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      Can you ignore your family’s politics? Jennifer Lawrence and Sydney Sweeney disagree

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      Can you ignore your family’s politics? Jennifer Lawrence and Sydney Sweeney disagreeArwa MahdawiThe Euphoria actor wants to keep things apolitical – but treating politics as abstract has always been a privilege Jennifer Lawrence says she “can’t fuck with people who aren’t political”. In a cover interview with Vogue, the actor revealed that she no longer has any patience for people who are passive about politics because things are now “too dire … Politics are killing people.”Politics have been killing people for a very long time, of course. Military spending decisions kill people. Austerity, and a lack of social welfare spending, kills people. Climate crisis and gun control policies, or a lack thereof, kill people. Treating politics as something abstract, something that doesn’t significantly impact your day-to-day life, has always been a privilege.I’m not here to scold Lawrence for not being woke straight out of the womb, though (this isn’t Twitter). She grew up in a conservative household in Kentucky and, as many people do, adopted her parents’ politics. Since then, however, she has evolved and been very frank about how and why she gradually moved away from Republican policies. Travelling for work expanded her worldview, Lawrence has said, and made her realize that wherever she went, wealth never seemed to trickle down but was always concentrated at the top. She wasn’t exactly radicalized but she became firmly liberal and now, she tells Vogue, she has nightmares about Tucker Carlson.Lawrence’s views may have evolved but her family’s don’t seem to have, which has caused a painful rift. The 2016 election fractured her relationship with some relatives, including her dad, she told Vogue. The reversal of Roe v Wade dealt it another blow. “I don’t want to disparage my family, but I know that a lot of people are in a similar position with their families. How could you raise a daughter from birth and believe that she doesn’t deserve equality? How?” Brett Kavanaugh, dad to two daughters, might be able to tell her.Lawrence isn’t the only celebrity whose family’s political leanings are making life hard for them. The Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney recently caught flak because her mother threw a hoedown-themed 60th birthday that looked a little Trumpy. Photos of party guests wearing Maga-style red baseball caps with the phrase “Make Sixty Great Again”, and one unidentified guest wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” T-shirt (a pro-police backlash to Black Lives Matter), went viral.Twitter detectives went to work and found a picture on Sweeney’s brother’s Instagram account of a baby with a Maga hat on outside the White House. Rumours started swirling that Sweeney’s family were Trump-loving Republicans and a lot of fans got very upset and started questioning the actor’s politics. Sweeney, it should be noted, has never said much about her political leanings but her roles in shows like Euphoria – and the fact that her breakout role was in The Handmaid’s Tale – seem to have led a lot of her young, progressive fans to assume she’s liberal.“You guys this is wild,” Sweeney tweeted in response to the furore. “An innocent celebration for my moms milestone 60th birthday has turned into an absurd political statement, which was not the intention. Please stop making assumptions.”The anger directed towards Sweeney did feel a little over the top. After all, nobody chooses their family. However, her response to the outrage also felt disingenuous. When you wear a Blue Lives Matter shirt, you’re not making a fashion statement, you’re making a political statement. As a lot of commentators pointed out, Sweeney ignoring the political nature of some of the photos and accusing people of politicizing an innocent event felt a lot like gaslighting.‘I was absolutely terrified of Olivia’: Sydney Sweeney on her White Lotus characterRead moreAgain, nobody chooses their family. But when you’re an adult, you choose how you react to your family’s politics. Lawrence told Vogue that she has she has tried to “forgive my dad and my family and try to understand: it’s different. The information they are getting is different. Their life is different.” Still, she admitted, she can’t pretend their politics don’t matter. “I’ve tried to get over it and I really can’t. I can’t.”Sweeney, meanwhile, seems to have chosen to act as if politics don’t really matter, that civility is more important than civil rights. And she’s not alone in this approach. After Trump won the presidency in 2016, a lot of outlets published advice on how to survive Thanksgiving with a politically divided family. Much of that advice was along the lines of “agree to disagree!” Vogue even suggested a game where anyone who brought up politics was fined $20.You can acknowledge the fact that your parents supporting radically different ideas to you about a woman’s right to choose, for example, is not the same as them supporting a different sports team. You don’t have to disown your parents for their views, but if you don’t confront them in some way, then you are complicit.Maybe Lawrence should take young Sweeney aside at the next Hollywood award show and talk to her a bit about how it’s no longer possible to be passive about politics.TopicsFilmJennifer LawrenceTelevisionUS televisionUS politicscommentReuse this content More

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      Rough Draft review: Katy Tur’s fascinating – and flawed – story of news and family

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      Rough Draft review: Katy Tur’s fascinating – and flawed – story of news and familyThe MSNBC anchor follows her Trump bestseller with a compelling memoir but her press criticism falls flat Katy Tur spent 500 days covering Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, wrote a bestselling book called Unbelievable, and now hosts a show on MSNBC. She was planning to pitch a memoir about the 2020 election but changed her mind during the Covid pandemic, after a heavy package arrived from her mother.Because Our Fathers Lied review: Robert McNamara, Vietnam and a partial healingRead moreThe package contained a hard drive, which contained every minute of tape her parents, Bob Tur and Marika Gerrard, had taken as sole proprietors of the Los Angeles News Service. The drive contained all the footage shot from helicopters piloted by her father, Bob: from Madonna giving her parents the finger on the day she married Sean Penn to the famous chase of OJ Simpson as he sped through the streets of LA in a white Ford Bronco.As a child, Katy was often a passenger as her mother leaned far out of the cockpit to catch the best possible shot. Her daredevil father once got so close to a forest fire, he was cited for fanning its flames. Sometimes Katy felt the heat on her shins from a blaze barely 500ft below.That hard drive convinced Tur to switch subject. Her second book therefore tells a story she had spent her adult life avoiding: the story of her childhood. The switch was the right choice because even a particularly hard-fought campaign could not compete with the drama of her upbringing.Bob Tur was the kind of journalist who would do anything to get the story, “an oracle” to Katy. When the Northridge earthquake knocked out power to half of Los Angeles, her father used a forklift to rip open a hangar door so he could drag the chopper out and take off.He had such good sources in the fire department that he and his wife once scooped KABC-Los Angeles when its own 11pm anchor was shot outside the station. The Turs then sold the tape to KABC. A few hours later, Katy was born.Years later, she fondly recalled a childhood that “smelled like eucalyptus trees, the Pacific ocean and jet fuel”. But she was resolutely silent about all the ghastly things she experienced.Her father was the son of a gambler who would take him to the racetrack, give him the rent money to keep it from his own father, then beat his own son to get it back. Bob Tur’s “nose was broken by his father’s fist”, his “hand stabbed with his father’s fork”, his “face slashed by his father’s key”. He was “missing a piece of his ear because his father sliced it off”. In his mid-teens, Bob ran away.But according to Katy Tur, her father was unable to unlearn the worst lessons of his childhood and repeated the pattern of violence in his adult life, striking his wife, whipping Katy and her brother, punching holes in the living room walls.When Tur was covering the Boston Marathon bombing, she got the most startling call of her life. Her father told her he had “decided to become a woman. It’s why I’ve been so angry.”After the transition, Zoey Tur attacked Katy Tur for allegedly being transphobic. She insists she has always been supportive of such a courageous decision. But what she could not forgive was Zoey’s refusal to discuss or acknowledge the violence Bob Tur inflicted on his family, because the man who committed it no longer existed.Tur writes: “It felt like my dad was playing a get-out-of-gender-free card I didn’t know existed … I was dumbfounded by the idea that a person could change their gender … and think that in the process the deeds of the past would no longer be relevant.”It was “like a bank robber pleading not guilty on account of gender misalignment. But that’s how my father saw it.”“Bob Tur is dead,” Zoey Tur said. But, Katy Tur replied, “The stuff Bob Tur did isn’t dead.”The family story gives Katy Tur’s book its spine and its power. But interspersed with personal history are occasional attempts at press criticism which reveal uneven judgement.On the one hand, Tur acknowledges that her parents’ hugely successful focus on sensationalism is often blamed for the downfall of local TV news, and “some would say the downfall of national TV news too”.