Culture

Rory Stewart, who is awfully polite about wanting to be Britain’s next prime minister, has apologized for smoking opium while walking in Afghanistan. It was politeness that got him into trouble in the first place. Stewart says he felt it would have been rude not to take a deep drag on the pipe when it was passed around at the wedding he had wandered into, as one does when one is walking in Afghanistan. What happens in Herat stays in Herat, except of course, if one of your qualifications for the top job is your stint as Prisons Minister. Not a good look, as the Pashtun say. Jeremy Hunt, another ministerial candidate to replace Theresa May, has confessed to drinking mind-altering yoghurt when traveling in Asia.

On Thursday, May 30, Morrissey was ‘canceled’. According to the Guardian, a British newspaper fond of such decrees, fans now feel ‘betrayed’ by the singer’s recent controversial and provocative statements, which have included support for Anne Marie Waters’s nationalist For Britain party. ‘Morissey [sic], what happened?’ the Guardian agonized on Twitter. But maybe they already know the answer. In just a decade, political correctness has obtained a stranglehold on Western culture. The provocateurs and counter-cultural icons of the late 20th century have been replaced by commercially compromised ‘influencers’, and artists who are carefully selected by social censors.

Although partisans of LGBT+ like to dismiss psychoanalysis as out of date, many of them fully participate in the ongoing repression of basic Freudian insights. If psychoanalysis taught us anything, it is that human sexuality is immanently perverted, traversed by sadomasochist spins and power games, that in it, pleasure is inextricably interlinked with pain. What we get from many LGBT+ ideologists is the opposite of this insight, the naive view that, if sexuality is not distorted by patriarchal or binary pressure, it becomes a happy space of authentic expression of our true selves. Suffice it to remember what happened with Girl (2018), a Belgian film about a 15-year-old girl, born in the body of a boy, who dreams of becoming a ballerina.

If Oscar Wilde were on Twitter, he might note that the only fate worse than being talked about is being canceled. Readers fortunate enough to still be dwelling on shrinking islands of civility amid the rising tide of contemporary barbarism may be forgiven for not knowing what ‘cancel culture’ is. To be canceled is to undergo the digital equivalent of people pretending that you no longer exist. Ostracism was the worst of ancient punishments, solitary confinement is the cruelest of legal modern punishments, and cancelation is the next worst thing in the lands of digitalia. Laura Loomer has been canceled. At this juncture, it may be necessary to explain who Laura Loomer is too.

About halfway through the Swedish space saga Aniara, I realized that there is no future. Or at least no alternative future for us in space. For a genre set in a distant future, space movies haven’t changed in decades. The limits of the form, and the techno-dystopian implications of the flight from reality, were mapped out in the Fifties and Sixties. The peak space movies were all made a long time ago: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983), and Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995).

James Jeffrey served in the British Army for nine years, from his commissioning as a second lieutenant shortly after 9/11 to leaving as a captain in 2010. He served in Iraq in 2004 as a tank commander with the Queen’s Royal Lancers, providing armored support to the 1st Battalion The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, followed by another tour in 2006. He deployed to Afghanistan in 2009 with the headquarters of the Welsh Guards Battle Group on Operation Herrick 10, during which the regiment’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, was killed by a Taliban IED, the first commanding officer killed in action since the 1980s Falklands War. Jeffrey now works as a writer.

The fans had been waiting months to hear the end of the story. It was the only story in town, the only story in every city, in every corner of the nation – the most important story in the world. They were desperate, needy and impatient to know how it ended: they were fans. Rumors said that a boat from England would bring the final installment of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop to America. Crowds of fans gathered at the docks in New York, or perhaps in Boston. It was true. There was a boat. A great hush spread among the crowd. At once the solitary figure of the packet’s captain appeared on deck. As the boat grew ever closer to the shore a dreadful noise began to stir amongst the fans. The captain, overcome with emotion, had tears streaming down his face.

To understand the differing status of the arts in Britain and France, compare the publishers in Bridget Jones’s Diary and Olivier Assayas’s new film, Non-Fiction. In Bridget Jones’s Diary, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) is an underwear-obsessed cad who gets his comeuppance when he is beaten up by Colin Firth. In Non-Fiction, Alain Danielson ruminates philosophically about what the ‘digital transition’ means for civilization, and indulges in plenty of Cleaver-style trifling with the staff, but gets away with both. We are reminded that ‘intellectual’ is a compliment in France but a dirty word in Britain, and that sex is dirty in Britain but intellectual in France.

