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.

To call Labour 'Stalinists' for proposing regulation is beyond absurd

Mark Steel in The Independent

Some people might react to the energy companies raising prices another 8 per cent by saying, “It shouldn’t be allowed.” If you’re one of those people, you should be aware that you’re like Stalin. Because after Ed Miliband’s speech in which he said he would freeze energy prices for a while, he was attacked for being like Stalin by several Conservative politicians and newspapers. So if your neighbour says today, “Ooh those blooming gas people, we shouldn’t let them to put their ruddy prices up again”, tell her, “You murdering bastard. I know your sort, first you starved millions of peasants to death, then you signed a pact with Hitler. Well I’m not afraid to stand up to you, even if you are likely to incarcerate me in a Siberian prison, Mrs Whittaker.”

This is the history that will soon be accepted, that communism collapsed when millions of people demanded that electricity prices were doubled. Heroic citizens stood on the crumbling Berlin Wall and proclaimed, “At last we are free to vote and listen to rock music and charge thousands of pounds for turning the radiators on.”

This is a common response now to any proposal that big business is suspicious of. The suggestion that landowners may be required to use some of their land for housebuilding, to “expand towns such as Stevenage”, was compared by the Institute of Directors to “Joseph Stalin’s notorious seizure of land from prosperous Russians.” For those not familiar with the methods of Stalin, he sent his army to shoot any farmers who didn’t hand over all their land to the state. So if you own a garden in Stevenage you’re in trouble.

Tanks will roll past Luton and on to Welwyn Garden City, rampaging soldiers ignoring the cries of children as they transfer the waste ground behind Stevenage Asda to Hertfordshire County Council, cruelly laughing as they build two-bedroom affordable flats while the people of Bletchley can only wonder if they’ll be next.

Even more worrying, opinion polls show that 75 per cent of people support renationalising the railways, which even Labour aren’t proposing, so three-quarters of the population is WORSE than Stalin. This means that if Stalin was alive in Britain now, his speeches would start, “You lot want too much nationalisation, that’s your trouble.”

So we should write letters to First Great Western Trains such as, “Not only does this country have the most expensive rail network in Europe, but last week my train to Cardiff was delayed by two hours and I had to stand all the way. Congratulations, this proves we’re free. Please please don’t ever give in to those interfering Stalinists who’d take away your right to rob us blind and leave us with deep vein thrombosis.”

Similarly, Scottish Southern Energy’s managing director Will Morris explained his company’s latest 8 per cent price rise by saying, “Our aim is to keep prices low.” But that would clearly be immoral and Stalinist so be thankful he’s prepared to make a stand for freedom and put them up. Along with our payments we should send a tip, and a note saying, “Thank you Mr Morris sir, if I may address you sir, for putting up the prices an’ all, for us simple folk don’t want the burden of what to do wiv spare money and only go and waste it on crack like what happens wiv communism.”

Even when the European Union issued a directive that bankers’ bonuses should be kept to just double their salary, David Cameron went berserk about “interference”. Any attempt to regulate the behaviour of big business in any way is seen as an outrageous intrusion, against the laws of nature and sinful.

The Bible will be rewritten soon, to read that “Jesus took the seven loaves and two fish, and gave them to the starving crowd of thousands who all ate and were satisfied. And the Chief Executive of the Galilee Haddock Corporation did smite Jesus for artificially increasing supply, thereby interfering with the price as determined by the free market. And Jesus learned to refrain from miracles for the Institute of Directors did say they were Stalinist.”

For 30 years the trend has been towards allowing the biggest companies and banks to do whatever they like, even after the system crashed. To be fair this does create a wonderfully free society, as long as you’re on the board of one of those companies or banks. Obviously the section of society that isn’t on the board of a multinational corporation or a bank hasn’t done so well, but there will always be some minority with something to complain about.

After the crash of 1929, Western governments took the view that the banks should be regulated a bit, and these rules remained until they were ripped up in the 1980s. But this time the banks, businesses and individuals that fuelled the crash have carried on exactly as before.

Now Labour has suggested a handful of modifications to this system, and they’re called Stalinists. So we should allow the companies to behave as they like, until sections of the population sit freezing, unable to travel, their 40-year-old sons and daughters huddled with them as Stevenage remains unexpanded, maybe keeping a diary of their existence in the icy conditions that goes, “We’re all very grateful. At least it’s not like it would be under Stalin.”

Art galleries should be apothecaries for our deeper selves

Museums of art should recognise the therapeutic potential of their collections and display them accordingly. Step through the lobby into the gallery of love

• 
• • Alain de Botton
  • theguardian.com, Thursday 10 October 2013 13.35 BST

Jan Steen's Woman at her Toilet might help you make a long-term relationship more exciting.

What would you do to help someone who felt deeply anxious about the future? Or who was dragged down by a sense of sadness and loneliness? How could you make a long-term relationship more exciting or alleviate your impression of being a loser?

My answer in all of these cases is to recommend that you look closely and repeatedly at certain works of art. To be more specific, I'd advise taking in Sugimoto's North Atlantic Ocean for the first problem, Richard Serra's Fernanda Pessoa for the second, Jan Steen's Woman at her Toilet for the third and a 15th-century statue of the Buddhist saintly figure, Guanyin, for the fourth.

The idea that one might use art for a purpose, for "instrumental" reasons, tends to set off alarm bells. Art is not an instrument, comes the almost automatic reply. It shouldn't be thought of as some kind of tool. It's not a pill. It shouldn't be asked to perform some specific function, especially something as egocentric as to cheer you up or to make you a more empathetic person. Art galleries aren't chemists.

I couldn't disagree more. If culture is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what one might call our souls. Art galleries should be apothecaries for our deeper selves.

Religions have always been clear on to this psycho-therapeutic score. For hundreds of years in the west, Christian art had a very clear function: it was meant to direct us towards the good and wean us off vice. A lot of Buddhist sculpture had an equally clear mission: to encourage us to achieve an inner calm by contemplating the serene expression on the Buddha's face, especially his smile. We should take some inspiration from these examples and demand more from the art of our times.

There is nothing wrong with thinking of artworks as tools and asking them to do things for us. They can help our psyches in a variety of ways: rebalance our moods, lend us hope, usher in calm, stretch our sympathies, reignite our senses and reawaken appreciation. But in order to do these things, they need to be better signposted as having the power to do so. Modern galleries should recognise the therapeutic potential of their collections and honour it in the way they display them. At present, art museums are typically set out under headings such as The Nineteenth Century or The Northern Italian School, which reflect the academic traditions in which their curators have been educated. But this may not do very much for us in our deep selves. A more fertile indexing system would group together artworks from across genres and eras according to our inner needs.

In my ideal museum, you would enter into the lobby and find a map showing galleries devoted to a range of topics with which we often need help: work, love, family, mortality, community, status, anxiety. In the gallery of love, for example, you might be shown Pisano's Daphnis and Chloe, a deeply evocative reminder of the sense of gratitude and wonder with which most of us start relationships, but all too soon abandon (art is a superlative memory-bank for precious emotions that otherwise disappear). The gallery might then move us on to a Richard Long sculpture, where highly irregular and jagged stones were brought into harmony within a perfect circle, a metaphor for the way our own differences would ideally be accommodated in relationships.

Through such themed galleries, art would start to serve psychology in the same way it has served theology for centuries. A walk through a museum of art would amount to a structured encounter with a few of the emotions which are easiest for us to forget but life-enhancing to remember. Arranged in this way, museums of art would then be able to claim that they really had fulfilled that excellent but as yet elusive ambition of becoming substitutes for our cathedrals and churches in a rapidly secularising society.