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      in US Politics

      To be Trump, or not: what Shakespeare tells us about the last five years

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      The time is out of joint. When lost for words, as many have been over the past five years, William Shakespeare is a useful go-to guy. His plays have helped us make sense of plague, political upheaval and a mad monarch, delivering soliloquies by tweet.
      “While maintaining his career as the most-produced playwright in the world, he is also moonlighting as the most-cited provider of metaphors for the Trump era – and particularly its denouement,” Jesse Green, the chief theater critic of the New York Times, observed last month. “Hardly a thumb-sucking political analysis goes by without allusion to one of the 37 canonical plays, however limited or far-fetched the comparison may be.”
      But as the dust settles on the Trump presidency, Green’s exhortation – brush down your Shakespeare, stop quoting him now – seems unlikely to gain much traction.
      Books have been written. Jeffrey Wilson, a Harvard academic, is the author of Shakespeare and Trump, published last year. The book’s cover features its title emblazoned on a red cap, in lieu of the words “Make America great again”, beneath a pair of donkey’s ears.
      “The thesis of the book is tragedy but we’ve got a little bit of comedy in there too,” Wilson says. “So the cover alludes to Shakespeare’s character Bottom, who’s this kind of huckster blowhard who gets his head turned into a donkey to symbolise the stupidity. Plus, Bottom’s just obsessed with building a wall in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
      Which other characters parallel Trump? “There’s going to be Julius Caesar, who thinks he’s a god over people, not one of them. There’s going to be Richard III, this power-hungry criminal whose clownishness seduces supporters. There’s going to be Macbeth, whose thirst for power is wrapped up in his fragile masculinity.
      Book embed
      “There’s going to be Henry VI, this child king whose weak leadership creates this fractious counsellor infighting all around him. There’s going to be Angelo in Measure for Measure, a self-declared law-and-order guy who is himself a criminal. And there’s going to be King Lear, who so completely binds the personal and the political that the collapse of his government is also the collapse of his family.”
      When the pandemic finally ends and theatres spring back to life, that list will offer rich pickings to directors. There is a long tradition of holding up the mirror of Shakespeare to specific cultures, from Akira Kurosawa’s Throne Of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well and Ran to irreverent productions in South Africa that critiqued apartheid.
      Some are subtle, others on-the-nose. In 2017, the director Oskar Eustis’s production of Julius Caesar in New York’s Central Park depicted the eponymous character with blond hair and red tie. It all caused a brouhaha in conservative media: corporate sponsors pulled support, protesters stormed the stage and Eustis received death threats.
      Wilson reflects: “When I asked [Eustis], he insisted he wanted it to be a very blunt instrument. The fascinating thing for me about that production is that it may or may not have helped us better understand Donald Trump but it helped me better understand Julius Caesar as a text.
      “It allowed us to use Trump as a lens for understanding the way that Shakespeare wrote this play, which is so filled with comedy in the first half, the kind of outrageous, obnoxious, satirical comedy that is so associated with Trump. That’s how Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar should be performed.”
      The play, he says, “is drawing upon tropes of the 17th-century clown, the antichrist who comically comes on stage and thinks that he’s the most glorious thing ever invented and is revealed to be a total fraud.
      “You don’t really get that sense of Julius Caesar when you watch most Shakespearean stagings of the play but by using Trump as a lens to understand that, we can use the accessible emotions and knowledge that we have from current events to rethink how we should read this distant, old, obscure literature.”
      Wilson’s book also considers how America has seen Shakespeare in the age of Trump. A month after his victory in 2016, for example, students at the University of Pennsylvania took down a portrait of Shakespeare and replaced it with a photo of Audre Lorde, an African American writer, feminist and civil rights activist.
      Steve Bannon, who led Trump’s winning campaign and became a White House strategist, was previously a banker, media executive and Hollywood producer who in the 1990s co-wrote two Shakespearean adaptations: a Titus Andronicus set in space, complete with ectoplasmic sex, and a hip-hop Coriolanus, based in South-Central LA.
      The screenplays are not publicly available but Wilson tracked them down – and found an insidious racism. He writes: “Specifically, Bannon’s Coriolanus suggests that African Americans will kill themselves off through Black-on-Black crime, while his Andronicus tells the story of a ‘noble race’ eliminating its cultural enemies on the way to securing political power.”
      Wilson adds: “NowThis did a table read of Coriolanus and actors were just sprinting to get through the lines. One of them said, ‘It sounds like he’s never met a Black person in his life.’” More

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      in World Politics

      Tech Exodus: Is Silicon Valley in Trouble?

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      On January 7, the news media announced that Elon Musk had surpassed Jeff Bezos as “the richest person on Earth.” I have a personal interest in the story. Two of my neighbors just bought a Tesla, and this morning, on the highway between Geneva and Lausanne, an angry Tesla driver flashed me several times, demanding that I let him pass. His license plate was from Geneva. Apparently, these days, driving a Tesla automatically gives you privileges, including speeding, particularly if you sport a Geneva or Zurich license plate. In the old days, at least in Germany, bullying others on the highway was a privilege reserved for Mercedes and BMW drivers, who, as the saying went, had an “inbuilt right-of-way.” Oh my, how times have changed.

      Texas: The End of Authentic America?

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      Elon Musk is one of these success stories that only America can write. He is the postmodern equivalent of Howard Hughes, a visionary, if slightly unhinged, genius, who loved to flout conventions and later on in his life became a recluse. And yet, had you bought 100 shares of Tesla a year ago, your initial investment would be worth more than eight times as much today (from $98 to $850). Tough shit, as they like to say in Texas.

      The Lone Star

      Why Texas? At the end of last year, Elon Musk announced that he was going to leave Silicon Valley to find greener pastures in Texas. To be more precise, Austin, Texas. Austin is not only the capital of the Lone Star State. It also happens to be an oasis of liberalism in a predominantly red state. When I was a student at the University of Texas in the late 1970s, we would go to the Barton Springs pool, one of the few places where women could go topless. For a German, this was hardly noteworthy; for the average Texan, it probably bordered on revolutionary — and obscene.

      In the 2020 presidential election, in Travis County, which includes Austin and adjacent areas, Donald Trump garnered a mere 26% of the vote, compared to 52% for the whole state. Austin is also home to the University of Texas, one of America’s premier public universities, which “has spent decades investing in science and engineering programs.”

