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Conference Paper Call: Imaging America

Imaging America

Papers and session proposals are invited for the conference “Imaging America,” a meeting of the Great Lakes American Studies Association (GLASA), which will be held at the University of Notre Dame, March 19-21, 2009. Deadline for submission has been extended to October 15, 2008.

Imaging America evokes themes that are both fundamental to the development of American Studies as a discipline, and representative of some of the most current research in the field. “Images” can refer both to visual or material representations and to the cultural impressions and expectations embodied in texts, oral traditions, or social performance. “America” is a contested term in American Studies, referring alternately to the United States and the Americas. As a theme for our conference, we hope that “Imaging America” will provide an opportunity for scholars and emerging scholars to enter a discussion about the boundaries, both literal and cultural, of America, as well as about the role of images in our analysis of America.

Proposed papers may consider any aspect and interpretation of the theme “Imaging America” including the following:

“America” conceived and defined as a place, land, nation, and people in terms of visual, cultural, and textual images and practices of mapping, naming, and/or cultural geography.

The transnational dimensions of “America” with expanded attention to the “Americas,” both north and south.

Stereotypes, competing cultural images of and from minority communities, including those defined by race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, sexuality, ability, region.

The diversity of American religious iconography and images.

The production and cultural use of visual images, e.g. photography, art, advertising, and how new imaging technologies transform national, regional, and individual self-understanding and experience.

The ways in which America is “imaged” during political campaigns, especially the 2008 presidential election.

The roles that American images play in defining national subjectivity and determining who “counts” in the national imaginary.

The emotional and affective dimension of American images and icons, e.g. the flag, the soldier, the West.

Please send 200 word abstracts and c.v. by October 15, 2008 (electronic submission is preferred) to Erika Doss, Chair, Department of American Studies, University of Notre Dame, at: doss.2@nd.edu. Submissions may also be mailed to Sandra M. Gustafson, Department of English University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556.

Participants will be notified of their acceptance by November 1. Graduate students are encouraged to apply; partial funding for conference travel may be available.

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Conference: Cold War Culture

Cold War Culture
Friday 21 & Saturday 22 November 2008
10.30-17.00 Lecture Theatre

Victoria and Albert Museum

London

International conference that brings together art, design, cultural and architectural historians of the post-1945 period. The Cold War was a period of high tensions and exceptional creativity, which touched every aspect of life from everyday goods to the highest arenas of human achievement in science and culture. This conference explores the major themes of Cold War Divisions, Americanisation, High Technology, and Last Utopias. The keynote speaker is Ariel Dorfman, and other speakers include Alice Friedman, Jean-Louis Cohen, Michell Provoost, David Crowley, Branislav Jakovljevic, Victor Misiano and Richard Barbrook.

£110 for 2 days, £55 for 1 day, concessions available
Supported by the Council of Europe
Book online or email bookings.office@vam.ac.uk

Photograph by John French (1960s)/Victoria & Albert Museum.

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Repose and Heartbreak Outside the Markets

The breakdowns and bailouts in the financial markets have created sky-high levels of fear, anger, more fear, and more anger. As the Dow drops, anxiety spikes. The situation is awful, dire, disastrous, catastrophic–a maelstrom of panic, collapse, more panic, and further collapse as investors act like crazed victims piling up against a door in a theater that has caught fire.

Don’t think that I had my money in CDs. I’ve been nailed badly and the prospects are not good for my family. But somehow, everyone needs to take a deep breath and exhale. For all the talk of pain, the term remains a metaphor for many of us. And the panic is a symptom not only of the obvious problems but also of what happens when a society becomes a market society instead of a society with a market economy.

If a photograph can help us regain a sense of balance, it might be this one:

The caption at The Guardian tells us that we are looking at a man performing with a horse at the Cavalia equestrian show in Lisbon, Portugal. The horse will be exhibiting superb training, but the roles almost seem reversed. The man looks like the lesser animal, almost like a monkey who has been trained to do tricks on the big ball. By contrast, the horse seems the epitome of nobility, a superior being who only has to show up to dominate the scene. He is the standard by which the man will be judged.

