The story she was reading was about a forty-three-year-old unarmed civilian shot to death in a Tampa Bay movie theater by a seventy-two-year-old retired police captain who’d become “agitated” by the man during previews. Eyewitnesses said the victim had been “texting loudly.” Popcorn had been thrown.
She looked down from the screen at the bead of blood on her thumb. She watched it form a rivulet that ran down her palm and onto the white down comforter her friend had laid out on the bed for a Ukrainian folk singer arriving that night to teach a workshop in bilij holos at a nearby club. The blood formed a spot, brighter than the bead itself.
“He was a good, genuine person,” it was said of the deceased.
“He was just a funny guy. He brought life into every room.”
“Fate brought these two people together—it was ridiculous.”
None of the witnesses tried to stop the altercation. The movie was about Navy seals on a mission in Afghanistan. Its title was Lone Survivor.
She stared at the spot and then back at her thumb, where fresh blood coagulated. She thought again of the thing that had happened—that she had made happen, or at least not prevented from happening. The room had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the expressway, from which she could hear the variegated moan of afternoon traffic. She was having a hard time getting up.
Charles Cummings, a former Marine and Vietnam veteran who left the theater with the victim’s blood on his clothes, said he was shocked and saddened by the incident, which took place on his sixty-eighth birthday.
“I can’t believe anybody would bring a gun to a movie,” said Cummings.
“I can’t believe I got shot,” said the victim before he died.
The recipient of the texts was the man’s three-year-old daughter, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Read more…
From The Delinquent Man: Types of Offenders, 1897.
Wikimedia Commons, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma
Adrian Daub | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,170 words)
Physiognomy — the attempt to interpret a person’s character by means of their face — was one of those things that educated 19th-century Europeans knew wasn’t supposed to work. In his 1806 work The Phenomenology of Spirit, philosopher G.W.F. Hegel devoted a lengthy, indecipherable chapter to explain why physiognomy, and its cousin phrenology, had to be hokum. But even if Europeans knew they shouldn’t put stock in physiognomy, they found it incredibly difficult to resist the impulse.
To some extent this remains true today. During the Obama years, many of us were sensitive to representations of the new president, knowing full well that the way faces are read and analyzed could easily encode very old and deeply embedded racist ideas. Then Trump was elected. In a heartbeat, we were back to reading his face, playing with his face, and displaying it next to animal faces. Where does this temptation come from?
In the tactical operations center the general and I are watching out for innocent people like you, very closely, on-screen. We’re in southern Afghanistan still, a short helicopter ride from OP Shamalan, but most proper nouns inside the room are classified, and in exchange for entry I have agreed to leave my phones and recorders outside, so what I will describe comes from my notes and memory, can be verified only by those who were present. It is not necessarily their mission to tell the truth, but eventually I interview and record all of them separately outside that room, too, and without exception they believe themselves to be doing the right thing.
The operations captain, John, keeps dice on his desk and shakes them in his fist while he coordinates airstrikes. There is, on my arrival, much talk of how we don’t joke, we don’t cheer when we hit ’em, but soon everyone loosens up — like I’m cool with Hiroshima and You can’t say that shit in front of the reporter! And the word for a man who has escaped an airstrike and is running for his life on-screen is squirter. How could they not banter? Some of them are still kids, in that steel and plywood room. Not the chaplain, Sidney, though.Read more…
Anne Thériault | Longreads | September 2018 | 18 minutes (4,588 words)
From the notorious to the half-forgotten,Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.
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Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.
The year was 1519. Henry VIII was king of England and still (mostly) happily married to Catherine of Aragon. The throne of France was held by Francis I, also known as “Francis of the Large Nose,” which may or may not have been a dick joke. Charles I of Spain had just become Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Martin Luther was stirring up shit in Germany. And in Florence, a couple whose union represented a last-ditch coalition between France and the Pope against the ever-expanding Holy Roman Empire welcomed their first child, a daughter they named Catarina Maria Romula de’ Medici (hereafter referred to as Catherine).
