This is interesting and provocative. Certainly the Department of English at the University of Virginia, where I took my Ph.D. in the late 1970s, was operated--by its highly acclaimed faculty, BTW, and not the University administration--as a factory for neoliberal or "conservative" consensus in every area, from the teaching of creative writing to the teaching of expository writing, and in the cultivation of the then-fashionable frenchified post-structuralist "theory" in literary studies, as opposed to anything with a "big thinking" perspective that could conceivably be linked to social action--except for the thought of the profoundly ambigous Michel Foucault. 

The latter had to be approached with very long tongs.  Everything had to be made small and personal, even when large moral and intellectual claims were made for the academic products being marketed.

The expository writing program was systematically purged of anyone suspected of big ideas in favor of servile sycophants and snitches who mindlessly parroted the either reactionary or irrelevant neoliberal ideological doctrines of E.D. Hirsch, based on the notion that the "profession of English letters"--or the "professoriate" for short--could no longer pretend to make any "contribution to scholarship" but would instead have to move forward on the equivalent of a fee-for-service basis. The assumption there was that college English teachers had a uniquely marketable professional expertise, when properly indoctrinated in Hirschism, in the teaching of writing.  There were of course also potential armies of expendable graduate students and adjunct faculty who would do the actual work.

There were huge contradictions in the underlying theory, and there was AFAIK never any clearly demonstrable improvement in student writing as a result of the repressive purge, but the theory was a selling point for a profession both filled with rage by "the Sixties" and desperately alarmed by its possibly limited future. The angry and easily offended academic bonzes, fearing for the loss of their tenured idyll, were desperate to market the questionable new product, which promised a new stream of revenue and the opportunity to punish those who had dared to thumb their noses at the Wise.

To bolster the broader reactionary thrust of its overall agenda, UVa began recruiting professed reactionaries to its body of graduate students in English. The departmental coffee room where graduate students often socialized during the day always sported at least one arrogant and abusive libertarian or proud right-winger who delighted in ad hoc ritualistic Marx refutation and broad denunciations of "liberals" of every stripe. 

It was expected of the "happy few" male graduate students who were hand-picked for success from the moment of matriculation, despite melodramatic departmental protestations to the contrary, that they go on record denouncing homosexuality, and it was also expected that they would delight their voyeuristic faculty supporters by stunts, such as seducing each other's wives and girlfriends, to demonstrate the robustness of their masculinity. (The anti-gay bias could be voided in the case of eg the family of prominent Virginia families, but was otherwise so absolute that even the most fervent and snitch-prone gay percussores among the avenging squadrons of Hirschism wound up without tenured positions at other institutions after they had served their purpose in the purges.)

In 2001, the UVa English Department, which had risen to national prominence more than twenty years earlier and was then clearly in decline, achieved its apotheosis by graduating the Nazi Richard B. Spencer with a form of distinction invented especially for him, paving his way for acceptance into graduate school at the University of Chicago, where a prominent UVa doctoral alumnus had been a professor before returning to UVa to repaint the facades of the Potemkin Village expository writing program.

The Virginia English Department also had a big sideline in creative writing.  This focused on "writing small" in exactly the sense Bennett describes  A gifted scholar and poet who had been part of Robert Lowell's circle at Harvard (and was at the time married to a well-regarded woman poet who characterized herself as a Marxist) was denied tenure and replaced by Gregory Orr, a prominent practitioner of what was then known by its non-admirers as "stones and bones" poetry.

This was loosely related to the practice of Robert Bly and Mark Strand (or Georg Trakl by those fond of continental coffee). This school was given to documenting tiny snippets of experience in which the archetypal was revealed in somber little moments of intuition conveyed in Basic English.

The occasional solemn touch of symbolism was an allowable variation on the original faint surrealism and the occasional humor of the original genre. Lines like, "The hand takes what the earth proffers" were ooh'd and aah'd over as if they were not cliches. No unseemly humor in that.

This "thing" too was marketed as a student-friendly product. "I don't want to work for the meaning," said a prominent graduate student practitioner. It was claimed that undergraduates demanded with one voice that their instructors teach them how to write in the newly official style.

Orr had the immense advantage, from the viewpoint of this de facto "school," of having shot and killed his brother in a childhood gun accident--the prose flag was carried forward by a young short-story writer from West Virginia who wrote somber archetypal tales focusing on fossil trilobites and the like. This unfortunate young man committed suicide with a shotgun, and the English Department promptly devoted a major part of its self-promotion campaign to the exaltation of his slender legacy.  

The promotional campaign in prose fiction was carried forward to a considerable extent by the novelist John Casey, whose teaching career at the University came to an end following a series of sexual harassment allegations in the early 2000s.  

Writing programs--and Iowa IMO is a far more virtuous example than the sinister and tendentious UVa experiment--do provide a forum in which The Young can develop their talents--but they also place a tremendous premium on smoothness, coolness, and a kind of decorum that can deal only with the blandest universals rendered within the smallest possible compass of experience. Nobody in such an environment wants to risk ridicule--although at UVa instructors like Diane Wakoski tacitly encouraged gay-bashing in her seminars.

UVa was also a hotbed of venial corruption, sexual and otherwise.  Graduate students who could afford to put exchange invitations to fashionable dinner parties for senior faculty had a tremendous professional advantage over those who could barely afford room rent. In this world, the sexual casting couch (so to speak) played a prominent role. I have no idea whether this applies at Iowa, but have never heard anything about it if so. I think in any case that the corruption, the repression, and the full-throated embrace in the writing programs of timid mediocrity wedded to cowardly vindictiveness went and no doubt still go hand in hand with the now-obvious sinister degenerative tendencies of the neoliberal late capitalist Republic. 

Whether "literature" itself has any future in the world, I can't say. Since the human race itself seems to have at best a limited future, perhaps not. Besides, the one indefinitely renewable resource of human beings is culture--we can always make more of it.  So all of the concern-trolling over the fate of poetry and fiction writing may be a bit beside the point--eliminate capitalism, and the problem might solve itself--as long as there are still flourishing people.

I don’t care if she speaks in tongues; I am concerned about the authoritarian nature of the religious community she belongs to and its commitment to ‘male headship’, i.e., the idea that men should be in charge and women should follow and submit. But, yes, she will insist that none of this will affect her functioning as a Supreme Court judge and she will make her point well. 

