His wife too undergoes a unification with destiny. Sarai becomes Sarah. Shifting from “my princess” to “princess”, she becomes a princess to nations. Her barrenness, which had defined her, which had driven her to offer Hagar to her husband’s bed, is rewritten.

Abraham’s handmaiden Hagar also undergoes a transmutation. Hagar means “the stranger”. She is a function before she is a person. And yet it is Hagar the handmaiden who becomes the only figure in the Torah to give God a name. She is pregnant and alone. An angel tells her to return to her mistress. Her response is to name God. El Roi, she calls him. The God who sees. An exiled handmaiden names the creator of the universe. When Sarah dies, Abraham returns to Hagar, herself renamed to Keturah, incense — because her deeds were as pleasant as incense.

Then there is Jacob, whose name means “heel-grabber” or “supplanter”. The man who came out of the womb clutching his brother’s ankle, already scheming, already reaching for what wasn’t his. He lives into the name. He cheats Esau of a birthright. He deceives his blind father with goatskin on his arms. He is cheated in turn by Laban, and cheats Laban back. The name is a destiny and a curse. To be Jacob is to be always grasping, chasing destiny, fleeing its consequences.

And then, at the ford of the Jabbok, alone in the dark, a figure attacks him. They wrestle until dawn. Jacob will not let go. The figure wrenches Jacob’s hip from its socket, and still Jacob clings. I will not let you go until you bless me. The figure asks his name, and Jacob says it. Jacob. Heel-grabber. Supplanter. He confesses what he is. And the figure says: Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have wrestled with God and with men and have prevailed.

The heel-grabber becomes the God-wrestler. The man who worked through deception is renamed. And he bears his life-long limp as proof.

A name is not merely a label. It is a verdict. It is a destiny. In Hebrew, shem — name — shares a root with sham, meaning “there.” Your name is where you are. It is the coordinates of your soul.

This is why the Jewish tradition holds that when a person is deathly ill, you change their name. You call them Chaim (life) or Raphael (God heals) as an act of metaphysical intervention. The Kabbalists taught that the entirety of the Torah is composed of the names of God, and that every human soul has a letter within it, and that to know your true name — your shem ha-etzem, your essential name — is to know your purpose in creation.

After the first moments of creation, man is invited to name the animals of the earth. This recognises his dominion.

So the Bolsheviks renamed the world they wrested. Petrograd (itself formerly St. Petersburg) became Leningrad. Nizhny Novgorod became Gorky. Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad. They exorcised the contamination of the Tsars, of the Church, of everything the new order had replaced.

They renamed themselves. Ioseb Jughashvili, a Georgian cobbler’s son with a pockmarked face and a seminary education, became Stalin — man of steel. Vladimir Ulyanov became Lenin. Lev Bronstein became Trotsky. Vyacheslav Skriabin became Molotov — the hammer. Shed the father, shed the village, shed the faith, shed the ethnicity, and emerge as a pure instrument of history. Name becomes destiny. Stalin becomes steel.

The Zionists too adopted the monikers of destiny. They resurrected Hebrew as a national language and adopted the names of a land they reforged in their image. It was an act of civilisational rebirth. David Grün, a Polish lawyer’s son from Plońsk, became David Ben-Gurion. Shimon Perski became Shimon Peres. Golda Meyerson became Golda Meir. Levi Shkolnik became Levi Eshkol. Diaspora names — Yiddish, Russian, Polish — were shed like old skins. The new names were assertively, aggressively Hebraic.

Ben-Gurion demanded the change of his cadres. Golda Meir resented it for the rest of her life. She had been Golda Meyerson for decades. She was a Milwaukee girl who’d made aliyah. The name Meir — “one who illuminates” — was thrust upon her by a man who believed that the Jewish future could not be built with Jewish past-names.

When Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. declared that he would no longer answer to his “slave name,” he was performing an act of existential secession. The Associated Press did not use “Muhammad Ali” for years — itself an assertion of dominance. Frederick Bailey became Frederick Douglass, after a character in Walter Scott. A man who had been legally classified as livestock named himself after a fictional Scottish lord. Malcolm Little became Malcolm X. X marks the spot where a name had been stolen.

The Pope changes his name. The practice dates to the sixth century, when a priest named Mercury — Mercurius, after the pagan god — decided upon his election that a pope named for a Roman deity might send the wrong message. He chose John II. Ever since, the papal name has been a declaration of intent. Benedict XVI chose a name associated with monasticism and European civilisation. Francis chose a name associated with poverty, simplicity, and the unreformed Church. You were meant to predict their papacies from their names.

A woman takes a man's name. Two people announce a new entity — that the unit now supersedes its components. The family name becomes the name of a thing that did not exist before the wedding and that cannot be reduced to either party. Two become one, and the one needs a name, and the name is the covenant.

The story of migration and assimilation is the story of changing names and re-becoming.

To change your name is to assert that the story your parents began is not the only story available to you, that you can grasp at and transfigure your destiny.

“Everyone dies in this one.”

— Walter White, watching Scarface with his family

WARNING SPOILERS

One way to read Breaking Bad is that it’s a tale of a man breaking out of the confines of his domestication. In this telling, Skyler, his wife, is at least a feature of his emasculated prison, at worst a warden. Walt, of course, breaks out of this prison. He breaks bad. Cancer reinvigorates what he once had and lost: his will to power.

I was a Skyler White hater when Breaking Bad first came out. And when I rewatched it a decade ago. Get out of the way, woman! You’re ruining it! I was what Emily Nussbaum called a Bad Fan, fine, I admit it. Cuff me, hood over head, shoot me out back — I deserve it.

But now I’m a fat old dad, a decade into married life, four kids deep. And on rewatching last summer, Walt’s fatal pride is all the more pronounced. As is the ultimate redemption of them both.

Walt’s path to ruin is so compelling because you see all the off-ramps. He was so close to getting away with it. But Walt just can’t help but get back on. The man who dons the emperor’s crown is not the same man who can renounce it. He goads Hank back to the hunt, unable to let Hank believe the mighty Heisenberg was the piddling dead Gale. He has more money than he knows how to spend — before choosing to cook for Gus directly. He could have accepted Jesse and Mike’s proposal to sell the methylamine and walk away with $5m. But by then Walt’s not in the money business. He’s in the empire building business.

But that’s all gone when Walt meets Skyler for the final time. He is in the sunset of his life, broken amidst the ruins of his empire.

Rays of light fall on her, cut through the blinds, and she looks up to her man. She’s a suburban New Mexican Grace Kelly or Ingrid Bergman, raw and vulnerable in defeat. Angelic even. Her affection is gentle, tragic rather than angry. Here in the ruins of her family, in the endless hell of the fallout of their grand criminal enterprise, she meets her man, who dragged her into destruction. He gives her a ticket out. First, the phone call he knew was bugged by the cops, where he played the abusive husband and mastermind. And now, the location of Hank’s remains, something she might use to bargain with the prosecutor. He lets go of his pretense and compulsive lying. He confesses to her: he did it for himself. He liked it. He was good at it. He was alive. He assumes her sins in his final sacrificial arc. There is grace here between them. A deep lingering matrimonial love. The remains of their covenant. After all, isn’t every marriage a conspiracy?

Skyler too was complicit. This hell is also of her making. This moment is not just his redemption, but also hers.

Skyler does not have clean hands. She facilitates Walt’s criminal enterprise. She sics her goons on Ted. When Ted falls and gets knocked out, she visits him in hospital. He won’t say anything, he reassures her. At first we think he’s being paranoid. Then we realise he read her exactly right.

But the moment Skyler really breaks bad, is when she urges Walt to kill Jesse.

“We’ve come this far,” she tells Walt. “For us, what’s one more?”

What’s one more. She’s all in.

What more could any man want from his wife? For all her faults, is Lady Macbeth not the best wife in all of Shakespeare? Do the Macbeths not have the best marriage? Ok, so she loses the plot towards the end, but show me a wife…

Skyler cleaved to her husband, transforming into an image of him. She facilitated his empire with ruthless competence. She made mistakes within the terms of their marriage — such as her infidelity — but given the shock of finding herself married to the greatest drug kingpin in the Southwest, one who has endangered her family, perhaps some brashness is understandable. In the end, she adopted her husband’s worldview, stood by her man, and suffered the destruction of their world wrought by his megalomania.

What more could a husband want?

More Breaking Bad Kvetches

The Handmaid’s Tale TV show ends transformed from where it began, accidentally (?) finding itself a champion of the most reactionary idea of all: a woman’s supreme gift and purpose in life is motherhood.

It still toys with some of its liberal fantasies (you have to fight for your rights or the fascists will come! Protesting is power!), but its heart’s not in it.

The show ends totally child obsessed, adopting the worldview it was created to mock.

In the final episode Janine's ultimate salvation arrives in the return of her child. She emerges from the den of all her horrific brutalisations — the gauging out of her eye, the beatings, the rapes, the sex slavery — to be redeemed in a reunion with her daughter. June only speaks about her daughter Hannah. And Serena — what has become of our villain queen, our overthrower of regimes, our poetess? All I ever wanted was you, she tells her infant son. It turns out she didn't actually want societal change. She didn't really want to overthrow a regime (twice). She just wanted a baby. And now that she is stripped of status and money and security and shelter — she has all she needs in her son.

The show began as a hyperbolic critique of conservatism in the form of Gilead, a violent fertility cult that takes power in response to climate-induced fertility collapse. As the show’s hero June escapes her ritualised rape and captivity, the show grasps for another motive to keep her in the fight. It finds a compelling one: her stolen daughter. It leans into motherhood as a wellspring of meaning for its characters. It moves away from its individualist female liberation roots and towards a conception of meaning and freedom that resonates typically with conservatives: the freedoms and meaning found in the constraints and duties and privileges of parenthood. Wasn’t the book born out of abortion-restriction anxiety?

The entire show is a projection of liberal fantasies and neuroses. Gilead is what you get when the climate wreaks havoc on the world. It’s what you get when you stop fighting for abortion rights. What do you get? White male protestant theocracy. Every good guy couple is mixed race or gay. Every villain is white, the princes and princesses of the realm immaculately dressed for every occasion. The show indulges the liberal urge to map oppression by skin-tone, granting automatic moral credits to the ‘diverse’ while reserving sin mainly for white men.

The shocking total aesthetic supremacy of Gilead is a strange psychological phenomenon. Elegant sharp lines and well dressed men terrorise the liberal spirit. Gilead’s uniforms, old timber homes, marble foyers, and razor-straight ranks give liberal viewers the creeps precisely because they’re beautiful (maybe it’s also a throwback to the whole Hugo Boss-outfitted-Gestapo thing). Immaculate coronations and funerals suggest fascism will arrive not in MAGA trucker caps but in high-fashion minimalism.

None of the prettier characters are the subject of true romance but our harrowing warrior-hero Elizabeth Moss, whose close-up horror visage is a staple of the show, is the object of endless romantic yearning. It’s the least believable part of the show, but it’s an awkward observation — like observing the latest romance fiction about the werewolf or bulked up pirate whisking about the innocent girl is ‘not believable’. It’s a trashy fantasy! Of course it’s not believable! That is what The Handmaid’s Tale eventually reduces itself to. Fantasy fodder. The most powerful men in the land are madly in love with this woman. Why not you?

Canada is a Pinterest-Board Utopia. Gilead is grim Boston; Canada is a coffee-shop refuge stocked with multicultural hugs and free healthcare. It’s the liberal fantasy of a border one train-ride away where every refugee gets an IKEA-furnished apartment and moral validation on arrival. (To be fair, the Canadians do ultimately turn on the American refugees.)

Men are emotionally helpless children. Even the ‘good’ men — Nick, Luke, Lawrence — are either mopey romantics or tortured collaborators longing to be told what morality looks like. It reassures a certain progressive instinct: if men would only cede the steering wheel, women’s moral clarity would sort out the mess.

When June finally lashes out — fingers in a Commander’s eyeballs, a group lynching in the woods — the show delivers vigilante justice free of legal or psychological blowback. It’s the liberal daydream of righteous rage: you can ‘punch Nazis’ (or gouge them) and remain the story’s uncontested moral center.

You can tell The Handmaid’s Tale was first released around 2017. It’s microwaved #Resistance porn. The show begins as a love letter to the Women’s March era. It flatters the viewer with the idea that tweeting, chanting in costumes, and brandishing Latin slogans constitutes an existential threat to authoritarianism. The regime trembles because plucky activists ‘speak truth.’ This is the world that in our post-2024 era has now been reduced to the frenetic echo chambers of BlueSky. The entire aesthetic is already dated and vaguely embarrassing in the same way of pussy hats and Kamala Harris (brat summer!).

But this was tough to sustain over 6 seasons, let alone through the demolition of the political vibe into which it was born. In its final landing, The Handmaid’s Tale’s original warning about patriarchy or theocracy petered out into something else: a confession. The soft spot in modern liberalism — its longing for the very order it pretends to fear, the meaning it denies but still craves. Mama wants her baby.

Manne has not read how this story ends. The founders of Brith Shalom and even Magnes himself, who Manne so admires, ended their lives disillusioned following total Arab refusal to contemplate Jewish co-existence. And in subsequent decades the UN proved to be an impotent overlord.

Manne opens with two specific Arendt concerns: first, that the extinguishment of a new Israel would be the defining catastrophe of Jewish history. This did not happen! And this continues to not happen, much to the chagrin of Manne’s Arab mates. Second, in Manne’s words, that it would “destroy one of the great social experiments among the Jewish settlers in Palestine: the non-capitalist, collectivist kibbutz”. Lol. Well, that did happen. But it was not destroyed by Jewish militarism but by Jewish prosperity. Because socialism is bad, not because the Arabs quashed it. Sorry to wake you from your half-century stupor, but socialism lost.

As Manne concedes, it is a miracle that Israel managed to emerge at all. A convergence of political, military, and social dynamics provided a brief window for its emergence that any sensible person would have wagered against. Imagine wrangling Soviet and US and UN support for Jewish statehood. Britain, for example, which had provided such succor to the Zionist cause with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 proved mercurial. It subsequently changed its tune and supported Arab interests instead, preventing further Jewish migration to its Mandate in Palestine. Such were the turbulent and complex political winds of the time.

The idea of exchanging sovereignty for joint UN and US trusteeship is absurd. One can forgive it of Arendt, writing as she did contemporaneously. But for Manne — ludicrous. The US didn’t want it and the UN has repeatedly proven totally inept to manage such conflicts since. Concerning Israel alone, the record runs from U Thant's craven withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from Sinai the moment Nasser demanded it in 1967 — removing the one tripwire standing between Egypt and war — to the General Assembly's "Zionism is racism" resolution of 1975, to UNIFIL presiding over Hezbollah's rearmament in southern Lebanon. To call the UN competent in such matters is to live in a bizarro alternate reality.

Jewish statehood was not the catalyst for Arab bloodlust against the Jews. We know this because it long preceded it. The Nebi Musa riots of 1920 killed 5 Jews, the Jaffa riots of 1921 killed 47 Jews, the riots of 1929 killed 133 Jews, the Arab revolt of 1936 — 1939 killed around 500 Jews. As well as all the attacks in the lead up to statehood, where hundreds of Jews were massacred: the massacre of dozens of doctors, nurses, patients in the Hadassah medical convoy, the Ben Yehuda Street bombing killing dozens in Jerusalem, the massacre of ~150 Jews in Kfar Etzion, including surrendered defenders and civilians. No Jewish state! Just Jews.