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      Musk is hardly alone in relocating to Texas. Recently, both Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Oracle announced they would move operations there, the first one to Houston, the second to Austin, where it will join relatively long-time resident tech heavyweights such as recently reinvigorated Advanced Micro Devices and Dell. It is not clear, however, whether Oracle will feel more comfortable in Austin than Silicon Valley. After all, Oracle was very close to the Trump administration.

      Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the “tech exodus” from Silicon Valley. Michael Lind, the influential social analyst and pundit who also happens to teach at UT, has preferred to speak of a “Texodus,” as local patriotism obligates. Never short of hyperbole, Lind went so far as to boldly predict that the “flight of terrified techies from California to Texas marks the end of one era, and the beginning of a new one.” Up in Seattle and over in Miami, questions were raised whether or not and how they might benefit from the “Texit.”

      Lind’s argument is that over the past decade or so, Silicon Valley has gone off track. In the past, tech startups in the Bay Area succeeded because they produced something. As he puts it, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos “are building and testing rockets in rural Texas.” Musk produces cars and batteries. Against that, Silicon Valley’s new “tech” darlings come up with clever ideas, such as allowing “grandmothers to upload videos of their kittens for free, and then sell the advertising rights to the videos and pocket the cash.”

      The models are Uber and Lyft, which Lind dismisses as nothing more than hyped-up telephone companies. Apparently, Lind does not quite appreciate the significance of the gig economy and particularly the importance of big data, which is the real capital of these companies and makes them “tech.” This is hardly surprising, given Austin’s history of hostility to the sharing economy — at least as long as it associated with its industry giants. As early as 2016, Austin held a referendum on whether or not the local government should be allowed to regulate Uber and Lyft. The companies lost, and subsequently fired 10,000 drivers, leaving Austinites stranded.

      In the months that followed, underground ride-sharing schemes started to spring up, seeking to fill the void. In the meantime, Uber and Lyft lobbied the state legislature, which ultimately passed a ride-hailing law, which established licensing on the state level, circumventing local attempts at regulation, which allowed Uber and Lyft to resume operations.

      Unfortunately for Lind, he also has it in for Twitter and Facebook for their “regular and repeated censorship of Republicans and conservatives” — an unusual failure of foresight in light of recent events at the Capitol. Ironically enough, Facebook has a large presence in Austin. Business sources from the city reported that Facebook is in the market for an additional 1 million square feet of office space in Austin. So is Google, which in recent years has significantly expanded its presence in the city and elsewhere in Texas.

      Colonial Transplant

      Does that mean Austin is likely to be able to rival Silicon Valley as America’s top innovation center for the high-tech industry? Not necessarily. As Margaret O’Mara has pointed out in the pages of The New York Times, this is not the first time that Silicon Valley has faced this kind of losses. And yet, “Silicon Valley always roared back, each time greater than the last. One secret to its resilience: money. The wealth created by each boom — flowing chiefly to an elite circle of venture investors and lucky founders — outlasted each bust. No other tech region has generated such wealth and industry-specific expertise, which is why it has had such resilience.”

      Industry insiders concur. In their view, Austin is less a competitor than a “colony.” Or, to put it slightly differently, Austin is nothing more than an outpost for tech giants such as Google and Facebook, while their main operations stay in Silicon Valley. It is anyone’s guess whether this time, things will pan out the same or somewhat differently. This depends both on the push and pull factors that inform the most recent tech exodus — in other words, on what motivates Silicon Valley denizens to abandon the Bay Area for the hills surrounding Austin.

      A recent Berkeley IGS poll provides some answers. According to the poll, around half of Californians thought about leaving the state in 2019. Among the most important reasons were the high cost of housing, the state’s high taxes and, last but not least, the state’s “political culture.” More detailed analysis suggests that the latter is a very significant factor: Those identifying themselves as conservatives or Republicans were three times as likely than liberals and Democrats to say they were seriously considering leaving the state.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The fact that 85% of Republicans who thought about leaving did so for reasons of political culture is a strong indication of the impact of partisanship. Among Democrats, only around 10% mentioned political culture as a reason for thinking about leaving the state. Partisanship was also reflected in the response to the question of whether California is a “land of opportunity.” Among Democrats, 80% thought so; among Republicans, only about 40% did.

      Until recently, thinking about leaving hardly ever translated into actually going. COVID-19 has fundamentally changed the equation. The pandemic introduced the notion of working from home, of remote work via “old” technologies such as Skype and new ones like Zoom. In late February 2020, Zoom’s stock was at around $100; in mid-October, it was traded at more than $550. In the meantime, it has lost some $200, largely the result of the prospect of a “post-pandemic world” thanks to the availability of vaccines.

      At least for the moment, remote work has fundamentally changed the rationale behind being tied to a certain locality. Before COVID-19, as Katherine Bindley has noted in The Wall Street Journal, “leaving the area meant walking away from some of the best-paying and most prestigious jobs in America.” In the wake of the pandemic, this is no longer the case. In fact, major Silicon Valley tech companies, such as Google, Facebook and Lyft, have told their workforce that they won’t be returning to their offices until sometime late summer. Given that California has been one of the states most affected by the virus, and given its relatively large population heavily concentrated in two metropolitan areas, even these projections might be overly optimistic.

      Distributed Employment

      And it is not at all clear whether or not, once the pandemic has run its course, things will return to “normal.” Even before the pandemic, remote work was on the rise. In 2016, according to Gallup data, more than 40% of employees “worked remotely in some capacity, meaning they spent at least some of their time working away from their coworkers.” Tech firms have been particularly accommodating to employee wishes to work remotely, even on a permanent basis. In May, The Washington Post reported that Twitter had unveiled plans to offer their employees the option to work from home “forever.” In an internal survey in July, some 70% of Twitter employees said they wanted to continue working from home at least three days a week.

      Other tech companies are likely to follow suit, in line with the new buzzword in management thinking, “distributed employment,” itself a Silicon Valley product. Its most prominent promoter has been Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University. Bloom has shown that work from home tends to increase productivity, for at least two reasons. First, people working from home actually work their full shift. Second, they tend to concentrate better than in an office environment full of noise and distractions.

      Additional support for distributed employment has come from Gallup research. The results indicate that “remote workers are more productive than on-site workers.” Gallup claims that remote work boosts employee morale and their engagement with the company, which leads to the conclusion that “off-site workers offer leaders the greatest gains in business outcomes.”

