I can’t believe we’ve had marriage for a full year,’” she said.

Hillary Goodridge, Julie’s former partner, agreed. “I never saw same-sex marriage as the be-all and end-all of anything,” Hillary said in a separate interview.

The Goodridges, now divorced, were two of the seven same-sex couples in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, the case that in 2003 allowed gay people to wed in the U.S. for the first time. When I called Julie last June, minutes after the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges was announced, she was in tears. Before the ruling, same-sex marriage was already legal in 37 states and the District of Columbia, and a majority of the U.S. population supported it. Federal recognition—the recognition that prohibiting gay people from marrying violated their constitutional rights—was enormous. The ruling led to a surge in same-sex marriages in the year since, especially in the 13 states where it was outlawed.

But laws that provide other rights to LGBT people vary by state—the “patchwork of protection,” as Goodridge calls it. Twenty-nine states do not have laws that prohibit housing discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT advocacy organization. Thirty states do not prohibit discrimination in public accommodations, which includes governmental spaces and private businesses, like restaurants, movie theaters, and shops. Sixteen states do not have protections against discrimination in hiring; in these states, a gay person can get married one day and be fired the next solely because of their sexual orientation.

The Goodridges said they expected backlash to Obergefell—after all, they’d been through it in Massachusetts. In the year since the Supreme Court ruling, some state legislatures have considered so-called “religious freedom” legislation that would allow people to refuse certain services—wedding ceremonies, therapy, whatever their business offers—to gay people on the basis of their religious beliefs. Last September, Kim Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky, became national news when she was jailed for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses to couples. In recent months, “bathroom bills,” laws that require people to use public bathrooms that correspond with their gender at birth, have put the trans community squarely at the center of national debate over LGBT rights.

There have been wins for the LGBT equality movement, too. Major American companies, like American Airlines and Apple, have vehemently denounced bathroom bills. The Obama administration last month issued a warning to public-school administrators that discrimination against transgender students violates federal civil-rights law. Last week, President Obama announced the creation of the first national monument in U.S. history to honor LGBT civil rights.

Hillary Goodridge sees hope in the generation of Americans growing up in a post-Obergefell era. She recently spoke to a group of students at Brookline High School in Massachusetts at the school’s “day of dialogue,” a day of assemblies on issues within the LGBTQ community—something she couldn’t imagine taking place in the early 2000s.

“For them, it was stunning that there was a time when it was such a big deal that a man couldn’t marry a man or a woman couldn’t marry a woman,” she said.

Britain, Post-Brexit

—In a historic vote, the United Kingdom voted last week to leave the European Union. In response, Prime Minister David Cameron said he will step down by October.

—The stunning move raises major questions not only about how the U.K. will extricate itself from the 28-member bloc and the relationship it will have with it, but also about the country itself, and of the EU, post-World War II Europe's most ambitious political experiment.

—The pound has since slid to a 31-year low against the dollar on the news, and stocks are sharply lower, as are Dow futures.

—We’re live-blogging the events as they happen, and you can read how it all unfolded below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).

2:17 p.m.

Could Scotland veto the Brexit vote?

Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland—which voted 62 percent in favor of staying in the European Union—raised the possibility in interviews Sunday morning. On Saturday, the Scottish National Party leader, who two years ago pushed for and lost a referendum on Scottish independence from the United Kingdom, vowed to hold discussions with the European Union aimed at preserving Scotland’s position within it even as the rest of the United Kingdom withdrew.

Speaking to the BBC on Sunday, she said that, “from a logical perspective,” the U.K. should be required to seek the consent of Scottish Parliament to move forward with extricating itself from the EU, though she acknowledged, “I suspect the U.K. government will take a very different view on that.” She said that if such “legislative consent” were requested, she would ask parliament to withhold it. (Sturgeons’ SNP is the largest party in Scotland’s Parliament, with 63 of 129 seats.)

The vote, if held, might have more political consequences than legal ones, however, as the Scottish Conservative MP and constitutional law expert Adam Tomkins pointed out via The Guardian:

[The Scottish Parliament in] Holyrood has no power to block Brexit. It is not clear that a legislative consent motion would be triggered by Brexit, but withholding consent is not the same as having the power to block. The Scottish parliament does not hold the legal power to block [the U.K. exiting the EU].

June 26 at 11:03 a.m.

