#I have never seen a pivot so narratively criminal

[fizzigigsimmer]

Y'all remember when Joe & Dacre were just so professionally into each other - in a super serious homerotic but totally platonic TM sort of way - that everyone talked about it and whole articles were written about how gay Billy was for Steve and how open to that Joe was?

Cause I do. I was there.

[thedeviljudges]

the devil judge + the seven deadly sins

so, i made a gifset about who i thought falls under the seven deadly sins. and also shameless plug - please go reblog the gifset i made for this. took me ages to do.

but i figured i might as well make a meta post to correlate. so this is that post. it’s not everything i could discuss. i could be here for hours more, truth be told. but i hope it’s enough to chew on.

while i feel like a lot of these are going to be a no-brainer, i still want to talk it through because idk. i can, and i want to, and i feel like it, lmao.

gluttony

the elite are privileged and have an opportunity to indulge so much more than the general public, but in many different ways. this is shown throughout the show in the fact that they can indulge on luxury food, have political power, they can make a phone call or snap their fingers and everyone must follow their orders.

and the thing about gluttony is that there is always more to be had. you take a little and then realize it’s not enough and so you ask for more. case in point: in episode 11 when sunah suggests that yohan could be the new president, the current one gives her an alternative: dictatorship. because it wasn’t just enough for him to be an actor and the presiding president.

you’ll also know they turn in on themselves - the two other guys in the elite group. one who owns the company and the other dude - i really cannot remember their names and what they do, but y’all know who i’m talking about. it was so easy for them, when threatened, to fabricate documents to give to yohan about each other in order to get ahead. gluttony is only shared in the relationships we have until one realizes they can take a little extra of the pie. it’s the selfishness of having all the leftovers. gluttony cannot necessarily exist without someone else’s sacrifice.

lust

i kind of had an ah-ah moment when i was talking this over with @technitango​. i was trying to decide who was going to be lust because lust is portrayed very, very differently in this show than what most of us are used to. we, of course, know sunah who lusts after a life of indulgence and riches because she equates that with respect more than actually wanting it because it’s monetarily worth something.

but then i realized the public is lust because of their need for justice. i won’t say revenge necessarily because they’re doing as they’re told when given the judge show. but we can quickly see how that evaporates into something akin to bloodlust, for criminals and people who normally get away with shit, to have their fair taste at conviction for their misdeeds. we even see it with yohan’s fanboy club - the lust that comes from adoration and dedication.

and even more so, the public is easily swayed and so is the nature of lust. it follows in the vein of needs and wants, and as soon as new information is presented, however may false, so does the wants and desires of what people want sway. how easy was it for them to turn on yohan for a split second on two occasions - on two accounts of bribery.

envy

envy, above all, is about wanting what others have because you do not have it yourself. it may not be exactly what they have, but a form of it. some people don’t necessarily want money - they want what it can by, which is time, health and material goods.

sunah is the perfect example of this. she envies respect and recognition. she talks about bright and shiny objects, and that’s true to her kleptomania tendences, but more than anything, she wants to be seen as an equal because being poor with a vastly different upbringing means she’s looked down upon by those she thinks matters.

which also begs the question why she feels the need to seek validation from people in higher statuses to begin with when she can be the exception and not the rule - form her own understanding and environment to show others that the typical way of the elite is not actually all it’s cracked up to be - to which we see when she has no one to celebrate her victory with. it’s lonely being at the top. you get to your goal you thought you wanted but then what?

more importantly, sunah also envies family, relationships and simply put, human interaction. she wants to be cared for and treasured, and she looks for that in her position of power. because then all eyes are on you. because then that’s what people care about. what she fails to see is that those eyes are just as fruitless and just as wavering. to be a leader means people loving the idea of you but not you as a person.

“people of envious nature are sometimes stimulated to seek to emulate those who have completed some great achievements and in doing so achieve something great for themselves,” according to Understanding Philosophy.

wrath

while i realize that gaon not might entirely fit the wrath trope, he certainly has his moments, and i think he’s lived with a tampered flame since his parent’s death. he just learned to briefly put it out in the form of distractions and a false sense of righteousness and justice. it isn’t until he meets yohan that someone finally gives him the okay to feel the entirety of his emotions, that lets him breath and tells him it’s okay to feel anger and hurt. and while gaon ultimately chooses not to exact revenge, his wrath is what led him to becoming a judge and walking away from his teenage crimality.

gaon transposed his wrath into seeking justice, transformed it into livelihood, and reformed his narrative so that he was no longer angry and a teen with rash emotions. it was simply redirected and never really forgotten. yohan turned that redirection back around onto gaon’s ultimate heartache. fueled with that, it became easier to justify himself and his actions.

the most pivotal moment of turning his back on this mindset is, of course, the minister’s suicide, where he takes a good look at himself and doesn’t like what he sees. at this point, gaon’s upset isn’t necessarily at yohan but at the situation in which they got themselves into. because the thing is, gaon doesn’t absolve himself from what they did. he doesn’t turn a blind eye to that and try to dismiss it. he owns up to what happened and confesses how he feels to yohan and how he has to leave for his own good, and in some indirect way, for yohan’s, too.

with yohan, his ultimately weakness, despite never admitting to it, is family. his wrath comes in the form of anger when the ones he loves are threatened. yohan lives by a moral code of loyalty because that means you won’t be abandoned, and as a child who lived with that verdict since the day he was born, it’s an ever-pressing theme of his.

thing is, wrath comes in two particular forms for yohan. again, one is family and the second is the rose-colored glasses he’s given himself in his revenge story. he’s always had a goal to presumably make right the wrong for taking away isaac, but within that, 10 years is a long time to plot revenge, to the point where it becomes so much easier to lose yourself to that, to become enraged with it and forget the initial goal all along. we see this in his inability to form the bonding moments needed with his niece and his casual throwaway comments over people’s lives - the comment he made to gaon about moving on to the next plan, and the ultimately nail in the coffin of pushing gaon to leaving him.

his fury has also led him to convince himself his own humanity is nothing short of a lie. therefore, it’s easier to justify the means to an end because of his own self-worth and self-deprecation. it’s almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy: he even admitted to gaon’s mentor that he is an abyss. he’s referred to himself as nothing but an animal or a monster - all characteristics of despondency to survive and to justify what he’s doing. sort of like a catch 22, yohan claims he’s an animal/monster and behaves as such, but because he behaves as such, it means he’s an animal/monster.

wrath for gaon and yohan are very different yet the same. they are slow-burning, and that’s a dangerous type. it’s actually interesting when you think about the fire imagery surrounding the two of them because flames are quick to lap at anything in its wake, to destroy within a matter of minutes. and yet for the two of these men, their internal fire eats them from the inside out, painfully, until they’re almost unrecognizable to others and to themselves.

sloth

sloth was a little more difficult to pinpoint because of its characteristics. it was either the minister versus the mentor, both of which i think could work in this role. however, i chose the minister simply because she’s featured more and intertwines heavily with the plot line.

soth is a medieval translation of the Latin term acedia, meaning “without care.”

the ultimate characteristic of sloth is often identified as laziness, and while it’s easy to argue that the minister hasn’t been lazy in her ability to get where she is, she became as much when she started lying to get to her position. isn’t lying known as the easier way out? it absolves you of responsibility, of putting in the hard work, of apologizing and making things right. in the end, she had a goal and found the easiest solution to get there through her lack of responsibility for the roles she more than likely swore an oath to.

but that also translates into the other attributes of sloth: a failure to do the right thing, lack of emotions for people or of the self, and the fact that it “hinders man in his righteous undertakings and thus becomes a terrible source of man’s undoing” according to The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil.

while i think there are a lot of components of sloth that may not necessarily fit the minister, the apathy and carelessness are enough to showcase her aggression, despondency and restlessness when what little efforts she does put in do not go her way. another interesting thing to note is that many of sloth’s traits correspond with symptoms of mental illness, such as depression and anxiety. it’s an interesting thing to note given the way the minister chooses to end her life.

greed

i don’t know that jinjoo would’ve had any provocation to the limelight if it wasn’t for sunah’s direction, but she’s eager to please and wants to be useful. it’s only natural for her to want more because it’s clear she’s a career woman, loves her job and has a heart for serving the people.

but like gluttony, greed is also that little thing that plants itself and can take on a life of its own. you start looking for justifications as to why you can’t have more than what you do, and in jinjoo’s situation, she’s already overlooked through no fault of her own. and it’s not that gaon and yohan are doing it purposefully, which is what makes their neglect heartbreaking, because truthfully, they’re after the same thing jinoo is. sure, it looks different and the foundation of it is different, same with their motives. but they’re all three judges on a residing bench working to exact justice - even if all three of them have their own personal agenda. 

i don’t think jinoo fully aligns with greed, but she does want more for herself, and i think that’s only natural. you can tell she has a heart, and she’s keen not to be overlooked. this isn’t her pain point so much as it is she knows her worth and is more than ready to do what it takes to get where she wants. this, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a bad trait, but we can see how it leads to being deceived, especially for someone who’s been left in the dark for so long.

she is enticed by the glitz and the glamour of being a head judge, but you can tell she feels some remorse and guilt for those thoughts at times. i think her sense of greed is a battle within herself more than it is extremely outwardly.

pride

soohyun’s pride comes in the form of her imbalance with right and wrong. her sense of righteousness and justice is so far leaning, even more than gaon’s. it can be chalked up to her being a cop, but we’ve seen instances of this outside of her role within that agency. her pride doesn’t let her see beyond saving gaon and getting to the bottom of every mystery that comes her way.

it also comes in the form of impulsiveness and her savior complex, putting elijah in danger, for example, instead of waiting for backup. it’s not necessarily from a belief that she can fix things all on her own, but she sees injustice and immediately jumps in. another case in point is her and gaon watching yohan wreck the minister’s son’s car. she’s ready to go stop him, but gaon pulls her back, most likely because at that point, they hadn’t been observing the situation for very long to get a read on it. also the fact that at that point, neither of them truly knew yohan and his capabilities.

but as to where her characteristics come from, we simply don’t know beyond that of gaon. it’s unfortunate because we don’t have much of her backstory, so there is no real understanding why she so firmly believes in entities of regulation beyond keeping her friend out of jail. she prides herself on her work and what she’s able to accomplish, which is why it’s devastating to her to have to protect gaon by cleaning up his bloody handprint.

aristotle is of the belief that, “pride, then, seems to be a sort of crown of the virtues; for it makes them greater, and it is not found without them. Therefore it is hard to be truly proud; for it is impossible without nobility and goodness of character,” from Nicomachean Ethics.

but pride for soohyun isn’t about honors or rewards. it’s for herself and her capabilities, her ability to protect gaon, and the virtues she’s set as the precedent for herself. because sometimes it’s not even about establishing morals and ethics upon yourself. it’s about feelings/intuition, logic and observation. and no, i don’t mean the feelings she has for gaon. there are things that humans do, both actions and words, that we inherently know are bad without someone telling us as much and without the rules of the world seared into our brains. there are some things we know, for a fact, are wrong to us as individuals.

for soohyun, she knows that gaon’s actions, and even her own, have consequences. from what we’ve seen, i think it can be argued that it’s really about not doing those actions to prevent an outcome - not necessarily from a place of being just and right. that doesn’t mean she doesn’t understand good morals/ethics, but again, we have no background of what her internal guidance actually is.

to put this in layman’s terms, we’ll use gaon wanting to stab the conman in his youth. soohyun knows it’s wrong because it will incriminate gaon and therefore she stops it. gaon’s gone to her because he sees her as a moral compass. but is her own internal navigation rooted in justice the way gaon had to find it in the judicial system, or is hers rooted in her pride of keeping gaon safe? she stops him from doing things that will get him in trouble, but is she stopping him because the action itself is wrong or because the outcome will result in undesirable consequences for the two of them?

and of course, there is a flipped argument to be had there - i’m not arguing that gaon stabbing the conman would be right or justified. but what i am saying is that for her, her worldview is the only right one, and when anyone steps out of that, even gaon, it becomes a bit of an issue: the pride she has for that is palpable.

every character indulges

truthfully, every character has at least one form of these sins rooted in their characterization. some are larger than others, but the breadth of it can be explored even further for each. and that’s what makes them more realistic and not just characters written on a page or following a linear progression of their writing deity.

the seven deadly sins are also notoriously rooted in religion. they’re also a defining feature of aristotle’s works that represent the golden mean, in which each vice is parallel to a virtue.

the devil judge is so layered, but i think at the heart of it, it’s about humanity at its core. sprinked in are the philosophies and contradictions and what it means to look in the mirror, what happens when we’re blind to seeing our true selves and most importantly, how much changes when we’re swayed by our own misgivings. it really asks us to understand nature versus nurture, that people must find a belief in something to keep them going, and how futile our hopes and desires can actually be if we’re not carefully regulating ourselves, nevermind the entities established by society to regulate us, too.

the entirety of the show genuinely begs the question as to who is truly right, who is truly wrong, and if it’s even possible to find the correct answer.

[thewatsonbeekeepers]

Chapter 2 – Look up here, I’m in Heaven: the height metaphor

[The chapter title comes from David Bowie’s Lazarus. Lazarus is a cracking song, and you should listen to it. X CN: death, disturbing imagery]

It’s worth stating here that this whole meta has a cn for death and suicide – this one is analysing the literal peaks and troughs (height is important in this episode) that Sherlock goes through in order to look at how close he is to dying throughout.

In my reading, EMP theory begins once Mary shoots Sherlock in HLV – I’ve linked the reasons for this in Chapter 1 X, so I’m not going to run through them again here. I think Sherlock comes the closest to death that we see him in the EMP at the end of HLV – if you remember, he’s been put on a plane in ‘exile’ by Mycroft, but in reality is being sent to his death. This plane/height image is really important. In the Christian tradition (and therefore majority Western tradition that the writers are writing in), the sky is associated with heaven – Sherlock’s plane taking off being synonymous with his death seems a pretty straightforward metaphor in that regard. (It’s even one that’s used in Cats, though I don’t know if that’s a good thing.) Further to that – it ties in nicely with Sherlock being ‘high’ through a lot of s4, which represents the moments in which he is most repressed and his repression is most tied to self-harm. We have further ideas to buttress the height/aeroplane metaphor with, however – do you remember the plane in ASiB?

Sure, as I recall it never gets off the ground. But everybody on it is dead. Aeroplanes have an association with death already in this show, and the choice to put Sherlock on a plane rather than lock him up for four minutes or anything equivalent – and probably less expensive to shoot – suggests a deliberate throwback. We’re supposed to think of it as a kind of metal coffin.

[Obviously, there’s another, more notable use of an aeroplane in the programme – you can see where I’m going here. But bear with me – there’s more first.]

I want to quickly talk about what grounds Sherlock’s aeroplane. Moriarty appears on screens everywhere, and then we have the following exchange between Sherlock and Mycroft. I’ve already made a post about this that’s done the rounds on tumblr X, so if you already know this bit you’re ahead of the game.

As far as I can tell, nobody ever tells Sherlock that Moriarty is back. It’s possible Mycroft tells him offscreen, or that he googles it from his phone, given that he’s already breaking flight rules, but given that it’s the entire trigger for TAB, it seems a pretty odd thing to leave out. In EMP theory, it’s also the thing that downs his plane – in terms of the plane metaphor as well as literally, it stops him from dying. It’s pivotal, but we don’t see it. I therefore want to hypothesise – what does it mean if Sherlock is never told that Moriarty is back?

The first thing it tells us is that Sherlock is in his Mind Palace, because he knows that Moriarty is back without needing to be told. But the second is that Mycroft, the brain, is waking Sherlock from his dying stupor to tell him that England needs him, meaning that Sherlock’s brain equates Moriarty coming back with the word ‘England’ in some way. Perhaps this is a tenuous link, but the seed is planted back from ASiP, when we’re taught to associate John with his armchair.

Don’t mind me, I’m just crying. Basically, Sherlock knows that John is in danger and that’s what pulls him back from the brink – and we know it’s serious, because Mycroft, the brain, is warning him. Via call.

