Literary Observer re-aquaints himself with Ganesh as *flâneur?
Jun 25, 2025
Headline: How Los Angeles made the modern world
Sub-headline: The troubled city has done more than most to shape how people now live
https://www.ft.com/content/7f416e2b-a89b-4083-b3c2-77461d3986c4
It’s been sometime since I’ve read Mr Ganesh:
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*flâneur
someone who walks around not doing anything in particular but watching people and society:
She wanders around with her camera, a flâneur with a keen eye.
Lisbon is a city built for the ultra-relaxed, aimless flaneur.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/flaneur
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janan.ganesh@ft.com Denounces the American Hegemon & The Atlanticist Tories!
Political Observer comments.
May 29, 2024
The Reader confronts the latest of Mr. Ganesh’s essays, with his ability to view the 14 years of Tory rule, that has been shortsighted, across a range of issues. To express it in the blandest terms: which just might be the raison d’etre of this Ganesh intervention? The trivialization serves as the backdrop, for an apologetic that simply muddies the waters, of what an actual critical evaluation of those 14 years might be argued!
Boris Johnson, 2017: “We hear that we’re first in line to do a great trade deal with the US.” Liz Truss, 2019: “My main priority now will be agreeing a free trade deal with the US.” Dominic Raab, a cabinet eminence at around the same time: “President Trump has made clear again that he wants an ambitious trade agreement with the UK.”
Then Rishi Sunak on the same subject last summer. “For a while now, that has not been a priority for either the US or UK.” Oh.
This government’s single greatest disservice to the UK has been to misunderstand the US.
Mr. Ganesh’s political myopia eventuates, realizes itself , into an expression of a self-serving political refraction, that might capture the The Reader’s attention, in the moment. But on reflection is judged as disingenuous? And or leads The Reader to treat this as propaganda?
Editor: Brexit in the next paragraph becomes the ‘Paradise Lost’ in this narrative. A a huge bet on the economic openness of America is then argued as Derrida might have argued it, as an aporia ?
Brexit was, from the start, a huge bet on the economic openness of America. A bilateral trade deal with Washington was meant to offset the loss of unfettered access to the EU market. That no such deal emerged was bad enough (though as predictable as sunrise). But then Donald Trump and later Joe Biden embraced a wider protectionism. World trade is fragmenting as a result. So for Britain, double jeopardy: no agreement with America, but also less and less prospect of agreements with third countries.
Editor: I’ll select some quotes from the remainder of the essay.
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In essence, the nation staked its future on trade at the exact historical moment that it fell out of favour as an idea. It is the geostrategic equivalent of investing one’s life savings in a DVD manufacturer circa 2009.…
Anyone with a passing knowledge of Washington could have warned them not to confuse the place for a free-market bastion.
In 1992, the trade sceptic Ross Perot won 19 per cent of the national vote as an independent presidential candidate.
Editor: Potted American History:
Look at the dates here. This was the high summer of “neoliberalism”. Imagine how much stronger the protectionist impulse was in normal times. Or rather than imagine, check the record. It shows the tariff walls of the 1800s. It shows the statism of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln. Smoot-Hawley wasn’t an interwar aberration.…
But protectionist sentiment is a force in American life to an extent that it can’t be in a mid-sized, resource-poor archipelago. It is then transformed into policy via sectoral lobby groups of a scale and sophistication that must be seen up close to be believed.
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If I lived in a continental-scale market with superabundant resources, I’d need a lot of persuading from David Ricardo and The Economist that I am still better off trading. But that is the point. The Tories think the crucial fact about America is that it is made up of Britain’s “cousins”. (It isn’t, unless we are consulting the census of 1810.)
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After that, the next most important fact is its status. America is defending a position as the world’s number one power.
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Editor: Mr. Ganesh must realize that the Hegemon does as it pleases. The very history of Britain is defined by that practice, that claim!One needn’t admire this about the US. One can suspect it of hysteria, in fact. But the job of a British government is to fathom these things before betting the nation’s entire future on a hunch that America will forever uphold world trade.
Editor: the final paragraphs of this churlish meandering philippic come to an end!
This mistake came from “Atlanticist” Tories, remember — the ones who read Andrew Roberts and track the exact co-ordinates of the Churchill bust in the White House. (Barack Obama was hated for moving it.) Well, after giving it all that, these people failed on their own terms. They failed to understand US politics. Britain will foot the bill of their error for decades.
