Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 289

A Brief History of Sternly Written State Department Travel Warnings

The State Department issued a rare worldwide alert on Monday for Americans traveling abroad in the wake of the Paris attacks and ongoing anti-terrorism operations in Europe:

Current information suggests that ISIL (aka Da’esh), al-Qa’ida, Boko Haram, and other terrorist groups continue to plan terrorist attacks in multiple regions. These attacks may employ a wide variety of tactics, using conventional and non-conventional weapons and targeting both official and private interests.

The alert is the third such caution in as many years. The State Department previously sent out a global alert in 2013, while warning of potential al-Qaeda plots. It also issued an alert late last year, following Islamic State attacks in Sydney, Australia.

Notably, the last two alerts have three-month windows attached to them while the 2013 alert expired after a month.

Despite the severity of the tone, the State Department did not advise against outright travel, only urging Americans to follow ongoing events and “exercise vigilance when in public places or using transportation.” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson acknowledged the “anxiety across our country” following the Paris attacks, and reminded travelers that such alerts don’t mean a terrorist act is imminent.

“As we approach the holiday season, it is important to note that, at present, we know of no credible and specific intelligence indicating a Paris-like plot on the U.S. homeland,” he said in a statement Monday.

Neil deGrasse Tyson had some thoughts about it:

Odd that dangerous travel alerts increase when military actions are in progress that are intended to make us all feel safer.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) November 24, 2015

On Tuesday, President Obama held a joint press conference with French President Francois Hollande where he addressed security concerns as they relate to the recent attacks in Paris.

“I want to speak directly to the American people,” he said. “What happened in Paris is truly horrific. I understand that people worry that something similar could happen here. I want you to know that we will continue to do everything in our power to defend our nation.”

The president also offered praise for government officials saying, “They have prevented attacks, and they have saved lives. They are working every hour, every day for our security.”

Is the Pfizer-Allergan Deal ‘Unpatriotic’?

The headlines covering Pfizer and Allergan’s $160 billion merger deal evolved quickly on Monday: In the morning, they relayed an image of a blockbuster merger that will produce the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company. By the afternoon, the story was a grim picture of a U.S. corporation dodging taxes by seeking refuge on Irish shores.

In a press release announcing the merger on Monday, Brent Saunders, the CEO of Allergan, called the merger “highly strategic.” Pfizer is taxed at around 26 percent in the U.S., while Ireland has the second lowest corporate income-tax rate (behind Switzerland). So, in the financial highlights of the deal, Pfizer noted that the merger will save $2 billion over the first three years—partly due to a lower corporate tax rate of 17 to 18 percent when the company moves its headquarters to Dublin, where Allergan is based.

The math is easy, but the ethics are blurry. This process, called a “corporate inversion,” is when a U.S. company merges with a foreign one to become foreign-owned on paper while its operations and business remain in the U.S. While the companies that participate in inversions often claim it makes their business logistics more efficient, inversions have a curiously consistent habit of reducing companies’ tax bills.

There’s some evidence that the practice is becoming more popular. Last year, the Treasury announced that it was taking action. In order to make inversions less enticing from a tax-reduction standpoint, the Treasury added new requirements regarding ownership percentage and closed a loophole that allowed companies to avoid U.S. taxes. Earlier this month, the Treasury issued additional actions related to those last year. (These changes have already gone into effect.)

The Pfizer-Allergan deal has reignited arguments over the unfairness of dodging taxes and the need for corporate tax reform. John Cassidy at The New Yorker called the deal “a disgrace,” seeing as Pfizer has benefited from U.S. taxpayer-funded research and the talent of American scientists. Democratic and Republican presidential candidates slammed the deal yesterday, and senators and house representatives called for tax reform. On the other hand, the Bloomberg View editorial board found fault not with the companies but with the tax code that allowed their merger. Can a company be blamed for maximizing shareholder returns through global-tax sleight-of-hand when the law so clearly allows them to do so?

While this particular deal is unlikely to be blocked—it probably won’t qualify as an inversion under the Treasury’s new rules—it has people talking more seriously about how to make inversions less appealing. Some are saying that the corporate tax rate should be lowered so companies choose to stay in the U.S.; others are calling for a wholesale revision of corporate taxation.

For Pfizer, which made over $9 billion in profit in 2014, the equation to move abroad makes sense. But after all the backlash over this merger, executives are now saying they’re considering splitting up the companies again in a couple years.

Hollande Makes His Case for Action Against ISIS

After terrorists sprayed bullets and blew themselves up in the streets of his capital, the French president vowed to “be merciless toward the barbarians of Islamic State group.”

“Terrorism will not destroy France,” Francois Hollande said after the attacks, which claimed 130 lives, “because France will destroy it.”