The fear of Moriarty coming back might sound like a tenuous symbol for John being in danger, but when we probe deeper the two are actually quite obviously equivalent. The only threat that Moriarty has ever posed to Sherlock is a threat to John’s life – the Semtex, burning the heart out of him, John Watson is definitely in danger, the sniper at the fall. This is Sherlock’s pressure point, and by getting rid of Moriarty, he’s getting rid of any danger to John – we know from his drug abuse etc. that his regard for himself is much lower. So Sherlock being woken from the dead to save John makes complete sense. He died for him, and now he’ll resurrect himself for him.

There are several layers to how John is in danger – the bottom one, which for me s4 is about getting to the heart of, is that without Sherlock John is suicidal. This was established in ASiP, and I believe is the metaphorical plot of TLD (see Chapter 9 X). However, there’s also the problem of Mary, newly discovered as an assassin, and Sherlock trying to work out who she is and where she comes from – more on that later, but there’s certainly a chance she’s linked to Moriarty, given the Morstan/Moran connections. ‘Did you miss me?’ works for both of those layers – the danger John is in from criminals is something that was really apparent in s1 and 2, but John’s endangerment from suicide is also something that was there at the beginning of the series. Sherlock changed these things – and didn’t realise he was the changing factor, but something in his subconscious is telling him that with him gone, John Watson is once again in danger.

So, his plane comes back to the runway – still in his mind palace, of course, but coming down. TAB – of which more on later – seems to be about the return of Moriarty, and Sherlock puzzling through it, which is jarringly absent from TST and TLD if you’re reading it on a surface level – it takes TAB for Sherlock to puzzle through this and to pull him down from death, as he comes to understand the Moriarty threat. This all sounds pretty vague – the TAB chapter will deal with it in more detail. For now, let’s move on to the other places where the height/heaven metaphor comes into s4.

One thing that several meta-writers have pointed out is that Ella’s office is… fucky. It’s not the same office as John repeatedly visits outside the MP – it’s possible that Ella has moved premises, but it’s a weird thing to draw such obvious attention to by the weirdness of the room. This isn’t a subtle change, like John and Mary’s place, it’s a really dissonant one, and the oddness of the room pulls our attention towards a character and space that by rights belong in the background of the story. It’s a really odd move – and that’s why I’m so convinced that it’s important.  

It looks like Heaven, for want of a better description. The window with the light streaming through looks like the very top of a church window, and the beams suggest that the ceiling is like a kind of spire – and the spire in a church is meant to be closer to heaven, that’s part of the imagery. So there’s that side of things, and I really don’t think that’s a coincidence. However, the even weirder part is the partitioning of the room, for want of a better word. The wall ends at about chair height, and from there to the floor is – nothing? These aren’t mirrors because the chairs aren’t reflected. I have never seen a room partitioned like this, and nor has anyone I’ve shown the image to – again, it draws attention to itself. If the creative team had wanted us to take this scene at face value, they would have put Ella in an office. This is not a psychiatrist’s office. The partitions mean that it isn’t even private.

I don’t know if I’m right about the partitions, but there’s only one thing they remind me of, and that’s a closing door. It’s a trope in an adventure film – I first saw it in Indiana Jones, but it’s in many a movie. It also features in Doctor Who on multiple occasions.

It’s the moment when the door is coming down and you only have a few seconds to get under it, otherwise you die. Indiana Jones famously goes back for his hat. That one. That’s what the space under the partition looks like. Sherlock, thinking he’s solved the case of Norbury and therefore Mary (more in Chapter 7 X) is ready to pop off – he’s nearly gone. But in a moment of self-interrogation – making sure he got everything right, that John’s safe now – he realises he isn’t, and so he comes down. That sinking downwards is represented by the water imagery, as he sinks deep into his subconscious – LSiT has written a fantastic meta on water in S4 which you can read here X, as I’m loath to take credit for this idea!

I’m going to talk about water a lot more in the chapters on TFP, because of John in the well and pirates and so much, but the obvious thing to talk about now is the plane in TFP.

This is a point where surface level plot breaks down – because this cannot be in Eurus’s mind. When we watch film/tv, we make one of two assumptions – either we have the omnipotent view, like in most films, where we’re guided by the director but everything we see is ultimately objectively true, or we see through somebody else’s eyes (rarer). These can be played with – think of a film like The Usual Suspects (please skip to the next paragraph if you haven’t seen this film because it’s fantastic) where the film lets the viewer rest on their laurels and slip into normal, objective viewing patterns when of course it’s a subjective, flashback narrative, which Kevin Spacey is deliberately obscuring to trick an audience. This rug pull can be fantastic, but we don’t have such a rug pull here. Either it’s a poor man’s version, or there’s something else going on. Mug drop.

New paragraph – spoilers gone. Moments where the perspective was actually subjective and we missed it or forgot it are great rug pulls, because the clues are there but we don’t spot them. We love a good unreliable narrator. This isn’t the case here. The plane scene, as visualised, exists only inside Eurus’s head. Eurus is emphatically not our narrator during TFP, so when it comes out that the girl on the plane isn’t real, we just feel lied to.

If we accept that s4 takes place inside Sherlock’s MP, this makes more sense, because all of the characters are manifestations of different parts of Sherlock’s psyche and so he can jump between perspectives. It also means that the terror of being on a crashing plane that Eurus has felt ever since she was a child is not hers – it’s Sherlock’s. If we remember that planes are synonymous with dying in this show, an association that’s reinforced because of the “sleeping” people on the plane, a clear throwback to the dead passengers in ASiB, the climax of S4, when Sherlock is trying to save John and work out his repressed memories, is all fuelled by a child’s nightmare of dying, a terror that has resurfaced.

I think Eurus represents Sherlock’s queer trauma, and I’ll explain that in more detail in Chapter 5 X, which is completely devoted to Eurus. Her representing trauma, though, makes a great deal of sense in this situation. The problem of the plane, the threat that she hinges on, is one that has been repeating and repeating, though repressed, inside Sherlock’s consciousness, and he breaks through it with not only kindness, but the recognition that it is all in Eurus’s (and by extension his) head.

This doesn’t diminish the trauma that Sherlock experiences – one of the things I begrudgingly like about the ending of TFP. Sherlock can’t get rid of the problem and possible danger that is his trauma – but he can stop it from careering to the point of destruction by recognising it, he can learn to live in harmony (see the violin duet) with it, he can accept its existence.  Pushing through that trauma is what makes him able to abandon the plane and (we hope) return to the real world.

The positioning of the aeroplane problem in relation to the John-trapped-in-a-well problem is also pretty important. I’m of the firm belief that Eurus represents queer trauma, and this is the trauma that throughout the entirety of series 4 is both pushing him towards John and blocking him from him. Sherlock needs to wake up to save John, and has to push through the trauma to recognise this – but the trauma is blocking his way. She’s stopping him from helping John – it’s a terrible moment when Sherlock is telling John that he’s busy whilst John is drowning in the well – but it’s also pushing through the aeroplane moment that allows him to save John in the MP. This is the paradox of queer repression, right, and the paradox in Eurus’s behaviour – she’s simultaneously blocking Sherlock and leading him on to the solution.

When Sherlock finally reaches Eurus’s room, he tells her that he’s on the ground and he can bring her down too – and what is most striking is the way Eurus is sitting. She’s actually incredibly grounded, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and given that the house is burned it’s likely that this is the ground floor as well. The dark room is a far cry from the bright lighting of the plane – everything suggests that she’s been pulled back. And of course, the lovely touch that all she needs to do is open her eyes. That’s all the creators have ever been asking people to do – open their eyes to what is hiding in plain sight – and Eurus is allowing Sherlock to see things afresh for the first time. But also, this final breakthrough is what’s going to allow Sherlock to open his own eyes, right? So that phrase is doubly powerful.

And there was me hating on TFP for three years. That’s a brief journey through the highs and lows of series 4, though if anyone can explain the planes in TST to me that would be wonderful! The next chapter will do a run through of HLV before we move onto TAB and series 4.

[justgotham]

Time is running out for Jim Gordon and Gotham, and nobody is more acutely aware of that fact than Ben McKenzie, the actor who has portrayed the flinty Gordon for five seasons on the Fox series that shares its name with Batman’s hometown. “It’s a lot to take in,” McKenzie said about the Gotham series finale that airs tonight. “It really is one of those bittersweet moments. But the show was never an open-ended proposition.”

Tonight’s finale is titled “The Beginning…” but the name isn’t quite as ironic as it sounds. That’s because the drama was built to be a sort of “prequel procedural” that leads up to the familiar Batman mythology that DC Comics has been publishing since 1939. The narrative window would begin in Bruce Wayne’s youth with the murder of his parents, and effectively end with his first forays as a costumed crimefighter: Gotham would end when Batman begins. That graduation moment arrives tonight with the show’s 100th episode, the first to feature an appearance by the Caped Crusader in action.

Gotham fans are more than ready to see the Dark Knight in all his cowled glory, but the show’s creative team hasn’t shared that eagerness. Just the opposite. Executive producer Bruno Heller, the British producer best known for The Mentalist and Rome, has said he would never have developed the show if it was a traditional costumed-hero franchise. “I don’t think Batman works very well on TV,” Heller said back in 2014. “To have people behind masks? Frankly, all those superhero stories I’ve seen, I always love them — until they get into the costume.”

That has made Gotham an eccentric entry in the superhero sector, but not an entirely unprecedented one. Smallville (217 episodes, 2001-2010) still reigns as the longest-running television series ever based on DC Comics heroes, and creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar shared a similar aversion to costumed exploits. Their early mission statement was “no flights, no tights,” and the series held out until its final episode to put Clark Kent (Tom Welling) in Superman’s iconic suit.

For Heller and his team, the key to making a compelling Gothamwithout a Batman was to spotlight the hero’s trusted friend, James Gordon, the dedicated lawman destined to become the police commissioner of a city defined by its lawlessness and celebrity criminals. Gordon was introduced in the first panel of the first page of the first Batman comic book ever published, Detective Comics No. 27, the landmark issue that reached its 80th anniversary last month. Gotham added a key element to its version of Gordon — when Thomas and Martha Wayne are murdered, Gordon is the detective who handles the investigation.

Gordon is the good cop who holds on to his morals in a bad city that loses its marbles. The show found the man for the job in McKenzie, who had memorably portrayed LAPD officer Ben Sherman on the highly regarded (but lowly rated) Southland, which aired 2009 to 2013 on NBC and TNT. Before that, the Texan portrayed Ryan Atwood, a scruffy outsider adopted by a wealthy Newport Beach couple and the central character on The OC, the frothy Fox teen drama that aired for 92 episodes from 2003 to 2007.

“I had some things in common with the character,” McKenzie says with a shrug. It’s true, the 23-year-old actor trekked west from dusty Austin (instead of rural Chino) to Southern California, and bought himself a eye-catching Cadlliac DeVille that already had logged 17 hard years and 228,000 long miles. “That’s lot of miles.”

McKenzie has covered a lot of distance in his personal life while channeling the role of Gordon. In 2017, for instance, McKenzie married his Gotham co-star, Morena Baccarin, who has portrayed Dr. Leslie Thompkins on the series (and is well-known for her role in the Deadpool films as the mutant anti-hero’s love interest). The couple now have their first child.

For McKenzie, the end of Gotham closes a pivotal chapter in his screen life. But he’s also hoping that the final seasons will also someday represent a prelude to a different career story — one writing and directing. The actor directed the sixth episode of Season 5, and also directed one in each of the previous two seasons. McKenzie has also written the screenplay for two Gotham episodes: “One of My Three Soups” in Season 4 and “The Trial of Jim Gordon” in this final season.

McKenzie, the writer, didn’t exactly go easy on his fictional screen persona. The cop took a slug in the chest and hovered near death for much of the episode, stuck somewhere between “the here” and “the hereafter” in an existential courtroom where he had to defend his life.

‘I actually feel no sympathy for him at all,” McKenzie said with a chuckle. “The less sympathy you feel, the better, I’d say. The more pain you inflict upon the protagonist, hopefully, the higher the stakes are and the more emotion gets elicited. So I had to be a bit of masochist. Putting him through the ringer and having this existential crisis, this dream, where he’s on trial for his crimes and faces the loss of everything: the love of his life and his child at the same time. I think we got there. That’s about as high stakes as you can get. I think, ultimately satisfying, with the kind of emotional payoff we were looking for.”

That seems to apply to the season as a whole. The final episode is an epic send-off, too, with a story that flashes forward a decade (long enough for Gordon to sport a new mustache) and finds the Penguin (Robin Lord Taylor) returning from prison and Bruce Wayne returning to his ancestral home after years in self-imposed exile. It also coincides with the rise of the show’s off-kilter version of the Joker (Cameron Monaghan). “It’s fitting that he comes into conflict with Gordon and Wayne right at the end,” McKenzie said. “Cameron has been amazing and there was room for one more big flourish with the role.”

Most of the reviews have veered from good to great, encouraging news for the cast and crew of a series that had been uneven or over-the-top at times. “Everybody’s been very enthusiastic and positive,” McKenzie said. “The final season has been wrapping things up in the way the audience hoped we would.”

Gotham City is arguably the most famous city created in American popular culture since the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz (although Metropolis, Springfield, Mayberry, Twin Peaks, and Riverdale are other prominent spots on the map of un-real estate). Even without Batman, the city zoned by greed, paved in corruption, and mapped by trauma seems to have no limits as far as its story range.

“It’s extraordinary when you think about it,” McKenzie said. “The city itself is a character. There’s a lot of stories to be found in Gotham City. There’s a lot of stories being told from Gotham, too.”

It’s true, Gotham City will be the site of Batwoman, the pilot on The CW this fall, and for a string of upcoming feature films including Joker, The Batman, and the Birds of Prey project.

Also this year: a Harley Quinn animated series and Pennyworth (a series about Batman’s loyal butler) on Epix. Pennyworth and Gothamare unconnected in their story continuity, but both are from the tandem of executive producer/writer Bruno Heller (The Mentalist) and executive producer/director Danny Cannon (CSI franchises).

A passing reference in the 2016 film Suicide Squad identified Gotham City as a major metropolitan hub in the Garden State. The city’s location had been a vague matter for decades, but now it is officially part of New Jersey’s map, and Springsteen isn’t the only local hero named Bruce.

On Gotham, the city feels more like Al Capone’s Chicago than Dracula’s Transylvania. “There’s a specific look and style that Gotham has that sets the show apart. It’s visual identity is distinctive and it was really interesting to work within that as a director.”

Has McKenzie inherited anything Gordon, anything he will take with him forward? “Maybe. We have some things in common, too. He’s living in the same city I live in, New York, but just the slightly more dramatic version.  He’s had to figure things out on the fly and his life has changed and met the love of his life and had a child. There’s a lot of similarities there. But I haven’t bought a gun and I don’t go around shooting one. And I’m more a jeans and t-shirts guy. Although Gordon’s given me an appreciation for a good suit, that’s for sure.”

McKenzie said he’s learned a lot from the creative team he’s worked with, and he believes his acting has made his directing better and vice versa, as well. There’s several new projects that looks promising for McKenzie, both as an on-screen presence and writer or director. Still, saying goodbye to Gotham has been a sentimental exercise for the man who plays the taciturn detective.

“It’s hard. I’ve been through it a couple of times before. I’ve been on two shows before, so it’s been less daunting then before. I’ve built really strong bonds with these folks. We spent more time together than we do with our families for nine months a year. It’s been a joy and a experience I will never forget. I can’t forget.  I wake up every morning to my wife and child who happened during it. So yes, it’s been a city without limits for me.”

[starfriday]

Disney+ Hotstar unveils exciting new trailer for upcoming Hotstar Specials thriller Rudra - The Edge Of Darkness starring megastar Ajay Devgn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyuODiTjoFs&authuser=0

~ Produced by Applause Entertainment in association with BBC Studios India, Hotstar Specials Rudra - The Edge of Darkness is an Indian rendition of the iconic British series – Luther; set to be premiered on 4th March

Trailer link: https://youtu.be/FyuODiTjoFs

Mumbai, 14th February 2022:  A throbbing investigation of criminal masterminds and a gray hero living in the dark to discover the truth - the race to the finale is crucial. With an even darker, suspense-packed visual, Disney+ Hotstar today unveiled the second trailer for the most-awaited Hotstar Specials crime thriller, Rudra- The Edge Of Darkness at an event in Mumbai. Building curiosity, the trailer opens with a terrific dialogue by Ajay Devgn, “Jo andharo mein chupta hai, main usse wahi milta hu.” As he further introduces himself as ACP Rudra Veer, we get to see a glimpse of him solving the most mysterious crimes in the most unconventional ways.

