First Drafts
The Prospect magazine blog
Renegade
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26th December 2009
Obama’s mixed heritage finds a parallel in Spock
We should have guessed at the 2008 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, when Barack Obama spotted Leonard Nimoy and gave the double-finger Vulcan sign to the man who played Spock in the original Star Trek. Yes, Obama is a Trekkie. This endears him to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, King Abdullah of Jordan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who were all delighted to find a fellow fan. And it gives him some common ground with Al Gore, whose Harvard roommates said he spent more time watching the show than studying. (Colin Powell is another avid fan.)
Just as the world divides into Beatles and Stones fans, Trekkies are split into fans of cerebral Spock and those who prefer Captain Kirk (whose character was dreamed up in the 1960s as an echo of JFK). Even without considering his prominent ears, no prizes for guessing which way Obama leans—and what is more, the president is often compared to Spock.
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Damian Kahya
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24th December 2009
China's leader arrived in Copenhagen less ready to wreck than we now think
With Christmas upon us, the dust has settled on Copenhagen. And as Prospect editor David Goodhart posted yesterday, the settled view is becoming: blame China. Mark Lynas wrote an especially coruscating piece about it in the Guardian yesterday—a piece with which their editor agreed so strongly that he used his twitter guise of @alanrushbridger to say yesterday “if you read one piece on Copenhagen, read this.”
But in all this we are losing track of what actually happened, in which impact of the Chinese was more muddled and complex than the deliberate attack now gaining popularity. So Lets go back to Copenhagen to try and get it right.
With the talks about to veer into complete breakdown the US president hurried towards Air Force One. Like a sulky husband rushing to leave his awkward in-laws he explained he would love to stay but couldn’t – the weather demanded he go now. The deal he left behind was a conjuring trick of such audacity that it threw the slow thinking delegates and their press counterparts into a state of befuddled confusion.
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David Goodhart
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23rd December 2009
The misguided conventional copenhagen wisdom
Copenhagen is being called a failure, with various candidates blamed. Naomi Klein says it was Obama’s fault. Mark Lynas today is blaming the Chinese. But the conference wasn’t a failure. Or it was only so when measured against unrealistic expectations.
As Tony Brenton pointed out in the FT (letters, December 22nd, registration required), what matters here is power politics not consensus among all the world’s nations. There are about 20 nations that matter in climate change politics, and the core of the deal that was agreed came from five of them—the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. (And in what previous global deal could you have seen those five names lined up together?) The US and China have both committed themselves to a deal, indeed all the countries that matter have agreed, in public, that the rise in global temperature must be kept to under 2C. That in itself is a huge advance on just a couple of years ago.
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Elizabeth Kirkwood
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23rd December 2009
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The Misanthrope: smile or die?
Is it possible, even beneficial, to believe in despair? At the end of Martin Crimp’s version of The Misanthrope, currently running at the Comedy Theatre, the title’s namesake triumphantly declares to his shallow coterie: “I believe in despair”. His bitter valediction to the vapid and duplicitous celebrity “court”, which he is finally able to turn his back on, still remains the most powerful and fascinating sentiment of the play.
Aptly perhaps the most discussed element of this production has been Keira Knightley’s debut West End performance. Enough, if not too much, has already been said on that matter. She does a grand job; assured, and sufficiently mischievous as the young Hollywood star. She sparkles, but doesn’t quite dazzle. Say no more.
Much more interesting, however, is quite how pertinent Crimp’s adaptation of The Misanthrope is, and the questions it asks, of our present times. Transposed from the court of Louis XIV to the malicious world of actors and journalists today, the play’s preoccupation with endemic apathy and the toleration of sycophancy and hypocrisy means it overflows with barbed aphorism on how we might cope with life’s trials with least detriment to ourselves.
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Prospect
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22nd December 2009
The rights of babies
3rd December 2009
In her discussion of maternity rights, Catherine Hakim (December) throws the baby out with the bathwater, an unfortunate short-sightedness given that maternity rights exist not just for the sake of mothers, but for children. The psychological health of both an infant and a mother —and by extension the health of our society—depends on maternity rights. As the think tank Rand recently reported, the highest return on investment occurs in the first years of life, and then falls almost exponentially as the child grows.