Given this, it’s odd that Manne should wag his finger at the Irgun. As though violent resistance was not understandable in this context, and in light of a Britain blockade against Jews fleeing the killing fields of Europe to Palestine.

In One State, Two States writes that the massacre of the Hadassah medical convoy “was in effect the final nail in the coffin of Magnes’s binationalism”. Manne pines for the cultural Zionists of Brit Shalom, but Arthur Ruppin, a founder of Brit Shalom, concluded by 1936 that binationalism was “nothing more than a pipe dream”. The British Foreign Office’s Cadogan called it “pure eyewash”. Brit Shalom had effectively dissolved by 1933. After the 1929 riots — 130-plus Jews killed, 67 of them in Hebron — Ruppin kept his revolver at hand. Noble intentions punctured by harsh realities.

Magnes himself — the figure Manne most reveres in his piece — found “no Arab partners, or even interlocutors, who shared the binational vision”. In 1932 he wrote that “Arabs will not sit on any committee with Jews” and concluded in 1937 that “not even one Arab stood up,” and, despairing, that “Islam seemed to be a religion of the sword”.

The Jews accepted partition to a land much smaller than what they eventually got. The Arabs — arrogant and with vastly superior numbers — rejected it, invaded, and were defeated. Unfortunately, facilitated and subsided by organisations like the UN into perpetual grievance, the Palestinians have been kept as a useful bone in Israel’s throat ever since.

Would it have been better for Israel to have been founded elsewhere? Perhaps somewhere not surrounded by Arabs wishing to kill and subjugate Jews? Perhaps one of the mooted plans for an alternative in Uganda or Russia or Australia? Why not Hawaii? I like sand and surf.

Of course, this is absurd. And such fantasies are why the once dominant left of Israel has all but disappeared.

For better or worse, Israel was a Schelling point for global Jewry. Those who were skeptical or smarter than the scrappy Zionists perished in Galician killing fields and gas chambers. A nation for the Jews was unbelievably contingent and unlikely anywhere. Only armchair philosophers who have never made or built anything and have never led anyone, can point to the giants who willed that tiny state into existence then kept it alive against all odds and say — actually no, it would have been better to have done it like this or like that.

Manne would rather no state than an imperfect one. An impotent Jewry on its knees than one wielding its own destiny, however imperfectly.

Personally, I’d rather the Americans have found a way to live with the Comanches. Imagine the raiding and scalping bachelor parties. I’d also rather the dinosaurs still waltz about so I could have a pet triceratops. A man can dream!

Curiously, Manne’s reading of Arendt is incomplete. In the same book he quotes, Arendt notes that it was the Arabs that refused UN partition in 1947, and goes on to say:

The Arabs, however, instead of concluding at least local truce agreements, have decided to evacuate whole cities and towns rather than stay in Jewish-dominated territory. This behavior declares more effectively than all proclamations the Arab refusal of any compromise; it is obvious that they have decided to expend in time and numbers whatever it may take to win a decisive victory.

So even Arendt notes that Manne’s ‘Nakba’, the exile of the Arabs of the land, was at least meaningfully a result of Arab total intransigence.

Arendt was a sharp observer of politics and culture. She was also an Ashkenazi supremacist (no judgement). Totally dismissive of Arabs and Arab-esque Jews.

On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry. Below them, the prosecuting attorneys, Galicians, but still Europeans. Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would obey any order. And outside the doors, the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country. In addition, and very visible in Jerusalem, the peies and caftan Jews, who make life impossible for all the reasonable people here. (Hannah Arendt And Karl Jaspers Correspondence, Letter 285)

In this respect, she is to Manne what a wolf is to a poodle: by the time we get to Manne, we are left with a defanged, fluffy, and incomplete version of her condescension. I have no doubt he looks at brutish Jewish “half-Asiatics” with the same horror. Brutish Arabs are likely too exotic for him to treat as anything other than a fascination. Regardless, in his world, agency resides with the Jew, and specifically his lofty Ashkenazi kind (like Bibi). The Arabs kill because of the Jews, and the Arabs are killed because of the Jews. Never mind that over ten times the number of Arab Muslims have been killed by Arab Muslims since 1948, than have been killed by Jews. It’s not their statehood status that was the problem.

Arendt is one of the magnificent political writers of all time. Her errors have the excuse of contemporaneity. Manne’s do not. He might pearl clutch at the terrible choices facing Israel decade after decade, but the best he offers is the same fantasies that condemned his intellectual counterparts in Israel to historical and political oblivion. It is a terrible irony that the last vestiges of his kind in Israel — older Ashkenazi leftist Jews — were at the pointy end of Arab barbarism on October 7, tortured and massacred by the people they put such faith in.

Dogs hated him. The whole dog park thing was not for him unfortunately. He was never aggressive with people, although he would ‘mouth’ me if I annoyed him. People didn’t get it and would find him intimidating. Just try washing him.

My kids recently got old enough — and Kaiser mellow enough — to walk him. The girls would run him through a field like witches in the night, half terrifying themselves. He never hurt any of our children.

But he did hurt other animals. We’d find chewed up possum heads in our yard. A possum could escape a hundred times but need only slip once. A brush turkey, a chicken down the road. One time we caught him snarling at a baby possum that was hiding. He had just eaten its mother. We nursed the joey and called rescue.

I didn’t mind all this. He loved his masters. And we loved him.

But getting a dog was a mistake. A dog is all the labour of parenthood and none of the point. (When I ran this through Claude, it told me “If there were no point you’d have felt nothing today and written nothing.” You got me.)

You should not get a dog. People look at me funny when I say this — it’s not the done thing. But getting a dog is almost certainly a mistake for you. If you live on a farm, fine, whatever. Why not. You have space, you have animals. Wonderful. Enjoy. But you don’t live on a farm. Same if you are a Russian prince. You want to go hunting with your borzois? Wonderful. But you are not a Russian prince. You aren’t even a British lord. You are a gelded pleb in your little city home. Grow up.

Ok, so we got a Siberian sled dog for suburban Australia. Maybe our lessons don’t generalise so well. I accept that. OG looksmaxxers. Just went for a big beautiful dog. An understandable mistake for two young people in their prime. Who has time for half-rat breeds?

But dogs are a trap. They’re great at being loved. Your dog loves you no matter what? Maybe be unafraid of earning the love of fellow humans. Create enduring love that survives you — in your children.

Maybe your girlfriend wants a dog. She doesn’t want a dog, she wants a baby but you’re too much of a child to man up and give her one. Maybe your kids want a dog. Who cares what they want, kids want a lot of things. They won’t look after it. You don’t need the headache.

Our “pet parent” culture is a strict downgrade from our “parent” culture. It’s all cope. We role play responsibility and parenthood with these animals. And we have bred them down to furry handbags that love it. But we only make fools of ourselves. You don’t need to live in a pet ad. You can stop performing now. I give you permission.

One friend lives in an apartment with two kids. His dog needs to be walked twice a day to pee outside. Splits the pain with his wife. What a schlep. They hate it. Bang your head against a wall, it’s easier.

Another friend got two cavoodles for his three daughters. When they were considering it I told them it was a big mistake. Cute dogs. They were gone within a month. Who has time for that?

Many dogs are given away because their owners can no longer care for them. You won’t see that on your Tik or your Tok.

When we first got Kaiser, a lady quipped that I better enjoy picking up poo for the next decade. Big dog, big poo. I thought it was an odd comment, I now see its weary wisdom.

I like dogs. The relationship between a man and his dog is real. It’s an ancient bond. We have co-evolved together. But they don’t belong in cities, and they are no substitute for kids.

Even if you have kids, instead of getting a dog, have another kid. Kids eventually sort out their own poop. Every time you travel you need to make arrangements for your dog. If you’re going to accept the logistical overhead, the anchor of dog ownership, you may as well create generational legacy. A dog is a half-measure. No half-measures.

There’s a reason Charedim tend not to keep dogs. There is no religious prohibition. But I suspect it just doesn’t work when you have a fertility-obsessed urban culture (compliment). It’s not on the efficient frontier of family formation or urban life.

I had to carry Kaiser into the vet. The vets cooed at me. They saw he was unwell and I had tears welling. They spoke to me in baby-ish euphemisms. Asked me if I wanted to keep his ashes. Whispered comforting words to him as he lay unconscious. Asked me if I’d like him moved into another position before injecting him. I didn’t understand any of it. Hasn’t he suffered enough? It’s not their fault. People crave ritual and meaning. And it is a grave moment. It is lacking ritual. We have nothing to grasp onto. So she whispers, rest in peace Kaiser, in a sing-song voice, as she kills him.

Maybe I say all this because I wish he got better than a backyard and a guy with four kids. See ya, Kaiser.

I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

— John Adams

European nations sending their best sons to battle. Fragile alliances and fierce rivalries generating technological leaps. Vast treasures expended to fund the struggle. Dynasties pitted against one another. Epochal rivalries between brothers. Furtive attempts to carve up the New World.

I am talking, of course, about Formula 1.

Is it sad or beautiful that the apogee of several millennia of civilisation is bottled in a motor race? The same restless id that produced the stirrup, metallurgy, open-sea navigation, the cannon, the steam engine and the aeroplane has culminated in a race around a track. The princelings who fill the grid (the self-made Lewis Hamilton is the conspicuous exception) would once have poured their energies into ruling well, crushing their rivals on the battlefield, and winning glory for the nation. Perhaps it is a feature and not a bug that we have built them sandpits instead. And yet it is not exactly inspiring to realise that today’s Napoleon is driving an F1 car, building an AI app, or running a hedge fund.

This is made flesh in Max Mosley, who ran the sport’s governing body for sixteen years. His father was Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. He married Mosley’s mother, Diana Mitford, in a private ceremony at Joseph Goebbels’s home, with Hitler in attendance. (Decades later the News of the World would run footage of the son under the headline “Sick Nazi Orgy with Five Hookers”.) The father tried to seize a country. The son wrote motor-racing regulations. Is that an upgrade? To paraphrase John Adams, I must study war so that my son can race cars and enjoy hookers.

Like a city in Shogunate Japan, F1 is part spectacle of power, part cage for otherwise rowdy elites. If not this race to amuse them, to sink their finances and energies into, what terrible plotting might be unleashed? Perhaps better to leave the European Commission and national governments to the eunuchs.

The knights of this realm sport the colours of their houses and their sponsors. They track the rise and fall of industries and norms. For its first couple decades, tobacco kings dominated flows. Then they were banished, replaced by finance and oil barons, energy drinks, and then the crypto kings. F1 is a trophy room, where power is laundered by sheiks and dirty tycoons. F1 sponsorship shows which industry currently has more money than legitimacy. The car’s livery is a gauge for moral panics and manias.

In this international arena, once more the British shopkeeper and tinkerer defeats the continental aristocrat. Enzo Ferrari sneered at the small British teams — Cooper, Lotus, Williams, McLaren — as garagisti, garage-hands who came from nothing and bought their engines instead of forging them like a proper aristocrat. Those modular, underfunded, improvisational outfits then spent forty years beating him. It’s the English sea dogs, the Francis Drakes and John Hawkinses, taking on the rich Spanish galleons until they became the incumbents themselves.

There is no sport that more purely manifests Girardian rivalry. The fiercest rivals are their closest reflections (take Ferrari and McLaren). But no rivalry is fiercer than between two hero drivers of the same team. Vettel and Webber, Hamilton and Rosberg, Prost and Senna. Subject to the levelled playing field of same car, same engine, same team, they are reduced to nothing but their individual supremacy. Total zero sum rivalry, where one must defeat the other. Eventually one twin must be cast out for the house to function. It always ends with a scapegoat. The team courts the rivalry until it threatens the team itself (Prost and Senna literally driving into each other at Suzuka).

We revel in the blood sport. We want the smell of blood without the blood itself. We want the drivers to court death then act shocked when they are aflame. We mass around them as they duel and wrestle. Death is too much, but to walk the line of death is essential.

At its apex, the sport transcends its purpose. For the driver, F1 is not so much about victory as transcendence. Senna drove with the mandate of heaven. After one qualifier in Monaco, Senna said:

And I suddenly realized that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was kind of driving it by instinct, only I was in a different dimension… On that day, I said to myself, ‘That was the maximum for me; no room for anything more, I never really reached that feeling again.’

For its engineers and designers, performance fully decouples from utility. The overwhelming majority of F1 engineering is gloriously useless for any normal purpose. A billion dollars and a thousand of the planet's best engineers are spent to find a tenth of a second that helps no human being do anything. This is the engineering equivalent of pure mathematics or haute couture: excellence pursued past the point of use, for its own sake. Like all civilisational peaks, sublime uselessness is the point. They stand like the cathedral, the journey to the moon. We do it because it is hard and sublime.

The sport has its sacred institutions. Ferrari is kept alive even through extended periods of decrepitude. Ferrari is the only constructor present in every season since 1950. It is paid a unique historic bonus the other teams don't get and has held a contractual veto over the regulations. The sport needs Ferrari to exist more than Ferrari needs to win because the red, the tifosi, and the myth support the whole spectacle. Like monarchies, legacy universities, and flag-carrier airlines, Ferrari is too sacred to fail.

At its essence F1 is about people. We care about engines and cars but Liberty Media’s insight was that people bond with people not machines. This insight transformed the sport from a niche fascination to a global phenomenon. Drive to Survive made heroes of the men who lose — a soap opera of the doomed mid-grid strugglers, the foul-mouthed team bosses. I confess to being a pathetic Netflix F1 unter-fan. If you have loved this sport since the day you wept watching Senna die, you are entitled to sneer at me from your inherited season tickets. We care about our heroes made flesh. We admire the scimitar and the steed but it is the man who wields them that we venerate.

For in the cockpit, for the length of one impossible lap, a man stops driving and begins to pray with his hands, while a hundred thousand others lean in to smell a death that must be courted. The kings are dead. The wars are too terrible to wage. What remains is the duel, the steed, the colours of the house, and the twins lusting for victory. We gave them a sandpit. They built an altar.

WARNING: SPOILERS.

HONESTLY DON’T EVEN BOTHER READING THIS HUMAN SLOP.

Marty Supreme is the epic fantasy of a teenage Jewish boy, Portnoy’s id finishing in chopped liver over and over and over again. Our hero Marty is a pimply pinball racketing around post-war America, the grime on striver New York Jewry hurtling into the city’s establishment WASPs, smashing everything in his path, endlessly losing with the hysteria of an addict who’s convinced that if he breaks down enough doors there’ll be a score eventually.

Everything in the film is gritty, textured, pulsating with a ravenous adolescent sexuality. Watching this movie is scraping your teeth against bristling pockmarked skin, monobrows, protruding schnozzes and paunches, rotund or elongated or crumple-faced or googley-eyed grotesqueries, a Star Wars cast out of a Brooklyn bar mitzvah. Our wiry ferret hero believes himself to be chosen, him personally, and like every idiot false messiah he has just enough charisma and force of will to suck just enough believers into his vortex. Every humiliation follows this life where the next buck and meal and flight and kiss is a hustle away. Shame is the water these people swim in and shamelessness their superpower. They are spanked, beaten, shot at, fall naked through the rot of their motel floor.

There is no more outrageously visceral sequence in film than the recollection of an Auschwitz inmate dousing himself in wild honey and inviting his fellow inmates to lick it off him, suckling at his hairy emaciated chest and arms for sustenance, before cutting to a present-day beautiful washed up movie star Gwyneth Paltrow arriving to our young protagonist’s hotel suite to ravage him. Later after stealing from her and insulting her, she gifts Marty expensive jewellery to fund his escapades before he eats her out on park grass. It’s over. Every pimply yiddishe boy will demand his own giant blonde shiksa sugar mama. How can you possibly live without one.

What propels our feral runt messiah through this universe? A chip on his shoulder the size of a pyramid. He returns from Egypt one day with a gift for his poor mother: a rock chipped off the pyramids. We built that, he says. He is a Hitler’s defeat manifest, he tells journalists. In beating an Auschwitz survivor rival in a table tennis match, he will finish what Auschwitz failed to! Ok, that one went too far, he concedes. He runs his mouth like a Bangkok ping pong ball, sometimes it lands, sometimes it doesn’t.

This is a quest. Goy kids have The Never Ending Story, broken Jewish kids have this land of troll uncles and nasal-screeching mothers where one side-quest has you eating out Gwyneth Paltrow then getting spanked by her husband to unlock a flight to Japan to defeat a deaf table tennis champion at the risk of kissing a hog. Keep your 8-month pregnant married side-piece at bay while goyishe cops chase you past Chinese cooks in a New York alleyway.

Every kindness is squeezed to its limits, pressed until it pops like pus into putrid resentment. Every man and woman for themselves. Marty’s mother fakes hospitalisation to twist him, his sweetheart fakes a black eye, he’s playing his mother and sweetheart and the doorman and every other schmuck he careens into. You can’t win ‘em all but you gotta win just enough — a gambler’s manic ferocity and anxiety applied to every human interaction. Our hero knocks up his sweetheart in the basement of a shoe store. This is their world, how these people are conceived, sweaty mid-work sex squeezed into a feet-smelling underground crevice. And from birth every American goyishe boogeyman will be after you, from the farmer with a shotgun to country bumpkins in a pick up, heck, every yiddishe boogeyman will be after you too, hardly less terrifying.

Marty Supreme makes this pedestrian grotesquerie feel mythic. Infused with obsession and vomit-inducing levels of ambition, any boy’s fantasy and plight is made vital. That’s life isn’t it? You got one shot… one opportunity… there’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti. Marty is not redeemed; redemption would kill him. He is funny because he is awful, heroic only in the ancient, unflattering sense: a person with one monstrous gift and no corresponding wisdom. In this world ambition is compulsion, a rash that spreads across the soul. Jewishness is not identity-card piety but appetite, memory, resentment, comedy, terror, performance, inheritance, and noise. Shame. But in his hands shame is a rocket ship. Marty Supreme is a pustule, a prophet, a pervert, a champion. Above all he is alive.

We’re also watching one man’s radicalisation in real time. Front row seats to the origin story of Dark Joe rising. Perhaps it began with his “red-pilling” (his words) by Peter Tulip who confessed last year that his supply-side focused policy on housing would do bugger all and take decades to impact house prices.

Immigration is sitting right there! Instant lever! Just pause it bro! But Tulip wouldn’t touch it. Besides, for politicians, when 66% of Australian households are home owners, raising house prices is the point. That’s the political economy in which we live.

There is a whole public discourse taking place right now around building more houses and tinkering with tax incentives, when we are importing over 2 migrants for every new dwelling built. In the last three years we poured the equivalent of the city of Adelaide into this country. That’s why One Nation is #1 in the polls. Neuter right wing politics with this one weird trick.

So now we get Joe’s series on immigration.

First there’s Martin Parkinson, who ran the Australian Treasury (2011-2014), then the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet (2015-2019). He was also the “chair of the Australian government's 2023 Migration Review (the most significant review of our migration system in more than three decades).”

Parkinson is also the Chancellor of Macquarie University, which probably should have been disclosed given some of the subject matter, and where he is clearly being self-serving.

Great questions by Joe. He has this lovely cuddly centrist schtick where these people will confess anything to him. I really appreciated the candour. Not quite as shocking as Abul Rizvi’s, but remarkable still. Some confessions in this interview:

• We have a foreign working underclass in Australia that we accidentally stumbled into and wouldn’t have voted for.1

• Migrant workers are undercutting wages and dampening investment in productivity enhancing technology.2

• Foreign students are driving up rents.3

• Even the whole concept of a skills shortage, which large parts of Australia’s migration policy are ostensibly there to fill, is basically fake — wages are the natural corrective mechanism, which are being suppressed.4

• We import migrants for specific skills then bar them from working in those specific areas.5

• Astonishingly — as a university Chancellor — he even confesses that international students negatively impact education quality at universities.6 I hadn’t realised that fact — no secret for two decades at least — had penetrated accepted institutional wisdom. Things must be really grim on the ground.

One feels for the poor Swedish backpackers, looking to find a handsome Aussie boyfriend, forced to go pick fruit on a farm.7 The reason you don’t have a beautiful Swedish girlfriend, anon, is that the agri and tourism lobbies are hoarding them via indentured servitude regional agricultural work.

Parkinson was occasionally a little cute, for example claiming international students don’t increase rents in places Australians typically want to live.8

Maybe his students don’t live in places where people want to live with endless space up in Sydney’s suburban North Shore, but the students at USyd, UNSW, UMelb, Adelaide, and others are central and surrounded by some of the most desirable real estate in the country.

He notes that international students cross-subsidise Australian university research. That may be true, but there are other potential sources of funding. They need not obviously be coupled. Maybe if the government stopped pouring $50bn a year into witch doctors, sex work (ok, they did stop that), and suburbs of hucksters, via the NDIS, they’d have more for R&D. Of course, just try clawing back that $50bn from your constituents. But that’s the political economy in which we live.

Never stops being shocking how the Australian business and technocratic class reduces women to their value as workers. Motherhood is a distraction from working. Gotta pump those labour participation stats. Have to hand it to Parkinson for conceding our immigration policy is in lieu of the kind of “long-term thinking” that supporting fertility rates might entail.9

One of my favourite bits: we hate these clunky Soviet-style bureaucracies, but love... unions / employer tripartite councils?10

Why aren’t we just auctioning off a fixed number of skilled places to the highest bidder? Because productivity is not the point. The point is filling the trough for unions and business interests. That’s the political economy in which we live.

The other two podcasts in the series are also essential listening. Mark Cully, a former chief economist at the Australian Department of Immigration (2009-2012), is shockingly clear-eyed, opinionated, and sceptical of decades of establishment wisdom around immigrants making us better off. He recognises university and employer interest groups as rent-seekers on the question of immigration. I’ve been banging on about the importance of Australia’s mass subsidised migration program from the 1830s for a while — glad to see him focus on it. I look forward to reading his book.

The conversation with Mike Pezzullo is interesting for other reasons. He ran the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (2013-2014), then the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (2014-2017), then the Department of Home Affairs (2017-2023). Turns out we probably let in “tens of thousands” of migrants who we shouldn’t have prior to 2014.11 Whoops. Pezzullo is at pains throughout to emphasise that the immigrant terror threat is limited to a tiny portion of the Muslim migrant community. That may be so. But the question Joe doesn’t ask is: if one population brings in a few hundred men who seek to kill you (and a bunch more who non-violently hate you), and another population doesn’t, why not only bring the latter? Why bring any in at all? What exactly is the benefit we are getting as a country for this risk we are assuming? Pezzullo is pleased with the vast intelligence apparatus created to deal with the threat of a few hundred men. Understandably so, as he was charged with this noble task. But for over two centuries this was entirely unnecessary. Almost no one in our political class is bothering to ask whether we might absolve ourselves of this risk altogether.

“If only it were reliable and consistent. "K-Pop [Demon Hunters]" was probably our 30th animated film. So it's not at all reliable and consistent. Now it is a lot more like that of art, and seeing the contrarian edge, and what's the story. I mean, imagine the pitch for K-Pop Demon Hunters, right? You know, so it doesn't fit a set of formulas. So in that way, it is a lot like venture. And also that a few of the companies will generate outsized returns.”

— Reed Hastings, Founder CEO of Netflix

“Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess — and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”

— William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade

“If I had said yes to all the projects I turned down, and no to all the ones I took, it would have worked out about the same.”

— Hollywood Studio Executive in William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade

Netflix distributed KPop Demon Hunters in 2025. It sat there gathering moss, and then exploded into the most-viewed animated film in the platform’s history. Netflix’s CEO admitted they didn’t know it was a hit on the opening weekend. Their billion-dollar recommendation engine — the same one trained on the viewing habits of every Netflix subscriber on Earth — missed it.

In a Brisbane back room in 2017, the ABC’s Michael Carrington saw a five-minute pitch at the Asian Animation Summit. He liked it. He gave Ludo Studio $20,000 to refine the pilot. The ABC then commissioned 52 seven-minute episodes in partnership with BBC Worldwide. The BBC funded roughly 30% of the budget in exchange for global broadcast and commercial rights.

This is, and was, an entirely standard international co-production split for mid-2010s preschool animation. It is the same deal structure used since the late 1980s. The international partner takes the rest-of-world risk because it has the rest-of-world infrastructure. The domestic broadcaster gets cheap, on-charter content for its audience. Both parties make a bet. Most of the time, neither of them gets rich.

But this was not most of the time. This was Bluey. In 2025 Bluey was the most-streamed show in America — not the most-streamed kids' show, the most-streamed show, full stop, ahead of every adult drama and prestige flagship in the country — racking up 45 billion viewing minutes on Disney+ in a single year. It has been sold into 140+ countries and translated into more than 20 languages. 400 million views in a country of 26 million people, which means the average Australian has, statistically, watched 15 episodes of a children's cartoon about a blue heeler. It is the first Australian series ever licensed to Disney+. There is a Disney/BBC/Ludo theatrical movie booked into cinemas for August 2027. BBC Studios pulled £2.2 billion in commercial revenue in 2024-25 and Bluey is "a significant part" of US$3.6 billion in global retail sales. Brand Finance values the franchise at US$2 billion. A property whose entire creative seed was a $20,000 pilot animatic, made by a small Brisbane studio, refined over a five-minute pitch in a Queensland conference room, has inside seven years become one of the most lucrative pieces of children's IP on the planet. An Australian cultural export that has come to completely dominate its category.

And so we have spent 2026 listening to my friend Charlie Gearside call it “the shittest deal ever,” to Hugh Marks — the ABC’s own Managing Director — lament it as “$300 million of income that’s going to the UK,” to Ben Fordham declare it “the world’s worst deal,” and to Senator Dave Sharma demand the ABC “be alive to opportunities to commercialise its content.”

Lol. Yeah, and you should have bought shares in Amazon and Google in 2005. Bitcoin in 2015. NVIDIA in 2020. You idiot.

Nobody knows anything

Peppa Pig was a £1.3m gamble that Channel 5 funded about 12% of. The commercial broadcaster, whose entire reason for existing is to capture this kind of upside, chose to be a minority funder of what became a £100m business by 2009 and part of a US$3.8bn Hasbro deal a decade later. Pokémon was a Game Boy cartridge from a near-bankrupt studio. Teletubbies came out of the BBC and an indie producer with a working chemistry for unhinged preschool concepts. None of these properties were obvious at the time.

In 2017, the ABC paid $20,000 for a seven-minute pilot from a Brisbane indie with a portfolio of shows almost no Australian had heard of. To insist that anyone in the room should have spotted the future bonanza from there is to insist that the ABC’s children’s commissioning team in 2017 had a hit-picking ability that Netflix’s algorithm today still does not.

What is the ABC for?

The ABC is for government-sanctioned gardening propaganda, not moonshots.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983 lists the ABC’s functions. It uses words like “innovative,” “national identity,” “inform and entertain,” “cultural diversity,” and “educational.” It is not a venture studio. It is spiritually a cardigan wearer.

Compare this with the BBC. BBC Worldwide existed as a dedicated commercial subsidiary in some form from 1979. BBC Studios — the merged in-house production and commercial entity — was formed in April 2018, the year after the Bluey deal was signed. BBC Studios employs entire international consumer-products teams. Its children’s content director flies around the world looking for licensing-grade IP. That is her entire job. BBC Studios returns roughly £200–£276 million a year to the BBC. It exists, explicitly, “to maximise profits on behalf of the BBC.”

ABC Commercial — the ABC’s equivalent commercial arm — turned a profit of A$4.4 million in FY18-19.

Asking that operation to negotiate the retention of global merchandising rights on an unproven Brisbane animation — on the foresight that it would become a $2 billion franchise — and then to exploit those rights at scale, is not a critique of the 2017 deal. It is a critique of forty years of structural decisions about what kind of public broadcaster Australia wants.

High on bias

Hindsight bias was named by Baruch Fischhoff in 1975. His original paper was titled, I knew it would happen. The phenomenon comes in three stacked layers: memory distortion, inflated estimates of objective likelihood, and inflated subjective confidence in one’s own predictive ability. The bigger the missed upside, the larger the bias. There is no missed upside in Australian memory more conspicuous than Bluey. The conditions for maximum hindsight bias are exactly satisfied.

Add survivorship bias. The ABC commissions twenty to thirty new domestic kids’ titles a year. The vast majority of them never break out of Australia. Many of them are signed on identical international co-pro terms. You don’t know their names because they failed. Bluey is the survivor. To single it out as the deal that should have been negotiated differently is to pretend, retroactively, that it was distinguishable in 2017 from the dozens of other deals that weren’t.

Stop beating up Aunty

They call ABC Aunty, for goodness sakes. She’s an old bag. Cut her some slack. She’s not the problem. She is one shriveled tentacle in the sclerotic gerontocracy smothering Australian life. These are decrepit legacy institutions. SBS — the ABC’s sister government channel — was started to give foreign-born Australians foreign-language content. And it’s expanded! They have their own streaming app! They still haven’t heard of the internet in these places. They don’t know YouTube exists. They demand your tax dollars to fund their little shows for foreigners in the age of the internet. That’s who you’re dealing with. Imagine demanding they compete with Reed Hastings of Netflix, approaching half a trillion dollar market cap, who himself admits they have no idea.

An Australian studio that churns out hits and captures their value does not look like the ABC. It is not staffed or run or funded like the ABC. Asking the ABC to have predicted the merch curve is asking grandma to win an F1 race. Hollywood and Netflix can barely do their schtick. No government in the world has replicated that capability.

There are many, many reasons to beat up on our ruling class. Their negligence every day borders on treason. I understand the deep frustration with Australia’s Ls — they keep piling up. Two decades of own goals. But beating up Aunty for not being Netflix is just silly.

A mate and I were talking about it. My mate’s had mental health issues in the family, including one suicide. Something he is keenly attuned to, something he watches closely and manages in himself.

There was a particular texture to our conversation, one that I have surprisingly often with other men around my age (I’m not 40 yet, but getting there). I’ll try and convey some of that here.

I have no idea about the circumstances of this particular fund manager, and so none of what I write may apply to him. I’m just sharing some of the thoughts his untimely death provoked.

This period of our lives is tough. Young dads. We face family pressures. We have dependents. They depend on us. Financially, emotionally. We want to be good dads. We want to be good husbands. We are in the throes of our careers. We want to win. If you’re ever going to win bigly, now’s the time. The weight’s coming on a bit easier, tougher to work off. Back pain. You’re not the young man you once were.

Life’s become defined by compromise. When I first had a kid the way I thought about it was: you are measured out of 10 as a father, a husband, a friend, health, and work. If you’re a 10/10 in all, you have 50 points. But you only get 25 points to allocate each day. Your friends and health might drop to 0 as you scramble in other areas. Some days you’re a sucky dad or husband. Compromise. (Son didn’t even make the list. Sorry mum.)

