Culture

If I were asked to defend the foreign policy record of the Obama administration my sword wouldn’t exactly flash from its scabbard. Through tedious lectures in Cairo and Oslo, to the quasi-legal assassination of a US citizen abroad and the absurd Iran deal, President Obama governed the Empire with an odd mixture of mawkishness and callousness. One of the more bizarre and underrated diplomatic moments came at the 2013 G8 summit. Vladimir Putin made an astonishing request to Obama: make action star Steven Seagal an honorary consul of Russia in California and Arizona, with a view to being a key intermediary between Moscow and Washington.

Every circus needs a midget. This particular law of show business was established by the Victorians. It was P.T. Barnum who popularized the word ‘midget’. Harriet Beecher Stowe had used it in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to describe both children and a small adult, but it was Barnum, as great and merciless as master of the levers of sentiment as Dickens, who popularized the m-word when advertising the outsized talents of Colonel Tom Thumb, Commodore George Washington Nutt, and Lavinia Warren. Commodore Nutt, who was not a naval officer, wore a naval uniform. He loved Lavinia Warren, whose real name was Mercy Lavinia Bump. But she married the bill-topping Tom Thumb, who was originally Charles Stratton.

The case of Jussie Smollett is, among other things, an accidental tribute to the life and work of Tom Wolfe. Wolfe, who died last year, annoyed progressives with his portrayal of white guilt and black radicalism in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, and the contempt he expressed for identity politics and fashionable attitudes in other works. Wolfe, who coined the term the ‘Me Decade’, delighted in mocking cultural narcissism. He argued that America was full of ‘status spheres’ in which politicians, artists, activists and others jockeyed for cultural capital. One of his favorite targets was fashionable victimhood.

Nietzsche trained as a cavalryman, but injured himself attempting an unorthodox dismount. His last public act was to throw himself sobbing around the neck of a flogged horse in Turin. In the decades after the philosopher was carried to the asylum, we put horses out to pasture. Our constant companions, first domesticated on the Eurasian steppe some four- to six thousand years ago, were displaced by a new symbol of mobility and freedom, the internal combustion engine. In Farewell to the Horse (2017), the German historian Ulrich Raulff identifies the moment we abandoned our real four-legged friend as the moment we became modern — which is to say, lost amid freedom. If Americans are more lost than most, it is because they have more freedom than most.

Justice is blind. But, as it turns out, she’s not unwilling to negotiate. If it buys her some silence, she’ll play ball.Yesterday, Jussie Smollett was exonerated by the District Attorney for the state of Chicago. Like Trump, the celebrity victim has been cleared of all charges, though not cleared of wrongdoing. Whatever that means. Dead or alive? It’s Schrödinger’s cat.No one knows what to say exactly because the truth may be too damaging. After all, who knows what happens when you jail a young black gay celebrity? How much abuse would he endure? And if they do kill him, what will happen to our prison system? How much will all of this cost? Oh Jesus, make it go away!Or that’s what I figure happened. Closed doors won’t answer.

The new season of Veep will show Selina Meyer as a former president. It’s an awkward role at the best of times; George Washington’s model, Cincinnatus, has long since become Davos Man. For a woman, it’s likely to offer particular challenges — and a key element of the show’s genius has always been its consideration of the realities of female leadership. Veep was created by Armando Iannucci as a spin-off from his successful UK comedy, The Thick of It. Veep quickly came into its own, offering a view of the idiosyncrasies of American politics through a thick fog of obscenity and insults. Veep’s Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is not like the hapless, hopeless MPs satirized in The Thick of It.

‘I feel bad for the children. I feel bad for him,’ said Barbra Streisand to the Times of London about Michael Jackson, who was by his own admission ‘really bad’ and, according to Wade Robson and James Safechuck, much, much worse in private. Streisand’s interview was a wide-ranging reflection on her legend and upcoming tour. The kind of men who agree with her defense of Jackson won’t buy tickets. Most of them are already locked up. ‘His sexual needs were his sexual needs, coming from whatever childhood he has,’ said Babs, referring to the Jackson Five’s Greatest Hits and Freud’s theory of early childhood sexual development.

You never knew where Andy Kauffman the character ended and Andy Kauffman the human being began. Whether he was wrestling women or reading The Great Gatsby aloud, onstage, until he had emptied a theatre of his own fans, the great performance artist always asked the question of whether it was merely an act or whether the antics reflected real instability. When Kauffman died of lung cancer at the age of 35, some people even wondered if he had faked his own death. Many comedians have aped Kauffman’s deranged realism but his true heirs are not comics. They are right-wing performance artists like Alex Jones, Jacob Wohl, and Laura Loomer. Are they Trump-loving, left-hating, conspiracy-theorists? Or smart businesspeople exploiting their audience? Are they mad?

