Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 169

West, Texas, Explosion Was a 'Criminal Act'

The April 2013 fire that engulfed a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, and killed 15 people was set on purpose, federal investigators announced Wednesday.

“This fire was a criminal act,” Robert Elder, the special agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), said at a news conference.

ATF, which led the investigation, did not say if murder charges connected to the fire would be filed. Investigators interviewed 400 people and spent $2 million on the investigation, ATF officials said. Twelve of the 15 people who were killed were emergency responders. Another 200 people were wounded in the blast.

According to CNN:

That night, a fire broke out at the West Fertilizer Co. in the town of West, about 70 miles south of Dallas. Twenty minutes later, the plant exploded with such force it caused a magnitude-2.1 earthquake. “It was like a nuclear bomb went off,” West Mayor Tommy Muska said.

After the explosion, investigators from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board said the explosion was preventable, adding the plant’s 270 tons of ammonium nitrate that exploded from the fire was a serious hazard. The explosion was a national tragedy, prompting a visit from President Obama for a memorial service in nearby Waco, Texas.

A Moon Shaped Pool Is Radiohead's Strangest Album Yet

Radiohead’s music has historically been about feeling bad, but listening to Radiohead’s music has, on some level, usually felt good. To wail along with Thom Yorke, to nod to Phil Selway’s and Colin Greenwood’s grooves, and to hum Ed O’Brien’s and Jonny Greenwood’s guitar lines (or ondes Martenot lines, or synthesizer lines, or what have you), is to experience joy—even if that joy is minuscule in comparison to the grinding oppression, spiritual emptiness, and impending doom that Yorke likes to sing about. Radiohead fans are fans, foremost, for the thrill of catharsis.

This seeming contradiction between message and medium isn’t unique to the band. Pop music can be placed next to the momentarily reassuring human inventions—movies, monarchy, vehicular safety features—that OK Computer dramatized and sneered at. Which means, at base level, it’s a tricky format for fully expressing antisocial emotions or radical critiques. Kurt Cobain wasn’t able to mock away the ones singing all the pretty songs; Beyoncé hasn’t been able to escape bell hooks’s critique that she’s queen only of an exploitative system; Yorke and his band have remained on stage at the idioteque.

Radiohead have, again and again, addressed this tension. Listening to 1995’s The Bends today can be shocking because of the brightness of the guitar music next to some of the dourest lyrics Yorke would ever sing. Since then, they’ve moved away from rock and its ability to induce fist pumping, though the band’s crystalline songwriting has shone through every time—even through the drabbest arrangements of their career on 2011’s lukewarmly received King of Limbs. Radiohead’s brilliance has been in pushing everything about the music to as strange a place as it can go without breaking the underlying songs.

It takes a while—longer than ever before—to locate the underlying songs on A Moon Shaped Pool. The leap the band has made for this album initially might seem small but actually is profound: less a shift in instrumentation than in outlook, structure, and the intended sources of gratification from the music. By deleting their Internet presence before its release, Radiohead may have been suggesting a new era, and indeed, this is the first album of theirs that suggests a post-pop world. Accordingly, A Moon Shaped Pool delivers little joy but a whole lot of beauty.

The band arrives at this new paradigm gradually over the course of the album, with the first two songs (also the first two singles) making clear they could record another “classic” Radiohead album if they wanted to. The main innovation of the opening tracks is a lushness that partly reflects Greenwood’s recent work in the classical-music world. “Burn the Witch” uses strings as diesel for the band to vroom along the familiar turns of verse/chorus/verse/chorus, a format whose manipulative power is deployed sarcastically here (as it has frequently been for protest singers). “Sing a song on the jukebox that goes ‘burn the witch,’” Yorke squeals, a quick dig at catchiness itself.

Then comes “Daydreaming,” a delicate waltz whose swirling pianos and lilting vocals are flecked with little bursts of sound that resemble rewinding tape. Yorke sings about having crossed a point of no return, and by the end of the song, noise has replaced prettiness. The amusical rumble of a backmasked, pitch-shifted Yorke saying “half my life” may be a reference to him having recently split with the woman he’s been dating for, yes, half his life.

