(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

Politico Magazine has a fascinating piece about a well-financed and well-received (by test audiences) documentary film called The Sixth, an account of the violence on January 6, 2021, from the viewpoint of several people who were swept up in it. The documentary was made by two Academy Award–winning filmmakers, Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine, under the umbrella of A24, one of the hottest production companies in the business, and a massive campaign was planned for its release. Then things got weird.

Three years after the insurrection, with A24 sitting atop national box-office rankings thanks to Civil War, the documentary about a real domestic clash was unmentioned on the list of A24 films on the company’s website right before its release. Though The Sixth is scheduled to go public on May 3, the film is also weirdly absent from A24’s ordinarily robust social media accounts. Late on Wednesday, after I called to ask, the listing for The Sixth suddenly appeared on the site....People who were interviewed for the film were also told that it would be streaming on its release day as part of Amazon’s Prime Video service. But now that’s not happening either, and may not happen until after the election. An Amazon Prime spokesperson told me that no date had ever been scheduled, and the issue would be determined in due course by A24 and Amazon. You’ll still be able to rent it as of May 3 on Apple, Amazon and a variety of other platforms, but the lack of a distribution channel like Prime tends to severely constrict the attention to a movie.

Congressman Jamie Raskin, one of several people who share their memories in the film, is suspicious about what appears to be a collective act of looming cowardice.

“The subjects were all told that the movie would be available on Prime starting at the beginning of May, and I was certainly telling that to people because the premiere was completely sold out,” said U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, one of the six subjects. “I was telling people they’d be able to access it on Prime Video. And then the Fines told us that although that was the original understanding, it was now not going to be available for streaming on Prime Video and people would have to pay for it. That obviously will change by millions the number of people who will see it.”

And Raskin is not alone. Some of the other participants in the film have similar questions about the apparent lack of support.

“I’m very disappointed in the lack of publicity and the lack of promotion that’s coming from A24,” said Mel D. Cole, a photojournalist whose day among the crowds represents another of the film’s story lines. “I love their films and I think they always put their all into what they accomplish. I thought that this would have that same kind of push. To be honest, I turned down a few offers of being in documentaries. It was A24 that reached out to me initially and asked me to be in this film. It’s the reason I did it. The Fines are great, but I didn’t know them.”

Raskin suspects—and I agree with him because, well, he’s been right about January 6, 2021, since about January 7, 2021—that the slow-hyping of The Sixth may be part of an ongoing campaign to minimize what happened that day until it appears to be little more than a historical blip in time. This effort includes everything from Trump’s pitching the participants as “political prisoners” to the multi-pronged effort to thwart Jack Smith’s investigation to the whole damn ongoing Republican presidential campaign.

In fact, the contrast with A24’s current runaway hit is telling: While Civil War reflects the vibes of a country on edge, the fuzzy specifics of the film’s fictional war appear unrelated to the familiar red-blue divide. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are apt to walk out of the film feeling like they’re being blamed. On the other hand, even though The Sixth is about workaday Washingtonians grappling with the riot, it’s hard to walk away from any Jan. 6 artifact without feeling the real divide over Trump. You can see why any big company might want to avoid something likely to enrage 40 percent of viewers (not to mention the man currently leading several presidential polls).

I’m used to efforts to whitewash American history. Hell, we’re arguing about that all over the country right now. But this is different. This is an attempt to apply the ancient historical principle of “Who you gonna believe, me or your own lying eyes?” to something we all saw on television. And the stakes are immeasurable. We can’t afford the narcotic of historical amnesia this time.

Uh-0h. There’s more trouble at Dogkiller Base.

First came Noem’s disclosure about shooting and killing her 14-month-old wirehair pointer, Cricket, for misbehaving. Then, just as the dog-killing news cycle was cresting, the Dakota Scout reported on an anecdote in “No Going Back” that on its face is highly improbable: Noem’s claim that she met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un while serving as a back-bencher in Congress. “Through my tenure on the House Armed Services Committee,” Noem wrote, “I had the chance to travel to many countries to meet with world leaders. I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all).”

Noem’s spokesperson took time out from updating his résumé to cop to the charge.

Noem’s spokesperson, Ian Fury, seemed to concede that the Kim story was false Thursday night: “We’ve been made aware that the publisher will be addressing conflated world leaders’ names in the book before it is released.”

The book also contains a fanciful tale of Noem’s facing down the insidious blandishments of...Nikki Haley?

“After what seemed to me a bit of an awkward pause, she added, ‘I…just…also want you to know one more thing.…I’ve heard a lot of really good things about you. But I also want you to know that if I hear something bad…I will be sure to let you know.’
“There was a long pause. ‘Um, well, thanks for that, Ambassador.’
‘Let me be clear,’ she added. ‘I’ve heard many good things about you. But when I do hear bad things, I will make sure that you know. I’ve enjoyed talking to you. We will visit soon. Goodbye.’ Click.”

In the book, Noem recounts feeling the cold, clammy hand of political threat reaching up to South Dakota from South Carolina. She talks to an aide.

“ ‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure I was just threatened by Nikki Haley. It was clear that she wanted me to know that there was only room for one Republican woman in the spotlight. It was weird.’ “Unsurprisingly, I never received any calls or ‘mentoring’ from her, but the message was clear. I’m the alpha female here, and you should know your place. I actually felt a little sad for her.”

According to Haley’s camp, this encounter also was the sheerest moonshine.

“Nikki has long called and written notes supporting other women when they go through challenging times,” Denton said. “She called Governor Noem in 2020 to encourage her when she was criticized for keeping her state open during Covid. How she would twist that into a threat is just plain weird.”

And, on the other side of the rainbow bridge, Cricket—and the goat—look down and see Kristi Noem’s political career slouching slowly toward the gravel pit.

Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: “Crow Jane” (Tuba Skinny): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1965, is a performance from a husband and wife in the family business of fire-eating. And glass-walking. And glass-jumping. And flaming-arrow-catching. I guess this is what the old folks in Great Britain did on an evening when the kids were all screaming over the Beatles. History is so cool.

The anti-choice crew never sleeps. (Once again, Justice Sam Alito’s deep concern about future unintended consequences in the presidential-immunity case dries up when it comes to the actual, and perhaps not entirely unintended, consequences of this opinion in Dobbs.) In where-the-f*ck-else Texas, a man has engaged a lawyer to pursue a wrongful-death action against his partner who obtained a legal abortion in Colorado. From The Washington Post:

The previously unreported petition was submitted under an unusual legal mechanism often used in Texas to investigate suspected illegal actions before a lawsuit is filed. The petition claims Davis could sue either under the state’s wrongful-death statute or the novel Texas law known as Senate Bill 8 that allows private citizens to file suit against anyone who “aids or abets” an illegal abortion. The decision to target an abortion that occurred outside of Texas represents a potential new strategy by antiabortion activists to achieve a goal many in the movement have been working toward since Roe v. Wade was overturned: stopping women from traveling out of state to end their pregnancies. Crossing state lines for abortion care remains legal nationwide. The case also illustrates the role that men who disapprove of their partners’ decisions could play in surfacing future cases that may violate abortion bans — either by filing their own civil lawsuits or by reporting the abortions to law enforcement.

"Men disapproving" with the force of law behind them is pretty much the basic definition of patriarchy, not that it would occur to the aspiring patriarchs in the Texas government.

Discovery Corner. Hey, look what we found. From Smithsonian:

Two metal detectorists, Finn Ibsen and Lars Danielsen, were searching a field outside of Ringsted, a city on the island of Zealand, when Ibsen came across the unusual object. “I stand and jump on the spot and…wave Lars over,” Ibsen recalls to Kristoffer Koch of the Danish news outlet TV2 Øst, per Google Translate. “He comes running, and we can see that it is unique. It is a face.” The friends handed the portrait over to Denmark’s Museum West Zealand. Archaeologists aren’t certain about the small disc’s function, but they say it could have been a decoration attached to a shield or sword belt.
Freerk Oldenburger, an archaeologist at the museum, tells Live Science’s Jennifer Nalewicki that the disc is “almost identical” to a silver artifact found several years ago in Jutland, Denmark. "It’s quite a remarkable piece,” he says. “When it showed up on my desk, I nearly fell out of my chair because it’s almost the exact same portrait as the other, but this one is a little more coarse and is made of cast bronze and not gilded silver.”

So how did an image of a Macedonian conqueror end up in Scandinavia? One word: fanboy.

The metal disc was made some 500 years after Alexander’s reign, and researchers speculate that it may be linked to the Roman Empire. According to the museum, Alexander was a “great role model” for Roman leaders—and a particularly influential figure for the emperor Caracalla, who reigned from 198 to 217 C.E. The disc dates to “around the same time as Caracalla,” Oldenburger tells Live Science. “We know that he was completely obsessed with Alexander the Great and was interested and inspired by him, since he was the greatest conqueror of that time period.”

Memorabilia is an ancient art. Or an ancient scam. Anyway, Caracalla was something of a bloodthirsty madman whose own imperial guard did him in while he was attempting some Alexander cosplay against the Parthians in Mesopotamia. He deserves to have somebody make a buck on him after a couple millennia.

Hey, ScienceDaily, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

In a study published last year, it was claimed that dinosaurs like T. rex had an exceptionally high number of neurons and were substantially more intelligent than assumed. It was claimed that these high neuron counts could directly inform on intelligence, metabolism and life history, and that T. rex was rather monkey-like in some of its habits. Cultural transmission of knowledge as well as tool use were cited as examples of cognitive traits that it might have possessed.
However the new study, published today in The Anatomical Record, involving the University of Bristol’s Hady George, Dr Darren Naish (University of Southampton) and led by Dr Kai Caspar (Heinrich Heine University) with Dr Cristian Gutierrez-Ibanez (University of Alberta) and Dr Grant Hurlburt (Royal Ontario Museum) takes a closer look at techniques used to predict both brain size and neuron numbers in dinosaur brains. The team found that previous assumptions about brain size in dinosaurs, and the number of neurons their brains contained, were unreliable.

Tough call for the ol’ T. rex. For a while there, we thought the T. rex was smarter than the groaning, city-stomping beast of our movies. Now the best it gets is “monkey-like.” Good plot twist for those Godzilla v. Kong movies, I guess. They lived then so we could have fun at the movies now.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake line. Wear the damn mask. Take the damn shots, especially the boosters, and especially the most recent boosters. Watch out for the damn bird flu. And spare a moment for the good people of Baltimore, and for the people of Israel and of Gaza, the people of Ukraine, of Lewiston, Maine, and for the victims of monkeypox in the Republic of the Congo, and of the earthquake zones in Taiwan, Iraq, Turkey, Morocco, and Colombia, and in the flood zone in Libya, and the flood zones all across the Ohio Valley, and on the Horn of Africa, and in Tanzania and Kenya, and in the English midlands, and in Virginia, and in Texas and Louisiana, and in California, and the flood zones of Indonesia, and in the storm-battered south of Georgia, and in Kenya, and in the flood areas in Dubai (!) and in Pakistan, and in the flood zones in Russia and Kazakhstan, and in the flood zones in Iran, where loose crocodiles are becoming a problem, and in the fire zones in Australia, and in north Texas, and in Lahaina, where they’re still trying to recover their lives, and under the volcano in Iceland, and for the gun-traumatized folks in Austin and at UNLV, and in Philadelphia, and in Perry, Iowa, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.