Writing in ENOUGH EVIDENCE—I ASK FOR A GUILTY VERDICT…, I commented on the state of affairs in Iraq following the turning of the nth corner in our game of Whack-A-Mole with ISIS. This morning I continue to delved deeper in Ben Taub’s excellent Iraq’s Post-ISIS Campaign of Revenge for The New Yorker.

As I often am when thinking and writing about revolutionaries, I am reminded of the prophetic speech delivered by Leslie Nielsen in his role as the names sake of one of my ancestors. The Swamp Fox was right and Taub echoes the point when he writes:

The Islamic State has been mostly destroyed on the battlefield, but the war is far from over. Air strikes cannot kill an idea, and so it has fallen to Iraq’s fractured security, intelligence, and justice systems to try to finish the task. But, insofar as there is a strategy, it seems almost perfectly crafted to bring about the opposite of its intent. American and Iraqi military officials spent years planning the campaign to rid Iraq of ISIS, as if the absence of the jihadis would automatically lead Iraq toward the bright democratic future that George W. Bush’s Administration had envisaged when U.S. forces invaded the country, in 2003. But ISIS has always derived much of its dangerous appeal from the corruption and cruelty of the Iraqi state.

Cruelty and corruption have thwarted every doomed effort by the United States to be President Ronald Reagan’s shining city upon a hill…. Why would be expect the outcome to be different in the 21st century? Empire always has consequences. Just ask the Brits. In our imagined War On Terror, however, we have added a third category to Nielsen’s land, home and country: religious sectarianism. Taub continues:

Thousands of men and boys have been convicted of ISIS affiliation, and hundreds have been hanged. But, according to the senior intelligence official, these cases represent only a small fraction of the total number of detainees. “A few of the suspects are sent to court, but only to maintain the illusion that we have a justice system,” he said.

Suspects are tried under a law that makes no distinction between a person who “assists terrorists” and one who commits violent crimes on behalf of an extremist group. The conviction rate is around ninety-eight per cent. Family members of the accused rarely show up to watch the hearings, out of fear that they will be detained, too. It’s not uncommon for relatives to be rounded up by the security forces and sent to remote desert camps, where they are denied food, medical services, and access to documents. “We’re deleting thousands of families from Iraqi society,” the official told me. “This is not just revenge on ISIS. This is revenge on Sunnis.”

Nine years ago, two C.I.A. officers walked into an Iraqi prison and saw a hallway filled with hooded men, about to be executed for supposed affiliation with Al Qaeda in Iraq, the group that gave birth to ISIS. “We were hammering A.Q.I., but the Iraqi government was just rounding up Sunnis,” one of the C.I.A. officers recalled. “And, for a moment, it worked.” But, instead of releasing the innocents, the Iraqi government sentenced them to death. “So, of course, they came back,” the officer said, of Al Qaeda in Iraq. “What do you expect? You literally killed their dads.”

We are no strangers to religious sectarianism. We’ve killed thousands of our own—to understand just a part, read up on your Mormon history—for that reason. Add into that mix our history of ethnic cleansing as exemplified by President Andrew Jackson ejection of Indians from lands coveted by his supporters, and you don’t have to wonder why the official line about why the people in the region hate us is that they hate our freedom.

The reality is far more grim and indefensible.

The U.S.-led coalition decided to leave open the west as a kind of escape valve; this would allow ISIS members to be picked off as they fled into the desert, toward Syria.

A year and a half after the battle, Mosul’s Old City is still in ruins, and unexploded bombs regularly kill people. Ten million tons of rubble remain.

What followed was the most intense urban combat since the Second World War. Air strikes pummelled villages and towns in Mosul’s periphery, so ISIS contracted its territory, retreating to the city, along with thousands of civilians. “They told us that the Iraqi security forces would kill the men and rape the women,” a young woman from the village of Shirqat told me. “We trusted ISIS more than the Iraqi state.” Other villagers, who had spent years awaiting liberation, were loaded onto buses at gunpoint by ISIS fighters, and packed into Mosul’s front-line neighborhoods, to be used as human shields. In the ensuing months, the jihadis murdered hundreds of people who tried to escape, and hung bodies from electrical pylons.

Taub continues in his long-read to detail the atrocities and injustices he found in the wake of the expulsion of ISIS, but this vignette, again brought me up short. He writes:

In Baghdad, the relentless pace of trials struck me as so incongruous with the lack of evidence, the certainty of convictions, and the severity of sentences that I began to wonder whether judges had access to secret intelligence reports that they weren’t sharing in court. One evening, I visited the office of Munir Haddad, a magistrate who presided over the trial of Saddam Hussein. It was a troubled proceeding—defense lawyers were assassinated, and the Prime Minister pressured judges into issuing a death sentence—but, compared with the ISIS trials, Haddad said, “I believe the process was reasonably transparent. Saddam had lawyers. Only six or seven people were executed. These days, in terrorism courts, at least twenty-five people are sentenced to death every single day.”

Haddad lit a cigarette and threw his legs over an elegant wooden chair. Ali Shimari, a handsome young lawyer, sat next to him. Haddad left the bench years ago; he and Shimari now work as a team, defending terrorism suspects whom they believe to be innocent. That morning, Shimari had sat through the same hearings that I had. “Everything that the judge saw, the lawyers saw, too,” he said. “There’s usually no evidence, just the confession.”

I asked Shimari if the arbitrary nature of the trials frustrated him. “What can I do?” he replied, shrugging. “I’m a defense lawyer. I can’t tell the judge to pay attention. You can try once or twice, but it has no effect.”

Haddad laughed. “We are not in America,” he said. “It’s not possible to argue with the judge, because if you do he’ll just take it out on your client. As a lawyer, you just have to accept the humiliation.”

I asked Haddad whether, as a former judge in Iraq’s highest-profile tribunal, he believed that judges see their role as meting out a kind of cosmic justice, even if the truth lies beyond the kinds of evidence that can plausibly be collected. “ISIS has so many victims,” he said. “There have to be convictions.”

When I read that quote, my mind flashed to Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 film Paths of Glory. Those executed were not guilty, but rather sentenced by lots because there had to be executions.

We never learn. Taub continues:

Thaer Abd Ali al-Juboori, the spokesman for the Ministry of Justice, told me much the same thing. “Human-rights groups focus on the rights of suspects, but what about the rights of the victims and their families?” he said. “We have undergone thousands of terrorist attacks. There is immense public pressure on the judicial authorities.” He continued, “9/11 left three thousand people dead. The whole world obsessed over this attack. We cried for your innocent deaths. But, here in Iraq, we have had a terrorist death toll that has exceeded that by a factor of a hundred. Where is the sympathy that we have shown to the victims of 9/11? This is what Iraqis are upset about. We fight terrorists every day, on behalf of the rest of the world. And no one cares about our suffering.”

Caring is not the issue. What is happening in Iraq is not justice, but revenge driven by rage to make somebody fucking pay, damn it! And regardless of our role in all of this, we, the American people, are being held accountable for what is done in our name. When next that revenge driven by rage strikes here we will not be able to cite our freedom as the cause.

Where does all this take us?

In some camps, humanitarian workers offer aid in exchange for sex. Many women are pregnant from having been raped by the security forces or from having sex to feed themselves and their children. Although the fighting has ended, “these camps are meant to stay,” the N.G.O. director said. “If you are ten years old now, and you have no food, no assistance, and your mother has to prostitute herself to survive, and the whole of Iraqi society blames you because you were close to ISIS—in two, three, four years, what are you going to do? It’s clear. The seeds for the next conflict are all here.”

And the beat goes on…

Bonus No. 1: Bankers are never going to be punished for their dead-eyed corruption.

Bonus No. 2: CNBC scrubs Sherrod Brown’s capitulation to Wall Street–almost.

One of my favorite recordings of classical music is the 1987 compilation of Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax playing Ludwig von Beethoven’s five sonatas for cello and piano. The liner notes remark: With the exception of J.S. Bach’s solo sonatas, Beethoven’s five sonatas were the first significant contributions to the cello literature. But, quoth Radar O’Reilly: Ah, Bach.

This morning I’m listening to Yo-Yo’s latest recording of those Bach sonatas on his Six Revolutions CD. Alex Ross, writing in Yo-Yo Ma’s Days of Action for The New Yorker, ledes:

The cyclone of exuberance that is Yo-Yo Ma tore through the Washington, D.C., area at the end of November. The cellist is in the middle of a sprawling tour called the Bach Project, which involves performances of Bach’s six solo-cello suites in thirty-six places, on six continents. Classical music has taken to attaching the word “project” to undertakings large and small. If two or more Brahms symphonies are played, it becomes a Brahms Project. The Bach Project, though, is deserving of the name. Most of Ma’s concerts are slated for large spaces capable of accommodating thousands. Each is accompanied by a Day of Action, in which Ma meets with local artists, community leaders, students, and activists, exploring how culture can contribute to social progress. In Washington, the venue was the National Cathedral. The Day of Action took place in Anacostia, the historic African-American neighborhood in southeast D.C.

What caught my attention was Ma’s demonstration of the old saw: Time flies when you’re having fun.

When you’re interested in something, time goes really quickly. When you’re bored, it goes really slowly.” He got out his cello to illustrate the point. First, he played a bit of Mark O’Connor’s wistful Appalachia Waltz. It was not what the students needed at the end of a long school day. When Ma asked, “How long did that feel?,” the skeptic answered, “Too long.” Students guessed that the piece had lasted fifteen, twenty, even twenty-five minutes. In fact, it had been a little over a minute. He then launched into the Gigue of Bach’s C-major Suite—robust, driving music that Ma brought off with his usual precision and élan. “Sounds great,” a boy wearing a hood over a cap said. It still felt long, but not as long.

This might have been the cue for Ma to sing Bach’s praises, but he never mentioned the composer’s name. Instead, he led the students in a simple meditation exercise, taking slow, deep breaths for a minute. “I get really anxious when I play sometimes,” he said. “This makes me feel a little safer.” The experiment prompted some giggling, but one student allowed that he felt better afterward. “A lot of us don’t feel safe in a lot of situations,” Ma told them. “Your breath is one thing you can control. One minute is something you can control. You don’t have to believe me. In fact, I don’t want you to believe me.” He challenged them to test his theory at home.

As Ma went on to his next destination—a town-hall meeting at the Anacostia Playhouse—he reflected on the session with the students. “I’m using music to get at something more basic,” he said. “You have to try to meet kids where they are, so they can jump up one step. I’m trying to give them a couple of tools to handle the enormous stress I know they’re under. Maybe because I am this visitor from another planet I can give them a message in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t hear. Pretty cool how they responded to the Bach, right? The guy’s still got it.”

Now that’s education.

Bonus No. 1 Fear makes us smaller, culture makes us larger…

Bonus No. 2: The immense power of saying “no” to hegemony.

Neil Cavuto did his best to keep a straight face on his Fox Business show when he interviewed Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson. He broke down, however, when his guest made the assertion that healthcare is only a temporary reprieve and that he was guaranteed eternal healthcare by Jesus. This is the ultimate, 2,000+-year-old con by the 1 Percent.

We humans occupy a specific niche in Earth’s grand ecosystem. In the taxonomy of life we are grouped in: the Kingdom, Animalia; the Phylum, Chordata; the Class, Mammalia; the Order, Primates; the Family, Hominidae; the Genus, Homo and finally, the Species, Homo Sapiens. (there is also an informal subspecies category for Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but, as I’m fond of telling my students, there is no category Race.)

Mammals are known for their ability to endure excruciating pain in the short-term in order to preserve life in the long-term. Thus an animal caught in a trap may gnaw off a limb so as to escape the trap. Humans have shown—by the likes of Aron Ralston and others—that they too are capable of doing the same. What constitutes short-term and long-term is, of course, a matter of relativity. For anyone who believes in an eternal afterlife, a few score years of pain and suffering must be insignificant and protecting that eternal reward (by adhering to the rules stipulated by a religious hierarchy invested in maintaining the existing structure supporting those with the most wealth and power) would be paramount.

When those with wealth and power—like Robertson with his paltry few millions—seek to protect their earthly wealth by promising rewards after death, they are disingenuous in the extreme. To suggest that people don’t need healthcare because because of a fantasy reward is flat out evil. Robertson, of course, enjoys gold-plated healthcare. He’s in no hurry to die and pass over to his eternal reward by neglecting his temporal body.

Bonus No. 1: The Destruction of Matt Taibbi. (Via Mano Singham.)

Bonus No. 2: (Update at 1217 on 8 February) Seth Meyers takes a few shots at duck hunter as well.

