The Social World

Tag: Covid

  • Will the new Avatar be the last?

    Will the new Avatar be the last?

    For someone who has directed two of the three highest-grossing films of all time – and if we include Titanic in the mix, three of the top five – James Cameron struck an unusually modest figure at this week’s premiere Avatar: Fire and Ash. When asked at the screening whether its inevitable box-office success would result in the planned fourth and fifth films being produced, the erstwhile King of the World responded “I’m not even thinking about four. Are you kidding me? I’m unemployed right now.”

    Admittedly, Cameron’s definition of “unemployed” is rather different to that of most people, whether they be A-list directors or the less fortunate. He has now spent 16 years in the Avatar universe, and after the inordinate success of the first picture – still the highest-grossing film in history – he has shown no interest in diversifying away from the world of Pandora and its motion-captured blue denizens, instead constructing an increasingly baroque and detailed universe that drags in vast audiences. The films may be titanic in length – the latest one clocks in at 195 minutes – but they are also staggering in ambition and imaginative force, even if those who might prefer something more cerebral and less, well, blue are likely to be disappointed.

    Nonetheless, the now-71-year-old Cameron might be forgiven for dampening sky-high expectations with the latest release, as the world of cinema has changed beyond all recognition since 2009. Back then, 3D was the hottest game in town, with the Terminator and Aliens director its leading pioneer, and audiences were desperate to put on their plastic glasses and soak up the spectacle. Now, these same audiences have been reduced in the post-Covid, streaming era, and 3D is a novelty format that only Cameron still seems enamored of, despite or perhaps because of the high supplements that theater owners can charge for tickets.

    There are other issues, too. While the PG-13 Avatar films are hardly adult-oriented, there is also a sense that the only pictures that are doing really well are those aimed at teenagers and children – witness the recent success of the Wicked and Zootopia sequels, and the failure of virtually everything else – and that Cameron’s eco-zealotry may be an uncomfortable fit in the MAGA era; its predecessors both were released under Democratic administrations and seemed almost the cinematic exemplars of those governments.

    There is also the problem that the Avatar pictures aren’t actually all that good. Cameron’s undeniable skills as a director – pacing, action, spectacle – are perhaps outweighed by his deficiencies, namely that he cannot write dialogue or convincing characters to save his life, that his plots are stick-thin and that his love of technology is far greater than his interest in actors. Yet he seems unwilling to move into the kind of joyfully dynamic blockbusters that The Terminator, its superior sequel and Aliens represent – as well, for a guilty pleasure, as 1994’s very silly, very funny True Lies. Instead, he seems as lost in Pandora as his paraplegic marine Jake Sully, forever doomed to walk its groves in his own version of a giant blue body.

    For all this, I suspect that Fire and Ash will be an enormous hit, just like its predecessors, and that Cameron will remain within the Avatar universe, as planned, until 2031, when the final installment in the series is intended for release. By then, the filmmaker will be nearly 80; not in itself an ancient age, but the idea of his doing another Titanic-esque epic might seem beyond him. And when he finally expires, worn out by too much boundary-pushing and technical fiddling, we may look at this long period that this undeniably gifted filmmaker chose to spend in an imaginary world of his own creation, and wish that he had done something more interesting, instead.

  • Why does Jared Leto still have a career?

    Why does Jared Leto still have a career?

    This weekend, Tron: Ares releases across US cinemas, and is expected to make a decent, rather than record-setting, amount of money in its opening weekend. It is a curious film franchise in that neither of the two films that precede it are especially beloved, but both have iconic soundtracks composed, respectively, by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos and French electro duo Daft Punk. (The honors this time around fall to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, aka Nine Inch Nails.) Yet whatever the strengths and weaknesses of Tron: Ares – and the early reviews have not been kind – there is one aspect that can only make audiences groan in anticipation, and that is the casting of its star, Jared Leto.

    It is difficult to describe how spectacular Leto’s fall from public grace has been, and not simply because of incidents reported earlier this year in which he was accused of sexual misconduct with a series of women – claims he denies and that have not resulted in any further action. It is more because Leto, a famously handsome Oscar-winning actor and frontman of the commercially successful band Thirty Seconds To Mars, resembles a cautionary tale for our times. Give a talented, quirky young man all the fame and adulation that he could ever imagine, and watch him teeter under it. Let’s call it Shia LaBeouf syndrome.

