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      in UK Politics

      Elton John says government must act to save music industry from ‘looming catastrophe’ caused by Brexit or see it ‘crash and burn’

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      Elton John has issued a strongly worded statement warning the government that the UK is in danger of losing “a generation of talent” over the “gaping holes” in its trade deal with the EU.As The Independent revealed earlier in the year, despite Boris Johnson’s vow to “fix” the crisis – triggered by his Brexit deal – no talks have taken place and artists have merely been promised advice on the daunting barriers they now face.On Thursday 10 June, John shared a post to his Instagram revealing that he – along with his partner and Rocket Entertainment CEO David Furnish, Marshal Arts’ Craig Stanley and Lord Paul Strasberger – met with Lord Frost “to spell out the damage the trade agreement he negotiated with Europe is doing to the UK’s music industry”.John warned that, due to the trade deal, new and emerging artist will be unable to tour Europe freely – “an essential part of their education and development” – due to the prohibitive nature of the newly required visas, carnets and permits.“Despite this looming catastrophe, the government seems unable or unwilling to fix this gaping hole in their trade deal and defaults to blaming the EU rather than finding ways out of this mess,” the 74-year-old said.“The situation is already critical and touring musicians, crews and support staff are already losing their livelihood.”John stressed that he was not writing out of concern for artists who currently tour arenas and stadiums: “We are lucky enough to have the support staff, finance and infrastructure to cut through the red tape that Lord Frost’s no deal has created.”“This gravest of situations is about the damage to the next generation of musicians and emerging artists, whose careers will stall before they’ve even started due to this infuriating blame game,” he wrote.John said that had he faced the financial and logistical obstacles that young musicians do, he doubted he would be where he is today.“During our meeting Lord Frost said trying to solve this issue is a long process,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, our industry doesn’t have time. It is dying now. The government have broken the promise they outlined in 2020 to protect musicians and other creative industries from the impact of Brexit on tours to Europe.“They now need to find solutions in both the short and long term to ensure the UK music industry continues to thrive.”He concluded his statement by pointing to a “window of opportunity” created by the halt on touring the pandemic has caused.“I call on the government to sort this mess out or we risk losing future generations of world-beating talent,” he said. “This is about whether one of the UK’s most successful industries, worth £111bn a year, is allowed to prosper and contribute hugely to both our cultural and economic wealth, or crash and burn.”Last month, a legal opinion obtained by the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM) dismantled the reasons given for the government’s failure to secure a visa waiver agreement (VWA) with Brussels.The organisation also said the EU has no fewer than 28 such deals in place, which means performers in countries including Colombia, the UAE and Tonga can tour more easily than UK artists.“Despite what MPs have been told by ministers, the latest legal advice has shown that it is entirely possible for the government to create an agreement,” said Deborah Annetts, the ISM’s chief executive.“With the music sector now looking beyond coronavirus, it is still virtually impossible for many creative professionals to work in Europe on a short term or freelance basis.” More

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      in World Politics

      Growing LGBTI+ Hate Shows the UN’s Need to Adapt

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      Since February, security forces have arrested at least 24 people in Cameroon for alleged same-sex conduct or gender nonconformity. In Uzbekistan, videos showing the abuse, humiliation and beatings of gay men have been circulated around social media groups. In Poland, the government’s ongoing campaign against LGBTI+ people continues, with proposed legal changes to prevent same-sex couples from adopting children.

      The continuing persecution of LGBTI+ people is tragically under-acknowledged by the multilateral system. A failure to use the United Nations as a platform to raise these issues is a failure to understand one of its core purposes. There are no rights explicitly related to sexuality or gender identity codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 1 of the declaration accounts for factors such as language, religion and nationality, but relegates sexual and gender identity to “other status.”

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      Those who oppose LGBTI+ rights still have room to use the excuse that such rights are not fundamental, not universal or are beholden to regional and local interpretation.

      Oppressive States

      Free & Equal, the UN’s flagship campaign for promoting LGBTI+ rights, is a welcome step for the cause, using influential artists and activists as champions. Likewise, the 2017 standards of conduct for businesses on tackling discrimination against LGBTI+ people provides more resources for countering discrimination at the organizational level. The appointment of Victor Madrigal-Borloz as the UN’s independent expert on these issues was also a commendable move, in that it made LGBTI+ rights somebody’s job.

      While they do show support, none of these steps do anything to modernize the fundamental architecture of the UN system. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently signed a series of constitutional amendments to introduce a formal ban on same-sex marriage, showing that LGBTI+ hate is entrenched even in permanent member states of the Security Council, the UN’s most powerful branch. Campaigns and guidance may change some behavior, but they do not embed LGBTI+ rights into the UN’s cornerstone principles and agreements, meaning these rights still lack basic parity of esteem with other human rights.