Helmed by ace director Rajesh Mapuskar, this riveting psychological crime drama is celebrated actor Ajay Devgn’s digital series debut, where he will be donning the avatar of a cop never seen before. Produced by Applause Entertainment in association with BBC Studios India, the series has been shot at the most iconic locales of Mumbai. It also features a stellar cast including Raashii Khanna, Esha Deol, Atul Kulkarni, Ashwini Kalsekar, Tarun Gahlot, Ashish Vidyarthi, and Satyadeep Misra in pivotal roles.

“In Rudra – The Edge of Darkness, we are excited to bring a riveting thriller with one of India’s most loved actors, Ajay Devgn. Sameer Nair and his amazing team, Applause have helped deliver a show that we hope you will enjoy” said Gaurav Banerjee, Head, Content Disney+ Hotstar, and HSM Entertainment Network, Disney Star.

Sameer Nair, CEO, Applause Entertainment, said, “We are truly excited to be part of Ajay Devgn’s digital debut at such an ambitious scale with Rudra - The Edge Of Darkness. It’s been a terrific experience working on this unique narrative together with an amazing cast, crew and our production partners, BBC Studios. At Applause, we believe in the power of stories and storytelling, and with Rudra, we take forward our creative partnership with industry leader Disney+ Hotstar, and hope to continue entertaining audiences across the globe.”

Director Rajesh Mapuskar said, “Rudra spins a darker and grimmer tale to the usual cop and crime drama. The psyche of criminal minds is explored unusually with a hero who is quite dark himself, all through his pursuit of the truth. It was absorbing and enthralling to make and I hope it feels like that in the viewing.”

Bollywood Superstar, Ajay Devgn, said, “My character in Rudra - The Edge Of Darkness is possibly the greyest character you may have never witnessed before. This has been both challenging and inspiring for me, and I am elated to share the magic of Rudra with my fans across the world. I hope they fall in love with the show as intensely as we have worked towards the making of it."

Actor Esha Deol said, “It has been a thrilling ride to once again share the screen with my friend and co-actor Ajay Devgn, who, from the beginning of our shoot, eased me into being back in front of the camera. With Rudra-The Edge Of Darkness, I look forward to getting one step closer to the audience through my character and the show.”

Raashii Khanna who is also making her digital debut with Rudra-The Edge Of Darkness said,“Rudra is a dream project for me. It is the most difficult character I have played so far and it definitely pushed me out of my comfort zone. I hope the audience loves it as much as I loved playing it. I am also very grateful to be sharing screen space with a celebrated actor like Ajay Devgn sir.”

Actor Atul Kulkarni said, “I am excited to be a part of Rudra-The Edge Of Darkness and it’s been a pleasure working with actors like Ajay Devgn, Esha Deol, Raashi Khanna, and the entire crew. Viewers are going to be absolutely thrilled with the suspense and twists of the script. The entire crew has done a fabulous job and we can’t wait for everyone to watch the series."

Actor Ashwini Kalsekar said, “It has been a pleasure working with Director Rajesh Mapuskar and the entire cast of Rudra- The Edge Of Darkness. This series has been great learning for me and I am confident that viewers will be thrilled to watch this show. There is a lot of twists and suspense awaiting you.”

The six-episode series is an Indian rendition of the globally successful British series, Luther. The series has a dark and complex narrative that is an idiosyncratic race-against-the-clock thriller delving into the psyche of highly-intelligent criminals and the detective who hunts them. Rudra-The Edge of Darkness will be available exclusively on Disney+ Hotstar from 4th March 2022 in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and Bengali.

Synopsis: Set in Mumbai, Rudra-The Edge of Darkness is a race-against-the-clock thriller that delves into the psyche of highly intelligent criminals and the detective who hunts them. Each episode in the series features a new threat even as the overarching series arc continues, portraying the grave personal cost at which DCP Rudra Veer Singh pursues criminals and killers and the unlikely friendship that he forms with Aliyah, a genius sociopath. In the series, Mumbai, the metropolis goes beyond being a mere backdrop for our hero’s vigilante actions but sets the very stage upon which the war between good and evil is waged. Even in this darkness, Rudra believes there is still love in the world. Because in the end, humanity is all we've got. And it is for this belief that Rudra sacrifices everything he has.

Disney+ Hotstar offers an unmatched entertainment experience to users with the world’s best stories and LIVE sporting action coming together on one platform. With an annual subscription of Disney+ Hotstar viewers can enjoy mega-blockbuster films that release directly on the platform like Bhuj: The Pride of India, Hungama 2, Maestro, Netrikann, The Big Bull, Laxmii, Lootcase, and more, the best of global movies and shows dubbed in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu including Super Heroes (Loki, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Avengers: Endgame), best animation films (Frozen 2, The Lion King), kids favourite characters (Mickey Mouse, Doraemon), exclusive Hotstar Specials shows in seven languages like the trending series Human along with hugely popular series like The Legend of Hanuman, Grahan, City of Dreams, November Story, The Empire, Out of Love, Criminal Justice, 1962: The War In the Hills, Special Ops, Aarya, OK Computer, LIVE sporting action and much more!

~ Tune in to Disney+ Hotstar to catch Ajay Devgn’s digital debut with crime thriller drama Rudra – The Edge of Darkness from 4th March onwards ~

[back-and-totheleft]

Oliver Stone tackles the drugs war in America's backyard

A man steps across the floor of what seems to be a basement or dungeon, on a film shot by a wobbly, handheld camera. Blood, sticky underfoot, runs beneath his boots – and the camera catches what seems to be a severed head. The scene is being played on a computer screen, watched by an intense young man, transfixed. A beautiful girl looks also, over his shoulder. "Is that Iraq?", she asks, squirming at the degenerate and apparently gratuitous cruelty. "Mexico," replies the man with a grunt, clearly terrified himself. Welcome to the latest film by Hollywood's – even America's – heretic-in-chief, Oliver Stone. Unsurprisingly, this brief exchange is charged with greater meaning than it appears at first sight, and the film's director has come to elaborate.

The physical presence of Oliver Stone is not unlike that of his impact on cinema over the last four decades. He is immediately contrapuntal: tanned leathery skin, khaki waistcoat and black boots in the seamless, breezy tranquillity of a grandiose hotel in Berlin, answering waiters' questions in polite German with a growl, complimenting the pretty-prim waitress on her looks with a gravelly chuckle. And when he gets down to the business of explaining his new film – sleeves rolled up, hair like that of an old rocker (which he is) – there is no polite prologue to the heresy. "Yeah, this is one of America's wild wars that never ends and ain't going anywhere: the war on drugs." After all, this is the man who has – famously or infamously, depending on who you are – subverted and scorned every norm, rhyme and reason on which the narrative of the US political establishment (and America's strut in the world) is premised, his canon thereby so much greater than the sum of its parts.

Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July were pivotal contributions to America's attempt at reckoning with its own self-generated catastrophe in Vietnam; JFK, Nixon and W. retold and revolutionised received wisdom on the death of one president and the lives of two others. World Trade Center rescued the human story of 9/11 from that manipulated by Washington for its own reasons.

Perhaps most cogently of all, with hindsight, Salvador, from 1986, was among very few films or mainstream expressions of any kind which looked at the dirty war that ravaged the Americas during the 1980s through a Latin American lens, repositioning President Reagan's role as more that of jackboot than sponsor of the freedom he claimed to be spreading, through alliances with dictators and death squads. And more recently, South of the Border stood and stands as the only attempt of its kind to document a new dynamic across the hemisphere, and the rise of newly confident leftwing leaders in the Latin Americas, unbowed by the colossus, the US. Stone's latest, Savages, is to be seen in that vein – only the story concerns the country that is a mere 20 minutes walk from Texas across the Rio Grande, and just south of the border from the golden beaches of San Diego. It addresses the first war of the 21st century (which gives us a glimpse of what the rest of it may well look like), the narco cartel war in Mexico.

Of course Stone is drawn to this: Mexico's war – if that is what it is – has claimed 50,000 lives, and has done so with striking and baffling cruelty. "A lot of these people have died slowly," says Stone, approaching his theme. "I didn't want to show people being dissolved in acid, and there are plenty of other things we could have shown but didn't, or had to cut."

Indeed there are: in his hypothetical but meticulously researched film Stone does not detail the sewing of a flayed face to a soccer ball, or the decapitated bodies left dangling from bridges, mutilated corpses strewn along highways or filling mass graves. Strangely, though, the US media seems as keen to avoid mention of the daily litany of death across its underbelly as it is to cover it; even less does the American establishment want to understand why all this is happening, and consider the possibility that there may be deep-rooted economic causes of at least aspects of Mexico's agony for which the US bears some responsibility, quite apart from its insatiable need to consume drugs and welcome the profits they generate through its banks.

High time for a major film about all this, in an America which, as Stone says, "doesn't give a shit" – even though the violence is next door and spilling over the US government's fence through the desert, in defiance of Washington's militarisation of the sieve-like border. America wants there to be a wall along the 2,000 miles it shares with Mexico, like the one that once ran beneath the window at which Stone sits in Berlin. But that is not going to happen when the border is also the busiest commercial frontier in the world, crossed by a million people every day.

At first sight, Stone may seem to have flinched from making this badly needed film. Savages is not for the most part set in Mexico, not is it overtly about Mexico, as it might have been. It is an adaptation of a novel by the great American writer on the border and drug war, Don Winslow, about two men: Chon, a traumatised veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Ben, a karmic botanist par excellence. Their combined experience and knowledge enables them to grow marijuana of unrivalled potency and quality. It also helps them secure the devotion of lovely blonde O, whom they share as a narcotic-erotic ménage à trois.

Stone's generic Baja cartel, led by a matriarch called Elena, is set on acquiring the seed if not its growers, and kidnaps O in pursuit of this aim. The boys react heroically, and set out to rescue their woman. In the background is an aspirant deus ex machina, Dennis, a corrupt agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, who works alongside not only Don and Chon, but also the cartel's vicious enforcer on the US side, Lado.

There is detail in the film which Stone is the first – and only one, north of the border – to grasp, and the detail is important in reading not only this narco war, but also what it means to modern capitalist society. First is the perverse innovation in the cruelty, for its own sake and its recreational aspect. Stone treats us to the execution of a suspected snitch, hung by his wrists and whipped until he confesses (even though he is innocent), after which he is incinerated alive with a tyre around his arms and torso, running in wild circles to his death. During the scene, there's a moment of mastery: the soundtrack, the cackling laughter of those watching. It takes Stone to work that out. Yes, in Mexico's war, this is fun. "It's getting crueller out there," muses Stone. "It's gone up a level."

Another insight is the cartels' mastery of the internet and along with it their satanic sense of humour. The tit-for-tat over kidnapped O is conducted largely through cyberspace, and at one point the cartel sends our heroic duo an animated cartoon of the decapitation of their girl. And there is this about the real-life cartels: unlike the Bosnian Serbs or even al-Qaida, they do not need to speak to us, to the media or politicians, except on their terms. They control their message, they do so through their own mantas or banners, sick but funny notes pinned to the more illustrious victims' mutilated corpses, but above all through the internet – and in doing so they laugh at us. They have no cause to proselytise, nor is there any retort to them – that is their sick genius, and that is why they laugh. "Yeah – that humour thing," says Stone. "It's something else. It takes someone who knows what's going on to understand it, the humour and the cruelty. I was scared of it, but I wanted to make sure I could keep time with what is going on."

One of Stone's hallmarks, in films such as JFK and W., is that he make you suspend disbelief so thoroughly that you can be forgiven for thinking you're observing the real thing, not a dramatisation. In Savages Stone has mercilessly captured the horrific details of Mexico's war and it is tempting to ask why he opted for an action movie with rather annoyingly gym-cut Colgate Californians and a Barbie-blonde stoner as its central characters, instead of something that gets us inside Mexico. Inside, if not the Tijuana cartel, which is now, as Stone himself admits, "dealing with small pocket change", then a film about those others who are redefining what a narco cartel – indeed, criminality – is in the new world and global economy. The paramilitary Zetas, for example, are an entirely new breed of syndicate, utterly ruthless, apparently unstoppable. It seems a shame that even a film by America's most irreverent director (who has looked at the US through a rare Latin American eyepiece) must be centred on the United States. One would like Stone's take on the world's most wanted criminal, Joaquín "Chapo" Guzmán, fugitive leader of the Sinaloa cartel, or his nemesis, who has overtaken even him for savagery, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, founder of Los Zetas.

But actually I am missing the point completely, thinking this way. Stone has a terrifying and convincing thesis as to why the film has to be set in America, with American characters: "The point," he says, "is that wars come home, they come home to roost. And there are connections: one of the two main guys has come home from Afghanistan and Iraq, and he's brought all that with him, what I think are new levels of cruelty and combat technology we have out there."

He drives his theme: "Of course, humankind has always been cruel – the Third Reich and so on. But I think there are new levels of cruelty, new technologies now, a new ball game. Maybe I'm wrong, but the cruelty level in the world just went up in these recent wars. We get a lot of information about what's happening in Iraq, the Middle East and Afghanistan, which comes back to America with this guy. And who knows how this may influence what's happening in Mexico – I think it probably does."

It's a shocking but cogent point about the nature of the violence, and its arrival into our public domain. Stone cut his teeth in Vietnam, where images of violence (the famous girl on the bridge burned by napalm; and scenes from Stone's own films and past as a veteran) were supposed to shock us – and did. Now, in reality, all that has volte-faced: the Zetas relay their own atrocities on the web as recruiting posters, and in Stone's film, to parley with their proposed business partners. It has been posited before that the Zetas got their ideas for torture and execution videos from al-Qaida, who in turn respond to souvenir photos taken by American troops of their own abuses in Abu Ghraib. Stone, typically, hurls us to the logical, heretical, conclusion.

"This Middle East thing brought it to another level. The barbarism came back in a big way, and it was Bush who started that. It all began with Afghanistan and Iraq. The guy in the movie brings it home; and the cartel brings it home."

There are cinematic considerations too: "It's based on Winslow," says Stone, "and we've made it into a thriller. No, I don't think the cartels would work that way with independent marijuana growers in California. No, there aren't any IEDs going off in the Californian desert – but," and he grins with inimitably Stoneian mischief, "I like the idea!"

Another subtlety is Stone's depiction of the fall of Elena, the matriarch. This occurs as the result of a mutiny by Lado, who has switched sides to a rival, El Azul, and because she comes to California to visit her daughter. Her collapse – and with it, by implication, that of her cartel – could signify the arrival of a greater power, a new cartel led by El Azul. This has happened in real life: Guzmán has defeated the Tijuana cartel, which was led by one of the first female capos, Enedina Arellano Félix. It could be because "it's tough taking orders from a woman", observes Stone of Lado. But it could also be seen as Elena's weakness of character, or at least her old-fashioned view of what a cartel's code should be. As Stone puts it: "She's a good traditional woman. She's proud of the fact that her daughter is ashamed of her. And her fall is the fall of the don. Elena was weak because she had a thing for her daughter and wanted to rescue her." This is exactly it: the mutation of Mexico's cartels from the don of old, with his (or her) attachment to family and codes of honour, however criminal or perverse they were, and the transfer of power to those whose only code is raw ruthlessness – like Guzmán or, to an even greater degree, the Zetas.

In Savages, the DEA agent Dennis is corrupt and credible. He protects Chon and Ben for money, takes a bribe to deliver them Elena's daughter, and gets to strut and moralise at a press conference when Elena is finally felled – having himself switched allegiances to El Azul along with his contact, Lado. The role is in part shaped by a former DEA agent Stone hired called Eddie, who had "30 years experience. He was in the Middle East and he knew the scene in Mexico. I got into the DEA that way – Eddie took care of us; and getting that kind of insight into the DEA is a big deal."

Lado is a credible character who "wants to be an American", says Stone. "He takes his kids to little league, his wife worries that he's out last thing at night with his 'gardening business' – his cover, and of course he has other women. He comes in one night, and she can smell a woman on him and he takes her apart, he rapes her – but we had to let that scene go."

Lado "also has eight or nine chihuahuas at his feet", observes Stone, and it is a detail to relish though the scene was cut: "I've been to a couple of these drug lords' places", he says, "and it's like ocelots to them. They've got all these hairless chihuahuas, proud of the fact that 'they cost me a fucking fortune'."