Perhaps this seeming inversion of a natural order appealed to me because of the financial world being turned upside down, and because of my wish to regain a sense of balance. And the scene is about balance–more specifically, about repose, with balance one means to that end. Indeed, the man could be a metaphor for the markets, as he balances precariously (however skillfully) on a globe than is at once unified and capable of punishing any sudden shift in his stance. Above all, however, it is something different from the madness of the markets. Sure, they will have sold tickets to the show, but for a moment a man and a horse stand in perfect equipoise. The man is on top of a small world, but not to get rich. Communion with the horse is more important than that. The sense of ritual harmony runs deep; Confucius would say that this sense of things is essential to restoring balance in the individual and the state.

I could end there, but there is need to go a step further. Repose in a theater may be too easy. The real test is real pain. This is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and observance has included this beautiful portrait:

The caption at The Big Picture says, “Nathan Gentry, age 6, sits by a window overlooking New York City traffic on September 8, 2006.” Nathan died after months of painful treatments. Although trapped in a disease that most children, thankfully, do not experience, Nathan captures so much of the vulnerability of childhood and the profoundly precious quality of life itself.

This also is a picture of repose. He is experiencing, it seems, a moment free of pain, of quiet reflection on the scene outside the window. And the scene is outside: the glass walls him in as much as it lets him see, and the outer world has shrunk to that small portal. Outside we can see scaffolding, and so he is looking at a building that will be sustained, though he cannot be. His repose comes not for keeping everything in balance, but from putting himself in relationship with what remains. He asks–and takes–nothing but a moment of peace. It seems that he has already learned how to live with less. Obviously, that is something many of us have yet to learn.

Photographs by Nacho Doce/Reuters and, via The Big Picture, Susan Gentry (©), who asked for a link to the Children’s Neuroblastoma Cancer Foundation.

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The Organic City or the Global Desert?

Will the 21st century be a chronicle of cities or deserts? The stark contrast may seem artificial, but powerful forces are pushing global development in both directions at once. On the one hand, many hundreds of cities are growing rapidly and many of those are thriving. They are the sites of tremendous concentrations of wealth, human capital, social energy, information, and innovation. In the US, cities such as New York and Chicago are experiencing record levels of young people living in the urban core, which historically is a vital source of commercial and cultural progress. If rising energy prices keep that generation from migrating to the suburbs, then the transformation of the urban environment will continue. The future, then, will look like this:

I love this photograph of London at night. The city is a living thing, pulsing with vital forces, growing relentlessly along natural paths. The lighted arterials flow like roots feeding a plant, like blood vessels coursing through the body, like water cutting through rocks to become the channels of a great river carving the landscape. That landscape is suffused with both energy and density–an incredible concentration of social organization and electricity. This achievement is marked by the bridge and the river in the upper right of the photograph. The coordination of human enterprise and natural constraint is there in miniature, an historical token whose small scale and simplicity underscores the enormous amplification of social, political, economic, and technological power characterizing modernity.

So why talk about the desert? Because all that electrical power has to come from somewhere, and the enormous changes wrought by modernization in China, India, and elsewhere are–like the industrialized nations before them–rapidly depleting all natural resources, not least those that are non-renewable.   Urbanization has been aligned with global warming and greater inequities in wealth, education, and many other social goods. To put it bluntly, one way to make a city (and a civilization) is to turn the surrounding area into a desert.

As nations compete for ever more limited resources to achieve the benefits of modern civilization, one outcome could be a lot more of this:

This beautiful image is from the Sossusvlei Dunes in Namibia. The caption in the New York Times describes the country as one of “stark beauty and riveting contradictions.” If you want riveting contradictions, you don’t have to go to Namibia, and the picture has more in common with London as well. Note how the desert trees have the same ancient natural form as seen in the aerial view of the world city. The reversal of the color fields emphasizes their similarity: the branching pattern is gold on dark in the city, and dark on gold in the desert. In place of the teeming life of the city, however, here we see an environment defined by scarcity. And in place of density, we find stability gained by resisting erosion.

