newyorker--2020-09-14--The Man Who Refused to Spy

The Man Who Refused to Spy

In the spring of 2017 , an Iranian materials scientist named Sirous Asgari received a call from the United States consulate in Dubai .
Two years earlier , he and his wife , Fatemeh , had applied for visas to visit America , where their children lived .
The consulate informed him that their requests had finally been approved .
The timing was strange : President Donald Trump had just issued an executive order banning Iranians from entering the U.S. on the very kind of visa that Asgari and his wife were granted .
Maybe applications filed before the visa @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some career State Department official wanted to give families like his a last chance to reunite .
Asgari , who was then fifty-six years old , considered the U.S. a second home .
In the nineties , he had attended graduate school at Drexel University , in Philadelphia , and he came to like America ’ s commonsense efficiency .
His daughter Sara was born in the U.S. , making her an American citizen .
His two older children , Mohammad and Zahra , had attended American universities and stayed on .
Asgari @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Technology , in Tehran , and former graduate students of his worked in top American laboratories ; his scientific research , on metallurgy , sometimes took him to Cleveland , where he had close colleagues at Case Western Reserve University .
Asgari and Fatemeh boarded a flight to New York on June 21 , 2017 .
They planned to see Mohammad , who lived in the city , and then proceed to California , where they would visit Zahra and meet the man she had married .
But when the Asgaris stepped @ @ @ @ @ @ @ two officials accosted them .
The officials whisked the Asgaris into a room , where a phalanx of F.B.I .
agents awaited them .
Asgari was under arrest , the agents told him , accused of serious charges in a sealed indictment whose contents they couldn ’ t reveal at the airport .
He could go with them to a hotel and look over the indictment , or he could go to a local detention center , and then be transferred to Cleveland , for an arraignment .
In the turmoil of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had stamped his visa or returned his passport .
Asgari was fluent in English , but the word “ indictment ” was new to him .
He ’ d never had a problem with the law .
He was a high-spirited man accustomed to middle-class comforts , a professor ’ s lectern , and an easy repartee with people in authority .
Surely , he figured , he was the subject of some misunderstanding , and so he would go to the hotel and quickly clear it up .
At the hotel , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It charged him with theft of trade secrets , visa fraud , and eleven counts of wire fraud .
To Asgari , the indictment read like a spy thriller .
It centered on a four-month visit that he had made to Case Western four years earlier , which the document presented as part of a scheme to defraud an American valve manufacturer of its intellectual property in order to benefit the Iranian government .
The punishment , the agents made clear , could be many years in prison .
Their evidence had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which had swept up his e-mails before , during , and after the visit in question .
The charges were nonsense , Asgari said .
The processes he ’ d studied at Case Western were well known to materials scientists—they were hardly trade secrets .
If the government really meant to prosecute him , it would inevitably lose in court .
“ This will be your first , ” he replied .
Asgari didn ’ t realize it , but a vise was closing around him .
He had never seen his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its tensions with Iran .
“ Science is wild and has no homeland , ” an Iranian philosopher had once said , and Asgari believed this to be so .
His scientific community spanned the globe , its instruments and findings universally accessible .
That national boundaries and political intrigue should interfere with intellectual exchange seemed to him unnatural .
He had confidence in the capacity of cool rationality to set matters right .
If he could just make the F.B.I .
agents understand the science , Asgari told himself , they would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ relationships and the laboratory equipment that had attracted him to Case Western , and explained how the properties of a material emanated from the arrangement of its atoms , and could be altered by engineers who understood that structure .
But even as he talked he began to have a sinking feeling that an indictment was not something he could dissipate with words .
That night , Fatemeh went home with Mohammad , and two guards stayed in Asgari ’ s hotel room as he slept .
In the morning , the agents @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and son following behind .
He was arraigned at the federal courthouse and delivered to the Lake County Adult Detention Facility , a maximum-security jail in Painesville , Ohio .
For the first of the seventy-two days he would spend in that facility , Asgari occupied an isolated cell .
Lying on his bed , he could hear other inmates screaming .
The F.B.I .
had reason to be interested in a man like Asgari .
Sharif University was Iran ’ s premier technical institution , and the instruments and insights of materials @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and centrifuges as easily as to improve the iPhone or to better understand the properties of a gem .
Asgari ’ s concerns fell squarely on the civilian side of the line .
“ I never intentionally worked for destructive purposes , ” he told me , during a series of conversations that began in 2018 .
“ If you have a pen , you can write a love letter , or you can write instructions for making a bomb .
That ’ s not a problem with the pen.
” Asgari ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the atom .
He was dazzled the first time he discerned one with the aid of a transmission electron microscope , or TEM : within the seemingly inert surfaces of objects was a kaleidoscope of churning activity .
Atoms can not be seen with an ordinary optical microscope .
A TEM—which is about twice the size of an industrial refrigerator—is expensive , and so sensitive that it must be shielded from light , heat , cold , dust , the imperceptible shifting of buildings in wind , and the noise of distant galaxies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ TEM that Sharif acquired in 1994 .
He ran an élite research team of Ph.D. students and adored teaching .
Compact and clean-cut , with a heart-shaped face and wire-rimmed glasses , he spoke at volume , often insistently , with a charisma that occasionally verged on overbearing .
Professors at Sharif supplemented their salaries and financed their departments with industrial and government contracts .
Asgari had one with Iran ’ s energy ministry , assessing and extending the longevity of gas-turbine parts ; he was also conducting a feasibility study for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into producing high-performance , heat-resistant metals known as superalloys .
The two contracts brought the university some four hundred thousand dollars , which helped support the work of Asgari and his students .
International sanctions had long been a fact of life in Iran .
In the twenty-tens , in the run-up to nuclear negotiations between Iran and six world powers , the restrictions tightened : nothing that could be classified as “ dual use , ” or applicable to both military and civilian realms , could be imported to Iran .
Materials @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .

The deciding officer assigned to his case was Scott Wichrowski. Asgari met with him twice at Seneca. How, Asgari asked, was waiting for a travel document a reason to incarcerate a person? What threat did he pose? Wichrowski, Asgari told me, just looked at his shoes. “If I were him, I would resign—I wouldn’t just watch people suffering for nothing,” Asgari grumbled. (Wichrowski declined interview requests.)
At the legal library in Seneca County Jail, Asgari happened on a quote from Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court Justice in the nineteen-forties and fifties: “Procedural fairness and regularity are of the indispensable essence of liberty. . . . Indeed, if put to the choice, one might well prefer to live under Soviet substantive law applied in good faith by our common-law procedures than under our substantive law enforced by Soviet procedural practices.” Asgari concluded that he was a victim of American law enforced by Soviet-style procedures.
The coronavirus cut a brutal swath through Iran in February before wracking the United States. Flights to Iran were suspended. At first, Asgari was merely irritated; then he began to panic. He was at high risk of a severe COVID-19 infection. For six years, he’d suffered from repeated bouts of pneumonia, and he had a chronic liver condition and high blood pressure. Late that month, he developed a lung infection, but he took antibiotics and it cleared up, so he figured that it wasn’t COVID-19. Then, as the pandemic worsened, ICE began transferring him to one fetid prison after another.
His first transfer, on March 10th, took some twelve hours. He and other detainees, in shackles and chains, could hardly move their hands to eat, and some prisoners soiled themselves for lack of toilet access. They flew from base to base and finally landed in Alexandria, Louisiana, where ICE had a deportation hub. When it was time to disembark, Asgari had a pounding headache and could hardly stand; when he reached the stairs descending from the plane, he fainted.
Asgari was told that detainees could be kept at the Alexandria Staging Facility for a maximum of one week. The place was correspondingly stark, without books or the camaraderie of a stable cohort. Asgari’s blood pressure spiked. After seven days, he was scheduled for deportation. He spent another sixteen hours in shackles—this time going north, to New Hampshire, then south, to New Jersey, and then west, to Texas. At every stop, the plane sat for hours on the tarmac as more prisoners boarded. In the end, Asgari’s flight to Iran was cancelled, because of the pandemic. The ICE plane finally landed again at Alexandria at 10:45 p.m., with more than a hundred people on board—many of them, including Asgari, the same detainees who had left the facility that morning.
Asgari noticed that the corrections officers at Alexandria had taken to wearing masks, and he suspected that they knew something he didn’t. He had a mask in a suitcase that Mohammad had packed for his deportation, but he was forbidden to retrieve it. The transport hub was, as he put it, a viral bomb ready to detonate. Its population churned as other countries stopped accepting deportees. As most Americans began sheltering in place and tried to stay six feet apart on the street, the detainees in the Alexandria Staging Facility all but pickled in their shared breath.
On March 23rd, Asgari was put on another plane that flew hither and thither, collecting and disgorging inmates at every stop, and again he ended up back at the transport hub. Because he had left Alexandria for a day, ICE had technically avoided housing him at the facility for more than a week. Mohammad, in New York, reached out to activists and lawyers with mounting panic that his father would not live to return to Iran. Fatemeh could not visit him: she had applied for a visa to go to America, but her request had been denied.
If only Asgari had been convicted of theft of trade secrets, he would be in the criminal-justice system in Ohio, where Stephen Newman was working tirelessly to win his clients compassionate release from virus-ridden prisons. “We can’t get in front of a judge for Professor Asgari,” Newman lamented to me. “We can’t do anything for him. For two years, we were able to help him—and now we can’t.”
“Let this guy go around.” Cartoon by Charlie Hankin Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
At the end of March, Asgari was transferred to the Winn Correctional Center, a sprawling, privately operated complex near the Louisiana-Texas border. His first glimpse of the place was a gut punch. The pod was a concrete box, the air so humid that it soaked his bedsheets, the forty or so beds rusted. The few windows were covered in semi-opaque Plexiglas. It was the most depressing place he’d ever been. “Whenever I think I’ve seen the worst treatment by ICE, they surprise me again,” he told me.
For all that, he was relieved to have left Alexandria. An inmate in his pod there had tested positive for COVID-19, and so the entire pod had been sent to Winn, where its members would be isolated for fourteen days, their temperatures taken regularly. “A couple of us cried,” he said, of the group’s arrival. “They said, ‘Where the hell is this place?’ I told them, ‘Here, you are safer.’ ” Privately, Asgari told me that the facility was inhumane: “Nobody is talking to anybody. It is absolutely humiliating and disgusting to keep people here.” But within his quarantine pod a kind of fellowship emerged, even though the others mainly spoke Spanish, which Asgari did not.
As far as Asgari could tell, ICE did not seem to take the quarantine very seriously. Within a few days, several Colombians in the pod had been deported, despite the pod’s known exposure to the coronavirus. Some detainees from El Salvador were also repatriated before the end of the quarantine. Asgari joined a habeas-corpus suit of Louisiana ICE detainees at high risk of developing complications from COVID-19.
On April 10th, he told me that three men elsewhere in the facility had tested positive. His blood pressure hit a hundred and fifty over a hundred. By this time, his pod had been isolated for more than fourteen days without anyone having fallen ill. But while we were speaking he saw a new detainee being brought into the pod—an exposure risk for those inside. “I’m going to fight this!” he said. Asgari hung up, then called back a few minutes later to tell me that if I didn’t hear from him within an hour he had likely been taken to an isolation cell, and I should then call his family. Ten minutes later, he was back on the line, against a background roar of inmates cheering.
Asgari had led the pod in mobbing the entryway. He told the guards that he was fighting for his life and would not give in. His cellmates backed him, and the newcomer was led away. “Now people are happy,” Asgari told me. “Not one showed weakness.” When a new shift of guards arrived, Asgari said, they thanked him: they, too, felt safer because of what he’d done. A prison staffer who had witnessed the scene later told Asgari that he had been thrilled when Asgari had vowed to fight for his life, and had asked the other detainees if they would fight for theirs, too. Everyone had yelled, “Yes!” The staffer told Asgari, “I felt like I was in a movie.”
Asgari’s high spirits lasted only about three days. His right leg began to swell, purpled with bruises along a bone that he’d never injured. It became agonizing to walk the hundred feet from his bed to the pod door, where medicines were disbursed, or to the toilet. He was denied a wheelchair; a nurse offered him ice instead. At last, he saw a doctor, who suspected a blood clot and had him rushed to a hospital for an ultrasound. The doctor there also suspected clots, though they were too small to show on the ultrasound, and he told ICE that Asgari should not fly. Asgari did not seem entirely sorry that plans for his deportation were again delayed. If he stayed in the U.S. a little while longer, he told me, he might be granted habeas. “I want to show these guys they were wrong,” he said.
Asgari was relentless in pursuit of a cause—and there was always a cause. The hospital gave him crutches, but using them hurt his back, and within two days he’d sent them to a nurse, with a note demanding a wheelchair. Protocol forbade it, he was told. In protest, he enlisted his cellmates to drag him to his destinations on a bedsheet. (At one point, he told me, laughing, “they dragged me on the floor so fast, my ass was set on fire.”) How else, he asked a nurse, was he to transport himself? One day, a guard quietly placed a wheelchair inside the pod. Asgari attributed such victories to what he called the “power of one.” He told me, “An innocent, independent, wise individual will prevail in any situation.”
At Winn, Asgari had time to reflect on his experience. He had always lived, in a way, at a crossroads. He’d arrived as a student in the University of Tehran’s department of metallurgical engineering in 1977, just as Iran’s revolutionary student movement gathered force, and his faculty was its epicenter. When the movement toppled the Shah and established the Islamic Republic, Asgari helped form an organization called the Jihad of Construction, an Iranian counterpart to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He coördinated crews to build roads, pipe water, and harvest wheat. The Iran-Iraq War began in 1980, and the engineering students turned to military logistics. To move tanks onto the Al-Faw Peninsula, they helped design a pontoon bridge that had to be installed underwater in the middle of the night and then buoyed to the surface with air tanks. Asgari took part in five offensives; he saw bodies ripped apart, and once a mortar shell landed just behind him, causing the surrounding mud to boil.
Asgari had been a revolutionary not because he was a religious ideologue but because he was an egalitarian. He believed that social justice took precedence over any theory of the state. What surprised him most, when he first came to America, in the nineties, was that such a calm, orderly society had risen from the cruel machinery of capitalism.
He believed that his time in detention had given him a more complete picture of American society than most citizens possessed. “I have friends in low places,” he often told me, with a chuckle. He’d spent two years in the federal court system and five months in the clutches of ICE, all because the F.B.I. had tried and failed to recruit him, and because his visa—if it really was a visa—had never been stamped. Now, in an ICE detention center on the Texas-Louisiana border, he was having a Tocqueville moment.
Asgari still viewed America with affection. He marvelled that, in every prison, he could pick up a phone and talk to journalists, and that journalists could publish what they wanted without fear of being censored. But what he appreciated most was the independence of the American judiciary.
“I appeared as an Iranian in front of an American judge,” he reflected. “This American judge ruled against an F.B.I. agent in my favor. I was privileged to witness the way he handled the trial, from jury selection to the end, the way he advocated impartiality and fairness. I believe these are global values that should be respected by all governments, including my own.” He added, “My attorneys, who put their heart into this thing—they were employees of the same government that was on the other side of this case.”


newyorker--2020-09-14--How the Promise of Normalcy Won the 1920 Election

Here in stately , spacious Kalorama , a Washington , D.C. , neighborhood less familiar and storied than nearby Georgetown , politics makes strange neighbors .
Over on Tracy Place , Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump occupy a large , charmless house whose chief selling point , one suspects , was its fuck-you proximity to the post-Presidential residence of Barack and Michelle Obama , several houses away , on Belmont Road .
A short walk from either takes you to 2340 S Street , into which Mr. and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson moved after leaving the White House , in March @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Ohio ’ s Senator Warren G. Harding , and his wife , Florence , were packing up their house a few blocks away , at 2314 Wyoming .
Harding was a serious poker player , and today his old house is occupied by the Ambassador of gambling-friendly Monaco .
The Wilson House , a small museum that is Kalorama ’ s chief tourist attraction , has been closed during the COVID-19 pandemic .
With awareness of Wilson ’ s racism cancelling his once-good name , someone has placed a Black Lives Matter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ against a small pane of glass near the front door .
The last four of Wilson ’ s eight years in the White House were an epic drama .
Reëlected in 1916 on an implied promise of nonintervention ( “ He kept us out of war ” ) , he soon became the Commander-in-Chief of an American military victory and , on the streets of Europe , the rhapsodically received oracle of a permanent peace that would be sustained by a League of Nations .
Crushed by his own country ’ s resistance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stroke in 1919 after barnstorming the U.S. in support of the League .
The following year , he was too infirm to fulfill his hopes of bucking the two-term tradition and running for a third .
When considered against the electoral circumstances that exchanged Wilson , a Democrat , for Harding , a Republican , some of the tumults of 2020 appear to be a centennial reiteration , or inversion , of the calamities and longings of the 1920 campaign .
Then the country—recently riven by disease , inflamed with racial violence and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and globalism—yearned for what the winning candidate somewhat malapropically promised would be a return to “ normalcy.
” Early in 2020 , the term remained useful to supporters of Joe Biden , with its suggestion of Presidential behavior once more within the pale .
The word ’ s nostalgic tenor soon enough made it anathema to left-wing Democrats , and the cyclonic circumstances of the past six months may have made it feel obsolete to Biden himself , but it is still what he is talking about when he calls for removing Donald @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of this toxin ?
Or will we make it a permanent part of our national character ?
” In terms of the Presidential decency on which so much depends , there is nowhere to go but backward .
Harding received the Republican nomination on June 12th , in a hellishly hot Chicago .
His tenth-ballot victory came after the famous deadlock-dissolving conversations in a “ smoke-filled room ” at the Blackstone Hotel .
His image seemed to materialize as a kind of anti-Wilson : a non-cerebral , non-visionary backslapper , less interested in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that Main Street looked spruce .
His instinctive centrism led the Republican overlords to believe that Harding might finally reunite the “ regulars ” who had stuck with Taft in 1912 and the progressives who ’ d bolted away on Theodore Roosevelt ’ s bull moose .
When it came to the Party ’ s current fissures , Harding appeared likely to please the dwindling faction that remained open to participation in Wilson ’ s League , as well as the Senate ’ s Reservationists and Irreconcilables , who opposed it with varying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ took shape , Harding , whose success in politics had been only intermittent before he was elected to the Senate , in 1914 , was aided by his pacific , Rotarian temperament ; by an ambitious and mystical spouse ; and by his sensual handsomeness—Alice Roosevelt Longworth , daughter of Teddy , believed that he resembled “ a decaying Roman emperor.
” During the Convention , Harding had found time to dally , twice , with his mistress , Nan Britton , who ’ d given birth to their child a year earlier @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he was the opposite of the man the Republicans have now , a century later , nominated for a second time .
Far from bellowing that he alone could fix things , Harding accepted his nomination by saying , “ No man is big enough to run this great republic.
” He promised to be directed by his party , not by any sense of personal gifts or destiny .
If Trump is the most cultish figure ever to achieve his party ’ s nomination for President , Harding may have been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ another Ohioan , the state ’ s reformist governor , James M. Cox .
At the statehouse in Columbus , he had been both progressive and pragmatic , appointing skilled technicians where Harding would have chosen pals .
Cox , too , was a fallback choice at his party ’ s Convention , in San Francisco .
It took him forty-four ballots to beat the ballyhooed front-runners , including A. Mitchell Palmer , the Attorney General , who had made himself the scourge of left-wing radicals after anarchists bombed his home on Washington @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of 1919 .
Cox appeared to be , like Harding , a man who could thread several important needles .
Pro-League of Nations but not ardently so , he was also considered , when it came to the enforcement of just-imposed Prohibition , neither wet nor dry but , like the Democrats ’ deliberately flexible platform plank , “ moist.
” His bland memoir , “ Journey Through My Years ” ( 1946 ) , brings to mind such non-showstopping oratory as this , from 1920 : “ We stand at the forks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to follow.
” If Harding ’ s private life was secretly louche , Cox ’ s divorce from his first wife was eight years in the past and a matter of public record .
Now fifty , he was remarried , to a much younger woman , and the couple ’ s new baby , Anne , was about to become a popular photographic subject for the Washington Star ’ s Sunday rotogravure .
The candidates shared a background as newspapermen .
Cox had been the publisher of the Dayton Daily News , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ those of Harding ’ s Marion Star .
The nominees ’ former profession was a point of pride with the nation ’ s press , which presented them as tribunes , not enemies , of the people .
The Washington Star , buoyantly middlebrow and moderately conservative , seemed to endorse Harding on October 16th , though it ’ s difficult to tell .
The paper remained almost Panglossian in its faith that , whoever won , the rapidly urbanizing country had a cheerful future .
The marvels of modernity were regularly showcased @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coast-to-coast airmail ; Governor Cox ’ s use of an amplifier when addressing a crowd ; Senator Harding ’ s preservation , on a phonograph record , of one of his speeches .
A mid-July advertisement by Woodward & Lothrop , a now vanished Washington department store , enticed the homemaker to buy “ asbestos table mats.
” And yet the prevailing mood of the country was troubled .
The recent past weighed heavily on voters , who wanted to forget or suppress it .
The influenza epidemic had finally subsided in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and seventy-five thousand Americans dead—more than ten times the number of U.S. soldiers killed on European battlefields .
There might have been a strong public desire to celebrate the world war as a mission accomplished , but , nearly two years after the Armistice , bodies were still being repatriated from France for burial at Arlington , and the White House was only just getting around to selling a flock of sheep that had grazed the South Lawn , providing wool for the war effort .
Five thousand draft resisters had been convicted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on pursuing the rest .