I like to think of the Medicis as the Kardashians of Renaissance Europe; at the very least, they had the same intuitive understanding of how to create and exploit a personal brand. Just the mention of the Medici name conjures up images of vulgar opulence, moral decay, and murderous treachery. Machiavelli’s The Prince — the so-called “textbook for tyrants” — was dedicated to Catherine de’ Medici’s father, and it was rumored that each of her children carried a copy with them at all times. Catherine herself inspired such nicknames as the Serpent Queen, the Black Queen, the Maggot from Italy’s Tomb, and (more flatteringly) the Mother of the Modern High-Heeled Shoe. She was also called the Merchant’s Daughter, a dig at her family’s nonaristocratic origins.
Whether or not Catherine was a basilisk who covered her shimmering scales with silk and velvet is up for debate, but it’s true that the Medici dynasty had decidedly common roots. In fact, a little over a century before Catherine’s birth, the Medicis were little more than casually wealthy textile traders. I mean, they had money, but not in mind-boggling amounts. That all changed in 1397, when they started a bank and discovered a latent talent for money management. By the mid-1400s, the Banco dei Medici was the biggest bank on the continent, and the Medicis themselves were the richest family in Europe.
Money can’t buy you happiness, but it sure can get you just about anything else, including various titles, marriages into noble families, a couple of popedoms, and the de facto lordship of the entire city-state of Florence. Also: a tomb designed by Michelangelo! The only problem with the Medici family’s scheme to dominate Europe was that supply couldn’t keep up with demand; even as they acquired all these positions of power, their ability to produce heirs veered into a steep decline. By the time Catherine was born, she was the only legitimate heir of the main branch of the family, and it soon became clear that she was quite possibly the last.
“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury
when substituted for insight and understanding.”
— Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
* * *
There are some stupid mistakes that only very smart people make, and one of them is the notion that a sensible argument seriously presented can compete with a really good piece of theatre.
Every day, people on the internet ask why I won’t “debate” some self-actualizing gig-economy fascist or other, as if formal, public debate were the only way to steer public conversation. If you won’t debate, the argument goes, you’re an enemy of free speech. You’re basically no better than a Nazi, and certainly far worse than any of the actual Nazis muttering about not being allowed to preach racism from prestigious pulpits. Well-meaning liberals insist that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” anti-fascists disagree, the far right orders more popcorn, and round and round we go on the haunted carousel of western liberal thought until we’re all queasy.
This bad-faith argument is a repeating refrain of this low, dishonest decade, and this month it built to another crescendo. In the U.S., The New Yorker bowed to public pressure and disinvited Steve Bannon, Trump’s neo-nationalist former chief strategist, from its literary festival. And in the U.K., The Economist chose to do the opposite.
American actor Denzel Washington on the set of Glory, based on the book by Lincoln Kirstein, and directed by Edward Zwick. (Photo by TriStar Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)
In an incisive essay for the Baffler, political scientist Adolph Reed considers how many pop culture creations made with Black audiences in mind — including films like Birth of a Nation, Selma, and Black Panther — are narratives of singular, heroic, often male, achievement. “Tales of inspiration and uplift,” he calls them. Meanwhile, films like Glory, which hinged on its historical accuracy, were received by some with considerably less enthusiasm:
Occasionally on a boring flight, I’ll rewatch the Battle of James Island scene from the magnificent 1989 film, Glory. The scene depicts the first engagement of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first Northern regiment of black troops organized by the Army of the United States to fight against the Confederate insurrection. James Island was a fateful battle outside Charleston, SC, on July 16, 1863. I pulled up the clip on a recent flight and was moved yet again by the powerful imagery of black men finally able to strike a blow against the slaveocracy. Imagining what that felt like for the soldiers of the 54th is always intensely gratifying.
