The Dish

A Massacre In Mexico, Ctd

Juliana Jiménez Jaramillo follows up on the 43 Mexican students who disappeared in late September in the southwestern state of Guerrero:

Authorities believe the police delivered the students to the local drug cartel, Guerreros Unidos. The mayor of the town, José Luis Abarca, and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda, were later arrested and charged with ordering the police to capture the students out of fear that they would cause a disturbance. Three of the gang members confessed this week to murdering the students, burning them, and throwing the remains in plastic bags in a nearby river and garbage dump. The remains are so badly charred that local forensics investigators haven’t been able to confirm their identities. An outside commission from Argentina had to be called to perform further tests.

This is not the first, biggest, or most gruesome mass disappearance during Mexico’s past eight years of brutal drug violence. More than 106,000 have died in what government data term “executions,” “confrontations,” and “homicide-aggressions” since former President Felipe Calderon informally declared his war on drugs in 2006. But the tragedy of Ayotzinapa is different. Rarely has the collusion between local authorities and the cartels been so obvious and the consequences so dire.

The disappearances, the insidious corruption they revealed, and the Mexican authorities’ failure to locate the students’ remains despite uncovering one mass grave after another have sparked protests throughout the country, as citizens demand answers and accountability from president Enrique Peña Nieto and his government. Laura Carlsen focuses on how these protests relate to Mexico’s left-wing activist movement, with which the murdered students were associated:

While the demonstrators seek justice for the 43 students, what’s also driving them is a deep-seated anger at the Peña Nieto administration. The 16 rural teachers’ colleges embody that clash of cultures. No matter what fallout results from Ayotzinapa, the ongoing demonstrations have revealed the vast gulf between Mexico’s radical grassroots and its government. …

With public pressure rising and the protests showing no sign of abating, the Ayotzinapa case will almost certainly continue to ensnare government officials — the only question is how far up the chain. The Guerrero state governor, Angel Aguirre, was the first political leader forced to resign as a result of the crisis on Oct. 23; some are calling for the resignation of Peña Nieto and [Attorney General Jesus] Murillo. “This is the bad old Mexico, where local officials are inept, corrupt or in cahoots with organized crime; where life is cheap and justice elusive,” the Financial Times warned on Oct. 28 — a far cry from the modern, business-friendly image Peña Nieto has worked so hard to project.

José Cárdenas criticizes Peña Nieto’s “fitful approach to endemic security issues”:

What Guerrero puts into bold relief is the huge chasm between security efforts at the federal level, where security forces have been reshuffled and consolidated, and local levels, where weak and frequently corrupt state and municipal institutions have proved almost helpless against the armed capability and audacity of the large criminal groups, who have successfully infiltrated those same institutions and forces. Guerrero should be a watershed moment for Mexico, convincing Mexico City elites that the security situation is not a distraction from the economic agenda, but instead that dismantling the operations of criminal enterprises is indispensable to their nations’ stability and prosperity. Clearly, ordinary citizens are finding the levels of criminal violence unbearable and are losing patience with government strategies.

Anabel Hernández is less charitable:

Since Peña Nieto came to power, there have been grave regressions in Mexico, one of which is the abhorrence of transparency and public accountability, a move that was led by the presidential office and replicated by other governmental institutions. What else can be expected of this soiled government? In recent months, the military and the attorney general have presented false reports regarding crimes. Official information shows that in 2006 the number of criminal complaints not investigated by the federal government amounted to 24,000; in 2013, the number was 63,000. In Peña Nieto’s administration, law enforcement has become increasingly slow and pathetic.

(In Mexico City, Mexico on November 16, 2014 a protester holds a sign reading “Mexico is a grave” during a demonstration against Mexico’s government. By Miguel Tovar/LatinContent/Getty Images)

Is Another Shutdown Brewing?

Josh Marshall doesn’t rule it out:

After their big election win two weeks ago, GOP leaders in Washington pressed one key point again and again: No shutdowns. Certainly no impeachment. And more generally an end to the government by showdown and crisis which has been their order of the day since coming to power in early 2011. And yet here we are, not two weeks into the new era of unified GOP control on Capitol Hill (albeit in the majority-elect phase) and we’re already down to our first shutdown showdown. Indeed, shutdown is emerging as the ‘mainstream’ response to the President’s impending immigration executive order, with impeachment the preferred response of your moreforward-leaning GOP electeds and Fox News whips.

