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    ‘A vivid distillation of a deeply fractured country’: a history of the United States in nine photographs

    The American photographer Peter van Agtmael experienced a life-changing moment, aged 19, when he happened on a copy of Magnum Degrees, a photobook published in 2000 of dramatic images from the previous decade.“I got an instantaneous education in the beauty, violence, mystery, complexity and simplicity of photography,” he writes in his afterword to Magnum America, a much bigger, more mysterious and complex compendium of photographs spanning nine decades, from postwar 1940s to the present day.Magnum was formed as a cooperative by a group of renowned war photographers, including Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, in 1947. It’s cooperative nature was initially a reflection of its founders’ stoical postwar optimism in the face of the horrors and traumas they had witnessed, but also their shared spirit of creative independence.Magnum America traces the nation’s often turbulent journey from those tentatively optimistic postwar years to the existential anxiety of the present political moment in which democracy itself hangs in the balance. Though punctuated by celebrated portraits and observational series on ordinary American lives, it is the hard-hitting photojournalism that arrests, from Capa’s blurred but powerful images from the D-day landing at Omaha beach to Van Agtmael’s eye-of-the-storm reportage of the siege of the Capitol by Trump supporters in 2021.Van Agtmael and his fellow editor, the curator and feminist academic Laura Wexler, have not attempted to create a definitive visual history of the United States as reflexed through the lenses of Magnum photographers, but instead deftly explore ideas of history, culture, myth and national identity. The book comprises 600 images – some famous, some relatively unknown – culled from a total of 227,450. The selection here reflects that mix, but concentrates on images of conflict and political drama that are pertinent to today’s fraught pre-election moment.The book is also a revealing social history of Magnum itself: the ideal and the often problematic reality. For too long, it reflected the predominantly white, male world of photojournalism, the exceptions being pioneers such as Eve Arnold, Martine Franck, Inge Morath and, later, Susan Meiselas. And, though Magnum photographers made some of the most memorable images of the black civil rights struggle in the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1988 that Eli Reed became the first black photographer to enter the Magnum fold. That irony went unnoticed for a long time. Today, Magnum is a diverse organisation, but it is its relevance – and, by extension, photojournalism’s role – that is also at stake in a world of relentless image-making and instant image-dissemination, an environment unimaginable to its founders. The ongoing carnage in Gaza enters our consciousness daily on social media, where local photojournalists as well as ordinary people with mobile phones bear witness at great risk in the midst of an ongoing humanitarian disaster. Not one photojournalist from Magnum or any other western photo agency has reported from Gaza because of Israel’s refusal to admit even embedded members of the international media. The integral act of bearing witness, which is at the core of Magnum’s collective being, continues just as powerfully all the same. The next big volume of retrospective Magnum images may have to find a way of grappling with that dilemma.1940s: Robert CapaAmerican troops landing on Omaha beach, D-day, Normandy, France, 6 June 1944View image in fullscreenOn 6 June 1944, Robert Capa was one of a handful of photographers granted permission to cross the English Channel with allied forces during the D-day operation to liberate occupied France. He travelled with American soldiers from E Company of the 16th Infantry Regiment. This blurred but evocative image was taken in the immediate wake of their arrival at Omaha beach, where they were met with cannon and small arms fire from embedded German troops as they leapt off their landing crafts into cold, choppy waters. It remains one of the most visceral images of that pivotal, but at times chaotic, operation, during which about 4,440 allied soldiers lost their lives and close to 6,000 were wounded.Intriguingly, the circumstances in which the 11 images that comprise Capa’s reportage from Omaha beach were created – which he described in characteristically self-mythologising fashion in his memoir, Slightly Out of Focus – have recently been contested. Likewise his contention that they were all that remained of 106 pictures he sent to Life magazine on his return to England, the rest having been mysteriously destroyed after being left too long at a high temperature by an unfortunate lab assistant who was processing them.Whatever the truth, the photographs that were taken under extreme duress during his relatively short time on the beach – he made it on to a departing boat after a severe panic attack in which his hands were shaking so badly he could not reload his camera – are a powerful and up-close record of that day’s tumultuous events. There have been several attempts to identify the “soldier in the surf”, with Private Huston “Hu” Sears Riley the most likely contender. That he has not been definitively identified lends another level of poignancy to the image.Capa, one of Magnum’s founders, was arguably the most revered photojournalist of the 20th century. His most famous quote epitomised his cavalier approach: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” In 1954, 10 years after this photograph was taken, he was killed, aged 40, by a landmine in Vietnam, while covering the first Indochina war.1950s: Elliott ErwittWilmington, North Carolina, 1950View image in fullscreenElliott Erwitt was invited to join Magnum by Robert Capa in 1953. Having studied photography and film-making at college in California, Erwitt, aged 25, had already made a name for himself as an editorial photographer for various commercial magazines. He would go on to become one of the world’s most famous image-makers, best known for his striking, slightly surreal pictures of the everyday. His similarly offbeat portraits of dogs have been the subject of five photobooks to date. It is fair to say that Erwitt’s