Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 382

A Skeleton, a Catholic Relic, and a Mystery About American Origins

After 400 years in the Virginia dirt, the box came out of the ground looking like it had been plucked from the ocean. A tiny silver brick, now encrusted with a green patina and rough as sandpaper. Buried beneath it was a human skeleton. The remains would later be identified as those of Captain Gabriel Archer, one of the most prominent leaders at Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in America. But it was the box, which appeared to be an ancient Catholic reliquary, that had archaeologists bewildered and astonished.

“One of the major surprises was the discovery of this mysterious small silver box,” said James Horn, the president of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation. “I have to say, we’re still trying to figure this out. You have the very strange situation of a Catholic reliquary being found with the leader of the first Protestant church in the country.”

The finding is a historical bombshell, unearthed in a grave on the site of what was once the first church built at Jamestown. Which means researchers may have just discovered proof of an underground community of Catholics—including Archer and perhaps the person who buried him with the relic—who pretended to be Protestants.

“The first settlers there were mostly members of the Church of England,” said James O’Toole, a history professor at Boston College who focuses on the roots of American Catholicism. “While they didn't have the same active hostility to Catholics that the slightly later Puritan colonists in New England did, they were not particularly welcoming to Catholics. If there were Catholics in Tidewater Virginia ... that would be news.”

It’s the kind of discovery that makes historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and other academics giddy with curiosity. But it raises even bigger questions, too—ideas that could rewrite our understanding of the intersection of religious and cultural identities in colonial America.

The English settlement of the New World is most often remembered as a Protestant endeavor. But if indeed there were Catholics at Jamestown, then, from the very beginning, it was a project pursued by those of multiple faiths, seeking new opportunities.

“There is this sense that American Catholic history begins in the 19th century with a wave of immigrants from Germany and Ireland in the 1820s and 1830s, but there is a history of earlier Catholicism,” said Maura Jane Farrelly, an associate professor of American studies at Brandeis University. “What’s captivating about it is the notion of the secretive nature. If he’s secretly Catholic, what does that faith mean to him that he’s willing to hold onto it even though it’s dangerous?”

“We have been finding bits and pieces of rosaries and crucifixes and other things that obviously were Catholic.”

Researchers believe the box was buried with Archer after his death between 1608 and 1616—which would mean the person who buried him would have known the significance of the artifact. Archaeologists and historians announced their discovery at the Smithsonian on Tuesday, along with the identities of three other key Jamestown leaders whose remains were buried nearby. All four men were “involved in all of the major decisions that took place during the first four years of the colony's history,” Horn said in a video about the discovery. Researchers sussed out their identities from a list of several dozen high-status men who could have died in the early 1600s—a particularly chaotic period at Jamestown that included what’s known as “the starving time,” a grueling winter when three-quarters of the colonists died, and some resorted to cannibalism. Along with Archer, researchers found the remains of Reverend Robert Hunt, the first Anglican minister at Jamestown; Sir Ferdinando Wainman, a high-ranking officer who was in charge of horses and artillery for the colony; and Captain William West, a nephew of the governor of the Virginia Company that funded the establishment of Jamestown and other colonies in the New World.

“The discovery brings us back, in a very powerful way, to looking at individuals and personalities that were at Jamestown,” said William Kelso, the director of archaeology for the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation. “The story gets personal, and therefore you can have more empathy toward what people were up against, what they succeeded in doing, and what they failed in doing.” The presence of the relic in Archer’s grave also calls into question some of what researchers previously believed—their understanding of Archer as an individual, and of Jamestown and the trajectory of Catholicism in America more broadly.

Silver Reliquary and fragments of coffin wood found in the grave of Gabriel Archer. (Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation / Preservation Virginia)

Archer, an influential secretary and magistrate “was one of the most prominent of the first leaders at Jamestown,” Horn told me. Historians knew Archer as a rival of Captain John Smith, the explorer who, according to legend, was saved from execution by Pocahontas, the daughter of a Powhatan chief. Smith and Archer were rivals. “And Archer spent a good chunk of time trying to remove Smith from the government council of Jamestown,” Horn told me. Researchers now wonder whether there was more to the antagonistic relationship between Smith and Archer. Could Archer’s motives—as a colonial leader, as a searing critic of Smith's—have been linked to a secret religious identity?

“Gabriel Archer was a prime character, an eminent leader in this early period,” Horn told me. “He was taking on Smith, he’s involved in bringing down the first president [of the colony], he’s really at the heart of intrigue. I think historians have always considered that his motives were primarily personal, trying to elevate his own position. But was there something more going on? Was he trying to destabilize the colony's leadership from within?”

This idea is stunning for a couple of reasons, the most important of which is that Jamestown was fundamentally anti-Catholic. “This was a big ambition here on the part of the English,” Horn said. “Jamestown is not meant to be a fairly minor enterprise. It’s meant to be the beachhead for an English empire in America that will serve as a bulwark against Catholicism. That’s a lot of freight for this little object to carry.”

Catholicism was feared by the English, too. Settlers at Jamestown believed there was a very real threat that Spanish warships would one day arrive with Catholic conquistadors prepared to fight for the New World. Incidentally, this anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic attitude—which continued long after Archer and his townsmen died—is what, in 1632, situated the Province of Maryland where it is today, rather than further south where its Roman Catholic founder originally wanted it to be.

“When George Calvert was campaigning to get the charter to Maryland, he was actually looking to get territory—and he was approved to get territory—in what is now North Carolina,” said Farrelly, the Brandeis professor. “The people in Virginia were campaigning for him not to get a charter. The tactic they used is that [they said], ‘He’s going to use this charter as an excuse to bring Spanish priests and nuns over into Virginia, and they’re going to invade Virginia and take over the colony.’ That argument did prove to be contentious enough that at the last minute, it looked like Calvert was going to lose the territory.”

So there was certainly incentive for Archer, decades before Calvert’s time, to have hidden his Catholicism at Jamestown. “This person could have been from a family that was outwardly Anglican but privately Catholic,” Farrelly said. “That would explain why they would be bringing a relic over with them. It does make you wonder: What was it like for him? How secretive did he feel he needed to be, given that he’s living in a colony that is rabidly anti-Catholic. And who buried him with this relic?”

When archaeologists found the box in Archer’s grave in 2013, they could tell right away that there was something inside. It was light enough to feel hollow, and its contents rattled when researchers turned the box over in their hands. But they knew as soon as they gently scrubbed off the oxidation from its copper-alloy exterior—a conservation project that took more than 100 hours and revealed a minimalist engraving of the letter ‘M,’—that they wouldn't be able to open the box without causing irreparable damage. It was through subsequent CT-scan imaging that forensic historians were able to identify shards of bone and the lead ampulla inside, clear evidence of a Catholic relic.

"It was not uncommon—I'm not going to say it was common—but there were two different words to describe somebody who was basically a secret Catholic or a crypto-Catholic in England at the time," Farrelly told me. “Meaning he attended Anglican church services regularly, and therefore was not subject to fines, but would also attend Catholic services. ‘Schismatic’ was the term that Catholic priests used, and protestants called [them] ‘papists’ ... Neither the Catholic priests nor the Anglican priests liked these people. You’re not being true Anglicans and you’re not being true Catholics.”

But there’s still a nagging question in all this: What if the box wasn’t a Catholic relic at all? Such symbols have histories that are, at times, “messy,” Horn acknowledged. “And this is a line of inquiry we find quite intriguing," he said. “Perhaps this is a former Catholic holy object that, during the reformation, was translated or repurposed for Anglican use, therefore representing the spiritual heart of the new Church of England in the New World. We know that sacred objects were repurposed for Protestant use, for Anglican use, during this period.”

But there are other hints that suggest Archer was indeed a Catholic, and possibly even an important figure to other Catholics. He was buried in a hexagonal wooden coffin with his head pointing east. “Because of the orientation of archer in the grave, his head to the east, this is usually a sign of clerics,” Horn said. “He could have been the leader of a secret Catholic cell and even possibly a secret Catholic priest.”

Conserved silver reliquary with ‘M’ on lid. (Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation / Preservation Virginia)

Then there are the other Catholic objects, fragments found over the years at Jamestown that are taking on new meaning after the most recent discovery. “We have been finding bits and pieces of rosaries and crucifixes and other things that obviously were Catholic,” Kelso said. “One interpretation is they were bought over here to give to the Indians, even just to trade as trinkets. But now I think about it in a whole different way.”

“A new piece of archeological or historical evidence can help you better understand a whole range of previous evidence,” Horn said. Or, it can call into question much of what you thought you knew.

“When you think about the circumstances of Archer’s burial and the way this object was placed—it wasn’t just thrown in surreptitiously,” he said. “It was deliberately placed. It would have been quite public. Someone would have had to get down into the grave. These are real puzzles for us.”

How Writing Achieves Grace

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.

Doug McLean

Years ago, Mary-Beth Hughes, the author of the novel The Loved Ones, studied dance at the studio of the pioneering choreographer Merce Cunningham. The unorthodox dancing methods Hughes learned were a revelation. But it wasn’t until she discovered Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels that she saw how Cunningham’s core principles—his embrace of chance and randomness in creating form, for example—might be applied to fiction. In her interview for this series, Hughes discussed how Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower furthered an artistic awakening that began on the studio floor. She explained why she writes daily, embraces chance, and focuses on process instead of product—all in pursuit of those rare, fleeting moments when everything comes into focus.

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The Loved Ones is a fractured family portrait: The Devlin family has lost its youngest son, Cubbie, and readers witness their various attempts to process the loss. Hughes’s unflinching, fly-on-the-wall narrative depicts a family in freefall, trying to hold it together while indulging their most self-destructive impulses.

Mary-Beth Hughes is the author of the story collection Double Happiness and another novel, Wavemaker II. Her stories have appeared in A Public Space, Granta, and The Paris Review. She spoke to me by phone.

Mary-Beth Hughes: My dancing life in New York and my time studying at the Merce Cunningham studio had already ended when I first read Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. This was in 1997, when Mariner Paperbacks began issuing the first American editions of her books. At the time, I was trying to write the early pieces of my first novel. When I read The Blue Flower, I thought how much I wanted to be able to write in the way that she does.

It’s really an unbelievable novel—all of her books are great, but this was her last and her masterpiece. The story is about the 18th century German poet Novalis as a young man, Fritz von Hardenburg, before he became famous. Fitzgerald drew from his diaries, letters, and surviving work—published in five volumes by V. Kohlhammer Verlag—and, it seems, recast his language for her novel. I imagine she immersed herself enough to take on the vision of this young poet, then planted that vision in a very particular human life of loss and complex affections. It’s an incredible act of receptivity.

In the story Fritz falls in love with a young girl, Sophie von Kuhn, only 12 when they first meet, and he courts her to the dismay of his own family—he is of noble birth; she is not—and the friendly acceptance of hers. Fritz must first learn to become a salt-mine inspector to earn a living and intends to wait until Sophie is of age to marry, but she falls ill long before. The book surrounds what happens to her and what happens to him, as a result of her illness and death. My first novel also concerned the illness of a very young person, so this struck a chord with me. Fitzgerald manages to achieve an almost physical empathy for her characters that I deeply admire.

