How 9/11 Never Went Away

Apart from the prospect of AI ending humanity in the next ten years, the big news this week was the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I saw a lot of reports and remembrances of people who died in the attacks, or of those who survived them, or even just experienced them, and I also saw a few comments about how we're still living with the effects of that day.

I think that last point is fairly obvious, but I feel like few sources commented on how you can draw a straight line from the attacks to the situation we're in now. I also feel like I didn't see enough posts (though there were a few) excoriating George W Bush for his response to the attacks, because that's what's influenced our current situation so obviously.

The first point is that, by invading Iraq more than a year after the attacks, after having sent his proxies to lie to the UN and to the American people about Saddam Hussein's ability to build weapons of mass destruction, Bush gave rise to the conditions that led to the formation of the Islamic State (ISIS or Da'esh) and their acts of terror throughout the Middle East and Africa. ISIS became a bogeyman for Westerners, especially those on the right who espoused Islamophobia. This gave ammunition to right-wingers who wanted to end immigration from the Middle East, just as Bush's wars in the region created a wave of refugees and migration as people tried to escape the violence tearing their homelands apart.

I think it's pretty clear that we wouldn't have had Donald Trump as US president if he hadn't gotten so much traction for claiming he'd seen Muslim families in Jersey City celebrating the attacks - he may have come to prominence by questioning Barack Obama's US birth, but his increasingly outlandish 9/11 stories were his first foray into running his mouth off and being rewarded for it.

Bush's war on terror also gave cover to a bunch of other countries as they demonized their own Muslim communities. Israel's response was fairly quick, and we're living directly with the consequences of that, as the US wages a war of choice on Iran - and one that makes the case for the invasion of Iraq look legitimate - essentially because Israel had started trading missiles with Iran.

There's also India and China. China used it as cover to oppress their Turkic Uighur minority in the west of the country, while India's BJP ramped up its anti-Muslim rhetoric and has ridden high on that ever since. China's actions briefly galvanized Western opposition, while India's enabled the populist prime minister Narendra Modi to emerge as a global figure as he leads the world's most populous country.

Those are all the global effects, for which the death toll has reached the hundreds of thousands, if not millions by now. On the personal level, the national security apparatus that the US put in place after the attacks has had its own long-ranging effects. The biggest one, which has also largely faded into the background but was a big deal when it happened, was Edward Snowden's 2013 revelation of NSA spying on the population through pretty much every large tech company around at that time.

There was also all the immigration enforcement, which expanded into curbing illegal immigration and all of CBP's and ICE's excesses since then. And it has to be said, as bad as Trump's policies have been, Democratic presidents have also signed off on them: the NSA spying scandal was during Obama's administration, and people defending Trump's family separation policy noted that immigration authorities had done the same under Obama, too.

Jason Burke, who wrote The 9/11 Wars, has talked about the failure of Osama bin Laden's wider vision for the Middle East and for "bleeding" America dry. I think the Onion's joke headline "FBI Uncovers al Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States" captures what's happened since much better - even things that weren't explicitly caused by the terror attacks have led to our loss of standing in the world, and to our loss of cohesion as a society. I'm talking about the political polarization and the widening economic inequality.

My question is, when is all of this going to end? At some point the principals who've dominated US politics and foreign policy for the last 25 years will shuffle off the stage - most of them have, but they've also given rise to others, and the nightmare continues.

My other question is whether there'll ever be accountability for the lies that led to squandered American and Iraqi lives, among others. George W Bush has been spared going down in history as the worst president by Trump, but no amount of sharing candy with Michelle Obama can obscure the fact that his actions led to so much suffering, over so long.

Unfortunately, I think I know the answer to that second question: too many people on both sides of the aisle were complicit, even just at the point of voting to authorize the Iraq invasion. So I won't hold my breath - but I live in hope.

A Tangent on Rule of Law and Property Rights in Byzantium

This two-month trip to Europe has allowed me to finish a couple of books that have been sitting on my TBR pile for too long, among which is John Julius Norwich's Short History of Byzantium. Lord Norwich is perhaps not my favorite historian, but I appreciate his ability to put together a coherent narrative for the thousand-year history of the Byzantine Empire, even if he himself didn't add any new scholarship to the subject. He also had a nice and catty turn of phrase, which livened up the books of his that I've read.

One of these bons mots came when Lord Norwich suggested that a Byzantine emperor nationalizing a certain industry amounted to socialism, avant la lettre. He was being cheeky, given that he was no fan of socialists or communists, but his joke points to something relevant beyond his target, which is the role of property rights in the concept of rule of law.

Lord Norwich's joke was that this emperor was nationalizing the means of production by taking over this industry. I take it as a fair point, although a government doesn't have to be socialist to ignore property rights - it just has to assume that every item of property in the country belongs to the government, which in this case can be a single monarch or junta.

It got me thinking about a concept I've been turning over in my head for a while (which I acknowledge is probably old hat to scholars who study this stuff professionally), which is that you can't have rule of law without well-defined property rights. In this case, I define rule of law as the idea that the law applies equally to everyone, whether that's the king, the president or the ruling council. Property rights, for my purposes, consist of the idea that certain items or intangibles don't belong to the government.

To put it another way, if there are no property rights, then effectively everything in a country belongs to the government, and you as a citizen (or subject, I suppose), legally own nothing. The government can take your house, your car or your laptop whenever it wants and there's nothing you can do about it. This means there's also no rule of law, because if the government owns everything then the law is whatever it says it is at that time. This is indeed a pretty good definition of the legal status in autocratic empires such as Rome and Byzantium, but probably also France under the absolute rule of Louis XIV or China under its Communist Party.

On the other hand, if there's a mechanism for a private citizen to obtain legal redress from the government for property being taken away, then that means the government's powers are limited, and rule of law becomes possible. More than that, there should then also be a well-defined legal basis for resolving disputes between individual citizens. I don't know anything about Roman or Byzantine law, but despite the voluminous legal codices put together by emperors such as Justinian I, I assume there wasn't any concept of individual rights as we understand it today. This is probably also how Napoleonic France approached things, despite having sprung out of the Revolution: I suspect that Napoleon was okay with liberty, fraternity and equality as long as he got to run everything - and take whatever he wanted from whoever he wanted.

Lord Norwich's joke may have been aimed at well-heeled Trotskyites of his acquaintance, but you can also argue that English history has been a slow crawl along that continuum from absolute power wielded by the strong, whose monopoly on state violence meant that if they really wanted your land, they could take it. Documents like the Magna Carta were the first steps toward the other end of the continuum, where the monarch and the state could be held accountable for injuries to individuals, even if the individuals they had in mind in 1215 were landowning nobles and other potentates.

It's not a long distance from these concepts to our modern understanding of what governments can do with their own citizens. Prior to the Second World War and the Holocaust, international law essentially suggested that a government could do whatever it wanted with its own citizens, whether they owed allegiance to the head of state or a duly elected government. When the Nazi government decided to massacre millions of its own Jewish, Roma, LGBTQ and disabled citizens, among others, the world community essentially decided that this state of affairs couldn't stand, and built mechanisms to hold accountable leaders (if not nations) who tried to do the same.

The success of these measure is debatable, but it's notable that the debate exists at all. Apparently, when an Armenian survivor of the 1915 genocide killed one of his Turkish oppressors, there was no legal framework to mitigate the charges against the Armenian, who was tried for murder. Now it seems logical to us that a crime like the Armenian Genocide or the Holocaust should be prosecutable - even if international law scholars would point out that there's still a lot more nuance than how lay people understand this question.

Anyway, this is how my brain works - John Julius Norwich makes a cheeky comment about socialist Byzantine Emperors, and I find my way straight through to absolutist monarchies, rule of law and crimes against humanity. All of which, it must be said, are questions that run straight through Byzantine history anyway, if in different contexts to our own. At any rate, all things being equal, I'd rather live in a society where the government can't just jack my shit with impunity, because that also means the government can't just shoot me and toss me in a ditch whenever it wants.

At any rate, if a government did that to me now, one hopes there would be some debate about whether it was justified. It's a big question, and one we've been trying to solve throughout human history.

England's Weird Problem with Ireland

One of the books I'm reading at the moment is The Song Rising, the third in Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series. I met Shannon at a Super Relaxed Fantasy Club evening in London back in 2018, and ended up checking out her books after that, starting with the (then) standalone Priory of the Orange Tree, and eventually moving on to her ongoing series. I wasn't sure at first if it was the kind of thing I'd be into, but as I got further into the first book I became gradually more hooked.

It's not exactly urban fantasy, though it takes place in London and features spirits, psychics and otherworldly beings. It's also not exactly science fiction, even though it's set in a future fascist dystopia and features a certain amount of advanced technology. It's an interesting mix of those two genres, with Victorian/Edwardian trappings and a heavy debt to penny dreadfuls and the culture of London gangs.

Another thing that's struck me, several times as I've read the previous books in the series but most forcefully again as I've read this current book, is the Irish through line permeating the books. It makes sense when you consider Shannon's name, and her protagonist, Paige Mahoney, but a key theme in the series is the ongoing anti-Irish prejudice displayed by the ruling entity, Scion, as well as normal people surrounding Paige. This all made me think of the weird relationship the English have with the Irish, something I observed as a foreigner to both cultures, but which I'm sure Shannon has experienced firsthand growing up in London.

