Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 14

'We Are Better Than This Ban': Dissent Over Trump's Immigration Order

U.S. State Department officials are expected to sign a memorandum opposing President Trump’s executive order on immigration, saying “We are better than this ban.”

Trump’s executive order suspends the U.S. refugee intake for 120 days and bans Syrian refugees for the foreseeable future. It also bars from the country all citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen—regardless of their visa status for 90 days. The Trump administration says the move is to make the U.S. safer.

But in a draft memo obtained by the The Atlantic, and first published by Lawfare, the State Department officials say: “Looking beyond its effectiveness, this ban stands in opposition to the core American and constitutional values that we, as federal employees, took an oath to uphold.”

Asked about it at the daily White House press briefing on Monday, Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, said: “They should get with the program or they should go.”

The memo would be issued on the State Department’s Dissent Channel, which was established in 1971 during the Vietnam War as a venue for diplomats to freely express their concerns with U.S. policy. Responses to messages within the channel are guaranteed within two working days, according to the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), which represents foreign-service officers; a substantive reply is to be provided with 30-60 working days, AFSA adds.

The U.S. State Department expressly forbids reprisals for those who use the channel to express views that are contrary to stated U.S. policy. Here’s more:

Officers or employees found to have engaged in retaliation or reprisal against Dissent Channel users, or to have divulged to unauthorized personnel the source or contents of Dissent Channel messages, will be subject to disciplinary action.  Dissent Channel messages, including the identity of the authors, are a most sensitive element in the internal deliberative process and are to be protected accordingly.

The channel has been used several times over the years by diplomats to express reservations—or outright alarm—at U.S. policy. Perhaps the most famous cable sent on the dissent channel was the Blood Telegram in April 1971. It was written by Archer Blood, the U.S. consul general in what was then East Pakistan, and signed by 20 others to protest the U.S. policy of siding with the Pakistani government when it cracked down militarily on what was then the eastern, Bengali flank of its country after a Bengali politician was declared the winner of national elections. Here’s more from the telegram:

Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the [West Pakistan] dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy. … But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the … conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected.

Blood was recalled to Washington after writing the telegram. East Pakistan eventually broke away to form Bangladesh.

The channel has also been famously used to express dissent against U.S. policy during the conflicts in Bosnia and Iraq. More recently it was used last June by 51 diplomats who criticized the Obama administration’s policies in Syria, urging military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state at the time, met with the authors of the memo for about 30 minutes, engaging, The New York Times reported then, “in a surprisingly cordial conversation about whether there was a way, in the last six months of the Obama presidency, to use American military force to help end a conflict that by some estimates has claimed 500,000 lives.” Ultimately, that never happened.

Spicer’s call on the officers to quit if they disagree with policy is seen as highly unusual. I’ve reached out to AFSA for comments and will update this story when they respond.

How Trump Can Use the Supreme Court to Get Conservatives in Line

The blowback to Donald Trump’s immigration executive order may have come more fiercely than the president expected, but he was planning for such a moment months ago on the campaign trail, and the gaming veteran knew he had the right ace up his sleeve.

“Even if people don’t like me, they have to vote for me. They have no choice,” Trump said, for example, on August 2 in Virginia. “Even if you can’t stand Donald Trump, you think Donald Trump is the worst, you’re going to vote for me. You know why? Justices of the Supreme Court.”

Trump made many comments like that, from the spring of 2016, when he seemed to suddenly become interested in the court, right up until the closing days of the race. While there are a range of issues where the Court deals with conservative priorities, Trump and his audiences knew that what this really referred to was the Roe v. Wade decision asserting abortion rights, which social conservatives have long sought to overturn. Whatever Trump may not have understood about the pro-life movement or conservative jurisprudence, he well understood the bludgeoning power that Supreme Court appointments gave him in keeping the Republican Party in line when he got into a pinch. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made himself an ally in that fight, holding open the seat belonging to deceased Justice Antonin Scalia by blocking Barack Obama’s nominee for the slot.

The president is now employing that tool sooner than he might have expected, but precisely as he predicted. Trump’s order last week sparked chaos and mass protests in Washington and at airports around the nation. Many of those protesting most fervently may have never supported Trump in the first place, but the problems with the order have rattled Republicans, too, whether in Washington or at the grassroots level. In Gallup’s daily tracking poll, Trump’s approval/disapproval numbers—which had been hovering around even—suddenly dived underwater, with 51 percent disapproving.

A trickle of Republican members of Congress have criticized the order, many finding objectionable elements even when they support the broad strokes. Christian leaders, including evangelicals, have also reacted against the law. The National Association of Evangelicals called for the reversal of the order, as did a group of leaders of Christian organizations. The outcry is not unanimous—Franklin Graham, who has long characterized Islam as a “religion of hatred” and was a vocal supporter of Trump, has been supportive of the order. But there is, at the very least, unease about Trump’s moves, despite his telling David Brody of the evangelical outlet CBN that persecuted Christians will receive priority status as refugees.

With political pressure increasing on him, Trump announced an announcement for the Supreme Court on Twitter Monday morning:

I have made my decision on who I will nominate for The United States Supreme Court. It will be announced live on Tuesday at 8:00 P.M. (W.H.)

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 30, 2017

That’s an accelerated announcement: Last week, he announced, also on Twitter, that he would announce his pick of a justice on Thursday. With political pressure on, however, he’s decided to move the pick up 48 hours or so.

There has been no shortage of speculation on Trump’s public-relations strategy. Each new move, tweet, or appointment is hailed by some commentators as a feint to distract voters from the real issue, which is generally whatever that commentator cares about most. It’s an open question how true that is. When Trump was at his low points during the presidential campaign, he was similarly chaotic in his approach, sometimes undermining his own messaging efforts.

But it’s indisputable that Trump has benefited from his firehose approach. He weathered a series of scandals and missteps during the campaign that would have sunk any other presidential candidate, seemingly in part because the ceaseless march of stunning stories meant that none truly sank in. Trump has also scheduled the announcement of his selection for prime time, a break from the standard day-time announcements presidents have recently favored, which encourages the impression that he’s trying to change the subject away from immigration.

So the justice pick does look like an attempt at distraction, but its more important effect—in keeping with Trump’s statements on the stump—may be to knock conservatives back in line. It’s just as he warned them during the campaign: Conservatives, especially social conservatives, may have their differences with Trump, but he is still a Republican president with the chance to solidify conservative dominance on the Supreme Court for years to come.

That threat sufficed at the ballot box, where, according to exit polls, Trump overwhelmingly drew the votes of evangelical Christians, 80-16. That’s higher even than the margin by which they supported George W. Bush in 2004, which is especially striking since Bush was himself an evangelical, while Trump’s religious convictions seem shallow if held at all. Conservative Christian voters took a gamble in November, reasoning that even if Trump himself was not a man of great morality, he would be an instrument for conservative policies.

So far, that wager has been rewarded. The conservative radio host Eric Metaxas told my colleague Emma Green, in an interview published Monday, that Trump has “been shockingly, and perhaps even ironically, the most pro-life president in the history of the republic.” (Metaxas wrote a controversial column in The Wall Street Journal in October, calling for Christians to vote for Trump even though his behavior was “odious.”) That is ironic, given Trump’s past support for abortion rights; while plenty of former abortion backers have changed their mind to oppose it, such flips usually come with a conversion narrative, while Trump has offered little evidence of a change in moral conviction. His record is also short so far, and Metaxas’s judgment relies largely on Trump’s order barring government funds from going to organizations that back abortion overseas.

