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et-in-cinerem-reverteris · 5 years ago

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Class of 1953 - Chapter 3 - Hand In Glove (5.3K)

"Phil looks back up at Dan. Despite the storm getting worse, they both remain motionless, looking at each other. Dan’s eyes are fascinatingly deep and dark; moody against the backdrop of a thunderstorm and the billowing leaves of the tree behind him and Phil just wants to shut his eyes and lean in and-"

When Dan bashfully asks Phil to come shopping with him one weekend, Phil takes the opportunity to do a bit of probing on Dan's mysterious exterior. With the help of Oscar Wilde and a nosy lesbian, he finds out a lot more than he had originally set out to.

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Phil looks down at the scrap of paper in his hand.

11a.m. 19 Nov (saturday!)

parks road plane tree

opposite big doors!!!

He checks his wristwatch for the umpteenth time. 10:55. The blue ink on the crumpled note is smudged and clumsily applied, which is fair, Phil thinks, considering the surface on which the writer placed his pen on that night just over a week ago.

“Are you seriously so forgetful that you need me to write it down?” Dan had teased, growing increasingly hysterical under a mask of playful exasperation. “Okay, fine. Fetch us a pen and I’ll write it down for you.”

Dan had asked Phil to turn around so that he could use his back to write on. The pen tickled and made Phil squirm like a child, which made both of them laugh so hard that they were sure they’d disturbed at least a hundred students. Before parting ways, Dan had timidly asked Phil whether he wanted to go out shopping with him the following weekend - but only because he was already going out, of course, and Phil had agreed in an instant but only because he was also already going out, of course, so he may as well… for convenience’s sake…

Of course.

Now, just over a week later, the pair of them are meeting up to hit the town to pick up various bits and bobs before the Christmas crowds get out of control.

Phil looks around at Keble’s eye-catching red brick facade - a refreshing change from Oxford’s trademark limestone walls. He squints as the sun shines out from behind the plane trees, raising his hand as he does so to shield his sensitive eyes from the glaring light. The different coloured stones are arranged into diamonds, dots and dashes, just like morse code. How curious.

He checks his wristwatch again. 10:57.

Punctuality is not normally one of Phil’s virtues, but another unexpectedly early awakening had led him to spontaneously leave the college gates at 10 o’clock to go for an early morning walk. Down Turl Street, left at All Saints Church, past Magdalen College and through to The Grove - a large, grassy park that had become Phil’s location of choice for when he needed to calm his nerves. He had tried to relax by admiring the deer and feeding them acorns, but all of his thoughts anxiously meandered back to the problem of his first out-of-college meeting with Daniel.

Ever since they had last said goodbye to each other, the young English student had been obsessively mulling over the meaning behind some of Dan’s more ambiguous lines from that night.

“...in the past people took the mickey out of me for being a “pouf”...”

Phil knows exactly what the word “pouf” means. Synonyms include “queer”, “gay” and “homosexual”, which are all terms he might use to describe himself, were he to be so brave. The real question lay in whether or not those derogatory statements had any deeper meaning than just fleeting insults, and this, he had decided, was something he would have to do some investigating on.

“Hullo!”

Phil’s daydreaming is cut short by his enigmatic companion striding toward him, and is struck by how smart he looks. Clad in a long, black, double-breasted coat, with a silk scarf tied around his neck in a jaunty knot, and a dark grey fedora, complete with a pheasant’s feather, sitting on top of his chestnut curls, he radiates elegance, class, and sophistication.

“Daniel! You’re looking very dapper today!”

“Hmm, well,” Dan starts, looking around with squinted eyes. “I thought I may as well get dressed up for the occasion.” After a second passes, he looks at Phil with a smirk. “So, where are we off to then?”

“Err, I thought you were the one who wanted to go shopping first?”

Dan raises an eyebrow, before quickly adopting a more neutral face. “Oh, I was going to, but nevermind about that. I um, I’m not anymore.”

“Right.”

The pair begin walking in silence down Park Lane, towards Oxford’s central shopping area.

“Anyway, where are we off to?”

“First of all I’d like to stop by Blackwell’s to collect a book that they’re holding for me.”

“Okay.”

“Then I need to see about buying a bicycle.”

“Oh, we can pop over to Cowley Road for that, Raleigh have a shop there at number three hundred and eighty-seven.”

“Perfect, that’s that one sorted. After that, I thought we could try a cafe for a spot of lunch. What do you think?”

“I think that sounds splendid,” he grins.

Parks Road is fairly long, giving them plenty of time to break the barrier of small talk and ease into a more meaningful conversation, which, on this occasion, has turned to the subject of going home for the holidays. Phil is able to glean that Dan is dreading going back to his family in Wokingham, which a small town just outside of Reading that he hates as it reminds him of the years he spent there at a Catholic boarding school called The Oratory. In Dan’s words, The Oratory was “hell”; full of “dickheads" who picked on him “constantly”, leaving him with a “deep seated anger” which “permanently resides” in him at a constant simmer. At first Phil feels upset to hear that Dan had such an unhappy childhood there, but quickly succumbs to the laughter invoked by the unrelenting stream of side-splitting anecdotes served alongside the tales of his youth.

As Dan narrates another amusing episode, Phil’s attention slips away from the stories and instead drifts towards the orator himself. Slowly, subtly, Phil starts to realise how charming Dan is, how witty and articulate his words are, how his natural sense of humour and great story-telling abilities could turn a book about drying paint into a Penguin Classic. While Dan laments about how the boys at his school made fun of him, Phil’s gut wrenches with anguish. How can a man so gentle and kind have been tormented by such heartless idiots? How can this poor soul have forgiven the beasts who were so mercilessly picking on him? How on earth could bullies take pleasure in beating down a boy who is so mild and agreeable that he likens himself to Winnie the Pooh? He looks on as the beaming boy laughs at his own stories. If Phil hadn’t been crying tears of laughter, he would have been weeping tears of sorrow.

After turning right at the Bodleian Library, the pair finally reach Broad Street. Blackwell’s Bookshop is easily recognisable by the cobalt blue exterior, guarding an attractive array of books, plays, letters and diaries for students to both ponder and argue over. As the pair step inside, a brass doorbell rings gaily.

“So, what is it you’re here to pick up then, Mr. English Literature?”

“It’s a 1890 copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray , posted all the way from America. I put in an order through a collector’s magazine and they’ve been holding it here for a few days.”

“Blimey. How much is that costing you?” Dan asks with a hint of ridicule in his voice.

Phil sighs as they navigate through the shop, passing by bookshelves that run from floor to ceiling. “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

“Oooh no, I very much do,” he teases. “Go on then, out with it! How much?”

Phil turns back to face Dan, who can’t resist making a guess.

“Ten bob?”

He shakes his head.

“More? Christ! Twenty bob?”

“Up.”

“...Twenty-five?”

“Down.

“Twenty-two?”

The guilty party nods silently.

“ Twenty-two shillings? For a musty old book?” The corners of Dan’s mouth turn upwards with a mischievous smirk. “Well, I suppose it is Oscar Wilde.”

“Exactly,” replies Phil curtly as they approach the counter. “Now shush for a moment.”

Dan rolls his eyes at the shushing, skulking off while Phil hands over an inordinate amount of money for a rare book about 19th century homosexuals. When he has obtained his precious cargo, he finds his companion browsing the shelves of the fiction section. Now, he decides, is a good time for a bit of probing.

��Do you read much?”

The brunette continues to scan the bookshelves.

“Not that often unfortunately, but I have a few favourite authors I return to.”

“Such as…?”

A moment of silence.

“Lord Byron, for one.”

“Good choice! Great poetry, and a fascinating life too.”

“Mmmm. He definitely got up to some shenanigans on his Grand Tour.”

With lots of young men, Phil thinks. He decides to probe further.

“Anybody else?”

Dan slips him a quizzical look before picking up a random hardback and flicking through it.

“T. S. Eliot.”

“Another good choice!”

“How about you then?” Dan queries, seeming irritated. “Who’s your favourite author?”

Phil merely holds his recent purchase up to his face, peeping out from behind the cover.

“Ah,” Dan smiles, and Phil feels the tension melt away. “I suppose I should have guessed.”

After making their way through the maze of shelves they eventually locate the exit. As Phil walks through the door that Dan kindly holds open for him, he notices the other man take in a deep breath.

“So, on the subject of our friend Oscar. What do you make of his trial?”

Phil looks back at Dan with the panicked face of a deer in the headlights. Wilde’s trial, or trails , are still a risky topic sixty years later. Although he has a hunch about why Dan is asking about his opinions on Wilde, these are still untested waters. If Phil has read too much into Dan’s favourite authors, placed too much emphasis on the abuse hurled at him by the boys at The Oratory, focused too much on Dan’s meticulous sense of style and theatrical mannerisms and soft hand that felt surprisingly affectionate as it touched his, then this could all be over for him. This could be the start of rumours that destroy his life, exclusion that breaks his heart, and loneliness that turns it cold.

Phil’s hands are cold.

He’s starting to wish that a certain pair of palms would offer to warm them up.

Sod it. He may as well give it a try.

“I think it’s a crime,” he begins. “I don’t understand how somebody could be so... vindictive. To take a man to court for an act which hurts nobody, affects nobody, and is only the business of those who are involved, is utterly inhuman. Oscar Wilde was one of the greatest literary, classical and philosophical minds that this nation has ever seen, and yet he was put in prison and left to waste for what?! Gross indecency? It’s an outrage. So what if he had written books and poems about…,” he shrugs, “homosexual love? Those writings were works of art. It is stupid, ignorant and close-minded to take issue with it,” he finishes with a huff, having worked himself up a little bit too much. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to rant.”

As they turn left onto High Street Phil takes a nervous look at Dan, silently praying that he’s not about to be met with an icy stare. Instead his face is glowing, smiling feebly, eyes locked onto his in a state of awe.

There’s a short silence as they pass various shops.

“I dare say that I agree.”

“Hmmm.”

Silence falls again like a heavy blanket. The atmosphere isn’t uncomfortable, nor is is born out of having nothing left to say. Instead, it is the kind of serene and peaceful quietude that occurs when two individuals unexpectedly reveal a tender and intimate part of themselves, and are left to wordlessly contemplate their newfound solidarity.

“I’ve grown awfully hungry,” Dan pipes up, breaking the quiet. “I want to show you this adorable little cafe just down the road. Let me take you there, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. It’s ever so quaint.”

A minute or so later they arrive at a decadent-looking tea room. As they come into the warmth. Phil is immediately taken aback by the marble pillars, chandeliers and wood-panelled ceiling that decorate the large, luxurious venue. A bustling atmosphere is full of students neglecting their work in favour of an early lunch and retired couples sharing overpriced sandwiches. Following a short wait at the front of house, they are taken to a four-man table tucked into a corner with a view of the courtyard outside.

“Here’s a fact for you - this was the first coffee house in England,” Dan declares as he shucks his jacket and sets his fedora down onto the table. “Just popping to the little boy’s room, I won’t be a moment. Take a look at the menu, choose anything you fancy. It’s on me,” he announces, followed by a wink.

Phil watches Dan fondly as he snakes through the tables, observing the man’s heavy gait and sloped posture. Quite a juxtaposition between the eloquence of his articulation and gentle face, he decides. But before he can ease into his chair and relish the few minutes he has to process the day’s events thus far, a familiar voice suddenly cries out his name.

“Philip! Fancy seeing you here old chap.”

Bursting into view come John and Mary, who promptly set down bags copious bags of shopping on the now over-crowded table.

“Morning all” Phil beams, pulling out a chair as his friends sit down either side of him and shuffle up ridiculously close. “What brings you to The Grand Cafe this fine morning?”

John takes off his leather jacket and hangs it on the back of his chair. “We’ve just been out shopping, haven’t we?”

“Mmm, I can see that,” Phil retorts flatly. “But what for? Anything in particular?”

Mary opens her handbag to reveal a miniature tawny-coloured box, which she sets down on the wooden table before sliding it over towards Phil.

“It’s for the wife” Mary proclaims, holding her hands to her face as she smiles. “It’s our one-month anniversary next week, so I thought I may as well treat the old girl with something special.”

John sighs. “Mary, I’ve already told you that you can’t have a one month anniversary ! The word comes from the Latin ‘annus’, meaning year, and ‘versus’, meaning ‘return’. Get it wrong one more time and I’ll tell the Oxford dons to barr you from ever studying English again!”

Mary scoffs. “For God’s sake John, you’re starting to sound like your husband!” she jests, rolling her eyes towards Phil as she turns to him for a reaction. Preferring to avoid the conflict, Phil instead takes a look inside the box to see what could be for Mary’s “wife”.

The hinge of the top lid pops open, and concealed in the white satin lining is a gold ring. Adorned with a sizeable green stone surrounded by a cluster of several smaller, clear gems around the edge, it twinkles attractively under the dazzling lights of the cafe as he turns the bo from side to side. Phil doesn’t know much about gems and jewelry, but he has a feeling that this must have been fairly pricey. And such a pretty ring! But who for?

“Come on Lester, back me up here. You know how to speak Latin. I know I’m correct, aren’t I?”

“Uhh, yeah, you’re right,” he stutters, blinking in confusion. He examines the box again. “Who’s this ring for though?”

Mary and John exchange a look.

“I-It’s for Beth, obviously,” the black haired woman explains as if Phil were an idiot for not understanding. “What other special woman do I have in my life?”

Beth? Special woman?

“Come on Phil! Don’t tell me you had no idea!” she laughs, blushing as she folds her arms and scoots in further still. Phil can feel the embarrassment creep over him. Mary? In a relationship with...Beth?

“We’re the same, me and you.”

Mary’s words from secondary school come flooding back to him. So that’s what she meant! But that means she knows that Phil is-

The ring is quickly snatched away and pocketed by its owner, who has begun to look slightly sheepish.

“Anyway, enough about this old thing. So, what are you out and about for?”

“Oh, I’m just er, running some errands with Dan.”

“Ahhhh, Daniel! How charming. I’m glad you two are finally getting to know one another.” Mary locks her fingers together to use as a chin rest, which, over the years, has come to signify that somebody has suddenly become the object of great interest.

“W...what do you mean by that?”

Mary’s head sinks lower as she gives Phil ‘a look’.

“Darling, Daniel thinks you’re the bee’s knees . He hasn’t shut up about you ever since he first caught a glimpse of your pretty little face when we had our first ever lecture together.”

