Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

 

A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens

• Neil Gaiman
• theguardian.com, Tuesday 15 October 2013 14.51 BST

'We have an obligation to imagine' … Neil Gaiman gives The Reading Agency annual lecture on the future of reading and libraries. Photograph: Robin Mayes

It's important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members' interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I'm going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I'm an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living though my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So I'm biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

And I'm here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

And it's that change, and that act of reading that I'm here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What it's good for.

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.

It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end … that's a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children's books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I've seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

 No such thing as a bad writer... Enid Blyton's Famous Five. Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King's Carrie, saying if you liked those you'll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King's name is mentioned.)

And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

You're also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it's this:

The world doesn't have to be like this. Things can be different.

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

It's simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

And while we're on the subject, I'd like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it's a bad thing. As if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.

As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

 Tolkien's illustration of Bilbo's home, Bag End. Photograph: HarperCollins

Another way to destroy a child's love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children's' library I began on the adult books.

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.

I think it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories – they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.

In the last few years, we've moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. That's about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.

 Photograph: Alamy

Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before – books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access toebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world. It's a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.

Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.

According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the "only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account".

Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – as readers, as writers, as citizens – have obligations. I thought I'd try and spell out some of these obligations here.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.

We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers' throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves.

We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we 've lessened our own future and diminished theirs.

We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I'm going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we've shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

• This is an edited version of Neil Gaiman's lecture for the Reading Agency, delivered on Monday October 14 at the Barbican in London. The Reading Agency's annual lecture series was initiated in 2012 as a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share original, challenging ideas about reading and libraries.

Is cheekiness a truly British concept?

Cheekiness is a defining British characteristic and a valuable check on power, says Farrah Jarral.

Picture the scene. I am a doctor in a clinic, seeing an elderly patient whose last urine sample sent to the lab to check for infection has come back contaminated. We need to repeat the test - but this time with a proper mid-stream sample. He has white hair, leathery skin, twinkly eyes. He is a little hard of hearing, and English is not his first language.

So, slowly and clearly I explain how to perform this task, simple and yet easy to get wrong. I ask him to repeat the instructions back to me just to make sure he understands - a consultation tool I've been trained to use.

He says: "OK, so, first I start peeing." Yes, that's right. "And then halfway through I open the pot?"

Mm hmm, mm hmm.

"I pee into the pot." He pauses for effect. I nod earnestly and vigorously.

"And then... I drink it?"

In these three words, this gentleman had burst the bubble of order in that consultation. My seasoned, medical poker face didn't manage to get through that one. His urine-quaffing suggestion dispensed with decorum and smashed the usual doctor-patient power gradient, and I surrendered willingly.

Although I quite rightly don't often have the chance to be cheeky myself in my rather serious day job, I am a great lover of cheekiness and my experiences of such behaviour, particularly in my patients, have convinced me that there is far greater depth to this arguably very British concept than meets the eye.

So what is it exactly? Well, maybe it's easier to define what it's not. It's not quite the same as audacity - it takes itself less seriously than that. And it's not as rude as impudence because cheekiness never sets out to truly offend. Cheekiness, then, is neither high-minded nor aggressive. Its hallmark is good-hearted humour, a certain cheeriness of spirit.

Often it is loud - think of the effectiveness of the whoopee cushion left on the unsuspecting teacher's chair. But it can be just as deadly when silent, or even sartorial.

Cheekiness isn't just funny, though. It has the power to deflate pomposity faster than any whoopee cushion.

And no cultural form exemplifies this irreverence quite like British political satire. In what other country would Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell get away with casually encasing our prime minister's head in a condom in all his drawings? These moments of absolute bare-faced cheek could quite literally get you killed in many parts of the world, and yet they form a robust part of our political self-expression.

Translating cheekiness to someone unfamiliar with the concept in Britain can be tricky. Could it be that cheekiness as a concept is untranslatable, unique to the UK?

I looked at two of the cheekiest languages on earth - Yiddish and Punjabi - to see if they had any equivalents. In Yiddish, chutzpah does embody perhaps 90% of what it means to be cheeky. But the flexibility of cheekiness somehow outdoes the necessary boldness of chutzpah. Cheeky can be subtle.

Punjabi, too, is also a highly cheeky language, which is full of words to call people who are a bit forward. Paada is someone precocious, a chatty kind of character, jigr aala literally means she or he who has liver, the organ of courage, and maacha describes a blagger, a chancer. But none of them quite captures the essence of cheekiness correctly.

Even across nations that speak the same language, it's unclear. I asked several American friends if the term had a US equivalent, but some told me that the concept doesn't even exist in the same way. Meanwhile the internet turned up the frankly inexcusable translation of "cheeky monkey" as "zesty little chipmunk".