Stone's conclusion focuses less on the economic backdrop in Mexico than the failure of the war on drugs. Stone of course takes this further, entwining his themes. First: "That border is going all day and all night long. And it's 2,000 miles long. There's no way they're going to stop this. Dammit – they tried to build a wall across Berlin!" He gestures out of the window towards Starbucks, where no-man's land used to be: "Walls don't work, period." And second: "I don't see anything coming out of this so far as the war on drugs is concerned. It's been 40 years now, and its just become a method by which more money can be generated to fight what they now call narco-terror." And here's the crux, the entwinement again: "Drugs and terror, they couple them together, and the drug war becomes part of the war on terror that never ends. Part of the total terror that is overcoming our lives."

Apart from connections to the Middle East already made, it is impossible to continue in this vein without invoking South of the Border – indeed it is impossible to discuss any Stone film in isolation from the others.

South of the Border is a documentary series of interviews with those who are bringing Latin America to a new critical mass, a shift in power vis-a-vis the United States. All of them are elected, leftwing presidents of countries that have been, as Stone puts it, "in Uncle Sam's backyard", but which now brandish a new self-confidence, after decades of American puppet regimes: Néstor and Cristina Kirchner of Argentina, Luiz Inácio da Silva of Brazil, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Paraguay's Fernando Lugo and, famously, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

In January 2008, Stone's audacious recent history on the theme of South of the Border began in this newspaper, with an interview he gave the Observer in Bogotá in which Stone refused to condemn the Farc guerrillas, with whom he was trying to negotiate the release of three hostages. With him were Néstor Kirchner and Hugo Chávez. "I remember it well!" he half-laughs now. "I was on a mission. I wanted to stay low key. Néstor was there, and Hugo, and the American Red Cross, flying into this shithole of a town. Anyway, the Red Cross helicopter arrives, and, well, it was called off. The Farc people are always wary of the CIA, and I think the Americans just couldn't have Hugo involved in anything that would be a success – the hostages were released shortly afterwards, after Hugo had gone."

He reflects now on the wider theme: "The numbers don't lie. These are countries which have seen growth and real improvements after being failed by neo-liberal economics. The US took the side of the bad guys constantly – the media covering up so many of the abuses, in Argentina, Chile … But now, for the first time, these countries have thrown off the stranglehold of the International Monetary Fund and US treasury, which made loans the terms of which were those of what they call the 'neo-liberal Washington consensus' – [to] not only pay back the loans, but conform their economies to the privatisation of the kind we have here: hospitals, military, prisons. Well, in South America, privatisation did not work, it had disastrous consequences.

"And what they essentially did in the last 10 years was to throw off that tyranny. Their people have suffered so much, and they voted in new leaders. But even after they were elected, these people were resented by the US. I've never read one positive word about anything these people have done in the US media – let's face it, the Americans don't accept the idea of the election of leftwing leaders in their own backyard."

Accordingly: "Each one of these leaders has been picked off, one by one, by the United States … Disunite them, break them off from each other. But they've stood firm, and I think this is an important moment. They've done good for their countries, and I hope they last."

There is a connection between Savages and another Stone film, in fact two of them: Wall Street and its recent sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Chon and Ben have a money-launderer, a finance geek who has left the big bank for whom he worked. In real life, however, we now know that this would be no freelancer; this would be the man from the bank itself, in suit and tie, protected all the way to the top. The scandal and outrage of major high street banks laundering Mexican drug cartel money has made headlines recently: American Wachovia and British HSBC were the first to be named and shamed – with more on the way – but the typical fines in such cases fall well short of proper punishment.

The banks' direct connections to the cartels' bloody war and the misery of drugs inevitably causes Stone to reflect on his two films about what was once his father's business, in those distant days when, he says "a bank was something that you saved with, and gave you a loan". He says of the money-laundering: "You kind of get a sense of where the real power lies. Gekko [his character in Wall Street] was an 1980s creature. But by 2008-9, the banks had changed. What Gekko was doing in the 1980s, everyone was doing – rigging things, fixing things – the outsider Gekko had become the system. Look at them! Making money with the money they took from the public, and gambling with it! You have these huge settlements, with AIG underwriting Goldman Sachs – and it's all over New York, that level of confidence, that level of arrogance and impunity. You go to the Hamptons, and you feel it." And there is an inevitable connection between this financial elite and the corporatisation of government.

"The United States," he says, "has been a corporate-controlled country increasingly since world war two. The concept of a national security state plays into that concept of us as a mega-corporation. I view the Pentagon as essentially a huge corporation. The United States has moved into corporate gridlock, and the gridlock controls us – the power of the lobbyists, banks, oil companies, pharmaceuticals … After Reagan triumphed in 1980, we had this embrace of the free market. But it's not a free market really, it's fixed. Because monopolies tend to dominate it, they come to the fore and push everybody out of the way. So it's a rigged playing field, like we saw in 2008 – the banks getting bigger and bigger.

"And you know the weird thing?" he asks, as if to the street below, those around the Brandenburg Gate. "Everyone wants to buy into that shit! The people take their cue from whoever has the power and the money! Go into the Four Seasons in New York, and power is the hero! No one wanted to talk about the poor Vietnamese when this all started, or the poor people in Latin America – no, we embrace power!"

He goes on: "I don't think Americans give a shit about out there. They don't understand why in the Middle East everyone hates America. They don't understand the 'backyard'. JFK did, and so did Henry Wallace when he was vice-president. They both tried to turn it round – and what happened? As soon as JFK was assassinated, Lyndon Johnson said he'd crank it up in Vietnam. In Latin America it was: 'Enough of this Alliance for Progress' shit, what about the $9bn we've got invested down there?'"

Which brings Stone to another subject he wants to talk about; for it never rains, it only pours with this tempest of a man. As Savages premieres, get ready – at the end of this month – for the publication of his book and thereafter the 10-part television series (to be shown in Britain next year) on which it is based, The Untold History of the United States. Working with the American University historian Peter Kuznick, Stone has compiled a series which, he says "is inspired by your British series The World at War – pure narrative, no talking heads and actors to portray some of the players. Ten one-hour programmes; everything's been fact-checked and now CBS has a copy. It's an unorthodox, true global story about America. About how Truman did not have to drop the atomic bomb that all the kids get taught was dropped to save lives and stop the war. That isn't why it happened, it was so that the world would become a huge amphitheatre for America. It's about the true origins of the cold war, which we all think was started by the Russians when they invaded eastern Europe (he gestures towards the window again, sun glinting off an S-Bahn train trundling through the glorious iron-and-glass station at Friedrichstrasse – not long ago, the overground platforms were in East Berlin; the underground ones were an interchange for the West Berlin U-Bahn system).

"It's about Truman after the war, a small man, a cold warrior and a political hack. After the war, we tried to demobilise, but it didn't last long. They created this legacy of rightwingers who pulled at this alarm that we were falling behind the Russians. But the Russians never achieved anything like parity – maybe at the end of the 1970s, but it broke them."

This is not history for history's sake, however – this is the history of our present and future, long beyond cold war, into war on terror, war on drugs: "It's the history," says Stone, "of our building the national security state, which is interested in nobody's security apart from that of the state. Always supposedly falling behind the enemy, so there would be no end to it. It's a legacy thing," he pleads, almost. "The American history our kids are reading is all upside down. Everything is the opposite to what you think." With Stone, a conversation can only return to the beginning – in the best sense – "because it is all interconnected", as are his films. But there is not time – though he does afford himself a valedictory thought that sends a shiver down the spine.

"This terror that we're supposed to be so terrified of … What the fuck is it? Why should we all be so scared? Well, there's big money in it, for sure. So now we have every form of technology at the disposal of the government and its war on terror – but who are we supposed to be terrified of? Why must we be so terrified?" For want of any further answers to his terrifying rhetorical question about being terrified of terror, Stone affords himself a joke, for like all good heretics, he is a jester too, at the court of America: "Jeezus!" He swallows a small bowl of salad dressing, neat, and rises from his chair. "The idea that the government is doing all this to protect me from marijuana!?"

-Ed Vulliamy, "Oliver Stone tackles the drugs war in America's backyard," The Observer, Sept 22 2012 [x]

[illionoisprelawland-blog]

Confederate Statues In America’s History

By Meera Gosavi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Class of 2022

July 25, 2020

With a relatively young life, the United States has seen significant changes in civil rights. These changes have been immortalized in statues and monuments across the country, and often times they are of those who have played pivotal roles in the suppression of minority groups. In recent weeks, there has been a surge in demonstrative protest in the form of removing symbols of those who have taken part in slavery, forced colonization, and other acts of suppression. In the wake of the death of George Floyd, a black American killed during an arrest by a white officer, many Americans are reconsidering the role of remains from the Confederate States, which historically supported states’ rights to slavery. This movement has also encompassed other minority groups, leading to the forced removal and defacing of statues of Jefferson Davis, Columbus, and other Confederate leaders [i].

In 2003, the Veterans’ Memorial Preservation and Recognition Act was enacted, which stated that anybody who “willfully injures or destroys, or attempts to injure or destroy, any structure, plaque, statue, or other monument on public property commemorating the service of any person or persons in the armed forces of the United States shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both” [ii]. Individuals who defaced statues during the George Floyd protests were charged under this act, for inciting riots, and other threats to public safety. These memorials were further legally protected on June 26th, 2020, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order protecting American monuments, memorials, and statues. Under the country’s responsibility to protect “domestic tranquility,” Trump asserted that recent protests and riots were threatening the country’s history and promote anarchy. As part of the executive order, “It is the policy of the United States to prosecute to the fullest extent permitted under Federal law, and as appropriate, any person or any entity that destroys, damages, vandalizes, or desecrates a monument, memorial, or statue within the United States or otherwise vandalizes government property”[iii].

Trump’s reasoning behind protecting national monuments echoes the sentiments of about 44% of Americans [iv]. The main justification behind keeping Confederate statues up is their place in the history of the United States. Regardless of personal belief and conviction for the morals behind the war, the Civil War was a pivotal moment in the country’s history, and the historical actors in it integral. Some Americans say that removing the statues would be rewriting history and akin to ignoring the evils and struggles of the past. U.S. Representative Tom Tiffany is among those and says “[a]ny country that erases its history is doomed to repeat it. I want to make sure that my children never forget our ancestors’ struggle to end slavery and these statues are a part of that story” [v].

On the other side of the debate, some states have already started the process of removing Confederate statues, sharing the concerns of American protesters and activists. The mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, broke an ordinance and incurred a fine in order to remove several Confederate statues, the governor of North Carolina removed three monuments on the grounds of public safety, and numerous corporations, sports teams, and even the U.S. Army have rebranded through changing names, outlawing Confederate flags, and changing their policies [vi]. However, because of the current laws in place protecting historical monuments and the president’s executive order, some states are having difficulties removing these statues. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has been challenged in his removal of a giant statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate Commander during the Civil War, by William C. Gregory, who claims the statue is in his name and he has a duty to guard it [vii]. The national discussion has even found its way into the federal government, where the lower chamber recently approved, 305-113, legislation to replace pro-slavery politicians’ statues and busts [viii].  

Supporters of the removal of Confederate statues challenge the effects of these actions. “The point of removing the monuments is to move from symbolism of racism to the substance of racism,” say Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Harvard University professor of history, race, and public policy [ix]. Keeping the statues further perpetuates the “Lost Cause” perspective of the Civil War, which euphemizes the war into a struggle of cessation, not slavery, and shows slaves, Southern women, and other marginalized groups as loyal to the cause, and places Confederate soldiers on a pedestal [x]. Most of the statues were erected during the period immediately following the Civil War, when white southern Americans wanted to remember an idealized success that never happened [ix]. There is a major difference between destroying monuments to erase the past and removing remnants of a heavily romanticized history that is destructive to a large part of the population. There is a similarity in supporting the removal of Confederate statues and the Black Lives Matter movement in that both seek to reclaim the narrative of American history for what it is, not glamorizing it in either direction.

The statues of Confederate soldiers, Christopher Columbus, and other polarizing historical figures are widespread in the United States. It is clear that they are important historical figures, but the version of history they portray is what is so divisive for Americans. How should the country perverse the “right” side of history? And where should legislators draw the line in protecting these statues? If Confederate statues are protected, it seems as though Confederate flags would be next, and potentially other forms of hate speech. The George Floyd protests have once again opened the door to a country wide review of oppressor’s roles in history, and whether or not they have a place in today’s discussion of history.

________________________________________________________________

[i]“Confederate and Columbus Statues Toppled by US Protesters.” BBC News, BBC, 11 June 2020, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53005243.

[ii]Veterans’ Memorial Preservation and Recognition Act of 2003. Pub. L. No. 108-29, 117 STAT. 772 (2003) Authenticated U.S. Government Information, https://www.congress.gov/108/plaws/publ29/PLAW-108publ29.pdf

[iii]“Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence.” The White House, The United States Government, 26 June 2020, www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-protecting-american-monuments-memorials-statues-combating-recent-criminal-violence/.

[iv]Impelli, Matthew. “44 Percent of Americans Say Confederate Statues Should Remain Standing, Poll Shows.” Newsweek, 11 June 2020, www.newsweek.com/44-percent-americans-say-confederate-statues-should-remain-standing-poll-shows-1510282.

[v]Garfield, Molly Beck and Allison. “2 Wisconsin Republicans Vote against Removing Confederate Statues from Capitol While Ron Johnson Blocks Juneteenth Holiday.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 23 July 2020, www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/23/2-wisconsin-republicans-oppose-effort-remove-confederate-statues/5492876002/.

[vi]“Removal of Confederate Monuments and Memorials.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 21 July 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removal_of_Confederate_monuments_and_memorials.

[vii]“Judge: No Immediate Ruling on Robert E. Lee Statue Removal.” WTOP, 23 July 2020, wtop.com/virginia/2020/07/hearing-set-in-suit-over-robert-e-lee-statue-removal-plan/.

[viii]Touchberry, Ramsey. “113 House Republicans Vote Against Removing Confederate Statues from Capitol.” Newsweek, 22 July 2020, www.newsweek.com/112-house-republicans-vote-against-removing-confederate-statues-capitol-1519794.

[ix]Aguilera, Jasmine. “Confederate Statues Removed Amid Protests: What to Know.” Time, Time, 24 June 2020, time.com/5849184/confederate-statues-removed/.

[x] Janney, Caroline E. “The Lost Cause.” Enclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities, 27 July 2016, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/lost_cause_the#start_entry.

[kootenaygoon]

So,

Niles was on crutches, watering his garden.

It was late Tuesday afternoon, and we’d just put the Wednesday edition of the Star to bed. Despite the fact it was mid-October, the weather was still summery, with a light wind rustling its way up the valley. The Slocan River had a magical sheen in the distance as my RAV broke out of the trees. Brutus was running laps of the yard with a dog I didn’t recognize, too busy to bark at my arrival, so I followed the driveway around to the barn unmolested and parked beside a mud-spattered, half-deconstructed Jeep. Niles had invited me over to discuss his latest manuscript submission, which was over 100,000 words long. It sat hefty and dog-eared on my passenger seat, riddled with highlighter and scribbled notes, alongside a six-pack of Blue Buck. I wasn’t looking forward to this feedback session, because I wasn’t sure if he was mature enough to hear what I had to say.

“We’ve got the house to ourselves tonight, Goon. I’ve got the second season of Fargo queued up, plus I’ve acquired some fabulous Afghani Kush that will blow your hair back,” Niles said, his crutches squelching in the mud as he clopped over to my side door.

I lifted up his manuscript, which was called The Fox and the Fawn. “Did you forget about this?”

Since my arrival in Nelson I’d been keeping a small roster of three to five students, helping them develop everything from a fictional account of the Rwandan genocide to a fantasy novel about an autistic teen adventuring through an alternate dimension. The trouble was, I was starting to feel like an imposter. My repeated attempts at finishing Whatever you’re on, I want some hadn’t resulted in the fame and glory I was imagining, and now I was wondering if I’d been kidding myself this whole time. Yeah, I had my Master’s, but so what? Could I really be a writer? And if not, was I really worthy of being a teacher? Who was I kidding?

“I figured you would’ve burned that thing the moment you realized what a gargantuan turd it is,” Niles said, his blond hair hanging limply around his dishevelled face. He wasn’t looking healthy.