It concerns me that ACB's nomination hearing might turn into something like an Inquisition trial, more concerned with interpretations of the Bible that the Constitution.

You can expect the same crap as all the other hearings. She, like Clarence Thomas, et al, will affirm their commitment to an impartial and professional evaluation of each and every case while the Democrats will try to catch her up. Everybody knows that lawyers are trained to fend off such parries so any lawyer good enough to make it this far will find it easy-going.

Now available as VOD on Amazon, iTunes and Vimeo, “Ursula Von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own” is a film biography of one of the most renowned monumental sculptors in the world, a male-dominated field. That in itself would be extraordinary but Von Rydingsvard rise to the top against odds that would have daunted anybody, male of female, sets her apart.

She was born in Germany in 1942, when her Polish parents were swept into that country after Stalin and Hitler carved up their country. After WWII ended, they lived in displaced peoples camps until 1950. That year, the family resettled in Connecticut at a time when American policy toward refugees was relatively humane. With seven children, her father had a tough time keeping them housed and fed, usually working two jobs. His anger over the hand fate dealt him as well as a mean streak he was born with led him to verbally abuse and beat his children.

full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/09/29/ursula-von-rydingsvard-into-her-own/

President Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court may rouse debate over the dubious Christian practice of “speaking in tongues,” or glossalalia.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/29/babbling-in-tongues/

The story of how Stalin's mother used a connection with a distant relative and through her a connection to a neighbouring priest to gain admission to a seminary for her son is a good example of Henry Hale's Theory of Patronal Politics as sent to this list by Louis on September 25.
              ken h

NY Times, Sept. 28, 2020
Swami Agnivesh, Crusader Against Labor Abuses in India, Dies at 80
A pacifist monk, he championed social justice causes, fighting against child labor, indentured servitude and a rising tide of Hindu fundamentalism.
By Sameer Yasir

Swami Agnivesh, a revered longtime campaigner against child labor and indentured servitude in India, died on Sept. 11 in New Delhi. He was 80.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by an associate, Zayauddin Jawed, who said the cause was multiple organ failure.

A pacifist Hindu monk who renounced worldly possessions and relations at a young age, Mr. Agnivesh led a decades-long crusade against village moneylenders, landlords and brick kiln owners who forced landless, debt-ridden farmers into bonded labor, or indentured servitude.

In 1981 he founded the Bandhua Mukti Morcha, or the Bonded Labour Liberation Front, which he headed until his death. From 1994 to 2004, he was chairman of the United Nations Voluntary Trust Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery.

“The country is diminished by his passing,” Shashi Tharoor, one of India’s most influential opposition politicians, wrote on Twitter.

Mr. Agnivesh was a prominent champion of many social justice causes and a trusted mediator when conflicts arose. He fought on behalf of tribal communities that had few rights to land ownership even though they populated much of the country’s forests. In the 1980s, when environmentalists objected to settling bonded laborers on protected forest land, he helped defuse the situation, working out a compromise whereby much of the forest would continue to be preserved.

In 2011, after Maoist rebels abducted five police officers, leading to an 18-day hostage crisis in Chhattisgarh state, in central India, he helped negotiate their release.

“He had a steely courage, and enormous compassion,” said Ramachandra Guha, a pre-eminent Indian historian who knew Mr. Agnivesh for over three decades.

In recent years, as Hindu nationalism continued to rise in India, Mr. Agnivesh was one of its biggest critics, saying the core values on which the republic was founded were under strain. He wrote last year, “The democratic space — where these values are meant to prevail — is communalized, polarized and poisoned with hate.”


John Dayal, a fellow human-rights activist, said of Mr. Agnivesh: “His main challenge was the fundamentalist Hindu.”

“The politicalizing of Hinduism and the hijacking of sacred symbolisms for political gains — he abhorred it all,” Mr. Dayal said.

Mr. Guha said he had admired Mr. Agnivesh’s “willingness to put his life on the line in defense of the inclusive and plural faith he himself practiced.”

Mr. Agnivesh was beaten many times; in one incident a mob of Hindu nationalists stripped, kicked and punched him, accusing him of inciting tribal groups to fight the government. He was convinced, he said later, that they had intended to kill him.

Swami Agnivesh was born Vepa Shyam Rao on Sep. 21, 1939, into an orthodox Hindu Brahmin family in the Srikakulam district of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.

His father, Vepa Laxmi Narsinham, a farmer, died when Mr. Agnivesh was 4 years old. His mother, Sita Devi, a homemaker, died a year later. After he lost his parents, he was brought up by his maternal grandfather. He left no immediate survivors.

Mr. Agnivesh studied law and commerce at the University of Calcutta and, after graduating, became a professor of management studies at St. Xavier’s College in the Indian state of West Bengal.

He briefly practiced law, but soon left to work in the northern states of Haryana and Punjab, both of them notorious for bonded labor. For his work against child labor there he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for humanitarian work in 2004, given by a Swedish-based foundation.

Mr. Agnivesh spent 14 months in jail after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a national emergency in 1975, jailing political opponents and activists.

He fought against Mrs. Gandhi’s Indian National Congress party, was elected to the state Legislative Assembly in Haryana and was named a cabinet minister in Haryana. But he served just four months, pushed out after he protested against his own government, demanding an inquiry into the killing of 10 workers in an industrial township in a clash with police.

That episode led him to devote his life to fighting bonded labor.

On Saturday, a group of about 30 mustered under drizzly skies at the edge of the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pa. The site of one of the bloodiest and most important battles of the Civil War, Gettysburg has seen its share of clashes over the memory of the war in recent years. But this group was there to make a stand of a different kind.

They carried signs with quotations from 19th-century newspapers, passages from the Confederacy’s constitution extolling slavery, and facts (some of them footnoted) about Robert E. Lee’s treatment of his human property. Some in the group wore T-shirts emblazoned with a social media-ready battle cry: #wewantmorehistory.

Scott Hancock, a professor of history at Gettysburg College, urged the group to be “polite” to anyone who challenged them and reminded them they were not at a protest — or not exactly.

“Our job is to do something a bit more constructive by telling a fuller story,” he said.

The group was part of a “Call to Action” organized by the Journal of the Civil War Era, a scholarly publication. For two hours on Saturday, at about a dozen Civil War-related sites across the country, from New York to Nashville to St. Louis, historians simultaneously gathered with signs highlighting distortions in existing plaques and memorials, or things that simply weren’t being spoken of at all.

