Superman music

I am seduced by hype for James Gunn’s forthcoming Superman film and want to capture a thought about the music.

If you have seen any of Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies, you know that he is shameless and effective in using music.

This week, to hype the movie, first they released a “motion poster”, which is ordinarily a hokey marketing thing.

I was among the nerds surprised to have feelings about it, because of something very cunning going on the music. Moviebob, my favorite pop-geekculture media commentator, said earnestly:

This particular filmmaker understands what he’s been handed with this character at this moment, to do something very special and transcendent and important.

For a slightly-animated image with one minute of music?

Well, the music starts with the barest hint of Hans Zimmer’s Superman theme from Zach Snyder’s Superman films, featuring Henry Cavill as Superman.

Snyder’s films have some charms — that score among them — but I am among those who deeply hate them as misunderstanding what Superman is about. They even got Superman’s hair wrong, which sounds like a small thing but I think it is actually important. Snyder give us a “gritty”, pessimistic Superman, which is just plain wrong.

So I heard a Message from Gunn in how after that whisper of Zimmer, it turns to a new arrangement of John Williams’ Superman March from the films featuring Christopher Reeve as Superman.

Hope. Joy. Fun. Sunshine.

That’s what hooked me, and Moviebob, and plenty of other nerds.

And then, because everything is marketing decadence, the following day there was … not a proper trailer, not even a teaser trailer, but a teaser for the teaser trailer. It did the same thing with the music again! And the theme sure as heck was hope, with the tagline “look up”.

I am a sentimental nerd and I watched this a lot of times. And I noticed a second thing about the music, which reminded me of another John Williams theme dear to my nerdy heart: the Force theme from Williams’ opera cycle Star Wars, which I think is the best work of Williams’ amazing career as a film composer.

I think that part of the secret of the Force theme is that Williams never completes it. It always just drifts off, unresolved, producing a feeling of longing, most apparent in its use with young Luke gazing into Tattooine’s binary sunset in the original Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

The music for both the Superman poster and the teaser-teaser did that same thing, not quite finishing the Superman March.

So I made a prediction. We know that Gunn’s movie will not just re-use Williams’ score and themes; Gunn has described his excitement at the original score that composer John Murphy has created. But I think the use of Williams’ theme is not just for this marketing material. I expect the score for the new film to sprinkle it in at key places … and every time it will tug at our heartstrings by not completing it. After the teaser-teaser, I imagined that Gunn might even defer completing the Williams’ “Superman March” to a later film.

But then we got the full teaser trailer, including yet another new arrangement of Williams’ theme.

And I am a sentimental nerd and watched that a lot of times. If you want to see a bunch of nerdy adults feeling like kids again, YouTube is full of people recording themselves watching it. Music is not the only thing hooking us — there is a lot going on in two almost-wordless minutes — but it plays a big part.

It seems at first that this trailer completes the Williams theme, but it actually stops just short of that, hiding what it is doing under a crescendo echoing Superman whistling in the middle of the trailer. Given the context, that delivers all the warmth and hope one could ask for. But. It is not quite the same thing as closing the theme.

This makes me pretty sure that I was right about the forthcoming film toying with us by using Williams’ March without completing it.

I’m going to place a marker on an even more specific prediction. We will finally get the March completed over the last shot of Gunn’s film, when the story has earned it. Then the closing titles will start, and just as the 1978 Superman film opened with a proper overture over the titles, turning from the horns of the March to strings and such playing out all of the musical leitmotifs (starting at 2:15 in this capture of those titles), so too the closing titles of Gunn’s 2025 Superman will transition smoothly to all that film’s themes. I bet there will even be a bit more of Williams in there.

I also predict that Gunn’s Superman is going to make me cry like a baby. He understands the assignment.

Fashy flags

Capturing a long-running Twitter thread about weird flags flown by the far right in the US.

This started when I needed a flag image for another long thread of mine about American fascist iconography more broadly —

We should not pretend that we do not know what these signify.

Führerprinzip

This flag started my quest, because I had seen it obliquely in photos of a pro-Trump street action. What, precisely, do Trump and police “keep America safe” from? Fascism promises to rescue the nation from corrupting influences. Followers don’t need to say who.

The personality cult of Trump inclines toward fascism. He is the nation.

A fantasy of Trump as hyper-masculine hyper-violent warlord, in defiance of democratic institutions.

Trump as a Totenkopf symbol of a literal supervillain, representing ruthless vigilante violence against those he sees as corrupting society. This is also, perversely, reflective of support for police violence, as police have embraced the Punisher skull.

The anti-democratic impulse laid bare. Note that the rifle-bearing knights which flank King Trump evoke the Crusades, an image favored by the far right to reflect the need for war for “Western values” …

Christian nationalism

To much of the far right, the truth behind the nation is revealed to be Christianity, as manifested specifically with American Evangelical imagery. The claim that the fundamental truth of the nation is Christianity is fascist Christian Nationalism.

The Hospitallers’ Cross reflects the far right’s fascination with symbols of the Crusades, hunger to “defend” with violence “the West” against foreign corruption encroaching on what they claim to be their territory. Para-fascist sentiments again.

An aside about kitsch

It is tempting to laugh at a variation on that theme like this and dismiss it, but it is important to recognize a pattern here. Not all kitsch is fascist, but one should recognize how the fascist sensibility is attracted to kitschy & schmaltzy over-sentimental imagery, and they enjoy how the leftish intellectuals they hate dislike it.

The thin blue flag

A lot of these flags include a reference to the Thin Blue Line flag, representing “support for police” in opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Jacob said the flag was not a direct reaction to the first Black Lives Matter protests — an idea suggested by a previous origin story in Harper’s — but he allows he may have first seen the thin blue line image after those protests spurred the circulation of pro-police imagery online. “That’s maybe why it came to my eyes,” he said.

