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Make a loose fist with your hand. Now press your thumb against the inside of your index finger. Or let it rest on top. It should look as if you are giving an invisible cash note to someone. excellent. You’re giving Clinton a thumbs up (or Obama or Blair or Cameron thumbs up). Use this gesture to emphasize a point when speaking. It conveys firmness and resolution, without the implicit arrogance of a finger-pointing implication.
There concludes our first lesson in politics before Donald Trump. Next week: Message discipline. Come up with a rote phrase, like “We’re all in this together,” and be prepared to repeat it, regardless of the context.
Young readers will no doubt think I am dealing with the mechanistic politics and over-management of the recent past. Well, YouTube window, friends. If nothing else, Trump’s rise has revealed widespread public relief with consolidation and uniformity. I wonder if the same rebellion is spreading to other fields.
Take my own world, the media. Why do podcasts work so well? Because they are, in the end, messy, elliptical, everything else spews theory. (In the case of Joe Rogan, perhaps the biggest media figure in the Anglophone world, there couldn’t be much more difference between his on-air and off-air speech.) The narrow professionalism of linear radio is now, for the millions of us raised on it, incurable by comparison.
Even the world’s favorite sport, so long in the intellectual grip of perfectionist Pep Guardiola, may be intimidating. Arsenal, coached by one of his messengers, is as impressive as the inside of a Swiss watch. The spacing between players is just that. Free kicks and angles are choreographed according to ballet standards. Even in open play, we fans know that a series of time-tested moves will get the ball out to the right flank, where the opposition defenders will then flow, at which point a diagonal pass will unleash the reserve arsenal into the unmarked left central area.
It’s the most “engineered” football in the world, give or take Pep’s Manchester City, another team that’s easier to admire than love. But both have had disappointing seasons. Liverpool are a bit more free-spirited, with a squad that is clearly not better. If they achieve the Premier League, the era of over-coaching – the bane of modern fans – must subside.
Years ago, this column regretted “Maverick’s deathThe argument was that in most industries, there’s too much data about what works for everyone in the same way of doing things. Songwriters know to put a hook in the first 30 seconds to keep Spotify listeners from skipping a track. New construction apartments have the same kitchen-hall plan. It became Football is stagnant. My mistake was not anticipating that people would rebel at some point. How strange it is that politics, often in the direction of trends elsewhere, would go first when watching Trump’s inflammatory inaugural speech. Patronize one consolation. Its success sends a signal to other over-managed sectors: There are rewards for deviating from a strict form.
I’m writing this in Los Angeles, where I once lived. It has no dominant architectural style. It has no clear center. (“Downtown” is something of a misnomer.) The center of grim experiences may contain a gem of a restaurant or gallery. In its lack of pattern, it is more like life, more like the flow of experience, more than the world’s richest city except the richest city I can think of.
After the Great Fire of London in 1666, various geniuses presented plans to rebuild the place from first principles. Most wanted to bring some Euclidean order to the maze. Their designs—full of right angles and other atrocities—got nowhere. Otherwise, London would now be a bustling grid or (Christopher Wren’s idea) another European Piaca and Boulevard.
Well, Los Angeles, London’s less well-designed rival of the great Western cities, is going to have to change in a lot of ways. Even before her recent trauma, she had problems. In the end, though, as long as something in human identity opposes structure and regimentation, the gravity of this place cannot fade.
Email Yan’an at Janan.ganesh@ft.com
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2025-01-25 05:01:00