A sprawling New York Times feature package this week showcases essays, photos, and snippets of nostalgia that all amount to the declaration ‘This Gen X Mess.’ One of the declarations in one of the essays is that ‘it’s easy to decide that Gen X is culturally irrelevant.’ Who actually thinks that? I was born in the mid-1980s and I’ve been sick of hearing Gen-X talk about itself and its place in history ever since I grew old enough to date men born in the Seventies without it being gross and creepy. To backtrack a bit, the events of my birth toss me squarely into the elder bracket of ‘millennials,’ you know, that overexposed generation of helicopter-parented, selfie-snapping, Adderall-addled ‘digital natives.

‘Was Shakespeare a Woman?’ Elizabeth Winkler asks in the new issue of The Atlantic. Of course he was. If you believe that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, but Francis Bacon, or Walter Raleigh, or the Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, or even Emilia Bassano Lanier, then you have succumbed to a conspiracy theory. A pity that, given the public’s increasing willingness to believe anything, and some people’s increasing willingness to publish anything, that this conspiracy theory should be promulgated in The Atlantic, a magazine with a long, albeit lately abandoned, tradition of intelligent writing on literature.

One Saturday in 1975 a young man was walking through Macclesfield town center, without very much to do. He popped into Boots the Chemist and began flicking through their selection of records. After 10 minutes of random searching he found Patti Smith’s newly released LP Horses, and quickly returned home with it to Salford. As he recollects in his Autobiography, for Steven Patrick Morrissey finding Horses – in a pharmacy in Macclesfield of all places – was a defining experience: ‘Cross-legged by a dying fire later that night, and with only a side-light for company, I allowed Horses to enter my body like a spear… So surly and stark and betrayed, Patti Smith was the cynical voice radiating love… The past snaps.

Donald Trump is Satan. The Satan in question is perhaps the greatest literary character in the finest epic poem in the English language, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. That makes Washington Republicans the other fallen angels. In 2016, Republicans made a deal with the devil. Like Dr Faustus, they sold their souls for power. Now they stifle their consciences, never speak ill of President Trump, hug him closely, fearing the wrath of his base. The same Lindsey Graham who in 2016 wrote, ‘If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it,’ recently said, ‘To every Republican, if you don’t stand behind this president, we’re not going to stand behind you.

Remember hygge, the Danish art of warding off existential horror by suffocating your fear and trembling beneath a soft blanket? The cult of coziness is a Scandinavian speciality. You too would insist on marshmallows in your hot chocolate if there was a howling blizzard outside your window — in May. You too would feel like making the best of living alone with a cat and a set of matching sofa pillows if you had no choice but to live alone like Agnetha from ABBA in ‘The Winner Takes It All’. It was a Dane, Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote Fear and Trembling. This is not a novel set in a Danish dinner party, but a reflection on patriarchal authority and the uses of religious despair.

Hindi cinema has a deep and abiding love affair with Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare’s tragedy of star-crossed lovers has been adapted in at least six Bollywood films in the last seven years, from 2012’s Love Rebels (Ishaqzaade) to 2018’s Heartbeat (Dhadak).  And audiences like them: A Play of Bullets: Ram-Leela (Goliyon Ki Rasleela Ram-Leela) was India’s fifth highest-grossing film of 2013, and Wild in Love (Sairat) is still the highest-grossing film ever produced in the Marathi language. What has the Bard to do with Bollywood? And why the much ado about Romeo and Juliet?

The trouble with Trumpworld is it’s so often beyond parody. How could a comedian ratchet up the president ordering Big Macs for a visiting championship football team to make the moment funnier than it already is? It’s a problem which has plunged late-night comedy writing into an identity crisis, one that has blighted America’s flagship sketch show Saturday Night Live. The Trump era has seen SNL bag Emmys and reach record audiences. But it’s achieved this through polarization: hitting the same tired Trump tropes each week and playing to their coastal-elite base. Its viewers have noticed: 39 percent of them surveyed by The Hollywood Reporter said the show had become too political.

Ever since that agonizing day on November 8 in 2016, Donald Trump’s Twitter feed has been dark, and full of errors. His Lannister-blonde hair glinting in his avi as his tiny fingers mercilessly excrete torrents of egomaniacal tweets, like an illiterate Cersei drunk with power. Well, no more. This will not continue. Last November, Trump made the fatal mistake of revealing himself to be a Game of Thrones fan by posting a meme, a commitment he reaffirmed in January and April. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1058388700617498625 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1081735898679701505 https://twitter.

Romain Rolland once complained that ‘there is too much music in Germany.’ Today there are too many television critics in the world. Some of the finest writers of multiple generations spend most of their writing lives recapping last night’s television. Is any of it really criticism, or are thousands of words agonizing over, say, Don Draper, adding up to anything more than the digital equivalent of chip wrapping? Such thoughts do not bother the critics. They are convinced of their rectitude, secure in their sense of being the most powerful tastemakers in the land. As the New Yorker’s queen of TV Emily Nussbaum put it in 2015: ‘Those of us who love TV have won the war. The best scripted shows are regarded as significant art - debated, revered, denounced.

