Knives Out unravels a murder mystery in a wealthy family chock full of caricatures. Photo: Lionsgate

Is there a more tired pursuit than comparing a piece of pop culture to Donald Trump? Hes our pop culture president, a blob of references that could mean anything to anyone and nothing to everyone. The fiery blond tuft of hair, Twitter-happy demeanor and casual racism are so easily mimicked. From his rise as a property mogul with spurious ethics, to his unsolicited public intervention in the Central Park Five case, to playing hardboiled host on The Apprentice, Trumps hyper-powered branding machine has made him an integral figure of modern American history long before winning the presidency. It can be exhausting, then, when the T-word is used to make sense of all and any pieces of contemporary fiction. Everything is Trump, particularly now he lords over us all.

Which makes it easy to roll ones eyes when labels like Trumpian start getting thrown at films. Its become a crutch for industry watchers, looking for the things that keep movies relevant when the film industry increasingly faces competition from gaming, Netflix and Disney. Yet if art is a reflection of its era, then we are well and truly in a time of populist cinema. This year, Hollywood movies kept returning to themes of class warfare. They reveal the distance between the Trumpian idealism: that nostalgia for a simpler, halcyon Great Again era, and the reality of a country beset with fraught social division. In their efforts to explore this division, several of Hollywoods biggest films this year have inadvertently exposed the limits of using culture to fight politics.

The widening wealth-gap was sent up in Us, Jordan Peeles deliriously entertaining horror film that followed his phenomenally popular Get Out (2017). In Us, a rich African-American family is confronted by their doppelgngersshadow versions of themselves who can barely speak. Across a night of violence, the film makes allusions to the Reagan-era Hands Across America campaign (a nationwide movement to end poverty by asking citizens to hold hands).

Us is an open circle of references, dangling plot threads, and self-aware humour that come together in recurring visual symbols of rabbits and scissors. The film thus suggests that recovering a deeper meaning is merely a rewatch away. Its depiction of a wealthy family playing keeping up with the Joneses with their white neighbours shows a keen awareness of how race intersects with class. Even thoughUssfamily is ostensibly a Cosby Show sketch of American bliss, they still play catch up to their white friends.

Until things get untethered, the families live in a Trump-era fantasy. Their version of America is non-specific and prosperous, and they do not give much thought to those theyve had to tread on to get this far.Conversely, the Tetheredthe underground dwellers who come to wreck revenge on their upper-ground counterpartsrepresent those left behind in our world, but Peele cunningly shows that even the underclass harken to earlier versions of America to get their long-awaited dues. Their plot to reenact Hands Across America has no endpoint beyond the performative show of solidarity, because they know nothing else. Hold hands and itll all be okay.

The recent Hollywood mystery filmKnives Out attempts to make visible those left behind in Trumps America without causing any meaningful offence.Director Rian Johnsonspastiche of an Agatha Christie-style murder-mystery, Knives Out becomes a moral tale about a South American carers uprising against her wealthy white employers. With children still being kept in cages in America, this is a timely way to update the genre. But Johnson doesnt seem to know where to place his knife.

The family are such exaggerated caricatures of wealththeres a self-absorbed new-age influencer and a fanatical white supremacistthat their bigotry comes across as a mere punchline rather than the existential threat that many Americans face. Rather than burrow into the processes that mark inherited wealth, Johnson traffics in liberal cultural signifiers like Hamilton and angry Twitter storms. These buzzwords locate the film in 2019, but the film doesnt go any further than the ironic use of that line, Immigrants we get the job done. The very fact that Knives Outsgood-natured career, played by actress Ana De Armas, is constantly validated by the detective, played by Daniel Craig, as being a good immigrant, and is depicted without any real character traits outside of servitude to the family, suggests that the film only has a problem with patronising liberal pandering when its coming from the mouth of a person or character hes deemed too vulgar.

Us and Knives Out were among the only non-franchise Hollywood films to cross over 150 million dollars worldwide this year, showing a public appetite for these conversations. But their lack of staying power in public memorybox office and memes havent resulted in a cultural phenomenon like Get Outs sunken place, for exampleshows that the attempts to be all things to all viewers backfires. The world orbiting Trump is too wide-ranging for genre films like Knives Out and Us to handle. Can any single film match the sheer insanity of the American project?

Perhaps, if that film is three and a half hours long. The years most successful mainstream depiction of the American class system was The Irishman. Across six decades of American life, it depicts mob enforcer Frank Sheehan as a working stiff, a man who put in his hours, followed orders and worked for what he believed in. As he becomes more personally entwined in the business, his beliefs become corrupted and zealous.

Rather than make sweeping statements, The Irishmans relentless presentation of minute character details burrows into the issues, slowly infects the viewer with the progressive issues at play. Sheehan is actively complicit in the mob crimes without really questioning the specifics. And it is that blindness to the wider ranging implications of one persons actions in the name of a job that reflects how many of todays workers, locked in a desperate grab at a receding economy, are forced to overlook our own complicity in the destruction of the environment and the oppression of others.

Its in that sustained depiction of poisonous day-to-day banalities that Scorsese tells us far more than filmmakers who attempt sweeping gestures of hope. Like Martin Scorsese observing the long seep of the 20th century, its only by stepping back to see the common threads in 2019s best-intentioned Hollywood Product, that we can see what Trump Cinema really is.

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How Hollywood took on the Trumping of politics - Prospect

The easy camaraderie of the two men in Once Upon a Time evokes that in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the buddy movie that topped the box office in 1969. It also helped usher in a cinematic gender shift that by 1974 found Molly Haskell sounding a bleak, familiar alarm in her book From Reverence to Rape. Seen from a womans point of view, she wrote, the past decade with its covert misogyny (Lolita) and abusive male violence (Straw Dogs, et al.), had been the most disheartening in screen history. Although female performers had delivered memorable turns, she argued, even their great roles embraced stereotypes.

Icebergs, zombies and ballbreakers, Haskell wrote. Thats what little girls of the 60s and 70s are made of. She connected the demise of womens onscreen prominence with the end of the old studio system and its image-making machinery. Actresses may have had more freedom, but they no longer had the power that great female stars had commanded. (The end of the industrys self-censoring Production Code, which was replaced by the rating system in 1968, also meant actresses could be sexualized more graphically.) Yet even as the old system disappeared, Hollywood remained and remains hooked on old forms and ideas, which is why it has such trouble expressing the real-world changes affecting its audience, including shifting gender roles.

Feminism had an impact on Hollywood, whatever the industrys reluctance. But its no surprise that an industry long dominated by men has resisted sharing power with women. In the decades since Haskell sent out her warning, the industry has rationalized, and normalized, its discrimination with every possible excuse: the market, fan demand, creative vision. It invested in male-driven blockbusters (from Jaws to Avengers), elevated boy geniuses and hired male hacks over qualified women. It still does. Some male filmmakers themselves liberated, perhaps by feminist mothers and partners make stories with gentle, sensitive men who are already good dads and thoughtful spouses, and who can share, care and cry. At times, as in bromances, they outsource traditional femininity to men.

As men got in touch with their feelings onscreen (or not), it sometimes seemed that the mainstream industry with its male geniuses, brotherhoods, bad boys and superheroes came close to abandoning women. Things have recently improved because women have spoken out, as high-profile movies from and about women suggest. Men are listening. That much seems evident from this years male crisis movies, even if men often appear most interested in working on their issues and their feelings in stories about masculinity. For all the male introspection, though, our movies still love heroic and villainous men, spirited and supportive ladies the majority white along with simple moralizing and tidy, exultant endings. As Ford v Ferrari reminds us, the movies still love stories about men who change the world while women wait.

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Men Are in Trouble and Hollywood Wants to Help - The New York Times

Since the exit poll dropped on the night of December 12, Britains liberal commentariat have lined up to pass judgment on a failed movement. Their columns deride a political force that reached for the stars but landed in the ditch; that insisted on ideological purity and ended up with nothing to show; that ignored public opinion and spent years preaching to the converted before succumbing to the harsh test of electoral reality.