Hollande has embarked on a whirlwind tour this week to discuss that pledge, meeting with the leaders of the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia, Germany, and Italy to urge them to come together in  a “grand and single coalition” that transcends political disagreements. Two days after the attacks in Paris, France unleashed its biggest air raid in Syria to date, dropping 20 bombs over the Islamic State’s stronghold in Raqqa in a single night. Now, Hollande is trying to convince other nations to enhance their operations in Syria, too.

That’s easier said than done. The international consensus on the fight against the Islamic State has ballooned since the downing of a Russian airplane and attacks in Paris and Beirut—all attacks claimed by the Islamic State. But world powers each have their own reasons for fighting the world’s most violent jihadist organization—and their own strategies.

Hollande kicked off his itinerary with British Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday in Paris. By Hollande’s standards, it went well: After the talk, Cameron told reporters that he would begin making his case to his government for bombing Islamic State targets in Syria (so far, it has only hit targets in Iraq). The prime minister lost a vote in Parliament to allow air strikes there two years ago following the Assad government’s use of chemical weapons against Syrian citizens. But that was before the Islamic State emerged, and, as the Associated Press notes, the mood within the legislature has changed since then.

Hollande met with President Barack Obama on Tuesday, who pledged to support France in the fight against “a scourge that threatens all of us.” But Obama did not say the U.S. would intensify its air strikes in direct response to the Paris attacks, echoing his remarks from last week, in which he insisted the current U.S. strategy “is going to work.”

Obama’s assurances came across as largely symbolic. He said that he and Hollande have agreed “that nations must do more together” and that “we are going to keep stepping up that coordination.” Obama said that, under an agreement brokered after the attacks, Washington will share more intelligence information with Paris.

The meeting illustrated a role reversal for the U.S. and France. As Stephen Collinson and Kevin Liptak described it CNN:

A dozen years ago, it was a French President—Jacques Chirac—who was calling for restraint as George W. Bush was bristling for war with Saddam Hussein in Iraq following the September 11 attacks. And it was a French foreign minister who warned that Washington might win the war but lose the peace if it fractured Iraq.

The changing dynamic between the two old allies reflects the impact of 14 long years of war that has left America weary of foreign intervention, as well as the insistence by Obama that a rush to war after terror attacks often goes awry.

Obama was pointedly skeptical about cooperating with Russia, as Hollande has urged. Russia’s intervention in Syria has focused on rebel groups fighting against the Assad government opposed by the U.S., rather than on Islamic State targets.

“We agree that Russia could play a more constructive role if it were to shift the focus of its strike to defeating ISIL,” Obama said, using one of the acronyms for the Islamic State.

Hollande, who will travel to Moscow on Thursday, said he would tell Russian President Vladimir Putin that “France can work with Russia, if Russia concentrates the military action on Daesh,” using another name for the group.  

Russia has signaled that it is willing to work more closely with France in the campaign against the Islamic State. Last week, Putin ordered Russian naval forces to work with French warships “as allies” in attacking the Islamic State.

Any future cooperation, however, could be complicated by Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian warplane in Syria on Tuesday. At Turkey’s request, NATO, whose expansion in eastern Europe Putin has long and visibly resisted, will have an emergency meeting about the incident.

Hollande’s road show continues. He will meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday, and with Italy’s Prime Minister on Thursday in Paris, before heading off to Moscow.

Ted Cruz Catches Up

As a senator, Ted Cruz has been more of a hare than a tortoise. Promptly upon arriving in Washington, he began a noisy tenure—delivering a Green Eggs and Ham-enhanced faux-libuster against Obamacare, refusing to endorse fellow Texas Senator John Cornyn in a primary, and generally alienating as many of his colleagues as he could as quickly as he could. Cruz has become such an irritant to Washington Republicans and Democrats alike that it’s almost hard to believe he only arrived in January 2013.

That makes the Cruz presidential campaign all the more interesting—what seems like a textbook tortoise run. (Sorry, Jeb Bush.) Ruled out as an unlikely winner by much of the commentariat months ago, Cruz has been quietly plodding along, and he’s catching up to the frontrunners. A new Quinnipiac poll shows Cruz just two points behind Donald Trump in Iowa, practically a tie. A CBS/YouGov poll last week had Cruz farther back, but also placing second. Nationally, he’s seen his standing nearly double over the last month.

Cruz has been positioning himself as the man who will inherit Trump’s voters when Trump implodes. (It has long been an article of faith among pundits that Trump will implode. At the moment, Trump is coasting right along.) Instead, he seems to have gained his recent popularity at the expense of Ben Carson, who as I pointed out last week, is losing altitude both nationally and in Iowa. Carson and Cruz seem to appeal to similar tranche of voters, especially evangelicals. In the Quinnipiac poll, Cruz is cleaning up in all the demographics where Carson has dropped. Cruz and Trump now combine for nearly 50 percent of the total Republican vote in Iowa, a remarkable milestone.

