Search Results for: Nature

The Other People in Springfield

Photo by Alonzo via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Imran Siddiquee | Longreads | December 2017 | 15 minutes (3,638 words)

When I was 2 years old, my family moved from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Springfield, Illinois. My parents had come to Canada as graduate students in the early 1980s to attend the University of Manitoba, thousands of miles from their homes in Bangladesh. They were raising me and my two older sisters there when my dad received a job offer to teach economics at a small university in the middle of Illinois. So in 1987, they traveled across another border, embarking on a journey to becoming not only Americans, but Springfielders.

It was just a coincidence that soon after we had settled in the Land of Lincoln, around the same time I started at Carl Sandburg Elementary School, another family, much more famous than us, would move into a place called Springfield. Suddenly the name of our town would become synonymous with some larger American story, or at the very least, the absurdities of American culture.

***

The Simpsons debuted in 1989 when I was 5 years old, less than a year after my baby brother was born in Springfield. I recall my parents being wary of any of us watching this strange cartoon with its adult humor and reputation for vulgarity. But by the time I was in fourth grade I had managed to record a couple episodes on VHS, and my brother and I would occasionally watch life unfold in the fantasy Springfield in between chapters of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

By then The Simpsons was a global phenomenon, and regardless of whether you watched the show or not, its influence was pervasive. There were the enviable “Cowabunga” t-shirts at the mall, the ubiquitous TV ads featuring Homer being Homer, and the persistent echo of “D’Oh” and “Don’t have a cow, man” on the school playground. Lots of little boys wanted to be Bart and I was no exception, repeating risqué lines from a show I didn’t really understand. Even when we would visit family in Bangladesh, I remember people asking me about that strange-looking family from Springfield. Is that what’s it’s really like there?

But of course, in the real Springfield, in its classrooms and shopping malls, football games and state fairs, we were the strange-looking ones. And in truth, I was never going to be as rebellious as Bart, or be allowed to complete that journey across the border which my parents had set out on in the 80s. Because, when it came down to it, I was already someone else in the imaginary Springfield, the imaginary America.

As Hari Kondabolu explains in his new documentary The Problem With Apu, my family and I had been assigned a role by white culture — the foreign, strange, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon — as people like us had been assigned many times before, and would continue to be assigned many times after. On those same playgrounds, kids would soon ask me to do the famous accent or to nod my head from side-to-side like Apu did. I would learn that in order for white people to remain in their roles — people whose bumbling inadequacy never quite moves them from the center of American life — they needed me and my family to remain in the Kwik-e-Mart.

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The Loneliness of the Long Distance Rocker

Longreads Pick

The lead singer of the Old 97’s discusses the way digitization has disrupted the collaborative nature of a musical community whose members treat each other with respect, even when they’re making money.

Source: The Baffler
Published: Dec 4, 2017
Length: 9 minutes (2,423 words)

A Muslim, a Christian, and a Baby Named “God”

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad, painting by Homunkulus28/Getty

Rachel Pieh Jones | Longreads | December 2017 | 15 minutes (3,733 words)

 

“And sometimes it’s the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn’t belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.”Karen Armstrong, author of several books on comparative religion.

When God and his mother were released from the maternity ward they came directly to my house to use the air conditioner. It was early May and the summer heat that melted lollipops and caused car tires to burst enveloped Djibouti like a wet blanket. Power outages could exceed ten hours a day. Temperatures hadn’t peaked yet, 120 degrees would come in August, but the spring humidity without functioning fans during power outages turned everyone into hapless puddles. I prepared a mattress for Amaal* and her newborn and prayed the electricity would stay on so she could use the air conditioner and rest, recover.

In 2004 when my family arrived in Djibouti, I needed help minimizing the constant layer of dust; Amaal needed a job. I needed a friend and Amaal, with her quick laugh and cultural insights became my lifeline. My husband worked at the University of Djibouti and was gone most mornings and afternoons, plus some evenings. We had 4-year-old twins and without Amaal I might have packed our bags and returned to Minnesota out of loneliness and culture shock.

I hired Amaal before she had any children. She wasn’t married yet and her phone often rang while she worked, boys calling to see what she was doing on Thursday evening. To see if she wanted to go for a walk down the streets without street lights where young people could clandestinely hold hands or drink beer from glass Coca-Cola bottles. She rarely said yes until Abdi Fatah* started calling. He didn’t drink alcohol and didn’t pressure her into more physical contact than she was comfortable with in this Muslim country. She felt respected. She said yes.
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Is Estonia Leading the Way to the Future Digital World?

Lucas Vallecillos / VWPics via AP Images

Although you might not be able to find Estonia on a map, physical locations are less important in this country’s vision of the future. For The New Yorker, Nathan Heller visits this small Baltic nation to see how they’re transforming themselves into a borderless digital society.

Health records, banking information, student and car and voting registration, police reports, court cases ─ they’re all linked across digital platforms. To reduce breaches, the information is held locally, but a government-owned platform ultimately links data, even to other countries who use the platform. The goal isn’t to simply improve efficiency, it’s to save money and encourage business that will generate money. Having a porous digital society that uses a remote model attracts investors and entrepreneurs to Estonia, both physically and as e-residents. Heller’s story starts with Taavi Kotka, the chief information officer who helped roll out the e-Estonia project. As they spoke, a robot mowed Kotka’s lawn. “Everything here is robots,” Kotka told Heller. “Robots here, robots there.” But digitization has less to do with automation than it does with embracing the transient nature of labor in the European marketplace.

