thenation--2020-09-28--Behind the Myth of Pier Paolo Pasolini

Behind the Myth of Pier Paolo Pasolini

In the immediate aftermath of Pier Paolo Pasolini ’ s murder on November 2 , 1975 , the Italian press published articles comparing the poet , novelist , filmmaker , and polemicist with a whole “ canon of contrarian prophets , talismans and poètes maudits , ” according to the literary scholar Robert Gordon , who compiled the list : St. Augustine , Gabriele D ’ Annunzio , Jean Genet , Federico García Lorca , Cesare Pavese , Arthur Rimbaud , Girolamo Savonarola , Socrates , François Villon , Elio Vittorini , and even the archeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Narcissus , Don Quixote , and Jesus .
Nearly all those associations have some plausibility , but at least in a certain mood , I might lean toward Savonarola , the 15th century friar who became a populist tribune and scourge of religious and secular powers before being burned at the stake .
If Pasolini seemed to profane everything , it was because he wanted everything to be sacred .
Against the Avant-Garde : Pier Paolo Pasolini , Contemporary Art , and Neocapitalism Born in 1922 in Bologna , Pasolini spent part of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hometown in the impoverished northeastern province of Friuli , not far from the border with what is today Slovenia .
Back in Bologna for university , he began writing poetry in Friulian , though he did not know the language well .
Meanwhile , his political loyalties were shifting from Italy ’ s fascism of his childhood to the left .
In Friuli after World War II , he declared his support for the Italian Communist Party .
In 1949 , charged with sexual misconduct with several young men , he lost his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was expelled from the party .
In 1950 , Pasolini moved with his mother to a working-class neighborhood in Rome , finding work in the city ’ s Cinecittà film studio .
In these early Rome years , he made his name as a prodigious member of the literary intelligentsia .
His poetry was beginning to be published regularly , he cofounded one of Italy ’ s leading literary magazines , and he started writing novels , beginning with Ragazzi di Vita ( 1955 ) , which has been published in English under @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as The Street Kids .
But that anodyne rendering of the title hardly captures the implications of vita in this context , comparable to American street jargon in which “ the life ” means criminal life ; maybe Boys in the Life would have been a more accurate rendering .
In any case , Pasolini ’ s fascination with—and deep affection for—the petty thieves and hustlers of the Roman suburbs he lived in had already established itself .
As did his love for dialect : The Italian editions came with a glossary for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ slang .
In the following decade , Pasolini—having collaborated on some scripts for Federico Fellini—began making films of his own , starting with Accattone ( 1961 ) , a story of the Roman lumpenproletariat not unlike those of his novels .
Accattone takes the Italian neorealist tradition to an extreme and transforms it into something far darker and more pessimistic .
Technically , the film was striking for a visual bluntness or monumentality reminiscent of early Renaissance painting .
Bernardo Bertolucci , who served as Pasolini ’ s assistant director , recalled for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It was…like witnessing the invention of a new language .
And he never spoke of cinema , only of drawings and paintings , altarpieces.
” A new study of Pasolini—Against the Avant-Garde : Pier Paolo Pasolini , Contemporary Art , and Neocapitalism ( University of Chicago Press ) by Ara H. Merjian , an art historian and Italianist at New York University—takes painting , which Pasolini practiced fitfully but whose history he studied passionately , as a key to understanding his work as a whole .
As Pasolini remarked , “ My cinematic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cinema but in the figurative .
That which I carry in my head as vision , as a visual field , are the frescoes of Masaccio and Giotto.
” Not surprisingly , given this heritage , Pasolini ’ s films would draw on themes drawn from literature , myth , and religion , perhaps more suited to his hieratic sense of style—The Gospel According to St. Matthew ( 1966 ) , Oedipus Rex ( 1967 ) —or would treat contemporary life in an allegorical manner , as in Teorema ( 1968 ) .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ standard Italian , he took on the role of civil poet , commenting on contemporary events to express , as his friend the novelist Alberto Moravia put it , “ a lament for the devastated , disheartened , prostrated homeland , and nostalgia for the rural culture , ” which he remembered from his childhood and from which the urban proletariat of Rome had only just been expelled , and penning innumerable reviews , essays , and polemics that earned him enemies across the political spectrum , not to mention endless attempts at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fervent admirers too , of course , whom he was always willing to wrongfoot , such as when , amid the uprisings of 1968 , he stopped to point to the police as “ sons of the poor ” and the protesters as bourgeois .
Although the same poem clearly specifies , “ We are obviously in agreement against the police as an institution , ” he was taken by many as supporting them rather than clarifying his thought that students with no ties to the working class were in no position to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the early 1970s , Pasolini ’ s films—his “ Trilogy of Life ” ( 1971–74 ) —seemed to suggest a renewed belief that some eternal life force , incarnated in the rowdy impudence of the lower classes of all times and places , was irrepressible .
But then his vision grew darker again .
He seemed to see the multiplicity of life and language being stamped out by the monoculture of bourgeois consumerism , which he saw as a new and more powerful form of fascism , “ a ‘ total ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also culturally homologated Italy ” and therefore amounted to “ a real and true anthropological catastrophe.
” The line between polemicist and curmudgeon blurred in the last years of his life as he penned screeds on the stupefying power of television , long hair ( no longer a sign of leftism ) , and sacrilegious ads for blue jeans .
His 1975 film Salò , or the 120 Days of Sodom , represented this state of affairs under the guise of the rump state of Mussolini ’ s Italy toward the end of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ group of rich and powerful men retreat to a castle where they subject a group of young men and women to unspeakable abuse and torture—a sort of hymn to the death drive and one of the most difficult films to watch in the history of cinema .
It premiered three weeks after its maker ’ s still unsolved murder .
As Merjian points out , Pasolini ’ s death gave rise to his myth .
Both “ in the popular imagination and the gloss of countless pundits alike…Pasolini had willed his own death @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who believed this forgot that he had not long before declared of his time that “ the more I am detached from it , the more I agree only stoically to live in it.
” And fantasies of a self-willed death , undoubtedly stoked by the grimness of his final film , were not limited to Italy .
In a poem by Sandra Cisneros , published in 1994 in The New Yorker , Pasolini ’ s name seems to represent the superficial signifier of a nostalgic fantasy of bohemia : Pasolini ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ beach at Ostia , near the ancient port of Rome , he was beaten and then run over with his own car .
The culprit was supposed to be a young man Pasolini had picked up for sex .
Despite a confession , many found it hard to believe the story of cruising gone wrong .
Rumors suggested an assassination .
Why ?
“ Because he was homosexual , communist , and expressed himself openly against the bourgeoisie , government , Christian Democracy , fascists , judges , and police , ” as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it .
The supposed murderer later retracted his confession , and the case was never solved to anyone ’ s satisfaction .
Pasolini was a martyr , but to what cause ?
In Italy , Pasolini ’ s poetry is part of the 20th century canon .
Books like Le Ceneri di Gramsci ( The Ashes of Gramsci , 1957 ) and Poesia in Forma di Rosa ( Poem in the Form of a Rose , 1964 ) are unavoidable reference points .
Their very titles possess an aura .
What made his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sometime antagonist Franco Fortini—another great poet-critic—put it beautifully : “ Where almost all the poets who were his contemporaries or immediate precursors gave themselves a way out , a path to salvation by way of discretion , silence , or the so-called ‘ decency ’ that Montale spoke of , he recognized the moral necessity of indecency , of ‘ giving evidence of the scandal , ’ of the triumph of shame and excess.
” If anything , this moral tropism toward scandal and excess becomes even more evident in his films , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Pasolini pursued what he called a ‘ technical sacrality ’ in frank emulation of Renaissance panels and Romanesque sculpture.
” It was in religious art that he discovered the possibility of a gaze that would not flinch from even the most abject sight .
Recently , despite the difficulty of encompassing Pasolini ’ s manifold oeuvre in poetry , fiction , essays , films , and even painting , the artist seems to have been reemerging from behind the myth .
For fellow artists , he ’ s become a beacon .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ one of his best ( and most measured ) films—shown at the Venice Film Festival in 2014 but unreleased in the United States until 2019—to a chronicle of Pasolini ’ s last days , played with characteristic subtlety by Willem Dafoe .
As A.O .
Scott observed in The New York Times , Ferrara ’ s film “ is less concerned with the realistic reconstruction of the past than with communicating a mood in the present.
