#and with no prince in the equation you would know the inevitable would occur but youd fight till the end to hope for a good ending

[loversgothic]

i need to make v2 and mirage ultradanse art bc i have so many thoughts about the two of them in this AU bc giving v2 the role of odette was the most fucked up thing i couldve done

[hughungrybear]

Me while watching Last Twilight Ep. 11:

It just occured to me that the feeling of dread I've been feeling in the last episode is the fact that we will be watching the penultimate, the notorious Episode 11™️, which means a breakup is almost inevitable (I don't make the laws, blame the BL gods) 😅 Also, we have yet to see a P'Aof cameo.

1. An eye donation and operation on Christmas Eve? It's a Christmas miracle! If, and only if, this works 😭 Also hope those eyes DO NOT belong to anybody we know 😭😭😭

2. So, were back to reading the Little Prince? I tell you, I don't like the ending of that book 😭😭😭 though it's nice to see Night able to tell dirty jokes with Day now 😭😭😭

3. Again, I don't get Mum. Sure, it is natural to worry about your disabled kid. However, Mhok has demonstrated that he is more than capable of taking care of Day, if that is truly what she is looking for. Yet, her concerns comes out as snubbish as she seems to equate "care" with Mhok's job or his bank account (or the lack thereof).

4. <after the doctor removed the eye pads> I don't think it worked 😭😭😭 That sucked. Day has already given up hope that he could see one day, then in comes the hospital giving him another ray of hope, only for it to be dashed once again 😔 Also, the way Night hugged his little brother. I kennat 😭😭😭 This is heavy and we're only on Part 1 of 4 😱

5. Oooh, Porjai has given birth!!! But where is Daddy-ready Night? <after 5 seconds> There he is! What do you mean "oldest Uncle", Porjai??? 😂😂😂 Night obvs does not agree. Ngl, naming the baby Me is a bit confusing lol

6. Is Mum finally warming up to Mhok? Also, Day why are you sharing your Mum's trade secrets to Mhok in front of her salad? Lololol

7. So this "work trip" is a test? Also, hello, head chef P'Au 😅 Looks like P'Aof has passed his cameo baton to his protegé 😂😂😂

8. Ugh. Yeah, that would bore me to death - just staying in the room and waiting for Mhok to arrive from work. However, I think no amount of salary can remedy that - unless, Day also finds something meaningful to do with his life while Mhok is working.

9. I see the sh*t-stirring member of the prod crew in BBS (forgot his name) still stirring some sh*t in this series 😂😂😂 If I were him, I'm going to start demanding P'Aof and P'Au to give him a nice(r) character and better scenes in their next series 😂😂😂😂

10. I think that the lure of working abroad and ultimately be able to "care" for Day (like Mhon wanted to) will be irresistable. <after 5 seconds> Oh, wait. This isn't another one of those "so-close-I-can-almost-taste-it-but-the-moment-got-away-from-me", isn't it??? 😭😭😭 <after another 5 seconds> Whelp, it was.

11. Why would Mum be worried about Mhok? What is happening??? <after 5 seconds> Oh no. MHOK WAS CHOSEN. However, he didn't want to leave Day 😭😭😭 But Mhok, one of the main reasons why Day fell in love with you is because you have always treated him normally. Don't let your trauma (of Rung's un-aliving) dictate the future of your relationship. 😭😭😭

Whelp, there we have it. The curse of Episode 11™️ has officially landed here. I am Night in this episode. I don't understand what happened that brought us here 😭😭😭

[everyonewasabird]

@fremedon I’m going to move the conversation about Grantaire’s revolution rant to it’s own post! Hope that’s okay.

(beware, this got LONG, oh my god)

@fremedon said:

Coming back to Grantaire and “Preliminary Gaieties,” I’m thinking about that speech again in light of this post.

All the metaphors about God throwing a revolution to cover his bankruptcy are in service of a point that Grantaire also states in (for him) remarkably plain language–that as much as he would like for progress to occur smoothly and automatically, it doesn’t:

“What the rest of you call progress advances by means of two motors, men and events. But, sad to say, from time to time, the exceptional becomes necessary. The ordinary troupe suffices neither for event, nor for men: among men geniuses are required, among events, revolutions.”

He spends three pages circling back to the idea of revolution, and every time he lands on the same point–that it’s not only inevitable, but necessary; that the universe is badly made and God is unable to set it right without human action, which means revolution.

And then there’s this passage, which is kind of key to the whole thing (switching from Hapgood to FMA):

“Oh! By all saints of Olympus and all the gods of Paradise, I was not made to be a Parisian, that is to say, to richochet forever, like a shuttlecock between two rackets, from the company of loafers to the company of rioters!”

