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      Preventable review: Andy Slavitt indicts Trump over Covid – but scolds us all too

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      Andy Slavitt’s Preventable is a 336-page indictment of Donald Trump, Trumpworld, America’s lack of social cohesion, greed and big pharma. He laments needless deaths, hyper-partisanship and populist disdain of experts and expertise. The word “evil” appears. So does “privilege”.Slavitt, recently departed as a senior adviser to Joe Biden on Covid response, is himself a product of the Ivy League: the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard business school. He also did stints in the Obama administration and at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and United Healthcare.His book reads like Covid-porn for blue America. Unfortunately, he does not reflect on how the US reached this place.The saga of Albion’s Seed – English Protestants who slaughtered each other in the old country, overthrew the crown in a new land then waged a second civil war – does not figure in Slavitt’s calculus. Said differently, if kin can repeatedly raise arms against kin, the social fabric can never be taken for granted – especially not as demographics convulse. E pluribus unum has limitations.Slavitt sees Trump’s cruelty at the southern border but fails to acknowledge the grievances of those in flyover country. Brexit and Trump were not one-offs. They were inextricably related. Displacement exacts a price.Slavitt’s book is subtitled “The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the US Coronavirus Response”. He lauds pandemic responses in Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand and criticizes Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, governors of Texas and Florida.But he ignores the fact that cases and mortality rates in those two states were lower than in New York and New Jersey – states called home by coastal elites.To his credit, Slavitt does take to task Bill de Blasio, that hapless and tin-eared mayor, for urging New Yorkers to “go out and enjoy themselves at restaurants” as the pandemic took root.“The impact of New York’s delay was significant,” Slavitt writes.Similarly, Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s performative Republican governor, is derided for her “freedom-first” strategy. But unlike De Blasio she remains popular in her state and her party. A DeSantis-Noem Republican ticket in 2024 is not out of the question. In the eyes of voters, Noem did something right – much like Andrew Cuomo in New York, now beset by allegations of sexual misconduct but apparently on the verge of dodging a political bullet.On the other hand, the New York Times reports that even in east Asia and the south Pacific, supposed world leaders in containing the coronavirus, the fight is not yet won. Variants and their dangers loom. Vaccinations lag.To quote the Times, “people are fed up” and asking: “Why are we behind and when, for the love of all things good and great, will the pandemic routine finally come to an end?”Patience is never in limitless supply. Not in the US, not elsewhere. Slavitt makes insufficient allowance for this very human quirk.Trump was callous and mendacious but he grasped what made folks tick. Despite Slavitt’s vilification of big pharma, in those countries that possessed sufficient capital and foresight, vaccine manufacturers came through. Markets can work, even if they result in asymmetries.As expected, Preventable catalogs Trump’s failings in granular detail: his false promises of Covid quickly disappearing, his embrace of medical quackery, his rejection of testing as a crucial weapon. Slavitt also reminds readers that Trump chucked his predecessor’s pandemic response playbook and gutted the supply of personal protective equipment, just for the sake of blotting out the past.Politicians are self-centered. Trump more so than others. According to Slavitt, he saw himself as the smartest person in the room and expected to be flattered accordingly. One way to win his attention was to compliment his parenting skills. But being the owner of a debt-laden company forced to pay for golf course upkeep with no one on the greens may have injected additional anxiety. The public was expected to feel Trump’s pain.Slavitt also describes Trump’s difficulty in coming to grips with the possibility of the pandemic costing him the election, and his decision to offload to the states the mission of combating Covid. The White House became the backdrop for a reality show while the Confederate flag emerged as a symbol of pro-Trump, “liberate the state” sentiment.Jared Kushner told Slavitt: “We’re going to put testing back to the states.” The White House “can’t be responsible”, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser explained. “Some [governors] don’t want to succeed. Bad incentives to keep blaming us.”As an administration insider told the Guardian in April 2020, Trump was “killing his own supporters”.And yet, not surprisingly, Slavitt struggles with the reality that Democratic nay-saying almost lost Biden the White House and Nancy Pelosi the speaker’s gavel. Voters yearned for hope and wanted to know their sacrifice mattered.Being told “we are in this together” when “we” are manifestly not is more than a problem with messaging. For example, Slavitt omits mention of Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, and his infamous dinner at a Napa Valley restaurant in November as Covid cases mounted. On being found out, Newsom acknowledged: “We’re all human. We all fall short sometimes.” Whatever.Slavitt does upbraid the Fox News host Tucker Carlson for downplaying the dangers of Covid and recounts the inane pronouncements of Richard Epstein, a libertarian-minded New York University law school professor, to a similar end. Slavitt calls Epstein “disconnected from reality and remarkably self-assured”.This week, the US death toll passed 600,000. The vaccine works only on the living. The world has experienced more deaths halfway through 2021 than in all of 2020.Slavitt ends his book wondering whether “the lessons of the past year might be forgotten”. Don’t rule that out. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘We dodged a mortar round’: George Packer on America in crisis