Watching it this time, I remembered how startled I had been when Glory was released to learn that many people, including blacks and people on the left, dismissed or even disparaged the film as a “white savior narrative”—a phrase that is now a routine derogation of certain cross-racial sagas of resistance to white supremacy. In Glory’s case, this complaint arose mainly in response to the (historically accurate) depiction of the regiment’s commanding officers as Northern whites.
This objection left me dumbfounded. After all, the 54th Massachusetts was a real historical entity. As a compromise to ensure political support, it was stipulated that its officers be white. Nonetheless, prominent abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and the free black community of Boston, were enthusiastic about its formation and instrumental in recruiting its ranks.
Now I think I understand. I’ve long suspected that, to a certain strain of race-conscious or antiracist discourse, historical exploration in popular culture was less important than the propagation of tales of inspiration and uplift. These fables typically feature singular black heroes who have overcome crushing racist adversity against all odds. In recent years, a steady stream of films and other narratives have openly embraced that preference.
He suggests these escapist portrayals echo what is disturbingly superficial about our current drive to uplift diverse leadership and voices in media. “Winning anything politically — policies or changes in power relations — is not the point.,” Reed writes.
Decisions by blacks to support nonblack candidates or social policies not expressed in race-first terms are interpreted as evidence of flawed, limited, misguided, or otherwise co-opted black agency. The idea that blacks, like everyone else, make their history under conditions not of their own choosing becomes irrelevant, just another instance of insufficient symbolic representation.
The notion that black Americans are political agents just like other Americans, and can forge their own tactical alliances and coalitions to advance their interests in a pluralist political order is ruled out here on principle. Instead, blacks are imagined as so abject that only extraordinary intervention by committed black leaders has a prayer of producing real change. This pernicious assumption continually subordinates actually existing history to imaginary cultural narratives of individual black heroism and helps drive the intense—and myopic—opposition that many antiracist activists and commentators express to Bernie Sanders, social democracy, and a politics centered on economic inequality and working-class concerns.
“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”
— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
* * *
Huw Williams is not a hermit. Not exactly. For one thing, he answers a telephone while I’m visiting him. The phone connects to a jack somewhere, although I don’t understand how it can function properly; it seems impossible that a cabin so rudimentary and run-down could support something as technologically advanced as a telephone.
The floors are covered with broken power tools, a machete, unmarked VHS tapes, decades-old newspapers and knocked-over litter boxes once filled by the three cats prowling around. Stenches of urine and filth are masked only by the rot on the stove, where the remains of long-ago meals are eating through the pans they were prepared in. And the cabin is so cold that when anyone speaks, breath becomes vapor.
Dried-out orange peels hang from the ceiling. “It’s a way of breaking up the straight lines,” the 76-year-old Williams tells me cryptically. “I’m averse to being inside a box, with all straight lines.” A radio plays environmental talk radio here in Edwall, a tiny community about 35 miles by car from Spokane, Washington. The radio is part of an ’80s-style dual cassette player, but the trays where the cassettes should go are broken off.
When I came upon Williams’ cabin on a wet afternoon last September, I assumed it was empty. My GPS couldn’t locate it, and neighbors were unsure if it was inhabited. Rusted-out trucks and cars surround the house, which is up on a slight hill atop a dirt road that bisects another dirt road that runs off a few other dirt roads.
But for all his isolation, Williams is not hiding. He grew up on this land, which his parents ran as a cattle and wheat farm. He moved back here in the 1970s after his first wife ran off with their friend and took the kids. He also lived here with his second wife, until she too left him for another man. Anybody could find him, if anybody cared to. Maybe that’s the hardest part.
