How Violent Cops Stay in Law Enforcement

How Violent Cops Stay in Law Enforcement

Derek Colling was fired from one police department after two fatal shootings and allegations of brutality. Less than a year later, he had a new badge.

By Abe Streep The New Yorker

In September, 2009, a card dealer named Evie Oquendo arrived at her apartment, on the far east side of Las Vegas, with groceries for her fifteen-year-old son, Tanner Chamberlain. Tanner, who struggled with bipolar disorder, had stayed home from school that day, and Oquendo wanted to make beef stew, one of his favorite meals. But, before she could start cooking, Tanner became extremely agitated. Not long afterward, she discovered that he had swallowed a handful of her anti-anxiety pills. She wanted to take him to the hospital, but first she called her sister, a former New York City police officer. Her sister told her to call 911. “I said, ‘I’m not calling the police, because I’m afraid they’re gonna shoot him,’ ” Oquendo recalled. “She told me, ‘Evie, don’t be ridiculous. They’ll know how to handle it.’ ”

Tanner calmed down enough to suggest going to a nearby 7-Eleven for an iced tea, and Oquendo decided against calling the police. But her sister had already asked a family friend in Nevada to call 911, and soon officers from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department pulled up to Oquendo’s apartment building, a stucco complex with a pool and a playground. Among the group was a twenty-eight-year-old officer named Derek Colling, who had been with the department for four years. When Colling and the others approached, Tanner stood behind Oquendo, grasping his mother and holding a folding knife in one hand. Officers instructed him to drop the knife and release his mother, but he did not comply. One of the officers on the scene, who was trained in de-escalating crisis situations involving people with mental illnesses, tried to speak to Tanner. Colling trained his gun on Tanner. “Don’t shoot him!” Oquendo pleaded. Colling shot him in the head.

This was Colling’s second fatal shooting in three years: in 2006, he had been one of five officers to shoot and kill a man who pulled a gun at a gas station. In both cases, a coroner’s inquest declared the killings justified. “I did what had to be done,” Colling said, during the second inquiry. One of Colling’s childhood friends, Jedadiah Schultz, recalled meeting up with Colling shortly after Tanner’s death, at a baseball game, and asking him about the incident. “The way in which he was telling the story was like his heroic journey,” Schultz said. “I was deeply unsettled.” (Colling did not respond to requests for comment.)

In 2011, after Colling beat a videographer who was filming police activity in a suburban neighborhood, the footage went viral, and the department launched an investigation. In December, just weeks after the Las Vegas Review-Journal began publishing a series of articles on the use of lethal force by police, Colling was fired for policy violations. The city’s police department, which had a long-standing reputation as one of the most violent in the country, announced that it would be undertaking extensive reforms, in conjunction with the Department of Justice, to improve transparency and accountability.

No criminal charges were brought against Colling, and the internal investigation that led to the department’s decision was not made public. Still, Oquendo felt some sense of vindication: Colling wasn’t going to jail, but at least he’d lost his badge and his gun. She decided to pursue a civil case against Colling and the department, including a wrongful-death claim, and, in 2013, two years after she’d filed it, a federal district-court judge allowed the case to go forward.

But, in 2015, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the suit, citing qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects law-enforcement officers from civil lawsuits. Shortly afterward, while Oquendo was searching for news stories about Colling on the Internet, she got a hit from a paper in Laramie, Wyoming. Colling hadn’t left law enforcement—he’d just moved home. He was working as a patrol deputy for the Albany County sheriff’s office, which covers a forty-three-hundred-square-mile region of southeastern Wyoming, including Laramie, Colling’s home town. Oquendo was distraught. She started calling journalists and community leaders in Laramie. “I didn’t want him to kill again,” she said.

Eventually, she reached Debra Hinkel. An athletic woman with white-blond hair and a direct manner, Hinkel had lived in Laramie most of her life. She ran a few businesses in town, including the Ranger, a motel, bar, and liquor store, which her parents had owned. She was well-connected, and she had contacts at all three of the law-enforcement agencies with jurisdiction in Laramie—the police department, the sheriff’s office, and the University of Wyoming’s police department. Her middle child, Robbie Ramirez, had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in his early twenties, and, in the years since, Hinkel had come to dedicate much of her time to mental-health advocacy. Oquendo had found Hinkel’s phone number through the Laramie chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, where Hinkel served as president. After explaining her story, Oquendo urged Hinkel to use her standing in the community to agitate for Colling’s dismissal. “She was trying to get ahold of anybody she could,” Hinkel said. “She told me, ‘The guy’s dangerous.’ ”

Hinkel knew Derek Colling. His father was a highway patrolman, and his mother worked at a local school. Laramie is a college town of about thirty thousand that feels smaller. As boys, Colling and Robbie had played on the same baseball team, the Vigilantes. They had attended high school together; as members of the school choir, they travelled to Carnegie Hall. After graduating, Colling attended college in South Dakota, then explored a career in law enforcement. He got the job in Las Vegas in 2005. Robbie, meanwhile, had never left Wyoming.

Hinkel and Robbie lived a few blocks apart—she in a ranch house, he in a log-walled apartment owned by two of Hinkel’s brothers. They had a close-knit family, with relatives spread throughout the region. Robbie’s siblings, Randy and Robyn, lived about an hour away; their father, Jimmy Ramirez, lived in a small town across the Snowy Range mountains. Some months, Hinkel saw Robbie regularly. When he felt good, he coached hockey, made ceramic art, and worked at the Ranger. At other times, when he was feeling anxious or depressed, he kept to himself. A fun-loving skater in his younger days, Robbie had become exceedingly careful over the years, and police especially concerned him. After his diagnosis, he had been arrested a few times, and he wanted to avoid any similar encounters. He kept a detailed budget, and family members remember him painstakingly tracking his medications and meal plan. He spent hours tinkering with his Ford Ranger, but he was a tentative driver who rarely left Laramie. He said he needed to stay near home, where he was safe.

Hinkel decided not to tell her son about Colling, but he found out anyway. Not long after Oquendo’s call, Robbie walked into the Ranger and found his mother standing by the pool table. The Boomerang, Laramie’s daily, had just published an article about Oquendo’s civil case. Robbie sounded matter-of-fact, Hinkel recalled later, when he told her that he’d read about Colling. “He’ll probably shoot me someday,” Robbie said.

The sheriff of Albany County, David O’Malley, hired Colling in 2012, ten months after he was fired from his job in Las Vegas. Colling had applied to work for the town’s police department, too, but his history disqualified him. “We didn’t even finish his background,” Dale Stalder, the chief of the Laramie Police Department, said. A Laramie law-enforcement veteran told me that, when he heard that Colling was working for O’Malley, he was unsurprised. “The sheriff’s office is kind of a second-chance oasis for cops,” he said. 

O’Malley is widely known for his role investigating the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten and left to die on the outskirts of Laramie, in 1998. O’Malley, who was then the head of investigations at the Laramie Police Department, worked with a detective from the sheriff’s department to build the case that convicted two men of Shepard’s murder. The story garnered international attention, helped to catalyze a reckoning with anti-gay violence, and inspired a play, “The Laramie Project,” that was produced as a touring show. O’Malley became an outspoken public figure, advocating for national hate-crime legislation and speaking openly about his former anti-gay bigotry. He marched at Pride events, attended drag-queen bingo, and spoke out against a book that cast aspersions on Shepard. He left the police department in 2004 and, in 2010, ran for sheriff as a Democrat, winning by nearly twenty points.

The American sheriff—especially the Western sheriff—has always occupied a role that is both functional and performative, and O’Malley seemed intuitively aware of the outward-facing aspects of the job. He wore a bushy mustache and snap shirts, and he projected warmth, relying on folksy lingo. He was widely liked, and he easily won reëlection twice. But among law enforcement his department’s reputation was mixed, marred by a handful of cases of alleged misconduct. Stalder, Laramie’s police chief, told me that the expertise of sheriff’s departments varies widely. “There’s a huge disparity,” he said. “Some are very professional. Some are much less professional.” When I asked where O’Malley’s department fit within that spectrum, he said, “I think I’ll leave that one alone.”

Still, O’Malley’s popularity seemed undimmed, and he appeared confident deflecting scrutiny. A few years after Colling was hired, when local journalists found out about Colling’s history in Las Vegas, O’Malley defended him staunchly. In an interview with a local radio station and news site, he said, “The fact that he was terminated didn’t give me any real pause, because they didn’t move to decertify him as a law enforcement officer.” He added, “If you don’t believe that a person has any business in law enforcement, then you move for decertification. If they had done that, I couldn’t have considered Derek.”

Like the disbarring of an attorney, or the revocation of a doctor’s license, the decertification of a law-enforcement officer, which is handled by individual states, is meant to prevent bad actors from returning to the profession. (Wyoming, along with a few other states, recognizes decertification elsewhere as immediately disqualifying.) But standards for decertification vary widely. In a handful of states, like California, there is no process at all for removing an officer’s certification; in others, like Nevada, decertification is rare. Even though Colling had been fired following allegations of police brutality, his dismissal did not meet the state threshold for decertification. Kelly McMahill, a deputy chief at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, who oversaw the internal investigation that led to his firing, told me that, had the state initiated an inquiry, “It wouldn’t even have come close to pulling his certification.”