He introduces a list of loafers–the group he says he was born to be part of–ending with “a petty Germanic prince, furnishing the half of a foot-soldier to the Germanic confederation, and occupying his leisure with drying his breeches on his hedge, that is to say, his frontier.” This list balances Floreal’s banker, from the start of the speech–another idler in this vein, whose conquest of the grisette is explicitly equated with Brennus’s sack of Rome.

Grantaire wants to be idle; he wants to enjoy the appearances that God is trying so hard to keep up, but he’s seen through them; he understands that even the illusion of smooth social functioning that revolution and riot disrupts is still violent at every level, from the sack of cities to the defense of micro-states to Floreal’s poverty. He gets it, he sees the violence inherent in the system and he understands that any action to change will, under the circumstances, necessarily also be violent.

Philosophically and politically, he pretty much agrees with the Amis about how the world is and what it would take to change it.

And then he finally says the thing it’s taken him three pages and a bottle of wine to say, and that no one in the book has really said outright yet:

“And it appears that they are going to fight, all those imbeciles, and to break each other’s profiles and to massacre each other in the heart of summer, in the month of June, when they might go off with a creature on their arm, to breathe the immense heaps of new-mown hay in the meadows!”

They all know that just their political association, let alone the kind of organizing they’re doing, could on its own get themselves killed. They’ve been part of a network amassing weapons with the full intention of taking to the streets with them. They all know that if–when–it does come to insurrection, their lives will all be on the line.

No one talks about it. No one, before this point, ever acknowledges it out loud.

And when Grantaire finally does–in front of Joly and Bossuet! Who watched the funeral cortege go by and decided to have brunch instead! Who are very much on the side of Yes Do Notice the Flowers and the Spring!–what’s the response?

“Speaking of revolution,” said Joly, “it appears that Marius is decidedly amorous.”

“Does anyone know who it is?”

“No.”

THEY ARE SO DESPERATE TO CHANGE THE SUBJECT. THAT THEY RESORT TO GOSSIP. ABOUT MARIUS.

They don’t even HAVE any gossip about Marius! “SPEAKING OF REVOLUTION… … … OH HEY COURFEYRAC’S ROOMMATE HAS A CRUSH. On someone. Allegedly.” This is not even the “How about that local sports team” of subject changes. This is just flat refusal to engage with anything Grantaire has said.

In my headcanon, about 80% of Grantaire’s position as Resident Skeptic* comes down to this: that he sees as clearly as any of them do that their ideals, if taken to their logical conclusion lead to violent revolution, and that the chances of that revolution accomplishing anything significant are slim compared to the chances of their all getting killed. And that aside from Enjolras, most of them deal with this through flat-out denial.

Grantaire’s a depressive. He is Very Bad at denying unpleasant truths. He is self-medicating very hard just to be able to ignore enough of the world’s unpleasantness to get up in the morning. He works really, really, hard to see the flowers and the spring and enough of a bright side to go on with this life that they are all so willing to throw away on such a slim hope.

He really can’t get on board with just…hoping that the suicidally rash inevitable endgame will work out for the best. But the only one of them who appears to have any other coping mechanism is Enjolras, who conceives of himself as an instrument of war trying to make himself obsolete–whose metric of success is self-annihilation. Which I think Grantaire understands very well and wishes he didn’t.

*The other 20% is tied up with his objectification of Enjolras. In the very literal, “what a fine statue,” “Je crois à toi”  sense. Enjolras is an abstract concept? Grantaire’s a skeptic; Enjolras is a god? Grantaire’s an atheist; Enjolras is a statue? Grantaire’s an art school dropout.  If he can make Enjolras something other than a person, then he doesn’t have to take him seriously; he doesn’t have to worry about letting him down.

everyonewasabird:

Ooh, you and I are reading a LOT of things differently! Interesting!

So I don’t think I disagree about what Grantaire is saying but about how it lands: he’s wrong. He sees the problems of the world--and in his bitterness invents extra problems, like women marrying bankers, which is not an actual problem, Grantaire--and despair makes him think nothing can be changed. And Joly and Bossuet know he’s wrong.

On the “new mown hay” line--firstly, oh my god, Hapgood’s translatation of that is a travesty. That passage is gorgeous.

Here’s Wilbour:

“And it appears that they are going to fight, all these idiots, to get their heads broken, to massacre one another, in midsummer, in the month of June, when they might go off with some creature under their arm, to scent in the fields the huge cup of tea of the new mown hay! Really they are too silly.”