    There is no reason why it had to be like this. Leto began his career opposite Claire Danes in the still-excellent Nineties teen series My So-Called Life. He took an apparent delight in dismantling his heartthrob image. He was excellent in films as varied as Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and Mary Harron’s American Psycho, collaborated with David Fincher on Fight Club and Panic Room and was a convincingly vanity-free Mark Chapman, John Lennon’s assassin, in Chapter 27. Even as his band went stratospheric and he seemed to be lost to music rather than acting, he rebounded with an Oscar-winning performance in Dallas Buyers’ Club as a trans woman dying of AIDS. Back when that film was made in 2013, the idea of a heterosexual male actor playing such a role did not offend wider sensibilities, and Leto, who never broke character during filming, was lauded for his bravery and daring, rather than pilloried for, of all things, acting.

    Unfortunately, the film’s success and acclaim also turned Leto from an interesting and versatile actor into a tiresome attention-seeker. Few could have done anything to rescue Suicide Squad from torpor, admittedly. Yet Leto was not only tedious as the Joker on-screen, but his off-screen pranks – which included giving his co-stars “gifts” of used condoms and live rats – demonstrated that he now began to think of himself as A Great Thespian. As he grandly said a few years ago, “I’m an artist at the end of the day. If I do something risky and you don’t like it, basically, you can kiss my ass.”

    Leto’s “art” has not, so far, resulted in performances that the average cinemagoer would like. He was the worst thing about the otherwise excellent Blade Runner sequel as the blind tech mogul Niander Wallace – in a role earmarked for another musician-actor, David Bowie – and his tic-laden performance as a suspected serial killer in The Little Things was so annoying that when he is finally murdered by an exasperated Rami Malek, it is all you can do not to cheer. But worse was to come. Leto decided that he, too, needed a superhero franchise, and so he appeared as a vampire in the dismal Morbius, which flopped heavily. It was a mark of how bad the film was that it went viral for its perceived shoddiness, and that its desperate distributors Sony re-released it in the hope that it would become a camp classic of sorts: audiences were too savvy to be taken in.

    On a personal level, he (rightly) became a laughingstock March 2020, shortly after the outbreak of Covid and subsequent lockdown, for tweeting, “Wow. 12 days ago I began a silent meditation in the desert. We were totally isolated. No phone, no communication etc. We had no idea what was happening outside the facility.” It reinforced the idea of the actor as solipsistic and out-of-touch, someone whose Art cannot be affected by such trivial things as a global pandemic, and made him seem even more annoying than before.

    Yet Leto still can surprise, in a good way, when he can be bothered. His scenery-chewing performance in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci as Paolo Gucci, speaking in an accent that sounds like a Little Italy ice cream vendor, was widely panned by critics, but it’s a hilarious piece of opera buffa that peaks when Leto, encased in prosthetics like a circus attraction, says of his imprisoned papa, “how can I think about my line when my father could be dropping the soap!” It demonstrated that Leto can still be an excellent character actor of great versatility – and humor – when he is not trying so damn hard.

    Tron: Ares represents Leto the movie star, and it is a tiresome thing now to see. Yet weirdly, his next performance, as the villainous Skeletor in Masters of the Universe, could be a return to form of some kind. In the Eighties version of the film, Frank Langella stole the show from beneath a ton of make-up as the campy nemesis of He-Man. If Leto channels a similar sense of fun, then a whole new career could open up to him, with this most earnest of actors – or artists – not taking himself so seriously. If so, then he could yet recapture the promise of his earlier career. But if not, we will be stuck with an awful lot more movies like this one, with a lot more irritating, self-regarding performances by an actor who really does know better.

  • The Freedom Convoy trial has disgraced Canada’s justice system

    The Freedom Convoy trial has disgraced Canada’s justice system

    In a disgraceful conclusion to a disgraceful trial, Freedom Convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber have been sentenced to 12 months of house arrest and 6 months of curfew (with credit for the 49 days Lich has already spent in jail) – plus 100 hours of community service.

    An ironic addendum. For in the packed courtroom on October 7, there was likely not one person who has served the community with greater generosity than the two defendants.

    Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, organizers of the most successful protest in Canadian history, kept their cool, kept the peace and brought national unity, patriotism and common sense back to Canada after the pandemic – this, despite the sustained efforts of the most aggressively controlling, divisive government the nation has ever had. They achieved this under intense pressure and at great personal cost.

