Oh, Britannia, how you have changed
Andrew Sullivan   TIMES OF LONDON

When Andrew Sullivan left Britain for America it was a dreary, divided land. On his return he finds political turmoil – yet a nation at peace with itself

What should they know of England who only England know? That was Rudyard Kipling’s question in a famous piece of breezy, patriotic poetry, as he called upon the “winds of the world” to celebrate the triumph of Britishness across the globe. Of course, those who have known only England can know her pretty well, as another great Victorian, GK Chesterton, observed — “travel narrows the mind” — but a bit of perspective can sometimes help. Mine, perhaps, is a particularly strange one: a life lived in England for 21 continuous years and then one in America for a continuous 26.

By a quirk of fate — my HIV status severely restricted my travel under a retrograde 1980s US law now mercifully repealed — my visits home were rare, brief and often anxious. The last was five years ago. But this time, green card finally in hand, I allow myself the time to remain; and rest; and unhurriedly watch and listen to the country I once called home.

I have a blur of impressions, mixed with the odd feeling of being in a movie in which you are fast-forwarded a quarter-century and everyone suddenly ages. Those with brown hair now have white; your old garden has been sold to make room for another house; the nephew I always tended to think of as a toddler is now my height; a new nephew, the spitting image of my brother at four, is now glancing up under a haze of eyelashes to reassure the strange man with the enormous beard: “I know you’re my uncle.”

The stops on the train journey from my Sussex home to London are exactly the same, almost a long-forgotten mantra of Englishness to me: Hurst Green, Oxted, Woldingham, Upper Warlingham, Riddlesdown, Sanderstead ... The names reassure. And after you’ve lived in America, the sheer depth of each tiny stop, the generations that have lived there or near there for centuries, the overwhelming sense of real place you feel is something I once took easily for granted. Now it has the shock of the old, a sudden remembrance that this little island really does have an identity, a character.

And what is that character? The longer I have been away, the clearer it has become. It is prosaic and pragmatic; comfy and yet rude; resigned, yet not in any way depressed. I left at the crux of the Thatcher struggle, after teen years in the dreary dreadfulness of the 1970s, when this country truly was at war with itself, when the ideological divide was profound, when north was pitted against south and when “society”, far from being “big”, was rumoured to be nonexistent. I come back for a roaring, very British scandal and a culture far calmer, a divide far narrower and an identity much more settled. Everything is different and yet everything is also very much the same. Everyone is grumbling, but, if you will forgive a generalisation based purely on personal impressions, it seems a country that still makes sense; that has come to terms with itself; a country that, unlike my new home, America, is not in the midst of a cold civil war.

My friend the American columnist David Brooks put it this way recently: “Usually when I travel from Washington to Britain I move from less gloom to more gloom. But this time the mood is reversed. The British political system is basically functional while the American system is not.” The past few weeks may not seem exactly that to many Brits, but I couldn’t agree more.

The notion that England could change out of all recognition and yet remain the same never rang so true Take the prime minister, a man only vaguely known in America and one individual I did not meet along the way at Oxford. As I left Britain, the middle-class revolution was in full swing. In the Tory party, first Ted Heath and then Margaret Thatcher had ushered in what seemed to be a new era of petit bourgeois strivers, capped off by the very non-Oxford, nonEstablishment (and highly underrated) John Major. Who do I see in the Commons now? A slightly chubby, ruddy-faced Old Etonian, an almost Platonic ideal of a Tory prime minister.

Part Macmillan, part Baldwin, he confuses at first. Can a member of the Bullingdon club really still be running the country? I search to recognise the accent, something I had learnt to recognise almost instantly in order to recoil and retreat.

But I can’t quite place it. It’s got lost somewhere in the middle of the country, somewhere such as, say, Chipping Norton, a blend of easy entitlement and learnt engagement with the masses. And what, one wonders, could be more quintessentially Tory than that?

The scandal he was blundering through was like the Profumo affair without the sex. It’s all really light corruption by global standards, the air-kissing sleaze of too-cosy dinner parties and old friends, of coppers on the soft take, in pursuit of the old naughty-vicars-type gossip in the tabloids (only now they’re footballers) and a competitive press all eager to bring rivals down. Not exactly Watergate, I’m sorry to inform you. Or Abu Ghraib.

Once upon a time, the News of the World may actually have shocked people. Now, the English are forced to manufacture the shock on a Sunday morning to titillate themselves with nothing but prurience. Even the skulduggery has gone out of it. There’s nothing clever or naughty or admirably devious about hacking a phone to find out the intimate details of someone’s personal life. It’s too easy. But if the methods had changed, that old English instinct — the desire to take uppity people down — is the same. Except it’s not even uppity or successful people now; all you have to do to stir the envy of the masses is to appear for five minutes on a reality show.

In the end, it seemed to me that the scandal was yet another sign that the old Establishment was not just still running things but was resurgent. For what was this scandal about in the end but the toppling of the foreign interloper, the dirty digger, the man who in front of a parliamentary committee had brought up the subject of Gallipoli — yes, Gallipoli! — as a resentment that still stung?

Just to make me feel suddenly swept back a generation, I pick up Private Eye to wallow in a thoroughly fantastic orgy of nostalgia and gloat. Now there’s an institution that has not changed one iota. Yes! That photo of Andrew Neil in a vest! Yes! A Sylvie Krin romance novel — but now not about Charles and Diana but Wendi and “Lupert”. From Monty Python’s Asian version of Erizabeth L to ninja wife Wendi Deng yelling: “Shurrup, Lupert, and risten!” And has anyone noticed the remarkable similarity between Rebekah Brooks and King James II? Oh joy.

This was another turn of the English wheel, as one cliquish Establishment circles and replaces another: at once recognisable and then oddly not. I mean, who is this beautiful blonde carefully dismembering a vanguard of the right-wing press on a parliamentary committee? Oh, it’s Louise Mensch — a Conservative MP. The mind reels. Really?

And then you see the quiet social revolution begun by Tony Blair and cemented by Cameron. Politics is not merely about old white men any more. As Washington’s entire Congress includes three openly gay representatives, the Tories alone have 13 (if you’re not really counting). Soho, once a lovely, run-down redoubt of drunken, literate hacks, is now pulsating with gay muscles and foreign accents. The chairwoman of the Tories is a Muslim, an idea that would give John Boehner, Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, a fit of the vapours.

I go to the East End for a dinner and arrive via a lift in what looks like a factory into a vast New York-style loft, to find it is the Shoreditch version of Soho House. Then, a sentence you never expect in Britain: “Of course, we have gluten-free options.” I suppose I should not register any great shock at all this. But much of it was as unthinkable a quarter-century ago as a giant ferris wheel towering over the Commons.

And yet I also see some of the same things as Orwell did. The ridiculously heavy currency; the garishness of street advertising; the terror, after America’s 55mph freeways, of being driven at breakneck speed down a winding country road (which looks more like a green tunnel carved from the surrounding trees). The gentleness of nature here. New England comes close, but the winters there create a hardiness in the landscape you don’t see much in England. Here there is delicacy amid the damp; ferns in copses; oak trees in meadows.

My father and sister can recognise the tiniest varieties of garden plants from a long distance; my brother will see a speck in the sky and instantly know what kind of bird it is. Most Americans don’t really know flowers or care. But to know England is to know gardening, which is an utterly different thing from ranching or landscaping.

Gardening, like Englishness, is about being home; it is about tending to things, not remaking them; it is about learning to bend with nature, not to master it; it is a function of a culture that knows what it is and is prepared to stop for a few minutes to enjoy it. My father still loves pottering about in his, as I remember his father carefully pruning his rose bushes. And in my middle age I suddenly found myself with the urge to garden as well. All those afternoons with Gardeners’ Question Time humming in the background on the radio had proved their worth.

And the tiny things. I’d forgotten how it is possible for a shower to last 40 seconds and cover only half a street. I’d forgotten that it is possible to be chilled in July. I am forced to remember that the proper response to “How are you?” is not “Fine” but “Not too bad” and “Can’t complain”. And the general low-level alcoholism of almost everyone is as recognisable today as ever, with a slight twist. You can see across a pub now and not be scanning through a fog of smoke. Hence what struck me as a new and lovely tradition: the spilling-out onto the pavement of nicotine-craving boozers, in an impromptu alcoholic happening.

My only gripe: the horrible new English way of saying “yeah?” at the end of a sentence, where an “eh?” would once have sufficed. And yes, I know about chavs. They were always with us, in one form or another.

Then there are the things you cannot quite believe are still around. Bruce Forsyth. Seriously? And the post-everything shallowness, dressed up as snark, of the drivel written by a Toby Young; or the pious, mind-deadening leftism of a Polly Toynbee. Like small balls of powder in a badly mixed custard, these old oddities still shock the palate.

Race is another obvious quiet English revolution. I remember as a young boy some mutterings among my Clapham grandparents about how many “coloureds” there were. I remember the Brixton riots. My era was of My Beautiful Laundrette and the Anti-Nazi League. And I know there has been a vast conversation about whether multiculturalism and Englishness are compatible. But in my everyday wanderings, it seemed obvious to me that Englishness had simply added a few colour wheels. Of course, I’m talking only of London. But I felt no racial tension here — nothing like what was palpable in New York and Washington only a decade ago.

My sister dragged me to the Primark in Oxford Street and I was immediately hurled into what felt like a deafening, soul-crushing, overcrowded Arab souk with fluorescent lighting. But as your pupils adjusted to the banishment of all darkness, you realised they were all looking for bargains; and their overheard conversations, if I closed my eyes, struck me as instantly recognisable. Yep: that famous English cheapness. Still here. But in a burqa. The notion that England could change out of all recognition and yet remain the same — Orwell’s memorable expression — never rang so true.

And there does seem to me to be a national conversation in a way there sadly isn’t in the US. Various institutions, such as the BBC, ensure it. Nothing in America has the clout or audience of the Today programme, for example. There are no cities with the vibrant, clashing newspapers of London. I begin to see why blogging — endemic in the US — has not been so successful here. The BBC provides the news ballast and the papers add the competitive bias. The crucial niche carved by blogs in the US — the personal writing, the strong opinions — is already occupied here. It’s called the press. And for all its obvious faults, the Beeb remains a cohering cultural presence, like the West End theatre. Not so long ago, I would have been all for abolishing it. Not any more. It adds to Britain’s cultural continuity, and if you have ever been subjected to the screeching, ugly propaganda of Fox News, or the smothering smugness of its liberal rival, MSNBC, you’ll appreciate it some more.

What’s gone, of course, is the C of E. Religion itself appears to have been wiped from the cultural map in Britain in ways unimaginable in faithful America. This, to my mind, is a tragedy, for a society without some relationship to the transcendent can become simply boorish and myopic. But, again, I see the merits of secularism more clearly now. It takes constant exposure to American fundamentalism to feel relieved by the prosaic dismissal of the spiritual by the English. And again, I wonder whether this has really, truly changed. Anglicanism, as it was founded by the first Queen Elizabeth, was always about the blurring of doctrinal difference, the aversion to looking into others’ souls, the modesty of a limited spiritual imagination epitomised by the Book of Common Prayer.

An old don of mine once remarked that he supported the Church of England as a bulwark against religion. He had a point. And, yes, I know evangelicalism is on the march in England. But take it from me: it has a huge, long way to go. And an occasional, real, vibrant debate about what is existentially true could add some colour to the shades of grey in England’s tepid spiritual conversation.

But the central crisis of my youth — that of English identity — seems to me to have resolved itself. No one but a Simon Heffer even faintly has nostalgia for global power any more, let alone empire. The whole question of Europe has palpably calmed — lulled by the very English compromise of being in the EU but not truly of it. Thatcher was right about the euro, wasn’t she?

And what’s left feels like someone emerging from midlife crisis into a rather comfortable second wind, one in which illusions of grandeur have morphed into the modest pride of simply being who you are. For most of you, I imagine this cultural settlement is background white noise by now. To me, it’s deafening. After losing an empire, England has finally found a role: just being England.

As I wandered again through the Sussex woodlands I retreated to in my boyhood, and imagined the bluebells sweeping like a lush carpet under the freshness of the new spring green, that felt good enough to me. More than good enough. The Great in Britain remains — right in front of you. Sometimes it just takes a little time and distance to recognise it.

Amy Winehouse: 'She was a sweet, tiny thing with this huge great voice'At just 14 she started to write her own songs - stardom soon followed. But so too did a fatal attraction to drugs and drink. The UK Guardian

Up until May this year there had been hopes Winehouse had found a way back from the abyss. She was set to begin work on a new album. Photograph: Dave Hogan/Getty Images

It made painful viewing. Amy Winehouse, the tiny woman with the contralto voice, was mumbling her way through some of her most famous lyrics and managing only a few strained notes as she stumbled around a stage in Belgrade, apparently drunk.

The Serbian gig was the first of what was supposed to be a 12-day European comeback tour. But the 20,000 fans who had paid around £40 a ticket to see the 27-year-old booed her and many left the venue in disgust during the 90-minute show, as the singer repeatedly dropped her microphone and left the stage, leaving her backing band to try to fill the gaps.

The next two dates, festivals in Istanbul and Athens, were swiftly cancelled by her management who had reportedly been fighting to keep her clear of alcohol, searching her hotel rooms and giving strict instructions to staff that she was not to be served drink. Winehouse, who claimed last October that she had been free of hard drugs for three years, had checked out of London's Priory clinic earlier that month, promising to continue alcohol addiction treatment as an outpatient.

The whole tour and all scheduled performances were cancelled on 23 June. Just a month later, the troubled, talented young singer was found dead at her Camden Square home.

Her father Mitch, a cab driver who had fought for years to keep his daughter away from the "druggies and the hangers-on" who he believed preyed on her, was on a plane to New York where he was due to perform at a jazz festival. He had repeatedly and publicly warned that he believed Amy would die unless she curbed her use of class-A drugs. She suffered from emphysema and her father told one magazine in 2008 that she had received advice that she was putting her life in danger by continuing to smoke cigarettes and hard drugs. "The doctors have told her if she goes back to smoking drugs it won't just ruin her voice, it will kill her."

At the time he appealed: "I'm saying to those drug dealers, and they know who they are, if they are supplying crack to Amy, then they've got to take responsibility."

Amy Winehouse was born to a Jewish family in Southgate, London, and as she put it in an early interview, "raised on jazz". As a little girl she loved to dress up and sing for the family and her neighbours. She got her first guitar at the age of 13 and started writing songs at 14. "I loved James Taylor and Carole King, Sarah Vaughan. But all the music around then was a bit dull, so I just started writing music to challenge myself, to write my own stuff," she said in one of her early interviews.

"It's very jazz-influenced but hip-hop- and beat-driven; everything I listened to from the old to the new."

By 2001 the teenager was singing with a jazz band when her then-boyfriend, soul singer Tyler James, sent off her demo to a management company. She was signed by Simon Fuller's 19 Management and kept an "industry secret" until she found herself at the centre of a bidding war between rival record companies that saw her as a perfect foil to the reality TV music show winners who were dominating the charts.

Her first album, Frank, was released in 2003 to critical acclaim but it was her second album, Back to Black in 2006, that shot her to international fame. It reached number one in the UK and number six in the US, selling 10 million copies and winning five Grammy awards. The album's hit single Rehab, with the line: "They tried to make me go to rehab. I said, 'No, no, no'" became the prescient anthem that followed Winehouse's life from then on, as she quickly became a poster girl for the shock rock'n'roll lifestyle.

Almost overnight it seemed that the 5ft 3in singer with the cheeky eye make-up, bouffant beehive and the ever-present cigarette was on a destructive path. "The more insecure I feel, the more I drink," she said, when asked about her rapid weight loss, adding: "And the more insecure I feel, the bigger my beehive gets."

In 2007 Winehouse married Blake Fielder-Civil, a part-time gopher for a music video company with whom she had been having an on-off tempestuous relationship. His name joined her growing collection of tattoos – this one on her breast. The same year she was hospitalised for what was at first described as "exhaustion". She admitted later that the problem was a drug overdose.

The couple's relationship became fodder for the tabloids as they lurched from crisis to crisis before their divorce in 2009. Several video recordings made by Fielder-Civil ended up being sold on to tabloids, including one of him goading her to sing a racist song and another of Winehouse asleep surrounded by the paraphernalia of drug abuse.

Her mother Janis said in 2008: "I have known for a long time that my daughter has problems. We're watching her kill herself slowly. It's like watching a car crash – this person throwing these gifts away. I've already come to terms with her dead. I've steeled myself to ask her on what ground she wants to be buried, in which cemetery."

Until May there had been hopes that Winehouse might have been finding her way back from the abyss. She was bundled off to the Caribbean island of St Lucia where she was to work on a new album. There, hoped her family and friends, she would stay away from the drug dealers she knew so well in London. Sightings of Winehouse looking healthier suggested the plan was working, with the head of Universal Music, Lucian Grange, quoted as saying the new material was sounding "sensational".

The reservoir of goodwill in the industry towards Winehouse was enormous. She had been a huge trailblazing force in the music.

Spin magazine music editor Charles Aaron was quoted as saying: "Amy Winehouse was the Nirvana moment for all these women. They can all be traced back to her in terms of attitude, musical styles or fashion."

But last week the optimism began to evaporate. Veteran singer Tony Bennett, who recorded a song with her for his new album of duets, said he was "praying" for Winehouse.

In an interview with the Guardian, Bennett said: "Of all the contemporary artists I know, she has the most natural jazz voice, but I'm worried about her and I'm praying for her.

"She'd help everyone by sobering up and cleaning up her spirituality."

As fans and friends expressed overwhelming sadness at the loss of the singer, a member of her entourage told the Observer: "She was just like a really sweet little girl.

"Just a sweet tiny thing with a huge great voice. Maybe we all expected this would happen; maybe we all hoped someone else could stop it."

Roseanne’s New Reality

Roseanne Barr’s reality series, ‘Roseanne’s Nuts,’ marks the scandalous comedian’s return to the public eye after a carefully orchestrated retreat. She talks to Kate Aurthur about her sanity, Kabbalah, her children, the death of upward mobility, and Michele Bachmann.

Chris McPherson Newsweek

Near the end of our more than three-hour interview, Roseanne Barr cried. She was talking about how all of her five children—from the 40-year-old daughter she gave up for adoption when she was 18, to the three children she had with her first husband, to 15-year-old Buck, whom she had at age 43 with her third husband—have turned out to be good people.

“All my kids, they suffered a lot,” Barr said. “The best thing to me is when people at Buck’s school, they say—,” her eyes filled with tears—“‘You know, your son is so wonderful of a person.’” She began crying. “They just say, ‘Your son is such a great person.’ That’s just the greatest thing. And all my kids and my grandkids and stuff. I just have a great life.” She cried harder, and wiped her eyes. “They’re decent. Despite all of it. And that’s, like, man, that’s a big victory for me. The biggest. That’s the one that matters. When I look in the mirror or whatever, I’m like, ‘Whew—dodged a big fucking bullet there.’”

Barr continued, choked-up. “When your kids are looked up to by people you admire, that’s better than fucking 10 sitcoms. For me to have my kids come through fire—and they did. Thank God. Thank God, Allah, Buddha, Jesus. Everybody.” She composed herself, sniffled, and looked up, brightening. “That’s a good ending!”

Let’s use it as a beginning instead.

The 58-year-old comedian is launching a 16-episode reality series, Roseanne’s Nuts, on Lifetime on Wednesday. It shows her new life on a macadamia nut farm on the Big Island of Hawaii, which she bought in 2007 and moved to fulltime last year. She lives with her boyfriend of eight years, Johnny Argent, and teenaged Buck, with her adult children and grandchildren around, too. They’re all on the show, which Barr said is like “Larry David meets reality.” Meaning, it’s not exactly reality? “It’s based in reality,” she said. “But it’s funny. It’s not the Kardashians.”

Fellow comedian Sandra Bernhard—who became friends with Barr more than 20 years ago at legendary agent Sue Mengers’ house, and ended up being cast on Roseanne as a result—will appear on an episode. The show flew her and Phyllis Diller to Hawaii to hang out with Barr. “It was totally unlike any reality show that I’ve ever seen—the conversation was at the very highest level, but still really funny and crazy,” said Bernhard. “It kind of captured the brilliance of real conversation without being boring, pedantic, and a bummer.”

Rob Sharenow, Lifetime’s executive vice president of programming, said: “She’s not someone who can fake it. I don’t think that’s within her DNA—I think she has to be who she is.” Nor is he concerned that the over-saturated market of celebreality is a genre that hasn’t had a hit in awhile. “Roseanne is by far the biggest star to ever do a reality show. She is not a D-lister desperate for fame or looking to make a quick buck.”

No, she’s not desperate, and God knows she doesn’t need the bucks (she made $1 million per Roseanne episode for years, which was only part of her income at the series’ height). Strategically, 2011 has been Barr’s year of peeking out from behind the wall she had built around her and Buck to normalize their lives. She filmed Roseanne’s Nuts; her third memoir, Roseannearchy, was released in January and will come out in paperback in the fall; and in May she wrote a burn-it-all-down essay for New York magazine that tied together the spectacular Charlie Sheen catastrophe, her own war-like TV experiences, sexism, and the mental illness fame causes. The piece has received more than 52,000 “likes” on Facebook to date, caused the Internet to explode in conversation, and reminded a wide swath of people that they had really missed Roseanne’s bilious brilliance.

“It really captured it, and was dead-on,” said Bernhard. “Hollywood’s a fucking mess. It’s just the way it is there. It’s hard to navigate those waters if you’re a sensitive, smart, big thinker like she is, like I am.”

Not that Barr had ever pulled a full-on J.D. Salinger and dropped out—she made talk show appearances, she blogs, she’s on Twitter and Facebook, she and Argent co-host a weekly radio show on a Southern California station, and she’s done plenty of stand-up. “I have that burning thing to get out there and be part of the dialogue and add something,” Barr said. “I feel like I’d be disappointing too many people if I ever zip it.”

But when Buck was smaller, he said to her, “‘I wonder what it would be like to have a real mom,’” Barr said. “So I showed him.”

Having Buck, after all, “saved my life,” Barr said. “If I didn’t have Buck, I probably wouldn’t be alive. Or I’d be so fucking mental I would have already moved over into schizophrenia.” Her professional life was actively destructive to her sanity. As one Roseanne writer, Joel Madison, recalled: “A million a week—if you’re at all unstable, I don’t think it helps you. There was a lot of who’s-she-listening-to-at-the-moment—all the people who were trying to angle to take over the show, whispering in her ear.”

Fathered by Ben Thomas, the chauffeur-bodyguard Barr married after her disastrous marriage to comedian (and Roseanne profiteer) Tom Arnold came to a scorching end, Buck was hard-won: Barr reversed tubal ligation surgery to restore her fertility, underwent IVF, and then was on bed rest for 12 weeks in order to keep the pregnancy. Plus, the most famous screamer of our time was prescribed peaceful thoughts. “They said, ‘You can’t have any stress,’” Barr recalled. “It’s, like, WHAT? The stress of not being able to be stressed—it was, like, ‘What, I’m supposed to be, calm?’ Luckily for me at the time there was the O.J. trial. I think that’s a huge American pastime. Now I’m putting it all on the Casey Anthony trial. Those are good things for us.”

So parenting Buck was paramount. What finally drove her to take time off, however, was her first reality television experience. In 2003, Barr signed up for a twofer. She would do a cooking and lifestyle show on ABC Family called Domestic Goddess (the feminist/pro-housewife phrase she had made iconic in her pre-Roseanne stand-up), but before that, an ABC reality series called The Real Roseanne would trace the making of the cooking show from inception to completion.

The Real Roseanne aired for two weeks in August 2003. By that time, Barr had already bailed on both projects, which she blames on the show’s executive producer, R.J. Cutler (The September Issue). “I wanted to discuss that now that I knew how to meditate and that I had become a calmer, nicer person, was I going to be able to make a successful show?” Barr said about The Real Roseanne’s premise. “That was the show I thought I was doing. And the show he was doing was kind of The Osbournes.”

Barr said that Cutler, who was supposed to be hiring staff for the cooking show, “hired actors to be the producers. And they were told to really go out of their way to piss me off and see me explode.” On top of that, her oldest son, Jake Pentland, found a notebook in the production office that contained unflattering, one-dimensional descriptions of her family members and then-new boyfriend Argent (Thomas and Barr divorced in 2002). “It said, Jake, ‘lazy,’ my son-in-law Jeff, ‘stupid,’ Roseanne ‘drunk,’ Johnny ‘golddigger,’” Barr said. “Thank God I had control. Because kibosh. When we saw the edited version, we were just appalled. We were just fucking appalled.”

(Cutler responded by email to the two allegations: “1. False—I don’t know anything about this notebook. 2. False—no actors were hired to pretend to be producers or to harm Ms. Barr in any way.”)

Instead of going forward, Barr opted to have a somewhat optional hysterectomy, and the public story was that she had to bow out for medical reasons. “I always say I had to choose between giving up an organ or continuing on that reality show. So I chose to give up an organ.”

After that calamity, the therapized—and Kabbalah-influenced (since she had become close to the much-followed, controversial Rav Philip Berg of the Kabbalah Centre)—Barr decided to escape. Her hide-in-plain-sight refuge was El Segundo, a middle-class California suburb of L.A. near LAX and the beach that’s named after Chevron’s second (or “segundo”) oil refinery. “I thought I could solve my isolation by just not being isolated,” Barr said. “I was like, ‘I don’t give a fuck. I’m going to move to a regular neighborhood. I’m going to drive a regular car. I’m going to shop. I’m going to go to Ralphs.’” And that’s what she did while Buck started going to the local public school.

At first, of course, it was a bit weird for the ordinary citizens of El Segundo to have Roseanne around. She established her work life in a small production studio on the city’s Main Street. She would set up a booth and sell her homemade hot sauce at the local farmers’ market, which shuts down the street on Thursday afternoons. “I thought they were looking at me as if they were watching TV. Like, it was human television,” Barr said. “They’d go, ‘Are you Roseanne?’”

“I’d say, ‘I used to be.’”

She, Buck, and Argent stayed in the El Segundo area until they moved to Hawaii, and that’s where she returns to when visiting Los Angeles. This interview occurred at a conference table in her studio—and since it was a Thursday, the farmers’ market began bustling outside as we talked (minus Roseanne’s hot sauce booth). Her sons Jake and Buck were both around; Jake, 33, runs the studio and Buck was going to meet a friend down the street for pizza. The only time she employed the high-registered bark of Roseanne Conner is when talking to Buck: “Do you have money? Where’s your shoes? Do you have shoes!”

Barr’s hair has gone gray and she has feather hair extensions—she looks like a hippie (check), grandma (check), stoner (check: every Friday night for Shabbat from sundown until 2 a.m., she gets high, drinks red wine, and does a meditation Rav Berg taught her). Her left-wing bent is now reflected in her physicality, which includes her choice to put herself on a farm in Hawaii. “I really think that growing your own food is ground zero—the biggest protest,” Barr said. “For kids to learn where food comes from, it is a huge revolutionary thought in America.” Plus, she added, “I just like it. I feel like a human being there.”

It’s a more balanced life. One in which her Cassandra-like predictions about the erasure of the middle class (“We’re going to go like Mexico—the rich people and the poor people.”); Michele Bachmann (“She makes Sarah Palin look sane. Doesn’t she?”); her sustained Twitter meltdown after the not guilty verdict in the Casey Anthony trial; and the disappearance of the sort of class mobility that allowed her to go from being a poor Jewish kid in Salt Lake City to a ridiculously rich-and-famous comedian (“It’s not going to happen for anyone ever again.”) can be tempered by happier thoughts. For instance, she appreciates the rise of female comedians on television, such as Chelsea Handler, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and the upcoming season’s star Whitney Cummings. “I just like that all these women are coming to TV and they’ll have their say,” Barr said. “I think that’ll be cool.”

Her years away from Hollywood’s intensity have given her—perhaps more than anything—the perspective to lower her own expectations. Right now, she’s applying that broadened view to Roseanne’s Nuts. “Nothing I ever do is going to compare to what I’ve done,” Barr said. “Before I always was like, ‘I’ve got to top it.’ Make myself fucking crazy and too nervous. You know what? You’re never going top it. For so long, too, I’d be, like, ‘I can’t play that part, it’s too Roseanne Conner. I don’t want to be Roseanne Conner.’ And now, I’m, like, ‘Fuck it! Wait a minute—she’s me.’

News of the World to close as Rupert Murdoch acts to limit fallout

The tabloid's 200 staff are told that Sunday's edition will be the last, as speculation grows that it will be replaced by the Sun.

James Robinson guardian.co.uk

Rupert Murdoch acted with characteristic ruthlessness by closing the News of the World, Britain's best-selling Sunday newspaper, in a desperate attempt to limit the political and commercial fallout from the phone-hacking affair engulfing his media empire.

Murdoch's son James, who runs his UK titles, told the paper's 200 staff that Sunday's edition of the paper, which sells 2.6m copies a week, would be its last, ending the 168-year history of the title his father bought in 1969, a purchase that introduced him to the British public for the first time. The last News of the World will carry no commercial advertising.

"The good things the News of the World does … have been sullied by behaviour that was wrong. Indeed, if recent allegations are true, it was inhuman and has no place in our company," he said.

"The News of the World is in the business of holding others to account. But it failed when it came to itself."

There was immediate speculation last night that the paper will be replaced by a Sunday edition of the Sun which could be produced by staff at the daily. The domain names TheSunOnSunday.co.uk, TheSunOnSunday.com and SunOnSunday.co.uk were registered two days ago.

Readers and retailers had reacted with disgust to the revelation this week that journalists at the News of the World ordered the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire to hack into voicemail messages left on a mobile phone belonging to murdered teenager Milly Dowler in 2002, one of the most damaging in a series of reports by the Guardian on the hacking scandal over the last two years.

It also emerged that Mulcaire may have targeted the relatives of British servicemen killed in Afghanistan and Iraq and survivors of the 7/7 terrorist attacks on London. A reader boycott also seemed likely and one independent chain of newsagents said it would not stock the title.

Mark Lewis, the solicitor for Milly Dowler's family, said: "People are losing their jobs in order to sacrifice themselves to save the real perpetrators … lots of good individuals have lost their jobs or will lose their jobs and the people who should have fallen on their swords are still there."

Of Rupert Murdoch, who was filmed on a golf course during the crisis and refused to comment, Lewis added: "It's a bit like Nero fiddling while Rome was burning."

News International's chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, a former editor of the News of the World, was said to be in tears as news of the closure was announced. A News of the World employee who did not want to be named said Brooks had said she had offered to resign in the wake of Ed Miliband's call for her to be sacked, but that offer had been rejected. News International denies that claim.

Miliband said last night of the closure: "It's a big act but I don't think it solves the real issues. One of the people who's remaining in her job is the chief executive of News International who was the editor at the time of the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone."

Downing Street said last night: "What matters is that all wrongdoing is exposed and those responsible for these appalling acts are brought to justice."

Staff at the paper reacted with fury to the news, with one source claiming there was a "lynch mob mentality" at its London offices.

Colin Myler, the editor of the News of the World, said: "Whatever price this staff are paying for past misdeeds, nothing should diminish everything this great newspaper has achieved."

The newspaper was once Murdoch's flagship title although its stablemate, the Sun, is now more profitable, but it remained a totemic title around the world. In 1951 it sold 8.4m copies, the biggest ever circulation for any newspaper. Even now, only a handful of English-language newspapers can match its circulation.

The closure followed another day of high drama, during which more companies, including O2, the mobile phone company 3, Sainsbury's and Boots said they would not be placing adverts in the paper on Sunday. The News of the World takes about £660,000 in advertising income each weekend.

James Murdoch admitted to staff it was "a matter of serious regret" that he had authorised a six-figure payment to a phone-hacking victim several years ago, but blamed others at the company for his decision. "I now know that I did not have a complete picture when I did so," he said. "I acted on the advice of executives and lawyers."

A News of the World employee said staff suspected Murdoch had closed the title to ensure his £8bn bid to take full control of BSkyB goes through. Miliband has called for the deal to be blocked.

Labour MP Tom Watson, who has been highlighting the phone-hacking scandal at the paper for two years, said: "Rupert Murdoch did not close the News of the World. It is the revulsion of families up and down the land as to what they got up to. It was going to lose all its readers and it had no advertisers left. They had no choice."

Murdoch is renowned for risk-taking and for making bold moves swiftly. But the closure of the News of the World is one of the most shocking and unexpected decisions he has made since he moved his title secretly to Wapping in east London in a successful attempt to break the print unions. It is the first closure of a national newspaper in Britain since Today was shut down, also by Murdoch, in 1995.

Murdoch bought the News of the World 42 years ago after a protracted takeover battle with the late Robert Maxwell and immediately took it in a direction that many regarded as downmarket. It became the building block for his UK newspaper empire, which would in turn finance the expansion of News Corp into a global media conglomerate.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Josh Marshall TPM

July 1, 2011, 11:23AMThough President Obama once seemed to hold hopes of presiding over one of Washington's fabled 'grand bargains' to rein in the long-term national debt, recent events have painted a different picture. Republicans have pushed an increasingly maximalist line -- deep cuts to discretionary spending, Social Security and Medicare, zero new revenues and no effort to boost the economy at all. Meanwhile the president and his congressional allies have continued a series of tactical retreats with no clear stated limit on how much they'll concede.

But the picture is stranger when you leave the hot house environment of Washington, where I just spent a couple days and look at what evidence we actually have about the mood of the country.

The controversy in the debt ceiling debate has three main pillars. 1) raising taxes (or not) 2) cutting Social Security and Medicare (or not) and 3) the question of 'raising the debt ceiling' itself. For better or worse, discretionary spending is so detailed and various it's not highly politicized. But it may get there. So let's put it under the general heading of #2, budget cuts.

On the question of raising taxes on wealthier Americans, as a means of reining in the deficit, public opinion polls have been extremely consistent. Clear majorities and often in the range of 2 to 1 majorities support it.

Medicare and Social Security are probably the most obvious. Numerous polls over the last six months show that any cuts to Social Security or Medicare are extremely unpopular.

And that brings us to the popularity or unpopularity of raising the debt ceiling itself. In Washington and on Capitol Hill it's taken as a given that making a debt ceiling vote is political suicide. And it's true that it does not poll well. But even a cursory look at the polls show most people have very little understanding of what the question is and are much more divided than people -- or at least Washington -- realize. A Gallup poll from early May showed the second biggest number of people were those who said they didn't know enough about the question to have an opinion -- the Gallup poll from May 13: 47% said vote against a debt ceiling, 19% said vote for it and 34% said they didn't know enough to have an opinion. Note that 47% said don't vote to raise the debt ceiling at all. Not 'don't do it unless you get a good deal' but simply don't do it. Let the government default on its debts, which isn't even really up for discussion in Congress except for some on the Tea Party wing of the House GOP.

And more recent polls have shown rising support for raising the debt ceiling as the public learns more about potential consequences. The most recent poll from AP shows a tie: 41% oppose raising the debt limit, 38% support and 21% either say "neither" or "unsure".

That's hardly a public that's wildly against the proposition or even has terribly clear thoughts on the matter.

A fair reading of the debt limit polls is that when the public is asked should we take on more debt, it's not popular. Republicans are overwhelmingly against it. Some polls have said the rest of the electorate is divided. And a big chunk of the electorate doesn't even understand what the question is. It's really not at all clear that a vote to raise the debt limit is a clear political liability -- and the most recent poll shows the public evenly divided.

But again, draw back and see the big picture. The public overwhelmingly supports the Democrats on the tax question. On cutting Medicare and Social Security the public not only takes the Democrats side, the opposition to Republicans is at near lethal levels. The debt limit question may favor the Republicans but the public is generally divided and a significant plurality say they don't even understand the question.

From these facts, you'd expect that the debt ceiling/debt cutting debate would be a pitched battle or that the Democrats would have the whip hand. But that's far from the case. In fact, the Democrats have continued to concede ground as Republicans have upped the ante, daring the Democrats not to agree to cuts which are extremely unpopular.

Something doesn't fit about this picture. What's the disconnect? Some of this stems from deeper trends in the political economy -- a topic I'll discuss in another post. But the main answer is political. The Democrats have been overawed by Republicans continually raising the ante and bluffing -- and being genuinely worried about the consequences of the United States defaulting on its debt, something the GOP doesn't seem worried about. The real error here was buying into the idea of negotiations based on holding the future of the country's economy hostage. But now the problem is that the Democrats are focused on a behind closed doors negotiation with no outside game while not making any effort to bring the larger public into the conversation.