Author: Andrew Sullivan

Sarah Stillman spotlights the abuse of civil asset forfeiture laws:

The rise of civil forfeiture has, in some areas, proved of great value. It allows the government to extract swift penalties from white-collar criminals and offer restitution to victims of fraud; since 2012, the Department of Justice has turned over more than $1.5 billion in forfeited assets to four hundred thousand crime victims, often in cases of corporate criminality. Federal agents have also used forfeiture to go after ruthless migrant smugglers, organized-crime tycoons, and endangered-species poachers, stripping them of their illicit gains. Global Witness, the anti-corruption group, recently cheered the Justice Department’s civil-forfeiture action targeting the son of Equatorial Guinea’s dictator, which sought his Malibu mansion, Gulfstream jet, and some two million dollars’ worth of Michael Jackson memorabilia, including a bejewelled white glove.

Yet only a small portion of state and local forfeiture cases target powerful entities.

“There’s this myth that they’re cracking down on drug cartels and kingpins,” Lee McGrath, of the Institute for Justice, who recently co-wrote a paper on Georgia’s aggressive use of forfeiture, says. “In reality, it’s small amounts, where people aren’t entitled to a public defender, and can’t afford a lawyer, and the only rational response is to walk away from your property, because of the infeasibility of getting your money back.” In 2011, he reports, fifty-eight local, county, and statewide police forces in Georgia brought in $2.76 million in forfeitures; more than half the items taken were worth less than six hundred and fifty dollars. With minimal oversight, police can then spend nearly all those proceeds, often without reporting where the money has gone.

Ilya Somin believes that the “best solution is to abolish civil asset forfeiture completely”:

As a practical matter, most of the people victimized by asset forfeiture abuse are poor, lacking in political influence, and unable to bear the expense of prolonged litigation. For these reasons, there is little political pressure to prevent the sorts of abuses documented in Stillman’s article and elsewhere. And there is similarly little incentive for higher officials to monitor police and prosecutors’ use of asset forfeiture to curb this kind of behavior. A categorical ban on civil asset forfeiture would be easier to administer than piecemeal reforms, and therefore more likely to succeed.

In 1970, Dylan released Self Portrait, a notoriously awful album that has confounded many of his fans for decades. When Greil Marcus reviewed it in Rolling Stone, he famously began with the question, “What is this shit?” Now, as part of their “Bootleg Series” that uncovers rarities, outtakes, and unreleased tracks from Dylan’s recording sessions, Columbia Records is releasing Another Self Portrait, offering a fuller picture of what the songwriter was up to at the time. Kevin Courrier thinks we have reason to be optimistic about the album, believing it will show “a man tracing the roots of both his musical path and interests”:

Self Portrait suffers from the sense that Dylan is playing the songs to himself rather than to the listener.

But the samples I’ve heard on Another Self Portrait, from Eric Anderson’s “Thirsty Boots” and Tom Paxton’s “Annie’s Gonna Sing Her Song,” actually reach out to an audience. You hear the threads of what not only came to define the musical territory Dylan had already been mining to that point, but also what would later become the Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour on satellite radio. On that program Dylan, as the host, took us on musical journeys through the history of American music – blues, jazz, show-tunes, rock and folk – using a theme like ‘the weather’ as the clothes line on which he hung the songs. On Another Self Portrait, he also extends to his listeners the country sound he was immersed in with his previous album, Nashville Skyline, by reminding us (as he had on the infamous The Basement Tapes) that his music was not narrowed by the social protests of the topical song. In his mind, the American songbook is an evolving and expanding catalogue tracing a map of the nation’s struggles and triumphs.

Another Self Portrait could very well be the album that Self Portrait wasn’t. It may compare to how Good As I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993) set Dylan up for his series of records (Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft) that brought his voice back to its authentic sound. In those two early Nineties records, Dylan revisited the songs of his youth, earlier versions of the America that would help him come to terms with the country he was living in now. He then set forth to mine his own path with those tracks (“World Gone Wrong,” “Black Jack Davey”) as skeleton keys for his own (“Not Dark Yet,” “High Water (for Charley Patton)”). But we already know that the history that followed those sessions led into the eventual aimlessness that Good As I Been to You got him out of. The only authentic thing about Self Portrait was its portrait of an artist in hiding. What Another Self Portrait might just reveal is more of what Dylan was actually hiding from.

Jen Doll pens a love letter to the books that filled her childhood summers:

There are a great many excellent summer reads, but to me, some of the most moving books of summer are the ones we read way back when we were kids on summer vacation. These stories may be five or 10 or 20 years old, or more, yet they still manage to take us right back to that childhood sense of summer, and wonder, when the days stretched out long and full of possibility, when the sun didn’t go down until 9 p.m. and we could roam free in our neighborhoods, ruling our small worlds, until then. Anything could happen by day, but by night, I’d be tucked in bed with a good book, which I could read with impunity into the wee hours because there was no school the next day. I’m a big believer in re-reading, particularly books we experienced at some long-ago time in our lives, because the power of those stories is not just in their words. They are transportive, letting us remember, re-live, and compare who we were then with who we are now.

Along the same lines, Judith Hertog recently revisited Ivan Turgenev’s classic novel of social change in Russia, Fathers and Sons, and came away surprised by how her response to the work had changed:

On rereading, I had expected to recognize the scenes and characters that moved me years ago. But I could not even guess which passages I had underlined and annotated as a seventeen-year-old. I vaguely remembered being impressed with Bazarov – it was probably one of his speeches that I recommended to my friends – but as an adult, I found Bazarov childishly pompous and recognized him as an insecure young man who holds on to the reassurance of big ideas to avoid having to make emotional connections. He was, in fact, I now realized, the boyfriend with whom I had just broken up when I was seventeen and whom I continued to love obsessively.

On second reading, I found that my sympathy now lies with the older characters, whom Bazarov ridicules. I felt pity for Bazarov’s parents as they try to understand and please their disdainful son. I identified with Arkady’s tenderhearted father, whom Bazarov dismisses as a sentimental fool. I even found myself siding with Arkady’s conservative uncle, Pavel. When, in one of their many quarrels, Bazarov declares that he questions anything that has not been proven, Pavel replies: “We are old-fashioned people; we imagine that without principles… taken as you say on faith, there’s no taking a step, no breathing…” Now that I’m an adult, I’m inclined to agree with Pavel that there is indeed a limit to the power of rational thought. In the twenty-five years between my readings of Fathers and Sons, the elements that originally did not speak to me seem to have germinated and become a part of myself.