    They’re national heroes, and the persecution waged against them is destroying trust in the Canadian judicial system, though the judge involved does not seem to realize it. Justice Perkins-McVey said in court that if she discharged the defendants, it would “undermine confidence in the administration of justice”.

    But it’s quite the opposite. Though left-leaning outlets have portrayed the sentence as light, compared to the outrageous seven and eight years of jail time demanded by the Crown, any conviction and sentencing of the obviously innocent Lich and Barber only serves to confirm that Canadians with the wrong political views will not receive equal treatment before the law.

    We all know that in Canada, axe-wielding saboteurs, railway blockaders, rioters, traffic disruptors and violent protestors have escaped without so much as arrest, as long as the government views their cause with complaisance.

    Can you believe that Lich was convicted for saying things like “hold the line”, “stay united” and “don’t give in to fear”? Dangerous words indeed. And Barber? He was convicted for telling truckers not to honk unless their trucks were raided – this was defiance of the court order against honking. Three weeks of protesting, all recorded on thousands of devices, and those were the only charges that could be made to stick? It’s a good thing they didn’t try jaywalking.

    Thankfully, Lich’s lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon, says they are seriously considering an appeal of her conviction, on grounds that “constitutionally protected freedom of speech which encourages peaceful assembly should always prevail over any rights to the enjoyment of property”.

    There was another ironic moment at the sentencing. The judge announced, “Politics has no place inside this courtroom” – yet the trial has been widely viewed as nothing more than the political vengeance of Doug Ford and the Ontario government.

    If it weren’t for politics, Lich and Barber would never have been arrested, let alone put through jail time, solitary confinement, loss of employment, years of drawn-out, costly legal proceedings, onerous bail conditions and emotional strain.

    They inspired a movement that made the government look bad in the eyes of the world, they challenged its pandemic management and the government was forced to back down. Now the government wants to make an example of them – whatever the cost.

    And the cost, so far, has been $21 million. That’s how much tax money Doug Ford and his government have spent to date on prosecuting Lich, Barber and others involved with the trucker protest. His targets are all working-class people of modest income. Many have lost their livelihoods because of the drawn-out legal proceedings against them.

    The only way they have been able to afford a defense and cover the cost of travel to and from the Ottawa court, is through donations from the public. This means the public is paying twice – once as taxpayers, with money intended to pursue real criminals wasted on a political vendetta – and once again, voluntarily, to support the brave people who stood up to ask for an end to lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

    This is the same public that already gave $24 million to the truckers to help them go to Ottawa and protest vaccine mandates and lockdowns: $24 million that never reached them, because politicians colluded with fundraising sites and banks to freeze the money, debank the protestors and doxx the donors, all without a court order. No criminal charges have been laid in Canada, to this writer’s knowledge, against the perpetrators of these deeds, though they damaged national institutions far more than any protest ever could.

    Justice Perkins-McVey is right to be concerned about confidence in the administration of justice. Many Canadians share her concern. Sadly, her handling of this case has done little to dispel their fears.  

  • How António Guterres wrecked the UN

    How António Guterres wrecked the UN

    As the world’s leaders and foreign ministers meet in New York for the UN General Assembly this week, recognition of a Palestinian state is expected to be paraded as progress towards peace. In reality, it will be nothing of the sort. It will confirm what has become increasingly obvious to anyone watching the UN over the past eight years: that the organization is in a state of malaise, and its Secretary-General, António Guterres, is the embodiment of the decline.

    The UN is no stranger to dysfunction, which I saw first-hand as a Security Council Counterterror Coordinator for five years. Every secretary-general has faced allegations of irrelevance, hypocrisy or incompetence. But Guterres stands out for having presided over an organization that is now derided by its own staff. It is not the usual frustrations of understaffing or the griping of a bureaucracy that has never been known for efficiency. It is the weary recognition that the institution has lost its way, and that its leader appears more interested in burnishing his progressive credentials than in delivering results.

    Guterres presents himself as a statesman, but in truth he is an old-fashioned European socialist with all the expected traits: endless preaching, no moral courage, and a fondness for rewarding loyal friends with plum jobs they seem unqualified for. The result is a hollowed-out organization where personal loyalty and national patronage count for more than competence.

