#but I think there is an assumption that he's learned specifically about race and racism

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

1/2 With all due respect, there are many “murderous states” in the world that kill their own, and/or the citizens across the border. With the cry of religion, or birthrights to contested land, or a myriad of other reasons. I really don’t think Harry knew what was going on during world politics that summer to know what the inflatable hammer symbolized against Palestine. When Zayn saw the photo later, he likely was sickened. But ascribing that much knowledge to Harry at that point is a lot.

2/2 Harry is a pop star who is moving into musician/actor/creator territory. I’m going to him some time to grow. He has proven that not only is he not an asshole, he’s trying to make the world better. While he could do better with his methods, and maybe the cynics believe it’s clever branding- it’s a starting point. May be he will be more forward and specific soon. I’ve seen your thoughts on TPTK & MLK. I get it, it’s not enough.

3/3 Anyway, curious about your thoughts, sorry if I worded the anti-Jewish/Muslim parts awkwardly. Meant no disrespect to any of the groups, rather nothing but love for them both. Also, I’m writing this on mobile, and my thoughts are disjointed so I hope my tone is not preachy! Honestly, was just curious about the tension between Harry & Zayn and I always thought it was due to work ethic differences (being on time, substance abuse, and musical direction). You’ve given me a new point to consider.

******

Hi anon

My thoughts in response are also quite disjointed and it’s late, but I’ll do what I can. Working sort of backwards.

I don’t know any more than you do and I’m sure that what went on between them was very complicated.  I am very uncomfortable with the things you list being described as ‘work ethic’ (I definitely have a problem with the concept - unless it’s being used in an analytical sense ).  The idea that someone who is late or has a substance abuse problem has a bad work ethic (many a substance abuse problem has been in response to a drive to work ever harder)

My point about both TPWK and Harry’s contribution to the MLK video isn’t actually that they’re not enough.  I think putting any political obligation on popstars only leads to bad politics - so I work quite hard not to put political demands on them. I think that both TPWK and Harry’s contribution to the MLK video are both ideological positions that actively do harm in the world.

As for what Harry knew - I think that’s a complicated question.  I am interested in talking about celebrities and politics, but I find a lot of the discourse frustrating.  One option seems to be demanding ideological purity from celebrities and cancelling the moment they do anything wrong (usually reseved for people the person doing the cancelling already hates).  The other is to deny any meaning to their actions and treat them as if they have no way of learning about anything.

Harry was a human being with a smart phone in 2014. If he didn’t know about the actions of the Israeli state in Gaza then it was because he chose not to know.  If he decided to make a statement of support in Israel without investigating the situation there that was also his choice. Neither of these choices should be treated as the sum total of his character, but I’m not here to strip away Harry’s agency.

[bookshelfdreams]

So. Phrenology.

The study of the human head!

Not quite.

Phrenology does concern the human head, but it's more accurately described as the attempt to extrapolate personality traits and biographic facts from the size and shape of the skull. It's based on the assumption that each function of the brain is situated in a specific area and those expand or atrophy depending on how much they are used, like muscles. This is reflected in bumps and dents in the skull; if you know which area of the head corresponds to which brain function, you can "read" the skull of a specific person.

Note that "brain function" largely does not mean what we would consider actual brain functions, like speech, motor skills, or memory but more vague personality traits and such.

Doing phrenology as a parlour trick is kind of like astrology, or palm-reading. You build this whole system of arbitrarily associating personality traits with easily observable features people have no control over, and being successful largely depends on how good you are at exploiting the Barnum effect. It's not difficult to pull this off at all, but Stede screws up spectacularly. This is because he's a terrible liar, bad at reading people, and not confident enough to be a convincing conman (Frenchie would have killed it).

I am 100% certain that this very moment is the first time Stede ever hears about the concept. (It was developed in the 1790s and, like most pseudoscience, is more of a 19th century thing, but we're gonna ignore that, historical accuracy is for losers). When you watch the scene and focus on Stede it's a hilarious string of wtf expressions.

(wish I could gif that scene)

He's able to deduct it has something to do with feeling people's heads but he has no idea what he's supposed to learn from palpation. He makes a guess and fails because he doesn't recognize that literally all he has to do is tell Antoinette that she's a born fashionista, the smartest person in the room, and hot as hell.

There's something else that I find significant about it. At its heyday, phrenology was an integral part of all manner of gross, misanthropist bullshit pseudoscience, it was used to "diagnose" criminal tendencies and educational prospects. Of course it has its place in scientific history; for example, phrenology was also one of the first theories that proposed that the human brain is malleable and rehabilitation an option.

Overall though, it's outdated and bigoted, and even at the time, some people recognized that it's largely bullshit. It has contributed a lot more bad than good to the world. It's foundational to racism and eugenics, which of course culminated in the detailed categorization of human beings into "races" under national socialism. Culturally, this idea that outer beauty is reflective of moral purity and good character is still pervasive.

And this is an idea that ofmd rejects at its very core. In this story, conventional beauty and attractiveness has no bearing at all on character or worth. You are not what other people think of you. You need not let society's preconceived notions define you.

They bring up phrenology deliberately to discount it, to make fun of it; Stede, who is well-read and educated, doesn't even know what it is. Because it is insignificant. It's nothing more than a funny anecdote.

Look at these rich dumbasses, they actually believe the shape of your skull has any bearing on who you are as a person. lol.

[gothhabiba]

perhaps this is due in part to the pacing of this show just being unavoidably screwy, but during season four I think the Human Crop 2.0's characters and motivations are not adequately explored. the enormous question of the possibility of improvement from behaviours like misogyny, racism, and sexual harassment (which latter thing is just..... skated over completely?), which really ought to be central to a show about. ethics. is kind of phoned in.

in particular, it annoys me a good deal that we're TOLD that Simone makes unfair snap judgements about people, but we never.... see it? every time she "judges" Brent, it's an accurate assessment of whatever it is that he's just done, not a (however accurate or inaccurate) assumption about what he's about to do. we see the others' flaws actually play out, but not hers? and it feels REALLY weird to be told that a Black woman is judgemental and mean or whatever and then have that be completely unsubstantiated. you can call her decision not to help Brent out of the hole a demonstration of a flaw, but I'd see that as a lack of forgiveness or a failure to help someone regardless of how she feels about them. maybe a judgement of his future potential as a human being. and 1. that's different from what we're told is her flaw, which is making "snap judgements" (it's been a year at this point...) and 2. it's a little bit late to be demonstrating her flaw right at the end of the year, especially given that we're meant to believe that she has gotten better since the beginning of the year. you really could not show me her being unfairly judgemental once in like episode three or whatever?

the writers have Eleanor be like "Simone's right, she should not have to deal with this, this is Brent's problem, not hers" because they're using her as the mouthpiece of The Moral here and don't want to be misinterpreted as saying that Simone ought to just grant Brent forgiveness (for things he's not even sorry for). which is fine, if heavy-handed (and also kind of out of left field, since the last time we heard Eleanor say anything about gender or race it was to racially fetishise Tahani and continue to financially support a man who had committed sexual assault, so it would have been nice to have seen how she went from there to being so progressive that a racist misogynist could be hand-picked to annoy her specifically. I mean I guess she remembered where Chidi was from? lol). but they're walking a fine line here between "Simone is too judgemental" and "no no we swear, Eleanor tone policing a Black woman was a mistake that the characters learned from, we're not endorsing that" and it would have provided a lot of clarity here to show Simone actually be wrong once or twice. or even for her to have assumed that Brent was awful before he had really demonstrated it. did I just miss that scene??

we're also told that. what's-his-name. the gossipy gay guy (which uh??? lol) improves, and we see some of that initial bonding with Tahani, but a scene here or there about him demonstrating changed behaviour (refusing to gossip about someone! leaving women and their fashion choices alone!!) would have really helped to drive this point home. instead, right at the end, we're shown him 1. revealing someone else's secret; and 2. continuing to rag on a woman for daring to wear the same pair of shorts every day. and yet we're told that he's improved significantly, so. I guess we have to believe that

I'm now on season 4 episode 8 of my rewatch btw

[dailylgbtmusicals]

the only one making the implication that black men are violent and abusive here is you... how do you not realize that you’re the one perpetuating racism lol. most people who watched the show wouldn’t have even had a thought like that in the back of their minds until.. guess who brought it into the picture? you

Alrighty, strap in because we’re going on a history trip.

This article is a long read and very upsetting (trigger warning for racist images and the n word is used from a film quote) but it’s written by Dr. David Pilgrim, a black sociology professor, and it outlines the existence of the “brute caricature” throughout pieces of media and the impact that it’s had on real people, including the over 3000 lynchings of black Americans between 1882 and 1951 and the shooting down of the Dyer bill in 1922.

I’m not the one making assumptions here. This is a systematic and time honored tradition. Dr. Pilgrim puts it better than I do:

"The brute caricature portrays black men as innately savage, animalistic, destructive, and criminal -- deserving punishment, maybe death. This brute is a fiend, a sociopath, an anti-social menace. Black brutes are depicted as hideous, terrifying predators who target helpless victims, especially white women."

This is extra timely in connection to Carousel, because Billy dies in the process of committing a violent crime against a white man.

In specific connection to Carousel, though, I am not the only person who made this connection. Michael Feingold, a theatre critic, wrote a lengthy column that you can read here that explores how America’s troubled history with race relations and sexism and “every other kind of injustice toward individuals and groups” reflects in our arts, using the revival of Carousel as a case example. He puts it rather plainly when he writes:

“The recent revival of Carousel failed at least partly because it conveyed such discomfort with the collision of its subject matter and its colorblind casting: A swaggering black man who hits his white wife was apparently not the hero anyone involved wanted to put onstage, and so the gifted Joshua Henry came off as the most abashed Billy Bigelow imaginable.“

I think it’s foolish to pretend like we are beyond racism, because we’re not. Racism isn’t a switch, it’s a spectrum, and just because we may not have lynchings or segregation written into our laws doesn’t mean that we’ve reached true equality and we’re not wrestling with stereotypes and preconceived notions that are both consciously and subconsciously affected by things like the media we consume and what it says and crucially doesn’t say.

If we take a look at the site History on the Net, particularly it’s section on imagery and stereotypes and the mission statement for that section, it clearly says:

“The mission of this collection is to educate about the power of imagery in the stereotyping of race. By understanding how it happened, we can recognize it happening now. Once aware, we can make a conscious effort to avoid the messy thinking stereotyping promotes that leads to fear, prejudice, hate, and discrimination. Increasing sensitivity to these stereotypes can promote racial tolerance.”

(Emphasis mine) Which is something that I strongly believe in. You might benefit from reading the article on History on the Net about distancing yourself from the stereotypes, as you seem to believe that I am making a problem where there isn’t one by noting Joshua’s race and the implications included thereof. The last common excuse used as an example on this page addresses that:

“11. We should all just relax and not worry about this stuff. It's really no big deal. It would be nice if this were true. Unfortunately, we will never stop talking about race. Because of this, we must learn to talk about race better than we do now. Ignoring racism, pretending it doesn't exist is not the way to talk better about it.”

I don’t like Carousel for a lot of reasons, and I don’t think it should have been revived at all, and the racist stereotypes that it puts forth are only part of that. When we talk about the revival we often talk exclusively about the implications of putting on a musical that seems to justify domestic abuse through a forgiveness arc of a domestic abuser during the height of the Me Too movement, and that was not a smart move, but we shouldn’t let that obtuse decision overshadow the other harmful aspects, nor should we perpetrate the idea that noticing someone’s race is racist. 

We are not all the same. However, being different does not mean being lesser, it just means that we are having different experiences and coming from different places and carry different histories and cultures. Those differences should be celebrated, not erased. Pretending they don’t exist, whether by saying that you don’t see color or saying that I’m making it racist by noting them, is wrong. White people will never understand what it’s like to live as a person of color, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t still strive to listen to their experiences and recognize that things like media portrayals are a little too complex to express in 550 characters.

[iteratedextras]

@falkon8888​

By “implicit multiple-ethnonationalism-in-one-country,” I’m not referring to the history of the country - you do realize they teach about the trail of tears and all that in public schools and have for years, right?  Like none of that stuff is mindblowing information to most people.

What I mean is the assumption that “children won’t learn as well if the curriculum doesn’t contain people like them” - e.g. the idea that ‘children of color’ won’t want to learn math if it seems ‘too white’.  Aside from the fact that asian children seem to have little to no trouble with this...

If everyone learns best when it’s a matter of their own group’s historical pride, then we would expect the “best” results by giving each group their curriculum which is just about how their own group is personally awesome.

I don’t think that’s the case, but you need to recognize that Progressive rhetoric can be pretty creepy if you are not a Progressive, and a lot of the “racism” you see is a reaction to Progressives being creepy.

“Stolen Land,” in other parts of the world, can easily be a prelude to military invasion followed by forced ethnic displacement (or murder), just as one example.  Progressives were the ones who popularized “intent isn’t magic,” and they’re allegedly the culturally sensitive ones, but they still implicitly subscribe to the outdated monolithic blob theory of race relations even though they won’t admit it.

As a demonstration of the monolithic blob theory in action, white privilege theory can lower white liberals’ sympathy for poor whites.  If poor whites are suspicious about it, it seems that might be more well-founded than people think?

@hinatagem​

My experience is that a lot of Progressives are also quite ignorant and eager to jump on anyone they disagree with on that basis. Their lead in knowledge over the conservatives they hate so much is like the B- student lording how smart he is over the C+ student.

For instance, have you ever tried finding educational interventions that work to close the outcome gaps?  Or did you just assume we already know how to do it, and we’re only not doing it out of a lack of will?

Whenever I have looked, I have found that most of the interventions, except for things like lead removal, have not really worked that well.

The Perry Preschool Project managed to improve some other life outcomes (with an excellent rate of return, if it can be replicated) but not cognitive scores.  The effectiveness of Head Start is pretty disputed, and it looks like there’s a fade out in the effects, but there are reasons to be optimistic about the Reach Up and Learn program James Heckman is apparently involved in (discussed with Glenn Loury here). ...but the rise in incomes it had in Jamaica isn’t enough to close the gap even if it successfully scales up and applies in America.

There was some optimistic news about vitamin supplementation for a minority of malnourished children, but I wasn’t able to find more contemporary information to confirm it, et cetera.

When you dig in without a purely optimistic lens, you find that there are some potential gains to be made, but the situation overall appears to be obnoxiously resistant to interventions.

@geekandmisandry​

“Individualism” being “white supremacist” is the kind of garbage that shows up in leaks of training documents.  It’s not so different from the “linear, rational thinking is white” stuff that showed up in the Smithsonian infographic that was pulled.

Like yes, technically using a different number system is outside the space of what you guys would typically do, but the typical rejecter of this doesn’t know the exact ways in which you guys propose dumb bullshit, he’s just modelling your general tendency to propose dumb bullshit, and the magnitude and general direction are roughly correct, at least for the fringe.

...and the fringe is moving quick.

Like I can explain why you wouldn’t specifically go with that specific policy, and maybe Joe Footballwatcher can’t.

But would someone who thinks “cause and effect relationships” are “white culture” propose something that ridiculous?  Okay, well they pulled that infographic, but then what’s the overall direction?  In general it has been towards more ridiculous and more censorious, with fewer people being willing to criticize the overreach, so can Joe Footballwatcher be sure it hasn’t gotten that much worse in the past six months?

Throw in a bit of being misunderstood on purpose, and...

So again, this is the B- student lording it over the C+ student.

The real meme warfare type was whoever posted the “It’s okay to be white” flyer, which caused progressives to step on a rake they could have easily prevented by posting an “It’s okay to be black” flyer right next to it.

GAM or someone in the chain has blocked, but I will leave unblocked should they change their mind.

But... GAM - I may not have collected the full File of Actual They’re That Dumb As Implemented In Policy, but I’m not taking payment in useless dismissals of the problem anymore.

[stoiccthulhu]

Update time...actually, why should these be titled? I mean, whats the point of writing a title to these if all I’m going to do is ramble on and on with no specific topic of discussion, just several things on my mind?

Election day 2020 happened yesterday and I voted for nobody. And if I would have voiced my polling choice I would have voted for the candidate I see as being the best option in line with my thoughts and opinions concerning the state of the world at the moment as well as the future.

You can insert whomever you want to believe that would be based off an assumption and a look at my internetting footprint, but you would be wrong, but that’s part of the fun of interpreting what I’m writing down for you in the future. Trying to figure out what I’m actually saying. While it makes complete sense to me, because you don’t have the hidden key phrase you can’t decipher what it is that I am putting to digital paper.

I get it, I’m an asshole.

And this isn’t, completely, a justification towards my actions but a direct result of your intervention within my life that has caused this behaviour. Think of it sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You interpreted me, came back, and intervened in any little way imaginable. Negatively or positively, but no matter your justification, it was still an intervention that didn’t need to happen because, as Malcolm once said, “Life, finds a way.” And just like destiny, it will find a way. But enough of all that crazy talk, you’re here because you want to hear all about my political leanings and to unravel the mystery as to this anonymous random on the internet’s preferred presidential choice in the election that has already passed.

But before I do that, let’s get some shit off my chest because I tend to swear and if you don’t like it, go the hell away. I’m sick of people being sensitive over everything. As if they’re looking for any reason to complain or get offended nowadays.

“The internet has given everyone in (the world) a voice, and evidently everyone in (the world) has chosen to use that voice to bitch about (anyone they find offensive)” -Holden McNeil (with some modern revisions)

And that’s why I’ve chose not to be PC in this thing, whenever I feel the urge to put pen to paper, relatively speaking.

Like, let’s see who I can offend right off the bat.

Women need to start getting punched more and treated like human beings instead of china dolls. If you’re a pro-gender equality advocate, and you’re a woman, you need to be willing to be punched in the face for doing ANYTHING a man would otherwise be punched in the face for. They also need to be held accountable for the shit they do to everyone. I am a strong supporter in believing that no matter what women say about women controlling the government and such, while women have great communication skills, they have the worst track record when it comes to not being aggressive, biologically speaking.

In the wild, whom are normally the more aggressive of the genders? Whom is usually the one more protective of the young? more willing to go out to hunt?

To be fair, I have a very limited knowledge when it comes to the animal kingdom. But, I mean, the Black Widow is normally depicted as being a deadly female, the female preying mantis devours the head of her mate after they’re done mating. There are so many, example, of females being worse than males in nature its hard to ignore. And, to add religious believers to the list of people offended, if you’re not ignorant to science and knowledge, or at least the pursuit of it, we evolved over a long period of time from apes, which, by nature, makes us, humans, not white people, black people, yellow people(to stick to the color scheme), brown people(gotta throw the other Asian people’s in there as well), animals. Highly evolved and communicative animals, but animals none the less. Was that supposed to be one word? Nonetheless?

Doesn’t matter. So, if you stick with my logic, you’ll see that women are terrible. Terrible. But, because men like to have sex with females as opposed to men for the most part in today’s society women have a stranglehold on the pelvic reason of an entire world, which means they can make anyone, for the most part, do anything they want and see things their way, even if they’re saying the sky is as green as the skies of Namek. An example of this is perfectly laid out in a clip from That 70′s Show. Kelso and Hyde prove women can’t play fight because they’ll turn it real, for whatever reason, just because they’re girls. To prove this, Kelso and Hyde play fight, and it looks bad, but they stop, laugh, and hug it out. Then Jackie and Donna play fight, starting out playfully, but then turning it into hair pulling and needing to be pulled apart. Both visibly angry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUwxxJvtQnI

(OK, my memory was bad, it was Eric and Hyde, and it was set up differently, but the concept is still there.)

And I get it, they’re actors, being paid to do what the script is telling them to do, but it is true. Girls are worst during puberty as well, from what I’ve heard. And I get it, I have a biased standpoint being a male, but in today's culture that shouldn’t matter, it’s about what’s being said, not my gender.

Now that women are out of the way, lets also as black people, but not specifically black people, its more of a systemic form of racism that I believe shouldn’t exist. In which, if you are not of that specific race, you are not allowed to say the n-word. What makes me giggle right now is that with just that sentence every single person reading this probably got a bit riled up. A bit ruffled in the feathers because I’m not a black person. And if you weren’t, you are now, knowing what you know now.

So let me provide you with some context so you can understand how I’m not racist at the same time as saying what I said above.

I enjoy rap music and hip-hop, as do a lot of people throughout the world, black or otherwise. Which, in this current climate, would be considered one of the forms of cultural appropriation we tend to sweep under the rug because it doesn’t fit our narrative of being offended about something. Because I like rap music I tend to learn the word to all of the songs I enjoy listening to. Because I learn the words to the songs that I enjoy listening to I sing along. But, because I’m not black, I have to ruin my flow to edit myself just because the artist chose to use nigger in their song. Which, as an artist, is their choice.

Now, why should I have to edit myself? I have tried to replace it with “wigger”, but because of the closeness of the words, I felt that would still be offensive if I was ever overheard by the wrong black person who, understandably, would be mad if they heard a pasty white boy say the word nigger without any context.

I just think, unless the person is using the word in a hateful way, directed at the person the speaker either personally knows or is conciously speaking about, as in “i hate that nigger” or “you’re a nigger”. If it’s something like that, totally beat the shit out of that racist.

But if you’re singing along to Wu-Tang, and you say:

I be that insane nigga from the psycho ward I'm on the trigger, plus I got the Wu-Tang sword So how you figure, that you can even fuck with mine? Hey, yo, RZA! Hit me with that shit one time! And pull a foul, niggas, save the beef for the cow I'm milkin' this ho, this is my show, Tical! The fuck you wanna do on this mic piece, duke? I'm like a sniper, hyper off the ginseng root PLO Style, buddha monks with the owls Now who's the fuckin' man? Meth-Tical It shouldn’t be labelled as being racist.

There is more rattling around in my head right now, things that I’ve been thinking about for years, and things that have been bothering me for just about as long, but for now those were the two that fell out when I vomited all over my keyboard.

And if you’re offended. Get over it. You need to start.

Oh, I almost forgot. I was going to tell you whom it was I was going to vote for yesterday if I had voted for anybody. Jokingly I wanted to write-in “Obi-Wan Kenobi”. But in truth I was going to vote for Biden. Not because I thought he was the better candidate, but because there was not a good option at all, he was just the lesser of two evils. This election has made me decide I want a third option when it comes to my politicians, or at least, get rid of political parties all together. We spend so much time infighting and holding each other back instead of up no real change has happened in the past decade? Longer? And whatever change that does happen gets nitpicked apart so much it becomes a shell of its former self. But, enough about that. I have a baby demanding eggs and waffles and I still need to tag this.