While he acknowledged all the accolades and Oscar tips for Alfonso Cuarónt’s Roma upfront, Mano Singham did not enjoy the film. Mano is someone who’s opinions on culture I find dependable and much in sync with my own. That’s a big reason—with so much to read/see/listen to and so little time–why I haven’t seen the movie. (And yes, I do have Netflix.)

Back in December Mano wrote:

I found it tedious and somewhat pointless, with some scenes, such as the one where they all go to someone’s estate for Christmas, stitched together that seemed to serve no larger purpose in the narrative. I have admitted before that when it comes to films, I am definitely not in the category of a highbrow viewer and this film left me as mystified by its reputation as did Phantom Thread last year, though that was far more boring and pretentious, with its high society fashion context. At least this film had characters with whom one could empathize.

Last evening I read Anthony Lane’s Alfonso Cuarón Bears Witness to Peril with “Roma” in The New Yorker and grew intrigued. Lane points to a particular scene that he thinks is a pivotal moment dividing those who like the movie and those who don’t. He writes:

Not everyone will be seduced by “Roma,” and those who resist it will point to this crucial scene. Is it not too pat, fusing the personal crisis with a public upheaval and wringing meaning out of mere coincidence? Indeed, is the entire movie not stacked with fancy visual rhymes: the airplane high in the sky, for instance, that is mirrored in a flood of soapy water at the start and repeated in the final shot, or the two boys dressed as astronauts—the rich one, in his silvery costume, tramping through the woods, and the poor one, with a plastic bucket for a helmet, parading through a slum? And, if the echo implies that all children, whatever their social origins, are as one in their dreaming, is that not proof of the film’s political complacency? Though the mayhem outside the furniture store refers to a real event (the Corpus Christi Massacre of June, 1971, in which scores of demonstrators died), Cuarón makes no attempt to explain it, and nothing is more telling than the sight of Cleo glassed off from the scenes of revolt, as if they were beyond her comprehension. How can she, an indigenous member of the rural working class, find succor and satisfaction—even love—in fulfilling the needs of the upper bourgeoisie? Why must she kiss their kids good night?

I still haven’t seen the movie, I may watch it this week sometime, but I think I understand where Lane is taking his review. He continues:

All those charges are valid. Nothing will be fomented by the film. The bridling wrath of the underclass that we find in Italian neorealism—“I curse the day I was born,” is the hero’s cry in Bicycle Thieves (1948)—is wholly absent, and there’s not a whisper of the anarchistic mischief practiced by Buñuel in Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), in which the aging patriarch kneels down to unfasten the boots of a bored underling. Yet here’s the thing: “Roma” is persuasive in its beauty. It wins you over. The face of Aparicio, in the leading role, is not placidly resigned but serene in its stoicism, and if she is less a participant than a bystander during the major convulsions of the era, well, few of us can claim to be much more

I fully recognize that I may hate the movie, but after reading Lane’s piece, I feel I ought to at least give Roma a chance.

Bonus No. 1: Roma, the trailer…

Bonus No. 2: #TCMthoughts–50’s America’s lost anti-rich, anti-war, anti-cop DNA.

I believe all writers have manuscripts that they never want to see the light of day, even after they’re (the writer, not the manuscript) dead. Some, like Kafka, go so far as to arrange for a close friend to collect and burn everything after they’re dead. But we can’t do the burning ourselves. We find deleting our darlings difficult enough, but burning whole manuscripts?

The horror is unimaginable!

There is a rationale for the practice, however, and in contemporary literature, I can think of no better example than Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman, the book, while rejected multiple times, that would become the framework for her famous To Kill A Mockingbird. Watchman was what Charles Johnson called an apprentice novel. We all have them, we can’t burn them and we don’t want anyone to ever read them. For good reasons.

Casey Cep, writing in The Contested Legacy of Atticus Finch for The New Yorker, provides a perfect basis for the practice.

(Before I get down to Cep’s article, I must say that her first sentence—Only Jesus made his father more famous.—is one of the best I’ve read in a while.)

The contested legacy centers on who Lee’s fictional hero really was. Was he the man Lee wrote of in Mockingbird or was he the villain she wrote about—and then kept in a box—in Watchman? Cep writes:

Fictional characters walk off the page all the time, generally as cautionary tales, like Pollyanna or Walter Mitty, but Atticus has inspired legions of lawyers, been memorialized with a public sculpture, had professional-achievement awards and a nonprofit organization named after him, and been invoked admiringly by Barack Obama, who quoted one of the character’s folksy fatherisms in his farewell address as President: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

A telling point here, and one that I make time and time again to young writers, is that behind every great writers there is an even greater editor. Lee’s was Tay Hohoff. But for Hohoff, Watchman would have gathered dust and Mockingbird would have not seen the light of day.

Realistic or not, the early, overtly racist Atticus of “Watchman” was rejected by nearly every publisher that met him. Tay Hohoff, an editor at J.P. Lippincott, decided to take a chance on Lee, but encouraged her to abandon the didactic, abrasive scenes between adults and focus on the manuscript’s endearing childhood scenes. For two years, Hohoff helped Lee create “To Kill a Mockingbird”: a coming-of-age story in which the protagonist and narrator, Scout—along with Jem and their summer sidekick, Dill—learns that she has misjudged the local outcast, Boo Radley, even as others in the town misjudge Tom Robinson. The novel is set exclusively during the Great Depression, leaving the civil-rights movement to hover in its margins, never overtly clashing with any character, including Atticus.

Clearly, Lee had good reasons to follow Hohoff’s guidance and when the work was done, to see that Watchman went away. Cep continues.

Like any legal precedent, though, Atticus has faced challenges and dissents, and lately his status as a hero has seemed perilously close to being overturned. Criticisms of his accommodationist racial politics, his classism, and his sexism went mainstream a few years ago, after the publication of an earlier novel by Lee, “Go Set a Watchman,” which gave us an older Atticus, and a less admirable one: a grownup Scout came home to Alabama from New York City to find that, in his dotage, her beloved father was opposing the work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and attending meetings of a white-supremacist group.

No fictional character is ever created ex nihilo. A writer can only write from what they have experienced, but the beauty of fiction is that writers are not limited by fact. We shade and twist and extrapolate and wonder what if? This is how we make sense of the world. Yes, Lee was writing about her father, but Atticus Finch was not Amasa Coleman Lee. Amasa left the starting block, but Atticus crossed the finish line.

Let this be a cautionary tale for all writers.

¹Why, you may well ask, do I used euphemism instead of pejorative (which I also really, really hate)? Because the pejorative in contention here—nigger—is both a pejorative and a euphemism. Nigger is (as are all pejoratives) a euphemism for nothing.

On the topic of euphemisms: I hate them. I hate them because, like George Carlin, I think they hide the truth. Also, like Professor Phillip Adamo, I think that some words carry such heavy baggage that they out not to be used, but they can be mentioned.

Adamo was suspended from his job teaching history at Augsburg University because, in an Honors class where he discussed James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, nigger raised its ugly head. According to Colleen Flaherty, writing in Too Taboo for Class? for Inside Higher Ed,

Bonus No. 1: Then there’s Lenny Bruce. along with Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase.

Bonus No. 2: Yes, Cameo is a thing.

Bonus No. 3: From Ross Perot to Brexit–via ignored swastikas.

When I first began writing Absent Son, my historical novel set in Charleston, South Carolina following the American Civil War, I made the decision—with the help of John Gregory Brown—to write the novel as a 19th century novel. That made the task harder, but in the end, more satisfying. To that end I have been reading as much writing from the period as I can find.

One such is Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Edward Davidson. Why Poe?

I had three reasons for selecting Poe. First, I was woefully unread in his works. Second, one of my favorite students, when asked to suggest authors for another student to read, put Poe at the top of his list and the third reached back to my own high school years when for a few months I was an old-school movie usher for Marietta’s Colony Theater where I saw the same movies once a night for four nights and then three or four times each on Saturday and Sunday with cartoons and occasionally a short before the feature.

The short before one movie (I think it might have been McCabe & Mrs. Miller) was a recitation of Poe’s Annabel Lee. I think that was the first time I ever heard a poem professionally recited. The experience—especially repeated more than a dozen times—was enlightening.

The first poem in Davidson’s book is Tamerlane.

Kind solace in a dying hour!
    Such, father, is not (now) my theme—
I will not madly deem that power
        Of Earth may shrive me of the sin
        Unearthly pride hath revell’d in—
    I have no time to dote or dream:
You call it hope—that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire:
If I can k hope—Oh God! I can—
    Its fount is holier—more divine—
I would not call thee fool, old man,
    But such is not a gift of thine.

Know thou the secret of a spirit
    Bow’d from its wild pride into shame.
O! yearning heart! I did inherit
    Thy withering portion with the fame,
The searing glory which hath shone
Amid the jewels of my throne,
Halo of Hell! and with a pain
Not Hell shall make me fear again—
O! craving heart, for the lost flowers
And sunshine of my summer hours!
Th’ undying voice of that dead time,
With its interminable chime,
Rings, in the spirit of a spell,
Upon thy emptiness—a knell.

I have not always been as now:
The fever’d diadem on my brow
    I claim’d and won usurpingly—
Hath not the same fierce heirdom given
    Rome to the Caesar—this to me?
        The heritage of a kingly mind,
And a proud spirit which hath striven
        Triumphantly with human kind.

On mountain soil I first drew life:
    The mists of the Taglay¹ have shed
    Nightly their dews upon my head,
And, I believe, the winged strife
And tumult of the headlong air
Have nestled in my very hair.

So late from Heaven—that dew—it fell
    (Mid dreams of an unholy night)
Upon me—with the touch of Hell,
    While the red flashing of the light
From clouds that hung, like banners, o’er,
    Appeared to my half-closing eye
    The pageantry of monarchy,
And the deep trumpet-thunder’s roar
    Came hurriedly upon me, telling
        Of human battle, where my voice,
    My own voice, silly child!—was swelling
        (O! how my spirit would rejoice,
And leap within me at the cry)
The battle-cry of Victory!

The rain came down upon my head
    Unshelter’d—and the heavy wind
    Was giantlike—so thou, my mind!—
It was but man, I thought, who shed
    Laurels upon me: and the rush—
The torrent of the chilly air
Gurgled within my ear the crush
    Of empires—with the captive’s prayer—
The hum of suiters—and the tone
Of flattery ‘round a sovereign’s throne.

My passions, from that hapless hour,
    Usurp’d a tyranny which men
Have deem’d, since I have reach’d to power;
        My innate nature—be it so:
    But, father, there liv’d one who, then,
Then—in my boyhood—when their fire
        Burn’d with a still intenser glow,
(For passion must, with youth, expire)
    E’en then who knew this iron heart
    In woman’s weakness had a part.

I have no words—alas!—to tell
The loveliness of loving well!
Nor would I now attempt to trace
The more than beauty of a face
Whose lineaments, upon my mind,
Are—shadows on th’ unstable wind:
Thus I remember having dwelt
Some page of early lore upon,
With loitering eye, till I have felt
The letters—with their meaning—melt
To fantasies—with none.

O, she was worthy of all love!
Love—as in infancy was mine—
‘Twas such as angel minds above
Might envy; her young heart the shrine
On which my ev’ry hope and thought
    Were incense—then a goodly gift,
        For they were childish—and upright—
Pure—as her young example taught:
    Why did I leave it, and, adrift,
        Trust to the fire within, for light?

We grew in age—and love—together,
    Roaming the forest, and the wild;
My breast her shield in wintry weather—
    And, when the friendly sunshine smil’d,
And she would mark the opening skies,
I saw no Heaven—but in her eyes.

Young Love’s first lesson is—the heart:
    For ‘mid that sunshine, and those smiles,
When, from our little cares apart,
    And laughing at her girlish wiles,
I’d throw me on her throbbing breast,
    And pour my spirit out in tears—
There was no need to speak the rest—
    No need to quiet any fears
Of her—who ask’d no reason why,
But turn’d on me her quiet eye!

Yet more than worthy of the love
My spirit struggled with, and strove,
When, on the mountain peak, alone,
Ambition lent it a new tone—
I had no being—but in thee:
    The world, and all it did contain
In the earth—the air—the sea—
    Its joy—its little lot of pain
That was new pleasure—the ideal,
    Dim, vanities of dreams by night—
And dimmer nothings which were real—
    (Shadows—and a more shadowy light!)
Parted upon their misty wings,
        And, so, confusedly, became
        Thine image, and—a name—a name!
Two separate—yet most intimate things.

