Ad Choices. Ryan Costello, a centrist wonk, ran for Congress to solve problemsbut his colleagues fell in line with Trumps parade of resentment. His 2005 book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq analyzes the events that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and reports on subsequent developments in that country, largely based on interviews with ordinary Iraqis. Richard Armitage, when I interviewed him, placed the blame on a complete lack of accountability at the highest levels. member, warned that a strike could last months and do immense damage. Maybe we needed someone who could think outside the really toxic divisions that we live with. 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. The utilitarian reason is a good one. They have little faith that the U.S. can achieve it, but even less that their own government and security forces can. When youre been an industry for a long time, you cant imagine things differently. This post has been corrected. Even when the result is considered a success, as in Nikole In 2019, Packer released a book titled Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. Its all particularly personal at The New Yorker, where the campaign has pitted a culture built on personal relationships and deep trust against a group of employees who reject the idea that they should be subject to the whims of any boss, no matter how benign. Say what you want, but Biden is . He told his colleagues that after years of reporting from Iraq, he had requested and received health insurance before the birth of his first child. All of these are public stories that are familiar to those who follow Amazons moves in the publishing world; what Packer does it put them all in one place and make them comprehensible to a general audience. Just as youre more loyal to your family than to people you dont know. Its hard to even begin to think how you start reaching a giant chunk of Real America. The Democrats did all they could in the early Obama years to find some common ground, even with large majorities in Congress. His essays and articles have appeared in Boston Review, The Nation, World Affairs, Harper's, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among other publications. It is a new aristocracy of credentials, and people are born into it. 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. To me, its a kind of reparations, and a necessary one. Theres been nothing like it since the 1930s. Obama did what you are talking about, in terms of making compromises in the way he talked about certain issues. I have a list of qualities that I think apply to most of us, that foreigners immediately pick up as American traits. Do you know if many Vietnamese felt the same way as these Iraqi translators and others whom we employed and then abandoned? They are as intimate as they are grand, and they offer themselves for worship by ordinary people searching for a suitable object of devotion. The basic division that I began to see begins with libertarianism, which I call Free America, which is Reagans America. And I think thats necessary, because weve demonized one another through social media, through isolation during the pandemic, to a point where people are unrecognizable and have been cast in terms of good and evil. Feb 04 2015. The difference is that Gerald Ford, knowing that Vietnam was lost, was politically able to bring refugees here in large numbers and felt morally compelled to do so. Maybe publishers need to think disruptively and not be victims., Maybe, he added, they should think a little more like predators., [For the Record, 1:15 p.m. PST Feb. 10: An earlier version of this post misquoted author George Packer as saying, Maybe publishers need to think destructively and not be victims. He used the word disruptively, not destructively.], Join Carolyn Kellogg on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. In the best tradition of Carlyle and Swift, he spends much of the first half of the book . First of all, I agree about Obama. I think nationalism is destructive. Why did ISIS . The book proposes my own narrative, although it doesnt claim it as a narrative. Interspersed are capsule biographies of influential figures of the time such as Colin Powell, Newt Gingrich, Elizabeth Warren, Jay-Z, and Raymond Carver. In half a week, between Quebec and Singapore, Trump showed that the liberal order is hateful to him, and that he wants out. But the alternatives to American power will be even less appealing. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. It might require a book to answer. In "Our Man," Packer, who recently joined the Atlantic after years writing for the New Yorker, conducted more than 200 interviews and had exclusive access to Holbrooke's diaries and private . So theres affirmative action, theres diversity hiring, theres childrens health insurance. Exactly. "[4], Packer graduated from Yale College in 1982, where he resided at Calhoun College (now called Grace Hopper College). He was a supporter of the Iraq war. Are junior employees apprentices or a permanent creative underclass? 89 (1): 31-32. But that is precisely the problem: Packer - I believe, and please correct me if I am wrong - has no training in North Africa's history and politics and I don't think he has spent much time there except for these quick hit trips for the long New Yorker piece (again, please correct me if I am wrong). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. But I think Just America has gone in the direction of a dead end that has some of the illiberal qualities of Real America, and that comes up with a politics and policies that arent working and which are going to doom it. Along with Canada, the panelists included Abhijit Banerjee, Katherine Boo, and Jose Antonio Vargas.[8]. Add that to the extreme difficulty of Iraqis emigrating to the West (Sweden is the exception), and they are basically unwelcome all over the world. Were arrogant. Here I was re-creating what Iraqis told me had happened months or years ago, and I kept pressing them to be as specific as possible, which often ran up against their desire not to be identifiable. Anyone can read what you share. $26. He is the author of several books, including The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, and The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq, which was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by the New York Times and won the New York Public Librarys Helen Bernstein Book Award and an Overseas Press Club book award. [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. And I think were going through something not unlike that: a generational conflict in which the young think the old have sold them out, and the old think the young are arrogant and foolish. 