In the same interview, Metaxas spoke measuredly about Trump’s immigration executive order. On the one hand, he worried that the immigration order was being misrepresented by the media, but he also said, “I don’t think that the people who voted for him, most of them, would ever be for not caring for immigrants or refugees. People in the church know it’s our obligation.”

Bringing the focus back to the Supreme Court—and, by implication, Roe—is a way for Trump to remind his social-conservative backers about the deal they made in backing him, and of the importance of maintaining a unified front in favor of the president. After all, if social conservatives were willing to forgive Trump’s coarse statements and ideological flexibility during the presidential campaign, why would they abandon him now, over a matter as minor as disagreements about an executive order, when the prize of a conservative replacement for Scalia is now at hand?

If Trump’s nominee is to their liking, they might very well hesitate before criticizing him on other matters as long as the opportunity to more seriously reshape the Court remains on the table.

Samantha Bee Will Host a Shadow White House Correspondents' Dinner

This weekend, in response to the events of the first week of the Trump presidency, Change.org posted a petition. It was written by M. Scullion of Bethlehem, Pa.; it arose, Scullion wrote, in response to recent “attacks on a pillar of our democracy, the independent press.” Its proposal? The cancellation of the 2017 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

As Scullion explained of the annual Washington gala,

This event will give the White House yet another opportunity to strengthen its narrative of a biased media and spread its propaganda whilst condemning, embarrassing, and further undermining the fourth estate. As we march in the streets to force the White House to hear us, we need to know that the press stands separate, not rubbing elbows with the administration that we march against. Please reconsider this event.

The Correspondents’ Dinner is, as it stands, currently expected to continue. And it will likely take roughly the same shape that it long has: as a kind of mutualized roast, with the president making fun of the press and vice versa. April of 2017 will likely find members of those shadow three branches—the government, the press, the entertainment industry—gathering in the Washington Hilton for the event that has come to be known, both lovingly and less so, as the Nerdprom.

What will be different about this year’s Correspondents’ Dinner, though, is that this one will have some competition. The 2017 Nerdprom will feature a shadow dinner, itself attended, like the original one, by media members and celebrities. This dinner, however, will be thrown not by the White House Correspondents’ Association, but by the cable network TBS. It will be hosted not by the head of the WHCA, but by the comedian Samantha Bee. It will be called, simply but sort of profoundly, Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

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The Inauguration, and the Counter-Inauguration

The shadow Correspondents’ Dinner will be, like its forerunner, a “gala affair”—one that, a press release notes, will welcome “journalists and non-irritating celebrities from around the world.” It will take place, through “an incredible coincidence,” at precisely the same time as the official White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “We suspect some members of the press may find themselves unexpectedly free that night,” TBS puts it, “and we want to feed them and give them hugs.” Hugs both literal and more figurative, it seems: All proceeds from the event will go to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

As Bee explained it, “The evening is sure to bring plenty of surprises, music, food, and laughter—and if you’re not careful you just might learn something. Specifically, you’ll learn how screwed we’d be without a free press.”

She added: “We’re really doing this. This is not a joke.”

It’s not. It’s happening (in this case, at Washington’s Willard Hotel). The alt-Correspondents’ Dinner is a joke, though, in the sense that it’s selling itself as an event-long version of the roast a high-profile comedian—Larry Wilmore, Cecily Strong, Stephen Colbert—traditionally offers, with jokes aimed at both the president and the press. Bee will fill that role at the Not the Correspondents’ Dinner; her target, though, isn’t necessarily the president or the press, but rather the notion that the two can participate in a gala event in the first place. The anti-ness of the event suggests that, with President Trump, something has shifted, enough to make the traditional WHCD glad-handing and elbow-rubbing not just awkward, but, in fact, impossible.

Washington has its “alternative facts”; increasingly, it seems, it also has its “alternative events.”

The traditional complaint about the Correspondents’ Dinner is that it’s too friendly, too smarmy, too compliant in its willingness to put members of the government and the press together in one room, sharing some jokes and some par-cooked salmon. TBS is waging another criticism, though: It is suggesting, via its shadow event, that the over-friendliness has given way to under-. That the smarm has given way, this year, to all-out war. (Sm)armistice, in that context, is no longer a possibility. We suspect some members of the press may find themselves unexpectedly free that night.

This is a moment of alternatives. The inauguration of the new president was followed, a day later, by a protest march that, in its aesthetics, suggested a counter-inauguration. Many works of pop culture, as my colleague Spencer Kornhaber noted earlier this month, are exploring the notion of alternate realities in their fictive worlds. And we live among, of course, “alternative facts”—offered both by the White House and by authors of far-flung and occasionally hazy origin. It’s a time of epistemic chaos, and a time when Newton’s law—the action, followed inevitably by the opposite reaction—is being realized, ever more, in civic life. It’s extremely fitting, in that sense, that 2017 would offer both a White House Correspondents’ Dinner and a counter-White House Correspondents Dinner. And it’s fitting, as well, that the hashtag that has already been determined for the latter event will be, simply, #NotTheWHCD.

A Politically Charged Night at the SAG Awards

Mahershala Ali converted to Islam 17 years ago. His mother, an ordained minister, “didn’t do backflips” when he called to tell her the news, the actor recalled in his acceptance speech at Sunday’s SAG Awards, where he won Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture for his work in Moonlight. “But I tell you now, we put things to the side, and I’m able to see her, she’s able to see me—we love each other, the love has grown, and that stuff is minutiae,” Ali said.

It was a powerful, personal sentiment on a night that carried a topical charge, one where most of the winning actors (and some of the presenters) took the opportunity to speak on the politics of the moment, particularly President Donald Trump’s sweeping, restrictive executive order on immigration, which targeted citizens of seven majority-Muslim nations, as well as refugees. “What I’ve learned from working on Moonlight is, we see what happens when you persecute people. They fold into themselves,” Ali told the SAG audience, which responded with cheers and applause. “There’s an opportunity to see the texture of that person, the characteristics that make them unique. And then there’s an opportunity to go to war about it, and to say that that person is different than me, and I don’t like you, so let’s battle.”

In Moonlight, Ali plays Juan, a local drug dealer who shelters and mentors a young gay boy he finds hiding from bullies in an abandoned Miami building. The film has a humane message of looking beyond stereotype and prejudice, directed at both its characters and its audience. Ali distilled that message in his speech and tried to emphasize compassion as he addressed current events. While many a Hollywood awards ceremony in the past has featured political comment, Sunday night was notable for just how pervasive the sense of dissent toward the Trump administration’s recent actions was on the part of the winners.

Sarah Paulson, who won for playing Marcia Clark in The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, urged viewers to donate to the ACLU “to protect rights and liberties of people across this country.” Bryan Cranston, who won his fifth SAG trophy for his performance as Lyndon Johnson in All the Way, said that the 36th president might have some typically colorful advice for the 45th: “Something he said often, as a form of encouragement and a cautionary tale: ‘Just don’t piss in the soup that all of us got to eat.’”

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, named Best Actress in a Comedy Series for Veep, referenced her father, Gérard Louis-Dreyfus, who moved to the United States from France in 1940, fleeing religious persecution from the Nazis (his father, Pierre, was a Jew who fought in the French Resistance during World War II). “I’m an American patriot and I love this country,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “And because I love this country, I am horrified by its blemishes, and this immigrant ban is a blemish and it’s un-American.”