“Trade”: even the moral connotation of the word is distinct in each nation. It has had a high-minded ring to it in Britain ever since the abolition of the Corn Laws helped to feed the working poor. In America, where the cotton-exporting Confederates were free-traders, history isn’t quite so clear-cut. It is almost as if these are different countries.
https://www.ft.com/content/8f229e15-9842-46ce-a828-19647a48f6d6
Political Observer
Editor:
Paragraph 1.
Editor: Mr. Ganesh in this latest feuilleton is heavely embroidered with Players in the first unweildy paragraph:
Mr. Ganesh in this latest feuilleton that is heavely embroidered with The Players in the first unweildy paragraph:-a bilingual city with a Spanish name- English as the ruling language on Earth-the British empire-French when the Versailles treaty was drafted in Woodrow Wilson’s native tongue, not just Georges Clemenceau’s-Thank Hollywood for ending the contest. Thank Disney for not having to master le subjonctif.
Editor: Ganesh resorts to free imaginative variation as his argumentative toll of ghoice !
Paragraph 2.
My favourite American city is in trouble- Donald Trump-the National Guard there this month-No one ever confused LA’s public spaces with those of Zurich- High-profile deserters include Joe Rogan, now of Texas. Brian Wilson made the ultimate departure last week: his death all the more poignant because he fixed LA in the world’s mind as the cloudless Shangri-La it isn’t.
Paragraph 3.
Editor : Ganesh resortes to the jejune:
The city can turn things around. San Francisco to the north is getting better under a mayor who has brought such whimsical innovations as enforcing the criminal law.
Paragraph 4.
Editor: The unhappy marriage of Porn and Hollywood!
Count the ways. The “other” film sector, porn, whose base of operations is the San Fernando Valley — because which of us wouldn’t look better in that light? — has had even more effect on this century than Hollywood.
Paragraph 5.
Editor: Ganesh explores Architecture and West Hollywood: He is no Ada Louise Huxtable or Aline Bernstein Saarinen!
Paragraph 6.
Editor: Ganesh explores the Politics of LA with wide latitude:
Even in politics, LA has had bizarre influence for what is not even a state capital. The radicalisation of the American right in the past century, whose spillover effects are global, has origins in Orange County, among other sunbelt suburbs. Nixon and Reagan were southern Californians by upbringing or choice. It is unthinkable but true that LA was once seen as a Wasp haven from the “ethnic” east. Cold war hardliners weren’t out of place in a region whose wealth has always rested as much on Northrop Grumman as on Paramount Pictures. I wonder how much of Trump’s animus comes in part from a sense that LA is lost conservative ground.
Paragraph 7.
Editor: The Appearance of Francis Fukuyama, the Hegalian Pretender who became a ‘Liberal’, appears as the uttery dubious counterpoint to Ganesh L.A. Crush!
And for all the intellectual condescension towards LA, the most cited, if not understood, idea of recent decades came from a former analyst at Santa Monica’s RAND Corporation called Francis Fukuyama. (Though he was also a Washington hand. Perhaps no argument, let alone “The End of History?”, can take full shape when a beach is two blocks away.)
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Editor: The final paragraphs molded by Ganesh seven paragraphs, when the place name fails to beguile The Reader, he tosses in Werner Herzog. The repeating of those romantic place names fail to evoke in this Reader, what Ganesh finds of such moment. I long to drive up Alameda Street to Los Angeles, following the Railroad Tracks and seeing and smelling the air, and not seeing CityHall, now lost from view!
You will object that a lot of these impacts on the world aren’t for the better. But negative influence is still influence. If our present civilisation falls, and is dug up in some future renaissance, the proper excavation site will be LA. New York, London and Paris are “better” cities but how much has each done to change the human experience in the past half-century? Their role has become to contain things — almost literally all things — rather than originate them. This is what Werner Herzog was getting at when he cited LA’s “substance” as his reason for living there.
That substance might be running out. Hollywood seems creatively spent. The serious end of tech has never made the dash from northern to southern California that is forever in the offing. But the half-life of the influence that LA has exerted until now will run on for decades. The fundamental change that we are living through, from a culture in which the written word is central to one where the image is central, traces back to Hollywood. Perhaps another city is limbering up to take over as the moulder of the world. Until then, we all live in LA.
(*https://www.oed.com/dictionary/feuilleton_n?tl=true)
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