I was ambitious—have you known
        The passion, father? You have not:
A cottager, I mark’d a throne
Of half the world as all my own,
        And murmur’d at such lowly lot—
But, just like any other dream,
        Upon the vapour of the dew
My own had past, did not the beam
        Of beauty which did while it thro’
The minute—the hour—the day—oppress
My mind with double loveliness.

We walk’d together on the crown
Of a high mountain which look’d down
Afar from its proud natural towers
    Of rock and forest, on the hills—
The dwindled hills! begirt with bowers
    And shouting with a thousand rills.

I spoke to her of power and pride,
    But mystically—in such guise
That she might deem it nought beside
    The moment’s converse; in her eyes
I read, perhaps too carelessly—
    A mingled feeling with my own—
The flush on her bright cheek, to me
    Seem’d to become a queenly throne
Too well that I should let it be
    Light in the wilderness alone.

I wrapp’d myself in grandeur then,
    And donn’d a visionary crown—
        Yet it was not that Fantasy
        Had thrown her mantle over me—
But that, among the rabble—men,
        Lion ambition is chain’d down—
And crouches to a keeper’s hand—
Not so in deserts where the grand
The wild—the terrible conspire
With their own breath to fan his fire.

Look ‘round thee now on Samarcand!²—
    Is not she queen of Earth? her pride
Above all cities? in her hand
    Their destinies? in all beside
Of glory which the world hath known
Stands she not nobly and alone?
Falling—her veriest stepping-stone
Shall form the pedestal of a throne—
And who her sovereign? Timour—he
    Whom the astonished people saw
Striding o’er empires haughtily
    A diadem’d outlaw—

O! human love! thou spirit given,
On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!
Which fall’st into the soul like rain
Upon the Siroc wither’d³ plain,
And failing in thy power to bless
But leav’st the heart a wilderness!
Idea! which bindest life around
With music of so strange a sound
And beauty of so wild a birth—
Farewell! for I have won the Earth!

When Hope, the eagle that tower’d, could see
    No cliff beyond him in the sky,
His pinions were bent droopingly—
    And homeward turn’d his soften’d eye.
‘Twas sunset: when the sun will part
There comes a sullenness of heart
To him who still would look upon
The glory of the summer sun.
That soul will hate the ev’ning mist,
So often lovely, and will list
To the sound of the coming darkness (known
To those whose spirits hearken) as one
Who, in a dream of night, would fly
But cannot from a danger nigh.

What tho’ the moon—the white moon
Shed all the splendour of her noon,
Her smile is chilly—and her beam,
In that time of dreariness, will seem
(So like you gather in your breath)
A portrait taken after death.
And boyhood is a summer sun
Whose waning is the dreariest one—
For all we live to know is known,
And all we seek to keep hath flown—
Let life, then, as the day-flower, fall
With the noon-day beauty—which is all.

I reach’d my home—my home no more—
    For all had flown who made it so—
I pass’d from out its mossy door,
    And, tho’ my tread was soft and low,
A voice came from the threshold stone
Of one whom I had earlier known—
    O! I defy thee, Hell, to show
    On beds of fire that burn below,
    A humbler heart—a deeper wo—

Father, I firmly do believe—
    I know—for Death, who comes for me
        From regions of the blest afar,
Where there is nothing to deceive,
        Hath left his iron gate ajar,
    And rays of truth you cannot see
    Are flashing thro’ Eternity—
I do believe that Eblis⁴ hath
A snare in ev’ry human path—
Else how, when in the holy grove
I wandered of the idol, Love,
Who daily scents his snowy wings
With incense of burnt offerings
From the most unpolluted things,
Whose pleasant bowers are yet so riven
Above with trelliced rays from Heaven
No mote may shun—no tiniest fly
The light’ning of his eagle eye—
How was it that Ambition crept,
    Unseen, amid the revels there,
Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt
    In the tangles of Love’s very hair?

¹The mountains of Belur Taglay are a branch of the Immaus, in the southern part of Independent Tartary.
²After the battle of Angoria that Tamerlane made Samarcand his residence. It became for a time the seat of learning and the arts.
³A hot dust-laden wind from the Libyan deserts that blows on the northern Mediterranean coast chiefly in Italy, Malta, and Sicily.
⁴Satan.

Bonus No. 1: If you prefer, you can listen to the poem.
Bonus No. 2: Why Finland has the best education system in the world.
Bonus No. 3: I am the canary in Sherrod Brown’s cage.

That the Russians in 2013 could record a video of a future President of the United States watching Russian prostitutes urinate on the bed once shared by the then President and his wife, would not have given George Orwell pause. Even in 1948, the KGB, the secret police of the Soviet Union, routinely photographed, recorded, filmed and followed visiting dignitaries.

Orwell’s prophetic masterwork, 1984, grips the minds of those paying attention 70 years after the books publication and 34 years past the title’s sell-by date. Yet, we pay less and less attention. So much so that in 1984—the year I graduated from college—Orwell’s Big Brother made an appearance in a Superbowl commercial that was meant to disprove Orwell but has had (especially in light of the latest revelation about Apple’s iPhone) the opposite result.

Edward Snowden showed us around the time of the yellow rain in Moscow, that our devices were following, listening and watching us more than we were listening and watching them. Five years later, not much has changed except our devices have become exponentially better at keeping tabs on us and we’re doing little to rein them in. In his book, Orwell set the stage this way:

Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

And the whole plot hangs on a bit of archtechural abnormality that allows Winston Smith to believe he’s exempt.

For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

David Owen, writing in Should We Be Worried About Computerized Facial Recognition? for The New Yorker, starts out in a happy place talking about dairy cows in Ireland—I do love me some Kerrygold Irish butter—but four pages in goes dark. At one point, Owen loops through the Appleverse:

In October, Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, while speaking at a privacy conference in Brussels, said, “Our own information, from the everyday to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us with military efficiency.”

How different that view is from the 1984 commercial. Cook has reason to sound a warning, even when his company is a culpable in all this.

In 2012, the New York Police Department implemented what it calls the Domain Awareness System, which it developed in partnership with Microsoft (and from which it earns a royalty when other cities adopt it). The system uses thousands of public-facing surveillance cameras, including many owned by private businesses. One afternoon in September, I sat on a bench in front of One Police Plaza, the N.Y.P.D.’s headquarters, with Clare Garvie, who is a senior associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology, at Georgetown Law School, in Washington. From where we were sitting, I could see two cops in a brick security booth. Like most bored people nowadays, they were staring at their phones, but their inattention didn’t matter, because the plaza was being watched by a dozen or so building-mounted cameras, most of which looked like larger versions of the ones that Cainthus uses on cows: dark domes that resembled light fixtures. I asked Garvie what the police were doing with whatever the cameras were recording, and she said there was no way to know.

I would strongly suggest that we do know this: that whatever they’re doing, they’re not doing it to make us safer. Owen continues.

“The N.Y.P.D. has resisted our efforts to get any information about their technology,” she said. It was only after the center sued the department that it began to receive documents that it had initially requested more than two years earlier. By contrast, San Diego publishes reports on the facial-recognition system used by its police and holds public meetings about it. Last year, the Seattle City Council passed a comprehensive ordinance requiring disclosure of the city’s surveillance technologies; this year, it voted to physically dismantle a network of video cameras and cell-phone trackers, installed in 2013, that was like a smaller version of the Domain Awareness System. But most big cities don’t reveal much about what they’re up to, and no federal law requires them to do so. Chicago and Los Angeles are as secretive as New York, and have put off attempts by Garvie’s group, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other organizations to learn more.

Garvie is thirty-one. She majored in political science and human rights at Barnard, earned a law degree at Georgetown, and stayed on, after graduation, as a law fellow. In 2016, she was the lead author of The Perpetual Line-?Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America, a study whose title refers to the fact that many states allow police departments to search their databases of mug shots and driver’s-license photos. Garvie doesn’t doubt that facial recognition has legitimate uses in law enforcement, just as wiretaps and personal searches do. But misuse is inevitable. “Right now, quite literally, there’s no such thing as face-recognition abuse, in one sense, because there are really no laws governing its use by police,” she said. If your face appears in an accessible database, as it probably does, you’re effectively a suspect every time it’s searched.

Back in the Spring of 1984, when I was editor of what become the Fall issue of Athens magazine (now Southeast Ohio Magazine) the dean of my college nearly shredded the whole press run because we printed a photo of a professor who was arrested during Ohio Universities annual Halloween Bacchanalia. Cooler heads prevailed and the issue was distributed, but I mention this just because journalists have been dealing with the mugshot issue for decades. Digital photography and the Internet have changed that game, but there are solution out there.

Garvie and her colleagues have written a fourteen-page model bill intended to regulate the use of facial-recognition technology in law enforcement. Among many other things, it would require the custodians of arrest-photo databases to regularly purge images of people who are not later convicted of whatever act it was that prompted their arrest. Their first version of the bill was published in 2016; no legislature has adopted it.

Compare that track record to that of ALEC. We are not, so far, winning this fight because the technology is too valuable to those at the top.

Faces, unlike fingerprints or iris patterns, can easily be recorded without the knowledge of the people they belong to, and that means that facial recognition can be used for remote surveillance. “We would be horrified if law-enforcement agents were to walk through a protest demanding that everybody show their identification,” Garvie said. “Yet that’s what face recognition enables.” Computer-vision systems potentially allow cops and employers to track behaviors and activities that are none of their business, such as where you hang out after work, which fund-raisers you attend, and what that slight tremor in your hand (recorded by the camera in the elevator that you ride to your office every morning) portends about the size of your future medical claims.

Orwellian enough for you? Owen concludes:

A man who helped to develop the N.Y.P.D.’s facial-recognition system has said that when he was with the police department he enhanced surveillance photos by, for example, using Photoshop to replace suspects’ closed eyes with other people’s open eyes, creating what he once called “a second opportunity to return a match.” Garvie told me, “Eyes are incredibly important to a face identification, and here they were using someone else’s. It’s like taking half of a latent fingerprint and drawing in the rest.”

Both Garvie and Buolamwini believe that some uses, such as the incorporation of real-time facial identification into police body cameras, should be banned entirely. Body cams have generally been viewed as a valuable check on violence by cops—and as a backup for cops who’ve been wrongly accused—but the dangers are huge, they said. Garvie told me, “In most face-recognition systems that exist today, there is a human analyst somewhere who is given time to look at the photos and determine whether they represent a similar individual. But with body cams the technology itself becomes the final arbiter. An alert goes into a headset or a mobile device, and an officer with a gun has a moment to decide whether or not there is a threat to public safety.” Last year, Axon—the leading manufacturer of body cams, formerly known as Taser International—bought Dextro and Misfit, two startups in computer vision and artificial intelligence. In April, the Algorithmic Justice League and the Center on Privacy and Technology were among the signers of an open letter to Axon’s artificial-intelligence ethics board, urging, among other things, that the company not include real-time facial recognition in its body cams. Buolamwini told me, “Decisions to end lives are too precarious to be left to artificial intelligence. And, given what we know about the current state of the technology, it’s absolutely irresponsible.”

Ya think?

Here’s a simple action—one I’m taking this morning—forward the link to The Center on Privacy & Technology’s model legislation to: your state’s Congressional delagation (two senators and one representative) and the your governor, attorney general, state senator and state representative. Ask them why no one is championing this legislation. This is the email I sent to senators Brown and Portman, Rep. Gonzalez, Gov. Dewine, AG , Ohio Sen. Dolan and Ohio Rep. Patton. (Please note the Brown is the only Democrat on that list.)

Good morning,

Control of our technology and our rights to privacy are slipping away as further evidenced by the revelation of Apple’s Face Time bug.

I write this morning to encourage you to consider this Model Face Recognition Legislation (https://www.perpetuallineup.org/model-legislation) from the Center on Privacy and Technology, at Georgetown Law School.

Thank you for your time.

Jeff Hess

Let me know in the comments if you hear anything back.

Bonus No. 1: Can you spot the danger?

Bonus No. 2: No we don’t.

January was not a good month for President Donald John Trump. He got put in his place—albeit, only momentarily—by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and now faces a looming deadline on 15 February that he will have great difficulty dodging. The House of Representatives seems to be on a high, but I don’t think this is a time to cut them any slack.

Ralph Nader agrees and reminds us of his 12-points published at the beginning of the 116th Congress. Nader, in Demand Critical Congressional Hearings–Long Overdue, Avoided or Blocked, writes:

Earlier this month I wrote a column listing twelve major redirections or reforms that most people want for our country (see: “It’s Your Congress, People!” Make it work for you!). All of which require action by Congress—the gate-keeper. Now Congress must hold informative and investigative public hearings to inform the media and to alert and empower the people.