There is a passage I love toward the end of The Blue Flower, which occurs when Fritz has decided at last to leave Sophie’s deathbed and go home. He’s heartsick, and he writes himself a note in his diary. The paragraph begins, “As things are, we’re enemies of the world and foreigners to this earth. Our grasp of it is a process of estrangement.” His desire is to be the opposite: not to be an enemy of the world, not to be estranged, but to be very much in it. I think he’s exhorting himself to see the world more fully in spite of, or even in response to, his grief.

The passage continues:

I go further than this, much further and say this is waking, that is a dream, this belongs to the body, that to the spirit, this belongs to space and distance, that to time and duration. But space spills over into time, as the body into the soul, so that the one cannot be measured without the other. I want to exert myself to find a different kind of measurement.

In this passage, Fritz is at a moment when his formative vision as a poet meets terrible experience. And within the difficulty, an exquisite thing is coming into being. He doesn’t wish to extinguish his sorrow, or transport himself beyond it—instead, he seeks “a different kind of measurement.”

This openness, this strong desire to see things in a new way, is so characteristic of Fitzgerald. I felt I recognized this quality when I encountered it in her work. It seemed the literary incarnation of something I’d experienced, for the first time, as a young dancer in the Merce Cunningham studio.

Some dancers, like Merce, become extraordinary, ready channels for grace. Even as an old man, he could lift his arm and captivate a room. Whatever he was looking for just charged through him. Fitzgerald has the same presence on the page—that deep immersion in what she’s seeing, what she’s understanding, and a beautiful ability to convey it.

In the Cunningham studio sometimes it seemed that the whole approach was to watch and wait for those moments of clarity and grace. When the effort falls away, and it becomes people doing something just as they should be. Not estranged from this world. That lovely un-estrangement.

Reading Penelope Fitzgerald, I felt it was possible to write as I’d experienced dancing.

When dancers learn a dance it is always through watching and imitating another dancer. Body and sometimes soul. There is a lot of theory around Merce, certainly, but it begins there. That transfer from one dancer to another. In class, there would be a set of steps given—a portion of a dance, a counted phrase. Merce, or whoever was demonstrating, would show it, and the dancers would mark it: Rather than just looking, you would make light gestures as if you were tip-toeing through the dance with your whole body.

Because Merce’s dances were difficult to do—he liked balletic legs and a flexible torso on top —people were less likely to relax into their strengths. As the dancing would begin, dancers would struggle to get various aspects of the sequence. But, sometimes there would come a point when that struggle would be suspended. The dancer would drop into the movement and the dance would sort of manifest itself. When that happens, it communicates profoundly: The dancer becomes all of a piece. Often—at least to my perception—the most extraordinary dancing happened in class, or in rehearsal, or in the warm up before a performance. There is no capturing dance really, and his approach honored that.

Merce, even in a crowded classroom, would be attentive to those moments. He was often present in the studio—watching, curious. Even when he was working at his wooden table in the back, he seemed tuned for when a dancer dropped into that ephemeral something. That phrase, that dancer, that instant. It couldn’t be grabbed and saved: Okay, this works, I’ll put it here. Instead—I’m guessing, by observation—those moments must have informed him somehow and helped shape his thinking and understanding.

For me, that kind of open engagement was revelatory. And when I first read The Blue Flower, I thought I recognized it in Fitzgerald. I’d never seen anyone put a novel together that way before. I imagined her composing somewhat like Merce Cunningham—devising all the delicate beautiful lines of writing and imagery that will then come up in different patterns far into the book. There’s a compositional instinct that felt very liberating to me. Reading Fitzgerald, I felt it was possible to write as I’d experienced dancing. That writing that way was feasible. It was thrilling to read her. It still is.

I feel I was very lucky to be a dancer first. I learned not to be results-oriented, and I’m not sure I would have had the ability, as a young person, to find that for myself in writing. I learned over years and years that the most gorgeous things pop up unannounced, and the whole project is to be there when it happens.

For me, writing a story can be a lot like marking a dance. I reenter a story I’m working on by lightly writing into it, or around it, or just rereading it. Often, I’ll spend hours I can’t really account for, making only very small adjustments—but somehow relying on a sense of what it is I’m watching for.

I think daily practice is helpful as much as possible, and it’s not always possible. Writing is hard to pick up and put down, and it’s easier when it’s a routine. The widely held idea—belief—that showing up regularly is the only way to develop is a great gift of being a young dancer, and just being in a place—a studio—where the work is valued. Because I spent so many years as a dancer, I understand in every part of me how slow it all is. The zillion hours dancers put in so that they can do three steps across the floor.

Patience. Curiosity. Repetition. Looking again and again. Not imposing a story line. Letting composition emerge through pattern, rhythm, shape, sound, movement. Occasionally, like Fritz von Hardenberg in the middle of his salt inspection, you hit upon a moment of grace. You can’t plan for it. You just have to practice enough so that you’re ready when it comes.

Robert Gates, America's Unlikely Gay-Rights Hero

Eagle Scout. Young Republican. CIA recruit. Air Force officer. CIA director. Secretary of defense.

It’s not the resume of a radical civil-rights campaigner, but Robert Gates has now integrated two of the great bastions of macho American traditional morality—first the U.S. armed forces, and now the Boy Scouts of America. In both cases, Gates pursued a careful, gradual strategy, one that wasn't fast enough for activists. In both cases, he was careful to take the temperature of constituents. And in both cases, once he was ready to act, he did so decisively. In the end what seemed to matter most was not Gates’s personal feelings but his determination to safeguard institutions he cared about and his deft skills as a bureaucratic operator.

Before the Obama administration began moving to eliminate the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy there was barely any indication of Gates’s views on LBGT issues—though not none. In 1991, while director of central intelligence, Gates ordered an inquiry into whether CIA personnel had ever been blackmailed into espionage because they were gay. When he found no cases, he ended the practice of asking employees about their sexual orientation as part of polygraph tests. From 2002 until he took over the Pentagon in 2006, Gates was president of Texas A&M University, a famously culturally conservative school. (In 1984, students sued, successfully, to force the school to recognize a gay-student organization; the ruling effectively removed all legal prohibitions on LGBT student groups nationwide.) At A&M, Gates worked to improve student diversity overall—including racial minorities and LGBT students—and appointed the school’s first administrator specifically in charge of diversity.

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Given the rapid advance of gay rights over the last decade, it’s tough to remember just how different the stage was in 2006, when Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” had had plenty of critics since it was enacted in 1994—it had been President Bill Clinton’s distant second choice to full opening to gay servicemembers—but it was still firmly in place. The Bush administration was not interested in lifting the ban, and Gates took a cautious approach. He repeatedly told reporters that he was not reviewing or reconsidering the policy.

When, several months into his tenure, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, said that “homosexual acts between individuals are immoral,” Gates tried to avoid discussing the comments, and said of DADT, “As long as the law is what it is, that's what we'll do.” (Pace, who retired in September 2007, reiterated his personal opposition to homosexuality during an exit hearing with Congress, but also endorsed gay service in the military.) When, two months later, the military ejected 58 desperately needed Arabic linguists because they were gay, Gates still said the policy wasn’t under review.

Even after President Obama was elected and Gates accepted an offer to stay on as secretary, he remained cautious. Though the president pledged to repeal DADT during his first State of the Union, Gates expressed a preference in March 2009 to “push that one down the road a little bit,” infuriating gay activists. Yet in June, he was clearly expecting the policy to end and was exploring whether “there’s a more humane way to apply the law until it gets changed.” A similar pattern held in 2010, as Gates warned Congress not to repeal DADT before he had a policy in place for the aftermath and insisted courts not make the decision. He also issued a survey on gays to servicemembers, a step that LGBT activists, who saw it as putting civil rights to a vote, disagreed with. Yet there Gates was in the fall, saying DADT’s demise was “inevitable” and testifying to Congress in favor of repeal—before the courts did it. (And that survey? It turned out the troops were totally fine with LGBT comrades.)

Once DADT was repealed, Gates moved quickly to enforce discipline and get the change implemented in the military, and shot down any hopes that soldiers, sailors, and marines who disagreed with the policy could leave their commitments early.

Gates’s push for the end of DADT never relied on the soaring rhetoric of rights and justice that people like Obama used. Gates spoke with the dry, careful language of a bureaucrat, speaking in terms of unit cohesion, military readiness, and obstacle recognition. When he indulged emotion, it was to praise soldiers risking their lives—the same language a defense secretary would use for straight soldiers. The decision was more than anything a triumph of pragmatism. Gates carefully studied the effects repeal would have on the military and decided the downsides were minimal; and he looked at the way the country was changing and realized that the policy would have to end soon, and that he wanted it to end on the Pentagon’s terms to ensure the military’s stability and long-term health.

The DADT fight offers a template for the opening to gay scoutmasters. Gates had expressed tempered sympathy for gays in scouting as far back as 1993, when he told Wichita Rotarians, “Values central to Scouting are under challenge today as never before: challenges to our belief in God, challenges from Americans who are gay. Scouting must teach tolerance and respect for the dignity and worth of every individual person, certainly including gays.”

The Boy Scouts had already begun to dismantle some of their anti-gay policies when Gates was elected president in late 2013. A lopsided vote in May 2013 ended a ban on gay scouts but kept prohibitions on gay scout leaders and volunteers in place. Just as he had at Defense, Gates initially took a carefully diplomatic position. “I was prepared to go further than the decision that was made,” Gates said in May 2014. “I would have supported having gay Scoutmasters, but at the same time, I fully accept the decision that was democratically arrived at by 1,500 volunteers from across the entire country.” He said he wouldn’t reopen the decision during his term as president.

At some point in the last year, he had a change of heart.

The shift seems to reflect much the same calculus that guided Gates through the DADT decision. At the Pentagon, he had first avoided discussing repeal because it seemed too likely to create institutional instability; but once he decided that the writing was on the wall and that refusing to change was the greater risk to the organization, he moved swiftly and effectively to impose his new will. The point was to guarantee institutional survival.

In May 2015, one year after saying he wouldn’t reopen the issue of gay scoutmasters, Gates did just that. In short, he decided once again that if the institution he led didn’t change its policies now, a judge was likely to force it to do so later.

“I truly fear that any other alternative will be the end of us as a national movement.”

“The status quo in our movement's membership standards cannot be sustained,” he said. “Between internal challenges and potential legal conflicts, the BSA finds itself in an unsustainable position, a position that makes us vulnerable to the possibility the courts simply will order us at some point to change our membership policy.”

Gates warned that a court order would disarm the Boy Scouts’ ability to act of their own volition, and suggested that doing anything besides opening would be an existential threat.

“I truly fear that any other alternative will be the end of us as a national movement,” he said.

Monday evening, Gates got his wish, as the BSA’s 80-member board voted to approve the change. (A smaller executive committee had already approved it.) The new policy may not satisfy everyone. Traditionalists are upset about the move, while progressives feel it doesn’t go far enough—troops that are chartered by churches and other religious organizations would still be permitted to set their own standards. Regardless, the policy marks a serious shift for BSA, and it cements Robert Gates’s place in history: as one of the least likely but most successful proponents for gay equality in institutional America.