” Toward the end of his book , Merjian supplies a list of contemporary artists whose work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ incomplete catalog nonetheless includes some 80 names , grouped by art forms ranging from painting and photography to music and experimental novels and , of course , video and film .
Some of the categorizations seem odd .
The Italian conceptual artist Giulio Paolini is listed among those who have cited Pasolini in the medium of theater design , and the great Soviet director Sergei Parajanov ( who , like Pasolini , paid the price for his sexual nonconformity ) is listed for works on paper .
I could add other names to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the African American artist Glenn Ligon ( his neon sculpture Notes for a Poem on the Third World [ chapter one ] , 2018 ) , the Moroccan French visual artist Bouchra Khalili ( her video The Tempest Society , 2017 ) , and the Albanian Italian video artist Adrian Paci , who in 2005 named an exhibition in Zurich “ Secondo Pasolini ” ( “ According to Pasolini ” ) .
As Merjian remarks , “ One is hard pressed to think of a twentieth-century figure—whether poet , artist , or director—who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in such diverse media and over successive generations.
” He ’ s only right , I suppose , if one adds the disclaimer “ except for Picasso , ” but to put the two men ’ s names together that way only attests to the protean nature of Pasolini ’ s cultural impact .
Naturally , the depth and significance of those references is highly variable .
Richard Serra ’ s 1985 sculpture Pasolini consists of two blocks of forged steel , one horizontal—a double square that is twice as long as it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a double square but half the size of the horizontal one , so that it is as tall as its much larger companion .
( Two years later , Serra produced a screen print using the same title , with a single horizontal black form against the white ground of the paper . )
Serra ’ s undoubtedly sincere admiration for Pasolini can not change the fact that his own art is resolutely abstract and concerned with phenomenology , a meditation on size , scale , and above all , proportion .
Nothing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ us anything about Pasolini or about Serra ’ s feelings about Pasolini .
The sculptor has , as he said in a different context , “ more to say about the balance of weight , the loss of weight , adding or removing weight , the concentration of weight , the imbalance of weight , the rotation of weight , the movement of weight , the directionality of weight , the form of weight.
” I thought of how the smaller upright element could be taken allegorically for the mere living , standing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the man taken by death , something like the “ calm block fallen down here from an unseen disaster ” that Stéphane Mallarmé ( in Peter Manson ’ s luminous translation ) saw in the tomb of Edgar Allan Poe , the poet “ such as into Himself at last eternity changes him.
” But as much as I can see in Pasolini something of Poe—Mallarmé ’ s imagined Poe , I mean , not the real one , who died as mysteriously if less violently than Pasolini in 1849 in Baltimore—I can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ frame of mind to conceive of Serra indulging in anything like the baleful reflection that the French symbolist gathered from his American predecessor .
By contrast , Sharon Hayes , in her video work Ricerche : Three ( 2013 ) —which somehow did not make Merjian ’ s list and which I wrote about a couple of years ago when reviewing the exhibition “ Trigger : Gender as Tool and Weapon ” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York—does not evoke Pasolini ’ s biography even as much as the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the piece on a film by Pasolini , though not one of his best-known works : the 1963 documentary Comizi d ’ Amore ( Love Meetings ) , which , as Pasolini lamented , achieved little success beyond “ cinephiles ” and “ sociologists.
” And yet it might be one of his key works , an unsparing attempt to come to terms with the spiritual state of modern Italy .
He traveled the length and breadth of the country to interview citizens of all ages , occupations , and social classes about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ role of women in society , divorce ( then still illegal in Italy ) , and so on .
Comizi d ’ Amore starts with a gaggle of kids in Palermo being asked the obvious question , “ Where do babies come from ?
” The stork brings them , or maybe a midwife .
Next Pasolini meets with Alberto Moravia and the psychoanalyst Cesare Musatti : Is this series of interviews worth undertaking ?
Sure , says , Moravia , because no one talks about these things in Italy even privately , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ warns , “ People will either not answer or lie.
” And a bit later on , a young man in a craftsman ’ s shop in Florence admits that he finds the whole topic of sex sad rather than exciting .
A soldier believes that society pushes men to play the Don Juan or else be considered a failure , but his buddies disagree ; they feel they are too short or don ’ t have the looks to play that game .
A peasant father in Emilia Romagna , asked if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if women should be inferior , replies , “ A little inferior , but not a wide gap.
” His daughter , smiling , disagrees .
( Later , a woman sunning herself on the Lido in Venice allows , “ We ’ d like to be superior , but sometimes it ’ s convenient to feel inferior.
” ) We also meet university students , a pro soccer team , female factory workers , sex workers , and notably , the elderly poet Giuseppe Ungaretti , who , though sitting on a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ suit and tie .
Since everyone is different , he says , “ all men are , in their own way , abnormal .
All men are , in a way , in contrast with nature.
” Asked to be more specific about his transgressions of norms , Ungaretti ( who seems utterly embarrassed by the whole conversation ) tells Pasolini , “ I break all laws by writing poetry.
” I couldn ’ t help thinking that Pasolini must have silently considered his elder ’ s response evasive—but that the response might @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of his own role .
In any case , Pasolini finds an absolute difference between the north of Italy , “ modern but…confused , ” and the south , which with its “ poor yet real population ” maintains the cruel clarity of ancient ways , and concludes that , as articulated “ from the lower classes and the deepest instincts , ” “ certain impelling desires ” are in conflict with “ a modern and democratic law ” —a situation that is met only “ with disarming superficiality or hopeless confusion.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more than a local variant on what Sigmund Freud much earlier diagnosed as “ das Unbehagen in der Kultur , ” that is , an inherent discomfort or unease with civilized life .
( The title of his book by that name is ordinarily mistranslated as Civilization and Its Discontents . )
What ’ s striking in Comizi d ’ Amore—what marks it as the work of Pasolini rather than an ordinary journalist ’ s—are not his questions or even the answers he gets but the way that the questions , by throwing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a position in which they don ’ t always know how to respond , reveal something normally hidden , not in their views but in their faces , their bodies , their habitus : a profoundly human sense of being caught on the cusp of revealing some inner secret not even they ever paid attention to , a kind of innocence even amid hypocrisy or willful ignorance , which does not affect the truth that , as Pasolini once said , “ that which anyone really is is something mysterious and profound.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ encyclopedic in encompassing all strata of Italian society , Hayes ’ s Ricerche , less than half the length of its model , concentrates on a single place , a single age group .
Her interviewees were all students at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts , one of the last remaining US all-women colleges—which today means that it has to accommodate the increasing porosity of gender identities .
As Hayes points out , “ The interview unfolds on camera in such a way that you ’ re not entirely sure how many people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in as the camera , following the interviewer , shifts across the group left to right , ” which is to say , while her sampling of subjects is very narrow compared with Pasolini ’ s , its precise limits are ambiguous .
The interviewees are a far more diverse group than Pasolini could have dreamed of encountering in the Italy of six decades ago—white , Black , Native American , Latinx , South Asian , East Asian .
Their relationship to the category of women is far more varied than could ever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Italy , too , since the group includes gender-fluid individuals as well as trans men and cis women .
And while all of Pasolini ’ s interlocutors were marked , implicitly or explicitly , by the country ’ s dominant Catholicism ( though Moravia ’ s Judaic roots go unmentioned ) , the Holyoke students ’ religious upbringing and commitments are varied .
This is as much of a conclusion as they can reach : “ We are talking about different ‘ wes.
’ ” Would Pasolini , if he had lived into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
Permit me to doubt it and not only because his unqualified agreement with anything was so rare .
Savonarola wouldn ’ t have liked it , either .
Pasolini might well have derided the diversity of the Mount Holyoke students as an entirely bourgeois diversity , another example of that assimilation of everything to a dominant culture , a dominant language , a consumerist and mass-marketed bazaar of fungible identities “ obtained by the imposition of a form of hedonism and joie de vivre , ” as he believed .
By now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just a contrarian but an out-and-out reactionary .
Merjian makes clear—starting with his title , Against the Avant-Garde—that although today we might like to see Pasolini as a vanguard artist , he came to reject abstract and Pop art , electronic and aleatory music , the literary experiments of many Italian poets and writers of the 1960s , and the anti-narrative films of Michelangelo Antonioni as much as the abstract “ cinema of lyric poetry obtained through editing and the intensification of technique.
” All of these he saw , not without reason @ @ @ @ @ @ @ institutions without eating into them.
