Lionel Shriver

I’m accustomed to a sense of urgency in relation to Netflix offerings because the streaming service often buys short-term rights that abruptly run out. But this time, I rushed to see Dave Chappelle’s new stand-up special The Closer lest Netflix’s own disgruntled employees succeed in getting the performance taken down. Strictly speaking, the affronted staff aren’t demanding the show’s withdrawal, but it’s hard to see what else the proposed employee walkout on Wednesday was designed to accomplish. After all, in the olden days if you didn’t like something on television you just didn’t watch it, but in our enlightened times you make damned sure no one else can watch it either.

Trends in New York City tend to foretell trends in London, whose fashions in turn set the pace for smaller British cities. After a summer in the Apple, I can therefore provide British urbanites with a glimpse of their future. I get around on what I newly perceive as a dumpy, sluggish pushbike. Mayor Bill de Blasio has invested extensively in the city’s cycling infrastructure — much to the resentment of motorists, and often for good reason. As London drivers will also attest, removing whole lanes from congested thoroughfares is rarely justified by the modest number of car trips that cyclists obviate. Still, given the soaring popularity of two-wheeled transport, when chugging against a headwind alongside the Hudson I ought to have plenty of company. Indeed, I do.

This last weekend I attended the memorial service for my father, who died in July. This isn’t a bid for sympathy. Everyone’s father dies; most of us expect to suffer our bereavements in private; you didn’t know him. But in a larger sense, this is a bid for sympathy. That is, sympathy for us all. Beforehand, Riverside Church — a grand, storied edifice on Manhattan’s Upper West Side — had sent out an email circular to prospective attendees. Perhaps recipients might have anticipated a ministerial reaching out: ‘We treasured Dr Shriver’s membership of our congregation, and Riverside’s clerics wish to convey our sorrow at your loss. We regard his passing as our loss, too.

It gets lost in the many creative purposes successive American administrations invented to justify remaining in Afghanistan, but the primary goal of the original aerial assault in 2001 was clear and primitive: revenge. Not always a dish best served cold. That military operation was an attempt to satisfy public thirst for payback, and also for agency. 9/11 made the country feel powerless. Given today’s glorification of victimhood, it’s worth remembering that when Americans were granted victimhood en masse, they didn’t care for it. If in the eating revenge is often thin gruel, so also is the experience of being proved right. I opposed the extended occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq.

12 Sept 2021: Health Secretary Sajid Javid has announced that the government is shelving its plans to introduce mandatory domestic vaccine passports (details here). Below is Lionel Shriver's column from August 2021, in which she argues vaccine passports were always a bad tool for tackling Covid-19. Despite having mocked app-happy Albion in my last column, I finally downloaded the NHS app. (Lest I seem a raging hypocrite, the institutional app is quite distinct from the Track-and-Trace Covid one, possession of which marks you as insane.) I found the app’s elaborate security features for registration bitterly comical. I had to photograph my passport, then record a video of myself speaking four prescribed numbers to affirm that my face matches my ID.

As I begin, I’m tortured by the doo-do-doo-do of The Twilight Zone’s theme music. I’ve hurtled back in time. Suddenly I’m a wise-ass, liberty-loving journalist who’s had it up to my eyeballs with intrusive, ineffectual top-down nanny-ism, and I’m pooping on yet another pitiful feint at ‘doing something’ by the lumbering big state. OK, check. This feels dead familiar. But I went to a poncier school, my hair is way weirder, and it seems that my name is Boris Johnson. Consider this, then, an act of either plagiarism or ventriloquism. If with a tad more alliteration (I’m keener on assonance myself), Boris of a few years back would have written this very column in The Spectator.

During the political car crash of 2019, I couldn’t imagine ever agreeing with Theresa May. Yet last week she exhibited both principle and pragmatism — qualities sorely lacking in her capitulation to the conniving EU paradigm whereby Northern Ireland made Brexit supposedly insoluble. The legacy of that surrender, Ulster’s disastrously unworkable trade protocol, will wait for another day. I come to praise May, not to bury her. The previous prime minister stressed to the Commons that ‘chaotic’ and ‘incomprehensible’ international travel restrictions, more oppressive this summer than last, send the message that Britain is ‘shut for business’.

However surreal and dystopian the pandemic landscape seemed at first, no enduring vista feels ‘surreal’ and ‘dystopian’ indefinitely. Citizenries uniformly obliterating their faces with ear-to-ear muzzles has come to seem par for the course. But I’m still amazed by how eagerly a certain segment has embraced masking in public, especially in the US. More perplexingly still, many of these people regard any release from mask mandates as an attempt to take something precious away from them. They recall a certain kind of belligerent animal that gets trapped in a cage, and when you open the door it glooms in a corner and refuses to leave.

I like Bill Maher. He’s a rare practising left-wing comic who’s actually funny. But last week, his routine on cryptocurrency hit eerie harmonics. ‘I fully understand that our financial system isn’t perfect, but at least it’s real,’ he began. By contrast, crypto is ‘just Easter bunny cartoon cash. I’ve read articles about it. I’ve had it explained to me. I still don’t get it, and neither do you’. Bitcoin is ‘made up out of thin air’ and is comparable with ‘Monopoly money’. As for conventional legal tender: ‘We knew money had to originate from and be generated by something real, somewhere.

Last week, a bill cleared the US House Judiciary Committee that would establish a 13-person commission to consider federal reparations for slavery. Although similar legislation has been introduced in every Congress since 1989, this is the closest such a bill has ever advanced towards a full vote in the House. The President’s support for this pet far-left project is unsurprising. A reparations commission featured in Joe Biden’s campaign platform. Advocating the establishment of this commission is a hop, skip and a jump from advocating reparations, full stop. The UK’s proliferating parliamentary inquiries often function to kick sensitive subjects into the long grass. But an American panel convened to address such a hot topic would create expectations.