Life in Black and White

we have to talk about cancel culture, says AUTHOR LIONEL SHRIVER IN A PODCAST CONVERSATION WITH NICK CATER

Nick Cater: You may recall we met in 2014 at the Perth Writers Festival when our mutual publisher, Harper Collins, took us out for dinner. I got a bit of a rough ride at that Writers Festival, as you do when you are on the centre-right, but I detected you got a bit of an easier ride. I thought maybe it's because you're a novelist and you can put your thoughts in the head of one of the protagonists in the book and get away with it.

Lionel Shriver: I'm afraid that the “it wasn't me, it was my imaginary friend”, get-out-of-jail-free card doesn't work as well as it used to. In fact, we're entering such a literal period, which is quite distinct from literary, that anything you put in a novel, regardless of what character is speaking, is assumed to be the thinking of the writer. So, all fiction is now being read effectively as non-fiction. And that's despite the fact that it is likely to have dialogue with voices of completely contradictory opinions.

But it's now a little dangerous to express any non-orthodox opinion or statement, even in novels, even through the voices of your characters. So I'm afraid the world of oppression has visited my profession.

Cater: It's extraordinary. When I set up for this podcast this morning, I propped up my microphone on three books, and by coincidence, I notice the one at the top is Salman Rushdie's 'The Satanic Verses’. And at that time, when you'd remember that, we thought it was just terrible, that a novelist should be persecuted for what he'd written, in that case by Islamicists. But, now every novelist is vulnerable.

Shriver: Yes indeed. And they may not be getting death threats per se, but 'cancel-culture' threatens you with a certain kind of death. And that is if you have been targeted, the ambition is to muzzle you and make it impossible for you to publish and to have a platform on the web or be on TV, or write poems and newspaper articles. You can be murdered in every way but the literal sort of murder. And if you care about your work, which most of us do, that is a very effective punishment. I mean, this is canny stuff. That's the worst stuff you can do to a writer, is to not allow them to publish their work, not allow them to have an audience. Because I don't know about you, but I write to be read, in that it's not just something that I do to amuse myself. I do amuse myself. I think you can tell from the books. With no audiences, I mean I would just wither up.

Cater: I mean, I suppose one of the few good things about the increasingly authoritarian progressive left, is that they do give you plenty of material for comedy, don't they? I mean, there's a lovely scene in the book in which Remington Alabaster, one of the chief protagonists, faces a kangaroo court because he's alleged to have assaulted his black boss, but of course it turns out to be total nonsense. There's lots of humour in it, isn't there?

Shriver: Oh yeah. I mean, I loved writing that scene. I got the idea for that scene from, what at the time was quite a notorious iPhone tape. A young woman in Canada had been hauled before an academic tribunal at her university, because she had dared to show a Jordan Peterson video to her class. And someone reported her, that this was somehow abuse, right?

The recording was extraordinary, she was the one who recorded the encounter. These academics were beyond parody, they were self-parodying in a way that was positively improbable.  They did nothing but talk in jargon and using all the classic left-wing lexicon.

If anything, in the scene I created, I toned it down in comparison. And they were incredibly cruel, and they reduced to her tears, but she had had the wit beforehand to turn on the recording function on her smartphone. And therefore, put it out on the web. And it made the academics look vicious, predatory and trite. And I thought, if nothing else, that this business of taking a phone into a tribunal, it was a way of getting a way around a point of view problem.

The story is told from the perspective of this person's wife, and she couldn't have been there. So he could bring home the tape and she could listen to it, and that way my reader could be at the scene without my violating the structural rules in the book. So it was useful.  It's certainly an aspect of the book that is asking for trouble. I mean, it makes fun of identity politics without apology, I think it is funny, but at this movement's expense. And the whole sub-plot has to do with the fact that Remington's boss, who is half his age, was hired to tick a number of diversity boxes, right? She's second-generation Nigerian, she's female, the people who hired her were under the impression she was Muslim, although it turns out she's Christian, and she's clearly a diversity hire. And she also doesn't know anything about running a department of transportation in a medium-sized American city. So she's not very good at her job and this is exactly the kind of character that a white writer like me is not supposed to create. I mean, it breaks every single possible rule.

At the same time, I was interested to listen to a podcast by Glenn Lowry, who is black, talking about the fact that there must be a large number of white employees seething because they were being supervised by people hired just to fill diversity targets, but were not competent at their jobs. And so it was interesting that a black commentator made that observation.

