He'd broken his word his good name for to clear
A handful of political things. Mostly links accumulated over the last few days, plus some pop culture.
1. Rebecca Solnit, "On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway." From last November, but none the less relevant, especially at this moment the line: "Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?"
2. Caitlin Flanagan, "Worst Revolution Ever." Despite the title, not lightly written, and not dismissive of either the damage or the danger: "They were looking for someone to tell them what to do. Trump told them what to do. So did the velvet ropes."
3. Fiona Hill, "Yes, It Was a Coup. Here's Why." The information is cogent, non-alarmist, and not sugarcoating: "As in the case of other coup attempts, the president's actions have put us on the brink of civil war."
4. Zeynep Tufekci, "Most House Republicans Did What the Rioters Wanted." Following up on all of the above: "There is a great desire to blame Trump—who is certainly very much to blame—and move on, without recognizing and responding to the dire reality: that much of the GOP enlisted in his attempt to steal an election." And are still there, if the ten who dissented in favor of impeachment are anything to count by. (Me to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selkie, on hearing the number: "Holy fuck, is Sodom going to be spared?")
5. I have now found myself saying in several different conversations that America's foundation myth has conditioned its inheritors to believe that the revolution is always right—a mindset that not only failed to be disenchanted by the Civil War, I suspect it's one of the reasons the romantic rehabilitation of the Lost Cause caught on. The rebels are always the good guys. And now here we are with the good guys planning to lynch lawmakers, because nothing says freedom like a dictator-for-life, but there's no dissonance for the people who believe themselves in the tradition of Patrick Henry as much as P.G.T. Beauregard. All of which incidentally clicked into place how weird it is—and how American—that the Galactic Empire of Star Wars (1977) is a bunch of Nazis who speak RP. The idea of a Resistance had to wait for the sequels; the heroes of the original films are the Rebel Alliance. The Imperials have stormtroopers and Riefenstahl choreography and everyone on the Death Star looks like they just clocked off the garrison at Navarone, but The Empire Strikes Back (1980) explicitly cast its Imperial officers with British actors just to drive the parallel further home. I know I'm far from the first person to notice, but it's like shaking all the pieces of Axis & Allies indiscriminately together, so long as an American viewer would get the right inimical echoes. A little Dam Busters, a little Yorktown. And sure, it's impossible not to get some Rome in the mix when a Republic turns to Empire, but it's much less present in the aesthetics than the political name-checks; besides, we never personally fought the Romans. (For the record, I appreciate both Alan Garner's Red Shift (1973) and, however I feel about it as a version of Sutcliff, Kevin Macdonald's The Eagle (2011) reversing the usual convention and representing their Roman characters as identifiably American. I believe Vietnam was the impetus in one case; perhaps the War on Terror in the other.) The disparate strands of the current civil unrest were another piece of what reminded me, I suppose. Our national self-image is a hell of a thing.
1. Rebecca Solnit, "On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway." From last November, but none the less relevant, especially at this moment the line: "Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?"
2. Caitlin Flanagan, "Worst Revolution Ever." Despite the title, not lightly written, and not dismissive of either the damage or the danger: "They were looking for someone to tell them what to do. Trump told them what to do. So did the velvet ropes."
3. Fiona Hill, "Yes, It Was a Coup. Here's Why." The information is cogent, non-alarmist, and not sugarcoating: "As in the case of other coup attempts, the president's actions have put us on the brink of civil war."
4. Zeynep Tufekci, "Most House Republicans Did What the Rioters Wanted." Following up on all of the above: "There is a great desire to blame Trump—who is certainly very much to blame—and move on, without recognizing and responding to the dire reality: that much of the GOP enlisted in his attempt to steal an election." And are still there, if the ten who dissented in favor of impeachment are anything to count by. (Me to
selkie, on hearing the number: "Holy fuck, is Sodom going to be spared?")5. I have now found myself saying in several different conversations that America's foundation myth has conditioned its inheritors to believe that the revolution is always right—a mindset that not only failed to be disenchanted by the Civil War, I suspect it's one of the reasons the romantic rehabilitation of the Lost Cause caught on. The rebels are always the good guys. And now here we are with the good guys planning to lynch lawmakers, because nothing says freedom like a dictator-for-life, but there's no dissonance for the people who believe themselves in the tradition of Patrick Henry as much as P.G.T. Beauregard. All of which incidentally clicked into place how weird it is—and how American—that the Galactic Empire of Star Wars (1977) is a bunch of Nazis who speak RP. The idea of a Resistance had to wait for the sequels; the heroes of the original films are the Rebel Alliance. The Imperials have stormtroopers and Riefenstahl choreography and everyone on the Death Star looks like they just clocked off the garrison at Navarone, but The Empire Strikes Back (1980) explicitly cast its Imperial officers with British actors just to drive the parallel further home. I know I'm far from the first person to notice, but it's like shaking all the pieces of Axis & Allies indiscriminately together, so long as an American viewer would get the right inimical echoes. A little Dam Busters, a little Yorktown. And sure, it's impossible not to get some Rome in the mix when a Republic turns to Empire, but it's much less present in the aesthetics than the political name-checks; besides, we never personally fought the Romans. (For the record, I appreciate both Alan Garner's Red Shift (1973) and, however I feel about it as a version of Sutcliff, Kevin Macdonald's The Eagle (2011) reversing the usual convention and representing their Roman characters as identifiably American. I believe Vietnam was the impetus in one case; perhaps the War on Terror in the other.) The disparate strands of the current civil unrest were another piece of what reminded me, I suppose. Our national self-image is a hell of a thing.