The candidates shared a background as newspapermen. Cox had been the publisher of the Dayton Daily News, whose presses rolled only eighty miles from those of Harding’s Marion Star. The nominees’ former profession was a point of pride with the nation’s press, which presented them as tribunes, not enemies, of the people. The Washington Star, buoyantly middlebrow and moderately conservative, seemed to endorse Harding on October 16th, though it’s difficult to tell. The paper remained almost Panglossian in its faith that, whoever won, the rapidly urbanizing country had a cheerful future. The marvels of modernity were regularly showcased in the paper: the start of coast-to-coast airmail; Governor Cox’s use of an amplifier when addressing a crowd; Senator Harding’s preservation, on a phonograph record, of one of his speeches. A mid-July advertisement by Woodward & Lothrop, a now vanished Washington department store, enticed the homemaker to buy “asbestos table mats.”
And yet the prevailing mood of the country was troubled. The recent past weighed heavily on voters, who wanted to forget or suppress it. The influenza epidemic had finally subsided in the spring of 1920, leaving six hundred and seventy-five thousand Americans dead—more than ten times the number of U.S. soldiers killed on European battlefields. There might have been a strong public desire to celebrate the world war as a mission accomplished, but, nearly two years after the Armistice, bodies were still being repatriated from France for burial at Arlington, and the White House was only just getting around to selling a flock of sheep that had grazed the South Lawn, providing wool for the war effort. Five thousand draft resisters had been convicted, but Attorney General Palmer was bent on pursuing the rest.
The country feared that this immediate past was already turning into prologue. Nothing abroad had been settled. After the Versailles Treaty was rejected by the U.S. Senate, the European Allies had to arrange its implementation by themselves, negotiating disarmament and reparations with the Weimar Republic at a conference in Spa, Belgium, which the Star’s correspondent compared to “a pack of wolves snarling over a carcass.” Americans had increasing reason to fear that the war would never really be “over over there,” and that their doughboys would soon be heading back.
The American voter of 2020 is aware of a Europe that wants to isolate itself from the United States, to raise a shield against Trump and his feckless gestures at disease control. The electorate of 1920 felt a compulsion to isolate itself from an array of needy, troubled European suitors. Many Americans cast doubtful looks across the Atlantic, and nativists were suspicious of the still assimilating Europeans they nonetheless pandered to as new voting constituencies. The threats to America were coming, after all, from the same places those people had recently left, and to which they might still feel attached.
In late July, the Comintern, in Moscow, told British and European workers to get ready for “heavy civil war” and “revolutionary struggle.” As Poland held off Trotsky’s Red Army, a delegation of Polish-Americans pleaded with Wilson’s secretary, Joseph Tumulty, for U.S. aid to Warsaw. Neither candidate advocated such action, which seemed symptomatic of what Harding identified as the problem of “hyphenated citizenship,” the dual loyalties that made immigrants to the U.S. encourage American “meddling” in their countries of origin. Such fears about those already here could amount to a kind of domestic xenophobia, and Cox saw Harding as the beneficiary of the split allegiances he publicly deplored. In his memoirs, Cox pointed out how blocs of ethnic voters were either aggrieved with Wilson for going to war (the Germans) or angry with him for abandoning their interests, such as Irish independence, in the Versailles negotiations. It was this “racial lineup,” Cox wrote, which guaranteed a G.O.P. victory.
American participation in a League of Nations would only cement those grievances, but Wilson remained determined to see the U.S. join. The effects of his stroke rendered him so inactive and so little visible that, for stretches of the 1920 campaign, Cox and Harding appeared to be running for a job that no longer existed. The President’s wife, Edith, along with his physician and his secretary, kept affairs of state operating at a minimal level, while Wilson navigated what his biographer A. Scott Berg calls “a twilight zone—a state of physical exhaustion, emotional turbulence and mental unrest.”
The League became, to Cox’s clear disadvantage, the central issue of the 1920 campaign after he was permitted to visit the White House on Sunday, July 18th. The sight of the disabled Wilson moved him to tears, changing the dynamic between the two men and ultimately the tenor of the whole campaign. Cox had been sufficiently lukewarm toward the League that Wilson was initially anything but enthusiastic about his candidacy. Now, however, the nominee impulsively pledged to Wilson his “million percent support” for the League. Cox’s ardor became emotive and personal, prompting him to tell one campaign audience that Wilson had been reduced to “the saddest picture in all history” by the ad-hominem hatred of his tormentors in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Harding tried to finesse the League issue. His willingness to consider a different “international association” or a souped-up version of the World Court left him open to charges of waffling. Moreover, the Democrats’ new commitment to the League gave Republican senators Henry Cabot Lodge, Hiram Johnson, and William Borah a reason to hold their candidate’s feet to the rejectionist fire. As Cox pronounced opposition to the League a betrayal of “the boys who died in France,” Lodge attacked the new organization as “a breeder of war.” By October 7th, Harding appeared ready to offer a straight answer. “I favor staying out,” he told the citizens of Des Moines.
The League issue came to the fore partly because it could be decided yes or no. Domestic anxieties never attained the same clarity but were ever present. In fact, the initials H.C.L., which turn up in headlines and stories, were shorthand not for Henry Cabot Lodge but for the high cost of living. Rising postwar prices for beef, coal, and sugar preoccupied householders and bureaucrats. The economic situation was not nearly as dire as the one strangling 2020, but then, as now, the federal response looked ham-fisted. The War Department sold off stockpiled canned meat, and the Justice Department’s H.C.L. task force recommended, as an affordable “common sense garment,” a dress made from sugar sacks. Until prices began coming down in September, Harding blamed the incumbent Democrats, in one speech intoning, with an ecstatic, Whitmanesque repetition, the phrase “more production,” as the essential cure for consumer woe. A protective tariff, he believed, was also in order.
Throughout the year, labor was restive. The Wobblies, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, were said to be planning a “reign of terror” in the Pacific Northwest. The White House jawboned striking coal miners back to work, and threatened D.C. sewer workers, who were contemplating a walkout, with replacement by U.S. troops. The biggest, blackest headline of the campaign appeared in mid-September, after an attack on New York’s financial district: “20 KILLED IN WALL STREET EXPLOSION.” (The final death toll was thirty-eight.) Inside J. P. Morgan’s bank, as Beverly Gage reconstructed the scene in her book, “The Day Wall Street Exploded” (2009), one man experienced “a shudder followed by a blizzard of white” as “papers burst from their files.” On the streets outside, “men on fire dropped to the ground: ‘Save me! Save me! Put me out!’ Customers fled barbershops, with cream on their faces, aprons streaming behind. . . .” No one was ever convicted of the attack, but evidence pointed to Italian anarchists, heightening the appeals to nativism and isolationism.
“Sorry, kid. The guy who comes up with names is on vacation, so we’re just gonna call you Peter Who Eats Sandwiches.” Cartoon by Hartley Lin Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
The socialist Eugene V. Debs, already imprisoned for sedition in encouraging draft resistance during the war, continued a third-party Presidential campaign from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He told the press that he was glad to have an alibi for his whereabouts during the bombing.
Racial violence remained a phenomenon of such dailiness in 1920 that its occurrence, even when reported, was perceived as being more inevitable than eventful, something that required an occasional word from the candidates without anybody believing it would seriously affect the election. During the campaign, there were lynchings in Duluth, Minnesota; Paris, Texas; Graham, North Carolina; Corinth, Mississippi; Macclenny, Florida; and elsewhere. The Star had occasionally, over the previous year, published strong editorials against lynching, but the paper’s complacency more often prevailed. When it had reason to feature or consider the Civil War, only as distant from 1920 as the Kennedy Presidency is from our own day, it took satisfaction from lore and legend, and from North-South reconciliation—which (rather than emancipation) would be the dominant theme of the Lincoln Memorial, still under construction. The Star’s Sunday magazine made a serious revival of the Ku Klux Klan in Virginia and Georgia seem part of a colorful pageant being staged by reënactors: “The Old Klan, Its Mysterious Rites, the Blazing Cross and the Fantastic Costumes.”
Harding declared, in his speech accepting the nomination, “I believe the federal government should stamp out lynching,” but his party’s platform was more evasive: “We urge Congress to consider the most effective means to end lynching in this country.” The cravenness of the Convention document compelled the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs to withhold its endorsement from the G.O.P. ticket. The Democratic Party, the nation’s principal political guarantor of Jim Crow segregation for two more generations, offered even less. The word “lynching” doesn’t appear in the platform constructed in San Francisco, and when Cox, late in the campaign, wrote that his opponent was trying to “arouse racial hatred,” he meant that Harding was making too many pledges to Black citizens, which he had no “intention of carrying out.” During the last days of the campaign, a pamphlet claiming that Harding had Black ancestry received substantial press coverage, but too late to incite the full horror it intended.
Memory of the recent mass death from influenza underwent its own sort of quarantine, a mental feat akin to the general denial surrounding race. The pandemic had never received sustained attention from the federal government. Wilson didn’t address it in public, not even during its third wave, in 1919, when he remained preoccupied with peacemaking abroad. His detachment may have been enabled by something newly messianic in him, whereas Trump’s petulant self-pity over COVID-19 was inevitable from the start. But the Presidential vacuum feels shocking in either century. Harding, in 1919, had been one of two senators to propose a modest appropriation for research into the flu; in 1920, there was no serious campaign discussion of any public-health policies that might blunt future pandemics. Whooping cough, tuberculosis, and even anthrax (a possible danger from new shaving brushes) all found their way into the news, but the flu departed from political discussion as stealthily as it had once settled into people’s lungs.


