newyorker--2020-07-13--The Argument of “Afropessimism”

The Argument of “Afropessimism”

After Dartmouth and a surprising stretch as a stockbroker in Minneapolis—an experience that goes mostly undescribed in “ Afropessimism ” but which Wilderson has elsewhere characterized as a kind of double life—Wilderson enrolls in the creative-writing program at Columbia .
At night , he attends classes at the New School , where stream of consciousness is in vogue .
That downtown influence still shows : Wilderson skids from one glint of perception to the next without much regard for grounding details or fluid transitions ; in the middle of an anecdote , he tosses you down a chute and you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of theoretical jargon .
He thinks vertically , in terms of hierarchies and structures ; the horizontal time line is beside the point .
He writes from history ’ s humid basement , or from its even less accessible underground bunker , and the plants that bloom in his writing are less floral than fungal—his arguments and remembrances grow in tight groups , close to the ground and propped atop rotting anecdotal logs , all of them adding to the shroomy funk of the room .
Though “ Afropessimism ” may veer from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doesn ’ t escape genre altogether .
It falls into a category sometimes called “ auto-theory , ” an attempt to arrive at a philosophy by way of the self .
The most pertinent example is “ Black Skin , White Masks , ” by the French-Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon , who worked up his theory of “ epidermalization ” —the process by which the societal inferiority of Black people is grafted onto the skin—by recounting his own experiences , along with a series of psychiatric case studies .
Wilderson takes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ death—a critique of humanism as it has been practiced ( or , more often , not practiced ) in the Western world .
“ Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man , yet murder men everywhere they find them , at the corner of every one of their own streets , in all the corners of the globe , ” Fanon wrote .
And yet , for Fanon , the process of decolonization—by way of inevitably bloody revolution—was also a process of humanization .
“ Decolonization , ” he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Earth , ” “ is the veritable creation of new men.
” For Wilderson , Fanon ’ s cup is too full .
Other previously colonized peoples are indeed human , but not Black people .
One of the bleakest aspects of Afropessimist thought is its denial that there is any meaningful analogy between Blacks and other nonwhites .
When Frank and Stella try to explain their poison-induced injuries to a Chinese-American doctor , she turns them away , and Wilderson muses that “ Dr .
Zhou is as much a master @ @ @ @ @ @ @ antagonists in 12 Years a Slave.
” In Wilderson ’ s view , “ people of color ” —a term he uses for those who are neither white nor Black—are “ junior partners ” to whites in the enslavement of Blacks .
One of the memories that recur in “ Afropessimism ” involves a Palestinian friend named Sameer , who , detailing life under Israeli occupation , describes the “ shameful and humiliating way the soldiers run their hands up and down your body , ” then admits that “ the shame and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ soldier is an Ethiopian Jew.
” This expression of anti-Black racism from a Palestinian is a cataclysm for Wilderson .
Now he understands that , “ in the collective unconscious , Palestinian insurgents have more in common with the Israeli state and civil society than they do with Black people.
” In the same vein , Wilderson describes a meeting that his father attended , as an emissary of the University of Minnesota , with several Native American leaders , hoping to resolve a conflict about reservation lands .
Young Frank was in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ him cried out , “ We don ’ t want you , a nigger man , telling us what to do !
” The lesson that Wilderson takes from the episode is that the Native Americans—raped and slaughtered on these lands , subjected to a genocide that enabled the Americas as we know them to exist—are “ sovereigns , ” and therefore human , while his dad , middle class , American , and Black , is not .
In a previous book , “ Red , White & Black : Cinema and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which grew out of his dissertation , Wilderson describes “ the Red , Indigenous , or ‘ Savage ’ position ” as existing “ liminally as half-death and half-life between the Slave ( Black ) and the Human ( White , or non-Black ) .
” In “ Afropessimism , ” even that gradation is gone .
Wilderson overwrites history with the darkest , most permanent marker .
Every society has a murderous hierarchy : someone ’ s always knocking at the basement door , trying to get free .
But life is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and degraded in America while also profiting from wanton extraction of resources overseas , oppressing millions of non-Black others , and living on land stolen from indigenous people .
We are always joined in our sufferings , often by somebody we can ’ t see through the darkness .
We speak of solidarity precisely because the empathetic act of analogy is a way of acknowledging this complexity , and of training our ethical senses , again and again , to widen the circle of our concern .
Any system of thought that has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kinship with the stranded Guatemalan kid detained at the U.S. border , or with the functionally enslaved Uyghur in China , or , again—I can ’ t get over it—with the Native American on whose stolen ancestral ground you live and do your business , is lost in its own fog .
Black thought at its best has been a vehicle for and a product of analogy .
Black Christians saw the liberatory potential in the story of the Hebrews rescued by God from beneath Pharaoh ’ s thumb and , still more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Palestinian preacher Jesus , put to death by the colonizers of his homeland .
Some of them looked to Latin America , where liberation theology blossomed ; they created Black liberation theology , and forever transformed the flavor of American religion .
A feeling of kinship with the colonized people of India , and with Gandhi in particular , helped make nonviolence a core practice of the civil-rights movement .
A study of the revolutionary struggles in Algeria , Fanon ’ s great subject , helped to make the case—argued most famously by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Wilderson—for the occasional necessity of violence .
None of this is incidental : the impulse toward freedom is always seeking friends .
While he was studying at Columbia , Wilderson was in a long-distance relationship with a woman he had met on a trip to South Africa .
After completing his M.F.A.
, he moved to Johannesburg .
It was the early nineties , the end of the apartheid era .
He became involved with the African National Congress , Nelson Mandela ’ s party .
He participated in political education and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like a minor spy ; eventually , he became an elected official in the A.N.C .
Later , he broke with Mandela , siding with the party ’ s more radical members .
These adventures are the subject of his first book , “ Incognegro : A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid.
” The South African section of “ Afropessimism ” mostly concerns Wilderson ’ s brief employment as a waiter at an Italian restaurant .
He takes the job after getting fired from a teaching gig , essentially because of his political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s , is owned by a white immigrant , and Wilderson works there alongside several Black Africans : an older waiter who tries to school him in the intricacies of racial manners under apartheid ; two cooks who , he learns too late , are supporters of the reactionary party that opposes the A.N.C .
; and a young woman named Doreen , who is casually harassed by the owner and eventually framed for theft by his wife , Riana .
Everybody tiptoes around the whites except for Wilderson , who , by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bombastic presence .
He meets , flatters , and befriends the Nobel-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer , a regular at the restaurant .
He goads his Black peers into taking ever more brazen liberties with the whites .
Why should they sit in the kitchen eating porridge during their breaks when the whites are out in the dining room , feasting on Italian ?
Owing to his obvious erudition and , above all , his Americanness , he ’ s invited to join the whites one night .
He drags the other Blacks along @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He chows down while everyone else falls silent .
Of course , he understands the situation .
He sort of glories in it .

