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Coming to America

Back in the olden days, American immigration protocols were little more than a punchline for the bien-pensant: the way that you always had to answer the question about whether you were, or ever had been, a member of the Communist Party. You ticked the box saying no, you entered the country, you got on with your life.

Things are very different now. People who follow immigration issues closely already know this, but it seems to me at least that most of the recent changes in the law have generally gone unnoticed.

Many of the changes seem designed to maximise inconvenience. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, no longer exists: it has been moved from the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security, and its name has been changed to the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, or BCIS. The old enforcement role of the INS didn't move to BCIS, however: it's now a different part of Homeland Security, called the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Meanwhile, the arm of the government which actually issues visas remains the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the State Department, although State seems to have much less control over what it does and how it does it than it used to. Unless you come from one of 27 countries, you always need a visa to visit the US, but until now individual consulates have had a lot of discretion in terms of the hoops they may or may not force people to jump through before getting one. Starting tomorrow, however, every single visa issued for entry into the United States will have to follow a personal interview between the applicant and a consular offficial.

It's not like the system is working smoothly at the moment and will easily be able to cope with the extra workload. Back in May, when the system changed and most people started having to have interviews, the State Department said that

Visa applications are now subject to a greater degree of scrutiny than in the past. For many applicants, a personal appearance interview is required as a standard part of visa processing. Additionally, applicants affected by these procedures are informed of the need for additional screening at the time they submit their applications and are being advised to expect delays. The time needed for adjudication of individual cases will continue to be difficult to predict. For travelers, the need for an interview will mean additional coordination with the embassy or consulate is needed to schedule an interview appointment. We recommend that individuals build in ample time before their planned travel date when seeking to obtain a visa.

Now, things are only going to get worse. Whole classes of visitors, like South Koreans over the age of 55, who were not interviewed until now, will have to start waiting for appointments. (The Seoul consulate is the most overworked in the world: since South Korea isn't part of the visa waiver scheme, every Korean in the US needs a visa, and there are a lot of Koreans travelling here.)

It's not just Koreans who are going to be inconvenienced, however. The waiting time for obtaining a visa in Delhi is already legendary, and even America's best friends, the Israelis, have to go in for a personal interview if they want to be able to travel to the United States.

You even need a personal interview if all you're doing is changing your visa. Here's a true story: a Turkish journalist was working for a US news organisation on an H visa, and then switched jobs to work for a Turkish news organisation. So he applied for, and received, a change of status from the Department of Homeland Security: they approved his change from working on an H visa to working on an I visa. (These things are incredibly important if you're a foreigner in the US.) The journalist then was sent down to Venezuela to cover the demonstrations there, whereupon he learned that he wasn't allowed to return to the US. He had his authorisation from Homeland Security, but he didn't have his actual new visa, from State. To get that, he had to fly from Venezuela to Turkey, apply for the visa in Istanbul, get the piece of paper in his passport, and then, finally, go back home.

While all these things are justified in the name of increased national security post-9/11, most of the inconveniences with the system seem to be bureaucratic snafus rather than anything justifiable on the grounds of the war against terror. It's hard to understand, for instance, why I would need to register with the State Department just to be able to get a driver's license, and only because I'm a journalist.

And things are going to be getting worse for the foreseeable future. By October 26 next year, for instance, all US visas will have biometric information embedded in them somehow – the State Department isn't entirely sure how, yet. There will certainly be a photograph, and probably a fingerprint, or maybe some kind of retinal scan. Once I get my next visa, I'll probably have my fingerprints or irises checked every time I come into the country. There's no way that that is going to speed up the lines at JFK.

I'm lucky, however, that I'm from one of the 27 visa-waiver countries, rather than one of the 27 NSEERS countries, since citizens of those countries are already fingerprinted and photographed every time they enter the US. (Since State does visas and Homeland Security does immigration, the two programmes are completely separate, and soon visitors from these countries are going to have to be fingerprinted twice before they enter the country: once when they apply for their visa, and then a second time at the airport.)

NSEERS, which stands for National Security Entry Exit Registration System, is by far the most Big Brotherish of the government's programmes. It's expanding fast: it started with just Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria – the countries you can imagine that the US would be most worried about. Soon men from Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen were added to the list: it seems that the US was keen to cover pretty much the entire Arab world. Next came Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, followed by Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, and Kuwait.

Yes, all men from friendly, secular Muslim countries like Egypt and Indonesia now have to get fingerprinted upon arrival in the US, and then need to report to the authorities after being here for 30 days and then every year thereafter. If they arrived here before the rule was enacted, they need to report to an Immigration Office anyway. And if anything is found to be amiss with their status, they'll probably be deported.