      It is for these reasons that this time, Silicon Valley might be in real trouble. Distributed employment fundamentally challenges the rationale behind the Valley’s success. As The Washington Post expose put it, in the past, “great ideas at work were born out of daily in-person interactions.” Creativity came from “serendipitous run-ins with colleagues,” as Steve Jobs would put it, “’from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.’” Distributed employment is the antithesis of this kind of thinking. With the potential end of this model, Silicon Valley loses much of its raison d’être — unless it manages to reinvent itself, as it has done so many times in the past.

      A few years ago, Berkeley Professor AnnaLee Saxenian, who wrote a highly influential comparative study of how Silicon Valley outstripped Boston’s Route 128, has noted that Silicon Valley was “a set of human beings, and a set of institutions around them, that happen to be very well adapted to the world that we live in.” The question is whether or not this is still the case. After all, at one point, Route 128 was a hotspot of creativity and innovation, a serious rival of Silicon Valley. A couple of decades later, Route 128 was completely eclipsed by the Valley, a victim of an outdated industrial system, based on companies that kept largely to themselves.

      Against that, in the Valley, there emerged a new network-based system that promoted mutual learning, entrepreneurship and experimentation. The question is to what degree this kind of system will be capable to deal with the new challenges posed by the impact of COVID-19, which has fundamentally disrupted the fundamentals of the system.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In the meantime, locations such as Austin look particularly attractive. This is when the pull factors come in. Unlike California, Texas has no state income tax. In California, state income tax is more than 13%, the highest in the United States. To make things worse, late last year, California legislators considered raising taxes on the wealthy to bring in money to alleviate the plight of the homeless who have flocked in particular to San Francisco. Earlier on, state legislators had sought to raise the state income tax rate to almost 17%. It failed to pass.

      At the same time, they also came up with a piece of legislation “that would have created a first-in-the-nation wealth tax that included a feature to tax former residents for 10 years after they left the Golden State.” This one failed too, but it left a sour taste in the mouth of many a tech millionaire and certainly did little to counteract the flight from the state.

      No wonder Austin looks so much better, and not only because of Texas’s generally more business-friendly atmosphere. Austin offers California’s tech expats a lifestyle similar to that in the Bay Area, but at a considerably more reasonable cost. Add to that the absence of one of the most distressing assaults on hygiene: Between 2011 and 2018, the number of officially recorded incidences of human feces on the streets of San Francisco quintupled, from 5,500 cases to over 28,000 cases — largely the result of the city’s substantial homeless population. The fact is that California is one of the most unequal states in the nation. As Farhad Manjoo has recently put it in The New York Times, “the cost of living is taken into account, billionaire-brimming California ranks as the most poverty-stricken state, with a fifth of the population struggling to get by.”

      Homelessness is one result. And California’s wealthy liberals have done little to make things better. On the contrary, more often than not, they have used their considerable clout to block any attempt to change restrictive zoning laws and increase the supply of affordable housing, what Manjoo characterizes as “exclusionary urban restrictionism.”

      To be sure, restrictive zoning laws have a long history in San Francisco, going all the way back to the second half of the 19th century. At the time, San Francisco was home to a significant Chinese population, largely living in boarding houses. In the early 1870s, the city came up with new ordinances, designed “to criminalize Chinese renters and landlords so their jobs and living space could be reclaimed for San Francisco’s white residents.” Ever since, zoning laws have been informed by “efforts to appease the city’s wealthy, well-connected homeowners.” And this in a city that considers itself among the most progressive in the nation.

      None of these factors in isolation explains the current tech exodus from the Bay Area. Taken together, however, they make up a rather convincing case for why this time, Silicon Valley might be in real trouble. Unfortunately enough, the exodus might contribute to the “big sort” that has occurred in the US over the past few decades, meaning the “self-segregation of Americans into like-minded communities” that has been a major factor behind the dramatic polarization of the American political landscape. The signs are there, the consequences known — at least since the assault on the US Capitol.

