DC

This is not a city. It’s an endless maze of low barriers and security zones, a place infinitely cordoned off from itself. Every street is lined with low ugly business-park blocks that modestly announce themselves as the headquarters of some kind of terrible global evil: the International Directorate for Diarrhoea and Diarrhoea-Causing Pathogens, the Alliance for Tearing Small Holes In Mosquito Nets, the US State Department, the IMF. Evil without grandeur: the ground floor of every one of these blocks is always occupied by a CVS or a Peet’s Coffee. You want to eat? Eat this cinnamon swirl; it’s made from corn syrup and chalk. Your only other option is some brassy gloomy den of a hotel restaurant, where greased lobbyists feed their politicians on plates of paler flesh, scorched and braised, with truffles grated on top. Don’t ask what animal this came from. You don’t want to know his name. In the streets, the DC people bustle about: cut-throat mediocrities with suits shinier than their lanyards and foreheads shinier still, visibly humming with satisfaction. I made it! I’m here, in the birdshit trench of despair where Everything Gets Done! It’s good that these people don’t get Congressional representation. They shouldn’t get to breathe. Nothing good can survive in a place like this. Imagine if Slough or Swindon or Milton Keynes were also the nexus of a fanatical empire bent on world domination. Imagine seventy square miles in which the Nazis won the war.

Loves me some invective.

Belief

Sane, sober and alone, any serious professional political journalist knew that this deal would be made and broadly what it would look like. ... Yet absolutely everyone has been pumping out this false narrative of cliff-hanging tension, as have the national ministers of EU states in the EU Council and the Members of the European Parliament.

...

This forcefully reminds me of the run-up to the Iraq War, when I asked an FCO colleague working directly on Iraq how he managed to do his job when he knew full well that Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction. He replied to me that he was an avid player of “Football Manager”; while in the game he really was immersed for hours and the manager of Arsenal, once he left the game of course he knew he was not. Walking into the FCO to work was the same. While in the FCO, he believed Iraq had WMD and acted on that basis; once he left in the evening he did not.

Mungo MacCallum 1941-2020

If they tell us they care about the future but show neither vision nor emotion about it, why should we care any more than they do? We vote without enthusiasm or conviction, and often in the belief that whatever we do will make no real difference; that the ritual is no longer worthwhile. And when we, the people, reject the democratic process, the very spirit of the nation withers and dies.

The only problem with this quote is that it isn't funny; and Mr MacCallum was. Very. This vicious year leaves us with another unfillable void.

Thanksgiving

In 2010, a US air force drone crew watching infrared video of a night-time convoy of Afghan vehicles, as revealed in the transcript of their conversation, thought that warm dots in the trucks they saw on their screens were weapons. In fact, they were turkeys, presents carried by the peasant passengers for their relatives in Kabul. (The trucks were attacked, killing 23 people.)

Triumph

Jesus, Saddam Hussein went out with more dignity than this.

Oh look, here's Thomas Frank, perennial winner of the Ian Malcolm Award for Political Commentary* back in the Guardian again, shouting the blindingly obvious into the howling void.

I have been narrating our country’s toboggan ride to hell for much of my adult life, and I can attest that Biden’s triumph by itself is not enough to bring it to a stop. It will never stop until a Democratic president faces up to his party’s mistakes and brings to a halt the ignoble experiment of the last four decades.

Yeah, well, good luck with that. These are after all the idiots who thought Biden would be good for down ticket candidates, when his whole strategy was to persuade disaffected GOPers to vote against Trump, while cheerfully ignoring the obvious question - why on Earth would they vote Democrat in any other race? And the idiots now arguing the failed campaigns of "centrists" are the fault of the progressives who won. But of course it makes perfect sense to construct a national election strategy around the question of whether it might spook some paranoid ex-Cubans in America's wang.

* It's a statuette of a young Jeff Goldblum in a leather jacket, with the inscription around the plinth: "Boy do I hate being right all the time."

Pitch

Sixties used car pitchman's joke out-take (warning: quite a lot of sailor-talk).

Success

Seriously, desk calendar*? Again with the jokes?

*Different brand this year. It must be endemic.

Square

It is not people like the Abbie Hoffman of The Trial of the Chicago 7 — those who dare to memorialize the troops and celebrate our institutions while critiquing them within reason — who are most essential to a thriving democracy. It is people like the actual Abbie Hoffman, who could never have been the subject of an Aaron Sorkin film, because Sorkin would never have been able to get a square liberal audience to like him.

Apparently, but unsurprisingly, the new Chicago 10 flick isn't very good, taking place, as it does, in the alternative history magic pixie land that is Sorkinworld. These two are better, or you could just read the transcript.

Perversity

Still, let us genuflect before the superhuman perversity of the thing. Tax cuts, union busting, and deregulation - the historic achievements of right-wing populism - have led us straight back to the massively skewed economic arrangements of the 1890s. It takes a kind of hallucinatory bravado to call yourself a populist while cracking down on workers and ignoring antitrust laws, which the Reagan administration and its successors did. It's like a banker calling himself a freedom fighter because he likes Basque cuisine. It's like a slumlord signing his eviction notices, "Yours in solidarity."

- Thomas Frank, from "The People, No!", Chapter 7 (for what it's worth, my copy is the Scribe edition with the tiresome alternative title People Without Power)

Presidential

I'd have to toss a coin to choose between my two favourite moments from that trainwreck:

Trump pronouncing "Antifa", slavishly followed by Biden, like it was an island in the West Indies (AnTEEfah).

Biden shoehorning in a reference to Trump's alleged reference to WW1 dead as "losers" by pretending he was misremembering Trump's attacks on his corrupt druggie son Hunter as being attacks on his brave veteran son Beau: that's a courageous stratagem for a guy the GOPers are keen to paint as senile.

Top-down

Jared Diamond notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organization. Walter Scheidel notwithstanding, it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe. To take just one well-documented example: around 200 AD, the city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, with a population of 120,000 (one of the largest in the world at the time), appears to have undergone a profound transformation, turning its back on pyramid-temples and human sacrifice, and reconstructing itself as a vast collection of comfortable villas, all almost exactly the same size. It remained so for perhaps 400 years. Even in Cortés’ day, Central Mexico was still home to cities like Tlaxcala, run by an elected council whose members were periodically whipped by their constituents to remind them who was ultimately in charge.

Possibly not the most interesting paragraph of Graeber and Wengrow's How to change the course of human history (at least, the part that’s already happened) - that's more likely to be the discussion of seasonal variation in prehistoric political structures, or the article's various vigorous myth demolitions - but certainly the one that made me laugh.

Editing

GPT-3 produced eight different outputs, or essays. Each was unique, interesting and advanced a different argument. The Guardian could have just run one of the essays in its entirety. However, we chose instead to pick the best parts of each, in order to capture the different styles and registers of the AI. Editing GPT-3’s op-ed was no different to editing a human op-ed.

Which explains why this op-ed written by a computer program proceeds through a series of non-sequiturs to make no coherent conclusion, in case you were going to blame the poor AI for the Guardian house style.