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.. in 2015 and has continued apace. He labels these four distinct expressions of contemporary American culture: "Free America" (center-right and libertarians), "Smart America" (center-left meritocratic elites), "Real America" (Donald Trump's . Many writers have tweeted in support. F. Scott Fitzgeralds Great Gatsby is full of magazine spreads of tennis players and socialites, popular song lyrics, movie stars, paparazzi, gangsters and sports scandals machine-made by technology, advertising and public relations. And, if Im wrong, then Id be actually quite happy. That and time and a change in Washington will eventually, I hope, restore Americas good name. In recent years, a small group of scholars has focussed on war-termination theory. Its been the most dominant narrative in our society. @TangoMan I imagine that's what the Department of Water Resources dam management was worried about during the rains from 2/2 to 2/6 as they maintained the water level at 850 feet rather than flush a lot of valuable water down the river to get ready for the second half of the long set of storms from 2/7 to 2/10. But the other chunk of the story is how much Gutekunst wants to see more of Love in the regular season. There is no country in the region that wants to absorb Iraqis in a long-term resettlement. I wonder how much its in the control of, say, one side of the political spectrum to bring the other side back. And that rebellion was out in the heartland. 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 . 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. He is best known for his writings for The New Yorker and The Atlantic about U.S. foreign policy and for his book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq.Packer also wrote The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, covering the history of the US from 1978 to 2012.In November 2013, The Unwinding received the . The New Yorker staff writer George Packer answers readers questions about his article These are gross generalizations, but I think they have some truth to them. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. But I have also come to believe that Iraq represents a larger failure than just that of individuals in the Bush Administration or the Administration as a whole. (The contents of the writers group messages were shared with me on the condition I only quote people by name with their permission. Some of the material in this article is also drawn from reporting on this topic by my colleagues Noam Scheiber and Marc Tracy. Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Author, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America Doug Sovern, KCBS Radio Political Reporter - Moderator. It doesnt happen in neighborhoods. He has certainly made it clear hes trying. None of them are original, and a lot of them are long shots. 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. But the support Mr. Remnick retains among the signature writers is deep. Because I wanted to write about the whole arc of the war in their lives, I spent many hoursin a couple of cases, two full daystalking with them. America in Iraq. And, if there is a return to that, then Im happy. And this is really the story of my adult life, from the late nineteen-seventies onward. He now writes for The Atlantic. We had to end a pandemic. Patriotism, to me, is closer to what Im trying to describe because its like loyalty. Free America in the eighties, Smart America with Clinton in the nineties. His uncle, George Huddleston, Jr., succeeded to his father's seat in the House of Representatives from 1954 to 1964. My worry is that the philosophical and practical direction of this movement is making those achievements less likely. 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. George Packer broke with the magazines tight-lipped traditions by sharing details of his own deal with Cond Nast. Sarah Palin was the early warning sign that Free America was breaking up. Those opportunities now also include newsletter platforms like Substack, and a new start-up called Puck, a digital magazine in which star writers get a cut of the subscription business and a share of the company. They arent particularly concerned with the terms of the debate in Washingtontime lines, benchmarks, departure dates, troop numbers. Our Man George Packer 2019-05-09 From one of America's greatest non-fiction writers, an epic saga of the rise and fall of American power, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, told through the life of one man. Right. An editor there, Daniel Menaker, wrote years later that he was embarrassed about the ineffectuality and yes, ordinariness of the Guild people wed come in contact with, but also that Mr. Shawns conduct had been revealing a classic case of liberals turning to the right when the capitalist chips were down just as I had been told, from my childhood on, liberals usually do.. I very much enjoyed this piece, because it seems to fit with the thoughts you expressed in your book The Assassins Gate, which I read with great interest. Narrator: George Packer; Length: 19 hours 46 minutes; Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc. On every trip to Iraq, I have met remarkable American individuals in military and civilian ranks, but, like most people I have talked to about Iraq, I am stunned by the level of general American incompetence there. ranges across the country to chronicle the time when "the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way." "I am the empire at the end of the decadence." Thus said the French poet Mallarm. Politicians are always letting the public off the hookit might be the most unforgivably dishonest thing they do. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Its the professional class. ), None of us want to do anything that could jeopardize the magazine we love. It seemed like a way to jolt the picture productively. 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. But politically, if that is its messageif identity is its messageI think its going to be an uphill battle. A new mood of activism has swept through the home of the mascot Eustace Tilley. "To name a few," he went on, "Liana Finck, Emily . There is something sadly touching about this blog post from the New Yorker's George Packer that went up over the weekend (and quickly proceeded to . One of the things Packer mentions is the Gazelle Project, referencing Stones book. And Just America has rightly said, Thats not working for a lot of Americans who still are second-class citizens.. In many ways, this reminds me of the nineteen-sixties, and millennials and boomers have a lot more in common than either side has acknowledged. Iraqs population is largely Arab, with the major exception being the Kurds. The lesson is not to embrace one or the other; its to combine them with wisdom. I dont much want to live in the republic of any of them, Packer writes. That dynamic's been entrenched for six, seven years now. But this is the direction we have to go in. President Ashraf Ghani is an expert on failed states. Packer has made four tours on assignment in Iraq for The New I respond with shame and defiancemostly shame. While the union won headlines by marching to Ms. Wintours house, which was guarded, disappointingly, by two low-key men in shapeless cotton shirts, Ms. Wintour has no real involvement in The New Yorker. By Alexander Russo It's no simple task when journalists decide to write about their families' school choices and their children's classroom experiences. I think its exactly the right one. I think you can include Elizabeth Warren in that, as well. The New Yorker George Packer is an author and staff writer for The New Yorker . 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