It gets worse. It's not only INS (sorry, BCIS) agents who are going to be wielding this kind of power – after all, they've been doing that kind of thing for years. But here's John Ashcroft, announcing the scheme:

When aliens violate these rules, we will place their photographs, fingerprints, and information in the National Crime Information Center (or NCIC) system. The nation's 650,000 police officers check this system regularly in the course of traffic stops and routine encounters.
When federal, state and local law enforcement officers encounter an alien of national security concern who has been listed on the NCIC for violating immigration law, federal law permits them to arrest that individual and transfer him to the custody of the INS.

In other words, get caught speeding – or even just get stopped as part of a routine traffic stop – and you could be deported. And if you're burgled, or assaulted, if you're being abused, or being paid less than the minimum wage, don't even think about going to the police. If John Ashcroft was deliberately trying to create a scheme where immigrant communities would be cut off from the rest of society and pushed into taking the law into their own hands, he could hardly have designed it better.

What's more, the government isn't going to stop now it's covered the entire Muslim world. Notes Ashcroft: "Congress has mandated that, by 2005, the Department of Justice build an entry-exit system that tracks virtually all of the 35 million foreign visitors who come to the United States annually."

So along with their biometrically-enhanced visas, some 35 million visitors a year to the Land of the Free are going to be tracked by the Department of Homeland Security. Here's Ashcroft again:

We are an open country that welcomes the people of the world to visit our blessed land. We will continue to greet our international neighbors with good will. Asking some visitors to verify their activities while they are here is fully consistent with that outlook.

So just remember, next time you're asked to "verify your activity", that in fact you're beeing greeted with good will. There. It doesn't seem so bad, now, does it?

Posted by Felix at 13:47 EST | Comments (0)

Dia:Beacon

I went up to Dia:Beacon last month, and wrote it up for Loft magazine, available in English at all good Miami newsstands. For those of you without easy access to a Miami newsstand, however, here's the article: enjoy!

Since long before the Guggenheim Museum single-handedly revitalised the entire Basque economy with its Gehry-designed, titanium-clad outpost in Bilbao, it has been an article of faith among museum directors that new art galleries have to make a splash. Whether it was Renzo Piano and Norman Foster in Paris or James Stirling in Stuttgart, architecture has long trumped art: the thing you most remember after visiting these places is the building, not its contents. Eventually the process reached its logical conclusion when crowds lined up around the block to view Daniel Libeskind’s new – and empty – Jewish Museum in Berlin.

But that is all in the past. To see the future, you need to travel 80 minutes up the Hudson River from New York City, to the characterful if crumbling town of Beacon. Built on light-industrial manufacturing and long in decline, Beacon has suddenly become revitalized by the construction and opening of the world’s biggest museum of contemporary art.

Dia:Beacon breaks all the rules. For one thing, no big-name architect is claiming credit for it; for another, it’s all but invisible from any direction until you’re more or less on top of it. The views you remember after a visit there are not from the outside looking in, but rather from the inside looking out: standing in a gallery full of John Chamberlain sculptures, with the verdant riverside forest visible through the characterful old windows which let in more light than you’ve ever experienced in an art museum before.

Direct sunlight has historically been the enemy of fine art, which can be damaged by unfiltered ultraviolet radiation. But Dia has an art collection full of pieces made of steel, glass or string, and these – impervious to light damage – have never looked better than they do here.

The centerpiece of the collection is a series of monumental sculptures by Richard Serra, installed where the rail sidings used to be – Dia:Beacon is housed in a converted Nabisco packaging factory. Serra has bent and torqued enormous slabs of Cor-Ten steel into previously unimagined forms, and the unidirectional light coming from the high windows causes them to cast dramatic shadows on themselves which change in subtle and unexpected ways over the course of the hours and months. Serra’s most recent sculpture, 2000, takes the visitor on a spiral journey into a light-and-dark-filled inner sanctum with walls the color and texture of ancient sandstone. A sign at the entrance to the gallery admonishes visitors to “please do not touch the artworks,”but everybody does: they have no choice, in fact, given the narrowness of some of the steel corridors into which they are forced.

Dia is full of such pieces: works which engage the body of the viewer, rather than just his eye or brain. Fred Sandback, for instance, uses the simplest possible means – lengths of acrylic yarn -– to literally carve out spaces in the gallery. You walk up to them and then you walk through them: almost as if you’ve become a ghost who can walk through walls. The feeling is one of heightened sensitivity: suddenly cracks in the poured-concrete floor take on a sculptural significance.

The idea of art residing not in a single object but rather in the way that a viewer experiences a space is common to many of the artworks at Dia. Robert Ryman, for instance, has taken his paintings – which started off as more-or-less conventional oil on canvas – and both pared them down and expanded them, so that distinctions between the painting, the wall on which it is mounted, and the gallery space in which the wall is contained all start to blur in to each other. And Robert Irwin, who was one of the first artists to explore such boundaries of what could and couldn’t be considered art, has worked entirely outside the formal gallery space altogether, landscaping Dia’s gardens and car park.

Meanwhile, Walter De Maria has a series of highly poliched stainless steel squares and circles running in parallel down the length of two long, long galleries. Most visitors don’t spend much time with them, but in a sense that doesn’t matter: even if they don’t consciously realise that the forms get slightly bigger or smaller, nearly all the people who visit Dia will on some kind of level get a frisson of distorted perspective.

Such works change the whole experience of museum-going: rather than simply walking around looking at paintings on walls, Dia’s patrons become that much more highly attuned to everything around them, even when they leave the gallery entirely. This is what happens when artists, rather than architects, take control of a building.

Dia spent a lot of time and money making sure that the necessary infrastructure of a modern art museum was invisible to the visitor. “A lot of expense went into making it look like the building was a raw, mechanical structure,” says Michael Govan, Dia’s director. Govan likens the roof of the gallery to a computer chip: in order to maintain the cleanliness of the gallery spaces, all the pipes, wires and whatnot got bumped up top. “The idea was that it would have that simplicity and calm and light and space,” he says – and it does. Such simplicity doesn’t come cheap: Dia:Beacon cost more than $57 million to construct and renovate, even after having been given the building for free by International Paper, its most recent owner. The amount is pretty reasonable on a per-square-foot basis (there are 240,000 square feet of exhibition galleries alone), but Govan would still take it as a compliment to be told that it doesn’t feel like $57 million has been spent here. You’re not meant to admire the architecture: you’re meant to admire the art.

And there’s a lot of art to admire, arranged in rooms which were designed, mostly, with the active cooperation and involvement of the artists concerned. Every artist gets his or her own space or spaces, which means that there’s almost nothing in the way of curatorial mischief. (The closest Dia comes is probably placing an early Richard Serra scatter piece right next to Joseph Beuys, emphasizing how similar these titans of European and American contemporary art really were.)

So Richard Serra divides up the gallery into narrow, claustrophobic spaces filled with massive works; Gerhard Richter installs a series of gray mirrors underneath a clerestory of skylights; and Louise Bourgeois retreats, insect-like, to the attic, where she installs one of her trademark spiders, as well as a haunting, darkened shrine full of sexual menace.

But interestingly, often it’s the dead artists who come off the best. Dan Flavin’s huge series of fluorescent-light “monuments” are stunning in the daylight next to a window-filled wall, while painting cycles from both Blinky Palermo and Andy Warhol sit simply and beautifully under the natural light of Dia’s north-facing sawtooth skylights.

Living artists like Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin, on the other hand, seem to have done their best work in the early 60s, near the beginning of their careers, and have indulged their freedom to exhibit what they want by showing too much of their weaker, later pieces.

But that’s the way that Dia works, and is meant to work. Dia was founded to be, and remains, a place which supports a few artists in an extremely generous manner – hence the fact that this enormous museum houses the work of just 24 artists. The vast majority are going to be here permanently: if you come back in 20 years’ time, this place will look much the same as it does now. It’s the kind of legacy most artists can only dream of, especially when they themselves are involved in every aspect of the installation of their own work.

For Dia takes the historical perspective: Govan points out that Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field – another Dia project – has been seen by some 15,000 people since its installation near Quemado, New Mexico, in 1977, despite only a handful ever experiencing it at any one time. He’s therefore comfortable not spending any money on advertising, since over a period of decades it’s inevitable that a huge number of people are going to pass through his doors. Here’s one man refreshingly free of the feed-the-masses culture seen at places like the Guggenheim or the Tate – a museum director who seems genuinely not to care how many people visit his flagship venue. “Whether it’s 50,000 or 200,000 people a year,” he says, “is not really a huge concern.”