The turmoil within the opposition Labour Party has intensified. Six Labour cabinet members resigned Sunday, following after Hilary Benn, who was fired by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn Saturday after Benn told Corbyn he had lost confidence in Corbyn’s leadership. According to The New York Times, the following people have quit:

Heidi Alexander, who speaks for the party on health issues, stepped down, with others following: Gloria De Piero, youth affairs; Ian Murray, for Scotland and Labour’s only remaining member of Parliament there; Lilian Greenwood, transport; Lucy Powell, education; and Kerry McCarthy, environment.

Greenwood sharply criticized Corbyn in an interview Sunday that was reported in The Guardian:

Lilian Greenwood, who resigned earlier as shadow transport secretary, has just told Sky News that having sat in the shadow cabinet for nine months she is clear that Jeremy Corbyn is not suited to be leader.

She said she would not be standing herself for the leadership. She did not have the skills set for that, she says. Asked who she would like to see leading the party, she said there were a number of suitable candidates.

Corbyn has no plans to buckle, according to a statement from his office to several news organizations. “There will be no resignation of a democratically elected leader with a strong mandate from the membership,” it said.

June 25 at 9:42 p.m.

The turmoil within Britain’s two largest political parties continues to grow after Thursday’s stunning vote.

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn sacked Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, late Saturday night amid reports Benn was orchestrating an internal coup against Corbyn’s leadership. Two Labour MPs previously said Friday they are pushing for a vote of no confidence against Corbyn, which could come as early as next week.

Corbyn has faced criticism from within his party and from other Remain campaigners for not working hard enough to prevent a Leave victory, a claim he strongly disputes.

Among the Conservatives, Leave figurehead Boris Johnson is the likely frontrunner to replace David Cameron as party leader and prime minister. Fellow Leave campaigner Michael Gove, the British Justice Secretary, backed Johnson Saturday night.

But his road to Downing Street isn’t clear yet. Conservative MPs wary of Johnson’s leadership are reportedly rallying behind Home Secretary Theresa May, who backed Remain but kept a low profile during the campaign. Other top Tories who could seek the post are Energy Secretary Amber Rudd and former Defense Secretary Liam Fox.

Updated on June 25 at 3:34 p.m.

While the world—and certainly its financial markets—are acting as if the sky has fallen on its head, the German Foreign Office provides some perspective on its Twitter feed:

We are off now to an Irish pub to get decently drunk. And from tomorrow on we will again work for a better #Europe! Promised! #EURef

The Urgency of LGBT History After Orlando

In an evening filled with tear-inducing reactions to the killing of 49 people at an Orlando gay bar, the most powerful speech of Logo’s Trailblazer Honors, which aired Saturday night, arrived in the inimitable voice of Harvey Fierstein.

"These last two weeks have been very hard for all of us, especially for gay people,” Fierstein said, accepting an award for his career as an out gay man on Broadway and in Hollywood. “As soon as we heard the news we knew who took out that gun and shot … He took a gun to prove he was a man, and destroyed hundreds of lives. It wasn't just 49 dead people. All of those other people that were shot—all of their friends, all of their families' lives destroyed. Because someone told him he could not be him."

As soon as we heard the news we knew: Fierstein’s comment gets at the thudding feeling that many felt upon seeing the headlines about Pulse nightclub. What had happened was not, in fact, the unthinkable. It was a particular grand display of something that has been thought about time and again—the awful inevitability of violence against queer people by people raised to hate them, even or especially by those who may have been one of them.

Logo is Viacom’s LGBT-focused TV network, and its yearly Trailblazer Honors would seem to have an impossibly wide mission: a queer State of the Union, Hall of Fame, and Oscars in one. The network’s current flagship program, RuPaul’s Drag Race, is a celebration of gay fabulousness and fantasy, peppered with only occasional references to trauma and danger that helped forge its aesthetic. The Trailblazer Honors totally flipped that dynamic, as is probably right both in light of Orlando and in light of the facts of LGBT history. It ceremonially ratified the recent bloody reminder that, even in the era of so many triumphs for queer rights, being a sexual minority means being bound to the potential for danger and persecution.

The night opened with a montage of famous faces, queer and not, making like the Human Rights Campaign in recent days and pledging to advocate for gun control. Orlando then remained omnipresent through the evening: Almost every speaker acknowledged it, there were three musical tributes to it, and, most potently, there were two speeches focused on individual victims of the shooting. In a sad symbol of the interconnectedness of the community, those speeches came from LGBT celebrities with direct ties to the tragedy: The actor Wilson Cruz spoke about his mother’s stepsister Brenda McCool, a mother of 11 who died shielding her son Isaiah from gunfire, and the Drag Race contestant Jade Sotomayor eulogized friend Eddie Sotomayor, Jr. Both were able to highlight the specific fact that it was Latino people mainly targeted two weeks ago.

