Search Results for: The Believer

Putin’s Rasputin

St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square; Moscow, Russia. (Rickson Liebano/Getty)

Amos Barshad | An excerpt adapted from No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World | Harry N. Abrams | 17 minutes (4,490 words)

 

In the lobby of a heavy-stone building in central Moscow, I’m greeted by a friendly young woman in a pantsuit who, she explains, is working “in the field of geopolitics.” She takes me to the security desk, where my passport is carefully, minutely inspected before I’m granted access. As we head upstairs the woman slowly whispers a joke: “This is what will save us from the terrorists.”

We walk down a long, high hallway that looks or bare or unfinished or forgotten, like maybe someone was planning on shutting down this wing of the office but never got around to it. There are linoleum floors, cracking and peeling, and bits of mismatched tile in the style of sixties Americana. Rank-and-file office clerks shuffle through, and no one pays attention to a faint buzzing emanating from somewhere near.

We stop in front of a heavy wooden door. Inside is Aleksandr Dugin.

The man is an ideologue with a convoluted, bizarre, unsettling worldview. He believes the world is divided into two spheres of influence — sea powers, which he calls Eternal Carthage, and land powers, which he calls Eternal Rome. He believes it has always been so. Today, those spheres are represented by America, the Carthage, and Russia, the Rome. He believes that Carthage and Rome are locked in a forever war that will only end with the destruction of one or the other. Read more…

Bundyville: The Remnant — Character List

The reporting path that led to the formation of Bundyville: The Remnant was one that wound thousands of miles around the American West — from Nevada to Utah, Arizona to Oregon and Washington. It’s a story of martyrdom and mystery, told through the eyes of a long list of characters — people who, in many cases, don’t know each other, or even cross paths in this series. These biographical sketches can be used as a tool to keep names and stories straight as you read.



Barry Byrd

The pastor of Marble Community Fellowship, in Stevens County, Washington. Byrd was also the singer in the bands Legacy and the Watchman, and was one of 15 signers of a Christian Identity manifesto called the “Remnant Resolves.” Byrd attended The Ark — a known Christian Identity church in Stevens County — for years before founding Marble Country, a “Christian covenant community” with his wife, Anne.

Stella Anne Byrd

A North Carolina native, Stella Anne Byrd (nee Bulla) is married to Barry Byrd, and helped found Marble Community Fellowship. Anne often preaches from the pulpit as well, and is seen by many people raised at Marble as someone who believes she is a prophet. Two of her brothers also believe they are prophets.

Brad Bulla

Brother of Anne Byrd. Brad Bulla was one of the fifteen authors of the Christian Identity manifesto, the Remnant Resolves, alongside his brother-in-law, Barry Byrd. He also played in the band Legacy with the Byrds. Bulla was excommunicated from Marble by his sister, and now is a traveling musician.

Ammon Bundy

Son of Cliven Bundy, Ammon Bundy was considered the leader of the 2016 Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation in Southeastern Oregon. Bundy, who lives in Idaho, has since become a public speaker on his theories about the federal government and his anti-environmentalism stance. In 2018, he made headlines when he spoke out against President Trump’s remarks about a migrant caravan at the US/Mexico border.

Cliven Bundy

A Nevada cattle rancher, Cliven Bundy became a national name when, in 2014, he led an armed standoff between his militia supporters and employees of the US Park Service and Bureau of Land Management. By that point, Bundy had not paid the required fees to graze his cattle on public land for nearly 20 years, on the basis of his claim that the federal government could not actually own land. Bundy is the father of Ammon Bundy and Ryan Bundy, who led the 2016 armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Bundy was held in federal prison for two years for charges related to the 2014 standoff, but was freed when the judge dismissed the case after determining that government prosecutors had failed to turn over relevant evidence to Bundy’s lawyers.  The government has appealed the dismissal

Richard Butler

As the founder of the neo-Nazi compound, the Aryan Nations, Butler established the group in North Idaho during the 1970s — which became a hub for white supremacists from around the country to gather. Butler was also an ardent believer in Christian Identity, and also ran a church devoted to the ideology at the Aryan Nations, called the Church of Jesus Christ Christian. Butler lost his compound in a 2000 lawsuit, and died in his sleep in 2004.

