Our friends Peter and Andrea Rothberg are visiting (since Thursday). They are back for a second time and we have just returned from a wonderful long weekend in Lisbon. (More about that in a different post.) We went to the Tate Modern to see the Sir Elton John photography exhibit which I wrote about earlier. We also had time to see some of the other permanent exhibits. We were in the Rothko Room, full of paintings that were originally painted for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, when the museum closed and we were asked to leave. (Rothko cancelled the commissions and gave the works to the Tate. He committed suicide the week after they were installed.) I also discovered that the new wing of Tate Modern has a great view-point of London. See below.

“Art”: On the Friday after Andrea and Peter arrived, we went to the Old Vic to see “Art”, a play by the French playwright, Yazmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton. It is the 20th anniversary of its first production in London. (We saw it on Broadway with Alan Alda, Joe Morton and George Wendt sometime around 1999.) It is a play that is really about the relationships between three men. One of the three friends, Serge, has purchased an expensive, large painting that is entirely white. Serge, played by Rufus Sewall (probably best known for his recent portrayal of Lord M in the TV series “Victoria”) is a fan of this minimalist modern style and loves his painting. He invites his best friend, Marc (played by Paul Ritter), over and proudly shows it to him. Marc immediately hates it and is aghast that Serge bought it. He cannot conceal his alarm, anger and disgust. The rest of the play is about how their friendship is almost destroyed by the purchase of the painting. Marc feels betrayed and furious that Serge could have bought such a thing. And Serge is equally furious at what he sees as Marc’s condescending attitude and rigidity. Along the way, their other friend, Yvan (hysterically played by Tim West), finds himself in the middle of the argument. He tries to like the painting (even though he doesn’t really), which infuriates Marc and then infuriates Serge when he admits he doesn’t really like it that much. He becomes their punching bag as they fight with each other. It is a fascinating look at the nature of male friendship, as the rift caused by the disagreement about art escalates into increasingly hurtful statements about other, more personal subjects. And you could say that it is about men’s lack of empathy and the inability of individuals with strongly held beliefs to admit that someone with equally strong opposing beliefs may not be a fool. As the director’s notes point out, this second underlying theme has a great resonance today, in an England divided by Brexit and a world divided by Trump, where the opposing camps cannot bring themselves to even talk civilly to each other. It is wonderful and cleverly written in a style that is reminiscent of Stoppard. It takes a simple concept and creates a parable about life and friendship. And it manages the seemingly impossible by coming up with a resolution that does not seem contrived and is somehow satisfying. Another thing I’m going to miss about London: The Old Vic.

It Looks Like We Will Avoid Deportation: You may recall that we were somewhat concerned that our visas are scheduled to expire on the 9th of February, but we intend to keep living here until early April. We were concerned that Judie might be closely questioned upon our return from Lisbon and she had letters from the law firm explaining that she was now officially working in the New York office (and therefore no longer needs anything more than a visitor’s visa). The immigration law specialist hired by the firm seemed to think that there was a possibility that it would not work and we would have to leave or something. But, as it turned out, the Immigration person had no interest in Judie’s letters and just let us in on visitor’s visas with virtually no fuss at all. It was a relief for us, as this particular detail of our repatriation has been worrying us for weeks.

Brexit Update: May Wins, Labour in Disarray: This week the entire Breixt process leading to the UK leaving the EU became officially irreversible (although it has seemed like an unstoppable lava flow for months). In response to the High Court’s ruling that the Article 50 notice (beginning the process of leaving the EU) had to be approved by Parliament, the Conservative submitted a very short bill that gives Theresa May a blank check. The Tories were solidly behind it (except for Kenneth Clark, a voice crying out in the darkness that has become the Conservative Party) and beat back efforts by some MPS to amend the bill. The Scottish National Party was opposed. Corbyn and Labour found themselves in a difficult spot. Many of the traditional Labour constituencies in the Midlands and elsewhere voted heavily to leave and they were justifiably concerned that voting against the triggering of Article 50 might lead to an electoral rout. So Corbyn decided that Labour had to support the bill and ordered a “Three-line whip” be issued. (This is a message to the Labour MPs about an upcoming vote. If the message is underlined once, the members are urged to come and vote, underlined twice and the members are told that this is a very important matter. If it is underlined three times, the MPs are told that they must vote and are instructed on how they must vote.) About 50 Labour MPs defied Corbyn (and the three-line whip) and voted against the bill. They were from places that voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU and really had to oppose it. But this is simply not done in Parliament and this sort of rebelliousness is unusual. Several front-benchers in the shadow cabinet voted against the bill and therefore had to resign their positions. Why Corbyn couldn’t have given his members a “free vote”, avoiding the inevitable resistance is beyond me. It all just reinforces the pre-existing story line that he doesn’t know what he is doing and that Labour is in disarray. So May wins overwhelmingly (so overwhelmingly that there is no chance of the House of Lords doing anything) and the Brexit process will start in the next six weeks. The two-year negotiations are unlikely to go well or even be completed, so this could turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory for her.