The upshot is clear and shouldn’t surprise us: government by crisis is built into the DNA of the current GOP. And leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, despite their efforts since just after the 2010 election, are largely powerless to control or discipline it.

Politico reports on Republican leaders’ attempts to avoid a shutdown:

The least desirable option, according to several Republicans directly involved in planning, is a series of short-term spending bills. McConnell and Boehner desperately want to avoid a rolling set of spending fights early in the year, which would undermine their campaign promises to return Congress to regular order. An endless stream of stopgap spending bills would throw Washington back into the crisis-like atmosphere that has defined the post-2010 divided government. The dynamic amounts to the first true post-election test for Republican leaders: They want to push back aggressively on the administration without going too far.

Matthew Boyle hears “a consensus emerging among Republicans on Capitol Hill: There will be no funding for Obama’s planned executive amnesty.” But he doubts this will result in a shutdown:

First off, unlike Obamacare, executive amnesty is not the law. It’s a lot easier to make a case to block funding to use Congress’ power of the purse to stop an executive amnesty, and Lee said he expects many of the Democrats who have publicly opposed Obama’s planned executive amnesty will join in the effort to stop him.

Secondly, unlike Obamacare, amnesty is not implemented yet—and an effort to block funding would prevent the expenditure of taxpayer dollars being used to carry out a future action; in this case, the printing of executive amnesty documents like work permits, ID cards, and Social Security numbers for illegal aliens.

Thirdly and most importantly, with full control of both chambers of Congress, the GOP can push through appropriations bills or a partial Continuing Resolution that funds everything except for the Department of Homeland Security—separating that out for another fight.

Sargent weighs in:

Republicans will work hard to create a narrative in which their own drastic measures were only necessary in response to Obama’s extreme lawlessness.

So let’s recall a bit of context here: Republicans had previously been planning to possibly use government funding fights — which carry with them the implicit threat of a government shutdown — to reverse Obama’s already achieved policy gains. We know this because Mitch McConnell himself usefully confirmed it on the record in August. He said the new GOP Senate majority would attach riders to spending bills, designed to get Obama to agree to roll back his policies on the environment, health care, and elsewhere, or risk a government shutdown. McConnell made the same pledge in a private Koch confab with wealthy donors.

McConnell may or may not go through with that tactic; it may well have been just bluster for the base. He appears to want to move away from it now. But it’s looking increasingly like GOP leaders may have no choice.

Lastly, should the government shut down, Chait expects it to backfire on the GOP:

Republican leaders had hoped to pass a year-long bill to keep the government open. Ultraconservative dissidents have instead proposed a short-term bill, which would allow Republicans to come back and attach conditions (weakening Obama’s authority to regulate the environment and revamp immigration enforcement) to any bill to keep the government open. A bill that prevents a shutdown for a year, argues a National Review editorial, “would surrender all leverage Republicans have with government funding.”

That a shutdown gives Republicans any actual leverage, as opposed to imagined leverage, is another right-wing fantasy. It is now fairly well-established that the sole impact of a government shutdown is to make the public hate the party that controls Congress. The gun the conservatives are holding is pointed at their own head.

The Loneliest Stars

Alexandra Witze flags a report showing that “as many as half of all stars in the Universe lurk outside galactic boundaries”:

“There might be people living out there, out in the middle of cold dark space, that don’t have a Milky Way,” says Harvey Moseley, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The stars were probably tossed there when galaxies collided. A team led by astrophysicist Michael Zemcov, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, reports the discovery in the 7 November issue of Science. … Stars normally reside within galaxies, but can be yanked out by gravitational forces when galaxies collide. Bock suspects that a lot of these renegade stars could have come from relatively lightweight galaxies, which can lose hold of their stars more easily than more massive galaxies. “If this is true, then there is an entire population of stars that’s been sitting out there, but because they are individually so faint we can really only see them in ensemble,” says Moseley.