The Real Test of the Iran Deal

A week ago I volunteered my way into an Atlantic debate on the merits of the Iran nuclear agreement. The long version of the post is here; the summary is that the administration has both specific facts and longer-term historic patterns on its side in recommending the deal.

On the factual front, I argued that opponents had not then (and have not now) met President Obama’s challenge to propose a better real-world alternative to the negotiated terms. Better means one that would make it less attractive for Iran to pursue a bomb, over a longer period of time. Real world means not the standard “Obama should have been tougher” carping but a specific demand that the other countries on “our” side, notably including Russia and China, would have joined in insisting on, and that the Iranians would have accepted.

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“What’s your better idea?” is a challenge any honest opponent must accept. If this deal fails—which means, if the U.S. Congress rejects an agreement that the U.K., France, Germany, Russia, China, and Iran have accepted—then something else will happen, and all known “somethings” involve faster Iranian progress toward a bomb.

On historical judgment, I said that for two reasons the supporters of the deal should get the benefit of the doubt. The short-term reason is that nearly everyone who in 2015 is alarmist about Iran was in 2002 alarmist about Iraq. You can find exceptions, but only a few. That doesn’t prove that today’s alarmists are wrong, but in any other realm it would count. The longer-term reason is that the history of controversial diplomatic agreements through the past century shows that those recommending “risks for peace” have more often proven right than their opponents. (Don’t believe me? Go back and consider the past examples.)

Three topics for today’s updates, with a connecting historical theme.

* * *

Correlation of Forces

In the two weeks since the deal was announced, the forces pro and con have lined up. The clear opponents include:

—The congressional GOP, which invited Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to speak against the deal long before it was struck, and virtually all of whose members oppose it.

—Candidates for the GOP presidential nomination, including Scott Walker with his promise to revoke the deal on day one in office (which would be difficult, unless he could convince Russia, China, etc. to reinstate sanctions), Mike Huckabee with his odious “oven” line, and the rest who oppose the deal as uniformly as they opposed Obamacare.

—Many Israelis in and out of government, from Benjamin Netanyahu to Natan Sharansky. And, using arguments like Netanyahu’s, American organizations like AIPAC, Bill Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel, the Zionist Organization of America (which went out of its way to endorse Huckabee’s statement), possibly the Anti-Defamation League, and of course Sheldon Adelson.

The question for Congress to ask is whether the deal (a) does more than any alternative to (b) minimize Iran’s incentives to develop weapons for (c) as long a period as possible.

So who do we have on the other side?

—Most of the American public, by a 54-38 margin, according to a new poll by the Democratic-affiliated Public Policy Polling. “Voters within every gender, race, and age group are in support of it, reflecting the broad-based mandate for the deal,” the PPP analysis said.

—Most Jewish Americans, by a larger margin than the public in general, according to a Los Angeles Jewish Journal poll reported in the The Jerusalem Post. In this poll, American Jews supported the deal by a 49-31 margin; among the rest of the public in this study, the support was only 28-24, with a very large group undecided. According to the poll, 53 percent of Jewish Americans wanted Congress to approve the deal, versus 35 percent who wanted Congress to stop it.

   — Numerous Israeli analysts and former military and intelligence-service officials. For instance, various members of the IDF’s general staff; a former head of Mossad; a former head of Shin Bet; a scientist from Israel’s nuclear program; a former head of the IDF’s intelligence branch; a former deputy national-security advisor; another former IDF official; the think-tank Molad; Marc Schulman of HistoryCentral.com; and many more. Every American has seen and read the literally cartoonish fulminations of Netanyahu against the deal (see below). How about more coverage of the Israeli defense professionals making the opposite case?

Benjamin Netanyahu at the UN three years ago (Lucas Jackson / Reuters)

   — Five former U.S. ambassadors to Israel from administrations of both parties, and three former U.S. Under Secretaries of State (including Thomas Pickering, who held both jobs), who issued a public letter on Monday supporting the deal. Sample passage: “Those who advocate rejection of the JCPOA [the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran’s Nuclear Program, a.k.a. the deal] should assess carefully the value and feasibility of any alternative strategy. … The consequences of rejection are grave: U.S. responsibility for the collapse of the agreement; the inability to hold the P5+1 together for the essential international sanctions regime and such other action that may be required against Iran; and the real possibility that Iran will decide to build a nuclear weapon under significantly reduced or no inspections.”

   — More than 100 former U.S. ambassadors, career and political alike, and from both parties, who signed a similar public letter endorsing the deal. It begins, “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran stands as a landmark agreement in deterring the proliferation of nuclear weapons.”

   — More than 60 American “national-security leaders”—politicians, military officers, strategists, Republicans and Democrats—who issued their own public letter urging Congress to approve the deal. E.g., “We congratulate President Obama and all the negotiators for a landmark agreement unprecedented in its importance for preventing the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran.” Here are a few Republicans who signed this letter: former Special Trade Representative Carla Hills; former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill; former Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum. Here are a few Democrats: former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell; former Defense Secretary William Perry. I’m resisting saying: But what do any of them know, compared with Mike Huckabee?

   — Hans Blix, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who a dozen years ago tried to avert the disaster in Iraq. He says of the deal, “I think it is a remarkably far-reaching and detailed agreement. And I think it has a potential for stabilizing and improving the situation in the region as it gradually gets implemented.”

   — A number of Iranian dissidents, who say that the deal could shift the internal balance in their country.

   — An increasingly solid bloc of Democrats in Congress, being marshaled by Representatives David Price of North Carolina and Lloyd Doggett of Texas, who have been working since last year to reinforce support for the deal. “While demanding thorough scrutiny, this agreement appears to mark genuine progress for all who believe that peace will make us more secure than war with Iran,” Doggett (a longtime friend from our days in Texas) said when the deal was announced. “The bomb-Iran naysayers for whom the only good deal is a dead deal will unceasingly raise obstacles, but ultimately reason will prevail and the President’s leadership will be sustained.” It is interesting (to put it neutrally) to contrast the Price-Doggett effort, which has the support of Nancy Pelosi, with the equivocation of their Senate counterpart, leader-aspirant Chuck Schumer.

   — An increasing number of journalists asking: if not this deal, exactly what? A notable example is Fareed Zakaria, who wrote: “Let’s imagine that the opponents of the nuclear agreement with Iran get their way: The U.S. Congress kills it. What is the most likely consequence? Within one year, Iran would have more than 25,000 centrifuges, its breakout time would shrink to mere weeks and the sanctions against it would crumble. How is this in the United States’ national interest? Or Israel’s? Or Saudi Arabia’s?” See also Uriel Heilman’s “The Iran deal and the hubris of certainty” for the Jewish Telegraph Agency.

I could go on, but you get the point. Judge for yourself. You can be persuaded by Netanyahu, Huckabee, Cruz, Kristol, Adelson, et al., all of whom were wrong on the last high-stakes judgment call about U.S. interests in the Middle East. Or by an overwhelming majority of the people from both parties with operating experience in America’s war-fighting and peace-making enterprises in this part of the world.

* * *

The Rut of History

One of the journalists who is not part of the trend I mention is of course Leon Wieseltier, for many decades the literary editor of The New Republic and now an Atlantic contributing editor. In our pages on Monday he made his case against the deal in particular and what he considers the defective larger conception of history that lies behind it.

By all means read it and judge for yourself. I’ll say collegially that I see the larger point entirely differently, and also disagree on specifics about this deal.

On the bigger idea behind the deal, Wieseltier quotes Obama’s aide Ben Rhodes as saying that the president is “willing to step out of the rut of history.” Wieseltier responds this way:

The rut of history: It is a phrase worth pondering. It expresses a deep scorn for the past, a zeal for newness and rupture, an arrogance about old struggles and old accomplishments, a hastiness with inherited precedents and circumstances, a superstition about the magical powers of the present. It expresses also a generational view of history, which, like the view of history in terms of decades and centuries, is one of the shallowest views of all.

This is nothing other than the mentality of disruption applied to foreign policy.

This is an eloquent and powerful description of Year Zero-style ahistorical thinking. I just don’t think it applies to Obama, least of all in his foreign policy. In 2009, the Nobel Peace Prize committee may have thought that the newly elected Obama was the man described above. They were wrong. 20 years from now, or 50, I think assessments of Obama’s international strategy will stress its incremental, small-c conservative nature, rather than any impulsive willingness to overturn the furniture and see what happens then.

For decades, U.S. diplomats and scholars have talked about the inevitable end of Cuba’s unnatural exclusion. For nearly as long, they have studied the conditions in which Iran’s extremist-pariah estrangement would end. And for at least a decade, they have considered how the U.S. could undo the damage in its relations with the Muslim world wrought by the Iraq War. Obama has moved steadily on all these fronts, and slowly. You can agree or disagree with his judgment (I generally agree), but I don’t think you can call him impulsive. If you want to see impatient, impulsive zeal for newness, “the mentality of disruption applied to foreign policy,” go back and study the thinking that led us into the Iraq War.

On the specifics of the deal, Wieseltier says this:

This agreement was designed to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. If it does not prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—and it seems uncontroversial to suggest that it does not guarantee such an outcome—then it does not solve the problem that it was designed to solve. And if it does not solve the problem that it was designed to solve, then it is itself not an alternative, is it?

I believe that this misstates the ambition of the agreement and thus mischaracterizes the standard to which it should be held.

This deal does not guarantee that Iran can never produce nuclear weapons, because no deal could do so. The science and engineering behind nuclear weaponry are no country’s secret anymore. If there ever was a time when Iran’s nuclear potential could have been forcibly eliminated (as Iraq’s was in the Israeli raid on Osirak in 1981), that time is many years in the past. Eleven years ago, U.S. military experts were already judging it impossible. Moreover, as is rarely mentioned in the U.S., Iran could fully comply with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and still keep a civilian nuclear industry.

Through the Cold War era and afterwards, the only way to keep nuclear weapons from being used was to make the cost of that use unacceptably high. This is the brutal logic of deterrence: What stops you from killing us is the knowledge that you’ll be killed in return. And the only way to prevent these weapons from being spread is to make the costs of proliferation higher than the perceived benefits. This was the purpose of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and also of the current sanctions against Iran.

Twenty years from now, assessments of Obama’s international strategy will stress its incremental, small-c conservative nature.

Thus the test of the deal is not whether it guarantees that Iran can never build nuclear weaponry. If that’s what you’re for, you are against any real-world deal.

The question for Congress to ask about this agreement is whether it (a) does more than any alternative to (b) minimize Iran’s incentives to develop weapons for (c) as long a period as possible. Saying “No deal!” notably fails this final test, since China and Russia won’t continue sanctions just because the GOP thinks they should.