Self-awareness has never been these pundits strong suit, so we shouldnt expect them to realize that theyre describing their own reflection. They rail against Corbynism, but their patronizing strictures could be much more aptly applied to the amorphous movement known as Continuity Remain. Boris Johnsons triumph at the polls was a crushing defeat for the anti-Brexit campaigners of the liberal center. Their strategy has proved to be an abject failure.

That failure is nothing to celebrate. Hard-right, xenophobic nationalism has routed left and center alike in British politics. Theres no point reveling in the eclipse of Jo Swinson, the Liberal Democrat leader who claimed she might become the countrys next prime minister but finished the campaign by losing her own seat. Swinson for PM was always a joke; Boris Johnson as PM is the reality everyone will have to cope with for the next five years.

However, its important to put on record the catastrophic failings of Continuity Remain, because its leading partisans still occupy vital positions of influence ones that they have no intention of giving up. Theyre already hard at work rewriting history and shifting the blame above all, onto the shoulders of those who repeatedly warned that their approach would end in calamity.

It would be fatuous to scold liberals for not supporting Corbynism, a project that was never their own (although some did claim to support the kind of social-democratic policies that Labour spelled out in its election manifestos). But we can certainly blame them for undermining their own self-proclaimed goal: to stop Brexit, or, failing that, to mitigate its potential consequences.

Continuity Remain largely defined itself in opposition to Labours Brexit policy after the 2016 referendum. So its worth spelling out again what that policy actually was, and why Labour came to adopt it.

The position set out in Labours 2017 manifesto could be summarized as follows: we accept the result of the referendum; its not the result we wanted, but people have voted to leave the European Union and we cant ignore that choice. That doesnt mean were going to give the Tory government a blank check to negotiate any kind of withdrawal deal they like. There are several possible routes out of the EU, some of which would be far more damaging than others. We wont support a deal that will destroy peoples jobs and living standards, or one that will prepare the ground for a bonfire of social rights and protections.

This was in no way a distinctly Corbynite position. Leading figures on the Labour right gave it their firm support in the run-up to the 2017 election: from Tom Watson and Yvette Cooper to Chuka Umunna and Wes Streeting.

The thinking behind it was simple. On grounds of principle, it would have been extremely dubious for politicians to reject the outcome of the referendum altogether. All the major British parties agreed to hold it in the first place, and there were no conditions for a quorum or a supermajority attached before the vote. The turnout was reasonably high, and those who took part voted to leave the EU by a small but decisive margin. Trying to overturn a democratic vote without having made any attempt to honor it would set an ugly precedent for the future.

It might still have been necessary to do so if all possible versions of Brexit were bound to be disastrous, but that simply wasnt the case. Norway has never belonged to the EU, and theres no reason to think its citizens are worse off than their neighbors in Sweden or Denmark. A so-called soft-Brexit deal would have been a perfectly acceptable framework for Labour to carry out domestic social reforms: a step sideways, not a step backward.

There was also a pragmatic case for Labours Brexit platform that could not be ignored or wished away. The Leave/Remain divide cut through the heart of the partys electoral base. Two-thirds of Labours 2015 electorate voted Remain, the rest broke for Leave, but the Labour Leavers werent spread evenly around the country. Roughly two-thirds of Labour-held constituencies had a pro-Brexit majority in 2016: if all the Labour Leave voters defected to the Conservatives or just stayed at home on polling day the party could end up losing dozens of seats. It would be much easier for the Conservatives to win a general election on a hard-line pro-Brexit platform than it would be for Labour to see them off with a clear-cut anti-Brexit stance.

The pundits and politicians who became the leaders of Continuity Remain understood this logic perfectly well. The movement they began to forge after the June 2017 general election was a curious amalgam: an inner core of cynics surrounded by an outer layer of zealots.

For the cynics, it was primarily a vehicle to revive the fortunes of their own political faction, the liberal center: a loose tendency that encompasses Labours right-wing current, the Liberal Democrats, and newspapers like the Guardian and the Observer.

That tendency had suffered three major blows in the space of two years. First, it lost control of the Labour Party to Jeremy Corbyn and his allies in the summer of 2015. Then came the Leave vote in the 2016 referendum. But worst of all, from their perspective, was the big increase in support for Labour in the 2017 election. Centrist figureheads had insisted that Corbyns leadership was sure to be disastrous: instead, the party managed its best performance since Tony Blairs second victory in 2001 and would have won the election outright were it not for the post-Brexit Tory surge.

That performance was a vindication of Labours Brexit policy. Once again, its electoral coalition split roughly two-to-one between Remain and Leave supporters. Since Labour had added 3.5 million votes to its 2015 score, that meant the party must have gained more Leave voters than it lost to the Conservatives. In 2017, the predicted Tory breakthrough in Leave-supporting areas didnt really materialize: although the Tories made significant gains in regions like North East England, Labour either matched those gains or surpassed them and kept hold of its seats.

There were two factors that made it possible for Labour to pull off this balancing act. On the Remain side of the partys voting base, there was a general willingness to accept some form of Brexit, as long as it didnt seem likely to prove calamitous. Meanwhile, the partys acceptance of the referendum result held together its Leave vote and shored up its flank against Tory encroachments.

Continuity Remain did everything in its power to upset that balance. Its leaders concentrated all their fire on Labours Brexit policy, denouncing it as a betrayal. Many of those leaders had supported that policy before the 2017 election, because they expected Corbyn to be gone soon. But after the election result strengthened Corbyns position, they made a cynical U-turn and started a longer-term bid to undermine his leadership using Brexit as a wedge issue.

Of course, we shouldnt exaggerate the ability of any political force to shape the course of events. However, the leaders of Continuity Remain had significant resources at their disposal that more authentic social movements could only dream of. Experienced political operators like Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, and Chuka Umunna knew how to play the media and get their message across. They had financial backing from wealthy businessmen like Roland Rudd, who bankrolled the main organizational vehicle of Continuity Remain, the Peoples Vote campaign. They also had the support of the liberal broadsheets a privilege that was never granted to the Corbyn leadership, which faced their unrelenting hostility even though the vast majority of Guardian readers had supported Labour in the 2017 election.

To supplement these political assets, Continuity Remain could call upon its own army of foot soldiers. Daniel Cohen painted a memorable picture of those he called remainists in an article published last summer:

Just as only a fraction of the people who supported Margaret Thatcher could be called Thatcherite, voting remain is not enough to make you a remainist. Remainists are the people who keep bringing the conversation back to Brexit. They point out that the referendum was only ever meant to be advisory, and insist that another one is just around the corner. They go on protests. They have strong opinions about Guy Verhofstadt and Sabine Weyand. They worry about chlorinated chicken. They have acquired detailed knowledge of electoral law and can list the Leave campaigns violations. They light up at any mention of the 2012 Olympics. They wonder what Orwell would have made of all this. They hang the EU flag in their windows.

Anyone who has encountered the Twitter hashtag FBPE will recognize the type. This was the outer layer of zealots that gave the anti-Brexit cause much of its impact on social media (just as equally zealous supporters of Corbyn or Scottish independence helped promote those movements online). It included many people from British cultural life actors, novelists, comedians, philosophers who had a significant profile in their own right. They used those platforms to amplify the arguments fed to them by the likes of Campbell, Umunna, and the Guardian elite.

Exploiting these advantages to the full, the inner core of Continuity Remain worked tirelessly to misrepresent Labours Brexit platform and turn the partys Remain voters against it. Daniel Cohens essay helps explain why it was possible for them to do so. As he noted, the liberals who supported the campaign against Brexit had formerly seen themselves as part of Britains political mainstream:

Before the referendum, many of the people who have become remainists considered themselves immune to the passions of politics. They tended to hover around the centre ground and didnt strongly identify with any party. They were used to being on the inside, to being listened to. But since 23 June 2016, remainists have found themselves out in the cold.