And that’s if things are going well. Let’s not even get started on divorce, addiction, illness, a death in the family. A disabled child. Singular or lifelong cataclysmic events that tend to lie beneath the surface, behind the external facing self.

The boundless potential and freedom of youth has careened into the gritty, textured, responsibility-laden reality of manhood.

But here’s the thing. Whining is for losers. No one cares. Your friends care but they have their own problems. Whining is bad for your soul. Just get on with it. You know this already. Oh, no one told you it would be like this? You want to live a life they told you about? Go live in a fairytale.

It’s hard, and sure there’s no hierarchy to suffering, but it’s not the Eastern Front. We live in opulence. Figure it out.

Here are some reasons you should not kill yourself:

• You can always kill yourself tomorrow. Why kill yourself now, when you can just wait and see. It’s a one way door. Funky stuff can happen in your head, circumstances can change. The world is big and weird. You always have the option, why would you give that up? Don’t ever kill yourself today — you can always kill yourself tomorrow.

• It’s not fair on your kids. You know that already.

• You don’t win any brownie points. It’s not a solve. Your friends will be sad and your enemies will laugh at you. You probably don’t even have any enemies. You’re not an archnemesis guy. Most people won’t think about it much at all. Except the people who love you.

• Choose coffee. A fake-internet meme is Albert Camus asking himself “coffee or suicide?” Blokes I know ask themselves this every morning. Have a cuppa. Lift weights. Read a book. Swim. Walk the dog. Eat cake. The miracle of creation is all around you.

• Sleep. Sun. Food.

• Do you really want to top yourself over a work thing? Ok so you underperformed or markets suck. Your grandparents fled Cossacks. Get a grip.

• There are better ways to go. Tackling a terrorist. Seppuku. That time in 1865 when former governor of New Zealand Robert FitzRoy killed himself because the method of weather forecasting he invented didn’t work. The bar is high.

• Plenty of great men fumbled bad. John Maynard Keynes got wiped out by margin calls — twice. Isaac Newton invented calculus then got obliterated in the South Sea Bubble of 1720. Mark Twain sank his fortune and a chunk of his wife’s into a typesetting machine that almost worked, bankrupt at 59. Winston Churchill got wiped out in the 1929 crash. You’ll be fine.

• Lesser men than you punch through every day. Obviously, you can do this. Every man in your line made it work. The world is filled with men who make it work.

You’re a dad and a man and it’s life. Go out and win.

May his memory be a blessing.

He fathered eighteen children by two wives. (You live in the abundance of 2026 inner Sydney and wonder how you could possibly have children. You are a eunuch.)

The Struves were a freak of heredity — five generations of working astronomers, rivaled only by the great astronomers of the Herschel dynasty (William, who found Uranus; his sister Caroline, who found eight comets; his son John, who mapped the southern skies from the Cape; his grandson Alexander who carried the family into meteor spectroscopy). Friedrich, twenty-three years old in 1816 and based at the Imperial Observatory at Dorpat in Russian Estonia, decided he would measure his planet. To the inch.

The first man to measure the circumference of the earth did it with a shadow and a well, in 240 BC. Eratosthenes of Cyrene was chief librarian at Alexandria — appointed by Ptolemy III to keep the largest collection of scrolls in the world. Critics, recorded centuries later in the Suda, nicknamed him Beta because he was perennially second-best: at poetry, mathematics, astronomy, music theory, geography, philology. He had heard about a well at Syene — modern Aswan, six hundred miles up the Nile — where, on the longest day of the year, at noon, the sun struck the water at the bottom of the shaft directly.

The implication, to Eratosthenes, was geometric. If the sun stood directly above Syene at that moment, a vertical stick anywhere else on Earth would, at the same moment, cast a shadow that betrayed the curvature of the ground between the two points. He drove a gnomon — the vertical rod of a sundial — into the soil at Alexandria, waited for noon on the solstice, and measured the angle of its shadow: seven point two degrees, exactly one fiftieth of a circle. The distance from Syene to Alexandria was, by the count of the bematists — professional pacers in Ptolemaic employ, trained from boyhood to walk in unvarying strides across desert and floodplain — five thousand stadia. Multiply by fifty. Two hundred and fifty thousand stadia for the whole circumference of the planet. Nobody today is entirely sure which stadion he was using; the Greeks had several. Depending on the conversion, his figure falls somewhere between thirty-nine and forty-six thousand kilometres — off by, at worst, a few percent; at best, a fraction of one.

Struve endeavoured for greater precision. He would mark a single line of longitude — a meridian — running 1,600 miles from the Arctic coast of Norway down to the Black Sea, conveniently passing through his home in Dorpat. He began on his own front doorstep. He scratched a small letter X into the marble step of his observatory and worked outward from there.

He would use triangulation. Measure one side and two angles, and the rest of the triangle reveals itself. Pick a distant hill or steeple. Sight to it from one end of a known baseline. Move to the other end. Sight again. Three angles, summing to 180 degrees by Euclidean fiat — and now the two remaining sides could be deduced.

What that looked like in practice was hauling heavy brass-and-glass instruments — German theodolites, twelve-foot zenith sectors, quadrants that took two men to lift — through swamp and forest and snowstorm, across rivers and lakes and the wind-blasted ice of the Scandinavian north. Where there was no convenient hill or church spire to sight from, the surveyors built their own wooden towers and dragged the gear up with rope and pulley. To take one reading across the Gulf of Finland, they scaled the spire of an old church, built a platform among the bats, and watched for the answering flash of a heliograph — a mirror that signalled by catching the sun — mounted on a tower they had themselves erected on the opposite shore.

In total: 258 main triangles. Ten baselines for cross-checking, laid out with chains of brass that resisted the swelling of summer heat and the contraction of winter cold. Forty years of it.

The work proceeded in fits and starts, dependent on the moods of the imperial treasury. The breakthrough came in the late 1830s when Tsar Nicholas I — by training an engineer, never having expected to inherit the throne — became enchanted with the project. He built Struve a new observatory at Pulkovo, south of the Winter Palace, and shipped in a thirty-inch refracting telescope from Cambridge, Massachusetts. With the imperial coffers flowing, the arc advanced. The line was at last completed, Hammerfest to the Black Sea, in the summer of 1855.

Each of Struve’s stations had been fixed by drilling deep into bedrock, pouring molten lead into the cavity, sinking a steel bolt through the cooling metal, and capping the assembly with a brass plate — foundations that now lie scattered across ten countries, from Norway to Ukraine. In 2005 UNESCO declared what was left a World Heritage Site. By that point only thirty-four of the original points could still be located. The rest had been ground down by frost and vandals, or pried up by hunters who melted the lead into buckshot.

Struve measured a quarter meridian of 10,002,174 metres, deducing a planetary circumference of 40,008,696 metres. NASA’s modern satellite figure is 40,007,017. Struve had been off by 1,679 metres. Eratosthenes, working with a stick and a shadow in Alexandria two thousand years earlier, had been off by 1.4 million.

The dam is one of the engineering wonders of the twentieth century. But the Afsluitdijk was not really the work of the twentieth century. It was the final stone in a wall a thousand years long.

Long before the Romans reached the mouth of the Rhine, the people who would become the Dutch were pushed northward. The high ground of the continent was already taken; the forests of the interior held by tribes who had no interest in sharing them. What remained was what no one else wanted. The great delta where three rivers met the sea, a flat soaking sponge of peat and salt marsh and tidal flat, half land and half water, scrubbed twice a day by the tides. These marshlands were uninhabitable. The Frisians inhabited them.

They began, more than two thousand years ago, by raising mounds. They piled clay and dung and refuse into great low hills — terpen, the Frisians called them; wierden, the Saxons — and on these little artificial islands they built their longhouses and grazed their cattle and waited out the floods. There are more than a thousand of these mounds still rising from the fields of Friesland and Groningen, some of them fifteen feet high, the bones of their builders still buried in their flanks.

The first dikes were small things — earthen walls thrown up around a single field, a single pasture, to keep the salt out long enough for a crop to grow. By the eleventh century, ring-dikes encircled whole villages. By the twelfth, dikes ran for miles along the rivers, joined together, became continuous. The drowned land behind them was reclaimed acre by acre. By the late Middle Ages, the Dutch had bent the windmill to the work of drainage, and now they were not merely walling out the sea but pumping it back, draining lakes that had stood since the last ice age, exposing the rich black bottom-mud and turning it into farmland. The Beemster, drained in 1612, is still a perfect grid of fields thirteen feet below sea level, its dairy cattle grazing where herring once swam.

By the time the Dutch Republic was the wealthiest nation in Europe, perhaps a fifth of its territory had been made by hand. The country existed because it had been built. God schiep de wereld, maar de Nederlander schiep Nederland. God created the world, but the Dutchman created the Netherlands. The nation was a continuous act of self-creation by a people believing themselves to be chosen by God.

But the sea took back what it could. The Zuiderzee itself was a wound — once a freshwater lake called Lake Flevo, fringed by peat bog and farmland, until in the storm of 1170 the North Sea broke through the dunes and began to devour the land. Each generation lost more. The St. Lucia’s flood of 1287 drowned somewhere between fifty and eighty thousand people in a single night, one of the deadliest natural disasters in European history outside the plagues, and when the waters receded the Zuiderzee had its modern shape: a great salt arm reaching deep into the country, nearly two thousand square miles of ocean where there had been pasture and peat.

It was the Frisians who named it. Zuiderzee — South Sea — may seem a misleading name for a body of water in the north of the country. But the Frisians lived along its top edge, and to a man standing on the dunes of Friesland looking out at the enormous, tempestuous body of water that fed on his coast, the water was to his south. Men are provincial animals.

The towns along its new coast — Hoorn, Enkhuizen, Stavoren — grew rich on its herring. They also grew used to its rage. The All Saints’ Flood, the St. Elizabeth’s Flood, the Christmas Flood of 1717 that killed fourteen thousand in a single night across the northern provinces. The Zuiderzee was a waterwolf — the old Dutch word for a body of water that fed itself by eating land. For seven hundred years the Dutch tolerated it because they could not imagine an alternative. To close the Zuiderzee would mean building a dam across an open sea — twenty miles of wall through tides that ran at five knots, in water sixty feet deep in places, on a foundation of soft marine clay that would swallow stone. It was the equivalent, in scale and difficulty, of throwing a causeway across the English Channel. Men had contemplated such a feat before. Hendrik Stevin had sketched one in the seventeenth century; others had followed in every generation since. None had been built. Nowhere in Europe — nowhere in the world — had any people closed a stretch of open sea this wide, this deep, this fast.

Cornelis Lely was born in Amsterdam in 1854, the son of a paper merchant. He studied to be an engineer, came up through the Society for the Reclamation of the Zuiderzee, and by his early thirties was the leading expert on the inland sea. In 1891, at the age of thirty-six, he submitted to the Dutch government a complete plan: a great enclosing dam from the North Holland coast to the Frisian shore, the inland body to be drained gradually into freshwater, and four enormous polders to be reclaimed from its bed. Lely proposed building a new province out of ocean.

The government rejected it. It was too expensive. The fishing towns along the Zuiderzee — Volendam, Marken, Urk — would lose their livelihoods. The agricultural lobby did not want more farmland flooding the market.

Lely went into politics to realise his vision. He became Minister of Water Management three separate times — in 1891, in 1897, in 1913 — and each time he pushed his plan, and each time it was deferred. The dam he had designed at thirty-six was still on paper when he turned sixty.

In January 1916 a winter storm broke through the Zuiderzee dikes in a dozen places, drowning villages along the inland coast and a chunk of the country around Amsterdam. The flood killed only nineteen people, but it killed them in places that had thought themselves safe, and the political resistance to Lely’s plan collapsed almost overnight. In June 1918 the Zuiderzee Act passed the States General. Lely was sixty-four years old. He had been waiting twenty-seven years.

Construction began in 1927. Four enormous work-yards were thrown up along the chosen line and from each, gangs of men began to push out into the open sea. They had to invent the work as there was no precedent to copy. Dredges scooped boulder clay from the bottom of the Zuiderzee itself, so that the dam was built from the bed of the sea it was to close. Barges then dumped the clay in two parallel lines along the planned route, sand was poured between the lines, and a second layer of clay was laid over the top to seal it. Beneath it all, sunk on the soft marine floor, lay great mats woven from osier — the supple willow Dutch farmers had been cutting for baskets since the Middle Ages — weighted down with basalt boulders. It was the only foundation the engineers had found that would not slowly disappear into the mud.

The fleet was an entire navy of construction. Twenty-seven dredges, thirteen floating cranes, a hundred and thirty-two barges, eighty-eight tugs. To build the middle of the dam they built work-platforms first — two artificial islands, Kornwerderzand and Breezanddijk, raised out of the open sea solely to give the men somewhere to stand. By the time the work was done, the dam contained roughly thirty-seven million cubic metres of clay and sand. Fourteen Great Pyramids of Giza, dropped into the Zuiderzee.

Around ten thousand men passed through the camps; five thousand worked the line on any given day — Frisians, Hollanders, men from the depressed peat towns of the east, men with no other work in a country sliding into depression. They worked through gales that washed entire sections of fresh-laid embankment back into the sea. They worked in winter, faces black with frostbite under their woollen caps, and in summer, swarmed by midges off the mudflats. They lived in barracks on barges and rafts and on the dam itself as it grew, surrounded by water on all sides, building the land that would house them.

Shipworm — the marine mollusc the Dutch called paalworm, the pile-worm — ate through the willow mat base, and the galvanised steel wire holding the bundles together had been chewed away by salt. The foundation was failing under the dam they had built on top of it. Barite was imported from Germany to replace the rotten willow. Whole stretches of the floor were rebuilt in deep water, in winter, while the men above kept dumping clay.

The dam was finally closed on 28 May 1932 at a place called the Vlieter, eight miles east of the North Holland shore. The last gap was perhaps fifty metres wide. On either side, the dam stood finished. Through the gap the tide ran like a river, four knots, five knots, in and out twice a day, the last living artery of the Zuiderzee.

The engineers had waited for slack water — the moment between tides when the current pauses and the sea forgets which way to run. Two columns of barges loaded with boulder clay converged on the gap from either side, watched by a row of film cameras strung along the new dam, and dumped their cargo at once into the narrowing channel. The water boiled and foamed and could not get through. In a few minutes it was over. The Zuiderzee was sealed.

Lely had died three years earlier at seventy-four. A statue of Cornelis Lely stands now at the western end of the dam, looking out over his works, the great apogee of Dutch contest against the sea.

You’re telling me you haven’t watched Australia’s Blood Meridian, starring Guy Pearce and written and scored by Nick Cave?

SPOILERS

A shoot out in a whorehouse. Its fiends scrambling frantically as bullets pierce its tin shed walls, the arrows of light illuminating the whores and their criminal customers within. The cops have ‘em.

So begins The Proposition, the agents of light descending on their demonic prey. Milton's war in heaven relocated to a tin shack in Queensland, the rebel angels caught mid-rut.

“What fresh hell is this?” says the captain of this victorious vanguard, sweating profusely as he stares out across the hot plains. He has been sent on a civilising mission from above. But how does one civilise hell, he wonders. He must drag the lower provinces into the light by force, and the force will blacken him.

The equivocal hero of our tale is Charlie Burns, played by an emaciated outback Guy Pearce. In the whorehouse he is caught with his beloved younger brother. In exchange for Mikey’s life — who will otherwise hang on Christmas day — our captain offers him a proposition. To find and kill his older brother, the rapist and mass murderer Arthur Burns.