I climbed out and shut the door. “I read some of it to my new roommate Mika, actually. We had a little reading in my living room.”

“You didn’t.”

“Yeah, she wanted to hear the sex scene.”

Niles roared with delight. That’s what he was always looking for, an audience to the lewd reality of his existence. As far as he was concerned, he was the best kind of criminal — the kind that never gets caught. The Fox and the Fawn was a fangirl tribute to himself, to his gangster exploits as a Slocan Valley weed king. With legalization finally here, he felt it was time to tell his story. The manuscript was Bukowski mixed with Kerouac, demented and perverse and shockingly violent. At one point he even casually admits to date rape, including a scene where his girlfriend rages at him for taking advantage of her while he was drunk.

“I didn’t know you had a new roommate,” he said. “What happened to Brendan?”

“Nothing. I just found a new place, levelled up. Teamed up with this girl Mika who works at my pot dispensary. She’s got a pet rabbit.”

“You’re still getting your shit from there? Why aren’t you coming to me?”

Niles was wearing a brown bathrobe. He opened his front door, told me not to worry about my shoes, then handed me the crutches while he hopped on one foot up the carpeted staircase. He grunted and sighed with each step, muttering swear words under his breath. I’d never seen him like this. When we reached the top I gave him his crutches and the beer, and he motioned for me to take a seat in the living room. As I passed by the familiar John Cooper paintings, I noticed that he’d hung the self-portrait I’d given him as a present a month earlier. I’d painted it with Natalya.

“You hung my painting upside down?”

He laughed, opening the fridge. “Yeah, I dunno why I did that. Just seemed to me like it looks better that way. I get a kick out of it.”

I shook my head. For the past month I’d been painting furiously, and it felt like a swirling green portal had opened up inside my brain. My writing may have stalled, but this was a way to channel my creativity into something other than journalism. I was getting sick of the Star, getting sick of taking the same pictures of the same fundraiser events, getting sick of the constraints. My relationship with Ed and Kai was strained too, as they were tired of my entitled laziness. Maybe they knew I was stoned every day, slumping into the office uninspired and half-assing my stories. I felt like the universe was wasting me, but painting had become a soothing therapy, something I did exclusively for myself. I was giving myself permission to be sloppy and flamboyant and outrageous, slathering my canvases with dribbling glitter and chaotic streaks of inspiration. This painting I’d given Niles was my first.

As he banged around in the kitchen, I walked over to the living room window and looked out at the Slocan Valley. The trees were the colour of flames, red and orange and electric yellow, and they matched the darkening sky. Lately I’d been feeling a subtle dread, like the magic was slowly draining from my surroundings. Winter is coming. I hated being single, hated being a chronic stoner, and hated how much of my life I spent stressing out about money. In university I’d become so convinced that I had life sorted out, that I was on a consistently upwards trajectory, that it was only a matter of time before I would be rewarded with creative success and lifelong fulfillment. Now I wasn’t so sure. It was easy to blame Paisley and all the drama she’d brought to my life, but she’d been gone for over a year now. At some point I would have to address my own shit without using her as a scapegoat.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this, man.”

Niles scuffed back into the living room holding our beers. “This?”

“The Kootenays. The Star. I got into a bit of a scrap with Kai and Ed today, in the newsroom,” I said. “Over our coverage of Me Too.”

He laughed, sinking into his recliner. “You’re too radical for them?”

I shook my head, crossed to the couch. “I’ve just been seeing all these posts, right? Women sharing their trauma, men self-flagellating, but the discourse isn’t actually going anywhere. It’s not actually accomplishing anything. But I wanted to do something tangible, so I interviewed the superintendent and a bunch of principals about how they’re responding to it. Just to get it official, on the record, how they plan to change things.”

He snorted. “I’m sure they loved that.”

“So I hand in this 1200-word behemoth of a story, with all these different angles and perspectives, and they told me it didn’t have any teeth. They said it’s just a bunch of talking heads. I tried to argue, you know, that it’s important to be holding these people accountable and that their words are powerful, but they weren’t hearing it. They said if I’m going to write a story about sexual assault then I need a real sexual assault.”

He frowned, shrugged. “So what’re you going to do?”

I felt myself getting worked up. For the past few days I’d been endlessly scrolling through Twitter and Facebook, feeding on the outrage and vitriol. It was bringing everything up, Trent and Galloway and my strange obsession with crucifixion. The topic of sexual violence was like an intricate bomb I was trying to defuse with nothing but a screwdriver. As far as I was concerned, the conversation had to move beyond the rage to solutions. Men had to own their complicity, with more than just empty words, and propose tangible solutions. I was determined to prove Kai and Ed wrong, to show that my journalism had real teeth.

“Well, I’ve already started writing a column about it. About my personal feelings on the subject. And I’m going to illustrate it with a picture of my face with the words ‘Part of the Problem’ scrawled across my forehead.”

Niles laughed. “That should piss off the right people.”

“Not only that, I’ve found two girls who are willing to go on record about their assaults. One who was a student at Elephant Mountain Secondary, and the other from Selkirk College. If I do this right, this could be the most powerful story I’ve written since coming to the Star. Like, I think it could be a really big deal.” 

“Well, Goon,” he said. “I think your saviour complex is alive and kicking.”

Eventually we pivoted to discussing his manuscript, and I flipped through it on the coffee table as I took him through my notes. All of his female characters came off as interchangeable, he had a tendency to summarize scenes rather than depict them, and by the end of the narrative he came off as completely unlikeable. Being self-deprecating is one thing, but it was like he was going out of his way to shock the reader with his shitty behaviour. It felt like he was daring his audience to hate him. At times it reminded me of the memoir A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden, by Stephen Reid, so I recommended he check it out for inspiration. I felt Reid struck a fine balance between owning his mistakes and aspiring to be a better human being.

“That’s the bank robber?”

“Yeah, they made a movie about him. Point Break.”

“That surfer movie with Keanu Reeves?”

“I think they fictionalized it a bit. The point is, there’s a guy who has actually grappled with his own soul. That takes balls.”

He nodded. “A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden. I like that.”

Once we were finished with notes, Niles padded off into his bedroom and returned with an elaborate dragon-themed bong. As we smoked together I thought of the caterpillar from the animated version of Alice in Wonderland, asking in his condescending tone “Who are you?” That was the sort of question that was getting harder to answer all the time. Thinking about rape culture all day had me hating myself to the point where I felt physically sick, but at other times I was convinced of my own prophethood, my special destiny to save the world somehow. If I could tackle this Me Too story from exactly the right angle I knew it could have a legit impact. Everyone was encouraging women to speak while men listen, but I had been listening. And now I had something to say. I leaned back in the couch and examined the light fixture in the ceiling, composing my column in my head.

“Here,” Niles said. “You want another hit?”

The Kootenay Goon

[chronotopes]

star trek parent child relationships ranked by objective quality

15. elim garak and enabran tain. as a character whose daddy issues serve as pivotal plot points in not one but two excellent two-parters, garak deserves no less than the bottom spot on this list. garak’s dad refused to acknowledge him as his son for years and forcibly locked him in a closet as a punishment, which is a charmingly unsubtle way to let us all know that tain is a homophobic 1950s politician. this adds an extra dimension to the already horribly sad dynamic between the two. 

14. gul dukat and tora ziyal. ziyal actually beats garak for the dubious prize of ‘most plot-essential daddy issues’. maybe this is something they bond over? anyway this is some truly shit tier stuff. the power dynamics are truly horrific, she’s not in a place to register this until a week or so before the narrative unceremoniously kills her off, and his biggest achievement as a parent is choosing not to kill her off to preserve his career. 

13. julian, richard, and amsha bashir. eugenics is bad, kids! while they are outwardly nicer than tain, and are not war criminals like dukat, the ever present knowledge that eugenics is, in fact, bad, means that they’re basically tied with tain from my pov. another way in which julian and garak are soulmates. 

12. worf and alexander. while worf is a pretty great guy, unlike all the other parents on this list so far, i think it’s best for these two to stay apart. also sons and daughters was only interesting during the ziyal b-plot and young alexander seems incredibly annoying. 

11. jim kirk and david marcus. to be frank jim and david isn’t much of anything! jim was absent for the majority of david’s life and when he did return david’s life went to shit pretty fast. this wasn’t through any fault of jim’s own but carol really could have benefited from sending david off on vacation for the entirety of the khan thing. from an audience perspective, the only useful thing david does is act as another kirk mirror who is (beta-canonically) fucking saavik, a spock mirror. which is fine but we went over that in tmp. ultimately they land so low not because they’re incredibly troubled but because the search for spock is a badly written movie. 

10. kira nerys and kira meru. these two , like the previous two, were characterized by an overall lack of contact. in fact i’m not sure that traveling back in time to find out if your mom was fucking gul dukat counts as a relationship, but i liked that episode even though its temporal mechanics were shoddy. and even though nerys did attempt to kill her for a bit there, meru does love her and nerys does realize this ultimately. and regardless of the questions re: collaborators and how much meru enjoyed the thing with dukat and the degree to which it  matters, she did a lot for nerys. and i’m fucked up over how much this show TORTURED my girl but that’s all known already

9. spock and sarek. these two probably deserve to be lower but i’m a sucker for their reconciliation arc! sarek LOVES HIS SON, man, it’s REAL. the mind meld scene in search for spock is a great scene in an overall pretty bad movie. in fact i’m obsessed with sarek’s antics as a father-in-law. still, though, sarek was a total dick.

8. sarek and michael burnham. i’m still only on ep 3 of discovery but they seem pretty cool. she facetimes him midway through a space battle which is perhaps not an ideal use of pacing but it does reflect the degree to which they trust each other and all.  

7. beverly and wesley crusher. wesley is a shit but from the minimal tng i’ve seen bev seems to be doing her best. god bless her she deals with a lot. and it’s a compelling ongoing idea to return to in theory, so i’m keeping it up here. 

6. spock and amanda. they love each other! fuck jjverse for killing her off, though. that was low.

5. kira nerys and kira taban. well even though i had to look up her dad’s name on memory alpha, and even though (much like meru) taban gets just one episode, they seem like they loved each other SO MUCH and it’s another episode that i’m fucked up over! nerys missed out on his death because she was out shooting cardassians but he forgives her, over in the celestial temple. occupations fuck with people’s priorities. they loved each other is what i’m saying. 

4. molly, kirayoshi, miles, and keiko o’brien. (and kira nerys.) one big happy deep space family! they retain a really good home life, mainly, for a family where the mom is written in or out as it suits the writers’ convenience and the dad is formulaically required to be tortured in every season. good on them! 

3. nog and rom. (and later leeta.) the extent to which i was ultimately invested in this One Big Happy Ferengi Family is something i could not have AT ALL predicted over the course of my ds9 adventure. they both advanced their careers out of quark’s shitty bar and became compelling characters, AND they loved each other and made it through trials such as ptsd and quark’s continued shittiness. (dw quark i reluctantly love you too.) good on them as well. 

2. joseph and benjamin sisko. joe sisko is in like five episodes but he proves to be just as iconic as his son and grandson. his golden moments include calling ben out for getting too Patriot Act on him, being a badass priest in ben’s prophet vision about racism & rick berman sucking but science fiction being great, and running around a desert in his old age out of sheer stubornness. a kind man who gives good advice. a sisko father son relationship that can only be challenged by… 

1. benjamin and jake sisko. dodging cliche sources of manufactured conflict as ben accepts jake’s decision not to join starfleet easily! making us all cry in the visitor! warming our hearts as ben supports jake’s career as a writer wholeheartedly! get this lads: ben is the only starfleet captain to balance a career and a family, prophets bullshit nonwithstanding, and he was in the middle of a WAR. your faves could never! prophets bless them forever. 

[giovannicavalcanti-blog]

THE LIES OF DEMOCRACY

The Oscars 2020 is taking place today at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles, California, and among the highly rated, multi-million-dollar Hollywood productions, there is also a number of foreign work competing for the statuette. 

One of them being the self-proclaimed "documentary" 'The Edge of Democracy', directed by Brazilian director Petra Costa, in which she narrates her side about the recent political situation in Brazil. 

Who is Petra Costa?

Petra Costa is a Brazilian actress and filmmaker. She is daughter of far-left activists who integrated a communist armed guerrilla in the 70s and fought the Brazilian military dictatorship during the time. She is also the granddaughter of Gabriel Donato de Andrade, one of the co-founders of Andrade Gutierrez, one of the country's major construction companies––directly involved in the corruption and bribery scandal revealed by the Car Wash Operation in 2015, leading to the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-corruption-andrade/brazils-andrade-gutierrez-to-pay-381-million-fine-to-settle-graft-charges-idUSKBN1OH22U

Her mother is also affiliated to the far-left party PT (Worker's Party). 

Petra is flat-out biased. She even states that in the beginning of her film. 

In her documentary, however, she is not just simply utilizing her bias to distort reality and depict the facts the way she feels the most convenient for her narrative. She lies repeatedly throughout the film––at least once every 5 sentences. She blatantly distorts the facts so that PT can be perceived as an inoffensive political party who did nothing wrong.

The saddest thing is that she believes every single word of it. 

Furthermore, among the cesspool of lies and cynicism, Petra also presents us with dramatic testimonies of her mother about Dilma Rousseff and how she loves the former President. Lula also compares himself to Jesus Christ. Yes. 

The whole thing boils down to a documentary produced by a left-wing activist––whose parents are affiliated to the party that she (the author) is trying to persuade us into believing did nothing wrong. It is the PT standpoint on the impeachment process and corruption scandals that brought their party down. 

PT is responsible for orchestrating one of the biggest corruption schemes ever seen in politics. 

With the insane amount of lies and distortions, I have listed 8 of the most blatant ones so we can keep reality in its place.

1. The dimension of protests in favor of the 

impeachment of Dilma Rousseff

The documentary blatantly omits the real dimension of protests against then-President Dilma Rousseff, presenting just a couple of scenes from local demonstrations, as opposed to the humongous protests in favor of her impeachment that took place during the time––thus painting the impeachment process as something unwanted by the majority, which in reality is the utter contrary. In March 13, 2016, a massive protest in Sao Paulo gathered nearly 2 million people––the biggest protest in the history of the country. 

To ignore this fact is to ignore history. To omit it is to try to erase history and rewrite your own. 

It is undeniably comical the way these protests are depicted in her documentary.

An utter and complete fiction. 

2. Lula was unjustly imprisoned

Petra hilariously hurls out key pieces of Lula's process in the Car Wash operation, which resulted in his imprisonment. The documentary affirms that, after 2 years of investigations, the only evidence found was that Lula had 'supposedly' (she actually uses this word, as though it is not factual) received an apartment as kickback payment from the Petrobras corruption scheme––known as Petrolão. 

Lula was sentenced to 9 years in prison, in the district court, by then-judge Sergio Moro, for corruption and money laundering. He was accused of receiving a beach apartment as kickback payment from one of the construction companies that benefited from the Petrobras corruption scandal and nearly bankrupted the company––the OAS. Lula appealed the sentence.

His defense's main argument was that Lula was not the owner of the apartment and that he was solely interested in buying the luxurious property. 

A highly contradictory argument: the apartment was never put up for sale. According to testimony given by the CEO of OAS, Léo Pinheiro, the apartment in case, a luxurious three-floor property, was never up for sale.

That heavily blows out of the water Lula's main defense that he was only interested in buying the property, which. . . was never put for sale. 

The federal police stormed Lula's home and found documents of the apartment registered in his wife's name. 

The police also obtained security footage of the building, which shows Lula and his wife visiting the apartment on multiple occasions, as well as pictures of the two in the property. 

It is a 200-page report detailing the crime with exculpatory evidence Lula is guilty and his pivotal intention was to hide the property but utilize it as the real owner. 

Lula appealed the sentence, but was found guilty again in the appellate court.

Lula was also sentenced in a second case, accused of receiving a ranch house as kickback payment––from the same company––, in which he was sentenced to 12 years in prison, appealed, and then had his sentence raised by the appellate court: 17 years in prison. 

He is also a defendant in 6 other cases. 

3. Mensalão Scandal

Petra downplays the importance of the Mensalao Scandal––dirty money paid to legislators in order to get them to vote and approve bills put forward by Lula's government. The fact is that then-President Lula, PT party and his Chief of Staff, José Dirceu, extorted House representatives so that Lula would get his projects and bills passed in Congress.