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The idea was to move beyond binary debates about problematic monuments — tear down or keep? — and instead emphasize the inaccuracies and omissions of the existing commemorative landscape, including the erasure of Black history.

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“Historians have different views on taking down statues,” said Gregory Downs, a professor at the University of California, Davis, and one of the organizers. “But that debate doesn’t really capture what historians do, which is to bring more history.”

The action was roughly timed to the anniversary of Lincoln’s issuing the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, on Sept., 22, 1862, which widened the purpose of the war to include ending slavery, as well as preserving the Union.

But Saturday’s event also comes at a moment when the battle over Civil War memory — and the telling of American history more generally — has intensified, with seemingly no end in sight.

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Since the George Floyd protests this summer, a growing number of Confederate monuments have come down across the country. At the same time, defenders have rallied to protect them against assault, real and imagined; here in Gettysburg, hundreds of militia members and others, some heavily armed, gathered on July 4 to guard the site against a rumored invasion by antifa flag-burners that turned out to be a Twitter hoax.

Meanwhile, President Trump has made history a campaign issue. Speaking this month at what was billed as the first White House Conference on American History, he called for a return to “patriotic education” — an appeal that drew sharp criticism from the American Historical Association and 28 other scholarly groups.

If the rhetorical temperature on Saturday was lower, that was the point. The event was billed as a “demonstration of good history” — “demonstration” in the sense not of protest, but of proof.

“We’re trying to poke holes in Lost Cause mythology, to show how it’s inaccurate,” said Kate Masur, a professor at Northwestern, referring to the depiction of the Confederate cause as a noble and just one. Prof. Masur, who coedits the journal with Prof. Downs, explained that they “want to add to history, by showing more of the African-American history that has been erased.”

The event was inspired by the work of Prof. Hancock. Starting in 2015, when the murder of nine churchgoers in Charleston by a white supremacist intensified debates about the Confederate flag, he began making regular visits to the battlefield’s monuments carrying simple homemade signs that provided missing context about race and slavery and delved into the flag’s history as a white supremacist symbol.

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Prof. Hancock was there on July 4, when the armed counter-demonstrators came, ready to do battle with antifa. He said he was used to intense conversations with park visitors skeptical of his message. “But it was not a hostile atmosphere until this July 4,” he said.

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The Eternal Light Peace Memorial, where Prof. Hancock’s group gathered on Saturday, commemorates the 50th reunion encampment of 1913, itself a signal event in the effort to recast the conflict as a tragic battle between brothers. Their signs were intended to point out the centrality of slavery to the war, a fact that Prof. Hancock said goes largely unmentioned on the site’s many monuments.

One sign quoted from the Charleston Mercury in 1862: “As a people, we are fighting to maintain the heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race.” Another noted that roughly 31 percent of white households across the 11 Confederate states had owned slaves.

Prof. Downs wore a sign around his neck noting that Robert E. Lee “whipped his slaves hard,” and quoting one slave who called him “the meanest man I ever saw” — a riposte to those today who paint Lee as a kindly or reluctant slave owner.

“Learn your history — all of it,” one sign exhorted. “What are we afraid of?”

In 2008, the National Park Service overhauled the Gettysburg Museum and Visitor Center to add discussion of slavery, making its centrality to the war clear. And Prof. Hancock said the Park Service had done “good work” presenting interpretive material relating to African-Americans present at Gettysburg, including at two homesites.

The battlefield’s superintendent, Steven Sims, said in a telephone interview that the Park Service was still in the process of adding more context regarding slavery on the battlefield itself. But near the Virginia Monument, a re-enactor who gave his name as “Rebel Rich” said he saw no reason to mention slavery there.

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“That statue is here to represent where Lee stood when he watched 12,500 men cross that field,” said the re-enactor, 68, who wore a battle uniform and carried a Confederate flag. “When those young boys crossed that field, they didn’t know anything about the slavery part. They were fighting for their land rights.”

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Historical erasure is not limited to the South, a fact the event on Saturday underlined. In New York, LeeAnna Keith, a historian and high school teacher, stood near the corner of Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, where she had pasted hand-lettered signs about the 1863 Civil War draft riots.

The weeklong violence began when white mobs erupted in protest over the draft, but quickly turned into an assault on the city’s Black citizens. On the first day, a mob attacked the Colored Orphans Asylum, which once stood at the corner where Dr. Keith posted her signs (now an empty lot), burning it to the ground.

The riots were finally quelled with help from federal troops redirected from Gettysburg, where the battle had taken place just two weeks before. One of Dr. Keith’s signs listed the casualties: 11 Black men lynched, more than 100 rioters killed and some 2,000 Black residents driven from the city.

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The New York draft riots were the deadliest urban disturbance in American history, and a forerunner of better-known racist massacres like those in Colfax, Miss., in 1873, or Tulsa in 1921. But the city does not have a single plaque or marker commemorating the event, Dr. Keith said.

“White rioting is a major factor in American history,” Dr. Keith explained. “But we so often mislabel it, or don’t remember it at all.”

In Chicago, Prof. Masur was at “Confederate Mound,” a monument in Oak Woods Cemetery, on the South Side. “This monument was a white supremacist project,” one of her hand-lettered signs read.

In an image posted to Twitter, it was propped up against the official plaque, which makes no mention of slavery.

The monument marks the burial site of some of the 4,000 Confederate soldiers who died at Camp Douglas, a Union prisoner-of-war camp on Chicago’s South Side. The dedication of the monument in 1895 drew 100,000 people and, one of Prof. Masur’s signs pointed out, featured a speech by Wade Hampton III, who was a Confederate officer and, after the war, a leader of the Red Shirts, a white supremacist militia that violently suppressed the Black vote. In his address, he lamented how “the best blood of the country” — North and South — had been “poured out like water on many a battlefield.”

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The contributions of Black Civil War soldiers, Prof. Masur said, receive very little memorialization, even in the North. At some other sites on Saturday, participants highlighted the ways Black Americans had held their own commemorations.

In Elizabeth City, N.C., a city of about 20,000 in the northeast corner of the state, a group organized by Hilary Green, an associate professor from the University of Alabama, gathered on the waterfront near Albemarle Sound, at a site where African-Americans had held Emancipation Day parades for decades following the war.

