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This Letter From a Gay Veteran’s Brother Is the Most Heartbreaking Response to Indiana’s Law We’ve Read Yet

by EddieStreeton Posted on April 1, 2015

Mother Jones

On Tuesday morning, Indiana’s largest newspaper, the Indianapolis Star, published a full front-page editorial calling on Gov. Mike Pence to repeal the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the new bill that has incited national furor because it allows businesses to refuse service to gay people, citing their religious beliefs.

Tuesday’s Indianapolis Star. @markalesia/Twitter

By the end of the day, the paper received a heartbreaking letter from Nick Crews of Plainfield. Crews writes about walking his dogs to the local market that morning to pick up two copies of the day’s Star, something he never does. He continues:

With the papers under my arm, I walked to Plainfield’s Maple Hill Cemetery, and found my brother’s grave. My brother, who had been a troubled Vietnam War vet, was gay at a time when being gay was a very difficult thing to be. When he died of AIDS in 1985 in a far-off city, his refuge from his closed-minded native state, some in our family were sufficiently ashamed that his cause of death was not discussed.

At the grave I opened the Star. I said, “Well, Charlie, times have changed, thank God. It turns out you were on the right side of history after all.” Then I read aloud as much of the paper’s editorial as tears would let me get through.

And today I’m doing what I never thought I’d do. I’m renewing my subscription to the Star. I’m doing this because, if for no other reason, I believe we must all support those who stand against discrimination and for inclusiveness. I do it too as thanks to the Star whose courage and right-mindedness on this issue made this moment of personal closure possible for me.

Read his entire letter here.

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From the Howard Zinn Archive: Fighting Respectability Politics at Spelman College

by MarianaTrujillo Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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The excerpt, from a longer 1960 piece by Howard Zinn and a 2015 Paula Giddings article, are from the Nation magazine’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue on newsstands in April. They come to us from the TomDispatch website.

Finishing School for Pickets

By Howard Zinn (August 6, 1960)

One afternoon some weeks ago, with the dogwood on the Spelman College campus newly bloomed and the grass close-cropped and fragrant, an attractive, tawny-skinned girl crossed the lawn to her dormitory to put a notice on the bulletin board. It read: Young Ladies Who Can Picket Please Sign Below.

The notice revealed, in its own quaint language, that within the dramatic revolt of Negro college students in the South today another phenomenon has been developing. This is the upsurge of the young, educated Negro woman against the generations-old advice of her elders: be nice, be well-mannered and ladylike, don’t speak loudly, and don’t get into trouble. On the campus of the nation’s leading college for Negro young women—pious, sedate, encrusted with the traditions of gentility and moderation—these exhortations, for the first time, are being firmly rejected.

Spelman College girls are still “nice,” but not enough to keep them from walking up and down, carrying picket signs, in front of supermarkets in the heart of Atlanta. They are well-mannered, but this is somewhat tempered by a recent declaration that they will use every method short of violence to end segregation. As for staying out of trouble, they were doing fine until this spring, when fourteen of them were arrested and jailed by Atlanta police. The staid New England women missionaries who helped found Spelman College back in the 1880s would probably be distressed at this turn of events, and present-day conservatives in the administration and faculty are rather upset. But respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today.

“You can always tell a Spelman girl,” alumni and friends of the college have boasted for years. The “Spelman girl” walked gracefully, talked properly, went to church every Sunday, poured tea elegantly, and had all the attributes of the product of a fine finishing school. If intellect and talent and social consciousness happened to develop also, they were, to an alarming extent, byproducts.

This is changing. It would be an exaggeration to say: “You can always tell a Spelman girl—she’s under arrest.” But the statement has a measure of truth.

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) wrote for The Nation from 1960 to 2008. Those articles are collected in Some Truths Are Not Self-Evident: Essays in The Nation on Civil Rights, Vietnam and the “War on Terror.” (eBookNation, 2014).

Learning Insubordination

By Paula J. Giddings (March 2015)

In the current age of “lean-in” feminism at one end of the spectrum and an “anti-respectability” discourse at the other, the late Howard Zinn’s essay reminds us of an earlier meaning of women’s liberation.

Zinn was of Russian-Jewish heritage, an influential historian and, in 1960, a beloved professor at Spelman College, the historically black women’s institution in the then-segregated city of Atlanta. The attribution of “finishing school” in the title was well-earned: Spelman girls, whose acceptance letters included requests to bring white gloves and girdles with them to campus, were molded to honor the virtues of “true-womanhood”: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.

