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NEW YORK This past August, in Murfreesboro, Tenn., the drag queen Sasha Velour shook the hands of a pair of anti-drag activists, as TV cameras recorded. Velour was dressed in head-to-toe silver, looking like an art deco skyscraper, with red lips, contoured cheeks and catlike eyeliner. The activists a bearded father and his teenage daughter called her sir. They said that God created man with a penis and woman with a vagina. They referenced the Bible and referred to the LGBTQ religion as a cult. They told her: Somethings wrong with you.

Velour invoked the separation of church and state. She talked about the variety in terms of chromosomal gender. She added: Theres nothing immoral about loving someone.

Velour parried ignorant comments with a firm politeness, like a lawyer disarming a hostile witness. She never lost her composure. To us, she gently told the activists, this sounds like hatred.

This encounter takes place in the third episode of the new season of HBOs Were Here, a reality series in which drag queens visit small-town America and face stereotypical resistance from locals (the show returns to Max on April 26). She was a long way from New York, where her art is revered, her shows sell out, and she is developing a stage show with Broadway ambitions.

To some drag fans, Velour may not have seemed like the most obvious queen to send to the front lines of the culture wars. The winner of Season 9 of RuPauls Drag Race, in 2017, Velour is known for her highbrow, cerebral interpretation of drag, and for her reveals drag lingo for little surprises built into a performance. Hers is the kind of drag that feels like true performance art, not like an appetizer for a boozy brunch.

The protests she encountered while filming the show felt like drag, in its own way, she would say later. They dress up, they put on their red hats, and put on demented, wrong drag, where its like youre performing something, and theres no acknowledgment that its a performance. And its really designed to make people feel unsafe and weak and small unlike real drag, which, at its best, makes the crowd (and the performer) feel joyful and empowered.

So Velour stood strong and tall, towering in heels over the pair of activists.

Im grateful that this young woman and her father want to speak with us, Velour said to the TV cameras, but it doesnt feel like they really want to have a conversation. Theyre not going to hear us.

In one America, drag is practically illegal. In another, its never been more mainstream. Some drag artists get picketed and threatened with arrest, while others get Super Bowl commercials and Emmy Awards. The emotional and geographical distance between the two is growing depressingly distant.

Velour, 36, has become a traveler between these disparate lands. Having reached an echelon of drag fame below only RuPaul, Velour could have stayed ensconced in New York, leaving only to play sold-out crowds on her national and European tours. Shes doing those things, too, but shes also fighting with conservatives for her freedom of expression, and for the rights of queer people in small towns.

Six months later and 900 miles away from Murfreesboro, Velour is sitting in her art-filled Brooklyn home with her Italian greyhound, Vanya, lounging nearby. Her partner, Johnny, is upstairs with covid. This return to reality TV is a move that Velour joked about dreading in the intro to her 2023 memoir and drag history book, The Big Reveal.

Will such a move make a difference? Could a performance amid people who hate her art change their hearts and minds about it? She demurred.

If anything, Velour says, I think our ability to be visible on TV is a reflection of the work activists do on the ground to shift culture and to change up institutions, and to illuminate for powerful people where their blind spots are.

A few days prior, at a rehearsal space in Times Square, a group of powerful people (i.e. potential investors) was prepared to open their wallets for her theatrical project, a drag history that also explores how she went from Alexander Hedges Steinberg the theatrical, vampire-obsessed queer child of academics in Urbana, Ill. to Sasha Velour, drag superstar.

The show, opening in San Diego in August, is based on Velours book, which traces drag from ancient shamanistic ritual to Elizabethan theater and Chinese opera.

Director Moiss Kaufman who considers Velour one of the best performers of her generation introduced the presentation, standing before a makeshift white curtain that looked like bedsheets. Everything you see has been made with spit and glue, Kaufman told attendees. If something crashes, thats drag.

But Velours drag is not ad hoc or ramshackle. It is precise, considered, sharpened to a knifes edge. She emerged through those bedsheet-curtains and stretched a spike-heeled foot to the sky. She wore a showgirl headdress and was surrounded by a video projection of four versions of Sasha Velour making her, in effect, her own backup dancers. Then she competed with these avatars for the spotlight in increasingly comic and then aggressive ways. They spilled virtual marbles and tripped her, trying to sabotage her act. She pushed them back behind the curtain. They closed in on her. She let out, to the tune of Aerosmiths Dream On, a lip-synced scream.

Our art literally gets criminalized, she says during another number. Our voices, often discredited. But not tonight.

Every good drag show has a reveal, and every reveal contains a greater truth. So its tempting to view the offstage version of Sasha Velour as the real Sasha Velour sans makeup, wearing a black turtleneck and angular glasses, looking like shes about to teach a college course on neo-expressionism.

With drag queens, everyone will focus on unmasking the person and seeing, you know, who they really are, Velour says at home. Theres something kind of faulty about that. Many people, she says, find out who they really are through drag, through fantasy.

Velour began to find that through her grandmother Dina, a Ukrainian immigrant to San Francisco and failed actress, who encouraged a young Velour to dress up in dramatic costumes and perform skits. Velours father taught Russian history, and her mother edited a scholarly journal. They were supportive of their childs sexuality and drag ambitions, and Velours book praises their seriously good parenting. The influence of their academic rigor can be seen throughout her book, which delves into unheralded gender-nonconforming performers in history, including Barbette (a 1920s drag aerialist), Coccinelle (a French actress who, in 1958, underwent gender-affirming surgery), and Washingtons own William Dorsey Swann (a former enslaved person known as the queen of drag).

