New Republic: The Best of 2015

Why Women Can’t Break Free From the Parent Trap

The New Republic’s Legacy on Race

Phantom of the Orchestra

Fear of a Radical Pope

“Do You Understand That Your Baby Goes Away and Never Comes Back?”

The Ghost of Cornel West

Future Queer

At War in the Garden of Eden

Corn Wars

First, Let’s Get Rid of All the Bosses

Why I Live Where I Live

Why Women Can’t Break Free From the Parent Trap

More women than ever are having babies at the peak of their careers. When will we stop punishing them for it?

BY REBECCA TRAISTER | February

In May of last year, I took a trip to Nevada to report a profile of a political candidate. After a three-hour interview with my subject, a member of her communications team suggested we go to lunch. Midway through, I jumped up from the table and ran toward the restaurant’s bathroom. I was unable to make it all the way to the toilet and ended up retching on the floor of the stall. After cleaning up as best I could and shamefacedly informing the manager about the remaining mess, I was spent. I staggered out of the restaurant and found myself unable to do anything but take a quick nap (i.e., pass out) in the car of the campaign staffer.

I didn’t have food poisoning. I was six weeks pregnant, struggling with the biliousness and debilitating exhaustion that accompanies the first trimester for some women. I don’t recall this episode as cute, or with any of the maternal bravado sometimes found on parenting blogs. The staffer in whose car I crashed was really nice about it, but it was professionally humiliating. Pregnancy made it hard for me to do my job in the manner in which I’ve done it for the past 15 years. And there was no simple fix: I very much wanted to be pregnant; I also very much wanted to do my job well.

If you’re a person who has worked ambitiously, energetically, and efficiently for decades, it can be wildly discombobulating to find yourself suddenly tripped up by your own body, especially when it’s not illness or disability that’s stopping you, but among the most common and human of conditions. Yet this is a regular, lived reality for more women than ever before.

In 1970, the average woman had her first child at 21.4; by 2012, it was almost 26, an age by which many young adults are at least a few years deep into jobs or careers. Around 15 percent of first births are now to women over the age of 35, compared with just 1 percent back in 1970. Women across all classes are now participating in the labor market like never before, and far too few are able to spare a cent. Women comprise about 47 percent of the workforce in the United States and two-thirds of the low-wage workforce. In 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 64 percent of mothers with children under six worked. In 40 percent of households with children, women are now the sole or primary breadwinners.

The confluence of all these factors means that women are now having babies smack in the middle of their peak earning periods and that their earnings are crucial to the economic stability of their families. And there is no denying that motherhood makes an economic and practical dent in the shape and solidity of their careers. University of Massachusetts sociologist Michelle Budig has found that, on average, an American woman’s earnings decrease by 4 percent for every child that she bears, a figure that sounds even more brutal when compared to the fact that after men have kids, their earnings increase, on average, by 6 percent. Researchers have also found that fathers are more likely to be hired and to be regarded as more competent employees than mothers.

These gendered discrepancies in post-childbirth careers can be understood via a host of historical assumptions about mothers and fathers; hoary ideas about providers versus nurturers, masculine responsibility versus feminine pliability. And, of course, there is the stratospheric cost of unsubsidized American childcare, a factor that leads many more women than men to drop out of the workforce or cut back on their professional commitments. These realities are abhorrent, but they are, at least, studied. What goes less noticed is the way pregnancy and immediate postpartum life itself plays a serious role in slowing professional momentum for women for whom the simple—and celebrated—act of having a baby turns out to be a stunningly precarious economic and professional choice.

The professional binds begin, in many cases, before conception. Women who are even thinking about trying to get pregnant often feel tethered to whatever job they’re in at the time. A move to a new job—a better-paying or more prestigious job, a job with more manageable hours or a more dynamic boss—can mean losing vested benefits like built-up sick days, vacation days, or family leave, and with them, any promise of being able to take time off after a baby. The Family and Medical Leave Act, currently the only federal leave protection available to American workers who have babies, does not require that an employer pay a new mother for a single day of leave; it merely protects her job for twelve weeks of unpaid leave, and then, only if she has worked at her company for at least a year. So, in many states, if you take a new job and then, two months later, discover that you’re pregnant, and nine months later give birth, your employer has no obligation to hold your job for you; he can simply decide that he’d prefer to avoid the hassle and expense of finding a temporary replacement and let you go. During childbearing years, changing jobs—even for a fundamentally better gig—can be a very bad idea.

Those prime childbearing years—mid-twenties to early forties—overlap precisely with prime professional years. This is when employees are most attractive to new employers, when they should be able to zip up ladders with the most alacrity. But for women who feel they might want to have a baby, hesitation can extend far longer than nine months: There’s no telling how long it will take to actually get pregnant. The professional paralysis brought on by anticipated pregnancy can drag for years—not because women are less ambitious, but because they are navigating the culturally and politically crafted disadvantages of our social policies.

And that’s to say nothing of the process of applying for a new job—or putting oneself forward for a promotion or a raise—while actually pregnant. Yes, there are official prohibitions related to discrimination in hiring based on gender or pregnancy. But imagine that your dream post opens up at another company or within your own; then imagine the likelihood that your pregnancy does not—on some level—serve as a strike against you. I have advised friends, and have been advised, that a woman is not required to tell a prospective employer that she is pregnant. But I’ve also done the math, considered the impact on a relationship with a new boss. I’ve always told; they always know.

These are the complicated negotiations many women in childbearing years must navigate with their co-workers and employers. What is happening to their bodies is a whole other story. You know what’s awkward at work? Vomiting. Also, trying to sit through a meeting or wait tables or complete your shift in a factory where physical conditions require vigilance, when suddenly you’re hit by a wave of fatigue so intense that it feels as if your bones may have melted. And it’s in those first few months of pregnancy, when everyone urges newly pregnant women not to breathe a word about their condition, for the (very legitimate) fear of miscarriage, that these symptoms are often most severe.

There’s another reason we don’t talk about the debilitations that pregnancy can involve: not every pregnant woman experiences them. And the assumption that pregnancy is going to hobble a professional woman can be nearly as bad as the lack of accommodation for the ways in which it might hobble her. The question of whether to acknowledge pregnancy as vulnerability—as a kind of temporary disability—returns us to age-old tussles between egalitarian and protectionist feminism.

I’m usually in the egalitarian camp: I don’t believe in treating femininity as a special diminished category. As appreciative as I am of all attempts to provide paid compensation to new parents, I find myself cringing at the use of “disability insurance” by some companies in some states as a means to patch together paid time off. Pregnancy does not—contrary to baby-oriented media eager to promote “Mommy brain”—make women stupid. It is not a physical handicap; expectant women are not rendered, by dint of their suddenly obvious femaleness, incapable of doing their jobs well.

Except when, sometimes, they are: for an afternoon or a day or a week or a period of months. When you are pregnant, there may be moments when you will not be able to stock the shelves or take the business trip, and there is too often no flexibility. In the pregnancy discrimination case argued in the Supreme Court in early December, former UPS worker Peggy Young asserted that her company would not allow her to modify her duties by lifting only light packages (as ordered by her doctor) during her pregnancy; she was placed on unpaid leave and lost her health care, pension, and disability benefits. Young’s co-workers who had been injured on the job were protected from this kind of treatment by the Americans with Disabilities Act. She was not.

This case is symptomatic of simple, systemic failures to account for the fact that a large percentage of the American workforce requires consideration of physical circumstance: circumstance which may or may not be enfeebling, which is very rarely long-term, and which—not for nothing—is central to the propagation of the species.

As you read this, I am home with a new baby, and paychecks are still arriving in my bank account. To say that I am lucky would be a great understatement. I have won the woman lottery.

Eighty-eight percent of American women do not get paid for a single day or a single hour after they give birth. When I had my first child, three-and-a-half years ago, for reasons related to my particular professional choices, I did not get paid leave.

This is what it felt like: It felt like I was a successful professional adult who, from the time I’d started scooping ice cream and busing tables in tenth grade, had always had a job, except for the times I’d been laid off. In this case, I hadn’t been laid off. I’d finally, at age 35, done the thing that everyone from Mitt Romney to most of Facebook had assured me was the most rewarding and most valuable—the most downright American—thing I could do: I’d had a baby. And my income—my economic independence—had vanished.

My plight was far cushier than most. I am partnered. My husband earns money (though the weeks he took off after the birth of our first child were also unpaid), the nature of my work permits flexibility and the ability to work from home, and I had a portion of a book advance. But that advance—meant to stretch over a year—was quickly lost to diapers and onesies and devices designed to suck snot from tiny human noses. I started writing journalism again—in a frenzied, desperate way—about six weeks after I had my daughter, but I was not really back in gear for three months and not earning anything like what I had been before the baby for a year—or maybe it was three years—after that. And again: compared with most new mothers whose income dries up as soon as they give birth, I was coasting.

For the majority of new parents, whose penniless postpartum months (or weeks, or days, or whatever they can afford to take without pay, which is often nothing) are simply the result of the way things are in a country that venerates motherhood but in practice accords it zero economic value, the situation is far more dire. It makes parenting a privileged pursuit, takes women out of the workforce, and ultimately affirms public and professional life as being built for men. Mercifully, the Obama administration is starting to come around to this reality. In January, the president announced that he would sign an executive order giving federal employees six weeks of paid family leave, and that he would pressure Congress to encourage better family and sick leave policies. The post that announced the shift was titled “Why We Think Paid Leave Is a Worker’s Right, Not a Privilege.”

When I discovered I was pregnant with my second child this spring, I was employed as a senior editor at the new republic, but I had been there for less than a year, and, at first, on contract, not as a staffer. I was unsure of what was going to happen.

The new republic is a venerable institution long dedicated to progressive politics. Back in the 1980s, two of its female editors, Dorothy Wickenden and Ann Hulbert, had babies. They asked then-editor and owner Marty Peretz for three months of paid leave and received it. But their claims were specific, personal; they did not result in comprehensive company policy. When my colleague—the editor of this piece—asked in 2013 about the new republic’s maternity policy, she was initially told that there was none. She negotiated her way up to a promise of three weeks of paid leave and then—following intervention by colleagues, many of them young men—got boosted to eight weeks. New fathers were guaranteed three weeks of paid leave.

This policy, which my bosses graciously offered to me even though—since I had been at the company for less than a year—they didn’t have to, was generous by the standards of my industry, positively luxurious by the standards of this country. But it was meager in comparison to international practices, and, increasingly, in comparison to what is offered by high-end tech companies. In the past year, places like Google, Apple, Reddit, and Facebook have elicited mixed responses to their ample benefits packages, which include not just twelve weeks (and more, in some cases) of paid leave for mothers and fathers, but also baby bonuses, child care credits, subsidized fertility treatments, and egg-freezing.

These companies make many Americans feel anxious, for some very good reasons: Are their munificent incentives part of a plan to lure workers into becoming capitalist tech drones? Allowing them to have families but trapping workers on office treadmills that never allow them to spend time with them? Are they meant to enforce corporate loyalty to companies that profit by margins that will never be accessible to employees? Yes, maybe they are. What’s certainly true is that these benefits are accruing to a comparatively elite, educated workforce and not to those who could use them the most.

But it’s also true that these companies are capitalizing on a serious weakness in our social contract. The United States and its corporate structures were built with one kind of worker—frankly, with one kind of citizen—in mind. That citizen wage-earner was a white man. That this weakness is being addressed by employers faster than it is being addressed by Congress contributes to the widening of the class chasm. Policies that account for the fact that women now give birth and earn wages on which their families depend—and, for that matter, that men now earn wages and provide childcare on which their families depend—should not be crafted by individual bosses or corporations on a piecemeal basis that inevitably favors already privileged populations. They should be available to every American. But until we see a large-scale, national refashioning of family leave, the economic fates of childbearers will be left in the hands of the private entities that employ them.

In the weeks before I gave birth, the new republic underwent some widely reported editorial turmoil. Its current owner, an online entrepreneur, hired a CEO from the tech world, who said some things that appeared to threaten the legacy of the magazine. The bosses who hired me and the majority of my beloved, brilliant colleagues—the very people who had helped my editor negotiate her 2013 leave—departed, leaving those of us who stayed bereft.

There were several reasons that I was not inclined to quit my job, but among them was the fact of my upcoming leave. Even had I wanted to, I couldn’t have quit. Despite the fact that I was staying on for a variety of reasons—because of an optimism about the future and less of an attachment to the new republic’s past than some of my longer-serving colleagues—the easiest explanation of my actions turned on the fact of my late-stage pregnancy. My body and its condition defined my professional situation.

And then my new boss announced changes to the new republic’s leave policy. Women and men at the company will now each receive 16 weeks paid leave after the birth or adoption of a new baby. These are lush—er, humane—Silicon Valley–style benefits, accompanying the Silicon Valley–style language that—reasonably— alarmed the new republic’s former editorial team. This is the kind of policy that would allow a pregnant woman to take some time off before the baby is born, if she needed to.

I am immensely grateful for these benefits. Does my gratitude make me complicit in the decline of an American institution, or does it make me a lucky beneficiary of that institution’s progressive evolution? Do these expansive new benefits work as a carrot to draw new employees and then to keep them around? Is it such a bad thing to attract workers by offering them more equitable conditions, by considering that some number of them—male and female—might be producing children in the same years that they are producing content?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. And, in the end, I’m not sure I can afford to care. I’m a woman who’s just had a baby. My choices are limited. a

The New Republic’s Legacy on Race

A historical reflection

BY JEET HEER | February

Legacies are never simple; they create victims as well as beneficiaries. The more substantial the legacy, the more heated the disputes are over who has title of ownership, who gets to enjoy an inheritance, and who is left out in the cold.

One of the most dangerous ways to treat a legacy is to bask in past achievements and revel in riches earned by others without awareness that they came with costs. This shallow legacy-enjoyment is evident in the cheaper sort of nationalism, which glories in a country’s conquests without thought as to the suffering entailed.

The phrase “legacy of racism” encapsulates in a few words a large reality: Bigotries can have complex, ongoing ramifications. Few, if any, longstanding institutions have been historically free of racism. Given the pervasiveness of racism in the past, the struggle to understand this legacy and figure out how to overcome it remains a political and institutional imperative.

Over the last few months, following the new republic’s centenary anniversary and a staff shake-up, a perceived legacy of racism in the magazine has been the topic of intense arguments, mostly carried out online. In the wake of the debate, vexing questions demand answers: How do we reconcile the magazine’s liberalism, the ideology that animated the Civil Rights revolution, with the fact that many black readers have long seen—and still see—the magazine as inimical and at times outright hostile to their concerns? How could a magazine that published so much excellent on-the-ground reporting on the unforgivable sins visited upon black America by white America—lynchings, legal frame-ups, political disenfranchisement, and more—also give credence to toxic and damaging racial theorizing? And why has the new republic had only a handful of black editorial staff members in its 100 years?

The new republic owes an accounting to itself, its critics, and its readers; an honest reckoning on where it has gone wrong is the necessary first step to figuring out how to do better. This self-appraisal is urgent on a number of grounds: A magazine that is loyal to the traditions of liberalism has to account for its occasional betrayal of liberal ideals; honest and pointed criticism, of the sort the magazine has received, deserves a straightforward answer; and finally, as the new republic reinvents itself in its second century, the lessons of the first 100 years demand attention. Returning to the beginning, we can answer the question: How can this magazine—or any legacy institution—come to terms with a blighted legacy on race and transcend it?

The New Republic was born in 1914, a moment when African American politics was polarized between two giants, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, both of whom contributed to the magazine in its first few years. Washington, the most influential black leader of the early twentieth century, was an advocate of conciliation verging on capitulation. He pushed for a grand bargain with white America, whereby blacks would accept the status quo of the Jim Crow South—segregation in schools, restaurants, public places, public transportation and so forth—in exchange for economic development through industrial education, in schools such as the Tuskegee Institute, which Washington helped found. Du Bois, the first black person to get a doctorate from Harvard, was the insurgent. Through the NAACP, which he helped establish in 1909, Du Bois was an advocate of full civil rights, political participation, and a black educated class.

For at least the first six years of its existence, under founding editors Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, and Walter Lippmann, the new republic adopted Washington’s outlook on race as its own. One problem with Washington’s approach, especially as filtered through the magazine’s privileged white writers, was that it framed justice for black America in terms of what was good for white America. Calls for civil rights were often tempered by assurances that fundamental dividing lines such as intermarriage and residential segregation would not be touched. The magazine’s editors thought they were taking a progressive attitude toward race. However, articles calling for cooperation often ended up justifying racism, as in a 1915 piece by one Louis B. Wehle, a Kentucky lawyer and friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who argued, “The negro, as a mental survival from slavery, cheerfully accepts the idea of his social inferiority; his problems are born of his shiftlessness, slack morality, and propensity to crimes of violence.” Likewise, a 1920 review of Herbert J. Seligmann’s The Negro Faces America cautioned, “At a time like the present, when race prejudice is peculiarly active throughout the world, we expect a responsible writer to avoid aggressive insistence upon race equality and the right of intermarriage, to accept a considerable degree of race prejudice as irreducible.”

Washingtonian politics meant placing a naïve faith in the power of cooperation. A 1916 report in the magazine on African American education ended with this homily: “In suggesting his program for the further development of Negro education, Dr. Jones places justifiable confidence in a growing spirit of fair play and increasing broadmindedness on the part of the South. The Negro problem is a problem of the democracy and it cannot be solved without the cooperation of the South, the Negro and the North, inspired with ‘an abiding faith in one another.’”

By the mid-’20s, however, the new republic’s commitment to Washington’s strategy of compromise was running aground on the shoals of brute reality. The murderous race riots that followed World War I were a jolt, as was the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan. “Why in America, more than any other country, do we have race riots, mobs, lynchings, burnings, and manhunts generally?” the sociologist Robert E. Park asked in 1923. Throughout the ’20s, the magazine slowly adopted Du Bois’s call for full civil rights. The 1931 Scottsboro case, where nine black teenagers were falsely accused of rape and eight of them were initially sentenced to death by an all-white jury, became a cause célèbre with the magazine. “Whatever the decision of the Supreme Court in the present appeal may be, the innocence of the nine defendants has long since been established in the minds of all fair-minded people who have followed the trials and know the facts,” the magazine declared in a ringing 1934 editorial. “It is a record of brutality, chicanery, violence and injustice on one side … and of determined, unremitting and courageous struggle for justice on the other.”

This shift in the new republic toward a more rigorous accounting of racial injustice was coupled with a curiosity in black culture, spurred by the magazine’s location in New York and proximity to the Harlem Renaissance. Readers were served reviews of black theater, fiction, spirituals, and jazz—performances that rarely got such alert attention in other white venues. In 1926, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant provided a long portrait of Paul Robeson, locating his masterful revitalization of spirituals in his double consciousness as a black man in America. The following year, a searching essay by Wallace Thurman called out works that “treated the Negro as a sociological problem rather than as a human being,” anticipating future essays by Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin.

Still, the new republic’s discussion of African American culture was punctuated by a jarring insouciance, particularly in the work of white writers. Throughout the first two decades, white writers would throw around the n-word with the casual aplomb of characters in a Quentin Tarantino movie. In 1916, travel writer Harrison Rhodes opined, “We should not be so pleasant a people nor so agreeable a land were the niggers not among us … both the devil and the black man should get their due.” Rhodes thought he was writing as a friend to blacks, whereas he ended up replicating the very racism he thought he was challenging.

“Niggers can be admired artists without any gift more singular than high spirits: so why drag in the intellect?” Clive Bell, the Bloomsbury critic (and brother-in-law to Virginia Woolf) argued in 1921. In 1928, assistant editor T.S. Matthews, who would go on to succeed Henry Luce as editor of Time and marry the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, shared an anecdote about “a big, young, shiny-black buck nigger” riding a train.

This type of language was partially a literary affect. The magazine was trying to be modern, vernacular, and street smart. But on a deeper level, the magazine’s writers seemed to be going out of their way to assure readers that while they took up the cause of political parity between the races, they weren’t so naïve to accept blacks as social equals.

The pathology of this dual-mindedness is evident in an impassioned 1933 report on the Scottsboro case, by the Louisiana-born novelist Hamilton Basso, in which he noted in an aside, “There is something comic about a Negro who looks like an ape.”

Another distinguished writer who played contradictory roles in the magazine’s legacy was the literary critic Edmund Wilson. Reviewing Wilson’s diaries from the 1930s in The New Yorker, John Updike wrote, “‘Nigger’ seems to be Wilson’s natural way of referring to black people (even ‘coon’ occurs), though as the decade wears on, and he has visited the shacks of Kentucky and the slums of Chicago, the more respectful term ‘Negro’ gradually takes over.”

Looking more closely at Wilson’s work in the new republic, what we see is less an evolution than a split-mindedness. In a July 1931 article on the Southern Agrarians, Wilson offered a credulous acceptance of neo-Confederate mythology, arguing that “even the master who worked his slaves to death or flogged them to death had perhaps a certain moral advantage over the capitalist manufacturer or speculator. ... To this day, the relations in the South between the landowning gentry and the Negroes are more intimate and, in a sense, more human than the relations between the mill-owner and the workers in the factory.” Remarkably, one month after this whitewashing of slavery, Wilson wrote a masterful summary of the Scottsboro case, based on first-hand reporting, which not only made the miscarriage of justice clear, but also portrayed with great nuance the political and class divisions in the black community that led to a rift in legal tactics.

Wilson would return to neo-Confederate mythmaking in his 1962 book Patriotic Gore, so it’s not quite true to say he progressed on race. Rather he worked in two modes: abstractly as a race theorist (where he wrote nonsense) and concretely as a reporter during the Depression (where he wrote much of value). The discipline of factual journalism, applied to subjects often neglected by the mainstream press, made the new republic an invaluable repository of black history. At the same time, when these same writers tried to be more speculative, they often fell victim to condescension if not outright, folklore-tinged fantasy.

Fortunately, the magazine also provided a forum where black writers, such as Hubert Harrison, Walter F. White, and Wallace Thurman, could tackle debates in their community. (Alas, black women were scarce, if not non-existent, as contributors to the new republic, although books by black women were reviewed.) In 1923, while reviewing an inept play by a white writer who mangled African American dialect, Harrison, a black socialist, wrote, “If the fox may be forgiven a word of comment on the hunt, I might even say ‘Bosh!’” Whether it was Du Bois’s prophetic linkage in 1921 of civil rights with anti-imperialist struggles in Africa, or Eric Walrond’s 1922 account of looking for work in New York and getting cold dismissals, a small but vital group of black writers brought sensibilities and perspectives which couldn’t be found elsewhere.

One could argue that between the late ’30s and the mid-’70s, the new republic was one of the best magazines outside the black press in its coverage of the rise of the civil rights movement. Thomas Sancton, Sr., managing editor from 1942–1943, was a particularly radical advocate, holding FDR’s feet to the fire for his compromises with the Jim Crow South, and doing brave reporting on the Detroit race riots of 1943. Some of the best work from this period is enshrined in the Library of America’s two-volume Reporting Civil Rights, including Lucille B. Milner’s “Jim Crow in the Army” (1944) and Andrew Kopkind’s “Selma” (1965).

After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year, the country’s conversation about race turned to more ambiguous debates over busing, affirmative action, and overcoming economic hurdles. The owner who would oversee that new era was Martin Peretz.

Peretz would be a neoliberal owner of a liberal magazine, one who took the title editor in chief for himself while nurturing the careers of a cadre of editors in his charge. The magazine became a bully pulpit for Peretz’s political beliefs, but staff members were given free rein to disagree with him in private and public. “I have a problem with some of the needlessly vicious things about Arabs that we publish,” said Michael Kinsley in an interview during his tenure as editor. Peretz’s passion for Israel could occasionally be matched with an unflattering view of Arabs. In a 1982 interview with Haaretz, he urged the Palestinians “be turned into just another crushed nation, like the Kurds or the Afghans.” In a March 1990 essay, he argued the Lebanese “fight simply because they live. And the culture from which they come scarcely thinks this is odd.”

Peretz didn’t reserve his vitriol for Arabs. In 2009, he described Mexico as “a Latin society with all of its characteristic deficiencies: congenital corruption, authoritarian government, anarchic politics, near-tropical work habits, stifling social mores, Catholic dogma with the usual unacknowledged compromises, an anarchic counterculture and increasingly violent modes of conflict.”

Meanwhile, Peretz’s magazine was attributing the problems of black America to Jesse Jackson, Marion Barry, and anonymous welfare mothers, while largely ignoring deindustrialization and mass incarceration. Affirmative action became a regular target; legacy admission of whites to colleges and universities was rarely discussed. Of course, the competing positions on affirmative action deserved an airing. But to attack affirmative action in a magazine with a staff that was almost entirely white and male was to defend not a principle but a troubling status quo.

When that point of view permeated a piece of reporting, the results were regrettable. A 1995 piece by Ruth Shalit argued that if The Washington Post hired strictly on merit, it would be an all-white newspaper: “The Post, of course, is in an agonizing position. If editors refuse to adjust their traditional hiring standards, they will end up with a nearly all-white staff. But if they do reach out aggressively to ensure proportionate representation for each relevant minority, they transform not just the complexion but the content of the paper.”

Shalit’s piece made no mention of the fact that the magazine she was writing for had an almost all-white editorial staff. After the piece appeared, roughly half of the 28 Post staffers Shalit interviewed wrote in to say that she had either lied about what they told her or misrepresented them; the new republic printed only a fraction of these complaints. (The piece was later found to be riddled with inaccuracies, leading James Warren, the Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune to label Shalit a “journalistic Unabomber.”)

Likewise, before his fabrication of articles was revealed in 1998, Stephen Glass penned a 1996 piece about the Washington, D.C. taxi cab industry that seemed to cater to Peretz’s appetite for melodramas illustrating black cultural pathology. The article drew an invidious contrast between hard-working, uncomplaining immigrants who believed in the American dream versus entitled black Americans who spurned honest work (and chased after white women). The piece included imaginary details such as, “Four months ago, a 17-year-old held a gun to Eswan’s head while his girlfriend performed oral sex on the gunman.” Glass also claimed to be in a cab when a young African American man mugged the driver, and celebrated the exploits of a fictional Kae Bang, the “Korean cab-driver- turned-vigilante” who used martial arts to beat up black teenagers who tried to rob his cab. It’s fair to say that Glass’s fabrications in this piece and others did more damage to the new republic than any event in its history. And it’s hard to accept a piece like the above would have been published in a magazine which wasn’t already inclined toward a pernicious view of African Americans.

One may also ask if a staff dominated by privileged white males might not have benefited from greater diversity, and not just along racial lines. “Marty [Peretz] doesn’t take women seriously for positions of responsibility,” staff writer Henry Fairlie told Esquire magazine in 1985. “He’s really most comfortable with a room full of Harvard males.” In a 1988 article for Vanity Fair, occasional contributor James Wolcott concurred, noting, “the new republic has a history of shunting women to the sidelines and today injects itself with fresh blood drawn largely from male interns down from Harvard.” When Robert Wright succeeded Michael Kinsley in 1988, he joked he was hired as part of an “affirmative action program” since he went to Princeton, not Harvard.

The magazine’s close ties to Harvard go back to the fledgling days of Croly and Lippmann, both alumni of the Ivy League school. Yet, as Harvard diversified over the decades, the new republic’s staff did not. Its masthead remained largely demographically unchanged, replicating itself generation after generation. Magazines are as susceptible as any institution to falling into a feedback loop: Just as some universities attract students from the same few families decade after decade, a publication can have a narrow demographic base, drawing its editors from the type of people who grew up reading the magazine. And considering the fact that the new republic was the gateway for many distinguished careers at publications like The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, the magazine can be seen as not just reflecting the media’s diversity problem, but actively contributing to it.

The magazine’s myopia on racial issues was never more apparent than in Peretz’s and editor Andrew Sullivan’s decision in 1994 to excerpt The Bell Curve, a foray into scientific racism in which the authors, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, asserted that differences in IQ among blacks and whites were largely genetic and almost impossible to significantly change. The book had not been peer-reviewed, nor were galleys sent to the relevant scientific journals. As The Wall Street Journal reported, The Bell Curve was “swept forward by a strategy that provided book galleys to likely supporters while withholding them from likely critics.”

Staff members at the new republic vehemently opposed running the excerpt, but Sullivan and Peretz had the final word. A compromise was reached: The excerpt would run along with critiques written by the new republic contributors, such as Mickey Kaus and John Judis. While the critiques made good points, only one was written by a scientist with the background needed to evaluate the book’s claims. “I’m not a scientist,” literary editor Leon Wieseltier wrote in his contribution. “I know nothing about psychometrics.”

Because most of the critiques were political and philosophic in nature, many readers were left with the false impression that the book had some scientific validity. By the time devastating scientific reviews appeared in places like the Journal of Economic Literature and Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve (edited by Bernie Devlin, et. al), the book already enjoyed unmerited prestige, thanks to the imprimatur of the new republic. The Bell Curve was perhaps the most impactful, and unfortunate, example of the magazine’s embrace of racial mythmaking.

Sometimes, the new republic’s cluelessness about race was almost comic. A 1991 piece by David Samuels—under the headline “The ‘Black Music’ That Isn’t Either”—assured the magazine’s readers that rap music was neither black nor music, and would be a passing fad. “Whatever its continuing significance in the realm of racial politics, rap’s hour as innovative popular music has come and gone,” Samuels wrote. The issue’s cover showed a white teenager as “The Real Face of Rap.”

Peretz’s new republic did occasionally publish racially astute pieces, such as Caryl Phillips’s 1996 essay on Trinidadian radical Marxist historian C.L.R. James, and Peter Beinart’s 1997 piece on black-Latino tensions, but such contributions were the exception.

Whatever the problems had been with the early twentieth-century the new republic, it published a spectrum of black voices, so readers (both black and white) had a sense of how black America thought about things. It published the conservative Washington, the centrist White, the militant Du Bois, and voices more radical than Du Bois himself, such as Du Bois’s Marxist critic Abram L. Harris.

Under Peretz, with very few exceptions, the magazine printed only the more conservative end of black political discourse: Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Juan Williams, Stanley Crouch, Randall Kennedy, and Glenn Loury.

Consider, for example, the black intellectuals who didn’t write for the magazine: Toni Morrison, Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West, Nell Painter, Robin Kelly, Ismael Reed, and Brent Staples, to name a few. This didn’t stop the magazine from trumpeting “The Decline of the Black Intellectual” on its cover in 1995; the accompanying 5,500-word essay by Wieseltier focused on exactly one intellectual, Cornel West. In fact, black intellectual life was vibrant at the time; it was just absent from the new republic.

In recent years, under editors Peter Beinart, Richard Just, and Franklin Foer, there was a strong improvement in coverage of race. Dayo Olopade brought a much needed black perspective to her reporting on President Obama’s 2008 run, and in 2014, Alec MacGillis wrote a piece about Scott Walker and the toxic racial politics of Wisconsin. The same year Jason Zengerle wrote incisively about the rollback of civil rights. Rebecca Traister has had wise words about race and the Bill Cosby scandal.

Every magazine is aimed at imaginary readers, an idealized sense of the people leafing through the pages. Perhaps the core problem with Peretz’s new republic was that the imaginary readers were unquestionably white. It was hard to imagine black readers picking up the magazine, let alone dreaming of writing for it, unless, like the new republic contributor Walter Williams, they were readers who thought the Confederacy had some merit.

The last century of the new republic has bestowed a rich legacy of lessons, both positive and negative, on race. At its best moments, the magazine has been a beacon of fact-based reporting and a forum for rich debate over racial issues. At its worst, the magazine has fallen under the sway of racial theorizing and crackpot racial lore. Moving forward, any reformation program should start by honestly acknowledging the past. The range of non-white voices in the magazine needs to expand, not just by having more nonwhite writers, but by having writers who aren’t just talking to an imaginary white audience but are addressing readers who look like the world. The magazine has to avoid the temptation to be an insular insider journal for the elite and recognize that its finest moments are when analytical intelligence is joined with grassroots reporting. The magazine’s well-stocked and complex legacy shouldn’t be jettisoned, but it can be reformed, built on, and made new. a

Phantom of the Orchestra

Mamoru Samuragochi’s story hit all the right notes: a deaf genius whose music inspired a nation. But the “Japanese Beethoven” wasn’t who he seemed.

BY CHRISTOPHER BEAM | MARCH/APRIL

The night Mamoru Samuragochi lost his hearing completely, he had a dream. “I was sitting on a beach at night, alone, holding my knees,” he wrote in his 2007 autobiography, Symphony No. 1. He stood and walked into the sea until the water came up to his neck. All he could hear was the sound of waves crashing on the shore. “At that moment, something grabbed my ankles and started pulling me under.”

He struggled to swim to the surface but kept sinking. “The sound became smaller and smaller as the water entered my ears,” he wrote. “All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe anymore, and I lost consciousness. It was then that I woke up.”

He got out of bed, walked over to his keyboard, and laid his fingers on the keys. He heard nothing. “I realized the keyboard wasn’t on,” he wrote. “I thanked God.” He switched it on, held his breath, and struck the keys again. “The result was the same.” Silence. He started to panic. He paced the room, smashed his ears with his fists, and slammed his head against the wall. When he finally came to, he found himself in a puddle of blood—somehow he had torn his knee to the bone. “But nothing mattered,” he wrote.

Then Samuragochi got an idea. The tinnitus inside his skull maintained a steady pitch, like a tuning fork. He grabbed a blank sheet of staff paper. His favorite Beethoven piece, the “Moonlight Sonata,” played in his head, and he scribbled it down from memory. He then found the original sheet music and laid the two pieces of paper side by side. They were identical, note for note. Samuragochi wept. Even if he couldn’t hear, he could keep composing.

This story would become the foundation of the Samuragochi legend. In 2001, Time magazine dubbed him a “digital-age Beethoven.” He played piano for the magazine’s reporter, whose eyes, he said, welled with tears. Samuragochi told Time, “Losing my hearing was a gift from God.”

That same year, Samuragochi began work on his first symphony. Then one day, he felt a sharp pain in his wrist. “That’s when I realized I could not play piano anymore,” he wrote in Symphony No. 1. “I was shaking with anger, screaming in the studio, and I couldn’t even hear my voice screaming.” His tinnitus intensified, becoming a 24-hour intracranial roar, “as if I was trapped in a boiler room.” He had seizures, during which “it was rare that I didn’t urinate,” he wrote. “The sacred music room became a frightening battlefield of vomit and piss and blood.” Finally, in the fall of 2003, he finished the symphony. “Immediately after, I tried to kill myself.”

In 2008 his hometown of Hiroshima selected the symphony to be performed at a ceremony commemorating the bombing of the city in World War II. The time and place were particularly meaningful to Samuragochi. On August 6, 1945, his parents had been within two miles of the nuclear explosion. His father, a rice deliveryman, was covered in the “black rain” of nuclear fallout, Samuragochi wrote. Doctors could never explain the reasons for Samuragochi’s hearing loss, but “some said they couldn’t rule out a genetic handicap as a second generation atomic bomb victim,” he wrote. “The blood of the atomic bomb itself now runs through my body.”

After the performance, Samuragochi would be hailed as one of the great classical talents of his generation. Japanese media seized on Samuragochi’s spectacular story, featuring him on TV specials and in magazine articles. CD sales of the symphony by Nippon Columbia, one of Japan’s oldest and most respected record labels, eventually climbed to 180,000—a blockbuster for the Japanese classical music industry, which had been struggling to attract new listeners. When Recording Arts magazine asked readers to name their 20 favorite classical CDs of 2011, Samuragochi was the only living composer on the list. In the summer of 2013, his publisher released a paperback version of his autobiography with a cover blurb from the legendary writer Hiroyuki Itsuki: “If there is an artist whom we can call a genius today, Mamoru Samuragochi would definitely be the one.” After decades of struggle, Samuragochi was finally receiving the recognition he’d always craved.

It wouldn’t last. On February 2, 2014, his former manager Minoru Kurimura was in a meeting when, feeling bored, he pulled out his iPhone and checked his email. He saw a message from Samuragochi. “I’m human filth,” he wrote. “I have betrayed you to an extent I can never fully repay. I offer my deepest apologies.” The Samuragochi story was, it turned out, a lie. Within days, nearly every detail of the deaf composer genius narrative would be called into question. Kurimura read on: “I have embroiled you in a terrible quandary of my own making. I am prepared for death.”

On a summer afternoon in 1996, Samuragochi went to a coffee shop in Shibuya, an upscale district in Central Tokyo, with a business proposal for Takashi Niigaki, a young music teacher who’d been introduced by a mutual friend. From the moment they shook hands, it was clear the two men were opposites. Born in Hiroshima in 1963, Samuragochi moved to Tokyo as a teenager and fronted a rock band, but abandoned the stage after his younger brother died in a car crash. He turned instead to composing, and in 1993 began to write scores for television and film. Samuragochi was intense—he told Niigaki he “subsisted without food”—and almost absurdly confident, saying he was famous in his field. He wore black, and his dark hair fell past his broad shoulders. “In a word,” Niigaki recalled, “heavy metal.”

Niigaki, meanwhile, was a specimen of Japan’s music education system. Unmarried and still living with his parents, the then-25-year-old dressed conservatively and mumbled without making eye contact. Born in Tokyo, he first sat down at a piano when he was four years old. His older brother Shigeru remembers him refusing to come outside and play so he could practice piano at home. By age eight, Niigaki was composing his own short pieces. He had an epiphany when he saw Star Wars. “That was the first time I felt the joy of orchestrated music,” he told me. After he heard one of John Cage’s “prepared piano” works on a radio show, his tastes skewed experimental and came to include everything from Baroque to jazz to pop.