“I am President to a digital society,” she declared in her address. The leaders of Europe were arrayed in folding chairs, with Angela Merkel, in front, slumped wearily in a red leather jacket. “Simple people suffer in the hands of heavy bureaucracies,” Kaljulaid told them. “We must go for inclusiveness, not high end. And we must go for reliability, not complex.”

Kaljulaid urged the leaders to consider a transient population. Theresa May had told her people, after Brexit, “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.” With May in the audience, Kaljulaid staked out the opposite view. “Our citizens will be global soon,” she said. “We have to fly like bees from flower to flower to gather those taxes from citizens working in the morning in France, in the evening in the U.K., living half a year in Estonia and then going to Australia.” Citizens had to remain connected, she said, as the French President, Emmanuel Macron, began nodding vigorously and whispering to an associate. When Kaljulaid finished, Merkel came up to the podium.

“You’re so much further than we are,” she said. Later, the E.U. member states announced an agreement to work toward digital government and, as the Estonian Prime Minister put it in a statement, “rethink our entire labor market.”

Read the story

Watching a Fall

AP Photo/Massoud Hossaini

Christine Spillson | Boulevard | Fall 2017 | 18 minutes (5,070 words)

On the morning of August 14, 1936, Rainey Bethea stepped out a door and into the crowd whose reported numbers would conflict greatly, anywhere between 10,000-20,000, but whose number, reports agree, had been growing in the dark of pre-dawn Owensboro, Kentucky.  Though neither Bethea nor anyone else in the crowd could have known it, this would be the last public execution in the United States. When Bethea arrived for his scheduled hanging, he had his short-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the top so that his collar was closed.

He did not wear a necktie.

A path had been cleared for him. A tunnel, walled with human bodies, funneled him towards a stage. On the stage stood a scaffold, in the middle of which, was a trap door marked with an X. The X told Rainey Bethea where he would be standing and where the other men, some in white panama hats some not, should not stand. Not if they didn’t want to drop into history with the convicted man that they guided toward the center.

Rainey Bethea put one shoeless foot forward, pushing lightly down, as if to test the integrity of the space. As he moved onto the X it’s possible that, as Phil Hanna (“the humane hangman”) slipped on the noose he took a moment to whisper, “Remember, I am here to help you.”

The night before he was to be executed, Bethea took his last meal in a Louisville, Kentucky prison. One of the more widely printed pictures of Bethea shows him in the process of eating either lemon pie or mashed potatoes, both of which he requested. The black and white of the photo makes it difficult to tell which he is eating. In the picture, his shirt opens at the collar, revealing a cross tightly circling his neck. He stares out.

At some time between 5:23 a.m., when he arrived at the foot of the stairs, and 5:44 a.m., when he was pronounced dead, Bethea must have had a moment to stare out at the crowd that had gathered to watch him. He stood there watching them watch him watch them. A cycle that loops out into an infinite moment of observation. As he looked out he couldn’t have known that one of the men in the crowd had just told a reporter that he’d driven with six others from Florida to see the hanging. Bethea probably didn’t know that reporters were taking note of license plates from at least half a dozen other states and twenty different counties in Kentucky. The distance that they had traveled to be there didn’t matter, the audience was just a massive white monolith that pressed towards him from the front, the way dawn’s short but lengthening fingers reached toward him from his right, the way the stairs receded from his left, and the way that empty space beneath him pressed up toward his feet until it met the wood that held the X which, for that moment, still held his feet. Behind him, he must have known, there was nothing he could turn to see. Then there was the black hood to cover his face, a courtesy for the audience not Rainey Bethea; after that, he could see nothing at all.

***

My grandmother was there. My mother has tried to provide me an excuse for it. My grandmother, Dorothy Hagan before she was Dorothy Hagan Riley, was seventeen in 1936. She had left school three years earlier, after the eighth grade, to help support her family, her three brothers and two sisters. Her father, Jerome, walked every day to work in his tobacco field outside of town. While the living he made from it was enough to have moved his family from a log cabin with dirt floors and no running water and into a house in Owensboro, it was not enough to be enough. They had not made it far enough from the cabin and from rural poverty not to need more. A picture in my mother’s room shows her in that abandoned house, leaning out of a loft window that looks more like something that belongs to a barn than a home, and I stand below with my sister and my grandmother.