The loudest speech came from David Harbour, who accepted on behalf of the cast of Netflix’s Stranger Things, named Best Ensemble in a Drama Series. He called on the assembled actors in the audience to create a “more empathetic and understanding society by revealing intimate truths that serve as a forceful reminder to folks that, when they feel broken and afraid and tired, they are not alone.”

At the Golden Globes this month, Meryl Streep gave a pointed address criticizing Donald Trump while receiving her lifetime achievement award, drawing familiar criticism from some corners about Hollywood’s liberal “bubble,” and actors’ tendency to preach to the choir regarding current events. But, as my colleague Spencer Kornhaber noted, it was effective both in drawing a furious response from the president and in asserting “that the election’s results would not silence Hollywood when it comes to Trump,” in effect, resisting the specter of “normalization” in the wake of his victory.

After Trump’s first week in office ended with nationwide protests over the executive order on immigration, there was little doubt that such political response would continue through awards season. It will likely build to a fever pitch for the Academy Awards next month, where the global audience numbers in the hundreds of millions. Last year’s SAG Awards served as a repudiation of the Oscars, giving trophies to Idris Elba, Viola Davis (who won again this year), Uzo Aduba, and other actors of color in a year when the Academy’s slate of acting nominees was all white. This year, it may serve as more of a preview, as public protest in all its forms becomes the norm for Americans unhappy with the new administration.

Why It Took So Long to Translate a Dutch Classic

The Dutch novelist Gerard Reve led a scandal-filled career. In 1966, he converted to Catholicism while being one of the Netherlands’ first openly gay writers. That same year, he was prosecuted for blasphemy: The trial concerned a passage from his book Nearer to Thee wherein God manifests himself as a donkey, only for the narrator to have sex with it—three times. But Reve’s first big controversy came much earlier in 1947, when he published what is widely considered the greatest Dutch novel of the 20th century, De avonden, or The Evenings. After being labeled as “untranslatable” for years, the novel is now being published stateside for the first time, in English, roughly 70 years after its initial release.

Set at the end of 1946, The Evenings concerns Frits, a 23-year-old office worker living with his parents in Amsterdam, and how he spends the 10 evenings leading up to New Year’s Day. In terms of plot, that’s it, yet the book was considered shocking upon its release. Following World War II, there was a widespread belief that “the youth had the future,” Reve’s late-career editor Victor Schiferli told me. “These were the years of rebuilding the nation, and it was not considered a good thing to be negative about this.” But Reve was. He quietly attacked Dutch society by cataloguing it intimately and indiscriminately, and by portraying the outer tedium and inner frustrations of the Netherlands’s post-war youth.

The difficulty of capturing Reve’s style in another language has an almost mythic status among his native readers.

The English translation of The Evenings has brought renewed attention to what made the novel an unlikely classic—and to its reputation for being “too Dutch” to resonate with a non-native audience. As Sam Garrett, whose translation will be published in the U.S. on January 31, told me, “People often asked me, when they heard I was working on the book: ‘Oh, how can you translate De avonden? It’s so specifically Dutch.’” That claim, of course, raises the question of what it means to be Dutch in the first place. Critics often cite a number of qualities that account for The Evenings’ national specificity: Reve’s sense of humor, mundane references to local culture, the religious dimensions of the Dutch language, and of course the historical context. These elements—along with some practical roadblocks—contributed to the myth of the book’s untranslatability for decades. Now, that myth has effectively shattered.

In The Evenings, Reve captured the disaffection of Dutch youth through Frits’s grotesque dreams, his ability to joke about anything (even war casualties), and his constant intermingling of the sacred and profane. The novel opens by announcing Frits, with comic grandeur, as “the hero of this story.” He checks his watch early in the morning before drifting into a dream where six men carry a coffin with a cracked, sagging bottom. A hand then emerges from the crack and reaches for one of the men’s throats. “If I scream,” thinks Frits, “the whole thing will fall to the floor… there’s nothing I can do.” The book continues as it begins: with a mixture of clock-watching banality, cryptic symbolism, and ironic bombast. And it’s captivating.

Much of the book’s comedy comes from Frits’s stately tone, and how he applies it to everyday, and sometimes inappropriate, subjects. To wield Dutch, Reve believed a writer needed to absorb the Statenbijbel, the Netherlands’ equivalent of the King James Bible, that was published in 1637. “That language,” Reve said, “that dialect, is what has become Dutch.” The Statenbijbel helped to unify the various dialects of the Dutch Republic into one language, and so too helped in unifying the Netherlands as a whole. In the late 1940s, this style would’ve seemed highly formal, almost parliamentary, but the biblical echoes would not have been lost on Reve’s audience. Which is why it was subtly sacrilegious for Reve to use that tone—in the then very Christian Netherlands—to describe Frits wandering home drunk or examining himself naked in a mirror.

What goes unsaid also plays a key role in The Evenings. World War II is arguably the book’s center, but it is an absent center, one perpetually talked around, and only mentioned a couple of times in passing. Frits’s obsessive attention to detail and abstract ruminations often act as distractions from the war’s after-effects. Late in the novel, Frits’s mother accidentally buys fruit juice rather than wine, leading to a monologue often considered one of the most beautiful ever composed in Dutch. Frits pleads to God, listing all his parents’ little foibles: His father “hears little [and] what he hears is not worth mentioning,” his mother “makes oliebollen,” Dutch pastries, “with the wrong pieces of apple.” He then tearfully proclaims their “immeasurable goodness” and expresses his concern for them as “death approaches and the grave yawns.” But they will not even have the dignity of a grave; they’ll have an urn as “we pay for that in weekly installments.” The book’s tragedy lies in Frits’s flippant attitude toward the world and in the way time takes on a renewed poignancy. “Let us make sure our time is well spent,” Frits says earlier in the novel, while seeming to waste his time on trivialities. Yet, in the aftermath of a war, there is something quietly life-affirming in having time to waste. “I am alive,” Frits announces to his toy rabbit on New Year’s morning, “whatever ordeals are yet to come, I am alive.”

To get a deeper sense of The Evenings’s literary appeal and its trickiness as a translation project, I spoke with someone who had tried to translate it a couple of years ago. Lydia Davis, an acclaimed translator and one of the most original short-fiction writers working today, first came across the novel in 2014. Described by her Dutch friends as “boring, very Dutch, and funny,” The Evenings appealed to Davis in part because of its “tight structure.” She was also drawn to Reve’s portrayal of family life, particularly the relationship between Frits’s parents. “So much of the conversation between an older, long-married couple is just like this: mundane, sympathetic, but often absurd,” she said.

Reve’s nuanced style is his substance—and that nuance is, in part, where Lydia Davis’s translation faltered. A self-described “novice” of the Dutch language—despite her (still ongoing) work translating the stories of the writer A. L. Snijders—Davis’s approach to The Evenings was pragmatic. She had two Dutch friends, both writers, vetting her work for mistakes. A major publisher was interested, but wanted Davis to apply for “approved translator” status with the Dutch Foundation for Literature, which would make her eligible for grants. That’s where the project stumbled. A sample of Davis’s work was sent to two readers. “One thought it was good, the other did not,” she said. “Both found mistakes and misinterpretations.” She didn’t get approval, and so the work was halted.

Davis sent me a sample of her draft. To a non-Dutch speaker, its variations compared to the translation now being published, seem slight (she says “early morning” instead of “early morning hours,” “tomorrow” instead of “Monday”). But this is the problem. “Although on the surface,” Davis told me, “[The Evenings] does not appear to be so hard [to translate]—the action is concrete and repetitive, the vocabulary limited—there are stylistic subtleties that I would not be equal to.” This isn’t a slight on Davis’s ability; the difficulty of capturing Reve’s style in another language has an almost mythic status among his native readers.