For college, Niigaki attended the Toho Gakuen School of Music, the alma mater of the renowned conductor Seiji Ozawa, and stayed on after graduation to teach composition. His students loved their soft-spoken teacher, a gentle savant with an encyclopedic knowledge of classical music. Most lecturers, when discussing a composition, would hand out photocopied sheets of music to students; Niigaki would write on the chalkboard from memory.

Outside of class, Niigaki wrote his own music, and soon became known in Tokyo composer circles for his virtuosic, often kooky pieces. (One featured dueling vacuum cleaners.) He didn’t own a TV, computer, or cell phone. When he composed, instead of using software, he wrote the music out by hand, his distinctive, angular notes slashing across the staff.

“In the centuries of music I’d studied, I wanted to be seen as standing at the forefront,” Niigaki told me. “The Bachs, the Beethovens, the Mozarts—I wanted my name to be the last one in line.” But whereas some composers had a knack for self-promotion, Niigaki lacked bravado. “He’s a man who avoids the spotlight at all costs,” said Kenichi Nishizawa, a composer friend of Niigaki. For fun, Niigaki would invite friends over to his place for beers and they’d listen to old cassette tapes, competing to guess the composer and the year of composition. Niigaki always won. “I don’t think he’s really capable of doing anything besides writing music,” said his friend Takafumi Suzuki, a music critic in Tokyo.

Over coffee in Shibuya, Samuragochi told Niigaki he’d been hired to compose the score for a small film about an aids patient who faces discrimination, and he needed help with the orchestration. For composers, this was a common request, as breaking down a piece into parts for each instrument can be painstaking work. Samuragochi handed him a tape of his own music, to give Niigaki a sense of his style. It featured Tibetan monks chanting over a rhythm track. “It was rudimentary, to be kind,” Niigaki remembered.

Samuragochi was no Mozart, but he had managed to get the soundtrack job, which was more than Niigaki had ever done. Plus, Niigaki had always had difficulty saying no. He took the job.

Ever since Japan began to open its ports to the outside world in 1868, the country has embraced Western classical music. At first, conductors and musicians strived to copy European performance as faithfully as possible. Western classical music receded in the nationalist fervor of World War II, then returned in the post-war years. But by then, tastemakers had moved on from Romantic music and were deep into the vertiginous experimentation of composers like Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and György Ligeti. Japan produced its maestros: Toru Takemitsu, best known for scoring films by Akira Kurosawa, borrowed from both European and Japanese traditions, while Ozawa became one of the world’s top conductors. But the country never had a great Romantic composer. There was no Japanese Beethoven. Samuragochi made no secret of his ambition. He may have lacked formal training, but he aspired to nothing less than the resurrection of Romantic tonal music.

Samuragochi gave Niigaki a demo tape as guidance for the film score. It turned out orchestration was only part of the job. Some of the tracks, recorded at home on Samuragochi’s synthesizer, were complete; others were sketches that Niigaki would have to rework entirely. Two months later, Niigaki sent the finished piece back to Samuragochi. “He was very, very pleased,” Niigaki said.

At the end of the recording process, Samuragochi told Niigaki that, unfortunately, he would not be credited for the score. Niigaki was disappointed, but he deferred to Samuragochi. It wasn’t the first time a composer had hogged credit for the work of an underling, and Niigaki was grateful for the chance to write for an orchestra.

Six months later, the phone rang. Samuragochi had landed another job, the soundtrack for a video game in the Resident Evil series, and he needed Niigaki’s help. The catch: They had only ten days to complete it. But there was a determination—in retrospect, a desperation—in Samuragochi’s voice, and a presumption of inevitability Samuragochi had already lined everything up: He’d even persuaded the producers at the gaming giant Capcom to spring for an orchestra. Now he needed Niigaki. “It wasn’t a question of maybe,” Niigaki recalled.

If video games seem like a strange outlet for an aspiring composer, you didn’t grow up in Japan. Some of the most popular Japanese music of the last few decades originated in video games and anime cartoons. The soundtracks to several Final Fantasy games have reached the top 10 on the Japanese charts. In the 1980s, boys flocked to concert halls to hear orchestras perform music from the game Dragon Quest. Legend has it their thumbs danced over invisible controllers as they listened.

Niigaki frantically threw together dozens of short pieces for the game, soliciting help from composer friends to complete the project on time. Samuragochi once brought Niigaki to a meeting with Capcom producers and introduced Niigaki as his assistant. Whenever the Capcom producers had a technical question about the music, Samuragochi would defer to Niigaki. Again, Samuragochi received full credit for the score.

By the time Samuragochi called back in early 1999, Niigaki knew the routine. “When he calls, everything’s already ordered and assigned, deadline and everything,” Niigaki said. “There’s no way out.” Niigaki’s friends described him as well-meaning but submissive, accommodating to the point of spinelessness. “If somebody is pushy, he’s going to be the first to back down,” said Suzuki. “Samuragochi is not a man he could say no to.”

The new project was their most ambitious yet. Capcom had hired Samuragochi to compose 20 minutes of music for Onimusha, a role-playing game for PlayStation 2, and he had arranged for a 205-piece orchestra to perform at the press conference announcing the game—a rare splurge for a video-game soundtrack. Samuragochi’s creative contribution was minimal, according to Niigaki: He recorded an eight-bar phrase on his synthesizer, which would become the game’s fanfare-like battle theme, and a passage featuring bamboo flute and drums.

While they were working on Onimusha, Samuragochi told Niigaki that he was having hearing problems. “I remember telling him I was so sorry,” Niigaki said. But they continued to converse normally, as though Samuragochi could hear him perfectly well. According to Niigaki, Samuragochi soon told him that he was doubling down on deafness: From then on, he would pretend that he couldn’t hear anything at all. “The reason is clear,” Niigaki said, looking back: With the Onimusha press conference, Samuragochi was coming out as a public figure, but he still couldn’t write music. If he pretended to be deaf, he could avoid answering questions.

But the orchestra posed a problem. A conductor often needs to confer with the composer of a new piece of music, so Samuragochi recommended that Capcom hire Niigaki to lead the orchestra. During rehearsals, when a question arose, Niigaki would pretend to consult Samuragochi. “I would go over to him and point to the score so he could nod,” Niigaki said.

Niigaki was deeply uncomfortable abetting Samuragochi’s lie. But he was thrilled to be conducting his own music—“I had the best seat,” he said—and the concert at the press conference drew praise. “I never expect to experience anything that magnificent again in my life,” Niigaki said.

As the release date of the Onimusha soundtrack approached, Samuragochi asked Niigaki if he, as conductor, would be willing to write a short essay for the CD liner notes. “Praise me the way you wish your own music would be praised,” Samuragochi told him. Niigaki wrote a paragraph describing the music in kind but plain terms. He sent the draft to Samuragochi, who asked if he could make some modifications.

When the liner notes finally appeared in print, Niigaki saw that Samuragochi had made more than a few changes. The title now read: “Witness a Miracle.” The development of the theme in the second section was “an act of God,” the climax in the third movement “a work of genius.” The author of the essay, “Niigaki,” then recounted watching Samuragochi compose the piece in a fit of creative madness, “almost like he was possessed.”

When Niigaki saw the essay printed under his name, he was “profoundly embarrassed,” he told me. “My face turned red.” Niigaki was now on the record as part of the lie.

Still, that wasn’t what flustered Niigaki most. The liner notes contained an even more disturbing passage: “Mamoru Samuragochi is currently working on his first symphony.”

If Samuragochi was not in fact deaf, he certainly committed to the act. He turned off the audio function on his phone, communicating only by text and email. He learned sign language, and used an interpreter during interviews and public appearances. He took to wearing sunglasses, which he claimed helped ease his tinnitus.

After Onimusha, Niigaki assumed that the truth would come out at any moment. “All the evidence was there for anyone who wanted to look,” he said. Niigaki told only one person, his friend Suzuki, and focused on the positive. “I saw it as a chance to test my abilities,” he said. It also gave him access to a mass audience, which few living composers ever get. Niigaki was by now a fixture of Tokyo’s contemporary music scene, but his pieces targeted the in-crowd. Writing for Samuragochi—writing as Samuragochi—gave him a new identity as a composer, and unlocked a fresh musical vocabulary.

When Samuragochi asked Niigaki to compose a 70-minute symphony, Niigaki was stunned. “I didn’t think it was possible,” he said. The longest piece Niigaki had ever composed was 20 minutes, and Samuragochi wanted the symphony within a year. Niigaki also faced a new conundrum: This wasn’t another commercial gig for an audience of gamers. He would now be creating music for the classical world. He would be deceiving his own.

Samuragochi communicated his vision to Niigaki on a single sheet of white paper covered edge-to-edge with scribblings: exhortations followed by multiple exclamation points, diagrams tracing dynamics, and flowery descriptions of sound. “Only compose music the value of which will last into the future!” he wrote at the top. He mapped out the symphony’s four themes, which he called “Prayer,” “Ascension,” “Suffering,” and “Chaos.” The piece should begin with a Gregorian chant, “which is the origin of Western music,” and then trace its evolution from the polyphony of the Middle Ages to Bach. The “Prayer” section should sound like William Byrd’s “Missa” and Victoria’s “Requiem.” “All the sadness has to be expressed in the ‘Prayer’ section,” he wrote. “Suffering” should recall the style of Mozart’s “Requiem” or Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana.” Samuragochi added a note at the end that fairly summed up his philosophy: “There’s no rule you cannot break to achieve a better result.”

Niigaki didn’t think much of Samuragochi’s guidelines. “That’s not how you make music,” he told me. In his autobiography, Samuragochi wrote: “Music, if it’s meant to support people who are suffering, can only be created by someone who has suffered more than anybody else.” But for Niigaki, composing the symphony wasn’t a matter of digging into his soul. It was about using a set of musical tools, developed over centuries, to conjure those feelings. The experience of suffering itself, he said, is “completely unnecessary.”

In Niigaki’s telling, he simply built on the “Samuragochi sound” he’d developed during their previous projects: dark, melodic, bombastic. While Niigaki was busy composing, Samuragochi was emailing Kurimura, his manager, narrating his daily creative struggle. In retrospect, Kurimura said, it reminds him of A Beautiful Mind: “I think he really thought he was composing.”

When the symphony finally came out, critics would note its similarities to Mahler, Bruckner, and other late-Romantic heavies. The final section in particular, they said, was an obvious homage to—or a rip-off of—Mahler’s Third Symphony. It amused Niigaki to hear people make this comparison. “That’s not Mahler,” he told me. It’s a reference to the theme song of “Space Battleship Yamato,” a classic anime series from 1974. It was an important allusion, Niigaki argued, as it reflected his catholic, music-is-music philosophy of composition. Samuragochi always insisted that his music be gloomier. “That was his request, that it sound tortured,” Niigaki said. The fact that his masterpiece contains a blatant anime reference would probably sail over his head: “I don’t think he’d get it.” Though Niigaki would never mock Samuragochi to his face, he was doing it through the music.

Niigaki finished the symphony in 2003 and tried to forget about it. Kurimura remembers Samuragochi saying the piece “would not be played during my lifetime.” “It’s not going to make any money,” Samuragochi told him, “but I have to try it.” In the meantime, Samuragochi commissioned other, smaller pieces—string quartets, piano sonatas—which Niigaki continued to deliver. But the symphony haunted him. He was torn between wanting it released and knowing how painful it would be to see someone else take credit for a year’s labor. It was like giving one’s child up for adoption, he said. He also knew that once the symphony went public, their lie could only last so long.

Samuragochi proved to be as much a virtuoso at marketing as Niigaki was at composing. While Niigaki made music, Samuragochi wrote and published his autobiography, pitched his story to TV networks, and tried to drum up interest in the finished symphony. His salesmanship revolved around the theme of suffering—a ripe subject in Japan, where disabled people are treated with a certain guilty deference; where survivors of the bombing in Hiroshima, known as hibakusha, enjoy saintlike status; where natural disasters regularly ravage the country’s infrastructure. Samuragochi built up his suffering bona fides whenever possible, visiting community centers for handicapped children, taking photographs, and displaying them in his living room for the benefit of journalists. Between his apparent deafness, his background as a child of Hiroshima victims, and the endorsements of authoritative voices like Hiroyuki Itsuki and Time magazine, no one dared question the Samuragochi myth.

In 2008, Samuragochi contacted Niigaki with some good news: The Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra had selected his opus to be performed at a G-8 ceremony commemorating the anniversary of the blast. The symphony had originally been called “Celebration of Today,” but Samuragochi had renamed it “Hiroshima,” which likely contributed to its selection. (Composers have long known the marketing power of tragedy: Krzysztof Penderecki changed the title of his ear-piercing “ 8'37'' ” to “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima.”) Niigaki felt only dread: “That which must not happen had happened,” he told me. “This ghost that I’d cast into the shadows had returned.”

Word of the deaf genius second-generation atomic bomb victim composer eventually reached Nippon Columbia, which signed on to record the “Hiroshima” symphony. It was then that Niigaki tried to sabotage Samuragochi for the first time. He dispatched his friend Suzuki to tell a producer at the record label that Samuragochi had a collaborator. “The truth needed to be shared,” Niigaki told me. But nothing happened. Two years later, Nippon Columbia received another tip, this time from a former Capcom employee, who said that Samuragochi used an assistant. He, too, was ignored.

The recording sessions in April 2011 were emotional. A month earlier, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake off the east coast of Japan generated a tsunami that killed more than 15,000 people, and destroyed the nuclear reactor in Fukushima. The symphony recorded over those days would become an anthem and a source of hope for the victims.

Despite his reservations, Niigaki continued to compose, and Samuragochi ramped up the PR. One day in 2008, Samuragochi saw a young girl on TV named Miku Okubo, who played piano and violin despite having only one arm. He wrote her a letter and decided to start composing for her. With his backing, Okubo became a minor celebrity, featured on TV and playing regular gigs at concert halls, and the subject of a full-length book. Samuragochi described their relationship as that of “master and apprentice,” and Okubo’s family warmed to him. “He seemed like a kind, delicate man,” her father told reporters later. (The Okubo family declined to be interviewed for this article.) By pure coincidence, the Okubos knew Niigaki separately: He had been accompanying their daughter on piano during violin performances since she was four. But they had no idea that Niigaki was actually writing the music Samuragochi gave her.

In 2012, after the “Hiroshima” symphony became a surprise hit, Samuragochi told Niigaki that the national network NHK would be shooting a documentary about him. Samuragochi was to compose a new piece for the victims of the tsunami in northern Japan, and the filmmakers would document his creative process. Samuragochi imposed one ground rule: He would not let them film him writing music. “The process is sacred,” he told the director.

As usual, Samuragochi gave Niigaki a tight deadline—he had two months to compose a ten-minute “Requiem for Piano.” Complicating things further, Niigaki would have to deliver the piece while the documentary was being filmed. Since Samuragochi would have a camera crew trailing him 24/7, he asked Niigaki to send the sheet music to his house by courier using a fake name. He reminded Niigaki to use generic, unidentifiable notations and to include blank sheets of music paper, for the “before” shots. Samuragochi wrote in a text message: “It’s an important piece that is going to be played at the end of the NHK special, showing that the genius composer went through hell to compose a song for the victims.”

Meanwhile, Samuragochi was pretending to go through hell. During the filming, he “met” a young girl named Minami—she was pre-screened by the producers—whose mother died in the tsunami, and dedicated the requiem to her. For inspiration, he sat alone on the beach where the girl’s mother disappeared, “so that the spirits of the victims come down to him,” according to the film’s narrator. Later, back at his house, he writhed in bed, groaned from the supposed pain of his tinnitus, swallowed dozens of white pills, and crawled around on the floor, apparently too weak to stand. Finally, Samuragochi stumbled into the living room. “It’s finished,” he said. He then disappeared into his study. Twelve hours later, he emerged with the complete score. The camera lingered over the perfectly shaped notes.

The documentary aired in March 2013 and reached millions of viewers. When Niigaki saw it, he was dismayed. He picked up a copy of Samuragochi’s autobiography, just reissued in paperback, and discovered episodes from his own musical training, retold as if they were Samuragochi’s. “It read as farce,” he told me. Enough was enough. “It’s dangerous to keep doing what we’re doing,” Niigaki wrote in a text message to Samuragochi. “I think it would be smart to stop after the current tour is over.” Samuragochi responded immediately, asking to meet. The next day, Niigaki went to Samuragochi’s house in Yokohama. They sat down, and Samuragochi handed Niigaki a letter. “This is from my wife,” he said. In the letter, she begged Niigaki not to reveal the secret, suggesting that if he did, she and Samuragochi would kill themselves. Samuragochi then laid his head at Niigaki’s feet, begging him to continue. When Niigaki still hesitated, Samuragochi pressed an envelope with 1 million yen into his hand. This envelope brought the amount of money Samuragochi had paid Niigaki—for more than 20 pieces over 18 years—to 7 million yen, or about $60,000. Niigaki relented. He would continue to compose.

In October 2013, Niigaki went to a bookstore and picked up the newest issue of the literary magazine Shincho 45, which featured an article titled, “ ‘Totally Deaf Genius Composer’ Mamoru Samuragochi—Is He Real?” In it, the music critic Takeo Noguchi questioned the entire Samuragochi spectacle, from his tortured creative process to his deafness. Noguchi didn’t have any inside sources: He’d simply listened to the music, watched the TV programs, read the autobiography, and concluded that Samuragochi was a con artist.

“The word is out,” Niigaki told Samuragochi and suggested once again that they disband. But the article didn’t garner much attention. Samuragochi, who was just beginning to enjoy his long-sought fame, dismissed Niigaki’s concerns.

Tensions were also escalating between Samuragochi and the Okubo family. Okubo had declined to participate in a concert for the NHK documentary, enraging Samuragochi. After that, he kept making new, increasingly strange demands. In the run-up to a concert in the fall of 2013, Samuragochi told Okubo to walk onstage with her prosthetic arm detached, then attach it before playing. Okubo refused. If she was serious about violin, he said, she had to quit her school’s ping-pong club. “He’s very good at reading people’s minds,” Okubo’s father told reporters later. “He knows how to exploit your weak points, and how to make you feel good.” In October, Samuragochi sent the 13-year-old Okubo an email delivering an ultimatum: Either quit ping-pong and devote her life to a career supported by “Mamoru-san”; or give up her dream of becoming a professional violinist. “Make your choice. It’s your life,” he wrote. Okubo replied that she would continue studying violin without his help.

Niigaki, meanwhile, was avoiding Samuragochi. Yes, he’d agreed to keep up their collaboration at Samuragochi’s pleading, but now he hoped silence would make him go away. Samuragochi would not be ignored. In a series of increasingly panicked emails, he begged Niigaki for a meeting. “Please give me five minutes at our house in Yokohama.” “I’m really shocked that you’re not responding.” “You obviously changed your phone number.” He threatened to show up at Niigaki’s office at school. “This is my final suggestion,” Samuragochi wrote on December 8. “Before [my wife and I] commit suicide, I’m going to write a letter telling the truth about our 18-year collaboration.”

Niigaki started getting emails from their mutual friends, who he suspected were reaching out on Samuragochi’s behalf. One of them was from Okubo’s mother, asking him to return some sheet music from a recent recital in which he’d accompanied her daughter. When he didn’t reply, she sent a follow-up, mentioning off-hand that Okubo had quit music school. Startled, Niigaki replied to ask why, and Okubo’s mother explained that they’d had a falling out with Samuragochi.

This, Niigaki later said, was the moment he decided to quit for good. He’d always reassured himself that his collaboration with Samuragochi was a victimless crime. They were lying, but they were making quality music that people enjoyed. Now he understood that Samuragochi was hurting people, and Niigaki was enabling him. “If I stayed silent now, I’d stay silent forever,” Niigaki told me. He emailed Okubo’s mother back, suggesting they talk
in person.

They met at a coffee shop near the Okubos’ house, and Niigaki told the story of his relationship with Samuragochi. To prove it, he pulled from his briefcase an order sheet Samuragochi had given him, requesting a short piano piece. “They were shocked, of course,” he said. But it wasn’t clear how they wanted to handle this information until a few weeks later, when the father called Niigaki and said, “There’s someone we’d like you to meet.”

Every country has its own theater of apology, but Japan has elevated the form to an art. Company executives routinely apologize to the public for everything from product recalls to a bad fiscal year. In April 2014, a Japanese stem cell researcher wiped away tears as she apologized to a roomful of journalists after being accused of plagiarizing and fabricating data in two high-profile papers published in the journal Nature. (Her supervisor hanged himself.) A Japanese politician’s apology for misusing public money went viral in July after he
cried hysterically during a three-hour press conference.

On February 6, 2014, Niigaki stepped in front of a thicket of microphones at the Hotel New Otani in Tokyo. He was visibly, almost comically nervous, staring down at his prepared statement as more than a hundred journalists waited to take down his words. This hadn’t been his idea. Niigaki would have preferred the slow fade—tell people that Samuragochi’s health had declined and he could no longer compose. “We’d gotten there through fiction, I thought maybe we could get out through fiction,” Niigaki told me. But when the Okubo family introduced him to Norio Koyama, a journalist for the tabloid newspaper Weekly Bunshun, and Koyama pushed Niigaki to go public, Niigaki found himself once again unable to say no.

Now here was Niigaki, sweating in his gray suit. “Ever since I met Mamoru Samuragochi eighteen years ago, I’ve been composing music for him,” Niigaki began, camera flashes popping as he spoke. “Even though I knew he was lying to the world, I agreed to compose for him, so I too am a co-criminal.” The press conference followed the typical script: confession, self-flagellation, submission to judgment. Niigaki’s complex reasons for revealing the lie were boiled down to the media-friendly explanation that the figure skater Daisuke Takahashi had selected the “Sonatina for Violin” for his performance at the Sochi Olympics, and Niigaki didn’t want him to be hurt by the deception. The presser concluded with a video of Okubo playing the violin while Niigaki accompanied her on piano—a performance organized by Koyama two days earlier—suggesting that the two real musicians were now out from under Samuragochi’s malevolent sway.

The Japanese media flayed Samuragochi with the same gusto with which they had built him up. Koyama’s Weekly Bunshun investigation led the coverage with the blaring headline, “Totally Deaf Composer Was a Con Man; Ghostwriter Apologizes and Reveals His Real Name.” The paper described Samuragochi’s past attempts at fame, including a small role in a gangster movie, and old acquaintances came forward to bash him. “The only thing he put his heart into was deceiving people,” said Mondo Okura, a producer who worked with him in his rock band days. Samuragochi’s mother-in-law compared him to the cult leader who orchestrated the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.

The companies that abetted the lie hastened to distance themselves from Samuragochi. Nippon Columbia issued a statement saying it was “appalled and deeply indignant”—even though they’d twice received warnings about Samuragochi—and would no longer sell his CDs. Capcom also apologized and claimed ignorance, though Weekly Bunshun quoted a source saying that it was an open secret within the company that Samuragochi could hear. NHK aired a segment apologizing for failing to catch Samuragochi’s lie, and the director of the NHK documentary went into hiding. A nationwide tour was truncated, and an upcoming performance in New York City was canceled Niigaki resigned from Toho Gakuen, but otherwise he was enjoying his new life in the open. His piano performances drew bigger crowds than ever. He recorded an album with the free jazz musician Ryuichi Yoshida. He went on television to talk about the Samuragochi saga and to plug his own work. One program showed him visiting the home of the girl whose mother had died in the tsunami, to apologize for what he and Samuragochi had done. Her grandmother bid him farewell in front of the cameras: “I wish you the best. Don’t hide, be proud.”

At the end of 2014, some of Japan’s year-in-review TV shows featured Niigaki riffing on piano and, in one case, jamming on guitar with a popular metal band. Niigaki was playing the fame game, and playing it well.

A few weeks after Niigaki’s press conference, Samuragochi hosted his own. He appeared transformed—clean shaven, hair cut short, trademark sunglasses gone—and apologized to his listeners, his publisher, NHK, Nippon Columbia, his tour organizers, the figure skater Takahashi, and the girl who lost her mother in the tsunami. (He did not include Okubo.) Then he vanished. He changed his email address and phone number and cut off everyone but a small handful of trusted friends. Reporters would congregate in the lobby of his apartment building in Yokohama, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. A furtive photo of Samuragochi taken on the subway went viral. Last July, I visited his building and pushed the buzzer. No one answered.

So I was surprised when, in January, he agreed to an interview—his first with international media since the press conference. He met me and my translator, David, at the door of his flat, bowing and greeting us by name. We walked into his dining room, a documentary crew trailing behind. (He would speak to me only on condition that it be filmed.) A row of sunglasses were lined up on the kitchen counter. Samuragochi’s hair had grown back to near-shoulder length, a few strands of gray among the black, and his beard had returned. He asked permission to dim the lights—his eyes are sensitive, he said—and his wife, Kaori, brought coffee. “Today,” he said, “for the first time, I’d like to present my side of the story.”

The last year had been painful, he said. “Eighty percent of my waking hours are spent in genuflection, regret, and apology.” He rarely goes outside, passing all his time in the small apartment with his wife and his cat, Minokichi, named after a bug character from Onimusha. He doesn’t watch television, but he seemed well aware of the judgment of the outside world.

Samuragochi did not dispute individual facts so much as the entire media narrative. Niigaki was the true genius, the story now went, cruelly exploited by Samuragochi, a man so callous and manipulative that he faked a disability.

This was all wrong, Samuragochi explained. Yes, he had hired Niigaki to help write his music, but Niigaki wasn’t being exploited. He was simply working for pay. It was a collaboration, Samuragochi said, and the music originated in his head; Niigaki was merely an “exceptional technician.” He insisted that over the years, he had provided Niigaki with numerous tapes recorded on his synthesizer to supplement the instructional diagrams. I asked Samuragochi if he could play me any of these tapes. Unfortunately, he said, he had destroyed them, since they were evidence of the illicit partnership. Then what about the instruments he’d used to record the tapes? He said he had thrown away his keyboards when he moved into the new apartment three years ago. “At this point,” he said, “all I can do is ask you to believe.”

Samuragochi also insisted that, although he had recovered some hearing in recent years, he was still deaf, at least partially. He pulled out a printout of the results of a hearing exam and pointed to one line: “Right ear, 40 decibels. Left ear, 60 decibels.” (A typical conversation in a quiet room is roughly 60 decibels.) I asked what our voices sounded like at that moment. As I spoke, he trained his eyes on Kaori, who listened to David’s interpretation and translated the question into Japanese sign language. “Something like this”—Samuragochi rapped his knuckles on the table—“I can hear,” he said. His hearing trouble was important, he said: The only reason the Japanese media painted him as a villain was Niigaki’s assertion that he could actually hear, and was therefore profiting off the disabled.

The real liar, said Samuragochi, was Niigaki. “It pains me,” he said. “I’d rather believe it’s not him saying these things, but that it’s someone else manipulating him.” Samuragochi blamed “the scurrilous Mr. Koyama” for orchestrating his downfall and for pressuring Niigaki to go along with it. He also suggested that Niigaki received generous compensation. “I understand he’s done very well off this incident,” he said. Niigaki is claiming full ownership of only two works, the “Sonatina” and the “Requiem.” But here Samuragochi sees yet another ploy, since these two pieces were explicitly composed for a disabled person and the victim of a natural disaster, respectively. “If I discard my co-authorship of those two, then I become this terrible man who exploits the suffering of others,” he said.

Samuragochi had a point. Public favor had shifted unanimously to Niigaki, even though Niigaki had helped create the lie. Niigaki had needed Samuragochi as much as Samuragochi needed Niigaki. Niigaki himself acknowledged this dependency, saying he was “grateful” to Samuragochi for the opportunities he provided. And Samuragochi had indeed contributed to the music, at least a little.

There was even evidence that he wanted to take their art in a new direction. At one point, he pulled out an essay he had written, titled “Rationality vs. Irrationality,” that was the basis for their still-unfinished Symphony No. 2. It described the music in detail, from the long, Cage-like silence at the beginning—a “conductor’s solo”—to the ratios of homophony and polyphony in different sections. He called this symphony the “antithesis” to Symphony No. 1, difficult where the latter had been easily grasped. The producers at Columbia thought it would be a tough sell, he said: “They wanted us to rework it to make it more like the successful ‘Hiroshima.’ We thought, Let’s finish it, but put it away until the times catch up.”

The irony is that Samuragochi didn’t have to lie. His story was compelling without embellishment. He was the child of Hiroshima survivors; he did have hearing problems; his brother did die young. If he and Niigaki had simply billed themselves as a team, they might have still shared fortune and fame. Instead, Samuragochi cultivated the image of a solitary genius. “I understood that people needed a story,” he told me. “There was this Beethoven idea, some larger-than-life figure, that I think the world wanted from me.” And it was that same need for a single figure—incarnated now in Niigaki—that brought him down.

When we spoke, Samuragochi could not resist overplaying his hand. He minimized Niigaki’s role to the point of insult. After I spent an hour trying to persuade him to reproduce something that he had composed, he paused dramatically, then broke out into song—an atonal moan of a melody, as if he were trying to sound as pathetic as possible. At another point, following a long discussion of his hearing, he lost his temper and yelled, “No!”—then asked innocently, “Was I shouting? I couldn’t hear.” He said he despised the Beethoven comparison: “The first time I heard that, I said, ‘Really? Isn’t this hyperbolic?’ ” But his former manager, Kurimura, said Samuragochi explicitly asked him to publicize the idea that he was a modern Beethoven.

I thought back to what Kurimura had said: He seemed to really think he was composing. It was like he had the temperament of an artist, but lacked the tools to actually create art. The closest he came to a masterpiece was the performance itself: the mass duping of a nation that exposed its own dreams and vulnerabilities.

I asked Samuragochi if he would ever compose again. “I think anything I released would be savaged,” he said. Then he thought for a minute. “This may be a sort of strange premise,” he began. “You could even call it a dangerous conception.” He was speaking slowly, pausing between each word. “Perhaps in some way there’s a benefit,” he said, “that this bizarre episode has brought some recognition to this kind of music.” His dream had been to express his love for Romantic music, and to make the world love it with him. At that, he had succeeded.

The lie, far from dooming their music to oblivion, may actually guarantee its survival. The sensational backstory has not deflated interest; it has become a selling point. When the Estonia National Symphony Orchestra announced that its final concert of the 2015 season will feature the “Hiroshima” symphony, the promotional materials described the Samuragochi saga with breathless, postmodern delight: Samuragochi “performed the role of a deaf genius wonderfully,” while Niigaki “was regarded as a national hero.” The lineup reads simply: Richard Strauss. Sergey Prokofiev. Mamoru Samuragochi/Takashi Niigaki. a

Fear of a Radical Pope

The conservative struggle for the future (and past) of the Catholic church

BY ELIZABETH BRUENIG | MARCH/APRIL

In 2013, I traveled to Cambridge, England, to study for a master’s degree in Christian theology. I had been active in church as a teenager, but it was not until college that I began to feel a spiritual calling twisting in my heart. I suspected that my cause would be bound up with that of Christ’s beloved poor; I had always wanted to understand why people even in wealthy countries are left impoverished, and how, as a Christian, I should reflect theologically on that predicament. But when I arrived in Cambridge, at 22 years old, my notion of how to achieve that was still hazy and incomplete. I found myself adrift in England, where both the people and the surroundings were cooler than my native home in Texas. One fall morning before my first term began, I took a walk around the labyrinthine courtyards and moss-covered edifices of Jesus College. I soon realized that I had lost my way, both in the literal sense of a stranger wandering a new city, but also in a subtler one, as a young person trying to find herself as a student and spiritual aspirant.

Jesus College is built on the site of a twelfth-century nunnery. The remains of the original abbey include the refectory and chapel, a stark and steep gothic church of graying stone. Inside, the chapel was dim and cavernous, with faded frescoes giving a vague suggestion of the sidelong eyes and swanlike necks of the high Middle Ages. As I looked around, a priest emerged from the incense smoke enveloping the altar. He was a slightly nervous man of average height and build, with elfin features and an unparalleled keenness.

“Are you lost?” he asked.

Father John Hughes became my degree supervisor, teacher, spiritual guide, and friend. I loved him almost instantly, in the uncritical and voracious way one is allowed to love a mentor. He possessed a deep wealth of knowledge about everything I cared about: Saint Augustine, political theory, private property, wealth, and social justice. John called himself a Christian socialist, the first I had ever met, and an appellation to which I aspired. A young priest, he asked to be referred to by his first name. I forgo his honorific only in memory. In his presence, I called him Father.

The study of theology demands painstaking work backward through a winding tangle of older thoughts. To do so meaningfully requires a guide, and John proved to be a particularly capable one. Faithful living for Catholics, such as myself, depends on engagement with the Church’s direction on life issues. This process is not merely an academic one, but deeply spiritual. I wanted to know, for example, what Augustine thought of private property because I feel called to the cause of the poor; John’s mentorship on the subject was for me more than an exercise in personal enrichment. He was building within me the love necessary to follow through on my spiritual calling.

The world’s most renowned Christian theological guide is, of course, the Pope. He is, in a sense, a steward of the Church’s religious past, a clerical leader who must mediate the institution’s traditions as a public figure and symbol, and in his writings and pronouncements, which bear a great deal more authority among the Catholic faithful than do papal visits or interviews. The Church views herself in terms of apostolic succession and papal primacy—terms that describe a continuous transmission of authority that can be traced to the original apostles of Christ. The Pope has a special relationship to the past, being the recipient of so much carefully preserved thought and practice. Each Pope, therefore, must make use of the richness of Church tradition, while also ministering effectively to a world of ever-evolving challenges and realities.

Pope Francis ascended to the papacy two years ago, becoming Catholicism’s first leader from South America. A curious narrative soon emerged with regards to his approach to the past and the traditions of the Church among cultural, political, and religious conservatives in the United States. He has made no substantial changes to Catholic doctrine, and yet has nonetheless earned opprobrium worthy of extreme tampering. It seems rather that Francis inspires uncomfortable feelings, and affronts particular dispositions rather than particular doctrines. A key moment for testing this hypothesis is on the horizon: This summer Francis is expected to publish an encyclical—an authoritative papal document indicating an issue’s pressing priority—on the environment. It will reportedly address matters of environmental stewardship and climate change. (No specifics of the document have been issued yet.) As its release draws near, American conservatives have begun protesting supposedly vast reforms that have not happened. Steve Moore, chief economist at The Heritage Foundation, has declared Francis an adherent of a “modern pagan green religion”; Maureen Mullarkey, a writer for the religious journal First Things, charged the Pope with “bending theology to premature, intemperate policy endorsements.” No one but Pope Francis and his closest advisers know what is contained within the encyclical. Conservatives troubled by the very suggestion of a theological approach to climate change have been forced to expose more id than argument, dragging in such temporal terms as modern and premature. Pope Francis will travel to Washington, D.C. in September to address Congress, a visit already hotly anticipated. To understand the responses of conservative Catholic politicians like Representatives Paul Ryan and Peter King to papal pronouncements on inequality and climate change requires untangling the Church’s other trinity: of the Pope, the past, and the right wing.

Conservatives have been wary of Francis since his ascension in March 2013. On the day he was named Pope, the far-right Catholic blog Rorate Caæli called Francis “a sworn enemy of the traditional Mass.” In the following summer, legendarily plainspoken Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput said that the right wing of the Church “generally have not been really happy” with Francis’s papacy. Francis had that week made his famous quip, “Who am I to judge?” when asked about homosexuality. He was referring specifically to gay people who follow Church teaching and seek a celibate life within the Church, and thus his statement was entirely in keeping with Catholic doctrine. The trouble seemed to stem largely from the fact that he had used the modern parlance gay. In May 2014, conservative Catholic writer Michael Brendan Dougherty published a provocative op-ed in The Week arguing that “Catholics must learn to resist their Popes—even Pope Francis.” Dougherty suggested that the legitimacy of papal teaching—and in a sense, the principle of papal infallibility—was subject to review by the greater body of Catholic faithful. The duty of the believer, he concluded, “is not just to rebuke and correct those in authority . . . but to throw rotting cabbage at them, or make them miserable.”

There have always been grumblings about popes, but the differences in opinion between Francis and the movement collectively known as the “American right” appear especially numerous, and unusually bitter. In October 2014, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who is Catholic, wrote that in matters of marriage and family life, “[Francis] may be preserved from error only if the Church itself resists him.” The “error” he referred to was Francis’s leadership at the Synod on the Family, held in Rome in October. The Pope’s hand-picked prelates had drafted a working document for the synod, which contained early, and mildly positive, language regarding homosexual orientation and the possibility of communion for the divorced. “Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community,” the document originally read, adding, “For some [divorced and remarried persons], partaking of the sacraments might occur were it preceded by a penitential path.”

The final report issued from the synod was substantially revised, and most of this language was removed. Communion remains generally unavailable to the divorced and remarried, and Church attitudes toward homosexuality continue to be negative. Conservatives were nonetheless rattled by Francis’s willingness to flexibly address what appear to be “modern problems”: gay people in the Church and the ever-growing number of divorced and remarried persons. At the end of his column, Douthat wondered, with some anxiety, if Francis might “be stacking the next synod’s ranks with supporters of a sweeping change” that would leave traditionalists unfairly on the wrong side of history.

