Search Results for: Prison

The Writer Alone

Pexels / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Tajja Isen | Longreads | September 2018 | 10 minutes (3,511 words)

Imagine the kind of company I was: Between sixteen and twenty-three, solitude lit up the part of my brain that other people save for smoking breaks. How long it had been since my last bout and how soon till the next, when I’d finally slip away and breathe easy. If the smoker’s unit of time was the splintered hour, mine was the unbroken day. Real life did not begin until I was alone. Anything done around others was merely provisional, a wavering line between two points, during which my mind was mostly elsewhere — if I even showed up. To friends, I made out like I was put upon, as though these ascetic stretches were mandated by some higher-up. As if it didn’t feel a bit like playing god to cancel plans and sever a connection. I affected regret, but I thrived on these excisions; tiny cuts that whittled my world into a zone of focus. These, I believed, were the optimal, and probably only, conditions under which art could be made.

It worked, at least for a while. I was militant about the time and space in which I wrote. I’d mimic the rhythms of different idols — Kafka’s wee hours worked well, as we shared a need for silence in houses stuffed with other lives; Franzen’s free passage from early rising to writing, an unbroken motion from one dream state to another. I briefly considered the Nabokovian retreat to drafting in the bathroom. Unpopular heroes, now, but I was very young, and men remain a benchmark for permission to take your work seriously. Franzen in particular compelled me; the way he made his dedication into a sort of faith. Stretches of The Corrections were written with shades drawn and lights off, the author blindfolded — presumably of his own accord — and his ears doubly blocked by plugs and muffs. This to keep the work “free of all clichés.” I admit to a curiosity about this method that still flickers.

Now, this kind of glass-blown aloneness feels like it’s fallen out of fashion; something consigned to a certain type of writer from the late nineties or early aughts, for whom the internet remains a thing to be poked with a stick from afar. I’ve been shaped by Franzen’s work more than it’s cool to admit, but in late 2018, it’s hard to conceive of a model of “genius” that’s aged worse than a white man alone in the dark, sensorily deprived in preparation to pass judgment on the culture. Who dares to cover his eyes, especially now? We tend, and rightly, to be suspicious of the artist who wants to hold herself apart from the quick, polluting current of opinion, yet still reserve the right to jump in and condemn it. The total opt-out has become the stuff of satire, the absurdity of privilege writ large, whether through its deliberate skewering in fiction or the razor-edged photographic negative of a magazine profile. Most people have lives. Read more…

Hiking With Nietzsche

AP Photo/Keystone/Desair

John Kaag | Hiking with Nietzsche | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | September 2018 | 30 minutes (6,007 words)

 

I often tell my students that philosophy saved my life. And it’s true. But on that first trip to Sils-Maria—on my way to Piz Corvatsch—it nearly killed me. It was 1999, and I was in the process of writing a thesis about genius, insanity, and aesthetic experience in the writings of Nietzsche and his American contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson. On the sheltered brink of my twenties, I’d rarely ventured beyond the invisible walls of central Pennsylvania, so my adviser pulled some administrative strings and found a way for me to escape. At the end of my junior­ year he handed me an unmarked envelope—inside was a check for three thousand dollars. “You should go to Basel,” he suggested, probably knowing full well that I wouldn’t stay there.

Basel was a turning point, a pivot between Nietzsche’s early conventional life as a scholar and his increasingly erratic existence as Europe’s philosopher-poet. He had come to the city in 1869 as the youngest tenured faculty member at the University of Basel. In the ensuing years he would write his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in which he argued that the allure of tragedy was its ability to harmonize the two competing urges of being human: the desire for order and the strange but undeniable longing for chaos. When I arrived in Basel, still a teenager, I couldn’t help thinking that the first of these drives—an obsessive craving for stability and reason that Nietzsche termed “the Apollonian”—had gotten the better of modern society.

The train station in Basel is a model of Swiss precision—beautiful people in beautiful clothes glide through a grand­ atrium to meet trains that never fail to run on time. Across the street stands a massive cylindrical skyscraper, home to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the most powerful financial institution in the world. I exited the station and ate my breakfast outside the bank as a throng of well-suited Apollos vanished inside on their way to work. “The educated classes,” Nietzsche explained, “are being swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy.” The prospects for life in modern capitalist society were lucrative but nonetheless bleak: “The world has never been so worldly, never poorer in love and goodness.”

According to Nietzsche, love and goodness were not realized in lockstep order but embodied its opposite: Dionysian revelry. His life in Basel was supposed to be happy and well-ordered, the life of the mind and of high society, but upon arriving, he fell into a fast friendship with the Romantic composer Richard Wagner, and that life was quickly brought to an end. He’d come to Basel to teach classical philology, the study of language and original meanings, which seems harmless enough, but Nietzsche, unlike many of his more conservative colleagues, understood how radical this sort of theoretical excavating could be. In The Birth of Tragedy, he claims that Western culture, in all of its grand refinement, is built upon a deep and subterranean structure that was laid out ages ago by Dionysus himself. And, in the early years of their friendship, Nietzsche and Wagner aimed to dig it up.

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‘The Very Top Guy in the Stasi was Personally Involved in Figuring Out How to Destroy Punk.’

"Punkers and policemen face each other during a demonstration against the census on the 9th of May in 1987." Chris Hoffmann/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images, Algonquin Books

Will Hermes | Longreads | September 2018 | 14 minutes (3,534 words)

Punk rock was revolution-minded from the get-go, at least about aesthetics. Its political consciousness bloomed later –- most vividly in the U.K., then in scenes around the world. Yet for all the anti-Thatcher, anti-Reagan bluster, punk can lay direct claim to just one full regime change. That’s the takeaway from Tim Mohr’s revelatory new book Burning Down The Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. It chronicles the rise of the scene — essentially seeded, Mohr writes, by a 15-year-old girl whose moniker became Major — in the Soviet Bloc German Democratic Republic in the ’80s. As its numbers swelled, it attracted the attention of the famously ruthless Stasi intelligence and security force (basically the KGB of the GDR), whose mandate included crushing any murmurs of rebelliousness or dissent, and who employed a psychological warfare strategy known as Zersetzung, or decomposition, towards those ends. Kids were picked up and interrogated, for hours and even days, for their haircuts, or clothing, or scraps of paper with song lyrics. For even minor transgressions, they lost college placements, government-controlled apartments, and jobs, their parents and relatives often punished in a similar manner. Kids were arrested and beaten, spent months in prison, threatened with expatriation.

Yet the scene kept growing. Bands like Namenlos and Schleim-Keim formed, playing gigs in church compounds — pretty much the only places alternative culture could exist, since church “open work” spaces were theoretically off-limits to the Stasi, at least initially. There, communities grew; punks connected with environmental activists and others working for change, sharing strategies and collaborating. They staged concerts and festivals, which the Stasi tried to suppress. When street protests began in force, swelling from thousands to hundreds of thousands, and the Berlin Wall finally came down in 1989, it was a culmination of the civil unrest that began in significant part, Mohr suggests, with a handful of strong-willed teenage punks hanging out at a park in Plänterwald.

Mohr encountered this history during his years in East Berlin, where he deejayed in clubs that had sprouted in the free-for-all communities of post-reunification Germany — clubs often created, staffed and attended by the same culture warriors that came up in the ’80s punk scene. Mohr spoke with us from his current home in Brooklyn, NY.

Listen to an audio version of this interview on the Longreads Podcast:

Longreads: So how did you first wind up in Berlin? This was after the wall fell, right?

Tim Mohr: Yeah, it was ‘92, so two years after unification. I was just determined to live abroad for a while, and I didn’t really have much of a clue about Germany. I guess I’d say I was a stupid American at the time. I thought Oktoberfest and Germany were the same thing, and I expected to get off the plane in Berlin and see everyone running around in lederhosen.

Chugging beer…

Yeah, out of giant mugs. And of course, it wasn’t the case. I ended up in a typical Eastern Bloc high rise, far in the East. This was somewhat disappointing. But pretty quickly I discovered the scene that was happening in crumbling old buildings in the central part of town, where people were squatting and the first generation of clubs and bars were up and running.