There are cultural, linguistic, and more practical reasons Reve’s novel took so long to be translated into English—but none as insurmountable as commonly believed. “It may well be typically Dutch to call someone or something ‘too Dutch’ to be successful abroad,” joked Edwin Praat, a lecturer at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and the author of a recent book about Reve and his public image. “For me, if I were to point at any ‘Dutchness’ in the novel, it would be the characteristic humor. This blend of sarcasm, cynicism, irony, and directness can be used in our country in order to distance oneself from another person, but also to tighten the special bond one has with another person.” In the Netherlands, however, Reve’s humor is also considered idiosyncratic and has its own name: “Evenings humor.”

Even in a more general sense, The Evenings isn’t quite as Dutch as many people insist. Ask natives about the national character of the Netherlands, and you will likely get responses such as “tolerant,” “pragmatic,” or “plain-spoken.” Those are the cliches, some of which are self-perpetuated. However, Reve’s Frits is none of these: His bizarre obsession with baldness, and the strange, discriminatory theories about it with which he tortures his balding friends and relatives, parodies the bigotry that so marked the Nazi regime. Further, Frits is thoroughly impractical and prone to grandiloquent observations.

The novel’s connection to a particular time in its native country shouldn’t hurt its accessibility, either. “De avonden catches a very specific cultural [and] historical moment in the Netherlands,” Henriette Louwerse, a senior lecturer in Dutch at the University of Sheffield, told me of the book’s postwar setting. But it’s also a moment that has passed. “Dutch readers of under 25/30 are as removed from that particular mood as my British students,” she said.

Frits’s hilariously grandiose meditations on everyday details make everything seem equally alien, Dutch or otherwise.

An additional obstacle to translation may have actually been the book’s author. “Reve himself—and later, his estate—watched over the English-language rights very closely,” Garrett told me. “He guarded his work jealously, and during his lifetime an English-language translation of The Evenings never received his fiat.” Not long after the novel was published, Reve abandoned his mother tongue and spent years trying to write in English, but never found the audience he had hoped for (he did, ironically, become an acclaimed translator of English-language plays). Reve, at least as far as his biographer Nop Maas is aware, never planned to translate The Evenings himself. Over time, his feelings toward the book changed. The model for Frits’s parents were Reve’s own, and, in later life, he found his depiction of them uncomfortable. He even wrote a comic poem comparing the book to cholera. Why push for translating a book you no longer care for?

Still, Maas told me that Reve never actually stood in the way of an English version of De avonden. Barring an unfinished version in the early ’50s, the only other significant attempt to bring Reve into English was Paul Vincent’s 1986 translation. According to Maas, Reve himself claimed contracts had been signed; according to Vincent, the work was a passion project that near perpetually remained in a drawer. Still, Reve was critical of portions that he read: “Translate the spirit rather than the letter,” he told Vincent. Reve specifically started writing in English looking for international recognition, but his very knowledge of the language allowed him to appraise English renderings of his work. As Garrett told me, Reve “must have held strong opinions about our English language… [it] must have meant a great deal to him.” If Reve himself could not succeed in English, what hope did anyone else have of satisfying him? And after the author’s death, his estate, which appears to have a difficult reputation and a penchant for lawsuits, did not help matters much (in 2010, they attempted to ban the third volume of Maas’s Reve biography).

Seventy years later, these obstacles have been overcome, and the success of Garrett’s translation dispels much of the “untranslatabililty” myth. The Evenings has received rave reviews since its U.K. release last November, and is now on to its sixth printing there. “It’s precisely Reve’s artful rendering of specifics,” Garrett told me, “that makes The Evenings universally recognizable.” Frits’s hilariously grandiose meditations on everyday details and occurrences make everything seem equally alien, Dutch or otherwise. Of course there will be elements specific to Dutch culture, but that’s precisely what makes world literature so wonderful: It is a chance to glimpse something new.

Throughout his life, Reve railed against much of Dutch society; that society would later come to cherish him. Is there a greater symbol of tolerance than turning an establishment antagonist into its emblem? Even if not, that says more about the Netherlands than about De avonden. Dutch culture shaped Reve, and Reve helped shape Dutch culture. His voice is both singular and tethered to his homeland. “I first read De avonden in 1983,” Garrett told me, “and felt an immediate shock of recognition. A young man, disenfranchised, bored, sardonic and ashamed of his parents, but also ashamed of being ashamed of his parents. Is there an intelligent young person alive who doesn’t recognize that?” Thankfully, English speakers now have a chance to see if they do, too. And in a time of increased divisions, recognizing the universal—even an impish, adolescent universal—in the unfamiliar is more important than ever. Translation helps us do that. As does Gerard Reve.

‘First They Came’: The Poem of the Protests

One of the most striking elements of the protests taking place around the country have been the signs—signs that warn, signs that rage, signs that joke, signs that manage, wittily, to do a little of each. Whether scrolled on the sides of old Amazon boxes, or painted in primary colors on brand-new poster board, signs, as tools of protest, function as visual voices: Shared on Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook and Twitter, and captured by professional photographers who send their images to the wire services, they translate the hums of the throngs into language. On Saturday, and again on Sunday, as crowds gathered to protest President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, signs once again served as speech. Some of the most common read “NO BAN, NO WALL.” Some insisted that “IMMIGRANTS MAKE AMERICA GREAT.” Some noted that “JESUS WAS A REFUGEE.”

Many others, however, quoted the words of a familiar poem—an idea coined by the Lutheran pastor and theologian, Martin Niemöller, in the years following World War II. “FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE MUSLIMS,” the signs start. They add a new ending to the well-worn lines: “AND WE SAID ‘NOT TODAY.’”

Please join me in deleting your Uber app and signing up for @lyft who donates 1 million to @aclu_nationwide

A photo posted by @amyschumer on Jan 29, 2017 at 11:47am PST

Protesters at Discovery Green Park during Super Bowl events in Houston, Texas, on January 29, 2017 (Trish Badger / Reuters)



Protesters at Discovery Green Park during Super Bowl events in Houston, Texas, on January 29, 2017 (Trish Badger / Reuters)



Protesters carry signs and chant in Lafayette Park near the White House during a demonstration to denounce President Donald Trump's executive order that bars citizens of seven predominantly Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. on Jan. 29, 2017, in Washington. (Alex Brandon / AP)

The specific words of the saying the signs borrowed from vary; the most commonly cited version of Niemöller’s pseudo-poem, however—the one quoted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as a lyrical manifestation of the evils of political apathy—reads like this:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

It is a reference to the Holocaust. It is also, however, a warning about the ease with which such an event could occur again, if we of the present allow ourselves to become ignorant of the lessons of the past. Niemöller, born in 1892, was German, and a Protestant. Initially a supporter of Hitler’s rise to power, he came to oppose the Reich in the years leading up to the war: In 1933, he came to head a group of clergy members, the Pfarrernotbund, that opposed Hitler. For that, in 1937, he was arrested by the Reich. He was sent to the concentration camps—first to Sachsenhausen and then to Dachau; he survived the confinement until the end of the war, when the Allies liberated him and his fellow prisoners. Niemöller returned, after that, to the clergy—and he focused, for the rest of his life, on reconciliation as both a political and a theological aspiration. “First They Came” emerged from that effort.

It is a poem made powerful by its pronouns: They-I-I, They-I-I, They-I-I, They-no one-me.