As Jacob built the company, a “Blue Lives Matter” movement was growing in the wake of news stories of multiple officers shot to death in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Brooklyn, New York; and Dallas, Texas. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, as a presidential candidate, called police “the force between civilization and total chaos.”

American fascism often presents superficially as anti-authoritarian, but the embrace of a police state is telling.

Here we get our themes combined: nation defined by guns for vigilante violence, support of the state’s agents of violence, Maximum Leader. Which opens another theme …

Gun fetishism

The naming of weapons as central to the soul of the nation is enthusiasm for violence.

Often literally just guns

More explicitly fascist sensibilities

Far right use of “We the People” bends the democratic sentiment to hint that they are the only true American people. The nation is white conservatives and their instruments of violence. A para-fascist sentiment.

This flag brings our themes together to tell us that the True American People are defined by their adherence to true religion plus their enthusiasm for violence, which is necessary because they face unnamed threats. This is a fascist sentiment.

This flag combines far right symbols with only a hint of the US flag remaining. The “III” is a reference to Three Percenters, far right paramilitary gun nuts who say that only 3% of Americans who took up arms for the Revolution against England.

This variant is not simply a claim of popular support. It is a threat.

Additional flag vocabulary

This inversion of normal US flag symbolizes the sovereign citizen movement, a far right conspiracy theory which holds that the US government is illegitimate. If you have ever had someone rant about gold fringe on a US flag and admiralty law, you have encountered them.

This is the “no quarter” flag symbolizing a fascist desire to mass murder their political enemies.

This flag from the Whiskey Rebellion — y’know, the one that was put down when President Washington personally rode to Pennsylvania at the head of an army — has been turning up a bit, reflecting a sentiment of violently rebelling against the Federal government in rejection of its legitimate right to tax citizens.

Two symbols for the same thing appear on this flag. The “Hawai’ian” floral print evokes a “big luau”, which rhymes with both “big igloo” and “boogaloo”, reflecting the far right militias eager to fight in “Civil War II: Electric Boogaloo”.

More on fashy American aesthetics

I eventually need to capture this post’s sister thread on Twitter. For now, I’ll just add the single best thing in it, a link to Nate Powell’s sophisticated meditation on American masculinity and far right aesthetics, About Face.

Sacrifice play

This is sort-of a spoiler, but really you need to know the things already to recognize them.

A while back I saw a terrific little movie scene in which a character who has been set up as extraordinary only in his decency ends up on the phone with the Action Heroes as they walk him through defusing a nuke.

Absurd thriller stuff, but well-executed in a way that was legitimately moving.

As things of course go wrong, the Action Heroes look increasingly worried but put on a brave face — er, voice — over the phone to Ordinary Guy. “You’re doing great. Here’s what we are going to do next.”

When time runs out Ordinary Guy has to reach in and just pull out the nuke’s core. The Action Heroes know that they are telling him to expose himself to a lethal dose of radiation. Ordinary Guy has no idea.

I was very impressed that the filmmakers trusted the actors to communicate to us how this would kill him without putting it in As You Know Bob dialogue.

The actors delivered the goods. The scene is poignant, and the story puts a button on it when the Action Heroes finally get to the Ordinary Guy.

“Did I do okay?”

“Yeah. You did great.”

I’m not crying. You’re crying.

This story worked. The Action Heroes had to make a hard, ugly choice. The Ordinary Guy’s quiet heroism, demonstrated earlier, turns into these melodramatic heroics.

But. I felt it failed to pay off the work it had already done establishing that Ordinary Guy would not hesitate to commit his life to protecting other people. I wonder whether someone in the writers’ room wanted a different version:

We see the bomb’s LEDs counting down …

3:20	Ordinary Guy: “Whoa. That sphere is the part that explodes, right?”
3:03	Action Hero: “Yes, that’s plutonium. Now remove the casing over the bundle of wires.”
2:41	Ordinary Guy: “It’s sitting right there. Can’t I just … pull it out?”
2:28	Action Hero: “That would work, but with direct contact, radiation from the core will kill you. Tell me when you have the detonator exposed.”
2:04	Ordinary Guy: “We’re running out of time.”
1:57	Action Hero: “Relax. You’re doing fine.”
1:48	Ordinary Guy [pulls out the core]

The friend who turned me on to this story says:

ugh, yes. you know it would have played out like this. (this is now canon for me)

I was so sure it was going to show us how this was actually an easy choice for him.

“You didn’t have to do that, D.”

“M, you know that I did.”

Partly this is just me being a dead sucker for Horatius At The Bridge. Romantic bullshit that gets me every time.

Partly I think of how Heinlein did a version of that in “The Long Watch”. The internet tells me that in his novel Space Cadet, a would-be Space Patrolman argues that the protagonist of “The Long Watch” was wrong to disobey orders … but another cadet responds with a regulation, saying “the responsibility of determining the legality of the order rests on the person ordered as well as on the person giving the order”. Dude’s politics were twisty.

Partly I wonder whether American popular media is too enthusiastic about characters refusing to compromise, too enthusiastic about making characters sweat tough decisions, too rarely giving us characters demonstrating who they are when they do not hesitate to accept a hard sacrifice.

Why health insurers refuse to say what they cover

I do research-driven system design. In the early 2000s I did a project for a major US health insurance company who wanted to know what they could do to make their plan members hate them less.

So I interviewed dozens of people with “good” employer-sponsored health insurance about their encounters with their insurers. I handed over a big thick research report and talked the executives through the highlights, the way you do.

One of the key findings was “People Are Frustrated That They Cannot See The Costs Of Their Choices”.

A high-ranking executive vigorously objected. “The last thing people care about with their health is what it costs!”

(It would later emerge that we had a miscommunication. He thought I was saying that patients were concerned with what it would cost their insurer, rather than themselves. That this seemed to him like the obvious reading of what I meant is itself a lesson in where his head was.)

So I said, “I’ll tell you a particular story from the research.”