Deserts, like cities, are the result of both human and natural forces. London is the sum total of millions upon millions of decisions yet still subject to the deep interdependencies shaping the planet. Deserts will grow or shrink depending on how humans are or are not able to cooperate with each other regarding resource consumption, economic regulation, and other requirements for a sustainable modern civilization. Taken together, these two photographs remind us of one more thing: just as natural beauty is evident in both the city and the desert, nature couldn’t care less whether humanity brings itself to success or failure.

Photographs by Jason Hawkes/The Big Picture and Evelyn Hockstein/New York Times. For more of Jason Hawkes‘ stunning photographs of London, go to this post at The Big Picture. The Times story on traveling in Namibia is here.

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Paper Call: Visual Culture in War

Call for Papers

Taking Sides: The Role of Visual Culture in War, Occupation and Resistance

Radical History Review Issue #106:

The Radical History Review solicits contributions for a special issue on visual culture in war, occupation and resistance. Artists have often taken sides in ideological conflicts and in actual conflagrations. In terms of visual culture and resistance, the literature and music of the South African struggle, the murals of Belfast and Derry in Ireland and the poetry of the many Latin American movements for change are relatively well documented. Less analysis is available on the role of artists on one side or another of recent conflicts. Wars of Liberation and popular revolts such as those in Angola, Algeria, Iran and the Basque Country spring to mind. Despite the scale and impact of the Vietnam War, little knowledge is available in terms of the role of visual culture in the mass mobilizations against both the French and US occupations. Approaching five years into the occupation of Iraq and with numerous groups engaged in resistance, what form does visual culture play in demarcating opposing political positions? How have artists in colonized or oppressed nations viewed themselves and their work in terms of the largely western models that shape what is commonly defined as ‘art’ (the gallery, theater etc)? What has been the role of visual culture in support of imperialism or colonial expansion, as well as officially ‘state sanctioned’ cultural production?

The role of visual culture in conflict situations also prompts an examination of the implications of artistic ‘neutrality’. Despite current global instability many artists and cultural producers, especially in the western artistic tradition, consider their work to be apolitical or neutral. Can artistic neutrality be said to exist in conflict situations, or is culture ultimately, in the words of Edward Said, “…a battleground on which causes expose themselves to the light of day and contend with one another?” (Culture and Imperialism).

This issue of RHR is particularly interested in exploring these questions.

A partial list of topics of interest is available here.

Radical History Review solicits article proposals from scholars working in all historical periods and across all disciplines, including art history, history, anthropology, religious studies, media studies, sociology, philosophy, political science, gender, and cultural studies. Submissions are not restricted to traditional scholarly articles. We welcome short essays, documents, photo essays, art and illustrations, teaching resources, including syllabi, and reviews of books and exhibitions.

Submissions are due by November 15, 2008 and should be submitted electronically, as an attachment, to rhr@igc.org with “Issue 106 submission” in the subject line. For artwork, please send images as high-resolution digital files (each image as a separate file). For preliminary e-mail inquiries, please include “Issue 106” in the subject line. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 106 of the Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in Winter 2009.

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Wall Street Blackmail or Ecological Prudence

The science section can be a pleasant diversion from the overheated controversies on the front page of the newspaper, but this week there is a connection that shouldn’t be overlooked. Let’s start with the science.

This is a portrait of three langurs, an endangered species residing in southern China. Between hunting and deforestation, they were on a steep slope toward extinction. This population was down to 96 when Chinese biologist Pan Wenshi began studying them in 1996. Today, despite continued development in the area, they number around 500.

The picture above may look like a nuclear family but actually is a mother, child, and another female. Monkeys have social organization, one might even say polity, to survive, and this population may even be experiencing socio-political evolution from patrilineal infantide to negotiated power sharing. What is equally impressive is how Dr. Pan called on human social organization to develop a more effective strategy for saving the langurs. Instead of enclaving the endanged population and focusing all his resources on them, Pan worked at improving the infrastructure for the human population surrounding them. Soon the villagers had clean water, medical services, a school, and more sustainable energy–basic infrastructual needs that required only smart designs, effective advocacy, and not a great deal of money. One result was that the forests recovered and villagers started to protect the monkeys from hunting.