Posted by Felix at 15:21 EST | Comments (4)

Girlie Mags and serious journalism

Seth Mnookin had quite a scoop yesterday: it looks like Penthouse is about to go under. Apparently Friday's paychecks were slashed by 75%, and the parent company's long-precarious finances have never looked worse. The latest issue of Penthouse could be the last ever: something even owner and editor-in-chief Bob Guccione is not blind to. He told the New York Times over a year ago that there is “no future for adult business in mass market magazines.”

Mnookin says that

For years, Penthouse has been squeezed from both directions by the Scylla and Charybdis of men’s entertainment. On the one side, the monster growth of hard-core pornography on the Internet has meant that consumers no longer need to suffer the embarrassment of receiving their mail in plain brown wrappers. On the other side, the rise of laddie publications like Maxim and FHM has meant there are publications that show a lot of skin without the stigma of being pornographers.

He's undoubtedly right, but I think he misses something. Playboy and Penthouse are unique among magazines in that they attempt to deliver everything a man might want: smut, yes, but also (gasp!) interesting articles. The death of Penthouse might not mean much by itself: it will rank quite a ways down the list of what Matthew Rose calls the "little scandals" of magazine closings, well below Talk and Rosie. It is, however, symptomatic of a broader phenomenon: that of the ghettoisation of intelligent journalism. If you want smut, you can still get it; you'll just get nothing else. If you want to read something smart, you'll have to work your way through the dry pages of the Atlantic, the New Yorker, or Harper's.

I went out yesterday afternoon and picked up the latest issues of Playboy and Penthouse, as well as the smuttiest lad mag I could find: the UK's Loaded. I didn't pick up Maxim or FHM, partly because I've already written about Maxim, and partly because I really don't think that Playboy and Penthouse actually compete with the lad mags. The venerable duo live (or lived) largely on subscriptions, while the hot newcomers are newsstand giants, spending most of their effort on their cover lines. As Mnookin says, pornography carries a stigma, not only with advertisers but also with the general public: I can't recall ever seeing someone reading Playboy or Penthouse at the local coffee shop or on the subway.

And indeed, for all that Loaded probably features more bare breasts than Playboy and Penthouse combined, it does so in a fun, relaxed way. Look at the covers above: even though Playboy has poached James Kaminsky from Maxim to give it some of the Felix Dennis magic, it still boasts astonishingly dull cover lines like "New Millennium Sports Awards: Tyson's Tattoo to Bush's Pretzel". (That's not a story which would have appeared in the old Playboy, to be sure, but it's also not a story which is going to make anybody buy the magazine.) Loaded, by contrast, has cover lines like "Win £1,000 Jeans" to pique your interest, along with the promise of "27 clothes-free foreign ladies".

What Loaded doesn't have is any long-form articles. The Playboy Interview is famous, but the magazine also devotes five pages to Charles Rangel, the New York congressman; it also has ten pages of fiction by T Coraghessan Boyle. To top it all off, there's another nine pages of proper narrative investigative journalism about a drugs sting at a high school in Pennsylvania. It's illustrated with a full-page photo of a hot babe, but the story itself is not lascivious: it's easy to imagine it in the New Yorker.

Playboy, in other words, is keeping up its traditions: while the age-old story about "I read it for the articles" might be as much of a fib as ever, the idea is obviously still to keep the subscription renewals coming by giving men some protein along with their dessert. After all, if all you want to do is ogle babes, you don't need to shell out cash any more: scantily-clad women are everywhere these days, from the internet to the TV.

Playboy's high-mindedness has meant that it's kept its advertisers. There are the booze and fags, of course, but also people like Toyota and Pioneer who would never buy space in Penthouse. Why? Because where Loaded has breasts and Playboy has a small amount of oh-so-tasteful full-frontal nudity, Penthouse is hard-core. Mnookin's choice of language is revealing:

Penthouse has gone ultra hard-core. These days, the extreme close-ups of Penthouse’s pictorials seem more appropriate for a medical manual, and the live-action sex scenes are as graphic as anything available.

The fact is, hard-core pornography – where you show sex acts – is hard-core pornography. You might not like it, but Penthouse isn't "ultra" hard-core: it's just made the decision that if it's to compete with what's available for free on the internet, this is the stuff which it has to publish. Or maybe the logic was a bit different: Playboy made lots of money by showing things which other magazines wouldn't, and then Hustler made lots of money by showing things which Playboy wouldn't, and now Penthouse is positioning itself at the hardest end of the market, as the magazine which shows things all other household-name magazines shy away from.

