Power Trip by Damian McBride – digested read

I've spent many years writing things for other people: heartfelt conference speeches about my bosses' triumphs. Where did it get me? Out of a job, pissed and a bit broke. So now I am writing under my own name. And if I have chosen as my publisher a well-known Conservative blogger, who will time the serialisation of my book to be as disruptive as possible to the Labour party, let me assure you that I in no way intend to be disloyal to the Labour party.

Looking back, you could say I've always been a bit of a bastard. At Cambridge, I betrayed friends and threatened others with physical violence. But all I can say in my defence is that I have always tried to act in accordance with my Catholic faith, and it's not my fault that being a macho liar and a bully are precisely the qualities that politicians most value.

If you'd told me I'd spend my early working life looking through VAT forms, I'd have said you had the wrong man – but thankfully, I was still able to fit in 10 solid hours in the pub each day. I was soon identified as a steady pair of hands by Gordon Brown and was asked to join his team at the Treasury as an adviser. It was here that I first met the two Eds, who now appear to have absolutely no recollection of ever meeting me.I always found Ed Miliband to be extremely considerate when it was to his own advantage, but Ed Balls was more my kind of man. I once woke up in his bed at a party conference and made a grab for him, thinking he was some bird I'd pulled. Happy days.

I will obviously have to pad out the pages with lots of boring details you will want to skip. But to me, it was so all-absorbing, I didn't realise I had been dumped by my girlfriend until a year later. The hard-ons we got from sitting around government offices talking about how exciting it was to be at the centre of power had to be seen to be believed. Just imagine how important it feels to get a sentence into a budget speech and get driven around by chauffeurs.

Some people have asked what it was I actually did in government. What I did was survive for nearly 10 years, briefing against Gordon's enemies and killing any stories that might be damaging to him. Governing the country was always a secondary consideration; what mattered most was not to let anyone else have a go at doing it. Besides which, it was far easier to leak a few stories to lobby journalists about how we were going to be doing something, rather than actually do anything concrete. Gordon always thought the highlight of my career was me telling the papers he was responsible for Pink Floyd reforming at Live 8.

I should stress that never at any time did Gordon or the two Eds have any idea whatsoever that I was leaking stories to the media or briefing against colleagues. Every time something to our advantage dominated the headlines, they would all three gasp with amazement and say: "Wow! What a brilliant coincidence. Aren't we lucky to have so many coincidences! Are you sure you didn't have anything to do with this?" And I would reply: "I know I've got a reputation for being a bit of a liar, but I promise I'm not lying this time. Believe me, if I'd known the minister was shagging his secretary, I'd have told the Mail ages ago." And they would say: "You're so sweet, Damian."

Eventually, we all managed to force… I mean, Tony resigned. But Gordon's time in office was not as happy as it should have been. Mostly because of Ed's shit of a brother. Sadly, I had to resign after the only two emails I ever wrote plotting to smear rivals were leaked to the Telegraph, but my strong faith and the advance for this book have been a great comfort.

Digested, read digested: Sic transit gloria mundi.

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Books about the power of alone time

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'Playing With Water' is a good alone time book.

Our world is a relentlessly social one: We are plugging in, signing on and checking in, it seems, at all times. With the marvels of digital life so close at hand, it's easy to lose sight of solitude's benefits. So, it's more crucial than ever to make time for peace and privacy. From Susain Cain's Quiet to Thoreau's Walden, these books reveal the many ways alone time can enrich.

1. Solitude by Anthony Storr

British psychiatrist Anthony Storr challenges the established notion that love and friendship are the "only source of human happiness." Pointing to several figures throughout history--from Beethoven and Beatrix Potter to Ann Sexton--whose greatest achievements came about in moments of solitude, he argues that taking alone time can lead to an enhanced understanding of oneself, as well as bouts of superior creativity.