    The UN has always had its share of cronyism – but under Guterres, it has become the organizing principle of appointments, in contravention of the current imperative to make cuts. High-caliber officials with relevant experience are sidelined while mediocrities from the Secretary-General’s inner circle are parachuted into high-profile posts. There was particular disquiet among UN staff earlier this year, when Guterres promoted fellow Portuguese national Miguel Graca to Assistant Secretary General in March, making him a director in Guterres’s own executive office. Critics observed that a sideways move could have been made at zero cost, rather than incurring the salary burden of creating a new ASG at this time of austerity. 

    Guterres is an exceptionally poor leader. I will never forget the sense of vacuum at the top during and after Covid, when the UN became the laughing stock of New York for its excessive attachment to working from home. Instead of leading the calls to get staff back into the office, he devolved decision making down to middle management who ultimately had to bear the brunt of staff complaints about returning to Turtle Bay. As one senior UN manager said to me: “Guterres gets to sound like the one who cares about staff welfare, while we have to impose operational necessity on them.”

    The charge sheet does not end there. Equally glaring is an inconsistency in his loud campaign for gender parity in senior appointments. This has sometimes extended to throwing carefully compiled interview shortlists back at his top aides and demanding a woman be selected. When his own re-appointment was at stake in 2021, all talk of female empowerment conveniently evaporated. There was no question of stepping aside to support a woman candidate; equality, it seems, was good enough for the bureaucracy but not for him. This hypocrisy is noticed, and it corrodes morale. In the case of the new Portuguese ASG, this particular “Global North” male was allowed to buck the trend of promoting “Global South” females wherever possible.

    Guterres’s crusade for fashionable causes does not end with gender politics. However noble his dogged progressivism may seem in the West, such an approach has proved catastrophic in conservative host countries. I am no fan of the death penalty, but when three of the five permanent members of the Security Council have it (China, the United States and technically Russia) what justifies the UN in adopting such an inflexible stance against it in Iraq? When UN overreach leads to expulsion, it leaves the host country and its citizens without the support and protection they desperately need. In recent years, we have seen the UN effectively forced to leave Mali, Sudan and DRC; and to abandon its work in Iraq on securing justice for the victims of ISIS.

    Even staff who still believe in the essential role of the UN despair of the Guterres effect. Speaking of his attendance at the Brics summit in Russia last October, where he was photographed sharing what looked like a very deferential handshake with Vladimir Putin, one official said: “Nato wouldn’t put Guterres in a difficult position by inviting him to their summit, but even if they did he wouldn’t attend.” What this conveys is not just frustration, but a recognition that the UN under Guterres has lost its way. He, however, remains deaf to these warnings, apparently more interested in applause from the lowest common denominator of the General Assembly than in preserving access to make a positive difference in Baghdad or Bamako.

    For all the malaise inside the organization, the UN still enjoys reverence among the wider public, and an annual budget of $3.72 billion for day-to-day running costs. To many people it remains the arbiter of legitimacy in world affairs, a sort of secular Vatican whose pronouncements carry moral weight simply by virtue of being made. That misplaced deference is precisely what has allowed various UN Special Rapporteurs to make wild assertions that Britain and other western allies are serial human rights abusers.

    While conflict has spread in many regions in recent years, Guterres has done precious little to stop it. The Gaza war has exposed the rot most starkly. From the moment Hamas launched its 7 October massacre, murdering families in their homes, raping women and abducting children, Guterres has struggled to say plainly who was responsible. His initial reaction to the terror attack? It “did not happen in a vacuum”.

    His interventions since have been framed almost entirely in humanitarian terms, with little mention of the hostages, and endless calls for ceasefires that made no demands of Hamas. Despite several countries voicing their concerns, the aggressively controversial Francesca Albanese was reappointed as Special Rapporteur for Palestine. The UN has turned a deaf ear to increasingly forceful objections from the US to its Palestinian refugee operation, UNRWA, which is hopelessly compromised by its long association with Hamas. And it is also alienating the US by refusing to work with the American-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

    The durability of the UN brand meant that last week’s “genocide” report on Gaza landed with the authority of scripture rather than the polemic it truly was. The fact that the chair of the “expert panel” which put the report together has a long history of anti-Israel bias was glossed over once her findings bore the UN stamp. The enduring illusion of UN sanctity allows the institution to launder prejudice and pass it off as impartial judgment. But this illusion of sanctity fools nobody in Washington, DC, where the UN’s most powerful member state and largest donor is sharpening its knives for an organization in which it has lost all confidence. President Trump’s UNGA speech on yesterday was full of scorn for the organization’s contribution to meeting international challenges.

