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An ocean of violence between me and you
Today involved grocery shopping, housecleaning, pizza, keeping an eye on the news, and accruing links. I am way more tired than I feel the physical aspects of the day should account for.
1. Carly Pildis, "My Family Is Black and Jewish. Here's What Charlottesville Means to Me." I find this paragraph particularly acute: "It's how I know that America is both our sanctuary and where our neighbors were brought in chains. It is both our home and a place we can never fully trust. We have more freedom than ever before but the swastika still haunts the doorstep of our synagogue. We love America but wonder if our kids are really safe at our local JCC."
2. Jelani Cobb, "The Battle of Charlottesville." Crystallizes a lot of things I have seen people saying and thinking—including me, but more elegantly—and then goes one analytical step further. "It is a moment of indeterminate morality, one in which the centrifugal forces of contempt, resentment, and racial superiority are pitted against the ideal of common humanity and the possibility of a civic society. We have entered a new phase of the Trump era."
3. In terms of amplifying voices in Charlottesville, I have found both butchsaffron and eshusplayground to be valuable perspectives. I'm not even on Tumblr. News moves faster off Dreamwidth, whee.
4. I discovered Erynn Brook's "White Feelings: 0-60 for Charlottesville" via more than one white person who said it was useful to them. It strikes me as a good example of the snarkily worded but sincerely intended anti-racist primer; I have reservations mostly about its elision of Jews. On that front, see this post and its follow-up. This one is also related.
5. The murdered counter-protester has been named; so has the man who drove the car into her. The White House winks and nods and barely even dogwhistles at this point, but I am hoping the local law will bolt the terrorist to the wall. Let there be consequences. Not just private ones like a sock in the jaw, but formal, legal ones like convictions for terrorism. Free speech is one thing, but hate speech another, and violence is something else entirely.
6. I wanted to link this cycle days ago: twenty-one poets writing for the Statue of Liberty in the age of Trump.
7. As people keep talking about appropriate responses to neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate violence, I keep thinking of the speech delivered by Anton Walbrook to Roger Livesey in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). The German refugee is talking to the English gentleman, to the English audience, about the facts of fighting Nazis. Both the scriptwriter and the actor may be speaking through him. Jewish, stateless Pressburger had left Berlin in a life-saving hurry in 1933; Walbrook took his chance in 1936, Austrian, half-Jewish, and queer. They knew whereof Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff spoke. I couldn't find a very good clip of the scene, but here it is:
I read your broadcast up to the point where you describe the collapse of France. You commented on Nazi methods, foul fighting, bombing refugees, machine-gunning hospitals, lifeboats, lightships, bailed-out pilots and so on, by saying that you despised them, that you would be ashamed to fight on their side and that you would sooner accept defeat than victory if it could only be won by those methods . . . Clive! If you let yourself be defeated by them, just because you are too fair to hit back the same way they hit at you, there won't be any methods but Nazi methods! If you preach the Rules of the Game while they use every foul and filthy trick against you, they'll laugh at you! They think you're weak, decadent! I thought so myself in 1919 . . . I don't think you won [the last war]. We lost it. But you lost something, too. You forgot to learn the moral. Because victory was yours, you failed to learn your lesson twenty years ago, and you have to pay the school fees again! Some of you will learn quicker than the others. Some will never learn it. Because you have been educated to be a gentleman and a sportsman—in peace and in war. But, Clive, dear old Clive, this is not a gentleman's war. This time you are fighting for your very existence against the most devilish idea ever created by a human brain—Nazism. And if you lose there won't be a return match next year, perhaps not even for a hundred years! You mustn't mind me, an alien, saying all this. But who can describe hydrophobia better than one who has been bitten—and is now immune?
1. Carly Pildis, "My Family Is Black and Jewish. Here's What Charlottesville Means to Me." I find this paragraph particularly acute: "It's how I know that America is both our sanctuary and where our neighbors were brought in chains. It is both our home and a place we can never fully trust. We have more freedom than ever before but the swastika still haunts the doorstep of our synagogue. We love America but wonder if our kids are really safe at our local JCC."
2. Jelani Cobb, "The Battle of Charlottesville." Crystallizes a lot of things I have seen people saying and thinking—including me, but more elegantly—and then goes one analytical step further. "It is a moment of indeterminate morality, one in which the centrifugal forces of contempt, resentment, and racial superiority are pitted against the ideal of common humanity and the possibility of a civic society. We have entered a new phase of the Trump era."