      The United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commission (OHCHR) argues that a specific set of LGBTI+ rights is unnecessary. Yet their absence leaves space for oppressive states to claim that they are less important or more fundamental than other rights. A campaign to introduce and ratify a set of specific rights safeguarding all aspects of sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sexual characteristics should be a priority for all countries. Doing so would send a strong message of solidarity to those LGBTI+ people living in repressive societies.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Yogyakarta Principles offer a ready-made framework for codifying rules protecting sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) into universal rights frameworks. A coalition of states publicly declaring its support for the principles would pile on the pressure at the UN, as would pushing for General Assembly votes for their adoption.

      There are currently 10 UN human rights treaty bodies, overseeing the protection of rights in areas including disability and migrant status. There is no treaty body safeguarding the rights of LGBTI+ people. Calls for the introduction and ratification of a new treaty providing safeguards for sexuality and gender identity would send a powerful message of support throughout the multilateral system.

      National Level

      Alongside multilateral action, countries should be stepping up their game at the national level. Having robust policies on support for LGBTI+ rights would bolster countries’ credibility and authority when pushing for reform at the UN level. For instance, Germany recently announced comprehensive new measures for the promotion of LGBTI+ rights abroad.

      Other states would do well to follow suit, providing comprehensive diplomatic training on LGBTI+ issues so that in-country staff can better understand the challenges and potential remedies around LGBTI+ persecution. Shoring up embassies’ commitment to offer support and protection for those facing persecution will also send a strong message to host governments that LGBTI+ discrimination will not be tolerated anywhere.

      Those countries with strong track records of support for LGBTI+ rights should also be working harder through existing UN mechanisms. More action should be taken through existing UN fora. The UN General Assembly’s Third Committee and Human Rights Council sessions should be regular venues for raising these issues.

      Here, sustained diplomatic and reputational pressure should be applied to countries that continue to persecute people based on their sexuality and/or gender identity at an institutional level. Using these venues to declare the many and varied forms of LGBTI+ persecution as a global crisis would demonstrate solidarity to those facing persecution and send a strong message of resolve to those perpetrating it.

      The resistance of certain states to particular rights is not a reason to believe that some types of discrimination are unavoidable. It is imperative to speak louder. More liberal countries that advocate for these rights should use every avenue to translate their vocal support into action, leading to tangible and long-lasting reforms at the UN and state levels. The current lackluster approach is a shame to all countries that purport to support equality for LGBTI+ people. They must do better.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of Young Professionals in Foreign Policy.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Nixon is much more serious than Trump’: Michael Dobbs and the tale of the White House tapes