I can't comment on the cultural nuances of zesty chipmunks, but science has suggested that cheeky monkeys really do exist. The primatologist Franz de Waal famously showed the world a piece of footage of an outraged Capuchin monkey reacting to inequality. When its monkey friend received better food - a delicious succulent, sweet grape rather than the pedestrian cucumber they had both been enjoying previously - the cheeky monkey threw the piece of cucumber back into the face of the researcher who fed him.

Monkeys are cheeky because they are intelligent enough to be aware not only of complex social rules and expectations of behaviour, but also of the ways in which they can deliberately break these rules and thus express their refusal to accept the way things are.

So cheekiness can be a serious matter - and not just for monkeys. Despite the chances of social humiliation, it is a low-risk way of breaking the rules and protesting. It says, in a gentle way, that you do not consent to something - some dynamic, some power structure, some constraint imposed on you by a bigger force.

Cheekiness is a way of creatively, often playfully, injecting resistance into the quotidian. It creates a space in which to push back against inequality, against commoditisation, colonisation, against the rules that say who you can talk to, what you are allowed to talk about, and how you talk, what your aspirations can be, what constitutes success or beauty, or how you are supposed to wear your masculinity or femininity. Scratch the surface, and you will find that beneath the silliest acts of cheekiness, there is often a deeply important matter that is being negotiated.

Some people may argue that cheekiness, in its very smallness and apparent harmlessness, is an ineffective form of resistance that simply serves to reinforce the very power structures that it wants to challenge.

But even the anarchist James C Scott, champion of "non-revolutionary resistance", suggested breaking the odd trivial law here and there as a form of "anarchist calisthenics" to prepare for a broader struggle. And the people that threaten, imprison or kill Iranian cartoonists, naked Egyptian bloggers or Burmese stand-up comedians certainly don't think that cheekiness is a trifling matter.

Is it too much to imagine that cheekiness as part of the national character is one of the reasons the UK has largely avoided a bloody revolution like so many other democracies?

Could it be that expressing bubbling dissent and resistance through humour has been like letting off steam through a pressure valve, thus avoiding a full-blown explosion?

Cheekiness is the checking of power - and power needs checking. It is the individual or group giving the machine a bit of backchat. It's a reclaiming of dignity, a playful subversion of the status quo, however briefly, a challenge to authority.

The fact that no glamorous, perfect Hollywood star is ever safe from having a ridiculous moustache drawn on their face on London Underground posters is resistance. And when my twinkly-eyed joker wryly suggested a sip of his own frothy amber nectar, poking fun at my unwittingly disempowering manner, he demonstrated with elegance and panache how cheekiness can rebalance an ancient power asymmetry - in a way that all my earnest medical-school attempts could not.

Our lives are monitored, constrained and pressured both explicitly and implicitly in almost every waking minute of our existence. Open protest, staring down tanks, self-immolation, is hard, but if we can't bring ourselves to mount a full-scale rebellion, we can still exercise our right to cheekiness in little everyday ways - loudly, quietly, in song, art, or style, jokes or poems, to push back for the things that deep down, do mean something to us.

So if we aren't going to break out and take over, the very least we can do is practice our anarchist calisthenics and fling back those cucumber chunks from inside the cage.

This is an edited version of Farrah Jarral's Four Thought, which will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 20:45 BST on 16 October 2013.

Once a celebrity has been linked with a silly object, they stay connected for ever

Sarah Ferguson, Princess Di and verrucas; Matthew McConaughey and bongos; Bill Clinton and chicken nuggets – for me, public figures are always defined by ridiculous objects

• 
• • Sophie Heawood
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 15 October 2013 18.35 BST

Before the infected shoe incident … Sarah Ferguson and Princess Diana at the Epsom Derby. Photograph: Ken Goff/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Here's a sentence I'm fairly confident nobody has written before: I have recently become obsessed with Sarah Ferguson and Diana, Princess of Wales, after discovering their friendship is believed to have come to an abrupt end when Fergie told everyone she got a verruca from one of Diana's shoes. Fergie wrote in her memoirs that she and Diana were so close they would even share their heels, in true gal‑pal fashion, but that this once led to Fergie contracting a plantar wart. Allegedly – and this comes from Tina Brown's unauthorised take on Diana's life – the comical indiscretion was so humiliating to the princess that she never spoke to the duchess again. That was it – their friendship, all because of an infected shoe. A year later, Diana was dead.

It's not the two individuals who fascinate me so much as the idea that empires rise and fall, alliances begin and end, over something as ridiculous as a pair of slip-ons with a virus nestled in the toe. For me, public figures are always defined by the ridiculously random objects they inevitably end up associated with. Every celebrity has one.

