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Parasite's sweep of the Oscars on Sunday night for best original screenplay, international feature film, director and finally, and most improbably picture offered up a smorgasbord of joys. As a longtime Bong Joon Ho champion, I was thrilled to see one of cinema's finest and most unpredictable filmmakers recognized at the peak of his career, and on such a global stage. As an advocate for greater diversity within the entertainment industry, I was excited that the Academy honored a non-English-language film that happened to be, in my opinion, one of the two most deserving contenders in the best picture category (the other beingLittle Women), especially after last year's regressive pick,Green Book. And as a disappointed viewer let down by the ceremony's many elbowing allusions to the overwhelming whiteness of the nominees, I foundParasite's organic triumphs to be a welcome antidote to the Academy's performative white guilt.

But I felt most keenly my delight as a Korean American and an Asian American.Parasitewas a lot of firsts for Korean film as far as Western accolades go: the first winner of the Palme d'Or, the first winner of a Golden Globe, the first feature to compete for an Oscar in any category, the first to win every one of those aforementioned Oscar categories, of course, and the first non-English best picture Oscar winner. Bong will return home to South Korea a celebrity and a luminary. Korea is a tiny country one the majority of Americans probably couldn't find on a map and the outsized influence of its cultural contributions (which include K-pop, K-dramas, Korean cuisine, tae kwon do and its beauty industry) is an immense source of national pride. Growing up in Los Angeles' Koreatown, where Korean was and is spoken on every street, I never could have imagined my mother tongue spoken onstage repeatedly! just a few miles away at the Dolby Theatre.

It can be tricky, if not impossible, for many Asian Americans to fully identify with the country or countries of their ethnic origin. (For a deeply affecting illustration, look no further than Lulu Wang'sThe Farewell, which won best feature honors at the Spirit Awards on Saturday, making it a grand weekend for filmmakers of Asian descent.) The peculiarities of Asian America mean constantly proving our Americanness, our non-foreignness, our belonging. "Where are youreallyfrom?" is a question that haunts Asian Americans, which is why second- and third-generation immigrants may feel the need to play up our rights to this country.

That can mean playing down other parts of ourselves, whether by choice or by acculturation. I don't speak Korean most of the time, because most of the people I spend my time with don't know the language. I never proposed going out to eat Korean food with my non-Korean friends until my mid-20s, when I discovered that KBBQ was the thing to do in L.A. (The cuisinedu jouris probably something else now.) WatchingParasitebe embraced by so many people has been an unburdening, a de-otherization I didn't know I needed. The parts of myself I didn't think would be understood by non-Koreans maybe weren't so illegible, so unknowable, after all partly because of the way Korean culture has spread internationally, partly because I had preemptively decided others might find those aspects of me too esoteric or difficult to comprehend (and, to be perfectly honest, partly because I do not feel like ever explaining again why the question "Are you from South Korea or North Korea?" is profoundly stupid). And at a time when the White House is codifying xenophobia into policy and the 24-hour news cycle is fomenting anti-Asian paranoia stateside (through that hoariest of yellow-peril tropes, the filthy foreigner), I'll takeParasite's win as a small one for me, too.

Much of the comfort I've found inParasite's triumphs has to do with how deeply and specifically Korean I found the film to be. Since its October release, I've discussed nonstop inarticles, podcasts and TV appearances how technically brilliant Bong's signature tonal hairpins are, where scenes suddenly whiplash from, say, slapstick comedy to Greek tragedy to ironic satire. (My favorite example is a scene inThe Host, where Bong practicallydares you to laughat a mourning family for the histrionic display of their grief.) Those hairpins are a writerly and directorial achievement that has garnered Bong recognition in Korea, too, but there's also something distinctly Korean to me about his ability to weld extreme pain to earthy comedy, along with a profound distrust in government institutions and an eclectic mix of international influences.

Bong's filmography, which encompasses both urban Seoul and the more suburban and agricultural provinces, also feels more like the ordinary Korea I know, even with the sci-fi monsters and grisly murders, than the glossy futurism projected by K-pop. And because achievement and prestige among Asian Americans remain divisive issues conjuring accusations of abusive parenting and hollow ambition in some circles, and misplaced priorities and the erasure of the economic diversity within Asian America in others Parasite's grappling with such striving and its costs without the cacophonous noise of the American culture wars in the background was bracing.

