#and the thing is: i think the author is mostly sincerely sympathetic to women! and even maybe to queer people! but his analysis/commentary.

[random-french-girl]

I'm reading Montaillou right now, by Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, a well known historical/anthropological work by a well known french historian, about a mountain village and its inhabitants in France in the 14th century and it is fascinating, it's so well written and really delves into the daily life and beliefs and feelings of ordinary people of the middle ages and I genuinely love it

however

MY GOD i wish a feminist had written this book. some passages on women, sexuality and/or violence are just. painfully, horribly misogynistic. to say nothing of the homophobia of it all.

[katelynrushe26]

The Dog Brain of Ragetti & the Secret Success of Pintel

Original essay here: https://whatsnewwithkru.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-dog-brain-of-ragetti-and-secret.html

The characters Pintel and Ragetti from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise are no strangers to my blog. I've discussed a few things about them in past entries, mostly on how their actors and the screenwriters view them, but I've never delved into any serious analysis of the characters themselves. As hard to believe as this sounds, I actually think there's a lot to analyze about this comic relief duo, even if most of what you come up with probably wasn't intended by the writers.

Intended or not, the fact stands that in the three Pirates films that feature Pintel and Ragetti, we see a surprising amount of growth in both characters. Since the films rarely explain any of that growth, the door is left wide open for fans to speculate and fill in the narrative gaps. This essay is my own interpretation of Pintel and Ragetti's character arcs throughout the series, and if there's any truth in what I've gathered, then their subplot could be one of the more meaningful ones in the original trilogy.

Played by Lee Arenberg and Mackenzie Crook, Pintel and Ragetti first appear in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl as two members of Captain Barbossa's evil, undead pirate crew. At first they seem like your typical dim-witted henchman duo, but throughout the movie, we get a lot of hints at their personalities, their backstories, their thoughts on their situation, and most importantly, their relationship with each other.

As far as that goes, there are three important things to notice:

1. Pintel and Ragetti are always together

2. Pintel frequently loses his temper and lashes out at Ragetti

3. Ragetti acts like a dog

I don't mean that Ragetti's lewd, either. I mean that he literally barks and growls at people whenever he gets angry or excited. He also shrinks back with his head down in a very tail-between-the-legs manner whenever Pintel yells at him. He doesn't talk much in Curse of the Black Pearl, but often when he does, it's just to chime in with Pintel. Given that Pintel hits him with a parasol and throttles him purely out of embarrassment at two points in the film, you can kind of see why Ragetti tries to be so obedient.    

The only time we see another side to their relationship is roughly halfway through the film, when Barbossa's crew tries using the heroine Elizabeth Swann to break their undead curse. Right before the proceedings, the crew sorts through the piles of treasure around them, and Pintel and Ragetti more or less have a moment alone to talk. Pintel is curiously sympathetic towards Ragetti, assuring the one-eyed pirate that he can buy a glass eye once the curse is lifted and then patiently chiding him when he rubs the splintery wooden one that he does have. During the curse-lifting ritual, Pintel is seen leaning over Ragetti's shoulder at the front and center of the crowd and playfully nudging his arm to keep him excited about what's happening.

To me, Pintel comes across in these scenes like a guilty parent trying too hard to make up for letting their child down. There's sincerity there, but also a slightly selfish motive behind it. We don't know if he and Ragetti are really uncle and nephew like their actors say, but Pintel is obviously the mentor/decision maker in this relationship. Perhaps he feels responsible for getting his younger companion into this mess with the curse, and perhaps he believes he can clear his conscience by helping Ragetti have a better life after it's over.    

The problem in the meantime seems to be that they're in a situation where Pintel feels he can't afford to look weak. Barbossa and the rest of his crew are frequently shown to be bullies, needlessly mistreating their captives and sometimes turning on each other, and Pintel and Ragetti appear to be at the very bottom of the Black Pearl's ranks. As fond as Pintel is of pillaging, plundering, and shooting people in the face, we see that he's terrified of the crew's first mate Bo'sun -- and because of Bo'sun's authority, that can make Pintel fear the entire crew at times. It's conceivable that he and Ragetti always stay close together for security as well as company, and that at least some of Pintel's vicious persona is just a front that he puts up to avoid harassment.