The best time to read a book by Frank B. Wilderson III, it turns out, is during a hot summer of uneasy isolation, social heartbreak, and racial uprising. I read his latest, “Afropessimism” (Liveright), twice: once before the world crawled to a halt under the horror of covid-19, and again after anger about the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis—Wilderson’s home town—erupted into a righteous spectacle of fire and glass. Since then, Wilderson’s work has received notice in unlikely places. In mid-June, the temperamentally soft and sunny conservative Times columnist David Brooks—who, five years ago, lamented that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s best-seller “Between the World and Me” would “trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future”—suggested that readers who wished to understand the alienation of African-Americans should read “Afropessimism,” quoting the book’s insistence that “the spectacle of Black death is essential to the mental health of the world.”
Wilderson, a professor of African-American studies at the University of California, Irvine, is one of the founders of a philosophical school called Afropessimism—a slightly misleading bit of nomenclature. Neither the body of thought associated with the term nor Wilderson’s new book espouses an orientation toward the future, or gives much of a damn about social fortunes. Rather, Afropessimism sketches a structural map of human experience. On this map, Black people are integral to human society but at all times and in all places excluded from it. They are in a state of “social death,” a concept that Wilderson borrows from the sociologist Orlando Patterson. For Patterson, social death describes the experience of slavery as it has appeared across time and space—a slave is not merely an exploited person but someone robbed of his or her personhood. For Wilderson, the state of slavery, for Black people, is permanent: every Black person is always a slave and, therefore, a perpetual corpse, buried beneath the world and stinking it up. “Blackness is coterminous with slaveness,” Wilderson writes. And civil society as we know it requires this category of nonperson to exist. Emancipation is a myth. (Patterson, for his part, does not think that African-Americans are currently “in a situation of social death,” and has called his influence on Afropessimism “ironic.”)
Wilderson contends that “the narrative arc of the slave who is Black (unlike Orlando Patterson’s generic Slave, who may be of any race) is not an arc at all, but a flat line.” This principle poses a challenge for the book, which is largely a work of memoir. Wilderson’s solution is to give us life as a series of cutouts. His memories are like scraps fished out of the shredder and reassembled into the shape of a monster; just to figure out the order of the events relayed in the book is a task. He was born in 1956 and spent the early part of his life shuttling among college towns. His parents were middle-class intellectuals, and his father’s faculty positions at various well-regarded universities made Frank’s childhood not unlike that of an Army brat. The Wildersons lived in Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Seattle, Detroit, and Chicago, but they stayed in Minneapolis long enough to call it home. They lived in upscale Kenwood; the mansion of the local hero and future Vice-President Walter Mondale was nearby. (Wilderson recalls Mondale’s effort to recruit his father to run for Congress.) Like many of the kids in Kenwood, Wilderson played football and idolized movie stars. Unlike nearly all of them, Wilderson was Black. The toll of that awkward fact accumulated subtly. The mother of a friend asked him, during a playdate, how it felt to be a Negro.
Wilderson doesn’t say much about his schooling, but he did well enough to earn admission to Dartmouth—where he was eventually suspended, for two years, after protesting in support of some white laborers on campus. By this time, he has become the kind of post-civil-rights-era young man who quotes from Ramparts and earns an F.B.I. file before his senior year in college. (The file, now declassified, “is riddled with redactions like sprigs of buckshot etched on the flank of a deer,” Wilderson writes.) Back in Minneapolis, he begins dating a woman named Stella, who is almost twenty years his senior and is raising a young daughter. She teaches Frank how to listen to Miles Davis and listens to him read bits of the novel he’s writing. She’s an activist, too, and has filed a lawsuit against a Great Society-era anti-poverty program, accusing its administrators of embezzlement, among other crimes. (A note on the copyright page explains that “names and other potentially identifying characteristics of some people in this book have been changed,” and this seems to be the case with many of those involved in these events.) Stella also has a falling out with a white neighbor named Josephine, and soon she and Frank begin to experience burning sensations whenever they’re in Stella’s apartment: their joints hurt, their armpits and private parts start to smart. They conclude that they’re being poisoned—perhaps Josephine has procured radioactive material from the university lab where she works. They flee the apartment, and sleep, when necessary, in the car Frank has stolen from his parents.
What ensues is part “Bonnie and Clyde,” part “Waiting for Godot,” and part “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Either because of Stella’s lawsuit or because of the government suspicion that Wilderson himself has provoked, they find themselves on the run from shadowy figures they assume to be with the F.B.I. On the road, they are followed, and occasionally chased, by anonymous white men, and Wilderson breaks his account of these chases into shardlike mini-chapters. The couple visit a succession of Stella’s old friends, hoping for shelter and some time to think. Wilderson implies that these acquaintances are scared to get involved in such a dangerous matter, though it seems equally plausible that nobody believes the couple. (My own intermittent trouble swallowing the story made me feel like a race traitor more than once.) One of these friends, a former member of the Weather Underground who has withdrawn into the life of a respectable middle-class white person, treats the two like a pair of ghosts.
In the end, nobody dies, and nobody’s arrested. Wilderson winds up back at Dartmouth; soon, without any closure, Stella falls out of the book entirely. “This is a story I’ve never told before,” Wilderson writes—not even to his current wife, he adds. You can’t blame him.
It’s possible to regard Wilderson’s manner of spinning toward and away from the particulars of a story without ever fully telling the thing as a critique of the Black autobiographical tradition—which, in America, begins with the slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass and includes Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” and the autobiographies of Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur. Common to the genre, even in its most radical iterations, is a narrative thrust that accentuates the forward movement of the writer. (“Narratives of ascent,” the literary theorist Robert B. Stepto called them.) Douglass learns to read and escapes slavery; Malcolm finds God and Elijah Muhammad; Davis, wanted by the government, goes on the run and gets put in prison but ends up free. Even if progress isn’t the message, it insinuates itself into the rhythm of this kind of book and becomes a quiet component of its logic. Wilderson obliterates that logic. What happened to him yesterday is what will happen to him today, only more loudly. Nothing has really changed: Black people still occupy the position of slaves, and what matters in the story of Frank and Stella is the nature of the forces arrayed against them, not how and whether they get away. (No one gets away.)
After Dartmouth and a surprising stretch as a stockbroker in Minneapolis—an experience that goes mostly undescribed in “Afropessimism” but which Wilderson has elsewhere characterized as a kind of double life—Wilderson enrolls in the creative-writing program at Columbia. At night, he attends classes at the New School, where stream of consciousness is in vogue. That downtown influence still shows: Wilderson skids from one glint of perception to the next without much regard for grounding details or fluid transitions; in the middle of an anecdote, he tosses you down a chute and you find yourself stumbling through a thick tangle of theoretical jargon. He thinks vertically, in terms of hierarchies and structures; the horizontal time line is beside the point. He writes from history’s humid basement, or from its even less accessible underground bunker, and the plants that bloom in his writing are less floral than fungal—his arguments and remembrances grow in tight groups, close to the ground and propped atop rotting anecdotal logs, all of them adding to the shroomy funk of the room.
Though “Afropessimism” may veer from the Black autobiographical tradition, the book doesn’t escape genre altogether. It falls into a category sometimes called “auto-theory,” an attempt to arrive at a philosophy by way of the self. The most pertinent example is “Black Skin, White Masks,” by the French-Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, who worked up his theory of “epidermalization”—the process by which the societal inferiority of Black people is grafted onto the skin—by recounting his own experiences, along with a series of psychiatric case studies. Wilderson takes from Fanon—and then exaggerates, literally to death—a critique of humanism as it has been practiced (or, more often, not practiced) in the Western world. “Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe,” Fanon wrote. And yet, for Fanon, the process of decolonization—by way of inevitably bloody revolution—was also a process of humanization. “Decolonization,” he wrote, in “The Wretched of the Earth,” “is the veritable creation of new men.”
For Wilderson, Fanon’s cup is too full. Other previously colonized peoples are indeed human, but not Black people. One of the bleakest aspects of Afropessimist thought is its denial that there is any meaningful analogy between Blacks and other nonwhites. When Frank and Stella try to explain their poison-induced injuries to a Chinese-American doctor, she turns them away, and Wilderson muses that “Dr. Zhou is as much a master as Edwin and Mary Epps, the antagonists in 12 Years a Slave.” In Wilderson’s view, “people of color”—a term he uses for those who are neither white nor Black—are “junior partners” to whites in the enslavement of Blacks. One of the memories that recur in “Afropessimism” involves a Palestinian friend named Sameer, who, detailing life under Israeli occupation, describes the “shameful and humiliating way the soldiers run their hands up and down your body,” then admits that “the shame and humiliation runs even deeper if the Israeli soldier is an Ethiopian Jew.” This expression of anti-Black racism from a Palestinian is a cataclysm for Wilderson. Now he understands that, “in the collective unconscious, Palestinian insurgents have more in common with the Israeli state and civil society than they do with Black people.”
In the same vein, Wilderson describes a meeting that his father attended, as an emissary of the University of Minnesota, with several Native American leaders, hoping to resolve a conflict about reservation lands. Young Frank was in the audience, and someone sitting near him cried out, “We don’t want you, a nigger man, telling us what to do!” The lesson that Wilderson takes from the episode is that the Native Americans—raped and slaughtered on these lands, subjected to a genocide that enabled the Americas as we know them to exist—are “sovereigns,” and therefore human, while his dad, middle class, American, and Black, is not. In a previous book, “Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,” which grew out of his dissertation, Wilderson describes “the Red, Indigenous, or ‘Savage’ position” as existing “liminally as half-death and half-life between the Slave (Black) and the Human (White, or non-Black).” In “Afropessimism,” even that gradation is gone. Wilderson overwrites history with the darkest, most permanent marker.


newyorker--2020-07-13--Richard McGuire’s “Dream Vacation”

Richard McGuire’s “Dream Vacation”

Richard McGuire ’ s latest New Yorker cover captures an increasingly familiar scene for those of us who live and work on our computers .
The artist recently talked to us about his favorite vacations , life in quarantine , and how design can further public health .
What ’ s the best vacation you ’ ve ever taken ?
It ’ s hard to say !
I went to Antigua once—it was perfect , like I was suspended outside of reality .
I spent a few weeks travelling around Italy , another trip that ’ s high on my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rome for the first time ; I visited Giotto ’ s chapel , in Padua .
And the first time I went to Japan was wonderful .
There ’ s so much that I love about their culture : the food , the design , the philosophy .
I stayed in a traditional ryokan , in Tokyo , and the night I arrived I ended up going to an art opening , a dinner , and an after-party .
Along the way , I lost my wallet .
Everyone kept telling me not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to some sort of central lost-and-found department .
I thought they were just humoring me .
To my surprise , I got it back , with my money and credit cards intact !
It still amazes me .
So much of daily life now is virtual .
Do you spend much time on your computer , or do you prioritize non-digital approaches—painting instead of Photoshop , for example , or newspapers instead of scrolling ?
I enjoy painting and making things in the real world .
The computer is just another tool .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to limit it , but it ’ s been hard to resist these days .
I ’ ve been posting more on Instagram , and , like everyone , I ’ ve been having get-togethers on FaceTime and Zoom .
I did recently get a sneak peek of the virtual-reality version of my book “ Here.
” It ’ s being made with a technology called volumetric capture , in which actors ’ performances are captured in 3-D and then placed into virtual backgrounds .
It ’ s quite amazing , and I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it will develop .
You were part of a group of designers who made P.S.A .
posters about the coronavirus pandemic in April .
Do you believe that good design can help instill good habits ?
I was happy to be asked to participate .
I made two versions of a poster , one with text and one without , and I think I prefer the pure image .
It was posted on screens around New York City , in all five boroughs , and in Chicago and Boston , as well .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ create change .
We are constantly taking in information .
Even if we are taking it in subliminally , it helps .
For more vacation-themed covers , see below :

