Rebellion against overregulation
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Make a loose fist with your hands. Now press your thumb to the inside of your index finger. Or let it rest on your head. You should look as if you are giving an invisible cash note to someone. Excellent. You’re doing the Clinton thumb (or the Obama or Blair or Cameron thumb). Use this gesture to emphasize a point when speaking. It conveys toughness and resolution, without the arrogance hidden in a twitch of a finger.
There concludes our first lesson on politics before Donald Trump. Next week: message discipline. Come up with a parrot phrase, such as we’re all in this together, and be prepared to repeat it, regardless of the context.
Young readers have no doubt that I am harping on the robotic and over-regulated politics of the recent past. Yes, Trawl YouTube, friends. If nothing else, Trump’s rise has exposed a widespread public allegiance to uniformity and standardization. I wonder if the same uprising is spreading to other areas.
Take my own world, the media. Why do podcasts do so well? Because, in the end, they are messy, elliptical, digressive and everything else that airs Abhors theory. . who was raised on it, is inaudible by comparison.
Even the world’s favorite sport, so long in the intellectual grip of micro-perfectionist Pep Guardiola, could be loosened. Arsenal, coached by one of its apostles, is impressive, as the inside of a Swiss watch is impressive. The distance between players is just that. Free kicks and corners are choreographed to ballet standards. Even in open play, we fans know that a sequence of maneuvers will move the ball to the right, where the opposition defenders will then rush, at which point a diagonal pass will clear the ball. launch the spare arsenal forward in the tied left center area.
This is the most engineered football in the world, give or take Pep’s Manchester City, another team easier to admire than love. But both had disappointing seasons. A somewhat free-flowing Liverpool are thriving, with a squad that is not clearly better. If they win the Premier League, the era of over-coaching—bane of the modern fan—should be in retreat.
Years ago, this column had regretsMaverick’s death”. The argument is that in most industries there is so much data about what works that people converge on the same way of working. Musicians know to place a hook in the first 30 seconds to keep Spotify listeners from skipping a track. New construction apartments have the same kitchen lounge plan. Football has become rigid. My mistake was not foreseeing that at some point people would rebel. It’s strange that politics, so often downstream of trends elsewhere, would get ahead. Watching Trump’s effective inauguration speech, I took care of a consolation. His success sends a signal to other over-regulated sectors: there are rewards for deviating from strict form.
I’m writing this in Los Angeles, where I used to live. It has no dominant architectural style. It has no clear center. . In its lack of pattern, it is more life-like, more experience-like, than all but one rich world city I can think of.
After the Great Fire of London in 1666, many geniuses submitted plans to rebuild the place from first principles. Most want to bring some Euclidean ordering to the maze. Their design – full of right angles and other atrocities – is out of place. Otherwise, London would now be a grisly grid or (Christopher Wren’s idea) another European-and-Boulevard advertising setup.
Well, LA, a rival to London as the least designed of the Great Western cities, will have to change in many ways. Even before its recent injury, it had problems. However, in the end, as long as something in human ID resists the structure and regiment, the appeal of the place cannot fade.
Email Janan at [email protected]
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