As in Gettysburg and Chicago, the signs historians brought emphasized facts and primary sources. One reproduced newspaper articles from the 1880s and ’90s describing parades and speeches. Another highlighted an 1898 Grand Army of the Republic encampment at the county courthouse in Elizabeth City, which brought together Black and white veterans in the area who had fought on the Union side.

“North Carolina was a complex state,” Prof. Green, who helped coordinate the national event, said by telephone. “Not everyone believed in the Southern cause.”

This summer, the City Council narrowly voted to move from the front of its courthouse a Confederate monument that was dedicated in 1911, during the high point of Confederate commemoration across the country. But Prof. Green emphasized that Saturday’s event was about adding, not subtracting.

“We really want more history,” she said. “Our commemorative landscape erases so much.”

NY Times, Sept. 25, 2020
China Is Erasing Mosques and Precious Shrines in Xinjiang
By Chris Buckley and Austin Ramzy

Until a decade ago, the pilgrims would travel by bus, car, donkey and foot to gather by the thousands at the Imam Asim Shrine in the desert on China’s western frontier.

They trudged through the sand dunes to kneel at the sacred site dedicated to Imam Asim, a Muslim holy man who helped defeat the Buddhist kingdom that had ruled here over a thousand years ago. The devotees were Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority, and often joined annual festivals to pray for abundant harvests, good health and strong babies.

They tied strips of cloth carrying prayerful messages to wooden posts around and near the shrine. They delighted in fairground amusements on the site’s edge, where magicians, wrestlers and musicians entertained the crowds. They clustered around storytellers reciting ancient tales.

Thousands of pilgrims were praying at the Imam Asim Shrine in 2009.Video by Rahile Dawut and her students
“It was not just a pilgrimage. There were performers, games, food, seesaws for the children, poetry reading, and a whole area for story-telling,” said Tamar Mayer, a professor at Middlebury College who visited the Imam Asim Shrine for research in 2008 and 2009. “It was still so full of people, and full of life.”

Even then the authorities were trying to limit the crowds at the shrine with checkpoints. By 2014, pilgrims had been almost entirely banned. And by last year, much of the shrine had been demolished. Wooden fences and poles that once encircled the tomb and held fluttering prayer flags had been torn down. Satellite images show that a mosque at the site was leveled. All that remained was the mud-brick building marking the tomb of Imam Asim, which appeared to be intact amid the ruins.

The Chinese authorities have in recent years closed and demolished many of the major shrines, mosques and other holy sites across Xinjiang that have long preserved the culture and Islamic beliefs of the region’s Muslims.

The effort to close off and erase these sites is part of China’s broader campaign to turn the region’s Uighurs, Kazakhs and members of other Central Asian ethnic groups into loyal followers of the Communist Party. The assimilation drive has led to the detention of hundreds of thousands in indoctrination centers.

The new report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a research group based in Canberra, systematically gauges the degree of destruction and alteration to religious sites in recent years. It estimated that around 8,500 mosques across Xinjiang have been completely demolished since 2017 — more than a third of the number of mosques the government says are in the region.

“What it does show is a campaign of demolition and erasure that is unprecedented since the Cultural Revolution,” said Nathan Ruser, the researcher at the institute who led the analysis. During the decade-long turmoil that unfolded from 1966 under Mao Zedong, many mosques and other religious sites were destroyed.

The institute, also known as ASPI, compiled a randomized sample of 533 known mosque sites across Xinjiang, and analyzed satellite images of each site taken at different times to assess changes. It studied the state of the region’s shrines, cemeteries and other sacred sites through a sample of 382 locations taken from a state-sponsored survey and online records.

The Chinese government has dismissed reports of widespread demolition of religious sites as “total nonsense” and said that it values the protection and repair of mosques.

Chinese officials have accused the Australian Strategic Policy Institute of seeking to malign China, and pointed to its funding from the United States government as evidence that its findings are biased. The institute rejects that claim, saying its research is completely independent from its funders.

The authorities have placed tight controls on movement within Xinjiang and curbed the flow of information out of the region, making it a challenge to assess the scale of the destruction on the ground. The New York Times verified many of the details in ASPI’s report by studying satellite images and visiting sites across southern Xinjiang last year.

“What we see here is the deliberate destruction of sites which are in every way the heritage of the Uighur people and the heritage of this land,” said Rachel Harris, an expert on Uighur music and culture at the University of London who reviewed the report.

During festival time in 2008, the Imam Asim Shrine also included a fairground area of entertainment and children’s rides.Tamar Mayer
Many of the shrines and cemeteries that the authorities have recently closed or razed embodied the Uighurs’ diverse Islamic traditions. Pilgrims would visit shrines, known locally as “mazar,” with food offerings, goat horns and animal hides to show their piety, or cloth dolls embodying their hopes for a healthy child. Some spent weeks traveling from one sacred site to another.

Large shrines are often gravesites of imams, merchants and soldiers who spread Islam in the region over a thousand years ago. Some are imposing complexes built and rebuilt over the centuries. But a tree or pile of stones can also serve as a shrine, marking a holy presence for villagers.

At Ordam, a famed shrine in the desert of southern Xinjiang, pilgrims had been gathering for more than 400 years years to celebrate the memory of a leader who brought Islam to the region and fought a rival Buddhist kingdom.

“If you have a donkey and a cart, you load up your food and you spend three weeks to get to a shrine,” said Rian Thum, a researcher at the University of Nottingham who has studied Ordam and other shrines and their fate. “The only place I’ve seen a grown Uighur man cry was at a shrine.”

But in the 1990s, the Chinese government grew increasingly nervous about the expansion of mosques and revival of shrines in Xinjiang. Officials saw the gathering of pilgrims as kindling for uncontrolled religious devotion and extremism, and a spate of antigovernment attacks by discontented Uighurs set the authorities on edge.

Still, some visitors and tourists crept in to visit.

“One Uighur who had managed to visit Ordam told some of the villagers nearby that she had been, and they started weeping and one asked for some dust from her jacket,” Mr. Thum recalled. “This gives a sense how important this place is to people, even when they cannot visit.”

The previous closures and bans on visits to the shrines were a prelude to a more aggressive campaign by the government.

By early 2018, the Ordam shrine, isolated in the desert and almost 50 miles from the nearest town, had been leveled, eradicating one of most important sites of Uighur heritage. Satellite images from that time showed the shrine’s mosque, prayer hall and simple housing where its custodians once lived had been razed. There is no news of what happened to the huge cooking pots where pilgrims left meat, grain and vegetables that custodians of the shrine cooked into holy meals.

