George Packer's Blog, page 223

Postscript: Daniel Berrigan, 1921-2016

He was in the elevator when we got on, riding down from his rooms in the building on 98th Street that housed the priests known as the West Side Jesuits. His hair, thick and black in the old news photographs, had gone gray. Instead of a black turtleneck and suit coat—the outfit with which he had united clerical garb with Beat style—he had on a collarless linen shirt, untucked at the waist. His face was thin and lined. At the time, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, it seemed that the Roman Catholic Church and the gay men of New York City were at war, but he was spending his time ministering to AIDS patients at St. Vincent’s Hospital, in Greenwich Village. He stepped off the elevator, and, as we trailed behind, the Jesuit priest we were with said, a little boastfully: “Dan Berrigan—that was him. He lives with us.”

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Related:
Daniel Berrigan, My Dangerous Friend
The New Morality of Pope Francis
The Catholic Movement Against Capital Punishment

Virginians with a Felony Conviction Can Now Vote, But Getting a Job Is No Easier

Two weeks ago, Terry McAuliffe, the governor of Virginia, issued an executive order that restored the vote to two hundred and six thousand people who have completed prison sentences and probation or parole for a felony conviction. The move was rightly hailed as a milestone for the state. The Governor effectively overrode a provision in Virginia’s Constitution from the post-Civil War period which was meant to disenfranchise African-Americans. In 2010, according to the Sentencing Project, one of every five black voters in the state had lost the right to vote, one of the highest rates of disenfranchisement in the country.

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Daily Cartoon: Monday, May 2nd
The Artist Who Wants to Make the E.U. Sexy—And Defeat Brexit
Mississippi, the Two-Flag State

Daniel Berrigan, My Dangerous Friend

I was a twenty-two-year-old seminarian in 1965, struggling to imagine myself in what already seemed the impossible life of the Catholic priest, when I came upon the writing of Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit poet. Berrigan, who died on Saturday at the age of ninety-four, quickly came to embody for me a new ideal. He testified, in his expansive life, to language itself as an opening to transcendence. What was Creation if not the Word of God, and what were human words if not sacraments of God’s real presence? Writing could be an act of worship. The idea defines me still.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Postscript: Daniel Berrigan, 1921-2016
The New Morality of Pope Francis
The Catholic Movement Against Capital Punishment

On Puerto Rico, Congress Once Again Fails to Do the Obvious

When Alejandro García Padilla, the governor of Puerto Rico, announced that the island’s Government Development Bank would not pay its creditors an installment that was due on Sunday, he effectively put the territory into partial default. But what he really did was to acknowledge a hard fact: Puerto Rico owes far more money than it can possibly repay, and no one’s interests—least of all its citizens’—are being served by pretending otherwise.

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Related:
On Immigration, the Supreme Court Sounds More Like Congress
Obama Signs Executive Order Relocating Congress to Guantánamo
How to Recognize a Constitutional Crisis

Comment from the May 9, 2016, Issue

In “Ready or Not,” Amy Davidson writes about how Paul Ryan and the G.O.P. leadership need to confront their Donald Trump problem head on.

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Daily Cartoon: Friday, April 29th
The Ancestral German Home of the Trumps
Donald Trump’s Very Republican Foreign-Policy Speech

How the Curse of Sykes-Picot Still Haunts the Middle East

In the Middle East, few men are pilloried these days as much as Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. Sykes, a British diplomat, travelled the same turf as T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), served in the Boer War, inherited a baronetcy, and won a Conservative seat in Parliament. He died young, at thirty-nine, during the 1919 flu epidemic. Picot was a French lawyer and diplomat who led a long but obscure life, mainly in backwater posts, until his death, in 1950. But the two men live on in the secret agreement they were assigned to draft, during the First World War, to divide the Ottoman Empire’s vast land mass into British and French spheres of influence. The Sykes-Picot Agreement launched a nine-year process—and other deals, declarations, and treaties—that created the modern Middle East states out of the Ottoman carcass. The new borders ultimately bore little resemblance to the original Sykes-Picot map, but their map is still viewed as the root cause of much that has happened ever since.