Cruz recently picked up the endorsement of Representative Steve King, the outspoken Iowa Republican and hardcore conservative. He’s also rumored to be close to clinching the endorsement of influential evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats.

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Iowa has a tendency to elect more conservative and more religious candidates, which makes it ideal Cruz country. It’s getting increasingly easy to imagine that Cruz wins the Iowa caucuses (now just 69 days away!). If Cruz continues to gain, or if Trump finally does begin to slide, he could pull out a victory. So let’s say Cruz walks out of Iowa on February 1 with a win. That puts him in the elite company of such future nominees also-rans as Mike Huckabee (2008) and Rick Santorum (2012), right? While those two came in third and second for the nomination, respectively, neither was a serious threat. (Believe it or not, they are both ostensibly still candidates for 2016, too.)

In part, that’s because after winning in Iowa they ran into New Hampshire, which tends to be less fond of evangelicals. Both sank in those primaries. Cruz is placing a solid third in New Hampshire polls right now, behind Marco Rubio and well behind Trump. After that comes South Carolina, where Cruz is a solid fourth, behind Trump, Carson, and Rubio. That’s less promising for the Texan, but it’s also only so useful to compare him to Huckabee and Santorum.

Santorum limped out of Iowa with a cash-strapped campaign. (He also got very unlucky with media coverage: Preliminary results showed him losing the Hawkeye State caucus, only to be crowned the winner later, by 34 votes.) The former Pennsylvania senator never had much funding. Santorum was running a shoe-string campaign and was buoyed by impressive legwork—he crisscrossed the state obsessively—and the fact that no one was excited about weak frontrunner Mitt Romney. Huckabee has also struggled with fundraising throughout his career.

Cruz, by contrast, is a different sort of candidate. As Andrew Romano writes in a profile today—and as Cruz’s come-from-behind win in the 2012 Texas Senate primary showed—he’s always playing a long game. For one thing, Cruz isn’t lacking for cash. He raised the third-most of any candidate in the third quarter, and if you count the huge sums raised by several super PACs on his behalf, he trails only Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton in total fundraising. As Bush has discovered, the fact that a super PAC has a lot of cash doesn’t necessarily mean everything is copacetic; super PACs are legally barred from cooperating with candidates. Cruz aides have even criticized the Cruz-supporting super PACs for not spending more so far. Either way, the money isn’t going to run out soon. (One, Keep the Promise, also just announced a big hiring spree in South Carolina.)

Cruz is also running a far more elaborate operation than Huckabee or Santorum—what Dan Pfeiffer, President Obama’s former communications director, calls “the best campaign” on the Republican side. Just as Barack Obama won the 2008 primary in large part because of smart, careful planning of how to win delegates, Cruz’s campaign has put together a plan that includes a strong showing the March 1 “SEC primary” and picking off delegates in little-noticed territories like Guam and American Samoa.

If that’s all good reason not to dismiss Cruz as the second coming of Santorum, it also doesn’t prove that he’s a lock for the nomination. He still has plenty of weaknesses, like a deeply negative favorability rating. And voters’ opinions pale in comparison to those of fellow elected officials. Not unlike Santorum, who ended up alienating many of his fellow senators, Cruz is deeply unpopular among Republican officials and officeholders. Endorsements from party leaders turn out to be a surprisingly effective predictor of the eventual nominee. In FiveThirtyEight’s running tally of endorsement “points,” Cruz trails even Rand Paul and John Kasich.

Cruz’s deep unpopularity might also help Marco Rubio, who is working to consolidate party support. If Cruz continues to gain altitude, it might lead GOP leaders to rally around Rubio because they dislike Cruz—or because they fear he’d be a much weaker general-election candidate. For now, however, Cruz’s rising numbers in Iowa and nationally ought to put to rest the conventional wisdom that Cruz can’t possibly win.

Creed Lands Every Punch

Anyone who’s ever seen a Rocky movie will know what to expect from Creed, the seventh entry in the “underdog boxing hero makes good” series. Coming 39 years after the original film starring Sylvester Stallone, the movie certainly has its share of training montages and struggles against adversity, as well as an endearing romance between a young fighter and a woman from the neighborhood. But Creed is also necessarily fresh, giving beneficial tweaks to an old formula. Audiences will still likely see every punch coming from a mile away, but what’s remarkable is how the movie lands them all: It’s an invigorating piece of nostalgia that fuels a bigger adrenaline rush with its climax than any big-budget blockbuster could provide.

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It’s worth remembering that the original Rocky is a great film, both overshadowed and enhanced by its bombastic sequels. While later films saw the lovable Philadelphian Rocky Balboa fight Mr. T, conquer the Soviet Union, and own a talking robot, the first movie is a touching character study of a mumbling, distant, sweet-natured guy who gets an unprecedented shot at fame. Creed revives that character, giving Stallone his best part in decades as the retired champ, now puttering away in an Italian restaurant he owns. But it wisely invests most of its running time in its compelling new protagonist, Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan, playing the son of Rocky’s deceased rival Apollo), and in giving the old rags-to-riches story a clever spin.