“They don’t dispute it,” she writes. “Neither do I.”But when she complains that too many people bemoan the decline of her profession in the decades since Walter Cronkite practiced it, she goes completely off the rails.Quoting a biography of Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, another pundit of uneven judgement, she endorses the absurd idea that CBS Evening News covered the civil rights movement of the 1960s too sympathetically – citing as evidence the fact that bigoted southern affiliates derided their New York parent as the “Colored Broadcasting Station.”Tur also thinks it was wrong for the CBS Evening News to devote two thirds of its broadcast to Watergate two days before the 1972 election, when the New York Times and every major organization except the Washington Post was ignoring the scandal.The Great Stewardess Rebellion review: stirring study of what Roe v Wade helped vanquishRead moreShe disputes Cronkite’s 1968 description of Chicago police under Mayor Richard Daley as a “bunch of thugs”, a description delivered when the Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff was accurately accusing Daley of using “Gestapo tactics” against leftwing protesters.Tur even questions Cronkite’s single finest moment, also in ’68, when he accurately identified Vietnam as a “stalemate” after the Tet offensive.Tur is a better than average network news correspondent. I admired her work when she covered Trump. But judgements like the ones she passes on Cronkite are the very reason so many long for the days when networks employed correspondents of the caliber of Roger Mudd, Richard Threlkeld, Charles Kuralt, Elie Abel, Bob Simon, Charles Collingwood, Ed Bradley, Edwin Newman, Jim Wooten and more – all of whom were vastly superior to their current counterparts.
      Rough Draft: Motherhood and Journalism in a World Gone Mad is published in the US by Atria/One Signal
      TopicsBooksUS press and publishingUS television industryMSNBCUS televisionTelevisionUS politicsreviewsReuse this content More

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      Congress’s January hearings aim to be TV spectacular that ‘blows the roof off’

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      Congress’s January hearings aim to be TV spectacular that ‘blows the roof off’House select committee members have drafted in a former top TV executive to choreograph the six public hearings The directors are hoping that the storyline will have all the elements of a TV smash hit: a King Lear figure ranting and raving as his power slips away from him, a glamorous couple struggling to rise above the fray, shady characters scheming sedition in hotel bedrooms, hordes of thugs in paramilitary gear chanting “hang him” as they march on the nation’s capitol.Inaugural January 6 hearing to track activities of Proud Boys during Capitol attackRead moreWhen the US House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection opens its hearings on Thursday evening, it will do so in prime time and with primetime production values. The seven Democrats and two Republicans – shunned by their own party – who sit on the panel are pulling out all the stops in an attempt to seize the public’s attention.They have brought onboard a former president of ABC News, James Goldston, a veteran of Good Morning America and other mass-market TV programmes, to tightly choreograph the six public hearings into movie-length episodes ranging from 90 minutes to two and a half hours. His task: to fulfill the prediction of one of the Democratic committee members, Jamie Raskin, that the hearings “will tell a story that will really blow the roof off the House”.To amplify the event, activists are hosting dozens of public watch parties in living rooms and union halls across the country. A “flagship event” will take place at the Robert Taft Memorial and Carillon in Washington, where attendees can watch the hearing on a jumbotron while enjoying free Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream.Reports suggest that one ratings-boosting tactic under consideration would be to show clips from the committee’s interviews with Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner. They were witness to many of Donald Trump’s rantings in the buildup to January 6, and highlights of their quizzing could command a large audience.As a counterpoint to the glamorous couple, the committee is also likely to focus during the opening session on the activities of far-right groups including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. This week, the justice department charged the national chairman of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, and four of the group’s other leaders with seditious conspiracy.The indictments will act as backdrop to two of the committee’s main ambitions for the hearings. First, to show in dramatic and previously unseen footage – edited for maximum effect on TV and social media alike – the harrowing violence and brutal destruction that was unleashed during the storming of the Capitol, in which the vice-president was forced to flee rioters shouting: “Hang Mike Pence.”The second ambition is to convey to the American people that the maelstrom of rage was not random and unprompted, but rather the opposite – instigated, organised, meticulously planned