The thought of Orlando gave urgency to other topics of the ceremony. The tennis legend Billie Jean King received the night’s first honor, and while the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” match would seem to define her as a victor in history, she also spoke about the painful treatment she received upon being outed as a lesbian. She also marveled at the gains made in the current era, where Barack Obama made her one of the first LGBT beneficiaries of a Medal of Freedom in 2009. But her experience visiting Russia as part of the 2014 U.S. Olympic delegation was sobering: “It was a great experience, but I felt very unsafe. And I can’t imagine what our brothers and our sisters and all genders are feeling that have to go through their days in Russia.”

“You have fucked with the wrong group of people.”

Posthumous honors went to Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, trans icons who were both pivotal to the Stonewall riots—which just this week was recognized in a national monument—and to the liberation movement that rose out of it. Tragedy pervaded their stories too; in 1992, Rivera was found dead at a spot near where she’d reportedly been harassed before. Representing the present day, the Syrian refugee Subhi Nahas told of homophobic atrocities and oppression by ISIS and others in the Middle East; his testimony made the image of the Iraqi soldiers and boyfriends Nayyef Hrebid and Btoo Allami (the subjects of the documentary Out of Iraq) kissing in the audience almost unbearably poignant.

The litany of issues yet to be addressed by the march of progress seemed daunting by the end of the night: queer homelessness, work discrimination laws, the North Carolina bathroom bill, all against the backdrop of mortal peril for LGBT people at home and abroad. But all the attention to struggle in turn gave renewed meaning to the notion of pride, especially during the segment toward the end of the ceremony honoring The Advocate magazine. Founded in response to pre-Stonewall police harassment of gay bars, it has existed for the entirety of the modern queer-rights movement. In his acceptance speech, its editor-in-chief Matthew Breen called out politicians and religious leaders who “methodically work to keep us down and keep the madmen armed.”

“You have fucked with the wrong group of people,” he said to roars and applause. “In case you have not been paying attention for the last 50 years, this community is strong, resilient, very effective, and mightily pissed off.”

Brexit: Can They Change Their Minds?

Lest we think the Euroskepticism displayed this week by British voters is new, let me present a scene from the BBC’s Yes, Minister, a comedy about the U.K. civil service’s relationship with a minister. The series ran from 1980 to ’84 (and, yes, it was funny), at a time when the European Union was a mere glint in its founders’ eyes.

The Europe being referred to in the scene is the European Economic Community (EEC), an eventually 12-member bloc established in the mid-1950s, to bring about greater economic integration among its members.

In many ways, the seeds of the U.K.’s Thursday referendum on its membership in the European Union were sown soon after the country joined the now-defunct EEC in 1973. Then, as now, the ruling Conservative Party and opposition Labour, along with the rest of the country, were deeply divided over the issue. In the run-up to the general election the following year, Labour promised in its manifesto to put the U.K.’s EEC membership to a public referendum. Labour eventually came to power and Parliament passed the Referendum Act in 1975, fulfilling that campaign promise. The vote was held on June 5, 1975, and the result was what the political establishment had hoped for: an overwhelming 67 percent of voters supported the country’s EEC membership.

Fast-forward to January 23, 2013, and what has become known as Prime Minister David Cameron’s “Bloomberg speech,” delivered at the company’s European headquarters. In it, Cameron cited public disillusionment with the EU, the successor to the EEC. He said the 28-member bloc was headed in a direction Britons had not signed up to. Indeed, in the preceding four decades, all of Europe came to be treated as a single market (with the Single European Act of 1986), allowing the free movement of labor and goods across the bloc; the bloc moved toward a single economic and monetary union (with the Maastricht Treaty of 1992) that would result in the euro (which the U.K. opted out of); and more powers were given to the European Parliament (with the Treaty of Lisbon of 2007).

For those who believed the EU had become too large, too powerful, and too distant, this was a nightmare come true. As Cameron put it in his Bloomberg speech: “They resent the interference in our national life by what they see as unnecessary rules and regulation. And they wonder what the point of it all is. Put simply, many ask, ‘Why can’t we just have what we voted to join—a common market?’”

Cameron said a vote on the U.K.’s membership in the EU was inevitable. It was better, he said, to hold it sooner rather than later to ensure a “remain” vote. In 2015, after much public debate over the issue, Parliament passed the European Union Referendum Act to make such a public vote possible, and in February of this year, Cameron announced the referendum would be held on June 23. And, by now, we all know how that ended, and the hand-wringing and warnings of doom that followed. But there is, in theory, an out: The 2015 Act did not make a provision for the referendum’s result to be legally binding. The law did not spell out the next steps in the event of a “leave” victory. That job, in the U.K., falls to Parliament because the country, like some other parliamentary democracies, views the legislature as sovereign.

