Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 931

How Trump gets away with his 9/11 lies: The disturbing truth about Islamophobia in America

Anyone who has paid notice to the GOP primary over the past several weeks has no doubt heard Donald Trump make the following dubious claim: that, on September 11, 2001, he viewed television news footage of thousands of New Jersey Arabs cheering the attacks of the World Trade Center. “There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations,” Trump told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos during an interview on Nov. 22. “They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down. I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down — as those buildings came down.” To be clear, the claim has been thoroughly debunked. Even Ben Carson, who initially backed Trump's false version of events, later said he may have actually been referring to an event somewhere else—perhaps, it seems, this footage of celebrations in East Jerusalem. As Carson told Fox News' Megyn Kelly on Nov. 23:

“Well, what we were talking about is the reaction of Muslims after the 9/11 attack and if they were in a celebratory mood. I was really focusing on that it was an inappropriate thing to do, no matter where they were. They asked me did I see the film. I did see the film. I don’t know where they were. But I did see a film of Muslims celebrating."

"It’s important,” Kelly pointed out to Carson, “whether these are American Muslims in New Jersey versus folks over in Iran or the Middle East.” But, in reality, that's the very distinction that doesn't matter to Trump and Carson. The conflation of Arabs in East Jerusalem and New Jersey is an easy trick to pull off, because Americans often view Arabs and Muslims as an undifferentiated mass. So it doesn't really matter to Trump and his followers which Muslims were celebrating and where, just as the distinction between ISIS militants and the Muslims fleeing them is lost on anti-refugee agitators. Indeed, even the distinction between Arabs (an ethnic category) and Muslims (a religious one) is often not comprehended -- except for when people like Jeb Bush suggest that Arab Christian refugees should be given priority over their Muslim neighbors. As Louise Cainkar, a sociologist at Marquette University, explained in an email to Salon:

“Arabs and Muslims, often conflated, are usually portrayed by the mainstream U.S. media in collectivities, such as mobs, or groups of men praying. Rarely are they portrayed in the mainstream media as individuals, except when they are reviled individuals. This type of representation feeds and confirms the notion that all are alike, that all think alike, and that any one of them can be suspect.”

Take, for example, the harrowing scene below, in which two CNN anchors hector Yasser Louati, a spokesperson for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, and demand that the country's entire Muslim community take responsibility for the Paris attacks. “Why is it that no one within the Muslim community there in France knew what these guys were up to?” CNN's John Vause demanded. After the interview ended, Vause added that he has “yet to hear the condemnation from the Muslim community on this, but we’ll wait and see.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx6vd... “The idea that either Arabs or Muslims can be individualized and can occupy many different kinds of positions and that we can treat them as individuals is rare,” says Moustafa Bayoumi, a professor of English at Brooklyn College and the author of This Muslim American Life: Dispatches From the War on Terror. "The problem is that its a reflection of our racist assumptions when it comes to Arabs and Muslims that they act always collectively and irrationally and en masse.” Damaging stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, as Edward Said's classic book "Orientalism" details, are quite old. And as the film "Reel Bad Arabs" demonstrates, they have long dominated in Hollywood: See the perennial depictions of inept but vicious warlords and terrorists, lecherous sheiks, alternately oppressed and hyper-sexualized women — the list goes on. Showtime’s “Homeland” is one current example. As James Poniewozik wrote at the New York Times earlier this year:

"Homeland" often uses scenes in which crowded streets in the Middle East and the Islamic world (in addition to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the show has also ventured to Iraq, Lebanon and Iran) stand for a kind of alien, unintelligible chaos, a teeming welter of noise and dust and veils in which danger can lurk anywhere.

This crowded and faceless vision has also been subtly but frequently propagated by mainstream news outlets, which reduce Arab public opinion to the phrase “Arab street.” Research published by Terry Regier and Muhammad Ali Khalidi in 2009 found that the term “Arab street” is widespread in American press and often suggests “a presumed seething underclass within Arab society,' where individuals blur into faceless “demonstrations, of crowds of people waving banners and flags and chanting slogans.” By contrast, there is “almost no incidence of the expressions American street, French street, Israeli street, and the like in the US media,” which “leaves the impression that public opinion in this part of the world is of a different kind than public opinion elsewhere.” Usage of the term, they found, increased after the September 11th attacks. The upshot is a vision of Muslims and Arabs as an undifferentiated mass. As a man protesting a long-standing mosque's plant to construct of a new house of worship in Virginia put it, “You are terrorists. Every one of you are terrorists. I don't care what you say.” White and Christian extremists, of course, are not generally taken to be representatives to represent all of white Christian society—except, notably, by groups like ISIS.Anyone who has paid notice to the GOP primary over the past several weeks has no doubt heard Donald Trump make the following dubious claim: that, on September 11, 2001, he viewed television news footage of thousands of New Jersey Arabs cheering the attacks of the World Trade Center. “There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations,” Trump told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos during an interview on Nov. 22. “They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down. I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down — as those buildings came down.” To be clear, the claim has been thoroughly debunked. Even Ben Carson, who initially backed Trump's false version of events, later said he may have actually been referring to an event somewhere else—perhaps, it seems, this footage of celebrations in East Jerusalem. As Carson told Fox News' Megyn Kelly on Nov. 23:

“Well, what we were talking about is the reaction of Muslims after the 9/11 attack and if they were in a celebratory mood. I was really focusing on that it was an inappropriate thing to do, no matter where they were. They asked me did I see the film. I did see the film. I don’t know where they were. But I did see a film of Muslims celebrating."

"It’s important,” Kelly pointed out to Carson, “whether these are American Muslims in New Jersey versus folks over in Iran or the Middle East.” But, in reality, that's the very distinction that doesn't matter to Trump and Carson. The conflation of Arabs in East Jerusalem and New Jersey is an easy trick to pull off, because Americans often view Arabs and Muslims as an undifferentiated mass. So it doesn't really matter to Trump and his followers which Muslims were celebrating and where, just as the distinction between ISIS militants and the Muslims fleeing them is lost on anti-refugee agitators. Indeed, even the distinction between Arabs (an ethnic category) and Muslims (a religious one) is often not comprehended -- except for when people like Jeb Bush suggest that Arab Christian refugees should be given priority over their Muslim neighbors. As Louise Cainkar, a sociologist at Marquette University, explained in an email to Salon:

“Arabs and Muslims, often conflated, are usually portrayed by the mainstream U.S. media in collectivities, such as mobs, or groups of men praying. Rarely are they portrayed in the mainstream media as individuals, except when they are reviled individuals. This type of representation feeds and confirms the notion that all are alike, that all think alike, and that any one of them can be suspect.”

Take, for example, the harrowing scene below, in which two CNN anchors hector Yasser Louati, a spokesperson for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, and demand that the country's entire Muslim community take responsibility for the Paris attacks. “Why is it that no one within the Muslim community there in France knew what these guys were up to?” CNN's John Vause demanded. After the interview ended, Vause added that he has “yet to hear the condemnation from the Muslim community on this, but we’ll wait and see.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx6vd... “The idea that either Arabs or Muslims can be individualized and can occupy many different kinds of positions and that we can treat them as individuals is rare,” says Moustafa Bayoumi, a professor of English at Brooklyn College and the author of This Muslim American Life: Dispatches From the War on Terror. "The problem is that its a reflection of our racist assumptions when it comes to Arabs and Muslims that they act always collectively and irrationally and en masse.” Damaging stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, as Edward Said's classic book "Orientalism" details, are quite old. And as the film "Reel Bad Arabs" demonstrates, they have long dominated in Hollywood: See the perennial depictions of inept but vicious warlords and terrorists, lecherous sheiks, alternately oppressed and hyper-sexualized women — the list goes on. Showtime’s “Homeland” is one current example. As James Poniewozik wrote at the New York Times earlier this year:

"Homeland" often uses scenes in which crowded streets in the Middle East and the Islamic world (in addition to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the show has also ventured to Iraq, Lebanon and Iran) stand for a kind of alien, unintelligible chaos, a teeming welter of noise and dust and veils in which danger can lurk anywhere.

This crowded and faceless vision has also been subtly but frequently propagated by mainstream news outlets, which reduce Arab public opinion to the phrase “Arab street.” Research published by Terry Regier and Muhammad Ali Khalidi in 2009 found that the term “Arab street” is widespread in American press and often suggests “a presumed seething underclass within Arab society,' where individuals blur into faceless “demonstrations, of crowds of people waving banners and flags and chanting slogans.” By contrast, there is “almost no incidence of the expressions American street, French street, Israeli street, and the like in the US media,” which “leaves the impression that public opinion in this part of the world is of a different kind than public opinion elsewhere.” Usage of the term, they found, increased after the September 11th attacks. The upshot is a vision of Muslims and Arabs as an undifferentiated mass. As a man protesting a long-standing mosque's plant to construct of a new house of worship in Virginia put it, “You are terrorists. Every one of you are terrorists. I don't care what you say.” White and Christian extremists, of course, are not generally taken to be representatives to represent all of white Christian society—except, notably, by groups like ISIS.Anyone who has paid notice to the GOP primary over the past several weeks has no doubt heard Donald Trump make the following dubious claim: that, on September 11, 2001, he viewed television news footage of thousands of New Jersey Arabs cheering the attacks of the World Trade Center. “There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations,” Trump told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos during an interview on Nov. 22. “They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down. I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down — as those buildings came down.” To be clear, the claim has been thoroughly debunked. Even Ben Carson, who initially backed Trump's false version of events, later said he may have actually been referring to an event somewhere else—perhaps, it seems, this footage of celebrations in East Jerusalem. As Carson told Fox News' Megyn Kelly on Nov. 23:

“Well, what we were talking about is the reaction of Muslims after the 9/11 attack and if they were in a celebratory mood. I was really focusing on that it was an inappropriate thing to do, no matter where they were. They asked me did I see the film. I did see the film. I don’t know where they were. But I did see a film of Muslims celebrating."

"It’s important,” Kelly pointed out to Carson, “whether these are American Muslims in New Jersey versus folks over in Iran or the Middle East.” But, in reality, that's the very distinction that doesn't matter to Trump and Carson. The conflation of Arabs in East Jerusalem and New Jersey is an easy trick to pull off, because Americans often view Arabs and Muslims as an undifferentiated mass. So it doesn't really matter to Trump and his followers which Muslims were celebrating and where, just as the distinction between ISIS militants and the Muslims fleeing them is lost on anti-refugee agitators. Indeed, even the distinction between Arabs (an ethnic category) and Muslims (a religious one) is often not comprehended -- except for when people like Jeb Bush suggest that Arab Christian refugees should be given priority over their Muslim neighbors. As Louise Cainkar, a sociologist at Marquette University, explained in an email to Salon:

“Arabs and Muslims, often conflated, are usually portrayed by the mainstream U.S. media in collectivities, such as mobs, or groups of men praying. Rarely are they portrayed in the mainstream media as individuals, except when they are reviled individuals. This type of representation feeds and confirms the notion that all are alike, that all think alike, and that any one of them can be suspect.”

Take, for example, the harrowing scene below, in which two CNN anchors hector Yasser Louati, a spokesperson for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, and demand that the country's entire Muslim community take responsibility for the Paris attacks. “Why is it that no one within the Muslim community there in France knew what these guys were up to?” CNN's John Vause demanded. After the interview ended, Vause added that he has “yet to hear the condemnation from the Muslim community on this, but we’ll wait and see.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx6vd... “The idea that either Arabs or Muslims can be individualized and can occupy many different kinds of positions and that we can treat them as individuals is rare,” says Moustafa Bayoumi, a professor of English at Brooklyn College and the author of This Muslim American Life: Dispatches From the War on Terror. "The problem is that its a reflection of our racist assumptions when it comes to Arabs and Muslims that they act always collectively and irrationally and en masse.” Damaging stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, as Edward Said's classic book "Orientalism" details, are quite old. And as the film "Reel Bad Arabs" demonstrates, they have long dominated in Hollywood: See the perennial depictions of inept but vicious warlords and terrorists, lecherous sheiks, alternately oppressed and hyper-sexualized women — the list goes on. Showtime’s “Homeland” is one current example. As James Poniewozik wrote at the New York Times earlier this year:

"Homeland" often uses scenes in which crowded streets in the Middle East and the Islamic world (in addition to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the show has also ventured to Iraq, Lebanon and Iran) stand for a kind of alien, unintelligible chaos, a teeming welter of noise and dust and veils in which danger can lurk anywhere.

This crowded and faceless vision has also been subtly but frequently propagated by mainstream news outlets, which reduce Arab public opinion to the phrase “Arab street.” Research published by Terry Regier and Muhammad Ali Khalidi in 2009 found that the term “Arab street” is widespread in American press and often suggests “a presumed seething underclass within Arab society,' where individuals blur into faceless “demonstrations, of crowds of people waving banners and flags and chanting slogans.” By contrast, there is “almost no incidence of the expressions American street, French street, Israeli street, and the like in the US media,” which “leaves the impression that public opinion in this part of the world is of a different kind than public opinion elsewhere.” Usage of the term, they found, increased after the September 11th attacks. The upshot is a vision of Muslims and Arabs as an undifferentiated mass. As a man protesting a long-standing mosque's plant to construct of a new house of worship in Virginia put it, “You are terrorists. Every one of you are terrorists. I don't care what you say.” White and Christian extremists, of course, are not generally taken to be representatives to represent all of white Christian society—except, notably, by groups like ISIS.

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“It was the tour from hell”: Inside the Grateful Dead’s last shows, and Jerry Garcia’s final days