and conceived by an array of conscious actors.To tease out the violent drama and the calculated premeditation of the insurrection, the panel is expected to call Nick Quested to testify. The British film-maker attached himself to far-right groups in the days leading up to January 6, and on the day itself joined a group of Proud Boys as they entered the Capitol compound.The Republican leadership, which is planning a slew of counter-programming measures to undermine the hearings, is counting on the American people being so bored by January 6 and distracted by Ukraine, inflation and other worries that millions will avoid tuning in. But opinion poll research suggests they should not be too confident.Republican media blitz aims to discredit Capitol attack hearingsRead moreCelinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster, told a press event staged by the Defend Democracy Project that she had been “frankly quite surprised” to find a high level of public interest in the hearings. “I did not think with everything else on their plates and how fleeting the public’s attention is that this would be such a major issue, but it’s really penetrated their consciousness,” she said.The elephant in the room is Trump. How to play the former president and his role behind January 6 is one of the most sensitive issues facing the hearings’ orchestrators.Doug Jones, the former Democratic senator from Alabama and a former federal prosecutor, urged colleagues to avoid giving the impression they were out to get him.“They should not give the American public the perception that this is an attack on Donald Trump – this is truly an attack on democracy. Right now for primetime, they need to lay the facts and let the American public see this for what it is.”The committee is thought to be intending to tackle Trump head on in the final of the six public hearings which, like the first, will be held in primetime later this month. Unnamed sources have been predicting that presentation will contain several “bombshells” which, if true, are certain to be deployed to full dramatic effect.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS televisionnewsReuse this content More

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      Star Trek makes Stacey Abrams president of United Earth – and stokes conservative anger

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      Star Trek makes Stacey Abrams president of United Earth – and stokes conservative angerNational Review says candidate for governor in Georgia and self-confessed superfan does not deserve fictional title The Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights campaigner Stacey Abrams has been made president – of United Earth.‘Champion for Alaska’: Don Young, longest-serving House Republican, dies at 88 Read moreThe honour, which a leading conservative website said Abrams did not deserve, was bestowed by the Paramount+ TV series Star Trek: Discovery, in its season four finale.Abrams is a self-confessed Star Trek superfan. In 2019, she told the New York Times she binged on episodes during her last run for governor.“I love Voyager and I love Discovery and of course I respect the original,” she said, “but I revere The Next Generation.”Michelle Paradise, executive producer of Star Trek: Discovery, told Variety the show decided it needed a figure of suitable gravitas.“When the time came to start talking about the president of Earth,” she said, “it seemed like, ‘Well, who better to represent that than her?”Abrams is a former Democratic member of the Georgia state house as well as a prolific romance novelist. She has said she will be US president by 2040.In 2018, she ran the Republican Brian Kemp close for governor of Georgia. She is seeking a rematch this year and in part thanks to her work on voting rights has risen to prominence in the national party, having been considered for vice-president to Joe Biden.Abrams’s work helped secure both Biden’s win in Georgia in 2020 and Democratic control of the US Senate, via two Georgia run-offs.Such work has made her a target of the right. On Friday, the National Review, a conservative site, published a column about her Star Trek cameo: Stacey Abrams Does Not Deserve to Be President of Earth.Abrams, the Review said, “is, at this time, most famous for losing the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election and then proceeding to deny she had lost it”.Abrams refused to concede to Kemp, who as Georgia secretary of state oversaw the purging of voter rolls before the election he contested.Brad Raffensperger, the current Georgia secretary of state, has argued that Abrams’ refusal to concede was “morally indistinguishable from – and helped set the stage for – former president Donald Trump’s behavior after the 2020 presidential election”.Raffensperger famously stood up to Trump, whose request that Raffensperger “find” sufficient votes to flip the state is at the heart of a grand jury investigation.In 2019, Abrams told the New York Times that while she “legally acknowledge[d] that Brian Kemp secured a sufficient number of votes under our existing