Velour entered the pantheon herself because of three simple, perfect reveals in the semifinals of Drag Race Season 9, which aired five chaotic months into the presidency of Donald Trump, but before Republicans focused their sights on queer literature and drag.

Velour was considered the avant-garde underdog against her competitor, Shea Coule, who had won more challenges that season. But as soon as they started to lip-sync Whitney Houstons So Emotional, Velour ran away with the show. She began to rip the petals off a rose, mouthing the lyrics with a snarl. At the first emotional crest of the song I get so emotional, baby she plucked off an elbow-length glove and unleashed an arching spray of hidden rose petals. She teased off the other glove, burlesque-style, as the second verse began, sending up another burst of petals. When the song reached its climax, she lifted her crimson wig, arms quivering, to unleash a cascade of petals onto her signature shaved head a tribute to her mother, who died of cancer in 2015.

Most Drag Race reveals had, until this point, consisted of ripping off a dress to display another outfit underneath, or taking off a long wig to reveal a short one a neat trick, but one that didnt capture the emotional catharsis of a song, or reinterpret it entirely. Velours So Emotional wasnt about the romantic swell of love; it was about out-of-control obsession, vulnerability and savagery. In her 1987 music video, Whitney Houston smiled and cooed her way through So Emotional. When Velour lip-synced the song, she sneered and raged and flared her eyes. She field-dressed a bubbly pop song into a meaty, manic breakdown.

The rose petals were one reveal within a larger reveal. The audience, electrified, leaped to its feet.

Within 24 hours of her arrival in Murfreesboro, seven years after her win, someone shouted the age-old slur F-----s! at Velour and one of her co-stars, Priyanka, a winner of the Canadian version of Drag Race.

Thank you, Velour replied. I love that word!

Despite her impervious reply, shooting episodes of Were Here brought Velour back to her teenage years, living in a small town, being the only gay person she knew. She was used to online trolls, in 2023, but to hear hateful words directly, to her face, after so much progress?

That was pretty new for me, Velour says.

The life of a modern drag queen: caught between abject adoration and casual degradation.

When they meet her, fans sometimes pull off wigs and shower the floor with petals, and Velour is always polite, even though its equivalent to, say, a person performing a scene from Kramer vs. Kramer in front of Meryl Streep (Its sweet, Velour says, diplomatically).

Early seasons of Were Here, which premiered in 2020, could be summed up with a pithy elevator pitch: Queer Eye, but for drag. Queens traveled the states, performed makeovers on queer locals and allies, shared bittersweet personal stories, and finished the episode off with a joyous drag show.

Then came the drag bans. Were Here creators Stephen Warren and Johnnie Ingram decided that the show needed to change its format. Season 4 spends more time in two communities Murfreesboro and Bartlesville, Okla. that had effectively banned drag in public, at least for a time (Murfreesboros ban was repealed in December; Bartlesvilles one-year restriction expired this month).

When Velour was announced as a new cast member, Steve Morris, a political reporter, wrote dryly on Twitter: Sasha Velour asking rural southerners if theyve read Judith Butler. The implication was that Velour who had considered impersonating the famous gender-studies scholar on Drag Race was too erudite to connect with real Americans, and it wasnt really fair to either party; Oklahomans and Tennesseans read gender theory, too.

But the perception of Velour has always been that of a highbrow academic. She studied literature at Vassar. She received a Fulbright Scholarship to study public art and urban identity in Moscow. She is fluent in Russian. Her book notes that her favorite philosopher is the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who believed that a single person exists beyond definition particularly definitions imposed by external forces.

Velour even illustrated a cover of the New Yorker with her own face she has an MFA in cartooning and told the magazine that the most revolutionary aspect of drag isnt this act of dressing up against the rules; its the way we use this no-bulls--- philosophy to stand up for what is right.

To people who dont really know Sasha Velour, she comes across like an art piece that should be hanging in a museum, you know? says Priyanka.

The Sasha Velour in Were Here may soften that perception. The reveal is that she makes a great drag mother, as mentors are called within a community where many performers are rejected by their own families. She is behind some of the shows moments of tenderness, such as accompanying a newly transitioning woman on a trip to buy her first wig.

But the producers, aware of her stiletto-sharp mind, also deployed her to interact with bigots. Velour is the queen who parses a Murfreesboro ordinance, to understand the legal definition of prurient interests. In August, the cast attended a Murfreesboro city council meeting on this decency legislation. The experience shook Velour.

During the meeting, Priyanka said that Velour was breathing so heavily. And I was like, Are you okay? And shes like, Im just getting so overwhelmed because I cannot believe what Im seeing.

Were Here draws parallels between drag and other forms of dress-up and fantasy, such as pro wrestling and the child beauty-pageant circuit (the latter actually sexualizes minors, Velour notes). And, of course, there is the protesters American flag drag as symbolic and ostentatious as any sequined, high-haired, RuPaul-ready outfit.

Arent we all performing, though, regardless of whether were on or off a stage? We put on different faces for friends, family, work. We reveal ourselves in our own ways, sometimes through a glance, sometimes through a joke, sometimes through a protest. We dress for the role, and the role is ever-changing and incomplete.

As Bakhtin wrote in 1929: Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world.

Or as RuPaul famously said: Were all born naked, and the rest is drag.

The cast and producers of Were Here have no idea how the people in these communities will react to the show, but Velour gets the last word. The seasons final scene takes place in an Oklahoma church not far from the town where Nex Benedict, a nonbinary teenager, died in February after intense bullying (their death was ruled a suicide by the state medical examiner). Velours performance in the church culminates in what might be her greatest reveal yet. Its not a prop surprise, like a flurry of rose petals, or the inversion of a famous song. The reveal is meant to make an entire community an entire country, really confront itself.