 PT congressman José Guimarães's assistant was caught on camera filling up his underwear with money––$200 thousand dollars––and was later arrested trying to scape with the money he had received from the scheme.

The scandal resulted in 24 people convicted and sent to prison. Among them, here are the ones with direct ties to Lula:

José Dirceu (Lula's former Chief of Staff)

José Genoino (former president of PT)

Delubio Soares (former treasurer of PT)

4. Economic crisis

For some reason, Petra thought it would be a smooth idea to omit the fact that the economic crisis she mentions in the documentary was, solely, of PT's responsibility–– which ran the country for 14 years with both Lula and Dilma. 

She maliciously downplays the significance of the economic situation and does not bother to explain, of course, the actual dimension of the crisis caused by years of PT in power–– the worse economic crisis in the history of the country, leading to an estimate of 15 million people without jobs. 

5. Lula was leading the polls in 2018

In 2018, Lula was indeed leading the polls for the presidential election. However, the documentary completely omits the fact that Lula was also the most rejected candidate out of the bunch. 

His rejection, according to polls, was 55,8% as of March 2018, precisely 8 months before the election. It was nearly identical as that of then-canditate Jair Bolsonaro. 

6. Jair Bolsonaro's stabbing

Jair Bolsonaro, then presidential candidate, was stabbed in the stomach during one of his rallies in the city of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, precisely one month before election day. 

Petra maliciously ignores this fact while describing the circumstances in which the 2018 elections happened. 

The documentary, which narrates the polarization and waning of democracy, completely leaves out an actual assassination attempt suffered by one of the main candidates during the election process.

7. Leaked audio between Lula and Dilma 

Rousseff

The documentary blatantly tries to undermine the actual content of a leaked audio executed by then-judge Sergio Moro, where Lula (while having his phone tapped by authorities) receives a call from Dilma Rousseff, then President, in which Dilma offers Lula the position of Chief of Staff (a ministry) in her government. All of this happened while Lula was being investigated in the Car Wash operation. The position would have given Lula parliamentary immunity, thus blocking him from any possible investigations and putting an end to the one already at place.

Sergio Moro saw this as a blatant attempt to obstruct justice. Then, lawfully, he allowed the content of the audio to become public.

There was absolutely nothing even remotely ilegal in making the audio public, other than the audio itself. 

Petra also falsely states that Sergio Moro was tapping Dilma Rousseff's phone, which is a bizarre lie. Moro had legal authority to tap Lula's phone––the one actually being investigated. Dilma, then, called Lula and was the second player in the story. 

8. Sergio Moro removed Lula from the 

presidential election

That is insanely false. 

Sergio Moro was a district-court judge in the state of Curitiba, south of Brazil. He was the judge in charge of the Car Wash operation––which sentenced 155 of the most powerful people in the country, including politicians, entrepreneurs, etc. Furthermore, Lula, then-House speaker Eduardo Cunha (who led the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff), and many other politicians were put in prison by the operation, as the country witnessed white collar criminals going to jail for the first time. 

Moro sentenced Lula in only one case: the beach apartment. He was found guilty and sentenced to to 9 years in prison, in September of 2017. 

Sergio Moro's sentence did not imprison Lula or removed his political rights.

The sentence in the district court of Curitiba did not put Lula in jail, neither did it remove his political rights, as Lula appealed the sentence and waited for the ruling from the appellate court out of prison. 

In January, 2018, the appellate court convicted Lula in the apartment case, increasing his sentence from 9 to 12 years in prison. Lula was then sent to prison, as the only court he could appeal to was the STJ (Superior Tribunal of Justice). 

According to the Lei da Ficha Limpa or Supplementary Law no. 135 of 2010, one's political right has to be revoked immediately upon conviction in the appellate court. 

Lula was also found guilty in the Superior Tribunal of Justice - STJ.

That is the last court Lula could have appealed to, except for constitutional issues that shall be brought to the Supreme Court. 

Thus, Lula was found guilty in every level of the Judiciary system.

Petra blatantly dismisses all of these facts and propels the narrative that Moro actually blocked Lula from running for president: a comical delusion perpetuated by the far-left in Brazil. It also so happens to be a perfect regurgitation of the exact narrative ran by Lula himself and the PT party. 

As fiction, the movie successfully stay on theme: it perfectly distorces every fact there is, allowing the viewer to be subjected to a complete alternate reality, in which PT and Lula are perceived as the saviors of Democracy, who suffered a coup perpetrated by evil white oligarchs and bankers who run the countries market––the same ones PT benefited the most while in power.

A sad truth.

[anghraine]

for the otp meme - 29 and 30 - jyn/cassian

Late, sorry, but you’ll see why :P

29) One headcanon about this OTP that breaks your heart?

So if, theoretically, they died on Scarif—okay, I’ve already said that I think the idea of Rogue One being forgotten is completely ludicrous for Jyn and literally impossible for Cassian. And I completely stand by that! 

(I’ve seen people trying to fanwank obvious problems to make the tragically forgotten narrative work. None of the rationalizations are remotely credible.)

But there is just so much that people wouldn’t know. Apart from Force visions, there is no way to know personal details of who they really were and what they went through. They’re well-known heroes, the leaders of one of the most pivotal missions in the entire history of the war. There are some pictures—personnel files for Cassian, whatever they might have found to identify Jyn to the rescue team. There’s a long service record for him, a detailed dossier for her. But nothing personal. Nothing about what drove them, what made them heroes.

Nobody knows why Jyn Erso left as a disaffected criminal and come back preaching about how rebellions are built on hope. Nobody knows that Cassian saw her throw herself into crossfire for a child she’d never seen before. They don’t know that Jyn could wreck a team of stormtroopers with some batons or that Cassian kept her alive with one perfect shot. They don’t know that Jyn’s nickname was Stardust or that Cassian had nothing but a robot friend and a crusade against the Empire. They don’t know about Galen’s message breaking her heart or Cassian carrying his prison with him. They don’t know how they went from mutually suspicious barely-allies to seamless partnership. They don’t know about the fight on Eadu or the heart-eyes in the hangar. 

They’re interesting and extremely important to the eyes of history. But they’re also ephemeral. A pair of names, and faces, and data records. That’s it.

30) One headcanon about this OTP that mends it?

OKAY, so while that breaks my heart, there’s also… the combination of prominence and mystery doesn’t make people consign their heroes to the dustbin of history. It makes them try to put the pieces together! 

And I honestly kind of love the idea of people later on—“later on” meaning literally any time from ANH onwards—really trying to figure them out. They had such narrow lives, and what they did over a few weeks has entire swaths of the Rebellion fascinated with them, trying to figure out who they were as people from all these different directions. There are serious interpretations of the facts, but there’s also just this wealth of story and imagination that grows up around them.

I mean? Basically, they know that Jyn Erso, daughter of the scientist who built the Death Star and (mostly) petty criminal, was busted out of Imperial prison by the Rebellion. She reluctantly accepted their bribe to try and negotiate contact with Saw Gerrera over information from a defecting pilot. The Rebellion sent Cassian Andor, a young but extremely valuable spy who’d obediently served the Rebellion for nearly his entire life, to work with her as a partner/handler. Ideally, they’d be able to rescue Galen Erso, but at the very least they should be able to identify his facility for the Alliance to wipe out.

Some time in: Andor sent back a message saying that the planet-killer was real, it had obliterated the Holy City, UHHHH WHAT NOW

Some time after that: Andor provided the location, but quickly tried to call off the attack. He was shouting something about “Jyn” and the platform.

Erso, who days before dismissively described political opinions as a luxury, returned calling for open revolution and swearing that her father had sabotaged the planet-killer. After the Council’s rejection, she headed out with the defector and monks, while behind the scenes, the otherwise by-the-book Andor scraped up a crack intelligence/special ops team and went rogue with her. 

Maybe someone paid attention to their extremely public conversation/gravitational pull in the hangar, maybe not. In any case, all that’s known is that they managed to transmit the plans and must have died shortly thereafter under the Death Star.

I am personally 100% convinced that—given their personalities and drastic swerves after spending time together—a romance would be generally assumed. I mean, undoubtedly there’d be some killjoys who insist there’s no way to know, and they only spent a few weeks together at most, blahblah, but most people tune them out and “unexpectedly Erso and Andor fell in love” gets more and more embedded into the standard narrative.

Okay, and what I love here isn’t just the idea of people believing they fell in love, but having no idea how it happened. Like I was saying, people always fill in blanks in stories. So instead of having one love story, Jyn and Cassian have many of them! Wildly different, and most of the time wildly inaccurate. 

My favourite version is easily the First Order’s (really):

So, the official account is pretty common knowledge under the New Republic, but of course the ex-Imperials (“ex”) have their own perspective. For them, the story begins with a mad Imperial scientist whose beautiful daughter gets seduced by a Rebel spy. It’s all very pulp serial à la Flash Gordon.

And the scientist turns traitor himself and plots with a faithless Imperial pilot to destroy the peace and stability brought by the Empire. They’re all rightly defeated, OF COURSE, but the damage was done (DUNDUNDUN), and no one knew just how much damage was done until after the fact. LO THE DANGERS OF HUBRIS

There are probably really cheap holodramas about this. They turn Krennic into a tragic, twenty-something hero, a protégé of Galen’s who was secretly in love with Jyn from boyhood but LOVED HONOUR MORE. He nobly died stopping the now-corrupt Jyn and her ruthless lover.

…This is the version Finn grows up with, ofc. He was mostly intrigued by Galen and Bodhi, the Imperial defectors, but he’s sentimental enough for the DOOMED BADWRONG LOVE to appeal. Rey’s knowledge of the entire Rogue One mission is probably minimal, so of course, he enthusiastically provides a dramatic performance of The Mad Scientist’s Daughter. 

Poe, naturally, was brought up with the story of the brave Rebel captain, the dashing outlaw he recruited, and the passionate romance that led Andor to defiance and Erso to conviction. They planned a daring rogue mission because they knew it was right, no matter what anyone said!!!, and though they they themselves died (martyrs for the cause!), their doomed heroic love brought HOPE TO THE GALAXY (*soaring music*). 

(There are a lot more schmaltzy kisses and declarations of eternal devotion in that version, though his father once admitted that he vaguely knew Andor and found it … uh, really hard to picture. That just makes it better as far as Poe is concerned.)

Anyway, he is both horrified and delighted by the First Order version and keeps adding well ACTUALLY asides.

…Damn is this long, but anyway, iconic lovers Jyn and Cassian whose story is constantly repurposed and debated does make me happy on a certain level.

[nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany]

Politics is Show Business for Ugly People…

Digital Elixir Politics is Show Business for Ugly People…

  “It’s too late baby Now it’s too late” –Carole King

  Politics is show business for ugly people. And you’ve got to play by show business rules.

Show business is all about preparation, getting the act, song, movie, TV show, ready and then marketing it so people will be aware of it and buy it.

And you always want to be first, and you want to eliminate all chance.

You want an upward curve, even if you start low and slow.

You want no lulls. You want to keep people interested, by teasing them with new information on a regular basis.

You want to control the narrative.

And what is the narrative the Democrats are trying to sell?

Damned if I know. The only thing they can agree on is they hate Trump. I hate KISS, but that doesn’t keep them off the road, playing to empty arenas, their fans support them. And speaking of KISS, Gene Simmons is one of the greatest marketers of all time, a complete blowhard, but he’s making it work for himself and the band. Maybe he learned it all from Neil Bogart, who changed his name from “Bogatz,” to give the right “impression.” Bogart failed on his first attempt, trying to sell a record of Johnny Carson routines, it went instantly into the cut-out bin, but then he pivoted to disco and Donna Summer and KISS.

And Bogart was a showman, full of crap. Seemingly everything he said was inflated and wrong. Remember when there were four simultaneous KISS solo albums and Neil said they were instantly gold? The press bought it, even though all of them but Peter Criss’s came back.

You see it’s all about perception. Sell the myth, not the facts.

It’s more important that Elizabeth Warren be seen as a fighter against the man than any specific policy position. People don’t go that deep. CONGRESS doesn’t go that deep! Did you read the “New Yorker” story on Al Franken? His accuser told boldfaced lies, there was history disputing her account, but she got out there first and what she said ruled, even though she was working for a pro-Trump radio station. Once again, the Democrats reacted, and now they’re doubling-down, can’t see why they were wrong. Kirsten Gillibrand, YOU’RE HISTORY!

The press said Trump was losing because he brought up the “i” word before the Democrats. But Trump knows you get ahead of the blowback, you make the first punch, and you load the media with so much b.s. that it can’t keep up.

Meanwhile, the public doesn’t know the difference between impeachment and conviction and Pelosi seems as old as she really is. She’s Perry Como after the Beatles. Doesn’t she realize THE RULES HAVE CHANGED?

Happens in entertainment all the time. Suddenly you can’t sell hair bands. Suddenly hip-hop is burgeoning. And if you fight the tide, you drown. Oh, little fish can still swim in their own private backwaters, but if you’re playing for everything, if you want to run the table, you’ve got to be looking to the future, not the past!

Trump speaks to the public. Pelosi speaks to insiders.

That’s why AOC gets so much traction, she speaks to the public-at-large, it’s less about legislation than attitude, which is move over you old farts and let the younger generation take the reins, you oldsters have no idea what is going on anymore!

But Team Pelosi says you’ve got to run to the center, because you’ve got to appeal to those districts that flipped for Democrats in 2016. That’s like making Aerosmith play acoustic, and refusing to let them play new material.

Of course, Aerosmith doesn’t play new material, and Chris Christie is a big Boss fan. It’s kinda like long hair. Once upon a time it symbolized something, you were either for us or against us, then it was just a fashion choice.

Anyone who plays to the rearguard is always disrupted. Didn’t you ever read Clayton Christensen? Everybody pooh-poohs the new, saying it’s not as good as the old, and then it becomes better and the old folds overnight. Christensen says to embrace the new, and then eliminate the old when the new gains traction. The DNC is being disrupted and their answer? Let’s go back to Good Ol’ Joe. That’s like asking your grandfather for music advice.

So what we’ve got is candidates who want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and the Democrats are freaking out, they can’t even get aligned on one position. Criticize the Republicans all you want, but after Trump they all got in line. That’s how you win, when you play like a team!

And if you try to appeal to everybody, you lose. The road is littered with middle of the road artists, who fail on the chart and play to a dwindling audience in Branson and clubs. You want to get people EXCITED! That’s what Warren and Harris and Bernie and Buttigieg are doing.

And what does the establishment say?

THEY’RE TOO FAR LEFT!

AC/DC was too heavy until suddenly they weren’t. “Back In Black” is still streaming prodigiously today, “You Shook Me All Night Long” is an American anthem! Of course Mutt Lange helped. The right has Karl Rove, who do we have on the left?

So the reason you wanted impeachment is so the whole world would watch, so Trump’s bad behavior, criminal or not, would infect the public. When the truth outs, it’s hard to deny.

But no, it was never time. Pelosi and her pals are like a Silicon Valley outfit that never releases its product. It’s so busy getting it right that it can never come out. Meanwhile, Facebook becomes so big by having a motto of “move fast and break things.” Forget that Zuckerberg is the enemy now, he’s on top of the pyramid, he controls the conversation more than not only Congress, but the mainstream media! Furthermore, he just pivoted, saying it was about private conversations, when the Democrats are still looking for that elusive consensus. Everything worth paying attention to starts off the radar, small, and then it blows up and BECOMES THE MAINSTREAM!

So Barr says Trump is innocent.

The Dems folded their tent.

Then Mueller sends his letter and they think…wow, maybe there’s something here. Like a band the label has stopped working that is suddenly selling tickets…the label is on to something else, it’s hard to get it restarted on your old product.

And then the Democrats placed all their hopes on Mueller testifying. That’s like taking someone with a great record, who’s never been on stage, and having them headline Coachella! No one would do that, the odds of failure are too high.

So Mueller didn’t deliver. Oh, don’t make it about Russia, the Dems thought Mueller was gonna blow a hole through the curtain, reveal that Trump was culpable and should be charged. Not only did Mueller not do this, he said as much after he delivered his report earlier…this was his final statement!