Niemöller himself resisted the notion that the lines constitute a poem; instead, he said, they emerged gradually, and organically, through a series of speeches he delivered after the war. One scholar, UC Santa Barbara’s Harold Marcuse, who has studied Niemöller’s diaries, suggests that “First They Came” might have crystallized during a visit Niemöller took to Dachau in November of 1945, mere months after his liberation from the camp. The quotation itself, as it’s used today, Marcuse notes, “most likely emerged in 1946, and it definitely took on the well-known poetic form by the early 1950s.”

And it quickly became popular as a lyrical argument for civil rights and collective action—and, more broadly, for simple empathy. The quote was that rarest of things: a political argument grounded in religious tradition. As Niemöller explained of the origin of the lines, in 1976 [translated from the German]:

There were no minutes or copy of what I said, and it may be that I formulated it differently. But the idea was anyhow: The communists, we still let that happen calmly; and the trade unions, we also let that happen; and we even let the Social Democrats happen. All of that was not our affair. The Church did not concern itself with politics at all at that time, and it shouldn’t have anything do with them either. In the Confessing Church we didn’t want to represent any political resistance per se, but we wanted to determine for the Church that that was not right, and that it should not become right in the Church ….

In 1933, Niemöller added, he and his fellow clergy members included in the founding documents of their pastors’ emergency federation (Pfarrernotbund) the idea that any action made against a minister of Jewish heritage would be considered an action against the collective. As he put it: “That was probably the first anti-antisemitic pronouncement coming from the Protestant Church.”

What gives “First They Came” such resonance today isn’t merely its warnings about the dangers of apathy or its recognition of what would later be dubbed “normality creep” or, indeed, its lesson in how easily the privileged can become the oppressed. The lines’s elegant structure also lends itself to subjectivity. “First They Came” is uniquely malleable—a 20th-century poem that reads as almost tailor-made for the remix culture of the 21st. It features an almost fill-in-the-blank format of omni-relevance. Its structure has been adopted by everyone from James Baldwin (“If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night”) to union activists (“First they came for McDonald’s…”).

“If they come for me in the morning,” James Baldwin wrote, “they will come for you in the night.”

“First They Came,” in other words, is particularly attuned to the needs of the modern protest: It offers wisdom about the evils of the past, in an attempt to prevent more evils of the future. To use its language is to claim an understanding of history—and an understanding, too, of how easily its mistakes can be repeated by those who fall victim to the luxuries of forgetfulness. It is #neveragain, and #neverforget, with the subjects added in. It is a poem made powerful by its pronouns: They-I-I, They-I-I, They-I-I, They-no one-me.

Harold Marcuse, for his part, warns that remix was likely not Niemöller’s intention when he used his warnings as a refrain. “Niemöller’s original argument was premised on naming groups he and his audience would instinctively not care about,” Marcuse writes. “When his poem is invoked today it is usually to add one’s own group to the list of persecuted. That was not a meaning that Niemöller ever wished to convey.” It’s an objection, however, that proves the rule: “First They Came,” as used today, derives its power from the notion that no one should be instinctively not cared about—that everyone is deserving of care. That is the nature of politics, and of compassion. And it is to our peril, the poem suggests, that we forget how wound and woven we all are. They-I-me: The great promise—and the great threat—is, the poem warns, that they will prove to be the same.

Claiming the Future of Black TV

In his 1976 book-length essay The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin argued that no black actor has ever lived up to his or her potential on-screen. However famous black performers become, he explained, they are constrained by the limited choices afforded to them by a racist industry. Looking at the history of film and television, the same can be said of black producers, writers, directors, and those on every strata of the studio system. Black creatives must also navigate a minefield of expectations, having to represent both themselves as artists and their entire community.

This past year, though, television seems to have proven that Baldwin’s observation no longer holds true: 2016 was a banner year for black people in front of and behind the camera. The growth hasn’t come out of nowhere; instead it is built on the success that showrunners like the powerhouses Shonda Rhimes and Mara Brock Akil have worked for in recent years.  When Scandal’s Olivia Pope sauntered onto television screens in 2012, she was the first black female TV lead in almost 40 years. Now, she and her creator, Rhimes, are no longer anomalies at a time when TV is bursting with new and returning black-led series, many of which are also helmed by black showrunners. Last year alone saw the arrival of new shows including Atlanta, Insecure, Queen Sugar, Chewing Gum, and Luke Cage, and the return of others, such as Being Mary Jane, Black-ish, Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder, Empire, and Power.

Hollywood seems to be evolving for the better in the way it constructs and markets black TV series, and many are taking notice. For Vulture, Dee Lockett wrote, “It’s no coincidence that one of television’s best years was also the year it got noticeably blacker.” Likewise, CNN, Shadow and Act, and MTV News discussed the uptick in diversity in front of and behind the camera to the point that 2016 could be considered a new golden age for black television. But in 2017, the conversation moving forward will be about whether last year was the start of a revolution that will continue to normalize black stories on TV, or whether it was simply another trend that will fizzle out, as the industry saw in the 1990s and early aughts. (The 1970s, too, had many black-led series like Good Times before subsequent decades backtracked on that progress.) In order to secure lasting change, the industry needs to understand why exactly 2016 was so remarkable for black representation and what’s still missing.

As the 1990s demonstrated most recently, gains in representation for black TV audiences are often followed by a disappointing reversal. This decade had shows like the Queen Latifah-led sitcom Living Single; the raunchy Saturday Night Live alternative In Living Color; the heartwarming portrayal of life at an HBCU, A Different World; and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the most audacious entry in the storied franchise featuring its first black captain. But by the early 2000s, this wave fizzled out, and for a number of reasons: There was the loss of the network UPN, which featured several black series, including Girlfriends; the idea that shows and films with black leads didn’t have enough “cross over appeal” to be financially successful (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary); and the critical shift to an interest in “auteur” series.

So-called auteur series, which are considered to have a sole creative voice, became popular in the years following The Sopranos. In addition to having mostly white, male creators, auteur series like Mad Men and Breaking Bad rarely hired black writers or told the stories of black characters. Even two 2000s-era shows often acclaimed for their portrayal of black life—The Wire and Treme—were helmed by the white creator David Simon. This isn’t to say white writers can’t successfully craft black characters. But when it’s mostly white men who are treated as artistic visionaries, it winnows down the kind of prestige television that’s seen as viable—and defines who gets to make such shows. These examples hint at one of the biggest reasons for 2016’s success: the boon in black writers, directors, and showrunners.

This past summer, the British director Amma Assante tweeted an interesting question in response to another study that noted the lack of black female directors: “Is a [woman of color] even ‘allowed’ to be named an ‘auteur’?” She wasn’t asking whether women of color have the artistry and work ethic necessary to become auteurs. Instead, she seemed to be alluding to how female directors of color (and minority filmmakers as a whole) usually don’t have the opportunity to create a body of work that can vault them from being generally admired to being considered vital. Auteurs are studied, revered, and most importantly, funded; when black creatives are hired or given big projects, it can open the door for others like them in the process.

Unsurprisingly, most of the creators and writers behind 2016’s biggest black-led shows have discussed the TV industry’s barriers to entry at length. Issa Rae, the creator and star of HBO’s Insecure, has discussed the catch-22 for minority creatives who are unable to get into TV due to a lack of experience. “‘There are no writers of color in the room because they don’t have experience’ is an excuse, because how can they get experience if [networks] won’t hire them?” Rae said. Donald Glover, who created and starred in Atlanta, touched on a similar idea when discussing how he formed the writer’s room for his show.