Will anyone hear the message? Will it change anything?

I dont think entertainment is enough, Velour says, at her dining room table in Brooklyn. But I think the emotional impact on the audience can be really profound. Profound enough to save a life, she adds. So the answer, actually, is yes.

In Judaism, Velours religion, one who saves a single life has saved the whole world, according to the Talmud. And Velour, according to her own book and aligned with the philosophy of Bakhtin supposes that a single life is only truly perceptible when its over.

The biggest reveal, she writes, is death.

When asked at home to elaborate, Velour reveals a bit more: Ive always been compelled by the idea that our afterlife is how our story gets told and how were remembered, and that we give people an afterlife by remembering them and telling their story.

An hour before a February show at Le Poisson Rouge, in Greenwich Village, Velour was washing her makeup sponges, surrounded by a trio of pink wigs. When she was coming onto the scene, years earlier, she felt pushback against alternative forms of drag. Now it feels like experimental drag is mainstream drag.

Near Velours dressing room, a D.C. drag king named King Molasses trimmed a luxuriously thick faux beard. NightGowns is a North Star for so many of us, said Molasses, referring to Velours monthly revue, which for nine years has given guest stars a chance to tell their own stories, often through drag that is abstract, experimental or just plain bizarre.

A drag show at a bar, where performers work for tips, isnt the best environment for true artistry or adventure, said Sapphira Cristl, a finalist on the current season of Drag Race, as she was getting ready backstage.

But when Sasha Velour is the curator, Sapphira says, we get to feel like true artists, and be respected that way.

A trained opera singer, Sapphiras second NightGowns performance that night was a confrontational lip-sync about black femininity, to Danielle Brookss Black Woman.

Nymphia Wind, another finalist on the current season of Drag Race, began her lip-sync to Take It All, from the musical Nine, like a typical burlesque number, with backup dancers. But it became a balletic assault a commentary on violence against the queer community. The dancers stripped off Nymphias clothes and carried her limp body. And then she began a dreamy, sinewy dance to FKA Twigs Mothercreep that ended with her being draped in a sheet, like a corpse, or a ghost.

Death: the biggest reveal.

Addressing the rapt, sold-out crowd at Le Poisson Rouge later that night, Velour proclaimed that notion as her guiding light.

My only spiritual belief, really, is that by dressing up in drag, we connect with the generations that came before us, she said from the stage, dressed in a shimmery caftan. We put on drag sometimes as protest, sometimes as community, sometimes as a little hustle. Always as art.

Shot at Love Studios. Makeup by Velour. Styling by Willyum Beck. Velour wears dresses by Quine Li and Attico, shoes by Pleasers and models own, jewelry by Robert Sorrell and Misho, gloves by Wing & Weft, mask by Lory Sun.

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Drag queen Sasha Velour stars in Season 4 of Max's 'We're Here' - The Washington Post - The Washington Post

Advances in medicine over the past 50 years represent a shining example of the power of combining humanism and science to save lives and foster love. St. John Paul II celebrated these developments and emphasized the need to use them responsibly when he stated in 2000:

When those limits are followed, medicine can serve its goal of defending and promoting human dignity and, when appropriate, acceptance of the human condition in the face of death (Evangelium vitae, No. 65).

This brings us to the complicated dynamics of declaring death in an increasingly technologically complicated set of clinical circumstances. The Catholic Church, as always, is offering a significant contribution to this ethical conversation, and we believe it is time to offer clarification in light of some well-intended but misguided advice from voices within the church. Such clarification is based on our collective expertise as members of the clergy, clinicians and ethicists because understanding the issues at hand requires a multidisciplinary approach that is both theoretically and practically well-informed.

The authors and signatories of a recently published document called Catholics United on Brain Death and Organ Donation: A Call to Action have condemned the use of neurological criteria for determining that patients have died and the view that it is ethically permissible to recover their vital organs in these circumstances if they or their loved ones have consented to donation. Their statement concludes that Catholics should conscientiously refuse permission for such neurological testing and that Catholic health care practitioners should refuse to use such criteria to declare someone dead. Consequently, they also call upon Catholics to refuse to be organ donors.

First of all, the documents title is a misnomer. Far from promoting unity within the church, it will undoubtedly create disunity, confusion and even scandal among the faithful. For example, there is widespread public confusion regarding the colloquial termbrain death. The use of this term often incorrectly conflates those declared dead using neurological criteria with patients in a persistent vegetative state, like Terri Schiavo, whose death in 2005 followed intense debate both within and outside of the church. Her brother, Bobby Schindler, is one of the statements signatories. The misappropriation of the term brain death, even by medical professionals, leaves many vulnerable to being exploited by fear.

Moreover, although the list of signatories includes several health care professionals, we are aware of Catholic neurologists, critical care and transplant physicians, and ethicists working in Catholic health care who were approached and explicitly chose not to sign the document because they adamantly disagreed with it on medical and bioethical grounds. There is an evident lack of insight in the statement regarding the realities of clinical practice and how determination of death by neurological criteria and organ recovery actually works in hospitals. There is a strong difference between theory and practice.

At the centerpiece of the statement is the concern that the current Uniform Determination of Death Act, the model legislation first crafted in 1981 and thereafter adopted by every U.S. state and territory, is being routinely violated because it requires irreversible loss of all functions of the entire brain. If, as the statement notes, more than half of patients declared dead using neurological criteria have persistent neuroendocrine function via the hypothalamus, then, they argue, the U.D.D.A. criterion is not being met. However, from the beginning this criterion has never been understood to entail that every single part of the brain must have irreversibly ceased functioning for death to be declared. As neurologist James Bernat and others have argued since the early 1980s, specific critical functions of the brain need to remain intact for a human body to be alive.

