John Cusack: ‘I have not been hot for a long time’
Two o’clock, Chicago time. The curtains are down against a bright afternoon sun and John Cusack, who is by reputation a late riser, takes a seat at the breakfast counter in his kitchen. For decades this storied, experienced and rather solitary-seeming actor has dressed all in black. Today is no exception. He wears a black T-shirt, black bandana and a black leather biker’s jacket. But for the incongruous cup he’s drinking coffee from (a medieval-style flagon, large as a flowerpot) Cusack could be one of those menacing motorcycle dudes who parks himself next to you at an American dive bar and starts explaining, unbidden, how he once killed a man but in error.
He turned 54 in the summer. The voice is gravellier than when you knew it best, when Cusack was in his mid-30s heyday and playing those brilliant lovelorn everymen in Being John Malkovich (1999), High Fidelity (2000) and Serendipity (2001). The eyes, always so coolly narrowed when Cusack first made a name for himself as a teen star of the 80s, are more starey and tired these days. He rubs them a lot while he talks.
Professionally speaking, Cusack has been on a wearying run of form of late, the past five years a hotchpotch of underwhelming thrillers. (He hopes that a new Amazon TV drama he’s starring in, Utopia, will help revive his stock.) And politically speaking, as with so many who lean left, Cusack has been left exhausted by four years of a Trump presidency. The actor was online most of the day before, getting angry at news bulletins and tweeting strangers and friends – broadcasters, Edward Snowden, a librarian in North Carolina, a chocoholic in the UK – about the president’s latest outrages. “He’s an evil fuck,” Cusack growls, “and he grinds our faces in it every day.”
Back in 2012, when Cusack was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a few of the people closest to him gave speeches, his sister Joan Cusack described his character as part It’sa Wonderful Life (melancholy, sweet), part Doctor Strangelove (eccentric, political). Kate Beckinsale, Cusack’s co-star in romcom Serendipity, described him as a “bit mysterious”. Defining himself in his Twitter bio,
Cusack prefers the phrase “apocalyptic shit-disturber”. Whoever is most right, Cusack is an interestingly complicated guy, both opinionated and deferential, salty and sweet. Sometimes strangers will send him messages, suggesting that he leave politics alone, stay in his lane. “You have officially ruined Serendipity for me!” they say. Or: “You used to be one of my favourites!” Sometimes, Cusack will reply: “Aww. You’ll be OK.”
I ask him what he thinks about the idea that actors ought to stay in their lane, away from politics, and he takes a deep breath. (The “you” in the following speech can be taken to be directed at the person for whom Serendipity has been ruined.) “When you see children being ripped away from their mothers’ arms and put into kennels,” he says, “I’m sorry if you think someone speaking out against that is someone not staying in their lane. But let’s agree that, if you can’t figure out that that’s fascism, then we don’t have anything more to say to each other, and I don’t have any respect for you, and we should probably not talk. I mean!”
When I ask if he holds out much hope for a return to political normality after the November election, Cusack puffs out his cheeks and wags his head, weighing it. “One hopes that sanity comes back. But, um, America is a bat-shit-crazy place. So you just don’t know.”
And “you just don’t know” is the primary lesson a long career in Hollywood has taught him. A 30-plus-year veteran of the business, Cusack has known
what it’s like to feel hot as an actor, and also what it’s like to feel the icy touch of irrelevance. When I ask about the difference between those two feelings, being hot and cold, Cusack pauses for a good long while and then says: “We-e-eell. I haven’t really been hot for a long time.”
Utopia, the show he hopes will warm him up, is colourful, breathless and vicious – a remake of Dennis Kelly’s Channel 4 hit, this time written by Gillian Flynn. It’s a multi-threaded drama that interweaves the stories of a gang of millennial comic-book readers, a pair of assassins and the sinister founder of a biotech company. Cusack, who can be peerlessly sinister when he wants to be (see his double turn in 2013, first as a serial killer in The Frozen Ground and then as Richard Nixon in Lee Daniels’ The Butler), plays the founder.