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2. Quiet by Susan Cain

In her recent bestseller Quiet (now out in paperback), Susan Cain introduces readers to the inner lives of introverts (people for whom alone time is the norm). Drawing on her own experience as an introvert in the high-octane world of corporate law, she argues that our culture's bias towards outspokenness and charisma leads us to overlook shy people and often miss out on their acumen and potential.

3. Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

A classic of solitary literature if there ever was one, "Walden" is the story of Henry David Thoreau's two-year retreat in rural Massachusetts, where he went to live as simply and "deliberately" as he could. Holed up in a spartan cabin and subsisting solely off the land, he chronicles his rugged education in self-reliance and his meditations on God, nature and society. The experience leaves him with an irrefutable sense of self-sufficiency and a deep appreciation for aloneness. As he puts it, "I never found a companion so companionable as solitude."

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4. Celebrating Time Alone by Lionel Fisher

Six years of living alone on an island in the Pacific Northwest showed freelance writer Lionel Fisher both the bliss and treachery of extensive solitude. Fisher shares wisdom from his own experience and those of others, exploring the perils of alienation and the ways in which extensive alone time can bring happiness. "What is tragic, and so wasteful of the sanctity of life," he writes on his website, "is that we seek our happiness, our fulfillment, our answers, our very identity in others when first we must find it in ourselves."

5. Playing with Water by James Hamilton-Paterson

In "Playing With Water," renowned British travel writer and novelist James Hamilton-Paterson describes his life on a remote island in the Philippines. With little to do beyond spearing his own fish, he looks back on his life thus far, observes the graces and pitfalls of island culture, and comes to discover the tenacity of his own self-reliance.

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This article was originally posted on Bookish.com.

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STICKS AND STONES: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy

Mar 15, 2013

Emily Bazelon
Random House
ISBN 978-0812992809
386 pages
$27

Reviewed by Vinca LaFleur

In researching her book "Sticks and Stones," Emily Bazelon was struck by how many of the adults she interviewed "could access, with riveting clarity, a memory of childhood bullying." Whether they had been victims, bullies or bystanders didn't seem to matter. "These early experiences of cruelty were transformative," she writes, "no matter which role you played in the memory reel."

Bullying isn't new. But our attempts to respond to it are, as Bazelon explains in her richly detailed, thought-provoking book. Scholarship on bullying has its roots in the 1970s, when Swedish psychologist Dan Olweus developed what became the gold standard for prevention programs in schools. Yet it wasn't until 1999, when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris opened fire on their Columbine classmates, that the United States began tackling the issue in a serious way.

Today, however, the challenge has been complicated by kids' access to new technologies, which have given rise to virtual tormentors, Cyberbullies and "Facebook thugs." Whether or not the Internet has made bullying more frequent, it has made it more pernicious and pervasive. Malicious gossip that once was limited to the hallways or the bathroom walls now spreads like wildfire through "the constant connectivity of cellphones and laptops." Harsh words hastily exchanged online can hit harder than when delivered face-to-face. Kids can't get away from bullies who pop up on the screens in their bedrooms. Emotional violence in the virtual world can inflict real pain.

Young girls, who tend to be greater users of social media, are especially at risk. As Bazelon describes, when the Pew Research Center asked 12- and 13-year-old girls, "Have you had a bad experience online that made you nervous about going to school the next day?," more than 25 percent said yes. The vicious online exchanges reprinted in "Sticks and Stones" could turn this 21st-century mom into a Luddite. Combine that with the headline-grabbing tragedies of young bullying victims who turn to suicide, and parents of adolescents can be forgiven for obsessing about the tech-toting teen barbarians at the gate.

Yet "Sticks and Stones" is not intended to fuel parental hysteria. Rather than bemoan the bullying epidemic, Bazelon reassures us that none exists - or at least that the statistics haven't really changed since the 1970s. To deal effectively with bullying, she asserts, we should "choose the response that fits the facts, not our less rational fears."