The U.S. Government Publishing Office explains a Congressional Hearing as follows:

“A hearing is a meeting or session of a Senate, House, joint, or special committee of Congress, usually open to the public, to obtain information and opinions on proposed legislation, conduct an investigation, or evaluate/oversee the activities of a government department or the implementation of a Federal law. In addition Continue Reading »

If you took Psychology 101 in college, you remember the five stages of grief and the five levels in the hierarchy of needs. (The reason for five in each is another discussion.) Everything else is a gauzy haze befitting all 101 classes. Both theories play a major role in understanding the visceral fight over climate change. The first applies to the fossil-fuel industry

The second pertains to the the 99.99 percent of humanity struggling—oddly seen in the government workers here in the United States frequenting food pantries during our recent shutdown—to get by. Elizabeth Kolbert reporting in Coal for Christmas at the U.N. Climate Conference for The New Yorker touched a nerve when, in the middle of her piece, she wrote:

…just as the session in Katowice was getting under way, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, suspended plans to raise that nation’s gasoline and diesel-fuel taxes. The increase had been intended to speed the transition to cleaner cars; the postponement came in response to violent protests by the so-called “yellow vest” movement. Demonstrators complained that Macron was worried about the end of the world, while they were worried about the end of the month. [Emphasis mine. JH]

The Trump Administration, meanwhile, has already made plain its intention of undermining the whole [Conference Of the Parties] process. Last week, the Administration basically flipped off negotiators in Poland by unveiling not one but two new schemes for promoting fossil-fuel use. The first was a proposed rollback of an Obama-era rule that effectively blocked new construction of coal-fired power plants. (The rollback was presented by the acting head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal-industry lobbyist.) The second was a plan to open some nine million acres of public lands in Western states to oil and gas drilling by sweeping aside protections for the greater sage grouse. Environmentalists—justifiably—labelled this move a “giveaway” to the fossil-fuel industry. As the Times noted, it would “open more land to drilling than any other step the administration has taken.”

Ironically, the actions of both presidents were interpreted by their national majorities as directly opposite of their intents. In the first case, French citizens were focused on the next 30 days and not on the next 30 years. In the second case, American citizens think that the president did what he did to keep their gas prices low, not to put more money in the pockets of the fossil-fuel industry.

In both cases, as long as most people live, at most, at Level Two—safety needs, security—on Maslow’s pyramid, they won’t have energy to think past the next paycheck. I have to wonder if this is the real reason that the 1 Percent fight so vehemently against Socialist Principles: they fear that once the peasants move upward on the pyramid that the Phrygian caps will come out that the tumbrels will roll.

Another pyramid issue that has come to the fore since the rise of Black Lives Matter and the heroic actions of Colin Kaepernick is the current third wave of civil rights protests. Superbowl LIII has been politicized, in no small part, because of these protests and the role that the city hosting the game, Atlanta, plays in the mythos of African American history and culture.

Louisa Thomas, reporting in Michael Bennett’s Political Football, goes back to the beginning of the season to set the stage.

When “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played before the first game of the 2018 N.F.L. season, between the Atlanta Falcons and the Philadelphia Eagles, the defending champions, in September, Michael Bennett knew that he was being watched. Football fans, and sportswriters, were waiting to see if the narrative of another year would be dominated not by division rivalries but by the debate over players who protested racial inequality during the national anthem.

What Bennett did that day, and why he chose that action, is history now, but the pyramid issue and the access to the highest levels of the pyramid, roll on.

Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback who had begun the protests, in 2016, was the star of a new Nike commercial that was set to air during the game. (The tagline: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”) But Kaepernick had been out of the league since the end of that season—he has sued the owners, alleging collusion—and, Nike campaign aside, rarely spoke publicly. Bennett, a defensive end for the Eagles, was one of the most recognizable players to keep the protests going in his absence.

What pisses (mostly white) people off about the protests is that they buy into the trope that only politicians—and people like themselves—are allowed to have political opinions. Movie, television and sports stars should shut the fuck up and just do what they’re paid to do: provide entertainment. Gawd forbid that a provocateur like Bennett should speak out. Thomas continues:

Bennett has always been candid about politics. In 2015, after his teammate Richard Sherman critiqued the rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement, Bennett, unprompted, politely detailed his disagreements with Sherman at a press conference the next day. He wrote a statement expressing solidarity with the women’s strike on International Women’s Day; he is an avid reader of the academic and activist Angela Davis. [Later in the article, Thomas wrote:

Bennett lingered in front of his locker, which was filled with a messy pile of cleats and stacked with books: The Revolt of the Black Athlete, by the sociologist Harry Edwards, who has advised Kaepernick; Soul of a Citizen, by the activist Paul Rogat Loeb. He gave Chris Long, whose locker was now next to his, his copy of Martin Buber’s Good and Evil.]

But, in the year since he began protesting, in August, 2017, the political has become increasingly personal, and he has been reminded what it can mean to be a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time. That month, he was handcuffed in Las Vegas by police officers with weapons drawn, during what the officers believed was an active-shooter situation—an instance, Bennett maintains, of racial profiling. A few weeks later, a doctored photograph that had Bennett dancing in the Seahawks’ locker room with a burning American flag went viral. In March, he was indicted on a felony charge for allegedly pushing an elderly woman as he made his way onto the field after the 2017 Super Bowl, an accusation that he emphatically denies. In April, he published a memoir, called Things That Make White People Uncomfortable….

The Kirkus review of the book begins: An outspoken activist athlete practically dares readers to think of professional football and its players in the same way again after finishing this book.

I wouldn’t take that dare.

Bonus No. 1: The key to winning victories against big oil? Perseverance.

Bonus No. 2: Deaf Lives Matter with Nyle DiMarco.

Bonus No. 3: Captain America Quits in Protest in New Marvel Comic.

This is a story of hope and magic and venal greed for power. What cynically began as a project to help wounded warriors became a march to wound even more. Raffi Khatchadourian, writing in How to Control a Machine with Your Brain for The New Yorker, explains through the experiences of Andrew Schwartz, and Jan Scheuermann.

Schwartz is a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh. Scheuermann has been paralyzed from the neck down for 18 years as a result of spinocerebellar degeneration, a rare ailment that ruins lines of communication between the brain and the spine.

There is a tremendous amount of background text in first seven pages of Khatchadourian’s piece, but I want to leap ahead to the eighth page where he describes Scheuermann’s transformation:

Schwartz met Scheuermann only briefly in the early interviews. The project for Revolutionizing Prosthetics involved a large team, including postdocs, a neurosurgeon, and experts on assistive technology. He was close to achieving a career-long ambition, but he was too preoccupied with the details to dwell on it. “Think about going to the moon,” he told me. “You have all these guys worried about scheduling and mechanics. You are more concerned with the minutiae, how everything is going to fit together.” The transition to human trials had brought many unknowns—from new equipment and more complex surgery to the inexperience of the researchers who had joined him. He said, “We had no guarantee we had the skill and capability to get this to work in a human.”

In February, 2012, after months of preparation, Scheuermann was ushered into a hospital room to be prepped for surgery. “Several people greeted me, and I’m sure that behind their masks, they were smiling,” she later recalled. “But I could not see their smiles; I could only see bright lights, gowned and masked figures, and trays of medical equipment. The solemnity of what was about to happen finally hit me.”

The successful implantation of a Utah array requires tremendous precision. After lasers were used to make a 3-D scan of Scheuermann’s head, a location was marked; part of her scalp was shaved, and the neurosurgeon—Elizabeth Tyler-Kabara, who had operated on Schwartz’s animals—cut back a flap of skin. With a drill, she began to cut around the site. Bone shavings piled up around the bit, like snow.

While the surgeon opened Scheuermann’s skull, the Utah arrays were kept on a tray nearby. They were four millimetres square—no wider than a “W” on this page—and manufactured from a block of silicon that had been sliced, chemically treated, and then etched in acid, until the surface resembled a minuscule bed of nails. Each studded square had been shipped to Pittsburgh with its pedestal, made from titanium: the plug port that would be mounted atop Scheuermann’s head. They were tethered together by a cable of ninety-six gold wires, one for each electrode.

Tyler-Kabara carried over a set, and carefully screwed the pedestal into the skull, while the array hung from a ball of beeswax mounted on Scheuermann’s scalp. Once the pedestal was attached, she placed the array face down on the naked cortex, with the microelectrodes poised to penetrate the brain. To push it in by hand risked damaging the tissue or misdirecting the device; a ballistic entry was necessary. A pneumatic injector the shape of a wand was positioned precisely atop the implant. With a forceful blast, it would shoot the array in at twenty-five miles per hour. The shot had to be timed to Scheuermann’s respiration. With each breath, her brain was rising and falling, as it floated in the shifting spinal fluid in her skull, and it was crucial to implant when the cortex rose to maximum height.

Tyler-Kabara asked one of the Pittsburgh researchers on the Revolutionizing Prosthetics team to press the button. Everyone paused, to internalize the rhythm of Scheuermann’s brain movements. Then, suddenly, the injector was triggered. The sound of valves opening and closing filled the operating theatre, along with the rush of compressed air through the injector, the noise a lightning-quick mechanical breath, culminating in a metallic clink. In an instant, the ninety-six electrodes were in, like a soccer cleat going into soft earth.

[snip]

The following morning, the pain subsided, and she asked for a handheld mirror, so she could see herself. Protruding from the top of her head were the two pedestals: cylinders reminiscent of Frankenstein’s monster, each the diameter of a quarter, and capped to prevent moisture from getting into the contact points. Scheuermann vowed to embrace them. She told herself they were instruments of exploration, and named them Lewis and Clark.

Don’t worry about the terms in the above. You should read the whole piece to grasp the technical details. I focused on the human right now.

As Scheuermann and Schwartz entered the testing phase of Lewis and Clark, two bits leapt out at me. First:

When we observe an action, our brains often respond to the behavior as if it were our own: if you watch a person use a screwdriver, some of the neurons in your motor cortex will appear to fire as if you were driving in the screw. (The motor cortex is often very active when we read. [Emphasis mine, JH])

And, second:

With training, a person can gain volitional control over the firing of a single neuron to accomplish a goal.

Clearly, the Bene Gesserit (see Page 6: #2 Know thyself) know what they are talking about.

Two pages later, Khatchadourian begins to reveal the dark side:

In the nineteen-sixties, José Delgado, a Spanish neuroscientist at Yale University, had designed a radio-controlled electrode that could be implanted deep inside an animal’s brain. With conditioning, Delgado found, the probe could be used to diminish aggressive behavior in monkeys. In 1964, he travelled to Spain and implanted his electrode in a bull; then, theatrically, he faced down the animal in a bullfighting arena, with nothing but a matador’s red cape and a handheld radio switch that controlled the device. As the bull charged, he activated the implant, dramatically causing the animal to appear to lose interest in him. Later, Delgado used the electrodes on psychiatric patients. According to Scientific American, “With the push of a button, he could evoke smiles, snarls, bliss, terror, hunger, garrulousness, lust.” In a book titled “Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society,” Delgado imagined a utopia of machine-modulated cognition. One critic, testifying before Congress, described it as a harbinger of “technological totalitarianism.” It was evident that such technology could be misused. After the race riots of the late nineteen-sixties, two Harvard neurosurgeons proposed that neural electrodes could be used to quell social violence. In 1972, a Tulane psychiatrist used them to try to create “heterosexual arousal” in a gay man.

Weaponizing the technology became—perhaps always was—the ne plus ultra of the research.

In Schwartz’s view, Scheuermann had demonstrated far more sophisticated brain control with the robotic arm; by comparison, flying the airplane, using only two degrees of freedom, was scientifically empty, epitomizing the theatrical showiness that he had long avoided. But officials at [Applied Physics Laboratory] were ecstatic. In addition to the Mooney, Scheuermann had flown the simulated F-35, though with greater difficulty. “Jan Scheuermann was able to fly,” McLoughlin told me. “She embodied that plane. That’s really powerful—really powerful.”

At [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], Geoff Ling screened a video of Scheuermann flying, and described it in momentous terms. The experiment, he believed, prefigured evolutionary changes to the human organism. “Don’t you understand what has happened?” he told me. “We just got rid of the confines of our bodies. That is taking mankind to another level, brother! Can you imagine a body with four arms? Can you imagine having two more eyes? The body we have been given is a biological thing. We could totally break free of it.”

And swarms of drones danced in DARPA’s heads. They wanted Ender Wiggins.

