IT BEATS the Oscars any day. For months, markets have been giving odds on who would replace Alan Greenspan when he retires at the end of January after 18 years as the world’s super-banker. The name that George Bush came up with on Monday October 24th was hardly a surprise: Ben Bernanke, once Princeton professor, recently Federal Reserve governor and currently chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, was the odds-on favourite. But it did much to cheer dollar bulls. Waiting for the news to be made official, the greenback skidded as investors were forced to face Mr Greenspan’s official mortality. Hearing his successor, it rallied. Is Mr Bernanke good for the dollar?
Something certainly is. The currency has gained more than 10% this year, hitting a two-year high against the yen last week and a three-month peak against the euro. This is despite an American current-account deficit even wider than last year’s and apparently reduced enthusiasm among Asian central banks for dollar-denominated assets. Buttonwood was among those early in the year who expected the dollar to go every which way but up. How wrong can a columnista be? Why didn’t the currency behave as she told it to? Don’t deficits matter?
The answer seems to be that they do, but only when relative returns are not compelling and other news looks likely to be gloomy too. Coming into 2005, the dollar had been sliding, broadly since 2002 but specifically since the summer of 2004. Investors were worried that global economic growth, the highest in 20 years, was set to slow along with America’s. Asian central banks were propping up the US Treasury market, in an attempt to keep their own currencies from appreciating, and the word was that they wanted to diversify away from dollars. Though the Fed had started raising short-term rates in June 2004, the difference between the yield on three-month dollars and that on three-month euros was still only 17 basis points (hundredths of one percent) in December. The dollar kept slipping and, with their eyes on America's mountainous trade and fiscal deficits, a lot of people bet against it, including Warren Buffett.
How different things have been in 2005, thanks mainly to the widening gap between American interest rates and those of most other big developed countries. Despite hurricanes, higher oil prices and indeed higher interest rates, America’s economy has grown more strongly than most people expected. And Mr Greenspan’s Fed has shown an increasing amount of anti-inflationary zeal: it has raised the federal-funds rate 11 times, to 3.75%, and is likely to do so again on November 1st. In the slow-growing euro area, by contrast, the European Central Bank (ECB) has left its rate untouched at 2% for more than two years, while the Bank of Japan is still looking at virtually free short-term money. So investors have stopped worrying about America’s deficits and started salivating over the returns it offers.
Then there is the vanishing central-bank scare. Those who feared that Asian central banks would get tired of buying depreciating dollars, causing the currency to collapse and long bond yields to shoot up, have also had to think again. Though official statistics capture only a fraction of what the banks do with their fast-growing foreign-exchange reserves ($2 trillion higher since 2000), central banks are certainly a shadow of their former selves at Treasury auctions these days. The dollar has strengthened nonetheless, and ten-year bond yields are only a little higher than a year ago. Now that dollar bonds look a plausible investment, the central banks that used to buy them to foster their own export-led development have been able to retire, while private investors have stepped up to the plate.
So too, intriguingly, have the oil-exporting countries, whose current-account surpluses—far larger than China’s—cast a long shadow over financial markets these days. The impact of petrodollars on the ordinary sort is hard to pin down. Economists at Credit Suisse First Boston, for example, have calculated that for every increase of $10 a barrel in oil prices, the daily demand for dollars just to carry out transactions increases by $300m (though other transactions may be crowded out because energy-consumers don’t have money for both).
More important is where the petrodollars end up invested. Though credible figures are elusive, a fair whack has certainly found a home in dollar-denominated assets, some in corporate bonds and some in short-term paper. In the longer term, much of it will flow to Europe and Asia—to Germany, for example, which exports the kind of capital equipment the Gulf states need to develop their infrastructure. For the moment, however, the sharp rise in oil prices this year may well have helped the dollar.
Other circumstances, too, are boosting the greenback. The Homeland Investment Act offers American firms a tax break if they repatriate foreign earnings held abroad by the end of this fiscal year and use them for vaguely-defined useful things. After a slow start, more companies are showing interest. The total brought back is likely to be some $200 billion-300 billion, reckons Thomas Stolper, global market economist at Goldman Sachs, and about a third of it will have to be converted to dollars. There is probably another $30 billion still to come through the foreign-exchange markets. And another point: China’s mini-revaluation in July made it clear that the dollar had nothing to fear for the moment from a significant Asian realignment.
Handle with care
Yet if all this sounds too Goldilocks to be true, it probably is, for a couple of reasons. Any big upward movement in the dollar’s exchange rate is probably limited by the perception that there are sellers of dollars out there waiting for right price (central banks, especially). “Non-commercial traders” have longer net positions in dollar futures than almost ever before, on figures from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission—always a bad sign. As the dollar strengthens, American investors themselves are pouring money into foreign markets, which in time could blunt the greenback’s rise. Some of Japan’s normally risk-averse investors are stripping off their currency hedges to capture higher yields in America; they could flee at the slightest sign that the dollar is in trouble or Japan’s economic recovery is finally starting to lift the yen. And the euro has lost 12% in value since the beginning of the year. If the ECB starts raising interest rates in the first half of next year just as the Fed stops, it might gain it back.
So though many on Wall Street have raised their forecasts of where the dollar will be trading three to six months from now, fewer are as sanguine about the outlook in a year’s time. Much will depend on how Mr Bernanke handles his inheritance and how he is perceived to handle it. He has received a rare unanimous welcome from economists and politicians and, tellingly, from former students. But only time will tell whether he is as tough on inflation as his predecessor (who perhaps talked a better game than he played). He may well find the federal-funds rate at 4.25% when he takes office: high enough to do damage if the next move is the wrong one. For now, he has won the prize, and the plaudits. But he has miles to go before he sleeps.
About Me
- Xerxes
- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
- Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)
28.10.05
13.10.05
Iraq, for Better and Worse
WAS THE Iraq war worth it?
Ever since its beginnings, long ago, as a gleam in the eye of Bush administration officials and neoconservative thinkers, the war has forced on all of us F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous test of a first-rate intelligence: 'the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.'
Before the invasion, there was the possibility of a world without Saddam Hussein and of an Iraq that no longer threatened endless violence in its volatile region � which was attractive. There was also the certainty of death and destruction in a new war, and the many reasons to doubt that this administration was up to the job � which was frightening.
One had to balance fear against hope, the Middle Eastern status quo against unknown consequences, Donald Rumsfeld against the legacy of the Halabja poison gas attack, the United Nations against democratic idealism. In the winter of 2003, what you thought about the war mattered less to me than how you thought about it. The ability to function meant honest engagement with the full range of opposing ideas; it meant facing rather than avoiding the other position's best arguments. In those tense months, the mark of second-rate minds was absolute certainty one way or the other.
I came down on the pro-war side, by a whisker. I understood the risks and costs; I didn't understand how large they would be � how much larger than necessary because of the arrogance and incompetence of U.S. leaders.
I thought then, and think now, that the war's merits could not be known in advance. The argument that the war was 'illegal,' and therefore damned at birth, wasn't persuasive; the intervention in Kosovo was justified without"
Ever since its beginnings, long ago, as a gleam in the eye of Bush administration officials and neoconservative thinkers, the war has forced on all of us F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous test of a first-rate intelligence: 'the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.'
Before the invasion, there was the possibility of a world without Saddam Hussein and of an Iraq that no longer threatened endless violence in its volatile region � which was attractive. There was also the certainty of death and destruction in a new war, and the many reasons to doubt that this administration was up to the job � which was frightening.
One had to balance fear against hope, the Middle Eastern status quo against unknown consequences, Donald Rumsfeld against the legacy of the Halabja poison gas attack, the United Nations against democratic idealism. In the winter of 2003, what you thought about the war mattered less to me than how you thought about it. The ability to function meant honest engagement with the full range of opposing ideas; it meant facing rather than avoiding the other position's best arguments. In those tense months, the mark of second-rate minds was absolute certainty one way or the other.
I came down on the pro-war side, by a whisker. I understood the risks and costs; I didn't understand how large they would be � how much larger than necessary because of the arrogance and incompetence of U.S. leaders.
I thought then, and think now, that the war's merits could not be known in advance. The argument that the war was 'illegal,' and therefore damned at birth, wasn't persuasive; the intervention in Kosovo was justified without"
Stuck In Baghdad? I Think Not
It is no longer justifiable for reasonable people to support the war in Iraq, if it ever was. At this point, "staying the course" is neither logically nor morally defensible.
Believing in the war's ever-shifting goals and in the competence and motivation of those tasked to accomplish them is no longer a matter of ideology or party affiliation. When it comes to facts on the ground, we have reached a moment of clear division between the "reality-based community" and those willing to accept the storyline of the day from proven liars in the White House and the Pentagon.
We're almost back to the days of the "Five O'Clock Follies," when the military told a frankly disbelieving press corps that everything was going swimmingly in Vietnam. Now, top commanders testify to Congress that we have little hope of "winning" in Iraq, and then go on the cable news show circuit and say that just the opposite is true.
With such a stark disconnect, it's no longer possible to tolerate differences about whether the war should be seen through to its questionable end.
We're not stuck in Iraq because of the reasons the foreign policy elite in Washington would have us believe. We're not stuck there by history, or by the threat of the country devolving into civil war (although that's a troubling reality we need to face). We're stuck in Iraq because we have a leadership that wants to be "stuck" there, and a strategic class that lives in a bubble formed of its own endlessly repeated blather about "Vietnam syndromes" and "failed states" and "Powell doctrines." And we're stuck because making Iraq into an example of U.S. dominance and undoing the taint of Vietnam, or 'finishing what we started' during the first Gulf War remain the goals of other constituents in Bush's foreign policy world.
But most of all, we're stuck in Iraq because the burden of fighting the war has fallen disproportionally on rural, small-town America - on the poor and the middle class - while the benefits of a wide-open, ultra-neoliberal Iraqi economy and access to what may be the world's largest oil reserves are still on course to line the pockets of the administration's backers. And as long as they have the cover of pro-war Democrats and the shelter of their liberal media conspiracy theories, it's a lot easier for them to pretend things aren't as bad as they obviously are in Iraq, and "stuck" we will remain.
As Antonia Juhasz wrote in the Los Angeles Times:
The Bush administration has succeeded in maintaining a stranglehold on issues such as public versus private ownership of resources, foreign access to Iraqi oil and U.S. control of the reconstruction effort -- all of which are still governed by administration policies put into place immediately after the invasion. The Bush economic agenda favors foreign interests -- American interests -- over Iraqi self-determination.
Is it worth the loss of American blood and treasure to "stay the course" in the hope that Iraq will become safe for foreign investors, or should we get out as soon as we can without making matters much worse than they are today? Keep in mind that Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News that "Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years."
The argument that we can't 'cut and run' is as seductive as it is illogical: we broke Iraq, and now we have to put it back together. It's a moral argument that the public can't ignore, and, worst of all, it's a crutch for the Democratic establishment to keep the "get out of Iraq" position of its supporters at arm's length.
But it has three fatal problems. First, it assumes that the only way we can hope to influence the outcome in Iraq is through military occupation. Second, it ignores the Catch-22 that's plagued the Iraq adventure from the beginning: the fact that the occupation itself -- our military presence in yet another Muslim country -- is the primary source of instability. Finally, it assumes that we can learn from our mistakes and change our policies in Iraq - that we can do the job better.
All of these are faith-based arguments, and we have to reject them. We would be well-served to remember that U.S. troops remained in the Philippines for 94 years after we "liberated" them from the Spanish, and they remain today in Japan 61 years after its surrender and in Korea 52 years after the ceasefire that ended that "police action."
As Representative Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who introduced a bill preventing the U.S. from entering into long-term basing deals in Iraq, recently wrote:
…the Chicago Tribune reported on the construction of 14 "enduring bases" in Iraq… [The] Washington Post described the military's plan to consolidate military personnel in Iraq into four massive "contingency operating bases." According to the Congressional Research Service, Emergency Supplemental funds appropriated for military construction in Iraq for fiscal years 2001 to 2005 total more than $805 million, with the vast majority, more than $597 million, coming in the 2005 fiscal year.