      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

      Kill Switch review: how the Senate filibuster props up Republican power

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      For nearly a month, Mitch McConnell and his Senate Republicans have waged the parliamentary equivalent of a guerrilla war. Having lost the Georgia runoffs and with them the Senate, McConnell has still managed to stymie formal reorganization of the chamber. In an already sulfurous political landscape, the filibuster – the need for super-majorities of 60 votes to pass legislation – looms once again as a flashpoint.
      In other words, Adam Jentleson’s book is perfectly timed and aptly subtitled. Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy is an authoritative and well-documented plea for abolishing a 19th-century relic used to thwart the majority’s agenda.
      As Jentleson makes clear, the filibuster was first wielded by an agrarian and slave-holding south in opposition to the north’s burgeoning manufacturing economy – and modernity itself. A century on, in the 1960s, the filibuster became synonymous with Jim Crow, segregation and the malignant doctrine of separate but equal.
      A 54-day filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act refocused the nation on the jagged legacy of slavery, a full 101 years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. In a century and a half, so much and so little had changed.
      In Jentleson’s telling, John Calhoun stands as progenitor of the filibuster. As a senator from South Carolina in the 1840s, he sought to gag voices supporting the abolition of slavery. Constricting debate was one way to do it. Calhoun had also been vice-president to John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. He saw slavery as more than just an evil to be tolerated. As Jentleson notes, to Calhoun, slavery was “a good. A positive good.”
      Calhoun also believed states could secede from the union. For that, he earned the ire of Jackson, a fellow slave-owner. Jackson reportedly said: “John Calhoun, if you secede from my nation, I will secede your head from the rest of your body.” Old Hickory was an ex-general as well as a president.
      Jentleson draws a line from Calhoun to McConnell via Richard Russell, a segregationist Georgia senator and Democrat who served from 1933 to 1971. Russell once said: “Any southern white man worth a pinch of salt would give his all to maintain white supremacy.” One of the Senate’s three office buildings is named after him.
      As for the Senate’s current minority leader, Kill Switch reminds the reader of an earlier McConnell quote: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” A dubious distinction, but one Donald Trump would instead come to hold.
      Jentleson is not a dispassionate observer. An avowed Democrat, he was once deputy chief of staff to Harry Reid. As Democratic leader in the Senate for a decade, Reid, an ex-boxer from Nevada, frequently sparred with McConnell. Reid’s legacy includes the Affordable Care Act and scrapping the filibuster for nominations to lower federal courts and the executive branch.
      Picking up where Reid left off, McConnell ended the filibuster for supreme court confirmations. Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett have him to thank for their jobs, not just Trump.
      “With the flick of a wrist,” Jentleson writes, McConnell had gone “nuclear himself”.
      These days, the author hangs his hat at Democracy Forward, a political non-profit chaired by a Democratic super-lawyer, Marc Elias, which includes on its board John Podesta, a veteran of the Clinton and Obama White Houses. Ron Klain, now Joe Biden’s chief of staff, was once treasurer. The group’s targets have included Ivanka Trump and her alleged ethics violations.
      Kill Switch can become myopic when it points the finger elsewhere. For example, the book takes Republicans to task for attempting in 2013 to block the confirmation of Mel Watt, a longtime North Carolina congressman, to run the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), a financial regulator. But Jentleson makes no mention of Watt’s lapses.
      Watt sought to slash funding for the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) – after it cleared him over allegations he diluted consumer protection legislation in exchange for campaign contributions. For his efforts, the liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington branded Watt’s conduct “disgraceful”.
      In 2018, furthermore, reports surfaced of Watt being investigated for sexual harassment. More than a year later, the FHFA reached a settlement.
      Jentleson can also make too much out of race and ethnicity, interconnected realms strewn with pitfalls and landmines. He asserts that of the Senate’s current members of color, only two are Republican: Tim Scott of South Carolina, an African American, and Marco Rubio of Florida, whose parents came from Cuba. But Rubio self-identifies as both white and Hispanic.
      Book embed
      In the beginning, senators relied on the filibuster to block civil rights and labor legislation. Now it’s the new normal, wielded by Democrats and Republicans alike. Not much legislating gets done. When the Republican party is home to a congresswoman who muses about Jewish laser beams deployed to “clear space or something for high speed rail”, as a colleague put it, finding common ground is unlikely.
      Whether the filibuster is abolished or modified remains to be seen. Although only a simple majority is needed to end it, it appears safe for now. Two Democrats have voiced opposition to changing the rules and the president is OK with the status quo.
      If the Democrats can bypass the filibuster through reconciliation, a process used for budgeting that relies upon a simple majority, calls to end the filibuster will likely soften. If not, expect the filibuster to remain front and center heading into the 2022 midterms. Keep Kill Switch close at hand.
      Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy, is published by Liveright Publishing Corporation More

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      in US Politics

      Godfrey Hodgson obituary

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      The journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson, who has died aged 86, was among the most perceptive and industrious observers of his generation, particularly in the field of American society and politics.His reputation was founded on his landmark study, America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon (1976), acknowledged by the Cambridge historian Gary Gerstle as “one of the great works of political and social history written in the past half century”. At 600 pages long and in continuous print since its first publication, it was but one item in a prolific output that ran to more than 15 books, extensive university teaching and a lifetime of newspaper and television reporting (as well as numerous Guardian obituaries). As a journalist, Hodgson reckoned he had worked in 48 of the 50 US states.The central thesis of America in Our Time was that, from the end of the second world war until the mid-1960s, what Hodgson called a “liberal consensus” defined American politics. Conservatives accepted most of the New Deal domestic philosophy espoused by Democrats, and liberals mostly accepted the aggressive foreign policy advocated by Republicans to contain and defeat communism. In theory, the free enterprise system would create abundance at home, leaving America free to civilise the world. The term “liberal consensus” had been used before, but Hodgson was responsible for its entry into the lexicon of American history.Viewed from an age thrown into turmoil by Donald Trump, this analysis appears sadly optimistic. But it held sway as a key tenet in American academia for many years – a considerable achievement for a British writer in US scholarship. It was a measure of Hodgson’s intellectual honesty that in 2017 he could contribute to a collection of essays, The Liberal Consensus Reconsidered (edited by Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan), reflecting on the inadequacies of his earlier theory and analysing why the period had come to an end; the answers were mainly to do with race, Vietnam and the failure of US capitalism.Born in Horsham, now in West Sussex, Godfrey returned to the Yorkshire of his family roots at the age of three when his father, Arthur Hodgson, was appointed headteacher of Archbishop Holgate’s grammar school, York. Two tragedies overshadowed his childhood. At the age of two, he contracted osteomyelitis, a bone infection; when he was seven, it became clear that his mother, Jessica (nee Hill), was suffering from untreatable multiple sclerosis.The former left him with a disfigured right arm and an iron determination to succeed: one of his proudest achievements was later to bowl for the Winchester college first XI. The latter resulted in his being packed off to the Dragon school in Oxford at the age of nine, to shield him from his mother’s illness. He learned of her death in 1947 as a lonely 13-year-old far from home. Perhaps in part to compensate, he poured his considerable intellectual energies into study, winning scholarships to both Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained a first in history in 1954.Hodgson’s introduction to the US came in the form of a copy of John Gunther’s classic study Inside USA, a gift from his father on his 14th birthday. He first encountered the real thing in 1955, when, aged 21, he sailed on the Queen Mary to take up a postgraduate scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. There he worked in the college library, and wrote his MA thesis on the civil war – not the American one of Lincoln but the English one of Cromwell. He also discovered jazz, and the American south, a region for which he developed a special affection.Back in Britain, he learned his reporting skills on the Times before joining the Observer in 1960, initially to write the paper’s Mammon column. His great opportunity came two years later, when, aged 28, he returned to Washington as the Observer’s correspondent (1962-65), appointed by the editor, David Astor, as one of the gifted young men who would elevate his paper’s foreign coverage. This was a golden time to be a reporter in America and Hodgson loved it.He covered the push for civil rights in the south, witnessing the tense confrontations as the first black students were escorted into the universities of Mississippi and Alabama, and he was at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to hear Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Events just kept on coming: the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination and the complex presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who, even then, Hodgson rated more highly than the liberal commentariat of the day.Returning to London, he developed his coverage of America as a reporter on the ITV current affairs programme This Week (1965-67) and as editor of the Sunday Times Insight team (1967-71), during which time he co-wrote An American Melodrama (1969) with Bruce Page and Lewis Chester, the story of the 1968 election that brought Richard Nixon to the White House. He anchored LWT’s The London Programme (1976-81), was one of the four founding presenters of Channel 4 News (with Peter Sissons, Trevor McDonald and Sarah Hogg) from 1982 until 1985, and for two years from 1990 was foreign editor of the Independent. He was also a stalwart of Granada’s late-night What the Papers Say.He enjoyed showing that the first Thanksgiving was not celebrated with turkey and cranberry sauce – because there wasn’t anyFriends observed in the younger Hodgson a rumbling tension between his yearning for academic recognition and his enjoyment of the more material pleasures of journalism, a trade that suited his gregarious personality well. He was fortunate in being able to reconcile these conflicting needs as director of the Reuters Foundation (1992-2001), a post that combined mentoring bright young foreign reporters with a fellowship at Green Templeton College, Oxford. The move opened up a world of graduate teaching, both in Britain and the US, which he continued into his 80s.His Oxford appointment chimed well with the generosity he showed towards aspiring young colleagues. I experienced this personally as we travelled through the American south together in the summer of 1967, researching a television documentary on the civil rights movement. Each day would begin with a reading from the appropriate state guide of the Federal Writers’ Project, an inspiration of FDR’s New Deal, and continue as a free-flowing lecture often late into the evening.The same spirit inspired his involvement in starting up, with the journalist Ben Bradlee and the literary agent Felicity Bryan, the Laurence Stern fellowship. Since 1980 it has funded a three-month summer programme on the Washington Post for a young British reporter (Guardian beneficiaries of the scheme have included David Leigh, Gary Younge, Audrey Gillan, Jonathan Freedland and Ian Black); after the Covid-19 pandemic it will return as the Stern-Bryan fellowship.Hodgson’s later books ranged from biographies of the US statesmen Henry Stimson (The Colonel, 1990) and Edward House (Woodrow Wilson’s Right Hand, 2006) to critical studies of the rise of conservatism, including The World Turned Right Side Up (1996) and More Equal Than Others (2004). Always at his best when challenging conventional wisdoms, as in The Myth of American Exceptionalism (2009), he enjoyed particularly showing in A Great and Godly Adventure (2006) that the first Thanksgiving was not celebrated with turkey and cranberry sauce – because there wasn’t any – and that the early American settlers did not see themselves as revolutionaries against the British crown.Following a serious fall in 2007, he nursed himself back to health by writing a delightful history of the local river near his West Oxfordshire home, Sweet Evenlode (2008). Above all, Hodgson could tell a good story.In 1958 he married Alice Vidal, and they had two sons, Pierre and Francis. They divorced in 1969, and the following year he married Hilary Lamb, with whom he had two daughters, Jessica and Laura. Hilary died in 2015, and he is survived by his children.• Godfrey Michael Talbot Hodgson, journalist and historian, born 1 February 1934; died 27 January 2021• John Shirley died in 2018 More