If we stipulate that every last neuron in the brain must cease firing before we declare someone dead, we would have to abandon even traditional cardiopulmonary means of determining death andawait the onset of putrefaction. This cannot be what St. John Paul II meant when he said, in an address to the International Congress of the Transplantation Society in 2000, complete cessation of brain activity is morally required. He said as much himself in that address when he acknowledged that scientific approaches to ascertaining death had shifted from cardio-respiratory signs to neurological criterion:

This has long been the understanding of the U.D.D.A.s requirement regarding all functions of the entire brain. It was always meant to clarify that both the cerebrum and the brain stem must be dead, and that being in a persistent vegetative state does not constitute death.

Discussions about including the hypothalamus and other parts of the diencephalon in brain death testing were well known at the time of St. John Paul IIs statement in 2000, as well as thelegal clinical mismatch between what the U.D.D.A. requires for death to be declared by neurological criteria and what is done in clinical practice, where testing for hypothalamic function has never been required for determination of death. Why is this the case? It is because the hypothalamus does not play a central role in preserving the human organisms integrative unity. The hypothalamus produces hormones related to reproduction and puberty, and it tells the body to manage its fluid homeostasis, temperature, satiety, sleep and blood pressure. These are vegetative functions but not functions fundamental for life in the way that brain-stem-coordinated circulation of oxygenated blood and respiration are.

Indeed, people can live well without a hypothalamus (e.g., after removal from surgery due to a tumor extraction) with exogenous hormonal replacement. The brains other structures can be irreversibly destroyed (with no potential for recovery) and the hypothalamus can be preserved because of collateral blood flow from blood vessels external to the brain if organ support is maintained via IV fluids and a ventilator to stabilize blood pressure and oxygen levels. This is similar to medical technology that allows aheart to beat in a box outside the body, as in cardiac transplantation. Clearly a heart outside of a body is not a living person, yet the hearts tissue and neural pathways can be stimulated to make the heart beat.

Thus, while it is the case anatomically with hypothalamic function preserved that not all functions of the entire brain have ceased, it is the case functionally that patients determined to be dead by neurological criteriawill never regain consciousness or breathe independently again, irrespective of whether neuroendocrine function is present or not.

If St. John Paul II meant to include the hypothalamus in the above listing for brain death, or similar neuroendocrine structures like the pituitary gland, surely he would have done so. Instead, he went on to say, With regard to the parameters used today for ascertaining deathwhether the encephalic signs or the more traditional cardio-respiratory signsthe Church does not make technical decisions (Address to the 18th International Congress of the Transplantation Society, No. 5). The pope here reflects the wisdom of St. Augustine when he warned, in his Literal Commentary on the Book of Genesis, against Christians speaking about scientific matters outside of their expertise, lest they be laughed at and the faith be scandalized (Book I, Chapter 19, Paragraph 39).

We thus come to the crucial question of the role of the hypothalamus with respect to the integrative unity of a living human body. Does the hypothalamus fulfill a critical function in terms of bodily integration, control or behavior? For the reasons outlined above, it is evident it does not. While undoubtedly playing an important role in the vegetative effects of the brain, there is no evidence that hypothalamic function is either necessary or sufficient for the persistent integrative life of a mature human organism.

In fact, it is not substantively different from the function of other endocrine glands like the adrenal glands that lie above the kidneys, yet no one believes testing for adrenal function is relevant for determining death.

Thus, the authors of the statement Catholics United on Brain Death and Organ Donation: A Call to Action seem to mistake the hypothalamuss location as being more relevant than its function. This is why some other legal jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom, require only irreversible cessation ofbrainstem function, given its unique and irreplaceable role in preserving and regulating cardiopulmonary function.

It is also worth highlighting, as the statements authors note, that assessing hypothalamic function has not been included as a requirement for determining death going back to the 1995 guidelines from the American Academy of Neurology. So why has attention now been drawn to this small area of the brain? One speculative explanation is the increasingly deep-seated attitudes that inform Americas current culture wars, leading to an overarching hermeneutic of suspicion regarding the A.A.N. criteria and the medical profession in general. The scrupulous fear that giving the gift of oneself through organ donation to extend the lives of others will prematurely cause ones own death ends up fomenting fear, discord and disunity within the church.

The arguments against the use of neurological criteria have yet to prove persuasive to either the medical community or the churchs magisterium after multiple studies in the 1980s and 2000s by thePontifical Academy of Sciences. Thus, while we agree that the current neurological criteria should continue to be critically examined and refined where needed, and that there needs to be legal and moral accountability to ensure the integrity of how death is ascertained, it is inappropriate to reject the clinical use of neurological criteria altogether and sow distrust between Catholics and their health care providers, as well as Catholic hospitals and society as a whole, by calling for conscientious refusal of neurological determination of death and organ donation.

The potential ramifications of such confusion and distrust are manifold, not only with respect to organ donationabout 2 percent of all in-hospital deaths are declared using neurological criteria; only about 20 percent of the patients declared dead using neurological criteria become organ donorsbut more especially regarding family decision-making concerning continued technological intervention to sustain vegetative operations. Rather than accepting the reality that natural death has occurred and maintaining faithful hope in a future resurrection, families may feel compelled to cling to the false hope of their loved ones technologically mediated recovery, as witnessed in the recent case of Jahi McMath.

Promoting such false hope, by making brain death the latest battlefront in the ongoing culture wars, places an undue burden on families at a time of immense grief when they are most in need of clear pastoral guidance and the healing that comes from accepting our mortality while faithfully acknowledging that death is not finalthis is the churchs unified Gospel message.

