I'm voting for Justin Trudeau

Perusing the news at cbc.ca a couple of days ago, I discovered this arresting photo. It shows Justin Trudeau walking my favorite river, the Sylvia Grinnell. When I lived in Iqaluit, I walked that exact same spot many times. Trudeau is the only party leader to visit the North during the current election campaign. 

Recently, Barack Obama said,

I was proud to work with Justin Trudeau as President. He's a hard-working, effective leader who takes on big issues like climate change. The world needs his progressive leadership now, and I hope our neighbors to the north support him for another term.

On October 21, I’m voting for Justin Trudeau. 

October 3, 2016, Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Jon Lee Anderson’s “The Cuba Play” is one of 2016’s most absorbing reporting pieces. It tells the story of Obama’s Cuba project, beginning with a remarkable scene – Obama on stage at La Cerveceria, on Havana Harbor, speaking directly to the Cuban people about entrepreneurship – then cutting to Anderson’s interview with Obama (“A few weeks later, in the Oval Office, I asked Obama about the reaction”), then moving into a remarkable reconstruction of the string of events leading to the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations, including the famous handshake between Obama and Raúl Castro at Nelson Mendela’s funeral (“Castro wore an expression of flustered delight”), secret negotiations in Ottawa, the transfer of a vial of sperm of a Cuban spy, and a covert letter from Pope Francis to Obama. Anderson has discussed some of these events before in his “News Desk” posts on newyorker.com. But in “The Cuba Play,” he masterfully draws it all together, combining it with fascinating quotations from his personal interviews with Obama and other key players. If you consider the opening with Cuba one of Obama's major accomplishments, as I do, you’ll surely appreciate Anderson’s great “The Cuba Play.”

2.  I relish descriptions of scent. There are two dandies in this week’s issue: Jiayang Fan’s “Just then, the chocolate fondue arrived, halting the conversation with its exhalation of cinnamon and coconut” (“Tables For Two: Ladybird”), and Ian Frazier’s “He ordered a decaf espresso and asked the waiter to top it off with Sambuca. A smell of licorice rose” (“Don’t Tread On Me”).

3. I’m not crazy about pop music, but Hua Hsu’s “Word of Mouth,” on Bon Iver’s digitally manipulated sound, impinged my consciousness with this inspired line: “Speech synthesizers often make a song sound as though someone were running a leaky fluorescent highlighter across its lyrics.”

January 27, 2014 Issue

The balance between description and analysis that I look for in a political piece was never struck better than it is in David Remnick’s “Going the Distance,” a remarkable profile of Barack Obama, in this week’s issue. Remnick assesses Obama’s strengths (“This is the archetypal Obama habit of mind and politics, the calm, professorial immersion in complexity …”) and weaknesses (“unwilling to jolly his allies along the fairway and take a 9-iron to his enemies”), as he accompanies the President on a three-day fund-raising trip to Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, “rattling the cup in one preposterous mansion after another.” Of the piece’s many pleasures – the travelogue structure, the engaging first-person perspective – the most piquant is Remnick’s superb eye for detail: Obama’s fat lip (he caught an elbow in the mouth while playing basket ball at Fort McNair); Obama’s furtive chewing on a piece of Nicorette; the supply of blood matching Obama’s type kept in the trunk of his limo; the Claes Oldenburg safety pin looming in the dark at Jon Shirley’s house; “Renegade” – Obama’s Secret Service handle; Obama’s aides, ever focused on their iPhones (“The aides were, as ever, staring down at their iPhones, scrolling, tapping, mentally occupying a psychic space somewhere  between where they were and the unspooling news cycle back in Washington”); Obama mouthing the announcer’s words, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States,” as he walks toward the stage; the breakfast menu on Air Force One (“pumpkin spiced French toast drizzled with caramel syrup and a dollop of fresh whipped cream”); Obama’s trip director, Marvin Nicholson (“He and the President toss a football around, they shoot baskets, they shoot the shit”); the anecdote about Obama and his body guard Reggie Love taking a break during the Osama bin Laden mission to play spades; the Oval Office’s grandfather clock (“In the preternaturally quiet office, you could hear, between every long pause that Obama took, the ticking of a grandfather clock just to his left”). “Going the Distance” is an epic piece of reporting. I enjoyed it immensely. 

David Maraniss's Chaotic Theory of History

One of the coolest, most interesting theories I’ve read recently is David Maraniss’s statement of his approach to history writing. In his new biography, Barack Obama: The Story, Maraniss says:

My perspective in researching and writing this book, and my broader philosophy, is shaped by a contradiction that I cannot and never intend to resolve. I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder. I find these connections in story, in history, threading together individual lives as well as disparate societies – and they were everywhere I looked in the story of Barack Obama.

I share Maraniss’s belief. Chance does play a part in the way our lives unfold. I’ll never forget the line Ian Frazier uses in his great Family (1994) to describe the beginning of the attack at Chancellorville that killed several of his Ohio ancestors: “In the next instant, History, that force which always seems to choose people who are richer or poorer or in a different place, caught my relatives and the rest of the 55^th square on the point of the chin.” That’s the way history works. If you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – look out!

However, at least two reviewers have criticized Maraniss’s theory. Jill Lepore, in her “Obama, The Prequel” (The New Yorker, June 25, 2012), says:

There is something quite searching and wonderful about seeing much of history as a chaos of chance. It has a few pitfalls, however. One is that it renders brutality, as a driver of the course of human events, hard to see and even harder to gauge. Politics and economics appear in Maraniss’s account, in carefully researched detail: slavery and abolition, Jim Crow and civil rights in the United States, and colonialism in Kenya and Indonesia. But they can seem like richly painted stage cloth. Another difficulty is that telling the story of the President’s ancestors to explain how the President became the President is a teleological project, and a teleologist who embraces randomness is in some danger of finding himself unable to decide which details to include and which to leave out.

Darryl Pinckney, in his “Young Barry Wins” (The New York Review of Books, August 16, 2012), has a different complaint: “But if Dreams from My Father is Obama’s declaration of selfhood, it is his self-definition that Maraniss tries to take away from him by recasting him not as self-invented, but as the sum of inherited characteristics and traumatic circumstances.”

But I don’t think Maraniss is saying that “inherited characteristics and traumatic circumstances” are the only causes in Obama’s history. He treats them as among the multiplicity of causes in play at all times, in all humans. As Lepore points out, “By no means does Maraniss believe only in chaos. He has a passion for chance, but also a belief in order and a commitment to evidence.”

Is brutality “hard to see” in Maraniss’s account? It mightn’t be emphasized to the degree that it is in, say, Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, but it’s implicit, I submit, in Maraniss’s coverage of slavery, civil rights, colonialism, etc.

What I like about Maraniss’s theory is that it treats chance, accident and mistake the way, say, Carlyle treats heroes, and Marx treats relations of production, that is, as bright threads in history’s causal tapestry.