True bullying is characterized by repeated acts of physical or verbal aggression in which a physically stronger or more popular child wields that power over a weaker one. Conflict among equals and random acts of meanness don't qualify. This doesn't mean that what kids call "drama" is pleasant to live through. But the vast majority of young people never get involved in the oppressive brutality of bullying, and broadcasting that fact could in fact be helpful in combating the problem. As Bazelon points out, "When kids understand that concerted cruelty is the exception and not the rule, they respond: bullying drops, and students become more active about reporting it."

A law school graduate and journalist, Bazelon makes her case through the lens of three teenagers' experiences: A 13-year-old girl whose persecution began over a hairdo and escalated to the point that she changed schools; an eighth-grade boy who sued his school for failing to protect him against anti-gay harassment; and a female high school student who faced criminal charges in connection with the suicide of another teen who had been bullied before her death. Comprehensive in her reporting and balanced in her conclusions, Bazelon extracts from these stories useful lessons for young people, parents and principals alike.

Most enlightening and disturbing, however, is her discussion of social networking sites like Formspring and Facebook. These platforms can be potent conduits for cruelty; a 2011 survey by the Pew Center found that 15 percent of teens "said they'd been harassed on a social networking site in the last twelve months." Twenty million kids are Facebook users; and as Bazelon persuasively describes, Facebook could easily devote more resources to tackling online bullying, helping schools to do the same, and enforcing its own policies.

I was impressed, for example, by the influence Facebook holds over young users; 94 percent of objectionable Facebook users under 18 never caused a problem again after receiving just one official warning that "content they posted prompted an abuse report the site had investigated and confirmed." Yet Bazelon reports that the Facebook employees who review harassment complaints spend only a few seconds per case, and with 2 million abuse reports of all kinds pouring in every week, many seem to slip through the cracks. There's no hotline to get immediate relief from anti-social networking.

Bazelon concludes by urging parents to rethink the balance between how we let our kids spend their time and the way we supervise them: "If you wouldn't let your kids out at night alone, why would you give them unfettered access to every corner of the Internet?" In-person contact and communication are the cornerstones of healthy relationships. In an age where our kids can have 5,000 "friends," they need to learn what it really means to be one.

Vinca LaFleur is a partner at West Wing Writers.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE OBAMIANS: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power

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Washington Post book reviewers

Jun 15, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

James Mann
Viking
ISBN 978-0670023769
392 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Gideon Rose

The officials who make foreign policy don't have it easy. Trapped between the domestic political environment on one side and the international system on the other, they have only modest freedom to choose a course of action. They need to weigh the relative merits of several policy options on a vast range of intricate and thorny issues, many of them interconnected. And every few years, the senior management of the operation is completely replaced, with the top jobs going to newcomers who often know little about the issues in question.

How those newcomers handle themselves in office is a perennially interesting question and one that the journalist James Mann has made something of a cottage industry. His 2004 book, "The Rise of the Vulcans," chronicled the backgrounds and experiences of George W. Bush's initial foreign policy team, and "The Obamians" does something similar for the current administration.

Mann is a good reporter. He writes clearly and accessibly, often with insight and sound judgment. There are gaps in the new book's coverage (Israel, Europe, trade), but the subjects he does treat (national security, Afghanistan and Pakistan, China, the Arab Spring) are handled accurately and without ideological bias. And here, as before, Mann's strength remains his close attention to the political and professional backgrounds of key administration officials, many of whom he interviewed.

The portrait is mixed. Mann argues that Obama himself dominates foreign policy, relying on a few close junior staffers in the White House to execute his will while more senior, high-profile figures in the cabinet protect his political flanks. The president comes off as smart, disciplined and engaged, but also arrogant, controlling, thin-skinned and political. He gives big speeches filled with grand rhetoric and ambitious goals, but not much of that gets translated into policy or achievement. Obama tries to escape stark choices, preferring to reconcile seemingly opposed courses of action. The record includes some successes and some failures, some bullets dodged, and a lot of cans kicked down the road.