The announced deal does more on those three measures than any other proposal I’m aware of. If there is a better option, let’s hear it. Wieseltier says that it is “demagogic” to raise this “compared with what?” question. I think it’s responsible and unavoidable. On this point Charlie Stevenson, a longtime professor at the National War College who is now at SAIS, writes in to say:

Let’s suppose U.S. critics of the agreement succeed in voting a resolution of disapproval and then override a presidential veto. Some sanctions can still be lifted by executive order, but many would stay in place. Meanwhile, the UN Security Council will vote to lift international sanctions and most other countries will rush to trade with Tehran.

Each Republican presidential candidate should be asked to lay out what they would do if elected given that fact situation. Promising even tougher unilateral sanctions would sound weak indeed. They should also be asked how they would conduct their presidencies if an Obama veto stands, and most sanctions are already lifted by America and others. Would they abandon the inspection regime or otherwise undermine its implementation?

Toughness, like hope, is not a strategy.

* * *

History as Metaphor

In an earlier post, I argued that most of the past century’s negotiated agreements had turned out better than their political critics feared. The obvious exception, I said, was Munich.

I’ve received a flood of mail from historians and other readers saying that current historiography tells a more complicated story. It sounds like a classic SlatePitch to cast Neville Chamberlain as other than a dupe, and two years ago Slate actually ran an item defending him. But a number of other readers wrote to this effect:

From what I’ve gathered, the Munich agreement was not ‘peace in our time’ (that was for public consumption). It was a ploy to buy desperately needed time to rearm. The British government never expected anything else from it.

In addition, France and Great Britain had very limited power to affect things happening in Eastern Europe. They weren’t in a position to attack Germany worth anything, and the major lesson from WWI was that offensives could be very, very costly, with little to show for them.  

And in any occasion, when one side has nothing to say but ‘Munich!’, it’s clear that they have no argument.

This post is long enough, and it is late enough, that I’ll save elaboration on this final point for another time. July and August are often torpid, silly-news periods in our national life, and certainly there is plenty of spectacle on the political scene. But this Iran deal is important, and I am glad it is getting so much attention.

Ted Cruz Plays the Maverick

On Friday, Ted Cruz called the leader of his party a liar on the Senate floor. On Sunday, Cruz’s fellow Republicans responded by abandoning him in dramatic fashion.

Cruz has turned to the tried-and-true method of using his perch in the Senate to draw attention to himself in recent days, as his presidential campaign struggles to gain traction. But unlike colleagues such as Rand Paul or Marco Rubio, the Texas Tea Partier hasn’t limited himself to the typical Senate headline-grabbing moves—a lengthy filibuster-type speech, for example, or a dogged push for legislation. No, the Cruz style is to attack the institution itself, its norms and conventions, and in particular, its precious decorum.

From a purely political perspective, it’s not a bad move. Congress is never popular, and accusing a polarizing legislative leader like Mitch McConnell of lying is not the same as, say, belittling the war record of John McCain and suggesting it was his fault the Vietcong captured and tortured him for seven years, as Donald Trump recently did. (Nor is it as offensive as Mike Huckabee’s invocation of the most wretched imagery of the Holocaust to protest the Iran nuclear deal.) The Senate may have been designed as the “cooling saucer” of American government, but no one prizes its glacial pace or its Treehouse Club rules and traditions nearly as much as the senators themselves.

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“Squabbling and sanctimony may be tolerated in other venues—or perhaps on the campaign trail—but they have no place among colleagues in the United States Senate,” Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, the longest-serving Republican, said in a floor speech at the opening of an unusual Sunday session. In the best passive-aggressive tradition of the Senate, Hatch did not mention Cruz by name, but it was obvious to all who he was talking about.

The admonition followed Cruz’s outburst on Friday, when he said McConnell told Republicans a “flat-out lie” about his intentions to allow supporters to revive the expired charter of the Export-Import Bank—a lending agency targeted by conservatives—as part of an unrelated highway bill. McConnell on Sunday denied making a “special deal,” but he largely left his defense to a handful of other senior Republicans who went after Cruz. Among those standing with McConnell was Cruz’s own Texas colleague, John Cornyn, who said he was “mistaken” in calling out the majority leader.

“Squabbling and sanctimony may be tolerated in other venues—or perhaps on the campaign trail—but they have no place among colleagues in the United States Senate.”

To no one’s surprise, Cruz refused to back down. He insisted that he had not violated the Senate’s sacred decorum. “I do not believe speaking the truth is anything other than in the very best tradition of the United States Senate,” Cruz told reporters, according to CNN.

Yet the rhetorical barbs were only part of the story on Sunday. Cruz next turned to the Senate’s arcane procedural rules to try to get his way. In a bid to appease conservatives upset over the Ex-Im Bank amendment, McConnell had announced Friday that the Senate would also vote on a full repeal of Obamacare. Cruz had denounced this offer as “an empty show vote,” and on that point, he was exactly right. Under the rules devised by McConnell, the amendment repealing the healthcare law would be subject to a 60-vote threshold, thereby ensuring its failure, given that none of the 45 Democrats would ever support repeal.

Instead of fighting on Obamacare, Cruz tried to rally Republicans around an amendment blocking any relaxation of Iran sanctions until the regime in Tehran releases American prisoners. But Republicans ignored Cruz. He couldn’t even get his colleagues to second his motion for an initial vote on Iran; the effort was turned aside by voice vote.

In Cruz’s maneuver, Republicans saw something much more dangerous than a simple political vote on Iran: They saw someone trying to subvert the long-held order of the Senate for his own personal ambitions. “It would create chaos in the Senate,” warned Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, himself a former failed presidential candidate. It wasn’t much consolation to Cruz, but Republicans blocked similar bids by Senator Mike Lee to get a vote on defunding Planned Parenthood and repealing Obamacare by a simple majority of 51 votes. (Roll Call has a good explanation of the procedure.)

Ted Cruz lost every which way on Sunday. The Senate voted to revive the Ex-Im Bank over his protests, the Obamacare repeal vote fell predictably short, and the failure of his procedural gambit revealed that not only does Cruz lack allies in Washington, he lacks friends as well.

But those failures may be precisely what he needed to revive his presidential bid. Whereas on Friday he was attacking McConnell, by Sunday afternoon he was attacking the entire “Washington Cartel”—recasting a handful of bland, cautious senators in their 60s and 70s as, perhaps, a band of brazen, drug-dealing warlords. Cruz is trying to persuade voters that he’s just the man to take on Washington’s political establishment, and on Sunday, a parade of senators professing their grave disappointment inadvertently bolstered his cause.

Bobby Jindal's Case for (a Tiny Bit of) Gun Control

Bobby Jindal has sometimes struggled to garner attention for his presidential campaign by declaiming on issues important to hardcore conservatives. Unsolicited, he weighed in on Rudy Giuliani’s musing that Barack Obama doesn’t love America (Jindal agreed). When other states backed off so-called religious-freedom laws and orders, Jindal went out of his way to issue an executive order doing the same in Louisiana.

Jindal’s latest comments might attract the attention of strong conservatives, but they’re unlikely to meet with approval. Speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Louisiana governor discussed the shooting at a theater in Lafayette on July 23, in which a gunman killed two women before shooting himself. Jindal noted that Louisiana reports information on involuntary commitments for mental illness to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

“I think every state should strengthen their laws,” he said. “Every state should make sure this information is being reported in the background system. We need to make sure that background system is working. Absolutely, in this instance, this man never should have been able to buy a gun.”

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That’s a notable statement because elected Republican officeholders have generally tended to oppose any expansion of gun laws. Although polls showed that a great majority of Americans favored at least modest new restrictions on gun access—including, notably, expanded background checks to close existing loopholes—legislation to implement such measures failed in Congress in 2013 on strong opposition from Republicans.

Jindal stands out from the pack on this issue. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry, one of Jindal’s rivals for the GOP nod, said that Thursday’s shooting ought to inspire looser gun laws: “I believe that, with all my heart, that if you have the citizens who are well trained, and particularly in these places that are considered to be gun-free zones, that we can stop that type of activity, or stop it before there's as many people that are impacted as what we saw in Lafayette.” Other Republicans haven’t offered much comment. (Donald Trump, for what it’s worth, says the shooting “has nothing to do with guns.”)

As Jindal noted, Louisiana only implemented automatic reporting of mental-health information to NICS a couple years ago. Even as the national gun-control legislation after the Newtown massacre foundered, Jindal—who enjoys an A-plus rating from the NRA—successfully pushed to overturn a Louisiana law that blocked mental-health reporting to NICS. It’s intriguing to imagine Jindal pushing to his party’s left on gun politics. There simply isn’t much room left to the right, and besides, the NRA has been notably more open to mental-health-focused restrictions than to other types of gun regulation. To paraphrase, the group argues that guns don’t kill people; the mentally ill sometimes do. That means the position that Jindal is staking out isn’t at all radical, even though it’s to Perry’s left.

In theory, federal law has long barred persons who are adjudicated to be mentally ill, or involuntarily committed to a mental institution, from acquiring firearms. In practice, reporting is pretty shoddy—many states simply have no mechanism for or don’t bother to send information to the national database, where it’s used for the background checks that determine whether someone is eligible to buy a gun. Activists say reporting has generally improved in the last few years.

It’s also not clear that, even if the loopholes were closed, reporting of this sort would actually make a difference. John Houser, the Lafayette shooter, is said to have bought the gun he used legally in Alabama in 2014. (Background-check systems have a variety of loopholes and delays, and a failure of some variety allowed Charleston shooter Dylann Roof to purchase a gun.) Some reports suggested that he had been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital in 2008. On Monday, however, the Georgia judge in that case said there had been no involuntary commitment. The judge ordered Houser’s apprehension and evaluation at a mental hospital, but if Houser was released after that evaluation, or voluntarily extended his stay without a court order, he would not have been barred from purchasing a firearm under the law.

Many mass shootings have involved people who wouldn’t have been stopped by stricter laws. That includes those whose names are run through the database without any flags—including James Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado, shooter; Jared Loughner, who shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords and others in Arizona; and now possibly Houser—and those who receive guns from family members or as gifts, including Newtown shooter Adam Lanza.

But the larger question is whether there’s really much link between mental illness and gun violence. Jeffrey Swanson, a psychologist and sociologist at Duke, has studied the link at length, and he has found that mental illness is a bad predictor of gun violence—those who became violent were often using drugs or alcohol, which is a better predictor, whether or not they were mentally ill. Most mass murderers don’t have a psychiatric history, while a vast majority of people suffering from mental illness won’t ever commit an act of violence, much less a mass murder.

Swanson compared results before and after Connecticut began reporting mental-health information to NICS, ProPublica notes, and found that while submitting the information was an effective way to keep the mentally ill from getting guns, it didn’t do much to actually decrease violence—it reduced predicted violent crime by less than half of 1 percent.

“What we try to do is keep the guns out of the hands of dangerous people, and that's hard, because it's hard to predict.”

Is that enough to bother? Reducing violent crime is obviously a positive goal, but there are plenty of steps that governments of all levels could take that would produce incremental reductions, but which they don’t do, because the costs are too great or the payoff too little. Swanson told ProPublica’s Lois Beckett last year that the simplest way to reduce gun crime is reduce the number of guns around.

