Letters Letters
Walk, Don’t Run? George Zornick’s great article on Senator Elizabeth Warren [“Waiting for Warren,” Feb. 23] reminds me of the months before the 1968 primaries. Antiwar liberals and progressives wanted Robert F. Kennedy to announce his candidacy for president. He held back, and Senator McCarthy jumped in, rolling up impressive totals against Lyndon Johnson and demonstrating how damaged the president was. RFK entered the primaries, forced Johnson out and no doubt would have gone on to victory in November. Is Bernie Sanders playing the role of Eugene McCarthy, and is the hesitant Senator Warren playing that of Robert Kennedy? Impressive margins against Clinton in the early primaries could send a clear message that the base of the Democratic Party is sick and tired of corporate Democrats. Run, Liz, run! William F. Johnston tacoma, wash. I am a liberal Democrat, and I am not waiting for Warren. What is wrong with The Nation and other liberal groups? Why are you trying to destroy Hillary? Liberals should unite around Hillary, who is liberal enough for most Americans. It would be difficult for the Democrats to win the presidency three times in a row. Hillary is the best hope. I don’t want to push her to the left. I want her to be in a position where she can win. Reba Shimansky new york Progressives who are crying for Elizabeth Warren to run for president are succumbing to the craving for a woman on a white horse. Warren, if I read her comments correctly, is looking at the long game. If she were to be elected president in 2016, her political career would be over by 2024, which is not long enough to make the changes we need. If she stays in the Senate, she can look forward to two or three decades working for progressive causes, and by 2024 she might be majority leader. Bear in mind that Barack Obama had limited success in implementing his agenda, not only because he didn’t try all that hard, but also because he was saddled with Harry Reid, possibly the most ineffectual Senate majority leader in recent history. A progressive president without effective allies in Congress is just a celebrity. Ted Kennedy accomplished more as a senator than he likely would have if he had become president. Liz, don’t run! Tim Connor portland, ore. I was aggrieved to read George Zornick’s article in The Nation about the MoveOn–Democracy for America campaign to draft my senator, Elizabeth Warren, to run for the presidency. Zornick states that there are no other politicians “being drafted by the party’s grassroots.” But there are! Progressive Democrats of America and other groups have been organizing our “Run, Bernie, Run—as a Democrat” campaign since last May. We have nearly 20,000 signatures on a petition, and have worked with Senator Sanders at house parties around the country. Indeed, Sanders has talked to enthusiastic crowds in New Hampshire and Iowa. I continue to wonder why two of the country’s largest progressive groups would blow several million dollars on a candidate who has said numerous times that she will not run. This push for a noncandidate will ensure the nomination of Hillary Clinton. Run, Bernie, run! Russell Freedman lanesborough, mass. Elizabeth Warren openly supported Israel’s scorched-earth tactics against Palestinians and condoned the massacre in Gaza. She is no progressive, and if somebody were to tell me she is not running for president, I would savor that news with a sigh of relief. Sasboy Warren in Verse Lizzy Warren told the facts And gave ol’ Wall Street forty whacks The banksters shuddered and did wail: This woman wants us all in jail! The SEC did dish out fines (a pittance to their bottom lines) When Gitmo’s empty of its guests Let’s fill it with these greedy pests. Bob Kenyon batavia, ill. The Odd Couplet There are only 40,000 publishing poets in the United States, which means that I can think of a good 39,999 less inappropriate to the pages of The Nation than The New Criterion’s William Logan [“Snow,” March 2/9]. What next? Rick Santorum filling in for Katha Pollitt? At least Calvin Trillin doesn’t have to tack on an unnecessary “perhaps” just to make his rhymes work. Ron Silliman paoli, pa. Heard It Here First Many thanks for bringing a great American laureate to bear on the “efficacy” of air power as an instrument of US foreign policy [John Ashbery, “Forget Where I Heard It,” March 2/9]. Our poetry appreciation club has just voted to adopt the central line of this trenchant critique as our motto: “Otherwise, as coma says, my beans, my peas, my coma….” John S. Harris