So why am I telling you this? Because in the front section of the newspaper you can read all about the $700 billion bailout plan for reckless financial corporations that is being pushed by the Bush administration. That’s the same administration that refused to regulate the industry or address any of the danger signs that have been accumulating for several years. I’ll let that go, because now the key question is how to protect the economy. And that’s why we need to pay attention to Dr. Pan instead of Treasury Secretary M. Paulson Jr. and company.

The gist of the administration proposal is that we have to save the few in order to save the many. The few don’t deserve to be saved, that that’s not important; they are likely to salvage enormous personal fortunes despite financial malpractice, but that’s a separate issue; there are no obligations in place of continuing incentives for mismanagement, but this is not the time for that; the costs are excessive and are to be paid by millions of people who have done no wrong and will be harmed by the payout, but we don’t have time to do anything else; this is contrary to the reigning ideology that is one cause of the disaster, but we must be practical rather than principled or “partisan.” Or so we are told.

I’d like to think that this debacle is one of the last vestiges of the political economy of twentieth century oligarchy. That’s too optimistic, of course, but it does suggest that the complex problems of the twenty-first century require smarter, less resource-intensive, and–let’s say it–more democratic solutions. The approach taken by Dr. Pan, for example. His basic idea is that in order to save the few, you have to save the many.

There has been a lot of talk about prudence lately in respect to both Wall Street and the presidential campaign. The administration’s bailout is not prudent. In the name of saving the system it puts system sustainability at risk. While claiming that the issue is of the highest seriousness, it refuses to take the time for adequate deliberation. Instead of concentrating on foundational issues such as a fair distribution of wealth, maintaining essential infrastructure, providing adequate regulation for a modern economy, and otherwise protecting the basic social contract that undergirds the society, it ransoms all that for a quick fix.

The plan may go through. A similar propaganda campaign led to another trillion dollar disaster not too long ago, so the cynical money may be on Paulson. Whatever happens, the rest of us need to start emulating Dr. Pan’s approach. He had specific advantages that favored its development, of course: he was far from the center of power, had little money, and cared about more than his own self-interest. Come to think of it, we may have a lot in common.

Photograph by Peking University Chongzuo Biodiversity Research Institute.  The accompanying story is here.

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Environmental Transformation

Guest post by Aric Mayer

For the past few months I have been following a logging operation that is taking place within the watershed of Bellingham, Washington. High up on the hillsides above Lake Whatcom, the timber rights for public land are sold off and the trees are cut in commercial logging operations. There are many obvious problems with logging within one’s watershed. Erosion and habitat destruction are two.

There are also difficulties in visually communicating environmental transformation through photographs. Visual drama is easy to catch. It is the long, slow passage of time that pictures cannot easily touch. Cinema is a medium better suited to constructing a narrative. Photographs are fixed and therefore are unchanging. There is no passage of time within an image. Because of this, though, it is possible to see into two places in time simultaneously. The effects can be jarring, especially when it is the same place in two radically altered states.

The first picture above is a view of a healthy middle-aged forest. In another 20 years, the trees would have thinned out, with the stronger trees thickening and growing taller, pushing out the weaker in the quest for sunlight, and the weaker trees falling and contributing through their decay to the life of the forest floor. In the second image, taken some weeks after the first, the forest is completely destroyed in a commercial logging operation. For a decade this will be almost entirely uninhabitable land. With no trees to impede the sunlight, brush and weeds will rule. Then, slowly, birds and animals will return again to find habitat in the returning trees.

In this next pair of images, we first see trees in the foreground in a healthy forest. In the second image they are gone, cut down, dragged away, stripped and stacked on the pile of logs in the background waiting to be sent to the mill. The three less useful trees with blue painted bands in the upper right corner anchor both images. The green life has been stomped out of the foreground. Only broken branches and debris remain.

Not only are these images a record of the passing of a forest, but they are also competing visions of success. Progress in the first images takes decades to achieve. Progress in the second can be reached in just days. There is an obvious question of values here. Many of us may not be alive long enough to see this forest return. On a planet with looming environmental crises, how much cheap lumber do we need, and at what expense?