But the scientists at Pittsburgh resisted, arguing that, unlike the flight tests in virtual reality, which offered insight into how a paralyzed person could access a computer, commanding physical drones in a distant and uncontrolled setting was likely to yield little scientific information of value. Furthermore, it could violate ethical commitments to oversight boards, and divert lab time from the project’s core mission: assistive technology for the impaired. “They said, ‘That is not academic research,’ ” McLoughlin told me.

DARPA and A.P.L won.

Soon afterward, A.P.L. demanded that the hardware that processed data from the Utah arrays be returned. While the university scrambled to acquire replacements, A.P.L. pushed ahead with brain-controlled aviation.

They were done with Scheuermann.

Soon after her pedestals—Lewis and Clark—were removed, her husband and children took her to the movies. “The sun was shining on the hillside across the river, highlighting the glorious colors of autumn,” she wrote. “I was just basking in the company of my family and my beautiful day. I remember thinking how beautiful life was, and how blessed I was. Then, in the twenty-minute drive home, it happened. I went from that blissful happiness to being a sobbing, blubbering mess. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the loss of Lewis and Clark and what their absence meant. It meant I would never control Hector again. It was all over. I might visit the lab, but I would never again be hooked up, would never again make Hector move. The full measure of that loss hit me, and I cried.” Scheuermann yearned to see the arm one last time, to speak to it. “I had to tell him that I would miss him, and I knew he would miss me. I thought that Hector needed to hear that we had had a wonderful time together, but that it was all right for him to have a good time with someone else now, and to achieve new things with that person. I didn’t want Hector to feel that he was betraying me by making a connection with a new subject. As I thought this over, I realized what I really needed was to tell myself all that.”

In our history from the what my father called the M1 Bone, has humanity failed to turn any technological innovation to the purposes of oppression and death. Is it any wonder that, if they indeed exist and know of us, that the rest of the universe will keep us confined to our creche until we have destroyed ourselves?

Bonus No. 1: Social Media in 2020 will be a wasteland of capital.

In what I can only describe as the most ignorant statement to flow from a any U.S. president: President Donald John Trump said tweeted: In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming (sic)? Please come back fast, we need you! Is he blaming Ridgeley and Michael?

Meanwhile, from someone who knows what he’s talking about, Bill McKibben, reflecting in How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet for The New Yorker, writes:

Thirty years ago, this magazine published The End of Nature, a long article about what we then called the greenhouse effect. I was in my twenties when I wrote it, and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted with sadness. We were spewing so much carbon into the atmosphere that nature was no longer a force beyond our influence—and humanity, with its capacity for industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic metre of the planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its water. Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the world made by man.

More appropriately the era ought to be referred to as the world unmade by humanity. Fuck Shiva: We are the virus that has become death, the destroyer of worlds, because, McKibben continues:

In the face of our environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether the human game has begun to falter—perhaps even to play itself out.

I’ll be wormfood before the end, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (see Bonus No. 1) and her cohort won’t and they see the heat wave on the near horizon. But so far, McKibben writes: We will have drawn a line in the sand and then watched a rising tide erase it. He later quotes Orrin Pilkey, an expert on sea levels at Duke University, wrote in his book Retreat from a Rising Sea, who wrote:

We can plan now and retreat in a strategic and calculated fashion, or we can worry about it later and retreat in tactical disarray in response to devastating storms. In other words, we can walk away methodically, or we can flee in panic.

We are rapidly approaching that Monty Python moment. because we’ve been buying the lies from the evil fucks in the fossil fuel industry.

Simple inertia and the human tendency to prioritize short-term gains have played a role, but the fossil-fuel industry’s contribution has been by far the most damaging. Alex Steffen, an environmental writer, coined the term “predatory delay” to describe “the blocking or slowing of needed change, in order to make money off unsustainable, unjust systems in the meantime.” The behavior of the oil companies, which have pulled off perhaps the most consequential deception in mankind’s history, is a prime example.

I first learned about global warming in 1969. The fossil fuel mother fuckers put it all down on paper eight years later.

In July, 1977, James F. Black, one of Exxon’s senior scientists, addressed many of the company’s top leaders in New York, explaining the earliest research on the greenhouse effect. “There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon-dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” he said, according to a written version of the speech which was later recorded, and which was obtained by InsideClimate News. In 1978, speaking to the company’s executives, Black estimated that a doubling of the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by between two and three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as ten degrees Celsius (eighteen degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles.

Exxon spent millions of dollars researching the problem. It outfitted an oil tanker, the Esso Atlantic, with CO2 detectors to measure how fast the oceans could absorb excess carbon, and hired mathematicians to build sophisticated climate models. By 1982, they had concluded that even the company’s earlier estimates were probably too low. In a private corporate primer, they wrote that heading off global warming and “potentially catastrophic events” would “require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”

An investigation by the L.A. Times revealed that Exxon executives took these warnings seriously. Ken Croasdale, a senior researcher for the company’s Canadian subsidiary, led a team that investigated the positive and negative effects of warming on Exxon’s Arctic operations. In 1991, he found that greenhouse gases were rising due to the burning of fossil fuels. “Nobody disputes this fact,” he said. The following year, he wrote that “global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs” in the Beaufort Sea. Drilling season in the Arctic, he correctly predicted, would increase from two months to as many as five months. At the same time, he said, the rise in the sea level could threaten onshore infrastructure and create bigger waves that would damage offshore drilling structures. Thawing permafrost could make the earth buckle and slide under buildings and pipelines. As a result of these findings, Exxon and other major oil companies began laying plans to move into the Arctic, and started to build their new drilling platforms with higher decks, to compensate for the anticipated rises in sea level.

McKibben puts this bow on Exxon’s evil plan:

The implications of the exposés were startling. Not only did Exxon and other companies know that scientists like Hansen were right; they used his NASA climate models to figure out how low their drilling costs in the Arctic would eventually fall.

Fast forward to 1997 and Kyoto, Japan:

On a December morning in 1997 at the Kyoto Convention Center, after a long night of negotiation, the developed nations reached a tentative accord on climate change. Exhausted delegates lay slumped on couches in the corridor, or on the floor in their suits, but most of them were grinning. Imperfect and limited though the agreement was, it seemed that momentum had gathered behind fighting climate change. But as I watched the delegates cheering and clapping, an American lobbyist, who had been coördinating much of the opposition to the accord, turned to me and said, “I can’t wait to get back to Washington, where we’ve got this under control.” [Emphasis mine, JH]

He was right. On January 29, 2001, nine days after George W. Bush was inaugurated, Lee Raymond visited his old friend Vice-President Dick Cheney, who had just stepped down as the C.E.O. of the oil-drilling giant Halliburton. Cheney helped persuade Bush to abandon his campaign promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Within the year, Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant for Bush, had produced an internal memo that made a doctrine of the strategy that the G.C.C. had hit on a decade earlier. “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community,” Luntz wrote in the memo, which was obtained by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based organization. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”

Exxon is far from the only Blofeld here, but the fossil fuel giant is the bellwether. Beginning the penultimate section of his reflection, McKibben writes:

Exxon’s behavior is shocking, but not entirely surprising. Philip Morris lied about the effects of cigarette smoking before the government stood up to Big Tobacco. The mystery that historians will have to unravel is what went so wrong in our governance and our culture that we have done, essentially, nothing to stand up to the fossil-fuel industry.

There are undoubtedly myriad intellectual, psychological, and political sources for our inaction, but I cannot help thinking that the influence of Ayn Rand, the Russian émigré novelist, may have played a role. Rand’s disquisitions on the “virtue of selfishness” and unbridled capitalism are admired by many American politicians and economists—Paul Ryan, Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, Andrew Puzder, and Donald Trump, among them. Trump, who has called “The Fountainhead” his favorite book [I’ll give anyone $100 for documentary proof that Trump ever read the book, JH], said that the novel “relates to business and beauty and life and inner emotions. That book relates to… everything.” Long after Rand’s death, in 1982, the libertarian gospel of the novel continues to sway our politics: Government is bad. Solidarity is a trap. Taxes are theft. The Koch brothers, whose enormous fortune derives in large part from the mining and refining of oil and gas, have peddled a similar message, broadening the efforts that Exxon-funded groups like the Global Climate Coalition spearheaded in the late nineteen-eighties.

The Virtue of selfishness and the gospel of government is bad, solidarity is a trap and taxes are theft.

Yeah, that’s the Republican Party.

Bonus No. 1: This is my first real natural disaster and it sucks.

There is no practical difference between putting a .22 caliber or a .45 caliber bullet in someone’s brain. Yes, the former is neater than the latter, but the victim cannot be more dead in one case than the other. The idea of arming an intercontinental ballistic missile with a tactical warhead is ludicrous and dangerous. We are now officially in Stranglovian territory.

If we detonate a battlefield nuclear weapon there is a 100 percent chance that the survivors will find a way to respond in kind. At that point escalation becomes nearly impossible to prevent.

Julian Borger, reporting in US nuclear weapons: first low-yield warheads roll off the production line for The Guardian, writes:

The US has begun making a new, low-yield nuclear warhead for its Trident missiles that arms control advocates warn could lower the threshold for a nuclear conflict.

The National Nuclear Security Administration announced in an email it had started manufacturing the weapon at its Pantex nuclear weapons plant in Texas, as ordered by Donald Trump’s nuclear posture review last year.

The NNSA said the first of the new warheads had come off the production line and that it was on schedule to deliver the first batch–an unspecified number referred to as “initial operational capability”–before the end of September.

The numbers are not hard to guess. 14 Trident-capable submarines each carrying 24 submarine-launched ballistic missiles capable of lofting up to 12 (100-475 kt) warheads each equals 4,032 warheads under the control of just 28 (Captain and Executive Officer, see Crimson Tide) naval officers. Having more than one missile per sub, with more than one crippled warhead each would make no sense unless you were hell bent on a nuclear holocaust, so 14 warheads—one per sub—with maybe a further seven as backup in the depot.

The warhead size speculated at is a 5 kt (kilo tons equivalent of TNT) device. That is the size of the nuclear warheads on the Terrier surface-to-air missiles I’m most familiar with. If you’re crazy enough to build and deploy that size warhead, you don’t put it on an SLBM, you put it on a cruise missile. Why? Two words: spy satellites.

The Soviets and the Chinese will see an SLBM launch within seconds. They’ll know (roughly) where the missile is headed, but they will not know what the payload is. In short, they’ll go batshit and give very serious thought to retaliating while they still have missile to retaliate with. (If you believe either country would accept our word that the target was some third party, you’re already batshit crazy. Think about it. If you were president of the United States, would you believe that message from either Russia or China?) Hello…! WW III.

If we detonate a battlefield nuclear weapon there is a 100 percent chance that the survivors will find a way to respond in kind. At that point escalation becomes nearly impossible to prevent.

The nuclear weapons budget is likely to be an important battlefield in the struggle between Trump and congressional Democrats. The president is increasingly surrounding himself with Reagan-era nuclear hawks, including John Bolton, his national security adviser and who pushed for the INF to be jettisoned. Bolton’s new deputy, Charles Kupperman, once argued a nuclear war could be won “in the classical sense” if one side emerged the stronger, even if there were tens of millions of casualties.

Speaking to reporters last week, former defence secretary William Perry, an arms control advocate, said he was less worried about the number of nuclear warheads left in the world than by the return of cold war talk about such weapons being “usable”.

“The belief that there might be tactical advantage using nuclear weapons–which I haven’t heard that being openly discussed in the United States or in Russia for a good many years – is happening now in those countries which I think is extremely distressing,” Perry said.

“That’s a very dangerous belief.”

No shit, Sherlock.

When he sent the Great White—the ships were actually painted white—fleet to circumnavigate the glove in 1907-08, Republican President Theodore Roosevelt’s maxim was Walk softly and carry a big stick, not, as President Donald John Trump seems to believe, lurch around like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster waving your little stick.

Whoever came up with this idea is ignorant and certifiable.

Sometime in the late ’90s—I think it was 1997—I read a biography of Sir Issac Newton in which was described a book on fluid mechanics that he had read as a boy. I was intrigued and sought a copy of the book. I was astonished to discover that the rare books room in the Cleveland Public Library had a 17th-century copy. I had to see it.

I called ahead to the library and made an appointment for the next day. I took a bus downtown and when I arrived found the book, in an archival box, waiting for me along with a pair of white cotton gloves to protect the pages from contamination by my touch. I spent perhaps two or three hours gently leafing through a book that had inspired one of our great geniuses. I kept the gloves and they now rest draped over my reproduction (you can see them in the upper left of this photo) of a self-portrait by humanity’s greatest genius: Leonardo da Vinci.

That time at the library was magical, but until yesterday—reading Do Proteins Hold the Key to the Past? by Sam Knight—I didn’t realize just how magical.

