Some of the large pieces, which are chopped up and welded onto the rest in roughly 20-page blocks, began as articles in The New Yorker, where Mr. Packer is a staff writer. The Republicans exploited it. . And this is really the story of my adult life, from the late nineteen-seventies onward. Nationalism is a word I avoid as a positive. In half a week, between Quebec and Singapore, Trump showed that the liberal order is hateful to him, and that he wants out. ), None of us want to do anything that could jeopardize the magazine we love. Still, the Bush Administration has, almost deliberately at times, brought anti-Americanism to unprecedented levels, acting under the illusion that, if America does something, it is right and will be seen as right. My worry is that the philosophical and practical direction of this movement is making those achievements less likely. The magazine was once a charity case among flush glossies, but its subscription business, which boomed in the Trump years, has given its editor unique leverage: The New Yorker avoided companywide layoffs last year, and has also been left out of the rest of Cond Nasts painful drive toward centralization. I can do what you cant do. It is not the same as the ideal of everyone being equal, which is in the Declaration of Independence, because of course throughout our history lots of people have not been equal. 2,141 likes. Why did ISIS allow its negotiations with Jordan to collapse? When someones in a fight with you, you cant just say, Were not fighting. You have to fight. Well be lucky if we do. I have a list of qualities that I think apply to most of us, that foreigners immediately pick up as American traits. I dont know enough to agree or disagree., But in terms of telling the story, it was helpful. I think youre right. Am I really prepared to say its over? As I read your article, I got a sickening feeling that we have been here before. His award-winning biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, was released in May 2019. [1] His parents taught at Stanford University: his mother, Nancy Packer (ne Huddleston), was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in the Creative Writing Program and later professor of English, and his father, Herbert L. Packer, was a distinguished professor of law, and the author of numerous books and articles. He said it was misleading. Gili Ostfield, a production employee and union member, pointedly told HuffPost last week that if The New Yorker tries to print a diminished magazine without striking employees, it will be a stain on David Remnicks reputation.. After a month in office, he has already proved himself unable to discharge his duties. Well, I agree. As Real America is a rebellion against the ossified libertarianism of Free America, Just Americawhich is a difficult term, because it doesnt quite capture itis a generational rebellion against the complacency of Smart America, which had promised, As long as you get an education and work hard and play by the rules and go as far as your God-given talents will take you, you will have a successful life. And the generation that came after Clinton, the millennials, found out that this wasnt true, and that the sanguine promises of their liberal parents just didnt resonate. purchase. Their father's background was Jewish and their mother's Christian. Anyone can read what you share. "People were more . But other tensions revolve around the sense that the junior jobs only rarely offer promotions into the ranks of writers, and no clear career path. There is no country in the region that wants to absorb Iraqis in a long-term resettlement. I think nationalism is destructive. Its even hard to understand how you get your message to them. The conversation made clear how inconsistent benefits and pay were among writers, and many left angry at Cond Nast over the opaque and uneven system. When she denied it, he theatrically produced a printed-out screenshot of a WhatsApp message that Ms. Mohit had sent to some 80 of the unionizing employees. That gets back to the question of whether were trying to make good policy or win elections, right? Researchers have studied how much of our personality is set from childhood, but what youre like isnt who you are. Instead, youll be speaking to them ideologically, and they might tune you out. George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and (most recently) the author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. Its a phrase Palin used during the 2008 campaign. It would be giving young people a chance, whether through military or civilian ways, to serve the country and one another, and to get to know one another across all the lines that divide us. But the support Mr. Remnick retains among the signature writers is deep. "Long engagements". Or has the threat to liberalism by Just America been overstated? All rights reserved. When youre been an industry for a long time, you cant imagine things differently. Can the rightward forty-five per cent of the country at this point be talked to? And underlying much of the 2021 labor tensions are political tensions. It might require a book to answer. Theres been nothing like it since the 1930s. Interesting facts in his article: When a buyer searches for a book on Amazon.com, the results are partly determined by the fees paid by publishers; publishers pay Amazon a percentage of the profits they make through the online store each year; those percentages have gone up; although publishers may be squeezed by Amazon, they remain dependent on the company for as much as 30% of their sales, a number thats still growing. It doesnt help. The book is kind of a quarrel with myself because, on the one hand, I am in a state of utter disgust and rage at the Republican Party, and its