EDITOR'S LETTER
HOPE IS DOPE

Not a portrait of Lily Allen

There will be a mention of Lily Allen in this editorial, so do read on. But first, imagine me at the end of a recent convivial dinner alongside patrons of an art institution at which the election of Zohran Mamdani had been discussed at some length. As we were getting ready to leave, the charming older lady sitting opposite leaned over and asked, “Do you think Jews are safe in New York?” This takes me back to 2008 and the US presidential elections of that year, when another handsome, Harvard-educated, Black candidate ran on a platform of hope. Both candidates used branding and publicity material with a lo-fi, primary-coloured retro feel aimed at a younger, hipper electorate. While the messaging for Obama in 2008 was short on detail and long on emotional pull, Zohran has run on a list of clear policies designed to make the city more affordable for families and working people. Obama leaned on race and identity in his campaign, while his policies sought to reassure the centre. Campaign in poetry and govern in prose, as the wisdom of the age went.

In 2008, as now, opposition had been growing to the never-ending war abroad, and everyone dreaded a looming economic crisis at home. Sounds familiar, no? Before discussing Barack Obama’s now infamous game of bait and switch, it’s only fair to remember that his nomination was not handed to him on a plate either. Rather, like Mamdani, he had to battle the Democratic Party machine under the control of the Clinton clan just as hard as he would later have to fight the Tea Party blood-and-soil types. So as the presidential election day loomed, we were so excited by the promise of the first Black POTUS – even three and a half thousand miles away in London – that we decided to shut up shop for a week and decamp to New York, thrilled at the prospect of celebrating what we hoped would be a historic victory together with the angels of Harlem.

In New York, I had lunch with Hamid Dabashi, professor of comparative literature at Columbia University (a post once held by the great Edward Said). Our talk inevitably turned to the plight of the Palestinians. The professor told me of his hopes for the new administration and Obama’s sympathy for the Palestinian cause. The prospective president had attended dinners with Said in the past and cultivated a friendship with Palestinian academic Rashid Khalidi. Dabashi said, “No one who has sat to eat with a Palestinian, looked him in the eye and felt his pain will be able to betray their cause.”

Mamdani has not followed Obama’s tactic of obfuscating on direct questions, triangulating audiences and hiding from hot topics and actual policy promises. Rather, he has leant into both his ways of eating rice and his socialist radicalism. Mamdani has had the audacity of winning by delivering policies, not vibes, and he’s been insane enough to want to uphold international law. His politics are aligned more with Bernie Sanders’ avowed radicalism, and his all-women transition team includes the former head of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan (who we featured in TANK before her appointment by Biden). Khan is admired by both progressives and populist Republicans and has a track record for promoting policies to curb the anticompetitive practices that are currently transforming late-stage capitalism into an oligarchy. Note that Michael Bloomberg coughed up eight million for anti-Mamdani ads, and that the donors paying for Trump’s new ballroom are Amazon, Meta, Google and Apple.

Under Obama, market fundamentalism continued, as did the existing policies of arming and providing political cover for Israel. In fact, the Obama administration increased military aid to Israel by an additional 10% to make a round $3bn per year, and abandoned other policies that he had condemned before being elected, such as the use of torture in black sites and the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, often after “extraordinary rendition”, or kidnapping. The use of drones for extra-judicial assassinations had escalated through the last years of the Bush administration, but under Obama, they became a key component of counterterrorism strategy, peaking in 2010 under a framework that defined all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, even if they were attending a wedding. At Obama’s star-studded inauguration party, the first couple danced to Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)”. It took us a few short years to realise that whoever the Obamas belonged to; it wasn’t us.

In the US and UK political discourse, the term Centrism is as truthful as the ministry by that name in Orwell’s 1984. The so-called centre may have once been a place between political opposites in a liberal democracy, the location where the tug of war between factions would stabilise as a form of balance between social forces. That idea nowadays holds as much meat as a Greggs vegan sausage roll. In America, the bipartisan consensus of the mainstream Democratic as well as the Republican parties (AKA the extreme centre) are, with some justification, what the MAGA crowd call “the swamp”.

There is one topic that unites establishment politicians from all sides, and that’s foreign policy and what they used to call defence. As Chinese venture capitalist Eric X Li once quipped, “In China, policies change but the party remains the same. In the US, the parties change, but the policy remains the same.” The policy, broadly, is one of eternal conflict. Trump’s minister of defence, former television personality Pete Hegseth, recently dispensed with the pleasantries by rebranding it the Ministry of War.

US foreign and defence policy is the unwitting hero, or should that be the villain, in the new Netflix documentary Cover-Up, directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, about Seymour Hersh (pictured), a veteran American journalist and one of a handful of people to have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize more than once. Sy, as he is also known, is a reluctant subject, and his work is, by definition, uncinematic. Fifty years of reading stuff and talking to people on the phone, only interrupted by making cups of tea, is hardly the material for a blockbuster. More exciting occasions, when he might have arranged late-night clandestine meetings with a whistleblower or been fired from a magazine after an argument, are also understandably camera-free zones.

The film is a canter through the highlands of Hersh’s unmatched career in reporting stories, starting with the My Lai massacre, Watergate Scandal, and the invasion of Iraq, followed by the Abu Ghraib photos, the Syrian civil war and most recently the Nord Stream 2 explosion. The documentary is really as much a portrait of the empire as it is the man reporting on it, as the final scene of military debriefing makes clear. From Vietnam to Chile, from Henry Kissinger to Donald Rumsfeld, the places and the personnel change but the story remains the same. A lot of dead bodies everywhere. Perhaps the most lingering sentence in Cover-Up is from the only time we hear one of Sy’s sources, an unnamed woman talking to him about the details of the ongoing genocide. Gaza, she says, “compresses past, present and future in one”. Gaza is the ghoulish trailer for a world tour of American intervention, from Hiroshima to Vietnam to El Salvador. The empire’s footprint isn’t responsible for all that has gone wrong in the world, but close enough.

The story of Zohran’s rise has not been the only big New York story this autumn, as I am contractually obliged to mention Lily Allen, a humble gift from these islands shipped across the Atlantic like a reverse Madonna. Allen’s album landed with some sobering revelations; apparently, an open marriage can go wrong. But the domestic affairs of the Allen-Harbour household are another, more intimate expression of the defunct system that is this particular iteration of late, late capitalism. Not only a story of real estate and its economics, it echoes in culture as a psychic phenomenon. As a rule, I don’t believe in condemning people for their taste in wallpaper, but casually glancing for a full 30 minutes at the Architectural Digest tour of Ms Allen and spouse’s home (along with 8.5 million other people) I think we could make an exception. When solipsistic, talentless individuals who owe their livelihoods to being the children of people whose only talent themselves was attracting the attention of the stupidification machine that passes for journalism, which pumps a sewage-pipe-wide stream of prurient putrified garbage about their tawdry unoriginal lives into society, yet feel like they need to be awarded cultural accolades for being so outré as to mention buttplugs in a song, then I am mildly perturbed.

New York is both the heart of the empire and its antagonist, the capital of capitalism and the birthplace of the Occupy movement. Allen and Harbour’s Brooklyn brownstone was the American dream, until it wasn’t, just as New York is losing its position to Dubai or Hong Kong. Yet still, whatever happens there has a global impact, as both those who celebrate or lament Mamdani’s election know. Hope may be the opium of wallpaperless masses, but it sure beats the Fentanyl of extreme market fundamentalism. Masoud Golsorkhi