Cater: I have to say your characters are beautifully drawn, but none of them ever seem particularly likeable to me in your books. You don't fall in love with any of them...

Shriver: I like them. I do. But maybe I have strange taste in people. I'm not interested in perfect people. I don't believe there's such a thing. And I like watching people's foibles play out. I think it's ultimately for their foibles that we end up loving most people, there's something endearing about flaws.

Cater: I think that's probably true of your protagonist in this book. But, I think you're a bit mischievous with your naming, your almost Dickensian name, 'Remington Alabaster'. We know immediately that he is white.

Shriver: Of course. He's my white everyman, because there's a regular sub-theme in the book, I'm sure you picked it up; looking at the state of white American masculinity. And having a little bit of sympathy, which you're not supposed to have anymore, this is the last group that we ever pity or identify with. They're at the very bottom of the victimhood totem pole. And I instinctively feel sorry for any group that I'm instructed not to feel sorry for, that's my instinctive perversity. I think right now it's really hard to be a man, it's especially hard to be a white man, and it's especially hard to be an ageing white man. I mean, that is a deadly combo right now.  And so, that's one of my main characters is all of those things.

He's 64, he's lost his job, ignominiously, but that's just old enough not to be able to get another one. Nevertheless, we're also living in a time that he could easily live 30 more years or more. And that's a long time to not be a fruitful member of society, and he's in a pretty grim circumstance and it makes sense therefore that he'd fall prey to the endurance sport industry.

Cater: He becomes what we call a 'fitness freak' doesn't he, in his early old age?

Shriver: Yes, absolutely. And this is after having been entirely sedentary his whole life. And first he suddenly wants to run a marathon and once he finally gets through that, it's not good enough and he wants to do a triathlon. And not just one of the little ones, but he wants more like an Iron Man, I invented my own outfit called Mettle Man, just M-E-T-T-L-E, so that I could make any comment I wanted about it without being sued.

Cater: Yes we should say any resemblance between Mettle Man and Iron Man is purely coincidental.

Shriver: Purely coincidental.

Cater: Just to go back to the whiteness aspect though, I gave that lovely quote from The Guardian, which actually wrote, I thought, quite a good review. “Entertainingly problematic”.

Shriver: I was really surprised I got a good review from this book of all books, I was astonished. And that quote you pulled, it's going on my paperback.

Cater: Oh excellent, because in the book you have a couple of goes at the word problematic.At one stage it's “a great big giant word for everything that's super bad.” And then a little bit later: “What does problematic mean? It means the trespasses of white people who are unfathomably evil, meaning white people, period. The ‘unfathomably’ goes without saying.”

Look, I hate this right now, this hardening, isn't it, of identity politics of intersectionality. That you can't think of people as individuals, you can't dislike somebody because they're an individual, you're accused of disliking them for their race or their gender.

Shriver: Exactly, and that comes up in the tribunal that I transcribe in the novel because Remington asks his accusers expressly whether it is possible in today's environment, to personally dislike anyone from a minority group. You can't do that, it would immediately be regarded as racism if the person you dislike happens to be black, then you're a racist. Which is a racist position, ironically.

You can't deal with people who have a different race than you as real people, right? Whom you take a great liking to, or instinctively find annoying. I mean, like a normal person, right? That's how we used to deal with each other all the time like that. Now it's not possible and it is a kind of flattening and reduction of what it means to be a person. What that means is that you encounter somebody from another race and then all they are is a walking representative of that race. I mean, I don't know about you, but I sure don't want to be a walking representative of whiteness. And that's certainly not the way I think of myself and it's not the way I think about my husband, who happens to be white, or any of my friends who happen to be white and I think it's a terrible way of thinking of people.

And I am completely flummoxed how we got here, why we're hurtling in the wrong direction, I mean, Martin Luther King exhorted us to get beyond the colour of peoples' skin and look to their character instead. He said it more eloquently than that but that's one of his most often-quoted list of advice. And suddenly, we don't do that anymore, and suddenly we judge each other according to the colour of our skin almost exclusively. And I just feel as if we've gone back a hundred years, I just don't get it, in the guise of progress.

Cater: Oh yeah, I feel exactly that. I guess you and I are roughly of the same generation, we grew up through that Civil Rights period, me a bit more remotely than you, but we came to think about that and we were told at school you don't judge somebody according to the colour of their skin, it's about what they're like inside. If I could just indulge for a minute, where there was a presenter on the ABC, who reported that he had racist comments thrown at him on a bus. And I thought, 'that's extraordinary, why would he have racist comments thrown at him?' It was only when I looked at him more carefully that I realised he was of Indian extraction. But it just hadn't occurred to me as an issue up to that point, because I think that's the way we were brought up, weren't we, to literally ignore it.