newyorker--2020-09-14--Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music

Martin Luther King , Jr. , in his book “ Stride Toward Freedom , ” wrote , “ On a cool Saturday afternoon in January 1954 , I set out to drive from Atlanta , Georgia , to Montgomery , Alabama .
.
.
.
The Metropolitan Opera was on the radio with a performance of one of my favorite operas—Donizetti ’ s ‘ Lucia di Lammermoor.
’ So with the beauty of the countryside , the inspiration of Donizetti ’ s inimitable music , and the splendor of the skies , the usual monotony that accompanies a relatively long @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pleasant diversions.
” What does it mean , if anything , that King was listening to bel-canto opera as he made his historic journey to preach his first sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church ?
One response would be to find something curious , or even contradictory , in the image of King enjoying Donizetti behind the wheel of his car .
He was poised to become a titan in the civil-rights movement ; classical music is a world in which Black people have seldom been allowed to play a leading role @ @ @ @ @ @ @ asked about W. E. B .
Du Bois , who admired the music of Richard Wagner to such an extent that he attended the Bayreuth Festival , in 1936 .
Even though Wagner was notoriously racist , Du Bois said , “ The musical dramas of Wagner tell of human life as he lived it , and no human being , white or black , can afford not to know them , if he would know life.
” Several scholars have conjectured that King was sending a cultural signal when he inserted Donizetti @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rieder says that the story demonstrates “ King ’ s desire to cast himself as a man of sensibility and distinction.
” Godfrey Hodgson writes that such references were intended to “ reassure northern intellectuals that he was on the same wavelength as they were.
” Du Bois ’ s cosmopolitan tastes have elicited similar commentary .
It is questionable , though , to assume that these two formidable personalities were simply trying to assimilate themselves to a perceived white aesthetic .
Rather , they were taking possession of the European inheritance and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ More elementally , they loved the music , and had no need to justify their taste .
It is equally questionable to assume that King ’ s and Du Bois ’ s fondness for classical music lends it some kind of universal , anti-racist virtue .
In that sense , my attraction to these anecdotes of fandom is suspect .
I am a white American who grew up with the classics , and I am troubled by the presumption that they are stamped with whiteness—and are even aligned with white supremacy , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can not counter that suggestion simply by gesturing toward important Black figures who cherished this same tradition , or by reeling off the names of Black singers and composers .
The exceptions remain exceptions .
This world is blindingly white , both in its history and its present .
Since nationwide protests over police violence erupted , in May and June , American culture has been engaged in an examination , however nominal , of its relationship with racism .
Such an examination is sorely needed in classical music , because of its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The undertaking is complex ; the field must acknowledge a history of systemic racism while also honoring the individual experiences of Black composers , musicians , and listeners .
Black people have long been marginalized , but they have never been outsiders .
This spring , the journal Music Theory Online published “ Music Theory and the White Racial Frame , ” an article by Philip Ewell , who teaches at Hunter College .
It begins with the sentence “ Music theory is white , ” and goes on to argue that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only in the lack of diversity in its membership but also in a deep-seated ideology of white supremacy , one that insidiously affects how music is analyzed and taught .
The main target of Ewell ’ s critique is the early-twentieth-century Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker ( 1868-1935 ) , who parsed musical structures in terms of foreground , middle-ground , and background levels , teasing out the tonal formulas that underpin large-scale movements .
Schenker held racist views , particularly with regard to Black people , and according to Ewell those views seeped @ @ @ @ @ @ @ theoretical work .
Schenker was Jewish , but his adherence to doctrines of Germanic superiority blinkered him to such an extent that , in 1933 , he praised Hitler , adding , “ If only a man were born to music , who would finally exterminate the musical Marxists.
” Schenker ’ s advocates have long been aware of his disturbing views but have insisted that his bigoted rhetoric has nothing to do with his theoretical writing .
Ewell argued that Schenker ’ s system is , in fact , founded on national @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kind of supreme talent who can assemble monumental musical structures shades into biological definitions of genius , and the biology of genius spills over into the biology of race .
Ewell concluded , “ There can be no question that for Schenker , the concept of ‘ genius ’ was associated with whiteness to some degree.
” Shortly after Ewell ’ s article was published , a skirmish broke out in the music-theory community , incited not by the article itself but by a twenty-minute condensed version of the material that Ewell had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The Journal of Schenkerian Studies , which is based at the University of North Texas , chose to devote ninety pages to responses to that brief talk .
Some were supportive , others dismissive ; one accused Ewell , who is African-American , of exhibiting “ Black anti-Semitism , ” even though Ewell had not mentioned Schenker ’ s Jewishness .
On social media , Ewell ’ s colleagues came to his defense and questioned the journal ’ s methodology .
The historian Kira Thurman wrote , “ Did the Journal of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Professor Ewell ’ s scholarship that was ‘ anonymous ’ ?
Yes.
” National Review and Fox News somehow stumbled on the episode and cast it as so-called cancel culture run amok ; it was claimed that Ewell was trying to ban Beethoven , although nothing of the sort had been suggested .
At first glance , the Schenker debate looks to be of limited relevance to the wider classical-music world , not to mention the general population .
Although his theories have been taught in American universities for generations , they are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ musicologists , for example , have never taken him as seriously .
Even in the U.S. , conservatory students can often undergo a thorough training without encountering his work .
Yet the case of Schenker illustrates an implicit prejudice that is endemic in the teaching , playing , and interpretation of classical music .
His method is far from unique in elevating the European tradition while concealing its cultural bias behind eternal , abstract principles .
What Ewell calls “ the white racial frame ” —he takes the term from the sociologist Joe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Thurman , in her paper “ Performing Lieder , Hearing Race , ” makes a similar point : “ Classical music , like whiteness itself , is frequently racially unmarked and presented as universal—until people of color start performing it.
” The hysterical complaints that Ewell was proposing to “ cancel ” the classical canon stemmed mainly from a blog post in which he called Beethoven an “ above-average composer ” who has been “ propped up by the white-male frame , both consciously and subconsciously , with descriptors such as genius @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a provocation , though it is hardly the first to have been lobbed at the great man : Debussy wrote that Beethoven ’ s sonatas were badly written for the piano , and Ned Rorem memorably dinged the Ninth Symphony as “ the first piece of junk in the grand style.
” Ewell provokes with a higher purpose : he is goading a classical culture that awards the vast majority of performances to a tight circle of superstars , shutting out female and nonwhite composers who , until the mid-twentieth century , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In some ways , that Valhalla mentality is as entrenched as ever .