lies, its conspiracies, its racism, its cynicism. One of the things Packer mentions is the Gazelle Project, referencing Stones book. I ended up travelling through Europe and the Middle East for about a month, with two weeks in Baghdad. So, for example, in the COVID-relief bill, theres several billion dollars for disadvantaged farmers. In July 2013 the New Yorker Festival released a video entitled Geoffrey Canada on Giving Voice to the Have-nots, of a panel that was moderated by George Packer. I very much enjoyed this piece, because it seems to fit . [2] Packer's sister, Ann Packer, also is a writer. But I mean it in a larger sense. But, in comparison with Iraq, America acquitted itself with a measure of honor by evacuating and resettling its Vietnamese friends in the United Statesa hundred and forty thousand of them by the end of 1975. Egypt, Jordan, and United Arab Emirates have largely stopped issuing residence visas and are even forcing some Iraqis to return home. It seemed like a way to jolt the picture productively. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are pretty much closed to Iraqis. To me, thats like saying Do we stop looking at the data on poverty because there are disparate outcomes among different groups? No. George Packer, a staff writer from 2003 to 2018, has covered the Iraq War for The New Yorker and has also written about the atrocities committed in Sierra Leone, civil unrest in the Ivory Coast . But the only people with real leverage over him wont use it. . A rumor began to circulate, spurned by an article in The Sun, attributing the cause of the wreck to Judge carrying the ashes of Sattay on the Umbria. Its been the most dominant narrative in our society. He has tried to be reassuring, even as the prospect of putting out the print magazine without editorial staff members looms. Some of the writers are also worried about the impact of a strike. I think there are two questions. I just think its a nightmare scenario, and so Im maybe a little bit quixotically doing what I can to put a thread in us. June 29, 2021. Initially, Amazon was going to give Packer access to report about the company from the inside, then things changed. He reports that men employed by Americans as . Mr. Remnick declined to be interviewed, but said in an email that his two goals were that we achieve our highest editorial ambitions and that we work together with fairness, adding, Ill be glad to see us sign a foundational contract that memorializes our commitment to both., Many of the writers I spoke to said they saw Mr. Remnick as caught between an uncompromising union and an ailing parent company. He doesn't measure or model it. Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Author, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America Doug Sovern, KCBS Radio Political Reporter - Moderator. But in times of widespread opportunity, the distance between gods and mortals closes, the monuments shrink closer to human size and the centrality of celebrities in the culture recedes. Even more, segregation ended because of the civil-rights movement. Everyone I met on my last trip feared a wider catastrophe without American troops. And instead they got the back of the hand of Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party, just as Biden is getting it now. The New Yorker staff writer George Packer answers readers' questions about his article " Betrayed," from the issue of April 2, 2007. I try not to use it for books more than I have to, he said, because I see a real value in walking into a bookstore and seeing things jump off the shelves.. The Devastating New History of the January 6th Insurrection. 2023 Cond Nast. I recently spoke by phone with Packer, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic and was previously a staff writer at The New Yorker. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Because of the difficulties of working in Iraq and the concerns Iraqis have about their safety, this story presented logistical challenges. What accounts for the level of incompetence in the American administration of postwar Iraq? A month after releasing long-lists of 10 in each of the four . In his new book, Adam Hochschild remembers a time when a crusade for democracy abroad released a demonic spirit of intolerance and violence at home. What happened next was not exactly a scene out of Norma Rae. Emily Nussbaum, a television critic, said she would expect to be fired if she wasnt doing a good job, according to two people there. Many talk of him as an adored, slightly feared and somewhat distant father whose approval they always seek. I have a bunch of ideas at the end of the book. And both are in an almost permanent state of conflict, in which the country really isnt progressing. Ad Choices. IN "The Assassins' Gate," his chronicle of the Iraq war, George Packer tells the tale of Drew Erdmann, a young American . The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America focuses on the ways that America changed in the years between 1978 and 2012. Packer argues that seismic economic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, leaving the social contract in pieces and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. By Alexander Russo It's no simple task when journalists decide to write about their families' school choices and their children's classroom experiences. Is a Woman Ever Going to Win the White House? Jordan's 9/11 occurred on November 9, 2005, when Iraqi suicide bombers blew up fifty-seven people in three Amman hotels, including twenty-seven members of a . A war on this scale puts a whole country to the test, like a human body thats been slack for a while and then is suddenly exerted to the limits of its strength. Not since the Berlin Wall fell has