'The Blue Cloth', by Maurice Heerdink

(via The Blue Cloth – The Maurice Heerdink Gallery)

(via Literary Magazines for Socialists Funded by the CIA, Ranked - The Awl)

For the lolz!

On this day in 1944, an experimental Nazi V-2 rocket reaches an altitude of 176 km, becoming the first man-made object to reach outer space. The German rocket technology would be crucial for the post-war Soviet and American space program. Crucial for the Cold War as well. pic.twitter.com/KFsg6LleyI

— Klaas Meijer (@klaasm67) June 20, 2021

Twelfth Night

I'm sure we all have our personal "strangest thing about the last four years" - as if it wasn't strange enough to have a literal gameshow host as President of the United States (following on, it has to be said, from the son of the last President but one in the year 2000 and then, in 2008, a turd in a suit). To my mind, looking back, the weirdest political development in my own life was that the best political analysis I could get suddenly seemed to be coming from Pat Buchanan.

Well perhaps no longer! In reaching its apogee and/or nadir (depending on your political tastes) of its glory/horror on the Feast of the Epiphany this year, the Trump tenure at the White House suddenly seemed to shift back into normal focus. Pat Buchanan's somewhat hysterical take on the Trump "insurrection" is here. Mark Steyn's wryly cynical but spot-on analysis, on the other hand, is here.

So was this really another "color revolution" or not? Because clearly that was the idea, not so long ago. Trump was going to try to cling on to office and then be chased out of the White House by a surprisingly well organised "spontaneous" mob of Antifa, BLM and other, er, "colored" people. The American secret state and its various "civil society" offshoots have been doing this sort of thing all over the world for years. In 2020 they were just going to bring that magic home.

In the event, of course, it wasn't quite like that. Trump and his people wised up very early on, the election proved much trickier to rig than was thought (though not impossible, apparently!), Trump made it clear that he would be out in time for his opponent to take up occupancy but would not stop protesting that he'd been robbed, and then the mob that ended up storming Washington turned out to be his one, not that of the "revolution".

Interesting then that Juan Guaidó, the intended beneficiary of the Deep State's most recent "democratic revolution", which was supposed to happen in Caracas, has himself condemned the Trumpists' counter coup de theatre!

El ataque al Capitolio 🇺🇸 es a la democracia. Mis pensamientos con sus ciudadanos y funcionarios que sienten atacada la raíz de su país

La fortaleza de la democracia radica en la solidez e independencia institucional, en el vigor de su entramado social y la consciencia ciudadana

— Juan Guaidó (@jguaido) January 6, 2021

Which, as RT has pointed out, is a bit rich given some of the dodgy shit he's pulled over the years. And yet there he is on Twitter, lining up with the rest of the Pax Americana's slimy quislings to condemn exactly the sort of behaviour that he and his supporters have themselves been guilty of purely because this time it was the other side doing it.

Not that one need think too hard about why he is distancing himself from Trump! Officially he's still America and Britain's man. But with the ink scarcely dry on the Brexit deal he's been unceremoniously dumped by the European Union, and Biden now may well be thinking (and I use the term as one of art rather than exact scientific description) of scrapping the Venezuelan operation altogether. 

Role reversal has been a standard trope of Twelfth Night celebrations since time immemorial. I suppose the "mainstream" just weren't expecting quite such an obvious one this time round.

Something extremely bogus is going on. Was tested for covid four times today. Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test from BD.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2020

The British Establishment and the Media

Can anyone else remember those heady, halcyon, pre-Covid days from, oh, about nine months ago, when righteous liberals were challenging the British MSM to be sceptical about Boris Johnson? (It really wasn't so long ago...)

Things like Channel 4's eating humble pie after one of their classic blunders (if you can really call it a blunder to accuse the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of "racism") during last year's general election ought to have come with a sense of relief. For any of  the mainstream media (MSM) to repent of any of their screw-ups is unusual, after all. But at the time it felt a lot like a strategy of diversion and even (pace the current epidemiological situation) inoculation - apologising for a comparatively minor error in order to distract from a far, far larger one.