One couple we spoke to were prosperous and had good insurance. They did not need the honorarium we paid them for participating in the study, but they were eager to talk to us because they wanted to tell their story.

They had a kid who was born deaf and was a good candidate for a cochlear implant. It’s a procedure that costs about ^$10,000 if you pay out of pocket. In the kid’s case it had about a 50/50 chance of working.

Their insurance paid for it. It didn’t work. But for the kid’s condition, it was possible to just try it again; they could in principle attempt the proceedure repeatedly with the same odds each time. They were wary of pressing against bad luck and ending up putting their kid through surgery several times, but taking a second bite at the apple seemed like it might be sensible. As they were thinking about it, they called an agent at their insurer to see if they would cover another attempt.

The same logic which had them hesitant to put their child through repeated surgeries had them sympathetic to the possibility that the insurer would refuse; it seemed fair to them that their insurance policy would have to draw a line somewhere. And they were close to deciding that they would just pay for it out of pocket if the insurer said No.

Their insurance rep confidently told them that a second surgery would be covered the same as the first. The couple asked if there was a pre-authorization they could get in writing, but the agent said that it did not work that way. But not to worry, it was definitely covered!

Of course you can guess what happened.

They had to pay a big bill, which they would have done with a smile had the insurer just not jerked them around. As a result of this misadventure, they became obsessed with hating that insurer, and talked about how they look for every possible opportunity to tell their story, which is how they wound up talking to me.

The executive looked sincerely mortified by this example. He said, “That’s horrible. Who was their insurer?”

And I smiled. Because I got to tell him, “Oh, that was you. Your company screwed those people.”

(When I tell this story, people usually ask me who the client was. Having already bent my NDA enough, I will not reveal it. Plus — and this is important — it does not matter. This is characteristic of how all US insurers operate.)

“Understand,” I added, “we talked to people with much worse experiences than that. We talked to people hit with financial impacts they could not afford. We talked to people whose insurers’ decisions had awful, lasting medical impacts.”

In the course of that project — since I was looking at systems design — I learned why this happens. It does not come from trying to screw insurance plan members, it comes from trying to screw doctors and hospitals.

Insurance companies write deliberately obfuscated contracts with healthcare providers: Rule 122.7.14b combined with Rule 37.4.9 combined with Rule 71.16a/7 mean that the doctor only gets paid for part of Proceedure X. This creates such complexity in evaluating how a healthcare provider will get reïmbursed for what they do, so many dependencies on super-specific particulars, that the insurer cannot run the hypothetical on what their own systems will do! The machine simply cannnot produce an answer.

That does not make this inability to make commitments innocent. These are design choices. Insurers have smart people working hard all day every day to figure out inventive ways to screw doctors and hospitals. They prioritize doing that over enabling patients to make clear decisions.

I think of this whenever defenders of the private insurance system in the US talk about stuff like the virtues of copayments, the small fees patients make when getting a proceedure or medication which their insurer does cover. This is meant to create incentives which prevent patients from making frivolous use of medical services, as part of giving patients “skin in the game” in managing costs, in making trade-offs about when it matters to them to get resource-intensive care. But even if that design reasoning made sense — and I do not think it does — the capriciousness of costs which the insured actually experience makes it entirely useless.

There is no fixing this class of problem in private insurance. It is inherent in the incentives insurers face.

This is one among many reasons why there is no fixing private insurance. I advocate for single payer public healthcare — best known by the slogan “Medicare For All” — because there is no legitimate argument against it.

Yes, 300 is fascist

Unintentional fascism

Both Frank Miller’s comic 300 and Zach Snyder’s film adaptation have deeply fascist sensibilities. I feel certain that neither creator intended this, or even knows it, but there it is.

I have read most of Miller’s work. I am sure he would reject any reading of his work as fascist since he sincerely hates Nazis and US conservatives, and he often is a political satirist. But fascist themes recur in his work. Someday I have to write a thorough examination of them in his masterwork The Dark Knight Returns, but that is a big undertaking; for now, I will just note that at the climax of the story has Batman arrive as a man on horseback (literally), his mere presence immediately turning the violent energy of young men away from the perversion & chaos permitted by decadent elites, turning them toward a restoration of purpose & order, and that then spreads through society.

I also confess to enjoying many of Snyder’s films as a guilty pleasure, including 300. Patrick H. Willems’ video-essay Our Himbo Auteur examines Snyder’s whole filmography; like me, he concludes that Snyder’s tendency toward fascist themes is unconscious. Snyder is well known for seeing himself as a libertarian — he dreams of someday making a film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — which I feel confident that he would offer as inherently opposed to the authoritarianism of fascism. But the fascist sensibility includes more than just authoritarianism.

Both creators describe 300 as apolitical, just a gripping yarn animated by romanticized ideas of heroism and bravery. In that too I take them as sincere … and wrong. I think both were trying to embrace the violence as self-consciously Bad Wrong Fun but stumbled into reproducing fascist themes along the way. All stories have politics, and it is difficult to imagine a more thoroughly fascist work in either medium which is not intentional propaganda.

Fascist themes

• Presenting & romanticizing the Spartans as a society in which men define themselves entirely as warriors, in which war is necessary, noble, and good for the creation of a strong society. Every man a violent hero.
• Presenting this warrior ethos as making the Spartans superior to the other ancient Greeks — superior as men and superior as guarantors of civilization — because the other Greeks are devoted first to their trades and crafts. (A familiar, ahistorical reactionary fantasy.)
• Presents the Spartans as defending Western civilization from decadent, perverse, dark-skinned, monstrously inhuman queer-coded hordes from distant countries with different cultures determined to destroy their society.
• Offering just a glimpse of the other institutions of Spartan society, casting them as hopelessly corrupt in contrast to the soldiers. Miller emphasizes the parasitic priests, Snyder the cowardly ruling council which demonstrates that “democracy” is a sham.
• Depicting Spartan society as made great through ruthless eugenic elimination of the unfit and traumatizing training of boys to be men who refuse to admit any fear, pain, or weakness.
• Presenting Leonidas pitching Xerxes’ herald into a pit as a seeming mistake which proves to save Greece, romanticizing visceral emotion producing violent action as superior to calm, reason, openness, and such.
• Romanticizing the bodies of athletic men, framed in terms which vigorously insist that this is not eroticized.

