Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'
Covid
Following my questions of yesterday, a corollary has been posed this morning - Is there a politically painless exit from the strategy of periodic lockdowns? Only, I guess, if and when governments say there's now an acceptable of deaths. Possibly after everyone over 80 has died and the oldest person in the country is 79. . . I jest, of course. But not much.
As we wait for this moment, you might sympathise with this view: It was the woman on the TV who finally broke me. Pinch-faced, bespectacled, stats-drunk, finger-wagging, power-tripping and headmistressy, the immunisation tsar was telling us “it is very important we don’t relax too quickly”. We might have vaccinated millions of people, said the head of immunisation at Public Health England, but as long as there was still a small chance of someone, somewhere, contracting a tiny speck of “serious disease”, 65 million people would simply have to get used to masks and social distancing, possibly for “years”. Big events would be “monitored very carefully”, and people might not be allowed abroad until “other parts of the world are as well vaccinated as we are”. But this is total madness, I thought. . . . This is the language of someone who is seriously frightened. Everywhere it is the same: terrified people seem unable to make sensible decisions because of the previous bad decisions they have made, or situations they haven’t predicted and have lost control over. Back to the (dominant?) issue of a sensible exit,
Spain:
1. The ban in travellers from the UK has been lifted, in time for the tourist season. Though pessimists see August as the first month of permitted departures/arrivals. Despite the vaccination success of the UK.
2. The current overview here is that cases have fallen considerably since the beginning of the year but are starting to rise again in some parts. Authorities are concerned Easter will bring a fresh spike. Our 4th wave, in other words.
3. A worrying graph?
Cosas de España
Permitted inter-regional traffic this Easter
If I ever knew, I’d forgotten that there’s a political party in Spain which promotes a Spexit. At first glance, it looks rather left wing. Somos España es el partido de los millones de españoles que ven los problemas que anegan el país pero no tienen vía práctica para solucionarlos. Es el partido de los que no quieren 17 chiringuitos partitocráticos repartiéndose el país como si de una tarta se tratara. El partido de los que prefieren empleo y riqueza a servir a políticos, empresarios y especuladores sin escrúpulos. El partido de la política seria, que no busca llenarse los bolsillos. SOMOS España es tu partido.
The UK
From the columnist I cited above: Are we seriously going to have to put up with months, possibly years, of do-gooders fear-mongering about the possibility of a third wave? Boris Johnson is no longer a risk-taker, having stupidly taken too many risks in the early stages, allowing Britain to soar to the top of the list of most-affected countries and threaten what most obsesses him: his political legacy. We are now suffering a second time to save Boris’s fragile view of himself, because he didn’t take our lives seriously enough in the first place. Spot on.
The Way of the World
Welcome to the woke age of cinema - where 'historical dramas' peddle revisionist lies. See the article below.
English
You doubtless know what a CEO is. And possibly even a CFO. But let's hear it for Chimpo. Or Chief impact officer.
I suggested yesterday that 'legacy' now meant 'previous¡. On reflection, better alternative might well be 'old-fashioned'. Or 'previously dominant' Reflecting the fact they still exist.
Finally . . .
If you're wondering why so much media attention is being given to a big boat stuck in the Suez Canal, it's because it's nearly identical to the worst-case scenario for the global trade of goods by sea, or about 90% of the total of world trade. The knock-on effects - eg on prices - are very significant.
THE ARTICLE
Welcome to the woke age of cinema - where 'historical dramas' peddle revisionist lies. In ‘Ammonite’, film-maker Francis Lee has usurped and misconstrued the life of paleontologist Mary Anning in favour of titillation: Zoe Strimpel, the Sunday Telegraph
Even 5 years ago, it would have been hard to argue with a straight face that a film about a 19th century lady fossil scientist stood as a symbol of one of the great and most menacing social ills of our time.
Well, welcome to 2021, a year that – while promising in other ways – seems destined to build on the horrors of its predecessor where woke hegemony and its penchant for ceaseless propaganda, distortion and revisionism are concerned.