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      “I love you, as you know,” says Richard Nixon. “Like my brother.”The 37th president is bidding farewell to chief of staff Bob Haldeman in an unexpectedly intimate phone call that, half a century later, lingers in the air like a ghost.Donald Trump had tweets but Nixon had tapes: 3,700 hours of them, secretly recorded by a White House system the East German Stasi might have envied. The conversations were released between 2007 and 2013, an eavesdropping opportunity never likely to be repeated.They have proved a goldmine for Michael Dobbs, a British-born author and journalist whose elegantly written book, King Richard – Nixon and Watergate: An American Tragedy, zooms in on the hundred days that followed Nixon’s second inauguration and led to his downfall.The narrative follows Nixon from room to room, day by day, sometimes minute by minute. It tells how the tapes capture ice cubes tinkling in a glass, Nixon’s voice softening when his 24-year-old daughter Julie calls and, as the world knows, some bilious rants about the media as the Watergate scandal deepens.Why did this famously secretive president leave such an incriminating trace? Nixon never intended for the tapes, made between February 1971 and July 1973, to become public. But he did have an eye on posterity.“It’s a bit like Churchill said: ‘History will be kind to me because I intend to write it myself,’” says Dobbs, 70.“That was Nixon’s idea as well. This is one difference from Trump: [Nixon] really had studied history in some depth, and compared himself to people like Churchill and De Gaulle. He wanted to write memoirs that would justify his place in history and particularly undercut any attempts by uppity aides like [Henry] Kissinger to claim all the credit for his foreign policy initiatives.The tapes force a writer to step into his shoes and to see events from his point of view so you see him destroy himself“So he never imagined that the tapes would become public. He thought they were just going to be his private property that he could draw on for writing his memoirs. Of course, he didn’t really understand that just to go back and listen to these tapes, he’d have to spend his entire retirement trying to decipher them. The tapes became completely out of control in the end.”Lyndon Johnson recorded about 800 hours of phone calls but Nixon took it to a whole new level. Dobbs says: “The difference with Nixon was that he was so ham-fisted and a bit of a klutz that he didn’t know how to turn tape recorders on and off so they invented a system which turned out to be completely diabolic: it would just turn on by itself. It recorded absolutely everything without any sort of input from him, which is what really did him in in the end.”Sometimes Nixon could forget the tapes were running as he and his aides plotted dirty tricks, unleashed crude diatribes or made racist asides. In one, Haldeman suggests that the White House counsel, John Dean, must have been taking out “all his frustrations in just pure, raw, animal, unadulterated sex”.Nixon’s Trump-like loathing of the media includes a boast that he “really stuck ’em in the groin”. It also crops up in a conversation with his special counsel, Chuck Colson, on the eve of his inauguration. Dobbs says: “He’s about to give this speech and he’s gloating with Colson, his hatchet man, about how he’s going to stick it to the Washington Post and drive the Post’s share price down. He generally calls the reporters ‘the bastards’.”At this point, Nixon was riding high after a thumping election victory and with a near-70% approval rating. The break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex, seven months prior, was seemingly behind him despite the efforts of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.“But then, within just a few weeks and months, the whole thing has completely unravelled and you have all these people within the White House at each other’s throats and, as Nixon says, ‘pissing on each other’ and eventually pissing on the president. So it’s an amazing three-month period in which probably one of the most disciplined White House operations in history completely falls apart.”By July 1973, some of Nixon’s advisers were pleading with him to destroy the tapes lest they reveal his part in the Watergate cover-up. He felt they would strengthen his defence. He was wrong.The supreme court ordered the release of a “smoking gun tape” confirming Dean’s testimony that Nixon told aides to order the CIA to shut down the FBI investigation into the burglary. Nixon lost the confidence of fellow Republicans and was forced to resign in August 1974, before he could be impeached.Dobbs reflects: “At a certain point, it becomes Dean’s word against Nixon’s word. There wasn’t sufficient evidence to impeach the president at that point. The only reason that he was forced to resign was because the tapes started coming out and that went all the way to the supreme court. Without the tapes, there would not have been a sufficient basis to force Nixon out of office.”And yet, as Dobbs listened, he also found the tapes that ruined Nixon’s reputation in the moment could yet provide a measure of redemption.“What they do is to force a writer to step into his shoes and to see events from his point of view so you see him destroy himself and destroy his presidency and the pain and agony that he feels.“Unless you’re an absolute dyed-in-the-wool Nixon hater, you have to feel some sympathy for the man, not because you approve of what he did, but just on a personal level.”The president’s conversations with his daughters help humanise him.“You can relate to him the way he talks to Julie, particularly if you’ve listened to the previous tape of him talking to Haldeman. Suddenly he’s switching from being an irascible president who’s barking orders at people to being a loving father.”Then there is that wistful call with Haldeman, who knew the president better than anyone.“Nixon never invited him to a family meal, never shook hands with him, and then suddenly here is Nixon saying, ‘I love you like my brother.’ If you know the background of Nixon’s two brothers dying from tuberculosis when he was a young man, it’s extraordinary.”Dobbs wrote the book during Trump’s scandal-peppered, twice-impeached, one-term presidency. Parallels with Nixon were inescapable: the exploitation of racial resentment, the whipping up of the “silent majority”, the hostility towards the press and east coast elites. But he believes there are key differences too.“Nixon is a much more substantive, serious person than Trump and he had a real sophisticated understanding of history and foreign policy. We don’t know how Trump is going to be treated by historians, 40, 50 years later, but I find Nixon a more empathetic character than Trump.“To some extent, Nixon has succeeded in rehabilitating himself, or at least we have a more nuanced picture of Nixon now. I’m not sure that Trump is going to be rehabilitated, at least among historians.”The author, a dual British-American citizen who has worked for the Guardian and Washington Post, continues: “One distinguishing thing between the two of them is the whole claim that the election was rigged and stolen from Trump. Although Nixon did have a lot of grudges about particularly the 1960 election and felt the Kennedys had stolen it from him, he did not go public with that and he did not try to dispute it in any serious way.“He accepted it because he thought that was one rule of the game. Trump completely threw that rule of the game overboard. Nixon is within the mainstream American presidents. Trump is outside the mainstream.”It remains to be seen whether historians will regard Trump as a Shakespearean figure or conclude he was simply not that psychologically interesting. Dobbs believes Nixon, who rose from poverty to the presidency only to endure catastrophe, does meet the King Lear standard. Along with its theatrical title, the book is divided into four “acts” and has a list of “dramatic personae”.“To call him a Shakespearean tragic hero does not mean that you approve of him or you like him,” Dobbs says. “It means that you’re just struck by this fall from grace and you’ve become aware of the suffering involved. I was more interested in telling the story than to pass judgment.”Exit, pursued by a tape recorder. More

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      in World Politics

      Understanding Racism in All Its Forms

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      Twenty years ago, Amnesty International’s “Racism and the Administration of Justice” report warned that “unchecked racism can lead to tragedy on a massive scale.” Last week, as we remembered George Floyd and pondered over the meaning of his death a year ago, another aspect of unchecked racism resurfaced. On May 21, just as a cautious ceasefire was beginning thousands of miles away between Israel and Hamas, Joseph Borgen, a Jewish man reportedly on his way to a pro-Israel rally in Manhattan, was attacked by demonstrators attending a pro-Palestine rally, one of whom has since been charged with a hate crime.

