Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 19

Sorry, Betsy DeVos: Guns Aren't a Bear Necessity in Schools

The confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees have had plenty of wild moments, but none seems to have captured the imagination of so many people as much as Betsy DeVos’s explanation for why it might be wise to allow guns in schools.

DeVos, Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, fielded a question from Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, an outspoken advocate for gun control, on the matter of gun-free school zones. She responded by citing an example she’d heard from Senator Mike Enzi about a school in Wapiti, Wyoming, Enzi’s home state, that had a fence to keep grizzly bears out.

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“I think probably there, I would imagine that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies,” DeVos said. Thus was whelped a sleuth of bear jokes at DeVos’ expense.

But it turns out the bear-baiting was misplaced, or at least badly exaggerated. The backlash is perhaps unsurprising: From the Mama Grizzly to Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s divergent approaches to the Russian bear, Washington has become a den of polarized opinions. Yet encounters with bears at schools across the country turn out to be a somewhat common occurrence—and as bear populations bounce back, particularly in the east, more schools are joining the cub, so to speak.

No example is quite so delightful as a 2015 episode at the high school in Bozeman, Montana. It turns out the bear was an early bird—despite the species’ reputation for sleeping at length, it couldn’t compete with the slumber of teenage humans, and arrived well before the starting school bell:

The bear entered the school through an open garage door in the back of the building at around 7:30 a.m., nearly an hour before school started. Students and staff were in the building, according to Bozeman Public Schools Superintendent Rob Watson. The bear left through another open door after about a minute.

The cub rattled around lockers, presumably looking for honey, and rattled some school officials. In a short video, a nervous voice asks the principal, “What do you want me to do, Kevin?”

A bear visited a #Bozeman #Montana high school this morning! pic.twitter.com/vVJEOQqbe7

— The Senior List (@SeniorList) October 14, 2015

But as the Billings Gazette reports (as part of its “Montana Bears in the News Series”), the animal eventually ambled out of the school on its own, with no live ammunition needed.

That seems to be the case for most bears’ scholastic excursions. In 2013, students in Montclair, New Jersey, were put on lockdown after a black bear was spotted near an elementary school. The bear was eventually found in a tree, shot down with a tranquilizer gun, and freed. Something similar happened in Ridgewood, New Jersey, the following year. That animal was “caused no harm,” The New York Times assured readers. In 2011, a bear cavorted outside Tualatin Elementary School in Oregon before being caught and released in the wild. Bears have been tranquilized or trapped when they got too close to schools in states from Connecticut to Florida to Idaho, though it’s just as common for them to simply clear out before anyone can do anything. In 1985, employees at a girls’ school in upstate New York tried to run one off but only succeeded in scaring it up a tree, from whence animal-control officials had to retrieve it.

It turns out that what motivates the bears is the same thing that manages to get many teenagers up and moving on a daily basis: “They’re after food and sex,” a Connecticut state biologist told the Times in 2005.

Sadly, not every encounter resolves itself peacefully; some come to a grizzly ending. In Irvington, New Jersey, in 2006, a frightened black bear scared officials, too, resulting in a lockdown of schools. But with the end of the school day nearing, it was decided that the bear had to go. As officers neared the animal, wielding tranquilizer guns, it became aggressive, and they decided to shoot it with a shotgun.

“It was for our own safety,” said the impossibly well-named animal-control officer Jim Osorio.

In 2015, authorities managed to catch a bear that had been menacing schools in Arvada, Colorado, but ultimately decided to euthanize her because of health concerns.

A deadly outcome is less likely in Wapiti, Wyoming, though. Urged along by DeVos’s comment, Politifact’s Lauren Carroll called up the school superintendent there, who informed Carroll that in accordance with the district’s gun-free policy, there’s no firearm at the school, and the anti-grizzly-bear fence seems to do the trick. What’s more, Politifact found that guns are often ineffective against the animals. If DeVos remains concerned about the threat of bears at schools in the U.S., perhaps she’d do just as well to forget the guns and instead a take page out of the playbook of the president she hopes to serve: Build the wall.

Unfortunately, the bears are unlikely to pay for it.

The Founder Is the Fast Food of Biopics

Ray Kroc’s story is a distinctly American one; it’s a tale of business success marked by corporate greed, dodgy backroom deals, and an overwhelming desire for sameness. Kroc was the salesman who took a small burger restaurant in San Bernardino, California, franchised it around the country, and turned it into the McDonald’s Corporation—and he only had to disrespect the wishes of the restaurant’s actual founders to do it. It’s a rather bleak rise to prosperity, but an interesting one nonetheless, since so much of Kroc’s skill at spreading McDonald’s around the country relied on his packaging of a fast-food restaurant as a plain, inoffensive monument to American family values.

Unfortunately, The Founder, John Lee Hancock’s new biopic about Kroc’s rise to power in the ’50s and ’60s, is as bland as the burgers the businessman hawked. The film had the chance to subvert the typical bootstrap tale of American triumph, but instead it plays right into that easy narrative, trying to celebrate his business acumen without skirting past his darker misdeeds. The Founder ends up feeling extremely wishy-washy, unable to scrub the nastiness of Kroc’s success but also incapable of confronting it. In the end, it feels too close to the movie you’d imagine Kroc approving of—not exactly a hagiography, but a Wikipedia entry in which all the controversial material is squeezed into one small section at the bottom.

Kroc is played by Michael Keaton as half-huckster, half-social climber—a try-hard salesman who has a roving eye for business opportunities, much to the despair of his wife Ethel (Laura Dern). When selling milkshake makers to a burger joint in California, Kroc is amazed by the efficiency of their operation, getting a tour from the eponymous McDonald brothers Dick (Nick Offerman) and Mac (John Carroll Lynch). Kroc’s genius, such as it is, mostly lies in understanding how easily the restaurant can be replicated. His riskiest pitch is to the brothers, to allow him to run their franchising operation.

There’s one scene early on that sums up the strange, slightly terrifying appeal of the McDonald brothers’ operation. Before setting up their restaurant, they draw its kitchen, in chalk, on a tennis court and have their employees mimic preparing the meals for customers, acting out each step (ketchup, pickles, fries, milkshakes) with perfect automation, in an eerie factory-floor dance. It’s beautiful, and it’s unsettling—a vision of America’s fast-food future where speed and efficiency will trump restaurant quality. Kroc hears about this and envisions a formula he can plug people into—but Hancock films the whole chalk-drawing scene with airy delight, a light, lilting score accompanying his overhead shots of the restaurant rehearsals.  

The Founder’s script is by Robert D. Siegel, the former editor-in-chief of The Onion, whose previous films Big Fan and The Wrestler focused on the bleak lives of their subjects while never letting go of their core humanity. He never quite achieves this with Kroc—a man whose business canny is impossible to dismiss, but who otherwise is a bit of a blank slate, perhaps befitting a champion of mediocrity. He’s drawn to McDonald’s, as he tells Dick and Mac, because of the All-American quality of its name—free of the limiting gimmickry of a Burger King, easy to project one’s own values onto, a non-threatening place for families to congregate.

What should be a complicated work ends up a neatly packaged, easily disposable piece of Oscar bait.

Hancock, in turn, has projected his own values onto Kroc, and has turned his subject into another of his dull biopic heroes. Hancock’s previous films include The Blind Side, The Rookie, and Saving Mr. Banks—“true-story” films about people who accomplished great things against all odds, works that declined to do anything more than celebrate their protagonists’ achievements. Hancock is a purveyor of easygoing Hollywood confections, which makes him an especially odd choice for Kroc’s story, the morals of which are anything but easygoing.

Kroc eventually pried the McDonald’s business away from its original founders, expanding it quickly around the country even as Dick, who designed the restaurant’s fast-food system, worried its quality would be diluted as the product got less and less centralized. Hancock plays their disputes like friendly disagreements—grumpy phone calls that eventually need to be sorted out by lawyers—and quickly skates by the more malicious aspects of the story, such as Kroc opening a McDonald’s franchise across the street from the original restaurant to put it out of business. The dissolution of Kroc’s marriage takes place off-screen, as does his affair with Joan (Linda Cardellini), the wife of franchise owner Rollie Smith (Patrick Wilson).