Lee added, "No one disputes that many of the installations under construction are of a physically permanent character." And Iraqis know that as well as anyone.
Why it's immoral to stay the course
Staying the course - as flawed as it has been -- is not what the majority of Iraqis want, not what the majority of Americans want and it's against the security interests of both nations' citizens.
The Iraqis' desire for the occupation to end, while on the one hand apparent, also goes largely unreported by the mainstream media. In May 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority conducted a poll of Iraqis and found that 97 percent viewed the U.S. forces as 'occupiers,' while only 2 percent saw them as 'liberators.'
A Zogby opinion poll conducted in January found that 82 percent of Sunnis and 69 percent of Shiites were in favor of the withdrawal of American and coalition forces "either immediately or after an elected government is in place." Meanwhile, a New York Times/ CBS news poll of Americans released two weeks ago found U.S. support of the war "at an all-time low."
We're told that the reason we have to stay, despite the desires of both the Iraqi and the American people, is that: 1) to do otherwise would precipitate civil war and 2) we need to fight "them" over there so we don't fight them in our own backyards.
But as Juan Cole, the University of Michigan's Middle-east expert, told me, "There's already a low-level, unconventional civil war in Iraq. When twenty or thirty guys end up dead in an alleyway each morning, that's a civil war." He differentiated between the low-level civil conflict that exists in Iraq and larger "set-piece" wars such as the one he experienced in Lebanon during the 1980s.
As for the "flypaper theory" - that we're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here -- advanced by the Bush administration and its supporters, it has been debunked so thoroughly that to repeat it is to show one's contempt for reality.
For the most part, we are not fighting "militants," but normal, pissed-off Iraqis. According to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "Non-Iraqi militants made up less than 10 percent of the insurgents' ranks -- perhaps even half that." What's more, "most were motivated by "revulsion at the idea of an Arab land being occupied by a non-Arab country."
When I asked Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) about this, he said, "As long as our troops are there they're going to be a continued irritant in the situation, partly because -- and this is a very important point -- the troops are just kids put into a foreign land where they don't know who the enemy is and they don't know the language.
"So they protect themselves and innocent Iraqis get killed, and that fans the fires of the insurgency. Whose fault is it? The administration's, not the 20 year-old's."
Last month, Major General Joseph Taluto, head of the US 42nd Infantry Division which covers "trouble spots" including Baquba and Samarra, told the Gulf News that "good, honest" Iraqis are fighting us:
If a good, honest person feels having all these Humvees driving on the road, having us moving people out of the way, having us patrol the streets, having car bombs going off, you can understand how they could [want to fight us]."
That our presence in Iraq is the source of this is no longer a debatable point. In July, the Royal Institute of International Affairs - a British defense think-tank - reported that "the invasion of Iraq and its bloody aftermath had boosted recruitment and fund-raising for al Qaeda."
And the University of Chicago's Robert Pape, who has compiled data on every suicide bombing in the past 25 years, wrote in an Op-Ed for the New York Times [$$]:
Al Qaeda is today less a product of Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries.
Meanwhile, none of those who argue that Islamic militants hate us for our "values" have ever had an answer for Osama Bin Laden's straightforward challenge to the 'Clash of Civilizations' narrative: "explain why we did not attack Sweden, for example."
Pick an exit strategy, any exit strategy
If you strip away the straw man arguments - no one advocates leaving Iraq tomorrow - you get a choice between those who argue for immediately announcing an exit from Iraq based on a phased withdrawal and those who want to keep on pursuing the same policies and hope for better results.
According to reports from Iraq, a deal regarding the constitution has been hammered out and is likely to be approved. That would be a perfect opportunity for the United States to declare either victory or defeat - they're the same at this point aside from the spin - and get out.
But the first part of exiting Iraq is the hardest: deciding we need to. Rep. McDermott, whose calls for a sudden exit are among the most direct in the Democratic Party, laid the problem out to me in eight sentences:
I keep coming up with the problem, my first stage problem, is how do I get the President of the United States to change his attitude about what's going on? If I can't get him to go to the United Nations and say: 'You know, things have gotten to the point in Iraq that it's very clear that we need a new path.' I don't even want him to get on his knees and beg or anything like that -- I'm not looking for that -- but he has to go up to the United Nations and say: 'We as the United Nations have to sit down and figure out how to work this out.
Then it makes it possible to talk about a United Nations peace enforcing force or it makes it possible to talk about NATO or it makes it possible to talk about a lot of things as ways of sort of stabilizing the situation and getting the chronic irritant of the United States military and our presence out. But unfortunately, I can't get around the president's attitude that we're going to stay the course and we're going to make this happen. I mean we're locked into Vietnam … I think the rest of the world would get involved if they thought that we were serious.
The Big Lie is that withdrawal is a complex game. Juan Cole has proposed withdrawing troops from populated areas and using airpower to support the Iraqi government. Russ Feingold has proposed a "flexible" exit strategy that would have U.S. troops home by the end of next year. Several have suggested a strategy where, in the first stage, U.S. troops would turn over domestic security to Iraq's fledgling security forces and withdrawal to less populace parts of the country - ostensibly to secure Iraq's borders. That would be followed by further withdrawals as Iraqi security forces are trained. Naomi Klein has proposed a remarkably human strategy that requires that we take our obligations to the Iraqi people seriously.
Even those liberal hawks at the Center for American Progress have a half-baked plan to reduce our presence in Iraq to 40,000 troops - hardly an exit plan, but a start.
Conservatives are correct about one thing: the only force that can compel the United States military to withdrawal from a conflict is lack of support from the American public. And that's why we have to challenge the electoral viability of Democrats who continue to provide cover for this administration's occupation, and refuse to apologize for their catastrophic choices. Ultimately, their hands are as bloody as the administration's.
Believing in the war's ever-shifting goals and in the competence and motivation of those tasked to accomplish them is no longer a matter of ideology or party affiliation. When it comes to facts on the ground, we have reached a moment of clear division between the "reality-based community" and those willing to accept the storyline of the day from proven liars in the White House and the Pentagon.
We're almost back to the days of the "Five O'Clock Follies," when the military told a frankly disbelieving press corps that everything was going swimmingly in Vietnam. Now, top commanders testify to Congress that we have little hope of "winning" in Iraq, and then go on the cable news show circuit and say that just the opposite is true.
With such a stark disconnect, it's no longer possible to tolerate differences about whether the war should be seen through to its questionable end.
We're not stuck in Iraq because of the reasons the foreign policy elite in Washington would have us believe. We're not stuck there by history, or by the threat of the country devolving into civil war (although that's a troubling reality we need to face). We're stuck in Iraq because we have a leadership that wants to be "stuck" there, and a strategic class that lives in a bubble formed of its own endlessly repeated blather about "Vietnam syndromes" and "failed states" and "Powell doctrines." And we're stuck because making Iraq into an example of U.S. dominance and undoing the taint of Vietnam, or 'finishing what we started' during the first Gulf War remain the goals of other constituents in Bush's foreign policy world.
But most of all, we're stuck in Iraq because the burden of fighting the war has fallen disproportionally on rural, small-town America - on the poor and the middle class - while the benefits of a wide-open, ultra-neoliberal Iraqi economy and access to what may be the world's largest oil reserves are still on course to line the pockets of the administration's backers. And as long as they have the cover of pro-war Democrats and the shelter of their liberal media conspiracy theories, it's a lot easier for them to pretend things aren't as bad as they obviously are in Iraq, and "stuck" we will remain.
As Antonia Juhasz wrote in the Los Angeles Times:
The Bush administration has succeeded in maintaining a stranglehold on issues such as public versus private ownership of resources, foreign access to Iraqi oil and U.S. control of the reconstruction effort -- all of which are still governed by administration policies put into place immediately after the invasion. The Bush economic agenda favors foreign interests -- American interests -- over Iraqi self-determination.
Is it worth the loss of American blood and treasure to "stay the course" in the hope that Iraq will become safe for foreign investors, or should we get out as soon as we can without making matters much worse than they are today? Keep in mind that Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News that "Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years."
The argument that we can't 'cut and run' is as seductive as it is illogical: we broke Iraq, and now we have to put it back together. It's a moral argument that the public can't ignore, and, worst of all, it's a crutch for the Democratic establishment to keep the "get out of Iraq" position of its supporters at arm's length.
But it has three fatal problems. First, it assumes that the only way we can hope to influence the outcome in Iraq is through military occupation. Second, it ignores the Catch-22 that's plagued the Iraq adventure from the beginning: the fact that the occupation itself -- our military presence in yet another Muslim country -- is the primary source of instability. Finally, it assumes that we can learn from our mistakes and change our policies in Iraq - that we can do the job better.
All of these are faith-based arguments, and we have to reject them. We would be well-served to remember that U.S. troops remained in the Philippines for 94 years after we "liberated" them from the Spanish, and they remain today in Japan 61 years after its surrender and in Korea 52 years after the ceasefire that ended that "police action."
As Representative Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who introduced a bill preventing the U.S. from entering into long-term basing deals in Iraq, recently wrote:
…the Chicago Tribune reported on the construction of 14 "enduring bases" in Iraq… [The] Washington Post described the military's plan to consolidate military personnel in Iraq into four massive "contingency operating bases." According to the Congressional Research Service, Emergency Supplemental funds appropriated for military construction in Iraq for fiscal years 2001 to 2005 total more than $805 million, with the vast majority, more than $597 million, coming in the 2005 fiscal year.
Lee added, "No one disputes that many of the installations under construction are of a physically permanent character." And Iraqis know that as well as anyone.
Why it's immoral to stay the course
Staying the course - as flawed as it has been -- is not what the majority of Iraqis want, not what the majority of Americans want and it's against the security interests of both nations' citizens.
The Iraqis' desire for the occupation to end, while on the one hand apparent, also goes largely unreported by the mainstream media. In May 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority conducted a poll of Iraqis and found that 97 percent viewed the U.S. forces as 'occupiers,' while only 2 percent saw them as 'liberators.'
A Zogby opinion poll conducted in January found that 82 percent of Sunnis and 69 percent of Shiites were in favor of the withdrawal of American and coalition forces "either immediately or after an elected government is in place." Meanwhile, a New York Times/ CBS news poll of Americans released two weeks ago found U.S. support of the war "at an all-time low."
We're told that the reason we have to stay, despite the desires of both the Iraqi and the American people, is that: 1) to do otherwise would precipitate civil war and 2) we need to fight "them" over there so we don't fight them in our own backyards.
But as Juan Cole, the University of Michigan's Middle-east expert, told me, "There's already a low-level, unconventional civil war in Iraq. When twenty or thirty guys end up dead in an alleyway each morning, that's a civil war." He differentiated between the low-level civil conflict that exists in Iraq and larger "set-piece" wars such as the one he experienced in Lebanon during the 1980s.
As for the "flypaper theory" - that we're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here -- advanced by the Bush administration and its supporters, it has been debunked so thoroughly that to repeat it is to show one's contempt for reality.
For the most part, we are not fighting "militants," but normal, pissed-off Iraqis. According to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "Non-Iraqi militants made up less than 10 percent of the insurgents' ranks -- perhaps even half that." What's more, "most were motivated by "revulsion at the idea of an Arab land being occupied by a non-Arab country."
When I asked Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) about this, he said, "As long as our troops are there they're going to be a continued irritant in the situation, partly because -- and this is a very important point -- the troops are just kids put into a foreign land where they don't know who the enemy is and they don't know the language.
"So they protect themselves and innocent Iraqis get killed, and that fans the fires of the insurgency. Whose fault is it? The administration's, not the 20 year-old's."