Richard McGuire’s latest New Yorker cover captures an increasingly familiar scene for those of us who live and work on our computers. The artist recently talked to us about his favorite vacations, life in quarantine, and how design can further public health.
What’s the best vacation you’ve ever taken?
It’s hard to say! I went to Antigua once—it was perfect, like I was suspended outside of reality. I spent a few weeks travelling around Italy, another trip that’s high on my list. I went to Venice and Rome for the first time; I visited Giotto’s chapel, in Padua. And the first time I went to Japan was wonderful. There’s so much that I love about their culture: the food, the design, the philosophy. I stayed in a traditional ryokan, in Tokyo, and the night I arrived I ended up going to an art opening, a dinner, and an after-party. Along the way, I lost my wallet. Everyone kept telling me not to worry, that it would go to some sort of central lost-and-found department. I thought they were just humoring me. To my surprise, I got it back, with my money and credit cards intact! It still amazes me.
So much of daily life now is virtual. Do you spend much time on your computer, or do you prioritize non-digital approaches—painting instead of Photoshop, for example, or newspapers instead of scrolling?
I enjoy painting and making things in the real world. The computer is just another tool. As for online time, I try to limit it, but it’s been hard to resist these days. I’ve been posting more on Instagram, and, like everyone, I’ve been having get-togethers on FaceTime and Zoom.
I did recently get a sneak peek of the virtual-reality version of my book “Here.” It’s being made with a technology called volumetric capture, in which actors’ performances are captured in 3-D and then placed into virtual backgrounds. It’s quite amazing, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it will develop.
You were part of a group of designers who made P.S.A. posters about the coronavirus pandemic in April. Do you believe that good design can help instill good habits?
I was happy to be asked to participate. I made two versions of a poster, one with text and one without, and I think I prefer the pure image. It was posted on screens around New York City, in all five boroughs, and in Chicago and Boston, as well. But I think messaging always helps to create change. We are constantly taking in information. Even if we are taking it in subliminally, it helps.
For more vacation-themed covers, see below:


newyorker--2020-07-13--How Pandemics Wreak Havoc—and Open Minds

Great crises tend to bring profound social change , for good or ill .
The consequences of wars and economic depressions have been amply studied ; the consequences of pandemics , less so .
This spring , in order to understand our possible future , I decided to look at the past through the eyes of Gianna Pomata , a retired professor at the Institute of the History of Medicine , at Johns Hopkins University .
When we first talked , on Skype , she immediately compared COVID-19 to the bubonic plague that struck Europe in the fourteenth century— “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in terms of shaking up the way people think.
” She went on , “ The Black Death really marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of something else.
” That something else was the Renaissance .
Since retiring , Pomata has returned to her home town , the old city of Bologna .
“ You know Bologna , right ?
” she asked in that first conversation , on March 27th .
Decades ago , I was the best man at a wedding there .
I recalled the giant @ @ @ @ @ @ @ marble walkways under arched porticoes ; a stately city , low-slung , amber-hued , full of students and indomitable old couples .
During the Middle Ages , Bologna was home to more than a hundred towers , the skyscrapers of their era , which served as showplaces of wealth and ambition for powerful oligarchs .
Two of the remaining ones have become symbols of Bologna : one slightly out of plumb , the other as cockeyed as its cousin in Pisa .
“ You remember the Piazza Maggiore , the very heart of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Pomata said .
“ That ’ s where I live.
” Pomata ’ s country had been in a nationwide lockdown since March 10th .
“ In Italy , the streets are always crowded , night and day , ” she said .
“ Our cities are medieval , made for a different way of life—not for cars but for people .
Right now , to see them empty of people is so sad.
” When we spoke , the number of confirmed cases in Italy had reached eighty-six thousand .
Only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , having just eclipsed China .
Pomata , who is sixty-nine , has brown hair , with a long , open face .
That day , tortoiseshell glasses rested at half-mast on her nose , beneath upward-pointing , quizzical eyebrows .
Like me , she was beginning to show the pallor of confinement .
Having spent much of her adult life in the United States , her English had little accent , but she retained an Italian lilt , lingering on the broad vowels .
I asked Pomata to imagine walking out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ago , during the Black Death .
How would Bologna appear different ?
“ If you try to imagine a plague-stricken city in the Middle Ages , the first thing you ’ d see would be dead people on the streets , ” she said .
“ Just as we have to send the Army to take coffins to crematories in other cities , as in Bergamo right now , in the Middle Ages they couldn ’ t cope with so many dead .
The bodies just piled up on the streets.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ don ’ t have an idyllic vision of the Middle Ages.
” Italy at the beginning of the fourteenth century was a conglomeration of prosperous city-states that had broken free of the feudal system .
Some of them , such as Venice , formed merchant republics , which became seedbeds for capitalism .
Venice and other coastal cities , including Genoa , Pisa , and Amalfi , set up trading networks and established outposts throughout the Mediterranean and as far away as the Black Sea .
Other Italian cities , such as Bologna @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that peasants fleeing feudal estates were granted freedom once they entered the city walls .
Serfs became artisans .
A middle class began to form .
The early fourteenth century was robust and ambitious .
Then , suddenly , people began to die .
Bologna was a stronghold of medical teaching .
The city ’ s famous university , established in 1088 , is the oldest in the world .
“ What they had we call scholastic medicine , ” Pomata told me .
“ When we say ‘ scholastic , ’ we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not concrete , not empirical.
” European scholars at the time studied a number of classical physicians—including Hippocrates , the Greek philosopher of the fifth century B.C .
who is considered the father of medicine , and Galen , the second-century Roman who was the most influential medical figure in antiquity—but scholastic medicine was confounded with astrological notions .
When the King of France sought to understand the cause of the plague , the medical faculty at the University of Paris blamed a triple conjunction of Saturn , Jupiter , and Mars in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had occurred on March 20 , 1345 .
“ Whether it descended on us mortals through the influence of the heavenly bodies or was sent down by God in His righteous anger to chastise us because of our wickedness , it had begun some years before in the East , ” Giovanni Boccaccio wrote in the Decameron , which was completed by 1353 and is set during the plague in Florence .
“ At its onset , in men and women alike , certain swellings would develop in the groin or under the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like an ordinary apple and others like an egg.
” These pus-filled swellings , called buboes , were inflammations of the lymph nodes .
They eventually erupted .
Internal organs broke down in a bloody froth , and bodies darkened with gangrene , which is why the plague came to be called the Black Death .
Before arriving in Italy , the rampaging contagion had already killed millions of people as it burned through China , Russia , India , Persia , Syria , and Asia Minor .
It was said that there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ alive .
The source of the disease was sometimes thought to be “ miasma , ” or air that was considered unhealthy , such as sea breezes .
Paradoxically , there was also a folk belief that attendants who cleaned latrines were immune , which led some people to confine themselves for hours a day amid human waste , absorbing the presumed medicinal odors .
“ The advice of doctors and the power of medicine appeared useless and unavailing , ” Boccaccio wrote .
Some people maintained that “ the surest medicine for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ heavily , enjoy life ’ s pleasures , and go about singing and having fun , satisfying their appetites by any means available , while laughing at everything.
” Others , he observed , “ formed themselves into companies and lived in isolation from everyone else.
” The Decameron tells of ten friends who shelter in place , entertaining one another with stories while the plague assails Florence .
These ribald tales pay little heed to medieval notions of sacredness or piety ; indeed , the society that the sequestered young people describe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are portrayed as stupid , lustful , greedy connivers .
Illicit sex is exalted .
The earthy realism of the Decameron , written in Italian vernacular rather than in classical Latin verse , sounded one of the opening notes of the Renaissance .
Pomata told me , “ What happens after the Black Death , it ’ s like a wind—fresh air coming in , the fresh air of common sense.
” The intellectual overthrow of the scholastic-medicine establishment in the Middle Ages was caused by doctors who set aside the classical texts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It was a revival of medical science , which had been dismissed after the fall of ancient Rome , a thousand years earlier .
“ After the Black Death , nothing was the same , ” Pomata said .
“ What I expect now is something as dramatic is going to happen , not so much in medicine but in economy and culture .
Because of danger , there ’ s this wonderful human response , which is to think in a new way .
”