Jason T. Eberl is the Hubert Mder chair in health care ethics, professor of health care ethics and philosophy, and director of the Albert Gnaegi Center for health care ethics at Saint Louis University. He is the editor of Contemporary Controversies in Catholic Bioethics (Springer, 2017).

Becket Gremmels is system vice president for theology and ethics at CommonSpirit Health.

The Most Rev. Michael F. Olson is the bishop of Fort Worth. He is a member of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Doctrine and serves as the chair of that committees Subcommittee on Health Care Issues.

E. Wesley Ely is the founder and co-director of the Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction, Survivorship Center and the Grant W. Liddle Endowed Chair of Medicine and Critical Care at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the associate director of aging research at the Tennessee Valley Geriatric Research Education Clinical Center.

The Rev. John J. Raphael is a priest of the Diocese of Nashville, staff chaplain/specialist for Catholic ministry and bedsideethics consultant at Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital West. He is a contributing author to Catholic Health Care Ethics: A Manual for Practitioners (3rd edition, National Catholic Bioethics Center.)

Allen J. Aksamit is professor and consultant in neurology at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. He has served asthe education division chair in neurology and has subspecialty expertise in neurovirology and neurosarcoidosis. He sits on committees of the American Neurological Association and the American Academy of Neurology.

Laura B. Webster serves as the vice president of ethics in the northwest region of CommonSpirit Health, is an affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington School of Medicine in the Department of Bioethics and Humanities, and is a volunteer community nurse. She worked as a nurse in the neuroICU and the emergency department of a level-one trauma center for over a decade.

The views expressed here are the authors own and do not necessarily represent the policy and practice of their affiliated organizations.

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The danger of turning 'brain death' and organ donation into culture war issues - America: The Jesuit Review

Herodotus writing in the 5th century BC contended more than once that a solar eclipse changed the entire course of history. First, the Medes and the Lydians were encouraged to broker a peace treaty under an inauspiciously darkened sky; and again, the Persian general Xerxes took an eclipse as a good omen for his planned invasion of Athens. The New Testament says the sky turned dark as Jesus was crucified. The Aztecs believed eclipses were a warning shot from the jaguar god; the Incas, meanwhile, were terribly concerned about the wrath of their own sun god.

If we think we have progressed past such primitive attempts to rationalise and understand the stars, we are very wrong. Mondays eclipse displayed no more intellectual sophistication than our Persian forebears, no more cool-headed rationality. In fact, there was perhaps no greater reminder of human atavism than Americans gathering outside to stare at the sky. The eclipse is as compelling to us now as it always has been and so, naturally, it quickly became a point of politics, a vehicle for the culture wars, a contemporary example of our base instinct for mythology.

The last total solar eclipse before Mondays happened on August 21st, 2017. Donald Trump and his wife Melania stood outside the White House to watch. Against the advice of all medical experts Trump looked up, pointed his finger, and stared directly into the sun. It was a humanising moment for those of us who know they couldnt resist the threat of a burned retina out of primal curiosity. But, more than that, it was a political statement.

Donald Trump looks up at the solar eclipse of August 21st, 2017 from a balcony in the White House. Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Meanwhile, this week Joe Biden took a different approach. In a clip shared on social media, Biden is standing in the same spot where Trump and Melania stood seven years ago, but he is wearing protective eclipse goggles. An eclipse is worth marvelling at. But dont be silly, folks play it safe and wear protective eyewear, the post read. It immediately and purposefully conjures 2017 Trump.

In the middle of the pandemic Hillary Clinton used the same image of a squinting Trump. Please do not take medical advice from a man who looked directly at a solar eclipse, she said. And so the eclipse (both in 2017 and now) became no mere celestial event but a symbol of moral fortitude, a lesson on how to vote, a display of values, an augury for Covid-19. Xerxes looking to the sun for advice on when to attack Athens made him no fool. Humans havent changed.

Trump foolishly peering at the sun strikes a rather different figure to Bidens dorky public safety announcement. It is perfect shorthand for the Trump voter: one mans virility versus anothers frailty. For the Democrat, it is a clear display of the wanton recklessness of Trump versus the cautious sense of Biden. It doesnt really matter which interpretation is closer to the truth. The contrasting images are just a simple metaphor, ready to be warped into the shape of long-held prejudice, ready to be adopted as a symbol for something that extends far beyond the realm of astronomy. Which politician can be trusted? When should we invade Athens?

[Great American eclipse was, like, wooaahhh, writes Keith Duggan ]

I used to think mistakenly that these kinds of culture wars were a distraction from the substance of real politics; that serious minded people did not get caught up in the frivolities of things like the colour of a passport, the alleged race politics of Harry Potter, Joe Rogan and Russell Brand. I thought these things were deliberate ploys to divert attention from important matters of trade policy and infrastructure spending. I thought things could somehow fall victim to the culture wars. Mea culpa.

I have since come to realise via a rather robust correction afforded to me by the historian Dominic Sandbrook that this was wrong. Culture wars are no distraction from the substance of politics they are the substance of politics, he argues. The eclipse was neat evidence of this fact as it became a metaphor far more powerful and captivating than any taxation manifesto could ever aspire to be, as it revealed our culture-war instincts are as ancient as the Persians.

If anything should have disabused us of the idea that there is no meaningful distinction between culture and politics, perhaps it is the pandemic. Follow the science was an adage as much about political allegiance as any statement of policy. Mask-wearing in the US is still a dividing force between certain coastal liberal elites and the rest of the country. Lockdown policy was as much a reflection of a countrys values as anything else Jacinda Arderns New Zealand versus Boris Johnsons Britain a stark example of this fact.