And so lo, before our very eyes the old symbiosis of the MSM and government was re-established. The two faces of the Establishment’s PR machine - its party politicians and its corporate journalists - duly kissed and made up.

Nick Cohen and Huw Edwards did their best to get a battle going on between Boris and the BBC - both readily supporting the latter - because supporting an undemocratic media corporation against a democratically elected government is, of course, democratic! (Cohen in particular might like to look up the word ‘democratic’ in a dictionary some time. Only people like him equate it with permanent rule in favour of a state’s “institutions” and their vested interests -and no normal person thinks the BBC or the civil service are impartial. In fact getting the latter to implement the manifesto commitments of a legitimately elected executive is a pretty good definition of what democracy ought to be. Of the people, by the people, for the people... and all that guff! But there’s no telling some people.)

Looking back on this supposed feud between Boris and the Beeb from just over nine months later unfortunately it's surprising how misguided it feels, not to mention how quickly it fizzled out. Most of this at the time, for example, just came across as paranoid partisan sniping, with little genuine sense of a big intellectual or institutional split.* As it happens, he was of course quite right not to trust Boris Johnson. And keeping an eye on Boris’s manipulations of the media would definitely have been a Good Idea. It just never actually happened. The MSM swallowed all of Boris's claims about Covid, including the claims that contradicted the other claims, and asked for seconds.

I would suggest though that since 2016 something has gone quite badly wrong with the mainstream media generally! After all, 'according to Ofcom 49 per cent of Britons now get their news from social media, a proportion that has risen from 18 per cent in just four years.' [The Spectator] Their undisguised and undiluted hatred of Brexit and Trump, for example, has made them utterly incapable of reporting on current affairs in either Britain or America (and probably Russia, if you think about it) with anything even approaching fairness or balance. And lo and behold, half the population have given up on them completely!

Not that things are that much better across the herring pond. The ever redoubtable Douglas Murray recently blew the gaffe on Bill Maher.

Most people have mixed feelings about Bill Maher — they like him when he agrees with them and dislike him when he doesn’t. Perhaps I should note that throughout his career I’ve always admired him. But there’s a problem with his show: the unnaturally close relationship between him and studio-audience. When Maher says something vaguely funny, the audience whoops and hollers. When a guest he disapproves of says something funny or wise that he doesn’t agree with, the guest is met with stony silence. It is made to seem as though it is very hard to get one over on Bill Maher. 

It was only when someone who had been in the audience explained to me the warm-up procedures for the show and the fact that the audience is actually directed when to laugh, clap and applaud, that you realise how much power Maher has (far more than almost any other host) to be the one who decides which guests do well, and which points fly.

Every day’s a school day, I suppose. (Why is it always the creepiest and most feckless of libertarians - Emperor Boris included! - who wants to be Ming the Merciless?)

The "independent" media, alas, are not noticeably better. To this day it’s not entirely clear to me whose side the “investigative journalists” of Exaro were really on (let alone what they were on, given how whacky some of what they were coming out with was). Yes, their links to the British “mainstream” Left are a matter of public record. And their “anti-Establishment” credentials ended up being somewhat tarnished not just because the smears they were peddling were spurious (and morally appalling) but also because they were directed not against the Establishment per se so much as against various individual members of the Tory Party. In fact their putative founder Jerome Booth (Christ Church, Oxford and Anglia Ruskin, something big in emerging markets doncha know, etc.) is rather more “Establishment” than they might let on.

Perhaps the simple truth though is really just that everyone likes a good conspiracy theory, and if it involves sex then most people will like it even more. For some reason everyone but everyone likes either (a) reading about sex, or (b) looking down from a moral high horse on anyone whose sexual tastes are slightly more, er, exotic than his own, or (c) both. Though it may have a had a distinctly left-ish hue to it, at the end of the day the “Westminster paedophile” allegations scandal was really just a product of bigotry and titillation and not very much more.