Nicholas St. Fleur elaborates:

As a part of their research into ancient galaxies, Zemcov and his team of scientists from the U.S., Japan, and Korea, launched a rocket equipped with a built-in telescope to take an enormous picture of space. The experiment, called Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment, or CIBER, had a field of view that was 20 times larger than the surface of the moon, according to Zemcov. It offered the team a single image of millions of galaxies. When the team analyzed the data, they observed twice as much infrared light as they expected to find. To investigate the discrepancy, the team blacked out the light coming from the star clusters and observed that a lot of light seeped from between the galaxies. “It’s like looking at a LiteBrite with all of the little pegs being galaxies with clusters of stars,” said Zemcov. “We masked the light emitted from the galaxies, or pegs, and expected to see a black screen, but actually there were small amounts of light still emitted.” The findings stumped the team at first. Not until they eliminated several other possibilities did they deduce that the light was coming from large amounts of rogue stars.

(Photo: This time-lapse photograph shows the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER) rocket launch, taken from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia in 2013. By T. Arai/University of Tokyo.)

The Best Hangover In Fiction? Ctd

The latest in the popular thread:

You kicked off your discussion with Boris Johnson nominating Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim. I think it’s worth pointing out that Amis had his own nomination:

Perhaps Franz Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis, which starts with the hero waking up to find he has turned into a man-sized cockroach, is the best literary treatment of all. The central image could hardly be better chosen, and there is a telling touch in the nasty way everybody goes on at the chap.

For my own part, I’d like to nominate the following passage from P.G. Wodehouse’s famous short story “Jeeves Takes Charge,” in which Bertie meets — and hires — Jeeves for the first time:

I shall always remember the morning he came.

It so happened that the night before I had been present at a rather cheery little supper, and I was feeling pretty rocky. On top of this I was trying to read a book Florence Craye had given me. She had been one of the house-party at Easeby, and two or three days before I left we had got engaged. I was due back at the end of the week, and I knew she would expect me to have finished the book by then. You see, she was particularly keen on boosting me up a bit nearer her own plane of intellect. She was a girl with a wonderful profile, but steeped to the gills in serious purpose. I can’t give you a better idea of the way things stood than by telling you that the book she’d given me to read was called “Types of Ethical Theory,” and that when I opened it at random I struck a page beginning:

— The postulate or common understanding involved in speech is certainly co-extensive, in the obligation it carries, with the social organism of which language is the instrument, and the ends of which it is an effort to subserve.

All perfectly true, no doubt; but not the sort of thing to spring on a lad with a morning head.

I was doing my best to skim through this bright little volume when the bell rang. I crawled off the sofa and opened the door. A kind of darkish sort of respectful Johnnie stood without.

“I was sent by the agency, sir,” he said. “I was given to understand that you required a valet.”

I’d have preferred an undertaker; but I told him to stagger in, and he floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing zephyr. That impressed me from the start. Meadowes had had flat feet and used to clump. This fellow didn’t seem to have any feet at all. He just streamed in. He had a grave, sympathetic face, as if he, too, knew what it was to sup with the lads.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said gently.

Then he seemed to flicker, and wasn’t there any longer.

I heard him moving about in the kitchen, and presently he came back with a glass on a tray.

“If you would drink this, sir,” he said, with a kind of bedside manner, rather like the royal doctor shooting the bracer into the sick prince. “It is a little preparation of my own invention. It is the Worcester Sauce that gives it its color. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it its bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it extremely invigorating after a late evening.”

I would have clutched at anything that looked like a life-line that morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.

“You’re engaged!” I said, as soon as I could say anything.

As for the reader who suggested discussing “the best word for hangover in any language,” I submit for your consideration the New Year’s essay “How to Say ‘Hangover’ in French, German, Finnish, and Many Other Languages,” written by Sam Dean for Bon Appétit magazine, in its entirety. His “world tour of misery” is hard to beat, and a treat for any logophile. There’s just one word that Dean misses: if you wake up drunk among the Tsonga people in South Africa, you might realize you’ve been rhwe: sleeping, drunk and naked, on the floor without a mat.

Several Douglas Adams fans are also weighing in. One writes, “There’s always the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, described as ‘like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon, wrapped ’round a large gold brick’ and ‘the alcoholic equivalent to a mugging: expensive and bad for the head.'” Another:

I’m surprised no one has offered the opening to the great Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Here you go:

At eight o’clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn’t feel very good. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash.

Toothpaste on the brush – so. Scrub.