Joshua Cluff

A nurse and former colleague of Glenn Jones, Cluff and his family were the victims of the 2016 Panaca bombing committed by Jones. Cluff is a cousin of LaVoy Finicum, and is married to Tiffany Cluff, who was home when the bombing occurred with the couple’s three daughters.  

Glenn Jones

A 59-year-old former nurse at the Grover C. Dils Medical Center in Caliente, Nevada, Jones detonated two bombs at the Panaca, Nevada home of his former co-workers, Joshua and Tiffany Cluff on July 13, 2016. Jones shot himself before the bombs exploded, and died at the scene. At the end of his life, Jones lived at an RV park in Kingman, Arizona.

Robert LaVoy Finicum

In January 2016, 54-year-old Robert LaVoy Finicum was considered a leader of the 41-day armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Southeastern Oregon. Preferred to be called LaVoy, Finicum was an Arizona native who became a rancher late in life. He was the father of 11 children, and numerous foster children, and was married to Dorothea Jeanette Finicum. He was shot and killed after fleeing from police during a traffic stop on January 26, 2016 that was intended to arrest the leaders of the refuge occupation. Finicum is widely considered a martyr in the anti-government Patriot movement.  

Sheriff Kerry Lee

A Panaca native, Kerry Lee has been the sheriff of Lincoln County, Nevada — one of the largest counties by square foot in America — for 13 years. He is also the chief of the Panaca volunteer fire department and the county coroner. He lives down the street from the 2016 bomb site, and was one of the first people to respond to the scene.  

William Keebler

An ardent hunter and Utah militiaman, William “Bill” Keebler spent two weeks at the 2014 Bundy Ranch standoff, providing supplies for Bundy’s supporters and acting as a bodyguard to the family. Keebler was an associate of LaVoy Finicum. After the standoff, Keebler returned home to Utah and founded the Patriots Defense Force (PDF) militia. In June 2016, Keebler pushed the button to detonate a fake bomb at a Arizona Bureau of Land Management building. The explosive was supplied by a PDF member who was actually an undercover FBI agent. After two years of court proceedings, Keebler was sentenced to time served and is out on parole.

Stewart Rhodes

The founder of the Oath Keepers militia, which is considered to be an anti-government group formed out of conspiratorial beliefs. Rhodes is a graduate of Yale Law School and is a former staffer for Ron Paul. During a February 2019 Trump campaign rally, Rhodes appeared in the front row of the crowd.

“Brad Miller” and “Jake Davis”

Two undercover FBI agents who infiltrated William Keebler’s Patriots Defense Force militia.

Washington State Representative Matt Shea

A six-term Washington state house member representing Spokane Valley, Matt Shea has aligned himself at the far-right of the state’s Republican party. He made headlines in 2018 when he claimed to have distributed a document called the Biblical Basis for War, which spelled out a battle plan for a holy war. Shea has long been vocal about his conspiratorial views, and has been a guest on Alex Jones’s broadcast InfoWars. He is an annual speaker at the God and Country Celebration at Marble Community Fellowship, a secretive religious community. He is a leader of the 51st State movement, which advocates for Eastern Washington to break off from the more liberal west side of the state. The new state would be called “Liberty.”

Timothy McVeigh

The perpetrator of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which left 168 people dead. McVeigh was known to hold anti-government beliefs, and said the bombing was revenge for the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents.

Dorothea Jeanette Finicum

The widow of Robert LaVoy Finicum and mother of 11, Jeanette became an activist and popular Patriot Movement speaker after her husband’s death. She filed a wrongful death lawsuit against several defendants, including the State of Oregon, because of his death, and helped create a movie about her husband called LaVoy: Dead Man Talking.

Mark Herr

Founder of the Center for Self-Governance, Herr is also the producer of LaVoy: Dead Man Talking.

Guy Finicum

LaVoy Finicum’s younger brother. A licensed mental health counselor.

Paul Glanville

A Colorado doctor who lived at Marble Country during the 1990s, but left the community after coming to believe it was a religious cult.

Jay Grimstead

Founder of the Coalition on Revival, which advocates for laws to be restructured to follow Biblical law. Grimstead briefly lived at Marble Community Fellowship, and later became a critic of the Byrds’ authoritarian structure. 