It’s hard to know what Hancock saw in Kroc outside of the roaring success of his business, and The Founder doesn’t give viewers more than that. What should be a terrifically complicated work ends up a neatly packaged, easily disposable piece of Oscar bait. It’s a thin gruel, best summed up by the milkshake substitute Kroc hits upon as a cost-cutting measure for his growing corporation. Just take water, add powdered milk, and stir: It looks like the real thing, and tastes near enough. The Founder is the fast-food dinner of biopics—20 minutes after you eat it, you’re already hungry again.

How Iván Rodríguez Captured an Era of Baseball

Catchers are involved in every play of a baseball game. Good ones can embody the qualities of their teams, and great ones can embody the qualities of their eras. Iván “Pudge” Rodríguez, elected on Wednesday to the 2017 class of the Baseball Hall of Fame, belongs to the latter camp. Rodríguez is one of the undisputed best of all time at his position, and nobody who watched him play will forget the sight of him: his quickness and precision behind the plate, his uninvolved but effective swing, and most of all his otherworldly throwing arm.

For the better part of the 1990s and 2000s, trying to steal a base against Rodríguez ranked among the more foolish things a player could attempt on a field. Those runners bold or silly enough to try would get a close look at a process whose familiarity did nothing to dull its excitement. Rodríguez would snap his glove around the incoming pitch, jump to his feet, and send the ball blazing right to the second baseman’s glove. Watching him throw was like watching a meteor land in a teacup.

The 2017 Hall of Fame class is rounded out by two other inductees—the slugger Jeff Bagwell and the leadoff man extraordinaire Tim Raines, both fine players rightly beloved by fans in Houston and Montreal—but Rodríguez stands apart. It is not just that his numbers astound, though they do; over a 21-year career playing mostly for the Texas Rangers and Detroit Tigers, Rodríguez caught more games than anyone else ever has (2,427), tallied 2,844 base hits, knocked 311 homers, nabbed 661 would-be base-stealers, and won the 1999 MVP award and one World Series, in 2003 with the Florida Marlins. Rodríguez also seemed to distill the qualities of his time.

For reasons ranging from the strategic to the chemical, baseball during Rodríguez’s era was stronger and faster—bigger—than ever before. Home runs flew higher and more often, and pitchers lit up radar guns. Just as the happy-go-lucky Yankee backstop Yogi Berra stood in for the halcyon midcentury and Johnny Bench starred in the Cincinnati Reds-dominated ’70s, Rodríguez seemed to personify his period of the sport. He hit like few catchers ever had, batting above .300 for eight straight seasons in his prime, and threw like nobody before him. He brought the bold style permeating the game to its most essential position.

Rodríguez barely cleared the 75 percent threshold required for induction, likely because his missteps, too, were those of his peers. “Only God knows,” Rodríguez once said when asked if he had ever tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, and though he may be correct, media members have a few ideas of their own on the subject. His body’s transformations over the course of his career fit a suspect pattern, and Jose Canseco, who played with Rodríguez in Texas, claims in his infamous steroid account Juiced to have personally injected his former teammate.

Rodríguez’s imminent induction, then, will not only be a celebration of one outstanding player; it will also mark increasing acceptance of a time when PED use ran rampant. If last year’s induction of Mike Piazza suggested that the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, the group responsible for Hall of Fame voting, was willing to disregard steroid rumor and hearsay, honoring Rodríguez signals that it will look past more convincing, if still circumstantial, evidence. Elsewhere on the ballot, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens made massive gains, each securing over 50 percent of the vote for the first time. If and when they reach the Hall, the so-called “steroid era” will have been folded into the rest of baseball history.

This will rankle some—Rodríguez’s candidacy alone prompted concerns—but it portends good things for the Hall of Fame as an institution dedicated to the sport’s whole story, the sordid and glamorous elements that have sometimes gone hand-in-hand. The seasons around the start of the 21st century were home to all sorts of subterfuge, but they also produced some of the greatest players anybody has ever seen. In the coming years, the Hall will likely acknowledge them in full. For now, it recognizes a fitting early entrant in Rodríguez, a player as thrilling as any in his larger-than-life time.

“From day one, I loved the game of baseball and I took a lot of pride every single day and I was a winner,” he said after hearing of his good news. “That’s probably the bottom line from all of this.” That’s not the bottom line, of course—the effect of his nod will be felt in elections to come—but Rodríguez’s statement makes for a handy reminder that, behind all the speculation and hard lines drawn by voters, there’s still the basic fact of the game.

Revisiting Toby Keith's Beer for My Horses

Almost a decade before starring tonight at an inaugural event for Donald Trump, country standout Toby Keith starred in a 2008 film called Beer for My Horses, a cinematic endeavor that managed the exceptional feat of earning 0 percent on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. To be fair, this score was based on a statistically inadequate total of six reviews. But having belatedly caught up with the film, I can attest that its critical reputation is well-earned.

The movie was written by Keith and the comedian/country singer Rodney Carrington (who also co-stars), and it is the sole feature directed by Michael Salomon, a music-video director known for his frequent collaborations with Keith. Given the extreme lack of relevant expertise on hand—that is to say, acting, screenwriting, and filmmaking—it is perhaps no surprise that the movie is a generally inept undertaking: by turns, a comedy that isn’t funny, a drama devoid of tension, and an action movie in sore need of a shot of epinephrine.

It’s a pity, given that Keith is a likable onscreen presence; he harbors political views more eclectic than those generally associated with him (he opposed the Iraq war, for instance, and has been supportive of Barack Obama on occasion); and his own songs typically display more wit than anything in this movie (e.g., High maintenance woman don’t want no maintenance man; or, I ain’t as good as I once was, but I’m as good once as I ever was).

But Beer for My Horses is nonetheless a moderately interesting cultural document, especially at this inaugural moment, because it is very clearly presented as an entertainment of, by, and for red state America. It features an earnest, low-key amiability, but one that is generally reserved for its white-male protagonists and that occasionally veers unexpectedly into the bizarre and reprehensible. (I should perhaps note here that I am a lifelong blue-stater with only a passing familiarity with Toby Keith; but my wife, with whom I watched the movie, is a big-time Keith fan who grew up all across the South.)

The movie borrows its title from Keith’s 2003 number-one hit with Willie Nelson, who also has a small role. (The chorus: Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses…) Alas, there are no horses in the film, let alone beer-drinking ones. The overlap between song and movie is essentially limited to the thematic, a kind of inchoate enthusiasm for “law and order” that carries the usual political, cultural, and racial undertones. (The movie’s dispiriting tagline, “Vigilante Justice: It’s a Real Blast!”, does little to quell accusations—denied by Keith—that the initial song was effectively pro-lynching.)

Keith stars as “Rack” Racklin, a deputy sheriff in the hamlet of Mangum, Oklahoma, and Carrington plays his pal Lonnie—also a deputy, albeit a vastly less capable one. The two enjoy a life of relatively low-effort policing (mediating domestic disputes, etc.) until their lives are beset by a pair of misfortunes: First, Rack’s lawnmower is damaged. (This takes place when his longtime, live-in girlfriend—played in a barely-there cameo by Gina Gershon—leaves him; one of the movie’s running gags is that everyone in town considers the mower the greater loss.) And second, on a routine surveillance outing, the boys wind up arresting a Mexican drug dealer whose brother is the head of a major cartel.

Conveniently for Rack, the true love of his life, Annie (Claire Forlani), has just moved back to town from Chicago. Less conveniently, after their first reunion date, she is kidnapped by the aforementioned cartel lord, who promises to kill her unless his brother is released from jail. Avatars of American manhood that they are, Rack and Lonnie drive to Mexico to rescue her.