So, what’s next? The Treaty of Lisbon for the first time set in place a mechanism for an EU member to leave the bloc—the by now well-known Article 50. But the referendum’s results were not an automatic trigger for its invocation. Parliament must invoke Article 50 in order for Britain’s negotiations on how it will extricate itself from the EU can begin.

A joint statement by the EU’s top officials, no doubt miffed that the U.K. had voted to withdraw despite multiple appeals from the European public and incentives to stay from European leaders, was clear: “We now expect the United Kingdom government to give effect to this decision of the British people as soon as possible, however painful that process may be. Any delay would unnecessarily prolong uncertainty. We have rules to deal with this in an orderly way.”

But in a speech Friday, in which Cameron announced he was stepping down in October, the British prime minister made clear that the next steps would be deliberate—and at the same time offered some wiggle room for his successor.

“A negotiation with the European Union will need to begin under a new Prime Minister,” he said, “and I think it’s right that this new Prime Minister takes the decision about when to trigger Article 50 and start the former and legal process of leaving the EU.”

Could the current or future British prime minister put that decision on hold? They certainly have the legal right to do so. It is, however, highly unlikely that (s)he or Parliament, where Cameron’s Conservatives hold a majority, will ignore the wishes of 52 percent of its people (despite a petition signed by more than 2 million Britons that asks them to do just that)—even if it means alienating some of the U.K.’s allies in Europe. After all, in the words of Yes, Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby, “Diplomacy is about surviving until the next century—politics is about surviving until Friday afternoon.”

Arizona's Death Penalty Fades Away

Arizona prison officials told a federal court Friday they could no longer perform executions due to problems obtaining lethal-injection drugs, effectively ending capital punishment in the state for the foreseeable future.

The Arizona Department of Corrections said it amended its execution protocols to omit midazolam and that the state lacked supplies of either sodium thiopental or pentobarbital, according to a filing in a federal district court in Phoenix, Arizona. All three drugs are sedatives used to render inmates unconscious during a lethal injection.

The department’s “lack of the drugs and its current inability to obtain these drugs means that the Department is presently incapable of carrying out an execution,” the filing said. The state’s current supply of midazolam is also scheduled to expire before a lawsuit by five death-row inmates challenging the state’s use of the drug will be completed. Buzzfeed has more:

In January, in the wake of the ruling, Arizona had tried to get approval to move ahead with executions with the use of a supply of midazolam that was due to expire in May, but U.S. District Court Judge Neil Wake denied the states’ request to dismiss the inmates’ challenge — meaning that the midazolam supply would expire before it could be used.

Now, the state is removing one of its four execution protocols that included the use of midazolam, it informed the court on Friday.

Its other three protocols include either the use of pentobarbital or sodium thiopental, and the state told the court on Friday that it has been unable to obtain either drug. (It has attempted to import sodium thiopental from India, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration detained the shipment when it arrived at the airport in Phoenix.)

Arizona’s lethal-injection problems began during the botched execution of Joseph Wood in July 2014. Witnesses said Wood gasped for air in apparent agony for one hour and 57 minutes before dying, long enough for his lawyers to file a motion to stay the execution.

One of the drugs Arizona used to execute Wood was midazolam, a controversial sedative also used in Oklahoma’s botched execution of Clayton Lockett two months earlier. In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly upheld midazolam’s use in lethal injections in Glossip v. Gross.

Despite the ruling, the death penalty is an increasingly unusual practice in the 31 states that permit it by law. Only nine states have carried one or more executions since 2014, with Texas and Missouri accounting for the bulk of them.

Part of the decline stems from the growing scarcity of lethal-injection drugs. Pfizer, for example, announced last month it would tighten controls to prevent states from using its products for executions. Similar efforts throughout the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. and Europe effectively severed lawful supply lines for state death rows throughout the United States.

But the death penalty is also losing political favor, with polls showing public support at its lowest levels since the Supreme Court revived capital punishment in 1976. On Friday, the Democratic Party's platform committee approved a measure in its national platform calling for the death penalty’s abolition.

O.J. Simpson and the Counter-Revolution of 1968

Every fall Sunday, when I was a kid, half an hour before the pre-game shows and an hour before the games themselves, I would tune into the latest offering from NFL Films. This was the pre-pre-game show—an assembly of short films derived from the massive archive of professional football. Steve Sabol, whose father founded NFL Films, would preside. He’d offer and then throw it to Jon Facenda or Jefferson Kaye, who would narrate the career highlights of players like Gale Sayers, Earl Campbell, or Dick “Night Train” Lane.