Scapegoating Jeremy Corbyn made instinctive sense to these people, because the Labour leader clearly didnt belong to the mainstream or the center ground in any accepted sense. His sudden arrival at the heart of British politics had come just a few months before the trauma of the Brexit referendum, and it was easy for remainists to lump the two phenomena together. That conflation might be illogical and unsupported by the facts but its emotional resonance still gave it wide currency.

Cohen put his finger on another aspect of remainism that made it easy to direct against the Labour leadership:

Remainists often describe Brexit as a distraction from the real problems Britain faces austerity, inequality, a creaking NHS. Yet those problems existed long before the referendum, without galvanising most remainists in the way Brexit has. For many remainists, in fact, it can feel as if everything else is a distraction: what drives them on is their belief that Brexit is the battle of a lifetime.

Corbyn and his allies really did see Brexit as a distraction, as a problem to be managed and hopefully put to bed as soon as possible. Yet this attitude baffled those who considered the struggle against Brexit to be the great cause of their generation. It was a short step for them to imagine that Labours pragmatic line masked a hidden agenda, a desire on Corbyns part to enable Brexit because he was a closet Leaver. And many Labour politicians from the partys right wing were happy to encourage such conspiracy theories. Even those MPs representing Leave-voting constituencies who stood firmly against a second referendum hid behind Corbyns authority, letting him take all the flak for a position really designed to protect their own seats.

This tendency to hold Corbyn personally responsible, not only for Labours Brexit policy, but even for Brexit itself, encouraged Remain partisans to catastrophically underestimate their opponents strength. Time and again, spokesmen for Continuity Remain insisted that support for Brexit was collapsing, that the scales had fallen from peoples eyes and the outcome of a new referendum would be a foregone conclusion; only Corbyn and his Brexiteer advisers stood in the way. Yet the polls told a very different story: while Remain usually had a modest lead in opinion surveys, that was mainly thanks to people who hadnt been eligible to vote in 2016 joining the electoral register. The Leave constituency itself hadnt suffered any real attrition, and the outcome of a second vote was impossible to predict.

Those surveys also needed to be handled with care, because they didnt prove that all or even most Remain supporters were hell-bent on securing a new referendum. The pollsters usually asked people how they would vote if there was another chance to do so (or if they now regretted the 2016 result). Simple yes-or-no questions like that could never fully capture the different shades of opinion. More fine-grained polling suggested that many Remainers would be happy with a soft-Brexit deal, even if it wasnt their first preference. The Peoples Vote leaders took it for granted that everyone cared about EU membership as much as they did. The idea that people might have other priorities to weigh against Brexit such as the election of a left-wing government didnt feature in their calculations.

Did Labours alternative strategy ever stand a chance? Its biggest test came when Theresa May returned with a withdrawal agreement at the end of 2018. When the House of Commons got to vote on Mays deal in January 2019, MPs defeated it by a resounding majority. Labour came forward with its own platform for the Brexit negotiations that set out clearly the terms of a soft-Brexit deal. It was practical and achievable and the leading EU officials said so publicly.

In a remarkable display of groupthink, the British media ignored those clear statements from EU leaders and dismissed Labours alternative blueprint out of hand: it was either a unicorn deal, with no purchase on reality, or else indistinguishable from the package May had already negotiated. The Continuity Remain camp took the same attitude. As a result, May faced no public scrutiny for her refusal to engage with Labours proposals. With the clock ticking, she clung stubbornly to the terms of her own agreement, refusing to soften it in any way.

Labours experience in this period speaks volumes about the hypocrisy and opportunism of the partys hard-Remain critics. May invited the opposition leaders to Downing Street for talks; Corbyn initially refused to attend, because it was clear that she had no intention of making any compromises and simply wanted to lecture her opponents. Continuity Remain attacked Corbyn for not agreeing to meet with May; when he reversed that position and went into talks with her government, they flip-flopped immediately and accused Labour of colluding with the Tories to deliver Brexit.

In hindsight, the closest Britain came to avoiding the disaster of Johnsons victory was at the beginning of April. Parliament had voted down Mays deal three times, and MPs scheduled a round of indicative votes to determine if there was any option from no deal to a second referendum that could win majority support. The indicative votes were not legally binding, but if one proposal had come out on top, it might have become a rallying point as the Brexit deadline approached.

Its worth looking closely at the second round of indicative votes, which came after Parliament had whittled down the options from eight to four. The motion that came closest to passing was the one in favor of a customs union with the EU, proposed by veteran Tory politician Kenneth Clarke. It fell by just three votes. A motion in favor of soft Brexit staying in the European single market and customs union lost by twenty-one votes, while another to support a second referendum lost by seventeen.

The soft-Brexit motion, referred to as Norway Plus, could have passed with the support of those Labour MPs who either voted against it or abstained (fifty-eight in total). They did so for what seem like diametrically opposed reasons: some were actively pro-Brexit in a way that never held true for Corbyn while others were stridently pro-Remain and refused to support any path other than staying in the EU.

It should have been possible for campaigners to direct their fire at both groups and pressure them to support the soft-Brexit proposal, which would address most of the reasonable concerns Remainers had about what Brexit might entail, without obliging MPs in Leave-voting constituencies to campaign for a second referendum. Instead, the Peoples Vote campaign and its media outriders devoted their energies to attacking the Labour leadership and shooting down every compromise proposal.

The failure of the indicative votes set in motion a sequence of events that led inexorably to the December vote and Johnsons triumph. May had to ask the EU for an extension of the deadline until autumn, which meant that the UK would take part in the upcoming European elections. Continuity Remain saw the election as a glorious opportunity to punish Labour for not adopting their preferred line. Their arguments started to hit home beyond the activist circles of the anti-Brexit movement. Labour came third, well behind the Liberal Democrats, while also leaking support to the Greens and the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales.

The Peoples Vote campaigners hailed the result as a triumph for the hard-Remain parties who had made such deep inroads into Labours electoral base. Yet they ignored the most striking outcome of the night: Nigel Farages Brexit Party, an Astroturf operation hastily launched a few months earlier, had won the election by a country mile, taking 30 percent of the vote and swallowing up most of the Tory electorate.

While Continuity Remain patted itself on the back for a job well done, the Conservative Party drew a simple lesson: it must deliver Brexit at all costs, the harder the better. Within a couple of months, the Tories had selected Boris Johnson, the only politician who could rival Farage as a champion of the Brexit cause, to replace Theresa May. Meanwhile, Labour shifted in the opposite direction, taking up the call for a second referendum as the Peoples Vote campaign had been demanding.

The die was cast for a snap general election. Continuity Remain started the year with a number of goals: they wanted to discredit any soft-Brexit compromise, force the Labour Party to support a second referendum, and polarize British politics around Leave vs. Remain. In every respect, they got exactly what they wanted. And they reaped the harvest on December 12.

Its possible that Labour would also have lost support heavily if it had stuck to its original position, albeit from Remain voters rather than Leavers. There was, in fact, still a leakage of votes to the hard-Remain parties, in particular the Lib Dems.

That doesnt soften the indictment of the Continuity Remain leadership in the slightest. It was always their goal to force Labour into a position where it had to choose between two unattractive options. And their behavior after Labour had embraced the second-referendum call laid bare the cynicism of the whole enterprise.

The contrast with the pro-Brexit camp could not be starker. Nigel Farage initially planned to run a full slate of candidates in opposition to the Conservatives, denouncing Johnsons deal with the EU in exactly the same terms that he had used to condemn the agreement brought home by Theresa May. But the right-wing press came down hard against Farage. So did Leave-supporting capitalists like Arron Banks. As Banks put it:

The only way Brexit is going to get delivered is by a Boris majority. Nigel reminds me of a gambler at a casino thats been winning all night and its time to take the chips off the table and step away.

