Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

                                                     WORST OF THE DYING YEAR.   

Last posting I gave you a cheery farewell to 2023 called Best of the Dying Year, wherein I listed the things I most enjoyed in the past twelve months. But given that I’m an incorrigible misanthrope and sad sack, you didn’t really expect me to end on a positive note did you?   So here are some of the things that made the year irritating, annoying, and sometimes tragic.

Irritating: Watching on Netflix the story of an unhappy, comely but none-too-bright young woman who had a hard time with her husband because he had clearly been bonking another woman when he should have occupied the unhappy young woman’s bed. Anyway, the marriage broke up and she sought solace with another man and it seemed to go smoothly until she died in a car crash and a lot of people got upset and thought she was some sort of saint and… oh hang on a minute. I wondered why her husband was so weird. He suffered from an awful disease, namely being part of a Firm that called itself The Royal Family and he was the Prince of Wales, not that the Welsh had asked for one. Anyway he later became King when his mum died and that meant he was now the Governor of the Church of England so his extracurricular activities could be discreetly forgotten, but Netflix didn’t get up to that. As always, what a bin of tosh. The Crown, like every other attempt to dramatize real events, had to make up the dialogue, especially when it came to private conversations which nobody had recorded. In other words, the dialogue had to be the invention of the scriptwriters. Fair enough. That’s what all “based-on-a-true-story” plays or films always do. But having Dead Di addressing, in ghostly form, the people who had wronged or misunderstood her, the show went O.T.T. and disbelief was not suspended. Will The Crown get up to the later events in the lives of the notorious Windsor Gang? It would be interesting to see how they could deal with Andy and his 20-million-pound pay-off, but somehow I don’t think we’ll ever see that.

Annoying: [Sorry, but only New Zealanders will get this one] Will the stapled-together coalition of three separate political parties make for a stable government? It’d be a miracle if it did. There’s at least one party’s leader who has a track record of upsetting things and alienating erstwhile allies. [“NO. NO. THAT’S NOT TRUE. NO. I NEVER SAID THAT. YOU’RE MISQUOTING ME. LOOK SON, GO BACK TO JOURNALIST SCHOOL. I WAS DEALING WITH THESE MATTERS BEFORE YOU WERE BORN. DON’T MAKE THINGS UP. ANY MORE QUESTIONS?’] Quite apart from that, it’s clear that on many issues the three parties are pulling in three different directions…. Yet dare I say (being a heretic) how annoying it has also been to experience the sobbing and wailing of some people when Jacinda Ardern decided to step down from being prime minister? She’d said she was exhausted and her “tank was empty”. Oh the grief! Oh the tears! But for God’s sake she was making a reasonable decision. Beside which, she was after all just a politician. They do come and go and they never perform miracles.

Tragic: And how trivial all the above are when compared with the things that really upset the world. The never-ending war in Ukraine… and the disgust of seeing Ukraine’s allies delicately creeping away because they expected a war to be over with quickly, the way they are in the movies. The war (for war it is) between Israel and Palestine. Who is in the right and who is in the wrong? Both? Neither? Hamas fired first in a terrorist raid and Israel has (at time of my writing this) retaliated at least four-times over, basically smashing Gaza City to smithereens. Woe to the innocent non-combatants who are being punished. There is as yet no sight of a permanent cease-fire, only some temporary truces. I know that Jews and Arabs are both Semitic peoples but the term “anti-Semitic” has come to mean “Anti-Jewish”. I do not believe that it is “anti-Semitic” to criticise the actions of the state of Israel, but it is clear (in huge pro-Palestinian protests in both England and the U. S. A.) that for many the war is an excuse for stepping up the anti-Semitism. This is a fearful sight to see and hear. Will the tension between Israel and Palestine ever be solved? Hard to see any end to it.

Happy New Year. If you can face it.