Again, more interesting than the plot—this may be the definition of a low hurdle—is the cultural signage that the movie consistently offers for display. There’s a scene set in a honky tonk to establish that Rack and Lonnie are the kind of guys who hang out at a honky tonk; a pig-hunting scene to establish that they’re the kind of guys who hunt pigs; and a scene at church to establish that they’re nominally churchgoing, even if Lonnie gets in trouble for snoring during the service. Rack and Lonnie take the latter’s brand-new truck to Mexico, in order to underline just how holy an object a brand-new truck is. (It is not the only subplot to make this point.) And Annie usefully reminds us that her life in the “big city”—the phrase is used constantly—was inferior to life in small-town Mangum.

Despite its generally genial air, there are a few scenes and storylines that lodge in the mind unpleasantly.

Still more interesting are the details the film advertises less aggressively, in particular the decline of the institution of marriage. It’s not only Rack: Lonnie, too, is in a longstanding, living-together relationship that has not progressed to the nuptial phase. (Another comic gem: Lonnie is convinced that if he ever does propose to his girlfriend, she’ll immediately get fat.) Even when Rack is asked whether he intends to marry Annie—again, the very much all-caps LOVE OF HIS LIFE—he replies, “yeah,” before quickly adding, “maybe someday.” There are also hints of the rural methamphetamine epidemic that has since become so familiar: Rack and Lonnie arrest their dealer when he’s attempting to steal fertilizer to process meth; and the movie opens with the horrifically prescient song “Choctaw Bingo,” by alt-country singer James McMurtry (son of Larry).

And then there’s Ted Nugent. On some level, there probably had to be. The singer-turned-conservative-activist plays “Skunk,” another Mangum deputy and buddy of Rack and Lonnie’s. Nugent has spent the latter portion of his career desperately publicizing himself as a kind of American ur-male (bow hunting!) and it’s a little hard to tell whether his performance here is an over-the-top extension of that effort or a self-mocking sendup of the same. The first time we see him, he is sharpening a hunting knife on a whetstone. Soon after, he has shot an arrow into a bad guy’s ass and then fired two machine pistols into the air as the power chords of “Cat Scratch Fever” jangle in the background. You be the judge.

If that was all there was to it, Beer for My Horses would remain a nearly instantly forgettable misfire, too ineptly made even to truly offend. There are several jokes about a farting dog and several more about a dozy, doughnut-eating cop; after executing an underling, the drug lord even drags out that stalest of chestnuts, “Good help is so hard to find.” But despite its generally genial, boys-will-be-boys air, there are a few scenes and storylines that lodge in the mind unpleasantly. Begin (as Donald Trump did) with the Mexicans. The small-time criminal and his cartel-boss brother both have the same handful of characterological modes: maniacal screaming, diabolical leering, and—when confronted with Rack’s robust American mettle—whimpering like children. This may be the first time that I’ve ever felt a murderous drug lord was treated unfairly onscreen.

A low-grade fog of sexism and homophobia hovers consistently over the proceedings: the lawnmower that’s more important than a girlfriend; the worry that marriage is a license for obesity; a prostitute character who seems to exist solely to be lusted after (by Lonnie) and insulted (by Rack). And I’m not sure the movie goes ten minutes without a grade-school-level gay taunt: “your boyfriend,” “you girls,” etc., etc.

But there are two scenes that truly stand out, in part because they are self-contained and generally unrelated to the larger story. The first is awful but straightforward: As Rack and Lonnie are driving to Mexico, a jeep full of young women pulls up beside them and, for no reason at all, one of them lifts her shirt to expose her breasts. Actually, not quite for no reason at all: The scene is set to a song by Carrington (a.k.a., the co-writer and co-star), titled “Show Them to Me.” Beer For My Horses does not treat us to the full opus, but we do get a representative taste: Unclasp your bra and set those puppies free / They’d look a whole lot better without that sweater baby / I’m sure you’ll agree / If you got two fun bags / Show them to me. Thank goodness Bob Dylan has given us a precedent for bestowing the Nobel Prize for Literature on songwriters.

But the worst scene in the film—and the one that I fear will linger in memory—is another that takes place during Rack and Lonnie’s journey into Mexico. Along the way, they pull over at a rest stop. But when they go to the bathroom, who should be there but a handful of black guys (the only ones in the movie, I believe), dressed in what is evidently meant to be a mildly thuggish manner. Because that’s as close as we come to an explanation—well, apart from the fact that one of them is smoking a cigarette—for Rack’s decision to ostentatiously take out his pistol and place it on the urinal as a warning. Apparently, you can’t be too careful with those black people...

Rack completes his business, but Lonnie is still attending to his own in a stall. While he waits for things to loosen up, he decides to start singing “Shout,” the Isley Brothers song subsequently made iconic when Otis Day and the Knights performed it for the boys of Delta Tau Chi in Animal House. And what would you know, but the moment they hear it, the presumptively criminal black guys in the bathroom start singing harmony and dancing!

To recap, in the span of just a few minutes Beer for My Horses suggests that: a) black people should be assumed to be dangerous, even when they haven’t done anything remotely threatening; b) they cease to be dangerous as soon as you invoke their native enthusiasm for music; and c) they especially enjoy performing “Shout” for white people.

Though at least, the movie implicitly reassures, they’re not as bad as Mexicans.

Happy inauguration.

What to Expect When You're Expecting a Peaceful Transition of Power

When George Washington was inaugurated, in late April of 1789, his aides had to scramble, right before his swearing-in ceremony began, to find a Bible on which he could take the oath of office. It hadn’t occurred to any of them, as they’d been planning the event, that they’d need one. Washington and his fellow founders were winging it. They knew, though—or, at least, they hoped—that they were, in imagining the installation of a man who would be the nation’s chief executive rather than its king, establishing a ceremony that would be repeated many, many times again.

Their hope was realized. The inauguration of a new American president is now a matter of ritual, honed by centuries of trial and error, its details—pomp, circumstance, just a smidge more pomp for good measure—planned down to the second. Each inaugural exercise is attuned to the man who is stepping into office; each one, though, even more importantly—even more symbolically—is the stuff of shared ceremony, a ritualized version of what George Washington would learn after he took his oath (on a Bible that was borrowed, finally, from a Masonic lodge): When you become the American president, your life is no longer, fully, your own. People may serve at your pleasure; you serve, however, at the pleasure of the people. So while the inauguration is a celebration of the new president, it is also a step-by-step ceremony of conversion: It is a man, and his family, shedding the life they have known for the one they have chosen.

Here, then, is what you can expect from that ceremony. Here’s a guide to the days-long festivities—the closest thing America’s stubborn non-monarchy will ever come to a coronation—that will culminate, this weekend, in Donald John Trump becoming the 45th president of these United States.

* * *

THURSDAY, JANUARY 19

10:35 a.m.: “Voices of the People,” a day-long public concert, will begin at the Lincoln Memorial. The concert will feature performances from, according to the official inauguration website, the King’s Academy Honor Choir, the Republican Hindu Coalition, the Montgomery Area High School Marching Band, Marlana Van Hoose, the Maury NJROTC Color Guard, the Pride of Madawaska, Webelos Troop 177, the Northern Middle School Honors Choir, the American Tap Company,  the Everett High School Viking Marching Band, the TwirlTasTix Baton Twirling group, and not one—not two—but three different bagpipe groups.

3:30 p.m.: Trump and Vice President-Elect Mike Pence will participate in a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. The ritual, a long-standing element of the inaugural exercises, is a gesture meant to honor the nation’s veterans.

4 p.m.: Trump will arrive at the Voices of the People concert during a segment of the festivities dubbed the “Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration.” The event, which will be headlined by country stars Toby Keith (whose 2008 song “Beer for My Horses” has spurred controversy for its lyrics’ apparent allusion to lynching) and Lee Greenwood, the singer of “God Bless the U.S.A.” The concert will also feature The Piano Guys, 3 Doors Down, the DJ known as Ravi Drums, and the Frontmen of Country. It will also feature, in a late addition to the roster, the soul singer Sam Moore. Jon Voight will be there, too.