    Into this fog comes the great folly of statehood recognition. At the time of writing, 156 of the UN’s 193 member states have already recognized Palestine and achieved nothing. Ordinary Palestinians remain no freer, no safer and no more prosperous than before.

    At best, recognition lends a sheen of legitimacy to Mahmoud Abbas and his corrupt Palestinian Authority, a body so discredited that it has lost control of large parts of the West Bank to Iranian-backed groups. At worst, recognition teaches extremists that massacres work. To grant statehood in the aftermath of 7 October is to confirm that pogroms pay. Applause in the General Assembly will only underline the message received on the ground.

    Member states that still care about the UN should be under no illusion. An organization that cannot call Hamas what it is, that loses missions by imposing western social agendas on skeptical hosts, and that breeds contempt among its own staff, all while somehow managing to maintain the gloss and credibility of an internationally renowned arbiter of diplomacy is not merely failing. Some of its perversities are making the world a more dangerous place.

    The UN was founded to defend peace and security, and it is still needed to do just that. I have seen too many conflicts in which individual member states either have no interest or refuse to take responsibility, and we will always need the UN or something similar to step into that kind of breach. But under António Guterres the UN has become a theater of platitudes, a showcase for hypocrisy and an institution starved of resources and hollowed out by malaise.

    I hope the UN survives and even thrives beyond Guterres’s tenure. It has many excellent, dedicated staff and the world still needs its services. But the organization needs reform and new leadership. Until then, recognition of Palestine will be yet another empty gesture in a UN increasingly defined by them.

  • Is Jacinda Ardern trying to avoid Covid scrutiny?

    Is Jacinda Ardern trying to avoid Covid scrutiny?

    During the five years Jacinda Ardern led New Zealand, much was made of her “transparent” style of touchy-feely leadership and willingness to deal with thorny questions. Yet on the biggest issue of her record – her zero Covid policies – the former prime minister has gone missing.

    A planned week-long public hearing at an inquiry in New Zealand into the nation’s Covid response was abandoned last month, after Jacinda Ardern and other senior figures from her government unexpectedly refused to testify.

    Ardern’s no-show came as a surprise to many, including the country’s prime minister, Christopher Luxon, who said his predecessor’s decision was “not right.”

    Summarizing her decision not to speak publicly about her handling of the pandemic, the commission said Ardern and her former allies – her health minister, Ayesha Verrall, the minister in charge of the Covid response, Chris Hipkins, and her high-spending finance minister Grant Robertson – believed that the exercise would merely be “performative” rather than “informative.”

    The erstwhile ministers had also been concerned that the livestreaming or publication of their evidence could become fodder for epic online trolling.

    A spokesman for Ardern said she had already provided “extensive evidence, including a recent interview that lasted three hours” for the commission, which is currently in its second phase of evaluating the country’s response to Covid – homing in on the later period when much of the gloss came off the Ardern juggernaut.

    A touch wearily, Hipkins, who has led Labour since Ardern stepped down in early 2023, said he had already spent years talking about the subject.

    As Ardern’s minister in charge of the Covid response, Hipkins oversaw the implementation of a raft of policies that saw cities locked down for months at a time, all but the luckiest expatriate Kiwis denied entry back into their country and, most controversially, Ardern’s “no jab, no job” policy for public servants in education and health who refused the vaccines.

    The last measure led to a month-long occupation outside parliament that ended with running street battles between police and hundreds of protesters.

    In the wake of the chaos, the telegenic leader’s hitherto unassailable poll numbers began to crash, and within a year she decided to call it a political day – even as her reputation abroad remained as high as ever in social democratic circles.

    Her latest decision to stay mum about the central event of her life seems awkwardly timed. With political life now behind her, Ardern has been promoting a bestselling new book about the “different” kind of leadership she brought to world politics.

    Billed as an “inspiring story of how a Mormon girl plagued by self-doubt changed our assumptions of what a leader can be,” Ardern’s new work has also been criticized in Britain as a 350-page transcript of a less-than-enthralling therapy session.