[cryptovalid]

Watchmen: My favorite show of 2019

Now that I’ve watched HBO’s Watchmen in its entirety, I can safely say that it is by far my favorite show I’ve seen this year. The more I think about it though, the less it seems to offer a coherent statement about vigilantism, power and violence the way the original graphic novel did. I don’t think this makes it any less clever, bold or satisfying to watch, but Watchmen is more interested in playing with the weight and drama of themes than actually expressing a clear, useful thesis about them.

The show is a sequel to the graphic novel, taking place in 2019, when the fallout from the 1987 story finally comes home to roost. 

To give you some more context, I’ll be talking about Alan Moore’s 1986-1987 maxiseries of comics first, and then comparing it to the new television series narratively. In terms of acting and production values, I’d say that the show is great across the board, although your mileage may vary. This is doubly true of its narrative: I’m curious if the show is too confusing for people who’ve never read the comic, and the show doesn’t show a lot of reverence for the characters of the original. In my opinion, this is for the best and actually completely in the spirit of Alan Moore’s work. From here on out, There be Spoilers for the comic, movie and the tv series.

Watchmen (1987) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is by far my absolute favorite superhero comic. It is the only graphic novel to be named as one of Time’s 100 best novels of the twentieth century. It’s certainly not true that it is the only graphic novel that deserves that kind of honor, but it is not on that list for bad reasons. This post would be too long if I listed all of Watchmen’s many achievements, so I will just say this: Watchmen investigates how the existence of masked vigilantes and superheroes would change the real world, and its answer is not positive. No matter how you slice it, in order to inflict violence on strangers or save the world based purely on your own moral compass, you have to be either hopelessly naive or narcissistic, sadistic, fascistic, fetishist, manic, or untethered from human experience in one way or the other. However you imagine them, superheroes escalate danger. They are not cooperative or peace-loving by their nature, the comic says. ‘Superheroes’ will do terrible things in the name of ‘saving the world’ or ‘doing the right thing’. In this sense, the book is thoroughly anti-utopian but also anti-superhero, and it commits to this by depicting all of its ‘protagonists’ as deeply flawed, ultimately dangerous or inept people. 

In terms of plot, the big twist that effects the show is that the smartest man in the world, the vigilante Ozymandias, predicts that nuclear armageddon is inevitable unless he convinces the global superpowers that there is a massive alien threat, making their feuds appear petty and risky by comparison. He literally kills millions of people with a genetically engineered giant monster that he teleports to New York, not including the dozens of murders to prepare the ground and cover up this fact. The fear that more monsters like this could appear prevents nuclear war at the last second, but another vigilante named Rorshach figured out Ozymandias’ plan and wanted to expose it, which would undo its intended peacemaking effect. He was killed, but his notes survived.  

In the end, the only vigilante with actual superpowers, Dr. Manhattan, is so far removed from human experience because of his godlike powers and his nonlinear perception of time, that he seems to retreat from Earth itself, expressing a desire to create life elsewhere.      

This is the backdrop against which Watchmen (2019) frames itself: what would that alternate history look like about 20 years later? But instead of focusing on the evils that vigilantism and superpowers would create, this sequel puts race and policing at the core of its narrative. The main protagonists: Angela Abar, Will Reeves, Laurie Blake and Wade Tillman are all cops and all of them are at one point in their lives masked vigilantes. They are also pitted against white supremacist terrorists, and the show depicts them as regularly violating the constitutional rights of suspects and killing lots of people in justifiable situations. The show depicts both cops and civilians in both real and historical race riots.  

But the more I think about it, the less I can identify a coherent thesis about the origins or nature of racism or the morality of extra-judicial violence. It seems to say ‘violating a person’s human rights is alright as long as they’re racist’, and I mean, I can’t be too mad about that, but it also implies that the cops are basically good, that it is possible to root out specific racist conspiracies and that’s all that’s needed to set things right. There’s a definite assumption that most of the time, we can just trust cops to have integrity. The show rarely frames unmitigated violence as a systemic issue; even when the government is implicated. The protagonists are also relatable and sympathetic, and their victory against the white supremacist conspiracy is without any real moral complications or ironic personal costs. This show, unlike its source material, is pro-vigilante. Or at most neutral on the subject.   

Its message about racism is more straightforward, but also a little hollow. Racist violence is shown viscerally, but also roundly condemed, ridiculed, and avenged by the protagonists. But that’s really as deep as it goes. All racists in this show are openly and stereotypically Southern whites. There is very little exploration or covert or insidious racism: there is a clear divide between literal neo-KKK types and antiracist avengers, with little ambiguity in between. We are not really shown what drives racists to be racist. The most motivation racists are given is a resentment over two attempts at improving the world: Reparations for the Tulsa Massacre, and the aforementioned plot to stop the Cold War by faking extradimensional invasion. Not that I’m begging for a humane portrayal of racist terrorists, but it does make it extremely easy for actual, less obvious white supremacists to ignore any criticism because ‘at least they’re not like the Seventh Kavalery’. It in short, doesn’t give viewers any special insight into racism and how to deal with it in the real world.

What Watchmen does do beautifully is representation. The first masked vigilante, Hooded Justice, who in the comic was a clear reference to a Klansman, is reimagined as the victim of a threatened lynching, who fights his attackers still wearing the noose and hood they put on him. He then pretends to be white to gain the support and cover he needs to be a vigilante. This man, Will Reeves, named himself after his childhood hero, the historical inspiration for the Lone Ranger, Bass Reeves. As a child, he was smuggled out from the Bombing of Tulsa in the trunk of a carriage, much like Moses or Superman. We later discover that HJ is bisexual and is essentially strung along for years by the media-savvy Captain Metropolis for publicity purposes and sex, and ends up desillusioned by his white allies. We also learn that Angela Abar, the de facto main character, is in fact his granddaughter, and she becomes involved in his decades-spanning plans to root out the racist conspiracy that the plot revolves around.

Perhaps even more interesting is the decision to integrate Doctor Manhattan into this sequel as a jewish and a black man. Rather than simply recasting the part, the show frames the revelation in a way that Dr. Manhattan might experience it: out of order, but also clearly telegraphed. The show uses this to characterize Dr. Manhattan as someone whose decisions do not adhere to standard causality. Why does he start to woo Angela Abar in the first place? Because from his perspective, he’s always been in love with her. Just like nothing ever ends, it doesn’t really begin from his perspective either. One day, he walks into A Bar and starts explaining to Angela Abar that they will be in a relationship for ten years, which wil then end in tragedy. While she is understandably skeptical, Regina King and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II really manage to sell both the frustrating absurdity and the transcendant romance of this idea. In the end, Osterman chooses to take the shape of a dead man based purely on the fact that Angela is most attracted to, and goes to great lengths to lose is powers and become human again, as a black man named Calvin Abar, who we first meet as Angela’s charming stay-at-home husband and father to their adopted children. The fact that he is Dr. Manhattan all along is revealed to us in my favorite sequence in the whole show. We, the audience, fall in love with both the husband as well as the God, Jon Osterman, as both are vulnerable and honest about who they are. Even though everyone knows it can’t last. These scenes are both heartbreaking and beautiful, and are foreshadowed masterfully from the beginning. This is what I mean when I say the show is clever. 

The dialogue is witty and the cinematography, editing and plotting do a subtle job of worldbuilding. There are very few exposition dumps and characters rarely do or say things just to help the plot along; they are always driven by their own motivations rather than those the viewer might prefer in their hurry to learn more.

As a result, characters feel smart and their personalities and relationships develop more naturally. From Jeremy Irons’ Ozymandias to Hong Chau’s Lady Trieu to Jean Smart’s Laurie Blake, they all come across as clearly defined assholes with a charismatic competence.   

The world and its history also unfold at their own pace. This can be confusing in the first couple of episodes. It isn’t explained why cops wear masks, what ‘Redfordations’ are, or why squids rain from the sky often enough that a siren goes off whenever it happens. Instead, viewers piece a lot of it together from context. The details make it feel very believable. It makes me feel like I’m discovering an alternate history the way a lost time traveler might.

In the end, it is not the themes that make this version of Watchmen so enjoyable. Its the intricate details of its world and the interactions between its characters that make Watchmen 2019 so fun to watch. And as far as on the nose messages go, ‘vaporize as many racists as possible‘ isn’t that bad.  

[some-cookie-crumbz]

Philosophical Debate

Philosophical Debate - Kidge Month Day 26 Prompt Fill Fandom: Voltron: Legendary Defender Pairing: Kidge Summary: Sometimes, debates with alien life forms go over swimmingly for the Paladins of Voltron. Other times... Things get a little fighty. And sometimes it isn’t always Keith slugging it out. Standard Disclaimer: If you read and enjoy this, please give it a like/ reblog so I know if I should write more.

When he was informed that Pidge had gotten into a fight with an alien on his way to a debriefing with the Blade about Haggar’s recent movements, he wasn’t exactly surprised. For as much as one would think that being a Paladin of Voltron would earn someone the respect and regard of the entire known universe, it actually didn’t. Many a time he’d observed alien leader after alien leader talk down to the Green Paladin, as if they were teaching a knee-high child, and then laughed when Pidge would tear down their assumption with one well-timed quip. Normally about they were misrepresenting their technologies practices or capabilities. Sometimes they’d become meek and passive, rolling over and yielding to her without much of a fight. Other times, though, they would see her rebuttal as an attack to their credibility and intelligence. So, when he heard Pidge had gone toe-to-toe with another alien? He figured it was just another instance of that.

He was thrown for a loop, however, when he was informed that it had actually led to fisticuffs and that both of them were sitting in the infirmary, most likely getting chewed out by Shiro.

He headed off to the infirmary once the debriefing was done, curious about what had been said to set her off like that. She was sitting there, holding an ice pack to one cheek, scowling at the floor. Shiro was standing in front of her, arms crossed over his chest, sporting a look Keith had seen plenty of times himself. The older man glanced over at the sound of the door opening, his expression morphing at the sight of Keith. He stared at him, hard, before looking back at Pidge, as if to say, “Do you see what you’ve done? See how you’ve rubbed off on her?”

Keith dipped his head, a mix of embarrassed and avoidance, before peering around the room for the other impromptu brawler. He spotted them sitting off to the side, leaning over to glare at him from around a separation curtain. They seemed to be Dindurian, a planet that they had assisted recently at the request of Kolivan and the slowly rebuilding Blade.  It seemed that, a few months prior, their home world of Dindu had been taken over by a rogue Galran Commander frantically trying to gain a foot hole of control in the changing times. Prior to this, Dindu had been an ally to the Blade of Marmora, serving as a brief salvation point for Galran prisoners the Blade had snuck out. Voltron and the Atlus stepped in to liberate the planet post-haste. Afterwards, a few of their more technologically-inclined were insistent in joining the Atlas crew, hungry to repay Team Voltron for their help. He couldn’t recall the name of the one glaring him down but he did recognize them.

Once they had been informed of Keith’s Galran heritage, this Dindurian in specific began adamantly avoiding him. He didn’t necessarily blame them, but it still hurt.

Just by looking at them, he could see they’d been the one to walk away more scathed. Three of their eyes were starting to swell, there was a bruise developing on their left cheek, and there was a faint yellow crust, which he knew was dried blood, around the slits that he had learned were their nostrils. He could see another bruise poking up from under the collar of their shirt. In normal circumstances, he probably would have been impressed by how quickly Pidge had done such a good amount of damage, considering he was sure the fight had been broken up in a snap, but now he was only concerned as to what this would do to their alliance with the rest of the Dindurians.

“So, what happened here?” Keith asked as he approached, coming to stand beside Shiro.

“Pidge and Jaugg had themselves a friendly debate that got significantly less friendly the longer they discussed,” Shiro said, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Only because I don’t feed into statements made using sweeping generalizations, pure ignorance, and blatant racism!” Pidge seethed, turning to glare back at Jaugg, pure venom in her tone and look.

“Oh, come off it!” Jaugg scoffed, rolling all four of their eyes.

“You come off it! You don’t get to walk around here, talking that level of shit, and not expect someone to sit your ass down and explain why you’re wrong! Or, in this case, knock you on your ass because you’d rather be an igno-!”

“I see that things are still rather heated in here,” A calm voice chimed in from the doorway. They all turned to see a much taller, older looking Dindurian walking in.

Jaugg sucked in a breath. “Sage Hatur… Ma’am, please, take some sense into them! They think I have conducted myself in a way unbecoming when I have not,” they pleaded softly.

Sage Hatur seemed unimpressed, her luminous blue eyes shifting from the younger to Shiro. “I would like to apologize for this, Captain Shirogane,” she said, dipping her head, before turning to look at Keith, “as well as to you, Head Paladin.”

Keith blinked a bit in surprise. “I… I’m afraid I don’t follow,”

“We hadn’t actually discussed the whole situation yet with him, Sage Hatur,” Shiro said calmly.

She blinked a bit in surprise before turning her attention back to Keith. “Regardless, though, apologies are owed, and consequences must be dealt,” she said patiently.

“Consequences?” Keith parroted.

“This young one has been saying incredibly unkind things about yourself,” Sage Hatur elaborated, indicating Keith with a tip of her head. Her gaze then moved back over towards Jaugg, who was looking away in a mix of anger and shame, and her eyes narrowed to a glare. “These are not the behaviors I expect of one who looks to numbers and research to come to conclusions. As such, it is in the best interest of Voltron’s continued success that you be suspended from our research team and sent home.”

Jaugg looked up at their leader, eyes wide in horror.

Keith blinked before holding up a hand. “I appreciate your concern for my feelings, Sage Hatur,” he said calmly, “but I think that this seems a bit extreme. I think getting roughed up by Pidge here is enough of a sign that, regardless of what they think of me, they should perhaps keep it to themselves.”

“Are you sure, Head Paladin?” she asked worriedly.

He nodded. “It’s not the first time it’s happened, and it certainly won’t be the last,” he said with a shrug. From the corner of his eye, he could see Pidge squaring up, as if she were ready to launch herself at him next.

“Regardless of it happening before or likely happening again, I do not think this is something that should simply be disregarded,” Sage Hatur said gently, reaching out to set a hand on Keith’s shoulder. “You do not desire to be treated impolitely for crimes you neither committed nor support.”

“I understand and respect your stance on this subject. Please just consider letting the matter drop here to be a favor you are doing for me,” he said, offering her a small smile.

Sage Hatur let out a small sigh, squeezing his shoulder. “You are a much kinder soul than you need to be. I shall yield to your request,” she said. She lifted her head to pin Jaugg with another strict look. “While I cannot force you to change your thoughts or feelings, I will advise you to keep them to yourself going forward. Now, hurry along. You are not so grievously injured that you cannot resume your normal duties.” And then, she glanced over at Shiro again. “Also, Captain, I had something I had wished to discuss with you, if you should have the moment to spare.”

“Of course. I think I’ve gotten the point regarding peaceful conflict resolution across to Pidge,” he said, glancing at her briefly. When he turned to walk off with Hatur, however, Pidge rolled her eyes and screwed her face up in a small act of defiance. Keith offered her a raised eyebrow, but still seeming miffed at him, she answered him but turning away from him.

It reminded him quite a bit of one of Lance’s temper tantrums, what with how theatric she was being.

Jaugg hopped of the exam table and started walking out once Hatur and Shiro were almost out of the room, clearly wanting to put some distance between them. They paused briefly to glare at Keith as they walked past. “My opinion of you remains unchanged, half-breed scum,” they growled.

“That’s fine,” he answered, completely unaffected. He’d heard that one so many times that a small part of him almost wanted to tell him that, if he really wanted to get under Keith’s skin, he would need to think of a more original insult.

They seemed alarmed by that before glaring again, swearing at him in their native tongue, and then storming out of the room on Sage Hatur’s heels. “You didn’t need to humor that asshole,” Pidge snapped suddenly, voice tight with anger.

He turned to face her and shrugged. “Like I said, he isn’t the first to act like that just because my Mom is Galra. And I know that he won’t be the last,”

“You shouldn’t have let him get away with it, though!” Pidge argued.

“I can deal with it,”

“But you shouldn’t have to!” Pidge growled, clearly frustrated. She threw herself back against the exam table, throwing an arm over her eyes, and he outright laughed at the spectacle she was being.

“Okay, Lance,” he teased, walking over to sit beside her on the table.

“How dare you,” she said quietly, lifting her arm to look up at him. There was no real venom in her words, though, and some of her irritation seemed to have subsided. “How can you let stuff like that go? They’re basically saying you’re an awful person just because of what alien race your Mom is from. I mean, that’s just super messed up, don’t you think?”

“It is, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to do it. And if they decide that they want to keep living in ignorance, that’s their decision. The people that matter will always defend me, or be willing to have their opinion proven wrong. There’s no point in getting mad over it,” he said with a shrug.

“You? Not seeing a point in getting mad about something?” she asked, sitting upright. She then pressed one of her hands to his forehead. “Are you sick? Dying? On some magical Black Lion peace vibes nonsense?”

He laughed and shook his head. “No, I just… I’ve learned, I think, to only worry about the things that really matter or count,” he said.

“Huh. Sounds boring,”

“Kind of is. But, hey,” he hummed, flashing her an amused grin, “at least it gives you something to do, right?”

She blinked then smirked. “You do have a point there,”

[sol1056]

anons on the dragon prince

Yes, we all know the comparison points, so I’m skipping those to focus solely on tDP. Alright, starting from the top.

It does speak volumes [...] that tDP has seemingly (and unless proven otherwise in s2 by a fan theory coming true) killed one of a major CoC after only 3 episodes [but] the fandom, and PoC fans more importantly, still trust Ehasz/Wonderstorm and the story to not let them down ...

I was talking to someone the other day who DM’d me about finally seeing tDP, who said something along the lines of “I feel like I can breathe.” Which isn’t that far off what @ptw30 and I were telling each other, when we binge-watched tDP the night of its release. 

First episode, we were both a little ennnhhh over the animation style. Second episode, we barely noticed that anymore. Third episode, everything went to hell in a handbasket and yet our shared reaction was something along the lines of, “I feel like I can settle in, and let the story go where it’s going. I don’t have to stress about this. The writers have got this.” 

Think of being a passenger when the driver isn’t sure where they’re going. They slow repeatedly to check road signs, show an ‘ehhhh oh right no no we’re fine’ expression (or say it out loud), or switch lanes back and forth unexpectedly. Eventually you’re going to give serious thought to pulling out your phone and offering to navigate, just so someone in the car has a clue. Failing that, you end up worrying whether you’ll get there on time (or at all). 

Not once did tDP give me the remotest worry about where it’s going. Even if it seems counterintuitive that we could get to a Manhattan happy ending by way of a Brooklyn character death, the story must have a good reason. We can relax and enjoy the trip. 

It’s hard to pin down what creates that trust for an audience, because it’s so many things. It’s a combination of setups and payoffs. It’s getting emotional beats at regular intervals. It’s having questions raised and getting just enough answered that you don’t feel like the story is covering for not actually knowing and/or hoping you won’t notice it’s making things up as it goes along. 

More behind the cut: tDP’s handling of race, who’s right vs wrong, and whether tDP’s storytelling can/will surpass AtLA.

I rewatched The Dragon Prince recently and it's amazing how carefully they show racism in only 9 episodes [where other shows failed in multiple seasons]. You can see what happens when people in charge care not only about their own characters, but also the audience following their story.

It’s a very thoughtful story, in the sense that the writers clearly put a great deal of thought into each character’s perspective and place. General Amaya is a walking poster child for How To Do This Shit Right Yo, as is Ava. It makes sense that no less attention was paid to the potentially complicated issue of racism, and how viewers’ real-world experiences would impact and layer on top of what the story is trying to do. 

I mean, tDP could’ve decided that Amaya would be deaf... and then proceed to make up its own sign language. Or that magic could (and should) heal disabilities. When the story did neither, it told me the writing team is aware stories don’t exist in a vacuum: that disabled viewers have also been waiting to see themselves on screen, as characters with agency, treated with respect. 

(The lack of subtitles for Amaya may’ve confused those of us who don’t know ASL, but it was absolutely a gift to those who do. It was saying: hey, this is just for you. All those times you’ve missed something that hearing people take for granted? Now’s your turn to be the one in the know. And come on, that’s just awesome.)

Will tDP stumble at some point? Sure. Stories and people are complex things, and the world is a thousand times more so. It’s not the stumbling that bothers me. It’s when a story is thoughtless, because it won’t even recognize its stumbles, let alone fix them. 

I really struggle with liking the show, specifically because it seems to take the stance that the elf girl was "right" to betray the other elves (leading to the slaughter of her entire team). beyond the pain of the ribbon, she doesn't seem to show any sadness or remorse, and then it seems that the human characters are quick to condemn the elf assassins, instead of the king's slaughter of the dragon king. what writing purpose does this serve?

It serves to prompt exactly what you’re doing: asking questions.

The story is full of conflicting interpretations of events, actions, reactions, and motivations if you just think twice. The humans may fear the elves, and do their best to prevent the elves from succeeding --- but Harrow acknowledged explicitly that it’s not as though the elves don’t have just cause. Harrow wasn’t going to go down easy, but I saw no condemnation on his part upon the elves’ retaliation for human crimes. 

Callum argued with Harrow over why Harrow couldn’t just ‘make peace.’ When Rayla shows Runaan the egg and demands Runaan call everything off, isn’t she effectively arguing the same thing? Additionally, Rayla went into the castle determined to make up for her failing; if she’d succeeded in her mission (especially with Callum’s misdirection), it’d be a very short story, indeed. Instead, the three protagonists end up unified in their hope that this could prevent any further bloodshed. 

Note that I say ‘further’ because what is done, and out of their control, is done. Rayla didn’t act out of a wish to betray; when she choose not to assassinate the prince, she acted out of a hope there could be peace. When the first ribbon falls off and the messenger-arrow flies overhead, Rayla’s assumption makes sense, based on those two details: her team achieved at least one of their goals. We don’t know their fate (other than Runaan), but it also sets up a later plot-point where Rayla discovers the team did not, in fact, all return intact. 

For that matter, by the time she learns those details (and concludes who won and who lost), she’s already befriended the princes. From the very first scene, it’s clear Rayla isn’t cut out for this assassination business. She’s incapable of seeing targets. As Ezran later notes, she sees people as, well, people, even when they’re strangers. Is it really so surprising that she’d waffle even more, once those strangers have become something nearing friends, or at least allies? 

