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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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.