Nevertheless, by 1960, Zinn’s students had morphed from “nice, well-mannered and ladylike” paragons of politesse to determined demonstrators who picketed, organized sit-ins, and were sometimes arrested and jailed for their efforts. “Respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today,” Zinn concluded.

These young girls were born in the 1940s, and whatever the background of their parents (who might be sharecroppers, teachers, or doctors), their generation was destined to belong to a new stratum of Americans: the “Black Bourgeoisie,” as the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called it. An economic class that was literally wedged in the “middle” between a small black elite and the black masses, this group emerged in no small part because of the unprecedented number of educated women who, historically excluded from pink-collar positions, now had access not only to the elite professions, but to mainstream administrative, clerical, and civil-service jobs.

For black women, burdened by stereotypes of hypersexuality, this development meant more than a triumph of simple social mobility. With education, more girls could now escape the domestic and personal service work that subjected them to the sexual exploitation of employers and others. To be able to avoid such a soul-killing future was the dream of generations of mothers for their daughters—one that I often heard from my own grandmother, who had migrated north so that my mother could be the first in the family to attain a college education. The stakes in taking advantage of these newer opportunities were indeed high and brimmed with profound meaning and emotion.

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From the Howard Zinn Archive: Fighting Respectability Politics at Spelman College

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The 19 Best Photobooks of 2014

by AndreasD07 Posted on December 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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The tide of excellent photobooks continues to rise, with new releases straining wallets and bookshelves of collectors as well as those of us who just enjoy a well-put-together body of photography. While there are worse predicaments than wondering where you’ll keep all these gems, it’s definitely been tough to keep up. Here’s a round-up of the ones that stood out to the Mother Jones photo department this year.

Night Walk & Invisible City, Ken Schles (Steidl)
Night Walk is an essential companion to the new, long-awaited reprint of Schles’ gritty 1988 classic Invisible City. A document of life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side as it went through the death throes of being a dirty, lawless pocket of the city, Invisible City and Night Walk evokes a sense of danger and fun in roaming through this veritable no man’s land. The grainy black-and-white photos make you feel like you’re falling through a dream.

Frontcountry, Lucas Foglia (Nazraeli Press)
Lucas Foglia‘s second monograph looks at the intersection and conflict of mining, ranching, and environmental interests in the American West. It’s a wry, beautiful book. Unlike a lot of fine-art-oriented documentary photobooks, Frontcountry feels grounded while still serving page after page of gorgeous photos that at times feel surreal. Foglia has a knack for putting humans in their place against expansive landscapes, as well as capturing serene moments of breathlessness, waiting to exhale.

Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down, Eugene Richards (Many Voices Press)
This self-published book brings together Eugene Richards’ work from the Arkansas Delta since the days he first went as there a Vista volunteer in 1969. Some of the work appeared in his first book, Few Comforts or Surprises, published in 1972. It’s a mix of classic documentary reportage of the ’60s and ’70s; the forceful, wide-angle work for which Richards became known in the ’80s; and his recent, sublime color work. A single line of text on each page opposite the photographs strings the whole thing together. It’s very lyrical, in a way you may not expect if the last Eugene Richards book you looked at was Cocaine True Cocaine Blue or even Walking Through the Ashes. Far more than a collection of Richards’ work in the Delta, Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down is about his fulfillment of a promise made to a woman he met long ago—and to himself.

Still Moving, Danny Clinch (Harry Abrams)
He would probably shun the comparison, but Danny Clinch has become something akin to this era’s Jim Marshall. He shoots plenty of great portraits, sure, but unlike a lot of music photographers who eventually abandon shooting concerts, Clinch still gets in the mix, capturing great backstage moments as well as generation-defining live moments. He’s certainly among the best living music photographers.

The Sound of Two Eyes Opening, Spot (Sinecure)
Well known to punks as the man who recorded dozens of ’80s hardcore records on SST Records and toured with their bands (namely Black Flag), it turns out Spot was also something of a shutterbug. This book gives an unflinching look at beach life in the LA area during the ’70s. Lots of girls on roller skates in short shorts and dudes in tube socks skateboarding, as well as early photos of Black Flag and the Los Angeles punk scene. It’s worth picking up the slipcase deluxe edition which comes with a poster, print, and record (available only from the publisher).