So she chooses to keep silent, and her motivation is wonderfully complex, from a writer’s perspective. She wants peace, and believes returning the egg will do that, so reminding the two princes of her role in their father’s death would alienate them, and put her desires at risk. She likes the princes by that point, and doesn’t want to hurt them with such news. And she’s also feeling guilty for the part she played, especially knowing her secret (not just of failing her mission but of preventing anyone else from succeeding) is probably already known. 

Most of that thought process seems to get decided early in the journey. After that, Rayla goes through all the stages as she realizes the consequences of failing to fulfill a sacred oath: anger, bargaining, grief. At the end, Rayla weighs the two options --- keeping her hand, vs killing someone innocent of any crime --- and decides her hand is a small sacrifice in comparison. 

(Note that thematically, this is echoed in Ava’s story. Ava’s paw was caught in a trap, and escaping came at the cost of her paw. Yet Ava remains perfect as she is, and it’s only other people who require Ava appear to be whole. Part of the reason for going up the mountain is to save the egg, but Rayla also implies she wishes she could save her hand, too. Ava’s story is telling us that such a disability doesn’t and shouldn’t render Rayla broken or useless.) 

Alongside that, the boys don’t seem to have fully put together their father’s role in the current situation. I think Callum might have (in a roundabout way), but not so much for Ezran. It’s a process, though. First we’re shown the princes were raised with a bias they’ve never had reason to question, about elves being bloodthirsty monsters. The story lets Rayla call them on it and express her hurt, and the boys are remorseful. 

The story also doesn’t position Callum (as human) as always knowing the rightness of things; hell, it takes Rayla calling him a mage before he even realizes the meaning of what he’s done. The story also shows the boys are eager to learn (and willing to question their assumptions), when Callum asks Rayla what it’s like in her country.

By the end of S1, both princes have worked their way through several points: from ‘all elves are bad’ to ‘Rayla is the one exception’ to ‘maybe elves aren’t the monsters we were told they are.’ The next logical step is for them to begin questioning their father’s actions. Like you, the story is leading them into questioning things that they took for granted when the story began. 

That’s the purpose of creating a story where perspective shifts with each new character: the story is rewarding you for digging deeper.    

A story that doesn’t want those questions raised --- that isn’t prepared to grapple with them --- would tell you from the get-go, “elves are plain evil, that’s all there is to it.” Or, “humans are always good and their actions are righteous.” Any hint of a conflicting perspective would eventually be revealed as false within the story, or a minor oversight outside the story. 

Where tDP is so well-crafted is that it’s given everything enough layers and conflicts that poking at the story reveals more underneath. All you have to do is give it a bit of thought, and you can see a larger picture, and that larger story’s view may be tilted from what you’ve seen so far, if not flipped outright (or flipped back again). That’s the beauty of a large cast where each character has their own motivation, agency, reasons and beliefs and assumptions: there’s always another side to things.

That’s what makes a story truly rich and deep. Not the worldbuilding, not the complexity of the final solution, not the number of product placements or jokes or high-octane fight sequences. It’s characters with individual perspectives and motivations, agreeing and conflicting per their own purposes, and each one seeing themselves as the hero of their own story.  

...what is it about TDP that makes it a good show for you? What is it you like about it, what about it pulls you in? And would you say it's on par or close to the quality of Avatar?

I think my answers above have probably already covered your question, but I’ll add this: I think tDP has potential to not just be ‘on par’ with Avatar but to leave it far, far behind. 

I mean, AtLA is already ten years old. In 2003, Ehasz’ credits consisted of three freelance episodes for two shows, and one episode as a staff writer. That’s it. That he catapulted from that to head-of-story for AtLA speaks to a definite talent --- but of course he’d get better from there, with ten intervening years of continuing to hone his craft. 

I’d say there are two places where it’s most apparent: exposition and humor. While I (mostly) like AtLA, the exposition could be somewhat clunky. It needed to be in there, but it wasn’t always quite as deft as I would’ve liked, in terms of combining information with characterization. 

The writing in tDP is far superlative in that regard. We get exposition, yes, but it's not delivering answers so much as answering one thing to raise ten more questions. There are almost no “as you know Bob” exchanges. When Rayla talks about what her country is like, it’s exposition, but it’s also a wonderful characterization moment; Rayla’s love for her world shines through, along with a certain ambivalence about her place in that world.

The other place Ehasz has improved a thousand-fold is his humor. One of the things I hated most about AtLA was its use of bathos: taking a serious moment and turning on a dime to crack a joke and trivialize the moment. (Sokka was the worst offender, but no character was immune.) As AtLA went on, the story scaled back on that, but it still raised its head often enough to make me wince.

In contrast, tDP’s humor is seamlessly organic. When Rayla yells, “I’m not falling for that flashing frog trick again!” she’s deadly serious, but that makes the bizarre phrase even funnier. When Gren translates Amaya’s sarcasm and has a beat in which he’s clearly trying to find a family-friendly way to translate “bullshit”... that beat is the joke. We don’t need someone gesticulating wildly to tell us it’s funny. 

At the same time, Ehasz is clearly unafraid, now, to let the serious moments be. He doesn’t trivialize the characters’ emotions with a joke; the story isn’t afraid we’ll see it as cheesy or asinine -- as less -- when it’s being sincere. 

As Carol Burnett once put it, comedy is tragedy at a distance. What tDP is doing isn’t comedy in that sense, where the characters themselves (as AtLA often did) use humor to distance themselves. Instead, it’s humor most often in one of three modes. 

One is when a character intends to crack a joke: Soren and Claudia jibing each other, or Callum attempting to lighten everyone’s spirits. This is kept relatively light, so it’s not a constant thing, as if too much levity is to be feared.

The second is simply a witty delivery, like Rayla when her temper’s up. She doesn’t deliver the line “I’m habsolutely hurious” as if she expects a laugh; she is angry, after all. Or when Soren decides to let Callum 'win’ the bout: Soren’s melodramatic as all get out, but he’s not mocking Callum, for whom impressing Claudia is a big deal. Soren’s dramatic words and over-acting are actually a wonderfully compact characterization that tells us a whole lot in a single scene of what someone should expect when Soren tries to ‘help’. 

In the penultimate episode, when Rayla accepts the consequences of her choice and decides she’s okay with paying, this is a significant emotional beat. Her conclusion is... well, it makes sense given her thoughts to this point. 

But it’s also a blunt and rather startling way to put it. Again, this isn’t cracking a joke to create distance from emotion. It’s wittier than that. 

Ezran’s shock as he registers the words is barely two frames. Any longer and it’d be overplayed. Between basically saying someone's friendship is worth a body part, and Ezran’s half-beat of shock, the combination definitely startled a laugh out of me. 

And here’s the thing: in AtLA, one of the two would’ve cracked a joke. The story would’ve backed away from what really, underneath, is a pretty phenomenal admission. Not just of friendship, but also of how Rayla herself has changed so significantly between when she made that oath, versus where she sits now. 

Ezran’s response is both funny (again, in a witty sense) but also just as heartfelt. It’s also extremely telling in terms of Ezran’s characterization. 

The one character most likely to crack a joke --- Callum --- doesn’t always, either. In fact, sometimes he’s remarkably vulnerable and honest in ways Sokka, his spiritual predecessor, wasn’t allowed to be. At the same point that Ezran and Rayla are having their heart-to-heart, Callum’s admitting freely that he doesn’t have immense power; he just has a swirly stone that does the work for him. He doesn’t make a joke of Ellis’ compliment, nor make fun of himself. 

Ellis’ line was delivered seriously, as she has every reason to believe her perspective is true. If Callum were to joke, he’d be mocking her sincerity, and the story is willing to respect that Callum is someone who responds to sincerity with sincerity of his own. 

In a word, tDP is unafraid of its own heart. 

[soulvomit]

I’ve reinvented myself several times, but there’s one reinvention that could never “take.”

I was in some groups that had traditional-adjacent viewpoints a long time ago. I hoped that somehow I could learn to be socially “normal.” I thought that what I was learning in these groups could map to same-gender relationships as well since I’d gotten about half of the same critiques and policing from LGBT culture with the main difference being the hair and clothing styles they preferred women to have. The idea of having to pick one specific gender expression uniform and wear that same look day in and day out, is something I ran into in BOTH settings. LGBT culture gave me a few different ones to choose from where mainstream cookie cutter Stepford Wife culture gave me only one, but it still felt like prescriptivism. I’d already gotten a lot of “bad woman” messaging from homosocial LGBT environments so figured that at least the hetero version of “bad woman” programming would be something I could be resigned to and get the majority of the culture’s support. (I wonder if this is what’s going on sometimes with ex-LUG women who suddenly go whole hog into really conventional hetero culture. “I’m a bad woman anyway and will always be a bad woman, at least I can still have hetero passing privilege since my basic badness can never be fixed.” Yet performing “good woman” didn’t get me any of that. It just made me feel worse about myself. I wasn’t trying to date men, or really trying to date *anyone* at that time - I was just trying to feel “normal,” and figured that this performance would make me more “normal,” because they sure did represent themselves as normal.   It was initially about being part of a singles culture that could teach me how to perform Womanhood(tm), whatever Womanhood(tm) was. It was before these groups started to really radicalize, it was during a really fucked up point in my life, and I wasn’t involved that long (about six months?). Both groups were some of the most toxic groups of women I’ve ever been in, but they internalized their toxicity as “we are the NORM, and learning to be part of the NORM is painful.”  I wondered at one point if my dating preferences (toward women) were because I was “performing womanhood wrong” and if only I performed it RIGHT, then more men would like me, and I could just choose one of them, right? (The irony is that I got about 50% of the same messages in homosocial LGBT culture, with some minor changes in flavor!) Here are some of the things I learned: * always fake more social capital than you have because social capital is 100% of why men marry some women but only date or sleep with other women. (These women believed this.) * Only one style of dress is acceptable. There is a “look” that books like The Rules and quasi-trad matchmakers like the Millionaire Matchmaker, tell women to wear. There was practically a branded Rules look and it consisted of a blouse with a pencil skirt, flat ironed hair, ALWAYS going out with makeup on (in case you meet Mr. Right in the produce aisle). Later, I learned that this dovetails into traditionalist men expressing that they do not like trendy or “fashionable” clothing on women (but don’t like single women to look like prudes, either). So basically that left me doing a once over of “too sexy? not sexy enough?” every time I left the house even though I wasn’t really interested in dating anyone. * Don’t talk about your own aspirations or interests. * Don’t be too excited about anything of your own.   * You have to always be dating whether you want to or not, because you have until 30 to lock someone down who will be a good provider (which is what you should always and only be looking for), and if you’re over 30 then you have to look even harder. You should be dating two different people a week and not commit to monogamy until you get a marriage proposal. * Men do not like trendy or “fashionable” clothing on women unless it adds to the man’s level of social capital.  * Men don’t respect you once they know you have a sexual history * What other women in a room are wearing, REALLY REALLY MATTERS. Be sure to wear a skirt and heels everywhere, and if other women in the environment are wearing jeans then it just brings down the environment somehow. * If the other women in the room are somehow not doing all these rules then it drags the entire environment down and you should move somewhere else, because the men won’t treat you right. * The slut-shaminess of it all! There was a real belief that relationships and sex had some kind of market rate and that women were in a bidding war.  In this framework, other women’s sexual preferences and habits and history really, really matter and have anything to do with whether or not *you* will find love. If you’re being treated like shit, it’s not men who ruined it for you, it’s other women, for setting their standards too low.

* If you’re over 35 then you are only attracting people who are settling for you, and no one will ever REALLY have strong sexual feelings for you unless it’s somebody horribly broken in some way. (This is the one big thing that LGBT culture didn’t have, it’s ageist, but not ageist in the same way that hetero culture is.) * Men who aren’t sleeping in their mother’s basement only want women who meet these really narrow requirements (the irony being that after I left the groups, the opposite proved true over and over.) * If you attract someone *into you* and you’re "undesirable” (not having an ideal body, not being white enough, not being “normal” enough, being a nerd) then it means anyone attracted to you, is also “undesirable” in some way. If a man likes a woman who doesn’t meet these women’s standards of social capital then it’s open season to mock the couple, and it’s open season to try to find something wrong with him.  (This REALLY fucked me up. It played into a lot of fucked up self image issues I already had.) * Faking a whole personality is okay. * The moment you start dating someone, there’s a timeline you have to abide until you get married. If the other person doesn’t propose to you in a year (you are NEVER supposed to bring up engagement or marriage) then you should dump them. * NEVER bring up your own wants, never bring up marriage or your future plans. Date the person who “surprises” you with what you actually want. * One group consisted mostly of professional women who seemed to be engaged in perpetual class warfare with other women. This group seemed to be more about women describing their dates and the clothes they wore with an obsessive focus on how they looked, and how many compliments they got. * Meeting people in friend groups is never okay because they will never “value” you the way they “value” a total stranger they’re chasing. This is a weird belief I’ve seen in the dating world for decades, going as far back as my teen years, and I bought it myself for a while. And then when I finally got into a GOOD relationship, that DID have mutual “valuing” as the groups expressed it but also had passion, which the groups expressed wasn’t supposed to exist in “good” relationships - it was somebody I’d been friends with for years, where we knew each other really well. * Strong sexual attraction to your partner in the beginning is taken as a red flag that he’s probably “bad”  * Get with someone who is far more attracted to you than you are to them so that you can leverage their feelings to get what you want * Getting commitment is about negotiating  * If a woman dates men who don’t propose marriage, it’s the woman’s fault somehow, and the assumption is that ALL WOMEN want to get married  * If you end up in a relationship with someone of another race, or with someone who is a smidge younger, or with someone who has basically normal middle class levels of social capital, it must mean something is wrong with you. (There are a lot of women in these groups who considered being an average person who gets with an average person, to be settling horribly - it’s practically a mirror assumption to those that male incels often have.) And according to these groups, this is NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN. Yet when I was in the *real world* talking to *real people* away from internet groups, most people seemed to have good relationships. There was also an undercurrent of racism in one of the groups (not the other, which was pretty diverse) and that’s the reason I finally left one group and that’s when I learned that traditionalism and fascism are often fellow travelers. Which started the whole unravelling of a lot of American traditionalism for me. Also, women’s actual feelings about anyone - like my feelings about women vs men - were completely irrelevant because women were supposed to just respond to men’s feelings anyway and not have feelings of our own. (With that in mind, a lot of these women couldn’t wrap their mind around women being lesbians, because women aren’t supposed to have those kinds of feelings toward either men OR women, amirite?)  What I noticed after I left the group is that most relationships I knew in real life, did NOT form the way that any of these groups thought they formed.  I also noticed that if you do all the things these groups asked you to do, then it actually attracted the WORST men - it was practically a step by step how-to on how to attract the most misogynist, controlling men. It was easy to fall into this kind of thinking because it’s what my mom’s always believed, and the complaints these women had about other women were the same ones that my mom often had about me, and their assumptions were the same ones my mom has. So I thought that “fixing myself” to fit my mom’s rules and having a support group to do it in, would fix the rest of my life. I didn’t go very far with my “trying to walk away from being LGBT” because at some point during this, I developed intense feelings for a woman friend that lasted for some time. (We didn’t get together, but this did break me out of wanting to do a whole personality reinvention and makeover.) The funny thing is that once I walked away, I stopped seeing the world that way. I noticed that in real life, most people’s relationships did not meet the standards of these women’s. They were taking ideas that really only apply to the culture of very rich white men, and trying to map that to the rest of the world, when it’s really only how the very most entitled, privileged men see the world, and you don’t have to be a Barbie doll if you’re not looking for someone who’s looking for that. The Rules DID teach me how to pull off a more polished look and more polished behavior in professional settings, for what it’s worth. This is something I’d had a problem with for a long time, because I got into work that expected professional standards of women yet I’d never really known how to look and act the part. (The gender-prescriptive part of “being professional” is especially bad. Especially now that I’m middle aged with chronic pain and just don’t want to do heels, girdles, and nylons. There isn’t a single traditionally female shoe style that I can wear anymore. If I can’t be professional in pants and walking shoes then fuck it.) But if this was the NORM, then why did MOST people I knew, manage to be happy enough without doing ANY of these things? And these ideas seemed calibrated to only a particular type of ideal romantic partner (the “high type clean cut” as old school employment ads used to call him) as if no other people even existed.

[mikeo56]

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize“

– Voltaire

Why do I speak of “AngloZionists”? I got that question many times in the past, so I am making a separate post about it to (hopefully) explain this once and for all.

1) Anglo:

The USA in an Empire. With roughly 1000 overseas bases (depends on how you count), an undeniably messianic ideology, a bigger defense-offense budget then the rest of the planet combined, 16+ spy agencies, the dollar as the world’s currency, there is no doubt that the US is a planetary Empire.

Where did the US Empire come from? Again, that’s a no-brainer – from the British Empire. Furthermore, the US Empire is really based on a select group of nations: the Echelon countries, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and, of course, the US. What do these countries have in common? They are the leftovers of the British Empire and they are all English speaking. Notice that France, Germany or Japan are not part of this elite even though they are arguably as important or more to the USA then, say, New Zealand and far more powerful.

So the “Anglo” part is undeniable. And yet, even though “Anglo” is an ethnic/linguistic/cultural category while “Zionist” is a political/ideological one, very rarely do I get an objection about speaking of “Anglos” or the “Anglosphere”.

2) Zionist:

Let’s take the (hyper politically correct) Wikipedia definition of what the word “Zionism” means: it is “a nationalist movement of Jews and Jewish culture that supports the creation of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the Land of Israel“. Apparently, no link to the US, the Ukraine or Timbuktu, right? But think again. Why would Jews – whether defined as a religion or an ethnicity – need a homeland anyway? Why can’t they just live wherever they are born, just like Buddhist (a religion) or the African Bushmen (ethnicity) who live in many different countries?

The canonical answer is that Jews have been persecuted everywhere and that therefore they need their own homeland to serve as a safe haven in case of persecutions. Without going into the issue of why Jews were persecuted everywhere and, apparently, in all times, this rationale clearly implies if not the inevitability of more persecutions or, at the very least, a high risk thereof. Let’s accept that for demonstration sake and see what this, in turn, implies.

First, that implies that Jews are inherently threatened by non-Jews who are all at least potential anti-Semites. The threat is so severe that a separate Gentile-free homeland must be created as the only, best and last way to protect Jews worldwide. This, in turn, implies that the continued existence of this homeland should become a vital and irreplaceable priority of all Jews worldwide lest a persecution suddenly breaks out and they have nowhere to go. Furthermore, until all Jews finally “move up” to Israel, they had better be very, very careful as all the goyim around them could literally come down with a sudden case of genocidal anti-Semitism at any moment. Hence all the anti-anti-Semitic organizations a la ADL or UEJF, the Betar clubs, the networks of sayanim, etc.

In other words, far from being a local “dealing with Israel only” phenomenon, Zionism is a worldwide movement whose aim is to protect Jews from the apparently incurable anti-Semitism of the rest of the planet.

As Israel Shahak correctly identified it, Zionism postulates that Jews should “think locally and act globally” and when given a choice of policies they should always ask THE crucial question: “But is it good for Jews?“.

So far from being only focused on Israel, Zionism is really a global, planetary, ideology which unequivocally splits up all of mankind into two groups (Jews and Gentiles). It assumes the latter are all potential genocidal maniacs (which is racist) and believes that saving Jewish lives is qualitatively different and more important than saving Gentile lives (which is racist again).

Anyone doubting the ferocity of this determination should either ask a Palestinian or study the holiday of Purim, or both. Even better, read Gilad Atzmon and look up his definition of what is brilliantly called “pre-traumatic stress disorder”

3) Anglo-Zionist:

The British Empire and the early USA used to be pretty much wall-to-wall Anglo. Sure, Jews had a strong influence (in banking for example), but Zionism was a non-issue not only among non-Jews, but also among US Jews. Besides, religious Jews were often very hostile to the notion of a secular Israel while secular Jews did not really care about this quasi-Biblical notion.

WWII gave a massive boost to the Zionist movement while, as Norman Finkelstein explained it, the topic of the “Holocaust” became central to Jewish discourse and identity only many years later. I won’t go into the history of the rise to power of Jews in the USA, but from roughly Ford to GW Bush’s Neocons it has been steady. And even though Obama initially pushed the Neocons out, they came right back in through the backdoor. Right now, the only question is whether US Jews have more power than US Anglos or the other way around.

Before going any further, let me also immediately say that I am not talking about Jews or Anglos as a group, but I am referring to the top 1% within each of these groups. Furthermore, I don’t believe that the top 1% of Jews cares any more about Israel or the 99% of Jews than the top 1% of Anglos care about the USA or the Anglo people.

So, here is my thesis:

The US Empire is run by a 1% (or less) elite which can be called the “deep state” which is composed of two main groups: Anglos and Jews. These two groups are in many ways hostile to each other (just like the SS and SA or Trotskysts and Stalinists), but they share 1) a racist outlook on the rest of mankind 2) a messianic ideology 3) a phenomenal propensity for violence 4) an obsession with money and greed and its power to corrupt. So they work together almost all the time.

Now this might seem basic, but so many people miss it, that I will have to explicitly state it:

To say that most US elites are Anglos or Jews does not mean that most Anglos or Jews are part of the US elites. That is a straw-man argument which deliberately ignores the noncommutative property of my thesis to turn it into a racist statement which accuses most/all Anglos or Jews of some evil doing. So to be very clear:

When I speak of AngloZionist Empire I am referring to the predominant ideology of the 1%ers, the elites which form the Empire’s “deep state”.

By the way, there are non-Jewish Zionists (Biden, in his own words) and there are plenty of anti-Zionist Jews. Likewise, there are non-Anglo imperialists and there are plenty of anti-imperialists Anglos. To speak of “Nazi Germany” or “Soviet Russia” does in no way imply that all Germans were Nazis or all Russians Communists. All this means it that the predominant ideology of these nations at that specific moment in time was National-Socialism and Marxism, that’s all.

My personal opinion now:

First, I don’t believe that Jews are a race or an ethnicity. I have always doubted it, but reading Shlomo Sand really convinced me. Jews are not defined by religion either (most/many are secular). Truly, Jews are a tribe (which Oxford Dictionaires defines as: a social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, with a common culture and dialect, typically having a recognized leader). A group one can chose to join (Elizabeth Taylor) or leave (Gilad Atzmon).

In other words, I see “Jewishness” as a culture, or ideology, or education or any other number of things, but not something rooted in biology. I fully agree with Atzmon when he says that Jews can be racist, but that does not make them a race.

Second, I don’t even believe that the concept of “race” has been properly defined and, hence, that it has any objective meaning. I, therefore, don’t differentiate between human beings on the basis of an undefined criterion.