And the Dems are playing by old rules and crying to the nonexistent refs that the Republicans are cheating. No, Trump and his posse have invented new rules, like no one in the regime needs to testify. When they up the ante, so do you! You don’t say there’s no crying in baseball!

So now, on left wing radio, all the talk is about getting the transcripts from the grand jury. God, even in the NFL when you lose, you lose, no matter how heinous the call. Because without rules, you’ve got no game.

And that’s what’s happening now, WE’VE GOT NO GAME! Trump and his cronies are running ragged and the Dems and the media are so flummoxed, they do NOTHING!

Come on. Even the most lame influencer knows you’ve got to deliver product on a regular basis. You’ve got to hook the audience and deliver. That’s certainly what Trump has done, and all the left keeps saying is HE SHOULDN’T TWEET!

Meanwhile, these same wankers are posting to Instagram, the national pastime, and despite their constant disparagement of the internet and Twitter, Twitter is where the news happens, and if you’re not on it, you don’t know what’s going on.

So impeachment failed in the marketplace. It’s like Annapurna, Megan Ellison’s movie company. No matter how great the film, and she’s put out plenty, they never reach expectations. “Booksmart,” one of the best-reviewed movies this year, which appeals to oldsters and youngsters…dead. Product is only one part of the puzzle, you need the aforementioned marketing. The big studios may put out lame films, but they’re experts in marketing them.

When you fail, you write it off. Just look at the Fortune 500, that’s what they do. Did Bezos try to improve the Fire phone? No, he deleted it from the catalog. And today, your mistakes don’t haunt you as long as you continue to play and make noise. Once again, the game has changed, there’s so much noise that the biggest challenge is just reaching the public. And if you don’t, people forget what you were selling, they’re inundated with new messages.

And I’ve used a plethora of metaphors here, but now I’m gonna use one more. Pro football used to be a running game. Now running backs make a fraction of what they used to, all the emphasis is on passing and receiving! You change with the times!

Seems like everybody can change with the times but the Democrats.

So forget impeachment. This is the gang that can’t shoot straight, even if they have clear evidence that Trump needs to go, the right will spin it otherwise and rule the marketplace, i.e. public opinion. And just like a record, you don’t have to appeal to everybody to win. How come Trump knows this and the Democrats don’t?

Instead of clinging to the past, trying to rebuild the old edifice, it’s time to build a new one. And there are a number of candidates promising this. Safe rarely succeeds. Can you say Romney? Can you say Kerry! One of the reasons Obama won was because he HAD little history. There was little to nail him on and he promised hope.

Believe me, Ol’ Joe is not promising hope. He’s like a boomer musician waiting for Hilary Rosen to save them from streaming. But Hilary’s moved on from the RIAA, and streaming has already won, soon there won’t even be any hardware to play discs! Apple kills the iPod because the innards are no longer manufactured, and the Democrats keep trying to prop up oldsters, held together by baling wire. Bill Clinton had Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and her husband selling him, and despite baggage, he won anyway!

Who do the Democrats have?

Maybe it’s time to hire Bill Belichick.

