Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 64

Hope in the Rubble of the American Dream

“The financial crisis laid bare a lot about the ways in which the American dream is not that accessible to everybody,” the writer Imbolo Mbue, originally from Cameroon, recently told NPR’s Rachel Martin. “I was very disillusioned about America.” After losing her job in marketing during the Great Recession, she turned to fiction to explore that disillusionment. Behold the Dreamers, her debut novel, opens in 2007 and follows Jende and Neni Jonga, a pair of Cameroonian immigrants whose sights are fixed on “the milk, honey, and liberty flowing in the paradise-for-strivers called America.” Both husband and wife go to work for the family of a Lehman Brothers executive. Red flags wave from the first page, signaling disappointment ahead—and visa troubles are on the horizon as well. But whether or not America will have them, they don’t lose faith in its platonic form: “a magnificent land of uninhibited dreamers.”

Jade Chang’s debut, The Wangs vs. the World, is fueled by currents of immigrant disenchantment too. It picks up in 2008 just as Lehman Brothers files for Chapter 11, and features a family that has enjoyed decades at a pinnacle perhaps even higher than Mbue’s American executive. But now Charles Wang, a Chinese immigrant who made hundreds of millions running cosmetics factories in southern California, has lost everything. He is “mad at America” and “mad at history,” which propelled his emigration in the first place. (Like Charles, Chang’s Chinese parents came to the U.S. by way of Taiwan.)  Forced to give up his home and his business, Charles sets out on a cross-country road trip with his wife and two of his children. As he heads east to stay with his eldest daughter in upstate New York, he dreams of “the land in China” he hopes to reclaim.

The project of these novels is inspired: to chronicle a period during which just about every American questioned the Dream, and many watched it crumble, through the eyes of people who never considered its promise a birthright. Immigrants, by definition, are poised to wonder about things that natives might never think to question in good times—things like national character, cultural values, and civic priorities. When bad times arrive, they are already in the habit of asking the relevant questions. They genuinely want to know, as Neni asks, “What kind of country is this?” Together, these novels suggest a clear answer: the U.S. may be inhospitable to these immigrants’ dreams in the near term, but one day it’s altogether likely to belong to their children.

* * *

The financial crisis proves disastrous for the Jongas and the Wangs alike. For the Jongas, it’s the ultimate barrier to entry; the Wangs experience it as a humiliating fall from grace. In both cases—and in many real-life cases too, of course—the crashing market is a symbol of disintegrating national myths. Hard work does not always end in success. Not only does homeownership come at a steep price—it may not be possible to begin with. And America’s pluralism is prized more in theory than in practice.

But for the immigrant protagonists of both novels, the myths are only part of the equation. They are also acutely aware—in a way that bankers, as depicted in both novels, are distinctly not—that the world they see crumbling around them is not the whole world. Wall Street is not the sole center of gravity. As their American lives fall apart, both families look back toward the homelands they were once so eager to escape, now armed with a measure of the hard-won clarity they’ve gained in the U.S.

Post-crash America remains, in their minds, the land of choices and all kinds of chances.

In Behold the Dreamers, Jende and Neni Jonga’s approach to the new world in which they find themselves—they’re a little skeptical, and very curious—offers a fresh perspective on the excesses of the pre-crash one percent. They encounter not just a chaotic city, but a bewildering set of terms and social codes for what they discover is the primary activity: the making and spending of money. Though Jende spends his days chauffeuring a banker and reads the Wall Street Journal religiously, he is enough of an outsider that he assumes Enron was a person. Still, his thoughts come across as more sensible than ignorant: “The bailout thing was in the news every day, but he still didn’t understand if it was a good thing or a bad thing.” In the Hamptons, startled by the size of her employer’s second home, Neni wonders, “didn’t they understand that no matter how much money a person had, they could sleep on only one bed at a time?”

If Mbue sometimes strays into homiletic territory with her protagonists, she also deftly parodies the natives. Vince, the banker’s son who wants to disabuse Jende of “all the lies [he’s] been fed about America,” is a caricature of a self-conscious radical chafing at his privilege, naïve and unworldly in his vague cynicism. But such sweeping dismissal of the country is its own kind of privilege. Newcomers, more quickly than the natives, learn to see the good and the bad in one frame. When the Jongas head back to Cameroon, chastened by their experience, post-crash America remains, in their minds, the land of choices and all kinds of chances. They imagine their young children someday returning.

