Mata merupakan jendela Anda dalam melihat dunia. Walaupun begitu, terkadang Anda tidak pernah menyadari pentingnya funsgi mata hingga Anda mengalami gangguan kesehatan mata.
Ada banyak masalah yang mampu mempengaruhi kualitas penglihatan Anda. salah satu masalah yang paling umum adalah katarak. katarak telah terjadi ketika protein yang ada di dalam mata Anda menghalangi pandangan Anda. Bahkan katarak juga dapat menjadi salah satu penyebab umum kebutaan.
Berikut adalah penyebab teratas munculnya katarak :
Usia
Usia adalah salah satu penyebab utama munculnya katarak. Protein lensa Anda akan semakin menurun ketika usia Anda bertambah. Selain faktor tersebut, faktor lingkungan juga dapat menyebabkan katarak.
Trauma
Trauma akan mengakibatkan pembengkakan, penebalan, dan munculnya warna putih di serat lensa. Warna putih yang terbentuk pada akhirnya dapat menyebabkan katarak.
Genetika
Genetika juga merupakan salah satu faktor yang dapat menyebabkan terjadinya kataraka. Sebab kelainan kromosom mampu mempengaruhi kualitas lensa mata Anda.
Penyakit kulit
Beberapa penyakit kulit tertentu mampu untuk mempengaruhi kesehatan lensa mata Anda sepertii dermatitis atopik, ichthyosis, pemfigus, dan eksim.
Infeksi
Jenis infeksi tertentu seperti kusta, toksoplasmosis, dan cysticercosis dapat memicu timbulnya katarak. Oleh karena itu apabila Anda mengalaminya, sebaiknya segera obati penyakit tersebut sebelum infeksi penyakit ini menyebar.
Diabetes
Diabetes kerap kali dituding telah menjadi penyakit yang dapat menyebabkan katarak. Sebab enzim aldosa reduktase yang ada di dalam tubuh penderita diabetes mampu memicu timbulnya penyakit katarak.
Penggunaan obat tertentu
Ada beberapa jenis obat tertentu yang mampu mempengaruhi penglihatan mata Anda. Obat-obatan seperti kortikosteroid terbukti mampu menyebabkan timbulnya katarak.
Itulah beberapa penyebab munculnya penyakit katarak. Mengetahui penyebab munculnya penyakit ini dapat menjadi cara untuk dapat mencegah penyakit katarak sebelum bertambah parah.
7 Penyebab teratas munculnya penyakit katarak
KECELAKAAN DI TOL
Kecelakaan tunggal terjadi Tol Tangerang pada sekitar pukul 03.28 WIB pagi ini. Kecelakaan ini telah menimpa pengemudi mobil Honda Jazz yang bernomor polisi B 2226 QT.
"Kecelakaan telah terjadi di KM 19 arah Karawaci ke Tangerang," jelas Putra Petugas Jasa Marga Traffic Information Center , Senin (10/3).
Akibat dari kecelakaan tersebut, pengemudi diketahui telah mengalami luka berat. Meski begitu belum dapat diketahui identitas pengendara Jazz tersebut.
"Ada korban luka berat karena kendaraan melintang di tengah jalan," tambah dia.
Sampai saat ini belum pasti penyebab kecelakaan tersebut. Petugas sudah ada di lokasi untuk melakukan penanganan.KECELAKAAN DI TOL
ZAMAN MINANGKABAU
2. Zaman Minangkabau Timur
Istilah ini dipinjam dari istilah yang dikemukakan oleh Drs. M. D. Mansoer dkk, dalam bukunya, Sejarah Minangkabau, dikatakannya Minangkabau mengalami dua periode, yaitu periode Minangkabau Timur yang berlangsung antara abad ketujuh sampai kira-kira tahun 1350 dan periode Minangkabau Pagaruyung antara tahun 1347-1809.
Dikatakannya, bahwa kerajaan-kerajaan lama, pusat perdagangan lada, pusat perekonomian, politik dan budaya yang pertama timbul dan berkembang di Minangkabau adalah di lembah aliran Batang Hari dan Sungai Dareh. Daerah itu berkembang pada abad ke tujuh sampai pertengahan abad keempat belas.
Secara geografis memang pantai timur pulau Sumatera lebih memungkinkan untuk dilayari oleh kapal-kapal dagang yang dapat berlayar sampai masuk jauh kepedalaman. Daerah pantai Sumatera Timur ini pulalah yangdahulu didatangi oleh nenek moyang orang Minangkabau yang berlayar sampai ke daerah Mahat di Kabupaten Lima Puluh Kota sebelah Utara. Pedagang-pedagang Islam yang mula-mula ke Minangkabau juga melalui daerah ini, sehingga perdagangan diwaktu periode Minangkabau ini menjadi sangat ramai sekali, bukan itu saja, Islam pertama pun masuk dari sini, baik yang dibawa oleh pedagang-pedagang dari Arab sendiri, maupun yang dibawa oleh pedagang-pedagang dari Persia, Hindustan, Cina, India dan lain-lain.
Pada permulaan abad Masehi perpindahan bangsa-bangsa dari utara ke selatan telah berakhir. Mereka telah menetap di sepanjang pantai kepulauan Nusantara. Setelah mereka menempati kepulauan Nusantara dan hidup secara terpisah, akhirnya karena lingkungan alam kehidupan bahasa yang mereka pergunakan pun mengalami perubahan seperti yang kita kenal sekarang dengan suku-suku bangsa Minangkabau, Jawa, Bugis, Madura, Sunda, Bali dan lain-lain.
Pada zaman purbakala, di Asia terdapat dua jalan perdagangan yang ramai antara Barat dan Timur, yaitu melalui darat dan laut, jalan yang melalui darat disebut jalan Sutera, mulai dari daratan Cina melalui Asia Tengah sampai ke Laut Tengah. Perhubungan darat ini sudah mulai semenjak abad kelima sebelum Masehi. Waktu dimulainya perpindahan bangsa Melayu Muda ke arah selatan. Perhubungan darat ini terutama menghubungkan antara Cina dengan Benua Eropah (Romawi) diwaktu itu dibawah raja Iskandar Zulkarnain dan selanjutnya dengan menyinggahi daerah sepanjang perjalanan seperti India, Persia dan lain-lain.
Perhubungan laut ialah dari Cina dan Indonesia melalui selat Malaka terus ke Teluk Persia dan Laut Tengah. Perhubungan laut ini menjadi sangat ramai pada awal abad pertama Masehi, karena jalan darat mulai tidak aman lagi. Sejak waktu itulah daerah-daerah di Pantai Timur Sumatera dan Pantai Utara Jawa menjadi daerah perhubungan antara perdagangan Arab, India dan Cina. Keadaan ini memungkinkan pedagang-pedagang Indonesia, termasuk di dalamnya pedagang-pedagang Minangkabau ikut aktif berdagang.
Dengan aktifnya pedagang-pedagang Minangkabau dalam perdagangan dengan India, maka terbuka pulalah perhubungan antara kebudayaannya. Dari sini dapat kita lihat masuknya pengaruh Hindu ke Minangkabau melalui daerah pantai timur pulau Sumatera. Dalam abad kedua setelah Indonesia mempunyai perhubungan dengan India dan selama enam abad berturut-turut pengaruh Hindu di Indonesia besar sekali.
Jadi karena keadaan, pedagang-pedagang Minangkabau ikut terlibat dalam kancah lalu lintas perdagangan yang ramai di Asia. Keadaan itu pulalah yang menyebabkan Minangkabau di daerah aslinya sendiri yang jauh terletak di pedalaman.
Karena selat Malaka sangat ramai dilalui oleh kapal-kapal dagang dari Cina dan India maka salah satu bandar diselat itu bertumbuh dengan pesatnya sehingga akhirnya umbuh menjadi kerajaan Melayu. Kerajaan Melayu ini menurut para ahli berpusat di daerah Jambi yang sekarang dan diperkirakan berdirinya pada awal abad ketujuh Masehi. Nama Melayu pertama kalinya muncul dalam cerita Cina. Dalam buku Tseh Fu-ji Kwei diterangkan bahwa pada tahun 664 dan 665 kerajaan Melayu mengirimkan utusan kenegeri Cina untuk mempersembahkan hasilnya pada raja Cina. Pada waktu itu daerah Minangkabau merupakan daerah penghasil merica yang utama di dunia.
Rupanya Minangkabau Timur tidak lama memegang peranan dalam perdagangan di Selat Malaka, kareana sesudah muncul kerajaan Melayu dan kemudian sesudah kerajaan Melayu jatuh di bawah kekuasaan Sriwijaya, Minangkabau Timur menjadi bahagian dari kerajan Sriwijaya.
Dengan berdirinya kerajaan Melayu dan kerajaan Sriwijaya kelihatan peranan Minangkabau Timur tidak ada lagi, karena berita-berita dari Cina hanya ada menyebut tentang Melayu dan Sriwijaya saja.
Dalam satu buku yang disusun oleh It-Tsing dapat kita ketahui bahwa dalam tahun 690 Masehi, Sriwijaya meluaskan daerah kekuasaannya dan kerajaan Melayu dapat ditaklukannya sebelum tahun 692 Masehi.
Kerajaan Sriwijaya merupakan salah satu kerajaan pantai, negara perniagaan dan perdagangan internasional dari Asia Timur ke Asia Barat. Selama lebih kurang enam abad kerajaan Sriwijaya merupakan kerajaan utama di daerah nusantara waktu itu. Namun sementara itu di Jawa mulai timbul kerajaan-kerajaan baru yang lama-kelamaan menjadi saingan utama dari kerajaan Sriwijawa dalam merebut hegemoni perdagangan di wilayah nusantara yang menyebabkan lemahnya Sriwijaya.