Maternity rights, then, are a social investment for our future. The professional adult world needs to accept this fact and reorganise to accommodate it. What too often gets forgotten in Britain is that sometimes maximising productivity and winning the top job is not necessarily good for one’s health, nor especially for the health of one’s baby and new family.
Jonathan Delafield-Butt
University of Edinburgh
Prospect
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20th December 2009
Prime minister Putin: niet votes
What is the Russian for public intellectual? Fashionable website openSpace.ru is finding out, writes Susan Richards, with a version of Prospect’s own big brain competition. No orchestrated hijacking of the public vote has yet occurred—perhaps because the Kremlin is far too canny to stick its nose in. As a result, Putin has won almost no votes, while the man behind his “sovereign democracy” concept, Vladislav Surkov, has netted just 1 per cent. Results so far reflect the nation’s new diversity, with Viktor Pelevin—fantastical satirical novelist of the post-Soviet era—leading; pursued by youthful (yet banal) blogger Danil Shepovalov. Bunching in third are the head of Russia’s Orthodox Church, imprisoned ex-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and a prominent ultra-nationalist media oddball, Konstantin Krylov. The winner will be announced on 21st December.
Damian Kahya
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18th December 2009
Any deal will be born out of lack of sleep as much as the imperative to save the planet
It’s the last day on the strange and in some ways amazing multinational spaceship that is Copenhagen’s Bella Center. Or at least so we think—a US delegate grabbing a coffee warned me it may go on until Sunday.
But then she also asked me if I’d heard how things were going––an unusual, and perturbing, thing for a US delegate to ask a journalist.
In his latest speech the Brazilian leader, Lula, said the negotiations had reminded him of his youth as a union leader—arguing with the management until two in the morning. It didn’t seem to be a fond memory. Read more »
Philip Hunter
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18th December 2009
The Ban on under-15 drinking flouts science and sense
“The science is clear.” We have heard that one before in other contexts, like anthropogenic global warming, but now the assertion has come from the British government’s chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, in calling parents to prohibit their children from drinking until they are 15 and then continuing to supervise their intake until 17.
Donaldson himself seemed confused over what science he was talking about. When pressed on the Radio 4 Today programme, he admitted that small amounts of alcohol could not harm a child. Alcohol after all is a natural product of metabolism, and everybody’s metabolism has to handle a little. There is no such thing as a total teetotaller.
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David Killen
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18th December 2009
By Huw Aaron, Prospect’s cartoonist of the month
Climate Consultant
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18th December 2009
"There is tremendous anger and frustration, but the protests tell a misleading story"
International negotiations aren’t what they used to be. When Metternich convened the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the crowned heads of state (including the Czar, British King and various obscure dukes) spent six months wining and dining each other and did deals over late-night cards in the ballroom. Relieved at having got rid of Napoleon, the Austrian government picked up the tab.
130 years later, when Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met at Yalta, only a few select diplomats accompanied them. The world’s media were entirely absent: the Royal Air Force did not deem it necessary to shuttle them to the Crimea via Liberia and Egypt (Roosevelt’s approach route) or by flying boat through Gibraltar and the Dardanelles (as Churchill arrived). There was no civil society present when Churchill drew the post-war balance of power in Europe on a paper napkin and Stalin nodded his assent.
By contrast, Copenhagen 2009 has been, until the last 48 hours, an open, democratic process. The Bella Centre, a vast hangar on the outskirts of the Danish capital, has room for 15,000 people. Over 45,000 people applied for passes, most of them associated with non-governmental organisations. Even the official parties to the negotiation, who had preferential access to the centre, included many participants who were neither diplomats nor government figures. The delegation I went to see got me a ‘party’ badge. (I never found out if there was an ‘after-party’ badge).
The conference may be doomed to failure, but in part this reflects impossibly high expectations. A multilateral negotiation process, involving over 200 countries and many other non-state entities, cannot possibly lead to a mutually satisfactory ‘global deal’. Global deals, by their nature, involve small numbers of powerful people talking to each other in closed rooms. To be successful, they require a sense of urgency (even fear), extraordinary levels of gumption, a willingness to take risks even though the numbers and implications are unclear. We’ll know in the next 48 hours if those conditions were present.
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