Optimists have been quick to proclaim an end to America's long-running culture wars after Barack Obama's presidential victory.
The blogger and writer for the Nation, Christopher Hayes, believes John McCain's failed campaign has burned out the political battles over guns, abortion, religion and public morals. According to Hayes, McCain's various unsuccessful attacks on Obama trotted out all the old culture war arguments—in reverse chronological order.
First, McCain's attack dogs hinted that Obama was Muslim, pressing contemporary "war on terror" buttons. Then they dubbed him a Hollywood-style "celebrity" and a supporter of sex education in schools, two biggies from the 1980s and 1990s. When these failed to gain traction, the white-haired warrior backtracked further, dredging up Obama's association with 1960s terrorist Bill Ayers. And finally, having seemingly exhausted all other options, McCain ended the race painting his rival as a "socialist": a nod to cold war-era McCarthyism, the wellspring of America's cultural and moral divisions.
It's a nice theory, but as George W Bush would say: "Whoa there fellers! Not so fast." For starters, quota politics—a perennial bugbear for the right—are back. Obama wants a woman in one of the three top political jobs: state, defence or treasury. How typical of a lily-livered liberal.
But wait. He also wants a token Republican—and might even take two, were he to appoint Sheila Baer to the treasury post. That, surely, is the sort of politically correct madness even the most ardent conservative can stomach.
String theory out
Did string theory cause the financial crisis? Perhaps, says Martin Rees, professor of Cosmology at Cambridge and president of the Royal Society. He thinks disaster may have been avoided if the City hadn't been so stuffed with Oxbridge maths whiz kids who swapped theories of everything for weird securities. "Perhaps we should blame the crash," he quipped to Prospect, "on string theorists who defected" and who ended up "as out-of-touch with reality in their banking as their physics." What advice, then, for budding geniuses doing the milk round? "Over the last three years, I've told students that the City is fine, as long as they don't call it the 'real world.' Faffing around with complex derivatives is far from anything that really matters." Nothing like the honest toil of puzzling over the mysteries of black holes and dark matter, then.
Google-whacked
October brought big book news: Google's three-year battle with the US publishing industry reached a ceasefire, with provisional agreement to allow online access to copyrighted books. Effectively, Google is now a bookseller; their users will soon be able to pay to read out-of-print books either on the web or on new e-book readers. The move has been hailed as a potential windfall for the struggling publishing industry, which will take a share of the proceeds from any online sales. But might this victory be more like winning the right to sell video tapes just after the invention of DVDs? It seems only a matter of time before the giant search engine starts to squeeze out the publishers by selling, and maybe even producing, new electronic books of its own.
Publishers, though, appear willfully unaware of the coming competition. Judging by their Christmas offerings, they intend to battle Google with yet more celeb memoirs, bonkbusters and repackaged classics—including delights like White's Book's classic editions of Shakespeare and Dickens complete with "cloth covers by designers who have worked with Louis Vuitton, Habitat, Ridley Scott and Radiohead." The future really can't come too soon.
Image, below:A child turns a head-over-heels in a Philippines cemetery. Ten caretakers and their families live there to avoid the violence endemic to the surrounding neighbourhood of Pasay, a poor district of Manila
Aged super-charity
A geriatric giant is on the way, with the launch next spring of a new super-charity, from the merger of Age Concern and Help the Aged. It's not the first time these two have tried to tie the knot. They've failed to join forces on no less than six previous occasions.
Dismissing talk of "synergies," cost savings and job cuts, the organisations insist that their plan will allow the reborn entity to compete for donations with other charity super-brands like the RSPCA. Under the surface, though, the merger looks suspiciously like a late-life shotgun marriage to help Age Concern fix its loss-making health and retirement advisory unit, Heyday. This commercial venture missed its membership target of 300,000 oldies by a cool 260,000, and recently gave its boss an £815,00 payoff. Perhaps an aging population isn't so good for business after all.
The twitterati
In late October, keen-eared Prospect readers may have heard a clearly-perplexed John Humphrys grumble about gadgetry on Radio 4 when discussing the hot new internet phenomenon, Twitter. This is a "microblogging" service that urges its users to reveal what they are doing via short, frequently-updated text messages. Humphrys hadn't heard of it, and sounded genuinely surprised that Today programme staff were "tweeting"—as it's officially known—regularly. He's clearly behind the curve. Even stick-in-the-muds like Stephen Fry are tweeting many times daily. If Humphrys needs a techno-Jeeves to get him twittering, Fry may well be the man for the job.
Rise of the red Tory
Oxonian assets
In July 2008, Prospect reported on Oxford University's ambition to raise £1.25bn in a fundraising drive modelled on the Ivy League. It's now almost halfway there, helped along by £50m from venture capitalist Michael Moritz for his old college, Christ Church. Moritz's gift came with an unprecedented stipulation: that it be invested in Oxford University Asset Management, a new university-wide fund designed to give Oxford long-term security by pooling its fragmented assets. But will everyone join up? Oxford's 38 colleges hold between them around £2.7bn in endowments but, as Moritz knows, their individual investment records haven't always matched up to their academic reputations. With Oxford chancellor Chris Patten calling the limit on tuition fees "intolerably" low, getting more bang for their buck is crucial to the university's global reputation. Let's just hope the dons don't learn the wrong lesson about financial innovation from their sponsors for this December's varsity rugby match, Lehman Brothers.
Founding farmers
In this momentous time for global politics, it isn't just America that has been lighting a beacon for hope and change. Britain's own Falkland Islands are getting in on the act. As Barack Obama was making real a promise written in his nation's founding documents, Britain's tiny dependent territory was rewriting its own version of a basic law, which now enshrines their "right of self-determination." As a foreign office minister noted, "the world has moved on since the previous Falkland Islands' constitution…in 1985." How time flies.
The battle for the BBC billions
But don't expect the BBC to disgorge the loot quietly. Director-general Mark Thompson and chairman Michael Lyons are mounting a rearguard action, armed with new spending plans, and they plan a fierce lobbying battle. Burnham has said publicly that he wants the issues settled by January; hence the prospect of some savage scrapping (rather than the usual seasonal smooching) under the Whitehall mistletoe. Complicating things further is the arrival of ex-Ofcom head Stephen Carter—following a stint as Gordon Brown's chief strategist—as the government's digital supremo. Carter has a free market bent, and is no BBC lackey. But will he really want his successor Richards to pull off such a coup so soon into his tenure? Duncan's fingernails may well take a yuletide bashing.
