The Wilson Quarterly - From The Editors

From the Editors: What We re Reading

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 07:00:00 EST

Steve Lagerfeld: A book bent on rescuing the reputation of bankers? The contrarian in me couldn’t resist Robert J. Shiller’s Finance and the Good Society (2012), a searching look at sleaze and the potential for good in the world of money. Shiller doesn’t stop at bankers; he sprinkles fairy dust over virtually every other group of players in the financial sector. But he also delivers some sharp jabs, arriving at the measured judgment that “we have to accept that some less-than-high-minded behavior may be the product of an economic system that is essentially good overall.”

Shiller is the Yale economist who famously predicted the stock market bust of 2000 in Irrational Exuberance and later the real estate collapse of 2007-08. He’s hardly a Wall Street shill—he favors progressive taxation, among other things, and is often mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate. It’s unfortunately true that he writes in a style befitting such a prudent, even-handed sort, lumbering with that basket of fairy dust through the financial world, examining the vices and virtues of bankers, mortgage lenders, accountants, and many others. It’s odd and strangely touching, however, to read an Ivy League academic come to the moral defense of Wall Street types, and he’s persuasive.

Along the way, Shiller provides an enlightening ground level understanding of how the financial system works. He is passionate about the need to continue “democratizing” finance, which means giving relatively free reign to financial innovations such as mortgage securitization while spreading their benefits more widely. One of his many interesting ideas is to provide government subsidies to help individuals get legal and financial advice so they aren’t easy prey for snake-oil salesmen. This is a sober yet idealistic book, just the kind of antidote to hysterical demonizing that America needs.

Darcy Courteau: I do more rereading than reading, and I’m currently going through Family Ties (1960) by Clarice Lispector for perhaps the dozenth time. The best-known story in the Brazilian writer’s collection, “The Smallest Woman in the World,” tells of a French explorer who has just discovered the title character, an African pygmy whom he names Little Flower. In its Sunday edition, a newspaper prints a life-size photograph of her, disturbing some and delighting others. While following the reactions of readers in several households (one child imagines keeping the woman as a toy), Lispector’s story becomes a meditation on love, which is, in the author’s hands, dark and devouring:

In [one] apartment, a lady felt such perverse tenderness for the smallest of the African women that—an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure—Little Flower could never be left alone to the tenderness of that lady. Who knows to what murkiness of love tenderness can lead? The woman was upset all day, almost as if she were missing something. Besides, it was spring and there was a dangerous leniency in the air.

Back in the jungle, the tiny woman falls in love, too, with the explorer. She gazes upon him and his boots, her eyes telling him that “it is good to own, good to own, good to own.”

Here in DC, the weather has gone from freezing rain to nearly 70 degrees in the past couple of days. We’ve just received word that a line of storms is moving in. Spring, in other words. It’s a dangerous time.

Cullen Nutt: In the novel The Yellow Birds (2012)—which I recently finished—Iraq veteran Private John Bartle doesn’t realize why he joined the U.S. Army until near the end of the book, when his postwar mental disintegration is nearly complete. The author, Kevin Powers, has also published poetry, and he brings that form’s spare prose here. Bartle admits that all the gratitude shown him by friends and family for his military service is actually killing him—he has done terrible things, but

everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start to want to burn the whole goddamn country down, you want to burn every goddamn yellow ribbon in sight . . . but then you signed up to go so it’s all your fault . . . and, really, cowardice got you into this mess because you wanted to be a man and people made fun of you and pushed you around in the cafeteria and the hallways in high school because you liked to read books and poems sometimes and they’d call you fag and really deep down you know you went because you wanted to be a man and that’s never gonna happen now and you’re too much of a coward to be a man . . .

Powers is himself an Iraq War veteran. He joined up as a 17-year-old from Virginia and, in 2004 and 2005, served for a year as a machine gunner in Iraq. After the military, Powers went to college and then earned an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Texas at Austin. The Yellow Birds, his first novel, was a finalist for a National Book Award in fiction. Now Powers is at work on a book of poems, which is where he truly shines. In “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting,” published in Poetry in 2009, Powers mentions a “Pvt. Bartle” in an arresting stanza:

I tell her how Pvt. Bartle says, offhand,

that war is just us

making little pieces of metal

pass through each other.

For more vivid insights into the agony and absurdity of war, read The Yellow Birds.