Chevie Kehoe

Kehoe, who attended The Ark, a Christian Identity church in Stevens County, WA, believed he could create the white American bastion in the Northwest that racists before him, like Bob Mathews, believed in. Kehoe went on a multi-state crime spree, which included murders, robberies, and a shootout with police before he was arrested and sentenced to three life sentences. He is currently incarcerated at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado.

Kevin Harpham

A Stevens County, Washington white supremacist who planted a bomb in 2011 on the route of the Spokane, Washington Martin Luther King Jr Day Unity March. Currently in prison.

Dan Henry

A Christian Identity pastor at The Ark, now called Our Place Fellowship, in Stevens County, Washington.

Jesse Johnson

Was raised at Marble Country before being excommunicated as a teenager.

Israel Keyes

A childhood acquaintance of Kehoe who also reportedly attended the Ark, Keyes confessed to committing murders around the United States shortly before killing himself in jail.

Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich

The sheriff of Spokane County, Washington since 2006, Knezovich — a Republican — has risen as one of the loudest voices against State Rep. Matt Shea.

Robert “Bob” Mathews

A former anti-government militia leader, in 1983 Mathews formed The Order: a white supremacist group that committed bombings, robberies, and a murder around the American West in hopes of sparking a race war. Mathews hoped to turn the Northwest into a “white American bastion.”

Pete Peters

A Christian Identity pastor and radio host, Pete Peters ran a small Colorado church devoted to anti-homosexual, anti-Jewish and racist teachings in the 1980s. Peters spoke at conferences and to groups of Christian Identity adherents around the country, including at The Ark in Stevens County and the Aryan Nations compound in North Idaho. Although Peters tried to shed the Christian Identity label, he continued to preach the ideology throughout his life. Peters hosted a radio and online ministry called Scriptures for America, which still continues today in his absence. He died in 2011.

Dennis Peacocke

A California political activist-turned-spiritual leader, Peacocke is an advocate for dominionism and is something of a spiritual advisor to the Byrds.

Jay Pounder

A devout Christian and former security staffer for State Rep. Matt Shea, Pounder helped leaked the Biblical Basis for War document in 2018.

Tanner Rowe

Rowe worked security for State Rep. Matt Shea on Election Night 2016. In 2018, alongside Jay Pounder, Rowe would release a document called The Biblical Basis for War — which Shea had distributed. The paper advocates for a holy war. Rowe is also a loud critic of Shea’s 51st State Movement.

John Smith

Former Washington state representative, representing Stevens County, Washington. As a young man, Smith attended The Ark, a Christian Identity church in the county, but has since disavowed his past and become one of the loudest voices in the county against the ideology. In 2018, Smith collaborated with Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich on a three-part podcast about the presence of white supremacist ideologies in the region.

Glen Wadsworth

A native Panacan who is both a prison conservation crew supervisor and a member of the volunteer Fire Department in Panaca, Nevada. He was mowing the lawn of his childhood home on July 13, 2016, when Glenn Jones detonated two massive bombs next door.  

Pastor John Weaver

A longtime neo-Confederate speaker who opposes interracial marriage, Weaver was a featured guest at the 2015 God and Country Celebration at Marble Community Fellowship.


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PHOTO CREDITS Guy Finicum, Tanner Rowe, Glen Wadsworth, Kerry Lee: Ryan Haas; Jesse Johnson: Leah Sottile; Joshua Cluff: Facebook; Cliven Bundy: Gage Skidmore; Robert Finicum: The Realist Report; Ammon Bundy: Rob Kerr–AFP/Getty Images; William Keebler: Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office; Stewart Rhodes: Course Correction; Glenn Jones: KTNV; Representative Matt Shea: Ted S. Warren/AP/REX Shutterstock; Timothy McVeigh: AP Handout; Dorothea Finicum: Dave Blanchard/OPB; Mark Herr: Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in Action; Barry Byrd: Marble Country; Stella Byrd: Facebook; Brad Bulla: Facebook; Richard Butler: Southern Poverty Law Center; Pete Peters: Blair Godbout/The Coloradoan; John Smith: Washington State Legislature; Robert Matthews: Wiki Fair Use; Chevie Kehoe: Homeschooling’s Invisible Children; Israel Keyes: HOPD; Pastor John Weaver: Immortal 600; Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich: Spokane County; Jay Pounder: Exceptional Gent; Jay Grimstead: Reformation; FBI Badges: Getty; Dan Henry: SonPlace; Dennis Peacocke: Go Strategic; Paul Glanville: Eagles Wing Medical; Kevin Harpham: Associated Press.