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Being Flooded, Letting Go

This is going to be a brief post as I’m not through cleaning up the basement that was flooded this weekend. Of course, the damage was not even close to what people are experiencing in the Gulf Coast, while many other people will not have had to worry about water at all. The question for all of us, regardless of circumstances, is what is there to learn from being flooded? When I looked through the photographs in the papers I realized that one lesson was hidden in plain sight. Somewhat like this, perhaps:

You are looking at a car under water on a Chicago highway. Nice car, isn’t it? It’s also a nice photo: The dirty water is everywhere, making the car appear all the more self-contained and beautifully machined. The car is both there and not there, seen yet only partially visible, as if already being transmuted into a ghostly counterpart of itself. The streamlined design and smooth surface implies power and mystery as if it were to emerge like some god out of the primal waters, except that you know that everything is going in the other direction. This vehicle will be written off as a complete loss.

The hurricane and flood coverage has been all about loss. The loss of property, to get right down to it. Granted, there has been little loss of life and the deaths largely are unknown or kept private, but I doubt those are the only reasons that so much of the coverage features the destruction of property. The encounter with nature reveals any society’s preoccupations. A modern, capitalist society is one that is absorbed with the acquisition of material things. Nothing wrong with that, but it does shape our emotional response to what happens. Perhaps that is why I liked this photograph:

A single sandal floats, almost as if it had been made for floating. It is a small and inexpensive thing, yet it has the same sleek design and machined look of the car in the first photo. And this photo also is about being both present and absent. The sandal is there, ready for wear, just the thing for a wet day, and yet it is a study in subtraction. It’s mate is missing, and more to the point its owner is no longer there. Again, person and property have been separated. If the image is poignant it is because we realize that only the property remains. That sandal could last for centuries, but the naked foot that fits inside can only last a few years before being reabsorbed into the earth.

Which is why I’ll close with this photograph.

A villager is walking through floodwaters in Kumarkhad, India. The photograph reflects both the flood and a latent Orientalism, but let’s use that frame for the moment. The tone here is one of serenity–and that of the “perennial philosophy” of Eastern nonattachment. We see no property whatsoever, only a single human being half-immersed in oceanic stillness. This is not a study in loss but rather a depiction of eternal return: from nothing, through the small disruption of the waters that is human consciousness, to nothing.

I don’t think you will see many photographs like this in media coverage of the flooding in the US. People will be picking through their broken, sodden property and holding on to whatever they can. After all, what else can they do? This is no time to ask them for transcendence. Those who have not lost so much, however, might want to think about why we hold on so tightly to what are just things. Why we hold on to them because we are trying to hold on to something else that is sure to slip away.

A hard lesson, perhaps, but no reason to be mournful. Rilke knew as much:

And though you fade from earthly sight,
declare to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water say: I am.

The Sonnets to Orpheus, by Rainer Maria Rilke; translation by Robert Hunter.

Photographs by Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune, unknown/Chicago Tribune, and Diptendu Dutta/AFP.

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Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century

If it seems too soon to really be in the 21st century, just take a look backwards.

This photograph of North Korean troops on parade appeared on the front page of the New York Times earlier this week, but it’s really an example of time travel. North Korea is one of the last countries in the world that is trapped in the past century. A rigidly totalitarian state, command economy, and extreme isolation combine to keep the people miserable. For once, a stock photograph seems the appropriate documentary report.

The photo is nothing if not conventional. You can look through it to generations of Soviet May Day parades and before that the German Wehrmacht goose-stepping through Europe. Indeed, this is the most typical image of the totalitarian state: militaristic, uniformed, regimented, everyone marching in lock-step formation. Machine-like regimentation concentrates power in the state while making individuals interchangeable and expendable.