Conservatism gives up its nature with its name. at its core, conservatism represents a commitment, however often flouted, to the conservation of some element of the past. Contemporary American political conservatism—especially of the kind marketed as “neoconservatism”—usually maintains a fixation on markets and freedom from nosy states while simultaneously preferring a close personal regulation of one’s behaviors. Irving Kristol, an influential neoconservative, wrote in his 1976 essay “What Is a Neoconservative?” that conservatives should be “respectful of traditional values and institutions” as a central tenet of their politics and practice. Kristol believed that obligation to “the sovereignty of traditional values” kept people moored to the past in a way that prevented the nihilism that leads to authoritarianism and anomie. The freedom of markets and appropriate weakness
of the state depend on citizens preferring traditional modes of living to the heady vertigo of progressivism. Like many neoconservative luminaries, Kristol was Jewish; but, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the success of early neoconservatism arose largely from the intellectualization of white working-class cultural sentiment. Neoconservatism, though preceding the rise of the “Christian right,” bore the seeds of that movement from its inception.

Conservatives describe themselves in terms of attachment to the past. In a 2014 National Affairs article titled “The Conservative Governing Disposition,” Philip Wallach and Justus Myers addressed a question they felt had been neglected during the Republican Party’s previous two presidential defeats: “What is conservatism?” Conservatism, they argued, is more a disposition than a set of political goals, one for which “social practices, habits, and institutions embody the accumulated wisdom of trial-and-error experience.” This thinking detaches conservatism from the realm of policy, and returns it to the core of conservative commitments, where they believe it should be. At the center of the conservative disposition, Wallach and Myers locate a belief that explains why conservatives “doubt the ability of fallible people to overhaul [the] evolved social order according to their vision of how it should be.” The conservative disposition springs from the conviction that there is something transcendently meaningful about the past. “Conservatism has the most to offer societies,” Wallach and Myers wrote, “that have much worth conserving yet run the risk of dissipating their inheritance through wrong-headed, sweeping changes.” What obtains today, in the conservative mind, does so because it was found worthy in the past, and humility should prevent us from meddling too much with received wisdom.

This treatment of the past unites religious and political conservatives. Indeed, the Catholic Church has its own version of the conflict between conservatism and progressivism that one finds in American politics. Between 1962 and 1965, the Vatican held the Second Vatican Council at Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It was the twenty-first ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, a meeting of Catholic leaders and theologians first convened by Roman emperors in the early years of the Church, and now by Pope John XXIII, to settle the place of the Catholic Church in the modern world. The ramifications of Vatican II, as it is known, still command the contours of contemporary Catholicism.

Vatican II addressed matters of liturgy: the language used in Mass (vernacular versus Latin), ecclesiology, and the place of Catholic teaching in the modern world. The intention of “modernizing” Catholic expression and teaching, which was brought up in the most incremental terms, was enough to alienate conservative Catholics. Church historian and professor Massimo Faggioli pointed out in his 2012 book Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning, that traditionalist Catholics “have grown much more vocal in denouncing the council as synonymous with disaster and chaos in the Church. Their negative view of the results of the liturgical reform could be applied uniformly to all of the major developments of Vatican II (ecclesiology, ecumenism, religious freedom, and the Church and the modern world) without altering their level of outrage.” Faggioli also observes the connection between “the main accusers of Vatican II as a ‘rupture’ with the tradition of the Church,” and those who “questioned the very legitimacy of Vatican II as a council in the tradition of the Church, its previous councils, and papal magisterium.” Traditionalists were offended not only by the outcome of Vatican II’s reforms, but by the idea of modernization itself, as though such a thing could be truly avoided.

Francis was not present at Vatican II. But suspicion of a Catholic gesture toward modernity—and thus the world—colors the attitudes of conservative Catholics toward him, and helps explain the rancor with which his minimalist approach to change has been received. The spirit of the council also affected the socio-political standing of the Church in Latin America in a way that could not help but influence Francis. Liberation theology, for example, was fruit of the same vine as Vatican II, despite official condemnations of it from the Vatican beginning in the late ’70s. In 1979, Pope John Paul II opened a speech at a conference in Puebla, Mexico, by declaring, “Christ, as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive man from Nazareth, does not tally with the Church’s catechesis.” It should come as no surprise that Pope Francis, who was born in Argentina, has not been nearly as censorious toward liberation theology as his predecessors, even undoing a few of the penalties imposed by John Paul II on priests who espoused it; or that this perceived warmth has inspired anxiety among his conservative critics.

Father John was frustratingly circumspect in his directions to me. One rainy afternoon he gave me a book to read. “Write up your thoughts,” he said, and that was all. I turned the book, a heavy hardback, over in my hands. It was In Defence of War, a Christian theological treatment of modern warfare by Nigel Biggar. I was at Cambridge to study the theology of private property, especially in the political theory of Augustine. It was unclear why he would want me to read a book defending war. And since I had no idea what John wanted me to learn from the book, I didn’t know what to look for in it, or how to produce something he would approve of. By then, I had become desperate to do work he would be proud of. The love of students for their teachers poured into my mind through the texts we read: “And I began to love him,” Augustine wrote of his mentor, Saint Ambrose, in the fifth book of his Confessions, “of course, not at the first as a teacher of the truth, for I had entirely despaired of finding that in [God’s] Church—but as a friendly man.” Love, Augustine came to find, layers upon love: This is especially true of teachers who are at once guides, friends, mentors, and pastors. Still, I happened to be reading Umberto Eco’s 1980 medieval-era novel The Name of the Rose in my spare time, and I imagined myself, rather dramatically, as a modern-day version of Adso of Melk, a novice monk blindly following his wise master through a labyrinth of theological controversy, mystery, and text. 

My review of A Defence of War, which I presented to John some time later, focused on the role of property in conflict. This seemed a stretch, but I couldn’t think of any other way of doing it. He took his time reading my paper, settled, as he often did, in a high-backed chair near an empty fireplace in his office. His glasses rose on his thin nose as he began to smile: “You focused on Augustine,” he said. I had come up with a rather critical Augustinian reading of Biggar’s book, while Biggar had equally rooted his argument in Augustinian arguments for just war. As it turned out, this was the goal of the assignment: to reveal to me the vastly different interpretations that can issue from ostensibly identical classical frameworks. The point was so simple it is still distilling in my mind. When you go digging in the past, you always find what you’re looking for.

The conservative reverence for the past does not necessarily mean that their tactics or politics to protect it will be properly traditional. Corey Robin, in his 2011 book, The Reactionary Mind, writes, “while the conservative theorist claims for his tradition the mantle of prudence and moderation there is a not-so-subterranean strain of imprudence and immoderation running through that tradition—a strain that, however counterintuitive it seems, connects Sarah Palin to Edmund Burke.” Thus conservatives can claim a deep attachment to the America of their grandparents while trying to dismantle labor unions and Social Security, mainstays of the era they profess to love. It is more difficult to explain the disconnect between a conservative self-identity deeply interwoven with an attachment to the past, and the conservative politics—inside the Church and out—that often employ themes and practices of the revolutionary movements they seek to counter.

Chalking it up to duplicitousness, opportunism, or malice, as progressives tend to do, fails to identify the internal tension of conservatism. The past, whatever we make of it, is in some permanent but elusive way unknowable to us. We have texts, reconstructions, artifacts, stories—all things that add up to less than a single human memory. The difficulty of the historical record, burdened as it is with the attitudes and interpretations of those who have come before us, is only the beginning of the troubles one encounters when it comes to appropriating the past. Indeed, as philosopher and Brown University professor Charles Larmore reminds us in his 2008 book The Autonomy of Morality, even reasoning itself “bears the mark of our time and place.”

To turn to the past with explicitly political motives—say, to attempt to discover a traditional or old-fashioned approach to a problem—is to saddle history with the task of solving our modern problems, and our own interests can therefore subtly color our understanding of the history we encounter. Alastair Roberts, a contributing editor to the journal Political Theology Today, cites the philosopher Charles Taylor’s concept of “authenticity” in locating contemporary individualism in the conservative tendency to seek the past:

“The turn to historic liturgies among many [conservatives] today has been shaped by a need created by expressive individualism’s quest for authenticity. Plagued by a disquieting sense of inauthenticity amidst the simulacra of postmodern consumer culture, many in quest of traditional liturgy can be like the stereotypical hipster who seeks out ‘honest’ and ‘authentic’ vintage styles in the thrift store.”

The hipster relates to the smoking jacket he scavenged from a secondhand shop as a symbol of old-fashioned masculinity. This is very different than the way the wearer once related to it, and the affected performance of old-fashioned masculinity is as thoroughly contemporary as any brand new performance of gender; indeed, it can only be intelligible by comparison with modern alternatives. And the same is true of liturgy: To insist that the Church differentiate herself from the world by adhering to the praxis of the past—be it saying Mass in Latin or ignoring man-made climate change because it is not present in biblical text—is to relate to the past in a wholly modern way. Those who ignored climate change in the Middle Ages did so because it was unknown, not because they intended to make a particular statement about the transcendent factual bearing of the biblical text. We can ape their attitudes, but the outcome is always historical reenactment, no closer to medieval practice than Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones.

The instinct to return to the modes of thinking dominant in the past is a purely modern one. In that case, the conservative disposition is embattled by nature: While it desires to make use of all worthy inheritance, it actually invents what it inherits. Perhaps this is what Rimbaud meant when he wrote, at the end of A Season in Hell, “One must be absolutely modern.” It is not so much a choice as a fait accompli. To consider whether or not one would prefer to be modern is to be modern; the decision is already made.

Pope Francis approaches the past with dialogue, not mere deference, in mind. He knows that the only useful approach to the past is to recognize it as a work in progress. This has the effect of imbuing accumulated tradition with no special authority over current conclusions. The present and the past must speak as equals, as both are works of human effort. From that alone conservatively disposed Catholics might flinch. This attitude—this disposition—allows him to utilize a modern lexicon while drawing on Church tradition. Consider, for instance, his remarks on financial inequality, in which he called for a “legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the state, as well as indispensable cooperation between the private sector and civil society.” Pundits like Fox News host Sean Hannity erupted into paroxysms of anxiety, speculating that the Pope had some newfangled socialist schema in mind. Meanwhile, conservative leaders such as Catholic League President Bill Donohue offered only a lukewarm defense of their pontiff, deflecting outrage by arguing that Francis’s remarks were not really as radical as they seemed. And they weren’t: The Catholic Church has always been “liberal” on economic matters. Since the early centuries of the Church, prominent theologians such as Ambrose, Augustine, and Saint John Chrysostom have emphasized that private property rights obtain only after all human needs have been met, and that the excess of the wealthy truly belongs to the poor.

In light of these teachings, “liberal” is too modern a word for Francis’s papal economics. They are at once in keeping with the ancient tradition of the Church and intelligible to modern political lexicons, pairing actionable politics with classical Christian ethics. Every blowhard with a stake in unmitigated capitalism, from Rush Limbaugh to The Economist, has had their turn at accusing Francis of sundry McCarthyist infractions, Marxist, Leninist, and otherwise. But the reality is that Francis’s views on economic justice hew more closely to traditional Christian teaching than those of a free marketeer. It is the language of present-day economic movements that arouses such jitters among self-proclaimed proponents of tradition. As German Cardinal Walter Kasper said in a speech on Pope Francis at The Catholic University of America, “[Francis] does not represent a liberal position, but a radical position, understood in the original sense of the word as going back to the roots, the radix.”

The same is true of Francis’s upcoming encyclical. In Crisis Magazine, Rachel Lu, an instructor at the University of St. Thomas, contemplated the ramifications of carbon emissions as a matter of theological concern: “It would smack of intellectual faddism,” Lu wrote, “and it’s always depressing to feel that Church authorities are more focused on trendy social controversies than on the fundamental business of saving souls.” But stewardship of the Earth as the charge of humanity is native to the Genesis account itself, and the dignity due the environment can be traced in the Catholic tradition to none other than Saint Francis of Assisi, whose name the Pope adopted. If Francis’s language on the environment—he told reporters accompanying him on a trip to the Philippines that “We have, in a sense, lorded it over nature, over Sister Earth, over Mother Earth”—sounds too much like a “modern pagan green religion” to folks like Steve Moore, it is only because they have forgotten the words from St. Francis of Assisi’s hymn “Canticle of the Sun”: “Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth / Who feeds us and rules us, / And produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.”

Pope Francis knows that his language is evocative of contemporary ecological movements, but this is a testament to his genius, not his incompetence. Capturing the essence of Catholic tradition in conversation via modern thought makes his theology accessible, if distasteful, to those who would take refuge from the present in an imagined past.

Francis’s handling of tradition and modernity privileges neither, but rather produces a workable synthesis of their contributions. Conservative appeals to the past, in contrast, rely on the sort of “decline” narrative for which they seem especially partial. Newly elected Republican Senator Joni Ernst used her response to this year’s State of the Union Address to reminisce about her childhood in Iowa, recalling that “[my] parents may not have had much, but they worked hard for what they did have.” Ernst’s words harken back to a time when people were satisfied with poverty. They also cast modern-day folk in a less-than-flattering light: We don’t work for what we have and instead subsist on oft-maligned handouts like welfare. Finally, those who do work have less to show for it than the imagined bootstrappers of yesteryear, thanks to the regulatory bogeyman that is the federal government.

This is conservatism at its most reactionary, where a past that never existed functions as carte blanche for nothing more than a glorified U-turn, though the destination would be unreachable even if it were real. Francis’s dialogical approach, meanwhile, yields new riches at every turn. In his 2013 apostolic exhortation on evangelism in the Church, Evangelii Gaudium, Francis uses Augustine’s theological claim that humanity loves beauty to argue for the use of modern art and music within churches: “We must be bold enough to discover new signs and new symbols, new flesh to embody and communicate the word, and different forms of beauty which are valued in different cultural settings, including those unconventional modes of beauty.”

Conservatives inside the Church and out will, in all likelihood, continue to rankle at Francis’s presence, his persona, his wildly successful evangelism. With every word, he offers an obviously superior approach to theirs, one that renders the conservative disposition as unappealing as it is impossible.

The Name of the Rose ends with Adso as an old man, alone in his monastery’s scriptorium. A fire consumed the abbey he once explored with his master, though Adso has, over many years and journeys, salvaged a few half-burnt pages from the ruins of its library. He confesses to searching them superstitiously for some meaning, some message, some guide to what his past should mean. He is adrift without his master William, who died sometime after the novel’s adventure. I, too, am now without my master: Last summer, John died in a car accident. He was 35 years old.

John wrote one book in his life, The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism. For a while after his death I turned to it like an encyclopedia, scouring it for meaning. I wanted it to answer all of the questions I had intended to ask John, to decode the statements he had made to me off-handedly that I had stored away to decipher later. But it is a book about labor and liturgy, not a book about John and me. If I have discovered anything in the wake of my grief, it is that the past cannot be recovered, but only shabbily reconstructed. It is most useful when considered an open matter. This is true of the past in our lives, of the past in politics, of the past in the Church: Dialogue is the most we can make of it.

And that is enough. a

“Do You Understand That Your Baby Goes Away and Never Comes Back?”

Adoption is embraced in the Marshall Islands, but in the Ozarks, it means something very different. The tragic consequences of cultural misunderstanding.

BY KATHRYN JOYCE | MAY

On July 29, 2014, Maryann and Dexter Koshiba, 32 and 37 years old, sat, utterly exhausted, in a recovery room at Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas. That morning, Maryann had given birth to a baby girl, and both had been up all night through the labor. Around five in the afternoon, Dexter recalled, he received a phone call. A local adoption attorney named Marti Woodruff was sending someone to the hospital with documents for the couple to sign. The Koshibas had been working with Woodruff for about a month to arrange the adoption of their unborn child, and everything had proceeded relatively smoothly until then. An unfamiliar woman arrived and handed over the relinquishment documents. Dexter was so tired that he couldn’t fully focus on the papers. But he signed them anyway, and roused Maryann to do the same. “Do you know her?” asked Dexter, once the woman had left, but Maryann was so groggy that she didn’t recognize anyone right then. Like that, one of the most important decisions of their lives was made.

Maryann and Dexter had grown up together in the Marshall Islands, on the capital island of Majuro, but Maryann had moved to Hawaii with her family and infant son in 2007, and then on to Oregon. Dexter followed in 2008, moving first to Arkansas, and then, after becoming involved with Maryann, to the West Coast, where they lived in Seattle for almost two years before moving, together, to Springdale, in the northwest corner of Arkansas—the unlikely home of a large Marshallese population.

Dexter got a job at George’s, a local chicken-processing plant, making around minimum wage; they found an apartment and settled in among the Marshallese community. In 2011, Dexter took a job at a Butterball turkey plant, where the wages and benefits were slightly better, but the couple still struggled to pay the $450 monthly rent. Leading up to Thanksgiving, the work was steady, as the plant churned out around 45,000 birds per day. But for the rest of the year, Dexter often failed to get enough hours. Their family was starting to grow—in addition to Maryann’s son, the couple had two new daughters—and some months they could barely pay their bills. Maryann wanted to get a job, but they couldn’t afford a babysitter. They pinned their hopes on a tax refund that might let them buy a ticket to fly Maryann’s sister over from the Islands so she could watch the kids.

In 2013, soon after their then-youngest daughter was born, Maryann got pregnant again. By March 2014, the couple had decided to place their unborn baby for adoption. They already had three children to care for, and both had other children from previous relationships living with extended family. The stories that circulated among the Marshallese in Springdale made U.S. adoption sound not dissimilar to customs back home: The adoptive parents would call and send pictures regularly; the biological parents would have the right to reclaim their children if need be; and the children would return to their birth parents when they turned 18. They’d also heard that Marshallese women who placed their babies for adoption in the United States were paid around $10,000.

With the help of a Marshallese man named Justin Aine—a distant cousin of Dexter’s—who had become a liaison between an adoption lawyer named Vaughn Cordes and the transplanted Marshallese community, Dexter and Maryann were matched with a prospective adoptive family. They chatted with the family over Skype and generally had a good impression of them. Immediately after they agreed to the adoption, they started to receive checks from Cordes—about $1,200 each month. The funds nearly doubled the family’s income. They were able to pay off old bills and buy clothes for the children and milk for the baby. Dexter bought a car to travel to and from work.

In the last month of her pregnancy, however, Maryann pulled out of the arrangement. She fought with Aine—she said he insulted her father; he said she was pestering him for money. She was still determined to place the baby for adoption, though, and the other Marshallese women in the community advised her to contact another local attorney, Woodruff, to complete the proceedings. “The Marshallese ladies talked about Marti,” said Dexter when I met him and Maryann last November at their tidy apartment in Huntsville, a village of about 2,000 people 27 miles outside Springdale, “and said, she’s a good person, helping people do anything.” Woodruff found a new family to adopt the baby and sent Cordes a check to reimburse him for the money he had given to Maryann during the pregnancy.

But almost as soon as Maryann gave birth, something seemed amiss. First, there was the rush surrounding the signing of the papers dropped off by the mysterious woman—papers that were written in English, which Maryann couldn’t read. (Woodruff doesn’t remember sending anyone from her office to the hospital and said that Maryann and Dexter may have been referring to a hospital social worker; she also insists that the documents would have been translated by the hospital.) When the adoptive parents arrived at the hospital, the two sets of parents crowded around the baby for a group photo. But then the adoptive parents moved to a separate room until the infant was ready to leave the hospital. Woodruff gave Dexter and Maryann some cash—a couple hundred dollars, Dexter said—and instructed them to go home. They asked to speak to the adoptive parents one last time—they wanted to exchange contact information. Woodruff, the couple said, put them off—disappearing somewhere in the hospital. Maryann was confused; she had thought that the adoptive mother would stay in touch. Now she was being hustled out of the hospital without so much as a phone number. (“If she had been promised phone numbers by somebody, it wasn’t us,” said Woodruff.)

Months passed, and no photos came. Depression took hold of Maryann. “Every day I’m always crying, and my husband [asks] ‘What happened to you?’” Maryann said. “I’m worried because I don’t know where she is right now.” She began to call Woodruff regularly, asking for the adoptive parents’ phone number. She wouldn’t try to take the baby back, she promised, she just wanted to know the child was OK. (Woodruff said that Maryann only called to argue that she hadn’t signed a consent form, but that if she had asked for the adoptive parents’ phone number, she would have told Maryann that information is confidential.) Dexter said they offered to repay the money they’d received from Woodruff, but Woodruff told them that wasn’t a possibility. Woodruff stated that she makes sure all the birth parents she works with understand the terms of their agreement: “I have never promised open adoption to anybody because, to me, that would be misstatement of Arkansas law.” At one point, Maryann tried to go back to Aine, hoping to reconnect with the first set of adoptive parents—the ones who had promised to stay in touch. But, of course, it was too late.

In desperation, Maryann called the police. She says the police called Woodruff, then told Maryann that she wasn’t entitled to any information since she had willingly entered into a closed adoption. Closed adoption is the default form of adoption in Arkansas, and it mandates that adoption records are sealed; no identifying information about either birth or adoptive parents is shared and the parties can only contact each other through their agency or attorney. If she persisted in calling the precinct or Woodruff’s office, Maryann claimed the police told her, she’d be thrown in jail. Together, the couple approached a lawyer to see if they could sue for the return of the baby. But after a quick call to Woodruff’s office, the lawyer told the Koshibas the same thing the police had: They’d agreed to a closed adoption, and that was that. “I don’t even know what that means, ‘closed adoption,’” Maryann told me. “What is ‘closed adoption?’” Dexter repeated. “We’re just trying to find someone to help us.”

In 1946, the U.S. Navy detonated the first of nearly 70 nuclear bombs off the coast of Bikini Atoll, one of the 1,200-plus islands that make up the Marshall Islands. More than 2,000 miles in every direction from Australia, Hawaii, or Japan, the Islands had become a U.N. trust controlled by the United States after World War II, and the bombings were part of America’s postwar Pacific Proving Grounds project—more broadly, they were part of the Cold War nuclear arms race. To clear the way for the testing, the 167 residents of Bikini Atoll were evacuated: first to the uninhabited atoll of Rongerik, where they began to starve; then to Kwajalein, where they lived in tents along an airstrip; finally, to tiny Kili Island, less than half a square mile large. Residents of other atolls were also relocated; some were neglected. A 1954 H-bomb test on Rongelap Atoll left the unevacuated residents there exposed to three times the radiation as people who lived near Chernobyl. By the time the testing stopped in 1958, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission called the idyllic Marshall Islands “by far, the most contaminated place in the world.” As compensation, the Marshallese received heavy financial assistance from the United States for many years.

In 1986, the country finally became an independent nation—the Republic of the Marshall Islands—but the ties weren’t completely cut. The Islands entered a Compact of Free Association with the United States. In exchange for permitting a U.S. missile defense system to remain on Kwajalein Atoll, the Marshallese could enter and exit the United States without visas. They wouldn’t become citizens, but they could study or work in the United States for as long as they’d like.

This was appealing to the Marshallese, who were beginning to feel the combined pressures of a reduction in U.S. aid and overpopulation. The country’s fertility rate is relatively high—4.1 children per woman—and some of the coral atolls that make up the nation are scarcely bigger than a football field. On the capital island of Majuro, 30,000 people live on a narrow strip of sand amounting to less than four square miles of land.

The precise reason any population picks up from one place and ends up in another is hard to explain. But the Marshallese credit a man named John Moody with bringing them to northwest Arkansas. Moody arrived from the Islands in the ’80s to work for Tyson Foods, and soon spread the word among his tightly interwoven network that there were jobs to be had in Springdale. Within ten years of Moody’s arrival, the city had become “the Springdale Atoll”: the largest diaspora community outside the Islands, with anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 Marshallese. In 1999, the Marshallese community in Springdale awarded Moody an honorary plaque, thanking him “for his pioneering efforts to bring us to our adopted homeland.”

Springdale offers Marshallese emigrants something like the good life. The city sits in the middle of a sprawling suburban corridor of nearly half-a-million people, connecting what used to be the separate towns of Fayetteville, Rogers, and Bentonville. Venture a few miles off Interstate 49 in either direction, and the countryside is still Old Arkansas: rolling Ozark hills, covered with grazing cattle—the region, wrote anthropologist Jamie C. Brandon, that defined “what it means to be rural in America.” (It was from the Ozarks that the Beverly Hillbillies began their journey.) But along the main drag of I-49, you find subdivision after subdivision, the McMansions representing an axis of industrial might anchored by the global headquarters of Walmart in Bentonville, shipping company J.B. Hunt Transport in Lowell, and Tyson Foods in Springdale. Dense, commercial strips full of fast-food restaurants run from the highway to downtown Springdale, where the remnants of the aging buildings sit beside large new community complexes named after corporate benefactors. The region is one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. Housing is abundant, and some Marshallese families are even able to buy their homes and approximate a middle-class life. A handful of Marshallese churches and a Marshallese consulate have sprung up around the area to cater to the community.

But it’s not an easy life. Most new Marshallese work in the local poultry plants: George’s, Cargill, and Butterball, in addition to Tyson. (In 2013, the Arkansas Senate declared Springdale “The Poultry Capital of the World.”) These are smelly, dangerous jobs that rarely pay more than minimum wage. In 2011, 173 Tyson workers at one of the Springdale plants were treated for exposure to chlorine gas after a chemical accident.

New Marshallese arrivals also confront a cultural chasm. On the Islands, large, multigenerational families typically share a residence, and they continue to do so in Arkansas, with many one-family apartments housing as many as 20 people. (Fears of eviction for over-occupancy lead many Marshallese to underreport the number of people living in their homes, leading to wildly disparate estimates of the community’s size.) After generations of living on family-owned land, many are paying rent for the first time. Many have never owned a car. And after growing up with island weather, many people wear sandals into the winter. When I met Maryann, her toddler was dressed in a tank top, even though the temperature hovered in the 30s.

The adjustments are not just a challenge for the Marshallese, but also for their new neighbors. Children often arrive for school hours late—their parents, local doctors and attorneys like to joke, are used to “island time.” One school principal reportedly bought alarm clocks for the parents of all her Marshallese students. Accustomed to the diffuse oversight of relatives and family friends, Marshallese parents often let their children play outside without supervision. To Springdale locals, said Consul General Carmen Chong Gum, this could look like neglect. Doctors and nurses reported that many of their Marshallese patients failed to show up for appointments, and when they did, they were often severely ill. Community liaisons chalk this up to the strong culture of reserve among the Marshallese, where many see admitting sickness as a sign of weakness. In 2010, a local coalition of nonprofit and government health organizations published an acclimation packet, with an introduction by then–Governor Mike Beebe, that discussed American culture in starkly rudimentary terms: Children need a good night’s sleep; be on time for job interviews and medical appointments; speak up if you don’t understand something.

But nothing baffled Arkansas officials and community members more than the fluid notions of Marshallese family: a matrilineal system wherein all related members of a generation are considered the joint parents of a child. “[Kids] will show up [to school] one day with someone and say, ‘This is my mom,’” said Sandy Hainline-Williams, an American nurse who has become a cultural liaison for Springdale’s Marshallese. “And the next day, a different woman: ‘This is my mom.’” Other nurses puzzled over women who were slow to answer when asked how many children they had. “I’ve teasingly said, ‘You can’t not remember having a baby!’” said Gina Jeremiah, a pregnancy intake nurse at Parkhill Clinic for Women, an obstetrics-gynecology practice within Willow Creek Women’s Hospital in Springdale. “All the women take on the role of mother in the kids’ lives,” said another nurse.

These attitudes, anthropologists believe, were born of the ethos of extreme generosity necessary for crowded island life. “There’s a general idea that things belong to everyone, as opposed to specific people,” said Elise Berman, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. “And those things include children.” Some studies have found that 25 percent of Marshallese children are raised by someone other than their biological parent. Many adoptions in the Marshall Islands take place because an older relative has actively solicited the offspring of their younger kin—a stark contrast to the United States, where adoption is mainly seen as the last resort of unprepared or unwilling parents. Older family members will approach expectant relatives and, in a telling linguistic formulation, say, “Give me my child.” And because an adopted child usually just moves a few doors down, adoptees almost always know their biological parents. If a birth mother suspects her child is being mistreated, she has the right to take him back. “We have this belief that the role of the mother will stay there forever,” said Melisa Laelan, a Marshallese court interpreter and the founder of Springdale’s nonprofit Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese. There’s even a Marshallese phrase for this: Jined Ilo Kobo, which refers to the unbreakable connection that a mother has with her children; it can’t be severed no matter who raises them.

When President Reagan spoke to the Marshallese on the occasion of their 1986 independence, he promised that they would “always be family.” A decade later, it didn’t seem like a bad gamble to some Marshallese to make that a literal reality: expanding their family as they’d always done, through the gift of a child. In the late ’90s, the Marshall Islands underwent an international adoption boom: Children from the Islands began leaving in greater numbers than ever before. When American adoptive parents began to send care packages to their children’s biological parents back in the Marshall Islands, Island residents watched with interest. But the primary reason for the uptick was that adopting a child from the Marshall Islands was easier than adopting from other foreign countries. For all other international adoptions, adoptive parents are required to obtain an “orphan visa” that satisfies certain State Department requirements for bringing a child into the United States. Marshallese adoptees needed no visa.

Before 1996, there had only been around seven international adoptions from the Islands each year; by 1998, the number was up to 143. That tally doesn’t sound alarmingly high, but juxtaposed against the Islands’ population of about 55,000 people in 1998, it was a startling outflow of the nation’s offspring—that same year there were fewer than 2,000 total births in the Marshall Islands. Adoption agencies began to compete with each other by promising perks—to send birth mothers to Hawaiian colleges or entire families to Disneyland, according to research by Jini Roby, an attorney and Brigham Young University social work professor.

In 1999, the Marshallese government invited Roby to study the rapid acceleration of international adoption. She found that 82 percent of the Marshallese birth mothers she interviewed believed that their children would return when they were 18 “with a good education and material wealth”; around 70 percent believed they would receive financial support; 70 percent also believed that their child would come home if the adoption didn’t work out. When Roby led a forum for Marshallese teachers and government officials to explain U.S. adoption, her audience “sat in stunned silence,” she later wrote, as they tried to absorb the fact that a “legal fiction” could sever “an unchangeable fact of life.” The Marshallese, Roby told me, were “not only more trusting” but also working from a drastically different cultural frame of reference. For the Marshallese, adoption “doesn’t tear families apart,” said Roby, “it builds them.”

Later that year, the Marshallese government enacted an adoption moratorium so they could, with Roby’s help, draft the country’s first formal adoption laws. But during the 15-month moratorium, Marshallese adoptions didn’t really stop. Instead, agencies began flying pregnant Marshallese mothers to Hawaii, where they set them up in apartments until they delivered, sometimes securing their commitment with nothing more than $300 and a plane ticket to Honolulu. A 2003 investigation by The Baltimore Sun uncovered agencies that withheld mothers’ passports and lawyers who brawled in online forums, accusing each other of poaching birth mothers. The business, The Sun found, was lucrative: Some lawyers made up to $13,500 per baby, with Marshallese recruiters taking a $2,500 cut per mother. In most cases, the mothers’ medical bills were picked up by Medicaid. There were concerns, Hawaii State Senator Roslyn Baker recalled to me, that Hawaii was becoming “a gateway for human trafficking.”

U.S. state and federal authorities sought a way to shut down these adoptions, which, if not blatantly illegal, seemed to operate in a gray area of the law. In 2003, President George W. Bush signed a law that amended the Compact of Free Association, requiring a visa for any Marshallese person entering the United States for the purposes of adoption. In Hawaii, Marshallese women flying into the state were asked at customs whether they intended to relinquish a child for adoption, and immigration officials began to confiscate the passports of Marshallese they suspected of circumventing adoption laws, even threatening to deport some. Most effectively, said anthropologist Julianne Walsh, a Hawaiian family court judge began requiring third-party interpreters to be present for Marshallese adoptions—a move she believes “effectively ended the adoptions in Hawaii.”

But as Hawaii and, to some extent, the federal government tightened its oversight, the adoptions just moved: to Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Arizona, and, most significantly, Arkansas. Private domestic infant adoptions in the United States are controlled at the state level, and Arkansas’s lenient, “adoption-friendly” laws had long made it a destination for hopeful parents from around the country. Birth mothers in Arkansas can consent to adoption anytime after they give birth—sooner than in most other states, which require at least a two-day waiting period. As in many states, there’s a window of time in which mothers can revoke their consent to the adoption, but Arkansas mothers can also waive their full revocation window, so that adoptions become irrevocable after just five days.

In the decade after the Marshall Islands slowed outgoing overseas adoptions, international adoption began to decline across the board. Since the peak of international adoption in 2004, when nearly 23,000 foreign children were adopted by U.S. families, that number has been cut by more than two-thirds. In some cases, this is because “sending countries,” like China, now have substantial domestic demand for adoptable babies; in other countries, like Guatemala, Vietnam, or Ethiopia, high-profile reports of abuse have forced either the United States or the sending country’s governments to stop or slow down adoptions. The State Department reported just over 7,000 adoptions in 2013, and 6,441 in 2014. For adoption advocates, this is an alarming trend—the “adoption cliff,” they call it. Critics of adoption policies say it’s the natural leveling off of an unnatural bubble. In market terms, the supply is being cut off, while the demand remains as high as ever.

Last June, within a single Springdale-area hospital, six Marshallese children were adopted in just three days. Making her rounds of the nursery the following Monday, the numbers struck pediatrician Stacy Furlow as impossible. “We wouldn’t have had six adoptions in a year five years ago,” she said. According to one person with inside knowledge of adoption proceedings, about 90 percent of the adoptions in Washington County now involve Marshallese babies.

Like everyone in the region, Furlow, a cheerful, animated mother of four, with a wavy blond bob and welcoming smile, had followed the growth of the Marshallese community with interest. When she was in high school in Fayetteville in the late ’80s, Springdale was so racially homogenous that she sensed tension when Fayetteville’s multiracial sports teams traveled there to play. To Furlow, the diversification of the community—it’s now 40 percent Pacific Islander and Latino—was a positive development, evidence of a little pocket of progressivism.

Furlow, who has done volunteer health work in Haiti and has developed familiarity with conditions common to developing-world children, ended up building a practice where she sees many adoptive families. But as more and more adoptive parents began coming to her office with newborn Marshallese babies in tow, she was puzzled. Her corner of the Ozarks, it seemed, was becoming the new destination for international adoptions—and this development was bringing along with it some of the ugliest baggage of cultural misunderstanding. On one adoption blog Furlow stumbled upon, a would-be mother wrote of the Springdale Marshallese, “these people make babies.” An Alabama church that had sent nearly two dozen members on a mission to Springdale claimed to have returned home with promises from several pregnant women, according to one adoptive parent’s blog.

Furlow wasn’t the only one concerned. At area hospitals, staff watched dozens of their Marshallese patients plan to relinquish their children, often to couples who had signed up just months—or even weeks—earlier. (Hopeful adoptive parents frequently wait years for a match with a healthy newborn baby.) Labor and nursery nurses traded horror stories involving tearful and confused new mothers, who asked whether they were allowed to hold or feed their babies, and lamented that they couldn’t change their minds because they lacked the money to repay the lawyers. Once, after a mother refused to part with her baby, an adoption attorney came in with his translator to “chew the mother out,” said one nurse. Another time, an attorney wrote an angry letter to an area hospital, instructing the staff to stop speaking to the mothers about adoption, said another nurse.

Staff at both local hospitals, Washington Regional and Willow Creek, began increasing their efforts to inform Marshallese mothers of their rights, but they were often stymied by the language barrier. Though the hospitals subscribed to a phone-in translation service, Marshallese interpreters were so rare that they needed to make an appointment. They often had to rely on family members or the adoption liaisons instead, and were never sure what information was being passed along. And Marshallese women were arriving from the Islands all the time; it was the new arrivals who seemed to give up their children most often. “It sounds juvenile, but I put it in terms of, ‘Do you understand that your baby goes away and never comes back?’” said Gina Jeremiah, the pregnancy intake nurse at Parkhill. “There’s been several instances where they go, ‘No, I’ll see my baby when it turns 18.’”

For Furlow and many of her colleagues, an uneasy sense of complicity began to set in. (It was Furlow who contacted me last July and asked me to look into this story.) “I feel like I’m involved unwillingly,” said Jeremiah last November. “On the one hand, we’re happy for the couples that are struggling and can’t get pregnant. But then from the other side of it, I ache for them a little bit—for the patients that are having to go through this,” said another Parkhill physician, Julian Terry. “For all of us,” said Laureen Benafield, one of Furlow’s pediatric partners and an adoptive mother herself, “the red flag has just been the volume . . . the sheer numbers feel so wrong, predatory.” Benafield wasn’t the only one to note the volume: “When we say it’s gotten out of control, it’s really a money-making business for many people,” Robert Hix, an OB-GYN at Parkhill, told me. “You can almost tell that some of them are not sure what’s going on until the baby is gone.” A judge who has handled many adoption cases summarized the sense of concern and helplessness among his colleagues, who told him: “If they present you paperwork in the right manner, then you’ve gotta sign it.”

But the flip side of the same story is told very differently. The lawyers and liaisons who help facilitate adoptions for the Marshallese believe they’re offering an essential service. Paul Petersen, a Mormon attorney who has done mission work in the Marshall Islands and was recently elected as a county assessor in Arizona, has been facilitating Marshallese adoptions in Arkansas for five years without a state license. He plans to take the bar in Arkansas so that he can continue to do so. “The need is great,” he told me. The first lawyer that the Koshibas worked with, Vaughn Cordes, said that he’s also helping the women. “The reality is, they can’t afford to care for [these] children.” The women he works with, he told me, “all know from the start” that they might never see their babies again. “It’s too complicated, it’s too hard, to have the mother think she’s in an open adoption.”

The most forthcoming of the lawyers, Marti Woodruff, explained it in even more blunt terms: “They’re not going to raise the children. The only question is: Who will? The rich friends’ family or the adoptive parents?” Springdale, Woodruff said, has essentially been faced with developing-world issues—“It’s Third World meets colonialism,” she told me when we met in her country-kitsch-filled office last November—and the lawyers and the families who adopt are just doing what they can to help.