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Speak Truth to Power

Nastasic / Getty, Scribner / Simon & Schuster

Lacy M. Johnson | Excerpt adapted from The Reckonings: Essays | Scribner | October 2018 | 32 minutes (6,472 words)

The first time I admit in public to having been kidnapped and raped by a man I used to live with, I am at a nonfiction reading at the university where I work. I’ve given enough readings now that I’m usually no longer nervous, but as I sit in the front row at this reading, waiting for my turn to approach the podium, I feel profoundly ill. Because I was, some time ago, a graduate student at this same university, audience members include my former professors and mentors—people I now consider colleagues and friends. Also in the audience are former students, current students, future students, as well as people I’ve never met before, and for all I know will never meet again. One reader goes before me, but I don’t hear a word he says. My hands shake as I hold the book I will read from—still only a galley copy then. My legs nearly buckle underneath me as I stand from my chair. My armpits swim. Bile burns the base of my esophagus. The blood rising to my face tells me that what I am about to do is shameful, embarrassing, wrong. But for 14 years, I have kept a silence. Today I want to break it.

The blood rising to my face tells me that what I am about to do is shameful, embarrassing, wrong. But for 14 years, I have kept a silence. Today I want to break it.

The story of Philomela seems relevant here — that ancient cautionary tale against speaking about rape, which is in many ways about the impossibility of speaking about rape. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Philomela is considered a minor character — a princess from Athens who is raped by a somewhat less minor character, who happens to be her sister’s husband, King Tereus, a tyrant from a war-waged kingdom across the sea from Philomela’s home in Greece. After the rape — after she has torn her hair and scratched and beat her arms — she curses Tereus and vows to tell everyone what he has done. Half out of fear, half out of rage, Tereus draws his sword. But instead of killing her, as she hopes he will do, he cuts out her tongue to prevent her from speaking.

It seems impossible to speak about rape precisely because this threat of violent retribution is real, whether explicit or implicit, but also because of the widespread belief in our culture that rape is an aberration: a violence so unthinkable, so unfathomable, so taboo as to render it unspeakable. It is unspeakable, we are told, because respect for the sanctity and integrity of a woman’s body is the norm. This is, of course, not the way most women have experienced their own bodies throughout history. For most women, rape has been the norm and respect the exception.

I learn first from social media that, in the early-morning hours of August 12, 2011, a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio, woke up in her front yard, still a little drunk, unsure how she got there. She learned by checking Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr what happened the night before. She got drunk at a party, where she was very possibly drugged, before a group of high school football players also at the party taunted her, urinated on her, carried her unconscious by her wrists and ankles from that party to another party, and to another, while they fingered her in public, in the back seat of a car, on the sidewalk as she vomited into the street. They flashed her breasts to anyone wishing to see, stripped off her clothes, and took turns slapping her with flaccid penises.

When her parents took her to the police station two days later to file charges, the pictures and tweets and videos bystanders recorded of “the incident” had mostly been removed. “My daughter learned about what had happened to her that night by reading the story about it in the local newspaper,” the girl’s mother tells the press. In a video recorded that night, one of the party-goers, Ohio State football player Michael Nodianos, jokes about men raping and urinating on a dead girl. Between each line, each riff, each variation on the joke, he and the person recording the video laugh hysterically.

“She’s deader than Obi-Wan,” Michael Nodianos sputters in the 12½ minute video to his own hysterical laughter.

She’s deader than Andy Reed’s son.
She’s deader than Chris Henry.
She’s deader than OJ’s wife.
They raped her harder than that cop raped Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction.
They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson raped that one girl.
They raped her more than the Duke lacrosse team.
She is so raped right now, she is just a dead body.

During the rape trial in Ohio, it emerges that the person who recorded the 12½ minute video, in which Nodianos jokes about the rape, is the same person who recorded a video of one of the defendants molesting the victim in the back of a car. He’s a witness for the prosecution and has been given immunity for his testimony. Although he admits later deleting the video because he realized “it was wrong,” he says he recorded it because he thought the girl should know what had happened to her. It’s something he wanted her to see: how she was naked, molested, exposed. The witness admits it was his basement where the 12½ minute video is filmed. It’s his laughter we hear. It’s his hand trying to steady the camera. In another room of that same basement, maybe even while he is filming the video, another boy takes pictures of the 16-year-old girl: naked, unconscious, lying facedown on the floor.

Two boys, both juveniles, are found “delinquent” (the juvenile equivalent of guilty) in the case. “Such promising futures,” one anchor says on network television. At the reading of the verdict, one of the boys breaks down in tears in the courtroom, sobbing like a child: “My life is over. No one is going to want me now.”

The girl remains anonymous in all of this, though a few reports have carelessly revealed her identity and then quickly redacted it. It doesn’t matter; most of the people in the town already know who she is. She receives death threats. She is ostracized, abandoned by her friends. In the comments section of any of the articles about the case, she might be called a slur I won’t repeat. Her attorney speaks for the girl, says she feels relieved: “She just wants to get back to her normal life.” He’s nodding as he says this, as if this were not already “normal life” for many girls.

Each day, women and girls come forward to voice accusations against men who are famous or unknown, who are powerful or paupers. They voice accusations against Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Matt Lauer, and Peyton Manning; against men whose names we haven’t heard before at colleges and prep schools and high schools and middle schools, in hospitals and universities and prisons, in the military, in law offices, even in the White House. We are told that these accusations are the exception, or that this is an affliction particular to our present moment, or that these women are lying or trying to get even or get attention or extort money.

“The finest trick of the devil,” writes Baudelaire, “is to persuade you that he does not exist.”

Each day, women and girls come forward to voice accusations against men who are famous or unknown, who are powerful or paupers.

In Houston, where I live, a 16-year-old girl known simply as “Jada” comes forward to publicly accuse two men of drugging her at a party, gang-raping her, and posting pictures on social media of her unconscious body, one arm tucked behind her back, legs akimbo, naked from the waist down. That these men post these pictures without fear of the consequences is only proof they have no reason to believe there will be consequences. Jada was not the only girl at the party assaulted in this way. These same men, along with other adult men, drugged other girls, raped them, recorded video of themselves raping them, and posted these photos and videos to social media, where they are shared and shared and shared.

After her assault goes viral, Jada appears on MSNBC to speak with Ronan Farrow, who draws connections between her story and the story of his own family’s history of violence and abuse. That February, Ronan’s sister, Dylan Farrow, had penned an open letter about her experience of sexual abuse at the hands of her famous and powerful father, Woody Allen. The New York Times published Farrow’s 936-word letter in an online column; six days later, the Times gave Allen 1,800 words in the print edition to respond, a retaliatory account in which he denies the accusations, calls them “ludicrous,” their malevolence “obvious.” According to Allen, the whole thing is a long-enduring revenge plot by Mia Farrow, Dylan’s mother, who was, he says, hysterical and vindictive that he had an affair with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, herself a teenage girl when their affair began. In his account, Mia can’t be believed because of her own history of dating much older men, because of her spite at being spurned, because perhaps she lied about the paternity of her son Ronan — that Dylan’s experience is a fiction created by her mother, that he couldn’t have committed this crime because of his fear of enclosed spaces, that in fact the accusation is a crime and he is its victim.

When two men — Clinton Onyeahialam, who is an adult, as well as an unnamed juvenile — are arrested in December, Jada returns to MSNBC to speak with Ronan Farrow again. As before, she appears with a family friend, a self-described activist named Quanell X, who is her advocate, her spokesperson, helping to call out the police for dragging their feet and to draw media attention to the case. This seems to be Quanell X’s main skill. In 2011 he held a rally in Cleveland, Texas, in support of a group of 21 men who were later convicted of gang-raping an 11-year-old girl. At that rally, he blamed the girl’s parents for the men’s violence, blamed the girl, pointed to her social media profiles as evidence she had already been sexually active with adult men, accused the police of letting the investigation be run by the KKK — all of this in spite of the crime having been caught on video, which had gone viral by the time the girl went to the police. The excerpts of the video that could be shown over and over on the news were extremely graphic, though not as graphic as the portions that were not shown. All 21 men were convicted, but only because they had pled guilty to lesser crimes, some receiving sentences as minor as seven years of probation.