The Wangs, who have been in the U.S for decades or since birth, are far less pious than the Jongas when it comes to their assessment of the country’s character. Cursing America’s shortcomings and making fun of its self-importance—and laughing with and at each other—are some of the family’s favorite pastimes. Charles, brash and flamboyant, defies the stereotype of the modest, model Chinese immigrant. He’s a man who walked off the plane vowing to turn “shit into Shinola,” and never looked back. Even brought to ruin, he can’t help but dream ridiculously big. Chang’s picaresque plot has him swearing, stealing, and sweet-talking his way out of near-disasters from Santa Barbara to High Point, North Carolina as he and his two youngest kids drive east in the family’s old powder-blue Mercedes station wagon. Shortly after arriving in upstate New York, he sneaks off to China, “to our old home,” telling his children via email, “Do not be worried, be happy.” He makes it to the ancestral property he’s been dreaming about and has “a brief and glorious moment” there—“the Wangs, the great and glorious Wangs, never should have left”—before realizing, with his pants unzipped (“he would piss over every inch of this land”), that it’s being developed into an apartment complex.

People on the move, ready to stake their claims, are the rule, not the exception.

There’s plenty of humor at Charles’s expense throughout this very funny novel, but his over-the-top sense of entitlement and willfully blind optimism also transcend mockery.   One never doubts that, for all his delusions of grandeur, his heart is in the right place. The very delusion that had landed him, even before the crash, in a mess (he now refers to it as “the Failure”) was a noble one in its way: He staked everything on a makeup line for nonwhite women, intent on proving to a skeptical WASPy banker that this was “not some NAACP for eye shadow” but a “brilliant” and “necessary” venture. His children may roll their eyes at their father’s proclamations—they certainly do not share his visions of a great and glorious return to China—but their love, like his, runs deep. When Charles’s fight for the land takes a physical toll, all three Wang kids fly to China to be by his side.

Chang, as high-spirited as her protagonist, goes for broke with a comic ending that showcases the reconciliation of a father and his children, of dreams and reality, of Old World and New. Finally, having taken them as far east as he can imagine, Charles realizes that the Wangs are, more than anything, Americans. The Indians, he decides, were merely a “tribe of early Chinese people who took a long walk across the Bering Land Bridge and ended up in a New World.” His hyperbole speaks to a greater truth about a world, not just a nation, of immigrants. People on the move, ready to stake their claims, are the rule, not the exception. With his children in mind, Charles asks, “What did it matter how a country full of white people saw them when the whole world was theirs?”

Both these novels pose a version of that question, and give a version of the same answer: America may have failed these immigrants, and may yet fail thousands more. But larger forces are at work, Mbue and Chang implicitly acknowledge. The financial crisis, rather than the end of the story, was the beginning of a new chapter. Immigrants, in Chang’s words, are “here to knock shit down and rebuild the country in their own image.”

The Cops Who Discussed Whether to Hit a Black Man With Their Car

NEWS BRIEF Sacramento police have released the audio from dashboard-camera footage showing officers chasing a black man with their car, then discussing whether they should swerve to hit him.

The video captured the death of Joseph Mann, who officers shot 14 times in July after they received a 911 call that he was acting erratically. The video was released in September 20, but a version with enhanced audio published by The Sacramento Bee over the weekend has upset activists, city council members, and others. In the latest version, officers can be heard discussing whether they should use their car to hit the man as they arrive on scene.

A 911 caller had reported Mann had a gun or a knife and was walking down a busy street on July 11. Police responded and tailed Mann for several blocks as he ignored their repeated orders to stop. “Fuck this guy,” one officer says. When Mann then comes into view an officer says, “I’m going to hit him.”

“Go for it,” the other officer says.

The car barely misses Mann, who makes his way across the street. The officers back up and swerve once more at Mann before he crosses the median and runs to the opposite side of the road, where more police have gathered. The video does not show Mann’s death, but the gunshots that supposedly kill him can be heard.

Here’s the video:

Mann’s family later said he was homeless and suffered from a mental illness.

Officers said they later found a four-inch knife beside Mann. The footage has upset some Sacramento officials and city council members, who asked the police chief if this type of action is customary.

Using a car to injure someone is “tough to defend,” retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s commander Charles Heal told the Los Angeles Times. Heal cautioned that it is difficult to discern what happened before the clip begins. But the officers seem to declare intent to use lethal force before being provoked, which critics of police practices say constitutes excessive force.