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      in World Politics

      Out of Many, Two: The American Art of Choosing Sides

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      The US has always proclaimed its dedication to freedom of expression as the founding virtue of its vaunted “exceptionalism.” Children learn in civics classes that the only brake on freedom of expression is the irresponsible, antisocial act of crying “fire” in a theater. In such a culture, the question of censorship should theoretically never arise, …
      Continue Reading “Out of Many, Two: The American Art of Choosing Sides”
      The post Out of Many, Two: The American Art of Choosing Sides appeared first on Fair Observer. More

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      in World Politics

      Domestic Enemies: The American Way of Life

      by

      Newly elected President Joe Biden promised in his inaugural address to focus on achieving national unity. It is a customary theme of new presidents who wish to assure those who voted against them that their interests will not be neglected. But given the current political and social atmosphere in the United States, it will require more than rhetorical reassurance to achieve even a minimum sense of unity in a divided nation.

      Visible Cracks in the New American Order

      READ MORE

      CBS published the astonishing results of a poll conducted a week after the uprising at Capitol Hill on January 6. It revealed just how deeply alienated Americans feel. This may be nothing more than the immediate effect of the botched transition between Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s administrations. But CBS hints that it may be durable: “Of potential threats to their way of life — from foreign adversaries to economic forces to natural disasters — Americans today say the biggest threat comes from inside the country, from ‘other people in America, and domestic enemies.’”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Way of life:

      The imaginary idea that because a population consumes — and often over-consumes — the same industrial products, its habits of consumption imply the harmonious existence of a common culture, converging values and shared goals.

      Contextual Note

      The most glaringly depressing statistic from the poll shows that 54% of Americans identify “other people in America” as “the biggest threat to America’s way of life.” Interestingly, the fear of “foreign threats” — a category that presumably includes terrorism — is highlighted by only 8% of those polled. Such findings demonstrate the effect of the culture wars that have been brewing for decades. Whether this will lead to open conflict, similar to the January 6 insurrection, or whether it simply settles into a pattern of increasingly irreparable degradation of human relations at work or in public places, nobody knows. In either case, the nation is facing a troubled future.

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      CBS pessimistically concluded that “Americans are bracing for more political violence, not just in the next week at Mr. Biden’s inauguration … but also over the coming years.” Some will now be heartened by the fact that no political violence occurred on the day of the inauguration. They may conclude that the fear of trouble “over the coming years” is equally exaggerated. But there are significant signs that things may get worse before they get better.

      At least one finding of the poll pointed in what seems a positive direction. Although 52% said they were “scared” about the future, nearly half of those polled (49%) said that they were still “hopeful.” That includes some who said they were both scared and hopeful. That might mean people are becoming vigilant and ready to take positive action. But being scared of one’s neighbors cannot bode well for the stability of society. Faced with the choice between “optimistic” and “pessimistic” about the next four years under Biden, 58% chose optimism. On the other hand, only 13% claimed to be “excited,” which should surprise no one, since Biden has never been known for his exciting personality. Somewhat more troubling is the fact that 26% claim to be angry, especially among people whose “way of life” includes owning guns, cultivating assertiveness and speaking up to get satisfaction for one’s demands.

      How likely is it that this feeling among so many people may produce serious conflict? And which are the groups most likely to upset the nation’s tranquility? The New York Times focuses on the threat from the conspiratorial far right, recently emboldened by Donald Trump’s presidency and apparently willing to rally behind any banner Trump may choose to unfurl in the next few years. The implications go beyond the US, since right-wing populism has become a global movement, also stimulated by Trump’s example. 

      Under the title “An ‘apocalyptically minded’ global far right,” The Times warns of the existence of “a web of diffuse international links.” That makes the internal threat appear even more threatening. The Times notes that, to assess the danger, in the coming weeks and months, officials will be closely observing this trend. Some expect a reinforcement of the already powerful security state. That may have the effect of aggravating the sense of threat rather than alleviating it.