” Many of the back-and-forth polemics that Merjian chronicles among Pasolini and his contemporaries now seem to be of essentially antiquarian interest , although their ferocity might give pause to those who today lament such vehement and ad hominem public disputes as evidence of a newfangled “ cancel culture.
” What counts is the consistency with which , in what Merjian calls Pasolini ’ s “ all-out war against the present , ” he found his fellow writers and artists all too timely in their interventions .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ artistic beatification in a world that has become , if anything , even more homogenous in its colonization by neoliberalism than the one he decried ?
He might not have appreciated the 80 or so homages that Merjian notes .
I suspect Pasolini would have quoted one of the verse passages of his 1968 novel Teorema : But if Pasolini ’ s great lesson was his pessimism , our task is to learn when to apply it and when it might do us more harm than good .
The young people Hayes interviewed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ very reason , I wonder whether Pasolini was , after all , the right model for her work .
Or perhaps it ’ s that she understands him better than he understood himself when , finally—but “ finally ” only because of a contingent act of violence he never willed—he slid from pessimism to despair .

In the immediate aftermath of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s murder on November 2, 1975, the Italian press published articles comparing the poet, novelist, filmmaker, and polemicist with a whole “canon of contrarian prophets, talismans and poètes maudits,” according to the literary scholar Robert Gordon, who compiled the list: St. Augustine, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Jean Genet, Federico García Lorca, Cesare Pavese, Arthur Rimbaud, Girolamo Savonarola, Socrates, François Villon, Elio Vittorini, and even the archeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann, as well as Ariel, Midas, Narcissus, Don Quixote, and Jesus. Nearly all those associations have some plausibility, but at least in a certain mood, I might lean toward Savonarola, the 15th century friar who became a populist tribune and scourge of religious and secular powers before being burned at the stake. If Pasolini seemed to profane everything, it was because he wanted everything to be sacred. Books in Review Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism By Ara H. Merjian Buy this book
Born in 1922 in Bologna, Pasolini spent part of his childhood in his mother’s hometown in the impoverished northeastern province of Friuli, not far from the border with what is today Slovenia. Back in Bologna for university, he began writing poetry in Friulian, though he did not know the language well. Meanwhile, his political loyalties were shifting from Italy’s fascism of his childhood to the left. In Friuli after World War II, he declared his support for the Italian Communist Party. In 1949, charged with sexual misconduct with several young men, he lost his job as a secondary school teacher and was expelled from the party.
In 1950, Pasolini moved with his mother to a working-class neighborhood in Rome, finding work in the city’s Cinecittà film studio. In these early Rome years, he made his name as a prodigious member of the literary intelligentsia. His poetry was beginning to be published regularly, he cofounded one of Italy’s leading literary magazines, and he started writing novels, beginning with Ragazzi di Vita (1955), which has been published in English under several titles, most recently in 2016 as The Street Kids. But that anodyne rendering of the title hardly captures the implications of vita in this context, comparable to American street jargon in which “the life” means criminal life; maybe Boys in the Life would have been a more accurate rendering. In any case, Pasolini’s fascination with—and deep affection for—the petty thieves and hustlers of the Roman suburbs he lived in had already established itself. As did his love for dialect: The Italian editions came with a glossary for readers unacquainted with the often obscene Roman slang.
In the following decade, Pasolini—having collaborated on some scripts for Federico Fellini—began making films of his own, starting with Accattone (1961), a story of the Roman lumpenproletariat not unlike those of his novels. Accattone takes the Italian neorealist tradition to an extreme and transforms it into something far darker and more pessimistic. Technically, the film was striking for a visual bluntness or monumentality reminiscent of early Renaissance painting. Bernardo Bertolucci, who served as Pasolini’s assistant director, recalled for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, “It was…like witnessing the invention of a new language. And he never spoke of cinema, only of drawings and paintings, altarpieces.” A new study of Pasolini—Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism (University of Chicago Press) by Ara H. Merjian, an art historian and Italianist at New York University—takes painting, which Pasolini practiced fitfully but whose history he studied passionately, as a key to understanding his work as a whole. As Pasolini remarked, “My cinematic taste does not have its origins in cinema but in the figurative. That which I carry in my head as vision, as a visual field, are the frescoes of Masaccio and Giotto.” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
Not surprisingly, given this heritage, Pasolini’s films would draw on themes drawn from literature, myth, and religion, perhaps more suited to his hieratic sense of style—The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1966), Oedipus Rex (1967)—or would treat contemporary life in an allegorical manner, as in Teorema (1968). Meanwhile, having switched from Friulian to standard Italian, he took on the role of civil poet, commenting on contemporary events to express, as his friend the novelist Alberto Moravia put it, “a lament for the devastated, disheartened, prostrated homeland, and nostalgia for the rural culture,” which he remembered from his childhood and from which the urban proletariat of Rome had only just been expelled, and penning innumerable reviews, essays, and polemics that earned him enemies across the political spectrum, not to mention endless attempts at censorship and legal prosecution. He had fervent admirers too, of course, whom he was always willing to wrongfoot, such as when, amid the uprisings of 1968, he stopped to point to the police as “sons of the poor” and the protesters as bourgeois. Although the same poem clearly specifies, “We are obviously in agreement against the police as an institution,” he was taken by many as supporting them rather than clarifying his thought that students with no ties to the working class were in no position to make a revolution.
For a while in the early 1970s, Pasolini’s films—his “Trilogy of Life” (1971–74)—seemed to suggest a renewed belief that some eternal life force, incarnated in the rowdy impudence of the lower classes of all times and places, was irrepressible. But then his vision grew darker again. He seemed to see the multiplicity of life and language being stamped out by the monoculture of bourgeois consumerism, which he saw as a new and more powerful form of fascism, “a ‘total’ form of fascism” that “has also culturally homologated Italy” and therefore amounted to “a real and true anthropological catastrophe.”
The line between polemicist and curmudgeon blurred in the last years of his life as he penned screeds on the stupefying power of television, long hair (no longer a sign of leftism), and sacrilegious ads for blue jeans. His 1975 film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, represented this state of affairs under the guise of the rump state of Mussolini’s Italy toward the end of World War II, in which a group of rich and powerful men retreat to a castle where they subject a group of young men and women to unspeakable abuse and torture—a sort of hymn to the death drive and one of the most difficult films to watch in the history of cinema. It premiered three weeks after its maker’s still unsolved murder.
As Merjian points out, Pasolini’s death gave rise to his myth. Both “in the popular imagination and the gloss of countless pundits alike…Pasolini had willed his own death, even sought it out.” Those who believed this forgot that he had not long before declared of his time that “the more I am detached from it, the more I agree only stoically to live in it.” And fantasies of a self-willed death, undoubtedly stoked by the grimness of his final film, were not limited to Italy. In a poem by Sandra Cisneros, published in 1994 in The New Yorker, Pasolini’s name seems to represent the superficial signifier of a nostalgic fantasy of bohemia:
I recommend a narrow bed stained with semen, pee, and sorrow facing the wall
Stain and decay are romantic.
You’re positively Pasolini.
Likely to dangle and fandango yourself to death.
Pasolini’s death was no fandango. On the beach at Ostia, near the ancient port of Rome, he was beaten and then run over with his own car. The culprit was supposed to be a young man Pasolini had picked up for sex. Despite a confession, many found it hard to believe the story of cruising gone wrong. Rumors suggested an assassination. Why? “Because he was homosexual, communist, and expressed himself openly against the bourgeoisie, government, Christian Democracy, fascists, judges, and police,” as the Italian collective Wu Ming recently put it. The supposed murderer later retracted his confession, and the case was never solved to anyone’s satisfaction. Pasolini was a martyr, but to what cause?
In Italy, Pasolini’s poetry is part of the 20th century canon. Books like Le Ceneri di Gramsci (The Ashes of Gramsci, 1957) and Poesia in Forma di Rosa (Poem in the Form of a Rose, 1964) are unavoidable reference points. Their very titles possess an aura. What made his poetry so urgent? His friend and sometime antagonist Franco Fortini—another great poet-critic—put it beautifully: “Where almost all the poets who were his contemporaries or immediate precursors gave themselves a way out, a path to salvation by way of discretion, silence, or the so-called ‘decency’ that Montale spoke of, he recognized the moral necessity of indecency, of ‘giving evidence of the scandal,’ of the triumph of shame and excess.” If anything, this moral tropism toward scandal and excess becomes even more evident in his films, in which, as Merjian says, “Pasolini pursued what he called a ‘technical sacrality’ in frank emulation of Renaissance panels and Romanesque sculpture.” It was in religious art that he discovered the possibility of a gaze that would not flinch from even the most abject sight.