Quanell X is sitting beside Jada when Farrow asks how she feels about these two men being arrested, what she wants to see happen to them. There is a long pause. She blinks several times, then says, “I would like to see justice. That’s it.”

All across the country this situation is replicated with slight variations: a woman reports rape, is told that boys will be boys; a woman reports rape, is not believed. She is shamed. She is ostracized, traumatized, and retraumatized. At best, the woman’s life is forever and irrevocably changed. At worst, she self-destructs. Men, however, seem to thrive in a culture in which they can rape women with near impunity.

I know, I know. Not all men.

One man — a white professor in Georgia — learns his memoir has been rejected by a publisher YET AGAIN, around the same time that I give that reading at the university where I work. “What do I have to do to sell a memoir in this country?” he laments to his female colleague. “Get kidnapped and raped?” His female colleague thinks first of ignoring him, of saying nothing at all, but instead asks him if he is talking specifically about me, about my book. He says yes and makes some kind of James Frey reference, maybe accusing me of making the whole thing up to get attention and a publication. Months later, the female colleague resigns her job — I don’t know if the two things are related — and much later she tells me this story while standing in the kitchen of my house.


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Susan B. Anthony, writing in 1900, twenty years before women earned the right to vote, offers this: “No advanced step taken by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public. For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonized.”

I am on the phone with an editor at a women’s magazine known more for its sex advice than for its coverage of contemporary literature. The editor has a British accent — I think it is British anyway — and she is asking thoughtful, sensitive questions about my book and my life, about what connections I see between BDSM and sexual violence, if any, and about my advice to women who have survived sexual assault and domestic violence. It does not feel strange or uncomfortable to tell her about being raped. I cannot, after all, see her face.

After we hang up the phone, I don’t hear from her or anyone else at her magazine again until weeks later, just before the issue is scheduled to go to press, when the lawyer for the parent company of this magazine asks to see the police reports from my case, claiming they need to do due diligence to protect themselves against a defamation lawsuit from the man I accuse of kidnapping and raping me.

Keep in mind: I do not name this person — not in the book, and not in the interview. I give no identifying information about where the assault took place — not the city, not the state, not even the region. The man is an international fugitive, wanted on the same charges I recount in my book.

Nevertheless, the lawyer for the parent company for the women’s sex advice magazine is concerned this international fugitive might bring a defamation lawsuit against them, so he asks me to provide copies of the police reports from my case. This makes me very uncomfortable. But after gnashing over the idea for a couple of days, I agree to send the reports.

Hours later, the lawyer responds by saying that these reports are insufficient to satisfy their burden of proof. I might have forged the reports, the lawyer says; there’s nothing preventing me. Now he needs the police reports to come directly from the police department itself. I offer a contact name and number. The lawyer calls and the sergeant from the records department informs him that though, yes, she can confirm that there is indeed a warrant for the man’s arrest, and though, yes, she can confirm the exact charges, she cannot send him the records because the state has laws to preserve a victim’s confidentiality rights, which prevent the police department from releasing any information about the case. The lawyer then asks me to waive my confidentiality rights and ask the police department to send the files from my case directly to him. He alone will determine their veracity.

I learn at this moment that there are some people who will believe I am lying about what men have done to my body no matter what evidence I present to the contrary. I also learn it is not my responsibility to convince them.

I learn at this moment that there are some people who will believe I am lying about what men have done to my body no matter what evidence I present to the contrary.

Jon Krakauer points out in Missoula that, unlike murder, which results, very convincingly, in a dead body; or a kidnapping, which results in the clear absence of one; or even a violent physical attack, which results in medically verifiable wounds or contusions; rape is the only violent crime with a victim who is subject, and subjected, to doubt.

We find expressions of this doubt in our long and troublesome history of men deciding what rape is and what it is not. Several years ago, Representative Todd Akin of Missouri waxed ignorant on the phenomenon of so-called legitimate rape, wherein he opined that pregnancy never results from “legitimate rape” because a woman apparently “has ways of shutting that whole thing down.” Although this claim shows appalling ignorance about human biology, the choice to distinguish “legitimate rape” from other supposedly lesser crimes is not without precedent in the law. Many states, following the Model Penal Code created by the American Law Institute in 1962 to influence and standardize criminal lawmaking, still require prosecutors to prove that a man used force in order to find him guilty of raping an adult woman, and in every state, there is a distinction between the rape of an adult woman and the statutory rape of a girl, which, surprisingly, is a fairly recent development. For most of the history of this country, statutory rape existed only as a crime of “seduction,” punishable not by imprisonment but by fines.

Critics of harsher punishments claimed young girls should be held responsible for protecting themselves or for failing to: “In point of fact, the white girl of twelve anywhere throughout the civilized world, unless she is degenerate and imbecile, is abundantly qualified, so far as intellect is concerned, to protect her virginity if she so desires,” wrote Representative A. C. Tomkins of Kentucky in 1895. He opposed raising the age of consent since “sexual desire belongs equally to the male and female human being, and the law-makers of this state were then, and are now, unwilling to inflict the heaviest penalty of the law on the male when there is a possibility that the female is also to blame.” He goes on to make his case further against raising the age of consent from 12 by drawing on “science”—specifically the “scientific” fact that “negro girls” go through puberty earlier than white girls, become sexually active earlier than white girls, and are more “naturally sensual” than white girls—a “fact” he cites as proof that it is impossible to rape a woman of color.

I refer to this abominable text only because this “science” still survives today. We see evidence of it in our justice system, our literature, our television shows and movies. It survives as attitudes, as biases, as stereotypes, as bigotry.

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou writes how, at seven years old, she is raped repeatedly by her mother’s boyfriend, who threatens to murder her brother if she speaks about what they’ve done. What we’ve done? she wonders. When the man’s crime is finally discovered, far too late, and when young Maya, then called Marguerite, is hospitalized with injuries and the man is finally arrested for his crimes, Marguerite testifies against him. The lawyer asks her if it was just the one time or if it was many times, and Marguerite feels herself caught in a trap: if she tells the truth and says yes, it was many times, the lawyer will use it as proof of her “natural sensuality,” that she in fact could not have been raped by this adult man; and yet if she lies and says no, it was just the one time, she fails to convey the full force of his crimes against her. No is what she feels everyone in the courtroom expects her to say, even wants her to say. The lie enters her mouth and she lets it escape.

Her rapist is sentenced to a year and a day in prison, though his lawyer arranges his release later that afternoon. That night, he is found beaten to death, likely by Marguerite’s brothers and uncles, seeking justice where the courts failed to deliver it. She is struck mute with guilt about his death and does not speak for the next six years.

Rape is the only violent crime with a victim who is subject, and subjected, to doubt.

When an institution like a court, or a police department, or a district attorney’s office, or a university, or a family does not listen to a woman who speaks about her sexual assault, they betray an attitude that women’s speech does not matter — not when we give testimony, not when we make appeals, not when we report the violent crimes committed against us, not even when we say, very clearly, no.

Perhaps the lesson isn’t, then, that the violation of women’s bodies is unthinkable, but that men wield immense power when they think about, plan, and perform an act that we are told is forbidden. To be sure, one can often find pleasure in doing things that are expressly forbidden. We can each, no doubt, think of examples from our own youth. And yet I do not believe that the exclusive reason men rape is because they find pleasure in breaking a taboo. There are also taboos against cannibalism, but we hear of people eating other people almost never. But men rape women every day.