Shriver: We are being schooled to notice peoples' heritage first and foremost and I think one of the things that is lost is a kind of productive social ease and I have noticed in myself, a slight increase in self consciousness, a notch up of anxiety in dealing with people who are of a difference race or ethnicity from myself, that I never ever felt before, ever. And I hate it. I suddenly start feeling I better watch myself, turn on the editorial function, and check everything as it comes out of my mouth to make sure it doesn't break any rules. This keeps people apart, this is not good life. It is not good social life, it is an ugly way to relate to people. I don't want to be afraid of other people, I am accustomed to conducting a robust discourse with everybody and now, this anxiety is creeping into everything. And I am sure I am not alone in this transformation.

Cater: Well, you're not, but I sense that you take it very personally.  You are described as a controversial figure in Australia because of a speech you gave at the Brisbane Writer's Festival. Tell me about that.

Shriver: And on the basis of having said things that shouldn't have been controversial at all, that's what's shocking, right? I said basically, "if you're going to allow people to write fiction, they have to be able to make people up, and write about something other than themselves if they're going to write books that you want to read, because you're going to get really bored of autobiography." Is this scandalous?

Going into that speech, I was mostly nervous that it would be boring. I was worried that my point was self-evident. And at that time, the whole notion of cultural appropriation had not really arrived in fiction, so I felt as if, okay, I was trying to hit something off that I could see coming, but it wasn't necessarily going to be a problem for fiction writers. And maybe I was barking up the wrong tree, and I would be criticised because I was trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill, right? Instead, it turned into some kind of international incident.

And if you read that speech, I mean, it's a little playful, it's got some jokes in it.

I think that's part of the problem. You're not supposed to make jokes about anything to do with this stuff. But what I was saying should not have been controversial at that time and even if you dial back, say, five years before, all of my original fears would have been realised. This, "what's she on about?", "this is boring", "this isn't a problem", "she's being super sensitive", it's patently obvious that fiction writers have to be able to project themselves in the heads of people that are not like them. That's only five years earlier, that's the reaction I would have got to this.

Cater: I'm sorry you had such a bad experience here, by the way, because we knew the characters that were getting in to you, and we just thought 'oh, there they go again’. But it's pretty horrible when you get one of these, what they call 'Twitter storms' on social media.

Shriver: Well, I should clarify that I did not have a bad time in Australia and that was the fifth time I've been here, so I'm starting to feel at home. And it is a very small number of people who went for my jugular, of a particular political stripe, they do not represent the majority of Australians and I'm well aware of that.

And in fact, twice in the row now, when I've appeared at the Cheltenham Festival in the U.K., there's a little group of women from Australia who have access to the green room. And they've organized for me to be given a bottle of wine, two appearances in a row, thanking me for coming to Australia, begging me to come back, and imploring that I don't take those reactions on the far-left as representative of the Australian people. And I took that to heart. I felt that was a really nice gesture, and that's one reason I came back, honestly. Against the odds and having at previous appearance suffered an awful lot of character assassination, I came back at the end of August and did an appearance for the Centre for Independent Studies. And that speech went down fine and I had a great time. So it was worth coming back and I'd come back again.

Cater: Yeah, pleased to hear that. But as you intimate, this is getting worse.  There's an instance in your book towards the end, and I hope this is really just fiction and we haven't got to this point yet. But Serenata, who is probably the chief protagonist in the book makes a living recording audiobooks. And towards the end of the book, her work dries up because you're not allowed to mimic anybody. Mimicry becomes improper. I mean, that's incredible.

Shriver: That's it. I'll tell you what, I did make that problem up.

Cater: Thank you, I'm glad.

Shriver: Because it seemed to fit in with the kind of objections that people were making lately, and if you listen to any audiobooks, people who read audiobooks are usually good at accents. It's one of the things you're supposed to master if you're going to do that kind of work. And because there's only one reader for the whole book, and they have to voice all the different characters.

So in 'The Motion of Body Through Space', my character Serenata does a lot of audiobook work and she's really really good at accents. And at a certain point she's told, well, that's mimicry, that's a kind of stealing or ridicule and you're not allowed to do that anymore and now the voices of minority characters are going to have to be voiced by minorities. And while I made this problem up, it's happening. Someone just sent me a New York Post article about a woman who reads audiobooks and she's white, she's now said that she's not going to do any accents anymore because it's cultural appropriation or something. I couldn't believe it. I hate being right.

