Republic Dogs

Rescuing a classic from linkrot:

Republic Dogs

By Nathaniel Daw
Copyright 1994 and all that.

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[Thrasymachus is tied up in a chair. Socrates is brandishing a gun in his face.]

Thrasymachus:
Don’t kill me, man!

Socrates:
Are you finished, fucker?

Thrasymachus:
Look, look, man, you can have my ten yoke of oxen. My virgin daughters? My pomegranite orchard?

Socrates:
You like pomegranites? Shit, motherfucker, I hear they’ve got a fuckin’ all-you-can-eat special going on on pomegranites where you’re headed.

Thrasymachus:
Don’t do it, Socrates. Be fair.

Socrates: [Suddenly contemplative]
Fair?

Thrasymachus:

[Sees an opportunity for survival]
Yeah, fair … think about my wife and children --

Socrates:
Would you say that to be fair is the same thing as to be just?

Thrasymachus:
What?

Socrates:
Well, I’m just a dull, wandering street philosopher, so I don’t understand quite where you’re headed with this particular line of reasoning. Perhaps [motions with gun] you could further elucidate your theory of justice.

Thrasymachus:
My theory? Of justice?

Socrates:
Yes. You do … have a theory of justice, don’t you?

Thrasymachus:
Uh …

Socrates:
Or perhaps you’d like to hear my theory.

Thrasymachus:
Oh, yes, yes, yes, of course, your theory. You have a theory?

Socrates:
Well, yes, I have been thinking a little about justice -- not of course, so deeply as could a wise sage like yourself. But I’ve had a little idea, an insignificant but troubling little idea, and it’s been bothering me a little, and I thought that maybe someone as smart as yourself could help convince me that it was wrong.

Thrasymachus:
Of course, I’ll do anything I can to help.

Socrates:
So you’d like to hear my theory?

Thrasymachus:
I’d be honored.

Socrates:
My humble little idea goes something like this. [He is suddenly extremely loud and violent. Roars:] Justice is only the will of the stronger. What do you think about that, asshole? [Slaps Thrasymachus across the face with his gun]

Thrasymachus:
Uh, uh, uh …

Socrates:
Come on … come on, you wanna try and disprove my theory, you weak little shit? Yeah? Yeah? Shit, I think I feel a proof coming on. [Shoots him.] Why, thank you Thrasymachus, you’ve certainly opened my eyes.

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Narrator:
Thrasymachus. Alcibiades. Aristotle. Socrates -- are Quentin Tarantino’s Republic Dogs.

[Enter Alcibiades and Aristotle]

Aristotle:
So you’re saying you’d give Helen of Troy a foot massage?

Alcibiades:
Fuck yeah, in a minute.

Aristotle:
You’d touch her feet? She might be the most beautiful bitch since fucking Aphrodite, but trust me, her feet stink. And her armpits stink too. Just cuz she’s beautiful don’t mean she don’t smell like the rest of us. And don’t you go telling no deodorant story, either, cuz you know and I know it wasn’t invented during the Trojan war.

Alcibiades:
What, you wouldn’t do her?

Aristotle:
I didn’t say I wouldn’t do her. I said I wouldn’t give her a foot massage. I don’t dig on feet.

Alcibiades:
Well, what if before you did her you’d have to give her a foot massage to get her in the mood?

Aristotle:
Allow me to inquire, Alcibiades. What if you had to massage her armpits to get her in the mood?

Alcibiades:
Fuck you, Aristotle.

Socrates:
You guys have got it all wrong.

Alcibiades:
What, you don’t like foot massages either?

Socrates:
No, motherfucker, the Iliad, you’ve got the Iliad all wrong. Do you wanna know what the Iliad is about? Well, I’ll tell you what the Iliad is about. It ain’t about no bitches, that’s for fucking sure.

Alcibiades:
Sure it is. You’re saying Helen of Troy ain’t one hot bitch?

Socrates:
I’m not saying Helen of Troy ain’t a hot bitch, I’m saying the Iliad ain’t about her. She ain’t even in it. The Odyssey is about bitches, I’ll grant you that. But I’ll tell you what The Iliad is about. It’s about big boats. Didn’t you ever read the second Canto? Boats boats boats boats boats boats boats. Hence, the Trojan War.

Aristotle:
You’re full of shit.

Alcibiades:
Fuck yeah you are; the Iliad is about Achilles’ struggle with his own homosexuality.

Socrates:
Maybe I should frame my theory a bit more emphatically. [Drawing his gun.] Didn’t you ever hear of the face that launched a thousand … boats?

Alcibiades:
Uh …

Socrates:
WELL?

Alcibiades:
Yeah.

Socrates:
Well, how’d you like me to launch your face?

Alcibiades:
Uh …

Socrates:
Ahh, I guess that example cleared up all your objections then. [Points weapon at Aristotle] You don’t have any problems with that, do you?

Aristotle:
Hey, man, it’s cool. Cool. Boats are cool by me. I was just on a boat recently.

Socrates: [Putting away his gun.]
Well good for fucking you. This makes you special?

Aristotle:
From Mycinea.

Alcibiades:
What’s it like? I hear they do some crazy-ass shit there.

Aristotle:
Man, that place is like Mount-fucking-Olympus. Every night, they gather round the fire in certain legally designated areas, where government-licensed civil servants throw the roots of a domestically cultivated plant in the fire.

Socrates:
So fucking what?

Aristotle:
So the smoke makes them giddy and lighthearted as if they had drunk on wine, only they don’t have a headache in the morning, that’s fucking what.

Socrates:
That’s it, I’m fucking going. It’s the perfect fucking city.

Aristotle:
It ain’t the perfect fucking city.

Socrates:
You know a better city?

Aristotle:
No, I don’t know a better city, motherfucker, but that don’t mean fucking Mycinea is fucking perfect. “Perfect” doesn’t mean that there ain’t nothing better, it means perfect.

Socrates:
Can you explain that lofty idea in terms a base, wandering street philosopher like myself might be able to understand?

Aristotle:
Well, allow me to demonstrate. Let’s say there was an imaginary city, and all the people were divided into three groups. Let’s say I represent the Gold group, I’d be Mr. Gold, you, Socrates would be Mr. Silver, and, you, Alcibiades, Mr. Bronze.

Alcibiades:
Why do I have to be Mr. Bronze?

Aristotle:
Because it’s only a demonstration. So me, Gold, I’d be the philosopher king --

Alcibiades:
But why can’t I be the philosopher king? Look, Socrates, I’ll trade with you.

Aristotle:

[Draws a gun, fires a shot into the air,

and points it at Alcibiades]
Interrupt me again, motherfucker. Interrupt me again. Nobody’s trading with anybody. This is my allegory.

[Alcibiades gestures submission.]

Aristotle: [Putting away gun.]
So as the philosopher king, it would be my duty to keep seditious literature out of the city.

Socrates:
I got it. I understand.

Aristotle:
Shut up, motherfucker, how can you understand my perfect city when I haven’t explained it yet?

Socrates:
No, dickhead, not that, I understand what you were saying before, about perfection. It’s all about forms.

Aristotle:
Forms?

Socrates:
Yeah, motherfucker, forms. Like, something don’t have to physically exist for it to be perfect; it exists as the perfect ideal, the perfect form, beyond mortal comprehension.

Alcibiades:
Socrates, you’re supposed to pour your libations on the ground, not drink them till you’re talking like a crazy Bacchae bitch.

Socrates:
Normally, I’d be pouring libations with your spinal fluid right now, but since I’m feeling at peace with the universe I’ll try to enlighten your sorry ass instead. Imagine there’s this dark, underground cave.

Alcibiades:
Yeah?

Socrates:
And there’s this rapist-motherfucker, and he’s got this gimp, right, tied up in the cave. See that?

Aristotle:
Okay.

Socrates:
And this rapist, he’s a sick motherfucker, so let’s say one day he sends down a coupla pipe-hittin’ negroes to cut the gimp’s ear right off.

Alcibiades:
Cut his ear off?