Oh, that’s right, HE’S A TRUMPER!

  ~~~

Visit the archive: https://ift.tt/IH9kjT – @Lefsetz http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz – If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter

    Politics is Show Business for Ugly People…

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[intheshadowofsignificance]

I've been reading your analysis posts & we seem to see things in a very similar way 99% of the time so I wanted your opinion on something.I truly feel like duke's character in the anime is miles away from manga duke.In the anime he seems like a guy who has a great background & a good family. But in the manga you can see it's clearly not that way. I adore that boy and I'm 100% sure that beyond that pretty face is an amazing,kind heart.I really feel like his character is underdeveloped & it sucks.

Thanks for the kind words and support, it’s always a lot of fun to share my thoughts and meet new people!

I have to be completely honest, I’ve never read the manga in its entirety and, as such, don’t have a great concept of Duke’s character or homelife as portrayed in it.

But as far as the anime goes I really do consider him an underrated character. He’s unfortunately easy to minimize because he had one distinct mini arc and then, as was common with some of the minor characters, faded into the background aside from a few pivotal scenes. The Yugioh writers tend to piece people in when they need to further the plot and because it’s such a flippant narrative approach, sometimes the audience sees it as the characters themselves being expendable.

I think it’s even more complicated where Duke is concerned because, for a variety of reasons, he’s especially aware of and plays to the “pretty young money” trope.

He does a lot of posturing in order to survive his newfound success and stardom, even if it’s small-scale. Being in the public eye generally means being larger than life. He and his game either live up to media hype or flop, and after such a rare and lucrative opportunity partnering with his idol, he can’t afford to flop. So he’s cocksure and invincible, when he meets new people he’s pushy. Coming into the limelight means selling himself, usually over-selling himself, and eventually that becomes a coping mechanism as well as a business tool. It puts distance between him and people who are after him for fifteen minutes of fame.

I guess what I’m saying is: the persona Duke projects is very different from who he actually is, and many people don’t realize just how deliberate that is.

They tend to forget the deeper facets of his personality.

I agree that he’s incredibly kind and think that shows throughout the series. He genuinely trusts and cares for Pegasus, and even though hearing the awful truth about him and Duelist Kingdom is a huge blow, he eventually sees Yugi’s sincerity and pays his story the attention it deserves. He’s never dismissive and he never ignores the emotional plight that put everyone through.

Later in the series, though he teases Joey, he’s always there when the gang needs someone to talk to and isn’t above rushing in to help when he’s able. Not only is he willing to put himself at risk for Yugi and co doing whatever the situation calls for, he never once uses Yugi’s relative fame as a leg up in the industry, he never exploits his friendships for personal gain.

At the end of the series, when they step off (on?) the boat that leads to the ceremonial duel, Duke seems legitimately upset they didn’t call to fill him in. The important part of that is: he didn’t insist on going. He didn’t say, “this is my fight too, you’re stuck with me” but wished them well and made sure he was there to see them off and know they were okay.

It was never about what he could get, it was always a matter of support.

Duke’s loyalty is also supremely impressive and one of my favorite traits in the entire series. Despite everything Pegasus has done to that point, he calls him. This is a man who made him, and his game, what it is. This is also a man who has committed unspeakable transgressions against people he cares for deeply. Does he weigh those things against one another? Do we see Duke strip his relationship with Pegasus down to whatever is good for business? No.

He remains genuinely invested in Yugi, Joey, Tristan, Tea, and Ryou’s lives, while also being invested in Pegasus’s.

He loves and uplifts people even when he has seen them at their worst.

He doesn’t admonish them.

He doesn’t hold it over their heads.

He just loves them.

I really, really like Duke, and it’s outright criminal that he’s perceived as this shallow, superficial person.

[meeedeee]

The Great Wall: Review RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

Warning: all the spoilers for The Great Wall.

When I first heard about The Great Wall, I rolled my eyes and dismissed it as yet another exploitative tale of Western exceptionalism where the white guy comes in, either insults or co-opts the local culture, saves the day and gets the girl, all while taking a role originally intended for or grossly better suited to a person of colour. It wasn’t until later that I learned the film was directed by Zhang Yimou, filmed on location in Qingdao, China,  and featuring a predominantly Chinese cast, with Matt Damon – emphasised in Western marketing to attract a Western audience – starring as one of several leads, in a role that was always intended for a Western actor. The film was released in China at the end of 2016 – and is, in fact, the most expensive film ever shot entirely in China – and was meant to be an international release, designed to appeal to both Chinese and Western audiences, from the outset.

Which left me feeling rather more curious and charitable than I had been; enough so that, today, I went out and saw it. Historically, I’m not an enormous fan of Matt Damon, who always strikes me as having two on-screen modes – All-American Hero and Not-Quite-Character Actor, the former being generally more plausible than the latter at the expense of being less interesting – but I’ve always enjoyed Zhang Yimou’s cinematography, especially his flair for colour and battle sequences. The fact that The Great Wall is ultimately an historical action fantasy film – a genre I am predisposed to love – is also a point in its favour; I’ve watched a great deal of Hollywood trash over the years in service to my SFFnal heart, and even with Damon’s involvement, The Great Wall already started out on better footing than most of it by virtue of Zhang’s involvement.

Even so, I was wary about the execution overall, and so went in expecting something along the lines of a more highly polished but still likely disjointed Chinese equivalent to the abysmal 47 Ronin, an American production that floundered thanks to a combination of studio meddling, language issues with the predominantly Japanese-speaking cast being instructed to deliver their lines in English, last-minute changes and a script that couldn’t decide who was writing it. But of course, 47 Ronin’s biggest offence – aside from constituting a criminal waste of Rinko Kikuchi’s talents – was doing what I initially, falsely assumed The Great Wall was doing: unnecessarily centering a white actor playing a non-white role in an Asian setting whose authenticity was systematically bastardised by the Western producers.

Instead, I found myself watching one of the most enjoyable SFF action films I’ve seen since Pacific Rim. (Which did not waste Rinko Kikuchi.)

The premise: William (Matt Damon) and his companion Tovar (Pedro Pascal) are part of a Western trade mission sent to China to find black powder – gunpowder – for their armies at home. While fleeing Kitan bandits in the mountains, they encounter an unknown monster and, in seeking its origins, are soon taken in by the Nameless Order, an army manning the Great Wall against an expected incursion of the monsters, called Taotie. In charge are General Shao (Hanyu Zhang) and his offsider, Commander Lin Mae (Tian Jing), advised by Strategist Wang (Andy Lau). Every sixty years, the Taotie attack from a nearby mountain, and the next attack is just starting; as such, the Nameless Order and the Great Wall are all that stand between the hoards, controlled by a single Queen, and the nearby capital, Bianliang. While attempting to win Commander Lin’s trust, William makes two alliances: one with Sir Ballard (Willem Dafoe), a Westerner who initially came to China in search of black powder twenty-five years ago; and another with Peng Yong (Lu Han), a young soldier whose life he saves. While Tovar and Ballard are eager to steal the black powder and leave, Commander Lin, General Shao and Strategist Wang are working to counter the evolving strategies of the Taotie: if the Wall is breeched and Bianliang falls, the Taotie will have enough sustenance to overrun the world, a fact which forces William to choose between loyalty to his friends and to a higher cause.

From the outset, I was impressed by the scriptwriting in The Great Wall, which manages the trick of being both deft and playful, fast-paced without any stilted infodumping or obvious plot-holes, aside from a very slight and seemingly genre-requisite degree of handwaving around what the Taotie do when they’re not attacking. The fact that at least half the film is subtitled was another pleasant surprise: of the Chinese characters, both Lin and Wang speak English – their fluency is explained by years of Ballard’s tutelage – and who act as translators for the rest; even so, they still get to deliver plenty of lines in Chinese, and there are numerous scenes where none of the Western characters are present. A clever use is also made of the difference between literal and thematic translations: while the audience sees the literal English translation of the Chinese dialogue in subtitles, there are multiple occasions when, in translating out loud for the benefit of the English-speaking characters, Lin and Wang make subtle adjustments, either politely smoothing over private jokes or tweaking their words for best effect.The scene where Commander Lin’s ability to speak English is revealed made me laugh out loud in a good way: I hadn’t expected the film to be funny, either, but it frequently is, thanks in no small part to the wonderful Pedro Pascal, who plays Tovar so beautifully that he has a tendency to steal every scene he’s in.

Tovar is dry, witty and pragmatic, given to some dark moments, but also loyal, while his establishment as a Spanish character adds another historical dimension to the setting. Aside from calling William amigo, he only gets one real instance of subtitled Spanish dialogue, but the context in which he does this – using it as a private language in Lin’s presence, once her ability to speak English is known – makes for a pleasing gracenote in their collective characterisation. The brief details we’re given of William’s mercenary history, fighting the Danes and Franks and Spaniards, are likewise compelling, a quick acknowledgement of the wider world’s events. It reminded me, in an odd but favourable way, of The 13th Warrior, a film which made the strange decision to cast Antonio Banderas as an Arab protagonist, but whose premise evoked a similar sense of historical intersections not often explored by the action genre.

I also appreciated Tian Jing’s subtle performance as Commander Lin, not only because her leadership of the all-female Crane Corps is objectively awesome – in the opening battle, the women stand on extended platforms beyond the Wall, bungee down on harnesses and spear monsters in the face – but because, refreshingly, not a single person in the film questions either the capabilities or the presence of the female warriors. When General Shao is mortally wounded in battle, it’s Lin he chooses to succeed him, a decision his male Commanders accept absolutely. While there’s a certain inevitable hetero tension between William and Lin, I was pleased beyond measure that this never devolves into forced romance or random kissing: by the film’s end, the Emperor has confirmed Lin as a General, William is on his way back to Europe, and while they’re both enriched by the trust they found in each other, William is not her saviour and Lin is always treated respectfully – both by William, and by the narrative itself.

(Also, The Great Wall passes the Bechdel test, because the female warriors of the Crane Corps talk to each other about something other than men, although they do still, somewhat delightfully, talk shit about William at one point. This is such a low bar to pass that it shouldn’t even merit a mention. And yet.)

Though the action slows a little at the midway point, it remains engaging throughout, while the overall film is structurally solid. As a genre, fantasy action films tend to be overly subject to fridge logic, but the plotting in The Great Wall is consistently… well, consistent. Even small details, like the role of the Kitan raiders, William’s magnet and the arc of Peng Yong’s involvement are consistently shown to be meaningful, lending the film a pleasing all-over symmetry. And visually, it’s spectacular: the Taotie are as convincing as they are terrifying (and boast a refreshingly original monster design), while the real Chinese landscapes are genuinely breathtaking. Zhang Yimou’s trademark use of colour is in full effect with the costuming and direction, lending a visual richness to a concept and setting which, in Western hands, would likely have been rendered in that same flat, drearily gritty sepia palette of greys, browns and blacks that we’ve all come to associate with White Dudes Expressing The Horror Of War, Occasionally Ft. Aliens. Instead of that, we have the Crane Corps resplendent in gorgeous blue lamellar armour, the footsoldiers in black and the archers in red, with other divisions in yellow and purple. Though the ultimate explanation for the Taotie is satisfyingly science fictional rather than magical – which, again, evokes a comparison to another historical SFF film I enjoyed, 2008’s flawed but underrated Outlander – the visual presentation remains wonderfully fantastical.

While I can understand the baseline reluctance of many viewers to engage with a film set in ancient China that nonetheless has Matt Damon as a protagonist – and while I won’t fault anyone who wants to avoid it on those grounds, or just because they dislike Damon himself – the fact that it’s a predominantly Chinese production, and that William’s character isn’t an instance of whitewashing, is very much worth highlighting. While William certainly plays a pivotal role in vanquishing the enemy, the final battle is a cooperative effort, one he achieves on absolute equal terms and through equal participation with Lin. Nor do I want to downplay the significance of Pascal’s Tovar, who represents a three-dimensional, non-stereotyped Latinx character at a point in time when that’s something we badly need more of. Indeed, given the enthusiastic response to Diego Luna’s portrayal of Cassian Andor in Rogue One, particularly the fact that he kept his accent, I feel a great disservice has been done by everyone who’s failed to mention Pascal’s front-and-centre involvement in the project.

I went into The Great Wall expecting to be mildly entertained by an ambitious muddle, and came out feeling engaged, satisfied and happy. As a film, it’s infinitely better than the structural trainwreck that was the recent Assassin’s Creed adaptation, and not just because the latter stars Michael Fassbender, the world’s most smugly punchable man. The Great Wall is colourful, visually spectacular, well-scripted, neatly characterised, engagingly paced and consistently plotted, and while I might’ve wanted to see a little more of General Shao and his offsiders or learn more about the women of the Crane Corps, that wanting is a product of the success of what I did see: the chosen focus didn’t feel narrow by construction, but rather like a glimpse into a wider, more fully-fleshed setting that was carrying on in the background. For Western audiences, William and Tovar are the outsider characters who introduce us to the Chinese setting, but for Chinese audiences, I suspect, the balance of the film feels very different.

The Great Wall is the kind of production I want to see more of: ambitious, coherent, international and fantastical. If we have to sit through the inclusion of Matt Damon this one time to cement the viability of such collaborations, then so be it. With films like La La Land and Fantastic Beasts actively whitewashing their portrayals of America’s Jazz Age, those wanting to support historical diversity could do much worse than see something which represents a seemingly intelligent, respectful collaboration between Western and Chinese storytellers. Maybe the end result won’t be for everyone, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself – and really, what more can you ask?

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[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system.

MINNEAPOLIS — Last Wednesday, Marcell Harris was hit by a rubber bullet. He had joined the second day of protests in this city over the killing of George Floyd, a black man who died after a police officer kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes while bystanders filmed. Though these protests began with peaceful demonstrations outside the city’s 3rd Precinct, interactions between police and protesters had escalated. Police unleashed pepper spray, projectiles and tear gas. Protesters threw water bottles, built barricades and destroyed nearby property.

Harris said he had used his backpack as a shield and maneuvered close enough to take the baton of the officer who shot him. On Thursday night, he returned to the same spot to watch the precinct burn. With no police presence to be seen, he and other protesters were celebrating a victory. “I’m nonviolent,” he said. “But this feels emotional. George Floyd popped the bubble. It feels like the beginning of the end.” The end of what? “What we’ve been going through,” he said, referring to heavy-handed and often deadly policing of African Americans. “All the bullshit.”

Watching a peaceful protest turn into something much less palatable is hard. There has been a lot of hard the past few days, as people in dozens of cities have released pent-up anger against discriminatory police tactics. Cars and buildings have burned. Store windows have been smashed. Protesters and police have been hurt. When protests take a turn like this we naturally wonder … why? Was this preventable? Does anyone know how to stop it from happening?

Three federal commissions concluded that when police escalate force those efforts can often go wrong, creating the very violence that force was meant to prevent.

Turns out, we do know some of these answers. Researchers have spent 50 years studying the way crowds of protesters and crowds of police behave — and what happens when the two interact. One thing they will tell you is that when the police respond by escalating force — wearing riot gear from the start, or using tear gas on protesters — it doesn’t work. In fact, disproportionate police force is one of the things that can make a peaceful protest not so peaceful. But if we know that (and have known that for decades), why are police still doing it?

“There’s this failed mindset of ‘if we show force, immediately we will deter criminal activity or unruly activity’ and show me where that has worked,” said Scott Thomson, the former chief of police in Camden, New Jersey.

“That’s the primal response,” he said. “The adrenaline starts to pump, the temperature in the room is rising, and you want to go one step higher. But what we need to know as professionals is that there are times, if we go one step higher, we are forcing them to go one step higher.”

Interactions between police and protesters are, by their very nature, tough to study. Even when researchers get a good vantage point to observe protests in the real world — for example, by embedding within a crowd — the data that comes out is more descriptive and narrative as opposed to quantitative. Some kinds of protests are highly organized with top-down plans that are months in the making. Others, like many of the events across America this past week, are spontaneous outpourings of grief and anger. The social and political context of the time and place also affect what happens. Even a single protest isn’t really a single protest. “You have lots of mini protests happening in many places,” said Edward Maguire, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University. “There’s different dynamics. Some peaceful. Some not. And different police tactics.” In Baltimore on Saturday, for example, a police lieutenant mollified a crowd by reading out loud the names of victims of police brutality, while protesters outside City Hall threw bottles at police in riot gear and police used tear gas on the crowd, WBFF-TV reported.

But just because there’s no data about protests that can be easily compared in a chart doesn’t mean we’re bereft of information, said Pat Gillham, a professor of sociology at Western Washington University. There’s 50 years of research on violence at protests, dating back to the three federal commissions formed between 1967 and 1970. All three concluded that when police escalate force — using weapons, tear gas, mass arrests and other tools to make protesters do what the police want — those efforts can often go wrong, creating the very violence that force was meant to prevent. For example, the Kerner Commission, which was formed in 1967 to specifically investigate urban riots, found that police action was pivotal in starting half of the 24 riots the commission studied in detail. It recommended that police eliminate “abrasive policing tactics” and that cities establish fair ways to address complaints against police.

Experts say the following decades of research have turned up similar findings. Escalating force by police leads to more violence, not less. It tends to create feedback loops, where protesters escalate against police, police escalate even further, and both sides become increasingly angry and afraid.

Escalating force by police leads to more violence, not less, and tends to create feedback loops, where protesters escalate against police, police escalate even further, and both sides become increasingly angry and afraid.

“Do we know [this] in the way that you know if you put two chemicals together things explode?” said John Noakes, professor of sociology, anthropology and criminal justice at Arcadia University. “No. But there is a general consensus.”

De-escalation, of course, does not guarantee that a protest will remain peaceful, and when protests take an unpredictable turn, it can be challenging for police to estimate the appropriate level of force.

Former law-enforcement officials also said good policing of demonstrations isn’t as simple as just showing up with an approachable demeanor. “The time to make friends isn’t when you need them,” Thomson said. “You have to be in front of it.”

James Ginger, a veteran police monitor who is now overseeing the Albuquerque Police’s settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, agreed that only this longer-term trust-building exercise works. “Trying to find folks at the last minute that you can put out there in soft clothes and talk to people, frankly and in my opinion, wouldn’t work that well,” Ginger said. “You’ve got to till the soil before you can grow the beans.”

Still, if researchers know it’s not a good idea for police to use force against protests and demonstrations, and that information has been available for decades, why do we still see situations like this happening all over the country?

That part is harder to answer. At one point, in the 1980s and 1990s, many police departments in the U.S. did try different strategies, Noakes and Maguire said. The “negotiated management” model of protest policing called for officers to meet with protesters in advance to plan events together to specify the times, locations and activities that would happen, even when that included mass arrests.

“There was a time when the playbook was much more straightforward. The police would meet with the organizers of the protest, and they would lay out ground rules together that would provide for an opportunity for protesters to do exactly what they have a right to do,” said Ronal Serpas, a former police chief in New Orleans and Nashville who’s now a professor of criminology at Loyola University in New Orleans.

Seattle police cracked down on protests against the World Trade Organization with tear gas in 1999.

Christopher Morris / Corbis via Getty Images

But the era of negotiated management basically fell apart after the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, when protesters blocked streets, broke windows and successfully shut down the WTO meeting and stalled trade talks. When protesters violated the negotiated terms, police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets and took away the wrong lessons, Maguire said. “What a lot of people took from that in policing is, we can’t trust these people. We need to be smarter and overwhelm them to nip these things in the bud,” he said. “We sort of went backwards.”

Of course, as Gillham pointed out, negotiating and managing a protest can’t really work if the protest wasn’t organized ahead of time. That goes double, he said, if the topic of the protest is police brutality. It’s hard to negotiate with someone about the best way to demand they be fired.

Instead, it’s become normal in the U.S. for police departments to revert to tactics that amplify tensions and provoke protesters, Maguire said, including wearing intimidating tactical gear before its use would be warranted. Maguire does training for police officers and has tried, for years, to get buy-in on the idea that there could be a different way. “I have good relationships with police and I’ve been working with them for 25 years, and I’ve never experienced pushback like I do on this,” Maguire said.

De-escalation strategies definitely exist. Anne Nassauer, a professor of sociology at Freie Universität in Berlin, has studied how the Berlin Police Department handles protests and soccer matches. She found that one key element is transparent communication — something Nassauer said helps increase trust and diffuse potentially tense moments. The Berlin police employs people specifically to make announcements in these situations, using different speakers, with local accents or different languages, for things like information about what police are doing, and another speaker for commands. Either way, the messages are delivered in a calm, measured voice.

Communication is also a cornerstone of what police know as “the Madison Model,” created by former Madison, Wisconsin, chief of police David Couper. His strategy for dealing with protesters was to send officers out to talk with demonstrators, engage, ask them why protests are made, listen to their concerns and, above all, empathize.

Not all police officers trust this model, however. “When you have overly aggressive crowds you have to address them,” said Anthony Batts, who led departments in Long Beach and Oakland, California, as well as Baltimore. Batts was police commissioner during the violent clashes between police and protesters that followed the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore police custody.

Reached by text, Batts said that certain events, like fires and police retreats, “inspire” crowds. He said from his point of view, methods like the Madison model make crowds “go ballistic.”

A lot of this pushback from police has to do with some legitimate officer safety concerns related to de-escalation, Maguire said. “But we make the argument that [de-escalation] makes officers more safe, by reducing violent confrontations with protesters. If officers come into a situation already wearing protective body armor and face shields, that can make protesters feel uncomfortable and under attack long before there’s any kind of confrontation,” Maguire said.

“When I had the opportunity to build a new police department, I was able to do in three days what would normally take me three years to do.”

It’s also just hard to change police culture. Maguire compared it to trying to change hospital procedures by using evidence-based medicine. Even if the evidence is, “don’t perform this surgery in that way or someone could die,” it can still take 20 years for the new technique to be widely adopted.

The disconnect between rank and file and executive leadership — commonly cited as an impediment to policing reform — also seems to get in the way of improving policing of protests. Take the Atlanta Police Department as an example. On Saturday the city’s chief Erika Shields earned plaudits for meeting face to face with protesters, empathizing with their grief and fear, and even reprimanding some of her own officers: “I’m standing here because what I saw was my people face to face with this crowd and everyone is thinking, ‘How can we use force to diffuse it,’ and I’m not having that.” But mere hours later, her department was trending on social media again — this time because officers had used tasers to force two college students out of their vehicle, even though they did not appear to be posing any threat.

That, experts say, speaks to a cultural attitude that is endemic to the profession, and is hard to change with new chiefs or rules.

Thomson encountered this when he tried to make change in Camden. The police department was so dysfunctional that the city took the unprecedented step of disbanding the force and reconstituting a whole new agency from scratch. “When I had the opportunity to build a new police department, I was able to do in three days what would normally take me three years to do, because of work rules, because of the bureaucracy of collective bargaining agreements — there are a lot of impediments to reform,” Thomson said.

Couper, the creator of the Madison Method, said, “It’s this whole attitude of, ‘We keep order because we kick ass, and it’s us against them.’ (…) We’ve got to root those people out and say, ‘Look, this is the job that we expect. This is how a democracy is policed. If you can’t buy into it. I’m sorry. You just have to find another job.’”

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New Post has been published on Nehemiah Reset

New Post has been published on https://nehemiahreset.org/news/national-news/national-government-news/democrats-hope-mueller-gives-credence-to-their-claim-of-an-unlawful-trump/

Democrats hope Mueller gives credence to their claim of an unlawful Trump

House Democrats are hoping Robert S. Mueller III illuminates potential obstruction of justice by President Trump and gives credence to their claim of an unlawful president for millions of Americans who will decide on Trump’s political future.

Mueller’s much-anticipated testimony Wednesday is a pivotal moment for congressional investigators, holding promise — and peril — for Democrats as they finally get their chance to question a reluctant witness about his nearly two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether the president tried to derail the inquiry.

Democrats expect Mueller to describe in detail at least five of 10 episodes of possible obstruction that the former special counsel laid out in his report, which found insufficient evidence to show a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the election and reached no conclusion about whether the president tried to block the probe.

Democrats, however, are divided on what they hope to get out of the long-awaited day of Mueller speaking to Congress and a nation. Ninety-two Democrats favor impeachment of Trump and consider Mueller’s testimony their best shot at moving public sentiment toward ousting the president. Party leaders, reluctant to pursue an inquiry, are hoping the hearings inflict enough political damage to Trump to undermine his reelection bid in next year’s election.

During a recent closed meeting, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) argued that all Democrats need to do is let Mueller talk — particularly given that less than 3 percent of the country has read the 448-page redacted report, she said.

“I’d like to have a level of calmness — no drama — regarding the Mueller presentation,” Pelosi told her colleagues, according to an individual in the room who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss internal talks. “The very fact that he is presenting is what we want, so many more people will be aware of the charges that are in the Mueller report.”

Democrats do not expect major revelations from Mueller, who will testify for three hours before the House Judiciary Committee and two hours before the House Intelligence Committee. They expect his answers to be short and curt, and have crafted questions that they hope will elicit a narrative from Mueller of a president committing illegal acts who would have faced prosecution if not for Justice Department policy forbidding the indictment of a sitting president.

[Mueller, House panels strike deal to delay hearings until July 24, giving lawmakers more time to question him]

Mueller’s team wrote in the report that it was bound by that policy from deciding or alleging — even privately — that Trump had committed a crime.

“We don’t need anything dramatic from Robert Mueller,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee who favors impeachment. “We just need him to highlight the main parts of his report because it’s such a damning report — and then we win.”

Clearly feeling the pressure of the moment, Democrats have been practicing. Over the past few weeks, members of both committees have been holding one-on-one prep sessions, with aides playing Mueller and forcing lawmakers to respond to different scenarios, such as a reticent Mueller or a combative Mueller. Several lawmakers have had multiple sessions.

Privately, Pelosi has cautioned Democrats not to get carried away in their questioning, as overreach and grandstanding would undermine their goals for the hearings.

Democrats will be in the spotlight for their performance as much as Mueller. Academics, lawyers and former White House counsel John Dean, a key player in Watergate, have hardly created a ripple with their testimony. Congressional investigations have produced no blockbuster revelation seen as damaging to Trump, complicated in part by White House resistance to their inquiries.

At the same time, the party’s liberal base has grown increasingly frustrated with what they see as ineffective oversight of the president.

“I think people recognize that this is a very important moment in our oversight responsibilities,” said Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) when asked about the nervousness among Judiciary Committee members.

The two panels have taken the unusual step of coordinating their questioning. Judiciary Committee Democrats plan to focus on possible obstruction of justice, while members of the Intelligence Committee are intent on getting answers about Russia’s contacts with the Trump campaign.

“We are operating under the expectation that most American citizens have not had a chance to read the paper report,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the Intelligence Committee. “And then we’ll have questions for him that go beyond the report . . . we don’t recognize any limitations, there are none in law or statute or policy, and the attorney general has disregarded them anyway.”

Over the nearly two-year investigation, the special counsel charged 34 people, including 26 Russian nationals, and secured guilty pleas from seven, including several high-level Trump campaign and administration officials. The investigation concluded in March, and the Justice Department in April released the office’s report documenting its work.

[Mueller complained that Barr’s letter did not capture ‘context’ of Trump probe]

Democrats argue that in his public statements, Attorney General William P. Barr mischaracterized the report as more favorable to Trump than it was meant to be, and have prepared to push back on the impressions he created.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, wants to know “which relationships were so compromised that they still present security risks to the United States, even if they’re not criminally prosecutable.” Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), who sits on both committees, wants to know why Mueller didn’t push to interview Trump for his investigation and why he said he could not exonerate the president on obstruction. 

On the Republican side, lawmakers see the hearings as an opportunity to bolster their case that the report cleared the president, while demanding a reckoning from Mueller for an investigation they argue was biased from the start.

“There’s been a lot of concern about, you know, how this whole two-year trek got started and how things were done,” said Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.), the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “At the end of the day, the report showed no collusion conclusively and no charge of obstruction. . . . We’re just going to say: Why did we get put through this?”

Republicans also have been practicing. Some, including Trump ally Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), have studied videos of Mueller’s congressional testimony from when he was FBI director, to better understand his moves. Judiciary Republicans recently held a closed mock hearing for their members. 

“Robert Mueller is the LeBron James of using 300 words to say absolutely nothing,” Gaetz said, a reference to the basketball star.

Republicans plan to highlight Mueller’s finding that he could not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia; anti-Trump text messages discovered on the phones of two of Mueller’s agents by an independent watchdog; and allegations that a salacious, unsubstantiated dossier authored by Trump’s political adversaries triggered the probe.

The strategy holds potential promise with the GOP base, but also peril if lawmakers attack Mueller, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who has had a distinguished career serving both Republicans and Democrats. Yet that’s exactly what Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) suggested he might do with his five minutes of questioning. The Trump ally has a self-published book titled “Mueller Unmasked,” and he plans to raise those allegations.

House Intelligence Committee ranking member Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has also tried to discredit Mueller’s testimony in advance, accusing Democrats of feeding Mueller “helpful phrases.” In fact, no Democrat on the committee or aide has had direct contact with Mueller, according to a panel aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

Privately, some Republicans acknowledge that they have to strike a balance, calling into question any adverse findings about the president but also ensuring that they don’t appear too partisan in criticizing Mueller.

“The biggest risk that exists is that my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle overreach and attack Bob Mueller, who was someone with a history of being a war hero, law enforcement professional, a patriotic American,” said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries of New York, a Judiciary panel member. “But the likelihood is, my Republican friends cannot help themselves, because they never miss an opportunity to bend over backward to please Donald Trump.”

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