CAMERON SEARS, Grateful Dead manager: Once the manifestation of Jerry’s choices were becoming more and more apparent, it was forcing a conversation to happen that got a lot more attention. We did confront him. We did have a lot of meetings internally. People were genuinely concerned from a personal perspective for him and the music was not what people felt it should be, so there were a lot of things being discussed. But the X-factor in the whole thing was really Jerry’s reaction to it and what he wanted to do. Because at the end of the day it was his life to live how he chose. Initially, he was [dismissive]. Most people in that situation are. It’s the rare person who says, “You’re right. Thank you.” It doesn’t happen that way very often, in my experience. There were other physical problems. I had taken him to doctors, so we were aware. I took him to a hand specialist in the city and they were doing some treatments with him, to some success. His heart condition was also apparent. His approach to that, of course, was, “I’ll adjust my diet,” and he attempted to do that to some extent. He wasn’t a fool. He knew he needed to do things, but it’s very hard for anyone—no matter who it is—to stop what you’re accustomed to doing because you have to. Nobody wants to be told they can’t do something ever again. And he had multiple sets of things where he was being told that. “You need to lose forty pounds. You can’t smoke. You can’t eat this. You have to exercise.” At a certain point you’re kind of like: “Fuck this,” which you can picture Jerry saying internally. But because he was an intelligent and thoughtful and considerate person, he did want to take those steps, but they’re huge steps. Anybody who, in the best situation, has to lose twenty pounds, it’s an enormous undertaking. We all wish we worked out more and ate better. It’s not a simple thing. And in his case it was very complicated. JAN SIMMONS, Assistant to promoter Bill Graham and Sears: It was heartbreaking sometimes, watching Jerry being in such poor health that it was hard for him to walk up and down the stage stairs. And it was very painful to see somebody just loved that much, and respected that much, being in so much trouble. He had his good times and his bad times during the years I was with them. And it was not easy sometimes. STEVE SILBERMAN, Writer, fan: I went on tour in the fall of ’94 and I said to myself at the end of the tour, “Something is wrong, because I just saw fifteen shows or whatever and I can only think of three or four really transcendent moments.” ROB KORITZ (Musician): The musical quality declined over time, and I think part of that was having two drummers. There were a lot of other factors. I hate to say it, but we can’t deny what drug use did. Not just drug use, but alcohol as well, because I know some drinking also took place. I remember one time when I was talking with Billy. He was talking about the nineties in particular, when Jerry was out on the smack again. He said, “Most of that stuff was terrible, but no matter what, even if Jerry was out of his mind, every night there was at least one song—or sometimes it was just three minutes—when the magic would happen. And even when it was bad in the nineties, those three minutes of magic every night were worth it for me to stay there.” PHIL LESH, Grateful Dead bassist: [Dylan’s] “Visions of Jonhanna” is such a great song, and [Jerry] had such an identity with it. It’s a mystery to me why we didn’t start playing it earlier. Even without the teleprompter, he could usually remember most of it. And his guitar playing is just so moving. I just love the song, and I love his rendition of it. It’s him. It’s really him. “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.” Whew, yeah. In 1994 there was a very tentative attempt to make a studio record. BOB BRALOVE, Musician: Jerry was not in good form, but the band was playing really great, so they were putting down some really good tracks. Things were sounding pretty good, but nothing really gelled, so there weren’t any finished performances with vocals. The energy around it was kind of confusing, because there was this really positive energy coming from the band, but it was missing a key ingredient. He’d come late; he might be pissed off. DENNIS McNALLY, Grateful Dead publicist: In 1994 we played a gig at this airstrip in Highgate, Vermont [Franklin County Field, July 13, 1994]. It was almost a guerrilla thing. We went in, it was comfortable, we got out. The venue had been pristine, because nobody knew about it. This time [June 15, 1995, with Bob Dylan opening] every piece of land in the immediate vicinity of the venue was rented out—you can’t tell a bunch of Yankee farmers that they can’t make a buck off the passing circus, so they didn’t—and there were nitrous tanks and camping. So all of the people that had to stay moderately sober the previous year because they had to drive back to Burlington didn’t have to stay sober. There wasn’t a riot there; there would have been if we hadn’t opened the gates, but they made the rational decision that you’re not going to ask security guards making five dollars an hour to defend that gate with their last breath. Thousands of people [without tickets] were massed in front of the gates. They were going to come through the gates no matter what. So they opened the gates and then 10,000 more people were inside than should have been. So, right away, that’s a bad sign [at the beginning of the tour]. Jerry was in alarming health. [Earlier] that year, Vince and Gloria [DiBiase, who were longtime assistants to Garcia] told me that his blood sugar reading, which is supposed to be in the mid to high 90s if you’re healthy, was at 200. I actually do remember saying to people in January, “If we get to Boston this fall . . .” I knew. His physical health was crumbling. So he’s out of it in Albany [June 21–22, 1995], kids get hit by lightning at RFK [Stadium in Washington, D.C., June 24, 1995]— that’s where the “tour of doom” thing started. When we first got to Deer Creek [for shows on July 2–3, 1995— the venue is a lovely amphitheater in Noblesville, Indiana; the band had played every year since 1989], Kenny Viola [tour director of security] takes the band into a back room, then comes out and tells me what he did: he played them tapes of threatening phone calls that the venue had received against Jerry. Threatening to kill him— if I remember correctly, because Jerry had stolen his girlfriend, metaphorically, or literally, or otherwise. Look, we’re talking about a disturbed person. And Jerry’s going, “And?” So Ken asked if they wanted to play the show, and they said, “Of course we’re going to play the show. Don’t be ridiculous.” CAMERON SEARS: It was Jerry’s choice to play. He was pissed. He was not happy about the whole situation. Once the fences started coming down, I had to go out and see what was happening. Deer Creek had a big hill you had to climb and a big fence all the way around it, and once they started rushing the fence, security said, “You know what, we’re out!” What could they do? The most troubling aspect of it was the people inside cheering them on. It was a very twisted sense of entitlement. These were kids that really just didn’t give a shit what anybody said to them. You could say, “I work with Jerry, and no, Jerry doesn’t want you to tear down the fence,” and they’d say, “Fuck you!” They were anarchists, in a sense, and once people are in that place, there’s no reasoning with them. You don’t have a whole lot of alternatives in terms of how do you corral this. It’s crazy. It’s like an altered state. Some of them were these young skate punk hippie kids. A lot of them were Phish kids, too. They would go back and forth. Phish was having all the same problems as we were. DENNIS McNALLY: It was also really creepy leaving that night. We have this insane scene; people start panicking. We had one bus there, the production bus, [but most of us] had come in vans. So we get another van to take the sound crew home. We put the women and children, whoever were their guests, in a van, and they left in the middle of the second set. [After the show] we put the band in the bus and leave. This is twenty minutes after the show, and you had to go through the parking lot a long way at Deer Creek. There’s no backdoor entrance or exit. Then there were these people pounding on the side of the bus and there were people deliberately walking in front of the bus; it was basically a “fuck you.” It was really freaky and disconcerting. Then going on these back roads, which are really narrow, with sharp turns, the bus got stuck in a ditch, which actually broke the tension. We got out, and looking at it, all of it was so horrific, it was like it had descended into farce. And everybody sort of relaxed, and this local farmer lent us a miniature tractor. They’re trying to drag a bus out of a ditch, Ram Rod and [fellow roadie Billy] Grillo were digging at the tire, and trying to do this and that. Eventually a tow truck came and pulled us out and we went back to the hotel. The next day, on the way in, Cameron says to me, “Draft a press release.” The cops had said, “We’ll direct traffic for you outside the venue, but we will not work inside. We’re not going to risk our lives to defend your property.” So the band decided, “Well, we can’t do a show without the police. That’s it.” So I wrote a very strong press release [from the band to the fans] saying: “If you guys quit on us in terms of ethics, don’t forget we can quit on you,” and Jerry signed it. He was truly shaken. It was appalling. I did think, “You know, the Grateful Dead’s karma about touring for thirty years was remarkably lucky.” There were some famous moments where their [equipment] truck almost didn’t get through. But I don’t know how many, if any, shows the Grateful Dead ever had to cancel, but surely not many, and certainly not any because of the audience. JAN SIMMONS: It was the tour from hell, as far as we were concerned. The relationship between the entourage and the Deadheads, as far as I could tell, it was pretty good up until that time. Ticket sales were 100 percent and I really, until that last tour, maybe the last two tours, I wasn’t aware that there was that much bad activity going on. CAMERON SEARS: I don’t think anyone saw it coming to the extent that it manifested itself. We all were aware of the fragility of the situation. Every gig was kind of like a pressure cooker. But who would predict that someone would phone in a death threat to a show? Who would predict that at a campground a porch would collapse and people would get killed? Who could have predicted a lightning strike [at RFK Stadium]? We were all kind of looking at each other and saying, “Really? Is this all happening now?” It was a culmination of a lot of little things, and in each case it had nothing to do with us. RICHARD LOREN, Grateful Dead booking agent and manager: That last tour was the metaphor for the end. It really showed the collapse of the thing they tried to keep up for so long. The fact that [the Grateful Dead] weren’t savvy enough to not play that last year they played—they didn’t need the money and they could have served their fans another way. They could have created something, done a show somewhere, telecast it, whatever. They could have taken that collective spirit—that socio-musical spirit—and shared it with the rest of the world. Excerpted from "This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead." Copyright © 2015 by Blair Jackson and David Gans. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.CAMERON SEARS, Grateful Dead manager: Once the manifestation of Jerry’s choices were becoming more and more apparent, it was forcing a conversation to happen that got a lot more attention. We did confront him. We did have a lot of meetings internally. People were genuinely concerned from a personal perspective for him and the music was not what people felt it should be, so there were a lot of things being discussed. But the X-factor in the whole thing was really Jerry’s reaction to it and what he wanted to do. Because at the end of the day it was his life to live how he chose. Initially, he was [dismissive]. Most people in that situation are. It’s the rare person who says, “You’re right. Thank you.” It doesn’t happen that way very often, in my experience. There were other physical problems. I had taken him to doctors, so we were aware. I took him to a hand specialist in the city and they were doing some treatments with him, to some success. His heart condition was also apparent. His approach to that, of course, was, “I’ll adjust my diet,” and he attempted to do that to some extent. He wasn’t a fool. He knew he needed to do things, but it’s very hard for anyone—no matter who it is—to stop what you’re accustomed to doing because you have to. Nobody wants to be told they can’t do something ever again. And he had multiple sets of things where he was being told that. “You need to lose forty pounds. You can’t smoke. You can’t eat this. You have to exercise.” At a certain point you’re kind of like: “Fuck this,” which you can picture Jerry saying internally. But because he was an intelligent and thoughtful and considerate person, he did want to take those steps, but they’re huge steps. Anybody who, in the best situation, has to lose twenty pounds, it’s an enormous undertaking. We all wish we worked out more and ate better. It’s not a simple thing. And in his case it was very complicated. JAN SIMMONS, Assistant to promoter Bill Graham and Sears: It was heartbreaking sometimes, watching Jerry being in such poor health that it was hard for him to walk up and down the stage stairs. And it was very painful to see somebody just loved that much, and respected that much, being in so much trouble. He had his good times and his bad times during the years I was with them. And it was not easy sometimes. STEVE SILBERMAN, Writer, fan: I went on tour in the fall of ’94 and I said to myself at the end of the tour, “Something is wrong, because I just saw fifteen shows or whatever and I can only think of three or four really transcendent moments.” ROB KORITZ (Musician): The musical quality declined over time, and I think part of that was having two drummers. There were a lot of other factors. I hate to say it, but we can’t deny what drug use did. Not just drug use, but alcohol as well, because I know some drinking also took place. I remember one time when I was talking with Billy. He was talking about the nineties in particular, when Jerry was out on the smack again. He said, “Most of that stuff was terrible, but no matter what, even if Jerry was out of his mind, every night there was at least one song—or sometimes it was just three minutes—when the magic would happen. And even when it was bad in the nineties, those three minutes of magic every night were worth it for me to stay there.” PHIL LESH, Grateful Dead bassist: [Dylan’s] “Visions of Jonhanna” is such a great song, and [Jerry] had such an identity with it. It’s a mystery to me why we didn’t start playing it earlier. Even without the teleprompter, he could usually remember most of it. And his guitar playing is just so moving. I just love the song, and I love his rendition of it. It’s him. It’s really him. “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.” Whew, yeah. In 1994 there was a very tentative attempt to make a studio record. BOB BRALOVE, Musician: Jerry was not in good form, but the band was playing really great, so they were putting down some really good tracks. Things were sounding pretty good, but nothing really gelled, so there weren’t any finished performances with vocals. The energy around it was kind of confusing, because there was this really positive energy coming from the band, but it was missing a key ingredient. He’d come late; he might be pissed off. DENNIS McNALLY, Grateful Dead publicist: In 1994 we played a gig at this airstrip in Highgate, Vermont [Franklin County Field, July 13, 1994]. It was almost a guerrilla thing. We went in, it was comfortable, we got out. The venue had been pristine, because nobody knew about it. This time [June 15, 1995, with Bob Dylan opening] every piece of land in the immediate vicinity of the venue was rented out—you can’t tell a bunch of Yankee farmers that they can’t make a buck off the passing circus, so they didn’t—and there were nitrous tanks and camping. So all of the people that had to stay moderately sober the previous year because they had to drive back to Burlington didn’t have to stay sober. There wasn’t a riot there; there would have been if we hadn’t opened the gates, but they made the rational decision that you’re not going to ask security guards making five dollars an hour to defend that gate with their last breath. Thousands of people [without tickets] were massed in front of the gates. They were going to come through the gates no matter what. So they opened the gates and then 10,000 more people were inside than should have been. So, right away, that’s a bad sign [at the beginning of the tour]. Jerry was in alarming health. [Earlier] that year, Vince and Gloria [DiBiase, who were longtime assistants to Garcia] told me that his blood sugar reading, which is supposed to be in the mid to high 90s if you’re healthy, was at 200. I actually do remember saying to people in January, “If we get to Boston this fall . . .” I knew. His physical health was crumbling. So he’s