Adonis (or “Don”) is the forgotten son of a superstar whose mother died at a young age. The film introduces him as a kid brawling with other boys in juvie before he’s taken in by Apollo’s widow (Phylicia Rashad). While Rocky strived to escape the drudgery of life as a local unknown, Adonis has a cushy-looking white-collar job, which doesn’t stop him from feeling drawn to the world of boxing by the memory of his father, killed in the ring in Rocky IV before he was born. That leads him to Philadelphia, where he connects with his dad’s greatest rival and eventual friend, and, well, you can guess the rest.

It’s a heady embrace of what’s come before, but Jordan and the director Ryan Coogler (who scripted with Aaron Covington) infuse it with the visual energy and real-world grit the Rocky series has lacked since the first film. Adonis’s first fight is performed in one bravura take, Coogler’s camera dipping in and around the action with confidence. Jordan invests his performance with notes of suppressed rage and dopey charm. He creates the kind of real-world tough guy Stallone did so well in 1976, tapping into the magnetic star presence he showed in Coogler’s previous film, Fruitvale Station.

You’ll see every punch coming from a mile away, but what’s remarkable is how Creed still lands them all.

That film, Coogler’s debut, was a retelling of the last day of Oscar Grant’s life before he was shot dead, unarmed, by police in an Oakland subway station—a tragedy reflective of the dangers many young African American men face. Compared to that, Creed is a work of escapist fantasy. But Coogler and Jordan nonetheless create a protagonist of color who avoids the stereotypes of many of Hollywood’s black heroes while still being celebrated as one. Adonis is an easy hero for everyone to cheer for, but he’s not thinly painted. Scenes where he runs through Philadelphia followed by cheering kids on bikes are especially memorable—they celebrate the film’s myth-making without putting the hero on an unreachable pedestal.

Along with that, Coogler has crafted an homage to the Rocky series with authentic affection, referencing many of the greatest and corniest moments—chasing chickens in the backyard, Rocky and Apollo’s secret final fight. At the same time, Creed transcends every one of the franchise’s sequels. Notably, it’s the first Rocky film without Stallone’s name on the script, but he shines instead in his quiet, nuanced supporting turn as the aging fighter.

Stallone has never been the most versatile actor, but he layers his original performance with the steeliness that comes with encroaching mortality. As a career performance, it doesn’t feel far off from Clint Eastwood’s turn in Million Dollar Baby: After years of playing hard men, both finally get to embrace the youthful energy of their onscreen protégé. And in sidestepping many of the pitfalls that come with continuing a beloved franchise, the film invites viewers to revel in the old glory days without simply trying to recreate them. It might be obvious when the horns are about to blare, but it’s thrilling nonetheless.

The #ActualWorst Semi-Final: Ramsay Bolton vs. Jim Moriarty

Throughout the month of November, we’re soliciting readers’ help to definitively answer an age-old question: Who is the actual worst character on television? We reviewed your submissions, did our own research, and came up with a list of 32 characters across four different categories, who’ve gone head to head over the last three weeks. Only four are left. Which one of them will be crowned as the most despicable, unlikable, flat-out awful (fictional) person on the small screen?

See the bracket in its entirety here.

Spencer Kornhaber: We meet for a Trial by Blogging Combat. The parties: Ramsay Bolton and Jim Moriarty, both finalists for the title of Actual Worst. Their champions: Me, for Ramsay, and you, for Jim. Hide your eyes and don’t waste your time chanting at me.

Okay, apologies, Sophie. This little metaphor probably doesn’t makes a ton of sense to you because you’ve never seen Game of Thrones. Well, I’ve never seen Sherlock. So this should be fun. Your initial writeup indicated that Moriarty is a psycho terrorist archetype, someone who murders innocents through fantastical plots, largely out of an obsession with the show’s hero. Sounds scary, sure, but also a bit typical of TV and movies, no? So he played a horrible game of “Guess Which Pill Is Actually Poison” with random taxi passengers—was he twirling a mustache, too?

HBO

Ramsay might twirl a mustache, if he had facial hair instead of cherub cheeks. But the distinction between him and what you’d call “Joker-style lunatics” is really important. For the most part, Ramsay uses brutality as it’s commonly been used in history: for power. This was the case when he imprisoned and tortured Theon Greyjoy, destroying his body and soul so much so that he became a quivering slave named Reek. And one of the more underratedly sickening Ramsay moments came when he casually told his dad how he got a rebellious house in their kingdom to start paying taxes: by skinning alive the lord, his wife, and his oldest son—while forcing the lord’s youngest son, suddenly head of household, to watch.