Great crises tend to bring profound social change, for good or ill. The consequences of wars and economic depressions have been amply studied; the consequences of pandemics, less so. This spring, in order to understand our possible future, I decided to look at the past through the eyes of Gianna Pomata, a retired professor at the Institute of the History of Medicine, at Johns Hopkins University. When we first talked, on Skype, she immediately compared COVID-19 to the bubonic plague that struck Europe in the fourteenth century—“not in the number of dead but in terms of shaking up the way people think.” She went on, “The Black Death really marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of something else.” That something else was the Renaissance.
Since retiring, Pomata has returned to her home town, the old city of Bologna. “You know Bologna, right?” she asked in that first conversation, on March 27th. Decades ago, I was the best man at a wedding there. I recalled the giant churches, the red-tiled roofs, the marble walkways under arched porticoes; a stately city, low-slung, amber-hued, full of students and indomitable old couples. During the Middle Ages, Bologna was home to more than a hundred towers, the skyscrapers of their era, which served as showplaces of wealth and ambition for powerful oligarchs. Two of the remaining ones have become symbols of Bologna: one slightly out of plumb, the other as cockeyed as its cousin in Pisa. “You remember the Piazza Maggiore, the very heart of the city near the two towers?” Pomata said. “That’s where I live.”
Pomata’s country had been in a nationwide lockdown since March 10th. “In Italy, the streets are always crowded, night and day,” she said. “Our cities are medieval, made for a different way of life—not for cars but for people. Right now, to see them empty of people is so sad.” When we spoke, the number of confirmed cases in Italy had reached eighty-six thousand. Only the United States had a higher number, having just eclipsed China.
Pomata, who is sixty-nine, has brown hair, with a long, open face. That day, tortoiseshell glasses rested at half-mast on her nose, beneath upward-pointing, quizzical eyebrows. Like me, she was beginning to show the pallor of confinement. Having spent much of her adult life in the United States, her English had little accent, but she retained an Italian lilt, lingering on the broad vowels.
I asked Pomata to imagine walking out of her apartment six hundred and seventy-two years ago, during the Black Death. How would Bologna appear different? “If you try to imagine a plague-stricken city in the Middle Ages, the first thing you’d see would be dead people on the streets,” she said. “Just as we have to send the Army to take coffins to crematories in other cities, as in Bergamo right now, in the Middle Ages they couldn’t cope with so many dead. The bodies just piled up on the streets.” She paused and said, “I don’t have an idyllic vision of the Middle Ages.”
Italy at the beginning of the fourteenth century was a conglomeration of prosperous city-states that had broken free of the feudal system. Some of them, such as Venice, formed merchant republics, which became seedbeds for capitalism. Venice and other coastal cities, including Genoa, Pisa, and Amalfi, set up trading networks and established outposts throughout the Mediterranean and as far away as the Black Sea. Other Italian cities, such as Bologna, became free communes, which meant that peasants fleeing feudal estates were granted freedom once they entered the city walls. Serfs became artisans. A middle class began to form. The early fourteenth century was robust and ambitious. Then, suddenly, people began to die.
Bologna was a stronghold of medical teaching. The city’s famous university, established in 1088, is the oldest in the world. “What they had we call scholastic medicine,” Pomata told me. “When we say ‘scholastic,’ we mean something that is very abstract, not concrete, not empirical.” European scholars at the time studied a number of classical physicians—including Hippocrates, the Greek philosopher of the fifth century B.C. who is considered the father of medicine, and Galen, the second-century Roman who was the most influential medical figure in antiquity—but scholastic medicine was confounded with astrological notions. When the King of France sought to understand the cause of the plague, the medical faculty at the University of Paris blamed a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the fortieth degree of Aquarius, which had occurred on March 20, 1345.
“I just think things will work out for the best, and by the best I mean me.” Cartoon by Barbara Smaller Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
“Whether it descended on us mortals through the influence of the heavenly bodies or was sent down by God in His righteous anger to chastise us because of our wickedness, it had begun some years before in the East,” Giovanni Boccaccio wrote in the Decameron, which was completed by 1353 and is set during the plague in Florence. “At its onset, in men and women alike, certain swellings would develop in the groin or under the armpits, some of which would grow like an ordinary apple and others like an egg.” These pus-filled swellings, called buboes, were inflammations of the lymph nodes. They eventually erupted. Internal organs broke down in a bloody froth, and bodies darkened with gangrene, which is why the plague came to be called the Black Death.
Before arriving in Italy, the rampaging contagion had already killed millions of people as it burned through China, Russia, India, Persia, Syria, and Asia Minor. It was said that there were entire territories where nobody was left alive. The source of the disease was sometimes thought to be “miasma,” or air that was considered unhealthy, such as sea breezes. Paradoxically, there was also a folk belief that attendants who cleaned latrines were immune, which led some people to confine themselves for hours a day amid human waste, absorbing the presumed medicinal odors. “The advice of doctors and the power of medicine appeared useless and unavailing,” Boccaccio wrote. Some people maintained that “the surest medicine for such an evil disease was to drink heavily, enjoy life’s pleasures, and go about singing and having fun, satisfying their appetites by any means available, while laughing at everything.” Others, he observed, “formed themselves into companies and lived in isolation from everyone else.” The Decameron tells of ten friends who shelter in place, entertaining one another with stories while the plague assails Florence. These ribald tales pay little heed to medieval notions of sacredness or piety; indeed, the society that the sequestered young people describe is amoral and cheerfully hypocritical. Priests are portrayed as stupid, lustful, greedy connivers. Illicit sex is exalted. The earthy realism of the Decameron, written in Italian vernacular rather than in classical Latin verse, sounded one of the opening notes of the Renaissance.
Pomata told me, “What happens after the Black Death, it’s like a wind—fresh air coming in, the fresh air of common sense.” The intellectual overthrow of the scholastic-medicine establishment in the Middle Ages was caused by doctors who set aside the classical texts and gradually turned to empirical evidence. It was a revival of medical science, which had been dismissed after the fall of ancient Rome, a thousand years earlier. “After the Black Death, nothing was the same,” Pomata said. “What I expect now is something as dramatic is going to happen, not so much in medicine but in economy and culture. Because of danger, there’s this wonderful human response, which is to think in a new way.”
In the fourteenth century, Tartar warriors in Crimea laid siege to the Black Sea port city of Caffa, which was owned by a group of wealthy Genoese traders. Like so many armies in history, the Tartars were also fighting an unseen enemy: they carried with them a horrible disease, which killed some victims in a few days, and left others to die in indolent agony. Before retreating from Caffa, the Tartar general, Khan Jani Beg, ordered the diseased bodies of dead warriors catapulted over the city walls, in one of the first instances of biological warfare. Panicked citizens took to boats, navigating through the Dardanelles into the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean. A dozen ships made it to Sicily, in October, 1347.
Sicilians were appalled to find on their shores boats with dead men still at their oars. Other sailors, dead or barely alive, were in their bunks, covered with foul-smelling sores. The horrified Sicilians drove the ships back to sea, but it was too late. Rats and fleas, the carriers of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague, quickly infested the port of Messina. By January, Italy was engulfed. Ships arriving in the Venetian vassal state of Ragusa—present-day Dubrovnik—were required to sit at anchor for quaranta giorni, or forty days, which is where the term “quarantine” comes from.
Medieval mortality figures are a matter of speculation, but Bologna is believed to have lost half its population in 1348. Cities all over Europe were emptied. That first outbreak, between 1347 and 1351, is estimated to have killed at least seventy-five million people worldwide, and maybe as many as two hundred million.
“Child abandoned the father, husband the wife, wife the husband, one brother the other, one sister the other,” a contemporary writer, Marchione di Coppo Stefani, observed. Deep trenches were dug in churchyards. “Those who were responsible for the dead carried them on their backs in the night in which they died and threw them into the ditch,” Stefani continued. The next morning, dirt was thrown on the bodies as new corpses were piled on, “layer by layer, just like one puts layers of cheese in a lasagna.”
Pomata told me, “Chroniclers of the plague describe the crumbling of the family. At the same time, human beings are creative. They react to this perceived moral decay by creating new institutions. For instance, they create boards of health, which are in charge of quarantine.” For the first time, hospitals split patients up into specific wards, so that broken bones and wounds, say, were treated separately from diseases. There was also a rise in trade associations, to take care of medical costs and funeral expenses. “So you can see both trends,” Pomata said. “On the one hand, the plague works as a kind of acid. On the other hand, people try to re-create ties—and, perhaps, better ties.”
When I called Pomata again, on April 7th, using Zoom, she had set up an avatar: a bouquet of plumbago. I asked her why she had chosen it. “There was a big bush of plumbago next to the door of my grandmother’s little country house when I was a child,” she said. The house was in Sardinia, where Pomata grew up. “I loved my grandmother and I loved that house. So I just love that plant. It’s a color I remember from when I was very, very little.” Plumbago blossoms are a delicate blue, like a summer afternoon in Texas, where I live, when the color has almost been bleached out of the sky. Plumbago grows well in the heat.
Pomata’s sister, Daniela, is an emergency-room doctor in Bologna, at Sant’Orsola-Malpighi Polyclinic, the largest hospital in Italy. The two sisters live in the same building. “We used to be together constantly, and now I can’t see her,” Pomata said. From the start of the outbreak, her sister had emphasized that the coronavirus was not an ordinary flu. “She says, ‘I’ve never seen such pneumonias, they’re devastating,’ ” Pomata told me. When we spoke before, there was a fear that Sant’Orsola would run out of beds in its intensive-care unit. Now the crisis had begun to ease.
I asked Pomata if Italians who recovered would be allowed to return to work. “There is no work for them,” she said. Even before the global economic implosion caused by the coronavirus, unemployment for young Italians was thirty per cent. “What you need is exactly what the Fed is doing in the United States—you inject money into the system.”
Pomata’s daughter, Catherine, lives in New York, where she works in the film industry. “I don’t like the situation there at all,” Pomata said. “She is with her husband, she’s not by herself, so that’s good. They live in a tiny apartment near Columbia University, on the Upper West Side. Until recently, she was walking to Central Park, but now she doesn’t, because she feels that people don’t always pay attention to distance.” Catherine had sent her mother a video of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, just blocks from Catherine’s apartment, which was planning to house a temporary hospital. This underscored the scale of the contagion. “Catherine loves New York,” Pomata said. “Living in New York was a dream. But now I think she’s very scared.”
Another feature of the COVID-19 pandemic reminded Pomata of the Black Death. “We cannot go and visit the dying, we cannot celebrate funerals,” she said. “I think, What if something happens to my daughter, and I couldn’t even see her body? It just feels intolerable.”
Cartoon by Paul Noth Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
“I am reflecting on the idea of disease waves,” I said, when Pomata and I spoke again, in May. Scientists were talking about a second wave of COVID-19 in the fall, or perhaps many waves. The 1918 Spanish flu began in the early spring, disappeared in the summer, then returned in the autumn. October, 1918, was the deadliest month in American history. A third wave came in 1919; after that, the disease retreated, having killed at least fifty million people worldwide, including nearly seven hundred thousand Americans. Public-health officials dreaded the day the virus would return. In 1976, it did. This time, it killed only one American, a young Army recruit named David Lewis. Another variant of the same strain returned as a pandemic in 2009, but proved to be less severe than the usual seasonal flu.
The bubonic plague came in three great pandemics. The first, known as the Plague of Justinian, lasted from the sixth century until the eighth, with few letups, ravaging the Byzantine Empire. The second pandemic, the Black Death, arrived in Italy in December, 1347, and spread quickly across Europe. Pilgrims carried it to Mecca the following year. The plague soon infested Scandinavia. A third of the population of Egypt died. Subsidiary outbreaks continued to appear in Europe for three hundred years. The Great Plague of London, which Daniel Defoe chronicled, hit in 1665. After that, the plague mysteriously faded away.
“There was a much more circumscribed episode in Marseille in the early eighteenth century,” Pomata told me. “And that’s it for Europe, but not for Asia.” The last plague pandemic began in the mid-nineteenth century, in China, and spread to India, where it killed six million people. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the disease journeyed to America, where a Chinese resident of San Francisco was the first to die of it. Henry Gage, the governor of California at the time, tried to play down the outbreak, speculating that white people were immune to the disease; scores died. The plague has never been entirely eradicated, but, with each wave, it may have killed so efficiently that it starved itself of human hosts. Having persisted in flea and rat populations, the bacterium continues to infect humans from time to time. As many as two thousand cases are reported to the World Health Organization every year, often including a handful in the American Southwest.
The Black Death caused economic and demographic collapse throughout Europe, but some devastated regions rebounded surprisingly quickly. London, the engine of English prosperity even in the Middle Ages, lost an estimated forty thousand citizens, out of a population of perhaps seventy thousand, but it soon enjoyed greater affluence than ever. I asked Pomata about Italy’s economic experience after the Black Death. “It was a great time to be an artisan,” she said. “Suddenly, labor was scarce, and, because of that, market wages had to go up. The bourgeoisie, the artisans, and the workers started to have a stronger voice, simply because labor was scarce. When you don’t have people, you have to pay them better.” The relative standing of capital and labor reversed: landed gentry were battered by plunging food prices and rising wages, while former serfs, who had been too impoverished to leave anything but a portion of land to their eldest sons, increasingly found themselves able to spread their wealth among all their children, including their daughters. Women, many of them widows, entered depopulated professions, such as weaving and brewing.
At one point in our conversations, Pomata confessed, “I’m so upset and emotional, it’s difficult to think clearly.” I asked what was troubling her. “First of all, it is rediscovering the extreme fragility of life,” she said. “So much of our way of life is insane. Right now, for instance, in Italy we don’t have face masks.” Such masks used to be manufactured there, but today this work has been outsourced to China. If the pandemic had struck in the early nineteen-nineties, she believes, Italy would have responded more effectively from the start, and not just because masks would have been on hand. “Our national health-care system was better funded, we had more hospitals, the hospitals were better equipped, they had more intensive-care units, and all that has been cut, cut, cut for austerity policies dictated by Brussels”—that is, the European Union. Nevertheless, current talk about how the crisis could spell the end of the E.U. frightens her. “I am a Europeanist,” she said. “I have always believed in Europe as a culture and a political idea. But right now I see this. And I’m very angry.”
Pomata mentioned an essay that Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank, had published in the Financial Times, in March, suggesting that European leaders were questioning some fundamental ideas about economic growth. Draghi has been at “the pinnacle of the European bureaucracy that has been enforcing the economic policy called austerity,” Pomata explained. The southern tier of European countries—mainly Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece—have been struggling with heavy debt loads; northern countries, including Germany and the Netherlands, which hold the debt, insist that it must be repaid on a rigid schedule. She described the E.U.’s ethic as “Spending more than we have is heresy, and we should never do it.” She went on, “The problem, as John Maynard Keynes said, is that when you are in a crisis you don’t maintain that stance, because it makes the crisis worse. Which is what happened in the crisis of 1929. He said what you do is build an infrastructure—you build a pyramid if you have to, build anything. You create jobs and the economy doesn’t stop.”