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      When the pandemic struck, George Packer moved his family out of the city and upstate into the countryside.The move forced one America’s most celebrated and decorated non-fiction writers, famous for his reporting, to sit still for once – and to contemplate what was happening to his country.The result is an extended essay, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, a meditation on the crippling division of the nation into irreconcilable political tribes, on to which Packer has added some reflections on the way out of the mire.“I felt immobilised as a reporter,” Packer said. “It seemed like an essay was the thing to do – just put down a bunch of thoughts that get stirred up when you’re sitting in one place for a long time, looking hard at yourself and your country. So it was a Covid book for sure, making the best of a bad situation.”In some ways it is a long epilogue to a previous work, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, for which Packer won the National Book Award in 2013. That was a deeply reported account of the shredding of the social fabric. Last Best Hope is a stock-taking two presidential terms later, after the rise and fall of Donald Trump, who the author sees as the inevitable symptom of the national unraveling.Instead of getting in his car and driving across the country, Packer ordered a small pile of essays which did what he was trying to achieve, a diagnosis of a nation in crisis. One was a pamphlet by Walt Whitman called Democratic Vistas, “a passionate, wonderful book”; another was Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest, by the journalist Walter Lippmann in 1914.Packer also looked abroad, rereading George Orwell’s essay on wartime Britain, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, as well as Strange Defeat, a contemplation by French historian Marc Bloch of the chronic failings that gifted Hitler his easy conquest in 1940, published after its author was executed by the Nazis. Packer sees a parallel between France’s shock at being routed with the humbling of America in the face of Covid-19.Sitting alongside these shorter works in Packer’s rural retreat was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, an observation of the country and what made it different written by a French observer just over a half-century after its founding. Packer describes it as “a masterpiece of sociology and observation and political analysis”.He finished writing Last Best Hope at a point when the democracy de Tocqueville had described had barely survived a direct onslaught, the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol aimed at reversing the election result.“I think we dodged more than a bullet – a mortar round,” Packer said, noting that if Republican election officials in Georgia and Republican-appointed judges around the country had done the bidding of their president and party, and overturned the election, the battle would have spilled bloodily into the streets. And if Trump had not been so staggeringly inept in his handling of the pandemic, Packer believes he would have won easily.The Republicans are administering poison to the bedridden patient“I’ve seen the foreshadowing of something I never expected to see, never imagined, which is the end of our democracy,” he said. “I lived through a lot of bad political periods, but that never seemed to be on the horizon.”On closer examination, American democracy might not have dodged the bullet, or the mortar round, after all. It may have been badly wounded.Packer says he sees the courts, and state election machinery, and all the institutions that just about held the line in 2020, as “a patient getting out of bed after a really long illness and having just the strength to walk across the room”. The analogy raises the question of whether the patient will have the will and the vitality to do the same in 2022 or 2024.“The Republicans are administering poison to the bedridden patient at the moment,” Packer said. “They’re sneaking into the room and injecting toxins in the form of voter suppression laws and conspiracy theories and lies. So yeah, it’s a real question whether a democracy can survive if nearly half the country has embraced an anti-democratic worldview. That’s kind of the question we’re facing right now.”Real America, Just America … and moreOne of the side effects of Packer’s Covid-led move out of the city was that it brought him into proximity with people who saw the nation through a very different prism. He describes the night when he first sees Trump lawn signs in the yard of polite and friendly neighbours.“Five white letters stretched across a sign,” he writes. “The blaring shade of that red instantly told me what the five letters said.”His visceral reaction to Trumpists led to some introspection about the roots of those emotions and what they implied on a national scale.