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      The day after the attack, Borgen was interviewed by CNN anchor Don Lemon, where he said that he wanted to understand what made those who attacked him “act the way they did.” Prejudice, of course, comes in all shapes and sizes, all colors and cultures — as does violence. But the linchpin to unpacking the absurdity of this attack, of Muslim-on-Jew hate or Jew-on-Muslim hate, is understanding anti-Semitism and, through the drivers of that phenomenon, Islamophobia.

      Familiarity Breeds Contempt

      This attack, despicable as it was, should not surprise us given our understanding — or lack of it — of anti-Semitism, described as that “very light sleeper,” so easy to awaken. Such attacks are privileged acts of hate because the attackers consider their own particular cause to be exceptional and thus far from racist. Whether you are Jewish or Muslim, Arab or Israeli, the internet is a particularly convenient place to find vindication for what you think is the “truth.” 

      Embed from Getty Images

      What we encounter online is a cacophony of privileged hatreds. Jeremy Rosen wrote in his blog recently that, “In the age of social media and mass communication, so many people only believe one propagandist side of the argument and make no effort to hear another point of view.” He writes of how this saddens him in the same way that jihadism has given Islam a bad name “when it is only the most primitive, insecure, and misled who think that way.” But as he rightly states, “these are the tools of the prejudiced.”

      When otherwise peaceful demonstrations manifest themselves in brutal attacks by individuals, verbal or physical, on a perceived “other,” it is racism, pure and simple. But when the perpetrators of such acts are themselves from minority communities, it kowtows to only one agenda — that of white supremacy — which has no sympathy with any of them. The murder of George Floyd and the ensuing public awakening among so many diverse communities — of color, of faith, of culture, of economic disparity, of difference — should be a cue for communities everywhere to reexamine their own attitudes and get their priorities right.

      In relation to Jews and Muslims, a navel-gazing complacency has largely ignored the bigger picture, which is the fight against systemic, institutional or structural racism. The murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests have reminded the world that all people of good conscience should be focused on this type of discrimination. However, the Middle East question continues to revolve around, perhaps fatalistically, over the relationship between Arabs and Israelis, Muslims and Jews, to the detriment of those communities themselves as well as that greater struggle for minorities — combating discrimination and all forms of racism within the societies they actually inhabit.

      Common Ground

      Can Jews and Muslims find common ground from the example of what the killing of George Floyd has taught us? It isn’t as though they have not had opportunities to focus on a more nuanced understanding of each “other.” Attempts in the past to do so have covered art, music, academic enquiry and dialogue. The British composer Roxanna Panufnik’s work, “Abraham,” for instance, is a beautiful musical example of bridge-building between religions that share the essential belief in one God.

      In 2008, “The Call for Peace, Dialogue and Understanding between Muslims and Jews,” an open letter with 40 Muslim signatories, highlighted how, “although many … only know of Muslim-Jewish relations through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there needs to be an awareness of other positive encounters at different stages of our history.”

      In 2004, I co-convened a remarkable initiative called Alif-Aleph with Dr. Richard Stone, a former chair of the UK-based Runnymede Commission on Islamophobia. The manifesto of that initiative remains relevant and ought to be revived in the context of George Floyd’s wider legacy. The initiative ambitiously aimed to create a new golden age in which Muslims and Jews in the diaspora would spread the example of working together to other communities, building on their mutually positive contributions to society. Living side by side in the West is a new situation that provides new opportunities.

      In practice, the initiative explored a unified purpose in addressing racism. Underlining it was “a common experience of having to address hostilities that derive from mistaken stereotypes of our religions and our cultures, leading to Islamophobia and Antisemitism.” It declared that those who wish to promote negative stereotypes of Muslims and Jews as people who hate each other will be recognized as extremists, because “What the world needs are Harmonisers, not Polarisers.”

      Violently attacking and verbally abusing an innocent person because of how you perceive a particular truth makes you anathema to that truth, makes you a hypocrite, a hater and a racist. It makes you as unjust as those you are trying to expose.

      So what made the attackers “act the way they did”? Don Lemon probably answered that question on his show when he earlier told fellow CNN host Chris Cuomo that “the issue is for people to understand their own implicit bias and racism. … There are different cultures in different places but that doesn’t change … what racism is.” That is the lesson the jury heard when convicting the racist killer of George Floyd. That is the lesson Jews and Muslims, Arabs and Israelis must hear in their own search for a meaningful resolution of what divides them.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Zero Fail review: US Secret Service as presidential protectors – and drunken frat boys

