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~ Posted by Robert Butler, January 4th 2012

Two leading political commentators – one on the left, and one on the right – have complained about an inaccuracy in the movie “The Iron Lady”: it credits Margaret Thatcher with a sense of humour. She had many gifts as a prime minister, but she didn't do jokes unless they were supplied by her speechwriters. Even then, she could be resistant. Once, when she was persuaded to quote lines from Monty Python, she inquired: "Are you sure he is one of us?"

A BSOH is a trait apparently shared by Mitt Romney, who last night won the Republican caucuses in Iowa by the thinnest of margins: he polled 30,015 votes, Rick Santorum polled 30,007 votes. Romney had surprised reporters at the weekend by saying this:

I’ve been looking at some video clips on YouTube of President Obama, then candidate Obama going through Iowa, making promises. I think the gap between his promises and his performance is the largest I’ve seen, well, since the Kardashian wedding and the promise of "until death do we part".  read more »

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• POLITICS

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 13th 2011

The front cover of The Economist this week shows Vladimir Putin staring through cracks in the ice. The paper says the events following the December 4th election "constitute the biggest crack in Russia’s regime since Mr Putin first came to power in late 1999". It's not every day a famous ballet provides a point of reference for political upheaval. But, as Peter Pomerantsev writes today in the London Review of Books blog, political analysts are talking about the possibility of one of the pseudo-opposition leaders "suddenly having the balls" to become a real opposition leader. This is known as "the Petrushka effect", after the straw puppet in Stravinsky’s ballet that comes to life and develops human emotions. Or, as Stravinsky put it, "a puppet suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggi." Pomerantsev writes that the latest candidate for this role is Mikhail Prokhorov. Not that it's easy to imagine Prokhorov dancing arpeggi: he's six foot eight and owns the New Jersey Nets. 

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 9th 2011

Western Europeans woke up this morning to discover something very big had happened, but they weren't quite sure what. As The Economist's Charlemagne candidly admitted:

We journalists are probably too bleary-eyed after a sleepless night to understand the full significance of what has just happened in Brussels. What is clear is that after a long, hard and rancorous negotiation, at about 5am this morning the European Union split in a fundamental way.

It's also clear that the British have returned to their self-image, never far from the surface, as an isolated, go-it-alone, island people. The Financial Times says, "UK left isolated..." Le Monde says "La Grande-Bretagne plus insulaire que jamais." The Daily Mail says, "We're on our own now".  The city broker Terry Smith told this morning's Radio 4 listeners that David Cameron was as "isolated as somebody who refused to join the Titanic just before it sailed."

All this will add a certain frisson to tonight's performance of "Richard II", which opened this week at the Donmar in London. The speech that will jump out at the audience is John of Gaunt's in the second act. Michael Hadley breaks into the famous speech, informally, as if approaching it sideways. But there will be no avoiding how his words will resonate with the day's headlines.  read more »

During the 2008 presidential election Bill Clinton’s reputation took a battering. Democrats who had stuck with him through all the bimbo eruptions and political zigzags suddenly started accusing him of racism (in South Carolina) and boorishness (almost everywhere). This owed something to the press which had all but degenerated into an ahmen chorus to the Obama operation. But it owed more to a general sense of exhaustion with the former first family: few people wanted to see Bill become Putin to Hillary’s Medvedev.

How the mood has changed! The comeback kid is back with a vengeance. From September 30th to October 1st he celebrates the 20th anniversary of his announced run for the presidency in Little Rock, Arkansas. In November Knopf is publishing a new book, “Back to Work”, his second literary offering after his sprawling autobiography. And the press is primed for a love-fest. The further Barack Obama’s stock has fallen—and it has fallen a long way—the more Clinton’s has risen. And the worse the global economic crisis becomes—and it is becoming very bad indeed—the more people hanker after the stable growth of the 1990s.   read more »

With the mercy of a twitchy Pharaoh anticipating a few more plagues, China's authorities have released Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist and dissident, "on bail". As our Beijing correspondent writes in the Banyan blog:

Chinese authorities have given a rare hint of softening in the case of one prominent activist, Ai Weiwei. Late at night on June 22nd, looking a little thinner after nearly three months in detention, the bearded and still portly artist returned home. Mr Ai’s freedom, however, is unlikely to mean any let-up in China’s wider efforts to silence critics.

This is good news for Mr Ai and his wife, though it creates an uncertain precedent for other dissidents in the country. Our Beijing correspondent suggests the release may have something to do with Mr Ai's national influence—as the son of an important Communisty poet—and with the fact that China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, has some international meetings planned for later this week.  read more »

Apart from the standard dinosaur fare and a few French oils, Denver's museums tend to reflect their frontier location, with plenty of Native American artwork and old mansions of mining barons. The Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab (also described as the Centre for Empowered Living and Learning), or CELL, does not fit this model. The aim of this somewhat odd two-year-old $6m project—which sits right next to the Daniel Libeskind-designed Denver Art Museum—is not cultural elucidation or historic preservation. Rather, it is a non-profit institution that is all about terrorism: where it comes from, how it manifests itself and what people can do to reduce its threat. Larry Mizel, a local businessman and regular donor to the Republican party, both founded and funded the museum. It is affiliated with his Mizel Museum, a local museum dedicated to Jewish life and culture.