In doing so, however, it's lost its respectability. Its cover doesn't feature a hot babe or two, in the way that Loaded or Penthouse do: it features a too-young girl, with fluffy toys in her hair, with the implicit-to-readers (and delivered upon) promise that pretty soon we're going to see her spread-legged, wearing knee-high black leather boots and little else, doing something which most of us confine to the bathroom. If I were an advertiser, even if I liked that sort of thing I'd keep my product well away from it: there's simply no way that I could benefit from the association.

Yet Penthouse is still different from most porno mags. For one thing, the production values are very high; but more importantly, the magazine still attempts to be about more than just sex. On the cover are four headlines, the first of which is "Security shell game: Homeland terror war is Bush's ultimate power trip" and only one of which is purely sexual. Once again, there's intelligent original reporting here. Loaded's slogan is "For men who should know better"; Playboy's is "Entertainment for men"; but Penthouse's is "The magazine of sex, politics and protest". There's a reasonably wide mix of men's magazine material, from rock climbing to a profile of wrestler Chris Jericho. But the budget obviously isn't there, and at this point – the very end of Penthouse's life-cycle – it all feels a little weak.

The demise of Penthouse is, surely, no biggy. It's one of the slowest train crashes in history: everybody saw this one coming ages ago, and it will come as a surprise to nobody. But I wonder if Si Newhouse and Jann Wenner ought not to pay a certain amount of attention. Magazines like Rolling Stone and GQ still run expensive long-form narrative journalism, despite the fact that most people don't read it and that even those who do would probably still buy the magazine if it wasn't there. As US Weekly and Lucky increasingly dominate the newsstand, how much longer can such material last?

Maxim and FHM are the Fox News to GQ's CNN, and are clearly winning the ratings war. And just as CNN is going Foxier, GQ is increasing its babe quotient. Is the next step the elimination of the long stories which few people read?

Actually, I think there's room for optimism on that front. Penthouse wasn't killed by overspending on editorial, it was killed by a lack of advertising. Felix Dennis makes money from readers, but Si Newhouse makes money from advertisers. There aren't all that many of them, compared to the number of magazine readers, but they're much more important. Advertisers love being in prestigious publications, and running long articles by Sebastian Junger or whoever is a very good way of impressing onto advertisers just how prestigious you are.

But even if the death of Penthouse does not mean another nail in the coffin of general-interest magazines, it's still indicative of which way the wind is blowing. GQ had a wonderful headstart on FHM and Maxim, but no one could afford to start it up now, and if they did they would almost certainly fail. Every magazine fails eventually, and when the likes of GQ go, there will be nothing to replace them. Talk couldn't do it; Radar won't. High-end advertisers will be stuck with Vogue and Vanity Fair, and serious journalism will be all but banished from the glossies. It's already happened in the UK, there's no reason why it shouldn't happen here as well.

Posted by Felix at 23:32 EST | Comments (4)

Pyramid schemes in the Spectator

Back from holiday (which is why this is the first blog this month) and catching up on recent blogs, I find the normally well-above-my-head Charles Stewart link to the latest cover article in the Spectator with a single word: "Unbelievable". I'm normally all in favour of contrarian journalism, but this time I agree with Charles: it crosses the line from contrarian to irresponsible. Of course, the Spectator can print whatever it likes, but printing this story is the equivalent of running a big piece on how HIV doesn't cause AIDS. If people read it and believe it, serious harm can be done.

The cover shows a woman in bed, covered only by a sheet, surrounded by wads of cash, with her fingers to her lips. "Don't tell my husband," teases the headline; inside the magazine, the story is run under the heading "Girls just want to have funds". Here's the standfirst:

The government would like to outlaw pyramid selling. Why? Rachel Royce has joined Hearts, the girls-only investment scheme, and finds it good, clean — and profitable — fun.

Yep, that's right, the Spectator has now come out on the side of pyramid (or Ponzi) schemes. It's run a first-person account by a journalist who certainly stands to make more from her article than the £375 ($611) she says she's investing, although one wonders if she might not be telling a few porkies to make the scheme sound more harmless than it actually is. She says at the beginning that the £375 could generate "a return of £6,000", but then later admits that she got "sponsored" to join, which means that she only stands to double her money. Which either means she stands to gain at most a return of £375, or means that she's very bad indeed at sums.

All pyramid schemes work the same way. Basically, I persuade ten people to give me a buck, which means I get $10. Each of those ten people then perusades ten new people to give them a buck, meaning they get $10 too. And so on down the line, until the number of people runs out. Normally the people at the top get a slice of everybody's action, not just those people directly below them, which means that the number of people who actually gain from the scheme is very small, especially since many of the people who invest at the beginning, making money, keep that money in the scheme instead of taking it out. When the scheme collapses – as all pyramid schemes eventually do – even some of the initial investors lose everything.