Grand narratives of history too often focus on all the ways humanity has progressed but just as interesting is all the ways we do not change. The lure of mythology is a perfect example: astrology, organised religion, Republicanism, belief in national foundation stories, the flag, the monarchy. And the eclipse now is no different, not just in its ancient appeal but in its lessons: how to vote in November 2024; whether to wear a mask indoors; whether to broker a peace deal with the Medes.

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Finn McRedmond: Nothing is new under the sun: the solar eclipse became the latest shiny object in the culture wars - The Irish Times

In November 2023, members of Sudans Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and their allied militias went house-to-house in Ardamata on the outskirts of El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. They looted property and rounded men up for execution. A community Facebook page, El Geneina Darndouka, estimated the death count to be as high as 2,000 people. Among the dead was Muhammad Arbab, an 85-year-old Masalit leader, who was killed along with his son and eight grandchildren in an attack on their home.

Sudanese who had been forced off of their land in Darfur and were living on the outskirts of El Fasher in Abu Shuk Camp begin farming again, 2007. Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.

Sudans civil war broke out in Khartoum in April 2023. The RSF, Sudans most powerful militia force, seized the airfields and palaces of its erstwhile patron, the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF). The war quickly spread to West Darfur, where civilians from different social groups had been arming themselves against each other and against the violent systems of governance and resource extraction that had bolstered the RSF. Initially, fighting erupted between social groups rather than between armies. By May, the first mass graves were found, and hundreds of thousands of people fled across the Chadian border, 20 kilometers from El Geneina. In June, footage of the spectacular assassination of Khamis Abbakr, the governor of West Darfur and a leading figure in Masalit politics, circulated on social media. Hours before his death, Abbakr described the situation in El Geneina as genocide in what would become his last TV interview.

The violence recalled the intense, genocidal violence in Darfur that began in the mid-1990s and reached its height in the early 2000s. Darfurs system of governance at the time was dominated by the militias that would form the roots of the RSF, to whom the SAF outsourced security. The militias supported communities that practiced mobile pastoralism and those that had moved from mobile pastoralism into a new looting-based economy. Armed Masalit groups, first organized by Abbakr, fought against them. The system thrived off intercommunal violence among the ethnically diverse populations that lived in El Geneina, with the farms and pastures of West Darfur at the frontline of this violence.

Having come to rely on the RSF and its allied militias for security in the region, the SAF struggled to maintain control over garrisons in major cities when the current war first reached Darfur. By October, the SAFs capacity to maintain garrisons all but collapsed. In November, the SAF withdrew from their base in Ardamata, a garrison and airfield where many displaced Masalit people had settled, setting off another round of devastating violence against the Masalit population.

The Masalit describe the events of 2023 as a second genocide. Observers of Sudan often interpret this violenceintended to destroy national, ethnic, racial or religious groupsthrough culturalist explanations. But behind the racialized violence in Darfur is a decades-long history of climate migration, austerity politics and export-led growth that has significantly altered the regions relationship to land and livestock and peoples relations to one another.

El Geneina, the capital of the West Darfur state, has long been the political center of Dar Masalitthe homeland of the Masalit people, straddling the border between Chad and Sudan. This region, which was an independent sultanate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was incorporated into Sudan in 1924 under British colonial administration.

For much of the twentieth century, Dar Masalit was a destination for mobile pastoralists from the west and north. Today, many Darfurians, as well as outsiders, draw a stark distinction between herding and farming across the Sahel. Mobile pastoralists are often categorized as Arabs, while farmersmany of whom speak Nilo-Saharan languages as well as Arabic, Darfurs lingua francaare classed as Africans. But this racialized Afro-Arab binary does not capture the interconnectedness of these two livelihoods. Historically, herding communities lived in stationary or semi-mobile clusters of farayg (tents), typically with access to fields and watercourses. The most mobile groups moved across fairly narrow and predictable circuits, traveling from wetter to drier pastures. Meanwhile, farmers often kept animals, sending them to nearby pastures, and people from these farming communities would sometimes adopt more mobile herding livelihoods.[1]

Mobile pastoralists are often categorized as Arabs, while farmersmany of whom speak Nilo-Saharan languages as well as Arabic, Darfurs lingua francaare classed as Africans.

In the 1970s, an influx of migrants arrived from neighboring Chad, a Cold War frontier at the time that was aligned with France and Libya. In 1973, a massive drought wiped out as much as 70 percent of the countrys cattle, prompting Chadian cattle and camel herders to flee east through Dar Masalit, where many settled.[2] Drought in North Darfur also led many mobile pastoralists, along with their livestock, to move to the wadis (seasonal river pastures) south of El Geneina. Many switched from camel to cattle herding, as the pastures were more suitable, while others moved from herding to farming.

Further droughts in the 1980s crowded even more people into the fertile Dar Masalit, as pastures deteriorated and pastoral routes shifted due to desertification and climate change. This new influx of people intensified pressures on communal relations, and by the 1990s, conflicts began to emerge between the Masalit people and the pastoralists.

The escalating tensions were not solely the result of climate migration and the Cold War militarization of Chadian politics. Neoliberal policies also placed new pressures on rural pastoralists. In the 1970s, governments across Africa ramped up borrowing from international creditors to finance development strategies and consolidate newly independent states. By the early 1980s, global oil shocks and the collapse of the gold-based currency system led to a long-running financial crisis. In many African states, this crisis marked a shift to export-led growth strategies.