“What we try to do is keep the guns out of the hands of dangerous people, and that's hard, because it's hard to predict, and we have almost more guns than people,” he said.

But it’s clear that the United States, with its unusual history with guns, its atypical constitutional protection of the right to bear arms, and its powerful gun lobby, is unlikely to take any step so drastic any time soon—despite repeated mass killings. In the absence of such reform, the improved reporting Jindal called for may be better than nothing, but it’s unlikely to break the pattern of shootings.

Using the Restroom: A Privilege—If You’re a Teacher

It’s common knowledge that teachers today are stressed, that they feel underappreciated and disrespected, and disillusioned. It’s no wonder they’re ditching the classroom at such high rates—to the point where states from Indiana to Arizona to Kansas are dealing with teacher shortages. Meanwhile, the number of American students who go into teaching is steadily dropping.

A recent survey conducted jointly by the American Federation of Teachers and Badass Teachers Association asked educators about the quality of their worklife, and it got some pretty harrowing feedback. Just 15 percent of the 30,000 respondents, for example, strongly agreed that they’re enthusiastic about the profession. Compare that to the roughly 90 percent percent who strongly agreed that they were enthusiastic about it when they started their career, and it’s clear that something has changed about schools that’s pushing them away. Roughly three in four respondents said they “often” feel stressed by their jobs.

One in two teachers reported having inadequate bathroom breaks.

The survey’s results were largely what one would expect. Among the “everyday stressors” in the workplace and classroom, the most-cited were time pressure and mandated curricula, respectively, for example.

But perhaps the biggest takeaway is somewhat buried in the summary report: Of the various everyday workplace stressors educators could check off, one of the most popular was “Lack of opportunity to use restroom.” In fact, a fourth of the respondents—which amounts, presumably, to 7,500 educators—cited the bathroom issue as an everyday stressor, putting it in third place only after time pressure and disciplinary issues. What’s more, roughly one in two teachers reported having inadequate bathroom breaks, while about the same ratio said they’re unable to use the breaks they do get.

The survey results should certainly be taken with some skepticism. As the second-largest education union in the country, the AFT clearly has a vested interest in advocating for better work conditions for educators, as does the Badass Teachers Association, a group that “was created to give voice to every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality through education.” The language used in the summary report wasn’t particularly neutral, suggesting that at least some of the 80 questions included in the survey, which was circulated via email and social media, may have been worded in a way that influenced certain responses. (For instance: “How often do you find your work stressful?”) And certain teachers—particularly women and those who had been treated for anxiety at some point in their careers—were more prone to reporting inadequate bathroom time.

Statistical nuance aside, however, what’s clear from the survey results is that when teachers do list the issues that stress them most, the bathroom issue comes up high on the list. That means one of the most pervasive strains on teachers’ lives at work has little to do (at least directly) with the problems that get the most attention in policy circles and the media—stuff like standardized testing, the onslaught of classroom tech, and pay. Maybe the bathroom issue is too primal to make it into policy discussions. Maybe teachers’ physical discomfort seems tangential when students are underperforming, schools are underfunded, and disadvantaged children are falling further and further behind. Or maybe those teachers are too selfless or too modest or too inured to put the issue on the public’s radar. A campaign to “Reclaim the Promise of Brown v. Board”? Now that’s noble. A campaign for more time to tinkle? Not so much.

But that doesn’t mean the bathroom-break problem isn’t one decision makers and education reformers should be overlooking (which they currently seem to be doing, given the apparent lack of research and dialogue on the issue). Randi Weingarten, the president of the AFT, mentioned the problem only in passing in her keynote speech at the union’s annual TEACH conference earlier this month: “We’ve fought for language in contracts that covers everything from class size to peer-assistance programs to making sure that when a teacher is sick, a substitute is called and those students aren’t just dumped into the class of the person who’s least likely to say ‘no’ to the principal,” she said. “We’ve even fought for time for bathroom breaks.”

Only some teachers contracts explicitly address bathroom breaks, and the policies are often pretty austere. Members of California’s ABC Federation of Teachers and Missouri’s AFT St. Louis, for example, can take one “physical relief break” every three hours or two 15-minute relief breaks during the day, respectively. There isn’t a straightforward federal law protecting workers’ restroom rights, and a number of lawsuits have been filed against companies, such as Nabisco, by employees alleging unjust bathroom policies.

“I waited [to use the restroom] another 45 minutes feeling nauseous and miserable and questioning whether teaching is really the profession for me.”

It’s hard to deny the misery that a day without having much, if any, time to relieve oneself might cause—especially when compounded with the other stressors associated with teaching. And inadequate bathroom time can be particularly strenuous for pregnant teachers. Given that roughly three-fourths of teachers are females, and that close to half are under age 40, a significant percentage of classroom educators have likely been subject to that extra strain.

Teachers can easily end up compromising their health by avoiding hydration—important, of course, for keeping energized, focused, and headache-free—to cope with the limited restroom time. It’s not uncommon for teachers to discuss strategies on resisting the urge to go; it’s even the subject of various threads on Reddit and other online forums. “Do not drink too much,” wrote the Reddit user schaud2013 about a year ago in the thread “How do teachers find time to use the bathroom in the school day?” The user continued: “I was lucky this year to have prep 2nd hour, then lunch 2 hours later and then 3 hours of classes until the end of the day. If I do have to go, I hold it by focusing on something else and walking around class. That seems to help me.”

Another Reddit user, lemonshrk, commented that he or she is like a “well-trained puppy” during the school year. “You get used to the schedule,” the user, who self-identified as a high-school teacher, said, theorizing that the situation is probably different for teachers at other levels. After all, elementary-school teachers responding to the AFT survey were 26 percent less likely than their high-school counterparts to report having an adequate number of bathroom breaks, which makes sense considering the constant attention younger children need.

In another bathroom-break thread, this one on the forum “A to Z Teacher Stuff,” a substitute teacher recalled asking a colleague about restroom policies and emphasized that the inadequate time can amount to much more than an inconvenience:

She told me to call the office because teachers are not allowed to step out of their classrooms, not even to go into the hallway. In this case, to "keep an eye on" a neighboring class. She said that teachers may loose [sic] their license if they are caught doing this …

Anyhow, I have IBS [irritable bowel syndrome], and I will spare everyone the nasty details. I called the office, and asked for coverage for a bathroom break and the receptionist said that she couldn't find and administrator to cover for me because certified office staff cannot cover for certificated employees. To top it off she said, “We don't have extra people floating around for those things.”

Needless to say I waited another 45 minutes feeling nauseous and miserable and questioning whether teaching is really the profession for me.

In a response, a first-grade substitute teacher also pointed to potentially serious health consequences: “Regardless of where I sub I typically can only use the restroom during lunch (and sometimes not even then because I have duty or lunch detention). It’s definitely not healthy, but I don't drink any liquids before or during work.”

Chances are these Internet users aren’t healthcare professionals. And it’s nearly impossible to make conclusions about the health implications of inadequate restroom time given the limited scope of medical research on the topic. (Educators are, moreover, known for their tendency to complain about and perhaps over-exaggerate their stress levels.)

Still, a handful of studies do suggest that the issue should, at the very least, be getting more attention from a public-health perspective. It’s well-known that urinary tract infections are a common side effect of limiting either bathroom usage or hydration (often both). A 1997 International Urogynecology Journal study, “Thirst at work—an occupational hazard?,” appears to contain some of the only existing research specifically focused on the prevalence of UTIs among teachers. The study—which was a response to the growing number of lawsuits and “anecdotal reports by patients,” as well as a concern that “proscriptions against using the toilet during the working day may be contributing” to the prevalence of UTIs—offered compelling, though mixed, conclusions. Of the roughly 800 teachers surveyed, about a fourth said they “voided” (the fancy word for peed or pooped) never or only once daily, while another fourth said they did so four or more times a day; half of the respondents, on the other hand, said they “made a conscious effort” to drink less water during work hours to avoid having to go to the bathroom.

Teachers who didn’t have enough to drink were at more than two times the risk of having a UTI.

Although the researchers, a urogynecologist and a law professor, didn’t find an association between the number of bathroom visits and UTIs, they did find that, compared to women who drank adequate amounts of water at work, those who didn’t have enough to drink were at more than two times the risk of having a UTI. “If this association holds,” they wrote, “public policy must be changed to allow workers more adequate access to toilet facilities.”

Most conversations about school bathrooms these days focus on policies for students: The Internet is peppered with teachers exchanging tips, analyses of how much kids’ bathroom use should be regulated, news reports on lawsuits filed over draconian restrictions or transgender kids’ rights. One well-known children’s advocate wrote an article in 2001 targeted at kids reminding them that they’re entitled to use the restroom. “Using the bathroom is not a privilege,” she wrote. “It’s your right. YOUR right!” But what about teachers?

Ultimately, this seems to be one of the rare education problems whose solution is simple, free of cost, and, apolitical. As long as safeguards are put in place—asking a colleague to watch over a classroom, for example—ensuring teachers get the few extra minutes they need to do their business shouldn’t do much, if anything, to kids’ learning experience. In fact, it could even enhance it. It’s clear that uncomfortably full bladders (or y’know) are among the key issues contributing to teachers’ day-to-day stress—and that can surely take a toll on the quality of their instruction.

Part of teaching is being able to adapt and make sacrifices. As the University of Chicago professor Philip W. Jackson wrote in his book Life in Classrooms, “School is school, no matter where it happens.” Sometimes, however, it should matter: when teachers have to do their business, at the very least.

True Detective Season Two: The End of an Orgy

Each week following episodes of True Detective, Spencer Kornhaber, Sophie Gilbert, and Christopher Orr will discuss the murders and machinations depicted in the HBO drama.

Orr: “Sometimes a thing happens. Splits your life. There’s a before and after. I got like five of them at this point.”

This was Frank offering a pep talk to the son of his murdered former henchman Stan in tonight’s episode. (More on this in a moment.) But it’s also a line that captures this season of True Detective so perfectly that it almost seems like a form of subliminal self-critique.

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Remember when Ray got shot in episode two and appeared to be dead but came back with a renewed sense of purpose and stopped drinking. No? That’s okay. Neither does the show: It was essentially forgotten after the subsequent episode. Remember when half a dozen (or more) Vinci cops were killed in a bloody shootout along with dozen(s?) of civilians? No? Fine: True Detective’s left that behind, too. Unless I missed it, there was not a single mention of this nationally historic bloodbath tonight.

And that’s to say nothing of the smaller twists that the show tosses out episode after episode and then drops almost immediately: the Mad Max-like movie set from which the Caspere murder car was stolen; the baby-masked bad guy who torched said car and was then chased by Ani and Ray through Depression-Era Hobo Town; the deliberate poisoning of the land with heavy metals—remember, this supplied the first shot of the entire season—so that it would sell for less; etc., etc. … Fill in your own favorites from the dozen other intersecting and frequently mislaid story lines the show has offered up so far.

Again: Sometimes a thing happens. Splits your life. There’s a before and after. I got like five of them at this point.