But the sight that made me arguably happiest duringParasite's reign during awards season might be Bong's seeming lack of self-consciousness, his enjoyment of the privileges of the international auteur. For the most part and until extremely recently, Hollywood has preferred Mexican directors to Mexican American ones, Asian actors to Asian Americans ones. A standard interview question to American actors of color has become "What was your worst audition?" rare is the answer that doesn't involve race. Maybe because he had little to prove, at least race-wise, Bong acted his refreshingly carefree self, from the film's initial rollout through his awards campaign and Oscar night. Even beforeParasite's release, he insulted the Academy by calling the Oscars a "local" prize. WhenParasitetook the Golden Globe for best foreign language film, he chided Americans for being so incurious about all the movies on the other side of "the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles."

I laughed, and winced, at those comments. They're totally on-point, and they remind me of nearly every one of my middle-aged relatives in Korea, to whom bluntness is a given, not an option. They also made me wonder if the notoriously thin-skinned Hollywood elite and Americans as a whole would backlash, and whether that meant Bong had hobbled his own chances with his plain-spoken wit. Then there he was again, onstage Oscar night, flouting traditional awards etiquette by openly admiring his trophy while his co-writer Han Jin-won gave a heartfelt speech, and, later, making his Oscars kiss each other for the camera. Backstage, he said he came up with the idea forParasite"because I'm a fucking weirdo." The remark flung a hundred and one stereotypes about meek, dutiful, robotic Asian men out the window.

So what's next? Hollywood and the Oscars are so broken in so many ways that, if there were to be aParasiteeffect, it could be so many things: a more globally attuned Academy, a heartier embrace of movies by and about people of color, an even greater consideration of smaller films, many more firsts. Or we could start smaller: with more leaps over that one-inch-tall barrier. It's easy if you try.

See the rest here:
The Liberating Power of the 'Parasite' Oscar Win - Hollywood Reporter

Donald Trump delivered his third and potentially last formal State of the Union address from the well of the House chamber where he was impeached on the eve of his likely acquittal by a deeply divided Senate. The 78-minute speech sought to look past impeachment to his re-election in November. He touted his accomplishments, claiming a strong economy, the killing of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani and the passage of a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill.

But the mood was fraught on the eve of his acquittal, which is expected to take place on Wednesday as Republican loyalists stand by him. Few Democrats stood to clap for the president as Republicans chanted four more years.

Here are five key takeaways:

Trump dedicated nearly 20 minutes to ticking through his economic accomplishments, delivering a mix of dubious claims and exaggerations.

Our economy is the best it has ever been, Trump falsely claimed. While the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low and wages have risen, the economy is far from the best ever.

But other boasts were true: average unemployment is lower now than any administration in the history of our country. He touted the bipartisan renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, now called the USMCA as well as a deal with China to ease the trade war.

The rosy economic indicators could provide strong tailwinds for the president as he seeks re-election, especially if he faces a Democratic opponent who seeks to remake the economy as a number of candidates have proposed.

Trump inaccurately claimed USMCA would create 100,000 new high-paying American auto jobs. A report released by the US International Trade Commission estimated that the deal would add only 28,000 auto industry jobs in the six years following its implementation.

Ever eager to fan the flames of Americas culture wars, Trump delivered extended riffs on immigration, abortion, guns and religious liberty red meat to his conservative base.

We dont punish prayer, he declared before vowing to always protect your second amendment right to keep and bear arms.

He highlighted in grisly detail the stories of two US citizens murdered by an undocumented immigrant, a way to slam cities that refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement to enforce immigration law. At another point, he called on Congress to pass a federal ban on late-term abortions.

He also praised his appointment of two conservative supreme court justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, both of whom beamed back at the president from the front of the chamber.

We have many in the pipeline, Trump said, as Republicans broke into another round of deafening applause.

In less than 24 hours, Trump will become the third US president to be acquitted by the US Senate after being impeached by the House. But unlike his Twitter feed, where Trump airs all manner of grievances about the trial and the House leaders who led the effort, he made no mention of it in tonights speech.

However, the tension was clear. When Trump approached the rostrum, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, appeared to extend her hand but he refused to shake it.

She then omitted the flourish of announcing I have the high privilege and distinct honor of presenting to you the president of the United States, instead simply introducing him directly to the chamber. Then, after Trump finished his remarks, Pelosi tore up a copy of the speech.

Asked by reporters why she did that, Pelosi replied that it was the courteous thing to do.

No matter who the Democratic presidential nominee is in November, Trump and Republicans already plan to define the election as a battle to protect the country against socialism.