* * *

“I don’t hear her say anything,” Bill Cosby tells a team of lawyers during his deposition in the Andrea Constand civil suit. “And so I continue and I go into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection. I am not stopped.” Cosby’s euphemisms and innuendoes call to mind an image of the violence without the language of violence. To speak frankly, to admit drugging and raping this woman, would produce horror and revulsion, because drugging a woman in order to rape her is supposedly an unthinkable act. Cosby’s language is playful, as if the woman—what she says, what she does, what she might want for herself, the goals she might have set for her life—are entirely beside the point. It’s as if the fact of his eventual conquest has the power to remove his culpability for committing a crime, to remove the crime from history, to remove it even from the realm of possibility.

This trick, in which a man disappears himself (or is disappeared) from his actions, isn’t magic. We perform it on behalf of men whenever we talk about this violence that is supposedly unthinkable. We talk about the number of women and girls who are raped—in high school, in college, in marriages, in an attic, on a Tuesday—but not the number of men who rape women and girls. We talk of the women and girls who are murdered, kidnapped, found decapitated or frozen or barely alive in the front yard, or on the porch, or tossed on the side of the road, but not the number of men who murder, or kidnap, or maim, or destroy them. Nicole Brown Simpson was a “battered woman” before she was a dead one, but the man who beat her, and very possibly murdered her, escapes our sentences. We call Andrea Constand an “accuser,” a label we apply also to each of the dozens of women, individually and as a group, who have come forward to demand justice for being drugged and raped by Bill Cosby. Our language shields him, disappears him from the scene of the crime, transforms his crime into an allegation, a suggestion, a rumor.

This trick, in which a man disappears himself (or is disappeared) from his actions, isn’t magic.

The lawyers for Owen Labrie — a student at a private preparatory school in New Hampshire — disappeared him in exactly this way from accusations that he had raped a 15-year-old classmate. The girl’s testimony was harrowing: Labrie took her to a locked mechanical room, where he took off her pants and removed her underwear, where he kissed and bit her breasts as she was crying and telling him, “No, no, no,” where he scraped inside her vagina with his fingers, and held her hands above her head, and penetrated her with what she believed to be his penis. On the stand, Labrie denied this version of events, telling jurors, “I thought she was having a great time.” He denied penetrating her, denied that she had said no — although, when pressed by his lawyer about whether he had perhaps kissed the girl’s breasts too aggressively, he acknowledged that he “may have been a little carried away.”

If getting “carried away” is intelligible as any part of a defense, it is because some part of us believes that all men have this inside them — an instinct to which he had simply succumbed. And in the end, that defense succeeded. The prosecutors could not prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” to the jury — made up of nine men and three women — that the sex was “nonconsensual,” so they acquitted him on the charge of felony rape. But they could prove that he used a computer to lure a minor for sexual activity, a felony, and that he endangered a child, a misdemeanor, and these are the crimes for which he was convicted, along with 3 misdemeanor charges of sexual assault. He wept as the verdict was read, even though his defense had prevailed in what it set out to prove: that he was, in fact, just a “normal” young man.

* * *

“One in five women who goes to college will be assaulted,” Vice President Joe Biden says in a press conference. The year is 2014. A presidential task force has just released the results of a study on sexual assault on college campuses. I know these numbers are inaccurately low, since estimates predict that only 13 percent of women who are raped report the assault to authorities. The rest keep silent out of fear they’ll be shamed, fear of retribution, fear of invasive, inappropriate, and insensitive questions. “It’s a parent’s worst fear when you drop your daughter off at college,” the vice president says to his audience. “You say a little prayer for one thing: that your daughter will be safe. You pray that your daughter will be safe.”

The White House’s 1 Is 2 Many campaign launches with a PSA that stars Benicio del Toro, who is seated in a black leather wing chair in front of a fireplace in a wood-paneled room. “We have a big problem,” he begins, “and we need your help.” The problem, we are told by an A-list roster of celebrities like Dulé Hill, Seth Meyers, Daniel Craig, and Steve Carell, is sexual assault. The PSA encourages men to speak up, to act, to become part of the solution to the problem only they can name. The message is important and necessary, although it may be somewhat undermined by its spokespeople. Daniel Craig, for instance, is best known for reprising the role of James Bond, a character whose reputation for seducing women is topped only by his reputation for disposing of them. “If I saw it happening,” Daniel Craig says in the PSA, tilting his head to one side, “I’d never blame her. I’d help her.”

Del Toro continues: “If I saw it happening, I’d speak up.” It’s uncanny, really, because his characters don’t show this same moral fiber. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, for instance, it’s Johnny Depp’s Raoul Duke who speaks up, who acts, who intervenes when he finds his lawyer, Dr. Gonzo, sequestered in a hotel room with an underage “religious freak,” having plied her with LSD on the plane in order to more easily pressure her into sex once they reach the hotel. In the PSA, del Toro looks directly into the camera: “If she doesn’t consent, or if she can’t consent, it’s rape. It’s assault.”

Which is the real message? The franchise or the PSA? The paycheck or the community service? If our role models tell us they in fact have high respect for women and we all should too, how should we understand the roles they play that reinforce the opposite message: that a man’s value is determined by his virility, by the number of women he’s slept with, by his disregard for a woman’s body, her autonomy, her age? Do they mean it when they say that women matter? Do we matter or do we not?

* * *

I was 14 the first time a man raped me. It was February, Valentine’s Day, and he wore a baseball cap, stood with one hand plunged deep into his jean pocket; the other held out a bottle, offering a drink. We stood in a liquor store parking lot beside the highway. Where did I tell my parents I would be? He was a few years older than me. Tall, like a man, I remember thinking. What did I know? He was on the basketball team, over six feet tall. His mustache and chest hair appeared in earnest patches. He took a drag of his cigarette, blowing the smoke over one shoulder. He never took his eyes off me. What did he see? I lifted the bottle to my lips, tipped it back, and took a drink.

In the morning, my thighs were purpled with bruises from his sharp pelvic bones, a rust-colored stain on the sheet beneath me. My arm was sore at the shoulder, my lips swollen, full and smashed-looking in the mirror. I bent over the toilet while the night returned to me in heaves and waves: our lips met once, and then again, and then he was clawing and desperate. I wanted to move away from him, from what was approaching and unstoppable, and let a “no” fall from my mouth — then a string of them dripping like pearls. Afterward he dressed and slipped out the door. The bile in my stomach surged, acid and cinnamon and sweet.

When people heard what had happened they explained it back to me: “Slut,” they said. “Liar.” “Whore.”

That was ages ago, and very little about our situation has evolved. Then, as now, people will ask questions: What was that girl doing there in the first place? What clothes did she wear? To whom did she talk? At which jokes did she laugh? How did she hold her hand while she was laughing? Did she touch her tongue to her teeth? Did she cross or uncross her legs? What else had she done with her body that day? What about the previous day? What about the weeks or months or years before? What messages did she send, because he must have gotten the wrong ones. He was behaving as boys do, as men do. Men have needs. What did she expect? Then, as now, a community will coalesce to protect him — a chorus of accomplices, of friends, of parents and mentors and law enforcement officers, of district attorneys and judges, of lawmakers and teachers and neighbors, of celebrities and colleagues and football coaches and babysitters — who validate and corroborate and shield the man from the reach of the terrible consequences we might inflict. They have so much more at stake than only him.

* * *

Twenty-one years later, a few months after that first reading in the library at the university where I work, I am standing at the bottom of an outdoor amphitheater in Portland, Oregon, where the seats are filled with people. I feel certain the man who kidnapped and raped me when I was 21 is among them. I am planning, after all these years, to tell everyone what he has done. He’s here, I think. He has come to shoot me with a gun. But nothing, not even that, will prevent me from speaking.

And here I am, alive, still speaking.

If getting ‘carried away’ is intelligible as any part of a defense, it is because some part of us believes that all men have this inside them — an instinct to which he had simply succumbed.

* * *

“Maybe none of this is about control,” Margaret Atwood writes in The Handmaid’s Tale. “Maybe it isn’t really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it.”

“Power,” says Foucault, “is a set of relations between two persons.”