To the south of the state, 20 minutes east of San Diego, in El Cajon, religious leaders and demonstrators protested similar uses of lethal force in the death of Alfred Olango, an unarmed refugee from Uganda killed last week. Police arrested 17 protesters in El Cajon over the weekend, many on suspicion of unlawful assembly. They began protests after last week’s release of police body-cameras and dash cams showing officers draw their weapons on Olango, who then reached into his pocket for an electronic cigarette, then pointed it at officers like a gun. Olango’s family also said he suffered from a mental illness, and was acting erratically when police shot him.

Turkey's Ongoing Crackdown

NEWS BRIEF President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has suspended nearly 13,000 police officers over suspected links to Fethullah Gulen, the U.S.-based cleric Turkey says is responsible for the July 15 coup attempt.

The news comes hours after Turkey extended its state of emergency for another three months, a move that gave Erdogan full power over parliament since five days after the coup attempt, in which members of the military tried to take over the government. The suspensions amount to about 5 percent of the country’s entire police force. A statement from Turkish police, translated by Al Jazeera, said the government said the suspended officers “have been assessed to have communications or links to the Gulenist Terror Organization, identified as a threat to national security.”

Gulen is accused of leading a campaign to overthrow Erdogan’s government by setting up what the government calls a parallel state. The movement, the government says, has infiltrated the military, police, and judiciary.

Turkey also suspended several dozen air-force officers, as well as workers in the Interior Ministry’s headquarters, and closed a TV station for spreading “terrorist propaganda.” Since the coup attempt, Turkey has suspended about 100,000 people in the military, civil service, police, and at universities from their jobs for suspected ties to Gulen, who has denied any links to the coup attempt. The government has also arrested more than 32,000 people.

Erdogan has repeatedly asked the U.S. to extradite Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. Gulen says he will not receive a fair trial if judged in Turkey.

Erdogan’s critics believe he has used the coup as an opportunity to crack down on his political opposition. Before the coup, Erdogan was often accused of trying to silence critics, and he has since taken advantage of the state of emergency to close down dozens of media outlets. Opposition parties have asked Erdogan to return to parliamentary government, but Erdogan has said the state of emergency could last up to a year.

The Reduction of Maria Sharapova's Penalty

Updated on October 4 at 9:21 a.m. ET

NEWS BRIEF The Court of Arbitration (CAS) for Sport has granted Maria Sharapova a partial victory, reducing the International Tennis Federation’s two-year ban on the five-time Grand Slam champion to 15 months. Monday’s decision by the highest judicial body in sports means Sharapova she can return to tennis on April 26, 2017.

Sharapova, in a statement on Facebook, said:

Sharapova had  failed a drug test in March for the 2016 Australian Open. At the time, she admitted to testing positive for meldonium, a banned performance-enhancing  substance, prompting the ITF’s ban in June. Sharapova contended the doping wasn’t deliberate and appealed the suspension to CAS, sport’s highest judicial body. But the CAS, in its ruling Monday, said:

The Panel found that Ms Sharapova committed an anti-doping rule violation and that while it was with “no significant fault”, she bore some degree of fault, for which a sanction of fifteen months is appropriate. The Panel wishes to point out that the case it heard, and the award it has rendered, was only about the degree of fault that can be imputed to the player for her failure to make sure that the substance contained in a product that she had been taking over a long period remained in compliance with the anti-doping rules.

The Olympic silver medalist has been consistently at or near the top of the Women’s Tennis Association rankings. Monday’s ruling means she can return to tennis in time for next year’s Roland-Garros (the French Open) and the Wimbledon Championships.

'Taliban Was Defeated in Their Attack' on Kunduz

Afghan security forces are engaged in heavy fighting with the Taliban in Kunduz and have beat back the militant group, the provincial governor said Tuesday.

“Taliban was defeated in their attack and now the situation is good,” Assadullah Omarkhail, the governor of Kunduz province, said. His remarks were reported by Tolo‎ News, the Afghan news website.

“They failed to reach to their aim,” Omarkhail added.

As we reported Monday, Taliban militants launched an operation to recapture Kunduz, the capital of the province of the same name. The city, which the Taliban briefly seized in September 2015, is seen as strategically vital. It was the Taliban’s main northern stronghold before the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.