...God, it’s so beautiful. Anyway.

It’s worth noting that this passage is not like the rest of the speech. Grantaire was being racist and sexist and gross like a sentence ago, and he undercuts his own eloquence with “Really they are too silly” a sentence after. I think the magic in his spark of sincerely expressed fear and regret here is real! And I think Hugo and the brick feel that regret and that loss. But I don’t think Hugo and the brick agree that therefore it would be better to just not have the revolution.

About Grantaire you said:

He works really, really, hard to see the flowers and the spring and enough of a bright side to go on with this life

I don’t agree. I think Grantaire is trudging on with a life that fills him with horror and which he barely tolerates, and the one good thing he has are the people he surrounds himself with who actually do pay attention to flowers and spring and the bright side--like Joly and Bossuet, who keep making jokes for exactly this purpose. Like the joke about Marius and revolution!

It’s not that Bossuet and Joly value their lives less or are paying less attention to the cost of the fight than Grantaire is--it’s that they value the world more. They love their lives--hence their last, joyous brunch instead of the boring, rainy parade--and they love the world, and they believe enough in hope for the world that they will willingly and joyfully give those lives to fix it. That’s not the same thing!

I don’t read “speaking of a revolution, Marius is amorous” as avoidance at all--handling catastrophe with good humor is Joly and Bossuet’s whole thing. Grantaire is spiraling into despair that Bossuet and Joly don’t share, since they’ve committed to this fight and made their peace with it. So they redirect Grantaire’s collapsing despair spiral with the joke that Marius--whom they must think of as a massive prude, given, well, them--suddenly caring about romance constitutes a revolution on par with the one they’re planning. Honestly, I thought it was pretty funny!

I don’t think anyone is facing the revolution with denial--I’m not following where that idea comes from. It seems to me the Amis are brave and selfless and committed and good, and they see revolution as worth doing, and if they die in the effort, they see that as worth it. I think everyone but Grantaire is fully on board with that.

A LOT of my feeling that the text of the brick is adamantly pro-revolution comes from this post from pilferingapples, ostensibly about the Waterloo digression. This post seriously upended how I think of the revolution plot of the brick versus its weird bourgeois ending--honestly, it completely changed how I think about this book and just...books in general. I can’t overstate what that bit of meta did to me.

On Enjolras... oh wow, we’re seeing very different characters!

You say:

Enjolras, who conceives of himself as an instrument of war trying to make himself obsolete–whose metric of success is self-annihilation.

I definitely see the instrument of war thing! And I think he always saw the (possibility? probability? certainty?) that the world he fought for would not include him. But I don’t think his metric of success is self-annihilation. That might be Valjean’s, but I don’t think it’s his. I think Enjolras’s metric of success is the world being saved.

I think of Enjolras as the great moral victor of the story. Inasmuch as he has flaws, they’re about being too absolute and sublime, to the exclusion of all else. That’s not a damning flaw, and in embracing Grantaire he transcends it. Far from tending towards self-annihilation, he seems to me a character of nigh-superhuman resilience, too full of love for his friends and humanity and faith in a better world ever to break, under any circumstances. I don’t think his willingness to die is abnegation--I think it’s genuine love for the world and faith that even in defeat, he and his friends have moved humanity closer to a better future.

(I hope that wasn’t too combative! I’m happy to argue further! :D)

[jefferyryanlong]

Fresh Listen - jakubazookas, Makiki (Bandcamp, 2019)

(Some pieces of recorded music operate more like organisms than records. They live, they breathe, they reproduce. Fresh Listen is a periodic review of recently and not-so-recently released albums that crawl among us like radioactive spiders, gifting us with superpowers from their stingers.)

Crossing over. Switching sides. Going electric. It’s a naive nostalgia in me to imagine that there was once a less cynical intent in popular music. Performers would experiment with the conventions of oppositional, and sometimes antagonistic, forms of expression. The reward for their labors was a kind of perverse artistic fulfillment, or the fulfillment of a buried, seething love; not simply to disburse their brands to a more expansive demographic.

