We are not just different but better, and in some ways we must crush you. February 3, 2015. He will discuss the Bush administration policies that created the current situation in Iraq and the effects of the war on domestic politics and American life. As I wrote in the piece, there is a sense among some of Iraqs neighbors that Iraqis, by allowing the Americans to overthrow Saddam and install a Shiite-majority government, have betrayed the Arab cause and represent a pro-Iranian Shiite front that threatens Sunni Arab countries. I dont think you can persuade people. Is a Woman Ever Going to Win the White House? Its hard to even begin to think how you start reaching a giant chunk of Real America. Iraqs population is largely Arab, with the major exception being the Kurds. Can you do things in your rhetoric or in your politics to make your party less toxic for the six percentage points of people between forty-seven per cent and fifty-three per cent? Remember the slogan when Obama first ran? Chambers-like. The Talk of the . She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in English from the University of Southern California. [5] He served in the Peace Corps in Togo.[2][4]. @TangoMan I imagine that's what the Department of Water Resources dam management was worried about during the rains from 2/2 to 2/6 as they maintained the water level at 850 feet rather than flush a lot of valuable water down the river to get ready for the second half of the long set of storms from 2/7 to 2/10. He has tried to be reassuring, even as the prospect of putting out the print magazine without editorial staff members looms. All the pieces are in place for the abuse of power, and it could happen quickly. There is something sadly touching about this blog post from the New Yorker's George Packer that went up over the weekend (and quickly proceeded to . [2] Packer's sister, Ann Packer, also is a writer. You say at the end of the book that you dont particularly want to live in any of the four Americas you define. "To name a few," he went on, "Liana Finck, Emily . He doesnt fit. I dont much want to live in the republic of any of them, Packer writes. His uncle, George Huddleston, Jr., succeeded to his father's seat in the House of Representatives from 1954 to 1964. Can Clinton win it back? They originally thought of it as a [Jeff] Bezos piece, he said. Simon & Schuster, 576 pp., $20.00. Interesting facts in his article: When a buyer searches for a book on Amazon.com, the results are partly determined by the fees paid by publishers; publishers pay Amazon a percentage of the profits they make through the online store each year; those percentages have gone up; although publishers may be squeezed by Amazon, they remain dependent on the company for as much as 30% of their sales, a number thats still growing. Im really quite divided about this, Isaac. Can he save his country from collapse? The basic division that I began to see begins with libertarianism, which I call Free America, which is Reagans America. 1. . The other thing that I hold some hope in, in lowering the temperature, is simply improving the material conditions of peoples lives through government. Most Iraqi refugees I spoke with have found the reception from their Arab neighbors rather chilly. In 2019, Packer released a book titled Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. Virtually all of The New Yorker writers I spoke to said they supported the unions core economic goals, and believed the junior staff members deserve pay increases. The magazine was once a charity case among flush glossies, but its subscription business, which boomed in the Trump years, has given its editor unique leverage: The New Yorker avoided companywide layoffs last year, and has also been left out of the rest of Cond Nasts painful drive toward centralization. One lingering quibble is that your sense of liberal righteousness strikes me as the milk-and-water variety that Theodore Roosevelt warned against. The book is kind of a quarrel with myself because, on the one hand, I am in a state of utter disgust and rage at the Republican Party, and its lies, its conspiracies, its racism, its cynicism. The past four years have severely tested those ideals, and under the leadership of Jeffrey Goldberg, who became editor in chief the month before . But your point is valid, and I think that partly explains the Packers' willingness to continue pushing cap charges into the future with these restructures. The nineteen-sixties are on my mind a lot. Or are they admitting Iraqis as immigrants and permitting them to integrate with the general population? Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Carolyn Kellogg is a prize-winning writer who served as Books editor of the Los Angeles Times for three years. THE Roaring 20s was the decade when modern celebrity was invented in America. In their place, four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America's moral identity. And Obama was also trying to put forward an idea of America that is patriotic, that is aware of its flaws, and that says the arc of history bends toward justice, and so on. I think nationalism is destructive. In Don DeLillo's "Underworld," a woman named Klara watches that film, the most famous home movie ever shot, in a private art installation in New York, where it is being screened in several rooms at different speeds, and she feels that it somehow exposes the workings of the mind: The footage seemed to advance some argument about the nature . Many of the writers, it seemed, valued their independent contractor status. Last Best Hope was inspired, Packer says, by "political pamphlets from other periods of crisis.". The New Yorker. 