One performer who won’t be present for the concert? The Broadway star Jennifer Holliday. She had been previously scheduled to perform at this event, but later, in a note to The Wrap, declared that the decision to appear had been “a lapse of judgment.” Apologizing to the LGBT community for having considered participating, she reiterated that she “will not perform for the welcome concert or for any of the inauguration festivities!”

The “Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration” will be broadcast live, nationally (check your local listings, etc.). It will feature brief remarks from Trump himself, and will conclude with a fireworks finale orchestrated by Grucci—holders, according to the company’s website, of the Guinness World Record for “the ‘Largest Fireworks Display’ ever recorded.”

8 p.m.: The All American [sic] Inaugural Ball, emceed by Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe—and also featuring, according to The Comic’s Comic, performances from DJ Freedom and the comedian and the senior Intel engineer Dan Nainan, and “an appearance by astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Lt. Col. Oliver North from the Iran-Contra scandal, singer Beau Davidson, cover bands The Reagan Years and The MIXX”—will begin now. If you’d like to participate in the festivities but won’t be in town (or if you’d prefer not to pay the ball’s $300 ticket price), its performances will also be webcast, the ball’s site reports, through its eNaugural Webcast Studio.

Evening: Donald and Melania Trump will, as is customary, spend Thursday night at Blair House, the presidential guest residence located just across the street from the White House.

* * *

FRIDAY, JANUARY 20

6 a.m.: Gates open on the Mall for the members of the public who will be attending the Inauguration in person to claim their seats and/or their standing room. (Trump has encouraged his supporters to help him set an “all time record” for attendance; event planners, however, are currently expecting around 800,000 people—a number far below the crowd that came out for President Obama’s first inaugural.)

Early-ish morning: Since the first inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, it’s been customary for soon-to-be-inaugurated presidents-elect to begin their day of pomp and ceremony with reflection, via a church service. Trump and Pence, along with their families, will accordingly attend services at St. John’s Episcopal Church, just across Lafayette Square from the White House.

Later-ish morning: Trump, Pence, and their wives will be escorted to the White House by members of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. The Trumps will then join President and Mrs. Obama for coffee (or perhaps tea? or green juice? anyway, it’s presidents, there’s probably a decent beverage selection) at the White House. Once talk about the couples’ children has been exhausted, the conversation will move to Barack telling Donald that you have to sort of jiggle the handle of the toilet in the guest bathroom in the Residence to get a full flush. Old plumbing, and all.

After their coffee/tea/kalejuice, the presidential couples—furthering a tradition established in 1837, when Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson rode together in a carriage made of the wood of the former U.S.S. Constitution—will ride as a group (in a car this time) to the Capitol from the White House. The couples’ previous topics for pleasant conversation having been used up during the beverage portion of the morning, they will spend the 1.5-mile ride scrolling through, respectively, Twitter, ESPN, and very different customizations of Pinterest, and otherwise studiously avoiding eye contact with each other.  

9:30 a.m.: The inaugural musical performances will commence. Acts will include the Rockettes (some of whom will be performing reluctantly, bound by contractual obligations) and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, whose members—after one of them, Jan Chamberlin, quit the group in objection to the inaugural performance—will ostensibly be there of their own accord.

Had you heard that Elton John would be performing? Fake news: The singer’s representatives denied those claims. You may have also heard that Rebecca Ferguson, who was a runner-up on the UK’s X-Factor, had been offered a performance slot. The singer responded to that offer, however, by announcing that she would sing at the inauguration only if the song in question could be “Strange Fruit”—which, she said, “speaks to all the disregarded and downtrodden people in the United States.” Ferguson, in short, will likely not be performing.

Trump himself professes to be content about the relative lack of star power at his inaugural exercises, especially compared to the Aretha/Beyoncé/James Taylor/Kelly Clarkson/Yo-Yo Ma performances at the installments of his predecessor. As he recently wrote, “The so-called ‘A’ list celebrities are all wanting tixs to the inauguration, but look what they did for Hillary, NOTHING. I want the PEOPLE!”

Or, as Tom Barrack, the chair of Trump’s inaugural committee, put it to reporters—in a phrase that, warning, cannot be unread—the committee wants the new president’s inauguration to have, instead of glitz, a “soft sensuality.”

11 a.m.: The arrivals will commence. Inaugural attendees will include members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, diplomats, and other high-level government functionaries. Former presidents Jimmy Carter (the first former president to commit to attending the event), George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton will be there, too, as will Hillary Clinton. Former president George H.W. Bush, who has recently been hospitalized with pneumonia, will not be present.

Oh, and if you care about such things: Melania will be wearing, apparently, Karl Lagerfeld and Ralph Lauren.

11:30 a.m.: The ceremony (taking place on the west front of the Capitol) will commence. Things will begin with a call to order from Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri. They will continue with benedictions from a Catholic cardinal, a rabbi, a pastor, and other faith leaders.

11:42 a.m.: Joe Biden will chuckle to himself, lean over to Jill, and whisper, “So a priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar...”

11:43 a.m.: Jill will shush him.

11:43:13 a.m.: Jill will make a mental note to have Joe tell her the joke once they’re away from the cameras.

11:50 a.m.: Mike Pence will be sworn in as vice president by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The oath he takes will read (as will Trump’s, for the most part): “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of Vice President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

12:00 p.m.: Trump will take his own oath, as administered by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. For this, Trump will use two Bibles: one, the same book used by Abraham Lincoln for his own inauguration; the second, the Bible that Trump’s mother gave him on the occasion of his Sunday school graduation in 1955.

12:05 p.m.: The new president will deliver his inaugural address. It will begin, Trump told Fox & Friends on Wednesday, “by thanking everybody, all of the presidents, including, by the way, President Obama and Michelle, who have been absolutely nice.” And it will likely be, in length, somewhere between 135 words (the current record for the shortest inaugural address, held by George Washington) and 8,445—the length of the address delivered by William Henry Harrison in March of 1841. (Harrison died one month later, of pneumonia that was brought about in part by the length of time his speech demanded that he be out in the cold.)

12:22 p.m.: Another benediction.

12:25 p.m.: Jackie Evancho, the 16-year-old runner-up of America’s Got Talent, will perform the national anthem. (Evancho is another artist who has faced criticism about her decision to perform because her sister, Juliet, 18, is transgender. Evancho has deflected that criticism, saying on Good Morning America, “All of my true fans have been there for me and supportive and that’s really all I need, so I’m sticking to it.”)

12:30 p.m.: The ceremony will conclude. Barack and Michelle Obama will then make their official departure from the White House, taking a final ride first in the former Marine One and then the former Air Force One to an undisclosed location. If their exit is anything like the one featured on the “Tomorrow” episode of The West Wing, their feelings during this time will be Mournful, but also Hopeful. Mostly Mournful.

While the Obamas are making their exit, Trump and Pence, in another inaugural tradition, will attend the Congressional Lunch in the Capitol. The first such luncheon, in 1953, found President Eisenhower dining on creamed chicken, baked ham, and potato puffs in the Capitol’s Old Senate Chamber. President Trump’s, held in Statuary Hall, will be slightly more modern—and selected, as is also now tradition, with the meal’s states of origin in mind. Friday’s lunch will include Maine lobster, Gulf shrimp, and Seven Hills Angus beef, each course paired with a California wine. The dessert, however, will nod to the ’50s: chocolate soufflé and cherry vanilla ice cream.

3 p.m.: The inaugural parade will begin. Trump, Pence, and their families will walk the 1.5 miles along Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House down Constitution Avenue—past the Newseum, the National Archives Building, and the FBI headquarters. The procession will also pass the Old Post Office building, current home to the Trump International Hotel.

The new president and vice president will be followed in their procession by some 8,000 parade participants—including high school and university marching bands, equestrian corps, first responders, veteran groups, and members of each military branch. There will also be a tractor brigade.