Martin Luther King, Jr., in his book “Stride Toward Freedom,” wrote, “On a cool Saturday afternoon in January 1954, I set out to drive from Atlanta, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama. . . . The Metropolitan Opera was on the radio with a performance of one of my favorite operas—Donizetti’s ‘Lucia di Lammermoor.’ So with the beauty of the countryside, the inspiration of Donizetti’s inimitable music, and the splendor of the skies, the usual monotony that accompanies a relatively long drive—especially when one is alone—was dispelled in pleasant diversions.”
What does it mean, if anything, that King was listening to bel-canto opera as he made his historic journey to preach his first sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church? One response would be to find something curious, or even contradictory, in the image of King enjoying Donizetti behind the wheel of his car. He was poised to become a titan in the civil-rights movement; classical music is a world in which Black people have seldom been allowed to play a leading role. Much the same question could be asked about W. E. B. Du Bois, who admired the music of Richard Wagner to such an extent that he attended the Bayreuth Festival, in 1936. Even though Wagner was notoriously racist, Du Bois said, “The musical dramas of Wagner tell of human life as he lived it, and no human being, white or black, can afford not to know them, if he would know life.”
Several scholars have conjectured that King was sending a cultural signal when he inserted Donizetti into “Stride Toward Freedom.” Jonathan Rieder says that the story demonstrates “King’s desire to cast himself as a man of sensibility and distinction.” Godfrey Hodgson writes that such references were intended to “reassure northern intellectuals that he was on the same wavelength as they were.” Du Bois’s cosmopolitan tastes have elicited similar commentary. It is questionable, though, to assume that these two formidable personalities were simply trying to assimilate themselves to a perceived white aesthetic. Rather, they were taking possession of the European inheritance and pulling it into their own sphere. More elementally, they loved the music, and had no need to justify their taste.
It is equally questionable to assume that King’s and Du Bois’s fondness for classical music lends it some kind of universal, anti-racist virtue. In that sense, my attraction to these anecdotes of fandom is suspect. I am a white American who grew up with the classics, and I am troubled by the presumption that they are stamped with whiteness—and are even aligned with white supremacy, as some scholars have lately argued. I cannot counter that suggestion simply by gesturing toward important Black figures who cherished this same tradition, or by reeling off the names of Black singers and composers. The exceptions remain exceptions. This world is blindingly white, both in its history and its present.
Since nationwide protests over police violence erupted, in May and June, American culture has been engaged in an examination, however nominal, of its relationship with racism. Such an examination is sorely needed in classical music, because of its extreme dependence on a problematic past. The undertaking is complex; the field must acknowledge a history of systemic racism while also honoring the individual experiences of Black composers, musicians, and listeners. Black people have long been marginalized, but they have never been outsiders.
This spring, the journal Music Theory Online published “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” an article by Philip Ewell, who teaches at Hunter College. It begins with the sentence “Music theory is white,” and goes on to argue that the whiteness of the discipline is manifest not only in the lack of diversity in its membership but also in a deep-seated ideology of white supremacy, one that insidiously affects how music is analyzed and taught. The main target of Ewell’s critique is the early-twentieth-century Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), who parsed musical structures in terms of foreground, middle-ground, and background levels, teasing out the tonal formulas that underpin large-scale movements. Schenker held racist views, particularly with regard to Black people, and according to Ewell those views seeped into the seemingly abstract principles of his theoretical work.
Schenker was Jewish, but his adherence to doctrines of Germanic superiority blinkered him to such an extent that, in 1933, he praised Hitler, adding, “If only a man were born to music, who would finally exterminate the musical Marxists.” Schenker’s advocates have long been aware of his disturbing views but have insisted that his bigoted rhetoric has nothing to do with his theoretical writing. Ewell argued that Schenker’s system is, in fact, founded on national and racial hierarchies. Reverence for the kind of supreme talent who can assemble monumental musical structures shades into biological definitions of genius, and the biology of genius spills over into the biology of race. Ewell concluded, “There can be no question that for Schenker, the concept of ‘genius’ was associated with whiteness to some degree.”
Shortly after Ewell’s article was published, a skirmish broke out in the music-theory community, incited not by the article itself but by a twenty-minute condensed version of the material that Ewell had presented at a conference seven months earlier. The Journal of Schenkerian Studies, which is based at the University of North Texas, chose to devote ninety pages to responses to that brief talk. Some were supportive, others dismissive; one accused Ewell, who is African-American, of exhibiting “Black anti-Semitism,” even though Ewell had not mentioned Schenker’s Jewishness. On social media, Ewell’s colleagues came to his defense and questioned the journal’s methodology. The historian Kira Thurman wrote, “Did the Journal of Schenkerian Studies really publish a response to Professor Ewell’s scholarship that was ‘anonymous’? Yes.” National Review and Fox News somehow stumbled on the episode and cast it as so-called cancel culture run amok; it was claimed that Ewell was trying to ban Beethoven, although nothing of the sort had been suggested.
At first glance, the Schenker debate looks to be of limited relevance to the wider classical-music world, not to mention the general population. Although his theories have been taught in American universities for generations, they are by no means universally accepted. German-speaking musicologists, for example, have never taken him as seriously. Even in the U.S., conservatory students can often undergo a thorough training without encountering his work. Yet the case of Schenker illustrates an implicit prejudice that is endemic in the teaching, playing, and interpretation of classical music. His method is far from unique in elevating the European tradition while concealing its cultural bias behind eternal, abstract principles. What Ewell calls “the white racial frame”—he takes the term from the sociologist Joe Feagin—has the special power of being invisible. Thurman, in her paper “Performing Lieder, Hearing Race,” makes a similar point: “Classical music, like whiteness itself, is frequently racially unmarked and presented as universal—until people of color start performing it.”
The hysterical complaints that Ewell was proposing to “cancel” the classical canon stemmed mainly from a blog post in which he called Beethoven an “above-average composer” who has been “propped up by the white-male frame, both consciously and subconsciously, with descriptors such as genius, master, and masterwork.” This is a provocation, though it is hardly the first to have been lobbed at the great man: Debussy wrote that Beethoven’s sonatas were badly written for the piano, and Ned Rorem memorably dinged the Ninth Symphony as “the first piece of junk in the grand style.” Ewell provokes with a higher purpose: he is goading a classical culture that awards the vast majority of performances to a tight circle of superstars, shutting out female and nonwhite composers who, until the mid-twentieth century, had little chance of making a career. In some ways, that Valhalla mentality is as entrenched as ever.
The whiteness of classical music is, above all, an American problem. The racial and ethnic makeup of the canon is hardly surprising, given European demographics before the twentieth century. But, when that tradition was transplanted to the multicultural United States, it blended into the racial hierarchy that had governed the country from its founding. The white majority tended to adopt European music as a badge of its supremacy. The classical-music institutions that emerged in the mid- and late nineteenth century—the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Metropolitan Opera, and the like—became temples to European gods, as Lawrence Levine argued in his 1988 book, “Highbrow/Lowbrow.” Little effort was made to cultivate American composers; it seemed more important to manufacture a fantasy of Beethovenian grandeur.
Immigrant populations supplied much of the workforce for those ensembles: Germans gravitated toward the orchestras, Italians toward the opera. Such activity exemplifies the process of assimilation and ascent that Nell Irvin Painter describes in her 2010 book, “The History of White People”: the expansion of the category of “whiteness” to encompass new groups. A large wave of German immigrants arrived in the period of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, which sent thousands of leftists and liberals into exile. The Germania Musical Society, which was founded in 1848 and toured America widely, offered itself as a model of democracy in action—“one for all and all for one.” Members of the group exercised a decisive influence on the development of the New York Philharmonic and other ensembles.
The wealthy white Americans who underwrote the country’s élite orchestras tended to see their institutions as vehicles of uplift that allowed the lower classes to better themselves through exposure to the sublime airs of the masters. The contradictions of such paternalism are evident in the case of Henry Lee Higginson, who founded the Boston Symphony, in 1881. In his youth, Higginson opposed slavery, and after the Civil War he briefly ran a plantation in Georgia, aiming to provide employment and education to formerly enslaved African-Americans. When the project proved more difficult than he anticipated, he tended to blame his Black workers. In his later years, he adopted strident anti-immigrant rhetoric. By the time of his death, in 1919, he had become a leading member of the Immigration Restriction League.
Although a few well-dressed African-Americans would not have been unwelcome in the Boston Symphony audience, a Black musician had no hope of joining the orchestra. As Aaron Flagg recently recounted in Symphony magazine, the professionalization of the musician class in the late nineteenth century led directly to the segregation of musicians’ unions—a system that lingered into the nineteen-seventies. Black musicians had to establish their own unions and form their own ensembles. Not until the forties and fifties did Black players begin joining upper-echelon orchestras: Jack Bradley in Denver, Henry Lewis in Los Angeles, Donald White in Cleveland, and, in 1957, the double-bassist Ortiz Walton in Boston.


newyorker--2020-09-14--Chris Ware’s “Last Days”

Chris Ware’s “Last Days”

September , so often the month of turning—kids back at school , leaves shaking loose—seems different this year .
The changes are there , but so is a kind of stasis ; people remain mostly indoors , and the coronavirus pandemic is close to claiming its two-hundred-thousandth death in America .
In his latest cover , Chris Ware captures the small moments of community that can appease such bleakness .
We recently spoke with the artist about the cover , the pandemic , and more .
You ’ ve titled this “ Last Days , ” and at some point @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Last Days .
.
.
.
” What did you want to evoke with the title ?
I mean , first of all , it ’ s September , and the weirdest summer ever is almost over .
My original title , “ Democratic Party , ” I rejected as too ambiguous and unintentionally pejorative .
Besides , those of us who remember eighth-grade social studies know that we actually don ’ t live in a democracy but in a republic , so I could have just as easily titled it that , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ve been even worse .
The small-letter versions of these words are supposed to represent everything that we constitutionally revere , right ?
Not spark the flames of conflict or prompt a lock-and-load .
I can ’ t help feeling that this house is familiar to the artist .
Is it inspired by your own home ?
I live in the quiet , relatively diverse , and leafy “ village ” of Oak Park , literally across the street from Chicago , and all summer long I ’ ve seen neighborhood almost-but-not-quite get-togethers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Despite what the Trump Administration would have us believe—especially during this Great Reckoning and its highlighting of our centuries-long epidemic of racism—I think vastly more people still try to get along in America than not .
Our cities aren ’ t exclusively anarchic blast zones , and the suburbs aren ’ t all xenophobic cloisters .
Yet , now , the weather is cooling , and we ’ re all heading back inside to await the results of what will surely be the most contested election of our lifetimes .
The real @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a democracy or a republic but something that somehow stifles both .
See below for more covers by Ware :