In his speech, Trump vowed to never let socialism destroy American healthcare! while also dishonestly claiming that he would always protect patients with pre-existing conditions. In 2017, Republicans with Trumps strong support, attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a plan that would throw millions of Americans off their healthcare and would not guarantee its protections.

At another point, Trump pointed to one of his guests, Juan Guaid, the Venezuelan opposition leader who the US recognizes as the countrys rightful leader. Trump called the nations current president, Nicols Maduro, a socialist dictator and illegitimate ruler.

Socialism destroys nations, Trump said to whoops and cheers from Republicans. But always remember, freedom unifies the soul.

Its a tradition for the White House and members of Congress to invite guests who reflect their political priorities. Among the guests who attended on behalf of the president and first lady was Rush Limbaugh, the controversial conservative radio show host who announced this week that he is undergoing surgery for advanced lung cancer.

During his remarks, Trump announced that he would receive the countrys highest civilian honor, the presidential medal of freedom. In an unusual move, Trump paused his speech for Melania Trump to present him with the medal.

It was one of several surprises Trump had in store for his guests. He bestowed an education scholarship on a young girl whose mother could not afford to send her to a private school. And then, in a made-for-TV moment, Sergeant First Class Townsend Williams returned from deployment in Afghanistan to surprise his wife and children in the first ladys box.

Meanwhile, a handful of Democratic lawmakers chose to skip the affair altogether. The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she did not want to legitimize the presidents actions.

After much deliberation, I have decided that I will not use my presence at a state ceremony to normalize Trumps lawless conduct & subversion of the Constitution, she wrote on Twitter. None of this is normal, and I will not legitimize it.

The Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley said she could not in good conscience attend the speech, when he incessantly stokes fear in people of color, women, healthcare providers, LGBTQ+ communities, low-income families, and many more.

Congressman Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat, attended the speech but left halfway through.

I just walked out of the #StateOfTheUnion, he wrote. Ive had enough. Its like watching professional wrestling. Its all fake.

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Trump's State of the Union address: five key takeaways - The Guardian

The U.S. Capitol at sunset, November 22, 2019(Loren Elliott/Reuters)A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream, by Yuval Levin (Basic Books, 256 pp., $28)

We are born as crooked creatures prone to waywardness and sin, Yuval Levin writes in his new book, A Time to Build, originally delivered as the Charles E. Test Lectures at Princeton. As a result we continuously require moral and social formation to refine and develop our defective characters. What we have largely forgotten, Levin argues, is that institutions play a part in these processes of soul formation: They structure our perceptions and interactions, and as a result they structure us. They form our habits, our expectations, and ultimately our character.

But our institutions are breaking down. In an age that values the unformed self, Levin writes, we no longer try very hard to uphold the formative traditions of the institutions in which we find ourselves. Instead of giving our hearts to our little platoons, we affect a cynical distance from them and play the disgruntled outsider. We think of our institutions less as molds that shape our character than as platforms that enable us to market our personal brands through attention-getting stunts and playacting on social media.

Thus the presidency and Congress, Levin writes, become stages for political performance art by strutting politicians, the university becomes a venue for vain virtue signaling by disaffected scholars with a yen for street theater, and journalism becomes indistinguishable from activism as scribes seek cable-TV notoriety by staking out the most outr positions in the culture wars. Rather than commit ourselves to our institutions, we pack up and move on whenever we feel that a particular outfit isnt working for me, as the duchess of Sussex is alleged to have said of the British monarchy before she and Prince Harry lit out for the fresher territory of the @sussexroyal brand.

None of these forms of self-indulgence is entirely new. But Levin argues that where once institutional mores restrained the more destructive forms of aggrandizement, todays institutions have lost their corrective, soul-forming power: They no longer give us the tools of judgment and character and habit to use our freedom responsibly and effectively. He attributes this institutional decay to a decline in the expectation that our institutions should be formative. If we no longer believe that there are, in fact, objectively better and worse ways of being formed, we can only resent whatever character-forming practices vestigially linger in our institutions.

Liberal education is one casualty of this resistance to the institutional molding of character in accordance with an ideal. From the seminaries of Athens to the grammar school that helped form the mind of Shakespeare, teachers agreed that nothing was more likely to awaken and shape a young brain than a wallow in what Matthew Arnold called the best that has been thought and said in the world. But where untaught formlessness is the ideal, the formative character of such an enterprise is suspect, a threat to the authentic, untutored self. Were all noble savages now.

Levin traces the same antipathy to soul formation in the professions. Before 1850, Henry Adams said, lawyers, physicians, professors, and merchants were classes, and acted not as individuals, but as though they were clergymen and each profession were a church. By contrast, todays professional meritocrats, Levin writes, are radically individualistic and dismally technocratic, with little concern for the distinctive integrities of the institutions they tenuously inhabit.

Yet amid the general disintegration some institutions have retained their formative character. In the Vietnam era the code of the officer corps, Duty Honor Country, was in danger of being lost. The only place I learned about these things, a young captain said, was from a copy of the Officers Guide that I happened to buy one day in the bookstore. But the military refashioned itself and today maintains a high degree of institutional esprit de corps.

Even so the judiciary, which, Levin observes, has done a better job than many other governing institutions in appealing to an ideal of integrity that is fundamentally institutional in character and also rooted in something of a professional ethos. This institutional pride is clearly present in Chief Justice Roberts, whose heart is pledged to the code of the judge bound in honor, in his words, to pronounce judgment without fear or favor, deciding each matter with humility, integrity, and dispatch.

But if Levin is right, these institutions are the exception. Americans, he observes, have long been skeptical of institutional allegiance. Our culture, he writes, has its roots in a dissenting Protestantism that sought a direct connection to the divine and rejected as inauthentic or illegitimate most forms of institutional mediation. A preoccupation with self-realization, he says, makes us suspicious of enterprises that seek to cast us in a particular mold. Yet it may be that radical Protestantisms prosaic descendant, Yankee utilitarianism, has done quite as much as Calvinism itself to frustrate the ability of our institutions to command the heart.

At the bottom of every really vital institution there is always a whiff of poetry or mysticism. Man without mysticism may be, as Whittaker Chambers said, a monster, but institutions that lack it are soulless. Why does the judge don his robe, the priest his surplice, the scholar his gown, the barrister his wig, the queen her crown? It is all a piece of (perhaps not very impressive) magic, yet it has its effect. The art of the civilizing myth, the pleasing illusion, which once did something to hallow the institution, has given way to a dress-down cult of the merely functional, a culture of drabness. Ernest Renan said of his hometown of Trguier in Brittany that it was enveloped in an atmosphere of mythology as dense as Benares. Christ Church, Oxford, was saturated, John Ruskin remembered, in a mysticism made palpable in the living and musical forms of its ritual and ceremony. Smoke and mirrors perhaps, yet Ruskin had no doubt that it animated the young toffs for the highest duties owed to their country. But we Americans, Wallace Stevens says, never lived in a time / When mythology was possible.

The failure of myth and mysticism in the modern institution is complemented by an obliteration of institutional memory. The traditional institution has its pedigree and its ancestral portraits, a poetry that brings to life the different phases of its growth, so that the past always is obtruding on the present, and the present is continuously throwing an unsuspected light on the past. But the typical organization today exists in the shallow present of Henry Jamess Mrs. Worthingham, who was up to everything, aware of everything if one counted from a short enough time back (from week before last, say, and as if quantities of history had burst upon the world within the fortnight).

Levin is alive to the lack of place, connection, and belonging in American life and institutions, but his solutions seem a bit tepid and hortatory. He envisions lawyers developing a professional code that will hold them to a standard that has more to do with integrity than with raw intellect. But in fact the bar is always coming up with these kinds of reformatory codes. They are the work of committees and end in regulations that perpetuate all the vicious mediocrity Matthew Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy, foresaw in efforts to create an English Academy that would codify the integrity of English letters.

Rod Drehers Benedict Option might be a better way forward. If the archaic techniques of the separatist institutions he proposes really can promote a richer and more satisfying common life if they really are able to make of places and institutions what Florence was for Dante, a fair sheepfold, the center of a world they will catch on; the rest of us will try to emulate them. On the other hand, we might learn something from the pastoral instincts of the now-discredited WASPs, who, Levin observes, were raised and educated in ways intended to prepare them for responsibility and authority, to live up to a code of public service, humility, and institutional devotion. After the Civil War, when WASPs found themselves overshadowed by Gilded Age plutocrats, they reinvented themselves as a service class by means of the boarding school: an institutional combination of muscular rigor (the football field), humane education (the classics), and poetical mysticism (the chapel) that bit deep into the souls of impressionable youths. Much in this pastoral approach will now seem as archaic as Arnolds Rugby Chapel, but it may be that some of the techniques the WASPs used to foster a culture of civic conscience and institutional loyalty can be grafted onto our own soul-corroding schools.

Levins A Time to Build is a brilliant piece of work: lucid, dispassionate, composed in a calm and philosophic tone that rises above the rancor of the moment; its focus on institutional decline promises to change the terms of many sterile debates. But the institutional gangrene to which Levin draws attention seems to me to go beyond what the unguents in our current chrismatories can heal. To reform souls as crooked as ours, one wants a richer brew. One wants myths: But when one calls them myths, one implicitly concedes they arent true. A difficulty no amount of ingenuity can solve.

This article appears as Twilight of the Institutions in the February 24, 2020, print edition of National Review.

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'A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream' Book...

Meghan Daum is the author of The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars, in which she examines her own cognitive dissonance as a liberal and a feminist, and her feeling of alienation in todays cultural climate. She and Bridget discuss how society has changed dramatically in the last 10 years, the gulf between Gen X and Millennials, coming of age in a culture where theres a conversational chokehold happening and what the effects might be, and the death of cultural gatekeepers. They dive into the minefield of being writers in the age of social media when a provocative piece can get you cancelled, reminisce about growing up reaping the benefits of the feminist movement that came before them, explore why learning to stick up yourself is such an important skill for a woman to have, and wonder what happened to the life isnt fair philosophy that they were raised with. Its a fascinating conversation between two women on the front lines of the culture war who still believe that nuance is something that should not be vilified.

Subscribe to Walk-Ins Welcome w/ Bridget Phetasy in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.

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Meghan Daum Believes We Have Lost the Ability to Sustain Complex Arguments - Ricochet.com

There were a few days in mid-December when it looked like the nation might have won some respite from its daily diet of shouty culture wars. But then, on 17 December, just days after Boris Johnsons election victory, Piers Morgan signed his new contract with Good Morning Britain, and the most enthusiastic cheerleader of national disharmony was granted two more lucrative years behind his breakfast desk.

Morgan insisted that this would be his last term of office, and that he will sail off into the sunset in 2022. His original tabloid mentor, Kelvin MacKenzie, argued a year ago that Morgan would not be happy until he absolutely owns breakfast and is making 10m a year. I dont imagine he is quite there yet.

In the four and a half years since Morgan took up his seat back by unpopular demand Ive done my best to avoid watching Good Morning Britain because, well, obviously, who in their right mind wants to start the day with Morgan at their breakfast table? But in fact there is no escape. You dont need to be among the million viewers who tune in to Good Morning Britain to feel its daily presence in your life. Anyone with an eye on this countrys media, whether print, social, broadcast, will have absorbed Morgans more strident opinions about vegan sausage rolls or Donald Trump or gender identity by osmosis.

As part of a somewhat perverse new years resolution, for the past few weeks I have reversed my abstention, and watched Good Morning Britain the nations most talked about show as much as work has allowed. After the increasingly disconcerting political events of last year, I felt some need to begin the decade immersed in the nations prevailing gobby mood; where better to start? I have come to think of this hair-shirt commitment as Morganuary.

For Morgan, Monday mornings are critical he can set the dogs of particular itemsrunning all week

The exercise has reminded me of another story I once wrote for this paper, when, at the time the movie Super Size Me came out, I was required to eat only fast food for a week. Before and after my seven days of Big Macs and Bargain Buckets and Double Whoppers I had to undergo blood tests. The results, magnified on a hospital screen, showed an alarming rise in all sorts of fatty deposits in my veins. As I near the end of Morganuary I cant help feeling I should have taken similar before and after fMRi scans of my brain activity. I imagine neural pathways muddied with bombast, and clogged with undigested gobbets of vitriol.

Morgan has, as you will know whether you like it or not, begun this decade as he finished the last, as the nations self-appointed headline-generator in chief. His long-running obsession with Meghan Markle became, as if at his personal direction, also the nations primary obsession: having amplified the persecution of the Duchess of Sussex, Morgan then choreographed the fallout of her escape from that persecution. Along the way there has also been the usual quota of viral sidelines. Inevitably, Morgan chimed in with Laurence Fox and his acoustic struggle to highlight the plight of white male TV celebrities, along the way explaining his definition of racism to colleagues including mixed-race weatherman Alex Beresford and guests in what GMB regulars enjoy calling diversity corner.

Counter-intuitively, one effect of social media has been a dramatic narrowing of the range of topics that capture the collective mind. Morgan with his 7 million Twitter followers is a master of the kind of circularity that online debate demands all links lead back to him. As Roger Ailes, creator of Fox News, observed of the so-called infotainment age: People dont want to be informed, they want to seem informed. Morgan is a prime mover in that principle.

I should make a very obvious point, belatedly, here: that Morgan is never alone at his Good Morning Britain desk (though he sometimes seems to believe himself to be). He is, for a start, not there at all on Thursdays and Fridays, or over the weekend. And beside him, from Monday to Wednesday, sits the unflappably charming and sane Susanna Reid, winner of numerous awards for television valour. Reid is paid more than 1m a year; leaving aside the manifest absurdity of that wage, there can hardly be a regular viewer of Good Morning Britain who does not entertain the idea that she earns every penny.

The industry cliche has it that news anchors are finally hired on the basis of how convincing they appear with the sound off. Reid has taken that principle to a whole new level. Though she is an incisive interviewer witness her brilliant evisceration of Nicky Morgan talking nonsense about nurses before the election much of her best work is nonverbal. There are YouTube compilation videos of Reids grimaces and eye rolls during Morgans never-ending monologues. Susanna Reid dies a little inside every time Piers Morgan opens his mouth has nearly 800,000 views.

The more you watch the pair at work, you cant help but feel Morgan and Reid, for better and worse, dramatise precisely, depressingly, the public mood, in which those who talk loudest feel empowered to drown out those you might want to hear. Much of the time Morgan and Reid are engaged in inane banter about ratings or Gwyneth Paltrow, but arguably no television double act has better reflected a fracturing national psyche since Steptoe and Son. Just as Albert Steptoe never gave Harolds dreams of a more civilised life a moments thought, so Morgan blunders over Reids every effort at compromise or nuance.

Reid worked for 20 years at the BBC and once reflected that she had the corporation running through her like the words on a stick of rock. Her role on the show represents the collective memory of a more civilised, easygoing national sofa, before the arrival of her co-host and his confrontational desk, before trolling, before Brexit. Talking recently to the Radio Times, Reid noted, along with the rest of the nation, how [Piers] has pushed me to get more opinionated. I dont agree he should be left to chew these people up and spit them out like one of his rare steaks. Piers too needs to be held to account for what he says.

The latter is obviously easier said than done. Take last Monday. Even in the short time I have been watching I have noticed that some mornings matter to Morgan much more than others. Mondays are particularly critical because he can set the dogs of particular items running all week. The three stories that he has decided are dominating that mornings agenda are all out of his own back pocket, or at least he makes them seem so.

First, there is the tragic death of Kobe Bryant, which for Morgan inevitably becomes an occasion for personal reminiscence of his time watching basketball in Los Angeles when he was hosting his talk show for CNN. Second, there is the latest chapter in the ongoing Meghan Markle story, a trail for another exclusive interview with Markles estranged father, Thomas. And finally there is the kind of story Morgan gets up for. This is generated by a stray comment that Hugh Grant has made in promoting his latest movie, suggesting that the December election result was a catastrophe and, because of Brexit, Britain is finished.

In one of his many reflections on his decade editing the News of the World and the Mirror, Morgan once observed that on newspapers every day is a feud. All editors need one to get by. Morgan always needed several. Most days he rips into his current nemeses Gary Lineker, Alastair Campbell, feminists, Meghan Markle, assorted snowflakes, Lord Adonis but the feud with Grant seems more primal.

As he gets into his stride about how much he despises Grant one of Morgans gifts to the nation has been to normalise the idea that it is natural for presenters to own up to loathing and hating the guts of particular public figures you are reminded that one of the moments in his career of which Morgan is most proud was the day he ran out of his office punching the air delightedly and shrieking an order: Get the hooker! This after Grant had been arrested with a prostitute on Sunset Boulevard.

The drama of finding and buying off Divine Brown for the News of the World is presented in Morgans memoir, The Insider, as if he had taken possession of the Pentagon papers. Grant had the temerity not to be overly chuffed about that treatment in the News of the World, or about the fact that his phone was subsequently hacked by other journalists. Grant is many of the things that Morgan cant abide: he went to private school and to Oxford (Morgan, who grew up with his mother and stepfather at a village pub in Sussex, was educated privately until he was 13, then went to the local comp after his family fell on harder times).

I'm far enough into Morganuary that it seems that the reporting of no world event is complete without input from Morgan

Using all this stored animus, Morgan revs himself up at 6.40 to a quite alarming pitch about the romcom actors lack of patriotism while Reid winces silently beside him. Inevitably, an immediate poll is called for by Morgan (it is an overlooked fact that the national either/or of Brexit was primed by countless such online barometers of staged anger). Do you agree with Hugh Grant that Britain is finished?

It is then that Good Morning Britains hold on the national conversation kicks in. As you watch Morgan and Reid argue about Grant, you can also watch Morgans mansplaining immediately amplified in real time. Some of this comes from online reaction unchecked outrage about Grants throwaway line is by now trending on Twitter some comes from online newspaper journalists, who appear to watch Good Morning Britain in the way that their predecessors used to watch the tickertape of newswires.

Hardly has Morgan half-uttered the words Shut up to his co-host than an online news story in the Sun is breathlessly reporting the fact: Piers Morgan has admitted he pushes co-host Susanna Reid to her absolute limits when the pair host Good Morning Britain. This morning the pair exchanged fiery comments whilst presenting GMB live on air, signalling no end in sight to their stark differences in opinion, the paper announced.

Susanna attempted to shut down her fellow presenter by saying: I dont want to talk about Hugh Grant any more. In this particular moment, Susanna knew how to wind up the former newspaper editor as he was almost caught saying Shut up on camera. He let out a Shu before quickly correcting himself

By now I am far enough into Morganuary that it can seem that no reporting of a world event is complete without input from Morgan. There is a genuine weirdness in watching this unfold. Morgan writes newspaper columns for the Mail and the Mail on Sunday. There was a time when that would have meant that rival tabloid newspapers would have operated a blanket ban on coverage of him. Now, perversely, certain rival online editors appear to work on the principle that if a tree falls in a forest and Piers Morgan has not tweeted about it, has it really happened?

Here, for example, is how the Express ostensibly the biggest rival to the Mail for the hearts and minds of middle England first reported the tragedy of the helicopter crash in which basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his daughter died: Piers Morgan pays tribute to icon Kobe Bryant after death aged 41 the Express headline reads. And this is how the story that follows is constructed: PIERS MORGAN took to Twitter alongside many celebrities to pay tribute to basketball legend Kobe Bryant, who has passed away at the age of 41 The Good Morning Britain presenter, 54, shared a photo of the basketball star in his Lakers kit and wrote in view of his 7.1 million Twitter followers: Few bigger icons in the history of world sport than Kobe Bryant.

This habit of filtering world events through Morgans eyes is very far from an isolated case. On Monday morning there are by my count at least a dozen clickbait stories in the papers featuring Morgans reaction to the world. The previous week, in the Express alone, I had counted 16.

Does any of this matter? It used to be observed partly because of the grounding principles of the BBC in our media that something like Fox News, which set the tone for the extremist populism of Trump, could never gain a foothold in this country. With BBC news under siege from all sides, Good Morning Britain, operating in that no mans land between news and highly partisan presenter-dominated comment, goes some way to proving the opposite.

Morgans main opponent in this war is consensus. Increasingly of course, that means he casts himself as the defender of common sense and plain speaking in straw-man arguments about whether clapping should be replaced with jazz hands to make it more inclusive; or in rants about plus-sized models, gender-neutral clothing or men carrying babies in papooses.

Culture war seems a grandiose term for what Good Morning Britain does. But the effect is to add to that pervasive impression that public life is a zero sum game in which for me to win, you have to lose. Morgan jokes continuously about his rival morning show on the BBC (which brings in twice the viewers but emits a fraction of the noise). I want to destroy them, I want to dismantle them, I want to wreck them, he says, only partly tongue in cheek.

We might think of this kind of tone as an invention of cable networks and shock jocks in the United States. If you trace its history closely, however, the language of Breitbart and Fox News that mixture of laddish mischief and bigoted cruelty was lifted wholesale from the Sun and the News of the World in the 1970s and 80s. Rupert Murdoch first injected it into the American bloodstream in the pages of the New York Post, and then into television through Ailess Fox News. The lowest common denominator principle was to Give people what they want.

Morgan was in many ways the wunderkind of that impulse. In 1994, Murdoch scenting an ambition he could work with, promoted 28-year-old Morgan from being editor of the Suns celebrity gossip column, Bizarre, to the editorship of the planets most read paper, the News of the World. He no doubt sensed that Morgan understood, at heart, that profit should always come before principle. Morgan tested that idea a couple of times, most notably in his bold anti-war stance while editor of the Mirror at the time of the invasion of Iraq. A crash in sales, however, saw him send a note of apology to his then boss, Sly Bailey. One thing I wont be doing is sitting here defiantly telling myself how Im right and they are all wrong, he wrote. The readers are never wrong. Repulsive maybe, but never wrong.

That definitive populist wisdom is something Morgan has carried with him ever since; the sense that news was a business, or a game played with public sentiment, and one that you would be a mug not to play to win. Sometimes the job does feel a bit like playing God with peoples lives, he said of his time at the News of the World. I get, ultimately, to decide every week who lives and who dies by the NoW sword The obvious glee with which my newsdesk rehearse the weekly stories of misery and mayhem created by our revelations slightly unnerves, as well as excites.

That excitement has never quite left Morgan, even now he slurps his tea for the breakfast cameras. He would like you to believe that most of it is for show, these days, and that perhaps it always was.

In interviews, he says: My persona in public is a slight pantomime villain. I constantly fuel this because its fun, its entertaining, its provocative, it gets everybody going, it encourages debate. All the things I like.

The thing he most doesnt like is the suggestion that any of that villainy might ever have been for real. Morgan has long performed triple-salchows on the thinnest of ice around the hacking scandal that led to the closure of the News of the World, and 14 criminal convictions. By his own admission before the Leveson inquiry, he knew about illegal voicemail hacking some years before it became a public outrage but he has always strongly denied any involvement in the practice. These denials have never been tested before a jury because his former employer, Mirror Group now Reach plc has preferred to settle any claims out of court 70m has been set aside to cover compensation payments and legal fees and significant sums have already been paid out.

Two live cases may yet require Morgan to answer more legal questions. Princess Dianas former lover, James Hewitt, is suing Mirror Group for damages arising from unlawful information gathering during Morgans time as editor at the Mirror, while Prince Harry also has a suit pending against the Mirror and the Sun on similar grounds.

Morgan did not mention that latter case in the latest instalment of his headline-making interview with Thomas Markle on Monday, though he was once again pointedly critical of Meghans recourse to the courts in her privacy battle against another of his employers, the Mail on Sunday. He did not feel the need to highlight any conflict of interest.

When news of Hewitts suit against the Mirror was tweeted by Hugh Grant, Morgan was, as ever, however, quick to respond:

Great! Always wanted to get the Major into court so we can discuss his treasonous adultery with the wife of our future king. This will be fun! Ps Just a reminder, again, Saint Hugh one of us has a criminal record, and its not me. So stick your moralising up your a**.

Watching Morgan at breakfast over a period of time, and despite all his self-mockery, that old tabloid nastiness is never too far from the surface. Though by all accounts an affable and charming colleague and friend, in his professional life, even at 7am, he retains the right to a bullys instinct for taking advantage of vulnerability. That instinct, which he exploits more effectively than any other journalist in our tribal times, drives attention where he wants it: towards him. He knows how to feed that playground impulse that made you run toward a scrap when the cry of Fight! went up.

On Wednesday morning, Morgan was obsessing about his no-show at the National Television awards, and slagging off another of his hate figures, David Walliams. I watched Reid trying to get a word in edgeways, and felt her lucrative pain a few times when she had to give up. I could sense my resolve to keep my Morganuary habit going into our post-Brexit February waning. As with all new years resolutions, a month suddenly seemed like more than enough.

Author Afua Hirsch is asked to defend her New York Times piece Black Britons know why Meghan Markle wants out its the racism.

You cant just say these things are racist when theyre not, Morgan froths.

Im telling you that as someone whos lived the experience of being a person of African heritage in this country that there are narratives that are regularly Hirsch replies, before being cut off by her host.

A discussion about Harry and Meghans new life becomes another robust debate about whether the treatment of the couple by the UK media had been racist. Morgan says not. This prompts lawyer and activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu to say: You are a man privileged to have power and influence, and youre using your power so irresponsibly to spout some personal vendetta with nasty and vile comments.

Labour leadership candidate Lisa Nandy also ends up having to fact-check Morgans view that race and gender were not a factor in the medias treatment of Meghan Markle. If you dont mind me saying, how on earth would you know? she counters. As someone whos never had to deal with ingrained prejudice, youre not in a position to understand people who have.

He also picks a fight with GMBs mixed-race weather presenter, Alex Beresford, about, you guessed it, race and Meghan Markle.

After saying he had been championing the anti-woke frontman and Question Time celebrity Laurence Fox, Morgan clashes with him over Foxs comments that the inclusion of a Sikh soldier in the film 1917 was forcing diversity on people. Morgan points out that he was sort of insulting, actually, to Sikh soldiers who had served.

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Is Good Morning Britain the wake-up call we deserve? - The Guardian