'It's Been Revoked'

It's like Lethal Weapon 2 all over again, isn't it?  This business of that US diplomat's wife fleeing the country after her involvement in a fatal car crash, invoking 'diplomatic immunity'.  Every time I see or read anything about it, I just keep having visions of Joss Ackland shouting 'Diplomatic immunity' in a South African accent and waving his passport about.  Of course, there the conundrum of how to deal with these situations where someone uses diplomatic immunity to avoid prosecution for crimes committed on foreign soil was solved by the simple expedient of Danny Glover shooting Ackland in the head, telling him that his immunity had 'just been revoked'.  Somehow, I don't think that we'll be seeing Boris Johnson doing anything similar soon, despite his promises to take up the case 'personally' with the US and despite his penchant for law breaking.  (I've often idly wondered just how Murtagh avoided prosecution for shooting Ackland at the end of Lethal Weapon 2.  OK, I know that his character was a racist bastard who had been abusing his diplomatic immunity to circumvent US law and run some kind of massive criminal operation, not to mention filling Riggs full of lead - although he had miraculously recovered by the beginning of the next film - but he still had immunity from prosecution in the US.  And being shot).

I sometimes wonder if I should be worried that, increasingly, I seem to filter the world through a lifetime of pop culture references.  Particularly films.  But hell, they've been a big part of my life and is it really any different to people who reference their every experience with classical allusions?  (Like Boris Johnson, for instance).  Well, I suppose the main difference is that most people might actually understand references to, say, Lethal Weapon, whereas referencing Aechylus or Cato would probably leave them puzzled.  (Although, not necessarily - classics aren't just for toffs, even a working class oik like me studied some of the classics when I was at school, albeit not in the original Greek and Latin).  All of which brings us to the snobbery which surrounds ideas of culture: popular culture is always seen as being inferior to 'real' or 'high' culture.  Except of course, that much which is now seen as 'high' culture was originally popular culture: Homer didn't create the Iliad and Odyssey for elite audiences, for instance.  It's a question of what survives down the centuries, which isn't necessarily the 'best' or even the most popular.  Of course, today, thanks to the internet and digitalisation, more and more pop culture is being preserved for posterity, meaning that future generations will have a better overview of it, both the good and the bad.