Alex Tate: I recently finished Kevin Roose’s The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University (2010). Then an atheist sophomore at Brown, Roose rejected the study abroad experience in favor of spending a semester somewhere closer to home, but just as foreign: Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Founded by evangelical minister Jerry Falwell to train college students to be “Champions for Christ,” Liberty requires its students to live by a strict code of conduct that forbids, among other things, watching R-rated movies. Taking a page out of mentor and immersion journalist A.J. Jacobs’ books, Roose submerses himself in the life of an evangelical Christian. He takes a class on creationism, evangelizes in night clubs during spring break, and receives counseling to rein in his lust. Neither his professors nor his peers know about his intended project.

In his quest to humanize the image of Bible-thumping, vitriol-spewing fundamentalists, Roose has to face that sometimes “you can peel the stereotype off a person and not see a beautiful human being underneath.” Some Christians use religion as justification for being truly hateful and violent. He struggles to reconcile this realization with the many thoughtful and compassionate students who become his friends. Roose’s friendships are what he takes with him in the end, even after coming out as an atheist, as proof that America’s “God Divide” is not so great.

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Photo by eisenbahner via Flickr

From the Editors: Dilemma of a Football Fan

Cullen Nutt — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 07:00:00 EST

Football binds us together. Millions of Americans will gather to watch this Sunday’s Super Bowl. I’ll be watching at home with my dad. As Benjamin J. Dueholm put it recently, NFL football is “the central liturgical act of American civic religion.”

Dueholm is a Lutheran pastor in Wauconda, Illinois and a die-hard Green Bay Packers fan. In the Winter 2013 WQ, we highlighted his reluctant but compelling argument against American football. Writing as a concerned member of the faith in The Christian Century, Dueholm says the game’s physical and possibly neurological damage to those who play it is too large to ignore.

On the face of it, the evidence is mounting that a career in professional football, or even playing in high school or college, can haunt athletes after they hang up their cleats. A four-year study completed in December 2012 of the brains of 85 deceased athletes and military veterans found at least some symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease, in the brains of 34 of the 35 athletes who had played professional football.

These findings grabbed headlines, but the doctors behind the study cautioned against snap judgments. The players were far from a representative sample. Players’ families usually donate their loved ones’ brains to this research because they showed symptoms of CTE, such as dementia or depression, while still living.

Another group of doctors recently tested 34 retired NFL players for depression and cognitive problems. Eight players had mild cognitive impairment and eight suffered from depression. Both rates were slightly higher than normal. None of the players showed signs of CTE, and the authors noted that the diagnosis itself is sketchy. CTE “is not universally accepted, and clinical diagnostic criteria have yet to be established.”

Football’s damage to the rest of the body is more easily documented. Several weeks ago, Dan Le Batard of the Miami Herald wrote of the toll taken on former Miami Dolphins linebacker Jason Taylor in excruciating detail. Thanks to painkillers, Taylor played through horrific injuries during his 15-season career (1997–2011). At one point, he played with such a severe calf injury that he nearly had to have his leg amputated when a condition called compartment syndrome set in.

In 2011, New York Jets defensive lineman Kris Jenkins gave a similarly eye-opening account of his NFL career. “You ever been in a car crash?” he asked a New York Times reporter. “Football is like that. But 10 times worse. It’s hell.” But it’s a hell that many players say is worth enduring. Taylor insisted to Le Batard that he has no regrets. Neither does Jenkins.

Many players do have regrets, however. Some 4,000 players and their families—including the families of several players who have committed suicide, possibly as a result of CTE—are suing the NFL, charging that the league covered up the long-term effects of head injuries. Paul M. Barrett fully explores the case—and the NFL’s proactive response—in the latest Bloomberg Businessweek.

The NFL is only half the story. College and high school football pose grave risks to amateur athletes. On the professional front, Harper’s writer Nathaniel Rich recently spent time with the New Orleans VooDoo of the Arena Football League. The league’s small field, padded walls (there are no boundaries), and special rules encourage spectacular collisions. AFL players lay their bodies on the line for a shot to play in the NFL. Few make it. Rich tells of 31-year-old Josh Bush, a diminutive kick returner deemed too small for the NFL. “But he had been playing football since he was eight,” Rich writes, “and he refused to give it up.”

As a fan, I can’t imagine giving it up either. Can’t football be made safer? Dueholm doesn’t think so, and he may be right. I’ll still tune in to the Super Bowl on Sunday. I’ll savor the warm company of family and the shared enthusiasm for the game. I’ll admire the dedication of the players, many of whom say that theirs is a choice and a privilege to play at the highest level. But I’ll be more conscious than ever of football’s dangers. Watch—and play—with care.