I recently wrote that “I’m glad to say I can’t recognize Ramsay in real life.” The more I read about ISIS and then reflect on the greatest monsters in history, the more I want to revise that statement. He’s not evil for evil’s sake; he’s someone who sews atrocity and reaps benefits for himself and his family. I’d argue this resonance makes him worse than just about any other cackling sicko on TV.

Come at me!

Sophie Gilbert: Hi Spencer, I’m so used to only dialoguing with you about our favorite TV show that no one is watching that for a minute here I had to check my urge to Google biblical references. You’re quite confident for someone who’s never seen Sherlock. Here, watch this and tell me old Jim Moriarty’s just smoke and daggers.

Moriarty, too, is motivated by power, but I’d posit he’s more like Heath Ledger’s Joker than Ramsay in that he’s also a total psychopath who derives the utmost pleasure from devising horrific, twisted games and winning them—at whatever cost. The last we saw of Moriarty before the end of season three, he was shooting himself in the head on top of a hospital to guarantee Sherlock’s ruin. Of course, it transpires now that he might not actually be dead, and that it was yet another very clever long con I can’t figure out (just like Sherlock’s fake death, actually). But I think it speaks to how utterly insane Moriarty is that the idea he’d kill himself to seal his nemesis’s downfall was remotely plausible.

And that’s also what makes him terrifying—he’s totally unpredictable. Ramsay, maybe (yes, I stopped watching GOT after the first beheading) can at least be relied upon to do the worst possible thing on every occasion. Moriarty is much more capricious. He’s even, dare I say, compelling, although there’s real sadism underscoring almost everything he does. In 1989, he killed a teenager for laughing at him, and then he kept the kid’s sneakers for almost 25 years and used them as a prop in one of his very first Sherlockian schemes. He poisons children. He pays a terminally ill taxi driver to murder his passengers by offering them a choice of one of two pills, and threatening to shoot them if they don’t comply. He is, to put it politely, a total wackadoodle.

But I guess he isn’t a sexual sadist (as far as we know), so he has that going for him. As opposed to Ramsay, who seems to be the least popular person in Westeros (maybe he’s in Westeros, I’m not familiar with the geography of GOT).

Kornhaber: Ack! That YouTube clip you linked to ends with a cliffhanger! Does Sherlock shoot? What happens next? You’re the Actual Worst for sending this to me. Very engrossing show, though. I think I’m going to bump it up a few spots in my to-watch queue.

I’m getting a clearer picture of Moriarty, yes. He looks an awful lot like the bad guy in Spectre, first of all (Andrew Scott: a maestro of creepiness only slightly concealed by a suit and sense of manners, it seems). Secondly, he’s the kind of villain who straps people into bomb jackets and hires teams of precisely trained snipers and reveals his dastardly plot in monologues and makes long-term villainy plans based on a very personal vendetta. In other words, he’s the enemy in Spectre or most other Bond movies or any number of other pop-cultural works offering fantastical escapism and easy lessons about inherent good and evil. Burn, I know. In this documentary series Game of Thrones on the other hand …

I really shouldn’t belabor the idea that Ramsay is more “authentically” chilling (I write about pop music; all invocations of authenticity must be in scare quotes). But I’m glad you bring up Ramsay’s proclivity for sexual violence. Because, as with all the chaste torturing I mentioned before, his kink seems connected to his deeper hunger to prove his dominance. When he rapes Sansa, it is partly a very sick way of asserting to his potentially traitorous new bride that he’s the one in control. When he feeds maidens who’ve “bored” him to dogs, it’s a warning to the rest of his harem that they must kowtow or face an awful fate. You can psychoanalyze the source of this hunger to be The Man, if you want; the one thing we know about Ramsay is that he’s never been afforded much respect as the bastard son of a lesser lord. It’s wrong to say he illuminates the essence of evil: Evil is banal, and I think most of us intrinsically understand it. But he’s as convincing an illustration of it as I’ve seen in a work of fiction. Then again, maybe Moriarty will have that distinction too, once I get to know him better.

Gilbert: You’re right. There’s a theatricality and a charisma to Moriarty that makes him a lot of fun to watch. He is in that sense the ultimate nemesis—the perfect immoral foil to Sherlock, who lacks all of Moriarty’s social flair but actually is a good soul wrapped up in a sociopath’s coat and deerstalker. Even Moriarty admits it! “Every fairy tale needs a good old-fashioned villain,” he says to Sherlock. “You need me, or you’re nothing.”

Hartswood Films

So yes, a bit of a classic entry in the villain mold, but still terrifying. Can Ramsay hack every screen in the nation to replace scheduled programming with a gif of his face? Can he steal the crown jewels and get away with it? Does he have any flair? In my head he’s more of a Voldemort-style baddie—relentlessly cruel and utterly humorless. But I did just Google him and his catchphrase is apparently, “If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention,” which is pretty damn snappy. And he has what appears to be a bowl cut. And is apparently “fond of the ancient Bolton practice of flaying.” Okay, I think you might have the edge. Forcing people to jump off a tall building is one thing, but flaying them is something best left abandoned to the annals of season-six-of-Buffy.

