+The constant drumbeat of anti-Russian propaganda is now relentless. We have just learnt that a Russian submarine ‘collided with a Royal Navy warship.’ Except it didn’t. It merely bumped into a sonar which the warship, HMS Northumberland was trailing. As the MOD put it ‘In late 2020, a Russian submarine being tracked by HMS Northumberland came into contact with her towed array sonar.’ So it was the navy chasing a sub, not the other way round, but it makes a nice little story to make us all worry the more that Vlad the Impaler is everywhere, all-powerfully eroding our defences. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that Putin may not harbour ill-intent towards the West, but he does have as many grounds for suspicion against us as we may have towards him. And it suits his nationalistic agenda just as exaggerating his power suits the hawks in NATO and the Pentagon. They really are twins, umbilically dependent on each other for their macho military appetite. It makes me despondent that so much of our media just laps up this stuff without questioning it, but then I am reminded of how journalists generally ‘embedded’ with US/UK forces in Iraq necessarily saw things from only one side. I wonder how many of our journalists today are ‘embedded’ in the narrative that is fed to them if they want a ‘story,’ indeed, how many are actually journalists, as opposed to merely press release sifters (an issue unavoidably omnipresent in the hard pressed local and regional media)?
+I must express my admiration for Google’s security measures. Having been asked for some unknown reason to sign into my Gmail account, but having forgotten my password (how strange) I got a verification code on my mobile, which I duly fed in. Then I was told that a further verification code would be sent to my email account. That’s the hard part. Without that code, I can’t get into my email account. Am I missing something? +The C-list actress and ‘comedian’ ‘Dame’ Maureen Lipman has pronounced that Helen Mirren is the wrong person to play the role of Golda Meir, the former Israeli PM, in a new film. Wrong that is, because Mirren is not a Jew. Lipman’s thinking seems to be that it would be impossible for Mirren to really get into the skin of her subject, not being Jewish herself. She suggests it would be akin to casting Ben Kingsley in the role of Nelson Mandela. I’m not sure anybody suggested Kingsley should have portrayed Mandela (if they did they were idiots) but perhaps after his portrayal of Gandhi somebody toyed with the idea. Anyway it seems Lipman has now come up with a list of approved actors who could play Golda Meir, including for example Bette Midler or Barbara Streisand. As Lipman explained “As globalisation gets bigger, casting gets smaller and we’re getting more and more tribal.” Sorry, who’s getting tribal? Lipman apparently is a campaigner against ‘cancel culture’ but wants to cancel opportunities for ‘cross-tribal’ portrayals. Perhaps we shouldn’t have Glenda Jackson playing King Lear. Being a woman is not integral to Lear’s maleness is it? Joel Coen has just cast Denzil Washington as Macbeth in his latest film. This will come as a surprise to many Scots who never imagined that Macbeth might have been black. I wonder if Laurence Olivier had to ‘black up’ to play Othello in 1965? Lipman is an attention seeking C-lister whose occasional mental confusion swills into the public sphere (no more so when she was an arch-anti-Corbynite) like a cat's hairball and she should be completely ignored. End of. Say no more. I won't return to the subject. Ever.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
December 2024
|