st. louis Stranger Than Fiction Alice Kaplan omits an important fact from her discussion of Albert Camus’s story “The Guest” [“Camus Redux,” Feb. 23]: the fact that French colonial policy, between the 1870s and 1940, replaced Algerian wheat fields with vineyards. As Philip Naylor writes in his history of France and Algeria, this was “a stark repudiation of the colonized’s identity, given the Muslim proscription of alcohol.” Furthermore, the land that this policy left to Algerians “was usually poor” and could be cultivated “only by traditional methods that hastened erosion,” leading to soil exhaustion and, ultimately, “starvation.” This fact clarifies the plight of the prisoner in the story, a nameless Arab reduced to murder in a fight with a kinsman over grain. As Kaplan recognizes, the Arab (or the story) “speaks the truth” in questioning whether, in the midst of a famine, any European has “the right to judge the Arabs,” and whether it was “too late for a European to break bread with his Arab brothers.” But “The Guest” also challenges its readers to remember or discover the history behind this truth, a history that must have been well-known to Camus and to the brothers of the nameless prisoner in his story. Anita E. Feldman new york Correction In Michael T. Klare’s “2, 3, Many Vietnams” (March 16), the fiftieth anniversary of the introduction of main-force US troops into Vietnam was mistakenly identified, through no fault of the writer, as February 1965. The correct date is March 1965.
Mar 4, 2015 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
Black lives more than matter; sharing is creepy; the root of the problem; radical pessimism; one person, no vote; any fool can make a rule…
Feb 25, 2015 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
Those were the days; it's not mutual; the school-to-prayer pipeline; bad good guys; Julia M. Klein replies…
Feb 11, 2015 / Our Readers and Julia M. Klein
Letters Letters
Actions speak louder; progress and poverty; learning from Teachout; don’t be fooled
Feb 4, 2015 / Our Readers, Eric Alterman, and William Greider
Letters Letters
Fantasy Island; voices of sanity; going beyond green; clicking for human rights; no tears for TNR…
Jan 26, 2015 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
Mutualize Uber?… what a mensch!… too broad a brush… make ’em care!… nobody does it better…
Jan 13, 2015 / Our Readers and Barry Schwabsky
Letters Letters
Controlling the enemy—us?… Hillary hangover… keeping score…
Jan 6, 2015 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
Torch-Eyed Elephant Stampede!… droning on… black & white & gray all over… hanging up her pencils…
Dec 23, 2014 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
Calvino! Thanks so much to Aaron Thier for his wonderful and informative article on Italo Calvino [“Calculators and Butterflies,” Nov. 24]. I was so impressed by Calvino’s philosophies and writing style that I immediately went online and purchased a copy of Difficult Loves, principally for the short story “Smog.” Robert Fuller hayward, calif. Slavery and Capitalism I enjoyed “Apostles of Growth,” by Timothy Shenk [Nov. 24]. I recommend an excellent book, Reservation “Capitalism”: Economic Development in Indian Country, about Native American capitalism from pre-invasion to the present. It’s by Robert Miller, who taught Indian law at Lewis and Clark College. Eugene Johnson milwaukie, ore. Timothy Shenk’s “Apostles of Growth” matches an incisive assessment of how slavery in the United States figures centrally in new histories of capitalism with a demonstration of why that matters to progressive politics. What is lacking, and not without irony, is attention to a longer history of engaged scholarship that has demonstrated the ways slavery was integral and internal to modern capitalism as it was forged in the Americas. The groundbreaking work of anthropologists Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz foreshadows and, one can only hypothesize, informs the work of the historians to whom Shenk refers. Some nod to this precedent would have been welcome, especially given the deep and productive entanglements of history and anthropology today. Oren Kosansky portland, ore. Shenk Replies I am grateful to Oren Kosansky for allowing me to correct an omission made to prevent an already lengthy essay from becoming even longer. He is right to draw attention to the importance of Eric Wolf’s and Sidney Mintz’s writings; but, as I am sure he is well aware, the list of major antecedents to the newest students