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The Nation. since 1865

U P F R O N T 4 NRA by the Numbers: Outsized Lobbying; 8 These Men Have Blood on Their Hands: Top NRA Recipients in Congress; 11 Back Issues: (1978) A World Man

3 Act Up for Gun Control

4 Don’t Stop the Music Richard Kim

5 The Score Bryce Covert

C O L U M N S

6 The Liberal Media Broken Cable Eric Alterman

10 Between the Lines Each Other’s Keeper Laila Lalami

11 Deadline Poet An Explanation of Trump’s Explanation Calvin Trillin

Features 12 Attack of the

Superbugs Sonia Shah New contagions are a scientific challenge—and a political one.

16 The Genius of Jane Jacobs Roberta Brandes Gratz She insisted on the importance of local wisdom in urban planning.

18 A Plague of Private- Prison Deaths Seth Freed Wessler Inmates are dying, and the US government is ignoring its own watchdogs.

Books & the Arts

27 The Odd Couple Peter E. Gordon

32 The Repossessed Alisa Solomon

35 Brave Peculiarity David Hajdu

37 Shelf Life Larissa Pham

VOLUME 303, NUMBERS 1&2, July 4/11, 2016 The digital version of this issue is available to all subscribers June 16 at TheNation.com.

Cover illustration by Edel Rodriguez.

T he massacre in Orlando, Florida, will haunt us for a long time. The worst mass shooting in modern American his-tory took place at Pulse, a gay nightclub where patrons were enjoying “Latin Night” and also celebrating Pride Month. Forty-nine people were killed and another 53 wounded. Mostly

Act Up for Gun Control

Latino and LGBT, the dead include Franky Jimmy Dejesus Velazquez, a professional jíbaro dancer from Puerto Rico who at age 50 was the oldest vic- tim, as well as Akyra Monet Murray, 18, the young- est. Murray had just graduated from high school and was looking forward to starting college on a full basketball scholarship. In between are 47 other beloved human beings—healthcare workers, veter- ans, cancer survivors, mothers, brothers, students, retail workers, girlfriends, boyfriends—whose loss is breaking someone’s heart right now.

Around the world, in acts large and small, people of conscience expressed their solidarity with the citizens of Orlando and with LGBT people, especially those of color. Thousands of Floridians waited for hours to donate blood in a line whose length could only be captured by a heli- copter’s aerial footage. Vigils sprang up in the gay neighborhoods of world capitals, but also in the Main Streets of small towns across the country. And, in what has now become an all-too-familiar gesture, President Obama performed something of a Greek chorus, mourning the dead and lamenting this country’s inability to pass gun-control laws: “This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub. And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well.”

In contrast, the presumptive Republican nomi- nee, Donald Trump, demonstrated once again that he is unfit not only to be president, but to possess any kind of leadership position whatsoever. While barely expressing sympathy for the victims, Trump bragged on Twitter that the attack proved the wis- dom of his proposal to ban all Muslim immigrants to the United States—even though the perpetrator,

Omar Mateen, was a natural-born American citizen. He called on President Obama to resign because he did not use the words “radical Islam” in the im- mediate aftermath, and went so far as to suggest that Obama had some kind of connection to the Orlando attack itself, presumably because Trump believes the president is a secret Muslim. In a terrifying speech, Trump launched blanket accusations at Muslims and claimed that the United States has “no real

checks or scrutiny” for new immigrants (it does). When his conspiracy theories were challenged by The Washington Post, Trump banned the paper’s reporters from attending his events, as he has also done to journalists from BuzzFeed, The Huffing- ton Post, Univision, The Daily Beast, and Politico—demonstrating that he truly in- tends to govern as a demagogue with contempt for the role of a free press in a democracy. Just as Americans stood up

in solidarity with victims of the Orlando shooting, so too must we rise up to forcefully reject Trump’s divisive, hateful politics.

As we go to press, investigators and the media are still piecing together details of Omar Mateen’s life. What has emerged so far is a murky and be- wildering portrait. According to his father, Mateen was enraged by the sight of two men kissing in front of his wife and child, but he also regularly attended Pulse and was seen by its patrons on a gay-dating app. During the assault, Mateen called 911 and reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS, but his past is checkered with false claims of affiliation with other extremists, from the Tsarnaev brothers to the Nusra Front to Hezbollah—suggesting a generalized and superficial interest in radical Islam. He was, his first wife reported, an angry, violent, and controlling man. We may never know what exact combination of homophobia, self-loathing, religious extremism,

E D I T O R I A L

The Nation.4 July 4/11, 2016

wonders, by gentrification and Giuliani—but for a hot moment in the 1990s, it was the single most fabulous place in the galaxy. Dance moves were invented there. People went in, and when they came out, they weren’t just drunk—they were different people. That’s how powerful its juju was.