In the end, the Brexit Party ran a much more limited campaign targeting Labour-held seats, pushing Johnsons candidate over the line in a number of constituencies by taking votes from Labour.

Those who talked about stopping Brexit refused to practice the same kind of political realism. The only way to deliver a second referendum was to prevent the Tories from winning a majority of seats. In most of the country, that meant voting for the Labour Party. Instead of acknowledging this reality and acting upon it, the various strands of Continuity Remain chose to play childish, self-defeating games.

Roland Rudd scuttled the Peoples Vote campaign altogether, just before it had to face its first significant challenge. According to one of Rudds disgruntled allies, the businessman was more interested in using its database to create a new pro-European, Lib Dem-centered political force after Brexit a sort of mirror image of the Brexit Party capable of realigning British politics than he was in securing a second vote and preventing Brexit. Rudd ensured that none of the resources at the campaigns disposal would be used to mobilize voters against Boris Johnson.

For their part, the Lib Dems opted for a mendacious travesty of a campaign, pretending to believe that they could win a majority of seats, make Jo Swinson prime minister, and scrap Brexit altogether without any need for a fresh referendum. Deceptive tactical voting websites urged people to support no-hoper Lib Dem candidates in constituencies where only Labour could beat the Tories. The party ended up with one seat fewer than it had taken in 2017.

The role played by the Lib Dems in Kensington should be remembered for a long time to come, not because it was representative of the national trend, but because it perfectly encapsulated the moral and political bankruptcy of Continuity Remain. Labour had taken the seat by a very narrow margin in June 2017. Although Kensington has a reputation for affluence, it also contains many impoverished working-class communities, and was the location of the Grenfell disaster that took place just days after that election. The newly elected Labour MP Emma Dent Coad played an exemplary role speaking up on behalf of the Grenfell families. For what its worth, Dent Coad also consistently supported the Remain cause in Parliament.

In this years election, the Lib Dems ran a former Tory cabinet minister, Sam Gyimah, against her. On the campaign trail, Gyimah spread foul lies that Dent Coad was somehow complicit in the planning decisions that led to the Grenfell inferno. Gyimahs party distributed thousands of leaflets claiming that he was the only Remain candidate who could beat the Tories: in fact, Gyimah had voted for Theresa Mays deal when he was still a Conservative, so his record was inferior to Dent Coads even on the narrow question of Brexit. Long after it was clear that Labour had pulled way ahead of the Lib Dems, the Observer urged its readers to support Gyimah as the tactical choice in Kensington.

In the end, the Lib Dems nearly doubled their vote, but Gyimah still had barely half as much support as Dent Coad. The only result of his efforts was to hand the constituency to a Conservative banker, two years after Grenfell, by a margin of 150 votes. As a movement to stop Brexit, Continuity Remain was a disastrous failure. As an anti-Labour wrecking operation to facilitate hard-right Tories, it was an outstanding success.

In a column published in April 2019, the Guardians Polly Toynbee confidently predicted that Labour wouldnt pay any significant price for supporting a second referendum: Nigel Farage says his Brexit party will be rampaging through Labours northern heartlands, but he may find less of a welcome from Labours voters than he reckons.

She was right in one sense: it wasnt Farage who came rampaging through Labours northern heartlands, it was a Tory Party that had adopted Farages agenda. Disillusionment with Labour among its 2017 Leave voters could damage it in three different ways: they might cross over directly to the Tories, they might opt for the Brexit Party instead, or they might not vote at all. There is ample evidence of all three happening on a wide enough scale to cost Labour dozens of seats.

Unsurprisingly, Toynbee refused to take any responsibility for the outcome, offering a disingenuous diatribe against Corbyn in place of any serious analysis. The liberal commentariat is following her example en masse, with varying degrees of spleen and malice. Andrew Adonis, the Labour peer who ran as a candidate in the European elections and urged Leave voters not to support his party, has spent the last few days demanding a ruthless purge of the Left, instead of apologizing for his own foolishness and irresponsibility.

They all insist that it was Corbyn, not Brexit, that cost Labour the election. Of course, this is very convenient for those who insisted that the party should campaign for a second referendum and would surge in the polls if it did so. Yet all the evidence thus far available polling data, qualitative evidence from canvassers and journalists alike, the profile of the seats Labour lost suggests that Labour paid a heavy price for its new Brexit line.

Nor can the question of Corbyns public image be separated from Brexit. Surveys and focus groups repeatedly found that Corbyn suffered from a perception that he was weak, indecisive, or sitting on the fence over Brexit. That perception didnt arise spontaneously: it was deliberately fostered by those who wanted to polarize British politics around a simple choice, Brexit, yes or no? Labours preference for a soft-Brexit compromise did not stem from Corbyns personal character traits: it reflected a very real political dilemma, thrown into sharp relief by the election results.

Liberals who prefer to stress other reasons for Corbyns unpopularity betray their lack of self-awareness once again. The picture that the right-wing press painted of Corbyn after 2015 was no more grounded in reality than the picture the same press has painted of the European Union for the last thirty years, to the helpless fury of Europhiles and remainists. Of course, you need to have a strategy to deal with industrial-scale disinformation, now amplified by social media. But it ill behooves those who spent three years blaming Facebook ads for the Leave victory in 2016 to wag their fingers at the Left now for wanting to discuss media bias.

Labour supporters and the wider British left will need to digest last weeks result properly and draw the right conclusions about what went wrong. Theres plenty of room for self-criticism. However, nobody who backed Corbyns leadership should dream of prostrating themselves before the collective wisdom of Continuity Remain, a menagerie of political has-beens who guided their own ship onto the rocks in the course of wrecking Labours. The first priority, as the party again sets sail, should be to keep them well away from the helm.

Daniel Finn is deputy editor of the New Left Review. He is author of One Mans Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.

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The Obsessive Remainers Have Scored a Massive Own Goal - Jacobin magazine

Peter Mayfield is the founder and executive director of Gateway Mountain Center in California, an innovative program for helping youth learn, heal, and thrive.

As a teenager growing up in California, Peter became an accomplished rock climber, and developed into one of the worlds best mountain climbers, rising to become chief guide of the Yosemite Mountaineering School. Yosemite is known for being a rock climbing mecca, offering climbers some of the most difficult ascents anywhere in the world.

He has enjoyed a 40-year career guiding people in mountain experiences and developing entrepreneurial enterprises. He is the founder of City Rock, the first full-service climbing gym in the world.

Today, he is passionate about changing the system of care for youth suffering from serious emotional disturbances and complex trauma. Gateways program, Whole Hearts, Minds and Bodies is the first nature-based therapeutic program in California to achieve full-service partner contracts with County behavioral health departments and certification as a MediCal provider. This means that California has recognized his nature-based therapeutic programs as providing a medical benefit.

In this interview, Peter speaks about his journey from mountaineering to his role as an educator and mentor, and how enabling children and adolescents to connect with nature has such a profound effect on their health and wellbeing.

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio of the interview here.

Peter Mayfield: Im thrilled to be part of this community, Ive learned a lot from Mad in America and its efforts, so very glad to be here.

I started my lifetime love affair with the mountains at an early age and by 15 years old I was a certified climbing leader for the Sierra Club. My transformation started with this intense feeling of the contrast. Each weekend I would be facilitating a transformational experience for people in the mountains when leading a climbing outing. Then I would return to being a high school student in San Francisco taking physical education class and some coach would be barking at me to run laps and do push-ups. I felt very strongly that we needed to evolve physical education to become a much more embodied and connected experience. So that became my goal, I told people I want to do something to transform physical education in America. So I went right into guiding and I worked at the largest climbing school in America, Yosemite Mountaineering School where I was chief guide. So I did have a successful career as a climber, but I was teaching and guiding the whole time.