These fascist themes are not inherent in the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, even as the Greek propagandist-historian Herodotus told it. Miller thanks Victor Davis Hansen at the start of 300; Hanson is a notorious militarist racist neocon enthusiast for the Iraq war whose misreading of Thucydides has long been notorious and pernicious. Every change to the real history in both the book and the film point in the same, fascist direction.

And I have to underline that 300 offering the Spartans in contrast to the decadent queerness of Xerxes, his army, and the other Greeks is a particularly funny and ugly touch if you know anything about the historical Spartans.

B-b-b-but satire!

Defenders of 300 say that its divergences from history are justified by the ending, which presents everything we have seen as actually a telling by the surviving Spartan Dilios, who has romanticizized Thermopylae to gain Greek support for the war against the Xerxes.

Thus, they claim, the hidden meaning of 300 is a satire of fascist propaganda, just as Snyder’s Sucker Punch attempts a critique of its surface text.

Snyder would make this point in an interview with Total Film, stating that he sought to place audiences in a tight spot by showing the Spartans’ savagery in blunt terms as people who are prepared to throw newborn children off a cliff if they’re insufficiently healthy, and posing the question “These are the people you’re supposed to go with on this journey?” Elaborating on the point, Snyder felt that “part of the fun” of 300 was to depict a society leaving its sons to fend for themselves as children and only prepared to allow them to return home if they survive, and asking “Those are your heroes?”

But that does not stand up on examination of the actual film. When we see the “real world” of Dilios telling the story, it looks exactly the same. Nothing in the text of either work suggests that the fascist themes are deceitful, or bad in any way.

“But it shows the Spartans doing obviously bad things!” cry its defenders. But everything bad is shown to us as not bad but romantically badass.

These defenses point to its portrayal of Spartan eugenicist infanticide as showing that the story is unsympathetic to the Spartans. Yes, the sensible reader or viewer should find infanticide morally repulsive. But does the story itself share that reading? Both book and film offer the infanticide quickly, to frame other events which it lingers over.

It shows us King Leonidas as a child, facing a test of manhood in the wilderness, fighting a wolf. That he would be compelled to do such a thing is abusive, but the story revels in how this shows that Leonidas is a badass.

It shows the Spartans encountering the deformed Ephialtes, who survived infanticide and aspires to join the Spartans in their ranks. Ephialtes is presented as disgusting. Leonidas gently turns down his help, which is not just portrayed as a kindness but too much a kindness, since the story goes on to have Ephialtes betray the Spartans to the Persians, who seduce him with queer-coded debauchery with other deformed figures. Ephialtes in the story proves as weak in spirit as he is in body, another fascist theme.

Contrast 300 with Verhoeven’s film adaptation of Starship Troopers, which is a satire of fascist propaganda. Troopers does what 300’s defenders claim 300 does: it presents fascist propaganda on its own terms, expecting the audience to supply its own ironic reading. But unlike 300, the fascist voice of Troopers is not remotely seductive. The soldiers are not badass, they are incompetent. We get not the glorious sacrifice of 300 but screaming agony and mutilitated soldiers. The fascist sensibility is never cool, it is cringe-inducingly absurd. Fascist aesthetics get marked increasingly unambiguously, culminating in a major character wearing an imitation of an SS uniform. 300 includes nothing similar.

It is not satire when a work presents bad ideas. It must actually, y’know, satirize them.

But doctor …

This old joke is best known in the form delivered in the clipped prose of Rorschach, the half-crazy antihero superhero in Alan Moore & Dave Gibbon’s comics novel Watchemen:

Heard joke once:

Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel.

Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain.

Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.”

Man bursts into tears.

Says, “But doctor …

I am Pagliacci.”

Good joke.

Everybody laugh.

Roll on snare drum.

Curtains.

It has spawned an array of spoof memes, with this perhaps the best known:

doctor: treatment is simple. go see orville, very funny clown

pagliacci: what about pagliacci?

doctor: pagliacci? man i could not name a more suckass clown

pagliacci:

doctor: just downright dogshit of a clown

I have done one of my own:

Heard joke once:

Woman goes to doctor.

Says she’s depressed.

Says men don’t respect her.

Says they pedantically tell her things about her own area of expertise.

Says it makes her feel all alone.

Doctor says

“Treatment is simple.

Rebecca Solnit has essay.

Go read it.

At least you will see that this is not just you.”

Woman bursts into tears.

Says, “But doctor …

I am Rebecca Solnit.”

This of course has happened in real life:

“At a NASA Earth meeting 10 years ago, a white male post doc interrupted me to tell me that I didn’t understand human drivers of fire, that I def needed to read McCarty et al.

Looked him in the eye, pulled my long hair back so he could read my name tag.

“I’m McCarty et al.”

This moving variant, riffing on a classic SFF theme, is my favorite:

Heard joke once: man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him.”

Man goes to Pagliacci’s show. The theatre is full of laughter from the moment the clown trips onto the stage late. Man is overwhelmed with joy and an impression that life is bursting with meaning. He comes out of the theatre singing, and dances home under the stars.

The next day, he thinks he’ll go again. But when he turns up at the Box Office, they say Pagliacci has disappeared. He looks backstage, but the only trace there was ever a clown there is a very ragged script, which Man pockets.

Man has a burning passion to see Pagliacci again. For three decades, he travels the country and the major world capitals, looking for him. Nobody has seen Pagliacci. Nobody outside that first town has even heard of him, or recognises the script Man has copied out.