Stipulated: If it was controversial to see Lemonade as Beyoncé’s autobiography, it’s probably criminal to go around talking about A Moon Shaped Pool as a breakup album for Yorke, who, the legend goes, wrote parts of Kid A off of phrases pulled from a hat. Nevertheless, this album makes the most sense when heard as a document of a wrenching chapter for one human being. Of course, there are larger apocalyptic themes here too; “The Numbers,” formerly entitled “Silent Spring,” pretty clearly asks the world to not give up on reversing climate change. But no longer is Yorke’s music mostly about dread—it’s about what happens after the dreadful and inevitable has arrived. The video for “Daydreaming” is instructive as to the answer: Yorke is in a daze, wandering through brief visions of alternate realities and lives, alienated from the notion of existence as a linear narrative.

The real source of the album’s triumphs and frustrations is the production. In nearly every bar of music, Nigel Godrich (who has said he channeled his father’s death into the making of A Moon Shaped Pool) adds in panning and zipping sounds, or suddenly replaces one instrument with another, or manipulates reverb into new shapes. It’s not that the music’s crowded—the sound here is somehow roomier, airier than ever—but that so many elements are continually mutating in unusual ways. In the micro, the change is fascinating; in the macro, disorienting. Maybe that’s part of why the band opted for mostly slower material: to let the textures become the main event. These are sculptures before they’re songs.

A “jam” here might qualify as “Decks Dark,” where a metronome’s overtaken by a live drum kit, a fleet of trilling pianos make melody and chaos, and choral moaning accompanies Yorke spinning a prophecy about a spaceship coming to block out all light. It’s sung in the second-person, with the strongest emotion conveyed being a slight sinking feeling toward the middle of the song. “You gotta be kidding me,” Yorke says, perhaps to death itself.

The production here is somehow roomier than ever, filled with constantly mutating sounds.

Some of the tracks seem to address the music’s relationship to emotion. The big example is “Identikit,” which I’ve convinced myself is Radiohead’s final kiss-off to pop. In a middle portion that sounds like it could have been a chorus on an earlier Radiohead album, Yorke sings, “Broken hearts make it rain,” before a group of backing singers take over the refrain and carry it into the distance as the song moves on. Maybe it’s a passage about global warming, maybe it’s about Yorke’s breakup, but maybe it’s using slang to talk about turning pain into sellable sap, something the album steadfastly refuses to do.

Similarly, “Present Tense” brings bossa nova into Radiohead’s portfolio as Yorke sings remarkably straightforward lyrics about dancing as escape from the thought of having spent love in vain. But you can’t really envision anyone moving to the tune with the abandon of, say, Yorke in the “Lotus Flower” video. There’s another would-be rave about regret via the six-minute krautrock workout “Full Stop,” but it’s hard to locate yourself in the song; Yorke’s singing is often swallowed up by the mix.

Most ambitious is “The Numbers,” which fuses classic-rock elements and film-score strings on an epic scale even while adhering to the album’s ever-liquefying mentality. The guitars on the song recall Neil Young’s “Old Man,” offering perhaps coincidental support for the idea that A Moon Shaped Pool is about seeing the world through the specific lens of age. Yorke in the “Daydreaming” video looks so grizzled and unshowered that it feels like provocation—it certainly doesn’t mean that much to him, at this point in this life, to mean that much to you.

The image of a greying Yorke comes to mind again in the fantastic troll of a closer, “True Love Waits.” The song has been an unreleased fan favorite in Radiohead’s live catalogue for two decades, a rare example of warm acoustic guitar and seemingly mushy lyrics. Pool’s studio version extinguishes the campfire to throw a funeral. As a piano chords ring out in slow, uneasy phrasings, it becomes obvious how ambivalent the song’s meaning has been all along. True love feels as though it’s being sung about in airquotes; it’s a construct that can erase individuality, a myth that the singer believed in until he didn’t. You can admire the song, but, finally, you can’t feel good about it.