system to become the governor of Georgia. I do not concede that the process was proper, nor do I condone that process.”She also said: “I have no empirical evidence that I would have achieved a higher number of votes. However, I have sufficient and I think legally sufficient doubt about the process to say that it was not a fair election.”The Review complained that Star Trek would never make Trump president of Earth, not even “in the way that the evil genetic superman Khan Noonien Singh once despotically ruled one-quarter of earth’s population”.It added: “In classic Trek fashion, Abrams [was] shown as the logical and inevitable result of the kind of technocratic progressivism that the show has long advanced, a fruition of our highest ideals. Her behavior in the political sphere does not seem to bear this out.”Elie Mystal, a writer for the Nation, responded: “Look at how conservative white people react to a FICTIONAL black woman president.”Mystal also tied the Review’s criticism to events in Washington, where Ketanji Brown Jackson will next week begin confirmation hearings to be the first Black woman on the supreme court.“Next week,” Mystal wrote, “this same publication that can’t handle a black women president ON A TELEVISION SHOW is going to claim to have reasonable and *totally not racist* thoughts about a real life black woman on the supreme court.” The makers of Star Trek: Discovery seemed happy just to have had Abrams on set. They also explained how they fulfilled her request not to be told of the plot of her episode, so she could enjoy it later.As the Washington Post reported, the episode, which was filmed in Toronto last August, ended with Abrams “telling the show’s protagonist … ‘There’s a lot of work to do. Are you ready for that?’“‘I am,’ [Captain Michael Burnham] responds. ‘Let’s get to it.’”Sonequa Martin-Green, who plays Burnham, told Variety she was “taken aback … and really moved” by Abrams’ performance.“It really signaled the culmination of the season having her there,” she said, “because she’s such this symbol of hope and strength and connection and sacrifice and building something bigger than yourself that will last generations, and that’s exactly what we’re talking about doing in the story.”In a “cherished moment”, Martin-Green said, Abrams was presented with a trophy, a captain’s badge and a poem.TopicsStacey AbramsStar TrekUS politicsDemocratsUS midterm elections 2022GeorgiaUS televisionnewsReuse this content More

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      Fox anchor survives second Covid case and tells detractors: ‘Sorry to disappoint’

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      Fox anchor survives second Covid case and tells detractors: ‘Sorry to disappoint’Neil Cavuto returns to Fox Business to say doctors told him only vaccination saved his life this time The Fox anchor Neil Cavuto returned to the air on Monday, to say he nearly died from a second bout with the coronavirus and to tell detractors including those who sent death threats over his support for vaccines: “So sorry to disappoint you.”Queen cancels virtual engagements due to CovidRead moreMore than 935,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 in the last two years. The seven-day average daily death rate is just under 2,000 – the vast majority unvaccinated.Fox has strict vaccination requirements for staff. But hosts, prominently including Tucker Carlson, have spread misinformation about vaccines and resistance to Covid-19 public health measures including vaccination mandates.Cavuto is immunocompromised, with multiple sclerosis and having survived heart surgery and cancer.After his first positive Covid test, in October, he implored viewers: “My God, stop the politics. Life is too short to be an ass. Life is way too short to be ignorant of the promise of something that is helping people worldwide. Stop the deaths, stop the suffering, please get vaccinated, please.”Some viewers did not stop the politics. Cavuto revealed that he received disturbing messages, including death threats.On Fox Business on Monday, Cavuto said he had been hospitalised for weeks but Fox had not publicised his condition out of respect for his privacy.His second Covid case, he said, was a “far, far more serious strand” because of his immunocompromised status. He had, he said, been in “intensive care for quite a while”.“It was really touch and go,” he said. “Some of you who’ve wanted to put me out of my misery darn near got what you wished for. So sorry to disappoint you.”Cavuto also said: “Let me be clear: doctors say had I not been vaccinated at all, I wouldn’t be here.“This was scary. How scary? I’m talking, ‘Ponderosa suddenly out of the prime rib in the middle of the buffet line scary.’ That’s how scary.”Fox News/Business host Neil Cavuto explains on air that he was out for a while because he was hospitalized with Covid, adds, “doctors say that had I not been vaccinated at all, I wouldn’t be here.””I’m not here to debate vaccinations for you. Just offer an explanation for me.” pic.twitter.com/DwI5dKZAL3— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 21, 2022
