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      It was hard not to laugh at Rudy Giuliani's hair malfunction – but it's time to stop equating looks with character | Emma Beddington

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      Weren’t the pictures of Rudy Giuliani’s hair malfunction last week wonderful? I was transfixed by footage of him bug-eyed and ranting at a press conference, as dark rivulets of hair dye (or mascara, expert opinion was divided) ran down his sweaty cheeks. The incident spawned a delighted outpouring of comment and mocking tweets. He was a Scooby-Doo villain unmasked; a gargoyle, a comic-book grotesque, and it felt so apt. For critics, it was as if corruption, lies and moral turpitude were finally oozing out of him as a tarry discharge.It is the same satisfaction we feel as we dissect the brittle spun-sugar edifice of Trump’s hair, the harshly theatrical lines of his makeup (“una naranja espantosa”, a scary orange, as a White House housekeeper described it to the Washington Post) or his cack-handed panda-eye concealer habit. It is delicious when the facade cracks, especially in one so obsessed with surface. It feels like poetic justice when a man who built a gold tower, regularly comments on his daughter’s looks and mocked a disabled reporter is caught looking diminished and ridiculous.No amount of expensive vanity, it seems, can cover what is essentially rotten about these men: the ugliness keeps showing through. “If a person has ugly thoughts it begins to show on the face,” Roald Dahl wrote in The Twits. Except, of course, that is nonsense. I don’t believe for a moment that any of us actually thinks there is any correlation between looks and character. So why do we still allow and amplify this lazy trope?Years of cultural conditioning doesn’t help, I suppose. Hollywood has been conflating ugliness and moral failing since cinema began, and Shakespeare was doing it 500 years ago. The messaging is at its most intense in childhood: villains, from Disney to Harry Potter, are fat, disfigured or ugly. David Walliams has been called out for it; Dahl is infamous for it. Reading The Witches to my sons when they were small was an odd experience: they adored the story and Quentin Blake’s enchanting illustrations, but the diagram and explanation of an unmasked witch confused them – because it looked like me. I have alopecia and, like the witches, am bald beneath my wig. Was I planning to turn them into mice?Even in 2020, Anne Hathaway’s Grand High Witch in the new screen version is revealed, beneath her disguise, to be a bald monster with disfigured, claw-like hands. Weary disability campaigners were provoked into action once more on the film’s release, condemning yet another depiction of disability as evil. People with limb differences, from Paralympians to Bake Off’s Briony Williams tweeted pictures of themselves tagged #notawitch and Warner Bros was flustered into one of those weaselly not-quite apologies. The studio declared it was “deeply saddened … our depiction of the fictional characters in The Witches could upset people with disabilities”.Things are slowly changing: the British Film Institute has said it will not support films with facially scarred villains, and the campaigning group RespectAbility is dedicated to analysing shortcomings in Hollywood’s portrayal of disability and trying to shift its portrayals.From a fictional perspective, it is surely more interesting to subvert the “ugliness as evil” trope anyway. One of the best things about the Amazon’s ultra-gory, superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys is how absurdly good-looking the truly repellent baddies are, all chiselled cheekbones and dewy beauty.But this reframing needs to go further than fiction, and that is up to us. Corruption and amorality can also be high-definition glossy and ready for its closeup: think of Ivanka and Jared. The next generation of hard-right demagogues probably won’t look like Trump or Steve Bannon (another whose general aura of dissolution and decay it is terribly hard not to conflate with his repellent politics). Isn’t that actually far scarier?There are many reasons to loathe Trump and Giuliani, but a heavy hand with the retouching wand, a pale expanse of paunch spilling out of a golf shirt, or a turbo-charged bad hair day are not among them. They are rotten to the core; let’s resist the temptation to fixate on the surface. More

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      in US Politics

      How will Joe Biden's presidency affect arts and culture in America?