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Photo by Darin House via Flickr

From the Editors: Prickly German Privacy

Cullen Nutt — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 07:00:00 EST

Germans would seem to have modern living down pat. On my wintry weeklong stay there last month, Berlin hummed with activity. People thronged 60-odd Christmas markets, drinking mulled wine and buying up ornaments and trinkets. Cranes loomed over new buildings in what was East Berlin, the dreary capital of communist East Germany. German beer lived up to its billing. There was hardly a whiff of worry in the air.

I was in the country with 14 young American journalists as part of the Berlin Capital Program, a short fellowship paid for by the German Fulbright Commission. Despite the festive atmosphere, I discovered that the Germans do few things better than worry. Parliamentarians, journalists, editors, and academics we met repeated a long list of fears: Greek debt, nuclear power, right-wing nationalists, global warming, the failure of immigrant integration, enduring disparities between former East and West Germany, anti-Semitism, being late to appointments. You can count on Germans to touch every base.

The passion behind one German concern took me by surprise: data protection. Like many Europeans, Germans jealously guard their privacy. They shudder at the thought of government bodies or corporations storing their personal information, perhaps in part because the Nazis and, later, the East German secret police did this with deadly consequences. Companies in Germany cannot keep any personal information on file without specific permission from individuals. The Federal Data Protection Law (or Bundesdatenschutzgesetz to loquacious German-speakers), first passed in West Germany in 1976 and amended several times since, provides the legal basis for privacy protection. It is more stringent than any American equivalents. The law mandates the appointment of privacy protection watchdogs, known as data protection commissioners, in Germany’s 16 states and at the federal level.

The commissioners don’t shy away from a fight. Google ran afoul of them—and similar authorities across Europe and North America—when, between 2007 and 2010, it collected unencrypted data from private wireless networks during street-by-street photographic surveys for its Street View feature within Google Maps. Google claimed it was all an accident, which did little to placate outraged Germans. Prosecutors in Hamburg, where we took a day trip to visit the offices of Der Spiegel magazine, eventually dropped a criminal case against Google. In 2011, a state supreme court in Berlin ruled that, so long as people’s faces and license plates are blurred, Google’s Street View pictures—“accidental” wireless data sniffing notwithstanding—are legal. But the technology giant was sufficiently chastened that it voluntarily halted any expansion of its Street View picture archive in Germany. If Germans dislike the idea of their faceless figures, businesses, or residential facades appearing in Internet photos, they can opt to be blurred out entirely. As of April 2011, nearly 250,000 Germans had gone to the trouble to do so, airbrushing themselves out of Street View existence.

Nor has Facebook been spared. In August, Johannes Caspar, the Hamburg state data protection commissioner who led the charge against Google, cried foul over Facebook’s facial recognition technology, which scans faces in uploaded pictures and suggests friends to tag. Threatened with fines and bad PR, Facebook capitulated the next month and promised to turn the feature off in Europe. Then, just a few days ago, the data commissioner for the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein demanded that Facebook allow users to create accounts with pseudonyms rather than their real names. “It is unacceptable that a U.S. portal like Facebook violates German data protection law unopposed and with no prospect of an end,” Thilo Weichert said in a strongly worded press release. “The aim of the orders of [the state data commission] is to finally bring about a legal clarification of who is responsible for Facebook and to what this company is bound to.”

German law, evidently.

All the handwringing doesn’t keep Germans off the Web. Most of the young people I met had Facebook accounts. What distinguished them from many Americans was their awareness of the Internet’s intrusiveness. If Germany is a bit uptight about protecting privacy, then the United States may be altogether too lax. We could use a little more of their vigilance, not to mention their way with bratwurst and Christmas markets.

Photos: Hamburg Christmas market

From the Editors: Food and Rhetoric

Cullen Nutt — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 07:00:00 EST

Land grabs—a catchall term for purchases by governments and private investors of huge tracts of farmland, mostly in the developing world—are on the rise. Some 568 million acres of land—an area as large as Western Europe—changed hands or were leased between 2001 and 2011, according to one study. The lion’s share of those transactions occurred after 2008. Michael Kugelman, who in the Autumn 2012 WQ surveyed India’s sense of its unique role to play in world affairs, tackles the issue in The Global Farms Race: Land Grabs, Agricultural Investment, and the Scramble for Food Security (Island), which he co-edited with Susan L. Levenstein. Food prices reached new heights in 2008 (but have leveled off since then) and many governments fear the social and economic consequences of high commodity costs and diminishing resources. One solution is to bypass the global market and till faraway lands to supply your own needs. Countries as diverse as China, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Brazil have gotten in on the action—as have investors from the United States.