Ray Charles, who gestated in the chrysalis of Nat King Cole’s sophistication and, once slickly emerged, satanically defiled the pure, earthy tones of the black church with his pebbled, honeyed voice pounding like tom-toms between clusters of piano keys, very respectfully recorded an album of country and western hits of his time, transfiguring his exhortations, street shuffles and come on’s to operatic pathos swelled by a string section. When the psychedelic swirl could no longer be summoned from the twelve strings of Roger McGuinn’s guitar, the Byrds made a similar change--with a blade of grass between their teeth, they switched out the Rickenbacker for a pedal steel, going whole hog for a shit-kicking sound that carried over, for the most part, to the rest of their recorded output as a band. And lest one forget the curly-headed kid who disposed of his Goodwill garments and political tongue-twisters for a black leather motorcycle jacket, and acid, visionary hipster jive popped off with supreme contempt and confidence, surfing atop the crest of an electric wave that crashed down hard on the balding, disapproving heads at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965. And shortly thereafter, he’d too abandon his visions and try out a mellow country croon, which drawled out moon, spoon, and June rhymes as effortlessly as he’d once sang “A question in your nerves is lit / yet you know there is no answer fit / to satisfy you, ensure you not to quit / to keep it in your mind and not forget / that it is not she or they or or it  / that you belong to.”

We might all agree that commercial genre distinctions in popular music are only convenient signifiers for selling product more effectively. But we might also agree that beyond the superficial textures enwrapping each genre--funky bass, mercurial fiddle, distortion, shouting, rhyming, singing through one’s nose--there is a spirit that crystallizes each music into a unique expression, which in turn defines the form. Musicians, past and present, have tried to tap into those spirits beyond their established ken with mixed results, sometimes succeeding in only a pose. (Apart from “Torn and Frayed,” the Rolling Stones, despite the quality of some of their country-tinged output, were never able to master the sound of the South without oozing their standard irony).

Consider jakubazookas’s Makiki, an arresting full-length departure (or, as the record's Bandcamp description reads, “a score to a film yet unwritten”) composed on and played through, primarily, secondhand, decades-old European synthesizers. The album’s auteur, Christopher Claxton, has involved himself in a side project that feels like a culmination, distilled from a rich musical history. It is a detour that could just as well be a radically remodeled home.

Chris’s jakubazookas music is hardly representative of his principal aesthetics. Though he has incorporated electronics into criminally off-the-grid alter egos Buford Brixton and Summatyme Playerrrz, those digital colors were primarily at the service of an often nostalgic lyric entwined with a melody that seemed to have been imprinted upon the throat of forever, indestructible and immortal. Essentially, though, Chris has been a guitar man, in the singer-songwriter mold (though a seriously effective bassist and shredder when called upon), his melancholy voice spinning short films from his never-dull lyrics. 

Makiki disposes of melody (mostly) and words. On every track Chris hammers, coaxes, sprays and blows replicant instrumental textures from his synths in a single-minded pursuit of setting a groove. In some of his greatest songs (”Happy Ending,” “Lula”), Chris has either presaged or debriefed the events of apocalypse within our little blue world. As jakubazookas, he continues to do so, though through funky, discordant, palpable, and hopelessly antiquated keyboards. 

Tension bordering on paranoia informed by sinister intent is essence of “Blowhole,” Makiki’s first track. Its discomfiting arrangement echoes the national mood, the descent into civic belligerence about the most trivial disagreements. “Blowhole” is simply an apt expression of our times, its recurring percussive motif rising and falling in the background, manifesting in the imagination as distorted chanting, or marching, as if the ancient armies of hate were being mobilized under our noses, just outside the screens of our cell phones. 

The irony of our infatuation with technology is that, in our extreme egotism, we want our technology to be more human-like, even as we despise the true humanity around us. As in our quest to usher in our own obsolescence through the creation of a legitimate artificial intelligence, we want our electric things to talk to us, to anticipate us, and to do so in comforting human speech.

The Mellotron, once of the early synthesizers, for which rolls of tape informed each of the keyboard’s back and white ivories, was built to mimic the stirring fullness of a classical orchestra. Thankfully, it was never used correctly--on songs from the Moody Blues, King Crimson, or Led Zeppelin, the notes of the Mellotron are inevitably uncanny. Despite the haunting quality of the instrument’s tape rolls (when warm, the tapes tended to stretch, giving them a human-voice fallibility), the Mellotron generates a very contemporary unease by the nature of its artificiality. 

The equivalent to the Mellotron on Makiki is a synth effect that appears first on “She Stay on Display” and recurs through the album. I think of it as a “Panophone”; it seems an ill-advised crossbreeding of Pan flute and saxophone, as well as several wind instruments in-between. Through careful overlays and ad-libbed pitch-shifts, Chris is almost able to evoke human breath through his Panophone. Dizzyingly, it chases its own tail between radiated mutants clustered together at a dystopian dance party, the DJ an algorithm spitting out rhythmic equations via a mainframe from 1980′s digital tech.

