J Fergus Lamont, Arts Correspondent and author of The Neverending Story – waiting for the Haudagain Bypass
With the current requirement to stay in our homes, appreciators of the arts are once again forced to seek what intellectual sustenance we can from the small screen.
Thankfully, this festive season provided a pantheon of riches. I sat agog and found myself applauding such triumphs as the exhilarating treatise on semiotic meaning which was Blankety Blank with Bradley Walsh, or the thrilling fusion of Venetian carnival and Chinese opera that is The Masked Singer.
However, my appreciation of even those delights was trumped by the late-night film which had me gripped into the early hours of Thursday.
You will not have heard of it, for it has received little or no publicity, but the TV film Violent Protesters Storm The US Capitol was a deeply troubling vision of a once-respected democracy crumbling into dystopian chaos.
My last Terry’s Chocolate Orange sat untouched as I found myself unable to look away from the screen, and wondered if the whole thing might have been a bit too far-fetched.
I looked in vain for the reassuring presence of Bruce Willis or Gerard Butler in a vest, but instead only saw the faces of ordinary, unremarkable people, simultaneously contorted with glee at and utterly ignorant of the damage they were doing. I wept.
Tanya Souter – Lifestyle Correspondent
I da ken aboot youse, but I wiz affa pleased tae see that the big boys of social media hiv at last suspended a particular online menace fa wis saying stuff fit could provoke serious violence.
That’s the last time I keep een o’ my exes on ma freends list so’s they can cast aspirations at me a’ o’er the internet.
I wid hiv been roon tae confront him personally if we wiznae on lockdoon again. I dinna think it coonts as “essential travel” fan yer leaving yer house jist tae hae a stairheid rammy wi’ a bampot fa thinks a romantic late supper for twa means getting yer kebab deliveroo’d.
But aside fae him, Facebook his also banned Trump.
I mean tae say, nae afore time, eh? And at’s the trouble, is it? He’s been spikkin guff on there for aboot five year, and ye might say they’d hiv been better aff daein’ at afore he’d got a bunch o’ feels a’ riled up on the rampage.
Fan my three wiz little and nae behaving theirsels, I didnae wait five year and then only punish them efter they’d burned ma house doon.
As anybody wi’ kids kens, consequences for poor behaviour his tae be baith relevant and immediate.
Ron Cluny; official Council Spokesman
And so Trump’s regime ends like this: Not with a whimper, but with a bang. Shots fired, and protesters and a police officer dead.
The protesters are already being described as martyrs by some. If so then it is to a cult of narcissism, ego and lies. It is heartbreaking enough when people give their lives for a good cause. When they do it to prop up the ego of a deluded fool, the pain is indescribable.
Like a drunken house guest possessed of the irrational belief that he can juggle five open bottles of red wine, Trump will leave in absolute disgrace, but the stains he leaves behind will be hard to remove.
“Could we have done more to stop him? How could we ever have thought that this was a good idea?” Questions abound and, even now, so too do divisions.
How do the people who stood to object to counting the votes of millions of Americans, even as rioters sought to enforce their chosen conspiracy theory with pipe-bombs, look their colleagues in the eye? Why are people seriously talking about impeaching a man who is now a political corpse?
Future makers of historical mini-series will have difficult decisions to make.
“I know they looked like a ZZ Top tribute act fronted by the lead singer from Jamiroquai after a face-paint accident, but should we show them like that? Should we not make them look a bit more – you know, frightening, and less ridiculous?”
To them, and everyone else, I say. Just tell the truth. At long last, tell the truth.