What Is Trump Trying to Hide in His Tax Returns?

“This is the ultimate reality show—it’s the presidency of the United States,” Paul Manafort, a top adviser to Donald Trump, said on MSNBC Tuesday. Manafort’s comment was intended as both a defensive measure—a reply to those who mock Trump as a lightweight who thinks he’s still on The Apprentice—and a rebuke to President Obama, one of those who voiced the critique, sniping last week, “We are in serious times; this is a really serious job. This is not entertainment. This is not a reality show.”

But Manafort’s statement is also a useful key to explaining how Trump is approaching the general election. One of the rules of reality shows—right after not being there to make friends—is to break the rules. In an interview with the Associated Press released Wednesday morning, Trump said he will not release his tax returns before the general election in November. Here’s the AP report:

"There's nothing to learn from them," Trump told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday. He also has said he doesn't believe voters are interested.

This being Trump, it’s unwise to wager much on him sticking to that if the heat gets too intense—like every other politician, Trump launches trial balloons, though his are often less subtle. But if he didn’t release the documents, it would represent a serious change in norms about what Americans can expect to know about their leader.

The habit of candidates universally releasing tax returns runs back to the 1970s. Even before then, there’d been some releases. George Romney famously released 12 years of returns ahead of the 1968 election. During the 2012 election, George’s son Mitt dragged his feet on releasing returns, earning some unflattering comparisons. At the time, Politifact investigated and found that since 1972, only seven presidential nominees had refused to release their returns: Democrat Jerry Brown (1992); Republicans Pat Buchanan and Dick Lugar (1996), Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, and Romney (2008), and Green Party candidate Ralph Nader (2000).

One thing sticks out about those candidates: None of them won a major-party nomination, or for that matter really came especially close. Trump, as the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, is a different situation.

But Trump is a different situation for other reasons, too. He’s far wealthier than any other candidate to run for president, and he has a long history of questionable finances, and faces other allegations. His companies have declared bankruptcy four times. He’s been fined by the Federal Trade Commission for improper behavior. He incorrectly received a tax break for people making less than $500,000 per year. All of this means that people might have legitimate questions about what Trump is doing with his supposed vast sums: what he does with it, whether those things are legal, and further whether the techniques he likely uses to reduce his tax obligations (like many wealthy people) are appropriate, even when they are legal. Given Trump’s repeated attacks on companies that move their profits offshore, or hedge-fund managers who use the carried-interest loopholes, voters have a right to know whether he practices what he preaches.

It is true that candidates are all required to file a personal financial disclosure as part of post-Watergate reforms from the 1970s, but tax experts say returns offer a more complete view. Trump released a disclosure in 2015, claiming that he was worth $10 billion. But many finance experts greeted that estimate with feelings ranging from skepticism to derision. The disclosure form allows for ranges of values, so that Trump could simply say certain holdings were worth more than $50 million—and then claim the top-line value. The Wall Street Journal offered a more sober estimate of “at least $1.5 billion.”

The journalist Tim O’Brien was especially savage in mocking Trump’s rather inflated claims of value for his brand. If it seems a little personal for O’Brien, that’s understandable—and the backstory explains why it’s wise to be skeptical of Trump’s claims and push for more disclosure. In a 2005 book, O’Brien sought to determine just what Trump was really worth. He concluded that the Donald was really only worth $150 to $250 million. Trump, outraged, sued O’Brien for $5 billion for libel. (Perhaps he doth protest too much!) It didn’t work: The suit was thrown out. That doesn’t prove that O’Brien was right—it only proves that there weren’t grounds for a libel case—but the proceedings offered more reasons to doubt the face value of Trump’s claims, as O’Brien writes.

Moreover, Trump appears to already be lying about his taxes. He claims that he can’t release them now because he is being audited. Yet that claim is false: The IRS says there’s no reason a citizen can’t release returns that are under audit. If Trump stands behind the returns he signed, why not just put them out there?