If the various actors involved play nice, land grabs could benefit local growers and faraway consumers alike. But there is plenty of room for predation, writes Kugelman, a senior program associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Wilson Center. Land designated unused or fallow by central governments often turns out to be vital to people living nearby. The wheeling and dealing over land is opaque, and host governments are frequently in a weak negotiating position. Economists, sociologists, anthropologists, business consultants, and a commodity exporter contribute amplifying chapters on these issues. “The world may be experiencing a land rush,” Kugelman writes, “but it is also caught up in a rush for information about this topic—and supply is limited.”

In the Summer 2012 WQ, historian Gil Troy admitted that modern American presidential campaigns frequently descend into farce. But, he argued, they do a fine job of testing the candidates’ character and mettle. Troy, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, finds plenty of mettle in Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003), the Harvard sociologist and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1975 when the UN General Assembly passed a resolution that equated Zionism with racism. In Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism (Oxford), Troy recounts Moynihan’s famous reaction to the resolution. The United States, he thundered to the assembly, “does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.”

The Assembly ultimately revoked the resolution—in 1991. But Moynihan’s unvarnished words put him in diplomatic hot water. He resigned as ambassador a few months later. The speech won him praise and admiration from the American public, however. He went on to serve four terms as U.S. senator from New York (and was instrumental in creating the Woodrow Wilson Center). In the malaise of the 1970s, Troy argues, Moynihan’s speech jolted many Americans out of a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate coma. “Moynihan’s anger was patriotic but not personal, populist but not partisan, offering confident leadership when most leaders dithered,” Troy writes. Fully five years before the election of Ronald Reagan, Moynihan “paved the way for a more muscular, idealistic, foreign policy.”

The WQ tips its hat to Kugelman and Troy.

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Photo of newly cleared farmland in Uganda by Friends of the Earth International via flickr

From the Editors: Punting on Academics

Alex Tate — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 07:00:00 EST

Nothing excites Americans more than football. The last three Super Bowls were the most watched television events ever in the United States. With the NCAA poised to profit more than ever when it moves to a playoff system in 2014, debate swirls over compensation for student athletes and institutional spending on athletics. But does college football detract from students’ academic performance?

In the October 2012 issue of American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Jason Lindo, Isaac Swensen, and Glen Waddell tracked students’ grades during the football season at the University of Oregon from 1997 from 2007. As the Ducks' winning percentage went up—the team finished the 2001 season in the top five nationally—the grades of male non-athletes took a dive. The gap between male and female GPAs widened, and boys were more likely to receive failing grades. Girls’ performance may have suffered too, but the practice of grading on a curve obscures a clear answer. In a survey designed by the authors, both sexes said that the Ducks' wins fueled alcohol consumption, but males were more likely to party harder and study less.

The good news is that a winning football team doesn’t seem to do longer term damage to students’ careers. In fact, among girls with lower than average SAT scores and/or high financial need, the Ducks' winning streaks reduced the probability of dropping out. These girls could have been the main benefactors of grading on a curve, or they could have been buoyed by school spirit. So it may be that a winning season is, overall, a winning season for academics too.

Alex Tate is a senior at Georgetown University and the WQ’s autumn intern.

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Photo by vagabond by nature via flickr

From the Editors: A Pilgrimage to Ukraine: The Story Behind a Photo

Darcy Courteau — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 07:00:00 EST

Finding the right artwork to accompany an article is a pleasant but exacting task. It’s especially hard when the story’s subject is as solemn as that of anthropologist Margaret Paxson’s “Precipices” in our new issue, which considers two European communities’ very different responses to the Holocaust. To accompany parts of the essay that take place in France, we scored a couple of images by Pulitzer-winning photographer Lucian Perkins, who’s worked with Paxson in the past. But only after hours of searching did we find the work of Ted Seymour, who in 2009 visited Babi Yar, a ravine outside of Kiev that figures prominently in Paxson’s story. There, 100,000 people were killed during the war; in two days in September 1941, Nazi executioners, with the help of local collaborators, shot 34,000 Jews, letting their bodies fall into the ravine.