dedication to being, as he put it, “serious about not being serious” has tended to shift attention away from his more unsettlingly powerful images. One of the most rawly observant is his photograph of a grief stricken and bewildered Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s funeral.His photograph Wilmington, North Carolina, 1950 possesses a resonance that is at odds with its neutral geographical title. Like many images in Magnum America, it captures a significant moment, simultaneously evoking the darkness of the US’s past and signalling a turbulent future of hard-won progress. The tentative beginning of the civil rights movement was still four years away when this picture was taken, and it was 14 years before that struggle achieved one of its seminal victories when the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 outlawed segregation. The separate drinking fountains, marked “White” and “Colored”, the one modern and sleekly designed, the other makeshift and worn, speak of a time not that distant when discrimination was a given in certain states. The face of the man crouching over the sink beneath the Colored sign is blurred, and his stance suggests he is looking towards the other fountain that is so close yet out of bounds. As a signifier of the postwar era of US segregation in the south, Erwitt’s grainy image remains starkly affecting and deeply symbolic.1960s: Paul FuscoRobert Kennedy funeral train, USA, 1968View image in fullscreenIt was a year of sustained social and political turbulence in the US, the war in Vietnam dividing the country across generational lines and provoking widespread protests that often culminated in violence. The conflict on the streets reached a climax of sorts at the Democratic convention in Chicago in August 1968, when police brutally attacked activists and bystanders, the violence captured on TV cameras and broadcast nationally on news reports.By then, the already divided nation had been traumatised by the recent assassinations of two progressive leaders: the black civil rights figurehead Martin Luther King Jr and the Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy. Paul Fusco boarded the train taking Kennedy’s body from New York to Washington focused on how he would cover the senator’s state funeral at Arlington cemetery for Look magazine. When the train emerged from a long dark Manhattan tunnel into daylight, he was taken aback by what he saw. Ordinary citizens, young and old, had gathered in clusters by the railway track, standing in silent homage to the young politician whose death, like his life, had echoed that of his older, more famous brother, President John F Kennedy.The train moved slowly, perhaps out of respect for the dead senator, taking eight hours rather than the usual four to complete its journey. Along the entirety of the route, people congregated trackside in their summer clothes. Fusco shot about 2,000 photos en route to Washington. In them, he freeze-framed for posterity a nation in mourning: families and friends holding hands, men standing to attention to salute, a woman kneeling in prayer. Mostly, though, a seemingly endless succession of ordinary Americans of every race, creed and colour gaze upwards as the train trundles past from city to suburb and on through sun-dappled rural neighbourhoods, their collective silence palpable in every frame.At the time, the editors of Look bafflingly decided not to publish any of Fusco’s extraordinary funeral train series. After the magazine ceased publication in 1971, they remained unseen for another 30 years, consigned to the vast archive of the Library of Congress until they were uncovered by a Magnum researcher. Almost six decades on, they evoke another now distant US, one united in grief but also, as Fusco later put it, “grateful for the commitment and hope Bobby nurtured in the legions of the poor, the black and countless other forgotten Americans”.1970s: Alex WebbNixon resignation, Washington DC, 1974View image in fullscreenOn 8 August 1974, at 9pm, Richard Nixon, who was facing impeachment and removal from office for his role in the Watergate scandal, announced that he was resigning as president of America. He was the first and as yet only US head of state to do so. “As president,” he told the country in a live television broadcast from the White House, “I must put the interests of America first.”The evidence of his misdemeanours, as uncovered by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with the help of an anonymous source known as “Deep Throat”, suggested that sentiment had not been foremost in his mind two years earlier, when a break-in had occurred at the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington DC. It had been carried out by a group devoted to Nixon’s re-election, which included his former close associate G Gordon Liddy. Along with six others, Liddy was subsequently jailed for his part in the burglary.Woodward and Bernstein’s exhaustive investigation also uncovered evidence of wiretaps of the phones of those Nixon considered his most dangerous enemies. The break-in and cover-up was exposed in detail in the televised Watergate hearings that by turns enthralled and appalled the US public over 51 days in 1973.That Nixon hung on in office as long as he did was testament to his tenacity as well as his sense of entitlement. Tricky Dicky, as he came to be known, escaped the humiliation of impeachment and a possible prison sentence and was subsequently pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.When the news of his resignation broke, Alex Webb evoked the country’s collective response in his image of a single, anonymous individual intensely perusing the Washington Post on the streets of the capital. The front page headline, “Nixon Resigns”, resonates across the years, through the subsequent impeachments of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, as well as the turbulence of the latter’s first term of office, the incendiary nature of his departure from it, and the possibility of his imminent return. “It changed history,” Woodward recently said of the crimes he helped to uncover. “It was a red light for presidents.” We may find out soon enough if that is still the case.1980s: Susan MeiselasUS/Mexican border, 8am: undocumented workers discovered in a “drop off” site, Interstate 5, Oceanside, California, 1989View image in fullscreenThroughout his 