He drops the act during his talk with Ragetti in the treasure cave because despite the rest of their crew being present all around them, no one's really paying attention to them at that exact moment. As soon as Bo'sun walks by and sees them holding the frilly parasols that they've found though, Pintel panics and hits Ragetti with his parasol as mentioned before. The reason he throttles Ragetti later is because Bo'sun has ordered them to distract the British Navy by dressing up as women, and Ragetti makes him feel even more insecure by complimenting the way he looks in a dress.

Slapstick comedy aside, Pintel and Ragetti's relationship is not a healthy one. Ragetti's doglike demeanor (his "Dog Brain" if you will) is most likely a defense mechanism from all the abuse and trauma he's suffered, and unlike Pintel's murder-hungry rage, it doesn't seem to be an act at all. Pintel has contributed to Ragetti becoming a poorly adjusted, socially inept man with low self-esteem who can barely think for himself. That's not going to give him a better life after the curse is over.

We last see the duo getting outwitted by the hero Jack Sparrow and then arrested by the Navy right as their curse is finally lifted. In the second film, Dead Man's Chest, we first see them rowing through the ocean in a longboat with the jailhouse dog as they discuss how they escaped from prison. This takes place one year after the first film, and we get a very different Pintel and Ragetti this time around.

Here are the three important things to notice in Dead Man's Chest:

1. Ragetti is less doglike and more well-spoken than before

2. Ragetti constantly talks back to, argues with, and defies Pintel

3. Pintel never punishes Ragetti for it

He still yells at Ragetti a lot like he did in the first film, but he doesn't physically harm him anymore. And let's face it, doing that could very easily revert Ragetti back to his old self. It's possible the writers just made these changes to make Pintel more likable and Ragetti more three-dimensional since they join the heroes in this film, but this dramatic character growth can be explained in the context of the story.

For someone as naive as Ragetti, being thrown in jail with a guarantee of hanging has to be earth-shattering. It's the complete opposite of all the great things Pintel told him were going to happen after they broke their curse. What did they do to deserve something this awful instead? Ragetti probably had time to realize what they'd done to deserve it, and with all his pirate aspirations in ruins and death on the horizon, he probably turned to the only salvation he could find: religion.

Hence the Bible that he's trying to read in Dead Man's Chest (which he probably stole, by the way). His "beliefs" are flimsy at best, often getting twisted to justify the crimes that he and Pintel keep committing, but he still seems convinced  that "divine providence" was what broke them out of jail. Pintel disagrees, saying that he was what broke them out, but Ragetti doesn't relent. And why should he? Pintel was wrong about what would happen to them after the curse was lifted, so maybe he's wrong about a lot of other things. Ragetti might see it as his duty now to teach Pintel some humility and eventually steer him away from the sinful life of a pirate. This gives Ragetti some confidence, and that makes him rebellious. And I think for all his annoyance, Pintel lets him rebel because he sees it as a good thing.

If Pintel really did feel guilty for involving Ragetti in their curse, he probably also felt guilty for getting him thrown in jail — so guilty, perhaps, that it pushed him to break them out. He probably also did that to save himself, but the fact that he's stopped mistreating Ragetti (thus allowing the younger man to give him grief all the time) says a lot about his own growth. Maybe he doesn't feel the need to act tough anymore now that they're rid of Barbossa's crew. Maybe lifting the curse and losing his immortality has made him so afraid of death that he doesn't mind having a bolder sidekick to watch his back now. Or maybe he's gained some perspective since their arrest and really is trying to rein in his temper for Ragetti's sake. In the little way that he can, maybe Pintel is still trying to make life better for his friend.

Whatever the reason for this restraint, it does seem to be making a positive difference. Along with speaking up and acting out more often, we also see Ragetti perform a few duties aboard the Black Pearl without Pintel, including a hazardous one that involves clinging to the outside of the hull to hold a longboat in place during a storm. By the end of the film, he's built up enough nerve to save Elizabeth from the giant Kraken squid by chopping off one of its tentacles. He never would have taken a risk like that in the first movie.  