Shaving mirror – pointing at the ceiling. He adjusted it. For a moment it reflected a second bulldozer through the bathroom window. Properly adjusted, it reflected Arthur Dent’s bristles. He shaved them off, washed, dried, and stomped off to the kitchen to find something pleasant to put in his mouth.

Kettle, plug, fridge, milk, coffee. Yawn.

The word bulldozer wandered through his mind for a moment in search of something to connect with.

The bulldozer outside the kitchen window was quite a big one.

He stared at it.

“Yellow,” he thought and stomped off back to his bedroom to get dressed.

Passing the bathroom he stopped to drink a large glass of water, and another. He began to suspect that he was hung over. Why was he hung over? Had he been drinking the night before? He supposed that he must have been. He caught a glint in the shaving mirror. “Yellow,” he thought and stomped on to the bedroom.

He stood and thought. The pub, he thought. Oh dear, the pub. He vaguely remembered being angry, angry about something that seemed important. He’d been telling people about it, telling people about it at great length, he rather suspected: his clearest visual recollection was of glazed looks on other people’s faces.

Something about a new bypass he had just found out about. It had been in the pipeline for months only no one seemed to have known about it. Ridiculous. He took a swig of water. It would sort itself out, he’d decided, no one wanted a bypass, the council didn’t have a leg to stand on. It would sort itself out. God what a terrible hangover it had earned him though. He looked at himself in the wardrobe mirror.

He stuck out his tongue. “Yellow,” he thought. The word yellow wandered through his mind in search of something to connect with.

Fifteen seconds later he was out of the house and lying in front of a big yellow bulldozer that was advancing up his garden path.

Meanwhile, a naughty-minded reader can’t help himself:

If you’re going to have a thread on hangovers, I’d think it’s only natural to extend the idea to another thread: the best orgasm in fiction. (Sorry, I don’t have my own selection to recommend, but I do look forward to what your other readers, er, come up with.)

The Best Of The Dish Today

Know dope:

Some further thoughts on the issue of immigration I wrestled with today from a reader:

Like you, I’m an immigrant from Europe. I went through the grinder myself in the wake of 9/11, because of my Arabic name (it is Jewish-Arabic but hey, Arabic nonetheless). That’s my theory at least, because nobody at ICE/INS was ever available to explain to me why I was held up in France waiting for my immigrant visa (I was married to a US citizen thank god and legally entitled to one).

The immigration bureaucracy is terrifying, it literally controls your body. As I am sure you know, once you fall under the jurisdiction of INS, you have no habeas corpus or right to due process. Burden of proof is reversed, and the reason why there is such prosecutorial discretion is precisely because immigration proceedings are essentially lawless. So when conservatives talk about enforcing the immigration laws, well, it’s a little less than forthcoming (to say the least). This makes you appreciate the Magna Carta and British common law even more.

It is indeed hard to convey what it’s like to be helpless in front of the immigration bureaucracy. And one thing that has been missing from this debate is that human empathy. I know that my reader and I were legal immigrants trying to find our way through a maze of prejudice and prohibition; but I’ll never forget the radical insecurity of building a life knowing that it can always at any time be taken away from you. For parents of children legally in the US, the experience is unimaginable to me. Deferring the deportation of these parents is a basic act of compassion. And if the Republicans unleash rage over it, and still refuse to provide any legal remedy, their insensitivity will resonate for decades to come.

Some posts worth revisiting from today: the reckless language of Charles Krauthammer on immigration reform; the excruciating challenge of being circumcised as an adult or child; a model village where dementia is cared for and allowed; and some of the weirder window views sent in over the last few months. Plus: David Foster Wallace on sponsored content.

The most popular post of the day was Gruberism And Our Democracy, Ctd – where readers backed up the ACA; and last night’s Best of The Dish where I waved that inappropriate shirt. More on that today as well.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 20 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here, including our “Know Dope” shirts, which are detailed here. A final email for the day:

I just got back from seeing Rosewater. It is a beautiful film. During the section that showed the rising of the Green Revolution, with people in the streets, I thought back to how involved and absorbed I had felt about it, from here thousands of miles away, because of The Dish; because of you and your team, and your passion for following what was happening; and because of the rich information and context offered by members of the amazing community you have created. Thank you for creating that space, then and now.

See you in the morning.