Disco Night 9/11, Peter van Agtmael (Red Hook Editions)
Disco Nights has made a number of appearances on other “Best Of” lists—for a good reason. Though it’s a pretty simple book, lacking some of the bells and whistles that other notable photobooks include, the simplicity in this case reinforces the weight of the subject and lets the photos stand out. Having covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, van Agtmael continues his coverage by following the soldiers home and photographing their struggles getting used to normal life.

War Porn, Chris Bangert (Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg)
“These are not by best pictures,” Chris Bangert writes of this uncensored, unvarnished book of photos from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “This book is not about the drama of war or the phony myth of the heroic war photographer.” Rather, it’s about a photographer dealing with everything he’s seen, and the images he’s captured that linger in his mind. It’s full of the grisly, gruesome photos war photographers make but we rarely see. Editors don’t want them and often the photographers themselves don’t like to face them. All of which makes War Porn a tough little book to look at. It’s punctuated by a haunting epilogue involving Bangert’s grandfather, who served as a doctor with the Wehrmacht in Russia during World War II.

Chris Stein/Negative: Me, Blondie and the Advent of Punk (Rizzoli)
Pick this one up along with Playground, by Paul Zone (Glitterati Incorporated; I review it here) and you have an unbeatable ringside seat to the nascent days of New York City punk. Both Zone (of the Fast) and Stein (Blondie) were musicians foremost, but they seemed to always have their cameras on them, capturing the New York scene as it evolved from an eclectic group of musicians, artists, poets and filmmakers into the ground zero of American punk rock—until New Wave swept it away.

Rich and Poor, Jim Goldberg (Steidl)
Every write-up of this reprint mentions how it’s as poignant today as back in 1985 when it was published. As the title suggests, the book, shot in San Francisco from the late ’70s through the mid-’80s, is a study of the very wealthy and the very poor. In what was to become his trademark style, Jim Goldberg photographs subjects and then has them write something about themselves on the print. Of course, San Francisco is a different city now, with the income gap between rich and poor having grown to an enormous chasm. For the redesigned book, available in hardback, Goldberg added a few photos revisiting locations and people he shot for the original.

Bedrooms of the Fallen, Ashley Gilbertson (University of Chicago)
It’s a simple idea: Photograph the bedrooms of soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan using a wide angle panoramic camera. The resulting images are a stirring and unsettling documentation of lives left behind. Many bedrooms show transitions—remnants of boyhoods and teenage years mixed in with the trappings of new military personas. Some of the bedrooms have been made into shrines, carefully maintained by the parents. In other images, you sense the parents slowly moving on, with boxes and household items beginning to impose on the bedroom space. The very still, voyeuristic photos draw you in slowly and hold your attention through the book.

Vietnam: The Real War, AP (Abrams)
One of the better photobooks on the Vietnam War, Vietnam: The Real War, pulls images from the AP archives to trace the history of America’s involvement in the conflict. It’s a powerful collection that includes those iconic photos that altered the war’s trajectory by changing hearts and minds back home: Malcolm Browne’s 1963 photo of the Buddhist monk setting himself ablaze, Eddie Adams’ image of the chief of the South Vietnamese national police executing a suspected Viet Cong official in the street, Nick Ut’s image of the little girl running naked, burned by napalm.

Afghanistan, Larry Towell (Aperture)
Essentially a richly detailed scrapbook of Larry Towell’s time covering Afghanistan, this reproduction of his original artist’s maquette gets under the skin of the country and into the mind of the photographer. It’s about as close to a 360-degree view of the place as a Westerner can provide. The book covers ordinary Afghans, Western and Afghan soldiers, war victims, street scenes, and political machinations. The inclusion of Towell’s notes, contact sheets, and of course, excellent images, makes this a treasure for those who like to pull back the curtain on a photographer’s process.

The Decisive Moment, Henri Cartier-Bresson (Steidl)
One of the most influential (and yet hardest to find) photobooks in print gets the Steidl gold-standard reprint treatment here. Available for the first time in sixty years, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Decisive Moment still sizzles with taut, kinetic energy. From the Matisse-designed cover through the tightly edited image selection, it’s a brilliant mix of street photography and reportage, photos that, despite being perfectly composed, feel very alive. Many of them have evolved from classics to cultural wallpaper. The book reminds us of Cartier-Bresson’s genius—just in case you needed a reminder.