The CELL's mission, according to its website is "to provide the knowledge and tools needed to proactively effect change in order to help shape a better, safer world." But how threatening is Denver? This is the CELL's main point. Its well-crafted interactive exhibition, "Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere: Understanding the Threat of Terrorism", warns visitors that terrorism affects us all, even those who are far away from centres of power. If this sounds like an expensive, museum-size example of America's paranoia, that's because it is.  read more »

In London on November 3rd, the day after the mid-term elections in America, political conversations among expats concentrates mainly on two things: the Tea Party and America's economy. "With the Tea Party, if we can't agree on lowering the deficit and taxes, if we can't do that, then we haven't done our job," said Stacy Hilliard, the London-based vice chairman of Republicans Abroad. The group was hosting an event at the Red Lion, a pub near the House of Commons and Downing Street. The mood was upbeat, but understated. More glasses were filled with soft drinks than with beer or wine. "Obama has quadrupled the deficit. He hasn't done what he said he would do. He's very pie in the sky. People are suffering the hangover from Obama."
 
The 25 or so people who showed up for the group's post-mid-term election meet-up were a mixed bag: registered Republicans living in London, politically engaged local Brits and folks from Germany, Brazil and Venezuela, some of whom have family in America.
 
Michael Magan, a former White House aid to George W. Bush and a London-based political strategist, celebrated the GOP victories but was wary of assuming they gave momentum to Republicans. "In 2008 Obama came in with a majority in the Senate and the House, but he wasn't able to parlay that into success," Magan warned. "The Tea Party is as much a wake-up call to Democrats as Republicans. I would hope that both take that seriously and take a step back."
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"A nation born in revolution will always eye its history warily, and with anxiety," writes Jill Lepore in "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History". That anxiety, and the worst of its ancillary effects–overcompensation, deception, and manipulation—are the subject of the author's new book. Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard and a staff writer at the New Yorker, organises this volume into five short chapters, each beginning in present-day Boston and moving back in time to examine the historical rhetoric associated with the American Revolution.

Lepore offers two compelling reasons for her book. First, where American political tradition is concerned, "nothing trumps the Revolution"; and second, the assumptions made about the past by today's tea-party activists are, in Lepore’s mind, slipshod and anti-intellectual. "Every generation tells its own story about what the Revolution was about, of course, since no one is alive who remembers it anymore," she writes. The tea-party's version of the Revolution, however, shades far beyond kookiness and into the meretricious realm of "antihistory". (The Economist similarly finds the tea-party view of the constitution to be a "strangely ahistorical" one.)  read more »

In Donald Margulies's most recent play, "Time Stands Still", the emotional tension is palpable from the start. In the first scene we meet a couple, Sarah and James, as they return home from a hospital in Europe to their loft in Brooklyn. She is limping, with crutches and scars on her face; he wants to help but she resists. Sarah, a war photographer, and James, a journalist, have both returned from the Middle East and are trying live as civilians. The play follows them as they negotiate a more ordinary life, far from the thrills of a battleground. Yet the comforts of urban domesticity—the simple pleasures and small compromises—can be a minefield of its own. Mr Margulies includes another couple to balance this pair: their editor and old friend Richard, and his much younger and sweetly childish girlfriend, Mandy. 

"Time Stands Still" is back on Broadway after a successful run earlier this year, and it has reopened to rave reviews. The cast is wonderful, with Laura Linney as Sarah, Brian d'Arcy James as her husband James, Eric Bogosian as Richard, and Christina Ricci as Mandy (a role played by Alicia Silverstone when the play had its Broadway premiere in January). But this is Ms Linney's play. Sarah is a hard and hardened character, yet Ms Linney deftly reveals the chinks in her armour. 

Donald Margulies won the Pulitzer prize in 2000 for his play "Dinner with Friends", which also considered the ways relationships and expectations change over time. Mr Margulies is at his best when he concentrates on emotional interactions, and the grey area between the life you aspired to live and the one you actually have. Mr Margulies also teaches theatre and drama at Yale University. He answered our questions over e-mail.  read more »

Pink Floyd's album "The Wall" was written during a dreary time in 1979. A struggling economy dominated headlines, rubbish piled in the street, unemployment soared, and England's "winter of discontent" swept Margaret Thatcher to power. "The Wall" expressed a dark sense of this ugly modern age, and one man's desire to turn away from it all.

That man was Roger Waters, Pink Floyd's bassist, whose life and experiences inspired the characters of this rock opera. As Jon Pareles writes in the New York Times:

“The Wall” tells the story of a rock star, Mr. Pink Floyd. It touches on the death of his father (in World War II), vicious schoolmasters, a clinging mother, infidelity, divorce, rock-star excesses and the hollowness, paranoia and demagoguery of fame. Fears and drugs combine to wall him away from the world, until, after a surreal trial, the wall crumbles to both expose him and restore his humanity. “I was a miserable young man all those years ago,” Mr. Waters told the audience on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden. “I’m happier now,” he added, to moderate applause.

For the show's 30th anniversary international tour, Waters expands the album's conceit to include more contemporary concerns, such as the conflict between East and West, and a political climate of fear. "The story could be broadened as an allegory for what goes on in the political scene around the world," Waters said in an interview recently.  read more »