Anyway, only the vote will tell. So who is the actual worst?

The 5 Black Lives Matter Protestors Shot in Minneapolis

Updated on November 24 at 2:31 p.m.

Minneapolis police have arrested two suspects in the shooting of five people at a Black Lives Matter protest Monday night.

Since Jamar Clark was shot by police on November 15, protestors have been camped out outside the city’s Fourth Precinct police station, not far from where the shooting occurred. Around 10:45 Monday night, five of them were shot. None of their injuries was life-threatening.

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Police arrested a 23-year-old white man and a 32-year-old Hispanic man, and are searching for a third white, male suspect. All three suspects fled the scene.

Protestors say the men were counterdemonstrators. “A group of white supremacists showed up at the protest, as they have done most nights,” Miski Noor told the Star Tribune. The paper said that BLM demonstrators were trying to herd the counterdemonstrators away when the men opened fire.

KSTP, a local television station, reports that police said the men were wearing bulletproof vests.

Clark, 24, was shot in the head by police on November 15 and died the following day. The circumstances of his death are murky. Police said he was a suspect in a domestic violence call and was interfering with responders. Several witnesses said Clark was handcuffed and lying on the ground when he was shot, a claim police deny. The activists outside the precinct station have demanded the release of video of the incident. It’s unclear what the video might show. The state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has taken over the case and gathered footage from several sources, but said it wouldn’t release the videos until it had completed an investigation. The BCA also said that no single video shows the entire event.

Tuesday is also the one-year anniversary of rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, after a grand jury decided not to charge Officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, a touchstone moment in national protests against police violence. Black Lives Matter Minneapolis posted a statement on Facebook saying, “We will not be intimidated,” and calling for people to join in a March Tuesday afternoon.

Police have reported a series of incidents since Clark’s shooting, including gunshots and Molotov cocktails being thrown at police cars. Clark’s death has brought renewed focus to a long history of tension between the Minneapolis police and the community—in particular the African American community—and to questions about discipline and violence on the force.

Turkey Takes Down a Russian Warplane

Updated on November 24 at 3:03 p.m. ET

Turkey has shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian border after the aircraft violated its airspace and ignored repeated warnings, according to the Turkish military.

The Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday that one of its jets had crashed in northwestern Syria “presumably as a result of shelling from the ground,” The New York Times reported. Later, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is in Sochi meeting with Jordanian King Abdullah II, said at a press conference that the warplane was struck by air-to-air-missiles launched by Turkish fighter jets, The Guardian reported.

The Turkish military said its forces issued 10 warnings to the jet, a Sukhoi SU-24, after it entered its airspace near the Turkey-Syria border, according to CNN. Turkish military then “responded” when the warplane ignored the warnings. It also released radar images of what officials say shows the Russian aircraft flying over the country’s southern tip.

This is the first time a Russian or Soviet military aircraft has been shot down by a NATO member since the 1950s.

Putin called the downing of the plane “a stab in the back, carried out by the accomplices of terrorists.” He said the warplane did not violate Turkey’s airspace.

The warplane’s two pilots were able to eject themselves from the aircraft before it crashed. They came under fire by a Syrian rebel group, and both were killed as they parachuted the ground, Reuters reported.

The downing of the warcraft will likely further escalate tensions between Turkey and Russia. Moscow’s recent intervention in Syria has aggravated Ankara; Russian air strikes have targeted Turkish-backed rebel groups who are fighting against the Assad government, which Turkey opposes, and Russian warplanes in Turkish skies at least twice last month without permission.

NATO has called an emergency meeting, requested by Turkey. “The aim of this extraordinary NAC meeting is for Turkey to inform allies about the downing of a Russian airplane,” a NATO spokesperson told the AP.

Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has canceled a planned visit to Turkey on Wednesday. Russia’s ambassador to Turkey was summoned to the offices of Turkey’s foreign ministry, according to Russian news agency Sputnik.

Reuters reports that Syrian fighters forced a Russian helicopter to make an emergency landing in Syria’s Latakia province on Tuesday, and then destroyed it with an anti-tank missile, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The rebel group released a video showing the helicopter go up in flames.

In his remarks Tuesday, Putin mentioned a deconfliction agreement Moscow signed with Washington after Russian forces began bombing extremists in Syria last month in order to avoid dangerous clashes in a shared airspace.

“Taking into account that we signed an agreement on deconflicting with the U.S., and as we know Turkey was among the ones that has joined the U.S. coalition,” he said, referring to the U.S.-led mission of several nations that carries out near daily strikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria. Turkey joined in the effort in late August.