“Power,” says Voltaire, “consists in making others act as I choose.”

“Power,” says Hannah Arendt, “belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.”

We all know that men have power as a group, but I want to be clear about something: women as a group do too.

Before Elliot Rodger murdered six people and injured 14 others in Isla Vista, California, he had a long history of expressing hatred and violence toward women. He planned the crimes, and his premeditation is documented in YouTube videos he posted days and hours before the shootings, citing rejection by women as one of his motivations for the slaughter. In one of the videos he says, “I don’t know why you girls have never been attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.”

When women on Twitter begin pointing out that these attitudes of sexual entitlement are consistent with a broader, misogynistic, sexually aggressive culture, men on Twitter get defensive and assert that “not all men” are misogynistic or aggressive or homicidal. One woman — I wish I knew her name — begins tagging her tweets #YesAllWomen in response to the “not all men” argument, to make clear that, no, not all men are homicidal maniacs, but, yes, all women live in fear of those who are. Within days, millions of women everywhere in the world are tweeting their experiences of fear, intimidation, and harassment. At one point, there are as many as fifty thousand tweets a minute, each sharing an experience of everyday misogyny.

The backlash against #YesAllWomen is harsh, with women being trolled, harassed, insulted, and threatened. It happens again, years later, with #metoo, as women reveal they have been blacklisted, fired, sued. The threats and punishments are intended to silence us. In this, they must fail.

* * *

The phrase “speak truth to power” applies here. Often considered an 18th century Quakerism, a form of pacifist resistance against King George I of Britain, the phrase actually first appears in a letter from civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who was in fact a Quaker and who wrote a letter in August 1942 to the Quaker leadership urging them against providing spiritual support to troops being deployed in World War II. “The primary social function of a religious society,” Rustin writes, “is to ‘speak the truth to power.’ The truth is that war is wrong. It is then our duty to make war impossible first in us and then in society.”

As I see it, to speak truth to power means to struggle against various silences: the official silencing of a criminal justice system that claims to protect us but instead renders us mute; a cultural silence that seeks to discredit us before we even open our mouths; and the smaller, private silences we have sometimes imposed on ourselves. It is this last kind of silence I have found to be the most dangerous.

* * *

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story of Philomela does not end with Tereus cutting out her tongue. For a year, she remains imprisoned, weaving a tapestry that depicts the crime she suffered at this war-king’s hands — threads of deep purple on a white background. When the tapestry is finished, Philomela gives it to a servant, communicating to him through gestures to deliver it to her sister, the Queen. The servant obeys, not knowing what message the tapestry contains. The Queen understands the message, rescues her sister, and takes her back to the castle in secret. The two sisters conspire together to kill Tereus’s son, Itys, and serve him as dinner to the King. While feasting away, Tereus asks after his son. At this climactic moment, Philomela reveals herself, disheveled, disfigured, smeared in blood, and throws Itys’s head into Tereus’s lap. As he begins to understand what has happened to his only son, he flies into a rage and chases the two women out of the castle, through the woods, and into a field before the gods finally intervene and turn them all into birds.

In some translations, Philomela becomes a nightingale, doomed to sing her attacker’s name for all eternity: tereu, tereu. In others, her sister becomes the nightingale and Philomela is turned into a swallow, a bird that has no song at all.

Two things interest me about this story. The first is Philomela’s metamorphosis at the end, which is either justice or a further injustice, depending on your interpretation. The second, and more important, is her tapestry, an act of courageous speech that is not speech, this way of speaking out despite the impossibility of speaking. There is much to be learned from this.

To speak truth to power means to struggle against various silences.

Perhaps it is useful here to return to those famous lines by Muriel Rukeyser: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” It is a powerful image. But though I have turned to these lines often, I think what she is saying has proved only partially true. Many women have told the truth about their lives, however impossible that may seem at the time, and the world has gone on pretty much as before.

As you must have realized by now, the world does not shatter after I admit publicly to being kidnapped and raped. My mentors hug me and offer kind words of praise and admiration. Yes, I have a few very awkward conversations in which it becomes clear that others find the subject of my rape a more uncomfortable topic than I do. I now realize this has little, if anything, to do with me and have stopped considering myself responsible for other people’s feelings about that. And though I felt compelled to protect my family all these years from the painful story I carried, my mother and I had the most honest conversation of our lives after she read my book. My husband, whose opinion matters to me more than that of any other person on this Earth, said if anything, he loved and admired me more. Though my fear was that this secret would come to define me as “that woman who got raped,” that I would be shamed, ostracized, shunned, what occurs with far more frequency is that a woman approaches me, soaking wet with her own tears. She says nothing, which communicates a story for which she has not yet found the words.

In the 1960s, Betty Friedan called domestic oppression “the problem that has no name.” We might now call the epidemic of sexual violence against women the problem that has no language.

If we are going to do the difficult work of grappling with these failures, it is not enough that we speak our truth to one another in private or behind closed doors, though this is an important and necessary step. I understand the fear of breaking a long-held silence. It is a fear that holds tremendous power. But if there is any hope for justice, we must speak truth to that power. We must tell anyone and everyone who will listen. And those who will not listen must be made to hear.

* * *

From The Reckonings: Essays by Lacy M. Johnson. Copyright © 2018 by Lacy M. Johnson. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

* * *

Lacy Johnson is the author of The Reckonings and the memoir The Other Side, which was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime, and the CLMP Firecracker Award in Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Tin House, Guernica, and elsewhere. She lives in Houston and teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University.

 

Finding Comfort in Small Spaces

fottodk / Getty, Composite by Katie Kosma

Jessica Gross | Longreads | September 2018 | 11 minutes (2,864words)

In January of 2014, I rode a train from New York to Chicago, then back again. My little cabin had been provided by Amtrak: a “test run” of what later became the Amtrak Residency. In an essay for The Paris Review Daily, I tried to explain — that is, explain to myself — what trains offer writers, and, particularly, me. I arrived at the sense of containment I felt, bound by the train car and, even more so, by the little private bedroom that ensconced and held me.

What I didn’t say in that essay is that, when I began the journey, I was very, very lonely. On the overnight train trip to Chicago, I rotated between crying, reading Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (which, by absorbing and distracting me, would make me abruptly stop crying), talking on the telephone, taking notes for my essay, and frantically researching a last-minute freelance assignment. When I got to the hotel in Chicago — my plan was to stay over that Saturday night, then take another overnight train back the following day, to arrive back in New York on Monday — I called my mother, forlorn. She suggested I go home early. Instead, I took myself to dinner and people-watched. But it wasn’t until the next day that I was lifted out of my loneliness and into delight, or maybe peace.

On Sunday, before my train home and after an obligatory visit to the Bean, I took myself to the Art Institute of Chicago. There, wandering the basement in search of a bathroom, I happened upon the Thorne Miniature Rooms, a collection of intricate dioramas. Nestled into the wall, behind panes of glass or plastic, were almost 70 tiny scale models of interiors from different eras: European homes from the 1200s through the 1930s; American homes from the 1600s through the 1930s (the models were constructed between 1932 and 1940). I spent many minutes peering into these rooms: the replica of a New York parlor from the mid-1800s; the early-1700s-era English library; the Virginia dining room from around 1800. I suppose another person would have viewed the rooms in their proper historical context, or concerned themselves with what the designs revealed about the styles of the time. I — a person who has just listed several rooms out of chronological order — viewed the rooms from a position of purely personal need. I projected myself into their spaces, imagined sitting on the tiny couches and lying in the tiny beds. Their very littleness gave me a way to contain myself; and suddenly I was not lonely anymore.
Read more…

Hating Big Pharma Is Good, But Supply-Side Epidemic Theory Is Killing People

Jose A. Bernat Bacete / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Zachary Siegel | Longreads | September 2018 | 20 minutes (5,459 words)

After breakfast each Sunday we had the option to attend a spiritual group. The facility’s spiritual counselor was a tall woman with greying frizzy hair who collected vaguely heart-shaped rocks, and always had several on her desk that she’d gift to patients who stopped by her office.