Seymour had traveled to Ukraine in part to visit the homeland of his grandparents, Jews who immigrated to the United States in the 1920s, he said when I spoke with him over the phone. Once in Ukraine, he made three separate trips to Khotyn, the home town of one of his grandfathers, and attended religious services at the single remaining synagogue in the city. There was no rabbi, so one man volunteered to lead the services. According to members of the community, only 29 Jews remained in Khotyn. In 1900, Khotyn had been home to 24 synagogues and 18,000 Jews.

At Babi Yar, about 300 miles from Khotyn, Seymour, like our author, was struck by how desolate the place was, and how strewn with trash—“despoiled.” He settled on the edge of one of the draws, and holding a string of prayer beads, began reciting prayers as he imagined the people who had perished, their anger, terror, or spiritual preparations as they moved closer to the ravine’s edge.

After a while he lost track of his prayers. “My mind gravitated to the beauty that was there,” the flowers and trees now rooted in the ravine, he said, and he walked into it. He fashioned fallen, yard-long twigs into a Star of David, and snapped the image (shown above) that now accompanies Paxson’s story. He meant it as a small, personal gesture. “Maybe someone kicked it over the next day or maybe it stayed there for the next year, when it degraded,” he reflected. “I don’t know.”

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From the Editors: Possible Us

Erica Bleeg — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 07:00:00 EST

A month ago, the National Park Service unveiled panels documenting the long human history of Jones Point Park. “The hardest part of our work,” said Pam Cressey, a city archeologist involved in the effort, “is deciding what to say within a limited space.” A detail of the panel on astronomer Benjamin Banneker is shown below. (All photos © Erica Bleeg.)

By Erica Bleeg

In Alexandria, Virginia, just south of a wharf where at low tide great egrets feed, there is a 40-acre park on a small peninsula that since colonial times has been called Jones Point. Recently, I followed a dirt path into a grove of trees to explore, stopping at what the National Park Service calls an “interpretive wayside panel,” one of those ubiquitous educational plaques scattered throughout America’s parks. I was surprised to find a name I hadn’t seen in years: Benjamin Banneker.

As I walked and read the other half-dozen panels scattered throughout the park, each attempting to capture a different era of the peninsula’s history, I wondered how Banneker came to be remembered there. Banneker’s panel pictures two men, one white and peering into the lens of his surveying instrument, and one black, looking into the same distance with his naked eye, pencil and paper in hand. The man with the gadgetry is Major Andrew Ellicott, charged with surveying the D.C. boundary and based in Jones Point, the panel explains, while “on-site measurements and round-the-clock astronomical calculations were conducted by Benjamin Banneker, a free black, self-taught in math and astronomy.” The pair began work on Jones Point in 1791, after President Washington declared that the United States capital must be moved from Philadelphia to its present location.

Since 1964, the Park Service has worked with the Daughters of the American Revolution in developing Jones Point. In the early 20th century, the DAR maintained Banneker and Ellicott’s federal boundary markers, laid at one-mile intervals in 1791 and 1792 (37 of the original numbered stones still stand today), so I went to the local chapter’s former regent to ask if the chapter had anything to do with contributing the new panel content about Banneker and Ellicott. She didn’t know who they were.

Matt Virta, who led the Park Service’s team in developing historical content for Jones Point, said that it wasn’t until after the civil rights era that the United States began to give more funding to projects that documented the stories of minority groups and women. The Benjamin Banneker Park and Museum, for example, built on the land where the Banneker family once lived, was established in 1998, and in 2011 a memorial to Banneker was dedicated on Washington’s Southwest Heritage Trail. Virta doesn’t think Banneker is unknown so much as overshadowed, emerging from the field of history’s long tradition in which “the stories of great white men, their homes, and where they did their famous deeds were emphasized.”

Banneker first came to my attention in 1994 when I read Rita Dove’s poem by the same title. Dove was Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress at the time, the first African American to hold that position, and the youngest. “Banneker” was published in her second volume, Museum (1983), which honors the obscure and the exploited, those who typically don’t get a voice to tell their own stories in the historical record.

Dove recently confirmed via email that she saw Banneker as an “underappreciated American icon.” She doesn’t remember exactly how she came across his name, but she was living in West Berlin at the time, “a young writer who couldn’t read all the books in the library fast enough.” At the American Memorial Library on Bluecherplatz, she recalled, “The stacks were dusty and many of the pages crackled. This was especially true in the American history section. I’m certain I found Banneker in one of those volumes. . . . Far away from home, surrounded by a foreign culture in that most beautiful yet at the same time beleaguered city, I felt a kinship with Banneker’s miraculous existence.”