Socrates:
Yeah, and gouge out his fucking eyes. Now wouldn’t you say that the ear and eye are the proper receptacles of the senses of sight and hearing, respecitively?

Alcibiades:
Clearly so.

Socrates:
So, moreover, would you not agree that this gimp’s senses are imperfect?

Aristotle:
Why, yes, Socrates, I suppose they would be a trifle damaged.

Socrates:
And what do things look like to someone with imperfect senses?

Alcibiades:
Dark?

Socrates:
No, motherfucker, nine letters, begins with “I.”

Aristotle:
Imperfect.

Socrates:
Bingo. So you’d say this gimp, you’d say this gimp motherfucker would be unable to perceive true perfection -- but that don’t mean it don’t exist. Now if you brought him out of the cave, into the light, things would be less dark, and his eyes might heal a little, he might begin to see a glimmer of light, thereby gaining the idea of true perfection --

Aristotle:
What kind of argument is that? Your theory of the forms rests on an arbitrary and vicious act of violence.

Socrates: [Draws his gun.]
Aristotle, you’re Plato’s student, I respect you, but I will put fucking bullets through your heart if you don’t take back what you said about me being violent now!

Aristotle: [Also drawing gun]
You shoot, you’ll be dining with Lord Hades tonight. I repeat. You kill me, your ass is eating pomegranite fucking casserole for the rest of eternity.

Alcibiades:
Shit, man, you’re acting like a bunch of fuckin’ Spartans. Am I the only philosopher around here?

Socrates and Aristotle: [To Alcibiades]
Shut up!

Alcibiades:
Guys, guys, calm down. Look, I’ve got it. Let’s have a symposium -- we can all drink wine and make speeches in praise of love.

Aristotle:
What are you, some kind of pansy?

Socrates:
Shoot that dipshit.

[Socrates and Aristotle turn in unison and shoot Alcibiades, then turn back and again aim at each other.]

Socrates: [To Aristotle]
Don’t think you’re getting off that easy. You ever read Plato?

Aristotle:
Of course.

Socrates:
There’s this little passage I got memorized that I like to recite in situations like this. It is a tale of a brave man, Er, who once died in war. On the twelfth day, as he was already laid out on the funeral pyre, he revived, and told what he had seen yonder. He said that after his soul had left him it travelled with many others until they came to a marvellous place, where there were two openings upward into heaven, and between them sat judges. These, when they had given judgment, ordered the just to go upward through the heavens by the opening on the right. The unjust they ordered to travel downward by the opening on the left. For all the wrongs they had done to any person they paid a tenfold penalty. Savage men, all fiery to look at bound their feet, hands and heads, and threw them down and beat them, tortured them on thorny bushes.

Aristotle:
What the fuck was that all about?

Socrates:
So, motherfucker, prepare to test the hypothesis! See, I’ve got it figured out, I’m the just man, and you’re the unjust man, my gun is the thorny bushes, and Mr. dead pansy here is the judge. Now DIE MOTHERFUC --

Aristotle:
But what if I’m the just man and you’re the unjust man and this dead dipshit is the thorny bushes?

Socrates:
Oh, uh …

Aristotle:
Or what if Alcibiades is the just man, and we’re both unjust men. And the thorny bushes are the judge?

Socrates:
Shit, well I guess that all depends on your definition of justice.

Aristotle:
Exactly my point. That was what I was working up to with my description of the perfect city, before I was so rudely interrupted.

Socrates:
Shit, I’m sorry. I don’t suppose you could explain it to me now?

Aristotle:
Only if you stop pointing that thing at me.

Socrates:
Well … all right.

[Both of them holster their guns.]

Aristotle:
Whew. That was exciting. [Patting him on the back,] Could I interest you in a drink?

Socrates:
One minute. I’ll meet you there.

[Aristotle starts to walk off]

Socrates:

[drawing his gun and pointing it

  at Aristotle’s back]
But first, how’d you like to hear my theory of justice?

[they both freeze. the end.]

The Ballads of Malcolm Reynolds

Over on Bluesky, Sean Kelly says:

Malcolm Reynolds starting off as an abusive prick who all the women love anyway because deep down, he’s a good person is such a case of Joss Whedon telling on himself.

Kelly is smart about this sort of thing. I see why he says this. As someone who watched — twice — all of Whedon’s perverse masterwork Dollhouse, I recognize him frequently revealing his misogyny, narcissism, and abusiveness in his storytelling. I see plenty of those problems in Firefly.

But on this point I see something else going on, because we know quite a bit about what Whedon wanted to do with Firefly and with Malcolm Reynolds. A few years back, I posted a quote from Whedon on this very subject:

Mal is somebody that I knew, as I created him, I would not get along with. I don’t think we have the same politics. But that’s sort of the point.

The series offers Mal to us as a noble scoundrel loved by all of the women aboard the Serenity, but not because Whedon wanted to tell that story, quite. Whedon created that under protest, as an adaptation to Fox’s insistence that the central character of the ensemble could not be the utter bastard he wanted to examine. Whedon filed down Mal’s rough edges — still an abusive prick, but less so — and made the whole ensemble less fractious, more loving. That paradoxically meant that the story did less work to justify the sympathy for Mal it asked for, creating a dissonance which made Kelly itch.

We can glimpse the different Malcolm Reynolds Whedon wanted to give us in the pilot which the studio rejected. The first sequence introduces Mal as a callously violent soldier smugly fighting for the Space Confederacy. In the second sequence, we see that losing the war broke something in him, turning him into an utter shit. He is insulting and disrespectful toward a sincere priest and a self-possessed prostitute! Had Whedon been able to figure out a way to justify including a dog in the scene, Mal would have kicked it.

In that pilot, yes, Kaylee does love Mal. Whedon has said that in writing the show “when Kaylee says it, we believe it” because she is a pure soul, wise enough to fall in love with the real hero of the Serenity crew before his heroism became apparent. But her love for Mal is the only thing in the pilot telling us that this asshole is worth caring about. Even Mal himself tells us otherwise.

In that pilot, River does not love Mal. Well, she doesn’t get to say much. In the second first episode, River says in one of her fugues of holy madness, “Mal. Bad … in the Latin.” The show uses River’s inhuman insight to tell us things, much as Whedon says it uses Kaylee, so that is stark. River comes to love Mal as the whole crew do, but along the way River — who is a scary murder-monster — often fears Mal.

In that pilot, Zoe does not love Mal. She is utterly loyal to him, and she trusts him. The show hints that she feels indebted to him for something he did in the war. But that is not love. In the Serenity film, Whedon tells us very clearly that Zoe only loves only one person in the ’verse, and it ain’t Mal. In the pilot it seems that Zoe does not even like him, though maybe she hopes to someday get back a better Mal she knew before the war broke him.

In that pilot, Inara does not love Mal, despite genre savvy telling us that Inara & Mal have romantic tension. What keeps them apart? Mal being terrible. Inara finds Mal attractive but dislikes him, for good reasons. (In this do see a different accidental confession from Whedon, resentment that women like Inara often feel attracted to men like Mal, an ugly note which shows up many times in his work.)

The changes in charactization after the pilot are significant but not jarring because Whedon and his team are crafty, largely just fast-forwarding to a state Whedon had meant to work hard to earn over a few seasons of storytelling.

He did a similar trick in wrapping as much as he could of several TV seasons’ worth of storylines in the feature film Serenity, including an abbreviation of Malcolm Reynolds’ arc. The series gave us Mal living by a code of honor which emphasized total dedication to his crew. In the film, he realizes that caring for a small circle of people is not good enough. He has to care about everyone. His moral obligation to the ’verse outweighs his own life and even the lives of the people dear to him. Had Firefly ended after seven seasons that could take him there, I believe that in the last episode Mal would have taken off the coat, because no, the browncoats were not just the losing side, they were the wrong side.

Had Whedon gotten to make that Ballad Of Malcolm Reynolds, I doubt that many people would love it the way they love the cozier Ballad Of Malcolm Reynolds we got. There are a bunch of reasons why I think it would not have worked, but I wish I could reach into a parallel timeline to watch it because it would have been a hell of a thing.