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That does sound like some crossed symbolic wires.
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While I agree with your larger point, I'm feeling like nitpicking here, because to this European what's weird about the US presentation of revolution(s) is that only American revolutions are presented as right. Whereas the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and good lord, the Persian/Iranian Revolution are evil and wrong. (Re: the last one, of course the the Ayatollahs are terrible, but my point is that for decades, the number of Americans ready to acknowledge that the (US installed) Shah regime had been an oppressive dictatorship as well, that it had replaced an actual secular democratic state, and that the original uprising against it hadn't just been carried by Islamic fundamentalists but by those people who themselves would be either driven into exile or killed by the fundamentalists as well was very limited.) The way the French Revolution quickly accumulated a bad image in the US (and was equated in totem with the Terreur period) was particularly striking because it didn't just happen in the later 19th century but pretty much contemporanously - correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Jefferson a lone holdout in still being on Team French Revolution by the time of Washington's second term among the original American revolutionaries?
(Lion Feuchtwanger, when he wrote his Benjamin Franklin and Beaumarchais novel Proud Destiny intended as a thank you to the US for taking him in and saving his life, was in fact struck how utterly anti-all-revolution minded his contemporary (this would be late 1940s) American readership felt, hence there being a blatant "you were revolutionaries once" passage in the novel.)
All of which leads me to conclude: "The rebels are always right" only applies if they speak American English, and the institutions they're rebelling against have a British accent. If they speak another language, they're at best misguided, and more likely an evil mob of gibberish-talking foreigners.
Again, I still agree with your larger point, and definitely about what Star Wars channels re: the US pop culture psyche. (Though one tiny nitpick - notoriously, the original SW movie gives the Riefenstahl choreography to the rebels as well, in the climactic award ceremony at the end which is a blatant copy of the scene in Triumph of the Will where Hitler, Himmler and Röhm's replacement as head of the SA do their "honoring the martyrs of the movement" (i.e. the dead from the 1923 Putsch) ceremony.) It's why the sequels never even bothering with depicting a functioning democratic Republic and immediately providing a set up where there can be a rebellion/resistance against an evil state again is so predictable and so American. If I try to think of a popular US depiction of the state as functioning, of working for the government as good and heroic, even, in a situation where said government isn't depicted as fighting evil aliens/terrorists/what not (so that despite being a superpower, it still can see itself as the underdog), the only example that comes to mind for me is The West Wing.
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* To the point of refusing to give a French battleship they were refitting a radar fit any better than a US PT boat.
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Outside of Operation Jedburgh, I know remarkably little about American relations with the Free French, so thank you for this information, I hate it.
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Yeah, not to mention the infamous US casting of the anti-Communist fascists as "freedom fighters" (i.e. the Right Revolutionaries) under the Reagan doctrine, with results like the US installing and supporting the fascist Pinochet. Talk about doublethink.
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Didn't Operation Cyclone blow back similarly, speaking of the Reagan era?
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This made me think back to Independence Day in which not only are humans the underdog by default, but iirc, the destruction of most major cities early on means that “the American Government” basically consists of the President, a handful of advisors, and a small airforce that’s about 50% civilian or retired pilots who’ve volunteered.
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The generosity of America sharing its Independence Day with the entire world!
(I hate that movie. I hated it while I was watching it. Every now and then someone on Tumblr points out that it's just about the only big-budget action movie with an unambiguously Jewish hero and I'm not here to take that away from anyone, but I wish it had been the case in a better film. I saw it in theaters with my family. We had all liked Stargate (1994). We were all so sad.)