Woodruff, who describes herself on her website as “a down to earth, mom and grandmother who just happens to be an attorney who does private adoptions,” has a softer reputation than Petersen or Cordes. “Aunt Marti,” as the hospital nurses call her, likes to say she’s facilitated adoptions “for every kind God makes.” When Springdale’s chicken factories were staffed by Latinos, she did Latino adoptions; of the 200 adoptions she’s facilitated over the course of her career, she estimates that 75 were for Marshallese birth parents. She is said to leave her business cards in local Marshallese churches, and every year she sponsors a Marshallese women’s softball team, buying team t-shirts emblazoned with her law office’s logo.

Woodruff pointed to the high birth rates and aversion to birth control within the Marshallese community. Some women have come back to her, she said, just months after giving up their newborns, pregnant again and hoping for the same financial arrangement. The Marshallese have lots of problems, Woodruff said—a 50 percent diabetes rate, a lack of education—“but everybody is bitching about adoption.” In a neighboring county, there’s a lawyer who, she said, has conducted 700 adoptions for white babies. She doubted he’s ever been asked whether his Caucasian birth mothers are paid. And she defended the money she pays Marshallese birth mothers as just enough to replicate a successful, working-class life. She makes her clients sign consent forms, which specify that pregnant woman must reimburse adoptive families for money spent on their behalf—usually between $8,000 and $12,000 total—if they decide not to complete the adoption. But Woodruff said she knows the latter clause is all but unenforceable—“if they had resources to recover, they wouldn’t have chosen adoption in the first place.” Woodruff also said that she makes every effort to avoid misunderstanding: “I’m very careful to explain, and even the consent documents explain, that . . . this is a closed adoption, and that it’s very likely that [the mother] won’t see this child until after he or she seeks [the mother] out as an adult when they turn 18.” The documents, she said, are translated in an open court, “so there is no question that they understand the difference between informal Marshallese adoptions and formal U.S. adoptions.”

Though they are something akin to business competitors—and, like many rivals, hold decidedly poor opinions of each other—Woodruff’s rationale is not that different from that of Justin Aine, Cordes’s coordinator. Aine, like Woodruff, believes he is offering local Marshallese women a service they want and need. “If they want to do it, they can,” he said when we spoke by phone in January. He said he doesn’t solicit pregnant women (as Woodruff and others claim). The women mostly come to him because of his deep roots in the community. For years, he helped the Marshallese prepare their taxes; after hours, he sponsored a local softball team and ran a traditional Marshallese dance group. “I get a lot of girls, a lot of chicks,” he told me, referring to the women who end up relinquishing their babies. A person who has witnessed a number of courtroom proceedings said that Aine refers to the women he’s working with as “my girls” in the courtroom as well.

As of late January, Aine estimated that he had 35 pregnant women working with him and Cordes. Most of these women prefer, officially, to enter into private U.S. adoptions, he said, rather than the official adoption procedures the Marshallese government has set up, because they know they will be better compensated for it. He boasted that the families who work with him and Cordes honor their informal open adoption agreements and that none of his birth mothers—except Maryann—has ever backed out of an adoption. (At least in part, this may be because Aine tries to limit the information the mothers receive: He has fought with nurses over what they can tell their patients. “I come and tell [the nurses], you’re not supposed to tell the birth mother anything she don’t [sic] know,” he said. In recent months, said Jeremiah, she witnessed Aine reassuring a birth mother that “she could see her baby anytime she wants.” When Jeremiah interjected, Aine angrily told her that she’d “better shut [her] mouth,” and abruptly left with the patient.) Aine has had relatives back home who can’t afford to fly themselves to Arkansas; offering a child up for adoption in the United States seems like a way out, and they ask him repeatedly to help them make a match.

Last November, I met a pretty, extremely timid 21-year-old woman I’ll call Lisa in a Springdale McDonald’s. Three months earlier, Lisa had been living at her parents’ home in Majuro. Seven-months pregnant and single—her boyfriend had broken up with her when he found out she was pregnant—Lisa was not sure what she was going to do with the child, when two women came to visit her. If she relinquished her baby in the United States, Lisa said they told her, the adoptive family would buy her a house in Hawaii and help her find a job. Lisa’s parents were sick with diabetes; the women promised—according to Lisa—that, after the adoption was complete, they’d bring her parents over as well. She’d never been off the Islands, and she already had another son who had been adopted by her parents. (The father of that child also failed to support him.) Her mother told her to go. “Life in the Marshall Islands is very hard,” Lisa said.

In August, two weeks after the facilitators—who, Lisa said, were working on behalf of Arizona attorney Paul Petersen—approached her, Lisa prepared to leave. Petersen said via email that he does not have anyone working directly for him in the Marshall Islands, and that Lisa approached one of his facilitators who just happened to be back visiting the islands. But when Lisa and her parents arrived at the airport, she said there was a change of plans: Lisa wasn’t going to Hawaii, but instead to De Queen, Arkansas, a small town about 200 miles south of Springdale, near the Oklahoma border. Lisa was scared, she told me. Her mother advised her to stay, but her father said to go; it was the family’s only chance off the island. Petersen denied any involvement in this type of recruitment: “Promising something for someone’s consent to an adoption is flatly illegal. I never do that, and I would never have anyone associated with me do that either.” He also said he has only worked with women in the Marshall Islands who plan to remain permanently in the United States.

Lisa arrived in the rural enclave and moved into a house on the outskirts of town. About ten other pregnant Marshallese women were also staying there, some sharing a bed, the rest sleeping on the floor. The home was run by a Marshallese woman, who Lisa and another former resident of the home said was working for Petersen. Petersen maintains a house, he told me via email, “for those women who don’t have a safe place to stay who are working with me towards an adoption.” Every month, the facilitator in De Queen gave the pregnant women a stipend of a few hundred dollars. (Arkansas, like most states, allows adoptive parents and adoption lawyers to cover “reasonable” costs of medical care, legal expenses, and temporary living costs during the pregnancy.) They left the house whenever they wanted, to walk to the store or do other errands, but the facilitator also warned them against sharing some details about their arrangement with the adoptive parents. She didn’t want the women mentioning that they slept on the floor, Lisa said. More importantly, claimed Lisa, she told them not to say that they’d just arrived in the country. Instead, they were told to claim “that we’d been here for two or three years,” said Lisa.

On October 6, Lisa went into labor, and the facilitator drove her across the border to Idabel, Oklahoma, where she delivered her daughter at a local hospital. The next day, the adoptive parents—a nice couple from Utah—arrived in Idabel, and Lisa and the baby went to meet them at a motel. They spent an hour talking, and then Lisa said she signed some papers. They were written in English, which Lisa couldn’t read, so the facilitator translated them out loud. “The only thing that I know is that when the baby is about eighteen, it will come [home],” she said to me. And that the parents “will send a picture.” The parents and Lisa exchanged numbers and then they said goodbye. Lisa and the facilitator returned to De Queen. Within a few weeks, Lisa moved to Springdale to live with her uncle. Lisa never would have been able to relinquish without appearing before a judge, Petersen said: Lisa “consented to her adoption in court, under oath, and they asked her questions,” he told me. “I wasn’t there, but that’s how this works.” Petersen is correct that this is standard protocol; it seems possible that Lisa, unfamiliar with U.S. procedures, may have neglected to mention this part of the process.

For at least the first six weeks following the adoption, Lisa said, the adoptive parents followed through on their promise to send her pictures. In the middle of our conversation, she took out her cell phone and counted them proudly: There were seven. But neither the facilitator nor the recruiters back in the Islands ever bought the airline tickets Lisa claimed she had been promised, and though she was too nervous to confront anyone, she came to realize that there would be no house or job in Hawaii. Instead, Lisa said, two-and-a-half weeks after she gave birth, she started working a morning shift at Tyson, hanging chickens on the line. Her parents tell her that she’ll have to work hard so that she can buy them their tickets herself.

Several weeks after Lisa left De Queen, she was followed by a friend from the house, a woman I’ll call Sunny, a 23-year-old who was so hesitant to discuss her story that she could barely sit still when we spoke in a parked car outside a Springdale laundromat late at night last November. On Majuro, Sunny said that she had been told all the same things as Lisa: that the adoptive parents would buy her a house and find her a job. “They didn’t say how much [money they’d give us monthly],” Sunny said through Lisa, who acted as a translator, “they just said they would buy us a house.” But after staying in De Queen for three months, Sunny called family members in Springdale and asked them to pick her up. She didn’t want to give up her baby. She moved in with relatives, and, at the time we met, mostly stayed in their home, terrified of being discovered.

The family that had planned to adopt Sunny’s child wrote her a kind note, she said. The facilitator was less gracious; she called Lisa repeatedly, Lisa said, demanding to know where Sunny had gone. She texted Sunny’s phone, too, saying she had to repay the money spent on her plane ticket, food, and rent, and had the other expectant mothers call and text as well. They texted until the minutes on Sunny’s phone ran out, Sunny said; at the time we met, she didn’t have the money to turn the phone back on. (The facilitator did not respond to repeated interview requests, passed along through Petersen.)

The law in the Marshall Islands is clear. The Marshall Islands Adoption Act of 2002—developed in part by Roby—prohibits soliciting a child for adoption or “knowingly, encouraging, advising or facilitating a person to travel outside the Republic for purposes of placing that person’s child or children, whether born or unborn, for adoption.” The act also states that any form of monetary inducement is prohibited. Violations of the act are punishable, though the punishments seem meager: fines up to $1,000 or jail time of up to a year.

The U.S. law governing what happens to Marshallese women in Arkansas is murkier. The amended Compact of Free Association states that “a person who is coming to the United States pursuant to an adoption outside the United States, or for the purpose of adoption in the United States, is ineligible for admission under the Compact.” After the amended compact had passed—perhaps to clarify this issue—Hawaii Senator Daniel Akaka and two other senators wrote to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asking for the department’s assurance that the amended compact would “preclude the practice of allowing the [Federated States of Micronesia] and [Republic of Marshall Islands] birth mothers to be admitted visa-free as nonimmigrants under the Compact for the purpose of completing prearranged adoptions after their child is born in the United States.” A representative for DHS wrote back, acknowledging that the department understood Congress’s intent as expressed in the letter. (But it is unclear that the amended compact has ever been enforced, and it appears that there has not been greater clarification since the exchange with DHS.) Arkansas state family law prohibits the offering or receiving of any “thing of value as a consideration for the relinquishment of a minor for adoption.”

As Petersen put it to me: “Welcome to the world of legal realities. We all have differing opinions on things. . . . If their intent was to prevent that kind of thing, they’re failing miserably. And it’s because it’s unenforceable. If they really want to stop it, then they should bar all Marshallese people—women—from coming to the U.S. unless they have a medical examiner show they’re not pregnant.” Cordes said there are “very different takes” on the legality of bringing expectant mothers from the Marshall Islands. He said he’s done it once, but that it was a “very exceptional circumstance.” While it might not currently meet the strict standards of legal definition, many observers—including some of the adoption brokers and attorneys themselves—just call all this moving of bodies what it looks like: human trafficking. “[They’re] making money off us,” Lisa said simply.

There are some signs that growing scrutiny is having an effect. A handful of lawsuits have gained some traction. A litigator for Legal Aid of Arkansas, Marshall Prettyman, said he’s defended Marshallese women who backed out of adoptions and were subsequently threatened with expensive lawsuits. (Prettyman said that two of the lawsuits he’s worked on—for both Marshallese and Latino mothers—have involved Woodruff and Cordes.) Another group of disgruntled Marshallese birth mothers—somewhat ironically, aided by Aine—are reportedly collecting complaints about Woodruff. At the center of that effort is Sharlyn Lang, a 45-year-old grandmother who, in 2014, successfully blocked the adoption of her granddaughter by sitting vigil in the hospital until the adoptive parents gave up. Lang, a stylish and passionate woman who has lived in the United States for more than a decade and works as a translator for a car dealership, said she wasn’t intimidated. But most recent emigrants, she said, don’t have the same confidence. “This is a new country, people are afraid.”

More sweeping reform is stop-and-start. In January 2014, the Marshall Islands’ Central Adoption Authority (CAA) released an open letter warning brokers that recruiting pregnant women from the Marshall Islands would result in prosecution. For two years, the CAA’s director wrote, the agency had been watching Arkansas with concern. There had been a Marshallese father in Springdale who’d committed suicide after his girlfriend relinquished their child; pregnant Marshallese women participating in official adoptions through the CAA who were spirited away to Arkansas after being promised more money. The letter instructed adoption attorneys to register with Springdale’s Marshallese consulate. But Julianne Walsh—who’s kept abreast of Marshallese adoptions since the boom in Hawaii—said that the letter has had little consequence, and there’s been no follow-up from Majuro. This spring, Consul General Carmen Chong Gum said she was still waiting for instructions from the CAA to put the protections into effect.

Some practical efforts have had more measurable results: The court system has imposed a de-facto slowdown by insisting on a certified Marshallese translator for all adoption relinquishments; and, according to Laelan, the judges at the hearings in Washington County have begun asking tough questions: Why are the mothers relinquishing? How much money have they been given? Local hospital administrators have let the lawyers know they are on high alert for signs of coercion. Legal Aid of Arkansas is considering a community outreach campaign that would help educate Arkansas’s Marshallese population on the differences between U.S. and traditional Marshallese adoptions. One of the partners at Furlow’s pediatric clinic, Andrew Koehler, has complained directly to the FBI. “I mostly wanted to alert them to something that didn’t smell right to us,” he told me. A local judge has also contacted the FBI. A spokesperson for the FBI office in Little Rock said it would be inappropriate to comment.

But there are also signs that these measures might just prompt an evasive reaction. Last summer, doctors at Parkhill notified all the adoption attorneys in the area that they would no longer accept Medicaid for pregnant women who planned to relinquish. Medicaid had been used to cover many birth mothers’ care, even though adoption attorneys also received money from the adoptive parents to cover the birth mother’s medical bills. By indirectly confronting the attorneys with these suspicions of double-dipping, the doctors hoped to tamp down the adoption trade that seemed to be passing through their clinic. Instead, they said, the attorneys showed up with the money. Cordes, they recalled, brought a check for $35,000. Cordes denied that he brought it all in one check.

To Laelan, it seems clear that adoption brokers are trying to spread their business across multiple jurisdictions to capitalize on the fact that not all courthouses have implemented strict translation requirements. A doctor at Parkhill clinic, Robert Hix, said Marshallese patients have begun evading the doctors and nurses’ questions, and nurses have seen people exchanging babies in the parking lot in order to hide from suspicious medical staff. “As we’ve started to try to create systems to protect them,” said Koehler, “will it just become a kind of arms race,” with attorneys coaching potential birth mothers at every step? “Because it seems like we’ll always be behind on that.”

When the illicit adoption business was booming in Hawaii, it took a coordinated community campaign to create an alliance strong enough to stop it. Advocates met with Homeland Security, the FBI, and local and state legislators; judges intervened and hospitals and politicians were enlisted to help enforce regulations to protect Marshallese mothers and children. But the first step in Arkansas should probably be a widespread education campaign to help recently arrived Marshallese understand that the adoptions happening in Arkansas are a far cry from those back home. Marshallese women are offered false comfort, Lang said, through another Marshallese proverb, Jinen Koto In—or “Mother of the Wind”—which implies, even more than Jined Ilo Kobo, that nature will always return a child to her original mother. In the United States, where the rules governing closed adoptions are rigid and unyielding, that’s simply not true. Birth parents who sign away their children in closed adoptions will likely not see them for years or decades—if ever.

When I visited Maryann and Dexter Koshiba’s home in Huntsville last November, signs of neglect were apparent on the grounds of their apartment complex: Toys and discarded furniture were strewn around the lawn, most of the apartment numbers were written on the doors in permanent marker, and an inch of thick, early winter ice encased the outside staircase. The inside of their apartment, however, was different: sparsely furnished, but neat, with a thick, pink, floral rug lending the room a pop of colorful optimism. It was a bare-bones evocation of the better life that many Marshallese hope for when they emigrate to this corner of Arkansas. Maryann sat on the rug as the couple spoke with me; when Dexter came home from work, he sat on the couch. At one point, one of his daughters toddled over to him, and he reached for her, swinging her onto his lap as Maryann watched. The movement was fluid and innate, a glimpse of immediate familial intimacy—one that, for the Koshibas’ youngest daughter, has been cruelly interrupted. a

The Ghost of Cornel West

What happened to America’s most exciting black scholar?

BY MICHAEL ERIC DYSON | MAY

Nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned” is the best-known line from William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride. But I’m concerned with the phrase preceding it, which captures wrath in more universal terms: “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned.” Even an angry Almighty can’t compete with mortals whose love turns to hate.

Cornel West’s rage against President Barack Obama evokes that kind of venom. He has accused Obama of political minstrelsy, calling him a “Rockefeller Republican in blackface”; taunted him as a “brown-faced Clinton”; and derided him as a “neoliberal opportunist.” In 2011, West and I were both speakers at a black newspaper conference in Chicago. During a private conversation, West asked how I escaped being dubbed an “Obama hater” when I was just as critical of the president as he was. I shared my three-part formula for discussing Obama before black audiences: Start with love for the man and pride in his epic achievement; focus on the unprecedented acrimony he faces as the nation’s first black executive; and target his missteps and failures. No matter how vehemently I disagree with Obama, I respect him as a man wrestling with an incredibly difficult opportunity to shape history. West looked into my eyes, sighed, and said: “Well, I guess that’s the difference between me and you. I don’t respect the brother at all.”

West’s animus is longstanding, and only intermittently broken by bouts of calculated love. In February 2007, West lambasted Obama’s decision to announce his bid for the presidency in Illinois, instead of at journalist Tavis Smiley’s State of the Black Union meeting in Virginia, calling it proof that the nascent candidate wasn’t concerned about black people. “Coming out there is not fundamentally about us. It’s about somebody else. [Obama’s] got large numbers of white brothers and sisters who have fears and anxieties, and he’s got to speak to them in such a way that he holds us at arm’s length.” It is hard to know which is more astonishing: West faulting Obama for starting his White House run in the state where he’d been elected to the U.S. Senate—or the breathtaking insularity of equating Smiley’s conference with black America.

Despite West’s disapproval of Obama, he eventually embraced the political phenom, crossing the country as a surrogate and touting his Oval Office bona fides. The two publicly embraced at a 2007 Apollo Theater fundraiser in Harlem during which West christened Obama “my brother. . . companion and comrade.” Obama praised West as “a genius, a public intellectual, a preacher, an oracle,” and “a loving person.”

Obama welcomed West’s support because he is a juggernaut of the academy and an intellectual icon among the black masses. If black American scholars are like prizefighters, then West is not the greatest ever; that title belongs to W.E.B. Du Bois. Not the most powerful ever; that’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. Not the most influential; that would include Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, Black History Week founder Carter G. Woodson, historian John Hope Franklin, feminist bell hooks, Afrocentricity pioneer Molefi Kete Asante—and undoubtedly William Julius Wilson, whose sociological research has profoundly shaped racial debate and the public policies of at least two presidents. West may be a heavyweight champ of controversy, but he has competition as the pound-for-pound greatest: sociologists Oliver Cox, E. Franklin Frazier, and Lawrence D. Bobo; historians Robin D.G. Kelley, Nell Irvin Painter, and David Levering Lewis; political scientists Cedric Robinson and Manning Marable; art historian Richard J. Powell; legal theorists Kimberlé Crenshaw and Randall Kennedy; cultural critic Tricia Rose; and the literary scholars Hortense Spillers and Farah Jasmine Griffin—all are worthy contenders.

Yet West is, in my estimation, the most exciting black American scholar ever. At his peak, each new idea topped the last with greater vitality. His fluency in a remarkable range of disciplines spilled effortlessly from his pen, and the public performance of his massive erudition inspired many of his students to try to follow suit, from religious studies scholars Obery Hendricks and Eddie Glaude Jr. to cultural critics Imani Perry and Dwight McBride. West may not be Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, Jack Johnson, Jersey Joe Walcott, or Sugar Ray Robinson. He’s more Mike Tyson, a prodigiously gifted champion who rose to the throne early and tore through opponents with startling menace and ferocity. His reign was brutal, his punch devastating, his impact staggering.

It was that sense of scholarly excitement that drew me to West after I read his first book, Prophesy Deliverance!, in 1982. The book validated the intellectual passion I’d courted in my youth, never leaving me as I navigated some challenging circumstances. I had been a promising student from a Detroit ghetto who won a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school outside of town on the condition that I repeat the eleventh grade. I confronted racism head on for the first time at that new school, and it rocked me: I was expelled during my second year for poor performance. I returned to the inner city and the prospect of collecting my diploma at night school. I got married and became a teenage father, one who worked in an auto-supply factory and hustled odd jobs after high school. I didn’t start college until the fall of 1979, one month before my twenty-first birthday. That same year, I divorced my son’s mother after moving South to attend the historically black Knoxville College. My father died two years later, and I made do for a spell with the only material inheritance he could pass on: a Chevy station wagon that had once served as the work vehicle for our Dyson & Sons grass-cutting, sod-laying, and odd jobs enterprise. Over the next few years, I served as pastor of three different churches in Tennessee while completing my degree at Carson-Newman College, 20 miles northeast of Knoxville, where I transferred in 1981 to get a firmer footing in my study of philosophy.

When West’s book was published, my phone service at home had been shut off because I had no money to pay the bill. There was a pay telephone outside the laundromat where I washed my clothes, and one day, instead of doing the laundry, I spent my last $5 calling West at his Union Theological Seminary office in New York City. I rhapsodized about his philosophical acumen and cutting-edge theories of race for a while, and West let on that he had heard about me from a mutual friend and encouraged me to stay in touch. I took him at his word and soon scrounged up the money to drive the 600 miles from Tennessee to see him deliver a series of talks at Kalamazoo College.

West had not yet freed himself from reading his lectures to develop the rhetorical style for which he is justly celebrated: an extemporaneous exploration of ideas that features the improvised flourishes and tonal colors of a jazz musician and the rhythmic shifts and sonic manipulations of a gospel preacher. Yet even then West mesmerized, effortlessly surfing the broad waves of Western thought, defending the notion of black humanity while laying siege to white sectarianism—proving by his own impossibly literate performance that white superiority was a lie, at least as long as his gap-toothed mouth spit out esoteric knowledge.

West and I became dear friends. I admired his penetrating intellect and he nurtured my deepening commitment to a life of the mind. West wrote a letter of recommendation on my behalf when I applied to graduate school in 1984 and helped me to land at his alma mater Princeton, where he had been the first black student ever to earn a doctorate in philosophy, and where I became the second black student to earn a doctorate in religion. West had a huge crush on the R&B singer Anita Baker, and I got us tickets to see her perform in New Jersey. After a brief backstage introduction to the singer I had finagled, West relived his high school track glory and sprinted up the street in glee.

As a graduate student, I arranged for West to lecture at Princeton in the late ’80s, before he was an academic superstar, and I can still remember how he inventively grappled with the decline of European domination, the rise of American hegemony, and the decolonization of Third World countries, even as he spoke of the pervasive influence of black culture in the broader life of the nation, citing Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and Frantz Fanon as major witnesses to the trends he outlined. I had observed literary scholar Houston Baker dazzle another Princeton audience with a dynamic and dramatic lecture, but West topped that performance with the sheer breadth of his inquiry and the erudite ad-libs to his written presentation.

West’s early work was a marvel of rigor and imagination. He rode the beast of philosophy with linguistic panache as he snagged deep concepts and big thinkers in his theoretical lasso and then herded thousands of stalking students into Ivy League classrooms packed to the rafters. In Prophesy Deliverance!, West invited Foucault to sing the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” in the black revolutionary choir. The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989) ingeniously pitched American pragmatism as a multiracial conversation that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Du Bois, and Richard Rorty. And in Keeping Faith (1993), West gathered a slew of seminal essays on subjects like social theory and the philosophy of religion—baptizing poststructuralist thought in American waters while translating the insight of its biggest European stars with analytical verve.

At the age of 39, West catapulted to fame after struggling financially and became, deservedly, a far richer man with the publication of his best-known work, 1993’s Race Matters. It isn’t a scholarly book, per se, although its pages carry the weight of his formidable intellect as he traces the cultural dynamics of race with exquisite and uncharacteristic—for the time—lucidity. (Dense jargon was at its zenith in the postmodernist academy of the 1990s.) Race Matters changed how we speak of black identity in the United States. It gave our country a golden pun for matters of race that mattered more than they should and brought West the sort of celebrity that is intoxicating and distracting. West garnered glowing profiles in Newsweek and Time—in the same week—and explored his ideas on radio with Terry Gross and on television with Bill Moyers and Bill Maher. There was a certain satisfaction in West’s rise: One of the smartest men of his generation also became one of its most popular.

The intellectual landscape had shifted dramatically beneath West’s feet by the time Obama went after the presidency. The Internet and social media ushered in new voices on the nation’s most vexing problems and made room for fresh thinking on race and identity. Even as the pace of West’s published scholarship slowed, he remained a powerful cultural presence. If West’s most notable book argued that race mattered, his celebrity and iconic status meant that his endorsement also mattered.

West remained allied with Obama until he took the White House and, in football parlance, faked left and ran right. “[Obama] posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit,” West complained in an interview with Salon. “He acted as if he was . . . concerned about the issues of serious injustice and inequality, and it turned out that he’s just another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair.” It’s worth noting that the president’s actions were in keeping with the demands of his profession: Like most recent Democratic politicians, Obama nodded in a progressive direction while campaigning but toed a more centrist line when it came time to govern. What distinguishes West is that he assailed Obama’s insufficient leftism and proclaimed it a racial betrayal. “I would rather have a white president fundamentally dedicated to eradicating poverty and enhancing the plight of working people than a black president tied to Wall Street and drones,” he told The Guardian.

Long before their ideological schism, however, West believed himself personally betrayed by Obama because of his (supposed) disinterest after the election. It is a sad truth that most politicians are serial rhetorical lovers and promiscuous ideological mates, leaving behind scores of briefly valued surrogates and supporters. West should have understood that Obama had had similar trysts with many others. But West felt spurned and was embittered. This is where Congreve’s insight on love decomposed to rage comes crashing in. West has repeatedly declared that he did 65 engagements for the presidential campaign in 2008, and was offended when the president didn’t provide tickets to the inauguration. (Obama later told me in the White House that West left several voice messages, including prayers, from a blocked number with no instructions of where to return the call, a routine with which I was all too familiar.) In a 2011 interview with Chris Hedges on Truthdig that appeared under the headline “The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic,” West recalled his indignation during the Inauguration, when he arrived at his Washington hotel with his mother, and she noted that the bellman had a ticket to the event but not her son. “I couldn’t get a ticket for my mother and my brother,” West said. “We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, ‘That’s something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t get one, honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.’” Thus the left-wing critic found it unjust that the workingman and not the professor had a ticket to the inauguration. Only in a world where bankers and other fat cats greedily gobble rewards meant for everyday citizens would such a reversal appear unfair. J.P. Morgan might have been mad; Karl Marx would have been ecstatic.

This moment for West followed a pronounced and decades-long scholarly decline, something that did not escape the notice of other academics and intellectuals, none more notably than Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, who clashed publicly with West. (West departed Harvard for Princeton in 2002.) Summers had reprimanded West for his varied side projects, everything from advising Reverend Al Sharpton’s failed presidential bid to his vanity musical ventures. I couldn’t endorse these criticisms, but I knew Summers was right when he pointed to West’s diminished scholarly output. It is not only that West’s preoccupations with Obama’s perceived failures distracted him, though that is true; more accurate would be to say that the last several years revealed West’s paucity of serious and fresh intellectual work, a trend far longer in the making. West is still a Man of Ideas, but those ideas today are a vain and unimaginative repackaging of his earlier hits. He hasn’t published without aid of a co-writer a single scholarly book since Keeping Faith, which appeared in 1993, the same year as Race Matters. West has repeatedly tried to recapture the glory of that slim classic by imitating the 1960s-era rhythm and blues singers he loves so much: Make another song that sounds just like the one that topped the charts. In 2004, West published Democracy Matters, an obvious recycling of both the title and themes of his work a decade earlier. It was his biggest seller since Race Matters.

Even a cursory survey of West’s recent work captures the noticeable diminishment of his intellectual force. Hope on a Tightrope (2008) is mostly a collection of West-ian wisdom spoken and then transcribed. The cover features West standing at a blackboard with the words “What Would West Say?” chalked again and again, like an after school punishment, a haunting hubris suggesting a parallel to “What Would Jesus Do?” His memoir Brother West (2009) is an embarrassing farrago of scholarly aspiration and breathless self-congratulation—West, for instance, deems his co-authored book The War Against Parents (1998) a “seminal text”; praises Race Matters as “the right book at the right time”; and brags that Democracy Matters sold over 100,000 copies, landed at No. 5 on The New York Times bestseller list, and “continues to influence many.” None of this competes with the description on West’s website of his first spoken word album, Sketches of My Culture, which claimed at the time of its release that in “all modesty, this project constitutes a watershed moment in musical history.”

Brother West was co-written with David Ritz, a writer best known for album liner notes and ghostwriting entertainers’ biographies—a sure sign of West’s dramatic plummet from his perch as a world-class intellectual. It’s one thing for Ray Charles to turn to Ritz; another thing entirely for a top-shelf scholar to concede that he can’t write for himself, or is too busy to do so. It is akin to Du Bois hiring Truman Capote to fashion his autobiography. The journalist David Masciotra called The Rich and the Rest of Us (2012), which was also co-authored, this time by Tavis Smiley, “a cover version of a hit performed better by other singers—Barbara Ehrenreich, Joseph Stiglitz, and William Julius Wilson, to name a few.” West’s latest, Black Prophetic Fire, published last year, is another talk book, this one edited by Christa Buschendorf, a German scholar who interviewed West. Last October, Masciotra reviewed Fire for The Daily Beast, and called it “a strange and disappointing culmination of [West’s] metamorphosis from philosopher to celebrity,” one that is in keeping with “his pattern of not solely authoring any books in the past ten years.” If you’re counting: That’s two talk books and two co-authored ones across a decade—not quite up to the high scholarly standard West set for himself long ago.

In Brother West, West admitted that he is “more a natural reader than natural writer,” adding that “writing requires a concerted effort and forced discipline,” but that he reads “as easily as I breathe.” I can say with certainty, as a college professor for the last quarter century, that most of my students feel the same way. What’s more, West’s off-the-cuff riffs and rants, spoken into a microphone and later transcribed to page, lack the discipline of the written word. West’s rhetorical genius is undeniable, but there are limits on what speaking can do for someone trying to wrestle angels or battle demons to the page. This is no biased preference for the written word over the spoken; I am far from a champion of a Eurocentric paradigm of literacy. This is about scholar versus talker. Improvisational speaking bears its wonders: the emergence on the spot of turns of thought and pathways of insight one hadn’t planned, and the rapturous discovery, in front of a live audience, of meanings that usually lie buried beneath the rubble of formal restrictions and literary conventions. Yet West’s inability to write is hugely confining. For scholars, there is a depth that can only be tapped through the rigorous reworking of the same sentences until the meaning comes clean—or as clean as one can make it.

The ecstasies of the spoken word, when scholarship is at stake, leave the deep reader and the long listener hungry for more. Writing is an often-painful task that can feel like the death of one’s past. Equally discomfiting is seeing one’s present commitments to truths crumble once one begins to tap away at the keyboard or scar the page with ink. Writing demands a different sort of apprenticeship to ideas than does speaking. It beckons one to revisit over an extended, or at least delayed, period the same material and to revise what one thinks. Revision is reading again and again what one writes so that one can think again and again about what one wants to say and in turn determine if better and deeper things can be said.

West admires the Socratic process of questioning ideas and practices in fruitful dialogue, and while that may elicit thoughts he yearned to express anyhow, he’s at the mercy of his interlocutors. Thus when West inveighs, stampedes, and kvetches, he gets on a roll that might be amplified in conversation but arrested in print. It’s not a matter of skillful editing, either, so that the verbal repetition and set pieces that orators depend on get clipped and swept aside with the redactor’s broom. It’s the conceptual framework that suffers in translating what’s spoken to what’s written, since writing is about contrived naturalness: rigging the system of meaning to turn out the way you want, and making it look normal and inevitable in the process.

An essential tenet of West’s arguments, and the centerpiece of his public identity, is his belief about prophets, and more important, his claim to be one. West’s follow-up to Prophesy Deliverance! was Prophetic Fragments, a 1988 collection of essays, lectures, and speeches. Two more volumes followed in 1993: Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times and Prophetic Reflections. “I am a prophetic Christian freedom fighter,” West wrote in one essay, adding in his memoir, “I see my role as . . . someone who feels both a Socratic and prophetic calling.”

Prophets in the Judeo-Christian tradition draw on divine inspiration to speak God’s words on earth. They are called by God to advocate for the poor and vulnerable while decrying unrighteousness and battling injustice. Among black Americans, prophecy is often rooted in religious stories of overcoming oppression while influencing the moral vision of social activists. Black prophets are highly esteemed because they symbolize black resistance to white supremacy, stoke insurgence against the suppression of our freedom, inspire combat against social and political oppression, and risk their lives in the service of their people and the nation’s ideals. They remind us of the full measure of God’s love for the weak and unprotected, especially in an era when prophecy has been co-opted, turned into a bland cultural commodity, and marketed as the basis for enterprising exploits of major corporations or for political gain.

We see this phenomenon each year during the birthday celebration for Martin Luther King Jr., one of the greatest figures in both black and U.S. history, and someone who is revered as a prophet. Fast food corporations trumpet King’s message of togetherness and yet often fail to pay a living wage to their workers, even as conservative politicians pay homage to King’s memory while implementing voter ID laws that imperil the franchise for millions of black citizens. The same culture that killed King now seeks to kill contemporary expressions of his prophetic itinerary, by portraying today’s activists, such as those found in #BlackLivesMatter and the movement to end police brutality, as the moral opposites of his social vision and ’60s-era nonviolent protest. The argument over who and what is prophetic has rarely been more heated in black culture than it is now.

The model of the charismatic black male leader has come in for deserved drubbing since it overlooks the contributions of women and children that often went unheralded in the civil rights movement and earlier black freedom struggles. Queer activists sparked the #BlackLivesMatter movement, underscoring the unacknowledged sacrifice of black folk who are confined to the closets and corners of black existence. Even those who enjoy a direct relationship to King and to Malcolm X haven’t escaped scrutiny. Louis Farrakhan is faulted (and praised) for his distance from Malcolm’s racial politics, and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have been pilloried for lacking King’s gravitas and grace. The truth of those assessments is not as important as the value of the comparison: It holds would-be prophets to account for standards of achievement both noble and nostalgic, real and imagined.

Despite the profusion of prophecy in his texts and talks, West has never bothered to tell us in rich detail what makes a person a prophet. He doesn’t offer a theory of prophets so much as announce their virtues and functions while grieving over their lost art and practice. In Black Prophetic Fire, West offers a sweeping assessment of contemporary black life: “Black people once put a premium on serving the community, lifting others, and finding joy in empowering others,” he wrote. “Black people once had a strong prophetic tradition of lifting every voice.” Today, however, “Black people have succumbed to individualistic projects in pursuit of wealth, health, and status. . . . [They] engage in the petty practice of chasing dollars.”

West offers no empirical proof for these claims; like so much of his recent work there are assertions without sustained and compelling arguments, and certainly no polls or studies that prove the increase in black materialism, or individualism, or the decline in black prophetic beliefs and behavior. West’s failure to carefully chart the history and ethical arc of prophecy leads him to wild overstatement. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography, West may not seek to define a prophet, but he knows one when he sees one, and quite often, they sound just like him. This limp understanding of prophecy plays to his advantage because he can bless or dismiss prophets without answering how we determine who prophets are, who gets to say so, how they are different from social critics, to whom they answer, if they have standing in religious communities, or if God calls them.

West has never given us detailed comparative analyses of prophets in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or Zoroastrianism, nor has he distinguished between major and minor prophets. He hasn’t explored the differences between social and political prophecy; examined the fruitful connections between the biblical gift of prophecy and its cultural determinants; or linked his understanding of prophecy to secular expressions of the prophetic urge found in New Left radicalism, for example, which led to Jack Newfield’s notable analysis of the movement in A Prophetic Minority. (To be fair, Newfield didn’t spend a great deal of time exploring prophecy either; but then he didn’t fancy himself a prophet like West, nor did he viciously lambast those who fall short of his expectations or standards.)

What makes West a prophet? Is it his willingness to call out corporate elites and assail the purveyors of injustice and inequality? The actor Russell Brand does that in his book Revolution. Is he a prophet? Is it West’s self-identification with the poor? Tupac Shakur had that on lock. Should we deem him a prophet? Is it West’s self-styled resistance to police brutality, evidenced by his occasional willingness to get arrested in highly staged and camera-ready gestures of civil disobedience, such as in Ferguson last fall? West sees King as a prophet, but Jackson and Sharpton, who have also courted arrest in public fashion, are “ontologically addicted to the camera,” according to West. King used cameras to gain attention for the movement, a fact West fails to mention in his attacks on Jackson, “the head house Negro on the Clinton plantation,” and Sharpton, “the head house Negro on the Obama plantation.”