That’s the problem: I get like five of them with every episode of True Detective I watch, and I can hardly keep up with how many each of the principal characters have accumulated at this point. Off the top of my head ... Ray: killed his wife’s presumed rapist and lost his family; got shot and got a second chance; participated in the bloodiest shootout in modern law-enforcement history; learned he killed the wrong guy and lost his family even more. Ani: raped as a child by a Manson-y character who offered a VW van and a promise of unicorns (at least based on tonight’s evidence); mother committed suicide; participated in bloodiest shootout in etc, etc.; pretended to be a hooker, stabbing multiple people and (apparently) killing at least one. Paul: Mysterious Burns; Horror in the Desert; Terrible Sexual Secret (plus: bloodiest shootout). Frank: Dark Rat Basement; his I Went Legit But They Stole All My Money Anyway act; Whatever Other Things He Mentioned To Stan’s Kid But Hasn’t Shared With Us. (Yet.)

And then there is Stan, of course, of “Who the hell is Stan?” fame. (Don’t worry: Every single living watcher of the show asked the same question after episode three. Here’s the best answer I’ve seen—which is to say, barely an answer at all.) Leave it to True Detective to offer a long, wildly unnecessary sequence tonight featuring the wife and son of a tertiary character we essentially never even met.

Do you guys share my sense that creator Nic Pizzolatto hurriedly wrote enough material for about 30 episodes, and then even more hurriedly—like, 52 Pickup hurriedly—grabbed cards here and there and assembled them into some vague semblance of a deck?

Leave it to True Detective to offer a long, wildly unnecessary sequence with the wife and son of a tertiary character we essentially never met.

Tonight of course brought in a couple of additional subplots that we may or may not ever hear from again. It turns out that Caspere’s missing diamonds (anyone who can follow the way they’ve meandered in and out of the narrative deserves an award) were stolen from a jewelry store during the 1992 riots, in a crime that left the shop’s owners dead and their kids traumatized and lost in the child-welfare system. (Quick! Which now-adult characters do those kids resemble, if any?) Also, let us all welcome our new violent, nameless Mexican heavies, who enjoy Mexican standoffs—the irony!—and seem loosely if at all connected to the passel of violent, nameless Mexican heavies who were killed two episodes ago.

So what’s the point of continuing to watch True Detective? Well, it certainly doesn’t hurt that the season’s only eight episodes long. But the broader answer, pace Vulture, is not that it’s a straightforward hate watch, at least not for me. It’s that it continues to alternate small successes—a neatly written scene here, a couple of good lines of dialogue there—with increasingly unexpected failures. A show that’s consistently bad in the same way is boring. One that keeps finding new ways to be bad can be fascinating, especially if the bad is mixed with the good and, occasionally, very good.

I liked, for instance, the opening scene, with Ray and Frank pointing pistols at one another under the table like Han Solo and Greedo in Mos Eisley. “I’m gonna put my other hand up now. Don’t you fucking shoot me, Raymond” may have been Vince Vaughn’s best line reading of the season so far.

The scene in prison with Ray and his wife’s rapist even had a certain hard-boiled, B-movie vibe, until Ray (that is, Pizzolatto) ruined it with the howler, “If they don’t give you life, I will have every inch of your flesh removed with a cheese grater, starting with your prick.” As the world’s foremost hater of Game of Thrones’s resident torture-fiend Ramsay Bolton, let me offer credit where due: He’d never throw out a line that lame. Seriously, between this and his “buttfuck” threat back in episode one, Ray Velcoro may be the most embarrassing threatener-of-violence on TV today.

That said, the point at which the episode went irrevocably off the rails for me was in the transition from Ray’s awkward visit with Chad to his subsequent bender. The former had a touch of the humor that you, Sophie, have correctly lamented has been lacking all season. “We can watch Friends. It’s always on,” explained a boy who might have been born before the series went off the air. It is, in its way, a beautiful vision of cultural continuity: a show so generic yet genuine in its watchability that one can imagine our great-grandchildren putting it on the screen when they’re too lazy to look for anything else. But the segue to Ray cranking up the New York Dolls while pounding Cuervo and strip-mining a mountain of coke was as jarring and jagged as a phono needle scraping across an LP.

And that’s what the rest of the episode felt like for me. (One exception: Another hint of comedy when Ray suggests that Ani take Paul’s transponder and “stick it somewhere …” [Pause. Appalled look.] “… like in your shoe.”) After that, it seemed we were essentially ping-ponging back and forth between a second-rate Eyes Wide Shut and a third-rate Mission: Impossible.

A few last small observations on this last act of the episode and then I’ll turn it over to you guys.

1) I’m not a doctor, but just this once I’m going to play one on the Internet: I’m pretty confident that you can’t vomit out an aerosol spray that has already hit your bloodstream. Why make it an aerosol—the whole point of which would seem to be that it’s not something that makes its way down your alimentary canal—if you’re subsequently going to treat it like a pill or drink anyway?

2) Ray and Paul barely step within earshot of the premises before standing directly outside the office where Catalyst Group exec McCandless gives the most complete explanation to date of the season’s overall financial conspiracy to our old friend Osip. The only bigger coincidence would be if …

3)… Ani suddenly (if implausibly) becomes sober just in time to notice that the woman she’s been seeking, Vera, is passed out directly next to her. Convenient! Why not add ten—or five—seconds of her investigating (or escaping) before this encounter takes place?

That Texas oilman was a caricature worthy of The Muppets. Seriously: Take Tex Richman, remove singing, and add perversion.

4) Can you guys remind me again why Vera is important? Yes, way back in season one, when Ani was serving an eviction notice on her sister, the latter said she was missing. But when Ani checked with Vera’s previous employer (Ani’s own dad’s Panticapaeum Institute), her fellow maids said she’d left the job for one that offered more pay for fewer hours. There’s been no sign to date that she was abducted or kept against her will or physically harmed. Yes, these drug-fueled sex parties are disgusting, and something horrible happened to someone (not Vera) in that shack in the woods. But why does it seem such a moral absolute to save Vera and not any one of the dozens of other women at the party? Vera does have some connection to the diamonds. (Please refresh my memory here, guys.) But it’s remote enough that I can’t recall anyone seeing fit even to mention it tonight. And, again, her rescue seemed in any case less procedural than existential.

5) That Texas oilman seeking to get inside Ani’s dress was a caricature worthy of The Muppets. Seriously: Take Tex Richman, remove singing, and add perversion. Not an improvement.

6) It’s incredible for a prestige (or perhaps formerly prestige) HBO show to feature a line as bad as the one I’m about to cite; it’s more incredible still for it to be the final line of an episode. So I submit, without further comment, highway patrolman Paul Woodrugh’s gimlet-eyed observation: “These contracts—signatures are all over them!”

As much as I enjoyed that, however, I confess it paled in comparison to the subsequent scenes-from-next-week announcement: “Only. Two. Episodes. Left.”

As noted, I’m not exactly hate-watching, but neither am I love- or even consistently like-watching. I would be delighted if this season of True Detective ends well. But I’m looking forward to it just ending.

What about you guys? Please feel free to remind me of the details regarding Caspere’s diamonds. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on that grotesquely unsettling sex party. Only. Two. More. Weeks.

Gilbert: Contracts … covered in … signatures. The show’s given us some nightmarish imagery through the past six episodes but this almost takes the cake. I think it’s important to note also that Paul uttered this line right after Ani blurted out that she thought she’d killed a man in the party, while clutching her throat after nearly being strangled. But yes, by all means worry about those contracts, and their signatures. Given the contracts’ provenance at the depraved drug-fueled orgy, he’s frankly lucky signatures is all that was all over them.

More on the orgy later, but I want to start with Frank. This was the first episode of the season in which he showed some flickers of actual personality, and also the first in which Vince Vaughn didn’t come off like a 45-year-old who’s accidentally been cast in Bugsy Malone. Maybe I’m just sentimental, or feeling sad about the admission that Ray’s one of his only friends. But the scene with little Mikey in Stan’s backyard was undeniably touching, even sandwiched as it was by Ray’s awkward attempts to bond with Chad over model airplanes, pizza, and Friends. It was also the first time Frank’s hard-boiled wisdom seemed sincere rather than painfully forced: If you use it right, the bad thing, it makes you better, stronger. It gives you something most people don’t have … That’s what pain does. It shows you what was on the inside. The inside of you, it’s pure gold.

This is lovely, at least until we remember that Frank pulls men’s teeth out, makes a living out of drugs and prostitutes, and stabs criminals with screwdrivers and nail guns to get information he can use to make himself richer. In my head at least, his insides look like the interior of that cabin in the woods with the arterial blood and the vultures and the torture chair, only less homey. So it doesn’t really matter how much he seems to care about dead Irina Rufo, or however sympathetic the show wants to make him—he’s still a terrible, very bad man, regardless of his seemingly sincere intent to be a good father, or his traumatic childhood. But maybe, just maybe, Frank’s breezier quality this episode was Vaughn relaxing into the role a bit and going with his natural instincts rather than staying true to the corned-beef dialogue. Regardless, it was an improvement.

Speaking of traumatic childhoods, the episode was fairly heavy on its emphasis that the diamonds really do matter, with Paul uncovering not only their dubious origins but also their tragic history (the owners of the store were murdered while their two children hid inside cabinets and watched). The details of the case, recounted by a grizzled LAPD veteran still haunted by the fate of the kids—they ended up in foster care—along with the fact their names were revealed (Leonard and Laura) means that this might matter? If there’s time?

The orgy sequence was extraordinary in its tonal dissonance, seemingly incorporating elements from a hundred different sources.

Maybe, given the earlier accounts of being police in L.A. in the ’90s, Ray’s father was somehow involved? Like you said, Chris, there are so many loose ends whipping around that it’s impossible to imagine them all being tied up by season’s end, not to mention a shedload of unnecessary detail. For example: The jewelry store was owned by a husband and wife proprietor. The wife’s name was Margaret Osteren and she was pregnant when she was murdered, on April 30, 1992. The diamonds are worth $2.5 million. I don’t know about you both, but I almost fell asleep during this scene, not because it was boring, but because my brain wanted to immediately reject all the new information.

This, I guess, is True Detective season two: endless amounts of information uttered almost as an afterthought by characters who are near-impossible to understand, and then a few ambitious and cinematic scenes where hardly anyone speaks at all. The orgy sequence was extraordinary in its tonal dissonance, seemingly incorporating elements from a hundred different sources, none of which made sense together. The glaring string-section soundtrack that appeared to have been lifted directly from a John Huston movie. Ani’s twisted Cinderella makeover (total wasted opportunity IMHO, since Tim Gunn had to have been involved). All the briefly glimpsed sequences of bacchanalian horror starring real porn actors, and the nice orgy etiquette of Champagne glasses for Champagne, martini glasses for Viagra.

Also, like you mentioned, Chris, Ray, and Paul all dressed in black, pummeling security guards beyond what’s appropriate and deciding that a huge depraved orgy is the perfect time to eavesdrop on conversations about land ownership. (Did you guys know the full moon is the best time to ratify alliances?) And the countless hordes of silver-haired Uncle Pennybagses leering at the girls while mentally throwing their money in the air and cackling. Was the Texas oilman who prizes “dialogue” over all else a stand-in for Pizzolatto?