The Establishment's very own little beagle on the other hand is of course a decidedly strange outfit called Bellingcat. (See here.) And they're strangely convincing. Even the good old Speccie has fallen prey to their enthusiastic tail-wagging.

Julian Assange’s Wikileaks was once fêted by western media for its willingness to release suppressed information — for instance, footage of US choppers shooting up unarmed civilians in Iraq — but later turned into a channel for political dirt stolen by Kremlin-sponsored Russian hackers.

Except that (pace Mandy Rice-Davies) they say they didn’t. What probably happened in fact was simply that Assange’s team fell from grace with the Left partly because of his own sexual peccadilloes (in Sweden a famous leaker can be undone by, er, a leaky condom, it turns out) but mostly because they simply went too far. Assuming that Hillary would win anyway (because Trump wouldn’t “be allowed to win”), they thought they’d bolster their credentials with the Far Left (or should that be Far Far Left?) by coming out swinging for Bernie Sanders. These are, after all, the same people who were quite happy to force the West’s allies in Afghanistan to choose between exile from their country or possible murder by the Taliban (because they were “informants” and “they had it coming”). For them the actual election of Donald Trump was presumably just one of those things.

And finally, if you really do want to go all the way, there's dear old Pooty Poot and what's left of the pro-Russian Far Left. So was Peter Hitchens supping with the Devil again when he was recently endorsed by the Canary? One would counsel him to use a long spoon, in any case.†

*And if Cohen was merely his usual obnoxious leftist self, this from Edwards was dubious in the extreme.

And you realise yet again that the real purpose of many of the attacks is to undermine trust in institutions which have been sources of stability over many decades. The apparent purpose, in short, is to cause chaos and confusion.

Surely the point of attacking perceived bias is to correct that bias in favour of truth - or at least of fairness and balance? Here and there, of course, one did come across small victories. At least, for example, the BBC stopped insisting: (i) that an Albanian gangster murdered in London was Swedish; and (ii) that there was any very great mystery about why he was assassinated. But they were only ever few and far between.

†For what it’s worth (and I write as one who is normally deeply sceptical of the anti-Russian fantasies of the MSM) my instinct is that here be Russian disinformation rather than that Hitchens of all people stumbled upon a massive conspiracy - by the Americans, presumably! - to fabricate reasons for a war against Syria that, thanks to Trump, never actually happened. But perhaps we’ll see!

The Bores

Well it had its moments, but really it failed to live up to any of the promise of the first season. Whereas Season 1 of The Boys finished with shock revelations, complex characters and a decisive break from the source material, Season 2 rowed back on all three.

The biggest disappointment was of course Homelander, who by the end had more or less been reset to the "stupid Superman" character he is in the comics. All the hints of depth that he had in the first season are now gone. He doesn't say prayers before bed with his kid, for example, so presumably we're to take it as read that his Christianity in the first season was simple hypocrisy, rather than something that might have made him an "interesting" person. And although he can still be sneaky and manipulative from time to time, for the most part he's basically so dumb he's hardly even frightening anymore.

Every now and again, for example, both he and other characters seemed to be forget what his powers actually were. Why doesn't he hear Ashley Barrett approaching the door of Stilwell's old office, for example, before she interrupts his "moment". (Did he drop the bottle? Why not just screw it up into a tiny ball? Was he too engrossed in said moment? Is he starting to lose it? That would a surprisingly human direction to take a psychopath former lab experiment, but otherwise it's just a strangely sloppy moment in an otherwise remarkably genre aware franchise.) Ditto in episode 2! Why does he need to go through his ex's drawers when he could just, er, x-ray them? And by episode 3 he can stand in the same room as someone having a 'phone conversation and pretend not to overhear it - although of course in the next episode we discover that he did overhear it. (Why did Maeve imagine that he hadn't? Is she genuinely not so bright as we thought?)