In a change from past inaugurations, no university or high school marching bands from the Washington, D.C., area will be represented in the parade. Also missing, this time around: the parade’s longtime announcer, Charlie Brotman, who has voiced every inaugural parade since President Eisenhower’s second term. The 89-year-old was replaced by Trump’s inaugural committee. Announcing Trump’s parade will be, according to The Washington Post, Steve Ray, a D.C.-based freelance announcer and audio engineer.

One group that will be there, though, is the Talladega Marching Tornadoes. The marching band of Talladega College, a historically black college in Alabama, debated whether its members should participate in these particular inaugural festivities. Ultimately, they decided to go: “It’s about the students to have an opportunity to participate in this national stage, in this inaugural ceremony,” the college’s president, Billy Hawkins, told Bill O’Reilly. To get to Washington, though, the group needed some $75,000 for travel expenses. They set up a GoFundMe campaign to help raise that money—and ended up receiving $420,000.  

7 p.m.: Following a tradition established by Dolly Madison, via the gala she hosted at Long’s Hotel on Capitol Hill in 1809, Trump, Pence, and their wives will make appearances at three official inaugural balls. They will be serenaded by, among others, the swing jazz ensemble Tim Rushlow & His Big Band, BuzzFeed reports. And the song Trump has selected for his first dance as commander-in-chief? According to The Washington Examiner: It’s Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”

7 p.m.: The unofficial balls—including, but not limited to, the Gays for Trump Inaugural Ball; Dardanella: The Great Gatsby Presidential Inaugural Ball; The Inaugural Ball for the Arts; the Native Nations Inaugural Ball; the 2017 Inaugural Heartland Ball; PETA’s Inaugural Ball; the Bluegrass Ball; the Black Tie and Boots Inaugural Ball; and the Deplorables Inaugural Ball—will begin, as well.

* * *

SATURDAY, JANUARY 21

10 a.m.: Trump and Pence will attend the interfaith National Prayer Service, held at the Washington National Cathedral. The invitation-only event, according to a statement from the cathedral, will allow Trump “to pause and contemplate the incredible responsibility he has been entrusted with and to listen as the faith community offers prayers for the office of the president.”

10:38 a.m.: In the Café Car of the Amtrak Regional, Jill Biden will finally get Joe to tell her that priest/rabbi/minister joke. It’s not his best, but it’s pretty good—and as they hurtle off into the distance, Jill can’t help but laugh.

President Obama's Final Word: 'We're Going to Be Okay'

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Barack Obama is the leader of the nation’s progressive political party, but his belief in progress is more fundamental than a simple political label. “Hope” may have seemed a facile or even juvenile basis for a presidential campaign in 2008, but it was a sincere one, as Obama demonstrated one final time Wednesday afternoon in the final press conference of his presidency.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, he insisted that although the arc of history is long, passing even through a Donald Trump presidency, it does bend toward Obama’s vision of justice. This faith that there is a right side of history has been a hallmark of his term in office, but it looks shakier than ever to many members of his party since the November election. As he did in his farewell address on Tuesday, Obama made the case for hope, even as he offered a series of warnings to, and about, the incoming Trump administration.

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“I believe in this country. I believe in the American people,” he said. “I think we’re going to be okay.”

It was telling that he offered that sentiment in response to a question about First Lady Michelle Obama’s speeches during the presidential campaign, in which she portrayed the effects of a Trump victory as catastrophic for women, people of color, and others. Her husband, the eternal optimist, is more sanguine. “The only thing that is the end of the world is the end of the world,” he said.

With his worldview rooted in that faith in the American project, Obama projected equanimity about Trump’s approach. In the first days of his presidency, Obama offended Republicans when, in the midst of negotiations on policy, he reminded them, “I won.” But the president on Wednesday offered the same courtesy to his successor that he had invoked for himself, asserting again that elections have consequences.

“The president-elect will have his own policy,” he said, answering a question about Israeli-Palestinian policy. “The candidate for the ambassadorship [to Israel] obviously has very different views than I do. That is their prerogative. That is part of what happens in elections.” At another point, he said, “Having won an election opposed to many of my initiatives, it is appropriate for him to go forward with his vision and his values.”

But while he described his conversations with Trump as “cordial” and “substantive,” he offered warnings that were both explicit and implicit.

In an interview with The Times of London, Trump suggested he would cut a deal with Russia, offering to undo sanctions levied after the illegal annexation of Crimea in exchange for nuclear-arms reductions. Obama criticized that, saying the United States had to stand up for sovereignty of nations like Ukraine: “This is a good example of the vital role that America has to continue to play around the world in protecting basic values.”

As a word of advice to Trump, he emphasized the importance of hearing, and considering, good advice, and then acting upon it deliberately. “If you’re going to make big shifts in policy, make sure you’ve though it through. Actions typically create reactions. You want to be intentional about things.”

“The president-elect will have his own policy. That is their prerogative. That is part of what happens in elections.”

Obama also asserted the importance of “treating people with basic respect.” That could be read as a shot across the prickly president-elect’s bow, though it came during a riff in which he was discussing the importance of fighting economic inequality. As he did last week, Obama advocated a class-based approach, cutting across racial barriers to include the struggling poor in both inner cities and struggling rural communities.

But the president also offered a list of the issues on which he would feel compelled to speak out. It is customary for former commanders in chief to absent themselves from politics for a time and give their successors area to maneuver, but Obama has said he would not sit quietly while some of what he sees as core American values were undermined. He sketched out those bright lines on Wednesday:  “systematic discrimination being ratified in some fashion”; any attempt to stifle dissent or the press; any effort to undermine the right to vote; or movement to deport undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

The first two of those are somewhat abstract, but the second two are not. There are already, and have been for years, efforts to make voting more difficult, generally justified as an anti-fraud measure. Obama pointedly dismissed claims of voter fraud as “fake news,” nodding to the many studies that have failed to come up with any evidence of major fraud. The second was a cornerstone of Trump’s campaign promise to deport illegal immigrants, which would seem to set up a collision between the two men, though Trump has since backed off on the question of children somewhat.

Just this weekend, Trump aides floated the idea of kicking White House reporters out of the West Wing and into an adjoining building. The president replied to that idea in a preface in which he praised the press, saying, “Having you in this building has made this place work better. It keeps us honest.”

He also told them, “You’re not supposed to be sycophants. You’re supposed to be skeptics. You’re supposed to ask me tough questions.” Reporters did not press him especially hard on Wednesday, though. He was not, for example, asked to name his biggest mistakes, a question that infamously stumped George W. Bush. Obama easily dodged a question about Democrats boycotting the election, bounced a question about prosecuting Julian Assange to the Department of Justice, and eagerly answered a question about his legacy of LGBT rights. Obama said he expected that the expansions in LGBT rights secured over the last eight years are irreversible. He also said he expected that the nation would not only see another African American president, but also a woman president, a Jewish president, a Hindu president, a Latino president. “I suspect we’ll have a bunch of mixed-up presidents at some point that nobody really knows what to call, and that’s fine,” he said.

Obama prepares to leave office as one of the youngest and healthiest ex-presidents in American history, and curiosity runs high about how he will spend his time, especially with Trump’s victory. Asked about his plans, he joked that he needed to make sure that his wife “is ready to re-up” on their marriage, and said he wants to spend time with his daughters. He added that he won’t be running for office “anytime soon.”

The most immediate priority, once he’s had some time to process the last eight years, he said, is to work on his memoirs. “I wanna do some writing,” he said, but first, “I want to be quiet a little bit and not hear myself talk so darn much.” For many Americans, that will come as a relief. For many others, however, it will be hard to sustain the hope that Obama heralded eight years ago, and defended one last time Wednesday, in his absence.

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The Tangled Debate Over Art-World Protests

The culture industry’s response to Donald Trump’s election has largely consisted of different ways of saying “no.” Celebrities have refused to play his inauguration. Meryl Streep methodically blasted him at the Golden Globes. Hamilton’s cast greeted Mike Pence by informing him of their fears. And artists are considering a national strike on January 20th.