Last month, Major General Joseph Taluto, head of the US 42nd Infantry Division which covers "trouble spots" including Baquba and Samarra, told the Gulf News that "good, honest" Iraqis are fighting us:
If a good, honest person feels having all these Humvees driving on the road, having us moving people out of the way, having us patrol the streets, having car bombs going off, you can understand how they could [want to fight us]."
That our presence in Iraq is the source of this is no longer a debatable point. In July, the Royal Institute of International Affairs - a British defense think-tank - reported that "the invasion of Iraq and its bloody aftermath had boosted recruitment and fund-raising for al Qaeda."
And the University of Chicago's Robert Pape, who has compiled data on every suicide bombing in the past 25 years, wrote in an Op-Ed for the New York Times [$$]:
Al Qaeda is today less a product of Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries.
Meanwhile, none of those who argue that Islamic militants hate us for our "values" have ever had an answer for Osama Bin Laden's straightforward challenge to the 'Clash of Civilizations' narrative: "explain why we did not attack Sweden, for example."
Pick an exit strategy, any exit strategy
If you strip away the straw man arguments - no one advocates leaving Iraq tomorrow - you get a choice between those who argue for immediately announcing an exit from Iraq based on a phased withdrawal and those who want to keep on pursuing the same policies and hope for better results.
According to reports from Iraq, a deal regarding the constitution has been hammered out and is likely to be approved. That would be a perfect opportunity for the United States to declare either victory or defeat - they're the same at this point aside from the spin - and get out.
But the first part of exiting Iraq is the hardest: deciding we need to. Rep. McDermott, whose calls for a sudden exit are among the most direct in the Democratic Party, laid the problem out to me in eight sentences:
I keep coming up with the problem, my first stage problem, is how do I get the President of the United States to change his attitude about what's going on? If I can't get him to go to the United Nations and say: 'You know, things have gotten to the point in Iraq that it's very clear that we need a new path.' I don't even want him to get on his knees and beg or anything like that -- I'm not looking for that -- but he has to go up to the United Nations and say: 'We as the United Nations have to sit down and figure out how to work this out.
Then it makes it possible to talk about a United Nations peace enforcing force or it makes it possible to talk about NATO or it makes it possible to talk about a lot of things as ways of sort of stabilizing the situation and getting the chronic irritant of the United States military and our presence out. But unfortunately, I can't get around the president's attitude that we're going to stay the course and we're going to make this happen. I mean we're locked into Vietnam … I think the rest of the world would get involved if they thought that we were serious.
The Big Lie is that withdrawal is a complex game. Juan Cole has proposed withdrawing troops from populated areas and using airpower to support the Iraqi government. Russ Feingold has proposed a "flexible" exit strategy that would have U.S. troops home by the end of next year. Several have suggested a strategy where, in the first stage, U.S. troops would turn over domestic security to Iraq's fledgling security forces and withdrawal to less populace parts of the country - ostensibly to secure Iraq's borders. That would be followed by further withdrawals as Iraqi security forces are trained. Naomi Klein has proposed a remarkably human strategy that requires that we take our obligations to the Iraqi people seriously.
Even those liberal hawks at the Center for American Progress have a half-baked plan to reduce our presence in Iraq to 40,000 troops - hardly an exit plan, but a start.
Conservatives are correct about one thing: the only force that can compel the United States military to withdrawal from a conflict is lack of support from the American public. And that's why we have to challenge the electoral viability of Democrats who continue to provide cover for this administration's occupation, and refuse to apologize for their catastrophic choices. Ultimately, their hands are as bloody as the administration's.
10.10.05
Opera is Alive
From the Financial Times
Access all arias>By Amy Raphael>Published: October 8 2005 03:00 Last updated: October 8 2005 03:00>>
Rachid Sabitri grew up in Orpington, Kent, with football on his mind. He was small, skinny and promising. As a boy, he pretty much had his life planned out: he would be playing for Morocco in the World Cup in 2002. Life, however, has a habit of springing surprises. When one of his classmates fell ill, Sabitri was asked to take his place in a school play. There was a girl he wanted to walk home, so he agreed. He had to act and sing, to prance around the stage, to risk the wrath of his football mates. He loved it.
In 1996, when Sabitri was 16, he attended a local drama school while playing football semi-professionally for a youth team. He had a choice to make - by 2002 would he be playing for Morocco or appearing on stage? He was accepted at drama school in Guildford and eventually the football dream faded. He took some choir classes, did a music theatre course and later performed in a West End musical.
Although he turned down offers to appear in musicals that demanded Arabic or Asian actor-singers - notably Bombay Dreams - he was flattered when offered the chance to appear in Tangier Tattoo, a new show at Glyndebourne, as an enigmatic character called Idris. "Where I come from, the arts is for ponces," explains Sabitri over lunch in one of the restaurants in the rambling grounds of the Sussex opera house. "Orpington is very much 'Chav Ville'. It's full of uneducated, uncultured kids. I've never seen an opera before - all this is new for me. I was really intimidated before I arrived but now . . . now I'm really excited about Tangier Tattoo."
Sabitri is a member of what Glyndebourne itself refers to as opera's "Missing Audience". At 25, he falls into the 18 to 30 age group that opera has failed to entice through its doors. Although eight years the other side of 30, I too am part of the Missing Audience. I have been to perhaps a dozen operas. In Italy the romance of the occasion made it a fantastic experience, whereas at the English National Opera I was fascinated for a while then found myself surreptitiously trying to tell the time under dimmed lights.
The truth is I'd rather go to a rock gig. There's part of me that for some reason feels ashamed of this, as though I ought to enjoy this particular form of high art more. However, it would take a lot to get me back to opera in this country: maybe a set designed by David Hockney or a classic opera given the modern treatment. Such as American director Peter Sellars' Così Fan Tutti, which is set in the chrome and neon surroundings of a seaside diner.
So if I am reluctant, what of younger people who have never even been to an opera? The truth is they are intimidated by the institution, by the ticket prices, by the posh frocks and bow ties, by the champagne intervals, the old operas sung in foreign languages that may have universal themes but by their very nature don't address contemporary issues. Young people have little reason to make it to Glyndebourne, the ENO or London's Covent Garden.
Glyndebourne, which celebrated its 70th anniversary last year, sees opera in crisis and is trying to address the fact that, in order to survive, the genre has to progress. Not at the expense of the greats - the likes of Mozart, Verdi, Puccini and Janácek - but rather to complement the masters. Which is why, later this month, it is staging Tangier Tattoo.
A self-consciously contemporary story, it is a thriller about forming cross-cultural relationships in the Moroccan city against a backdrop of drugs, guns and sex. Disappointingly, Glyndebourne policy dictates that no one can see shows in rehearsal, so I know only what I am told by the cast and production team or what I can find on the official website. Everyone at the opera house is very hyped up by the idea of Tangier Tattoo, from the good- looking, trendy cast to the director Stephen Langridge, who is more what you might expect from an opera - softly spoken, earnest, with an expensive shirt and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the art form
The word "excited" crops up time and again but, to be brutal, just how exciting is the Missing Audience going to find Tangier Tattoo? By all accounts it's pacy, dramatic and probably very watchable, but it sounds a bit like West Side Story at the opera - a point with which Langridge gently but firmly takes issue.
In which case why not go to the far more accessible West End? The Missing Audience would probably prefer to see Mamma Mia than anything at the opera or, like me, spend the same amount of money on a pop gig (Tangier Tattoo ticket prices range from £5 to £25).
Yet Glyndebourne is determined to get it right. Tangier Tattoo is a direct response to research undertaken by composer John Lunn and librettist Stephen Plaice into the issues voiced by the students and young people they talked to across Sussex. Recurring topics arose: travel, adventure, the thrill and stimulation of meeting people from different ethnic backgrounds and struggling to communicate in a climate of cultural misunderstanding.
Plaice says the brief was to "produce a page-turner for the 'lost generation'" and decided Tangier, on the brink of European and Islamic worlds, was a perfect post-9/11 environment. Tangier Tattoo is the tale of Nick, a backpacking English student who meets and falls for Nadine, an American tattooed with an ancient symbol that means "perfect love". The couple meet outside a café and become caught-up in a drug feud involving a briefcase holding $24,000.
In a bizarre twist, the core of Plaice's story - militant fundamentalists take control of the production of the huge supply of marijuana grown in the Rif mountains to the east of Tangier - turned out to be true. Two years after he started work on the opera, Newsnight reported that jihadists were taking over the marijuana trade. "A spooky coincidence, perhaps, except that it was entirely predictable politically," says Plaice.
It is telling that both Plaice and Lunn's backgrounds are in TV drama. Plaice has written more than 20 episodes of The Bill as well as producing scripts for Ballykissangel, Dreamtime and Murder Squad. Lunn composed the soundtrack to, among numerous others, 2,000 Acres of Sky and Hamish Macbeth. As a partnership, they seem ideal to take opera off its pedestal as the ultimate high culture pastime and push it into the world of popular culture - if popular culture is willing to embrace it.
John Lunn says, quite simply, that "opera has to progress to survive". During our phone conversation, Lunn seems too cool for opera. Whereas director Langridge appears to be pretty much submerged in the world of opera, Lunn knows his pop music and was in an experimental pop group in the 1980s called Man Jumping.
As we start talking, Lunn sounds like he's given up before anyone has even seen his new work. "There are three problems with the type of opera I'm involved with: reaching the 18- to 30-year-old audience; knowing modern music critics will absolutely hate it; knowing the conventional opera audience will call it the death of opera."
If it's so tough, why does he persevere? He responds as though it's an odd question: "It's a great buzz. We have to be able to allow music to change us in some way, whether it's PJ Harvey or Beethoven." Lunn also thinks that works such as Tangier Tattoo can make a difference. "It's a great story and should seduce people on that level. It's full of twists and turns. I've composed lots of electronic music. It's very modern. The dialogue is how we speak - very modern-day speech rhythms. I've tried to make it as clear as possible and everyone is wearing a mic so they don't have to project as much."
I log on to the website and hear the snippets. Here I find examples of world music, electronic, Madonna in an eastern phase and a bit of 80s synth band Depeche Mode. It certainly sound interesting, makes me curious. But there's also the worry that Madonna and opera equals Evita, which isn't a good thing.
There's something about Lunn I instinctively trust, however. He tells a revealing anecdote: "Zoe, the last opera I did with Stephen [Plaice], was like popular music to me. But we took some samples of it to a secretarial college in Croydon and they thought it was weird. And yes, that was slightly frustrating. With Zoe and Tangier Tattoo, we did a lot of research into the community and had long chats with young people. We discovered that few people of that age group listen to music other than when they are getting ready to go clubbing or are actually out clubbing."
The notion of taking the samples to a secretarial college may be funny, but it also illustrates how extreme Glyndebourne is willing to be. In this instance, the target audience just wasn't interested. It sounds like "opera by market research" that still isn't succeeding. Glyndebourne will stage three nights of Tangier Tattoo and then it will go on tour to Woking, Norwich, Milton Keynes and Stoke-on-Trent. Taking the opera to the people is a great idea, but will the public really go?
The last two operas created by the trio of Stephen Plaice, John Lunn and Stephen Langridge were Misper and Zoe. Misper had a supporting cast of 120 children aged from 9 to 13 while Zoe had a cast aged between 16 and 20. Even Langridge volunteers that most of the seats were immediately snapped up by family and friends.
Tangier Tattoo certainly boasts a diverse cast: there are opera singers who have been instructed not to sing opera; musical actors; actors and pop singers. As Langridge observes, "It's not a great slab of modernism, nor is it a kind of postmodern Philip Glass-type experiment. It's just a different way of thinking."
To ensure that everyone knows about this different way of thinking, Glyndebourne has appointed an out-of-house PR company for the first time in its history to promote Tangier Tattoo. Getting Taylor Herring on board is an undeniably smart move where the Missing Audience are concerned. The west London "media and entertainment specialist PR agency" wields a great deal of power in the world of popular culture. Clients include Robbie Williams, Abi Titmuss, Big Brother and TV's Richard & Judy (I can hear regular opera-goers groaning).
