George Packer's Blog, page 116

The Radical Possibility of the Women’s March

On Saturday, a constellation of woman-centered, anti-Trump protest lit up across all seven continents. (A group on an expedition ship in Antarctica adopted the unofficial slogan “Penguins for Peace.”) At the center of the action was the Women’s March on Washington, which drew an estimated half a million participants. There were men and women of all origins and orientations, a teeming parade of pink hats and protest signs that brightened against a pale silver fog blanketing the sky. There were sensible moms and crust punks, bros in Patagonia and toddlers on shoulders. A group of Gen Xers from Pittsburgh kept yelling, “Go Steelers!” A great-grandmother leaned on a walker, ambling gamely down the National Mall with clouds of cotton in her ears.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump’s New World Disorder
A Bad Day for the Environment, with Many More to Come
Drawing the Women’s March and the Way Forward

A Spiritual March on Washington

What should—what will—protests against Donald Trump be like? I asked myself this question early yesterday morning while riding a bus down to Washington from New York. My bus left from Trinity Church, near Wall Street. On the bus were teen-agers, twentysomethings, parents, children, the late-middle-aged, and a few Episcopal priests. In the front seats, two young women were knitting pink pussy hats; across from them, two more made posters about racial justice. Would the march be cozy or confrontational? Affable or angry?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump’s New World Disorder
A Bad Day for the Environment, with Many More to Come
Drawing the Women’s March and the Way Forward

Trump’s Attack on the Press Shows Why Protests Are Necessary

At 6 P.M. on Saturday evening, six hours after the New York version of the Women’s March on Washington began, thousands of protesters were still streaming west along Forty-second Street, and then turning up Fifth Avenue to Trump Tower. The pace was slow, but the mood of many people in the crowd was upbeat, giddy almost. Most were women and girls, but there were plenty of men and boys, too. They chanted “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Donald Trump has got to go.” They cheered, and they carried homemade signs that said things like “HATE WON,” “NASTY WOMEN AGAINST FASCISM,” “#STOPTWEETING,” “READ A DAMN BOOK,” and, my personal favorite, “WE SHALL OVERCOMB.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Vainglorious Affront to the C.I.A.
Scenes from the Women’s March on Washington
The Women’s March: Me, Too

The N.F.L.’s Year of Ratings Politics

An odd thing happened to the National Football League this season: millions of people stopped watching the games on television. The sagging numbers were a curiosity at first, but by midseason the press was running stories filled with ominous verbs. Ratings were plummeting, or in free fall, or collapsing. Things got so bad, Advertising Age reported, that the networks were forced to offer their advertisers free airtime to make up for the missing viewers. All told, regular-season television ratings were down eight per cent from the previous year, according to ESPN, and off about ten per cent from the league’s peak, in 2013. That year, Americans were showing such a seemingly insatiable appetite for the sport that Roger Goodell, the N.F.L. commissioner, called for more games to be added to the regular-season schedule. Yet just three years later the league appeared to be in retreat.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Immersion Therapy in the Trump Archive
A Man Without Qualities: HBO’s “The Young Pope”
Nick Saban, College Football’s Uncharismatic Conservative

Hillary Clinton’s Personal March on Washington

In 1848, at Wesleyan Chapel, in Seneca Falls, New York, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a suffragist and abolitionist married to a co-founder of the Republican Party, submitted the Declaration of Sentiments, a revolutionary document that did for the cause of equal rights for women what the Declaration of Independence had done for the cause of the colonists and their grievances against the Crown.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Today, We March
Inaugural Fashion: White Is a Color of Mourning
Watching Trump’s Inauguration from the Cheap Seats

Last Day at the Civil Rights Division

At 10 A.M. on her last day of work, Vanita Gupta, the head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, opened a door in her office and stepped out into a conference room with cream-colored walls and a fireplace at one end. This room was once the office of the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, but now the Civil Rights Division uses it for meetings. That morning, Gupta and her senior leadership filed in. Before they took their seats, however, somebody noticed that the official portraits of President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch had vanished. Now there was a bare spot on the wall; everyone stared at the two brass hooks. “When did the pictures come down?” Gupta asked.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Welcome to the White House
Daily Cartoon: Friday, January 20th
Obama’s Parting Gift: The Power Not to Fear White Racism

Watching Trump’s Inauguration from the Cheap Seats

Past the seats reserved for dignitaries, out beyond the point where Donald Trump was discernible from a distance, people huddled around the Jumbotron, like tailgaters around the grill. The mood was giddy and informal, a contrast to that of the protesters far away and the forced bonhomie of Republicans and Democrats onstage at Trump’s Inauguration. Someone lit a joint, and teen-agers in green-camouflage Trump hats giggled at the aroma. The sky was dishwater-gray, spitting rain, but nobody complained. In the “non-ticketed” sections of the National Mall, where Trump’s supporters had room to roam and marvel at their achievement, Washington felt, for a few hours, like home.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Inaugural Fashion: White Is a Color of Mourning
A Dark Inaugural

A Dark Inaugural

Politicians, preparing for inaugurals, scurry for their histories. The Republican Senator Roy Blunt, who welcomed the crowd to Donald Trump’s Inauguration, chose to commemorate the peaceful transitions of the late eighteenth century, when partisan tensions were high and the Republic might not have survived. The Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, speaking just before the new President, read at length from a letter that Sullivan Ballou, a Union officer, wrote to his wife: “I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us.” In the faces just behind the new President and his family, viewers could detect the partisan zigzag of our recent political history: the Clintons, the Bushes, the Obamas. Clarence Thomas coaxed the new Administration into being in his magnificent, seldom-heard baritone. And yet, amid these displays of continuity, the new President insisted on a break. Trump spoke about a history in which power had been concentrated among élites and politicians, and said, “That all changes. Starting right here and right now.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Inaugural Fashion: White Is a Color of Mourning
Watching Trump’s Inauguration from the Cheap Seats

An Impulsive Authoritarian Populist in the White House

On Thursday evening, Jason Furman, the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, tweeted out a picture of himself leaving his office for the last time, with the message “Turning out the lights.” Whether it was deliberate or not, Furman’s message echoed the words of Lord Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, who remarked to a friend, in August, 1914, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Inaugural Fashion: White Is a Color of Mourning
Watching Trump’s Inauguration from the Cheap Seats

Roger Stone Versus the “Deep State”

At around 10:30 P.M. last night, Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s on-again off-again political adviser for the past thirty years, stood outside the DeploraBall, an inaugural event for Trump supporters held at the National Press Club, in downtown Washington, D.C. Reached on his cell phone, Stone said he was wearing black tie and holding an open bottle of champagne. Earlier, a large group of protesters had chanted “Nazi scum” and projected “Impeach the predatory president” on the side of the building.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Inaugural Fashion: White Is a Color of Mourning
Watching Trump’s Inauguration from the Cheap Seats