Matthew D'Ancona on Initiativitis

If Labour had held on to power on May 6, I think it is a safe bet that an official investigation into the Cumbrian massacre would already have been announced. In the Commons on Thursday, Alan Johnson, the Shadow Home Secretary, asked his Conservative successor at the Home Office, Theresa May, a series of rapid-fire questions that hinted heavily at what he would have done if still in office. Would there be a review of firearm laws? Were the follow-up checks on those issued with firearm certificates adequate? Was co-operation across police forces sufficient? Was a small, rural force such as Cumbria’s “properly equipped to deal with events that are more often predicted to happen in urban areas”?

One could see the former home secretary’s nerve-endings twitching with the old instinct to open an inquiry, launch an initiative, assemble a taskforce, appoint a firearms “tsar”. It is to the Coalition’s credit that it has thus far resisted this temptation, often clumsily but accurately described as “initiativitis”. When the nation’s attention is gripped by a tragedy of this scale and horror, the pressure upon a prime minister to make promises, no matter how vapid, and take action, no matter how rushed, is immense. But David Cameron showed courage and maturity in declaring that there wasn’t always “an instant legislative or regulatory answer”.

Obama

Obama’s besetting political fault is his automatic adoption of the tone of command, accompanied by a persistent reluctance to be seen as the source of the policy he commandeers.

Obama acted on the assumption that the establishment is one and irreplaceable, and must be served in roughly its present form. This assumption he seems to have acquired between the summer of 2008 – the time of his capitulation on domestic surveillance and his Aipac speech affirming support for Israel – and the National Archives Speech on security a year later. The trajectory was completed by the sacking last November of Greg Craig as White House counsel: Craig was the lawyer who drafted Obama’s original plan for the closing of Guantánamo.

Lex on Muni CDS

Always eager to deflect blame for fiscal lapses, state officials have pointed the finger at a small but growing market for municipal credit default swaps. There is no evidence, however, that banks are acting as anything but bond market facilitators. The first and loudest protests have come from – surprise, surprise – the state with the highest CDS prices, California. Treasurer Bill Lockyer has expressed indignation that prices imply California is riskier than many developing nations. With its intractable deficit, dysfunctional politics, powerful unions, inability to devalue and taxpayers who can decamp to states with lower taxes and better services, the CDS market may be right.

Mark Lillo on Tea Party Jacobins

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets............The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

Lex on Monetary Tightening

In their dreams monetary authorities tighten like Kaa, the Jungle Book python. Hypnotise the rank and file with assurances of a commitment to growth, while stealthily withdrawing various measures of support. Then, without anyone realising that the squeeze is actually on, the policy coils keep a firm grip on inflation.

Wyatt Mason on Celine

Spliced from a 1984 interview published in French in LaQuinzaine Littéraire, Roth's approbation reads differently in its original, unbowdlerized form:

To tell you the truth, in France, my Proust is Céline! There's a very great writer. Even if his anti- Semitism made him an abject, intolerable person. To read him, I have to suspend my Jewish conscience, but I do it, because anti-Semitism isn't at the heart of his books, even Castle to Castle. Céline is a great liberator. I feel called by his voice.

Just as Roth's "Jewish conscience" was itself silently suspended by editorial sleight of hand, a no less misleading elision of Céline's posterity has been made. Henri Godard, editor of the Pléiade edition of Céline's novels, has argued that, taken together, the eight novels possess a "dynamic unity" without which "it is not possible to get the true measure of Céline." This does not go far enough. Once one extends the reach of Godard's claim to include the anti-Semitic trilogy, the congruence of Céline's wink-wink misanthropy with his unblinking sociopathy becomes apparent. It is not that we shouldn't read Céline because he was, at a profound level, contemptible. It is rather that, to understand Céline, we must be ready to, and permitted to, read all that he wrote. Only in this way can we begin to understand what we are saying when we might think to class him as—of all things—a humorist.

Hilton Als on A Streetcar Named Desire

You might recall the moment: Stella has just had a baby. Returning home from the hospital, she sets about restoring order to her home. First things first. She commits her older sister to a mental institution. Stella, it seems, cannot live with this truth: that Stanley, her husband, has raped Blanche. Stella prefers to treat Blanche’s report as further proof of her madness. The new mother loves her sister, but she loves her life more. If she believed any aspect of what Blanche had to say, she’d have to leave Stanley, and forego those aspects of her existence that Blanche envies — and has contempt for. Without a man, though, who would Stella be? Her marriage defines her. To divorce Stanley would mean she’d probably end up as her sister’s custodian, thereby becoming another member of the pitiful, powerless female world Blanche is a member of.

But as Williams makes clear about half way through his 1947 drama, Stella would never dream of leaving Stanley. His crude, working class demeanor degrades the memory of his wife’s genteel upbringing in Mississippi. (“I pulled you down off those columns.”) As a result, Stanley makes Stella feel alive, turned on, present. And in order not to forfeit that feeling, Stella is complicit in her own brutalization, and, ultimately, her sister’s. In fact, Blanche matters less to Stella than her future as a happily conventional woman, dutifully attending to her home, and honoring her husband.

One requires a Brando-like intensity to play Blanche, but Blanchett doesn’t yet seem to possess the kind of imagination that understands degradation; she is too competitive a spirit to grovel where Blanche has groveled in order to stay alive. In fact, the moments leading up to Blanche’s rape—the cutting of the final chord of reality—rang especially false, because Blanchett plays it as though Blanche is drunk, confused, fitful, and not as a willing female victim to Stanley’s male need for control; she is ultimately relegated to the life of tragic mundanity she has tried so valiantly to escape, while Stella runs towards it.