Taylor Herring has already worked with the National Theatre on developing younger audiences and managing director James Herring was keen to add Glyndebourne to his roster. "Taking on a project of this nature was too good to miss - we felt it was very important that Tangier Tattoo be credible to avoid a 'yoofing up' backlash. Glyndebourne is a great British institution. It could quite easily sit back on the support of its myriad members; the summer season sells out in hours of going on sale. As such, the company should be applauded for looking forwards with an objective to make opera accessible to all. How many times have we heard critics scoff that opera is the sole preserve of the upper classes?"
Glyndebourne in particular has a tradition that reinforces this image: the picnic. The Glyndebourne Festival runs between May and August when the glorious grounds are open to the audience, who often bring lavish picnics and plenty of champagne. Roland Davitt, who has the lead role of Nick the English backpacking student in Tangier Tattoo, has sung in the chorus at Glyndebourne for years and knows its idiosyncrasies well. "It can be quite stuffy, especially the festival part. You see people bringing butlers to serve them dinner."
Davitt, 29, who was brought up in Dublin and was training to be an accountant before leaving to do a music degree, says he was always into musicals until a singing teacher introduced him to opera. Although Tangier Tattoo is his first lead role, he says it is hard to imagine his family or friends warming to the idea of coming to Glyndebourne. "To them opera is shouting men and screaming women with their hands up in the air."
There is this notion that opera is about big fat guys singing in German. He smiles. "Exactly. But look at Jerry Springer - The Opera. That's irreverent and ironic. It uses the traditional Brünnhilde singer, and it's a cracking show. But I think Tangier Tattoo is trying to be faithful to the opera genre without taking the piss out of itself." As a 30-year-old American, Katherine Rohrer, who plays Nick's love interest Nadine, has a similar perspective even though she has a different background, having been an artist in residence at San Francisco opera house for the last few years. "There is an absolute need for Glyndebourne to keep the art form alive, to take it forwards. And to find a way in which to do that."
Part of Glyndebourne's tactics in selling Tangier Tattoo is by using that old adage: sex sells. Davitt says he had to get to know Rohrer very quickly. "We were thrown in at the deep end in terms of publicity photos. We had hardly met when I had to take my top off, be covered in glycerine and pose on a bed with Kat for a photo shoot. Nice to meet you."
Rohrer is pragmatic. "Whatever sex or sexuality is displayed, it's not the biggest part of this opera and it's certainly not gratuitous." Some of the publicity shots for Tangier Tattoo may show a dishevelled Rohrer nuzzling into Davitt's worked-out chest, but as Davitt himself points out: "If they used a photo of us sitting on a bed looking bored and boring, younger people might think, 'Oh, that's opera, I won't bother.'"
Director Stephen Langridge says the sex is just part of a "damn good story". He is obviously more inspired by the music. "At the front of the piece, an Arabic pop singer comes on stage and sings in Arabic. That hasn't happened on this stage before. And before the Arabic pop singer is the huge shoot out at the cafe. It's all very exciting."
And he genuinely thinks Tangier Tattoo can change attitudes to opera. He was recently asked to attend a conference in Valencia to discuss the new work. All the heads of the big European opera houses are coming over to Sussex to see what the fuss is about. "Glyndebourne and Britain certainly lead the way in terms of considering accessibility for everyone and relying on contact with the community," Langridge says proudly. "It's not a case of saying, 'We're terribly posh but we'll pretend we're not for a bit'. It's a case of acknowledging that we're not reaching a whole section of society and we ought to be serving these people."
It seems that the public is responding, with ticket sales going well. Of course it's not clear who the public is and it won't be until Tangier Tattoo opens, but we do know that the University of Sussex has bought up roughly half of the auditorium on the second night for their students and alumni, a show of loyalty appreciated by the opera house.
After its three dates at Glyndebourne, Tangier Tattoo will tour alongside Le Nozze di Figaro and La Cenerentola. As composer, John Lunn's name looks conspicuous next to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Gioacchino Rossini, but it adds a certain welcome edginess too. Look on the Glyndebourne website under The Festival Season and it says "evening dress is customary". Under Touring Opera Dress Code, it offers "the dress is informal".
The Missing Audience, in their informal jeans and trainers, with their nights in spent watching reality television, action-packed DVDs or nights out clubbing, are opera's Holy Grail.
Rachid Sabitri says he would never pay around £50 to £100 to go to the opera, even now that he is appearing in one. Roland Davitt tries to tell him about queuing up at ENO at 6am for cheap seats, but he doesn't show much interest and I feel the same. I have been infected with Glyndebourne's enthusiasm for Tangier Tattoo and am curious to see it, but would I be so keen if I hadn't met the cast and the crew? Would a brief plot synopsis and a poster prove seductive, albeit a poster of anapparently post-coital couple? I'm still not sure. Opera will never be the new rock for me, but I'm willing to take a chance on Tangier Tattoo.
If I remain a little sceptical, and if Sabitri himself is an opera virgin, what about his old football mates? Is there any chance they will make it to Tangier Tattoo? "I can only judge from my own response to being here: I'm really intrigued how it's going to turn out. If it can engage me, there's hope it can do the same for my mates. It's a leap of faith but, you know, why not?" He grins optimistically. "They might just like it."
Find this article at: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/188424c8-371d-11da-af40-00000e2511c8,ft_acl=,s01=1.html
Access all arias>By Amy Raphael>Published: October 8 2005 03:00 Last updated: October 8 2005 03:00>>
Rachid Sabitri grew up in Orpington, Kent, with football on his mind. He was small, skinny and promising. As a boy, he pretty much had his life planned out: he would be playing for Morocco in the World Cup in 2002. Life, however, has a habit of springing surprises. When one of his classmates fell ill, Sabitri was asked to take his place in a school play. There was a girl he wanted to walk home, so he agreed. He had to act and sing, to prance around the stage, to risk the wrath of his football mates. He loved it.
In 1996, when Sabitri was 16, he attended a local drama school while playing football semi-professionally for a youth team. He had a choice to make - by 2002 would he be playing for Morocco or appearing on stage? He was accepted at drama school in Guildford and eventually the football dream faded. He took some choir classes, did a music theatre course and later performed in a West End musical.
Although he turned down offers to appear in musicals that demanded Arabic or Asian actor-singers - notably Bombay Dreams - he was flattered when offered the chance to appear in Tangier Tattoo, a new show at Glyndebourne, as an enigmatic character called Idris. "Where I come from, the arts is for ponces," explains Sabitri over lunch in one of the restaurants in the rambling grounds of the Sussex opera house. "Orpington is very much 'Chav Ville'. It's full of uneducated, uncultured kids. I've never seen an opera before - all this is new for me. I was really intimidated before I arrived but now . . . now I'm really excited about Tangier Tattoo."
Sabitri is a member of what Glyndebourne itself refers to as opera's "Missing Audience". At 25, he falls into the 18 to 30 age group that opera has failed to entice through its doors. Although eight years the other side of 30, I too am part of the Missing Audience. I have been to perhaps a dozen operas. In Italy the romance of the occasion made it a fantastic experience, whereas at the English National Opera I was fascinated for a while then found myself surreptitiously trying to tell the time under dimmed lights.
The truth is I'd rather go to a rock gig. There's part of me that for some reason feels ashamed of this, as though I ought to enjoy this particular form of high art more. However, it would take a lot to get me back to opera in this country: maybe a set designed by David Hockney or a classic opera given the modern treatment. Such as American director Peter Sellars' Così Fan Tutti, which is set in the chrome and neon surroundings of a seaside diner.
So if I am reluctant, what of younger people who have never even been to an opera? The truth is they are intimidated by the institution, by the ticket prices, by the posh frocks and bow ties, by the champagne intervals, the old operas sung in foreign languages that may have universal themes but by their very nature don't address contemporary issues. Young people have little reason to make it to Glyndebourne, the ENO or London's Covent Garden.
Glyndebourne, which celebrated its 70th anniversary last year, sees opera in crisis and is trying to address the fact that, in order to survive, the genre has to progress. Not at the expense of the greats - the likes of Mozart, Verdi, Puccini and Janácek - but rather to complement the masters. Which is why, later this month, it is staging Tangier Tattoo.
A self-consciously contemporary story, it is a thriller about forming cross-cultural relationships in the Moroccan city against a backdrop of drugs, guns and sex. Disappointingly, Glyndebourne policy dictates that no one can see shows in rehearsal, so I know only what I am told by the cast and production team or what I can find on the official website. Everyone at the opera house is very hyped up by the idea of Tangier Tattoo, from the good- looking, trendy cast to the director Stephen Langridge, who is more what you might expect from an opera - softly spoken, earnest, with an expensive shirt and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the art form
The word "excited" crops up time and again but, to be brutal, just how exciting is the Missing Audience going to find Tangier Tattoo? By all accounts it's pacy, dramatic and probably very watchable, but it sounds a bit like West Side Story at the opera - a point with which Langridge gently but firmly takes issue.
In which case why not go to the far more accessible West End? The Missing Audience would probably prefer to see Mamma Mia than anything at the opera or, like me, spend the same amount of money on a pop gig (Tangier Tattoo ticket prices range from £5 to £25).
Yet Glyndebourne is determined to get it right. Tangier Tattoo is a direct response to research undertaken by composer John Lunn and librettist Stephen Plaice into the issues voiced by the students and young people they talked to across Sussex. Recurring topics arose: travel, adventure, the thrill and stimulation of meeting people from different ethnic backgrounds and struggling to communicate in a climate of cultural misunderstanding.
Plaice says the brief was to "produce a page-turner for the 'lost generation'" and decided Tangier, on the brink of European and Islamic worlds, was a perfect post-9/11 environment. Tangier Tattoo is the tale of Nick, a backpacking English student who meets and falls for Nadine, an American tattooed with an ancient symbol that means "perfect love". The couple meet outside a café and become caught-up in a drug feud involving a briefcase holding $24,000.
In a bizarre twist, the core of Plaice's story - militant fundamentalists take control of the production of the huge supply of marijuana grown in the Rif mountains to the east of Tangier - turned out to be true. Two years after he started work on the opera, Newsnight reported that jihadists were taking over the marijuana trade. "A spooky coincidence, perhaps, except that it was entirely predictable politically," says Plaice.
It is telling that both Plaice and Lunn's backgrounds are in TV drama. Plaice has written more than 20 episodes of The Bill as well as producing scripts for Ballykissangel, Dreamtime and Murder Squad. Lunn composed the soundtrack to, among numerous others, 2,000 Acres of Sky and Hamish Macbeth. As a partnership, they seem ideal to take opera off its pedestal as the ultimate high culture pastime and push it into the world of popular culture - if popular culture is willing to embrace it.
John Lunn says, quite simply, that "opera has to progress to survive". During our phone conversation, Lunn seems too cool for opera. Whereas director Langridge appears to be pretty much submerged in the world of opera, Lunn knows his pop music and was in an experimental pop group in the 1980s called Man Jumping.
As we start talking, Lunn sounds like he's given up before anyone has even seen his new work. "There are three problems with the type of opera I'm involved with: reaching the 18- to 30-year-old audience; knowing modern music critics will absolutely hate it; knowing the conventional opera audience will call it the death of opera."
If it's so tough, why does he persevere? He responds as though it's an odd question: "It's a great buzz. We have to be able to allow music to change us in some way, whether it's PJ Harvey or Beethoven." Lunn also thinks that works such as Tangier Tattoo can make a difference. "It's a great story and should seduce people on that level. It's full of twists and turns. I've composed lots of electronic music. It's very modern. The dialogue is how we speak - very modern-day speech rhythms. I've tried to make it as clear as possible and everyone is wearing a mic so they don't have to project as much."
I log on to the website and hear the snippets. Here I find examples of world music, electronic, Madonna in an eastern phase and a bit of 80s synth band Depeche Mode. It certainly sound interesting, makes me curious. But there's also the worry that Madonna and opera equals Evita, which isn't a good thing.