Recently, despite the difficulty of encompassing Pasolini’s manifold oeuvre in poetry, fiction, essays, films, and even painting, the artist seems to have been reemerging from behind the myth. For fellow artists, he’s become a beacon. The normally ultra-sensationalistic filmmaker Abel Ferrara devoted one of his best (and most measured) films—shown at the Venice Film Festival in 2014 but unreleased in the United States until 2019—to a chronicle of Pasolini’s last days, played with characteristic subtlety by Willem Dafoe. As A.O. Scott observed in The New York Times, Ferrara’s film “is less concerned with the realistic reconstruction of the past than with communicating a mood in the present.”
Toward the end of his book, Merjian supplies a list of contemporary artists whose work has explicitly cited Pasolini. The necessarily incomplete catalog nonetheless includes some 80 names, grouped by art forms ranging from painting and photography to music and experimental novels and, of course, video and film. Some of the categorizations seem odd. The Italian conceptual artist Giulio Paolini is listed among those who have cited Pasolini in the medium of theater design, and the great Soviet director Sergei Parajanov (who, like Pasolini, paid the price for his sexual nonconformity) is listed for works on paper. I could add other names to Merjian’s list, such as the African American artist Glenn Ligon (his neon sculpture Notes for a Poem on the Third World [chapter one], 2018), the Moroccan French visual artist Bouchra Khalili (her video The Tempest Society, 2017), and the Albanian Italian video artist Adrian Paci, who in 2005 named an exhibition in Zurich “Secondo Pasolini” (“According to Pasolini”). As Merjian remarks, “One is hard pressed to think of a twentieth-century figure—whether poet, artist, or director—who has galvanized a comparable range of artists in such diverse media and over successive generations.” He’s only right, I suppose, if one adds the disclaimer “except for Picasso,” but to put the two men’s names together that way only attests to the protean nature of Pasolini’s cultural impact.
Naturally, the depth and significance of those references is highly variable. Richard Serra’s 1985 sculpture Pasolini consists of two blocks of forged steel, one horizontal—a double square that is twice as long as it is high—and the other upright, also a double square but half the size of the horizontal one, so that it is as tall as its much larger companion. (Two years later, Serra produced a screen print using the same title, with a single horizontal black form against the white ground of the paper.) Serra’s undoubtedly sincere admiration for Pasolini cannot change the fact that his own art is resolutely abstract and concerned with phenomenology, a meditation on size, scale, and above all, proportion. Nothing but the presence of the name tells us anything about Pasolini or about Serra’s feelings about Pasolini. The sculptor has, as he said in a different context, “more to say about the balance of weight, the loss of weight, adding or removing weight, the concentration of weight, the imbalance of weight, the rotation of weight, the movement of weight, the directionality of weight, the form of weight.” I thought of how the smaller upright element could be taken allegorically for the mere living, standing man and the greater horizontal might be the man taken by death, something like the “calm block fallen down here from an unseen disaster” that Stéphane Mallarmé (in Peter Manson’s luminous translation) saw in the tomb of Edgar Allan Poe, the poet “such as into Himself at last eternity changes him.” But as much as I can see in Pasolini something of Poe—Mallarmé’s imagined Poe, I mean, not the real one, who died as mysteriously if less violently than Pasolini in 1849 in Baltimore—I can’t quite put myself in a frame of mind to conceive of Serra indulging in anything like the baleful reflection that the French symbolist gathered from his American predecessor.
By contrast, Sharon Hayes, in her video work Ricerche: Three (2013)—which somehow did not make Merjian’s list and which I wrote about a couple of years ago when reviewing the exhibition “Trigger: Gender as Tool and Weapon” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York—does not evoke Pasolini’s biography even as much as the archformalist Serra. Instead, she modeled the piece on a film by Pasolini, though not one of his best-known works: the 1963 documentary Comizi d’Amore (Love Meetings), which, as Pasolini lamented, achieved little success beyond “cinephiles” and “sociologists.” And yet it might be one of his key works, an unsparing attempt to come to terms with the spiritual state of modern Italy. He traveled the length and breadth of the country to interview citizens of all ages, occupations, and social classes about love, sex, marriage, the role of women in society, divorce (then still illegal in Italy), and so on.
Comizi d’Amore starts with a gaggle of kids in Palermo being asked the obvious question, “Where do babies come from?” The stork brings them, or maybe a midwife. Next Pasolini meets with Alberto Moravia and the psychoanalyst Cesare Musatti: Is this series of interviews worth undertaking? Sure, says, Moravia, because no one talks about these things in Italy even privately, let alone on film. But Musatti warns, “People will either not answer or lie.” And a bit later on, a young man in a craftsman’s shop in Florence admits that he finds the whole topic of sex sad rather than exciting. A soldier believes that society pushes men to play the Don Juan or else be considered a failure, but his buddies disagree; they feel they are too short or don’t have the looks to play that game. A peasant father in Emilia Romagna, asked if men and women should be equal or if women should be inferior, replies, “A little inferior, but not a wide gap.” His daughter, smiling, disagrees. (Later, a woman sunning herself on the Lido in Venice allows, “We’d like to be superior, but sometimes it’s convenient to feel inferior.”)
We also meet university students, a pro soccer team, female factory workers, sex workers, and notably, the elderly poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, who, though sitting on a beach chair, is dressed in a suit and tie. Since everyone is different, he says, “all men are, in their own way, abnormal. All men are, in a way, in contrast with nature.” Asked to be more specific about his transgressions of norms, Ungaretti (who seems utterly embarrassed by the whole conversation) tells Pasolini, “I break all laws by writing poetry.” I couldn’t help thinking that Pasolini must have silently considered his elder’s response evasive—but that the response might have corresponded with Pasolini’s conception of his own role.
In any case, Pasolini finds an absolute difference between the north of Italy, “modern but…confused,” and the south, which with its “poor yet real population” maintains the cruel clarity of ancient ways, and concludes that, as articulated “from the lower classes and the deepest instincts,” “certain impelling desires” are in conflict with “a modern and democratic law”—a situation that is met only “with disarming superficiality or hopeless confusion.” This is, of course, nothing more than a local variant on what Sigmund Freud much earlier diagnosed as “das Unbehagen in der Kultur,” that is, an inherent discomfort or unease with civilized life. (The title of his book by that name is ordinarily mistranslated as Civilization and Its Discontents.)
What’s striking in Comizi d’Amore—what marks it as the work of Pasolini rather than an ordinary journalist’s—are not his questions or even the answers he gets but the way that the questions, by throwing the interviewees off balance, putting them in a position in which they don’t always know how to respond, reveal something normally hidden, not in their views but in their faces, their bodies, their habitus: a profoundly human sense of being caught on the cusp of revealing some inner secret not even they ever paid attention to, a kind of innocence even amid hypocrisy or willful ignorance, which does not affect the truth that, as Pasolini once said, “that which anyone really is is something mysterious and profound.”
If Pasolini attempts to be almost encyclopedic in encompassing all strata of Italian society, Hayes’s Ricerche, less than half the length of its model, concentrates on a single place, a single age group. Her interviewees were all students at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, one of the last remaining US all-women colleges—which today means that it has to accommodate the increasing porosity of gender identities. As Hayes points out, “The interview unfolds on camera in such a way that you’re not entirely sure how many people are being interviewed as interviewees slowly add in as the camera, following the interviewer, shifts across the group left to right,” which is to say, while her sampling of subjects is very narrow compared with Pasolini’s, its precise limits are ambiguous. The interviewees are a far more diverse group than Pasolini could have dreamed of encountering in the Italy of six decades ago—white, Black, Native American, Latinx, South Asian, East Asian. Their relationship to the category of women is far more varied than could ever have been articulated in Pasolini’s Italy, too, since the group includes gender-fluid individuals as well as trans men and cis women. And while all of Pasolini’s interlocutors were marked, implicitly or explicitly, by the country’s dominant Catholicism (though Moravia’s Judaic roots go unmentioned), the Holyoke students’ religious upbringing and commitments are varied. This is as much of a conclusion as they can reach: “We are talking about different ‘wes.’”