I first moved to the UK after my final year of university in Göttingen, Germany, where among other things, I got interested in Ireland. That's the year that I got into the Pogues, Brendan Behan and James Joyce, as well as general Irish history, all washed down with copious amounts of Guinness and other stouts at my local Irish pub. Part of it was my ongoing obsession with the works of Northern Irish comics writer Garth Ennis, but I think I was just fascinated by meeting actual Irish people for the first time, whether a crowd of kids from Dublin or the manager of the Irish pub, a guy named Mick. I made friends with Mick and with the Irish exchange students, took a class on the history of the Irish Free State (1916-1921) and ended up going on a trip to Dublin, Galway and Belfast, which was super fun.

All this Irish-ness gave me a certain perspective, not to say bias perhaps, when I moved to London at the end of that academic year. For a while I hung out with the brother of one of my friends from Göttingen and some of his Irish pals, and otherwise I absorbed how the English viewed their neighbors from across the Irish Sea.

This was the aftermath of the Good Friday Accords, which essentially put an end to the decades-long emergency in Northern Ireland, although in those months when I was newly in London tensions erupted again in Belfast. Luckily they didn't ruin the Accords, but it's been clear ever since that the various sides are always at least a little mistrustful of one another.

As I say, I had a certain perspective on the Troubles and the English response to them, whereas for my peers at my first job, there in Southend in Essex, I suppose various IRA atrocities were still alarmingly fresh in mind. I remember being shocked by a case where some Irish people suspected of IRA connections had just been gunned down, and being equally shocked when my flatmate at the time justified it saying that the UK had been on such a high alert because of the IRA; incidentally, this is why trash bins are so difficult to find in public places in London, especially on the Tube.

There were other examples, like when a friend rebuked me for referring to Derry instead of Londonderry. He claimed that only Irish republicans called it Derry, but my experience had been rather that only the English used the other name; in my experience in Belfast even the Protestants called it Derry. Or, most hilariously, when another friend suggested that the IRA had been engaged in a genocidal war against the English, which seems... a bit much.

And moving on from my own circle of friends into the wider culture, a travel book named McCarthy's Bar came out around then. Written by a comedian named Pete McCarthy, it was about a trip he took in Ireland, in which the hook was that he went to every pub he could find that had his name on it. Notably, it features the following line: 

"Each 17 March brings to a head the inability of the English middle classes to deal with the Irish Problem, in the sense that Ireland is a problem because it exists."

I still remember that line, despite only having read it once over two decades ago while skimming the book in the local Waterstone's on my lunch break, because it squared so totally with my own experience. That line McCarthy wrote went on to talk about how celebrations of St Patrick's Day always brought out the English patriots, or nationalists rather, who got annoyed at celebrating a patron saint of Ireland instead of their "own" Saint George (though these folks would doubtless get annoyed if you suggested that George wasn't, himself, English).

That all took place in the years 2002-2004, when we were still less than a decade off from the Good Friday Accords. But there were more recent indications of the weird attitude of the English (though I think at least the Scots, if not also the Welsh, are guilty of some of this too) during the whole Brexit tomfoolery. Because of the unique and weird status of Northern Ireland, Brexit threatened to either re-erect a physical barrier between the Republic of Ireland and the North, which would have been a violation of the Good Friday Accords; or it would have put up a hard border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the island of Britain, which was seen as effectively ceding the North to the Republic.

Neither option was palatable, so the ruling Tories went for a third option. Some suggested that the Republic of Ireland should also leave the EU, while others, most notably former Home Secretary Priti Patel, rather astonishingly suggested using food shortages to pressure the Republic to accede to British demands over the movement of goods between the south and the north. The point about the food shortages is particularly galling in light of the history of the Irish famine of the 1850s, in which about half the population emigrated or died, all because the English not only refused to provide aid but also continued exporting food from Ireland.

While it may be unfair to tar all the English by association with their absolute stupidest person (Priti Patel, to be clear, though she has a lot of competition these days from the likes of Liz Truss, Kemi Badenoch and Boris Johnson, among far too many others), it's notable that someone felt able to say the not-very-quiet part out loud like that. As the commentary I linked to suggests, the British and the Irish worked well together and learned more about one another while they were together in the EU, but it's depressing that this kind of boorishness was so ready to come back to the surface once the Brexit negotiations got serious.

All of this is to say that I appreciate that touch in Samantha Shannon's Bone Season novels, in which the English nationalist overlords are particularly anti-Irish. It's not something you're as likely to see in an English writer's dystopian vision, but I find it notable that Shannon has made it such a key part of her story. It's a shame that these prejudices persist, even among people that you'd normally consider reasonably progressive or enlightened, and it seems a shame that these attitudes will only harden the longer the UK is estranged from the EU.

UK Election 2024: Labour's Coming Home

Amid all the Euro 2024 fueled jubilation, I haven't had a chance to comment on last week's election in the UK (or on yesterday's election in France). But ever since the results came in, I've been thinking about the return of the Labour Party to 10 Downing Street, and the parallels with New Labour in 1997. What crystallized it for me was rewatching the Britpop documentary, Live Forever, which is overall a pretty good encapsulation of what was going on back then.

Comparing the results of 1997 with those of 2024, they look pretty similar. Labour had 418 seats then and has 411 now. In both elections the Conservatives are in second and the Liberal Democrats are third, though now the Tories have way fewer seats than in 1997 (121 vs 165) and the Lib Dems have more (72 vs 46). One of the big changes is that there are more parties represented in Westminster now, with the notable ones being Reform and the Greens, neither of which picked up seats in 1997 (Reform didn't exist, but UKIP, its predecessor, was one of a couple of Eurosceptic parties that put candidates forward). The Scottish National Party has a similar number of MPs as it did then, in part because it suffered an electoral wipeout, while Sinn Fein has grown to be the largest Northern Irish party, which would have been unheard of then.

Keir Starmer is from the same wing of Labour as Blair was, specifically the more centrist wing. Like Blair, he came in after a stinging defeat for Labour under a more leftwing leader; though apparently Jeremy Corbyn is a bit further left than Neil Kinnock was. Starmer's also relatively young, though he doesn't give off the same cool-guy vibes Blair did. Not that I've had an opportunity to see lots of Starmer interviews, but it's hard to see him noodling on a guitar or playing head tennis with Kevin Keegan. On the other hand, he did chat to Max Rushden and Barry Glendenning of the Guardian Football Weekly, so there may be a cool bone in his body somewhere.

The cultural moment is very different from 1997, though there are some interesting similarities. The big difference is the sense of exhaustion that's permeated Britain in the last couple of years. The country was hit hard by the pandemic and by Brexit, and by the mess the Tories left. Britain under Margaret Thatcher and John Major was a two-speed economy, with all the growth concentrated in the Southeast and the more industrial regions left behind. Britain under this vintage of Tories has that dynamic, though the hollowing out of anywhere outside London and the Home Counties has just accelerated in the past 30 years, plus it's suffered from austerity since 2010.

To put it another way, Britain before 1997 was just stultifying, where many young people had no option but to go on the dole. Britain up until 2024 hasn't even let them do that, because of the cuts to benefits implemented by the Tories (and to an extent by New Labour before them). Instead, young people have had to leave university in debt because of higher tuition fees, find worse and more cramped flats to live in (all in London, because that's where the jobs all seem to be), and pay for all this with increasingly precarious zero-hours contract jobs that offer no security or chance for advancement. The celebrations feel more muted now, probably because no one has any energy for a proper knees-up.

Culturally, Britain doesn't really feel like it's on the ascendant now, either. Part of that is the nature of the culture industry, and specifically the music industry - there's a reason why the Live Forever documentary is about music rather than sport or art or cinema. 

One side effect of all those young people on the dole was that they had time to make music, so we saw a great flowering of unique artists like Morrissey and the Smiths, Depeche Mode, Erasure, the Cure, New Order and loads more. These artists, who sang in their native accents and didn't try to emulate American mannerisms like some of the more popular singers and bands, so we got the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays, and these gave way to Suede, the Auteurs, and eventually to Blur, Pulp and Oasis. 

Now it seems a lot harder to find the new Morrissey or David Bowie or Robert Smith or Noel Gallagher. I'm sure there are great bands all over Britain, but none of them seems to have broken through to the mainstream or to the US. My suspicion is that Taylor Swift is the most popular artist in Britain right now, even though she's not British herself. 

This isn't to disparage any of the great grime or UK garage bands out there, by the way - Britpop was a lot of things, but it wasn't diverse, and there were precious few non-white faces among all the bands I loved as a teenager. Whereas now you can have someone like Stormzy headlining a stage at Glastonbury. It's just a sign that the culture industry is more fragmented than it was back then.

Of course, the 90s were a strange moment for Britain overall. It wasn't just music, as Live Forever points out, and as John Harris's book The Last Party also stresses (though Harris's book is more focused on music). British cinema was getting exciting, though the only names I can really point to are Danny Boyle and Ewan MacGregor. In art, Damien Hirst was probably the most visible face of an art movement that includes Tracey Emin and was doing all sorts of innovative stuff in the 80s and 90s. Live Forever even goes beyond its musical remit to talk to designer Ozwald Boateng, who was also held to embody the virtues of the UK back then.

Just about the only thing that seems to have the same hold on the British imagination now as it did in 1997 is football. The England team of the 90s benefited from an explosion of funding following the creation of the Premier League, and from a lot of goodwill as the game cleared out the violent hooligans and became something that everyone, notionally, could enjoy. Just as importantly, black players were starting to come through and play regularly for England, better reflecting the cultural and ethnic mix of the country.