“You see a real and what seems to be a conscious effort at destroying places that are important to Uighurs, precisely because they are important to Uighurs,” Mr. Thum said.

In some instances, the government has demolished mosques in the name of development. When Times reporters visited the city of Hotan in southern Xinjiang last year, we found a new park where satellite images showed there had been a mosque until late 2017.

We found four other sites in the city where mosques once stood that were now new parks or bare patches of ground, and one mosque that was half-torn down. The main central mosque in Hotan remains, though only a trickle of people attend, even for Friday prayers.

In Kashgar, the major city in southern Xinjiang, nearly all of the mosques in the center of town appeared shut, with furniture stacked up inside, gathering dust. One mosque had been turned into a bar.

“It’s like I’m losing my family members around me because our culture is being taken away,” said Mamutjan Abdurehim, a Uighur graduate student from Kashgar who now lives in Australia and has been seeking information about his wife in Xinjiang. “It’s like a part of our flesh, our body, is being removed.”

Not every religious site has been razed. Some are now official tourist attractions, and no longer serve as pilgrimage sites, like the famed Afaq Khoja Mausoleum in Kashgar. A sprawling Uighur cemetery on the edge of Kashgar has so far survived and families stopped to tidy graves and pay their respects.

Uighurs noted that shrines had been destroyed in previous decades then rebuilt, and that they could rise again. But they were daunted by the scale of the recent eradication.

“The intensity of this crackdown is quite shocking,” Mr. Abdurehim said. “Many Uighurs who would like to be hopeful are quite pessimistic, including me.”

(From 2004)

Last night I watched the special 3 hour conclusion to this season’s “The Apprentice,” a “reality” show that pits aggressive, young MBA types against each other for a job with Donald Trump. Each week the show concludes with the porcine Trump telling the losers of that episode: “You’re fired.” The survivors compete in the following week’s contest. It will come as no surprise that this show has parallels with the hit show “Survivor,” in which similar contests are mounted on remote desert islands or the Australian outback, etc.. The ex-paratrooper Mark Burnett produced both shows.

During a commercial break, there were ads for another NBC show called “The Biggest Loser,” where obese people compete with each other in a weight-losing contest. In the final moments of last night’s “The Apprentice,” another Burnett production scheduled for next season was hyped. It will feature amateur boxers competing with each other. It is a rip-off of a show that has already been aired on Rupert Murdoch’s network.

https://louisproyect.org/2004/12/17/the-apprentice/

By Barry Sheppard

http://europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article54985

Accra Shepp: How did you become politically active?

Archie Shepp: My third-grade teacher gave us an assignment to write about anything we chose, and I wrote a paper about prejudice and the injustice that minorities faced. I didn’t use exactly those terms. But she was really quite shocked that I should raise questions that had such adult implications.

She asked me where did I learn about prejudice and racism, perhaps not thinking that, in fact, I was a victim of those problems. I told her that I learned from my father [John Shepp] and our upstairs neighbor, William Meyers, who—on the weekends, when they weren’t working—used to have long political debates that went on all day in our apartment in Philadelphia. They would discuss social, political, economic problems that faced our people. So I had simply repeated things I had learned while listening to them.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/09/29/the-story-im-telling-an-interview-with-archie-shepp/

NY Review of Books, OCTOBER 8, 2020 ISSUE
Wendell Berry’s High Horse
Verlyn Klinkenborg

What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry, 1969–2017
by Wendell Berry
Library of America, 2 volumes, 1,674 pp., $75.00
Wendell Berry

Not quite thirty years ago, I heard Wendell Berry give a talk at an organic farming conference in Texas. He was funny! That’s what I remember. He stood behind the lectern, a tall, lean figure, and in his casual opening remarks he revealed that he was a lot slyer than he let on in print. He clearly knew how to get a laugh among farmers—always a tough crowd. But this was also an easy crowd, at least where Berry’s fundamental message was concerned. Like a lot of other people that day, I’d come to hear the Berry who was decidedly not funny, who, at most, permitted himself now and then a small, bitter irony in one of his tough-minded essays about agriculture and the modern world. So the laughter—it rolled around the hall like thunder—came partly from surprise, naive surprise in my case. I was abruptly reminded of a basic literary principle: the writer and the writer’s persona aren’t the same. To the man onstage talking off the cuff, I would have gone on listening a good deal longer.

It’s almost impossible to recapture how important Berry’s nonfiction voice once was. It emerged from a successful career as a young novelist and poet, a career defined by familiar landmarks: a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a succession of teaching jobs, a Guggenheim, a Greenwich Village apartment. But in 1965, when he was thirty, Berry, his wife, Tanya, and their two children went home for good to rural Kentucky, where he had grown up surrounded by farming kin. He began to farm, adhering, with some improvements, to the old-fashioned methods he had known as a child, including farming with horses. That move gave him the footing he needed to write something new, something with a sharper edge than his often nostalgic fiction and consolatory verse: plain, pointed essays about the ways in which American farming—and America itself—was going wrong.

The land became Berry’s moral center, and the early essays that emerged more or less directly from the land—gathered in The Long-Legged House (1969), The Unsettling of America (1977), and The Gift of Good Land (1981)—still have an unsettling power. The best of them, like “The Making of a Marginal Farm” (1980), form a kind of apologia, an account of his decision to leave the familiar career path of a prospering writer and return to farming. “The Making of a Marginal Farm” is the story of recovering a landscape burdened by bad agricultural practices and bringing it back to life. In a way, it’s the least metaphorical and the least argumentative of Berry’s essays. He is concerned, simply, to help us understand how he and his wife set about reclaiming the steep slopes of their small farm:

A great deal of work is still left to do, and some of it…will take longer than we will live. But in doing these things we have begun a restoration and a healing in ourselves.

On his farm, Berry fashioned the link between social activism, conservation, agriculture, and personal well-being. In his introduction to The Gift of Good Land, he writes, “The discipline of farming has a low public standing.” If this is no longer true, one of the reasons is Wendell Berry.