Cater: Let’s pick up on one other big theme in the book which I thought was very well observed.  It is this thing about the baby boomers, right? You hesitate at describing them as a single class.  But we are in this world, aren't we, where nobody dies young anymore. Everybody gets to grow old...

Shriver: Yup.

Cater: ...And the result is, there is a lot of us, a lot of people over 60. And on trends that group is going to get larger and larger...

Shriver: Yup.

Cater: And it seems to be tension building up between that group and people who, we might loosely call them millennials, who sort of resent them being around, resent everything. I notice with the COVID-19 thing, that millennials are going around describing it as the 'boomer disease'. I worry about that.  Do you sense that? I saw elements of that inter-generational tension in your book.

Shriver: Yup. I am worried about it. I grew up with some of that same tension. You all remember that whole 'don't trust anyone over 30'? That phrase didn't last very long because all the people using it turned 30. There was still an expression 'generation gap'. So it's not as if the inter-generational tension is new, but this has a different texture to it. And it's much more vicious. And the generation gap involved some mistrust and a recognition that the generations look at things differently, had different opinions. They were against the war and their parents supported the Vietnam War.

But this is more global, both in the sense of all around the Western world and also to do with everything. And it's powered by a terrifying resentment and a desire for vengeance, that I don't see any good in it. First, you've got apparently, we're all the ones responsible for climate change. I'm not quite sure why millennials, who also have flown everywhere, don't take any responsibility but somehow it's all our fault. And now we're being stuck with inherited racial guilt, that's all our fault too. I don't think it adds up, I mean, I don't know how many slaves you've had.

Cater: Well, we had no slaves in Australia, that's a historical fact. But now, of course, the left is saying we did.

Shriver: Yeah, yeah. Well facts don't count anymore. I mean that's one of the things that's really forbidden. But I don't see where the resentment gets us. Except in an ugly place. The point on which I'm really sympathetic with younger people is the economic one. This whole business of our living to all 95 and still retiring at 65 is not on and it's economically catastrophic. We're setting up a situation where it is routine to retire for almost as long as you worked. And who's going to pay for that? And also these are years where your healthcare costs go through the roof.

And the extension of life expectancy does not necessarily extend healthy life, it generally extends unhealthy life and a rather miserable life. In fact, the book that I've just finished writing is all about this subject because I'm very interested in it and it's looking at a couple who vow, back in 1991, when they're 50 and 51 years old, that once they reach the age of 80, they're going to kill themselves, that this is as old as you should really get, the rest of it is downhill. You're a terrible burden on society the older you get, and so to spare both themselves and family and the state, they're going to do the noble thing. And then it takes a look at how realistic that is, and sorts out all the possible outcomes whether they do or don't do, because of course once the second of them turns 80 in 2020, that's our jumping off point. It's a very interesting subject, it was a surprisingly fun book to write, also funny, not that you'd expect it. But this is where the resentment is correctly placed, although it isn't boomers' fault exactly, that they're able to live longer. I mean, this is the immeasurable advance of medicine. My father, he had an absolutely devastating case of lymphoma a few years ago, and survived it, and now he's 92. And who knows how long, he could make it to 100. Now that's in a way nice for him, but this is a classic case of "Okay, we cured that, and you've got to die of something". So, we're dealing with a big problem that will also be a problem for millennials or Generation X or whoever comes after them. This is a problem for the human race, it's not just a generational problem.

Cater: What do you do, do you just mark time? I think that was out of your book, actually. I think the lesson of your book, if there's a sort of spiritual message in there, is that you don't fight this fight (with old age).  Remington Alabaster tries to fight it by running, taking up ultra marathons and so forth, and his health gives way. His wife’s knees let her down.  You're only going to be comfortable if you go with the flow, aren't you?

Shriver: Well, from my observations, this obsession with fitness seems to only grow more intense. It’s one of the things that unites the generations, actually. Boomers are absolutely as obsessed with fitness as younger people are. They have slightly different motivations; now they're both motivated by vanity but younger people are also trying to improve their status, it's the whole Instagram thing. It's no longer good enough to be skinny, or to be handsome or pretty. You also have to be very fit, and you need a six-pack, and you have to have muscular arms and I don't need to tell you. All you need to do is look out on the street.

