Oh, America

January 16, 2014

Dennis McGuire (53), who was put to death earlier today by the State of Ohio, ordered a last meal of roast beef, fried chicken, fried potatoes with onions, potato salad, toasted onion bagel with cream cheese, butter pecan ice cream and a Coke.

America, where death sits down at the diner alongside representatives of the Coca-Cola corporation. There’s no need for spicy food, everyone agrees, when you’re gonna have it fried.

That’s not what happened to McGuire: the electric chair is little used nowadays. Instead he was injected with a novel combination of midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, a morphine derivative. The State of Ohio has previously administered lethal injections of a barbiturate, pentobarbital. But Danish manufacturers Lundbeck have refused to supply the drug to the United States for use in executions.

America, is your Big Pharma so belittled – so much in decline – that you can’t come up with a new killer drug? Is this what you call R&D nowadays – trying out a new cocktail?

The drugs used on McGuire did not work well. Following the injection (do they rub their arms with alcohol to prevent infection?), his wife and grown-up children watched as he heaved, choked, snorted and gasped, suffering the effects of ‘air hunger’. After 10 minutes of this, McGuire remained still for a few minutes more before he was pronounced dead.

Still as the placid man with a light beard in the mugshot issued by the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. Thrashing around as he and his heavily pregnant victim must have done, when he raped her and slashed her neck so that she bled to death in the woods where her body was found the following day.
America, the Big Country where executions are small and mean……and not very well executed.

Obama Care

December 31, 2013

Henry Fonda with close cropped hair and purple lips.
There is an Open Face in the Oval Office.
The rate of incoming is daunting. So many client-citizens here to see the patron-president.
All eyes on the prize…….real time, face-to-face facetime with the president himself.
Buoyed by the Office and its extensive trimmings, he manages to stay Open. Ready for visitors and ready to be seen receiving visitors at the Resolution Desk.
But it’s hard to believe that his second term only Opened earlier this year. Aside from numerous theatrical performances (the theatre of National Security, the theatre of Poor America, the theatre of International Delegations), he is already starting to seem like a spent force.
And who will care for Obama, open face and all, if he can’t get any Closure?

America: the country for old men

October 13, 2013

Old men and their tired faces. Pouchy cheeks and droopy eyes. Advised to watch their cholesterol and get the prostate checked.

On Thursday, America will be prostrate before its creditor nations unless by then the elderly men of Capitol Hill can agree to raise the Federal Government debt ceiling.

Shouldn’t be too difficult, gentlemen, deciding how much more we are allowed to ask to borrow; especially since our creditors cannot afford to refuse. We are, proverbially, too big to be allowed to fail.

Cut to Jim Yong Kim, lively and elegant in his cutaway collar. The chair of the World Bank is speaking about the dire consequences of American default – if it were allowed to happen on Thursday. Born in Seoul, raised in the Mid-West, former principal of Dartmouth College, nominated by President Obama – no less, he is Korean-American, surely symbolising this century as a co-production between East and West. Or if next week is truly telling, perhaps he already represents the changing face of power. Power having acquired distinctively Asiatic features, whereas until now it’s been too early to tell.

Gentlemen, we are, proverbially, too big to be allowed to fail.

Yet fail they might if they don’t sort themselves out in four days. Perhaps there will be an agreement before then, in which case the questions asked will be cut back to just one: what took you so long? But the answer to this question is also the reason why the default deadline may well go unmet.

Washington’s Congressmen have been ta(l)king so long because they’re in a double bind: if they act like the far-sighted, can-do country they used to be, this would entail substantive recognition of their current status as a dependent nation, increasingly reliant on the surplus produced elsewhere. On the other hand, as long as they lack the courage to look into this abyss, they also lack the gumption to get that crucial deal together. Aside from politicking in the West Wing and shenanigans on Capitol Hill, this is the existential crisis underlying Washington’s imminent debt crisis. read more

Stingray Launch Day

January 15, 2013

As part of the warm-up before the great unveiling, a blistering, cranked-up, raunchy rock’n’roll guitar solo played live by a blistering, cranked-up, raunchy rock’n’roll guitarist. Yaoooowwwweeee! How many notes per second? How fast do you like your clicheeeeees, sir? Comeback for the can-do country/ resurrection of Motor City, USA/ revival of the Great American sports car – the flaky phrases are coming thick and fast, and sticky as warm snow. A blizzard of Chevrolet execs in downtown Detroit for the International Auto Show, all of them hoping that the seventh generation Corvette – launched today complete with its own biopic, shot in black and white for the full Chevy heritage effect – will rev up to be a real icon. All of them wearing the distinctive Stingray badge based on the undulating body that wraps around the driver’s – and not in a James Dean, Spydery kind of way. The Stingray is engineered to be 99lbs lighter, yet more rigid and robust: the car has presence and the driver gets to feel it, allegedly. Could be the world’s most highly engineered vehicle, or a contraption for high end branding. A car or the image of one? Even after the veil was lifted to reveal the Stingray, Motor City’s order of priorities – ‘cos you can have it in any order you like so long as it’s this order – remains unclear.

Ryan rides the storm

August 28, 2012

Winsome from Wisconsin. The Ruminating Republican. If Mitt Romney is wooden, his vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan is Woody from Toy Story. Were he conventionally handsome it might cramp the style of the senior partner. But instead of the mature man, Ryan (42) is Mr Almost Grown. Absolutely not Mercutio, more like Sugarfoot or the Sundance Kid (though not as fully formed as Robert Redford), especially with his lips forming a rueful curve and his hair brushed forward to evoke the crew-cut-that-used-to-be. Whether or not it ever was, there is now a poignant contrast with Romney’s slicked back coif: elder to younger; generation to generation. Ryan is a picture of what integrity looks like just before it draws to a close. That’s his image, anyway, and with proceedings delayed because of Isaac storming the town, at the Republican National Convention there’s not much to do but doodle.

President of Self-Consciousness, Washington

May 30, 2012

In the White House, the new French president faces the press alongside Barack Obama. Monsieur Francois Hollande is dumpy and speccy compared to the iced-coffee elegance of his host. Although Obama stumbles over his visitor’s name (hesitates, then over-frenchifies it), it is Hollande who is somehow in the wrong. Instead of simply being the President of France on his first visit to Washington, he is also thinking that he is the President of France on his first visit to Washington; that kind of thinking which is one step removed from being there, doing it. Hollande only has to sit still while Obama introduces him to the Washington press corps. Naturally, Obama followed the ‘remarkable’ election in which Hollande ousted Sarkozy. Of course, having read his biography, Obama knows that as a young man Hollande spent time in America studying fast food. Meanwhile we can see the President of France wriggling in and out of his own skin: one moment inside himself; next second, beside himself. At the end, he chips in with a line about French fries and you only wish he hadn’t.

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