The hypocrisy in such claims is acute: West likewise hungers for the studio, and conspicuously so. There he is on CNN, extolling his prophetic pedigree. There he is on MSNBC, discussing his arrest in Ferguson while footage of the event rolls. There he is in the recording booth making not spoken word or hip-hop, but a grimly earnest sonic hybrid of speech and music, and saying, “If I can reach one young person with a message embedded in a sound that stirs his or her soul, then I have not labored in vain.” There he is in The Matrix sequels, doing something he’s become tragicomically good at—playing an unintentional caricature of his identity.

West most closely identifies with a black prophetic tradition that has deep roots in the church. But ordained ministers, and especially pastors, must give account to the congregations or denominations that offer them institutional support and the legitimacy to prophesize. They may face severe consequences—including excommunication, censorship, being defrocked, or even expelled from their parishes—for their acts. The words and prophetic actions of these brave souls impact their ministerial standing and their vocation. West faces no such penalty for his pretense to Christian prophecy.

West might argue that not being ordained leaves him free to act on his prophetic instincts and even disagree with the church on social matters. Thus he avoids the negative consequences of ordination while remaining spiritually anchored. That’s fine if you’re a run-of-the-mill Christian, but there is, and should be, a higher standard for prophets. True prophets embrace religious authority and bravely stand up to it in the name of a higher power. The effort to escape responsibility should sound an alarm for those who hold West’s views about how prophets should behave. One need not be Martin Luther King to qualify as a prophet. But when you claim to be a prophet, you are expected, as the classic gospel song goes, to live the life you sing about in your song.

As an ordained minister and professor, I know the difference between the professorate and the pastorate, between prophets and scholars. When I utter progressive beliefs about equal rights for women or queer folk as a professor, I am sometimes lauded. When I was a church pastor—not a prophet, something I have never claimed to be—the same sermon that garnered praise from progressive scholars earned me scorn from church officials and members and even cost me a pastorate when I tried to put my beliefs into action and ordain women as deacons.

As a freelancing, itinerant, nonordained, self-anointed prophet, West has only to answer to himself. That may symbolize a grand resistance to institutional authority, but it’s also a failure to acknowledge the institutional responsibilities that religious prophets bear. Most ministers are clerics attending to the needs of the local parish. Only a select few are cut from prophetic cloth. Yet nearly all the religious figures we recognize as prophets—Adam Clayton Powell Jr., King, Jackson, Sharpton—were ordained as ministers. Powell and King were pastors of local churches as well. To be sure, there are prophets who are not ministers or religious figures—especially women whose path to the ministry has been blocked by sexist theologies—but most of them have ties to organizations or institutions that hold them accountable.

West has a measure of responsibility as a professor, but he enjoys far greater freedom than most ministers or prophets. Professors have a lot of flexibility in teaching classes, advising students, writing books, and speaking their minds without worrying that a deacon board will censor them or trustees will boot them out. Prophets, as a rule, don’t have tenure. West gets the benefits of the association with prophecy while bearing none of its burdens. By refusing to take up the cross he urges prophetic Christians to carry, West is preaching courage while seeking to avoid reprisal or suffering. Playing it safe means that West doesn’t qualify for the prophetic role he espouses.

West’s lack of understanding of the prophetic tradition is perhaps most evident in his criticism of Sharpton and Jackson. He berates them for their appetite for access to power, their desire for insider status. Even if we concede for the moment that this is true, it isn’t a failure of their prophecy but of West’s ability to distinguish between kinds of prophets. In his 1995 book, The Preacher King, Duke Divinity School Professor Richard Lischer noted that in ancient Israel, the central prophet moved within the power structure, reminding the people of their covenant with God and also consulting kings on military matters and issues of national significance. Peripheral prophets were outsiders who embraced the poor, criticized the monarchy, and opposed war.

West ignores these variations, which results in an idealized, and deeply flawed, portrait of King as a peripheral prophet who was only useful when he hugged the margin. But that, Lischer argued, is a distorted rendering of King’s prophetic profile:

As a central prophet, Martin Luther King had been deeply involved with the Johnson administration’s efforts to pass civil rights legislation. Beginning already in the Eisenhower administration and increasing steadily throughout the turbulent Kennedy years, he had been regularly consulted on matters of interest to the Negro in America. After the March on Washington, Kennedy had scrambled to align himself with King’s beautifully articulated ideals. In some of Lyndon Johnson’s early civil rights speeches, King was gratified to hear echoes of his own ideas. No black leader had ever enjoyed comparable access to the Oval Office and the power it represented.

King moved from central to peripheral prophet in his last few years with an emphasis on economic justice and antiwar activism—views he grew into as he wrestled with his conscience, his staff, and the folk to whom he was accountable. But West’s insistence that only peripheral prophets are genuine and powerful is undercut by the legislation King helped to pass as a central prophet: the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. King was arguably more beneficial to the folk he loved when he swayed power with his influence and vision. When West begrudges Sharpton his closeness to Obama, he ignores the fact that King had similar access.

Sharpton and Jackson moved in the opposite prophetic direction of King. While King kissed the periphery with courageous vigor after enjoying his role as a central prophet, Jackson, and especially Sharpton, started on the periphery before coming into their own on the inside. Jackson’s transition was smoothed by the gulf left by King’s assassination, and while forging alliances with other outsiders on the black left, he easily adapted to the role of the inside-outsider who identified with the downcast while making his way to the heart of the Democratic Party.

Sharpton, lacking the leeway that derives from a leader’s violent death, had instead to kill his persona; the rabble-rousing and inflammatory style of his early days is gone. West remains an elite academic and can hardly be said to have ever been a true outsider, given his position in the academic elite and the upper reaches of the economy, but he hungers to be seen as rebellious. In truth, West is a scold, a curmudgeonly and bitter critic who has grown long in the tooth but sharp in the tongue when lashing one-time colleagues and allies.

Leon Wieseltier famously derided West’s work as “almost completely worthless” in these pages 20 years ago. And although I strongly disagree with Wieseltier’s views of West’s early works, it would be fitting for West to downsize his ambition and accept his role as a public intellectual, social gadfly, or merely a paid pest. There’s nobility in such roles, and one need not dress up one’s intellectual vocation as a prophetic one. West may draw on prophetic insight; he may look up to prophets on the front lines; and he may even employ prophetic vocabularies of social dissent. But none of that makes him a prophet. One of West’s heroes, Malcolm X, said that just because a cat has kittens in the oven doesn’t make them biscuits. That’s what philosophers call a category mistake.

If West’s harangues against Obama are not the words of a prophet, then how do we account for his extravagant excoriations? They might be explained with a bit of the moral psychology West likes to apply to the president. West said in 2011 that “my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” because as a biracial child growing up in a white world, “he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin.” West said that when Obama “meets an independent black brother, it is frightening.” Yet Obama wasn’t too frightened to confront West. According to Jonathan Alter’s 2013 book, The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, at the 2010 National Urban League convention, Obama barked at West, “I’m not progressive? What kind of shit is this?” Other foul words were uttered, West added, and Obama “cussed me out.” A photo of the exchange exists: West frozen like a dear brother in the headlights as he smiled broadly and stood speechless.

The irony is that, as highly charged as his criticism has become, West is, in some ways, not that different from Obama. The president has long wished to be the grand architect of bipartisanship, the conciliator of left and right, the bridge between conservatives and liberals. West used to fancy himself a similar figure; at least he did when he was riding high on best-seller lists as a progressive icon. West sought to account for the suffering of black America by steering between the arguments of conservative behaviorists and liberal structuralists. He thought it was important to acknowledge self-inflicted injuries as well as dehumanizing forces. As Stephen Steinberg, a sociologist at Queens College, has argued, West set himself up as “the voice of reason and moderation between liberals and conservatives,” as the “mediator between ideological extremes.” Obama has similarly argued that black folk must cultivate moral excellence at home and in the community even as he admits the government must help fight black suffering.

West’s prescription for what ails black folk—and a big part of Obama’s plan, too—involves a personal and behavioral dimension beyond social or political change. For West, the cure is a politics of conversion fueled by a strong love ethic. “Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care,” West wrote in Race Matters. “Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one’s soul. This turning is done through one’s own affirmation of one’s worth—an affirmation fueled by the concern of others.” Obama believes the blessed should care for the unfortunate, a hallmark of his My Brother’s Keeper initiative. West and Obama both advocate intervention for our most vulnerable citizens, but while West focuses on combating market forces that “edge out nonmarket values—love, care, service to others—handed down by preceding generations,” Obama, as Alter contends, is more practical, offering Pell grants; stimulus money that saved the jobs of hundreds of thousands of black state and local workers; the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced the disparity of sentences for powdered and crack cocaine; the extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which kept millions of working poor blacks from sliding into poverty; and the extension of unemployment insurance and food stamps, which helped millions of blacks.

The odd thing is that Obama talks right—chiding personal irresponsibility in a way that presumes the pathology of many black families and neighborhoods—but veers left in his public policy. West, on the other hand, talks left but thinks right in his notion of nihilism and the factors that might reduce its peril. In Race Matters, West argued that the spiritual malady of “nihilism” is the greatest threat to black America—not racism, not class inequality, not material hardship or poverty or hyperincarceration. Steinberg rightly argues that it “takes hairsplitting distinctions, that do not bear close scrutiny, to maintain that West’s view of nihilism is different from the conservative view of ghetto culture as deeply pathological, and as the chief source of the problems that beset African Americans.” Steinberg says that despite “frequent caveats, West has succeeded in shifting the focus of blame onto the black community. The affliction is theirs—something we shall call ‘nihilism.’” West did as much to slam the poor with his stylish, postmodern update of ghetto pathology and blame-the-victim reasoning as any conservative thinker. He gave the notion ideological cover because it got a sexy upgrade from a prominent leftist. As much as West berates Obama’s neglect of the poor, his own writing brought them harsher visibility than they deserved.

The conservative underpinnings of West’s views on nihilism make his confrontations with progressives like Melissa Harris-Perry, a Wake Forest professor and MSNBC host whom he helped to recruit to Princeton in 2006, curious to say the least. The conflict with her stemmed from an essay Harris-Perry wrote in 2008 for The Root accusing Tavis Smiley of throwing “a temper tantrum” because Obama had declined to attend his State of the Black Union conference in New Orleans that year. In the article, Harris-Perry also jabbed at West for levying the same criticism at Obama for skipping the event in 2007. Smiley, West, and their supporters, she wrote, had created a “false, racial litmus test” for Obama, one that he failed simply by not showing up.

Harris-Perry again attacked West in 2011 in The Nation, decrying his “self-aggrandizing, victimology sermon deceptively wrapped in the discourse of prophetic witness.” West, she wrote, “offers thin criticism of President Obama and stunning insight into the delicate ego of the self-appointed black leadership class that has been largely supplanted in recent years.” West fired back in a 2012 Diverse magazine interview, saying, “I have a love for the sister, but she is a liar, and I hate lying.” West called Harris-Perry “the momentary darling of liberals,” but he “pray[ed] for her because she’s in over her head. She’s a fake and fraud.” Harris-Perry told Diverse that she left Princeton for Tulane in 2011 after some members of the African American studies department blocked her promotion to full professor.

If West is no prophet but instead a dynamic and once-indispensable social critic, neither is his nastiness the echo of divine disfavor from on high. In a 2014 interview on HuffPost Live, Morehouse College Professor Marc Lamont Hill challenged West about his attacks on his fellow black progressives. West compared himself to biblical prophets Jeremiah and Amos, contending there is “a certain intensity to prophetic language that hits deep and seems to be unfair, but is coming from a place of such righteous indignation.” Not content to be in league with mere prophets, West compared himself with Christ, with those who disagreed with him cast in the role of the Lord’s unprincipled opponents. “If we could hear what Jesus was saying when he ran out the money changers in the temple, it was not polite discourse.”

If this isn’t the height of self-righteousness, it is the depth of delusion and exegetical corruption—isolating and then interpreting a text to sanctify his scurrilous views. But West’s broadsides lack a crucial element. Lischer argued that late in his career King, too, “began to give full vent to his rage.” But unlike West, King’s “was the holy rage of the prophetic tradition, and not the resentment or vengefulness of his nationalist critics, to which he lent his voice. His prophetic forebears, as it were, taught him how to get mad, what themes to press, and what language to use.”

In his callous disregard for plural visions of truth, West, like the prophet Elijah, retreats into a deluded and self-important belief in his singular and exclusive rightness. But God reminded Elijah that his prophetic exclamations were wrong. He instructed him to rest and recognize that he wasn’t the only one left who believed in God or bore witness to the truth. But these words mean nothing to West, who, after all, isn’t a prophet. He cannot retreat, and he relentlessly declares his humility to shield himself from the prophet’s duty of pitiless self-inventory.

West and I participated in several State of the Black Union meetings, as well as a 2010 roundtable in Chicago to address the black agenda. I expressed love for Obama and criticized him for not always loving us back, arguing that Obama the president is Pharaoh, not Moses: a politician, not a liberator. Throughout his presidency I have offered what I consider principled support and sustained criticism of Obama, a posture that didn’t mirror West’s black-or-white views—nor satisfy the Obama administration’s expectation of unqualified support.

In The Center Holds, Alter described a meeting Obama held with prominent black figures in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, during which radio host Tom Joyner “began to mix it up with the author Michael Eric Dyson, who wanted the administration to target its efforts more on particular black needs.” Alter wrote, “Obama jumped in to say he had no problem with Dyson or anyone else disagreeing with him about how to help the needy,” but that he got upset with “critics who ‘question my blackness and my commitment to blacks.’” I said nothing to the president that day that I hadn’t said many times over the years.

If West’s accusation that some progressives are Obama apologists rings false, his finding fault in those who crave access is downright laughable. That’s because West shamelessly flaunts his proximity to the rich and famous and takes pride in knowing there are powerful people who love and admire him. It’s all there in West’s memoir, Brother West. “It was the summer of 1988, and we were all gathered around the grand piano at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard,” he writes. The “we” includes Simon, West, and the opera singer Kathleen Battle, his girlfriend at the time. West got to meet other famous people because of Battle. “Roberta Flack invited us to her apartment at the Dakota,” and Battle “introduced me to two fabulous maestros: the inimitable James Levine . . . and the famous conductor Christoph von Dohnányi.” Then there’s the time in 1998 that Warren Beatty phoned West and asked if he could take a look at a film he’d just made. “When the film was over, Warren turned to me and asked the $64,000 question, ‘Should I release it?’ I didn’t hesitate. ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘It’s a fascinating critique of capitalism and market-driven politics. I think . . . [it] needs to be seen.’” Thus we have West to thank for Beatty’s political comedy, Bulworth. After giving the actor-director the green light, West said he, Beatty, and their filmmates for the night, Norman Mailer and his wife, “talked our heads off till three in the morning.”

And then there’s music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, whom West met after the star’s attorney—“my dear friend Johnnie Cochran Jr.”—called him and said, “Corn, Sean is in deep trouble,” asking West to come to court with Combs for moral support during his trial for gun possession and bribery. There’s the time he met the hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg on a flight from Chicago to Houston. “I spotted Snoop Dogg and, just like that, announced publicly, ‘Lyrical genius on the plane!’” Or the time he hung out with Prince, who “had graciously invited me to his Bel Air mansion.” West said he was approached at Prince’s home “by a beautiful Latina, who was overflowing with intellectual passion,” and at “evening’s end, I told the sweet lady that it was a delight” as “Salma Hayek went her way and I went mine.”

There are literally pages and pages of illustrious name-dropping in Brother West, a book that owes its subtitle, Living and Loving Out Loud, to another boldface name—Bob Dylan. West was in an airport when Dylan’s drummer approached him and said that the legendary artist loved and respected West. The drummer relayed something Dylan said about the professor: “‘Cornel West,’ said Dylan, ‘is a man who lives his life out loud.’”

Perhaps West despises the access of Sharpton and others to Obama because, unlike them, he has heroically resisted such impulses and invitations. But he couldn’t hush his enthusiasm when another president, Bill Clinton, invited him to the White House after the publication of Race Matters. West said Clinton brought him to the Oval Office, “eager to engage in serious intellectual conversation about culture and politics.” Writing of Clinton, West says:

The brother was absolutely brilliant and I was having a ball. When I looked at my watch, though, I saw it was far into the middle of the night. We had been at it for hours. I realized I had an early morning flight back to New Jersey to teach at Princeton and needed just a little nod of sleep. But he was as fresh as ever. I remember thinking to myself—Does this brother have a job?—when I realized—He’s the president of the United States! I did leave, but only after another hour of conversation.

West offers himself a benefit that he refuses to extend to others: He can go to the White House without becoming a presidential apologist or losing his prophetic cool. He can spend an evening with the president, the first of many such evenings, without selling his soul. West can delight in meeting Clinton, with the sudden burst of recognition that he’s in the presence of the president of the United States!—the italicized enthusiasm is all his! West’s hypocrisy in the matter is radiant; it shines through his belief that only he can resist the siren call of presidential access and retain his “black card” and his three-piece prophet’s robe of honor.

West’s attacks on me were a bleak forfeiture of 30 years of friendship; it was the repudiation of fond collegiality and intellectual companionship, of political camaraderie and joined social struggle. I was a mentee and, according to West, who was kind enough to write a blurb for one of my books, “a rare kind of genius with organic links to our beloved street brothers and sisters.” But I had somehow undergone a transformation in West’s mind: I was an Obama stooge who had forsaken the poor. In November 2012, West, friend and mentor, one of the three men whose name is on my Princeton doctoral dissertation, let me have it in the national media.

It was during an appearance with Tavis Smiley on Democracy Now, shortly after Obama’s reelection. “I love Brother Mike Dyson,” West said. “But we’re living in a society where everybody is up for sale. Everything is up for sale. And he and Brother Sharpton and Sister Melissa and others, they have sold their souls for a mess of Obama pottage. And we invite them back to the black prophetic tradition after Obama leaves. But at the moment, they want insider access, and they want to tell those kinds of lies. They want to turn their back to poor and working people. And it’s a sad thing to see them as apologists for the Obama administration in that way, given the kind of critical background that all of them have had at some point.”

West was just warming up. After a fiftieth anniversary celebration of the 1963 March on Washington on the National Mall, a celebration Sharpton led and at which I spoke, West argued that Martin Luther King Jr. “would’ve been turning over in his grave” at Sharpton’s “coronation” as the “bona fide house negro of the Obama plantation,” supported by “the Michael Dysons and others who’ve really prostituted themselves intellectually in a very, very ugly and vicious way.” And recently, while promoting Black Prophetic Fire, West argued “the Sharptons, the Melissa Harris-Perrys, and the Michael Eric Dysons . . . end up being these cheerleaders and bootlickers for the President, and I think it’s a disgrace when it comes to the black prophetic tradition of Malcolm and Martin.”

West’s aggressions brought me great sorrow. In his anger toward me I was forced, for the first time, to entertain seriously the wild accusations levied against him: that he was consumed with jealousy of Obama, that he simply couldn’t abide the rise of a figure who eclipsed most other black personalities for the time being and who, for many, even competed with King for recognition as the “greatest black man in American history.” I still don’t buy those theories, but I do think West’s deep loathing of Obama draws on some profoundly personal energy that is ultimately irrational—it’s a species of antipathy that no political difference could ever explain. It is sad to think that West aimed at me because my criticism failed to comport with his shrill and manic dispute with the president; our lost friendship is the collateral damage of his war on Obama.

West has sacrificed friendships and cut ties with former comrades because he insists that only outright denunciation of Obama will do. It is a colossal loss for such a gifted man to surrender to unheroic truculence: If a mind is a terrible thing to waste, then the loss of a brilliant black mind is more terrible, more wasteful. At precisely the moment when we could use the old West’s formidable analytical skills to grapple with the myriad polarities that glut the political horizon, the new West, already in the clutches of a fateful denouement, has instead sought the empty solace of emotional catharsis.

If West was once Tyson in his glory, he is Tyson, too, in his infamy. Once great, once dominant, once feared, he is now a faint echo of himself. Like Iron Mike, West is given to biting our ears with personal attacks rather than bending our minds with fresh and powerful scholarship. Like Tyson, he is given to making cameos—in West’s case, appearing as himself in scripted social unrest, or playing a prophet on television in the latest protest. He has squandered his intellectual gift in exchange for celebrity. He’s grown flabby with disinterest in the work needed to stay aloft: the readiness to read, think, and recast thought in the crucible of written words.

West’s memoir offers a poignant and honest accounting of his relationship with women, and by extension, his relationship with Obama, who was, for a time, the object of West’s profound political affection:

Because I’ve never been an advocate of psychotherapy as a path to self-understanding. . . . I’ve avoided such therapy because I worry about how it might exacerbate narcissistic tendencies. . . . I’m not sure I know myself well enough to share my whole self with others. This, in part, might explain my volatile relationships with women. One might argue that because I don’t know myself, the more time I spend with a woman, the more various parts of myself emerge—parts that are, in fact, foreign to me. In short, my whole self surfaces, and it is precisely my whole self that strikes me as a stranger. To maintain a long-term and long-lasting bond with a woman may require the kind of soul-sharing or self-sharing that’s beyond my capability.

West’s fears of his narcissistic tendencies seem to have come true in his fight with President Obama. Hedges also used the language of the jilted lover in describing West, noting that he “nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated, and betrayed.” West admitted to Hedges in their interview that he went “ballistic” about Obama because he had been “thoroughly misled”; or, put differently, he was crushed that Obama had ideologically cheated on him.

West’s narcissism in this matter is not exemplified by his sense of being jilted but in the way he has personalized his grief. And the longer West has nursed his resentment, the more he has revealed parts of himself that even he may not understand or be able to explain, since political disappointment in a politician’s behavior rarely provokes such torrents of passion, such protracted, dastardly, and sadly, such self-destructive hate. The volatility that West said roils his personal relations may also mar his political ones. Now he lumbers into his future, punch-drunk from too many fights unwisely undertaken, facing a cruel reality: His greatest opponent isn’t Obama, Sharpton, Harris-Perry, or me. It is the ghost of a self that spits at him from his own mirror. a

Future Queer

Where is Gay America going next?

BY ALEXANDER CHEE | JULY/AUGUST

The day in 2011 that I went to the office of the city clerk in lower Manhattan with my partner Dustin to register for our domestic partnership was coincidentally also the first day same-sex partners were allowed to register for marriage in the state of New York. A reporter was on hand, hoping to get a quote. As a prompt, she told us that the state’s marital forms had not been updated: Any couple registering that day would be required to designate one person as the man, and the other, the woman. Did we have any reaction?

“We’re not here for that,” we said, smiling, as we passed her, and then we found we had to keep saying it at every point of the process, to all of the helpful clerks at each step who reminded us that we could register to marry instead. We thanked them and continued on to get our partnership. We had discussed marriage and decided it wasn’t for us, not yet, maybe not ever. A domestic partnership suited us. We joked a little afterward about which one of us would have been the man, which the woman, but without question, I had the uncanny sense of entering another world, one in which government officials recognized our relationship in a friendly, helpful way, even if we weren’t going to marry—and even if the forms weren’t quite ready for the many people like me about to get married. I remember thinking: This is the future.

I’ve lived through several of these moments. In 1995, for example, when highly active antiretroviral therapy, or what became known as the “aids cocktail,” was approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and then later entered the lives of my friends with HIV or aids, I went from worrying if they were going to live, to worrying that they still smoked too much now that they were going to live. Or in 2007, when my sister, who’s a teacher, invited me to speak to her high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, and the students there asked me why I didn’t come out in high school. I had to explain that such an act was unimaginable for a boy from Maine in 1984—as was anything like a student Gay-Straight Alliance—and I could tell my past was as unimaginable to them as their present was to me.

Or in 2008, when the Democratic National Convention adopted “Health care is a right” into its platform for the presidency. I remembered staffing a volunteer table for ACT UP in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood in 1991, on the corner of Castro and 18th Street, and on my table were posters, stickers, and t-shirts that bore the same slogan in all caps—ACT UP slogan house style.

I wore one of those shirts to model for passers-by. People walked by me, uncomfortably most of the time, but on occasion, someone would come up and ask for a sticker or a t-shirt, and it felt like a little victory. This presidential platform moment, while huge, felt strangely small at the same time—still not enough.

ACT UP was trying to explain to Americans that aids could affect all of us, that health care that ended once your disease was expensive could affect more than gay men with HIV or aids. We were trying to tell them about the future—a future they didn’t yet see and would be forced to accept if they failed to act. But there was an epidemic of denial happening alongside aids, the belief that you could not get aids, not really, unless you were gay—and that you would never need the protections people with HIV needed. In 1990, health care was not something most people feared losing, and employer-based health care was not yet considered a business cost too high to bear. Blue Cross Blue Shield was not yet run for profit. But we had seen our friends and lovers abandoned by doctors and shunned by hospitals, and as we knew only too well, drug companies were run for profit, and there were drugs that needed to be tested in order for people with HIV to survive. The number of people infected in 1990 seemed too low to the people running spreadsheets at drug companies, and so they weren’t doing the tests on drugs that they could. There was no upside for them in making drugs that they believed would only benefit perhaps 50,000 people. This is a fate any American with a rare disease has faced—not just people with HIV—they quickly learn that their lives are the cost of doing business.

As of 2013, according to the World Health Organization, 35 million people were estimated to be living with HIV or aids globally, and 39 million have died from the disease. The epidemic of denial won, and now everyone knows there is money in the making of drugs for aids. There is now, sadly, a great deal of money in it. And, as some of my old ACT UP friends have noted, there is now no money in curing it. Instead, there is PrEP, the one-pill HIV, pre-exposure prophylaxis, which promises condom-free sex, if you can afford it, at a price tag for the uninsured of $8,000 to $14,000 a year.

What are the implications of what you’ve invented? That’s a question I often ask my students in fiction writing, as a way to get them to generate plots organically out of the little scenes that first come to them. So what are the implications of what we’ve invented?

I live in a world today that I never would have imagined possible. I can serve in the military as openly gay, if I wanted. I can join my friends as they passionately, freely, and publicly debate the merits and downsides of the sex life that PrEP makes possible. I can choose from male, female, and “custom,” as well as my preferred pronoun, on my Facebook profile, where I get notices about the upcoming reunion of ACT UP SF alongside updates about my upcoming high school reunion. And, yes, I can marry in 37 states.

The pursuit of marriage equality has changed us. We privilege the life of couples over those who might never marry in a way we never did before. For many Americans, marriage equality represents a capstone “here at last” moment for gay people, but we know it really is more of a beginning. It is still legal to be fired for being gay or transgender in more than half of U.S. states. Those openly gay soldiers, should they marry, can be denied shared retirement benefits for their spouses in states where marriage equality is not (yet) the law. Increased trans visibility and the conversation around gender identities have generated more awareness than ever before about trans lives, and has resulted, for example, in advances, such as the inclusion of trans girls in the Girl Scouts. Yet terrible violence against trans people continues, often as brutal murders, many of them left unsolved, should they even be investigated, especially against trans people of color. Religious conservatives, meanwhile, are busy using the courts and legislatures to try to deny us the rights we have only recently gained—claiming that upholding the laws that have been passed oppresses their religious freedom, and that they must be allowed the liberty of their bigotry.

And so it is with a very strange sort of ambivalence that I await news regarding marriage from the Supreme Court. I feel we are at the edge of another one of those uncanny thresholds—that the future is sneaking up on me again. At my most pessimistic, I fear that this decision, along with the appearance of PrEP, is a sign of some sort of Freudian repetition cycle the whole country is in, in which marriage equality is always being fought for and decided, and aids is always the ground for advances in treatment instead of a cure—all while these other very serious issues also need attention, and we fight forever over the same inch of ground.

If I were to write a novel about a gay man like myself in the future—let’s say the year 2035—his ability to marry another man, whatever the Supreme Court ruling, wouldn’t be in question—it could even be the conventional choice, the one his friends laugh at even as they attend because they love him. He might even be descended from two generations of officially recognized gay marriages. “Gay,” “Queer,” “Straight,” “Same-Sex”: these would be deeply retrograde terms—orthodoxies to be resisted, or historical fictions, even. Given the press of overpopulation on us now, I could imagine my character as having chosen a childless, single queerness, and could depict this as the green choice, sexually and emotionally. The rearing of children could be something that is done only rarely, especially given its increasing cost. More and more, having children is something only the wealthy can afford in the United States, so in 2035 it wouldn’t be science fiction to imagine an entrenched oligarchy as the only class legally allowed to have them. In a political twist, China’s one-child policy could be seen retroactively as both visionary and not having gone far enough.

My protagonist could find the process of questioning his sexuality and gender as normal as we now find deciding what to watch on television. He might have no single sexual identification—omnisexuality—and that could be the overwhelmingly mainstream norm. Or he could be a part of an elite group of wealthy gay men, all of them seronegative and residing in an intentional community sexually sealed off from anyone who can’t pass a credit check and an HIV test.

Marrying more than one person at the same time might also be possible for him within this system, especially if marriage is finally seen as the economic system it is—with fundamentalist Mormonism as something of a model for the legal future queer, but more like if the sister wives all ran away with each other and set up a home together. Or maybe my protagonist lives closeted inside a Christian radical white supremacist plantation state, complete with death camps for sexual deviants, married to a woman who is, perhaps, closeted herself.

Yet, when I think of the future for myself in real life and not fiction, I stick to what I know. Which is almost nothing. My hope is that marriage equality queers marriage, rather than straightening queers—that we reinvent it and keep reinventing it, and sexuality is finally acknowledged as having no inherent moral value except, perhaps, when it is ignored. But my generation never planned for this. Many of the men and women who might have showed us how to grow old while being queer are dead, and most of us, well, we didn’t think we’d live this long, either. One of the most punk rock things I can think of now for me and my friends from ACT UP, is for us to grow old with the people we love, however we choose to do it. Getting to be an old queer is our next revolution.

If I am alive in 2035, I will be 67, and I can easily imagine myself stepping down from a plane in Berlin to begin my retirement with Dustin, who, while he doesn’t quite believe in marriage and may never marry me, will also never leave me. In Germany, our immigration status as a domestically partnered couple is today protected in a way it wouldn’t be, say, if we were moving to the United States. And given the way marriage equality is in some states delegitimizing domestic partnership as a path to shared benefits, it could be that, at that time, we would be moving to avoid being forced to marry.

If I’m still in the United States, most likely, I’d be in the Catskills, having expanded the hunting cottage I just bought with my partner and our friends, Kera and Meredith, into something like a retirement compound. Kera and Meredith’s son Theo will be 23 by then, have just graduated college, if we still educate our young that way. Dustin and I are his gay uncles, and I will have taught him to pee standing up in the woods—we’re working on it now—and he won’t probably even remember it.

The future I can’t imagine, but want to imagine, is one where we’re all at peace, working toward something else. I find myself wanting to ask the religious right, which has fought so hard, all my life, to demonize me, if that is really the best use of their time on this earth. Because, as I think of my future, I think of all that I could have done if I hadn’t been fighting for the right to the basic freedoms we’re all supposed to enjoy as Americans—freedoms gay people have never fully had. I hope we find some way to live together in peace. I just don’t yet see how. a

At War in the Garden of Eden

Christian fighters, ISIS invaders, and the fight for Iraq’s Nineveh Plains.

BY JEN PERCY | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER

Nael Marcus Nissan sat smoking with his legs spread on a burgundy couch in an abandoned home in the village of Baqofa, 15 miles from the Islamic State front lines. Nissan was a fighter with the Dwekh Nawsha, one of the three primary Assyrian Christian militias founded in the Nineveh Plains in northwest Iraq’s Kurdistan, in the months after the isis invasion in June 2014. The Dwekh patrolled Baqofa in a black pickup truck with a small crucifix scratched on its side and a Russian machine gun mounted in the bed. They spoke Aramaic, the ancient language of Christ. Nissan was 25 years old, with high cheekbones and a trimmed goatee. He wore aviator sunglasses, a floppy camouflage hat, baggy fatigues, and an ammunition vest stocked with grenades and cigarettes. He preached gospel at the evangelical church in Dohuk, and since he learned English from listening to ’90s-era rap, he quoted Scripture in the cadence of Ja Rule. “I’m from New York,” he sang. “No, I’m from Baghdad!” His favorite song was Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise.”

“Did you see the guy like Robin Hood on our flag?” he said. It was tacked on the wall alongside paintings of Jesus with his heart lit up like a bulb. The flag was a white field with a golden orb surrounded by a four-pointed star—the sun—at its center. Red, white, and blue stripes stretched to each corner, representing the Tigris, Euphrates, and Great Zab rivers. At the top was Assur, the archer, “the god of empire and the god of war,” Nissan said. “God punished the Assyrian Empire. Now he punish us for the many sins we do.”

Nissan lit another cigarette. He wore gold rings on his pinkie fingers and had “John 3:16” written on his ammunition vest in black sharpie. “We fight to prove our existence,” he said. “The Assyrians have lived on this land for 7,000 years. If we lose the language, we lose the Assyrian people. We’ll disappear.”

Baqofa was empty other than the fighters. An elderly deacon named Yusef Odisho, along with Nissan and the rest of the Dwekh fighters, took me to a high-walled courtyard that enclosed an ancient Christian graveyard and a church constructed nearly 400 years ago. The graveyard was covered in dust and overrun with weeds. “This is my father,” Odisho said, reading the inscription on one of the headstones. “This is my grandfather.”

The doorway to the village church was blocked by an empty coffin. A short bearish soldier kicked it aside. The walls were an oceanic blue and there were six rows of wooden pews. A plastic Christmas tree lay on its side near the altar. Someone had filled a whiskey bottle with wine used as the Blood of Christ. Dog feces covered the floor of the room in which the children took Sunday school.

“Did Santa come?” I asked.

“With bombs, guns, and suicide,” Nissan said.

“This is not the first time we’ve been so close to disaster,” Odisho said. “This is always happening, and Iraq is always divided. This is the land of all religions. The land of ruins.”

In the nuns’ quarters, someone had left behind a letter to the looters:

Brothers,

We forgive you for your foul deeds. You have robbed our convent. Do you not know that we are virgins? We have no one to support us with money. You even put the refrigerator at the door to steal it at night. [You stole] the blankets, mattresses, gas canisters, and even our clothes. How can you say that you love God while you steal the livelihood of the poor? God does not have mercy on robbers. Unlawful deeds bring calamities upon their doers.

Your mother,

The Nun

Among the rubble Nissan discovered a ruler with each centimeter marked by the head of an American president. “George Bush destroyed my country and Barack Obama brought isis to my country,” he said. “All of them are Illuminati.” Nissan was fascinated by Illuminati. He owned three or four books on the subject. Later, when I got to know him better, he turned to me and said, “Suddenly I feel you are Illuminati.”

The Assyrians are the indigenous people of Iraq, native to the Nineveh Plains, home to some of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world. Christianity arrived in Nineveh in the first century, hundreds of years before Muhammad was born and Islam came to Iraq. The earliest known historical records of Baqofa date to the seventh century. Some believe the Yazidis, who practice a syncretic Middle Eastern religion that blends elements of Zoroastrian and other ancient Mesopotamian faiths, are descendants of the Assyrians who sought refuge in another faith after the fall of their empire.

isis entered Nineveh Province in June. Mosul fell in three days, and the militants moved east, past the ruins of the ancient city of Nineveh, into the heart of Iraq’s Christian community. They took the village of Zumar, and then Sinjar, where as many as 1,000 Yazidi men there and in nearby hiding places kneeled and died by firing squad before their corpses were bulldozed into mass graves. In Qaraqaosh, the largest Christian city in Iraq, 1,500 died by sword. They chopped a five-year-old in two.

It was evening when the nuns of Baqofa—Sisters Katrina, Magdalene, Noor, and Mary Dominique—heard shouting in the streets. isis was coming. They had ten minutes to flee. If they didn’t, the militants would do to them what they had done to the Yazidis: Sell them or behead them. The nuns fled before the assault, in a yellow school bus, until they reached the neighboring village of Telskuf. They watched news of the isis advance on television until a fighter from the peshmerga, the military force that controls Iraqi Kurdistan, told them to leave. Sister Mary Dominique, the eldest nun, stood up. “A Muslim is telling us this. It must be serious,” she said. They headed north, to the city of Dohuk, driving slowly because there were so many families fleeing on the road. Sister Mary Dominique wept the whole way. When they arrived at Dohuk, the monastery was already full of Christians. They drove as far as they could into the mountains and lived for weeks in an abandoned village. It was as far as they could get from everything.

The peshmerga drove isis from Baqofa in late August. They occupied the village for three months, looted it, and blamed isis for what they’d done, carrying away refrigerators, air conditioners, televisions, anything of value. They said the village was not safe, that isis could return, and they graffitied the doors to the homes and shops: no one is allowed in here. do not enter here. They tore the pages from holy books and scattered the pages like leaves. Now, the Dwekh were in control.

The Dwekh had set up base in a house that once belonged to the village mayor who had fled and was now living in a caravan near Dohuk. The house, still full of photographs of the family’s children, was enclosed by a mud wall covered in scribbles of bunnies, humans with mechanical body parts, a veined eyeball. The heads of rose-colored thistles grew above the wall.

The days were quiet and they had little to do. There were no marching drills or arms training, and there were no formal patrols set. They eavesdropped on isis radio chatter and listened as their enemies complained about the lack of women. Most of the fighting was between isis and the peshmerga elsewhere in the region, but isis lobbed shells at them periodically. The men passed the time watching movies: The Passion of the Christ with Mel Gibson or Tears of the Sun with Bruce Willis. They liked professional wrestling and would gather to watch WWE broadcasts. They posed for pictures with their weapons and posted the shots on Facebook. They drank tea and smoked cigarettes. In the afternoons they prayed.

In a sandbag bunker on the roof of the mayor’s house was a telescope. They kept it trained on the black flag of the Islamic State, which flew over the nearby Christian town of Bartella. Many of the Dwekh fighters were from Bartella, and in the evening they climbed onto the roof and watched their homes light up in the dark.