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised his faithful that he would construct “a big beautiful wall” between the US and Mexico, one that stretched across its 2,000-mile length, thus ending once and for all the flow of illegal migrants that, he claimed, threatened the security and identity of the US. The construction of a border wall was already well under way long before Trump began his campaign, with more than 600 miles of the southern border barricaded and protected by immigration authorities. It signified the strategy of deterrence through military-style policing that had been officially sanctioned by President Clinton in 1995.This photograph by Susan Meiselas was taken in 1989, when the border was more porous and economic migrants regularly made the crossing, mainly to do the myriad low-paid menial jobs that helped keep the American, and in particular the Californian, economy afloat. By then, Meiselas had made her name with her documentary reportage from the long civil war in El Salvador and the Nicaraguan revolution.For her series Crossings, she worked with the migrants and the border security patrols tasked with apprehending them. Many of those sent back to their homeland would try to enter again by different routes, such was their dedication to the dream of reinventing themselves in the US. This image dramatically evokes the precariousness of the immigrant journey by capturing the moment some undocumented workers are discovered by a border patrol officer at the drop-off site they’ve been left at by smugglers after crossing the border. “When people are coming across the border, they are giving up on their homeland,” she said later of this photo and others like it. “That’s a very hard thing to do. There’s an uncertainty; maybe it’s that uncertainty that you are seeing.”1990s: Eli ReedMembers of the Nation of Islam among the ruins of the Rodney King riots, Los Angeles, California, 1992View image in fullscreenThe Magnum archive is rich in memorable images of the struggle – and solidarity – of African American activists during the civil rights era by the likes of Leonard Freed, Burt Glinn, Bruce Davidson and Danny Lyon. It wasn’t until 1988, 41 years after the agency’s formation, that Eli Reed became the first black member of the organisation. “By signing him on, the agency granted loftiness to its existence,” Gordon Parks would later attest. Four decades earlier, in 1948, he had made a similar breakthrough when he became Life magazine’s first black staff photographer.From the moment he took up a camera as a young man, Reed’s ambition has been to capture the full range of black people’s experience, from the everyday to the politically seismic, the intimately tender to the collectively traumatic. To this end, his book Black in America, published in 1997, is punctuated throughout with moments of tentative optimism but also tempered by a deep anger and frustration that Reed, an activist with a camera, shared with many of his subjects.This striking image was made in the immediate aftermath of the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of four LAPD officers who had been captured on camera a year earlier brutally beating a young black man, Rodney King. It features three besuited members of the Nation of Islam, a black nationalist organisation that believes in the formation of a separate state for African Americans within the US. Despite their extremist views, they are regarded by some in the black community as role models who uphold the traditional values of discipline and self-respect, while espousing self-determination as the only alternative to endemic racism.Here, the three young men stand, alert and yet seemingly unconcerned by the proximity of Reed’s camera, in front of the ruins of a building destroyed in the riots. The stark contrast between their aura of calm authority and the wreckage that signifies chaos and disorder lends the image an edgy complexity. One of the underlying questions posed by Reed’s immersive reportage is how the black community should respond to often murderous police brutality. It has been answered in frequently dramatic fashion in the decades since, most resoundingly in the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which became a global phenomenon after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.2000s: Thomas HoepkerYoung people during lunch break in Brooklyn with the twin towers burning across the river, 11 September 2001View image in fullscreenThe terrorist attack on the twin towers in lower Manhattan on the morning of 11 September 2001 was captured by several Magnum photographers, and their images of the cataclysm and its aftermath were published in a large-format book, New York September 11, less than two months after the event. The exception was Thomas Hoepker’s complex and, for some, provocative portrait of a group of young people gathered by the river’s edge in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, while a dense plume of grey smoke billows from the familiar skyline in the middle distance. The image so disoriented its creator that he chose not to include it in the book, waiting until 2006, the fifth anniversary of the attack, before publishing it.Hoepker’s initial anxiety, it turned out, was justified. After its belated publication, Hoepker wrote a short article in response to a column in the New York Times that decried his “shocking” photograph and suggested that the five young people in it were relaxing, having already started to “move on” from the shock and horror of the attack. Hoepker admitted that he had initially found the image “ambiguous and confusing”, and had swiftly come to the conclusion that publishing it so close to the actual event “might distort the reality as we had felt it on that historic day”.This, in turn, prompted one of the people in the photograph, Walter Sipser, to respond, accusing both Hoepker and the NYT columnist of distorting his reality. He pointed out that the three people chatting to him and his girlfriend were passing strangers, the group having found themselves “suddenly bound together… in the aftermath of a catastrophe”. Rather than feeling relaxed, they were, he explained, united “in a profound state of shock and disbelief, like everyone else we encountered that day”. A scene that had initially appeared “ambiguous and confusing” to the photographer felt cynically manipulative