What rock climbing does is provide this instantly deep immersion into whats called a flow state and it is somewhat unique as an activity because that happens even with the first step off the ground for a beginner. In any sport, once you have enough hours to get toward mastery, a successful participant learns how to drop into that flow state, that present moment experience where you are just being, not ruminating and thinking and pondering, you are just in the moment and that is very powerful. So I focussed on exploring that state in many different contexts, including corporate leadership events, with military training groups and increasingly with youth who had issues and challenges in their lives.

My first business 30 years ago was the first full-service rock climbing gym. We catered for all sorts of groups and sometimes kids from the adolescent drug treatment center would join us. I worked with a group that was supporting homeless teens and helping with recovery from heroin addiction and we just saw how this type of climbing experience really made an impact. We witnessed how climbing improved their sense of self, their self-efficacy and self-awareness. So for me, it has been a long-time engagement with these ideas and I would describe it as my lifes work.

Mayfield: We are lucky to be in a spectacular and rugged location, up at the Sierra crest on the way to Lake Tahoe at an elevation of 7,100 feet. We partner with the Sierra Club and we make use of their lodge, so we can accommodate up to 145 youth. So naturally, we started with field trips. Groups of students, sixth grade through high school would come up with their teachers and stay with us for three or four days doing field science and mountain adventure.

Increasingly though we started to work on social, emotional skill building and resilience building through these mountain adventures. At the same time, we started doing programming for alternative education sites in our communities. We have a continuation high school and what used to be called a probation school which included youth who had previously been involved with law enforcement. This was around 13 years ago and as we did more and more therapeutic work, we began to see more and more youth who were on medication. We would get their medical forms for summer camps that are going to be seven days straight and the parents are loading us up with all the pill bottles.

This mirrored the increase in the number of youth diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and after a couple of years, we are seeing something like half our kids are on these medications. I found that interesting because I have seen for myself how many of those kids found their way to the sport of rock climbing or rock climbing camps. I think back to the 1970s when I was young and I am glad that I got to be a creative, energetic kid and that I wasnt labelled myself. So we started thinking that we should have focused programs to support these kids because they are finding us naturally. This was really on the upper-income level of the population we work with.

On the other hand, we are working in this probation school and we are seeing kids with serious emotional disturbances. Often these are the lower-income level and the kids are on Medicaid and MediCal. We are witnessing these kids who are depressed and suicidal, sometimes coming from a seriously adverse childhood background or a very challenging home life and we are seeing how long it took for them to get access to a therapist. We are also finding sporadic access to psychiatry, along with the unskilful application of medications.

In our California state system, there is a funding stream for mental health treatment called the Mental Health Service Act and about nine years ago they put a lot of emphasis on innovation. They were giving funding to support people trying new things and explicitly these monies could not be used for the existing system of care. We were invited to apply for funding because of our innovative work in the alternative education system. Right before our proposals were made, I read Robert Whitakers Anatomy of an Epidemic, and it had a big influence on me. I already had a strong opinion about ineffective mental health treatments in the United States for youth and reading that book matched with my own experience.

So then we were successful in securing funding and we were off and running, developing our initial program which was called Whole Hearts, Minds and Bodies Nature-based Therapeutic Mentoring. What we didnt anticipate though was that we would very quickly be given referrals to support some of the highest need youth in our communities. These are kids who have had multiple suicide attempts, multiple psychiatric hospitalizations and that could be said to be frequent flyers of the 5150 which is the term for when a kid gets committed to a psychiatric facility for five to seven days. We had school psychologists saying to us nothing else has worked, youre piloting this program, why dont you try with this kid?

We had some spectacular early success which led us rapidly to where we are today. We went from a funded experiment to full-service partnership with a large County in about 18 months, which is just unheard of. We signed a contract before we even had an office, at the time we were still running it out of a little spare room in my house, so thats the genesis of our program. It has really taken off and we are getting a lot of attention now as the nature as medicine movement is really growing. We are, as far as we can tell, the first nature-based therapeutic program that is getting Medicaid reimbursement and these government contracts. We are partnered with the school of psychiatry at UC Davis, so the fourth-year residents have us as an elective rotation. The psychiatrist is picking a kid up from school and spending three hours with him and then hes available to give parents some free counseling about medication. So in a sense, we have infiltrated the system of care to try to change it from within.

Mayfield: An entrepreneurs primary role and skillset to develop is hiring great people. We have a key partner, Nancy Midges, who is a holistic health educator and we partnered with the Center for Adolescent Studies in Oakland, which is an amazing resource for trainings and certifications. Weve hired several licensed Marriage and Family Therapists and so we are a fantastic internship location for people working toward their licensure. I think that we have hired well and then really made an effort to stay connected to the very forefront of trauma treatment theory and practice. I feel very committed to the Boston Trauma Center and were also looking at the Child Trauma Academy in Houston and the work of Dr. Bruce Perry along with the work of Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. We are being informed by these schools and by what we see in practice and using that to come up with our methods.So to answer your question, weve made a great effort to study and connect to what we feel is the best that is out there to develop our methods.

We are not a wilderness therapy program, so kids are not sent away to attend. Instead, we are treating them where they are. We pick them up from their school, spend three or four hours in a session involving nature and we often buy them dinner and take them home and then do it again the next week. So our service delivery is in the same rhythm as somebody getting weekly therapy. We are a nature-based, therapeutic program that can be woven into the youths normal life. Theyre still in their family, they are still in school and still in their community. This is the game-changing aspect of what we do.

Mayfield: I loved how you framed that question because for these kids that is their context, they are diagnosed and they are medicated. It takes a lot of skill and I use the term infiltrated because we support the family as we support the youth. No matter how well-meaning the practitioners are, that child has this message that something is wrong with them, so some of it is educating the parents. We do this carefully and sensitively because we want to be part of a movement where medication would be used less often and for less duration and more skillfully. I do distribute an essay that is posted on Mad in America from Dr. Sami Timimi, its a fantastic essay for parents considering medication. And I quote from that, we should look at it as a short term intervention, like if the kid broke their wrist and we put a cast on.The healing has to happen from within. Ill sometimes tell people, Attention Deficit Disorder, we call it Multiple Attention Ability and it is a familiar skillset that mountain guides and entrepreneurs use to see the big picture and connect the dots. So we help kids find the strength-based framework and that is the healing path.

Our method we call Four Roots for Growing a Human. Root number one is authentic relationship. A core tenet of authentic relationship is that these kids come in and theyve been given this messaging that they are broken or that we are going to fix them or that we are going to make this behaviour change in them. Our framework is that here you are and were going to connect and were going to develop a real therapeutic bond and we are not going to fix you, you have to fix yourself, you have to choose to change and grow. We hold that this therapeutic relationship can be like a mirror in which the youth grows their self-awareness and with growing self-awareness, kids tend to start making decisions they dont regret. Thats it, thats the framework and the beauty of our method is with three hours of engaging and sharing outdoor experiences, that relationship goes deep compared to 50 minutes on a couch.

We collaborate with all sorts of therapists and we love therapists but again so much of it is context. Ill give you this stark example. In our community, services are centered in a county building called the Joseph Center. Lets talk about a typical case we have, so maybe a youth who was exposed to drugs in utero and had a couple of foster placements but now theyre back with their family and their parents are sober, but theyve been through a lot. SoMom, who is kind of stressed out working two jobs, will take time off work and take her son to the Joseph Center. They go inside, on the left is the court, on the right is the sheriff. They go up to the second floor and there is child protective services and probation. They go to the third floor and there is a wonderful therapist in a windowless room, but just going up those stairs is like a retraumatizing for the Mom and the kid. Is that a healing context going past all the law enforcement, all the County agencies that have threatened to take the kid away or did take them away?