Not that Ragetti's Dog Brain is completely gone. We see him slip back into it twice in Dead Man's Chest, both at times when he's overwhelmed with emotion. As he and Pintel move in to fight Elizabeth for the titular chest, he sticks out his tongue like he's panting and goes back to mumbling and repeating what Pintel says. During the Kraken assault at the climax, he stops talking altogether and cowers close to Pintel for most of it. These moments seem to suggest that his more mature demeanor hasn't fully found its roots yet.

And this brings us to the third film, At World's End.

I've complained in the past about how this film handles Pintel's character, especially compared to how much better it handles Ragetti's. I still take issue with some of it, but I do feel like it plays out better if you watch it with this interpretation in mind.

We first see Pintel and Ragetti with three other members of Jack Sparrow's crew as they sneak into a building through a basement sewer. Ragetti is leading the mission, impressively enough, but when they enter the basement and a huge guard walks into view, his Dog Brain sends him running to hide behind Pintel again. This time though, the first mate Gibbs intercepts him. Gibbs says they don't have time for that kind of behavior anymore, then shoves Ragetti to the front of the line again.

After this, we start to notice three new dynamics with Pintel and Ragetti's relationship:

1. Ragetti spends more time on his own

2. Pintel spends more time with Gibbs

3. Pintel frequently follows Ragetti's lead without any arguments

We don't know if these changes have been in place for a while since the second film or if the confrontation with Gibbs suddenly triggered them. Either way, it's interesting to see Pintel spending less time with his closest friend and more time with a former enemy. It's also interesting that in spite of his growing desire to become the Black Pearl's captain, he's willing to go along with Ragetti's ideas and let Ragetti do a lot of the talking for them in this film.

Pintel could just be so overwhelmed by everything in At World's End that he's content to go with the flow for now, even if it means giving Ragetti the oars, but I also think he agrees with Gibbs that Ragetti needs to grow more independent. It could be that allowing his younger pal more space and responsibility is his way of helping that to happen, and that warming up to the Pearl's first mate in the meantime is him trying to further secure a better future for them. The fact that the duo barely argues anymore also says volumes about Pintel's anger management progress since the first film.

Take the scene where the pirates escape from Davy Jones' Locker by turning the Pearl upside-down. Not only does Pintel humor Ragetti's plan to tie themselves to the mast as the ship tips over, but he also keeps a pretty level head after that plan turns out to be terrible. What's more, when this watery escape ruins their gunpowder, Ragetti clunks him on the head with his pistol to practice wielding it as a club instead and Pintel doesn't hit him back. This is the same man who once throttled Ragetti just for telling him he looked nice in a dress. Pintel doesn't even yell at his friend for the pistol incident. He just simmers for a few seconds, then lets it go. If that isn't proof of how much their relationship has changed since Curse of the Black Pearl, I don't know what is.

And just like in Dead Man's Chest, this new approach seems to pay off in the end. The two main obstacles that Ragetti has to overcome in At World's End are his Dog Brain and his fear of people, which are both represented to him by Captain Barbossa. The former cursed captain joins the crew again in this film, and with him comes a whole boatload of Ragetti's old insecurities. Not being allowed to hide behind Pintel all the time anymore probably makes that all the more harrowing.

But after days of being pushed around, slapped around, and even made to give up his wooden eye by Barbossa, Ragetti finally summons just enough courage and confidence to show up his tormentor right before the film's climax. This involves freeing the sea goddess Calypso from her human form by reciting an incantation, which he points out that Barbossa had failed to do properly. Once he frees Calypso, Ragetti also becomes free himself. He's free of his Dog Brain, free of his fears, and is now a stronger, braver, and more capable man.

I used to dislike how Ragetti gets this big moment (and several others) all to himself in At World's End while the biggest moment Pintel gets is a throw-away scene of him chickening out after yelling at Jack and Barbossa. It just felt like the writers were sidelining him and scrapping the duo concept for no good reason. However, if his underlying arc really is about him reforming so he can see his friend better off, then Ragetti's success with Barbossa and Calypso is Pintel's success as well. That big triumphant moment secretly belongs to both of them. It's theirs to share as a duo after all.