Little of this is wrong, but little is surprising either. The book is a good representation of conventional Washington discussion about the subject - event-driven, superficial and solipsistic. There is a lot of America in these pages, but not much foreign or policy.

At one point, Mann distinguishes between the actual Obamians (who had backgrounds in Congress and became the loyal White House aides) and a group of experienced Democratic foreign policy professionals he calls the Trout Fishers (because of their penchant for fishing excursions during meetings of the blue-ribbon Aspen Strategy Group). Compared to the Trout Fishers, the Obamians "tended to know less about the nuances and subtleties of an issue, and they were less concerned with the practical details of governance. They were, however, more adept at providing a determined opposition to the Republicans, and much better at figuring out what to say in public about foreign policy [during the 2008 campaign]. They found it easier to offer the broad perspective of outsiders."

The problem, of course, is that once in office, outsiders end up having to grapple with all those pesky nuances and details. The Obamians prove smart enough to understand that throwing the standard foreign policy playbook out the window will make things worse rather than better. And so they eventually trim their sails and act less transformationally than either supporters or opponents expected.

Mann tells this story, but because he rarely gets down into the weeds of specific policy choices, he doesn't give the reader a strong sense of why this evolution is usually a good thing. The reason is that, as the Trout Fisher types of both parties understand, the basic template for American foreign policy has been relatively constant for almost seven decades now and needs only tweaking and updating, not fundamental revision.

The central task facing each new administration is pretty much the same: figuring out how to consolidate, protect and extend the liberal international order that emerged in the West after World War II. This order had both domestic and international components: At its core were democracies with mixed economies cooperating and trading with each other, nestling closely under an American security umbrella. It has provided a framework within which local economic, social and political development has proceeded across the globe, to the net benefit of both the United States and the world at large. Generations of policymakers in Washington and allied capitals have nurtured and guarded their precious offspring, keeping at bay a host of dangers - war and aggression, economic nationalism, disruption and chaos.

The order derived from Western policymakers' reflections on the nightmares of the interwar period, when unregulated markets and uncoordinated behavior had led to economic disaster and the rise of aggressive dictatorships. The outlines of the system were sketched before the postwar break with the Soviet Union, and "containment" was a late (if complementary and appropriate) addition to the policy mix. Rather than saying that the Cold War caused the order, in other words, it is more accurate to say that the Soviet Union's unwillingness to take part in the order caused the Cold War. This is why the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union changed the world less than many expected: Since those were never central to the order itself, their passing did little to affect it, merely paving the way for its extension into areas of the world previously off-limits.

In recent years, the threats to the order have evolved. As the danger of conflict between the great powers has receded and globalization has taken off, terrorism - historically a secondary concern - has gained new importance. Countries such as China, India and Brazil have emerged as powerful regional actors and crucial pillars of an ever-more-interdependent global economy. U.S. influence in non-military arenas has diminished, and the institutions used to manage the system no longer work well. The challenge for policymakers in Washington and elsewhere today, therefore, is devising ways to revitalize the order, giving it a new lease on life so future generations, here and abroad, can continue to enjoy its benefits.

As for the Obama team's record on this front, history will probably say that they made some progress, primarily by cauterizing some of the wounds of the Bush years. Thanks to their efforts, the next administration will inherit a cleaner slate and be able to focus less on crisis management and more on the big picture of global governance. That might sound like a small win - but given the extraordinary stakes for which this game is being played, even a small win is welcome indeed.

James Mann is editor of Foreign Affairs.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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DRAWING POWER: A Compendium of Cartoon Advertising 1870s-1940s

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Washington Post book reviewers

Nov 25, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Rick Marschall and Warren Bernard
Fantagraphics
ISBN 978-1606993996
114 pages
$28.99

Reviewed by Michael Taube

Rick Marschall and Warren Bernard's "Drawing Power" is a provocative visual examination of the wonderful world of cartoon advertising. Popular comic strip characters such as Mickey Mouse, Little Nemo and Krazy Kat sold everything from cookies to tobacco. Lavishly and lovingly drawn by talented cartoonists, these ads had a tremendous effect on the financial viability of many products.