In recent years, the very idea of problem officers has become a flashpoint in the public discourse on police violence: when politicians and police chiefs blame the failures of policing on a handful of officers, they seem to be ignoring the systemic issues that plague American law enforcement. But it is widely accepted in the field of decertification studies that a small number of officers account for a large number of civilian complaints; if implemented fairly and consistently, decertification can serve as a vital mechanism for removing the worst actors. “Most professions have a way of getting rid of bad professionals,” Roger Goldman, an emeritus professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law, who is an expert on decertification, told me. “So why not police?”

In 2014, after a Cleveland police officer named Timothy Loehmann shot and killed Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old Black child who was holding a toy gun, an investigation revealed that Loehmann had previously been deemed unfit for duty at another Ohio police department. Ohio decertifies law-enforcement officers in the event of felony convictions, but a grand jury declined to indict Loehmann for Rice’s killing. Although he was eventually fired from the Cleveland Police Department, on the grounds that he had falsified his employment history, he remained eligible to work in law enforcement.

Last year, the legal scholars Ben Grunwald and John Rappaport published a report, “The Wandering Officer,” that provided the first wide-scale analysis of officers, like Loehmann and Colling, who have lost employment at one law-enforcement agency and then found a new job at another. Analyzing data from nearly five hundred Florida police agencies over a thirty-year period, they found that such officers were more likely than their peers “to be fired from their next job or to receive a complaint for a ‘moral character violation.’ ”

Officers who have previously worked at large metropolitan agencies typically have extensive training, which can make them appealing as prospective hires for smaller departments with less funding, or rural departments with fewer applicants. When Colling attended Wyoming’s law-enforcement academy for basic training—a requirement for most new detention officers—he graduated at the top of his class and was recognized for exemplary physical fitness and marksmanship. The Albany County Sheriff’s Office is well funded—last year, it had $1.8 million in expenditures—but O’Malley said that he had struggled to recruit officers. “In the seventies and early eighties, you had people knocking down the door,” he told me. The last time he posted a job, he said, there were twenty applicants, but only eight showed up for the physical and psychological tests. Of those eight, he said, “We had one that our panel said they would recommend to hire.” Matthew Hickman, a professor of criminal justice at Seattle University, said, “Police departments in rural jurisdictions are just desperate for officers. And that’s where some of these guys end up.”

Still, O’Malley maintained that his agency had strict hiring procedures. He told me that Colling had been interviewed by a panel, which included representatives from the sheriff’s office, the police department, and the University of Wyoming Police Department. (He declined to share the interviewers’ names, citing the confidentiality of personnel records.) O’Malley also said that Colling had passed a background check: “I had a list of probably sixty people that were supervisory and peers.” He could not tell me exactly how many were interviewed, but he stood by comments he had made in the Boomerang, in 2014, in which he called Colling “the best man for the job.”

McMahill, a deputy chief in Las Vegas, was alarmed by the circumstances of Colling’s hiring in Wyoming. “I am shocked he got a job with another police agency,” she said. She said that the details from the investigation into Colling that she led, in 2011, were confidential. But she did tell me that Colling was one of a handful of officers who were involved in incidents that prompted the agency to change the way it monitored and supported personnel following use-of-force incidents. “What we realized is that so many of these officers, they’re going to relive their officer-involved shootings time and time and time again,” she told me. McMahill now sits on Nevada’s Peace Officers Standards and Training (post) commission, which certifies and decertifies officers. She told me that she hoped for reforms to the state’s decertification statute, and for more consistency across the country. “I think the answer to that is really, every state—state to state—is going to have to be much more lenient on what it takes to decertify someone.” She added, “We don’t want people like Derek Colling to remain with his post certificate.”

Debra Hinkel, like many Laramie residents, was unaware of Colling’s presence on the force until well after he had been hired, when the press got the story and Oquendo made calls around town. But she was inclined to trust O’Malley. Her kids had gone to school with his kids. She had once switched parties to vote for him, and they sat together on a mental-health board. She had also seen Robbie’s relationship with local law enforcement improve since he was first diagnosed. In the early years, Robbie and the rest of the family struggled to manage his condition. In 2004, Robbie punched an uncle at a family cabin, and was escorted to the hospital by sheriff’s deputies, who later tackled him to the ground so that a nurse could inject him with an antipsychotic. Robbie resisted, injuring two officers. After the incident, Hinkel became interested in crisis-intervention-team (C.I.T.) programs, which encourage the development of mental-health infrastructure and teach de-escalation techniques to law-enforcement officers. After attending a C.I.T. panel in San Diego, she met with a commander at the Laramie Police Department and representatives from the local hospital. Laramie’s C.I.T. program became among the first in the state.

Robbie’s final arrest for violent behavior was in 2010, when he punched a man outside of the Ranger. After that, he abided strictly by his court-ordered probation. He picked up skateboarding again, and, after buying a classical guitar while on vacation with his father, in Mazatlán, he started playing music with a local group. In 2016, the Wyoming legislature slashed funding for Medicaid, and Robbie became convinced that he needed to keep his income as low as possible in order to prevent his benefits from changing. He eventually stopped working, and his mental health declined. When Hinkel sold the Ranger, in 2018, he lost another anchor. But he tried to stay active, regularly visiting the Laramie skate park. 

At this point, local law enforcement knew how to handle Robbie when he was in an anxious spell. Stalder, the police chief, told me that, during calls to Robbie’s apartment, officers stood outside the door and talked in a gentle voice until he calmed down. The department had a be-on-the-lookout alert set up for Robbie’s vehicles, so officers would know to respond with calm in the event of a traffic stop. “Because of the officers’ abilities to create that space and that time, things worked out,” Stalder said.

In November, 2018, Robbie drove his Ranger west on Grand Avenue, a commercial area near the university. He was travelling significantly under the speed limit, and soon a patrol vehicle from the sheriff’s office pulled in behind him. Robbie moved into the left lane, then turned across traffic, flipping on his signal a few seconds late. The patrol car followed. Robbie turned again, this time without a signal. The patrol car flashed its lights, and they both pulled over. Robbie was about a hundred yards from home.

Derek Colling is trim and muscular, with a blond crew cut that was, that day, covered by a dark beanie. He strode toward Robbie’s car. In college, Colling had been a two-hundred-and-fifteen-pound football player, and he still maintained an athletic build, training regularly in a form of martial arts called Krav Maga, developed for the Israeli military. When he reached the passenger’s side of the car, he told Robbie to roll down the window. Robbie refused, and pointed to his apartment building, which was visible across the street. Colling demanded again, and Robbie’s responses turned agitated. Then he started the car, and pulled away. (For someone fleeing the police, he drove slowly; before turning into his apartment’s parking lot, he used his turn signal.) Colling ran to his cruiser and followed in pursuit, calling for backup. Robbie parked next to his apartment, at the end of the parking lot, and got out. Officers trained in responding to calls involving people experiencing mental-health crises are taught how to speak in a calm voice and maintain distance. Colling pulled up quickly, pinning in Robbie’s truck and leaving him effectively cornered.

Colling pulled out his Taser and pistol and yelled, “Get your hands up now!” He approached, weapons drawn, closing the space between them. “Get your hands up now,” he repeated. He then deployed the Taser: its barbs stuck in Robbie’s shirt but didn’t appear to take effect. “Don’t shoot at me,” Robbie said. Colling tried again. Robbie covered his head, cursed, and charged. As the men grappled, Colling fired his pistol, and Robbie fell. Colling called for medical assistance, and held Robbie’s body to the ground. (He would later say that he still considered Robbie a potential threat.) With the assistance of a responding officer, he handcuffed Robbie, who lay bleeding. Another officer arrived and administered CPR. Colling had shot Robbie three times, including in the back. An ambulance transported him to a hospital. Hinkel arrived shortly afterward. In the lobby, she was informed that her son was dead.

Six days later, a vigil for Robbie was held at the Laramie skate park. More than a hundred people came to light candles. Later, at the memorial service, a friend of Robbie’s from the skate park delivered a eulogy, and Hinkel gave a short speech. She thought that more of Robbie’s friends might speak. But, she said, “They just couldn’t. They were just so angry.”

Hinkel walks quickly, and often wears a grin that conveys preparedness rather than joy. Following Robbie’s death, his older brother, Randy, tried to avoid returning to Laramie. Hinkel left frequently, to escape, but always returned home. “I don’t know how my mom does it,” Randy said. “She can’t go to the grocery store without someone wanting to talk about it.”

A deeply spiritual person, Hinkel felt that her son’s death had happened for a reason, and that some change should come of it. But she also tended to be trusting of local authorities. In the press, she praised O’Malley and Peggy Trent, the county attorney, with whom she was friendly. She told the Boomerang that her son’s death was the fault of “one police officer and not the whole force.” When the state announced that its Department of Criminal Investigations (D.C.I.) would conduct an inquiry into the shooting, she trusted that the system would deliver justice.