out of it in Albany [June 21–22, 1995], kids get hit by lightning at RFK [Stadium in Washington, D.C., June 24, 1995]— that’s where the “tour of doom” thing started. When we first got to Deer Creek [for shows on July 2–3, 1995— the venue is a lovely amphitheater in Noblesville, Indiana; the band had played every year since 1989], Kenny Viola [tour director of security] takes the band into a back room, then comes out and tells me what he did: he played them tapes of threatening phone calls that the venue had received against Jerry. Threatening to kill him— if I remember correctly, because Jerry had stolen his girlfriend, metaphorically, or literally, or otherwise. Look, we’re talking about a disturbed person. And Jerry’s going, “And?” So Ken asked if they wanted to play the show, and they said, “Of course we’re going to play the show. Don’t be ridiculous.” CAMERON SEARS: It was Jerry’s choice to play. He was pissed. He was not happy about the whole situation. Once the fences started coming down, I had to go out and see what was happening. Deer Creek had a big hill you had to climb and a big fence all the way around it, and once they started rushing the fence, security said, “You know what, we’re out!” What could they do? The most troubling aspect of it was the people inside cheering them on. It was a very twisted sense of entitlement. These were kids that really just didn’t give a shit what anybody said to them. You could say, “I work with Jerry, and no, Jerry doesn’t want you to tear down the fence,” and they’d say, “Fuck you!” They were anarchists, in a sense, and once people are in that place, there’s no reasoning with them. You don’t have a whole lot of alternatives in terms of how do you corral this. It’s crazy. It’s like an altered state. Some of them were these young skate punk hippie kids. A lot of them were Phish kids, too. They would go back and forth. Phish was having all the same problems as we were. DENNIS McNALLY: It was also really creepy leaving that night. We have this insane scene; people start panicking. We had one bus there, the production bus, [but most of us] had come in vans. So we get another van to take the sound crew home. We put the women and children, whoever were their guests, in a van, and they left in the middle of the second set. [After the show] we put the band in the bus and leave. This is twenty minutes after the show, and you had to go through the parking lot a long way at Deer Creek. There’s no backdoor entrance or exit. Then there were these people pounding on the side of the bus and there were people deliberately walking in front of the bus; it was basically a “fuck you.” It was really freaky and disconcerting. Then going on these back roads, which are really narrow, with sharp turns, the bus got stuck in a ditch, which actually broke the tension. We got out, and looking at it, all of it was so horrific, it was like it had descended into farce. And everybody sort of relaxed, and this local farmer lent us a miniature tractor. They’re trying to drag a bus out of a ditch, Ram Rod and [fellow roadie Billy] Grillo were digging at the tire, and trying to do this and that. Eventually a tow truck came and pulled us out and we went back to the hotel. The next day, on the way in, Cameron says to me, “Draft a press release.” The cops had said, “We’ll direct traffic for you outside the venue, but we will not work inside. We’re not going to risk our lives to defend your property.” So the band decided, “Well, we can’t do a show without the police. That’s it.” So I wrote a very strong press release [from the band to the fans] saying: “If you guys quit on us in terms of ethics, don’t forget we can quit on you,” and Jerry signed it. He was truly shaken. It was appalling. I did think, “You know, the Grateful Dead’s karma about touring for thirty years was remarkably lucky.” There were some famous moments where their [equipment] truck almost didn’t get through. But I don’t know how many, if any, shows the Grateful Dead ever had to cancel, but surely not many, and certainly not any because of the audience. JAN SIMMONS: It was the tour from hell, as far as we were concerned. The relationship between the entourage and the Deadheads, as far as I could tell, it was pretty good up until that time. Ticket sales were 100 percent and I really, until that last tour, maybe the last two tours, I wasn’t aware that there was that much bad activity going on. CAMERON SEARS: I don’t think anyone saw it coming to the extent that it manifested itself. We all were aware of the fragility of the situation. Every gig was kind of like a pressure cooker. But who would predict that someone would phone in a death threat to a show? Who would predict that at a campground a porch would collapse and people would get killed? Who could have predicted a lightning strike [at RFK Stadium]? We were all kind of looking at each other and saying, “Really? Is this all happening now?” It was a culmination of a lot of little things, and in each case it had nothing to do with us. RICHARD LOREN, Grateful Dead booking agent and manager: That last tour was the metaphor for the end. It really showed the collapse of the thing they tried to keep up for so long. The fact that [the Grateful Dead] weren’t savvy enough to not play that last year they played—they didn’t need the money and they could have served their fans another way. They could have created something, done a show somewhere, telecast it, whatever. They could have taken that collective spirit—that socio-musical spirit—and shared it with the rest of the world. Excerpted from "This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead." Copyright © 2015 by Blair Jackson and David Gans. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.CAMERON SEARS, Grateful Dead manager: Once the manifestation of Jerry’s choices were becoming more and more apparent, it was forcing a conversation to happen that got a lot more attention. We did confront him. We did have a lot of meetings internally. People were genuinely concerned from a personal perspective for him and the music was not what people felt it should be, so there were a lot of things being discussed. But the X-factor in the whole thing was really Jerry’s reaction to it and what he wanted to do. Because at the end of the day it was his life to live how he chose. Initially, he was [dismissive]. Most people in that situation are. It’s the rare person who says, “You’re right. Thank you.” It doesn’t happen that way very often, in my experience. There were other physical problems. I had taken him to doctors, so we were aware. I took him to a hand specialist in the city and they were doing some treatments with him, to some success. His heart condition was also apparent. His approach to that, of course, was, “I’ll adjust my diet,” and he attempted to do that to some extent. He wasn’t a fool. He knew he needed to do things, but it’s very hard for anyone—no matter who it is—to stop what you’re accustomed to doing because you have to. Nobody wants to be told they can’t do something ever again. And he had multiple sets of things where he was being told that. “You need to lose forty pounds. You can’t smoke. You can’t eat this. You have to exercise.” At a certain point you’re kind of like: “Fuck this,” which you can picture Jerry saying internally. But because he was an intelligent and thoughtful and considerate person, he did want to take those steps, but they’re huge steps. Anybody who, in the best situation, has to lose twenty pounds, it’s an enormous undertaking. We all wish we worked out more and ate better. It’s not a simple thing. And in his case it was very complicated. JAN SIMMONS, Assistant to promoter Bill Graham and Sears: It was heartbreaking sometimes, watching Jerry being in such poor health that it was hard for him to walk up and down the stage stairs. And it was very painful to see somebody just loved that much, and respected that much, being in so much trouble. He had his good times and his bad times during the years I was with them. And it was not easy sometimes. STEVE SILBERMAN, Writer, fan: I went on tour in the fall of ’94 and I said to myself at the end of the tour, “Something is wrong, because I just saw fifteen shows or whatever and I can only think of three or four really transcendent moments.” ROB KORITZ (Musician): The musical quality declined over time, and I think part of that was having two drummers. There were a lot of other factors. I hate to say it, but we can’t deny what drug use did. Not just drug use, but alcohol as well, because I know some drinking also took place. I remember one time when I was talking with Billy. He was talking about the nineties in particular, when Jerry was out on the smack again. He said, “Most of that stuff was terrible, but no matter what, even if Jerry was out of his mind, every night there was at least one song—or sometimes it was just three minutes—when the magic would happen. And even when it was bad in the nineties, those three minutes of magic every night were worth it for me to stay there.” PHIL LESH, Grateful Dead bassist: [Dylan’s] “Visions of Jonhanna” is such a great song, and [Jerry] had such an identity with it. It’s a mystery to me why we didn’t start playing it earlier. Even without the teleprompter, he could usually remember most of it. And his guitar playing is just so moving. I just love the song, and I love his rendition of it. It’s him. It’s really him. “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.” Whew, yeah. In 1994 there was a very tentative attempt to make a studio record. BOB BRALOVE, Musician: Jerry was not in good form, but the band was playing really great, so they were putting down some really good tracks. Things were sounding pretty good, but nothing really gelled, so there weren’t any finished performances with vocals. The energy around it was kind of confusing, because there was this really positive energy coming from the band, but it was missing a key ingredient. He’d come late; he might be pissed off. DENNIS McNALLY, Grateful Dead publicist: In 1994 we played a gig at this airstrip in Highgate, Vermont [Franklin County Field, July 13, 1994]. It was almost a guerrilla thing. We went in, it was comfortable, we got out. The venue had been pristine, because nobody knew about it. This time [June 15, 1995, with Bob Dylan opening] every piece of land in the immediate vicinity of the venue was rented out—you can’t tell a bunch of Yankee farmers that they can’t make a buck off the passing circus, so they didn’t—and there were nitrous tanks and camping. So all of the people that had to stay moderately sober the previous year because they had to drive back to Burlington didn’t have to stay sober. There wasn’t a riot there; there would have been if we hadn’t opened the gates, but they made the rational decision that you’re not going to ask security guards making five dollars an hour to defend that gate with their last breath. Thousands of people [without tickets] were massed in front of the gates. They were going to come through the gates no matter what. So they opened the gates and then 10,000 more people were inside than should have been. So, right away, that’s a bad sign [at the beginning of the tour]. Jerry was in alarming health. [Earlier] that year, Vince and Gloria [DiBiase, who were longtime assistants to Garcia] told me that his blood sugar reading, which is supposed to be in the mid to high 90s if you’re healthy, was at 200. I actually do remember saying to people in January, “If we get to Boston this fall . . .” I knew. His physical health was crumbling. So he’s out of it in Albany [June 21–22, 1995], kids get hit by lightning at RFK [Stadium in Washington, D.C., June 24, 1995]— that’s where the “tour of doom” thing started. When we first got to Deer Creek [for shows on July 2–3, 1995— the venue is a lovely amphitheater in Noblesville, Indiana; the band had played every year since 1989], Kenny Viola [tour director of security] takes the band into a back room, then comes out and tells me what he did: he played them tapes of threatening phone calls that the venue had received against Jerry. Threatening to kill him— if I remember correctly, because Jerry had stolen his girlfriend, metaphorically, or literally, or otherwise. Look, we’re talking about a disturbed person. And Jerry’s going, “And?” So Ken asked if they wanted to play the show, and they said, “Of course we’re going to play the show. Don’t be ridiculous.” CAMERON SEARS: It was Jerry’s choice to play. He was pissed. He was not happy about the whole situation. Once the fences started coming down, I had to go out and see what was happening. Deer Creek had a big hill you had to climb and a big fence all the way around it, and once they started rushing the fence, security said, “You know what, we’re out!” What could they do? The most troubling aspect of it was the people inside cheering them on. It was a very twisted sense of entitlement. These were kids that really just didn’t give a shit what anybody said to them. You could say, “I work with Jerry, and no, Jerry doesn’t want you to tear down the fence,” and they’d say, “Fuck you!” They were anarchists, in a sense, and once people are in that place, there’s no reasoning with them. You don’t have a whole lot of alternatives in terms of how do you corral this. It’s crazy. It’s like an altered state. Some of them were these young skate punk hippie kids. A lot of them were Phish kids, too. They would go back and forth. Phish was having all the same problems as we were. DENNIS McNALLY: It was also really creepy leaving that night. We have this insane scene; people start panicking. We had one bus there, the production bus, [but most of us] had come in vans. So we get another van to take the sound crew home. We put the women and children, whoever were their guests, in a van, and they left in the middle of the second set. [After the show] we put the band in the bus and leave. This is twenty minutes after the show, and you had to go through the parking lot a long way at Deer Creek. There’s no backdoor entrance or exit. Then there were these people pounding on the side of the bus and there were people deliberately walking in front of the bus; it was basically a “fuck you.” It was really freaky and disconcerting. Then going on these back roads, which are really narrow, with sharp turns, the bus got stuck in a ditch, which actually broke the tension. We got out, and looking at it, all of it was so horrific, it was like it had descended into farce. And everybody sort of relaxed, and this local farmer lent us a miniature tractor. They’re trying to drag a bus out of a ditch, Ram Rod and [fellow roadie Billy] Grillo were digging at the tire, and trying to do this and that. Eventually a tow truck came and pulled us out and we went back to the hotel. The next day, on the way in, Cameron says to me, “Draft a press release.” The cops had said, “We’ll direct traffic for you outside the venue, but we will not work inside. We’re not going to risk our lives to defend your property.” So the band decided, “Well, we can’t do a show without the police. That’s it.” So I wrote a very strong press release [from the band to the fans] saying: “If you guys quit on us in terms of ethics, don’t forget we can quit on you,” and Jerry signed it. He was truly shaken. It was appalling. I did think, “You know, the Grateful Dead’s karma about touring for thirty years was remarkably lucky.” There were some famous moments where their [equipment] truck almost didn’t get through. But I don’t know how many, if any, shows the Grateful Dead ever had to cancel, but surely not many, and certainly not any because of the audience. JAN SIMMONS: It was the tour from hell, as far as we were concerned. The relationship between the entourage and the Deadheads, as far as I could tell, it was pretty good up until that time. Ticket sales were 100 percent and I really, until that last tour, maybe the last two tours, I wasn’t aware that there was that much bad activity going on. CAMERON SEARS: I don’t think anyone saw it coming to the extent that it manifested itself. We all were aware of the fragility of the situation. Every gig was kind of like a pressure cooker. But who would predict that someone would phone in a death threat to a show? Who would predict that at a campground a porch would collapse and people would get killed? Who could have predicted a lightning strike [at RFK Stadium]? We were all kind of looking at each other and saying, “Really? Is this all happening now?” It was a culmination of a lot of little things, and in each case it had nothing to do with us. RICHARD LOREN, Grateful Dead booking agent and manager: That last tour was the metaphor for the end. It really showed the collapse of the thing they tried to keep up for so long. The fact that [the Grateful Dead] weren’t savvy enough to not play that last year they played—they didn’t need the money and they could have served their fans another way. They could have created something, done a show somewhere, telecast it, whatever. They could have taken that collective spirit—that socio-musical spirit—and shared it with the rest of the world. Excerpted from "This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead." Copyright © 2015 by Blair Jackson and David Gans. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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6 dispiriting truths about America’s billionaires