Followers of his Twitter feed will know the powerful aversion to the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg this actor has. When I suggest to Cusack it must have been cathartic, playing a founder-saviour type, and getting to channel his deep suspicions about Musk and the rest, he corrects me: “Yeah. They’re not really suspicions so much as they’re, um, factual observations.” His unease about the Silicon Valley founder class stretches back to the 00s and his time aboard Bill Clinton’s plane as part of a celebrity delegation to Africa. Musk was on the flight, too, as were Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Google.
“Too weird an adventure to pass up,” Cusack says, explaining his unlikely presence aboard. “It’s not like I’ve always been pure. No! I was the dog, and I was walked too. But then you start to see through it. You see these people saying, ‘Don’t be evil! We’re not evil!’ A nice catchy phrase. But then you see that their business becomes datamining… You learn about what’s really happening with these companies. What their back doors are.”
His strong political views evolved from that trip, Cusack says. In recent years he has travelled to Russia with the novelist Arundhati Roy to meet American exile Edward Snowden – “Ed” – and show him support. He has been a full-blooded supporter of Bernie Sanders for a while now, and though he will vote for Biden in November Cusack insists he will do so grudgingly. (“You’re voting for an extension of the neoliberal order. But the alternative is fascism. You have to vote against Trump.”) A year ago his politics got him in trouble when he put out a tin-eared tweet that he meant as criticism of Israeli foreign policy but which was antisemitic. Cusack apologised. Recently, he took to the streets of
Chicago during the Black Lives Matter protests, and got rushed by a gang of baton-wielding cops while he was taking photographs. “They didn’t hit me, they just… tuned up my Vespa. Whack-whack-whack!”
By queasy chance, part of the story of Utopia, which was written and filmed last year, involves a pandemic. It’s an accidentally timely subplot that Amazon has not been shy to push in trailers for the show. I ask Cusack, when he first read the script, whether it seemed at all plausible that something like this could happen, and he says yes: “Given the convergence of dystopian realities that we’ve had, whether it’s food and water shortages, endless war, global warming, it didn’t feel like it was too much of a stretch to imagine it happening. ‘ Timely’ would be the wrong word, because that sounds like something that’s convenient and nice. But, for those people who have been Cassandras for a while, for those people who’ve been saying we must change, it feels like the rest of the world is catching up now.”
Do you consider yourself a Cassandra? Cusack rubs his eyes again. He smiles. He frowns. He appears to think, fuck it: “Sometimes you do. If you are saying things that people might not want to hear, or things that are annoying to hear… Y’know, yeah. A little bit!”
He’s gentler, honestly, than all this hoarse political speechifying makes him sound. He sister Joan once pointed out Cusack’s unconscious habit, at parties, of lowering his 6ft 2in frame to look someone shorter than himself in the eye: “To make them feel like the star.” Chatting as he sits in his kitchen, he isn’t so far away in manner from the affable, all-American boys he played so well in the 1980s. There was “Gib” Gibson in The Sure Thing (1985) and Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything( 1989). As a viewer I first encountered Cusack when he played the wise and tragic college boy Denny Lachance in Rob Reiner’s bildungsroman, Stand By Me.
Reiner, who also directed The Sure Thing, was a former teen star himself. Cusack remembers the director going out of his way to make him feel welcome in an industry that could be cold and cruel to its young actors. “You don’t need me to repeat all the clichés. Hollywood can be quite transactional and rough. I was lucky. I was 16, 17. Rob would invite you into his home, look after you – it wasn’t that… exploitative vibe at all. Movies were definitely the Wild West back then. But there were good people, too.”
What does he remember of his first encounters with the rougher edges of the business? Cusack looks at the curtained window, holding in a smile, apparently wondering whether to tell the following story or not. “I remember, early in my career, when I was still in high school, you’d be on a movie set and at the end of the day people would go and get beer from the prop truck. And also you could get coke.”
He doesn’t mean the kind with a capital C: “Like I said, the Wild West. Not that I was doing it all. But it was just sort of like, ‘Wow.’ Sort of like, ‘OK! Anything goes.’”
After his breakout years in the 1980s he was in and out of work in the early 90s, till Woody Allen cast him in Bullets Over Broadway. Cusack found a cool groove towards the end of that decade, co-writing and starring in the cult comedy Grosse Pointe Blank and appearing alongside John Malkovich in the dementedly silly, but sort of brilliant, action movie Con Air. That film ended with an aeroplane full of condemned prisoners landing on a fully populated LA strip. (Incredibly, this is not the silliest scene Cusack has ever rendered for the action-movie canon. For that you need to check out the apocalypse movie 2012 and a sequence in which he drives a stretch limo through a collapsing Los Angeles skyscraper.)
His career high came right at the turn of the century, when he reunited with Malkovich for the unforgettable Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jonze collaboration Being John Malkovich and a year later starred in, co-wrote and coproduced the movie adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. In 2001 he did Serendipity, which has proved durable, a well-thought-of Christmas romcom. The later 00s were not quite so fertile for him and might be best thought of as Cusack’s “with hilarious results” phase. On IMDB they summarise the plot of 2005’s Must Love Dogs as follows: “A 30something preschool teacher looks to the personals for a change of pace and a relationship, with hilarious results.”
In 2010 he starred in and produced the self-explanatory comedy Hot Tub Time Machine, a silly film that found a cult audience and doubled its money at the box office. But it was one of the last of his projects to date that Cusack was able to get real money for. “In the last few years, I haven’t been able to get projects financed,” he says. “That could be a function of getting older. Or it could be a function of being cold.” Instead, the past decade’s work has been characterised by some ace bit-parts and cameos (an eerie psychotherapist in David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, the musician Brian Wilson in Love &Mercy, a soliloquising preacher in Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq) as well as some terribly average thrillers, in almost all of which Cusack appears on the poster brandishing a gun or standing next to someone brandishing a gun.
“You may go make a film,” he sighs, lowering his torso over the breakfast counter, “you do all this work. And the movie sort of gets butchered in the editing room. And that happens, like…” (Cusack turns down his mouth, doing the sums) “like, nine times out of 10? So it’s not a very satisfying thing, if only one in 10 movies that you’re making work out the way they were planned.” Movie-making, he concludes, is “brutal, transactional, superficial and dumb.” Incredible, really, that he’s waited so long to get in on TV.
In all his years as an actor Cusack had never ventured further into telly than a 1996 guest-spot on Frasier, even as telly became an exciting, thriving, prestigious format, a refuge for so many forgotten or overlooked actors of Cusack’s generation. He has heard it said he was once considered for the role of Walter White in Breaking Bad. Even, that he was offered the gig and turned it down. The rumour has proved so persistent that Cusack finally had to sidle up to showrunner Vince Gilligan and ask. “I said: ‘I never got offered Breaking Bad, did I?’ And Vince said no.” The new Amazon show, Cusack insists, was his first serious offer. “One of those phone calls, they want you.”
And so he is waiting. For the show to come out (and maybe warm him up a little). For the presidential election in November, and the chance that Trump and his cronies will be ousted from power. All his adult life people have recognised Cusack, and tapped him on the shoulder, and said: I loved you in Say Anything (or High Fidelity, or Con Air). Sometimes a certain type of man, wary of looking soft, will insist it’s his wife who loves Cusack. Back in 2003, Cusack was at a boxing match in Las Vegas when he got one of these taps on the shoulder. “Hey, John,” said Donald Trump. “My wife loves you.” Cusack claims he shivered in revulsion even then.
When our interview is over he will be back online, barracking Trump, expressing his fury and his contempt. Before he goes I suggest to Cusack, gently as I can, that Twitter does not always look the healthiest place for him. “I would love to think about other things,” he agrees. “Poetry. Love. Anything else. But that’s just not the times we’re in. And, y’know, not all anger is just sort of somebody stuck in some rut in a basement. If you can’t be outraged on behalf of other people, or express anger at injustice, maybe that is its own rut. Sure, I might go too far sometimes. But I really just want to get across the message: that we’re sleepwalking into an incredibly dark possible future.”
Cusack rubs his tired eyes. He drinks from his big tin tankard of coffee. Who knows, he says? “Maybe being outspoken hurts your career… I’m just aware it helps me sleep better at night, knowing that I wasn’t passive during this time.”
It’s not like I’ve always been pure. No! I was the dog, and I was walked
in the room by asking the people at home to “imagine if karma and science teamed up to send a message” to Trump that would mercifully silence him. Carrey looks like he’s about to cut loose and say what many of us are thinking, but ultimately backs down. The same might be said of the show as a whole.
Chris Rock returns to his old stomping grounds for hosting duties. The comic starts out commenting on Trump’s health crisis, saying “my heart goes out to Covid”, but he quickly moves on to a scatterbrained takedown of government inefficiency. He complains that the qualifications for holding public office are too lax one second, then rails against the elitism of our elected officials in the next. No one expected Rock to drop any revelatory political insight tonight, but his middleof-the-road gripping comes off as utterly pointless given the direness and absurdity of our current situation.
For what’s sure to be the first of several lazy double entendre sketches this year, Eye on Pittsburgh covers a super spreader event occurring at the Name Change Department of the Pittsburgh Federal Building. Witnesses include Edith Puthie, Irma Guerd, Tess Tichol, Mike Roedick and so on.
Bottom of Your Face is a music video starring Chris Redd, Pete Davidson and Keenan Thompson. The umpteenth woke rap sketch from these guys, it starts out as an anthem encouraging women to take off their masks so they can see how hot (or not) they are, before Ego Nwodim and musical guest Megan Thee Stallion take over and turn the tables, calling the men out for their sexism and hypocrisy.
In Future Ghost, we flash back to October of 2000 to find teen gamer Zach (Kyle Mooney) transported to the present and shown the sorrowful future that awaits him. His initial horror at finding himself still living in his mother’s basement and wasting his life playing video games quickly morphs into excitement when he notices the advancements in gaming technology.
Megan Thee Stallion performs her first song of the night, Savage, which concludes with a demand for racial justice.
On Weekend Update, Colin Jost and Michael Che dive headlong into the president’s illness, while admitting the news caught them completely off guard. Che weighs the morality of making fun of someone – even someone as deserving as Trump – infected with a potentially deadly disease, but points out, “mathematically, if you were constructing a joke, this is all the ingredients you need”.
Apparently, that’s not the case when it comes to the Update hosts, who, much like SNL in general, do absolutely nothing with the bounty they were handed. Out of all the headline figures they could have used for Update guests – Melania Trump, Chris Christie, Amy Coney Barrett – they instead fall back on rote regulars Chen Biao (Bowne Yang), the sassy Chinese trade minister, and Carrie Crumb (Aidy Bryant), the bubbly tween travel expert. Anyone hoping for a final appearance of Kate McKinnon’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg will have to settle for a short and wordless cut away to her sitting in the audience, before a quick title card the reads: Rest in Power. At least we’re spared another cringeworthy rendition of Hallelujah.
Bubble Draft finds Rock hosting a dating show for would-be pro basketball groupies trying to make it into the NBA Bubble, where “they may not get a ring, but they’ll get the next best thing: 18 years of child support!” It’s incredibly dispiriting that SNL would drop as interminable and airless a sketch as this in the middle of an episode occurring during the biggest news week of this insane year, but it is what it is.
Speaking of interminable, a Covidsafety PSA from the Stunt Performers of America takes on the cliches of slapstick comedy in kid’s movies. That premise is idiosyncratic enough to get our hopes up, but the jokes are neither weird enough nor specific enough to land.
Joined by Young Thug, Megan Thee Stallion returns and wraps things up with a performance of Don’t Stop.
Judged on its own merits as an episode, this wouldn’t necessarily rank among the worst of all time (or even recent seasons), but considering everything the show had to work with, it should. It may be that this moment in history is simply too insane to successfully parody, but it’s still incumbent on Saturday Night Live to try. They might as well have had Lorne Michaels walk out during the cold open and throw in the towel.
year?’”
During the 2009 recession, De Beers’s profits plum meted 99%, forcing a company restructure and redundancies that gutted his team. “I was just miserable,” he says. Suzman ended up walking out of the job in 2013. “It was one of the happiest days of my life, marching out of there – and then I went straight back to the Kalahari.”
He set up the Anthropos think-tank, offering anthropological approaches to present-day problem-solving (at a corporate rate of up to £1,400 per day – half for NGOs), and later wrote a book, Affluence Without Abundance, about what the western world could learn from the Bushmen.
Suzman says his time at De Beers taught him to empathise. “It’s really easy to make a caricature of business people, but they’re cultural creatures – we all try to establish meaning and legitimacy around what we do with our lives.”
Many of us are unsuccessful. In a 2015 YouGov survey, 37% of Britons said their work did not meaningfully contribute to the world. In 2017, a Gallup poll of 155 counties found that only one in 10 western Europeans described themselves as engaged by their jobs. This has been framed as a workplace issue – actually, says Suzman, “it is a problem with the nature of work”. It reflects the 20th century boom in what the late anthropologist David Graeber dubbed “bullshit jobs”, creating work for work’s sake. From “human relations” departments that exist to improve attitudes to work and with it productivity, to pay and bonus structures to further favour top earners, Suzman says there has emerged “a whole class of people who were utterly invested in this idea that they were actually creating value”. The key to corporate success is convincing everyone else you’re important and worthwhile, as Suzman learned for himself at De Beers.
“You developed vast bureaucracies which were ultimately pointless, but that was the skill: the bigger your bureaucracy, the more power you wielded and the more important you became. I established this vast empire – I don’t think it made a jot of difference to anything when I got out.”
For a self-identifying worker, it was an important reminder: if work is a transaction of energy, our own is finite.
Not long ago, we dreamed of being liberated from work altogether. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes imagined a future in which technological innovation, efficiency gains and long-term capital growth might usher in a “golden age of leisure” in which we could satisfy our needs by working no more than 15 hours a week.
But a century of efforts to reduce work disappeared after the Second World War. Though labour productivity has increased roughly four- or five-fold in industrialised nations since then, average weekly working hours have remained stubborn at just under 40 hours a week. This is in part a result of our innate drive to keep ourselves occupied, says Suzman: “People like to be busy. This is an absolute fundamental thing: we like to be skilled, we like to whittle, we like to carve.”
In his new book, Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, Suzman takes a discursive path through millennia of milestones to trace our contemporary relationship to work – and concludes that the problem is a “very simple set of assumptions about human nature, which are clearly and demonstrably wrong”.
Chief among them is our preoccupation with scarcity – a hangover from the early agricultural state some 12,000 years ago, when we went from foragers to farmers. Somewhat paradoxically, in being able to cultivate and store food, we became fixated on the possibility we might not have enough – even as our productivity was turbo-charged by the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
The necessity – not to mention, moral good – of hard work was a cultural mantra that became hardwired over time, and persisted even as the driver switched from survival to financial capital. The emergence of cities 8,000 years ago created a whole new kind of work driven not by our material needs – those were met by farmers – but by desires: for status, pleasure, wealth and power.
“Greed became institutionalised with cities,” says Suzman. Our new physical proximity to wealth also exacerbated our anxiety over scarcity, focusing our minds on how we were lacking. “Suddenly there was now this confrontation, this contrast in wealth, and I think that began to shape people. It created this melancholy of constant aspiration.”
Signs of this are everywhere, says Suzman, from grand country-house gates in front of a humble semi-detached to the global trade in counterfeit luxury goods. Social media works as an “ostentation-amplifier”, reassuring ourselves of our success but further escalating our material desires.
“As a species, when we see inequality, we try to either level it down, which is what the Bushman approach was – or we try to level up to it,” says Suzman. We may not even be conscious of the path we’ve chosen, with people routinely underestimating the extent of material inequality in their home countries.
A recent report by Tax Justice found that Britons think accumulating wealth is positive and morally right, and are broadly supportive of the ultra-rich, believing them to have been rewarded for sacrifice and ambition. Tellingly, even the ultra-rich have not made it off the treadmill, tending to work longer hours and spend less time on leisure. But growth has become such an obsession, says Suzman, that, “We now spend most of our energy doing utterly pointless things” – which is damaging not only to our health but to that of the planet through emissions. As an exsmoker, Suzman likens it to a nicotine addiction. “We pump crap into the atmosphere. It doesn’t make us happy. I can’t work out who benefits.”
As Suzman is talking, I consider work as the source of both my greatest satisfactions and my most miserable lows. I’d continue to do my job, and maybe even to periodically burn out, even if I had no material need to do so. My relationship to work may be the most significant in my life – but I am often made uncomfortably aware that the feeling isn’t mutual.
For me, I tell Suzman – as I have told successive therapists, and with no small sadness – the hollowness emerges from a system that makes it seem both joyless and endless. “It’s that at the moment,” he agrees. “But it’s that feeling that makes me vaguely optimistic that we won’t put up with this any more.”
In just sixmonths, coronavirus has underscored much of what wasn’t working about work, and created the opportunity for change. “Essential workers” have been celebrated and revealed to be undervalued and underpaid. The successful switch to working from home may make punishing commutes – or even inner-city business districts – a thing of the past. Social media has abandoned “every day I’m hustling” in favour of a new catch cry: “You don’t have to be productive during a pandemic.” And the furlough scheme opened many people’s eyes to how the economy could be put to work for everybody. Support for once-fringe ideas that might redress a work-life balance skewed beyond proportion, such as a universal basic income ( UBI) or a fourday week, has been voiced even from conservative corners.
It is proof to Suzman that as “stupidly intransigent” as humans can be with regards to culture, “they do change when change is forced upon them” – a hopeful thought for the looming climate crisis. What we must do now, Suzman says, is to seize the opportunity to explore new approaches to organising capital.
“We know that there’s a problem: there’s the environmental aspect, the misery aspect. What we have to do is acknowledge that we actually have these problems… and take experimentation seriously.” Trialling a UBI, or ways of turning office blocks into housing, are two such possible steps towards a “future world order”, says Suzman. We are, after all, unable to go back.
Even the Ju/’hoansi could not return to a hunter-gatherer economy today, says Suzman, but; “I think an economy based on abundance is a cultural possibility, and a choice.” The Ju/’hoansi view of the world as “fundamentally a sharing place… cascaded through everything about their society,” he says. “There’s a recognising that when you take things out of a hierarchy, there’s a great deal more freedom.”
In imagining a new way to work, we might start by asking ourselves if our desires really are infinite – and what we are prepared to pay for them. Suzman is hopeful. “I don’t know anybody with infinite desires,” he says. “I think for most people, they’re pretty modest.”
Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, by James Suzman, is out now (Bloomsbury, £25). Buy a copy for £21.75 from guardianbookshop.com
In cities, the contrast in wealth created a melancholy of aspiration
Rather, the administration recently demanded the imposition of snap-back sanctions, a move opposed by allies in Europe. Trump and the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, are faced with the test of whether they can deploy the international banking and monetary systems to bend the rest of the world to their will and bring Iran to its knees.
McMaster strikes a similar tone on North Korea before Trump: “Washington remained weak in its response by continuing to engage the regime for potential talks, under the misguided assumption that reconciliatory diplomacy could generate a fundamental shift in Pyongyang’s policy.”
Yet McMaster laments Trump downplaying human rights abuses, including the death of Otto Warmbier. Trump, McMaster reminds the reader, described Kim Jong-un as “honorable” and a person who “loves his people” – despite the brutal maltreatment meted out to the student from Ohio.
Not surprisingly, the author has a dim view of both Russia and China. With regard to Russia, he recalls how Barack Obama mocked Mitt Romney for labeling it the No 1 geopolitical threat, and upbraids Trump’s 2016 campaign for enlisting its assistance. As for China, McMaster credits the
Trump administration for recognizing the danger posed by a resurgent Middle Kingdom, in contrast to its predecessors.
McMaster’s embrace of “strategic empathy” may well be a highbrow synonym for engaged prudence at home and abroad. Although he is sympathetic to the president’s demands that US allies pick up a larger share of defense costs, he places a premium on alliances. He sees them a means for projecting power and optimizing outcomes.
Likewise, McMaster takes climate change as reality, and accuses “climate deniers and skeptics” of “disregarding compelling evidence”. He makes clear that he opposed exiting the Paris accords.
At the same time, McMaster views the Green New Deal as an “unrealistic proposal” and a “non-solution”. He accuses both sides of strategic narcissism, and instead calls for a “comprehensive strategy” that recognizes that nations will not “suppress their security and economic interests” simply to join an international agreement”. Not surprisingly, McMaster advocates continued transnational cooperation – with the US taking the lead.
As the US hurtles toward election day, hyper-partisanship and metaphors of Armageddon fill our pages and screens. Tuesday’s debate further raised the temperature. Battlegrounds may struggle to find a ready audience. Its time may already be gone.
It is not clear the US public is in sync with the more muscular and constant use of force which McMaster supports