But others had started to organize around the shooting. After hearing about Robbie’s death, a graduate student named Karlee Provenza decided to start an advocacy group, which came to be called Albany County for Proper Policing (acopp). Twenty-four people showed up to the first meeting, which Provenza held at her house, a one-story home on Laramie’s west side, with a porch decorated by deer skulls. She served deer chili. One of Robbie’s uncles attended; Hinkel did not.

The week after Robbie’s vigil, Trent arranged a private viewing of Colling’s dash-camera and body-camera footage for Robbie’s family, including Hinkel, Ramirez, and their children Randy and Robyn. O’Malley was there, too. He cried as the tape rolled. “I felt bad for the family,” he told me later. Robyn hugged him and told him that she did not blame him for Robbie’s death. Randy felt different. “You did this,” he said to O’Malley. Hinkel left the room.

Trent eventually decided to gather a grand jury to determine whether Colling should be charged with a felony. Grand juries almost always convene in the absence of a judge or defense counsel, giving the prosecutor great influence. According to Kate Levine, a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, prosecutors often present exculpatory information during cases involving law-enforcement officers. “This is part of that careful, balanced presentation that is absolutely just never done for anyone but police officers,” Levine told me. Prosecutors have an incentive to maintain a good relationship with the police department, since they depend on the coöperation of law enforcement to build other cases, and jurors tend to trust and sympathize with law enforcement. Courts grant officers significant leeway in use-of-force cases: if officers who claim self-defense can demonstrate that they feared for their life or someone else’s, they can almost always avoid conviction. Rachel Harmon, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said that the legal standards “are mostly vague. And so they give a lot of room for officers who perceive a threat to use force.”

Shortly before the grand jury convened, Hinkel attended a community forum, where she finally met Provenza. They discussed the upcoming grand jury, which would convene under seal, concealing the proceedings from public scrutiny. Provenza was concerned that, if the grand jury declined to indict, it might create the impression that Robbie’s killing had been justified. “Debbie kind of brushed it aside,” Provenza told me. “Then, I think, she watched it happen.”

The grand jury, which met in January, 2019, was tasked with determining whether to indict Colling on a charge of involuntary manslaughter. Trent presented jurors with evidence that had been gathered by the D.C.I. Prepared by multiple investigators, including Tina Trimble, who was also the president of the Wyoming Fraternal Order of Police, the D.C.I. report provided a menacing portrayal of Robbie, noting that his apartment was extremely dirty and suggesting that he had not been taking his medication. (The report wasn’t released publicly until months later, under pressure from news outlets including the Boomerang and WyoFile, a nonprofit that has covered Robbie’s case extensively. Through a supervisor, Trimble declined an interview request.) The report briefly covered Colling’s two previous shootings, but it failed to mention his firing from the Las Vegas police department.

In an interview with Colling, which investigators waited to conduct until four days after the shooting, he claimed that he had not recognized Robbie during the encounter. But he also suggested that he had heard enough stories about Robbie’s past to consider him dangerous, providing secondhand accounts of encounters between Robbie and law enforcement that took place years before he joined the sheriff’s office. Only after Colling viewed body-camera footage did he come to the conclusion that Robbie might have been holding a key during their scuffle. “Colling remarked that he never saw the keys,” Trimble wrote, “but that he felt like it was an ‘edged weapon’ after viewing the video.”

The jurors listened to Colling’s interview, and to testimony from Trimble and from a use-of-force expert who has defended police officers in misconduct cases. One of the members of the grand jury told me that the group was instructed not to consider Colling’s history. (Later, in a press conference, Trent said that presenting the facts of Colling’s prior shootings would have taken away “the relevancy of the facts of the case.”) Much of the testimony, the juror said, “was framed in a way to say that law-enforcement officers had this different standard applied to them because of the parameters of their occupation.” The juror added that, for a charge to stick, “I feel like they have to scream out, ‘I’m going to kill you on purpose and I don’t care.’ And it has to be on camera.” (Trent said that she could not discuss the details of the grand jury, beyond her public comments.)

After three days of proceedings, the grand jury declined to indict Colling. O’Malley later moved Colling to an investigative role. Hinkel felt betrayed. “The whole good-ol’-boy aspect of protecting somebody who’s done something like that is totally confusing to me,” she said. She reconnected with Provenza, who was trying to get the county commissioners to establish a community oversight board for the sheriff’s office. Hinkel was impressed by Provenza’s persistence in a state where aggressive reform efforts are not the political norm. (In February, a former Albany County attorney wrote to Provenza, in an e-mail, “You should exercise caution in your efforts. The people you are challenging have the power of the entire state government to bring against you.”) Hinkel and Provenza discussed policing issues and decided to start working together on advocacy. In May, Hinkel wrote an op-ed that criticized O’Malley and the law-enforcement system: “Perhaps we need to look at de-certification of these officers so they do not continue to have opportunities to injure or kill citizens.” Provenza soon started gathering signatures on a petition that called for Colling’s decertification.

In Wyoming, as in many other states, decertification decisions are handled by the state’s post commission. (Most post agencies were established following the civil unrest of the nineteen-sixties, when authorities in cities across the U.S. responded to civil-rights protesters with military tactics.) In January, 2020, Hinkel and Provenza drove seventy-five icy miles north to a diner in Wheatland, where they met Chris Walsh, the director of the state’s post commission. Provenza presented Walsh with a petition for Colling’s decertification, which had nearly thirteen hundred signatures.

Typically, decertification cases are brought by police chiefs or sheriffs themselves. “The very people deciding whether to hire wandering officers are the people who need to decide whether to discipline them,” Ben Grunwald, the legal scholar, told me. But in Wyoming, citizens can file a grievance directly to the post commission. At the end of the meeting with Walsh, Hinkel filed a written complaint. Walsh began an investigation.

In April, Provenza announced that she was running as a Democrat for a seat in the legislature. Hinkel helped with the campaign, writing postcards to voters. A few weeks later, George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin, a white officer with eighteen prior complaints on his record. Protests erupted across the country, including in Laramie, where they attracted a diverse and durable crowd. Provenza attended, collecting more signatures for the decertification petition. Hinkel struggled to watch the video of Floyd’s death, and the similarity of the officers’ names—Derek Colling, Derek Chauvin—disturbed her. “Too many synchronicities,” she told me.

She left town to go rafting in Oregon. When she arrived home, in June, hundreds of people were marching in the streets, many of them chanting her son’s name. The marches continued daily. (Laramie police officers later arrested protesters for disorderly conduct and, in one case, “amplified noise,” even as counter-protesters in trucks with modified exhaust systems blasted them with diesel smoke.) 

One law-enforcement veteran in Laramie told me that the events of the summer had shaken his foundational beliefs about his profession. He had started to reexamine the assumptions that he had been trained to believe. When he had first seen the footage of Robbie’s death, he had thought Colling acted properly. “Now, looking at it through the way society is changing,” he told me, “it makes me question if it was a valid shoot.” For a long time, he had thought that the criminal-justice system was flawed but generally fair. “Having to now look at everything,” he said, “I’m starting to realize that—no, it is not fair. It is very skewed.” Another Laramie law-enforcement officer told me that Robbie’s death had deeply saddened and demoralized many of his colleagues. “With Robbie, it’s deeply personal,” he said. “Because Robbie was us.” He thought about Colling, and said, “Why was he hired?”

Walsh declined to comment on the specifics of the case, but he outlined a scenario that could hypothetically support decertification: “If a person were hired illegally, against Wyoming state statute, because, let’s say, information from another state is pertinent to their employment here, and through an investigation I found out that something had been overlooked”—that, he said, would be relevant. His investigation is ongoing. A hearing for Colling has not yet been scheduled.

In August, I met Sheriff O’Malley at the Albany County Courthouse, an impressive stone building on Grand Avenue. Inside, the receptionist greeted me from behind a gleaming one-way mirror. O’Malley came out and offered me a friendly handshake. He walked with his back slightly stooped. As he turned into his office, I could see Colling in a room across the way. O’Malley closed the door.

Hinkel had recently filed a twenty-million-dollar lawsuit on charges of wrongful death, listing the county, Colling, and O’Malley as defendants. O’Malley declined to discuss Hinkel’s suit directly, but his comments suggested that the public had developed an unfair impression of his office. He offered a quotation from Mark Twain (apocryphal, as it turns out): “No amount of evidence will ever convince an idiot.” He was concerned that the protests in Laramie and around the country were damaging the reputation of law enforcement. “The career, the profession, being associated with racism and excessive force and everything, that’s just—it’s not the case,” he said. “That happens, and there’s people in this profession that need to be out of it.” But Colling, he said, was not one of them. He stood by his decision to hire him. He said he planned to retire soon and move to Florida. “I can fish twelve months a year without cutting a hole in the ice,” he said, chuckling. He added, “I don’t know that I’ll ever come back.” He announced his resignation later that month.