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I was thinking in terms of American mythology and fiction, so I don't really disagree.
notoriously, the original SW movie gives the Riefenstahl choreography to the rebels as well
I'm aware of that and find it weird as hell, but honestly the relationship of Star Wars to World War II is weird as hell generally. It lifts Nazi aesthetics for its villains without grappling with the ideology—the Empire doesn't seem to practice space anti-Semitism, the destruction of Alderaan isn't a targeted genocide. If anything, the use of a weapon of mass destruction on civilians should wake echoes of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the film either didn't notice or didn't want its audience to notice, leaving it up to Rogue One (2016) to cast the designer of the Death Star as a kind of combination Oppenheimer-Heisenberg. The officer class of the Empire is very white and very human, but it's never textually addressed that I can remember; it just shows up by contrast with the multi-species Rebellion. It feels very much like a case of cherry-picking influences according to the rule of cool and while sometimes this produces marvelous results—I don't care that Lucas claimed it after the fact as a Campbellian monomyth, the narrative structure of the first film is a magnificent katamari that ricochets erratically around the galaxy until it's got enough significance stuck to it to achieve escape velocity—it can also produce some seriously unexamined excuse me, case in point.
so that despite being a superpower, it still can see itself as the underdog
I'm just going to quote myself from one of the aforementioned conversations, because it saves me having to restate: "Trump himself tapped into that myth with the idea that white Americans were an embattled, endangered minority who had to stand strong against the forces of literal darkness; it's the myth of white supremacy, the reason the tiki torchbearers of Charlottesville chanted 'Jews will not replace us!' The United States is in the same breath a Christian nation and a nation in which Christians are oppressed like in the days of martyrs to the lions. Everyone wants to feel like the underdog, but really stay on top."
the only example that comes to mind for me is The West Wing.
Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) is culturally beloved and enduring and takes as a matter of course that government work is worth doing even when the processes are unglamorous and the stakes as low as the fate of a parcel of land; there's graft and chicanery involved and the action eventually scales up to a filibuster and an attempted suicide, but there's not a constitutional crisis on the line, just a couple of careers and the ideals of America. It caused a political furor on its release for suggesting the existence of corruption in the U.S. Senate; it was claimed to be bad for American democracy because it didn't show the system ticking unproblematically along. And it got banned in all the fascist countries and the USSR, which just goes to show you can't please everyone.
Otto Preminger's Advise & Consent (1962) is cynical to the point of pessimism until all of a sudden it isn't, but it similarly treats the business of government as a serious enough trust that the character who crosses the morally acceptable line of dirty pool is more or less literally cast out.
I feel there are some pre-Code examples I will feel stupid for not remembering right now, but it may be that the oxygen is being sucked out of the room by the elephant of Gabriel Over the White House (1933).
Would you disqualify 1776 for being about the American Revolution? Because the entire point of that musical is that democracy is a pain in the ass and it still has to get done.
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however I feel about it as a version of Sutcliff, Kevin Macdonald's The Eagle (2011) reversing the usual convention and representing their Roman characters as identifiably American
Quite true. I remember reading Kirk Douglas' memoirs and how he was torn about whether or not to cast Jean Simmons as Varinia in Spartacus - since he produced it, it was his call - since that would break the Americans = slaves, Romans = Brits mold. Only then (when reading this) did I realise of how this applies to pretty much all US movies dealing with similar subjects as well. (In my defense, most of these I saw first dubbed into German, so that means the different accents are gone.)
Spartacus the tv series I think mixes and mingles - i.e. you have Brits, Americans, New Zealanders all both as Romans and slaves - though Spartacus himself in both incarnations speaks American.
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It isn't universal, but it's sufficiently observed at least with patrician characters that Ben-Hur (1959) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) stand out for their cross-national casting. Alas, in only one of these movies can Stephen Boyd actually act.
Spartacus the tv series I think mixes and mingles - i.e. you have Brits, Americans, New Zealanders all both as Romans and slaves - though Spartacus himself in both incarnations speaks American.
I haven't seen the series, but that is interesting, since to my knowledge neither lead actor was American.
I hadn't encountered the anecdote about Douglas and Simmons, but it fits.
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He was a member of the British National Front then met his life partner who happens to be Afro Caribbean.
He had the good grace to admit that he'd been a blind fool! :o)
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I am always glad to hear when people are capable of change.
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YES, I've been saying this over and over. The rebels are not always the good guys, but American culture is VERY uncomfortable recognizing that. Everyone always wants to be the rebels. Everyone!