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      At times, the US Secret Service has resembled a bunch of pistol-toting frat boys on a taxpayer-funded spring break. In the words of a drunken supervisor speaking to his men in the run-up to a 2012 summit in Cartagena, Colombia: “You don’t know how lucky you are … You are going to fuck your way across the globe.”Disturbingly, the debacle in Colombia was not a one-off, as Carol Leonnig makes clear. Rather, it was the most glaring episode in an accumulation of horribles. Six agents were dismissed, another six disciplined.Leonnig knows of what she writes. She won a Pulitzer for her reporting on security lapses at the Secret Service, including the “Vegas bachelor party” in South America, and was part of the Washington Post team that scored a Pulitzer for its work on Edward Snowden’s war on the National Security Agency.She also worked with Philip Rucker on A Very Stable Genius, one of the better and more informative books on Donald Trump’s time in the White House. Now she delivers her first solo work, Zero Fail. It paints an alarming portrait of those dedicated to protecting the president and offers a comprehensive look at an agency that has seen better days.In 2009, Michaele and Tareq Salahi slipped through White House security, attended a state dinner and met Barack Obama. In 2015, a pair of soused senior agents crashed an official car into the White House complex.There are incidents of shots being fired into the White House, an intruder making it into the building and an agent on Mike Pence’s detail hooking up with a hooker.The Secret Service’s motto? “Worthy of Trust and Confidence.”Leonnig tells of agents taking selfies with Donald Trump’s sleeping grandson. Trump asked their supervisor, “These guys weren’t being pervs, right?”The response: “They were just being idiots.”Zero Fail convincingly argues that the men and women who guard the president, the vice-president and their families are overworked. Leonnig also contends the Secret Service is a victim of mission creep, a buddy system saddled with out-of-date technology, a culture wedded to doing things because that is how they have always been done.When one young agent brought a pair of fresh eyes to the situation, he was dropped. His critique is now the stuff of in-house legend.Once part of the US Treasury, the Secret Service is presently housed within the Department of Homeland Security – a change that ultimately made little difference. Being swallowed by a bureaucratic Frankenstein did not help morale. The Secret Service became another body-part stitched to a cabinet ministry cobbled together in the aftermath of 9/11.A boost to the budget was not sustained. Trump’s persistent travels to Mar-a-Lago left the Secret Service operating on a shoestring.“Trump has set back this agency 10 years,” one former agent who departed during Trump’s tenure confides to Leonnig. “The overall culture and way of doing things took a big step back.”Time has dulled the images of selflessness displayed in Dallas in November 1963 and outside the Capitol Hilton in 1981. Clint Hill threw himself on to President Kennedy’s limousine. Rufus Youngblood Jr used his body to shield Lyndon Johnson. Tim McCarthy took a bullet meant for Ronald Reagan. Jerry Parr bundled the president away.Unwelcome occurrences are not always gamed out. As former agent Jonathan Wackrow puts it: “The policies and procedures of the Secret Service are born out of blood.”When the planes slammed into the World Trade Center, agents removed Dick Cheney from his office but were delayed in delivering the vice-president to a secure location. Chains of command stymied his immediate entry into a designated shelter. That and the lack of a key.In chronicling the heroics, failures and foibles of the Secret Service, Leonnig also opens a window on the families the agents served. Not surprisingly, some fare better than others. The Clintons and Carters trail the Bushes and Reagans.The agents respected and admired George and Barbara Bush. The feeling was mutual. The Bushes “treated the Secret Service agents who protected them and their large brood like part of the extended family – not like ‘the help’.” At Christmas, the Bushes delayed their celebration so agents could be home with their families. The former head of the Bush detail told Leonnig: “That’s why people would do anything for the President and Mrs Bush.”The Clintons stood on the other end of the spectrum. Bill’s priapic adventures were a headache and Hillary came to be loathed. As for Chelsea, Leonnig tells of her cutting short a telephone conversation with a friend as agents arrived.“I’ve got to go,” the youngest Clinton is remembered saying. “The pigs are here.”Reminded that the agents’ job was to “stand between you, your family and a bullet”, Chelsea reportedly responded: “Well, that’s what my mother and father call you.”The story spread. Suffice to say, Hillary’s “foul mouth” didn’t help her standing with those who protected her. Nor for that matter did the Secret Service’s personnel and culture, which leaned conservative and Republican. Bill and Hillary were children of the 60s. Military service and baking cookies were not for them.Whether and how the Secret Service rebounds remains to be seen. In the aftermath of the insurrection of 6 January, “one Secret Service officer called the armed protesters ‘patriots’ seeking to undo an illegitimate election”, according to Zero Fail. The agent also “falsely claimed to her friends that disguised antifa members had started the violence”, a view still held by the former president’s minions. Members of the Trump detail have been reassigned.To rejuvenate the Secret Service, work needs to be done. At a minimum, Leonnig’s book will get people talking and thinking. More

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      in World Politics

      America’s True Hyperreal Heroes

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      At the very moment that US President Joe Biden is busy demonstrating how little power he wields, whether in reigning in the neocolonial and militaristic behavior of the Israeli government or in attempting to push key legislation through Congress, Elon Musk, who has never been elected to any public office, is flaunting his unchallenged personal power over what may be the most disruptive force in today’s global economy: cryptocurrency.