The English game of the last few years may not have suffered from violent fans or a European ban like it had in the 80s, but since Gareth Southgate was hired as head coach of the men's national team, results have been a lot better, with England reaching the semifinals of the 2018 World Cup (the first time in any tournament since 1996), then the final of Euro 2020 (the first since 1966), and after a disappointing, but actually on-par quarterfinal exit from the 2022 World Cup, England is currently one of four teams remaining in Euro 2024.

Incidentally, I'm going into this level of detail to record the ongoing savage culture war that's raging over whether Gareth Southgate is a good manager or not. I'll probably go into that in detail in another post, but here it's worth pointing out that Southgate makes for a nice callback to the 90s, because he was in that Euro 96 team that reached the semifinals before losing to Germany (indeed, it was his missed penalty that sank England). You kind of wonder how much that sense of the country being behind the team has permeated how he approaches the job now - certainly London didn't feel as bound by love for the England team during the years that Sven-Göran Eriksson, Fabio Capello or Roy Hodgson managed them.

I suppose, coming back to the Starmer vs Blair theme, that Starmer appealed to football via the Football Weekly podcast because that's the one thing that still ties together a majority of people in Britain, or at least England. Blair could invite Blur and Oasis to policy confabs and No 10 cocktail parties, because they were the biggest bands in Britain and most people knew about them. He could champion British filmmakers and artists because all of them were firing on all cylinders, whereas now Starmer really can only use football to connect with people.

There's also a cynical comment to be made here: with culture so fragmented along lines of ethnicity, race, sexuality, etc, football is the only thing that won't subject Starmer to accusations of favoring one group over another. It sounds a little stupid to say it, until you remember how apoplectic certain subsets of England fans got when the team would take the knee for racial justice in 2021.

In 1996, about a year before Labour won the election, Britain was enthralled by the first tournament on home soil in a generation (remember, the Scots also qualified). The song of the moment was Three Lions, by the Lightning Seeds along with comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner, characterized by its chant that "football's coming home". Blair used that slogan on the campaign trail, tying himself into all the cultural strands that the electorate loved.

Three Lions fell out of fashion for a while, but made its comeback in 2018, and has been trotted out at every tournament since then. Just our luck, then, that it's being sung on the terraces in Germany just as, back home in the UK, Labour's coming, at long last, home.

UK Election 2024: July 4th Means Independence from the Tories

This week the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, set the date for a general election for July 4th. My original headline for this post was "About Damn Time", but I decided instead to go with a play on words relating to the US's Independence Day. This Tory government has been a disaster, and it's time the UK broke the shackles and liberated itself from their haphazardly misrule.

I say "this" Tory government, but which do we mean? There's the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government that ruled from 2010 to 2015; the Tories ruling on their own under David Cameron from 2015 to 2016, when he had to resign after the Brexit referendum turned out for Leave; the Theresa May government that lasted from 2016 to 2019; the Boris Johnson government that held the reins through the Covid pandemic until 2022; Liz Truss's 45-day tenure in 2022; and finally, Rishi Sunak's government, which has been in power since then.

In that time, other than the 2010 general election that brought the Tories to power after 13 years of Labour rule under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, there have been three general elections, in 2015 (which gave Cameron's Tories enough of a majority to rule without the Liberal Democrats), in 2017 (to cement Theresa May's position post-Brexit vote, but ended up forcing them to team with Northern Ireland's DUP), and finally in 2019, when Boris Johnson faced off with Labour under Jeremy Corbyn and returned a pretty strong majority.

They've all been pretty terrible. We might look back at the pre-2015 days as a beacon of stability - and they were - but those five years saw the Tories pretty much run roughshod over their coalition partners as they slashed public services, cut welfare benefits and raised university tuition fees. I was in the UK for the first three years of their term, and I remember the student protests at the tuition rises, which went from about £3,000 a year to over £9,000 - that might seem laughable to us in the US, where you have to fork out much more than that even to attend public universities, but consider that tuition tripled from one year to the next, effectively putting higher education out of reach for a certain amount of families.

That period was notable because the Tories had come to power on a wave of excitement about their young, dynamic new leader, Cameron, who urged people to call him Dave and seemed to court the votes of the bien-pensant sections of the electorate by biking to Parliament and installing a wind turbine on his home. He seemed to position himself as a sort of Conservative Obama, and he also benefited from anger at the chaos caused by the 2008 global recession - stuff like that always blows back against the government in power, and a significant portion of UK voters in 2010 seemed to blame Gordon Brown for the recession.

Never mind that it was actually caused by bank deregulation and risky behavior by investment bankers, plus the infamous sub-prime mortgages and credit default swaps. Voters were pissed off at their lost jobs and cratered portfolios, and they needed someone to punish. The sad thing is that they punished possibly the one politician, Brown, who was best-placed to cushion the UK's fall.

There was some idea that Cameron's Tories had shed the "nasty party" label that's always dogged the Conservatives, but he immediately started talking tough about "benefit scroungers" and illegal immigrants. In 2013 his Home Office secretary, Theresa May, approved a campaign where vans inviting illegal immigrants to go home or face arrest drove around.

This same kind of atmosphere led Cameron to call a referendum on whether the UK should stay in the EU or not. When it blew up in his face, he resigned, leaving the UK to enjoy May's premiership and everything that followed. May's time was pretty chaotic, as she found herself trying to negotiate a Brexit deal that would actually deliver on the Leave campaign's (false) promises, and having to fight against her own party multiple times in the process. Part of the problem was that, notwithstanding promises to avoid a "hard" Brexit, the other option was taking on a similar status to Norway or Switzerland, which meant following directives from Brussels - which they'd been doing before 2016, but with the crucial difference that, as members, the UK could actually influence those policies.

When May resigned, Johnson became the Tory leader and promptly won a landslide election against Corbyn, painting him as a dangerously loony socialist. This delivered the famous Red Wall Tories, i.e. those who stood for constituencies that had voted Labour (ergo "red") for generations, in part because of fears that a Corbyn government would immediately rejoin the EU.

Johnson faced two big crises in his premiership, the pandemic and the Ukraine war. Neither was his fault, and the latter allowed him room to actually behave in a moderately statesmanlike way, by becoming one of Ukraine's most vocal defenders. Of course, this was after decades of the UK turning a blind eye to Russian oligarchs with ties to Putin turning London into their own playground; on top of that, the war kinda saved Johnson's bacon, by diverting attention from the scandal that arose when it emerged that he'd broken his own lockdown rules to host parties at 10 Downing Street.

His handling of the pandemic was pretty awful, even apart from Partygate, as it became known. He was probably the first major leader to catch Covid, and his government's inability to settle on a policy (lockdowns vs herd immunity) led to way more cases and deaths than was necessary. Indeed, the only advanced economy that did worse was the US, which had its own mismanagement going on.

I could go on about Liz Truss and the shenanigans surrounding Rishi Sunak, but I don't have all night. The main point is to sum up the chaos that the UK has suffered as a result of this succession of Tory governments. Cameron's pitch in 2015 was that Labour would cause too much chaos, but in the end he destroyed the UK's biggest trade agreement, which has led to decreasing international confidence in the UK and gutted investment. Immigration has soared, even though the aim of Brexit was to kick the foreigners out, and UK businesses have a hell of a time exporting to the Continent. Brexit also almost destroyed the Northern Ireland peace accords of 1998, which depended on both Ireland and the UK being EU members, so there wouldn't be a hard border between the Republic and Northern Ireland.

For me, the original sin is Brexit, and everything bad comes back to that. Liz Truss may have taken just 45 days to tank the economy with unfunded tax cuts, but she wouldn't even have been in the conversation for PM if the Brexit referendum hadn't happened. Likewise with Sunak's signature policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda - if Labour had won any of those elections from 2010 on, he wouldn't have been there to implement this cruel policy.

So when I say that this upcoming general election signals independence from the Tories, I'm hoping that it breaks the back of the Conservative party for another few election cycles, just like Blair's 1997 victory did. I'm not naive enough to think that it'll destroy the Tories as a party, or naive enough to think that they'd be replaced by a more sensible center-right party.

But I do hope that it sends the worst, most xenophobic elements like Lee Anderson or Suella Braverman or Priti Patel packing from Parliament, never to be seen again. As a friend pointed out on Facebook when I posted about this very subject today, it could hopefully be an opportunity to introduce a more progressive voting system, which would give more representation to parties beyond just Labour and the Conservatives. At the very least, they could get ranked choice voting, which was the Lib Dems' pet project in 2010 and the main thing that the Tories bulldozed cynically to destroy their coalition partners.

Beyond that, I'm reminded of conversations I had with friends in the lead-up to the 2010 election. Some were so angry at Brown and Labour that they asked things like, "Who'd vote for Labour now?" I even remember seeing an article somewhere suggesting that saying you planned to vote Labour was enough to get you ostracized from your friend groups in some circles. Even back then I could see that Cameron's "call me Dave" act was false, and that they'd just pick up where Margaret Thatcher and John Major's policies left off.

Fourteen years later, I'm absolutely not above saying, I told you so.

I'm a Guy Who Thinks About Ancient Rome. Here's Why You Should Too

There's always some controversy happening on social media. Sometimes it's an ambiguously colored dress, or a YouTuber turns out to have a more exciting personal life than they've let on. In September 2023, it was the revelation that "most" men think regularly about Ancient Rome, to the bemusement of their partners.

I put "most" in quotes because presumably some men are denying that they think about Rome, and therefore not being recorded on TikTok. But as is the way with such things, the ones who do are taken as evidence that all of us do.

