America’s size is its strength – and its weakness
September 8th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
We often forget just how big the United States is. It is the fourth largest nation on earth by area after Russia, Canada, and China. It is the third most populous country on the planet after China and India.
As a result, the USA has enormous strengths. It is the world’s largest economy and such a large domestic market makes it an incubator for so many new products and services. The country accounts for approximately a quarter of global domestic product and almost 30% of total wealth in the world. It is the foremost military power in the world making up more than a third of global military spending.
But size carries a price and the USA has many weaknesses that stem from that size.
To govern a country of this size in a democratic fashion, there needs to be a federal system of government with power shared between the national level and 50 states. Each state has an executive, a legislature and a judiciary. In current circumstances, this makes any meaningful change to the two centuries old American constitution effectively impossible because, as well as a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress, three-quarters of the state legislatures have to ratify the proposed change. Even the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) failed to meet that threshold.
In recent months, this federal system has contributed significantly to the failure of such an advanced country as the USA to handle the coronavirus crisis because there is no nation-wide programme of action. Indeed the country has one of the worst records on earth in combatting the virus. And this is not just because of Donald Trump but because there are so many states with different approaches.
Or take the issue of police reform which has been highlighted as a urgent need by the Black Lives Matter movement. Such is the size of the country, there are no less than 18,000 police agencies to be reformed. There needs to be judicial and prison reform too but there are 50 judicial systems and 50 penal systems.
In terms of the American psyche, the impact of the size of the country is that most Americans have never left the country; indeed a significant proportion rarely leave their state. Only 40% of Americans even have a passport and most of them only use it to travel to adjoining Canada and Mexico. So, although we think of the USA as a melting pot of nations, most of its citizens have no comprehension of life outside their own country and mistakenly think that the American way is self-evidently the best way, not least on health care or gun control.
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A review of the 2017 film “Molly’s Game”
September 6th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
When you’re about to see a movie written and directed by Aaron Sorkin – creator of the wonderful television series “The West Wing” – you know what to expect: lots of fact-laiden dialogue delivered in snappy style and rapid cutting betweeen multifarious characters. There is plenty of these trademark features in “Molly’s Game” but also a cracking story and fine acting.
The titular character is real life Molly Bloom who hosted elite poker games in Los Angeles until the FBI came knocking. She is portrayed by Jessica Chastain who never gives anything but a strong performance (think “Zero Dark Thirty”), but there is an excellent support cast too, including Kevin Costner as Molly’s psychologist father and Idris Elba as her reluctant lawyer.
Sorkin’s film is based on Bloom’s memoir which reveals few actual names. If ever she decided to reveal all …
Link: Wikipedia page on Molly Bloom click here
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In both the USA and Britain, fair elections are under threat
September 2nd, 2020 by Roger Darlington
In the United States, the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) was formed in 1974 after the Watergate scandal to enforce the country’s new election spending laws and the campaign finance abuses of the presidential race two years earlier. The bipartisan, independent agency was designed to investigate potential cases of illegal campaign spending, issue advisory opinions where the law is unclear, administer public funding for presidential campaigns and disclose campaign finance data to the public.
The establishing statute calls for six commissioners – no more than three from the same party – who are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate for six-year terms. But incredibly the FEC currently has only three members and a quorum of four is needed to have meetings and make decisions. It is unlikely that the Senate will confirm a fourth member before the November election (the president’s last nominee waited nearly three years for a Senate vote).
More information here.
In Britain, the Electoral Commission – established in 2001 – regulates party and election finance and sets standards for how elections should be run. Among other things, it regulates political donations, spending and other areas, and has the power to undertake its own investigations, and fine parties and officials for breaches of the rules. The government’s advisory body the Committee on Standards in Public Life is currently holding a review of electoral regulation.
In a submission to the process, the Conservative Party has said the Commission should not be given new powers of prosecution, saying this would bring “too many conflicts of interest”. Instead the Party’s co-chair has argued that the body should accept more outside scrutiny or be disbanded: “If the Electoral Commission fails to make these changes and do the job it was set up to do then the only option would be to abolish it.”
More information here.
Too many people, think of democracy in bipolar terms: either a country is democratic or it is not. In fact, nations sit on a spectrum from totally democratic to totally authoritarian and frequently move along that spectrum. Both the USA and the UK are democracies but flawed ones and, in each case, recent developments have seen them become less democratic.
I have written an essay on “How To Critique a Political System”.
Posted in American current affairs, British current affairs | Comments (0)
So how is Trump’s wall doing and who is paying for it?
September 1st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
When Donald Trump first ran for the US presidency, one of his biggest – in every sense of the world – promises was that he would build a wall along the whole of the country’s southern border and that he would ensure that Mexico paid for it. So, now that he’s been in the White House for almost four years and he’s seeking re-election, how is that promise working out?
In his speech to the Republican National Convention, Trump asserted: “We have already built 300 miles of border wall”.
A total of 245 miles of wall has been built in place of old barriers. But only 30 miles of new wall has actually been built. Most of this (25 miles) is what is called “secondary wall”, which is constructed to reinforce the primary border barrier.
Now the total length of the continental border is 1,954 miles. That means that Trump has added 1.5 % to the existing wall in his four years in office.
While running for president, Trump claimed that the wall would cost $8 to $12 billion and that he could force Mexico to pay for it. Serious cost estimates of the proposed wall vary widely. In early 2017, shortly after Trump took office, the Department of Homeland Security estimated the cost at $22 billion.
So far, Mexico has contributed nothing. If you prefer a percentage figure, that’s 0%.
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Donald Trump – the greatest president of all time
August 31st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
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A review of the new blockbuster movie “Tenet”
August 29th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
“Tenet” is Christopher Nolan’s 11th film and I have viewed and admired all his previous work except his very first film which I’ve never seen. Of the movies that – like “Tenet” – Nolan wrote as well as directed, I was immensely impressed with “Memento” and “Inception” but struggled with the second half of “Interstellar”.