You contrast that to someone like myself picking that boy up from school with a kayak on my car. And he will say Hey Peter, what are we doing today? And I will reply well, are you up for a challenge today? The wind is blowing so strong, I think we can paddle up Donner Lake as far as we can to surf some waves on the way back? Then were sitting on the beach a couple of hours later and hes really sharing some hard stuff that happened, maybe the fight he got into at school that got him suspended last week. All sorts of drama and therapy are happening. But whats also happening is hes developing this self-confidence, what we call going throughembodied peak experience.

Just like he was challenging his balance paddling on the windy Lake. There is growing research that those inputs, that activation of the vestibular and the proprioceptive and the sensory-motor will strengthen his sense of self and that is actually healing. The medication he is on might keep him a little bit calmer, but its not going to heal him. This type of work will heal him, he will grow self-confidence, self-efficacy, self-awareness. In the relational experience he has an adult who is really there for him, a mentor, a coach telling him the truth. For a kid who has had a lot of emotional disturbance and family instability, that is key. Human beings need that.

Mayfield: We really do see that and I want to emphasize that the majority of the youth who we are working with are not athletic. A paper came out last year detailing the negative impacts on kids metabolism due to the common use of antipsychotics which essentially makes kids prediabetic rapidly. So it is common for us to have kids who are very overweight. They are not athletic and so we are looking for that embodied peak experience on relatively flat ground. I tell my team were looking for the rock climbing horizontally and that you can do that almost anywhere. So we are looking for the log across the Creek, the rock piles, the snowshoeing and deeper snow. Kayaking on a windy day does that too. Anything that drops them into the flow state, that place where theyre not thinking, they are doing, they are being, in their present moment.

Dr Ruth Lanius, a neuroscientist up in Western Ontario University, has done many brain scans on adults who experienced serious childhood trauma, complex trauma or developmental trauma disorder. The scans are showing consistent signatures where there are weak connections in parts of the default mode network and theres a growing theory that this consistent repetitive activation of the vestibular sensory-motor proprioceptive neurologic structures can strengthen those weak connections. We see that. Well have kids who come into our program, we start treating them and their posture is kind of submissive and worn out and beat by the world. They are shuffling their feet and not looking you in the eye. After a few months of these weekly sessions they are holding their head up, they are walking with confidence, their balance skills have improved and that strongly correlates with behavioral change. Their ability to regulate emotionally, their ability to face setbacks and challenges, their relationships with their families and their ability to get through the school day.

Mayfield: I have been a guide for 40 years, so it is a familiar feeling for me. For my staff, there are 18 therapeutic mentors, they really love this work and part of it is we dont burn them out. We want it to be a part-time, highly trained, highly supported, well-paid job. These people are working with two or three kids, devoting a few afternoons a week to this work. They love it and seeing the change in the kids and having that relationship is amazing. Another hallmark is that were a lot less boundaried than the typical therapists. So we do get to know these families. Were bringing the kid home after dark and they dont just jump out of our car, we go into the living room and talk to the families. A lot of the wounding that happens with kids who have serious emotional disturbances is disconnection from their families or they are wearing out their families or there is a lot of drama and we are there for the kids, but we are actually added capacity so we can give more family support too.

We also have a full-time social worker in-house now so that we can help with education. That is useful for parents when supporting a kid like this. We often end up getting invited to the younger sisters Quinceanera, or family picnics and were also there in the middle of the night when something bad happens. We will go to the probation meeting and well show up at the hospital. Its very meaningful to be able to have that. Not just be like were going to clinic nine to five and it goes to an answering service if you have a problem on the weekend or at night. I would just say we have a more intimate connection to the whole family. Thats very meaningful.

Mayfield: I would say the skillful way is to not explain but to get on your hands and knees with a young person and really look at that anthill and look at the leaf that the butterfly just flew away from. We evolved to be skilled at taking in the information from the incredibly rich sensorium of nature, that is how our brains adapted. It is so healthy to engage those structures in our brains and to be exposed to that. In the springtime, we put on waders and we go out in this lake and search for toad eggs and its amazing to wade around in half a meter of water and see mating toads and find big strings of toad eggs, then come back three weeks later and see little tadpoles. Im a grandfather and nothing is more rich and fun than rooting around on the forest floor with my two-year-old granddaughter or my five-year-old grandson. What has happened in our society is that maybe they do a field trip in sixth grade when theyre 11 or 12, and then it stops. So when you can take a 16-year-old who has had all this challenge and difficulty and trauma and being traumatized by the system and you can get back to that joyful place they were at as a five-year-old, it is healing.

Mayfield: We are always triaging a waitlist and that is the hardest part of this work, taking calls from parents who are really under stress in supporting their youngsters. Our service is reserved for the most serious cases, so maybe those kids who have had a hospitalization or been arrested or some kind of meltdown that was so serious that an intervention absolutely has to happen. But I do get a lot of calls from parents with kids who have normal teenage issues and they all want to be in our program. The counsel I give over the phone to these parents is to imagine how we all lived a few thousand years ago. We were in these bands of 45 to 60 people, deeply interdependent and interconnected and the adolescent brain evolved to be really good at connecting to other adults. There wasnt this isolated nuclear family back then. Adolescents are so hungry to connect, so a lot of my advice for these parents is the kid has to find what they can be passionate about but just help them, help expose them to all these opportunities to connect with other cool adults. The best parents in the world are not enough. Adolescents are hungry to connect to get into creative programs or sports programs, but also let them have free time. So its connecting to nature, but also connecting to each other. Adolescents connecting to great adults who can give them support.

Mayfield: It is so true, the kids going through our therapeutic method are also becoming more environmentally literate and that is a good thing. It is meaningful and we love this hugely growing youth movement about climate change and social activism too. So back to our four roots methods. Root number four is helping others. Some of its a trajectory of age. For example the 10-year-old, we will get them volunteering a little bit. But the 16-year-old when she says hey, I need to start looking for a job, can you give me some coaching about that? and we set her up with a really cool volunteer gig, all of a sudden she goes from being the problem child to being a helper. And that is hugely healing having these kids connecting to the community through service.

Adolescents want to have meaning in their life and to be part of something bigger. We all want that because we are all suffering from the huge, illogic disconnect between how our societies have organized our material existence and our relationship with the planet. Now I help kids get excited about future opportunities. I think this young generation gets to redesign everything about our material existence, how we do transportation and energy and food and housing. So to me, it presents an exciting opportunity but you can also see how fear of the future can contribute to the global increase in depression.

One thing thats very interesting about our method is its a very efficient delivery system. I think thats important. We built a system where one licensed therapist can clinically supervise five therapeutic mentors who are each treating two or three youth. So one licensed therapist is overseeing some 80 hours of nature-based therapeutic mentoring for the highest need youth. So it is a very effective delivery system and we are ambitious, we think this method should spread. We are hoping to prove this in some other locations and then really maybe to license the method in a much bigger context like to a large healthcare company. So were very excited about it. We think it is a potential model that that is worth spreading.

Mayfield: Thank you very much and as I said it means so much to me to be part of the Mad in America community. Its a great service that you have created to spread great knowledge.

Link:
Healing Youth with Nature and Connection: An Interview with Peter Mayfield - James Moore

Mars is a powerful planet, which according to astrological charts occupies a prime position empowering and enlightening your house of energy, efficiency, creativity, and vigor. A strong Mars positioned in your planet smoothens out the imperfections and rolls out bold changes and in the same way, a weak Mars can carry negative consequences.

Before the big solar eclipse, which will take place on December 26, Mars will transit into Scorpio, which is again, a powerful planet. The influx of the two, which will happen on December 25, 2019, will stay the same till February 8, 2020. This change in position carries changes for all planets. Read to know if this transit will be useful or not:

The transit signals a period of adversities for your sign. If you are feeling a little out of place during this time of the year, it might be due to an apparent shift in planetary positions. While Mars instills a little vigor in the charts, for Aries, the same is contradicted by lethargy and mismatched gaps. Accompanied by the seasonal blues, things might take a while to work around. You can experience some difficulty in achieving your goals. On the health front too, there can be some delays and unexpected issues that can demand your immediate attention. Injuries and accidents can be encountered if caution is not exercised.