The subhead to the New Yorker piece sets the state: New methods are allowing a group of scientists to reëxamine the world’s libraries and archives, in search of the hidden lives of authors.

Knight’s narrative begins with a 13th century bible.

In October, 2010, an Italian religious historian named Alberto Melloni stood over a small cherrywood box in the reading room of the Laurentian Library, in Florence. The box was old and slightly scuffed, and inked in places with words in Latin. It had been stored for several centuries inside one of the library’s distinctive sloping reading desks, which were designed by Michelangelo. Melloni slid the lid off the box. Inside was a yellow silk scarf, and wrapped in the scarf was a thirteenth-century Bible, no larger than the palm of his hand, which was falling to pieces.

The Bible was “a very poor one,” Melloni told me recently. “Very dark. Very nothing.” But it had a singular history. In 1685, a Jesuit priest who had travelled to China gave the Bible to the Medici family, suggesting that it had belonged to Marco Polo, the medieval explorer who reached the court of Kublai Khan around 1275.

Melloni wanted to restore the book and better understand its history, but was loath to allow any invasive, or destructive, testing regardless of how minute a sample might be needed. This was where the story, for me, grew fascinating.

In addition to standard conservation tools, like ultraviolet photography and infrared spectroscopy, which is used to study pigments, the experts there suggested proteomics. “It was the first time I heard the word ‘proteomic’ in my life,” Melloni recalled.

Proteomics is the study of the interaction of proteins in living things.

Every physical book I’ve ever read, every book anyone has ever read—without the benefit of those white, cotton gloves—retains a tiny chemical bit of the reader. Proteomis allows us to study those touches.

Proteomics aims for completeness. The proteome of a single human cell, which might contain billions of proteins, is sometimes compared to an atlas. It can guide geneticists or drug companies to early markers of a disease, or to the precise mechanism of aging, or to promising targets for cancer treatment.

Under the right conditions, proteins can survive for millions of years. In recent years, proteomic studies of art works and archeological remains have yielded biological information of startling clarity, revealing gossamer-thin layers of fish glue on seventeenth-century religious sculptures and identifying children’s milk teeth from pits of previously unrecognizable Neolithic bones. In 2008, researchers were able to sequence the proteins of a harbor seal that remained on the surface of six-hundred-year-old cooking pots found at an Inuit site in northern Alaska. Three years later, chemists found a hundred and twenty-six different proteins in a mammoth femur.

Accessing those biological traces without damaging the bit of history under scrutiny was a hurdle that Gleb Zilberstein, an inventor who works out of Rehovot, Israel, leaped. Knight continues his story:

He is a fan of Umberto Eco’s work on semiotics, which proposes multiple ways to interpret a text, and he had often wondered about the chemical interaction between an author and the pages on which he works. “Each person wants to understand cultural life things through the prism of his experience,” Zilberstein told me. “My experience is tools for analytical chemistry.”

Inspired by another chemist: Pier Giorgio Righetti, known in the world of proteomics for his work on electrophoresis, a process that helps to sort molecules by size and by electrical charge, Zilberstein had been struck by an idea.

His latest startup was a project to develop plastics with charged ions on their surface which would draw microbes and bacteria off other substances. He wanted to use the technology in food and drinks packaging. Zilberstein wondered if it could also be applied on works of art. In theory, researchers could use the charged plastics to remove proteins—in fact, almost any chemical—from an artifact without destroying part of it in the process. Even the most treasured documents and canvases could be analyzed for tantalizing traces that might remain on or near their surface: sweat, saliva, or signs of disease; evidence of an artist’s diet, drugs, even DNA. “You can find out what you ate, how you hurt, how the author was treated,” Zilberstein told me.

What they discovered together opened another universe.

“It is the irony of history that the most obvious things are the least discussed,” Patrick Boner, a visiting scholar at the Catholic University of America, who has written a book about Kepler’s astrology, said. “The way that people conceptualized time, remedies, health, even their bathing—all these kinds of things that are very routine—were very informed by things like astrology and alchemy.”

When I sent Righetti and Zilberstein’s Kepler draft to Boner, he told me he already knew their work, from their plague paper. “It’s opening a door,” he said. “The thing I appreciate about this project is how much more lies beyond any kind of written records.” Kepler once wrote, of his own search for knowledge in the movements of stars and matter and unimaginable things, rather than in the lessons of the printed word, “It is as though I had read a divine text, written into the world itself, not with letters but rather with essential objects, saying: ‘Man, stretch thy reason hither, so that thou mayest comprehend these things.’ ”

If I were a young student today, still participating in annual science fairs, this would be my next project. My father, perhaps inspired by Indiana Jones-like serials he watched on Saturdays as a boy, had wanted to be an archeologist. Combining Chemistry—I sure my Chemistry teacher Barry Guinn would have loved the exploration—with archeology would have been fascinating.

Any Science Fiction aficionado worth their salt know that Robot orginated with Karel Čapek’s 1920 Science Fiction play R.U.R. Robota, plural Roboti, is Czech for forced labor. (Sexbots came a little later in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.) While we pretend to pretty up our robots and make them look cute, they’re still forced labor.

Patricia Marx, writing in Learning to Love Robots for The New Yorker, initially goes for the cute, but comes around to the deeper issues when she writes:…

it is predicted that, by 2030, between thirty and forty-seven per cent of our jobs will become theirs. Elon Musk, who recently managed to lose his job as chairman of Tesla to a human, believes that a guaranteed universal income is the only solution to the inevitable mass unemployment. This will also mean more time to play with robots.

Really? That’s what the inevitable mass unemployment means? This is where Marx’s piece gets dark, and lonely, and sad.

For most of the night, the adults sat around the island counter in the kitchen, drinking wine and dissing the robots. “They make me feel more lonely, because they are faking affection,” Iris Smyles, a novelist, said. “Not to take this to a lofty place, but do you remember Sartre’s essay about essence and existence? What’s distasteful about these creatures is that they seem to exist without a specific function except to love or be loved. If they made pasta, too, that would be an improvement.” In the living room, Olivia Osborne, age fourteen, loudly and repeatedly enunciated, “Ku-ri! Play your fa-vo-rite song!,” to no avail. “It’s like talking to someone who only mildly understands English,” her friend Fiona Brainerd, also fourteen, said, adding, “Something’s wrong if you spend more time trying to get a robot to do something than it takes to do that thing.” As Rodney Brooks, the co-founder of iRobot and the inventor of the Roomba’s software control system, recently wrote to me via e-mail, “The physical appearance of a robot makes a promise about its capabilities. If that promise is not met by the reality of what it can do, then there will be disappointment.”

Of one of the robots at the party—Paro, a furry baby harp seal (with a $6,400 price tag), Marx writes:

I had the robot on a short-term loan from its maker, Takanori Shibata, an engineer from Tokyo whom I’d met with the day before in the lobby of the Hilton Times Square. Shibata was in the country for a series of meetings, including one with NASA, which he was trying to sell on the idea of including his stuffed animal on the mission to Mars, so that it can keep the astronauts company. “I wanted to develop a robot that enriched our lives psychologically, the way animals do,” he told me, opening a travel trunk that contained Paro and its charger—an electric baby pacifier that comes with a warning label that it is not for human use.

Paro was a hit at the party.

In the kitchen, the adults deemed Paro especially disturbing, and not only because its control switch is located under its tush. “It’s too needy,” Laurie Marvald, the manager of the music band AJR, said, noting that its constant motion felt like an attention-getting ploy to compel you to stroke it. “It would make me depressed and lonely by reminding me of the friend I don’t have,” Sarah Paley, a poet, said. “At least a bad date isn’t programmed to like you,” Smyles agreed.

In the next room, the seal was being doted on. “I like Paro the most, but sometimes I forget it’s a robot, and when I realize I’m having a reaction to it like it’s alive, it’s creepy,” Fiona said, almost perfectly describing the state for which the robotics professor Masahiro Mori, in 1970, coined the term uncanny valley.

There is a reason that the Japanese have an edge over the rest of the world in dealing with Mori’s concept.

According to Shunsuke Aoki, the forty-year-old C.E.O. of the Tokyo-based startup Yukai Engineering, the Japanese are more receptive than Americans to the concept of robots as friends and helpmates. “In Japan, we believe there are spirits in all objects, even man-made ones, and we feel harmony with them,” Aoki told me, referring to animism, a key component of the ancient religion of Shinto. Yukai Engineering is the maker of Qoobo ($149), a souped-up, purring pillow that is supposed to look like a cat in repose, with its round fluffy body in “husky gray” or “French brown,” and a tail that wags responsively, like a metronome gone berserk. Qoobo has no head, because, Aoki said, “this shape is designed for cuddling, and a head would get in the way.”

In contrast to Shintoism, Judeo-Christian theology suggests that, by begetting artificial life, you create false idols, who, inexorably, will decide to make your life miserable by destroying it. Take heed from the golem, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, Mickey Mouse’s enchanted brooms, Dolores in “Westworld”—or, indeed, from try-hard Jibo.

How can any creature birthed or built that brings joy be evil incarnate? This is the question that can creep out the hardiest. On her last day with Paro, Marx takes to the streets of New York to watch people watch her and Paro.

At the table next to ours, a woman in her forties on furlough from her job as a pastry chef on a cruise ship looked up from her book to stare at Paro squirming in my lap. “I know it’s not real, but it’s having a real effect on me,” she said. She asked to hold it, caressing its cushiony paw. The cruise ship doesn’t allow pets. “It would definitely bring me comfort,” she said. Paro blinked, then turned its head toward her and gave her what seemed like a come-hither look. “It’s what I want in a pet—something that says ‘Love me, want me, feed me!’ ” she said. “It would bring me joy. False joy, but I’d appreciate it anyway.”

Paro and I made our way to the subway, where we sat next to an old, frail-looking man wearing a green parka. Paro’s head rested on the man’s leg, which seemed to enchant him. He fixed his eyes on the seal, tentatively petting it and softly calling it “Beauty.” If Paro belonged to him, the man told me in a Russian accent, “I would take care of it and it would take care of me.” What would he name it? “Arna,” he said. “The name of my late wife.” Before leaving the car, he leaned over and gently kissed Paro’s forehead.

All things considered, Paro—even at $6,400—seems like a better deal, to me, than popping a Soma.

Bonus: Rumors swirl Armond Budish will resign, not serve 2nd full county executive term.

All that separates the Iraqi system of sentencing citizens to death and any one of Dante Alighieri’s levels of Hell as portrayed in his Inferno is that in Iraq, those responsible have not yet figured how to make the personal hell of the sufferers last for all eternity. I can’t bring myself to call this a Justice system, those presiding Judges or the participants Officers of the Court.

Ben Taub, writing in Iraq’s Post-ISIS Campaign of Revenge for The New Yorker, describes a scene that would make Dante jealous.

Shortly after ten o’clock, three judges in long black robes shuffled into Courtroom 2 and sat at the bench. Suhail Abdullah Sahar, a bald, middle-aged man with a thin, jowly face, sat in the center. There were twenty-one cases on his docket that day, sixteen related to terrorism. He quietly read out a name; a security officer shouted it down the hall to one of his colleagues, who shouted it to the guard, who shouted it into the cell. Out came a young man named Ahmed. A security officer led him to a wooden cage in the middle of the courtroom. Judge Sahar accused him of having joined ISIS in Qayyarah, a small town south of Mosul.

“Sir, I swear, I have never been to Qayyarah,” Ahmed said.

Sahar was skeptical. “I have a written confession here, with your thumbprint on it,” he said.

“Sir, I swear, I gave my thumbprint on a blank paper,” Ahmed replied. “And I was tortured by the security services.” Sahar listed Ahmed’s supposed jihadi associates; Ahmed denied knowing any of them.

“Enough evidence,” the prosecutor said. “I ask for a guilty verdict.”

Ahmed had no lawyer, and so Sahar called upon an elderly state attorney named Hussein, who was seated in the gallery, to spontaneously craft a defense. Hussein walked over to a lectern, repeated from memory what Ahmed had said, and, without requesting his release, concluded with a plea for “mercy in his sentencing.”

Ahmed wept as he was led out of the room. His trial had lasted four and a half minutes.

The next suspect insisted that he had been arrested by mistake—that his name was similar to that of someone in ISIS. A private defense lawyer explained that his client had confessed to ISIS affiliation under torture—he had a medical examination to prove it—but none of the judges appeared to be listening. As the lawyer spoke, they cracked jokes, signed documents, and beckoned their assistants to collect folders from the bench. Sahar yawned. The trial lasted eight minutes.