Captain Marvel is a triumph. Finally, we have a female superhero! This is progress. This is new. This is fresh. This is terrifying men all over the planet. Not since Ghostbusters 2016 has a movie featured such a strong female lead. I literally cannot think of ONE other comic book-based movie which has a woman in the title role. I wonder why this is? Oh, I know, it’s because Hollywood hates women. The star of the movie, Brie Larson is also a superhero in real life. She bravely spoke out about the negative reviews A Wrinkly Time received, stating that too many white men had seen it. Now, as a black woman, I watched that film with tears in my eyes.

Young Amber Heard met elderly Johnny Depp on the set of The Rum Diary (2011), a Hunter S. Thompson adaptation about a man trying to save his soul. Like the Depp-Heard marriage, the movie had a weak narrative, too much drinking, and generally poorly reviews. It lasted a lot longer than it should have done, too. Heard filed for divorce in May 2016, but you wouldn’t know it. Three years on, the marriage remains click-worthy. Days after filing, Heard accused Depp of being verbally and physically abusive throughout their relationship. Depp denied the allegations, and has now asked for $50 million in damages.

It’s always best to eat before you go to a dinner party, just to be on the safe. The same goes for weddings, but more so, because they go on so long. As a unprofessional musician who’ll play it if you’ll hum it, I’ve attended more weddings than Elizabeth Taylor multiplied by Zsa Zsa Gabor to the power of Mickey Rooney. Usually, the father of the bride spoils the fun. Weddings should be marathon festivities with endless food and rivers of free booze, but they usually tend towards reheated salmon, dysenteric chicken, emetic fake fizz, and two of the saddest words in the history of human socializing, ‘pay bar’. Jay, an Englishman of Pakistani extraction, is an enterprising fellow.

This year at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW), an impressive lineup of 2020 presidential candidates (and possible candidates) like Amy Klobuchar, Julián Castro, and John Kasich will take the stage for ‘Conversations About America’s Future,’ a series of one-on-one interviews with prominent media figures. Too bad everybody’s talking about Game of Thrones instead. In building its ‘Bleed for the Throne’ setup at the annual digital confab, HBO had to live up to the hype of last year’s SXSW stunt, where they surprised pretty much everybody by building an actual Westworld.

Is it still possible to talk about movies without mentioning superheroes? For the first three months of last year, Black Panther accounted for nearly a quarter of all domestic box office receipts. Eight of the top 20 highest grossing films of all time feature men and women who wear capes and fight crime. The consequence of ticket sales being increasingly concentrated among superhero movies is an increasing concentration of superhero movies. Today this feedback loop has dredged up another one: Captain Marvel. The modern superhero was born in the 1930s. Many of them – like Superman and Captain America – were anti-fascists who smacked Hitler around while fighting for ‘Truth, Justice and the American Way.

‘The innocence of America is one of its oldest traditions,’ said Oscar Wilde who, like Michael Jackson, was accused of seducing underage boys. Wilde was convicted, and cast into a disgrace that everyone now agrees was a crime against art and morality. Jackson was able to wriggle out of court, more than once. He had money and he had lawyers but, most of all, he had the entertainment business on his side, moralizing to us that he was a great artist. The pagan cult of show business is the real American religion, and the innocence of children is one of its most lucrative assets. The innocence of Michael Jackson, child star turned child abuser, was an article of faith because Jackson could fill a stadium.

‘I’m going to be linked with him until I die,’ said Luke Perry of Dylan McKay, the character Perry played in Beverly Hills 90210. He was right. On Monday, Perry tested his theory to its conclusion by dying aged 52, following a massive stroke.To late Gen X-ers now in our early forties, Perry is forever pickled in the aspic of 1990. Dylan McKay was a Diet Coke-swilling, James Dean for the MTV generation. In the very first episode of Beverly Hills 90210, he rode into the zip code of the stars and their servants astride a motorbike, wearing an unseasonably warm leather jacket and an oiled quiff that gleamed in the California sun. And there he stayed, at least in our imaginations.

‘Spain is an overflow of somberness,’ Wyndham Lewis wrote in The Wild Body (1927). ‘A strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.’ That was before the civil war of the Thirties and the Franco dictatorship. These days, if you cross the frontiers of Spain, or of any state in the southern tier of the European Union, you meet an immigrant wave from Africa, and a somber outflow of unemployed young emigrants. Americans, choosing the happy ending, prefer the overflowing cups of the ‘immigrant experience’ to the severances and silences of the emigrant experience. But an immigrant never quite escapes being an emigrant. The old language is still in your head.

Sunday night is Oscar night, from the red carpet in the early evening to the white line in the small hours. The Oscars, like the most of the members of the Academy, have seen better days. Audience shares are down, and it no longer seems possible to find presenters who can read jokes from an autocue, or, in the case of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in 2017, read the Best Picture winner’s name correctly. This year, it wasn’t even possible to find a presenter. Kevin Hart would have been a great host — unlike most actors in Hollywood, he’s capable of ad libbing, and he can also move the muscles of his face. But Hart was culled on grounds of political correctness.