But perhaps the most high-profile example of a show breaking the inexperience cycle is Queen Sugar, the adaptation of Natalie Baszile’s novel, for which Selma’s Ava DuVernay was an executive producer, showrunner, co-writer, and occasional director. DuVernay hired all female directors for the first season’s 13 episodes—a monumental move that spurred Jessica Jones to follow suit in its second season. Many of these women (most of whom were black) had never helmed an episode of TV despite success working on independent movies. “We just never had the opportunity,” Tina Mabry, one of the directors DuVernay hired, said.  “And that is something that Ava provided all of us with. That opportunity to actually showcase the skill that she knew we already had but had not gotten the chance to due to our industry, which struggles with inclusiveness.” The same logic applies to handing more ambitious projects to black showrunners and directors, and other networks would be wise to take note of Queen Sugar’s example.

This degree of behind-the-scenes diversity on black TV shows simply didn’t exist in the ’90s. That’s in part because many of these newer series sought talent from outside the traditional TV-network system, whether through independent film or music videos. Social media and sites such as YouTube, in particular, allow marginalized artists to tap directly into an audience that networks might not be paying attention to, or even know how to appeal to. The success of Glover and Rae, both of whom got their starts on YouTube and built notable followings, serves as a reminder that black stories aren’t niche.

Still, recent triumphs shouldn’t overshadow the ways in which artists and writers still have room to grow, innovate, and fill in the missing pieces of the black experience on TV. Even the well-received shows aren’t often as nuanced and forward-thinking as they might seem on the surface. Luke Cage, for instance, was heralded as an important turning point for Marvel and predominately white, male superhero projects in general. But the show, which follows a bulletproof superhero saving modern Harlem from criminals, feels like a relic from another era. In the comics, Luke Cage was inspired by the Blaxploitation film trend of the 1970s. In an effort to put a new spin on the character and perhaps adjust his inauthentic beginnings, the writers course-corrected too far, making his character feel so upstanding he was not only one-note but also an emblem of respectability politics.

Moving forward, TV could use more black stories in a wider variety of genres. When looking at the recent series that have garnered acclaim, they primarily operate within the realms of drama, nighttime soap operas, and sitcoms. When black characters do appear in science fiction, fantasy, noir, and other genre fare, they often exist in the margins and are poorly developed, which can be partially attributed to the shows’ predominantly non-black writing staffs. Black female characters on genre shows are particularly prone to this even when they are the lead, as the controversy around Nicole Beharie’s mistreatment and exit on Sleepy Hollow demonstrates. Other series like True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and The Flash suggest this isn’t an isolated problem.

When a friend recently asked me if I felt television was going through a black revolution, I hesitated. For all the considerable strides forward, I still didn’t see many aspects of my own life—especially issues of wide relevance—reflected on television. For one, there’s geography: Save for a couple of shows like Queen Sugar, most black series are still set in coastal cities and feature upwardly mobile professionals. This ignores the rich history of black stories that exist beyond New York and Los Angeles and that take place in other economic strata. Considering 55 percent of black Americans live in the South, it’s hard not to feel like plenty of fascinating storytelling opportunities are being ignored.

Despite the range of complex black characters on TV, mental illness remains a taboo subject in the community, both onscreen and off. When the issue comes up on shows like Being Mary Jane, it’s something a supporting character deals with. When leads like Olivia Pope on Scandal have mental-health problems, they aren’t diagnosed or dealt with in an authentic, engaging way. How to Get Away with Murder is the worst example of this, despite Viola Davis’s great performance as Annalise Keating, a cunning lawyer and law professor in Pennsylvania. After its first season, the show turned her character from a badass to a caricature of mental illness with a backstory of incest and abuse. While these topics are important, the show handles them in a way that further stigmatizes mental illness within a community that desperately needs to see more humane, honest portrayals of it.

Another problem is that today’s black series often don’t touch on the ways different communities of color relate to each other, or on more multicultural black experiences. Blackness is far too often defined in relation to whiteness and little else; Afro-Latinas like myself don’t fit that racial binary. Afro-Latina actors like Gina Torres, Lauren Velez, and Judy Reyes often discuss how they don’t get roles that reflect their cultural experience because of the narrow idea of how Latinas are supposed to look. (Torres, who has played supporting roles in Firefly and Suits, was cast in the lead of a series that would actually have her playing a Cuban American, but the show, described as a Macbeth-esque supernatural revenge drama, didn’t get picked up after pilot season.) Discussing the statistics and dynamics of black representation in comparison to white shows is important but often obscures the need for more nuance when it comes to class, sexuality, and geographic diversity.

Looking forward, 2017 holds more than just the promise of returning series. Star Trek: Discovery marks the first time the storied franchise has a black female lead along with other noteworthy steps forward. Bryan Fuller’s adaptation of American Gods adds another much-needed example of a black character who’s at the center of a fantasy, not a sidekick. Other anticipated series such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Riverdale will have prominent black female characters. All of these series have the potential to push the stories of black characters in bold new directions. But while they may end up featuring diverse writing staffs, none of these shows has a black showrunner.

Of course, we could see hundreds of new black shows and still not see a full spectrum of black experience on television. This doesn’t mean that series like Insecure or Atlanta need to compensate; no one show can speak to all black people nor should they be expected to. But 2016 offers clear lessons for those who don’t want to see the successes of black TV fizzle out: recognize how the “inexperience” excuse ends up hurting people of color, focus diversity behind the scenes, look for talent outside of the industry, and tell a broader range of stories. In recent years, social media has been instrumental in taking to task the failures of showrunners, networks, and the industry as a whole—a pressure that can help reinforce the achievements of Rhimes, DuVernay, Rae, Glover, and their peers. After decades of setbacks, perhaps the notability of seeing black people both in front of and behind the camera on TV will slowly—finally—become a thing of the past.

What Trump's Executive Order on Immigration Does—and Doesn't Do

President Trump signed on Friday an executive order that severely restricts immigration from seven Muslim countries, suspends all refugee admission for 120 days, and bars all Syrian refugees indefinitely. The order has been widely criticized and praised. Here’s what it does and doesn’t do.

Who is not affected?

Anyone with U.S. citizenship—whether that person in natural-born or naturalized.

Who is affected?

For 120 days, the order bars the entry of any refugee who is awaiting resettlement in the U.S. It also prohibits all Syrian refugees from entering the U.S. until further notice. Additionally, it bans the citizens of seven countries—Iraq, Iran, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, and Yemen—from entering the U.S. on any visa category. This appears to include those individuals who are permanent residents of the U.S. (green-card holders) who may have been traveling overseas to visit family or for work—though their applications will be considered on a case-by-case basis, a senior administration official said Saturday.

The official also said green-card holders from those countries who are in the U.S. will have to meet with a consular officer before leaving the U.S.

These countries are all Muslim or predominantly Muslim countries. The bans do not extend to Christians or other religious minorities deemed persecuted in the seven countries.

The order also targets individuals of those countries who hold dual citizenship with another country. For instance, an individual who holds both Iraqi and Canadian citizenships.

It does not apply to individuals who hold U.S. citizenship along with citizenship of another country.

Why were those seven countries chosen?

The U.S. allows the citizens of more than 30 countries to visit for short stays without a visa under a visa-waiver program. But that visa waiver does not apply if a citizen of an eligible country has visited—with some exceptions—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, or Yemen on or after March 1, 2011. Those individuals must apply for a visa at a U.S. consulate. These seven countries are listed under section 217(a)(12) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12) of the U.S. code, and it is this code that Trump’s executive order cited while banning citizens of those nations.