Williams has prostate cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, melanomas, multiple sclerosis, and he thinks he might be bipolar. He speaks slowly and softly, as if he might run out of breath at any second. He looks the Unabomber part, with his long beard and ragged clothing. But then, he was idiosyncratic even when he used to get out more. He hitchhiked across the country to protest nuclear war, got arrested a time or two, and, after going through a brief celibate period, was a swinger who had sex with his wife’s boyfriend’s mother. Most spectacularly, in 1963 he founded a 240-acre farm nearby that is among the longest-lasting remnants of the ‘60s communes that Charles Manson gave a bad name to. And it was based on the teachings of Leo Tolstoy. Read more…
The phrase "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work sets you free) appears at the entrance to Dachau and other Nazi concentration camps. Automatik, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sven Hoppe / AP. Photo illustration by Katie Kosma
Adam Skolnick | Longreads | August 2018 | 9 minutes (2,415 words)
“Every feature film is, in some ways, a lie,” said director Chris Weitz as he sipped his fourth double espresso. We were on set of Operation Finale, huddled under a tent next to acclaimed Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, and the specific lie up for debate was whether to turn a sunset scene into sunrise. That switch triggered some hand-wringing because moviemaking is an attempt to capture a scramble of moments, and if the look of one is altered, because, say, Oscar Isaac is still being primped in wardrobe as precious light fades from the sky, there are ripple effects, which can torpedo narrative flow and make even a true story feel false.
Whether or not the man Isaac was playing, Peter Malkin, actually landed at Ezeiza International Airport at dawn or dusk when he arrived in Buenos Aires in 1960 to help hunt down fugitive Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann, is beside the point. What matters is that Malkin’s arrival and all the moments thereafter feel real because this is a true story, one with urgent modern relevance. Plus, for Weitz this project is personal.
Chris Weitz, director of Operation Finale (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
If he missed an opportunity to shoot the scene as planned, the production schedule would be shredded, money wasted from an already stretched budget, and that matters because this is not the kind of movie studios like to make anymore. The 48-year-old director credits MGM for investing in an entertaining movie about a serious topic (read: there are no flying robots), but he’d declined to shoot in Budapest, which would have saved cash, preferring the authenticity of Buenos Aires — and now this.
“¿Qué estamos esperando?” Aguirresarobe asked nobody in particular. Weitz was wondering the same thing. It was 6:42 p.m. and the sky was darkening, but despite the pressure and his caffeine load, Weitz projected an aura of calm on his bustling bilingual set.
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“Every day you’re making a movie it sort of gravitates toward a clusterfuck,” Weitz reasoned as he rolled up the sleeves of his pin-striped button down. “You just have to surf it.” Scattered all around us were a range of cherry vintage vehicles (a Citroën, two DeSotos, and a few Di Tellas, Argentina’s endemic automotive brand) and more than 50 extras dressed in mid-century period attire. All of it — the dusky light, the location, the costumes, the stakes — produced a magical quality as if we were in the eye of a Fellini or Kurosawa dream sequence.
We’d met up earlier that morning at Weitz’s rented house in Buenos Aires’ hip Palermo district, with its trendy restaurants, corner cafés, and cobbled streets, hopped in his chauffeured Camry, and drove an hour out of town to set, during which time I peppered him with questions about his 20-year career. Weitz has imagined almost every movie genre starting with the iconic coming-of-age sex comedy, American Pie, which he produced and directed with his brother Paul. Their follow-up, About A Boy (they cowrote and codirected), placed them among the best screenwriters of their generation and garnered an Oscar nomination. Since then he’s directed fantasy popcorn (New Moon) and channeled his inner Star Wars geek to cowrite a smash hit franchise spin-off in Rogue One. In between he published three young-adult novels in a post-apocalyptic trilogy, and contemplated ditching Hollywood “to do something a bit more useful,” he said. Makes sense for a man who sits on the board of Homeboy Industries and is a sucker for the radical inclusiveness of Burning Man, where he met his wife, Mercedes Martinez. This was his first turn at the helm of a major studio movie in six years.
As soon as we arrived on the Argentine air force base doubling as Ezeiza, he was whisked away by production designer David Brisbin (Drugstore Cowboy, New Moon) and prop master Ellen Freund (Mad Men) to approve the throwback terminal and control tower. A bit later he was greeted by the base’s real-life commandant, distinguished in his flight suit, who invited him to a pig roast the following evening. His invitation sounded more like an order, but in each instance Weitz was gracious and unflappable, because, when it comes to making movies, he has seen it all.