This is the condemned nature of our hero’s quest. A life for a life. Redemption at the point of Cain’s stain. To strike down his guilty older brother to save his imbecile younger one. Cain killing Cain to save Abel.

Arthur Burns is a Judge-like monster from Blood Meridian. Eloquent, erudite, demonic. He will finish your poem before garroting you. He recites Yeats at sunset from a rock above the plains, a fallen angel addressing the void. Arthur in his hill fort is Satan on Niphates’ top, surveying Eden, soliloquising. Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell. He will rape a pregnant woman before murdering her and her family. He has read more than you have. He has thought more than you have. He has killed more than you have. A vampire at the firehose of life.

But Arthur is not the Judge. The Judge is too nihilistic for Cave, too invulnerable. The Judge cannot be killed because the Judge is not a man. He is the war that rides forever, dancing naked in the saloon at the end of history. Arthur has a soft spot. He is tethered to the earth. He's a brother, and only a brother can kill him. Cave believes in the wound. He believes love is the door through which death enters. The Judge has no door. Arthur has a door, and his brother walks through it at sunset with a pistol.

Arthur has built a kingdom in the hills, a Pandæmonium of one, and he sits in it reciting verse and watching the sun set, and his brother climbs up to him and the kingdom ends.

The land these figures stalk is the epic vastness of Australia, her burnt-out trees and sandy gullies. Above them countless stars. The living are half-dead. Flies swarm the dead and the half-dead alike. The cops are made of the same grit-mutt stuff as the fiends they hunt. (The cops joke-fantasise about ravaging their boss captain’s wife; a dark prophecy the fiends fulfil.) The desert is this country’s grim theology. A landscape that does not care, reducing men to insects crossing a pan.

The Proposition is stuffed with Australian blacks. Blacks are cops and criminals, free and wild, hunters and hunted. They are the only people in the film who seem to belong to the country rather than be punished by it. Just men like everyone else. Or whatever passes for men in these hellish ravines.

The captain’s wife is Eve, tending her English garden in this barren hell. She is desperately lonely in this flimsy oasis. What hubris — the idea that you can plant a rose bush in a furnace and expect it to bloom without watering it with blood. She insists on Mikey’s flogging. She demands vengeance and tastes of the red blood of Mikey’s back and the red blood of the lash, as Eve of the apple. She faints. Eve too is in the end repulsed by her sin. Their Garden is overrun. She is punished.

There is a kind of twisted justice meted out in these parts. When the imbecile Mikey is flogged to death, our good captain knows death will fly to them on wings of vengeance. It was not his doing, but he will bear its justice. Just as Mikey bore theirs. And so on Christmas day, as they wear the trappings of a far away land, a half-forgotten heaven in England, the captain and his wife pray. She says grace. For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. A dark sense of humour, as they are suddenly descended upon by ravenous demons.

As the demons scourge and rape, our strange hero enters. No more, Charlie Burns says, as he shoots Arthur and his lackey. They stumble out. He sits beside his older brother at the setting of the sun as he bleeds to death. No more.

She was looking at one of the most important building blocks of human civilisation.

It would take a decade for anyone to understand what Hilda Petrie had found. In 1916, the British Egyptologist Alan Gardiner sat down with the inscriptions and noticed that one sequence of symbols kept repeating. If you assumed each symbol stood for a single consonant sound and if you assumed the sounds corresponded to the Semitic names for the objects the symbols depicted, then that repeating sequence spelled out a word: b-ʿ-l-t. Baalat. The Lady. A title for the goddess Hathor, who was worshipped at the temple beside the mines.

Gardiner had cracked it. These were not Egyptian writings at all. They were the work of Semitic-speaking people — foreigners in Egypt. It was an alphabet.

For over a thousand years before those scratches were carved, the great civilisations of the ancient world had writing. The Egyptians had hieroglyphs. The Mesopotamians had cuneiform. The Chinese had their ideograms. These systems were fantastically complicated. Egyptian hieroglyphics used over a thousand distinct symbols. Some represented sounds, some represented whole words, some modified the meaning of other symbols, and the rules for which was which were labyrinthine. To become literate in hieroglyphics required years of training. This meant that writing belonged to a tiny elite — the scribes, the priests, the palace bureaucrats. If you were a farmer, a soldier, a miner, a craftsman, you could not read. You lived and died in a world where the written word was locked behind a wall of expertise.

The alphabet destroyed that wall. With twenty-two symbols, you could write anything. Any word in your language, any name, any prayer, any contract, any story. A bright child could learn the system in weeks. And because the symbols represented sounds, not meanings, the system was portable — speakers of other languages could adapt it to their own tongues with minor modifications.

And the alphabet happened only once.

From those scratches on the rocks of Sinai came the Phoenician alphabet, and from the Phoenician came the Greek, and from the Greek came the Latin and the Cyrillic, and from the Aramaic branch came Hebrew and Arabic and the scripts of Persia and India and Tibet and Thailand and Mongolia. Every alphabet on earth.

Writing itself was invented several times independently — in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, in China, in Mesoamerica. Human beings, separated by oceans and millennia, converged on the idea of using symbols to record language. But the alphabet — the radical insight that you could represent all of human speech with a small set of symbols for individual sounds — that idea occurred to one group of people, in one place, at one time. Never before. Never again, independently. The concept was so profoundly non-obvious, so alien to every existing practice of writing, that in the entire history of our species, across every civilisation on every continent, it only came to one people at one time.

The infinite, unknowable God chose language as His medium — the one form of creation that is both bounded and boundless. A finite number of sounds. An infinite horizon of meaning. The God of Israel created an infinite universe from a finite act of speech. The human mind, made in that image, generates infinite thought from finite words. The alphabet gave humanity a grammar of creation. It made this shared architecture visible for the first time.

At Sinai the infinite God spoke to a finite people in finite words. Those words were written down in letters carved on stone. The archaeological record tells us that at this place — Sinai — among this people — Semitic labourers in Egypt — the alphabet emerged. The technology and the theology are mirrors of each other. It not only enabled the written Bible, it is the very shape of revelation.1

It took three millennia from the invention of the alphabet to the mass production of the written word with the printing press. Gutenberg's revolution was not in language itself but in its distribution. The alphabet had made writing possible for everyone; the press made reading available to everyone. Until then, the written word lived in the extraordinarily expensive scroll and codex collections of the very wealthy. Then, everywhere.

Today, for the first time since the printing press we are living through a revolution in the technology of language. Large language models take a finite set of elements, learn the patterns of their combination, and from those patterns generate new meaning without limit. The alphabet allowed humans to turn thoughts into symbols. AI devoured our symbols and is now turning them back into thoughts.

When God breathed life into Adam, the Targum says he became a ruach memallela — a speaking being. Language was the mark of the divine image in humanity. If a machine can now wield language too, what remains of that image?

“And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home.”

— Moby Dick

When Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, stumbles through a magic door into Christmas Town he stands in the snow and looks around at this bright, warm, incomprehensible world.

What’s this? What’s this? There’s colour everywhere.

He has no word for “presents” or “snow” or “cheer”. He knows fright, he knows screams, he knows the artistry of the macabre. And now he’s standing before a world that operates by a completely different grammar. Before this world he is illiterate.

The Nightmare Before Christmas is the greatest film ever made about cultural illegibility. Its hero is one of the best Nietzschean Supermen we get on screen. Jack is great because he cannot help but reach for what lies beyond his ken. And the film’s genius is leaving those two worlds unbridged. Jack fails to understand Christmas Land. He is, in the end, a creature of Halloween. We are what we are. And look how drawn we are to men who reach for more.

In his gorgeous opening lament, Jack is not tired of being great. He is tired of being great at something he has completely mastered. Halloween is solved. There is nothing left to discover within its walls. The ghoulish citizens adore him, the scares are immaculate, the whole operation runs like freshly cut guillotine. And because it is solved, it is dead to him. This is the ache of the man who stands at the precipice of the world he has conquered. Napoleon in Egypt, staring at the pyramids of a civilisation whose hieroglyphs he could not read. Cortez at the edge of Tenochtitlan, confronted by a golden city on a lake. Alexander weeping because there are no more worlds to conquer.

—

Everything Jack sees in Christmas Town is distorted in translation. The presents wrapped under trees are enigmas. Snow is “white things in the air.” He may as well be speaking in a Zizekian or Borat accent: his jaunt parodies the immigrant experience.

Back home, Jack dissects Christmas. He pulls ornaments apart. He reads. He measures. It doesn’t work. He ends up more confused. The ornaments yield no secrets on the dissection table. The candy cane, sliced open, reveals nothing about why it makes children smile. You cannot reverse-engineer someone else’s civilisation from its artefacts.

The Skeleton King enlists the Halloween Town citizens into making presents. Yet everything they produce is an abomination — shrunken heads for gifts, a severed hand poking out of a box, a snake eating the Christmas tree. His own supervision is misguided too — no, he complains about a bit of roadkill being wrapped as a gift, It's been dead for much too long; try something fresher.

Yet the gifts Jack delivers to children are genuine treasures in Halloween Town. A shrunken head is a masterwork of his civilisation’s art. He is not giving junk. He is gifting the cultural equivalent of gold, frankincense and myrrh. His abominable followers are doing Christmas as they understand it. They have applied their own aesthetic vocabulary to someone else’s celebration and produced something that would make the recipients scream — which is exactly what Halloween is supposed to do. They have succeeded perfectly by their own standards while failing catastrophically by their adopted culture’s.

This is the immigrant community that has adopted the festivals of the host country and produced something that looks, to the natives, uncanny. It is what happens when a civilisation tries to absorb another’s institutions wholesale: you get the forms without the meaning. The Christmas tree with a snake in it. (Ironically, what is Christmas itself if not some abominable offspring of Christian conquest and old pagan lore?)

That the whole thing is the work of a Jew — the brilliant and nominatively determinative Danny Elfman — is itself another act of cultural bastardry.

Comedy but also tragedy runs through Nightmare. Good intentions, cultural enthusiasm, genuine generosity, even love for the other culture — none of it is sufficient. Cultural illegibility can give rise to horrors. You can adore Christmas and still deliver nightmares to its children.

Jack’s transformation is deeply personal. There is a scene where Jack stands before his mirror and dons the Santa Claus outfit. The red suit, the white trim, the hat. He puts it on and looks at himself. What does he see? A skeleton in a red suit. Bones where the belly should be. A rictus grin where the rosy cheeks should be. The dissonance is garish but invisible to him. But Sally sees it. She tells him it’s all wrong, he’s forgotten himself, he’s the Pumpkin King. He barrels on. The Great Man’s will is not so easily deflected.

This is the immigrant looking at himself in the costume of the host culture. The new suit that doesn’t quite fit. The adopted mannerisms that ring slightly false. The forced cheer of someone performing a festival they did not grow up with.

Sally is literally Dr. Finkelstein’s creation — his Bride, stitched together from parts, who has walked away from him. The man cannot even control his own created woman. Now Jack is trying to create Christmas — to manufacture it from parts, like Finkelstein manufactured Sally. He has taken the components (the tree, the gifts, the sleigh, the costume) and stitched them together. But the created thing has a will of its own. His Christmas escapes and becomes a nightmare.

You cannot stitch a civilisation together from parts and expect it to live. The form of the thing is not the thing. The suit is not the man.

—

The Mayor of Halloween Town wears a literal badge that says MAYOR, pinned to him like a participation trophy. He has two faces — one happy, one panicked — that rotate depending on his mood. When Jack disappears and things go sideways, the Mayor drives around in his hearse-car with a megaphone, crying:

I’m only an elected official here, I can’t make decisions by myself!

Democracy in Halloween Town is literally two-faced and impotent. The Mayor is an event coordinator. A middle manager. He exists to implement the vision of the sovereign. Democracy is insufficient to the demands of governance. You need a King.

And the King in Jack is the apex of their civilisation’s purpose. Legitimacy flows from his mastery, not from their votes. After all, what does it matter how a goon with an axe lodged in his head votes? You’re telling me you would like the regime to take into account the preferences of a goon with an axe lodged in his head? (Have you met the average voter?)

The villain of Nightmare is Oogie Boogie. He is the fascist alternative. A big sloppy sack who, when you tear him open, is nothing but bugs — the collective masquerading as a singular will. He has his thugs: Lock, Shock, and Barrel, who are children — the stormtroopers are kids playing dress-up. The childlike impulse to beat the crap out of your opponents.

Oogie Boogie is Jack’s twisted mirror image. Where Jack’s authority is rooted in actual supremacy, Oogie’s is rooted in menace. Where Jack wears a perfectly tailored suit, Oogie is a shapeless sack. Where Jack commands through charisma, Oogie commands through fear. He is what sovereignty looks like when it is unmoored from excellence — power as pure threat, form without content, a populist blob with a gambling addiction.

Nightmare’s political spectrum runs: legitimate monarchy (Jack, Santa Claus) > incompetent democracy (the Mayor) > fascist populism (Oogie Boogie). The two monarchs — one of Halloween, one of Christmas — are the only legitimate sovereigns. And they recognise each other as equals.

—

Jack’s escapade fails. He is shot out of the sky. His goons might enter Christmas Land with impunity and even run amok and kidnap its king. Christmas Land is slow to respond. But its orderliness is mistaken for weakness. Eventually its residents wise-up. It has an army. It has cannons that blast Jack out of the sky. Christmas Land acts with All-American delay and force.

When Jack is shot out of the sky he crash-lands in a cemetery — right back where he started, right where he was walking under the moon in the opening, pining for something more. He is broken. His suit is singed. His sleigh is destroyed. His great project lies in ruins.

And then he rises. And sings:

All I ever wanted was to bring them something great.

What the heck, I went and did my best. And by God, I really tasted something swell. And for a moment, why, I even touched the sky.

This is not a Christian redemption arc. He does not flagellate himself. He does not seek forgiveness from the people he wronged. He does not renounce ambition. What he does is remember what he is. “I am the Pumpkin King!” he cries. He was always the Pumpkin King. The Santa suit was a costume. The Great Man tried to become something he was not.

Unlike, say, in Breaking Bad, where Walt is vanquished at the altar of his hubris, Jack is not punished for wanting Christmas. He simply recognises that his greatness lies where it always did: in the thing he was made for.

Jack returns home. He defeats Oogie Boogie. He rescues Santa Claus. He realises he loves Sally — the quiet, thoughtful creature who saw through his delusion and loved him anyway.

And then it snows in Halloween Town.

Santa, restored to his rightful throne, sends a small gift back: snow. A light dusting of the foreign, falling softly on the familiar. Halloween Town’s citizens look up in wonder. They catch snowflakes on their tongues. It is beautiful and strange.

This is the film’s final word on cultural exchange: it can be valuable, but only when it falls lightly. Only when it arrives as a gift from one sovereign to another — monarch to monarch, each secure in his own domain. Not as immigration, not as conquest, not as wholesale adoption. As a gentle visitation. Snow on skulls.

Jack and Sally stand on the hill, silhouetted against the full moon. He is the Pumpkin King and she is the Bride who chose her own groom. Below them, their town — their town — wears a thin, temporary dusting of someone else’s beauty.

He will visit with Santa, his fellow king. They will drink whatever kings drink and joke about the burdens of sovereignty. But Jack will not try to be Santa again. He will remain the Master of Fright, in his own land, under his own moon, with snow melting on his bones.