“My attitude had something to do with my good luck,” he writes. “My life savings were doing pretty well. I was comfortable and was afraid, and this fearful security shut down my imaginative sympathy. No wonder they resented me as much as I despised them.”One of the central propositions in Last Best Hope is that the American political firmament has shattered into four rival narratives, crossing across the old red-blue divide. There is the Free America of small-government conservatives, who put the liberty of the individual above all; the Smart America of a smug, comfortable intellectual elite; the Real America of white Christian nationalism, the driving force behind populism; and there is Just America, built increasingly around identity politics and critical theory.His disdain for the latter, which he sees as both elitist and a rejection of Enlightenment ideals, is the main point of contention over his book on the left.“Just America embraces an ideology of rigid identity groups that keeps the professional class in its superior place, divides workers, and has little to do with the reality of an increasingly multiracial, intermarrying society,” Packer writes.His description of Black Lives Matter protesters in New York in the summer of 2020 as “disproportionately white millennials with advanced degrees making more than $100,000 a year” has raised hackles, to say the least.Critics accuse Packer of underestimating the fury of Black Americans at having to live in constant fear of lethal police brutality, and their agency in driving the BLM movement and the Biden campaign, helping it succeed where Hillary Clinton failed. Packer argues that presents a distorted view of the underpinnings of Biden’s victory.“I take issue with the notion that – let’s call it – the ‘identity left’ carried Biden over the line,” he said. “I think a coalition of groups carried Biden over the line, including suburbanites, including Never-Trump Republicans, including working class, black and Latino voters who voted for Biden in the primaries, who got him the nomination, when they could have gone for someone more closely identified with the left.”Biden really does have a feel for workers and for labourHe sees Biden as occupying space outside his Four Americas grid, a throwback to an age of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, and of powerful, respected labour unions. Packer approves.“He really does have a feel for workers and for labour. And I think he understands that you don’t advance the cause of equality by speaking to Americans as if they are members of monolithic identity groups that are somehow in perpetual conflict with each other.”To the extent that Packer has a remedy for America’s ills it lies in the reaffirmation of that trait De Tocqueville identified in the 1830s: a commitment to equality. And that, he argues, can only be achieved by the unification of the working class.It all sounds a bit un-American. For decades, the overwhelming majority of the population identified as middle class, the class to which almost every aspiring politician still appeals. But that aspirational self-image has been ground down over decades by the rapacity of the global economy and the elites who are its beneficiaries.“They don’t have the dignity that society once conferred on them,” Packer said. “They’re just struggling, drowning, paid abysmal wages, with no union to represent them. And now they’ve disappeared altogether because we have one-click shopping. So the working class is something we never have to think about because we don’t see them.”The pandemic, however, brought the working class back into the spotlight, albeit temporarily. The “knowledge workers” and the opinion-forming elites stranded at home were suddenly reliant on the essential workers who kept virtually the whole economy going with services and deliveries.Just maybe, Packer says, this moment of renewed appreciation can be leveraged under Biden into a real improvement in living standards of this virtually invisible majority, from all four Americas.‘Pipe dreams, long shots, far-fetched ideas’Some of the prescriptions in the tail end of the book, for restoring equality and the “art of self-government”, come across as somewhat fanciful, like calling on Americans to turn off Twitter and Facebook and do a year of national service, so followers of the four narratives have to spend some time in each other’s company.“The last pages are full of pipe dreams, long shots, far-fetched ideas,” Packer admitted, bluntly. “I’m not a political operative so I don’t think it’s my job to figure out how to get it passed through Congress. But I did feel the need to lay down a direction – here’s the way we need to go.”The key word in the book’s title is “hope” and it recalls a much earlier book on the American condition by the bard of the working classes, Stud Terkel. Terkel’s book was Hope Dies Last. For Packer, it is a necessity as much as a conviction.“For one thing I have kids, and it’s just almost psychologically impossible not to hold out hope,” he said.He believes Biden’s administration has a window in which it can address some national divisions indirectly, by demonstrating the power of government to change people’s lives for the better.“It won’t happen with a speech or with an open hand or with a plea, because the divisions are so deep and corrosive. It almost has to happen unconsciously,” Packer concluded. “I think we’re actually be getting to go in that direction, very slowly, with a lot of dangerous obstacles ahead.” More