      He also dismissed the idea the vaccine caused or contributed to his second Covid bout.“No, the vaccine didn’t cause that,” he said. “That ‘grassy knoll’ theory has come up a lot. Because I’ve had cancer, and right now I have multiple sclerosis, I am among the vulnerable 3% or so of the population that cannot sustain the full benefits of a vaccine.”In October, Cavuto described some of the threats he received for taking and advocating the shot.He also said: “I cannot stress this enough: it’s not about left or right. This is not about who’s conservative or liberal. Last time I checked, everyone regardless of their political persuasion is coming down with this …“Take the political speaking points and toss them for now, I’m begging you. Toss them and think of what’s good not only for yourself but for those around you.“I dare say people who experienced this and see loved ones who have been affected by this or have died from this are not judging the wisdom of mandates.“They’re wishing they got vaccinated, and they didn’t.”TopicsFox NewsCoronavirusVaccines and immunisationUS televisionUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      AOC calls Tucker Carlson ‘trash’ for saying she is not a woman of colour

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      AOC calls Tucker Carlson ‘trash’ for saying she is not a woman of colour‘You’re a creep, bro,’ says New York congresswoman after Carlson attacked Ocasio-Cortez in Fox News segment The Fox News host Tucker Carlson attacked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday night, claiming the US congresswoman was not a woman of colour.“She’s a rich entitled white lady,” he said.In return, the New York Democrat, popularly known as AOC, said: “This is the type of stuff you say when your name starts with a P and ends with dejo.”Dictionary.com defines pendejo as “a mildly vulgar insult for ‘asshole’ or ‘idiot’ in Spanish”.It’s Trump’s time to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth | Lloyd GreenRead more“Once again,” Ocasio-Cortez added, “the existence of a wife or daughters doesn’t make a man good. And this one is basura.”Basura is Spanish for “trash”.She also accused Carlson of sexual harassment.Ocasio-Cortez’s mother is from Puerto Rico, her father from the Bronx. She has described herself as a woman of colour.Carlson said: “No one ever dares to challenge that description, but every honest person knows it is hilariously absurd.“There is no place on Earth outside of American colleges and newsrooms where Sandy Cortez” – Carlson’s derisory nickname for the New York congresswoman – “would be recognized as a quote, woman of color, because she’s not!“She’s a rich entitled white lady. She’s the pampered obnoxious ski bunny in the matching snowsuit who tells you to pull up your mask while you’re standing in the lift line at Jackson Hole. They’re all the same. It doesn’t matter what shade they are.”The leading provocateur in Fox News’ evening line-up was discussing a book about Ocasio-Cortez, Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC, written by Lisa Miller, a reporter at New York magazine.Carlson said Miller’s book was “like a box of Fig Newtons. You know it’s wrong to open it, but the temptation is strong, and so we did.”As the media watchdog Mediate put it, several of the passages Carlson read were “fawning in nature and weave mundane videos AOC has posted online – such as her assembling Ikea furniture – into a grand narrative about her life”.In one passage, Carlson said, the congresswoman is described as “pointedly” saying into a camera, “I’m alone today”.“Is it just us or does that sound like an invitation to a booty call?” Carlson said.“Maybe one step from ‘What are you wearing?’ Either way it’s a little strange. It’s definitely over-sharing and yet, according to the book, over-sharing is the key to Sandy Cortez’s success.”Ocasio-Cortez wrote: “Remember when the right wing had a meltdown when I suggested they exhibit obsessive impulses around young women? Well now Tucker Carlson is wishing for … this on national TV.“You’re a creep, bro. If you’re this easy with sexual harassment on air, how are you treating your staff?”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezFox NewsRaceUS politicsDemocratsNew YorkPuerto RiconewsReuse this content More

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      PJ O’Rourke obituary