Also excellent timing with this wonderful Tyler Cowen interview with Paul Gillingham, author of the just-ordered Mexico: A 500-Year History. Gillingham has a very charming quirk where amidst his Irish accent he will do that very Mexican thing of say No? in a Mexican accent in affirming his own point.

I’ve been visiting Mexico for 20 years, and more frequently over the last decade since marrying a Mexican. I’ve road-tripped through the Yucatán and Quintana Roo, and spent time in Mexico City and Querétaro, among other places—admittedly a narrow aperture for such a big and diverse country. But it’s enough dots to sketch a few lines, and to get a feel for the relative trajectories of Mexico and my home country, Australia.

Mexico has always felt intense. For a young man out of rule-obsessed Australia, the chaos can be exhilarating. Everything is fundamentally negotiable. You can just do things.

On my most recent trip, however, those same qualities registered differently. I saw the chaos as less empowering and more dysfunctional. This shift says as much about my own life arc—moving from a risk-seeking young man to an early-middle-aged father—as it does about the state of the country. “Anything is possible” reads very differently to a young single man compared with a father of four young kids.

I thought I’d share some observations from over the years.

Mexico is culturally, economically, and ethnically hierarchical. This hierarchy has deep roots, stretching back through both indigenous and Spanish social structures. Given such stratification, one would expect low socioeconomic mobility—and for the most part, that expectation holds. Class is “sticky” here.

Yet there is a puzzle: the outsized success of newer immigrant groups over the past century, particularly from the Lebanese and Jewish communities. Mexico’s richest man, Carlos Slim, is of Maronite Lebanese descent, and the same pattern appears across Latin America—from business elites to heads of state, such as El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele (who is of Palestinian descent).

If class is fixed, how did these newcomers succeed? Mexico doesn’t value abstract merit as the West tends to do. No apparent school-to-university-to-career pipeline exists. Instead, the country rewards tight in-group capital: family cohesion, internal trust, and ethnic credit networks. A healthy distance from the local indigenous-white caste logic helps newcomers, too. With a status illegible to traditional Mexican castes, they can carve out their own destinies.

These groups arrived with merchant traditions and intra-marriage habits that function as portable infrastructure. They don’t need the Mexican state to work because they effectively have their own internal state.

Status illegibility enables status arbitrage, most visibly in relationships. People marry foreign partners who would otherwise sit well outside their dating market at home. I’ve seen upper-class Mexicans marry thoroughly ordinary Australians—and vice versa—because the foreigner is harder to place within familiar status frameworks. In a sometimes comical twist, many white Mexicans simply read white Australians as upper-class by default.

This kind of arbitrage applies to cross-cultural unions generally. Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård writes about how he can’t read a Swedish woman’s status by her clothes. Swedish customs are illegible to him. If even Swedish and Norwegian customs are mutually unreadable, then the range of who you can be in a place truly foreign is wider than you think.

It’s hard to make good money as an employee in Mexico. In Australia, there is a relatively high floor: a salary can sustain a middle-class life. Mexico has no such floor. Wages are low, and the labor pool so vast that employment offers little upside. Equity is the only serious path to wealth.

The opportunity to build a business is real. One Spanish woman I spoke with in Mexico City told me it was far easier to start a company there than in her native Europe. An industrial equipment–rental owner showed me machinery he had imported from India—far cheaper than what is available in the U.S. or Australian markets, where environmental standards are tighter. The Mexican market is huge, the general chaos is high enough that you can “just do things,” and the regulatory touch is . . . negotiable.

Entrepreneurship in Mexico often involves “innovating” in the regulatory environment as much as in the marketplace. Corruption takes many forms and has become an industry of its own. One sub-sector of that industry, born from a quirk of Mexico’s tax system, is particularly illustrative.

The facturera industry is the manufacture of invoices from fake companies. It’s used for tax avoidance and money laundering, and ChatGPT tells me that it accounts for as much as 2 percent of Mexican GDP. Ironically, the money laundering bit means paying taxes on otherwise untaxed income. These middlemen invoice-manufacturers sit at the center of a network that spans legitimate businesses and government officials.

Mexico City cargo cults the practices of wealthier places. Bike lanes adorn terrible roads for cycling. I met a few families who insist on separating their recycling from their trash, despite there being no recycling collection. And some curious status markers are peculiarly local: high-end restaurants often offer cuts of “kosher” meat. This meat may be purchased from a kosher supplier, but it’s not kosher in any meaningful sense (e.g. the restaurant is not kosher-certified). The dish signals quality and status in its association with the wealthy Mexican Jewish community.

The single greatest test for state capacity isn’t a space program or high-speed rail; it’s drinking water on tap. Providing safe, reliable water to millions of households requires boring, consistent competence and coordination across decades. It requires a state that can plan beyond the next election cycle and a citizenry that trusts the infrastructure.

Mexico fails this test. The country’s bottled water industry is the largest per capita in the world. It’s the total outsourcing of a public good to private entities. Once you build an entire economy around 20-liter garrafones, try building a public system to replace it. It’s too late—the incentives are broken. Beyond the ongoing financial cost, abundant potable water is a symbol of functionality and order, like houses of worship. The same logic applies to the sewerage system (can it handle flushing toilet paper?).

I’ve spent a bit of time in South Africa, and I often find myself it with Mexico. Both countries boast huge capital cities, gorgeous coastlines, and stunning natural attractions. Each country has massive pools of under-employed labor, leading to “make-work”—like men waving you in and out of car spots for a tip. Each society is divided into ethno-classes. The Mexican elites were smart enough to avoid legal apartheid, which has saved the country from U.S. approbation. But the economic and other informal divisions are just as sharp.

Consider the language of service. In Mexico, the standard call for a waiter is joven —literally, “young man.” In South Africa today, you’re probably not brave enough to call anyone “boy.” In France, garçon (boy) is harmless. In Mexico, I can’t bring myself to call a 50-year-old server joven. Maybe it’s the Australian in me. I just say amigo. That said, native women at shop counters will call me joven, so perhaps it’s less racially tinged than I first assumed.

In Mexico, as in South Africa, many amenities we’d consider public in Australia are often privatized: security, play areas, health care. The rich live behind fortifications. Even the middle class often live within gated communities.

Security is privatized in other ways, too, in Mexico. Every meaningful restaurant and nightclub pays a fee to its regional cartel. And it matters whether you are stopped by state police, federal police, or the army.

The ability of a state to maintain public goods and social order is surprisingly contingent. Perhaps state capacity is a foundational thing, hard to retrofit onto broken incentives. Once a society normalizes private provision of order, it’s incredibly hard to claw back. You need a broadly vested elite, upfront. Which is the opposite of how ethno-classist states like Mexico and South Africa are born.

Comparing the distribution of land in Mexico and Australia is instructive in revealing each country’s social architecture. In Australia, after the landed gentry (“squatters”) swallowed up vast swaths of territory in the 1860s, the government implemented reforms to redistribute land to smaller yeomen—albeit with mixed results. Mexico, by contrast, came early to be dominated by large landowners, the latifundistas. Though the country experienced wars and revolutions in reaction to its ethno-oligarchic economic and political order, many of these imbalances have persisted. The two paths have left distinct legacies in Australian and Mexican attitudes toward equality and hierarchy.

In Mexico, again as in South Africa, cheap labor means that household help is abundant. Even middle-class families can often afford staff. Some households have generational, live-in employees who become part of the family fabric; others rely on more transient help. This abundance of inexpensive labor means that childcare is available almost everywhere—shopping centers, restaurants. (One wonders whether this helps support fertility rates.)

At times it feels as if Australia is reaching for some of these benefits but cannot quite bring itself to grasp them. The country has one of the highest foreign-born shares in the world, yet it structurally avoids the large-scale use of immigrant labor in domestic service. Australians may want abundant help, but they also insist on equality. There remains a deep cultural aversion to the servant-class model. Still, as property prices rise, immigration continues, and the wealth gap widens between long-established Australians and newer arrivals, greater social rifts may emerge.

Both South Africa and Mexico suffer from brain drain: the brightest tend to go to the U.S. or some other land of opportunity. But pessimism lies thicker in South Africa. The decline is palpable. Cape Town, a cousin and once-peer of Sydney, feels forsaken. Mexico just feels stagnant, in a shoulder-shrug way. This feeling seems to say: sure, much has improved, and more might improve, but it will probably be eaten up by the corruption.

That said, a striking feature of travelling around South Africa is the endless, gorgeous pockets you’re tempted to buy land in. A beautiful homestead, perhaps in the shadow of some great mountain; acreage with wild game. You see much less of that in Mexico.

Mexico’s economy mirrors its social stratification. Two distinct economies exist side by side: one for the wealthy, often at least as expensive as what we find in Australia, and another—more affordable and more informal—for ordinary Mexicans.

Food runs the gamut from street vendors to high-end supermarkets, some fancier than anything in Australia. The same is true of medical services: you can obtain top-tier care on demand, but it will cost you. For everyone else, it’s a dog’s-breakfast public health system. Australia, by contrast, tends to offer a much narrower band of outcomes—generally ranging from fine to good—apt for a nation where mediocrity is a virtue.

Prices in Mexico seem to have skyrocketed over the last decade. I suspect this reflects both a weaker “Pacific peso” and the broader convergence of global capital. Is it good or bad for Australia that we now appear less expensive by comparison? It feels bearish for us, as if our “First World premium” were evaporating.

The idea that in Mexico “you can just do things” applies broadly. Sanborns, for example, combines a restaurant with a department store. Or consider KidZania in Mexico City—a bizarre theme park where children roleplay as workers in places like Amazon warehouses or pharmaceutical factories (they love it!). The whole enterprise is branded, a kind of hyper-capitalist fever dream. Perhaps more room is available to experiment with new formats when rent and labor are cheaper.

If Australia sits on the fringes of empire, Mexico lies at its feet. When the U.S. Treasury targeted a large Mexican bank last year with accusations of money laundering, it was a stark reminder of where sovereignty ultimately lies. The United States erased a Mexican financial institution overnight.

Mexico’s once-robust manufacturing sector has been ceding ground to China for some time. I met a former clothing manufacturer who watched his business evaporate in the 2000s as production shifted to China. The rise of the Chinese auto industry now feels like the next looming shock. Chinese cars are already everywhere in Mexico.

One thing that feels more alive than ever is Mexican culture. Music is a great example. There is a popular, cross-class, and entirely unironic appreciation for Mexican megastars—Luis Miguel, Alejandro Fernández, Thalía. With a distinctly national flavor, these performers fill stadiums. In Australia, by contrast, musicians tend to be either global (AC/DC) or niche (Nick Cave). They are rarely coded as distinctly “Australian.” We don’t really have a national pop culture that everyone—from the billionaire to the taxi driver—sings along to without irony. Mexicans will absolutely sing along to Juan Gabriel. Mexico’s culture is operatic. It is a telenovela writ large.

Maybe John Farnham is an exception, but I’m clutching at straws. Perhaps it’s an Anglo thing: folk or national music has always been a little too on the nose for the English tradition. American music now dominates the airwaves in many countries, and while it is certainly present in Mexico, Mexicans do not appear ready to give up their affection for their own musical traditions.

Urban design, or its lack thereof, can be grim in Mexican cities. Outside the old Spanish colonial centers, the landscape often becomes a jagged concrete jungle. If this is a YIMBY paradise—where anyone can build anything—count me out. Querétaro’s mass middle-class housing developments rival Soviet Khrushchyovkas in their ugliness. Still, perhaps they would look different in a country with four times the GDP per capita.

Then again, look at Tulum. They’ve essentially doubled the size of the tourist strip in a decade. Tulum is the perfect adult’s playground. It’s what Byron Bay would be if we were allowed to do things in Australia. But Tulum is better understood as an extension of New York City than a part of Mexico. It’s a walled garden for the global elite, with just the right amount of Mexican chaos.

And then there are the small things. The everyday machismo that still dictates social interactions (only men pay in group situations). The fact that raw chickens are yellow because of their feed (marigold petals). The chili on fruit and salt in beer—the Mexicans are correct about this, by the way (and you can do it, too).

And the food. Tongue and cow head street tacos. Menudo (tripe soup) is the most underrated dish in Mexico. Why is it a hangover cure and a breakfast staple like its tripe soup cousin in Georgia (xashi) and Vietnam (pho)? And who first thought to combine clams and tomatoes to make Clamato, a national drink in Mexico?

I love the guerito and gallo nicknames streets vendors have for my kids. (My youngest really does strut like a plucky little rooster). There are endless natural sites to visit. A niche personal favorite is the cave of the hanging serpents—but be prepared for blind snakes gulping down bats inches from your face.

The girl in the stars-and-stripes mini-skirt leans out.
She elicits the sympathy of the entire world by revealing
The touching forethought of a sudden matching thong.

…

I am a small god made of terracotta, trembling on a pedestal,
Interred in a maelstrom of sound.

Look what the little clay god has found, neatly folded!
A jumbled bundle of young black bones,
Secured by a teeny half-digested thong.

— Nick Cave, The Sick Bag Song

Nick Cave is Australia’s John Milton, and The Sick Bag Song is our Paradise Lost. Its epic form and lyricism are not the story of the Fall, but of a godling flittering about the vast American continent amidst its ghosts and detritus, lonely, masturbating in hotel rooms. Pretzels the size of severed heads. High grass prairies. The ghosts of the Cheyenne. A black girl in a stars-and-stripes mini-skirt and matching thong who stalks and winks at you.

Across this land Cave takes the form of many things. He is a deity on stage. He resists the liver spots that glare in the brutal bathroom light, lacquers his black hair atop his “multi-storied forehead”, and transforms into any number of decrepit gods past: Elvis Presley’s belly rolled up a hill in Sisyphean futility; a Johnny Cash overdose; a Patti Smith hellscape.

Or maybe The Sick Bag Song is our Beowulf, and Cave its lost storyteller. Where in Beowulf our hero seizes the giant-forged sword in Grendel’s mother’s lair and swings it in an arc to break through the bone-rings of her neck — “severed it entirely, toppling the doomed house of her flesh” — Cave might rather do the same to his own forehead. But in The Sick Bag Song Beowulf’s great dragon is reduced to a small one Cave finds beneath a bridge. He doesn’t battle it, but instead examines its sexual organ, and carries its corpse to the river to lie with his drowned gods.

Cave is a mythmaker. For him all memory is myth, the stories we tell ourselves about the past are fraught and unreliable, and so why let them stale, why not inflate them with grandeur, insert new heroes and others’ tales? He inflates the barren world he fled in regional Australia with the grandeur of mythology. He comes from Wangaratta, a town I only know of because a pretty girl I once met was somehow related to a murder-suicide there. The misbegotten ghosts of his Wangaratta youth stalk him.

Part of the magic of The Sick Bag Song is that Cave’s lyricism is unconstrained by music. He can be a lot in interviews, but he pulls it off — he is Nick Cave after all. His central conceit is blasting through Australia’s allergy to tall poppies. The hero Australia deserves. He’s a singular individual, inflected with Christianity and grandeur, a rare combination, both marginalised by Australian society. And yet his grandeur and self-mockery are inseparable. It’s Cave himself who inverts the epic poem genre into some smaller Australian grotesquerie. But then there are moments where his lyric bravado cracks into something raw. His son’s death is still ahead, but loss is everywhere in his work. Desire. Loneliness. We forgive the godling his posturing.