3. In terms of amplifying voices in Charlottesville, I have found both butchsaffron and eshusplayground to be valuable perspectives. I'm not even on Tumblr. News moves faster off Dreamwidth, whee.
4. I discovered Erynn Brook's "White Feelings: 0-60 for Charlottesville" via more than one white person who said it was useful to them. It strikes me as a good example of the snarkily worded but sincerely intended anti-racist primer; I have reservations mostly about its elision of Jews. On that front, see this post and its follow-up. This one is also related.
5. The murdered counter-protester has been named; so has the man who drove the car into her. The White House winks and nods and barely even dogwhistles at this point, but I am hoping the local law will bolt the terrorist to the wall. Let there be consequences. Not just private ones like a sock in the jaw, but formal, legal ones like convictions for terrorism. Free speech is one thing, but hate speech another, and violence is something else entirely.
6. I wanted to link this cycle days ago: twenty-one poets writing for the Statue of Liberty in the age of Trump.
7. As people keep talking about appropriate responses to neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate violence, I keep thinking of the speech delivered by Anton Walbrook to Roger Livesey in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). The German refugee is talking to the English gentleman, to the English audience, about the facts of fighting Nazis. Both the scriptwriter and the actor may be speaking through him. Jewish, stateless Pressburger had left Berlin in a life-saving hurry in 1933; Walbrook took his chance in 1936, Austrian, half-Jewish, and queer. They knew whereof Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff spoke. I couldn't find a very good clip of the scene, but here it is:
I read your broadcast up to the point where you describe the collapse of France. You commented on Nazi methods, foul fighting, bombing refugees, machine-gunning hospitals, lifeboats, lightships, bailed-out pilots and so on, by saying that you despised them, that you would be ashamed to fight on their side and that you would sooner accept defeat than victory if it could only be won by those methods . . . Clive! If you let yourself be defeated by them, just because you are too fair to hit back the same way they hit at you, there won't be any methods but Nazi methods! If you preach the Rules of the Game while they use every foul and filthy trick against you, they'll laugh at you! They think you're weak, decadent! I thought so myself in 1919 . . . I don't think you won [the last war]. We lost it. But you lost something, too. You forgot to learn the moral. Because victory was yours, you failed to learn your lesson twenty years ago, and you have to pay the school fees again! Some of you will learn quicker than the others. Some will never learn it. Because you have been educated to be a gentleman and a sportsman—in peace and in war. But, Clive, dear old Clive, this is not a gentleman's war. This time you are fighting for your very existence against the most devilish idea ever created by a human brain—Nazism. And if you lose there won't be a return match next year, perhaps not even for a hundred years! You mustn't mind me, an alien, saying all this. But who can describe hydrophobia better than one who has been bitten—and is now immune?
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Have you seen 'A Canterbury Tale'? It got badly mauled by the censors as a wartime film and no director's cut survives but it's still well worth a watch.
All filmed around places I know well and have deep places for.
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A Canterbury Tale has a very serious claim to being my favorite film. I saw it for the first time ten years ago—the 124-minute British cut, not the cut-down American version with Kim Hunter—and still love it. It was my introduction to Powell and Pressburger. After that I watched everything of theirs I could find. I've seen all (and written about most) of their films from The Spy in Black (1939) through The Tales of Hoffman (1951), after which I started to have trouble tracking down Region 1 DVDs or TV showings. They are close to being my favorite filmmakers and important to me either way.
All filmed around places I know well and have deep places for.
That's a good connection to have. I've been in Canterbury once. I was a senior in high school; I had never heard of Powell and Pressburger. I kept a travel journal for the first time in my life. I wrote:
"I wish we had been able to stay in Canterbury longer. They were Roman ruins beneath some of the buildings, Roman roads beneath the modern streets. There was even a museum—underground, I believe, in a villa that had had the city built over it. Romans aside, I just liked the town. There were old buildings, interesting stores, churches faced with flint next to very modern concrete. (Canterbury was bombed very badly during WWII—made me think of "A Tale of Time City")—I just wanted to stay there."
Ignoring the fact that that level of prose and insight belongs to a seventeen-year-old who was not the world's greatest memoirist, I look at that paragraph and I am not surprised that I turned out to feel the way I do about A Canterbury Tale.
[edit] It made me very happy to learn only a few months ago that it was Pressburger's film more than Powell's. I had been misled by it taking place in Kent.
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I was at uni in Canterbury- first as an undergrad studying English literature at Christ Church then to do MA history at UKC, finally back to Christ Church to do postgrad work in special educational needs.