September, so often the month of turning—kids back at school, leaves shaking loose—seems different this year. The changes are there, but so is a kind of stasis; people remain mostly indoors, and the coronavirus pandemic is close to claiming its two-hundred-thousandth death in America. In his latest cover, Chris Ware captures the small moments of community that can appease such bleakness. We recently spoke with the artist about the cover, the pandemic, and more.
You’ve titled this “Last Days,” and at some point you considered a slight variation, “Last Days. . . .” What did you want to evoke with the title?
I mean, first of all, it’s September, and the weirdest summer ever is almost over. My original title, “Democratic Party,” I rejected as too ambiguous and unintentionally pejorative. Besides, those of us who remember eighth-grade social studies know that we actually don’t live in a democracy but in a republic, so I could have just as easily titled it that, too. Which I guess would’ve been even worse. The small-letter versions of these words are supposed to represent everything that we constitutionally revere, right? Not spark the flames of conflict or prompt a lock-and-load.
I can’t help feeling that this house is familiar to the artist. Is it inspired by your own home?
I live in the quiet, relatively diverse, and leafy “village” of Oak Park, literally across the street from Chicago, and all summer long I’ve seen neighborhood almost-but-not-quite get-togethers, not unlike what I drew here.
Despite what the Trump Administration would have us believe—especially during this Great Reckoning and its highlighting of our centuries-long epidemic of racism—I think vastly more people still try to get along in America than not. Our cities aren’t exclusively anarchic blast zones, and the suburbs aren’t all xenophobic cloisters. Yet, now, the weather is cooling, and we’re all heading back inside to await the results of what will surely be the most contested election of our lifetimes. The real fear is what may result: not a democracy or a republic but something that somehow stifles both.
See below for more covers by Ware:


newyorker--2020-09-14--The Virus That Became a Muse for Hervé Guibert

A frail young man shadowboxes to Technotronic & MC Eric ’ s “ Tough.
” Clothes hang loose on his uncoöperative body , which sways with each tentative punch .
There ’ s nobody else in the room , but a mannequin and a stuffed monkey look on .
Cut to a spinning shot from the man ’ s perspective—a blur of paperbacks and floral carpeting—and then a bathroom ’ s wreckage of medicine .
He dissolves a tablet in a cup and looks at himself in the mirror .
One senses that he hasn ’ t left home in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Guibert ’ s “ La Pudeur ou l ’ Impudeur ” —an auto-obituary filmed by the thirty-five-year-old , AIDS-stricken writer months before his death , in December , 1991—during the COVID-19 lockdown in April .
It felt like a time capsule from another , lonelier epidemic : Guibert watches a video of a recent medical procedure , struggles to dress and shower , and discusses suicide with his elderly aunts .
On vacation in Elba , he sips from a glass that appears to contain a fatal dose of digitoxin .
A year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disclosing his diagnosis in a penetrating and uncannily lucid autobiographical novel , “ To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life.
” A controversial landmark of AIDS literature , the book included a fictionalized portrait of Michel Foucault , Guibert ’ s close friend and mentor , and revealed that his death , in 1984 , had been the result of AIDS .
Notorious for betraying secrets , Guibert justified the trespass as a prerogative of their shared destiny .
Soon , he would die the same way .
If Foucault never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Guibert would spend his last year in the glare of an unusual celebrity , dying of an illness that he treated as an instrument of self-revelation .
As he wrote in “ To the Friend , ” AIDS would be neither his secret nor his cause but his muse and teacher : In the year between the publication of “ To the Friend ” and his death , Guibert completed five books : two short novels , a hospital diary , and “ The Compassion Protocol , ” a moving account of his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the influence of an experimental treatment .
Altogether , they are a singular contribution to the literature of illness , the testament of a writer bracingly committed to everything that , in Virginia Woolf ’ s words , “ the cautious respectability of health conceals.
” Forget Susan Sontag ’ s dictum that diseases shouldn ’ t have meanings .
Guibert inhabited AIDS as though it were a darkroom or an astronomical observatory , a means for deciphering the patterns in life ’ s dying light .
Until recently , Hervé Guibert was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ To the Friend ” was translated in 1991 but received mixed reviews in America : too sexually and medically explicit for mainstream audiences , yet too politically detached for a gay community then engaged in a life-or-death struggle for recognition .
One reviewer for the Lambda Book Report wrote , “ ACT UP , Hervé .
ACT UP .
Or get new friends.
” A younger generation has proved more receptive to his raw , genre-bending body of work .
In a spate of new translations , Guibert has emerged as a forerunner @ @ @ @ @ @ @ writers of autofiction , such as Édouard Louis , Garth Greenwell , and Ocean Vuong .
Guibert has even inspired ( fictional ) pilgrims , as he once predicted ; in Andrew Durbin ’ s novella “ Skyland ” ( Nightboat ) , two young men search for a lost portrait of the writer on the island of Patmos .
Born in 1955 , Hervé Guibert grew up in Paris and La Rochelle .
His mother was a former teacher , and his father was a veterinary inspector who worked at a slaughterhouse @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and disconcertingly obsessed with their son ’ s hygiene , for which he later repaid them with a shockingly granular tell-all novel , “ Mes Parents ” ( 1986 ) .
Meanwhile , the young Guibert thrilled to Edgar Allan Poe stories and masturbated to stills from Fellini ’ s “ Satyricon.
” “ At fifteen , before I wrote anything , ” he once wrote , “ I understood wealth , celebrity , and death.
” He moved back to Paris at the age of seventeen , hoping to become an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ film school , he quickly rebounded into the world of magazines .
By twenty , he was contributing dating advice to 20 Ans , a glossy marketed to young women ; in his spare time , he wrote stories about voyeurism , dissection , cruising , and incestuous childhood memories .
“ I have a lyrical ass , ” he boasted in his first collection , which appeared , in 1977 , as “ La Mort Propagande.
” A striking blond with unruly curls and the haughtily vacant expression of an anime villain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ compared him to an angel , a bad boy from a Pasolini film , and even “ a little brother to Lucifer.
” Edmund White , who met Guibert in Michel Foucault ’ s circle , described him as “ hyacinthine , ringleted , foggyvoiced.
” Roland Barthes once tried to sleep with the younger writer , later analyzing his rejection in a long , wounded letter .
( “ By leaving so hurriedly , ” Barthes told Guibert , you “ constructed me as a seducer.
” ) Guibert published it .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ others were by him .
Joining Le Monde as a photography critic in 1978 , he simultaneously established himself as a photographer , publishing a photo-roman with strikingly intimate portraits of his great-aunts .
Soon afterward , he wrote “ Ghost Image ” ( 1981 ) , reissued in Robert Bononno ’ s translation in 2014 , a beautiful and insightful collection of essays on the portraiture of family albums , photo-booth film strips , pornographic Polaroids , and other ephemeral genres .
Guibert arrives at a vision of photography as tactile , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of desire .
A vanishingly thin boundary separated his art from his private life .
Often befriending the celebrities he wrote about—such as the actresses Gina Lollobrigida and Isabelle Adjani—he portrayed loved ones as though they were celebrities , idolizing and exposing them by turns .
“ With each book , I place exorbitant demands on my friends , abusive demands for love , ” he told an interviewer in 1990 .
“ But I ’ ve been very lucky .
My friends have never censored or put me down .
”