The band All Saints admit they split up because of a row about a jacket. "I would never, in a million years," said band member Shaznay Lewis some years later, "have put money on the group ending over a jacket." Jamie Oliver apparently sold his house in Hampstead after he got sick of drunken idiots coming out of the pub next door and shouting up at his window for a bacon sandwich. When I interviewed the actor Matthew McConaughey, I was delighted to learn he had once been arrested for causing a public disturbance after sitting on the roof of his house late at night, stoned and playing the bongos. Bongos! And I'm not saying that I've got too much time on my hands, but I did once become a quite active member of a Facebook group called "The day that Brian Harvey ate 47 baked potatoes then ran himself over", even though Harvey himself has claimed his intake at that fateful pre‑crash luncheon was a mere three jacket spuds – with tuna mayonnaise on, since you asked.

Once you've linked a celebrity with a silly object, they stay like that in your mind's eye for ever. David Miliband walking down the street with an awkward grin, clutching that banana. David Cameron has been entirely cunning at avoiding any object association – until his breadmaker, that is. I have American friends who always want to ask me about Prince Charles and his intercepted phone call to Camilla that led to tampongate. These objects come to trail alongside the celebrity, like a puppy who refuses to leave their side, or a daemon in a Phillip Pullman novel. When confronted by the monolithic narratives that prop up our state, institutions such as the royal family and Westminster that seem to have been there since the dawn of time, built of wealth and stone, I find it rather cheering to remind myself that they are just as vulnerable as the rest of us.

I've never been convinced that Philip Larkin was right when he wrote that all that remains of us is love. After Bill Clinton is dead and gone, it's not love that I'll remember him for. It's an object – and I don't even mean that cigar that went on holiday somewhere in Monica Lewinsky's nether regions. The object was brought to my attention in Alastair Campbell's diaries, in a story where Tony Blair, Kevin Spacey and Bill Clinton are all sitting in a McDonald's restaurant. In Blackpool. "So there we were," Campbell writes, "drinking Diet Coke and eating chicken nuggets as he [Clinton] poured forth on the theme of interdependence and the role of the Third Way in progressive politics." Obviously, it is the chicken nuggets that get me.

Campbell also mentions that Cherie Blair wore a magic pendant – a bioelectric shield, apparently – to ward off evil rays during their time at No 10. And for her part, Cherie has spoken of an amazing night out the Blairs enjoyed on an Italian summer holiday with that lovable old goat Silvio Berlusconi, who arranged a surprise fireworks display. Much to the Blairs' delight, the words VIVA TONY came to light, spelled out in rockets in the sky. This anecdote will always stay with me. In fact, I often struggle to concentrate on our former prime minister's face without seeing the words VIVA TONY beaming through his intergalactic eyes.

But back to those chicken nuggets that the most powerful man in the world enjoyed, perhaps – and I do like to imagine this is true – as part of a Happy Meal, or at least a meal deal with a fizzy drink thrown in for the price of the chips. In a burger bar lit by primary colours and over-enthusiastic plastic, in a rain washed seaside northern town, circled by gulls. Perhaps, all that remains of any of us is this.

From Obamacare to trade, superversion not subversion is the new and very real threat to the state

Rightwing politicians and their press use talk of patriotism to disguise where their true loyalty lies: the wealthy elite

BETA

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 14 October 2013 20.31 BST

Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre. 'Strangely, this suspicion of the state and the People Who Know Best does not appear to extend to the security services, whose assault on our ­freedoms Dacre was defending'. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

Subversion ain't what it used to be. Today it scarcely figures as a significant force. Nation states are threatened by something else.  Superversion: an attack from above.

It takes several forms. One is familiar, but greatly enhanced by new technology: the tendency of spooks and politicians to use the instruments of state to amplify undemocratic powers. We've now learnt that even members of the cabinet and the National Security Council had no idea what GCHQ was up to. No one told them that it was developing the capacity to watch, if it chooses, everything we do online. The real enemies of state (if by state we mean the compact between citizens and those they elect) are people like the head of MI5, and the home secretary, who seem to have failed to inform cabinet colleagues about these programmes.

Allied to the old abuses is a newer kind of superversion: the attempts by billionaires and their lieutenants to destroy the functions of the state. Note the current shutdown – and the debt-ceiling confrontation scheduled for Thursday – in the United States. The Republicans, propelled by a Tea Party movement created by the Koch brothers and financed by a gruesome collection of multimillionaires, have engineered what in other circumstances would be called a general strike. The difference is that the withdrawal of their labour has been imposed on the workers.