One day, a woman comes to his door. “I have heard about your search”, says the visitor. “Alas, I cannot tell you where Pagliacci is now. But I can still help”. She pulls out a strange machine. “This device”, she says, “can send you to the past, where you know where to find him.”

Man seizes the opportunity. He sets the contraption to take him back to that night where he saw Pagliacci, and makes his way to the theatre. When he gets there, he realises there's a risk of running into himself. “I can’t be recognisable”, he thinks.

Not to worry. It’s a theatre, so there’s sure to be costumes backstage. Sure enough, in the first dressing room he tries there’s a harlequin's suit and some shoes — albeit a little too big for him. For good measure he cakes some white facepaint on as well.

Realising the show must be about to start, he runs to the wing, so as not to miss a moment. The curtain rises, but nobody appears on stage. “This is a disaster”, he thinks, “This was the most important night of my life. I can’t let it not happen”.

But Man has had years of reading and re-reading the script. He knows precisely what needs to be said and done, and precisely how it needs to be said and done. He runs onto the stage to take over, trips over an uneven floorboard, and kicks off the evening of non-stop laughter.

At the end of the show, Man leaves a copy of the script in a dressing room, and leaves secretly. Then another thought strikes him: if he was Pagliacci the whole time, then how did the doctor know about the show?

He decides to use the time machine again, and goes back to earlier in the day, so he can find the doctor. He goes to the hospital and, disguised in a white coat and stethoscope, he sneaks into the doctor's office to wait for him to appear.

Finally the door opens, but he finds himself looking not at the doctor, but at a version of himself, thirty years younger. “I’m depressed”, the younger man says. “Life seems harsh and cruel. I feel all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain.”

“Treatment is simple”, replies the older. “Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him”.

As the patient closes the door behind him, the older man sits back in his chair and chuckles to himself, “But doctor … I am Pagliacci”.

Getting Iraq right

Reminded of this work of satire responding to the weak “how I got Iraq wrong” mea culpas by pundits who kept their positions of prominance despite being wrong about the easiest of easy calls.

The following appeared this week in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate and The New Yorker in a parallel universe …

---

How I Got It Right: Looking Back at a Time of Justified Opposition to a Mad, Violent Enterprise

So many publications have expressed such overwhelming interest in the perspectives of those of us who opposed the Iraq War when it had a chance of doing good that I have had to permit mutliple publication of this article in most of the nation’s elite media venues – collecting, I am almost embarrassed to admit, a separate fee from each. Everyone recognizes that the opinions of those of us who were right about Iraq then are crucial to formulating sane, just policy now. It’s a lot of pressure, so please forgive anything glib or short you read herein: between articles, interviews, think-tank panels and presentations before government agencies and policy organs I’m not permitted to mention, I’m a little frazzled.

On the bright side, and I can confirm that my experience has been similar to those of my fellow prophets, being the object of so much attention, being repeatedly quizzed by eager interlocutors on the same basic points, encourages one to distill one’s thinking to its essence. As Kenneth Pollack asked me the other day, “What the fuck was so special about you, anyway?”

Land of the Lost

A hundred hokey old movies and TV shows got stupid gritty reboots in the last couple of decades. But not the one which is a natural for that treatment.

Claudia Black + James McAvoy

Claudia Black, a regular on the odd, interesting SF television series Farscape (1999-2003), shared this little story I like in a Twitter thread a while back. I could not find a good archive of it, so I made one here.

As the new Dune premieres in London I’ll share a lil story. I’m the actor in this article whom James McAvoy quotes — pretty bonkers in and of itself. What tickles me about his story is that our respective recollections of our encounter are very different in sweet, powerful ways.

About 20 years ago, as a lead actor in a series on the then Sci-fi Channel, I was invited to a screening — with my co-star Ben Browder — of a Dune miniseries. Ben & I sat together.

I fidgeted a lot; sorry Ben. Undiagnosed ADD and PTSD made screenings at the best of times torturous.

This screening was looooong. I was struggling to stay focused until, I kid you not, in the last three seconds — ok maybe three minutes of this 2, 3 or 4 hour portion — a young man came on screen, walking through a door, chest heaving, eyes ablaze, not uttering a line of dialogue and the credits rolled.

I sat there frozen on the edge of my seat. Ben did too. We needed to know who that young actor was. It felt as though we were some of the first people to witness the rise of this prodigy. (We also knew how artists could be overlooked in science fiction).

This kid could not possibly suffer that fate. He was a supernova. And we needed to tell him; drum it in to him somehow before our beloved yet sometimes wretched and abusive business could wear him down and ever make him doubt his unquestionable talent, skill and abilities.

We’d had a rough ride ourselves. On the same network. On the not quite cool enough show that would not air in my home country despite being its most ambitious production to date, because the Australian network execs loathed & misunderstood sci-fi. We had become a tad despondent.

As luck would have it, this supernova was out in the lobby standing by himself. He was shuffling his worn boots along the carpet, his hands deeply shoved into leather jacket pockets to give their fidgeting refuge. We babbled. We fawned. We likely embarrassed ourselves, gushing.

He was humble & sweet, raw & real. His head bowed down to his boots as our effusiveness came in waves over him. I just needed him to know how damn good he was. I needed him to understand that he was about to become a huge star. His head shook. We parted ways. Never to meet again.

Twenty years later, driving through Studio City my son and I passed a billboard advertising tonight’s latest iteration of Dune. My lad said he was looking forward to seeing it. He’s a mid teen with great taste. I told him that Dune has quite an established cinematic history, but that my personal connection to it involved James McEvoy. I now had his attention. “I love James McEvoy!” (a more animated version of teen than I’m used to) “Me too,” I replied — “In fact I suspect everyone does. And I met him once. Right at the start of his career.”

He enjoyed my recounting of the story & the idea that someone could be that alive with zero dialogue. He also seemed pleased that his taste in actors had not betrayed him. Growing up as a set baby he is all too aware that most of us do not deserve to be unconditionally respected.