Expect your journey to be troubled by some ups and downs in the coming days, which may put a dampener on your daily schedule. While the negativities may bog you down, do remember that unfavorable situations and delays will leave you with life lessons that will help you in future. If you have been neglecting your health and wellness due to work, it is time you take the necessary steps and do the needful. Instead of procrastinating, face the present situations. It will only make you stronger.

After a smooth flowing December, this transit shifts you from the lap of comfort and puts you in the middle of chaos and extremities, which can take you by surprise. Mental tensions can crop up out of the blue and bring around conflicts. Seeking self-awareness and confidence is more important than ever. Your immunity may be compromised, resulting in infections and health problems. Hence, you are advised to take care of your diet and lifestyle and not take it lightly. Trips and breaks can give you a refreshing break away from stress. Overall, the Mars transit in Scorpio will carry a mixed bag of outcomes for your sign.

The transit in your house concerns your future decisions and changes, but it will also bring along some delays and tensions. This is the time many natives of Pisces may be forced to take important decisions. You might also be surrounded by a lot of opinions which can further trouble and confuse your mind. In between all of this, health can get neglected. If not taken care of, it can prove very costly. You are advised to take care of your health, exercise regularly to stay on the right side of the charts. However, transit also brings attention to the house of achievements and unlocks new experiences. Progress will be slow, but nonetheless, it will be there.

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Mars Transit in Scorpio may be tough for these zodiac signs. Here is what they can do - Times of India

And now for our next act, I present to you Bob Fosse, consummate showman, tireless workaholic, bottomless well of charisma. Fosse may be the ultimate tortured genius: both arrogant and deeply insecure about his talent, unappreciative of his success, lovable but deeply unreliable as a husband, a father, and a partner. Hed have been a cliche if not for the fact that he really was a kind of wizard, bringing a wholly unique style to theatrical dancing that everyones been trying to mimic ever since.

Unlike most tortured geniuses, however, one thing Fosse didnt lack was self-awareness. He seemed to be keenly aware that, if not for the fact that he sure could dance (and had the ability to make other people even better dancers than him), he wouldnt have been worth much. He had to stay on that stage spinning-shuffling-tapping, giving the people what they want, because he had nothing else to give. That grim awareness comes through, to a startling degree at times, in All That Jazz, a musical masterpiece co-written and directed by Bob Fosse, about Bob Fosse, warts and all. Or rather, mostly just warts.

Okay, fine, Joe Gideon, have it your way. But we all know its Bob Fosse, so thinly veiled you can see right through it. Roy Scheider as Joe bore a strong resemblance to Fosse, right down to the uniform of black pants and black shirt, and the ever-present cigarette in his mouth. The meta touches in All That Jazz are dizzying, as illustrated when Cliff Gorman was cast to play a character inspired by Dustin Hoffman, who in real life replaced Gorman as Lenny Bruce in the Fosse-directed film adaptation of Lenny. Fosses ex-girlfriend Ann Reinking was cast to play the character based on her but only after she had to audition for it. When the sound of tap dancing was needed to loop over a scene of young Joe (Keith Gordon) performing, Fosse recorded himself. Dialogue was lifted whole cloth from real life conversations, and theres even a scene where Joe stops in the middle of an argument with a girlfriend to write down a harsh observation she makes about him. Short of a few name changes and timeline shifts, it qualifies as a biopic.

There was just one glaring difference: in All That Jazz, he dies at the end.

Though All That Jazz was met with positive reviews upon release, there was some debate over whether it was a self-aggrandizing puff piece about a deeply flawed man. This was a criticism similarly leveled at Noah Baumbachs Marriage Story, that in making himself the protagonist he lacked the insight to understand how negatively the character came off. Its puzzling particularly when applied to All That Jazz, considering the entire third act of the film is devoted to a dying Gideon hallucinating a lavish musical about how much of a failure as a human being he is. Granted, in the end hes bid a fond farewell by friends, family, lovers, and enemies alike, but its at the cost of being described as a so-so entertainer, and painfully reminded that all the women in his life have moved on to better, happier things. Its the opposite of a vanity project.

Unlike most tortured geniuses, however, one thing Fosse didnt lack was self-awareness.

Lets face it, it would be great to have the kind of energy Joe Gideon has for a full day of choreographing, directing, editing, writing, shmoozing, and fucking, if only it didnt require a diet of cigarettes and speed. According to Sam Wassons exhaustively detailed biography of Fosse, his life really was like that, where rest was a dirty word and vacation meant renting out a summer home with a dozen friends and throwing parties every night. To stop working, even for just a little while, meant getting mowed down and left behind by the competition, and to be alone meant having to face himself for who he was, an insecure perfectionist in an industry that valued the new and the now, who perhaps needed women more than he actually liked them.

Perhaps most poignantly is that, even though its Gideons non-stop life and unhealthy choices that ultimately lead to his death, theres no indication that Fosse changed any of those habits in his real life. He lived for another six years after All That Jazz, and still maintained a physically and spiritually punishing lifestyle. It doesnt seem likely that he failed to heed the message of his own movie, but rather than he simply couldnt. The performing life was baked into him, he knew nothing else.

Its like the old story about someone retiring from their job, and dying a year later, because they had lost their purpose. Surely Fosse would have preferred to drop dead in the middle of a dance studio rather than withering away in a retirement home. He came darn close, dying on his way to a revival of Sweet Charity, one of his most famous musicals. In an ending that seems like something out of a movie itself, Fosse died in the arms of Gwen Verdon, his third wife, muse, closest friend and harshest critic.

The end of the movie, a dazzling 10 minute musical number that is alternately bleak and joyous, is Fosse throwing his own funeral. What wouldnt we give for such an opportunity, to feel that love we either couldnt see or ignored in life, and to take center stage before every single co-star, supporting character, and extra in the production number of our lives? Are we going to hide behind the curtain, or are we going to get out there and dance until the lights go down? What kind of miracle would it be to say one last goodbye to the people who meant something to us, to apologize, to thank them for being a cast member in our plays?

Joe isnt sad, hes exhilarated, even bursting into overwhelmed laughter at one point. At least I dont have to lie to you anymore, he says to Audrey (Leland Palmer), the character based on Gwen Verdon. If it had to come to this, at least hes going out on the kind of big budget, over the top level a showman like Joe Gideon deserves. When the shows over and he gets that standing ovation hes been craving his whole life, hes exhausted, but happy. Theres a weary peace in his eyes that comes from knowing he put on a show that no one will ever forget, long after the lights have dimmed, and the curtains have dropped. He gave them everything he could.

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All That Jazz & the Great Stage of Life - The Spool

As little ones dream of sugarplums this holiday season, the worlds cybercriminals are dreaming of a new decade in which they will plot ever more clever and evil ways in which to bring down your companys security framework. Their vision is to cost you money and time in lost productivity, compliance risk exposure, and the icing on the gingerbread house, a data breach in which ransomware can play a part.

Data breaches are hitting companies in all business sectors, from finance to health care services. This year a Capital One breach affected 100 million-plus credit card applications and more than 100,000 Social Security numbers; the Quest Diagnostics breach affected more than 12 million patients, and approximately 540 million Facebook user records were exposed by third-party app developers.

While the big brand names tend to get more public attention when there is an attack, the harsh reality is any company small, medium or large is vulnerable to a costly data breach and expensive recovery. Threats come from external sources like nation-state cyber criminals looking to cause large scale disruption. They also can come from third-party sources like the Facebook event. What companies are now realizing more is that threats, though inadvertent, can also come from within.