The narrow purpose of the strike is to prevent the distribution of wealth to poorer people, through the Affordable Care Act. The wider purpose (aside from a refusal to accept the legitimacy of a black president) is to topple the state as an effective instrument of taxation, regulation and social protection. The Koch shock troops in the Republican party seem prepared to inflict almost any damage in pursuit of this insurgency, including – if they hold out on Thursday – a US government default, which could trigger a new global financial crisis.

They do so on behalf of a class which has, in effect, seceded. It floats free of tax and the usual bonds of citizenship, jetting from one jurisdiction to another as it seeks the most favourable havens for its wealth. It removes itself so thoroughly from the life of the nation that it scarcely uses even the roads. Yet, through privatisation and outsourcing, it is capturing the public services on which the rest of us depend.

Using an unreformed political funding system to devastating effect, this superversive class demands that the state stop regulating, stop protecting, stop intervening. When this abandonment causes financial crisis, the remaining taxpayers are forced to bail out the authors of the disaster, who then stash their bonuses offshore.

One result is that those who call themselves conservatives and patriots appear to be deeply confused about what they are defending. In his article last week attacking the Guardian for revealing GCHQ's secret surveillance programmes, Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, characterised his readers as possessing an "over-riding suspicion of the state and the People Who Know Best". Strangely, this suspicion of the state and the People Who Know Best does not appear to extend to the security services, whose assault on our freedoms Dacre was defending.

To the rightwing press and the Conservative party, patriotism means standing up to the European Union. But it also means capitulating to the United States. It's an obvious and glaring contradiction, which is almost never acknowledged, let alone explained. In reality the EU and the US have become proxies for something which transcends national boundaries. The EU stands for state control and regulation while the US represents deregulation and atomisation.

In truth, this distinction is outdated, as the handful of people who have heard of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) will appreciate. The European commission calls it "the biggest trade deal in the world". Its purpose is to create a single transatlantic market, in which all regulatory differences between the US and the EU are gradually removed.

It has been negotiated largely in secret. This time, they're not just trying to bring down international trade barriers, but, as the commission boasts, "to tackle barriers behind the customs border – such as differences in technical regulations, standards and approval procedures". In other words, our own laws, affecting our own people.

A document published last year by two huge industrial lobby groups – the US Chamber of Commerce and BusinessEurope – explains the partnership's aims. It will have a "proactive requirement", directing governments to change their laws. The partnership should "put stakeholders at the table with regulators to essentially co-write regulation". Stakeholder is a euphemism for corporation.

They want it; they're getting it. New intellectual property laws that they have long demanded, but which sovereign governments have so far resisted – not least because of the mass mobilisation against the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act in the US – are back on the table, but this time largely inaccessible to public protest.

So are data protection, public procurement and financial services. You think that getting your own government to regulate bankers is hard enough? Try appealing to a transnational agreement brokered by corporations and justified by the deemed consent of citizens who have been neither informed nor consulted.

This deal is a direct assault on sovereignty and democracy. So where are the Daily Mail and the Telegraph and the other papers which have campaigned so hard against all transfers of power to the European Union? Where are the Conservative MPs who have fought for an EU referendum? Eerie silence descends. They do not oppose the TTIP because their allegiance lies not with the nation but with the offshored corporate elite.

These fake patriots proclaim a love for their country, while ensuring that there is nothing left to love. They are loyal to the pageantry – the flags, the coinage, the military parades – but intensely disloyal to the nation these symbols are supposed to represent. The greater the dissonance becomes, the louder the national anthem plays.

The man who was concrete

Jon Hotten in Cricinfo

Tavaré uncharacteristically animated for Kent against Middlesex in 1988  © Getty Images

Enlarge

There are some names that, as a young cricketer, you do not want, because they come loaded with a heavy freight. They are almost always familial. Imagine the task of clambering clear of the moniker of Botham or Richards as Liam and Mali once had to do. The Don's son briefly changed his, so distorting was its effect on his life. They are names that do not stand simply for cricketers of note, but for something bigger: a way of playing the game itself.

Imagine then, that you are William Tavaré, who has signed a contract to play professional cricket for Gloucestershire. Because as surely as Botham, Richards or Bradman are names that come laden with meaning, then so is Tavaré. William is the nephew of perhaps the most extraordinary batsman to appear for England in the last 30 years, the motionless phenomenon that was CJ Tavaré. 

No one who saw Chris Tavaré bat will forget it in a hurry, even if the detail is blurred by its endless repetition. If David Steele was the bank clerk who went to war, Tavaré was the conscientious objector who took arms. Tall, angular and splayfooted, a thin moustache sketched on his top lip, he would walk to the crease like a stork approaching a watering hole full of crocs.