Cave’s inversion of the epic poem is very Australian but it could still only be written among the ruins of a grand America, scrawled across the back of sick bags flying around on tour. Australia’s own epic is yet to be written. Voss’s star-spangled desert night and Aborigine-suckled dingo pups was a step in this direction, unfulfilled. Mr Inbetween points to the bodies buried across the vast outback, and the contours of our yearning, but shrinks from the epic. Australians are allergic to the epic. Our continent still waits for its epic tale to do it justice.

Of course, you must listen to the audiobook where Cave reads it himself. Hear him remember another man’s dreams or inspect his ageing face before roaring onstage, immortal.

In the wake of the great shearers’ strike of 1891 — after the defeat and arrests, and the mounted infantry dispersed the camps — William Lane decided there was no hope for workers in Australia. He would build a new society somewhere else. A white, socialist utopia. Nueva Australia — a New Australia in Paraguay.

To understand what drove two hundred and twenty Australians to board a ship for a jungle on the other side of the world, we must first understand what happened at Barcaldine.

By January 1891, the Queensland outback was as close to civil war as colonial Australia ever came. The pastoralists — the squatters, men who owned country the size of small European nations — had announced wage cuts and demanded shearers sign individual contracts that would break the unions. The shearers refused. Strike camps sprang up across central Queensland: at Clermont, at Hughenden, at Barcaldine, where up to a thousand men camped in tents arrayed in military rows along the south bank of Lagoon Creek. Many were armed. The Brisbane Courier asked whether “the industrial Armageddon” was about to be “fought in the heart of Australia.”

The colonial government’s response was overwhelming. More than two thousand soldiers and police deployed to the wool districts. Artillery pieces and mounted infantry took up positions near the strikers’ camps. In late March, police swept through the camps and arrested the strike leadership. Thirteen union leaders were convicted of sedition and conspiracy at Rockhampton and sentenced to three years’ hard labour on St Helena Island prison, in Moreton Bay. By May, the camps were full of hungry, penniless men. The strike was broken. The squatters had won.

Lane had watched all of this from Brisbane, where he edited The Worker, the union-funded newspaper that had become the voice of the movement. He was thirty years old, an English immigrant who had come to journalism through poverty and odd jobs across three continents — Bristol to Canada to Detroit to Brisbane. He was small and intense, an orator with what contemporaries called an American twang, a teetotaller so committed that he had once got himself deliberately arrested as a drunk to expose the conditions in Brisbane’s lock-ups. He wrote under a dozen pseudonyms. His novel, The Workingman’s Paradise, published under the name John Miller, sold copies to raise funds for the families of the imprisoned strike leaders.

The defeat of 1891 convinced Lane that reform within Australia was impossible. The capitalists controlled the state; the state would always crush the workers. The only solution was to leave — to create, somewhere else entirely, a society built from first principles. He announced the formation of the New Australia Co-operative Settlement Association. Each male member was required to contribute a minimum of sixty pounds — equivalent to perhaps eight thousand dollars today — representing the sale of their homes, their savings, everything they had. In return, they would receive a share in a new civilisation.

The rules Lane drafted for this civilisation were uncompromising. “It is right living to share equally because selfishness is wrong,” he wrote. “To teetotal because liquor drinking is wrong; to uphold life-marriage and keep white because looseness of living is wrong.” No alcohol. No fraternising with non-whites. No private property. The colony would be “genuinely democratic and co-operating,” with “all labour in common for the common good.” It would be the brotherhood of English-speaking whites.

Paraguay had reasons of its own to welcome these dreamers. A generation earlier, the country had launched itself into a war against the combined forces of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay — the War of the Triple Alliance, which lasted from 1864 to 1870 and became the bloodiest conflict in the history of Latin America. When the Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López was finally killed by Brazilian troops in 1870, his country was devastated. The war had killed somewhere between half and two-thirds of the total population. By some estimates, 90% of males of military age had perished. A postwar census found 221,079 people remaining: 106,254 women, 86,079 children, and 28,746 men. Four women for every man. The government was desperate for settlers — anyone who would come, who would work the land, who would repopulate the emptied countryside.

Lane’s scouts negotiated a grant of nearly half a million acres of fertile country, free of cost and without taxes, in the interior south-east of Asunción.

On 16 July 1893, two hundred and twenty Australians boarded the Royal Tar at Mort Bay in Sydney. The ship had been built for cargo, not passengers, and had to be extensively modified to accommodate the emigrants. The manifest recorded men, women, and children from across the eastern colonies — Queensland bushmen and shearers predominated, but there were also urban workers, idealists, and at least one suspected police informant. Among them was Hugh Blackwell, one of the strike leaders who had been arrested at Barcaldine, looking for a fresh start after his release from prison. There was George Birks, an Adelaide chemist who had sold his shop on Rundle Street to contribute to the common fund. There were families—the Hoares from South Australia with their children, the Kempsons with four young ones, the Thomas family with six. Men who had lost the strike and lost hope. Women who had watched their husbands come home defeated.

A farewell gathering was held at the Sydney Domain. The chair was taken by Chris Watson, a young union organiser who would, eleven years later, become Prime Minister of Australia — the first Labor prime minister anywhere in the world. Watson spoke of the workingman’s paradise to be established in the hinterland of tropical America. William Holman, who would himself become Premier of New South Wales, also addressed the crowd.

The voyage took sixty-eight days. They sailed south, rounding New Zealand, then fought through the storms of Cape Horn — the most dangerous passage in the world — before turning north up the Atlantic coast of South America to Montevideo. There they transferred to a riverboat and began the long journey inland, up the Río de la Plata, up the Paraná, up the Paraguay, a thousand miles into the heart of the continent. They arrived at Asunción on 22 September 1893. From there, a train took them to Villarrica, and then bullock carts carried them the final distance to the site of the colony, where the countryside looked, some of them said, like the Darling Downs back home.

But the Darling Downs it was not. The land was rough, uncleared. They had no common language with the Guaraní-speaking locals. Many of the colonists, it turned out, were urban idealists or what some called misfits and malcontents — men who had never cleared land in their lives. John Alfred Rogers wrote home: “there are several people here barefooted and without a shirt to their back and very often an empty belly.”

Lane’s rules were strict, and he enforced them with the zeal of a prophet. The ban on alcohol was tested quickly. On Christmas Day 1893, several men visited a nearby Guaraní village, obtained liquor, and returned to the settlement drunk and fighting. Lane called in the Paraguayan police and expelled them. A visiting British diplomat assessed Lane as “remarkably deficient in the tact and human sympathy so necessary in a leader of men.”

Tensions arose too about labour and women. Some colonists, men who had paid their sixty pounds and crossed an ocean, began to suggest that if this was to be a workers’ paradise, they might hire cheap local labour — the very kind of exploitation they had supposedly left behind. Others began to fraternise with Guaraní women, which Lane treated as the ultimate betrayal of the colour line.

A second boatload of emigrants arrived from Adelaide in early 1894. The factional fighting intensified. By May 1894, less than eight months after the founding, Lane had had enough. He and fifty-eight loyalists split off to form a second settlement called Cosme, seventy-two kilometres further south, on the banks of the Pirapó River. The remaining two hundred and seventeen colonists at New Australia abandoned socialism, asked the Paraguayan government to dissolve the cooperative, and divided the land into private holdings. Some drifted away — back to Australia, or to sheep stations in Patagonia, or into the Paraguayan interior.

Mary Gilmore, who would later adorn the ten dollar note, reached Cosme in January 1896. After helping the movement from Australia, she resigned from teaching in late 1895 and sailed to Paraguay to join Lane’s experiment.

Lane held on at Cosme for five more years, watching his second utopia fail more slowly than the first. Crops failed and colonists starved. His own health broke down. In 1899, exhausted and disillusioned, he resigned the chairmanship and sailed away with his family, first back to Australia, then to New Zealand. In Auckland, he reinvented himself as a conservative. He became editor of the New Zealand Herald, the establishment paper, and wrote under the pseudonym “Tohunga” — the Māori word for prophet. The radical socialist of the 1890s became an Empire loyalist, an ardent conscriptionist during the Great War. When he died in 1917, aged fifty-six, of bronchitis and a heart condition, the Australian labour press was divided between those who remembered what he had once been and those who could not forgive what he had become.

Lane never spoke of Paraguay again.

But something survived. Two thousand people in Paraguay still carry surnames like Wood, McLeod, Murray, and Kempson. They are cattle ranchers now, not communists. Some have become quite wealthy landowners, employing the very kind of labour their great-grandparents once refused to hire. They speak Spanish and Guaraní.

There are very few examples of good marriage on TV or in film. Plumbing the depths of marital dysfunction is a rich vein of creation. A Faustian pact binds Tony and Carmela’s marriage in the The Sopranos, where every marriage is fatally compromised except that of Johnny Sack and Gini, who are more a punchline than a fleshed-out marriage (excuse the pun). In Breaking Bad, marriage is a vice grip that Walt escapes then hijacks. Hank and Marie’s marriage is close to platonic but it is infertile and dies with him. Mad Men is in love with the aesthetic of philandering and the archetype of the boredom-broiled housewife. Fleishman is in Trouble peers into the horrorshow of divorce.

But for Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, the All-American undercover Soviet spy couple of The Americans, marriage turns out to be the bedrock of all things. Their marriage is born a fraud, a cover, arranged from above. It is under constant pressure. They spend days, nights, weeks apart. They even hit ‘pause’ on their marriage, Philip moving out to a grimy motel. Part of their job is to sleep with informants. Philip even marries an FBI secretary in a sham marriage, which Elizabeth attends as his fake sister. Elizabeth falls in love with a black communist collaborator, going to him when pregnant with Philip’s child. They have deep ideological disagreements — Philip eventually quits their spy practice. And yet, in the end, their marriage is all that’s left. As their cover unravels and the world they knew for decades collapses, they are forced to abandon their son. Their daughter abandons them. They are left with absolutely nothing but each other. Their world burns to a cinder, leaving only their covenant at its core. The earth breaks upon their marriage.

The Jennings’ marriage begins not with love but with duty. It thrives because it’s explicitly an unchosen obligation, and it is our unchosen obligations that define us. Their marriage is assigned by the Soviet state, a bureaucratic arrangement between two agents who barely know each other. Modern culture assumes marriage begins with love and only later discovers obligation. The Jennings’ marriage runs in the opposite direction. Obligation comes first — loyalty to the mission, loyalty to the partner — and love slowly grows out of it. What begins as a fraud becomes a covenant. It’s a fantastic irony. The Soviet state accidentally creates a stronger marriage than does modern Western society. The system that produces sham identities and lies ends up producing a real covenant while the free, romantic American marriages around them are mostly fragile.

Life as a spy mirrors that of a marriage. A lifetime commitment. An imperceptible future beyond an idealistic initiation. Only the vaguest, theoretical conception of the challenges that lie ahead. A constant performance — for others, for your children, for each other.

Their marriage survives these slings and arrows because their marriage is hard, because marriage is hard. But because The Americans begins with the premise that their marriage is a cover, it spends less time documenting its pitfalls than its promise. The subterranean tenderness that builds over time. That dwells in the knowing glance, in a long silence. How intimacy and love can grow from duty. Sprigs flowering around cold rails. The all-consuming nature of a fight with a spouse followed by the tenderness of reconciliation. Joint suffering over children, work. That thing where wives sometimes just know what their husbands need, how they grasp them in a moment of vulnerability and love them despite whatever feuding might trail them. The Jennings’ small acts — gestures, looks — of marital love are the sparks that sustain the show. In the final episode of Season 5, Elizabeth tells a young protege that he will fail in the spy business without a partner. She could have been talking about life. You need someone to get through the vicissitudes of life. And there is no institution formidable enough for that task than marriage. The Americans is a story about marriage dressed up as a spy thriller. The show’s heart isn’t into all the Soviet plot machinations. The tribulations of Elizabeth and Philip’s marriage is the beating heart of the show.

That, and friendship. Noah Emmerich makes for a superb Stan Beeman, their lonely FBI neighbour. Surely the greatest friendship heartbreak on TV. “I would have done anything for you Philip,” he tells Philip in their final confrontation, and I dare you not to choke up. They were best friends, ruse or no ruse. (Funny that Emmerich plays the fake best friend in the greatest film of fakery, The Truman Show.) It’s in these moments that the show reaches the heights of TV, Beeman left standing alone, his silhouette against an empty car park, stewing in his heartbreak, without his best friend, Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms strumming in the background.1

The Americans is also surprisingly ambitious in its form. Lured into watching a show about an American-as-apple-pie couple with a big secret, you end up watching a show half set in Russia and in Russian. An underappreciated forerunner to Shōgun, a genuine American masterpiece that’s somehow largely in Japanese.

Like all shows about people in middle life The Americans is about the crises of middle life. Dealing with kids growing up. Raising them in a foreign land, and figuring out how to impart what matters about your own culture — inevitably to some degree of failure. Marital turbulence. Career anxiety. The Jennings just have to deal with spy issues too, like fake second marriages and coups and handling stolen bioweapons.

What happens when the mask becomes the face? The Jennings really do become an American family. Their kids are American. Breaking up with or being dumped by a fake girlfriend turns out to suck as much as the real thing. The fake becomes the real. What is fake and real anyway? There is just what we do in this world. A fake marriage turns out to be indistinguishable from a real marriage. A fake travel business takes as much work and is as prone to failure as a real travel business. A fake friendship contains the same love and potential for loss as a real one. Take Philip’s fake second marriage to Martha, the FBI secretary. She stays loyal to him even after she uncovers the ruse. And he stays loyal to her. In an effort that strains credulity, they whisk all-American Martha out of the US and away from all she’s ever known to start again in the Soviet Union. This would be laughable in The Sopranos universe, where she’d have been lucky to get a bullet to the back of the head. Philip’s devotion to her, pushed to the limits of what he can do, is apparent to even Elizabeth, who in a rare moment of vulnerability tells him she understands if he would rather stay with Martha. But no. Philip’s ultimate loyalty lies with Elizabeth, his fake-cum-real wife.

And then there’s Keri Russell, who plays Elizabeth Jennings. They could have just called it the Keri Russell Show. Probably the greatest female lead in television history, although I may just be smitten by the line of her neck. She’s mesmerising. Tough as guts. Reminds me of my wife. Elizabeth is an apt paean to the wife. In her many guises she is fun, sexy. But she is most mesmerising in stillness. A stern, pained, or loving look. A thousand words in a glance. In the same way horror closeups of Elizabeth Moss’s horror-face augmented the horror of Gilead in A Handmaid’s Tale, Keri Russell’s steely wife’s love is the north star to every lost boy. She embodies the show’s idea of marriage — discipline, loyalty, and endurance. Something to hold onto in a harsh world.

The Americans doesn’t pull its punches. Senseless murders, sexual escapades, rapes, dismemberments — there is an endless procession of gore and titillation. And yet its range is far more limited than its predecessor, The Sopranos. Everyone in The Americans is too competent. Too nobly intended even. Adverse selection rules everything in The Sopranos. Its thugs brutalise everyone around them out of malice and incompetence in equal measure — that’s part of the general tragedy, the decay in everything. The Sopranos is a Great American tale, spanning farce and piercing insight into the human condition: fatherhood, marriage, civilisational decline, all through the eyes of New Jersey mobsters. The Americans dabbles in darkness but doesn’t really descend into it. Things seldom go to plan, Elizabeth tells her apprenticed daughter. But mainly they kind of do. How much competence can we really believe in the state security services of an indolent late-stage Soviet Union, or a decadent Reaganite FBI? But that competence is necessary for the tension of the show. Beside The Sopranos, which wallows in its darkness, The Americans is pristine.