Benjamin Banneker was born in 1731 in Oella, Maryland. Banneker’s father, Robert, was an escaped former slave from Guinea. His mother was the daughter of a white Englishwoman, Molly Welsh, who came to the colony as an indentured servant; after serving seven years, she purchased Banneka, a slave from Africa’s Gold Coast, to help on her fledgling farm. She then gave him his freedom and married him. Silvio A. Bendini’s biography, The Life of Benjamin Banneker (1972), reminds us that she did so “at considerable risk to her own freedom, for laws concerning miscegenation were stringent.”

Raised on his parents’ tobacco farm, Banneker learned how to read from his grandmother, who taught him from her one book, the bible. He attended a country school and advanced through “double-position,” what we now call high school freshman algebra, but his formal studies were cut short when his father needed full-time help. At 22, Banneker gained fame when he made an operational clock. In a time when few owned clocks, people would travel to his remote farm just to see the timepiece and meet “the unusual farmer” who made it.

Of those neighbors was George Ellicott, one of a cohort of brothers who launched a major flourmill operation in what is now Ellicott City, Maryland. George nurtured Banneker’s interest in astronomy, and probably helped him land the surveying position alongside his brother.

After the surveying project concluded, Banneker began publishing almanacs, peppering reports of lunar movements and weather with political commentary. In 1792, he boldly wrote to then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, stating that black people are not inferior to whites and should be free. He included a copy of his almanac as evidence of black people’s intelligence. Alluding to Jefferson’s role in drafting the Declaration of Independence, Banneker wrote, “Sir, how pitiable it is to reflect, that although you were so fully convinced of the Father of Mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of these rights and privileges, which he hath conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren.”

Banneker published his correspondence and Jefferson’s reply in his 1793 almanac. Despite his courteous response, Jefferson later confided to a friend that “I have a long letter from Banneker, which shows him to have had a mind of very common stature indeed.” He assumed Banneker relied on Andrew Ellicott for help with his mathematical calculations.

I turn to Dove’s Museum, whose dedication page reads, “for nobody / who made us possible.” Her poem “Banneker” begins:

What did he do except lie

under a pear tree, wrapped in

a great cloak, and meditate

on the heavenly bodies?

The provocative line, “What did he do . . . ?” plays over in my mind as I read to the end:

Lowering his eyes to fields

sweet with the rot of spring, he could see

a government’s domed city

rising from the morass and spreading

in a spiral of lights. . . .

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From the Editors: Horse Nation

Darcy Courteau — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 07:00:00 EST

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the National Museum of the American Indian’s “A Song for the Horse Nation,” an exhibit celebrating the relationship between Native Americans and horses, animals introduced by the Spanish and whose value American Indians quickly appreciated. Having grown up with horses, and a competent, not to say elegant rider, I went in. Who doesn’t like to look at horses?

The horse was a major player in Indian history for only 100 years, but in that short time, many peoples, particularly those of the Great Plains, became legendary riders. “Horse Nation” attests to the intensity of that human-animal interdependence. The exhibit debuted in the museum’s New York wing, but the subject, too big for the 5,000-foot space, soon migrated to DC. Here, a full-size teepee and two life-size horse mannequins, among other things, spread out over nearly twice as much alloted space.

The curator, Emil Her Many Horses, works as a professional artist—he marries traditional Lakota beadwork with contemporary installations—and the exhibit is full of intricately-beaded horse head dresses and other decorations. Objects such as dance sticks, each carved to resemble a particularly treasured horse and carried into ceremonies, point to a spiritual link with horses. But the collection also contains traces of another story, an economic one. Horses were capital. Before horses arrived, women or dogs would carry teepees and other goods when breaking camp. No more. And with the advent of mounted bison hunting, teepees made of their hides got bigger. Tribes began raiding one another’s stock; (“we never say ‘steal,’ ” Her Many Horses said with a smile).

In his book, The Comanche Empire (2009), Pekka Hämäläinen, a professor of history at University of California, Santa Barbara, goes further in stressing the horse’s importance. The people who would come to call themselves Comanche were once a little-known tribe of hunter-gatherers who traveled out of New Mexico in the early 1700s to become colonizers (and slavers) of the southern Plains, vying with other indigenous groups as well as the Spanish, French, Mexicans, and Americans for territory and trade. There were several reasons for the Comanches’ rise, Hämäläinen writes, but at the center was the horse. Unlike dogs, which required meat, horses ate grass: “A conduit between immense, abstract solar energy and concrete, immediately available muscle power, the horse redefined the realm of the possible, bringing the Comanches a step closer to the sun.”