The only downside is that Calypso doesn't end up saving the pirates like they'd hoped she would. Once she's free, she just abandons them and creates a maelstrom to add chaos to the final battle. We even get a moment where Pintel looks down over the ship's rail and laments that "she's no help at all," almost like he's disappointed for Ragetti. Despite this, the two pull themselves together for the final battle. They help to win it, part ways with the heroes when it's over, and then go back to their usual pirates' lives. The difference this time is that they seem to be working together to move their ways up in the ranks now.

Pintel and Ragetti were supposed to appear in the fourth film, but for various reasons, that didn't end up happening. The Pirates of the Caribbean Wiki site claims that their subplot would have involved them getting separated, each thinking the other was dead, and then reuniting by the end. As nice as it could have been to see their relationship finally get some dramatic focus, I don't think it's needed. Pinteal and Ragetti's story on screen ends with them standing side by side as equals on the deck of the Black Pearl, carving a new wooden eye and possibly plotting a mutiny against Barbossa. And since it's been shown that other crew men have survived what happens to the ship before the fourth film, we can assume that the duo did as well. All in all, it's easy to interpret a better life for both of them on the horizon.

[saints-row-2]

film watch day 30: A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge

Nightmare on Elm Street is not my favourite slasher franchise. while i can appreciate the first one for being a masterwork of horror, i have really no interest in subsequent sequels, and dont particularly like Freddy Krueger as a character after he stopped being a threatening villain and just became a joke. all that said, Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is fucking great. 

spoilers for this movie ahead, which im bothering to warn about because i do sincerely recommend it, but i also like, want to talk about this in-depth so im gonna have to give away the plot. 

like along with being honestly creepy and suspenseful and having a very likeable main character, i love NoES 2 because the running years-old argument of ‘is NoES 2 gay?’ finally got an answer a little while ago. it is! and while i reject the concept that you need an author to sign off on a gay reading of a text to give it legitimacy, theres something kind of great still about knowing that it was intentional. NoES 2 is a story where Freddy Krueger is a metaphor for homophobia, acting as conversion therapy for a gay teenager.

so NoES2 is about Jesse, whose family has just moved into a house on Elm Street. of course, he begins having vivid nightmares about a terrifying man called Freddy Krueger. however instead of just wanting to kill Jesse, Freddy is actively trying to drive Jesse to kill so that he can take over Jesse’s body, forcing the two to battle over which of them gets control.

lets talk about the gay subtext, which is the only thing i care about in any movie ever. so Jesse is a young dude whos starting to figure out his sexuality. his parents know something is up, but they mostly just want him to toughen up and be normal. he has a girlfriend, but hes uncomfortable being intimate with her and keeps pushing her away so he can hang out with his male friend. hes a nice kid and a good person. he is very transparently gay-coded. his actor, a guy called Mark Patton for whom i have enormous fucking respect and who quit Hollywood acting because he (rightly) felt the industry was intolerant of him as a gay man, influences this to a large degree. his personality shows through in his performance, and i think thats a large part of the reason why people latched onto this as a gay movie so early; its incredibly easy to identify with and connect with Jesse. 

so Jesse is a young man trying to come to terms with his sexual identity, but someone takes offense to that, and thats where Freddy Krueger comes in. when Freddy initially asks Jesse to become like him, to kill for him, Jesse obviously refuses. seeing that Jesse will not willingly be what he wants, Freddy decides to forcibly convert him to his way of being.

NoES2 has a pretty low body count for a horror movie; the only two character deaths in the film are, in turn, a teacher at Jesse’s school rumoured to be gay, and Jesse’s male best friend who he was emotionally confiding in. even later in the movie, a guy approaches the Freddy-possessed Jesse and sympathetically asks him if he needs help, tries to offer support. Freddy tosses him to the side, removing yet another person from Jesse’s life. Krueger quite literally is destroying the male connections in Jesse’s life; he sees connections with them that he doesnt want, so he systematically erases them in order to keep Jesse isolated and in fear.