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      Gregory Barber, writing for Wired, notes that through his tweeting, Musk has become a self-contained agent of volatility. He can send the value of different cryptocurrencies north or south, whenever he feels like it. As Barber frames it, “Musk is creating and destroying small fortunes, 280-characters at a time.” In his email promoting the article, Barber speculates: “Perhaps it’s strategic, or just whimsy, or maybe it’s a kind of performance art to inspire us all to wonder at the value of things. We might never know Musk’s true motives.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      True motives:

      In the current society built on the principle of hyperreality, intentions that though detectable, will never be exposed in public, even by the media who understand that reporting on reality could only confuse their consumers who have become addicted to the manipulated representation of reality rather reality itself.

      Contextual Note

      Elon Musk is a true hyperreal hero, whose only serious rival on the world stage has been Donald Trump. Both are committed to finding ways to obscure the public’s ability to understand some serious public issues. But, contrary to Barber’s assertion, their true motives have never been in doubt. They can be summarized in two words — money and power — and two pathologies — greed and narcissism.

      Because most people in the United States have been taught to revere money and power — money as the key to power, power as the means of obtaining wealth — for all their obvious faults, their admirers not only continue to admire them but also celebrate their consummate ability to epitomize hyperreality. In the Calvinist tradition, wealth and power in the community were signs of divine favor. With the fading of the Puritan ethic of sober achievement, in their excess, Musk and Trump have attained the status of secular gods.

      Embed from Getty Images

      American culture struggles helplessly with the idea of truth. Where the condition for basic survival is to be constantly selling something to other people (ideally by creating a marketplace), truth tends to disappear into a misty horizon, spawning a destabilizing doubt that it even exists. But rather than resigning themselves to the absence of truth, Americans now want to reduce it to the question of facts. Fact-checking is all the rage.

      But serious philosophers and psychologists have always understood that the idea of truth means much more than establishing facts. Paradoxically, facts themselves can represent a convenient way of burying the truth. Journalists and public figures know this. A typical New York Times article on a potentially controversial issue typically contains a breathless series of short paragraphs citing facts, events and expert statements.

      The authors avoid providing logical connections between the paragraphs in an effort to let the facts accumulate. After aligning litanies of factoids and well-chosen quotes, the authors can be certain that no reader will be capable of stitching together anything that leads them towards an underlying meaning. “True motives” will be lost in the onslaught. Here at The Daily Devil’s Dictionary, we have cited examples of these logicless developments, for instance here and here.

      Both of our hyperreal heroes have been publicly disciplined for tweeting irresponsibly. Perceived as less dangerous, Musk still has a Twitter account whereas Trump had his taken away just before leaving the White House. Musk once declared that “Twitter is a war zone,” whereas Trump was accused of using it to foment civil war. His “true motive” appears to have been an attempt to create enough havoc to justify remaining in the White House. It didn’t work for Trump, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have been inspired by Trump’s example after failing to form a new majority earlier this year.

      According to Barber, Musk’s tweets “drop from the sky without warning. He controls the narrative, and thus the market effect.” This is not just hyperreal posturing or playing an expected public role with melodramatic or comic effect, as both Trump and Musk are wont to do on practically any occasion. Musk’s tweets concerning cybercurrency give him a power to make money instantly, at the expense of millions of other people. It sounds dangerous and downright unethical, but as a lawyer quoted by Barber explains, “You can’t police based on what you think is somebody’s subjective heart-of-hearts intent.” Is “heart-of-hearts intent” a synonym of “true motive”? In US culture, people tend to think so.

      Barber notes that only “a small number of people” possess something comparable to Musk’s hyperreal power. He cites Warren Buffett and the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell. Neither of them is addicted to tweeting. But what is the true source of irresponsibility in this story? Is it Musk himself? Or is it Twitter as an institution that facilitates manipulation? Could it be cryptocurrency, which, as a pure product of purchasers’ greed, with no direct link to anything of substance, might justifiably be called hypercurrency? All three combine to define the hyperreal landscape that surrounds us, along with our media who amplify the drama the others generate.

      Historical Note

      Throughout history, political leaders have managed to control events by influencing the behavior of tens of thousands, and sometimes millions, of people. Think of Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler. Whatever extraordinary narrative their culture invented for them and whatever personal charisma on their part contributed to their success, what these figures from the past did was rooted in the reality of government, administration, coercive force and concrete economic relationships.

      Hyperreality today sits atop all those features of power but thrives in an independent world of its own. It may be that without the example of Hollywood we never would have reached this stage. Musk and Trump alike are more like entertainment figures — both writing the script and playing the role — than to leaders of social, political or cultural movements.

      Two centuries ago, P.T. Barnum provided the model for hyperreality that would fully blossom in the 20th century thanks to the disruptive technology of movies, television and finally the internet. Barnum invented an entire sector of entertainment based on the misrepresentation of facts when, after purchasing an aging slave, Joice Heth, put her on display, claiming she was 161 years old and had been young George Washington’s nurse. Barnum understood how facts and symbolism combine to draw the public to his spectacles.