And I think this is hugely irresponsible storytelling. Fun, romantic, sure, but unless you want the evil empire to be in power forever (because that's the only way you get to be the noble resistance forever--if you never win), you have to imagine a time when you're governing, where you're setting policy, where you're trying to build a thing, and that's inevitably going to be ... not perfect.
Yes, the whole unity thing is boggling and infuriating. As many, many people have pointed out, the aggressor isn't the one who gets to call for unity. Truth and reconciliation requires an acceptance of responsibility, remorse, and a willingness to make restitution AND EVEN THEN it's not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
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I've been thinking over the last few days that as much as I enjoy the term "ass hole putsch" to describe the attack on the Capitol, I'm a lot more worried about ending up in something closer to the Spanish Civil War. Where the rebels were not the good guys, unless you were a fascist. Which is rather the problem here.
Fun, romantic, sure, but unless you want the evil empire to be in power forever (because that's the only way you get to be the noble resistance forever--if you never win), you have to imagine a time when you're governing, where you're setting policy, where you're trying to build a thing, and that's inevitably going to be ... not perfect.
That's one of the reasons I like Yoon Ha Lee's Revenant Gun (2018) so much: it is entirely about what happens after the splintering of the evil empire, which is (a) civil war between its successor states (b) PAPERWORK. The character in charge of the non-totalitarian successor state would be fine with the paperwork if it didn't come with so many administrative meetings. I really feel for him.
Less fictionally, I really don't want to be fighting an evil empire forever, thank you very much. These last five years of merely living in one have been exhausting enough.
Truth and reconciliation requires an acceptance of responsibility, remorse, and a willingness to make restitution AND EVEN THEN it's not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Teshuvah, damn it!
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The character who gets stuck with the paperwork may be my favorite in the series and he doesn't appear until the second book, so I strongly support your plan.
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Really? From the first sentence she completely downplays the actual danger the rioters caused and how close they came to dragging out the representatives, which was obvious even before a lot of the new footage started coming out. Even on the day of, James Clyburn was questioning how they knew to go right to his private office and how they obviously knew that private office was the majority whip's. And did she totally miss the picture of the guy carrying off Pelosi's lectern? He sure didn't leave a quarter for that. Not to mention the stolen laptops. "They weren't really that organized and didn't really do that much damage" is already a conservative talking point (and that writer is very conservative).
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I appreciate the information about the writer's politics. I read the article with knowledge of the deaths caused, the near-deaths, and as many details of the inside job as were available last night when I encountered the piece, and it interested me as an observation of how many people approached a coup as a lethal kind of cosplay, really seeming to believe that the state—the true state, not the deep state, the global cabal, the usurping elite—would reward them, so they had no reason to reign in their behavior and nothing to hide. I would think it is clear from context that I do not believe armed insurrection to be negligible or harmless.
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*hugs*
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hugs you back
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(Yes, also, your takes are salient and we have our collective finger cramping in the sea-wall of antifascism, but I'm so easily distracted by Potential Historical Gay.)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmmc6zvb13w
Also, CT is doing a mild impersonation of a British accent, I think.
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I believe the film to be less slashy than the book, which is pretty much straight-up OT3 with the textual het relationship, but my encounters with the fandom on AO3 suggest that "less" does not equal "zero."
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I think it speaks well for the strength of the source material!
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I think that's his mild impersonation of a neutral American accent rather than his natural Southern voice, because one of the things that got my attention about the film (which, to be fair, already had my attention for adapting one of my formative childhood novels and being directed by the grandson of one of my favorite filmmakers) was the director's open discussion of casting its Romans American.
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"For me the center of the story is the two characters, Jamie and he and how they hate each other to begin with; they’re an odd couple - distrustful and resentful of each other and make a friendship out of that. It’s your classic bromance! But it was important that they be an odd couple, that they be as far apart as possible. You have Channing being big, physically adept, athletic, very American in every respect. Jamie, from Northern England, small, wily, feral, a lot going on in here [points at head].
*gurgles and cackles in fluent GHAY*
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Never apologize for Historical Gay! It gets us through the fascism!
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I don't know if I can speak cogently about them now, but I am sick of the double standard having driven us to a place where major news outlets are still debating whether the attack on the Capitol was just a "riot."
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I've seen fanworks from the perspective of characters who lost family etc. in the destruction(s) of the Death Star.
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I'll note the American admiration for (and unease about) rebellions predates our founding--especially around Boston, with puritans having *feelings* about Cromwell, while knowing that they needed to keep their heads down.
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I would have a much easier time with the idea of Star Wars as an interrogation if the Rebellion ever found itself contemplating the ethics of weapons of mass destruction or losing to guerrilla warfare in jungles—since they never are, it reads much more to me like displacing the blame. The Roman echoes of the Republic are much stronger to me than any idea of a Pax Americana.