Would Pasolini, if he had lived into his 90s, have approved of Ricerche? Permit me to doubt it and not only because his unqualified agreement with anything was so rare. Savonarola wouldn’t have liked it, either. Pasolini might well have derided the diversity of the Mount Holyoke students as an entirely bourgeois diversity, another example of that assimilation of everything to a dominant culture, a dominant language, a consumerist and mass-marketed bazaar of fungible identities “obtained by the imposition of a form of hedonism and joie de vivre,” as he believed.
By now, he easily might have become not just a contrarian but an out-and-out reactionary. Merjian makes clear—starting with his title, Against the Avant-Garde—that although today we might like to see Pasolini as a vanguard artist, he came to reject abstract and Pop art, electronic and aleatory music, the literary experiments of many Italian poets and writers of the 1960s, and the anti-narrative films of Michelangelo Antonioni as much as the abstract “cinema of lyric poetry obtained through editing and the intensification of technique.” All of these he saw, not without reason, as toothless attempts to “deride institutions without eating into them.” Many of the back-and-forth polemics that Merjian chronicles among Pasolini and his contemporaries now seem to be of essentially antiquarian interest, although their ferocity might give pause to those who today lament such vehement and ad hominem public disputes as evidence of a newfangled “cancel culture.” What counts is the consistency with which, in what Merjian calls Pasolini’s “all-out war against the present,” he found his fellow writers and artists all too timely in their interventions.
As for what Pasolini would think of his artistic beatification in a world that has become, if anything, even more homogenous in its colonization by neoliberalism than the one he decried? He might not have appreciated the 80 or so homages that Merjian notes. I suspect Pasolini would have quoted one of the verse passages of his 1968 novel Teorema:
But begin to understand immediately
that the poets and painters old or dead
in spite of the halo of a heroic air you give them
are useless to you, teach you nothing.
But if Pasolini’s great lesson was his pessimism, our task is to learn when to apply it and when it might do us more harm than good. The young people Hayes interviewed gave me hope. And for that very reason, I wonder whether Pasolini was, after all, the right model for her work. Or perhaps it’s that she understands him better than he understood himself when, finally—but “finally” only because of a contingent act of violence he never willed—he slid from pessimism to despair.


thenation--2020-09-28--Trump and McConnell Are Undoing the Supreme Court’s Constitutional Legitimacy

There has already been much talk about Judge Amy Coney Barrett ’ s qualifications and controversies—and there will be much more .
But the real Supreme Court story is not about Donald Trump ’ s latest nominee .
The real story is a nomination process that , if it progresses as anticipated , will rob an already discredited court of whatever constitutional legitimacy it retains .
It does not matter whom Trump has nominated .
If any nominee is confirmed in the last weeks of an election campaign in which the American people could well give a mandate to a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Senate—or in the weeks after an election that produces such a result—the court ’ s credibility will be shredded .
This stark prospect should frame every discussion about what Senate Judiciary Committee member Richard Blumenthal aptly describes as “ this illegitimate sham process.
” The effort to circumvent the will of the people is the essential issue for a country where the government—including the judiciary—is supposed to derive its just powers from “ the consent of the governed.
” The people never granted this president , or this Senate , the power to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into the platform for right-wing judicial activism that Trump and McConnell seek to make it .
Bernie Sanders Has Given Us a Tool Kit for Defending Against Trump ’ s Threat to Democracy Ilhan Omar Pushes Back Against the Desperate Racist Politics of Trump ’ s ‘ Cult-Like ’ Rallies Russ Feingold on Why We Need to Talk About Expanding the Supreme Court Donald Trump lost the 2016 election by 2.9 million votes .
He secured just 46.1 percent of the vote , versus 48.2 percent for Democrat Hillary Clinton .
In each @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Electoral College to the Republican nominee , the majority of voters cast their ballots for someone other than Trump—in Wisconsin , 54 percent of the electorate rejected him ; in Michigan , 53 percent rejected him ; in Pennsylvania , 53 percent rejected him .
He assumed the presidency with no mandate .
Yet , four years after that mandate was refused , that president is making his third nomination to the United States Supreme Court .
If Barrett is confirmed , the high court will be transformed .
An iconic liberal , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ replaced by a conservative extremist , Barrett , and the indelicate balance that existed will give way to right-wing rigidity .
“ This is a transformative appointment , ” explains Neal Katyal , a former acting solicitor general of the United States , who notes that Trump ’ s two previous picks , Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh , were conservatives replacing a conservative and a moderate conservative .
“ This is really moving from one side of the spectrum to the other.
” Barrett , who has served just three years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Seventh Circuit , is set to be ushered through the confirmation process by Mitch McConnell , the Kentucky Republican who leads a “ majority caucus ” that represents a minority of Americans .
Of the 100 senators , 53 Republicans represent states that are home to 153.5 million Americans , while 47 Democrats ( and independents who caucus with them ) represent 168.5 million Americans .
In the most recent round of Senate elections , in 2018 , 52,260,651 voters cast their ballots for Democrats while just 34,723,013 voted Republican .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 51,496,682 voters cast their ballots for Democrats while just 40,402,790 voted Republican .
Indeed , of the election cycles since 2000 , Democrats have won the most votes for the Senate in seven .
Republicans won the most votes in just three .
But now , on the eve of an election in which the president trails in the polls and control of the Senate could shift , Trump and McConnell are racing to pack the court .
This is an illegitimate process that , as American Constitution Society President Russ Feingold @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the court.
” “ The nomination follows close upon Republicans ’ theft of a Supreme Court seat from President Obama in 2016 and the disgraceful fiasco that resulted in Brett Kavanaugh joining the Court after proclaiming himself to be a bitter and vindictive partisan , ” explains the former chair of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee .
“ As a result , if this nominee is confirmed under these circumstances many Americans will ask whether the Court itself is any longer accountable to the Constitution rather than an ideological @ @ @ @ @ @ @ established a system of checks and balances that separated power between three branches of government .
Two of those branches—the executive and legislative—were expected to be at least somewhat accountable to the people .
Over time , with the extension of the franchise to include women and people of color , and with the direct election of senators , that accountability has increased .
Not sufficiently , mind you .
We still have an Electoral College , gerrymandering , and all the other pathologies that undermine and diminish democratic governance .
But presidents @ @ @ @ @ @ @ between popular sentiment and the authority they exercise .
Not so the Supreme Court .
The legitimacy of the judicial branch has always derived from its relationship to the other two branches .
An elected president nominates judges ; while , in the modern era , an elected Senate provides advice and consent .
A naked power grab that radically alters the court ’ s ideological balance on the eve of an election in which voters might signal that they do not want that balance to shift takes the people out of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the consent of the governed .
Power is turned against the governed .
“ For the sake of the Court , the Senate must not take up a nomination to fill the vacancy left by Justice Ginsburg ’ s passing until after the inauguration of the next president , who would then put forth a nominee , ” says Feingold , who argues that if “ the President and the Senate majority ram through this illegitimate nomination and the Court so constituted proceeds to inject itself in a partisan manner into possible controversies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seems eager to see ] , the time for warning of risks and threats to the Court ’ s legitimacy will have passed .
The damage will be done , it will be irreparable , and we will all be the worse for it.
” Feingold is not overstating the case .
If a court that has been hastily rebalanced in the president ’ s favor is called upon to decide 2020 election issues , it will have no credibility as an arbiter of those issues .
At that point , the court @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nation ’ s constitutional crisis .

Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. The best of the week.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Repro Nation A monthly newsletter on the global fight for reproductive freedom. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
There has already been much talk about Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s qualifications and controversies—and there will be much more. But the real Supreme Court story is not about Donald Trump’s latest nominee. The real story is a nomination process that, if it progresses as anticipated, will rob an already discredited court of whatever constitutional legitimacy it retains.
It does not matter whom Trump has nominated. If any nominee is confirmed in the last weeks of an election campaign in which the American people could well give a mandate to a new president and flip control of the Senate—or in the weeks after an election that produces such a result—the court’s credibility will be shredded.
This stark prospect should frame every discussion about what Senate Judiciary Committee member Richard Blumenthal aptly describes as “this illegitimate sham process.” The effort to circumvent the will of the people is the essential issue for a country where the government—including the judiciary—is supposed to derive its just powers from “the consent of the governed.”