More painfully, it's no longer clear that there's much more to the show's "politics" than simple, unrelenting, grinding (post-Trump!) wokeism. The show does still have its moments, but they're sketchy and less frequent than they used to be. Is there a socio-political comment behind Ryan's home-schooling, for example? Possibly - but it could just as easily be that home-schoolers can't manage to hold out against the "real" world for long. The idea of superheroes' being not "born" but "made" is a direct rewriting of the palaeo-leftist X-Men mythology. And the cut to a therapy session with the Deep is a direct call-back to the whole "being a mutant (or a kid wizard, for that matter) is like being a gay" meme. (Hero or monster? Beautiful angelic higher-functioning sociopath or neurotic little pervert? You decide!) But it's little more than a joke that is funny for a moment and then goes nowhere. The whole 'Girls get it done' subplot meanwhile is a glorious satire on Hollywood's prurient intersectional approach to homosexuality, but it never goes much further than a basically clunky leftist message that celebrities should be entitled to their "private lives".* And the worst "racist" in the series is of course Butcher, who apparently blames all supes for the sins of a minority of them. But we're supposed to imagine that by the last episode he's started to see the error of his ways.

As it happens, the weakest element in the drama throughout hasn't changed at all. It's very much still there, and it is of course the Boys themselves. They're almost wholly unlikable and, more to the point, their motivation is seldom clear. It's possible that modern screenwriters just aren't able to create identifiable right-wing characters. But it's also possible they're just lazy. Why, for example, do our eponymous anti-heroes spend so much time just lounging around in a basement? I can't say. But it's very, very boring.

The best new addition to the series was of course new supervillain Stormfront, but by the end she's been outed as a "Nazi" and (quite literally!) disarmed. The possibility of an interesting relationship between Homelander and his son has been peremptorily curtailed. Simon Pegg's not in it anymore. Most the old cast are now more or less 'phoning in their performances. And the revelation that the new left-wing politician character (basically an Alexandria Ocasio Cortez calque) is really a baddy looks altogether doomed from the outset. We're certainly not being promised that next season's baddy will be Far-Left, to balance out this season's "Far-Right" character. In fact quite the opposite! There's little doubt that she'll eventually be exposed as a "hypocritical" liberal who's simply "sold out" to the corporatists of Vought. Her leftist ideology will no doubt remain uncritiqued.

So all-in-all something of a disappointment - and with Joe Biden back in the White House there's little prospect that it (or any of the rest of America's "cultural output") will be getting very much better anytime soon!

*And they, of course, get to decide what counts as "private".

Things to Do in Dallas When You're Bored

The first season of The Umbrella Academy was genuinely quite appealing. It was basically what you'd get if Wes Anderson did a reboot of the X-Men, and even when it wasn't wholly original it was at least knowingly so and even, at times, slightly subversive.

Season 2 tries to repeat the successes of Season 1, but it does so with an utterly leaden, beat-for-beat approach that is altogether un-involving and which at times is slightly repulsive. Indeed by trying simply to repeat the formula of the first season it completely fails to build on its successes, which has the effect of freezing the series' worldbuilding, hamstringing its plot, and all but throttling its character stone dead. Indeed by the end of Season 2 the members of the Umbrella Academy have either stayed where they were at the beginning of Season 1 or indeed regressed and become even less sympathetic (and thus less interesting) than they've ever been before.

So now for example we have a 5 who is more homicidal than ever - though to be fair he is at least still trying to save the world. Klaus meanwhile has gone clean, but then he relapses. Luther is now a rebellious and complacent git. The Rumour (because I can't even remember her name) is a self-righteous revolutionary. (Even if you think that it's fair enough that a black woman would support the race revolution in the 1960s, she's from the future. She knows that it's going to happen anyway. Why exactly is she taking out her personal problems on the white people of her grandparents' generation? Somehow I can't imagine it's because she was bullied at school for being black.) The Hispanic one is just an oaf who wants to save JFK, without caring or even thinking about the consequences. (Spoiler: He fails anyway.) And Vanya is now just an obnoxious little marriage-wrecking bean-flicker.