When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that he will give away 99 percent of his personal fortune—now estimated at $44 billion—during his lifetime, he was lauded in newspapers and TV broadcasts from coast to coast. But few people noted that giving away his billions will still leave Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan and newborn daughter Max, with at least $440 million to live on. Such vast sums of money are unimaginable to most of us. But according to a just-released report, "Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us," by the Institute for Policy Studies, the Facebook founder is merely one of the 400 wealthiest Americans, whose net worth is growing while they evade taxation and drive economic inequality. “The Forbes 400 provides a useful snapshot of the nation’s wealthiest individuals, an insight into a world most people will never witness firsthand,” the report said, as it lists some incredible comparisons that contrast the vast wealth held by a select few compared to average Americans. “The Forbes 400 also provides an insight into just how lopsided our economy has become: Just 400 people hold as much wealth as over 190 million.” Consider the following six bullet points from the report. The authors state they “believe that these statistics actually underestimate our current national levels of wealth concentration,” because, “the growing use of offshore tax havens and legal trusts has made the concealing of assets much more widespread than ever before.” A luxury jet versus half a continent. America’s 20 wealthiest people — a group that could fit comfortably in a single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet –­ now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 152 million people in 57 million households. The unbelievable racial wealth gap. The Forbes 400 now own about as much wealth as the nation’s entire African-American population, plus more than a third of the Latino population, combined. Blacks still have the least wealth. The wealthiest 100 households now own about as much wealth as the entire African American population in the United States. Among the Forbes 400, just two individuals are African American: Oprah Winfrey and Robert Smith. Latinos are barely doing better. The wealthiest 186 members of the Forbes 400 own as much wealth as the entire Latino population. Just five members of the Forbes 400 are Latino: Jorge Perez, Arturo Moreno and three members of the Santo Domingo family. Four hundred versus 194 million. With a combined worth of $2.34 trillion, the Forbes 400 own more wealth than the bottom 61 percent of the country combined, a staggering 194 million people. Astounding wealth gap. The median American family has a net worth of $81,000. The Forbes 400 own more wealth than 36 million of these typical American families. That’s the number of households in the United States that own cats. There are many reasons why it's important to track the nation’s richest individuals and the wealth gap between them and average Americans. The authors point out that many of today’s economic insecurities could be lessened if the wealthiest Americans—exemplified by the Forbes 400—paid a fairer share of taxes and were no longer able to use an encylopedia’s worth of federal loopholes that enable them to park their money offshore and exercise disproportionate influence in the political process, from elections to lobbying. But before delving into their recommendations and policy solutions, the authors explain that simply using the term top 1 percent doesn’t really reveal the true picture of wealth concerntration in America. Nor does focusing on the top one-tenth of the 1 percent. “The bulge at the top of our wealth ‘space needle’ reflects America’s wealthiest 0.1 percent, the top one-thousandth of our population, an estimated 115,000 households with a net worth starting at $20 million,” they write. “This group owns more than 20 percent of U.S. household wealth, up from 7 percent in the 1970s. This elite subgroup, University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez points out, now owns about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of America combined.” Peeling Back Layers of Super Wealth A look at the wealthiest 400 people in the U.S. provides a better reflection. “We need to examine our wealthiest 400, a cohort small enough to dine in the rotating luxury restaurant atop the Space Needle in Seattle,” they write. “These 400 all possess fortunes worth at least $1.7 billion. Our wealthiest 400 now have more wealth combined than the bottom 61 percent of the U.S. population, an estimated 70 million households, or 194 million people. That’s more people than the population of Canada and Mexico combined.” And then there’s the top of the top: the 20 wealthiest individuals in the U.S. “The 20 wealthiest Americans include eight founders of corporations: Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg), and Phil Knight (Nike). The list also features nine heirs from families of dynastic wealth: two Koch brothers, four Waltons (Walmart), and three fortunate souls from the Mars candy empire. Rounding out this top 20: investors Warren Buffett and George Soros and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.” Of course, there’s a vast racial dimension to wealth gap, which they document. “Just 400 extremely wealthy individuals — the number of people who could fit into the swanky 21 Club Restaurant in midtown Manhattan — have as much wealth as 16 million African-American households and 5 million Latino households,” they write. “An even more striking stat: The wealthiest 100 members of the Forbes list alone own about as much wealth as the entire African American population of 42 million people.” You might ask, aren’t there any billionaire blacks and Latinos? “Only two African-Americans, Oprah Winfrey (#211 with $3 billion) and tech investor Robert Smith (#268 with $2.5 billion), currently reside within the Forbes 400,” they note. “The only other African-American billionaire in the United States, Michael Jordan, did not make the $1.7 billion Forbes 400 cut. Jordan’s net worth: $1.3 billion.” “Five members of the Forbes 400 come from Latino backgrounds,” they continue. “Jorge Perez, the condo king of Miami (#171 with $3.5 billion) and Arturo Moreno, a billboard billionaire and owner of the Los Angeles Angels baseball team (#375 with $1.8 billion). The three remaining Latinos all hail from one family, the U.S. children of the late Colombian beer magnate Julio Mario Santo Domingo, a major shareholder of SABMiller. Alejandro and Andres Santo Domingo sit at #149 on the list with $3.8 billion each, with Julio III at #358 with $1.9 billion.” Negative Impact on American LIves Such disproportionate private wealth matters for many reasons, the authors say. First, it corrupts the political system. “Wealthy donors dominate our campaign finance and lawmaking systems, even after efforts at reform,” they write. It causes bad public health outcomes. “Unequal communities have greater rates of heart disease, asthma, mental illness, cancer, and other morbid illnesses,” they write. “It is well known that poverty contributes to bad health outcomes. But research is showing that you are better off living in a community with a lower standard of living, but greater equality—than living in a community with a higher income, but more extreme inequalities.” It leads to less cohesion as communities and nations: “We’re becoming more polarized by class and race in terms of where we live,” they note, and that leads to economic instability. “More equal societies have stronger rates of growth, longer economic expansions, and are quicker to recover from economic downturns.” The solutions must come from government intervention, they emphasize. First, there must be efforts to lift people who are the bottom of the economic ladder out of poverty, such as passing higher minimum wage laws, paid sick leave, early childhood education, universal health insurance, and guaranteed minimum incomes, such as the fast-food worker campaign for a $15 minimum hourly wage. Then government tax reforms must not only make the wealthy pay a much larger and fairer share, they should repeal the fine-print laws that treat domestic and international business differently, usually conferring advantages to global enterprises. Government must also adopt stronger anti-monopoly policies, enforce anti-trust laws and close off the escape routes and tax dodges that enable individuals and corporations to park multi-billions in assets overseas. Closing loopholes and adopting progressive tax rates by seriously taxing the wealthiest households would yield significant revenues that could be invested in improving the economic security of all Americans, such as offering debt-free college and universities, restructured student loans with no interest, affordable housing, and improving access and benefits to safety net programs. As the 2016 presidential campaign continues and the candidates, especially the Democrats, cite many of the issues raised by this report, it is worth taking note of what solutions are being proposed and how they would be financed. The Billionaire Bonanza report underscores that the money is there to improve the livelihoods and economic security of average Americans—without leaving the super-super-rich anywhere near the poorhouse. After all, if the Zuckerbergs can pledge to give away 99 percent of their fortune in their lifetimes and still be left with at least $440 million to get by, other slightly less rich billionaires would likely find their lifestyles hardly dented. When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that he will give away 99 percent of his personal fortune—now estimated at $44 billion—during his lifetime, he was lauded in newspapers and TV broadcasts from coast to coast. But few people noted that giving away his billions will still leave Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan and newborn daughter Max, with at least $440 million to live on. Such vast sums of money are unimaginable to most of us. But according to a just-released report, "Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us," by the Institute for Policy Studies, the Facebook founder is merely one of the 400 wealthiest Americans, whose net worth is growing while they evade taxation and drive economic inequality. “The Forbes 400 provides a useful snapshot of the nation’s wealthiest individuals, an insight into a world most people will never witness firsthand,” the report said, as it lists some incredible comparisons that contrast the vast wealth held by a select few compared to average Americans. “The Forbes 400 also provides an insight into just how lopsided our economy has become: Just 400 people hold as much wealth as over 190 million.” Consider the following six bullet points from the report. The authors state they “believe that these statistics actually underestimate our current national levels of wealth concentration,” because, “the growing use of offshore tax havens and legal trusts has made the concealing of assets much more widespread than ever before.” A luxury jet versus half a continent. America’s 20 wealthiest people — a group that could fit comfortably in a single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet –­ now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 152 million people in 57 million households. The unbelievable racial wealth gap. The Forbes 400 now own about as much wealth as the nation’s entire African-American population, plus more than a third of the Latino population, combined. Blacks still have the least wealth. The wealthiest 100 households now own about as much wealth as the entire African American population in the United States. Among the Forbes 400, just two individuals are African American: Oprah Winfrey and Robert Smith. Latinos are barely doing better. The wealthiest 186 members of the Forbes 400 own as much wealth as the entire Latino population. Just five members of the Forbes 400 are Latino: Jorge Perez, Arturo Moreno and three members of the Santo Domingo family. Four hundred versus 194 million. With a combined worth of $2.34 trillion, the Forbes 400 own more wealth than the bottom 61 percent of the country combined, a staggering 194 million people. Astounding wealth gap. The median American family has a net worth of $81,000. The Forbes 400 own more wealth than 36 million of these typical American families. That’s the number of households in the United States that own cats. There are many reasons why it's important to track the nation’s richest individuals and the wealth gap between them and average Americans. The authors point out that many of today’s economic insecurities could be lessened if the wealthiest Americans—exemplified by the Forbes 400—paid a fairer share of taxes and were no longer able to use an encylopedia’s worth of federal loopholes that enable them to park their money offshore and exercise disproportionate influence in the political process, from elections to lobbying. But before delving into their recommendations and policy solutions, the authors explain that simply using the term top 1 percent doesn’t really reveal the true picture of wealth concerntration in America. Nor does focusing on the top one-tenth of the 1 percent. “The bulge at the top of our wealth ‘space needle’ reflects America’s wealthiest 0.1 percent, the top one-thousandth of our population, an estimated 115,000 households with a net worth starting at $20 million,” they write. “This group owns more than 20 percent of U.S. household wealth, up from 7 percent in the 1970s. This elite subgroup, University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez points out, now owns about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of America combined.” Peeling Back Layers of Super Wealth A look at the wealthiest 400 people in the U.S. provides a better reflection. “We need to examine our wealthiest 400, a cohort small enough to dine in the rotating luxury restaurant atop the Space Needle in Seattle,” they write. “These 400 all possess fortunes worth at least $1.7 billion. Our wealthiest 400 now have more wealth combined than the bottom 61 percent of the U.S. population, an estimated 70 million households, or 194 million people. That’s more people than the population of Canada and Mexico combined.” And then there’s the top of the top: the 20 wealthiest individuals in the U.S. “The 20 wealthiest Americans include eight founders of corporations: Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg), and Phil Knight (Nike). The list also features nine heirs from families of dynastic wealth: two Koch brothers, four Waltons (Walmart), and three fortunate souls from the Mars candy empire. Rounding out this top 20: investors Warren Buffett and George Soros and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.” Of course, there’s a vast racial dimension to wealth gap, which they document. “Just 400 extremely wealthy individuals — the number of people who could fit into the swanky 21 Club Restaurant in midtown Manhattan — have as much wealth as 16 million African-American households and 5 million Latino households,” they write. “An even more striking stat: The wealthiest 100 members of the Forbes list alone own about as much wealth as the entire African American population of 42 million people.” You might ask, aren’t there any billionaire blacks and Latinos? “Only two African-Americans, Oprah Winfrey (#211 with $3 billion) and tech investor Robert Smith (#268 with $2.5 billion), currently reside within the Forbes 400,” they note. “The only other African-American billionaire in the United States, Michael Jordan, did not make the $1.7 billion Forbes 400 cut. Jordan’s net worth: $1.3 billion.” “Five members of the Forbes 400 come from Latino backgrounds,” they continue. “Jorge Perez, the condo king of Miami (#171 with $3.5 billion) and Arturo Moreno, a billboard billionaire and owner of the Los Angeles Angels baseball team (#375 with $1.8 billion). The three remaining Latinos all hail from one family, the U.S. children of the late Colombian beer magnate Julio Mario Santo Domingo, a major shareholder of SABMiller. Alejandro and Andres Santo Domingo sit at #149 on the list with $3.8 billion each, with Julio III at #358 with $1.9 billion.” Negative Impact on American LIves Such disproportionate private wealth matters for many reasons, the authors say. First, it corrupts the political system. “Wealthy donors dominate our campaign finance and lawmaking systems, even after efforts at reform,” they write. It causes bad public health outcomes. “Unequal communities have greater rates of heart disease, asthma, mental illness, cancer, and other morbid illnesses,” they write. “It is well known that poverty contributes to bad health outcomes. But research is showing that you are better off living in a community with a lower standard of living, but greater equality—than living in a community with a higher income, but more extreme inequalities.” It leads to less cohesion as communities and nations: “We’re becoming more polarized by class and race in terms of where we live,” they note, and that leads to economic instability. “More equal societies have stronger rates of growth, longer economic expansions, and are quicker to recover from economic downturns.” The solutions must come from government intervention, they emphasize. First, there must be efforts to lift people who are the bottom of the economic ladder out of poverty, such as passing higher minimum wage laws, paid sick leave, early childhood education, universal health insurance, and guaranteed minimum incomes, such as the fast-food worker campaign for a $15 minimum hourly wage. Then government tax reforms must not only make the wealthy pay a much larger and fairer share, they should repeal the fine-print laws that treat domestic and international business differently, usually conferring advantages to global enterprises. Government must also adopt stronger anti-monopoly policies, enforce anti-trust laws and close off the escape routes and tax dodges that enable individuals and corporations to park multi-billions in assets overseas. Closing loopholes and adopting progressive tax rates by seriously taxing the wealthiest households would yield significant revenues that could be invested in improving the economic security of all Americans, such as offering debt-free college and universities, restructured student loans with no interest, affordable housing, and improving access and benefits to safety net programs. As the 2016 presidential campaign continues and the candidates, especially the Democrats, cite many of the issues raised by this report, it is worth taking note of what solutions are being proposed and how they would be financed. The Billionaire Bonanza report underscores that the money is there to improve the livelihoods and economic security of average Americans—without leaving the super-super-rich anywhere near the poorhouse. After all, if the Zuckerbergs can pledge to give away 99 percent of their fortune in their lifetimes and still be left with at least $440 million to get by, other slightly less rich billionaires would likely find their lifestyles hardly dented.

