Financial Times News - Christopher Caldwell Column

France and the culture wars

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:55:25 GMT

Not until this month, when Marie NDiaye won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, did most of her fellow citizens discover that she was living in self-imposed political exile. In an interview with the magazine Les Inrockuptibles last summer, in between her reflections on Tolstoy and Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry, the subject of being black in France came up. Ms NDiaye's Frenchness is much like Barack Obama's Americanness. Her African father left her a foreign-sounding name but returned home before he could have much influence over her upbringing. She grew up in a world that she describes as "100 per cent French". Her own acquaintance with Africa was acquired only as an adult.

Doubt in the Age of Obama

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:20:31 GMT

The winner's aura around Barack Obama dissipated a bit this week when his party lost the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia. It is tempting to see these elections, which always come in tandem a year after the presidential one, as a "referendum" on a new administration's policies. They were in 1993, when Democratic losses showed the limits of Bill Clinton's popularity and pointed to landslide Republican victories the following year. It is hard to assess whether voters were sending Mr Obama "a message" on healthcare or Afghanistan or something else. But it is not hard to assess the health of a political movement. The hopes with which Democrats entered the Age of Obama have been damped.

The return of rulings on faith

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:15:29 GMT

Last summer, during his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, President Barack Obama took America's harshest rhetorical shot at France since Donald Rumsfeld dismissed it as "old Europe" when he was defence secretary in the run-up to the Iraq war. Alluding to western countries that try to "dictate what clothes a Muslim woman should wear" - as France did when it banned headscarves in schools five years ago - Mr Obama said: "We can't disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism."

The state and journalism

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:20:22 GMT

The Reconstruction of American Journalism, a report published this week by Leonard Downie, a former Washington Post editor, and Michael Schudson, a Columbia journalism professor, came at an opportune time. On Monday, the New York Times announced it would buy out or sack 100 of its 1,200 newsroom employees by the end of the year. As US newspapers go, that is getting off easy. Some venerable papers, such as the Boston Globe, have lost about half their news employees.

The travesty of the commons

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:30:18 GMT

The political scientist Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel economics prize this week for finding new ways to address an age-old problem: the over-exploitation of "common-pool resources". If every person in a village has rights to fish out of the same pond, hauls that are reasonable at the personal level may lead in the aggregate to a depletion of stocks and no fish for anyone. So what is one to do?

Girls (and mice) on film

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 22:10:27 GMT

This week the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in US v Stevens, by some measures the most momentous free speech case in decades. The strangest thing about the case is that it arises from a law passed to keep women from stepping on mice. The second-strangest thing is that the Justice Department is fighting to keep that law on the books.

Polanski and the maiden

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:35:25 GMT

The film director Roman Polanski arrived at a festival in Zurich last weekend to get recognition for his life's work. In a way, he did. He was arrested on a warrant and extradition request issued by US judicial authorities. Mr Polanski pleaded guilty in 1978 to having sex with a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles, but then fled to France, which would not extradite him. He has lived there ever since.

Obama's age of atonement

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:45:22 GMT

There used to be a joke in San Francisco that the prettiest view of the Bay Area was from the top of the Transamerica building. Why? Because that was the only place in the city from which you couldn't see the Transamerica building. In a similar way, the rosiest view of globalisation has traditionally come from the American governing classes - from which you cannot see the interests of the major globalisers, only the ideals. Barack Obama's speech to the United Nations this week is a sign that he is having no more success than his predecessors in figuring out where interests leave off and ideals pick up.

French suicides complicate corporate life

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:00:13 GMT

Didier Lombard, chief executive of France Telecom, was summoned this week to a meeting with Xavier Darcos, the French labour minister. It put them both in an awkward spot. Mr Darcos was there both as a government official and a shareholder - the French state still owns 27 per cent of the telecommunications giant. Mr Lombard's position was even less comfortable. He was there to explain why 23 of his employees have killed themselves in the last 18 months.

French suicides complicate corporate life

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:00:13 GMT

Google writes its own rules

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:50:16 GMT

Sceptics often ask of new government programmes: if it is so worthwhile, why is the private sector not doing it already? A similar question can be asked of companies claiming to be acting for the general good: if the public needs it, why is the government not doing it already?

The west plays Gaddafi's game

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:55:13 GMT

Whether or not Libya's Colonel Muammer Gaddafi considers himself a Leninist, there are plenty of capitalists eager - as Lenin predicted - to sell him the rope to hang them with. It is the government of Gordon Brown that has suffered most since Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice minister, authorised an early release for the ailing terrorist Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. A Libyan intelligence operative, Mr Megrahi was convicted eight years ago of involvement in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, which left 270 dead. It seems unlikely the decision would have been made without the intercession of business. In July, the Libyan British Business Council, chaired by Lord Trefgarne, warned Mr MacAskill that the prospect of Mr Megrahi's dying in prison was of "grave concern".

The opposite of education

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:30:12 GMT

Stanley Kaplan, the self-taught educator who died at 90 this week, can lay a claim to having reshaped American society. He is a large part of the reason that the majority of American schoolchildren are back behind their desks this week and not running around on beaches and baseball fields until mid-September, as was traditional until quite recently. The school year starts earlier because the main project of much public education in the US is to prepare students for big standardised tests given each spring. The more time to prepare, the better. It was Kaplan who showed that huge standardised tests could be effectively studied for.