In other words all the characters we liked in the first season (and Vanya) are now just as unappealing as ever, nay more so. The dysfunctional family joke is no longer endearing. It's just tedious and disappointing. None of it feels fresh anymore, nor has it moved on from what went before, in terms of either character or plot.

Even the stuff about the Gallifreyan-style Time Agency (or is it the Temp Agency - which is a fun joke, if you think about it, but quite possibly one the neo-socialists who work in modern television wouldn't get?) makes no sense. If the 2019 "apocalypse" was a fixed point in time, how can the new one in 1963 be another one?

And the weirdest thing is that the show's mythology hasn't grown either. The main thing that made Season 1 so enjoyable was its inventiveness - constantly introducing new characters and ideas. And even if they weren't particularly original, at least they were introduced in an enjoyably kooky, left-field but ultimately knowing way. The old man in a child's body? It's been done before, but not for a while in a mainstream show. So why not? Time-travelling assassins? Ditto! Dysfunctional super-family? Might as well! Just turn it up to eleven. Super-intelligent chimp butlers are cool. So are robot moms. So are murder mysteries and apocalypses and adorable short trousers. Put it all together and what do you got?

My own hopes for the series - that they'd reboot the characters as children, and then have a genuine battle of minds and wills between what their father wanted them to be and what they eventually became - was obviously never going to happen. But in Season 2 there's virtually nothing new or even imaginative. We already know Hargreeves is an alien. But we don't find out anything more about him other than that. It's enough to leave one googling for Wikipedia.

Indulging in Far-Left fantasies isn't a good idea either, especially when the writers have to compensate for a singular lack of likeable negroes and lesbians by making every straight white adult male a bully and/or an incompetent buffoon. (This includes the baddies, unfortunately, making them unpleasant to no dramatic purpose and not really scary either.) Ellen Page for example is just as horrible as ever - narcissistic and one-dimensional to a tee. If your case is that she's an overgrown child actress playing a character with severely arrested psychological development then fine. But that none of the Hargreeves children has been able to form a meaningful relationship with a member of the opposite sex is something of a given. Page is just bad - and is particularly badly shown up by actual child actor Aidan Gallagher's range and energy (though in season 2 even 5 regresses to a somewhat one-dimensional mean here).

The characters hardly ever use their superpowers to move the plot along. Is this deliberate? The point that you don't need special powers to be a hero is perfectly legit. And more to the point the only dramatically satisfying victories are ones where superheroes don't use their powers. But here it's Vanya's super powers that lead to the end of the world (again!) and it's 5's time-travel powers that end up saving the day (again!).

The villains meanwhile have almost no motivation. (The Handler wants to make the time commission more "jazzy". That is literally it.) And the heroes just aren't motivated - with the exception of Aidan Gallagher, who still has just enough teenage energy to make his own scenes interesting, but not nearly enough to save this season in the way he both literally and figuratively saved the first. In fact both literally and figuratively the Umbrella Academy is more than the sum of its parts, and by splitting up the characters to do different boring things (boring boxing, boring asylum, boring sex cult, boring civil rights pressure group, boring nanny to a beautiful but boring autistic boy, etc.) we see just how boring each character is by himself.

What really drove the first season were the back stories and the flashbacks. They're almost entirely missing from the second season. What made us fall in love (or at least mildly warm to) the characters of The Umbrella Academy was that we were able to see the "good" versions of them (in their adorable short trousers and knee-socks). And yes, turning the Monocle from being a proud papa, who rewards his prepubescent charges with ice cream each time they save the day, into a straight-up dick (albeit an extra-terrestrial one) was definitely a mistake. Interestingly one of the few good things about Season 2 was the partial "redemption" of Hargreeves, but we'll see if this is a story-arc the show's writers are really going to continue with in Season 3.

And Season 3 need not (yet) be a total write-off. Arguably the biggest problem with Season 2 was a lack of source material, in principle because of how much of the second Umbrella Academy comic book went into Season 1. Well there's one more comic book still to go, and perhaps another in the pipeline, so it's to be hoped that the Sparrow Academy may offer some return to form next year.

But as usual we'll see.