George Packer's Blog, page 153

Bob Dylan’s Nobel Triumph in a Time of Trump

As a great American writer named Roth—still not, and perhaps never to be, Nobeled—once wrote, American reality perpetually astonishes our capacity to satirize it, and so this morning, as my colleague David Remnick has noted, broke with a double whammy of the indigenous-preposterous. Donald Trump and what one exasperated news outlet accurately called his squalid stooges were spinning desperately to negate the power of the testimony of women who said that Trump had kissed or grabbed them without even asking first if he might. Trump’s apologists rightly emphasized that an allegation is not proof—though they ostentatiously missed the point that this is not a case of allegations made in a vacuum of credibility but of unstinting agreement with the very enthusiastic description that Trump had offered of his own conduct. In a mordant and also purely American paradox, Trump has been insisting, at the debate and elsewhere, that he was lying when he bragged to Billy Bush, and the women were coming forward to say that no, for once Donald Trump had actually been telling the truth.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Modest Proposal for an Immodest Campaign
The Election May Be Over, but Trump’s Blowup Is Just Starting
Michelle Obama Takes on Donald Trump

Trump and the Truth: Climate-Change Denial

This essay is part of a series The New Yorker will be running through the election titled “Trump and the Truth.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Modest Proposal for an Immodest Campaign
The Election May Be Over, but Trump’s Blowup Is Just Starting
Michelle Obama Takes on Donald Trump

The Real Nuclear Threat

Donald Trump’s candidacy has been a source of anxiety for many reasons, but one stands out: the ability of the President to launch nuclear weapons. When it comes to starting a nuclear war, the President has more freedom than he or she does in, say, ordering the use of torture. In fact, the President has unilateral power to direct the use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances. Cabinet members may disagree and even resign in protest, but, ultimately, they must obey the order of the Commander-in-Chief. It’s all too easy to imagine Trump issuing an ultimate, thermonuclear “You’re fired!” to China, Iran, or another nation—and perhaps to the whole human race.*

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Modest Proposal for an Immodest Campaign
The Election May Be Over, but Trump’s Blowup Is Just Starting
Michelle Obama Takes on Donald Trump

Trump Gets Ready to Be a Bad Loser

In mid-August, a low point for Donald Trump, when he trailed behind Hillary Clinton by about eight points, one of his top advisers confronted the candidate during a meeting at Trump Tower. “Your biggest problem is temperament,” the adviser recalled telling Trump. “You remember Gerry Ford? He tripped a couple of times, and every time he misstepped the media made it into a big thing. Well, guess what? That’s what’s happening to you now. Don’t take their bait. You have to be careful what you say. So much of what people complain about is your temperament, because they want to know what you’re going to do. They don’t want to hear you brag. They want to hear what you’re going to do. And the type of voter you were going after in the primary is totally different than the type of voter we’re going after now, in the general.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump Versus Clinton, According to Aristophanes
The Illuminating but Unsurprising Content of Clinton’s Paid Speeches
Donald Trump’s Political Prisoners

Standing Rock: A New Moment for Native-American Rights

The last time Native Americans gathered and the nation noticed was in 1973. That February, after members of the Oglala Sioux tribe failed to impeach their chairman on charges of corruption, they, with leaders of the American Indian Movement, occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. It was a final act in the movement’s years-long campaign to compel the federal government to honor tribal treaty rights. Already, Native Americans had occupied Alcatraz Island, in a largely symbolic attempt to reclaim it, and Mt. Rushmore, which had been part of the Great Sioux Reservation until Congress redrew its borders. But at Wounded Knee the movement found its symbolic apex: the U.S. Marshals surrounded the occupiers, evoking the start of the massacre that had killed more than a hundred and fifty Lakota people in 1890. Over months, the standoff escalated. Officers manned roadblocks in armored personnel carriers, and neighboring states lent their National Guards. Both sides traded gunfire. The first man shot was a marshal, who survived but was paralyzed from the waist down. The second was a Cherokee man, who died. The third was Lawrence Lamont, an Oglala Lakota, whose death was the beginning of the end of the occupation.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Anger and Joy of a Native-American Poet in Brooklyn
A Pipeline Fight and America’s Dark Past
A Visit to the Paul Broste Rock Museum