Live Through This: Courtney Love at 55

Mick Hudson / Getty, istock / Getty Images Plus, Michael Ochs Archive / Getty, Vinnie Zuffante / Getty, pidjoe / Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | July 9th, 2019 | 24 minutes (6,539 words)

It’s hard to tell whether Thurston Moore is being sarcastic or sincere. It’s probably a bit of both. “The biggest star in this room is Courtney Love,” says the Sonic Youth singer and guitarist in a scene from 1991: The Year Punk Broke. The documentary follows Sonic Youth’s summer 1991 European tour and features performances and backstage antics from their tourmates, including a pre-Nevermind Nirvana, Babes in Toyland, and Dinosaur Jr.

Moore comments during an interview with 120 Minutes, an MTV program that spotlighted alternative music in the days before the music channel became the home of teen moms and spoiled Laguna Beach brats. As Moore declares his love of English food to the host — most definitely sarcasm — Love is behind him trying to get the camera’s attention. She waves and appears to stand on something to make herself taller. Her efforts pay off and soon she is in front of the host, all brazen, blond, and sporting blue baby doll barrettes.

Tongue-in-cheek or not, Moore was right. Love’s band Hole wasn’t on the European tour bill that summer and their debut album Pretty on the Inside hadn’t even been released yet, but Love was already on MTV.

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Why We Write Memoir: A Reading List

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No matter how many years pass, no matter how much I work in therapy, no matter how far I remove myself geographically from the site of trauma, whenever I open the YouTube video on a channel I cannot forget the name of, I start to drown. It is not a quick plunge underwater. When first the browser loads, I tell myself, as is my natural response to any inkling of pain, that I am fine.

The first sound is my laughter — a strained version. In the video, I hold my hands to my belly, as if emulating a kind of joy, before gripping the door frame to my college dormitory. My laugh reaches almost a shriek in pitch. Behind the camera, one of my former Division I college teammates cajoles, “Talk to us, talk to us, Jackie.”

I pause the video. I remind myself that I am here, in a new-to-me town in Pennsylvania, years and miles from this day, but my body tightens like a fist. I want to leave my apartment, to run beneath a sky tinged the soothing, sugar-spun pink of cotton candy. I want to weep. But instead, though I feel some kind of water rising around me, I press play again. I have to, I tell myself. I’m writing.

The thing about the video is that I do not remember it being recorded. In it, though I appear “normal” with my black Nike shorts, purple-framed glasses, dirty blond hair sleek to my shoulders, I am experiencing one of many mysterious neurological episodes that would plague me that semester. With the episodes came what doctors would later term aphasia and a transient alteration of awareness. In layman’s terms, this meant I would repeat a few words (“Sky News, Sky News, Sky News,” “Aurora, Aurora, Aurora”) for minutes at a time. I wouldn’t remember the episodes when I later woke up. A few of my teammates, gathered behind the lens of the camera, knew this. I don’t know what prompted them to film that day, if it was a gesture of care that turned cruel, or just a means of entertaining themselves from the beginning.

When I do speak in the footage, I first say, “I, um.” I glance down at the floor. Hoping to confuse me, the boys filming ask where I’m going tomorrow and where I’m going yesterday. I respond, “I, I, I” and look at my watch. As they continue to prod with their questions, my voice reaches a higher pitch. I shriek “No! Noo! I-no! I-no! I, I.” This is the part where I feel the water rising around me at my desk, where I know I’ll spend the rest of the day in what feels like a bottomless ocean, suspended by a grief I cannot name or easily swim out of.

I have been writing about this video for six years, as part of a memoir that I am still wrestling into being. After watching this video, when I am in the watery deep, I ask myself questions: How can I write ethically about my teammates, who both cared for me and inflicted deep pain in turns? What happens if they read this someday? Why, in a world where there is far more horrific news being reported daily, am I trying to add my voice? Why, if I don’t consciously remember this moment, can’t I let the video rot in oblivion where it belongs?