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“Ideological self-confidence and ruthless power politics”: Neo-conservatives, Charles Krauthammer and the real legacy of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy

In Search of the “Reagan Doctrine” The presidency of Ronald Reagan, which began in January 1981, brought new controversies, and a new set of tropes and doctrines, to the American foreign policy debate. In the first instance, Reaganism took its cue from the critics of détente, such as Paul Nitze, a key advisor, and George P. Shultz, his secretary of state from 1982 to 1989. They stood in a tradition of those who had always had a more overtly hawkish posture on the Cold War, dating back to the 1940s. Added to this was a pronounced skein of ideological anti-communism. This was chiefly, though not exclusively, associated with neo-conservatives, such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol. Also in the Reagan ranks were a number of supporters and staffers of Democratic senator Henry Jackson, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Perle (once a student of Hans Morgenthau). This group rowed in behind the president, feeling that they no longer had a viable home in the Democratic Party. In the 1970s, Commentary magazine had been the main incubator for this loose coalition. It offered both a critique of détente under Nixon and Ford, and of what was seen as a vague and half-committed emphasis on human rights under Carter. Jeane Kirkpatrick, then a professor at Georgetown, declared that a “realistic foreign policy that pursues ‘national interest’ without regard to morality, ultimately founders on its lack of realism about the irreducible human concern with morality.” Her famous essay of November 1979, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” won her the attention of Reagan, who hired her on its strength. It made a distinction between authoritarian regimes and the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. Kirkpatrick argued that the United States should generally promote the liberalization and democratization of other states. That said, it should not do so in a way that destabilized those authoritarian regimes that were friendly to the United States, particularly if this meant that they fell into the hands of communists. This mix of ideological self-confidence and ruthless power politics set the tone for much that came after. It became crucial to the neo-conservative conception of foreign policy. Robert Kagan, who started writing for Commentary as a twenty-two-year old in 1981, defined the approach as one that “combines an idealistic moralism, and even messianism, with a realist’s belief in the importance of power.” Irving Kristol, the figurehead of this group, rejected utopianism and bemoaned the naiveté of the human rights lobby. Yet he also insisted that “Realpolitik a la Disraeli” (Britain’s famously pragmatic Conservative prime minister of 1874–1880) was unthinkable in America. American foreign policy needed more ideological sustenance to sustain itself. Ironically, neo-conservatism shared one striking similarity with postwar American realism. Both held foreign policy to be an indicator of the general state of the nation and the health of the American republic. The two were indivisible. As noted earlier, Kristol had initially been favorable to the “Europeanization” of American foreign policy under Kissinger and Nixon. In part, he viewed this as an antidote to what he saw as the vapid internationalism of the country’s intellectual elite in the 1960s. Yet his despair at the state of the American middle classes took him in a different direction in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In his view, American bourgeois culture had lost some of its moral and religious fiber. A realist foreign policy was a symptom of a broader sickness. It represented the “the vulgar substitution of expedience for principle,” and it had “no part of the American political tradition.” A similar point was made by Jeane Kirkpatrick. She argued that the notion that foreign policy “should be orientated towards balance of power politics, or realpolitik,” was totally alien to the American way of life. It was Norman Podhoretz, a longer-term critic of Nixon’s foreign policy, who claimed to have convinced Kristol to come round to his way of thinking on this issue. For Podhoretz, writing in 1981, the failed war in Vietnam had proved—more than anything else—the hopelessness of pursuing a foreign policy without a convincing moral rationale, behind which the nation could rally. In the 1970s, the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations had robbed the conflict with the Soviet Union of its moral and political dimension. In Podhoretz’s view, this policy was doomed. A “strategy of containment centered on considerations of Realpolitik would be unable to count indefinitely on popular support” and would ultimately head toward isolationism. Podhoretz expanded on this argument in a long review of Kissinger’s White House memoirs, Years of Upheaval, in Commentary in 1982. In Years of Renewal, it is worth noting, Kissinger had actually praised Podhoretz for offering the “subtlest” critique of détente. In return, Podhoretz, like Kristol, expressed his admiration for Kissinger. Nonetheless, he objected to what he saw as an element of ideological relativism on which détente was predicated. The Kissinger approach was based on a long view of history that held that “Communist China was not all that different from Tsarist Russia, the facts of geography, history, and ancestral culture being far more decisive than the ideas of Marx and Lenin.” Was history so important after all? In complete contrast to Nixon’s, Reagan’s foreign policy was largely—one might even say defiantly—ahistorical. This is what surprised Kissinger more than anything else about the Reagan administration. He described, with some wonderment, how Reagan presided over an “astonishing performance—and, to some academic observers, incomprehensible.” A president who “knew next to no history” and who had “the shallowest academic background,” developed a foreign policy of “extraordinary consistency” and effectiveness. To class Reagan as a neo-conservative would be misleading; he is perhaps better described as a “hard-line romantic.” Nonetheless, there were important points of convergence between neo-conservative discourse and the administration’s foreign policy. A clear statement of intent from the Reagan administration came in January 1981 in the testimony of secretary of state-designate Alexander Haig before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As Soviet spending was outstripping American spending, Haig signaled his desire to break from the arms limitation treaties of the 1970s. While Haig did not last long in office, his choice of language before the committee was significant. It seemed to herald an idealist turn in Republican foreign policy: “An American foreign policy of cynical realpolitik cannot succeed because it leaves no room for the idealism that has characterized us from the inception of our national life,” he stated. Foreign policy was the “ultimate test of our character as a nation.” As ever, statements of intent were not always translated into policy. In fact, in pushing back against some Carter administration policies—in Latin America, for example—the Reaganites actually found themselves reverting to positions that were more characteristic of the Nixon-Ford years. The ambassador to Bolivia, Samuel F. Hart, claimed that within a matter of weeks of Haig’s appointment, the new secretary of state wanted to release him and bring an end to the existing policy—which had been to lean on the military junta to force it to either reform or leave office. Instead, it was felt that Haig wanted to “throw the policy of supporting democracy out the window, and to go back to something approaching a Cold War realpolitik in Latin America.” From the outset, Reagan’s foreign policy juggled these competing instincts. Despite their increasing prominence, the neo-conservatives were not always happy with the direction of policy in the administration. Again, like the realists perhaps, they were hard to satisfy. In a 1986 group profile in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, it was suggested that many of them—including Kristol, Podhoretz, and George Will—were “not policy practitioners by nature; they tend to be conceptualizers, opportunists and pamphleteers.” They were critical of both George P. Shultz (who replaced Secretary Haig in 1982) and even Paul Nitze—notwithstanding his reputation as a hard-liner—for the suggestion that the United States was prepared to engage in a “live and let live” approach to the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, they had “shaped the terms of the political debate” in Washington, even if they did not always get their way on arms control and other issues. Any attempt to put a name on Reaganism is fraught with difficulty then. The notion of a “Reagan doctrine” was put forward by the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer, of the New Republic and Time magazine, to denote the policy of supporting anti-communist movements across the world in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (also, in fact, known as the Kirkpatrick doctrine). In a famous 1986 essay, “The Poverty of Realism,” Krauthammer argued that the goal of American foreign policy was not just security but “the success of liberty.” This meant a foreign policy that was “universal in aspiration” but also “prudent in application.” Like many foreign policy doctrines, the Reagan doctrine seemed more coherent with the benefit of hindsight. In the 2004 Irving Kristol Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, Krauthammer described it as “democratic realism.” Unlike some Reagan partisans, Krauthammer did not reject the American realist tradition at its core—he even praised Hans Morgenthau. Instead, he suggested that Reaganism was the next stage of its evolution. Realism was a “valuable antidote to the woolly internationalism of the 1990s,” but it lacked a fundamental goal. Its basic problem lay in the narrow way in which Morgenthau had defined the national interest. Accoding to Krauthammer, Morgenthau postulated that what drives nations was the will to power. For most Americans, this “might be a correct description of the world—of what motivates other countries—but it cannot be a prescription for America. It cannot be our purpose.” Ultimately, America “cannot and will not live by realpolitik alone.” US foreign policy must be driven by “something beyond power.” In some ways, however, this was a post facto rationalization of Reaganism, viewed through the prism of victory in the Cold War. In fact, if one returns to the mid-1980s, Krauthammer’s version of the Reagan doctrine was much more haphazard and selective. It was less a grand strategy than a posture or an attitude—one in which hard-nosed and unsentimental military and political maneuvers were to be celebrated as proof of virility and power. At the simplest level, it was enough to remind the world that America was as ruthless as it was powerful—that it, too, could play rough with the best of them. Thus, in the midst of the Cold War, Krauthammer was quite willing to celebrate instances of naked realpolitik. In 1985, for example, he praised the administration for its willingness to deal with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, an old enemy, in the Iran-Iraq war. The rapprochement with Iraq showed that Americans “can play as cool a game of Realpolitik as anyone. ... And who can blame us? ... We must take our allies where we find them,” he wrote in the Washington Post. In 1988, when the Iran-Iraq War ended with Saddam in the ascendant, Krauthammer argued that it was time to tilt back toward Iran, and against Saddam, for precisely the same reasons. Iran was “no less odious a place today” than it was during the Iran-Iraq conflict. It was “only more useful,” he wrote. Power projection was the single most important factor in this understanding of foreign policy. It was the old realists who tended to urge restraint and probity. In an article in Foreign Affairs in late 1985, which defended the legacy of the realist tradition from attacks by Reaganites, George Kennan made the familiar point that “in national as in personal affairs the acceptance of one’s limitations is surely one of the first marks of true morality.” Against this was set an interpretation of the national interest in which virility and self-confidence were paramount. What was really at issue here were two contending versions of American nationalism, both born at home and tested abroad. Excerpted from "Realpolitik: A History" by John Bew. Published by Oxford University Press. Copyright 2016 by John Bew. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.In Search of the “Reagan Doctrine” The presidency of Ronald Reagan, which began in January 1981, brought new controversies, and a new set of tropes and doctrines, to the American foreign policy debate. In the first instance, Reaganism took its cue from the critics of détente, such as Paul Nitze, a key advisor, and George P. Shultz, his secretary of state from 1982 to 1989. They stood in a tradition of those who had always had a more overtly hawkish posture on the Cold War, dating back to the 1940s. Added to this was a pronounced skein of ideological anti-communism. This was chiefly, though not exclusively, associated with neo-conservatives, such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol. Also in the Reagan ranks were a number of supporters and staffers of Democratic senator Henry Jackson, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Perle (once a student of Hans Morgenthau). This group rowed in behind the president, feeling that they no longer had a viable home in the Democratic Party. In the 1970s, Commentary magazine had been the main incubator for this loose coalition. It offered both a critique of détente under Nixon and Ford, and of what was seen as a vague and half-committed emphasis on human rights under Carter. Jeane Kirkpatrick, then a professor at Georgetown, declared that a “realistic foreign policy that pursues ‘national interest’ without regard to morality, ultimately founders on its lack of realism about the irreducible human concern with morality.” Her famous essay of November 1979, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” won her the attention of Reagan, who hired her on its strength. It made a distinction between authoritarian regimes and the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. Kirkpatrick argued that the United States should generally promote the liberalization and democratization of other states. That said, it should not do so in a way that destabilized those authoritarian regimes that were friendly to the United States, particularly if this meant that they fell into the hands of communists. This mix of ideological self-confidence and ruthless power politics set the tone for much that came after. It became crucial to the neo-conservative conception of foreign policy. Robert Kagan, who started writing for Commentary as a twenty-two-year old in 1981, defined the approach as one that “combines an idealistic moralism, and even messianism, with a realist’s belief in the importance of power.” Irving Kristol, the figurehead of this group, rejected utopianism and bemoaned the naiveté of the human rights lobby. Yet he also insisted that “Realpolitik a la Disraeli” (Britain’s famously pragmatic Conservative prime minister of 1874–1880) was unthinkable in America. American foreign policy needed more ideological sustenance to sustain itself. Ironically, neo-conservatism shared one striking similarity with postwar American realism. Both held foreign policy to be an indicator of the general state of the nation and the health of the American republic. The two were indivisible. As noted earlier, Kristol had initially been favorable to the “Europeanization” of American foreign policy under Kissinger and Nixon. In part, he viewed this as an antidote to what he saw as the vapid internationalism of the country’s intellectual elite in the 1960s. Yet his despair at the state of the American middle classes took him in a different direction in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In his view, American bourgeois culture had lost some of its moral and religious fiber. A realist foreign policy was a symptom of a broader sickness. It represented the “the vulgar substitution of expedience for principle,” and it had “no part of the American political tradition.” A similar point was made by Jeane Kirkpatrick. She argued that the notion that foreign policy “should be orientated towards balance of power politics, or realpolitik,” was totally alien to the American way of life. It was Norman Podhoretz, a longer-term critic of Nixon’s foreign policy, who claimed to have convinced Kristol to come round to his way of thinking on this issue. For Podhoretz, writing in 1981, the failed war in Vietnam had proved—more than anything else—the hopelessness of pursuing a foreign policy without a convincing moral rationale, behind which the nation could rally. In the 1970s, the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations had robbed the conflict with the Soviet Union of its moral and political dimension. In Podhoretz’s view, this policy was doomed. A “strategy of containment centered on considerations of Realpolitik would be unable to count indefinitely on popular support” and would ultimately head toward isolationism. Podhoretz expanded on this argument in a long review of Kissinger’s White House memoirs, Years of Upheaval, in Commentary in 1982. In Years of Renewal, it is worth noting, Kissinger had actually praised Podhoretz for offering the “subtlest” critique of détente. In return, Podhoretz, like Kristol, expressed his admiration for Kissinger. Nonetheless, he objected to what he saw as an element of ideological relativism on which détente was predicated. The Kissinger approach was based on a long view of history that held that “Communist China was not all that different from Tsarist Russia, the facts of geography, history, and ancestral culture being far more decisive than the ideas of Marx and Lenin.” Was history so important after all? In complete contrast to Nixon’s, Reagan’s foreign policy was largely—one might even say defiantly—ahistorical. This is what surprised Kissinger more than anything else about the Reagan administration. He described, with some wonderment, how Reagan presided over an “astonishing performance—and, to some academic observers, incomprehensible.” A president who “knew next to no history” and who had “the shallowest academic background,” developed a foreign policy of “extraordinary consistency” and effectiveness. To class Reagan as a neo-conservative would be misleading; he is perhaps better described as a “hard-line romantic.” Nonetheless, there were important points of convergence between neo-conservative discourse and the administration’s foreign policy. A clear statement of intent from the Reagan administration came in January 1981 in the testimony of secretary of state-designate Alexander Haig before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As Soviet spending was outstripping American spending, Haig signaled his desire to break from the arms limitation treaties of the 1970s. While Haig did not last long in office, his choice of language before the committee was significant. It seemed to herald an idealist turn in Republican foreign policy: “An American foreign policy of cynical realpolitik cannot succeed because it leaves no room for the idealism that has characterized us from the inception of our national life,” he stated. Foreign policy was the “ultimate test of our character as a nation.” As ever, statements of intent were not always translated into policy. In fact, in pushing back against some Carter administration policies—in Latin America, for example—the Reaganites actually found themselves reverting to positions that were more characteristic of the Nixon-Ford years. The ambassador to Bolivia, Samuel F. Hart, claimed that within a matter of weeks of Haig’s appointment, the new secretary of state wanted to release him and bring an end to the existing policy—which had been to lean on the military junta to force it to either reform or leave office. Instead, it was felt that Haig wanted to “throw the policy of supporting democracy out the window, and to go back to something approaching a Cold War realpolitik in Latin America.” From the outset, Reagan’s foreign policy juggled these competing instincts. Despite their increasing prominence, the neo-conservatives were not always happy with the direction of policy in the administration. Again, like the realists perhaps, they were hard to satisfy. In a 1986 group profile in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, it was suggested that many of them—including Kristol, Podhoretz, and George Will—were “not policy practitioners by nature; they tend to be conceptualizers, opportunists and pamphleteers.” They were critical of both George P. Shultz (who replaced Secretary Haig in 1982) and even Paul Nitze—notwithstanding his reputation as a hard-liner—for the suggestion that the United States was prepared to engage in a “live and let live” approach to the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, they had “shaped the terms of the political debate” in Washington, even if they did not always get their way on arms control and other issues. Any attempt to put a name on Reaganism is fraught with difficulty then. The notion of a “Reagan doctrine” was put forward by the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer, of the New Republic and Time magazine, to denote the policy of supporting anti-communist movements across the world in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (also, in fact, known as the Kirkpatrick doctrine). In a famous 1986 essay, “The Poverty of Realism,” Krauthammer argued that the goal of American foreign policy was not just security but “the success of liberty.” This meant a foreign policy that was “universal in aspiration” but also “prudent in application.” Like many foreign policy doctrines, the Reagan doctrine seemed more coherent with the benefit of hindsight. In the 2004 Irving Kristol Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, Krauthammer described it as “democratic realism.” Unlike some Reagan partisans, Krauthammer did not reject the American realist tradition at its core—he even praised Hans Morgenthau. Instead, he suggested that Reaganism was the next stage of its evolution. Realism was a “valuable antidote to the woolly internationalism of the 1990s,” but it lacked a fundamental goal. Its basic problem lay in the narrow way in which Morgenthau had defined the national interest. Accoding to Krauthammer, Morgenthau postulated that what drives nations was the will to power. For most Americans, this “might be a correct description of the world—of what motivates other countries—but it cannot be a prescription for America. It cannot be our purpose.” Ultimately, America “cannot and will not live by realpolitik alone.” US foreign policy must be driven by “something beyond power.” In some ways, however, this was a post facto rationalization of Reaganism, viewed through the prism of victory in the Cold War. In fact, if one returns to the mid-1980s, Krauthammer’s version of the Reagan doctrine was much more haphazard and selective. It was less a grand strategy than a posture or an attitude—one in which hard-nosed and unsentimental military and political maneuvers were to be celebrated as proof of virility and power. At the simplest level, it was enough to remind the world that America was as ruthless as it was powerful—that it, too, could play rough with the best of them. Thus, in the midst of the Cold War, Krauthammer was quite willing to celebrate instances of naked realpolitik. In 1985, for example, he praised the administration for its willingness to deal with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, an old enemy, in the Iran-Iraq war. The rapprochement with Iraq showed that Americans “can play as cool a game of Realpolitik as anyone. ... And who can blame us? ... We must take our allies where we find them,” he wrote in the Washington Post. In 1988, when the Iran-Iraq War ended with Saddam in the ascendant, Krauthammer argued that it was time to tilt back toward Iran, and against Saddam, for precisely the same reasons. Iran was “no less odious a place today” than it was during the Iran-Iraq conflict. It was “only more useful,” he wrote. Power projection was the single most important factor in this understanding of foreign policy. It was the old realists who tended to urge restraint and probity. In an article in Foreign Affairs in late 1985, which defended the legacy of the realist tradition from attacks by Reaganites, George Kennan made the familiar point that “in national as in personal affairs the acceptance of one’s limitations is surely one of the first marks of true morality.” Against this was set an interpretation of the national interest in which virility and self-confidence were paramount. What was really at issue here were two contending versions of American nationalism, both born at home and tested abroad. Excerpted from "Realpolitik: A History" by John Bew. Published by Oxford University Press. Copyright 2016 by John Bew. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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Did my black life matter?: When I was roughed up in front of my house, I was surprised by who helped — and who didn’t