My grandmother, I am told, wouldn’t have gone to see a man hanged. My great-grandfather, I am told, wouldn’t have gone with his teenage daughter to see a man hanged. The definitive proof of this is that he was considered by all to be a Christian man. But they did. They were there. In that Friday’s predawn darkness, my great-grandfather chose not to walk to his fields outside of town but deeper into its center.  They walked together the few blocks from their home on Fifth Street and north towards the Ohio River and the parking lot that sat between First and Second streets (where the city convention center now stands) where the execution was to take place. They are somewhere there, possibly in the picture, definitely in the crowd of men in white hats, white shirts, and women in long skirts. After I asked, after I tried to make sense of it, of why the grandmother who I remember having jars full of those terrible puffy orange “circus peanut” candies, who made the world’s sweetest pecan pie and the South’s best biscuits and gravy, would have gone to watch a man killed, my mother calls me to offer her theory. She has come to it long after I originally posed the question and perhaps as a way to explain to herself why her mother would have been there. What lesson could she have been attempting to learn that wasn’t worth repeating to her children?  My mother tells me about the job in town. She argues that, if it was crowded like I say, then maybe it was hard to get home, hard to get out of the center of town, hard not to attend. She does not acknowledge that there is a distinction between having been there and having watched. I was told that she watched. I also know that it was done at dawn, that it was not evening, that she would not have been leaving. She had left her home early enough to attend.

***

The story of the execution of Rainey Bethea is likely not the story of an innocent man wrongly accused and put to death. It is not the story of a man being railroaded because of a city’s need for closure. Some disagree and the state of the justice system at the time certainly invites doubt but, by the time of his execution, Rainey Bethea had confessed to his crime on five separate occasions and had pleaded guilty during his trial. The first confession started in the back of a police car while being transported between jails after his arrest.

Sitting in the back of a Jefferson County police car, he leaned forward, “I might as well tell you something.” A small shape in the long back seat of the giant black Ford, he tells the two men driving him from Owensboro to Louisville that he entered Lishia Edward’s home, which he had worked in previously, by walking over the roofs of neighboring buildings and then prying at a loose window screen. In this first confession, possibly made while he was still intoxicated from the whiskey that he had been drinking earlier, he admits to choking the 70-year-old woman and then beating her and raping her. In this version, she does not move when he is finished and turns away to search the room for jewelry. By his fifth confession, she is alive when he leaves, and she tells his back as he exits out the window, “I know you.” But there, in his first confession, she doesn’t move as he left. He knew why the police focused on him and shook his head as if he can’t believe it even then, days later: “When I left, I forgot my ring.”

***

The crime that Rainey Bethea was convicted of committing, though horrific, becomes an essential but small detail in the story as it was brought to the nation. It was a story of a woman sheriff and the humane hangman. It was the story of a black man to be hanged by white men at the orders of a white woman in the South, and that was the way that it was presented. It was the story of a county that had elected to charge a man with rape rather than with murder, though the prosecutor believed him guilty of both, because in Kentucky one could punish rape by a public hanging in the town where the crime occurred; a murderer would be executed privately by the state with an electric chair.

In a decade that had seen 103 lynchings by the end of 1936 and would see another sixteen in the four years before its end, the public, court-sanctioned execution of an African American was, even so, a spectacle worthy of note and worthy of condemnation by the media of a country whose states had largely already removed the punishing of capital crimes from the public view. Even in a decade in which 2/3 of those executed by the government were African- American, the public nature of the event made it worthy of wider attention.

Rainey Bethea’s death was the story of a black man to be hanged by white men at the orders of a white woman in the South, and that was the way that it was presented.

The tension was obvious enough for anyone with an eye for drama to notice. The dynamics of race and gender and class were working together to create a story that was hard to look away from. Florence Shoemaker Thompson, the sheriff of Daviess County Kentucky, had been sheriff for only a few short months when Bethea was sentenced to hang. Sheriff Thompson had not run for the job. After her husband died in April of 1936 while in the office, a judge appointed his widow to fill the vacant seat. The appointment came from pity — she was a housewife with four young children that she needed to support — and from practicality — the vacancy needed to be filled swiftly so that law enforcement for the county could continue to function.

In his 1992 book, The Last Public Execution in America, Perry Ryan tells us that “hers is not the story of a feminist” rather “hers is the story of a simple but brave and forthright woman.” He characterizes Thompson as a good cook and an excellent seamstress who just wanted what was best for her children. This portrayal of the woman is reductively simple, just as the contemporary accounts of her go little beyond the picture of her as a sheriff in skirts. The press, and thus much of the nation, wondered if this woman who had only recently stepped outside of the home to work would be able to fulfill the duty required of a county sheriff if an execution was to be served out in their county. Could she, would she, pull the lever to make Rainey Bethea drop? How could they look away until they knew?

***

About a year ago, while eating dinner with my family in Florida, I very awkwardly brought up the topic of the execution of Rainey Bethea. My mother had invited her sister and brother over for dinner since I was home for a visit. I sat on the side of the dining room table that faces the smoked mirror wall that forms one side of the room. It is a relic of the house’s 1970’s origin that my mother finds charming and has refused to change in various renovation projects. I believe that she also thinks that it works to nicely reflect the light from the same era’s smoked glass bubble light chandelier that hangs over the dining room table, another relic of the house’s past that she has determined to keep.

I had watched a segment on The Rachel Maddow Show about the last public execution to take place in America. Maddow started the segment by talking about Florence Thompson inheriting her late husband’s job as the sheriff of Daviess County and the focused media attention that surrounded the execution. The point that Maddow was working to arrive at was that, though it was terrible, there was a sense of transparency to the processes, a transparency that had been notably absent during a botched lethal injection in Arizona. The story continued to stay in my mind as I thought about my grandmother’s connection to the place. I knew that while my mother and her siblings had not been born in or ever lived in that city, they had spent every summer there as children, since it was the town that their mother was from and the place where the majority of her family still lived. So when I brought it up over dinner in a sort of “did you know about this” way, I was surprised that my mother and her siblings looked at me with an “of course we knew that” look. They tell me that my grandmother attended but couldn’t explain why.