Regardless of how prevalent it actually is, the tone in the thinkpieces discussing the meme is of affectionate bemusement at the idea of thinking about Ancient Rome at all. Sometimes it's attributed to toxic masculinity, but overall it seems to be treated as this funny thing that guys do.

Well, I can confirm that I'm also a guy who thinks about Ancient Rome quite a lot. Part of it is patriotic pride: as an Italian, the Roman Empire sometimes feels like the only time we aren't seen as corrupt buffoons or louche aesthetes. In contrast to how Italians are seen now, people think it was full of manly men doing manly things like conquering Britain and, er, slaughtering Germanic tribes (sorry about that, Northern Europeans).

There's an age component to this too. I suspect that popular historians like Antony Beevor owe their entire careers to men like me who've reached the age where it suddenly seems important to know what happened at Stalingrad or during the Punic Wars, and have the financial wherewithal to shell out for five hundred-page tomes that describe them in excruciating detail.

I also like thinking about the parallels between the Late Roman Republic and our own current moment. Rome's transition from a republic, however limited the franchise, to a corrupt and violent despotism wracked by centuries of civil war, is instructive for those of us who don't want to see the US go the same way. Unfortunately, too many other people who think about the Roman Empire a lot actually would like to see the US go down that path. 

I should note right here that I'm not any kind of expert on Ancient Rome. My knowledge of that subject comes, in descending order of how much I've retained, from Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast, Asterix comics, family trips to Rome in the 1980s and 90s, Ridley Scott's Gladiator and Mary Beard's SPQR. I haven't read any primary sources, like Tacitus, Cassius Dio or Suetonius, nor have I made much headway with Stoic philosophy, despite it having had a bit of a moment here in the Silicon Valley in the last decade.

But not being an expert is, to my mind, precisely why it's worthwhile to consider the similarities of Rome's slide into authoritarianism with our own. All you have to do is describe an unequal society, with elites that grew more interested in consolidating their own power than in civic engagement, and you already see the parallels between late-republican Rome and the contemporary US.

It's also not much of a stretch to imagine parallels between certain people in our own era and in theirs. For example, if Donald Trump or Elon Musk had been alive then, it's easy to imagine them earning their riches in much the same way Marcus Crassus did. A member of the First Triumvirate alongside Julius Caesar and Pompey, and the richest man in Rome, Crassus made most of his money through speculative real estate purchases, stakes in silver mines and slave trafficking, but his side hustle really takes the cake. He apparently set up Rome's first fire brigade, but he only put out fires if the owner sold the property to him at a discount. He'd then rent the rebuilt properties back to their original owners.

Leaving aside comparisons to contemporary troublemakers, the story of Crassus, and the ongoing fascination with the Emperors of Rome, comes down to the fact that there are just so many colorful characters. Caligula made his horse a senator; three centuries later Valentinian died of apoplexy after furiously haranguing a diplomatic delegation; in between them Vespasian made light of the tradition of deifying emperors after death, with his last words, "Dear me, I think I'm becoming a god." He died of dysentery.

That said, these characters were able to be colorful because, as emperors, they had unlimited power. They only had unlimited power because Julius Caesar and a number of other generals put their ambition ahead of respecting Rome's rules. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, bringing his armies into Italy, he was doing something that centuries of precedent in Roman law hadn't considered a loyal general might do. When Donald Trump claims, against all evidence, that he's the rightful winner of the 2020 election, he's following a long tradition.

Speaking of Trump, do you know who else is thinking about Ancient Rome? The extreme right. Though they aren't just thinking about Ancient Rome. They also like the Spartans, thanks in part to Zack Snyder's 2007 film 300 and the 1998 comic by Frank Miller from which it is adapted. Comments by both Snyder and Miller seem to refute links to the "clash of civilizations" that was in vogue during those years after 9/11, but many critics have drawn the parallel between the white Spartans and the non-white (and monstrous) Persian army. 

Snyder and Miller aren't the first to portray the Spartans as the Classical equivalent of Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name. That myth goes back to Roman times – which I suppose means that what Roman men thought about several times a day was the Spartans. Historian and fantasy author Myke Cole devoted an entire book, The Bronze Lie, to dismantling this myth of Spartan martial prowess. From what he could tell, the myth seems to come from the fact that Sparta was the only Greek city-state that actually trained for war from time to time.

You sometimes get the sense Cole is tilting at windmills, including when he criticizes the overabundance of the "moron label", as he calls the Molon Labe tattoo that shows up on a lot of Second Amendment activists' arms. Molon Labe being Ancient Greek for "Come and take them", which is what the Spartans apparently said in response to a Persian demand to lay down their arms.

Cole isn't the only writer combating some of the myths that we have about the ancient world. Many scholars push back on the idea that Ancient Greece and Rome were "white", an idea that comes from the Enlightenment. They argue that our conceptions of race wouldn't have made sense to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, whose populations drew from ethnic and cultural groups from all over the Mediterranean. Still, this hasn't deterred White Nationalists, Nazis and other accelerationists from linking the supposed whiteness of the Classical world to Victorian conceptions of Whiteness, which get sanitized into the concept of "Western civilization".

According to Donna Zuckerberg, author of Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (and the sister of one Mark Zuckerberg), the far-right sees Ancient Greece and Rome as racially pure, patriarchal societies that were superior to our own supposedly decadent multiculturalism. The irony is that Rome became even more unstable after it transitioned from a republic to an empire.

The period in which Augustus ruled is held up as one of the golden ages of Rome, and the Empire hit its peak more than a century later under the so-called Five Good Emperors (not all of whom were good, and there weren't five of them). There were several violent transitions in that period, notably 69 AD, the Year of Four Emperors, but Nerva, the first "Good Emperor" was also installed thanks to a coup.

That point gets glossed over because of worse times later: there would be a Year of Five Emperors and a Year of Six Emperors, with pretenders to the throne popping up all over the Empire for the next few centuries. One emperor got the post because the Praetorian Guard murdered his predecessor and then auctioned the throne off to the highest bidder. The reign of Augustus may have ended the chaos of the Late Republic, but its genesis as a murderous power struggle meant that the Empire would always be vulnerable to whichever general or governor could get enough legions to support him.

Despite that, there are still many who fetishize Augustus. A number of personalities at the Claremont Institute, like Donald Trump's former advisor Michael Anton, have floated the idea of a Caesar-like figure, "halfway between monarchy and tyranny", who would be able to pull the US away from what they perceive as everything wrong with the country: wokeness, transgenderism, censorship, etc. The concept is called Caesarism or Red Caesarism.

Augustus has fans beyond extreme rightwing White House advisors. None other than Mark Zuckerberg is said to be a huge fan of the first Emperor, even apparently modeling his haircut on the Roman style sported by Julius Caesar, Augustus, and any number of dapper early Empire gentlemen. In a 2018 interview Zuckerberg mused to the New Yorker that Augustus established world peace "through a really harsh approach". This isn't to imply that Zuckerberg wants to make that tradeoff, but it's a little worrying that the man who gave us the Cambridge Analytica scandal is weighing the pros and cons. Mike Duncan's response to this, when interviewed by Rolling Stone, was to note that this "isn't great. Because just for the record, Augustus was kind of a sociopathic murderer."

The thing that jumps out to me about the whole "thinking about Rome" bit is that, if we're talking analogies, we're probably just at the first stage of the collapse of the Republic, when some of those great generals were finding they enjoyed being dictators. Julius Caesar is famous because of Shakespeare's play, and his ties to Augustus, and the fact that his assassination, instead of ending the crisis, brought it to the point of civil war.

Augustus took advantage of the Roman fear of kings – very much like ours – to call himself "princeps" or first citizen. He wrapped himself up in familiar iconography to assure the Romans that he wasn't doing what he was clearly doing. Crucially, he also managed to stop the wars tearing Rome apart.

However, his taking power ultimately was the start of Rome's chaos, not the end, and it'll be the same if the US falls into Caesarism. That's something worth thinking about three times a day, and not just for men.

All the President's Men: They Don't Make Them Like That Anymore

Since this month is pretty light on things leaving HBO Max, my viewing has been a little more scattershot of late. Instead of worrying about what's about to leave, I've checked out movies on other services, or just about anything that caught my eye. Last weekend it was Everything Everywhere All At Once (which was pretty ace) and this weekend I'm rewatching All the President's Men.

The only other time I watched it was back in 2005, on one of the first weekends I was at journalism school. They wanted to show us an idealized version of one of American journalism's greatest hits, presumably to inspire us to reach the same kinds of heights as Woodward and Bernstein. I don't know if it necessarily worked at that goal, but it did inculcate a love in me for movies about journalism.

For one thing, I like the procedural aspect of it. You've got Woodward and Bernstein chasing down leads bit by bit, sometimes doorstepping a contact, other times working the phones. You see them taking calls at all hours of the day, grabbing food in between meetings, and getting yelled at by their editor for not having enough to go on. So from that perspective, it really does do what my J-school was hoping to communicate, which is the detail work and the tenacity needed to land an investigation.

The other journalism movie I can think of that showed the legwork to the same degree is Spotlight, which I think I'm due for a rewatch as well. That said, I also have a big soft spot for the Post, which is less about the procedural, nitty gritty of journalism and more a high-minded discussion of what the press is for. Probably have to rewatch that one as well.