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      in US Politics

      After the Fall by Ben Rhodes review – nostalgic for certainties

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      Ben Rhodes was Barack Obama’s speechwriter and became one of the former president’s closest aides, a constant presence at his shoulder as he toured the world and sat down with the powerful and famous. Three years ago, soon after leaving the White House, Rhodes wrote a compelling insider account of that era called The World As It Is. He has now written the sequel, and has opted for the apocalyptic title After the Fall. It is the story of an aftermath, of the acolyte still travelling the globe with the greying former president as he garners awards, mobbed by adoring fans. A rueful Obama muses about his transition from political force to celebrity, adored but virtually powerless.After the Fall is a cleverly chosen title. It is about the ending of an administration and the aspirations of those who served in it, who look on aghast at the reign of Donald Trump. But it also has the suggestion of original sin – in this case, the US’s. The subtitle is Being American in the World We’ve Made, and the central theme of the book is a contemplation of the seeds of the country’s fall from grace in the world. Trump’s crassness is not the cause of the descent, but a symptom.Rhodes traces much of the decline to the 9/11 attacks and the George W Bush administration’s reaction to them, which sought to “reorient America’s entire national purpose to the task of fighting terrorism”. The Iraq invasion, in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, “cracked open the facade that elites in the United States knew what they were doing” and called into question “why Americans were the stewards of world order”. Then came the largely made-in-America financial crash of 2008, destabilising politics-as-usual around the world. At home, a pivotal 5-4 vote by the US supreme court in 2010 opened the floodgates to unaccountable “dark money” saturating politics. Meanwhile ever more extreme politics were facilitated by Facebook, Twitter and the like.“Profit-driven social media algorithms, like unchecked political contributions, were treated as free speech beyond the reach of government regulations,” Rhodes writes. He travels around the world observing the plight of other frail societies, such as Myanmar, Hungary, Russia and Hong Kong, where democracy is in retreat or has been routed altogether. He talks to dissidents trying to push back against the tide, and finds common strands in the American malaise and the rest of the world’s. Little of the analysis is new or original, but it is certainly elegantly expressed. This is the man, after all, with a degree in creative writing, who wrote so many of Obama’s soaring speeches.And Rhodes does have an interesting personal tale to tell. He found out from reporting by the Observer in May 2018 that a shady firm of Israeli ex-spooks-for-hire called Black Cube was sniffing around him and another Obama staffer, Colin Kahl. The firm had been hired by the Trump camp to discredit the top officials involved in the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. The abortive smear effort involved sending creepy fake emails to Rhodes’s wife. She did not fall for it but the experience so unnerved her that she insisted on moving their young family out of the political crosshairs to Los Angeles. Rhodes cannot help wondering if the family’s decision to flee politics is what his persecutors wanted all along. To kill off political engagement and drive an activist generation towards apathy and cynicism. He comes to the realisation that he is “a casualty of a war over identity – who defines it and who doesn’t, what is true and what isn’t, what happened and what didn’t, who you are and who you aren’t.”There is a very personal element to After the Fall in which Rhodes admits to disorientation and a desire for purpose in the long spiralling descent from the Oval Office. “I was a thirty-nine-year-old with as little idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life as I’d had as a twenty-three-year-old,” he reflects. “History was no longer something that took place in rooms where I sat.” The introspection, coupled with an itinerary of venerable European destinations, such as Paris, Budapest and Baden-Baden, sometimes gives the book the feel of a melancholy Chekhovian tale: the young courtier in the retinue of a revered, recently ousted monarch, touring old watering holes. He meets like-minded contemporaries, including Hungarian, Russian and Hong Kong dissidents, and they try to come to terms with the implosion of the world they had once hoped for.Throughout, Rhodes struggles with a certain ennui. On a trip to Yangon, he wanders into a pagoda and “sat staring at a Buddha, waiting to feel something”. Some of the best passages arise when he is back together with his old boss, and we are given an insight into what Obama thinks of it all, including the acerbic and memorable observation that “Trump is for a lot of white people what OJ’s acquittal was to a lot of black folks – you know it’s wrong, but it feels good.”We can also sit in while Obama considers the leadership challenge facing the progressive democratic cause in the US and further afield. Surveying the candidates in the 2020 Democratic primaries, the former president says he agrees with Bernie Sanders in his diagnosis of America’s malaise, a system chronically rigged to benefit the very rich. “But there’s something missing when Bernie talks about it,” Obama adds. “A spiritual component, a national identity that’s not nationalist.” Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg are better at invoking national unity but don’t have Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s fire in the belly, their outrage. Searching for a historical precedent of a progressive leader who could offer both, Obama has to go all the way back to Bobby Kennedy.It illustrates a certain nostalgia pervading the book, looking back at the times before the fall, and the allure of the apparent certainties of Rhodes’s youth, when America seemed to have all the answers. They still exert their pull on him, even though he now knows them to be hollow. More

