cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
TYRANNY
What is the precise moment, in the life of a country, when tyranny takes hold? It rarely happens in an instant; it arrives like twilight, and, at first, the eyes adjust….Tyranny does not begin with violence; it begins with the first gesture of collaboration. Its most enduring crime is drawing decent men and women into its siege of the truth.
–Evan Osnos in The New Yorker
GUNS
On March 17, 2000, [President Bill] Clinton and [Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew] Cuomo announced the deal: among other things, Smith & Wesson agreed to develop a smart gun and take steps to prevent dealers from selling to criminals. Cuomo declared, “We are finally on the road to a safer, more peaceful America.” But on the day the deal went public the N.R.A. denounced Smith & Wesson as “the first gun maker to run up the white flag of surrender.” It released [smith & Wesson CEO Ed] Shultz’s phone number, and encouraged members to complain. He received many threats. One caller said, “I’m a dead-on shot, Mr. Shultz.” Another executive took to wearing a bulletproof vest, according to “Outgunned,” a history of gun-control politics, by Peter Harry Brown and Daniel G. Abel. Online, a boycott took hold, and sales of Smith & Wesson guns fell so sharply that two factories temporarily shut down. In ten months, the stock lost ninety-five per cent of its value, and the company was sold the next year for a fraction of its former worth.
–Evan Osnos, “Making a Killing,” The New Yorker, June 27, 2016
(photo by Dan Winters)
PUTIN
To illustrate his emphasis on personality as a factor in foreign affairs, [Vice President Joe] Biden recalled visiting Putin at the Kremlin in 2011: “I had an interpreter, and when he was showing me his office I said, ‘It’s amazing what capitalism will do, won’t it? A magnificent office!’ And he laughed. As I turned, I was this close to him.” Biden held his hand a few inches from his nose. “I said, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul.’ ”
“You said that?” I asked. It sounded like a movie line.
“Absolutely, positively,” Biden said, and continued, “And he looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said, ‘We understand one another.’ ”
— Evan Osnos in the New Yorker
There’s some fine reporting by Evan Osnos on West Virginia’s environmental crisis, George Packer on recent examples of war literature, and Emily Nussbaum on Norman Lear and his impact on TV. But nothing beats “Elicitation,” John McPhee’s essay on the craft of reporting, specifically of conducting interviews. I associate McPhee exclusively with long and, frankly, boring New Yorker pieces (a three-part series on sand!), but he was a staff writer at Time magazine writing about entertainment in the 1960s, and his reminiscences here include succinct and fascinating portraits of Woody Allen, Jackie Gleason, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Maggie Smith (the last three on the set of The V.I.P.’s), along with a well-placed dig at Truman Capote.
Here’s a choice passage about Taylor: “In comparison with a great many of the actresses I had met in my years of writing about show business, she was not even half full of herself. She seemed curious, sophisticated, and unpretentious, and compared with people I had known in universities she seemed to have been particularly well educated. From childhood forward, she was tutored in the cafeteria at M-G-M.”
And, of course, another great Roz Chast cartoon:
An engrossing issue to read on a three-hour plane ride. Having spent a good chunk of the weekend watching the Olympics, I enjoyed the cover, along with a string of engrossing articles I might not otherwise have devoured quite so closely:
— Ryan Lizza’s informative and characteristically in-depth profile of Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, he of the ostensibly sensible budget that barely conceals all kinds of ideological landmines. Obama’s budget director, as Lizza puts it, “dismantled Ryan’s plan, point by point.” Ryan’s proposal would turn Medicare “into a voucher program, so that individuals are on their own in the health-care market,” he said. Over time, the program wouldn’t keep pace with rising medical costs, so seniors would have to pay thousands of dollars more a year for health care. The Roadmap would revive Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security and “provide large tax benefits to upper-income households . . . while shifting the burden onto middle- and lower-income households. It is a dramatically different approach in which much more risk is loaded onto individuals.”
— Lauren Collins’ piece on conceptual artist Tino Sehgal, whose work involves no objects whatsoever but focuses on personal interaction;
— Mark Singer’s absolutely riveting story about a Michigan dentist who went to incredibly arduous lengths to present himself as a marathon champion without ever actually completing a race and in some cases inventing them (and their websites) from scratch — which falls into the Department of Ugly Truths, or How Fucked-Up Human Beings Can Be. It is essentially a sleuth job on a pathological liar, a mysterious breed of personality;
— Evan Osnos on the curious case of Myanmar’s bloodless regime change; and
— a curious little previously unpublished story, “Thank You for the Light,” recently discovered among the papers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which you can read in its (brief) entirety here. The evocative illustration (below) is by Owen Freeman.
While I’m at it, let me put in a word for two must-reads in the previous issue (cover date July 30): the long and terrific profile of Bruce Springsteen, all the more impressive for being written by New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick, who often surprises me with his choice of subjects; and Zadie Smith’s delightful story, “Permission to Enter,” an excerpt from her forthcoming novel NW.
another eye opens 