The third suspect was a twenty-three-year-old from a village near Mosul, charged with ISIS affiliation and arrested while in a displaced-persons camp.

“When did you join ISIS?” Sahar asked.

“I didn’t join,” the suspect replied.

“Then why did you thumbprint this confession?”

“They blindfolded me and made me do it.”

“Enough evidence—I ask for a guilty verdict,” the prosecutor said.

The suspect’s defense lawyer carefully explained that regional intelligence reports showed that the suspect had been mistaken for someone with a similar name. In terrorism trials, the mere presence of a private defense lawyer can signal the suspect’s likely innocence; most lawyers refuse to take on ambiguous cases, out of fear that the security services will harass them for perceived links to the Islamic State. (Last year, Iraqi courts issued arrest warrants for at least fifteen defense lawyers and charged them with ISIS affiliation.) But, as the lawyer spoke, the judges tended to administrative tasks. The trial was over in nine minutes. “I hate ISIS—they blew up my house!” the suspect shouted, in tears, as he was led out of court.

By noon, Sahar had presided over ten trials, involving twenty suspects. The courtroom lost power twice, but Sahar kept going in the dark, skimming documents by the light of his cell phone. The final case before lunch involved three defendants, all badly injured. As they limped into the courtroom, a security officer put three plastic chairs in the cage. The last suspect to appear was a bald, bespectacled man in his mid-thirties, named Louai; he was hunched over a pair of short wooden crutches, and moved as if one of his legs were paralyzed and his vertebrae were no longer aligned. Courtroom 2 was silent, except for the sounds of him struggling toward the cage.

Sahar questioned the other suspects first. One, named Haidar, who wore a back brace, said that he had been mistakenly arrested for a car-bomb attack, in 2014, and that in the course of an interrogation, to make the torture stop, he had started naming random people, including Louai. Judge Sahar then called upon Louai, who rose from his chair and gripped the cage to support himself. “I went to sell my car in the market,” he said. “Then Haidar called me, and I was ambushed, arrested.” He spoke in an urgent, high-pitched tone, but he stuttered and slurred his words; during interrogations, he said, officers had beaten him so badly that he suffered a blood clot in his brain. “They also broke my back!” he shouted. “They broke my feet and hands! I can barely walk!”

“Enough evidence—I ask for a guilty verdict,” the prosecutor said. It was the only phrase she uttered in court that morning.

Haidar’s lawyer noted that there was no witness and no material evidence, and that his request for a medical examination, to prove that Haidar had been tortured, had been rejected. Louai’s lawyer explained that Louai’s confession had been coerced and made no sense: he had said that he remotely detonated the car bomb, when, in fact, the police had concluded that it was a suicide attack.

Louai had spent four years in pretrial detention, and, during the two or three minutes allotted to his defense, the judges had been talking among themselves. “I haven’t seen a judge until now!” he shouted.

“Take them out,” Sahar said. A security officer opened the cage. It took Louai nearly two minutes to limp to the door. Sahar took a lunch break, then ordered his execution.

And we wonder why they hate us.

Bonus No. 1: Watch The Backstory: Ben Taub on the future of Iraq, following the Islamic State’s defeat in Mosul.

Bonus No. 2: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets biblical on Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Earlier this month Ralph Nader lamented the passing of a corporate leader: Herb Kelleher. This week Nader remembers another member of the 1 Percent who wasn’t a bad guy but rather someone that Nader—and possibly Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (See Bonus No. 1 at the bottom of this story)—approved of.

Nader in John C. Bogle: Renaissance Money Manager for the People and More, writes:

The accolades were uniformly respectful for the honest, innovative, and unyielding defender of shareholder/investor rights–the late John C. Bogle–the founder of the now giant Vanguard Group of mutual funds. Writers took note of his pioneering low-cost, low-fee investing and mutual funds tied to stock-market indices. Index funds, tied to such indices as the S&P 500, now total trillions of dollars.

Bogle abhorred gouging by the money managers. He would add up their fees–seemingly small at less than 1 percent a year–and show how over time they could cut the cumulative return by 50 percent or more. That’s why he set up Vanguard in 1974, which by holding down costs and fees has begun to push the rest of the smug industry to be more reasonable. Vanguard now has over $5 trillion in managed assets.

He could have become as rich as Edward Johnson III–his counterpart at Fidelity Investments, who is worth over $7 billion. Instead, Bogle organized Vanguard as a mutual firm, not a stock firm, owned by its investors. Bogle’s fortune, at the time of his passing last week, was estimated at $80 million after a lifetime of giving away Continue Reading »

When I forwarded Jill Lapore’s Does Journalism Have a Future? to Roldo Bartimole and Sam Allard this morning, I included a note saying that we have no one to blame but ourselves because we knew in 1981 that the Internet was coming for our jobs and we did nothing to prepare. [Update at 0806 on 27 January: the internet isn’t looking so hot either.]

Some of us have been playing Paul Revere for nearly two-score years and we still don’t have any idea what Journalism will be a year from now. Lapore sets the table this way:

Between 1970 and 2016, the year the American Society of News Editors quit counting, five hundred or so dailies went out of business; the rest cut news coverage, or shrank the paper’s size, or stopped producing a print edition, or did all of that, and it still wasn’t enough. The newspaper mortality rate is old news, and nostalgia for dead papers is itself pitiful at this point, even though, I still say, there’s a principle involved. “I wouldn’t weep about a shoe factory or a branch-line railroad shutting down,” Heywood Broun, the founder of the American Newspaper Guild, said when the New York World went out of business, in 1931. “But newspapers are different.” And the bleeding hasn’t stopped. Between January, 2017, and April, 2018, a third of the nation’s largest newspapers, including the Denver Post and the San Jose Mercury News, reported layoffs. In a newer trend, so did about a quarter of digital-native news sites. BuzzFeed News laid off a hundred people in 2017; speculation is that BuzzFeed is trying to dump it. The Huffington Post paid most of its writers nothing for years, upping that recently to just above nothing, and yet, despite taking in tens of millions of dollars in advertising revenue in 2018, it failed to turn a profit.

Even veterans of august and still thriving papers are worried, especially about the fake news that’s risen from the ashes of the dead news. “We are, for the first time in modern history, facing the prospect of how societies would exist without reliable news,” Alan Rusbridger, for twenty years the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, writes in Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now. “There are not that many places left that do quality news well or even aim to do it at all,” Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of the New York Times, writes in Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts. Like most big-paper reporters and editors who write about the crisis of journalism, Rusbridger and Abramson are interested in national and international news organizations. The local story is worse.

This last, of course, why I sent the story to both Roldo and Sam. After 50 years Roldo is out of the game, but Sam is just beginning his career and I have to wonder how he sees his future. (For my part, I got out of Journalism in the mid-’90s for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was, even at 14.4 baud, I knew that print was on the way out.

I had a long conversation with one publisher about the future when I was still an editor and his query, “yeah, but how will you get advertisers to pay for it? That was the mindset, and when the Internet began offering better-targeted advertising options, well… Lapore continues:

Next came the dot-coms. Craigslist went online in the Bay Area in 1996 and spread across the continent like a weed, choking off local newspapers’ most reliable source of revenue: classified ads. The [Telegraph & Gazette, formerly the Worcester Telegram and the Evening Gazette] tried to hold on to its classified-advertising section by wading into the shallow waters of the Internet, at telegram.com, where it was called, acronymically, and not a little desperately, “TANGO!” Then began yet another round of corporate buyouts, deeply leveraged deals conducted by executives answerable to stockholders seeking higher dividends, not better papers. In 1999, the New York Times Company bought the T&G for nearly three hundred million dollars. By 2000, only three hundred and fifty of the fifteen hundred daily newspapers left in the United States were independently owned. And only one out of every hundred American cities that had a daily newspaper was anything other than a one-paper town.

Then came the fall, when papers all over the country, shackled to mammoth corporations and a lumbering, century-old business model, found themselves unable to compete with the upstarts—online news aggregators like the Huffington Post (est. 2005) and Breitbart News (est. 2007), which were, to readers, free. News aggregators also drew display advertisers away from print; Facebook and Google swallowed advertising accounts whole. Big papers found ways to adapt; smaller papers mainly folded. Between 1994 and 2016, years when the population of Worcester County rose by more than a hundred thousand, daily home delivery of the T&G declined from more than a hundred and twenty thousand to barely thirty thousand. In one year alone, circulation fell by twenty-nine per cent. In 2012, after another round of layoffs, the T&G left its building, its much reduced staff small enough to fit into two floors of an office building nearby. The next year, the owner of the Boston Red Sox bought the newspaper, along with the Boston Globe, from the New York Times Company for seventy million dollars, only to unload the T&G less than a year later, for seventeen million dollars, to Halifax Media Group, which held it for only half a year before Halifax itself was bought, flea-market style, by an entity that calls itself, unironically, the New Media Investment Group.

So far, fingers crossed, knock-on-wood, I still have access to not one, but two local weeklies: The North Royalton Post and The Royalton Recorder. How long they’ll last is anyone’s guess but both have digital editions.

With the table set, Lapore gets down to the meat and potatoes.

In the past half century, and especially in the past two decades, journalism itself—the way news is covered, reported, written, and edited—has changed, including in ways that have made possible the rise of fake news, and not only because of mergers and acquisitions, and corporate ownership, and job losses, and Google Search, and Facebook and BuzzFeed. There’s no shortage of amazing journalists at work, clear-eyed and courageous, broad-minded and brilliant, and no end of fascinating innovation in matters of form, especially in visual storytelling. Still, journalism, as a field, is as addled as an addict, gaunt, wasted, and twitchy, its pockets as empty as its nights are sleepless. It’s faster than it used to be, so fast. It’s also edgier, and needier, and angrier. It wants and it wants and it wants. But what does it need?

Ah, that’s the question I’ve been asking for 40 years. Lapore’s very sad answer is not news, not journalists, not even readers; he answer—and I agree here in 2019—is eyes/ears on the ads, and that’s death because fake news is better, and nearly cost free, at delivering customers than Journalism ever could be. There’s nothing new about fake news and President Donald John Trump is hardly the first president to take advantage of the trope. Lapore notes that:

In 1969, Nixon’s Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, delivered a speech drafted by the Nixon aide Pat Buchanan accusing the press of liberal bias. It’s “good politics for us to kick the press around,” Nixon is said to have told his staff. The press, Agnew said, represents “a concentration of power over American public opinion unknown in history,” consisting of men who “read the same newspapers” and “talk constantly to one another.” How dare they. Halberstam waved this aside as so much P.R. hooey, but, as has since become clear, Agnew reached a ready audience, especially in houses like mine.

Spiro who? “The press regarded Agnew with uncontrolled hilarity,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed in 1970, but “no one can question the force of Spiro T. Agnew’s personality, nor the impact of his speeches.” No scholar of journalism can afford to ignore Agnew anymore. In On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News, the historian Matthew Pressman argues that any understanding of the crisis of journalism in the twenty-first century has to begin by vanquishing the ghost of Spiro T. Agnew.

Ah, History.

I have a minor nit to pick with Loper when she starts talking about BuzzFeed and its primary revenue source: what she (probably following the lead of BuzzFeed—others) calls native advertising, an Orwellian term horrible enough to raise the dead. She writes:BuzzFeed surpassed the Times Web site in reader traffic in 2013. BuzzFeed News is subsidized by BuzzFeed, which, like many Web sites—including, at this point, those of most major news organizations—makes money by way of “native advertising,” ads that look like articles. In some publications, these fake stories are easy to spot; in others, they’re not. At BuzzFeed, they’re in the same font as every other story. BuzzFeed’s native-advertising bounty meant that BuzzFeed News had money to pay reporters and editors…

The term I grew up with was blowjob. Lying to readers and making them think that advertiser-sponsored-written bullshit was an act of prostitution as blatant as dropping to your knees and sucking the advertiser’s cock. To steal the line from an old joke: “We know what you are, now we’re just haggling over the price.” Blowjobs apparently played a role in Abramson’s departure from the Times.

In March, 2014, the Times produced an Innovation Report, announcing that the newspaper had fallen behind in “the art and science of getting our journalism to readers,” a field led by BuzzFeed. That May, Sulzberger fired Abramson, who had been less than all-in about the Times doing things like running native ads. …Not long afterward, the Times began running more lists, from book recommendations to fitness tips to takeaways from Presidential debates.

My newspaper—one which I do pay an annual subscription to—is The Guardian. Unlike the paper’s many competitors, it has a cushion: philanthropic trust established in 1936, that allows the paper to maneuver, change and grow. From 1995 (about when I was getting out of print journalism) through 2014 Guardian Editor Alan Rushbridger sought to turn the beast onto a different path.