A frail young man shadowboxes to Technotronic & MC Eric’s “Tough.” Clothes hang loose on his uncoöperative body, which sways with each tentative punch. There’s nobody else in the room, but a mannequin and a stuffed monkey look on. Cut to a spinning shot from the man’s perspective—a blur of paperbacks and floral carpeting—and then a bathroom’s wreckage of medicine. He dissolves a tablet in a cup and looks at himself in the mirror. One senses that he hasn’t left home in a long time.
I watched Hervé Guibert’s “La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur”—an auto-obituary filmed by the thirty-five-year-old, AIDS-stricken writer months before his death, in December, 1991—during the COVID-19 lockdown in April. It felt like a time capsule from another, lonelier epidemic: Guibert watches a video of a recent medical procedure, struggles to dress and shower, and discusses suicide with his elderly aunts. On vacation in Elba, he sips from a glass that appears to contain a fatal dose of digitoxin.
A year earlier, Guibert had shocked France by disclosing his diagnosis in a penetrating and uncannily lucid autobiographical novel, “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life.” A controversial landmark of AIDS literature, the book included a fictionalized portrait of Michel Foucault, Guibert’s close friend and mentor, and revealed that his death, in 1984, had been the result of AIDS. Notorious for betraying secrets, Guibert justified the trespass as a prerogative of their shared destiny. Soon, he would die the same way.
If Foucault never said a word about his illness, Guibert would spend his last year in the glare of an unusual celebrity, dying of an illness that he treated as an instrument of self-revelation. As he wrote in “To the Friend,” AIDS would be neither his secret nor his cause but his muse and teacher:
I was discovering something sleek and dazzling in its hideousness, for though it was certainly an inexorable illness, it wasn’t immediately catastrophic, it was an illness in stages, a very long flight of steps that led assuredly to death, but whose every step represented a unique apprenticeship. It was a disease that gave death time to live and its victims time to die, time to discover time, and in the end to discover life.
In the year between the publication of “To the Friend” and his death, Guibert completed five books: two short novels, a hospital diary, and “The Compassion Protocol,” a moving account of his brief yet transformative “resurrection” under the influence of an experimental treatment. Altogether, they are a singular contribution to the literature of illness, the testament of a writer bracingly committed to everything that, in Virginia Woolf’s words, “the cautious respectability of health conceals.” Forget Susan Sontag’s dictum that diseases shouldn’t have meanings. Guibert inhabited AIDS as though it were a darkroom or an astronomical observatory, a means for deciphering the patterns in life’s dying light.
Until recently, Hervé Guibert was not widely read in English. “To the Friend” was translated in 1991 but received mixed reviews in America: too sexually and medically explicit for mainstream audiences, yet too politically detached for a gay community then engaged in a life-or-death struggle for recognition. One reviewer for the Lambda Book Report wrote, “ACT UP, Hervé. ACT UP. Or get new friends.”
A younger generation has proved more receptive to his raw, genre-bending body of work. In a spate of new translations, Guibert has emerged as a forerunner of today’s most prominent gay writers of autofiction, such as Édouard Louis, Garth Greenwell, and Ocean Vuong. Guibert has even inspired (fictional) pilgrims, as he once predicted; in Andrew Durbin’s novella “Skyland” (Nightboat), two young men search for a lost portrait of the writer on the island of Patmos.
Born in 1955, Hervé Guibert grew up in Paris and La Rochelle. His mother was a former teacher, and his father was a veterinary inspector who worked at a slaughterhouse. They were conservative, middle class, and disconcertingly obsessed with their son’s hygiene, for which he later repaid them with a shockingly granular tell-all novel, “Mes Parents” (1986). Meanwhile, the young Guibert thrilled to Edgar Allan Poe stories and masturbated to stills from Fellini’s “Satyricon.” “At fifteen, before I wrote anything,” he once wrote, “I understood wealth, celebrity, and death.”
He moved back to Paris at the age of seventeen, hoping to become an actor or a scriptwriter. Rejected from film school, he quickly rebounded into the world of magazines. By twenty, he was contributing dating advice to 20 Ans, a glossy marketed to young women; in his spare time, he wrote stories about voyeurism, dissection, cruising, and incestuous childhood memories. “I have a lyrical ass,” he boasted in his first collection, which appeared, in 1977, as “La Mort Propagande.”
A striking blond with unruly curls and the haughtily vacant expression of an anime villain, Guibert turned many heads. Friends compared him to an angel, a bad boy from a Pasolini film, and even “a little brother to Lucifer.” Edmund White, who met Guibert in Michel Foucault’s circle, described him as “hyacinthine, ringleted, foggyvoiced.” Roland Barthes once tried to sleep with the younger writer, later analyzing his rejection in a long, wounded letter. (“By leaving so hurriedly,” Barthes told Guibert, you “constructed me as a seducer.”) Guibert published it.
He was as enraptured by images as others were by him. Joining Le Monde as a photography critic in 1978, he simultaneously established himself as a photographer, publishing a photo-roman with strikingly intimate portraits of his great-aunts. Soon afterward, he wrote “Ghost Image” (1981), reissued in Robert Bononno’s translation in 2014, a beautiful and insightful collection of essays on the portraiture of family albums, photo-booth film strips, pornographic Polaroids, and other ephemeral genres. Guibert arrives at a vision of photography as tactile, fetishistic, and inseparable from the frustrations of desire.
A vanishingly thin boundary separated his art from his private life. Often befriending the celebrities he wrote about—such as the actresses Gina Lollobrigida and Isabelle Adjani—he portrayed loved ones as though they were celebrities, idolizing and exposing them by turns. “With each book, I place exorbitant demands on my friends, abusive demands for love,” he told an interviewer in 1990. “But I’ve been very lucky. My friends have never censored or put me down.”
In “Crazy for Vincent” (1989), a highly entertaining erotic novella, translated by Christine Pichini in 2017, Guibert dramatized his relationship with an impulsive teen-age lover. Vincent’s wild life style and unpredictable appetites—for coke, heroin, girls, and, intermittently, Hervé—leave his suitor desperate enough to call the boy’s family home: “ ‘What’s it about?’ asks Vincent’s mother; urge to respond, ‘It’s about his cock, Madame, I need to suck it as soon as possible.’ ”
The Guibert revival’s capstone has been Semiotext(e)’s reissue, this year, of “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life,” published in tandem with a career-spanning collection of short stories, entitled “Written in Invisible Ink.” They reveal a writer of courage, beguiling flair, and sometimes maddening nastiness, who made the body his subject long before his own turned against him.
The several dozen stories of “Written in Invisible Ink,” artfully translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, read like schoolyard confessions carved into a desk. Surveying Guibert’s work from 1975 to 1989, the book reveals a young writer confident in his themes yet restlessly experimental in expression. Realist vignettes alternate with fairy tales, ghost stories, and descriptions of imaginary erotic machines. In one story, a knife-thrower tricks the narrator into agreeing to perform as his partner (in drag); in another, a man steals a wax head of Jeanne d’Arc. The over-all impression is that of a writer in search of shapes for his unruly energy, as though picking through limbs in an anatomist’s workshop.


The Mail

I read with interest Jon Lee Anderson ’ s account of his visit to Nunivak , in the Bering Sea , in search of musk-ox wool ( “ Wanderlust , ” August 17th ) .
Anderson cites as inspiration the late Peter Matthiessen ’ s participation in a 1964 expedition to Nunivak .
That journey was led by John J. Teal , Jr. , an American anthropologist and visionary , who , in a 1958 Profile in The New Yorker , was described as enjoying “ the unique and quite profitless distinction of being the only musk-ox herdsman in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had embarked on a mission to capture and domesticate the beast .
With support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation , he started Alaska ’ s first domestic-musk-ox farm , in Fairbanks .
He envisaged an Arctic domestic industry built around the animal ’ s underwool , known as qiviut , which is often used in hand-knitted products .
He hoped that this environmentally sustainable undertaking might provide income to native Arctic residents in a way that would align with their traditional culture and economy .
In the course of three expeditions to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Teal captured thirty-three musk-ox calves , which were taken to be raised on the farm in Fairbanks .
I became involved with the project in 1968 , and am now at work on a book-length history about it .
Teal died in 1982 , but his musk-ox-domestication project and the hand-knitting industry he began continue to this day .
Ruth Franklin ’ s review of Maria Dahvana Headley ’ s new translation of “ Beowulf ” asks why the monster Grendel terrorizes the Danes after hearing their feasting and singing ( Books , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ text , ” she writes , “ doesn ’ t give a reason ” for Grendel ’ s fury .
But , as Franklin mentions elsewhere in the article , the poem says that Grendel is a descendant of Cain , who was exiled by God .
Like his ancestor , then , Grendel is removed from happiness ; to know that the scop in Heorot , the magnificent hall , is singing of God ’ s creation further angers him .
Thus he subjects the Danes to long nights of terror , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his heroic quests .
Franklin applauds Headley ’ s thesis about the Old English word “ brimwyl , ” which appears in the “ Beowulf ” manuscript to describe Grendel ’ s mother .
It is usually taken to be a scribal error for “ brimwylf , ” “ sea-wolf , ” but Headley believes that it could read “ brimwif , ” “ sea-woman.
” This argument , which feminizes Grendel ’ s mother , ignores the fact that she is given the epithet “ brimwylf ” elsewhere in the poem ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ such formulaic phrases , it is reasonable to conclude that “ brimwylf ” was intended throughout .
Furthermore , the definite article “ sēo , ” which just precedes the misspelled word , is feminine , which means that it can modify “ brimwylf ” but not “ brimwif ” ; the word “ wif , ” despite meaning “ woman , ” is grammatically neuter , and the neuter form of the definite article looks nothing like “ sēo.
” But the emendation to “ sea-wolf ” takes away nothing from Grendel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a female sea wolf , after all , as evidenced in the use of “ wylf , ” the feminine form of “ wulf.
” Human and inhuman descriptors for both mother and son are integral to the poet ’ s conception of these characters , who exist unhappily on the outer edge of human society .
Letters should be sent with the writer ’ s name , address , and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail @ newyorker.com .
Letters may be edited for length and clarity , and may be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that owing to the volume of correspondence we can not reply to every letter .

Beasts of Nunivak Island
I read with interest Jon Lee Anderson’s account of his visit to Nunivak, in the Bering Sea, in search of musk-ox wool (“Wanderlust,” August 17th). Anderson cites as inspiration the late Peter Matthiessen’s participation in a 1964 expedition to Nunivak. That journey was led by John J. Teal, Jr., an American anthropologist and visionary, who, in a 1958 Profile in The New Yorker, was described as enjoying “the unique and quite profitless distinction of being the only musk-ox herdsman in the world.” Earlier that decade, Teal had embarked on a mission to capture and domesticate the beast. With support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, he started Alaska’s first domestic-musk-ox farm, in Fairbanks. He envisaged an Arctic domestic industry built around the animal’s underwool, known as qiviut, which is often used in hand-knitted products. He hoped that this environmentally sustainable undertaking might provide income to native Arctic residents in a way that would align with their traditional culture and economy. In the course of three expeditions to Nunivak, in 1964 and 1965, Teal captured thirty-three musk-ox calves, which were taken to be raised on the farm in Fairbanks. I became involved with the project in 1968, and am now at work on a book-length history about it. Teal died in 1982, but his musk-ox-domestication project and the hand-knitting industry he began continue to this day.
Paul F. Wilkinson
Saint-Paul-d’Abbotsford, Quebec
A Modern “beowulf”
Ruth Franklin’s review of Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of “Beowulf” asks why the monster Grendel terrorizes the Danes after hearing their feasting and singing (Books, August 31st). “The original text,” she writes, “doesn’t give a reason” for Grendel’s fury. But, as Franklin mentions elsewhere in the article, the poem says that Grendel is a descendant of Cain, who was exiled by God. Like his ancestor, then, Grendel is removed from happiness; to know that the scop in Heorot, the magnificent hall, is singing of God’s creation further angers him. Thus he subjects the Danes to long nights of terror, and thus Beowulf begins the first of his heroic quests.
Patricia Wemstrom
Mount Carroll, Ill.
Franklin applauds Headley’s thesis about the Old English word “brimwyl,” which appears in the “Beowulf” manuscript to describe Grendel’s mother. It is usually taken to be a scribal error for “brimwylf,” “sea-wolf,” but Headley believes that it could read “brimwif,” “sea-woman.” This argument, which feminizes Grendel’s mother, ignores the fact that she is given the epithet “brimwylf” elsewhere in the poem; considering that Old English poetry often repeats such formulaic phrases, it is reasonable to conclude that “brimwylf” was intended throughout. Furthermore, the definite article “sēo,” which just precedes the misspelled word, is feminine, which means that it can modify “brimwylf” but not “brimwif”; the word “wif,” despite meaning “woman,” is grammatically neuter, and the neuter form of the definite article looks nothing like “sēo.” But the emendation to “sea-wolf” takes away nothing from Grendel’s mother’s femininity—she is a female sea wolf, after all, as evidenced in the use of “wylf,” the feminine form of “wulf.” Human and inhuman descriptors for both mother and son are integral to the poet’s conception of these characters, who exist unhappily on the outer edge of human society.
Randi Claire Eldevik
Professor Emerita, Old English
Oklahoma State University
Stillwater, Okla.
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.