What Berry saw was that the population of this country had undergone an enormous shift in his lifetime. It had fled the countryside for the city. By the time he began writing essays about farming in the late 1960s, agriculture had become, for most Americans, an almost invisible subject, seemingly unconnected to their own lives. In his early essays, Berry showed that the damaging patterns of modern farming—its wastefulness, its reliance on machines and fossil fuels, its social destructiveness—were intrinsically connected to the damaging patterns of modern life as a whole. The vision of farming explicitly endorsed by the US Department of Agriculture was (and remains) essentially industrial rather than biological. It emphasized growth and efficiency, and it helped drive small farmers and farm laborers off the land by the millions. To go from Aldo Leopold’s seminal 1939 essay, “The Farmer as a Conservationist,” to Berry’s book The Unsettling of America is to travel from a time when the fundamental values of American farming were still being contested to an early version of the agricultural dystopia in which we now live. That is the span in which Wendell Berry came of age, and which gave him his voice as an essayist.

Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about farming, and I’ve written a lot about it. I come from an extended farming family, and I care about many of the same things Berry cares about. I concur with him again and again. And yet, reading him, I could always feel my attention jibbing. Worse, I often felt an instinctive wariness, a native recoil, that grew more serious as the years went on. “What’s my problem?” I’d wonder. Those feelings all came flooding back while I was working my way through What I Stand On,1 the two volumes of Berry’s essays recently published by the Library of America.2

Rereading Berry, I realized that my attention tends to wander whenever he seems to believe he deserves my full attention. That happens all the time, or so I judge from the nature of the prose. A reader can tell the difference, I think, between a writer who owes it to himself to keep writing and one who feels he owes it to the welfare of his readers. Berry can be both kinds, often at the same time. I found myself wishing he’d written far more about sheep and mules and horse-farming and the actual character of the soil and far less about sex and science and faith and the principles of Robert E. Lee.

And, rereading Berry, I realized that most of his essays aren’t really essays. They’re disquisitions, extended arguments. I don’t often get around to agreeing or disagreeing with their author, because I’m too busy arguing with his prose. Berry derives his strength as a writer from contact with the earth, the more immediate, the better. All his life, he’s been a vigilant man of conscience. He’s capable of moving and inspiring readers, capable too, at times, of getting to the heart of a cultural or social problem. But he can also make you feel like you’re warming yourself at a bonfire of straw men and women. All too often I’m disturbed, to the point of physical unease, by the involuted, strangely patristic way his writing and thinking move, the grandeur of his modesty.3 He seems, to borrow a phrase from George Bernard Shaw, “too full of the validity of his remoter generalizations.”

Here’s an example of what I mean. Two versions of the first person—“I”—present themselves in Berry’s nonfiction. One kind you can hear in this sentence from The Unsettling of America, his “review” of modern agriculture: “I am writing this in the north-central part of Kentucky on a morning near the end of June.” It’s a fresh, welcome voice, and you’d think it would be ubiquitous in the literary productions of a man as devoted to outdoor work as Berry is.

But it’s not. The first person that dominates these essays is the logical first person, the “I” (and its plural “we”) whose job is to fence in the argument and shepherd the sheep who are supposed to be grazing on it. This is the first person that turns up in the phrase “as I have been trying to show” or “as I am perforce aware.” (That kind of “I” is all too easily replaced by the noxious “it will be observed that,” which Berry uses in a passage about farming with horses.)4 It’s tempting to excuse these things by saying that the value of Berry’s essays is moral, not literary. But to me that just means he often fails to do the first important job of a writer—“even” a nonfiction writer—which is to make sentences that breathe with the life of the body, even when that body happens to be thinking.

In The Long-Legged House—a collection of essays that includes the earliest work gathered in this new anthology—Berry seems to have devoured Thoreau whole, minus a few of his less digestible tics, like his often untrackable flights of Orientalism. Thoreau may be “a man of the rarest genius,” in Berry’s words, but he’s uneven. Some of his prose—the clearest, sharpest paragraphs of Walden, for instance—has been a wonderful influence on later writers, and some has been a terrible influence. Berry seems to have partaken of both. You can hear the clear echo of Concord in a passage in which he’s thinking about an old, abandoned house and the way his ancestors “had trickled off into oblivion”:

And I was more grateful for the silence of their departure than I would be for the lineage of a king. Not knowing who had planted the flowers there, I did not have to weep over them, or grow reminiscent, but could enjoy them as they were. I had them free as wildflowers.

There are some familiar Thoreauvian overtones here: the slight sound of preening and the underlying suggestion that the purpose of writing prose is to allow the reader to enjoy the operation of the writer’s mind. These overtones occur again and again in Berry’s early nonfiction. One day, for instance, he notices a flock of wood ducks resting peacefully on the water and writes, “The moment was whole in itself, deeply satisfying both to them and to me.” Generously, in a way Thoreau might approve, the writer’s self-approbation spreads like a ground-fog over all of nature.

There’s also a kind of skittering in The Long-Legged House that reminds me of Thoreau—an uncannily quick movement from local to universal and back again, as if the writer were just waiting to slip an abstraction through a gap in the hedge. You can hear a version of this in the way that Thoreau—like Berry—uses metaphor. The instantaneous fusion of resemblance and dissonance that I hope to find in a good metaphor—the suddenness of perception—isn’t much use to Thoreau, because it’s hard to moralize one that works that way. Every actual thing in his prose seems to quiver with the desire to become metaphorical or symbolic, like the dead horse in Walden whose strong scent causes Thoreau to think of the myriads of creatures squashed and gobbled and “run over in the road,” ending in a vision of “universal innocence.” It’s a relief when things remain merely themselves.

Something similar happens in The Long-Legged House. Berry tells the story of a raccoon hunter who threw away his lantern in order to see better in the dark. Then comes this:

For I have turned aside from much that I knew, and have given up much that went before. What will not bring me, more certainly than before, to where I am is of no use to me. I have stepped out of the clearing into the woods. I have thrown away my lantern, and I can see the dark.

The lantern has been transmogrified in a way that leaves the reader puzzled, as does the phrasing of the sentence that begins “What will not bring me.” Berry says elsewhere that he’s “never been comfortable behind” a pulpit. But this habit of extemporaneous symbolizing—so similar to extemporaneous moralizing—is surely a pulpit habit, and it’s one that he will pursue.