A few days later I received an email from a teacher & fellow C-PTSD survivor. We had bonded a few years ago over trauma and sci-fi. (as one does) The title of the email was something along the lines of, ‘You made an impact!’

I was confused. The article was not about me.

Until it suddenly, shockingly was. On the impending eve of the new Dune, a writer had decided to interview Mr. McEvoy asking him about his experience working on it & what advice he would give Timothée Chalamet. Basically none, he said. Because Timothée was a cracking actor.

I was in an adaptation of the second and third [Dune] books. [Timothée Chalamet] is in the first book. And he’s playing a character who ultimately becomes my father, in terms of the character dialogue. So, no. I’ve got no advice for him. And he doesn’t need any advice from me, he’s a cracking actor.

But, he then went on to say something that almost made me pass out. He volunteered, that the best advice he’d been given was from a chick on a sci-fi show from years ago … what was it?

Farscape. That someone named Claudia Black, had given him advice he’d remembered his whole career that he’d found helpful.

But I’ll tell you what's one really good piece of advice that was given to me once, was by the cast of … what was the show called again? Farscape. And it was at the L.A. premiere of Children of Dune, and they said to me, that the thing with this sh*t, i.e. science fiction, is that you have to believe it more than you believe good writing. Good writing, you can just do. It’s easier. But this stuff is hard, because it’s so bonkers, you know what I mean? And I’ve really, I’ve always remembered that advice and taken it to heart. It’s so kept me going really, through a lot of science fiction and fantasy work that I’ve done. Because it was Claudia Black that said it. And I think that’s just good advice for any actor doing any kind of science fiction and/or fantasy, you know?

My jaw dropped. And my arms tingled. I did not recall telling him anything of value. And … wait … this dude knows my name?!

When I picked my kids up from school that afternoon I uncommonly flexed a little as I pointed to the billboard. “Hey, remember that story I told you about James McEvoy? Turns out it has a new surprise twist that involves yer mum.” Again, I had their attention. They smiled proudly.

What followed that evening was interesting and possibly coincidental. My son, who usually keeps to himself in his room, finished his homework early and joined me in the kitchen, offering to help me make dinner. We chatted and danced to some music as we made curry — one of his faves & I felt something I haven’t in a long time; visible.

Being a woman nearing 50 in entertainment, my stock has been plummeting since my late 30’s … Being dragged through family court for the better part of my 40’s in an unspeakably traumatizing divorce, led to social ostracism, an inability to travel for much desired and needed work when most work is in fact out of state … surviving my fair share of #metoo and on the health side — and totally stress-related — a bunch of illnesses that left me somewhat at the mercy of a clueless western medical system … I joke that it’s as if in my 40’s I fell out of the tree of life and hit every branch on the way down. I’ve been picking myself up ever since.

(no pity please, life is hard for most if not all)

Yet on this day, reading that I’d made an impact; somehow cut through the noise in a way that someone I respected had heard me, meant the world to me. It even feels pathetic to admit. But life gets very small for women who have kids. Smaller still for single mums. Some of the focus on minutiae is adorable. And parenting is a privilege. But dreams become elusive luxuries under high allostatic loads, and loads of unassisted chores. Feminism becomes a prequel. Community wanes, the savings disappear & you look in the mirror and realize you are not whom you want your kids to see. So thank you Mr McEvoy. After feeling for years that I’ve been standing behind & knocking on a thick plane of one-sided glass where no one could see nor hear me, for a moment, it was as if someone looked up and heard. Love that it was you.

I’m going to make more curries with the same spice mix though with way more pep, and while I don’t know what this next chapter holds for me, I loudly pray it’s more work. Great work. Juicy work that allows the world to see that I too have loads more to offer … & speaking of names. Think I’m going to name this here longest Twitter thread I’ve ever written, ‘The Comeback Curry.’

Special shout out to everyone out there who has seen my work and supported it, and me over the years. You also mean the world to me. And I’m aiming to make you proud.

👊🏼♥️

A fan somehow rustled up this picture:

Black appended it to her thread:

Holy crap! A photo I didn’t know existed.

At least I remembered correctly that he was wearing a leather jacket 😂

Fanfic

Indexing a few favorites. Most quotes are just a taste to get readers interested. Titles are links.

Trek

The Thing About The Kobayashi Maru

Do they, Bones? We’ve been at this for three years. Tell me, Bones, how many times have we faced a real no-win situation? A certain death in face of helping people? I write the logs, Bones. The answer is never. Not once. Sure, we lost feathers, and couldn’t always save everybody. But each time we made it, Bones, and each time, we saved people. The only reason the Maru is a no-win situation is because someone decided it should be. To make a point.

See also: Superman

Wars

Instruments of Destruction

Jerjerrod constructed a new timetable. Using his most reasonably optimistic estimates, the second Death Star would be completed in sixteen years, taking four times longer than the original timeline.

Jerjerrod could have sent a message to the Emperor informing him of this fact, but enough time had passed since Jerjerrod had been put in charge of the project that blame would almost certainly fall on him, especially given the rosy reports that the Emperor had been receiving. Announcing that the schedule was too optimistic would be seen as a matter of personal failure. Under the Emperor’s regime, failure on this scale didn’t mean demotion or court martial, it meant death. So what was Admiral Tian Jerjerrod to do?

A New Sith, or Revenge Of The Hope

Twenty years earlier, Chewbacca was second in command of the defence of his planet. He was there in the tactical conferences and there on the front lines and was a personal friend of Yoda's. So when he needed reliable people to join the embryonic Alliance, who else would Yoda turn to but his old friend from Kashykk? Given his background, it makes no sense that Chewbacca would spend the crucial years of the rebellion as the second-in-command to (sorry Han) a low-level smuggler. Unless it was his cover. In fact, Chewie is a top-line spy and flies what is in many ways the Rebellion's best ship.