Regional cuisine in these United States

I have San Franciscan pride in the unique magic of the Mission burrito. But I have the good grace not to claim it is the Only Good Burrito. Tex-Mex does not appeal to my California palate but it is legit; if you think it is the best Mexican food in Los Estados Unidos, I respectfully disagree.

Texas style wet brisket is my favorite American barbecue, but Americans have the good grace to know that we are engaging in joking chauvinism when we claim that Our BBQ Is The Best. This is how we keep the Union together.

To that point, I respect New Yorkers’ smug enthusiasm for their disgusting pizza because they have that little bit of grace to claim that it is the best pizza, not the only good pizza. We are humoring you when all we do is roll our eyes over it. Take the win on having a terrific local style of “Chinese” and the best bagels and the only real pastrami.

Some time ago a colleague of mine rolled over to my desk at work and said, “Hey JK, you know about This Kind Of Thing so I hope you can help me.”

“Already I am flattered. What are you wondering?”

“I just got back from NYC and while I was there I had this pastrami sandwich …”

“Oh yeah. That’s the stuff, Brother.”

“I couldn’t believe it. This pastrami sandwich was a religious experience.”

“No lie. Nothing better in this world.”

“So where do I get that here in San Francisco?”

“Oh my Brother, I am so very sorry. Your average pastrami sandwich in San Francisco is not even going to qualify as a real pastrami sandwich. I can point you to several places where you can get a real one, and a few where you can get a good one. But that sandwich? The one you had in New York? That sandwich is not available in exchange for love or money anywhere closer than Los Angeles, and even there you have to be smart enough to go to Canter’s Deli to get it. There is nothing to be done.”

I also love the regional stuff that does not properly exist at all elsewhere. The weird, delicious toasted ravioli of St. Louis. The gross-yet-magnificent Italian beef sandwich of Chicago, which is Just Not The Same if you get it somewhere else. (Also gotta love the deep dish pizza, though I insist that the best version in the world is weirdly only found in Berkeley.)

But, uh, Cincinnati? If you are going to brag about that … stuff … fine. Call it “chili” if you want, whatever. But you have to warn people that it is a completely different dish, fergawdsake.

Ready Player One

Damien Walter, whose commentaries on science fiction I admire, proposes ten SF novels which belong on any list of The Hundred Best Novels Of The 21^st Century (So Far). It is an interesting list, but I was surprised to see Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One among them. Walter observes:

Take a look at the world. It looks far more like RP1 than any other SF novel. The fact the author has limited self awareness and thinks the nightmare he depicts is keeeewl is another issue.

A striking point. The world of Ready Player One is a near-future of environmental and economic catastrophe in which people escape the misery of their lives through elaborate virtual reality games. Golden Age SFF writers would have given us heroes overthrowing this dystopia. Cyberpunks would have inverted that with antiheroes desperately navigating the horrors. Many SFF writers — and “literary” writers exercising the conceit — could have offered it as satire. These kinds of moves animate comparably prophetic worldbuilding in 20^th century SFF from writers like John Stand On Zanzibar Brunner, Octavia Parable Of The Sower Butler, Bruce Distraction Sterling, or Neal Snow Crash Stephenson.

RP1 breaks from those traditions in treating its world as uninteresting, little more than an enabling conceit for the virtual environment where Cline really wants to focus. This disinterest in his own sensitive prophetic antennae is weird.

Cline wants to give us, instead, the least interesting way SFF dialogues with itself.

All genre works interact with the meta-text of other works; I consider this the defining quality of “genre”. When a western introduces a sheriff, a horror story introduces a vampire, or an SF story introduces a time machine, it takes advantage of reader expectations about how these work from other stories. This can provide storytelling convenience, saving a bit of exposition … or it can support much more powerful effects.

Walter explores a deep version of this in his long video-essay on Iain M. Banks’ Culture stories, which are bursting with general space opera tropes and allusions to deep cut specific works from the SFF “canon”. If one knows those sources, the Culture has fun playing with old favorite toys, but that is candy coating on its sharp critiques of ideas behind earlier works, its use of the depth behind those elements to add complexity to the stories’ themes, and more.

RP1 has a simpler, frothier project. It reflects a style exemplified by John Myers Myers’ 1949 novel Silverlock, a picaresque in which the protagonist stumbles into encounters with various characters from history, myth, and literature. The story does serve a theme — the titular protagonist grows into a better person through a very direct encounter with Literature, as when piggish Shandon Silverlock encounters Circe from The Odyssey — but the main thing is having fun going oh, I get it!

I do not see Cline attempting even Silverlock’s modest thematic payload. The Hey I Recognize That thrill is the whole thing. Its structure as a puzzle-box mystery-thriller — in which the reader “plays along” to see if they can decode the clues presented in the story before the characters do — is a cunning move to amp up the effect. Unlike an Agatha Christie mystery, the clues are not all part of the text; one must know all the stuff it references to connect the dots. To keep from losing the reader, RP1 goes wide rather than deep, as much pop as geeky, referencing movies, teevee, and games which it expects Generation X geeks to all know.

Credit where credit is due: Cline’s love for the material shines through, and the puzzles are pretty good. As I am a GenX geek, the first few chapters of RP1 tickled me. I put down RP1 at that point, disappointed that it offered nothing else, but I cannot not fault people who wanted more of that than I did.

The loose film adaptation delivers fun popcorn entertainment by borrowing this playbook. It exercises Spielbert’s gift for kinetic and fantastical filmmaking, uses more familiar references, simplifies the puzzles down to just enough to drive events, and is a bit ennobled by a subtle performance by Mark Rylance cast as the MacGuffin.

That’s all fine as far as it goes, but I find it weird and troubling that Cline’s box of popcorn produced such a sensation. I wish I could take innocent, adolescent joy in RP1’s story of a fan whose fascination with things I like enables him to fix the media environment he inhabits and win glory, fortune, and (of course) a hawt girlfriend along the way. But I cannot. I think we must see RP1 reflecting a broad pop-geekkultur movement which avoids grappling with the kinds of juicy, challenging ideas available in SFF, a movement which so prefers superficial entertainment & affirmation that it expresses hostility to anything else. Smarter people than me have extensively criticized the cultural politics lurking in the book, and its attitude has realworld consequences: the Gamergate movemement of geeks zealously “protecting” geekkultur hurt real people in real life.

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A follow-up from Damien Walter:

Imagine a work of fiction written by a citizen of Oceania

who thinks Big Brother is keeeewel

and is a “fun read” in the way Nineteen Eighty Four never could be.

So, some folks questioned my selection of Ready Player One as a “great” book of the 21^st century.

Some thoughts.

I really dislike RP1. I viscerally despise the entire construct of “geek culture” it panders to. To borrow a one liner from Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western culture, “I think it would be a very good idea”

But. To think critically about a matter like the greatest SF of the 21^st century means thinking beyond my own preferences.

I strongly suspect that Ernest Cline had no more serious intention writing RP1 than to 1) indulge all the nerdish things he likes and 2) make himself the UberNerd.

And he succeeded on both counts.

So the “greatness” of RP1 wasn’t intended by its author. But nonetheless, deliberately or not, Ernest Cline wrote the perfect primer on the postmodern dystopia that anyone who grew up in the 1980s or later was born into.

The horror of postmodernity expressed by Jean Baudrillard was that even our inner lives were no longer our own. Immersed in the mass media simulacra, our most precious memories are mere imprints of mass culture commodities.

Cline's obsessive presentation of 1980s “geek culture” icons — that he presents with zero irony — is nonetheless a very effective representation of the postmodern horror. There really are billions of us today imprinted, not with unique memories of reality, but with mass manufactured dreams of time travelling Deloreans.

Of course PKD and Gibson did this all much better. But Neuromancer is a book that will always be read by the punks and hackers who already get it.

Ready Player One is a book about the matrix

written by a man who, even if he escaped the matrix, would demand to be put back in

for the poor souls still trapped in the matrix.

I think that qualifies it for greatness. Of a kind.