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      in US Politics

      Michael Wolff to publish third exposé of Trump, covering last days in office

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      Michael Wolff’s third book about Donald Trump, focusing on the final days of his presidency, will be published in July under a provocative title: Landslide.Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote and by 306-232 in the electoral college – a result he called a landslide when it was in his favour against Hillary Clinton in 2016.Trump has pursued the lie that Biden’s victory was the result of electoral fraud – a speech on the subject fuelled the deadly attack on the US Capitol in Washington on 6 January, leading to a second impeachment trial.Though Trump told Fox News on Wednesday night he “didn’t win” and wished Biden well, he also said the election was “unbelievably unfair”.Wolff published his first Trump tell-all in January 2018, rocking the White House when the Guardian broke news of the book, Fire and Fury.Trump sought to block publication, calling Wolff “a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book”. The reading public ignored him: the explosive exposé sold 1.7m copies in its first three weeks.In 2019 Wolff published Siege, which looked at a “presidency under fire”, tackling topics including Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and ties between Trump and Moscow.Wolff no longer enjoyed unfettered West Wing access but he did produce a bombshell, again first reported by the Guardian: that Mueller’s team had prepared and shelved an indictment of the president, on three counts of obstruction of justice.Wolff said he obtained the documents from “sources close to the Office of the Special Counsel”. The special counsel rejected his claim, a spokesman saying: “The documents that you’ve described do not exist.”Amid such controversy, and with competitors having flooded the shelves with reportage on the chaotic Trump presidency, Siege did not sell as well as Fire and Fury.Like its predecessor, Siege used Steve Bannon as a major source. By then, however, the far-right provocateur was no longer a White House strategist or even, thanks to his cooperation for Fire and Fury which enraged the president, a major figure in Trumpworld.On Thursday, Wolff’s publisher said he had interviewed the former president. It also said Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, would focus on his “tumultuous last months at the helm of the country”.Out on 27 July from Little, Brown in the UK and Macmillan in the US, the book is based on what the publishers called “extraordinary access to White House aides and to the former president himself, yielding a wealth of new information and insights about what really happened inside the highest office in the land, and the world”.Trump has claimed to be writing “the book of all books” himself. In a statement last week, he claimed he had “turned down two book deals, from the most unlikely of publishers”, adding: “I do not want a deal right now. I’m writing like crazy anyway, however.”After major publishers said they would not touch a Trump memoir, he insisted “two of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses have made very substantial offers which I have rejected”.“That doesn’t mean I won’t accept them sometime in the future,” he said. “… If my book will be the biggest of them all … does anybody really believe that they are above making a lot of money?”Possibly to Trump’s chagrin, those who served him in office have found publishers eager to release their memoirs – and to pay a lot of money to do so.Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, has a “seven-figure”, two-book deal – despite a staff rebellion at Simon & Schuster.Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has a deal for a “definitive” account of the Trump presidency. Broadside Books, a conservative imprint at HarperCollins, has said the book will come out in early 2022. The price of the deal was not disclosed.Last November, shortly after Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden, Barack Obama published the first volume of a projected two-part memoir that was sold to Penguin Random House with books by his wife, Michelle Obama, for a reported $65m. The former president’s book, A Promised Land, sold strongly.Another former president, Bill Clinton, has moved into fiction. The President’s Daughter – his second thriller, in this case about a president who also happens to be a former Navy Seal – is again written with James Patterson. This week, it debuted at No1 on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestsellers list. More