There's something about Lunn I instinctively trust, however. He tells a revealing anecdote: "Zoe, the last opera I did with Stephen [Plaice], was like popular music to me. But we took some samples of it to a secretarial college in Croydon and they thought it was weird. And yes, that was slightly frustrating. With Zoe and Tangier Tattoo, we did a lot of research into the community and had long chats with young people. We discovered that few people of that age group listen to music other than when they are getting ready to go clubbing or are actually out clubbing."
The notion of taking the samples to a secretarial college may be funny, but it also illustrates how extreme Glyndebourne is willing to be. In this instance, the target audience just wasn't interested. It sounds like "opera by market research" that still isn't succeeding. Glyndebourne will stage three nights of Tangier Tattoo and then it will go on tour to Woking, Norwich, Milton Keynes and Stoke-on-Trent. Taking the opera to the people is a great idea, but will the public really go?
The last two operas created by the trio of Stephen Plaice, John Lunn and Stephen Langridge were Misper and Zoe. Misper had a supporting cast of 120 children aged from 9 to 13 while Zoe had a cast aged between 16 and 20. Even Langridge volunteers that most of the seats were immediately snapped up by family and friends.
Tangier Tattoo certainly boasts a diverse cast: there are opera singers who have been instructed not to sing opera; musical actors; actors and pop singers. As Langridge observes, "It's not a great slab of modernism, nor is it a kind of postmodern Philip Glass-type experiment. It's just a different way of thinking."
To ensure that everyone knows about this different way of thinking, Glyndebourne has appointed an out-of-house PR company for the first time in its history to promote Tangier Tattoo. Getting Taylor Herring on board is an undeniably smart move where the Missing Audience are concerned. The west London "media and entertainment specialist PR agency" wields a great deal of power in the world of popular culture. Clients include Robbie Williams, Abi Titmuss, Big Brother and TV's Richard & Judy (I can hear regular opera-goers groaning).
Taylor Herring has already worked with the National Theatre on developing younger audiences and managing director James Herring was keen to add Glyndebourne to his roster. "Taking on a project of this nature was too good to miss - we felt it was very important that Tangier Tattoo be credible to avoid a 'yoofing up' backlash. Glyndebourne is a great British institution. It could quite easily sit back on the support of its myriad members; the summer season sells out in hours of going on sale. As such, the company should be applauded for looking forwards with an objective to make opera accessible to all. How many times have we heard critics scoff that opera is the sole preserve of the upper classes?"
Glyndebourne in particular has a tradition that reinforces this image: the picnic. The Glyndebourne Festival runs between May and August when the glorious grounds are open to the audience, who often bring lavish picnics and plenty of champagne. Roland Davitt, who has the lead role of Nick the English backpacking student in Tangier Tattoo, has sung in the chorus at Glyndebourne for years and knows its idiosyncrasies well. "It can be quite stuffy, especially the festival part. You see people bringing butlers to serve them dinner."
Davitt, 29, who was brought up in Dublin and was training to be an accountant before leaving to do a music degree, says he was always into musicals until a singing teacher introduced him to opera. Although Tangier Tattoo is his first lead role, he says it is hard to imagine his family or friends warming to the idea of coming to Glyndebourne. "To them opera is shouting men and screaming women with their hands up in the air."
There is this notion that opera is about big fat guys singing in German. He smiles. "Exactly. But look at Jerry Springer - The Opera. That's irreverent and ironic. It uses the traditional Brünnhilde singer, and it's a cracking show. But I think Tangier Tattoo is trying to be faithful to the opera genre without taking the piss out of itself." As a 30-year-old American, Katherine Rohrer, who plays Nick's love interest Nadine, has a similar perspective even though she has a different background, having been an artist in residence at San Francisco opera house for the last few years. "There is an absolute need for Glyndebourne to keep the art form alive, to take it forwards. And to find a way in which to do that."
Part of Glyndebourne's tactics in selling Tangier Tattoo is by using that old adage: sex sells. Davitt says he had to get to know Rohrer very quickly. "We were thrown in at the deep end in terms of publicity photos. We had hardly met when I had to take my top off, be covered in glycerine and pose on a bed with Kat for a photo shoot. Nice to meet you."
Rohrer is pragmatic. "Whatever sex or sexuality is displayed, it's not the biggest part of this opera and it's certainly not gratuitous." Some of the publicity shots for Tangier Tattoo may show a dishevelled Rohrer nuzzling into Davitt's worked-out chest, but as Davitt himself points out: "If they used a photo of us sitting on a bed looking bored and boring, younger people might think, 'Oh, that's opera, I won't bother.'"
Director Stephen Langridge says the sex is just part of a "damn good story". He is obviously more inspired by the music. "At the front of the piece, an Arabic pop singer comes on stage and sings in Arabic. That hasn't happened on this stage before. And before the Arabic pop singer is the huge shoot out at the cafe. It's all very exciting."
And he genuinely thinks Tangier Tattoo can change attitudes to opera. He was recently asked to attend a conference in Valencia to discuss the new work. All the heads of the big European opera houses are coming over to Sussex to see what the fuss is about. "Glyndebourne and Britain certainly lead the way in terms of considering accessibility for everyone and relying on contact with the community," Langridge says proudly. "It's not a case of saying, 'We're terribly posh but we'll pretend we're not for a bit'. It's a case of acknowledging that we're not reaching a whole section of society and we ought to be serving these people."
It seems that the public is responding, with ticket sales going well. Of course it's not clear who the public is and it won't be until Tangier Tattoo opens, but we do know that the University of Sussex has bought up roughly half of the auditorium on the second night for their students and alumni, a show of loyalty appreciated by the opera house.
After its three dates at Glyndebourne, Tangier Tattoo will tour alongside Le Nozze di Figaro and La Cenerentola. As composer, John Lunn's name looks conspicuous next to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Gioacchino Rossini, but it adds a certain welcome edginess too. Look on the Glyndebourne website under The Festival Season and it says "evening dress is customary". Under Touring Opera Dress Code, it offers "the dress is informal".
The Missing Audience, in their informal jeans and trainers, with their nights in spent watching reality television, action-packed DVDs or nights out clubbing, are opera's Holy Grail.
Rachid Sabitri says he would never pay around £50 to £100 to go to the opera, even now that he is appearing in one. Roland Davitt tries to tell him about queuing up at ENO at 6am for cheap seats, but he doesn't show much interest and I feel the same. I have been infected with Glyndebourne's enthusiasm for Tangier Tattoo and am curious to see it, but would I be so keen if I hadn't met the cast and the crew? Would a brief plot synopsis and a poster prove seductive, albeit a poster of anapparently post-coital couple? I'm still not sure. Opera will never be the new rock for me, but I'm willing to take a chance on Tangier Tattoo.
If I remain a little sceptical, and if Sabitri himself is an opera virgin, what about his old football mates? Is there any chance they will make it to Tangier Tattoo? "I can only judge from my own response to being here: I'm really intrigued how it's going to turn out. If it can engage me, there's hope it can do the same for my mates. It's a leap of faith but, you know, why not?" He grins optimistically. "They might just like it."
Find this article at: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/188424c8-371d-11da-af40-00000e2511c8,ft_acl=,s01=1.html
9.10.05
A Central Pillar of Iraq Policy Crumbling
Senior U.S. officials have begun to question a key presumption of American strategy in Iraq: that establishing democracy there can erode and ultimately eradicate the insurgency gripping the country.
The expectation that political progress would bring stability has been fundamental to the Bush administration's approach to rebuilding Iraq, as well as a central theme of White House rhetoric to convince the American public that its policy in Iraq remains on course.
rumbling - Los Angeles Times
How sadly ironic.
The expectation that political progress would bring stability has been fundamental to the Bush administration's approach to rebuilding Iraq, as well as a central theme of White House rhetoric to convince the American public that its policy in Iraq remains on course.
rumbling - Los Angeles Times
How sadly ironic.
8.10.05
The UN & the EU
A sad commentary from today's Financial Times:
Broken dream>By John Lloyd>Published: October 7 2005 16:24 Last updated: October 7 2005 16:24>>
These are low times for high ideals. Where the rhetoric of world peace and security once echoed, dry voices call for tighter accounting standards. Where the cry of “Never again!” caught every throat, polling evidence is passed around to show public indifference. The age of the visionary is gone: the auditor and the pollster come into their own.
Maybe these are blessings in disguise. So far, the disguise has been a good one.
For two engines of world union - the United Nations and the European Union - now run near empty. Both have well-defined and generally known crises - part of which is in their internal management and external capability. More importantly, both suffer from a crashing decline in support, trust and belief that their aspirations are anything more than yesterday’s news.
At the UN, the noble physiognomy and hypnotic voice of its secretary general takes on a more and more stricken aspect. Kofi Annan entered in 1997 as a reformer, who expressed regret that the UN was weak in Bosnia. Now he has the face of a man who has learned that weakness was his chalice, and will be his legacy.
The United States (which pays 22 per cent of the UN budget) thinks the place is a badly run, nepotistic, ineffectual shambles. Its new envoy is dismissed in most circles outside the US as Bolton the Barbarian: but John Bolton is not so very far from the centre of American politics.
This spring, Annan took delivery of a US bipartisan report (by the Republican Newt Gingrich and the Democrat George Mitchell). It argued that “the need for internal reform has never been more pressing”; that management reforms have “become bogged down under the weight of the organisation’s enormous inertia” and “have failed to create an institution that meets basic standards of good management”. The staff is swollen with placemen - and women - who “lack the skills or the motivation to perform their duties” and (they cite a Deloitte survey) show a “dismal” morale and “a high level of discontent, distrust and pessimism”.
There’s no strong voice that says this is wrong: only “enormous inertia”, which trumps all. Other states paddle their own canoes. Last month Junichiro Koizumi, Japan’s prime minister, asked again that his country (19.5 per cent of the UN budget) should get a permanent seat on the Security Council. China (2.1 per cent of the budget, but a permanent member) won’t have it; the US isn’t keen. The 60th anniversary celebrations were subdued.
The UN cannot adequately undertake the tasks bequeathed it, and yet it is being given still more: to intervene in humanitarian catastrophes everywhere. As this is written, two men of conscience - the former Czech president Vaclav Havel and the South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu - press on our attention a report that “strongly urges the Security Council to take up the situation of Burma. Preserving peace, security and stability in the world... requires nothing less.”
What will - what can - “take up” amount to? If the hard-nosed ayatollahs of Iran can defy a world that has “taken up” the problem of their apparent intent to become a nuclear-armed power, the hard-nosed generals can keep Aung San Suu Kyi (who won elections 15 years ago) closeted in her house and ensure that their country remains impervious to UN resolutions. There is no agreed way to “preserve peace, security and stability in the world”: there is only the exercise of US power, about which there is little agreement.
In Europe the German election result forced the two main party leaders, Angela Merkel and Gerhard Schroder, to scrap and posture and deal in the shadows. Their necessary manoeuvrings, and the uncertainty that now afflicts Germany, contrast with the gallery of centre-right and -left statesmen Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, who reconstructed and reunited their state from ruins and division, using Europe as both a political framework and a moral prop.
These, and a later, generation of German politicians saw in Europe a solvent for the nationalism for which they blamed their country’s descent into Nazism. That high sentiment is now voiced more in despair than in assertion. The senior German in the European Commission - the social democrat Gunter Verheugen, vice-president for enterprise and industry - gave a speech in June at Berlin’s Humboldt University, which began with the observation that “populist sentiment appears to be washing away the current political consensus in Europe” and ended with a call for “more courage”.
Germany and France, which promoted the high ideals and cut the low deals of Europe for the past half century, now seem unable to do either. Britain, Europe’s most politically robust state, retains (and feels confirmed in) a pragmatic view of Europe as a place where nation states can sensibly work together. It can provide examples of good governance. It cannot make the grand gesture of national transcendence that was injected into Euro- politics at its foundation, and whose weakening has found no replacement.