Jesse, who his girlfriend admits has been nervous and unsure of having an intimate relationship, is encouraged by Freddy during one of the few times they kiss, Freddy actively taking over his body in that moment and trying to force him to take it further. Krueger toys with Lisa, the girlfriend, but doesnt actually try to kill her, only chasing and harassing her while he dispatches with the men around Jesse without care. 

theres a lot of talk about identity in this film, in an abstract way. a lot of people talk about this film being gay because look! this guy has a man inside him lol! but i  think the focus is wrong there. Freddy is a violent intruder to the natural order of Jesse’s life; he wants Jesse to be frightened and alone, because thats what makes him powerful. he wants Jesse to hide and repress his personality, lose all sense of himself, and be in Freddy’s own mold. Freddy encourages Jesse to kill, to cut off the people in his life, to be like him; a violent misogynist who treats the people around him with contempt and has shallow, controlling relationships with women. 

during the climax of the movie Freddy succeeds in taking over Jesse’s body. “Jesse’s dead, I’m Jesse now” he repeats, as he wreaks havoc in the real world. the way Jesse overcomes Freddy isnt through violent action against him, its by literally breaking through the outside persona imprisoning him and coming out as himself. he destroys the heterosexual outer shell thats controlling him and making him do and say things he hates, and takes control of his life. this is a film about coming out as a powerful force for good. 

to see the entirety of the gay subtext in this film you kind of have to just watch it. again im gonna cite Mark Patton’s performance; he brings a huge amount of personality to Jesse and the film wouldnt be the same without him. and theres so many one-liners and eyebrow raising moments that really add to the greater idea that this movie is about a gay teenager, whether or not thats what it says on the box. like, this film for me is an honestly affirming and positive movie, and it makes me wish there were a lot more gay horror films out there. i mean, i wish that anyway, but this is such a weird example of how to do it right in its own way; creating an environment in which the message of the film can so easily be read as ‘coming out is good’.

also the film is just like, fun. its ridiculously campy and its often very silly but the goofiness and the fun tone stop it from getting too bleak, while Krueger himself manages to keep a respectful enough distance that he actually feels like a tangible threat and not someones wacky murdering uncle. 

and check out these outfits from Jesse

this is how i dress now. icon. 

[inbonobo]

The #Revolution, this argument might run, was a needless and brutal bit of slaveholders’ panic mixed with Enlightenment argle-bargle, producing a country that was always marked for violence and disruption and demagogy. Look north to #Canada, or south to Australia, and you will see different possibilities of peaceful evolution away from Britain, toward sane and whole, more equitable and less sanguinary countries. No revolution, and slavery might have ended, as it did elsewhere in the British Empire, more peacefully and sooner. No “peculiar institution,” no hideous Civil War and appalling aftermath. Instead, an orderly development of the interior—less violent, and less inclined to celebrate the desperado over the peaceful peasant. We could have ended with a social-democratic commonwealth that stretched from north to south, a near-continent-wide Canada.

The thought is taboo, the Revolution being still sacred in its self-directed propaganda. One can grasp the scale and strangeness of this sanctity only by leaving America for a country with a different attitude toward its past and its founding. As it happened, my own childhood was neatly divided between what I learned to call “the States” and Canada. In my Philadelphia grade school, we paraded with flags, singing “The Marines’ Hymn” and “Here Comes the Flag!” (“Fathers shall bless it / Children caress it / All shall maintain it / No one shall stain it.”) We were taught that the brave Americans hid behind trees to fight the redcoats—though why this made them brave was left unexplained. In Canada, ninth grade disclosed a history of uneasy compromise duality, and the constant search for temporary nonviolent solutions to intractable divides. The world wars, in which Canadians had played a large part, passed by mostly in solemn sadness. (That the Canadians had marched beyond their beach on D Day with aplomb while the Americans struggled on Omaha was never boasted about.) Patriotic pageantry arose only from actual accomplishments: when Team Canada won its eight-game series against the Russians, in 1972, the entire nation sang “O Canada”—but they sang it as a hockey anthem as much as a nationalist hymn.

Over the years, we have seen how hard it is to detach Americans from even the obviously fallacious parts of that elementary-school saga—the absurd rendering of Reconstruction, with its Northern carpetbaggers and local scalawags descending on a defenseless South, was still taught in the sixties. It was only in recent decades that schools cautiously began to relay the truth of the eighteen-seventies—of gradual and shameful Northern acquiescence in the terrorist imposition of apartheid on a post-slavery population.