She wouldn’t give you just any old rock; no, the rock she’d choose for you had a story: its color, unique dents and chips resembled resilience, an ability to withstand harsh elements while retaining your heart’s shape. She insisted the Sunday group wasn’t religious. “Religion is for people who’re afraid of going to hell,” the popular saying around Alcoholics Anonymous goes. “Spirituality is for people who have already been there.” So we sang along to “Let it Be” by The Beatles.

We had mostly blamed ourselves for what landed us inside an addiction treatment facility. But we were young, so we also blamed our parents (thanks Obamacare!). The reason why we were all in treatment and not quarantined in jail is because we were mostly white and upper-middle class. It was the summer of 2012 and young people like me all over the country were developing opioid addictions. The difference between us and the vast majority of others was our family’s resources, namely insurance that covered the $1,000 per day cost for a residential stint at a spiritually tinged hospital-meets-lake-house just outside the Twin Cities (the land of 10,000 treatment centers). The campus edged Medicine Lake, which I always found cruel because the facility didn’t much like to use medicine at the time, medicine that would’ve eased my withdrawal and given me the best chance at kicking for good. “We don’t do that here,” I recall a nice Minnesota doctor saying.

Addiction experienced in the first-person feels like watching a movie shot entirely in extreme close-ups. No matter how hard you try, you can’t see the world beyond the frame. A tolerance builds after a while and you grow used to the shaky, nauseating ride. We couldn’t have possibly known it at the time, that we weren’t the stars in our very own drama. The content of our stories differed in the details, but the tone was uncannily similar: how prescription painkillers first took hold; after pharmaceuticals became scarce and expensive, how we, as a generation in unison, playing a fucked up game of Red Rover, beelined toward heroin. Another thing we had in common was a lot of dead friends. Read more…

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

Sarah Smarsh | Scribner | September 2018 | 11 minutes (3,022 words)

We’re delighted to bring you an excerpt from chapter two of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh.

Body of a Poor Girl

Our bodies were born into hard labor. To people who Grandma Betty would say “never had to lift a finger,” that might sound like something to be pitied. But there was a beautiful efficiency to it — form in constant physical function with little energy left over. In some ways, I feel enriched rather than diminished for having lived it.

I know the strength of this body that helped hoist an air compressor into a truck, leveraged a sheet of drywall alone, carried buckets of feed against prairie wind. I know the quickness of my limbs that scaled a tall fence when a bull charged and that leapt when a ladder fell. But while I worked in those ways, like my mother and father I wrote poetry in my mind.

There’s an idea that laborers end up in their role because it’s all they’re suited for. What put us there, though, was birth, family history — not lack of talent for something else. “Blue-collar workers” have jobs requiring just as much brainpower as “white-collar professionals.” To run a family farm is to be a business owner in a complicated industry. But, unlike many jobs requiring smarts and creativity, working a farm summons the body’s intelligence, too.

To run a family farm is to be a business owner in a complicated industry. But, unlike many jobs requiring smarts and creativity, working a farm summons the body’s intelligence, too.

Sometimes it was miserable. Sometimes it was satisfying. The farmhouse living room where we spent evenings had a big woodstove in it, and no fire will ever feel more glorious than the ones we sat next to after working outside in January sleet that clung to the metal fences as a coat of ice. I’m a little sorry you never got to feel that. But I am not sorry that you never experienced the dangers of being devalued outside those farmhouse walls.

The person who drives a garbage truck may himself be viewed as trash. The worse danger is not the job itself but the devaluing of those who do it. A society that considers your body dispensable will inflict a violence upon you. Working in a field is one thing; being misled by a corporation about the safety of a carcinogenic pesticide is another. Hammering on a roof is one thing; not being able to afford a doctor when you fall off it is another. Waiting tables is one thing; working for an employer whose sexual harassment you can’t afford to fight and risk a night’s worth of tips is another.

For black and brown bodies, a particular danger exists regardless of how much money is in a bank account. We were white bodies in peril specifically because we were laborers.

The person who drives a garbage truck may himself be viewed as trash. The worse danger is not the job itself but the devaluing of those who do it.

For those of us who were female, the body was also defined by its role as a potential mother. That’s true in every class but becomes more problematic in the context of financial struggle. Poverty makes motherhood harder, and motherhood makes poverty harder. Single mothers and their children are, by far, the poorest type of family in the United States.

The frustration at the dangerous crossroads of gender and poverty was sharpened for my mom in a couple of ways, I think. She had a mind that wanted books, ideas, and sketch pads — things she sat with privately but didn’t get to share with the world. And, because people considered her beautiful, she got a constant stream of attention about her body, at work and elsewhere. Being physically objectified that many times over — as a labor machine, a producer of children, and a decorative object — all while being aware of your own unexpressed talent can make the body feel like a prison.

My mom was beloved among her friends as a kind, funny, wise, and generous person, I’d learn as an adult. But there was a deep pain in her that only those closest to her saw. I think sometimes that she didn’t really hate having children as a young woman; she hated her life, and the children who came into it would feel that.

My mom was beloved among her friends as a kind, funny, wise, and generous person, I’d learn as an adult. But there was a deep pain in her that only those closest to her saw.

There is a good chance you would have felt it, too. The anger she put on me, I would have put onto you. I can count on one hand the number of times someone has seen me in a moment of true rage; they would tell you my voice became quiet and my eyes stopped blinking. But I have felt the wild, ungrounded frustration of the women before me many more times than I have shown it. Not so much now. But very much when I was a teenager and into my twenties, during what would have been your most formative years. Back then it took every bit of strength in me to stop that energy running through my body like lightning, to refuse to be its conductor.

Anger was not Jeannie’s true self, I’d learn as she aged. But, as tends to happen with people who are beaten down by daily circumstances, my young mother’s core nature was glimpsed only in moments of life and death: the hospitalization of a loved one, her own water breaking. It was not a tender nature, but it wasn’t mean, either. It was a severe serenity, doing whatever a moment required without complaint.


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The day my brother arrived, she sat on the edge of my twin bed to wake me in the dark early-morning hours. She’d picked out my ruffled mauve bedding and kept it well laundered, but before that moment she had never sat on it, that I can recall. She had a habit of keeping her distance and flying off the handle at the smallest frustration. For this event that might actually warrant panic, though, she was calm as a priestess in the October moonlight.

“It’s time,” she said.

At the hospital more than thirty miles away in Wichita, Mom hemorrhaged during the labor. Her blood pressure dropped so low that the doctors said, “Stay with us.”

Once she had recovered, someone put me in a blue smock and took me to meet Matthew, who was blotchy and black haired. The visitors’ room had blue balloons and food on long tables; I’d never seen such a big spread of treats and drinks on a day that wasn’t Thanksgiving or Christmas. Dad gave me a cup of sparkling grape juice, which I knew was expensive since it was in a big glass bottle involving bubbles and foil.

Mom wore a pink-and-black-striped cotton gown. She had curled and teased her long brown hair and put makeup on her twenty-two-year-old face, but her eyes were tired. They would stay tired for a long time.

My parents couldn’t afford a babysitter and didn’t live in a proper neighborhood where there might have been fellow mothers to help a woman recovering from childbirth. Both my grandmothers, Betty and Teresa, had promised to come by when they could. Dad was determined to get back to work. The Family and Medical Leave Act that might have protected Mom’s job for a few weeks wouldn’t be passed for another eight years; toward the end of her pregnancy, she’d been forced to quit whatever low-paying gig she had at the time.

So Mom would be on her own with a child not yet in school, an infant, a checkbook for a bank account with thirty bucks in it, and long miles between us and any town, any store.

So Mom would be on her own with a child not yet in school, an infant, a checkbook for a bank account with thirty bucks in it, and long miles between us and any town, any store.