Your Monday Cry

The description on the video seen above:

Chris Picco singing Blackbird to his son, Lennon James Picco, who was delivered by emergency C-section at 24 weeks after Chris’ wife Ashley unexpectedly and tragically passed away in her sleep. Lennon’s lack of movement and brain activity was a constant concern for the doctors and nurses at Loma Linda University Children’s Hospital, where he received the absolute best care available. During the pregnancy, Ashley would often feel Lennon moving to music so Chris asked if he could bring his guitar into the NICU and play for Lennon, which he did for several hours during the last days of Lennon’s precious life. One day after filming this, Lennon went to sleep in his daddy’s arms.

A memorial fund has raised more than $100,000. Katy Waldman has mixed feelings about the Internet’s response to the story:

Why are we clicking and sharing (and giving)? Do we even understand what we see onscreen, or has Chris Picco’s tragedy just become another cheap portal to all the feels?

It’s hard to argue that the wave of financial support brought on by the video is somehow sinister. Sure, $100,000 is a lot of money and perhaps better spent elsewhere, but there are far more pernicious uses of a hundred grand than vastly improving the quality of life for a man who just lost his wife and newborn son. And while there may be some injustice in only the iPhone-documented and Facebook-approved tragedies attracting our dollars and attention—remember when the bullied bus driver received hundreds of thousands of dollars for her pain?—the solution to that injustice is pretty clearly not to declare that no one at all should get dollars or attention. (By the way: This is the same tension that many of us face when giving money to homeless people on the subway or street. Should I not give to this guy because I can’t give to everyone? I hope not.)

But it’s not really the strangers donating to Picco who are the bad guys here. It’s the voyeurs we’re truly worried about, the casual clickers ogling the wreckage before drifting on to another listicle. But what if a casual browser’s momentary engagement with Picco’s story isn’t gross, exploitative, or wrong? What if the small gleams of compassion and pity you feel for a dad you’ve never met only add to the store of compassion and pity in the world?

Update from a reader:

Katy Waldman may wonder why the Internet has responded to this story. I don’t. The Internet is made up of human beings.

I haven’t watched the video. I can’t watch the video. The headline is enough to make me cry. Because I too have sang to my son. I too held my son until he went to sleep.

Regardless, I know what is in that video – a very human story. A story not often told, but one that resonates with people. Every parent who sees that story knows the fear of losing their child. Every person who has been in love knows there could be a moment where they will need to give comfort and say goodbye. You are talking about core truths of the human experience that touch the deepest centers of our beings. The tragedy experienced by Chris Picco is something everyone can relate to at some level.

Worrying about what motivates the people watching this video kind of misses the point. What you have here is people reaching out, connecting to their loved ones, sharing something that touched them. Passing around a message of love and strength. Helping out if they can, in the way they can.

So what if some people are voyeurs? I am willing to bet that for every person who felt nothing and moved on to the next link there were many more who were left with a deeper appreciation of what they have and how easily it can all be lost. Some people probably even walked away grateful that they weren’t given that burden to bear. Do the reactions and understanding of the audience really matter? The story, and the truth behind it, is what matters.

Where Are The Widespread Wonder Drugs?

Dan Hurley investigates. Why a focus on genetics hasn’t paid off as much as hoped:

Gleevec, used since 2001 to treat chronic myelogenous leukemia (C.M.L.) and a variety of other cancers, is often pointed to as one of the great gene-to-medicine success stories. Its design followed logically from the identification of an abnormal protein caused by a genetic glitch found in almost every cancer cell of patients with C.M.L.

Many of the drugs developed through target-based discovery, however, work for only single-mutation diseases affecting a tiny number of people. Seventy percent of new drugs approved by the F.D.A. last year were so-called specialty drugs used by no more than 1 percent of the population. The drug Kalydeco, for instance, was approved in 2012 for people with a particular genetic mutation that causes cystic fibrosis. But only about 1,200 people in the United States have the mutation it corrects. For them it can be a lifesaver, but for the tens of millions of people suffering from more widespread diseases, target-based drugs derived from genomics have offered little.

However, he acknowledges that an “overreliance on genomics is not the only factor slowing down the discovery of new drugs”:

One challenge is that the industry is the victim of its own previous successes. In order to thrive, it must come up with drugs that work better than blockbusters of the past. After all, old drugs don’t fade away; they just go generic. Scannell and Warrington have dubbed this the “Better Than the Beatles” problem, as if every new song in the recording industry had to be bigger than “Hey Jude” or “I Want to Hold Your Hand.