Dalam hal ini lawan kerajaan Sriwijaya yang utama adalah kerajaan Kediri di Jawa Timur dan Kerajaan Colamandala di India selatan. Dari kelemahan Sriwijaya itu, rupanya kerajaan Melayu dapat melepaskan diri dari Sriwijaya dan dapat memperkuat diri kembali dengan memindahkan ibu kota kerajaan ke daerah hulu Sungai Batang Hari. Kerajaannya dinamakan dengan Darmasraya. Hal ini dapat diketahui dari prasasti Padang Candi tahun 1286 yang terdapat di Sungai Langsat Si Guntur dekat Sungai Dareh dalam Propinsi Sumatera Barat sekarang.
Pada tahun 1275, Raja Kertanegara dari kerajaan Singosari (kerajaan yang menggantikan kekuasaan Kediri di Jawa Timur) mengirimkan suatu ekspedisi militer ke Sumatera dalam rangka melemahkan kekuasaan Sriwijaya dan memperluas pengaruhnya di Nusantara. Ekspedisi ini dikenal dalam sejarah Indonesia dengan nama ekspedisi Pamalayu.
Sebagai hasil dari ekspedisi itu, maka Kertanegara pada tahun 1286 mengirimkan acara Amogapasa ke Sumatera sebagai hadiah untuk raja dan rakyat kerajaan Melayu. Dengan kejadian ini dapat diartikan, bahwa semenjak peristiwa itu kerajaan Melayu sudah mengikuti kerajaan Singosari dan menjadi daerah tumpuan untuk menghadapi kemungkinan serangan dari negeri Cina akibat peristiwa penghinaan terhadap utusan Cina sebelumnya.
3. Maharajo Dirajo
Dalam hal ini timbul suatu kontradiksi keterangan-keterangan, yaitu nama Maharajo Dirajo sudah disebutkan sebelumnya sebagai salah seorang panglima Iskandar Zulkarnain yang tugaskan menguasai Pulau Emas. Kalau memang demikian keadaannya, lalu bagaimana dengan Maharajo Dirajo yang sedang kita bicarakan ini yang waktunya sudah sangat jauh berbeda. Dalam hal ini kita tidak dapat memberikan jawaban yang pasti. Maharajo Dirajo yang sudah kita bicarakan hanya merupakan perkiraan saja dan belum tentu benar. Tetapi berdasarkan logika berfikir kira-kira diwaktu itulah hidupnya Maharajo Dirajo jika dihubungkan dengan nama Iskandar Zulkarnain. Sedangkan Maharajo Dirajo yang sedang dibicarakan sekarang ini adalah seperti yang dikatakan Tambo Alam Minangkabau yang mana yang benar perlu penelitian lebih lanjut. Dalam kesempatan ini kita hanya ingin memperlihatkan betapa rawannya penafsiran dari data yang diberikan Tambo Alam Minangkabau.
Maharajo Dirajo yang sekarang dibicarakan adalah Maharajo Dirajo seperti yang dikatakan Tambo. Dalam hal ini kita ingin mengangkat data dari Tambo menjadi Fakta sejarah Minangkabau.
Dalam Tambo disebutkan bahwa Iskandar Zulkarnain mempunyai tiga anak, yaitu Maharajo Alif, Maharajo Dipang, dan Maharajo Dirajo. Maharajo Alif menjadi raja di Benua Ruhun (Romawi), tetapi Josselin de Jong mengatakan, menjadi raja di Turki. Maharajo Dipang menjadi raja di negeri Cina, sedangkan Maharajo Dirajo menjadi raja di Pulau Emas (Sumatera).
Kalau kita melihat kalimat-kalimat Tambo sendiri, maka dikatakan sebagai berikut: “…Tatkala maso dahulu, batigo rajo naiek nobat, nan sorang Maharajo Alif, nan pai ka banua Ruhun, nan sorang Maharajo Dipang nan pai ka Nagari Cino, nan sorang Maharajo Dirajo manapek ka pulau ameh nan ko…” (pada masa dahulu kala, ada tiga orang yang naik tahta kerajaan, seorang bernama Maharaja Alif yang pergi ke negeri Ruhun, yang seorang Maharajo Dipang yang pergi ke negeri Cina, dan seorang lagi bernama Maharajo Dirajo yang menepat ke pulau Sumatera).
Dari keterangan Tambo itu tidak ada dikatakan angka tahunnya hanya dengan istilah “Masa dahulu kala” itulah yang memberikan petunjuk kepada kita bahwa kejadian itu sudah berlangsung sangat lama sekali, sedangkan waktu yang mencakup zaman dahulu kala itu sangat banyak sekali dan tidak ada kepastiannya. Kita hanya akan bertanya-tanya atau menduga-duga dengan tidak akan mendapat jawaban yang pasti. Di kerajaan Romawi atau Cina memang ada sejarah raja-raja yang besar, tetapi raja mana yang dimaksudkan oleh Tambo tidak kita ketahui. Dalam hal ini rupanya Tambo Alam Minangkabau tidak mementingkan angka tahun selain dari mementingkan kebesaran kemasyuran nama-nama rajanya.
Percantuman raja Romawi dalam Tambo menurut hemat kita hanya usaha dari pembuat Tambo untuk menyetarakan kemasyhuran raja Minangkabau dengan nama raja di luar negeri yang memang sudah sangat terkenal di seantero penjuru dunia.
Dengan mensejajarkan kedudukan raja-raja Minangkabau dengan raja yang sangat terkenal itu maka pandangan rakyat Minangkabau terhadap rajanya sendiri akan semakin tinggi pula. Disini kita bertemu dengan satu kebiasaan dunia Timur untuk mendongengkan tuah kebesaran rajanya kepada anak cucunya.
Gelar Maharajo Dirajo sendiri terlepas ada tidaknya raja tersebut, menunjukan kebesaran kekuasaan rajanya, karena istilah itu berarti penguasa sekalian raja-raja yang tunduk di bawah kekuasaannya. Josselin de Jong mengatakan Lord of the Word atau Raja Dunia.
Dalam sejarah Indonesia gelar Maharaja Diraja tidak hanya menjadi milik orang Minangkabau saja, melainkan juga ada raja lain yang bergelar demikian seperti Karta Negara dari Singasari dengan gelar Maharaja Diraja seperti yang tertulis pada arca Amogapasa tahun 1286 sebagai atasan dari Darmasraya yang bernama raja Tribuana.
Tambo mengatakan bahwa Maharajo Dirajo adalah raja Minangkabau pertama. Tetapi ada pendapat lain yang mengatakan bahwa Srimaharaja Diraja yang disebut dalam tambo sebagai raja Minangkabau yang pertama itu tidak lain dari Adityawarman sendiri yang menyebut dirinya dengan Maraja Diraja. Tentang Adityawarman mempergunakan gelar Maharaja Diraja memang semua ahli sudah sependapat, karena Adityawarman sendiri telah menulis demikian dalam prasasti Pagaruyung.
Dari gelar Maharaja Diraja yang dipakai Adityawarman menunjukan kepada kita bahwa sewaktu Adityawarman berkuasa di Minangkabau tidak ada lagi kekuasaan lain yang ada di atasnya, atau dengan perkataan lain dapat dikatakan pada waktu itu Minangkabau sudah berdiri sendiri, tidak berada di bawah kekuasaan Majapahit atau sudah melepaskan diri dari Majapahit. Kerajaan Majapahit adalah ahli waris dari Singasari. Sedangkan Singasari pernah menundukkan melayu Darmasraya, tentu berada di bawah kekuasaan Singasari - Majapahit itu, maka untuk melepaskan diri dari Singasari - Majapahit itu Adiyawarman memindahkan pusat kekuasaannya kepedalaman Minangkabau dan menyatakan tidak ada lagi yang berkuasa di atasnya dengan memakai gelar Maharaja Diraja.
Ada sesuatu pertanyaan kecil yang perlu dijawab, yaitu apakah tidak ada lagi kemungkinan bahwa gelar Maharajo Dirajo itu merupakan gelar keturunan bagi raja-raja Minangkabau, sehingga diwaktu Adityawarman menjadi raja di Minangkabau dia merasa perlu mempergunakan gelar tersebut agar dihormati oleh rakyat Minangkabau. Kalau memang demikian, maka kita akan dapat menghubungkannya dengan Maharajo Dirajo yang kita bicarakan kehidupannya sebelum abad Masehi. Tetapi hal ini kembali hanya berupa dugaan saja yang masih memerlukan pembuktian lebih lanjut.
Kalau kita mengikuti pendapat yang mengatakan bahwa Maharaja Diraja itu sama dengan Adityawarman, maka satu kepastian dapat dikatakan bahwa kerajaan Minangkabau baru bermula pad tahun 1347, yaitu pada waktu Adityawarman menjadi raja di Minangkabau yang berpusat di Pagaruyuang. Logikanya tentu sebelum Adityawarman, belum ada raja di Minangkabau, kalau ada baru merupakan daerah-daerahyang dikuasai oleh seorang kepala suku saja. Kalau pendapat itu tidak dapat diterima kebenarannya, maka tokoh Maharajo Dirajo yang disebut di dalam Tambo itu masih tetap merupakan seorang tokoh legendaris dalam sejarah Minangkabau dan hal ini akan tetap mengundang bermacam-macam pertanyaan yang pro dan kontra.
Kemungkinan gelar Maharajo sudah dipergunakan sebelum kedatangan Adityawarman memang ada. Tetapi apakah gelar itu merupakan gelar keturunan dari raja-raja Minangkabau masih belum lagi dapat diketahui dengan pasti. Yang jelas pada waktu sekarang ini, banyak gelar para penghulu di Sumatera Barat yang memakai gelar Maharajo sebagai gelar kepenghulunya disamping nama lainnya, seperti Dt. Maharajo, Dt. Marajo, Dt. Maharajo Basa, Dt. Maharajo Dirajo.
Kelihatan gelar tersebut dipergunakan oleh masyarakat Minangkabau sebagai gelar pusaka yang turun-menurun. Sebaliknya raja-raja Pagaruyung sendiri tidak mempergunakan gelar tersebut sebagai pusaka kerajaannya. Jadi, dapat disimpulkan bahwa gelar Maharajo Dirajo tersebut merupakan gelar pusaka Minangkabau dan sudah ada sebelum Adityawarman menjadi raja di Pagaruyung. Barangkali memang gelar itu diturunkan dari Maharajo dirajo seperti disebutkan dalam Tambo itu.ZAMAN MINANGKABAU
PENYEBAB KANKER KULIT
saco-indonesia.com,
Apa Saja Penyebab Kanker Kulit?
