Harper's Magazine June 2022

Higher-Border Thinking Reading James Pogue’s report, I was pleased that, rather than resort to the sanctimony expressed in press coverage at the time, he spent time with the secessionists in an effort to understand their grievances [“Notes on the State of Jefferson,” Letter from Shasta County, April]. I wonder whether the alarmism of liberal outsiders, if not entirely misguided, might ultimately signify admiration for the willingness of right-wing insurgents to question fundamental structures in ways that the left has forgotten how to do. County-level proposals to form a new state are met with reflexive pearl-clutching. But what is so sacred about California’s northern border or Oregon’s eastern border? Many state lines are the inheritance of seventeenth-century royal decrees, eighteenth-century surveys, or nineteenth-century railroads. Efforts to redress grievances as old as those in…

The optimists went to the gas chambers (or so it’s been said). The pessimists went to America. The collabos went to Maxim’s (for steak). The orphans went to the country (for safekeeping). De Gaulle went to London. Pétain went to Vichy. Some (not that many) joined the Resistance. When the Allies landed, crowds flooded the streets, cheering. But some fled. A few even put on German uniforms. Céline camped out with doomed Vichy elites at Sigmaringen, a tacky Swabian castle without proper heat. De Gaulle returned to Paris, walked the Champs-Élysées in his stiff kepi. The children of this history, raised on its myths, ran toward riot police on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. They retreated. They ran again. Emboldened, they asked their elders devastating questions about the war. A spirit was…

“When I was little, I dreamed that I was hiding in the basement of a bombed house, half-ruined. I heard, outside, the sound of machine guns. The Nazis were the ones shooting. I was scared that they would find me and kill me the way they killed my family. Since the beginning of the war, I have dreamed this dream again, but it’s worse. Because there’s a moment where I understand that I am the Nazi, and I wake up crying.” What my friend Irina is telling me here, she also wrote on her Facebook page. This scene takes place in a time when there’s still Facebook. Five days later, it’s over: no more Facebook. Her mother called her, terrified; most of her friends unfriended her. “The entire world hates us…

SOUTH SUDAN BUDGET TOUR The most affordable tour to the newest country in the world. South Sudan may have some of Africa’s most horrible road conditions we’ve ever experienced, but nothing that’ll stop our 4WDs. IRAN REVOLUTIONARY TOUR Our Iran tour is open to all nationalities except Israeli. Visit the Ebrat Museum, which displays atrocities carried out by the Shah’s secret police during the Seventies, all housed inside a former prison. Heavy doses of brutality and propaganda, not for the fainthearted! NORTH KOREA TOUR You’ll visit one of the “tensest places on earth,” the DMZ. Here we’ll meet a local military officer who will show us the Joint Security Area and the division of North and South Korea. We’ll then be upgraded to a colonel, who’ll take us farther inland to visit the concrete wall—this…

DAY FOUR I got put on bed rest! This is a real help on a hunger strike: you can warm up and relax while conserving energy and body heat. This afternoon I lay in bed for several hours and ended up falling asleep. I dreamed that my father was standing next to his red Moskvitch car and I was in the Peugeot I had before my most recent one. My brakes weren’t working and I couldn’t park next to him. My father didn’t seem to be looking at me and was instead talking to someone at a roadside kiosk. This was all happening in my home village, at a turnoff that leads from the garage where he used to work toward the kindergarten where my mother worked. In the end I managed…

a. You would need to understand something. To look at the sky, for example. To look at the palms of your hands and blindly feel your way forward. Sometimes it’s necessary to touch a wall and sometimes it’s necessary to claw at a wall. The pain at the tips of your fingers. Underneath your nails. The dead bolt of your fingers. The wall exists because of the echo that feels it out. The wall is your against which. The end of their line isn’t that right? What you really do is fall, and then, if possible, fall again. Reading is just one way of dropping to your knees. b. Speaking and crawling are often one and the same. Which means touching the ground with your hands. Which is not, like walking,…