First ever lecture? But that was back in October. Dan , talking about him , and for over a month - before they even met?? Phil traces his mind back to the day where he emerged from a lecture hall talking to Mary about how nasal their new professor’s voice was - or was this the professor that kept sneezing? Regardless, Dan probably caught sight of him then. But to have noticed Phil so early on, and only have approached him a few weeks ago? Has he seriously been doting for that long?

Electric blood courses through Phil’s veins as his brain runs a hundred miles a minute. Dan. Talking about him. To Mary. Secretly. For weeks. Tempting theories flirt with Phil’s brain.

“...what do you make of Wilde’s trial?”

“Not that I’m... stalking you or anything”

“... come and sit down here with me…”

Phil has never been more bewildered in his entire life, despite everything now making perfect sense.

Mary and Beth are...together.

Bill and John are probably also together.

Mary is a... homosexual .

Mary has known that Phil was also a homosexual ever since they first met.

Dan and Mary have (somehow) become friends.

Dan has become... interested in him.

And Mary has known about it all this time.

He shifts absent-mindedly in his seat, still staring at the floor with a blank expression. Despite these revelations, Phil wishes - he wishes he was even allowed to wish - that everything about Dan was now leading itself to one alluring conclusion, down one inevitable path, but the path is twisted and covered in leaves and bracken, and the bracken , Phil remembers to the tune of Du Maurier’s Rebecca , “the bracken had entered into an alien marriage with a host of nameless shrubs, poor, bastard things that clung about their roots as though conscious of their spurious origin. A lilac had mated-”

He begins to imagine Dan and himself as vines interlaced around each other and-

“Phil? Hello?”

He stifles a choke.

“Are you alright? You went very pale, and then very red. I hope you’re not having hot flushes. You’re too early to be going through your menopause.”

“Menopause?”

Mary cackles. “Ah, my humour is lost on both you. Anyway, look sharp, Dan’s here.”

He raises his head to see Dan weaving his way through the tables once again. The sleeves on his white shirt have been rolled up, and his tie is loosened slightly. All Phil can do is sit and stare with his cheeks a shameful shade of scarlet.

“‘Ello ‘ello ello! What a pleasure to see you here!” he beams at Mary before turning to John. “Hullo there, I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Daniel, pleased to make your acquaintance.” As the pair shake hands, Phil melts at the charm of Dan’s genteel formalities. This man, who is so handsome, so well educated, and so polite and witty and well dressed, thinks that he, Philip Michael Lester, is the “bees knees”? He’ll have to ask Mary for details later.

Lunch is a spectacle and a half. It emerges that Dan’s family is wealthy, very wealthy - more so than Phil’s, he is borderline aristocratic - and he offers to pay for every sandwich, cake, biscuit, every cup of exotic tea and coffee, and later every glass of expensive champagne that the waiters bring out on lavish trays. Dan woos their company with tale after tale, joke after joke, and by the time John checks his watch and reminds Mary that they really should get back to their dormitories before three o’clock, Phil finds himself fixated on Dan, eyes following him as if he were the second coming of Christ. Bills paid, jackets donned, bags arranged and door drunkenly stumbled out of, the quartet part ways as the sunshine dips behind the horizon and the temperature lulls itself back to freezing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After arriving at Raleigh on Cowley Road, the two students spend an hour or so wandering around the shop and making up characters for each of the bicycles by imitating their imagined personalities with various voices and poses. By the time they’re threatened with being locked inside as the shop closes for the day, the pair of them have finally decided on a bike for Phil to buy. Or, as it turns out, for Dan to buy for Phil. All £30 worth. The curly-haired boy had insisted, claiming that the Clubman Model 25 was the best bike in the entire shop, and that it would be an early birthday present, and that his parents had given him far too much money to spend over Michaelmas, and besides, he wanted to buy it for him, so that was that. Phil had first coyly protested, then seriously protested, until he let himself be spoiled by this increasingly confusing man who was now offering to pay for his expenses. Maybe it was the champagne. Maybe it wasn’t. It was probably the champagne when Dan insisted they both sit on the bike and ride it home together.

“Dan, this is not going to work, I’m telling you.”

“Oh, don’t be such a bore! Hurry up, get on! It’ll be getting dark soon and it’s too far to walk. You have no choice” he announces, triumphant as he puts Phil’s book inside a leather bag attached to the back of the bike and swings a leg over the navy blue frame.

“I don’t see how I’m going to fit on here. This isn’t a tandem bicycle.”

“It’s easy!” he assures with a gratified smile. “My brother and I used to do it all the time when we were young. If you sit down on this part of the seat, put your feet on the lower frame here , and hold onto this bottom part of the handlebars, you’ll be absolutely fine.”

Remaining dubious, Phil shuffles over to his recent purchase before staring long and hard at it, trying to figure out how to avoid cracking his head open within thirty seconds of liftoff.

“Stop dilly-dallying you wet rag. Look, do you want some help getting on?” Dan reaches out a hand and touches Phil’s forearm reassuringly, causing his arm to seize up.

“No! No, I’ll be fine,” comes his embarrassingly sharp reply. Damnit. They’re going to have to sit very close for this to work without them both dying.

“Okay, how am I supposed to do this again?”

Dan shuffles back on the seat before patting the front part with his right hand. Trying to suppress his nerves, Phil swings his left leg over the bike and grips the bottom part of the handlebars as told, except perhaps slightly more firmly than need be.

“Like this?”

“Yes, except that you’re forgetting the most important part.”

“What?!” he cries a little too loudly as he starts to get impatient.

The intimacy of having Dan sit only a few centimetres behind him is starting to have an adverse effect.

“Bottom on seat! Then we can set off.”

Phil really has no reason to huff, but agitation makes him. God. If only he weren’t so awkward and obvious.

“Chocks away!” Dan cries, and suddenly he senses movement behind him as the boy begins to pedal up the pavement and across onto the road.

“Aagghhh!”

“Stay calm Philip! You’ll be safe in my hands,” Dan shouts against the howling wind. Hearing those words spoken so closely to his ear is enough for Phil to settle down and keep mum, gazing around at the empty streets that they cycle by. The sky’s blue hues have faded to a cool evening grey, with dark, speckled clouds stretching across it. Breaking the silvery sheet is crisp tangerine strip where the setting sun illuminates the horizon, peppered by bursts of soft, glowing clouds that streak across the skyline. Nostalgia bares its warm hug to him. It feels like the family holidays that Phil used to go on when he was a child, where each day came to a close in the back of the family motorcar, staring out of the window at the spectacular sunsets best observed on winding country lanes over endless fields. He feels at home. He feels safe.

Out of tiredness, or, dare he admit it, out of relaxation, Phil has subconsciously leaned backwards enough for his spine to be pressed up against Dan’s chest. He’s not sure quite how it happened... but it has. Earlier on in the day he might have leapt forward and apologised. But now? Now he’s too sleepy to react, and anyway, at this point he just can’t bring himself to worry about this sort of thing anymore. Dan’s not complaining, and there’s nobody around to see it happen.

They cycle past the empty shops and illuminated houses until they pass Magdalene College and reach the High Street again. This time it’s dark, and the Christmas lights decorating the shops have slowly begun to turn on.

“This is pretty isn’t it?” Dan hums behind him, voice surprisingly low and mellow in contrast to his comparative bellowing at the cafe earlier on.

“Mmmmm.”

“I love Christmas - it’s one of my favourite times of year. I love getting festive when December starts, with all the lights and mince pies and scented candles. I do find it stressful shopping for people though. I always feel like I’m going to put my foot in it. And of course there’s the part where everything begins to get horribly fake and commercial, but I don’t particularly want to think about that at the moment if I’m honest. Everything is all too perfect right now.”

“Mmm.” All too perfect.

“I’m considering joining the choir this year,” Dan continues. “I haven’t sung in a choir since I was about thirteen. I do miss it occasionally. Ah well. We’ll have to see.”

The shop displays sparkle as they sail past - newspaper vendors and tea rooms and tuck shops and travel agencies all closing in preparation for Sunday.

“So you can act and sing?”

Dan’s laugh is short and shaky. “I suppose I can. Luckily there’s no singing in this play that’s coming up though. God,” he exhales, “I don’t even want to think about the damned thing.”

“Why, has something gone wrong?”

“No. Well, not really.”

There’s a brief silence.

“The problem is is that I’m beginning to get rather stressed about it the whole ordeal. There’s only a couple of weeks left until we’re meant to be performing, but I’ve got a lot of work to complete for Music and rehearsals are starting to take up a lot of my time, and to make matters worse this sodding roommate that I’ve got keeps taking up my side of our study room and I’m not too sure that he really likes me anymore and I just…,” he sighs, “I don’t know. It’s an intense period, to say the least.”

“Hmmm.”

Phil turns his attention back towards the shops as they make their way towards his college. As they cruise down the High Street, the faint sound of music begins to waft through the cars and chatter. It gets louder as they cycle onwards, until they come up to a bakery where a small brass band stands outside in the cold, playing a tune that Phil knows well but can’t name. There’s a small crowd gathered outside, and as the song finishes, people cheer.

“Dan.”

“Mmm?”

“If you’re worrying about Christmas shopping, why don’t you come with me? I was planning on going on the first weekend of December. I’m a master at choosing presents for people, so I’m sure I’ll be able to help. And I’d be happy to. I owe you for today.”

“Oh...than-”

“And about getting work done for Music - you could always use my room. It’s not very large but it does have a lot of desk space, and I don’t have any pesky roommates that would get on your nerves. Just ask. I won’t say no, I mean, how could I? You’d be very welcome. Tell the porter you’re here to see Phil at room seventeen, staircase nine, and he’ll let you in.”

The other man doesn’t say a word. As they cycle down the narrow path into Catte Street, across the cobbled square host to the 18th-century Radcliffe Camera and down Brasenose Lane with its high walls, a soft drizzle begins to fall from the gloomy, blackening clouds. Dan clears his throat.

“Thank you, Phil,” he begins in a low voice. “Seriously. I shall have to take you up on that offer. When can I come over? Would next Friday be okay?”

“As I said, any time.”

“Are you sure I wouldn’t be disturbing you?”

“No, not at all. Dan, I’m offering. I wouldn’t have done so if I didn’t want to.”

“Okay,” he mutters, finally surrendering.

Turning onto Turl Street, Dan slows the pace to a halt as Phil disembarks. They walk in silence as they approach the gargantuan entrance to monumentous 14th-century college building.

“Well, here we are,” Dan announces.

Phil leans against the cold, carved, limestone walls that slant towards the dark wooden doors. He looks back at Dan, who holds the bike with one large, strong hand. The bike’s angle seems to have cornered him in this small nook, but Phil tries not to think about that. Instead, he looks up at Dan. The boy’s curls are slightly disheveled under his grey fedora, and his coat is covered with a haze of tiny raindrops. A satisfied smirk sits on his lips, and in the low light Phil can see that his dimpled cheeks glow a faint shade of pink.

“Thank you for today” Dan begins solemnly.

“It was my pleasure. Plus you paid for most of it anyway!”

“Hah! I guess did. Well, I suppose I should give this back to you and trot along back to Keble.” There’s a hint of resignation in his voice. “Come on, go inside. You’ll get soaked if you stand out here any longer.”

The frame is icy as Phil takes hold of it, raindrops spattering onto his wet hands as the downpour becomes stronger. Phil looks back up at Dan. Despite the storm getting worse, they both remain motionless, looking at each other. Dan’s eyes are fascinatingly deep and dark; moody against the backdrop of a thunderstorm and the billowing leaves of the tree behind him. Those eyes study him with equal interest, flitting over his neck and jaw, making Phil want to just shut his eyes and lean in and-

Dan, as if sensing the tension, closes his lids with a smile and takes two steps back.

“See you next week, Phil!”

Turning his shoulders away, he strides around the bike-wall alcove, exiting that little bubble that had just been created.

“Cheerio!” he cries, saluting as he marches off back to his own college.

Phil shivvers.

Ah well. Maybe next week.

#my writing #phan #phanfic #phanfiction #phandom #Dan and Phil #dnp #dan howell #phil lester #amazingphil #danisnotonfire #daniel howell

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raging-violets · 6 years ago

Note

Lap pillow for Peter/Brielle

Narnia: Lap Pillow // Prompt // Peter x Brielle

A/N: Set during Prince Caspian

Peter wasn’t sure if the sound he let out from his mouth was a grunt of pain or a sigh of relief. Both–probably–filled his veins as he lowered himself to a sitting position, just seconds before his legs gave way entirely, crashing him down onto the ledge that overlooked the courtyard of the castle where the party grew boisterously as the night went on.

Peter smiled to himself, watching as Caspian whirled across the cobblestones, holding onto Lucy’s hands as he moved in a dance to the lively music playing below. Or, as he realized with amusement, followed Lucy’s movements as she dictated the direction of their dance.

Edmund sat happily at the head of the feasting table, cheersing with the centaurs that sat–stood?–around him, equally enjoying the feast. Susan was nearby, sitting carefully on the ground with a wide circle of children around her, listening to every word of whatever story she was telling, smiling with a mature-like sincerity when they would react at the right parts.

Peter lifted his gaze to look at the sky. At the stars that twinkled above, nestled against the backdrop of the moon that shone proudly above them, bringing extra light to the courtyard. The night was crisp, just in-between warm and cool, a perfect fit for the light tunic that’d been festooned upon him in rich navy colors once Caspian declared the night for celebration with the Pevensies’ immediate approval. The lights around the courtyard, around the castle was especially bright to the young king. Just as it should’ve been for a celebration. Miraz was defeated, Narnia was safe.

Everything was the way it should be.

And yet, there was enough wrong that Peter couldn’t quite enjoy himself. He watched the party with a certain detachment that he’d grown used, similar to how he saw things before returning to Narnia again. It seemed to be a century ago, having gotten into so many fights with other boys in his school, unable to stomach the disrespect coming his way. (He was a king for Aslan’s sake!) Watched as his peers went about their lives so..frivolously, with their noses so far in the air for anything different that they could’ve drowned if it rained. Didn’t think much about others’ lives unless it directly impacted them.

He wasn’t part of that world anymore, probably could never be again. Just as he’d never truly be a King again.

Peter heard footsteps, light and airy, coming up behind him and intuitively knew who it was. Edmund dragged his feet in a way that made their mother consistently fuss over the patching of his shoes and echoed his role in Narnia of following the decisions of the King, not quick to make them of his own volition, Lucy’s footsteps were quick, filled with the enthusiasm and enjoyment she had for life, ready to get to the next thing she could fixate on. Susan’s were almost a dance; a musicality that mixed her youthfulness and maturity in a combination no one else could follow. And Caspian’s were equally as confident as they were insecure; getting used to his new role as king, as leader of his people.