I have reported this footage to YouTube dozens of times. Each time, I select the option “Hateful or abusive content” and pick “Abusing vulnerable individuals.” I shrink away from the word “abusive,” telling myself it’s really not that bad, but then I remember that within the video, one of the girls observing — someone I considered a friend at the time — says, “You guys are so mean” and a boy from the team says, “she’s gonna cry” before they continue. Even while coherent, while completely within themselves, my teammates knew that their actions were harmful. And for me, though I don’t consciously remember this video being taken, my body holds a history of its own. The trauma lives in the way I isolated myself for years because I feared other people more than I feared my symptoms. The trauma lives in the way I used to scream when a tender former partner tried to care for me during episodes. The trauma lives in the fact that the video is a testimony I cannot ignore, a memory I cannot blur out of being like so many other incidents that happened that semester between the soft of my body and those teammates.

At times, these six years of writing have felt like living within a dense fog: I cannot see where I’m going or where I’ve been. The drafts seem to become both more refined and completely opaque as I press forward. But recently, my life has shifted in fundamental ways: I broke up with a partner who knew the contours of my history as well as he could and moved halfway across the country. Here, in this new place, alone, I have been working on a proposal version of the book. In some ways, the tectonic shifts in my personal life and geography have allowed me to see the story in a whole new way, as if I’m finally far enough away to make meaning. During this process, I have been practicing tenderness toward myself. I do leave my desk to chase cotton candy clouds each morning, all the while reminding myself to breathe. I email terrible drafts of my overview to writer friends who nurture me while I probe old wounds. And I have spent innumerable afternoon hours with the essays below, each writer’s words a lifeline pulling me from the deep.

1. Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy (T Kira Madden, March 22, 2019, Lit Hub)

I may have believed that to write The Thing down is to take one more step away from The Thing itself, one more step removed, one more page and another and another until there is a thick stack of proof, of growth, of Tada!—the restorative salvation.

After writing Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, T Kira Madden reckons with the idea that writing memoir is inherently cathartic. By closely examining her reaction to seeing a boy pounding his fists against the closed windows of his mother’s car, Madden considers the differences between life itself and life reexamined, and discusses the importance of allowing readers to enter a work.

2. But What Will Your Parents Think? (Morgan Jerkins, May 2018, Longreads)

This past February, during the book tour for my essay collection, This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female and Feminist in (White) America, one of the recurring questions I received most frequently from readers was about how I pushed past the fear to write about the most intimate aspects of my life?

Rather than providing her audience with a list of coping mechanisms, Morgan Jerkins told the truth: she never overcame fear, particularly the fear of sharing her work with her parents, but learned to acknowledge — and write within — its presence instead.

3. Amy Tan on Writing and the Secrets of Her Past (Nicole Chung, October 16, 2017, Shondaland)

Amy Tan discusses unexpected sites of discovery, reconciling her memory of loved ones with alternative realities, cultivating empathy while writing, and the importance of community in this riveting interview about her new memoir Where the Past Begins: Memory and Imagination with Nicole Chung.

Who we become has so much to do with the experiences we had, and how we survived. The book is not about happy situations — it’s about trauma, and the times when characters have to question who they are. It’s about my questions, and who I am.

4. Annie Dillard and the Writing Life (Alexander Chee, October 16, 2009, The Morning News)

Wanting to be a visual artist, Alexander Chee originally didn’t conceive of himself as a writer. One day, however, before a friend borrowed his typewriter, he wrote a story that “came out as I now know very few stories do: quickly and with confidence.”

Lorrie Moore calls the feeling I felt that day ‘the consolations of the mask,’ where you make a place that doesn’t exist in your own life for the life your life has no room for, the exiles of your memory. But I didn’t know this then.

Chee, who most recently published How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, reflects on the significant impact Annie Dillard had on his beginnings as a writer.

5. A Reckoning is Different than a Tell-All: An Interview with Kiese Laymon (Kiese Laymon, interviewed by Abigail Bereola, October 18, 2018, The Paris Review)

What’s the difference between a tell-all and a reckoning? How does audience change how a book is both written and read? What effect can memoir have on the level of personal relationships as well as within the realm of larger cultural conversation? Kiese Laymon addresses these questions and more in a brilliant interview by Abigail Bereola, as they discuss his groundbreaking memoir, Heavy.