Kanker kulit juga merupakan pertumbuhan sel-sel pada kulit manusia yang sudah pada taraf abnormal. Apa saja faktor penyebab kanker kulit? Sampai sekarang para peneliti juga belum dapat memastikan apa yang sebenarnya penyebab kanker kulit secara akurat. Tetapi ada beberapa hal yang sangat disarankan untuk dapat dihindari agar bisa terlepas dari yang namanya penyakit kanker kulit ini. Kanker kulit sendiri telah dibedakan berdasarkan tingkat keganasan kankernya. Oleh sebab itu selagi masih bisa sebaiknya kita harus menghindari kanker kulit dengan mempelajari faktor-faktor yang bisa dapat menimbulkan penyakit ini.
Faktor Usia Sebagai Penyebab Kanker Kulit
Jika yang satu ini memang telah tidak bisa dihindari lagi, karena juga sudah kodrat manusia akan memasuki masa tua. Pada umur 60 tahun keatas kita akan rentan untuk diserang penyakit kanker kulit.
Rokok dan Tembakau Penyebab Kanker Kulit
Asap yang keluar dari rokok dan dihirup oleh tubuh kita berpeluang besar sebagai dampak timbulnya kanker kulit. Bukan hanya pecandu rokok itu saja yang dapat berpeluang terjangkit penyakit ini, tetapi orang sekitar yang ikut menghirup asap rokok juga dapat berpeluang besar terkena kanker kulit.
Sinar Matahari Penyebab Kanker Kulit
Sinar matahari memang telah mengandung vitamin yang berguna bagi kulit kita. Hal ini juga akan berbeda jika kita berbicara mengenai sinar matahari pada siang hari. Kandungan ultraviolet pada siang hari diyakini akan bisa mengakibatkan kanker kulit.
Bahan Kimia Penyebab Kanker Kulit
Penyalahgunaan bahan kimia yang telah dimasukkan didalam makanan bisa dapat menyebabkan kanker kulit. Contohnya saja yang sering kita temukan adalah penggunaan bahan kimia sebagai pengawet makanan.
Bakteri dan Virus Penyebab Kanker Kulit
Bakteri ataupun virus juga merupakan salah satu penyumbang terbesar timbulnya kanker kulit. Jadi disarankan untuk selalu menjaga kebersihan lingkungan dan juga kebersihan badan kita. Sering gonta ganti pasangan berpeluang besar untuk mendatangkan virus masuk kedalam tubuh kita.
Faktor Keturunan Penyebab Kanker Kulit
Hal ini juga masih dalam perkiraan saja, dimana kanker kulit bisa dapat terjadi karena faktor keturunan. Karena menurut penelitian dari penderita kanker kulit diketahui bahwa ternyata mereka mempunyai orang tua dengan riwayat yang sama juga.
Apa saja faktor penyebab kanker kulit? Tentunya uraian diatas sudah bisa dapat memberikan gambaran yang cukup jelas mengenai faktor yang bisa mendatangkan kanker kulit. Paling tidak kita sudah bisa memproteksi diri sedini mungkin agar dapat terhindar dari penyakit mematikan ini.
Fakta Tentang Sarang Semut : Bebas Dari Kanker Tanpa Perlu Operasi, Kometerapi, dan Biopsi Hanya dalam Waktu Hitungan Bulan Saja! — Juga Terbukti Ampuh Mengatasi Tumor, TBC, Diabetes, Hipertensi, Lever, Asam Urat, Jantung Koroner, dan Berbagai Penyakit Berat Lainnya— Dikonsumsi Oleh Ribuan Orang Dan Terus Bertambah, Sejak dipekenalkan terapi sarang semut 6 Tahun Yang Lalu.
BEBAS DARI PENYAKIT-PENYAKIT DEGENERATIF
Obama Finds a Bolder Voice on Race Issues
As he reflected on the festering wounds deepened by race and grievance that have been on painful display in America’s cities lately, President Obama on Monday found himself thinking about a young man he had just met named Malachi.
A few minutes before, in a closed-door round-table discussion at Lehman College in the Bronx, Mr. Obama had asked a group of black and Hispanic students from disadvantaged backgrounds what could be done to help them reach their goals. Several talked about counseling and guidance programs.
“Malachi, he just talked about — we should talk about love,” Mr. Obama told a crowd afterward, drifting away from his prepared remarks. “Because Malachi and I shared the fact that our dad wasn’t around and that sometimes we wondered why he wasn’t around and what had happened. But really, that’s what this comes down to is: Do we love these kids?”
Many presidents have governed during times of racial tension, but Mr. Obama is the first to see in the mirror a face that looks like those on the other side of history’s ledger. While his first term was consumed with the economy, war and health care, his second keeps coming back to the societal divide that was not bridged by his election. A president who eschewed focusing on race now seems to have found his voice again as he thinks about how to use his remaining time in office and beyond.
At an event announcing the creation of a nonprofit focusing on young minority men, President Obama talked about the underlying reasons for recent protests in Baltimore and other cities.
By Associated Press on Publish Date May 4, 2015. Photo by Stephen Crowley/The New York Times.
In the aftermath of racially charged unrest in places like Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and New York, Mr. Obama came to the Bronx on Monday for the announcement of a new nonprofit organization that is being spun off from his White House initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Staked by more than $80 million in commitments from corporations and other donors, the new group, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, will in effect provide the nucleus for Mr. Obama’s post-presidency, which will begin in January 2017.
“This will remain a mission for me and for Michelle not just for the rest of my presidency but for the rest of my life,” Mr. Obama said. “And the reason is simple,” he added. Referring to some of the youths he had just met, he said: “We see ourselves in these young men. I grew up without a dad. I grew up lost sometimes and adrift, not having a sense of a clear path. The only difference between me and a lot of other young men in this neighborhood and all across the country is that I grew up in an environment that was a little more forgiving.”
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Organizers said the new alliance already had financial pledges from companies like American Express, Deloitte, Discovery Communications and News Corporation. The money will be used to help companies address obstacles facing young black and Hispanic men, provide grants to programs for disadvantaged youths, and help communities aid their populations.
Joe Echevarria, a former chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, will lead the alliance, and among those on its leadership team or advisory group are executives at PepsiCo, News Corporation, Sprint, BET and Prudential Group Insurance; former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey; former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; the music star John Legend; the retired athletes Alonzo Mourning, Jerome Bettis and Shaquille O’Neal; and the mayors of Indianapolis, Sacramento and Philadelphia.
The alliance, while nominally independent of the White House, may face some of the same questions confronting former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins another presidential campaign. Some of those donating to the alliance may have interests in government action, and skeptics may wonder whether they are trying to curry favor with the president by contributing.
“The Obama administration will have no role in deciding how donations are screened and what criteria they’ll set at the alliance for donor policies, because it’s an entirely separate entity,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One en route to New York. But he added, “I’m confident that the members of the board are well aware of the president’s commitment to transparency.”
The alliance was in the works before the disturbances last week after the death of Freddie Gray, the black man who suffered fatal injuries while in police custody in Baltimore, but it reflected the evolution of Mr. Obama’s presidency. For him, in a way, it is coming back to issues that animated him as a young community organizer and politician. It was his own struggle with race and identity, captured in his youthful memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” that stood him apart from other presidential aspirants.
But that was a side of him that he kept largely to himself through the first years of his presidency while he focused on other priorities like turning the economy around, expanding government-subsidized health care and avoiding electoral land mines en route to re-election.
After securing a second term, Mr. Obama appeared more emboldened. Just a month after his 2013 inauguration, he talked passionately about opportunity and race with a group of teenage boys in Chicago, a moment aides point to as perhaps the first time he had spoken about these issues in such a personal, powerful way as president. A few months later, he publicly lamented the death of Trayvon Martin, a black Florida teenager, saying that “could have been me 35 years ago.”
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President Obama on Monday with Darinel Montero, a student at Bronx International High School who introduced him before remarks at Lehman College in the Bronx.Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
That case, along with public ruptures of anger over police shootings in Ferguson and elsewhere, have pushed the issue of race and law enforcement onto the public agenda. Aides said they imagined that with his presidency in its final stages, Mr. Obama might be thinking more about what comes next and causes he can advance as a private citizen.
That is not to say that his public discussion of these issues has been universally welcomed. Some conservatives said he had made matters worse by seeming in their view to blame police officers in some of the disputed cases.
“President Obama, when he was elected, could have been a unifying leader,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican candidate for president, said at a forum last week. “He has made decisions that I think have inflamed racial tensions.”
On the other side of the ideological spectrum, some liberal African-American activists have complained that Mr. Obama has not done enough to help downtrodden communities. While he is speaking out more, these critics argue, he has hardly used the power of the presidency to make the sort of radical change they say is necessary.
The line Mr. Obama has tried to straddle has been a serrated one. He condemns police brutality as he defends most officers as honorable. He condemns “criminals and thugs” who looted in Baltimore while expressing empathy with those trapped in a cycle of poverty and hopelessness.
In the Bronx on Monday, Mr. Obama bemoaned the death of Brian Moore, a plainclothes New York police officer who had died earlier in the day after being shot in the head Saturday on a Queens street. Most police officers are “good and honest and fair and care deeply about their communities,” even as they put their lives on the line, Mr. Obama said.
“Which is why in addressing the issues in Baltimore or Ferguson or New York, the point I made was that if we’re just looking at policing, we’re looking at it too narrowly,” he added. “If we ask the police to simply contain and control problems that we ourselves have been unwilling to invest and solve, that’s not fair to the communities, it’s not fair to the police.”
Moreover, if society writes off some people, he said, “that’s not the kind of country I want to live in; that’s not what America is about.”