As Matt Gertz says, Trump’s statement that he won’t is a provocation to the media—in saying that citizens don’t care, he’s laying down a challenge to the press to make them care, and force him to release the returns. In the past, at least, that has worked. Romney ultimately opted to release his returns, despite misgivings, after extensive pressure from the media and other politicians. Stuart Stevens, a former top Romney aide, suggested that the Commission on Presidential Debates could make release a prerequisite for participation.

Whatever the mechanism, voters deserve a chance to assess Trump’s returns before they make their choice in November. The entertainer may be running a different sort of campaign, inspired by reality TV, but that doesn’t mean give him any leeway to cut them off from the normal information about a candidate’s private life. Besides, isn’t voyeurism the real allure of reality shows anyway?

The Charges Against Two California Deputies

Two California sheriff’s deputies were charged Tuesday in connection with the beating of a suspected car thief in San Francisco, almost six months after surveillance-camera footage of the incident was released to the public.

The San Francisco public defender’s office received the alleyway surveillance footage from an anonymous sender and posted it on YouTube in November. In the video, two deputies with the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office can be seen chasing a suspected car thief––later identified as Stanislav Petrov––into an alley in the Mission District, tackle him, then kick and beat him with batons until other officers arrive.

The two deputies, Paul Wieber and Luis Santamaria, have been charged each with multiple felonies, including assault with a deadly weapon, battery, and assault under color of authority.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the video:

… captured the deputies swinging on Petrov “over the course of 40 seconds, striking him at least 30 times,” prosecutors wrote. “During the beating, Mr. Petrov is heard crying out and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ ‘Help me,’ and ‘Oh my God.’ The deputies stopped striking Mr. Petrov when other peace officers from multiple law enforcement agencies arrived.”

Petrov suffered a concussion with a mild brain injury, deep head cuts and multiple broken bones in both hands, authorities said. Surgeons had to insert plates, screws and pins into his hands to repair them.

Petrov’s attorneys have filed a complaint against Alameda County that alleges deputies took “trophy photos” with Petrov’s bleeding body after the beating, and that the two deputies were allowed to change their original reports after the surveillance video surfaced. Those altered reports were only made public after they were requested by the Center for Human Rights and Privacy, a civil-rights group.

San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón said Tuesday that an investigation into the incident would continue. He said there were still “allegations related to false police statements, theft, bribery, witness tampering, and/or other wrongdoing related to this case.” He did not explain the time lapse between the release of the video and the announcement of charges.

In March, the Chronicle reported that a third deputy seen in the video allegedly stole money and jewelry from Petrov, then gave it to a homeless couple who had witnessed the beating.

China’s First Transgender-Discrimination Case

An arbitration panel in China ruled against a transgender man who said he was fired unfairly by his former employer, a decision that brings an end to the country’s first transgender workplace-discrimination case.

The man used only the name “Mr. C” in order to protect his identity, and he told the Associated Press he was fired from his sales job with a health-services company just eight days after being hired in April 2015. Mr. C was born a woman, and provided an arbitration panel in the southwestern province of Guizhou with a voice recording of a discussion with his employer. In it, a sales manager told Mr. C the way he dressed would hurt the company. The panel disagreed, saying the remarks didn’t represent the views of the company, because the manager didn’t work in the personnel department.

Mr. C had asked the panel for a month’s  pay, and an apology. The panel did award Mr. C $62––about a week’s back pay––but found no wrongdoing in his dismissal. After the ruling, the Associated Press reported:

"I am not satisfied with just the paid-back wages. What I want is respect, and respect from the whole of society for minorities like us," Mr. C said in a phone interview shortly after the arbitration panel handed down its decision.

"I am very disappointed about the result," he added. "This (arbitration) process has made me realize that discrimination against sexual orientation is far worse than I had expected, and I will continue to appeal to defend my rights."

The company, Ciming Health Checkup, said it fired Mr. C because he was incompetent. The panel agreed, and as justification used a performance evaluation that said Mr. C didn’t have the necessary skills for the job. The case prompted lawyers across 14 provinces to start an anti-labor-discrimination group that will provide legal help to people like Mr. C.  