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      Four years ago, as Donald Trump prepared to be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, his incoming administration faced a serious hurdle: booking any big-name artist to perform at his inauguration. Several artists declined or pulled out of the event; whereas Barack Obama had Beyoncé, the Trump team eventually secured country artists Lee Greenwood and Toby Keith, whose rah-rah patriotism and jingoistic lyrics fit the bill for an agenda the New Yorker writer Andrea K Scott called “America First, Art Last”. The performances drew middling crowds (ones flatly denied by then White House press secretary Sean Spicer) dwarfed the following day by the Women’s March, which drew a bevy of A-list stars to protest the Maga president.The combative, mutually bitter relationship between Trump and most artists and creative organizations has only deepened since. Though the Trump administration – called a “worst-case scenario” for arts groups – has largely failed to dismantle the federal arts programs it promised to defund, the Trump White House has been largely hostile to the arts, from Hollywood stars to political comedy down to local arts programs in cities, towns and rural areas across the country. Support of the arts, broadly construed, has understandably not been at the forefront of a rancorous and bruising 2020 election, as the economic crisis and ongoing pandemic imperil everything. But with Joe Biden’s election win, however unacknowledged by the current president, it’s worth looking ahead: what would a Biden administration mean for the arts?First and foremost, handling the coronavirus pandemic which has grounded most live performances to a halt, shuttered Broadway and theaters across the country, and tipped millions into unemployment. The Covid recession is the most unequal in modern American history, ensnaring society’s most vulnerable – including all but the biggest name artists – in prolonged, stagnating financial hardship. Without coronavirus under control, most efforts to resuscitate art economies are for nil.Once in office, Biden will undoubtedly call a cease-fire on executive attempts to destroy the cornerstones of federal arts programs: the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), long a target of the conservative culture wars since the late 1980s, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which supply funds to programs and institutions ranging from the Met, to regional theaters, to art classes for rural preschools. More

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      Positively shocking: Trump's boasts of help from Sean Connery fall apart

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      President claimed Bond actor helped him get planning permission for Scottish resortSean Connery, James Bond actor, dies aged 90 It was less licence to kill and more dramatic licence. Donald Trump’s claim that the late Sean Connery assisted him in getting planning applications passed in Scotland fell apart quickly on Sunday when the chair of the planning committee said the James Bond star was not involved.In a series of tweets, two days prior to the US election, Trump paid tribute to Connery, saying he was “highly regarded and respected in Scotland and beyond”. It was announced on Saturday the James Bond actor had died aged 90. Continue reading… More

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      Vote your cast: who is the greatest fictional US president?

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      Remember that lurch in your stomach when you realised that Donald Trump had been elected as US president? Not to bum anyone out, but there’s a chance that it might happen again in a few days. Elections are fun and exciting, but also have the potential to end democracy as we know it. That’s why we’ve put together the next best thing: a US election comprised solely of fictional presidents from film and TV. These figures are bold, pure and tough as nails. Most importantly, they don’t exist, so they won’t plunge the world into a nightmare of war and corruption if they get elected.Listed below are the names of a bunch of fictional presidents. Eight are Democrats, eight are Republican and three are unaffiliated. We will hold primaries for each category before handing the decisions over to our voters, Hari Kondabolu and Billy Ray. Kondabolu was responsible for the 2017 doc The Problem With Apu, and co-hosts the unmissable Politically Re-Active podcast. Ray wrote and directed brilliant miniseries The Comey Rule, which dramatised FBI director James Comey’s tortuous dealings with Donald Trump. They know their stuff. They want to speak for the people. In the event of a stalemate – to mimic the electoral college system – we will step in and decide with a coin toss. Ah, democracy in action …Republican primary More

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      John Kerry: 'People want a future. The orange menace is not providing that'

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      In 2004, the Democrats’ presidential candidate, John Kerry, was on the receiving end of one of the most egregious smear campaigns in modern history. At the height of the Iraq war, the Republicans came up with a strategy to combat the glaring military mismatch between Kerry, a decorated Vietnam vet, and the incumbent George W Bush, whose record consisted of a spell in the Texas Air National Guard. They concocted the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of Vietnam vets who claimed that Kerry had lied about and exaggerated his record. The claims were later discredited, but the lies travelled around the world, and the damage was done.“It was really the first of the fake news elections,” says Kerry, speaking via Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Where you can take a legitimate military record, which the US navy had certified, and you can lie about it. And that’s where we are today: massive lies. We’ve had tens of thousands of lies told by the president of the United States. We’re just completely divorced from the reality of what is happening to people’s lives.”Does it still make him angry? “Yeah,” he says, “which is why I try not to think about it too much. I made the decision very shortly after that I did not want to get lost in anger.” Having seen what Al Gore went through in the 2000 election, which saw similarly questionable tactics, Kerry decided against a long court process, but now, with the 2020 election days away, he is reconsidering.“The recent machinations about voter-suppression and interference in the election have prompted me to question not litigating. Because we’re seeing it still challenging our democracy in ways that are unacceptable. I wonder if that would have changed if we’d done it.”Since he left office as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State in January 2017, closing a five-decade political career, Kerry has kept a relatively low profile, but he has been transitioning from hard power towards soft. This is becoming a well-trodden route, with Gore making An Inconvenient Truth, and the Obamas signing a deal with Netflix in 2018. “After a long career in politics, if you’re doing it right, it’s about storytelling. It’s about having an impact on culture, and understanding what the culture is,” he says. More