Employees who unwittingly click on an email link designed to introduce malware into the network, or staff members who decide to work on company privacy material on a device off the corporate network are prime examples of what security professionals refer to as insider threats. To add to these threats there is another aspect, shadow IT, in which employees purchase devices or applications, and start using them without following any company security protocols first to ensure data protection.

Against this landscape of a varied threat environment, consider tuning up your companys security architecture and policies in order to begin the next year, and decade, with a stronger posture from which to defend against cyber threats. These practices are highly recommended by security IT teams:

No doubt, 2020 and the next decade will bring new threats to businesses and the personal data privacy of citizens. The best practice is to look at cybersecurity as a prism one facet being the external threats from malicious cyber criminals, another facet the inadvertent entry of malware by employees opening scam email links, and yet another facet the plethora of devices in use today, many of which may not be subject to effective access controls.

By incorporating these five security practices, companies can address this multi-faceted threat landscape. The best holiday gift is a data secure environment for company success in the New Year.

The rest is here:
Give Your Company The Gift of Better Security - Utah Business

Artist Calixte Hetier Clements exhibition traces her journey of living in Abu Dhabi

DUBAI: Clement studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, but later did courses in art and pursued both fields for several years. After moving to Abu Dhabi in 2018, she decided to focus solely on art. Through various series of oil on canvas paintings created in the UAE, Clement is sharing her feelings about uprooting herself from her own country, adapting to a new place and new cultures, and beginning to feel at home in the UAE.

Her first series, Love Reflections features a pair of hands in gestures evoking anxiety. I began this series in France and finished it here. Moving to Abu Dhabi was a big change in my life and these hands in the darkness express my uneasiness about the unknown and the scary feeling of losing control, the artist says.

After she felt settled in Abu Dhabi, she began the series, Hopiness a word she coined by combining hope and happiness. It features colourful paintings of people in different poses. Other series in the exhibition indicate her love for painting faces. Introspection, featuring close-up views of faces, is about looking deep into the soul of a person to discover their real self; and Faces reflects the multicultural community of the UAE. Another series, Freedom features joyful portraits of women indicating how comfortable she now feels here.

These paintings depict my personal evolution over the last year. It was difficult for me to move from my secure life in France, but now I am looking forward to the future and a beautiful life here. I have met people of many different nationalities here, and I have learnt that the most important thing is to be alive and to have plans. I have seen people patiently waiting and hoping for a better future and realised that the notion of time in various cultures is different from that in Paris. My palette is also changing with the bright skies and new light, and it is inspired by the colours of the fabrics, spices and handicrafts from various countries that I see in the souks. This exhibition is about introspection, self-awareness, and coming to terms with our own feelings as well as a tribute to the spirit of tolerance I have experienced here, the artist says.

Feelings will run at La Galerie, Alliance Franaise Dubai, Oud Metha Road until January 4, 2020.

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Coming home to the UAE | Arts Culture - Gulf News

CLAYTON EARLY LEARNING COMMUNITY MARKS THE HOLIDAY SEASON WITH A CELEBRATION OF INDIVIDUALITY AND CULTURAL AWARENESS Genesis Aguilar Pino, left, daughter of Jacqueline Pino Valenzuela, a child family educator in the Play and Learn community-based program at Clayton Early Learning, performed traditional Mexican dance with Kamille Pescador, a former Clayton Play and Learn student, at Clayton Culture Night.

Clayton Early Learning has its own special tradition when it comes to observing the holidays. Clayton Culture Night, the schools largest event of the year, recently celebrated the richly diverse individuals that comprise the Clayton Early Learning community.This years event was attended by 250 children, parents and Clayton staff.

Centered on the theme of This is Us, the celebration encompassed the unique life experiences that shape the students, families and staff as individuals and create community within the walls of the school and its early childhood programs, as well as the larger community of Denver and Colorado.

The event included an array of hands-on cultural cooking and crafting activities, as well as Mexican regional dance performances, and an African American storyteller.

Building and celebrating both self-awarenessand a sense of belonging is critical for healthy development in young children, leading to important socialemotional, cognitive, and language and literacy skills, commented Becky Crowe, president and CEO at Clayton Early Learning.This beautiful celebration is our way of honoring the individuality of everyone who is part of the Clayton community: children, their families, and our dedicated professional team.

Foods representing different family traditions were prepared in the Clayton kitchen, and staff and families also brought traditional foods of their own to share.

One particularly popular ethnic food was served by Clayton Teacher Edwina Annan, who teamed up with family and friends to share traditional foods from her Ghanaian roots. The team cooked all day to prepare Omotuo(rice balls) with peanut soup, and Jollof, a rice and chicken dish.I love cooking with my family, and we were happy to share our traditions with the Clayton community, said Annan. Im mastering these dishes so we dont lose the connection for future generations.

Clayton Early Learning is a hub for Colorados innovative work in early childhood development. Committed to the belief that healthy early childhood development offers one of the most powerful levers for ending poverty and inequality, Clayton applies a unique two-generation approach that demonstrates whats possible in the early years, and the positive impact that it has for children and families over time. Home to Colorados only Educare school, a nationally recognized model supporting children from birth to age 5, and their families, Clayton also influences systems change through research and evaluation services, professional development for educators and leaders, and policy and advocacy work at the state and federal levels.

With a professional team of teachers, social workers and health professionals, Clayton directly serves 500 families living below the poverty line, and 20,000 children are impacted through statewide systems-change work. Visitwww.claytonearlylearning.orgfor more information.

Susan Hagar is a public relations and communications consultant, and the owner of Hagar Communications.

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CLAYTON CULTURE NIGHT: THIS IS US - The Know

I have two answers to this case against laughter.

The first is a rejection of its final premise: Trump has indeed hurt vulnerable people, but between the leaven of incompetence in his cruelty, his rejection of some of the disastrous ambitions of his predecessors and a certain amount of fools luck, his administration is arguably responsible for fewer human tragedies so far than more high-minded, less personally degraded presidencies.

And I dont just mean to reference George W. Bush and the Iraq war here. To return to the subject of my last column, in President Barack Obamas first few years in office about 1,500 American soldiers and thousands more Afghans died for a futile and dishonestly justified campaign. If laughter was permissible while that deadly folly was transpiring (mostly out of the public eye), its probably O.K. to laugh at our situation now.

[Listen to The Argument podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]

The second answer, meanwhile, is a mild suggestion that a little more laughter might actually be good for the anti-Trump Resistance. In particular, anti-Trumpists might be a touch more effective if they could recognize how humorlessness and constant self-important dudgeon frequently helps the Trumpian cause, by setting up the dynamic I just sketched in my movie pitch where the country is asked to choose between two kinds of folly, one squalid and corrupt but the other pompous, insufferable and paranoid in its own self-important way.

The latter sort folly is at its worst, not on the far left, but on the establishment center-left and the Never-Trumper center-right, to which I belonged in 2016 and still do, in the sense that I continue to regard our president as unfit for his job and undeserving of a second term. But that belief, it seems to me, should coexist with some self-awareness about the many blunders by the great and good that brought us to this pass, some instinct for how absurd it sounds to write and talk as though the republic dies daily only to be resurrected overnight and slain by Trump anew, and some recognition that when our law enforcement agencies send their G-men to save the Republic from Vladimir Putin, sometimes they dont send their best.

Or to bring things to a finer point: If you couldnt see, long before the Mueller report fizzle or the latest revelations of F.B.I. incompetence, that Comey was a fundamentally comical figure rather than a paragon of old-school American virtue, then you have no business leading a resistance movement against a president whose main political talent is to make his rivals look ridiculous.

At the end of Burn After Reading, the pompous, alcoholic C.I.A.-agent character Ozzie Cox, played with urbane self-delusion by John Malkovich, confronts one of the civilians he believes has tormented and blackmailed him. You represent the idiocy of today, he says. Youre part of a league of morons.

Excerpt from:
Laughing Through the Trump Era - The New York Times