The discussion around such efforts has shown some of the typical—if muddied—ways people talk about the arts intersecting with politics. On the right, a common theme is that celebrity protests are only going to ensure Trump’s re-election by making his supporters feel condescended to. On the left, cultural anti-Trump efforts are being taken as examples of the kind of bold truth-telling Democratic operatives should mimic. Both frames prize electoral impact—policy influence now, voter persuasion for 2018 or 2020—over all else. Which is a strange way to think about art, a form of communication that exists to do what other forms—political, commercial, journalistic—can’t.

The debate around the arts walkout is a good example. More than 130 artists, curators, and critics—many of them prominent—are undertaking the #J20 Art Strike, a semi-open-ended call for collective action in the arts world on Inauguration Day. Some arts venues and arts workers have said they will literally strike—shut down, not show up—on January 20th. Others have responded to the prompt in different ways; New York City’s Whitney Museum, for example, will stay open but offer civic-minded programming and pay-what-you-want admission.

A familiar backlash alleging out-of-touchness and grandstanding has ensued. In The Guardian, the arts critic Jonathan Jones writes, “An art strike is just about the least effective idea for resisting Trump that I have heard. The American left is in for a long, wretched period of irrelevance if this is its idea of striking back.” Along the same lines, Artnet quotes a Facebook post from the artist Daniel Keller saying of the strike, “This is so pointless and anyone who doesn’t realize this is completely oblivious to the current political climate and of art’s utter irrelevancy within American culture.”

But the strike is partly a reaction to the specter of irrelevance—and has goals other than sending a message to the president-elect and his followers. At Hyperallergic, the critic Hrag Vartanian writes about how the Silicon Valley summit at Trump Tower made him realize just how structurally diffuse the arts are compared to tech and other industries. “There could never be an equivalent convening in art,” he says. “If you were to summon the leaders of art, who would they be? Who has that type of authority in our field?” A strike, he argues, could begin to reveal “the scope of our community as the beginning of a new phase of solidarity.”

More than that, a strike could be a moment for art workers to re-examine their relationship with the hypercapitalism and nationalism that Trump is seen by many to represent. Vartanian quotes the critic Yates McKee wondering if a walkout could “drive a wedge between staffs, on the one hand, and the upper echelons of institutional power—directors, boards, donors—on the other.”  The artist Coco Fusco also suggested using the opportunity to begin thinking about how to disentangle from “the Wall Street financiers who stand to gain from Trump … the same ones who have thrown bundles of cash into art.” Last week, the artist Richard Prince seemed to act on that idea by retroactively “faking” a piece he’d sold to Ivanka Trump—which is exactly the kind of mind-scrambling, beyond-logic statement that art excels at.

None of these rationales directly speaks to stopping the president-elect’s policies or removing him from office. They speak instead to an existential quandary triggered by the rise of someone who, to many in the art world, seems at odds with truth, free expression, and egalitarianism. An art strike, according to its supporters, is about reflection, recalibration, and ideological stress-testing in the name of more effectively wielding power in the years to come.

Now, the question of whether a strike is the best way to achieve those goals is a valid one: The writer Joyce Carol Oates has been essentially holding a Twitter forum on alternative artistic methods of opposing Trump. But that debate is in fact the kind of industry-wide political conversation that, it seems, the #J20 Strike wants to inspire: “… It is an invitation to motivate these [artistic] activities anew, to reimagine these [artistic] spaces as places where resistant forms of thinking, seeing, feeling, and acting can be produced,” the mission statement says. There’s precedent, too, in the 1970 arts collective action responding to the Vietnam War.

The debate around the strike echoes the ones that have followed other culture clashes in recent days. Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes speech—in which she homed in on Trump’s bullying and defended the media—led Meghan McCain and others to argue that rarefied celebrities denouncing the newly elected president just feeds the resentment that brought Trump to office. Maybe such criticisms are correct, or maybe the estrangement between red and blue cultures is already so deep that Streep moments make little difference. But the argument that artists should not say what they believe to be truth out of political concerns is—not to overstate it—completely anti-art.

Art can, of course, amplify causes, but first its purpose is pure expression. Punk rock did not bring down Ronald Reagan—it was a raw outpouring of rage that helped coalesce an opposition culture. Nelson Shanks’s painting of Bill Clinton in the shadow of Monica Lewinsky may now be in storage at the National Portrait Gallery—but it still potently summed up a fraught public persona. Kanye West’s “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” moment didn’t end up in campaign commercials—but it did forever crystallize a critique.

Art’s value is separate from the question of tactics.

Streep’s speech accomplished a number of things regardless of whether it, on its own, moved the vote total one way or another for the 2018 or 2020 elections. It articulated the opposition’s point of view in a compact, eloquent way that the liberal rank-and-file could use for inspiration and strategic discussion (e.g., should she have mentioned sports in the way she did?). It asserted that the election’s results would not silence Hollywood when it comes to Trump—which is to say, it was a move against normalization. Most concretely, it brought in donations for the Committee to Protect Journalists, just as many other cultural protests—see: the Nasty Women Exhibition to help Planned Parenthood—are financially benefiting causes possibly endangered under the next president.

Streep’s words also happened to bug Trump—just as the Hamilton/Pence moment and the mass refusal of entertainers to book his inauguration and Alec Baldwin’s SNL imitation all did. Whether this means more fodder for Trump’s side in the culture war or whether it helps undermine him—the truth could be both—the fact is that now more than ever cultural protests stand a chance of being amplified.

Certainly, criticisms alleging the pointlessness of protest might feel persuasive in a moment when Trump’s administration is forming, making its first moves, and preparing for a celebration. Jones’s Guardian column gets at all of this as it closes ominously: “The real reason art strikes and fine words at the Golden Globes are futile is that they cannot do justice to the danger the world is in.  ... Save your strength—you will need it.”

The truth, though, is that recent cultural efforts have partly attempted to shore up the resistance’s strength: to consolidate a fractured left, to create dialogues about ways of bringing change, and to signal to Trumpland that the president-elect does not have a blank check. Inauguration is about as far away from another election as you ever get; as other ballots approach and specific policy fights develop, culture creators will no doubt play a role in the skirmishes. But even then, their work should not only be evaluated in terms of electoral tactics. On some level, all art is for art’s sake.

On Writing, Smoking, and the Habit of Transcendence

Writers have long found rich fodder for their work in their leisure pursuits. John Updike, writing about golf in The New York Times in 1973, described the pastime as “a non-chemical hallucinogen” that “breaks the human body into components so strangely elongated and so tenuously linked, yet with anxious little bunches of hyper-consciousness and undue effort bulging here and there, along with rotating blind patches and a sort of cartilaginous euphoria.” Sketching out a particularly lucid paragraph about the act of preparing for a stroke, he confessed, “got me so excited I had to rush out into the yard and hit a few shots, even though it was pitch dark, and only the daffodils showed.”

Updike’s experience of transcendence while playing golf—his sense of tapping in to a kind of acute concentration that alters perception—is echoed vividly in the German writer Gregor Hens’s new memoir of sorts, Nicotine. It’s a slight and meandering work that essentially recounts the author’s life in cigarettes, but its most vital passages describe how smoking essentially shifted Hens’s reality, allowing him to access a meditative state in which he felt truly connected with himself and the world. Describing his very first cigarette, Hens writes, “I not only saw images, not only heard single words or sentences, but experienced an inner world. In that manner, I was offered an experience that was narratable for the very first time.”

In that sense, Nicotine enters a kind of sub-genre of literary memoirs focused around a single practice or obsession, in which the object or activity enables the writer to achieve sharper focus, heightened consciousness, and creative fire. Like Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Updike’s writing on golf, it illuminates the writerly quest for the elusive state the Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi named, simply, “flow.” Smoking, Hens seems to believe, transformed him into a writer by expanding his sense of what was real and what was perceivable. It physically and irreparably altered the pathways in his brain. And it punctuated and constructed the order of his professional life. “Even though I’ve not smoked for a long time, I still think and work in a constantly repeated rhythm of about half an hour,” he writes.