With Matt’s arrival just weeks before Ronald Reagan’s reelection, Mom would soon cast her second vote in a national election. This time, though, her politics were different. While her teenage instincts had gone with losing incumbent Carter the year I was born, by 1984 she had been won over by Reagan’s charm or at least by the national consensus that he was a good president. Many others in our community would vote for him, too — if they voted at all.

“They’re all crooks,” I often heard about politicians. Mom never said that. She was not given to apathy and did her best to stay on top of the news. Based on what she could glean, Reagan was a good man.

The Republican party would hurt women like my mother in direct and indirect ways that decade: removing the Equal Rights Amendment from the party’s platform, dismantling aid programs that helped poor women feed their children, eroding reproductive health rights. Unbeknownst to my mom, the Republican party was turning deeply socially conservative, different from the moderate, fiscally conservative party that people respected in my area. Mom didn’t think women on welfare were lazy or that feminists were militant monsters. She voted for Reagan because a cultural tide told her it was the right thing to do, and she had little time or resources to question the wave of sentiment the country was riding.

The country was swinging right, and working people were changing party allegiance. My mom was one of them, part of a national trend that I have found says more about clever political messaging than about what people truly know or think about the issues. Meanwhile, poor rural mothers like her were receding from view in both political parties, if they’d ever been in view at all.

When she got home from the hospital, to our new house in the country, Mom was still bleeding through the stitches between her legs. She was exhausted in a way she’d never been and scared to have a four-year-old and a newborn under her care. Dad had to go back to work.

“Please don’t go,” Mom said to him. She was generally too proud to ask anyone for anything, including her own husband for support. But she pleaded. “I can’t do this alone.”

There were houses to build, though. My uncle was outside honking the horn, and Dad left — believing, to some extent, that it was his job to provide and her job to take care of the kids. There was no paid leave for him either in such a moment.

Once Dad was gone, Mom lay in their bed trying to sleep through her pain as Matt cried from his crib. I crawled up a chest of drawers in her bedroom and tipped it over. The dresser crushed me against the carpet.

Mom ran from her bed and somehow lifted the chest off me, straining so hard she tore her stitches. Blood ran down her thighs.

I don’t think we went back to the hospital. When she told me the story, it was about a day she barely survived because of my dad’s absence. I see it now as a day she barely survived because society valued productivity and autonomy more than it valued women and children. Pregnancy slows you down, so pregnant women lost their jobs; mothers were alone in their nuclear households while fathers worked extra hours to make up the difference. For the poor and rural among them, the situation was keenly dangerous.

When Dad came home that night, Mom was quiet. She stayed quiet for weeks, until Dad made another announcement. He would be leaving for a construction job a long drive east of us. That meant weeks away from home. Mom thought he was finding excuses to be away from us.

I see it now as a day she barely survived because society valued productivity and autonomy more than it valued women and children.

“Please don’t go, please don’t go,” she said, screaming and crying. She often screamed but almost never cried. It was like something had broken in her when the stitches between her legs tore.

But Dad packed up his tools and left again.

He was concerned about providing for his family, he told me when I was grown, sitting next to him in his work truck and telling him how Mom remembered that day.

“I couldn’t have turned down good money, even if I had to be gone for a long time,” he said. His eyes filled with tears. “Look, maybe I was wrong.”

* * *

How to handle the stress of it all when you don’t even know that your life is stressful? Women saying “my nerves are shot” was the closest anyone came to examining the situation. What they didn’t discuss, though, they felt. That’s what substances were for.

Every adult I knew was addicted to something — mostly cigarettes or booze. Also pills, both prescribed and gotten by other means. The women of my mom’s family, who had grown up in Wichita with doctors nearby during decades when health care was cheaper, were sold on the idea of prescriptions for symptoms rooted in psychological strife. Most of them were on “thyroid medicine” for exhaustion, “nerve pills” for anxiety.

Dad, however, didn’t take even the most benign aspirin — not thinking it harmful or ineffective but suspecting it amounted to money spent on something your body and mind could do on their own, for free and without side effects. Dad had a quiet inner life as a self-healer. Once in a while he shared it with me, and in that way he was the most maternal force in my life.

Dad had a quiet inner life as a self-healer. Once in a while he shared it with me, and in that way he was the most maternal force in my life.

He tucked me in most nights and helped me say my Catholic prayers to the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, Mary, and the guardian angels of me and all my family. This helped me relax at bedtime, but I had a horrible time falling asleep. I’d lie in my bed thinking through every problem and staring at my closed closet while my muscles were frozen in fear. One night I finally told Dad that I couldn’t fall asleep for the longest time, even after the prayers. He listened. Then he put his hands around my toes through the comforter.

“Relax your feet,” he said in a soft voice, and I did.

He said to relax my legs. I was amazed to find that I could and did.

“Now relax your tummy,” he said. I did, knots and tension disappearing as though Dad had helped me wave them away. I felt like a warm blanket was being drawn over me, but on the inside.

“Now relax your arms and your fingers,” he said. “Now your shoulders.”

By the time the magic had reached my head, my eyebrows relaxed, and I fell asleep.

Dad knew how to help me quiet my mind because he had taught himself to quiet his own. No matter how hard a day was, he almost always treated me with respect, if only by keeping his distance when his own emotions were raging.

And he really listened to me. Even though Mom was the reader and writer of the two, Dad liked to claim I grew up to be good with words because he talked to me like a grown-up rather than in baby gibberish when I was an infant.

Conversations were different with the rest of my family. They often fell into trancelike repetition of nonsense once a kid had worn them out: “He needs a good pop upside the head,” they’d say. Or “He’s lazy,” or “She don’t mind when she’s told.” Even warm, loving Betty would brag about how she’d been beaten as a kid and it did her good. “She’s up to something,” grown adults would say about little kids — words of warning like an old fairy tale from a European forest, where a poor child was a burden unless she contributed to the household and obeyed the rules.

Dad never said things like that. He would have troubles with drinking and gambling over the years, but he carried an aura of peace even when our lives were chaotic. He brushed my knotted hair before the sun came up, before he went to work and I went to school. He jotted poetic little notes of wisdom on scraps of paper and put them in my bedroom. When I was older I realized how remarkable all that was in our culture where manliness had a specific definition.

“Writing poems and brushing your daughter’s hair before school isn’t something men brag about, where we’re from,” I told him, reflecting on how nurturing he was by nature.

“It ought to be,” he said.

He was so good with little kids over the years that, even though he never said he wanted me to have my own, I sometimes felt simultaneously relieved I wasn’t a mother and sad that he wasn’t a grandpa to you.

Driving his truck, he would hang his left arm out an open window and let the smell of his wheat fields fill the cab. He barely pushed the gas pedal. The truck seemed to stand still, but through the large, flapping gash in the floorboard under my dangling feet I could see the dirt road moving past. Dad was quiet. The radio was off or tuned to AM. The fields were dirt or green sprouts or blond waves or tall stubble like Dad’s beard. I’d crank my window down and do like Dad.

The place we lived was full of sharp objects, poisons, and frustrations, but there were moments — maybe most moments, on the whole — like in Dad’s truck with the windows down, when the west wind that reached us all the way from the Rockies cleared the air, and I felt more free than I’ve felt in cleaner, safer places.

To find that feeling by myself, I developed a trick I called “doing the reflection.” I’d crawl onto the bathroom countertop and press my face close to the mirror, my breath creating two little circles of fog that disappeared when I inhaled. I would stare into my own eyes. It was important not to blink, for some reason. Then I’d feel a shift inside my head, hear a little “swoosh” like the ocean inside a shell.

My face would suddenly look a little different, my vision was a fraction of a millimeter outside my own eyes. Then I felt calm, unlike the upset child I saw in the mirror.

The poverties that threatened my safety forced me to find that safest place. Eventually I would think of that realm as where we come from, and where we return when we die. That’s where I heard you. That’s the calm center where I received my most important assignment, as the body of a poor girl bound for a different life: to make sure you were never born.