Brielle’s were light and airy, an example of the way she flittered from person to person, a social butterfly who enjoyed everything life had to offer in meeting new people and learning new things…and finding new ways to annoy him.

But he was less than annoyed when he looked up as Brielle brushed aside the skirts of her pale cream dress, of which matched perfectly with her headdress, and lowered herself to her knees beside him. A sharp contrast to the chainmail, battle armor, and determined scowl she wore within the battle with Miraz and the Telmarine army.

She looked at him for a moment, cautious curiosity coming to her face, then said with a small smile, “You look like we just lost the war, my liege.”

Peter sighed. “We almost did.” He frowned, eyes narrowing for a second, then corrected himself. “I almost did.” It wasn’t anyone else’s fault what’d happened. It was his, all alone. He’d abused the power he had over his followers, bullied them, in a way, into following his lead so that he could..what? Prove to Caspian he was the one to rule Narnia?

Peter lowered his head, shaking it back and forth so that his fringe shifted on the light breeze that blew through the courtyard. “We lost so many today, and for what?”

“For Narnia,” Brielle reminded him. “For the Telmarines who had no choice but to follow Miraz and his men. For those who wanted peace.” She chuckled, tucking loose brown hair behind her ear. “And, I suppose, to not die.” As if sensing the miscalculated landing of her joke, she blinked rapidly, gently shaking her head.

Peter chuckled humorlessly. He didn’t like to think about things like that too often; where he brought in the stressors of his thoughts as a king into…into what? It was too much for him to hide away with the confidence he worked to bring into his role as the king.

Former King?

Was he still considered a King of Narnia anymore?

The Son of Adam that turned into the High King upon defeating the White Witch and releasing Narnia from its hundred year winter storm?

Maybe it was that loss that was hitting him harder than he’d expected. The loss of a title. After such a short time of having it. Most of the time being when he was back in the ‘real world’. His former life wasn’t a part of him anymore, as much as he thought of his parents and the war that brewed there. But he couldn’t let his heart go like that and he didn’t want to bring it up to her.

She didn’t expect him to be perfect, didn’t think he was. Teased and taunted him about it at almost every turn. And in the moment between breaths that was a comfort in itself. Still he wouldn’t have expect what came next.

Exhaustion came over him quicker than he’d anticipated. Maybe it was finally slowing down, finally off his feet after long days of battle and conflict. Maybe it was the adrenaline rush petering out, letting everything else run him over. Maybe it was speaking, out loud, of the worries that filled his head. But Peter’s head lolled, his vision swam, he worked hard not to yawn, eyes sliding shut.

He hadn’t realized he was moving until he rocked forward, shaking his head. His eyes fluttered, working to stay open. Brielle surprised him, grabbing his arm in a gentle grasp to move him over and down, down, down until his head rested on her lap, her skirts creating the perfect pillow for his weary head.

Despite how they were often in each other’s space while in battle (while sparring or in actual battle), taunting each other, working to cut each other down when in the moments they could show her closeness to the Pevensies, the moment was strange and…nice all on its own. Peter looked out at the city through half-lidded eyes, barely breathing as he felt her hand combing through his hair.

He relaxed.

A full body sigh escaped him, his eyes nearly closed. One breath, two breaths, nearly asleep.

After some time, her fingers stopped, he didn’t mind. Didn’t move. She was there with him and all the worries and disappointments of the day had melted away.

[ Number/Ship Rom-Com | Ask Box ]

@darknightfrombeyond @chuck-hansens

#Anonymous #ocappreciation #allaboutocs #the chronicles of narnia #peter pevensie #pc #prince caspian #narnia oc #oc: brielle #peter x brielle #prielle #answered ask #prompt #authored by: riley #gif by: riley

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momtemplative · 5 years ago

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Four Seeds.

Very little experiential information comes in from the outside world these days. The ports, energetic and literal, are closed for the foreseeable future. The ships have been docked.

So, every piece and part and bit of this house—as well as the people in it—suddenly feel like they are all posing for extreme close-ups. Corners that had been ignored for time immemorial are now simply untenable—how did I not notice that mess before? The top shelves that were wooly with dust are now slick and glossy. Random shoe boxes that had morphed into being part of the shelves (we began to stack things on top of them) have been cracked open like time capsules—so that’s where all the finger puppets went! Jesse even cleaned out his desk when he brought it upstairs and found the plastic polka-dot costume-jewelry rings we used to get married at the courthouse, two weeks before our actual wedding twelve years ago!

There are many treasures yet to uncover.

We also observe the bliss that comes from the alignment of two glorious things: decent weather and a spacious backyard. When we bought this house twelve years ago, we had no idea that our backyard would become such a cherished commodity. That, come Spring of 2020, we’d be rejoicing every single day we stepped foot on our chipped-up deck and muddy yard.

The yard is the scenic backdrop to a heavy percentage of our day. A few days ago, the dog gallivanted passed with a dead fetus of a mole rat dangling from his lips, and then dropped the rubbery carcass at his feet. I screeched and Ruthy heard that screech and ran my way yelling “What is it, Mama?!!” And, well, it felt as if all of humanity was contained in that tiny moment.

A while back, we planted five bean seeds that we got as a gift from my sister-in-law’s baby shower. We—Ruth and I—placed them deeply in rich soil in a medium-sized terra cotta pot. During the few days, Ruth treated the pot like a tiny sandbox for her toy figurines. I reminded her that dirt-play was for outside and told her we need to protect the baby seeds if we want them to grow. So, she flooded them with water then covered the soil with an entire bag of cotton balls to “Keep them warm.”

I reluctantly removed the terra cotta pot from the front window where it received the best lighting and radiating warmth, but where it was equally under threat of Ruth’s tiny fingers and endless curiosity. I placed the pot temporarily on the porch, safely out of reach but still in the (albeit chillier) sun. Then I promptly forgot to bring it inside that night when the temperatures plummeted. (When I awoke and peered out the front door to see the little pot out there, soil nearly frozen, my heart sank. I figured those guys were goners.)

The pot wound up on an out-of-reach shelf, then the kitchen table, then the back deck. It went through multiple re-locations, temperatures and lighting variations, all to keep it safe from little fingers that love nothing more than the feel of dirt.

It felt like one of those social experiments that was forced on the youth of yesteryear in school, where they had to pretend to be a parent to an egg, a watermelon, a doll, something non-sentient. There I was, taking painstaking care of my terra-cotta pot filled with, what appeared to be, just soil.

If I’m being honest, I was sure we had abused those five little bean seeds well beyond growth. I tried to imagine their little cosmos beneath the soil. Was it a forgiving place? Ahhh well, I thought. Damn shame.

Until, a few more days later, Opal called from the kitchen— “MOM!!! LOOK!”

I found her peering at my terra cotta pot with a wide grin. Behold, there were four tiny sprouts that had harnessed all their imperial magic, their godly juices, their tiny but most potent life forces to come forth into the world.

Once they broke through to the open air, nothing could hold them back. They grew so quickly you could almost see it with bare eyes. We paid close attention and reported on them numerous times a day. “How are the spouts?” “Honey can you check on the sprouts?” “Is the soil dry?”

I returned them to the front window because I couldn’t resist the accommodations, even if I did notice occasional dirty piles around the edges of the pot alongside a Daniel Tiger Figurine waist-deep in the dirt. But at that point, the sprouts seems less vulnerable, more teenage-like. If they were out in the garden, they'd have to hold their own with any-which backyard creature. I figured now they could handle—benefit from, even—some light adversity.

They got so tall I had to tie them with pipe-cleaners to a stick, for lack of a trellis. I’d have waited a bit longer to plant them if I had expected them to thrive so suddenly and so wildly. We needed just a little more time before they could go into the outside vegetable bed. But they were clearly outgrowing their home in the pot, like the hermit crab in the book Ruth had been reading in preschool before the shut-down.

Then one morning, Ruth emerged from behind her play tent wearing a backpack for pretend school, slouching from its visible weight on her shoulders.

“Whew, this backpack is HEA-VY!” she said, fishing for the acknowledgement of her strength from either Jesse or I or both who were in the vicinity.

She trailed off in another direction, audibly talking to herself about the plants.

Jesse and I exchanged a look of precise understanding and quick-stepped in her direction.

Indeed, Ruth had crammed the entire potted plant into her small backpack.

I gasped when I saw the sprouts, a good 10 inches tall now, shoved to fit in there, like unruly hairs manhandled into a fitted cap. To her credit, she must’ve put the pot into her backpack with some level of care, because there was very little dirt in there. She even packed the little tray underneath! She also left the zipper open to give them air. But the sprouts— those fragile strands that had already weathered so much—were discolored from their bends and from where the leaves had snapped or bent straight in half.

Oh dear. I said.

“I just wanted to bring them to show and tell,” Ruth said. Eyes waiting and hungry, like gaping vessels for us to tell her how she should feel right now.

Jesse said. “Oh honey, it was an accident. You didn’t know.” Sweet girl was as proud of those small-scale bits enchantment as I was. Proud enough to take them to pretend show and tell.

I extracted the terra cotta pot from the backpack with nimble surgeon fingers. I placed it on the kitchen table, the way a paramedic would lift a body that had sustained an uncertain amount of injuries onto a gurney. I tried to smooth out the sprouts as if I were running my fingers through hair, avoiding the larger knots. I released a bloated, audible exhale.

And that is where the four wounded sprouts currently reside—in their own little personal ICU—until we receive further information. Time will tell.

March 30, 2020

#momtemplative #HeatMamaWords #mindfulparenting #FourSeeds

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miralboom · 2 years ago

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Forecasting Love and Weather is a romantic comedy series ofpeople at the Korea Meteorological Administration who break, fall and get back on their feet every day. Overview: Forecasting Love and Weather is a cheerful romance drama of people at the Korea Meteorological Administration who break, fall and get back on their feet every day. Starring: Park Min Young, Song Kang, Yoon Bak, Yura Writer: Sun Young Launch date: February 12thĮpisodes: 16 episodes (Every Sat & Sun 2 episodes per week) Their sparkling love and growth, as well as the chemistry and hardships among the five friends, remind us of our intense yet beautiful youth. The fine line between a heart-fluttering first love and a heart-warming friendship gives them butterflies. Now they’ve each become twenty-five and twenty-one. They called out each other’s names for the first time when they were twenty-two and eighteen. Overview: Twenty Five, Twenty One is a drama of youths who lost their dream to the zeitgeist of 1998, a drama of their dilemma and growth.

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See below for Netflix’s full 2022 Korean slate.ĭirected by: Jung Jeehyun Writer: Kwon Doe-un Launch date: February 12th Episodes: 16 episodes (Every Sat & Sun 2 episodes per week) Starring: Kim Tae-ri, Nam Joo-hyuk, Kim Ji Yeon, Choi Hyun Wook, Lee Ju Myung Disney+ unveiled a slate of seven Korean originals when it went live in South Korea and other Asian territories last fall, and Warner Media’s HBO Max will undoubtedly invest heavily in the category when it eventually launches in East Asia sometime this year. Netflix has carved out a commanding lead as the go-to global platform for Korean content fans - the service has launched more than 130 Korean titles to date - but competition from international rivals is ramping up. Some of the highlights of Netflix’s coming Korean slate include All of Us Are Dead, in which zombies invade a high school Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area, an adaptation of the hit Spanish genre series and action film Seoul Vibe, about the adventures of a special-ops team set against the backdrop of the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. “We are excited to continue collaborating with Korean storytellers to bring the K-wave to new heights,” said Don Kang, Netflix’s vp content for Korea. Sci-fi mystery The Silent Sea also made it to the number one spot on the weekly Top 10 lists for non-English content. Hits that followed Squid Game’s lead included the dark fantasy series Hellbound, which ranked No. Korean Film Figures Condemn Venice for Honoring Kim Ki-duk Despite Sexual Abuse Allegations

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thesinglesjukebox · 7 years ago

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youtube

LAURA JEAN - GIRLS ON THE TV [8.27] Melbourne singer goes back to high school, discovers synths...

Jonathan Bradley: Laura Jean's self-titled album, her fourth -- it is now four years old -- is a skeletal folk record: it sounds like an Australia I don't often hear in pop song or mass media. It draws wintry charcoal sketches of Melbourne city parks and lonely stretches of national highways. The gothic domesticity acted like blotting paper, pressing against the natural rhythms of life and recording them in irrupted detail. Against this backdrop, "Girls on the TV" is a new single awash with astonishing colour: pastel synth swirls and a disco bass pulse pushing through the mix. Removed from context, this pop impulse might not be so unexpected, but I hear in Jean's airy, wavering tones an artist reinventing herself as the introspective rejoinder to the vivant throwback fervor of Betty Who or Catcall. And yet even in this new guise, Jean's bleak folk endures, with an anecdotal lyric that carefully and precisely narrates the drawn-out process of a girlhood destroyed. Ricky, who can "dance like the girls on the TV," is a childhood friend whose joy in the physical possibilities of her body is commodified and contaminated: by demanding teachers who ask her to perform feats she cannot, by cruel classmates who tease her for her weight, and by adult men who make sexual demands upon her. "Girls on the TV" is a sad song of youth that is made sadder by how keenly aware it is of the libertine and evanescent possibilities of the pop it embraces. [9]

Rebecca A. Gowns: "Girls on the TV" falls into that tricky vein of narrative pop songs; telling a full story can be hard to pull off without coming across as maudlin or pretentious or just clunky, but Laura Jean executes it perfectly. It's a story about a woman extending compassion to her sister -- or friend, or possibly even an old lover/crush -- but it tugs at me the most when I think of them as siblings. It's got to be, right? This kind of bittersweet, constant reminiscing reminds me of the pangs I get when I think about my little brother. We grew up so close. We're so different today. We keep reaching out to each other, grasping each other's hands through gaps in a wall that keeps building then falling down then building up again. But every time I see him, no matter the year, no matter the occasion, I'll think of the way we danced when we were kids, singing along to music videos, pulling faces, promising each other we'd be in a band together someday. "Someday" -- and then time flies, and people change -- but the memory remains. This is that feeling in a crystal bottle. [10]