Ponte City, Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse (Steidl)
A multi-part book about a 54-story residential building in Johannesburg that Mikhael Subotzky describes as, “a huge blinking advertising crown visible from Soweto in the south to Sandton in the north.” Built in 1976, “Ponte City” housed young professional types before falling on hard times in ’90s, as those people fled to the suburbs. Developers who bought the building in 2008 with grand plans to refurbish it went belly-up. Subotzky and Waterhouse’s book-in-a-box includes a standard hardcover photobook along with 17 pamphlet/zine type booklets, each focusing on a different aspect of the building. It’s an audacious deep-dive into Ponte City that traces its history through archival documents and photographs of those who live there.

Testament, Chris Hondros (powerhouse)
This retrospective of Chris Hondros, a photojournalist killed in Tripoli while covering the Libyan civil war, proves what a talented and courageous photographer he was. Testament, which I reviewed earlier this year, holds up as a standout. Even in volatile situations, Hondros managed to find the poignant, emotional image that often told more of what was going on than the bang-bang shot. And it’s worth mentioning that proceeds from Testament go to the Chris Hondros Fund.

Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit, Paul Martineau (Getty Publications)
Fully appreciating Minor White’s images, like learning to taste the subtleties of a good wine, requires something of a learning curve. His landscapes, nudes, still lifes and street photos all bear a very classic beauty. Very fine grained, precisely printed and composed, technically perfect in nearly every way, these are photos that legions of photographers have tried to imitate. As this book makes clear, White was a tour de force, constantly seeking, always challenging himself with new projects. His impact extends well beyond his work as a photographer. He was a founder of Aperture and worked closely with Ansel Adams at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), eventually leading the photo program there. Amid the many retrospectives of White’s career, this stands as one of the best overviews, an excellent starting point in your education on one of the world’s greatest photographers.

Superlative Light, Robert Shults (Daylight)
Superlative Light is a simple soft-cover book of black-and-white photos of the Petawatt Laser facility in Austin, Texas, that look like stills from an old sci-fi movie. It’s an unassuming project really, basic reportage about the facility that in 2009, when these photos were taken, produced the most powerful laser pulse to date. Translating something so magnificent yet so clinically mundane in such striking photos is no small feat.

The Photobook: A History, Vol. III, Martin Parr and Gerry Badger (Phaidon)
The third and final installment in a series that jump-started a recent increased interest in photobooks. Parr and Badger’s insightful series highlights books that mark significant points of evolution in the medium. From well-known masterpieces like Robert Frank’s The Americans to lesser-known books like Morten Andersen’s Fast City, the series leaves no stone unturned. This third edition focuses on photobooks published from World War II to the present.

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The 19 Best Photobooks of 2014

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The Cost of US Wars Since 9/11: $1.6 Trillion

by IXYEmeryebk Posted on December 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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The cost of US war-making in the 13 years since the September 11 terrorist attacks reached a whopping $1.6 trillion in 2014, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

The $1.6 trillion in war spending over that time span includes the cost of military operations, the training of security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, weapons maintenance, base support, reconstruction, embassy maintenance, foreign aid, and veterans’ medical care, as well as war-related intelligence operations not tracked by the Pentagon. The report tracks expenses through September, the end of the government’s 2014 fiscal year. Here’s a breakdown of where most of that money went:

The key factor determining the cost of war during a given period over the last 13 years has been the number of US troops deployed, according to the report. The number of troops in Afghanistan peaked in 2011, when 100,000 Americans were stationed there. The number of US armed forces in Iraq reached a high of about 170,000 in 2007.

Although Congress enacted across-the-board spending cuts in March 2013, the Pentagon’s war-making money was left untouched. The minimal cuts, known as sequestration, came from the Defense Department’s regular peacetime budget. The Pentagon gets a separate budget for fighting wars.

In the spending bill that Congress approved earlier this month, lawmakers doled out $73.7 billion for war-related activities in 2015—$2.3 billion more than President Barack Obama had requested. As Mother Jones‘ Dave Gilson reported last year, US military spending is on pace to taper far less dramatically in the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars than it did after the end of the Vietnam War or the Cold War.

Other reports have estimated the cost of US wars since 9/11 to be far higher than $1.6 trillion. A report by Neta Crawford, a political science professor at Boston University, estimated the total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as well as post-2001 assistance to Pakistan—to be roughly $4.4 trillion. The CRS estimate is lower because it does not include additional costs including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt.

Chart by AJ Vicens.