the world been cleaved so deeply by the kind of conflict that John F. Kennedy called a long, twilight struggle.. When you say that if liberals do not engage in a certain form of patriotism then that space will be taken over by the right, are you talking about winning votes? Far creepier, however, are the some of the more "complex" explanations for Bales's crime, notably one proffered by Iraq war supporter and neocon-enabler George Packer, in the New Yorker, who denounces "the smugness of the antiwar crowd" and instructs us to avoid "easy condemnations." After all, says Packer, Packer was born in California around 1960. If Just America can reform policing, and make our criminal-justice system less barbaric, and close the wealth gap, and close the achievement gap, then Id say all the angst that comes from reading Twitter and the exchange of vitriol that goes on all the time in our culture and in our media will seem trivial. I still am looking for some way to describe us as a people, as Americans. Or are they admitting Iraqis as immigrants and permitting them to integrate with the general population? Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, Sr., had served eleven successive terms (19151937) representing Alabama's 9th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. 1. . Why did you decide to structure this book around four Americas? Im in favor of putting together an exit strategy for Iraq, but Im also sure that if we were to leave most of the territory in the near future, the country would erupt in bloodshed of a scope that we havent seen in a long time. So theres affirmative action, theres diversity hiring, theres childrens health insurance. His book records the Administrations struggle to shape its own narrative. The writers in the room had been invited merely to a meeting to understand what the existing union drive meant for them, Mr. Taub said, and had no sense that they were secretly being organized. George Packer's new Atlantic story traces a theme of disappointment with President Joe Biden's failure to live up to his initial ideals as he tracks Biden's shifting views on the long war . But why does neither of them appeal to you? George Packer is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins' Gate, an acclaimed 2005 book on the war in Iraq. And so, if Smart America is a new aristocracy in which families essentially pass on membership to their children, then its in the end going to be a destructive force, even if a lot of good things have come from it. In the quarter-century after World War II, the country established collective structures, not individual monuments, that channeled the aspirations of ordinary people: state universities, progressive taxation, interstate highways, collective bargaining, health insurance for the elderly, credible news organizations. Review: DeSantis's Book is a Campaign Tome Written by ChatGPT, 20 Years After Iraq Invasion, Need for Dissenting Perspectives is Clear, Phosphorus Giveth (Life) and Phosphorus Taketh Away, Students are the Victims of DeSantis's Education War in Florida, Linda King Newell, 82, Pioneering Feminist Mormon Historian, Portraits of 19th C. Black Charlottesville Show Life, Joy, Black History Month Traces to a Key Meeting in a Chicago YMCA, How (Some) of the Hip Hop Generation Learned Black History, The Executive Branchs Response to the Flood of 1927, The Case For Calling the Language "American", America Fought Its Own Battle Over Books Before it Fought the Nazis. New Yorker writer Packer (Interesting Times: Writing from a Turbulent Decade, 2009, etc.) G eorge Packer's incisive, deftly argued book about the moral and political quandary of the United States begins and ends with his declaration: "I am an American." The statement is self . When he came back from book leave in mid-2013, Packer's New Yorker editors suggested the idea to him. Why The New Yorkers Stars Didnt Join Its Union, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/business/media/new-yorker-union.html. Like many Germans of my generation, I am fully aware of the fact that we owe the U.S., and it breaks my heart to see a good friend choose the path of (self) destruction. Can you do things in your rhetoric or in your politics to make your party less toxic for the six percentage points of people between forty-seven per cent and fifty-three per cent? You say at the end of the book that you dont particularly want to live in any of the four Americas you define. Packer was a columnist for Mother Jones and was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 2003 to 2018. Im afraid it will take years for America to recover its international prestige; at the very least, it will take a change of Administration. Iraqs population is largely Arab, with the major exception being the Kurds. She told them, two people in the room said, that the guild could protect them from being fired and could even defend them against misguided editorial choices, if, for example, an editor she cited Arianna Huffington suddenly wanted everyone to write about sleep. How do you understand that? His uncle, George Huddleston, Jr., succeeded to his father's seat in the House of Representatives from 1954 to 1964. I wonder how much its in the control of, say, one side of the political spectrum to bring the other side back. Packer's sharp portraits of these new tribes are the heart of this book, and his critique of them reveal his central concerns. The article, Packer said, kept eluding me. To me, he embodies it. In his new book, " Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal ," George Packer writes that the United States is in a state of disrepair, brought about primarily by the fact . They have all kinds of identities. 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