What is the impact?

The number of permanent residents from these countries is relatively small. For instance, 1,016,518 green cards were issued in 2014. Of these, 19,153 went to Iraqis and 11,615 to Iranians, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s data. These two countries make up the overwhelming majority of U.S. permanent residents from among the seven nations, which together have 500,000 permanent resident in the U.S., according to ProPublica. But the seven nations, as I reported this week, also account for 40 percent of the U.S. refugee intake.

Numbers, however, seldom tell the whole story. There have been multiple reports since the executive order was signed of people being prevented from boarding flights; refugees, who had gone through the years-long process before being approved to come to the U.S., stranded in third countries; of Iraqis who had worked for years with the U.S. military being denied entry; of Iranian students stuck overseas; of U.S. tech companies recalling its foreign workers because of the possible impact.   

Is this a Muslim ban?

Technically no. The ban includes seven majority Muslim countries, but by no means are these states the most populous Muslim countries, nor are they among the top sources of Muslim immigration to the U.S., nor have they produced terrorists in the same numbers as other Muslim countries not on the list.

But the ban does appear to apply only to Muslims.

“What we’ve seen here is stunning,” David Leopold, a Cleveland-based immigration lawyer who is a past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said on a conference call with reporters. “No president ever ever has used the authority and statute of the law to ban people based on their religion, ban people based on their nationality.”

He said President Carter’s ban on Iranians in 1980 after the Islamic revolution “barred certain classifications, not the whole country.”

Is there legal action?

Trump has broad discretion under the law to bar a class of person deemed detrimental to the U.S. from entering the country. Leopold said the issue will have to be resolved by the courts.

Indeed, the ACLU filed a legal challenge on behalf of the two Iraqis who were detained at JFK Airport Saturday seeking to have the men released. The group also filed what’s known as a motion for class certification, which would allow it to represent others who say they were detained at airports and other ports of entry to the U.S. But there may be challenges ahead.

“The problem we’ve got there,” Leopold said, “ is that this is unprecedented.”

Archie Comics and Jazz-Rap: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Archie’s Long, Dark Journey to Riverdale

Abraham Riesman | Vulture

“The characters are also a romantic vision of another time, though not in the way you might think. Sure, there’s a way in which the Riverdale gang harkens back to an invented, Pleasantville-esque period of American consensus and stability. But the time that we seek through Archie and his pals isn’t a historical time, but rather a personal one: adolescence. When you’re a child, you thumb through an Archie digest and, like the young Aguirre-Sacasa, dream of how great it’ll be to be a teenager. When you pick up one of Goldwater’s revamped Archie comics as an adult, you’re dreaming of how great it was to be a teenager. Either way, you’re pining for those axial days of high school.”

The Future of Abortion on TV

Julie Kliegman | The Ringer

“For an abortion plotline that’s both entertaining and destigmatizing, look to Jane the Virgin, the third-season CW show with the premise that Jane (Gina Rodriguez) brings a baby into her Catholic family—rather than getting an abortion—after she’s accidentally artificially inseminated at 23. But in Season 2, Jane’s mom, Xiomara, gets pregnant and decides to have an abortion at the beginning of Season 3. To be blunt: That’s important, since TV generally underrepresents people of color getting abortions.”

Grave New World

Josephine Livingstone | The New Republic

“1984 does not pastiche a world ravaged by capitalism and ruled by celebrities—the kind of world that could lead to the election of someone like Trump. Instead, it depicts suffering inflicted by state control masquerading as socialism. Remember, the banned book that opens Winston’s mind is called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchal Collectivism. That book, mixed with Winston’s own memories, supposedly reveal the true history of his world.”

Rebooting Queer Eye and Will & Grace Is a Mistake

Tom Vellner | BuzzFeed

“The producers are right: America stands divided as it approaches an uncertain future. It’s also true that gay men are brave and laugh and have hearts. But the fact that television producers are still using the words ‘moisturizer,’ ‘fabulous,’ and ‘pink’ to define gay men is flagrantly out of touch. Ten years after Queer Eye ended its popular run in 2007, gay men are apparently still being reduced to neutered sidekicks—portrayed as if they do not have complex interior lives of their own, because they’re too busy improving the fashion habits of straight men.”

Going Solo: Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth Steps Outside the Frame

Mike Powell | Pitchfork

“Here’s a guy who once wrote a concept album that in his words juxtaposed ‘the Aztec Empire with contemporary America and this idea of the destruction of place,’ who seemed strenuously, almost angrily opposed to making art that might humanize him in the eyes of his audience. Now he’s writing about lovers lying silently in each other’s arms and how heartache can turn even a brick wall inside out. Reality—the mundanity of it, but also the way those mundanities accrue into something remarkable—is the grail now.”

Aminé and the Politics of Jazz-Rap

Tirhakah Love | MTV News

“Why should Aminé’s political coda be such a surprise? Even as hip-hop begins to embrace positive-leaning comfort music in trying times, there’s a very real need to ground that optimism within the realities of the Trump era. The words that Aminé added on The Tonight Show ended up overshadowing the rest of his performance—but that’s not a dis. In this case, working backward toward protest was exactly the right move. Aminé’s performance was a potent symbol of the way that urge will continue to seep into even the most seemingly apolitical music. White, mainstream audiences matter, not only in determining how well a song charts but in building up a national consensus across racial and class lines against fascism, racism, and xenophobia.”

What Does Trainspotting’s Opening Speech Mean Today?

Stuart Jeffries | The Guardian

“What both [Irvine] Welsh and [Chuck] Palahniuk were addressing as the last millennium hobbled towards its end was not just consumerism’s existential void, but a crisis in masculinity, wherein men bridled at the domesticated half-lives they were leading and dreamed of a wild transvaluation of prevailing values. (Whether women were similarly bridling wasn’t considered in Fight Club or Trainspotting. Not really.)”

Reading the Game: Red Dead Redemption

Jason Sheehan | NPR

“If we take as fact that Westerns are the American literary counterpoint to the samey-sameness and circular repetition of the Campbellian Hero's Journey in European high fantasy—that, like jazz or cubism, the Western exists to turn classical form inside out in an attempt at telling a truer story by beginning with the hero, broken by his labors, and attempting (almost always) to get a fresh throw of fate's dice—then Red Dead is a bonafide masterpiece.”

How Culture Became a Powerful Political Weapon

When it comes to living in a democracy, Nato Thompson argues, nothing affects us more directly and more powerfully than culture. Culture suffuses the world we live in, from TV to music to advertising to sports. And all these things, Thompson writes in his new book, Culture as Weapon, “influence our emotions, our actions, and our very understanding of ourselves as citizens.”

But comprehending how dominant culture has become also means thinking about the ways it can be, and has been, employed to manipulate consumers, by politicians, brands, and other powerful institutions. In Culture as Weapon, Thompson delves into the culture wars of the 1980s, the early origins of public relations and advertising in the early 20th century, how culture became a powerful vehicle for reinventing cities, and how brands associate themselves with causes to shape their own reputations. He looks at how artists have responded to these impulses, and how the emergence of the internet contributed to a new kind of immersion in culture, in which we’re more deeply absorbed in it than ever.

Thompson is the artistic director of the nonprofit arts organization Creative Time, which commissions and supports socially engaged works of art. He spoke to me by phone. The interview has been edited and condensed.

Sophie Gilbert: Your book explores how arts, entertainment, and culture in the larger sense color our view, as citizens, of how we interpret current events. Do you think this played out particularly in the last election?