The Americans is relentlessly anti-Soviet. Our hero agents kill innocents. Characters recall evils committed by Soviets to each other. A KGB’s officer’s mother was imprisoned at a camp and sold herself for food. Elizabeth was raped. I recall only one moment in the entire show where there is an honest compliment paid to the USSR. A dissident — who hates the Soviet Union — says, America has food and money but it’s not so easy to be happy. He misses his street, his home, his friends. That’s the only moment in six seasons the show pushes back on Reaganite America. Easy to be sympathetic with that posture. But wouldn’t it have been more powerful for the show to undermine some of America’s sheen? The Wire was set 15 years later. Show the real streets of Baltimore — the Jennings live in DC! But that kind of moral exploration (nihilism?) lies outside of the show’s narrow aperture.

The show deftly gets at deep cultural fissures through cultural misunderstandings. Reagan’s assassination attempt is immediately perceived by the Soviets as a military coup. Obvious to a Soviet cynic, absurd to an American. American crop testing to create bug resistant wheat is misconstrued by the Soviets as a pest to cause mass famine. The show correctly gleans a cynical glint to the Soviet eye; suspicion where it is unjustified, and a projection of its own vast malice.

The ending is satisfying and emotionally intense, but the emotional nadir of the show comes late in the penultimate season. Our heroes are asked to hunt down a Nazi collaborator, living under false pretenses in the US. Their righteous crusade becomes morally muddied. Turns out their collaborator had been sixteen. Her family had been shot around her. The Germans got her drunk and made her shoot Soviet prisoners. She had made a decent life since — the American dream. Philip hesitates and Elizabeth guns her down, along with her loving American husband. It’s a brutal scene. Even the Soviets’ righteous crusades become grotesque abortions.

The emotional thread that runs through the series is the couple’s slow disenchantment with their mission. They’re constantly running into ‘are we the bad guys’ dilemmas. Like their disguises, their little evils decorate the show. Knifing dissidents and leaving them to be found by their young son. Encouraging a dissident’s teenager to suicide. Seducing an underage daughter of a CIA operative. Innocents killed as collateral damage. They try to steelman their revolutionary zeal and their communist comrades, but it’s difficult, especially by the 1980s when the Soviet functionaries themselves are stripped of most idealism and are soaked in cynicism. They see the opulence in the America around them, and compare it to the scarcity back home. Once they could have excused this for the terrible burden shouldered by the Soviets during the Great Patriotic War. By the late Soviet era that excuse rings hollow. One dissident they ‘befriend’ complains constantly about the lack of freedoms and other evils that travailed him in the USSR, grating against their idealisation of life back home. As their faith in communism frays, their faith in their marriage grows. It’s too late for them to stay in America. But back home where they end up — unbeknownst to them ahead of total collapse — they have each other.

The Americans steps up its music game in the last season, and especially the last episode. Just like The Sopranos nailed its ending with Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, U2’s With or Without You plays to the Jennings’ final moments in America as their family and their world unravels. Are they allowed to just claim a banger like that? Almost cheating, frankly. Between the couple and their abandoned children, between them and the dying USSR, they can’t live with or without any of it.

The Americans dissolves the line between real and fake, but not the line between meaning and a joke. “You made my life a joke,” Stan tells Philip in their final confrontation. “My life was the joke,” Philip responds. Philip and Elizabeth fought for a hollow cause, for false masters. They lost their children, who will now hate them as they pick up the pieces of their lives. (“You’re a whore,” her daughter tells Elizabeth, the full extent of her mother’s professional philandering dawning upon her.) What was it all for? What is any of it for? What’s left? Each other. They still raised their two kids to adulthood. “They'll remember us. They're not kids anymore. We raised them,” Philip tells Elizabeth in the final scene. And the friendship with Stan? Despite everything, it was real. Not everything is eternal. Broken things can have had meaning too.

Over the last few years I’ve been reading Australian history. Historians, essayists, memoirs, novels to try and understand who we are, how we got here, the nature of the issues we face.

I’ve been astounded by the richness of our history and the prose of our historians.

Over summer I read Neville Meaney, a great historian on Australian security concerns and identity and more. And I’ve shared his provocations in a loose series over recent weeks (here, here, and here).

The White Australia policy arched over a 60 — 70 year period when our colonies were forged into a nation in Federation and two World Wars. We were thoroughly British — literal British subjects, the idea of a separate Australian citizenship utterly alien — and then we weren’t. We tiptoed from being a consciously white British nation with a near exclusive British immigration policy to one with a more open migration policy. And that trickle became a flood until today, where we have one of the highest rates of foreign born populations in the developed world, twice the rate of the US.

And we act today as if this always was. That this is the word of God and that all sorts of people from far away lands must fall upon this earth like rain.

We have no cultural memory of White Australia. Before then may as well be before the Flood. We do not recall White Australia other than in distant admonition. It’s our antebellum sin.

And as explored in this series, the truth is more sensible, less scurrilous, and more ennobling of the men who made this nation.

Our change in posture mid-century was abrupt. Historians have tended to glide over this change, either in a Whig gesture to the winds of progress, or they have offered up reasons that aren’t that compelling upon closer examination.

Was it merely some inevitable economic or cultural entanglement with Asia? Economic and cultural engagement happens all the time without being coupled with migration.

Was it a return to liberal roots? Too essentialist. We contain multitudes.

It’s been difficult to pin down, yet the reason has been staring us in the face.

Over the last century, the defining force of Australian political and cultural has been American hegemony. When the US hopped, we jumped. Our sails have blown with the American hurricane.

Partly, this is no secret at all — it’s very much an explicit part of our nation’s narrative. We made an explicit security decision to fall under America’s security umbrella. This is well trodden stuff. We also feel the flood of American cultural dominance every day in the music we listen to and the TV we watch. But we don’t quite appreciate how total the socio-political dominance has been. Observing American dominance to the extent I will here is, I believe, a unique contribution. (If it’s not unique, I’m sure someone will yell at me for it.)

Total American dominance is the massive, redacted centre of Australia’s story over the last century.

The extent of this dominance is missing in explicit readings of our history because it flatters no one in this country. Not our so-called intelligentsia, provincial yet proud. Not our politicians, pretenders to agency. Not our historians, who centre Australian interests and actors. Not leftists, who are inflamed by the example of local activists and the moral arc of history, nor rightists who explain our actions in terms of our own traditions or character or philosophies (are you a Gladstonian or Disraeli conservative?).

We want to believe that our moral actions as a country have been a function of local courage and conviction, of great moral actors and awakenings in this land. Not merely functions of imperial mimicry. Yet our moral heroes tend to be grafted awkwardly in retrospect, and when they were sailing in the right direction it was on the currents on American empire.

We are not alone. Much of Europe — and other peoples — could probably tell a similar story. But Australia’s political mimicry has arguably been particularly intense. And this is a story about Australia by an Australian, one almost entirely elided by Australian historians, as much as I love them.

This is the story of Australia over the last century: American FOB, American mimic.

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This statement, made three weeks after Pearl Harbor, is often treated as Australia’s geopolitical coming-of-age — its declaration of independence from Britain and pivot to the United States. But the pivot had already begun thirty-three years earlier.

On 20 August 1908, sixteen American battleships steamed into Sydney Harbour, their hulls painted white to denote peace. One quarter of Australia’s entire population — over one million people — turned out to see the Great White Fleet during its three-week visit to Sydney, Melbourne, and Albany. A public holiday was declared. A week of parades, balls, concerts, and sporting events followed. Buildings were illuminated at night. The crowds were rapturous.

The visit was not on Theodore Roosevelt’s original itinerary. Prime Minister Alfred Deakin had invited them directly, bypassing London — an extraordinary breach of imperial protocol for a dominion that still considered itself thoroughly British. Deakin told Roosevelt that “no other Federation in the world possesses so many features [in common with] the United States as does the Commonwealth of Australia.”

What was Deakin playing at? The same thing the Australian founding fathers had been anxious about since Federation: Japan’s rising naval power and Britain’s indifference to it. Japan had defeated Russia in 1905, a European Great Power humiliated by an Asian nation for the first time in modern history. The British, focused on Europe, brushed off Australian concerns about the Pacific. Japan was, after all, a British ally — they had fought together in the Great War. The British maintained a small squadron in Sydney — one that could be recalled at any time — and considered that adequate.

Deakin disagreed. The Great White Fleet’s visit was his way of making a point: that Australia needed to think about its own defence, and that there was another great power in the Pacific who might be interested in helping. The visit gave Deakin the political capital to establish an Australian navy. It also heralded a wholesale strategic shift toward American shores.

The Australian founding fathers turned out to be exactly right about Japan. The British dismissal of the Pacific theatre led directly to the catastrophe of Singapore’s fall in 1942. More than 15,000 Australian soldiers were captured; over 7,000 would die as prisoners of war. The defensive strategy Australia had invested in for fifteen years was in ruins.

It was in this context that Curtin published his famous statement. Churchill was furious. Roosevelt was “astonished” — and privately displeased.

But Curtin was ahead of both of them. He defied Churchill’s direct orders to divert Australian troops to Burma, insisting they return home to defend Australia. When American General Douglas MacArthur arrived and told Curtin bluntly that America had “no sovereign interest in the integrity of Australia” and viewed it merely as “a base from which to attack and defeat the Japanese,” Curtin didn’t flinch. He knew Australia needed America more than America needed Australia. That asymmetry would define the relationship ever after.

The ANZUS treaty was signed in 1951. Australia would back its big ally in war. Australian troops served in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But not only did Australia support America in its wars. Australia introduced conscription for the Vietnam War, something Billy Hughes lost two referenda over during WWI. And we were so supportive and early in George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ that we got our own special class of US visa. Australia did everything it could at every stage to demonstrate Australian fealty.

But the relationship went deeper than just security. Australia didn’t just align with American military power.

Australian political and cultural commentators tend to tell the story of Australian social evolution with reference to internal factors: Australian history, Australian actors, Australian preferences.

But the reality is we quickly followed American socio-political trends. This is the defining feature of Australian political evolution for the last century.

Consider the legislative timeline:

• The US passes its Civil Rights Act in 1964. Australia holds its referendum on Aboriginal race powers in 1967 and passes a Racial Discrimination Act in 1975.

• The US passes the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, ending racial quotas. Australia dismantles White Australia from 1966–1973.

• The US passes Title VII (1964) and Title IX (1972) on sex discrimination. Australia passes its Sex Discrimination Act in 1984.

• The US passes the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Australia passes the Disability Discrimination Act in 1992.

• Obergefell v. Hodges legalises same-sex marriage in the US in 2015. Australia legalises it in 2017.

Even our great Snowy Hydro scheme, which began construction in 1949, was modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority of the decade before.

I knew a couple at university who got married in Australia only after Obergefell and read from Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion at the wedding. The tentacles of empire run deep in this land.

The 1967 referendum may be the centre-piece of Australia's civil rights mythology — our Selma, our March on Washington. In popular mythology it’s confused for having granted Aboriginal people the vote or citizenship (they had both already). The referendum was an amendment to the Commonwealth's race power, granting the federal government authority to make laws on the basis of race. In a cosmic irony, it was a move away from colour-blindness. The referendum gave Canberra the constitutional machinery for racial discrimination. This too is in line with the American cultural revolution at the time. As writers like Christopher Caldwell and Richard Hanania have pointed out, the Civil Rights Act became the legal foundation for affirmative action, disparate impact doctrine, and a vast apparatus of mandated racial consciousness. The Australian version didn't even bother with the facade. We wrote the race power directly into the constitution. The mimicry was faithful, in both the divergent mythologies of racial equality and realities of racial preference they created.

There is one striking counterexample to the mimicry. The High Court’s Mabo decision of 1992 — which overturned terra nullius and recognised native title — may be considered a distinctly Australian development.

But even then, look closer and the imperial scaffolding reappears. Justice Brennan’s lead judgment explicitly invoked international law as the lever for change, writing that it was contrary to “international standards” and “fundamental values” to maintain a discriminatory rule denying indigenous people rights to their land. The key legal precedent was not Australian but Canadian — Calder v British Columbia (1973), in which the Supreme Court of Canada first recognised that aboriginal title predated colonisation. Ron Castan QC, lead counsel for the Mabo plaintiffs, was frank about this: asked how much he’d drawn on Australian legal experience, he replied that he’d essentially just laid Calder before the High Court and told them it was all there. And the case itself only survived because of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 — the very legislation that sits in our timeline as a downstream product of the American Civil Rights Act. When Queensland tried to legislatively extinguish Meriam native title mid-case, the High Court struck the legislation down as inconsistent with the RDA. Without the American civil rights movement, there is no RDA; without the RDA, there is no Mabo. The chain of imperial transmission holds.

Australia’s land acknowledgements are a genuine cultural export. Canadians didn’t adopt land acknowledgments widely until after 2015, and in America they’re still a punchline. This is a local liturgy, born of local identity anxieties, that have escalated in strange ways over the last decade or so.

American socio-political dominance is not a conscious decision. It’s the water we swim in. Race has been the defining cultural rubric for the United States since its 1960s cultural revolution. It did well for Australia to go along with that. The new imperial zeitgeist demanded racial enlightenment, and Australia provided it.

In June 2020, following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, tens of thousands of Australians took to the streets in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. They chanted I can’t breathe. They held moments of silence for George Floyd. They demanded an end to Aboriginal deaths in custody, grafting American rhetoric to local conditions.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned against importing “things happening in other countries.” He was ignored. The protests proceeded. The signs read Black Lives Matter.

The Sydney protest was organised jointly by the Indigenous Social Justice Association and the Anticolonial Asian Alliance — a name that could only have emerged from American academic discourse. Each new iteration of the gay flag and acronym is quickly downloaded from American HQ.

Or consider Obama. In 2008, 64% of Australians wanted Obama to win, against 14% for McCain. By 2012, 80% wanted Obama re-elected, against 9% for Romney. When Obama finally visited Australia in 2011 the reception was ecstatic. Obamamania, the press called it. One journalist noted that “in Australia, an Obama speech still packs the kind of punch it did in the United States in 2008. It’s as if he were still seen in the haze of can-do hype that has worn off in the cities of America.”

Australia was more excited about Obama than America was.

I suspect most Australians believed we are protected by a First Amendment. (We aren’t.)

Australia changed after the 1950s because America changed. Australia took its cues from the imperial centre. This has been true since the Great White Fleet steamed into Sydney Harbour in 1908, and it remains true today.

Australian security anxiety runs deep. A sense of British flakiness led to Federation. Following Federation, Australia asked the US to extend its Monroe Doctrine to the Pacific, which it declined. Australia has never felt the requisite institutional confidence to take an independent security posture, much to the frustration of Australian security analysts like Hugh White and Sam Roggeveen, who deftly chart what such a course might look like. Our current defense posture is total subsumption into the American military machine, and Australian political and media actors struggle to explain it. Because it makes no sense unless one understands Australia’s defence posture as an American forward operating base.

Our geopolitical anxiety is so acute we feel not only must we be supportive of our sponsor’s military exploits, but also that we quickly follow its cultural transitions. We must not be culturally illegible to our sponsor.

Australia is an outpost of American empire, as it was once an outpost of British empire. We are a sub-imperial power. A forward operating base. A FOB. And as a result, Australians absorbed American preoccupations, American vocabulary, American culture wars, and American moral frameworks. Our most iconic developments in governance and culture have been American mimicry.