Jussie Smollett is a long way from rehabilitation. In fact, he has a long way to go before he reaches full dehabilitation. That’s a real word, and I’m willing to hire two Nigerian bodybuilders to prove it while wearing MAGA hats. Dehabilitation is the process of becoming estranged from family, friends and society, usually because of something disgusting like leprosy, or filing false reports of racist and homophobic assault to the police. Smollett is now in dehab, but his apology to the cast of Empire suggests that he thinks he’s moving into rehab. This means he hasn’t yet understood the mess he’s in. This is America. There can only be rehab after dehab.

One of my favorite observations made by F. A. Hayek concerns the semantic detonations of the word ‘social.’ Especially pernicious, he noted, was the conjunction of the word ‘social’ with the word ‘justice.’ ‘Much the worst use of the word “social,”’ he wrote, and ‘one that wholly destroys the meaning of the word it qualifies, is in the almost universally used phrase “social justice.”’ There are, Hayek continued, other instances of this sort of ‘semantic fraud.’ Consider the phrase ‘People’s Democracy.’ The one thing you can be sure of about states describing themselves thus is that they are totalitarian, not democratic.

Reincarnation is like a drug. Everyone’s dying to try it. About a quarter of American adults believe in it. The ranks of the born again and again include a similar proportion of American Christians. If de Tocqueville were to be reincarnated among us, he would say, ‘I told you so’, take a long draw on his Juul, then make some droll observation about religion in a market economy, and the importance of giving the customers what they want, in this life and the previous. Never mind hell and heresy, the land of the second chance is the land of the third and fourth chance. Russian Doll is an ironic comedy about reincarnation set in lower Manhattan. Aging cynics will recognize it as the metempsychotic rebirth of Groundhog Day (1993) and After Hours (1985).

In the struggle against ‘sexism’ (some) women demanded that we end the fetishization of their breasts and accept them as just another part of a woman’s body. One of the results of this struggle for ‘free nipples’ was that, in some big cities, groups of women organized protest walks where they were naked above the belt – the point was precisely to de-eroticize breasts. We are now entering the next logical step in this direction – the goal is now to ‘demystify’ the ultimate sexual object.

Joy Villa shot to infamy in 2017 by donning a Make America Great Again dress. She set eyeballs rolling again last year with her pro-life fetus-in-the-womb outfit. How could she top that, you ask? Why, by dressing as the border wall of course! Her outfit included a barbed wire necklace, a Pink Floyd-inspired border wall gown and a MAGA handbag (handMAG?), and was designed by Desi Lee Allinger-Nelson. Cockburn caught up with Villa last night in New York to find out the gossip from the ceremony. ‘On the red carpet, I was getting a lot of side-eye from celebrities, which I kind of expected,’ she said. ‘Camila Cabello smiled at me, and Lele Pons, the YouTuber was really nice, she came up and was like “I love your dress, I’m in gold and you’re in silver!

I became aware of a bizarre fixation when the Netflix series Dark Tourist visited Milwaukee, former stalking ground of Jeffrey Dahmer who tortured, murdered, dismembered and even ate at least 17 men and boys. By far the majority of those who pay to join the ghoulish city tours commemorating his life and work were attractive, single women of marriageable age, who seemed somehow to consider him the ultimate dreamy life partner they would just love to have reformed – if only he hadn’t been bludgeoned to death in prison while serving 16 consecutive life terms. Now Netflix has turned its attention to another serial-killing supervillain Ted Bundy.

For the first time in what seems like decades, Saturday Night Live turned their sights on the Democrats – and delivered what Cockburn considers one of their best sketches of the season. ‘State Meeting’ takes place in the Virginia State Capitol, where an African American ethics committee chief (Kenan Thompson) addresses a room of mostly white colleagues to check whether they have ever worn blackface. Unsurprisingly, many of them have – and they ask whether their excuses for doing so are good enough. ‘I have a question,’ asks Beck Bennett’s state senator. ‘What if your blackface was just part of your costume as a black person?’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrpQVSVa2QI ‘Does it count if you did it all the way back in the Eighties?

I’m so exhausted. I’ve spent the past three days stalking the streets of York with a bike lock, blinded by rage, looking for Liam Neeson. On Wednesday night however, a friend pointed out to me that Liam Neeson actually lives in NEW York which is apparently in America, and so my lust for revenge was thankfully brought into sharp focus. In a horrifying interview on Monday, Neeson spoke about a time in his past when for no reason at all he became so racist, he wanted to kill all black people. Going so far as to drive around Ireland in a big tank for several months, with the aim of ruthlessly mowing down every PoC he saw. Thankfully, we are going back many years when there were very few black people in Ireland and so his evil plan was scuppered.

Fresh off her formal campaign announcement last weekend, Tulsi Gabbard took to the hallowed grounds of Morning Joe’s studio for a friendly sit-down interview. Surely the expectation was that Joe, Mika, and the rest of the gang would herald Tulsi’s history-making potential as the first female, minority, and non-Christian president. A trailblazer! An inspiration! Instead, the discussion immediately took on a dark, interrogatory tone, focused (as usual) on Tulsi’s alleged fondness for Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. Kasie Hunt, the most overtly dimwitted of the Morning Joe crew, asked whether she thinks Assad ‘is a good person.