But older people have the added motivation that they think that as long as they get enough exercise, they're never going to get sick, they're never going to get old and they're never going to die. And that's a lot to put on sit-ups.

Cater: Back to that generational split, and you're right, in the sixties it was very strong. But it is sort of amusing these days to see Roger Daltrey from 'The Who' staggering around the stage singing 'My Generation' with that great line "hope I die before I get old."

Shriver: That's great.

Cater: He doesn't have that luxury, does he? But that's the point, I guess. I'm really looking forward to your next book because we don't choose to be old. My father  said to me once: “Old age? I don't like it, I didn't vote for it."

 Shriver: Well that's the thing, I mean, it is really hard to do well. And I think there is such a thing as doing it well, the trouble is you don't ever know what you're going to have to be good at to be good at it, because you never know what's going to get thrown at you. Your body decays but it doesn't give you an alert necessarily, ahead of time, what's going to go. So you never know what new incapacity you're going to have to accommodate. I think old age requires an almost inhuman capacity for grace. It requires humility and generosity and the squelching of self-pity. And it’s probably also useful to have a sense of humour. Especially at your own expense.

Cater: Indeed. But can I push you a bit on the idea of grace and humility? Dare I say, Christian, religious concepts? You grew up in a very religious household, didn't you?

Shriver: Yeah I did, I mean, it was not religious in the sense of evangelical, it was a very liberal household, Democratic in the United States. Politically involved, supported environmental causes, opposed Vietnam War and my father marched in Selma with Martin Luther King, was heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement. So it isn't that kind of religiosity that we were speaking in tongues around the dinner table, that said, Presbyterianism didn't take with me. I mean, I'm still interested in political issues but have not been a practising Christian in reality, since I was about eight years old. I mean, I just didn't quite buy it.

You can find this in my ninth novel. I have some albeit begrudging appreciation for the values that Christianity has promoted throughout generations and I also appreciate that Western European culture is heavily based in Christianity. Having some understanding of it is useful for having a better understanding of history. Where, in a very general sense, I come from.

And I do note as well that we have entered a fully secular age, an age in which my resistance to religion is no longer very meaningful. I mean, big deal. I mean, it's the Presbyterians who are unusual now. Being secular, not having a religious faith per se, is totally the norm right now, in fact it's more the norm than not. I don't think that's quite the case in the United States yet, but it certainly is in Europe.

Therefore, we discover that there is some natural yearning in people in general, to have a faith in something.  What we're going through right now, these throes over George Floyd's murder, there's a distinctively religious fervour behind the Black Lives Matter movement. And clearly with most people, they have a need to fill that void with something.

Cater: This isn't an original thought. Lots of people have suggested that this manifest, loss of religious faith, has given the next generation, the upcoming generations a sort of nihilism. They don't know what to believe in, so perhaps that's why they latch onto some of these things like Black Lives Matter or, dare I say, climate change. It's almost religious.

Shriver: It has the same kind of texture, If you know it's about the end of the world, it's about Judgment Day, it has that biblical apocalyptic vision. It's not hard to construct these belief systems as essentially religious in character.

One of the things that distinguishes a religion is its imperviousness to fact, and that's what we're seeing in these movements. It doesn't matter how many times you churn out the statistics of police killings in the U.S. for the last 10 years, and there is no disparity, there is no rage of white cops killing unarmed black civilians, there isn't. But the facts don't matter, the statistics don't matter. They have been analysed, but that doesn't make the slightest dent in the conviction on the street, that daily, young black men are being mown down by the hundreds by crazed white racist cops. I mean, that's the vision that this movement has latched onto.

Cater: So you live part of the year in the U.K., I think most of your time there, I think, don't you? And some time back in the States so you're in a position to...

Shriver: Yeah, I spend three quarters of the year in London.

Cater: How it is in the States now? A sort of frustration seems to be building up, a double frustration. One about Donald Trump, at least among half the population, and the other about just being locked down. It seems to me those two frustrations have come together with a Black Lives Matter movement. How do you see it?

Shriver: Oh, I see the extraordinary explosion of feeling over the Floyd murder as directly connected to lock downs. People have been going nuts and there has been a huge amount of energy stored up that is looking for an outlet. I just think no lock downs and those protests would be a fraction of the size they are. It’s especially young people who've been losing their minds, and I don't blame them. I mean, it's been horrible and a lot of them have been stuck with their parents all this time.  University students, sent home, had an independent life going and suddenly you're back with Mom and Dad and it's just awful.