Nineveh was full of dead cities and oil fires. A sickly yellow fog hovered over the flat plains. On the way to Baqofa I could see smoke rising from Mosul. Within Nineveh’s borders are the overlapping lives and beliefs of the Turkmen, Yazidis, Shabaks, Sunni and Shiite Arabs, Mandeans, and Assyrian Christians. The soil of the Assyrian Empire, which once stretched from Egypt to Persia, is buried beneath the soil of Kurdistan. In its eastern sector is Lalish, the center of what the Yazidis believe is the historical location of the Garden of Eden, which once nurtured the Tree of Life and led to the fall of man.

The region is not barren of biblical romance. There are the sites of old biblical stories, and ruins that are symbols of eternity. Nineveh demands our mythologies because it supports them.

isis has targeted the Yazidis, Assyrian Christians, and the region’s other minority groups for persecution. Each faith is fighting over the same questions they were fighting over when their theologies developed, which is really the question of which culture will be dominant, whose God, or whose version of God, will be the better God. This fight has meaning not only here but around the world, and its battlegrounds inexorably draw the faithful to its violence.

The American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan advanced a simplistic concept of good and evil, a dichotomy that continues to exist in the minds of those who dictate our actions abroad. “We carried our grief to the Lord Almighty in prayer,” said George W. Bush after September 11—and we took that grief and that God with us in search of hegemony and revenge. And if it is true that the failure of American imperial ambition in Iraq created the conditions that led to the rise of isis, then, too, isis’s existence provides an opportunity for redemption. “We’re not going to let them create some caliphate through Syria and Iraq,” President Obama said in August 2014, as he used isis’s atrocities as a reason to renew air strikes in Iraq and continue the military operations he vowed to end. Obama, it could be argued, was not interested in a theocratic campaign against isis—his concern was preventing genocide. But isis’s actions tapped into the public’s lingering Bush-era mentality in a powerful way. In Congress, meanwhile, calls went out to support the peshmerga. Five hundred million dollars in U.S. aid was proposed as the amount necessary to protect the weak and vanquish the villain. Rand Paul, in an outpouring of Western largesse and presidential enterprise, went further, suggesting the Kurds be granted their independence from Iraq, saying, “they would fight like hell,” if freedom was the reward for isis’s demise.

Together, the Assyrian Christian militias have an estimated 500 to 900 men under arms. The Nineveh Plains Protection Unit (NPU) is based largely in Dohuk. Its web site calls for the development of a “native defence force” to “safeguard existing Assyrian and Yazidi lands and take back what has been plundered.” For a donation of $100 or more, supporters receive an “archival quality” photo of an NPU fighter, smiling and bearded, holding a weapon, his shoulders draped in ammunition bandoleers. “These prints will last for years, and can be hung as a poster or framed and placed in your home.” The Nineveh Plains Forces (NPF), based in Telskuf, operates under the auspices of the peshmerga, which provides them with weapons and training, obviating the need for a comparable online fund-raising apparatus.

The Dwekh is the only militia that welcomes foreign recruits. Rama Baito, the Dwekh’s digital media manager, told CNN in April that the group had a waiting list of 200 foreign fighters looking to join. “We simply do not have enough weapons or training capacities,” he said. The first American in the Dwekh was a 28-year-old from Troy, Michigan, named Brett Felton. Felton’s Facebook page lists the Dwekh and Jesus Christ as his employers. His cover photo shows a thin and handsome young man with mournful brown eyes and a well-tended mustache. He is seated on a couch in a Dwekh camp, in full fatigues and sunglasses, a kaffiyeh wrapped around his neck, holding an assault rifle. A large cross is overlaid on the image. In another photo, Felton is shown again dressed in fatigues, his kaffiyeh this time wrapped around his head, wearing body armor with an American flag and an Iraqi flag sewn on (the U.S. flag on top). Six other foreign fighters had been with the Dwekh, until June, when, according to Albert Kiso, the militia’s spokesperson—a different role than digital media manager—they got bored and took off with the peshmerga to a base near Sinjar. “They wanted to have fun,” Kiso said.

Felton arrived in Baqofa in August 2014, the phrase “King of Nineveh” written in Arabic across his ammunition vest. On his right forearm was a tattoo of Jesus and on the left a machine gun. On his back was the archangel Michael. Felton’s presence brought a great deal of press and social media attention to the Dwekh, which helped with donations. He set up a PayPal account for people who wanted to contribute, using the email address soldierofchrist2005@gmail.com. In news reports, he identified himself as a “crusader” and said that it would be “an honor to give my life” to protect Christians from isis. He added that he had come to Iraq to “keep the church bells ringing.”

No one knows how many Americans have journeyed to Iraq to fight isis under the guise of Christian idealism. “We patrolled every day, got shot at, mortared, hit by IEDs [Improvised Explosive Devices], one of my friends was killed,” Patrick Maxwell, a former Marine sergeant who returned to Iraq in 2014 and fought with the peshmerga, told The New York Times. “But I never saw the enemy, never fired a shot.”

Still, for the Dwekh, the presence of Christian crusaders, from America or elsewhere, is not a welcome one. Although they are an independent force, they work closely with the much larger and better-armed peshmerga, who are predominantly Sunni Muslims. Nor was there much affection for Felton, who left the Dwekh in March. Before he left, Nissan told Felton, “Your God is not my God. Your God is a businessman.” One day when he was still in camp, Felton drank too much whiskey and passed out. Nissan opened his laptop. It was full of photographs of naked women.

“King of Nineveh,” Nissan said of Felton. “What an asshole.”

Outside the city of Tal Afar, which sits in the Nineveh Plains northwest of Mosul, a range of low green hills marks the border between isis and Iraqi forces. The peshmerga have small bases located every few miles along the front line. Tal Afar, which is under isis control, is situated just on the other side of the hills in a low desert plain. To the west is Mount Sinjar, where Kurdish forces and isis regularly exchange fire. The roads in the area are cracked with craters from explosions. The day I arrived ten isis militants were arrested in a nearby village. Weeks earlier, villagers had come upon the corpses of several isis fighters being eaten by dogs.

Colonel Khaled Hamzo and his soldiers occupied a peshmerga base near the front. They were billeted in an abandoned home a couple of miles away. It was a two-story stucco structure, comfortable, with a balcony and a garden filled with pink flowers. The foreign fighters were in the garden in their fatigues and body armor, carrying their weapons. Between them was a table crowded with cigarettes and Tiger brand energy drinks. The lawn in the garden was immaculate with pink flowers in full bloom. Fields of deep grass stretched for miles in every direction. They’d been in camp with Colonel Hamzo for a week.

“I’m representing the Marine Corps,” said Louis “Tex” Park, a 25-year-old from Houston. “This is the kind of shit we do when we get out.”

Park had been discharged from the Marines in January 2015 due to problems he had after he was diagnosed with ptsd. He had served in the infantry in Afghanistan. Things didn’t work for him after he got home, Park said. All he did was drink. He broke up with his girlfriend, found another, broke up with her. Therapy helped, and when things finally got better, he saved all his money to buy a first-class airplane ticket to return to Iraq. His family wasn’t happy about the decision. They told him they didn’t think killing isis was a very Christian thing to do. “If doing the right thing earns me a place in hell,” Park said. “Then I’ll take my rightful place in hell.”

Later, Park said, “A lot of Western media out here think we are doing a lot of fighting.”

“What have you been doing?” I asked.

“This sort of thing,” he answered. He meant sitting and waiting and talking to reporters.

Richard Jones, 29, had a trim auburn beard, intense eyes, and a slightly cross-jawed underbite. He wore Oakley sunglasses with a rainbow sheen. He had done two tours of duty, one for the U.S. National Guard in 2004, and another for the Georgia State Defense Force in 2010, but he had never deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Jones was one of the newest recruits to the Dwekh Nawsha.

Cory was a 24-year-old U.S. Army veteran who’d served a tour of duty in Iraq. (He refused to tell me his full name.) The Dwekh had called him “Hot Pussy” because they thought his long hair was girlish. He had been in the country only two weeks, traveling here to make a documentary about the Western fighters taking on isis. He had abandoned the project when he couldn’t find anyone fighting. “I thought there was going to be this big push, this big front,” he said. “But there wasn’t a big push or a big front.”

Cory and Jones had GoPro cameras (corporate slogan: “Be a Hero”) attached to their ammunition vests.

Jenny wore fatigues covered in Canadian flag patches. She said she had a military background but was reluctant to describe it in detail. “I think the media already made up a story about me,” she said. “I’ll roll with that.”

“Jenny” was in fact Gill Rosenberg, a 31-year old Canadian-Israeli originally from Vancouver. In 2006, she had immigrated to Israel, served with the Israeli Defense Forces, and then gotten involved in a telemarketing scheme that scammed thousands of dollars from senior citizens in the United States after telling them they had won the lottery. She was extradited, pled guilty in a Manhattan court, and served a couple of years of a four-year sentence. (Rosenberg did not reply to several requests for comment.) She received an early release predicated on the condition that she remain on U.S. or Israeli soil, but in 2014, she slipped out of the country and into Syria to fight isis, a move she described as “an act of redemption.” She left Syria in January to fight with the Dwekh and now the peshmerga.

There was one other Westerner who no one really talked to because his British accent was so thick it wasn’t worth the effort. He looked worn out, like a gnarled tree root. Everybody called him Jimbo.

“You seem like an expert,” I told him.

“Unfortunately not,” he said.

They’d received an influx of messages from foreigners interested in joining the Christian militia but they told everyone it was a waste of time and there was a lot of bureaucracy. They were, as far as they knew, the only group of Westerners in the area. The mission for these the Western fighters was simply to get a mission. Park was with the Dwekh for eight months and never fired a round in anger. He helped out tracking isis’s movements and did a little work training the fighters. And he spoke to members of the Western media, who were, of course, excited to know that adventurers from America had joined the fight. Colonel Hamzo treated them more as guests than soldiers. They ate large meals with him and slept on the floor of his bedroom alongside his top commanders. The rest of the soldiers ate less and slept wherever they could.

Colonel Hamzo and Mohammed Ahmed, his second in command, joined us in the garden. The colonel wore a brown jumpsuit and a wide belt. Ahmed spoke English with a slight British accent and wore a green vest over his uniform.

“You should ask them questions,” Jones whispered. “Because they always feel left out.”

“So tonight,” Ahmed said. “100 percent daesh attack.” (Daesh is a pejorative term for isis in Arabic.)

“Daesh is coming?” Park asked, kicking his legs and leaning forward. “After the battle we will count the bodies to see who killed more, you or me.”

“Winner buys chai,” Cory said.

“Fuck that,” Park said. “If we kill more daesh, we get to stay here.”

“Let’s go to Tal Afar,” Jones said.

Ahmed stared at the men. “Listen,” he said. “When you fight, you kill someone. Fighting isn’t a joke.”

The smiles disappeared. “We know,” Park said. “We’ve lost friends fighting.”

“Clearly we’re not going to go attack Tal Afar now,” Jones explained to me. “Sometimes you ask for the big trip even if you get the little trip. It’s just like a lot of times we wear our equipment and uniforms to reinforce the concept that we’re ready. I don’t want you to think we’re just sitting here making jokes. If you talk about invading Mosul, well, maybe they will let us go to Tal Afar. But we won’t go to Tal Afar. You know?”

“We are definitely not the A-team,” Cory said. “But it works for us.”

Nissan lived with his mother in a small house in Dohuk. I traveled there one afternoon on his day off. He was chain-smoking in the street, dressed in a white tank top and bleached jeans. He needed money, so we set off looking for an ATM. Sewage ran in the alleys. A cat trapped in a plastic bag struggled for breath. Without his camouflage hat and Kevlar, he was skinnier than I’d imagined him to be. His greased hair sparkled as if encased in ice. He invited me inside his home and showed me to his tiny room, where he had a bookshelf full of Bibles. He introduced me to his mother, who wandered around the house in a flower-print dress looking fretful. I asked about his father. “His heart exploded,” he said, adding after a beat, “From all the coffee.” Nissan had five brothers, but he was the only one who stayed at home to take care of his mother. She suffered from a psychiatric disorder that included symptoms associated with schizophrenia or perhaps depression, but Nissan had never been able to take her to a doctor to find out exactly what was wrong.

Before joining the Dwekh, Nissan had worked for a telemarketing company called CSS Global. He had never bothered to figure out what the CSS meant. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Just one shithole on the way to another.” He was raised in the Assyrian section of the Baghdad neighborhood of Dori. His whole life, he said, violence had trailed him. Packs of stray dogs used to chase him through the Baghdad streets. His mother beat him; his father, too. When the Americans arrived in 2003, Sunni extremists took over his neighborhood. He survived two IED strikes and three car bombs. One of them struck a Baghdad market where he was selling French perfume, so close by that it singed his hair and knocked him over. In 2006, the Sunnis commenced an ethnic-cleansing campaign in Dori. They stopped cars on the street, asked the religion of everyone inside, and shot the Christians. During these years, many of Nissan’s friends joined Sunni extremist groups and a couple threatened to kill him. He lost a friend to cross fire between the Americans and the extremists.

In 2007, his family fled Baghdad to Nineveh, where his grandparents lived. Under Saddam, Nineveh had been a refuge for Assyrian Christians, a place where they could live with relative autonomy and security. That changed after the regime fell and grew worse following the 2004 U.S. assault on Fallujah, which drove Sunni extremists north into Nineveh. The Assyrians, seen as allies of the Americans, became targets. “Leave or die” notes appeared on doorsteps.

Nissan took work as a shepherd in a village outside of Dohuk. He slept on the ground among his sheep. He didn’t shower and spoke to no one. After a year he came in from the fields and asked his father for a cigarette; they smoked, and he felt a surge of warmth stirring in his heart. That night he showered and lay in the living room where his family slept together by the air conditioner. He was Christian, and there were Bibles in the house, but he had never read them with much attention. But now he rose to find them. He opened one to Genesis and then to Isaiah. He read Psalms. He read John, Peter, Jacob, and Jehovah. In John, it talked about love.

He went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. “I’m no Christian,” he said. “All these years I thought I was a Christian, and now I find out I’m not a Christian.” He smoked, he drank, he made problems. He hadn’t been living his life according to Scripture. Then he heard God say, “Yes, you’re not Christian. You don’t love people.” It’s true, Nissan said to me. I didn’t even love my mother or my father.

The following morning he went to a service at a Chaldean Catholic church—the primary Iraqi Christian denomination—but nothing made sense. He tried to pray, and he felt something in his mind, something rising; he thought it was God, but it was only a headache. He left the Catholics for an evangelical church led by a priest from Detroit who spoke in tongues. The priest put his hand on Nissan’s shoulder and gave him three prophecies, and one of these prophecies was that he would be a leader of men; leading them not to war but to God. “I read the Bible more and more after that.”

In 2009, he was baptized, and he knew that when you go underwater, you die. And then you come out and you have a new life. Now his thoughts were interrupted by the babbling of God. He heard words, audible sounds. God had started the war in Syria, and it will never end. All of Damascus will be destroyed. Babylon will be destroyed. Nissan believed that the apocalypse is near. “God is out of time,” he said. “Daesh is the monster in Revelations.”

When isis was advancing in Nineveh, everyone fled to the mountains. Nissan didn’t run. He walked the deserted streets of Dohuk and listened to “epic music,” compositions that left him with feelings of grandeur and heroism.

“Daesh, they’re like ghosts,” he said. “The sound of daesh coming is the sound of the wind.”

The Jesus Loves Those With Broken Hearts Conference was held in Dohuk in mid-May at Geli Hall, a modern performance space with polished white floors and dangling purple lights. In its scale and aesthetic the hall was reminiscent of an American mega church. A Lebanese singer from Boston named Nizar Fares sang songs for the broken hearts of the displaced. He wore a powder blue blazer and white jeans. The conference was organized by a Sacred Heart priest named Sheikh Abu Rami, who ran a medium-sized but very popular church in the center of Dohuk. Dozens of priests and hundreds of displaced people—the broken hearts—were in attendance, some Christian, many not, and donations had been collected from as far away as Canada and the Netherlands.

Most of the displaced families lived in a construction site across the street from Geli Hall. They’d lost all their possessions and homes, and had been witness to firing squads, torture, abductions, and women sold into sexual slavery. A 28-year-old Yazidi from Sinjar who said his name was Amar told me about a family whose daughter had been tied to a chair and burned alive. In the back row, seated alone, was a young Yazidi man in a black suit. He hung his head and gripped a thick Bible. He was working as a teacher in a village of 400 people near Sinjar until isis arrived, killing all the boys and stealing all the girls.

“King Peacock,” he said, “never came.”

For the Yazidis, God is the creator of the world, and the world is under the care of seven holy beings, the chief being Melek Taus, or King Peacock. Thousands of years ago God sent King Peacock on a mission to visit earth and make it beautiful. He landed in Iraq and saw volcanoes, earthquakes, and other unpleasant things. Melek Taus fell from God’s favor and was exiled to hell. Unlike Satan, the fallen angel of Christendom, King Peacock extinguished the flames of hell with his own tears. He cried for 7,000 years, and God forgave him.

It was dusk and bats swooped the fields. The peshmerga bases glowed like bonfires along the front. The foreign fighters had climbed to the roof of the house to talk away from their peshmerga hosts.

“Scientists came up with this theory,” Jones said. “You can’t observe something without changing it.”

“Reality might change now,” Park agreed. “It’s like Schrödinger’s cat. You know we can’t ever see things for what they are because even to observe things changes them.”

Everyone agreed Park had gotten the name of the theory wrong, but no one knew which one was the right one.

“I’m talking about how you can’t see things in a pure way,” Jones said. “The fact is even when a journalist comes it’s almost impossible for them to actually see us. It’s almost like we are acting in an unnatural state.”

“That’s right. You being around changes things. This means we might not get to the front,” Cory said. “We’re out here, you’re out here. What the hell is everybody else doing? If the Holocaust had happened to the Jews in the time of Facebook, how many people would have sat back and let it happen? There is genocide going on. Why is it so hard to do good?”

“The naïveté,” Jones said, “comes from the belief that everything that happens in the world is happening on a television screen.”

“We are men of action,” Park said. “It hurts.”

Colonel Hamzo came up the stairs with a group of his soldiers and pointed flashlights in our eyes. One of the soldiers walked to the edge of the roof and searched the fields. The beam was thick and bright. Colonel Hamzo slipped his hands over Park’s shoulders. Choni, he said. Something was on the way. Two large armored vehicles on our side of the hills.

“What? Daesh is coming? This is great news,” Park said. “If it has wheels, we can shoot it. We can jack it.”

The colonel gave no commands.

At two in the morning, we were eating meat by a fire in the yard when Ahmed stopped by to announce that the militants were on their way. He wrapped a kaffiyeh around his head and tied a knot in the back so it hung down his neck like a ponytail.

“You look like Geronimo,” Cory said.

“We killed a big boss today,” Ahmed said.

The boss was Abu Alaa al-Afari, and he was second in command to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of isis. They had caught him at the Martyrs Mosque in a village outside Tal Afar. The peshmerga slipped ammunition vests packed tight with magazine rounds over their heads. They retrieved their weapons, and piled into three trucks. The foreign fighters joined them.

Colonel Hamzo removed his vest and put it on me. He handed me an AK-47, took my photo, and retrieved his rifle. Then we left. I rode with Colonel Hamzo and three others in the back of his Land Cruiser. We drove for ten minutes. The grass was deep and the road dark. The foreigners were in the truck ahead of us.

The driver turned on his low beams. Stray dogs loped in and out of the lights. What sounded like a chant broke the silence. The colonel turned up the volume on the radio. It was Kurdish propaganda music, a bolster for death and patriotism.

“Peshmerga. Peshmerga. Peshmerga,” the voice said. A video screen lit up the center dashboard, showing images of soldiers eating meat or marching. Colonel Hamzo moved his hands to the music. He lit a cigarette and flicked the ashes at the dogs.

The base was nothing but a single makeshift bunker, a lean-to of sorts fashioned out of sandbags and old blankets. Soldiers crowded beneath a yolk-colored light. The air was cold. Beyond the edge of the base there was nothing but blackness, the abyss of the Islamic State. Park ran off to man a PKM machine gun. Jones handed me a glow stick. “Wave this around if you disappear,” he said. The shelter was rimmed with floodlights and the peshmerga outside stood casually illuminated. One of the trucks attempted to turn around but got stuck. It kicked dust, and the wheels groaned.

Colonel Hamzo walked calmly into the shelter and sat on a cot with his legs crossed. I followed him inside. Jones and Cory sat across from each other. Cory had brought along a PSL Romanian Sniper Rifle and Jones an AK-47 assault rifle. The two sat on the edge of the cots with the gun between their legs and ping-ponged military jargon.

Cory said he had first two and then every other. Jones asked Cory if it was a nine or a six. Cory said it was a one. Jones said let’s crank it six because a six is zero plus five plus four. Jones wished for z-mags. Cory wanted infrared laser. “If we hit the IR-7s on the sevens with laser, we’d go far,” Cory said. Jones guaranteed infrared in the green beam. Cory swapped mag rounds. He said he’d keep one molly if Jones racked it. Jones said look for the red magnesium tag on the rear. Cory said he felt good with that dope, hold low for close or high for far. He’d roll.

So many days without a mission, without fighting. It seemed to have built up a pressure inside them, and we were beginning to see it fissure.

“I can’t wait to get out there,” Jones said. “You are lucky you get to see this.”

Cory clicked a magazine into place and stood up. The peshmerga were all staring open-jawed or laying on their backs smoking. “I feel like I am the center of attention right now,” Cory said.

A moment passed. The colonel spoke with Ahmed. A few soldiers went in and out. “What are we waiting for?” I asked.

“Something to happen,” Cory said.

Colonel Hamzo pressed his hands together. “Let’s have chai,” the Colonel said. I leaned over to Cory who sat to my right. “Why are we drinking tea?”

“Fuck if I know,” he said.

The peshmerga smoked. Cory sat back down and I continued writing. Colonel Hamzo asked if I was done yet. He nodded towards my notebook, and I had the distinct feeling that this was a set up, the whole thing was staged; the foreigners equally towed in.

The colonel put extra sugar in my tea, and then he ordered everyone back into the vehicles, and we returned to the base.

Back in the colonel’s quarters the foreign fighters lounged on the floor and ate plates of fruit. “It’s time to sing,” Colonel Hamzo said. There was an awkward pause: No one volunteered.

“Every night,” Park said. “Not a day gone by we don’t work in Top Gun.” He pulled out his iPhone and nodded his head to “Highway to the Danger Zone.”

“Hey, Boss,” Cory said to the colonel. “I don’t remember you singing.”

Colonel Hamzo shook his head and swatted the air with his hands. No one would sleep until the Americans sang.

“OK,” Park said. “Guys?” He sighed. “Star-Spangled Banner?”

Park unpacked an American flag that he had brought with him to Iraq from Georgia. “Got to get out the flag,” he said. They all sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” but didn’t make it to the end. They didn’t know the words. So they tried a tune from Team America: World Police.

“America,” they sang. “Fuck Yeah!” a

Corn Wars

The farm-by-farm fight between China and the United States to dominate the global food supply.

BY TED GENOWAYS | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER

On September 30, 2012, agents from the FBI contacted U.S. Customs and Border Protection at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago with an urgent request. They wanted bags from two passengers on an outbound flight to Beijing pulled for immediate inspection. The passengers didn’t track as dangerous criminals: Li Shaoming, president of Beijing Kings Nower Seed Science & Technology, a large Chinese agricultural company that develops corn, rice, cotton, and canola seeds, and Ye Jian, the company’s crop research manager.

In Li’s luggage, agents found two large Pop Weaver microwave popcorn boxes. Buried under the bags of unpopped snack kernels were roughly 300 tiny manila envelopes, all cryptically numbered—2155, 2403, 20362. Inside each envelope was a single corn seed. In Ye’s luggage, agents found more corn seeds hidden amid his clothes, each one individually wrapped in napkins from a Subway restaurant. Customs officers were dispatched to the gate area for the Beijing flight, where they found the two men and conducted body searches. Still more corn seeds, also folded into napkins, were discovered in Ye’s pockets.

Meanwhile, at a different gate, Wang Hongwei, another Chinese national believed to be in the employ of Kings Nower (agents never learned if he worked for the company or was related to someone who did), boarded a separate flight for Burlington, Vermont, where he had a car waiting for him to drive to Canada. FBI agents were there to follow him—though Wang, after leaving the airport parking garage, made a series of abrupt turns and managed to give his surveillance team the slip. It didn’t matter. Border patrol officers were waiting when Wang pulled up to the Highgate Springs port of entry along the U.S.-Canadian border. He was selected out for a search, which turned up 44 bags of corn seeds under his seat and in his suitcases, as well as a notebook filled with GPS coordinates and a digital camera containing hundreds of pictures of cornfields. Questioned by agents, Wang would say only that he had purchased the seeds from a man named Mo Hailong, the director of international business at the Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group (DBN Group), the parent company of Kings Nower Seed.

Not wanting to alert Mo, agents allowed all three men to leave the country, but their corn seeds were confiscated. Special Agent Mark E. Betten, a 16-year veteran of the FBI specializing in the investigation of intellectual property theft, had the seeds sent to an independent bio-diagnostic testing laboratory, which confirmed that they were proprietary, genetically modified hybrids. Eventually, their genetic sequencing was matched to seeds under development by Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, and LG Seeds, which, including LG’s parent company, Groupe Limagrain, comprise three of the four largest seed companies in the world. The GPS coordinates were found to correspond with farms in Iowa and Illinois, where those companies were testing the performance of new hybrids.

In December 2013, after collecting this evidence, U.S. marshals arrived at Mo’s home in Boca Raton, Florida. He was taken into custody and extradited to Iowa, where he has been under house arrest in Des Moines ever since. The FBI also brought charges against five alleged co-conspirators, all Chinese, who remain at large, including the three men stopped by customs agents, and eventually against Mo’s sister, Mo Yun, as well. Mo and his sister are scheduled to stand trial before a federal court in Iowa in September on charges of conspiracy to steal trade secrets. If convicted, they face up to ten years in prison and a $5 million fine.

This may seem like a lot of post-September 11 cloak-and-dagger for a few corn seeds, but the U.S. government believes that something much larger is going on. This theft, they argue, stems from an undeniable and dangerous fact: Despite its remarkable landmass, China simply can’t grow enough food to feed itself, particularly now that the country’s burgeoning middle class has acquired an appetite for meat. (Most corn in China is used as feed for livestock.) Water shortages and lack of arable terrain have forced their government to buy between two and five million metric tons of American corn annually, approximately 94 percent of all corn imported into China each year.

If China hopes to feed (and pacify) its growing population while also loosening the very real stranglehold that America has on its national food supply, its farmers have to start producing a lot more corn—not just enough to meet their domestic demand in good years but enough to maintain a stockpile to offset their global market impact during bad ones. For decades, China has increased corn yields by putting more acres into production, but they’re running out of arable land, and the usda now estimates that Chinese corn consumption will rise by 41 percent by 2023, far outpacing production increases. The only tenable way for China to meet its own demand, then, is by planting high-performance hybrids, which can single-handedly double or potentially even triple per-acre corn production. Chinese scientists haven’t developed a significant corn hybrid in years. But Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer, the two American seed giants, have produced so many successful hybrids that they now control 45 percent of all the seed sold in the world.

The Department of Justice maintains that China is quietly permitting and even encouraging companies to steal American agricultural secrets right out of the ground. Acquiring the technology behind these next-generation hybrids could save companies like DBN Group—and the country—as much as a decade, and many millions of dollars, in research. And, plant geneticists familiar with the case told me, the very fact that Kings Nower Seed has brought to market—and intended to bring more—products with stolen genetics hints that the Chinese government is complicit. The theft is not hard to detect or prove; the only way that DBN Group could hope to get away with this scheme is if China were pushing such spying as a matter of policy.

In fact, a 2011 report prepared by the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, which advises the president on intelligence matters related to national security, listed “agricultural technology” among the targets “likely to be of greatest interest” to spies from Russia and China. “Surging prices for food,” the report stated, “may increase the value of and interest in collecting U.S. technologies related to crop production, such as genetic engineering, improved seeds, and fertilizer.” Since that report, the Department of Justice has cracked down, successfully prosecuting Chinese national Kexue Huang for stealing secrets related to organic fertilizer production and an unidentified “new food product” while he was employed at both Dow AgroSciences and Cargill, as well as Weiqiang Zhang, for theft of genetically engineered rice seeds from Colorado-based Ventria Bioscience.

What makes the case against Mo Hailong stand out is that the FBI openly acknowledges that each step of its operation, each escalation of surveillance, was approved by a federal judge under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (fisa), which requires that the investigating agency provide evidence that wiretapping is “necessary, or relevant, to the ability of the United States to protect against foreign threats to national security, such as attack, sabotage, terrorism, or clandestine intelligence activities.” The federal government, thereby, has implicitly acknowledged that it considers agricultural products both an asset and a weapon in a long-range geopolitical chess match with China, a resource of near-military value and importance, one that must be protected by all available means. By that logic, those Chinese nationals stealing corn are spies, no different—and, indeed, perhaps more important—than those who swipe plans for a new weapons system.

This may, at first glance, appear melodramatic—like Homeland in the heartland—but it is striking that the Department of Justice did not invoke fisa measures (at least not openly) in carrying out similar investigations into Dongfan Chung, a former Boeing engineer who stole trade secrets related to the Delta IV rocket and the Air Force’s C-17 aircraft, or Qing Li, who conspired to procure 30 military accelerometers, which, according to the government, “have applications in smart bombs, missiles, and calibrating g-forces of nuclear explosions.” When asked about the extraordinary use of fisa in this case, Nick Klinefeldt, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, who is prosecuting Mo, chose his words carefully. “The agriculture industry is important,” he said. “It’s important not just to the state of Iowa but to the United States.” In announcing the charges against Mo last July, Thomas R. Metz, special agent in charge of the Omaha Division of the FBI, went still further, saying that “identifying and deterring those focused on stealing trade secrets, propriety [sic] and confidential information, or national security information is the number two priority for the FBI, second only to terrorism.”

Think about that: The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI now contend, in effect, that the theft of genetically modified corn technology is as credible a threat to national security as the spread to nation-states of the technology necessary to deliver and detonate nuclear warheads. Disturbingly, they may be right. As the global population continues to climb and climate change makes arable soil and water for irrigation ever more scarce, the world’s next superpower will be determined not just by which country has the most military might but also, and more importantly, by its mastery of the technology required to produce large quantities of food.

The bureau’s investigation of Mo Hailong began only after Mo made a stunning blunder. It was early May 2011, and Mo and Wang Lei, vice chairman of Kings Nower Seed at the time, were driving country roads in Tama County, Iowa, allegedly searching for a DuPont Pioneer test field. But apparently uncertain if he was in the right place or unsure of what kind of seed DuPont Pioneer was testing, Mo had Wang pull to the edge of a field, so they could question a farmer in the midst of spring planting. Mo and Wang told the farmer they had been attending an international agricultural conference at Iowa State and wanted to see someone planting a real cornfield. The farmer was dubious. Ames was nearly an hour away with nothing but expanses of cornfields in between, all at the peak of planting season. How had these two men chanced upon his field on the very day that he happened to be planting an experimental and top-secret seed under development by DuPont Pioneer?

The next day, a DuPont Pioneer field manager spotted the same car. He watched Mo scramble up the ditch bank, and then kneel down in the dirt and begin digging corn seeds out of the ground. When confronted by the field manager, Mo grew flustered and red-faced. He now claimed to be a researcher from the University of Iowa—not Iowa State—on his way to a conference. But before the field manager could question him further, Mo fled. He jumped into the waiting car, and Wang took off, swerving through the grassy ditch before fishtailing onto the gravel road and speeding away.

A few weeks later, agents from the Iowa office of the FBI sat down with DuPont Pioneer representatives for a standing meeting (which itself says something about the importance our law enforcement officials place on our corn) at their corporate headquarters in Johnston, Iowa, a northern suburb of Des Moines. A DuPont Pioneer executive mentioned the incident and explained that the company enters into exclusive contracts with farmers to grow proprietary and often genetically engineered seeds. The exact genetic sequence of successful seeds is a tightly held secret, worth many millions of dollars. The DuPont Pioneer field manager had written down the license plate number and handed it over to company security. Multinational food conglomerates like DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto have sizable security forces and highly efficient investigatory networks. They traced the plates back to a rental car company at the Kansas City airport. Representatives there said the car had been rented by Mo Hailong.

According to court documents, an unnamed vice president and general manager from DuPont Pioneer’s Chinese subsidiary told the FBI he already had reason to believe that Kings Nower Seed was somehow stealing the company’s experimental seeds in order to raise clones for sale to Chinese farmers. DuPont Pioneer had recently discovered that one of DBN Group’s best-selling corn seed products in China shared genetic sequencing with a male parent line that the company had genetically engineered. The executive had confronted a DBN Group executive, sarcastically congratulating him on the success of their product. The Chinese executive had allegedly cracked a knowing smile and nodded, which the DuPont executive had taken as a tacit admission. The FBI agreed to investigate.

Four months later, while the FBI was still looking into the Tama incident, a call came into the sheriff’s office in Polk County, Iowa, with a report of three Asian males walking around a cornfield in Bondurant, just outside of Des Moines. Despite the strangeness of such a call, the responding deputy hurried to the field, approached the men, and took down their names: Mo Hailong Robert (Mo occasionally used the alias Robert Mo), Wang Lei, and Li Shaoming, the CEO of Kings Nower Seed. The men acknowledged that they were Chinese seed growers but claimed they were there to offer advice to the owner of the farm. When the FBI learned of the report—and recognized Mo’s name—they dispatched an agent from the Omaha field office to interview the farmer. He had never heard of the three men, much less sought their advice. He told the agent he didn’t even know what kind of corn he was growing, other than to say he was under contract to Monsanto. Soon after, a Monsanto field representative confirmed that this, too, was a test site for a new parent seed the company had under development.

With an emerging picture of what Mo was up to, the FBI began tracking his movements—and soon discovered that he and Wang were intending to travel together to Des Moines for events held in connection with the World Food Prize. The morning after their arrival, on February 15, 2012, the security team at DuPont Pioneer called the FBI to report “they were confident” (in the words of the subsequent report) that Mo, using an alias and fake corporate affiliation, had joined a delegation visiting their headquarters. The FBI collected the surveillance video of the tour inside DuPont Pioneer’s research lab and also identified Mo on corresponding security footage from the delegation’s tour of a Monsanto research facility in Ankeny later in the day. That night, agents tracked Mo to a state dinner hosted by Iowa Governor Terry Branstad in honor of Xi Jinping, then the vice president of China and now the president. The next day, Mo and Wang went together to a sports bar near the hotel where they were staying in the Des Moines suburbs. They met up with Xaoming Bao, a Chinese seed executive and former DuPont Pioneer employee whose wife was employed by the company as a corn-genetics researcher.

FBI investigators could now demonstrate that Mo had, on two separate occasions, sought to obtain experimental seeds by collecting them from secret test sites, and furthermore, it appeared he had gained the information about how to find those locations by working with corporate insiders. The FBI also discovered that while he was in Iowa, Mo had shipped hundreds of pounds of packages from a West Des Moines UPS location to his home in Boca Raton. The contents listed on the tracking sheet: “corn samples.”

The theft of high-performing corn seeds from a competitor’s fields is as old as the cultivation of corn. “They say that a good plant breeder always had lots of pockets,” said Donald J. Lee, a professor and plant geneticist in the department of agronomy and horticulture at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. “And when he would go visit his neighbor’s plant breeding fields, they always came back full.” Until recently, farmers were their own seed providers. Lee told me his grandfather, a farmer in Iowa a century ago, would select ears from each harvest to provide the seed for planting the next year. He recorded the quality of his yield, slowly identifying a set of seed characteristics that seemed to produce the best crop. In those days, it was not unusual for family and friends to share seed stock. “Maybe a neighbor would say, ‘Hey, I really did good with this seed that I got from a cousin in eastern Iowa. You should try a little of this,’” Lee said. “But they were all open-pollinated populations, so those seeds were not genetically identical. In fact, probably every seed was genetically distinct.”

So much genetic variability meant that farmers like Lee’s grandfather would cross two varieties and get large, robust ears one year, only to find that the same two varieties produced scraggly cobs with missing kernels and dead tips the next. “So if you take a look at the historic yields of corn in Iowa and Nebraska during the teens, the twenties, the thirties—it’s flat,” he said.

That all changed with the arrival of Henry A. Wallace, the founder of Pioneer Hi-Bred Seeds, who Lee described as “the Bill Gates of the seed industry.” Wallace, the son of the longtime president of the Cornbelt Meat Producers, first encountered the problem of genetic variation while studying corn breeding at Iowa State Agricultural College. Rediscovering Gregor Mendel’s groundbreaking research on pea pods, Wallace had the key insight that the only solution to producing hearty corn hybrids was to first create genetically pure inbred varieties that could be used as “parents” year after year. Wallace initially worried that such an approach “was probably impractical because of the difficulty of doing the hand-pollinating work,” but he was won over by a paper published in 1918 by Donald Jones, a chemist at the Connecticut Agricultural Station’s experimental farm. Jones had successfully inbred two separate varieties of corn and then crossed them to produce a durable, high-performing hybrid. Wallace recognized that this was the key to creating seed corn with consistently higher yields, but the old problem remained: Producing these hybrids would be far too complex for the average farmer to undertake alone.