‘Every feature film is, in some ways, a lie,’ said director Chris Weitz as he sipped his fourth double espresso.
Weitz was raised around the business. His grandfather Paul Kohner was a prominent agent and producer who married Mexican-born actress Lupita Tovar. Their daughter, Susan, Weitz’s mother, also became an actress, who won two Golden Globes and was nominated for an Oscar for the 1959 film Imitation of Life. The brothers Weitz grew up in New York City, but visited their grandparents in L.A. often. That meant attending sprawling Bel Air dinners with scions of Old Hollywood, John Huston and Ingmar Bergman among them, but the reason MGM’s Jonathan Glickman hired Weitz for Operation Finale was because of his father’s history.
John Weitz was 10 when Adolf Hitler was declared Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Part of a wealthy Jewish family, he was sent from Berlin to St. Paul’s School in London, where he would stay until 1938 when the rest of his family finally fled Nazi Germany. Together they made their way to the United States. Weitz joined the army in 1943, and as a well-educated native German speaker, matriculated into the Office for Strategic Services (OSS), a predecessor to the CIA. In late April 1945, John Weitz was part of the team that liberated Dachau, the notorious death camp, and became one of the first Allied soldiers to see the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand. He shared what he witnessed with a few close friends in a series of letters, but he never told his grisly war stories to his sons.
“When I think about it now,” Weitz said of his father, “it’s quite likely that he had some kind of PTSD. He never slept very well. He was tightly wrapped.”
After retiring from a successful career in New York fashion, John Weitz began writing biographies of Nazis, including one of the Minister of Economics under Hitler, Hjalmar Schacht, as if Nazism was a riddle he was still trying to solve. When Chris returned home for the summers while earning his degree at Cambridge, he was dispatched to the main branch of the New York Public Library to help with research. That meant poring over giant leather-bound catalogs in search of obscure German diplomatic histories. He’d frequently return to his father’s study with photocopies of entire books in hand.
In late April 1945, John Weitz was part of the team that liberated Dachau, the notorious death camp, and became one of the first Allied soldiers to see the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand.
“He was fascinated with how the upper classes in Germany made accommodations and kind of allowed or justified Nazis to themselves,” Weitz said, “having first mocked everything about it.” Still, his father never showed his scars from Dachau. It wasn’t until 2014, 12 years after his death, that Weitz received a copy of a letter signed by his father, dated May 5, 1945. It details a descent into an unfathomable waking nightmare.
Prisoners are milling around everywhere, the way they looked cannot be described … starved, beaten, scarred … They showed me the horrors… The gas chamber… the label over the door says in bitter irony “Brausebad”… cement walls and floors, little barred windows knee high… and eighteen nozzles in the ceiling… and next door the “control room” … where the SS men used to turn on the hot water then turn off the hot water and turn on the gas… and then the hundred or so… would choke to death, scraping their hands bloody on the cruel cement walls… tens of thousands died here… it can be smelled from hundreds of yards away… the stink of death …
Pull a thread from any of the tragic stories discovered at Dachau and it leads to Adolf Eichmann. He planned the logistics first for the mass deportation of Jews, then their herding into urban ghettos across Europe, and finally transporting them like abused livestock by train to concentration camps. Because of his meticulous design, at least 11 million people were murdered with brutal efficiency while he lived out the war like a gilded robber baron in stolen luxury.
Pull a thread from any of the tragic stories discovered at Dachau and it leads to Adolf Eichmann…Because of his meticulous design, at least 11 million people were murdered with brutal efficiency while he lived out the war like a gilded robber baron in stolen luxury.
Within weeks of reading his father’s letters for the first time, Weitz received the Operation Finale script from Glickman, who calls the movie “a riveting thriller” about Israel’s daring operation to capture Eichmann in 1960. Weitz knew the history. In the chaos that followed allied victory, some of the worst war criminals slipped free, including Eichmann, who escaped from a POW camp before he could be identified. Penniless and on the run, he worked as a lumberjack then a chicken farmer before connecting to an underground railroad for war criminals run by Nazi sympathizers within the Catholic Church. It was a cabal of priests that wrangled him a Red Cross passport — the same document Holocaust survivors depended upon — and, with the help of former SS-affiliated Argentinians, facilitated his escape from Italy to Argentina, where he built a life as Ricardo Klement and eventually sent for his family. It wasn’t until the daughter of a Holocaust survivor started dating his son, who still carried the Eichmann name, that his presence would register on the radar of Israel’s national intelligence agency, Mossad.
The original script, a debut written by 28-year-old Brit Matthew Orton, was terrific, and Weitz guided rewrites that would make it even better. Eichmann could have had an inner Hannibal Lecter quality, but Orton and Weitz resisted this interpretation. “That’s very juicy stuff, but I wanted him to be less of a villain so that he could end up more of a threat,” Weitz said. “Humanize him, and he becomes even worse.” That tracks historically, too. By the time Mossad agents found him, Eichmann was living the ordinary life of a factory foreman on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, hidden in plain sight.
In a fascinating bit of casting, Weitz tapped Sir Ben Kingsley to play Eichmann, which offers the Oscar winner, who brought Itzhak Stern to life in Schindler’s List, a chance to explore the Holocaust from the wrong side of history. Soon after, Oscar Isaac came on board as a Mossad agent who is haunted by his family’s death at the hands of Nazis. One week into shooting, Weitz shared the Dachau letter with his cast.
Originally slated for production in 2016, the schedule shifted to 2017 to accommodate Isaac, and an old story found modern relevance thanks to Brexit, Trump’s election, and a widening acceptance of racist, authoritarian thought. There was Charlottesville, of course, and Trump’s reaction to the tiki torch bearers who managed to be shocking, yet easy to dismiss in their buffoonery, making them even more dangerous. After all, how many steps is it from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Warsaw, Poland, where 60,000 angry people, including thousands of skinheads and Nazis took over the streets last November. And how different is the Trump administration — which championed a horrifying and brutal family separation policy for illegal immigrants that was widely condemned as child abuse (at least 528 children remain separated from their deported parents, and one toddler who was taken into ICE custody on the border has died) — from the coalition government in Austria, which includes leaders of their radical right Freedom Party, or Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary, which has consolidated power by demonizing Muslim immigrants and refugees. Are we just as bad? Are we worse? How much worse might we soon become?
I like to think part of the reason “alt-right,” nationalist ideas are thriving today is that somehow the idea of Nazism has been sanitized of its horrors, and that too many have forgotten — or were miseducated in the first place — about what the Nazi flag represents. A similar Nazi resurgence swept Europe, particularly Germany, in 1960, when Israel sent Mossad agents to Buenos Aires to kidnap Eichmann to put him on trial in the promised land. Back then, Germany hadn’t yet tuned their education system toward truth and reconciliation. Cleansed of blood, denial was comforting. The thrill of nationalism, nourishing. If Eichmann was offered a fair trial, the theory went, with the opportunity to defend himself, hard evidence could be displayed, witnesses would testify, and the entire truth about the Holocaust could be laid bare before a worldwide televised audience.
I like to think part of the reason “alt-right,” nationalist ideas are thriving today is that somehow the idea of Nazism has been sanitized of its horrors, and that too many have forgotten — or were miseducated in the first place — about what the Nazi flag represents.
“There is a line in the movie when Eichmann says, ‘Your lawyers and your lying press will frame me,’” Weitz said. “That very phrase is propped up in ‘alt-right’ circles today because if you attack the sources of information you attack the notion of truth itself, and if you destroy those sources you have the right to impose your will.”
Weitz has no illusions that his film, which includes a depiction of that trial, will influence policy or stem the tide of nationalism, as if it’s 1960 all over again. His focus has always been to tell an entertaining and suspenseful tale. “What’s cool about this story,” Weitz said, “is the [good guys] don’t have guns. Their job was to get him out alive.”