The extent of the Afghan government’s gain Tuesday is unclear, however. Tolo News quoted Mohammad Ali, a local police commander, as saying, in the words of the news website, “most parts of the city had fallen to the Taliban on Monday night except the airport, NDS office, governor’s compound, Bala Hisar and police headquarters.” Local officials who spoke to The New York Times offered similar assessments.  

The fall of Kunduz city in 2015 was a major setback for the Afghan government because local troops were seen as unable to fill the security vacuum after the departure of U.S. and NATO troops in 2014. Government troops, aided by U.S. airstrikes, eventually recaptured the city, but the Taliban’s quick entry into Kunduz this week are likely to prompt similar fears. Indeed, the Times pointed out that U.S. forces were protecting Omarkhail’s compound in the city.

The fighting in Kunduz comes as the Afghan government officials, including Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, are at an EU-led conference in Brussels to seek financial support to rebuild their country.

  

The Nobel Prize in Physics

NEWS BRIEF David Thouless, Duncan Haldane, and Michael Kosterlitz have been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on “theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”—or in easier-to understand terms, they used advanced mathematical methods to explain strange phenomena in unusual phases.

In the 1970s, Kosterlitz, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and Thouless, an emeritus professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, used topology—a branch of mathematics that describes properties that only change step-wise—in physics to overturn the then-prevalent theory that superconductivity or suprafluidity could not occur in thin layers.  

“They demonstrated that superconductivity could occur at low temperatures and also explained the mechanism, phase transition, that makes superconductivity disappear at higher temperatures,” the Nobel committee said in a statement.

It added:

Then in the 1980s, Thouless was able to explain a previous experiment with very thin electrically conducting layers in which conductance was precisely measured as integer steps. He showed that these integers were topological in their nature.

At about the same time, Haldane, now 82 and a professor of physics at Princeton University, used topological concepts to understand the properties of chains of small magnets found in some materials.

It’s hoped, the Nobel Committee said, that this are of research can be used in new generations of electronics and superconductors, or in future quantum computers.

The winners will share the 8 million kronor ($9.3 million) prize.

The Continuing Turkish State of Emergency

NEWS BRIEF Turkey has extended its state of emergency another three months, officials announced Monday.

Since the failed coup on July 15, which left nearly 300 people dead, Turkish authorities have arrested tens of thousands of alleged political dissidents in the military, judiciary, academia, and the media, to the dismay of human-rights activists.

In an attempt to continue that purge against supposed loyalist of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has extended the state of emergency for 90 more days. More from the Associated Press:

The state of emergency has allowed the government to rule through decrees, often bypassing parliament and facilitating authorities' clampdown on the Gulen movement, accused of orchestrating the uprising. Turkey has so far arrested some 32,000 people in connection with the coup while tens of thousands of people have been dismissed or suspended from government jobs including the police, military and judiciary.

The state of emergency has been in effect since July 20, five days after the putsch. Just last week, Turkish authorities shut down 12 Kurdish television stations, alleging they were a threat to national security.

Gulen remains in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. The Turkish government has formally requested the U.S. extradite Gulen. The cleric has denied any role in the failed coup.

The Rescuing of 6,000 Migrants in the Mediterranean

NEWS BRIEF The Italian coast guard rescued more than 6,000 migrants from the Mediterranean Sea, officials said Monday, in one of the largest single-day rescues of the European migration crisis.

Nine migrants were found dead during rescue operations off the coast of Libya, including a 23-year-old pregnant woman.

Smugglers carried migrants on 40 rubber dinghies and at least two rafts. In one of Monday’s operations, members of the Italian coast guard rescued 725 migrants who were fitted on one boat. The Associated Press adds:

The coast guard said it coordinated a total of 39 rescues Monday in the sea about 30 miles north of Tripoli. Smugglers took advantage of the first day of calm seas after days of rough waters to launch vessels crowded with migrants who pay them in hopes of reaching European shores.

The rescue effort took around 10 ships to complete, Reuters reports.

This comes just one week after a boat carrying as many as 600 migrants capsized off the Egyptian coast as it headed to Italy, where at least 160 people died. So far this year, 132,000 migrants have arrived in Italy, while more than 3,000 have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean, according to the International Organization for Migration.

A Judicial Rebuke of Mike Pence's Syrian-Refugee Policy

NEWS BRIEF A federal appellate court rebuked Indiana Governor Mike Pence’s attempt to block Syrian refugees from resettling in his state on Monday, at one point comparing those efforts to racial discrimination against African Americans.