A Brief Political Rant: We are living in such a weird time. A few hundred thousand votes and Hillary is President, there might be a Democratic majority in the Senate and all the pundits would be writing about the dismal future of the GOP. But for whatever reason, those votes did not materialize and we are faced with Trump, which would be bad enough for one lifetime, but also a Republican Party whose awful partisanship and refusal to govern has been rewarded. With Republicans in charge, one would expect all sorts of terrible things–giveaways to the rich, attempts to shred the safety net as much as possible, attacks on the EPA, the CFPB and Dodd-Frank. Elections have consequences and at least some of these horrible things will inevitably happen. I’m not sure that we can fight all of them. And I don’t know where Democrats would get by being simply the party of “No”, as the GOP was for six years, especially since they are in the minority. There has to be resistance, but it has to be smart and constructive resistance, with apositive message underlying it. And there are lines in the sand that must be drawn that will lead to bloody fights.

Trump is a sort of different matter. It is important to call him out on his endless false statements and the fact that his administration is utterly feckless and incompetent. I  personally have no real hope that the Republicans will impeach him, but I think he can and will be weakened. But to obsess on every stupid tweet and crazy statement seems also to be self-defeating. It is important to make some distinctions over the merely idiotic and venal things he says and the things he says that threaten tyranny. There really is a difference between complaining about Nordstom’s and threatening the judiciary. We are teetering on the edge of an abyss. It is not hard to envision a situation in which the USA slips into tyrrany. What we do as a country over the next several months and years will have an inordinate impact on the future of the world. This is all frightening in a way that Reagan or W were not.

Administrative Note: I’m going to change to the premium version of Word Press this weekend. This will change the address of this blog to nickinshoreditch.com. If you are signed up to get notifications by e-mail, this may not matter, but if you are used to just getting it through a browser, you won’t be able to find my blog using the current URL. So if you are looking for nickinshoreditch.wordpress.com and it isn’t popping up, then I’ve made the change. I’ll post an announcement on Facebook and one more right before I make the change.

Trump from a Distance: I have been blessed to be in London for this election season. Things like the interminable primary debates were on to late to watch (and I’m sure that I would have compulsively watched many of them, given the opportunity). I have missed endless Trump stories and hours upon hours of blathering by various talking heads. Which is not to say that the BBC doesn’t pay any attention to the election, it just has other stuff to cover and only spends a few minutes on the proceedings. Trump was, at first, an object of fascination to most Brits, who all wanted to know if he was a serious candidate and could someone like him actually get nominated. I have to say that I discounted Trump for far too long. After he was nominated, the questions changed from “How could he have been nominated?” to “He can’t win, can he?” to “My G0d, what is going on in America?” I have taken to compulsively checking FiveThirtyEight (Nate Silver), as well as the Times and the New Yorker and the Guardian to try to get a sense of what is going on in this miserable excuse for democratic process.

Now that the Trump campaign seems to be in a Trump-perpetuated death spiral, there is a palpable sense of relief here and I suspect in large parts of the US. But, even if Trump does lose and even if he loses in a landslide (which seems more likely than not), it is hard to feel very good about the future. It is difficult to picture Hillary being able to govern effectively, since she is unlikely to have a cooperative Congress, is reviled by so many and faces a Republican machine that will do what they did to Obama only much worse. The Republican Party seems likely to fracture and be in such a mess that it cannot be a responsible partner in government (recognizing that a significant percentage of their leaders have no interest in such a role anyway). And all of those angry Trump people, who have now been energized, are not going to go away. (And, unfortunately, neither will Trump.) Americans should not feel too smug about the defeat of Trump or claim that “It can’t happen here.” In fact, Trump proved that it could happen and if he was a not so clearly a bat shit crazy narcissist and sexual predator, he might very well have been elected  President next month.

“Merchant of Venice”: On Yom Kippur, of all days, we went to the Globe to see “The Merchant of Venice” with Jonathan Pryce as Shylock. Our seats were not great (don’t get seats on the side there if you ever go) and there was a major rain storm about 30-40 minutes into the play, which soaked the people standing in the pit. (The Globe has no roof, although the seats and the stage are mostly protected.) Then the temperature dropped and the wind kicked up and it was positively frosty. Not at all Venetian. (It is strange commenting on the weather when talking about a play.) Despite all of that, I did enjoy the performance. I had forgotten much of the plot other than the Shylock bits, particularly the sections in which Portia’s suitors are tested to see if they can marry her. These scenes were wonderfully done. The cast was typically very good. British actors just do Shakespeare really well, although sometimes overeager directors with weird interpretations let them down. Perhaps it is part of their training that accounts for it. Shylock’s daughter was played by Pryce’s real-life daughter, which was actually more of an interesting footnote than something which added to the overall performance. Rachel Pickup, who played Portia, the dominant part in the play, was marvelous. I suppose that you could play Shylock differently than Pryce did, but it is hard to imagine it being played any better.