“She always just shook her head if it came up,” my aunt told me while we ate dessert. From what I can gather she never actually said a word about it to any of her children. But they never really asked about it. They didn’t ask her why she went. When I ask if she was racist or if her father was racist I get the reply, “No, of course not.”

I try to imagine going to see the execution out of a sense of justice or to get a feeling of closure. These are reasons that are offered for capital punishment, the reasons why they held public executions in the community that was affected by the crime, the reasons that might support my grandmother’s attendance. The victim had lived on the same street as my grandmother. It is said that everyone in town knew Lishia Edwards. Perhaps she felt personally injured. Perhaps she, and what was likely a majority of the Owensboro, felt that to watch the execution was to watch justice being done.

In 2001, when Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber, was to be executed, the government received more than 250 requests from those who had lost someone in the bombing for access to view the execution. Oneta Johnson lost her mother in the bombing, her body hadn’t been found until ten days later in the rubble. Ms. Johnson said that she hoped that seeing McVeigh dead might make her feel better. The Entertainment Network Inc. in Tampa, FL tried to sue the government so that we could all watch. They wanted to webcast the footage of McVeigh being executed to anyone willing to pay $1.95. The Entertainment Network Inc. lost its suit.

***

When Bethea was incarcerated in 1935 for the theft of two purses from the Vogue Beauty Shop located on Frederica Street in Owensboro for which he pleaded guilty to grand larceny, he was given a physical at which time his weight was noted as being 128 pounds and his height was recorded as 5’4”. Because of his small stature and slight build, he would, according to the 1947 Army Manual for military executions, need to drop a distance between 7’10” and 7’7” for an optimal outcome. An optimal outcome here would mean that he did not drop too far and too long, which could result in decapitation, or drop too short and too briefly which would result in a slow strangulation that could subsequently take up to forty-five minutes.

G. Phil Hanna would have known this. He might have known these figures and recommendations by heart when he stood waiting at the top of the scaffold that day in August. Bethea’s execution would be his seventieth. The hangman would have known how far a man needs to fall. He would have known that it is recommended that a hanging rope should be made from manila hemp fibers, and should be not more than one-and-a-quarter inches in diameter but not less than three-quarters of an inch. Hanna, by that point, would know that the experts suggest that the rope be thirty feet in length and that the rope should “be boiled and then stretched while drying to eliminate any spring, stiffness, or tendency to coil” and that the “portion of the noose which slides through the knot will be treated with wax, soap or grease to ensure a smooth sliding action through the knot.” A smooth sliding action through the knot would be vital to the execution, so when Hanna bought his hanging rope, or rather had one specially made for him in St. Louis out of a long-strand hemp fiber (which would be softer and less scratchy), he was willing to pay $65.

He knew the importance of a good rope. He kept all thirty-eight feet of it coiled and protected in a special box. He could observe you, estimate your weight and tell you how far you’d need to drop for a good hanging, something that he did to a reporter interviewing him in 1933 for The Decatur Daily Review. “I tie the knot” Hanna said. “Your neck would require about eight turns of the rope.” He knows that a man with a long neck might require thirteen turns of the rope but had learned to eyeball it with accuracy. He then demonstrated the noose’s construction, the twists and turns that he would require of the rope. If it weren’t just a demonstration, if it were a real hanging, he would treat the knot with pure castile soap and then sprinkle it with a scented talcum. If this were a real hanging, he would have gone to the jail and introduced himself to the condemned man by saying his name and then, “I am here to help you.”

The victim had lived on the same street as my grandmother.  Perhaps she felt personally injured. Perhaps she, and what was likely a majority of the Owensboro, felt that to watch the execution was to watch justice being done.

Hanna was a curiosity in the same way the woman sheriff and the town square hanging was a curiosity for the press. He had already earned his reputation of “humane hangman” when he was recommended to Sheriff Thompson because he had his own equipment and the experience and expertise to carry off the sentence. He also didn’t demand any payment. Hanna saw his work of execution facilitator (perhaps a term that he’d appreciate given that he did not like being called a hangman) as vocational rather than occupational and he had never, in any of his seventy hangings, actually sprung the trapdoor.

Having hired Hanna to bring his portable scaffold, his thirty-eight-foot rope, and his experience in sixty-nine previous hangings, Sheriff Thompson was faced with making the decision of who would officially pull the lever to spring the moment that would ultimately kill a man. It was, strictly speaking, her duty. She refused to answer any questions posed by an interested public and a persistent press about whether she would be acting as the executioner. She started receiving requests for “reserve seating” tickets and questions as to when they might be going on sale from people all over the country. She spoke to her priest, she spoke to her friends, but she wouldn’t speak to the press. This was a mistake. By not telling anyone what her decision was she creates mystery. This mystery, the will-she or won’t-she aspect of the story became a mystery that had a defined expiration date and that would end with a death regardless of her decision. How could it fail to sell papers?

Dear Mrs. Thompson,

I am writing you this letter, offering you my services … for several reasons, … First you are a woman and have four children, none of which I am sure would want you to spring the trap that sends Rainey Bethea into eternity. Second, I wouldn’t want my mother to be placed in such an unpleasant position. Third, I am an ex-serviceman and served … in France in 1918 and 1919, and I know just how you would feel after the execution if you went through with it. You may think it wouldn’t bother you, after it is all over, but I know different … Please do not give this letter to anyone for publication … I am not hunting for publicity. I only want to help you.

Your friend,
A.L. Hash

The press didn’t know that Sheriff Thompson had been corresponding with Arthur L. Hash, a former Louisville policeman, and that he had offered to take up this responsibility on her behalf. He cites his wartime service in France as evidence that he knows what she would feel in the aftermath of the execution, even though the death wasn’t the result of a choice that she had made. “You may think it wouldn’t bother you after it is all over, but I know different,” Hash tells her. Perhaps aware that duty and obligation wouldn’t remove the immediate connection between her hand on the lever and the sudden rushing sense of a body moving quickly through space before the abrupt snap. And, of course, it will be witnessed, written about, photographed and talked about.

***

In his writings about incarceration and punishment, Michel Foucault made an observation similar to so many of the newspapers writing contemporary accounts of the execution of Bethea. The public aspect of punishment often turned into a carnival. If the purpose of public execution was once to terrify a population into being law-abiding citizens, to act as a type of control of the masses by the smaller coalitions of people in positions of power, modern public executions slipped further and further from the horror that they sought to inspire. Rather than reaffirming the authority of those in power, public executions started to degrade it and, through the lawlessness of the crowd, offered those attending as witnesses a glimpse of their own collective power.

France continued to behead people in public spaces until 1939 (and continue to behead people in private until capital punishment was banned in 1977). The final public use of the guillotine was photographed by people in the crowd. One person was able to film it. The video and photographic evidence of the social revelry before and after the execution was said to be disturbing enough to the wider French population and the French government that the use of public executions was reassessed.

Of course, this was the very narrative that Foucault was denying. He didn’t believe that the authorities developed some sentiment about the brutality of the practice, that they suddenly saw wrong and cringed from the horror. It was an issue of control.

Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle, would likely have agreed but for different reasoning.

The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever…The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification.

For this context, the last public execution in the U.S., we might understand this to mean that we get a greater and greater transference of power from the action and the representation of the action. In an earlier society, the government or those with power had, for the most part, direct and limiting control of the images of a public execution. They scheduled it; they carried it out. Once people have the ability to take these images themselves and distribute them widely and in whatever context they chose, the power of the spectacle transferred from those that once controlled the execution to those who observe it and then redistribute it.

After 1936, control of these images was reestablished. With executions moved indoors, journalists may watch, if they are selected (usually through a lottery system), but they may not bring cameras or recording devices. They may be searched and stripped of all personal items and given a small spiral notebook that they can use. The families of victims watch like Oneta Johnson watched. In several states volunteer witnesses also watch. In Missouri, at least eight “reputable citizen” witnesses are required at each execution. Virginia, reportedly, has a list of twenty to thirty rotating witnesses compiled from a bank of hundreds of volunteers, because six are required to be at every execution. One of the volunteer witnesses, a paint store salesman from Emporia, told one reported that he had witnessed fifteen executions. When applying to be a witness, you must answer the question “why?” Why they would they want to sign up to watch people die. Some write in that it is a civic duty, some admit to being curious. Florida, though it requires volunteer witnesses, has stopped asking why.

In 1936, though, there was no need to apply for a spot. The execution was downtown, public lot, open humid air. The people were crowding and climbing, the press was swarming. The widely distributed narrative of the execution wouldn’t be the one that constructed by the police or the courts or even the guillotine operator or the hangman. It was the details shared in the papers, in the photographs. The execution was constructed characters: the Lady Sheriff, the Humane Hangman, the Condemned Man, and finally a newcomer to the show — Arthur Hash aka “Daredevil Dick from Montana”. These people become the show and it’s a show that we must now watch to the end.

We might watch out of a need for closure; we might watch out of a feeling of obligation to act as a witness; we might watch because we believe that this is justice; we might, too, still be watching because now it is a story and, even if we know the ending, we can’t resist turning the page.

***

On the day of the execution, 1,300 reporters were present and ready to make the news. Twenty-thousand people stood waiting in the dark vacant lot for history to happen. Vendors had set up the day before and sold the crowd hotdogs and soda. Parents brought their children. People climbed trees, climbed buildings, climbed telephone poles, climbed cars, including the one that would take away Rainey Bethea’s body after the hanging. Phil Hanna stood at the top of the gallows and tested the trapdoor three times to make sure they wouldn’t stick or swing up to hit Bethea on his way down.

Then dawn was arriving and the crowd was growing restless. Some had been up all night at house parties. Some had spent the night traveling to town or trying to sleep in the lot adjacent to the scaffold. Some had tried to sleep underneath the scaffold. The people were growing restless for the event that they had come to see. Shortly after 5:00 a.m., when the dark wasn’t as dark as it had been all night, some in the crowd began to yell “bring him out” and “let’s go!”

Rainey Bethea exited the Daviess County jail and walked the approximately 800 feet to the steps of the scaffold. From witness accounts, at this moment either the crowd cheered or grew hushed. Obviously, it couldn’t be both. At the bottom of the thirteen steps that lead up to the trapdoor, Bethea paused. Sitting down for a moment on the bottom step, he said “I don’t like to die with my shoes on.” He removed one shoe and then the other. He took another moment to remove one sock and then the other and to put on a new, clean pair before standing to take his first step up. He was finally at the top and at the literal center of the attention. He knelt before Father Lammers and said his final confession. Bethea’s ankles, thighs, and arms were then strapped together with leather bindings. The bindings made his body compressed and rippled. Hanna slipped on the noose and arranged it so the knot rested behind his left ear.

It became obvious as the moment neared and Sheriff Thompson didn’t appear, that she had chosen someone else to handle the duty of springing the trap. The picture that the press had come for, the headline that they all wanted, wouldn’t be happening that day. It would never happen. Perhaps fearing her presence would make it more of a circus, Sheriff Thompson sat in a car parked fifty yards away. She had chosen to deputize Arthur Hash who climbed the stairs in a white suit and a panama hat, dodging the reporter’s questions about who he was by saying, “I’m Daredevil Dick of Montana. Take a drink with me when this is over and I’ll tell you my name.”

***

In a moment, it will be over. In a moment, the man will drop and the dreadful physics of a hanging will go as smoothly as Hanna promised with his grim expertise. A moment after that, spectators, in a frenetic rush, will descend upon the still, but hanging, body to tear at it, to rip at the concealing hood and shred it for souvenirs. So many wanted a small piece to take home with them. It will be this frenzy, the barbarism, the reports, the headlines and photographs that show to the world a cheering crowd and the total annihilation of the order that this execution was proposed to uphold that would drive future death behind walls and screens and the transparent, illusory distance of the glass observation window behind which sit those that have retained their right to watch.

***

At the top of the scaffold, Hash appeared to be drunk and staggering. His wife, Cordie, hadn’t been able to understand why he would agree to play the role of executioner, possibly not knowing at the time that he hadn’t just accepted it but sought it out. He sought out this role, to be not only one among many in the crowd, but to be one among few at the top of the gallows’ stairs and to be the sole person with the responsibility of pulling the lever which would hang Raniey Bethea. “Can you imagine him doing a thing like that,” Cordie Hash said “when there are other people in the state who would do it?”

Can we imagine?

When the moment arrived Hash seemed unsure of what he was doing. The moment expanded and went on. He fumbled. Finally, someone helped him spring the door.

* * *

This essay first appeared in Boulevard, St. Louis’ biannual print journal, founded by fiction writer Richard Burgin in 1985. Our thanks to Spillson and the Boulevard staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

Living Differently: How the Feminist Utopia Is Something You Have to Be Doing Now

Cover of program for the National American Women's Suffrage Association procession. (Getty Images)

Lynne Segal | Verso | November 2017 | 32 minutes (8,100 words)

The following is an excerpt from Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, by Lynne Segal (Verso, November 2017). This essay is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

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The utopian novel had become one of the most effective means of frightening people off it.

It is sometimes said that the twentieth century began with utopian dreaming and ended with nostalgia, as those alternative futures once envisioned seemed by then almost entirely discredited. However, it was never quite so straightforward. The challenge to envisage how to live differently, in ways that seem better than the present, never entirely disappears.

The most prominent American utopian studies scholar, Lyman Tower Sargent, notes that dystopian scenarios increasingly dominated the speculative literary form as the twentieth century progressed. In the UK, the equally eminent utopian studies scholar Ruth Levitas concurs, pointing out, for instance, that as sociology became institutionalized in the academy, it became ‘consistently hostile’ to any utopian content.

What stands out in speculative fantasies of the future arising towards the end of the twentieth century are their darkly dystopic leanings, whether in books, cinema, comics or elsewhere. The best known would include the mass surveillance depicted in the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s satirical novel We (1921).

Set in the future, it describes a scientifically managed totalitarian state, known as One State, governed by logic and reason, where people live in glass buildings, march in step, and are known by their numbers. England’s Aldous Huxley called his dystopic science fiction Brave New World (1932), where again all individuality has been conditioned out in the pursuit of happiness. Bleaker still was George Orwell’s terrifyingly totalitarian 1984 (1945): ‘If you want a picture of the future,’ Orwell wrote in 1984, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’

These imaginings serve primarily as warnings against futures that are often read, as with Zamyatin and Orwell, as condemnations of Soviet society. The happiness expressed in Huxley’s ‘utopic’ universe depicts a deformed or sinister version of the route where all utopias end up, as totalitarian regimes, in which free will is crushed. As the Marxist political scientist Bertell Ollman later noted: ‘From a means of winning people over to the ideal of socialism, the utopian novel had become one of the most effective means of frightening people off it.’

Post-1945, public intellectuals for the most part broadcast the view that democracy and utopic thinking were opposed, the latter declared both impossible and dangerous. The influential émigré and British philosopher of science Karl Popper argued in his classic essay ‘Utopia and Violence’ (1947) that while ‘Utopia’ may look desirable, all too desirable, it was in practice a ‘dangerous and pernicious’ idea, one that is ‘self‐defeating’ and ‘leads to violence’. There is no way of deciding rationally between competing utopian ideals, he suggested, since we cannot (contra Marxism) scientifically predict the future, which means our statements are not open to falsification and hence fail his test for any sort of reliability.

Indeed, accusations of ‘totalitarian’ thinking were the chief weapon of the Cold War, used by Western propaganda to see off any talk of communism. In the USA it was employed to undermine any left or labour movement affiliations, as through the fear and financial ruin inflicted upon hundreds of Americans hauled before Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s – over half of them Jewish Americans. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2017: Sports Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in sports writing.

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Mary Pilon
Contributor to The New Yorker, Esquire, and Vice. Previously on staff at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Author of The Monopolists and The Kevin Show (March 2018)

Is This the NFL’s First Female Player? (Lars Anderson, B/R Mag)

I’m a sucker for high school sports stories, but Anderson’s examination of Becca Longo isn’t just a showcase of a plucky talent, it also challenges long-held assumptions about the league’s recruitment pipeline. Longo is the first woman to earn a football scholarship to a Division I or Division II school, and Anderson offers a fascinating window into the training and psyche required to become be an ace-level kicker. In lesser hands, the story could have been mawkish or puffy, but Anderson’s prose is sharp, layered, and will likely be reread when we see Longo in the Super Bowl one day.

Read more…

Derivative Sport: The Journalistic Legacy of David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace in New York City's East Village, circa 2002. (Janette Beckman/Redferns)

By Josh Roiland

Longreads | December 2017 | 32 minutes (8,200 words)

At a hip Manhattan book launch for John Jeremiah Sullivan’s 2011 essay collection Pulphead, David Rees, the event’s emcee, asked the two-time National Magazine Award winner, “So John…are you the next David Foster Wallace?” The exchange is startling for its absurdity, and Sullivan shakes his head in disbelief before finally answering, “No, that’s—I’m embarrassed by that.” But the comparison has attached itself to Sullivan and a host of other young literary journalists whom critics have noted bear resemblance to Wallace in style, subject matter, and voice.

When Leslie Jamison published The Empathy Exams, her 2014 collection of essays and journalism, a Slate review said “her writing often recalls the work of David Foster Wallace.” Similarly, when Michelle Orange’s This is Running for Your Life appeared a year earlier, a review in the L.A. Review of Books proclaimed: “If Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace had a love child, I thought, Michelle Orange would be it.”

Wallace was, himself, a three-time finalist for the National Magazine Award, winning once, in 2001; yet he compulsively identified himself as “not a journalist” both in his interactions with sources and reflexively as a character in his own stories. Nonetheless, he casts a long shadow in the world of literary journalism—a genre of nonfiction writing that adheres to all the reportorial and truth-telling covenants of traditional journalism, while employing rhetorical and storytelling techniques more commonly associated with fiction. To give better shape to that penumbra of influence, I spoke with Sullivan, Jamison, and Orange, along with Maria Bustillos, Jeff Sharlet, Joel Lovell, and Colin Harrison about Wallace’s impact on today’s narrative nonfiction writers. They spoke about comparisons to Wallace, what they love (and hate) about his work, what it was like to edit him, their favorite stories, posthumous controversies, and his influence and legacy.

Joel Lovell only worked with Wallace on one brief essay. Despite that singular experience, Lovell’s editorial time at Harper’s and elsewhere in the 1990s and 2000s put him in great position to witness Wallace’s rising status in the world of magazine journalism. He was unequivocal when I asked him which nonfiction writer today most reminds him of Wallace.

Joel Lovell: The clear descendant is John Jeremiah Sullivan, of course. For all sorts of reasons (the ability to move authoritatively between high and low culture and diction; the freakishly perceptive humor on the page) but mostly just because there’s no one else writing narrative nonfiction or essays right now whose brain is so flexible and powerful, and whose brainpower is so evident, sentence by sentence, in the way that Wallace’s was. No one who’s read so widely and deeply and can therefore “read” American culture (literature, television, music) so incisively. No one who can make language come alive in quite the same way. He’s an undeniable linguistic genius, like Dave, who happens to enjoy exercising that genius through magazine journalism. Read more…

Second Life: A World that, for Some, Allows Full Participation

Photo by Alicia Chenaux (CC-BY-SA 2.0)

At The Atlantic, Leslie Jamison profiles several long-term, hard-core users of the immersive, virtual reality platform Second Life. In the game, you create a fantasy alter-ego and your “selective self” resides in a virtual world that allows you to leave behind everything you don’t like about yourself and your real life. Weary of your teal-blue lozenge pool? Install another.

Some critics of Second Life easily dismiss it as escapism. Despite the fact that Jamison herself struggled to embrace the virtual land of imperfect perfection, she discovered that for some, it can offer a kind of refuge from the hassles and frustrations of everyday life — an oasis of belonging regardless or age, status, or whether or not you have a physical disability or a mental illness. As she notes, “Second Life recognizes the ways that we often feel more plural and less coherent than the world allows us to be.”