Now, the main thing that those two more recent movies are missing is the weird naturalism of 70s movies that pervades All the President's Men. Part of it is technological, like when Woodward and Bernstein are driving in a car at night, and they drive through a deep enough shadow that the screen goes completely black, though you still hear their voices. Even into the 80s and 90s, filmmaking technology couldn't cope with dim lighting the way it can now, although clearly the director of this film probably wanted that shot to look natural, to the point of sacrificing the visuals. I don't think a modern film would get away with that.

Then there's the sound production. You have a lot of background hum, whether from whatever's happening in the shot or just the noise the microphones picked up back in the 70s. My favorite moment, though, is when Bernstein's talking to a source outside and a jet flies past, making the two characters have to shout. I can only assume that's on purpose, possibly even to evoke what happened when the real Carl Bernstein was having that actual conversation, but once again, you can't imagine a heavily curated and managed film in 2022 having that same feeling of artful sloppiness.

This is a thing that's always fascinated me about movies from the 70s. You start to see it in the late 60s, not only when New Hollywood directors were coming up but even in something like Bullitt, where shots were deliberately staged differently than they might have been just a decade earlier. The framing of shots and the way sound is recorded are deliberately done poorly (like lens flares), to make things seem more natural. There's also an odd quality to the way lines are delivered, which you wouldn't hear in movies now, again probably to sound more like how people were thought to speak.

It's gone by the 80s, where shots are framed in more traditional ways, although the first Superman film with Christopher Reeves, from 1978, is also shot in that more straightforward style, so it might be a question of what fits the content, too. I have to say, though, as odd as the framing and sound mixing are in movies from that era, I never quite get tired of it, even if the special effects aren't as good as now.

The other striking thing about watching All the President's Men in 2022 is how little has changed, and how much. We've just spent the summer watching hearings about a president's criminal misdeeds (the January 6 insurrection), and read about an entirely different set of misdeeds (the improper handling of classified material at Mar-A-Lago), so that's how little has changed - dishonest president doing dishonest things.

What's different, of course, is the willingness of said dishonest president's own party to condemn him. All the President's Men makes a point of having various Republican characters denounce what the Committee to Re-Elect the President was doing with regard to the Watergate break-in. I can't imagine future movies made about the current era being able to find quite as many Republicans willing to criticize Donald Trump, witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson notwithstanding. Especially when you consider that a lot of these supposed Republican critics of Trump are on record as saying they'd vote for him again.

I don't want to say that the events depicted in All the President's Men seem quaint in comparison to thousands of yahoos storming the Capitol, because going by the portrayal onscreen in that movie, the burglars hired by Nixon's people were just as incompetent as Trump's coterie. And one has to remember, the first time Trump was impeached was for doing stuff to undermine his rival, just like Nixon was doing. Still, it's not quite the same as whipping up a mob to kill your own vice-president and disrupt the electoral process.

Though if that security guard Frank Wills hadn't discovered the break-in, who knows what Nixon might have unleashed later on in his second term?

Quick Thoughts on Judas and the Black Messiah

Just finished watching Judas and the Black Messiah on HBO Max, and I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to check it out earlier. As with so many movies and books in my various queues, there was always something more urgent to watch, but the spur for me to watch it now was the fact that it's set to disappear from HBO Max at the end of September.

The first thing to say is that the movie is stuffed with magnetic performances. Daniel Kaluuya is the most obvious one, playing Chairman Fred Hampton, but LaKeith Stanfield does a great job as Bill O'Neal and so does Jesse Plemons as FBI agent Roy Mitchell. Kaluuya and Stanfield have rightly been recognized for their performances, but I was struck by Plemons in this, how he's clearly evil but also, to an extent, conflicted by what he's meant to be doing. 

What I liked about his performance was contrasting it with his roles in Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad, which are clear opposites to one another, while in this film he's somewhere between the boy in Friday Night Lights and the sociopath in Breaking Bad - he has things he cares about, and isn't even completely unsympathetic to what he's asking of Bill O'Neal, but he's quick to harden his heart and do what his superiors order (with Martin Sheen playing a gross and sinister J. Edgar Hoover, making a nice change from Jed Bartlet).

Of course, it's perverse to write about Judas and the Black Messiah and only single out the white dude for praise, so let's be clear that Daniel Kaluuya is amazing. His speeches suck you in from the first scene, and the speech he gives when he gets out of jail was especially electrifying. Beyond that, I loved his relationships with Deborah, Bill, even the other gangs that he enlists into the Rainbow Coalition.

As far as the history, it's an era that I know so little about, even though the Black Panthers were founded just across the Bay in Oakland. That said, it's not surprising that a group that couched the racial liberation struggle in Marxist/Maoist terms would be hard for American culture to understand. But it was fascinating to see the organizing that they did, in addition to their more proactive methods of countering police brutality. It makes me want to find out more about them, because a cursory search on their Wikipedia page just now shows that there was a lot to the original organization, good and bad.

One thing that the movie elided but that I thought would have been interesting to raise was that Rainbow Coalition that Fred Hampton put together. He's depicted pulling together other Black gangs in Chicago, as well as Puerto Ricans and the Young Patriots, which look like a white supremacist movement, mostly because they're all shown to be southern whites and they're standing in front of a Confederate flag. It turns out that they were a far-left movement that also advocated class struggle, but aimed at poor whites from the South.

Knowing that, it makes more sense that Fred Hampton would have been able to bring them into his movement, but it would have been nice to see it spelled out better. The fact that there was a revolutionary group aimed at poor whites is a pretty eye-opening idea, since the portrayal of them on film usually seems to lean on the racism.

Of course, part of my problem is that my understanding of the 60s is mediated almost exclusively through Star Trek, Spiderman, music (Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel especially) and repeated viewings of Forrest Gump when I was in school. The latter, in particular, does a nice job of transmitting the atmosphere of the 60s, but doesn't go very deep, and none of those sources can encompass the wide sweep of everything that was happening then. So we end up with cartoonish portrayals of the Black Panthers or other movements of the era, without understanding what they were actually about.

That's why I liked this movie so much: it goes into a topic that I feel I ought to know more about, anchoring it around a fascinating personality in the form of Fred Hampton. And by showing us what was happening in the 60s, it lets us draw a comparison with how race relations are going now, showing how despite certain markers of progress, there are still the same power structures in place that led to Hampton's assassination.

As I mentioned, Judas and the Black Messiah is streaming on HBO Max through the end of September. I'd have liked to watch it earlier, but I'm glad I caught it now.

Mike Duncan vs Mary Beard: Different Approaches to History

A couple of months ago I wrote a post talking about how much I was enjoying Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast, and how it was sticking with me more than previous attempts to learn about Roman history, including Mary Beard's SPQR. Now that I've finished Duncan's series (as of yesterday) and had a chance in Italy to review some of Beard's book, I thought it would be a good time to look at the two different approaches to history and why I responded better to one than the other.

Part of it is clearly the way my brain retains information. Over the course of several months, I listened to Duncan narrate various points in Roman history, and I think the repetition helped facts to stick in my mind. He also helpfully pointed out when an important figured entered the historical record, so that my mind was primed to learn more about this person I'd been told to expect.

By contrast, when I read SPQR it was in my lunch breaks at work, and in the evenings, and at times I've found that I focus too much on getting through pages to really take in what I'm reading. I have this romantic idea of how many books I should be reading each month or year (4 and 50, respectively), and sometimes find myself chasing page counts rather than luxuriating in the prose or the facts for which I'm ostensibly reading a book. It seems likely that SPQR fell victim to that, as other books have before it.

Ironically, I'm finding that in certain circumstances the antidote to that forgetting is to read multiple books at the same time, a few pages at a time. Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of several books I'm reading (or rather rereading) at the moment, and I feel I'm retaining more than I did the first time I read it, back in 2003 or so.

The other difference between SPQR and the History of Rome is how they're organized. SPQR is clearly a work of erudition, drawing on Beard's expertise in Roman and Classical history, but looking at it again last month it didn't seem organized in the way I'd have preferred (I'm tying myself into knots to avoid saying that it's poorly organized, because I don't think it necessarily is - it's just poorly organized for me).

I suppose this is how my brain organizes information, but I need that spine of who was in charge, and in what sequence, to take in the sweep of history. This is why I've retained more of John Keay's China: A History, than of his India: A History. The book on China is given shape by explaining how each of the major dynasties arose, while India's history is a little more messy and so I have more trouble understanding the significance of the Maurya Empire, among others. All I know is that it came long before the Mughals, but I have precious little understanding of what happened between them - hence why I'm also rereading that book.

Another example is British history, or English history, if you prefer. A couple of years ago I picked up Simon Schama's History of Britain, thinking that it would be good to finally have a grounding in the history of the nation in which I've spent most of my life, apart from the US. His books are well-written, don't get me wrong, and I did get some understanding of that sweep of history, but for whatever reason his middle volume, on the English Civil War and the various religious wars, escaped me.

Subsequent to that, I picked up a copy of Rebecca Fraser's Story of Britain, which in the UK is (possibly cheekily) titled A People's History of Britain, and which I christened in my head A Tory History of Britain. It's defiantly old-fashioned, hanging its structure off the doings of kings and queens and nobles, and Oliver Cromwell; a review I read praised its focus, saying that it was superior to the current vogue for relating the daily life in "Boringshire".