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The Cost of US Wars Since 9/11: $1.6 Trillion

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Monsanto Is Using Big Data to Take Over the World

by KurtisPatrick Posted on November 19, 2014

Mother Jones

You probably know Monsanto as the world’s leading producer of genetically engineered seeds—a global agribusiness giant whose critics accuse it of everything from boosting our reliance on pesticides to driving Indian farmers to suicide.

But that’s actually just the latest in a long series of evolving corporate identities. When the company was founded in 1901 by a St. Louis pharmacist, its initial product was artificial sweetener. Over the next few decades Monsanto expanded into industrial chemicals, releasing its first agricultural herbicide, 2,4-D, in 1945. In the ’50s it produced laundry detergent, the infamous insecticide DDT, and chemical components for nuclear bombs. In the ’60s it churned out Agent Orange for the Vietnam War. In the ’70s it became one of the largest producers of LED lights.

It was around this time that Robb Fraley, now Monsanto’s chief technology officer, joined the company as a mid-level biotechnology scientist. Back then, he recalls, the company had its hand in oil wells, plastics, carpets—you name it. It wasn’t until the early ’80s that Monsanto began to shift its focus to biotechnology, conducting the first US field trials of bioengineered plants in 1987. By the end of the ’90s, it was a full-fledged biotech company. And over the last 10 years, after a series of seed company acquisitions, it has become the company we all know and love—or hate—today.

Now, there’s a new evolution on the horizon: “I could easily see us in the next five or 10 years being an information technology company,” says Fraley.

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This Veteran Is Tired of Being Thanked for His Service

by PattiHeighway Posted on November 3, 2014

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Last week, in a quiet indie bookstore on the north side of Chicago, I saw the latest issue of Rolling Stone resting on a chrome-colored plastic table a few feet from a barista brewing a vanilla latte. A cold October rain fell outside. A friend of mine grabbed the issue and began flipping through it. Knowing that I was a veteran, he said, “Hey, did you see this?” pointing to a news story that seemed more like an ad. It read in part:

“This Veterans Day, Bruce Springsteen, Eminem, Rihanna, Dave Grohl, and Metallica will be among numerous artists who will head to the National Mall in Washington DC on November 11th for ‘The Concert For Valor,’ an all-star event that will pay tribute to armed services.”

“Concert For Valor? That sounds like something the North Korean government would organize,” I said as I typed Concertforvalor.com into my MacBook Pro looking for more information.

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This Veteran Is Tired of Being Thanked for His Service

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The Climate Change Movement Is Not Wishful Thinking Anymore

by RaquelKeaton Posted on October 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Less than two weeks have passed and yet it isn’t too early to say it: the People’s Climate March changed the social map—many maps, in fact, since hundreds of smaller marches took place in 162 countries. That march in New York City, spectacular as it may have been with its 400,000 participants, joyous as it was, moving as it was (slow-moving, actually, since it filled more than a mile’s worth of wide avenues and countless side streets), was no simple spectacle for a day. It represented the upwelling of something that matters so much more: a genuine global climate movement.

When I first heard the term “climate movement” a year ago, as a latecomer to this developing tale, I suspected the term was extravagant, a product of wishful thinking. I had, after all, seen a few movements in my time (and participated in several). I knew something of what they felt like and looked like—and this, I felt, wasn’t it.

I knew, of course, that there were climate-related organizations, demonstrations, projects, books, magazines, tweets, and for an amateur, I was reasonably well read on “the issues,” but I didn’t see, hear, or otherwise sense that intangible, polymorphous, transformative presence that adds up to a true, potentially society-changing movement.

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The Climate Change Movement Is Not Wishful Thinking Anymore

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Does Congress Ever Turn Down a Request for War?

by CarleyHannan Posted on September 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Plenty of people think Congress should be called back into session to conduct a vote on the bombing campaign in Syria. John Boehner disagrees:

Boehner’s office deferred to the White House when asked about the issue.

“As the Speaker has said, he thinks it would be good for the country to have a new authorization for the use of military force covering our actions against ISIL, but traditionally such an authorization is requested and written by the commander-in-chief — and President Obama has not done that,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said via email.

One of these days Boehner is going to have to make up his mind whether President Obama does too much or too little. It’s getting a little hard to keep up with him.

But this raises a question. Has Congress ever turned down a president who asked for authorization to use military force? Sure, there was Ford’s last-ditch aid request for Vietnam in 1975, but that was for the end of a war, not the start of one. Anything else? Do the fights over funding for the contras count? I feel like I’m going to be embarrassed when someone points out some famous congressional refusal that I’ve forgotten about, but I sure can’t dredge anything up.