The Revolution remains the last bulwark of national myth. Academics write on the growth of the Founding Father biographical genre in our time; the rule for any new writer should be that if you want a Pulitzer and a best-seller you must find a Founding Father and fetishize him. While no longer reverential, these accounts are always heroic in the core sense of showing us men, and now, occasionally, women, who transcend their flaws with spirit (though these flaws may include little things like holding other human beings as property, dividing their families, and selling off their children). The phenomenon of “Hamilton,” the hip-hop musical that is, contrary to one’s expectations, wholly faithful to a heroic view of American independence, reinforces the sanctity of the American Revolution in American life.

Academic histories of the Revolution, though, have been peeping over the parapets, joining scholarly scruples to contemporary polemic. One new take insists that we misunderstand the Revolution if we make what was an intramural and fratricidal battle of ideas in the English-speaking Empire look like a modern colonial rebellion. Another insists that the Revolution was a piece of great-power politics, fought in unimaginably brutal terms, and no more connected to ideas or principles than any other piece of great-power politics: America was essentially a Third World country that became the battlefield for two First World powers. Stirred into the larger pot of recent revisionism, these arguments leave us with a big question: was it really worth it, and are we better off for its having happened? In plain American, is Donald Trump a bug or a feature of the American heritage?

Justin du Rivage’s “Revolution Against Empire” (Yale) re-situates the Revolution not as a colonial rebellion against the mother country but as one episode in a much larger political quarrel that swept the British Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century. Basically, du Rivage thinks that the American Revolution wasn’t American. The quarrels that took place in New York and Philadelphia went on with equal ferocity, and on much the same terms, in India and England, and though they got settled by force of arms and minds differently in each place, it was the same struggle everywhere. “Radicalism flourished in Boston, Bristol, and Bengal, while fears of disorder and licentiousness provoked rural elites in both the Hudson Valley and the English shires,” du Rivage writes. “As radical Whigs gained strength in North America, the political culture of the British Empire became increasingly Janus-faced.”

On one side were what he calls “authoritarian reformers”; on the other, those radical Whigs. (Both were seeking to sway or supplant the “establishment Whigs.”) This isn’t the familiarly rendered divide between Tories and Whigs; the authoritarian reformers were less fusty country squires attached to old English institutions than an élite executive class of intellectuals and aristocrats committed to the Empire and to the reform of institutions that were seen as preventing the Empire from being maximally efficient. It was a group of men who, in spirit and psychology, were not entirely unlike the “reformers” in Communist China, open to change for the purpose of reinforcing their own power in an intact hierarchy. The authoritarian reformers were “not a political party per se,” du Rivage writes. “They were, rather, an ideological vanguard, a loosely organized group of politicians, publicists, and theorists.” (Significantly, no famous names cling to the group; career politicians and businessmen like William Murray, Matthew Decker, and Viscount Bolingbroke were their mostly interchangeable leaders.) They wanted a strong monarch surrounded by a circle of aristocratic advisers; very limited democracy; reform in the Army and Navy; and a tax-heavy system of mercantile trade—all of it intended to make the Empire as profitable as it needed to be.

Extended taxation within the Empire was central to their agenda. They sincerely believed in “taxation without representation,” because they saw citizenship not in terms of sovereignty and equality but in terms of tribute received and protection offered. Pay up, and the British Navy will keep the Frenchmen, pirates, and aboriginals away. Samuel Johnson, who was hired by the authoritarian reformers to write the 1775 pamphlet “Taxation No Tyranny,” captured the argument best: the men who settled America had chosen to leave a place where they had the vote but little property in order to live in a place where they had no vote but much property. With lucid authoritarian logic, Johnson explained that even though the American citizen might not have a vote on how he was taxed, “he still is governed by his own consent; because he has consented to throw his atom of interest into the general mass of the community.”