Star Trek as liberal propaganda

The root beer scene from the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode of “Way Of The Warrior” is my single favorite work of liberal-as-in-Isaiah-Berlin-and-liberal-democracy propaganda.

If you don’t know Trek, a little grounding:

• The guy with the ears is Quark; his society are quasi-libertarian space capitalists
• The guy with the neck is Garak; his society are space fascists
• The Federation are our space heroes, the liberal society that Kirk, Spock, and Picard come from, space rivals to the other two space societies
• Over the next season of the show, the Federation will in fact decisively win the space war they are talking about

I have watched this dozens of times and find it moving every time. (Evidently actors Andrew Robinson & Armin Shimerman deserve credit for it!)

It has become common to mock conservatives grumbling about Star Trek “going woke”, since original Trek was very deliberately and transparently liberal-as-in-not-conservative propaganda in countless ways. But Trek is also structurally about liberalism in the deeper sense. A Star Trek story goes like this:

1. Our protagonists encounter Something Strange.
2. The Something Strange seems hostile.
3. Our protagnoists assume that they do not understand why the Something Strange is presenting the threat.
4. Our protagonists work together as a team, combining their different knowledge, talents, and perspectives to figure out what is up with the Something Strange.
5. Though a blend of heart and reason, they figure it out. Yep, this was a big misunderstanding.
6. Armed with this knowledge, the protagonists do something difficult — even risky — to help the Something Strange.
7. Aiding the Something Strange makes it no longer a threat.
8. Now our protagonists have a new friend.

Star Trek is the dream of liberalism always working, just as Superman is the dream of refusing to accept the terms of the Trolly Problem and saving everyone.

Is this formulaic? Heck yes. This post started as a Twitter thread, where I noted a conservative wag mocking the then-forthcoming Marvels movie:

Wait, wait … hang on … just a wild guess here, but I bet Carol Danvers discovers that only by Working As A Team and by Utilizing Diverse Strengths can she defeat the Big Baddie. Also, quips! And multiverse!

Calling the Marvel Cinematic Universe formulaic is an insult to formulas.

That guy does not hate that Marvel movies are formulaic. He hates that they are a formula for liberalism.

Not that the formula always works, either in Marvel or Trek. I need to follow up this post with a look at the ways pop liberal propaganda fails at its own project, often revealing cracks in the foundations. I am particularly grumpy at how recent Trek so often misfires.

But I remain committed to libdem. When Trek delivers formulaic boosterism for liberalism, that is the good comfort food. I count root beer as the sacred libation of Aphrodítē Pandēmos — god of love for all in the shared space of the ἀγορά, and thus for me god of liberal democracy — and my thirst for it is bottomless.

Garak
Might I trouble you for a glass of kanar?

Quark
Help yourself. It’s on the house.

Garak
How uncharacteristically generous of you.

Quark
I’m in an uncharacteristic mood. Besides, I’ve got eighty cases of this stuff sitting in my stockroom. And the way things are going, I’ll never unload another bottle unless it’s to you.

Garak
How thoughtless of me not to consider the effect the destruction of my homeworld would have on your business. These must be trying times for you. Be brave.

Quark
I should’ve listened to my cousin Gaila. He said to me, “Quark, I’ve got one word for you: weapons. No one ever went broke selling weapons.” But did I take his advice? No. And why not? Because I’m a people person. I like interacting with my customers. Like you and I are doing right now. Talking to each other, getting to know one another.

Garak
I can see the attraction. For you.

Quark
But when you’re dealing in weapons, buyers aren’t interested in casual conversation. They just want their merchandise, no questions asked. It’s so impersonal.

Garak
Your charms would be wasted.

Quark
Exactly. So now Gaila owns his own moon, and I’m staring into the abyss. And the worst part is, my only hope for salvation is the Federation.

Garak
I know precisely how you feel.

Quark
I want you to try something for me. Take a sip of this.

Garak
What is it?

Quark
A human drink. It's called “root beer”.

Garak
I don’t know.

Quark
Come on. Aren’t you just a little bit curious?

Garak drinks, looks disgusted

Quark
What do you think?

Garak
It’s vile.

Quark
I know. It’s so bubbly and cloying and happy.

Garak
Just like the Federation.

Quark
But you know what’s really frightening? If you drink enough of it … you begin to like it.

Garak
It’s insidious.

Quark
Just like the Federation.

Garak
Do you think they’ll be able to save us?

Quark
I hope so.

On the other hand, pessimism

I have had a lot of conversations about the limits of Trek as a format for doing liberal parables, and have not succeeded in assembling the case well. I have a Bluesky thread and a Twitter thread nibbling at the project. Capturing some of that here:

Early episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds had me hopeful about it updating the kind of weekly liberal parables characteristic of the The Original Series and The Next Generation with smarter contemporary sensibilities, but frustratingly almost every episode ends up a Broken Aesop which delivers the opposite of the lesson intended. Like, I get why people love the SNW episode “Ad Astra per Aspera”, but all I could see is Federation regulations creating apartheid planets. And don’t get me started on SNW directly contradicting the point of the original parable of the Gorn.

Discovery is an even greater betrayal: later seasons send us to a future in which progress does not progress, knowledge does not increase, and humanity does not mature into a better form. The Federation’s liberalism proves neither powerful nor universal; it depends on particular technologies & circumstances. They do not bring peace and justice to the Emerald Chain; negotiation with Osyraa fails, and they have to defeat her by Michael being good at shooting guns and punching.

Even if they fixed the story problems, the worm at the heart of Trek is how the whole framework is an attempt to reframe the colonialist stories of “adventure” to purge them of the moral horror of colonialism. Rather than deliver anti-colonialist adventure stories, result tends to whitewash the horrors of colonialism, or have the horrors bubble up in a more oblique form. The Prime Directive is the key exemplar of what Trek attempts, and the reasons why I worry that it will always founder: it replaces the paternalistic We Know Better bullying integral to colonialism with … a different paternalism in which the Federation does not trust “less advanced” societies with knowledge. First we get Klingons as swarthy villains, then try to fix that by making them into a bumpy-forehead Proud Warrior Race. A character confronts Federation war crimes … and just gets exploded for their trouble. Et cetera.

Smart people with smart cultural politics are trying to do a lot of re-framings of our popcultural inheritance and this turns out to be really hard. I love the people attempting egalitarian, liberatory, queer re-framings away from the colonialist implications of Dungeons & Dragons, and attempting anti-feudal genre fantasy more generally … I love experiments in not-Trek like Firefly and Farscape and the Battlestar Galactica reboot … I love Andor leveraging Star Wars as a setting to tell a genuinely thoughtful story about authoritarianim & revolution … but we see how hard it is for any of these to overcome the soil from which they spring. Lucas built Star Wars to re-tell old war stories without the racism, brutality, and other evils, but gave us droid slavery and fun cosplay fascism and aliens which embody racist cartoons.

I think a lot about Steven Universe and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, both of them Stories About War, For Kids told with astonishing craft and moral clarity. They say that war is bad but that there are causes worth fighting for, portraying wars of defense against colonial exploitation, with characters from the colonizing powers rising to the defense of the colonized. They remind us that our enemies are not monsters, that good-hearted people can support evil causes … and can be turned. They are honest about how war traumatizes everyone it touches. She-Ra even portrays how a martial, authoritarian political order is entangled with traumatizing domestic relationships! Both have their flaws, which smarter people than me have explored, but I think part of why they both work is that they are very weird.

So maybe Trek is just not weird enough?

Toward an anti-Trek

A wise friend disgusted by this, given the horrors of Actual Real Liberal Societies, snarks:

I wish I could watch a scene of two far right imperial representatives, one being a literal genocide doer and secret police official, waxing lyrical about how human liberal governance is more subversive and suffocating than either of them could dream of, and feel the optimism you do.

The cultural imperialism reading sure is there, yes.

So apropos of the re-framing I talk about above, I see a need for an anti-Trek: a pop entertainment directly in dialogue with Trek, criticizing how Actual Liberal Hegemons are very unlike the romantic fantasy Trek offers, analagous to calling shenanigans on monarchist genre fantasy as Peter Jackson did for two delicious minutes or GRRM tries to do at length in A Song Of Ice And Fire.