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      Film-maker Alexandra Pelosi: ‘I think phones are more dangerous than guns’

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      The documentarian and daughter of the House speaker discusses her new film that looks at an angry and divided AmericaAmerica is, as the refrain goes, divided. This has been demonstrated empirically, with evidence on America’s increasing political polarization, and anecdotally, if you’ve lived in America for the past decade, and especially the last four years. Easily legible examples of a country fraying at the seams abound; American Selfie: One Nation Shoots Itself, a new documentary from Showtime, serializes some of the most prominent ones of the last year, with a retrospective of such indelible yet quickly faded images as crematory trucks in the height of pandemic New York, the Trump motorcycle rally in pandemic summer South Dakota, and a fraught border checkpoint in El Paso, Texas. Related: ‘There’s a whole war going on’: the film tracing a decade of cyber-attacks Continue reading… More

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      in World Politics

      Star Trek vs. the Radical Right: Visions of a Better World

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      Science fiction has a long history of progressive politics. Probably the best-known example is the Star Trek franchise that started in the 1960s with an Asian helmsman, a navigator from Russia and a black woman as a communications officer and features non-binary and transgender characters in the upcoming third season of “Star Trek: Discovery.” Such politics are not that of the radical right, be they communicated through doctrinaire texts or (science) fiction(s) of a “better world,” the latter being arguably more persuasive due to their emotive nature and a good story’s ability to psychologically transport the reader away from reality and into the world of a hero’s fictive journey.

      An occasion where these two modes meet is Guillaume Faye’s “Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age,” which was originally published in French in 1998. Faye recently featured on these pages, and it is thus sufficient to say that this key thinker of the radical right puts forward a specific argument against egalitarianism and the philosophy of progress.

      Did a French Far-Right Thinker Predict 2020?

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      Following an introduction, “Archeofuturism” starts with an assessment of the Nouvelle Droite (the New Right), including criticism of “ethno-cultural relativism” that prevented the affirmation of “the superiority of our own civilization.” This is followed by a chapter on archeofuturism; an “Ideologically Dissident Statements”; Faye’s discussion of a two-tier world economy; a chapter entitled “The Ethnic Question and the European”; and, finally, a short science fiction story to which I now turn.

      The Great Catastrophe

      Concerning archeofuturism, Faye introduces archaism in terms of the unchangeable “values, which are purely biological and human,” meaning separated gender roles, defending organic communities and “explicit and ideologically legitimated inequality” among social statuses, while futurism is described as “the planning of the future,” a “constant feature of the European mindset” that rejects “what is unchangeable.” Hence, “Archeofuturism” celebrates technological advancements such as genetic engineering from a distinctly radical-right ethos.

      Not quite Star Trek’s message, but why bother? Although Faye presents “Archeofuturism” in a classic intellectual style, he also attempts to increase its appeal by fictionalizing his ideas. That is, a story at the end of the book conveys not simply its key points, but an entire, alternative future. This final chapter is not simply dystopian, as is the case with so many radical-right fiction novels, but utopian — not foregrounding decadence and catastrophe, but “the good life” and a happy rebirth of “our folk — whether in Toulouse, Rennes, Milan, Prague, Munich, Antwerp or Moscow.” Thus, the story facilitates emotional identification with a not so distant future, warranting a closer look at this fictionalization of radical-right politics.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The short story is entitled “A Day in the Life of Dimitri Leonidovich Oblomov: A Chronicle of Archeofuturist Times” and introduces the reader to Faye’s future through the eyes of the Plenipotentiary Councillor of the Eurosiberian Federation Dimitri Leonidovich Oblomov on a day in June 2073. It describes what happened following the “Great Catastrophe,” a convergence of catastrophes central to Faye’s theory that allegedly manifests the end of the “fairytale ideology” of egalitarianism and progress underpinning modernity.

      According to Faye, this is the convergence of seven main crises: a demographic colonization of Europe; an economic and demographic crisis; the chaos in the South; a global economic crisis; the rise of religious fanaticism, primarily Islam; a North-South confrontation; and environmental pollution, which, interestingly, includes an unambiguous acceptance of anthropogenic climate change. Faye assumed this convergence to take place between 2010 and 2020. The story speaks of 2014-16 and tells the reader that, consequently, 2 billion people had died by 2020.