Of course, first they had to find him, and that meant a sunset — or perhaps sunrise — arrival at an exotic airport for Peter Malkin. Just before 7 p.m., Isaac appeared on set looking every bit the movie star, and the cameras rolled. By 7:10 p.m., after a couple of hiccups there was just enough light for one more take, and Isaac delivered. Though the scene was utilitarian — he’s getting picked up curbside — and is more an orchestration of extras and camera movements, he found the tension in his rival agent in the driver’s seat. “Avi sent you?” Isaac asked, annoyed. The camera held for a long beat, and the entire set exhaled.
“OK, OK, OK,” Weitz said, “We live.”
***
Adam Skolnick is an author and journalist living in Los Angeles.
Operation Finale stars Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley, and Mélanie Laurent, and is in theaters on August 29, 2018.
The spirit of the dead must live its life one more time in an accelerated fashion before departing to the realm of the ancestors. . . . It is believed that doing what was once done frees the living from the dead and vice versa.
— Malidoma Patrice Some, Ritual
I had just attended the 2013 Community Awareness Tournament in Roxbury. It was dark. I walked aimlessly along St. Mary’s Street near Boston University. Painful images of the young boys and men of Roxbury flooded my head. That afternoon Russell had asked me to read Marvin’s “Let It Be Magic” poem at halftime to the crowd. I couldn’t do it. Grief racked my body. I left the game. Tears rolled down my eyes as the full impact of the interviews and stories of Boston’s black young men hit me. This wasn’t a few suffering individuals — it was a collective injury. Take Marlon, whom I mention in the introduction. He was a long and skinny six-foot-two-inch player from Roxbury, versatile as a Swiss army knife. He shot threes from deep, made defenders fall with his hesitation dribble, and dunked on players off of one leg. A rhythmic beat reverberated through his head and the sound would grip his body during games:
It seemed like I always had a song going in my head, but I never knew what the song was. That’s just how my game was. It felt like I was dancing on the court. It’s not trying to show off, it’s just how my mind was going and obviously achieved. My mind had a song and I’m bumping to it in my head so now on the court it got me — I’m about to go dunk on somebody or I’m about to go shoot somebody’s lights out. I’m about to cross somebody. It was funny, it’s like I don’t know how many dudes that I made fall just from a simple move. Not even a crossover. A quick step and like “see you later.” Go down, roll it, dunk it.
Marlon, however, was almost raped by his abusive stepfather in a pissy Boston housing project building as a child. Fortunately, he fought him off, dressed his little sister, and hustled down several miles of snow-filled sidewalks to his grandmother’s apartment. His biological father was in prison and his mother was a drug addict, like so many parents of other ballplayers that I interviewed. “I’d run into somebody that was always like, ‘Your mom just copped [bought] some morphine,’ ” explained Marlon. “I tell them, don’t sell nothing to my mom. I’ll kill you. That’s what I tell a person. It’s like, ‘little n***er get the fuck out of here. You ain’t got no gun.’ ‘Oh, I don’t. Okay, be right back.’ [I’d] walk right into the projects. Saw one of the older dudes that know my mother and know my father like, ‘yo’ such and such this and such and such is my mom’s.’ ‘Here take that . . .’ ” and the older gangster would hand him a gun.
Staff Sgt. Alexander Pascual, right, from Kohala, Hawaii, from the U.S. Army First Battalion, 26th Infantry, looks back as he patrols the mountains of in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan's Kunar Province Saturday, May 9, 2009. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder)
As C.J. Chivers reports at The New York Times Magazine, the war in Afghanistan will soon be 17 years old. Three U.S. presidential administrations have presided over it, all the while issuing a series of politically palatable, yet hollow justifications. As seen through the eyes of Specialist Robert Soto, Chivers recounts Viper Company’s 2008 rotation in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, a brutal, harrowing, in-your-face example of how the hundreds of thousands of men and women who signed on to protect the United States after 9/11 have become the true casualties of ever-shifting, yet obstinate U.S. foreign policy.