Having read Fraser's book, though, I can say that the approach helps, conservative revisionism aside (and besides, Robert Tombs's The English and Their History made Fraser's Tory History look positively Blairite). Don't ask me to distinguish between the Angevins and the Plantagenets, or to put the Poitevins into that historical context [never mind, I just looked it up on Wikipedia. Ed.], but between one thing and another I have a better sense of how the Stuart dynasty failed and gave way to the Hanoverians, who led to Queen Victoria and the current British royals.

By the way, this isn't to say that history should never deviate from talking about what nobles and royals were doing. The History of Rome took a couple of episodes to talk about what daily life was actually like in different points of the empire, and did so in a way that made it come alive better than any source I'd seen before. That said, his series misses out on what women were doing during those centuries of Rome. This is in part because the sources we have available don't say anything about women, although he has a lot more to say about various empresses at the end of the Western Empire.

Looking at SPQR again, Beard organized her book to touch on various topics, and only devoted one chapter to the emperors, from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius. Her overall scope ends in the early 200s, when Caracalla gave citizenship to all residents of the empire, as opposed to just Romans or Italians. There are certainly good reasons to foreground the historical currents rather than the emperors, who weren't always in control of events, but I can't help feeling I'd have gotten more out of her book if she'd used the sequence of emperors (roughly speaking; you don't have to go into too much detail on Otho, Galba or Vitellius, as she doesn't) as a starting point to talk about what life was like in the empire.

To put it another way, not much may have happened during the reign of Antoninus Pius, fourth of the so-called Five Good Emperors, but that's because Rome was enjoying an unprecedented period of stability since the accession of Nerva through the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian. Antoninus Pius isn't too interesting on his own, but he's worth mentioning when considering that stability, since it would end with the death of his successor Marcus Aurlius, and would never be attained again. SPQR didn't leave me with that understanding, and the History of Rome podcast did.

In Praise of the History of Rome Podcast

At some point during the pandemic, I saw an author (possibly Adrian Tchaikovsky but I haven't been able to confirm) mention several podcasts on ancient history, as potential sources for story ideas. These were The Ancients, The Ancient World and Fall of Civilizations, all of which I checked out. The Ancients is a weekly show that highlights different topics and has weekly guests, so I've dipped in here and there to download episodes that particularly interest me.

Fall of the Ancients is a narrative podcast by Paul MM Cooper, in which he talks about a different empire's collapse in each episode. I've downloaded them all but so far only listened to the first, about Roman Britain. 

The Ancient World is also a narrative series, with the podcaster, Scott Chesworth, starting from the very beginning of recorded history and going through most of Near Eastern History, prior to Rome. I downloaded the whole of the first slate of episodes, which started out by doing periodic surveys of what was happening all over the world in the earliest ancient times, including in South America. I haven't listened to his other sub-series, but at some point he mentioned Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast, which I duly also checked out.

The first thing that struck me about the History of Rome was that the episodes were super-short, at least at first. My main experience with history podcasts was Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, which regularly features episodes exceeding three, sometimes four or five hours, so episodes lasting less than 20 minutes were quite an inducement (though I should note that I do enjoy Hardcore History, length notwithstanding).

The other thing about History of Rome is that it started from the very earliest, semi-mythical origins of Rome and went through to the fall of the Western Empire. I decided a few years ago that I wanted to investigate Roman history a bit more, since what I knew was picked up from scattered (sometimes fictional) sources, and I wasn't left with any sense of how it went from kingdom to republic to empire, or really what happened after it became ruled by the emperors. I read Mary Beard's SPQR a couple of years ago, but for whatever reason very little of it stuck in my mind, whereas the short, focused episodes of History of Rome have given me a better understanding of how the empire played out following the assassination of Julius Caesar.

What's interesting is that Mike Duncan isn't an academic, but a political science major who just decided to start doing it at some point in 2007, and kept going for 179 episodes until the fall of the Western Empire. His Wikipedia page claims that he was working as a fishmonger during part of the recording of the podcast, but that he's since also served as a consultant on a Netflix series about Ancient Rome and an episode of the Simpsons. This, of course, makes him a good example of the DIY ethos that I used to love about the old Nerdist Podcast.

I'd say my grasp of the back-and-forth of Republican Rome is still incomplete (through no fault of the host), because there are a lot of names and wars to keep track of, so it gets hard to sort your Scipii from your Brutii from your Marian reforms and Sullan dictatorships. Though the fact that I now know Marius and Sulla were political rivals is thanks for Duncan's efforts.

On the other hand, since the switch to the Empire, in which he focused heavily on the emperors themselves, I've learned the order of emperors, so now I can name them all from Augustus to Pertinax. Presumably by the end will really be able to impress the ladies by naming every (western) emperor through Romulus Augustulus.

Jokes aside, it's easy to get confused about the order of emperors, since some of the craziest emperors, like Caligula, came quite early in the empire's history. By contrast, some of the better emperors came a century after Augustus, and it's been good learning about the Five Good Emperors and putting their achievements, like Hadrian's Wall, in historical context. 

This is all important to me because, being Italian, it's part of my heritage, however remotely, and because whenever I go to Rome, or really anywhere that has Roman ruins or artifacts, it would be nice to understand how those ruins or relics fit into the wider history. To put it another way, now that I know who Vespasian was, I can appreciate the Colosseum's place in Rome's history, and understand why Hadrian built that wall in northern England (which I still have yet to see, but that's by the by).

I'm still going through the podcast, having taken a quick break before the episodes about Marcus Aurelius to catch up with the rest of my podcast backlog. I expect to finish it at some point this year, though, and may pick up listening to another podcaster's sequel series on Byzantium (though that's still not complete even though it's at almost 250 episodes). I'm also considering checking out Revolutions, Duncan's follow-up.

Overall, though, I'm enjoying these bite-sized (usually under 30 minutes) episodes of a history that's always fascinated me, so I urge you all to check the show out, even if it did end ten years ago.

Why was the 1918 flu forgotten?

Like everyone else in the world since March 2020, I've become conspicuously well-informed about the previous big pandemic, the 1918 flu. I've seen (and probably shared) memes on social media about people being told to wear masks back then, or how cases surged, then dipped, then surged again over the two years that the pandemic raged across the world.

Now, that preceding paragraph needs to be rendered in a special sarcasm font, because I'm totally not well-informed about the 1918 flu, though I have indeed seen more information about it in the last 18 months or so, than I had in the preceding 40 or so years of my life. But what's spurring me to write this blog today is the fact that just the other day I was reading a book about the history of Canada, published in 2006, and it makes not a single mention of the pandemic.

I even checked the notes and index, and there's nothing about 1918 flu, Spanish flu, or pandemics in the entire book. This despite a big section on the First World War, in which Canada played a prominent role, and another on the aftermath of the war (though in fairness, that section isn't so big, because the author skips over much of the 1920s).

I've been hyper-aware of this gap in history since the coronavirus pandemic began, particularly in how books from around that period have ignored it. In fact, I think the first instance where I heard of the 1918 flu was in a series of books of alternate history by Harry Turtledove, which explore the long-term consequences of the South winning the Civil War.

When preparing to write this blog, I found this post on History.com, which suggests that this collective act of forgetting came about because people made a conscious effort to forget it. So distraught was everyone at the ferocity of the illness, that doctors made a point of not writing about it; on top of that, the world was recovering from the Great War, and America was racked by political and racial violence.

The problem is, this explanation is still unsatisfying. I get that the books I typically read wouldn't necessarily make a big deal of the 1918 flu, especially because they might have been aimed at kids or written ten years later. But given how many people it affected, it's hard to imagine everyone taking the collective decision to never speak of it again, and then abiding by that decision for the next hundred years.

For one thing, I've learned in the last 18 months that there have been other forgotten pandemics since 1918. Apparently there was one in the 1950s in Britain, for example, which I only heard about in the context of this one. I suppose it makes sense that if a disease is raging only in one or two areas, or if it's over fairly quickly, then you wouldn't hear of it again.

At the same time, I'm well aware of the polio epidemic that raged throughout the Western world in the early decades of the 20th century. That was only beaten in the 1950s, when the Salk vaccine came out, but presumably the long decades in which polio was a danger to people meant it was harder to ignore.

In this context, I can't help thinking of another forgotten event, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, which I'd never heard of before the HBO Watchmen show came out a couple of years ago. In that case, the forgetting is probably easier to explain, because it happened quickly (over two days) and in just one place, though of course there were other such incidents over the course of the 20th century. And, perhaps a bit distastefully, it was easy for the rest of America to forget given who was massacred in Tulsa - what would a reader of the New York Times have cared for a Black community in Tulsa being burned to the ground?

I think that, on top of people wanting to ignore these kinds of events, the reason we've forgotten them is that it was so hard to get information out back then. One point in that History.com article that I found interesting was that the papers covering the 1918 flu didn't really talk about the human impact of it - contrast that with now, when we see people on Facebook and Twitter who have caught the coronavirus, or died of it. We're all constantly talking about it, and doing so in a way that's leaving a more-or-less permanent record - something that didn't necessarily exist 100 years ago.

Still, given how unknown these events are, it makes you wonder what else we've collectively forgotten - and whether that forgetting is setting us up to repeat whatever's happened.

Au Revoir Afghanistan

Odd historical synchronicity (or maybe not) that the US withdraws from Afghanistan just in time for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. There's been a lot of ink spilled about what this all means, but the thing that's stuck with me the most has been the piece in Vox about the "death of liberal interventionism".

I didn't manage to read the whole thing (I try to keep my morning sweep of the news short), but one point that stood out was that, with the US riding high after the end of the Cold War and the successful intervention in Kosovo, we thought we had the moral high ground locked up... but there was nothing preventing us from doing "nation-building" were there wasn't such a clear danger of crimes against humanity. This is exactly what we ended up with after 9/11 and the rush to war in Iraq.