Third, since being Jew (or not) is a choice: to belong, adhere and endorse a tribe (secular Jews) or a religion (Judaics). Any choice implies a judgment call and it, therefore, a legitimate target for scrutiny and criticism.

Fourth, I believe that Zionism, even when secular, instrumentalizes the values, ideas, myths and ethos of rabbinical Judaism (aka “Talmudism” or “Phariseeism”) and both are racist in their core value and assumptions.

Fifth, both Zionism and Nazism are twin brothers born from the same ugly womb: 19th-century European nationalism (Brecht was right, “The belly is still fertile from which the foul beast sprang”). Nazis and Zionists can hate each other to their hearts’ content, but they are still twins.

Sixth, I reject any and all form of racism as a denial of our common humanity, a denial of the freedom of choice of each human being and – being an Orthodox Christian – as a heresy (a form of iconoclasm, really). To me people who chose to identify themselves with, and as, Jews are not inherently different from any other human and they deserve no more and no fewer rights and protections than any other human being.

I will note here that while the vast majority of my readers are Anglos, they almost never complain about the “Anglo” part of my “AngloZionist” term. The vast majority of objections focus on the “Zionist” part. You might want to think long and hard about why this is so and what it tells us about the kind of power Zionists have over the prevailing ideology. Could it be linked to the reason why the (openly racist and truly genocidal) Israeli Prime Minister gets more standing ovations in Congress (29) than the US President (25)? Probably, but this is hardly the full story.

(This is the end of the 2014 blog entry. The current article begins below)

It is undeniable that Jews did suffer persecutions in the past and that the Nazis horribly persecuted Jews during WWII. This is important because nowadays we are all conditioned to associate and even identify any criticism of Jews or Zionist with the kind of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist rhetoric which the Nazis used to justify their atrocities. This is quite understandable, but it is also completely illogical because what this reaction is based on is the implicit assumption that any criticism of Jews or Zionist must be Nazi in its argumentation, motives, goals or methods. This is beyond ridiculous.

Saint John Chrysostom (349 – 407), the “Golden Mouth” of early Christianity, recognized as one of the greatest saints in history by both Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics, authored a series of homilies, Kata Ioudaiōn, which are extremely critical of Jews, yet no sane person would accuse him of being a Nazi. Chrysostom was hardly alone. Other great saints critical of Jews include Saint Cyprian of Carthage, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Ephrem the Syrian, Saint Ambrose of Milan, Saint Justin Martyr and many others.

But if these saints were not Nazis, maybe they still were racist, no? That, of course, depends on your definition of ‘racism’. Here is my own:

First, racism is, in my opinion, not so much the belief that various human groups are different from each other, say like dog breeds can be different, but the belief that the differences between human groups are larger than similarities within the group.

Second, racism is also a belief that the biological characteristics of your group somehow pre-determine your actions/choices/values in life.

Third, racism often, but not always, assumes a hierarchy amongst human groups (Germanic Aryans over Slavs or Jews, Jews over Gentiles, etc.)

I reject all three of these assumptions because I believe that God created all humans with the same purpose and that we are all “brothers in Adam”, that we all equally share the image (eternal and inherent potential for perfection) of God (as opposed to our likeness to Him, which is our temporary and changing individual condition).

By that definition, the Church Fathers were most definitely not racists as their critique was solely aimed at the religion of the Jews, not at their ethnicity (which is hardly surprising since Christ and His Apostles and most early Christians were all “ethnic” Jews). This begs the question of whether criticizing a religion is legitimate or not.

I submit that anything resulting from an individual choice is fair game for criticism. Even if somebody is “born into” a religious community, all adults come to the point in life where they make a conscious decision to endorse or reject the religion they were “born into”. Being a Christian, a Muslim or a Jew (in the sense of “Judaic”) is always a personal decision. The same applies to political views. One chooses to become a Marxist or a Monarchist or a Zionist. And since our individual decisions do, indeed, directly impact our other choices in life, it is not racist or objectionable to criticize Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Marxism, Monarchism or Zionism. Criticizing any one of them, or even all of them, in no way denies our common humanity which is something which racism always does.

Having said all that, none of the above addresses a most important, but rarely openly discussed, issue: what if, regardless of all the arguments above, using expressions such as “AngloZionism” offends some people (Jews or not), what if the use of this term alienates them so much that it would make them unwilling to listen to any argument or point of view using this expression?

This is a very different issue, not an ethical, moral or philosophical one – but a practical one: is it worth losing readers, supporters and even donors for the sake of using an expression which requires several pages of explanations in its defense? This issue is one every blogger, every website, every alternative news outlet has had to struggle with. I know that I got more angry mails over this than over any other form of crimethink I so often engage in.

I will readily admit that there is a cost involved in using the term “AngloZionist Empire”. But that cost needs to be compared to the cost of *not* using that term.

Is there anybody out there who seriously doubts the huge role the so-called “Israel Lobby” or the “Neocons” or, to use the expression of Professor James Petras, the “Zionist Power Configuration” plays in modern politics? Twenty years ago – maybe. But not today. We all are perfectly aware of the “elephant in the room”, courtesy not only of courageous folks like Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shahak or Norman Finkelstein but even such mainstream Anglo personalities as John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt or even Jimmy Carter.

It is plain silly to pretend that we don’t know when we all know that we all know.

Pretending that we don’t see this elephant in the room makes us look either subservient to that elephant, or simply like a coward who dares not speak truth to power. In other words, if you do want to shoot your credibility, pretend really hard that you are totally unaware of the elephant in the room: some of your sponsors might love you, but everybody else will despise you.

What about the very real risk of being perceived as some kind of Nazi?

Yes, the risk is there, but only if you allow yourself to flirt with racist or even para-racist notions. But if you are categorical in your rejection of any form of racism (including any form of anti-Jewish racism), then the accusation will simply not stick. Oh sure, the Zionists out there will try hard to make you look like a Nazi, but they will fail simply because they will have nothing to base that accusation on other than some vague “overtones” or “lack of sensitivity”. In my experience, people are not that stupid and they rapidly see through that worn-out accusation of “anti-Semitism” ( a meaningless concept to begin with, as Michael Neumann so brilliantly demonstrates in his essay “What is Antisemitism?”).

The truth is that the Zionists are only as powerful as we allow them to be. If we allow them to scare us into silence, then indeed their power is immense, but if we simply demand that they stop treating some humans as “more equal than others” then their own racism suddenly becomes obvious for all to see and their power vanishes.

It is really that simple: since nobody can accuse a real anti-racist of racism, then truly being an anti-racist gives you an immunity against the accusation of anti-Semitism.

So what we need, at this point, is to consider the terms used.

“Israel Lobby” suffers from several major issues. First, it implies that the folks in this lobby really care about Israel and the people of Israel. While some probably do, we also have overwhelming evidence (such as the testimony of Sibel Edmonds) that many/most folks in the “Israel Lobby” use the topic of Israel for their own, very different goals (usually power, often money). Have the people of Israel really benefited from from the Neocon-triggered wars? I doubt it.

Furthermore, when hearing the word “Israel Lobby” most people will think of a lobby in the US Congress, something like the NRA or the AARP. The problem we are dealing with today is clearly international. Bernard Henri Levi, George Soros or Mikhail Khodorkovsky have no connection to AIPAC or the US Congress. “Zionist Power Configuration” is better, but “configuration” is vague. What we are dealing with is clearly an empire. Besides, this is clearly not only a Zionist Empire, the Anglo component is at least as influential, so why only mention one and not both?

Still, I don’t think that we should get too caught up in semantics here. From my point of view, there are two truly essential issues which need to be addressed:

1) We need to start talking freely about the “elephant in the room” and stop fearing reprisals from those who want us to pretend we don’t see it.

2) We need to stop using politically correct euphemisms in the vain hope that those who want us to shut up will accept them. They won’t.

Currently, much of the discourse on Jewish or Zionist topics is severely restricted. Doubting the obligatory “6 million” murdered Jews during WWII can land in you jail in several European countries. Ditto if you express any doubts about the actual mode of executions (gas chambers vs firing squads and disease) of these Jews. “Revisionism”, as asking such questions is now known, is seen either as a crime or, at least, a moral abomination, even though “revisionism” is what all real historians do: historiography is revisionistic by its very nature. But even daring to mention such truisms immediately makes you a potential Nazi in the eyes of many/most people.

Since when is expressing a doubt an endorsement of an ideology? This is crazy, no?

I personally came to the conclusion that the West became an easy victim of such “conceptual hijackings” because of a sense of guilt about having let the Nazis murder so many European Jews without taking any meaningful action. It is a fact that it was the Soviet Union which carried 80% or more of the burden of destroying Hitler’s war machine: most Europeans resisted shamefully little. As for the Anglos, they waited until the Soviet victory before even entering the war in Europe.

Okay, fine – let those who feel guilty feel guilty (even if I personally don’t believe in collective guilt). But we cannot allow them to try to silence those of us who strongly feel that we are guilty of absolutely nothing!

Do we really have to kowtow to all Jews, including the top 1% of Jews who, like all 1%ers, do not care about the rest of the 99%? How long are we going to continue to allow the top 1% of Jews enjoy a bizarre form of political immunity because they hide behind the memory of Jews murdered during WWII or the political sensitivities of the 99% of Jews with whom they have no real connection anyway?

I strongly believe that all 1%ers are exactly the same: they care about themselves and nobody else. Their power, what I call the AngloZionist Empire, is based on two things: deception and violence. Their worldview is based on one of two forms of messianism: Anglo imperialism and Zionism (which is just a secularized version of Judaic racial exceptionalism). This has nothing to do with Nazism, WWII or anti-Semitism and everything with ruthless power politics. Unless we are willing to call a spade a spade we will never be able to meaningfully oppose this Empire or the 1%ers who run it.

In truth, since we owe them nothing except our categorical rejection and opposition. It is, I believe, our moral duty to shed a powerful light on their true nature and debunk the lies they try so hard to hide behind.

If their way is by deception, then ours ought to be by truth, because, as Christ said, the truth shall make us free.

Euphemisms only serve to further enslave us.

The Saker

[asecondinavoid]

Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist - DAN FLORY

Know thyself. Inscription on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi!

In his recent book White, Richard Dyer argues that racial whiteness has operated in Western film and photography as an idealized standard against which other races have been judged. Making his case inductively using instruction manuals, historical theories of race, and tradi- tional lighting and make-up practices, as well as the dominant ideals for human beauty uti- lized in developing film stocks and camera equipment over the last 150 years and more, Dyer maintains that Western visual culture has presented whites as the norm for what it is to be “just human” or “just people,” whereas other human beings have been presented as raced, as different from the norm.? This manner of depicting whiteness has invested the category itself with the power to represent the commonality of humanity. Furthermore, Dyer argues that this historical function of whiteness’s normativity continues to be pro- foundly influential in current practices and instruction.*

Dyer’s argument is in accord with what phi- losophers such as Charles W. Mills and Lewis R. Gordon have advanced in broader theoretical terms regarding the operation of whiteness as a norm against which nonwhites—and particu- larly blacks—have been negatively judged.* Like Dyer, Mills and Gordon argue that pre- sumptions of whiteness institutionalize racial beliefs at the level of background assumptions that most would not even think to examine. Based on this claim, these philosophers reason that whiteness functions not only as a social norm, but also at the epistemological level as a form of learned ignorance that may only with

considerable effort be brought forward for explicit critical inspection?

Similarly, many of Spike Lee’s films place into question presumptions about the normativ- ity of whiteness. A crucial aim in his ongoing cinematic oeuvre has been to make the experi- ence of racism understandable to white audi- ence members who “cross-over” and view his films. Because seeing matters of race from a nonwhite perspective is typically a standpoint unfamiliar to white viewers, Lee has sought to make more accessible such an outlook through the construction and use of specific character types. One way he achieves this goal is by offering depictions of characters who function as what I will call “sympathetic racists”: charac- ters with whom mainstream audiences readily ally themselves but who embrace racist beliefs and commit racist acts. By self-consciously pre- senting white viewers with the fact that they may form positive allegiances with characters whose racist bigotry is revealed as the story unfolds, Lee provokes his viewers to consider a far more complex view of what it means to think of one’s self as “white” and how that may affect one’s overall sense of humanity.

Lee thus probes white audiences’ investment in what might be called their “racial alle- giances,” a dimension of film narrative pertain- ing to the manner in which audiences become morally allied to characters through categories and presumptions about race.° Foregrounding racial allegiances allows him to depict the way in which ideas of race may affect characters’ and audience members’ behavior at much deeper levels cognitively, emotionally, and morally than many of them realize. By offering a critical perspective on their investment in race, Lee issues his viewers a philosophical

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI 68

challenge, both within the context of their narra- tive understanding and their lives generally. In focusing audience attention on a character toward whom they feel favorably while also revealing that character’s racism, Lee constructs a film that philosophizes by developing a con- ception of what it means to be racist that funda- mentally challenges white viewers to inspect their own presumptions about how they see themselves and others.

Lee depicts sympathetic racist characters so that viewers may initially forge positive alle- giances with them in spite of those characters’ anti-black beliefs and actions, which in earlier stages of the narrative seem trivial, benign, unimportant, or may even go unnoticed. He then alienates viewers from such characters by revealing the harmfulness of these typically white beliefs and actions. Through this tech- nique, Lee contests the presumed human com- monality attached to being white by providing viewers with an opportunity to see their concep- tions of whiteness analytically. By introducing a critical distance between viewers and what it means to be white, Lee makes a Brechtian move with respect to race. As Douglas Kellner points out, he “dramatizes the necessity of making moral and political choices” by forcing his viewer “to come to grips” with certain crucial issues and “adopt a critical approach” to the emotions and cognitions involved.’ The oppot- tunity offered to white viewers who cross-over to see Lee’s films is that of experiencing what they have been culturally trained to take as typi- cal or normative—being white—and see it depicted from a different perspective, namely, that of being black in America, which in turn removes white viewers from their own experi- ence and provides a detailed access to that of others. Exploiting this kind of anti-egoist strat- egy regarding fiction’s capacities to give audi- ences access to the perspectives of others is something that philosophers such as Kendall Walton, Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, Alex Neill, and others have long recognized.® It is just this strategy that Lee takes advantage of in his films.

Given this characterization of Lee’s goals, I would argue that we should recognize the opportunity he offers white viewers as a chance to imagine whiteness “from the outside”—see it acentrally and sympathetically, as opposed to

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

imagining it centrally and empathetically. Both kinds of responses are modes of imaginative engagement; sympathy, however, is generally a more distanced attitude in which we imagine that such-and-such were the case, whereas empathy calls for something closer to imagining from one’s own situation.” By encouraging viewer response to be more sympathetic than empathetic, Lee promotes a mode of detached critical reflection that is not merely Brechtian, but philosophical, for it involves reflectively considering presuppositions of the self and humanity that are among the most fundamental in contemporary conceptions of personal iden- tity, namely, those regarding race.'* In this sense, Lee challenges his white viewers to know themselves along the lines of the Delphic inscription made famous by Socrates.

Lee’s crucial insight here regarding his use of sympathetic racist characters is that, analogous to white viewers’ generally favorable “internal” predisposition to white characters, such viewers also have trouble imagining what it is like to be African American “from the inside’”—engag- ing black points of view empathetically— because they often do not understand black experience from a detailed or intimate perspec- tive. It is frequently too far from their own experience of the world, too foreign to what they are able to envision as ways in which human life might proceed. Thomas Hill and Bernard Boxill have argued that this limitation in imagining other life possibilities may inter- fere with whites knowing the moral thing to do because they may be easily deceived by their own social advantages into thinking that such accrue to all, and thus will be unable to perceive many cases of racial injustice. Hill and Boxill note that such a cognitive insensitivity may affect even well-meaning sincere individuals who wish for nothing more than to act morally in situations where questions of racial injustice might arise, a phenomenon that Janine Jones refers to as “the impairment of empathy in goodwill whites.”!!

To counteract such an imaginative limitation in film viewing, Lee offers depictions that invite a deeper imagining with respect to black- ness. Not only does he provide numerous detailed representations of African-American characters in his films, but he also offers sym- pathetic racist character types who provide a

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI Flory Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist

conception of how it might be possible for a white person to act favorably toward blacks but still be racist toward them. In this sense, Lee constructs the sympathetic racist character type as an “alloy” of morally good and bad charac- teristics, in the terminology developed by film theorist Murray Smith in Engaging Characters and elsewhere.'!? As Smith notes, the moral complexity of such characters can force us “to question certain habits of moral judgment,” which is precisely what Lee achieves in many of his films.'?

What Spike Lee offers, then, is a more acen- tral access (that is, detached access “from the outside”) to white characters so that white view- ers may look at these characters more critically. This type of access might be thought of as the first step in giving whites a sort of “double con- sciousness” regarding their own race. If W. E. B. Du Bois was correct in observing that African Americans possess a sense of “‘twoness” regard- ing themselves racially in American society, then the “single consciousness” of whites would make them particularly susceptible to narrative allegiances based on whiteness and resistant to seeing white characters from other perspec- tives.'* The presupposition of white racial experience in much film narrative, then, contin- gently predisposes viewers, especially white viewers, to understanding characters from a racialized point of view. Thus, counteracting this phenomenon and creating an incipient white double consciousness might be conceived as another way to think of Spike Lee’s overall aim with regard to his white viewers. As Linda Martin Alcoff has explained, such a perspective would involve a critical sense that white iden- tity possessed a clear stake in racialized social structures and inequalities as well as some sense of responsibility for helping rectify these ineq- uities.!° In this sense, the technique of self-con- sciously depicting sympathetic racists throws into question white racial allegiances, for the self-conscious use of this character type pro- vokes in white viewers a philosophical exam- ination of why one might feel favorably toward such characters, in spite of their racist beliefs and actions.

Lee also encourages his viewers to reflect on how whiteness possesses specific characteris- tics that make white experience different from nonwhite experience, and vice versa. African-

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American experience, for example, is consti- tuted by specificities that involve a history and legacy of racialized slavery, as well as the ongoing “scientific” research project that has time and again ranked blacks at the bottom of what was claimed to be an empirically verified racial hierarchy, and that frequently served as grounds for arguing that blacks possess lesser capacities to be moral, intelligent, and law-abid- ing. African Americans have been subject to the burden of representation established across dec- ades (one could also now say centuries) by ster- eotypes that arose out of blackface minstrelsy as well as a history of having been subject to lynching on the basis of one’s skin color.!® These features need to be kept in focus when thinking about and assessing the actions, beliefs, and emotions of black American char- acters in many films, as it is not unusual for blacks to have the capacity to imagine that whites who are sympathetic toward them might also harbor racist beliefs or act in racist ways. History provides many examples of African Americans having to deal with such individuals, among them Abraham Lincoln.!? Thus it would not be difficult to transfer this cognitive capa- city over to understanding film narratives. On the other hand, neither this history nor its related imaginative capacities are generally shared by whites. Lee’s self-conscious use of sympathetic racist character types, then, aims to assist whites in acquiring the rudiments of these imaginative competencies.

Spike Lee is not the only filmmaker to employ the narrative technique of constructing sympathetic racist characters, but his work seems to be the locus classicus for such figures in the new “black film wave.”!® From Do the Right Thing (1989) to Clockers (1995) and Summer of Sam (1999), Lee’s films have self- consciously foregrounded allegiances with sympathetic racists or similar morally complex “good-bad characters” for the inspection and contemplation of his audiences.'? In this fashion he has sought to make white viewers more criti- cally aware of anti-black racism and fear of dif- ference. I should add here that I do not believe that Lee and other filmmakers necessarily devised these narrative techniques with exactly the theoretical goals I describe or by using the philosophical considerations I outline in this essay. Rather, while I assume that there is some

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI 70

overlap between their goals and the ones I describe, filmmakers use these techniques because they work well in depicting certain characters and narrative situations. In contrast, what I provide here is a theoretical explanation and clarification of what these techniques are, how they work cognitively, and why they achieve the effects that they do.

Even as Spike Lee offers his white viewers an opportunity to contemplate their racial alle- giances, it is important to note that one problem associated with the depiction of sympathetic racist characters is that their critical use may not always be evident to viewers. Some audience members may not detect such narrative figures as racist; others will. What I offer next is a detailed analysis that makes clear what Lee seeks to accomplish by presenting this character type as well as an explanation of the fact that some viewers are unable to apprehend it as racist.

I. WHO—AND WHAT—IS SAL?

In an otherwise astute examination of auteur theory, Berys Gaut argues that the character of the Italian-American pizzeria owner, Sal (Danny Aiello), in Do the Right Thing is not a racist figure (p. 166).7° Aiello’s performance, Gaut asserts, overcomes Lee’s explicit directo- rial intention of revealing racist beliefs in a character who is for many viewers the film’s richest, most complex, and sympathetic narra- tive figure.”! Despite Lee’s clearly stated aim to portray this character as a racist, Aiello alleg- edly trumps that aim through his rendition of Sal.?? Gaut sees this conflict between director and actor as an “artistically fruitful disagree- ment” that contributes to “the film’s richness and complexity” (p. 166), in spite of Sal’s “complicity in a racial tragedy culminating in a horrifying murder” (p. 165). Gaut quotes film scholar Thomas Doherty to support his point, noting that, “‘on the screen if not in the screen- play [Aiello’s] portrayal wins the argument’” by depicting Sal’s character as someone who is not racist.”

Other viewers, however, have regarded Sal’s character differently. Film scholar Ed Guerrero argues that despite Sal’s humanity and reasona- bleness through most of the film, when con-

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

fronted with Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) and Buggin’ Out’s (Giancarlo Esposito) demands at the end of a long, hot day, “Sal’s good-natured paternal persona quickly cracks and out comes a screed of racist invective about ‘jungle music,’ accompanied by egregious racial profanities, the likes of ‘black cocksucker,’ ‘nigger mother- fucker,’ and so on.”** Guerrero’s point is that by using these terms nonironically and ascrip- tively with respect to black characters in the narrative, Sal reveals himself as a racist. Simi- larly, African-American studies scholar Clyde Taylor notes that it is Sal who explicitly racial- izes this confrontation by insulting his adversar- ies’ choice of melodic accompaniment with the angry exclamation: “Turn that jungle music off! We ain’t in Africa!”” From this point on, racial epithets explode from Sal’s mouth.