newyorker--2020-07-13--The Invention of the Police

The Invention of the Police

To police is to maintain law and order , but the word derives from polis—the Greek for “ city , ” or “ polity ” —by way of politia , the Latin for “ citizenship , ” and it entered English from the Middle French police , which meant not constables but government .
“ The police , ” as a civil force charged with deterring crime , came to the United States from England and is generally associated with monarchy— “ keeping the king ’ s peace ” —which makes it surprising that , in the antimonarchical United States @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fast .
The reason is , mainly , slavery .
“ Abolish the police , ” as a rallying cry , dates to 1988 ( the year that N.W.A .
recorded “ Fuck tha Police ” ) , but , long before anyone called for its abolition , someone had to invent the police : the ancient Greek polis had to become the modern police .
“ To be political , to live in a polis , meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Human Condition.
” In the polis , men argued and debated , as equals , under a rule of law .
Outside the polis , in households , men dominated women , children , servants , and slaves , under a rule of force .
This division of government sailed down the river of time like a raft , getting battered , but also bigger , collecting sticks and mud .
Kings asserted a rule of force over their subjects on the idea that their kingdom was their household .
In 1769 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the Laws of England , ” argued that the king , as “ pater-familias of the nation , ” directs “ the public police , ” exercising the means by which “ the individuals of the state , like members of a well-governed family , are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety , good neighbourhood , and good manners ; and to be decent , industrious , and inoffensive in their respective stations.
” The police are the king ’ s men .
History begins with etymology @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there .
The polis is not the police .
The American Revolution toppled the power of the king over his people—in America , “ the law is king , ” Thomas Paine wrote—but not the power of a man over his family .
The power of the police has its origins in that kind of power .
Under the rule of law , people are equals ; under the rule of police , as the legal theorist Markus Dubber has written , we are not .
We are more like the women , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a household in ancient Greece , the people who were not allowed to be a part of the polis .
But for centuries , through struggles for independence , emancipation , enfranchisement , and equal rights , we ’ ve been fighting to enter the polis .
One way to think about “ Abolish the police , ” then , is as an argument that , now that all of us have finally clawed our way into the polis , the police are obsolete .
But are they ?
The crisis in policing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ failures—failures of education , social services , public health , gun regulation , criminal justice , and economic development .
Police have a lot in common with firefighters , E.M.T.s , and paramedics : they ’ re there to help , often at great sacrifice , and by placing themselves in harm ’ s way .
To say that this doesn ’ t always work out , however , does not begin to cover the size of the problem .
The killing of George Floyd , in Minneapolis , can not be wished @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the past five years , police in the United States have killed roughly a thousand people .
( During each of those same years , about a hundred police officers were killed in the line of duty . )
One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards , about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles .
Urban police forces are nearly always whiter than the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ police brutality are disproportionately Black teen-age boys : children .
To say that many good and admirable people are police officers , dedicated and brave public servants , which is , of course , true , is to fail to address both the nature and the scale of the crisis and the legacy of centuries of racial injustice .
The best people , with the best of intentions , doing their utmost , can not fix this system from within .
There are nearly seven hundred thousand police officers in the United States @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a rate that is lower than the European average .
The difference is guns .
Police in Finland fired six bullets in all of 2013 ; in an encounter on a single day in the year 2015 , in Pasco , Washington , three policemen fired seventeen bullets when they shot and killed an unarmed thirty-five-year-old orchard worker from Mexico .
Five years ago , when the Guardian counted police killings , it reported that , “ in the first 24 days of 2015 , police in the US fatally shot more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Wales , combined , over the past 24 years.
” American police are armed to the teeth , with more than seven billion dollars ’ worth of surplus military equipment off-loaded by the Pentagon to eight thousand law-enforcement agencies since 1997 .
At the same time , they face the most heavily armed civilian population in the world : one in three Americans owns a gun , typically more than one .
Gun violence undermines civilian life and debases everyone .
A study found that , given the ravages of stress , white @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life expectancy twenty-two years shorter than that of the average American male .
The debate about policing also has to do with all the money that ’ s spent paying heavily armed agents of the state to do things that they aren ’ t trained to do and that other institutions would do better .
History haunts this debate like a bullet-riddled ghost .
That history begins in England , in the thirteenth century , when maintaining the king ’ s peace became the duty of an officer of the court called a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ every male adult could be called on to take a turn walking a ward at night and , if trouble came , to raise a hue and cry .
This practice lasted for centuries .
( A version endures : George Zimmerman , when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin , in 2012 , was serving on his neighborhood watch . )
The watch didn ’ t work especially well in England— “ The average constable is an ignoramus who knows little or nothing of the law , ” Blackstone wrote—and it didn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s colonies .
Rich men paid poor men to take their turns on the watch , which meant that most watchmen were either very elderly or very poor , and very exhausted from working all day .
Boston established a watch in 1631 .
New York tried paying watchmen in 1658 .
In Philadelphia , in 1705 , the governor expressed the view that the militia could make the city safer than the watch , but militias weren ’ t supposed to police the king ’ s subjects ; they were supposed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the French , fighting Native peoples who were trying to hold on to their lands , or suppressing slave rebellions .
The government of slavery was not a rule of law .
It was a rule of police .
In 1661 , the English colony of Barbados passed its first slave law ; revised in 1688 , it decreed that “ Negroes and other Slaves ” were “ wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws .
.
.
of our Nations , ” and devised , instead , a special set of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ordering of them.
” Virginia adopted similar measures , known as slave codes , in 1680 :