O’Malley’s successor, Aaron Appelhans, was the first Black sheriff in Wyoming’s history. Appelhans said that he was focussed on improving services for the mentally ill and recruiting from underserved communities. “I’m not really sure law enforcement has put in enough work to really see the change,” he told me. Colling was reassigned to a job at the county detention center. O’Malley moved away; Trent took a job in Kansas. In November, on the anniversary of Robbie’s death, Karlee Provenza won her election by a hundred and sixty votes. Hinkel cried when she heard the news. “It’s not all about justice,” she said. “It’s about a need for a change.”

Still, Hinkel found herself spending more and more time away from home. She went to Colorado, Santa Fe, Elko. “There’s a heaviness in my heart every time I drive into Laramie,” she said. “I still have to leave periodically to just regroup.” One of her trips took her to Las Vegas, where she looked up Evie Oquendo. When they met, at a restaurant in a video poker lounge, they laughed at their similar statures—both women stand about five feet tall. Since losing the appeal for her case, Oquendo had been unable to work. At her apartment, she kept Tanner’s room as it had been, with his clothes still in the closet. She struggled to sleep, and her dreams were bad. Still, she said, she saw in Hinkel’s lawsuit a glimmer of hope. Maybe, she thought, it would yield a different result from her own.

Oquendo rarely left Las Vegas, and she was impressed by Hinkel’s adventurous nature. They talked about taking a trip one day. “Kind of a heck of a way to become kindred spirits,” Hinkel said. They finished lunch, and Hinkel started the long drive through Utah and Colorado and into the vast plains of Wyoming. After she arrived, her phone rang. It was Oquendo, calling to make sure she had got home safely.

 

A reminder of what America is finally about

 This week marks the 67th anniversary of Brown V Board of Education at Topeka, Kansas ruling by the US Supreme Court. Here is the famous dissent in Plessy V Ferguson 1896 by Justice Harlan that warned of the tragic consequence and future disaster for ignoring the constitution and permitting state sanctioned bigotry.

Primary Source Document

 Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)

In Plessy v. Ferguson the Supreme Court held that the state of Louisiana did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment by establishing and enforcing a policy of racial segregation in its railway system.  Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote a memorable dissent to that decision, parts of which are quoted today by both sides of the affirmative action controversy.  One statement often quoted by opponents of race-conscious affirmative action programs is Harlan's assertion that the Constitution is "color-blind," which can be found in the excerpts below.

Judge Harlan's dissent

In respect of civil rights, common to all citizens, the Constitution of the United States does not, I think permit any public authority to know the race of those entitled to be protected in the enjoyment of such rights.  Every true man has pride of race, and under appropriate circumstances which the rights of others, his equals before the law, are not to be affected, it is his privilege to express such pride and to take such action based upon it as to him seems proper.  But I deny that any legislative body or judicial tribunal may have regard to the race of citizens which the civil rights of those citizens are involved.  Indeed, such legislation as that here in question is inconsistent not only with that equality of rights which pertains to citizenship, national and state but with the personal liberty enjoyed by everyone within the United States....

It was said in argument that the statute of Louisiana does not discriminate against either race but prescribes a rule applicable alike to white and colored citizens.  But this argument does not meet the difficulty.  Everyone knows that the statues in question had its origin in the purpose, not so much to exclude white persons from railroad cars occupied by blacks, as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons.   Railroad corporations of Louisiana did not make discrimination among whites in the matter of accommodation for travellers.  The thing to accomplish was, under the guise of giving equal accommodations for whites and blacks, to compel the latter to keep to themselves while travelling in railroad passenger coaches.  No one would be so wanting in candor as to assert the contrary.  The fundamental objection, therefore, to the statues is that it interferes with the personal freedom of citizens....If a white man and a black man choose to occupy the same public conveyance on a public highway, it is their right to do so, and no government, proceeding alone on grounds of race, can prevent it without infringing the personal liberty of each....

The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country.  And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power.  So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty.  But in the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens.  There is no caste here.  Our Constitution in color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.  In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.   The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.  The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved....

The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution.  It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds

If evils will result from the commingling of the two races upon public highways established for the benefit of all, they will infinitely less than those that will surely come from state legislation regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race.  We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples.  But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with the state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow citizens, our equals before the law.  The thin disguise of "equal" accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead anyone, nor atone for the wrong this day done....

 I do not deems it necessary to review the decisions of state courts to which reference was made in argument.  Some, and the most important to them are wholly inapplicable, because rendered prior to the adoption of the last amendments of the Constitution, when colored people had very few rights which the dominant race felt obliged to respect.  Others were made at a time when public opinion, in many localities was dominated by the institution of slavery, when it would not have been safe to do justice to the black man; and when, so far as the rights of blacks were concerned, race guides in the era introduced by the recent amendments of the supreme law, which established universal freedom, gave citizenship to all born or naturalized in the Untied States and residing here, obliterated the race line from our systems of governments, national and state, and placed our free institutions upon the broad and sure foundation of the equality of all men before the law....

For the reasons state, I am constrained to withhold my assent from the opinion and judgment of the majority. 

Source:  McKenna, George, ed.  A Guide to the Constitution That Delicate Balance (New York, 1984),  pp. 384-386.

 

Free and Worldly

Louis Menand’s questionable pantheon of Cold War–era luminaries

© Paul Sahre Baffler

Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 880 pages.

AT THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR, the United States, with 6 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 50 percent of the world’s production. Militarily, it was invulnerable: it controlled both oceans and had sole possession of the most fearsome weapon ever invented. Culturally, American movies and popular music were all-conquering. Perhaps most important was America’s moral standing. Woodrow Wilson’s (not entirely deserved) reputation as an apostle of self-determination; the United States’ apparent lack of territorial ambition; and the awful fate from which the U.S. and the USSR had saved Europe—all aroused hopes for America’s moral leadership. Those hopes seemed to find fulfillment in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as wise and generous a scheme for international order as any yet devised. But the UN, along with America’s moral prestige, fell victim to the superpower rivalry that extended from 1945 to 1991 and is known as the Cold War.

That is not the story Louis Menand aims to tell in his teeming and colorful history of “art and thought in the Cold War.” Helpfully, Menand explains that this is “not a book about the ‘cultural Cold War’ (the use of cultural diplomacy as an instrument of foreign policy).” Nor is it a book about “‘Cold War culture’ (art and ideas as reflections of Cold War ideology and conditions).” (A good example of the former is Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War; of the latter, Duncan White’s Cold Warriors.) The Free World is intellectual history, primarily a narrative of ideas talking to ideas and works of art talking to works of art, while also trying to take into account “the underlying social forces—economic, geopolitical, demographic, technological—that created the conditions for the possibility of certain kinds of art and ideas.”

It is a tall order, but he has pulled it off brilliantly once before, in his The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2001). That book traced the personal and intellectual histories of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. The first three of these were friends (and members of a discussion group called the Metaphysical Club), and all four of them were central to American thought between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. They were all broad-gauged thinkers, so following their intellectual odysseys meant touching on nearly every significant current of thought in their time. The book’s narrative weave and astute interpretations set, in effect, an impossibly high standard for The Free World, which is half again as long and has a cast roughly ten times as large. The Free World pays the price of its ambition—it is not, like The Metaphysical Club, a masterpiece. But it is a splendid book.

You Must Be Kennan

Understandably but unfortunately, Menand begins with a portrait of George Kennan. Kennan was widely revered as the patron saint of American foreign policy during the Cold War. While on diplomatic service in Russia after World War II, he sent back a famous eight-thousand-word dispatch, the “Long Telegram,” that explained the Soviet Union to the State Department. Russians were, he cautioned, by nature devious, mistrustful, chronically suspicious: in a word, paranoid. No lasting understanding could be expected between such a regime and the high-minded, straight-shooting United States. Internationally, the sneaky Soviets would strive, he warned, “to stimulate all forms of disunity,” and “poor will be set against rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers against established residents, etc.” (How dastardly of them!) All in all, the best we could hope for was to firmly, patiently contain Soviet attempts to spread their disruptive ideology, while waiting for a favorable evolution. The term “containment” stuck.

The Free World pays the price of its ambition—it is not, like The Metaphysical Club, a masterpiece.

Kennan explained the Kremlin’s “neurotic view of world affairs” as the result of a “traditional and distinctive Russian sense of insecurity . . . [the] insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on [a] vast exposed plain in [the] neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples.” This was compounded by contact with the economically advanced West, which induced “fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies.” Russian fears of capitalist hostility were of course “sheerest nonsense”: capitalist countries “showed no disposition to solve their differences by joining in [a] crusade against [the] USSR.”