In a report by the Asia Catalyst foundation, a nonprofit group that has offices in New York and Beijing, an estimated 9.5 million transgender people live in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The number is based on sex-reassignment surgeries in the country, and on previous studies that find .1 to 1.1 percent of the world’s adult population is transgender.

The Spin Zone

“Cow!” says Jo Thornton Harding, as a black-and-white bovine, caught on the edge of a tornado, sweeps, legs flailing, in front of the truck she’s sharing with her soon-to-be ex-husband, Bill “The Extreme” Harding.

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The creature is swept out of view. And then: “Another cow!” Jo says.

“Actually,” Bill replies, “I think it was the same cow.”

It’s an exchange that, apologies to Casablanca and Gone With the Wind, may well be the best bit of dialogue in American cinematic history: elegant, sparse, ironic. And even if it isn’t, it is still perfect in the context of Twister, which was released 20 years ago today and which is not a good movie but definitely a great one. Twister was a summer blockbuster that embraced its own delightful mediocrity, combining, among other things: tornadoes, water spouts, a main character nicknamed “The Extreme,” a love triangle, a wackily stonerized Philip Seymour Hoffman, a gently villainous Cary Elwes, and Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. NPR’s Linda Holmes recently crowned Twister as her choice for the “best bad movie” ever, and she made an excellent case, against many worthy competitors, for the film’s triumphal terribleness.

What is in retrospect most remarkable about Twister, though, is what the film got right about its primary antagonist: the eponymous tornado. Twister is a movie about weather that was released right before the era when “weather” got political. It came about largely before “global warming” became “climate change,” and during a time when the existence of those phenomena was still considered to be, in the culture at large, a viable matter of debate. Twister, in 1996, embraced an assumption that is helping to define 2016: the fact that, of all the monsters we fight against in our action movies, one of the most dangerous may be the planet we call home.

Twister is a movie about weather that was released right before the era when “weather” got political.

Twister would be followed by a collection of films you could group under the loose category of “cli-fi” (short for “climate fiction”): films that, with varying shades of subtlety, address weather as a potential threat to human existence. In Twister’s wake came, among others, The Perfect Storm (2000), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Happy Feet (2006), The Happening (2008), 2012 (2009), Snowpiercer (2013), San Andreas (2015), and Interstellar (2015)—not to mention, of course, documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and Racing Extinction (2015). And Twister itself came as part of a specifically mid-’90s cadre that included Waterworld (1995) and The American President (1996), the latter a rom-com that featured a carbon-emissions subplot. Together those films reflected an understanding of climate change as both an intimate threat and a distant one.

Twister coincided in its release with 1996’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Second Assessment Report, which gravely warned that:

… carbon dioxide remains the most important contributor to anthropogenic forcing of climate change; projections of future global mean temperature change and sea level rise confirm the potential for human activities to alter the Earth’s climate to an extent unprecedented in human history; and the long time-scales governing both the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the response of the climate system to those accumulations, means that many important aspects of climate change are effectively irreversible.

On the surface—in the screenplay that was doctored, without credit, by Joss Whedon—Twister ignored those warnings. It was, after all, a summer action movie in the typical explosion-happy vein (it was produced in part by Steven Spielberg). Twister whirled cow(s), and then joked about it. It was a movie about the weather that was effectively not at all about the weather. It was in that sense retrograde, even by the standards of 1996.

But Twister also cannily anticipated the 2016 climate of climate change—specifically through its depiction of an environment that acts not just as a background to human activity, but also as a potential threat to it. The film understood that the weather—weather that is increasingly unpredictable, and increasingly violent—could transform itself into something menacing. That wind and water and air, those most basic of elements, could combine to become a kind of monster.