Export-led growth began to upend the pastoralist societies of western Sudan. In the 1970s, most families in Darfur kept cattle or sheep as a reliable way of saving up farming wealth, with a few wealthy families holding about half the cattle. Herding stock in a village was cared for by farmers in a few bush camps or manuring fields or entrusted to mobile pastoralists. Farmers supplied meat to El Geneina, and itinerant livestock traders sometimes bought large male animals, keeping prices high.[3]

The shift to livestock exports was not due to government intervention; the state regarded herding and farming systems in western Sudan as subsistence activities, and they barely featured in the five-year plans of the period. Rather, a host of cash pressures beset populations living at the margins of markets as they were forced to cope with new patterns of climate, migration and accumulation. Beginning in the 1980s, demand for live sheep for Eid al-Adha and camels in Saudi Arabia and Egypt put increased pressure on producers and pastures. Over the course of the 1990s, Sudanese sheep exports went up sevenfold, and camel exports rose a hundredfold.[4]

At the same time, the drought and climate crisis pushed some groups in Darfur away from pastoralism. To the north of El Geneina, some pastoralist systems collapsed entirely. Yet, the fertile wadi lands around El Geneina continued to attract pastoralists. Pressure on these lands intensified, and relationships between already-arrived farming groups and newcomer herding groups became increasingly tense.

The global financial crisis of the 1980s, and the austerity that came in its wake, radically destabilized the already frayed relationships.

Under Omar al-Bashir, Sudans longstanding dictator who came to power in 1989, the state adopted a neoliberal response to the multidimensional crisis caused by climate change, debt overload and the failure of debt-funded development policies aimed at fostering national unity. He imposed austerity policies that involved replacing government investment in social services with user fees that were unaffordable for much of the population. In Darfur, rather than building schools or water points to help Masalit people and their neighbors, his security forces exacerbated local disputes over boundaries and political representation. The security forces deepened polarization between Masalit groups and their neighbors, crystallizing pre-existing cultural and linguistic differences into a racialized Afro-Arab binary. These new divisions cast Masalit people as Black/African and pastoralists as Arab, despite both groups living in Africa, speaking Arabic, intermarrying and sharing lands.

The politics of representation became a key arena for state intervention. In colonial times, rural governance in Darfur and Kordofan was structured around the Native Administrationleaders who had the power to collect taxes, administer justice, oversee land tenure and mediate between communities. Many of these leaders came from prominent families whose authority predated the colonial state and was rooted in the control of land and custom. The Islamist government repurposed the Native Administrations, inventing a new chiefly title, amir, the Arabic word for commander, which also carries Islamic significance. In the mid-1990s, al-Bashirs governor in West Darfur created eight amirchieftaincies along supposedly tribal lines, with all but one assigned to groups identified as Arab. The newly appointed amirs posed a threat to Masalit land governance, exacerbating the tensions that already existed as a result of climate-driven migration.

In 1995, these tensions led to the outbreak of violence in Darfur. Following the announcement of administrative reforms in August, raiders identified as Arab attacked Masalit villages to the east of El Geneina, killing 75 people. The government began supplying these raiding groups with weapons, and toward the end of the 1990s, armed groups, led by amirs, conducted raids across West Darfur. The first major violence in El Geneina took place in 1999, when tit-for-tat shootings between farmers and herders turned into a rampage through villages to the south and east of the capital. Masalit sources suggest that as many as 2,000 people were killed.

Responding to the growing insurgency, the government outsourced security to both militias and irregular forces drawn from land-poor Arab groups led by amirs.

The militias were run by intelligence officers based in military garrisons belonging to the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), located in Darfurs towns. The mobile counter-insurgency militias, run by the intelligence officers, were known as Janjaweed. After 2013, with the rebel forces weakened, the counter-insurgency militias unified into a new force, the RSF, under the command of Muhammad Hamdan Daglo, known by his nickname Himedti. The RSF eventually pushed nearly all insurgent militias out of Darfur and into Libya and South Sudan. Outsourcing security to these militias aligned with the privatization agenda of the Bashir government. It was intended to keep costs down, given that militia soldiers were paid less than regular soldiers. Emboldening these militias, however, turned out to be a fateful move, creating a dual military structure divided between aggressive, mobile militias and static, garrison forces.

Amirs led the pro-government militias that attacked the Masalit villages. Masalit and other groups continued to form rebel armies, which their enemies described as zurga or Black/African. With the consolidation and militarization of the Arab/African binary, violence intensified. Human rights investigators chronicled the racial slurs that counterinsurgency militias used during village burnings, rapes and murders. This violence was mostly targeted against the settled population, identified as African. Millions of Sudanese were forced into displacement camps, most of them around cities like El Geneina, where the presence of the RSF and groups of armed civilians belonging to different ethnolinguistic communities meant that petty confrontations would often morph into street massacres.

In 2010, when the International Criminal Court first indicted al-Bashir for genocide, it built its case around these events. Following a protracted period of half-implemented peace deals and insecurity, a military campaign led by RSF leader Himedti between 2014 and 2016 defeated most of the armed groups in Darfur. Many of the insurgents were pushed towards dirty war jobs in Libya and South Sudan. Himedti, meanwhile, was welcomed into the center of state and regional politics.

As the conflict in Darfur stalemated, Sudans sheep exports to Saudi Arabia shot up.

Sheep exports helped mitigate the long economic crisis that began after South Sudans independence in 2011. During the 2000s, southern oil wealth transformed Sudans economy and its balance of payments. With South Sudans independence, however, Sudan could no longer balance its books. Livestock exports became vital, amounting to roughly a quarter of Sudans total foreign currency earnings by 2012. In 2017, Sudan and Somalia together accounted for 80 percent of Gulf imports of livestock. [5] But these earnings still could not cover the consumption requirements of Sudans citieswhose populations were expanding due to rural violence.[6] Moreover, Gulf demand for livestock continued to place pressures on land and pastures in Darfur, contributing to communal tensions that sporadically erupted into violence.