Once there, he began not to bat but to set, concrete drying under the sun. His principal movement was between the stumps and square leg, to where he would walk, gingerly, after every ball. If John Le Mesurier had played Test cricket, he would have played it like Chris Tavaré. His innings spread themselves across games, eroding the will of the opposition and the spectator alike, smoothing off the edges as if they were pebbles in a stream.

The portents came early. In his third Test innings, against West Indies at Lord's in 1980, he fussed for more than four hours over 42. In his next game, his 69 and 78 combined to occupy just under 12 hours of playing time.

Then came the innings that cemented (almost literally) his legend. His four-hour-plus fifty against Pakistan in 1982 was the second-slowest half-century in the history of the game, and yet even that paled in comparison to the five-and-a-half hour 35 against India in Madras, a knock that assumed the dimensions of a siege for all involved.

In a team that contained Botham, Gatting, Lamb and Gower, Tavaré truly stood out. The mighty ballast that he provided against the Australians in '81 (179 runs at 44.75) played a part in that famous win, albeit one that never quite makes the highlights reels.

His only Ashes tour in 1982-83 left its scars on the local psyche, too. As Matthew Engel slyly noted, "he was the antithesis of the Australians' idea of a cricketer". In Perth, he treated them to an eight-hour 89, 60 minutes of which were entirely scoreless. Gideon Haigh fell into a trance-like state while watching it on television, and later discovered that Tavaré (a uxorious gent, of course) had been troubled all tour by his wife's fear of flying, a mental trauma that nailed him ever more firmly to the crease.

Like a lot of slow players, stories abounded that he was a wolf in sheep's clothing, capable of pillaging county attacks on quiet Canterbury afternoons. If it happened, no one remembers it now. Instead, his high point as a man of action must remain the classic fourth Test, in Melbourne, that began, on Boxing Day of 1982, with Tav making 89 in just 247 minutes at a strike rate north of three an over, an innings that contained 15 boundaries in an era when the distant reaches of the MCG were marked only by the pickets. It was his anomalous masterpiece, and England won by three runs.

Rather marvellously, Chris Tavaré is now a biology teacher, and his pupils are surely rigorously but gently schooled. Into a cricketing world that he would not recognise steps William, whose first-class record to date is respectable (nine innings at 32.75, with a best of 61), but even if he turns out to be the next Chris Gayle, the Tavaré name will plod after him - slowly and from a distance of course. Good luck, my friend.

Two South Indian gentlemen

Farewell: Dravid and Laxman

 

Rahul Bhattacharya

	Laxman and Dravid "dissolved into one another more harmoniously, more significantly, than any other Indian duo" © AFP  Enlarge

"Nusrat singing, Laxman and Dravid batting - TV on mute, and yoga." A note from an acquaintance in Mumbai had this description of his perfect day. Rahul Dravid and V. V. S. Laxman marked their Test debuts within six months of one another in 1996 with accomplished half-centuries. Sixteen years later they announced their retirements in accomplished press conferences, also within six months of each other. But this note came not on the occasion of a batting feat or a retirement. It was, in Indian shorthand, an ode to long-form cricket - and the pair that most profoundly summoned its sensation.

Consider the correspondent's other passions. A partnership of Laxman and Dravid could contain both the incantatory rapture of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the meditative discipline of yoga. One might say Laxman was the rapture and Dravid the discipline, but that would not only be partially false, it would be to miss the point. The beauty of a jugalbandi, a duet between classical soloists, is in the interplay. A jugalbandi is a duet in the same way as a batting partnership: not simultaneous, but one performer at a time, in improvisatory rotation. The great sitar player Ustad Vilayat Khan said the idea was to both showcase and subdue oneself. As he hands over to his partner, the artist must judge how much to dissolve the tune. Dravid and Laxman dissolved into one another more harmoniously, more significantly, than any other Indian duo.

Separately, theirs were brilliant careers. Dravid's was colossal. He played 164 Tests, faced more deliveries than anyone in history (31,260), and made more runs (13,288) than all but two. He became the first man to 200 catches, most of them snaffled at first slip. For a supposed misfit in one-day internationals, he still racked up over 10,000 runs at nearly 40. Though he enjoyed neither, he kept wicket or opened the innings with courage and competence, whenever needed. In a tumultuous stint as captain, he oversaw a first-round World Cup exit and Test series victories in the West Indies and England.

Laxman, who when picked for India still hadn't ruled out returning to medical studies to become a doctor like his parents, scored close to 9,000 runs in 134 Tests. Against Australia, the premier team of the era, he struck ten sublime international centuries, including one that may just be the greatest innings in all cricket. Like Dravid, he caught well at bat-pad, then in the slips. Sometimes vice-captain, he was seen by younger team-mates as the avuncular bridge between generations. They called himmama, or uncle. These are the bare facts.