Movie monsters, as my colleague Sophie Gilbert noted, tend to change with the times, tapping into some of our deepest anxieties about who we are and where we’re going. Godzilla reflected anxieties about the effects of a nuclear world. The Omen reflected anxieties about parenthood. It Follows reflected anxieties about the disembodied threats of the digital world. And Twister, for its part, reflected—and, indeed, anticipated—anxieties about the weather’s ability to turn on us, at any moment. Its murderous monster is, simply, nature. The fears it taps into concern an anxiety that has long been part of human culture, but that has sharpened in recent years: “Mother Earth” betraying her children, as perhaps her children have betrayed her.

The film understood that the weather, far from being a passive setting to human existence, can easily transform itself into a monster.

The tornadoes of the film can’t, of course, be defeated in the way more traditional movie monsters might. They can’t be killed; they can merely be survived. And the best way to survive them, Twister suggests, is to analyze them in advance of their coming. The film’s protagonists are scientists who are doing their life-risking work to further human knowledge. They are trying to learn more about tornadoes specifically so that people will have more time—even a few more seconds would help—to avoid their fury. “They had no warning,” Jo (Helen Hunt), Twister’s most passionate storm-chaser, laments repeatedly of the film’s tornado victims.

So that was another way that Twister was, despite its inanities, fairly prophetic: It trusted science as a weapon against the film’s biggest antagonist. And it mistrusted everything that wasn’t scientific. The movie’s human villains, it’s worth noting—Cary Elwes and his gang of black-Suburban-driving storm-chasers—are only nefarious insofar as, as Bill scoffs, they’re “in it for the money, not the science.” They’re not bad; they’re just badly motivated. They don’t share Bill’s—and the movie’s—faith in data.

Twister wasn’t alone in that faith: It would be followed by many other blockbusters (1996’s Independence Day, 1998’s Armageddon, 2015’s The Martian) that saw science as essential to humanity’s survival of whatever threat might face it, be it alien invasion or environmental catastrophe. For Twister, yes, that faith manifested in part as a winking recognition that what seems like two cows might simply be a cyclical repetition of the same cow. But the movie also offered a more important insight: that when the monster is all around you—indeed, when the monster is the very world you live in—defeating it is beside the point.

High Tensions in Bangladesh

Bangladesh on Tuesday executed one of the country’s top Islamist leaders, threatening a new wave of extremist violence in the South Asian country.

Motiur Rahman Nizami led Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which advocated for making the country an Islamic state. He was hanged early Wednesday local time for crimes he allegedly committed during the country’s war of independence from Pakistan in 1971.

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He was convicted of genocide, rape and torture, charges the defence said were not proven beyond reasonable doubt… Nizami is the fourth leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party to have been executed since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina set up a war crimes tribunal to look into abuses during the independence war. A former government minister, Nizami was one of the most important figures to be found guilty. He was convicted of setting up a militia which helped the Pakistani army identify and kill pro-independence activists.

Those previous executions of Jamaat-e-Islami leaders resulted in violence.

Nizami’s execution early Wednesday comes amid a spate of attacks by Islamists in Bangladesh on secular activists.

Peaking at Mount Everest

Climbing teams on Mount Everest reached the last base camp before the summit Tuesday and are now waiting for good weather conditions before they ascend to the peak of the world’s tallest mountain, unreachable for the past two seasons because of deadly avalanches.

The South Col, the final camp before the top of the 29,000-foot mountain, is just 3,000 feet below. But that last leg is one of the riskiest parts of the climb, and the weather there is notoriously fickle. Climbers have not successfully completed the ascent since 2014, when an avalanche near the Khumbu Icefall killed 16 sherpa guides. In 2015, another avalanche triggered by Nepal’s massive earthquake killed at least 18 people and closed climbing for the year.

There are currently 289 climbers and guides at various camps along routes to the summit. For those at the highest camp, like one climber with the Adventure Consultants team, there’s plenty of waiting involved as climbers wait for the weather to clear. In the team’s blog, a climber who signed his name as Mike described the waiting game:

I awoke to yet another milky sky day with a big halo around the sun. Sure enough it was snowing just after noon. As dry and sunny as April was May has been the opposite. Sun now hits my tent before 7.00am and if I'm not woken by avalanches there is a dawn chorus of birds.