But unlike, say, running or golf, or even taking minute doses of LSD to increase focus, smoking is, of course, an extremely toxic habit. While Nicotine is at its most interesting when Hens expounds on his chosen subject as though it’s the magical source of his inspiration, he considers it primarily as a mental act rather than a physical one. The great irony of Nicotine is that Hens no longer smokes. So his meditation on cigarettes and their transcendent power has the feel of an artist chasing something out of reach: half an ode to the pleasures and promise of smoking, half an elegy for the power he’s lost in giving it up.

Addiction memoirs tend to be stories of recovery, of battling demons and emerging stronger on the other side. But nicotine is different, and so is Nicotine. It’s a truth universally repeated that as a drug, nicotine is more addictive than heroin or cocaine, but it’s considerably less mind-altering. The vast majority of smokers are high-functioning addicts, even as they’re killing themselves at vastly higher rates: An estimated 480,000 adults die each year in the U.S. from smoking-related diseases, almost ten times the number who fatally overdosed on drugs in 2015.

Hens is aware of the bargain he’s made on behalf of his health. As a nonsmoker, he writes, he exercises daily and climbs mountains, switching out one compulsive behavior for other, considerably more healthful ones. But even a short passage about how cycling is his strongest physical discipline quickly evolves into a description of a terrifying road accident, in which he hits the side of a delivery van at forty kilometers an hour. After eight days in bed, he painfully makes his way to a bar near his apartment where he smokes his first cigarette in eight years: “I staggered, held on tightly to the rickety balustrade running around the bar and cried with happiness. My legs were shaking. I was back.”

The bargain then, is a a reluctant and fragile one: It’s harder to rhapsodize over the ecstasy of breathing clearly than it is to ponder the promise of the first cigarette in a crisp new pack. Nicotine is laced with moments that capture the truths most ex-smokers would shudder to admit. Seeing a hypnotherapist, Hens confesses, “I sometimes wish that I would have another accident. I wish that something comparably dreadful would throw me off track. Because if something bad, something really awful happened, I could start smoking again.”

It’s hard to assess where addiction ends and obsession begins. Often, Hens seems to be mistaking the euphoric state induced by nicotine intoxication for something more potent, more otherworldly. Certainly, his writing about smoking is focused, clear, and lyrical, while on other subjects he tends to wander about the page. After a period of abstinence, he writes, “When I smoke the first cigarette—and I always smoke it alone—it’s as if I can look inside my own brain, as if I can discover every thought in its formation, every thrill in a neural pathway, every synaptic leap, every seminal feeling developing from my thoughts.” Even thinking about the sensation of smoking offers a glimpse of the same feeling, the elevated pulse, the heightened consciousness.

For smokers, this description might spark the same rapid heartbeat, the same liminal hit. For ex-smokers, Nicotine should probably come with a trigger warning. Hens writes so fondly of cigarettes and their role in his life that it’s almost difficult to understand why he gave up: The reasons, he writes, are so obvious that they don’t need explaining, but their absence is nevertheless notable. Nicotine is an addiction memoir that doesn’t deal in horror stories, but in nostalgic pangs. There are a handful of scenes that shock (Hens had his first cigarette at the age of five, when his mother gave him one to light a firework with and told him to puff on it to keep it lit), but Hens seems to believe that smoking made him the person—the writer—he is now. “I regret nothing,” he writes. “Every cigarette I’ve ever smoked was a good cigarette.”

But perhaps Hens is right: Maybe smoking really is his muse. After all, Nicotine is his first book translated into English, his most high-profile published work. Still, if the process of writing the book seems to have involved a kind of exquisite torture, it also brings him closer to resolution. Toward the end of the book, within the space of eight pages, Nicotine goes from pondering the “giddy clarity” of cigarettes, their “private, tranquil joy,” to an almost hysterical aversion to second-hand fumes. “Smoke,” he writes, “makes it apparent that something permeates us that has just escaped the body, the moist, bacteria-populated bodily orifice of a stranger.” With this, he takes the first step toward the non-smoker’s self-righteous disgust, and, it might seem, toward freedom.

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Hidden Figures and the Appeal of Math in an Age of Inequality

“Get the girl to check the numbers,” John Glenn says, in a pivotal scene in the wonderful film Hidden Figures. The soon-to-be-star-astronaut is on the ground at Cape Canaveral, clad in his gleaming spacesuit, the Friendship 7 capsule he will soon be piloting waiting for him to board it. Glenn is about to become the first American to orbit the Earth; in that, he is also about to put his life in the hands of NASA, the still-relatively-new American space agency. He would prefer that the numbers that will determine whether he survives the flight will, indeed, check out.

And so: They get the girl. The numbers check out. The rest is history.

Well, the rest is newly common history. Hidden Figures, as its title suggests, is a movie that knows that humans’s capacity to remember our past is outmatched only by our capacity to forget. But it is also, as its title (and that title’s wordplay) further suggest, a movie that celebrates the subtle ways that humans and numbers can weave and wind to make history what it is. The film, which tells the story of three of the many black women who helped the United States to win the space race, is a work of history, and a collective biopic, and a beautifully rendered drama of the small-scale victories that lead to large-scale progress. It is also, however, a movie-long exploration of the ways that “checking the numbers” is, as a proposition, both complicated and saliently simple. On the one hand: Culture being what it is, and racism being what it is, even the straightforward making of calculations, in the America of the 1960s, was fraught. Even something as basic as math was once regarded as a privilege that could be practiced, at the highest levels, only by the white and the male.

Numbers are leveling. They do not care about one’s gender. They do not care about the color of one’s skin.

And yet Hidden Figures, ultimately, celebrates numbers. Not just as tools for understanding the world, but as instruments for making it better. Get the girl to check the numbers. Because lives are at stake, and that fact, right now, transcends everything else, and “the girl”—Katherine Johnson—is objectively better with those numbers than anyone else around. And what Hidden Figures also knows—and what the book that occasioned the film knows, as well—is that numbers, when they can be freed of their human freight, are leveling. They do not care about one’s gender. They do not care about one’s creed. They do not care about the color of one’s skin. They can be used by anyone who cares to learn their ways. “Mathematics,” the scientist Ellie Arroway puts it in Contact, “is the only truly universal language.”

Hidden Figures tells a story of the early American space program, which is also to say that it tells a story of the boring bureaucracy that is so often required to make history. Katherine Goble, later Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), is, like her good friends Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), a calculator at NASA, doing the work that machines would soon come to do. Goble is a prodigy, however, and her gifts, thus far sorely underutilized, finally meet the moment with the mathematical demands of the Mercury program: NASA needs someone skilled at geometry to help to calculate the flight trajectories that will make the difference between life and death, and between progress and tragedy.

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Katherine is black. She is a woman. She is a single mother. She is, in short, many of the things that Americans living in the still-segregated Virginia of the 1960s were supposed to, to the extent they possibly could, avoid being. NASA, however, is desperate—to solve the problem it has set for itself. To beat the USSR. To inspire. To win. The agency needs someone who gets the math—indeed, as Goble’s eventual boss, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), repeatedly tells his team at the Space Task Group, the agency needs someone who can invent the math. NASA needs, although it takes far too long to realize it, Katherine Goble.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, as it were, and for the NASA of that segregated Virginia, the “desperate measures” in this case involve giving a black woman a chance to check the numbers. And once that woman is given a chance … her genius becomes too apparent to ignore. Via the numbers—and, of course, via the prodigious mathematical mind that is housed in the body of a woman—the arc of history moves, little by little, until finally, physics being what they are, it bends. What is that arc, after all, if not another geometric equation?