The soul of Chris Claxton can be discovered on “Coral Cavern,” where the most organic sway of these intricately programmed, wind-up birdsongs lives. Chris’s intimacy with hip-hop, though mostly absent from his guitar-based compositions, is evoked through an infectious call-and-response pattern, which plays out over a droning hurdy-gurdy of doom. 

Tipping his hand on the track “Floor Delete,” Chris at last goes all in on Prince--or at least an abstraction of Prince, projected hologram-style. The inspiration of the method behind Makiki becomes clear: a solo savant layering his electro bumps and buzzes, zapping an imitation of life from the overlapping electrical currents. “Floor Delete,” with its funky, Prince-ian bass-lessness, aspires to that ineffable spark that switches one from listening mode to dancing mode, while in our minds we picture flying cars lifting off from the dunes of deserts.

The Panophone emits some serious Lonely Shepherd feels on the meditative, New Age-style “Sloe Jam and Tonic,” while “1CH1″ and “A Death” lean into Makiki’s soundtrack nature as if the accompanying score to some horrifying onscreen discovery a la Air’s Virgin Suicides record. Though the discovery could be less cinematic than existential--both songs play as if some awful thought has just occurred, “A Death” propelled by the hateful riffing of an electric guitar just loud enough to be imposing.

Both “Grazie 001″ and “Internal Demands” are more complete compositions, as opposed to sustained vibes repeating their technological truths as mantras. While imperfect, each song has a definitive life cycle, a spectrum of modes and tones that begins and ends. “Rebirth,” with its hovering helicopter FX and unholy call to obscene prayer, seems much more terrible than its title would suggest, unless that suggestion is that we are born again in some hideous form we lack the capacity to comprehend. Rather, the song comes across as the end of a cursed life, the part where, trapped within a haunted canyon, you realize the hellhounds have at last tracked your scent and are baying in their bloodlust. 

The expression of dread--of inevitable climate disaster, of racial violence, of the erosion of protective institutions, of atavistic impulses we were sure we’d overcome through learning and a broader awareness--might as well be the lingua franca of our age. With Makiki, Chris Claxton temporarily eschews the artist he was born to be for the artist he must be, gently demanding listeners contextualize our shared predicament as filtered through the psychology of artifice, of saying (through an electronic simulacrum) one thing in an effort to convey a deeper, scarier, other thing.

[vitalmindandbody]

Two American Reveries: how a dumbed-down society lost spate of a great impression

As Clinton and Trump prepare to debate next week , princely models are overwhelmed in a culture where most Americans do not know what is real anymore and the dream of equal opportunity is just a fantasy

Every child had a pretty good shot

To get at least as far as their old boy got

But something happened on the way to that place

They hurled an American flag in our face.

Billy Joel, Allentown

Its one of the greatest fabrications of all time, and just like it says on the dollar bill novus ordo seclorum it established an entirely new tell in human affairs. After millennia of pharaohs, lords, lords, kings, sultans, caesars and czars, with all their attendant gentries and locked-down social structure, a country was founded where birth and lineage didnt topic so much, where by application of your genius, force, labor and willingness to play by the rules, you could improve your information spate in life and achieve a measure of financial insurance for yourself and your family. Peasants and proles could aspire to more than mere survival. Progressive!

We know it today as the American Dream. The now-obscure historian James Truslow Adams coined the expression in his book The Epic of America, characterizing the American reverie as TAGEND

a dream of a social order in which each man and each girl shall be able to attain to the fullest prominence of which they are innately capable, and be recognised by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of delivery or position.

Adams was writing in 1931, but the dreaming was there from the beginning, in Jeffersons pursuit of happiness formulation in the Declaration of Independence, joy residing in its 18 th-century appreciation of succes, thrive, wellbeing.

Nobody ever came to America with a starry-eyed dream of working for famine compensations. Spate of that offered in the old country, and thats precise why we left, escaping serfdom, peonage, tenancy, indenture all different iterations of what was essentially a rigged organisation, to set it in current political verbiage that channeled the profits of our proletariat upstream to the Man. We came to America to do better, to secure for ourselves the liberation that financial defence accompanieds, and for millions largely lily-white males at first, and then slowly, sputteringly, women and people of color thats the direction it used to work , nothing less than a revolution in the human condition.

Upward mobility is indispensable to the American Dream, the notion that people can rise from working to middle class, and middle to upper and even higher on the prototype of a( imaginary) Horatio Alger or an( actual) Andrew Carnegie. Upward mobility across classes peaked in the US in the late 19 th century. Most of the benefits of the 20 th century were achieved en masse; it wasnt so much a phenomenon of great numbers of people emerge from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising sharply for all world-class. You didnt “ve got to be” exceptional to rise. Opportunity was sufficiently broad that hard work and steadiness would do, along with implicit buy-in to the social contract, allegiance to the system proceeding on the assumption that the system was mostly fair.