The Illuminating but Unsurprising Content of Clinton’s Paid Speeches

Since last Friday, WikiLeaks has been posting online e-mails and documents relating to Hillary Clinton and her campaign. On Wednesday alone, the organization released about nineteen hundred e-mails in two batches. The materials appear to have been obtained when someone hacked the e-mail account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. The Clinton campaign is blaming the Russian government and alleging that WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are in cahoots with the Kremlin to help elect Donald Trump. WikiLeaks, as usual, isn’t saying where it got its material.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump Versus Clinton, According to Aristophanes
Trump Gets Ready to Be a Bad Loser
Donald Trump’s Political Prisoners

Donald Trump’s Political Prisoners

Americans—well, some Americans—gasped during the debate on Sunday night when Donald Trump looked menacingly at Hillary Clinton and said, “Because you’d be in jail.” Did he just threaten his opponent with imprisonment? This seemed to be a first. Isn’t this the sort of thing that happens elsewhere?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump Versus Clinton, According to Aristophanes
Trump Gets Ready to Be a Bad Loser
The Illuminating but Unsurprising Content of Clinton’s Paid Speeches

Mike Pence and the Revolution

On Tuesday, at a town-hall meeting in Newton, Iowa, a woman who said that her name was Rhonda stood up to ask Mike Pence, the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, a question. Rhonda was wearing a gold hat, of the sort one might see at a New Year’s Eve party or a political convention, and she was worried. “I’ve been on social media every day, all day, non-stop, since last June, you know, pushing Trump,” she said. “And one of the biggest things that I can tell you a lot of us are scared of is voter fraud.” Some in the audience applauded. She said that “a lot of us” would wear red on Election Day. (This was a reference to the notion that, if Trump voters are not visible, the media would pretend that there were few or none of them, enabling fraud; one of the hashtags on social media is #CodeRed.) “Our lives depend on this election. Our kids’ futures depend on this election. And I will tell you, just for me, and I don’t want this to happen”—Rhonda put her hand on her heart, and continued—“but I will tell you, for me, personally, if Hillary Clinton gets in, I, myself, I’m ready for a revolution, because we can’t have her in.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump Versus Clinton, According to Aristophanes
Trump Gets Ready to Be a Bad Loser
The Illuminating but Unsurprising Content of Clinton’s Paid Speeches

Trump’s Muse on U.S. Trade with China

Economics has been a crutch for some Republicans who want to convince themselves that, of two hated candidates, Donald Trump is the one who shares most of their values. He doesn’t like taxes—boy, does he not like taxes—and he doesn’t like regulation, so we’ll let his hatred of trade slide. But his hatred of trade, unlike his more perfunctory economic pronouncements, is enthusiastic. At the Presidential debate on Sunday night, when asked a vague question about caring for all Americans, he went straight to his comfortable place: “When I look at . . . the potential that our country has, we have such tremendous potential.” What is preventing that potential from being realized? “Trade, where we’re doing so badly. . . . It’s hard to believe. Inconceivable.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump Versus Clinton, According to Aristophanes
Trump Gets Ready to Be a Bad Loser
The Illuminating but Unsurprising Content of Clinton’s Paid Speeches

Beirut’s Museums of War and Memories

For fifteen years, the National Museum of Beirut was one of the most dangerous places in the world’s most violent city. It was in the middle of the deadly Green Line, which divided more than a dozen warring militias. It marked one of only five crossing points between the Muslim west and the Christian east. When I lived in Beirut, in the nineteen-eighties, I used to dash like mad along the museum crossing during occasional ceasefires to get supplies in the east, then hope that the ceasefire would last long enough for me to race back to the west. Snipers were positioned inside and around the building to pick off people even when guns were supposed to be silent.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How Peter Hujar Defined Downtown
Drawing the World’s Greatest Bookstores
Todd Hido’s “Intimate Distance”