      Historical Note

      Every American with a television remembers that Superman famously deployed his superstrength in the cause of “truth, justice and the American way.” By “the American way,” the authors of the TV series that appeared in the 1950s were apparently referring to the American way of life. But in the midst of the Cold War, it could also have meant “not the Soviet communist way.” In other words, quite simply, God-fearing capitalism.

      By the mid-20th century, the character of Superman — originally created in 1938 on the brink of the Second World War — came to resemble a supernatural religious crusader, a post-Christian incarnation of a new kind of divinity who had the material powers associated with an omnipotent god and who used them to defend the way of life of the faithful. He was both godlike — coming from the heavens — and committed to defending America’s culture and lifestyle.

      The faithful were those who believed in consumer capitalism, which had become the closest thing to an official national credo. Capitalism could achieve this status because it wasn’t a religion. It had no theology other than Adam Smith’s mysterious “invisible hand,” a concept that did in fact evoke associations with religion. Since capitalism lacked an overt theology, it could be adopted as a quasi-official religion to the extent that it didn’t violate the First Amendment proscription of an established religion. An established credo was okay so long as it wasn’t a religion.

      How did the vast majority of Americans implicitly acquire their faith in an “American way” that couldn’t even be defined? Edward Bernays may be the man to thank for that. He is credited with inventing the profession of public relations. Bernays was employed by President Woodrow Wilson, for whom he coined the phrase that has been used ever since to define a pillar of US interventionist foreign policy: “Make the world safe for democracy.” He also launched the idea of propaganda as a synonym for advertising.

      Embed from Getty Images

      But Bernays did much more than change the tone and ambition of US foreign policy. He created the modern American way of life by giving shape to the ultimate goal of capitalism: the realization of the utopia known as the consumer society. Bernays transformed the psychology of selling, which quite logically also transformed an economy that became increasingly dedicated to hooking consumers on convenience products. In his book “Propaganda,” he explained: “Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

      Americans in the 1950s assumed there was something called the American way of life and never questioned the unseen manipulators who had created it and imposed it on them, essentially through the entertainment media and the advertising that accompanied it. The 1960s witnessed the first challenge to the world of consumerism when the hippies revolted against the conformism that constituted the core of consumerism. But the power of the system Bernays had created was such that in the following decades the consumerist way of life would simply integrate the most marketable elements spawned by the counterculture.

      Half a century after the hippies, the consumer society faces a new challenge: the global menace of climate change. The COVID-19 pandemic has aggravated the sense that the consumerist way of life is rapidly decomposing. In its never-ending political assault on government regulations, the right wing in the US has consistently framed the question of liberties in consumerist terms. It is built on the freedom of choice, such as refusing energy-efficient light bulbs, and the freedom to pollute by maximizing the unbridled production of consumer goods.

      When neighbors see their neighbors as the enemy, the kind of problem-solving necessary to address global warming, economic inequity and other visible problems becomes impossible. But rather than encourage reflection, commercial media and social media prefer to incite citizens to focus on blaming those who don’t share their values and seeing them as a threat to their way of life.

      *[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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      in US Politics

      Jon Bon Jovi on wealth, love and his ugly tussle with Trump: 'It was seriously scarring'