Specialist Robert Soto had been haunted by dread as the soldiers left their base, the Korengal Outpost.
Soto sensed eyes following the patrol. Everybody can see us.
He was 19, but at 160 pounds and barely needing to shave, he could pass for two years younger. He was nobody’s archetype of a fighter. A high school drama student, he joined the Army at 17 and planned to become an actor if he survived the war. Often he went about his duties with an enormous smile, singing no matter what anyone else thought — R. & B., rap, rock, hip-hop, the blues. All of this made him popular in the platoon, even as he had become tenser than his former self and older than his years; even as his friends and sergeants he admired were killed, leaving him a burden of ghosts.
In early October, the Afghan war will be 17 years old, a milestone that has loomed with grim inevitability as the fighting has continued without a clear exit strategy across three presidential administrations. With this anniversary, prospective recruits born after the terrorist attacks of 2001 will be old enough to enlist. And Afghanistan is not the sole enduring American campaign. The war in Iraq, which started in 2003, has resumed and continues in a different form over the border in Syria, where the American military also has settled into a string of ground outposts without articulating a plan or schedule for a way out. The United States has at various times declared success in its many campaigns — in late 2001; in the spring of 2003; in 2008; in the short-lived withdrawal from Iraq late in 2011; and in its allies’ recapture more recently of the ruins of Ramadi, Falluja, Mosul and Raqqa from the Islamic State, a terrorist organization, formed in the crucible of occupied Iraq, that did not even exist when the wars to defeat terrorism started. And still the wars grind on, with the conflict in Afghanistan on track to be a destination for American soldiers born after it began.
More than three million Americans have served in uniform in these wars. Nearly 7,000 of them have died. Tens of thousands more have been wounded. More are killed or wounded each year, in smaller numbers but often in dreary circumstances, including the fatal attack in July on Cpl. Joseph Maciel by an Afghan soldier — a member of the very forces that the United States has underwritten, trained and equipped, and yet as a matter of necessity and practice now guards itself against.
On one matter there can be no argument: The policies that sent these men and women abroad, with their emphasis on military action and their visions of reordering nations and cultures, have not succeeded. It is beyond honest dispute that the wars did not achieve what their organizers promised, no matter the party in power or the generals in command. Astonishingly expensive, strategically incoherent, sold by a shifting slate of senior officers and politicians and editorial-page hawks, the wars have continued in varied forms and under different rationales each and every year since passenger jets struck the World Trade Center in 2001. They continue today without an end in sight, reauthorized in Pentagon budgets almost as if distant war is a presumed government action.
Time eases only so much doubt. Six years after leaving the Army, Soto still spent nights awake, trying to come to terms with his Korengal tour. It was not regret or the trauma of combat that drained him. It was the memories of lost soldiers, an indelible grief blended with a fuller understanding that could feel like a curse. Often when Soto reflected upon his service, he was caught between the conflicting urges of deference and candor. He tread as if a balance might exist between respecting the sacrifice and pain of others and speaking forthrightly about the fatal misjudgments of those who managed America’s wars. “I try to be respectful; I don’t want to say that people died for nothing,” he said. “I could never make the families who lost someone think their loved one died in vain.”
Still he wondered: Was there no accountability for the senior officer class? The war was turning 17, and the services and the Pentagon seemed to have been given passes on all the failures and the drift.
Some days he accepted it. Others he could not square what he heard with what he and his fellow veterans had lived. The dead were not replaceable, and they had been lost in a place the Army did not need them to be. Sometimes, when he was awake in the restless hours between midnight and dawn, his memories of lost friends orbiting his mind, Soto entertained the questions. What befell those who sent them? Did generals lose sleep, too? “They just failed as leaders,” he said. “They should know: They failed, as leaders. They let us down.”
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