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Related:
A Syrian Family Finds Refuge on a Swedish Island
The Assad Files in Arabic
The Lives of American Soldiers, Before and After War

What Apple Has to Fear from China

No company wants to report that its sales have declined. But when you’re Apple, which has consistently seen its revenues grow for more than twelve years, it’s not just bad news but a serious kink in a joyful narrative of boundless possibility. Earlier this week the company—the most valuable in the U.S.—told shareholders that revenues had declined by thirteen per cent. Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, did his best to spin the numbers—temporary currency fluctuations were to blame; sales will rise again as the iPhone SE continues its rollout; the company will rebound thanks to “the incredible strength of the Apple ecosystem.” But Cook couldn’t assuage fears about the biggest reason for the revenue decline: a twenty-six-per-cent drop in sales in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, accounting for fifty-eight per cent of the over-all decline in Apple’s growth. The company’s stock price promptly plummeted.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Postscript: Bill Campbell, 1940-2016
Apple at Forty: Steve Jobs Led Us to the Fourth Dimension
Lessons from Apple vs. the F.B.I.

Mississippi, the Two-Flag State

Well into middle age, after years working as a writer and an editor in Washington, D.C., and Virginia, I found myself unemployed and floundering. I eventually stumbled across a job, teaching as the Eudora Welty Visiting Scholar in Southern Studies at Millsaps College, a place loved by Miss Welty (to call her anything else would violate Southern propriety) and a quick walk from the house where she wrote her novel “Losing Battles.” I grew up on a farm near the small town of Mount Olive, and attended Ole Miss, a college where the Confederate battle flag was flown at football games. Upon graduating, in 1978, I left for the North and vowed never to return. But when I needed somewhere to go and sort out my life, there were no questions asked. After years as a black Southern expatriate and sometime critic of the place that shaped the man I have become, my loyalties were not scrutinized. In spite of everything, Mississippi left the door open for me and had my room ready.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Daily Cartoon: Friday, April 29th
Cruz Hopes to Tap Into Immense Popularity of Carly Fiorina
Koch Brothers Consider Purchasing First Democrat

A “Wayne’s World” Argument at the Supreme Court

As I read the transcript of Wednesday’s Supreme Court oral arguments in the corruption case of the former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, I thought of the movie “Wayne’s World.” There’s a scene halfway through the film in which Wayne and Garth, the lovable public-access TV hosts, argue with Benjamin, the slick corporate producer, about giving their sponsor airtime. As they make their case against selling out, Wayne and Garth serve as pitchmen. “I will not bow to any sponsor,” Wayne says, sticking his hand into a Pizza Hut box and pulling out a slice. Before the Court this week, McDonnell’s lawyers made a similarly convincing claim that he couldn’t be bought.

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Related:
The Collapse of Dilma Rousseff, the Richard Nixon of Brazil
Comment from the February 29, 2016, Issue
Put an Atheist on the Supreme Court

Baltimore and the Future of Protest Politics

Wednesday was the first anniversary of the violent demonstrations that erupted in Baltimore after Freddie Gray’s death. Tuesday, the day before that anniversary, was the Democratic mayoral primary—effectively the mayoral election, since Baltimore is a one-party town—which was won by a veteran state senator named Catherine Pugh. For months, the expectation was that the energies that accumulated during the demonstrations and dark summer after Gray’s death would find some resolution in the election, but by the end of the race the election and the memory of the insurrection had separated again. The political insider who took up the banner of the protests, the city councilman Nick Mosby, withdrew in the final weeks, with five-per-cent support; the outsider DeRay Mckesson, one of the most prominent figures in the Black Lives Matter movement, drew less than three per cent of the vote. Flanking Pugh onstage during her victory speech were two giants of Baltimore politics, Elijah Cummings, the longtime Democratic congressman who represents most of Baltimore County, and Kweisi Mfume, his predecessor, the former leader of the Congressional Black Caucus and the former president of the N.A.A.C.P. (“Nobody I know likes to walk naked in front of a truck, and Kweisi is a big truck,” a lobbyist once said of Mfume’s influence in the city.) Pugh thanked Cummings for taking her late-night calls, and the firefighters’ union for an early endorsement. She bragged about the appropriations she and her colleagues had won for Baltimore in the state legislature, and the city’s bond rating. She mentioned the civic unrest only glancingly, at the end.

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Related:
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, April 12th
The Year in Jelani Cobb
A Freddie Gray Mistrial