to the subjects, for whom it is a stolen and distorted moment in which nothing but the unimaginable horror unfolding in the background is what it seems. Here, the idea of bearing witness that has traditionally underpinned photojournalism in general, and Magnum in particular, seems to collapse in on itself.2010s: Alec SothLockdown drill, Belle Plaine high school, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2014View image in fullscreenSchool shootings are a particularly American phenomenon, the deadliest of which have imprinted the names of their locations – Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech – on our collective consciousness. According to a recent CNN report, there were at least 58 shootings on US school grounds and collage campuses between January and mid-October of this year, resulting in 28 deaths and more than 72 injuries.Alec Soth’s dramatic photograph was taken during a school lockdown drill that had interrupted an eight-grade gym class at Belle Plaine high school in his home town, Minneapolis. These kinds of drills are compulsory in more than 20 states. That they are now such a common feature in US schools, that they have become almost normalised, speaks volumes about US gun culture and the failure of legislation to control it. Kenneth Trump, the president of National School Safety and Security Services, told the New York Times: “The majority of today’s generation of students and school staff view lockdowns as a routine part of the school culture, just as we have viewed fire drills for many years.”Soth’s deftly composed photograph is startling in its stillness and atmosphere of vulnerability. The young girls huddled together, faces hidden in hands, heads bowed in silent thought. Their pale limbs are in dramatic contrast to the deep red of their school T-shirts and the shiny gym lockers. The drama here lies in the dread possibility of what might one day come to pass, and one cannot help but ponder where the schoolgirls’ thoughts have wandered in this silent, confined space. It is an image neither violent nor transgressive but that disturbs all the same in its evocation of a singular kind of collective cognitive dissonance.2020s: Peter van AgtmaelStorming of the Capitol, Washington DC, 6 January 2021View image in fullscreenThe tumultuous events of 6 January 2021, when a riotous mob stormed the Capitol building after an inflammatory speech by Donald Trump, hang like a storm cloud over the imminent US election. As the election results pivoted towards a Democrat victory, Trump had urged his followers to converge on the Capitol to “stop the steal”. Many thousands responded, fighting their way into the Capitol building where they ransacked offices, smashed furniture and wandered the corridors in search of the politicians that Trump had demonised. Chief among them were Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Mike Pence, his presidential running mate, who had refused to challenge the result. Both were perilously close to the rioters inside the building before they were safely evacuated.Peter van Agtmael, whose photojournalism over the past few decades has interrogated the US’s foreign wars and its concurrent domestic discontents was in the midst of the mob at Capitol Hill on the day. From the eye of the hurricane, he captured protesters clashing violently with outnumbered police armed with batons and pepper spray. This image distills the greater scattered disorder that erupted around the Capitol building and the dogged determination of the protesters, one of whom has scaled a high wall, his hand clinging to a marble ledge as he bends to help others beneath him. Only his baseball cap is visible and beyond it a panoramic of the unruly horde spread out across the grounds, many of them carrying US flags.In the background, the tall Washington Monument, built in honour of the first US president, points towards the sky, a symbol of the birth of US democracy. Beneath it, all is chaos and disorder. Van Agtmael’s dramatic image is a vivid distillation of a deeply fractured US. It may also be an augury of more turbulent times to come.

    Magnum America by Peter van Agtmael and Laura Wexler is published by Thames & Hudson (£125). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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    The BBC’s Gary O’Donoghue: ‘I knew those were gunshots, and then realised Trump had stopped talking’

    Born in Norfolk in 1968, and becoming blind by the age of eight, Gary O’Donoghue studied philosophy and modern languages at Oxford University. After graduating he joined the BBC as a junior reporter on the Today programme, later becoming Radio 4’s chief political correspondent. Now the BBC’s senior North America correspondent, O’Donoghue was in attendance at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania where Donald Trump was hit by a bullet; his interview with eyewitness Greg Smith subsequently revealed astonishing security lapses. With election day on Tuesday and Americans worried there could be more violence to come, O’Donoghue spoke to us from the corporation’s Washington DC bureau. He divides his time between Washington DC, London and Yorkshire with his partner and their daughter.Where will you be when America goes to the polls?I’ll be covering election day and night, and the fallout afterwards, from Mar-a-Lago, Trump HQ.You’re just back from swing state Michigan. Any sense of which way things will go?We always laugh when people ask us this. I have no idea. It’s a cliche but it really is decided in these swing states. In Michigan, the phrase “the lesser of two evils” was said dozens of times – and by the way, when people say that, they’re usually voting Trump.A recent poll found that a quarter of Americans fear civil war following the election. Does that seem a credible threat to you?The idea of America is under enormous strain. The divides are everywhere – between the coasts and the centre, the north and the south, the urban and the rural, the religious and the unreligious. They are so entrenched that there is very little crossover communication, very little empathy. I find that incredibly sad. Do I think there could be civil war? I don’t but you’d be a fool to rule out violence. I mean, we’ve already had violence, haven’t we?View image in fullscreenRight. What went through your mind as you dived for cover at Butler?I knew