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      PJ O’Rourke obituaryConservative American humorist, political satirist and writer who took aim at his own generation – the baby boomers The American humorist PJ O’Rourke, who has died aged 74 of lung cancer, was a writer of sharp wit that ranged from dry to lusciously over the top, but was always leavened by a measure of self deprecation that stopped it from being cruel or harsh. In the political satire that dominated his later writing, he became that rarest of things, a funny conservative.His political writing was based on his early change of tack from 1960s lefty to what he could call the libertarian right, libertarian being the escape hatch for those trapped within the Republican party. His changing stance mirrored the course of his career, from the satire of the National Lampoon and hipness of Rolling Stone to more earnest outlets such as the Atlantic Monthly and the rightwing Cato Institute.He had been instrumental in making the Atlantic Monthly Press a success; its editor Morgan Entrekin called him “one of the major voices of his generation”.The recurrent theme in his writing was his place in his generation – the baby boomers. “My generation spoiled everything for you,” he told younger readers. “It has always been the prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grownups. But my generation exhausted the earth’s resources of the weird … all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologise.”He was born in Toledo, Ohio, to Delfine (nee Loy), a housewife and later a school administrator, and Clifford O’Rourke, a car salesman. He went to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio – “the one where you can’t major in windsurfing” – and took a master’s in English (1970) at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he began writing for a local underground paper, Harry, and the Rip-Off Review of Western Culture, which got him a gig with the National Lampoon magazine in 1973.He made his mark quickly, working on the stage show Lemmings, which made stars of John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest, and co-writing with the Lampoon founder Doug Kenney The National Lampoon High School Yearbook, based on a piece by Michael O’Donoghue. There was a strong Irish-American wise-guys at the back of the class vibe at the Lampoon.Kenney also hailed from Ohio, but had attended a private school; the record of the fictional class of 1964 at a high school in Dacron (the name a cross between Ohio cities Dayton and Akron, but also a popular brand of cheap polyester cloth) was based squarely on O’Rourke’s days at Toledo’s DeVilbiss high. The yearbook itself was purportedly the property of one Larry Kroger, who would reappear in 1978 as the naive protagonist of the film National Lampoon’s Animal House.By the time Animal House became a hit, O’Rourke was the editor-in-chief of the Lampoon, charged with “the Squaresville task of making the magazine show a profit”. In the 2018 biopic of Kenney, A Futile and Stupid Gesture, O’Rourke is portrayed in just that light – but his empathy with squares was crucial to the yearbook’s success.Now he found himself out of place in a “clubby and snitty” atmosphere which remained as the creative core of the Lampoon moved on to Hollywood and Saturday Night Live. He turned the magazine, according to one critic, into “comedy you can jack off to”.In 1981 he went freelance, writing for the top-payers such as Vanity Fair and Playboy. His key Lampoon essay “How To Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink”, was reprinted in his first book, Republican Party Reptile (1987), a homage to Hunter Thompson, the chief exponent of gonzo journalism, that saw him appointed “foreign desk chief” at Rolling Stone, the ultimate hip boomer journal.His writing moved from social satire to politics and he reported from war zones, where his knack for satirising the absurd found its true metier. His 1988 collection, Holidays in Hell, is perhaps the best of his 20 books. He became a celebrity, without slowing down in the least, but as I can attest after surviving a London evening with him and my then ABC television colleague Charles Glass, O’Rourke was one of those rare people who was nicer in private, going beyond his public affability, which often surprised those expecting combative wit.In 1991 O’Rourke interviewed Bill Clinton, along with his Rolling Stone colleagues Thompson and William Greider, and its publisher, Jann Wenner. He quickly slid Clinton into identity politics via the Lampoon yearbook template. Clinton’s favourite Beatle was Paul McCartney: Clinton was the “band geek” who paid attention in class.For a short time O’Rourke held down the right side of Point/Counterpoint on CBS’s flagship news show 60 Minutes, opposite the equally funny and acerbic Molly Ivins, but they were too brilliant a mix to last on network TV. As he once wrote, “no humorist is under any obligation to provide answers”.That voice could lose its affability when writing for the Cato Institute, but the new millennium presented new problems, which his work for the Atlantic laid out clearly. A 2004 essay on listening to the radio host Rush Limbaugh shouting to his echo chamber of “ditto heads” led him to search for a leftwing equivalent, but when he could not find one he wound up blaming the entire media landscape. He complained in another essay you could not tell the “liberals who once led Vietnam protests in clown pants from the car ads”, ironically putting his young self and his father into the same boat.His libertarian conservatism reached its apotheosis with Donald Trump’s taking over the Republican party, reflected in his 2016 book of election coverage How the Hell Did This Happen? He endorsed Hillary Clinton, because “she’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters”. Although he claimed in 1992 he had “given up” the 60s, Trump was exactly the sort of spoiled preppy boomer O’Rourke could despise. But he might have looked back to his childhood, and Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo. It was Pogo who said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”In 1990 O’Rourke married Amy Lumet, daughter of the film director Sidney and granddaughter of the entertainer Lena Horne.They divorced three years later, and in 1995 he married Tina Mallon. She and their children, Olivia, Clifford and Elizabeth, survive him.TopicsMediaUS politicsComedyMagazinesUS televisionobituariesReuse this content More