It is a pity Trotsky never had an opportunity to comment on the Long Telegram. I think he would have shredded it so thoroughly that even American foreign-policy intellectuals, normally rather sheep-like, would have felt obliged to sternly repudiate it. For it was not merely the existence of that “vast exposed plain,” extending through much of Eastern and Central Europe, that made the Russians anxious; it was also the fact that three times in 150 years, invaders from the West had crossed those plains into Russia, on the most recent occasion very nearly annihilating the country, exterminating much of its population and enslaving the rest, while its Western allies dithered, one of them (Churchill) opining that it would be no bad thing if the Nazis and Bolsheviks killed as many of each other as possible before the U.S. and UK fulfilled their long-delayed promise to open a second front. Of course Stalin had no right to occupy Eastern and Central Europe after the war. But to ascribe the Soviets’ concern for their western borders to traditional Russian “paranoia” was preposterous.

The Soviets also had a more up-to-date reason to want to hold on to Eastern and Central Europe. In the late 1940s, they pushed for a unified, demilitarized Germany, with free elections, and possibly even a pullback of the Red Army. It was German military power they were worried about, for obvious reasons. But the United States insisted on partition, with West Germany to be part of a new military alliance, NATO. Not surprisingly, the Red Army stayed put.

Perhaps the most outrageous line in Kennan’s dispatch was his ridiculing as “sheerest nonsense” the notion of capitalist countries “joining in a crusade against the USSR.” In fact, the moment World War I ended, that’s exactly what they did. The United States, Britain, Japan, and other capitalist countries sent 180,000 troops to support the rebellious anti-Bolshevik White Army. The resulting civil war lasted several years and made an already bad situation in Russia incomparably worse. In short, there were many reasons for the USSR to distrust the West at the outset of the Cold War besides what Kennan called “the very disrespect of Russians for objective truth.” But Kennan told the U.S.—and the West generally—what we wanted to hear: we are rational and honorable; they are devious and paranoid. Naturally, he was hailed as a Wise Man and the Cold War deemed inevitable and “tragic”—the latter term usually (as in Vietnam and in Kissinger’s “philosophical” blatherings about international affairs) a tacit acknowledgment that the policy or practice in question is indefensible.

There’s not a great deal more about politics in The Free World, except for a chapter about James Burnham and George Orwell. Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941), which Orwell wrote about several times and drew on in Nineteen Eighty-Four, predicted that bureaucrats and technocrats would be the ruling class in advanced countries, that the state would extend its control indefinitely over economic and private life, and that states would form shifting blocs, always in conflict, often military. This was to be the fate of both capitalist and socialist countries, hence “the convergence theory of totalitarianism.” It didn’t turn out that way, in most respects at least. Still, it struck many people as one of the most powerful and persuasive social theories (in Orwell’s case, visions) of the twentieth century.

There was a deep difference, though, between Burnham and Orwell, which Menand mentions but doesn’t make enough of. They were both notably tough-minded; that is, they shared an intense dislike of cant and wishful thinking. But Burnham was a thoroughgoing nihilist: he thought that all ideals were sentimental rubbish, that lasting peace was a pipedream, and that power was the only reality in politics. Orwell, on the other hand—though in Nineteen Eighty-Four he portrayed nihilism more brilliantly than anyone else ever has or, probably, ever will—was nevertheless the most idealistic of men, with solidarity and generosity seemingly written into his source code. Burnham doubtless pitied the poor, deluded democratic socialist Orwell. But as Orwell observed dryly in “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” (1946): “So long as they were winning, Burnham seems to have seen nothing wrong with the methods of the Nazis.” That is not something a decent person would want to have written about himself. Perhaps tough-mindedness is not the last word in politics.

Your Eminents

One of The Free World’s larger themes is the replacement of Paris by New York as “the capital of the modern.” For nearly a century, Menand writes, “Paris was where advanced Western culture—especially painting, sculpture, literature, dance, film, and photography, but also fashion, cuisine, and sexual mores—was . . . created, accredited, and transmitted.” It was not the Nazi occupation that changed things; Paris got off lightly compared with other occupied capitals. (Though it would have been burned to the ground if the German commandant had not ignored Hitler’s orders.) And immediately after the Liberation in 1944, there was a cultural efflorescence. Existentialism was in vogue everywhere; its three main exponents—Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir—were international celebrities. But the compass needle was turning: as Sartre acknowledged, “the greatest literary development in France between 1929 and 1939 was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Caldwell, Steinbeck.” American leadership in painting was even more pronounced in the 1940s and 50s. Paris would always retain its aura, particularly for Black American writers and musicians, though not only for them—Paris would play a large part in liberating Susan Sontag, for example. But American global primacy was so complete in the fifties and sixties that the cultural primacy of its capital city could not be gainsaid.

Menand gives a lengthy but concise and penetrating sketch, both biographical and intellectual, of Sartre and Beauvoir. That is his modus operandi. Though there’s plenty of connective tissue, the book essentially consists of a very large number of profiles of such luminaries as Hannah Arendt, David Riesman, Jackson Pollock, Clement Greenberg, C. Wright Mills, Harold Rosenberg, Lionel Trilling, Diana Trilling, Allen Ginsberg, Claude Lévi-Strauss, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Isaiah Berlin, James Baldwin, I.A. Richards, Northrop Frye, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Norman Mailer, Andy Warhol, Betty Friedan, Susan Sontag, Ralph Ellison, Pauline Kael, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Tom Hayden, as well as quite a few only slightly less luminous figures. In addition, there are many sketches, pretty full and mostly even-handed, of influential institutions, movements, and doctrines, such as the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, UNESCO’s The Family of Man exhibit, “Action” painting, structuralism, the Beats, the New Criticism, deconstruction, Industrial Art, Cahiers du Cinéma, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the rise of the rock-and-roll industry, the rise of the paperback book industry (with special attention to Grove Press and Olympia Press), the Leo Castelli Gallery, the Vietnam War, and Bonnie and Clyde. It is possible to quibble with some of his judgments (as I’ll do in a moment). But it’s not possible, I’d say, to read the book without learning a vast amount about twentieth-century intellectual history.

One of The Free World’s larger themes is the replacement of Paris by New York as “the capital of the modern.”

Menand plays his cards pretty close to the vest, ideologically. He is however, notably indulgent toward eminent centrists. Kennan is one example; another is Isaiah Berlin. Berlin was one of the most influential intellectuals in the English-speaking world at mid-century, so Menand had to discuss him at some length. But he didn’t have to discuss him respectfully. Berlin made a career of admonishing everyone to his left that perfect harmony and rationality in politics are unattainable, that not all desirable values can be fully and simultaneously realized, and that therefore anyone who talked of utopia, or even radical change, was a totalitarian in sheep’s clothing. His political views, for all his suavity, really were no more sophisticated than that, though they did very often have the virtue of being tacked on to the rather elegant essays in intellectual history in which he specialized. His regrettably popular book on Marx assured liberals that the Moor was fundamentally unsound and largely responsible for the Bolshevik outrages. And his main contribution to political philosophy, the essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” by insisting on a sharp distinction between “freedom from” coercion (from e.g., taxation and gun laws) and “freedom to” live with dignity (e.g., to afford housing, education, health care), aimed a poisoned shaft at the Communist countries—who of course deserved it but who were paying no attention to Berlin—and which unfortunately landed in the English-speaking countries, where the eventual results were Thatcherism and the Republican Freedom Caucus. Berlin might have regretted this, but to forestall it he would have had to take a firm stand in favor of democratic socialism, or at least social democracy. That, however, might have been unpopular at his Oxford High Table and was therefore unthinkable.

A Clever Racket

Menand’s interpretations are always plausible, but not always quite convincing. The Black Mountain and New York City avant-gardes figure largely in the book, and he nicely balances narratives of their individual careers and collaborations. But with the best will in the world (well, perhaps something less than that), I couldn’t accept his claims for their significance. Three of this story’s central figures were Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage. In the early 1950s, each produced an important work. Rauschenberg’s was White Paintings, several canvases painted white. Cunningham’s was Theatre Piece No. 1, a forty-five-minute-long multimedia piece which consisted of a movie turned on and off throughout the performance, a lecturer (Cage) alternately speaking and silent, piano music, records playing on a Victrola, and some intermittent and spontaneous dancing—all of these lasting for intervals determined by chance. From the rafters hung Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, which supposedly inspired Cage’s now-famous 4’33”—four minutes and thirty-three seconds of ambient noise, with the performer sitting at the piano holding a stopwatch.

Menand tells a plausible enough story of how each of those artists arrived at his chef d’oeuvre (or cul de sac). But to show that it was worth getting there is something else again. “These works,” he writes,

—the White Paintings, Theatre Piece No. 1, and 4’33”—are at the center of the Rauschenberg-[Jasper] Johns-Cage-Cunningham aesthetic, and they are easily misread. They are not Dada or anti-art, and they do not embrace a philosophy of “anything goes.” They are completely committed to a traditional view of art as a transformative experience, and they are highly disciplined. They rule out much more than they permit.