I think people conflate memoir with autobiography a lot, but memoir is the artful rendering of an experience. For me, to get to the artfulness of it, I had to think of a person who could help me keep the good fat and cut out the bad fat.

6. Writing truthfully about my father: An act of resistance, an act of love (Allie Rowbottom, July 27, 2018, Salon)

Allie Rowbottom’s father, after reading a draft of her memoir, JELL-O Girls, says he feels suicidal. In this ruminative piece, Rowbottom provides a window into her writing process as pertains to the ethics of representing others, as well as conveys how important it was for her to stay true to her own story, even if it revealed wounds that others had not yet reckoned with.

I’m doing it right now, as I did when I sent my dad my book, as I did when I wrote it, chronicling my experience on the page, saving myself through writing, despite the painful fear of what the work I produce might lead my father to threaten or create. Facing this fear is the most challenging work I have ever done.

7. The World’s on Fire. Can We Still Talk About Books? (Rebecca Makkai, December 6, 2018, Electric Lit)

She might just as easily, as many have done before her and many continue to do, ask how one could post about books on a day when there’d been a mass shooting, a day when babies were in cages, a day when toddlers were gassed, a day when… well, any other day, really.

How — and should we? — write or celebrate art with so many atrocities in the world around us? By examining historical instances of people writing in the midst of unimaginable horrors and considering the context within her recent novel, The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai asserts that art, now, as much as ever, can serve as a vital form of resistance.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, GuernicaTin House, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

Holding the Pain

Illustration by Lily Padula

Amye Archer | Longreads | July 2019 | 14 minutes (3,422 words)

On the morning of December 14th, 2012, one of my twin daughters stayed home from school. Warm from fever, Samantha drifted in and out of sleep as I cleaned around her. The house was still out of sorts from the girls’ 6th birthday party only two days prior. Shortly after 10 a.m., I started receiving texts from my more news-conscious friends alerting me to a school shooting unfolding at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Sandy Hook. It would be the first and last time I would ever hear those two words and not feel an ache somewhere inside of me.

I turned on the news and saw dozens of children with terror on their faces, walking in connected ropes, hands on shoulders through the parking lot. As the minutes ticked by, reporters began saying numbers. Two, four, six, twelve. I remember thinking that’s a dozen. A dozen children are dead. I tried hard to busy myself. I washed the same dish three times, dismantled the bathroom faucet and scrubbed every part with an old toothbrush, anything to keep from thinking of that number. Then, a CNN text alert: Dozens dead. They had added an “s.”

I couldn’t hide any longer. I turned the television on low. There it was on the Chiron: 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7 were dead. I struggled to breathe. Twenty. Twenty children the same age as my twin daughters. I pressed my spine against the doorframe of my kitchen and sobbed. I prayed the frame would hold my pain.

I watched the coverage in drips as Samantha was waking up. I remember thinking she should not associate first grade with murder. She will never go back. I came up with explanations I would use if she woke and discovered the news. I came up empty. I worried that I would never be able to adequately explain what happened at Sandy Hook. I also worried about school. I prayed my other daughter, Penelope, who was tucked away in the safety of her Kindergarten classroom, didn’t know. Can I ever assume she is safely tucked away there ever again? I wondered if I should call the principal and ask him not to tell her. Not to tell any of them? I made a promise to myself right then and there that I would be a bucket for my daughters, and that I would carry this for as long as I could so they didn’t have to.

Shortly before 2:30 pm, I dressed a groggy Samantha and took her with me to pick up Penelope. The school was only blocks away, and we rode in silence. As we waited outside the elementary school exit for the students to emerge, I scanned the other parents’ faces for any sign of worry or anguish. They seemed fine, relaxed, smiling. Did they know? Many looked like they came right from work. I envied them in that moment, in that place, the not-knowing. I wished I could warn them. There was a bomb of heartache waiting for them at home. Tick, tick, tick.

