Let’s begin on a humorous note. I couldn’t really improve on the Craig Brown diary of Barack Obama in Private Eye (date lost).

It recounts Obama and his daughter waiting to buy an ice-cream at the beach:

private eye


‘ “Next!” says the gentleman in the ice-cream truck. And then he addresses me in this way. “Sir, if you can’t make up your mind, I’m gonna have to ask you to move. Others are waiting.”
I step aside and turn to Malia Ann. “This is a defining moment, Malia Ann,” I say.
“A moment when it pays us to heed the will of those who follow us.
“To stand in line avails us nothing, Malia Ann, if by so doing we fail to match their courage and determination, their hard work and sacrifice, with equal measures of resolve.
“Without that resolve, we shall not gain our popsicle.
“Yes, Malia Ann, we have a popsicle to pursue, and we must resolve to pursue that popsicle until we have that popsicle in our hands, ready to consume -- to consume without fear, to consume without favour.” ’

That’s not the best bit. I’m not sure it captures the Yoda-like cadences of POTUS. But I chuckled.

So, on to the man’s potential Waterloo. Patrick Cockburn writes “Return to Afghanistan” for the 11 June 2009 (Vol. 31/No. 11) of the London Review of Books. Among other prescient revelations he reports:

“Will the surge work? The problem for the US military is that whatever goodwill they have earned by building schools, roads, and bridges can be quickly lost. A quarter of Afghans approve of the use of armed force against US or Nato forces, but this figure jumps to 44 per cent among those who have been shelled or bombed by them . . . .The US military is supposedly more sensitive about inflicting civilian casualties because of the Iraq war, but there is little sign of [it].”

Another favourite piece in LRB is the Diary. 2007 Booker Prize winner Anne Enright got in hot water that year by writing that she actually couldn’t trust the McCanns (particularly Gerry) though she could quite figure out why their grief at the loss of a daughter felt so false. This year on 28 May she describes travel (48 nights away from home in one year). Some observations are obvious (hotel residents are mostly white and male; cleaning staff is universally female and mostly Asian). She also writes:

“Hotel bathrooms are highly fetishised, with their rows of toiletries, and the possibility of a sewing kit. I love the showers and have a faint, geological interest in the tiling (so much marble!), but I hate the toiletries, most of which could strip paint. There was a nice body lotion by Roger & Gallet once, that smelt of cucumber – but once is not enough out of so many, many hundreds of little plastic bottles, refilled or thrown away by the chambermaid the next day. I hope she steals them . . . .”



Predictably, among English-language journals, few are better written than The New Yorker, even if standards are not as high as once. Among my favourite articles was Jonah Lehrer’s “DON’T-- The Secret of self-control” (18 May) which describes research that indicates children who are patient (eg, control impulses in exchange for reward) are more academically successful and tend to have more stable careers. According to the “science”:

“Even the most mundane routines of childhood –– such as not snacking before dinner, or saving up your allowance, or holding out until Christmas morning –– are really sly exerciese in cognitive training: we’re teaching ourselves how to think so that we can outsmart our desires.”

Anyone who has heard me extemporise on cheap food, knows that I see the great achievement of government policy in the US and UK is to have made poor people (and middle income for that matter) fat with inexpensive, highly processed crap –– such as the factory farmed chicken with its added benefit of notoriously high levels of hormones and antibiotics.

Elizabeth Kolbert is probably my most envied staff writer, given that she has dismantled the climate change sceptics and shown repeatedly how the phenomena is happening. Now. On July 20, however, a book review “XXXL -- Why are we so fat?” caught my eye. Pouring through a few books, she writes that neither evolution (we were meant to be more active) nor price (coca cola is 20 per cent cheaper now than in the early 80s) can explain why we’re becoming tubbies. There is also behaviour called “conditioned hypereating” which is abetted by food manufacturers calculating the precise ratios of fat, sugar, and salt to keep us at the proverbial trough. And how “super-sizing” seems to fit our desires, too. Give us a lot and we’ll bloody well eat it. Don’t blame Mcdonald’s entirely. The practice apparently began with popcorn portions at the cinema.  Even recipe books are at it: The number and amount of ingredients stay the same but the number of servings produced magically dropped.

Finally she comes to the global situation and indeed America might be lagging (although surely countries such as Slovakia or Cyprus started at a lower point). My pet theory pops up in a book called Globesity: “[I]n the new world order, it is possible to be overweight and malnourished . . . ." Kolbert concludes:

“The problem goes even beyond the corporate interest that have brought us ‘eatertaining’ foods, Value Meals, and oceans of high fructose corn syrup. Collecting the maximum number of calories with the least amount of effort is, after all, the dream of every creature, including those too primitive to dream. With the BK™ Quad Stacker –– four beef patties, four pieces of bacon, and four slices of cheese for $4.99 –– man edges close to realizing this ambition. And that’s without the fries.”