USA

An unrecognizable nation.

Half the country thinks something has gone drastically wrong in America, to the point that it is rapidly becoming unrecognizable. Millions feel they are virtual lab rats in some grand research project conducted by entitled elites who could care less when the experiment blows up.

Consider: Our military turns over $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons to terrorists in Kabul and then flees in disgrace?

On stage at Wembley Stadium in late July, performing alongside his childhood buddy Bruce Springsteen, Steven Van Zandt looks entirely relaxed as the E Street Band hammer out Born to Run, Dancing in the Dark and The Rising to 90,000 fans. Twenty-four hours later, on stage at a screening theatre in Soho after the premiere of Disciple, an HBO documentary about his life, Van Zandt stands in front of just 100 people, many of them close friends and colleagues, and looks as if he’d rather be anywhere else.

He has long been lost to me.

We are deep into the 2024 presidential election cycle, and already we’ve had an assassination attempt, a ridiculous excuse for a substantive debate, and a major party candidate, Joe Biden, has dropped out of the race for reasons suspected to be related to his health. What else could happen?

Wait a minute! The replacement candidate for Biden is none other than his current vice president, Kamala Harris. Most people, Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike, believe Kamala was originally an accommodation to the Democrat Party ticket in 2020. After all, she is black…sort of…and she is a woman. She became a placeholder balance on the Democrat ticket to avoid the charge that the Democrats were just nominating another old, white guy. The DNC never considered Kamala as presidential material.

Ohio is a startling place for an Englishman. There are flashes of familiarity, of course: the low grey skies, unfashionable cities and place names: London and Portsmouth, Oxford and even Mansfield. Yet the longer you are there, the more you feel its Americana: the scale of suburban wealth and segregation, the presidential monuments and out of town shopping malls.

Ohio is America in many respects: a land of race and religion, LeBron James and the Tafts. And it is the epicentre of the new democratic world we are about to enter: the home of J.D. Vance and the Rust Belt rebellion. Ohio is the state that voted for Barack Obama, twice, and then for Donald Trump, twice. It’s a place that was once a swing state and could be again — but isn’t.

In the popular 2013 movie Olympus Has Fallen, a murderously efficient Secret Service agent played by Gerard Butler single-handedly defeats a North Korean assault team which has captured the White House and taken the president hostage.

That was by no means the sole offering in the genre that year. White House Down, starring Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx, followed a similar theme.

Going further back, Michael Douglas and Keifer Sutherland slugged it out in the 2006 caper Sentinel, while the 1993 movie In the Line of Fire had an ageing Clint Eastwood playing a haggard but determined agent on the presidential security detail.