...



In general this is a time of the expedition for patiently waiting, going for walks to keep fit and monitoring weather forecasts.

Climbers choose from several routes to reach Mount Everest’s summit, and one of the more popular has always been the southern route, the site of the 2014 avalanche. This year, most teams have hiked the Southeast Ridge. However, an avalanche that struck Tuesday has trapped two Slovak climbers on the southwest face, which is considered much riskier, The Himalayan Times reported. One of the climbers is believed to be injured. The other is considered to be in fine condition, but rescue helicopters have failed twice to find the climbers.

Weather on Mount Everest has posed an increasingly constant challenge for climbers. In September, a Japanese mountaineer failed to reach the peak because of high winds. In 2014, Wang Jing, a Chinese climber, reached the top of Mount Everest and would have been the only person to do so that year, but her ascent has been invalidated in the view of many climbers, because they say she used a helicopter to carry her over a dangerous obstacle.

Bartlet for America, Forever

The White House press briefing has been presided over by its share of celebrity guests over the years, but when C.J. Cregg took the podium on April 29, it might’ve marked the first appearance of a fictional character. “Josh is out today, he has ... I believe it’s a root canal?” she quipped, probably referring to the incumbent Press Secretary Josh Earnest—or was it Josh Lyman, who had once stepped in for C.J. after her own dental emergency? Either way, she’d lost none of her poise. “Let’s be honest, I’m better at this than he is anyway,” she joked.

The moment was mostly a fun political stunt: The actress Allison Janney, who played the role of Press Secretary C.J. Cregg for seven years on NBC’s hit drama The West Wing, eventually broke character and ceded the stage back to Earnest after briefly speaking about sufferers of opioid abuse. But the gag was also the latest in a long line of enthusiastic throwbacks to a show that depicted a gentler, more idealistic time for Washington D.C.—one where White House staffers could be realistically portrayed as hard-charging, lovable do-gooders. The West Wing has been off the air since 2006, but this unfulfilled desire for harmony and efficacy in the political process is perhaps why there’s been more nostalgia for the fictional Jed Bartlet administration than for any real one in recent memory.

Though Janney was only in character for a couple of minutes, the sight of her behind the podium talking to reporters felt particularly meta—even for a show whose fictional elements have so often bled into, or influenced, reality. The West Wing, which debuted in 1999, is now old enough that it surely inspired some of the younger staffers in the Obama administration to get into politics. And when the show intrudes into the real world, it does so in ways partly playful and partly serious: Back in 2008, the fictional Democratic President Bartlet (Creggs’s boss) even “endorsed” Obama in Maureen Dowd’s New York Times op-ed column, via a peculiar dream dialogue conjured by the show’s creator Aaron Sorkin.

There’s been more nostalgia for the fictional Jed Bartlet administration, it seems, than there has been for any real one in recent memory.

Since airing its series finale almost a decade ago, The West Wing has remained in the public consciousness, thanks to its easy availability on Netflix and an evolving world of Internet fandom, including a slew of popular Twitter accounts imitating the show’s main characters. Now, the actual cast is getting more involved with the nostalgia boom. In a recent episode of The Late Late Show, the host James Corden did a walk-and-talk sketch with Janney (back as Cregg), this time accompanied by a white-haired Bradley Whitford as Bartlet’s Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman. In March, the actor Joshua Malina (who played Will Bailey on the show’s later seasons) and the composer Hrishikesh Hirway launched The West Wing Weekly, a recap podcast that tackles an episode a week.

Malina is now a regular on Scandal, one of a new wave of popular shows that present a darker side of Washington than The West Wing did—and that reflect the more cynical view many Americans today have of the political process. Scandal has always highlighted its president’s human weaknesses: Fitzgerald Grant is a philanderer who had the election stolen for him and possesses little actual power. He’s also committed murder, as has House of Cards’s Frank Underwood.