    Surprisingly little space is devoted in the book to lingering questions over her handling of the pandemic. The period is mainly recounted in the context of a factual retelling of landmark moments without much reflection on the kinds of pratfalls that almost certainly would have been raised at any public hearing in New Zealand.

    It could be that she has simply moved on to brighter things. Since leaving politics, Ardern has nabbed a number of plum stateside academic roles, including dual fellowships at Harvard Kennedy School – the university’s school of public policy and government – and a recent commencement speech at Yale.

    This year she became a visiting fellow at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, where she offers what the school describes as her insights into “leadership in times of crisis, commitment to public service, and deep understanding of governance.” Presumably not to be repeated beyond closed doors.

  • Boomer hate has gone too far

    Boomer hate has gone too far

    Charles Murray, whose work on race and IQ has made him something of a darling of the online right, found himself out of favor with his fan base when he posted on X that a young married couple – each making $15 an hour and working 48-hour weeks – can afford a baby and a place to live.

    The reaction was furious. “Charles Murray is a good man,” wrote Zarathustra, a popular dissident right-wing poster. “Sadly, however, he’s also a Boomer. Which by necessity, means his bumper sticker talking points on political economy are comically out of touch garbage, and read like a moldy Reagan Youth pamphlet from 1982.” Murray’s post broke X containment and made it to the subreddit r/BoomersBeingFools. Indeed, most of the anger directed toward Murray followed the same theme: he was wrong because he is a baby boomer. 

    Boomer hate is nothing new, and it’s more or less a bipartisan phenomenon. The “OK boomer” meme appeared on 4chan as early as 2015 and took off as a mass cultural phenomenon in November 2019, when it went viral on TikTok with the influencer Neekolul wearing a Bernie Sanders crop-top lip-syncing to “Oki Doki Boomer.” Just months later, Covid lockdowns took over the world, and the global public-health apparatus shut down the schools and colleges and parties and workplaces of the young in an attempt to preserve the final years of the old. During that time, the left’s distaste toward boomers remained relatively surface-level – they’re old and out of touch, for example – but the right’s resentment toward the generation grew far deeper. In its opposition to mandates, conservatives began to react against a politics and a society that privileged the aging at the expense of everyone else.

    The Silent Generation (with certain big exceptions, such as Anthony Fauci and Joe Biden) has drawn little contempt online, perhaps because it was never memed, perhaps because its members are generally too old and out of the spotlight – but boomers? They embody, for the right, the worst sort of self-preservation, weaponizing their outsize power and numbers in public health and government to fight for policies that were utterly destructive for younger people, to whom they seemingly felt no responsibility. And it wasn’t just about Covid: it was about the fact that they had let insane ideologies – so-called racial reckonings and pediatric sex changes – take over mainstream American life and institutions, crushing the young on top of material concerns such as runaway inflation and housing prices and crime. In other words, they climbed the ladder and then pulled it out from under them, as Helen Andrews argued in her 2021 book, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.

    And yet, these days, most of the ire directed toward boomers seems to be toward the idea that they, like Charles Murray, promote “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps,” with many on the right having joined their counterparts on the left in assuming there can be essentially no self-improvement in the face of material problems. They’re not wrong in that Murray does sound a bit out of touch when he insists on a model that doesn’t entirely account for inflation, the increased prices of insurance and education and assumes more hours than most entry-level jobs are willing to provide employees. But beyond raging against the system – which is precisely what many boomers did during their 1960s youths – and encouraging constant, mostly online outrage, it’s not clear what alternative the anti-boomer right is offering. Meanwhile, a young person might actually be able to make a change in his or her life by taking Murray’s advice seriously, if not literally. At some point, following conventional boomer wisdom becomes a Pascal’s Wager of sorts: if pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps doesn’t work, the worst that can happen is we try something new – but if it does, our work will reward us in ways that wallowing in self-pity never will.

    That’s not the end of unjustified boomer hate. The young right’s antipathy toward boomers is ostensibly about the generation’s entitlement and overeagerness to toss aside tradition, but is, ironically, grounded in entitlement toward boomers’ money and a desire to snub whatever tradition and wisdom it is that boomers themselves have passed on, even if we don’t recognize it as such.

    Indeed, while many on the right look forward to boomers stepping aside – some even gloating over the “Boomer Die Off” in the coming decades – what they don’t realize is that, for better or for worse, boomers are the last link to the old world, being the last generation to truly remember it. Many of the opera houses, symphonies and mainline churches will likely shutter with the boomers, as will any last memory of decorum, of a world in which left hands are for forks, in which suits are for the office, and in which men remove their hats when entering a building.

    The idea that Western civilization will be better off without the boomers is laughably naïve. What’s far more likely is that the small number of people in younger generations who care enough about art and culture and manners will become de facto hobbyists, while those in the greater majority won’t even know what they’ll be missing. 

    Boomers may be flawed, but aren’t we all? To blame them for all our ills, especially as younger generations gain prominence and replace them in positions of power, is to abdicate responsibility. And if we do indeed fall into that trap, those of us in younger generations will have no one to blame but ourselves.

  • Mamdani, the fraud abroad

    Mamdani, the fraud abroad

    On Monday night, New York City golden boy Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, tweeted, after the terrifying gun attack on Park Avenue, “I’m heartbroken to learn of the horrific shooting in midtown and I am holding the victims, their families, and the [New York Police Department] officer in critical condition in my thoughts. Grateful for all of our first responders on the ground.” He also sent special condolences to the families of Didarul Islam, the Bangladeshi immigrant and NYPD officer who died in the attack.

    But there’s a reason Mamdani was holding NYC in his thoughts and not giving a press conference on the ground: He’s at his family’s luxury compound in Uganda, where he’s summering after getting married there a couple of weeks ago. You can’t fault him for getting married, or even for getting married in Uganda, where his father is from. But he’s running for mayor of New York City right now! I know that his roster of opponents is almost a literal clown car. Still, Mamdani needs to be in New York, dealing with New York problems.

    The irony is too delicious. An avowedly socialist mayoral candidate, the presumptive heir to Gracie Mansion, is on a luxury vacation – in Africa – when a crazed gunman attacks the headquarters of an investment and financial-management company and the National Football League. Perhaps Mamdani was eating cake when he heard about the attack. But this is pretty on-brand for contemporary Democrats.

    Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass also happened to be in Africa, on a ding-dong diplomatic mission, when the city’s fires broke out. She could have canceled the trip because the warning signs were there, but she didn’t. Mamdani’s “holding thoughts” also brings to mind other great moments of clueless rich Democrats in action, such as Nancy Pelosi’s Covid haircut or Gavin Newsom’s dinner at the French Laundry. I almost needed to be defibrillated when our erstwhile mayor in Austin, Steve Adler, a multimillionaire real-estate developer, sent out a Covid stay-home order while he was celebrating his daughter’s wedding in Cabo San Lucas, which he had reached via private jet.

    This raised-pinky behavior in times of crisis is hardly exclusive to Democrats. Remember Ted Cruz bopping off to Mexico as the Texas power grid went down during a deep freeze? He shrugged his shoulders, said, “What me, worry?” and donned a little extra sunscreen. But Cruz’s nonchalance aside, Democrats acting like rich jerks in the face of disaster almost feels like a brand.

    Anyone who thinks that Democrats, any Democrats, other than maybe John Fetterman, stand for regular people isn’t paying attention or is living in fantasyland. It’s a party of consultants, nonprofit scam artists, overpaid defense attorneys, artsy trust funders, and trust-fund TikTok grifters like the ones who pushed Mamdani over the top.

    In many ways, Mamdani is the perfect representation of the modern Democratic Party. He espouses far-left populist rhetoric while enjoying a monsoon wedding under the watchful eyes of an army of paid security guards. His hustle makes the Black Lives Matter mansion buyers look positively amateur. It’s utter fraudulence, a total snow job, only without the snow because it’s a balmy 80 degrees over there.

    Yes, Donald Trump was in Scotland when the shootings happened, and he also played some golf. But he negotiated a historic trade agreement with the European Union in the process and apparently also stopped a war in Southeast Asia. If something bad happens stateside, it’s not uncommon for Trump to be at his own estate, Mar-A-Lago. But that estate is in Florida. If a crisis breaks, Trump can be on the ground in the White House in under two hours.

    Mamdani, on the other hand, is in Africa. He may only return when Gotham deems it’s time to place a crown upon his head. No matter how much tragedy occurs at home, it’s gonna take a lot to drag him away from there.