“Highlights” understates what NFL films was actually doing. The shorts were drawn from some the most beautifully shot footage in all of sports. It wasn’t unheard of for NFL Films to go high concept—this piece on football and ballet, with cameos from Allen Ginsberg and George Will, may be the definitive example. Great football plays would be injected not with the normal hurrahs, but with poetry. When Facenda, for instance, wanted to introduce a spectacular touchdown run by Marcus Allen, he did so in the omniscient third person: “On came Marcus Allen—running with the night.”

I watched that Super Bowl run live when it happened. I can still remember leaping up and down in my parents’ living room. But the NFL Films version, with its sweeping chords, is so powerful that I remember it through that lens. Indeed Todd Christensen—who was on the field in that very game—remembers it in the same way. The point of all of those sweeping chords was to convince the viewer that professional football was not just a sport, but an elegant tradition. The NBA was a game. The NFL was heritage.

More importantly, NFL Films was propaganda—beautiful, gorgeous, and artfully rendered propaganda, but propaganda all the same. Some of that same footage appears in the first episode of Ezra Edelman’s majestic documentary O.J.: Made in America, though to very different effect. The five-part film is as great as everyone says—a majestic work which doesn’t uplift, but haunts. Edelman agrees with the NFL—football is heritage—but proceeds to put that heritage within the context of the flawed human history that makes football so necessary to us all.

In this business, it’s worth restating that O.J. Simpson was a dazzling tailback and Edelman frames him in all of his balletic beauty. We see Simpson—high and angular—his hips lurching in one direction, his head swiveling in another. We see him accelerating at an uncanny rate—surrounded by swarm of defenders, and then just as suddenly alone in the open green. He seems to have an advanced sense of space and time, twisting defenders in knots, juking them until their sense of balance distorts and they fall as though struck by a great blow. There’s one shot of Simpson falling untouched on a play and the defender falling with him. But unlike the defender, Simpson gets up and keeps on running. “This is how it is supposed to be,” he said, attempting to capture the sentiment of breaking a big run. “This is correct. This is the natural state of things.”

The contrast—awe and loss—works because football is itself a great contrast: a game of terrible, violent, brain-bashing beauty.

NFL Films usually backs its highlights with loud, martial music. Edelman prefers the kind of subtle pianos and soft strings more appropriate for an in memoriam segment. Where NFL Films typically celebrates a running back gliding through a hole, Edelman seems to be mourning the death of some part of Simpson, or the death of some part of us. The contrast—awe and loss—works because football is itself a great contrast: a game of terrible, violent, brain-bashing beauty. As beautiful as Simpson is cutting through the field—and he is beautiful—you always know that the subtext of that beauty is 11 men paid and primed to inflict as much violence as the rules permit upon his body.

The employment of contrast goes beyond the music. Edelman pairs the violence of the football field with the violence of America itself. Simpson came of age in the late ’60s, during a time when America was exploding with riots and assassinations. He dazzled at USC—a veritable utopia built within walking distance of Watts. While other athletes perceived the overlap between sports and politics, Simpson and his coterie would have none of it. “For us, O.J. was colorless,” says the Hertz CEO Frank Olsen. And then the racist underpinnings of that “colorless” status become clear. “He’s African,” says the ad man Fred Levinson. “But he’s a good looking man, he almost has white features.”

What O.J. seemed to perceive—and then exploit—was the extent to which the larger country was interested in his talents and disinterested in the forces that produced them. At one point Edelman asks O.J.’s USC teammate Fred Khasigian what he thinks about when he thinks of 1968. Khasigian pauses for a minute. We see a collage of images—Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, the violence at that year’s Democratic convention. And then he answers:

I think of winning all the games, getting O.J. famous. Everybody on campus thinking this is the greatest thing on earth. That’s all we thought about. There was nothing else going on.

In fairness, Khasigian is likely aware that more was “going on” that year. But he captures the insular sense at USC and around football in general—the notion that sport can, somehow, be greater than all of us. But it is not. And the contrasts that Edelman teases out throughout the film are not artifacts of the past. Though Edelman is skeptical of its import for Simpson, the question of CTE hangs in the background throughout the series. As do the ways in which black athletes are used up and disregarded at the college level. Episode One is a counterweight to the kind of slick football propaganda NFL Films fed us as kids. It works not by being delivered as an anti-football screed, but by showing all the beauty and ugliness of the game, all at the same time, and thus giving the truest depiction of pro football I’ve ever seen.