I was 16 when I had my first run-in with police. I was behind the wheel of my ’85 Mitsubishi Mirage hatchback with my close friend, and crush, Marisa, on the highway on our way back from the beach when a police vehicle sped up behind me, then pulled up next to me, passed me, jumped in front of me, slowed down, sped up, then got behind me again, fired up its lights and pulled me over. Following too closely to another vehicle was the charge. Marisa and I were dumbfounded. Racist asshole, we lamented. I wouldn’t be free of such traffic violations until I sold my car and moved to New York. In New York, I would have a few minor run-ins with police, but none like my most recent. I was in front of my Flatbush, Brooklyn apartment waiting for parking. A space opened up behind me, and I hit the gas in reverse. The floor rug got caught between the pedals and, unable to stop, I scraped the door of a car that stood idling at a fire hydrant. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. Totally to blame, I apologized profusely, over and over again. The woman behind the wheel was in disbelief, which I more than understood. I told her I lived across the street, asked if she was OK, and assured her that I had insurance. I apologized several more times, each apology more sincere than the last. The woman was Caribbean, and she had Pennsylvania plates, a North Carolina driver's license and, when we exchanged phone numbers, a Florida area code. I could tell that she didn’t want to involve insurance, so to move things along, I proposed we handle the matter off the books, leave insurance out of it, if that was what she preferred. She perked up, said she had a friend who was a mechanic down the street. I said OK — it was Sunday and dusky so I thought we’d be in touch and deal with our cars later. No. By down the street, she meant a few houses away, in an abandoned lot, next to a house that had suspiciously burned down months before, where the neighborhood pariah hung out, smoking weed, getting drunk, playing cards and hooting at girls — among other things. I was friendly with most of the guys from the lot and thought nothing of it. They were no different than the guys I knew as a kid growing up in Houston’s notorious 3rd Ward in the early '80s. The woman returned from the lot, walking ahead of a man I assumed was there to help. Instead, the man was hostile, berating and belittling her before irritably telling her to tell me how much she wanted me to pay for the damage. He stormed off, as if she’d wasted his time. “Who’s that?” I asked. Near tears, she said, “My boyfriend.” Together, she and I agreed on a cost — cash that would put me in the red, but whatever. With that she would take her car to a body shop, and if the cost was more, she would provide me with the receipt and I would pay the difference. I returned from the ATM with cash, but within the short time I was gone, everything had changed. Her “boyfriend,” who’d previously blown her off, was now engaged. He said the price we agreed on wouldn’t cut it and asked for more than double. “At least!” I didn’t take him seriously — I couldn’t, it was a scrape — and continued trying to deal with the woman, but the boyfriend shut her out completely, and told me I had to talk to him. “Pay up,” he demanded. I said no, and he and I went back and forth. I refused to budge from the agreed-upon price. “If this is a problem then let’s exchange insurance or call the police to file a report,” I said. Incensed, his eyes widened. He got in my face, just short of touching me, and threatened me: either I pay what he wanted or he would go “get something” for me. He was intimidating as hell, psychotic seeming, but I didn’t back down. “Go get whatever it is you got,” I said, hiding my nerves. “I’m not giving you that much money.” How things escalated so fast, I had no idea, but against his girlfriend’s pleas not to do anything crazy, he marched off toward the lot. “What’s he going to get?” I asked, worried. “I don’t know,” she moaned, both hands clutching the wheel, her head down, upset over what was happening. I wanted to tell her to leave. Her boyfriend returned with two guys, one a young, big guy I recognized from the lot but didn’t know. The other guy was wearing a jacket in the middle of a weeklong heat wave. “Let me hear you talk that police bullshit now,” the man barked, his enforcers behind him. “This is my block!” I told him and his crew that this was my block too, and I pointed across the street to my building, but he didn’t care. “Give me your money,” he demanded. It’s a harsh reality that in low-income neighborhoods like mine, a majority of the violent crimes committed are perpetrated against people of color by people of color. Still, it was a statistic I thought had nothing to do with me, since I was older, fully employed and a family man who wasn’t involved in any social situations that left me prone to street violence — unlike when I was younger and my older brother and I were forced to fight tag-team-style when jumped by our neighborhood bullies for not being joiners. So I couldn’t believe it when I found myself surrounded, on my street, by three men, shouting at me to give them money. Neighbors — women and children included — who’d blessed my golden-haired kids gawked from their porches. Pedestrians slowed down to rubberneck and then, anticipating the worst, went about their business so as not to be witnesses or innocent bystanders. Even the odd-job dude in my building, who, aside from “watching the block,” washed cars — mine included — and painted houses on our street for drinking money, pretended to not know me and stood by, only yards away, watching the entire incident unfold through his bloodshot eyes. The apathy of so many black people infuriated me more than the possibility of my being beat up or killed. I stood my ground for all to see on my street, as the three men knocked me around like Will Smith in the opening of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-air." “Give us the money and this won’t end up so bad,” one said. “You got kids to worry about,” said another, after noticing the car seats in my car. “Let’s show this nigga,” the leader suggested, gripping my wrists as the others held both my arms and attempted to drag me somewhere out of sight, triggering my most primal response: fight or flight. I was scrappy enough to fight them off and get away. I didn’t care that they took my phone and my car insurance; I hurried home, the same way I ran home as a kid to get my brother to come outside and help me deal with boys who were on my tail. Or — after my parents split and my brother went to live with my father, and my mother, baby sister and I fled to the suburbs for better schools — the way I skateboarded at top speed to the Cruz brothers' house for help after being chased by rednecks in our neighborhood for being the only black person there. I blew into my apartment outraged. Instead of my brother, I found my wife, reading bedtime stories to our kids. We called the police, and within minutes an army of police swarmed my street from both directions. Mostly gentrifiers inhabited the front section of our building, and I knew some of them had to have called. Plus, it was Labor Day weekend, which included the West Indian Day Parade, and anyone who knew anything about central Brooklyn knew Flatbush was hot and tense. Already two were dead. I agreed to go to the police precinct to give a statement and look at mug shots. The images of all those young black men, their faces emotionless, eyes hopeless, slouching because their hands were bound by cuffs, broke my heart. I saw guys I knew from the empty lot but not the ones who’d assaulted me. Then again, I was mostly looking away, because, according to the white police officers, the crime committed against me was serious and someone would go to jail. I’d be seen as a “chump” if I let them get away with the crime, one white officer told me. “We can’t do anything without you,” he added. My black life mattered. * My life mattered more to them that it did to the police in Nigeria, where my family is from, which is my measurement for good and bad. Last time I was there, police surrounded my cousin and me, pointed their automatic rifles inches from our faces. All because we refused to pay them the bribe they ordered us to pay when they stopped us at their makeshift checkpoint for no reason other than to collect a bribe. Because I was American, rather than throw me in jail and abuse me, they confiscated my passport until I agreed to pay them. It’s an African diaspora tale I’m constantly asked to write about when dealing with white agents, publishers and film producers. “That is so fascinating,” they’d say, after rejecting the type of stories I preferred to write. “People want to know about that.” The way the NYPD handled my ordeal reminded me of why I loved cops as a kid, considered them crime fighters equal to any comic book superhero. They were why I cherished a photo of my father in his police uniform, taken in swinging '60s Nigeria before the civil war broke out and he was conscripted to take up arms to fight for independence. “More Africa,” I hear white literary gatekeepers salivate. “More, more!” But I don’t want to talk about that. I’m not in Nigeria. I’m here in the USA, in New York, where I finally had to concede that issues of race are just as bad as they are in Texas, or anywhere else. Here in New York, after years of stellar job performance and talk of a raise, I was unexpectedly thrown into a Kafka novel, accused, by what I will call a new administration, of being “threatening” and “intimidating.” I was put on probation. “Channel your inner smile … as a man of color, be more attuned to your tone … This job is your livelihood,” the administration clearly pointed out to me, knowing that I had another child on the way. Feeling I had no other immediate option, I defied the voice that my mother had instilled and nurtured in me and toned down my blackness. I did as my colleagues of color, wary of the powers that be, advised me to do and laid low. In a follow-up meeting with the administration months later, I was honest, vulnerable. I brought up the racism that I’d experienced growing up in the South and the bad feeling I got at work, being made out to be the “scary black guy.” I did my best to articulate a strong feeling I got from people, one I could only describe as an air of “Who is he to tell people what to do?” It was an air black people understood all too well. But the administration was quick to invalidate how I felt, saying that I was delusional to think such a thing, alleging that I didn’t want to own up to my behavior, and that this wasn’t the Deep South where I had to answer, "Yes massa!” Then, as if on cue, Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner lit up the social — and sociopathic — mediasphere. And just like that, as randomly as my life had been turned upside down, I was left alone. Where once I was the only man of color in a supervisory position, a new era of diversity was ushered in, changing the look of my workplace. Practically overnight, my black life mattered. * The day after I was jumped, on Labor Day, hours before the West Indian Day Parade was set to kick off, I packed our car for a day at the beach with family and friends. I didn’t want our friends knowing about what had happened to me the night before. White, thoughtful and liberal-minded, they would have been beside themselves with anger and demanded justice. “That’s not right,” they would have said, but they thought a lot of things weren’t right and did things about it. They changed laws, created jobs, chose diets and dictated etiquette. Their expectation that people adhere to the laws of the road created by them, within their infrastructure, was a level of entitlement that I don’t possess, and that most black Americans I know don’t possess. If there was black entitlement, it didn’t come without an old white guy positioned as middle man. Because I’m a third-world boy at heart, surrounded by people with first-world problems that I can’t really comprehend all the time. Justice in the town my family is from in Nigeria doesn’t come from the police. It comes from the Bakassi Boys, a group of machete-wielding vigilantes who troll the streets and villages of Abia State for those who’ve committed crimes as egregious as, say, robbery. Their style of law enforcement is that they find the perpetrator, who is always a man, they judge him with a witness on hand and condemn him to death by cutting open his gut, letting him bleed out, and then they set the body on fire. The corpse is dropped off in a public place and left to rot under the hot African sun, as pedestrians cover their noses and go about their business. When I was in Nigeria last, I saw a corpse sit for a week in a major shopping area. The smell sticks with me till this day and it’s why I haven’t been back. I hate to admit it, but sometimes during arguments with my wife — who’s white — that I just want to end, I wish that she could smell that smell. I fantasize that after that we would forgive and go back to our most loving place. The complex nuances of my multicultural world are why I decided not to press charges on the guys who jumped me. It turns out that while I was at the precinct, I’d called my wife to give her an update, and she said she’d been trying to contact me. One of the perpetrators had delivered my phone back to our apartment. According to my wife, he was genuinely apologetic, claiming the entire incident was a mistake, and that he didn’t know we lived across the street from him. “Man to man,” he told my wife, he was deeply sorry. He would apologize to me in person soon after. While I didn’t agree with any of what had happened, I felt I had to honor his mea culpa. He apologized and returned what had been taken from me, which, aside from going back in time, was all that I could ask for — I got resolution. I’d leave it to someone else to redirect the rest of the path the young man was on. My brother’s keeper. Entering my building after loading the car, I held the front door open for a neighbor — a white woman — who was on her way out. She thanked me and, halfway through the door, stopped and asked if I was all right. She had a knowing look. Her apartment was located in the front of the building and her windows faced the street. “I’m all right, thank you,” I said. She was out of the building, with her head buried in her phone, avoiding eye contact with the people on our street. I was on my way upstairs when I ran into the odd-job dude, who’d stood by and watched me get jumped. He carried himself as if he was invisible — either by choice or circumstance — and that wasn’t an easy existence. But he had gotten deep under my skin. I despised him as much as I felt sorry for him. I wanted to hit him and I wanted to embrace him. I wanted him to suffer and I wanted to help him. Unable to resist, I asked if he was taking care of the block. Missing my sarcasm, he growled, “Yeah, man.” As I ascended the stairs and he headed back to nowhere, he asked from below, “Say, what happened with you and them fellas last night?” “You tell me,” I replied. “They get your phone?” he asked. Angered, I stumbled down a rabbit hole. A friend of mine had lost her baby after seven months. A Ghanaian man I was friendly with in my building, who’d been granted custody of his three kids after the mother was deemed unfit, lost one from a separate relationship after she was killed by a car that was speeding down her dead-end street while she was playing. The image of the toddler washed up, face down, on the Turkish beach, dead after his family fled persecution in Syria. Then I thought about my son, how he was born upstairs in our bedroom. If the block belonged to anyone, it belonged to him. I thought about the hug my 4-year-old daughter gave me after she saw "Sesame Street Live." The most talkative person I know, she was confounded for words and buried her head in my shoulder, claiming she was too confused with excitement to speak. My heart began to bloom again. “Does that matter?” I asked and continued up the stairs.I was 16 when I had my first run-in with police. I was behind the wheel of my ’85 Mitsubishi Mirage hatchback with my close friend, and crush, Marisa, on the highway on our way back from the beach when a police vehicle sped up behind me, then pulled up next to me, passed me, jumped in front of me, slowed down, sped up, then got behind me again, fired up its lights and pulled me over. Following too closely to another vehicle was the charge. Marisa and I were dumbfounded. Racist asshole, we lamented. I wouldn’t be free of such traffic violations until I sold my car and moved to New York. In New York, I would have a few minor run-ins with police, but none like my most recent. I was in front of my Flatbush, Brooklyn apartment waiting for parking. A space opened up behind me, and I hit the gas in reverse. The floor rug got caught between the pedals and, unable to stop, I scraped the door of a car that stood idling at a fire hydrant. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. Totally to blame, I apologized profusely, over and over again. The woman behind the wheel was in disbelief, which I more than understood. I told her I lived across the street, asked if she was OK, and assured her that I had insurance. I apologized several more times, each apology more sincere than the last. The woman was Caribbean, and she had Pennsylvania plates, a North Carolina driver's license and, when we exchanged phone numbers, a Florida area code. I could tell that she didn’t want to involve insurance, so to move things along, I proposed we handle the matter off the books, leave insurance out of it, if that was what she preferred. She perked up, said she had a friend who was a mechanic down the street. I said OK — it was Sunday and dusky so I thought we’d be in touch and deal with our cars later. No. By down the street, she meant a few houses away, in an abandoned lot, next to a house that had suspiciously burned down months before, where the neighborhood pariah hung out, smoking weed, getting drunk, playing cards and hooting at girls — among other things. I was friendly with most of the guys from the lot and thought nothing of it. They were no different than the guys I knew as a kid growing up in Houston’s notorious 3rd Ward in the early '80s. The woman returned from the lot, walking ahead of a man I assumed was there to help. Instead, the man was hostile, berating and belittling her before irritably telling her to tell me how much she wanted me to pay for the damage. He stormed off, as if she’d wasted his time. “Who’s that?” I asked. Near tears, she said, “My boyfriend.” Together, she and I agreed on a cost — cash that would put me in the red, but whatever. With that she would take her car to a body shop, and if the cost was more, she would provide me with the receipt and I would pay the difference. I returned from the ATM with cash, but within the short time I was gone, everything had changed. Her “boyfriend,” who’d previously blown her off, was now engaged. He said the price we agreed on wouldn’t cut it and asked for more than double. “At least!” I didn’t take him seriously — I couldn’t, it was a scrape — and continued trying to deal with the woman, but the boyfriend shut her out completely, and told me I had to talk to him. “Pay up,” he demanded. I said no, and he and I went back and forth. I refused to budge from the agreed-upon price. “If this is a problem then let’s exchange insurance or call the police to file a report,” I said. Incensed, his eyes widened. He got in my face, just short of touching me, and threatened me: either I pay what he wanted or he would go “get something” for me. He was intimidating as hell, psychotic seeming, but I didn’t back down. “Go get whatever it is you got,” I said, hiding my nerves. “I’m not giving you that much money.” How things escalated so fast, I had no idea, but against his girlfriend’s pleas not to do anything crazy, he marched off toward the lot. “What’s he going to get?” I asked, worried. “I don’t know,” she moaned, both hands clutching the wheel, her head down, upset over what was happening. I wanted to tell her to leave. Her boyfriend returned with two guys, one a young, big guy I recognized from the lot but didn’t know. The other guy was wearing a jacket in the middle of a weeklong heat wave. “Let me hear you talk that police bullshit now,” the man barked, his enforcers behind him. “This is my block!” I told him and his crew that this was my block too, and I pointed across the street to my building, but he didn’t care. “Give me your money,” he demanded. It’s a harsh reality that in low-income neighborhoods like mine, a majority of the violent crimes committed are perpetrated against people of color by people of color. Still, it was a statistic I thought had nothing to do with me, since I was older, fully employed and a family man who wasn’t involved in any social situations that left me prone to street violence — unlike when I was younger and my older brother and I were forced to fight tag-team-style when jumped by our neighborhood bullies for not being joiners. So I couldn’t believe it when I found myself surrounded, on my street, by three men, shouting at me to give them money. Neighbors — women and children included — who’d blessed my golden-haired kids gawked from their porches. Pedestrians slowed down to rubberneck and then, anticipating the worst, went about their business so as not to be witnesses or innocent bystanders. Even the odd-job dude in my building, who, aside from “watching the block,” washed cars — mine included — and painted houses on our street for drinking money, pretended to not know me and stood by, only yards away, watching the entire incident unfold through his bloodshot eyes. The apathy of so many black people infuriated me more than the possibility of my being beat up or killed. I stood my ground for all to see on my street, as the three men knocked me around like Will Smith in the opening of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-air." “Give us the money and this won’t end up so bad,” one said. “You got kids to worry about,” said another, after noticing the car seats in my car. “Let’s show this nigga,” the leader suggested, gripping my wrists as the others held both my arms and attempted to drag me somewhere out of sight, triggering my most primal response: fight or flight. I was scrappy enough to fight them off and get away. I didn’t care that they took my phone and my car insurance; I hurried home, the same way I ran home as a kid to get my brother to come outside and help me deal with boys who were on my tail. Or — after my parents split and my brother went to live with my father, and my mother, baby sister and I fled to the suburbs for better schools — the way I skateboarded at top speed to the Cruz brothers' house for help after being chased by rednecks in our neighborhood for being the only black person there. I blew into my apartment outraged. Instead of my brother, I found my wife, reading bedtime stories to our kids. We called the police, and within minutes an army of police swarmed my street from both directions. Mostly gentrifiers inhabited the front section of our building, and I knew some of them had to have called. Plus, it was Labor Day weekend, which included the West Indian Day Parade, and anyone who knew anything about central Brooklyn knew Flatbush was hot and tense. Already two were dead. I agreed to go to the police precinct to give a statement and look at mug shots. The images of all those young black men, their faces emotionless, eyes hopeless, slouching because their hands were bound by cuffs, broke my heart. I saw guys I knew from the empty lot but not the ones who’d assaulted me. Then again, I was mostly looking away, because, according to the white police officers, the crime committed against me was serious and someone would go to jail. I’d be seen as a “chump” if I let them get away with the crime, one white officer told me. “We can’t do anything without you,” he added. My black life mattered. * My life mattered more to them that it did to the police in Nigeria, where my family is from, which is my measurement for good and bad. Last time I was there, police surrounded my cousin and me, pointed their automatic rifles inches from our faces. All because we refused to pay them the bribe they ordered us to pay when they stopped us at their makeshift checkpoint for no reason other than to collect a bribe. Because I was American, rather than throw me in jail and abuse me, they confiscated my passport until I agreed to pay them. It’s an African diaspora tale I’m constantly asked to write about when dealing with white agents, publishers and film producers. “That is so fascinating,” they’d say, after rejecting the type of stories I preferred to write. “People want to know about that.” The way the NYPD handled my ordeal reminded me of why I loved cops as a kid, considered them crime fighters equal to any comic book superhero. They were why I cherished a photo of my father in his police uniform, taken in swinging '60s Nigeria before the civil war broke out and he was conscripted to take up arms to fight for independence. “More Africa,” I hear white literary gatekeepers salivate. “More, more!” But I don’t want to talk about that. I’m not in Nigeria. I’m here in the USA, in New York, where I finally had to concede that issues of race are just as bad as they are in Texas, or anywhere else. Here in New York, after years of stellar job performance and talk of a raise, I was unexpectedly thrown into a Kafka novel, accused, by what I will call a new administration, of being “threatening” and “intimidating.” I was put on probation. “Channel your inner smile … as a man of color, be more attuned to your tone … This job is your livelihood,” the administration clearly pointed out to me, knowing that I had another child on the way. Feeling I had no other immediate option, I defied the voice that my mother had instilled and nurtured in me and toned down my blackness. I did as my colleagues of color, wary of the powers that be, advised me to do and laid low. In a follow-up meeting with the administration months later, I was honest, vulnerable. I brought up the racism that I’d experienced growing up in the South and the bad feeling I got at work, being made out to be the “scary black guy.” I did my best to articulate a strong feeling I got from people, one I could only describe as an air of “Who is he to tell people what to do?” It was an air black people understood all too well. But the administration was quick to invalidate how I felt, saying that I was delusional to think such a thing, alleging that I didn’t want to own up to my behavior, and that this wasn’t the Deep South where I had to answer, "Yes massa!” Then, as if on cue, Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner lit up the social — and sociopathic — mediasphere. And just like that, as randomly as my life had been turned upside down, I was left alone. Where once I was the only man of color in a supervisory position, a new era of diversity was ushered in, changing the look of my workplace. Practically overnight, my black life mattered. * The day after I was jumped, on Labor Day, hours before the West Indian Day Parade was set to kick off, I packed our car for a day at the beach with family and friends. I didn’t want our friends knowing about what had happened to me the night before. White, thoughtful and liberal-minded, they would have been beside themselves with anger and demanded justice. “That’s not right,” they would have said, but they thought a lot of things weren’t right and did things about it. They changed laws, created jobs, chose diets and dictated etiquette. Their expectation that people adhere to the laws of the road created by them, within their infrastructure, was a level of entitlement that I don’t possess, and that most black Americans I know don’t possess. If there was black entitlement, it didn’t come without an old white guy positioned as middle man. Because I’m a third-world boy at heart, surrounded by people with first-world problems that I can’t really comprehend all the time. Justice in the town my family is from in Nigeria doesn’t come from the police. It comes from the Bakassi Boys, a group of machete-wielding vigilantes who troll the streets and villages of Abia State for those who’ve committed crimes as egregious as, say, robbery. Their style of law enforcement is that they find the perpetrator, who is always a man, they judge him with a witness on hand and condemn him to death by cutting open his gut, letting him bleed out, and then they set the body on fire. The corpse is dropped off in a public place and left to rot under the hot African sun, as pedestrians cover their noses and go about their business. When I was in Nigeria last, I saw a corpse sit for a week in a major shopping area. The smell sticks with me till this day and it’s why I haven’t been back. I hate to admit it, but sometimes during arguments with my wife — who’s white — that I just want to end, I wish that she could smell that smell. I fantasize that after that we would forgive and go back to our most loving place. The complex nuances of my multicultural world are why I decided not to press charges on the guys who jumped me. It turns out that while I was at the precinct, I’d called my wife to give her an update, and she said she’d been trying to contact me. One of the perpetrators had delivered my phone back to our apartment. According to my wife, he was genuinely apologetic, claiming the entire incident was a mistake, and that he didn’t know we lived across the street from him. “Man to man,” he told my wife, he was deeply sorry. He would apologize to me in person soon after. While I didn’t agree with any of what had happened, I felt I had to honor his mea culpa. He apologized and returned what had been taken from me, which, aside from going back in time, was all that I could ask for — I got resolution. I’d leave it to someone else to redirect the rest of the path the young man was on. My brother’s keeper. Entering my building after loading the car, I held the front door open for a neighbor — a white woman — who was on her way out. She thanked me and, halfway through the door, stopped and asked if I was all right. She had a knowing look. Her apartment was located in the front of the building and her windows faced the street. “I’m all right, thank you,” I said. She was out of the building, with her head buried in her phone, avoiding eye contact with the people on our street. I was on my way upstairs when I ran into the odd-job dude, who’d stood by and watched me get jumped. He carried himself as if he was invisible — either by choice or circumstance — and that wasn’t an easy existence. But he had gotten deep under my skin. I despised him as much as I felt sorry for him. I wanted to hit him and I wanted to embrace him. I wanted him to suffer and I wanted to help him. Unable to resist, I asked if he was taking care of the block. Missing my sarcasm, he growled, “Yeah, man.” As I ascended the stairs and he headed back to nowhere, he asked from below, “Say, what happened with you and them fellas last night?” “You tell me,” I replied. “They get your phone?” he asked. Angered, I stumbled down a rabbit hole. A friend of mine had lost her baby after seven months. A Ghanaian man I was friendly with in my building, who’d been granted custody of his three kids after the mother was deemed unfit, lost one from a separate relationship after she was killed by a car that was speeding down her dead-end street while she was playing. The image of the toddler washed up, face down, on the Turkish beach, dead after his family fled persecution in Syria. Then I thought about my son, how he was born upstairs in our bedroom. If the block belonged to anyone, it belonged to him. I thought about the hug my 4-year-old daughter gave me after she saw "Sesame Street Live." The most talkative person I know, she was confounded for words and buried her head in my shoulder, claiming she was too confused with excitement to speak. My heart began to bloom again. “Does that matter?” I asked and continued up the stairs.