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      Rudy Giuliani doesn’t need a monster costume to scare children | Sam Wolfson

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      Rudy Giuliani doesn’t need a monster costume to scare childrenSam WolfsonTrump’s lawyer was revealed to be a contestant on The Masked Singer – and when Robin Thicke storms off in protest, you know you’ve got problems It’s like something from a Guillermo del Toro film: a grotesque fantasy creature disrobes, only to reveal an even more horrifying monster underneath. But that’s what viewers will see when the US version of The Masked Singer, Fox’s incognito singing competition, returns at the end of this month.Rudy Giuliani’s surprise reveal on Masked Singer led to judges walking offRead moreThe show, in which a panel of judges and the audience try to guess the identity of celebrity vocalists dressed in furry theme-park costumes, is taped in advance of airing. But Deadline reports that at the first episode’s climax, when the eliminated singer reveals their true identity, it was Rudy Giuliani whose head popped out of the costume. Judges Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke walked off the set in protest. Quite a good reflection of how bad a guy you have to be when rape-culture chanteur Thicke, the singer of Blurred Lines, decides you’re beyond the pale.The disbarred attorney and former mayor of New York, who played one of the largest roles in trying to end 250 years of American democracy, is now under investigation for bribing foreign powers to investigate his political opponent, lying about election fraud, and trying to actively overturn votes, in some cases by seizing voting machines or ignoring electoral counts. It would be fair to say that the only reason the results of a democratic presidential election were not overturned is because Giuliani’s attempts were thwarted.So what better place for this cuddly henchman to hide from law enforcement than on a cosplay singing show. No footage has yet been released of what outfit Giuliani was wearing, although he doesn’t need a monster costume to scare children. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how the producers came up with something more grotesque than his own smirking face, seen recently on the Borat sequel making creepy sex eyes at an actor he believed was a young journalist as he thrust his hand down his trousers.The Masked Singer began in Korea, but has been exported round the world and become one of the most successful non-scripted series in the US of the last decade. Stars from every era, including Gladys Knight, T-Pain, Jojo and Jewel, have found career rejuvenation after appearing on the show as furrier versions of themselves.But the masks have also been a way on sneaking controversial figures who may not normally be accepted on primetime TV. Logan Paul, who uploaded footage of a suicide victim to his YouTube channel, was eliminated in season five, and in season three a cuddly pink bear that rapped Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Baby Got Back was revealed to be former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Palin later commented that her appearance was “a walking middle finger to the haters out there”.Reality TV provides a fantastic and powerful form of reputation-washing, in which all participants are celebrated “for being able to laugh at themselves”, as if that was a greater attribute than not being a fascist.There is a reason Giuliani, Palin, Sean Spicer (Dancing with the Stars), Anthony Scaramucci and Omarosa Manigault Newman (Celebrity Big Brother) have attempted to use entertainment, rather than politics, to revive their reputations, and it’s not just because they enjoying turning network television into a moral-less Hunger Games universe where propagandists with blood on their hands shimmy in sparkles in between adverts for pharmaceuticals and Tostitos. Shows like The Masked Singer encourage viewers to think of politicians’ personalities as somehow separate from their political positions.We’ll have to wait until next month to find out what Giuliani wore. Until then, we’re left to imagine what stench uncontrolled flatulence might create in a costume that producers have previously warmed can get dangerously hot.TopicsRudy GiulianiTelevisionUS politicsTrump administrationUS televisioncommentReuse this content More