The radical Whigs, though they, too, were implanted within establishment circles—grouped around William Pitt and the pro-American Marquess of Rockingham, with the devilish John Wilkes representing their most radical popular presence—were sympathetic to Enlightenment ideas, out of both principle and self-protection, as analgesics to mollify “the mob.” They represented, albeit episodically, the first stirrings of a party of the merchant class. They thought that colonists should be seen as potential consumers. Alexander Hamilton, back in New York, was a model radical Whig—trusting in bank credit and national debt as a prod toward prosperity, while the authoritarian reformers were convinced, as their successors are to this day, that debt was toxic (in part because they feared that it created chaos; in part because easy credit undermined hierarchy).

The radical Whigs were for democratization, the authoritarian reformers firmly against it. The radical Whigs were for responsible authority, the authoritarian reformers for firm authority. And so on. This quarrel, du Rivage argues, swept across the Empire and, as much as it divided colony from home country, it united proponents of either view transnationally. Those we think of as “loyalists” in the American context were simply authoritarian reformers who lost their war; those we think of as “patriots” were simply radical Whigs who won.

Some of the force of du Rivage’s account of the Revolution lies in his dogged insistence that the great political quarrel of the time really was a quarrel of principles. His book, he tells us in the introduction, is ultimately about “how ideas and politics shape social and economic experience.” This is a more radically Whiggish proposition than it sounds. For a long time, under the influence of the formidable Lewis Namier, the historian of Britain’s eighteenth-century Parliament, the pervasive ideas in the political life of the period were held to depend on clans and clan relations, not systems of thought. Even Edmund Burke, we were told, was no more drawn to Rockingham by ideology than Tom Hagen was drawn to the Corleone family because he shared Vito’s views on urban governance.

Though there is obviously truth in this approach, then and now, du Rivage deprecates it as much as it has ever been deprecated. (His evidence for the power and specificity of this battle of ideas includes a number of political cartoons, drawn by the participants: it is astonishing how often the political figures of the time, from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Revere, communicated in comic images.) Throughout, he makes a convincing case for the view that people quarrelled not about clans but about concepts. In fact, participants in the quarrels could cross clan lines: the radical Pitt’s brother-in-law, George Grenville, himself a Prime Minister, was the leader of the authoritarian reformers in Parliament.

This account cuts against the American specificity of the Revolution—the sense that it was a rebellion against a king and a distant country. No one at the time, du Rivage suggests, saw what was happening as pitting a distinct “American” nation against an alien British one. Participants largely saw the conflict in terms of two parties fighting for dominance in the English-speaking world. The scandalous high-water mark of du Rivage’s iconography occurs in January of 1775, when Pitt (now ennobled as the Earl of Chatham) brought Franklin, then living in London, into the House of Lords to witness his speech on behalf of the American radicals, in effect sealing the unity of the single party across the ocean. This scene—though nowhere captured in the familiar imagery of Franklin flying his kite and inventing bifocals—was, in its day, as significant as that of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The transnational nature of the Revolution, du Rivage shows, has been blanked out. The promise of transatlantic unity in a move toward modernity was very real. Had the radical Whigs secured their power in Britain, our Revolution might well have taken on a look and feel far more like those of the later Canadian and Australian dissolutions from the Brits: a political break toward “home rule” but without any of the elaborate paraphernalia of patriotism attached to it. We would probably still have had some piece of the British flag upon our own, and Betsy Ross would have sewn in vain.

Du Rivage’s book began as a Yale Ph.D. thesis, and has not lost all traces of its origins. He has the passion for his labels that any inventor has for his own mousetraps: scarcely a page in his book goes by without at least one of the terms “radical Whigs” and “authoritarian reformers” appearing on it. He is so taken with his explanatory scheme that he asserts it even when the lines between the camps were a little blurrier than the neat Ping-Pong division suggests. Although his sympathies are with the radical Whigs, he sees that many of the authoritarians’ claims were not false. As Alan Taylor made clear last year in his mind-opening “American Revolutions” (Norton), the victory of the rebels immediately led to the loss of the protection of the British Navy, leaving American merchant ships defenseless against the pirates of the Barbary Coast, a situation that produced a lot of imprisoned American sailors and, eventually, the Marines hitting the shores of Tripoli, inspiring the song we sang in that second-grade class in Philadelphia. The imperial protection racket really did protect; its withdrawal meant that we had to put together an enforcement squad of our own, which we did, and are still paying for.

(via We Could Have Been Canada - The New Yorker)