His message to young men like Malachi Hernandez, who attends Boston Latin Academy in Massachusetts, is not to give up.
“I want you to know you matter,” he said. “You matter to us.”
Obama Finds a Bolder Voice on Race Issues
François Michelin, Head of Tire Company, Dies at 88
Under Mr. Michelin’s leadership, which ended when he left the company in 2002, the Michelin Group became the world’s biggest tire maker, establishing a big presence in the United States and other major markets overseas.
François Michelin, Head of Tire Company, Dies at 88
Negative View of U.S. Race Relations Grows, Poll Finds
Public perceptions of race relations in America have grown substantially more negative in the aftermath of the death of a young black man who was injured while in police custody in Baltimore and the subsequent unrest, far eclipsing the sentiment recorded in the wake of turmoil in Ferguson, Mo., last summer.
The poll findings highlight the challenges for local leaders and police officials in trying to maintain order while sustaining faith in the criminal justice system in a racially polarized nation.
Sixty-one percent of Americans now say race relations in this country are generally bad. That figure is up sharply from 44 percent after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown and the unrest that followed in Ferguson in August, and 43 percent in December. In a CBS News poll just two months ago, 38 percent said race relations were generally bad. Current views are by far the worst of Barack Obama’s presidency.
The negative sentiment is echoed by broad majorities of blacks and whites alike, a stark change from earlier this year, when 58 percent of blacks thought race relations were bad, but just 35 percent of whites agreed. In August, 48 percent of blacks and 41 percent of whites said they felt that way.
Looking ahead, 44 percent of Americans think race relations are worsening, up from 36 percent in December. Forty-one percent of blacks and 46 percent of whites think so. Pessimism among whites has increased 10 points since December.
Do you think race relations in the United States are getting better, getting worse or staying about the same?
Getting worse
Staying the same
Getting better
Don't know/No answer
All adults
Whites
Blacks
44%
37
17
46
36
16
41
42
15
The poll finds that profound racial divisions in views of how the police use deadly force remain. Blacks are more than twice as likely to say police in most communities are more apt to use deadly force against a black person — 79 percent of blacks say so compared with 37 percent of whites. A slim majority of whites say race is not a factor in a police officer’s decision to use deadly force.
Overall, 44 percent of Americans say deadly force is more likely to be used against a black person, up from 37 percent in August and 40 percent in December.
Blacks also remain far more likely than whites to say they feel mostly anxious about the police in their community. Forty-two percent say so, while 51 percent feel mostly safe. Among whites, 8 in 10 feel mostly safe.
One proposal to address the matter — having on-duty police officers wear body cameras — receives overwhelming support. More than 9 in 10 whites and blacks alike favor it.
In general, do you think the police in most communities are more likely to use deadly force against a black person, or more likely to use it against a white person, or don’t you think race affects police use of deadly force?
Police more likely to use deadly force against a black person
Police more likely to use deadly force against a white person
Do you favor or oppose on-duty police officers wearing video cameras that would record events and actions as they occur?
Favor
Oppose
Don't know/No answer
All adults
Whites
Blacks
92%
93%
93%
6%
5%
5%
2%
2%
2%
Asked specifically about the situation in Baltimore, most Americans expressed at least some confidence that the investigation by local authorities would be conducted fairly. But while nearly two-thirds of whites think so, fewer than half of blacks agree. Still, more blacks are confident now than were in August regarding the investigation in Ferguson. On Friday, six members of the police force involved in the arrest of Mr. Gray were charged with serious offenses, including manslaughter. The poll was conducted Thursday through Sunday; results from before charges were announced are similar to those from after.
Reaction to the recent turmoil in Baltimore, however, is similar among blacks and whites. Most Americans, 61 percent, say the unrest after Mr. Gray’s death was not justified. That includes 64 percent of whites and 57 percent of blacks.
As you may know, a Baltimore man, Freddie Gray, recently died after being in the custody of the Baltimore police. How much confidence do you have that the investigation by local authorities into this matter will be conducted fairly?
A lot
Some
Not much
None at all
Don't know/No answer
All adults
Whites
Blacks
29%
31
22
14
5
31
33
20
11
5
20
26
30
22
In general, do you think the unrest in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray was justified, or do you think the unrest was not justified?
Justified
Not justified
Don't know/No answer
All adults
Whites
Blacks
28%
61
11
26
64
11
37
57
6
The nationwide poll was conducted from April 30 to May 3 on landlines and cellphones with 1,027 adults, including 793 whites and 128 blacks. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points for all adults, four percentage points for whites and nine percentage points for blacks. See the full poll here.
Negative View of U.S. Race Relations Grows, Poll Finds
Betsy von Furstenberg, Baroness and Versatile Actress, Dies at 83
Ms. von Furstenberg made her debut in the movies and on the Broadway stage in the early 1950s as a teenager and later reinvented herself as a television actress, writer and philanthropist.
Betsy von Furstenberg, Baroness and Versatile Actress, Dies at 83
From T Magazine: Street Lit’s Power Couple
THE WRITERS ASHLEY AND JAQUAVIS COLEMAN know the value of a good curtain-raiser. The couple have co-authored dozens of novels, and they like to start them with a bang: a headlong action sequence, a blast of violence or sex that rocks readers back on their heels. But the Colemans concede they would be hard-pressed to dream up anything more gripping than their own real-life opening scene.
In the summer of 2001, JaQuavis Coleman was a 16-year-old foster child in Flint, Mich., the former auto-manufacturing mecca that had devolved, in the wake of General Motors’ plant closures, into one of the country’s most dangerous cities, with a decimated economy and a violent crime rate more than three times the national average. When JaQuavis was 8, social services had removed him from his mother’s home. He spent years bouncing between foster families. At 16, JaQuavis was also a businessman: a crack dealer with a network of street-corner peddlers in his employ.
One day that summer, JaQuavis met a fellow dealer in a parking lot on Flint’s west side. He was there to make a bulk sale of a quarter-brick, or “nine-piece” — a nine-ounce parcel of cocaine, with a street value of about $11,000. In the middle of the transaction, JaQuavis heard the telltale chirp of a walkie-talkie. His customer, he now realized, was an undercover policeman. JaQuavis jumped into his car and spun out onto the road, with two unmarked police cars in pursuit. He didn’t want to get into a high-speed chase, so he whipped his car into a church parking lot and made a run for it, darting into an alleyway behind a row of small houses, where he tossed the quarter-brick into some bushes. When JaQuavis reached the small residential street on the other side of the houses, he was greeted by the police, who handcuffed him and went to search behind the houses where, they told him, they were certain he had ditched the drugs. JaQuavis had been dealing since he was 12, had amassed more than $100,000 and had never been arrested. Now, he thought: It’s over.
But when the police looked in the bushes, they couldn’t find any cocaine. They interrogated JaQuavis, who denied having ever possessed or sold drugs. They combed the backyard alley some more. After an hour of fruitless efforts, the police were forced to unlock the handcuffs and release their suspect.
JaQuavis was baffled by the turn of events until the next day, when he received a phone call. The previous afternoon, a 15-year-old girl had been sitting in her home on the west side of Flint when she heard sirens. She looked out of the window of her bedroom, and watched a young man throw a package in the bushes behind her house. She recognized him. He was a high school classmate — a handsome, charismatic boy whom she had admired from afar. The girl crept outside and grabbed the bundle, which she hid in her basement. “I have something that belongs to you,” Ashley Snell told JaQuavis Coleman when she reached him by phone. “You wanna come over here and pick it up?”
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Three of the nearly 50 works of urban fiction published by the Colemans over the last decade, often featuring drug deals, violence, sex and a brash kind of feminism.Credit Marko Metzinger
In the Colemans’ first novel, “Dirty Money” (2005), they told a version of this story. The outline was the same: the drug deal gone bad, the dope chucked in the bushes, the fateful phone call. To the extent that the authors took poetic license, it was to tone down the meet-cute improbability of the true-life events. In “Dirty Money,” the girl, Anari, and the crack dealer, Maurice, circle each other warily for a year or so before coupling up. But the facts of Ashley and JaQuavis’s romance outstripped pulp fiction. They fell in love more or less at first sight, moved into their own apartment while still in high school and were married in 2008. “We were together from the day we met,” Ashley says. “I don’t think we’ve spent more than a week apart in total over the past 14 years.”
That partnership turned out to be creative and entrepreneurial as well as romantic. Over the past decade, the Colemans have published nearly 50 books, sometimes as solo writers, sometimes under pseudonyms, but usually as collaborators with a byline that has become a trusted brand: “Ashley & JaQuavis.” They are marquee stars of urban fiction, or street lit, a genre whose inner-city settings and lurid mix of crime, sex and sensationalism have earned it comparisons to gangsta rap. The emergence of street lit is one of the big stories in recent American publishing, a juggernaut that has generated huge sales by catering to a readership — young, black and, for the most part, female — that historically has been ill-served by the book business. But the genre is also widely maligned. Street lit is subject to a kind of triple snobbery: scorned by literati who look down on genre fiction generally, ignored by a white publishing establishment that remains largely indifferent to black books and disparaged by African-American intellectuals for poor writing, coarse values and trafficking in racial stereotypes.
But if a certain kind of cultural prestige is shut off to the Colemans, they have reaped other rewards. They’ve built a large and loyal fan base, which gobbles up the new Ashley & JaQuavis titles that arrive every few months. Many of those books are sold at street-corner stands and other off-the-grid venues in African-American neighborhoods, a literary gray market that doesn’t register a blip on best-seller tallies. Yet the Colemans’ most popular series now regularly crack the trade fiction best-seller lists of The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. For years, the pair had no literary agent; they sold hundreds of thousands of books without banking a penny in royalties. Still, they have earned millions of dollars, almost exclusively from cash-for-manuscript deals negotiated directly with independent publishing houses. In short, though little known outside of the world of urban fiction, the Colemans are one of America’s most successful literary couples, a distinction they’ve achieved, they insist, because of their work’s gritty authenticity and their devotion to a primal literary virtue: the power of the ripping yarn.