Middle Earth

The Truth About Tom Bombadil

Tom Bombadil and the Witch-king of Angmar are the same person.

Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil

Now, in his conversation with Frodo, Bombadil implies (but avoids directly stating) that he had heard of their coming from Farmer Maggot and from Gildor’s elves (both of whom Frodo had recently described). But that also makes no sense. Maggot lives west of the Brandywine, remained there when Frodo left, and never even knew that Frodo would be leaving the Shire. And if Elrond knows nothing of Bombadil, how can he be a friend of Gildor’s?

What do we know about Tom Bombadil? He lies.

A question: what is the most dangerous place in Middle Earth? First place goes to the Mines of Moria, home of the Balrog, but what is the second most dangerous place? Tom Bombadil’s country.

Fear No Evil: On Sorting Hats and Forest Gods

Stay on the path. Follow him. Trust him. Obey him, because he is friendly, and because he is Iarwain Ben-adar, Eldest and Fatherless, who saw the first of everything. Try not to notice the way the One Ring doesn’t stir any evil in him. It corrupts everyone who wears it, but not this man. Try not to wonder about what kind of purity is incorruptible; try not to wonder what he is made of, that a thing of perfect evil does not change him at all.

Marvel

Captain America meets Blade

Transcribed all of this one:

Blade:
help me murder every single vampire to satisfy my own deep-seated issues with my parentage and (film version) the genocidal spite of my mentor figure

Captain America:
wait a second. (pause) so you want to kill this entire group of queer-coded reputed blood-drinkers

Blade:
yeah they’re a monstrous conspiracy of blood-drinking abominations who control and corrupt society

Captain America:
hey bucky does this song and dance sound familiar?

Bucky:
lil’ bit

Blade:
pardon?

Cap:
… yeah, no offense Blade, I’m sure a lot of ’em are awful, but … look, if they hunt and kill folks yeah we have laws for dealing with that, but this looks bad, dude.

Blade:
what do you mean?

Cap:
this looks just … a smidge? a smidge. fashy, man.

Blade:
but they’re vampires! they are impure minions of Evil!

Cap:
not helping your case! look I’m just saying genocidal campaigns of extermination for distinct demographics are not Hero Things, man

Blade:
but they’re vampires

Cap:
dude, depending on whether we’re in film or comics canon, so are you, and you explicitly used to eat homeless people. ease back, yo.

Blade:
you’ve killed vampires!

Cap:
yeah, Nazi vampires, I am all about some Nazi-killing, and supervillain vampires, but Nazis don’t bite people and turn ’em into more Nazis, they’re a political identity.

Blade:
so you’re saying my anti-vampire crusade sounds awkwardly like classic anti-Semitic tropes of blood libel, all-powerful Jewish-coded conspiracy and “sexual corruption” mixed with queerphobia? Right down to purifying the corrupted with murder?

Cap:
it rhymes

Blade:
aw, fuck. can you at least help me kill Dracula? he's getting his doom fortress overlord of darkness thing on again

Cap:
oh sure, give me the stake and let’s go.

Blade:
wait what?

Cap:
there’s no creed against killing supervillains for being monstrous assholes. shoulda started there

Steve Rogers, PR disaster

He was bound to figure it out someday. Steve was a determined guy, and even if he somehow never discovered Wikipedia, if nothing else, he had a library card. Still, something in the way his eyes narrowed made her stammer,

“Uh, nothing, never mind, it’s fine. The word ‘socialist’, uh, means something different now, so it’s no longer really accurate to describe yourself like that. Just, if reporters ask or something.”

Captain America, red diaper baby

All those things add up to a very interesting, potentially shocking, probably fascinating backstory that’s never been touched on. Namely, that Steve Rogers probably grew up in a Communist household. He might not have been a card-carrying Communist himself, but his parents almost certainly were.

I actually blogged that one before, along with some other good reflections on Cap.

Tony Stark & Bruce Banner, science bros

You can see the look on Natasha and Steve’s faces when Tony asks if Bruce turned up yet. They’ve counted Bruce out. Guy’s a mess, right? He’s too volatile. Doesn’t play well with others. He could never work as part of a team. No-one thinks he’ll come through when it matters. Except Tony.

Others

The Raven

Transcribed the whole of this little ditty.

Poe:
Once upon a midnight

Beastie Boys:
DREARY

Poe:
While I pondered,

Beastie Boys:
WEAK

Poe:
and

Beastie Boys:
WEARY

[⋯]

Mike D:
Tell me what thy lordly name is

MCA:
On night’s Plutonian shore

Both:
QUOTH THE RAVEN

Bird squawk sample

Ad-Rock:
ᴺ ᵉ ᵛ ᵉ ʳ ᵐ ᵒ ʳ ᵉ

TV commercials for insurance

“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there,” we chant, and another agent appears in the pentagram. He screams. The Dark Lord feasts tonight.

Pride and Extreme Prejudice

At this moment the path through the shrubbery took a sharp dogleg to accomodate a stately lime tree. To Patience’s discomfiture Mr. Connor was lounging on the bench around the bole, just striking a match on the sole of his boot. His glance at Mr. Terminus was distinctly cold. He drew on his pipe until the tobacco was well alight before saying, “My dear Patience, clockwork and machinery is properly the sphere of the lower orders. The delicately nurtured female can have no commerce with the denizen of a factory. May I escort you back to the terrace?”

The Hippocratic Oath

I have weirdly strong feelings about the Hippocratic Oath as an ethical frame around the medical profession. I think it is the most noble commitment which any professional community makes.

Over on Twitter I have accumulated a little thread of commentaries on the friction between physicians’ obligations versus our politics & society. In it I repeatedly reference “the shade of Hippocrates”, not just because I am pagan in that sense, but because referencing him underlines that the commitment is sacred in every sense of the word, the material equivalent of bodhicitta.

Two of my favorite evocations of the profundity of the commitment come from pop culture.