Will Adams: "Girls on the TV" plays like a memory you visit while idly passing the time. The vault you access in your mind safe and warm, bordered by storybook clouds and soundtracked by dreamy synthpop. But, as always, the details that pierce through the most are the ones you want to remember the least: authority figures pressuring you to overexert yourself; peers excavating your every flaw and parading them about; parents imposing their austere lifestyle on you; abusers reducing you to a vessel for their pleasure; the eventual realization that everyone around you has moved forward, gotten hitched, settled down, while you remain stuck in place, feet swamped with the mud of an unkind youth. But those dancing girls are still there, as is the lingering promise that, one day, you could be one of them too. [7]

Katherine St Asaph: A tale of dashed female friendship akin to Who Will Run the Frog Hospital or Cat's Eye; what it loses in prose it gains in a kaleidoscopic, wistful arrangement. It fills its six minutes well; like memory itself, it's alternatingly immediate and almost photorealistic (that one deep synth around 0:30), then languid and ungraspable. [9]

Alfred Soto: The rare single whose insistence on taking its time pays off, "Girls on the TV" sparkles like distant stars, its synthesizers a platform instead of hoping to get noticed. The pace and arrangement suits Laura Jean's remarkable performance: a damaged meditation on loving someone you can see and hear but can't touch and all the better for it -- "Space Age Love Song" and "TVC 15" without the spritz. "She could always dance better than me," Jean repeats: a statement of fact, mild complaint, and prayer. [9]

Vikram Joseph: A languorously paced, well-written coming-of-age story about female friendship and crushed dreams. The airy, breathy pre-chorus is a particularly good showcase for Laura Jean's vocals. It's unlikely to get the blood racing -- sonically, it's undeniably a bit adult contemporary -- but it owns the middle of the road better than 95 per cent of the stuff you'd hear on drive-time radio. [7]

Julian Axelrod: An immersive, deeply felt meditation on ambition and destiny, sung with the resignation of a woman long since disillusioned with both. The longer I sit with it, the more its faults feel like strengths: Its leisurely runtime reflects time's slow and relentless march, while its dourness finds balance in its faint glimmers of hope. After living within it for a week, it already feels like I've carried this story with me my entire life. [9]

Peter Ryan: The languid quality is perfect misdirection, masking what's going on until the chords break open at the chorus. What emerges is an unflinching sketch of a web connecting childhood pain, coping attempts, and "contemporary adult life." There's no glib gesturing toward resilience, and instead of pity or judgment I hear an indictment of actual and would-be tormentors. Laura Jean brings a sibling's testimony, one that doesn't seek to bridge the gulf between shared upbringing and shared experience, and is all the more potent for it. The wrapping is more chiffon than velvet, but underneath is still an iron fist. [9]

Jonathan Bogart: A folkie's idea of dance music, muted and unflustered, with warm electric bass and polyrhythms played by actual hands rather than programming. Sweet, certainly, and the lyrics' sketch of childhood and adolescent friendship are well-observed and touching without being sentimental. Which is the trouble: the whole production is an exercise in keeping vulgarity, of which sentimentality is one expression, and actual dance music that makes you sweat another, at arm's length. [6]

Alex Clifton: Like if Belle & Sebastian's "Expectations" was twice as long with more disco. Laura Jean has the same gifts for both character and melody Stuart Murdoch has. The dreamy backing helps it go by as quickly as my teenage years did, and her falsetto for the chorus haunts the rest of the song like a memory. It's steeped in nostalgia, but is there any other way to write about adolescence? [7]

William John: Like half the Internet, I've been preoccupied with Hannah Gadsby's Nanette for the past few weeks: a subversive, quasi-TED Talk comedy special that blew my mind when I first saw it in a theatre late last year. Now on Netflix, Nanette is hard to distill succinctly, but central to its significance is its blunt presentation of the devastation rapacious men can effect on others. That devastation lingers in those victims and continues to humiliate them for years -- decades, even -- afterward. In "Girls on the TV", fellow Australian woman Laura Jean presents an unvarnished picture of friend Ricky, a bullied, vulnerable, talented tap dancer, and reminisces wistfully upon the relationship they formed as members of the high school concert band. In the fourth verse, a new character is introduced -- Jean's mother's boyfriend, a violent, young, and predatory 21 year old. In a line excised from the video edit of the song, Jean notes that after Ricky's encounter with this man, she felt like she "didn't know her, or how she got that way"; there is no explicit cause-and-effect drawn, but the implication for the listener is that this incident had extensive ramifications for Ricky, that included cocaine addiction and relationships with married men. It's a sad story that demonstrates the way the action of a third party can destabilise and dismantle a friendship, but it's told with a compelling breathiness by Jean that seems to gather more and more momentum with each passing second. I'm unaccustomed to hearing such brusque, direct, and yet tender third-person storytelling in modern synth-pop. The importance of storytelling is central to Gadsby's Nanette -- stories "hold our cure," she says, and have the power to forge connection. Jean's memories of sitting in front of rage on a Saturday morning when young serve as an access point into an important story that deserved to be recounted. [9]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

#laura jean #pop #pop music #music #music video #music writing #music reviews #australian music #new music

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techcrunchappcom · 4 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/analysis-nato-faces-conundrum-as-it-mulls-afghan-pullout-national-news/

Analysis: NATO faces conundrum as it mulls Afghan pullout | National News

ISLAMABAD (AP) — After 20 years of military engagement and billions of dollars spent, NATO and the United States still grapple with the same, seemingly intractable conundrum — how to withdraw troops from Afghanistan without abandoning the country to even more mayhem.

An accelerated U.S. drawdown over the past few months, led by the previous U.S. administration, has signaled what may be in store for long-suffering Afghans.

Violence is spiking and the culprits are, well, everyone: the Taliban, the Islamic State group, warlords, criminal gangs and corrupt government officials.

Currently, 2,500 U.S. and about 10,000 NATO troops are still in Afghanistan. NATO defense ministers will meet on Wednesday and Thursday to discuss the way forward.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is reviewing his predecessor’s 2020 deal with the Taliban, which includes a May 1 deadline for a final U.S. troop withdrawal from the war-ravaged country. In Washington, calls are mounting for the U.S. to delay the final exit or renegotiate the deal to allow the presence of a smaller, intelligence-based American force.

All key players needed for a stable post-war Afghanistan come with heavy baggage.

The Taliban now hold sway over half the country and both sides in the conflict have continued to wage war, even after peace talks between the Taliban and the Kabul government began last year in Qatar.

The Taliban have lately been accused of targeted killings of journalists and civic leaders — charges they deny. But they lack credibility, particularly because they refuse to agree to a cease-fire. There is also no proof they have cut ties with al-Qaida militants as required under the Taliban-U.S. deal. A January report by the U.S Treasury found that they continue to cooperate and that al-Qaida is getting stronger.

Some reports from areas under Taliban control speak of heavy-handed enforcement of a strict interpretation of Islamic law: While the Taliban allow girls to go to school, the curriculum for both boys and girls seems mostly focused on religion. There is little evidence of women’s progress in the deeply conservative, rural areas.

Afghan warlords — some accused of war crimes — have been co-opted by international forces since the 2001 collapse of the Taliban regime, amassing power and wealth. In a vacuum that would follow the withdrawal of foreign troops, activists and Afghans fear the heavily armed warlords would return to another round of fighting, similar to the 1992-1996 bloodletting. At that time, the warlords turned their firepower on each other, killing more than 50,000 people, mostly civilians, and destroying much of the capital, Kabul.

Afghan forces have also been accused of heavy-handedness. In January, a new U.N. report said that nearly a third of all detainees held in detention centers across Afghanistan say they have suffered some form of torture or ill-treatment. Corruption is rampant and government promises to tackle it, according to a U.S. watchdog, rarely go beyond paper.

The regional affiliate of the Islamic State group, which in particular targets the country’s minority Shiites, has grown more brazen and violent, its attacks increasing in frequency and audacity, testing a weak security apparatus.

Despite nearly $1 trillion spent in Afghanistan — of which a lion’s share went on security — lawlessness is rampant. According to the U.S. State Department, crime in Kabul is widespread, with criminals typically working in groups and using deadly force. “Local authorities are generally ineffective in deterring crime,” the State Department said. “Officers openly solicit bribery at all levels of local law enforcement. In some cases, officers carry out crimes themselves.”

Economic benchmarks are no better.

The World Bank said the poverty rate rose from 55% in 2019 to 72% in 2020. Two-thirds of Afghans live on less than $1.90 a day. Unemployment rose in 2020 to 37.9%, from 23.9%, the World Bank said last week.

“This is an absolute disgrace given the billions spent on this country over the last two decades,” Saad Mohsini, owner of Afghanistan’s popular TOLO TV, tweeted in response. “Who will stand up and take responsibility?”

Meanwhile, Afghan youth, activists, minorities and women worry that the freedoms they have won since 2001 — while still fragile — will be lost to a Taliban-shared government, and if not to the Taliban, then to warring warlords.

For the U.S. and NATO, the big concern is national security. Both want guarantees that Afghanistan will not again become a safe haven for terrorist groups as it was both during the Taliban era and when warlords ruled.

Among them is Abdur Rasoul Sayyaf, now a key player in Kabul, whose group brought al-Qaida’s Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan from Sudan in May 1996. Sayyaf was the inspiration behind the Philippine terrorist group Abu Sayyaf.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, another warlord in Kabul, briefly gave bin Laden a safe haven following the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that ousted the Taliban, who had up to that point sheltered the al-Qaida leader. In 2017, Hekmatyar signed a peace agreement with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and is now a member of the country’s wider peace reconciliation council.

Back in 2012, Human Rights Watch warned NATO that unless it held government forces as well as the Taliban accountable for abuses, the alliance’s “legacy would be a country run by abusive warlords — including the Taliban — and unaccountable security forces,” said Patricia Gossman, associate director for Asia at the New York-based group.

Analysts agree there is no easy solution to Afghanistan’s deteriorating conditions, regardless of whether NATO stays or goes.

“Let’s be very clear: A fragile peace process meant to stabilize the security environment hangs in the balance against the backdrop of a rogue’s gallery of spoilers,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the Washington-based Wilson Center.

Some say NATO and the U.S. should send a strong message for peace to all sides in Afghanistan’s protracted conflict.

“The U.S. and NATO must be very clear … that they do not wish more war in Afghanistan, that they want a political settlement between the warring parties and that those leaders who shout for more war, on both sides, are no longer good partners with the international community,” said Torek Farhadi, political analyst and former adviser to the Afghan government.

“Absent a political settlement, Afghanistan is headed for a bitter civil war and potentially the country being fractured in the longer run,” he added.

———

Associated Press news director for Afghanistan and Pakistan Kathy Gannon has been covering Afghanistan for The Associated Press since 1988. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/Kathygannon

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#afghan #analysis #conundrum #faces #mulls #pullout #National

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alexiabartolomeo-blog1 · 7 years ago

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Ten Interesting Afghanistan Novels

1. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini: “The Kite Runner tells the story of Amir, a young boy from the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, whose closest friend is Hassan. The story is set against a backdrop of tumultuous events, from the fall of Afghanistan's monarchy through the Soviet military intervention, the exodus of refugees to Pakistan and the United States, and the rise of the Taliban regime.” 2. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini: ”Mariam is an illegitimate child, and suffers from both the stigma surrounding her birth along with the abuse she faces throughout her marriage. Laila, born a generation later, is comparatively privileged during her youth until their lives intersect and she is also forced to accept a marriage proposal from Rasheed, Mariam's husband.” 3. Fear of Beauty by Susan Froetschel: “The battered body of an Afghan boy is found at the base of a cliff outside a remote village in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Did he fall as most of the villagers think? Or is this the work of American soldiers, as others want to believe? Not far from the village, the US Army has set up a training outpost. Sofi, the boy's illiterate young mother, is desperate to find the truth about her son's death. But extremists move in and offer to roust the "infidels" from the region, adding new pressures and restrictions for the small village and its women.” 4. The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam: “There’s Marcus, an English expat who was married to an outspoken Afghani doctor; David, a former American spy; Lara, from St. Petersburg, looking for traces of her brother, a Russian soldier who disappeared years before; Casa, a young Afghani whose hatred of the Americans has plunged him into the blinding depths of zealotry; and James, an American Special Forces soldier. Aslam reveals the intertwining paths that these characters have traveled, constructing a timely and intimate portrait of the complex ties that bind us and the wars that continue to tear us apart.” 5. The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi: “In Persian folklore, Syngue Sabour is the name of a magical black stone, a patience stone, which absorbs the plight of those who confide in it. It is believed that the day it explodes, after having received too much hardship and pain, will be the day of the Apocalypse. But here, the Syngue Sabour is not a stone but rather a man lying brain-dead with a bullet lodged in his neck. His wife is with him, sitting by his side. But she resents him for having sacrificed her to the war, for never being able to resist the call to arms, for wanting to be a hero, and in the end, after all was said and done, for being incapacitated in a small skirmish. Yet she cares, and she speaks to him. She even talks to him more and more, opening up her deepest desires, pains, and secrets. While in the streets rival factions clash and soldiers are looting and killing around her, she speaks of her life, never knowing if her husband really hears. And it is an extraordinary confession, without restraint, about sex and love and her anger against a man who never understood her, who mistreated her, who never showed her any respect or kindness. Her admission releases the weight of oppression of marital, social, and religious norms, and she leads her story up to the great secret that is unthinkable in a country such as Afghanistan.” 6. Caravans by James A. Michener: “The story is set in Afghanistan immediately following World War II. The protagonist, Mark Miller, is stationed in Kabul at the American embassy and is given the assignment of an investigation to find a young woman, Ellen Jasper, also from the United States, who has disappeared after her marriage to an Afghan national thirteen months previously. During his journey through Afghanistan, Miller comes to a deeper understanding of the complexities and nuances of contemporary Afghan life. His travels also reveal the similarities of human nature across cultural and social boundaries.” 7. Flashes of War: Short Stories by Katey Schultz: “Schultz questions the stereotypes of modern war by bearing witness to the shared struggles of all who are touched by it. Numerous characters-returning U.S. soldier and pragmatic jihadist, Afghan mother and listless American sister, courageous amputee and a ghost that cannot let go-appear in Flashes of War, which captures personal moments of fear, introspection, confusion, and valor in one collection spanning nations and perspectives.” 8. The Pearl that Broke Its Shell by Nadia Hashimi: “Kabul, 2007: The Taliban rules the streets. With a drug-addicted father and no brothers, Rahima and her sisters can rarely leave the house or attend school. Their only hope lies in the ancient Afghan custom of bacha posh, which allows young Rahima to dress and be treated as a son until she is of marriageable age. As a boy, she has the kind of freedom that was previously unimaginable...freedom that will transform her forever. But Rahima is not the first in her family to adopt this unusual custom. A century earlier, her great-great-grandmother Shekiba, left orphaned by an epidemic, saved herself and built a new life in the same way—the change took her on a journey from the deprivation of life in a rural village to the opulence of a king’s palace in the bustling metropolis of Kabul.” 9. The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis: “Breadwinner series is an award-winning novel about loyalty, survival, families, and friendship under extraordinary circumstances during the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan. Eleven-year-old Parvana lives with her family in one room of a bombed-out apartment building in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital city. Parvana’s father — a history teacher until his school was bombed and his health destroyed — works from a blanket on the ground in the marketplace, reading letters for people who cannot read or write. One day, he is arrested for the crime of having a foreign education, and the family is left without someone who can earn money or even shop for food. As conditions for the family grow desperate, only one solution emerges. Forbidden to earn money as a girl, Parvana must transform herself into a boy, and become the breadwinner.” 10. The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra: “Set in Kabul under the rule of the Taliban, this extraordinary novel takes readers into the lives of two couples: Mohsen, who comes from a family of wealthy shopkeepers whom the Taliban has destroyed; Zunaira, his wife, exceedingly beautiful, who was once a brilliant teacher and is now no longer allowed to leave her home without an escort or covering her face. Intersecting their world is Atiq, a prison keeper, a man who has sincerely adopted the Taliban ideology and struggles to keep his faith, and his wife, Musarrat, who once rescued Atiq and is now dying of sickness and despair.”