      Readers furthermore learn that following this Great Catastrophe, the Eurosiberian Federation, resulting from the fusion of the European Union and Russia, was founded. Indeed, the idea of a federal Europe is central to Faye’s approach. In contrast to most of his fellow travelers on the radical right, Faye views the contemporary European Union as an insufficient but necessary step toward this federation. Such an imperial block — like India, China, North America, Latin America, the Muslim world, black Africa and peninsular Asia — would be a semi-autarky and an actor on the world stage while simultaneously enabling strengthening of regional identities across the federation.

      Another key element of Faye’s theory, its unrestricted celebration of technoscience, is also present throughout the story. For example, Oblomov speaks of a base on Mars and spends most of the story on a “planetary train” from Brest to Komsomolsk, a journey which takes only about three hours.

      However, within the federation, only 19% cent of the population participate in the technoscientific economy and way of life which “solve[ed] the problems of pollution and energy waste – the planet could finally breathe again. … Still, it was too late to stop global warming, the greenhouse effect and the rise of sea levels caused by wide-scale toxic emissions in the Twentieth century. Science had made rapid progress, but it only affected a minority of the population; the others had reverted to a Medieval form of economy based on agriculture, craftsmanship and farming.”

      Not only is this program manifestly inegalitarian, Faye also simply assumes that the vast majority, in fiction and reality, will enjoy a pre-industrial, neotraditional way of living. Faye’s technoscientific vision includes chimeras and the genetic manipulation of children, the benefits of which will only be available to a minority.

      Extra-European

      Turning to the representation of women, the story introduces three in particular and not untypical ways: Oblomov’s wife, who looks after the children and who only really enters at the end of the story; a virtual female secretary — not “a fat and repulsive old hag” but one who “had perfect measurements, always appeared in scanty dresses and made suggestive remarks from time to time”; and a “dark-skinned and very beautiful girl.” In fact, it is through the conversation between this Indian girl and Oblomov during the train ride that the reader learns much about Faye’s archeofuturist vision.

      Finally, Faye’s vision of the post-catastrophic age includes the cleansing of Europe from its “extra-European” population. In Faye’s writing, Islam is the main enemy and, consequently, the story reports an invasion of Europe by an Islamic army in 2017 that teams up with ‘“ethnic gangs”’ before a Reconquista (with the help of Russia) leads to victory and the deportation of millions of descendants of extra-European immigrants. Unsurprisingly, deportation is driven by archaic criteria as Faye talks about the “right of blood” and the “collective biological unconscious.” 

      A radical-right publisher in Germany recently released the story as a stand-alone book, and the piece is particularly notable due to its direct transformation of theory into science fiction. Indeed, the story is a prime example of how radical-right fictional accounts “imagine the unimaginable” — the transformation toward what the radical right considers a “better world.” Not only fans of Star Trek should take notice of such worlding as the latter can have real-world consequences.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      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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      Jennifer Lawrence: I voted for John McCain rather than Barack Obama

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      The actor Jennifer Lawrence used to vote Republican, she has revealed. Speaking on the Absolutely Not podcast, Lawrence told host Heather McMahan she “grew up Republican. My first time voting, I voted for John McCain. I was a little Republican.”Lawrence said she remained grateful for her upbringing as it enabled her to “see the fiscal benefits of some of the Republican policies” while also noting that her and the party’s views on social issues “weren’t in line”.“When Donald Trump got elected, that just changed everything,” said Lawrence. “This is an impeached president who’s broken many laws and refused to condemn white supremacy and it feels there’s been a line drawn in the sand.”Despite not voting for him the first time around, Lawrence said she reflected fondly on the years when Barack Obama was in power, saying: “You would go days without thinking about the president.”Speaking before Trump’s election in 2016, Lawrence said she couldn’t “imagine supporting a party that doesn’t support women’s basic rights. It’s 2015 and gay people can get married and we think that we’ve come so far, so, yay! But have we? I don’t want to stay quiet about that stuff.”She also expressed the view that “if Donald Trump is president of the United States, it will be the end of the world. And he’s also the best thing to happen to the Democrats ever.”Earlier this month, Lawrence endorsed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in November’s election saying: “Voting is the foundation of our democracy and our freedom. And I would consider this upcoming election the most consequential of our lifetime.“Donald Trump has and will continue to put himself before the safety and well-being of America. He does not represent my values as an American, and most importantly as a human being.”For the past three years, Lawrence has also served on the board of RepresentUs, which she described as “an incredible non-partisan movement and anti-corruption organisation working to unrig America’s broken political system, and put power back in the hands of the American people.” More