Curiously, on the same day (Wednesday, September 10) the Times featured a very different story on the same front page. I don’t have the exact photo that was used in the paper edition, but this is a variant from the online slide show:

It’s Fashion Week in New York, and the show by Marc Jacobs was featured in part because he “used the early 20th century as the inspiration for his latest collection.” Compared to the photo of the North Korean soldiers, this scene would seem to be from another planet. But look again: Although each model is arrayed differently, they are marching in formation, the actual individuals are interchangeable parts in a production controlled completely by others, and the entire display has little bearing on what ordinary people actually do. The riot of color serves the same purpose as the drab uniforms of the soldiers: individuals are woven into a culture defined by a single orientation.  In one we see the massed power and collective discipline of the state, in the other the richness of the market; both are ideological displays.

The two images have something else in common: complete gender segregation. This bifurcation carries another: politics in one place, society in another. The first image reduces modern politics to the nation-state’s monopoly on violence. The second image reduces modern society to conspicuous consumption in a private sphere having no visible politics at all. Thus, both photos reproduce one of the stock assumptions of modern political thought: that politics and society are essentially separate spheres, each having its own autonomy and each disrupted by any intrusion from the other realm.

In the 21st century this fiction is becoming increasingly dated. From suicide bombers to Blackwater mercenaries, creationists to environmentalists, free trade to slow food, third world modernization to global warming, it is clear that society and politics are complexly interwoven. Of course, there still is need for distinctions that protect both individual and common interests. (I want to maintain the relative autonomy of church and state, for example.) That said, this is a time for moving beyond the old binaries. They are so twentieth century. More to the point, such stock images and conventional assumptions get in the way of creating a better world.

Photographs by Kyodo News via Associated Press and Richard Temine/New York Times.

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How to Party On in the Oval Office

As Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and The Onion regularly demonstrate, sometimes you have to get silly to get to the truth of American politics. The guys writing their material are pros, but sometimes amateur cut-ups can do just as well.

You are looking at a fun couple enjoying themselves in a replica of the Oval Office at CivicFest, “a vibrant civic festival celebrating Minnesota and American history, democracy, and the U.S. Presidency.” The event was held in Minneapolis during the Republican National Convention; in this case, it provided the locale for a delegate party. And these two do know how to party.

I’d kill to know what she’s whispering in his ear, but that’s beside the point. This photo inadvertently captures the history of the American presidency during the last ten years. Start with Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Might have been just like that. Now fast forward to John McCain and Sarah Palin. . . . Unfair? Sure, and yet there certainly is an erotic undercurrent to the current billing that leads directly to fantasy shots like this one. And in between: the frat boy, George Bush. Laura doesn’t even need to be in the picture for the rest to ring true. He’s been playing, and playing at being president, for seven years. In fact, Bush always looks most comfortable when he’s goofing around at some ceremonial gig. He probably can be a lot of fun; he just needs to be in another house.

This photo may also be prophetic. The basic idea of the CivicFest replica is that ordinary citizens can put themselves virtually into the center of the U.S. government. That, of course, is not too far from the idea of democratic representation: the people elect an official to represent their interests while providing for the general welfare. What has happened, however, is that this principle of representation has become entangled with a politics of personal identification. People are encouraged to vote for those who seem just like them: ordinary people, you know, the kind who work hard but don’t take politics too seriously. Frat boys and so-called “mavericks” seem to fit the bill, never mind that most of us are not rich and have not spent the last two decades in Congress. And don’t get me started on beauty queens.

The couple in the photo are just having a good time. More power to them. One of the secrets to the success of American politics is that political parties can make politics fun. God help us if it becomes nothing but solemn debates. But I keep coming back to this picture. It gets truer still: a stage set bedecked with the symbols of American government, yet in fact the party in power has been playing, not just with some aide, but with the integrity of our most basic institutions and the lives of our military personnel. And if American voters vote to put someone just like them into the picture, it will get worse yet.

One can’t help but feel wistful about what might have been. Even the dippy CivicFest has some sense of direction. Their blurb for the replica says, “Experience the White House Oval Office and sit behind the president’s desk, sign a bill into law and have a souvenir photo.” Ordinary people will be there for the photo, but they are given the benefit of the doubt regarding their fantasies of power. “Sign a bill into law”–what a thought. Maybe even a good bill, one that would serve the people. It could happen, you know, if only enough people would, for one day of the year, get serious.

Photograph by Todd Heisler/New York Times.

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