Gulf demand for livestock continued to place pressures on land and pastures in Darfur, contributing to communal tensions that sporadically erupted into violence.

The uprisings that started in 2018 and eventually overthrew al-Bashir were fueled, in part, by the confluence of urban migrationspurred by rural violenceand Sudans economic crisis. In cities, protestors took to the streets demanding bread and freedom. Under Himedtis leadership, the RSF initially cracked down violently on protestors. Ultimately, however, it joined forces with the Sudanese army to oust al-Bashir.

The protestors forced the creation of a new civil-military government under Abdullah Hamdok. But the new government prioritized making peace between rebel and government-outsourced militias over meeting the popular demands of the Sudanese people. Himedti, the de facto vice president, was sent to make peace with Darfurian armed groups fighting in Libya or South Sudan.

Former Darfurian rebel groups, including the faction led by Abbakr, signed the Juba Peace Agreement with Himedti in October 2020. Under the agreement, many Darfurian armed groups returned from Libya to Sudan. Some rebel leaders, including Abbakr, were given posts in the Hamdok government. Over the ensuing months, however, a number of these former rebel groups allied with the SAF and RSF against the civilians, ultimately joining the October 2021 coup against Hamdoks government.

Even during the relatively peaceful years that preceded the coup, the Juba agreement did not end violence in Darfur. Many local groups held on to their weapons, and many young men moved out of pastoralism and farming into looting and land-grabbing. Violence occasionally broke out in Dar Masalit between local groups of armed civilians, now straitjacketed into the racialized Afro-Arab binary.

The military coup also failed to lead to a lasting entente between Sudans two armies. In April of 2023, large-scale violence erupted when the RSF and SAF turned on each other. After years of outsourcing the SAF lacked the capacity for mobile warfare. Meanwhile, the RSF excelled at street battles but struggled to dislodge the SAF from their fixed positions in garrisons and airfields, leaving both armies in a stalemate.

Starting in May of 2023, as the RSF swept through Darfur, they allied with the Arab militias led by the amirs, some of whom seized on the outbreak of war to push Masalit people out of El Geneina. In El Geneina, the RSF and its allies expelled up to 70 percent of the Masalit population.

The RSF and its allies came to control much of Darfur, while the SAF defended its garrisons in the five Darfurian state capitals: El Geneina, Zalingei, Nyala, El Fasher and El Daein. In November 2023, however, the SAFs 15 Division in Ardamata appeared to surrender its position without a fight. The collapse of the garrison at Ardamata, one of West Darfurs largest Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps, led to large-scale attacks on Masalit groups. Initial reports suggest that thousands of women fled from Ardamata to the Chadian border, as hundreds of men were rounded up and killed.

Amid these mass atrocities and displacements, the livestock trade appears to be expanding. Although Sudan no longer produces foreign trade statistics, Atar, a new Sudanese online publication that monitors shipping from Port Sudan, reports that most ships departing Port Sudan are carrying livestock bound for Saudi Arabia.[7] In March, Sudans finance minister announced that 4.7 million head of livestock had been exported in 2023, compared to less than 2 million heads the year prior.

The civilian government failed to follow through on its promise to conduct an animal census for Sudan. But such a census would likely reveal that most of the countrys livestock is in the west of the country, now under Himedtis control. This data would also likely find that mobile pastoralists livestock-rearing practices are more efficient than others, suggesting there is an economic rationale for turning the stressed wadis around El Geneina into pastureland. According to Sudanese academic Magdi el Gizouli, the Janjaweed spearheaded an agrarian transition that liquidated subsistence farming and herding in western Sudan, replacing it with commercial livestock systems that the war and national economy now depend on.[8] The genocide in El Geneina is part of this transition.

One of the factors behind Himedtis success has been his ability to gain control over key sectors of rural production, including gold, sesame and livestock. The militarization of rural governance has allowed him to extract or extort wealth from producers. Indeed, his access to resources appears to be key to his ability to resupply his vast army, spread out across the country. Some observers question the RSFs ability to tax markets and producers.

But if the war turns out to be a long one, control over rural production and militias will determine the ability of Himedtiand the neoliberal militia he commandsto control Darfur.

[1] Hartmut Lang and Uta Holier, Arab Camel Nomads in the North West Sudan: The Northern Mahria from a Census Point of View, Anthropos 91/1-3 (1996).

[2] J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins, Darfur: The Long Road to Disaster (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2008)

[3] Dennis Tully, Culture and Context in Sudan: The Process of Market Incorporation in Dar Masalit (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 132-138

[4] World Bank (2003) Sudan Stabilization and Reconstruction: Country Economic Memorandum, Washington, DC: World Bank, vol 2, p.46

[5] Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton, How capitalism is destroying the Horn of Africa: sheep and the crises in Somalia and Sudan, Review of African Political Economy (2023)

[6] Edward Thomas and Alex de Waal Hunger in Sudans Political Marketplace, World Peace Foundation Occasional Paper (Somerville, MA: Tufts University, 2022).

[7] Atar Network Team, Tijrat al-sdn al-khrijya: al-yawm al-thn bad al-arb [Sudans foreign trade: the day after the war], Atar 2, October 19, 2023, p. 4.

[8] Magdi el Gizouli, arb la sqn al-n [A war on the sheep shanks]Atar 7, November 23, 2023.

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Land, Livestock and Darfurs 'Culture Wars' - MERIP

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

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[]

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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Arizona embraces the culture wars on the losing side - Daily Kos