I don’t have it in me to envision how such a thing would work. Grubby & adult like The Wire and Andor? Or embracing the hokiness of Trek? Probably a white guy cannot do it; Whedon sure botched the Alliance in Firefly as the Federation seen through the eyes of the discontented.

I would want it to say “do not do this, do Better Liberalism”. But the person actually capable of a great anti-Trek might instead offer something better than liberalism. I’m skeptical, but if I drank enough of that, I hope that I would start to like it.

Another popculture allegory

Scott Alexander is dangerously untrustworthy but I cannot help loving his defense of the kind of liberalism I am talking about here, In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization. It is characteristically long-winded, and worth it. But in this context, I want to just offer the last bit, where he puts a button on his point with another reference to Liberalism Propaganda Fiction.

For context:

Most of Alexander’s post focuses on criticizing a leftist whom he refers to as “Andrew”, for rejecting certain liberal values. Mencius Moldbug is the nom de guerre of Curtis Yarvin, a neoreactionary leader who is much better-known now than he was then.

Liberalism does not conquer by fire and sword. Liberalism conquers by communities of people who agree to play by the rules, slowly growing until eventually an equilibrium is disturbed. Its battle cry is not “Death to the unbelievers!” but “If you’re nice, you can join our cuddle pile!”

But some people, through lack of imagination, fail to find this battle cry sufficiently fear-inspiring.

I hate to invoke fictional evidence, especially since perhaps Andrew’s strongest point is that the real world doesn’t work like fiction. But these people need to read Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Avatar.

Elua is the god of kindness and flowers and free love. All the other gods are gods of blood and fire, and Elua is just like “Love as thou wilt” and “All knowlege is worth having”. He is the patron deity of exactly the kind of sickeningly sweet namby-pamby charitable liberalism that Andrew is complaining about.

And there is a certain commonality to a lot of the Kushiel books, where some tyrant or sorcerer thinks that a god of flowers and free love will be a pushover, and starts harassing his followers. And the only Eluite who shows up to stop him is Phèdre nó Delaunay, and the tyrant thinks “Ha! A woman, who doesn’t even know how to fight, doesn’t have any magic! What a wuss!”

But here is an important rule about dealing with fantasy book characters.

If you ever piss off Sauron, you should probably find the Ring of Power and take it to Mount Doom.

If you ever get piss off Voldemort, you should probably start looking for Horcruxes.

If you ever piss off Phèdre nó Delaunay, run and never stop running.

Elua is the god of flowers and free love and he is terrifying. If you oppose him, there will not be enough left of you to bury, and it will not matter because there will not be enough left of your city to bury you in.

And Jacqueline Carey and Mencius Moldbug are both wiser than Andrew Cord.

Carey portrays liberalism as Elua, a terrifying unspeakable Elder God who is fundamentally good.

Moldbug portrays liberalism as Cthulhu, a terrifying unspeakable Elder God who is fundamentally evil.

But Andrew? He doesn’t even seem to realize liberalism is a terrifying unspeakable Elder God at all. It’s like, what?

Andrew is the poor shmuck who is sitting there saying “Ha ha, a god who doesn’t even control any hell-monsters or command his worshippers to become killing machines. What a weakling! This is going to be so easy!”

And you want to scream: “THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY THIS CAN POSSIBLY END AND IT INVOLVES YOU BEING EATEN BY YOUR OWN LEGIONS OF DEMONAICALLY CONTROLLED ANTS”

(uh, spoilers)

Saying grace

A helpful internet friend shared a lovely little story worth a minute of your time.

I was and am Jewish, and at thirteen, I had never in my life done the whole “saying Grace” thing before, though I was at least aware that the practice existed

I have a different funny story about this culture gap.

In my freshman year in college I dropped in to a few Christian dorm lounge Bible studies, which lead to my sweetheart finding Jesus, which led to several instructive months of hanging around Evangelicals. Among other things, it made me feel very Jewish — the God I did not believe in turned out to be a very different figure than the one they did believe in.

Their style of saying grace was pretty improvisational: “Would anyone like to say grace?” Then someone would volunteer, with lots of “lift up my sister Colinda who has a midterm tomorrow” et cetera. I never offered. But one day we wer sitting down to pizza or something and nobody was feeling like doing it, so someone turned to me and asked if I would like to. I imagine that they expected one of the friendly demurrals I had gotten good at. But instead I felt a bit inspired.

“Can I do it in Hebrew?”

I had not yet absorbed how the unnerving philo-semitism of Evangelicals works, so I was not prepared for how enthusiastic they were about this idea.

I could not resist a little theatrical wave of my hands over our repast as I exhausted a good 20% of my entire Hebrew vocabulary saying “בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה׳ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם הַמּוֹצִיא לֶחֶם מִן הָאָרֶץ” adding a hearty “אָמֵן” and pronouncing it “ah-mayn” instead of their “ah-men”. I wryly added, “For those of you who do not speak Hebrew, that means, ‘Blessed art thou, O Lord, our god, king of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth’.”

They were very impressed. I had (mis)understood their enthusiasm for me proposing it — exposure to the cool practices of other cultures and all that — but the aftermath was too much. What the heck?

Then it hit me maybe a week later. They must have assumed that I just made that up on the spot, that I could have gone on like that for hours if I felt like it!

Tarantino, fascism, cinema, and violence

Rescued from Twitter:

Emperor Norton <@ashleynaftule> argues:

Something I really appreciate about Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained is that they are a very rare species of Hollywood cinema that understands that half-measures in the face of fascism don’t work and doesn't try to equivocate about the morality of its political violence

tl;dr Nazis and slave-owners getting absolutely Itchy & Scratchy wrecked is good

Like, Quentin isn’t a Marxist or anything but it’s hilarious when people call him a reactionary. Absolutely no conservative on planet Earth would take this much joy from depicting jackboots and slavemasters getting turned into torrential streams of uncanned Chef Boyardee

I find this fascinating because I simultaneously understand this reading and think it is profoundly wrong.

Both Basterds and Django call shenanigans on cathartic movie violence. They say: “Hey, in the world we portray in movies, slavery and WWII would have been over quickly with victories over evil. So movie logic is bullshit.”

As I have described before at length, I do not see how one can watch the Bear Jew sequence in Basterds and read the movie as just a cathartic good time killin’ Nazis. It drags us back and forth over the line of I Want To See It Happen vs Oh Gods No I Don’t. Tarantino marshals every bit of cinematic vocabulary he can — framing, music, editing, et cetera — to give the Nazi a Stoic Heroic Sacrifice at the hands of cruel maniacs. Not just a German soldier, a guy who expresses his antisemitism directly.

It is not Tarantino saying that Nazis are the real heroes here; one cannot read the movie that way. It is Tarantino criticizing movies. Criticizing the kind of violent movies he himself has made.

Understand, I love a cathartic good time watching movie heroes killin’ Nazis. My favorite scene in all of cinema is one of those.

I love Tarkovsky and Kurosawa and Bergman and all that film nerd shit but honestly this is my favorite scene in any film I have ever seen. I have watched it a hundred times and I will watch it a hundred more. There should have been ten movies of this.

I am not above enjoying Inglorious Basterds that way as well. It invites us to! But I think it delivers that in service of trying to get us to examine why and how we like it.

1. The movie gives us a theater full of Nazis gleefully enjoying a movie depicting pointless nihilistic violence. Tarantino is asking, “What the fuck is wrong with me and my audience? Is this what we are?”
   
2. Not for nothing, the logic of cinema reverses at the end of Inglorious Basterds. The Action Heroes’ plan fails. The Nazis are defeated by ordinary people, a Black man and Jewish woman, by them burning their back catalgoue of films.
3. The overpoweredginger <@AdmiralOPG> adds:

   also I think it’s worth noting that the Allies’ plan fails not just because of the violence, but also because of the language

   their inability to communicate like the Germans & Italians directly hampers their effectiveness, but the people from within that environment don’t

   Tarantino says here that expertise in violence is worthless where it really counts; cultural sophistication is far more powerful. Notice how from the very beginning, his films have been Comedies Of Manners Decorated With Violence.