This might yet turn out to be a blessing - if the UN and the EU are both able to let “I would” wait upon “I can”, and to refashion their common aspirations to united action round what the people will support as actively as they did when they saw these institutions as an antidote to war, devastation and want. There is a high bar over which new generations of politicians must aspire to jump. For that generation now exercising, or passing out of, power, the game seems too much altered to allow them to play.
john.lloyd@ft.com
>>>
Find this article at: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/47ff05a8-33e2-11da-adae-00000e2511c8,ft_acl=,s01=1.html
Broken dream>By John Lloyd>Published: October 7 2005 16:24 Last updated: October 7 2005 16:24>>
These are low times for high ideals. Where the rhetoric of world peace and security once echoed, dry voices call for tighter accounting standards. Where the cry of “Never again!” caught every throat, polling evidence is passed around to show public indifference. The age of the visionary is gone: the auditor and the pollster come into their own.
Maybe these are blessings in disguise. So far, the disguise has been a good one.
For two engines of world union - the United Nations and the European Union - now run near empty. Both have well-defined and generally known crises - part of which is in their internal management and external capability. More importantly, both suffer from a crashing decline in support, trust and belief that their aspirations are anything more than yesterday’s news.
At the UN, the noble physiognomy and hypnotic voice of its secretary general takes on a more and more stricken aspect. Kofi Annan entered in 1997 as a reformer, who expressed regret that the UN was weak in Bosnia. Now he has the face of a man who has learned that weakness was his chalice, and will be his legacy.
The United States (which pays 22 per cent of the UN budget) thinks the place is a badly run, nepotistic, ineffectual shambles. Its new envoy is dismissed in most circles outside the US as Bolton the Barbarian: but John Bolton is not so very far from the centre of American politics.
This spring, Annan took delivery of a US bipartisan report (by the Republican Newt Gingrich and the Democrat George Mitchell). It argued that “the need for internal reform has never been more pressing”; that management reforms have “become bogged down under the weight of the organisation’s enormous inertia” and “have failed to create an institution that meets basic standards of good management”. The staff is swollen with placemen - and women - who “lack the skills or the motivation to perform their duties” and (they cite a Deloitte survey) show a “dismal” morale and “a high level of discontent, distrust and pessimism”.
There’s no strong voice that says this is wrong: only “enormous inertia”, which trumps all. Other states paddle their own canoes. Last month Junichiro Koizumi, Japan’s prime minister, asked again that his country (19.5 per cent of the UN budget) should get a permanent seat on the Security Council. China (2.1 per cent of the budget, but a permanent member) won’t have it; the US isn’t keen. The 60th anniversary celebrations were subdued.
The UN cannot adequately undertake the tasks bequeathed it, and yet it is being given still more: to intervene in humanitarian catastrophes everywhere. As this is written, two men of conscience - the former Czech president Vaclav Havel and the South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu - press on our attention a report that “strongly urges the Security Council to take up the situation of Burma. Preserving peace, security and stability in the world... requires nothing less.”
What will - what can - “take up” amount to? If the hard-nosed ayatollahs of Iran can defy a world that has “taken up” the problem of their apparent intent to become a nuclear-armed power, the hard-nosed generals can keep Aung San Suu Kyi (who won elections 15 years ago) closeted in her house and ensure that their country remains impervious to UN resolutions. There is no agreed way to “preserve peace, security and stability in the world”: there is only the exercise of US power, about which there is little agreement.
In Europe the German election result forced the two main party leaders, Angela Merkel and Gerhard Schroder, to scrap and posture and deal in the shadows. Their necessary manoeuvrings, and the uncertainty that now afflicts Germany, contrast with the gallery of centre-right and -left statesmen Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, who reconstructed and reunited their state from ruins and division, using Europe as both a political framework and a moral prop.
These, and a later, generation of German politicians saw in Europe a solvent for the nationalism for which they blamed their country’s descent into Nazism. That high sentiment is now voiced more in despair than in assertion. The senior German in the European Commission - the social democrat Gunter Verheugen, vice-president for enterprise and industry - gave a speech in June at Berlin’s Humboldt University, which began with the observation that “populist sentiment appears to be washing away the current political consensus in Europe” and ended with a call for “more courage”.
Germany and France, which promoted the high ideals and cut the low deals of Europe for the past half century, now seem unable to do either. Britain, Europe’s most politically robust state, retains (and feels confirmed in) a pragmatic view of Europe as a place where nation states can sensibly work together. It can provide examples of good governance. It cannot make the grand gesture of national transcendence that was injected into Euro- politics at its foundation, and whose weakening has found no replacement.
This might yet turn out to be a blessing - if the UN and the EU are both able to let “I would” wait upon “I can”, and to refashion their common aspirations to united action round what the people will support as actively as they did when they saw these institutions as an antidote to war, devastation and want. There is a high bar over which new generations of politicians must aspire to jump. For that generation now exercising, or passing out of, power, the game seems too much altered to allow them to play.
john.lloyd@ft.com
>>>
Find this article at: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/47ff05a8-33e2-11da-adae-00000e2511c8,ft_acl=,s01=1.html
2.10.05
California : We dream of the Future
IF IT were a country, California would be one with more people than Canada and an economy the size of China's. Its scientists shoot, with their rockets, for the moon; its films spread Hollywood's culture around the globe; its athletes break world records; even its wines now rank with the best of France's. Somehow, it is always at the cutting edge, be it in the flower-power days of the 1960s or the dotcom boom of the 1990s. As Kevin Starr points out in his history of the state, California has long been “one of the prisms through which the American people, for better and for worse, could glimpse their future”.
Mr Starr is too good a historian to offer any pat explanation; instead, he concentrates on the extraordinary array of people and events that have led from the mythical land of Queen Calafia, through the rule of Spain and Mexico, and on to the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger (what other state in America would have elected an iron-pumping film star with an Austrian accent?). Moreover, he does so with such elegance and humour that his book is a joy to read.
What emerges is not all Californian sunshine and light. Think back to the savage violence that accompanied the 1849 Gold Rush; or to the exclusion orders against the Chinese; or to the riots that regularly marked industrial and social relations in San Francisco (though dictionaries prefer Bavaria as the origin of “hoodlum”, Mr Starr reckons it derives from young men invading Chinatown with the war cry “huddle them!”). California, it should be remembered, was very much the wild west, having to wait until 1850 before it could force its way to statehood.
So what tamed it? Mr Starr's answer is a combination of great men, great ideas and great projects. He emphasises the development of California's infrastructure: the extraordinary system of aqueducts and canals that transferred water from the north of the state to the arid south; the development of agriculture; the spread of the railroads and freeways; and, perhaps the most important factor for today's hi-tech California, the creation of a superb set of public universities.
All this, he writes, “began with water, the sine qua non of any civilisation.” He goes on cheerfully to note the “monumental damage to the environment” caused by irrigation projects that were “plagued by claims of deception, double-dealing and conflict of interest”: a state of affairs that was fodder for such Hollywood films as Roman Polanski's “Chinatown”.
One virtue of this book is its structure. Mr Starr is never trapped by his chronological framework. Instead, when the subject demands it, he manages deftly to flit back and forth among the decades (throughout the book, he is particularly good on the regular outbreaks of labour unrest, be it in the San Francisco dockyards or the fields of the Central Valley). Less satisfying is his account of California's cultural progress in the 19th and 20th centuries: does he really need to invoke so many long-forgotten writers to accompany such names as Jack London, Frank Norris, Mark Twain or Raymond Chandler?
But that is a minor criticism for a book that will become a California classic. The regret is that Mr Starr, doubtless pressed for space, leaves so little room—just a brief final chapter—for the implications of the past for California's future. He poses the question that most Americans prefer to gloss over: is California governable? “For all its impressive growth, there remains a volatility in the politics and governance of California, which became perfectly clear to the rest of the nation in the fall of 2003 when the voters of California recalled one governor and elected another.”
Tough for the Terminator
Indeed so, and Mr Starr wisely avoids making any premature judgment on their choice. Ills such as soaring house prices, gridlocked freeways and “embattled” public schools, combined with the budgetary problems that stem from the tax revolt of 1978 would test to the limit any governor, even the Terminator. As Mr Starr notes, no one should cite California as an unambiguous triumph: “There has always been something slightly bipolar about California. It was either utopia or dystopia, a dream or a nightmare, a hope or a broken promise—and too infrequently anything in between.”
Mr Starr is too good a historian to offer any pat explanation; instead, he concentrates on the extraordinary array of people and events that have led from the mythical land of Queen Calafia, through the rule of Spain and Mexico, and on to the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger (what other state in America would have elected an iron-pumping film star with an Austrian accent?). Moreover, he does so with such elegance and humour that his book is a joy to read.
What emerges is not all Californian sunshine and light. Think back to the savage violence that accompanied the 1849 Gold Rush; or to the exclusion orders against the Chinese; or to the riots that regularly marked industrial and social relations in San Francisco (though dictionaries prefer Bavaria as the origin of “hoodlum”, Mr Starr reckons it derives from young men invading Chinatown with the war cry “huddle them!”). California, it should be remembered, was very much the wild west, having to wait until 1850 before it could force its way to statehood.
So what tamed it? Mr Starr's answer is a combination of great men, great ideas and great projects. He emphasises the development of California's infrastructure: the extraordinary system of aqueducts and canals that transferred water from the north of the state to the arid south; the development of agriculture; the spread of the railroads and freeways; and, perhaps the most important factor for today's hi-tech California, the creation of a superb set of public universities.
All this, he writes, “began with water, the sine qua non of any civilisation.” He goes on cheerfully to note the “monumental damage to the environment” caused by irrigation projects that were “plagued by claims of deception, double-dealing and conflict of interest”: a state of affairs that was fodder for such Hollywood films as Roman Polanski's “Chinatown”.
One virtue of this book is its structure. Mr Starr is never trapped by his chronological framework. Instead, when the subject demands it, he manages deftly to flit back and forth among the decades (throughout the book, he is particularly good on the regular outbreaks of labour unrest, be it in the San Francisco dockyards or the fields of the Central Valley). Less satisfying is his account of California's cultural progress in the 19th and 20th centuries: does he really need to invoke so many long-forgotten writers to accompany such names as Jack London, Frank Norris, Mark Twain or Raymond Chandler?
But that is a minor criticism for a book that will become a California classic. The regret is that Mr Starr, doubtless pressed for space, leaves so little room—just a brief final chapter—for the implications of the past for California's future. He poses the question that most Americans prefer to gloss over: is California governable? “For all its impressive growth, there remains a volatility in the politics and governance of California, which became perfectly clear to the rest of the nation in the fall of 2003 when the voters of California recalled one governor and elected another.”
Tough for the Terminator
Indeed so, and Mr Starr wisely avoids making any premature judgment on their choice. Ills such as soaring house prices, gridlocked freeways and “embattled” public schools, combined with the budgetary problems that stem from the tax revolt of 1978 would test to the limit any governor, even the Terminator. As Mr Starr notes, no one should cite California as an unambiguous triumph: “There has always been something slightly bipolar about California. It was either utopia or dystopia, a dream or a nightmare, a hope or a broken promise—and too infrequently anything in between.”
1.10.05
Everything Old is New Again
WE'RE told on good authority that history repeats itself, but this is getting ridiculous. The past week has been a giant flashback to the 1960s. On Saturday 100,000 anti-war demonstrators descended on Washington, DC, to chant peacenik slogans and listen to Joan Baez sing “Where have all the flowers gone?” The only thing missing was Abbie Hoffman trying to levitate the Pentagon. And that's not all. PBS broadcast Martin Scorsese's lengthy homage to Bob Dylan, alongside a week of tributes to “the years that shaped a generation” (including a special edition of “Antiques Roadshow”). Both the Rolling Stones and Jane Fonda have dragged their aged limbs on tour.