Regarding Ani, I’m not sure why they gave her a transponder if she wasn’t even going to try to use it, but the flashbacks to her abuser were nicely stylized, even if totally ridiculous. Who knew “pure Molly” induced hallucinations? If so, why weren’t any of the other pros freaking out, apart from (conveniently) the one in the corner of the bathroom who turned out to be the missing girl from episode one? Some people just can’t handle their vaporized club drugs, I tell you. Between this and Ray’s extended anti-cocaine PSA (the one that left him sobbing on the carpet and smashing up his coffee table and the model airplanes), it was not a good night for narcotics.

Spencer, what did you make of the orgy, and the torture, and the giant coke blowout, and the conveniently located missing hooker? (Like I don’t ask you that question every Monday morning.)

Kornhaber: Good questions about hallucination, Dr. Gilbert. I think in most cases if you’re seeing things while on MDMA, it’s new colors, not old predators. And nice catch, Dr. Orr, about inhalation vs. ingestion. On Twitter, the writer and editor Adam Sternbergh aired some other brainteasers raised by the randy rich-people rager. Such as: Is an orgy really the place to finalize paperwork on a $12 million land deal, full moon or no? Would pasty titans of industry really be so eager to get sexy together? “Is it weird to look over and see like Newt Gingrich naked?”

We may never have an answer to these questions. But even so, I actually found the soiree to be a fairly neato piece of television—perhaps because, as has been said about all great True Detective Season 2 moments, it featured almost no dialogue. The Hitchcockian score, the camerawork that peeked but didn’t leer, and the image of that disturbing yet likely scrumptious hog’s head felt like the work of a better show, one whose creepiness hooks you along rather than tires you out.

But in the real True Detective, moments that should be fascinating only highlight the show’s deep failings. Six episodes in, there’s nearly zero narrative momentum and the stakes remain low, which means that there was almost no reason for suspense when Ani headed to the party other than a humane concern that she might get hurt. Before it all went down, I couldn’t even have told you what the undercover mission hoped to accomplish. If, as it now seems, the goal was to locate the mansion so the boys could break in, the team could just have camped out at the Ventura meetup spot and then trailed the hooker-party bus—no wigs required. But as is so often the case in the True Detective universe, the deeper why doesn’t matter. Cause does not equal effect. Things just… happen.

Like you, Chris, I wouldn’t say I’m “hate watching.” I’m more, say, puzzle watching; for however weak the plot is, I do want to know where it goes. Increasingly, it seems like early hunches about Lieutenant Kevin Burris being shady were correct: At a slender six feet tall, actor James Frain fits the description Irina provided about a cop who asked her to pawn the city manager’s goods. (The other contender is Paul, whose involvement in the murder would be a cool twist if the show could justify it in a coherent way, which it can’t.) Sophie, you pointed out that Velcoro’s dad was in the LAPD at the time of the ’92 riots; so too was Vinci’s current police chief, Holloway. Maybe he grabbed the jewels back then, and maybe he sold them to Caspere to keep him from unleashing the blackmail material on the hard drive, and maybe he and his lieutenant Burris then had to get rough with the city manager—or at least cover up some of the details surrounding his death.

The deeper why doesn’t matter. Cause does not equal effect. Things just… happen.

But the bigger mystery of the show isn’t about who killed Caspere. It’s about what in the name of Santa Muerte Nic Pizzolatto has been thinking this whole time. He obviously has a lot of ambition—but ambition to accomplish what? To create a postmodern film-noir mashup, like Quentin Tarantino tackling Raymond Chandler but boring? To keep anyone from hiring Vince Vaughn as a dramatic actor ever again? Or, given all the philosophizing his characters partake in, is Pizzolatto trying to … gulp … say something?

If he is, that something probably has to do with parents and kids. Frank’s conception troubles and traumatic youth are all-too-well documented, as is Ani’s angst over her upbringing. In this episode, Ray gave up custody of his son in exchange for not having his paternity questioned, as if the title of “father” is all that justifies his existence. Paul, meanwhile, bragged about having a baby on the way … just after he learned about two childhoods ruined by the kind of violence he’s often exposed to. Add it all up, and childbirth starts to seem less like a miracle than a supremely risky act of narcissism.

It’s not hard to see a link between that point of view and the rest of the show, in which everything supposedly beautiful about life has been destroyed by the act of living. California is so lovely that, as Katherine Davis says, you’d be lucky to die there—but the land is now poisoned. Working hard was going to be Frank’s ticket to a solid future—but he was thwarted by people he trusted, like Blake, Osip, and Caspere. And love, the thing that supposedly conquers all, led Ray to destroy a few lives and has been turned into a commodity by the Russian sex-slave ring. Maybe the noble thing really is to deny our programming, stop reproducing, and walk hand in hand into extinction. Or maybe the noble thing is to switch off this mean mess of a show and turn on Friends.

The Iran Deal and the Rut of History

“The president said many times he’s willing to step out of the rut of history.” In this way Ben Rhodes of the White House, who over the years has broken new ground in the grandiosity of presidential apologetics, described the courage of Barack Obama in concluding the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with the Islamic Republic of Iran, otherwise known as the Iran deal. Once again Rhodes has, perhaps inadvertently, exposed the president’s premises more clearly than the president likes to do. The rut of history: It is a phrase worth pondering. It expresses a deep scorn for the past, a zeal for newness and rupture, an arrogance about old struggles and old accomplishments, a hastiness with inherited precedents and circumstances, a superstition about the magical powers of the present. It expresses also a generational view of history, which, like the view of history in terms of decades and centuries, is one of the shallowest views of all.

This is nothing other than the mentality of disruption applied to foreign policy. In the realm of technology, innovation justifies itself; but in the realm of diplomacy and security, innovation must be justified, and it cannot be justified merely by an appetite for change. Tedium does not count against a principled alliance or a grand strategy. Indeed, a continuity of policy may in some cases—the Korean peninsula, for example: a rut if ever there was one—represent a significant achievement. But for the president, it appears, the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Certainly it did in the case of Cuba, where the feeling that it was time to move on (that great euphemism for American impatience and inconstancy) eclipsed any scruple about political liberty as a condition for movement; and it did with Iran, where, as Rhodes admits, the president was tired of things staying the same, and was enduring history as a rut. And in the 21st century, when all human affairs are to begin again!

Obama’s restlessness about American policy toward Iran was apparent long before the question of Iran’s nuclear capability focused the mind of the world. In his first inaugural address, he famously offered an extended hand in exchange for an unclenched fist. Obama seems to believe that the United States owes Iran some sort of expiation. As he explained to Thomas Friedman the day after the nuclear agreement was reached, “we had some involvement with overthrowing a democratically elected regime in Iran” in 1953. Six years ago, when the streets of Iran exploded in a democratic rebellion and the White House stood by as it was put down by the government with savage force against ordinary citizens, memories of Mohammad Mosaddegh were in the air around the administration, as if to explain that the United States was morally disqualified by a prior sin of intervention from intervening in any way in support of the dissidents. The guilt of 1953 trumped the duty of 2009. The Iranian fist, in the event, stayed clenched. Or to put it in Rhodes-spin, our Iran policy remained in a rut.

What democrat, what pluralist, what liberal, what conservative, what believer, what non-believer, would want this Iran for a friend?

But it is important to recognize that the rut—or the persistence of the adversarial relationship between Iran and the United States—was not a blind fate, or an accident of historical inertia, or a failure of diplomatic imagination. It was a choice. On the Iranian side, the choice was based upon a worldview that was founded in large measure on a fiery, theological anti-Americanism, an officially sanctioned and officially disseminated view of Americanism as satanism. On the American side, the choice was based upon an opposition to the tyranny and the terror that the Islamic Republic represented and proliferated. It is true that in the years prior to the Khomeini revolution the United States tolerated vicious abuses of human rights in Iran; but then our enmity toward the ayatollahs’ autocracy may be regarded as a moral correction. (A correction is an admirable kind of hypocrisy.) The adversarial relationship between America and the regime in Tehran has been based on the fact that we are proper adversaries. We should be adversaries. What democrat, what pluralist, what liberal, what conservative, what believer, what non-believer, would want this Iran for a friend?

When one speaks about an unfree country, one may refer either to its people or to its regime. One cannot refer at once to both, because they are not on the same side. Obama likes to think, when he speaks of Iran, that he speaks of its people, but in practice he has extended his hand to its regime. With his talk about reintegrating Iran into the international community, about the Islamic Republic becoming “a very successful regional power” and so on, he has legitimated a regime that was more and more lacking in legitimacy. (There was something grotesque about the chumminess, the jolly camaraderie, of the American negotiators and the Iranian negotiators. Why is Mohammad Javad Zarif laughing?) The text of the agreement states that the signatories will submit a resolution to the UN Security Council “expressing its desire to build a new relationship with Iran.” Not a relationship with a new Iran, but a new relationship with this Iran, as it is presently—that is to say, theocratically, oppressively, xenophobically, aggressively, anti-Semitically, misogynistically, homophobically—constituted. When the president speaks about the people of Iran, he reveals a bizarre refusal to recognize the character of life in a dictatorship. In his recent Nowruz message, for example, he exhorted the “people of Iran … to speak up for the future [they] seek.” To speak up! Does he think Iran is Iowa? The last time the people of Iran spoke up to their government, they left their blood on the streets. “Whether the Iranian people have sufficient influence to shift how their leaders think about these issues,” Obama told Friedman, “time will tell.” There he is again, the most powerful man in the world, backing off and bearing witness.

If I could believe that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action marked the end of Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon—that it is, in the president’s unambiguous declaration, “the most definitive path by which Iran will not get a nuclear weapon” because “every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off”—I would support it. I do not support it because it is none of those things. It is only a deferral and a delay. Every pathway is not cut off, not at all. The accord provides for a respite of 15 years, but 15 years is just a young person’s idea of a long time. Time, to borrow the president’s words, will tell. Even though the text of the agreement twice states that “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons,” there is no evidence that the Iranian regime has made a strategic decision to turn away from the possibility of the militarization of nuclear power. Its strategic objective has been, rather, to escape the sanctions and their economic and social severities. In this, it has succeeded. If even a fraction of the returned revenues are allocated to Iran’s vile adventures beyond its borders, the United States will have subsidized an expansion of its own nightmares.

If the deal does not prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, then it does not solve the problem that it was designed to solve.

But what is the alternative? This is the question that is supposed to silence all objections. It is, for a start, a demagogic question. This agreement was designed to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. If it does not prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—and it seems uncontroversial to suggest that it does not guarantee such an outcome—then it does not solve the problem that it was designed to solve. And if it does not solve the problem that it was designed to solve, then it is itself not an alternative, is it? The status is still quo. Or should we prefer the sweetness of illusion to the nastiness of reality? For as long as Iran does not agree to retire its infrastructure so that the manufacture of a nuclear weapon becomes not improbable but impossible, the United States will not have transformed the reality that worries it. We will only have mitigated it and prettified it. We will have found relief from the crisis, but not a resolution of it.