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fabrickind · 8 years ago

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Revolutionary Girl Utena Liveblog: Episode 1

It all begins here! Join me for sex, violence, intrigue, and lots of rambling analysis about societal structures.

After the opening theme, this episode starts off with a fairytale framework. The curtain rises, and we are told the story of a young princess who was saved by a prince on a white horse.

I know about two things, and that’s film theory and fabrics.With that, I have to say...the animators here clearly have no idea how fabric folds work.

Besides the surprising amount of foreshadowing in the opening theme animation, this sequence sets a lot of the tone of the series. It takes a familiar structure and changes it, though at this point in the series, you may not be aware of these changes. This is just a straightforward shoujo about a girl finding her prince and living happily ever after...right?

The spinning rose frame here is another recurring element in the series. What this episode is telling you is that this is a story, a fantasy. It is a framing. It had to have been framed by someone or some perspective. It is aware of itself as narrative, and is pointing the audience to also be aware of it as narrative. The brilliance of this framework is that the show starts of fairly straightforward, if a little weird and “anime” in its presentation, so that you go along with its premises, like you would with any other story out there. This is a series that teaches you how to watch it as you go, and devices like the opening framework simultaneously throw you directly into the show’s devices and hide their own functioning until much later in the series. Suspension of disbelief and playing into common genre tropes will do that to you.

The spinning rose frame quickly disappears once we change shots, but the play-like animation style remains. Everything looks like it is from a popup book, with the very flat-looking character models (faceless at that) against more realistic but clearly hand-drawn, and somewhat unusual/abstract/surrealist, backdrops. they even cast shadows.

Though, we do get one shot of the prince kissing kid!Utena’s face in the actual style of the show, and properly animated instead of in the stiff cutout style -- is this memory somehow more “real” than the rest? Or is the fact that this memory is mixed in with the “play” aspects a way of telling us that even the “true” memory is not to be trusted? The prince placing the ring on her finger is animated in the same style, and then it immediately cuts back to the stiff cardboard cutout style. These seem to be the “real” memories we get in episode 34, but with this show, there’s no real way to tell what is “real” or if such a concept even applies. (I won’t get too Lacanian here, but I think that the concept of the Real might be applicable somehow...)

That said, the pairing of imagery and spoken lines is really interesting to me here.

Something something being trapped in your coffin something.

Actually, the first time I saw this series, I thought “I’m going to be so mad if it turns out that Utena was dead the whole time” after watching this sequence for the first time. Years later, I’m still not sure if I should be mad or not.

I just noticed the appearances of the rose frames and when they do or do not appear in this sequence -- at the very start, when the prince is leaving, and when the princess decides to become a prince. the colors are red, then white, then pink. I’m sure there’s a reason for this, and I think it has to do with the (literal, in this case framing of Utena’s story. More thoughts to come in later liveblogs.

No liveblog would be complete without repeating the main question: “but was that really such a good idea?” Brave viewer, you will have to draw your own conclusion on that by the end.

After the fairytale opening, it appears to be a fairly typical slice of life schoolgirl shoujo fluffy nonsense show. We get our introduction to Wakaba, who calls Utena her “boyfriend,” and then the camera pans over to the school and lingers on the suspiciously phallic tower, until it cuts to some nice scenery shots of the school’s important locations, including the rose garden and the forest that contains the dueling arena. The phallic tower features very prominently in these shots, but the triumphant music signals that this is just a series of normal establishing shots of the school and not massive foreshadowing.

I am a bit jealous of their architecture, though.

Our introduction to our intrepid heroine comes about by way of the sound of footsteps and images of fragmented parts of her body. We get her feet, an overhead shot of her turning all the ladies’ heads, and then her feet again, this time with a slow tilt up her body until her face is revealed. This doesn’t seem to be an attempt to sexualize her or objectify her, but rather to slowly establish her as our heroine. There’s a bit of an element of shock here -- we first see her as a cool, level-headed girl, but then the moment she opens her mouth (her first line is “weird getup?”), that image is dispelled. She is trying very hard to fit a certain image. Our introduction to her is also our introduction to the teacher who is always hounding her about her uniform, establishing this character as someone who is willing to bend the rules, but only within the already established framework. Checking the student rulebook shows this quite clearly -- she’ll wear a “boy’s” uniform, but she’s still working with the system of both the rules established by the school and the system that establishes a difference between “boys” and “girls” in terms of clothing choices.

I get a distinct sense that Utena here is set up to be both a typical shoujo type character and an atypical one, but in ways that are working within the shoujo economy of representation, which becomes thoroughly queered by the end of the series. She’s a girly-girl at heart, always insisting that she’s just a “normal girl” and that she doesn’t want to play basketball with the boys, yet she’s also a fairly typical tomboy figure in that she’s fawned over by the other girls at the school, she plays sports, and she bucks the rules to a degree. She is simultaneously both sides of the binary set up, yet she doesn’t end up as the simple Feminist Figure™ of the boyish girl who still retains her connection to femininity, or the figure who rejects femininity because she finds masculinity to be Stronger and Better, even as she’s set up as such from the start. That’s part of the framework that we’re trained to think within, however.

I think my favorite part of this sequence is Utena doing all of her weird poses for the camera and then the teacher literally breaking the fourth wall. That showoff.

The show pretty clearly sets itself up as spectacle, here. We know that we’re watching something, and it’s letting us know from the very start.

Who else but Utena would hold court in the middle of the school, her pink masculinity and youth contrasting sharply with the feminine, older, green teacher who is her mirror here? We are removed from the action here, much like the students watching from above, but we are also set apart from them, even as we are still firmly put in the place of “audience.” We are watching the in-universe audience, which puts us in a unique position, where we can become self-aware of our position and they cannot.

Utena insists that she’s a girl and doesn’t want to be a boy, yet claims that she wants to be a prince. The (perpetually offscreen) boy that she’s talking to doesn’t seem to understand the difference, and I think this says a lot about the show’s use of gender -- to an outside party, “prince” is conditional on “boy,” but the world that Utena gets wrapped up in seems to have “prince” and “princess” as the genders, not tied to the outside concepts of “boy” and “girl,” even as they are very strongly tied to societal concepts of masculinity and femininity. (I would say that “duelist” is a category that moves between these, and that “witch” is the other side of “princess”...but we have many weeks to go before we get there) Utena is set up as very naive here, but that’s what makes her so powerful as a protagonist. She’s trying to fit into these societal structures, but she’s doing it “wrong,” and her lack of understanding of the similarity between “boy” and “prince” (among other things) both sets her up to fall completely into these categories and find a way around them. Eventually.

More frames within frames, but this time, we’re suturing ourselves to Utena’s point of view as we watch a story largely play out for our benefit. There’s an odd sense of flatness in this frame, as if she’s looking at a painting rather than through a window. Of course, while Anthy is actually being abused (and in far worse ways than we can imagine in this first episode), this entire scene is staged to help give Utena character motivation, and the framing of it and the explicit sense of watching cues us in to that.

One thing that always strikes me about this show is the use of overlap editing. Our first example is in Saionji slapping Anthy -- he doesn’t slap her twice, we just see it twice -- which not only puts emphasis on the action, but it expands the screentime of the action (vs. the story time). What we sees takes longer than what “actually” happens, and this establishes early on the sense of time that this series uses. (Another very obvious example is the sword-pulling sequence -- the actions don’t happen multiple times, we just see them multiple times.) Time here is cyclical -- it doesn’t matter if Saionji slapped Anthy once or hundreds of times in that moment, because it’s all of those times, and none of those times. “Natural” time doesn’t have an effect here.

I would like to take a moment to appreciate Wakaba. she’s too precious.

Our first Student Council meeting is somehow both the most normal one and the most unusual one. No baseball games or rows of fans in the background?

And yet, the council actually calls Saionji out on his behavior, which seems rather unusual. I feel like even though Utena isn’t here to witness this meeting, it’s still entirely for our benefit -- setting up Saionji as a villain, letting us know about this ~shadowy organization~ (full of huge dorks), and establishing further that Saionji’s treatment of Anthy is Not Okay, which puts us on Utena (and Anthy’s) side. Of course, Anthy’s own actions here are largely performance, in that she’s acting the role of the Rose Bride.

A few things to note in this meeting:

Miki taking “minutes”

Juri’s dramatic posing that would put even a Jojo to shame (just a little more of a side lean and bring that hand up to your face, Juri...)

Everyone repeating Touga’s line back

Miki dramatically using his stopwatch (3:12 is the time when he stops it)

How TALL are you, Saionji???

Though, the way in which romance is framed here is interesting to me. they all call Saionji out on his abuse, but don’t ultimately actually do anything about it. Even though everyone knows that his behavior is wrong (as evidenced by not just the fact that they’re confronting him, but but things like Miki sweating and shaking when dealing with the situation), they’re quick to brush it off as a surface-level “oh they’re just lovebirds and we shouldn’t meddle in their affairs,” even as that contradicts their previous words and actions. Of course, no one here is really seeing Anthy as human, just as an object to help them get what they want, and they aren’t actually seeing the “engagement” as a romantic relationship, but rather an arrangement based on power.

I’m not sure if the dueling rules change here or if Saionji is just poking fun at his fellow councilmembers.

“If you’re so concerned about the rules of the Rose Seal...

Later, it’s pretty clearly established that End of the World tells the Duelists (at least in this arc) who is going to duel and when through his letters. Is this something that is relatively new once Utena arrives on the scene? Or is this something that was happening all along and there was a set order before? (This changes quite a bit once we get further in the series, of course, and motivations and Duelists change up a bit)

A few things about the love letter scene

Wakaba has amazing stationary

The crowd is entirely boys (what is this space? Is it a boys-only space, or does it just happen to have a lot of boys in it?) (There’s actually a lot of really interesting framing in this scene, but I won’t cap it all)

Utena’s comment about “real” men. This plays into a lot of ideas about how a “real” man would act in certain ways (in this case, as typically, this would be acting as a gentleman, setting immaturity [=boyhood] against maturity [=manhood] as the marker or masculinity, rather than setting femininity against masculinity as the marker of manhood), which ultimately ties back to the distinction Utena makes between a “boy” and a “prince.” Princes want to protect women (princesses) in distress, at least in Utena’s mind. She’s basing her gender policing on roles rather than on appearances, which is how her gender expression is often policed. Same framework, but a different way of conceptualizing it within there.

In the next scene, Saionji claims that he didn’t post the letter, and then changes to claim that he used it to give everyone a laugh. I actually believe the first claim. It would make more sense if it were posted in order to frame him as more of a villain within the world of the story (not that he isn’t a terrible guy already) to further push Utena into dueling.

Though, can we take a moment to appreciate how amazingly ridiculous the story of this show is? Some jerk made the protagonist’s bff cry, so she challenges him to a duel for the sake of getting revenge and accidentally wins a girl in the process.

Our first Shadow Girls play: “But be careful, brave hero. There are rules in the forest. Do you know what they are?”

Besides a very ominous bit of foreshadowing here (and where the narrative starts to break down), I think this speaks to some of the issues of systems of power that I’m been drawing out here. Utena has walked unknowingly into a system of power that she doesn’t fully understand, while also largely following the rules of that system (while not being wholly determined by them). The Shadow Girls outright state this in the very first episode. Yes, it could easily refer to the actual rules of the dueling game, but this is RGU we’re talking about.

This also begs the question -- what perspective are these shadow plays coming from, and for whose benefit are they? I feel like this answer would change, even, once we get to the Black Rose Saga and C-ko, but it’s worth asking early on. Utena is directly addressed, but she doesn’t seem to have (conscious, at least) awareness of the plays until the BRS (and then episode 34), so it seems as if the plays are for our benefit as the audience. And yet...are these characters omniscient? Who are they (aliens) and where are they getting their information?

We get that great imagery of the magical door with the special key (the ring) and then everything in the landscape shifts to open up to the dueling arena. I’ve always loved how Utena is a little bit “wtf?” but then doesn’t really ever question it again that there’s a forest with a ton of impossible stairs in it somehow behind the school. Or the fact that it changes from night to day once she enters, speaking of weird concepts of time. (Is the light from the projector just that bright???)

So that’s what they meant... :P

[insert obligatory note about how this is more literal than anyone realizes at this point]

[insert obligatory note about deflowering]

[insert obligatory note of “who the hell is ringing the bells at the start and end of each duel?”]

Actually, a real note on the bells -- are they wedding bells or funerary bells?

Is Anthy’s shock during the duel feigned? Or is she actually surprised that someone seems to be dueling for her sake (and wins)? I think it could go either way. (Also, obligatory note about the “senpai” clapback and how great it is)

When Utena is walking home and Anthy is there to declare herself engaged to Utena, but Anthy doesn’t move in with her until later...where do they go? What happens in that space of time?

The duel itself is pretty much setting up the structure for the series here, so there isn’t terribly much to note besides capping some of the more interesting juxtapositions of lyrics and characters. Pull the sword, duel, Utena wins. It’s when this structure changes that the duels start to get really interesting, and I’ll have more to say about those particular cases, and maybe more about what the dueling structure itself means. As for now....I’m tired. And glad to be done with with the first episode of my liveblog.