Gidge Uriza lives in an elegant wooden house with large glass windows overlooking a glittering creek, fringed by weeping willows and meadows twinkling with fireflies. She keeps buying new swimming pools because she keeps falling in love with different ones. The current specimen is a teal lozenge with a waterfall cascading from its archway of stones. Gidge spends her days lounging in a swimsuit on her poolside patio, or else tucked under a lacy comforter, wearing nothing but a bra and bathrobe, with a chocolate-glazed donut perched on the pile of books beside her. “Good morning girls,” she writes on her blog one day. “I’m slow moving, trying to get out of bed this morning, but when I’m surrounded by my pretty pink bed it’s difficult to get out and away like I should.”

In another life, the one most people would call “real,” Gidge Uriza is Bridgette McNeal, an Atlanta mother who works eight-hour days at a call center and is raising a 14-year-old son, a 7-year-old daughter, and severely autistic twins, now 13. Her days are full of the selflessness and endless mundanity of raising children with special needs: giving her twins baths after they have soiled themselves (they still wear diapers, and most likely always will), baking applesauce bread with one to calm him down after a tantrum, asking the other to stop playing “the Barney theme song slowed down to sound like some demonic dirge.” One day, she takes all four kids to a nature center for an idyllic afternoon that gets interrupted by the reality of changing an adolescent’s diaper in a musty bathroom.

I heard about a veteran with PTSD who gave biweekly Italian cooking classes in an open-air gazebo, and I visited an online version of Yosemite created by a woman who had joined Second Life in the wake of several severe depressive episodes and hospitalizations. She uses an avatar named Jadyn Firehawk and spends up to 12 hours a day on Second Life, many of them devoted to refining her bespoke wonderland—full of waterfalls, sequoias, and horses named after important people in John Muir’s life—grateful that Second Life doesn’t ask her to inhabit an identity entirely contoured by her illness, unlike internet chat rooms focused on bipolar disorder that are all about being sick. “I live a well-rounded life on SL,” she told me. “It feeds all my other selves.”

Some people call Second Life escapist, and often its residents argue against that. But for me, the question isn’t whether or not Second Life involves escape. The more important point is that the impulse to escape our lives is universal, and hardly worth vilifying. Inhabiting any life always involves reckoning with the urge to abandon it—through daydreaming; through storytelling; through the ecstasies of art and music, or hard drugs, or adultery, or a smartphone screen. These forms of “leaving” aren’t the opposite of authentic presence. They are simply one of its symptoms—the way love contains conflict, intimacy contains distance, and faith contains doubt.

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The Sandwich Whisperer of Victoria Street

Photo by Eric Hossinger (CC BY 2.0)

Sandwiches are a booming, multi-billion-pound industry in the UK. In The Guardian, Sam Knight’s history of the modern British sandwich follows its transformation from a soggy excuse of a meal into a signature product of late-capitalist discipline. What made the story irresistible for me, though, are the people we meet along the way — from the Wembley factory workers stacking chicken on 33 sandwiches per minute to Julian Metcalfe, the tireless founder of Pret A Manger.

Soaring above them all, though, is Frank Boltman. A veteran filled-croissant innovator, his business never grew to the scale of the Prets of the world, but each of his multiple appearances in the piece comes full of compact, delicious morsels of sandwich wisdom.

“My idea of relaxation is to write down five new sandwiches,” he said when we met recently at his latest baby, a vaguely hipsterish place called Trade, on the Essex Road in north London. The quest of the sandwich inventor is a mostly pitiless one. The industry has its own 80:20 rule: 80% of sales come from 20% of the flavours. These are often referred to as “the core” – the egg mayonnaise, the BLT, the chicken salad – and they are as familiar as our own blood. Pret’s best-selling sandwiches (the top three are all baguettes: chicken caesar and bacon, tuna and cucumber, cheddar and pickle) have not changed for seven years. M&S’s prawn mayo has been its No 1 for 36.

Undaunted by this, Boltman starts out by choosing the bread, and the ingredients from those he is already using on his menu. The art of the sandwich designer is to think inwards, to find variations within a known and delineated realm. “It is a question of using tenacity, knowledge, know-how, flair,” said Boltman. People in the industry talk about seminal new combinations – Pret’s crayfish and rocket; M&S’s Wensleydale and carrot chutney – like Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night Dream, or Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. The story comes alive again. Someone finds a new move in chess.

It is possible to be a showman. Boltman talked about a chicken and broccoli bun he made in the 80s. “Granary seeded roll as a vehicle,” he said. “Unbelievable.” While we were talking, the kitchen made me Boltman’s interpretation of the Reuben, which he sells for £8.50. I hadn’t eaten that morning, and the pastrami, which had been cured for a week, lay deep. The taste of caraway seeds in the rye bread lingered in the roof of my mouth. “Did the secret sauce come through?” he asked.

Boltman has been round the block a few times. He had a McDonald’s franchise for a while. He observed that, even as sandwiches function as an accelerant of our harried, grinding lives, they also offer a moment of precious, private escape. “People want to eat,” he said, leaning close. “They want comfort. They want solace. I’ve had a shit morning. I’ve fallen out with my boss. I’ve had a fucking horrible journey in. A poxy lettuce-and-whatever concoction in a plastic bowl is not going to do it for me. I want a cup of tea, a chocolate biscuit and I actually want to cry. I am going out for a fucking sandwich.”

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