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      George Washington was already known as “the father of the nation.” Barnum provided an exotic, black mothering figure for the father of the country. At the same time, the supposed relationship served to justify slavery and racism by promoting the idea that blacks in a situation of service could nurture whites, and whites would protect and nurture blacks.

      Barnum later became famous for organizing his three-ring circus, but before that he built his reputation around presenting facts or the appearance of facts. He created the American Museum in Manhattan. It featured both authentic historical artifacts and a freak show, prolonging the spirit of deception he developed around Joice Heth. With his partner James Bailey, he launched hyperreality’s ultimate theme with a circus they called “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Barnum himself never sought to be a hyperreal hero. He simply propagated the values of the culture of American hyperreality that would be refined by a later generation of architects of hyperreality.

      William Randolph Hearst modeled the modern idea of the news. Sigmund Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays, invented the art of public relations built around the science of advertising designed as a form of mind control. Trump and Musk have come to represent the ultimate hyperreal heroes, but they have built their identities around the culture created by geniuses like Barnum and Bernays combined with the culture of Hollywood’s larger-than-life screen heroes. They are not alone. There are plenty of hyperreal supporting actors and extras who give depth to the representation. But they are the ones talented enough and sufficiently narcissistic to occupy center stage and ultimately influence the audience’s behavior.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Battle for the Soul review: how Biden beat Trump – and exposed Democratic divides

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      On Saturday 7 November, the networks finally called the election for Joe Biden. Barack Obama’s vice-president prevailed by more than 7m votes but his margin in the electoral college was too close for comfort. The Democrats lost seats in the House and did not take control of the Senate until January, when Biden took office. America stands divided but the Democrats’ own fissures are also on display.The party of Jackson, FDR and JFK is now an upstairs-down coalition of coastal elites and minorities, hounded by politically self-destructive demands for defunding the police and ever greater wokeness. As Biden acknowledged to Edward-Isaac Dovere, when he won the White House at the third attempt, the former senator from Delaware was the “dog who caught the bus”. Now what?Dovere’s first book is informed and granular, filled with up-close quotes and lacerating observations, a must-read for newsrooms and political junkies. It captures Biden’s post-2016 ascent and the conflicts within his party.Donald Trump weighs on the narrative but is not its focal point. Pride of place goes to Biden and Obama. They are plenty interesting.Obama is portrayed as skeptical of Biden’s chances and doubtful of his ability to energize a crowd. In his eyes, Biden could strut, wear Ray-Bans … and then “stumble”. He did not mesmerize.“Americans liked their presidents to have some swagger,” Obama thought.Likewise, Biden knew he was no Obama, saying: “I’ve never seen a man who’s better at talking to a thousand people than to one.”Still, Biden understood that he could relate on the quotidian level. At 30, he buried a wife and daughter. Decades later he lost his elder son to cancer and watched the other become mired in a hellscape of booze, pills and powder.If Biden seethed with ambition, at least he did reasonable job of avoiding self-delusion. Battle for the Soul depicts Eric Holder, Obama’s friend and former attorney general, as overly optimistic about the 44th president’s powers. And that is being kind.Holder actually believed Obama’s win in 2008 would usher in an Aquarian age. “Everyone thought his election would lead to a post-racial society,” according to Holder, adding that “somehow the normal rules would not apply” and “that all things negative” would be gone.The only thing missing from that tableau was a cotton candy unicorn.Biden saw his own candidacy more prosaically. He could be “what stopped the backlash that Obama had set off”, a modest but important feat. By the numbers, Biden improved on Hillary Clinton’s margins among white voters – with and without college degrees.Over time the GOP traded upward arc for resentment as its central message and ceded the votes of Americans with four-year degrees. The flip side: Battle for the Soul records Biden lamenting the disconnect between his party and their old lunch-bucket base. The descendants of Ellis Island had forgotten their forbears. The New Deal was no longer a memory.On that score, Biden criticizes the Democrats for emphasizing the plight of the poor at the expense of society’s middle rungs.“How many times did you hear us, even in parts of our administration, talking about the middle class?” he asks Dovere.A graduate of the University of Delaware and Syracuse Law School, Biden criticized the left for embracing the abstract and Medicare for All over what people actually needed.“Some of the party sort of became a little bit elitist,” Biden conceded. The faculty lounge had replaced the political clubhouse. When it came to defunding the police, Biden refused to buy what the progressives were selling. In his campaign autobiography, Promise Me Dad, he took pride in “close relationship with the police and the civil rights community”.Whether Biden can bridge those two groups in office may determine the outcome of the midterms and his chances of re-election. In the summer of 2020, amid protests against police brutality and racism, Biden feared Trump’s message of law and order would resonate. In the end, it almost did.Murder is up. America’s cities are shooting galleries again. The murder of George Floyd by a police officer continues to reverberate. Unfortunately, the gap between police and policed widens. The urban landscape festers.Dovere aims some of his sharpest slings at Jared Kushner. In 2016, after a post-election tour of the West Wing, Trump’s son-in-law noted the decor and announced to his guides: “Oh Mr Trump is going to love this … It’s going to remind him of one of his golf clubhouses.”In the author’s words, Kushner was a “wannabe wunderkind” whose biggest achievement was “over-leveraging himself into the most expensive real estate deal in New York City history”.Ted Cruz also receives his share of scorn. Dovere labels the Texas senator a “self-styled great moralizer who brought intellectual imperiousness to his labored Elmer Gantry impression”. Unlike Kushner, Cruz fundraises off such turns of phrase. There’s nothing like saying: “I’m persecuted, I’m No 1.”How much more Biden accomplishes remains to be seen. The pandemic appears to have subsided, if it has not been vanquished. The economy grows, albeit unevenly. What additional legislation will be passed is unknown; 4 July is almost here and there is no infrastructure bill.If politics teaches us anything it is that culture counts and crime matters. How Biden and the Democrats navigate these challenges is an open question. Should Nancy Pelosi loses the speaker’s gavel, Biden will be forced to contend with both the Republicans and the Squad, the influential group of progressive House women. For any mortal, that would be a daunting task.Battle for the Soul provides ample warning and plenty of food for thought. More