Nato Thompson: I feel like it plays out in every election. And to put a cautionary note around it, I’m game on for talking about the urgency of what Trump presents, but the misleading part of that is that it makes us think that those who didn’t vote for Trump are somehow outside of the bubble, which I totally do not believe. It falls too conveniently into the idea that the masses are somehow hypnotized by the media-culture machine but the progressive rationalists escape it, which just isn’t true. Our ideological terrain is much murkier than that.

Gilbert: That’s interesting, because my next question was going to be about how you explore in the book how people and companies use culture to expand and maintain their influence. And one thing about the last president was that he was really a master of this, and in using cultural soft power. Can you talk a little bit about how he used culture within his administration?

Thompson: Just the way Obama ran was interesting. He ran on a “change” platform, which is also what Trump ran on, obviously. Certainly this was the post-Bush era, and change was welcome to a country totally exhausted by the Iraq War and the War on Terror, and so the “brand” of Obama, to put it in those terms, was, “Yes we can,” and, “Change you can believe in.” Which certainly appeals to the heart, but could also easily be an ad for Pepsi-Cola. That said, he was extraordinarily personable, and probably the coolest president we will ever have. He was extremely deft on a talk show, he was the first president who could do a mic drop, he was the first president up there shooting hoops where you actually thought he was good. He was cool, but certainly not without a brand image.

Gilbert: The first chapter is largely about the culture wars that emerged during the Reagan presidency, and it feels in some ways very familiar, especially with the current threats to NEA funding. Do you feel like history is repeating itself?

Thompson: Yes, although at a very different speed. One of the lessons that we’re all learning that Reagan knew, very well in fact, is that controversies are on your side. When it comes to the culture wars, paradox is your friend. So when Trump says he’s going to build a wall—which I think is going to be the most iconic artwork of this era—it’s meant to make people angry. Some people think Trump is a master media strategist, but whether he is or not doesn’t matter. His personality happens to coincide with the needs of the media itself, and his behavior is such that the camera can’t get off him, and that’s something that the Christian right learned with the culture wars. When Jesse Helms went after “sodomites,” not only was he able to galvanize what he called the silent majority, but simultaneously he was able to gay-bash, to talk viscerally about sex, while pretending to hate it. He could have his cake and eat it. Trump does that too, I think. He enjoys condemning things because the things he’s condemning obsess the media.

Gilbert: There’s a quote in the book from Hitler, who describes citizens as “a vascillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another,” and how the art of propaganda consists of finding ways to capture their attention. Do you think culture wars are about uniting people or dividing them?

Thompson: Well, I don’t want to generalize because it’s a complex media landscape, and certain actions do in fact bring people together. But to say something kind of weird, I know a lot of people say love trumps hate—they use that phraseology—but I would say fear of the other is a more historically powerful force. Fear is one of these things in our emotional toolkits that gets a reaction out of us as people very fast. In our psychology, fear doesn’t have an opposite: It is the dominant emotional register. I say that because it’s useful to understand that fear is something we’re very vulnerable to, and because of that it will continue to be used. It’s a weapon we use on all fronts, because it’s how we function. This is the way things tend to have played out historically, and are playing out now.

Gilbert: What did you make of the inauguration? What kind of message did it project?

Thompson: It was interesting—there was so much footage of anarchists breaking windows, and I thought, this is the same media impulse that couldn’t take its eyes off Trump. An alternative title for the book certainly could have been, “If It Bleeds, It Leads,” and you see that same addiction to hyperbole, addiction to sensationalism, ratings, clickbait. I watched that and was so infuriated by it, because it just felt like nothing was changing in terms of the way we’re reading the world.

Gilbert: I wanted to ask, too, about the concert the day before, with Toby Keith and The Piano Guys. Eight years previously we saw this huge cultural event with Bruce Springsteen and Beyoncé, and the recent concert was also touted as a big inaugural event but the talent was markedly different. Do you have any thoughts on the message of that?

Thompson: There’s been such a different range in this election with cultural strategies, and here I’m talking capital-C culture, like arts and entertainment. Because, of course, we all know Trump had a difficult time getting acts to agree to come, and certainly had he had his druthers, he would have had the Rolling Stones or someone big-name and mainstream, but it didn’t go that way. Quite frankly, I don’t think Trump thinks of himself as appealing to the demographic that actually ended up playing the inaugural concert.

Gilbert: I thought about the protests, too, when I was reading the section on Campbell’s soup, and the power of branding for charitable causes, like pink soup cans for breast cancer. It seems there’s immense power in this instant visual iconography, like a sea of pink hats everywhere.

Thompson: As far as I’m concerned, that march could have been led by a myriad of different issues, but thank goodness it was a women’s march. It was great for that, it had a different tone and a different feel, and the pink hats led a lot of that, a feeling of literal texture. The Campbell’s thing is a little different because that chapter is about how companies like to brand themselves as social-good companies, like how Google’s motto is “Don’t Be Evil.” I think that under Trump we’re going to be in for a lot more of brands for social justice, because, I suspect, a lot of people are going to be unhappy with him, even if they supported him. A lot of the energy with him was against something—against Hillary—and now she’s out of the picture that’ll have to shift to another target. And a lot of companies will be able to position themselves as being against the current system, when really in fact they’re not against it at all.

Gilbert: The idea in the book too about the massive psychogenic illness of social media, and our self-perpetuating bubbles was fascinating. Because right now, every time I go on Twitter, I get a feedback loop of doom.

Thompson: I think we’re all in a national and international learning curve with that. It’s almost like there’s an emotional logic to social networking that we’re all learning together, collectively. We’re learning the emotional responses that happen to us online, we’re learning that we’re all kind of trolls when it comes to the internet. We’re watching everyone freak out but also learning that freaking out emotionally wears us down. We’re all on this strange emotional rollercoaster ride together. This is such a new way to receive news, it’s such a new way to relate to people close to us. Who knows where it’s all going? But that, certainly, is very different from the culture wars of the ’80s.

Gilbert: How can we, as consumers of culture, be aware of the ways in which our emotions might be being manipulated by it? While also not being afraid of it?

Thompson: Well, it’s a good question. I think mindfulness, certainly, and I’m no therapist, but I’m a big fan of talking things out in groups and getting some distance from how things affect you before you react to them. There’s an early analysis in the book of Walter Lippmann [his thoughts on democracy, and how he believed that people acted emotionally rather than rationally]. I would say the same analysis applies to media. I don’t want to dismiss democracy as a concept, but certainly key pillars of it—that citizens vote rationally—are inaccurate when it comes to who we are as people. Part of that, then, is really getting a handle on how people know what they know. A lot of what drives culture is branding, and a lot of the driving engine of our society knows already exactly who we are and how to get us to do things. The logic of most industries actually works very coercively. So, I’m not answering your question, but I think it’s good to be aware of how intimate and deeply fearful we are.

Gilbert: What I took from your last answer is that since we’re begin targeted so effectively by brands based on our identity, maybe we should start mixing things up? I should start consuming culture that isn’t typically my kind of thing?

Thompson: Quite honestly, on a more strategic level, it’s good to just get outside of your bubbles. Looking at the red state/blue state thing, it’s not really about states. If you throw a rock 40 minutes outside of a city, you’ll probably hit a Trump area. But what that demonstrates, too, is that geographical proximity also has a huge power over who we think we are. The people around you inform you more than the internet does. This says to me that what we need is for people from the country to come to the city, and people from the city to come to the country, and we need to have honest and open conversations about what we’re thinking about.