Mitch McConnell, transgender action and reaction, and authenticity in Dickens
Rowan Moore
Continuing a new series, our writer considers just what makes the Senate’s majority leader so amazing
‘Horribly good at what he does’: Mitch McConnell. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
I have to confess to an unhealthy obsession with Mitch McConnell, the majority leader of the United States Senate. It is not just that he has the strangely amazed look of a southern gentleman who has just caught his wife in flagrante with the stable hand. It is also that he has a very clear idea of what he wants to do and will stop at nothing to do it. His aim is to serve the interests of the Republican party in the Senate. Everything else – the interests of the US, the constitution, truth, justice, even Republicans not in the Senate – is subservient.
There is something about the US separation of powers that makes congressional politicians highly distilled examples of their profession. McConnell is a distillation of this distillation. He is horribly good at what he does. Whenever I read how, this time, he has misplayed his hand, I wait for events to prove that he has. So far, they haven’t.
Which allows a different interpretation of his amazed look: he is astonished at what he can get away with.
Trans people aren’t spoiling for a fight
Carrying the flag for transgender rights. Photograph: Demetrius Freeman/Reuters
There’s an ugly game on Twitter (yes, I know, just the one?) in which someone says something antagonistic to transgender women, one or a few of whom then respond with aggression. At which point the first someone righteously retweets the aggressive response with a comment to the effect that this is what “trans activists” are like. Then (among other things) a man whom I follow, someone of humanity and humour, retweets with evident approval and support of this first someone.
As the father of a trans man, who is passionate about trans causes but would never dream of engaging in these sort of attacks, I want to say this. Stop. Think. Is it right to generalise about “trans activists” from a few enraged and anonymous individuals? Does it really help any kind of understanding or compassion to stir up fights like this? Any group, after all, if judged by the worst things said by members of its population on Twitter, would probably not come off well.
Never mind the futtocks
Dev Patel as David Copperfield. Photograph: Allstar/FILMNATION ENTERTAINMENT
There’s a paradox about costume dramas: the more authentic they are, the more they don’t feel right. Film-makers might recreate the period with perfect precision, down to every stitch, patch and grease stain, but they can’t recreate in the audience the perceptions of the time depicted. Dress of the past is in a foreign language. You can form general impressions of luxury or poverty, display or modesty, but the nuance – what is fashionable, what pretentious, what inappropriate – is obscure.
“If this scene is so perfectly 1840s,” a voice in your head might also say, “how come it is being captured by state-of-the art cameras and recording technology?” This problem of inauthentic authenticity is one of many reasons to welcome the casting of Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield, in which actors of Asian and African-Caribbean origin play characters conceived by Charles Dickens as white. For sure it’s not precisely accurate, in which respect it is little different from those countless miles of footage of the First and Second World Wars, or indeed Victorian London, that omit the non-white faces that were in fact there. But precise accuracy is not the point.
My grandfather, an expert on sailing ships, could be a bit of nightmare in the cinema, venting his outrage at inaccuracies on a blameless usherette. “Where are the futtock shrouds?” he would splutter. I, in whom the nerd gene has transferred itself to architecture, could feel the ancestral gorge starting to rise at some anachronistic glazing in David Copperfield. But then I remembered: it’s a story, it’s a fiction, it’s a show. Relax.
• Rowan Moore is architecture critic of the Observer
Mitch McConnell, transgender action and reaction, and authenticity in Dickens
Rowan Moore
Continuing a new series, our writer considers just what makes the Senate’s majority leader so amazing
Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
I have to confess to an unhealthy obsession with Mitch McConnell, the majority leader of the United States Senate. It is not just that he has the strangely amazed look of a southern gentleman who has just caught his wife in flagrante with the stable hand. It is also that he has a very clear idea of what he wants to do and will stop at nothing to do it. His aim is to serve the interests of the Republican party in the Senate. Everything else – the interests of the US, the constitution, truth, justice, even Republicans not in the Senate – is subservient.
There is something about the US separation of powers that makes congressional politicians highly distilled examples of their profession. McConnell is a distillation of this distillation. He is horribly good at what he does. Whenever I read how, this time, he has misplayed his hand, I wait for events to prove that he has. So far, they haven’t.
Which allows a different interpretation of his amazed look: he is astonished at what he can get away with.
Trans people aren’t spoiling for a fight
There’s an ugly game on Twitter (yes, I know, just the one?) in which someone says something antagonistic to transgender women, one or a few of whom then respond with aggression. At which point the first someone righteously retweets the aggressive response with a comment to the effect that this is what “trans activists” are like. Then (among other things) a man whom I follow, someone of humanity and humour, retweets with evident approval and support of this first someone.
As the father of a trans man, who is passionate about trans causes but would never dream of engaging in these sort of attacks, I want to say this. Stop. Think. Is it right to generalise about “trans activists” from a few enraged and anonymous individuals? Does it really help any kind of understanding or compassion to stir up fights like this? Any group, after all, if judged by the worst things said by members of its population on Twitter, would probably not come off well.
Never mind the futtocks
There’s a paradox about costume dramas: the more authentic they are, the more they don’t feel right. Film-makers might recreate the period with perfect precision, down to every stitch, patch and grease stain, but they can’t recreate in the audience the perceptions of the time depicted. Dress of the past is in a foreign language. You can form general impressions of luxury or poverty, display or modesty, but the nuance – what is fashionable, what pretentious, what inappropriate – is obscure.
“If this scene is so perfectly 1840s,” a voice in your head might also say, “how come it is being captured by state-of-the art cameras and recording technology?” This problem of inauthentic authenticity is one of many reasons to welcome the casting of Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield, in which actors of Asian and African-Caribbean origin play characters conceived by Charles Dickens as white. For sure it’s not precisely accurate, in which respect it is little different from those countless miles of footage of the First and Second World Wars, or indeed Victorian London, that omit the non-white faces that were in fact there. But precise accuracy is not the point.
My grandfather, an expert on sailing ships, could be a bit of nightmare in the cinema, venting his outrage at inaccuracies on a blameless usherette. “Where are the futtock shrouds?” he would splutter. I, in whom the nerd gene has transferred itself to architecture, could feel the ancestral gorge starting to rise at some anachronistic glazing in David Copperfield. But then I remembered: it’s a story, it’s a fiction, it’s a show. Relax.
• Rowan Moore is architecture critic of the Observer