of slavery’s relationship to capitalism extends well beyond these two scholars. Eric Williams’s classic 1944 Capitalism and Slavery remains an essential starting point for any serious consideration of the topic, and Williams has worthy successors in more recent figures such as Ira Berlin, Robin Blackburn, Barbara Fields, Cedric Robinson, Seth Rockman and Stephanie Smallwood. But even now our scope is too limited. If Christopher Hayes is right to argue, as he has in these pages, that the emancipation of 4 million enslaved Americans in the nineteenth century provides the most useful precedent for opponents of climate change today, then we must also study the connection between capitalism and abolitionism. Here, David Brion Davis, Eric Foner and James Oakes supply indispensable guidance, but they are just three contributors to a much larger field. Even if our concern is restricted to slavery’s relationship with economic growth, no discussion is complete without reflecting on Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman. Trained as economists, they depicted antebellum slavery as a thriving system in their 1974 work Time on the Cross, which appeared decades before historians of capitalism took their own path to a similar conclusion. That book sparked a fiery controversy upon its release, further widening the division between historians and economists. Much of the template it relied on, however, was already apparent in Fogel’s first book. There, as in Time on the Cross, Fogel used techniques developed by mid-century economists to reframe a question fiercely debated among historians. In this earlier case, the subject was not slavery but railroads. Yet Fogel’s larger concerns were characteristic of their moment, and evident from the book’s title alone: Railroads and American Economic Growth. Timothy Shenk new york city Questions for Pro-Lifers I’d like to add another to Katha Pollitt’s excellent list of “Questions for Pro-Lifers” [Nov. 24]: far more fetuses are lost by miscarriage than abortion, a significant number of them caused by preventable conditions such as inadequate nutrition and healthcare. Since you’re concerned about the life of the fetus, isn’t it equally (or more) important to ensure that every woman of childbearing age is guaranteed basic healthcare, nutrition, and safe and healthy living conditions? Ken Jones yakima, wash. I would add one more question: If “personhood” begins at conception, what (if anything) would you do to limit corporate practices that threaten fetuses in the womb (i.e., fracking, GMOs, toxic waste, etc.)? Cait McKnelly I’d add: Are you against the death penalty? Why haven’t we heard you speak out against capital punishment? We haven’t seen you demonstrate at executions at penitentiaries, but you do at abortion clinics. You claim to be Christian, yet you don’t let that pesky Commandment get in the way. Michael Miller Jr. philadelphia “Personhood” and related ideas are contrary to the concepts of Judaism, which do not consider an unborn fetus a nefesh, or complete human being. It is dependent on the mother; thus, ending its existence is not deemed murder. Also, in Judaism the life of the mother is paramount; if her life is threatened by a fetus, Jewish law requires an end to the fetus. Amjpnc Point 5, “Men,” in Katha Pollitt’s list is the key. The pro-life movement’s male supporters know they will never, ever have to face the hard choices faced by a woman with an unwanted pregnancy. We can’t change that, but we can change that men get off scot-free. Until such time as it is shown that women can make themselves pregnant, I propose we institute a universal “dick tax.” (Think of it as honoring Nixon and Cheney.) The dick tax would be a flat fee of $100 annually for every US male over the age of 14. Dick tax avoiders would be excluded from all government benefits, as well as driver’s licenses, hunting and fishing licenses, concealed-carry permits, etc. Such a tax would raise some $15 billion a year and could be used to support women with prenatal care, childcare and education. Men who could prove they are incapable of impregnating someone would be exempt. Haydon Rochester Jr. onancock, va. Unsung Masters Readers may be interested to know that a collection of poems by Catherine Breese Davis (1924–2002), author of “The Summer Leaves” [Nov. 10], will be published in the Unsung Masters series, accompanied by essays, in June 2015. Martha Collins, Kevin Prufer, Martin Rock, co-editors cambridge, mass.; houston
Dec 16, 2014 / Our Readers and Timothy Shenk