To police is to maintain law and order, but the word derives from polis—the Greek for “city,” or “polity”—by way of politia, the Latin for “citizenship,” and it entered English from the Middle French police, which meant not constables but government. “The police,” as a civil force charged with deterring crime, came to the United States from England and is generally associated with monarchy—“keeping the king’s peace”—which makes it surprising that, in the antimonarchical United States, it got so big, so fast. The reason is, mainly, slavery.
“Abolish the police,” as a rallying cry, dates to 1988 (the year that N.W.A. recorded “Fuck tha Police”), but, long before anyone called for its abolition, someone had to invent the police: the ancient Greek polis had to become the modern police. “To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Human Condition.” In the polis, men argued and debated, as equals, under a rule of law. Outside the polis, in households, men dominated women, children, servants, and slaves, under a rule of force. This division of government sailed down the river of time like a raft, getting battered, but also bigger, collecting sticks and mud. Kings asserted a rule of force over their subjects on the idea that their kingdom was their household. In 1769, William Blackstone, in his “Commentaries on the Laws of England,” argued that the king, as “pater-familias of the nation,” directs “the public police,” exercising the means by which “the individuals of the state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood, and good manners; and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations.” The police are the king’s men.
History begins with etymology, but it doesn’t end there. The polis is not the police. The American Revolution toppled the power of the king over his people—in America, “the law is king,” Thomas Paine wrote—but not the power of a man over his family. The power of the police has its origins in that kind of power. Under the rule of law, people are equals; under the rule of police, as the legal theorist Markus Dubber has written, we are not. We are more like the women, children, servants, and slaves in a household in ancient Greece, the people who were not allowed to be a part of the polis. But for centuries, through struggles for independence, emancipation, enfranchisement, and equal rights, we’ve been fighting to enter the polis. One way to think about “Abolish the police,” then, is as an argument that, now that all of us have finally clawed our way into the polis, the police are obsolete.
But are they? The crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures—failures of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development. Police have a lot in common with firefighters, E.M.T.s, and paramedics: they’re there to help, often at great sacrifice, and by placing themselves in harm’s way. To say that this doesn’t always work out, however, does not begin to cover the size of the problem. The killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, cannot be wished away as an outlier. In each of the past five years, police in the United States have killed roughly a thousand people. (During each of those same years, about a hundred police officers were killed in the line of duty.) One study suggests that, among American men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four, the number who were treated in emergency rooms as a result of injuries inflicted by police and security guards was almost as great as the number who, as pedestrians, were injured by motor vehicles. Urban police forces are nearly always whiter than the communities they patrol. The victims of police brutality are disproportionately Black teen-age boys: children. To say that many good and admirable people are police officers, dedicated and brave public servants, which is, of course, true, is to fail to address both the nature and the scale of the crisis and the legacy of centuries of racial injustice. The best people, with the best of intentions, doing their utmost, cannot fix this system from within.
There are nearly seven hundred thousand police officers in the United States, about two for every thousand people, a rate that is lower than the European average. The difference is guns. Police in Finland fired six bullets in all of 2013; in an encounter on a single day in the year 2015, in Pasco, Washington, three policemen fired seventeen bullets when they shot and killed an unarmed thirty-five-year-old orchard worker from Mexico. Five years ago, when the Guardian counted police killings, it reported that, “in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.” American police are armed to the teeth, with more than seven billion dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment off-loaded by the Pentagon to eight thousand law-enforcement agencies since 1997. At the same time, they face the most heavily armed civilian population in the world: one in three Americans owns a gun, typically more than one. Gun violence undermines civilian life and debases everyone. A study found that, given the ravages of stress, white male police officers in Buffalo have a life expectancy twenty-two years shorter than that of the average American male. The debate about policing also has to do with all the money that’s spent paying heavily armed agents of the state to do things that they aren’t trained to do and that other institutions would do better. History haunts this debate like a bullet-riddled ghost.
That history begins in England, in the thirteenth century, when maintaining the king’s peace became the duty of an officer of the court called a constable, aided by his watchmen: every male adult could be called on to take a turn walking a ward at night and, if trouble came, to raise a hue and cry. This practice lasted for centuries. (A version endures: George Zimmerman, when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, in 2012, was serving on his neighborhood watch.) The watch didn’t work especially well in England—“The average constable is an ignoramus who knows little or nothing of the law,” Blackstone wrote—and it didn’t work especially well in England’s colonies. Rich men paid poor men to take their turns on the watch, which meant that most watchmen were either very elderly or very poor, and very exhausted from working all day. Boston established a watch in 1631. New York tried paying watchmen in 1658. In Philadelphia, in 1705, the governor expressed the view that the militia could make the city safer than the watch, but militias weren’t supposed to police the king’s subjects; they were supposed to serve the common defense—waging wars against the French, fighting Native peoples who were trying to hold on to their lands, or suppressing slave rebellions.
The government of slavery was not a rule of law. It was a rule of police. In 1661, the English colony of Barbados passed its first slave law; revised in 1688, it decreed that “Negroes and other Slaves” were “wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws . . . of our Nations,” and devised, instead, a special set of rules “for the good Regulating and Ordering of them.” Virginia adopted similar measures, known as slave codes, in 1680:
It shall not be lawfull for any negroe or other slave to carry or arme himselfe with any club, staffe, gunn, sword or any other weapon of defence or offence, nor to goe or depart from of his masters ground without a certificate from his master, mistris or overseer, and such permission not to be granted but upon perticuler and necessary occasions; and every negroe or slave soe offending not haveing a certificate as aforesaid shalbe sent to the next constable, who is hereby enjoyned and required to give the said negroe twenty lashes on his bare back well layd on, and soe sent home to his said master, mistris or overseer . . . that if any negroe or other slave shall absent himself from his masters service and lye hid and lurking in obscure places, comitting injuries to the inhabitants, and shall resist any person or persons that shalby any lawfull authority be imployed to apprehend and take the said negroe, that then in case of such resistance, it shalbe lawfull for such person or persons to kill the said negroe or slave soe lying out and resisting.
In eighteenth-century New York, a person held as a slave could not gather in a group of more than three; could not ride a horse; could not hold a funeral at night; could not be out an hour after sunset without a lantern; and could not sell “Indian corn, peaches, or any other fruit” in any street or market in the city. Stop and frisk, stop and whip, shoot to kill.
“Do you like creepily polite children of strangers?” Cartoon by Carolita Johnson Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Then there were the slave patrols. Armed Spanish bands called hermandades had hunted runaways in Cuba beginning in the fifteen-thirties, a practice that was adopted by the English in Barbados a century later. It had a lot in common with England’s posse comitatus, a band of stout men that a county sheriff could summon to chase down an escaped criminal. South Carolina, founded by slaveowners from Barbados, authorized its first slave patrol in 1702; Virginia followed in 1726, North Carolina in 1753. Slave patrols married the watch to the militia: serving on patrol was required of all able-bodied men (often, the patrol was mustered from the militia), and patrollers used the hue and cry to call for anyone within hearing distance to join the chase. Neither the watch nor the militia nor the patrols were “police,” who were French, and considered despotic. In North America, the French city of New Orleans was distinctive in having la police: armed City Guards, who wore military-style uniforms and received wages, an urban slave patrol.
In 1779, Thomas Jefferson created a chair in “law and police” at the College of William & Mary. The meaning of the word began to change. In 1789, Jeremy Bentham, noting that “police” had recently entered the English language, in something like its modern sense, made this distinction: police keep the peace; justice punishes disorder. (“No justice, no peace!” Black Lives Matter protesters cry in the streets.) Then, in 1797, a London magistrate named Patrick Colquhoun published “A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis.” He, too, distinguished peace kept in the streets from justice administered by the courts: police were responsible for the regulation and correction of behavior and “the PREVENTION and DETECTION OF CRIMES.”
It is often said that Britain created the police, and the United States copied it. One could argue that the reverse is true. Colquhoun spent his teens and early twenties in Colonial Virginia, had served as an agent for British cotton manufacturers, and owned shares in sugar plantations in Jamaica. He knew all about slave codes and slave patrols. But nothing came of Colquhoun’s ideas about policing until 1829, when Home Secretary Robert Peel—in the wake of a great deal of labor unrest, and after years of suppressing Catholic rebellions in Ireland, in his capacity as Irish Secretary—persuaded Parliament to establish the Metropolitan Police, a force of some three thousand men, headed by two civilian justices (later called “commissioners”), and organized like an army, with each superintendent overseeing four inspectors, sixteen sergeants, and a hundred and sixty-five constables, who wore coats and pants of blue with black top hats, each assigned a numbered badge and a baton. Londoners came to call these men “bobbies,” for Bobby Peel.
It is also often said that modern American urban policing began in 1838, when the Massachusetts legislature authorized the hiring of police officers in Boston. This, too, ignores the role of slavery in the history of the police. In 1829, a Black abolitionist in Boston named David Walker published “An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World,” calling for violent rebellion: “One good black man can put to death six white men.” Walker was found dead within the year, and Boston thereafter had a series of mob attacks against abolitionists, including an attempt to lynch William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of The Liberator, in 1835. Walker’s words terrified Southern slaveowners. The governor of North Carolina wrote to his state’s senators, “I beg you will lay this matter before the police of your town and invite their prompt attention to the necessity of arresting the circulation of the book.” By “police,” he meant slave patrols: in response to Walker’s “Appeal,” North Carolina formed a statewide “patrol committee.”
New York established a police department in 1844; New Orleans and Cincinnati followed in 1852, then, later in the eighteen-fifties, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore. Population growth, the widening inequality brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and the rise in such crimes as prostitution and burglary all contributed to the emergence of urban policing. So did immigration, especially from Ireland and Germany, and the hostility to immigration: a new party, the Know-Nothings, sought to prevent immigrants from voting, holding office, and becoming citizens. In 1854, Boston disbanded its ancient watch and formally established a police department; that year, Know-Nothings swept the city’s elections.