Unlike these critics, however, many white viewers tend not to notice or acknowledge this dimension of Sal’s character. Instead, like Gaut and Doherty, these audience members often see him as a good person who does a bad thing, or a rational person defeated by an irrational world, but not as someone who is a racist.” This form of explanation also seems to have been actor Danny Aiello’s own understanding of Sal. In St. Clair Bourne’s documentary Making “Do the Right Thing”, Aiello remarks during an early read through of the script that “I thought [Sal is] not a racist—he’s a nice guy; he sees people as equal.” In a later discussion of his character, Aiello further explains: “The word [‘nigger’] is distasteful to him.” Finally, after acting out Sal’s explosion of rage that sparks Raheem’s attack and brings down the New York City Police Department’s fatal interven- tion, Aiello summarizes: “Is he [Sal] a racist? I don’t think so. But he’s heard those words so fucking often, he reached down... If it was me and I said it—I’m capable of saying those words; I’m capable-——And I have said them, but I’m not a racist.” Aiello thus consistently believed, in developing and acting out his char- acter during the production of the film, that Sal was not a racist, but rather a fair and equal- minded character who in this one case made a mistake and did something that was racist. In his anger and fatigue, he “reached down” into himself and found the most insulting words he could to throw at those who made him angry and thus ended up acting like a racist, even

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI Flory Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist

though he himself was not one. This under- standing of Sal would thus seem to be a com- mon strategy for white viewers to use in explaining the character.

Such a conflict in viewers’ understanding of Sal presents an interpretational dilemma, which, I argue, the concepts of racial allegiance and the sympathetic racist help to resolve. Accordingly, the explanation for why many white viewers— and Aiello himself—resist seeing Sal as a racist might be formulated in the following way. A white audience member’s understanding of a white character’s actions often accrues from a firm but implicit grasp of white racial experience, which presupposes the many ways in which the long histories of world white supremacy, eco- nomic, social, and cultural advantage, and being at the top of what was supposedly a scientifically proven racial hierarchy, underlay and remain influential in white people’s lives. After all, the circumstances that resulted from hundreds of years of pursuing the goals of presumed Euro- pean superiority—namely, global domination by whites in economic, cultural, social, religious, intellectual, national, governmental, and various other ways—remain structurally in place.?’ Such dimensions of white experience are part of the “co-text,” what Smith refers to as the internal system of “values, beliefs, and so forth that form the backdrop to the events of the narrative,” for individuals raised in white-dominated cultures regardless of their race.78 As dimensions of white experience in particular, they operate as implicit, nonconscious presumptions and expectations that form the background for viewing narrative fiction films. For white viewers, this co-text is part of what Smith calls their “automatized” or ““teferentially transparent belief-schemata, which here I take to form a crucially important and racially inflected ground for understanding and empathizing with white characters.’ This system of beliefs, values, emotional responses, and so on amounts to a set of readily available, albeit largely unconscious, cultural assumptions concerning what it is to be white that have been implicitly built into much Western visual media like film.

Because white viewers are rarely called on to imagine their whiteness from the outside, they tend to have difficulty looking at it critically. This circumstance of rarely having their back- ground beliefs put to the test means that many

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white viewers find it hard to question or give up their racial allegiances, even to characters like Sal. In fact, they resist not empathizing with him and seeing him from a nonwhite perspec- tive. Unlike nonwhite viewers, who, often out of necessity, develop a critical sense of race or double consciousness merely to function and survive in cultures like America’s, most white viewers lack the cognitive tools that would allow them to recognize and question the typi- cally presumed cinematic viewpoint of white- ness. Their life experience as well as their viewing experience are such that they ordinarily have neither opportunity nor need to develop such forms of cognition. Thus, when confronted with narratives that call for them to utilize such cognitive forms or to incorporate new information concerning them, they may react in confused or myopic ways. They resist the possibility of race being an issue and overlook crucial pieces of information that would require them to revise their typical ways of thinking about race because their previous experience has prepared them cognitively neither for the possibility of changing their standard ways of thinking nor for properly incorporating such information.

Clearly, it is not that such audience members are logically incapable of doing so, but rather that given their strongly ingrained and rein- forced “initial schema” for conceptualizing race, there is little or no cognitive space for per- ceiving certain crucial details offered by Lee’s narrative. Were this flaw pointed out and explained to them, no doubt many audience members would modify their viewing stance toward race and seek to properly absorb the crit- ical points advanced. From a cognitive perspec- tive, this epistemological limitation should not be particularly surprising; as E. H. Gombrich noted decades ago, sometimes when our initial belief schemata for art works “have no provi- sions for certain kinds of information... it is just too bad for the information.”?° We simply lack the requisite tools for absorbing it, although with some conceptual assistance we could make the necessary changes.

Because many whites may easily live lives oblivious to how matters of race have had and continue to have an impact on their lives, it is quite possible for them to wholeheartedly embrace the belief that race is no longer a major

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI 72

factor in anyone’s existence. This de-racialized outlook is one version of the cognitive insensi- tivity stressed in the work of Hill, Boxill, Jones, Mills, Gordon, and others.*! As they point out, absent from such an outlook is a sense that race could be of any major importance in human life experience. Those who believe otherwise, by contrast, appear to be paranoid, morbidly focused on the past, or otherwise psychologi- cally impaired.

When watching films, then, many white viewers may strongly resist the invitation to reconsider their racial allegiances because, from their perspective, such a reconsideration does not make sense. It flouts a system of beliefs, values, and emotional responses presupposed by their everyday lives as well as their typical film viewing and would require a fundamental upheaval in their overall belief-schemata if those elements needed to be substantially revised or abandoned. Such an invitation asks them to consider as a problem something that they believe to have been resolved long ago. To accommodate a character like Sal and make the least disruptive changes in their system of belief—which unconsciously presupposes aspects of white advantage and power—trather than seeing Sal as a sympathetic racist charac- ter, they view him as an empathetic and morally good character. The hateful, bigoted dimensions of his racist beliefs and actions drop out; these aspects of his character are seen as not really racist. Perhaps for some viewers, these matters are explained away as an accurate reflection on “how things are” with respect to nonwhites and are therefore not thought to be racist because they are thought to be true, alluding back to explicit racial hierarchies of times gone by. More frequently, however, such viewers explain away Sal’s racist actions at the end of the film as not truly representative of his char- acter. Instead, his actions are seen as an aberra- tion, an exception to his overall good character. Many white viewers thus empathize with Sal and do not understand him as a “good-bad” moral alloy, but simply as a morally good char- acter who is trying to do the right thing—an “amalgam,” in Smith’s terminology.** He becomes a good person who does a bad thing, or a rational person defeated by an irrational world, as some reviewers described him, a char- acter who is not racist but through a bad moral

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

choice toward the end of the narrative is unfortunately complicit in a racial tragedy that culminates in a horrifying murder? Such explanations of the character fit better into their existing schemata for viewing racial matters on film as well as in life than do alternative expla- nations, such as that Sal is a sympathetic racist.

A major task facing viewers of Do the Right Thing is that of constructing Sal such that his actions, beliefs, and characteristics fit together coherently.*+ However, white racial allegiances can distort this process in such a way that Sal’s racism may seem peripheral or temporary rather than central and ongoing. An ignorance of the fundamental role race plays in currently exist- ing versions of human _ identity—especially white identity, as explained by the philosophers noted above—may prevent viewers from seeing racism’s centrality to Sal’s character. Again, the monocular nature of white racial consciousness may well prevent viewers from constructing Sal’s character in a way that coherently assem- bles his actions, beliefs, and primary character- istics.

A careful examination of the film, however, indicates that such an approach would be to misunderstand Sal as the narrative presents him. A variety of cues provide ample support for the idea that the film directly addresses the matter of anti-black racism at the core of Sal’s charac- ter and militates against the interpretation that Sal is merely the victim of a bad moral choice. In closely watching the scene depicting the con- frontation between him, Raheem, and Buggin’ Out, for example, audiences may detect Lee sig- naling to the audience that the issue of racism will be explicitly raised. As Buggin’ Out and his associates stand in the doorway of Sal’s, one hears on the soundtrack Raheem’s boom box playing once again Public Enemy’s song “Fight the Power.” Specifically, the lines sung by Chuck D. blast forth, observing that “Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me... a straight-out racist sucker; it’s simple and plain.” The function of the music in referring to Elvis Presley, who appropriated from black culture the music, clothes, and movements that origi- nally made him famous, is to foreshadow what will be presented as the scene unfolds—namely, that issues of race that normally remain hidden will be brought to the surface and scrutinized. In other words, the music operates as a textual

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI Flory Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist

as well as a narrative prompt employed by Lee to encourage viewers to imagine that the sequence to follow will address anti-black rac- ism.*° Moreover, during the sequence itself Sal’s insults to blacks are underscored by other characters repeating them indignantly and resentfully. Sal’s initial racializing of the incid- ent through the use of the terms “jungle music” and “Africa” to denigrate Raheem’s choice of acoustic accompaniment is explicitly noted by Buggin’ Out, who argues that such terms are irrelevant regarding what pictures should hang on the wall of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. “Why it got to be about jungle music? Why it got to be about Africa? It’s about them fucking pictures!” Buggin’ Out doggedly protests, refusing to let Sal get off the subject. Similarly, Sal’s use of the term ‘nigger’ is repeated indignantly and resentfully by the group of teenagers waiting for one last slice before the pizzeria closes. Lastly, after Sal has smashed Raheem’s boom box, he looks its erstwhile owner in the eye and unapologetically declares, “I just killed your fucking radio.” By explicitly stating that he has destroyed the source of the “jungle music,” the origin of the unwanted “African” melodic pres- ence, as well as Raheem’s pride, joy, and sense of identity, Sal underlines his own violently imposed and racially inflected dominance.

Perhaps most damning of all, however, is Sal’s immediate reaction to Raheem’s death. With the eyes of the entire community looking to him for some sort of appropriate response, Sal can think of nothing better to say than the tired old saw, “You do what you gotta do,” as if he had just stepped out of some John Wayne movie, rather than offering any hint of an apol- ogy or regret for his complicity in the events that led to Raheem’s death. Sal’s response self- servingly portrays his violent destruction of Raheem’s boom box as justified, as the best and most appropriate reaction to the situation, given the circumstances. His listeners in front of the pizzeria shout him down in anger and resent- ment at the outrageousness of such a stance. Getting Raheem to turn down his boom box did not require Sal to destroy it, then rub his tri- umph in with a humiliating remark. Plus, in no way does Sal’s alleged justification of his actions speak to the events that ensued, specifi- cally, Raheem’s murder at the hands of the police.

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As much as any other factor, Sal’s breath- taking callousness at this point of the narrative in seeking to exonerate himself and unfairly justify his actions as appropriate brings on the riot that follows. His moral insensitivity is at least threefold. First, Sal lacks an understanding of the racial issues involved in his own response to the confrontation between himself, Raheem, and Buggin’ Out. Second, he does not grasp the racial dimension of Raheem’s death by means of the famous “choke hold” that urban police forces long argued affected African Americans more lethally than whites. Third, his overall lack of compassion over Raheem’s death sparks the neighborhood’s revulsion, which surprises him to such an extent that he has no further response except to exclaim, “What'd I do?” and yell for the crowd not to destroy his business. In this way the narrative shows that Sal values his property over Raheem’s life. All these factors mix and combust to the point that community members lose control and riot, burning and gut- ting the pizzeria in an angry riposte to Sal’s racial and moral callousness.*’

Spike Lee foreshadows Sal’s subtly racist character earlier in the narrative as well. When describing to his openly racist son Pino (John Turturro) why they cannot move their business from the African-American neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant to their own Italian-Ameri- can neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Sal refers to the community’s residents as “these people,” thereby using language that distances himself from them, that “others” them. Earlier still in the narrative, when Buggin’ Out first questions the absence of African Americans on the “Wall of Fame” in Sal’s restaurant (“Hey Sal, how come you got no brothers up on the Wall here?”) and suggests that Sal put up pictures of Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, or even Michael Jordan because African Americans are the mainstay of the business, Sal ridicules the black vernacular use of the term “brother,” scorning it so maliciously that even his mild-mannered, passive son Vito (Richard Edson) tells him, “Take it easy, Pop.” A moment later Sal threat- ens Buggin’ Out with the same baseball bat that he eventually uses to destroy Raheem’s radio. We should note that, particularly during the late 1980s in New York City, baseball bats were symbolic of white on black violence due to their use in a number of racist incidents involving

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whites beating blacks for being in the wrong neighborhood, being there at the wrong time, dating the wrong (that is white) girl, and so on28

After Sal commands the expulsion of Bug- gin’ Out from the pizzeria for suggesting that the Wall of Fame might display famous people of color, Sal’s delivery person Mookie (Spike Lee) defends Buggin’ Out’s freedom of expres- sion by declaring: “People are free to do what- ever the hell they want to do.” To this very typical American declaration of freedom, Sal replies, “What ‘free’? What the hell are you talking about, ‘free’? ‘Free’? There is no ‘free’ here. What—I’m the boss. No freedom. I’m the boss.” For Sal, the application of freedom has limited scope. Although he couches his response in the terms of a businessman setting the rules for frequenting his establishment, because of other factors—primarily, the racial one that Sal and his sons are virtually the only whites consistently in the neighborhood and his customers are almost exclusively nonwhites—it amounts to saying that in his establishment only white Americans like himself may exercise freedom of expression, not his African-Ameri- can patrons. They, in contrast, must abide by his (the white man’s) rules, dictates, and desires. For African Americans then, there is no free- dom inside the confines of Sal’s Famous Pizze- ria. Sal is the boss. No freedom. As Guerrero notes, “Sal is the congenial and sometimes con- tentious, but always paternal, head of what amounts to a pizza plantation, a colonial outpost in native territory.”°?

Given these redundant narrative cues, I would argue that utilizing the concepts of racial allegiance and the sympathetic racist help to make better sense of the character Sal in Do the Right Thing than other possible interpretational strategies because such an analysis coheres more completely with what the film actually presents, even if it does not cohere with typical white presumptions regarding race. Seeing Sal as a good-bad character, an alloy who possesses both positive moral traits as well as negative ones, synthesizes his character much more con- sistently and comprehensively than competing possibilities. This narrative figure coheres better if one attributes to him a racist character, even if he is also sympathetic in other ways, than if one seeks to explain away his actions late in the nar-

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

rative as that of a morally good character who makes a bad decision that leads him to do racist and immoral things, even though he himself is not racist.

Many white viewers tend to miss or overlook the details of Sal’s anti-black racism because these particulars do not easily fit into their pre- conceptions of where their moral allegiances should lie. They tend to more readily empathize with white characters like Sal than black char- acters like, say, Mookie or Raheem, who, in spite of his intimidating character and bullying ways, was nevertheless murdered by the police and therefore deserves something more than to be forgotten or valued as less important than the destruction of Sal’s business, which is what many white viewers did.*°

Some empathy for Sal, of course, must be attributed to nonracial factors. To present a nuanced sympathetic racist character for whom viewers might initially establish a solid favorable outlook, Lee makes him narratively central and treats him compassionately much of the time. This strategy carries with it a cer- tain risk—namely, that viewers will find it dif- ficult to judge him negatively as a racist because they know him well and have become firmly attached to his character. White viewers in particular might be inclined to overlook or excuse the depth of Sal’s wrongdoing because their attachment to the character—based on both racial and nonracial elements of the narra- tive—is too powerful. On the other hand, it should be noted that Lee counterbalances this possibility by making the film an ensemble piece. The story focuses not just on Sal, but on the whole neighborhood, including numerous African-American characters who receive significant screen time, such as Mookie, Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), and Mother Sister (Ruby Dee). I would argue that this narrative counter- balancing aims to keep viewers from investing themselves too heavily in Sal by presenting other, nonwhite characters with whom viewers might also ally themselves. Of course, these other character allegiances may be partly or even wholly blocked by racial factors as well, but one can see that from the viewpoint of narrative construction, these figures operate to spread out audience allegiance rather than investing it in just one central character such as Sal.

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI Flory Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist

From the point of view of epistemology, white viewers may resist developing a critical distance from Sal and instead find ways to explain his actions that downplay or eliminate the matter of racism as constituent of his character. Rather than questioning their own deep-seated habits of judgment and imagining whiteness from the outside, as the narrative encourages them to do, they find fault in the narrative’s inconsistency with their current, racially influenced beliefs and expectations. In this sense, the pull of empathy for Sal, the pull of white racial allegiance, is too strong for many white viewers to overcome and begin reexamining their habits of moral judgment. For these viewers, it seems less disruptive cogni- tively and emotionally to ignore or leave aside certain uncomfortable details in the narrative than to substantially change their belief- schemata—the narrative’s co-text—to accom- modate those details. Rather than working to develop a rudimentary white racial double con- sciousness, many viewers choose to embrace their already existing white single conscious- ness and use it as best they can to understand the film’s narrative, even if that white-privilege- influenced perspective requires them to ignore certain clearly presented details and can only poorly explain others. If Gombrich has accu- rately identified our typical use of “initial sche- mata” in understanding visual artworks, these narrative details would be precisely the ones that white viewers would tend to overlook in any case, given the cognitive background from which they work. Whites typically lack sensitiv- ity to the importance of these features because they tend not to see race as cognitively import- ant in the sorts of situations presented by the film. Thus Do the Right Thing tends to come up short when measured by means of such an inter- pretive stance.

This problem of cognitive insensitivity may be further clarified by means of Janine Jones’s analysis of empathetic impairment in goodwill whites. Jones argues that if whites—even whites of moral goodwill and in possession of the desire not to be racist—are unable to detect the cognitive importance of race in situations where anti-black racism impinges on African Americans in day-to-day interactions with whites (such as those depicted in Do the Right Thing), then they will also be impaired and

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perhaps even unable to analogize from their own circumstances to those of African Ameri- cans. The construction of analogy between white and black experience, which would be critical to any sort of successful empathizing here, breaks down because certain crucial ele- ments of the former experience are seen as strongly disanalogous to the latter. White view- ers may empathize incorrectly or even not at all with black characters, and therefore misunder- stand the situations and outlooks of African- American characters. Empathy, Jones points out, requires being able to produce an accurate system of mapping between another person’s life and some aspect of our own. Empathic understanding thus begins with an appreciation of the other person’s situation.*! If that situation is not well appreciated or understood, then empathy will go awry or fail to occur.

This failure of “mental simulation” also makes clear why many whites fail to see Sal from what is for them the acentral, African- American perspective offered by Spike Lee’s film.” They empathize with Sal because they fail to grasp the importance of certain details that the narrative presents to them—namely, the way his actions and statements build up to a kind of subtle, mostly nonconscious racism that is a part of his character, as opposed to being attributable to a single bad decision or two. They empathize with him, even though Lee indicates time and again through narrative cues that they should ultimately want to distance and qualify their attitude toward Sal. The details of Sal’s character are meant to operate cumula- tively as signals to mitigate ultimate viewer empathy for him, even if the narrative to some extent courted that imaginative stance toward him earlier. Lee urges viewers to distance them- selves from Sal by the film’s end and look at his character critically, instead of embracing him as someone close to their hearts. Again, nonwhite viewers, who typically possess a more finely tuned racial awareness, tend to see this sugges- tion much more clearly, but it is by no means beyond the cognitive capacities of whites to develop this sharper racial awareness. It is just that socially and culturally, such an awareness is not encouraged in white viewers. Rather, as Dyer argues, Western visual media tend to reinforce presumptions of whiteness as the norm, even to the extent that racial whiteness

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI 76

functions as the assumed standpoint from which to perceive popular film narrative. The typical viewer is presumed to be white or to at least have a full working grasp of what it is to engage films from a white perspective.

A further way to characterize this problem of audience asymmetry with respect to responses involving race is by comparing it to an example analyzed at length by Jones. She builds much of her case around the divergent ways in which many whites viewed the videotapes of the Rod- ney King beating on the one hand, and the attack on Reginald Denny on the other. Infa- mously, King, an African American, was stopped in 1991 for a traffic violation by the LAPD and was severely beaten by several police officers using riot batons. Denny, a white truck driver, was pulled from his rig by several black youths who used bricks and other objects to beat him during the riots that followed more than a year later in the wake of those same police officers being found not guilty of assault- ing King. Both men were hospitalized for extended periods and suffer from permanent disabilities as a result of their injuries. Both incidents were also secretly videotaped. What Jones noted was that in viewing the videotapes of these incidents, whites did not react in the same way toward both individuals, in spite of the similarity of their situations. As one white professor of law who viewed the tapes put it: “‘For King I felt sympathy; for Denny, empathy.’”44

I would argue that the difference in response to the two cases here may be readily explained as one of racial allegiance. White viewers of the videotapes felt closer to the situation, possibil- ity, and overall experience of Denny than to that of King, even though both tapes depicted brutal beatings of helpless individuals by multiple attackers using clubs, bricks, and other blunt instruments. Constructing an appropriate expe- riential analog in the case of Denny came much more easily for most white viewers due to a shared experience of whiteness, an analog not extended in the case of King. White viewers’ racial commonality permitted a much more immediate response—empathy for Denny—as opposed to the more detached attitude of sym- pathy for King.

Like the allegiance that many white viewers felt while watching the videotape of Denny’s

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

beating, responses to Sal often seem to be based more on racial allegiance than on close attention to narrative details. Thus these audience mem- bers are more inclined to empathize with Sal than to distance themselves from his character. They ignore, miss, reject, or downplay the Afri- can-American perspective offered by Lee’s film in favor of another racially inflected one already embedded in their typical responses to popular film narratives, in spite of ample evidence that this latter perspective fails to fully explain many details presented in the narrative. At the same time, this aspect of the film allows us to see how it aims to trouble the viewer into making a closer examination of background assumptions concerning film viewing, race, and personal identity.

Tl. CRITICAL REFLECTION AND SYMPATHETIC RACISTS

By self-consciously depicting a character who is both sympathetic and racist—and goading his viewers to think about how it might be possible for such a character to be both at the same time—Spike Lee casts a critical eye on the assumptions that underlie white racial alle- giance. In this manner he hopes to move white audience members toward a more complex per- spective on race. I would further argue that through this provocation to have his viewers confront and reevaluate the racial presupposi- tions of their film viewing, Lee summons his audience members to think philosophically about race. By means of Do the Right Thing’s narrative and the character type of the sympa- thetic racist in particular, Lee encourages many of his white viewers to reflect on and devise a new belief schema for understanding race. In ways perhaps not unlike many students in intro- ductory philosophy courses, however, some white viewers resist this invitation because the prospect of replacing their old way of cognizing would call for them to perform too radical an epistemological revision, require too much of a change in their existing belief structures for them to feel comfortable exploring such a pos- sibility. At some level, perhaps they realize that such a re-examination and replacement of unquestioned background presumptions would not only concern their film viewing, but also an understanding of their own identities and

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI Flory Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist

humanity itself, thereby touching them at their core, so to speak.