immediately that those were gunshots, and then suddenly realised Trump had stopped talking. That’s the “Oh shit!” moment. Your mind is working at a million miles an hour – you have no idea whether it’s over or not, and then you hear the screaming start and you think, we’re in a pretty exposed position.You ended up getting a vital interview – with a man wearing a Trump visor topped with fake hair and holding a beer can.I don’t know what prejudices I’d have brought to it if I could see. One of the advantages of being blind and in journalism is that you can focus on the words. I’m a listener. If we’d put someone on air live who was lying or got it wrong, it could have really inflamed the situation, but Greg Smith was consistent.Advances in technology must have made your professional life simultaneously easier and still more challenging.Keeping up with information and the world as it is now, I feel like I’m paddling furiously under the surface the whole time. You’re listening to things mainly on audio, so it’s all linear, you can’t skim in the way you can when you can see. I rely on the wonderful Iona [Hampson, O’Donoghue’s senior producer] to let me know what’s trending and what I’m missing, but I must spend 70% more time than my colleagues just trying to keep up.Does it ever get you down?Sometimes it takes its toll because you’re obviously dealing with the same kind of life stuff that everyone has. I was in Chicago to report on Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the DNC when my mother died. I had a bit of a wobble recently because I realised I hadn’t thought about her once in four or five days. The guilt was just awful.How has broadcast journalism changed over the course of your career?When I started out, there were no anti-discrimination laws. People could say: “You can’t be a reporter, you’re blind.” Now they can’t say that, which makes it harder to spot, but there are still dinosaurs around who believe it. Fortunately the key people at the BBC get it and they’re kind of chuffed – I mean, I am the first ever disabled foreign correspondent. We’re publicly funded, we need to walk, talk, look, sound, smell like the country who pays our salaries, right?View image in fullscreenWhere does your resilience come from?I lost my sight when I was eight and was sent away to boarding school, because that’s where blind children were educated in those days. It was actually the best thing that ever happened to me because I ended up with a Rolls-Royce education. But the other thing that happens is you’re forced to build some resilience because a thousand times a day there are micro-aggressions, as they call them nowadays.You’ve spoken about how your mother once confided that things were so hard in your childhood, she’d thought of killing you both. Presumably she betrayed none of that at the time?None at all. It was really tough and my parents weren’t educated people, but they were incredibly foresightful: they knew that getting me an education would give me some independence in life. It must have broken their hearts sending me away but they did the right thing.What’s the most distressing news story you’ve ever had to report on?The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. I’d done other mass shootings but there was so much horrible detail about what happened, every sinew in me was screaming. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to losing it on air.Is there a story you’re especially proud of?The Trump conviction. I basically did the whole 10 o’clock news with Clive Myrie. The drama was magnificent but the thing I was particularly pleased with is that the years of working hard to understand America meant I could sustain something as high profile as that, for all that time.What do you do to decompress?I’m continually rereading the multi-volume Oxford History of the United States, but fiction is the thing that calms me down. I love Colson Whitehead, Claire Keegan, Henry James.Is there anything you miss about the UK?London, mince pies and proper chocolate. American chocolate sucks, as they say. More

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    Seth Meyers on Trump’s garbage truck stunt: ‘I think you should stay there’

    Late-night hosts talk Donald Trump dressing up as a garbageman as a late campaign stunt and Kamala Harris’s lead among suburban women.Seth Meyers“All politicians pander,” said Seth Meyers on Thursday’s Late Night, “but Donald Trump is the most shameless and prolific panderer in American history”. And “one of Trump’s favorite pandering tactics is playing dress-up”.On Wednesday, the former US president donned his “latest and perhaps most insane outfit yet” at a campaign stop in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Wearing a reflective orange vest, Trump climbed into a garbage truck emblazoned with his name and asked reporters: “What do you think of my garbage truck?”“You want to know what I really think of your garbage truck? I think it’s awesome and I think you should stay there,” Meyers replied. “I think you should drop out of the race and host a reality show where you try out different jobs while wearing exactly one piece of that job’s uniform.”Trump continued to wear the vest at a rally after the garbage truck stunt, designed to distract from the backlash to racist comments about Puerto Rico at his rally over the weekend. At his rally, he danced to his trademark campaign song, the Village People’s YMCA. “How is this real life?” Meyers wondered. “He doesn’t look like he’s running for president. He looks like he’s at a Halloween party at an assisted living facility.”In truth, “Trump could never make it as a sanitation worker,” Meyers added. “It’s a tough job with actual stakes and genuine responsibility, and no amount of cosplaying can make up for the fact that he’d be really bad at it. He wouldn’t last a day.”The stunt underscored the “central lie” of Trump’s political career: “that he’s a populist, an everyman, a champion of the working class. It’s a fraud.” Meyers reminded that Trump has cozied up to the world’s richest people, promised deregulation to please billionaires like Elon Musk, promised a tax cut for the wealthy and said he would not continue overtime pay. During his presidency, corporate profits soared while manufacturing jobs declined.