Rauschenberg made large claims for White Paintings, saying that they deserved “a place with other outstanding paintings and yet they are not Art because they take you to a place in painting [that] art has not yet been.” Menand apparently agrees. “The discipline in the White Paintings is the uninflected surface. Rauschenberg was insistent about this. . . . Keeping the artist out of the work required constant vigilance. . . . The artist doesn’t make the paintings signify; the viewer does. . . . Cage got what was going on in the White Paintings. He described them as ‘airports for the light, shadows, and particles’ in the space around them. They proved that ‘[a] canvas is never empty.’” As Marcel Duchamp had shown, “the art object itself is empty, inert; it is ‘made’ by the spectator . . . The art is happening because of the canvas, but not on the canvas.”

Menand’s interpretations are always plausible, but not always quite convincing.

Theatre Piece No. 1 may have sounded to its audience like “a cacophony of simultaneous and unrehearsed independent actions,” but there was order, Menand counters. The order consisted in the fact that, even though the performances had no relation to one another, the noises and silences were not determined by the whims of the performers. They were not determined by Cage either. They were determined by chance, which was Cage’s usual method of composition at this stage of his career. 4’33”, which was Cage’s favorite work to date, was also full of order: a stopwatch, a score whose pages Cage would turn without playing anything, the wind and rain, and the audience, who “made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”

As that last phrase suggests, the audience for 4’33” (likewise Theatre Piece No. 1), who were other artists and not easily intimidated middlebrow concertgoers, were not impressed by Cage’s and Cunningham’s masterpieces. (Rauschenberg was already well-known; it is interesting to imagine an unknown painter bringing a set of white-painted canvases to a midtown gallery and insisting that they “deserve a place with other outstanding art.”)

I had high hopes for Menand’s chapter on the “Rauschenberg- Johns-Cage-Cunningham aesthetic”: I’ve struggled for decades between closing the book on American avant-garde painting, music, and dance, as I’m inclined to do, and giving an ear one more time to astute and knowledgeable interpreters like Menand, and perhaps finally getting it. Alas, la lutte continue.

I’ve never felt any such ambivalence about Andy Warhol. He’s always seemed to me a clever racket, disclaiming any special knowledge of what his productions meant, even to him, and inviting his viewers to invest the work with their own meanings, while refraining, sphinx-like, from responding, lest he limit their saleability. According to Menand, that pretty much is what Warhol was up to, and more power to him. “Pop Art was a market-driven phenomenon.”

Warhol’s [Campbell Soup can] painting is a painting about the nature of painting. It represents the idea that a soup can is a commodity, and so is a painting of a soup can. . . . There is a marketplace for everything. This collapse of the fine art-commerce distinction seems banal today, but in 1962, it tied people in knots.

Actually, I hadn’t heard that there was no longer any distinction between fine art and commerce. I’m not sure I like the idea. Menand gets a bit wound up on the subject:

[Pop Art] was what [Clement] Greenberg said it should be, the next step in art’s investigation of its own nature. And it brought that investigation to an end. Pop Art showed that the only difference between art, such as a sculpture that looks like a grocery carton, and reality, such as a grocery carton, is that the first is received as art and the second is not. At that moment, art could be anything it wanted. The illusion/reality barrier had been broken.

It sounds a little like a stock market pyramid scheme. The winner is the person who guesses exactly when other people are going to stop receiving sculptures of grocery cartons and paintings of soup cans as art, and sells at the top of the market. In the stock market, too, the “illusion/reality barrier” has been broken, with fictitious financial instruments like derivatives and collateralized debt obligations and fun games like super-hyper-ultra high-speed trading, in which one gang of trader-buccaneers will pay tens of billions of dollars for a new cable with a few thousandths-of-a-second faster connection to a stock exchange. If they say something’s money, it’s money.

Seriously Ridiculous

I’m afraid Menand didn’t convince me that Warhol is even worth arguing about—I half-suspect he made those extravagant claims for Pop Art just to get a rise out of reviewers. Susan Sontag is another matter. “She had been educated at Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, and Oxford . . . She had a command of the Western literary, philosophical, and classical music canon; she was up to date on Continental thought; she was a dedicated cinéaste who often saw two or three movies a day; and she followed the avant-garde . . . She also wrote experimental fiction.” Menand, who is strictly measured in his praise of nearly everyone else, is unmeasured in his praise of Sontag. “There was no one like her.” She was “in the forefront of American letters.” “Every other American critic of the period looks provincial by comparison.”

How good was Sontag? Her experimental fiction, as Menand half-admits, was barbarously bad. Her conventional fiction was good but not outstanding. On Photography, Illness As Metaphor, and AIDS and Its Metaphors were intermittently interesting, but hardly the brilliant revelations some of her admirers claimed. Her most interesting and enduring work is in her five essay collections. Many of the essays are fine: on Bresson, Camus, “The Pornographic Imagination,” Riefenstahl, Walter Benjamin, Victor Serge, “On Style,” others. There are quite a few political pronouncements, usually wise and eloquent. But she is generally considered a literary critic, and virtually none of her essays, I would say, is literary criticism. They are literary history, literary journalism, literary theory, literary reflections, sometimes, as I have said, very good. But almost nowhere does she grapple with a poem or novel or film or painting or piece of music and show us, from the inside, how it works: how, precisely, it achieves the effects it does. Menand suggests that that’s an outdated idea of literary criticism, the so-called New Criticism, which Paul de Man allegedly rendered obsolete with his dazzling deconstructive approach. But de Man, too, was a literary theorist and historian rather than a critic; when he actually essayed interpreting a text, the results were not impressive. And what Menand calls the New Criticism is, I’d say, simply criticism: what F. R. Leavis did with Hard Times, Lionel Trilling with Little Dorrit and The Princess Casamassima, Irving Howe with Nostromo, Randall Jarrell with Marianne Moore, Helen Vendler with Wallace Stevens, and William Gass with Rilke.

Sontag simply was not interested in getting to grips with individual works like that. As Menand writes: “She just wanted to be on the cutting edge of cultural awareness.” That will keep you busy. She did, on at least two occasions, become the cutting edge herself. “Notes on Camp,” her most famous essay, was a jeu d’esprit, a catalogue of practically everything in cultural history that is serious and ridiculous at the same time. It was so popular that later in life she hated to be reminded of it. It remains fun, however. The other large splash was “Against Interpretation,” a protest against the tyranny of meaning, content, intellect. “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art” was only one of the flaming arrows Sontag shot into the traditionalist camp. Marxist and Freudian approaches are paradigms of critical aggression against art. But any determined search for meaning is a mistake. Something else altogether is needed. “Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” It sounds like a mindfulness exercise.

Sontag is perhaps the key figure in The Free World, or at any rate the one Menand admires most. But he must sense that there’s something a little unstable about her reputation, because his discussion is largely defensive: noting and answering criticisms of her. Here is one of his best formulations, explaining what (he thought) she was up to in “Against Interpretation”:

Sontag was not a permissivist or a leveler. She was not saying that the Beatles are as good as Thomas Mann. She was saying that the fine arts can be approached with the same openness and lack of pretension that people bring to pop songs and Hollywood movies.

Well, yes. But then, there’s an awful lot in Thomas Mann (and the fine arts generally) that you can only get through discipline and interpretive skill, while for the Beatles (and pop songs and Hollywood movies), openness and lack of pretension are all you need.

The Free World does not have a single, comprehensive argument; it contains many disparate arguments, only a few of which I’ve touched on here. It is based on a vast amount of research, biographical, historical, even economic, which shows (though it doesn’t obtrude—Menand is too graceful a writer for that). Though he has not overcome my skepticism about some of the artistic and cultural developments of the period, he has nevertheless taught me a good deal. It will be a long time, I imagine, before a better account of art and thought in mid-twentieth-century America appears.

A Pennsylvania Lawmaker and the Resurgence of Christian Nationalism

 A Pennsylvania Lawmaker and the Resurgence of Christian Nationalism

How Doug Mastriano’s rise embodies the spread of a movement centered on the belief that God intended America to be a Christian nation.

 

By Eliza Griswold The New Yorker

The Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano has supported legislation to mandate teaching the Bible in public schools and allowing adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples, among other things.

Doug Mastriano, a Republican state senator from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and parts of neighboring counties, was a little-known figure in state politics before the coronavirus pandemic. But, in the past year, he has led rallies against mask mandates and other public-health protocols, which he has characterized as “the governor’s autocratic control over our lives.” He has become a leader of the Stop the Steal campaign, and claims that he spoke to Donald Trump at least fifteen times between the 2020 election and the insurrection at the Capitol, on January 6th. He urged his followers to attend the rally at the Capitol that led to the riots, saying, “I’m really praying that God will pour His Spirit upon Washington, D.C., like we’ve never seen before.” Throughout this time, he has cast the fight against both lockdowns and Trump’s electoral loss as a religious battle against the forces of evil. He has come to embody a set of beliefs characterized as Christian nationalism, which center on the idea that God intended America to be a Christian nation, and which, when mingled with conspiracy theory and white nationalism, helped to fuel the insurrection. “Violence has always been a part of Christian nationalism,” Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist and co-author of “Taking America Back for God,” told me. “It’s just that the nature of the enemy has changed.”