For anyone who actually read through all of that, thank you for sticking with it!! :D I’ll be posting up the next episode next week, and I hope to do one a week until I’ve finished out the series.

Please, let this spark discussion and analysis, and always feel free to send me analytical questions. :]

#revolutionary girl utena #utena liveblog #utena analysis #long post is long #not blog themed #real talk with fabrickind #god this is long #enjoy!! :D

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robandsonsme · 6 years ago

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PLEASE BUY AND FOLLOW ME CLICK ON LINKS TO BUY ONLINE PLEASE BUY SALES FROM THIS BOOK GO TO ADELAIDE HOSPITAL CHILDRENS WARD (leukemia)

Father’s Love My Father didn’t admit to having a past. The story of his early life was a mystery lost in his lack of words and an inability to expose anything that could be vulnerability, humanity or even shows any kindness. The devil was his only friend. Even this friend would abandon him. My Mother would eventually and begrudgingly supply me with a few details, but this only went on to provoke more questions. He was an enigma to the end; leaving no suicide note, no apology and no peace for those who survived him. I am only certain of one thing. My Father’s hate for me was virulent. My hate for him would grow to the point where I would consider his murder every day of my teenage years. The dynamic of the real family is rarely the all-encompassing love of the fairy tale or the softness of the detergent commercial, but my family was extreme by any standards. Violence was our currency and the absence of genuine love left a void that was filled with darkness, betrayal and humiliation. We were an Australian family and Australia was an uncompromising place in the sixties or at least that is how it appeared to me. To me, in those days everything was black and white. We were told we were growing up in the lucky country. We were told we could achieve anything through challenging work and spirit yet at the same time I was being brutalised and made to feel worthless by the people I loved the most and trusted. I often thought to myself was I born evil? It would happen at night. I was small for my age, a premature twin, the smallest to survive in Victoria at the time; I was easily carried out of the house and into the garden by someone of my Father’s build. He would be drunk, clumsy and rough. I would be hastily stripped. My clothes were torn from me and I would have to stand defenceless and naked in the yard. I would have to take my chances. I wouldn’t wait to see if he would stop at the humiliation and spare me the violence, he never did. I would take advantage of his drunkenness and feel for his grip to loosen or slip and then I would go. I would run through the neighbourhood to escape the attack. Was I worried about the neighbours seeing me naked? Hardly, this had happened so many times before. I knew what it was to run barefoot on cracked bitumen that was baking from the day’s biting sun. I knew running naked in the near-freezing winter nights too. I knew what it was like to be running for your life. I spent a childhood running the streets and I’ve spent a lifetime escaping my Father. My Father was born in South Australia in 1929. He was the son of a prostitute and born out of wedlock. He must not have known his Father in any meaningful way, but he will have had suspicions about the 100’s of men who visited his Mother’s house. My Father had inherited a large build, olive skin, deep brown eyes and a tremendous capacity for anger. My Father’s hair and mood were black for his entire life. Father is him as a boy holding a black dog. He had the patience with animals he could never show to people. He was tall and skinny with a mop of black hair. This child would develop into a man of six foot four with a powerful build clothed in skin scarred by the Australian sun. He was mutilated emotionally and carried a pain that could infect anyone in his vicinity. His hands would grow to be huge, always at least twice the size of mine yet he was quite graceful in his movements and well kept. He was clean shaven and took pride in his appearance. At home, he dressed in casual jeans and shirt and he insisted that they were clean and ironed which meant my Mother would often discover lipstick stains on his collar. A fight would then ensue with the devil rising into those brown eyes and consuming the man. My Father’s childhood was as fractured as any other part of his life. He would always be on the move, change jobs and locations and even personalities but his consistent companions were alcohol and misery. He was Christened Robert Sheriff, the same name he gave me. He left school early and worked a succession of tough, unskilled jobs. He was a station hand and a fruit picker and went from one manual labour to another building calluses and emotional hardness. The one anecdote I know from his youth is an incident where he nearly drowned. At age nine he was pulled from the water at Port Pirie. Pirie was and still is a small industrial town in the shadow of grain silos and a lead smelter. About a two-hour drive north of Adelaide where grain shipping and industry had called for unskilled immigrants to come and build a town. All of life in Pirie takes place with the backdrop of the smell of sulphur, a soft scent of hell from the lead smelting process. One day my Father fell into the water that carried the grain ships and plunged toward oblivion in the waters that reflected the belching chimney stacks. A man walking past at the time saw my Father fall and dived into the water to save him. The story made the local press where it describes my Father’s saviour as a hero. This stranger’s act has ensured thirty-five descendants, and I exist because of him, my children and grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, my sisters, my beloved twin brother were all offered a chance of life because my Father didn’t drown that day, but I wonder if my Father had any appreciation for his rescuer and those bitter and soulless years he lived until he decided to meet his maker at his own hands. My son Robert (3rd) recently found some photos of my Father I had not seen for over forty years. I shuddered I freak out I still fear him as I still think he can hurt me. Silly you say but believe me, it is a fear that I would want no man, woman or child to live or relive and relive. Mother’s Love In defence of my Mother, she was a dreamer. I understand that now that I have made it to adulthood. I got through my life by constructing a future (A plan) where things would better. It was an impossible dream that allowed us to disengage from reality and to survive it. From an early age, she wanted to escape the poverty of her upbringing and the limits of her class. But there was a dark secret my Mother did not want to get out. On my Mother’s side. My Great-Great-Great-Grand Mother was a half cast. My Mother did not want the world to know. A white man could not marry an aboriginal back then. My son Robert 3rd tried to go back on my Mother’s family tree. He could only go back as far as my Mother as they were all born bastards. born out of wedlock as I said same as my Father. She wanted to be better, different and special. She dreamt of Hollywood and imagined being a singer or a movie actress. She would constantly play records on an old gramophone that I now keep in my current home. We were brought up to the sounds of Al Jolson, Crosby, Sinatra and many other artists. And my Mother in duet with me echoing through the house. I do a great tribute to Al Jolson. My Mother would imagine being one of the artists she played, an international superstar. There is nothing wrong with dreaming. I think she must have imagined that life for me too and that way she didn’t have to acknowledge my reality. In her head, I was with her on the stage. I was famous, rich, happy and she didn’t have to feel any guilt. I shared her dreams of being anywhere far away from where I was and inherited her ability to live in a constructed fantasy rather than face the pain of my real life. It is a method for those of us who have very little light. We descend into the darkness where we have to imagine stars.

My History Then on my Father’s side, my bloodlines go back to Scotland. I am part Australian Aboriginal. On my Mother’s side. My Great-Great-Grand Mother. Her Mother was a half cast. She got pregnant to My Great-Great-Grand Father. I was part of the Stolen Generation. Then on my Father’s side, my bloodlines go back to Scotland. I only went to grade three. I self-educated. I have been for married 38 with six children ten grandchildren two great-grandchildren. I am sixty-three-years old. My wife’s name is Carol. I believe in God. I am retired they call what I am doing my bucket list,

Robert Sherriff 0466246021 Robert Sherriff 2016 Australian Actor-Poet -Model-Singer- Historian Part of Wolf Creek TV series 2015 Part of Movie 'Maurice’s Symphony’ 2015 Australian Copyright Act 1968 Motivation Speaker Movie - Snuff 2016 Movie - CULT 2016 Movie - Time of Zoe 2016 Movie - “ZOE – A ZOMBIE SHORT” 2017 Singer old songs Still (Model) Photo Shoot SA Health Robert Sherriff [email protected] 0466246021 38 Browne ct Craigmore 5114 South Australia

Nobody’s Home By Robert Sherriff A memoir by Robert Sherriff This is the story of an ordinary man who pulled off an extraordinary feat of survival. I am part Australian Aboriginal. I was part of the Stolen Generation. Born into a working-class family in post-war Australia Robert Sheriff was premature, small and physically frail. He was also at the epicentre of his father’s drunken rage and hate, his mother’s indifference and his societies ability to live in denial. Just as Robert was beginning to understand just how dangerous his home environment was, he was ‘saved’ by the state and placed into care where violence and sexual abuse were systemic and rife. Robert survived the darkest period in South Australia’s institutional history where young people and predators were placed in facilities away from scrutiny. Robert’s story is honest, brutal and horrifying but it is a story of hope. Not all the children in the system did survive. Very few of the adults they became were emotionally unscathed, and Robert lived through mental health challenges, alcoholism and homelessness to eventually become a successful husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Robert’s story is in the context of a country growing up. He was born into a traditional blue-collar family and rubbed shoulders with the counterculture and its hedonistic excesses. It is a reflection on a life that’s been hard, far from fair and challenges the notion of the lucky country. It is told without self-pity, without malice and spite and it celebrates the love that Robert found on his journey and has rediscovered now in his later years. I believe that this book would become a huge commercial success where I would change things to suit the USA market. I had a phone call from the Prime Minister of Australia he rang me. I became involved in a Royal Commission that has been held in Australia for the last four years. Mr Malcolm’s Turnbull thanked me for my time that I was involved. Mr Malcolm’s Turnbull also stated that he was laying down the law to the States where they would pay correct compensation to all the victims of sexual abuse. Malcolm’s Turnbull will make an announcement sometime this year in Australia. This could cost the States millions of dollars. Mr Malcolm’s Turnbull stated that he knew it was hard for me to tackle domestic violence and sexual abuse. Mr Malcolm’s Turnbull asked me to send him a copy of the book. We were on the phone for twenty-five minutes. I have a publisher in England I have a contract. 38 Browne cct Craigmore South Australia. Australia 5114 [email protected] 0466246021 https://indaily.com.au/news/2018/10/22/adelaide-abuse-survivors-welcome-apology-but-action-must-follow/ https://www.sbs.com.au/news/sa-abuse-victims-tell-their-stories

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mdye · 8 years ago

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[Editor’s note: Nixon biographer John A. Farrell wrote this comparison of the two presidents in February — well before the firing of FBI Director James Comey. It is reposted here with only light edits.]

We’re barely into the Trump administration and we’ve had war on the press, electronic eavesdropping, a sacked attorney general, humongous demonstrations, fury over a Democratic National Committee break-in, Cold War–style skirmishes, and scandalous intrigues akin to Watergate.

Sound familiar?

“Imagine packing 6 yrs of the Nixon admin into 3 weeks,” tweeted Nicole Hemmer, a scholar from the University of Virginia’s Miller Center (and Vox columnist), in February. “It’s like Nixon speed-dating.”

Veteran hands like Dan Rather, Bill Moyers, John Dean, and William Kristol have joined youngsters like Rachel Maddow in drawing parallels between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.

As the author of a new biography of Nixon, I get asked — a lot — how I plotted the book’s release to coincide with the surge in discussion, in the press and social media, of similarities between the disgraced 37th president of the United States and his latest successor, Donald Trump.

Having lived the past six years with Nixon in my head (I seek no pity; just buy the book), I approach the idea of comparing the two leaders with caution and restraint, for there are important differences.

As bad as Nixon was, for example, he never embraced white nationalists, much less sat one on his National Security Council. Nixon supported every major civil rights bill in the 1960s, and may have lost the 1962 gubernatorial election in California as a result of his spirited denunciation of the John Birch Society, the alt-right wack jobs of their day. “It was time to take on the lunatic fringe,” he wrote to Dwight Eisenhower.

Which is not to cast Tricky Dick as a saint. Fallacious comparisons cut both ways. When Trump dismissed acting Attorney General Sally Yates, a Justice Department holdover from the previous administration, for declining to defend his executive order on immigration, the episode was immediately compared to Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.” But Trump’s move hardly rates with Nixon’s. The stakes were far higher in 1973, with war in the Middle East, a nuclear alert, and the resignation of a corrupt vice president as a backdrop. Nixon’s own attorney general and his successor resigned over principle after refusing to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, before Solicitor General Robert Bork stepped in to do the deed.

So restraint keeps me from overstating the echoes. But then Trump will produce a performance like his rambling, combative February 16 press conference (“Russia is fake news!”) so rich with “narcissism, thin skin and deeply personal grievances,” as NBC’s Brian Williams put it, that the analogies with Nixon’s piteous “last press conference” of 1962, or his Watergate-era clashes with the media, are insistent and appropriate.

And finally, perhaps inevitably, Trump himself joined the game: He alleged that Barack Obama had bugged Trump Tower in an act worthy of “Nixon/Watergate.” (You want to see your book sales leap on Amazon? Have POTUS tweet your topic.)

Why is Nixon the go-to model for presidential misbehavior? For one thing, he is deeply embedded in our lives and culture. The only president to resign in disgrace was famously polarizing long before Watergate. This red-baiter from Southern California was the point man for McCarthyism, earning the eternal enmity of postwar liberals.

In the swinging ’60s, he was the stodgy self-made man: the square in the age of hip. As such, Nixon was a model for Mad Men’s Don Draper and, after stretching out the Vietnam War for four additional years, his reign helped inspire the evil Galactic Empire in Star Wars (according to George Lucas). He may not be the subject of a hip-hop Broadway musical, but he has served as the central figure in an opera (Nixon in China) and played the villain in the X-Men and Watchmen movies.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / Getty It took Nixon a while to provoke protests like these. On the other hand, some two-thirds of the current American population were either not alive or not residents of the United States, when Nixon resigned in 1974. In my Nixon biography, and in what follows, I’ve tried to portray this oft-caricatured scoundrel, in all his glories, for Gen X-ers and millennials who may know him only as the disembodied head on Futurama.

Thinking through the points of similarity between Nixon and Trump, and where they differ, may help us to better understand both men.

Psychobiography — correlation: modest

The differences in their upbringing — Trump came from a wealthy home in New York, Nixon from the California outback and a family wracked by illness, death, and poverty — make any comparison between the two men on this score somewhat strained. Yet both are known for self-centered, narcissistic personalities — and these, perhaps were sired by the emotional austerity of their childhoods. Trump exhibits insecurity, harbors grandiose fantasies, and shows a tetchiness about criticism. So did Nixon.

The Nixon home was known for its physical and emotional severity. Frank Nixon was a crotchety and abusive dad described, by a nephew, as “a highly acquisitive person and a slave driver” who “worked all his children and he worked his wife.” Nixon’s mother, Hannah, a devout Quaker, gave the future president his sense of idealism: He really did want to bring peace to the world. But she was preoccupied with his four brothers, two of whom died as youths, and the demands of the family store. Dick craved her approval, but she never, as Nixon famously confessed, told him that she loved him.