“This is the one discernible throughline of Trump’s presidency in his three campaigns: billionaires will flourish, while regular people will suffer,” said Meyers.Stephen ColbertOn the Late Show, Stephen Colbert mocked Trump’s stumbling ascent into the garbage truck. “Looks like Trump is taking walking lessons from Rudy Giuliani,” he quipped.Trump tried to give a press conference from the truck, which devolved into rambling that ended with “I hope you enjoyed this garbage truck.”“That’s an inspiring closing message,” Colbert deadpanned, before imitating the former president. “I hope you enjoyed this garbage truck, by which I mean, this campaign. It has been a true honor and a bone-chilling dumpster fire.”At his rally, Trump mused about how he was advised not to say he wants to “protect women” by allowing Roe v Wade to be overturned. “I said, well, I’m gonna go do it whether the women like it or not. I’m going to protect them,” he said.“Now, I know that seems weird and creepy there, but I promise you, it sounded much sweeter in his wedding vows,” Colbert quipped.The host also noted that over 60 million people have already voted, with a 10-point gender gap in early turnout. The polls show that Harris has a 19-point lead among suburban women. “That’s right, Harris is almost as popular among suburban women as cocktail napkins that say ‘Wine do you mean we’re out of wine?!’” he joked.The gender gap has led to a rise in online queries such as: “Can my husband find out who I voted for?”“No, he can’t,” said Colbert. “But if that’s really a concern, the two of you should just sit down, and while he’s watching TV maybe look up your old college boyfriend on Facebook.”Jimmy KimmelAnd in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel also relished Trump’s brand-emblazoned garbage truck “because he is a ridiculous person”.Nevertheless, Trump’s cronies, such as Sean Hannity, tried to spin the photo op as a triumph. “The dumber Trump gets, the deeper Sean digs to spin stupid into smart,” said Kimmel.The Fox News host tried to claim the photo op was an “iconic, epic moment that we will remember for a long time”.“Washington crossed the Delaware, Trump hitched a ride on a garbage Trump,” Kimmel quipped. “The garbage drove the truck.”Kimmel also noted the absurdity of Trump’s subsequent rally with the reflective vest still on. “If there is a single image that we will look back on and think ‘this defines what America was going through in 2024’ I think it will be the Republican nominee for president dancing to the song YMCA in a garbageman costume,” he said.“That vest will come in handy when he’s on the side of the road picking up trash with the other inmates.” More

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    ‘Our government is economically illiterate’: BBC Question Time audience member rips into Labour MP

    An angry Question Time audience member delivered a powerful speech hitting out at “economically illiterate” MPs.The man addressed the panel on Thursday’s show (31 October) – the day after Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered her Budget, announcing a £40bn tax hike.He said: “Whenever there is a change from Tory to Labour, Labour will come in, the Tories will come in, like Cameron did in 2010 and the Labour lot had left a note saying, ‘haha, there’s no money left’.”Then the Tories smashed the economy and Labour come in and say ‘Oh, well, we’ve got fill this 40 billion, 9 billion, 22 billion, it changes by the day, who knows?“I do not understand how, out of 65 million people in this country, we end up with economically illiterate people in the government.“All the time. You are not fit for office.” More

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    Avengers stars assemble to endorse Kamala Harris – by brainstorming an election catchphrase

    The cast of Marvel’s Avengers movies have come out in support of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris less than a week before the US election.In a video posted first on Vanity Fair on Thursday evening, actors Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Don Cheadle, Chris Evans, Danai Gurira and Paul Bettany playfully riffed on their respective characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe while encouraging viewers to vote for Harris.The video, which runs for just over 90 seconds, opens with the actors taking an incoming video call from Johansson. On screen, they brainstorm ideas for a catchphrase for Harris, landing on the dubious “Down with Democracy”, which they spin into a brief Marvel-style Harris/Walz campaign video with dramatic music and comic-style graphics. The final frame of the video encourages viewers to vote on November 5.Sharing the video on X, Ruffalo, a vocal Democrat supporter who is best known for his role as the Hulk, wrote: “Don’t sit this one out. It’s the one where we will lose big: Project 2025, women’s reproductive rights, climate change, LGBTQIA+ rights, public education, student debt relief, Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and as of today, life saving vaccines. This shit is real and it’s going to come for you.”Speaking to Vanity Fair about the making of the video, Johansson, who played Black Widow in the Marvel films, said, “It just immediately turned into people trying to one-up each other with one-liners,” and joked that Downey Jr and Ruffalo were “bickering like two old ladies. And, of course, I’m the person that’s just trying to organise everybody. It’s very similar to what our dynamic is in the films. It was wonderful to feel everybody assemble around it, and hopefully it will engage our fans in the process of voting.”Johansson initiated the project, reaching out to her fellow MCU alumni via their group chat and reminding them: “We’ve got a lot of powerful people on this thread, and it would be great to unite … in hopefully creating a bit of a viral moment for Kamala.”The Avengers cast join a list of celebrities who have endorsed the Harris/Walz campaign, including Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen and Oprah. In the last week alone, Beyoncé, Madonna, Bad Bunny, Ricky Martin, LeBron James and the former Republican governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger have all come out in support of Harris. More

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    Groping, greed and the lust for great power: what Wagner’s Ring Cycle tells us about Trump v Harris