I worked as barmaid in a pub there to help make ends meet as a student. It was run by a couple who'd had it since WW2 and had vivid memories of the blitz.
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It is appropriate, even ethical, to answer force with proportional force, when that force is required to restore a just peace. We seek peace because on the whole it is far better than war; but as history has taught us, not every peace is better than the war it prevents.
I agree with that statement. But I can't bring myself to agree with the quote you have from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, though maybe it's saying a similar thing, just with different rhetoric. There are many things that I don't want my side doing--including bombing refugees and machine-gunning hospitals, at least not as go-to tactics. Maybe the difference between my side, as I conceive it, and the other side, is that they embrace those methods from the get-go and my side would only do such a thing in extremis, and some things, never (rounding up and exterminating civilians, for example). I mean maybe this goes without saying?
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I don't think the character of Theo—or the film of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp—is advocating the use of war crimes or genocide as best practice for dealing with one's enemies, either preemptively or in a they-did-it-to-us-first fashion. Clive Wynne-Candy is a sweet man, an honorable man, not an imaginative man but not a stupid one either, but in this scene what is most important is that he's a man who came out the other side of the horror and chaos of World War still believing that "Right is Might after all," because his side won and he didn't have to reexamine any of the gentlemanly illusions with which he entered the war. "The Germans have shelled hospitals, bombed open towns, sunk neutral ships, used poison gas—and we won. Clean fighting, honest soldiering have won." He never seems to have understood that Allied conduct in World War I was not all sterling chivalry, that the Central Powers were not solely responsible for the monstrous waste of life that was trench warfare and home by Christmas. He didn't understand the bitterness of his German friend in the wake of the armistice because as far as Clive was concerned, the war ended at 11/11/11 and then everyone was friends again, shake hands, no hard feelings. He's such a decent person that it becomes its own kind of danger. So I understand Theo reacting with horror to Clive's proud declaration that he would rather lose to the Nazis than feel he had to stoop to their level to beat them, because Theo who fled his own country knows what a Nazi victory would entail in ways Clive cannot even comprehend—Clive doesn't know that he's placing his own knightly self-image ahead of the lives of millions, but by 1940 that's what he's talking about. That is what I think Theo is stressing when he says "there won't be any methods but Nazi methods" if Clive—and the England he embodies—can't take the threat seriously. I don't think this is an all's-fair-in-love-and-war philosophy. Especially right now, Theo's stance reads to me a lot more like not ceding an advantage to the Nazis over the people they want to hurt.
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You're welcome. I am always happy to provide as much information as I can.
The part about placing his own knightly self-image ahead of millions of lives--that has to be fought and his eyes need to be opened.
It's a real and current and complicated question: what does the most good for the people who need it most? Those aren't the terms Clive is thinking in; Theo who was until recently one of those people (and if the war goes badly, may be one of them again) makes him see them.
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oh, LOVELY: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/politics/trump-charlottesville-protest.html
'Trump Attacks Merck Chief Kenneth Frazier for Quitting Advisory Panel'
On Twitter. Of course.
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It's pretty crap.
I have no difficulty believing these things are happening; I just believe they shouldn't.
'Trump Attacks Merck Chief Kenneth Frazier for Quitting Advisory Panel'
Obviously Frazier should have been a neo-Nazi; then 45 would have been kinder to him.
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We put the child on a bus to the Arse End of the State to go do another week of scout camp, and it had very much the air, for me, of a Kindertransport. God forbid, but it's true.
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*hugs*
How was everyone?
We put the child on a bus to the Arse End of the State to go do another week of scout camp, and it had very much the air, for me, of a Kindertransport. God forbid, but it's true.
I've felt time rewinding and remixing since November and I wish it would take a break already.
Love.
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I just don't want to be in this particular timeline. I am too old, too fat, and too tired for a proper resistance organization.
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Early exposure to the folktale of "It Could Always Be Worse" has cautioned me against stating absolutes, but this is a crummy timeline.