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      in UK Politics

      Selena Gomez calls out Boris Johnson over surplus vaccine pledge

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      Selena Gomez has tweeted at Boris Johnson criticising him over his announcement that the UK will have donated five million surplus doses of coronavirus vaccines by September. On Thursday 10 June, the prime minister said the UK will begin donating vaccines to poorer countries in the next few weeks. Five million doses will be given by the UK by the end of September, with a further 25 million donated by the end of the year. “[Boris Johnson], five million doses by September is too little too late,” Gomez wrote on Twitter, tagging the PM’s account. “You promised Britain would donate ALL its surplus vaccines.” The pop star and actor then addressed her followers: “Ahead of the #G7 summit in Cornwall, call on the PM to help meet one billion doses.”Gomez linked to a Global Citizen petition calling on Johnson to “act now”.“As a result of the success of the UK’s vaccine programme we are now in a position to share some of our surplus doses with those who need them.” Johnson said in a statement made ahead of the G7 summit in Cornwall. “In doing so we will take a massive step towards beating this pandemic for good.”US president Joe Biden has pledged that 500 million doses of Pfizer vaccines will go to 92 low and middle-income countries and the African Union.Earlier in the week, stars including Priyanka Chopra, Billie Eilish and David Beckham appealed to G7 leaders to donate 20 per cent of their vaccines to poorer nations.“The pandemic will not be over anywhere until it is over everywhere, and that means getting vaccines to every country, as quickly and equitably as possible,” they said in an open letter.“This weekend’s G7 Summit (11 to 13 June) is a vital opportunity for you to agree to the actions that will get vaccines where they are most needed, fast.”Gomez also signed the letter, along with fellow celebrities including Liam Payne, Olivia Colman, Orlando Bloom, Ewan McGregor and Lucy Liu. More

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      in US Politics

      Bill Clinton: ‘I always wanted to be a writer, but doubted my ability to do it’

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      The book I am currently readingThe End of Everything by Katie Mack. The theoretical physicist explains the five most likely endings for our expanding universe, hopefully an unimaginably long time from now. It’s witty, clear and upbeat. A good companion to Brian Greene’s Until the End of Time. I’m also reading Minds Wide Shut by Gary Saul Morson and Morton O Schapiro, a sweeping study of the rise of rigid certainty in politics, economics and literature, and the threat it presents to democracy, which requires open-mindedness and compromise.The book that changed my lifeThe Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. It made me rethink the roots of our deepest fears and insecurities, and why we often disappoint ourselves in how we manifest them.The book I wish I’d writtenOne Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I still believe it’s the greatest novel written since William Faulkner died.Read John Grisham’s Sooley, you’ll want to cry tooThe book that had the greatest influence on my writingI always wanted to be a writer, but doubted my ability to do it. From my senior year in college to my first year in law school, I read five books that made me think it was worth a try: North Toward Home by Willie Morris; The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron; You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe; The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin; and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.The book that changed my mindThat’s a great question. I think Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and Adam Grant’s Think Again forced me to rethink how deeply embedded our unexamined preconceptions are, not just in relation to race, gender, class and religion, but to any number of categories that lead us to see others as inferior, less worthy of being seen and heard. I like Nelson Mandela’s way of restorative reconciliation and inclusion better.The last book that made me crySooley by John Grisham. Read it, you’ll want to cry too.The last book that made me laughJanet Evanovich’s latest book. Stephanie Plum always makes me laugh.The book I’m ashamed not to have readUlysses. I love Irish poetry, prose and nonfiction. I love Joyce. But I always give out and give up before I get through it. I’ll keep trying.The books I give as giftsMeditations by Marcus Aurelius; The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney; and The Social Conquest of Earth by EO Wilson. In different ways, each is full of wisdom.The book I’d most like to be remembered forSo far My Life, for the reasons Larry McMurtry stated in his review: it’s a story of my life and times; an account of what it’s like to be president when so much is happening at once, with fuller explanations of events such as Black Hawk Down that you won’t see anywhere else; and a testament of what I believe and why.My comfort readI find comfort in thrillers with interesting characters and good stories. I really liked Stacey Abrams’s While Justice Sleeps, and all of Louise Penny’s Gamache books, Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski books, Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins books, James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux series, and Michael Connelly’s Bosch books. I love Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon, and David Baldacci and Lee Child are still getting better. And I love my co-author James Patterson’s books, especially those with Michael Bennett and Alex Cross. I hope our new book, The President’s Daughter, makes other people’s lists. I like the characters and the story.The book I think is most underratedProbably Ron Chernow’s Grant. He makes an irrefutable case not just for Grant’s genius as a military leader, but for his courage and determination to ensure that the American civil war was not fought in vain. With the latest efforts to discredit the 2020 election, pass voter suppression measures, and kill the January 6 commission, and the changing composition of the supreme court, we are reminded of what Grant knew: the risks of making our union more perfect includes the possibility that the inevitable reaction can rob us of our democracy altogether. More

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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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      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.

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      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