    ‘America is ready for a new chapter,” Barack Obama declared to the Democratic National Convention in August, “America is ready for a better story.” Many would agree, but as commentators try to explain the bewildering reversals and bizarre dynamics of this long and unprecedented election campaign they have often instead reached for stories that are old and familiar.Shakespeare has been a popular reference point: Joe Biden has frequently been compared to King Lear in his reluctance to relinquish power, Donald Trump to everyone from Richard III to Macbeth. Yet a rather different form of drama, ostensibly less realistic and less obviously relevant to contemporary politics, may in fact offer analogies that are more illuminating still.Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung was first performed in its entirety in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth almost 150 years ago. As the cycle of dramas begins, the dwarf Alberich, the Nibelung from whom it takes its name, gropes the beautiful Rhinemaidens and lasciviously compares their charms. They carelessly reveal that their river contains gold that could make its owner master of the world, but only if he renounces love. Alberich accepts this condition and steals the gold, an act of despoliation whose consequences ripple out through the work’s four evenings. With his brother Mime as his apprentice, he makes a ring and a magic helmet that bring him supreme authority. Similarities with Donald Trump, his beauty contests and gameshows, his misogyny, his exhortations to “drill, baby, drill” and his amoral lust for power, are not hard to find.View image in fullscreenLike Trump, Alberich holds on to power for much less time than he hopes. His enemies exploit his vanity to trick him out of the ring, effecting a transition whose legitimacy he will never accept. Alberich exhorts his followers to revolt, but without success, and regaining the ring is an obsession that endures for the rest of the story. In the final drama, Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung), Alberich enlists the help of Hagen, the son he has fathered in a loveless union with a mortal woman. Trump, too, relies on younger family members to prosecute his interests: Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner were crucial figures in his presidency, Eric and his wife Lara have recently risen to prominence, Donald Jr is a constant presence.Trump’s latest surrogate is his vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, reputedly selected at Donald Jr’s behest. Like Hagen, Vance is a vociferous advocate of marriage: in Twilight of the Gods, Hagen seeks matches for his half-siblings Gunther and Gutrune, supposedly for their benefit but in fact as part of an elaborate strategy to trick Siegfried into giving up the ring. Both Vance and Hagen offer plausibility, engaging in social interactions and vice-presidential debates with a superficial courtesy of which Trump and Alberich are incapable.But both are less interested in serving their promoters than in securing for themselves the ultimate prize, whether that is the ring or the 2028 Republican nomination.View image in fullscreenThe parallels between Biden and Wotan – the character who seizes the ring from Alberich – are equally striking. Like the 46th president, the king of the gods has accomplished much during his long career as a legislator, notably building the magnificent fortress of Valhalla.But he is tormented by his waning abilities, and the reluctant realisation that the task he wants to accomplish himself – the recovery of the ring from the dragon, Fafner – can only be achieved by a younger proxy: stronger, fearless and less tarnished by a lifetime of compromise. Ultimately, it is a female authority figure, older even than himself, who persuades him to abandon his ambitions. Few people know what Nancy Pelosi said to Biden in July, but the agonised confrontation between Wotan and Erda in Act III of Siegfried gives some idea of the likely emotions involved.Wotan’s daughter, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, ends The Ring with an impassioned soliloquy. It is now impossible to predict whether Kamala Harris can emulate Brünnhilde by having the last word in this year’s election drama – but millions across the world cling to the hope that she will. Through most of Twilight of the Gods, Brünnhilde is exploited and humiliated by Siegfried, the hero she thought was her husband, and Hagen, the villain who uses her for his own ends. But in the drama’s final minutes, she emerges from her torment to convey a commanding message of love, laughter and joy. Harris’s willingness to embody these same values, conspicuously absent from recent political discourse, fuelled her swift transformation from patronised vice-president to plausible candidate. Journalists covering her campaign frequently comment on her personal warmth; her equally exuberant running-mate, Tim Walz, observes that “she brings the joy”.View image in fullscreenOf course, as many have noted, joy is not a political programme, and despite Harris’s success in changing the campaign’s character, she has struggled to define what she would do differently from the unpopular administration she has served. Late in the day though it came, Harris’s incursion into the hostile territory of Fox News, where she insisted that her presidency would not be a continuation of Biden’s, was a notable effort to do just that. The interview’s equivalent in The Ring is Brünnhilde’s searing encounter with Waltraute in act I of Twilight of the Gods, when she resists her sister’s pleas to halt their father’s decline by returning the ring to the Rhine. By doing so, she condemns Wotan to irrelevance, but also articulates what is most important to her, establishing the moral authority that allows her to command the cycle’s ending as she does.Needless to say, the parallels between Wagner’s story and that of the election only stretch so far. Incest and immolation, key motifs in The Ring, have not surfaced as themes even in the most surreal of Trump’s ramblings – though with a week to go, anything remains possible. Nor are there many swords and spears, dragons or talking birds in today’s American politics. Intrepid heroes, too, are notably absent, though perhaps there have been enough would-be Siegfrieds among Biden’s 45 predecessors. But if we take The Ring less literally, it offers extraordinary insights into how