President Obama said Tuesday at a press conference with French President Francois Hollande that the incident “points to an ongoing problem with the Russian operations” in Syria, which have focused on rebel groups battling Syrian military forces, and not on the Islamic State, the group that the Russians said prompted them to intervene.

“Turkey, like every country, has a right to defend its territory and airspace,” Obama said. “I think it is very important for us to right now make sure that both the Russians and the Turks are talking to each other, and find out exactly what happened and take measures to discourage any kind of escalation.”

Hope and the Artist

I’ve been thinking a lot about the implied notion that writing that does not offer hope is necessarily deficient or somehow useless. To be less coy, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that my own writing is somehow cheating the reader because it seems so unconcerned with “hope.” I admit to having a hard time with this notion. No art I’ve ever loved takes the offering of hope (or despair) as its central mission, and a good deal of the art I detest does.

I spent some time with Joan Didion’s The White Album this summer. I was enchanted by Didion’s sparse, clean sentences and her detached, almost bemused view of California. But I did not emerge from her work feeling that the sun would still come out tomorrow. I am (slowly) making my way through her collection of political essays. There’s a beautiful symmetry between her stripped-down aesthetic and her exacting view of politics. Didion has no time for piety. Perhaps people think of her as kind of a downer. But that strikes me as a little silly—like going to a steakhouse and complaining about the falafel.

I’ve gone on at some length about how much I adore The Age of Innocence.  The penultimate scene for me is the dose of realism Ellen Olenska pours on Newland Archer. Newland and Madame Olenska love each other, though Newland is betrothed to someone else. He wants to live in a world where this doesn’t matter, and categories like husband and wife don’t either. Madame Olenska will have none of it:

She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. “Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?” she asked; and as he remained sullenly dumb she went on: “I know so many who’ve tried to find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo—and it wasn’t at all different from the old world they’d left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous.”

I’ve read The Age of Innocence several times, now. I do not think it would have been better if Newland and Madame Olenska had run off together. This is not a work of life-affirmation, nor a treatise on the ultimate triumph of love and freedom. Olenska says that life has fastened her eyelids open, that it has made it so she can never live in “the blessed darkness” again. I find something of myself here. Hope is not the value that Wharton seeks to impress upon us. Enlightenment—an escape from “the blessed darkness”—is.

I was in my mid 30s by the time I read Wharton, but this perspective—the privileging of enlightenment over hope, of understanding over fables—is old for me. No art more informs my own than hip-hop. This is true from the art of sentence construction to the music’s aesthetic outlook. The third verse of Nas’s “One Love” is an elegantly drawn conversation in which a young hustler recounts educating another hustler—Shorty Doo-Wop—who is younger still. The older hustler is amazed by Shorty’s ruthlessness and when he speaks of murdering someone, part of you wants the older hustler—the voice of “One Love”—to tell the kid to get an education. Nas baits this hopeful desire:

I had to school him, told him don’t let niggas fool him
Cause when the pistol blows the one that’s murdered be the cool one
Tough luck when niggas are struck, families fucked up
Coulda caught your man, but didn’t look when you bucked up

And then he destroys it:

Mistakes happen, so take heed never bust up
At the crowd catch him solo, make the right man bleed.

This is not about stopping the violence. This is about the sagacious delegation of violence. By the time I’d heard these lyrics I’d been a hip-hop fan for well over a decade. But even for hip-hop, advising a kid how to kill other kids felt like a gut-punch. It hurt because the voice in the song is dimly conscious that something is very wrong with his world, but not conscious enough to really join the reader in his urge for uplift.  This is as it should it be. To allow for conversion via light from above, a deux ex machina of hope,  would somehow transform the voice of the piece into a voice of feel-goodism. It would be to lie.

But if “One Love” is not a work of hope, it is very much a work of enlightenment. It’s one of the great illustrations of how living amidst constant violence necessarily alters one’s standards and mores. No one is innocent in Nas’s ghetto—“Jerome’s niece” is shot in the head coming from Jones’ Beach. Revenge is the entire ethos. And whether the listener feels hopeful amidst all of this is irrelevant. Enlightenment—the rendering of academic facts as human reality, the transformation of dead stats into something touchable, the rejection of “the blessed darkness”—is the point.

Hope for hope’s sake, hope as tautology, hope because hope, hope because “I said so,” is the enemy of intelligence.

We don’t like to talk like this—we don’t like to think of “hope” as a kind of darkness. It need not be. If one observes the world and genuinely feels hopeful, and truly feels that the future is not chaos, but is in fact already written, then one has a responsibility to say so. Or, less grandly, if one can feel hopeful about a literal tomorrow and one’s individual prospects one should certainly say so.

