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.
no subject
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.