Hidden Figures, to be clear, isn’t an idealized representation of progress’s march forward. “Desperate measures” is a decidedly suboptimal way for people to win the most basic measures of equality. Goble’s fate—which is, in this case, also John Glenn’s, and Al Harrison’s, and the nation’s—rests in the hands of people who are so myopic in their desire to win the space race that they are willing to put aside their feelings about race of a different form. Harrison may be less inclined to tolerate the “that’s the way it is” explanations that other characters offer in their attempts to justify—and, indeed, to absolve—NASA in its endorsement of segregated bathrooms, lunchrooms, and coffee pots; that disinclination, however, is an extremely poor substitute for true heroism. Hidden Figures’s narrative trajectory involves not just progress that emerges, too often, from pettiness, but also thematic elements of the white savior, and of a culturally enforced tiara syndrome. All those things effectively temper the idealism of its message.  

And yet all that is precisely what makes Hidden Figures—and its message—so powerful. The film is, Soraya Nadia McDonald argued in a fantastic essay for The Undefeated, deeply pragmatic about progress itself. “It’s a glimpse at how you win civil rights victories even if you don’t win hearts and minds,” McDonald writes. “It’s about winning battles as a result of common interests even as your adversaries have trouble seeing you as a person who is just like them.” The film’s message doesn’t soar so much as it insists on staying rooted in reality. It is an exploration of the ways that history’s arc-ish movements can be as lurching and frayed as they can be smooth. Hidden Figures, in other words, offers not empty idealism, but rather, as McDonald puts it, “tangible hope.”

Math’s equations double, in Hidden Figures, as a hope for equality.

And in many ways, the instruments of that hope are the numbers that make the math that make the history. Numbers, in Hidden Figures, are their own instruments of progress. This is a film, my colleague Lenika Cruz noted in her review, that celebrates the power of collective genius—and it is numbers that allow that genius to reveal itself, in all its undeniable empiricism. The answer is either correct or not. The problem is either solved or not. Math, in that sense, is in Hidden Figures a tool of meritocracy. It is a symbol of the power of education (chalk being handed from one person to another is a recurring motif in the film), but it is also, more broadly, a metaphor for a world that could be so much better if we would just let everyone, equally, have a say in its improvement. Math’s equations double, in Hidden Figures, as a hope for equality.

In that aspiration, Hidden Figures is akin to many other recent films about space. The Martian, whose hero saves himself—and inspires the world—by “science-ing the shit” out of his dire situation, doubles as a celebration of math’s ability to bring people together in shared, nation-transcendent, Arrowayesque pursuit. Gravity does something similar. So, in a way, does Interstellar. Arrival treats language as a science—as knowledge that can be gained, systematically, and that can lead to a better understanding of the universe and its occupants; its own “hidden figures” are the words and grammar and modes of communicating that shape us—and, indeed, that help to make us human.

Films about space, whether they are set beyond Earth or rooted firmly on its ground, will always be, on some level, about transcendence. They will gaze at the planet as a whole, and be awed by its beauty, and be disappointed by the cruelties that can happen within its haze. But at their best those movies will also, like Hidden Figures, have more to say about humans than they do about space itself. They will argue, in their telescopic vision, for the person-to-person equality that has thus far eluded our grasp. They will see us, ultimately, the way John Glenn did, circling the planet with the help of Katherine Jackson’s calculations: as small, and connected, and beautiful, and same.

What Happens When a President Is Declared Illegitimate?

When was the last time America had a “legitimate” president?

You’d have to go back a ways to find a unanimous choice. Certainly not Donald Trump. Representative John Lewis, the civil-rights icon, has sparked a fury by saying, “I don't see this president-elect as a legitimate president.” Had Hillary Clinton won, she would not have fit the bill, either: Trump said repeatedly during the campaign that she should not have been allowed to run. Certainly not Barack Obama. Many opponents—none of them more prominent than Trump, yet again—argued, falsely and preposterously, that he was not even eligible to stand for the presidency because he had not been born in the United States. And certainly not George W. Bush, whom many Democrats viewed as illegitimate for several reasons: his popular-vote loss; questions over the final count in Florida; the fact that the Supreme Court effectively decided the election on a party-line vote.

Shoot, even Bill Clinton had his detractors. Well, detractor, singular. Representative Bob Dornan of California made a habit of going after the 42nd president, who he called “a small man in a big office and an illegitimate president” and on another occasion “this illegitimate president ... a serial adulterer ... a triple draft-dodger.”

The fact that you’d have to go reach back as far as 2000—or even 1992—for a  president unanimously accepted by Congress as legitimate doesn’t make the controversy over whether Trump is legitimate any less interesting. Lewis is only the most visible exponent of the argument. The Georgia representative cited what top U.S. officials, as well as Trump, have acknowledged as Russian hacking intended to influence the presidential election to hurt Hillary Clinton and aid Trump. There are now almost 60 Democratic members of the House who have publicly announced that they are skipping the inaugural festivities to register their disapproval of Trump. (Politico notes that skipping is actually not that unusual, but given the heavily mannered traditions of the the transfer of power, splashy announcements are unusual.)

There are other arguments for why Trump should be viewed as illegitimate. One is that FBI Director James Comey’s statements about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server unfairly tipped the scales toward him. Another is that, like Bush, Trump lost the popular vote, though by a much larger margin.

Surely there is a hypothetical scenario in which a U.S. president might be widely and rightly considered illegitimate. Perhaps the discovery of ballot boxes full of hundreds of thousands of fake ballots, which if subtracted from the vote total would have swung the outcome. Yet most of the actual arguments about illegitimate presidents have trouble standing up to scrutiny. Did Russian hacking or Comey’s statements influence some voters’ decisions? Certainly. But isolating the specific effects of either is impossible. Meanwhile, there are other factors that also affected the final tally. Given the close margins in  several states, it’s conceivable that a better tactical approach by Clinton’s campaign might have produced a victory anyway.

Even so, the po-faced condemnations from some Republicans are rather hard to take seriously, given the fervor with which Trump and some other elected officials espoused the “birther” lie that Obama was not born in Hawaii, which was entirely baseless. Demands that Obama now speak forcefully against the crowd calling Trump illegitimate would be more credible had not so many Republicans—including quite a few, such as Mitt Romney, who did not espouse the birther lie themselves—been mostly willing to look the other way when conservative and GOP figures were insisting Obama was illegitimate. (Obama has, according to Trump aides, been helpful to Trump during the transition period, and during his farewell address last week offered a rousing defense of the transition to the new president.)

What happens after these declarations of illegitimacy? In the immediate term, they appear to make very little difference. Mostly, people come around and move on. Obama won reelection handily in 2012, and he leaves office with fairly strong approval ratings. George W. Bush won reelection in 2004, and while a few fringe figures argued the election was hacked, most accepted it. When Bush left office in 2009, he was intensely unpopular, but as a result of the policies he pursued, not because he was viewed as an imposter. As Carl Cannon and Caitlin Huey-Burns write in RealClearPolitics today, there’s an interesting footnote to the Bush story. John Lewis skipped that inauguration, too. When he announced his boycott this year, he claimed it was the first he’d missed since entering Congress, and then had to acknowledge he was wrong. Yet Lewis now says that he calls Bush “a friend.”

So, is all well that ends with legitimacy? It’s hard to imagine that having three consecutive presidents who have been labeled illegitimate by visible portions of the opposition party doesn’t have a corrosive effect on democracy. Over time, the accusations seem to have migrated from the fringe—Dornan was a notorious crank, and the newly elected Republican Congress censured him in 1995 for his broadsides against Clinton—to the center, as represented by the chief birther’s ascension to the White House.

Trump’s election might represent the logical end of constant insistence that successive presidents are illegitimate. Trump was a historically dishonest candidate. Exit polls found that voters viewed him unfavorably by a wide margin, wider even than they did Clinton, and believed that neither his resume nor his temperament qualified him for office. And yet many of the same voters who held that view voted for Trump anyway. They were disgusted with America’s institutions, and told reporters time and again that while they had hesitations about the candidate, they wanted someone who would shake up the whole rotten system—which they believed Trump could do.

When the leaders of America’s political institutions are willing to label their opponents as illegitimate, they may end up convincing voters that the institutions themselves are corrupt—and that any change at all has to be for the better.