Mastriano grew up mostly in New Jersey, in a military family, and attended Eastern College, a Christian university outside Philadelphia. After he graduated, in 1986, he joined the military, and, as a junior intelligence officer, was stationed at the border of West Germany and Czechoslovakia. Mastriano, like many conservative Christians, came to see the Cold War as a spiritual campaign, applying religious notions of good and evil to U.S. foreign policy. “Seeing awful things in the East, and atheistic, communistic, socialist regimes oppressing people” convinced him of the need for “protecting freedom, the free people of the West,” he told “Crosspoint,” a Christian podcast, in 2018. While deployed, Mastriano often carried a Bible under his arm. “It wasn’t for show,” he said.

In 1991, as the Cold War was winding down, Mastriano was deployed to Iraq to fight in the Gulf War. He believed that he was on the front lines of a new religious conflict, this time against radical Islam. Mastriano’s wife, Rebecca, knew little about his posting, which was classified, and gathered people to engage in what she called “spiritual warfare,” praying that he would prevail against evil on the battlefield. In late February of that year, Mastriano’s unit was about to face Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, when a sandstorm struck. “Thunder and lightning and rain and sand, and it blinds the Iraqis. We can miraculously see through this silicon and moisture in the air, and we start picking off the enemy,” he said, on the podcast. “Because of this, our small regiment, compared to the armored divisions we were facing, was able to break the back of the Iraqi line and therefore end the war rapidly.” Days later, a ceasefire was announced.

Mastriano believed that this was a miracle, and evidence that Rebecca’s spiritual warfare had tangible results. “I believe I was saved by God, who answered the prayers of Pennsylvanians, “ Mastriano wrote to me in an email. “Rebbie played a significant role in leading those prayer efforts as she had more than twenty churches praying specifically for my unit.” For the next three decades, he continued to serve in military intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he appears to have developed a dim view of Islam. In recent years, he has often spread Islamophobic memes online. In one, he spread a conspiracy theory that Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, directed fellow-Muslims to throw a five-year-old over a balcony. In another, he shared a graphic that read “Islam wants to kill gay rights, Judaism, Christianity and pacifism.” In yet another, he encouraged the idea that the fire at the Notre-Dame cathedral, in Paris, was started by Muslims, captioning a photo of two dark-skinned men grinning, “Something wicked this way comes.” (Mastriano did not respond to a request for comment on these social-media posts.)

In 2019, after retiring from the military and teaching at the U.S. Army War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Mastriano decided to run for office. “Our freedoms are being encroached,” he wrote to me, “and the precious lives of babies are eliminated without concern, while free speech is under attack by Orwellian-like ideologies that are taking over our public institutions.” Mastriano won a seat as a state representative in Pennsylvania. He soon began attending events held by a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation, a loosely linked network of charismatics and Pentecostals that, over the past decade, has played an influential role in conservative American circles. (Mastriano denied working directly with the group.) Many members believe that God speaks to them directly, and that they have been tasked with battling real-world demons who control global leaders. Prominent members in the group go by the title Apostle or Prophet to hark back to early Christianity. The N.A.R.’s overarching agenda—to return the United States to an idealized Christian past—is largely built upon the work of the pseudo-historian David Barton, who has advanced the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation. “Mastriano’s significance, alongside that of the N.A.R., is that he is attempting to create a theonomy—a system of enacting God’s law on earth,” Frederick Clarkson, a research analyst at Political Research Associates, told me. Bills that Mastriano supported in the legislature would have mandated teaching the Bible in public schools and would have made it legal for adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples, among other things.

As lockdowns took hold, Mastriano railed against what he saw as the curtailment of God-given freedoms. “It says in John 8:36 that if Jesus set you free, you are free indeed,” he wrote to me. “This is why my motto is ‘Walk as Free People.’ ” On nightly Facebook fireside chats, he suggested that his viewers find new congregations if their pastors weren’t leading in-person worship services. He gained increasingly extreme followers; last June, at a gun-rights protest on the steps of the state capitol, he posed for pictures with white men in fatigues carrying AR-15s and several others in Hawaiian shirts, a hallmark of the Boogaloo Bois, a white-nationalist militia. In July, Mastriano attended a rally on the Gettysburg battlefield, where militia members gathered in response to a hoax circulated on social media that Antifa was going to topple Confederate statues. “A lot of people here just keeping an eye on stuff,” he said. “Americans doing American things. Isn’t that beautiful?”

Many white evangelicals reject the Christian-nationalist label. “Christian nationalism doesn’t exist,” Franklin Graham, the evangelical leader, told me, calling it “just another name to throw at Christians.” He added, “The left is very good at calling people names.” Mastriano also rejected the phrase, writing to me, “Is this a term you fabricated? What does it mean and where have I indicated that I am a Christian Nationalist?” But historians and sociologists have found the term useful to describe an undercurrent of nativist religion that runs through American history. “Christian nationalism was part of our cultural framework since the arrival of the colonists, who located what they were doing in the sacred, as part of God’s plan,” the author Andrew Whitehead said. John Winthrop, the seventeenth-century puritan leader, preached that Colonial America would become the “city on a hill” that Jesus described in his Sermon on the Mount. “In order to advance this Christian civilization, violence was required,” John Fea, a professor of history at Messiah College, told me. “Winthrop regularly talked about killing Indians in a providential way, and, two hundred years later, this language leads directly into Manifest Destiny.”

Throughout U.S. history, a combination of Christianity and patriotism often served as a rallying cry against a common enemy. Following the Second World War, many Christians came to believe, as Mastriano did, that the battle against communism was a religious struggle, in part as a result of the Soviet Union’s massacres of clergy members. President Dwight Eisenhower encouraged the pastor Billy Graham to stoke this fervor. Matthew Avery Sutton, a professor of history at Washington State University, told me, “From President Truman to Ronald Reagan, American Presidents allied with the Vatican and orthodox Christian leaders to frame the crusade against communism and atheism in hyper-religious terms.”

By the nineties and two-thousands, many white evangelicals had come to understand Islam to be the primary threat to America. “White evangelicals were already worried about the growth of Islam, especially beginning in the seventies with the Arab-Israeli war and the rise of oil,” Sutton told me. “What 9/11 shifts is that Muslims are no longer just a threat to Israel but a direct threat to the United States.” This hostility also turned on Muslim communities in America. At megachurches, pastors preached about the spread of “sharia law.” Secular liberalism and movements for social justice were also seen as threatening. “In the early two-thousands, among conservative pastors, you’d often hear that the gays are softening up our society in preparation for Islam,” Michelle Goldberg, the author of “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism,” told me.

The election of Donald Trump intensified certain strains of Christian nationalism. He fanned fears of pluralism with Islamophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric. He often invoked Christianity, albeit in terms that were largely about ethnic identity rather than faith. “The greatest ethnic dog whistle the right has ever come up with is ‘Christian,’ because it means ‘people like us,’ it means white,” Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma and co-author of “Taking America Back For God,” told me. In 2019, Trump hosted Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s right-wing Prime Minister, at the White House, and praised him for building a border fence to keep immigrants out, saying, “You have been great with respect to Christian communities. You have really put a block up, and we appreciate that very much.”

“That’s Not Who We Are” Is the Wrong Reaction to the Attack on the Capitol 

Those who espouse Christian-nationalist ideas also appeared to grow more militant during this period. In the early years of Trump’s term, membership in white-supremacist militias grew rapidly, but the backlash to the Charlottesville rally, in 2017, proved damaging. “Since then, there has been a major shift among far-right groups, white nationalists, and militias toward espousing Christian nationalism, much like the Ku Klux Klan did,” Alexander Reid Ross, a geography lecturer at Portland State University, said. Beginning in 2018, white supremacists donned suits and appeared at conferences held by the N.A.R. and similar groups. “The tactic has been to use Christian nationalism to cool down the idea of fascism without losing the fascism,” Ross said. For example, after the white-nationalist organization Identity Evropa was dissolved, a former leader aligned himself with America First, a movement to make America a “white Christian nation.” (America First was one of the most prominent groups at the Capitol insurrection.)

A long-standing distrust of educational institutions and the mainstream media, coupled with a tradition of anti-intellectualism, has also left white evangelicals vulnerable to conspiracy theory. Many prominent conspiracy theories draw heavily on Christian-nationalist ideas; QAnon, which holds that America must be saved from a cabal of pedophilic Democrats, speaks of believers as an “elect,” and references Scripture and end-times theology. A recent study by the American Enterprise Institute found that twenty-seven per cent of white evangelicals, more than any other religious group, believe that the basic tenets of QAnon are “mostly true.” (Mastriano denies any affiliation with QAnon, though he has made several appearances on QAnon-connected media outlets.)