      by

      Jon Bon Jovi is singing Livin’ on a Prayer to me. No, this is not another crazy lockdown dream; it is actually happening.“Tommy used to work on the docks …” he begins, strumming a guitar he produces out of nowhere, his still impressive bouffant (“I’m the only man in my field brave enough to let it go grey!”) bouncing in time to the music.I later look up how much it would cost to hire Bon Jovi for a private party. “More than $1m” is the best estimate. All I did was ask if he was tired of being asked about his 1986 megahit. The answer, apparently, is no.“Union’s been on strike, he’s down on his luck …” he continues.Going from the zero of lockdown to the zillion miles an hour of a Bon Jovi private performance is a helluva ride and I tell him I might pass out. He laughs the laugh of a man who is neither unaccustomed nor averse to female adoration.“That song, God bless it. But my God, who knew? Not us, I can assure you. It was created on a day when none of us had any ideas, we just had a conversation and it came out of that. I’m sure happy my name’s on it!” Bon Jovi grins.So he didn’t know it was a hit when he wrote it?“Not at all. I remember walking out of the room with Richie [Sambora, his band’s second most famous but now former member] and I said: ‘Eh, it’s OK. Maybe we should just put it on a movie soundtrack.’ Richie looked at me and said: ‘You’re an idiot – it’s really good.’ I said: ‘I just don’t know where it’s going.’ But it didn’t have that boom boom boom bassline yet, so it sounded more like the Clash.”Did it buy him a house?Bon Jovi looks at me as if I had asked about the woods-based habits of bears.“It bought a lot of people houses,” he says.Bon Jovi, 58, is talking to me on Zoom from his house in New Jersey. “I am the crown prince of New Jersey,” he declares, which is probably true – he named one of his biggest-selling albums after the state and has stayed firmly loyal to his home turf. (Although I think we both know that if Bon Jovi is the prince of New Jersey, its king is Bruce Springsteen.) From the tiny amount I can see, his house looks lovely – wood-panelled walls and not over-flashy. “My life is much more normal than one would imagine,” says the sixth wealthiest rock star in the world, sandwiched on that list between Sting and Elton John. “There are no platinum records hanging anywhere in my house. The trappings of rock stardom were never a part of my home.” He and his wife of 31 years, Dorothea, have four kids: Stephanie, 27, Jesse, 25, Jacob, 18 and Romeo, 16, and for a long time, he says, “my younger kids weren’t quite sure what I do”.We are talking today because the latest single, Story of Love, from his album 2020, is about to be released in the UK. Anyone whose image of Bon Jovi is still locked in the Livin’ on a Prayer era – the big guitars, the bigger hair – will be somewhat taken aback by 2020. It is a thoughtful look at the past year, addressing gun control (Lower the Flag), the coronavirus crisis (Do What You Can) and the Black Lives Matter movement (the disarmingly beautiful American Reckoning). Perhaps you are thinking that you don’t especially need Jon Bon Jovi’s thoughts on BLM, but reason not the need: as he has done throughout his near 40-year career, he offers solid music and heartfelt lyrics, and, really, hats off to the man for engaging with the moment because Lord knows he doesn’t need to do anything at all any more. When lockdown hit, instead of running off to a house on the beach, Bon Jovi washed dishes every day in JBJ Soul Kitchen, one of the two community kitchens he set up near his home, where meals are provided through donations or volunteering. As celebrity efforts go, that probably beats posting a video of yourself singing Imagine.But just singing about the human cost of the US’s gun laws will count to many as taking a side. Does he worry about alienating any of his fans? “There are men on my stage who see things differently, but I don’t let our differences come between us. I never wanted to become a captive to the stage. How I live my life’s up to me,” he says.When we first speak, Bon Jovi is 48 hours from performing in a televised celebration for Joe Biden’s inauguration. This is his second inaugural event, after singing for Obama in 2009. Bon Jovi first started palling around with politicians when “a governor by the name of Bill Clinton” contacted him in the early 90s, and he has been actively involved since. “If Al [Gore] had got in I’d have been secretary for entertainment,” he jokes. In 2015 he allowed the Republican and then New Jersey governor Chris Christie to use his music in his presidential campaign. Springsteen has repeatedly rebuffed requests from Christie, a superfan, to play at his events. Does he disapprove of Springsteen’s refusal to reach across the aisle?“I don’t know how Bruce has treated Chris, so I can’t comment on that. But I would be a hypocrite if I told you I write songs that claim to be a witness to history, and then don’t listen [to the other side],” he says.Would he let Donald Trump use his music?He recoils as if physically attacked. “No! No no no! On every issue we wholeheartedly disagree, from how he handled the Covid crisis to immigration to the Paris accord – everything! No! No!”Bon Jovi and Trump have an extremely weird history. Back in 2014, the singer, along with some Canadian investors, tried to buy the NFL team the Buffalo Bills, outbidding Trump. But there was suddenly strong anti-Bon Jovi feeling in Buffalo, NY, with “Bon Jovi-free” zones and negative graffiti, stemming from the rumour that he and his partners would move the team out of the city. Bon Jovi fiercely denied that, but the Bills ultimately went to a third bidder and that was the end of that – until three years ago, when it emerged, inevitably, that the anti-Bon Jovi campaign had been started by Michael Caputo, a political strategist, who had been hired by Trump.“I was really shocked at the depths [Trump] went to. He wasn’t even qualified to buy the team, because you have to submit your tax returns, and he never filed the paperwork. Instead, he did this dark shadow assassination thing, hoping to buy the team at a bargain basement price. But I just couldn’t understand how this misinformation was being put out there. It was seriously scarring,” Bon Jovi says, eyes wide.After Trump failed to get the team, he stomped off and ran for president. Maybe you should have just given him the team, I say.“Yeah, for the sake of the world, he definitely should have got the team. Oh well,” he chuckles.Caputo later worked for Trump when he was president and was questioned as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. It was reported last September that Caputo had orchestrated a pressure campaign for official reports into the Covid crisis to be altered to be more flattering to Trump.“I guess we lived a page of Trump’s playbook in Buffalo,” says Bon Jovi.How did it feel to see his nemesis become president only two years after the battle in Buffalo?He hesitates. “Well, like all Americans, I have to support the office of the president – look how political I’m sounding! I’m trying to stop myself from bullshitting. The truth is, I was really disappointed.”Often in interviews Bon Jovi can sound a little monotone and bored, talking about the same things he has been talking about for decades. But today he is strikingly engaged and I ask if that’s because we’re mainly talking about politics rather than music.“Ha! Well, everyone’s an armchair quarterback when talking about politics,” he says.So he’s not thinking of pivoting to politics, spending his days arguing with Republicans such as Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell?“Or Chuck Schumer,” he adds, naming the Democrat leader in the Senate for balance. “It’s a shit existence – selling yourself and your soul. Hell no.”John Bongiovi Jr was born and raised in New Jersey, the son of two former marines. He started making music as a kid and wrote Runaway, which would be his first hit, when he was 19. By 21 he had a record deal and a band, of which he was the name, the face and the boss (“More like a benevolent dictator,” he insists). Initially they were marketed as a hard rock band. They certainly looked the part – big hair, tight trousers – but Bon Jovi had a different plan.“I said: ‘I want a tour with the Cars and Bryan Adams and all these pop groups,’ and my manager said: ‘No. You’re going to learn how to play with Judas Priest and Kiss and the Scorpions. Those audiences are loyal; pop audiences are fickle,’” he says. So they were packed off to open for Judas Priest, “a heavy metal band I’d never listened to,” Bon Jovi says. They won over audiences but he must have cut an unusual figure backstage: unlike pretty much everyone else on the 1980s hard rock scene, Bon Jovi never suffered from substance abuse issues. This has obviously worked in his favour: even aside from his unusual, maybe even unique career and marital stability, Bon Jovi at 58 looks like a man who spent his youth on yoga retreats as opposed to hanging out with Aerosmith. But how did he resist when he was so young?“To be honest with you, I didn’t have the capacity to handle drugs. I didn’t find joy in it, and I didn’t need to bury myself emotionally, so what was the purpose?”Was that because he had a reasonably stable childhood?“Mine was as fucked up as anyone else’s, but not enough to start using drugs. I saw a lot of friends die or there was havoc in their personal lives, but I just didn’t have the need or desire,” he says.When the band made their third album, Slippery When Wet, Bon Jovi was “so over” being marketed as something he wasn’t that he took back control and worked on telling stories. The music was still rock, but the lyrics were about Tommy and the docks. The public loved it, and Slippery When Wet sold gazillions, its singles You Give Love a Bad Name, Wanted Dead or Alive, Never Say Goodbye and, of course, Livin’ on a Prayer becoming the inescapable soundtrack of the mid-80s. This was followed by New Jersey (Bad Medicine, I’ll Be There for You, Lay Your Hands on Me), and then the shift to the 90s, when Bon Jovi cut his hair and softened the rock a little (Keep the Faith, These Days) and became increasingly known for his ballads (In These Arms, Always). He sold more than 100m albums, at which point he moved into acting, which he was unexpectedly good at, in Moonlight and Valentino (hunky painter), Ally McBeal (hunky plumber) and Sex and the City (hunky photographer). Did he mind being the rent-a-hunk?“Hell no – I never went to the Shakespeare Company!” he laughs. “Nobody had been able to do both [music and acting]: Madonna, Sting, Phil Collins – you tried and failed. I was so anxious to get work I said: ‘I will do the small role, the hunk, just to get enough of a résumé.’”Yet he hardly needed the money. He talks about wanting to learn “humility” and (of course) “loving the craft”, all of which sounds like a euphemism for just needing a change. Producers told him that if he quit making music they would give him bigger parts but Hollywood’s appeal had already waned.“I got the house in Malibu, saw the guys who are looking over your shoulder to see if they should go talk to someone else. That whole lifestyle was so vapid to me. I couldn’t wait to get away from it,” he says.Critics sneer that Bon Jovi – the band and the man – have become too corporate, too cheesy. This isn’t exactly wrong, but it’s missing the point about why Bon Jovi – the man – is such an enduring phenomenon. He has always been a control freak, over himself and his band, as he admitted in his 2000 hit It’s My Life, and he knows what’s needed for his band to survive. His very un-rockstar-like stability has helped. He married his high school sweetheart, and has been with her more than 40 years. “She sat down next to me in history class, and that was it,” he says. His bandmates Tico Torres and David Bryan have also been with him since the beginning. Disruptions to plans upset him inordinately: he says the Buffalo debacle took him five years to get over. The departure of Sambora in 2013 upset him so much that he said he was plunged into “a dark place” for three years. Are he and Sambora in touch now?“No. He chose to do what he did, but my heartbreak is I personally loved having him in the band – I loved my band. But there was not a chance in the world that we would discontinue because of his inability to go on,” he says, the sensitivity still audible.At Bon Jovi’s suggestion, we talk again two days later after the inauguration. To many people’s surprise, instead of relying on the band’s back catalogue, he performed the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun. “I never felt like I needed to sing a song more. It was cathartic,” he says. Initially I missed the usual Bon Jovi bombast, but as the sun rose behind him as he sang, there was no denying that the man knows what works in the moment. But the recording of my private performance of Livin’ on a Prayer? That will last for ever.Bon Jovi’s album 2020 is out now. The new single, Story of Love, will be released on Friday 29 January. Visit bonjovi.com. More