The biggest additions occurred in the post-second world war epoch of the GI Bill, cheap higher education, strong labor unions, and a progressive taxation code. Between the late 1940 s and early 1970 s, median household income in the US redoubled. Income inequality contacted historic lows. The median CEO salary was approximately 30 durations that of the lowest-paid hire, compared against todays gold-plated multiple of 370. The top tax bracket strayed in the neighborhood of 70% to 90%. Conceded, there used to be far less billionaires in those daylights. Somehow the society survived.

America is a dream of greater justice and the possibilities for the average “mens and”, if we are not able acquire it, all our other accomplishments amount to nothing. So wrote Eleanor Roosevelt in her syndicated pillar of 6 January 1941, an apt lead-in to her husbands State of the Union address eventually that day in which he enumerated the four exemptions necessary to American republic, among other issues freedom from want. In his Government of the Union address 3 years later, FDR expanded on this concept of freedom from want with his proposal for a Second Bill of Privilege, an economic statute of rights to antagonize what he viewed as the growing tyranny of the modern economic tell TAGEND

This Republic had at its beginning, and originated to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political claims among other issues the right of free speech, free press, free hero-worship As our person has grown in length and stature, however as our industrial economy has expanded these political claims have proved inadequate to assure us equality. We have come to a clear understanding of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic its safety and independence.

Political claims notwithstanding, liberty doughnuts excessively hollow when youre going nickel-and-dimed to extinction in your everyday life. The Roosevelts recognized that compensation peonage, or any organization that inclines toward subsistence level, is plainly incompatible with self-determination. Survival is, by definition, a constrained, desperate position; ones horizon is necessarily limited to the present daylight, to getting enough of what the body needs to make it to the next. These daylights a minimum wage laborer in New York City clocking 40 hours a week( at$ 9 per hour) earns $18,720 a year, well for the purposes of the Federal Poverty Line of $21,775. Thats a scrambling, anxious world, narrowly bounded. Close to impossible to decently feed, robe, and shelter yourself on a compensation like that, much less a family; much less buy health insurance, or save for your kids college, or are represented in any of those other good American concepts. Down at peon stage, the pursuit of prosperity sounds like a bad gag. Its “ve called the” American nightmare, George Carlin cracked, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Necessitous mortals are not free males, said FDR in that 1944 State of the Union speech. Beings who are ravenous and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are stimulate. A dreadful proclamation, demonstrably genuine, and especially unsettling in 2016, a point in time when the American Dream seems more viable as nostalgia than a lived phenomenon. Income inequality, asset distribution, mortality rates: by every measure, the average individual that Eleanor Roosevelt celebrated is sinking. Exceptional people continue to rise, but overall mobility is stagnant at best. If youre born poverty-stricken in Ferguson or Appalachia, chances are youre stay around that road. Ditto if your early retentions include the wading pool at the Houston Country Club or ski exercises at Deer Valley, youre likely going to keep your perch at the top of the heap.

Income inequality, gross disparities in opulence: were to say daily, perpetually, that these are the necessary the effects of a free market, as if the market was a force-out of quality on the order of weather or tides, and not the altogether manmade construct that it is. In flare of recent biography, blind credence of this sort of financials would seem to require a firm commitment to folly, but makes accept for the moment that its genuine, that the free market exists as a universe unto itself, as immutable in its workings as the regulations of physics. Does that universe include some ironclad convention who are in need of inequality of opportunity? Ive yet to sounds the suit for that, though doubtless some resourceful thinktanker could produce one out of this same free-market economics, together with stenches of genetic determinism as it relates to calibers of self-discipline and reputation. And it would be bogus, that case. And more than that, vile. That we should allow for wildly disparate possibilities due to accidents of birth ought to impres us as a crime equal in violence to child abuse or molestation.

Franklin Roosevelt:[ F] reedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is ensure equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place. The proposition leads deeper than sentimentality, deeper than programme, deeper even than adherence to equality and the pursuit of gaiety that are set out in the Declaration. It cuts all the way to the nature of democracy, and to the prospects for its very existence in America. We may have democracy in its own country, wrote state supreme court right Louis Brandeis, or we may have great capital concentrated in the sides of a few, but we cant have both. Those few, in Brandeiss judgment, would inevitably use their capability to subvert the free will of the majority; the super-rich as a class simply couldnt be trusted to do otherwise, a thesis thats being starkly acted out in the present period of Citizens United, Super Pacs, and truckloads of dark money.