As philosophers from Frantz Fanon to Mills have argued, our senses of personal identity in Western culture are strongly raced. For whites, however, this dimension of self-understanding is largely invisible and unacknowledged. To compel whites to recognize this invisibility, then, is a daunting and difficult task. Still, it is possible, and in fact many whites have done so, in film viewing as well as in their own senses of identity. But many others have not. Facilitating this possibility, which concerns cinematic as well as existential presuppositions, has guided Lee’s efforts, I would argue, to present and depict a sympathetic racist character like Sal. Through narrative characters like him, Lee encourages white viewers to look critically at their racialized sensibilities and assess what they see.

In this sense, Lee presents his viewers with a philosophical challenge: to evaluate the con- tents of their souls, so to speak, and gauge how those contents influence them to perceive mat- ters of race. This critical self-questioning was one of Socrates’s highest aspirations, as evi- denced in the Apology as well as dialogues with Euthyphro, Meno, Laches, and others. It has also inspired philosophers through the ages to the present day, such as Alexander Nehamas.* Socrates aspired to meet, both in his own case and that of others, the old Delphic injunction used as an epigraph for this essay. More recently, Noél Carroll has argued that Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) stages a debate meant to “afford the opportunity for the general audience to interrogate prevailing cultural views of the nature of human life by setting them forth in competition.” The Welles film is “similar in purpose to many philosophical dia- logues” because it seeks “to animate a debate” about human life and personal identity. In the same spirit, we may justifiably recognize Spike Lee as encouraging viewers to take up that sort of philosophical task regarding race through his construction of character and narrative in Do the Right Thing and other films. One could say, then, that Lee not only induces his white view- ers to do something Brechtian—that is, criti- cally distance themselves from certain characters and narrative situations in order to

77

consider moral and political choices—but charges them with a properly philosophical task as well. By drawing them into a favorable stance toward Sal only to alienate them from his character by means of the realization that he is also fundamentally a racist, Lee has pro- duced a film that philosophizes, a film that calls on viewers to think philosophically about questions regarding race, identity, and cine- matic viewership. Through this narrative fig- ure, Lee urges viewers to critically reflect on their own senses of self, humanity, and per- sonal identity, which is a hallmark of most if not virtually all persuasive conceptions of phi- losophy.

In addition, Lee’s film offers indications regarding the proper shape that answers to such self-questioning might take. For example, having a fuller sense of the role race has played in the formation of one’s identity as well as one’s overall cognitive perspective is strongly implied as a better epistemological stance to take than one that does not possess these features. For all of Sal’s compassion and patience toward neigh- borhood members like Da Mayor or Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith), his lack of racial self- awareness condemns him to incomprehension regarding much of what goes on around or even inside his pizzeria, and this incomprehension contributes significantly to his downfall. The film’s narrative thus suggests that having a greater racial awareness—a “double conscious- ness” about race, particularly for whites— would serve one better than lacking such a capacity. This attempt not only to pose but to shape fundamentally the answers to questions, to provide some sort of positive, in-depth con- tribution to the topic being discussed, is a fur- ther hallmark of many stronger senses of what counts as being philosophical, as this positive requirement implies that the film’s call for crit- ical reflection is solidly philosophical rather than merely social, psychological, or political.*° Some viewers may resist this invitation by means of alternative interpretative strategies but, as I have argued, the cost of that choice is failure to achieve full coherence in grasping characters and narratives like those presented in Do the Right Thing, to say nothing of the costs that such choices exact in one’s life or from the lives of one’s fellow human beings.*”

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI 78

DAN FLORY

Department of History and Philosophy Montana State University

Bozeman, Montana 59717

USA

INTERNET: dflory @montana.edu

1. Plato, Phaedrus 229e-230a, in Plato: the Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 478. See also W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 183-184.

2. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1-2.

3. See Dyer, White, especially pp. 70-144.

4. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1997), especially pp. 53-62, and Lewis R. Gordon, “Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness,” in What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. George Yancy (New York: Routledge, 2004), especially pp. 175-176, 181-182.

5. See, for example, Charles W. Mills, The Racial Con- tract, especially pp. 17-19, 91-109, and Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Phi- losophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 22-26, 38ff. See also Peg O’Connor, Oppression and Responsibility: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory (Pemn State University Press, 2002), especially pp. 1-59, 128-131.

6. The idea of a racial allegiance was suggested to me by one of my students, Calvin Selvey.

7. Douglas Kellner, “Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in the Films of Spike Lee,” in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” ed. Mark A. Reid (New York: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1997), p. 75, and Bertholt Brecht, Brecht on The- atre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), pp. 23, 101.

8. See Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 34; Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1985), especially pp. 64-67; Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), especially pp. 77-79; Alex Neill, “Empathy and (Film) Fiction,” in Post-Theory, ed. David Bordwell and Noél Carroll (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 179-180; Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 235-236.

9. For more on the distinction between central and acentral imagining, see Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), especially pp. 36-38; Richard Wollheim, On Art and the Mind (Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 58ff, and The Thread of Life (Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 73ff; Noél Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 88-96; Smith, Engaging Characters, pp. 76ff.

10. The claim that modern personal identity is intimately linked to race has been argued for by philosophers at least since Frantz Fanon. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 109-140; Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man; O’Connor, Oppression and Responsibility, Mills, The Racial Contract.

11. Thomas E. Hill Jr. and Bernard Boxill, “Kant and Race,” in Race and Racism, ed. Bernard Boxill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 469-470; Janine Jones, “The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for Afri- can Americans,” in What White Looks Like, pp. 65-86. Mills also notes this problem of empathic impairment; see The Racial Contract, p. 95.

12. Smith, Engaging Characters, pp. 209ff; “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes, or Apparently Perverse Allegiances,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1999), especially pp. 223ff.

13. Smith, “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes,” p. 228.

14. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet, 1969), p. 45.

15. Linda Martin Alcoff, “What Should White People Do?” Hypatia 13 (1998): 24-25.

16. For more on the history and legacy of the racialized existence of blacks, see Mills, The Racial Contract, espe- cially pp. 81-89, 109-120.

17. See Emmanuel C. Eze, Achieving Our Humanity: The Idea of a Postracial Future (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 27, as well as some of the title cards in D. W. Grif- fith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)! Some in the abolitionist movement might be understood in this way as well; see Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader, ed. Mason Low- ance (New York: Penguin, 2000).

18. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Temple University Press, 1993), p. 1.

19. For essays that argue implicitly for the use of such characters in Clockers, Summer of Sam, and director Carl Franklin’s One False Move (1992), see my “Black on White: Film Noir and the Epistemology of Race in Recent African American Cinema,” Journal of Social Philosophy 31 (2000): 82-116, especially 92-94, 101-104, and “The Epistemology of Race and Black American Film Noir: Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam as Lynching Parable,” in Film and Knowledge: Essays on the Integration of Images and ideas, ed. Kevin Stoehr (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), pp. 174-190. As Smith notes, the original source for the concept of the “good-bad” character is Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, The Movies: A Psychological Study (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), pp. 20ff.

20. Berys Gaut, “Film Authorship and Collaboration,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 149-174. Page numbers in this paragraph refer to this essay.

21. See, for example, Vincent Canby, “Spike Lee Tack- les Racism in Do the Right Thing,” New York Times, June 30, 1989, sec. C16; “Spike Lee Raises the Movies’ Black Voice,” New York Times, May 28, 1989, p. 14; Joe Klein, “Spiked? Dinkins and Do the Right Thing,” New York Magazine, June 26, 1989, 14-15.

22. See, for example, Spike Lee, with Lisa Jones, Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint (New York: Fireside, 1989), p. 45, and Marlaine Glicksman, “Spike Lee’s Bed-Stuy BBQ,” reprinted in Spike Lee: Interviews, ed. Cynthia Fuchs (University of Mississippi Press, 2002), pp. 18-19. Gaut notes that Lee also makes this point during a read

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI Flory Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist

through of the script with Aiello in director St. Clair Bourne’s documentary Making “Do the Right Thing” (1989); Gaut, “Film Authorship and Collaboration,” p. 166.

23. Gaut, “Film Authorship and Collaboration,” p. 166; see also Thomas Doherty, review of Do the Right Thing, Film Quarterly 43 (1989): 39.

24. Ed Guerrero, Do the Right Thing (London: BFI Pub- lishing, 2001), p. 75.

25. Clyde Taylor, The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aes- thetic Contract—Film and Literature (Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 269.

26. See, for example, Richard Corliss, “Hot Time in Bed-Stuy Tonight,” Time 134 (1989): 62; Murray Kempton, “The Pizza Is Burning!” New York Review of Books, September 28, 1989, 37; Stanley Kauffmann, “Do the Right Thing,” The New Republic 201 (1989): 25.

27. See Mills, The Racial Contract, especially pp. 140, 91-109; Eze, Achieving Our Humanity.

28. Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 194.

29. Ibid.

30. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Hlusion: A Study in the Psy- chology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 73. This point is also noted in Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 121.

31. See Hill and Boxill, “Kant and Race,” pp. 469-470; Jones, “The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for African Americans”; Mills, The Racial Contract, Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man; O’ Connor, Oppres- sion and Responsibility, Amold Farr, “Whiteness Visible: Enlightenment Racism and the Structure of Racialized Con- sciousness,” in What White Looks Like, pp. 143-158.

32. Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 203.

33. See Corliss, “Hot Time in Bed-Stuy Tonight”; Kempton, “The Pizza Is Burning!”

34. For more on the viewer’s need to construct charac- ters in ways that make sense of them as fictional agents, see Smith, Engaging Characters, especially pp. 120ff.

35. See, for example, Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 191-192; Ray Pratt, Rhythm and Resistance: Explorations in the Political Uses of Popular Music (New York: Praeger, 1990), pp. 135-139; Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: the Rise of Elvis Presley (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), especially pp. 3-54.

36. I borrow here the idea of a textual prompt from Smith’s “Imagining from the Inside,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, p. 417.

37. It is worth noting that even after the riot, when Mookie (Spike Lee) returns the next morning to receive his week’s pay, Sal remains unapologetic and defensive about his role in Raheem’s death. Although he acknowledges that Raheem is dead (“I was there, remember?”), he blames Raheem’s death entirely on Buggin’ Out (“He’s dead because of his buddy”), rather than seeing himself as being in any way complicit.

38. Baseball bats are negatively charged symbols of anti- black racism due to incidents in the New York City neigh- borhoods of Bensonhurst and Howard Beach in the late 1980s. Young black men in these incidents were either beaten to death or threatened with bats in ways that led to their death. See Lee and Jones, Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint, pp. 32-33, 46; S. Craig Watkins, Representing:

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Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 157, 270, n.43.

39. Guerrero, Do the Right Thing, p. 35.

40. See, for example, David Denby, “He’s Gotta Have It,” New York Magazine, June 26, 1989, 53-54; Klein, “Spiked? Dinkins and Do the Right Thing.”

41. Jones, “The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for African Americans,” p. 71.

42. I use the term ‘mental simulation’ here with some reservations because, although I think that work by Robert Gordon, Gregory Currie, and others on this concept has greatly increased our knowledge of the workings of the mind in general and empathy in particular—especially with respect to literary fiction and film—I am not yet ready to embrace the claim that when we imagine, empathize, and so on, we run our belief systems “off-line” and operate as if our brains were just like computers, as in Currie’s Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially pp. 141-197. I find these descriptions of how human minds work like computers to be too literal to feel com- fortable endorsing them. For a fuller argument detailing reservations about mental simulation, see Noél Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), especially pp. 342-356.

43. Cited in Jones, “The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for African Americans,” p. 75. As she notes, her analysis is based on Joe R. Feagin, Hernan Vera, and Pinar Batur, White Racism, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 117-151, especially pp. 141-142. (It should also be noted that the white professor of law quoted here, David B. Oppenheimer, was sharply critical of his own responses to these images. His position is actually consistent with the one I outline. See his “The Movement from Sympa- thy to Empathy, Through Fear; The Beatings of Rodney King and Reginald Denny Provoke Differing Emotions but Similar Racial Concerns,” The Recorder June 9 (1992): 14.)

44. See Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (University of California Press, 1998), especially pp. 40, 106, 185-188.

45. Noél Carroll, “Interpreting Citizen Kane,” Persist- ence of Vision 7 (1989): 51-61, reprinted in Interpreting the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 163.

46. For discussion of philosophy’s capacities and whether film can mimic them, see Stephen Mulhall, On Film (New York: Routledge, 2002), especially pp. 1-10; Julian Baggini, “Alien Ways of Thinking: Mulhall’s On Film,” Film-Philosophy 7 (2003), available at <http:// www .film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n24baggini>; Mul- hall, “Ways of Thinking: A Response to Andersen and Baggini,” Film-Philosophy 7 (2003), available at <http:// www .film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n25mulhall>.

47. An early version of this work was presented at the “Narration, Imagination, and Emotion in the Moving Image Media” conference sponsored by the Center for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, July 24, 2004. I thank audience members there, especially Lester Hunt, Amy Coplan, and Katherine Thomson-Jones, for comments and encouragement. I also thank Susan Kollin, Murray Smith, and Tom Wartenberg for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this essay.

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/j.0021-8529.2006.00230.x by NHMRC National Cochrane Australia, Wiley Online Library on [30/10/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use: OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License

[anewpoliticalspin]

Why wokeism can be controversial

I saw an article today that inspired me. “Conservatives are very angry Victoria’s Secret is ‘going woke’. They must hate capitalism”, in the UK’s the Independent. It talked about how certain conservatives have had such angry reactions to anything woke-ish, no matter what it is.

Two things about this:

I say this based on my gut instinct. I don’t have any empirical proof that this is why conservatives dislike wokeish things specifically. That’s a pretty niche topic, though, and since wokeism has come to light in recent years, I’m not sure how much research there is on the specific reasons why it can be controversial, if any. Yet I have a lot I’ve learned through life experience about how people respond to having to face some very hard truths.

Identity politics that causes people to have such a strong identity with one sociological group, especially when it involves a victim mindset. One example is when members of the black community ask for reparations for slavery (and they include segregation as a grievance, but yet its not directly affected them for 60 years, even with some trickle down effects). Another is when any group, be it ethnic minorities, homosexuals, women, etc, overfixate on their grievances of differential treatment to the extent that they have a victim vs oppressor mindset to far too many issues.

Still, though, why such a reaction to these things, such as when Victoria’s Secret had new models that looked different from the typical beauty ideal had for models, including some who were not skinny, and some who were non-white.

Even JP Sears, the widely popular YouTube comedian, started his satire on Wokeness by laughing at Victoria’s Secret for having new models who....didn’t always look like typical models.

I wonder why there can be so much hostility to wokeness, even when in good taste.

I remember a conversation I had with a staunchly conservative man who asked me why in such a successful rich free country we had people complaining so strongly about how you can be treated for being black, Hispanic, female, etc. As if these people didn’t have that much to complain about. After all, you only deserve to complain about things that are a big deal. So the assumption is that these things are not a big deal.

Oh we have things figured out don’t we?

Here’s why some people are so uncomfortable with any forms of wokeness: accepting that diversity programs and initiatives are sometimes necessary means accepting the very difficult truths about why they are there to begin with.

People don’t like admitting that people are sometimes treated differently because of their race, gender, disability, nationality, physical looks, economic status, etc. Yet if you want to know the truth there is plenty of research that affirms all these things.

Read also Jeremiah Goulka’s Confessions of a former Republican. He wrote that:

“I discovered that what I believed to be the full spectrum of reality was just a small slice of it and how that discovery knocked down my Republican worldview.”

“It turned out that everything I was ‘discovering’ had been hiding in plain sight and had been named: aversive racism, institutional racism, disparate impact and disparate treatment, structural poverty, neighborhood redlining, the "trial tax," the "poverty tax," and on and on. Having grown up obsessed with race (welfare and affirmative action were our betes noirs), I wondered why I had never heard of any of these concepts.”

“The enormity of the advantages I had always enjoyed started to truly sink in. Everyone begins life thinking that his or her normal is the normal.”

“An old saw has it that no one profits from talking about politics or religion. I think I finally understand what it means. We see different realities, different worlds. If you and I take in different slices of reality, chances are that we aren't talking about the same things. I think this explains much of modern American political dialogue.”

“My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a small and particularly rosy sliver of reality. To preserve that worldview, I had to believe that people had morally earned their ‘just’ desserts, and I had to ignore those whining liberals who tried to point out that the world didn't actually work that way.”

[chestshot]

On Reading Recitatif

Jimmy Hendrix, as well as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and the likes, made music that appealed to people of all racial identities. When Twyla sees Roberta at the dinner, it is learned that one of Roberta's boyfriends is going to meet up with Hendrix, who happened to be African American, but this is not stated in the story. His identity, for the sake of the story's development and unraveling, has been omitted. "Jimmy Hendrix... He's only the biggest-- Oh, wow. Forget it" (p.612) . I know that Jimmy Hendrix was a person of color, but that fact has been deliberately concealed from Twyla.

    Rock and Roll was never strictly a White Folk's music, although the history books would like to paint Rock as a "White" genre. I love that Morrison mentions Hendrix in her story because he is such a good example of challenging cultural assumptions; but you would have had to know about the history of the music industry to pick up on this aspect of the story. He played for humans, not for a particular race. I love his quote "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." Love comes in all colors.

    I tried to find clues as to weather Roberta was White, and Twyla African American, but I could not decide who was what. I was thinking "Music comes in all sorts of colors, but it is not racial." Music is not racial, in and of itself. Music can have themes of cultural and racial identity, but there is no such thing as "Music of Color." If there is, I haven't found it yet. I understand that some music is attributed to certain groups, but that is not what I am talking about here. Neither could I say that there is strictly "White Music", for all art is borrowed from the pioneers of times before, and there is no island to itself in the realm of art. For a moment in American history, the stage was very segregated. Artist of color could not play for a White audience, and if they did, it was usually behind a curtain. Composers of color could not own the rights to their music if they sold it. The music industry was racist. Ricky Valentino had to Americanize his name to Ricky Valens for Christ sake.

    Maggie, who was deaf and mute, was a person first, and then whatever followed. I think that this was a very deliberate approach to the symbolism that Morrison was employing. You Don't Kick A Person When They Are Down. Especially a person who can not speak for themselves, who has been historically marginalized, who has never heard with their own ears the truth of the disproportionate allocations of resources, who is set up to fail in a dog-eat-dog world.           The voiceless. The powerless. The vulnerable. The needy. The oppressed. Maggie was a symbol for the minority groups, who have had their humanity stripped from them, with no way of communicating. They have been removed from the dialogue of racial injustice. They have been dehumanized, taking beating after beating, with no opportunity to speak for themselves (mute), or to receive the saving wisdom that comes from a culturally competent education (deaf). "She worked from early in the morning till two o'clock... if she had too much cleaning... she's cut through the orchard so she wouldn't miss her bus" (p. 608). Stuck in low-skill labor, Maggie is trapped in her poverty, doing the best that she can, in a cycle of socioeconomic subjugation, with no way out.

    When Twyla and Roberta meet at the school, there is a mixed ideology of what is best. We think of what is best for the child. We think about what is best for the mother. In all of this confusion, I am left wondering about the purpose of an education. What is best for society is that all children have a free and appropriate public education. Years later, we learn that Twyla's son pursues his education into SUNY New Paltz (p. 618). When we talk about desegregation, there is often the temptation to assume that racial injustice is behind us, and that we should move on as a society. "I was able to do it. Why couldn't you?" The bottom line is that "some people were born on third base and go through life thinking they ran a triple" as Barry Switzer, former coach of the Dallas Cowboys, put it. Every persons struggle is so unique, and some people (Maggie) are born with less than others.

    We are told not to talk about racism. We are told to be colorblind. We are told that specific groups want special privileges. The matter of fact is that specific groups have already enjoyed special privileges since the beginning of American history. When we are silenced, have our ears covered, and are removed from the conversation of racial injustice, we are like Maggie, who is defenseless on the ground. "But what about if somebody tries to kill her?...Or what if she wants to cry? Can she cry? ... Sure... But just tears. No sounds come out" (p. 608). "You kicked a black lady who couldn't even scream" (p. 617). "She wasn't pitch black, I knew, or else I would have remembered that" (p. 618). The oppressed are like the mute and deaf. The can cry all they want, but society fails to hear their stifled clamor. Generations born without ever hearing the truth of their enslavement, which has slipped, permeated, and evolved through the supposed abolishment of 1865, into a more duplicitous breed of enslavement; A Colorblind Purgatory.