“When you read our books, you’re gonna realize: ‘Ashley & JaQuavis are storytellers,’ ” says Ashley. “Our tales will get your heart pounding.”
THE COLEMANS’ HOME BASE — the cottage from which they operate their cottage industry — is a spacious four-bedroom house in a genteel suburb about 35 miles north of downtown Detroit. The house is plush, but when I visited this past winter, it was sparsely appointed. The couple had just recently moved in, and had only had time to fully furnish the bedroom of their 4-year-old son, Quaye.
In conversation, Ashley and JaQuavis exude both modesty and bravado: gratitude for their good fortune and bootstrappers’ pride in having made their own luck. They talk a lot about their time in the trenches, the years they spent as a drug dealer and “ride-or-die girl” tandem. In Flint they learned to “grind hard.” Writing, they say, is merely a more elevated kind of grind.
“Instead of hitting the block like we used to, we hit the laptops,” says Ashley. “I know what every word is worth. So while I’m writing, I’m like: ‘Okay, there’s a hundred dollars. There’s a thousand dollars. There’s five thousand dollars.’ ”
They maintain a rigorous regimen. They each try to write 5,000 words per day, five days a week. The writers stagger their shifts: JaQuavis goes to bed at 7 p.m. and wakes up early, around 3 or 4 in the morning, to work while his wife and child sleep. Ashley writes during the day, often in libraries or at Starbucks.
They divide the labor in other ways. Chapters are divvied up more or less equally, with tasks assigned according to individual strengths. (JaQuavis typically handles character development. Ashley loves writing murder scenes.) The results are stitched together, with no editorial interference from one author in the other’s text. The real work, they contend, is the brainstorming. The Colemans spend weeks mapping out their plot-driven books — long conversations that turn into elaborate diagrams on dry-erase boards. “JaQuavis and I are so close, it makes the process real easy,” says Ashley. “Sometimes when I’m thinking of something, a plot point, he’ll say it out loud, and I’m like: ‘Wait — did I say that?’ ”
Their collaboration developed by accident, and on the fly. Both were bookish teenagers. Ashley read lots of Judy Blume and John Grisham; JaQuavis liked Shakespeare, Richard Wright and “Atlas Shrugged.” (Their first official date was at a Borders bookstore, where Ashley bought “The Coldest Winter Ever,” the Sister Souljah novel often credited with kick-starting the contemporary street-lit movement.) In 2003, Ashley, then 17, was forced to terminate an ectopic pregnancy. She was bedridden for three weeks, and to provide distraction and boost her spirits, JaQuavis challenged his girlfriend to a writing contest. “She just wasn’t talking. She was laying in bed. I said, ‘You know what? I bet you I could write a better book than you.’ My wife is real competitive. So I said, ‘Yo, all right, $500 bet.’ And I saw her eyes spark, like, ‘What?! You can’t write no better book than me!’ So I wrote about three chapters. She wrote about three chapters. Two days later, we switched.”
The result, hammered out in a few days, would become “Dirty Money.” Two years later, when Ashley and JaQuavis were students at Ferris State University in Western Michigan, they sold the manuscript to Urban Books, a street-lit imprint founded by the best-selling author Carl Weber. At the time, JaQuavis was still making his living selling drugs. When Ashley got the phone call informing her that their book had been bought, she assumed they’d hit it big, and flushed more than $10,000 worth of cocaine down the toilet. Their advance was a mere $4,000.
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The roots of street lit, found in the midcentury detective novels of Chester Himes and the ‘60s and ‘70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines.Credit Marko Metzinger
Those advances would soon increase, eventually reaching five and six figures. The Colemans built their career, JaQuavis says, in a manner that made sense to him as a veteran dope peddler: by flooding the street with product. From the start, they were prolific, churning out books at a rate of four or five a year. Their novels made their way into stores; the now-defunct chain Waldenbooks, which had stores in urban areas typically bypassed by booksellers, was a major engine of the street-lit market. But Ashley and JaQuavis took advantage of distribution channels established by pioneering urban fiction authors such as Teri Woods and Vickie Stringer, and a network of street-corner tables, magazine stands, corner shops and bodegas. Like rappers who establish their bona fides with gray-market mixtapes, street-lit authors use this system to circumnavigate industry gatekeepers, bringing their work straight to the genre’s core readership. But urban fiction has other aficionados, in less likely places. “Our books are so popular in the prison system,” JaQuavis says. “We’re banned in certain penitentiaries. Inmates fight over the books — there are incidents, you know? I have loved ones in jail, and they’re like: ‘Yo, your books can’t come in here. It’s against the rules.’ ”
The appeal of the Colemans’ work is not hard to fathom. The books are formulaic and taut; they deliver the expected goods efficiently and exuberantly. The titles telegraph the contents: “Diary of a Street Diva,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Murderville.” The novels serve up a stream of explicit sex and violence in a slangy, tangy, profane voice. In Ashley & JaQuavis’s books people don’t get killed: they get “popped,” “laid out,” get their “cap twisted back.” The smut is constant, with emphasis on the earthy, sticky, olfactory particulars. Romance novel clichés — shuddering orgasms, heroic carnal feats, superlative sexual skill sets — are rendered in the Colemans’ punchy patois.
Subtlety, in other words, isn’t Ashley & JaQuavis’s forte. But their books do have a grainy specificity. In “The Cartel” (2008), the first novel in the Colemans’ best-selling saga of a Miami drug syndicate, they catch the sights and smells of a crack workshop in a housing project: the nostril-stinging scent of cocaine and baking soda bubbling on stovetops; the teams of women, stripped naked except for hospital masks so they can’t pilfer the merchandise, “cutting up the cooked coke on the round wood table.” The subject matter is dark, but the Colemans’ tone is not quite noir. Even in the grimmest scenes, the mood is high-spirited, with the writers palpably relishing the lewd and gory details: the bodies writhing in boudoirs and crumpling under volleys of bullets, the geysers of blood and other bodily fluids.
The luridness of street lit has made it a flashpoint, inciting controversy reminiscent of the hip-hop culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. But the street-lit debate touches deeper historical roots, reviving decades-old arguments in black literary circles about the mandate to uplift the race and present wholesome images of African-Americans. In 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois slammed the “licentiousness” of “Home to Harlem,” Claude McKay’s rollicking novel of Harlem nightlife. McKay’s book, Du Bois wrote, “for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Similar sentiments have greeted 21st-century street lit. In a 2006 New York Times Op-Ed essay, the journalist and author Nick Chiles decried “the sexualization and degradation of black fiction.” African-American bookstores, Chiles complained, are “overrun with novels that . . . appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures — as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner.”
Copulating paperbacks aside, it’s clear that the street-lit debate is about more than literature, touching on questions of paternalism versus populism, and on middle-class anxieties about the black underclass. “It’s part and parcel of black elites’ efforts to define not only a literary tradition, but a racial politics,” said Kinohi Nishikawa, an assistant professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University. “There has always been a sense that because African-Americans’ opportunities to represent themselves are so limited in the first place, any hint of criminality or salaciousness would necessarily be a knock on the entire racial politics. One of the pressing debates about African-American literature today is: If we can’t include writers like Ashley & JaQuavis, to what extent is the foundation of our thinking about black literature faulty? Is it just a literature for elites? Or can it be inclusive, bringing urban fiction under the purview of our umbrella term ‘African-American literature’?”
Defenders of street lit note that the genre has a pedigree: a tradition of black pulp fiction that stretches from Chester Himes, the midcentury author of hardboiled Harlem detective stories, to the 1960s and ’70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, to the current wave of urban fiction authors. Others argue for street lit as a social good, noting that it attracts a large audience that might otherwise never read at all. Scholars like Nishikawa link street lit to recent studies showing increased reading among African-Americans. A 2014 Pew Research Center report found that a greater percentage of black Americans are book readers than whites or Latinos.
For their part, the Colemans place their work in the broader black literary tradition. “You have Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, James Baldwin — all of these traditional black writers, who wrote about the struggles of racism, injustice, inequality,” says Ashley. “We’re writing about the struggle as it happens now. It’s just a different struggle. I’m telling my story. I’m telling the struggle of a black girl from Flint, Michigan, who grew up on welfare.”
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The Colemans in their new four-bedroom house in the northern suburbs of Detroit.Credit Courtesy of Ashley and JaQuavis Coleman
Perhaps there is a high-minded case to be made for street lit. But the virtues of Ashley & JaQuavis’s work are more basic. Their novels do lack literary polish. The writing is not graceful; there are passages of clunky exposition and sex scenes that induce guffaws and eye rolls. But the pleasure quotient is high. The books flaunt a garish brand of feminism, with women characters cast not just as vixens, but also as gangsters — cold-blooded killers, “murder mamas.” The stories are exceptionally well-plotted. “The Cartel” opens by introducing its hero, the crime boss Carter Diamond; on page 9, a gunshot spatters Diamond’s brain across the interior of a police cruiser. The book then flashes back seven years and begins to hurtle forward again — a bullet train, whizzing readers through shifting alliances, romantic entanglements and betrayals, kidnappings, shootouts with Haitian and Dominican gangsters, and a cliffhanger closing scene that leaves the novel’s heroine tied to a chair in a basement, gruesomely tortured to the edge of death. Ashley & JaQuavis’s books are not Ralph Ellison, certainly, but they build up quite a head of steam. They move.
The Colemans are moving themselves these days. They recently signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press, which will bring out the next installment in the “Cartel” series as well as new solo series by both writers. The St. Martin’s deal is both lucrative and legitimizing — a validation of Ashley and JaQuavis’s work by one of publishing’s most venerable houses. The Colemans’ ambitions have grown, as well. A recent trilogy, “Murderville,” tackles human trafficking and the blood-diamond industry in West Africa, with storylines that sweep from Sierra Leone to Mexico to Los Angeles. Increasingly, Ashley & JaQuavis are leaning on research — traveling to far-flung settings and hitting the books in the libraries — and spending less time mining their own rough-and-tumble past.