2023 Cond Nast. The President and his new national-security adviser, John Bolton, are in an especially bad position to respond to the atrocities in Syria. And one thing thats interesting about both Real America and Just America is the rate of change, how fast theyve come on and how quickly theyve seized a lot of cultural groundat least, a lot of the discourse, if not the institutions of power. And that was a really potent story that Reagan told, and that the Republican Party lived by for decades, and to some extent still does. And Just America: its a necessary slap in the face to my generation and to the complacency of most Americans, who dont want to know the history of race in this country. BLOG; AUTHOR ARCHIVE; VIDEOS; PODCASTS; PHOTOS; PRESS; Why Print Journalism Survives: George Packer on "The Unwinding," Charlie Hebdo, and More. Or maybe a little less, because the motives of Trump voters are very hard to break down. He summarized what he saw as the consensus view in another WhatsApp message to colleagues. . Bluntly, re: NewsGuild, what it comes down to for me is that I would never hire an agent who had lied to or about me, Mr. Taub wrote to a WhatsApp group for staff writers after the incident. We use first names with strangers. Its the professional class. At the same time, you may not sell those policies through the frame of specific identities. Its because of the courage and openness of the people I spoke with that I was able to tell this story. Gatsby, a mysterious bootlegger who makes a meteoric ascent from Midwestern obscurity to the palatial splendor of West Egg, exemplifies one part of the celebrity code: its inherently illicit. But some also shun its blunt and adversarial language. The Democrats lost the white working class. Nationalism is a word I avoid as a positive. I wonder how much its in the control of, say, one side of the political spectrum to bring the other side back. The article, Packer said, kept eluding me. It would be giving young people a chance, whether through military or civilian ways, to serve the country and one another, and to get to know one another across all the lines that divide us. Join our community book club. But, in comparison with Iraq, America acquitted itself with a measure of honor by evacuating and resettling its Vietnamese friends in the United Statesa hundred and forty thousand of them by the end of 1975. An organizer for the NewsGuild who was present, Nastaran Mohit, told the writers she had avoided involving them in the original organizing drive because she knew how close many of them were to management, and she was worried theyd snitch. Our mission is to get Southern California reading and talking. I dont want to say too much for it. The conversation made clear how inconsistent benefits and pay were among writers, and many left angry at Cond Nast over the opaque and uneven system. George Packer, a staff writer from 2003 to 2018, has covered the Iraq War for The New Yorker and has also written about the atrocities committed in Sierra Leone, civil unrest in the Ivory Coast . Smart America is where I mostly live, but its no longer a meritocracy, if it ever was. Id call that Real America. In the best tradition of Carlyle and Swift, he spends much of the first half of the book . It was a white Christian-nationalist narrative that said, Your free trade, your immigration, even your corporations and monopolies have not improved a lot of towns, and rural areas have sunk and are in deep trouble, and have some of the same serious problems that the inner cities have had for decades. And so, when Trump came along, in 2015, he intuited in his reptilian way that the old, sunny, optimistic Reagan message didnt cut it, and that something more dark and nativist and ugly would appealthat people didnt want to hear how good things were. Theres been nothing like it since the 1930s. montreal bypass to new brunswick map; mark bouris byron bay house; are belvita breakfast biscuits good for diabetics; is hello alice grant legit; the squad fs19 mods; famous muslim tennis players; google street view caribbean It's a full-scale scholarly biography of Richard Holbrooke, one of the most influential U.S. diplomats of the late 20th Century.[9]. Her passions are breaking up monopolies, regulating corporationsclass struggle, really. The union includes 120 people and there are about the same number of staff and contributing writers. The unionization effort has created an uncomfortable moment for the writers at The New Yorker, who have the kind of jobs and influence every journalist wants but few attain. He labels these four distinct expressions of contemporary American culture: "Free America" (center-right and libertarians), "Smart America" (center-left meritocratic elites), "Real America" (Donald Trump's . And in a way you can see they have followed each other in power from one decade to the next. George Packer (born ca. Still, the Bush Administration has, almost deliberately at times, brought anti-Americanism to unprecedented levels, acting under the illusion that, if America does something, it is right and will be seen as right. They would like security and order, however possible. Were nice. Its all particularly personal at The New Yorker, where the campaign has pitted a culture built on personal relationships and deep trust against a group of employees who reject the idea that they should be subject to the whims of any boss, no