newyorker--2020-07-13--How Trump Is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic

On June 22nd , in the baking heat of a parking lot a few miles inland from Delaware ’ s beaches , several dozen poultry workers , many of them Black or Latino , gathered to decry the conditions at a local poultry plant owned by one of President Donald Trump ’ s biggest campaign contributors .
“ We ’ re here for a reason that is atrocious , ” Nelson Hill , an official with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union , told the small but boisterous crowd , which included top Democratic officials from the state @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The union , part of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
, represents some 1.3 million laborers in poultry-processing and meatpacking plants , as well as workers in grocery stores and retail establishments .
Its members , many defined as “ essential ” workers—without the option of staying home—have been hit extraordinarily hard by the coronavirus .
The union estimates that nearly thirty thousand of its workers in the food and health-care sectors have contracted COVID-19 , and that two hundred and thirty-eight of those have died .
For the previous forty-two years , a thousand or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in Selbyville , had been represented by Local 27 .
Just two years earlier , the workers there had ratified a new five-year contract .
But , Hill told the crowd , in the middle of the pandemic , as the number of infected workers soared , the plant ’ s owner , Mountaire Corporation—one of the country ’ s largest purveyors of chicken—conspired , along with Donald Trump , to “ kick us out.
” Hill , who is Black and from a working-class family on the Delmarva Peninsula—a scrubby stretch @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Maryland , and Virginia—was used to the area ’ s heat and humidity .
But , as he spoke to the crowd , behind dark glasses , his face glistened with anger .
“ It ’ s greed , that ’ s what it is , ” he said .
“ It ’ s a damn shame.
” The jobs at Mountaire rank as among the most dangerous and worst paid in America .
Government statistics indicate that poultry and meat-processing companies report more severe injuries than other industries commonly assumed to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and sawmilling .
Between 2015 and 2018 , on average , a slaughterhouse worker lost a body part , or went to the hospital for in-patient treatment , about every other day .
Unlike meatpackers , two-thirds of whom belong to unions , only about a third of poultry workers are represented by organized labor—and those who are unionized face mounting pressure .
The industry , which is dominated by large multinational corporations such as Mountaire , has grown increasingly concentrated , expanding its political influence while replacing unionized employees with contract hires @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vulnerable workers are technically hired by temp agencies , relieving poultry plants of accountability if documentation is lacking .
Trump has weakened federal oversight of the industry while accepting millions of dollars in political donations from some of its most powerful figures , including Ronald Cameron , Mountaire ’ s reclusive owner .
In 2016 , Cameron gave nearly three million dollars to organizations supporting Trump ’ s candidacy .
Founded in Little Rock , Arkansas , but incorporated in Delaware , Mountaire has operations in five states .
It reportedly generated more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ year .
Because it is owned almost entirely by Cameron—and because it supplies poultry to other companies that put their own labels on the meat—the company ’ s public profile is virtually nonexistent .
Cameron himself has received almost no media attention .
“ I ’ ve tried mightily over the years to bump into him , but he lays low , ” Max Brantley , a longtime editor at the Arkansas Times , told me .
According to trade journals , however , Mountaire has been spectacularly successful .
Arkansas Business reported @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2019 were a billion dollars higher than they were in 2010 , nearly doubling the size of the business .
Information on profits isn ’ t available , but as Mountaire ’ s revenues have risen wages for poultry workers have fallen even further behind .
In 2002 , workers were paid twenty-four per cent less than the national average for manufacturing jobs ; today , they are paid forty-four per cent less .
On average , poultry workers now earn less than fourteen dollars an hour .
By long-standing custom , labor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ years , giving a union time to prove its value to members .
But in April a laborer at the Selbyville plant , Oscar Cruz Sosa , raised a legal objection to the contract , arguing that he ’ d been forced to join the union and pay dues against his will .
He wanted a vote on whether to decertify the union .
Mountaire maintains that it played no role in Cruz Sosa ’ s actions , and that the move to decertify the union was “ entirely employee-driven.
” But Cruz @ @ @ @ @ @ @ His case was supported by lawyers from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation , the foremost anti-union advocacy group , which is funded by undisclosed tax-deductible donations .
Meanwhile , a mysterious group calling itself the Oscar Cruz Committee for Employee Rights sent out mailings , in English , supporting Cruz Sosa ’ s complaint .
( Cruz Sosa speaks only Spanish . )
The return address was the Rehoboth Beach branch of MailBiz , which rents post-office boxes .
Jonathan Williams , a spokesperson for the union , suspects that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ It ’ s not hard to find one individual , who may get special privileges from management , and who maybe is offered a future position , ” he told me .
“ It ’ s very , very rare , though , when an employee does the research , contacts the Department of Labor , and goes through all this effort .
Usually , someone is being coached.
” ( Cruz Sosa didn ’ t respond to interview requests . )
When the union reached out to Cruz Sosa , his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Labor Relations Board , claiming harassment .
The specific legal dispute is abstruse .
Mark Mix , the president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation , has called the contract ’ s language “ illegal , ” claiming that it didn ’ t make sufficiently clear that—as stipulated by law—new employees had thirty days to decide whether to join the union .
The union argues that applications presented to new employees are unambiguous about the time frame , and says that the current contract has virtually the same boilerplate used @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
After Cruz Sosa got thirty per cent of his co-workers to sign a petition , the National Labor Relations Board ordered an election at the Selbyville plant .
When the union protested that this would violate the customary bar on overturning contracts before three years , the N.L.R.B .
decided to broaden the case , reëxamining the entire concept of barring challenges to settled union contracts .
The move has shocked labor-law experts .
By statute , the N.L.R.B .
has five members and is bipartisan , but the Trump Administration has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Republicans .
Given the pandemic , the union argued that there was no way an in-person election could be safely and fairly held in Sussex County , where Selbyville is situated .
Delaware ’ s governor had declared a state of emergency on March 23rd , because of the surge in COVID-19 cases , almost half of them in Sussex County , which has many poultry plants .
The union asked for a stay , but on June 24th the N.L.R.B .
moved to proceed with the election , by mail .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ received by July 14th .
Meanwhile , the board will weigh the larger question of whether such elections are legal , potentially overturning a precedent that dates back to the New Deal .