But Flint remains a source of inspiration. One evening not long ago, JaQuavis led me on a tour of his hometown: a popular roadside bar; the parking lot where he met the undercover cop for the ill-fated drug deal; Ashley’s old house, the site of his almost-arrest. He took me to a ramshackle vehicle repair shop on Flint’s west side, where he worked as a kid, washing cars. He showed me a bathroom at the rear of the garage, where, at age 12, he sneaked away to inspect the first “boulder” of crack that he ever sold. A spray-painted sign on the garage wall, which JaQuavis remembered from his time at the car wash, offered words of warning:
WHAT EVERY YOUNG MAN SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT USING A GUN:
MURDER . . . 30 Years
ARMED ROBBERY . . . 15 Years
ASSAULT . . . 15 Years
RAPE . . . 20 Years
POSSESSION . . . 5 Years
JACKING . . . 20 YEARS
“We still love Flint, Michigan,” JaQuavis says. “It’s so seedy, so treacherous. But there’s some heart in this city. This is where it all started, selling books out the box. In the days when we would get those little $40,000 advances, they’d send us a couple boxes of books for free. We would hit the streets to sell our books, right out of the car trunk. It was a hustle. It still is.”
One old neighborhood asset that the Colemans have not shaken off is swagger. “My wife is the best female writer in the game,” JaQuavis told me. “I believe I’m the best male writer in the game. I’m sleeping next to the best writer in the world. And she’s doing the same.”
From T Magazine: Street Lit’s Power Couple
Calvin Peete, 71, a Racial Pioneer on the PGA Tour, Is Dead
With 12 tournament victories in his career, Mr. Peete was the most successful black professional golfer before Tiger Woods.
Calvin Peete, 71, a Racial Pioneer on the PGA Tour, Is Dead
ay 4, 2015 ‘Game of Thrones’ Q&A: Keisha Castle-Hughes on the Tao of the Sand Snakes
“It was really nice to play with other women and not have this underlying tone of being at each other’s throats.”
ay 4, 2015 ‘Game of Thrones’ Q&A: Keisha Castle-Hughes on the Tao of the Sand Snakes
Meet Mago, Former Heavyweight
GREENWICH, Conn. — Mago is in the bedroom. You can go in.
The big man lies on a hospital bed with his bare feet scraping its bottom rail. His head is propped on a scarlet pillow, the left temple dented, the right side paralyzed. His dark hair is kept just long enough to conceal the scars.
The occasional sounds he makes are understood only by his wife, but he still has that punctuating left hand. In slow motion, the fingers curl and close. A thumbs-up greeting.
Hello, Mago.
This is Magomed Abdusalamov, 34, also known as the Russian Tyson, also known as Mago. He is a former heavyweight boxer who scored four knockouts and 14 technical knockouts in his first 18 professional fights. He preferred to stand between rounds. Sitting conveyed weakness.
But Mago lost his 19th fight, his big chance, at the packed Theater at Madison Square Garden in November 2013. His 19th decision, and his last.
Now here he is, in a small bedroom in a working-class neighborhood in Greenwich, in a modest house his family rents cheap from a devoted friend. The air-pressure machine for his mattress hums like an expectant crowd.
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Mike Perez, left, and Magomed Abdusalamov during the fight in which Abdusalamov was injured.Credit Joe Camporeale/USA Today Sports, via Reuters
Today is like any other day, except for those days when he is hurried in crisis to the hospital. Every three hours during the night, his slight wife, Bakanay, 28, has risen to turn his 6-foot-3 body — 210 pounds of dead weight. It has to be done. Infections of the gaping bedsore above his tailbone have nearly killed him.
Then, with the help of a young caretaker, Baka has gotten two of their daughters off to elementary school and settled down the toddler. Yes, Mago and Baka are blessed with all girls, but they had also hoped for a son someday.
They feed Mago as they clean him; it’s easier that way. For breakfast, which comes with a side of crushed antiseizure pills, he likes oatmeal with a squirt of Hershey’s chocolate syrup. But even oatmeal must be puréed and fed to him by spoon.
He opens his mouth to indicate more, the way a baby does. But his paralysis has made everything a choking hazard. His water needs a stirring of powdered food thickener, and still he chokes — eh-eh-eh — as he tries to cough up what will not go down.
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Mago used to drink only water. No alcohol. Not even soda. A sip of juice would be as far as he dared. Now even water betrays him.
With the caretaker’s help, Baka uses a washcloth and soap to clean his body and shampoo his hair. How handsome still, she has thought. Sometimes, in the night, she leaves the bedroom to watch old videos, just to hear again his voice in the fullness of life. She cries, wipes her eyes and returns, feigning happiness. Mago must never see her sad.
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Abdusalamov's hand being massaged.Credit Ángel Franco/The New York Times
When Baka finishes, Mago is cleanshaven and fresh down to his trimmed and filed toenails. “I want him to look good,” she says.
Theirs was an arranged Muslim marriage in Makhachkala, in the Russian republic of Dagestan. He was 23, she was 18 and their future hinged on boxing. Sometimes they would shadowbox in love, her David to his Goliath. You are so strong, he would tell her.
His father once told him he could either be a bandit or an athlete, but if he chose banditry, “I will kill you.” This paternal advice, Mago later told The Ventura County Reporter, “made it a very easy decision for me.”
Mago won against mediocre competition, in Moscow and Hollywood, Fla., in Las Vegas and Johnstown, Pa. He was knocked down only once, and even then, it surprised more than hurt. He scored a technical knockout in the next round.
It all led up to this: the undercard at the Garden, Mike Perez vs. Magomed Abdusalamov, 10 rounds, on HBO. A win, he believed, would improve his chances of taking on the heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, who sat in the crowd of 4,600 with his fiancée, the actress Hayden Panettiere, watching.
Wearing black-and-red trunks and a green mouth guard, Mago went to work. But in the first round, a hard forearm to his left cheek rocked him. At the bell, he returned to his corner, and this time, he sat down. “I think it’s broken,” he repeatedly said in Russian.
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Bakanay Abdusalamova, Abdusalamov's wife, and her injured husband and a masseur in the background.Credit Ángel Franco/The New York Times
Maybe at that point, somebody — the referee, the ringside doctors, his handlers — should have stopped the fight, under a guiding principle: better one punch too early than one punch too late. But the bloody trade of blows continued into the seventh, eighth, ninth, a hand and orbital bone broken, his face transforming.
Meanwhile, in the family’s apartment in Miami, Baka forced herself to watch the broadcast. She could see it in his swollen eyes. Something was off.
After the final round, Perez raised his tattooed arms in victory, and Mago wandered off in a fog. He had taken 312 punches in about 40 minutes, for a purse of $40,000.
In the locker room, doctors sutured a cut above Mago’s left eye and tested his cognitive abilities. He did not do well. The ambulance that waits in expectation at every fight was not summoned by boxing officials.
Blood was pooling in Mago’s cranial cavity as he left the Garden. He vomited on the pavement while his handlers flagged a taxi to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital. There, doctors induced a coma and removed part of his skull to drain fluids and ease the swelling.
Then came the stroke.
Photo
A championship belt belonging to Abdusalamov and a card from one of his daughters.Credit Ángel Franco/The New York Times
It is lunchtime now, and the aroma of puréed beef and potatoes lingers. So do the questions.
How will Mago and Baka pay the $2 million in medical bills they owe? What if their friend can no longer offer them this home? Will they win their lawsuits against the five ringside doctors, the referee, and a New York State boxing inspector? What about Mago’s future care?
Most of all: Is this it?
A napkin rests on Mago’s chest. As another spoonful of mush approaches, he opens his mouth, half-swallows, chokes, and coughs until it clears. Eh-eh-eh. Sometimes he turns bluish, but Baka never shows fear. Always happy for Mago.
Some days he is wheeled out for physical therapy or speech therapy. Today, two massage therapists come to knead his half-limp body like a pair of skilled corner men.
Soon, Mago will doze. Then his three daughters, ages 2, 6 and 9, will descend upon him to talk of their day. Not long ago, the oldest lugged his championship belt to school for a proud show-and-tell moment. Her classmates were amazed at the weight of it.
Then, tonight, there will be more puréed food and pulverized medication, more coughing, and more tender care from his wife, before sleep comes.
Goodbye, Mago.
He half-smiles, raises his one good hand, and forms a fist.
Meet Mago, Former Heavyweight
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Ben Carson Says He’ll Seek 2016 G.O.P. Nomination
ate in February, Dr. Ben Carson, the celebrated pediatric neurosurgeon turned political insurrectionist, was trying to check off another box on his presidential-campaign to-do list: hiring a press secretary. The lead prospect, a public-relations specialist named Deana Bass, had come to meet him at the dimly lit Capitol Hill office of Carson’s confidant and business manager, Armstrong Williams. Carson sat back and scrutinized her from behind a small granite table, as life-size cardboard cutouts of more conventional politicians — President Obama, with a tight smile, and Senator John McCain, glowering — loomed behind each of his shoulders. (The mock $3 bill someone had left on a table in Williams’s waiting room undercut any notion that this was a bipartisan zone; it featured Obama wearing a turban.)
Bass seemed momentarily speechless, and not just because no one had warned her that a New York Times reporter would be sitting in on her job interview. Though she knew Williams — a jack-of-all-trades entrepreneur who owns several television stations and a public-affairs business and who hosts a daily talk-radio show — through Washington’s small circle of black conservatives, the two hadn’t spoken in years until he called her two days earlier. He had been struggling to come up with the perfect national spokesperson, he told her. Then, at the gym, her name popped into his head; Williams was fairly certain she was the one. Sitting across from a likely candidate for president, Bass was adjusting to the idea that her life might be about to take a sudden chaotic turn.
“It’s like getting the most random call on a Monday that you simply do not see coming,” she said. “Oftentimes, that is how the Lord works.”
His life in brain surgery
has prepared him for the
presidency, he maintains,
better than lives in
politics have for his rivals.