The people never granted this president, or this Senate, the power to turn the nation’s high court into the platform for right-wing judicial activism that Trump and McConnell seek to make it. More From John Nichols A GOP Debate Without Trump Is the Definition of Pointlessness August 11, 2023 A Win for Abortion Rights, a Win for Democracy: Ohio Voters Reject Issue 1 August 9, 2023 The Biggest Threat to Donald Trump Could Be the Constitution Itself August 4, 2023
Donald Trump lost the 2016 election by 2.9 million votes. He secured just 46.1 percent of the vote, versus 48.2 percent for Democrat Hillary Clinton. In each of the three states that tipped the Electoral College to the Republican nominee, the majority of voters cast their ballots for someone other than Trump—in Wisconsin, 54 percent of the electorate rejected him; in Michigan, 53 percent rejected him; in Pennsylvania, 53 percent rejected him. He assumed the presidency with no mandate.
Yet, four years after that mandate was refused, that president is making his third nomination to the United States Supreme Court. If Barrett is confirmed, the high court will be transformed. An iconic liberal, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, will be replaced by a conservative extremist, Barrett, and the indelicate balance that existed will give way to right-wing rigidity. “This is a transformative appointment,” explains Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general of the United States, who notes that Trump’s two previous picks, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, were conservatives replacing a conservative and a moderate conservative. “This is really moving from one side of the spectrum to the other.”
Barrett, who has served just three years on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, is set to be ushered through the confirmation process by Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who leads a “majority caucus” that represents a minority of Americans. Of the 100 senators, 53 Republicans represent states that are home to 153.5 million Americans, while 47 Democrats (and independents who caucus with them) represent 168.5 million Americans. In the most recent round of Senate elections, in 2018, 52,260,651 voters cast their ballots for Democrats while just 34,723,013 voted Republican. In 2016, when most Americans rejected Trump, 51,496,682 voters cast their ballots for Democrats while just 40,402,790 voted Republican. Indeed, of the election cycles since 2000, Democrats have won the most votes for the Senate in seven. Republicans won the most votes in just three. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Current Issue View our current issue
But now, on the eve of an election in which the president trails in the polls and control of the Senate could shift, Trump and McConnell are racing to pack the court.
This is an illegitimate process that, as American Constitution Society President Russ Feingold warns, “threatens the constitutional legitimacy of the court.”
“The nomination follows close upon Republicans’ theft of a Supreme Court seat from President Obama in 2016 and the disgraceful fiasco that resulted in Brett Kavanaugh joining the Court after proclaiming himself to be a bitter and vindictive partisan,” explains the former chair of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “As a result, if this nominee is confirmed under these circumstances many Americans will ask whether the Court itself is any longer accountable to the Constitution rather than an ideological faction.”
The Constitutional Convention of 1787 established a system of checks and balances that separated power between three branches of government. Two of those branches—the executive and legislative—were expected to be at least somewhat accountable to the people. Over time, with the extension of the franchise to include women and people of color, and with the direct election of senators, that accountability has increased. Not sufficiently, mind you. We still have an Electoral College, gerrymandering, and all the other pathologies that undermine and diminish democratic governance. But presidents and senators can usually claim some connection between popular sentiment and the authority they exercise.
Not so the Supreme Court. The legitimacy of the judicial branch has always derived from its relationship to the other two branches. An elected president nominates judges; while, in the modern era, an elected Senate provides advice and consent. The Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Defends His Turf Bob Moser
A naked power grab that radically alters the court’s ideological balance on the eve of an election in which voters might signal that they do not want that balance to shift takes the people out of the equation. Power is not derived from the consent of the governed. Power is turned against the governed.
“For the sake of the Court, the Senate must not take up a nomination to fill the vacancy left by Justice Ginsburg’s passing until after the inauguration of the next president, who would then put forth a nominee,” says Feingold, who argues that if “the President and the Senate majority ram through this illegitimate nomination and the Court so constituted proceeds to inject itself in a partisan manner into possible controversies surrounding the election [as President Trump seems eager to see], the time for warning of risks and threats to the Court’s legitimacy will have passed. The damage will be done, it will be irreparable, and we will all be the worse for it.”
Feingold is not overstating the case. If a court that has been hastily rebalanced in the president’s favor is called upon to decide 2020 election issues, it will have no credibility as an arbiter of those issues. At that point, the court’s constitutional illegitimacy will become the nation’s constitutional crisis.


thenation--2020-09-28--How a News Report on Hiroshima Helped Prevent Nuclear War

Whether you ’ re reading this with your morning coffee , just after lunch , or on the late shift in the wee small hours of the morning , it ’ s 100 seconds to midnight .
That ’ s just over a minute and a half .
And that should be completely unnerving .
It ’ s the closest to that witching hour we ’ ve ever been .
Since 1947 , the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has adjusted its Doomsday Clock to provide humanity with an expert estimate of just how close all of us are to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , nuclear annihilation .
A century ago , there was , of course , no need for such a measure .
Back then , the largest explosion ever caused by humans had likely occurred in Halifax , Canada , in 1917 , when a munitions ship collided with another vessel , in that city ’ s harbor .
That tragic blast killed nearly 2,000 , wounded another 9,000 , and left 6,000 homeless , but it didn ’ t imperil the planet .
The largest explosions after that occurred on July 16 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new type of weapon , an atomic bomb , in New Mexico and then on August 6 , 1945 , when the United States unleashed such a bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima .
Since then , our species has been precariously perched at the edge of auto-extermination .
No one knows precisely how many people were killed by the world ’ s first nuclear attack .
Around 70,000 , nearly all of them civilians , were vaporized , crushed , burned , or irradiated to death almost immediately .
Another 50,000 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as 280,000 were dead , many of radiation sickness , by the end of the year .
( An atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki , three days later , is thought to have killed as many as 70,000 . )
In the wake of the first nuclear attack , little was clear .
“ What happened at Hiroshima is not yet known , ” The New York Times reported that August 7 and the US government sought to keep it that way , portraying nuclear weapons as nothing more than super-charged @ @ @ @ @ @ @ effects of radiation .
Despite the heroic efforts of several reporters just after the blast , it wasn ’ t until a year later that Americans—and then the rest of the world—began to truly grasp the effects of such new weaponry and what it would mean for humanity from that moment onward .
We know about what happened at Hiroshima largely thanks to one man , John Hersey .
He was a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and former correspondent for Time and Life magazines .
He had covered World War II in Europe and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by the secretary of the Navy for helping evacuate wounded American troops on the Japanese-held island of Guadalcanal .
And we now know just how Hersey got the story of Hiroshima—a 30,000-word reportorial masterpiece that appeared in the August 1946 issue of The New Yorker magazine , describing the experiences of six survivors of that atomic blast—thanks to a meticulously researched and elegantly written new book by Lesley Blume , Fallout : The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World .
When I pack up my bags for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ consider to be the essentials for someone reporting on an armed conflict .
A water bottle with a built-in filter .
Trauma packs with a blood-clotting agent .
A first-aid kit .
A multitool .
A satellite phone .
Sometimes I forgo one or more of these items , but there ’ s always been a single , solitary staple , a necessity whose appearance has changed over the years , but whose presence in my rucksack has not .
Once , this item was intact , almost pristine .
But after the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in South Sudan , the Democratic Republic of Congo , Libya , and Burkina Faso , it ’ s a complete wreck .
Still , I carry it .
In part , it ’ s become ( and I ’ m only slightly embarrassed to say it ) something of a talisman for me .
But mostly , it ’ s because what ’ s between the figurative covers of that now-coverless , thoroughly mutilated copy of John Hersey ’ s Hiroshima—the New Yorker article in paperback form—is as terrifyingly brilliant as the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bookstore in New York City for 48 cents .
I know Hiroshima well .
I ’ ve read it cover-to-cover dozens of times .
Or sometimes on a plane or a helicopter or a river barge , in a hotel room or sitting by the side of a road , I ’ ll flip it open and take in a random 10 or 20 pages .
I always marveled at how skillfully Hersey constructed the narrative with overlapping personal accounts that make the horrific handiwork of that weapon with the power of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ how he explained something new to this world , atomic terror , in terms that readers could immediately grasp ; how he translated destruction on a previously unimaginable scale into a cautionary tale as old as the genre itself , but with an urgency that hasn ’ t faded or been matched .
I simply never knew how he did it until Lesley Blume pulled back the curtain .
Fallout , which was published last month—the 75th anniversary of America ’ s attack on Hiroshima—offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of just how Hersey and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of The New Yorker , were able to truly break the story of an attack that had been covered on the front pages of the world ’ s leading newspapers a year earlier and , in the process , produced one of the all-time great pieces of journalism .