Astride their horses, the Comanches reshaped the settling of swaths of country:

Horses allowed the Comanches to dominate long-distance trade networks and extend their raiding sphere hundreds of miles south of the Río Grande, far beyond the grasslands, which were the natural core area of North America’s hunting-pastoral societies. With horses, Comanches could transfer information more effectively, spread out more widely, and come together more frequently. The equine revolution, in short, compressed time and distance, reducing the daunting expanses of the Great Plains, the Southwest, and northern Mexico to a size a single polity could manage and dominate.

Typical Comanche camps numbered about 250 people and 1,000 horses and mules. Having forsaken most gathering for mounted hunting, Comanches exchanged bison meat for corn and other carbohydrates. Surplus stock was kept for trade or to mark status.

If horses allowed the Comanches to push back against indigenous and European peoples coming from the east—and against the “skewed” notion of “eastern power and dynamism toward western weakness and passivity”—equines would also contribute to the decline of Comanche rule. The bison were overhunted, and even the huge, southern Great Plains couldn’t sustain the massive herds of horses now treading its earth. A 20-year drought starting in 1845 marked the beginning of the end.

Now, only a few tribes, among them the Crow, Lakota, Blackfoot, and Navajo, maintain equestrian cultures, Her Many Horses said. The great-great-grandson of a woman known for the number of horses she owned (thus his surname), he admitted that he didn’t ride until he went to college in his home state of South Dakota and took a horsemanship class. Assuming that an Indian could ride, the instructor put him on Powwow Warrior, an easily antagonized, bucking appaloosa with whom he developed a love-hate relationship that ended with the semester. Still, images of horses appear in his artwork. “If we talk about horses, we don’t depend on them like we once did,” he said. “But they’re a part of who we are.”

Photo by Jeremy Hiebert via Flickr.

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From the Editors: Seekers

Steven Lagerfeld — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 07:00:00 EST

There is no easy way to say it: Our new Summer issue is the last print edition of The Wilson Quarterly.

Beginning with the Autumn issue, the WQ will appear in digital form only—as an app available for Apple and Android devices, on the Nook and Kindle, and as a PDF available for download on your computer. It is a change born of both economic necessity and faith in the future. We hope you will join us on the next leg of a journey that has already stretched over 36 years.

Technology is often painted as an enemy, a disrupter, but that has not been our experience at the WQ. Without the technological advances of the last two decades, this magazine would not have survived. I don’t remember with any great fondness the days when editors leafed through mounds of books in search of illustrations, then set assistants to work typing letters to hidebound clerks at distant museums begging them to mail copies of the selected images, before the next millennium, please. Thanks to online databases and other resources, we can now do that work quickly, with many fewer hands. I distinctly remember the excitement I felt in 2001 when we were able to gather essays from all over the globe via e-mail for our cluster “How the World Views America.”

Still, this is an apt moment to salute all that has gone before. I tip my hat to the late Peter Braestrup, the Yale-educated former Marine who pulled off the astonishing feat of launching the WQ in 1976 and shepherding it into adolescence, and to Jay Tolson, my brilliant predecessor, who grew it into adulthood. Many others, from editors and writers to businesspeople and financial supporters, have helped make the WQ what it is. But it is you, our readers, who have been the ultimate sustainers of the whole enterprise. The greatest reward for me and my colleagues has been our sense of serving a great community of restless, intellectually curious people—seekers. We hope you will seek us out on the other side of the digital divide.

From the Editors: What We re Reading

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 07:00:00 EST

Cullen Nutt: Yesterday I finished the last line of Alan Jacobs’ slim but satisfying book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Though it’s a mere 150 pages, it took me several months to finally go the distance. Jacobs, an English professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, might applaud this. He argues in favor of reading slowly and deliberately, of taking more notes, of re-reading, and, most important, of reading at Whim, which he reverentially capitalizes. Reading at Whim means letting go of guilt and obligation and reading what interests us. It also means shaking off the dangerous habit of reading to have read: to impress other people or to check off a book from some list. (I’m guilty of these tendencies.) Little wonder that 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die comes in for some very harsh criticism here.