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Let’s call everyone “they”: Gender-neutral language should be the norm, not the exception

This weekend, the New York Times made headlines. A story, titled “Where Radical Is Sensible,” profiled a Manhattan activist center, and spurred a broader conversation about gender neutral pronouns. “Mx. Hardwick, 27, who prefers not to be assigned a gender — and also insists on the gender neutral Mx. in place of Ms. or Mr.,” the piece read, consistently referring to “Mx. Hardwick” throughout. Though the move was touted as something of a victory, perhaps signaling broader acceptance of gender neutral language, the profile seemed to imply the opposite, linking Hardwick's gender neutrality with the store's “radicalism.” More jarring was the clarification. It was understandable that the Times found it necessary to define the honorific “Mx.” for readers unfamiliar with the term. But it was bizarre that the paper attributed the editorial decision to Hardwick's “preference,” or, for that matter, felt the need to explain it at all. The Times went out of its way to make clear that it would have assigned Hardwick a gender but for the subject's insistence otherwise. It's hard to imagine the paper of record including similar clarifications about other features. A recent

What really wiped out the dinosaurs: “It’s only when you have large aggregations of dark matter that it can have this enormous effect”

For years now, we’ve assumed that sixty-some million years ago, a comet or asteroid crashed to earth, landing near what is now the Yucatan, creating a huge earthquake kicking up enough an enormous amount of debris, and wiping out the dinosaurs and other large creatures. Lisa Randall, a Harvard cosmologist, speculates that the comet did not act alone: That a disc of dark matter at the heart of the galaxy knocked the comet out of orbit and sent it on its path toward the earth. The solar system’s orbit through the Milky Way allowed this disc to trigger comet strikes every 30-35 million years — which coincides with periodic waves of extinctions on earth. But what is dark matter and why does it have anything to do with us? Randall explains how this might have worked — complete with charts — in “Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe.” “A good theory is an act of the informed imagination — it reaches toward the unknown while grounded in the firmest foundations of the known,” Maria Popova wrote of Randall’s book in The New York Times Sunday Book Review. “If correct, Randall’s theory would require us to radically reappraise some of our most fundamental assumptions about the universe and our own existence.” We spoke to Randall from New York City. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. So you were concerned with the density of dark matter, and gave a lecture about your research. How did you end up dealing with the dinosaurs? I was giving a talk in Arizona, and [physicist] Paul Davies said, “So is this what was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs?” Or something of that nature. I had no idea what he was talking about. But then he told me about the weak evidence for periodicity that’s in the crater record. What it really boiled down to is — is there something in our galactic environment that could trigger periodic meteor strikes? There’s some marginal evidence that large-impact craters occur on a periodic basis — between 30 and 35 million years. Small stuff hits all the time. But the question is whether, with large stuff, there’s something predictive there — that it’s not just random. The suggestion for this is the Oort Cloud. Thousands of times farther away than Earth is from the sun, is a bunch of icy bodies that are very weakly bound … They are so far from the sun that its gravitational force keeps them in a weakly-bound orbit. And they turn into long-period comets. Sometimes their paths get so distorted that they enter the inner solar system. And sometimes, if you have some kick, it might go out of the orbit altogether. So the question becomes, "What could trigger comet strikes — the dislodging of objects — on a periodic basis?" Other people had tried to answer this question. But nothing on the ordinary matter sector seemed to work. But if there is this dark disc, as the solar system goes around the Milky Way, it also bobs up and down, along the galactic plane … How often it does that has to do with what’s in the galactic plane, because that’s the force that makes [the solar system] go up and down. Without dark matter, it would do it every 55 or 60 million years — much too slowly. But if there is dark matter, it would happen much more quickly ... The idea is that [the solar system] goes through this dark disc, and that would trigger comet strikes. So the comet would be already going through the solar system, but it’s this dark-matter disc that would send it our way ... That would send it out of its orbit. Some of them would go outside the solar system altogether. Some of them would go hurtling toward the inner solar system, where it could hit the earth. Let’s talk about dark matter for a minute. It’s sort of an unfortunate name, isn’t it? I think so. It’s dark in the sense of being obscure. But dark stuff we see, because it absorbs light. That’s why I prefer the term “transparent matter.” But there’s nothing really evil about dark matter. No — as far as our daily lives, it’s fairly impotent. It’s only when you have large aggregations of dark matter that it can have this enormous effect. In the history of the universe, it’s had beneficial effects: It’s what allowed objects the size of the galaxies to form ... We wouldn’t be talking about this if dark matter had not been around. So we can’t see dark matter because light doesn’t reflect off it, but it exerts a gravitational force … Exactly — dark matter interacts with gravity like any other form of matter, but it doesn’t interact with light. And it carries five times the energy [of ordinary matter.] A lot of people get upset about this idea — "Why should there be all this stuff we don’t see?" But I find it remarkable that ordinary matter is as large a fraction of the universe as it is. Why is that surprising? Well, why should it be? It could have been anything; it could have been one-one-trillionth. The fact that the amount of dark matter and ordinary matter are comparable maybe has some significance that might help us figure out what dark matter actually is. There’s a line early in your book that I really like, where you say, “The big lesson of physics over centuries is how much is hidden from our view.” Tell us what you mean by that. Well, almost the definition of science is it’s telling us the things that are not obvious to us: If they were obvious we’d know them already. As technology has advanced, we’re able to explore both larger and smaller scales. If you think about it, even something as basic as the atom: You can say the Greeks hypothesized atoms, but they had no idea. They were supposed to be eternal, never-changing objects. The way we found out about atoms is precisely because they change, because they are not fundamental objects — that they are broken down into nuclei and electrons. And if you think about it, we only knew about atoms at the turn of the last century. That’s because we don’t see them … All of this is hidden from of view. And things on the outer edges of the solar system are also hidden from our view. And the earliest galaxies — we’re only beginning to see them. So there’s a lot that’s beyond our immediate vision, and it takes technology to get there. One of the things I came away from your book with is that scientists, even the most informed and erudite, don’t know the answers to a lot of the most basic questions of the universe … I think for me the sign of true wisdom is being able to say, “I don’t know” when they don’t know. People who feel they have to say they know everything are typically not as bright. What distinguishes scientists is the ability to make advances in these questions: We don’t know the answer, how are we going to go about figuring it out? I guess a lot of what you do is necessarily speculative. In some ways these are, at least in part, thought experiments? Yeah — I don’t like that word. I know the Times review said that. You can call it that, but really, that’s what science is: You make hypotheses and you test them. Sometimes the data tells you the answer. But a lot of the time, with these really difficult experiments, where it’s really hard to observe things, you really need hypotheses, because you just won’t see things unless you’re looking for them. There are all these psychology experiments — the elephant on the basketball court. If you don’t know to look for it, you miss it. As I tried to make really clear in the book, this theory is speculative. It’s not my point, or the point of the book, to force people to believe it. It’s more a question of seeing how it ties together — how you can use this to show how what we know about the universe ties together. I learned a lot on this project — it was fun to share. This theory forces us to look at the things we think we do understand more carefully. By having a target, you get a more precise sense of what’s actually there.For years now, we’ve assumed that sixty-some million years ago, a comet or asteroid crashed to earth, landing near what is now the Yucatan, creating a huge earthquake kicking up enough an enormous amount of debris, and wiping out the dinosaurs and other large creatures. Lisa Randall, a Harvard cosmologist, speculates that the comet did not act alone: That a disc of dark matter at the heart of the galaxy knocked the comet out of orbit and sent it on its path toward the earth. The solar system’s orbit through the Milky Way allowed this disc to trigger comet strikes every 30-35 million years — which coincides with periodic waves of extinctions on earth. But what is dark matter and why does it have anything to do with us? Randall explains how this might have worked — complete with charts — in “Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe.” “A good theory is an act of the informed imagination — it reaches toward the unknown while grounded in the firmest foundations of the known,” Maria Popova wrote of Randall’s book in The New York Times Sunday Book Review. “If correct, Randall’s theory would require us to radically reappraise some of our most fundamental assumptions about the universe and our own existence.” We spoke to Randall from New York City. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. So you were concerned with the density of dark matter, and gave a lecture about your research. How did you end up dealing with the dinosaurs? I was giving a talk in Arizona, and [physicist] Paul Davies said, “So is this what was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs?” Or something of that nature. I had no idea what he was talking about. But then he told me about the weak evidence for periodicity that’s in the crater record. What it really boiled down to is — is there something in our galactic environment that could trigger periodic meteor strikes? There’s some marginal evidence that large-impact craters occur on a periodic basis — between 30 and 35 million years. Small stuff hits all the time. But the question is whether, with large stuff, there’s something predictive there — that it’s not just random. The suggestion for this is the Oort Cloud. Thousands of times farther away than Earth is from the sun, is a bunch of icy bodies that are very weakly bound … They are so far from the sun that its gravitational force keeps them in a weakly-bound orbit. And they turn into long-period comets. Sometimes their paths get so distorted that they enter the inner solar system. And sometimes, if you have some kick, it might go out of the orbit altogether. So the question becomes, "What could trigger comet strikes — the dislodging of objects — on a periodic basis?" Other people had tried to answer this question. But nothing on the ordinary matter sector seemed to work. But if there is this dark disc, as the solar system goes around the Milky Way, it also bobs up and down, along the galactic plane … How often it does that has to do with what’s in the galactic plane, because that’s the force that makes [the solar system] go up and down. Without dark matter, it would do it every 55 or 60 million years — much too slowly. But if there is dark matter, it would happen much more quickly ... The idea is that [the solar system] goes through this dark disc, and that would trigger comet strikes. So the comet would be already going through the solar system, but it’s this dark-matter disc that would send it our way ... That would send it out of its orbit. Some of them would go outside the solar system altogether. Some of them would go hurtling toward the inner solar system, where it could hit the earth. Let’s talk about dark matter for a minute. It’s sort of an unfortunate name, isn’t it? I think so. It’s dark in the sense of being obscure. But dark stuff we see, because it absorbs light. That’s why I prefer the term “transparent matter.” But there’s nothing really evil about dark matter. No — as far as our daily lives, it’s fairly impotent. It’s only when you have large aggregations of dark matter that it can have this enormous effect. In the history of the universe, it’s had beneficial effects: It’s what allowed objects the size of the galaxies to form ... We wouldn’t be talking about this if dark matter had not been around. So we can’t see dark matter because light doesn’t reflect off it, but it exerts a gravitational force … Exactly — dark matter interacts with gravity like any other form of matter, but it doesn’t interact with light. And it carries five times the energy [of ordinary matter.] A lot of people get upset about this idea — "Why should there be all this stuff we don’t see?" But I find it remarkable that ordinary matter is as large a fraction of the universe as it is. Why is that surprising? Well, why should it be? It could have been anything; it could have been one-one-trillionth. The fact that the amount of dark matter and ordinary matter are comparable maybe has some significance that might help us figure out what dark matter actually is. There’s a line early in your book that I really like, where you say, “The big lesson of physics over centuries is how much is hidden from our view.” Tell us what you mean by that. Well, almost the definition of science is it’s telling us the things that are not obvious to us: If they were obvious we’d know them already. As technology has advanced, we’re able to explore both larger and smaller scales. If you think about it, even something as basic as the atom: You can say the Greeks hypothesized atoms, but they had no idea. They were supposed to be eternal, never-changing objects. The way we found out about atoms is precisely because they change, because they are not fundamental objects — that they are broken down into nuclei and electrons. And if you think about it, we only knew about atoms at the turn of the last century. That’s because we don’t see them … All of this is hidden from of view. And things on the outer edges of the solar system are also hidden from our view. And the earliest galaxies — we’re only beginning to see them. So there’s a lot that’s beyond our immediate vision, and it takes technology to get there. One of the things I came away from your book with is that scientists, even the most informed and erudite, don’t know the answers to a lot of the most basic questions of the universe … I think for me the sign of true wisdom is being able to say, “I don’t know” when they don’t know. People who feel they have to say they know everything are typically not as bright. What distinguishes scientists is the ability to make advances in these questions: We don’t know the answer, how are we going to go about figuring it out? I guess a lot of what you do is necessarily speculative. In some ways these are, at least in part, thought experiments? Yeah — I don’t like that word. I know the Times review said that. You can call it that, but really, that’s what science is: You make hypotheses and you test them. Sometimes the data tells you the answer. But a lot of the time, with these really difficult experiments, where it’s really hard to observe things, you really need hypotheses, because you just won’t see things unless you’re looking for them. There are all these psychology experiments — the elephant on the basketball court. If you don’t know to look for it, you miss it. As I tried to make really clear in the book, this theory is speculative. It’s not my point, or the point of the book, to force people to believe it. It’s more a question of seeing how it ties together — how you can use this to show how what we know about the universe ties together. I learned a lot on this project — it was fun to share. This theory forces us to look at the things we think we do understand more carefully. By having a target, you get a more precise sense of what’s actually there.

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Fracking is still not the answer: Gas will not solve the climate-warming problem

"When you’ve got nowhere to turn, turn on the gas." Anonymous One of the great geological controversies of centuries past was the battle between the Plutonists and Neptunists over the origins of Earth’s surface. The Plutonists, who had Thomas Huxley on their side, asserted that rocks such as basalt and granite erupted in a molten state from deep within Earth, and that the other rock types, such as sandstone and slate, were derived from their breakdown and re-deposition as silt and mud. The Neptunists, who counted Goethe among their number, believed that Earth was originally covered in ocean, and that all rocks were formed as deposits on the floor of the ancient seas. By the mid-nineteenth century the matter had been all but settled in the Plutonists’ favour. But then in 1912, Randolph Kirkpatrick, a curator of corals at the Natural History Museum in London, published a bombshell which re-ignited the debate. In his book "The Nummulosphere," Kirkpatrick argued that the entire planet consisted of fossilised fragments of extinct foraminifera of the genus Nummulites. Foraminifera are amoeba-like organisms that live in the sea. Their supposedly universal distribution in rocks of all types was, Kirkpatrick argued, clear proof that the Neptunists were correct. Kirkpatrick’s idea is not as entirely as crackbrained as it sounds. He had noticed that the Egyptian pyramids were made of Nummulites’ skeletons similar in size and shape to a dime (nummulite being derived from a Latin word meaning little coin). In fact Nummulite fossils abound in rocks across vast swathes of Asia, north Africa and Europe. But Kirkpatrick claimed that he could see them in basalts and granites as well—rocks in which no fossils had ever been found. Many a scientist, after spending thousands of hours peering down a microscope at some repeated shape, is familiar with the phenomenon of seeing that shape ad nauseam on blank walls, and endlessly in dreams. Perhaps this is what happened to Kirkpatrick. Strangely enough, one of Kirkpatrick’s colleagues, Otto Hahn—a German lawyer turned Swedenborgian and amateur petrologist—had been staring at other things. He claimed that all the world’s rocks were in fact formed from the fossilised remnants of an ur-forest of algae. In accordance with his Swedenborgian beliefs, he asserted that algal fossils were present in meteorites, so the ancient algal forests must have originated in outer space. Among the tiny filaments of the fossil algae, Hahn said he spied the remains of a minute triple-jawed worm. This he named Titanus bismarcki, in honour of the German Chancellor. Kirkpatrick was irritated both by the name and the challenge to his theory. But soon, the whole scientific storm in a teacup was forgotten, and the Plutonists again reigned supreme. I sometimes think of Kirkpatrick and Hahn when I read the works of economists, business leaders and politicians as they discuss the future of gas. We often see what we want to see, and nowhere is this more evident than among analysts and investors who believe that gas is our energy future. Until the plunging oil price distracted analysts, the debate about gas played out endlessly in the financial pages of the world’s newspapers. The extraordinary boom in the shale gas industry, beginning around 2000, seemed to open endless possibilities. Will gas replace coal? Will oil from shale gas extend the fossil fuel era for transport? And will cheap gas delay the adoption of renewables in energy generation? Shale gas already accounts for 40 per cent of US natural gas production and 29 per cent of oil. As of 2014, most shale gas reserves were being drilled in the US. The sale of condensates alone provides a profit when the resource is exploited, so the gas can then be sold for next to nothing. This cheap gas has not only driven coal from the market, but helped rejuvenate the American economy, laying the basis for energy independence and the return to the US of large-scale chemical and manufacturing industries that had been moving offshore for decades. But the question of how big the future of gas might be remains. In the early 2000s, at the start of the shale gas boom, gas was seen as a temporary energy bridge to a renewables-based future. Yet some analysts now believe that gas is here to stay. Oxford University’s Dieter Helm, for one, sees a huge future for gas. In his 2012 book "The Carbon Crunch" he argues that gas will provide a bridge to a distant renewables future that is at least decades away. His basic message is that gas will remain cheap and abundant in many parts of the world, while renewables such as wind and solar will remain expensive and constrained by their intermittent nature. New energy technologies are developing so fast that it’s already possible to test some of Helm’s claims. First, is ‘tight’ gas (gas that typically requires fracking or a similar intervention to recover, of which shale gas is one type) widely available, and will it stay cheap? Wells drilled to exploit shale gas remain productive for only one to three years. The regular drilling of new wells adds to cost. Then there is the impact of the slump in oil prices, paradoxically created in part by fracking. As we’ve seen, it may threaten some fracking, and thus the expansion of production of this kind of gas. In addition, public resistance to fracking, particularly outside the US, has stalled the industry in several areas. Then there are the unanticipated outcomes. In October 2014, the price of gas in Queensland (most of which is ‘tight’ gas from coal-seams) was close to zero. That’s because the industry was in the ‘ramp-up phase.’ It had production, but no capacity, as yet, to export its product. You would think that companies in this situation would simply turn off their production. But that has proven impossible to do because the wells flood and cannot be restarted. It’s a surprise that will cost many millions of dollars, as otherwise useable gas is flared off or vented. So, while gas continues to boom, unanticipated problems are beginning to manifest themselves, dampening to some extent Helm’s enthusiasm. When it comes to renewables, the problems with Helm’s predictions are even clearer. Helm seems to hate wind turbines as a blot on the landscape. And wind power, he says, is hopelessly uneconomical, with little prospect for any significant cost reductions or technological innovation. Yet in 2014 the world invested US$310 billion on installing clean energy, including a record $99.5 billion for wind, owing to several ‘mega’ onshore and offshore wind projects. In 2004 the world was spending just US$60 billion overall on clean energy. Investments have grown fivefold in a decade. As we shall see when we examine the renewable energy industry, not only have innovation and cost reduction occurred on a massive scale in the wind industry, but they are accelerating sharply. According to Helm, solar is hopelessly expensive. But its cost has dropped, on average, to about twice that of coal, and in areas with good sunlight resources it is already cost-competitive with coal. Solar is anticipated by some to be globally competitive with coal by 2020. Those aware of the advances in clean technology have a different take from Helm, and are much less optimistic on the fracking craze. Dr Jiang Kejun, director of the Energy Research Institute/National Development and Reform Commission (ERI/NDRC), China, believes that the rush to gas is all about getting it out of the ground before it becomes uncompetitive with renewables. It’s not a view often heard in the US, but gas and renewables are already competing in the marketplace, and the most cost-effective technology will ultimately prevail. So, is gas our bridge to the future? A spate of recent analyses predictably come up with different answers. Ezra Levant’s "Groundswell: The Case for Fracking" is an unapologetic glorification of gas, arguing that fracking is the most important innovation of the twenty-first century. Levant reveals that fracking has economic, geopolitical, environmental and patriotic aspects—which makes it complicated to evaluate objectively. One attempt at a more objective approach is Bill Powers’ "Cold, Hungry and in the Dark: Exploding the Natural Gas Myth Supply." Using a detailed analysis of gas-well performance, he argues that US gas is headed for a ‘deliverability crisis’ by 2015. In other words, there will be a gas shortage. But, whatever its immediate or even medium-term future, there’s no doubt that gas is having a significant impact right now. A big enough impact, in fact, to cause some to doubt the short-term future of renewables. As David Crane, President of NRG Energy, which builds both gas and renewable power plants, said, ‘cheap gas has definitely made it harder to compete’, adding that only with renewable energy subsidies were companies able to propose wind projects below the price of gas. But continuous improvements in renewables are closing the gap, according to a panel of researchers at the Windpower 2014 conference:

Advances in materials have allowed the design of longer turbine blades and rotors that can operate efficiently at lower wind speeds. Since 2012, a ‘massive proliferation’ of these turbines has driven average capacity factor increases up by 10 per cent at every level of wind resource. As a result of these advances, costs are falling; preliminary data shows that the average 2013 power purchase agreement was at $0.021 per kilowatt-hour.

The economics of wind and gas are complex. Both have a global average cost of about US$84 a megawatt hour of generation capacity to install, excluding subsidies, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That’s 3 per cent higher than the cost of a coal-fired power plant, and about half that of a nuclear reactor if government takes on the insurance and other risks. In the US, federal subsidies for wind are worth US$23 per megawatt. But gas projects can take advantage of complex taxation arrangements, known as ‘master limited partnerships’, that allow pipeline operators to pay less income tax. This effectively acts as a subsidy, which helps drive down the cost of gas. The economics of both wind and gas are affected by geography. The best wind resources in the US are in south Texas, where wind farms can be built for US$60 a megawatt hour, which is less than the $65 price of a high-efficiency gas turbine, according to New Energy Finance. But there are hundreds of other variables that help determine whether a utility invests in gas or wind. And there are other players. For example, in April 2014, Austin Energy, Texas, signed a 25-year purchase agreement contract with a 150-megawatt solar plant. The cost? Less than 5 cents per kilowatt hour. As one analyst reflected:

The price reflects the benefit of the federal investment tax credit, but even without the credit the price would be 7 to 7.5 cents/kWh—still competitive with the utility’s cost estimates for power from natural gas (7 cents), and well below the cost of coal (10 cents) and nuclear (13 cents) power.

Without the tax credits, you might argue, Austin Energy would have signed up with a gas plant. After all, gas is half a cent cheaper. But there are good reasons for believing that solar represents a better deal, not least of which is the fact that solar runs on a zero-cost fuel stock. The gas market is notoriously volatile, and almost every analyst involved in the sector believes that costs will increase in the future. Overall, in much of the US, in the short term at least, gas seems to have the economic advantage. Yet not all agree that the current situation is sustainable. Jeremy Leggett, green energy entrepreneur, notes that:

Outside the US, shale gas is an increasingly contentious issue, and that is slowing its development. Much of Western Europe, for example, looks set to reject the industry. In Australia some states have rejected it, while others have embraced it. China hopes for great things from it, but has made little progress exploiting it. Almost everywhere, farmers fear its impact on ground water. And, among younger people, there’s a widespread perception that shale gas is ‘fossil fuel-lite’—but still a fossil fuel—and so something they don’t want.

Will the boom in gas make climate change better or worse? A recent study, using complex models, found that ‘market-driven increases in global supplies of unconventional natural gas do not discernibly reduce the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions or future climate change.’ In other words, gas is definitely not going to solve the climate problem. The models assume that the consumption of gas will have increased by up to 170 per cent by 2050. This might result in global greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 decreasing from what might otherwise have occurred, by 2 per cent at most. Or it might see them increase by up to 11 per cent. So, whatever else is claimed for it, we know that the gas boom will not alter our current trajectory from its worst-case scenario progress towards catastrophic warming. Excerpted from "Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis" by Tim Flannery. Published by Atlantic Monthly Press. Copyright 2015 by Tim Flannery. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved."When you’ve got nowhere to turn, turn on the gas." Anonymous One of the great geological controversies of centuries past was the battle between the Plutonists and Neptunists over the origins of Earth’s surface. The Plutonists, who had Thomas Huxley on their side, asserted that rocks such as basalt and granite erupted in a molten state from deep within Earth, and that the other rock types, such as sandstone and slate, were derived from their breakdown and re-deposition as silt and mud. The Neptunists, who counted Goethe among their number, believed that Earth was originally covered in ocean, and that all rocks were formed as deposits on the floor of the ancient seas. By the mid-nineteenth century the matter had been all but settled in the Plutonists’ favour. But then in 1912, Randolph Kirkpatrick, a curator of corals at the Natural History Museum in London, published a bombshell which re-ignited the debate. In his book "The Nummulosphere," Kirkpatrick argued that the entire planet consisted of fossilised fragments of extinct foraminifera of the genus Nummulites. Foraminifera are amoeba-like organisms that live in the sea. Their supposedly universal distribution in rocks of all types was, Kirkpatrick argued, clear proof that the Neptunists were correct. Kirkpatrick’s idea is not as entirely as crackbrained as it sounds. He had noticed that the Egyptian pyramids were made of Nummulites’ skeletons similar in size and shape to a dime (nummulite being derived from a Latin word meaning little coin). In fact Nummulite fossils abound in rocks across vast swathes of Asia, north Africa and Europe. But Kirkpatrick claimed that he could see them in basalts and granites as well—rocks in which no fossils had ever been found. Many a scientist, after spending thousands of hours peering down a microscope at some repeated shape, is familiar with the phenomenon of seeing that shape ad nauseam on blank walls, and endlessly in dreams. Perhaps this is what happened to Kirkpatrick. Strangely enough, one of Kirkpatrick’s colleagues, Otto Hahn—a German lawyer turned Swedenborgian and amateur petrologist—had been staring at other things. He claimed that all the world’s rocks were in fact formed from the fossilised remnants of an ur-forest of algae. In accordance with his Swedenborgian beliefs, he asserted that algal fossils were present in meteorites, so the ancient algal forests must have originated in outer space. Among the tiny filaments of the fossil algae, Hahn said he spied the remains of a minute triple-jawed worm. This he named Titanus bismarcki, in honour of the German Chancellor. Kirkpatrick was irritated both by the name and the challenge to his theory. But soon, the whole scientific storm in a teacup was forgotten, and the Plutonists again reigned supreme. I sometimes think of Kirkpatrick and Hahn when I read the works of economists, business leaders and politicians as they discuss the future of gas. We often see what we want to see, and nowhere is this more evident than among analysts and investors who believe that gas is our energy future. Until the plunging oil price distracted analysts, the debate about gas played out endlessly in the financial pages of the world’s newspapers. The extraordinary boom in the shale gas industry, beginning around 2000, seemed to open endless possibilities. Will gas replace coal? Will oil from shale gas extend the fossil fuel era for transport? And will cheap gas delay the adoption of renewables in energy generation? Shale gas already accounts for 40 per cent of US natural gas production and 29 per cent of oil. As of 2014, most shale gas reserves were being drilled in the US. The sale of condensates alone provides a profit when the resource is exploited, so the gas can then be sold for next to nothing. This cheap gas has not only driven coal from the market, but helped rejuvenate the American economy, laying the basis for energy independence and the return to the US of large-scale chemical and manufacturing industries that had been moving offshore for decades. But the question of how big the future of gas might be remains. In the early 2000s, at the start of the shale gas boom, gas was seen as a temporary energy bridge to a renewables-based future. Yet some analysts now believe that gas is here to stay. Oxford University’s Dieter Helm, for one, sees a huge future for gas. In his 2012 book "The Carbon Crunch" he argues that gas will provide a bridge to a distant renewables future that is at least decades away. His basic message is that gas will remain cheap and abundant in many parts of the world, while renewables such as wind and solar will remain expensive and constrained by their intermittent nature. New energy technologies are developing so fast that it’s already possible to test some of Helm’s claims. First, is ‘tight’ gas (gas that typically requires fracking or a similar intervention to recover, of which shale gas is one type) widely available, and will it stay cheap? Wells drilled to exploit shale gas remain productive for only one to three years. The regular drilling of new wells adds to cost. Then there is the impact of the slump in oil prices, paradoxically created in part by fracking. As we’ve seen, it may threaten some fracking, and thus the expansion of production of this kind of gas. In addition, public resistance to fracking, particularly outside the US, has stalled the industry in several areas. Then there are the unanticipated outcomes. In October 2014, the price of gas in Queensland (most of which is ‘tight’ gas from coal-seams) was close to zero. That’s because the industry was in the ‘ramp-up phase.’ It had production, but no capacity, as yet, to export its product. You would think that companies in this situation would simply turn off their production. But that has proven impossible to do because the wells flood and cannot be restarted. It’s a surprise that will cost many millions of dollars, as otherwise useable gas is flared off or vented. So, while gas continues to boom, unanticipated problems are beginning to manifest themselves, dampening to some extent Helm’s enthusiasm. When it comes to renewables, the problems with Helm’s predictions are even clearer. Helm seems to hate wind turbines as a blot on the landscape. And wind power, he says, is hopelessly uneconomical, with little prospect for any significant cost reductions or technological innovation. Yet in 2014 the world invested US$310 billion on installing clean energy, including a record $99.5 billion for wind, owing to several ‘mega’ onshore and offshore wind projects. In 2004 the world was spending just US$60 billion overall on clean energy. Investments have grown fivefold in a decade. As we shall see when we examine the renewable energy industry, not only have innovation and cost reduction occurred on a massive scale in the wind industry, but they are accelerating sharply. According to Helm, solar is hopelessly expensive. But its cost has dropped, on average, to about twice that of coal, and in areas with good sunlight resources it is already cost-competitive with coal. Solar is anticipated by some to be globally competitive with coal by 2020. Those aware of the advances in clean technology have a different take from Helm, and are much less optimistic on the fracking craze. Dr Jiang Kejun, director of the Energy Research Institute/National Development and Reform Commission (ERI/NDRC), China, believes that the rush to gas is all about getting it out of the ground before it becomes uncompetitive with renewables. It’s not a view often heard in the US, but gas and renewables are already competing in the marketplace, and the most cost-effective technology will ultimately prevail. So, is gas our bridge to the future? A spate of recent analyses predictably come up with different answers. Ezra Levant’s "Groundswell: The Case for Fracking" is an unapologetic glorification of gas, arguing that fracking is the most important innovation of the twenty-first century. Levant reveals that fracking has economic, geopolitical, environmental and patriotic aspects—which makes it complicated to evaluate objectively. One attempt at a more objective approach is Bill Powers’ "Cold, Hungry and in the Dark: Exploding the Natural Gas Myth Supply." Using a detailed analysis of gas-well performance, he argues that US gas is headed for a ‘deliverability crisis’ by 2015. In other words, there will be a gas shortage. But, whatever its immediate or even medium-term future, there’s no doubt that gas is having a significant impact right now. A big enough impact, in fact, to cause some to doubt the short-term future of renewables. As David Crane, President of NRG Energy, which builds both gas and renewable power plants, said, ‘cheap gas has definitely made it harder to compete’, adding that only with renewable energy subsidies were companies able to propose wind projects below the price of gas. But continuous improvements in renewables are closing the gap, according to a panel of researchers at the Windpower 2014 conference:

Advances in materials have allowed the design of longer turbine blades and rotors that can operate efficiently at lower wind speeds. Since 2012, a ‘massive proliferation’ of these turbines has driven average capacity factor increases up by 10 per cent at every level of wind resource. As a result of these advances, costs are falling; preliminary data shows that the average 2013 power purchase agreement was at $0.021 per kilowatt-hour.

The economics of wind and gas are complex. Both have a global average cost of about US$84 a megawatt hour of generation capacity to install, excluding subsidies, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That’s 3 per cent higher than the cost of a coal-fired power plant, and about half that of a nuclear reactor if government takes on the insurance and other risks. In the US, federal subsidies for wind are worth US$23 per megawatt. But gas projects can take advantage of complex taxation arrangements, known as ‘master limited partnerships’, that allow pipeline operators to pay less income tax. This effectively acts as a subsidy, which helps drive down the cost of gas. The economics of both wind and gas are affected by geography. The best wind resources in the US are in south Texas, where wind farms can be built for US$60 a megawatt hour, which is less than the $65 price of a high-efficiency gas turbine, according to New Energy Finance. But there are hundreds of other variables that help determine whether a utility invests in gas or wind. And there are other players. For example, in April 2014, Austin Energy, Texas, signed a 25-year purchase agreement contract with a 150-megawatt solar plant. The cost? Less than 5 cents per kilowatt hour. As one analyst reflected:

The price reflects the benefit of the federal investment tax credit, but even without the credit the price would be 7 to 7.5 cents/kWh—still competitive with the utility’s cost estimates for power from natural gas (7 cents), and well below the cost of coal (10 cents) and nuclear (13 cents) power.

Without the tax credits, you might argue, Austin Energy would have signed up with a gas plant. After all, gas is half a cent cheaper. But there are good reasons for believing that solar represents a better deal, not least of which is the fact that solar runs on a zero-cost fuel stock. The gas market is notoriously volatile, and almost every analyst involved in the sector believes that costs will increase in the future. Overall, in much of the US, in the short term at least, gas seems to have the economic advantage. Yet not all agree that the current situation is sustainable. Jeremy Leggett, green energy entrepreneur, notes that:

Outside the US, shale gas is an increasingly contentious issue, and that is slowing its development. Much of Western Europe, for example, looks set to reject the industry. In Australia some states have rejected it, while others have embraced it. China hopes for great things from it, but has made little progress exploiting it. Almost everywhere, farmers fear its impact on ground water. And, among younger people, there’s a widespread perception that shale gas is ‘fossil fuel-lite’—but still a fossil fuel—and so something they don’t want.

Will the boom in gas make climate change better or worse? A recent study, using complex models, found that ‘market-driven increases in global supplies of unconventional natural gas do not discernibly reduce the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions or future climate change.’ In other words, gas is definitely not going to solve the climate problem. The models assume that the consumption of gas will have increased by up to 170 per cent by 2050. This might result in global greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 decreasing from what might otherwise have occurred, by 2 per cent at most. Or it might see them increase by up to 11 per cent. So, whatever else is claimed for it, we know that the gas boom will not alter our current trajectory from its worst-case scenario progress towards catastrophic warming. Excerpted from "Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis" by Tim Flannery. Published by Atlantic Monthly Press. Copyright 2015 by Tim Flannery. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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