* * *

From Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh. Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Smarsh. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

* * *

Journalist Sarah Smarsh has covered socioeconomic class, politics and public policy for The Guardian, The New York Times, The Texas Observer and many other publications. A frequent commentator on class issues in the U.S., she recently was a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Smarsh’s first book, Heartland, was long-listed for the National Book Award in nonfiction. She lives in Kansas.

Sorry, But Drug-Induced Homicide Laws Aren’t Going to Solve Our Opioid Crisis

Tennessee Bureau of Investigation via AP

Prosecutors across the U.S. have revived old laws to prosecute the people who supply the drugs that lead to overdoses. Critics characterize this as another ineffective technique in the ineffective tough-on-crime approach to drug addiction. Instead of incarcerating the high-level drug traffickers the laws originally targeted, they treat family, friends, and small-time dealers as murderers. For The New Republic, Jack Shuler looks at a few recent cases of drug-induced homicide, explains this tactic’s origins, and it ineffectiveness.

While this trend began prior to Donald Trump’s election, it has accelerated since he assumed office. According to the United States Sentencing Commission, a federal agency, there was a 10 percent increase in 2017 in the number of people who received federal prison sentences for distributing drugs resulting in death or serious injury and a nearly 200 percent increase since 2013. Trump has made it clear that he favors an aggressive approach to the opioid crisis. “My take is you have to get really, really tough—really mean—with the drug pushers and the drug dealers,” Trump said in February, during a speech in Blue Ash, Ohio.

Trump has pushed this rhetoric to its logical conclusion, suggesting that drug dealers should face the death penalty, an idea he said he got from Chinese President Xi Jinping. He has also expressed admiration for President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines for his violent approach to curbing drug trafficking. In March, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo to the 93 U.S. attorneys reminding them that they have the power to pursue capital punishment in certain drug-related cases.

This aggressive approach has filtered down to the local level. In Ohio, residents have ample reason to be frustrated with the bodies piling up in the state’s morgues; the strain on health care, police and emergency services, and the workforce—a cost of up to billions of dollars every year; and the emotional pain it’s causing families. Last summer in Middletown, Ohio, a city of 50,000 near Cincinnati, city council member Dan Picard proposed a three strikes policy for overdose rescues. Overdose victims would be required to perform community service to make up for the cost of treatment—and if a 911 dispatcher determined that someone who was overdosing had not performed community service, they would not dispatch emergency services. “We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do to maintain our financial security, and this is just costing us too much money,” Picard told a local news station. First responders balked at the proposal, but the anger that bred it persists. Stickers that say SHOOT YOUR LOCAL HEROIN DEALER have started to appear on truck windows around the state. In Summit County, where the opioid crisis is so bad they have had to use refrigerated trailers as morgues, prosecutors have charged 49 people with manslaughter in connection to an overdose since 2014. And in Licking County, at least four people in addition to Tommy Kosto were charged for supplying drugs that led others to overdose between 2016 and 2017.

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An Accident Compounded By Injustice

a large lake is surrounded by trees with green, yellow, and orange leaves. The sky is blue, with no clouds.
Photo by easchiff via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Wendell Lindsey is serving a life sentence in a Texas prison, convicted of murdering his 10-year-old daughter in a fake drowning. He’s consistently maintained his innocence. As Jordan Smith uncovers, investigating the incident and trial for The Intercept, there’s a lot that suggests he might be telling the truth — or at least, that the case was never as cut and dry as the prosecution made it out to be.

I’ve been writing about wrongful convictions for 20 years, and I’ve done a lot of reporting on junk forensics, but this was the first time I’d encountered a case in which the science of drowning was called into question. A year after Nadel first contacted me, I can now say that of all the cases I’ve investigated, Lindsey’s ranks among the most dramatic and confounding I’ve seen. There is certainly junk science, and plenty of it: Self-professed experts in the mechanics of drowning were unequivocal in backing the state’s contention that the only way Lindsey’s daughter could have drowned that day was if Lindsey had forcibly held her under the water until she died.

But that’s not the only thing that went sideways. There was a lackluster police investigation built on a foundation of flawed assumptions. There were witnesses with serious credibility issues — chief among them, Lindsey’s estranged second wife, Linda, who painted an elaborate picture of Lindsey as heartless and capable of murder. As it turns out, she was a serial bigamist who was never legally married to Lindsey, and a private investigator had tied her to at least two fake Social Security numbers. There were allegations that the local medical examiner’s office changed its manner of death determination in order to satisfy police, a bumbling defense attorney who managed to make the case even more convoluted, and prosecutors who carried on an injudicious relationship with Lindsey’s surviving daughter after she testified at trial on behalf of the state.

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Ten Translations of Care

Illustration by Wenting Li

Mary Wang | Longreads | September 2018 | 23 minutes (5,814 words)

 

1. Care /ker/ [verb], 保护o hù, the process of protecting someone or something.

In January 2018, Guo Zhen, my grandmother, was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. A month later, I arrived home for the first Chinese New Year that I’d spend in China since I had moved away 20 years earlier. I came home with my armor ready — my suitcase was packed with a library including Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s canonical book on the illness; Susan Sontag’s Illness and Its Metaphors, so that my analytical mind could help carry the weight of my emotional one; and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a manual for grief in the event of the worst-case scenario. I had rehearsed the serene facial expression I’d use when I’d see Guo Zhen in her hospital bed for the first time, and I had conscientiously visualized every IV drip and beeping machine to blunt any potential shock. Yet what I found in our family home was the rehearsal of a familiar routine: Her son, my uncle Fu Yuan, was still battling with his son to choose his homework over his iPad; Guo Zhen still sat on her children’s stool in the morning, washing clothes in a bucket of cold water, and grandfather, Pu Cheng, still bugged her to play their daily chess game, holding up a paper board fortified so many times over that the plastic tape covering it was far thicker than the board itself.

Guo Zhen didn’t know she had cancer, and my family had carefully devised a strategy to keep it that way. Doctors and nurses in the hospital had been instructed to never speak of her illness in her presence, and visitors to our home signed an invisible contract before entering, agreeing to act as if her recent hospitalization was due to a case of pneumonia. I never asked her to sit down when she’d get up after every few bites during lunch or dinner to restock the table with congee, buns, or pickles — I knew she did this out of habit rather than necessity. Fu Yuan and his wife never fought to take over her housework, though we worried about the strain of repetitive hunching on her weakening body. Any deviation from routine risked puncturing the facade of normalcy we all worked carefully to preserve, and, within a month, my family had become a theater troupe improvising their first performance, an intimate Truman Show designed to deceive its protagonist.

At 78, there was no point in performing surgery or chemotherapy on Guo Zhen anymore, and any new miracle drug that might land in the world would only arrive in China years after its introduction on the American market. Besides, the decidedly optimistic belief that cancer will soon become only a chronic illness rather than a fatal one is more of an American specialty — its arrogant nature evident when President Nixon declared a “War on Cancer.” The Chinese counterpart to that phrase illustrates a different approach. As one local newspaper put it, “One third of cancer patients die of fear, one third die of its treatment, and only one third die of the illness itself.”

Since there wasn’t much territory to be won in terms of Guo Zhen’s illness or its treatment, we shifted our efforts to shielding her from the first possibility. As soon as doctors saw the dark spots on Guo Zhen’s X-rays, Fu Yuan instructed them to follow our script. “Don’t let the lao ren” — the elderly — “know,” he said, emphasizing Guo Zhen’s status as a senior to make clear that she was no longer a caretaker but the one who was cared for.

“If a man die,” William Carlos Williams wrote, “it is because death / has first possessed his imagination.” Grandfather Pu Cheng, unaware of the American poet, has long touted his own version of this phrase. Boasting about how he’s never stepped foot in a hospital for himself, he’d say, “Nine out of ten people die from fear.” Even though Pu Cheng was also left in the dark about his wife’s disease — we didn’t trust him to keep a secret from his partner of 60 years — we abided by his logic that a doctor’s diagnosis could be a death sentence in itself. By shielding Guo Zhen from the weight of the doctor’s words, we took over the burden of her illness with our own shoulders.
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