Turning to Django Unchained, of course there is a lot going on in it. Surely one can see in there its own ambivalence about the fantasy of cinema projected onto real historical horrors? Yeah, it feels great to unleash Black Cowboy Murder on slavers, and movie logic lets Django & Broomhilda get away. But in the movie, slavery is not defeated, is it?

Literally as I was walking out of the theater, it was clear to me that it was about not history but movies about slavery, making it impossible to watch Gone With The Wind uncritically. I said at the time:

Django Unchained is, first among many interesting things, Tarantino vs. Selznick. Tarantino wins.

I think that needed doing.

Now Tarantino does have a third, explicitly political film about how we respond to the fascist sensibility.

And boy howdy is The Hateful Eight a lot more complicated than either simply advocating responding with violence, or not. Maybe someday I will find time to write about that, or find someone who has already said it better than I could.

The fae courts of America

Rescuing another thread from Twitter.

It starts with David Thomas Moore <@dtmooreeditor> saying:

Headcanon:

Hotel California and The House of the Rising Sun are rival fae courts, and She and The Gamblin’ Man are their monarchs, locked in an endless war for the souls of America.

New blue jeans sewn by your mother are a powerful protection charm, but you must never take them off, and the creatures of the Two Houses will give you powerful incentives to do so.

A mirror on the ceiling will trap an unwary fae. Pink champagne is a lure to them, and can seal a sworn oath of loyalty.

The Gamblin’ Man can be outwitted, outfought or reasoned with, but only when sober. He carries a suitcase and a trunk everywhere he goes. Tempted though you may be, never open them without his invitation.

She keeps many treasures — Tiffany jewels, a Mercedes Benz — but will tolerate no wine being poured in Her hall, for reasons She does not share.

There is a Beast in the Master’s Chamber. It can never die.

(They say She took wine with Buzz Aldrin, Her last mortal consort. She truly loved him, they say, and so afeared for his soul was he that he fled the Earth to be free, and now She cannot bear to taste or even see it.)

I offered additional lore, mostly responding to comments on this and elsewhere.

DrBlonde <@DrBlonde1> adds:

In the version I know, the singer is the Gamblin’ Man’s wife, tempted away from her home. But as she ages & her husband does not, he becomes more and more obsessed with a projection of She which roams outside the Hotel’s walls. She has no name but the fishermen call her Jolene …

The song “Jolene” is a protective charm against She, the Queen of Hotel California. There are additional, secret verses which are more powerful, but one risks one’s sanity learning too many of them.

Gail Simone wonders:

Seriously though what if Fonzie was an elder god and Potsy was his herald of death and splishy splashy carnage

Given the powers he exhibits, that the Fonz is an avatar of a dread and incomprehensible cosmic entity is obvious. The question is whether the Fonz and Jolene are lovers, adversaries, or family.

Steve Cooper <@stevecooperorg> asks:

Is the beast a horse with no name?

Oh, the immortal Beast in the Master’s chambers has a name. One should pray never to hear it. Long ago there were those who tried to lure it through the desert in hopes that it would forget, but the Beast was far too cunning, so now it is their names which are lost to us.

Oiling my traps <@KaraSunburst> says:

On further reflection, I think “Spill The Wine” is like the Silmarillion to this. The wine, the girl? It’s all there.

Every kind of girl. Every kind of girl. If you understand the implications, then you see another clue about why wine has not been served at the Hotel California for more than half a century.

Rob Northrup. This Gun in My Hand podcast🕵 <@evilbobdayjob> reflects:

The Midnight Special or the train they call The City of New Orleans?

As a bonus, South Detroit is itself a fae land that humans rarely find. (Actual Detroiters call area to the South “Downriver”. No one but Journey calls any area “South Detroit”.)

Recall also that Midnight Train tickets are available to anywhere. But, once again, it is wise to carefully consider the risk if one rolls the dice just one more time.

porterwoman <@porterwoman> proposes:

So the Son of the Preacher Man was actually a changling, roaming the land, teaching and reaching out to mortals to bring to his mistress or master? Checks out 👍🏽

The sacred verses teach us that the Son travels with the Preacher Man, but uses his persuasive reassurances counter to his father’s will. One cannot trust the ease the Son offers to last.

Greys <@Greyist> says:

The Wayward Son is a hero that rises from men in times of great strife to bring peace, however brief, between the houses. They are not always welcome to do so, lead astray by mortal desires

There are in fact two Wayward Sons, brothers who know every back road and never stop anywhere for long. One is handsome and brash, the other beautiful and learnèd. No man, beast, fae, demon, or god can stand against them when they stand together.

Weaver95 🍔🍟 <@WeaverXP> asks:

But what about the joker, who said to the thief that there was too much confusion and could get no relief?

The Joker will tell you not to worry. He may offer to teach you a secret word which reveals the truth of love. He may hint that his name is Maurice.

Do not believe him. The Thief has his number. He speaks falsely.

CD <@Davisindisguise> asks:

How does Black Betty fit into all this

She is armed with a whip, a bottle of whiskey, and a flintlock musket. If she permits you to kiss her or one of these, choose wisely.

She stands with the House Of The Rising Sun, rock-steady in her fealty.

Fear her wild daughter, Brown Bess, who stands with no one.

Anosognosiogenesis <@pookleblinky> made the related observation:

Prince and David Bowie were 2 of the 3 mystical pillars holding the universe together. Dolly Parton is the third, and last. She is the only thing keeping reality itself from decomposing. She must be protected at all costs, the fate of the entire universe depends on it.

Tom Waits is not one of the pillars, but he has the important cosmic task of tricking people who attempt to find them.

And Dr Damien P Williams Warned You About Exactly This <@Wolven> adds a lovely bit of related lore:

Happy 70^th to the undisputed king of hobos, tramps, rail-riders, yarn spinners, leg pullers,& backwoods devil deal-makers — we found his party clown in a diner built from the haunted rubble of the last Woolworths in Sheboygan — everybody give it up for Mr Thomas Bartholtleby Waits!

Now some people say it’s <@tomwaits>’ 73^rd birthday, but see, he sold those extra three years back in ’97 for a pack of Pall Malls and a ’67 Chevy. Now the pall malls were stale and the chevy had a bad carburetor, but Jimmy the Pin had a line on fix and all old Tom had to do was run the Preakness and lose on the back of a broke down Palomino mule.

Now Tom stole the starter pistol so they had that downtown train whistle blowing like Gabriel kickin' down the absolute gates of hell to start the race when the jockey old Tom robbed for his saddle pulled his switchblade from a riding boot and a riding crop from exactly where you think he did and cut out sideways across the circuit riding Tom right down.

The polka band in the stands started playing a chase and Jimmy the Pin put that old carburetor right down in that ’67 Chevy and came barrelling around the bend just in time for Old Tom to jump right off the back of that palomino mule and through the window, and they took off out through the stables, and all to way down to the best diner in the Baltimore docks.

Never did see those three years again.

Responding to a lost tweet from Saladin Ahmed, I said that an important addition to the pop cosmology would be the trinity of Light Dolly, Dark Elvira, and the Red Sister.

setmajer he/him <@setmajer> offers deep lore on this:

The Red Sister is sibling to the Red Queen who in turn is the ancient antagonist of the all-knowing oracle Alice.

The Queen earned Alice’s eternal enmity when she sent her Knights in White Satin, famed for communicating entirely in reverse speech, to take Alice’s head.

Alice escaped thanks to instructions from her network of spies, known as the Chessmen.

Frustrated, the Queen lost the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. She shot and killed a man named Andrew, who was her Sheriff, though she spared his Deputy.

However, some in the south whisper that it was in fact the Red Sister, reputedly an unerring huntress, who murdered Andy.

Sadly, it was an innocent, who returned from a ramble to discover his wife had an affair with Andy, who was sent to the dungeons of Folsom for the crime.