matter how benign. We dont want so strong a union that mediocrity reigns and its impossible to get rid of poor performers. These days, however, the NewsGuild has the cultural wind at its back. Why did ISIS . Are junior employees apprentices or a permanent creative underclass? Some 20 of the writers, many of them marquee names, were getting together to decide how to react to the surprise announcement that their less heralded colleagues fact checkers, copy editors, web producers, social media editors were forming a union and demanding raises. Gutekunst feels his kicking leg will be plenty strong a year removed from the knee scope he had last spring, and with the minor back injury behind him as well. His 2005 book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq analyzes the events that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and reports on subsequent developments in that country, largely based on interviews with ordinary Iraqis. Justin is under the weather, his column will return Wednesday. Packer doesn't preach about this. George Packer, resident egghead-journalist at the New Yorker - and Iraq war supporter-turned-"anguished" semi-recanter - is the latest "liberal" to turn his guns on Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald for their alleged devotion to libertarianism.A whole genre has grown up around this subject: Sean Wilentz, writing in The New . Its more like a bunch of instincts and prejudices. member, warned that a strike could last months and do immense damage. I very much enjoyed this piece, because it seems to fit . The easiest-to-understand element of the dispute involves the wages of the production employees, the group that includes everyone from fact checkers to social media editors. Do you think the fights embodied by Just America at a lot of institutions are going to manifest themselves in politics soon? The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. On Saturday afternoon the primary participants of The New Yorker's delightful and addictive "Campaign Trail" podcast collected for a live version of same, sort of like when Monty Python did The Secret Policeman's Other Ball. The New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm was asked during a libel case how compensation was set. You write, Because people still live their lives in an actual place, and the nation is the largest place with which they can identify. Those two things together, I think, have given us Real America. And I think thats necessary, because weve demonized one another through social media, through isolation during the pandemic, to a point where people are unrecognizable and have been cast in terms of good and evil. We found out last year we had something really big to do. I recently spoke by phone with Packer, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic and was previously a staff writer at The New Yorker. All rights reserved. If you bloc most Americans into identity groups, George Packer says, if you create monoliths, you will end up not speaking to their actual, as people say, lived experience., Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal. When youre been an industry for a long time, you cant imagine things differently. His award-winning biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, was released in May 2019. In his new book, Adam Hochschild remembers a time when a crusade for democracy abroad released a demonic spirit of intolerance and violence at home. Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Author, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America Doug Sovern, KCBS Radio Political Reporter - Moderator. He was a supporter of the Iraq war. That I have much more skepticism about, because of social media, because of the conservative information environment. On every trip to Iraq, I have met remarkable American individuals in military and civilian ranks, but, like most people I have talked to about Iraq, I am stunned by the level of general American incompetence there. Its like loyalty to whats yours. He reports that men employed by Americans as . There is no country in the region that wants to absorb Iraqis in a long-term resettlement. Those opportunities now also include newsletter platforms like Substack, and a new start-up called Puck, a digital magazine in which star writers get a cut of the subscription business and a share of the company. That dynamic's been entrenched for six, seven years now. So its not as though there was a wild rejection of him. When he came back from book leave in mid-2013, Packer's New Yorker editors suggested the idea to him. Packer, George (2001). 3. He also wrote about payments Amazon gets from publishers, often in the form of discounts -- information that is rarely shared. And Democrats of Clintons generation moved way over toward the Free America side, in terms of their willingness to see the private sector as the main engine of both growth and fairness. BUT, most of us would like to be able to get health insurance.. And yet I wrote the book with both despair and a need for some hope. The utilitarian reason is a good one. Why did you decide to structure this book around four Americas? But that is precisely the problem: Packer - I believe, and please correct me if I am wrong - has no training in North Africa's history and politics and I don't think he has spent much time there except for these quick hit trips for the long New Yorker piece (again, please correct me if I am wrong). And its legacy might be similar. 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