This is his biggest and boldest movie with a budget reputed to be around $200M and a plot whose ambition is overwhelming. Additionally this is the first major new film since five months of lockdown as a result of the coronavirus global pandemic, so both Nolan’s reputation and the revival of cinema-going are at stake. I made sure that I saw it within a couple of days of release and that I viewed it in IMAX.
From the get-go, the movie is attention-grabbing and, for the next two and a half hours, one is never less than gripped. The locations – Estonia, India, Italy, Denmark, Norway – are terrific and the action sequences – car chase, plane crash, catamaran ride, military attacks, and lots of unarmed combat – are exciting.
There’s an enjoyable cast list too, including John David Washington as The Protagonist, Robert Pattinson as his side-kick, Kenneth Branagh as the Russian villain and 6′ 3″ Elizabeth Debicki as the bad guy’s’s wife. It’s all very evocative of the Bond movies and, if you’ve ever wondered what a black 007 would look like, Washington provides one answer.
The problem is the fiendishly complex plot which seems to be a threat to the whole of humankind as result of an issue with time called “inversion” which can only be solved with “temporal pincer movements” and a nine-part algorithm. At various points, someone does try to explain what’s going on, but the dialogue is often muffled and anyway it’s all nonsense.
Of course, Nolan has made a thing of playing with time in the films that he has written and, even with an historical event like “Dunkirk”, it has usually worked well. But I think it’s time for Nolan to give up on the time thing and try something different.
“Tenet” will do well: Nolan’s reputation and a thirst for new cinematic material will ensure that. But the movie will divide opinion – three reviewers in one newspaper have given it two, three and five stars. And I’m sure that I’ll see it again …
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Let’s hear it for friendship – and then let’s tackle inequality
August 27th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
“Relationships matter so much because other people can be our best sources of security, comfort and cooperation or our worst rivals. Just as bad relationships are highly stressful, friendship is relaxing and restorative. We have evolved an extraordinary sensitivity to relationships, because getting them right has always been crucial to our survival.”
This is an extract from an article in today’s “Guardian” newspaper which you can read here. The writer is Richard Wilkinson who is a researcher in social inequalities in health and emeritus professor of public health at the University of Nottingham.
A decade ago, Professor Wilkinson co-authored a seminal book entitle “The Spirit Level” which I reviewed here.
Both the article and the book argue that reducing inequality is the best way to improve economic and social outcomes for all, not just those at the bottom of the class scale. The article makes clear that recent experience – including the coronavirus pandemic – has underlined the validity of this argument.
Time to build back better.
Posted in British current affairs, Social policy, World current affairs | Comments (0)
A review of the novel “The Man In The High Castle” by Philip K Dick
August 26th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I decided to read this 1962 novel after the success of the Amazon television series of the same name broadcast in 40 parts between 2015-2019 even though I never viewed the series. It was immediately apparent to me that Dick’s books are generally better on the screen that on the page – think of “Total Recall”, “Minority Report” and especially “Blade Runner”.
The central proposition of the novel is intriguing and imaginative: the Second World War was won by the Axis powers of Germany, Japan and Italy and, after the war, the USA is divided up between the Germans and the Japanese with a buffer region in between. The eponymous male lives in the neutral buffer zone and has written a novel, called “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy”, which postulates a world in which the Allies won the war but not quite as we know our history.
The problem with Dick’s novel lies in his execution: it is very slow with only a couple of action sequences, it is full of extraneous detail about the making and sale of metalworks, it imbues mystical powers to an ancient text called called “I Ching” and one of the metal pieces, and the conclusion is anti-climatic and leaves important loose ends. At various points – and especially in a nine-page interlude towards the end – I felt that the author was under the influence of drugs.
Although Dick died young (he had a stroke at the age of 53), he was a prolific writer producing 44 published novels and approximately 121 short stories. The recurrent themes in his work included alternate realities and drug abuse. He won the Hugo Award for “The Man In The High Castle” and he was hailed as a genius in the science fiction world, but he was a flawed genius and this novel is not one that I could recommend.
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A review of the recent film “Crazy Rich Asians”
August 25th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
While this may not be the first Western-produced film with an East Asian cast – think “The Joy Luck Club” (1993) or “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000) – the sheer number of cast members with various Asian backgrounds and the huge commercial success of this 2018 movie (it was the highest-grossing romantic comedy in a decade) make it a step in cinematic history to be celebrated.
Set in the Chinese community of Singapore (although filming was in Malaysia as well as Singapore), it is essentially a simple story of the upper-class, uber-wealthy family of Singaporean Nick Young (a first feature film role for Henry Golding) not accepting Chinese-American Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) in spite of her being a college professor of economics. The principal obstacle is Nick’s mother (played by accomplished actress Michelle Yeoh) but Rachel has the support of an eccentric friend (played by rapper Awkwafina).
The film is based on the novel of the same name which is the first part of a trilogy by Kevin Kwan. The enormous sucess of “Crazy Rich Asians” means that we can look forward to sequels “China Rich Girlfriend” and “Rich People Problems”. And why not? It is refreshing and fun to see an old-fashioned love story in a different ethnic context.
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A review of the 1998 film “Dark City”
August 21st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Written, produced and directed by the Australian Alex Proyas, this is not a movie that will appeal to everyone. It is part mind-twisting science fiction like “The Matrix” and part homage to German Expressionism of the 1920s.
It looks wonderful – as dark as the title promises – but the plotting (a alien experiment with humankind) is rather confusing. Worth watching though if only for the cutting (an average of every two seconds), imagery (all neo-noir) and casting (Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connolly).
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