Instead, on April 28th, forty-eight hours after Tyson Foods, the world’s second-largest meat company, ran a full-page ad in several newspapers warning that “the food supply chain is breaking,” Trump issued an executive order defining slaughterhouse workers as essential. The White House had appointed Cameron to an advisory board on the pandemic’s economic impact. The executive order commanded meat-processing facilities to “continue operations uninterrupted to the extent possible.” The Labor Department released an accompanying statement that all but indemnified companies for exposing workers to COVID-19. It assured employers in essential industries that the agency wouldn’t hold them responsible if they failed to follow the C.D.C.’s health guidelines, as long as they made a “good faith” effort.
Meat and poultry workers had to keep working and risk infection—or lose their jobs. By July 7th, OSHA had received more than six thousand coronavirus-related workplace complaints but had issued only one citation, to a nursing home in Georgia. David Michaels, a professor of public health at George Washington University, who headed OSHA during the Obama Administration, told me that the agency was “saying that the Labor Department would side with the employers if workers sued,” and added, “That would be unthinkable in any other Administration. OSHA’s job isn’t to protect corporations—it’s to protect workers!”
The prospect of food shortages understandably caused concern in the White House. Yet reports show that in April, as Tyson and other producers were warning that “millions of pounds of meat will disappear” from American stores if they had to shut down, exports of pork to China broke records—and Mountaire’s chicken exports were 3.4 per cent higher than they were a year earlier. The next month, the company’s exports were 10.9 per cent lower than in 2019, but its exports to China and Hong Kong grew by 23.1 per cent in April and by fourteen per cent in May, according to statistics provided by Christopher Rogers, an analyst with Panjiva, which tracks the food-supply chain. Tony Corbo, a lobbyist for Food and Water Watch, a progressive nonprofit advocacy group, said, “They were crying about shortages, and yet we’re still exporting meat. The shortage was phony.”
Meanwhile, coronavirus cases exploded in the meat-and-poultry industry. Initially, Mountaire released statistics about employee infections. At the end of March, the company told the union that there had been forty-one cases in Selbyville. However, Hill’s shop steward, Manuel Rosales, told him not to trust this number. “Half the plant isn’t there,” he explained, either because the workers were sick or because they feared becoming so. A month later, a television station in North Carolina reported that a Mountaire plant, in Siler City, which employs some sixteen hundred workers, had at least seventy-four positive cases among workers and their families. After that, the company stopped sharing its COVID-19 numbers. Mountaire became so secretive, Hill said, that workers “were seeing people disappear, and they didn’t know what the hell was going on.” In many cases, a “co-worker had tested positive, but the company wouldn’t tell anyone.” Rosales, who works in the deboning department at the Selbyville plant, told me, “People are coughing and they don’t look well, but they just want to keep the chicken coming. It’s all hush-hush.”
Cathy Bassett, the communications director for Mountaire Farms of Delaware, confirmed, “We’re not releasing any numbers,” adding, “I don’t even know those numbers. We’ve told our workers that if you’ve been exposed we’ll notify you.” According to Hill, the company argued to the union that it was protecting employee privacy. “They were hiding behind it,” Hill told me. “We weren’t asking for private health information—we were just trying to report the numbers.”
Corbo said that, after “the President said these plants had to stay open,” the meat and poultry companies “clammed up.” Trump’s executive order was interpreted as superseding state and local health departments. In a private conversation with the union, Delaware’s governor, John Carney, a Democrat, admitted that he had wanted universal testing in the plants, and had considered ordering them shut, but felt “handcuffed” by Trump’s order. The result has been an extraordinary blackout of public-health information. “I can look online and find the number of COVID-19 cases in nursing homes,” Corbo said. “But not in the poultry industry. If you walk into a poultry plant, you don’t know whether the person next to you has got it. It’s unconscionable.”
The union also maintains that Mountaire charged employees for the protective equipment necessary for them to work safely. The company denies this: Bassett told me that Mountaire has distributed cloth masks to workers, although not N95 masks, and, “where possible,” has erected Plexiglas shields between employees, along with instituting daily body-temperature checks. But Williams, the union spokesperson, sent me a screenshot of a Mountaire paycheck stub that shows deductions for “plant supplies.” Williams said that the supplies in question were “gloves and aprons and such,” adding that deductions like these were illegal. At the rally, Hill protested that, if Mountaire’s owner could afford to give “two or three million dollars—or whatever it was he gave—to Trump, they shouldn’t be stealing money from workers’ paychecks.” Noting that Cameron is “Trump’s buddy,” Hill added, “I guess they feel like they can do whatever they want.”
The union’s struggles with the Labor Department are part of a much larger reversal of federal protections for workers, consumers, and the environment under Trump. In 2016, the President promised to “dismantle the regulatory state,” as Stephen Bannon, his former White House strategist, often put it. Given the complexities of federal rulemaking, this proved somewhat difficult in the first three years of the Administration. But the pandemic has offered Trump an opportunity: now that he can invoke an economic emergency, he can relax, rescind, or suspend federal regulations by fiat. In May and June, Trump issued a pair of executive orders directing national agencies to ignore federal regulations and environmental laws if they burdened the economy—again, in many instances, the companies were told that they just had to act “in good faith.” As the Times and the Washington Post have reported, these moves have weakened regulations on all kinds of businesses, from trucking companies to oil and gas pipelines. In Corbo’s view, many in the media have missed one of the biggest aspects of the COVID-19 story. “Everyone is looking at the shiny object—the pandemic,” he said. “Meanwhile, the government is deregulating everything. It’s unreal.”
Cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
In April, for instance, the United States Department of Agriculture granted fifteen waivers to poultry plants, including a Mountaire facility in North Carolina, authorizing them to increase the number of birds per minute—or B.P.M.—that workers must process. The waivers enabled companies to accelerate the pace from a hundred and forty B.P.M. to a hundred and seventy-five. Angela Stuesse, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has studied the poultry industry, told me that, in the chicken business, “you make pennies on a pound.” Among the few ways to increase profits are squeezing labor costs and accelerating line speeds, which are set by the U.S.D.A. to accommodate federal inspectors, who are supposed to assess every bird. The regulations have long been a point of contention between poultry-plant owners and unions, because as the line speed increases so do injuries and other stresses on workers’ bodies. “They move the birds so fast, you have to be really close together to get every bird,” Williams, the union spokesperson, told me. “It’s like the ‘I Love Lucy’ episode at the chocolate factory.” Even though the C.D.C. has emphasized that social distancing is necessary to maintain safety, faster production lines require more workers, who must then squeeze closer together. In many areas of a plant, poultry workers already stand two feet apart at most, often facing one another. Nonetheless, the U.S.D.A. has now indicated that it plans to permit faster line speeds throughout the poultry industry. The National Chicken Council, the industry’s trade group, had lobbied for precisely this change. Williams fears that “these policies will result in the deaths of many more workers.”
Debbie Berkowitz, a program director at the National Employment Law Project, a pro-labor group, who previously headed the health-and-safety division of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, told me that, thanks to the pandemic, “the Chamber of Commerce is getting everything they always wanted.” An analysis of public records by her group found that, of the fifteen poultry plants granted waivers to increase line speeds in April, eight had COVID-19 outbreaks at the time. “If you’re a worker in a plant bursting with COVID-19, it’s a shitshow for you,” Berkowitz said. “The industry is getting away with murdering people.”
Michaels, the former OSHA head, told me, “We’re very much back in Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’ ”—the 1906 novel that exposed abuses in the meat industry. The book so shocked Americans that President Theodore Roosevelt ordered an immediate investigation of slaughterhouses. The result was landmark consumer-protection legislation that formed the foundation of today’s Food and Drug Administration. But, for the past four decades, wealthy donors to the Republican Party have pushed hard for the dismantling of Progressive Era reforms and later curbs on corporate power. The 1980 platform of the Libertarian Party, which was underwritten by the billionaire conservative donors Charles and David Koch, laid out a road map, calling for the abolition of almost every federal agency, including the F.D.A. Although Trump claims to be a defender of the working class, he has delighted wealthy donors—and their pressure groups, such as the Club for Growth—by reliably serving their agenda. Michaels told me, “Mountaire and others are taking advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to say, ‘We need more chickens.’ The Trump Administration is aiding and abetting this. They’re saying, ‘Produce more food,’ regardless of the cost to workers. If companies cared as much about their workers as they do about their chickens, we’d be a better country.”