But the occasion for economic equality goes beyond even equations of influence politics. Democracys premise rests on the idea that the collective wisdom of the majority will demonstrate right more frequently than its incorrect. That have enough opening in the pursuit of happy, your population will develop its genius, its ability, its better judgment; that over time the national capacity for discernment and self-correction will be magnified. Life will improve. The way of your uniting will be more perfect, to borrow a phrase. But if a critical mass of your population maintained in peonage? All its vigor spent in the cuts of day-to-day existence, with insufficient opportunity to develop the full range of its faculties? Then how much poorer the prospects for your democracy will be.

Economic equality can no more be divorced from the smooth functioning of republic than the ballot. Jefferson, Brandeis, the Roosevelts all realise this home truth. The American Dream has to be the lived world of the two countries, not just a moderately tale we tell ourselves.

I have always go much more advertisement than anybody else.

Donald Trump

Then theres that other American dreaming, the numbed-out, dumbed-down, make-believe macrocosm where much of the national consciousness resides, the sum concoction of our mighty Fantasy Industrial Complex: movies, Tv, internet, texts, tweets, ad saturation, celebrity infatuation, athletics infatuation, Amazonian sewers of porn and political bullshit, the entire foray of media and messaging that is endeavouring to separate us from our brains. September 11, 2001 detonation us out of that daydream for about two minutes, but the dream is so elastic, so all-encompassing, that 9/11 was soon absorbed into the the matrix of FIC. This exceedingly complex incident horribly direct in the result, but a swamp when it is necessary to reasons was stripped down and binaried into a reliable fantasy narration of us against them, good versus sin, Christian against Muslim. The week after 9/11, Susan Sontag was virtually executed for pointing out that a few smidgens of historical awareness might help us understand how we came to this part. For this modest overture , no small number of her fellow Americans bid her dead. But if wed followed her induce if united done the hard work of digging down to the roots of the whole nasty thought perhaps we wouldnt still be fighting al-Qaida and its offspring 15 years later.

An 11 -year-old girl wears Trump socks at awareness-raising campaigns event for the Republican nominee at the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC. Image: Mike Segar/ Reuters

Heres a hypothesis, ugly, uncharitable, but opened our recent biography it begs probe: the majority of cases most Americans dont know whats real any more. How else to justify Trump, a billionaire on an ego trip capturing a major partys nomination for chairman? Another blunt-speaking billionaire tried twice for the presidency in the 1990 s and used to go in flames, but he made the error of operating as himself, a recognizably flesh-and-blood human being, whereas Trump comes to us as the ultimate individual, and indisputable maestro, of the Fantasy Industrial Complex. For much of his profession until 2004, to be exact he braced status in our lives as a more or less ordinary personality. Large than life, rest assured, cartoonishly extravagant, shamelessly self-promoting, and reliably hateful, but Trump didnt become Trump until The Apprentice debuted in January 2004. The first episode depicted 20.7 million viewers. By analogy, Ross Perot received 19,742, 000 polls in the 1992 general elections yes, Im equating referendum totals with Nielsen ratings but Trump stopped gleaning that robust 20 million week after week. The season climax that year reached 28 million viewers, and over the coming decade, for 13 more seasons, this was how America came to know him, in that weirdly intimate mode Tv has of giving luminary into the exceedingly middle of our lives.

It was this same Trump that 24 million viewers a record, of course tuned in to watch at the first Republican debate last year, the glowering, blustering, swaggering boardroom act representation who devoted every hope of shredding the pols. One amazes if Trump would have ever been Trump if there hadnt been a JR Ewing to pave the way, to show just how dear and real a dealmaking TV swindler could be to our middles. Trumps performance on that night did not dishearten , nor through all the debates in the long progress that followed, and if his consider for the truth has proved more erratic even than that of professional legislators, we should expect just as much. In the realm of the Fantasy Industrial Complex, actuality happens on a slipping proportion. The fact is just another possibility.

I speak the password primeval.

I would give the signaling of democracy ;P TAGEND

By God! I will accept good-for-nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

In nine epoches Trump and Hillary will take the stage for their first face-to-face conversation. There will be blood. The bayonets are going to be out, and the ratings are bound to be, need it be said, yuge. The American Dream will no doubt be invoked from both pulpits, for what true-blue patriot was ever against the American Dream? And yet for the past 30 times the Democratic nominee has worked comfortably within “states parties ” establishment thats battered the working and middle classes down to the bone. The brand-new Democrat of the Clinton era are always strong for political privileges, as long as they dont disturbed corporate Americas bottom line. Strong for racial and gender equality, strong for LGBT privileges( though that took occasion ). Meanwhile this same Democratic establishment met with the GOP to push a market- and finance-driven economic prescribe that ameliorates the already rich and leaves the rest of us sucking wind.