Carson concurred: “It’s always how he works in my life.” Carson is soft-spoken and often talks with his eyes half closed, frequently punctuating his sentences with a small laugh, even if the humor of his statement is not readily apparent. Bass told Carson that she had been a Republican staff member on Capitol Hill then worked for the Republican National Committee. In 2007 she started a Christian public-relations firm with her sister. She enjoyed working on the Hill, she said, but the pay wasn’t as high as the hours were long. “We figured that we worked like slaves for other people, and we wanted to work for ourselves.”
Carson stopped her. “You know you can’t mention that word, right?” Carson waited a beat, then laughed, and Williams and Bass joined in. He was getting to the point; he needed a professional who could help him check his penchant for creating uncontrolled controversy just by talking.
The Ben Carson movement began in 2013, when Carson, a neurosurgeon, whose operating-room prowess and up-from-poverty back story had made him the subject of a television movie and a regular on the inspirational-speaking circuit, was invited to address the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. With Barack Obama sitting just two seats away, Carson warned that “moral decay” and “fiscal irresponsibility” could destroy America just as it did ancient Rome. He proposed a substitute for Obamacare — Health Savings Accounts, which, he said, would end any talk of “death panels” — and a flat-tax based on the concept of tithing. His address, combined with the president’s stony reaction, was a smash with Republican activists. Speaking and interview requests flooded in. Carson, then 61, announced his planned retirement a few weeks later, freeing his calendar to accept just about all of them. In the months that followed, his rhetoric became increasingly strident. The claim that drew the most attention, perhaps, was that Obamacare was “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”
Bass’s own use of the word prompted Carson to ask her what she thought about that incident. She considered for a moment.
“If you want to reach people and have them even understand what you’re saying, there is a way to do it, without that hyperbole, that might be. . . . ” She paused. “I just think it’s important not to shut people off before they —”
Carson jumped in. “That doesn’t allow them to hear what you’re saying?”
Bass nodded.
Likening Obamacare to slavery — and slavery was incomparably worse, Carson said — had its political advantages for a candidacy like his. It was the kind of statement that stoked the angriest of the Republican voters: conservative stalwarts who can’t hear enough bad things about Obama. This, in turn, led to more talk-radio and Fox News appearances, more book sales, more donations to the super PAC started in his name, more support in the polls. (The day before the meeting, one poll of Republican voters showed Carson statistically tied for first place with Jeb Bush and Scott Walker.)
Rhetorical excess was good for business, but Carson now wants to be seen as more than a novelty candidate. He has come to learn that such extreme analogies, while true to his views, aren’t especially presidential. They alienate more moderate voters and, perhaps even more damaging, reinforce the impression that he is not “serious” — that he is another Herman Cain, the black former Godfather’s Pizza chief executive who rose to the top of the early presidential polls in 2011 but then bowed out before the Iowa caucuses, largely because of leaked allegations of sexual misconduct, which he denied but from which he never recovered. Cain lingers as a cautionary tale for the party as much as for a right-leaning candidate like Carson. The fact that Cain, with his folksy sayings (“shucky ducky”) and misnomers (“Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan”), reached the top of the national polls — much less that he was eventually followed there by the likes of Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, who all topped one or another poll in the 2012 primary season — wound up being a considerable embarrassment for the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, and for the longtime party regulars who were trying to fast-track his way to the nomination.
Carson liked Bass and, without directly saying so, made it clear the job was hers for the taking. Carson’s campaign chairman, Terry Giles — a white lawyer whose clients have included the comedian Richard Pryor and the stepson of the model Anna Nicole Smith and who helped reconcile the business interests of the descendants of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — had assembled a mostly white campaign team, including many from the 2012 Gingrich effort, and Carson wanted a person of color to speak for him. Bass said she would have to mull it over, pray about it. Carson nodded approvingly. “Pray about it,” he said. “See what you think.”
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Williams knew the party was intent on protecting the eventual 2016 nominee from the same embarrassment Romney suffered. Already, suspiciously tough articles about Carson were showing up in conservative magazines and on right-wing websites. “They’re protecting these establishment candidates,” Williams said. “This is coming from within the house. This is family.” At the very least, he wanted to make sure that Carson didn’t do their work for them. (Carson would commit another unforced error a week later, when he told CNN that homosexuality was clearly a choice, because a lot of people go in prison straight and “when they come out, they’re gay”; he later apologized.)
“We need somebody to protect him, sometimes, from himself,” he told Bass — laughing, but only half kidding.
A candidacy like Carson’s presents a new kind of problem to the establishment wing of the G.O.P., which, at least since 1980, has selected its presidential nominees with a routine efficiency that Democrats could only envy. The establishment candidate has usually been a current or former governor or senator, blandly Protestant, hailing from the moderate, big-business wing of the party (or at least friendly with it) and almost always a second-, third- or fourth-time national contender — someone who had waited “his turn.” These candidates would tack predictably to the right during the primaries to satisfy the evangelicals, deficit hawks, libertarian leaners and other inconvenient but vital constituents who made up the “base” of the party. In return, the base would, after a brief flirtation with some fantasy candidate like Steve Forbes or Pat Buchanan, “hold their noses” and deliver their votes come November. This bargain was always tenuous, of course, and when some of the furthest-right activists turned against George W. Bush, citing (among other apostasies) his expansion of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, it began to fall apart. After Barack Obama defeated McCain in 2008, the party’s once dependable base started to reconsider the wisdom of holding their noses at all.
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Republican candidates at a pre-straw-poll debate, held at Iowa State University in 2011.Credit Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
This insurgent attitude was helped along by changes in the nomination rules. In 2010, the Republican National Committee, hoping to capture the excitement of the coast-to-coast Democratic primary competition between Obama and Hillary Clinton, introduced new voting rules that required many of the early voting states to award some delegates to losing candidates, based on their shares of the vote. The proportional voting rules would encourage struggling candidates to stay in the primaries even after successive losses, as Clinton did, because they might be able to pull together enough delegates to take the nomination in a convention-floor fight or at least use them to bargain for a prime speaking slot or cabinet post.
This shift in incentives did not go unnoticed by potential 2012 candidates, nor did changes in election law that allowed billionaire donors to form super PACs in support of pet candidacies. At the same time, increasingly widespread broadband Internet access allowed candidates to reach supporters directly with video and email appeals and supporters to send money with the tap of a smartphone, making it easier than ever for individual candidates to ignore the wishes of the party.
Into this newly chaotic Republican landscape strode Mitt Romney. There could be no doubt that it was his turn, and yet his journey to the nomination was interrupted by one against-the-odds challenger after another — Cain, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul; always Ron Paul. It was easy to dismiss the 2012 primaries as a meaningless circus, but the onslaught did much more than tarnish the overall Republican brand. It also forced Romney to spend money he could have used against Obama and defend his right flank with embarrassing pandering that shadowed him through the general election. It was while trying to block a surge from Gingrich, for instance, that Romney told a debate audience that he was for the “self-deportation” of undocumented immigrants.
At the 2012 convention in Tampa, a group of longtime party hands, including Romney’s lawyer, Ben Ginsberg, gathered to discuss how to prevent a repeat of what had become known inside and outside the party as the “clown show.” Their aim was not just to protect the party but also to protect a potential President Romney from a primary challenge in 2016. They forced through new rules that would give future presumptive nominees more control over delegates in the event of a convention fight. They did away with the mandatory proportional delegate awards that encouraged long-shot candidacies. And, in a noticeably targeted effort, they raised the threshold that candidates needed to meet to enter their names into nomination, just as Ron Paul’s supporters were working to reach it. When John A. Boehner gaveled the rules in on a voice vote — a vote that many listeners heard as a tie, if not an outright loss — the hall erupted and a line of Ron Paul supporters walked off the floor in protest, along with many Tea Party members.
At a party meeting last winter, Reince Priebus, who as party chairman is charged with maintaining the support of all his constituencies, did restore some proportional primary and caucus voting, but only in states that held voting within a shortened two-week window. And he also condensed the nominating schedule to four and a half months from six months, and, for the first time required candidates to participate in a shortened debate schedule, determined by the party, not by the whims of the networks. (The panel that recommended those changes included names closely identified with the establishment — the former Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, the Mississippi committeeman Haley Barbour and, notably, Jeb Bush’s closest adviser, Sally Bradshaw.)
Grass-roots activists have complained that the condensed schedule robs nonestablishment candidates — “movement candidates” like Carson — of the extra time they need to build momentum, money and organizations. But Priebus, who says the nomination could be close to settled by April, said it helped all the party’s constituencies when the nominee was decided quickly. “We don’t need a six-month slice-and-dice festival,” Priebus said when we spoke in mid-March. “While I can’t always control everyone’s mouth, I can control how long we can kill each other.”
All the rules changes were built to sidestep the problems of 2012. But the 2016 field is shaping up to be vastly different and far larger. A new Republican hints that he or she is considering a run seemingly every week. There are moderates like Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and former Gov. George Pataki of New York; no-compromise conservatives like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania; business-wingers like the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina; one-of-a-kinds like Donald Trump — some 20 in all, a dozen or so who seem fairly serious about it. That opens the possibility of multiple candidates vying for all the major Republican constituencies, some of them possibly goaded along by super-PAC-funding billionaires, all of them trading wins and collecting delegates well into spring.
Giles says his candidate can capitalize on all that chaos. Rivals may laugh, but Giles argues that if Carson can make a respectable showing in Iowa, then win in South Carolina — or at least come in second should a home-state senator, Lindsey Graham, run — and come in second behind Bush or Senator Marco Rubio in their home state of Florida, he could be positioned to make a real run. But that would depend on avoiding pitfalls like Carson’s ill-considered comments on homosexuality. Rather than capitalizing on the chaos, Carson may only contribute to it.
Ben Carson is, in many ways, the ideal Republican presidential candidate. With a not-too-selective reading of his life story, conservative voters can — and do — see in him an inspiring, up-from-nowhere African-American who shares their beliefs, a right-wing answer to Barack Obama. Before he was born, his parents moved to Detroit from rural Tennessee as part of the second great migration. His father, Robert Solomon Carson, worked at a Cadillac factory. His mother, Sonya — who herself had grown up as one of 24 children and left school at third grade — cleaned houses. When Carson was 8, Sonya discovered that Robert was keeping a second family. She moved, with her two sons, into a rundown group house. It was in a part of town that Carson described to me as crawling with “big rats and roaches and all kinds of horrible things.” Sonya worked several jobs at a time and made up the shortfall with food stamps. (Carson has called for paring back the social safety net but not doing away with it.)