    Whether Maggie was Black or White is of secondary concern. She was a human first. Racial justice is not a Black issue. It is a human issue, and I believe that Morrison made racial ambiguity the stage for her short story Recitatif. The screams of the oppressed are silenced when we choose to stand neutral on the picket line of racial inequality. -Felix

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Well it’s about damn time estimate two half years ago I made this marble synthetic universe in chronological order video ever since then the question is in the most is wins election coming out so with avengersand Cindy working out in about a weekand that is a big sign is a need to do one last one of theseand yes this will most likely be the last of theseand seek analogies because after this this university to be weighted a trick out this video is high enough to make already just be the moviesand TV shows in the short filmsand even the tying comics as this video is ridiculously hilariously long but considering everything a document here in total is about 256 hours long condensing ends in two hours I think is not bad but maybe to watch this on one setting or do be impressive to just put a few disclaimers upfront if you must get themand find the video you can click to this time go had I will be too offended 170 states are to be 100 accurate that you might be assumptions recipe name hereand there because there are a lot of weird names of artifactsand planets also considering the stuff I need to cram into this I will be painting with a pretty broad brush for some of these especially TV shows I can go into every tiny subplot of agents of shield as much as I’m I went to’s that wasn’t super obvious spoilers ahead for everything like having everything I know I said sit back relaxand let’s get this thing started before we had to get into the eventsand everything are few things you should know about this universe is elite think of this universe is having two main sections there is the normal universe first which has earth that branches off to the rest of space goes to the galaxiesand planetsand guardians even further to planets like Asgardand the restaurants now in other card realms not planets but for my researchand understanding that realms are just planets deep out in spaceand is not specifically are connected to each other by Qaeda system called Yggdrasil basically just think nine important different planets connected to each otherand it got names from Norse mythology for the sake of not starting massive argument in the comments plan arounds from the out the nameplate around his Asgard with aliens living there have technology so advanced that they appear to be godsand also yeah have some magic powers that make them pretty godly then be on this regular universe in this other section there are hundreds thousands infinite number of parallel dimensions to this world all this is called the multi verse we mainly say our dimensions at this but in the story to be a lot of references to other dimensions basically universes that existed Dr strange portal with Myers so there planets switched rounds find twoand then there are the dimensions which will point out along the way okay I don’t Arity lots of people not set up but now it actually it started before the universe existed several billion years ago there were six singularities that eventually morphed into tiny gems with the powers of the universeand the powers of time power reality space the souland the mind in this pre universe darling on us to call it is a race of aliens called the dark elves who rule this place cousins are comprised of darknessand the love that I can’t get enough of darkness then the universe starts the dark elves don’t like this is no more infinite darkness so they would return the universe to how was before without of these planetsand speciesand whatnot so the albino leader of the dark elves Malikand gets his hands on the reality stoneand turns it into a substance called the ether basically turns a stone into a substance he can use as a weapon then as the universe evolves these giant spaceguard type things called celestial startup where we don’t really know the power to manipulate huge massand energyand so they are able to use the most powerful objects in the universe the infinity stones these into planetsand civilizations wherever they want is there just got pics like that of the celestial’s called egoand he finds being spaceguard disk kind of lonely he discovers he can manipulate the matter around himand create shells ponchos himself until he is an actual planet being a planet boring though so creates a smaller avatar from self to explore the universe over the next millions of years he finds tons of planets around the universeand decides he must conquer all of them he does this with a well thought out plan we start supplanting little seasonal planets that can turn this planets into extended versions of himself but to activate them the power of another celestial so how do you get another celestial you bang anything that moves in the entire universe apparently ego gets busy across the universeand since people church or the kids he makes for him one of these retrievers is eventually undo but were getting out of ourselves as pre pesto because none these kids inherit his celestial powersand so their useless 10 so he kills them all in stores the corpses in the lower part of the planet just technically inside of himself ill I at this point earth has finally formed kind of an immediate right filled with a superstrong element called by brainyand crash landsand what will become Africa because it’s awesome the rebellion gives the pilot around it special powersand extra strength had a few million yearsand now humans have evolved on earth in Africa five tribes of humans discovered the vibratingand decide to build a home around itand call it Wakonda that drives us fighting until one day one of the tribes warriors gets a message from the panther goddess passed to consume this plant affected by the librarian called the heart shaped herb okay pods yes there is apparently a panther goddess maybe this was just a hallucination as guy had a something because there’s really no expiration plan is universe whatever maybe does exist in part but anyway is he consumes the vibrating power plant superstrength speedand enhancing sinks from losses like yeah right as prequel he should be arcaneand so the tribes are united under his ruleand live in peace in Wakonda except for Jabari tribe who decide to live in the mountains instead a guy who eats the heart shaped herb also becomes the Black Panther the warrior protector of a condo over the centuries the natural kingand Black Panthers passed down with the help of the heart shaped herb also because they have a boatload by brainy him over the centuries work on it develops into an incredibly technologically advanced country far more advanced than anywhere else in the world however they decide to hide themselves so they don’t assure the techand wealth with the otherwise pretty sucky world of timeand so discuss themselves as a poor Third World country meanwhile this being somewhere else in the world who might be human might not it’s not really clear called out tomorrow discovers the Mystic arts basically realizes magic Israel Mr guards essentially allows you to manipulate those alternate dimensions I mentioned beforeand also do other cool stuff like make magic shields because this secretes a little club called the Masters of the mystic arts with a bunch of humansand start training in this art of energy manipulation magic really at some point he uses his magic powers to get his hands on the time infinity stone which he uses to make the Iraq Amato so he can control it as their fancy necklace he puts of three symptoms around the world to protect the world from threats from other dimensions these are symptoms in Hong Kong Londonand New York or what will eventually be displaces threats from other dimensions you ask my ass like for example this big amorphous that called her mother who is the Lord of the dark dimension that our dimension is one as many dimensions that exist out there in the multi verse time does not exist there that’s important detail the mother wants to conquer every dimension in the multi verse is he’s a giant superpower for bad guyand so he just wants to consume worlds it’s also possible to draw power from the dark dimension that old let’s say let you live for superlong time by is generally not a good idea to do so because the memo can influence youand come throughand destroy literally everything it’s not recommended now over to I called Oden who is the heir to the throne of that plan around the mentioned before Asgard currently the king is this guy called bore Asgard is a tale told of ragged rock this event that will destroy Asgardand sci fi demon called starters can do that using the eternal flame which basically gives them loads of powerand can resurrect that people like the sound of any of that so he fights orderand locks up on another plan around called Miss Lewis behind Danny Locke’s eternal flame is big screen textile vault back homeand Asgard will be stubborn rock from ever happening please take note as does the first of countless times Oden sucks at hiding stuff fast forward of itand the convergence is happening physically this means that all the nine plant rounds align with each otherand so they’re much easier to get to like literal portals open up between themand the fabric of reality starts getting weird so that race of aliens from before the universe called dark elves who are credentialing on the planet realm of content it take this opportunity to try destroy the universe again using the ether reality stone their stop by these guardians led by King Borer who also take ether from corpus either way were known find it kind of delicateand some of his troops managed to escapeand put themselves in hibernation until the next chance comes now back outthere’s a space of aliens called the Cree what you need to know about them is that they’re just the worst like pretty much all the time there also were with some other aliens at this particular time their suffering huge casualties in the war anyway to get the upper hand so they’re trying to search for that eventually they come across Earth set aside humans aren’t exactly good weapons but if the modified they can become good weaponsand so they decide to make in humans is not because the next part of this is slightly gatedand very important to the rest the story Cree experiment humansand give some of them powers that only manifest exposed to a missed called carriageand missed this mist is released by Turgeon crystals this process is called terror Genesis when she becoming human usually does get some sort superpowerand maybe deformity does the Cree put these Turgeon crystals in these weird shipping is called diviners while they were there the Cree decided also to go to Puerto Rico where they built a giant underground city where you can easily release the Turgeon list to activate your dormantand human powers if human with the inhuman Jean touches this divider Turgeon crystal carrier they had visions of a big that cities so they go thereand get their powers confused or just going started the Cree are happily making superpowered humans but after a while they like a these kind of suck let’s get out here when the first humans are made from this mine Hunter turns out to be a super powerfuland dangerousand human called hive who has a tentacle face is so powerful that the Cree want to get rid of them so they find a planet called Navistar Mavis found the universe call Mammothand build a portal called the monolith to easily transfer the human there to get rid of him they do soand he destroys the entire planet turning it into a barren wasteland however this hive has some followers back on earth that they believe that eventually can be brought back to rule the world so they started trying to get them backand built a whole society around the idea this secret organization became known as Hydra yes Hydra wasn’t always crazy Nazis they were originally crazy tentacle monster worshipers one point Hydra gets its hands on the monolithand transitionsand people to get hive but they never come back anyway the Creekand hallway from Earth but one poor Cree died while thereand so’s corpses just left behind at some point years well something humans that are left on earth find a way to get to the moon or a portal maybe anyway they get to the moon build a city thereand set up their own monarchyand society where the people who get good powers get to be royalty in divorceand lives while the people who get less can powers have to work in the mindsand remember you’re supposed to root for the rich people here for some reason back Asgard has become the King he has a daughter called hello who is now the heir to the throne decides he wants to expand as God’s powerand brings kingdom more glory does run the nine plant rounds of helloand conquers them sometimes that means that aren’t necessarily very sanitary eventually though multi lung style house a mission goes too bigand she gets a little too let’s say crazy with murdering so I banishes her to the plan around of hell is only capable realized yet is kind of a bad dude I was getting ashamed of all the terrible stuffand held it together so we just covered a lot then act like it never existed like the hero hits out finally were in the 80s metal multi verse thing where there are bunch of different dimensionsand another one of these dimensions theirs is awesome mystical city called Conlon which appears on earth somewhere in China about every 15 years or so in the city this group of monks called the order of the Crane mother teach the art of G this mystical life energy in every living thing is we can help you heal people superfast or can be used for fighting purposes also did I mention that dragons live in the city because they do that without style dragons over the years often die out except for one college shall allow is also always one special trainee in the order of the Crane mother who if there super amazing at punchingand kicking testified the Dragon shall allowand when the powers of the immortal iron fist the damage eventually achieve one fist to make it really strong busing heal peopleand you’re really good at fighting the orifice job is to defeat the enemies of the order of the Crane motherand got a secret passageway to come onand the metals passed down from generation to generation think of it as the city’s Black Panther minus the cloth it but things are all sunshine shall beatings and their five students one immortality using the Chi door of the grandmothers likeand so these five get banished to earth those five are called because no madam gal Alexandra Murakamiand so one day they been together to form an evil organization called the hand very sinister name figure out around the world their opponents while those dragons died scattered undergroundand through these bones they can get an elixir that lets you bring that people from the dead take elusive on time which is what they want has to strive to conquer Asia getting their own little army of ninjas together so the group called the chaste who don’t like that stand up against themand they battled for centuries to come the chased a big believer’s income line in the iron fistand they’d really like iron fist to help them out they had to go around being able to one point destroy the city of Pompeii is still a twin helland she hates it so she tries to escape ownsand his army of super bass worriers called the Valkyries to stopper they do it but all the Dina process except for one of them called Brunhild make a medical doctor for the rest of this she’s pretty shaken after seeing literally all of her friends get murdered so she goes off of the universe as her faith in Asgardand all that is shaken Jens Obama’s junk planet on space called cigar more or less all the garbage in the universe goes where she slowly turns in a Han Solo mixed with archer also has another kid with his lovely as guardian wife Freda called Thor Thor is now the heir to the throne of Asgard as hell it totally doesn’t count later on in another plan around cardio nine there’s a species called the frost giants who want to conquer earth they came that guard which again guest yes Earth is another planet realm so they start invasion in the heart of the earth Scandinavia in Norway these guardians meet themand paddle them all the way back to your nine where they defeat them also licking the frost giant has a baby but he just is not to die outand find that baby is like God’s cute so he keeps in the namesand Lokiand he raises him with his actual son Thor never telling him that he’s actually frost giant nice of negotiate a peace treaty with frost giantsand take their source of power at the casket of ancient winters he also present on his vault Loki grew up togetherand they love each other even though they don’t always get along snake transformed into himselfand make Loki’s generally just kind of envious of Dorcas secretly gets more attentionand Thor also gets kind of writing area as he grows up as a is a prince those blue aliens called the Cree welder still hated by actually everyoneand so the end of starting a war with this huge Empire space called the no vampire this empire spends a lot of planets that were last for a long long time don’t worry we’ll get back to it Asgard also has his army of special soldiers a bit super enragedand store everything called the berserker Army one member of this army after a battle on earth decides to stay thereand he ends up living in a quaint little monastery in Ireland is berserker staff makes a person superstrong so he split it up into three piecesand distributed around the world is still a pretty busy kingand so he gets his hands on another infinity stone the space stone which is also called the Tesseract is IK the subject of insane power the most secure place in the universe Norwayand so he does also this as guardian woman whose voice ensnares men called Laura lie goes around nine plant around collecting an army of slave men she stoppedand imprisoned by as guardian where your name sift though still in Asgard yes a bunch of as good stuff happens this time there’s this blacksmith called how dear which if I was using my Danish voice would probably be had to buy this videos in Danish so hold dear anyway this guy finds artifact called the cup of glory but Loki seizes him because he’s Loki things a plan to steal it insults hold yearand gets chased by Holger sunblock Thor stuff the Chaseand Loki says it should have a contest of skill intelligenceand virtue to settle the matter in teams together this challenge enters tricksand schemes Loki steals a cup of in the process however through circumstances that really unimportant here Thor is arrogantand tries to take the cup they are realized the companies at the worst of them looking at what he did how do those crazy with power because the cupand trust sealed until Thorand then Thor was the fightand that’s the end of that Burger King time comic I’m not getting nothing really important happened for about 300 years by the 1800s hydra still sitting people through portals to the novice to get their tentacle leader back I on the other side keeps killing themand taking on the bodily forms to stop himself from dying some pieces also cut off from the monolithand given to the biggest fatcatsand Hydra now over the next 100 years hydra sort of moves away from the Holton Gloucester thing becomes more focused on just world domination as you do still doesn’t the above there are still big passing also the hand still rock about just being eviland stuff just don’t forget in the 1930s this kid called Howard Stark make some pretty crazy inventions because he’s a genius uses these at his other brilliant ideas to become a multimillionaire at a relatively young age there’s this sickly skinny sad kid called Steve Rogers in Brooklyn who has a heart of gold this other guy called Bucky Barnes helps them with some bulliesand so they become testes for decades to come like a lot of decades 1934 one of the biggest members of hydra is a guy called Johann Schmidt now that the Nazisand taking over Germany you want to join up with them Schmidt meets with Hitler is IK unable your evil let’s do thisand it was like sounds good to also needs the scientist called Arden Zola yes Arden not Armen starts working closely with him Hydra is now the Nazi deep science divisionand Schmidt has quite a few things on his to do list was a turn itself into a super soldier weapon for hydra he wants to adopt special weapons for the Nazis to use is looking defining the mythical Tesseract since it’ll probably be pretty useful in the whole taking over the world thing Howard Stark in his billionaire ring also meets Dr Abraham or Scott a German scientist was working on a serum that enhances a person’s physical abilities to the max super soldier serum if you will that is like KS it was a serum convenientand so Schmidt capturesand forces her skyand make the serum threatening to kill as a family Hydra continues to develop high tech next suits weapons but don’t have the extra to make them super laser heand cinematic yet the rafters Steve Rogers’s mom Sarah Rogers dies of tuberculosis is not often but Bucky helps to get through the tough times is with them to the end of the line over in Soviet Russia the red room program is started by the Soviet government is designed to brainwashand train young women to be super deadly assassin’s physical tank of shooting forceful sterilizationand ballet a little girl who would later be called Dottie Underwood is draining this program to become a superspy out Stark has all this moneyand all this tackling around so he starts of the company for all his awesome inventions called Stark industries which start stealing scienceand eventually weapons with the help of his own resources Stark also comes across in that I bring him that still left over in Africa takes the tiny man he finds back USA to work on now there’s this woman called Peggy Carter she’s a code breaker in England working for the British she doesn’t get married to this guy called Fred her brotherand BFF Michael recommends her to be a field agent because she such a badass the pays like I can fight this guy you hate Michael but then Michael diesand this pushes Peggy to become field agentand call for wedding needs to start working with Chester Phillips in the US Army. And see you want to show in and on our supposed to possibly kill the enemy and and not the no feverish and will will in this and that’s not the problem is not going all five and you sold me know you are and that they go to the oh so real about is moving company off the money I will be in this will not only the cost know about me goal so don’t go now and that I was in this is that some smart is not okay what portion they know what they will about 1 See Other Shirt: There Was A Girl Who Really Loved Baking And Dogs It Was Me T Shirt

[mazurah]

Lost in Time Ch. 20:  Ride - An Elder Scrolls Fanfic

Chapter Summary: Ma’zurah and Fayrl get into and out of trouble, get to know each other better, and Ma’zurah has a realization.

Cross posted from Ao3. Chapter Rating: M for mild sexual situations.

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Lost in Time Chapter 20: Ride

Fayrl led Ma'zurah away from the Markarth front gate and down the stairs towards where the stables had once been. Sure enough, they stood on the exact same spot.

As they drew near, a Breton man approached them looking unhappy. “You two!!” he shouted, shaking so hard with rage that his hat slipped off the side of his head.

Fayrl exchanged a glance with Ma'zurah. “Good day, sera,” he began gently, “we were wondering--”

“Instead of wondering, maybe you could take your pile of splinters with you and pay for the damages you caused!”

Fayrl did not know what the man was referring to, but if the incident at the temple was any indication, their drunken escapade had caused more than one scene of chaos.

“Oh no, not again…” Ma'zurah muttered. “Ah… would these two be allowed to inspect the damage at least?” she asked, stepping forward.

The man glared at them. “Be my guest. But I warn you, if you try to run, I will call the guard!” He pointed the to the side of the stone building where a half destroyed cart lay.

“Oh dear, this is worse than I thought,” Fayrl sighed.

“Do you little scamps have any idea how much trouble you caused beyond crashing your cart into the stables? You spooked all the horses! We had three escape during the commotion, one of whom is probably on a Forsworn campfire now! Banning has had a hell of a time with the dogs. No one wants a war dog with a nervous condition! And I expect you don’t even have the means to pay for the results of your little pleasure ride!”

“My good man, we will pay for the damages and are very sorry for our past actions.” Fayrl let go of Ma’zurah to approach the man. “I am also willing to do whatever else it takes to make up for the stress I have put you and your partner through.”

The man took a step back. “Oh no. I know far too well what you’re about, grey skin! You keep your distance. I want that broken pile of junk out of here, and I want you to pay for your damages, and then I never want to see you in my city ever again!”

Fayrl simply backed away and bowed his head. “My apologies.”

Ma'zurah stepped toward the crashed cart. There were ruts in the dirt where they had apparently tried to turn the cart at the last moment, and the entire right side of the cart was smashed, but for the most part, the cart seemed to be in one discrete piece. Their horse was not present, and Ma’zurah looked around for sign of it. Hoof-prints in the mud led around to the front of the stables. Wherever their horse was, at least it was not dead.

Ma’zurah turned back to the cart and barked a sudden laugh. Perched carefully atop the driver’s seat in a nest of empty wine bottles lay the lute Fayrl had procured in Whiterun. More empty bottles were strewn around the back of the cart, surprisingly few of which were cracked or broken. “Oh, Fayrl! Come here for a second!”

Fayrl gave the stablemaster a sheepish smile and came to see what had interested Ma'zurah. He was relieved to discover his lute. It was neither lost nor harmed. He stepped up to the front of the cart to retrieve it from the driver's seat.

"I'm going to have to ask you to stop there."

Fayrl turned back to discover the stablemaster standing behind them, arms folded across his chest.

"I only wished to check my lute for damage," explained Fayrl.

"Oh, you mean the glib gentleman you left in charge of your cart?” said the Breton bitterly. “As I recall, you informed me that he would be waiting with the cart, and that he would give me the coin for idling in the stables. As you may be able to see, he doesn't have any money, so he is in my employ, paying off your debt. Only after you pay the stable fee and damages will I allow you to have your companion back.”

Fayrl looked helplessly toward Ma'zurah. He did not recall any of this.

"Sera, I could surely help to soothe your animals from their stress if you would allow me to make use of the lute," Fayrl tried to reason.

The Breton seemed to want no part of it. "Damages and stable fee first."

Ma’zurah pressed a palm against her forehead and shook her head. “This one can move the cart a short distance, or burn it to clear it out of your way. Your choice,” she told the Breton. “How much are the damages and stable fee?”

“You can't set fire to a cart here! You're likely to set the hay ablaze and burn down the stable! Not to mention disrupt my business even further!” He grumbled to himself, “A bloody cat acting like a filthy Dark Elf, just what I need.”

Ma'zurah pressed her lips together. Fire might not be her elemental affinity, but she still had enough mastery to burn something without letting the blaze run amok. It seemed foolish to press the point though.

Fayrl put his hands up, trying to ignore the stablemaster’s racist comment. “So the fee?”

“Your physical damages come to about 1200 gold, plus 280 for the stable fee. That's 1500 gold total. But the damages to our business are well beyond what two drunken whores could hope to afford.”

Fayrl stared at the man. Why did he assume they were both whores? Likely more assumptions of the mannish races and their particular breed of racism. “I think you mean 1480 gold, which we will gladly pay. Ma’zurah can move the cart. I can see to helping your animals.”

The Breton held up his hand. “I want nothing more to do with you both until I see the color of your gold.”

Ma'zurah was trying to be patient. She was trying to ignore the insults. They had done this man wrong, even if she did not remember it. She was trying not to let herself be angry at the man’s disrespect. Fifteen hundred gold though… that was all the gold she had. She crossed her arms. “Ma'zurah has the gold, but she would like to inquire about the specifics of these so called ‘damages’.” Her tail flicked in annoyance behind her. “Ma'zurah does not see that the cart has caused so much as a crack in the wall of the stable.”

The man’s face began going red with anger. “You think we were going to leave the broken troughs and barrels simply lying around where the animals can be injured? Sorry if your drunken stupor prevented you from observing the extent of the carnage your little stunt left in its wake! But if you do not pay me my gold now, I am going to call the guards and they can sort everything out for us. And I doubt you will pay so little if I do!”

Fayrl took a deep breath and pictured slitting the man’s throat. He began to reach for his purse, hoping that at least a show of getting the money might work to calm the man.

“And it had better be gold!” the Breton spat. “I won't accept any of your foreign coins made of tin or who knows what strange garbage metals!”

Ma'zurah turned on her heel and walked wordlessly to the cart, snatching the lute from atop the driver’s seat. Concentrating, she cast the strongest telekinesis spell she could muster, and lifted the entire cart, holding it about fifteen feet in the air.

She turned back to the Breton, one arm held above her head to direct the cart, the lute dangling from her other hand belligerently. “Where do you want this?” she asked icily. Bottles rolled off the seat and fell to the ground behind her.

“Guards!” the man shrieked, running towards the city gate. “They're trying to kill me!”

Fayrl cursed. There was no way they could resolve this situation peacefully at this point. They also could not simply take their own cart and leave.

Fayrl pointed at the cart that was idling nearby waiting for passengers to board. The coachman wasn't anywhere to be seen. “New plan, let’s get out of here!”

He started sprinting for the cart. The horse nervously scraped at the ground with its hoof as it kept an eye on the floating cart.

Ma'zurah sighed and set the cart back down. “Ma'zurah would rather not be labeled a horsethief right now! We have our own horse here somewhere!” she yelled after Fayrl. She jogged around to the front of the stable, and spotted their horse munching placidly on hay in the far stall.

“Come on!” she called, snatching a coil of rope and a bridle from a hook on the wall. “Ma'zurah hopes Fayrl can ride, because Ma'zurah has not ridden anything since she rode the mooncows her fifteenth summer!”

Fayrl spun sharply on his heels, making for the stables. “Yes, I’m well learned in riding most any beast. Not just guar and men!”

He took the bridle from Ma'zurah, took a deep breath, and began to hum as he coaxed the horse to take the bit and slipped the throatlatch and noseband over the horse’s muzzle. He was trying to hurry without spooking the horse. He knew just how much greater the danger was of them being caught if they did something to scare the horse--a beast already prone to fright.

“We haven’t the time for a saddle,” he said, swinging himself up on the horse’s back and holding out a hand for Ma'zurah. “We’ll be sore after, but alive and out of jail.”