Thats the very real feeling Trump to talk to , no fiction there. Bernie as well; small-minded think their constituencies overlapped, though Trumps admitted devotion to the common man stumbles over even the simplest proof. On whether to raise the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, Trumps moral compass has spun from an connoted no( wages are already too high ), to connote yes( wages are too low ), to weasel words( left open up to the states ), to yes and no in the same sigh( I would leave it and grow it rather ), and, ultimately, when pressed by Bill OReilly in July, to yes-but( raise it to $10, but its still good left to the states ). All this from the candidate whos securely in favor of abolishing the estate tax, to the great benefit of heirs of multimillionaires and none at all to the vast majority of us.

Meanwhile, the Fantasy Industrial Complex is doing just fine this election season, thank you. Communicating at a Morgan Stanley investors meeting in March, one of the commanders of the FIC, Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS and a husband whose 2015 compensation totaled $56.8 m, had this to say about the Trump campaign. It may not be good for America, but its damn good for CBS. The fund rolling in and this is fun this[ is] about to become a very good time for us. Sorry. Its a terrible thought to say. But bring it on, Donald. Keep going.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

The post Two American Reveries: how a dumbed-down society lost spate of a great impression appeared first on vitalmindandbody.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2yeTrzz via IFTTT

[deathisnotalesson]

postulations on the upcoming season of game of thrones

i haven't read asoiaf so i apologize in advance if some of this seems obvious or naive - this is more or less the product of a lay perspective of what might take place in season 8 and is purely speculative. if you haven't watched season 7 or really any of game of thrones and you plan to i would advise not reading further unless you don't really care about spoilers. some of this stuff just occurs to me throughout the day and i like to imagine hypothetical conversations between characters while doing mundane things - i've always really loved the conversational scenes even though they seemed to peak somewhere in the first few seasons with a few gems interspersed later on. insert spoiler alert flag here.

jaime really only has one place to go, and i get the feeling that this idea was ingrained into the main story arc in asoiaf - i can't really imagine a departure from the inevitable reunion of the lannister brothers, so that's more or less the starting point, but i'm fully expecting a curveball or two. following that line it's pretty clear that jaime will be met with extreme apprehension given dany's general antipathy toward the lannisters. another lannister joining the party is the last thing dany wants at this point, and jaime isn't just another lannister. he's the lannister that suicidally charged her and drogon on the battlefield, so she'd sooner see him incinerated like the tarlys than take him under her wing. enter tyrion.

TYRION: He's not all bad. I'm alive because of him. Cersei wouldn't have entertained us for a second.

DANY: (scowling furiously)

eventually he'll convince her to take him on board because - even though he's much smarter than jaime - he simply doesn't possess the same military mind as made evident by his embarrassing defeat at highgarden. his failure will have served the better purpose of prolonged fraternity. granted, jaime isn't the wisest military mind in westeros either - cersei is clearly the brains of the two, but nevertheless he'll be in a unique position to understand and counteract her brutal, underhanded style of warfare. at the very least he'll have insider information which could provide dany and co. with an advantage or innoculate them against her calculus. this would also open up some space to see a return of bran's humanity since he went all emotionless, contemplative three eyed raven and everything. how will he react when he comes face to face with the guy who crippled him from the waist down, who's now allied with his team? how will he react when he taps into cerebro and realizes it was him?

jaime's prince charming will be coming along for the ride, but he won't be ecstatic about leaving king's landing - his place of gainful employment - only to join the eunuchs under command of his sworn enemy. as we know, bronn is the only living person to put even so much as a scratch on one of dany's dragons since the sons of the harpy did some damage to an adolescent drogon back in season 5 - this would heighten dany and co.'s prospects for defeating zombie viserion assuming they can build a similar contraption or somehow hijack one of cersei's. add dragonglass to this equation and it becomes difficult to imagine how this wouldn't happen. i suspect dany will lose another dragon to the knight king but manage to burn the corpse before conversion and refuse to risk the life of her last which of course will be drogon - this will raise the urgency of finding another means to defeat viserion which may in the end require collaboration between a drogon-mounted dany and a well-aimed obsidian projectile courtesy of ser bronn. i wonder how many days of cgi rendering a shattering undead dragon in midflight will run them.

jon versus the night king doesn't intrigue me, but deprived of their winged mount the white walkers' days will surely be numbered.