It ’ s an important reminder that the biggest stories may be hiding in plain sight ; that breaking news coverage is essential but may not convey the full magnitude of an event ; and that a writer may be far better served by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in spartan prose , even when the story is so horrific it seems to demand a polemic .
Hersey begins Hiroshima in an understated fashion , noting exactly what each of the six survivors he chronicles was doing at the moment their lives changed forever .
“ Not everyone could comprehend how the atomic bomb worked or visualize an all-out , end-of-days nuclear world war , ” Blume observes .
“ But practically anyone could comprehend a story about a handful of regular people—mothers , fathers , grade school children , doctors , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ struck.
” As she points out , Hersey ’ s authorial voice is never raised and so the atomic horrors—victims whose eyeballs had melted and run down their cheeks , others whose skin hung from their bodies or slipped off their hands like gloves—speak for themselves .
It ’ s a feat made all the more astonishing when one considers , as Blume reveals , that its author , who had witnessed combat and widespread devastation from conventional bombing during World War II , was so terrified and tormented by what he saw @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he feared he would be unable to complete his assignment .
Incredibly , Hersey got the story of Hiroshima with official sanction , reporting under the scrutiny of the office of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers , Gen. Douglas MacArthur , the head of the American occupation of defeated Japan .
His prior reportage on the US military , including a book focused on MacArthur that he later called “ too adulatory , ” helped secure his access .
More amazing still , The New Yorker—fearing possible repercussions under the recently @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the article for review to Lt. Gen. Lesley Groves , who had overseen the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb , served as its chief booster , and went so far as to claim that radiation poisoning “ is a very pleasant way to die.
” Whatever concessions The New Yorker may have made to him have been lost in the sands of time , but Groves did sign off on the article , overlooking , as Blume notes , “ Hersey ’ s most unsettling revelations : the fact that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ suffering upon a largely civilian population on a scale unprecedented in human history and then tried to cover up the human cost of its new weapon.
” The impact on the US government would be swift .
The article was a sensation and immediately lauded as the best reporting to come out of World War II .
It quickly became one of the most reprinted news pieces of all time and led to widespread reappraisals by newspapers and readers alike of just what America had done to Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki @ @ @ @ @ @ @ remarkably bright light on the perils of nuclear weapons , writ large .
“ Hersey ’ s story , ” as Blume astutely notes , “ was the first truly effective , internationally heeded warning about the existential threat that nuclear arms posed to civilization.
” It ’ s been 74 years since “ Hiroshima ” hit the newsstands .
A Cold War and nuclear arms race followed as those weapons spread across the planet .
And this January , as a devastating pandemic was beginning to follow suit , all of us @ @ @ @ @ @ @ total annihilation because of the plethora of nuclear weapons on this earth , failures of US-Russian cooperation on arms control and disarmament , the Trump administration ’ s trashing of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal , and America ’ s efforts to develop and deploy yet more advanced nukes , as well as two other factors that have sped up that apocalyptic Doomsday Clock : climate change and cyber-based disinformation .
The latter , according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , is corrupting our “ information ecosphere , ” undermining democracy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and so creating hair-trigger conditions in international relations .
The former is transforming the planet ’ s actual ecosystem and placing humanity in another kind of ultimate peril .
“ Dangerous rivalry and hostility among the superpowers increases the likelihood of nuclear blunder , ” former California governor Jerry Brown , the executive chair of the Bulletin , said earlier this year .
“ Climate change just compounds the crisis .
If there ’ s ever a time to wake up , it ’ s now.
” Over the last three-plus years , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ threatened at least three nations with nuclear annihilation , including a US ally .
In addition to menacing North Korea with the possibility of unleashing “ fire and fury ” and his talk of ushering in “ the end ” of Iran , he even claimed to have “ plans ” to exterminate most of the population of Afghanistan .
The “ method of war ” he suggested employing could kill an estimated 20 million or more Afghans , almost all of them civilians .
John Hersey , who died in 1993 at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t have had a moment ’ s doubt about what he meant .
Trump ’ s nuclear threats may never come to fruition , but his administration , while putting significant effort into deep-sixing nuclear pacts , has also more than done its part to accelerate climate change , thinning rules designed to keep the planet as habitable as possible for humans .
A recent New York Times analysis , for example , tallied almost 70 environmental rules and regulations—governing planet-warming carbon dioxide and methane emissions , clean air , water , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , or revoked , with more than 30 additional rollbacks still in progress .
President Trump has not , however , been a total outlier when it comes to promoting environmental degradation .
American presidents have been presiding over the destruction of the natural environment since the founding of the republic .
Signed into law in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln , the Homestead Act , for instance , transformed countless American lives , providing free land for the masses .
But it also transferred 270 million acres of wilderness , or 10 percent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hands for “ improvements.
” More recently , Ronald Reagan launched attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency through deregulation and budget cuts , while George W. Bush ’ s administration worked to undermine science-based policies , specifically through the denial of anthropogenic climate change .
The difference , of course , was that Lincoln couldn ’ t have conceptualized the effects of global warming ( even if the first study of the “ greenhouse effect ” was published during his lifetime ) , whereas the science was already clear enough in the Reagan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the age of Trump , as each of them pursued policies that would push us precious seconds closer to Armageddon .
The tale of how John Hersey got his story is a great triumph of Lesley Blume ’ s Fallout , but what came after may be an even more compelling facet of the book .
Hersey gave the United States an image problem—and far worse .
“ The transition from global savior to genocidal superpower was an unwelcome reversal , ” she observes .
Worse yet for the US government , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country and themselves .
It ’ s beyond rare for a journalist to prompt true soul-searching or provide a moral mirror for a nation .
In an interview in his later years , Hersey , who generally avoided publicity , suggested that the testimony of survivors of the atomic blasts—like those he spotlighted—had helped to prevent nuclear war .
“ We know what an atomic apocalypse would look like because John Hersey showed us , ” writes Blume .
Unfortunately , while there have been many noteworthy , powerful works on climate change @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the one that packs the punch of “ Hiroshima.
” And so , humanity awaits that once-in-a-century article , as nuclear weapons , climate change , and cyber-based disinformation keep us just 100 clicks short of doomsday .
Hersey provided a template .
Blume has lifted the veil on how he did it .
Now someone needs to step up and write the world-changing piece of reportage that will shock our consciences and provide a little more breathing room between this vanishing moment and our ever-looming midnight .

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. The best of the week.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Repro Nation A monthly newsletter on the global fight for reproductive freedom. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Whether you’re reading this with your morning coffee, just after lunch, or on the late shift in the wee small hours of the morning, it’s 100 seconds to midnight. That’s just over a minute and a half. And that should be completely unnerving. It’s the closest to that witching hour we’ve ever been.
Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has adjusted its Doomsday Clock to provide humanity with an expert estimate of just how close all of us are to an apocalyptic “midnight”—that is, nuclear annihilation. A century ago, there was, of course, no need for such a measure. Back then, the largest explosion ever caused by humans had likely occurred in Halifax, Canada, in 1917, when a munitions ship collided with another vessel, in that city’s harbor. That tragic blast killed nearly 2,000, wounded another 9,000, and left 6,000 homeless, but it didn’t imperil the planet. The largest explosions after that occurred on July 16, 1945, in a test of a new type of weapon, an atomic bomb, in New Mexico and then on August 6, 1945, when the United States unleashed such a bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Since then, our species has been precariously perched at the edge of auto-extermination.
No one knows precisely how many people were killed by the world’s first nuclear attack. Around 70,000, nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned, or irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon after. As many as 280,000 were dead, many of radiation sickness, by the end of the year. (An atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki, three days later, is thought to have killed as many as 70,000.) In the wake of the first nuclear attack, little was clear. “What happened at Hiroshima is not yet known,” The New York Times reported that August 7 and the US government sought to keep it that way, portraying nuclear weapons as nothing more than super-charged conventional munitions, while downplaying the horrifying effects of radiation. Despite the heroic efforts of several reporters just after the blast, it wasn’t until a year later that Americans—and then the rest of the world—began to truly grasp the effects of such new weaponry and what it would mean for humanity from that moment onward. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
We know about what happened at Hiroshima largely thanks to one man, John Hersey. He was a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and former correspondent for Time and Life magazines. He had covered World War II in Europe and the Pacific, where he was commended by the secretary of the Navy for helping evacuate wounded American troops on the Japanese-held island of Guadalcanal. And we now know just how Hersey got the story of Hiroshima—a 30,000-word reportorial masterpiece that appeared in the August 1946 issue of The New Yorker magazine, describing the experiences of six survivors of that atomic blast—thanks to a meticulously researched and elegantly written new book by Lesley Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World.