Compared to those shows, The West Wing exudes an almost cartoonish optimism about the power of politics to work for the common good. “[The West Wing] is a little too gentle for the sort of the cable landscape we’re used to now, in terms of an hour-long drama,” Malina told Vulture in an interview about the podcast. “That’s part of what’s so great about rewatching it. It does feel like a palate cleanser from the world of Breaking Bad and Sopranos.” Of course, The West Wing, for all its merits, is still high fantasy. Amid growing disenchantment with the 2016 presidential race, where the two leading candidates are likely to be the most unpopular ever nominated by their parties, it’s become easier to understand why even Obama White House officials are looking backwards—or to a D.C. that never really existed.

In the end, any administration’s achievements will lack the scripted magic of the The West Wing, where insurmountable problems can be conquered in the writer’s room. Look at what the Bartlet administration accomplished in its two terms: One episode brokers peace between Israel and Palestine, another “solves” Social Security’s fiscal insolvency, and a third confirms a controversial liberal as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In the show’s earlier days, progress came more slowly, and episodes would end with the staff grinding their teeth at the seeming impossibility of enacting gun-control legislation or making college education free for all. Over the seasons, those achievements started to stack up, effectively enshrining The West Wing’s romantic view of Washington. But the real melancholy is the fact that America’s political heroes can only exist in a dream sequence. When they actually take the stage at the White House, they quickly have to break character.

The American Presidents Who Visited Hiroshima

The White House announced Tuesday that Barack Obama will become the first sitting American president to visit Hiroshima, where the United States dropped an atomic bomb on August 6, 1945, to force Japan’s surrender in World War II.

Obama will follow two of his predecessors to Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, but neither was in office at the time of their visits: Jimmy Carter visited on May 5, 1984, long after he’d left the White House, and Richard Nixon went on April 11, 1964, four years before he won the presidential election.

Carter, who visited the memorial with his wife, Rosalyn, and their daughter, Amy, pledged at the time to “eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of this Earth.” He and Takeshi Araki, Hiroshima’s mayor at the time, placed a wreath at the monument bearing the names of the victims of the bombing. An Associated Press account of the visit noted that the Carters “moved silently through the museum. They paused at the final display—the shadow of a man, whose body was disintegrated in the blast and was burned into a set of stone steps.”   

There are fewer details on Nixon’s visit. It came after he had been Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, and was the last part of a 24-day tour of Asia. A report at the time from United Press International noted that the would-be president “laid the wreath and stood for two minutes of silent prayer as about 60 persons, mostly high-school students and a few American personnel, looked on.” Hiroshima, he said, “has made the world promise to strive for peace.”

Nixon’s own views on the use of the nuclear weapons were complicated. On the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, he praised General Douglas MacArthur’s view of the use of atomic weapons in war.

“MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it, pacing the floor of his apartment in the Waldorf,” he said. “He thought it a tragedy that the bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited damage to noncombatants.  ... MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off.”

But in a 1985 interview, Nixon acknowledged that he considered using nuclear weapons four times during his presidency, including once to end the Vietnam War.

The prospect of a presidential visit remains controversial seven decades after the U.S. bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed an estimated 140,000 people. This, in part, is because of how the U.S. and Japan view World War II, Sheila Smith, a Japan expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told NPR. In Japan, she said, a poll last year found nearly 80 percent of people thought the atomic bombs should not have been used on the two cities. “In the United States,” she noted, “when we think of World War II, our war memories revolve around Pearl Harbor.”

When John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial last month, he spoke of the “extraordinary complexity of choices of war and what war does to people, to communities, countries, the world.” He did not, however, apologize. Nor indeed has any American official apologized for the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—though President Eisenhower had publicly regretted the use of “that awful thing.”

Obama, who will visit Hiroshima later this month with Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, is likely to remain firmly among their ranks. Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, wrote in a blog post on Medium Tuesday that the president “will not revisit the decision to use the atomic bomb at the end of World War II.”

“Instead,” Rhodes wrote, “he will offer a forward-looking vision focused on our shared future” with Japan.