Watching Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone was like a narcotic experience. The poetical monologue took you into a dimly-lit room, on the crackling leather of a worn couch, into thick plumes of cigarette smoke. Smartly suited, Serling introduced a flaw in the human condition in a rhythmic, jazzy voice, as if he were about to whip out a horn and blow the smoke away to reveal a moral, a twist, or riddle. Through 156 episodes, The Twilight Zone was as much a literary as a celluloid achievement. Remember ‘The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street’ from 1960? A parable of McCarthyism, and a mowing of the lawns of suburban paranoia. ‘The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout,’ Serling intoned.

American conservatives don’t usually like Marxist guerrillas, but they make an exception for the Kurds. So do American socialists. The further left you go, the more you feel the burn of contempt for the Kurds, until eventually you go far enough left to find yourself in the company of those who support the Kurds’ enemies. Our friends on the left have principles, you know. It isn’t sufficient to survive genocidal attacks and build a gender-neutral people’s militia. You have to hate America and Israel too. A bit of Islamist zealotry doesn’t go amiss either, for the decadent Western nostril is happy to mistake the stink of Islamism for the red rose of socialism.

Forty-seven years ago, in 1972, David Morrell wrote the novel First Blood which was later adapted into a hugely successful film and launched the iconic Rambo franchise. This September, Rambo will pick up his gun for the last time (again) in Rambo V: Last Blood. Sylvester Stallone, now 72, will play Rambo as he races to rescue a friend’s daughter from a vicious Mexican drug cartel. Stallone had almost walked away from the Rambo series in 2016 before agreeing to do the cartel storyline. Prior to its evolution into a kidnapping/rescue story, Morrell and Stallone had worked out a different Rambo outline. Their concept was very ‘character driven’ but was ultimately scrapped by the studio for unknown reasons in order to pursue the Mexican cartel plotline.

Aretha Franklin recorded her best album, the live Gospel performance Amazing Grace, over two nights in January 1972 at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles. The Queen of Soul had crossed over, and perhaps too far, with the Live at the Fillmore West album, a play for the white rock audience that included covers of ersatz Soul and Gospel hits like ‘Love The One You’re With’ and ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. Amazing Grace was Franklin’s musical and spiritual homecoming to the Baptist church. One of her mentors, the Reverend James Cleveland, presided over a full gospel choir, and the rhythm section with which Franklin had recorded the Young, Gifted and Black album in 1971. Her father, the Reverend C.L.

The art world has seen many iconic depictions of America’s first families. One can see a marvelous gallery on the website of the White House Historical Association, showing portraits of every president’s wife: Jackie Kennedy gets the most glamorous portrayal to date. At present, though, the collection is incomplete: the Association does not yet feature Melania Trump, wife of the Donald. As an established connoisseur of art, Cockburn thought he might do them a favor by compiling the finest images of Trump family members the internet had to offer. Any of them would look delightful hanging in the corridors of the West Wing. The First Lady During her husband’s first term, Melania has donned a number of iconic outfits, some of which inspired our artists.

The vision of Jude Law filming The New Pope at the beach has been acclaimed as a miracle — the washboard abs, the white trunks sticking closer than the Swiss Guard. As followers of the heretical TV series will know, the first series of The Young Pope featured another sporting vision, nuns playing soccer in slow motion. The soccer theme, if not the sporting nuns and the sex scene, is believed to derive from the real Pope Francis’s enthusiasm for the ‘beautiful game’. Any soccer fan wishing to understand the nature of faith will understand what Francis, a juvenile goalkeeper and fan of Argentinian league side San Lorenzo, sacrificed when, in 1990, he forswore watching soccer on television.

We’ve all got a bit of Deplorable in us, even me. To paraphrase the philosopher who left the White House in 2016, I cling to my religion because it’s the tree of life. Being rather Old World as well as old school, I’m appalled by the proliferation of advanced weaponry in the US, but I favor the right to cling to some kind of gun. And having spent more time in the academy than is healthy or useful, I can confirm the ongoing accuracy of William F. Buckley’s observation about the repository of wisdom that is the first 300 names in the Cambridge, Mass. phone book. But I don’t like Steve Bannon. I’m only fascinated by him. Bannon is the West’s foremost proponent of classic left-wing revolutionary strategies.

This week, Prince Harry called for the popular game Fortnite to be banned, saying: ‘That game shouldn't be allowed. Where is the benefit of having it in your household? It’s created to addict, an addiction to keep you in front of a computer for as long as possible. It’s so irresponsible.’ I could not agree with him more. These days children spend far too much time indoors, playing on their video games consoles and other electronic what-have-yous. Very often, I hear the argument ‘But many kids come from backgrounds where the internet and video games are the most easily-accessible way for them to socially engage with other like-minded young people.’ What utter rot!