It has long been obvious that we are living in an age in which historical accuracy has been superseded by the demands of a raging fixation with identity politics and political correctness. But what is becoming freshly apparent is the growing role that TV and film – most of it made by people who have drunk deeply from the trough of woke kool aid – are playing in distorting the past.
The order of the day seems to be historical dramas, based just enough on historical figures and events to lull audiences into believing they can rely, broadly, on what they are seeing. But their makers have different ideas. The latest example of this troubling revisionist impulse is the film ‘Ammonite’, starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan, which began streaming in the UK on Friday on Amazon Video and the like. It was immediately the recipient of gushing praise, especially from the Left-wing press. The film is meant to be about Mary Anning, the 19th century paleontologist (played by Winslet) who made groundbreaking fossil discoveries on the Jurassic Coast. She is a fascinating, totally unsung woman, the story of whose discoveries alone could easily have carried a brilliant, enriching film.
All of this was ignored by Francis Lee, the film-maker, who chose instead to focus not just on Anning’s sex life but on an entirely speculative, seemingly fabricated lesbianism with geologist Charlotte Murchison (Ronan). Lee himself is smug about the “storm” this decision has caused, proud of how he has put one in the eye of homophobic western culture and historical tradition. Odd, then, that he seems blind to the fact that he – a man – has usurped and misconstrued the life of the only significant female paleontologist in history in favour of titillation.
Lee explained himself in the tortuous logic of the self-styled progressive, demanding: “After seeing queer history be routinely ‘straightened’ throughout culture, and given a historical figure where there is no evidence whatsoever of a heterosexual relationship, is it not permissible to view that person within another context? Would [critics] have felt the need to whip up uninformed quotes from self-proclaimed experts if the character’s sexuality had been assumed to be heterosexual?”
It’s not clear what he’s complaining about, since many reviewers, especially in the lefty press, have mooned over ‘Ammonite’. But for people like my parents – interested in history, science and extraordinary women – it was a disaster. My father wrote to me after hearing Lee interviewed on the radio. “Who knows or cares what he was thinking?” my father wrote. “He has written the fake history and that will now forever occupy the landscape.”
But ‘Ammonite’ is just the latest in a growing line of such output. ‘Dickinson’, a 2019 drama about Emily Dickinson, featured the famously reclusive 19th century poet as sexually fluid – she actually twerks in one scene. Meanwhile ‘Jamestown’, about 17th century settlers in America, had young wives demanding an end to rape, and Hulu’s 2020 drama about Catherine the Great didn’t bother with history at all.
Who cares, you may ask? Well, ‘Jamestown’ or ‘Dickinson’ alone might not change the course of historical understanding. But other shows will – and have. Take ‘The Crown’ and ‘Bridgerton’, both watched by tens of millions of Netflix subscribers last year. ‘The Crown’ was based on living characters and real events that most people dimly recognised, so it appeared to be history. Even so, it manipulated reality – and the extraordinary achievements of Margaret Thatcher – in accordance with the politics of Peter Morgan, its maker. ‘Bridgerton’, meanwhile, was a costume romp but encouraged viewers to “learn”, misleadingly, that Queen Charlotte was black and that history has been racist in portraying the Regency court as largely white, which it was.
History is under siege everywhere from university classes to museum exhibits – and newspapers of the most respectable hue. In 2019, the New York Times launched its 1619 project, an attempt to rescript American history so that it revolves around the date the first slaves were imported, and comes to supersede 1776, the date of American independence. The year 1619 is indeed a terrible and important one, but it’s not where American history starts – and ends.
But in the golden age of streaming, it’s film and TV that packs the biggest punch. Nearly 30 million people watched the latest season of ‘The Crown’ in the week after it launched, while 82 million saw ‘Bridgerton’. That’s a lot of people imbibing “history” written by politics. ‘Ammonite’ is unlikely to reach such figures, but in turning a precious bit of women’s history and science into a leerathon, it’s arguably done just as much damage.