The administration’s apocalyptic rhetoric about the deal is absurd: The temporary diminishments of Iran’s enrichment activities are not what stand between the Islamic Republic and a bomb. The same people who assure us that Iran has admirably renounced its aspiration to a nuclear arsenal now warn direly that a failure to ratify the accord will send Iranian centrifuges spinning madly again. They ridicule the call for more stringent sanctions against Iran because the sanctions already in place are “leaky” and crumbling, and then they promise us that these same failing measures can be speedily and reliably reconstituted in a nifty mechanism called “snapback.” And how self-fulfilling was the administration’s belief that no better deal was possible? On what grounds was its limited sense of possibility determined? Surely there is nothing utopian about the demand for a larger degree of confidence in this matter: The stakes are unimaginably high. It is worth noting also that the greater certainty demanded by the skeptics does not involve, as the president says, “eliminating the presence of knowledge inside of Iran,” which cannot be done. Many countries possess the science but do not pose the threat. The Iranian will, not the Iranian mind, is the issue.

The period of negotiations that has just come to a close was a twisted moment in American foreign policy. We were inhibited by the talks and they were not. The United States was reluctant to offend its interlocutors by offering any decisive challenge to their many aggressions in the region and beyond; we chose instead to inhibit ourselves. This has been an activist era in Iranian foreign policy and a passivist era in American foreign policy. (Even our refusal to offer significant assistance to Ukraine in its genuinely noble struggle against Russian intimidation and invasion was owed in part to our solicitude for the Russian standpoint on Iran.) I expect that the administration will prevail, alas, over the opposition to the Iran deal. The can will be kicked down the road, which is Obama’s characteristic method of arranging his “legacy” in foreign affairs. Our dread of an Iranian bomb will not have been dispelled; we will still need to keep “all options on the table”; we will continue to ponder anxiously the question of whether a military response to an Iranian breakout will ever be required; we will again be living by our nerves. All this does not constitute a diplomatic triumph. As a consequence of the accord, moreover, the mullahs in Tehran, and the fascist Revolutionary Guards that enforce their rule and profit wildly from it, will certainly not loosen their grip on their society or open it up. This “linkage” is a tired fiction. The sanctions were not what cast Iran into its political darkness.

There are times when an injustice to only one man deserves to bring things to a halt.

This accord will strengthen a contemptible regime. And so I propose—futilely, I know—that now, in the aftermath of the accord, America proceed to weaken it. The conclusion of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action should be accompanied by a resumption of our hostility to the Iranian regime and its various forces. Diplomats like to say that you talk with your enemies. They are right. And we have talked with them. But they are still our enemies. This is the hour not for a fresh start but for a renovation of principle. We need to restore democratization to its pride of place among the priorities of our foreign policy and oppress the theocrats in Tehran everywhere with expressions, in word and in deed, of our implacable hostility to their war on their own people. We need to support the dissidents in any way we can, not least so that they do not feel abandoned and alone, and tiresomely demand the release of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi from the house arrest in which they have been sealed since the crackdown in 2009. (And how in good conscience could we have proceeded with the negotiations while the American journalist Jason Rezaian was a captive in an Iranian jail? Many years ago, when I studied the Dreyfus affair, I learned that there are times when an injustice to only one man deserves to bring things to a halt.) We need to despise the regime loudly and regularly, and damage its international position as fiercely and imaginatively as we can, for its desire to exterminate Israel. We need to arm the enemies of Iran in Syria and Iraq, and for many reasons. (In Syria, we have so far prepared 60 fighters: America is back!) We need to explore, with diplomatic daring, an American-sponsored alliance between Israel and the Sunni states, which are now experiencing an unprecedented convergence of interests.

But we will do none of this. We will instead persist in letting the fire spread and letting time tell, which we call realism. Wanting not to fight wars, we refuse to join struggles. Sometimes, I guess, history really is a rut.

Breakfast With Zeke

It's not every morning that a Rhodes Scholar asks you if you'd prefer to sit indoors or out and freshens your water glass. But that's what happens when Zeke Emanuel decides to cook breakfast at a pop-up restaurant for four days over two weekends and he enlists a daughter to lend a hand. By the time the fourth and last breakfast is over, next Sunday, each of Emanuel's three daughters, and at least one nephew and niece, will have helped find and bring ingredients, greet guests, and clear tables.

Nearly all of Emanuel's pop-up adventure, in fact, was true to its origins at one of the dinners he likes to invite people over for, from the ingredients obtained from his favorite purveyors at the Dupont Circle farmer's market, to the simple and direct flavors in the dishes he made, which were what you wish you could wake up to any weekend or for that matter weekday—French toast, pancakes and waffles, omelets, fruit salad with granola and yogurt, hash browns, and breakfast sausage, with slightly fancified additions like quail eggs with quinoa and grated tomato.

Like most people's, Emanuel's palate was cultivated by family, curiosity, and cultural background. Breakfast is a meal he believes in as part of family duties and pleasures: His grandfather, a “food-delivery guy,” served him and his brothers  breakfast from scratch every day, and that’s what he served his three daughters. He invites friends to breakfast as often as he does to dinner and stands at the waffle iron conversing till guests have finished every quarter. His food, like his conversation, is forthright, thorough, unfussy.  

But standing at a kitchen counter and keeping four guests fed isn’t the same as directing a staff of nine cooks and serving 111 on the first morning, and more than that on the second. That took a few months of planning, and enlisting assistants and friends.

“What is this, some kind of George Plimpton thing?” someone at my table asked.

“What is this, some kind of George Plimpton thing?” someone at my table asked as we watched Emanuel, his mike clipped to a blue “Breakfast is on the table with Zeke” T-shirt that was part of the gift bag (of course, there was a video crew filming him), take long tweezers to thin slices of compressed honeydew before sprinkling spearmint leaves in fine chiffonade over the top. “A midlife crisis,” his brother Rahm commented to the Chicago Tribune with familial bluntness, though he did lend his brother two children to help serve and clear dishes. (“This is Rahm's standard thing for everything that is unusual,” Zeke explained). Many food people and writers are in fact regularly suspected of wanting to cook in restaurants, though as a longtime restaurant critic I know just how exhausting the work is, and have harbored no such wish. Emanuel is not a normal food person (and he is one: see his articles for the late Atlantic Food Channel here), and he's an Emanuel. So he doesn't shy from challenges—he climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, as he remarked in an aside in his article for us about not wanting to live past 75. (And found the whole thing meh, which he didn't add).

When our mutual friend Sara Weiner, originator of the Good Food Awards for artisanal food products, came to his house for dinner and launched into a frequent rant about the lack of any decent breakfast restaurants in Washington, another guest—Jodie McLean, CEO of Edens, the developer of the large collection of artisanal food vendors at Union Market in northeast Washington—challenged him to fix it, however briefly. A restaurant in a space Edens manages called Masseria (named for the stucco farmhouses of the southern Italian region of Puglia) was about to open; Edens and the restaurant's chef-owner, Nicholas Stefanelli, offered to donate the kitchen and dining room, ingredients, cooks, and servers to the three charities the proceeds from the very modest "diner prices" they set for the menu: Martha's Table, the Good Food Awards, and DC Central Kitchen.

Though the breakfast was billed as healthful, they were no haranguing admonitions on the menu and no haranguing table side lectures from the chef, though diners might have expected both. Instead there were enthusiastic recommendations of the ingredients Emanuel “sourced,” both when he would swoop into a table and on printed sheets with the menu, and a blanket prohibition of potatoes (the hash browns were made from grated malanga, a nutty-flavored tuber commonly used in Puerto Rico and Cuba and a complex rather than simple carbohydrate). His kitchen is kosher and though he eats everything on his adventurous trips to cutting-edge restaurant, he has no taste for pork, so bacon is duck and sausage is lamb, from Red Apron Butchery.  

The restaurant, which had its first family-and-friends dinner the night before Emanuel’s first pop-up breakfast, is airy and attractive, with a large patio and outdoor lounge. It’s of a piece with the almost terrifyingly upscale collection of food boutiques in the new Union Market, which is incongruously beside the old wholesale market, where neighborhood families patiently line up to have wholesale meat and fish, mostly from huge unlabeled freezer chests, cut to order at a friendly, thronged butcher whose only name we could find was “Union Market.”

As soon as we sat down, Emanuel arrived at the table and announced “You have to try everything on the menu.”

The Masseria cooks and servers plunged into the Emanuel experiment with good cheer and efficiency. The first-day results, as you might expect, were slightly bumpy, but with the satisfactions you get when a father cooks you breakfast (and with few complaints, as most of the diners were family and friends too). A father, that is, who shops with care. Berries with a pitcher of just-pourable honey yogurt from Clear Spring Creamery demonstrated the importance of sourcing: I scraped the bottom of the yogurt pitcher with a spoon. Blueberry pancakes were so light yet rich-tasting that I suspected sour cream in the batter, but the recipe for “Zeke's super fast blueberry pancakes” provided in the goodie bag (there is one, PC burlap on PC-brown paper) specifies just flour, egg, milk, and a modest amount of canola oil—though the last step does say “smother in butter and maple syrup.” And there were better-than-proficient omelets, with lacy exteriors folded over sauteed oyster and hen of the wood mushrooms, a large deep orange-yolked soft-boiled egg the kitchen managed to time so the yolk was almost cooked but still liquid, and superior French toast.

Dreamy French toast, in fact. As soon as we sat down, Emanuel arrived at the table, announced “You have to try everything on the menu” (by the time I left, three hours later, I had, much of it cadged from unsuspecting diners' plates with coerced permission), and plunked down a plate of three thick, mottled-brown slices of raisin challah with a half white peach sauteed in saba, grape juice cooked down to a syrup, in the middle. “Wait for the syrup!” he barked (his standard form of address). “It's special.” It had indeed been fetched on a New Hampshire farm by his daughter Gabrielle, who loaded a car with plastic gallons of it.

But the French toast, which in an informal survey was everyone's favorite, was special too. As is almost never the case and certainly not with restaurant French toast, the egg-milk mixture had thoroughly soaked through the challah, from Lyon Bakery, which has a stall at Union Market, but not left too long to get soggy. So the sauteed slices had the milky freshness and souffle-like texture inside you hope for in fresh-out-of-the-oven bread pudding but seldom get, and crisped crust. I’ll be hoping for that French toast for a long time. There were no desserts, but the gift bag contained a tiny square of the chocolate Emanuel recommends as part of a daily healthful diet, from Askinosie Chocolate, a chocolate-maker in Springfield, Missouri that teaches underserved high-school students how to make chocolate and brings them on trips to African cacao farms, and which won its second Good Food Awards in 2014, when Emanuel was master of ceremonies.

It’s not too late to book for the farewell engagement, next Saturday and Sunday mornings (you can email Julia Cottafavi at JCottavafi@edens.com for reservations). And next week the challah for the French toast will be handmade and shipped from Boston by Marc Garnick, who taught Emanuel oncology at Harvard and is, he says, the best baker he knows. The Zeke show, at close range or far, is always entertaining. And for two more days it comes with the best breakfast in Washington.