Beware blind faith in bigness

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:45:25 GMT

If there is a slogan or catchphrase that sums up the way the world's mind has changed in the past year, it is "too big to fail". When governments rushed to the aid of failing financial institutions last autumn, everyone sensed there was something wrong with the way our societies and economies were organised. For a while, the world appeared to have rediscovered a lot of age-old wisdom about hubris and excess. Yet we have lost the sense that big institutions can be a problem even when they are not failing. Managing bigness is always a problem because big companies, big organisations, big political units, tend to narrow the individual initiative of those who belong to them.

Guilt cannot be nameless

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:35:22 GMT

The story of Peter Connelly has troubled the British public since his life ended, at the age of 17 months, of a variety of tortures and injuries inflicted in north London in August 2007. His mother Tracey Connelly, her boyfriend Steven Barker and Mr Barker's brother Jason Owen were convicted in May of "causing or allowing" the child's death. Perhaps some lessons can be taken from this gruesome episode. But until last week, the public has had to absorb them in ignorance of who the mother and the boyfriend were. By court order, all journalistic discussion of the case, even after the verdict, had to omit the names of the couple, and Peter Connelly was known only as "Baby P". (Mr Owen was named.) With the lifting of the gag order, we have a clear view of the situation. We also know one of the good reasons why their anonymity was protected for so long - to avoid prejudicing a grisly trial, involving the rape of a two-year-old, in which Mr Barker was found guilty and given a life sentence. Ms Connelly was cleared on a lesser charge.

To the court of King Kim

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:00:23 GMT

"Bill Can Still Get the Women," ran a headline in the New York Post on Wednesday, as former president Bill Clinton returned from North Korea having met its dictator and secured the release of two reporters imprisoned (or held hostage) since March. If the language was exuberant, there was certainly cause for exuberance. Laura Ling and Euna Lee of CurrentTV, the internet news start-up, were arrested after crossing into North Korea from China. In June the pair were sentenced to 12 years' hard labour.

Some trifles do concern the law

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:35:16 GMT

That pen I took out of the supply room at work and am now using to scribble down these notes ... did I steal it? Probably not, as long as the work involves an article. It is not until I write out a grocery list or a doodle or a poem that I become a menace to private property. How seriously the property rights of employers should be enforced against employees is often a fuzzy area, and it is made the more fuzzy by the fact that the stakes are often small. One is more likely to leave the office with a paper clip than a printing press.

California's fiscal charade

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:25:27 GMT

Monday's agreement between Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, and state legislators seemed to promise a temporary resolution to an ongoing budget crisis. But before legislators had even had a chance to vote on it, Californians were indulging in that peculiar mix of sanctimony and surrealism which marks almost all political discourse in the state. "What about the children?" ran the headline over the letters section of the San Francisco Chronicle, as if the important divide in the state's politics were between those who "care" and those who do not.

An unsentimental education

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:30:25 GMT

Long before the US began shedding millions of jobs last year, American politicians were obsessed with retraining people cast off by the global economy. "The average worker will change jobs six or seven times in a lifetime," Bill Clinton said in an address to the Cleveland City Club in 1994. That was not much help: how do you train people for tomorrow's jobs if you do not know what tomorrow's jobs will be?

Mixing morals and money

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:10:21 GMT

To judge from his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, published this week, Pope Benedict XVI agrees with those who say that something has gone wrong with the way the world does business. What makes his document unusually disturbing and thought-provoking is an assumption he does not share. The Pope does not think that making capitalism more moral will be a simple matter of bringing a few malefactors to account, whether this involves summoning a half-dozen bankers to hearings in Westminster or Washington, or chanting slogans against Bernard Madoff in Manhattan's streets. "Many people today would claim that they owe nothing to anyone, except to themselves," the Pope writes. "They are concerned only with their rights." That certainly describes a lot of businessmen - and most of the rest of us.

A test of logic for civil rights

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:25:19 GMT

For about four decades, the US has had a system of racial preference (affirmative action) meant to remedy the dire consequences of its previous system of racial preference (Jim Crow). Last Monday, a narrow decision in the Supreme Court showed that the system has reached the limits of its logic.

Germany has misread Islam

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:45:24 GMT

When Wolfgang Schäuble convoked a multi-year "Islam Conference" in 2006 to ease relations between German society and its Muslim minority, the interior minister made a statement - "Islam is a part of Germany" - that was viewed as a groundbreaking and generous concession.

The catch in the copyright

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:20:21 GMT

J.D. Salinger's 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye has sold 35m copies over the decades and stood, this week, at 122 on the Amazon bestseller list. Now Mr Salinger - a reclusive, litigious 90-year-old - is suing Britain's Wind-Up Bird Publishing, Swedish publisher Nicotext and a US distributor over their decision to bring out a novel that draws on it. Just published in the UK and due out in the US in coming weeks, 60 Years Later was written by "John David California", the pseudonym of one of the Swedish firm's founders. It concerns a 76-year-old named Mr C. - easily identifiable as Mr Salinger's protagonist Holden Caulfield - who escapes from a nursing home and returns to many of the same Manhattan places that Holden did in Mr Salinger's original.

Addicts have made a choice

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:40:18 GMT

The US Congress voted this week to let the Food and Drug Administration regulate tobacco almost out of existence, but could not work up the nerve to ban it. The latest of America's periodic bouts of prohibitionism is thus coming to an end in a typically ambivalent fashion. Authorities are split over whether people are moral agents, competent to make their own decisions about drugs, or helpless victims; and whether drug abuse is a choice or a disease.

The politics of self-abasement

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:00:21 GMT

With his speech to the Muslim world at Cairo University on Thursday, Barack Obama put a new face on American foreign policy, or at least a face that the world has not seen since the 1970s. This is America's penitent, humbled and even sycophantic face.