The differences between Thoreau and Berry begin to sharpen soon after The Long-Legged House, and they’re instructive. Intellectually, Thoreau isn’t a system-builder. He’s a noticer, wedded to the particular, no matter how it distracts him from any larger purpose. By the time Berry’s nonfiction prose reaches full stride, in The Unsettling of America, his urge to explain, to persuade, and to resonate has turned him into a very different kind of writer. He has begun to construct a systematic, philosophical edifice on an analogical foundation, a structure erected to the sound of one man thinking as deliberately as he can, trying “to slow language down and make it thoughtful.”

I’m eager to understand just why Berry’s essays pursue the methods they do, but he has little to say about it. In “The Burden of the Gospels” (2005), he says, “I expect any writing to make literal sense before making sense of any other kind.” Fair enough. But that tells me less about his method—why he sounds the way he does—than this peculiar sentence from “Standing By Words” (1983): “In public writing, and in speech passing between strangers, there may only be degrees of generalization.” Berry’s essays are indeed public writing and, having been published in books and magazines, they are also a form of speech passing between strangers. But does that really explain the extraordinarily high degree of abstraction and generalization in his prose?

Perhaps the best explanation comes in his afterword to the third edition of The Unsettling of America:

Another reason my book has received no vigorous counterargument, I fear, is that in centers of learning and power argument itself has become virtually obsolete, a lost art. Public discourse of all kinds now tends to pattern itself either upon the arts of advertisement and propaganda (that is, the arts of persuasion without argument, which lead to reasonless and even unconscious acquiescence) or upon the allegedly objective or value-free demonstrations of science.

This is shifty stuff. It seems to leave Berry standing alone with his book and argument, the last debater, mourning the death of civilization and logical dueling. What it really does is add another straw man to the fire. He sounds perilously close to saying, “I see nothing that I choose to recognize as argument.” In Berry’s eyes, this isn’t merely an institutional failure, it’s also a betrayal of something much larger, “for,” as he says, “the pursuit of truth by argument and counterargument is a major part of our cultural tradition from the gospels and the Platonic dialogues to every county courthouse today.”

The word that’s missing in that passage is “evidence,” a pretty important word in county courthouses and a word whose absence offers a valuable clue to how Berry’s nonfiction often works. For in his essays he assumes, again and again, that he will supply the argument and we will supply the evidence—the evidence of our own hollow lives, our degenerate bodies, our feelings of dislocation and spiritual bankruptcy. It’s surprising, in fact, how little teaching, as opposed to lecturing, you find in these two volumes, how little you can learn about the workings of the actual world. Berry has said that “the discipline of thought is not generalization; it is detail.” But for the most part you won’t find this borne out in his essays. His prose relishes abstraction.

In The Unsettling of America, for example, there’s a long passage about soil. It’s a moment when, with a little effort, Berry might have given us a sotto in su perspective—a glimpse of the world above from the worm’s eye below. He might have taught us a little about the microbial and mineral contents of the soil, its extraordinary biological complexity, its fragility and resilience—the actual gritty stuff right under his feet—all of which would have served his argument well. But Berry is on the trail of a metaphor. “We see,” he writes,

that we have not only a description of the fundamental biological process, but also a metaphor of great beauty and power. It is impossible to contemplate the life of the soil for very long without seeing it as analogous to the life of the spirit.

When I contemplate the life of the soil, I come nowhere near “the life of the spirit.” I never think of it. I see the incredible richness of biological existence, of which I’m wholly a part. But Berry’s reader, in this case me, is overridden by the peremptory phrase “it is impossible to contemplate,” which, as a form of argument, is no argument at all.

Just how open Berry is to argument and counterargument became clear in 1988, when several readers complained about his now infamous essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” which was reprinted by Harper’s in its September issue.5 The trouble arose with this line: “My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 1956 and as good now as it was then.” Not surprisingly, some readers complained about a man who refused to buy a (possibly) labor-saving device while relying on the labor of his wife. And, not surprisingly, some readers complained in ways that were foolish and thoughtless.

To me, the real trouble begins a little lower down in the paragraph, when Berry says, “We have, I think, a literary cottage industry that works well and pleasantly. I do not see anything wrong with it.” He may be right about the pleasant cottage industry. I don’t know, and in any case that’s between him and his wife. It’s the next sentence that sticks in my craw: “I do not see anything wrong with it.” Berry attacks many men in the pages of his essays—Buckminster Fuller, Earl Butz, who was head of the USDA under Nixon and Ford (and surely deserves vilification as a racist and a diehard exponent of industrialized agriculture), and a host of lesser “specialists” and “experts.” I can imagine each of them saying simply, and in the same tone of voice, “I do not see anything wrong with it.” And expecting to get away with it.

Harper’s published five letters from critical readers as well as Berry’s response to them. It reads like an exercise in pique. He belittles the letter-writers and claims that they believe in a “technological fundamentalism that…wishes to monopolize a whole society and, therefore, cannot tolerate the smallest difference of opinion.” He concludes his argument by saying, “it seems to me that none of my correspondents recognizes the innovativeness of my essay. If the use of a computer is a new idea, then a newer idea is not to use one.”

Perhaps that’s meant to be what Berry calls, accusing himself of it elsewhere, a bit of “smartassery.” But it’s hard to tell, because it sounds like the kind of conclusion he’s usually in the business of reaching. To me, Berry’s response suggests a failure of imagination and empathy—twin aspects of the same state of mind. The problem isn’t that he couldn’t see anything wrong with having his wife type his work. It’s that he couldn’t imagine anything wrong with it. Nor could he imagine anyone else seeing anything wrong with it.

Again and again, you come across moments in Berry’s essays where logic overrides empathy, where conviction overrides imagination, where the pursuit of a single truth overrides the possibility of other truths. Here is one such moment. In The Unsettling of America, Berry writes, “An infertile woman and an infertile field both receive a dose of chemicals…and are thus equally reduced to the status of productive machines.” You can feel in this sentence how seductive the power of analogy is to a man building an argument—it is brick and mortar both. But there’s a person in this sentence—a woman—and she and her sense of herself have been left entirely out of his account.

Berry can imagine the woman being reduced to the status of a machine, though syntactically and analogically he’s the one doing the reducing. But he won’t pause to imagine what she thinks or feels about fertility or the autonomy of her body. What he’s interested in is making his point, which is this: “For the care or control of fertility…we have allowed a technology of chemicals and devices to replace entirely the cultural means of ceremonial forms, disciplines, and restraints.” What I see here is a lapse of historical imagination—a failure to recognize that these “cultural means” have not only been inadequate, they have been oppressive.