Obviously Obama has philosophical reasons for insisting that he can go to war on his own, and he also has political reasons for not forcing fellow Democrats to take a tough vote. But does he have even the slightest chance of Congress actually turning him down?

UPDATE: OK, I’m already embarrassed. I guess you could count the non-vote on Syria last year, couldn’t you? After all, Obama did ask for permission to bomb Syria, and Congress did let it die without any real debate. On the other hand, I’d say that Obama mostly asked for authorization in the hopes of being turned down. He didn’t exactly put on a full-court press, did he?

Any other examples?

UPDATE 2: There have been a few other suggestions. (1) Congressional hindrance of FDR before Pearl Harbor. That was a mixed bag, and anyway, I guess I was thinking of more recent (postwar) history. (2) Kosovo and Libya. Interesting cases, but more of a muddle than an outright loss for the president. Congress approved some funding bills and denied others.

Still, there’s enough here to suggest that presidents often have to fight with Congress over military action. Especially Democratic presidents.

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Does Congress Ever Turn Down a Request for War?

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Hillary Clinton Praises a Guy With Lots of Blood on His Hands

by TangelaMullens Posted on September 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton often plays the hawk card: She voted for the Iraq war, dissed President Barack Obama for not being tough enough on Syria, and compared Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler. This is to be expected from a politician who has angled for a certain title: the first female president of the United States. Whether her muscular views are sincerely held or not, a conventional political calculation would lead her to assume it may be difficult for many voters to elect as commander-in-chief a woman who did not project an aggressive and assertive stance on foreign policy. So her tough talk might be charitably evaluated in such a (somewhat) forgiving context. Yet what remains more puzzling and alarming is the big wet kiss she planted (rhetorically) on former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger this week, with a fawning review of his latest book, World Order.

Sure, perhaps there is secretary’s privilege—an old boy and girls club, in which the ex-foreign-policy chiefs do not speak ill of each other and try to help out the person presently in the post. Nothing wrong with that. But former-Madam Secretary Clinton had no obligation to praise Kissinger and publicly participate in his decades-long mission to rehabilitate his image. In the review, she calls Kissinger a “friend” and reports, “I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state. He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels.” She does add that she and Henry “have often seen the world and some of our challenges quite differently, and advocated different responses now and in the past.” But here’s the kicker: At the end of the review, she notes that Kissinger is “surprisingly idealistic”:

Even when there are tensions between our values and other objectives, America, he reminds us, succeeds by standing up for our values, not shirking them, and leads by engaging peoples and societies, the sources of legitimacy, not governments alone.

Kissinger reminds us that America succeeds by standing up for its values? Did she inhale?

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A 70-Year-Old Reflects On the So-Called "American Century"

by LashundU23 Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

* Seventy-three years ago, on February 17, 1941, as a second devastating global war approached, Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines, called on his countrymen to “create the first great American Century.” Luce died in 1967 at age 69. Life, the pictorial magazine no home would have been without in my 1950s childhood, ceased to exist as a weekly in 1972 and as a monthly in 2000; Time, which launched his career as a media mogul, is still wobbling on, a shadow of its former self. No one today could claim that this is Time‘s century, or the American Century, or perhaps anyone else’s. Even the greatest empires now seem to have shortened lifespans. The Soviet Century, after all, barely lasted seven decades. Of course, only the rarest among us live to be 100, which means that at 70, like Time, I’m undoubtedly beginning to wobble, too.

* The other day I sat down with an old friend, a law professor who started telling me about his students. What he said aged me instantly. They’re so young, he pointed out, that their parents didn’t even come of age during the Vietnam War. For them, he added, that war is what World War I was to us. He might as well have mentioned the Mongol conquests or the War of the Roses. We’re talking about the white-haired guys riding in the open cars in Veteran’s Day parades when I was a boy. And now, it seems, I’m them.

* In March 1976, accompanied by two friends, my wife and I got married at City Hall in San Francisco, and then adjourned to a Chinese restaurant for a dim sum lunch. If, while I was settling our bill of perhaps $30, you had told me that, almost half a century in the future, marriage would be an annual $40 billion dollar business, that official couplings would be preceded by elaborate bachelor and bachelorette parties, and that there would be such a thing as destination weddings, I would have assumed you were clueless about the future. On that score at least, the nature of the world to come was self-evident and elaborate weddings of any sort weren’t going to be part of it.

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A 70-Year-Old Reflects On the So-Called "American Century"

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