In a unanimous opinion, a three-judge panel on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s injunction against Pence, who is also the Republican vice-presidential candidate,  in Exodus Refugee International v. Pence. At the same time, they also rejected the security claims behind Pence’s efforts as unfounded.

“The governor of Indiana believes, though without evidence, that some of these persons were sent to Syria by ISIS to engage in terrorism and now wish to infiltrate the United States in order to commit terrorist acts here,” Judge Richard Posner wrote for the panel. “No evidence of this belief has been presented, however; it is nightmare speculation.”

The case’s origins trace back to November 2015, when Pence directed state agencies to deny federal grant money to organizations that assist refugees from Syria. His executive order, which was issued days after the Paris terrorist attacks, came amid similar resistance from other Republican-led states to the Obama administration’s resettlement program.

Exodus, a nonprofit organization in Indiana that helps refugees resettle there, sued Pence in response. A federal district court sided with Exodus and issued an injunction blocking Pence’s order from going into effect in February.

Other states, including Alabama and Texas, have also waged legal battles in the courts to block Syrian refugees. But what set Indiana’s appeal to the Seventh Circuit apart was the high-profile three-judge panel that heard it. In addition to Posner, the nation’s most-cited legal scholar, the panel also consisted of Frank Easterbrook, a star in the conservative legal firmament, and Diane Sykes, whom Donald Trump frequently suggests he would appoint to the Supreme Court.

During a contentious oral-argument session last month, both Easterbrook and Posner extensively criticized Indiana’s legal position. Easterbrook zeroed in on the state’s lack of authority under federal law to block the funds while rebuffing Indiana’s disagreements with the State Department. Posner was more blunt. “Are Syrians the only Muslims Indiana fears?” he asked during a heated exchange with Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher.

Monday’s brief six-page ruling adopted the same hostile stance. Federal law prohibits Indiana from discriminating on the basis of nationality when disbursing federal funds, the court said in its ruling. This would be enough to uphold the injunction, but the panel also made clear its distaste. At one point, Posner says Pence’s efforts to bar Syrian refugees would be legally akin to a hypothetical effort to banning African Americans from settling in Indiana.

[Pence] argues that his policy of excluding Syrian refugees is based not on nationality and thus is not discriminatory, but is based solely on the threat he thinks they pose to the safety of residents of Indiana. But that’s the equivalent of his saying (not that he does say) that he wants to forbid black people to settle in Indiana not because they’re black but because he’s afraid of them, and since race is therefore not his motive he isn’t discriminating. But that of course would be racial discrimination, just as his targeting Syrian refugees is discrimination on the basis of nationality.

The Seventh Circuit’s ruling comes three days after Texas Governor Greg Abbott withdrew his state from the federal government’s Refugee Resettlement Program. Abbott cited both security fears and the Obama administration’s plan to accept 110,000 Syrian refugees over the next fiscal year when he announced the state’s imminent departure last month.

The $10 Million Robbery of Kim Kardashian West

NEWS BRIEF Kim Kardashian West left Paris Monday hours after she was robbed at gunpoint by a group of men who took millions of dollars worth of jewelry, police officials told The Associated Press.

The reality-TV star was visiting Paris for its biannual fashion week and was staying in a private residence in the French capital’s eighth arrondissement when at 2:30 a.m. local time a group of five armed men reportedly forced the building’s concierge to open her private apartment. Two of the men then entered the residence, where they tied Kardashian West up and locked her in the bathroom before running off with the star’s jewelry box said to have contained valuables collectively worth more than $10 million.

A statement from Kardashian West’s spokeswoman said the incident left her

“badly shaken but physically unharmed.” Her husband, rapper Kanye West, first learned of the robbery during a performance at New York’s Meadows Music and Arts Festival, which prompted him to end the show mid-song, citing a family emergency.

The social-media reaction to the incident ranged from messages of support to accusations that the robbery was an inside job, as well as mockery directed at the reality star. But Anne Hidalgo, the Paris mayor, expressed her support for Kardashian West, who she said will “always be welcome in Paris.”

“I have full confidence that the police force, as part of their investigation, will quickly identify and apprehend the perpetrators of these acts,” Hidalgo said in a statement.

Others, however, used the incident to raise concern over security in France, which has been under a state of emergency following numerous attacks in the country since November. Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, a member of the French National Assembly and one of five potential Republican candidates in the upcoming presidential elections, cited the robbery as proof of “a general emergency on security.”