The first is a little scene from the TV series The West Wing in which President Jed Bartlet talks to his wife Abbey, who is a physician.

Jed
Eisenmenger’s Syndrome.

Abbey
It’s a cyanotic heart condition. There’s something called ventricular-septal defect …

Jed
The Ayatollah’s son has it.
[⋯]

Abbey
What’s the problem, Jed? Don’t tell me there’s a problem with State …

Jed
The only doctor available won’t do it.

Abbey
He’s Jewish?

Jed
Persian.

Abbey
He doesn’t have a choice.

Jed
Abbey …

Abbey
He doesn’t. Doctors aren’t instruments of the state, and they’re not allowed to choose patients on spec.

Jed
I can’t order him to do it.

Abbey
Yes, you can.

Jed
Through the power vested in me by you?

Abbey
Samuel Mudd set Booth’s leg after he shot Lincoln. Doctors are liable in this country if they don’t treat the patient in front of them.

Jed
Just for the record, this is why we don’t talk about foreign policy — which we do, but you don’t think we do enough.

Abbey
Why?

Jed
Because Samuel Mudd was tried and convicted of treason for setting that leg.

Abbey
So?

Jed
What “so”?

Abbey
So that’s the way it goes. You set the leg.

The second is from the TV series Firefly. Jayne wakes up in the dispensary after having betrayed not just their doctor, but their doctor’s sister, whom we have seen him sacrifice a great deal to protect. The doctor says to him:

You’re in a dangerous line of work, Jayne. Odds are you’ll be under my knife again. Often.

I want you to understand one thing very clearly.

No matter what you do, or say, or plot — no matter how you come down on us — I will never, ever harm you. When you’re on this table, you’re safe, because I’m your medic.

And however little we may like or trust each other, we’re on the same crew. Got the same troubles, same enemies, and more than enough of both.

Now, we could circle each other and growl. Sleep with one eye open. But that thought wearies me. I don’t care what you’ve done. I don’t know what you’re planning on doing. But I’m trusting you. I think you should do the same.

Because I don’t see this working any other way.

This is on my mind because we are entering a time of profound conflict.

I am bitter. I am scared. I am angry.

And I am determined to remember that my object is and will remain to save everybody. Including my enemies. Especially my enemies.

Ignorance, and different kinds of Trump voters

Waking up to Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, I shared to social media the comment:

Most of Trump’s voters weren’t asking for what’s coming.

But they will embrace it when it arrives.

A wise friend challenged me for acting as an apologist for Trump voters. But this is an indictment of them.

My wise friend mistook me as suggesting that Trump voters are not really mean-spirited bigots. I recognize that Americans — not just Trump voters — broadly are mean-spirited bigots. I recognize that bigotry is integral to support for Trump.

But. Anyone reading this is likely to have a hard time understanding how bogglingly ignorant & misinformed most ordinary Americans are about politics.

As I learned from Chris Hayes before he was famous:

The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief — not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.

I have done a little bit of political attitudes research for my day job. I can report from the field that it is not just “undecideds” who are that confused. Many people with strong party affiliation are in the dark. Left and right. College-educated and not.

I have had people ask who the Presidential candidates were. I have had people attributing Biden policies to Trump and vice versa. I have heard Democrats who hated Trump say that his first term proved that if he won it would not be that bad. They. Don’t. Know.

That ignorance is not a blessing. It does not make Trump voters less culpable. It does not protect us from what I see ahead. The same tendencies which produced that ignorance will make them rationalize every horror that comes. I have heard people say things that make my blood run cold.

It helps to break down Trump voters into three types, including two kinds of MAGAs.

Though with precious few exceptions MAGAs refuse to recognize themselves as fascists, that is what both types are. Fascists are driven by bigotry, drawn to the absurdities of fascist rhetoric which free them not just from moral responsibility but from having to think rationally at all.

Hard MAGAs have bloodlust. They do in fact dream of gunning down millions of people they hate et cetera. They know Haitian immigrants are not eating pet cats, but since Those People are inhuman monsters, they love the lie for getting at the “essential truth” that the suffering & death of Those People is a positive good in itself.

Soft MAGAs have doublethink. Horseshit to rationalize horrors — as good, as necessary, or as not actually horrible — works better the more preposterous it is because it distracts from facing the centrality of their bigotry. They “believe” that Haitian immigrants eating pet cats must be “true”: it “makes sense”, it justifies the fantasy they have of Getting Rid Of Those People. They don’t think about what that will require, and when the bloodshed does appear before them, these kinds of “beliefs” will justify their schadenfreude at the suffering & death.

Non-MAGA Trump voters do not think like fascists. They are bigots but it is not their central motivation in the same way. They prefer to look away from their own bigotry; the shame they feel about it compels them to deny they have it rather than to correct it as they should. They dislike the absurdities of MAGA, but see aligning with MAGA as “necessary” in the face of the Greater Evil of the nightmarish “radical left” Democratic Party. They have selected an information bubble which protects them from hearing the story about Haitian immigrants eating cats; Trump’s nonsense is irrelevant, they just have a thirdhand impression that he cares about the Important Problems facing Real Americans. If MAGA fascism guns down millions of people, they will deny that they knew and it will be half-true because they go out of their way to not know.

Both the bigotry and the support for horrors is equally monstrous in all three cases. Practically everyone in all three categories will help fascism build murder factories. I respect refusing to care about the machinery of their thinking and the degree to which they actively want what they will build, because the bottom line is the same.

But. If one wants to understand them — and there are instrumental reasons why one would — one has to see how only the hard MAGAs want murder factories as a positive good, while the dynamics are different for the others. My hand-wave-y guess is that about half of Trump voters are soft MAGAs, with non-MAGAs outnumbering hard MAGAs by a small margin.

From Milton Meyer’s book with the brilliant title They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45:

Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?

[⋯]

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

You have gone almost all the way yourself.