The Stormy Present

This week: Joe Biden the father wins out over Joe Biden the politician, and the mystery of outer London’s strange white posts. Plus, a philosophical question: how long is now?

Please forgive me for what I am about to write, but: there’s a scene in The West Wing I’ve been thinking about a lot this week. They’re practicing for a debate, and communications director Toby Ziegler asks President Bartlett, an opponent of capital punishment, if he wouldn’t want to see a theoretical man who theoretically raped and murdered his youngest daughter put to death. The President, flustered, responds with word salad; Toby loses it. “Yes, you’d want to see him put to death! You’d want it to be cruel and unusual, which is why it’s probably a good idea that fathers of murder victims don’t have legal rights in these situations!”

It’s all a prank, of course. (Whether anything involving some of the words in the previous paragraph could ever actually be particularly amusing is perhaps best left aside.) The President knows the answer: he was pretending he didn’t because he wanted to wind-up Toby. Later that season, something terrible truly does happen to his daughter, and he temporarily stands down, ceding power to his political opponents because he knows his judgement cannot be trusted right now. This, writer Aaron Sorkin is telling us, is what an honourable man would do.

But for all its surface attempts at verisimilitude, the world of The West Wing is about as realistic as that of Star Wars, and you needn’t turn to Donald Trump to find evidence that people with power do not in fact behave this way. In Britain the obvious example is Boris Johnson, but his predecessor Theresa May also repeatedly made decisions based on short-term political advantage, rather than the high principles we were told she possessed. On the far side of the world, President Yoon Suk Yeol just tried to impose martial law rather than lose power; and it’s a reassuring mark of the maturity of South Korean democracy that the rest of the government absolutely did not let him. There are counter examples available, sure; but if a political system gives someone power, you should probably assume there’s a chance that they’ll use it. This, as I’ve banged on about many times, was exactly what did for the Roman Republic.

All of which is a long way around to the news that Joe Biden has issued an unconditional pardon for his son Hunter, who was due to be sentenced this month on a series of federal felony charges. The president’s claim that “politics has infected this process” is undeniably true; the claim that it was “a miscarriage of justice” rather more questionable. The inevitable result has been screaming about corruption from Republicans, and criticism from those on the other side, who argue that the president has just given Donald Trump carte blanche to pull the exact same sort of tricks – as if there is any plausible universe in which he wasn’t going to do that anyway.

Whatever the politics of the situation, though, this decision strikes me as all but inevitable. Joe Biden lost his first wife and daughter in a car crash in 1972; his eldest son, Beau, died in 2015. Whatever he has or hasn’t done, Hunter is all that is left to Joe Biden of that family. The president is 82 years old. Of course he pardoned him. Who among us wouldn’t?

That does not, of course, make doing so either morally or politically right; but it does make it understandable. If a political system gives someone the power to save someone they love from jail, it’s absurd to imagine they’re not going to use it. The problem here is less with the president’s personal lack of moral fibre than it is with a weirdly monarchical political system which allows its president to pardon essentially whoever they want.

That system is about to hand all that power to a man with a damn sight fewer principles than Joe Biden. The real world is not scripted by Aaron Sorkin.

Self-promotion corner

So, firstly, thank you to the surprising number of newsletter readers who came to see me at Foyles on Thursday: the reason I had a queue to get through, while certain name broadcasters in my eyeline sat looking grumpy on their own for 20 minutes and then left, was almost entirely because of the readers of this newsletter, and I appreciated it very much.

My queue, feat. some of you people.

I didn’t win Foyles’ book of the year, by the way – despite making the shortlist, I lost to Sally Rooney; story of my life. But the book – which will make a quite excellent Christmas present for any human beings you happen to know – is still available from Waterstones, Foyles, Amazon or my American publisher, The Experiment.

If you couldn’t make it but would still like to see me in the flesh, your best shot is to come to the Comedy Store, Leicester Square, on Tuesday 10th. I’ll be on the panel for the Oh God, What Now? Christmas liveshow, chatting to Dorian Lynskey, Marie Le Conte and the Guardian’s John Crace about the events of 2024. You can get your ticket here.

How long is now?

I’ve written before about the challenge of understanding the past as we do the present: the difficulty of imagining the world as it appeared to our forebears, of differentiating between what would have felt recent to them, and what almost as historical as it does to us. But I recently had another thought about the problem we have in comprehending the world as it appeared to those who came before – one concerned not with how they conceived of past or future, but with how they saw the present. This too, frankly, might be the sort of thing they teach first year history undergrads, but I never was one of those so I’m writing it down. It can be summed up with a question: when did our present era start?

There are lots of different ways of answering the question, depending on who you are and where you live. From a British perspective – others are available – off the top of my head I can think of: