Any Other Business: Part LIII

As the title suggests, so forth.

SAVE BBC FOUR!

It was alarming to hear yesterday that Lucy Worsley and Janina Ramirez were starting a campaign to try and save BBC FOUR, after word leaked that the BBC was planning to let it disappear at the end of 2020 to save money. The BBC doesn’t need to save said money of course, it’s just the Tories maliciously toying with them in the way US Republicans toy with the US Postal Service. They object to it in principle and then set arbitrary and impossible targets to justify eliminating it in practice. Rather akin to Bogie in The Big Sleep complaining a goon will knock his teeth out and then gut-punch him for mumbling. And the real kicker is that losing BBC FOUR in 2021 means losing BBC FOUR from 2013 to 2020 too. Having lost JFK, Apocalypse Now, Die Hard, The Dark Knight and season 1 of Person of Interest to the difference between RTE 2 and RTE2 I know that all my recordings of the channel will disappear with it. And that’s a lot of recordings… To watch any of these recordings is to time-travel back to watching them with Dad since 2013.  Andrew Graham Dixon’s Art of China, several series and specials by Michael Scott on Ancient Greece, Hew Strachan’s The First World War, Robin Lane Fox’s special on the archaeological origins of Greek myths, the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s appearance on Jazz 625 in the 1960s, and a colossal amount of recordings from the BBC Proms including performances of Prokofiev’s 5^th Symphony, Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances and Isle of the Dead, Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, Mark Simpson playing Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto, Jeremy Denk playing Bartok’s 2^nd Piano Concerto, and Yo-Yo Ma playing all six Bach Cello Suites. To watch any of these recordings is to remember watching them with my Dad and also to recall the well nigh parodic amounts of workplace conversations I have been part of that began with somebody saying “I was watching BBC FOUR the other night, and there was this programme on—” I struggle to think of a greater act of wilful capricious cultural vandalism and intellectual hamstringing that could be perpetrated by a British government than the shuttering of BBC FOUR as a broadcast station. How has it offended? Telling the truth about the world, informing people? Boris ‘Bullsh-t and Bluster’ Johnson is of the party that has had enough of experts; it seems that the mere existence of objective truth now offends him, and must be plucked out. BBC FOUR exists largely because BBC 2 has abdicated its original mission. Coverage of the Proms, as Clemency Burton-Hill rightly lamented, is now largely a BBC FOUR affair. Even the venerable Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for children have been booted to BBC FOUR. If you deride and discard expertise, you end up with buffoonery bungling a plague.

That joke isn’t funny anymore

The Engineer, just before Christmas, muttered that some day he would watch The West Wing. Just probably not while Trump was President, as that would amount to self-inflicted torture… I opined that it might be better to watch it sooner rather than later, Trump or no Trump, because it took its cues from the world as it was at the peak of human civilisation in 1999 in a way that was becoming increasingly unrecognisable. Deals being made in Congress. Deals?! Deals being made across party lines? People being friends across party lines?! Conservative Democrats and Liberal Republicans? This was soon all going to be every bit as far-fetched as the need for three corroborating sources before publication in All the President’s Men. And then as I cycled again thru TG4’s re-runs I hit the ‘Stirred’ episode of season three. Oh boy… There had been a potentially a radioactive spill in a tunnel in Idaho. Bartlet jokes to Leo before taking a phone call from Boise that the Governor of Idaho wants to know what the radiation levels are, and he’ll say that he’ll tell him – but first give me all your electoral votes in the fall. Well, that joke doesn’t seem farfetched anymore given that Trump is deliberately sending more ventilators and PPE per capita to states with Republican governors that need them less than states with Democratic governors, boasting about ordering VP Pence not to call ‘the woman in Michigan’ and then lying about his own boast, and making it plain that unless governors flatter his insatiable ego they will not get the materiel they need to stop their citizens dying. Trump Delenda Est.

Objectivity for … some students!

Well, now. So Fine Gael having happily presided over the degradation of the Junior Cert on the arbitrary assertion of Ruari Quinn, a complaint hereabouts over the last four years, is abruptly unwilling to stand over the same procedure being applied to the Leaving Cert. Odd that. Remember the cutesy animation that ran in cinemas explaining why Ruari Quinn’s nonsense ‘reforms’ of the Junior Cert could only be opposed by heartless monsters equally opposed to learning and out of touch with the real world? It takes mere seconds to articulate the counter-argument against Ruari Quinn’s pet project. If you and your teacher are engaged in a profoundly active balance of terror do you really want that person marking all your work for three years, or would you prefer that your work be in the final analysis independently judged by somebody else, anonymously, and far away from the grudges of your school? Quinn’s folly was based on the syllogism that the Junior Cert needed reform, this was a reform, therefore it needed this reform; without ever articulating why the Junior Cert needed reform. Now it seems Fine Gael has belatedly realised predictive grading for the Leaving Cert would replace a system of blind meritocracy with an all too personal one obviously open to abuse, from both sides; teachers and parents. What finally made the penny drop? The threat of lawsuits from well-connected students expecting places in medicine and law? Or was it the many comedy sketches about vindictive teachers victimising their most unruly pupils? And so we have students promised exams that will be marked objectively.

Gaslighting and Masks

Well. I don’t know quite what to make of this. According to Beauregarde Hinkelmeister-Schmitt, a source usually as reliable as his name is not, it is an open secret among certain journalists that the Government ordered 100,000,000 cotton face masks some time ago and is waiting for them to arrive, hence their glacial progress towards officially admitting face masks are useful. The logic apparently being there’s no point demanding people wear them before we have enough – there’d only be panic and irritation as the shops emptied out. Also, they’re probably more useful as we relax the lockdown. However, the experience of face masks elsewhere suggests they’re useful from the very beginning. Hinkelmeister-Schmitt has perhaps been spinning a party line, in finding all sorts of ways to disparage the example of every country using masks in that fashion; the connecting logic being a fatuous —It wouldn’t work here. Well, cotton masks aren’t N95 PPE. Any old paisley bandanna will do the job. For all of Status Burgundy I wrapped a merino scarf around my face before I went on the dreaded late night shopping sortie. What makes me doubt that this can be true is that I just find incredible the idea that the ‘experts’ would denigrate mask wearing for 2 months and more, and then turn around and say — actually they are da bomb, and there’s one for everyone in the audience. Actually there’re 20 for everyone in the audience. Why would anyone ever again believe anything from the mouths of people who lied to them consistently while planning all the while to do the opposite of what they were saying? How you could possibly impose a second lockdown for a second wave in the autumn after such a breach of trust? I don’t think gaslighting the nation can ever be in the interest of the nation.

Any Other Business: Part XLV

As the title suggests, so forth.

If we just hold our position here, fellas, a plot might stumble across us

The Winds of the Pacific War

Having staggered to the end of HBO’s incredibly underwhelming miniseries The Pacific I found myself growing irate at the closing credits which revealed the fates of a number of the characters who were real. The sense of camaraderie and regret among these men over the decades following the war only highlighted the failure of the series to depict any of this camaraderie. This stands in stark contrast to the C Company in-jokes and friendships that made its predecessor Band of Brothers so compelling. Characters the show lost interest in, that I had given up for dead, turned out to have survived and the band of brothers all re-united Stateside after VJ Day. What a colossal waste of resources it was to take these ten scripts and give them the big bow wow HBO treatment. I can’t help but feel that in the golden age of miniseries in the late 1970s and early 1980s if someone had brought these ten scripts to a network executive two things would have happened. First, he would have beaten senseless the writers room who had confused the mores of New Hollywood with network television. Second, he would have patiently explained that the ten episodes proposed lacked any sense of focus or direction or indeed point. Band of Brothers was based on one book about one company on their journey from training to D-Day thru the Battle of the Bulge to Germany. The Pacific by contrast tried to pull together three books about disparate bands of brothers on different missions and failed miserably. Ditching John Basilone entirely to focus on Eugene Sledge and Robert Leckie would be the most obvious fix for some of the problems, but even then… Shortly before watching this series I had seen The Pacific War in Colour, which covers the same battles with the same soldier-memoirists using their actual words as voiceover. And maps and diagrams that gave the geography as well as the stakes of the engagements. How is it possible to have got more of a sense of the battles from CGI maps plus vague colour war footage and voiceover than from a big budget show depicting the authors of those voiceovers literally in the trenches fighting? Did The Pacific need to introduce officer characters as an excuse for some big maps on big boards in war rooms, as well as dialogue to explain how the strategy of the theatre informs the tactics that Sledge and Leckie must execute? That sort of clarity, along with putting far more effort into fleshing out the friendships of these men, should surely have been the first order of business in the outlining stage of the writing, and would have made The Pacific feel less disjointed and prone to wandering off on aimless tangents to the point where you perversely doff your cap in astonished disbelief that anybody could take the Greatest Generation’s own accounts of their Hell in the Pacific and make it so goddamn boring.

I know, Holden. Charles Manson… Even thinking about the guy makes me start to yawn.

Where is my Mind(hunter)?

I admit defeat. My temporary Netflix subscription has expired and I still had the final 4 episodes left to watch of Mindhunter season 2. I just couldn’t motivate myself to do it. I stuck in there for as a long as I could. I managed to hold on for longer than my sometime co-writer the Engineer did, making it thru the horrors of Anna Torv’s newly yellow appearance all the way to Justified star Damon Herriman’s fantastic turn as Charles Manson. And yet, for all that Herriman gave that long-anticipated sequence all he could, it was let down by, of all things, a seeming lack of confidence by the writers of Mindhunter that the audience would be interested in Holden Ford and Bill Tench interviewing Charles Freaking Manson without that Tench be given some thoroughly bogus (and oh so very painfully and slowly manufactured) ‘personal’ stake in the Manson case via his son being dragged into a macabre crime by youths. It’s Charles Manson. If you’re watching Mindhunter, you’ll be interested.

One Nation, Indivisible?

There is a keen if not sickening irony in Leo Varadkar calling for national unity at this time of global coronavirus crisis. As a minister and as Taoiseach he has presided directly and indirectly for nearly a decade over a number of campaigns designed specifically to set citizen against citizen. Public money was spent on cinema advertisements to propagandise to students that their teachers were wrong to resist Ruari Quinn’s debasement of the Junior Cert. Varadkar himself beamed broadly shortly before he became Taoiseach as he held a placard to launch his ‘Welfare cheats cheat us all’ campaign – his sole achievement as Minister for Social Protection. He was deeply involved in gay marriage and abortion referendum campaigns that were deliberately run in as bitter a fashion as possible. And his government continues advertisements lecturing us about sexual harassment on television, teaching us to always assume the worst of each other. And now, after Fine Gael losing a second election in a row, but showing even less inclination than last time to leave government, he has the audacity to turn around and lecture us all on the need for national unity – having just rejected the national unity of a national government to deal with this coronavirus crisis; because it seems fully 1/4 of the voters he wants to unify behind his continued unelected (and indeed actually rejected) leadership would fit neatly into his own personal basket of deplorables. To mash together the 1940 sentiments of David Lloyd George and Leo Amery – There is nothing which can contribute more to unity in this time than that he should sacrifice the seals of office. In the name of God, GO!

The Fall of New Seattle

And as I continue catching up with iZombie the feeling of disappointment only grows stronger. The idea of making Ravi a part-time zombie for the lolz seems a Scrappy-Doo like innovation to the format, the depiction of the walled city of New Seattle never satisfies in the way that Dark Angel‘s technologically crippled Seattle after the terrorist Pulse did, and the season arc of Liv becoming the new Renegade opposed to Chase Graves’ Robespierrean rule rings hollow because it ignores the fact that Chase’s behaviour is motivated not by outright psychopathy but a food supply that cannot support the zombie hordes already in existence. The feelgood riff on Buffy being elected Class Protector at her Prom doesn’t feel remotely earned as a finale, and frankly I am not sure I want to watch another 13 episodes of iZombie if it’s going to keep declining this precipitously.

85,000 dead, Leo?

I’m curious as to the provenance of this figure of coronavirus potentially killing 85,000 people in Ireland. My back of the envelope calculations last week put it at potentially 39,000 dead in the Republic, and that was working from an American estimate that 39% of the population would be infected. Either Leo is assuming that closer to 80% of the population is going to be infected, or he’s assuming the coronavirus is twice as lethal as the given figure. Either of which is a startling change of parameter that I’d like to hear more about. In any case 39,000 dead from the coronavirus here would sit on top of around 30,000 deaths a year in Ireland. Which is equivalent to doubling the amount of funerals you attended last year. A nasty jolt to the national psyche. After all only 20,000 people were reported to have died here from the Spanish Flu in 1918 and 1919.

Politik: Part VI

It has been, mercifully, over a year since this blog last strayed in the direction of politics; and yet now, very regrettably, it’s happening again.

The Whig Interpretation of History

Herbert Butterfield influentially examined the notion of always progressing from a less progressive past towards a more progressive present and an even more progressive future, usually when the party supported by the historian was in power. That Whig view of Britain inevitably driving towards constitutional monarchy and a democracy liberal enough to sensibly put the Whigs in power carries over in its generalities most everywhere, even as an unspoken assumption. And sometimes you find piquant examples to explode the notion, like this contrast between ringing patriotism and hesitant excuse delivered like Bertie Ahern’s evasions.

“No longer shall our children, like our cattle, be brought up for export” – Taoiseach Eamon DeValera, 1934, speech to Dail Eireann.

“Em, it’s always been the case to buy a house, ah, you need to, eh, raise a deposit. People do it in lots of different ways. Ehh, you know, sometimes peep-people people people go abroad for a period and they get money” – Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, 2018, speech to Dail Eireann.

 

Project 2040

Sitting in cinemas recently and suffering through the unskippable cutesy animation/propaganda reel the Government had spent our money on to publicise its Project 2040, I simmered with multiple feelings of déjà vu. I flashed back to my suffering through a previous cutesy animation explaining why Ruari Quinn’s nonsense ‘reforms’ of the Junior Cert could only be opposed by heartless monsters equally opposed to learning and out of touch with the real world. I flashed back to Bertie Ahern’s National Spatial Strategy in 2002 which would guide the next 20 years of Ireland’s regional development, based on the presence in key towns of … junior ministers. Plus ca change, we have Project 2040 advertisements referring to junior minister Boxer Moran as the King of the Midlands… It’s galling this advertisement is placed in cinemas to catch a captive youth audience and indoctrinate them by repetition of amiable propaganda. It’s galling there’s a spin doctor unit funded by our money working overtime to make Leo Varadkar appear to be a caring competent man of vision with a plan to do the country proud by 2040: he was willing to collapse the government just before Christmas supporting his Justice Minister on what could be described as a Nixonian point of principle – If I see wrongdoing, and I’m told it’s none of my business, that means that it’s none of my business. And it’s galling to know that there isn’t a damn thing we can do to stop Fine Gael using our money to lie to us about their awesomeness, strategically placing advertisements boosting their candidates for the next election. I will believe we have a plan drawn up impartially by experts working from objective data when the government hears it when we do. If we hear a horrified gasp from the back, “But there’s not even a f****** junior minister in Carrick-on-Shannon!”, then we’ll know this is a good plan.

Fair and Balanced, in all things

Sometimes two stories will pop up pages apart in a newspaper and their juxtaposition will beggar belief. I was reading the Irish Independent one day in March and found the NCH regrettably bowing to pressure for some sort of official gender policy to ensure that more music composed by women is performed. It doesn’t need to be good music, mind, just composed by women. Meanwhile a few pages over the BAI cheerfully announced print and broadcast media needed to know that they didn’t have to ask people from both sides to appear on a rigid 50/50 basis. There were other ways to achieve balance in the abortion referendum they suggested, like asking ‘hard questions’ of the Yes campaigners. So, there you have it, quotas are absolutely necessary to ensure fairness, except when they’re not.

He who pays the piper calls the tune or Most news is fake news

The Irish Times recently published their opinion poll announcing 47% of people supported repealing the 8^th as a reasonable compromise that reasonable people would reasonably take on abortion to be reasonable. But then, they would say that, wouldn’t they? This is not news, though it may be mistaken by some for it. Opinion polls can cause certain people to act in disastrous ways, cf. the heave against Enda Kenny, and then they create actual news. Opinion polls are not news; they are not reporting on events that have occurred, they are creating headlines to control the news cycle, push an agenda, and make a newspaper seem important. Opinion polls can be manipulated with contemptuous ease by the framing of the questions, as Sir Humphrey memorably demonstrated by getting Bernard to assent and dissent within a minute to the same question. Can you recall any newspaper trumpeting on its front page an opinion poll announcing most people thought said newspaper’s political agenda was nonsense? He who pays the piper calls the tune… Expect the Irish Times to release another opinion poll the week of the referendum announcing Repeal is over the 50% mark, and therefore a majority of reasonable people reasonably agree with reasonable abortion, and anyone who demurs is a misogynist religious bigot with a yen for torturing suffering women. But it won’t be too far over the 50% mark, because they wouldn’t want to depress the Yes turnout by suggesting it was a foregone conclusion…

Politik: Part V

Lamentably a return to political matters, after thinking about art and propaganda vis a vis I, Daniel Blake and reading A Very British Coup.

 

Lies, lies, and propaganda

Does a government have a right to use taxpayers’ money to fund propaganda campaigns designed to turn some citizens against others? That’s a thought that’s been nagging me a lot recently in cinemas as I’ve sat aghast and agog at a cutesy animation explaining why the nonsense ‘reforms’ of the Junior Cert could only be opposed by heartless monsters equally opposed to learning and out of touch with the real world. It’s hard to find the animation on YouTube for some reason… Possibly because it is targeted at a captive youth audience who for once can’t escape the ads. It takes seconds to articulate an argument against Ruari Quinn’s pet project. If you and your teacher are engaged in a profoundly active balance of terror do you really want that person marking all your work for three years, or would you prefer that your work be in the final analysis independently judged by somebody else, anonymously, and far away from the grudges of your school? Quinn’s folly was based on the syllogism that the Junior Cert needed reform, this was a reform, therefore it needed this reform; without ever articulating why the Junior Cert needed reform. Surely now that Quinn and his party have deservedly been removed from office and almost from existence by an electorate with an unusually good memory of the pig in a poke they were sold in 2011 it is time for his nonsense to be dropped before a system of blind meritocracy is replaced by a system obviously open to abuse. And for God’s sake stop wasting public money on an advertising campaign that would embarrass a communist regime in its substitution of marketing asininity for mental acuity.

God, Lana, read a book!

The latest ad for Liberty Insurance had a young hipster smugly proclaim in voice-over “We’re the first generation in history to live life on our own terms.” … … … The level of historical obliviousness it takes to usher such a sentiment from brainstorming meeting in a hipster advertising agency, through copy-writing and presenting to the client, on into the recording booth, and finally into the editing suite; without anyone questioning whether this assertion might be coming it devilishly high; is truly jaw-dropping. One wonders what the Bright Young Things might have made of such a dismissal of their daring, or what Byron et al might have had to reply in doggerel to it, or the Young Hegelians disproving it in rigorous dialectics through which they now knew how (for the first time [sic] in history) to announce the end of history. It appears there may have been a derisive snort aimed at the right place, because the offending ad is now airing on TV – with a different voice-over, one that admits that we might not have much stuff but we love the stuff we have. A folksy sentiment to warm the cockles of Abraham Lincoln’s heart.