But hope for hope’s sake, hope as tautology, hope because hope, hope because “I said so,” is the enemy of intelligence. One can say the same about the opposing pole of despair. Neither of these—hope or despair—are “wrong.” They each reflect human sentiment, much like anger, sadness, love, and joy. Art that uses any of these to say something larger is interesting to me. Art that takes any of these as its aim does not.

The Burghers of Calais don’t need to smile for me. And I don’t need Macbeth to be a fairy tales. Even our fairy tales are rarely fairy tales.

‘Edelweiss’: An American Song for Global Dystopia

The Man in the High Castle tells the story of an America that is no longer, in the traditional sense, American. It’s set in a place that emerged from an Axis victory in World War II, with the area run in the east by the Nazi Reich and in the west by Japan. The show in this universe—its many dramas playing out in 1962, after a generation of Axis rule—focuses on the small band of insurgents who rebel against the police state that the former United States has become. It’s an alternate history that does what all good alternate histories will do: It offers lessons about the history the show’s viewers are actually living.

The tone for The Man in the High Castle—the irony of it all, the violence of it all, the sepia-washed eeriness of it all—is set, for each of its 10 episodes, by its title sequence. Which goes like this: A film reel crackles and whirs. Guitar strings strum, plaintively. The words refuse to wait for a proper introduction. “Edelweiss, edelweiss ...”

The Man in the High Castle’s theme song, which is of course a version of another show’s theme song, is haunting both because of and despite its familiarity. Here is the iconic tune from The Sound of Music—a love song to a person, a love song to a country, a love song to all that is swept up in the phrase “way of life”—transformed into an anthem of dystopia. Here is a story about the tyrannies of fascism, set to a song that is known—or, at least, that has been known—for being soft and lush and lullaby-like. Here is a song of freedom, transformed into one of despair.

Which is all extremely effective as a (musical) rhetorical device. “Edelweiss,” here, is performed by the Swedish singer Jeanette Olsson, and her icy, sparse rendition infuses the song’s sibilants with an extra, telling hiss. Adding to the creepiness of the whole thing are the images that accompany the song: Mount Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, the Manhattan skyline … all of them, like the song, familiar and yet eerily changed.

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But while the song is striking mostly because of its discordance, one way “Edelweiss” is at home in Amazon’s tale of victorious fascism is in its history: The song has never been the simple, waltz-like lullaby its lyrics would suggest it to be. It has always, in its way, insistently merged the personal and the political. And it has always functioned as a kind of elegy.

It’s a common misconception that “Edelweiss” is a classic Austrian folk song, selected for The Sound of Music to bring to the show an added dash of cultural authenticity. It is not. It was written for the musical in the late 1950s by Rodgers and Hammerstein, who wanted to create a song for Captain von Trapp that would subtly convey his regret and his sadness and his pre-emptive nostalgia at having to leave Austria after the Nazi takeover. And since the actor playing von Trapp in the Broadway show, Theodore Bikel, was also an accomplished folk guitarist, the pair decided to write his elegy as if it were, indeed, a folk song.

For the lyrics of “Edelweiss,” Rodgers and Hammerstein focused on the German myths about the edelweiss flower, famed not only for its metaphor-friendly ability to withstand harsh Alpine winters but also for its symbolism of love’s triumphs: Suitors would climb the Alps to pick the flowers, giving them as gifts that proved both their prowess and their affection. The lyrics they wrote went, finally, like this:

Edelweiss, Edelweiss
Every morning you greet me
Small and white, clean and bright
You look happy to meet me.

Blossom of snow, may you bloom and grow
Bloom and grow forever
Edelweiss, Edelweiss
Bless my homeland forever.

In the High Castle version of the song, the initial second-person lines—“every morning you greet me”—have been jarringly removed. The small, human story, the “me,” has been replaced with something broader and arguably more epic. What we get instead are the descriptions of the white flower prized for its ability to blossom in the midst of snowy winters. What we get ultimately are adjectives that take on a new, chilling meaning in the context of the fascist regime that’s taken over America: “Small and white, clean and bright …”

And, then, we get one jarring “you”: The “you” that stands in for the “homeland” that will come at the end of the song. The “you” that insists that the “homeland” is something whose needs can be reasonably disentangled from those of the people who live within it.

Which is both striking and, given the song’s history, strangely appropriate. Rodgers and Hammerstein created “Edelweiss” with the intention that it would do double duty: It was to be a song of acquiescence—to family, to love, to the small satisfactions of stability—and also of resistance. It was both a symbol and an instrument of the Von Trapps’ fleeing of the Nazis—an embodiment of their belief that the “homeland” was something that could, like a flower that blooms in winter, survive the harshness of fascist rule. The original song, Playbill notes, “represented the indomitable spirit of the Austrians under Nazi control.” In The Man in the High Castle, it represents the American version of the same thing. “Edelweiss,” here, is a lullaby that is soothing precisely because it insists, against all odds, on staying awake.