It is said that the Queen, her already-fragile sanity shattered by guilt, went over the hills to the Misty Mountains where to this day her shade can be heard wailing ‘Let me go!’

To which the sylphs reply, ‘Bismillah! We will not let you go!’

While most say her disciples simply grew tired and emotional due to her distant and fickle demeanour, in the southern province of Georgia some whisper the true cause was her infidelity with Seth and Andrew, and the conviction of her innocent husband for Andrew’s murder.

In this we see the cruelty of the fae, as in fact one of the sylphs, posing as a girl so fair, had captured the innocent Rambling Man’s soul as it departed his body and carried it over the hills and far away to become the Spirit in the Sky.

The Rambling Man, of course, was the son of The Gambler who also hailed from Georgia. But his is a story for another time.

Nor will I talk about the Midnight Rambler, who none living have seen, save to say that as to his purported seelie origins he’s not one of those.

I will add to that lore:

You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaraunt. Except for Alice. She delivers what you want, not what you asked for, so a Thanksgiving dinner which cannot be beat may leave you with a criminal record … or may prevent you from being conscripted for military service … or both. As always with the fae, deal carefully, for the wyrd of price is impossible to predict.

Physical education

Thinking about how to rescue things I posted to Twitter given its ongoing implosion, I should capture that one of my most popular tweets was this:

I have bottomless rage at having been forced to spend about a thousand hours of my life in “physical education” classes that did not teach me how to stretch, train, or even lift a heavy box properly but did teach me to hate exercise

It got thousands of ♥︎s and re-tweets, and numerous heartbreaking replies. It was inspired by this thread:

PE teachers can wreck your health. Dr Anne Elliott found that bad experiences in school PE actively deterred people from taking exercise in later life & led to a state of alienation from their own bodies:

A multi-method investigation into physical activity in middle-age through a lifecourse perspective

There was a crew of savvy girls who knew the exact spot where you could break off the cross country course, nip over into the graveyard for a fag, then rejoin the course further along on the other side. One of them — Alison F, God love her — even showed me the proper technique for hiding matches under the bra strap in such a way that they did not rattle & give the game away. Not something I ever had occasion to use but I appreciated the confidence.

Anyway, though catharsis is satisfying, I think the important point of Dr Elliott’s research is that people who suffered corporeal disassociation as a result of school PE can still be helped to enjoy exercise in later life through bespoke training.

Lots of you in the same situation it seems. This is the least isolated I’ve felt all lockdown

[⋯]

Also, this excellent documentary is still up. Don't know if people outside the UK can listen to it but I'm sure there are ways and means

If you want to jump straight to the relevant research by @DrAnneElliott then head to 9 minutes 24 seconds in. (The whole documentary is well worth your time, though)

BBC — PE — A History Of Violence

This comment from LEX <@LexTheQueer> stands out as a perfect encapsulation of the cultural politics.

PE taught me that my boundaries, wants, needs, and experiences around physical activity didn’t matter. My “no” didn’t matter, so I stopped bringing my equipment so I had to sit out.

Many more underlined how cruelty from classmates in PE classes was not just a byproduct of the class as a forum, but implicitly (or even explicitly) encouraged by the adults responsible to the kids in their care, like chandra🐀 <@chandradawn1>:

I developed large breasts in the 9^th grade. It was uncomfortable to run, do pushups, be in front of other kids. Half stared, half called me a whore based on breast size alone. Teachers were willing fail me for not participating, but none were willing to tell my classmates to stfu

People talked about being taught bad practices by cruel methods, like in this from george smiley’s man titties <@holodeckfreud>:

when i was a kid (like ages 5 to 8) i took ballet and gymnastics classes and was told that the stretching was supposed to hurt. i was often in tears by the end of stretching. years later, i complained to my mom that all the stretching we were doing together was making me achey

she explained to me that it was actually dangerous and bad for you to stretch until you were in extreme pain. who knew

for a little explanation: i am unusually inflexible and always have been, same with my mom. i’m like the opposite of double jointed. what’s a light pleasant stretch for most people is excruciating for me. this is why i wasn’t believed by ballet and gymnastics teacher i think

And since we are here, I also want to capture this related Twitter thread from I 💙 Yami Bakuri <@SuikaShoujo>:

Ooooh boy do I have some Thoughts™ on PE classes

I should start off by pointing out that I grew up in Illinois, where you are required by law to be in some sort of PE class every single semester, kindergarten through your final year of high school. I had other, more useful classes I never got to take because I had to be in gym.

In elementary-middle school (my school was small and k-8, so there were only 2 PE teachers, and they worked as a pair) I didn't *love* it, but thanks to the size of my class, the teachers knew me, and were shockingly accommodating in certain cases.

The big reward they used to make us behave was the possibility of a “Game Day,” which in theory meant the class would pick 3 games, then vote on which one to play, but in practice it was just picking between 3 slightly different versions of dodgeball with foam balls.

This may shock people, but I was, uh, not a fan of dodgeball. I was either targeted so I could be laughed at (during some of the worse periods of bullying), or ignored entirely, so I usually just stood in the back and waited for the crowd to thin out.

It got to the point where I would “forget” my PE uniform at home and take the loss in points, because you weren’t allowed to participate in the class if you weren’t dressed for it. Spent a lot of time brainstorming fic ideas like that in 8^th grade, lol.

The main teacher was fairly understanding about my complete lack of athletic ability, and as long as I put in visible effort the majority of the time, there were a few times where I straight up got out of participating despite being dressed. I cried my way out of the mile once.

The absolute worst part was the Presidential Fitness Test, though. They didn't even really prepare us for it between the endless dodgeball games, we were just expected to be able to do an obscene amount of push-ups and run really fast.

I was (and am still not) athletic. At all. In any sense of the word. It didn't matter how much effort I put into those tests, they were physically impossible for me.

But they weren’t judging based on effort. They were judging on results. And guess what! Those results were factored into our final grade for the class! You can’t hold your entire body weight up with bent arms while hanging from a bar for an extended amount of time? Enjoy your F!

Even that wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t have to do these tests while the entire grade was watching. Because that's what the preteen girl who is consistently teased for her weight needs, is to show off how out of shape she is. Apparently.

And that was just in middle school. High school somehow took every issue I had previously had with PE classes and made them worse.

It also introduced the pacer test, which, while the memes about it are entertaining, deserves a rant thread of its own, because holy shit.

The biggest shift for me between middle school and high school was the fact that I went from a class of 40 to a class of 400. So I was always in PE classes with people I didn't know well, if at all. Which is a problem when you have to pick a partner for everything.

There's something uniquely humiliating about being in a class with an odd number of students, where you are always, without fail, the leftover that either gets pushed into an unwilling group of 3, or paired with the teacher.

“But why didn’t you just coordinate your schedule with your friends so you were in the same class, like everyone else?" Bold of you to assume I had a single friend I was close enough with to make that a possibility.

See also this from Lili Saintcrow <@lilithsaintcrow>:

“Adult-Onset Athleticism” Is a Thing. Here’s Why.

The language of military readiness and the rigor of the curricula the PCYF promoted…are mostly what the council is remembered for, especially by participants traumatized by failing the fitness test…

The article is good, but I think it doesn’t give enough weight to the fact that PE, in American public schools, is a tool for militarization and conformity instead of some mythical “fitness”. And the pouring of money into “competitive sports” is sheer waste tolerated only because it profits certain people/corporations and also serves the same militarization and violently enforced conformity. TL;DR: PE in America’s public school system is meant to be a preparation for militarization and unquestioning obedience when it isn’t a means for private actors to make a profit over the agonized bodies of children.

And one more link: PE was Hell until 35

Black Mirror

If you are squarely in the target audience for Black Mirror, you have already watched it. If you have not yet jumped in, I have a few resources here which may help decide whether it is right for you, including a skip guide if you want to just pick up a few of the best episdodes for your tastes.