At the same time, the demand for proof of safety and efficacy, not only from the F.D.A. but also from trial lawyers and the public at large, is far higher than in years past. The days when drugs like the original insulin could be sold within a year of their discovery by chemists are long gone, and rightly so.

Was Van Gogh Murdered?

That’s the case Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith make in their fascinating investigation into the painter’s death, which unsettles the familiar story of a mad artist killing himself. The entire essay is worth reading, but it begins with these questions:

Van Gogh himself wrote not a word about his final days. The film [Lust for Life] got it wrong: he left no suicide note—odd for a man who churned out letters so profligately. A piece of writing allegedly found in his clothes after he died turned out to be an early draft of his final letter to his brother Theo, which he posted the day of the shooting, July 27, 1890. That letter was upbeat—even ebullient—about the future. He had placed a large order for more paints only a few days before a bullet put a hole in his abdomen. Because the missile missed his vital organs, it took 29 agonizing hours to kill him.

None of the earliest accounts of the shooting—those written in the days immediately after the event—mentioned suicide. They said only that Van Gogh had “wounded himself.” Strangely, the townspeople of Auvers, the picturesque community near Paris where he stayed in the last months of his life, maintained a studied silence about the incident. At first, no one admitted having seen Van Gogh on his last, fateful outing, despite the summer crowding in the streets. No one knew where he would have gotten a gun; no one admitted to finding the gun afterward, or any of the other items he had taken with him (canvas, easel, paints, etc.). His deathbed doctors, an obstetrician and a homeopathist, could make no sense of his wounds.

And, anyway, what kind of a person, no matter how unbalanced, tries to kill himself with a shot to the midsection? And then, rather than finish himself off with a second shot, staggers a mile back to his room in agonizing pain from a bullet in his belly?

(Image: Van Gogh’s 1889 self-portrait, via Wikimedia Commons)

Face Of The Day

A man grooms his mini poodle after competition at the 2014 China International Pet Show in Beijing on November 17, 2014. The China International Pet Show (CIPS) will take place from November 17 to 20. By Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images.

A reader writes regarding Friday’s FOTD:

While I know you posted that white tiger with the best of intentions, I wish you might have accompanied it with some education about the white tiger, which occur in nature, but which zoos usually acquire by breeding a father white tiger to his female white tiger offspring – resulting in a wide variety of health issues that plague these animals throughout their lives. White tigers may seem exotic, but they are actually a representation of animal cruelty. Here is a link with some more information.

The Perils Of Political Poetry

David Wojahn considers them:

If you set out simply to write a poem of social criticism or invective, the results are almost invariably going to be mere agitprop. And that problem afflicts much of the work of even some of our greatest poets of invective—Neruda and Brecht come to mind. Finding a way to blend the personal and the social is a complex and tricky imaginative problem—you have to ask yourself what right you have to address an injustice you yourself have probably not experienced; you have to find a form that allows the personal and the political to commingle in a way that seems effortless and serendipitous; you can’t rely on the same old lefty pieties any more than you can rely on the equivalent pieties that make for a poetic period style. But one of the principal functions of poetry is to preserve and protect human dignity, and if you are sufficiently loyal to that function you find a way to navigate through all the pitfalls, both pitfalls of inadequate craft and of fuzzy political thinking.

How Wojahn describes writing one of his own political poems, “For the Honorable Wayne LaPierre, President, National Rifle Association,” which borrows from Dante and places the gun-rights activist in the seventh circle of Hell:

It’s interesting that Dante seems again and again to encounter his contemporaries in hell and purgatory—people he knew in Florence, often his political adversaries. It’s an incredibly clever way to get back at the people who he felt wronged by. A few years back, I came across a very smug and self-satisfied interview with LaPierre, given right after the Supreme Court had declared the DC handgun ban unconstitutional. It occurred to me that LaPierre was exactly the sort of reprobate Dante placed in the furthest circles of inferno. In one of the rings of Circle Seven he situates “the violent against their neighbors,” and that label seemed to me to aptly fit people like LaPierre and George Zimmerman. To try to re-describe and contemporize Dante’s punishments while still being faithful to his spirit was an exciting challenge, and I think having to focus on that helped me to avoid making the poem simply a diatribe against the NRA.