I'll note the American admiration for (and unease about) rebellions predates our founding--especially around Boston, with puritans having *feelings* about Cromwell, while knowing that they needed to keep their heads down.
I do not argue that the ambivalence was baked in from the start.
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I agree with you that this displaces the blame and misses the point, but that seems perfectly typical of what narcissistic mainstream boomer counterculture did. Getting upset that you might get drafted, not being outraged about what's happening to Vietnamese.
Eventually we see this play out in Return--jungle warfare is the distraction that happens off to the side with muppets, while the main plot is about the protagonist reconciling with their father who is "redeemed" in a way that doesn't hold him accountable for anything. (In a movie that comes out in the 80s, when only a tiny handful of activists are upset about US imperialist adventures in Central America, because the draft is gone.)
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It may be that I disagree with your read on the movie because I disagree with your read on the counterculture.
(I don't necessarily disagree with your read on George Lucas as a person who has certainly proven himself unable to see beyond his own ego. I have a lot of feelings about the demonization of the counterculture of the '60's and '70's and how conservatively useful it is to be able to point at a mass protest movement intertwined with societal sea-change and fix it in the memory of succeeding generations as childishly self-involved and futile.)
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Of course, my cohort of engaged Gen Xers was often too cynical, and to prone to focus on narrow issues where a few people could at least hope to get some traction: stop funding death squads, get recruiters off campus, protest Apartheid, demand action on AIDS but mostly fight to get condoms in the bathrooms, free Mumia rather than change everything about policing, get that ozone hole closed, but don't have a sustained critique of the root causes. People to whom civil unions seemed, almost, like an irrelevantly unattainable if aspirational goal.
The sort of people who would eventually do much of the hard work conjuring the web out of nothing, but who wouldn't ask deep enough questions about what they wrought.
As for Lucas, I kind of want to sneak through a portal and see what would have happened his career without the ego inflation of making Star Wars. If he had been the director of Apocalypse Now, as originally planned, so he didn't have time to make his space opera flick. Could Spielberg alone have pushed the industry to focus on blockbusters if Lucas ended up being just another member of the American New Wave, the one known for ruthless technical skill and inept dialogue?
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That sounds phenomenal.
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In recent days, hearing the word "insurrection" in the air, I have realized that "insurrection" has a decidedly positive connotation for me, and that comes from Les Misérables. I find it positively strange to hear it used negatively. But although that example is French, the tendency to adulate rebels is similar.
I will go out on a limb and say this though: I don't like the habit of decrying the Confederacy for being "traitors." I say, decry them for supporting enslavement. Decry them for being willing to fight a massively bloody war to retain enslavement. But to decry them for trying to break away from a parent government they found oppressive feels to me hypocritical. I don't know where to go with that except that Americans were also traitors against Britain, and I don't know how that discourse helps us. (And I know that position is very unpopular, so I'll bury it in the DW comments and be quiet now.)
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You're welcome; I'm glad they are useful to you.
I find it positively strange to hear it used negatively.
You can always use "coup," which seems to be emerging as the most technically accurate description.
Not a gotcha question: what is your definition of treason? I believe the term was in play at the time of the Civil War, rather than being a contemporary rear-projection.
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Oh, I don't for a moment doubt treason was discussed all the time in the Civil War. I didn't mean to suggest it's a modern revision of history. On the contrary, I'm sure the feelings and language today are 150 times milder (though stronger, I think, than ten years ago).
Merriam-Webster tells me "treason" is defined thus:
the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or the sovereign's family.
Under this definition, I think it's arguable if either the Confederacy or the emerging US committed treason. Neither sought to completely overthrow the parent government. The US wasn't trying to overthrow Britain; the South wasn't trying to take over the entire United States. Is it "overthrowing your government" to break away from it, make its sphere of influence smaller? One could argue yes; it takes away that government's land, resources, etc. But again, I don't see a huge conceptual difference between the South and the American colonies on that score. One could argue the South had more of a hand in creating the US than the American colonies did in deciding how the British administered them and, therefore, had more responsibility to stay, but I'm not sure where that reasoning takes us. If, for example, you helped design the Soviet Union and then decided it had become corrupt and you wanted your state to secede, are you ethically barred from ever doing so because you helped create the original government?
(Oh, and I see I had some slippage between "treason" and "unethical." It's a whole other question if treason can ever be ethical. To take the other part of the definition just as a "for instance," in Game of Thrones, Jaime kills his king, which is clearly treason, but he also does so stop the king from killing many other people, so is that ethical? Could be.)