In fact, Jacobs would rather we bluff than surrender whim. “It is wrong to lie, but it may be still more wrong to read a bunch of books you don’t want to read,” he writes, “in order to impress people whose opinion you shouldn’t be deferring to anyhow.” Instead, “take a little time to figure out what people will be impressed to hear that you’re reading, use Wikipedia to find out just enough about these books to enable you to bluff plausibly when questioned—and then go back home and read whatever you want to read.” Amen to Whim.

Darcy Courteau: I just finished David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and I can’t remember when I was last so enchanted with a novel, or so wistful when it ended. The story happens in 1799 on an artificial island in Nagasaki Harbor, the only place in Japan where Westerners are allowed. It’s a no-man’s-land where employees of the Dutch East Indies Company serve multi-year contracts, passing the time with prostitutes, drink, and the graft that finally sank the actual company. It’s a hard place for a person softened with books and study, but accountant de Zoet is determined to stay true to his principles.

The ease of Mitchell’s telling—this is first and foremost a reader’s book—belies the insane amount of research that certainly went into detailing 18th-century corporate politicking, seafaring, arcane medical practices (the scene of a kidney stone’s removal is as fascinating as it is ghastly). Mitchell often stacks single-sentence paragraphs one on top of another, creating a sort of elegant, vertical script in keeping with the Japanese setting:

He turns to his sketch and sets about shading the sea with charcoal.

Curious, the oarsmen lean over; Jacob shows them the page:

The older oarsman makes a face to say, Not bad.

A shout from a guard boat startles the pair: they return to their posts.

Don’t take Thousand Autumns to the beach if you plan on getting any swimming in.

Steve Lagerfeld: The breeziest book I’ve read so far this summer is, believe it or not, David Wessel’s Red Ink: Inside the High-Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget. I got to know David when he was writing the book in an office a few doors down from mine here at the Wilson Center so I may be slightly biased, but there’s no doubt that it’s a remarkably readable work—I particularly liked his useful history of our modern budget struggles.

Parking may be the most underappreciated activity in American life—think of all the time and resources devoted to this everyday act—so I recently added Eran Ben-Joseph’s Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking to my parking library (yes, I have one). Ben-Joseph’s argument for a more humane approach to parking lot design may be a bit much for those who aren’t parking aficionados, but there’s a lot of interesting observation here, along with great facts: If all of the parking spaces in the United States were combined, they would cover an area the size of Puerto Rico. Facts galore populate Franklin E. Zimring’s The City That Became Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and its Control, an overlooked analysis of the causes behind perhaps the greatest policy triumph in decades, the suppression of crime, as seen through the lens of New York City’s experience. It’s good to be reminded that not everything is going to hell in a hand basket.

Megan Buskey: In a couple of weeks, I’m pulling up stakes and moving to the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C. In preparation, I’m making my way through Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850-1970 (1980) by historian James Borchert. After the Civil War, Borchert writes, the population of the capital swelled. With transportation limited to horse and buggy, space in neighborhoods such as Shaw, which is just north of downtown, was highly prized. Stately Victorian row houses proliferated along the neighborhood’s streets, but poor, usually African-American families made do with shacks and modest homes in the alleys behind them. Alley dwellings eventually landed in the crosshairs of social reformers such as Eleanor Roosevelt on account of what was deemed their hazardous conditions, and the city razed and regulated its way to alley-free living by the 1970s. Now, as with many survivors from the past in a reenergized D.C., the alleys that remain are being revived—a set on my new block is host to a coffee and waffles shop, a boxing gym, and an upscale molecular gastronomy restaurant. These developments may be welcome news to gentrifiers like me, but Borchert’s enduring work ensures that the history of the area will not be lost.

Michael Hendrix: After a few too many dry history books in a row this spring, I borrowed Salman Rushdie’s short novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) from a friend. Haroun, a young boy, and his father venture into a fantastical dreamworld, defending the story-loving Land of Gup against the silence-worshipping hordes of Khattam-Shud. The book’s themes led reviewers to note the parallel between the persecution Rushdie faced across the Muslim world for his Satanic Verses (1988) and the danger of “silencing” faced by the mythical Kingdom of Gup. Rushdie flaunts his talents at wordplay as few others can; names of characters and places are often puns in English, Hindustani, or both. Haroun combines the creativity of Dr. Seuss with mature thematic depth. For those looking for a refreshing break from nonfiction, Haroun fits the bill perfectly.

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