By the time we got home, the country knew more. Six educators were also killed. We learned it was a lone gunman. We learned what collective heartbreak felt like. Shortly after 3 p.m., President Obama spoke to a stunned and grieving nation. I set the girls up with some Legos in the other room so I could watch. He fought to hold back tears at first. Then, he let them fall. In that moment, he wasn’t our President, he was also Sasha and Malia’s dad. I ran into the small guest bathroom, locked the door and called my mother. I cried harder than I ever have in my life.
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To Protect Children from Sexual Abuse, the Catholic Church Must Eliminate the Clergy

Vadim Pacajev/Sipa USA via AP Images

In a gripping and contentious cover story for the Atlantic, journalist and ex-Catholic priest James Carroll argues that it’s time for Catholicism to dismantle the priesthood. The fundamental problem, Carroll writes, is that “clericalism, with its cult of secrecy, its theological misogyny, its sexual repressiveness, and its hierarchical power based on threats of a doom-laden afterlife, is at the root of Roman Catholic dysfunction.” The clergy were not created by God or the bible, he explains, but are political units of the Roman empire, and it has corrupted the Church in a way that has made the systematic abuse of children around the world possible.

The Church’s maleness and misogyny became inseparable from its structure. The conceptual underpinnings of clericalism can be laid out simply: Women were subservient to men. Laypeople were subservient to priests, who were defined as having been made “ontologically” superior by the sacrament of holy orders. Removed by celibacy from competing bonds of family and obligation, priests were slotted into a clerical hierarchy that replicated the medieval feudal order. When I became a priest, I placed my hands between the hands of the bishop ordaining me—a feudal gesture derived from the homage of a vassal to his lord. In my case, the bishop was Terence Cooke, the archbishop of New York. Following this rubric of the sacrament, I gave my loyalty to him, not to a set of principles or ideals, or even to the Church. Should we be surprised that men invited to think of themselves on such a scale of power—even as an alter Christus, “another Christ”—might get lost in a wilderness of self-centeredness? Or that they might find it hard to break from the feudal order that provides community and preferment, not to mention an elevated status the unordained will never enjoy? Or that Church law provides for the excommunication of any woman who attempts to say the Mass, but mandates no such penalty for a pedophile priest? Clericalism is self-fulfilling and self-sustaining. It thrives on secrecy, and it looks after itself.

While Carroll still extols the many benefits of Catholicism’s vast, global, care-giving network of hospitals and schools, he sees the Church’s hierarchy and exclusionary structures as harming, not serving, its 1 billion believers.

In the Americas and Africa; in Europe, Asia, and Australia—wherever there were Catholic priests, there were children being preyed upon and tossed aside. Were it not for crusading journalists and lawyers, the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests would still be hidden, and rampant. A power structure that is accountable only to itself will always end up abusing the powerless. According to one victim, Cardinal Law, of Boston, before being forced to resign because of his support for predator priests, attempted to silence the man by invoking the sacred seal: “I bind you by the power of the confessional,” Law said, his hands pressing on the man’s head, “not to speak to anyone else about this.”

A priest did this. That is the decisive recognition. The abuse of minors occurs in many settings, yes, but such violation by a priest exists in a different order, and not simply because of its global magnitude. For Catholics, priests are the living sacrament of Christ’s presence, delegated above all to consecrate the bread and wine that define the soul of the faith. This symbol of Christ has come to stand for something profoundly wicked. Even as I write that sentence, I think of the good men on whom I have depended for priestly ministry over the years, and how they may well regard my conclusion as a friend’s betrayal. But the institutional corruption of clericalism transcends that concern, and anguish should be reserved for the victims of priests. Their suffering must be the permanent measure of our responses.

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America Is Still Hard To Find

Eugene A. Cernan holds the American flag during his first space walk, becoming the last man to walk on the moon. (NASA / Donaldson Collection / Getty Images)

Lily Meyer | Longreads | May 2019 | 12 minutes (3,115 words)

Catonsville, Maryland, is a quiet suburb of Baltimore, a leafy, American Dream-looking town where, in May 1968, a group of nine Catholic protestors led by pacifist priest Daniel Berrigan staged one of the most famous protests of the Vietnam War. As Berrigan describes it in America Is Hard to Find, a shaggy collection of letters and musings that functions roughly as his autobiography, “nine of us invaded the draft board at Catonsville, Maryland, extracted some 350 draft files and burned them in a parking lot nearby with homemade napalm.” Why? Because “it was better to burn papers than to burn children.”