Wallace began to envision an organized way of breeding and distributing high-performing corn seed to farmers across the Midwest. A man of unusual commitment to the common good, he wrote a friend that he did not consider himself a corn breeder but rather “a searcher for methods of bringing the ‘inner light’ to outward manifestation.” So Wallace at first conceived of a nonprofit organization, potentially run with government cooperation and even public funding. In 1921, his father, Henry C. Wallace, was appointed secretary of agriculture and might have helped spearhead such an effort. But after his father died unexpectedly at age 58 and Calvin Coolidge settled into the laissez-faire years of his presidency, Wallace saw little chance of an ambitious national program gaining traction. He decided instead, in May 1926, to start the Hi-Bred Corn Company—the world’s first hybrid seed producer.

To interest farmers, Roswell Garst, Wallace’s lead salesman, who later became a major seed producer in his own right, went from one farm to the next, across 16 counties in western Iowa, giving away enough eight-pound sample bags of Hi-Bred seeds for farmers to plant half their fields. Whatever additional yield the hybrid corn produced, Pioneer would split fifty-fifty with the farmer. After several years, farmers realized that they would see greater profits by simply buying the bags of seeds, instead of sharing the surplus yield with the company.

Those shared harvests produced something even more valuable than profit for the young company: information about how the seeds performed under different growing conditions. Wallace directed a sizable chunk of his revenue back into research, hiring a team of new corn breeders to devise still more hybrids. In the early 1930s, Perry Collins, one of Wallace’s researchers, developed Hybrid 307—the first corn specifically developed and marketed for drought-resistance, hitting seed dealerships just as the country spiraled into the Dust Bowl. And when Wallace was, like his father, appointed secretary of agriculture, by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, he finally had the resources to nationally evangelize for hybrid seed, which he believed had the potential to rescue the nation from the Great Depression.

The transformation that followed was staggering. When Wallace joined Roosevelt’s cabinet, less than 1 percent of America’s corn came from hybrid seeds. A decade later, more than three-quarters of all corn was grown from hybrids—nearly doubling the national per-acre yield over the next 20 years. To keep this record output from depressing corn prices, Wallace created the “ever-normal granary,” under which the federal government would establish a federal grain reserve. In years of high production, the Department of Agriculture would buy corn and store it to keep prices up. In years of crop loss, the government would release the reserve to keep prices down. Wallace’s plan was hugely popular, stabilizing American food prices—and winning him a spot as FDR’s running mate in 1940.

But Wallace’s remarkable Hi-Bred Corn had one significant drawback: It consumed far more nitrogen compounds from the soil than ordinary corn—more, in fact, than almost any other crop. During the war years, the government solved the problem by simply putting more acres into production, but after World War II, the Department of Agriculture found a different solution. Giant chemical manufacturers, like DuPont and Monsanto, had secured wartime defense contracts to produce ammonia nitrate and anhydrous ammonia to make bombs and other munitions. They had developed an herbicide known as 2,4-D as a potential destroyer of German crops and manufactured the insecticide DDT to prevent the spread of typhus-carrying lice among GIs. As soon as the war was over, DuPont turned to marketing those same chemicals for lawn and garden use as fertilizer, weed killer, and DuPont 5% DDT Insect Spray. Company advertisements from the period touted their products as “Better Things for Better Living … Through Chemistry.” But gardens were just the tip of the iceberg. DuPont, along with other giant chemical manufacturers like Dow and Monsanto, teamed up with the grain cartels, including Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, to lobby for congressional support for producing these compounds as large-scale agri-chemicals.

In 1953, the industry found its greatest ally, when Ezra Taft Benson took over as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture. (Wallace, by then, had retired from public life. He was briefly the editor of the new republic before making a failed bid for the presidency in 1948.) Benson, a high-ranking member of the Mormon Church and a fanatical Red Scare Republican, immediately informed Eisenhower that he was philosophically opposed to the government price supports developed by Wallace, because, to his mind, they were tantamount to socialism. He publicly referred to small farmers as “irresponsible feeders at the public trough.”

Foreshadowing today’s aggressive, pro-corporate agricultural policies, Benson argued that the only way to outcompete the collective farms of the Soviet Union and Red China was to use our superior corn and chemical technology to the fullest. The United States could, if it chose, overproduce corn to drive down international prices, and it could use the surplus as a tool of diplomatic leverage in the form of foreign aid. Instead of guns, the United States began to give our allies grain—transforming, for the first time, a food product into a weapon in the national arsenal. The only problem was that by effectively militarizing American agriculture, Benson made agri-tech a target for foreign spying.

In April 2012, Mo flew from his home in Florida to O’Hare International Airport and rented a car. An FBI surveillance team followed him as he drove along back roads through rural Illinois and northern Indiana. After about a week of this, Mo stopped one day at a farm near Monee, Illinois, advertising DuPont Pioneer seeds for sale. The farmer there later told the FBI that Mo had asked about what types of corn and soybeans he could buy, explaining that he had purchased 40 acres nearby and was planning to plant the property. The surveillance team followed Mo to a farm about 15 minutes west of Monee, where, a review of property records soon revealed, Kings Nower Seed had purchased a parcel for $600,000 only the month before.

As agents watched Mo crisscross the Midwest, stopping at seed stores to inquire about different products, they began to suspect that he planned to plant the Illinois acreage by hand. Donald J. Lee, the University of Nebraska professor, compares stealing parent seeds to obtaining programming code without knowing what application it is intended for or what operating system it’s meant to run on. Likewise, knowing the genetic structure of a corn seed is just one part of the problem. “You don’t know the importance of those genes, unless you have yield data,” said Lee. “When did the plant mature? What’s its development profile? How did it respond to such-and-such disease?” This is what Mo appeared to be doing: setting up his own covert test farm, one that he could oversee personally.

FBI surveillance teams followed Mo to Crossroads Ag, a DuPont Pioneer seed dealer in Dallas Center, Iowa, and observed him loading bags of seeds into his trunk. When investigators questioned the owner, he said Mo paid in cash—more than $1,500—for six bags of Pioneer Hi-Bred corn seeds. He said Mo had been purchasing seed there for two years, always asking for DuPont Pioneer’s “latest products,” but this year he had arrived with a detailed list. The owner had told Mo that he wasn’t supposed to sell him some of the specific products he was asking for, unless he had a contract agreement with DuPont Pioneer, which the owner knew he didn’t. The next day, FBI surveillance watched Mo repeat the process, buying six bags of DeKalb brand seed corn, a Monsanto product, at MFA Agri Services in Pattonsburg, Missouri.

Finally, the team followed Mo back to Adel, Iowa, where Mo unloaded some of the seed bags at a storage facility before driving on to the farm in Illinois where the remaining bags were unloaded and, the FBI believes, seeds may have been planted. About one out of every 200 seeds in a bag of hybrid corn seed is a parent, which can be identified by planting the bag and then collecting kernels from whichever plants look different from the rest. Investigators believe Mo may have been collecting some parent seeds this way. Later, when Mo and two DBN Group employees attempted to FedEx the remaining corn seeds to an associate in Hong Kong, the FBI intercepted the packages and conducted a search of the five boxes. Each contained eight or nine gallon-sized baggies filled with seed corn, along with a handwritten numerical code identifying each hybrid.

The FBI has not revealed exactly when they applied to a fisa court for more broad-ranging investigatory powers, but the FBI’s court filings show that their information on Mo and his associates became much more detailed after meetings with DuPont Pioneer executives over the summer. Top executives told agents that “the loss of an inbred line of seed would result in losing approximately five to eight years of research and a minimum of $30 to $40 million dollars, potentially much more.” After that, the FBI tapped the men’s mobile phones and tracked Mo’s bank records. They collected their email from Yahoo, Google, and Hotmail, corporate documents from DropBox, and thousands of files from Mo’s Apple iCloud account. The FBI used Mo’s mobile phone to track his movements, bugged his rental cars to eavesdrop on his conversations, and installed a video camera outside the storage unit in Adel.

To exercise such investigatory power, the FBI had to argue that Mo was an “agent of a foreign power”—or, in other words, to persuade a judge that Mo might be acting on behalf not just of DBN Group but at the direction of the People’s Republic of China. With that, the FBI had the authority to treat Mo as if he were the leader of a state-sponsored Chinese spy ring. (Klinefeldt, the U.S. attorney prosecuting the case, was evasive about whether that suspicion proved substantive. “When you start an investigation,” he said, “you don’t know exactly where it will lead.”)

FBI investigators soon got the explicit evidence they needed to make arrests. Over a listening device installed in an Enterprise rental car, the surveillance team recorded a bizarre and inept conversation between two of Mo’s associates from DBN Group, Lin Yong and Ye Jian. In the translated transcript, submitted as part of the government’s case, the two men are consumed by worry that they are being followed and about the charges they could face if caught. So, as they drive around rural Illinois looking for DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto test fields from which to steal, they begin making a list of the crimes they have committed. After some back and forth, they come up with trespassing for every time they have slipped onto private property, larceny for the seeds and ears they have been stealing from the fields, and multiple violations of intellectual property protections.

“These are actually very serious offenses,” Lin says.

“They could treat us as spies!” Ye interjects.

Lin, exasperated, responds: “That is what we’ve been doing!”

Soon after, with the harvest season nearly complete, Mo seems to have decided it was time to send to China what corn he and his associates had collected. The group drove back to the secret Illinois farm and began discussing how they would divvy up the seeds. Some would go into checked bags bound for Beijing, others would be carried to a car and driven across the border from Vermont into Canada, and some would go with Mo back to Florida, where he would ship them to China. With tickets booked for departure the following morning, the five men readied their caches of seeds—Li deciding to stash his under packets of Pop Weaver microwave popcorn. The whole group then piled into a white minivan and drove into Monee to eat at the local Subway. On their way out, one of the men, perhaps Ye, must have stuffed his pockets full of napkins.

When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States at President Eisenhower’s invitation in 1959, he specifically requested to see only one man: Roswell Garst, the former Pioneer seed salesman for Henry A. Wallace, who was then head of Garst and Thomas Hi-Bred Corn Company. Khrushchev had met Garst once before, when he visited the Soviet Union, and had become obsessed by the potential of hybrid corn. Khrushchev and his wife spent a day at Garst’s farm near Coon Rapids, Iowa. In his memoirs, Khrushchev later wrote, “Garst gave me an entire lecture on agriculture,” in which he earnestly explained that American farmers had stopped worrying about crop rotation. “Science today considers that approach outdated. And I think so, too,” Garst told the Soviet leader. In past years, planting the same crop repeatedly would have attracted pests and depleted the soil of nitrogen. “Now there is no such problem. We have herbicides and other such chemical substances that make it possible to combat pests,” Garst said. And there was no longer any need to plant clover or alfalfa to accumulate nitrogen. “It is more profitable for me to buy nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, in mix form, and add this fertilizer.”

On that same official visit, Ezra Taft Benson led Khrushchev on a tour of the U.S. Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland. Benson, in his official remarks, said that there was a “constant give-and-take of information between government scientists and those in private industry,” adding that “we are all working together within the framework of our capitalistic free-enterprise society to benefit our farmers, all our citizens, and people throughout the world.” He listed hybrid corn first among the achievements of such cooperative efforts and introduced white-coated lab researchers who extolled the virtues of 2,4-D and chemical fertilizers. Khrushchev was unimpressed by a visit he made to a farm owned by President Eisenhower, dismissing it as “not on a scale such as we have at our collective farms and state farms.” Benson later remembered that Khrushchev bragged, “We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands.” Benson vowed that American farms would outproduce the Soviets through superior chemistry.

By the end of the Eisenhower era, however, environmentalists began to raise concerns about the hundreds of commercial herbicides and pesticides being applied to American crops in quantities totaling hundreds of millions of pounds. Benson admonished doubters that “abandoning the use of chemicals on farms and in the food industry would result in an immediate decline in the quantity and overall quality of our food supply and cause a rapid rise in food prices paid by the consumer.” Even when Rachel Carson documented connections between DDT and 2,4-D and elevated incidence rates of rare forms of cancer in Silent Spring, Benson remained unmoved. He is said to have written to Eisenhower wondering “why a spinster with no children was so concerned with genetics,” and then, as if to answer his own question, offered that Carson was “probably a Communist.” (The Eisenhower Presidential Library, for what it’s worth, contains no record of this letter.)

Benson’s war on the “socialist” price supports and farm aid programs instituted by Henry A. Wallace stalled out during the liberal-minded 1960s. But at the advent of the new decade, President Richard Nixon appointed Earl Butz, Benson’s former assistant, to become the new secretary of agriculture. Butz had grown up on a farm in Indiana and spent 30 years teaching agricultural economics at Purdue before becoming dean of the university’s College of Agriculture. Many small farmers hated him, because he had been such a vocal advocate for turning family farming into big business during the Eisenhower administration. His refrain for those families, famously, was: “Get big or get out.”

Almost as soon as Butz won approval from Congress, he canceled payments for fallow land and urged farmers to “plant fencerow to fencerow,” promising to use the emerging global economy to buttress against low prices. If our supply threatened futures, we would simply go to the world market and use our size and economic might to meet the demand and forge foreign dependence on American food in the bargain. We would defeat the Communists by making them dependent on us to feed themselves. In January 1972, Butz sold what amounted to our entire grain reserve to the Soviets. The following month, Nixon went to China and brokered a deal with Chairman Mao Zedong, allowing the importation of American corn and securing contracts for American companies to build 13 of the world’s largest ammonia-processing plants for producing fertilizer on Chinese soil.

America’s Communist foes regarded these moves as an agreement not to wage war through food. But Butz discussed these moves in terms of “agri-power,” and stated it plainly: “Food is a weapon.” To open a new front in the conflict, he supported maintaining American food superiority through yet another innovation: bioengineering feed, such as corn and soybeans. Through the miracle of science, the United States would not only produce more crops than our rivals; we would produce better crops. By 1972, scientists had already developed the ability to cut and splice protein strands in the DNA sequences of bacteria. If they could do the same with plant cells, then they could chemically insert resistance to weeds and insects. Less than five years later, a team from the University of Washington discovered that a bacterium that causes tumorlike growths on plants did so by inserting its own DNA into the cell nuclei of its host plant. What they had discovered was essentially a natural form of gene splicing. By the 1980s, researchers had devised techniques for removing the bacteria genes and inserting desirable DNA sequences.

The U.S. government recognized this as technology the Soviets and Chinese could not match. Monsanto was also quick to see the market opportunity. The company had grown with the production of 2,4-D and its descendant 2,4,5-T, which were then combined to produce Agent Orange to defoliate forest cover during the Vietnam War. In 1970, in an effort to come up with an even stronger plant killer, Monsanto chemist John E. Franz hit upon an herbicide called glyphosate, which was marketed under the trade name Roundup and had seen unmatched growth in broadleaf weed control in the agricultural industry. The only problem with Roundup: It was such an effective herbicide that farmers had to apply it carefully, spraying only early sprouting weeds, to avoid exterminating their crops.

Monsanto’s engineers set about searching for a gene that would allow crops to survive exposure to Roundup. They found it in the wastewater-treatment plant of one of their own glyphosate production plants in Louisiana, where workers had noticed a range of bacteria thriving despite exposure to Roundup—and one, under lab testing, displayed total immunity to glyphosate pesticides. By 1996, Monsanto had commercially introduced soybeans that had been genetically modified to resist glyphosate—what the company termed “Roundup Ready.”

Next, researchers set to trying to find a genetic-engineering solution to the European corn borer, an insect that inflicted more than $1 billion in losses of corn production in the U.S. and Canada each year. Since the 1960s, endotoxins produced by Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a common bacteria found in the soil, had been sold as a commercial microbial insecticide to kill moth larvae. If the specific DNA that produced Bt toxins could be isolated and spliced into corn genetic sequences, scientists believed they could create an ear of corn that would be lethal to the European corn borer. Soon, that hurdle had been cleared, and Monsanto began looking for a seed partner to market its pest-resistant corn. If it could marry its genetic modifications with Pioneer’s hybrid seeds, Monsanto believed it would have a corn seed with unmatched yield potential.

In the early 1990s, perhaps too eager to demonstrate the effectiveness of its new GMO crops, Monsanto allowed Pioneer to use its biotech to produce Roundup Ready soybeans and Bt corn—asking only for small usage fees and no royalties. For less than $40 million, Pioneer suddenly had the technology and the sales muscle to move toward genetically modified feed crops, a growth market worth many billions of dollars. Rather than partner with Monsanto, Pioneer became its greatest competitor, entering into a joint venture with DuPont, called Optimum Quality Grains. In response, Monsanto launched a series of bitter and protracted lawsuits, and eventually, in 1999, Pioneer sold its entire remaining stock to DuPont (thus changing the name to DuPont Pioneer). In 2002, all eleven lawsuits were settled at once—as DuPont Pioneer realized that it had more to gain by paying for Monsanto’s genetics and focusing on capturing the Chinese market.

In the years since, DuPont Pioneer has increased its share of the corn-seed market in China from less than a tenth of a percent to 12 percent. (Monsanto has a 1 percent market share.) DuPont Pioneer has told Chinese officials that they should Americanize their agriculture: consolidate land, plant GMO seed, apply industrial fertilizers, subsidize the sale of planting and harvest equipment. This way, the company argues, China could dramatically increase its per-acre yield. William S. Niebur, who leads DuPont Pioneer’s operations in China, told the Des Moines Register last year that officials have listened to these recommendations with an “open ear.”

In March 2015, Mo Hailong’s attorneys filed a motion to suppress all evidence gathered from the secret recordings made of Mo and his associates, arguing that the authorization to gather those materials should never have been granted. In order to legally justify the use of fisa, surveillance must target an “agent of a foreign power,” and the purpose of the surveillance must be to gather “foreign intelligence information.” Mo’s attorneys argue there is no evidence that Mo is an agent of the Chinese government or that his company is backed by China, so for “the first time in the statute’s history (as far as our research reveals), the [U.S.] government used fisa to investigate a trade secret dispute between two privately owned companies.”

When it comes to the Chinese form of capitalism, the line is undeniably murky. The government has taken a strong hand in recent years in encouraging the growth of China’s agricultural sector. In 2013, for example, China’s Shuanghui International entered an overvalue bid to buy Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest producer of pork. Under questioning by Congress, Smithfield insisted the purchase came without the urging or backing of the Chinese government. But after the purchase received congressional approval, Nathan Halverson at the Center for Investigative Reporting discovered that the Bank of China, the state bank of the Chinese government, had approved the $4 billion loan for Shuanghui to purchase Smithfield in a single day—and in China, Shuanghui has touted the support the government is giving them.

In the wake of that purchase, the Chinese government has been actively consolidating the country’s seed companies, which currently number more than 5,000. This consolidation would centralize research, improving China’s ability to develop its own hybrids to compete with giants like DuPont and Monsanto, and it would also allow China to mimic the field-to-slaughter vertical integration that has given meat producers like Smithfield and Cargill such an advantage in the United States. DBN Group is a notable example of a seed company that is booming thanks to consolidation and government assistance. Founded in 1994 by seed-tech whiz kid Shao Genhuo, DBN Group has recently acquired more than 30 feed operations from the Chinese government, and the company runs China Farmer University jointly with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. By targeting Mo and his sister Mo Yun as the leaders of the spy ring, the FBI may hope to incriminate Shao (who is married to Mo Yun)—and, ultimately, implicate Chinese agriculture ministers. But the U.S. government’s argument that the technology behind Roundup Ready soybeans and Bt corn constitutes not just trade secrets but national security secrets is a problematic one.

Companies like DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto like to maintain that they are striving only to feed a burgeoning global population. Last year, Niebur, of DuPont Pioneer China, asked, “Without China’s food security, how can we ever imagine an effective, realistic, sustainable global food-security system?” But DuPont Pioneer’s goal, of course, is not global food security or feeding the Chinese people, but rather increasing market share and profit by keeping China as a customer. And the Department of Justice has taken up the argument that such a goal is not only of importance to our economy but a matter of national security, an unsettling conflation of the interests of large corporations with that of the country itself.

Today, it’s estimated that 92 percent of American corn and 94 percent of American soybeans are GMOs, almost all of it produced by Monsanto or DuPont Pioneer, and again, nearly half of the seed sold globally. Activists in both China and the United States have raised concerns about just two corporations having so much influence over the world food supply, with so little transparency. (Despite repeated requests, DuPont Pioneer declined to participate in this story.)

But these fears, while well founded, miss the larger point of what such companies represent: the intent of the
U.S. government to use food as an ever-more powerful point of leverage to wield over large, increasingly hungry nations like China. The prosecution of Mo Hailong and his circle stands as a warning to the Chinese government, issued through its proxy companies. The ears in the field, the seeds in the ground, even the pollen on the wind, are American-owned and American-protected. They are available to the world as food only if you agree to our conditions and are willing to pay our price. a

First, Let’s Get Rid of All the Bosses

A radical experiment at Zappos to end the office workplace as we know it

BY ROGER D. HODGE | NOVEMBER

Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, the online shoe and clothing store, lives in a trailer park in downtown Las Vegas. The Airstream Park, as it’s called, occupies about half a city block, surrounded by a tall fence crowned with barbed wire and punctuated with palm trees. When I arrived in April, Adirondack chairs, picnic tables, and a colorful assortment of portable seating encircled a pair of fire pits. On one side of the park was a low stage, directly opposite a large two-story Airstream, known as the Llamamobile, equipped with a roof deck and a third fire pit and decorated with a mural of a lone llama grazing in a limitless lush green field. Next to the Airstream, modified shipping containers painted in primary colors revealed a laundry room, kitchen, and a pantry stocked with cases of Fernet, an Italian digestif. Scratched into a concrete step was the word “Llamalopolis.”

Hsieh sleeps in a 22-foot Airstream, and the park serves as his preferred location for hanging out with friends and colleagues, for entertainment, and for much of his business life. In personal style he is aggressively casual, wearing a daily uniform of blue jeans, black sneakers, and a Zappos t-shirt. Everyone calls him Tony. Although he is reserved and quiet, Hsieh clearly enjoys a good party. In his memoir, Delivering Happiness, he wrote that one of the primary reasons he sold his first company, LinkExchange, to Microsoft in 1998 was that running the business had ceased to be fun. So it comes as no surprise that the atmosphere Hsieh has created around himself in Las Vegas, where he moved the company from San Francisco in 2004, is aggressively festive. “South by Southwest meets TED meets Burning Man,” he told me. “But as a lifestyle, not a festival.”

Although Hsieh did not found Zappos—he was an early investor and joined the company as CEO in 2000—he encountered the same sense of connection and tribal identification in running the online shoe company that he had once felt at raves. His new company became his tribe, and although there were some tough times during the early years—the dot-com crash, layoffs, salary reductions, and extremely long hours—Hsieh’s focus was always about making the company culture as positive and caring and fun as possible.

That “tribal” focus remains strong today, and the company’s culture is decidedly wacky. An unofficial dress-code of t-shirts and sneakers predominates in its expansive open-plan offices; large tattoos, high-fives, and hugs abound; severed neckties, liberated from stuffed-shirt visitors, adorn a wall behind the lobby reception desk. Conventional job titles hardly exist, and top executives are referred to as “monkeys”; assistants, on the other hand, are “ninjas.” Stuffed animals, toys, and murals decorate most surfaces. Upbeat music blares from speakers in the headquarters’ courtyard. Zapponians, as the employees call one another, like to talk about “work-life integration” rather than work-life balance.

In recent years, however, Hsieh’s experiments with corporate culture have become more philosophical. About three years ago, he introduced an arcane management system, called Holacracy, that baffled many longtime Zapponians. Then, in March, he sent out an email to all 1,443 Zappos employees. “This is a long email,” he wrote. “Please take 30 minutes to read through the email in its entirety.” Ominous words to see in a message from one’s CEO. Were layoffs coming? Was Hsieh resigning? Was Amazon, which acquired Zappos for an estimated $800 million in 2009, finally going to impose its famously cutthroat corporate culture? No, it was nothing like that, though the news was certainly dramatic. After four paragraphs salted with esoteric terms such as “Teal organization,” “self-organization,” and “Glass Frog,” Hsieh finally reached the point: “As of 4/30/15, in order to eliminate the legacy management hierarchy, there will be effectively no more people managers.”

Zappos, Hsieh explained, was moving from “Green” to “Teal,” the next stage of its collective corporate evolution, and managers were no longer valued by the company. To make the transition easier, former managers would be permitted to keep their salaries, though not their responsibilities, through the end of 2015, if they chose to find new roles with the company. The email landed like a bomb at Zappos. People inside the company were upset. People on the outside were just confused, and a flurry of perplexed news items appeared in the business press. Clearly, some kind of corporate revolution was underway—though exactly what all this meant was far from obvious—and Hsieh wanted to make sure that his employees were on board. For those who were not, a new version of Zappos’s famous “offer” would be available. New Zappos employees typically undergo several weeks of training and education in the culture and traditions of the company, a period that includes at least one week working in the call center, or CLT (Customer Loyalty Team). At that point, new hires have the option to accept the offer: a no-questions-asked $3,000 payment if they’d simply like to walk away. In the March email, Hsieh asked everyone in his company to read Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux—generally referred to as “the book” by Zapponians—and to make their intentions known by April 30. If they decided to leave, they would receive a minimum of three months severance, or one month for each year on the job.

What was “Teal,” and why was it better than being “Green”? And what did it mean for an online retailer with annual sales of more than $1 billion, that fills 280,000 orders per week, to be “self-organized”? These were open questions, and no one at Zappos, including Hsieh, claimed to have the answers. But Hsieh had forcefully positioned himself at the vanguard of a growing movement that hopes to bring about the end of corporate management as we know it.

After I settled into the trailer where I would be staying for the next several nights, I walked around the park, where I met several bearded men. One was doing a handstand. They were working on a movie called Poor Boy. Lou Pucci, who had a long beard and ripped jeans exposing a painfully fresh tattoo on his leg, told me that he and his friends were trying to hang out here in the park as much as possible, because out there (he pointed vaguely toward the casinos in the distance) people were trying to corrupt them. “In the last couple of weeks I got engaged,” he said dramatically, swaying slightly. “And I got this big tattoo!”

Two of Hsieh’s close colleagues, Jeanne Markel and Maggie Hsu, arrived to give me a tour of the Downtown Project, a real-estate development and business incubator that over the last three years has transformed a formerly derelict section of Las Vegas known as Fremont East. The DTP, as everyone calls it, comprises about 60 acres of real estate, almost 300 buildings, and includes about 50 small businesses as well as various startups. The project was born about the time Zappos moved from Henderson, a suburb 15 miles outside of town, into the former Las Vegas City Hall downtown. Employees weren’t very enthusiastic at first, since the surrounding area was rundown and dangerous, so Hsieh decided to invest $350 million of his own money to transform the neighborhood. The DTP is not technically a part of Zappos, though in practice it’s often hard to tell the difference. Markel has moved back-and-forth, but now works at Zappos, basically as Hsieh’s shadow, while Hsu works for DTP. From what I could tell, Hsieh’s enthusiasm for his urban experiment seems to outstrip his interest in selling shoes.

After wandering through a hip collection of retail establishments, including a vinyl record shop, an independent bookstore, and several restaurants, we arrived at the large open courtyard of the Zappos headquarters, a squat, almost Brutalist, building. A petting zoo had been installed for the afternoon. After half an hour watching small children toddle around in cages chasing exotic armadillos and capybaras, I headed back to the Airstream Park, stopping first at a shopping center called the Container Park, which was guarded by a giant praying mantis perched on what appeared to be an armored personnel carrier, to grab a couple of tacos.

Back in the park, I selected a Corona from the communal pantry and deposited a dollar in a huge lifelike spotted piggybank. I sat down in an Adirondack chair near a fireless fire pit and chatted with a red-bearded Zapponian named Tyler Williams as he set up microphones and amplifiers on the Airstream stage for a biweekly jam session called Open Air. Williams, whose job title was “fun-gineer,” spotted my beer, told me I had the right idea, and got one for himself. More musicians arrived, and I was befriended by Gio, a charming six-and-a-half-year-old boy who lives in the park with his mother and sister. As I spoke with him, I noticed Hsieh walking back-and-forth, back-and-forth, across the ovular expanse of asphalt in the center of the trailer park. He was deep in conversation with a thirtysomething woman wearing shorts and a t-shirt. She did not look happy. Not at all.

Catherine Cook, who works for Zappos in marketing and public relations, showed up, and then so did Markel and Hsu. Shadows were getting long, and people were starting to do sound checks. A blow-up movie screen had appeared behind the stage, and an array of stage lights had been set up as well. Hsieh was still walking back-and-forth, deep in conversation with the unhappy-looking woman. I met a Zapponian named Laura Krosky, who started in customer service and then moved to public relations. She was a marketing ninja for a while, and then answered Hsieh’s email. Before joining Zappos she worked as a blackjack dealer at Planet Hollywood.

Evening was coming on when I met the woman who had spent the previous two hours in the walking meeting with Hsieh. Her name was Rachel Murch. I mentioned I was writing about the changes at Zappos and she gave me a sharp, skeptical look and said, somewhat cryptically, “Or whatever all this will mean for Zappos.”

Around 10 p.m. Hsieh and several other Zapponians went up to the top of the big Airstream for a meeting. I could see what they meant by work-life integration. By the time Lou Pucci took the stage and sang “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” the band had swelled. A guy named Joey was playing trumpet, and another named Daniel was tearing it up on an electric fiddle. A lovely dark-haired high school girl who sang and played guitar announced from the stage that she had an algebra test tomorrow, so she had to go home. I saw Hsieh pick up a tambourine and heard a couple of straight-laced guys—clearly not Zappos employees, possibly Germans—making plans to go sky diving with a slick start-up dude sporting stiff gelled hair and a leather jacket.

From my conversations with various Zapponians, I gathered that this idyllic scene was typical of life in Tony Hsieh’s magical kingdom. Work was fun, which is good, because people never really stopped working. Meetings might be scheduled at 10 p.m. on a Sunday, in the middle of what appeared to be a party but was really just an extension of the all-encompassing Zappos corporate culture. Was this what Hsieh meant by self-organization? Did going Teal mean selling shoes and designer purses plus open mic sessions and Fernet shots?

I pondered these questions as I headed for my trailer. Right then I saw Murch approach Hsieh. They spoke for a moment and then walked away from the stage. I sensed the beginning of another walking meeting. The next morning I checked Hsieh’s public Evernote log, on which he memorializes his emails and meetings and often includes the number of steps he’s taken on a particular day. The previous day he had logged 12,916 steps. Last night he simply recorded “steps.”

On my second day in Las Vegas, I reported to the lobby of the Zappos headquarters building to meet my guide, Josh Pedro. Like many other employees, Pedro began his career in CLT, working the phones. After a few years, he moved to zcon, the Zappos concierge team, which handles tours and the reception of vendors and guests. More recently, he had moved to the marketing team, which handles public relations. After checking me in at the front desk, we stepped out into the bright courtyard. “Tainted Love,” by Soft Cell, was blaring from outdoor speakers.

As we walked through the former city hall, passing stuffed giraffes and a tiger, Pedro explained the basic tenets of Zappos culture, which can be summarized by its ten core values, the most important of which seemed to be “deliver WOW through service,” “pursue growth and learning,” “create fun and a little weirdness,” and “embrace and drive change.” Naturally I had read about these core values before I arrived, and I had read Hsieh’s book, in which he argues that a company’s brand is best understood as a reflection of its culture. Even so, most corporate (and nonprofit) mission statements might as well be written on toilet paper in the chief executive’s bathroom. Not so at Zappos, which is renowned for its commitment to customer service. Shockingly, everyone also seemed to believe in the other values. The company encourages its 600 CLT representatives to make personal connections with callers, and to send flowers, cookies, or thank-you cards. Desks were adorned with balloons, wacky signs, streamers, stuffed animals, and other toys. Some walls were covered with murals painted by artistic employees; others advertised the company’s generous benefits packages as well as convenient services such as the on-site haircuts, laundry pickup and delivery, car washes, and oil changes. Most people wore sneakers and t-shirts, of course, but dry cleaning and shoe shines were available as well. Each floor seemed to have multiple kitchens and break rooms, vending machines, and mini-fridges filled with free snacks. Everywhere we went, I saw signs of creativity, fun, and moderate weirdness. People called out greetings to one another, and I saw multiple hugs and high-fives. Almost everyone was smiling. At first the earnest happy vibe felt slightly creepy, but I soon grew to appreciate it.

The business of selling things over the internet was going on all around me. Orders were being placed on the web site, but that’s invisible when you walk the floor. People sat at desks and talked on the phone with customers, or they emailed or chatted with customers. Also invisible were all the warehouse personnel, who used to work in Kentucky for Zappos but now all work directly for Amazon—and, to judge from news reports, that doesn’t sound like very much fun at all.

Most of the people I spoke to over the course of the next several days were extremely enthusiastic about the future of Zappos. But there were signs of trouble. At one point, I saw a samizdat Post-it in the elevator. It read: “sli.do/teal have something to say?” Later, when I went to the URL, I found signs of secret Zappos sadness:

Anonymous: “What on earth were they thinking having all of these changes going on at once? Why not hammer out one thing at a time?”

Anonymous: “I’m afraid to speak up in my circle because I’m afraid my lead link might retaliate. What resources are available to me?”

Anonymous: “Upvote this if you don’t trust Tony anymore.”

When the deadline arrived on the last day of April, 14 percent of the company, 210 people, took the offer. Twenty of them were managers, I was told, out of a total of 246. It was a difficult day. Tear-stained faces replaced the typical smiles on the Zappos campus.

My first formal interview at Zappos was with John Bunch, a tall and lanky former professional poker player who joined the company five years ago as a software developer. He told me he had been on a typical management path, running a team of other developers, when he saw an announcement for a new job shadowing Hsieh for a year as a technical adviser. Soon Bunch was taking on other projects, one of which was a pilot Holacracy program. Bunch quickly became a strong advocate, and when the decision was made to roll out Holacracy to the rest of the company, he led the effort.

Many of the reactions in the business media to the changes at Zappos have focused on Holacracy, probably because it’s a well-established brand, but that’s a bit like mistaking the finger for the moon. It is, in fact, just one example of a growing movement, driven largely, but by no means exclusively, by the technology industry, that seeks to apply insights derived from evolutionary biology and psychology, systems and chaos theory, as well as New Age spirituality and postmodern philosophy, to corporate management practices.

Of course, business school professors have been proposing far-reaching programs to reform the workplace, especially the corporate workplace, for as long as we’ve had business schools. They study successful companies, write up case studies, and publish their results in publications like the Harvard Business Review. Then they write inspirational how-to books. Entrepreneurs and heroic CEOs, like Hsieh and Jack Welch, also write best-selling “how I did it” books. Every now and then, a management guru like Clayton Christensen strikes a chord, and suddenly everyone is talking about “disruption.”

Another stream of the corporate reform movement grows out of a general dissatisfaction with bottom-line materialism and a lingering sense that devoting one’s life to the pursuit of naked profit leaves people emotionally exhausted and spiritually barren. You can see its roots as far back as the 1920s and 1930s, when Mary Parker Follet wrote a series of influential articles on the subject. Companies like Ben & Jerry’s and Patagonia came of age in the 1970s, and their founders strove to align their business strategies with their moral values. Nowadays “purpose” has emerged as a bankable buzzword.

Often these management trends are simply fads, voguish recipes for business success that do little but exchange one set of buzzwords for another. But every couple of decades, a new generation of management theorists comes along and applies the latest and greatest scientific paradigms to the corporation. The current wave of scientific management has been bubbling up for years. Managers have tried to make large slow-moving companies function like small agile startups. They’ve eliminated luxurious corner offices and imposed open-plan workspaces on middle managers and executive teams alike. Offices where the CEO occupies a regular desk like anyone else are now commonplace, and these changes have introduced a more casual and superficially democratic ethos to corporate America.

What’s interesting about the Zappos version of corporate reform is that it combines several familiar tropes of management theory. Hsieh is a successful entrepreneur and a heroic CEO and an inspirational “happiness” guru (his book’s subtitle is A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose) who happens to be fascinated with ideas derived from network theory and evolutionary biology, with systems that are at least partially self-regulating and self-organizing, like ant colonies and, to some extent, cities. Thus, it’s not really surprising that he would be attracted to a management technique like Holacracy.

Holacracy is, at its core, a commercial product. It was created by Brian Robertson, the founder of a defunct startup called Ternary Software. Robertson bills Holacracy as an organizational operating system, “social technology.” The word itself, a coinage derived from Arthur Koestler’s concept of the “holon” (sort of like a fractal, a whole that is part of a larger whole), is a registered trademark, and though the system is nominally free to use, companies must license Robertson’s proprietary web-based application, called Glass Frog, on which the system depends for its strict implementation.

And by strict, I mean strict. A Holacracy meeting follows a rigid script, with a facilitator who directs conversational traffic. No chitchat allowed, no crosstalk. It is a model of efficiency but also inflexible and highly abstract and stultifying to describe in detail. The point is that all meetings follow the script, and decisions and action plans must be recorded in Glass Frog.

In general terms, though, the idea behind Holacracy is simple enough and follows from a few assumptions, such as the belief that people are inherently creative. Another is that old-fashioned management hierarchies stifle innovation, because they naturally generate informal rules and cliques of powerful insiders, which is inefficient and demoralizing, so a new and better system would be founded on clear, transparent rules. Even better, the rules should be flexible and adaptable, so governance procedures should be incorporated into the system.