There have been a few attempts to update things. This time, some anti-war protesters wore T-shirts that read “make levees not war”, while Sir Michael Jagger has penned a song about the evils of neo-conservatism. But for the most part, everybody seems happiest with golden oldies.
Why are the 1960s so difficult to escape? One reason is the sheer size of the baby-boom generation. Giant arboreal slums of boomers now sit at the top of every establishment tree, not least the media. And like all ageing geezers they continue to see the world through the prism of their youths. Listen to Charles Rangel, a black congressman from New York, comparing George Bush to Bull Connor (the notorious white police boss in Birmingham, Alabama); or Jesse Jackson likening the peace protesters to the civil-rights heroine, Rosa Parks; or just about every pundit doing the “Iraq war as Vietnam quagmire” routine.
The other reason why the 1960s are so hard to shake off is that the decade split America down the middle, launching the culture wars that still haunt American politics and redefining America's two great parties. The Democrats became the party of people who regarded the 1960s as an unmitigated good (particularly feminists, blacks and social liberals) while the Republicans regarded the 1960s as an unmitigated evil (particularly white southerners and other “conservatives of the heart”).
This has made for “Groundhog Day” politics. Every election the same arguments appear about draft dodging, the permissive society and so on. Last year, while Iraq burned, American politics fixated on which Swift Boat veteran did what 40 years ago.
Is there really no escape? In fact, last year's election looks like the last hurrah for 1960s politics. John Kerry presumably thought that turning the 2004 election into a referendum on his war service in Vietnam was a slam-dunk, given that he fought heroically while Mr Bush skulked at home. But many voters were less obsessed by the Mekong Delta, and others remembered him as a war protester, not a war hero.
The future of both parties is in the hands of people who want to jettison their 1960s baggage. On the Democrat side, before Mr Kerry reintroduced Vietnam, the Clintonites had spent much of the 1990s distancing themselves from Eugene McCarthy. They demonised black radicals such as Sister Souljah, embraced tough policies on crime and welfare, supported school uniforms and V-chips, and sent American bombers into Bosnia. In her preparation for 2008, Hillary Clinton has taken positions on military force and abortion rights that would have scandalised her younger self. Barack Obama, a possible running mate, is very different from the older black leaders. On the relative merits of liberal and conservative solutions to black poverty—spending more money versus changing the behaviour of the poor—he says: “It's not either/or. It's both/and.”
For their part, the Republicans have been trying to get beyond Richard Nixon's “southern strategy”. Mr Bush has appointed blacks to more senior positions in his administration than any previous president and lavished more attention on wooing black voters. The reason why black Democrats seized on the catastrophe in New Orleans to demonise Mr Bush is not because they really think that he is Bull Connor reincarnated, but because they worry that his strategy of creating a multicultural Republican Party might get somewhere.
The old road is rapidly ageing
More broadly, American society is beginning to make its peace with that divisive decade: it is becoming neither a pro-1960s culture nor an anti-1960s culture but a post-1960s culture. Polls show only 5% of voters objecting to the civil-rights revolution. For all the rage of the culture warriors, most Americans—particularly young ones—put a high premium on “tolerance”. At the same time, they also think that the counter-culture went too far. Very few people decry the nuclear family or urge people to tune in, turn on and drop out.
Society is in a process of repairing itself after the big dislocations of the 1960s, when rates of crime, pre-marital sex and family breakdown began to surge. (The annual number of divorces, for example, more than doubled between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s.) The figures for teenage pregnancy and abortion are both declining. Crime is down (America now has fewer burglaries per head than Canada), and divorce is beginning to drop, particularly among the college-educated, as the children of divorced parents re-embrace the nuclear family. Most young Americans say they believe in God and love their country.
Mr Dylan remains such an iconic figure not because he embodied the 1960s but because, unlike many of his acolytes, he refused to be defined by the decade. Mr Scorsese makes great play about the way the folk protester infuriated his hard-core fans by going electric. But this was only one of the bard's changes. He distanced himself from his protest songs. He got God in a big way. And in his recent memoirs he boasts that his dream was a “nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard.” That's where the flowers went, Joan.
There have been a few attempts to update things. This time, some anti-war protesters wore T-shirts that read “make levees not war”, while Sir Michael Jagger has penned a song about the evils of neo-conservatism. But for the most part, everybody seems happiest with golden oldies.
Why are the 1960s so difficult to escape? One reason is the sheer size of the baby-boom generation. Giant arboreal slums of boomers now sit at the top of every establishment tree, not least the media. And like all ageing geezers they continue to see the world through the prism of their youths. Listen to Charles Rangel, a black congressman from New York, comparing George Bush to Bull Connor (the notorious white police boss in Birmingham, Alabama); or Jesse Jackson likening the peace protesters to the civil-rights heroine, Rosa Parks; or just about every pundit doing the “Iraq war as Vietnam quagmire” routine.
The other reason why the 1960s are so hard to shake off is that the decade split America down the middle, launching the culture wars that still haunt American politics and redefining America's two great parties. The Democrats became the party of people who regarded the 1960s as an unmitigated good (particularly feminists, blacks and social liberals) while the Republicans regarded the 1960s as an unmitigated evil (particularly white southerners and other “conservatives of the heart”).
This has made for “Groundhog Day” politics. Every election the same arguments appear about draft dodging, the permissive society and so on. Last year, while Iraq burned, American politics fixated on which Swift Boat veteran did what 40 years ago.
Is there really no escape? In fact, last year's election looks like the last hurrah for 1960s politics. John Kerry presumably thought that turning the 2004 election into a referendum on his war service in Vietnam was a slam-dunk, given that he fought heroically while Mr Bush skulked at home. But many voters were less obsessed by the Mekong Delta, and others remembered him as a war protester, not a war hero.
The future of both parties is in the hands of people who want to jettison their 1960s baggage. On the Democrat side, before Mr Kerry reintroduced Vietnam, the Clintonites had spent much of the 1990s distancing themselves from Eugene McCarthy. They demonised black radicals such as Sister Souljah, embraced tough policies on crime and welfare, supported school uniforms and V-chips, and sent American bombers into Bosnia. In her preparation for 2008, Hillary Clinton has taken positions on military force and abortion rights that would have scandalised her younger self. Barack Obama, a possible running mate, is very different from the older black leaders. On the relative merits of liberal and conservative solutions to black poverty—spending more money versus changing the behaviour of the poor—he says: “It's not either/or. It's both/and.”
For their part, the Republicans have been trying to get beyond Richard Nixon's “southern strategy”. Mr Bush has appointed blacks to more senior positions in his administration than any previous president and lavished more attention on wooing black voters. The reason why black Democrats seized on the catastrophe in New Orleans to demonise Mr Bush is not because they really think that he is Bull Connor reincarnated, but because they worry that his strategy of creating a multicultural Republican Party might get somewhere.
The old road is rapidly ageing
More broadly, American society is beginning to make its peace with that divisive decade: it is becoming neither a pro-1960s culture nor an anti-1960s culture but a post-1960s culture. Polls show only 5% of voters objecting to the civil-rights revolution. For all the rage of the culture warriors, most Americans—particularly young ones—put a high premium on “tolerance”. At the same time, they also think that the counter-culture went too far. Very few people decry the nuclear family or urge people to tune in, turn on and drop out.
Society is in a process of repairing itself after the big dislocations of the 1960s, when rates of crime, pre-marital sex and family breakdown began to surge. (The annual number of divorces, for example, more than doubled between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s.) The figures for teenage pregnancy and abortion are both declining. Crime is down (America now has fewer burglaries per head than Canada), and divorce is beginning to drop, particularly among the college-educated, as the children of divorced parents re-embrace the nuclear family. Most young Americans say they believe in God and love their country.
Mr Dylan remains such an iconic figure not because he embodied the 1960s but because, unlike many of his acolytes, he refused to be defined by the decade. Mr Scorsese makes great play about the way the folk protester infuriated his hard-core fans by going electric. But this was only one of the bard's changes. He distanced himself from his protest songs. He got God in a big way. And in his recent memoirs he boasts that his dream was a “nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard.” That's where the flowers went, Joan.
ART TODAY
Lunch with the FT: Wirth’s fortune
How, at the age of 34, does the son of a Swiss architect and teacher become the second most powerful art dealer in the world? Ranked number 11 in Art Review’s recent “Power 100” of the international art market, this London gallery owner is also judged more influential than the collector Charles Saatchi, Christies’ chief Francois Pinault, or the million-dollar-a-canvas painter Gerhard Richter. Will such a person be insufferably bumptious, or maddeningly nice? And will he mind that I am late for our lunch?
In the sedate calm of the George Club in Mayfair, Iwan Wirth leaps from his chair to greet me and apologises for being early. Tall, broad-shouldered and open-shirted, he has the eagerness of a bouncy cub rather than a young lion of legend, and yet there is something instantly reassuring about his solid presence and informal manner. “I am happy that people trusted me,” he says of his early days as a dealer, and you can see why they did.
Chubby baby face; dark curly hair framing a high, wide forehead; large black-rimmed glasses: his intellectual look stands out among the bland faces in suits and the blondes in diamonds who are our fellow diners. Several have beside them not one but two nearly-full glasses of champagne. Wirth, however, asks for water and launches into a story about a business “disaster” - he acquired a late Picasso portrait of his wife Jacqueline, signed in her lipstick, which no one bought for 12 years, at which point he “sold it at a huge loss”.
His quiet, serious voice, the hint of a German accent adding gravitas, distinguishes him from the generally pushy New York dealers (”American galleries are sharp”) who have long dominated the art world. Nevertheless, though self-deprecating at times, he also allows himself to revel. “It’s such a beautifully unregulated market,” he sighs, as if the entire art world were some particularly fine objet. “The whole system works with tools that would be illegal in any other market - fixing prices, having a cartel. The art market needs that. I really enjoy being in a market where one can be a real entrepreneur. And who knows for how much longer?”
Indeed. In the past four years, the Sothebys chairman Alfred Taubman has been imprisoned for price-fixing, the New York dealer Larry Gagosian has been embroiled in a tax evasion scandal, while in Germany questions have been raised about insider trading and the influence of Wirth himself on one of his clients, Friedrich Christian “Mick” Flick. The grandson of a notorious Nazi industrialist, Flick is showing part of his collection of contemporary art in an exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof - a state museum. German critics say that the collection looks suspiciously similar to a recent roll-call of work at Wirth’s three galleries: Hauser and Wirth, in London’s Piccadilly and Zurich, and Zwirner and Wirth, New York.
The art market, says Wirth, is a “people business” and “the relationship between a gallery and a collector is very close. It’s a creative process, and that can only happen when you like each other.” On the other hand, he says, “it’s more important to be a good book keeper” than anything else.
As if to moderate his own strength of character, he demurely asks the waiter’s advice on a starter. Tomato, onion and mozzarella salad arrives, piled up like a tottering red tower of Pisa, and collapses at the first stab of his fork. “I’ve ruined it,” he shrugs. The menu is waved away as if it were a distraction and then, without hesitation, he orders a main course, vitello tonnato (slivers of veal in tuna sauce), from the passing trolley, because it happens to catch his eye.
”You can be a good dealer but still not have a good eye. I believe in what I do. But that is not true for everyone who is successful in this market,” Wirth says. Cynics say it is easy for him to put his money where his mouth is because he has such a lot of it: in 1996 he married Manuela, the Hauser in Hauser and Wirth and heir to a giant Swiss retail fortune. She is now occupied with building up the family collection of contemporary art, housed at St Gallen, Switzerland, and is expecting the couple’s fourth child. Theirs was an office romance with class: Wirth’s mother-in-law, Ursula, a modern art collector, was a business partner at his first gallery.
There was “never any question” but that he would be a dealer, he says. As a child, he remembers learning to read for the first time when he was desperate to decipher the wall captions at a Giacometti exhibition. “I couldn’t afford collecting because I had no money, so I thought of a gallery, as the cheapest, most efficient way to be surrounded by art.” He wanted to study law because great 20th-century dealers, such as Leo Castelli, were lawyers by training, but he gave it up after three weeks.