Part of their harmony was that Laxman and Dravid were similar and dissimilar in equal measure. They were both from southern India - Laxman from Hyderabad, Dravid from Bangalore - and were both gentlemen (south Indians will think this a tautology). Raised on matting wickets, they enjoyed bounce and back-foot play. They were tall, wristy, hit the ball along the ground, and possessed what cricket watchers refer to as "temperament".

For all that, they could give off very different impressions: Dravid seemed to care a little too much, Laxman not enough. This may be because Dravid perspired heavily and tended to grimace, whereas Laxman looked always a serene stroller in pleasant climes. It may be because Dravid committed himself to sincere footwork, whereas Laxman (against pace) trusted his hands and the curvy abstractions of what he once told me was his "bat flow".

Sporting impressions are rarely false. It's just that sportswriters, like cartoonists, exaggerate the features. As with David Gower, the game looked easy in Laxman's lovely hands. He was Goweresque in only that respect. He was not to be spotted swooping in a biplane over his team-mates, or sozzled at an official reception. He was a diligent man, who worked all career at ironing out any incriminating casualness from his strokes; a religious man, who can quote verses from the Bhagavad Gita, and in the early years could be seen muttering a prayer (to the saint Sai Baba) as he faced up.

Meanwhile Dravid, given to over-intensity, honed relaxation into a fine art. Before matches, he willed himself away from self-torture through video analysis and training sessions, to long lunches, long sleep, and slow living. Waiting to bat, he watched the game only briefly. He was no contest, it is true, for Laxman, who was fond of showering when the man before him went in, and thereafter might be found lying under a table listening to music on headphones.

When his turn arrived, Dravid strode out briskly to the centre. On certain days, with chest and arm guards in place, his back erect and knees high for a man with pads, it could be said he marched out. Laxman appeared sometimes belatedly, somewhat gingerly (bad knees), with a pacific, Mona Lisa quasi-smile, and collar turned up in the Hyderabadi way. At the crease they were calm, immersed in their work like artistes. They were happy to bat for hours, days. Occasionally Dravid responded to sledging, though in an upstanding kind of manner. Laxman seemed not to notice at all. While fielding in the slips they talked to each other, Dravid told journalist Nagraj Gollapudi, "about kids, house construction, plumbers, electricians, running errands".

The mammoth partnership has usually been the preserve of those in successive batting positions. Only seven pairs in Test history have put together two or more triple-century stands, as Dravid and Laxman did. These have been either openers - Herschelle Gibbs and Graeme Smith - or batted close together: Bill Ponsford and Don Bradman, Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene, Younis Khan and Mohammad Yousuf, Hashim Amla and Jacques Kallis, Ricky Ponting and Michael Clarke. But Dravid and Laxman batted at opposite poles of the middle order, at first drop and fourth. Three-hundred-and-something runs for the fifth wicket suggests more than appetite: it suggests valour.

Valour was scarce in the times we refer to. To understand Indian cricket at the turn of the century, consider the sequence: clean-swept in Australia, clean- swept at home by South Africa, the resignation of a deflated captain (Sachin Tendulkar), the naming of the previous captain (Mohammad Azharuddin) and several players in a match-fixing scandal. To passionate fans, cricket felt desperate; to others, it felt wholly discredited.

Kolkata, 2001: it was a day short of the Ides of March. But the 14th was no less portentous for Australia's Caesar, Steve Waugh. On that day two years previously, a beleaguered West Indies side had risen again in Kingston: from 37 for four overnight, Brian Lara and Jimmy Adams batted almost all day and overturned a series. Australia had advanced since, revivified by the phenomenon of Adam Gilchrist, the tank-sniper combination of Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer, and Waugh's own ruthless ambition. Forget losses: they barely did draws. Going into Kolkata they had racked up a world record 16 straight Test wins. The latest of those was a three-day demolition of India in Mumbai. And in Kolkata, a quartet of Glenn McGrath, Jason Gillespie, Michael Kasprowicz and Shane Warne had bowled Australia to a 274-run lead.

	Kolkata 2001: "batting, and batting, and more beautiful batting" © AFP  Enlarge

The rest is an Indian fairytale: Laxman the last man out in the first innings for a dashing 59, asked to keep his pads on by his captain and the coach, swapping positions with a struggling Dravid in the follow-on, the two coming together in the second innings with Laxman almost upon his century but India still behind Australia's first-innings total.