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You were talking in your last posts about liking things where people punched Nazis/Bigots etc., so I have found some/similar, although they were from my immediately tumblring and things so a bit inadequate, but hey:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xrU9lHHbwR8/UmrCi5CuPSI/AAAAAAAAD4o/woyltroWWQA/s320/doctor+who+-+rory+punching+hitler.gif
http://photobucket.com/gallery/user/sey115/media/cGF0aDovdHVtYmxyX29wNnJ5anhBZFkxcWY1dHI1bzVfNTQwX3pwc2J2dmpiejRvLmdpZg==/?ref= (from this recap of S10's Thin Ice. (As it says, now isn't the time for subtlety, indeed. So, also: http://lostspook2.tumblr.com/post/160150157213 for the speech that also came up in that scene.)
http://stephadoo.tumblr.com/post/164118416063
And one I made myself, which is not v good (I have marginally improved since, at least I can get the bits I want to get and not just whatever makeagif decides I should have), but it is a librarian knocking a Nazi over in a fight over Mr Polly: http://68.media.tumblr.com/0bb3fc7a3b1ab17f580f34ba60d623cc/tumblr_o9ln98kmwr1ry6805o2_r1_400.gif (The librarian didn't mean to do it, but having done it, she stuck to her guns and principles and refused to make a public apology and went to prison for it.)
:-(
(It is bad enough with stuff happening here, let alone watching the surreality of what you've got going on over the pond right now. :-/)
Also, not related to anything else (although now that I think of it, I suppose teen!Ace's reaction to racism and bigotry is to burn a house down; also not subtle!), I keep meaning to say - I know you have watched some Seventh Doctor and enjoyed him. Have you watched Ghostlight yet because it is probably the most wonderfully weird & meta DW serial ever, and my joint favourite with Robots of Death. So, given our track record here, you may very well enjoy it if you can find a copy. (Also Ace gets to wear both a tux and a dress. Although not at the same time.) If you have already watched it, you will no doubt already know what I mean, or hate it!
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It's not good! Most of the positive things I have been encountering lately are in direct opposition to the other stuff, which on the one hand is life-affirming and on the other hand doesn't really provide a break.
You were talking in your last posts about liking things where people punched Nazis/Bigots etc., so I have found some/similar, although they were from my immediately tumblring and things so a bit inadequate, but hey
I appreciate it! I have seen Christopher Plummer making the rounds on Facebook and the Tumblrs I read, but none of the others so far. What is the librarian from?
Have you watched Ghostlight yet because it is probably the most wonderfully weird & meta DW serial ever, and my joint favourite with Robots of Death.
I believe the answer is yes, unless there's another episode of Doctor Who where somebody gets turned into primordial soup, but since I remember almost nothing else about it (Ace burning the house down), I should clearly see it again. I certainly don't remember hating it. I don't remember hating any of the Seven/Ace I've seen so far, although everything I can remember about Battlefield is Arthurian gonzo. Ace bonding with another woman over explosives was excellent.
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Well, the primordial soup bit is pretty hard to forget! It's not everyone's cup of tea, though, but I love the weirdness, all the wordplay and referenced Victoriana and the meta and the intense Doctor & Ace stuff. (Ace burning the house down is talked about rather than seen; it's what she did as a teenager to get herself arrested. Asked by the Doctor at the end if she has any regrets, she says, "Yes. I wish I'd blown it up instead!")
I appreciate it! I have seen Christopher Plummer making the rounds on Facebook and the Tumblrs I read, but none of the others so far. What is the librarian from?
The librarian is from a 1978-80 series Enemy at the Door, about the Occupation of the Channel Islands. I don't mean to keep watching WWII things, but 1970s British TV is so full of them, I keep falling over them despite myself, but EatD is one I unexpectedly loved probably more than any of the other 70s non-cult drama shows I've seen so far. Episode 2 is "The Librarian" which is where that comes from. As I said, it begins accidentally, because she tries to argue with the SS Officer who's taking library books away, but once she's in that situation, she refuses to take the easy way out and goes to prison essentially as a protest against censorship and Nazi ideology. Judging by the rest of it, it's most likely based on a true incident of some kind, but not one I've come across as yet.
(I am not v reliable on this show or this episode, because it spoke to me a lot about where I was being ill - there's a lot about people having to endure through things they can't do much about, trapped on a small island together - and all the devalument of my profession as a librarian that had happened before that, so I like it and the other people I know who have seen it seem to mostly agree with me, so I'm probably not wrong, but you know what it's like when the right thing comes along at the right time emotionally!)
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(This is, obviously, an expression of deepest love.)
You know, I imagine, the story about Walbrook facing down Churchill in his Watch on the Rhine dressing room?
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Perfectly appropriate.
You know, I imagine, the story about Walbrook facing down Churchill in his Watch on the Rhine dressing room?
"No people in the world other than the English would have had the courage, in the midst of war, to tell the people such unvarnished truth."