“Forms, disciplines, and restraints”: these are the kinds of abstractions and generalizations that crowd Wendell Berry’s work. Berry uses these words in an almost talismanic way, but without much specificity, as you can tell when you begin to ask a few questions. Who establishes these forms? Who imposes these restraints? Who administers these disciplines? Berry’s answer is “the community”—as in, “without the community disciplines that make for a stable, neighborly population, the cities have become scenes of poverty, boredom, and disease.” Berry asks us to trust him when he talks about things like “community disciplines.” I balk at that.

At the root of his quiet radicalism, Berry is a champion of what he calls “established forms,” which is one of the reasons he always prefers the word “Creation” to “nature.” Like so many of the moral abstractions in these essays, “community disciplines” is a container into which anything can be poured—into which, historically, everything has been poured, to the peril of those not imposing the disciplines.6 Berry’s prose seems to suggest that there can be no question about the nature of community or whom it includes if it includes men of goodwill like him. The inadequacy of this in America at this moment should be obvious.

Acottage industry of Wendell Berry quotations seems to have sprung up in the past few years. I see them everywhere, on office walls, in yoga studios, in church basements. And the strange thing is that Berry’s conclusions—often quite quotable—are often more persuasive than the means he uses to reach them. For example: “The preserver of abundance is excellence.” Or: “To live at the expense of the source of life is obviously suicidal.” Or this: “The time is past when it was enough merely to elect our officials. We will have to elect them and then go and watch them and keep our hands on them, the way the coal companies do.”

Berry is often regarded as a prophet, and it’s our collective tragedy that his prophecy has been fulfilled. Agriculture across the planet has been industrialized—Americanized—with social and ecological consequences on a scale that even Berry, I think, didn’t imagine. We live now in a world where agriculture is completely dependent on the consumption of fossil fuels, where, as Berry says, “we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat.” Agriculture, instead of being what it naturally should be—a vast carbon sink and thus a solution to climate change—is one of the leading climate offenders. With all of this has come a linked decline in biological and social complexity that is appalling.

It’s tempting to look at these changes as though they’re almost a natural, if unfortunate, evolution of sorts. Berry has never made that mistake, and the force of his most potent essays from the 1970s and early 1980s arose from the fact that he refused to let his readers make it. He kept turning over words like “progress” and “efficiency” until we saw the corruption they hid. In the Darwinian economy of nature, humans do not make the rules. But when it comes to the Darwinism of markets—the Darwinism of economic assumptions—we do make the rules, and, as Berry reminds us, they have been skewed against life itself.

In England in the fall of 1830 there were riots in the countryside, caused in part by fifteen years of serious agricultural depression. Farm laborers burned barns and hay-ricks and threshing machines in the night. Their leader was a fictional creation named Captain Swing. One of the great reforming essayists of the time—the Reverend Sydney Smith, a clergyman-farmer and a man of extraordinary moral courage—wrote a public letter to Mr. Swing, which was published in 1830. The logic of what he said is nearly unassailable. “If you begin to object to machinery in farming,” Smith wrote,

you may as well object to a plow, because it employs fewer men than a spade. You may object to a harrow, because it employs fewer men than a rake. You may object even to a spade, because it employs fewer men than fingers and sticks, with which savages scratch the ground in Otaheite [Tahiti].

As far as it goes, Smith’s argument is right. But he’d never seen a half-million-dollar combine or an automated hog-confinement system. It had never occurred to him that farming could be structured around the welfare of machines, not humans (or animals), to the benefit of multinational corporations and the destruction of local towns and the soil itself. As for the ecological destruction that mass industrial farming has brought and is bringing about on this planet, I can’t even imagine how one would explain it to him.

Wendell Berry’s most important contribution to American discourse may turn out to be the decision he made in 1965 to return to Henry County, Kentucky, and farm with horses where his family had farmed. He is one of the great stayers—the greatest, perhaps—in American agriculture, which has been a slash-and-burn affair from the start. His choice said—and still says—that in the progression from rake to spade to plow to half-million-dollar combine, we get to decide where to stop, where to find the balance between nature and our needs. Berry chose to become, in a sense, the control in a one-sided experiment. He’d farm the way that he would farm, the rest of the world would farm the way that it would farm, and a few decades hence we’d compare the two. We know the result.

1
What I Stand On is an allusion to I’ll Take My Stand, a collection of essays published in 1930 by the Southern Agrarians, a group of writers that included Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren.  ↩

2
This is a peculiar production. The slipcase that houses the two volumes bears the subtitle “The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry 1969–2017.” But a glance at the table of contents tells you that this is a selection of Berry’s essays. For instance, only seven of the twenty-four essays in The Gift of Good Land are reprinted here. Counterpoint has been reissuing a lot of Berry’s work lately, including a recent anthology, The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry, with an introduction by Paul Kingsnorth (2018). For most readers, this will be enough nonfiction Berry.  ↩

3
A surefire antidote for this unease has been reading the work of Berry’s longtime friend Gene Logsdon. He says much of what Berry says, but he says it as if he’s talking directly to you instead of gazing into the middle distance.  ↩

4
Similarly, in Berry’s nonfiction, the word “then” stops referring to a point in time and becomes a bookmark of causation, referring to a location in an argument, thus: “As a writer, then, I have had this place as my fate.”  ↩

5
Counterpoint will reissue this essay in a slim volume in 2021.  ↩

6
A little more Berry on “community”: “A healthy community is a form that includes all the local things that are connected by the larger, ultimately mysterious form of the Creation.” ↩

IF THIS YEAR has a zeitgeist, it’s collapse — of ecosystems, government norms, pandemic preparedness, and quite a few minds. That process has, of course, been coming on for decades, with plenty of writers racing to unravel it, from Bill McKibben picking up where Rachel Carson left off, to Elizabeth Kolbert and David Wallace-Wells.

But these Cassandras have generally been stronger on analyzing the turmoil than showing us how to make our way through it — and we’ve long been in need of a map. With 100 degree Fahrenheit temperatures now hitting the Arctic Circle, “mask rage” and worse erupting across the United States, and the near future radioactive with uncertainty, we have, it seems, reached the end of a road. As if on cue, two exceptional books have arrived to wrangle with the implications: Ben Ehrenreich’s Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time and Bradley Garrett’s Bunker: Building for the End Times.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-to-live-through-the-apocalypse/