As a result, during Trump’s Presidency, many white evangelicals came to believe that his government, the one chosen by God, was under threat from an internal enemy: a shadowy conspiracy of leftists. And, when Trump started claiming that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, many evangelicals took up the call. According to Perry’s research, some sixty-seven per cent of evangelicals believe that the results of the 2020 election were “not at all fair.” Trump’s most powerful evangelical allies, including Franklin Graham, repeatedly undermined the results of the election. “Was there funny business in this last election? Sure there was,” Graham told me. “And there’s mountains of evidence.” Paula White, Trump’s religious adviser and a leader of the New Apostolic Reformation, held a televised campaign in which she led prayers against those with a “demonic agenda” that included “trying to steal this election.” Mastriano has likened his political agenda to that of the Old Testament figure of Esther, a queen who stopped the ancient Persians from massacring the Israelites; Mastriano said that “if we get the call, we’re not going to stand away from our Esther moment.” “His trajectory is precisely what we see in white evangelicalism,” Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University and the author of “Jesus and John Wayne,” told me. “Anti-communism from the late nineteen-forties to the nineteen-sixties was really the crucible in which this sense of ‘us versus them’ and militarism was formed. After 9/11, Islam became the new enemy.” She added, “Now, for some, the enemy has become the forces of secular democracy.”

As the effort to delegitimize the election heated up, Mastriano told his supporters on Facebook, “You know, when things go wrong, oftentimes Christians will say, ‘Oh, it’s God’s will,’ and kind of throw their hands. That’s nonsense. What a cop-out. Please don’t do that. This isn’t His will.” He appeared on Steve Bannon’s radio show, “War Room,” as well as on a right-wing Christian show called “The Eric Metaxas Radio Show,” during which Trump called in and said, “Doug is a hero!” In Pennsylvania, Mastriano supported a barrage of lawsuits and a bid to appoint special electors. On November 25th, he hosted a theatrical hearing in Gettysburg, featuring Rudy Giuliani as a faux prosecutor. That afternoon, Mastriano and his son drove from Gettysburg to the White House at the President’s invitation. (Mastriano tested positive for covid-19 and was reportedly ushered out of the meeting with Trump.)

On December 12th, Mastriano returned to Washington, D.C., to participate in a series of “Jericho Marches” organized by leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation in which conservative Christians, among a hodgepodge of QAnon followers and white nationalists, gathered to pray that God would keep Trump in office. Alex Jones, of Infowars, attended, as did members of the Oath Keepers militia. Participants dressed in Colonial knickers, to evoke the American Revolution, or in animal skins, to evoke the Israelites. Jack Jenkins, a reporter for Religion News Service, told me, “They blew on shofars”—ram’s horns that Israelite priests blew, according to the Bible, to bring down the sinful city of Jericho—“believing they could literally overturn the election results.” Mastriano exhorted his followers to “do what George Washington asked us to do in 1775. Appeal to Heaven. Pray to God. We need an intervention.” The phrase “appeal to heaven” comes from John Locke’s argument in support of the right to violent revolution in the face of tyranny. “An Appeal to Heaven” appeared on a flag that a squadron of George Washington’s warships reportedly flew, and has grown popular among N.A.R. members. Mastriano has hung a sign reading “An Appeal to Heaven” on his office door, and the flag sometimes appears behind him during his fireside chats. He told his followers that laws and governments made by man needn’t always be respected, reminding them that Hitler, too, was an elected official.

Many who hold Christian-nationalist beliefs think that God’s will should determine America’s course. “Christian nationalists take the view that because America is a ‘Christian nation,’ any party or leader who isn’t Christian in the ‘right’ way, or who fails to conform to their agenda, is illegitimate,” Katherine Stewart, the author of “The Power Worshippers,” told me. “Legitimacy derives not from elections or any democratic process but from representing an alleged fidelity to their version of the American past and what they believe is the will of God.” As a result, overthrowing an election, if it seems to have subverted God’s will, would be justified. “That kind of anti-democratic ideology made it very easy for these radicals to imagine they were being patriotic, even while they were attacking the most basic institutions of democracy: the U.S. Congress and the election process.”

Two days before the Capitol riots, Mastriano said that he was heading to Washington, D.C., and “calling out to God for divine revelation.” He used campaign funds to charter six buses to shuttle followers to Washington, D.C., and told them that he would speak on the Capitol steps. Around 1 p.m., rioters broke into the Capitol, some wielding Bibles, “Jesus 2020” signs, “An Appeal to Heaven” flags, and shofars. On the Senate floor, one insurrectionist called out from the dais, “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!” Another thanked God for “filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ” and for “allowing the United States of America to be reborn.” One later told an interviewer that he and the others were guided by the “An Appeal to Heaven” flag to storm the building, saying, “We appeal to heaven, because we, as individuals, are powerless.”

Later that evening, Mastriano appeared on Facebook Live for his fireside chat, looking spooked. He told viewers that he had left the Capitol after he saw things “get weird,” saying, “When it was apparent that this was no longer a peaceful protest, my wife and I left the area.” Mastriano later told a radio interviewer that he stayed long enough to witness both the first and second breaches of the building. “There were several speaking events planned," he told me, by e-mail. "It was to be a peaceful gathering as it had been previously. When it no longer looked that way, the buses departed.” James Sinclair, a man from Bensalem, Pennsylvania, who rode one of the buses to the Capitol, was arrested for a curfew violation and possession of a weapon. Sandy Weyer, a bus rider who was photographed at the door of the Capitol with her first raised, tweeted, “Truth be known about storming the capitol . . . we were sick and tired of DITHERING!!!” Rick Groves, another bus rider, told a local radio host, of the insurrection, “All I saw was unity and love, and it was a beautiful thing, like Woodstock almost, with Trump flags.”

After the insurrection, Mastriano’s colleagues in the state legislature were outraged. “He needs to be expelled,” Vincent Hughes, a Democratic state senator from Philadelphia, said. “This was not a bus trip to the casino. This was a trip organized to overthrow the government.” Brian Sims, a Democratic state representative, has called for Mastriano to be court-martialed. “He’s not just a preacher screaming from the rooftops. He has been trained in subterfuge and destabilization in military intelligence for other countries. Mirroring those actions here is very, very dangerous,” he said.

In March, a group of concerned citizens from Mastriano’s district met with Sims via Zoom. They wanted to inform Sims that some of Mastriano’s funding came from groups associated with Jeffrey Yass, a libertarian businessman and Koch brothers’ associate. The group also had been amassing alarming Facebook videos, which Mastriano often removes after they air. They found Mastriano’s mix of Biblical references and warlike talk troubling. “I’ve worked with the Department of Defense for thirty years and fought in three wars,” a businessman said. “This is not what the U.S. military teaches.” As Mastriano’s following came to include an increasing number of white nationalists and militia members, the members of the group of concerned citizens had grown cautious about speaking out against him. “I’m getting scared,” a woman on a treadmill said at the Zoom meeting. “The farm behind me got their Biden sign wrapped around a dead cat.”

Christian-nationalist ideas don’t seem to be receding. “There’s been a doubling down,” Perry, the sociology professor, told me. According to his research, in August of 2020, sixty-eight per cent of white evangelicals believed that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were divinely inspired; by this February, that figure had jumped to seventy-four per cent. “That’s a big climb,” Perry added. The majority of white evangelicals still believe that the Presidential election was illegitimate. (Around sixty-eight per cent also believe that the January 6th insurrection was the work of Black Lives Matter and Antifa.) Some experts believe that the narrative of a stolen election will inflame Christian-nationalist sentiment. Perry told me, “Trump has become the foremost martyr of this time.” Others believe that Christian nationalism is well positioned to become more dominant in the Republican Party, cloaking Trump’s inflammatory xenophobia in religious language that may be more broadly palatable.

Mastriano has toned down his rhetoric, and spends his fireside chats flipping through a scrapbook of his service during Desert Storm. But he continues to push Trump’s claims of a stolen election, and has introduced legislation to limit mail-in voting in the state. (“I am after truth,” Mastriano wrote to me. “Is it not appropriate to ask questions and seek answers to ensure each person has a legal vote?”) Most recently, he has vociferously opposed vaccine passports, penning an op-ed in a local paper, and reintroduced legislation to ban most legal abortion. He appears to be preparing to run for governor in 2022. “He’s built this relationship with Donald Trump that I don’t think any other Republican in Pennsylvania has,” J. J. Abbott, the executive director of Commonwealth Communications, a progressive advocacy group, told me. “He has a very unique profile to be successful in a post-Trump Republican Party.”

On a Monday afternoon in February, at the statehouse, Mastriano stood at a lectern, wearing a gray suit and a yellow tie, and gave a speech celebrating the first day of the Fast of Jonah. He spoke of the Assyrian Christians who were forced by isis to flee Iraq, and compared them to early American settlers: “The parallels between the people of ancient Assyria as well as those Quakers of William Penn’s ancestry, who settled Pennsylvania, are likewise profound.” Following Mastriano’s speech, Tim Kearney, a Democratic state senator, addressed his colleagues via Zoom. He called for further investigation into Mastriano’s role in inciting violence at the Capitol, quoting a claim that Mastriano had made a day before the insurrection that Republicans “were in a death match” with Democrats. He said, “If you call for a death match with your political opponents, you cannot be surprised when people turn to violence.”