Before the ’80s were hijacked by hipsters in tiny jackets, Crowbar had a theme night called “1984,” and it was ridiculously fun. But because I was under- age and stupid and felt the need to piss on fun things, I once said something catty there like: “Isn’t it kinda pathetic and weird that all these gays are nostalgic for a decade that ended 10 seconds ago?” And some guy I knew—whom I considered ancient, though he was probably all of 32 at the time—snapped back: “Listen, you little piece of shit, we didn’t get to dance to this music the first time—we were too busy burying each other. So take your bad vibes and get the fuck out of here… I need this more than you need to suck!” Then he twirled, fabulously, away from me and my toxic aura.

That was my first lesson that gay bars are more than just licensed establishments where homosexuals pay to

drink. Gay bars are therapy for people who can’t afford therapy; temples for people who lost their religion (or whose religion lost them); vacations for people who can’t go on vacation; homes for folk without families; sanctuaries against aggres- sion. They take sound and fabric and flesh from the ordinary world and, under cover of darkness

and the influence of alcohol or drugs, transform it into something that scrapes up against utopia.

I’ve never been to Pulse, the Orlando nightclub where Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded another 53 who had gathered there for “Latin Night.” But I know that for many queer locals, it was their uto- pia. As Daniel Leon-Davis movingly recollected for Fusion, the club was a “safe haven,” the place “where I learned to love myself as a gay man,” and “where I learned to love my community.” Or as President Obama put it, “a place of solidarity and empower- ment.” In the early hours of Sunday, June 12, this place was violated.

We may never know to what extent pure homopho- bia drove Mateen to kill as he did, or how deeply he drank from other springs of madness, extremism, and self-loathing. But we can definitely say one thing: Just as Dylann Roof preyed upon the openness and hospitality of Mother Emanuel Church, Omar Ma- teen exploited precisely the things that make gay bars magic. He took the darkness, the clamor, the density, the chaos of the dance floor, and made them his ac- complices in what is now the largest mass shooting in this nation’s modern history.

But he does not own those things, and his act of desecration cannot defeat us. We must remember that our joy is not just its own purpose; it is a higher call- ing. To all the bartenders and barbacks and bouncers and go-go boys and drag queens and club kids and freaks who make up the nightlife: I love you. Stay strong. RICHARD KIM

Don’t Stop the Music The Orlando shooter attacked a sanctuary.

M y first gay bar was Crowbar in Man- hattan’s East Village. Like all great gay bars, it was a dump: dark and crowded, with low ceilings and a shitty sound system. It was off Tompkins Square

Park and Avenue B, back when the park was still a place to which you’d go to buy drugs. It smelled like mildew, urine, cheap vodka, and Designer Imposters body spray. It’s long since gone—made extinct, like too many

mental illness, and rage drove Mateen to do what he did—and in many ways, that is beside the point.

The Orlando massacre was the 998th mass shooting in the United States (defined as incidents in which four or more people—excluding the shooter—are shot at the same time and place) since a gunman walked into Sandy Hook elementary school and killed 26 people on December 14, 2012. Only a handful of these attacks involved radical Islam or any discernible ideological motive whatsoever. Almost all of the shooters were men. But the common denomina- tor in every single one of these incidents—as well as in the more than 10,000 gun deaths that take place in the United States each year—is guns.

America has virtually as many guns as people, far exceeding any other country in the number of privately held firearms per capita. Completely unsurprisingly, our rate of gun-related homicides dwarfs that of comparable nations (six times Canada’s rate, 16 times Germany’s, 21 times Australia’s). As the president rightly pointed out, this situation is not an accident; it’s the desired outcome of our political process. Last month, three Harvard Business School professors published a stunning study showing that mass shootings do in fact precipitate policy changes. While the researchers found no significant ef- fect on the passage of new laws in Democratic-controlled legislatures, they found that in Republican-controlled ones, “a mass shooting increases the number of enacted laws that loosen gun restrictions by 75 percent.” Yes, you read that correctly: Much like pressing one’s scorched hand down harder on a hot stove, our collective response to an epidemic of mass shootings has been to pass laws that further facilitate mass shootings. A political system that behaves in such a manner is fundamentally broken, and it must be reconstructed—now.

In what we hope is a sign of a new, more radical anti-gun politics, on Monday, June 13, a group of House Democrats walked out of the chamber as Speaker Paul Ryan sought to hold a ritualistic moment of silence for the Orlando shooting victims. The group included Jim Himes, whose district borders Newtown, Connecticut, and Mark Pocan, who is gay. “Our silence does not honor the victims,” Himes declared, “it mocks them.” Pocan called for “a moment of action” and warned: “If Congress continues to fail to act, we will have blood on our hands. The same is true for all Americans, who must now take our heartbreak and rage and start acting up.”

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$277M Money spent by the NRA and its affiliates in 2010

99 TO 1 How much that 2010 spending by the NRA and its affiliates ex- ceeded that of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the most active gun- control nonprofit in the country

143 Number of bills for which the NRA lob- bied in 2015

“None of the funds

made available for…the Centers

for Disease Control and Prevention

may be used to advocate or promote

gun control.”

Language added to the CDC’s budget

appropriation in 1996 by Arkansas Congressman Jay

Dickey at the behest of the NRA. Turn

the page to see how the NRA has shaped public opinion over

the last 20 years.

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