Marschall, a former political cartoonist, observes that comic strips and cartoons made the truth "accessible" and that when "lies are told, cartoon ads make the lies seem irrelevant." Moreover, Marschall notes, "at all times, they have made (selling) fun."

People took notice when R.F. Outcault's hugely popular character the Yellow Kid promoted High Admiral Cigarettes and his other popular creation, Buster Brown, peddled shoes. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck donned military uniforms for Sunoco Oil. Cartoon versions of baseball heroes such as Dizzy Dean, Joe DiMaggio and Hank Greenberg were in breakfast cereal ads. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola evidently had a good friend in cartoonist Fontaine Fox and his comic strip, "Toonerville Folks."

From an artistic point of view, the most impressive cartoon ads occurred during the 1910s and '20s. Cartoonists such as Winsor McCay "snapped to attention and supported America's intervention in the Great War," producing brilliant portraits of heroic infantrymen. Sheet music covers incorporated beloved comic strips such as George McManus' "Bringing Up Father." Bud Fisher's "Mutt and Jeff" landed on posters up and down the winding American landscape.

Marschall and Bernard have mixed an unusual batch of artistic and economic history. After reading this book, you'll never look at comic strips and capitalism the same way again.

Michael Taube is a Toronto-based columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and a former speechwriter for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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Joseph Nye picks 5 books about power

1.The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria (2008). Zakaria looks at whether the United States is in decline, and decides that the problem with the term “decline” is that, if it means absolute decline, as with ancient Rome, then it’s not a very good description. What the United States faces is not absolute decline but relative decline, in that the gap between the Unites States and other countries is diminishing with the rise of China, India, Brazil and others. Zakaria chose a happy term that is better than relative decline — “the rise of the rest.”

2.History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides (fifth century B.C.).Thucydides points out that sometimes people are worried not just about absolute gains but about relative gains. That is, we’re all getting better off, but if you’re getting a lot better off than I am, then you’re going to be able to exercise power over me, and I begin to develop anxieties. So when Thucydides is trying to account for the Peloponnesian War, an extraordinary war in the fifth century B.C. in which the Greek city-state system tore itself apart, he says the basic cause was the rise in power of Athens and the fear that this created in Sparta. He points out that this kind of fear, along with a belief that war is inevitable, can itself become a cause of war.

3.Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade, by Bill Emmott (2008). As we look at the rise of China, we have to ask whether China will present the kind of challenge to the United States that Athens did to Sparta. But Emmott argues that if you look more carefully, you see that Asia has its own internal balance of power. As China’s power grows, the Japanese, Indians — not to mention the Vietnamese, South Koreans and so on — become worried and ask themselves, how can we balance that power? That makes them actually welcome America’s presence.

4.Power: A Radical View, by Steven Lukes (1974). This book on radical views of power follows a tradition of people writing that power was the ability to get others to do what they otherwise wouldn’t do. Lukes said, wait a minute, if I can set the agenda so that your items don’t even arise for us to discuss, then I don’t have to twist your arm. What’s more, if I can establish your preferences, then I don’t have to coerce you to get you to do what I want. What Lukes did was to identify three faces of power: coercion and payments (or sticks and carrots); setting the agenda so that your issues don’t come up; and shaping your preferences so that you want what I want and I don’t have to spend anything on carrots and sticks.

5.Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It, by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake (2010). When you look at the enormous opportunities that the Internet has presented — economic efficiency, great communication — we generally think of the positive side. But Clarke and Knake point out that, as we open these opportunities, we also make ourselves vulnerable to their disruption. For example, you may have the capacity to do damage in the physical world just by sending electrons across a border. If there were suddenly a loss of electricity, water supply or transportation in the United States, we wouldn’t know who did it, a government or an individual. “Cyber War” is a useful introduction to the increasing availability of power to non-state actors.

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