When he was 15, he drew up a business plan and got himself a lawyer and a deal with a landlord. In 1986, aged 16, he opened his gallery, on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons and all day on Sunday: the only times of the week in Switzerland when school is out. He began with one artist - Bruno Gasser from Basel - who had responded to his out-of-the-blue letter with an invitation to a working trip in Egypt. “I couldn’t tell him I’d never flown,” says Wirth. “I did everything wrong. I didn’t have a passport, didn’t know how to check in, drank water from the wine glass.”
But the Hauser backing meant Wirth could soon lure the hippest talent from both sides of the Atlantic and across three generations. His vertical market business model includes the 93-year-old feminist sculptor Louise Bourgeois and the 33-year-old Polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal, the newest star of Saatchi’s “The Triumph of Painting” exhibition; the Americans Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades and Roni Horn; the Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist, whose installation “Homo Sapiens Sapiens” at the San Stae church in Venice is one of the most popular draws at the Biennale; and the Turner prize-winner Martin Creed.
Wirth got the big names because he realised from the start that “no artist needs a gallery in Switzerland. We had to give them a reason to show with us. We do more.” Providing production teams, technical crew, studios and storage, Wirth is the Mr Fixit of the art world because he understood instinctively that the old gallery model of buying and selling was outdated. “When Pipilotti came to us, she said, what I need is this, and this, and this. And we’ll spend four weeks setting up the installation for our new Jason Rhoades show [which is now open].” In an art world dominated by installation and video work, his youth works in his favour: he grew up in the age of information overload and makes no distinction between different media (”too boring to discuss, the brush is now everything”).
That his seriousness, too, is an advantage reflects the changing nature of the contemporary market, “a truly global business” that thrives on increasing affluence and education. “Our artists are considered difficult, so the entry level is high. We hardly ever meet idiots.” Yet art has “become a lifestyle”, he says, gesturing to the smart hedonists around us. “If you ask at this restaurant, 90 per cent would say they were interested in contemporary art. Twenty years ago it would have been 10 per cent. There are worse things you can do with your money than buy art. You’re not harming the environment. You’re not hurting other people.”
Most of his business is done in the US - New York “will remain the art capital of the world” - but London, to where he has just moved with his German-speaking family, has “more creative energy, the most interesting potential”. Confidence in the market, he believes, grew in America after 9/11. Why? “Confidence!” he replies with glee - dismissing the desert trolley but feasting on the lurid outsize Smarties (”you can’t stop eating them”) that come with the coffee - “Philosophically, it was about intimacy. How do you want to lead your life? People don’t want to travel... It’s a spiritual thing.”
It’s also a money thing. When I inquire into the rumour that all 35 of his artists are going to contribute a piece for his new home in Holland Park, he mutters “not all of them”, with a quiver of embarrassment. Who are his favourite artists? “I have 35 - I’ve never lost anyone.” What does he think of Saatchi’s collection? “No comment!” In a slip from evenhandedness that seems to astonish even him, he admits that “I’m not a fan” of a certain rival dealer, then grabs my arm and demands “Don’t write that!”
How would he reply to those who say visual art is in terminal decline? His eyes light up. “If it’s downhill, there’ll be lots of opportunities.” No, I say, I mean the rubbish flooding the market. “Oh, there’s much more of that than 20 years ago. That’s why you have to be ever more selective and choose your adviser.” But, as I ask for the bill, insisting that the FT always picks up the tab, he neutralises the salesmanship with a play at unworldliness. “Oh, I didn’t realise. I was worried, I had to stop on the way here to make sure I had enough money to pay.” And then, with the charming smile and firm handshake of old European courtesy, this perfect Swiss balancing act disappears into the jumble of a bright London street, leaving me wondering how many tricks I’d missed.
George Club, Mount Street, London
1 x tomato, mozzarella and onion salad
1 x smoked salmon with poached eggs and avocado
1 x veal in tuna sauce
1 x vegetable rissotto
2 x mineral water
1 x espresso
Total: £77.05
.
How, at the age of 34, does the son of a Swiss architect and teacher become the second most powerful art dealer in the world? Ranked number 11 in Art Review’s recent “Power 100” of the international art market, this London gallery owner is also judged more influential than the collector Charles Saatchi, Christies’ chief Francois Pinault, or the million-dollar-a-canvas painter Gerhard Richter. Will such a person be insufferably bumptious, or maddeningly nice? And will he mind that I am late for our lunch?
In the sedate calm of the George Club in Mayfair, Iwan Wirth leaps from his chair to greet me and apologises for being early. Tall, broad-shouldered and open-shirted, he has the eagerness of a bouncy cub rather than a young lion of legend, and yet there is something instantly reassuring about his solid presence and informal manner. “I am happy that people trusted me,” he says of his early days as a dealer, and you can see why they did.
Chubby baby face; dark curly hair framing a high, wide forehead; large black-rimmed glasses: his intellectual look stands out among the bland faces in suits and the blondes in diamonds who are our fellow diners. Several have beside them not one but two nearly-full glasses of champagne. Wirth, however, asks for water and launches into a story about a business “disaster” - he acquired a late Picasso portrait of his wife Jacqueline, signed in her lipstick, which no one bought for 12 years, at which point he “sold it at a huge loss”.
His quiet, serious voice, the hint of a German accent adding gravitas, distinguishes him from the generally pushy New York dealers (”American galleries are sharp”) who have long dominated the art world. Nevertheless, though self-deprecating at times, he also allows himself to revel. “It’s such a beautifully unregulated market,” he sighs, as if the entire art world were some particularly fine objet. “The whole system works with tools that would be illegal in any other market - fixing prices, having a cartel. The art market needs that. I really enjoy being in a market where one can be a real entrepreneur. And who knows for how much longer?”
Indeed. In the past four years, the Sothebys chairman Alfred Taubman has been imprisoned for price-fixing, the New York dealer Larry Gagosian has been embroiled in a tax evasion scandal, while in Germany questions have been raised about insider trading and the influence of Wirth himself on one of his clients, Friedrich Christian “Mick” Flick. The grandson of a notorious Nazi industrialist, Flick is showing part of his collection of contemporary art in an exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof - a state museum. German critics say that the collection looks suspiciously similar to a recent roll-call of work at Wirth’s three galleries: Hauser and Wirth, in London’s Piccadilly and Zurich, and Zwirner and Wirth, New York.
The art market, says Wirth, is a “people business” and “the relationship between a gallery and a collector is very close. It’s a creative process, and that can only happen when you like each other.” On the other hand, he says, “it’s more important to be a good book keeper” than anything else.
As if to moderate his own strength of character, he demurely asks the waiter’s advice on a starter. Tomato, onion and mozzarella salad arrives, piled up like a tottering red tower of Pisa, and collapses at the first stab of his fork. “I’ve ruined it,” he shrugs. The menu is waved away as if it were a distraction and then, without hesitation, he orders a main course, vitello tonnato (slivers of veal in tuna sauce), from the passing trolley, because it happens to catch his eye.
”You can be a good dealer but still not have a good eye. I believe in what I do. But that is not true for everyone who is successful in this market,” Wirth says. Cynics say it is easy for him to put his money where his mouth is because he has such a lot of it: in 1996 he married Manuela, the Hauser in Hauser and Wirth and heir to a giant Swiss retail fortune. She is now occupied with building up the family collection of contemporary art, housed at St Gallen, Switzerland, and is expecting the couple’s fourth child. Theirs was an office romance with class: Wirth’s mother-in-law, Ursula, a modern art collector, was a business partner at his first gallery.
There was “never any question” but that he would be a dealer, he says. As a child, he remembers learning to read for the first time when he was desperate to decipher the wall captions at a Giacometti exhibition. “I couldn’t afford collecting because I had no money, so I thought of a gallery, as the cheapest, most efficient way to be surrounded by art.” He wanted to study law because great 20th-century dealers, such as Leo Castelli, were lawyers by training, but he gave it up after three weeks.
When he was 15, he drew up a business plan and got himself a lawyer and a deal with a landlord. In 1986, aged 16, he opened his gallery, on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons and all day on Sunday: the only times of the week in Switzerland when school is out. He began with one artist - Bruno Gasser from Basel - who had responded to his out-of-the-blue letter with an invitation to a working trip in Egypt. “I couldn’t tell him I’d never flown,” says Wirth. “I did everything wrong. I didn’t have a passport, didn’t know how to check in, drank water from the wine glass.”
But the Hauser backing meant Wirth could soon lure the hippest talent from both sides of the Atlantic and across three generations. His vertical market business model includes the 93-year-old feminist sculptor Louise Bourgeois and the 33-year-old Polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal, the newest star of Saatchi’s “The Triumph of Painting” exhibition; the Americans Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades and Roni Horn; the Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist, whose installation “Homo Sapiens Sapiens” at the San Stae church in Venice is one of the most popular draws at the Biennale; and the Turner prize-winner Martin Creed.
Wirth got the big names because he realised from the start that “no artist needs a gallery in Switzerland. We had to give them a reason to show with us. We do more.” Providing production teams, technical crew, studios and storage, Wirth is the Mr Fixit of the art world because he understood instinctively that the old gallery model of buying and selling was outdated. “When Pipilotti came to us, she said, what I need is this, and this, and this. And we’ll spend four weeks setting up the installation for our new Jason Rhoades show [which is now open].” In an art world dominated by installation and video work, his youth works in his favour: he grew up in the age of information overload and makes no distinction between different media (”too boring to discuss, the brush is now everything”).
That his seriousness, too, is an advantage reflects the changing nature of the contemporary market, “a truly global business” that thrives on increasing affluence and education. “Our artists are considered difficult, so the entry level is high. We hardly ever meet idiots.” Yet art has “become a lifestyle”, he says, gesturing to the smart hedonists around us. “If you ask at this restaurant, 90 per cent would say they were interested in contemporary art. Twenty years ago it would have been 10 per cent. There are worse things you can do with your money than buy art. You’re not harming the environment. You’re not hurting other people.”
Most of his business is done in the US - New York “will remain the art capital of the world” - but London, to where he has just moved with his German-speaking family, has “more creative energy, the most interesting potential”. Confidence in the market, he believes, grew in America after 9/11. Why? “Confidence!” he replies with glee - dismissing the desert trolley but feasting on the lurid outsize Smarties (”you can’t stop eating them”) that come with the coffee - “Philosophically, it was about intimacy. How do you want to lead your life? People don’t want to travel... It’s a spiritual thing.”
It’s also a money thing. When I inquire into the rumour that all 35 of his artists are going to contribute a piece for his new home in Holland Park, he mutters “not all of them”, with a quiver of embarrassment. Who are his favourite artists? “I have 35 - I’ve never lost anyone.” What does he think of Saatchi’s collection? “No comment!” In a slip from evenhandedness that seems to astonish even him, he admits that “I’m not a fan” of a certain rival dealer, then grabs my arm and demands “Don’t write that!”
How would he reply to those who say visual art is in terminal decline? His eyes light up. “If it’s downhill, there’ll be lots of opportunities.” No, I say, I mean the rubbish flooding the market. “Oh, there’s much more of that than 20 years ago. That’s why you have to be ever more selective and choose your adviser.” But, as I ask for the bill, insisting that the FT always picks up the tab, he neutralises the salesmanship with a play at unworldliness. “Oh, I didn’t realise. I was worried, I had to stop on the way here to make sure I had enough money to pay.” And then, with the charming smile and firm handshake of old European courtesy, this perfect Swiss balancing act disappears into the jumble of a bright London street, leaving me wondering how many tricks I’d missed.
George Club, Mount Street, London
1 x tomato, mozzarella and onion salad
1 x smoked salmon with poached eggs and avocado
1 x veal in tuna sauce
1 x vegetable rissotto
2 x mineral water
1 x espresso
Total: £77.05
.
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