Historians tread lightly when it comes to psychobiography, but Nixon’s career “vindicates one of that maligned genre’s most trustworthy findings: The recipe for a successfully driven politician should include a doting mother to convince the son he can accomplish anything, and an emotionally distant father to convince the son that no accomplishment can ever be enough,” wrote Rick Perlstein in Nixonland.

Much of that may apply to Trump. As biographers Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher describe him in their book, Trump Revealed, the president’s father, Fred Trump, was also a disciplinarian, a workaholic, and a skinflint. At 13, Donald was culled from his family and exiled to military school as a disciplinary remedy. It may not be unreasonable to suggest that, like Nixon, Trump has spent his life seeking to fill an emotional void.

The press — correlation: high

It is no accident that both Nixon and Trump are famous for waging war beyond reason with the press. In men with their backgrounds, criticism may be interpreted as rejection, ripping the scabs from old psychic wounds and inducing emotional pain and hostility.

It’s also no small irony that each was quite successful at courting the press in their early years. Nixon was a protégé of the Chandler family, which owned the then-right-wing Los Angeles Times and promoted Nixon’s career through the simple tactic of imposing news blackouts on his opponents. Trump was a dealmaking playboy in New York’s tabloid jungle. The experiences left both men spoiled by the media’s fawning, cynical about its professed values, and reckless with the truth.

Mark Wilson / Getty Trump surveys the “enemy of the people.” Trump’s well-documented disregard for veracity was well matched by Nixon’s: He lied repeatedly about Vietnam and Watergate as president. When announcing that he was dispatching troops to invade Cambodia, Nixon solemnly assured the nation that the US had been scrupulous, to that point, in observing that poor country’s neutrality. In fact, he had been bombing Cambodia, secretly, for a year.

Nixon was as brash about his lying as Trump. On one occasion, when he thought the camera had stopped filming, Nixon told an interviewer how he had inserted a crude obscenity into a quote from Lyndon Johnson, because it made for a more colorful story — and portrayed Johnson as a vulgar bumpkin. When his aides could not find the chopsticks he used during his famous trip to China, Nixon told them to use any pair for a museum display, as the public would never know the difference.

Striving to maintain control, Trump rages over leaks. Nixon, too, confessed to being “paranoid” about leakers, and famously declared: “The press is the enemy.” Trump has friends in some corners of the media, and his declaration of war may be cynical and manipulative. For Nixon, the hate was real.

Trump, erupting in nocturnal tweets — emissions quite similar to those captured on Nixon’s White House tapes, except that they are instantaneously blasted out to tens of millions of Twitter fans — has taken it further. The press is not just his enemy, he tweeted, but the “enemy of the American people.”

Their politics — correlation: modest

Trump and Nixon both rode the politics of grievance — particularly white grievance — to the White House.

“I am your voice,” Trump told the disaffected electorate of the South, West, and Midwest, who responded by giving him an Electoral College majority. In his speeches, Trump called for the return of “law and order,” just like Nixon in 1968. “The silent majority is back,” Trump said, identifying his voters precisely as Nixon did. “We are going to take the country back.”

The division between coastal elites and the heartland is a hardy theme in American political history — the tension between frontier farmers and the Founding Fathers led to open rebellions in 1787 and 1791. In crises, the country draws together, then the old divisions reemerge in times of peace.

The gulf yawned after World War I, when the carnage of industrial warfare and the doctrines of scientific and moral relativity inspired a fundamentalist response in the midlands. Americans came together during the Second World War, but the rifts reappeared thereafter. In 1946, a young Navy veteran, running as a Republican, unseated a New Deal Congress member in rural California with a campaign that promised, “Richard Nixon Is One of Us” — not one of the pointy-headed pinko elitists running things in Washington.

Arriving in Washington, as a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Rep. Nixon embraced journalist Whittaker Chambers, a reformed communist agent, and went to war with the establishment by identifying one of the New Deal’s golden lads, the former diplomat Alger Hiss, as a Soviet spy.

It was “an epitomizing drama,” Chambers wrote in his memoir Witness, a book that would become a bible for the conservative movement. There was “a jagged fissure” between “the plain men and women of the nation and those who affected to act, think and speak for them … from their roosts in the great cities, and certain collegiate eyries.” The left “controlled the narrows of news and opinion,” Chambers wrote, but “my people, humble people, strong in common sense, in common goodness” were led and inspired by Nixon — “the kind and good.”

Nixon used the Hiss case as a launchpad to the Senate, and then to a spot as Eisenhower’s running mate. He survived a brush with scandal over a campaign slush fund filled by wealthy businessmen with a now-legendary televised address, in which he made memorably mawkish mention of his mortgage, his wife’s cloth coat, and the family cocker spaniel, Checkers.

“The sophisticates … sneer,” wrote columnist Robert Ruark, but Nixon’s speech “came closer to humanizing the Republican Party than anything that has happened in my memory. … Tuesday night the nation saw a little man, squirming his way out of a dilemma, and laying bare his most private hopes, fears and liabilities. This time the common man was a Republican.”

That was 1952. Long before the ’60s, the culture war was raging. The ’50s were “the Nixon years,” columnist Murray Kempton would write, when “the American lower middle class in the person of this man moved to engrave into the history of the United States, as the voice of America, its own faltering spirit, its self-pity and its envy, its continual anxiety about what the wrong people might think, its whole peevish resentful whine.” And so Trump and his legions follow Nixon down a well-worn path in American politics.

However, there is one significant difference in how Nixon and Trump got elected. As circumstances had it, in all three of Nixon’s campaigns for the presidency —against John Kennedy’s “New Frontier” in 1960, amid the chaos of 1968, and against George McGovern in 1972 — he ran as the candidate of moderation, of calm and experience. His speeches were generally soothing.

A young Navy officer named Bob Woodward cast his vote for Nixon, convinced he was the candidate who could end the Vietnam War. Even Hunter S. Thompson bought in.

“For years I’ve regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad,” Thompson wrote in 1968. But “the ‘new Nixon’ is more relaxed, wiser, more mellow.” Nixon’s were campaigns, as the political scientists Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg put it, of “social stolidity.”

Trump is anything but stolid.

Monkey-wrenched elections — correlation: high?

It is a testament to the efficacy of the Republican cover-up that four months after a foreign power affected — may even have determined — the outcome of an American presidential election, we still don’t know the facts. The timidity of the electorate, permitting Congress to let this pivotal question go unanswered, is stunning.

Ira Gay Sealy / Getty Anna Chennault was Nixon’s secret liaison with the South Vietnamese government before the 1968 election. The extent of President Trump’s possible contacts with a foreign government before the 2017 election has come under scrutiny.

From what we do know, it is safe to say that the Russians sought to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, in favor of Donald Trump. We don’t know how or if he and his advisers, in contacts with Russian officials, acted to further the illegal hacking of Democratic organizations and officials. We know that Trump publicly encouraged the Russians to do so (though whether this was a serious request or a glib comment is debatable). This has been written off, like several such misdeeds, as “Trump being Trump.”

In Nixon’s case, it has taken almost half a century for the truth to come out about the 1968 election — about his own conspiring with a foreign power, and the steps that he took to affect that year’s outcome.

Nixon feared that Lyndon Johnson’s election year initiative to negotiate an agreement that would bring an end to the Vietnam War was nothing more than an “October Surprise” designed to elect Vice President Hubert Humphrey. (LBJ had pulled such a trick in the off-year elections of 1966.) And so Nixon employed a campaign official, Anna Chennault, to act as a go-between and persuade South Vietnam to drag its feet and scuttle peace talks with North Vietnam. He — and she — promised the South Vietnamese better terms if Nixon won.

Tragically, peace was indeed close at hand in 1968. The Soviet Union, wanting to promote Humphrey, had promised Johnson a “breakthrough” in the talks and vowed to pressure North Vietnam. But Nixon’s attempts to monkey-wrench the talks were successful. In a telephone call to Sen. Everett Dirksen, a bitter LBJ, who had been getting details of Nixon’s machinations from electronic eavesdropping conducted by US intelligence agencies, accused Nixon of “treason.”

(Trump has offered no evidence for his claim that his campaign was “tapped” by President Barack Obama last fall, but there is no doubt that LBJ was eavesdropping on Chennault, a Nixon campaign official, in her discussions with the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington.)

There is a law — the Logan Act — that makes it illegal for a private citizen to interfere in the foreign affairs and diplomacy of the United States. Nixon appears to have crossed that line; without more facts, we cannot say that Trump did too.

The deep state — correlation: modest

Like Julius Caesar, cut down by Brutus and a gang of conspirators, Richard Nixon fell victim to a coalition of mutinous forces. He had clashed repeatedly with Congress over its power to declare war, to appropriate funds, and to have access to presidential documents and tapes. He declared war on the press. His antipathy for the State Department, the CIA, the military brass, and other power centers was well-known, and his reliance on backchannel diplomacy with China and the USSR spurred the Joint Chiefs of Staff to plant a spy in the White House. Nixon may also have alienated the federal judiciary by pledging to end its lifelong terms and security.

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

The FBI offers an instructive test case on what Nixon’s rash antipathy yielded. Nixon had come to power in Washington with the help of Director J. Edgar Hoover, but after Hoover died, the president provoked the bureau by trying to install a Nixon loyalist as a replacement. “Deep Throat” — the legendary anonymous source for Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward — was Mark Felt, a deputy director that Nixon passed over when choosing Hoover’s successor.

Trump has been tormented by leaks he blames on Obama holdovers in the national security agencies and other entrenched bureaucracies. Trump profited during the campaign from FBI Director James Comey’s eleventh-hour revelation about Hillary Clinton’s emails. But Comey was reportedly outraged by Trump’s allegation that Obama tapped Trump’s headquarters during the campaign and, according to leaks, demanded a public repudiation of the imputation. (And now, of course, Comey has been fired.)

Scandals — correlation: to be determined

There are more than half a million responses to a Google search for Trump and Watergate. But as much as his critics hope to see the 45th president exit the White House like Nixon, we have a long way to go before “Russiagate” is reasonably equated to Watergate.

There are obvious parallels. Both scandals stem from break-ins at the Democratic Party headquarters, whether real or virtual. Both involve electronic eavesdropping. And credit must be given to Roger Stone, a minor figure in the Watergate wars, who managed to survive the decades since and surface once more in the Russiagate stew.

Yet Nixon had years to dig his grave, and the Watergate scandals were, as Woodward and Bernstein famously wrote, “a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage.”

The DNC headquarters at the Watergate were one of a half-dozen targets for burglary and/or bugging, including the campaign headquarters of Sens. Edmund Muskie and George McGovern and the offices of the psychiatrist who treated Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. By the time Nixon resigned, Watergate was a vast umbrella. The scandal brought to light subsidiary issues — like whether Nixon shortchanged the Treasury on his income taxes, and used taxpayer funds to protect and improve his Florida vacation home — that have obvious correspondence to Trump’s behavior.

But there will have to be some remarkable revelations — proof that Trump and his aides offered inducements to the Russian hackers — before Russiagate can be compared to Watergate. On the other hand, if it is proven that the Trump campaign, in league with a foreign power, stole the White House, it could supplant Watergate as the greatest political scandal of them all.

John A. Farrell is the author of Richard Nixon: The Life, which is being published March 28.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, often scholarly excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at [email protected].

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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Sunday, May 30, 2021

Travel numbers climb as Americans hit the road for holiday (AP) Americans hit the road in near-record numbers at the start of the Memorial Day weekend, as their eagerness to break free from coronavirus confinement overcame higher prices for flights, gasoline and hotels. More than 1.8 million people went through U.S. airports Thursday, and the daily number was widely expected to cross 2 million at least once over the long holiday weekend, which would be the highest mark since early March 2020. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned people to expect long lines at airports and appealed for travelers to be patient.

Colombia sends military to western province after four die during protests (Reuters) Colombia will begin “the maximum deployment” of military personnel in the western province of Valle del Cauca and its capital, Cali, President Ivan Duque said on Friday, after four people died in protests to mark a month of anti-government demonstrations. The four died in and around Cali on Friday as tens of thousands marched across the country in the latest in demonstrations that started on April 28 to oppose tax reform but have since expanded to include wide-ranging demands. The demonstrations have been plagued by violence. As of Thursday 17 civilians have died in connection with protests, the government said. Human rights groups say dozens more have been killed by security forces. Two police officers were also earlier reported killed. Human Rights Watch’s executive director for the Americas, Jose Miguel Vivanco, said on Twitter the advocacy group had verified videos published on social media showing armed men in civilian clothes firing weapons while police look on.

Brazil on drought alert, faces worst dry spell in 91 years (Reuters) Brazil’s government agencies warned of droughts this week as the country faces its worst dry spell in 91 years, increasing fears of energy rationing, hitting hydroelectric power generation and agriculture while raising the risk of Amazon fires. Late on Thursday, the Electricity Sector Monitoring Committee (CMSE), which is linked to Brazil’s Mines and Energy Ministry, recommended that the water regulator ANA recognize a state of “water scarcity,” after a prolonged drought hit Central and Southern parts of Brazil along the Paraná river basin. The lack of rain across much of Brazil has negative implications for grain cultivation, livestock and electricity generation, as Brazil relies heavily on hydro dams for its power.

In time for summer, Europe sees dramatic fall in virus cases (AP) Europe is returning to a semblance of normalcy that was unthinkable even a few weeks ago. Coronavirus infections, hospitalizations and deaths are plummeting across the continent, after Europe led the world in new cases last fall and winter in waves that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, forced more rolling lockdowns and overwhelmed intensive care units. Now, vaccination rates are accelerating across Europe, and with them, the promise of summer vacations on Ibiza, Crete or Corsica. There are hopes for a rebirth of a tourism industry that in Spain and Italy alone accounts for 13% of gross domestic product but was wiped out by the pandemic. “We don’t speak of 2020. We speak of from today onward,” said Guglielmo Miani, president of Milan’s Montenapoleone luxury shopping district, where European and American tourists have started trickling back, wooed in part by in-person meetups with design teams and free breakfasts at iconic cafes. The hope is that Asian tourists will follow next year.