The Guardian, founded as the Manchester Guardian in 1821, has been held by a philanthropic trust since 1936, which somewhat insulates it from market forces, just as Jeff Bezos’s ownership now does something similar for the Post. By investing in digital-readership research from the time Rusbridger took charge, in 1995, the Guardian became, for a while, the online market leader in the U.K. By 2006, two-thirds of its digital readers were outside the U.K. In 2007, the Guardian undertook what Rusbridger calls “the Great Integration,” pulling its Web and print parts together into a single news organization, with the same editorial management. It also developed a theory about the relationship between print and digital, deciding, in 2011, to be a “digital-first organization” and to “make print a slower, more reflective read which would not aspire to cover the entire waterfront in news.”

Rusbridger explains, with a palpable grief, his dawning realization that the rise of social media meant that “chaotic information was [I would say lies and rumors were] free: good information was expensive,” which meant, in turn, that “good information was increasingly for smaller elites” and that “it was harder for good information to compete on equal terms with bad.” He takes these circumstances as something of a dare: “Our generation had been handed the challenge of rethinking almost [I would have deleted the almost here, JH] everything societies had, for centuries, taken for granted about journalism.”

Taking anything for granted is how we got here. Every assumption, every maxim, every reality we think we know, must be constantly questioned and requestioned.

The new normal is that there is no normal.

Life is not a game. We don’t take turns. There are no turns. I’ve always been partial to the Buddhist concept of life as a flowing river. We might delude ourselves into thinking that we can freeze, understand, a moment but in the time we take to declare the moment now! the moment is gone. Decisions are like that.

Every decision we ever made, every decision we’ll ever make, began forming with our first breath; maybe before. Joshua Rothman, writing in The Art of Decision-Making for The New Yorker, tries to decide how he feels about all that.

We say that we “decide” to get married, to have children, to live in particular cities or embark on particular careers, and in a sense this is true. But how do we actually make those choices? One of the paradoxes of life is that our big decisions are often less calculated than our small ones are. We agonize over what to stream on Netflix, then let TV shows persuade us to move to New York; buying a new laptop may involve weeks of Internet research, but the deliberations behind a life-changing breakup could consist of a few bottles of wine. We’re hardly more advanced than the ancient Persians, who, Herodotus says, made big decisions by discussing them twice: once while drunk, once while sober.

Steven Johnson, author of Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most thinks he can help us with that Johnson, writes Rothman:

examines a number of complex decisions with far-reaching consequences—such as the choice, made by President Barack Obama and his advisers, to green-light the raid on Osama bin Laden’s presumed compound, in Abbottabad, Pakistan—and then shows how the people in charge drew upon insights from “decision science,” a research field at the intersection of behavioral economics, psychology, and management. He thinks that we should apply such techniques to our own lives.

I’ve never had to decide whether to launch a covert raid on a suspected terrorist compound, but I’ve made my share of big decisions. This past summer, my wife and I had a baby boy. His existence suggests that, at some point, I decided to become a father. Did I, though?

My answer would be sort of. I like how Rothman rings Leo Tolstoy into the frame:

In War and Peace, Tolstoy writes that, while an armchair general may imagine himself “analyzing some campaign on a map” and then issuing orders, a real general never finds himself at “the beginning of some event”; instead, he is perpetually situated in the middle of a series of events, each a link in an endless chain of causation. “Can it be that I allowed Napoleon to get as far as Moscow?” Tolstoy’s General Kutuzov wonders. “When was it decided? Was it yesterday, when I sent Platov the order to retreat, or was it the evening before, when I dozed off and told Bennigsen to give the orders? Or still earlier?” Unlike the capture of Moscow by Napoleon, the birth of my son was a joyous occasion. Still, like Kutuzov, I’m at a loss to explain it: it’s a momentous choice, but I can’t pinpoint the making of it in space or time.

For Tolstoy, the tendency of big decisions to make themselves was one of the great mysteries of existence. It suggested that the stories we tell about our lives are inadequate to their real complexity. Johnson means to offer a way out of the Tolstoyan conundrum.

I don’t see the problem. We are the sum of all that we have lived. No decision can be made in a vacuum and that is mostly because what we think of as Free Will is a conceit, a chimera, assembled by our ego. If you want to hear gawd laugh, share your plans.

Toward the end of the article, Rothman switches gears a bit and begins to talk about ambitions vs. aspirations through the lens of Agnes (my mother’s saint name) Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago. We, according to Callard, aspire to self-transformation by trying on the values that we hope one day to possess, just as we might strike a pose in the mirror before heading out on a date. In place of a moment of decision, Rothman writes, Callard sees a more gradual process: “Old Person aspires to become New Person.”

That makes much more sense to me. I see this all the time with my students who seem capable of shifting from 10-year-old self to 30-year-old self in a blink as they try on personas. Rothman continues:Suppose that you sign up for a classical-music-appreciation class, in which your first assignment is to listen to a symphony. You put on headphones, press Play—and fall asleep. The problem is that you don’t actually want to listen to classical music; you just want to want to. Aspiring, Callard thinks, is a common human activity: there are aspiring wine lovers, art appreciators, sports fans, fashionistas, d.j.s, executives, alpinists, do-gooders, parents, and religious believers, all hatching plans to value new things. Many ordinary decisions, moreover—such as choosing between Goldman Sachs and Partners in Health—also touch on the question of who we aspire to become.

Aspiration, however, is not the same as ambition. Callard makes this distinction.

Some of the people taking the music-appreciation class are ambitious; they enrolled not because they aspire to love classical music but because the class is an easy A. From the first day, they know what they value: their grades. (“Turning ambition into aspiration is one of the job descriptions of any teacher,” [I like that, JH] Callard notes.) The ambitious students find it easy to explain why they’re taking the class. But the aspirants must grow comfortable with a certain quantity of awkward pretense. If someone were to ask you why you enrolled, you would be overreaching if you said that you were moved by the profound beauty of classical music. The truth, which is harder to communicate, is that you have some vague sense of its value, which you hope that some future version of yourself might properly grasp.

Aspiration is all well and good, but I like myself now and all that go me here. Tomorrow is tomorrow.

Bonus No. 1: I write good messages/letters/emails. Amy Cunningham does too: How to Write a Condolence Letter.

Bonus No. 2: That Time In 2005 Paul Hackett Got Sherrod Brown To Let His Mask Slip—Here We Go Again.

Bonus No. 3: Australia Day! Our sacred day many depraved leftists are calling Nazi Christmas

I tell my students that each morning I celebrate my ignorance because being ignorant means I get to learn more about my world that day. Until this week I was ignorant of Nick Drnaso and his graphic novels: Beverly and Sabrina) D. T. Max, writing in The Bleak Brilliance of Nick Drnaso’s Graphic Novels for The New Yorker, began to ease my ignorance on Drnaso.

I ordered copies of Beverly and Sabrina—I’m 94 pages into the former—and the book is not a leisure read. Max explains partly why that is, but I also think there is a bit of generational hurdle that I have to get over.

The first passage that I marked caught my attention because I was reminded of our own John Derf Backderf and the work that he is best known for: My Friend Dahmer. Max writes:

Drnaso, who lives in Chicago, has spent many hours in the darker corners of the Internet. “I have a morbid curiosity in me,” he said. But Sabrina is not autobiographical. He told me that he had followed the advice that the celebrated graphic novelist Chris Ware once gave to aspiring cartoonists: throw out your yearbooks. “They are not reference material,” Ware warned.

I don’t know if Derf ever recieved the same advice, but if he did, I’m very happy he ignored it.

The next passage that gave me pause concerned Drnaso’s work satisfaction.

He told me that, in 2012, soon after graduating from college, he was asked to paint a mural for an art opening in Chicago. That month, as a member of a maintenance crew at a local concert arena, he was also staining a fence. He finished the two jobs on the same day, he told me, recalling, “The feeling of satisfaction was exactly the same between when I looked at the finished fence and when I looked at the mural.

I don’t know quite what to make of that. At one level I can say that an hour of writing a blog post gives me much the same satisfaction as the same time writing an email or a novel chapter. There is a kind of Solzhenitsyan-Socialist satisfaction in a job well done—whether in building wall in Siberia or writing a novel in Moscow—but still, oughtn’t Art provide a higher satisfaction than toil or even craft? I’m not sure.

The final line to catch my attention—coming as it did after my reading The Art Of Fiction No. 240–was this:

He had depicted the murder as a four-page sequence. In the first three pages, the men’s-rights activist rants about how society has wronged him. On the fourth page, the man methodically stabs Sabrina to death, with a detachment consistent with the rest of the book. Drnaso had been able to draw Sabrina’s murder only after getting drunk. [Emphasis mine, JH] He wondered if reading these pages would be any different from going online and watching an isis murder video or, as he had once done, looking at forensic photographs of Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment. As a teen-ager, he had watched “Faces of Death”—a video compilation of beheadings and electrocutions—at a friend’s house, and he had never forgotten it. Now, with “Sabrina,” he concluded that he had created a poisonous book out of our poisoned times. “It’s not going to be healthy for anyone to read this,” he told himself. He e-mailed his editor and said that he did not want “Sabrina” to be read by the public.

I have to think that we, the artists and writers, are the last people—think Kafka and Brod—who should be trusted with what the public ought to see and not see of our work. If we have to resort to alcohol or herbals or pharmaceuticals or witchcraft to create, what do we know?

Bonus No. 1: For another fascinating aspect of art and creation, read Julie Belcove’s Marking Time with Yuji Agematsu.

Bonus No. 2: Ohio Reduplicate Senator Rob Portman gets a nod in Amy Davidson Sorkin’s The Republican Test at the Border

Bonus No. 3: The government is literally doing nothing, call the election now Scott Donald Barnevelder Morrison!

The great words of great individuals encourage great acts. In my early life there were great speakers, but none as great as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I was yet an ignorant 8th grader in the year that he was assassinated, and while I am yet still profoundly ignorant nearly 50 years later, I have constantly chipped away at my deficit.

I move ahead, in part, by recalling my heroes.

On this Martin Luther King Day I would first recall a message that Dr. King wrote in a cold jail cell and then a message he delivered before a rapt audience. The first—Letter From a Birmingham Jail—is from 16 April 1963, :

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants–for example, to remove the stores’ humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained. As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?” We decided to schedule our direct action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham’s mayoral election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run off, we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I it” relationship for an “I thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state’s segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as “rabble rousers” and “outside agitators” those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies–a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: “Get rid of your discontent.” Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . .” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime–the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some -such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle–have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as “dirty nigger-lovers.” Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful “action” antidotes to combat the disease of segregation. Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: “Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.” In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?”

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful–in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent–and often even vocal–sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation -and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather “nonviolently” in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood, Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Second is what has been called Dr. King’s seminal address, his —Beyond Vietnam—delivered delivered precisely one year before he would be assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on 4 April 1967.

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, some of the most distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it’s always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit.

I come to this great magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization that brought us together, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement, and pray that our inner being may be sensitive to its guidance. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?” “Peace and civil rights don’t mix,” they say. “Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people?” they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate—leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that “America will be” are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954.* And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.

But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men—for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954—in 1945 rather—after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China—for whom the Vietnamese have no great love—but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed and Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all of this was presided over by United States influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call “fortified hamlets.” The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation front, that strangely anonymous group we call “VC” or “communists”? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of “aggression from the North” as if there was nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only real party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of a new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western worlds, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led this nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a unified Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be considered.

Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called “enemy,” I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Surely this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroy, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increased in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

Unquote.

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.

Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement. [sustained applause]

Part of our ongoing [applause continues], part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary. Meanwhile [applause], meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. [sustained applause] I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. [applause] Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. [applause] These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality [applause], and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. [sustained applause] So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” [applause] Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [applause]

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. [sustained applause]

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. [applause] War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy [applause], realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low [Audience:] (Yes); the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I’m not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.” Unquote.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood—it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message—of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment do decide,
In the strife of truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet ‘tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. [sustained applause]

*King says “1954,” but most likely means 1964, the year he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

The man is 50 years gone, but his words still burn bright.

Bonus No. 1: Ta-Nehisi Coates interviews Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez on MLK Day. You should pay particular attention to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s Amazon is a digital Walmart comment at timemark 38:06. While the whole event(and the video) lasted more than four hours, this segments ends at timemark 1:05:40.

Bonus No. 2: Of course the response to the interview was at times vicious.

Bonus No. 3: Aaron McGruder brought Dr. King back 40 years later to deliver a different speech.