And then the batting, and batting, and more beautiful batting, over a short evening, the whole of March 14, and then some more. Laxman curling the ball through imperceptible gaps, Dravid regaining lost form through pure unblinking will, Laxman now flick-pulling the fast bowlers as if tossing frisbees, now driving them on the rise, sinuous jabs that raced improbably across the big green outfield, Dravid now blocking, now shouldering arms, now leaning back to cut, the old sureness slowly redeveloping, Laxman inside-outing Warne miraculously from far outside leg stump, now whipping him against the turn, Dravid, fully restored, emboldened to come down the track himself and wrist Warne across his break, all of this in the huge sound and growing belief of a hundred thousand in Eden Gardens, an energy that must be experienced to be understood.

Laxman batted ten and a half hours for 281. Dravid was run out for 180 after nearly seven and a half. Together they put on 376. These were runs made in some discomfort: Laxman had been listing, much like a ship, and his back had to be realigned by the physio during the intervals; Dravid, battling the high humidity of Kolkata and his own rate of perspiration, cramped with dehydration. Around their necks both wore strips of towel drenched in ice-water, and they returned to a dressing-room installed with drips. India won the Test, magically, then the series. If a virtue of sport is to make a people cast aside their troubles, not by fantasy but aspiration, here it was.

Three seasons on, the Indian team were finding their way in the world - but not yet in Australia. At Adelaide, they were 85 for four, trailing by 471, doomed to a ritual humiliation. Despite the absence of Warne and McGrath, the task didn't look hard: it looked hopeless. India hadn't won a Test in Australia for 23 years. Of the 26 Tests that Steve Waugh had captained at home, Australia had won 21 and lost one (a dead rubber in the 2002-03 Ashes). Soon the familiar chemistry between our like-and-unlike couple began to galvanise into something close to inevitability.

Here, Dravid played the lead. He was back at No. 3, and in the form of his life. The previous year he had hit Test centuries in four successive innings, three of them in England, including a defensive tour de force at Headingley. Sunny Adelaide allowed him to be more expansive. His handsomest stroke, the front-foot drive through cover, he repeatedly demonstrated, bending low on his left knee like a skater and letting his arms arc out. Astonishingly, he brought up his century with a miscued pull - for six. He even surprised himself when, late in the collaboration, he looked at the scoreboard to find he had outscored his partner. "Yeah, jeez, not bad for a blocker, huh?" he told the sportswriter Rohit Brijnath.

This time they put on 303: Laxman 148, Dravid 233. In a neat inversion, as Laxman had set up Kolkata with a first-innings fifty, here Dravid anchored a hard fourth-innings chase with 72 not out. When he cut the winning runs to the boundary, Waugh made a point of retrieving the ball from the gutter and handing it over. Waugh retired after the series, and to write a foreword to his autobiography he invited Dravid, a much younger man who had once sought him out to ask how to take his game to a higher plane.

There was much more to Dravid and Laxman than these two partnerships - and also, of course, often much less. Laxmanophiles were bewildered that a batsman of his calibre should average so far below 50, appalled (and secretly charmed) by his running between the wickets, and plain frustrated when the ball seamed about and he poked to slip; against England he averaged 30. Likewise, Dravid partisans could try to construct defences for his unflattering averages against Australia and South Africa, the best bowling attacks of the time - but how to enjoy his most tuneless offerings, the 16-off-114-balls variety, except by wilful perversity? (Dravid, who had not just the cussedness but also the humour to perpetrate these innings, once raised his bat to applause from an Australian crowd after a single.)

Indians place on a pedestal the twin epics because of what they were, and also because of their associations. To think of Dravid's 233 at Adelaide is also to think of his monumental 270 in Rawalpindi, 148 at Headingley, or 93 at Perth - all setting up ground-breaking overseas victories. To think of Laxman's Kolkata masterpiece is also an oblique tribute to its younger brothers: from late 2010 alone, extraordinary fourth-innings chases against Australia and Sri Lanka, and a third-innings 96 in Durban when nobody else in the match touched 40.

Team success cannot and should never be a necessary or a sufficient condition for a cricketer's accomplishments, but in the Indian instance it felt urgent. The Indian side of the 2000s was up against a history of flickering achievement amid lethargic underperformance. Of the batting line-up instrumental in overturning that history, Dravid was the spine and Laxman the nerve. Their runs were tough, elegant and vital. Their manner was classic. The echoes of Kolkata and Adelaide rang down the decade, in far-flung venues and memories, and in notes from cricket watchers to one another.

US shutdown: The rise of America’s vetocracy is true to the ideals of the Founding Fathers

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA in The Independent

Friday 11 October 2013

In a system designed to empower minorities and block majorities, stalemate will go on

The House Republicans’ willingness to provoke a government shutdown as part of their effort to defund or delay the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, illustrates some  enduring truths about American politics — and how the United States is an outlier among the world’s rich democracies. As President Obama asserted, America is indeed exceptional. But that’s not necessarily a good thing.