power passes from one generation to another, into the consequences of denuding the Earth of its resources, and into the transformative potential of love.Wagner has often been appropriated by the political right, notoriously during the Third Reich, and there is plenty in his writing to encourage fascists and authoritarians, not least the disgustingly antisemitic tracts that disfigure his posthumous reputation. But at the time he conceived The Ring, Wagner was a leftwing revolutionary, working to overthrow the regime in Saxony that employed him as Kapellmeister. As his idealism curdled into resignation, he experimented with different endings, giving Brünnhilde words that echoed the philosophy of renunciation of his new intellectual hero, Arthur Schopenhauer. He ultimately decided not to set these words, giving the final say instead to music, and to an ecstatic melody that he told his wife Cosima represented the “glorification of Brünnhilde”.View image in fullscreenThe Ring is many things: a practical realisation of a revolutionary theory of musical theatre; a compendium of brilliant orchestral sounds; a monumental physical and psychological challenge for singers; for some, a philosophical meditation or political tract. But it is also, perhaps above all, a supreme piece of storytelling, one that only truly exists when played out in a theatre. This need for perpetual recreation makes The Ring inescapably not just a story of its own time but of ours too, one that absorbs and reflects its audience’s preoccupations. And by allowing music to take flight in his drama’s final moments, Wagner invites his listeners to fill the imaginative space he has opened up, connecting his concerns with our own.Like The Ring, this election campaign still permits many possible endings, and like Wagner, the American electorate is leaving it uncomfortably late in the process to clarify which will prevail. The ultimate fate of Alberich is left ambiguous: almost uniquely among The Ring’s major characters, he is neither shown nor described as dying, though his world-view is discredited and his scheming thwarted, and he plays no part in the cycle’s final act. Perhaps the one certainty about this election is that whether defeated or victorious, Trump will not remain similarly silent. But whatever the outcome, old stories like Wagner’s can help us understand the newest chapters in our own. More

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    Stevie Nicks says Fleetwood Mac would have been ‘done’ without 1977 abortion

    Stevie Nicks thrust herself into the ongoing fight for access to abortion in the US because she had “been there, done that”, the legendary singer-songwriter says in a new interview.“I tell a good story,” Nicks remarked in an interview conducted by CBS News Sunday Morning, a clip of which was circulated by the network in advance.“So maybe I should try to do something.“I was also there.”Nicks’ comments come after the release in September of her new single The Lighthouse, which was inspired by progressives’ battle to reinstate federal abortion rights in the US.She wrote the rock song after three US supreme court justices appointed by the Donald Trump White House voted to essentially overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that gave Americans a constitutional right to an abortion.In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Nicks discussed her certainty that if she had not gotten an abortion in the 1970s, it would have marked the end of the renowned band Fleetwood Mac that she ultimately helped launch to rock immortality.Nicks at the time had a contraceptive intrauterine device but nonetheless became pregnant with singer Don Henley after breaking up her prior relationship with Fleetwood Mac bandmate Lindsey Buckingham, she told Rolling Stone. She said she decided to terminate the pregnancy in about 1977, or going into 1978, as Fleetwood Mac sat atop the world after its album Rumours.Rumours won Fleetwood Mac the Grammy for album of the year in 1978, a year that saw the band play 18 live shows in 11 US states. Three of the album’s singles – Go Your Own Way, Don’t Stop and You Make Loving Fun – reached the top 10 on the charts. Dreams, with Nicks’ vocals, went No 1 as Rumours eventually finished seventh on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.“Now what the hell am I going to do?” Nicks said to Rolling Stone about her thought process at the time of her aborted pregnancy. “I cannot have a child. I am not the kind of woman who would hand my baby over to a nanny, not in a million years.“So we would be dragging a baby around the world on tour, and I wouldn’t do that to my baby. I wouldn’t say I just need nine months. I would say I need a couple of years, and that would break up the band period.”Nicks said she doesn’t “really care” if people become upset with her over having decided to get an abortion. “My life was my life, and my plan was my plan and had been since I was in the fourth grade,” Nicks said to Rolling Stone, adding that Fleetwood Mac would have been “done” if she had decided otherwise.Nicks’ remarks to Rolling Stone about her personal experience with abortion elaborate on ones she delivered to the Guardian in 2020, when she said: “There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly.”Meanwhile, after the reversal of Roe v Wade as Trump set his sights on a second presidency in the 5 November election, Nicks said she heard everywhere around her that “somebody has to do … [and] say something” to support abortion rights.“And I’m like: ‘Well I have a platform,’” Nicks said after CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Tracy Smith asked the singer about the courage needed to “step into the waters of the abortion debate”.The result was The Lighthouse, a rare new release for Nicks, whose last album of entirely fresh material was put out in 2011. The single casts her as a lighthouse guiding women to campaign for their rights as voters choose between Kamala Harris and Trump, whose supporters include a conservative thinktank that is urging him to step up attacks against sexual and reproductive health and rights.“They’ll take your soul, take your power, unless you stand up, take it back,” Nicks sings on the track. “Try to see the future and get mad/It’s slipping through your fingers, you don’t have what you had/And you don’t have much time to get it back.” More