Orange Juice & Ryvita

Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure

Category America

  • Ambassador

    THERE IS A CERTAIN tragic drama to the rough month between the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of the First World War. Everyone who ever studied history in high school (or watched the really pretty good 37 Days) knows the basic story and I'm, in spite of myself, a bit fascinated by it: here was a closed world, an exclusive masculine society of gentlemen, of the upper class in their own countries but also members of a cross-national exclusive elite, speaking the same languages, familiar with the same Greek and Latin and French, bearers of an enormous responsibility to their governments and the world. They all valued their ability to maintain a kind of concert peace amongst great powers. They were aware of themselves as a class and as a professional corps of diplomats, habituated to the exercise of unaccountable influence, answerable at best only to a Cabinet and at worst to an uninterested monarch, and regardless of their shade of politics (from liberal to reactionary) had a kind of mutual sympatico that let them always empathise with one another regardless of their countries' positions.

    So, how well did a group of highly skilled, professionally serious, high-minded, exquisitely literate and trained communicators handle the world-historic outbreak of violence? Pretty badly, as it turns out. Nobody mourns them.

    The United States will be represented in Malaysia by its new Ambassador, former Ashfield Councillor, reject from the Liberal Party, 'alpha male' influencer and success coach, probable self-parodist (though who can be certain, honestly) Nick Adams. It's absolutely typical Trumpism to elevate the last guy whose book he read or whose TV slot he saw. How will the Hooters-loving, performatively chauvinist influencer go as plenipotentiary to a majority Muslim nation already at odds with the US over its support for the war in Gaza? Is diplomacy better in the hands of top-hatted and tailed gentlemen or MAGA fabulists?

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  • Methodism

    THE IDEOLOGICAL BASIS TO the American tariffs, and to whatever else the hell they seem to be doing to their economy and society, has a long-standing history.

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  • Burger

    AMERICA EXISTS AT MANY levels. It's a real nation of people with geographic territory and a federal State, it's the constantly self-referenced ideal of constitutional self-government, it's the religious-liberal experiment of shining lighthood and the city on the hill, it's a historical tradition of progress and of dynamism. It also exists of course as a culinary-industrial tradition admired and imitated around the world, for example by Khrushchev, who ate a hot dog and declared it 'good, but not enough'.

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  • Kings

    MONARCHY IS ONE OF the older and more ridiculous of human conceits. The more you think about it the weirder it gets. Elective or hereditary it's permanent; there's no such thing as rotating kingship, and the idea is that you do it unaccountably until you die, restricted only by God or the Mandate of Heaven. They are, like the current world's political situation is, totally ludicrous, but very, very serious.

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  • Fighting

    THE AMERICAN WAY OF war is well known and extensively written about; it's that of massing tremendous amounts of logistical material and aiming for a crushing, annihilating, victory. In the 20th and 21st centuries that's involved an emphasis, even a dependence, on air power. There's a curious symmetry I think, between that well observed fact, with the obvious emphasis on air power in American disaster response.

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  • Hobbes

    WE LIVE IN AN age identified by meritocratic principles. Those aren't ones which describe the world as it is, since clearly the best people are not selected to the highest positions of privilege (I mean, look around), they're principles that describe the world as it ought to be, and which serve to justify what will be. The meritocratic model of the world is one in which it's the inequality of human achievements, intelligence, hard work, talents, that justifies the existence of inequalities of power and privilege, and which aims to exclude accidents of undeserved success. The meritocratic model says, good things should come to the good, and by implication, lays the judgement of failure on the failed. From here, let me introduce a seemingly irrelevant but actually critically relevant event: US President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden.

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  • Role models

    IRONY IS A HARD form of humour to appreciate. Senator Ralph Babet (of the Clive Palmer franchise team United Australia Party) went on twitter to post a bunch of slurs. At one level, that's just twitter these days; and his content is no different to the garden variety of hate that everyone still on there stews in, but on the other hand, it is a notable thing for an Australian Senator to do. And what's ironic about it is that it shows a gigantic and secular shift in the way we culture war about values.

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