The “black mirror” of the title references both the computer screen and, of course, the show’s intention to reflect back to us the way computers and related technologies affect our society today. Most episodes take the form of a sort of design-science-fiction: stories which explore the implications of imaginary technologies. The tone generally relies heavily on morbid humor and tragic ironic twists in the style of Richard Matheson. (Even if you do not recognize Matheson’s name you probably recognize the Matheson Twist from countless imitations and screen adaptations, including more than a dozen episodes of the original Twilight Zone series.)Black Mirror also invites comparison to The Twilight Zone in having an anthology format, each episode an independent story.

I recommend these episodes most highly, starting with an important word of advice:

• S01E01 “The National Anthem” — One of the gutsiest satires ever put on film. But even if you plan to watch the whole series, do not watch this first episode first. If you take to the show, you can go back for this episode later. But the tone of it is so deadpan — and the moves it makes so mortifying — that it can easily throw one out of the show entirely.
• S03E04 “San Junipero” — A break from the show’s usual tone, poignant and ultimately optimistic ... plus some of the best evocation of clothing from the 1980s ever put on film. I recommend it as your One Episode if you feel sure you will not care for the show in general. And pick it up as a parting dessert if you find yourself losing interest.
• S03E01 “Nosedive” — Both one of the best meditations on the show’s themes and one of its best-executed stories. The ending is cathartic. If you only watch one episode to get what the show is about, I recommend this one or ...
• S01E02 “Fifteen Million Merits” — My favorite episode. It squeezes in half a dozen turns where it becomes about something different, and intelligently satirizes several particular things plus a big thing which is hard to name.
• S04E01 “USS Callister” — Famous for its witty evocation of Star Trek, though one should expect the middle part of the story to go seriously dark places.
• S04E05 “Metalhead” — Though it has a topical theme, this episode is an almost pure, lean action thriller rather than a satire with something to say.
• S02E03 “The Waldo Moment” — A political satire which felt a bit too broad and fantastical when it was released in 2013 ... and now feels frighteningly prescient.
• S05E02 “Smithereens” — A complex satire which covers a lot of ground. I think it falls a little short of its thematic ambitions, but still impressive because it aims high.
• S04E04 “Hang the DJ” — Though not as strong as “San Junipero”, it also has a twist more like more sentimental O. Henry than cutting Richard Matheson.

Content warnings

Black Mirror presents the tricky bind that many episodes have cause for content warnings ... which constitute significan spoilers. If you have trauma triggers, ask someone who has seen the show about whether yours mean you should skip an episode; if you lack such a friend, I invite you to drop me a line.

I do have a quick word about two key episodes:

• S04E06 “Black Museum” delivers its own mini-anthology of stories. Despite my strong stomach, the segment about the doctor squicked me right out. Know that it will Go There hard.
• S03E02 “Playtest” is a straight-up monster horror story. It delivers effective shocks but disappointingly hollow storytelling, not just in having nothing to say but also in the execution of its horror conceit. Teenage Me probably would have dug it, but adult me thinks even folks who take to the show might want to give it a pass.

The Trial Of The Chicago 7

I thoroughly enjoyed Aaron Sorkin’s film and was dazzled by some of the performances. And I hated the politics of the way it presented the history.

To understand my frustrations, mild spoilers below.

On bare facts the film is okay. It takes a large number of small liberties with historical details, and a handful of understandable big liberties. One of the big revisions is that the treatment of Bobby Seale in the courtroom, which feels like imaginary movie theatrics, is actually dramatically toned down from what really happened. So it goes with historical dramas, in the name of telling the story. I gather that Slate’s list running down the particulars is pretty good, if you want them.

But on the texture, it is much more frustrating. There are some high points — “we see a cop do something you don’t ever wanna see a cop do” is a shattering line in context of the film and the world we have now — but it is fundamentally a misrepresentation of the meaning of the story, who the Seven were, and what they stood for.

The heart of the problem is the treatment of Abbie Hoffman. Sasha Baron Cohen is breathtaking in the role and Aaron Sorkin’s knack for writing smart characters who feel like they talk like real smart people talk communicates how Hoffman, for all his deliberate clowning, was very very smart and very very purposeful. And vigor of that portrayal makes the problem with it all the more galling as a demonstration of the general problem of the movie.

Much of the film concerns friction between Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden. At the start of Act III the movie gives us a Sorkin-tastic moment in which they have The Conversation in which they reveal that they Truly Respect One Another. I admire Sorkin’s mastery of dialogue and story structure and the scene is, as craft, terrific. As is often the case with Sorkin’s writing, while I was watching I fell under his spell and found it moving in the way I was supposed to.

But in that scene Movie Hoffman says a thing about his aims which would have repulsed Real Hoffman. Sorkin does not understand the left, thinks he does, and thinks he can bend left voices to speak for his undercooked mushy liberalism. Abbie Hoffman wanted a transformative leftist revolution. He was working for one. He believed that he and his movement would achieve it. He wanted to save the lives of American soldiers, yes, but he understood that the moral urgency was in saving the lives of Vietnamese people.

If you understand that, you will see what is wrong with The Conversation, the climax, and the whole film.

After you have seen the movie, I recommend checking out some critical commentaries:

• Jeet Heer at The Nation
• Charlotte Rosen at The Nation
• Joshua First at the Jewish Daily Forward

Midnight Mass review

I binged Midnight Mass on Netflix this last weekend. I have a lot of thoughts but first I have a spoiler-free review, and I ask for no spoilers in comments.

Is it good? It has some serious flaws, but at its best it is not merely good but great.

Do you want to see it? That depends …

I think it is best to go into Mass knowing as little as possible about it, so I’m going to avoid talking about the plot or the particular themes and do my best to equip you to decide if you want to see it, saving criticism for another day.

It has seven hour-long chapters and takes a while to spin up, so if you’re going to check it out, you must commit. The first couple of chapters deliver what may land for you as a slow burn … or as just slow. For me, the first couple of chapters had serious weaknesses that almost threw me out of the show. I am very glad they did not. It picked up like whoa.

The series is an ensemble story about a small town, its church, and its people, which uses a turn toward genre horror to deliver a complex meditation on religion, redemption, and Christianity. It has gore and hokey supernatural horror tropes. It delivers thoughtful, engaged ambivalence about religion in general and Christianity in particular. There are talky character monologues.

So that may put you on this train or off it, right there.

To gauge my response to the religious themes, it may help you to know that I am not a Christian and do not come from Christian culture, though I have done some study because I am a religion nerd. I love The Last Temptation of Christ as a passionate, sincere, spiritual reflection on Christianity, and I love Midnight Mass for similar reasons, though it addresses different things, in a different voice, but referencing it is a useful gauge because if you feel cold with indifference or hot with disgust at Last Temptation, then Mass is probably not for you.

If I told you how Mass interweaves its horror tropes with Christian scripture & doctrine in the last two chapters, it would spoil the show and make it sound dumb. It is not. It is very smart and very clever and very thoughtful, better than I could have imagined. I must also mention that the show prominently features a nuanced portrayal of priesthood in action — when do you get to see that? — which for me was enough in itself to make it worth the time.

(And please forgive that punnish use of “passionate” above, but its layered meanings really are le mot juste for both Last Temptation and Mass, though again in very different ways, so I could not resist.)

The show delivers the goods on its Spooky Town With A Secret and its Horror Movie genre requirements in a big way. If you love that stuff, that is reason enough to watch it. You don’t have to love horror to like the show, nor do you need a super strong stomach for it, but if you are a viewer who just cannot process horror then the show is not for you. (And content warning for harm to animals and a pet, if that squicks you.)

A lot of folks think the show features great performances from the actors all around, and I … don’t. But some of the performances are breathtaking. There are starmaking turns from Samantha Sloyan and Hamish Linklater in key roles. Similarly, Mass is one of these ensemble things where every character gets their turn with a juicy monologue. I love that sort of thing yet found several of the particular monologues lacking … but many were good, and a few were breathtaking.

In sum, Midnight Mass is wildly ambitious and while in my opinion it does not achieve all of those ambitions — I have some serious frustrations — it achieves a lot and has admirable ambition. I loved it. If this review has not put you off it, I do strongly recommend taking the plunge. People will be talking about it for years.