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      in Elections

      Amanda Gorman at Biden's inauguration reminded me: politics needs poetry

      by

      Obama-endorsed and wearing gold-clipped braids and Oprah-gifted earrings, 22-year old poet Amanada Gorman and her poem The Hill We Climb have been the talking point of Biden’s inauguration. Her five-minute poem, which started with the question “When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?”, explored grief, redemption and recovery, and wowed the world. Imperfect but fervent, it reminded us of something important: politics needs poetry.Gorman, born in 1998 in Los Angeles and raised by a mother who works as a teacher, graduated from Harvard university in 2020. She was the first US national youth poet laureate and its youngest ever inaugural poet. Owing to a speech impediment, she couldn’t pronounce the letter R until two years ago. She has described spoken word as “my own type of pathology”. Praise has overflowed for the young poet and many have celebrated her passion, beauty and poise in this historic moment that closes the door on Trump. “I honor you, @TheAmandaGorman. Thank you,” wrote the daughter of Dr Martin Luther King Junior, Bernice King on Twitter.The clips circulating on the internet of Gorman, glowing and optimistic, stand in utter contrast to scenes of Trump supporters storming the Capitol, grotesque and desperate. She wrote the remainder of the piece after the events of 6 January , staying up late to watch the storming the Capitol. The line: “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it” speaks directly to the attempted derailment of democracy.On Instagram, Gorman describes herself as a dreamer, and the line: “Our people diverse and beautiful will emerge, battered and beautiful” shows her faith – a young woman dreaming aloud before millions of people in the form of spoken word. The moment has gone viral. Spoken word is a craft and a powerful art form, from the cadence to the delivery, to the subtle choreography. The moment, as internationally syndicated as it was, belongs to America. I don’t necessarily desire to see a version of it reproduced should Keir Starmer ever be elected prime minister (nor for the poet to find inspiration in Winston Churchill speeches).American politics’ relationship to poetry has a deep legacy in its fight for justice. In 1861, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a poet and lecturer, wrote To the Union Savers of Cleveland, a poem about Sara Lucy Bagby, a woman who had escaped enslavement and was arrested and returned to her “owner” under the Fugitive Slave Act. Harper published the poem in abolitionist newspaper The Anti-Slavery Bugle, and addressed it fervently to the white people of Ohio, writing “And your guilty, sin-cursed Union/ Shall be shaken to its base/ Till ye learn that simple justice/ Is the right of every race.” Poetry has long been the platform for opposing the current condition. As Matt Sandler writes in The Black Romantic Revolution: “Harper and her contemporaries borrowed and transformed the techniques and theories of Romanticism in an effort to bring about the end of slavery.”Poets are vendors of aspiration and are always fashioning together depictions of a better tomorrow, but it’s fair to ask if they are ever truly listened to in political spaces.Maya Angelou read her poem On the Pulse of Morning in 1993, at the inauguration of Bill Clinton. She says: “Lift up your hearts/ Each new hour holds new chances/ For a new beginning./ Do not be wedded forever/ To fear, yoked eternally/ To brutishness./ The horizon leans forward,/ Offering you space to place new steps of change.” Clinton would later go on to instigate the war on drugs and enact the 1994 Crime Bill that would destroy many lives and accelerate the incarceration of African Americans.I have wished many times to see more poets in positions of power, though writing poetry hasn’t made presidents any less barbaric or kinder – as one might think a writer of similes would be. Obama published poems at 19 in a literary review, published in 1982 by Occidental College. Jimmy Carter was the first US president to write a book of poetry, Always a Reckoning, and Other Poems, in 1995. Neither of these men has clean hands.For now, it’s paramount that young poets be given the space, funding and opportunities to be the voices of their communities. They are often spokespeople for those who look and live like them. Don’t wait until a black poet is on the world stage to be inspired by them – often they are not invited, and often they don’t want to endorse state activities by engaging in such ceremonies.Those poems, performed on neighbourhood stages, sitting in anthologies and self-published books, showcased at slams and open mics, have the answers too. There are many young poets like Gorman, who have glistening ideas for tomorrow and deserve to be recognised and propelled into superstardom, or at least just read. Buy their books too.Gorman was an alumnus of empowering youth projects such as Youth Speaks and Urban Word. If you fell in love with Gorman’s inaugural poem, support your local equivalent too. More