Carson recounts this story in his best-selling 1990 memoir, “Gifted Hands,” which also became the basis for a 2009 movie on TNT, starring Cuba Gooding Jr. as Carson. Raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, Carson realized that he wanted to become a physician during a church sermon about a missionary doctor who, while serving overseas, was almost attacked by thieves but found safety by putting his faith in God. When Carson, then 8, told his mother his new dream, “She said, ‘Absolutely, you could do it, you could do anything,’ ” he told me. Forced by his mother to read two extra books a week, he made it to Yale, then to medical school at the University of Michigan, where he decided to specialize in neurosurgery. He was selected for residency at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, where he was named director of pediatric neurosurgery at 33, becoming the youngest person, and the first black person, to hold the title. He drew national attention by conducting a succession of operations that had never been performed successfully, most famously planning and managing the first separation of conjoined twins connected through major blood vessels in the brain.
Carson, a two-time Jimmy Carter voter, traces his conservative political awakening to a patient he met during the Reagan years. During a routine obstetrics rotation, he found himself treating an unwed pregnant teenager who had run away from her well-to-do parents. When Carson asked her how she was getting by, she informed him she was on public assistance; this led him to ponder the fact that the government was paying for the result of what he did not view as a “wise decision.” The incident, he says, fed his growing sense that the welfare system too often saps motivation and rewards irresponsible behavior. (When we spoke, he suggested that the government should cut off assistance to would-be unwed mothers, but only after warning them that it would do so within a certain amount of time, say five years. “I bet you’d see a dramatic decrease in unwed motherhood.”)
Carson’s friends at Hopkins say they do not remember him being particularly outspoken about his conservatism. He devoted most of his public engagement to urging poor kids in bad neighborhoods to use “these fancy brains God gave us,” through weekly school visits, student hospital tours and, ultimately, a multimillion-dollar scholarship program. “His issues were always medical care for the poor, education for the poor, equal opportunity — helping the less fortunate and really inspiring them as an example,” a mentor who named him to the chief pediatrics-neurosurgery post at Hopkins, Dr. Donlin Long, told me.
Even when Carson got the chance, in 1997, to speak in front of President Bill Clinton, at the national prayer breakfast, he mostly discussed the lack of role models for black children who were not sports stars or rappers. (There was possibly an oblique reference to Clinton’s sex scandals, when he told the audience that, if they are always honest, they won’t have to worry later about “skeletons in the closet.”)
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Ben Carson at CPAC on Feb. 26 in Oxon Hill, Md.Credit Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times
In 2011, Carson’s politics took a strident turn, mirroring that of many in his party during the Obama years. “America the Beautiful,” his sixth book, which he wrote with Candy Carson, his wife of 39 years, included a get-tough-on-illegal-immigration message and offered anti-establishment praise for the Tea Party. It suggested that blacks who voted for Obama only because he was black were themselves practicing a form of racism. (Earlier this year he admitted to Buzzfeed that portions of the book were lifted directly from several sources without proper attribution.) His prayer-breakfast performance in 2013, and the extremity of his remarks in the months afterward (Obamacare is the worst thing since slavery; the United States is “very much like Nazi Germany”; allowing same-sex marriage could lead to allowing bestiality), left some of his old friends bewildered. Students at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine protested his planned convocation address there in 2013, and he eventually backed out. When I asked Carson about the view at Hopkins that he had changed, he said his themes are still the same: “hard work, self-reliance, helping other people.” If he had become more overtly political, he said, it was only because the Obama years had led him to believe that “we’re really moving in a direction that is very, very destructive.”
None of this went unnoticed by campaign professionals. In August 2013, John Philip Sousa IV and Vernon Robinson, each of whom professes to be a virtual stranger to Carson, and who had previously been active in the anti-illegal-immigration movement, started the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee. Sousa was just coming off a campaign to defend the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, Joe Arpaio, from a recall effort, and he told me that he found Carson’s lack of political experience refreshing. “We have 500 guys and gals with probably a collective 5,000 years experience, and look at the mess we’re in,” he said.
Many others in the party feel the same way. Carson’s PAC finished 2014 with more than $13 million in donations, more than Ready for Hillary. Much of its money has gone toward further fund-raising, but Sousa — the great-grandson of the famous composer — points out that their effort has already built far more than just a war chest, organizing leaders in all 99 of Iowa’s counties. Regardless, Carson credits the fund-raising success of Sousa and Robinson with persuading him to enter the race.
Very early the morning after the job interview, Carson was in a black S.U.V., heading from Washington to the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Md., where he was to give the opening candidate speech of the Conservative Political Action Conference. The event, which functions as an early tryout for Republican presidential contenders, tends to skew rightward in its audience, drawing many of the same sorts of people who shouted at Boehner in Tampa. As such, it tends to favor anti-establishment candidates, but the news leading up to this year’s event was that Jeb Bush hoped to make inroads there.
It was still dark when we set out, and I joked with Carson about the hour, telling him he’d better get used to it. He retorted that his career in pediatric brain surgery made him no stranger to early mornings. This is a big theme of Carson’s presidential pitch: that neither the rigors of the campaign nor those of the White House can faze a man who held children’s lives in his hands. His life in brain surgery has prepared him for the presidency, he maintains, better than lives in politics have for his rivals. At the very least, he says, it conditioned him against getting too worked up about any problem that isn’t life threatening. “I mean, it’s grueling, but interestingly enough, I don’t feel the pressure,” he said.
At the convention hall, we were quickly surrounded by admirers. Two women were already waiting to meet him — white, middle-aged volunteers for Carson’s super PAC, who had traveled from South Carolina. One of them, Chris Horne, was holding a dog-eared and taped Bible. A founding member of the Charleston Tea Party who went on to work for Gingrich’s successful South Carolina primary campaign in 2012, Horne lamented over the attacks that Carson was sure to face. “You served us, you served the Lord, just don’t let them steal that from you,” she said. Her friend told him, “You’ve got God behind you!” Such religious evocations trailed Carson constantly while I walked the CPAC floor with him. Evangelicals are impressed not only with his devotion to their politics but also with his career path; as one of them told me, what’s more pro-life than saving babies?
During our ride to the conference, Carson told me his speech was not looking to “feed the beast.” When his appointed time came, he kept his remarks as tame as promised. “Real compassion” meant “using our intellect” to help people “climb out of dependency and realize the American dream,” he said. The national debt is going to “destroy us,” Obamacare was about “redistribution and control,” but Republicans better come forward with their own alternative before they repeal it, he said.
Because his speech was first, and it started several minutes early, the auditorium was slow to fill. Still, the first day saw a crush of people seeking autographs and pictures as he roamed the hall. The Draft Carson committee’s 150 volunteers swarmed the auditorium, collecting emails and handing out “Run Ben Run” stickers. After a quick interview with Sean Hannity, the conservative-radio and Fox News host — his second in two days — Carson was off to Tampa.
In the hours that followed his talk, the hall offered a view in miniature of what the next 12 to 14 months might hold for the party. Chris Christie, sitting across from the tough-minded talk-radio host Laura Ingraham, boasted about his multiple vetoes of Planned Parenthood funding, his refusal to raise income taxes and his belief that “sometimes people need to be told to sit down and shut up.” Cruz, an audience favorite, warning his fellow Republicans against falling for a “squishy moderate,” declared, “Take all 125,000 I.R.S. agents and put ’em on our Southern border!” Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, surging in polls, boasted that if he could face down the 100,000 union supporters who protested his legislation limiting collective bargaining for public employees, he could certainly handle ISIS. The next day, the traditional CPAC favorite Rand Paul spoke, packing the hall with his supporters who chanted “President Paul.” He warned, counter to the overall hawkish tenor of the event, that “we should not succumb to the notion that a government inept at home will somehow become successful abroad.” But he also vowed to end foreign aid to countries whose citizens are seen burning American flags. “Not one penny more to these haters of America.”
Perhaps the defining moment came near the end of the conference, when Jeb Bush spoke. In a neat trick of political gamesmanship — and a show of establishment muscle — his team had bused in an ample cheering section for the dozens of cameras on hand for his appearance. But a small contingent of Tea Party activists and Rand Paul supporters staged a walk out. When Bush began a question-and-answer session, they turned and left the auditorium to chant “U.S.A., U.S.A.” in the hallway, led by a man in colonial garb waving a huge “Don’t Tread on Me” banner. Plenty of other detractors stayed in the hall and peppered Bush’s remarks with booing as he stood by positions unpopular with the conservative grass roots: support for the Common Core standards and an immigration overhaul that provides a “path to legal status” for undocumented immigrants. Bush took it all in good humor, but finally seemed to give up.
“For those who made an ‘oo’ sound — is that what it was? — I’m marking you down as neutral,” he said. “And I want to be your second choice.”
Bush strategists told me they would not repeat Romney’s mistakes. Of course they would love to glide to an early nomination, they said, but they are prepared for a long contest and won’t be wasting any energy bending under pressure from a Paul or a Cruz or a Carson.
No one doubts that the pressure will increase, though. Despite the best wishes of the party’s leaders, GOP primary voters have given little indication that they will narrow the field quickly.
Before I left, I spotted Newt Gingrich, himself a fleeting presidential front-runner during those strange primary days of 2012. I asked him whether he thought all the party maneuvering — all the attempts to change the rules and fast-track the process — would preclude someone from presenting the sort of outside primary challenge he had carried out in the last election.
“No,” he told me, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Look at where Ben Carson is right now.”
Jim Rutenberg is the chief political correspondent for the magazine. His most recent feature was about Megyn Kelly.
Ben Carson Says He’ll Seek 2016 G.O.P. Nomination
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