There are arguments for and against interventionism, but I lean toward the side that says we, as the world's superpower (at least back then), should put a stop to the most egregious crimes. I was suspicious of the motive to going to war in Iraq, even though I agreed with the idea that the world was better off without Saddam Hussein in charge of an army. I just didn't believe the arguments put forward in support of the Iraq War.

The rest is history. We quickly lost more soldiers in Iraq than the number of victims who died on 9/11, sank a crap-ton of money there to create ISIS, and lost a huge chunk of our international standing. Afghanistan wasn't as flashy a disaster, but it lasted longer and we end our involvement there with the Taliban back in charge, ready to roll back whatever notional gains we made in these two decades.

I'm not unmoved by the arguments that the US presence in Afghanistan bolstered women's education and participation in society, though. In fact, that's at the heart of what I'm talking about here. The liberal interventionism of the 1990s, as I remember it, was never only about projecting power, even if those being bombed by us at the time might remember things differently. The neocon nation-building projects of the following century, however, were absolutely about projecting power and scaring unfriendly regimes into not messing with us.

What the argument about intervention misses, and presumably that article in Vox, is that we've also become very bad at soft power. Not just since 9/11, but since Vietnam (or probably earlier, like Korea). These last twenty years of attritional warfare have sapped our ability and resolve to find non-military solutions to global problems, but it seems we never had much resolve for that approach... only now we don't even pretend to care.

One of my biggest complaints about the Obama years is that his administration oversaw US pullbacks from regions where we've been a presence for years. It may seem strange when I've just mentioned soft power, but several countries in Southeast Asia have seen cause to regret the withdrawal of US naval forces from their regions, because now China's throwing around its weight and claiming their territorial waters. US forces being there seem to have kept things calm, but now it's unlikely that the US can go back to keeping the peace there without a confrontation with China.

Africa is another example, more appropriate to talking about soft power. China is investing heavily in the continent, bankrolling infrastructure so that it can collect raw materials to feed its factories and markets. The US, on the other hand, is nowhere to be seen: I'm not saying we should be exploiting Africa's resources, but because it has little of what we want, we don't have any interest in engaging with the place. Meanwhile, China lets Africa's despotisms do what they want.

I don't see anyone in US politics who looks willing to engage with the rest of the world, and that frustrates me. Bernie Sanders, for all that I agreed with him on a lot of his platform, just seemed unengaged with the world - which may seem okay if you think that American power is exclusively a bad thing. But I do still believe that America has a positive role to play in world affairs, if it would just get itself together to do so, and if it could actually do so sensitively.

I keep coming back to initiatives like the Marshall Plan or the rebuilding of Japan. Both of those came with negatives, like the fact that the eastern half of Europe languished under the Soviets for fifty years, or that South Korea was a US-backed dictatorship until the 1970s, but Western Europe and Japan are stable, prosperous societies that grew with the help of the US. They may seem lost in the current multipolar era, but Japan essentially created the technological world we now live in, and Europe is a huge exporter of culture (including my beloved football).

This is all relevant for Afghanistan. When the US toppled the Taliban, it claimed it wanted to create a stable, open society like Afghanistan apparently had until the 1970s. If it had actually tried to help the country, rather than spending all its money on destroying Iraq and arrogantly presuming that the Afghans would be eager to turn into Americans, then the cultural gains that women, liberals and LGBTQ people have made there in the last two decades wouldn't be threatened now.

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

In the years since I've started this blog, I've frequently written an in memoriam piece whenever a pop culture personality died, if they were relevant to me in some way. I talk about my experience of their work, and how it's changed as I've grown, or if there's some other theme that's relevant to them.

In the case of Prince Philip, it's a little different. Not only am I not a fan of the British royal family, but the Duke of Edinburgh himself is a figure that I had little thought for. To the extent that I knew anything about him, it was the line, oft-repeated by the comedy panel shows, that he was given to racist gaffes when speaking in public. I also encountered the storyline in season one of Netflix's the Crown, which implied he was unfaithful to Queen Elizabeth, but that's about it.

I don't have any relationship to Philip as a pop-culture figure, and my perception of him is roughly unchanged since I started paying attention to his existence in about 2002. So why am I writing about him? I suppose it's because it hit me that his death brings us closer to the day that Elizabeth herself passes away, and the undiscovered country that will be Britain after her death.

There was a time, back in elementary school, that I found the Windsors interesting. But otherwise, I've always sort of rolled my eyes at coverage of them in the press, especially here in the US. Particularly funny to me is the idea that the British royals are constantly up to some form of shenanigans - Americans think they're constantly partying and sleeping around but the House of Windsor is so media-savvy that they keep a tight lid on any whiff of scandal (Prince Harry dressing up as a Nazi in his early 20s aside).

That said, when you stop and think about it, Elizabeth has been on the throne since 1952, longer than my mother has been alive. She's been married to Philip since 1947, when my father wasn't even a year old. Her reign coincided with the rebuilding of Britain after the Second World War, the cultural reinvigoration of the 60s, the doldrums of the 70s, the Thatcher years, the end of the Cold War, the War on Terrorism, economic collapse (again), nationalism and Brexit. Or to put it another way, there are people who were born after Elizabeth and Philip married, and died of natural causes before he died on Friday. Her reign, and marriage, accounts for a very long slice of history, as these things go.

So I wonder what a post-Elizabeth Britain will look like. Bits and pieces have been coming off since the 1940s, and more are looking like they're about to come off now. Prince Charles doesn't really have the love of the British people that his mother, or first wife, command, though I've also heard some people say good things about his involvement in causes like the environment. There was a time when people talked about skipping over Charles to go straight to Prince William, but he seems less in the public eye (though I appreciate him as a fellow early-baldy).

I see the attraction of converting to a republic, but I also don't find the idea of the monarchy that offensive, since it's a cultural institution that helps tie together the British public and gives them a shared sense of community that's sorely missing here. Britain's politics may be as different now from when she took power as politics in America are from their place in 1952, but the vast majority of Britons alive today were born during her reign, so no matter who lives at Downing Street, that whole country has tuned in at Christmas to hear Elizabeth give the Queen's Speech. 

This continuity matters, even when you have divisions as deep as those between England and Scotland or Wales or Northern Ireland, or between London and the rest of England, or between the north and south of England. Scottish talk of independence aside, there's a feeling of community and shared vision in Britain that is sorely lacking here - given that the US looks to be splitting asunder on Democratic/progressive versus Republican/reactionary lines at any moment.

So I read a certain amount of the coverage on Philip last Friday, since it's a reminder that Queen Elizabeth II, this presence that we and our parents have grown up with, is still a mortal person and who one day won't be there anymore. He may have been awful or great, or somewhere in between, but it's a reminder that eventually even the longest reigns come to an end.

In Praise of Sandman Mystery Theatre

I guess it's getting to be a cliche that I write to praise whatever comic I'm reading at the moment, but this post is just that: I restarted my collection of Vertigo's Sandman Mystery Theatre, and I'm glad I did.

I wasn't going to, initially. My Great Big Comics Re-read is in progress, as it has been for almost three years, and oddly enough it felt like I'd just recently read the collected and single issues I have. A few years ago I'd unearthed my old copies, which started about 24 issues in and missed the first issues of several successive storylines, and then at my now-departed local comics shop I found some beautiful collected editions that gathered one year's worth of issues in each volume. I picked up the first two volumes, which got me up to speed on where my single issues had started.

When I first started reading the series in the 90s, it was because of my interest in the wider DC Golden Age, spurred in part because of James Robinson's Starman series (which at one point featured a crossover with SMT and its artist, Guy Davis). It took a while for other Golden Age heroes to appear, but I was intrigued by the re-imaginings of characters like Hourman or the Crimson Avenger. And then I was further drawn in by the dark storylines and the trappings of the period.

It also helped that the series was subtly connected to Neil Gaiman's Sandman, where Wesley Dodds (the main character of SMT) is mystically influenced to start his adventures. This connection takes the form of prophetic dreams that plague Dodds in each story, and relate to the case he's working on. The connection was further exploited in the Sandman Midnight Theatre special, where Dodds encountered Dream during his captivity.

On this reread I'm less interested in the connections to the rest of the DC Universe (or the Vertigo-verse), but find myself more transfixed by the period details. I can't claim to be a great 1930s buff, but some of the other stories I've been enjoying lately, like HBO's Boardwalk Empire, put me in mind of SMT because of when they take place.

Part of the period detail is the look of Wesley Dodds, who's portrayed in most of the storylines less as a Batman-style playboy adventurer, and more as a kind of nerd who fights crime. Instead of being tall, handsome and strong-jawed, he's a bit dumpy and wears glasses.

But this portrayal of the main character brings to mind the other thing I'm enjoying about reading this series again. A key theme is the cruelty and indifference of the period, and it's unflinching in showing the effects on the victims and criminals of all the violence, racism and other horrors on display. Even the cops are casually cruel, as when one hints that he disavowed his sister because she married a black man; even Wesley Dodds wrestles with his own prejudices during a storyline that involves the murder of a string of gay men.

The reason I like this aspect of the series is that, especially in comics, we treat the 1930s as a time of innocence and fun, but it was actually fairly violent. It wasn't a patch on the 20s, when Prohibition turned basically all Americans into criminals, but it cemented the power of the gangsters who made their reputations in the previous decade. And on top of that, the Depression caused a huge dislocation of life and its certainties, which led to violence and fascism basically everywhere.