Of course, the overriding theme that makes the play great and the thing that you come away thinking about is the anti-semitism. It is actually remarkable that Shakespeare was able create the character of Shylock since, as the programme points out, there were virtually no jews in England during Elizabethan times. (It was dangerous enough being the wrong type of Christian in the era.) This actually seemed to make the anti-semitism of that time even worse, as there were no actual humans to put the lie to the crazy tales and conspiracy theories that dominated. Shakespeare’s audience would certainly have been utterly anti-semitic and ready to accept any sort of evil characterization of a jewish money-lender. But Shakespeare went out of his way to make Shylock human (“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”) and, it seemed to me, showed that he was responding to horrible treatment over many years by Antonio and the other merchants of Venice, who repeatedly spit on Shylock in the course of the play. Pryce’s Shylock was so reasoned and aggrieved that I found myself rooting for him to get his pound of flesh. But, of course, there was no way that Shakespeare could allow the Jew to win and Portia snatches victory away from him and replaces it with ruin and the humiliation of forced conversion to Christianity. Pryce’s performance made it clear that it was the latter result that was by far the worst. But in a way, Shylock brought this on himself by his hatred and desire for revenge. And I think that was the real moral of this production: that unreasoning hatred and the compulsion to get revenge can only lead to calamity.

Brexit Update: For some reason, the New York Times has suddenly become interested in Brexit and its impact on the British economy and government and has published a number of articles this week. I suspect this might reflect concern over the weakening pound and how this will play out in the world economy. Here are few impressions from this side of the pond:

• The pound has started to fall again, after seeming to stabilize after its initial plunge. I’d say that this reflects market worry about the future of the British economy. Until recently, you could kid yourself that it wouldn’t be that bad and that Theresa May wouldn’t let things get out of hand. You’d have been wrong. May made it clear at the Conservative Party Conference recently that Brexit was happening and that Britain would not accept any deal that included freedom of movement. The government later announced that it would not let any foreign nationals (even those who were teaching at the London School of Economics) participate in the Brexit negotiations (even though it is generally agreed that Britain is woefully short of experienced negotiators). And then it was announced that businesses would be required to disclose the number of foreigners it employed. As it became obvious that the xenophobic kooks were taking charge, the pound began to fall.
• This led to the Great Marmite Controversy. Because the pound had lost almost 20% of it value, Unilever wanted to increase its price for the items it sells to Tesco, the largest grocery chain in Britain. A stalemate ensued and soon Tesco began to run out of the beloved yeast goo. This caused outrage, only in part because Marmite is actually produced in England. I think what really scared people is that this was a clear harbinger of price increases to come.
• Meanwhile, back in Parliament, the tenuous Conservative majority was facing the same problems with delusional back-benchers that had bedeviled Cameron. This group of 100 or more MPs keep talking about “sovereignty” and returning Britain to it position of greatness. So far, their big idea is to re-commission a Royal Yacht for the Queen, with the supposition that everything will return to Rule Britannia. It would be pathetically funny if it all weren’t so serious. May’s honeymoon period seems to have run its course.
• Just this week, the highest British court has begun to hear a case which seeks a “constitutional” ruling (there is no written Constitution here) that May and her ministers cannot unilaterally invoke Article 50 to begin the process of leaving the EU. It is argued that the treaty that would be abrogated was ratified by Parliament and therefore can only be terminated by that body. Anther argument that the entire basis of unwritten British constitutional law is that Parliament is paramount and that an irreversible act of that import must be taken by that supreme legislative body. These seems like winning arguments to me. If the suit is indeed successful, turmoil is certain.
• And then there is Boris Johnson and the Brexit troika of ministers. Last week, BoJo said that the aim of Britain in the negotiations with the EU is to “have our cake and eat it to.” This was instantly denounced by European leaders and seemed to harden their negotiating resolve (not that BoJo and his buddies have any sort of negotiating position beyond bluster). The European President suggested that Johnson buy a cake, eat it and see what he had left.
• In the background, Judie’s bank clients are asking for advice about where to move their offices. Dublin, Frankfort and Paris may scoop up a lot of EU banking business that has been centered in London, which would be a complete disaster for the post-industrial British economy. A “hard Brexit”, in which the banks would lose their “passporting rights” (i.e., the ability to apply their British license throughout Europe) would make this inevitable. But this complete break from Europe is exactly what the most delusional MPs insist upon.