Tag: United States

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Daily

A polygamist raid undoes a governor

First published in The Daily.

From the red cliffs overlooking Short Creek, Ariz., anyone could see an invading army coming from miles away. Perhaps that’s why the first Mormon families chose to settle there. On July 26, 1953, when the attackers finally came, they attempted to creep in under cover of darkness, during a total eclipse of the moon. Short Creek’s sentries spotted the trespassers anyway, and blew up a charge of dynamite to warn the town. Everyone gathered in the local schoolhouse to sing songs praising God and spend their last few minutes together. Then the government troops arrived.

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Daily

James Joyce and Freedom of Speech

Originally appeared in The Daily.

Landmark 1933 trial defeats would-be censors of racy ‘Ulysses’

It takes a fanatic to fight a fanatic. And in 1933, two gangs of fanatics faced off: on one side, a coalition of Christian moralists and guardians of decency, and on the other, a group of free-speech absolutists. At issue was the right to import and distribute a novel in which a leering Irish shopkeeper pleasures himself while watching a girl flash her undies at him from across a beach. The novel was “Ulysses” by James Joyce. On Dec. 6, a most unfanatical man, Judge John M. Woolsey of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, was called upon to pick a side.

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Daily

America’s First Public Transsexual

Originally appeared in The Daily.

A carpenter’s son, George Jorgensen was raised to be a good Lutheran kid, hardworking and decent, like the generations of skinny Danish farmers from whom he was descended. During his teenage years in the Bronx, when he realized he was falling in love with a male classmate, he knew instinctively that his feelings were not homosexual, but rather the love of a girl for a boy. So in 1952, at the age of 25, the God-fearing young man went to Copenhagen and had his genitals surgically removed so he could become the girl he thought nature intended him to be. George’s new self, known to the world as Christine Jorgensen, debuted on December 1, 1952, on the front page of the New York Daily News.  Hearst newspapers paid Jorgensen $20,000 for an exclusive interview; the banner headline read “EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY.”

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London Review of Books

Letter

Letter to the London Review of Books

Nicholas Guyatt, in his piece on the US Christian right, mentions that at the funeral of the notorious religious huckster Jerry Falwell, one lamb from Pastor Falwell’s flock was caught with homemade bombs in his car, claiming that he’d brought them in case liberal protesters threatened the cortège. In the event, the protesters weren’t ‘liberal’: they were members of an even more extreme religious sect, the Westboro Baptist Church, which denounced Falwell as a ‘corpulent false prophet’. The WBC, whose members believe the Iraq war is God’s way of punishing America for its permissive attitudes towards homosexuality, have weathered years of denunciation by more moderate clerics, such as Falwell. Yet when I interviewed them at one of their demonstrations, WBC members said they regard the US Constitution, including its provision guaranteeing freedom of speech and religion, as one of God’s greatest blessings. It’s a melancholy fact that many US Christians appreciate their Constitution only when their own beliefs are the ones ridiculed and suppressed.

Graeme Wood
Ciudad del Este, Paraguay

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Atlantic Monthly

Classify This

The Atlantic, September 2007. Includes this graphic by Ryan Morris.

The Bush administration conducts much of its work in the shadows. “Black site” detentions, extraordinary renditions, and domestic eavesdropping all happen in secret, and only by the grace of leaks and slipups do we know they happen at all.

Most secrets stay secret. But for the last quarter century, at least we’ve known how many secrets were being kept, because of the Information Security Oversight Office, or ISOO, an internal government watchdog that keeps tabs on secrecy standards and the number of documents classified each year. Its data show that the shadows have been getting darker and bigger lately, and are now at least the size of those at the height of the Cold War.

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Salon

A Prisoner’s Tale

Salon

The saga of a hapless New Zealander who ended up behind bars after seeking work in Iraq reveals the darker side of the U.S.-led coalition’s operations.

When Andreas Schafer was released from a prison in Iraq earlier this year, the Iraqi police apologized abjectly for having inconvenienced him for three months. They made sure he knew that if ever he wanted to get back at the arresting officer by, say, slaying the man’s brother, it would be all right by them. And he could expect not to be prosecuted for the crime.

It says something about Iraqi justice and the American-led occupation that Iraq’s finest viewed an invitation to murder as a triumph of decency and due process. Schafer, a hapless, idealistic 26-year-old New Zealander who had gone to Iraq in search of a job with a nongovernmental organization, ended up languishing in a prison in southern Iraq as an unacknowledged prisoner of the U.S.-led coalition. By keeping Schafer in an Iraqi-run prison, rather than in a prison monitored by Americans or international observers, the United States avoided putting him on the books and having to account for his treatment, even to his own government.

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