The first way America is different is that its constitutional system throws extraordinary obstacles into the path of strong political action. All democracies seek to balance the need for decisiveness and majority rule, on the one hand, and protection against an overreaching state on the other. Compared with most other democratic systems, America’s is biased strongly toward the latter. When a parliamentary system like Britain’s elects a government, the new leaders get to make decisions based on a legislative majority. The United States, by contrast, features a legislature divided into two equally powerful chambers, each of which may be held by a different party, alongside the presidency. The courts and the powers distributed to states and localities are further barriers to the ability of the majority at the national level to get its way.

Despite this dissipation of power, the American system was reasonably functional during much of the 20th century, both in periods when government was expanding (think New Deal) and retreating (as under Ronald Reagan). This happened because the two political parties shared many assumptions about the direction of policy and showed significant ideological overlap. But they have drifted far apart since the 1980s, such that the most liberal Republican now remains significantly to the right of the most conservative Democrat. (This does not reflect a corresponding polarisation in the views of the public, meaning that we have a real problem in representation.) This drift to the extremes is most evident in the Republican Party, whose geographic core has become the Old South.

As congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have pointed out, this combination of party polarisation and strongly separated powers produces government paralysis. Under such conditions, the much-admired American system of checks and balances can be seen as a “vetocracy” — it empowers a wide variety of political players representing minority positions to block action by the majority and prevent the government from doing anything.

American vetocracy was on full display this past week. The Republicans could not achieve a simple majority in both houses of Congress to defund or repeal the Affordable Care Act, much less the supermajority necessary to override an inevitable presidential veto. So they used their ability to block funding for the federal government to try to exact acquiescence with their position. And they may do the same with the debt limit in a few days. Our political system makes it easier to prevent things from getting done than to make a proactive decision.

In most European parliamentary democracies, by contrast, the losing side of the election generally accepts the right of the majority to govern and does not seek to use every institutional lever available to undermine the winner. In the Netherlands and Sweden, it requires not 41 per cent of the total, but rather a single lawmaker, to hold up legislation indefinitely (i.e. filibuster). Yet this power is almost never used because people accept that decisions need to be made. There is no Ted Cruz there.

The second respect in which America is different has to do with the virulence of the Republican rejection of the Affordable Care Act. Every other developed democracy — Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Germany, you name it — has some form of government-mandated, universal health insurance, and many have had such systems for more than a  century. Before Obamacare, our health-care system was highly dysfunctional, costing twice as much per person as the average among rich countries, while producing worse results and leaving millions uninsured. The health-care law is no doubt a flawed piece of legislation, like any bill written to satisfy the demands of legions of lobbyists and interest groups. But only in America can a government mandate to buy something that is good for you in any case be characterised as an intolerable intrusion on individual liberty.

According to many Republicans, Obamacare signals nothing short of the end of the US, something that “we will never recover from,” in the words of one GOP House member. And yes, some on the right have compared Obama’s America to Hitler’s Germany. The House Republicans see themselves as a beleaguered minority, standing on core principles like the brave abolitionists opposing slavery before the Civil War. It is this kind of rhetoric that makes non-Americans scratch their heads in disbelief.

But while the showdown over the Affordable Care Act makes America exceptional among contemporary democracies, it is also perfectly consistent with our history. US constitutional checks and balances — our vetocratic political system — have consistently allowed minorities to block major pieces of social legislation over the past century and a half. The clearest example was civil rights: For 100 years after the Civil War and the passage of the 13th and 14th amendments, a minority of Southern states was able to block federal legislation granting full civil and political rights to African Americans. National regulation of railroads, legislation on working conditions and rules on occupational safety were checked or delayed by different parts of the system.

Many Americans may say: “Yes, that’s the genius of the American constitutional system.” It has slowed or prevented the growth of a large, European-style regulatory welfare state, allowing the private sector to flourish and unleashing the US as a world leader in technology and entrepreneurship.

All of that is true; there are important pluses as well as minuses to the American system. But conservatives beware: the combination of polarisation and vetocracy means that future efforts to cut back the government will be mired in gridlock as well. This will be a particular problem with health care. The Affordable Care Act has many problems and will need to be modified. But our politics will offer only two choices: complete repeal or status quo. Moreover, there are huge issues of cost containment that the law doesn’t begin to address. But the likelihood of our system seriously coming to terms with these issues seems minimal.

Some Democrats take comfort in the fact that the country’s demographics will eventually produce electoral majorities for their party. But the system is designed to empower minorities and block majorities, so the current stalemate is likely to persist for many years. Obama has criticised the House Republicans for trying to relitigate the last election. That’s true, but that’s also what our political system was designed to do.