The novelist Kathleen Alcott takes both the title and the spirit of her third book, America Was Hard to Find, from Berrigan. Alcott’s previous novels, The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets and Infinite Home, are both elegant, contemporary stories set in extremely contained worlds. America Was Hard to Find, in contrast, stretches its limbs across two decades and two continents, plus the moon. It’s more structured than its namesake, but remains digressive and expansive, following a left-wing radical named Fay Fern and her loved ones across time and space. This includes outer space; Alcott’s history deviates very slightly from ours, and in her world, the first man on the moon was not Neil Armstrong but the fictional Vincent Kahn, Fay’s onetime lover and the father of her only child.

Vincent and Fay work as foils, as do Fay and her son, Wright. Through their shifting and overlapping perspectives, Alcott offers her own anti-war observation of Cold War America. She takes the political questions Berrigan lays out in America Is Hard to Find — what are the ethical limits of protest? What are the ethical limits of technology? Will citizens burning papers prevent a government from burning children? — and enacts them in slow, stylish, keenly observed prose. Read more…

United States of Conspiracy: An Interview with Anna Merlan

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Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | April 2019 | 17 minutes (4,461 words)

 

On March 13, 2019, a twenty-four year old construction worker named Anthony Comello drove to Staten Island and backed his pickup into a Cadillac owned by the head of the Gambino crime family, Frank Cali. When Cali came to the door, Comello shot him. Comello was arrested a few days later in Brick, New Jersey, and upon his appearance in court, it became clear that he was a believer in the confusing and ever-shifting conspiracy theory, QAnon — whose adherents believe President Trump is locked in a mortal battle with a “deep state,” which they contend is running child sex trafficking rings (among other things). A photo from the arraignment shows that Comello had written the letter “Q” on his hand, along with “MAGA FOREVER” and “United We Stand.”

A mob boss, a cadillac, a murder, a town called Brick, New Jersey — all of those things make sense when itemized and grouped together. In 2019 it’s not even that surprising that a member of QAnon was involved. But, barring new information, what is surprising is the simplicity of the actual motive — Comello wanted to date Cali’s niece and Cali disapproved.

“Life is so much more random than we would like it to be,” Anna Merlan told me over the phone, when we were talking about Cali’s murder. “Everything is so much weirder and less meaningful than we would like it to be and I constantly see people that I talk to grappling with that idea — that maybe there isn’t a grand narrative under the surface animating everything.” Read more…

The Light Years

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Chris Rush | The Light Years | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | April 2019 | 33 minutes (6,653 words)

 

Fate is a crazy bird, swooping down from heaven.

I’m in a helicopter — it’s inconceivably loud. Out the porthole, I see a blue bay and a tiny island. It’s Alcatraz, but I don’t know that. I barely know where I am. Across from me sits an angelic blonde woman, her lavender gown falling to the floor. On her lap rests a black attaché case and a Bible. She keeps smiling at me.

Why am I so afraid?

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Chimayó

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Esmé Weijun Wang | an excerpt from The Collected Schizophrenias | Graywolf | January 2019 | 17 minutes (4,971 words)

When I walked into the neurologist’s office in 2013 with C., it should have been apparent that something was very wrong with me. I struggled to keep open my eyes, not because of exhaustion but because of the weakness of my muscles. If you lifted my arm, it would immediately flop back down again as though boneless. My body frequently broke out into inexplicable sweats and chills. On top of all that, I had been experiencing delusions for approximately ten months that year. My psychiatrist suspected anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, made famous by Susannah Cahalan’s memoir, Brain on Fire: My Months of Madness, but that did not explain everything that was wrong with me, including the peripheral neuropathy that attacked my hands and feet, my “idiopathic fainting,” or the extreme weight loss that caused suspicions of cancer—and so I was referred to this neurologist, who was described by my psychiatrist as “smart” and “good in her field.”

“I don’t think you have anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, based on your chart,” she said brusquely while C. and I sat in matching chairs that faced her examination table. “I’m doing this as a favor to your psychiatrist.” And then she added, “Someday, we’ll be able to trace all mental illnesses to autoimmune disorders. But we’re not there yet.”

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I had never been prior to 2017, my friend and fellow writer Porochista insisted that we visit the pilgrimage site of Chimayó. “You’ll be able to write something amazing about it,” she said. We were in the IV room of an integrative healthcare clinic when she said this, facing each other in enormous leather chairs with oxygen tubes in our noses and IV needles taped to our veins.

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