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      Matthew McConaughey ‘making calls’ about run for Texas governor – report

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      The actor Matthew McConaughey appears to be seriously considering entering politics, according to a report on Sunday which said the Dallas Buyer’s Club star has been “quietly making calls to influential people in Texas political circles” as he mulls a run for governor.McConaughey, 51, was born in Uvalde, Texas, and lives in Austin, the state capital, with his wife and children. Last year he published an autobiography of sorts and in March he told a Texas podcast running for governor was “a true consideration”.“I’m looking into now again, what is my leadership role?” he said. “Because I do think I have some things to teach and share, and what is my role? What’s my category in my next chapter of life that I’m going into?”Brendan Steinhauser, an Austin-based Republican strategist, told Politico, which reported the McConaughey calls, he was “a little more surprised that people aren’t taking him more seriously, honestly.“Celebrity in this country counts for a lot … it’s not like some C-list actor no one likes. He has an appeal.”McConaughey’s other recent screen credits include The Wolf of Wall Street, for Martin Scorsese; The Gentlemen, directed by Guy Ritchie; and Free State of Jones, about a civil war deserter who led an uprising against the slave-owning Confederacy.He also has an impressive three entries – The Paperboy, The Wedding Planner and Serenity – in Hear Me Out, a Guardian series in which writers make a case for why widely loathed movies deserve to be re-examined.In the US, entertainment often bleeds into politics. Ronald Reagan was an actor before campaigning for rightwing causes, becoming governor of California and beating an incumbent, Jimmy Carter, for the White House. The bodybuilder and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California, the wrestler Jesse Ventura governor of Minnesota.And, of course, when Donald Trump ran for the White House in 2016, he owed his fame more to a reality TV hit, The Apprentice, than to his bankruptcy-flecked career in real estate.McConaughey is not alone in pondering a switch from Hollywood to a governor’s mansion. The reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner is in the early – if faltering – stages of a run in California, as Republicans seek to recall Gavin Newsom.The Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, will seek a third term next year. He remains a formidable figure, despite controversy over his handling of a winter storm earlier this year which crippled the power grid, left 125 Texans dead and made state Republicans a national laughing stock.Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Trump and Jenner ran as Republicans. Ventura was the candidate of the Reform Party, his victory a major shock.McConaughey’s views are mostly a mystery. Karl Rove, a senior adviser to the last governor of Texas to become president, George W Bush, told Politico he found a McConaughey run “improbable, but not out of the question” and said “the question is: Would he run as a Republican? A Democrat? Independent? And where is he on the political scale?“He says he has a funny phrase about being a hardcore centrist, but what party would he run under?”Democratic hopes of turning Texas blue – or at least purple, away from its baked-in ruby red Republicanism – have continually come up short.In 2018, Beto O’Rourke, a congressman, made national headlines but failed to eject Ted Cruz from the US Senate. In 2020 the state’s other Republican senator, John Cornyn, also survived a much-hyped challenge.Earlier this month a long slate of Democratic candidates in a race for an open US House seat effectively cancelled each other out, two Republicans making the runoff.O’Rourke failed to parlay his fame into a successful presidential run and has yet to say if he will seek to challenge Abbott. Julián Castro, a former mayor of San Antonio, US housing secretary and candidate for the Democratic nomination, could also run.McConaughey’s star status is proving a considerable lure for progressives but many fear a run as an independent. Most observers reason that would only succeed in splitting the vote and ushering Abbott back into power.A leading Democratic strategist, Paul Begala, told Politico: “Texas doesn’t need a third party, Matthew! We need a second party.” More