Only the Essentials
When I pack up my bags for a war zone, I carry what I consider to be the essentials for someone reporting on an armed conflict. A water bottle with a built-in filter. Trauma packs with a blood-clotting agent. A first-aid kit. A multitool. A satellite phone. Sometimes I forgo one or more of these items, but there’s always been a single, solitary staple, a necessity whose appearance has changed over the years, but whose presence in my rucksack has not.
Once, this item was intact, almost pristine. But after the better part of a decade covering conflicts in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, and Burkina Faso, it’s a complete wreck. Still, I carry it. In part, it’s become (and I’m only slightly embarrassed to say it) something of a talisman for me. But mostly, it’s because what’s between the figurative covers of that now-coverless, thoroughly mutilated copy of John Hersey’s Hiroshima—the New Yorker article in paperback form—is as terrifyingly brilliant as the day I bought it at the Strand bookstore in New York City for 48 cents.
I know Hiroshima well. I’ve read it cover-to-cover dozens of times. Or sometimes on a plane or a helicopter or a river barge, in a hotel room or sitting by the side of a road, I’ll flip it open and take in a random 10 or 20 pages. I always marveled at how skillfully Hersey constructed the narrative with overlapping personal accounts that make the horrific handiwork of that weapon with the power of the gods accessible on a human level; how he explained something new to this world, atomic terror, in terms that readers could immediately grasp; how he translated destruction on a previously unimaginable scale into a cautionary tale as old as the genre itself, but with an urgency that hasn’t faded or been matched. I simply never knew how he did it until Lesley Blume pulled back the curtain. Current Issue View our current issue
Fallout, which was published last month—the 75th anniversary of America’s attack on Hiroshima—offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of just how Hersey and William Shawn, then the managing editor of The New Yorker, were able to truly break the story of an attack that had been covered on the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers a year earlier and, in the process, produced one of the all-time great pieces of journalism. It’s an important reminder that the biggest stories may be hiding in plain sight; that breaking news coverage is essential but may not convey the full magnitude of an event; and that a writer may be far better served by laying out a detailed, chronological account in spartan prose, even when the story is so horrific it seems to demand a polemic.
Hersey begins Hiroshima in an understated fashion, noting exactly what each of the six survivors he chronicles was doing at the moment their lives changed forever. “Not everyone could comprehend how the atomic bomb worked or visualize an all-out, end-of-days nuclear world war,” Blume observes. “But practically anyone could comprehend a story about a handful of regular people—mothers, fathers, grade school children, doctors, clerks—going about their daily routines when catastrophe struck.”
As she points out, Hersey’s authorial voice is never raised and so the atomic horrors—victims whose eyeballs had melted and run down their cheeks, others whose skin hung from their bodies or slipped off their hands like gloves—speak for themselves. It’s a feat made all the more astonishing when one considers, as Blume reveals, that its author, who had witnessed combat and widespread devastation from conventional bombing during World War II, was so terrified and tormented by what he saw in Hiroshima months after the attack that he feared he would be unable to complete his assignment.
Incredibly, Hersey got the story of Hiroshima with official sanction, reporting under the scrutiny of the office of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the head of the American occupation of defeated Japan. His prior reportage on the US military, including a book focused on MacArthur that he later called “too adulatory,” helped secure his access. More amazing still, The New Yorker—fearing possible repercussions under the recently passed Atomic Energy Act—submitted a final draft of the article for review to Lt. Gen. Lesley Groves, who had overseen the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb, served as its chief booster, and went so far as to claim that radiation poisoning “is a very pleasant way to die.”
Whatever concessions The New Yorker may have made to him have been lost in the sands of time, but Groves did sign off on the article, overlooking, as Blume notes, “Hersey’s most unsettling revelations: the fact that the United States had unleashed destruction and suffering upon a largely civilian population on a scale unprecedented in human history and then tried to cover up the human cost of its new weapon.”
The impact on the US government would be swift. The article was a sensation and immediately lauded as the best reporting to come out of World War II. It quickly became one of the most reprinted news pieces of all time and led to widespread reappraisals by newspapers and readers alike of just what America had done to Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also managed to shine a remarkably bright light on the perils of nuclear weapons, writ large. “Hersey’s story,” as Blume astutely notes, “was the first truly effective, internationally heeded warning about the existential threat that nuclear arms posed to civilization.”
Wanted: A Hersey for Our Time
It’s been 74 years since “Hiroshima” hit the newsstands. A Cold War and nuclear arms race followed as those weapons spread across the planet. And this January, as a devastating pandemic was beginning to follow suit, all of us found ourselves just 100 seconds away from total annihilation because of the plethora of nuclear weapons on this earth, failures of US-Russian cooperation on arms control and disarmament, the Trump administration’s trashing of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and America’s efforts to develop and deploy yet more advanced nukes, as well as two other factors that have sped up that apocalyptic Doomsday Clock: climate change and cyber-based disinformation.
The latter, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is corrupting our “information ecosphere,” undermining democracy as well as trust among nations, and so creating hair-trigger conditions in international relations. The former is transforming the planet’s actual ecosystem and placing humanity in another kind of ultimate peril. “Dangerous rivalry and hostility among the superpowers increases the likelihood of nuclear blunder,” former California governor Jerry Brown, the executive chair of the Bulletin, said earlier this year. “Climate change just compounds the crisis. If there’s ever a time to wake up, it’s now.”
Over the last three-plus years, however, President Donald Trump has seemingly threatened at least three nations with nuclear annihilation, including a US ally. In addition to menacing North Korea with the possibility of unleashing “fire and fury” and his talk of ushering in “the end” of Iran, he even claimed to have “plans” to exterminate most of the population of Afghanistan. The “method of war” he suggested employing could kill an estimated 20 million or more Afghans, almost all of them civilians. John Hersey, who died in 1993 at the age of 78, wouldn’t have had a moment’s doubt about what he meant.
Trump’s nuclear threats may never come to fruition, but his administration, while putting significant effort into deep-sixing nuclear pacts, has also more than done its part to accelerate climate change, thinning rules designed to keep the planet as habitable as possible for humans. A recent New York Times analysis, for example, tallied almost 70 environmental rules and regulations—governing planet-warming carbon dioxide and methane emissions, clean air, water, and toxic chemicals—that have been rescinded, reversed, or revoked, with more than 30 additional rollbacks still in progress.
President Trump has not, however, been a total outlier when it comes to promoting environmental degradation. American presidents have been presiding over the destruction of the natural environment since the founding of the republic. Signed into law in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln, the Homestead Act, for instance, transformed countless American lives, providing free land for the masses. But it also transferred 270 million acres of wilderness, or 10 percent of the United States, into private hands for “improvements.”
More recently, Ronald Reagan launched attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency through deregulation and budget cuts, while George W. Bush’s administration worked to undermine science-based policies, specifically through the denial of anthropogenic climate change. The difference, of course, was that Lincoln couldn’t have conceptualized the effects of global warming (even if the first study of the “greenhouse effect” was published during his lifetime), whereas the science was already clear enough in the Reagan and Bush years, and brutally self-apparent in the age of Trump, as each of them pursued policies that would push us precious seconds closer to Armageddon.
The tale of how John Hersey got his story is a great triumph of Lesley Blume’s Fallout, but what came after may be an even more compelling facet of the book. Hersey gave the United States an image problem—and far worse. “The transition from global savior to genocidal superpower was an unwelcome reversal,” she observes. Worse yet for the US government, the article left many Americans reevaluating their country and themselves. It’s beyond rare for a journalist to prompt true soul-searching or provide a moral mirror for a nation. In an interview in his later years, Hersey, who generally avoided publicity, suggested that the testimony of survivors of the atomic blasts—like those he spotlighted—had helped to prevent nuclear war.
“We know what an atomic apocalypse would look like because John Hersey showed us,” writes Blume. Unfortunately, while there have been many noteworthy, powerful works on climate change, we’re still waiting for the one that packs the punch of “Hiroshima.” And so, humanity awaits that once-in-a-century article, as nuclear weapons, climate change, and cyber-based disinformation keep us just 100 clicks short of doomsday.
Hersey provided a template. Blume has lifted the veil on how he did it. Now someone needs to step up and write the world-changing piece of reportage that will shock our consciences and provide a little more breathing room between this vanishing moment and our ever-looming midnight.