Rachel Royce knows all this. "One of the scary Internet articles had pointed out that each pyramid must increase by a factor of eight, so for everyone in my line to get their money, we would need 4,096 people," she says. "Another lurid article suggested that for 12 layers of a pyramid you would need eight billion people — more than the population of the planet." Yet still she believes, and still she manages to hold completely contradictory thoughts at the same time. Here she is about halfway through the article:

The government is planning to introduce hefty fines, and even up to six months in prison, for anyone indulging in this sort of pyramid-gambling practice. But new legislation isn’t expected until 2005 as part of a new Gambling Act. At the moment it’s not illegal in this country.

And here she is seven paragraphs later:

I may yet be able to dodge my obligation to part with £375 if the government goes ahead and keeps its promise to ban the scheme. I think the threat of a six-month prison sentence would be a good enough excuse to allow me to back down gracefully and still show my face in the village.

None of this makes sense, of course, which is why it's so jaw-droppingly amazing that the Spectator should put it on the cover. One minute: "It’s an upper-middle-class thing. In my neck of the woods it’s a horsey, upper-middle-class thing. The women sign up, wait and buy a nice new horse." The next: "If you are like me and pathetically poor, then you can opt to buy a smaller share — in my case, an eighth of a heart." And here's a real beaut: "I studied Torli’s chart, which shows all the hearts with names, home and mobile phone numbers. There were quite a few names on the chart that I already knew: my Astanga Yoga teacher, for one. I felt that anyone who regularly meditates on the power of Om couldn’t possibly break a sacred female bond of trust and friendship." Yep, why trust mathematics when you can take financial advice from your yoga teacher?

The key fallacy in that last quotation, of course, is that the pyramid scheme will only collapse if its members "break a sacred female bond of trust and friendship." But there's no ill will necessary for a pyramid scheme to collapse, although Royce's hoping that she might be able to get out of coughing up her £375 would seem to be less than perfectly trusting. All that's necessary is that the members run out of new recruits, and indeed that seems to be what's happening: now that they can't find anybody else to pony up £3,000, they're reduced to finding suckers like Royce who might be able to afford £375. It's like a drug addict crawling the floor looking for any last crumbs to keep the buzz going just that tiniest bit longer.

And the really depressing thing is that the whole save-our-scheme campaign is wrapped up in rhetoric about female empowerment. Here's the relevant bits:

The scheme I’ve invested in is known as Hearts, and it’s for women only. It calls itself a ‘gifting scheme that benefits all women’. Men aren’t allowed in because they’d ruin it with their incessant cynicism and greed. They aren’t even supposed to know about it. That, in a way, is the point.
Rich or poor, however, these women are responsible for their own actions. That in a way is what this little scam is all about: allowing women the responsibility to make financial decisions and giving them the rather glorious feeling of naughty financial independence.
I’m quite looking forward to upgrading my horse for something that doesn’t try to buck me off every time I sit on it. And my boyfriend would never notice — as far as he’s concerned, Hearts isn’t the only pastime that’s strictly for the girls.

"My boyfriend," it turns out, is Rod Liddle, the editor of Radio Four's Today programme, and the father of Royce's two children. Royce herself is a television journalist. Could it be that the whole article is basically an anti-anti-BBC slap at the woman who wants to make pyramid schemes illegal? Note the way that Royce spins the opposition:

Hearts is heartily disapproved of by boyfriends, partners, husbands, and by the government, which wants to ban it. Ministers say that it doesn’t work and women are being conned. They say it’s a form of pyramid selling where those at the top do very well and those at the bottom lose their entire investment. Tessa Jowell, taking a break from attacking the BBC, said a few weeks ago, ‘I feel particularly concerned that many women have lost thousands of pounds of hard-earned savings, and many more may lose out. There is no doubting the misery these schemes can cause, and my advice to women contemplating joining is simple: “Don’t do it.”’

Basically, the government (which hates BBC journalists), along with other killjoys like husbands and boyfriends, wants to deprive women of "the rather glorious feeling of naughty financial independence". How dare they? This is the 21st Century, and women should be making their own mistakes "having a flutter on their friends".

Inevitably, when Hearts collapses, its members will blame the government, for scaring off potential new investors. Many fewer people will blame the Spectator for the inevitable financial catastrophes that will result. But they should.

Posted by Felix at 9:17 EST | Comments (3)

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