And furthermore, talk about apocalyptic visions, I believe that the lock downs created an atmosphere, especially in large cities, of the end of the world, of Mad Max. We've never seen New York look like this. The streets completely empty, all the shops boarded up and shuttered, no life, nothing. It’s like a neutron bomb has been dropped. This has never, ever happened before. Even Christmas morning has more activity than that.

This has been such an extraordinary period, such an exceptional period, and we have created a sense that anything could happen. Anything could happen, and also the future is in peril, and it is, economically. It's terribly in peril. So there's just this feeling of end of days that has permeated the Western world, which means that all kinds of behaviour starts feeling possible.

I mean, why not burn everything down? When you start feeling as if there is no future, then you're liberated in the most horrible way. A lot of what controls our behaviour is belief in our own future and our guarding of that future. You don't want to do a lot of things, because maybe you'll get arrested and it'll ruin your life. But if you think that your life is already ruined, or the world is just going to Hell, then you don't control yourself. There's not reason to. Why not steal the tennis shoes if you want them?

I'm on record as opposing these lock downs, from the beginning, I was one of the earliest columnists to come out and say, "this is a terrible mistake, we have never responded to a contagious illness in this manner, by closing entire countries for months on end" and there was a good reason we didn't, and that's because it's a terrible idea. It's not even very epidemiologically effective, the curves that the infection has followed in lock down and no lock down countries has almost been identical. And the only really long lasting effect it has is to completely destroy the economy and the balance sheet of government after government. I'm just horrified, it has really been looking like the entire Western world has committed suicide.

And one of the weird things about witnessing this suicide, is that it has been so peaceful. It has been so quiet, the skies are clear, the birds are tweeting, it is as if rather than the end of the world, it's like suddenly utopia has arrived and none of us has to work anymore, it's just great. And you can sleep late, and in countries such as the U.K. the government pays 80% of your salary, and you don't have to do anything for that. I mean, it's like we've all died and gone to heaven.

And the irony is, this period of tranquility and quiet is actually an act of mind-boggling destruction. If the businesses that are going down were buildings instead of organizations, than the sound would be deafening. They would be buried under a pile of bricks. But it has been a dissonant experience because it’s been so pleasant.

I haven't kept up with what the weather has been like in Australia, but that was the nicest, warmest, sunniest Spring the U.K. has ever had since records began. There was just this atmosphere of calm and happiness. And all the time I'm thinking, "But this is destroying this country, it is destroying the United Kingdom.”

And the other irony is that people have gone through this period of enforced stasis and imagined that the sacrifice of not going to restaurants and bars and not going to the theatre, that this is the bad part. And now we're coming out and the end of lockdown and the bad part is over.

No. The bad part hasn't even started yet. The bad part starts, A, when you lose your own job, your furlough's over, you thought you were going back to work. No, you've just been fired. Your company has gone to the wall. And then B, a host of things that you want to do you can't do any more. Oh, finally you could go out to eat. No, actually, all the restaurants have gone bust and the couple that are still operating have social-distancing rules that will make sure that within the month, they'll also go bust. You go to get your shoes repaired, no, the shoe repair place has gone bust. Your favourite little deli on the corner, over.

I think we're going to discover it's going to take a little while for it to come home to us, that we have just destroyed the commercial world.

Cater: The people that make the decisions over there are the 'shiny-pants' aren't they? They're the white collar professionals...

Shriver: I haven't heard that expression.

Cater: ...Who sit on their bums and that's how they make a living. And they've loved it. They live in nice houses, of course, they don't have screaming kids in a one bedroom flat. So they're enjoying it, but the people who are really paying the price for this are the people who can least afford to.

Shriver: I think that one of the ironies of the Black Lives Matter protests is that, give them a few months, and they'll really have something to protest about. I am concerned about the way that this coming downturn, if not long depression, is going to disproportionately punish minorities and anyone who is at the bottom of the income ladder. It's people who are in the more knowledge-based sphere that have gone through lockdown unscathed, and by the way, I would be one of them. I didn't have any problems whatsoever continuing to do my work, I just sit in front of my computer and it was possible to be far more productive than usual because I wasn't interrupted all the time to do personal appearances. So I'm the perfect example of somebody who has come out relatively unscathed. But I am very worried about upcoming and altogether justified civil unrest. And this time it won't necessarily be about a single shooting in Minneapolis. It's going to be about mass unemployment.