George Packer's Blog, page 155
October 7, 2016
The Nobel Creates Another Twist in Colombian Peace Talks
In the hours after last Sunday’s plebiscite called by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos to ratify the peace deal he had struck with his country’s FARC guerrillas—which was rejected by a margin of sixty-three thousand ballots, out of thirteen million cast—memes appeared showing a cartoonish Santos lying prone on the ground, apparently kicked to death by Álvaro Uribe, his arch-adversary and right-wing predecessor. Uribe had launched and led the successful “No” campaign against Santos’s peace deal, opposing it on the grounds that it was too lenient to the FARC, and also exposed government soldiers to possible war-crimes prosecution. In the cartoon, Uribe was depicted as being forcibly led away from the scene by several supporters, with a caption reading, “Enough, leave him, he’s dead.” Another meme riffed on the expectation that Santos’s chances of winning a Nobel Peace Prize—a possibility that had been floating in the atmosphere in recent months—were now doomed.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:How Colombia’s Voters Rejected Peace
At Last, a Peace Deal in Colombia
This Week in Fiction: Julianne Pachico
Trump in Deep Trouble on Eve of Second Debate
If the Presidential election continues on its current course, historians may well look back on the third weekend in September as the moment when Donald Trump came closest to the White House, while millions of Americans reached for the Xanax. That Saturday, Hillary Clinton’s lead over Trump narrowed to one percentage point in the widely watched Real Clear Politics poll average, which combines the results from a number of surveys. A day later, Clinton’s lead fell to 0.9 percentage points.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:The New York Tale of Donald Trump’s Accountant
Does Trump’s Rise Mean Liberalism’s End?
Trump and the Truth
Does Trump’s Rise Mean Liberalism’s End?
Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or tables, and the simpler the story, the better. The story that has ruled our world in the past few decades is what we might call the Liberal Story. It was a simple and attractive tale, but it is now collapsing, and so far no new story has emerged to fill the vacuum. Instead, we get Donald Trump.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:The New York Tale of Donald Trump’s Accountant
Trump in Deep Trouble on Eve of Second Debate
Trump and the Truth
Trump and the Truth
In recent weeks, writers and fact-checkers at The New Yorker have produced a series of reported essays about Donald Trump and the truth. Presidential candidates have always lied, “but sometimes there really is something new under the political sun,” David Remnick wrote when he introduced the series, last month. Trump, the Republican nominee, “does not so much struggle with the truth as strangle it altogether.” Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, has had her bald-faced moments. “But, in the scale and in the depth of his lying, Donald Trump is in another category.”
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:The New York Tale of Donald Trump’s Accountant
Trump in Deep Trouble on Eve of Second Debate
Does Trump’s Rise Mean Liberalism’s End?
Showtime’s “The Circus” Offers Dark Lessons in Horse-Race Journalism
On the night of the Iowa caucuses, in February, Bernie Sanders stood in a hotel room watching CNN report the results on television. Earlier that night, the Vermont senator had delivered a quasi-victory speech, but the vote was the closest that Iowa’s Democratic caucuses had ever seen (Hillary Clinton would ultimately be declared the winner), and the analysts on TV seemed no more sure what to make of it than any of the staffers or reporters gathered around Sanders, who stood closer to the screen than anyone else. Eventually, people started to clear the room, but Sanders beckoned for one reporter, John Heilemann, to stay. “And I swear to God he looked at me and he goes, ‘What am I supposed to think about this?’ Like, ‘I’ve just given the speech declaring victory, but I’m not a hundred per cent really sure how to interpret this,’ ” Heilemann said later, recounting the moment during an episode of his Showtime program, “The Circus.” As he told the story, Heilemann was piloting a rented Chevy through snowy New Hampshire, while one of his co-hosts, Mark Halperin, sat in the passenger’s seat. “Just, like, a moment of candidate vulnerability,” Heilemann continued. “Wanting some exterior validation, because it was clear that he hadn’t spoken to anyone outside of his own bubble.”
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:The New York Tale of Donald Trump’s Accountant
Trump in Deep Trouble on Eve of Second Debate
Trump and the Truth
October 6, 2016
The Bullying Anti-Asian Racism of Fox News’s “Watters’ World”
The past year has not exactly been a good one for Asian-Americans. Back during the Republican primaries, fear-mongering politicians talked about Asian immigrants and their “anchor babies” in a way that portrayed an entire race as opportunists thronging to exploit America and its resources on behalf of their offspring. After predicating his campaign on deranged anti-immigrant rhetoric, the Republican Presidential nominee, Donald Trump, gleefully mocked the Chinese and Japanese using broken, accented English during a campaign rally in Iowa. In August, he included Filipinos on a list of potentially terrorist immigrants and said, “We’re dealing with animals.” (There were also North Africans and Middle Easterners on his list.) During the first Presidential debate, China was mentioned twelve times, mostly by Trump, as a threat and hindrance to America’s growth.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Afternoon Cartoon: Thursday, October 6th
The Cartoon Lounge: Thinking Inside the Box
Seeing Trump in Trump Tower
Hurricane Matthew’s Devastating Toll in Haiti
It is hard to describe to people who have never experienced a major hurricane what it’s like to go through one. The pounding torrential rains. The roaring gale-force winds, which can uproot and toss massive trees as though they were twigs. The relentlessness of it all as it carries on for hours, slowly increasing your doubts about your creaking house’s ability to remain standing. It is as if the air you are accustomed to breathing has suddenly gathered supernatural force and become angry, and decided to try to kill you.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Louisiana, Its Floods, and the Presidential Question
Haiti Has a President
Sweet Micky and the Sad Déjà Vu of Haiti’s Presidential Elections
October 5, 2016
Looking Backward at Donald Trump
Here is a thought experiment: Imagine how the 2016 Presidential election would look to someone encountering it for the first time—in particular, imagine the reaction of a Trump innocent, a man or woman who’d never experienced a full dose of Donald J. Trump. Students of American political history may someday understand how the world’s oldest democracy produced such a candidate, and no doubt it can partly be explained by what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meant when she talked about the other basket—not the “deplorables” but people, as she put it, “who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.” A simpler explanation may be that Trump’s appeal, as the political historian John Judis argues, has more to do with celebrity and entertainment than with bigotry; after all, as he pointed out during a recent interview with Slate, Trump first appeared on the cover of People in the early nineteen-eighties. Trump has even entertained Democrats, starting with the primaries, during which (with occasional help from Governor Chris Christie) he whacked, politically speaking, one weak competitor after another. For non-Trumpians, taking pleasure in that spectacle was only possible if it was accompanied by a belief that a Trump Presidential victory wasn’t at all possible. This hasn’t been a sustainable position for a while, although his odds are now a question for journalists and the panelists on cable news programs. (If American manufacturers are making less stuff than they used to, this country sure can make panelists.)
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Can Donald Trump Learn from Mike Pence?
Afternoon Cartoon: Wednesday, October 5th
Mike Pence, Dancing with Trump
Can Donald Trump Learn from Mike Pence?
Tuesday’s debate between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence is unlikely to have a significant effect on the outcome of the Presidential election. Historically, the clash of Vice-Presidential wannabes has rarely shifted the opinion polls much, let alone the actual voting. Why should this year be any different? The back-and-forth on Tuesday provided plenty of fodder for political commentators and partisans, but it was always a sideshow. The real contest moves on to St. Louis, Missouri, where, on Sunday night, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will take part in their second Presidential debate.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Looking Backward at Donald Trump
Afternoon Cartoon: Wednesday, October 5th
Mike Pence, Dancing with Trump
George Packer's Blog
- George Packer's profile
- 481 followers
