Cultural affairs

 Hi, my name is Buttermilk and I watch The Crown.  I don't binge but I tend to gobble, so I'm already through with Season Four.  I can't help it -- the acting is top-drawer, the settings are astonishing, the titillating bits are titillating and I love the horses and cars.  Do I think it's a documentary?  Don't be daft.

Oliver Dowden CBE is Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and he thinks Netflix should add a "health warning" to each episode so viewers will know it's a drama and not a documentary where Olivia Colman has mysteriously replaced the actual queen.  Viewers are already cautioned when an episode depicts eating disorders, nudity or (brace yourself) smoking, but Dowden apparently has a low opinion of the average subscriber's intelligence, probably the result of working for Boris Johnson.  Warning:  contains fiction seems a step too far.

Many people have had problems with this season --  the queen is improperly uniformed for Trooping the Colour, the royal visit to Australia was clearly filmed in Spain, Princess Margaret never visited the care home where her mother's learning-disabled cousins spent their sad lives, and wasn't there a protracted miners' strike during the Thatcher years which goes unnoticed?  For example.  Mostly, though, Peter Morgan follows the historical record, spiced up with necessarily speculative bits about the characters' personal lives.  (I do hope he's finally got that royalty/stag metaphor out of the way and we aren't going to see a deer jump in front of Diana's car, then vanish down the Paris tunnel.)  Guessing which parts are fiction is part of the fun, when you aren't all that interested in uniforms or weather.  

Maybe all history-based drama should come with a caution, from Agamemnon (there is no evidence that Cassandra was clairvoyant or even existed) to Mississippi Burning (the FBI was not instrumental in solving the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, or, as Roy Blount, Jr., put it, "this movie is so full of shit").   But what about people who learn all their history from costume dramas?  Isn't that why Gone With the Wind now carries a disclaimer?  What happens when historians change their minds based on newer evidence?   If the poor bloke under the car park really is King Richard III then Shakespeare was right about his crooked back (scoliosis), not necessarily about his being born with a full set of teeth.  Has Hilary Mantel changed thousands of minds about Thomas Cromwell, a most unattractive character as recently as A Man For All Seasons?  More to the point, should she?  It's still fiction, with no obligation to follow all the facts.  It's a great read, period.

Oliver Dowden is a busy fellow, responsible for all that digital, media, culture and sport -- mainly sport, since that's what most people care about -- and in his spare time expected to represent Hertsmere in the Commons.  I think he's got enough to do without holding viewers' hands during a soap opera about real-sounding people.  It's probably as well that there is no equivalent position in the American president's cabinet -- it would require an entire government department to fact-check the fiction emitted daily just by Trump, while another bureaucracy vets films like Thirteen Days (the Cuban missile crisis) and All the President's Men and every Western made before 1972.  And a lot of people will believe utter rubbish anyway.  At last count, seventy million of them.

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And just as mysteriously as it came -- it's gone.

Actually, a man the Guardian delightfully calls "adventurer Riccardo Marino" thinks he saw the Utah Mystery Monolith being hauled away in a pickup truck, in its place "a message written in the dirt that said 'bye bitch' with a fresh pee stain right next to it," but there's no reason to believe the truck wasn't driven by aliens.  Perhaps Marino himself is a visitor from another part of the galaxy.  So many questions left unanswered.

Try as I might, I can't find anything more recent than August about the chichi White House Tennis Pavilion, which left the readers of archinect.com unimpressed.  A lot has happened since then, of course, and I wouldn't be surprised if the departing Trumps left a muddy hole in the ground full of dead rodents and torn-up classified briefings along with all their other disasters.  If the Bumpus family from A Christmas Story had an unlimited budget and no hounds...

Who is Pa Bumpus blaming today?  In a phone-in with Maria Bartiromo unhinged even by his standards, Trump accused the FBI and his own Justice Department of conspiring with the governor of Georgia, the federal judiciary and the usual suspects to deny him glorious victory.  He promised to use "125 percent of my energy" to overturn the election and also the way arithmetic works.  Someone has explained that the Supreme Court chooses which cases to hear, that he can't just send Giuliani over there with a pile of "affidavits," so he's mad about that, too.  The Washington Post has a long, fascinating description of the election night nervous breakdown that no enemy of the people will want to miss; I especially liked the (as usual) unnamed close adviser who saw Trump "like mad King George muttering, 'I won.  I won.  I won."

It's probably just as well Bartiromo didn't interrupt with questions about objective reality.  Had she mentioned the pandemic, he would have blamed China for plotting against him, claimed credit for developing all the vaccines and found a new reason to attack Anthony Fauci.  Had she asked about the millions of Americans who had to celebrate Thanksgiving with donated food, he would have praised himself for fixing the economy by boosting the Dow over 30,000 ("a sacred number").  Mostly she nodded and let him rave, and was rewarded by being called "brave."  Good girl, Maria.  There's a job waiting for you at The Blaze when Fox goes under.

Add another name to the conspiracy:  North Carolina businessman Fredric Eshelman donated $2.5 million to "True the Vote," a Texas outfit that promised to sue at least seven states for being won by Biden.  But they have ceased operations and Eshelman would like his money back.  Nobody is returning his calls, so he's suing them.  Truly this is a golden age of lawyers as well as dupes.  

"What happened to Rudy Giuliani?  Nothing, he's been like this for twenty-five years."  Keith Olbermann is always worth listening to, but I especially recommend this beauty.   And now I can't wait for another week of Donnie Disappointment.  God help me, I love it so.