So instead of having jobs, in Holacracy people have roles. Each role belongs to a circle rather than a department, and circles are guided not by managers but by lead links. Circles overlap, and individuals hold many different roles. Of course, in traditional organizations, individuals occupy a variety of roles as well, but this is often an implicit and de facto state of affairs. Holacracy codifies that reality, so that dynamic roles replace static jobs. Authority becomes distributed, rather like packets of information on the internet.

People being people, conflicts and problems will naturally arise, and so a mechanism—“sensing a tension”—must be devised to handle conflicts and resolve them. A tension is not necessarily a bad thing, however. Tensions might arise from anything that prevents getting work done, any gap between what is and what ought to be. As its adherents often say, in Holacracy “tensions drive everything.”

The tension I sense in many readers right now is that this all sounds unnecessarily confusing and abstract. It sounds like something invented by a software engineer, and that’s exactly what it is. Companies that implement the system tend to be small and tech-oriented, like Medium, the blog publisher created by Twitter and Blogger co-founder Evan Williams. Zappos is by far the largest company to adopt Holacracy.

Of course not every meeting at Zappos follows the Holacratic script—that would be intolerable—but watching a well-run Holacracy meeting in action can be revelatory, because when everyone knows the drill it eliminates much of the time-wasting verbosity and psychological microdrama that often turns workdays into an endless series of unproductive jaw-sessions. Glass Frog, despite the twee name, is a decent mechanism for capturing the work that people actually do and helps in a meeting to memorialize what happened and who was supposed to do what as a result of the decisions made by the group. But it’s basically just a well-designed database and to-do list that teams use to define the work they’re supposed to be doing and to hold themselves accountable for those tasks. Of course, everyone also complains about its limitations.

When I was speaking with John Bunch, it was clear to me that he was passionate about the utility of Holacracy, but when I asked whether Holacracy was the goal or simply a tool, he didn’t hesitate. He sees Holacracy not as an endpoint but as a means of ascent toward that elusive state known at Zappos as Teal.

The language of Teal comes from “the book,” with its deceptively banal title, Reinventing Organizations. Zapponians use the book the way a certain kind of Marxist used to refer to the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital. Teal, in Laloux’s grand narrative of human history, isn’t so much about work or workplaces, but a new stage in the evolution of humanity’s consciousness. Full-fledged Teal organizations, very much like true Communist societies, have yet to fully emerge, Laloux writes, but that claim often feels like a postmodernist hedge, because he freely describes the companies that he profiles as “Teal organizations.” Laloux devotes a few dozen pages of his very long manifesto to Holacracy, but far fewer than he does to a series of other businesses, all instances of a growing corporate reform movement dedicated to the idea that work should be invested with meaning and purpose, but also
with flexible and innovative practices that avoid the traps of conventional management. Some of the companies Laloux profiles are familiar, such as Patagonia, but others are relatively small and are typically based outside the United States, such as Buurtzorg, a Dutch nonprofit that supplies home nursing care to the elderly. He also mentions Hsieh’s experiments at Zappos.

In Laloux’s scheme, old-fashioned bureaucratic corporations are wretched, miserable, soulless places. Filled with political infighting, turf wars, and meaningless procedures, they are slow to adapt to changing markets and technologies. They are like lumbering dinosaurs gazing up in befuddlement as a screaming asteroid comes across the sky, marking them for extinction. Teal organizations, by contrast, are—or will be—nimble, innovative, and dynamic, filled with joy and purpose. Many of the companies Laloux discusses have been around for decades, but HolacracyOne, Robertson’s firm, now occupies a special niche in the contemporary proto-Teal vanguard, primarily because of its adoption by Zappos. The central concept among the Tealiocrats is “self-organization.”

Laloux devotes many pages to a colorful typology of organizations that correspond, in his account, with different stages in the evolution of human consciousness—all of which aim, teleologically, toward self-organization. Human history thus begins with Reactive-Infrared (small family bands of hunter-gatherers) before progressing to Magic-Magenta (larger groups of up to a few hundred who explain the world using primitive animist mythologies), followed by Impulsive-Red. Red organizations emerge from war and conquest, and in the modern world still can be seen in street gangs and the mafia. Conformist-Amber comes next. “When Conformist-Amber consciousness emerged,” Laloux writes, “humankind leaped from a tribal world subsisting on horticulture to the age of agriculture, states and civilizations, institutions, bureaucracies, and organized religions.” As examples of Amber organizations, Laloux mentions the Catholic Church, government agencies, public schools, and the military.

Out of the Amber mindset grows the Achievement-Orange paradigm, which is based on science, progress, and material success. Orange organizations are all about innovation, research and development, meritocracy and accountability. Modern global corporations, such as Nike, Walmart, and Coca-Cola, are their embodiment. Many internet companies, like Amazon, despite their otherwise nontraditional cultures, also fall into the Orange paradigm. Yet as successful and profitable as Orange companies might be, for many people they remain unsatisfying. The relentless materialism of the Orange worldview causes many individuals to yearn for more meaningful lives.

Enter the Pluralistic-Green paradigm. Green organizations (like Zappos in its pre-Holacracy incarnation) build upon the successes of Orange, yet seek to inject meaning, purpose, and fairness into their business models. Green organizations, such as Southwest Airlines and Ben & Jerry’s, often use the metaphor of family to describe themselves, and they have experimented with worker-ownership, rotating leadership, and other forms of power sharing. Most often, however, they devolve into a form of benign dictatorship; Green organizations often stand or fall with the presence of heroic and parental CEOs. Ben & Jerry’s, for example, was an iconic brand, known for its social and environmental activism. In 2000, however, after struggling for a few years, it was acquired by Unilever, the global food conglomerate, which promised its new employees everything would continue as before, but soon began downsizing and closing plants.

According to Laloux, each stage in the evolution of human organization has come as a result of a leap forward in the evolution of human consciousness. The move from Red to Amber happens when Red learns to internalize rules that allow it to control its impulses; the shift to Orange when Amber stops fully identifying with group values and norms; Green organizations emerge from the recognition that Orange organizations are devastating society and the planet. And, according to Laloux, “The shift to Evolutionary-Teal happens when we learn to disidentify from our own ego. By looking at our ego from a distance, we can suddenly see how its fears, ambitions, and desires often run our life.” Teal organizations are those that have freed themselves from their ego-fears and begun “to trust in the abundance of life.”

People who have achieved the Teal mindset, Laloux writes, are often interested in wisdom traditions, transpersonal psychology, yoga, meditation, and martial arts. Rather than being preoccupied with social norms, success, or wealth, or even the Green value of harmony, Teal people are focused on internal yardsticks and self-actualization. “We do not pursue recognition, success, wealth, and belonging to live a good life,” Laloux explains. “We pursue a life well-lived, and the consequence might just be recognition, success, wealth, and love.”

At its heart, a Teal organization is one that seeks to empower its members to be creative, independent, adaptable, and self-directed—an alliance of entrepreneurs rather than an army of servile corporate drones. Mindful of the lures and snares of the Green mindset, they avoid the quagmire of consensus. As they undergo the transition to Teal, organizations do away with hierarchies of people and of power and replace them with a hierarchy of purpose. The three basic “breakthroughs” that Laloux attributes to Teal organizations are self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose. What being Teal means for any one company, then, will vary considerably. At Zappos, the most urgent question, one very much up in the air, is the following: What exactly will Teal mean for us? Which is just another way of saying, What does Teal mean for Tony?

When I sat down with Hsieh in late April, in a small conference room off the Zappos lobby, I asked him to describe what attracted him to the principles of self-organization. Hsieh spoke rapidly, in an almost affectless monotone; he was wearing his trademark jeans and a Zappos t-shirt. He gave several answers. First was the business perspective. The world is moving too fast, he said, and the business environment is too unpredictable to do things the old-fashioned way. He wants everyone at Zappos to approach their work like an entrepreneur, to be adaptable, flexible, resourceful, and creative. He spoke about cities and how resilient they are and cited a finding that when cities grow in size, the productivity of residents increases as well. Precisely the opposite happens with organizations. “Companies all die at some point,” he said. “But cities often don’t.”

From a human perspective, he continued, Zappos has always encouraged its employees to bring their full creative selves to work, rather than leaving a big part of themselves at home. Keeping employees satisfied and engaged, for Hsieh, isn’t just a matter of benevolence. “There’s just so much untapped potential,” he said. “With 1,500 employees, I think the answers for almost anything we want to do are here.”

Holacracy, for Hsieh, has been useful as a means for making explicit what Zappos was already doing, and as a tool for reproducing his preferred practices throughout the company. The same could be said for “the book.” It’s a useful compendium of practices and case studies that will help Zappos as it evolves as a company.

When we spoke about principles of self-organization, our conversation inevitably turned to parties, and what makes a great one. When he lived in San Francisco, Hsieh bought a large loft primarily so that he and his friends would have a place to hang out. Now he uses the Airstream Park in the same way, and though parties are an important metaphor for Hsieh, he’s not the kind of person who thrives on being the center of the action. He prefers to be off to the side, “part of the energy,” but not occupying the stage. Watching what emerges seems to be the main attraction.

Hsieh told me he didn’t really think there was anything surprising or newsworthy about the March offer. Zappos has been on the path to Holacracy for some time, and they’d been talking about Teal for months. Employees have been urged to read “the book,” and free copies are available to all. “As far as the offer goes,” he said, “some were upset about the relatively short time-line. To me, that’s weird, because nobody was being forced to take it. If you don’t like the offer, just rewind a week and pretend that we never gave the offer.”

A number of the Zapponians I interviewed agreed. Brian Kirby, a software engineer who formerly worked at Adobe, told me he was “all Teal all the time.” Kirby is a big guy with a full beard, a receding hairline, and a huge personality. For him, Teal was all about personal liberty, and he even wrote a manifesto comparing Teal to the American Revolution. He told me the tech department had been slow to adopt Holacracy, and middle managers had actively resisted it. The attitude among some of his colleagues had been that Holacracy was just the flavor of the month. They preferred to ignore it, or adopt it superficially. That resistance among the tech department was borne out by the fact that 53 out of 257 people in tech, or just over 21 percent, took the offer.

As far as Kirby was concerned, that was just fine. He had joined Zappos because he saw the potential of self-organizing principles latent in Delivering Happiness, and he was sick of fighting with other middle managers. But the question of compensation was a real one. Kirby has a large family, and he told me if his compensation drops significantly after the new year, the deadline for former managers to establish their new roles in the company, he’ll have to leave. All this talk about higher stages of consciousness is fine, but even gung-ho Tealiocrats like Kirby are unwilling to live on the bleeding edge if they have to take a pay cut.

And so far, even months later, no one seems to know whether they will. It wasn’t just that management roles have been deprecated. Almost every management policy has been called into question. Everything—including compensation, performance management, discipline, time management and attendance, appointments and promotions, recruitment and dismissal—was very much in flux.

The resulting uncertainty explains why many Zapponians were upset by the April offer, even if they were fully onboard with the Zappos culture, Teal, and self-organization. Rachel Murch, the woman I had observed walking back-and-forth with Hsieh at the Airstream Park, was not at all happy with the way the change had been handled. A Las Vegas native who was recruited five years ago as a change manager, Murch told me she saw a draft of Hsieh’s March email before it was sent out. “I thought, ‘Oh my God. I have to figure out a way to make this better.’” She believes the final version was better than it had been, but she still thinks the whole thing had been handled badly. She immediately set out to organize a series of weekly “Teal Talks” to help employees make sense of the changes.

Murch believes the talks have been helpful, but feels like she and the other organizers were playing catch-up. “We’re now doing what we should have done months ago, before the offer was made, to prepare people and educate them,” she said. “Tony had no idea how people would take this.”

Murch didn’t take the offer, but she introduced me to someone who did. Chris Coy joined Zappos in 2014, so he hadn’t been at the company very long at all. I spoke to him by phone the week after he took the offer. Coy was hired as a user experience designer, to work on the web site, but Zappos’s customer-facing web site has been basically frozen for the last few years while the company migrates its backend systems to Amazon’s platforms, a multiyear project known as Supercloud.

In Holacratic terms, Coy’s role at the company fell within the “user experience community of practice,” a group that met from time to time to talk about their craft as designers, but, for the most part, he and his tech colleagues worked alone or in small teams. Coy told me he didn’t object to the principles of self-organization, and, in fact, he considers his whole career trajectory to have been self-organized. “It’s not the ideas, it’s the execution,” he said. “We’re not a culture of critique or open dialogue.” So people don’t feel free to speak openly because of the “subtle culture of coercive positivity.” He pointed out that you see the same thing in politics and religion all the time. An order gets handed down from above, and most people just fall in line. “Power is just reframing itself in this new ideology.” When I asked him why he thought things had been handled the way they were, Coy replied that change at Zappos has always been sudden and jarring. Over the last few years, as the company has grown, he believes the company’s leadership has simply struggled with the complexities that are inherent in such a large organization. “I think what we’re seeing,” Coy continued, “is an untethered leadership, especially at the executive level.”

It wasn’t just Hsieh who was out of touch with the lives of normal employees, Coy said. Other members of the core leadership were having a hard time empathizing with people in the call center, who, Coy said, were having a difficult time adjusting to all the changes. They’re at the bottom of the totem pole and, like most people who seek corporate jobs, they’re looking for security and stability. They tend to be risk averse, he said, even if they do have tattoos and piercings. He described one manager who said the people who don’t like the new state of affairs can always get another job. But entry-level jobs aren’t that easy to come by in Las Vegas (or anywhere), Coy responded, and for people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, a job that’s always in flux can be pretty terrifying.

“People who live in trailers,” he said darkly, “generally do so because they’re broke, not because it’s a fun social experiment.”

Meanwhile, the migration of Zappos’s entire IT infrastructure to Amazon—which means figuring out a way to move an extraordinarily complex set of custom software programs that power a billion-dollar-a-year e-commerce site over to an entirely new environment—continues. The difficulty of this effort is almost unfathomable. Imagine taking a million square pegs and attempting to insert them into a million round holes, except you don’t even know if all the holes exist, or where the holes might be located, and you have to negotiate access to the holes with dozens of different teams of hostile software engineers. The project has consumed Zappos’s tech department for more than two years, and during that time, the Zappos site has been almost completely static. That means no improvements or innovations and only minimal bug fixes.

Barry Van Beek, the project’s program manager, told me he thought Supercloud was the single largest e-commerce replatforming in history. “No one has ever attempted this before, on this scale.” Van Beek, who has been at Zappos for eight years, said Supercloud has about 20 different teams, with 250 to 350 people, including contractors, working with more than 100 different Amazon teams. When they began, they had no idea what they were getting into. It took months to figure out what was available on the Amazon side, and for well over a year, Van Beek wasn’t even sure the migration was technically possible. But, he said, Supercloud is an Amazon-mandated goal, and they didn’t have any choice. So they figured it out. “The level of effort,” he said, “was almost incomprehensible.”

As Van Beek described the enormous scale of the project, which was introduced by Zappos leadership in March 2013, I couldn’t help but notice that Supercloud happened to correspond almost exactly with the introduction of Holacracy. Van Beek agreed. “Anytime you introduce companywide or departmentwide change, it’s going to have a negative effect on your progress,” he said. “We were prepared for that. Zappos is a place of never-ending change anyway.”

Holacracy was a big change, he said, but it wasn’t really all that disruptive. Software projects often tend to be self-organizing, and Supercloud, because of its vast scale, had to be broken up into largely autonomous teams anyway. Each team was given broad goals, but how they ended up meeting those targets was left to the individual members. The introduction of Teal, however, was something else entirely. Teal has been “far more disruptive to our progress,” Van Beek said. “And I think it’s had more of an effect on morale. Mostly because it’s personal.”

For managers, having that identity stripped from them was personal; being told their compensation might change was personal. Van Beek’s title of program manager will no longer exist. All of a sudden, as the deadline for the completion of Supercloud loomed at the end of 2015, instead of thinking about how they were going to get the web site’s shopping cart to work on an Amazon server, Zapponians were worried about whether they should stay at the company or take the severance package. As a result, almost immediately after the original offer, damage control kicked in, and the tech department was given a deferred offer and a deadline of January 1, 2016. “If we hadn’t put together the deferred offer,” he said, “I think we would have seen a level of attrition in tech that probably wouldn’t have allowed us to complete it at all this year.”

Even so, the offer hit tech hardest. Whole teams were devastated. Now Van Beek had to worry about replacing extremely talented and expensive employees. Then, once the April 30 deadline had passed, Zappos published a list of who had taken the offer. That took everyone by surprise. “A lot of people didn’t get to tell their colleagues and friends that they took the offer before the list came out.”

For the engineers, developers, and programmers who stayed, the road to Teal will not be easy. Each of them must grapple with significant questions. As Van Beek put it, “Not only do I have to decide whether I want to work at Zappos anymore, but is my role going to be relevant? Is it even possible for me to stay, and if so, in what context? Will I be using the skills that I’m passionate about?”

I asked Van Beek if he would have preferred for Hsieh to wait until after Supercloud to make the Teal offer. He laughed pretty hard at that question. “Oh, absolutely. I call it executive interruption. That’s expected, especially at Zappos. But when Supercloud began, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine executive interruption at this scale, especially toward the end of what we’re trying to do. Not saying that the decision was right or wrong. Just happens to be at a time when we’re trying to finish what is probably the most complex thing we’ll ever work on.”

Van Beek told me he is confident Supercloud can be completed, but he worries the disruptions caused by the offer, as well as unforeseeable delays on the Amazon side, will slow their progress. When Zappos does complete the migration, he hopes the tech department will be able to turn its attention to innovating in the e-commerce space, tackling challenges such as the size and fit problem. If customers are more likely to arrive at a good fit before they order, eliminating returns and the associated restocking and shipping costs will improve margins.

Somehow I doubt Hsieh will be satisfied with such mundane improvements. Every few years, he decides to turn his company upside down. First it was the move to Las Vegas, then the move downtown, then the introduction of Holacracy. Now it was Teal and the offer. Hsieh said he expects the offer to be “something we’ll probably randomly end up doing in the future. Not on a set schedule, but call it every three-to-five years.” Next time around there will likely be some new theory of organizations that will motivate him. It’s a recipe for permanent revolution, a revolution that is driven, above all, by his instincts and intuitions. Maybe he just gets bored.

But the disconnections, miscommunications, and “executive interruptions” described by Murch, Coy, and Van Beek suggest that Hsieh’s relentless organizational experimentation may no longer be as sustainable as it once was, when Zappos was a much smaller company. When the CEO becomes a distant figure, sheer force of personality and charisma cease to be enough to motivate hundreds of employees as they weather wave after wave of perpetual organizational flux.

In June, I contacted Murch to see if things were beginning to settle down at work. “No one knows how to get things done anymore,” she wrote to me in an email. “It’s easy when there are bosses with budgets. Now we still don’t have any answers to how budgets are going to work, and no one is willing to make any decisions because they don’t know if they have the authority to do so. My Zappos life is not very productive right now and I hate that. Hopefully things will get better soon.”

When I followed up in September, Murch told me things were slowly improving, or at least that people were figuring out how to get their work done. When I asked if anything had been decided about how compensation was going to be set, however, she sounded less enthusiastic. In fact, she sounded pretty frustrated. Increasingly, she said, compensation at Zappos was being tied to something called “badges” and a confusing new internal currency called “People Points.” Everyone at Zappos has 100 People Points that add up, roughly, to the percentage of time they spend on all of their roles.

The badging system seems to be modeled on scouting merit badges. Employees can earn badges for attending workshops or events. These are “suit up-show up” badges, Murch said. And badges exist for a variety of accomplishments, which are created mostly by employees themselves, or perhaps by lead links in particular circles, or by Hsieh. Then there are the compensation badges, and these, she said, were getting a lot of attention right then, for obvious reasons. “People are starting to go, OK, I’m ready for a raise, what do I have to do?”

One thing Zapponians now have to do is their own research about salaries, to find out the market rate for jobs at other companies that correspond to their roles. In a normal corporation, such things are taken care of by the human resources department. Not at Zappos, not anymore. Instead, if Murch wants a raise, she has to do all the research into what she’s worth, create a badge, come up with qualifications for receiving the badge, and then design the actual look of the badge. Then it all has to be approved by the People Pool & Comp circle. And who happens to be the lead link of that circle? “Now, instead of trying to convince your boss that you deserve more money,” said Murch, incredulously, “you have to convince Tony Hsieh.”

The emphasis on badges and People Points has been building for some time, and Murch, for one, has tried to ignore it, but she knew that eventually she was going to have to get with the program, goofy as it was, if she ever wanted another raise, or even a cost-of-living increase. Murch also mentioned something new, something that seems to have been invented since the Teal offer, known as “the Beach,” which is where people “go” if they don’t have a role. If a lead link doesn’t like you, or doesn’t think you’re good at your job, that person can remove you from the role. The lead link can’t fire you anymore, so someone at Zappos came up with the fairly terrifying idea that people with no roles should be “on the Beach.”

Murch put me in touch with a former HR manager named Tammy Williams who has been trying to reform the Beach. Williams, who joined Zappos in October 2014 after a 30-year career in HR, was hired as a senior manager in HR, and relocated to Las Vegas just a few months before her job was eliminated with the advent of Teal. She chose not to take the offer, however, because she saw the changes as an opportunity. She could act almost as an independent contractor or entrepreneur within a large company. Plus she looked around and saw obvious needs that she could meet.

Zappos culture, she said, had always been one of “hire slow and fire fast.” People who were identified as bad “culture fits” were quickly weeded out. With the coming of Teal, however, and the creation of the Beach as a kind of holding pen or killing floor, the culture had taken a brutal turn. Some people who got beached found themselves being shunned as if they were contagious. These were people who, for whatever reason, were not successful at manning the phones, for example, but perhaps could make a contribution elsewhere in the company. It’s not that they were suddenly bad people. They just needed help.

So Williams rechristened the Beach as the Why Space, a kind of in-company outplacement agency. “Tony has allowed me two weeks to three months,” Williams said, for “beachgoers” to reinvent themselves. All beachgoers who enter the Why Space start off with two weeks, and Williams extends their stay a week at a time, “as long as they are doing the work,” which means keeping a journal, attending workshops, and taking personality assessments as they seek to be redeployed within the company.

Williams told me the story of one woman, named Rosemary, who had been removed from her role in CLT shortly after she completed new hire training. Her lead link didn’t think she was connecting emotionally with customers, even though the woman had 13 years of call-center experience. As it turned out, Williams said, Rosemary was simply too polite. She said, “Yes, ma’am,” and, “Yes, sir,” because that’s how she had been trained to address customers, but such old-fashioned formal manners were foreign to her lead link, who demanded a grittier personal style. Rosemary was the first beachgoer to keep a journal, which is now a requirement of the Why Space. At a recent all-hands meeting, Williams asked Rosemary to read her journal in front of the entire company, to show people how hurt she’d been when her new Zappos friends had ostracized her after she was beached. After reading the journal, Rosemary was offered a new role right there onstage.

The theme of the all-hands meeting had been “Hero’s Journey,” and was organized around the work of Joseph Campbell, whose popular writings on myth are heavily infused with Jungian psychoanalysis. Everyone was so inspired by Rosemary’s example, by the way she had “slain her dragon,” that the Why Space was rebranded as Hero’s Journey—though as often happens at Zappos, with its frequent changes of nomenclature, Zapponians will probably always use the Beach, Why Space, and Hero’s Journey interchangeably, thus giving new hires and visiting journalists even more to scratch their heads about. “Beachgoers” and “Why Spacers” are also now known as “Explorers.”

I asked Williams about the badges. “There was just an email—finally, everyone’s been waiting on it—probably
15 minutes before our call, from Tony’s circle, the People Pool & Comp circle, and they have come right out and
said explicitly now that in the future they’re moving the compensation structure to badging skill sets that you bring to the workplace.” The email she mentioned, also known as a “shard” from Glass Frog, included a link to the new compensation policy, which outlined a labyrinthine process that has defeated my most strenuous attempts at comprehension. At Zappos, Williams said, the traditional HR concept of a career path is out the window. “We’re being encouraged to think in terms of a choose-your-own-career adventure.”

The contemporary movement of corporate reform, the drive to make the workplace more humane and meaningful, to imbue companies with joy and a higher purpose, will not stand or fall with Zappos. But if it does fail, if Amazon clamps down and assimilates the happy-wacky Zapponian culture and absorbs all those smiles and hugs and high-fives into its vale of tears, the rest of the reform movement will suffer. The stakes are pretty high, at least for people who would prefer not to spend their days in a live-action Dilbert comic strip. Unfortunately, right now it seems that most of the self-organizing and self-actualization at Zappos is being carried out by Hsieh. Everybody else is just following along.

One night in Las Vegas, I was sitting around a fire pit in the Airstream Park with a group of visitors when Hsieh showed up and decided to give everyone a tour of the Downtown Project. Eventually we found ourselves on Fremont Street next to the giant praying mantis, which Hsieh bought one year at Burning Man. Behind the praying mantis was a geodesic dome the size of a small house, illuminated from within by colored lights. Hsieh was using a special iPhone app to control the lighting, changing colors, and making them pulse on and off. Suddenly, the mantis began belching fire from its antennae. The noise and the heat were almost too much. Small children scattered, laughing and screaming with delight and terror. Hsieh made a quick gesture, and the mantis operator descended with a simple push-button controller. We each took turns working the mantis, shooting fire into the desert air in time with AC/DC and Queen. Off to one side, Hsieh quietly presided over the spectacle, the puppet master
in his element, in the flow but well out of the spotlight, his face aglow, eyes flashing. a

Why I Live Where I Live

Some writers need to go abroad to see home clearly, but New York City has all I need.

BY VIVIAN GORNICK | NOVEMBER

The Southern writer Harry Crews once explained why he lived on three acres of uncleared land in the middle of a small university town 100 miles from the place in Georgia where he was born and raised:

I’ve tried to work—that is, to write—in Georgia, but I could not. Even under the best of circumstances, at my mama’s farm, for instance, it was all too much for me. I was too deep in it, too close to it, to make anything out of it. ... [On the other hand], I can’t write if I get too far away. I tried to work on a novel in Tennessee once and after a ruined two months gave it up in despair. I once spent four months near Lake Placid in a beautiful house lent to me by a friend—perfect place to write—and I didn’t do a damn thing but eat my guts and look out the window at the mountains.

As a writer, Crews knew that it had been his task to search for and find the geographic distance that equated with the inner distance necessary for his novels to emerge from the emotional swamp that is the natural dwelling place of all writing. Linked both to the past and the future, this little university town 100 miles from home was now home for Crews because wherever he could work (that is, write) was bound to become home.

Once, in Houston, I brought a dinner table conversation on this very subject—why we live where we live—to an abrupt halt when I said, quite casually, that if everyone I knew died tomorrow I’d be OK because I’d still have New York. The sentence shot out of me, surprising (shocking) me as much as it did everyone else at the table. What, after all, could such a sentiment imply, much less mean? I realized that evening that while I’ve often described in an episodic or story-telling way my many encounters on the streets of the city, I’ve never tried to analyze my joined-at-the-hip relation to New York City. Why it was that, regardless of all other attachments, nowhere—and with no one!—else in the world did I feel as richly connected to myself as I did on the street in the city of my birth? I also realized that evening that while I’ve traveled a good bit of the world, and even lived for months at a time in parts of it, I have never begun a significant piece of writing anywhere except in New York. Completed work abroad yes, but started it no. It occurred to me then that many writers probably have the same relation to their place of abode as did Crews and, for that matter, as do I: Live where you can feel life on your skin and get it down on paper. A problem whose solution involves the mystery of temperament.

In the opening chapter of The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s protagonist, the writer Anna Wulf (clearly a stand-in for Lessing herself), and her friend, Molly, sit talking. Molly has reluctantly returned from a vacation abroad, and she asks Anna, with some bitterness, why she’d had to come back to the dreariness of 1950s London, why she could not have remained in Europe. “Because this is the country we know,” Anna replies. “The other countries are places we don’t think in.”

Anna’s observation—delivered in a section famously called “Free Women”—is that of a writer (Lessing herself) who equates thinking with the hard work necessary to encounter the genuine in her own thought and feeling—and London with the place where the inner freedom necessary to do so is to be found. By inner freedom, Lessing means what D.H. Lawrence meant when he said, “Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. … Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.” For Anna Wulf, writing-thinking-London equates with diving in the Lawrentian sense of the word: That, in fact, is what The Golden Notebook itself testifies to. Molly’s sojourn abroad delivered sybaritic pleasure, but under continental blue skies, she was doing anything but thinking, much less diving. To the contrary, she was blissing out: the direct opposite of what Anna calls thinking.

Of course, it hardly needs saying that not all writers define the act of thinking as does Lessing’s protagonist. No one thinks harder than those who employ intuition as much or more than they do the faculty of reason that Lessing so prizes: The poet or the writer of magical realism or the creator of a Proustian sentence, all of whom, when successful, are certainly diving deep and taking the reader with them.

A writer for whom sybaritic pleasure did equate with what Lessing called thinking and Lawrence called diving was Henry Miller; it was only through the obsessive pursuit of a free-spirited, anti-social eroticism explored 3,000 miles from his native environment that Miller could reach the part of himself that wrote with the unstructured, uncensored honesty that delivers the writing goods. The underside of bohemian Paris in the dead middle of the Great Depression is not only the setting for Miller’s masterpiece, Tropic of Cancer (published in 1934), it is the material through which he released the untethered voice that brought into visceral existence the drunks, artists, scoundrels, derelicts, prostitutes, and deracinated intellectuals who populate the book—some in search of Sadean pleasure, some in search of Enlightenment, some in search of a meal; all willing to engage at the most inconceivable levels of human exchange, all uniformly amazed at what they find themselves capable of saying and doing.

As he had been the same deadbeat in Brooklyn that he was in Europe, Miller knew firsthand, and long before he left the United States, that if you turned over the rock of respectability anywhere in the world this was what would crawl out from under it—and he needed not only to tell what he knew (especially to middle-class America), he hungered to send it up into the Western skies through a blaze of rocket prose that would do nothing less than electrify. For the ten best years of his writing life, Paris was talismanic for Miller only because it was the place in which he wrote the books that let him soar and dive. He often said he was afraid of leaving the City of Light and indeed, his fears were justified. In 1940, he returned to the United States, settled himself on a mountaintop in California where he happily became an unexceptional citizen of his own country—and never again wrote an original word.

Countless writers have become expats in order to write more freely about home than they ever could at home. One of these was Gertrude Stein who went to Paris in 1903 and spent her life in France writing about an America she had internalized but could not bear to live in. When she said of her hometown, Oakland, California, “There is no there there,” she was speaking about an inchoate vastness of American life about which she had much feeling but no clarity. In struggling to get a handle on a world she knew to be formative not only for herself but for the future of the West, she stumbled on a self-created English that helped usher in literary modernism: a movement that could not have been born in turn-of-the-century America itself but was certainly seeded by the self-imposed exile of Americans like Stein.

Another language-changing writer was James Joyce, who also spent his working life physically far from the country of his birth yet metaphorically bound to it ’til the day he died. It was out of that Ireland, the one he conjured in his head, that Joyce intended, as Mary McCarthy put it, to make a literary revolution “whose strategy required his physical absence to foster mental concentration.” And so it did. Wherever he landed—Trieste, Paris, Zurich—it was the Ireland in his mind that provided the air that Joyce breathed, the songs he sang, the speech rhythms he worshipped. He was, for all intents and purposes, a man in exile rather than an expatriate. He never settled anywhere, never took part in the life of the various countries he perched in, never became anything other than a man in transit who hung around continental Europe for decades, living almost entirely in his head while he wrote and wrote and wrote to wrestle into shape, in the most brilliantly original English of his or any other century, all the thought and feeling about a haunted sense of home out of which he fashioned a fictional essence of human consciousness never before or since equaled.

Very often, writers have felt themselves in exile while living in their native lands, and have transformed homegrown anomie into a galvanizing force not only for literary but for social change. In the United States, the Beat writers of the 1950s were, if anything, such a group. America’s cold war politics had created an atmosphere of threat so remarkable—children went to bed afraid that the Bomb would go off while they slept—that it was as if we had lost World War II, not won it. The Beats saw themselves as a group of visionaries whose writings would return the country to a lost sense of the innate holiness of life; (the term “Beats” was derived from their routine use of the word “beatitude.”) The major figures among them—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs—wrote to tell the world why they felt as alienated as they did, and why their readers should be feeling the same.

These were people who knew themselves to be on the road to Enlightenment. This conviction easily persuaded them that they were emissaries obliged to spread the word. And what was that word? We must spend our years religiously celebrating the beauty of life and condemning all those who do not. They saw themselves as the Buddha had seen himself, as a man on a mission of conversion that could be accomplished only by wandering the earth. So the Beats wandered: all over the United States and halfway around the world as well. These wanderings were memorialized by Kerouac, who was perpetually on the road in the United States, and Ginsberg, who spent years (metaphorically speaking) writing poems in one ashram or another. After a while the wander itself became home territory; and the work of the wanderers underwritten by an angry love for an America they were forever leaving in order to forever mythologize. For most of their lives, not one of the Beats could stay put.

Then again, there was Robert Frost and Flannery O’Connor and Emily Dickinson, writers who seem hardly ever to have left the house. For these writers, a sufficiency of human experience lay close at hand in the writer’s interaction with the weather, the neighbors, the in-laws; the death of a child, the betrayals of marriage, the shock of their own emergent characters. For them, the sheer wonderment of life crystallizing repeatedly through the daily encounter with the quotidian provided a lifetime of writing.

It was in this camp, as it turned out, that I belonged. I became one of those writers who, when away from home—in my case, New York City—was filled with such a basic absence of well-being that I sometimes imagined myself under citywide house arrest. In no place else in the world, it seemed—as Anna Wulf might have put it—was my intelligence capable of expanding, much less diving.

To complicate matters, the home I am speaking of was not the place I was actually born in, rather it was one, though only a subway ride away, I had, metaphysically speaking, to journey to. The journey I speak of was the one taken from the outer boroughs—in my case, the Bronx—to Manhattan; one that many of my generation have described as the longest in the world. It was the trip taken by those of us who came from working class, immigrant homes to what we thought of as the center of art and intellect, literary success and political influence, glamour and cultivation. Many of us did indeed penetrate quickly to the center of one or another of these larger worlds, but for many more of us, me included, the glittering enterprise remained elusive: perpetually within reach but never quite within grasp. I went to school but the degree did not gain me a profession. I left the Bronx but only for a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side. I began to write, but nobody read me beyond the streets of Greenwich Village.

Thus, I became that other kind of Manhattanite: a walker in the city; and discovered that nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like joining the endless stream of people moving steadily, as blood moves through veins and arteries, along these democratic streets. The relief I felt stepping daily into the anonymous crowd was almost indescribable; and then relief morphed into vigor, and vigor gave me vital information. Walking day after day on pavements inscribed with savvy, laughter, and anxiety, what struck me almost viscerally was the sense of expectation that seemed to rise and fall before my very eyes, and then rise yet again. I soon understood that it was this expectation that supplied New York with its unique brand of energy: avid, noisy, fast-moving; wild to get into the act. That was it, really, getting into the act. Clearly, there was no doubt among this crowd that there was an act to get into: even, or perhaps especially, if it need be self-created. Daily, I experienced the multitude of ways in which people in New York scrambled not merely to survive but to provide a platform on which to perform. Street theater in the city was there on demand: at a traffic light, on a bus, in a store, in your own apartment when you opened the door to the plumber or the electrician. It was as though every man, woman, and child in town was ready at a moment’s notice to ad lib an exchange that, given enough story-telling time, would transform an event into an experience. It was this impulse that, soon enough, infused an atmosphere I came, permanently, to call home.

To this day, the street achieves for me what I so often cannot achieve for myself: composition. When it does I never fail to realize that this is my deepest need—to know not the peace and excitement of love, marriage, or continental adventure, but of composition. The promise of narrative that flashes repeatedly out of the mass of swiftly moving figures—always leaving in its wake scraps of conversation, profiles of dramatic beauty, gestures of humor and despair—that, again and again, restores me not necessarily to meaning but to an affection for life that fills me—stomach, arms, chest, and brain—with peace and joy and the longing to dive.

On Sixth Avenue at 34th Street, a couple, somewhere in their forties I’d say, is walking rapidly toward me. The woman’s hair is the color of brass, the man’s shoe-polish black; her nails long and blood-red, his bitten to the quick; her eyes flash, his are defeated. As they come abreast of me, she brings all the nails of one hand together, shakes them in the air beneath her companion’s nose and demands exasperatedly, “Don-choo unner-stann the facts of life?”

At the corner, waiting for the light to change, two women are standing beside me. “So, how’s the boyfriend situation?” one asks. “I slept with someone the other night, but it’s not gonna work out,” comes the answer. Why, her companion asks. “He was a great performer, but it was like going to bed with a tender bull.” The other shrugs, “Every woman’s dream. What’s your problem?”

On Park Avenue, a middle-aged couple wearing expensive clothes and tired faces emerge from an elegant building. “You don’t get the point at all,” she says just past the doorman. “You never have, you never will!” The man stops dead at the end of the awning. “You’re insulted, aren’t you?” he says softly. “My lack of understanding. It’s an insult to your very person, isn’t it?”

I lie in bed that night thinking, how on earth could I ever live anywhere but in New York? And know that I never will. a

image credits. traister: Alice Proujansky; HEER: Pixland/Getty Images Plus; BEAM: Jérémie Souteyrat; BRUENIG: Associated Press/L’Osservatore Romano; JOYCE: Andrea Morales; DYSON: HelloVon; CHEE: Neil Gilks; PERCY: Erin Trieb; GENOWAYS: Brian Stauffer; HODGE: Gregg Segal; GORNICK: ©Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photo

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