Belarusians increasingly cornered after EU cuts air links (AP) As fear of repression rises among Belarusians following the arrest of a dissident journalist whose plane was forcibly diverted to Minsk, those who want to leave the country are feeling increasingly cornered. Its land borders already were under tight restrictions, and now the European Union has banned flights from Belarus after a jetliner was diverted to Minsk earlier this week and authorities arrested a dissident journalist who was aboard. That leaves opposition-minded Belarusians with few options to get out from under the authoritarian rule of President Alexander Lukashenko. “Shutting the borders turns Belarus into a can of rotting preserves. We are being turned into hostages,” said Tatsiana Hatsura-Yavorska, who leads a rights group that helps those released from prison adapt to life and also organizes documentary film festivals.

Huge swathes of farm land swamped in eastern India after cyclone (Reuters) More than 96,000 hectares (237,221 acres) of agricultural land has been inundated in parts of an eastern Indian state hit by a powerful storm this week, officials said on Friday, a year after the coastal region was ravaged by a super cyclone. Cyclone Yaas swept in from the Bay of Bengal on Wednesday, triggering storm surges that broke through embankments in West Bengal state. Initial assessment by the West Bengal government showed that water had entered around 96,650 hectares of land that had standing crops, a state official said.

The true scope of India’s Covid-19 crisis (Quartz) Reporters at Sandesh, a newspaper in Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, conducted an informal census of hospitals and crematoriums and found daily pandemic death tolls that were 10 times higher than the officially reported figures.

Orphans, soldiers, students: N.Korea turns to ‘volunteers’ for coal mines, construction (Reuters) Orphans, conscripted soldiers, and students—some appearing to be children—are “volunteering” to work manual labour in North Korea, including in coal mines, farms, and large construction projects, the country’s state media have reported. Hundreds of graduates of orphan schools “volunteered to work in difficult fields”, according to reports by state news agency KCNA. The reports did not specify the orphans’ ages, but said they had graduated from middle schools, and photos published in state newspapers showed youths who appeared to be in their teens. Drastic measures taken by North Korea to contain COVID-19 have exacerbated human rights abuses and economic hardship for its citizens, including reports of starvation, the United Nations has said. According to the 2020 U.S. State Department report on human rights practices, in some cases children ages 16 and 17 were enrolled in military-style construction brigades for 10-year periods and subjected to long working hours and hazardous work.

Tokyo Olympics looking more and more like fan-free event (AP) The president of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee hinted Friday that even local fans may be barred from venues when the games open in just under two months. Fans from abroad were ruled out months ago as being too risky during a pandemic. The prospect of empty venues at the postponed Olympics became more likely when the Japanese government decided Friday to extend a state of emergency until June 20 as COVID-19 cases continue to put the medical system under strain. The state of emergency was to have been lifted on Monday. The extension in Tokyo, Osaka and other prefectures raises even more questions if the Olympics can be held at all. Organizers and the IOC are insistent they will go ahead despite polls in Japan showing 60-80% want them called off.

An Israeli Death and the Tangled Conflict Left Behind (NYT) Four holes in the wooden door to his tiny apartment mark where shrapnel from a Hamas rocket penetrated the home of Gershon Franco, 56, and killed him. It was the early afternoon of May 15, a Saturday, the Sabbath in this bustling town just east of Tel Aviv. Mr. Franco’s death has drawn little attention. He was a poor Israeli, a loner, who had no close family. Almost two weeks after the attack here, a pile of wood, twisted aluminum, broken glass and rubble lies near the rocket’s point of impact on a street now surrounded by damaged three-story apartment buildings. Workers busy themselves repairing apartments, hanging blinds, installing new windows in store fronts. Most of the laborers are Palestinians. They have journeyed more than three hours from their homes in the occupied West Bank to fix damage caused by Palestinians in Gaza. They work for Israeli contractors. One of the men identified himself as Nahed Abdel al-Baqr from Zeita, a village near Nablus. What did he think of his situation, repairing what Hamas wrought, for an Israeli boss, against the backdrop of Israeli flags? “That’s life,” he said, with a slight smile. “Nothing changes.” It’s life in the Holy Land, where the absurd always lurks just beneath the tragic, where peace can always be imagined but never implemented, and Jewish and Arab existences are at once conflictual and intertwined.

#headlines #news

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lodelss · 5 years ago

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 | 9 minutes (2,284 words)

I hate jocks. Like a good Gen X’er, I walked around my high school with that patch on my backpack — red lettering, white backdrop, frisbee-size. A jock high school. It’s impossible to overstate the contempt I had for sports as a kid. I hated what I took to be phony puddle-deep camaraderie, the brain-dead monosyllabic mottos, the aggressive anti-intellectualism. More than that, there appeared to be a very specific cruelty to it. The way there were always a couple of kids who were always picked last. The collective bullying if someone didn’t measure up to the collective goals. And none of the teachers ever seemed to be as mean as the coaches. They strutted around like grown children, permanently transfixed by the ambitions of their adolescence, actively excluding the same kids they had mocked in their youth.

When I hear about sports stars who kill or commit suicide or generally behave antisocially, I always think: no wonder. In a culture that destroys your body and your mind, no wonder. It’s something of a paradox, of course, because, as we are repeatedly told, physical activity is often essential to psychological health. But why is it so rarely the other way around? I watch Cheer and I watch Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez and I watch former NBA star Delonte West get callously thrashed and I wonder why these athletes’ inner lives weren’t as prized as their motor skills. That’s not true; I know why. It suits a lucrative industry that shapes you from childhood to keep you pliable. And what makes you more pliable than mental instability? What better way to get a winning team than to have it populated with people for whom winning validates their existence and for whom losing is tantamount to death?

* * *

There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the Hernandez doc when there’s an unexpected crossover with Cheer. A childhood photo of the late NFL star and convicted murderer flashes on-screen as we learn that his female cousins made him want be a cheerleader. It was the same for Cheer’s La’Darius Marshall, who is shown in one snapshot as a young cheerleader, having discovered the sport after hanging out with one of his childhood girlfriends. Both men came from dysfunctional backgrounds: Marshall’s mom was a drug user who ended up in prison for five years. He was sexually abused, not to mention beaten up by his brothers; Hernandez found his own mother distant, and he was also physically and sexually abused. Both found solace in sports, though Hernandez had the kind of dad who “slapped the faggot right out of you,” per one childhood friend, so he ended up in football, his dad’s sport, instead. But their similarities underscore how professional athletics, when so closely tied to a person’s sense of self, can simultaneously be a boon to your mental health and its undoing.

Killer Inside is a misnomer for a start. Everything pointed to Hernandez’s conviction for murdering another footballer (semipro linebacker Odin Lloyd) — or at the very least a fair amount of psychological distress. (I’m not certain why the doc chose to focus on his sexuality — besides prurience — as it seemed to be the least of his concerns.) As he said himself to his mom, who almost immediately replaced her dead husband with Hernandez’s cousin’s husband when he was just a teenager: “I had nobody. What’d you think I was gonna do, become a perfect angel?” The way he fled from his home straight into the arms of a University of Florida football scholarship, having wrapped up high school a semester early, is telling. Football made him somebody. He depended on being a star player because the alternative was being nothing — as one journalist says in the doc, at Florida you had to “win to survive.”

If the NFL didn’t know the depth of his suffering, they at least knew something, something a scouting service categorized as low “social maturity.” Their report stated that Hernandez’s responses “suggest he enjoys living on the edge of acceptable behavior and that he may be prone to partying too much and doing questionable things that could be seen as a problem for him and his team.” But his schools seemed to care more about his history of drug use than his high school concussion (his autopsy would later show chronic traumatic encephalopathy) or the fact that he busted a bar manager’s eardrum for confronting him with his bill. Physical pain was something you played through — one former linebacker described a row of Wisconsin players lining up with their pants down to get painkiller injections — and psychological pain was apparently no different. “It’s a big industry,” the ex-linebacker said, “and they’re willing to put basically kids, young men, in situations that will compromise their long-term health just to beat Northwestern.”

Cheerleading, the billion-dollar sport monopolized by a company called Varsity Brand, has a similarly mercenary approach. While the money is less extreme — the NFL’s annual revenue is more than $14 billion — the contingent self-worth is not. A number of the kids highlighted in Cheer had the kind of childhoods that made them feel like Hernandez, like they had nobody. Morgan Simianer in particular, the weaker flyer who is chosen for her “look,” radiates insecurity. Abandoned by both her parents, she was left as a high school sophomore in a trailer with her brother to fend for herself. “I felt, like, super alone,” Simianer said. “Like everyone was against me and I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t important to anyone.” Though Marshall’s experience was different, his memories of growing up are almost identical to his fellow cheerleader’s. “I felt like I was really alone,” he said. “There was nobody that was gonna come save me.” Like Hernandez, sports was all they had.

And if a competitive sport defines you, then its coach controls you. Hernandez’s father, the ex-football heavyweight, was known as the King; Monica Aldama, the head coach on Cheer, is the Queen. Describing how she felt when Aldama remembered her name at tryouts, Simianer said, “It was like I’m not just nobody.” For her ability to literally pummel a bunch of college kids into a winning team in half the regular time, Aldama has been characterized as both a saint and a sinner. While she claims to be an advocate for the troubled members of her team, she fails to see how their histories skew her intentions — her position as a maternal figure whose love is not unconditional ultimately puts the athletes more at risk. Aldama proudly comments on Simianer’s lack of fear, while it is a clear case of recklessness. This is a girl who is unable to express her pain in any way sacrificing her own life (literally — with her fragile ribs, one errant move could puncture an organ) for the woman who, ironically, made her feel like she was worthy of it. “I would do anything for that woman,” Simianer confesses at one point. “I would take a bullet for her.” Jury’s out on whether Marshall, the outspoken outsize talent who regularly clashes with his team, would do the same. His ambivalent approach to Aldama seems connected to how self-aware he is about his own struggles, which affords him freedom from her grasp. After she pushes him to be more empathetic, he explains, “It’s hard to be like that when you are mentally battling yourself.”

That Cheer and Killer Inside focus on the psychological as well as the physical strain faced by athletes — not to mention that athletics have no gender — is an improvement on the sports industries they present, which often objectify their stars as mere pedestals for their talents. The Navarro cheerleaders and Hernandez are both helped and hurt by sports, an outlet which can at once mean everything and nothing in the end. This is the legacy of the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, which followed two teen NBA hopefuls and was as much about the intersections of race and class as it was about basketball. Not to mention OJ: Made in America, the 2016 ESPN miniseries that explored how the story of the football star and alleged murderer reflected race relations in the United States in the mid-’90s. Conversely, mainstream film and television continues to be heavily male when it comes to sports, focusing on individual heroics, on pain leading to gain — the American Dream on steroids. Cheer and Killer Inside expose this narrative for the myth it is, spotlighting that all athletes have both minds and bodies that break, that their legacies as human beings are not about what they have won but who they are. But the climate in which they’ve landed cannot be ignored either, a social-media marinated world in which sports stars are no longer just players but people who are willing to be vulnerable with their public, who are even further willing to sign their names next to their problems for The Players’ Tribune, the six-year-old platform populated by content provided by pro athletes. “Everyone is going through something,” wrote NBA star Kevin Love in an industry-shaking post in 2018. “No matter what our circumstances, we’re all carrying around things that hurt — and they can hurt us if we keep them buried inside.”

Fast-forward to that new video of former basketball pro Delonte West, the one of him having his head stomped on so hard in the middle of the street that I still wonder how he survived it. He also came from an underprivileged, unstable background. He chose the college he did for its “family atmosphere.” Like Simianer, he fixated on his failures and played with abandon. Like her, he also had trouble verbalizing his feelings, to the point that they would overflow (in anger for him, tears for her). Though he says he was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, he considers his biggest problem to be “self-loathing.” But why? He was a sports star who signed a nearly $13 million contract in his prime — what better reason for self-love? A study published two years ago in the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, profiling the psychological well-being of 99 elite athletes, may provide an answer. The study found that those with high perfectionism, fear of failure, and performance-based self-worth had the highest levels of depression, anxiety, shame, and life dissatisfaction. Those with a more global self-worth that did not depend on their performance had the opposite outcome. As if to provide confirmation, a subsequent study published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise that same year revealed that athletes with contingent self-esteem were more likely to burn out. When sports become your only source of value, your wins ultimately don’t come to much.

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The irony of all of this is that I came back to sports as an adult for my mental health. Obviously, I’m not an elite athlete — whatever the opposite of that is, I am. But having no stakes makes it that much easier to use physical activity for good. Nothing is dependent on it; that I’m moving at all is victory enough. But my circumstances are different. My jock high school was a private school, sports were (mostly) optional, and elite academics were where most of us found validation — and financial stability. “Conventional wisdom suggests that the sport offers an ‘escape’ from under-resourced communities suffering from the effects of systemic neglect,” Natalie Weiner writes in SB Nation. “If you work hard enough and make the right choices — playing football being one of the most accessible and appealing ways for boys, at least, to do that — you should be safe.” This reminds me of Aldama telling a room of underprivileged kids with limited prospects, “If you work hard at anything you do, you will be rewarded, you will be successful in life.” This is the American Dream–infused sports culture the media has traditionally plugged — the one, ironically, dismantled by the show in which Aldama herself appears. As Spike Lee tells a group of the top high school basketball players in the country in Hoop Dreams: “The only reason why you’re here, you can make their team win, and if their team wins, schools get a lot of money. This whole thing is revolving around money.”

In the same SB Nation article, which focused on how school football coaches combat gun violence, Darnell Grant, a high school coach in Newark, admitted he prioritized schoolwork, something both Cheer and Killer Inside barely mentioned. “My thing is to at least have the choice,” he said. Without that, kids are caught in the thrall of sports, which serves the industry but not its players. Contingent self-worth does the same thing, which is why mental health is as much of a priority as education. The head football coach at a Chicago high school, D’Angelo Dereef, explained why dropping a problematic player — which is basically what happened to Hernandez at U of F, where coach Urban Meyer pushed him into the NFL draft rather than taking him back — doesn’t fix them. “They’re not getting into their brains to figure out why,” Dereef told the site. “It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a big cut — that’s not going to stop the bleeding.” While the NBA was the first major sports league to address mental health in its collective bargaining agreement in 2018, in mid-January the WNBA signed its own new CBA, which only vaguely promised “enhanced mental health benefits and resources.” That the sports industry as a whole does not go far enough to address the psychological welfare of its players is to their detriment, but also to their own: At least one study from 2003 has shown that prioritizing “athletes’ needs of autonomy” — the opposite of contingent self-worth — as opposed to conformity, has the potential to improve their motivation and performance. In sports terms, that’s a win-win.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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