The Depression and the onset of fascism are hinted at in the book, but it's impossible to discount their influence on the tone of the book, and they make it a powerful response to the more libertarian/objectivist readings of superhero comics (e.g. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns).

That said, I don't know if I've ever met anyone else who read Sandman Mystery Theatre when it was running, so I consider it one of the also-rans of Vertigo. This is unfortunate, because I consider it one of the better-written books from the imprint, for the reasons mentioned above. I'm glad that DC published those large collected volumes I found, but the thing I'd really love to see is an HBO adaptation of the book - I think the themes would work quite well on TV now, and they'd be able to make the setting look really good.

And more than anything, it'd be nice to see the book gain some new fans, and potentially lead to more collected editions...

When Chicago Was More Than the Second City

I've long wanted to visit more of America, and the last few years living in the US have given me the chance to see parts that I wouldn't get to when I was flying over from London. Some of it, like Portland or the more mountainy bits of California, have been for pleasure, but work trips have let me get acquainted with the likes of Las Vegas (where I went for CES for four years), Fort Worth and now Chicago.

My company is based in Bloomington, Illinois, and I got the word two weeks ago that they wanted me out there for a meeting. I weighed up my options and quickly decided that I wanted to add a couple of days in Chicago, which is about 140 miles away. I got a rental car, and the company was happy that it would cost them less to send me home on Sunday (i.e. yesterday) rather than the Thursday after the meeting ended, so I was set.

And things improved when my girlfriend agreed to fly out to meet me the day I drove up from Bloomington, marking our first long weekend away together (cue "Awwwws"). She managed to get on the same flight as me, and even booked herself into the seat beside mine, which made the whole trip even nicer.

As for the city itself: I planned on one major sight per day, and while we missed the Field Museum, Wrigley Field and Shedd Aquarium, we did get to tour the river on a cruise that focused specifically on the architecture, plus we hit the American Writers' Museum and the Art Institute, so I think it's fair to say we caught a bunch of things that are relevant to my interests. We even went to the viewing deck at Hancock Tower, overlooking Lake Michigan and downtown, where we spent a romantic evening watching the sun go down and the city lights come on.

Top of the World, Ma

My girlfriend laughed at me the first morning on the bus up to the Architecture Center, when I said I was already feeling good about the place, and could kind of see myself living there. I've since moderated that since a friend who lives there explained how brutal the winters have been, but even she agrees that it's a great city, if only they would put it somewhere more temperate.

Mostly I was just excited to be in a big city again, especially one with so much history. Between paintings, music and architecture, as well as politics and business, so much of what we associate with the idea of America comes from Chicago, more so than from New York or Los Angeles. I've heard more than one person (on and off TV) poke fun at the regard Chicagoans have for their city, and the self-regard on the gift shop shelves can be a little overblown, but it is nice to think of a third pole to the US, separate from the two giant cities on either coast.

More than that, being in Chicago reminds you of a time, not even that long ago, when the US considered a lot of cities important: Detroit, St. Louis and so forth. And of a time when New York was just this scruffy, dirty, dangerous city over on the East Coast, rather than the gilded playland that shows like Sex and the City are at pains to present.

View from the start of the river tour

On the drive back to O'Hare yesterday I kept thinking about Sufjan Stevens's Illinois album, which at its best talks about the human stories dotted around the entire state, referencing cultural signifiers like Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln and even Superman and John Wayne Gacy. It's not the best album, because it was his attempt to keep up with his (quickly abandoned) idea of doing an album for all 50 states, but in its best moments I do recognize what I've seen of the city.

I guess I'm affected by the city because it hearkens back to times when America was still confident and good at making things, and when you could make it big in pretty much any big city. This is a feeling I also get when I read Bill Bryson's books about America, for instance his memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, which talks about growing up in Iowa in the 1950s. Now Iowa is kind of the butt of jokes, but here on the coasts we forget at our peril that people do live there - maybe if we hadn't bypassed the middle of America by flying over it and shifting our manufacturing out of cities like Detroit, we wouldn't be in the mess we're currently in.

The Seer's Tower and modernist architecture in front

I think the city's tallest tower is a good example. When it was the Sears Tower, and the world's tallest office building, it represented a strain of American business that employed a good chunk of the workforce. Now it's the Willis Tower, and Sears-Roebuck has pretty much torn itself apart through dire mismanagement. But the tower itself is still the daily destination for around 12,000 workers every day - representing how just because a place is no longer the center of the business world people still live and work there.

Illinois is obviously not as down-at-heel as cities like Ohio and Michigan (or at least parts thereof), which were more reliant on heavy industry. It's been helped along by its more service-oriented economy, I suppose, and its continuing cultural capital comes from being the first stepping stone for a lot of Saturday Night Live comedians... as well as housing works like Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.

In any case, I'd like to go back and see more of it - potentially arriving on Amtrak, the way people used to get there before flying was commonplace, and you had to stop there on trips between the coasts. My friend who lives there talked about how it's a city of neighborhoods, and I think it'd be fun to find out more about those places, too.

And maybe spend another romantic evening with my honey up at the top of the city? That sounds pretty good, too.

Big Cold War Love

Every once in a while you step back and notice a pattern in what you're watching, reading, listening, or whatever. I've recently noticed how many movies and TV shows I'm watching that are about the last few years of the Cold War.

The big one for me at the moment is FX's The Americans, which I'm getting on Netflix DVD because I'm stubborn like that. But before that it was Deutschland '83, then Atomic Blonde, and it feels like there are a few others. And it's not just me catching up on things - for some reason the Cold War and especially the way it played out in Germany seems to be a really popular theme with Hollywood these days.

It might be a tenuous link, but I think it's there. Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow came out about the same time, and seem to be about roughly the same thing (though I haven't seen Red Sparrow, so I don't know if it's got the same twists and turns as Atomic Blonde). They're both also very similar to Deutschland '83, which has as its backdrop the Able Archer exercise, but what's funny to me is that more than one of the actors in that show has done other 80s period pieces - for example 2014's Dessau Dancers, about an East German breakdance troupe.

It's not hard to figure out why German media is interested in going over this ground, three decades after the Berlin Wall fell. On the one hand for a lot of Easterners (or Ossis) the certainties of the previous 40 years were replaced by the uncertainty of making your way in a society where you weren't being constantly surveilled and controlled - the best example from recent years is Goodbye Lenin, where a woman's family pretends that the DDR never fell, because they worry the shock of the truth would kill her.

On the other hand, movies like The Lives of Others (another which I haven't seen) talk about the actual mechanisms of coercion the state used, in this case snooping on citizens and encouraging them to rat one another out to the authorities for not expressing sufficient confidence in communism. Turning people on their friends and families as a way to control them creates a wound that's slow to heal, if ever, and the Germans are still working out what that meant, to the extent that authors like Christa Wolf have seen their reputations destroyed when hints emerge that they worked for the Stasi.

What's harder to guess is why American media is so fascinated by it at the moment. Deutschland '83 was a joint-production of Germany's RTL and the US's Sundance Channel, the first German-language TV show to air on an American network, and one of the creators, Anna Winger, is American by birth. Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow are both American movies, and even X-Men Apocalypse, which was set in the 80s, chooses Berlin as one of its settings, suggesting to me that there's something in the air.

I can't think of a real political reason for this interest appearing in the last few years. It doesn't seem to fit with other media that's grappling with the current Trump situation, although shows like the Americans at least reference the West's relationship to Russia. And very few of these are particularly triumphant about America beating the Commies - the protagonists are frequently on the USSR's or the DDR's side, which makes it uncomfortable to consider whether we're rooting for the "bad guy" against our own side (a theme that the AV Club's coverage of the Americans took on frequently).

Part of it may also be that my generation has come of age, and one of the things we're mining for content is that first decade we remember, where nuclear war became a real possibility again. Deutschland '83 is full of cultural signifiers that would have been familiar to Americans in particular - Nena's 99 Luftballons, Peter Schilling's Major Tom (Coming Home), and so on.

In a lot of ways, the 80s were the last decade that America even paid attention to a lot of places like Germany. That, in particular, would have been because the presence of East and West Germany was likely to be the start of any conflagrations between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, but we also grew fascinated by places like Australia (see all those Paul Hogan and Yahoo Serious movies), in a way that we wouldn't be again.

I don't get a sense, looking back, that we were so outwardly focused in the 90s, possibly because America had retreated into self-satisfaction after seeing off the Soviet threat. And then in the 00s, of course, 9/11 meant we approached the world on a more adversarial and contemptuous basis, which has colored our relations with everyone else ever since.

Though the self-satisfaction may be present in these movies as well - Deutschland '83 has a scene where Jonas Nay's protagonist is struck dumb by the amount of choice in a West Berlin supermarket, which is already getting a bit cliche. Which I guess means there's some triumphalism remaining - a fiction that I've seen coming up more and more recently is that our "economic" ideals were part of what beat the Soviets. This is partly true, in that East German teens wanted to buy the same jeans and music that their Wessi cousins had, but as Goodbye Lenin pointed out, they didn't sign up for gross income inequality or the increasingly dog-eat-dog nature of capitalism.

Anyway, this all might be fantastical - some themes go in and out of fashion, and it's hard to point to any one reason for their popularity. I guess the test will be seeing how the third and final season, Deutschland '89, tackles the fall of the Berlin Wall.