Bermuda Wants You!

State tourism boards have ceased their siren calls in recent months , instead offering tough love in response to the pandemic .
Colorado ’ s “ Waiting to CO ” anti-tourism campaign asked that would-be visitors , in lieu of actually coming to the state , post pictures of “ Colorado activities ” that could be safely enjoyed at home .
Kayaking in the pool , perhaps ?
Climbing the chimney with ropes ?
The campaign was intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus in a state that ’ s had more than sixty thousand cases of COVID-19 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ post-pandemic trips .
Campaigns to keep people out are not exactly new .
In the seventies , an Oregon governor proclaimed , “ For heaven ’ s sake , don ’ t move here.
” Long before Seattle became a mecca for Kurt Cobain fans , a prescient local journalist popularized the slogan “ Keep the Bastards Out !
” In 2018 , Nebraska introduced the catchphrase “ Honestly , It ’ s Not for Everyone , ” which actually succeeded in bringing more people to the Cornhusker State— “ which had been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to visit for a long time , ” John Ricks , Nebraska ’ s tourism director , said recently .
Ricks , who is based in Lincoln , helped come up with “ Honestly , It ’ s Not for Everyone , ” which was inspired by a concept from the field of medicine .
“ Inoculation is what we call it , ” Ricks said .
“ That ’ s where you feed off the negative perception.
” He went on , “ We ’ ve been fortunate during this COVID crisis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ open places , smaller cities , rural communities , places you ’ ve never been.
’ Well , that ’ s our product !
” Of course , if there were an uptick in cases , Nebraska could change course and tout the old perceptions of the state .
As Ricks put it , “ Nothing to do , flat and boring , dusty plains.
” Jimmy Im , the Brooklyn-based founder of the Web site TravelBinger , claims to have visited more hotels around the world ( “ six hundred and counting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has been to some forty states in his capacity as a travel professional .
“ And I ’ ve been invited to many of the rest , ” he said , mentioning Nebraska .
But for now he ’ s staying put at home , in Williamsburg .
Im offered tourism boards some unsolicited slogans , to help them keep vacationers away .
Florida : “ Governor Ron is a Douchebag.
” Iowa : “ Not Enough Attractions.
” California : “ It ’ s a Natural Disaster.
” Idaho : “ Neo-Nazis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ go somewhere—facetiously , or as a matter of life and death—is an about-face for most travel-industry professionals .
“ It ’ s hard , ” Campbell Levy , a vice-president at Turner , a public-relations company with travel-related clients in two dozen states , said the other day , from his home , in Evergreen , Colorado .
“ The world is different than it was .
The tourism business is suffering .
But it just doesn ’ t make a lot of sense to get on a plane right now , unless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Levy has been pushing an alternative to Stateside travel : obtaining a twelve-month worker certificate from Bermuda .
His company represents the British territory , which is situated approximately six hundred and fifty miles off the North Carolina coast and has a population of more than sixty thousand .
Unlike most places , Bermuda wants visitors—its economy is dependent on them .
“ There ’ s practically no COVID there , ” Levy said .
( Only a hundred and seventy-seven COVID cases have been confirmed on the island ; eight are currently @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a prime opportunity , ” he added .
“ And they ’ ve got really robust testing.
” More than three hundred people from a dozen countries—including Brazil , China , South Africa , and Bangladesh—have applied for Bermuda ’ s certificate program , which launched in August .
Certification for a twelve-month stay costs two hundred and sixty-three dollars ( lodging not included ) .
Sadie Millard , a New Yorker in her forties who works as a partner at a Wall Street brokerage firm , got a head start .
She @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as a civil engineer in Bermuda , when COVID hit New York , in March .
“ I came for the weekend , then things got crazy , ” she said .
Airlines began suspending outbound flights from the island , her firm closed its offices , and employees began working remotely .
She decided to stay .
Her partners at the firm are fine with it .
Even if there were in-person meetings to attend ( there are not ) , New York is just a two-hour flight away .
Trading her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ golf course was not a tough call .
“ Nothing was open in New York , ” she said .
“ No theatre , no concerts , no anything.
” Storm season has arrived , but Millard , who expects to receive her worker certificate next week , is taking her chances : “ I ’ d rather go through a hurricane than get COVID in New York City.
” Back in Colorado , Levy couldn ’ t stop himself from pitching a potential future traveller on Nebraska , one of his stalled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there ?
“ It ’ s really worth floating down a river in a livestock tank with a few buddies , ” Levy said , a pastime that locals call “ tanking.
” He added , “ But only once it ’ s safe again .
♦

State tourism boards have ceased their siren calls in recent months, instead offering tough love in response to the pandemic. Colorado’s “Waiting to CO” anti-tourism campaign asked that would-be visitors, in lieu of actually coming to the state, post pictures of “Colorado activities” that could be safely enjoyed at home. Kayaking in the pool, perhaps? Climbing the chimney with ropes? The campaign was intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus in a state that’s had more than sixty thousand cases of COVID-19, while simultaneously whetting travellers’ appetites for post-pandemic trips.
Campaigns to keep people out are not exactly new. In the seventies, an Oregon governor proclaimed, “For heaven’s sake, don’t move here.” Long before Seattle became a mecca for Kurt Cobain fans, a prescient local journalist popularized the slogan “Keep the Bastards Out!” In 2018, Nebraska introduced the catchphrase “Honestly, It’s Not for Everyone,” which actually succeeded in bringing more people to the Cornhusker State—“which had been among the least likely states for anybody to visit for a long time,” John Ricks, Nebraska’s tourism director, said recently.
Ricks, who is based in Lincoln, helped come up with “Honestly, It’s Not for Everyone,” which was inspired by a concept from the field of medicine. “Inoculation is what we call it,” Ricks said. “That’s where you feed off the negative perception.” He went on, “We’ve been fortunate during this COVID crisis. People say, ‘Go to open places, smaller cities, rural communities, places you’ve never been.’ Well, that’s our product!” Of course, if there were an uptick in cases, Nebraska could change course and tout the old perceptions of the state. As Ricks put it, “Nothing to do, flat and boring, dusty plains.”
Jimmy Im, the Brooklyn-based founder of the Web site TravelBinger, claims to have visited more hotels around the world (“six hundred and counting”) than anyone else, and has been to some forty states in his capacity as a travel professional. “And I’ve been invited to many of the rest,” he said, mentioning Nebraska. But for now he’s staying put at home, in Williamsburg. Im offered tourism boards some unsolicited slogans, to help them keep vacationers away. Florida: “Governor Ron is a Douchebag.” Iowa: “Not Enough Attractions.” California: “It’s a Natural Disaster.” Idaho: “Neo-Nazis and Whatnot.”
Telling tourists not to go somewhere—facetiously, or as a matter of life and death—is an about-face for most travel-industry professionals. “It’s hard,” Campbell Levy, a vice-president at Turner, a public-relations company with travel-related clients in two dozen states, said the other day, from his home, in Evergreen, Colorado. “The world is different than it was. The tourism business is suffering. But it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to get on a plane right now, unless you really have to.”
“Oh, that’s just all the online yoga she’s been doing lately.” Cartoon by Millie von Platen Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Lately, Levy has been pushing an alternative to Stateside travel: obtaining a twelve-month worker certificate from Bermuda. His company represents the British territory, which is situated approximately six hundred and fifty miles off the North Carolina coast and has a population of more than sixty thousand. Unlike most places, Bermuda wants visitors—its economy is dependent on them. “There’s practically no COVID there,” Levy said. (Only a hundred and seventy-seven COVID cases have been confirmed on the island; eight are currently active.) “It’s a prime opportunity,” he added. “And they’ve got really robust testing.”
More than three hundred people from a dozen countries—including Brazil, China, South Africa, and Bangladesh—have applied for Bermuda’s certificate program, which launched in August. Certification for a twelve-month stay costs two hundred and sixty-three dollars (lodging not included). Sadie Millard, a New Yorker in her forties who works as a partner at a Wall Street brokerage firm, got a head start. She was visiting her boyfriend, who works as a civil engineer in Bermuda, when COVID hit New York, in March. “I came for the weekend, then things got crazy,” she said. Airlines began suspending outbound flights from the island, her firm closed its offices, and employees began working remotely. She decided to stay. Her partners at the firm are fine with it. Even if there were in-person meetings to attend (there are not), New York is just a two-hour flight away.
Trading her six-hundred-square-foot apartment for a house near a golf course was not a tough call. “Nothing was open in New York,” she said. “No theatre, no concerts, no anything.” Storm season has arrived, but Millard, who expects to receive her worker certificate next week, is taking her chances: “I’d rather go through a hurricane than get COVID in New York City.”
Back in Colorado, Levy couldn’t stop himself from pitching a potential future traveller on Nebraska, one of his stalled accounts. What would this tourist do there? “It’s really worth floating down a river in a livestock tank with a few buddies,” Levy said, a pastime that locals call “tanking.” He added, “But only once it’s safe again.” ♦