Ma’zurah awkwardly pulled herself up behind Fayrl and held on to his waist. She looked up the path toward the city gate, and caught sight of the Breton stablemaster in a heated argument with the two brawling guards in the open entryway, a crowd beginning to gather behind them. She squeaked and gripped Fayrl harder as he urged the horse down the road away from the city.

“Try not to talk too much. You don’t want to bite your tongue.” Fayrl summoned a giant web with spiders across the path behind them as he took them down the road. They wouldn’t stay for long, but it would be enough to buy them some time should the guards manage to come after them. If nothing else, the poison that the spiders would leave behind in the wake of their return to Mephala’s realm would be enough to slow down any pursuer.

As soon as Fayrl judged that they were far enough down the road, he slowed the horse and turned to Ma’zurah. “Are you alright? Do you have everything?”

“Yes. And your lute.” She smiled wryly and held it out to show him. Fayrl took the lute and put the strap around him, shifting the instrument to his front.

Ma'zurah shifted uncomfortably. “But, um, Fayrl's pack makes it very awkward to ride behind him. Fayrl can give it to Ma’zurah and she can wear both packs, or we can use the rope to turn them into saddlebags.” She glanced back down the road, looking for sign of pursuit. “Not now though! We should keep going for now. Here, Ma’zurah can cast invisibility for a while.”

Fayrl nodded and urged the horse into a trot. “Just let me know when you think it’s safe to stop again.” He wasn’t sure where they should go now. At least it was summer and a bit of wandering wasn’t going to put them through inclement weather, or leave an obvious trail to follow.

Ma’zurah cast invisibility on the horse and themselves, and nearly two hours elapsed as Ma’zurah and Fayrl rode in silence, following the riverside road. No signs of pursuit appeared, but Ma’zurah recast their invisibility spell every so often, just in case.

Fayrl felt at home as they rode in silence. It reminded him of the many years he had spent traveling these roads in his own time. Everything was both familiar and new. The landscape had changed much in a millennium. Erosion had worn the river wider. A sapling he had used as a trail marker now stood as the stump of a once mighty tree. He wondered what its life had been like.

It seemed everything had changed. It was only natural, of course, but sad as well. Only he remained the same, unchanged.

He wished he could sing. He had always sung while he traveled before. It kept the bears and sabre cats away. Yet he could not chance it, even as minutes grew into hours.

They passed a few farms tucked into the rocky river valley, and a mining settlement before they came to a fork in the path. Fayrl brought the horse to a halt a short distance ahead of the intersection.

“Ma’zurah needs to look at the map,” Ma’zurah said, dismounting and digging through her pack. She carefully unrolled the thick vellum map she had received from Farengar, and searched for their location. They had the choice of continuing eastward across a wide stone bridge, or turning north.

As she studied the map, Fayrl dismounted. He let down his hair and combed it out before putting it back up. Ma’zurah found their location and pointed it out to Fayrl.

“So if we are here,” she gestured, “then we should keep going eastward and turn north at the road to Old Hroldan to get to Rorikstead like the priestess said.”

She lowered the map and peered across the bridge to the east. “There might be a problem though.” She pointed across the river to a small encampment of tents set just back from the road. Blue banners flew over the largest of the tents, and Ma’zurah had a fairly good guess as to what kind of encampment this was. “It might be a better idea to take the north path and avoid them.”

“Well, it sounds like north is our road then.” Fayrl eyed the banners suspiciously. He did not know the faction associated with them, nor did he wish to find out. “They look more organized that your typical group of bandits. And I’ve had enough excitement for one day.”

“They look like the rebels we almost got captured with outside Helgen. The color is the same at least. Ma’zurah cannot make out the symbol on those banners, but the Jarl we were in the cart with had a bear on his armor. Ma’zurah would rather not get close enough to see.”

“I do believe you’re right,” Fayrl said, scrutinizing the banners as best he could. “I shouldn’t like to be involved with them again.”

“Here. Help Ma’zurah with this rope.” Ma’zurah disentangled a blanket from the bedroll tied to her pack and started attempting to craft a makeshift saddle, to which she tied their packs. “Also, are you hungry? Ma’zurah has food.”

At the mention of food Fayrl’s stomach growled. He had completely neglected breakfast in the excitement of their morning. How long had it even been since last they had eaten? It was hard to tell. He tried to recall anything from after their drinking, but there was nothing to be found.

“I suppose I am a bit peckish,” he said. “A bit of whatever you have should do nicely.” A part of him wondered about how delicious a steak made of their current mount might be.

Ma’zurah dug through her pack and pulled out several waxed paper packages of preserved foods. “Ma’zurah has dried pheasant, venison jerky and pemmican, and dried smoked salmon. There is also… some bread, ironwood nuts, honey nut balls, jazbay raisins, dried snowberries, dried apples, some cheese, and dried mushrooms. And honeycomb.” Ma’zurah grinned. “Your choice!”

Fayrl looked excitedly at the spread of food. His stomach rumbled again. “I suppose I might have just a nibble of salmon and cheese. And maybe just a couple of mushrooms and jerky. A bite or two of the pheasant….” He stopped. He didn't want to sound greedy. “That’s too much. I’m only a bit peckish.” He took the salmon and cheese and bread and pulled out a knife to slice it all out, laying it down on a cloth he pulled out of the inside of his cuff. “Thank you for procuring so much food.”

“Of course! Ma’zurah was getting supplies to climb the Throat of the World. We should ration it by hunting though.” Ma’zurah took a handful of honey nut balls and dried fruits and put away the rest of the food. “Ma’zurah would like to keep moving, if that is alright. Eat on the horse?” Ma’zurah stroked the horse’s neck, and passed it a dried apple slice.

Fayrl thought about the futility of eating crumbly bread and holding salmon and cheese atop it while trying to ride. “Just a moment,” he said and turned around and crouched down. He took as big a bite as he could of each thing, eating as fast as he could. He would have loved a nice glass of brandy to help wash down the dry food, but he choked it all down as fast as he could and brushed the crumbs from his face with the cloth afterwards before turning back around and standing up. “Alright, shall we go?”

Ma’zurah paused with a piece of fruit halfway to her mouth and started giggling. “You could have wrapped it in the cloth! You did not have to eat it so fast!”

She tucked her food into a pocket and brushed off her hands. “Help Ma’zurah up?”

Fayrl swung himself up onto the horse. “Of course.” He smiled at her and held out his hands, helping her up onto the horse behind him. He was thankful for the thick blanket between him and the horse. Already his backside was feeling sore and to go much longer without would have made their subsequent travel all the harder. “You ready?”

Ma’zurah settled onto the horse and immediately tried to shift so that her groin was not rubbing up against Fayrl’s rear--a problem she had not had while Fayrl had been wearing his pack. “Um, yes. Ma’zurah is ready.”

Fayrl checked that all their bags were properly secured and that they did not appear to have left anything behind. As soon as he was certain they were ready, he gave a squeeze of his thighs and the horse took off at a trot.

He turned them northward, careful to give as wide a berth as he could to the bridge beyond which lay the camp with the blue banners. He was cautious not to ride the horse too fast while they passed. He directed the horse along the far side of the path where large juniper trees grew with low-hanging branches, trying to avoid the obvious line of sight. He leaned this way and that to avoid the branches tangling in his hair.

Ma’zurah clung to Fayrl’s waist, squirming to try not to press up against him while he was moving around so much, but the blanket saddle would not let her move farther away. The friction was making things difficult for her.

Fayrl smiled at the feeling of Ma’zurah’s arms around his waist. He was tempted to tease her about her first time on a horse but thought better of it. He could feel her pressing against him as they jostled their way along the path. Instinctively he leaned back against her. He knew it wasn’t something he should do; it was hardly nice while she had little choice in the matter, but he just couldn’t quite seem to stop himself.

Realizing that she could not avoid the contact, Ma’zurah closed her eyes and sat as still as she could, hoping that Fayrl would not notice the uncomfortable bulge in her trousers. Ma’zurah was not a person who got embarrassed easily, but it was embarrassing how aroused she was becoming. Fayrl just would not quit moving!

Feeling her stiffen behind him, Fayrl thought he would have just a little more fun with her before he stopped. They were out of sight of the suspicious camp, so Fayrl felt he could speed up a bit without attracting undue attention. His grin widened as he picked up the pace, knocking them together more with each clip of the horse’s hooves.

Ma’zurah’s breath caught as their pace increased, and she whimpered quietly at the friction, taking guilty pleasure in it. It got to be too much. “Sorry! Ma’zurah needs to stop for a little bit!” She slid off the horse as soon as they slowed, and ran to the edge of the path, finding a less steep area of embankment, and scrambling down toward the river. She hid behind a particularly large juniper tree and took a second to breathe.

Fayrl cursed under his breath. He had pushed her too much. Should he go after her? Maybe he should let her have a minute to herself first.

He got off the horse and gave it the chance to rest and browse the roadside grass, tying it to a nearby tree. He took his lute and sat on a rock beside the horse, deciding to sing a song while he thought.

He would let Ma'zurah have a few minutes, and if she wasn’t back, he would go and check on her--gently. He knew it was his fault that she had run off.

Five minutes later, Ma’zurah climbed back up to the road, looking sheepish. “Sorry about that…” She began to untie her bedroll pillow from her pack, hoping to use it as a temporary solution to this unexpected problem. She hoped Fayrl would not ask too many questions; it was easier to say that she wanted the pillow to ride more comfortably than to explain away the feeling of her arousal, should he ask.

Fayrl tilted his head. “Um… how are you doing?” he asked. “I’m sorry about all that. I got a bit carried away. You can sit in the front if it will make things easier for you.”

He wasn’t sure if the offer would actually make things any easier for her, but seeing her face caused him to feel the full weight of his guilt.

Ma’zurah’s face immediately took on an expression of guilt and anxiety. He’d noticed. “W-What?”

“Sorry about teasing you.” Fayrl looked at the ground, nudging a rock in the road with the toe of his boot. “I get a bit carried away sometimes. I shouldn’t have done it. Can you forgive me?”

“...Fayrl was teasing Ma’zurah?” Ma’zurah asked carefully, trying to discern his expression. He seemed unsurprised and unconcerned about her unusual anatomy, and his apology sounded sincere. Ma’zurah was confused.

Fayrl let out a sigh. “Yes. I was. I’m sorry.”

Ma’zurah’s brow furrowed. “...How long has Fayrl… known about Ma’zurah?”

Fayrl had expected her to be angry. This was not a reaction he had anticipated. “Since the first time we touched,” he said, initially confused, then with dawning realization, “I’m sorry, I forget that you wouldn’t have known what I had seen.”

Ma’zurah blinked at him, then sat down suddenly in the middle of the road. She grappled with the sudden urge to cry, the mix of emotions she was feeling almost overwhelming her. She felt relieved that she did not have to explain, grateful that he seemed to accept her without question, and embarrassed by the whole situation. He was the first person who was not Khajiit who hadn’t even had any questions for her.

Fayrl wasn’t sure how, but this seemed like an answer that only made things worse. She had an expression on her face that seemed somehow more upset than before. He sat down beside her. “Is there anything I can do? You want me to give you some space?”

All he hoped was that he wouldn’t be upsetting her more. He wasn’t good with dealing with people’s emotions. Not when he actually cared about them. He only knew one method of comfort, but it was currently inappropriate.

Ma’zurah leaned against Fayrl and hugged him, brushing her whiskers against his cheek. “Thank you…”

Fayrl had no idea what this meant, but he put an arm around her shoulders lightly. “You are… welcome…?”

“You are wonderful. Ma’zurah is so glad she has you here with her.” She stopped suddenly, realizing the implications of this statement. “Sorry… that probably makes Ma’zurah sound selfish… She is just glad that since she has to be here, now, she has someone as nice as you are with her.”

Fayrl wasn’t sure what had caused the sudden barrage of compliments. Had she not felt this way before? What had changed? He had no way of knowing. “I feel the same for you. I would not have been able to get so far without you. I mean, you’re a being of legend. I should be so lucky as to have such a powerful mage and Azura’s Champion at my side.”

He shifted his weight. “I am sorry for upsetting you. Will you forgive me for taking things too far? I enjoy teasing, but I did not mean to do anything that would hurt you. Surely if either of us be selfish, it is not you who has already saved Morrowind once before.”

Ma’zurah rubbed her face against his cheeks and purred. “You did not hurt Ma’zurah, and you did not upset her. There is nothing to forgive. Ma’zurah is just relieved that she does not have to hide from Fayrl!” She gave him a brilliant smile.

“Oh.” Fayrl looked away, then quickly back at her. “Oh!” He had been foolish not to have seen what she had meant before.

“You don’t have to hide anything from me. You said we should be honest after all, right?” He winked at her. “If there’s ever anything you need to talk about or… want to do, I’m here.”

Ma’zurah closed her eyes, a wistful smile on her lips. She desperately wanted to kiss him. She settled for rubbing her whiskers against his cheeks again. “You are a sweetheart,” she told him affectionately.

Fayrl had to restrain himself. He was getting some very intimate signals from her and his body was instantly ready to react. Yet, after what had happened on the horse, he did not want to risk teasing her only to scare her off again. He wasn’t sure how much was related to her fear of him finding out about her anatomy. Still, it was best not to chance these things.

He dropped his arm from around her. “You should see how sweet I am when I don’t mean it.”

“Ma’zurah prefers it when Fayrl is sincere.” Ma’zurah said with laughter in her eyes. “Come on! We should keep moving, but this time Ma’zurah is putting a pillow between herself and Fayrl!” She stood and offered her hand to him.

Fayrl laughed. “Well, if that will make you more comfortable. Less fun that way though.”

He strapped his lute back in front of him and climbed atop the horse before extending a hand to help Ma’zurah back up.

Ma’zurah settled into place, this time with a pillow preventing a repeat performance of her earlier embarrassment. She hugged Fayrl around the waist, still purring. “Tell Ma’zurah more about Fayrl?” she asked as they began moving again.

Fayrl would have enjoyed the hug, even more so the purring, if it had not been for the question. He had agreed to answer her honestly--something he was not used to doing when speaking about himself. He would have to think very carefully before he answered. He was so used to nesting his truths within many lies.

“Well, let’s see. I think you already know that I am from Morrowind and Indoril, born and raised in Mournhold. You already know of my religious beliefs. What else did you wish to know?”

“Oh everything! Anything! What are Fayrl’s favorite things? What kinds of things does Fayrl enjoy doing? What does Fayrl care about? What makes Fayrl laugh? That kind of thing!”

Fayrl suddenly felt rather warm. “Well, alright. I suppose I shall start with favorite things.”

He had to think for a moment to decide if the list that sprang to mind was genuine. “I enjoy hearing about the lives and experiences of others, particularly over a good mug of hard liquor. I enjoy singing but also listening to the music of others.”

He paused. Did he actually like watching the sunrise? How did he feel about eggs? Did he even enjoy taverns other than the attention and companionship they provided him?

“I care a lot for the reform of the Pact, though… I suppose that matters little now. Everything I had hoped to work towards fell apart.” He laughed as though it was a joke and not something heartbreaking. “I care for my family, although I am not always very good to them. My son, my brother, my husband, mother, even father. I care deeply for them.”

Fayrl took another deep breath. What was it that made him truly laugh? He had laughed at Ma’zurah’s story; that was genuine. But how could he qualify the exact set of things that brought him amusement? “What else was there?”

Ma’zurah hugged Fayrl gently at the mention of the Ebonheart Pact and his family. She had been trying to make lighthearted conversation, and hadn’t intended to remind him of things that might cause him pain. But now she was curious. “Fayrl has a brother?”

“Yes and no. B’vek, I didn’t mean to be so ambiguous. Avon and I are not brothers by blood, but rather by bond. We have known one another since childhood. He was my first friend. Mother took him with us to the Velothi camps to learn about the True Tribunal. As I followed Mephala, he took after mother and followed Azura. He became legal guardian of my son. I am sure that until I return he will be taking care of him. With mother’s help if need be, of course.”

Mazurah leaned her cheek against the back of Fayrl’s shoulder. “How old is Fayrl’s son? What is his son like?”

“He takes his sixth name day this year. I am sad to say he is a very shy boy. His mother treated him poorly while I was not around, and as a result he is slow to trust. He has terrible panics whenever I have to leave him. It took months before he could stand to sleep in his own room or to go to his tutors without me nearby. He is a sweet boy though. Incredibly bright. Very magically gifted, like mother. In many ways he is far more like Avon than he is like me, despite looking much as I did at that age.”

“You mentioned that your wife betrayed you and tried to have you assassinated… That was why you were not around?” Ma'zurah prompted. “How recently did you even find out you have a son?”

“When was it exactly?” He tried to think. It didn’t feel like it was a short time, yet it must have been. “Second Seed last year? Midyear perhaps? I was in Skyrim at the time.”

He thought back to when Avon had chased after him in Riften with a deep sense of guilt. How many times did he have to treat that mer less than he deserved? It was a wonder that Avon still stayed with him.

“So that is why you are familiar with Skyrim!” Ma'zurah exclaimed. “You were in Skyrim the whole time you were fleeing your wife’s assassins?”

“Well, I was familiar with Skyrim before that, but I would say that of the nearly six years I was away, I probably spent five of them in Skyrim.”

Ma’zurah nodded against Fayrl’s back. “What did you do while you were in Skyrim that whole time?”

“Well, mostly singing and whoring,” he replied nonchalantly. “Anything to keep a low profile.”

“Whoring?” Ma’zurah laughed. “Ma’zurah has always been good friends with the whores! She knew there was a reason she liked Fayrl!”

“I was never a certified whore.” Fayrl never had gone through the formal training and certification process. “I just do it as a source of income. Or for a room for the night. Or a hot meal and a mug of ale. Really, anything to get things for free. I do hate to spend money for no reason.”

Ma’zurah snorted. “Alright then! That explains some things! Good to know.” She was quiet for a moment, then she rested her forehead against Fayrl’s shoulder. “You do not ever have to do that while Ma’zurah is around unless you want to, alright? Kaaka rabi, raba. We share resources, like clan.” (What is mine is yours.)

Fayrl smiled. “I appreciate that. Please feel free to use anything I have as well. To be honest though, I enjoy the chance to pray and get something out of it. And for those who are particularly devious, I get to pray to another pillar as well.”

Ma’zurah nodded, suddenly understanding why Mafala chose him as her Champion and wielder of the Ebony Blade. “We need to come up with a more subtle method of communication than Dunmeris then, if you plan to use this method to fuel the Lady’s sword. And plans in case we get separated.”

“A brilliant idea. I take it you have some suggestion?” Fayrl was intrigued by what suggestions Ma'zurah might have. He wondered what--if any--magical means she might employ.

“Well… Ma’zurah has never been good at enchanting… but if we get two rings or amulets, and some filled soul gems, Ma’zurah will attempt to enchant a pair of telepathy rings like those Ma’zurah has for her friends and partners. It might be easier to find an enchanter though. In the meantime, we can pass notes, or use hand signals, or even phrases. What do you think?”

“Those all sound like good ideas. Only, I don’t have magical powers, so you’ll have to show me how to use the ring without it.” He hoped there was a way to use the telepathy rings or amulets without magicka, and that he could keep his own thoughts private in the process. “Is there a way to control precisely when the telepathy works?”

“You activate telepathy rings like any magickal item or scroll to talk to the person with the other ring. It does require some trust, because either person with the ring can hear what is going on in the background anytime they activate the ring, but they cannot read your thoughts unless you think them at the person through the ring. Since Fayrl knows how to channel magicka for fire spells and scrolls, Fayrl should not have any problems activating a magickal item.” Ma’zurah paused. “Not that it really matters right now. Ma’zurah does not know whether she will be able to create them or find an enchanter anytime soon. In the meantime, Ma’zurah can show you some combat signals that are quite useful.”

Fayrl shifted a bit in his seat. He was not feeling particularly confident about the situation. “Well, that sounds simple then. No need to worry.” He wondered if false confidence was technically a lie or not. “Please, do show me some of your more modern signals. I’m afraid mine are about a millennium too old to be of much use.”

“Alright. Here are the hand signals for how many enemies are ahead and what weapons they are using…”

By the time the sun had crossed the apex of the sky and begun to sink low towards the horizon, and the two realized they should probably stop to eat something, they had already agreed upon and begun to practice a set of signals to communicate silently in combat, multiple verbal and nonverbal indicators that they needed alone time for various reasons, including ways for Fayrl to indicate his intent to seduce someone or sacrifice someone with Mephala’s Blade, and various other subtle communication devices, both silly and serious. They had also come up with short and long term plans if they became separated: they would wait at the nearest inn for a week for the other to arrive, and then leave word for the other at that inn and send a courier to search for them before returning to Whiterun to wait another three months. If all else failed, they would leave a message for the other with Farengar, or his replacement should he lose his position.

Ma’zurah’s stomach grumbled, and she laughed. “Ma’zurah guesses she should not rely on honey nut balls to sustain her all day! We should probably stop and eat. There is a shallower portion of the river bank that the horse might be able to use up ahead, there.” Ma’zurah pointed.

Fayrl laughed. “I'm surprised you did not discover your hunger sooner. I'd have ended up eating the horse if I'd only eaten those little cloying nut balls. You need more sustenance for a full day of riding.”

He pulled the horse to the side of the road and brought it to a stop. He hopped off, then led it by the reins to the edge of the river bank before offering his hand to help Ma’zurah off the horse.

“We should also begin to consider how much longer we will ride before making camp,” he warned. “We have a small tent, but no one wants to have to set it up in the dark. The nights here get surprisingly cold and you want the tent up so you can retain some of the heat of the sun. You'll be thankful for it when the temperature drops.”

The evening had turned cloudy, and Ma’zurah took the opportunity to take in the landscape without the sun getting in her eyes. They were still heading northeast along a road sandwiched between a steep stone rise and the bank of the river. There was little flat space visible off the road, and Ma’zurah did not relish the thought of trying to camp in the road. To the north above the rise she thought she saw what might be the roofs of buildings, but no path made itself apparent. She pulled out her map while Fayrl watered the horse.

“Ma’zurah thinks that might be Karthwasten over there. If she is right, there should be a turnoff to it on the road ahead. See?” She turned and showed the map to Fayrl.

Fayrl glanced towards the map, still holding the reigns. He could not recall any place by that name in his time, but it was likely that a new stronghold or village could have started sometime in the last millennium.

“Let's hope they have an inn with a decent room then. I am still feeling a bit stiff from waking up on that stone floor. And who knows what else we got up to.”

“Oh gods!” Ma'zurah buried her face in one hand. “Ma'zurah does not even want to think about it! Who knows what she did! She wishes she could remember!”

She put away the map and dug through her pack again, assembling a meal of preserved meats, cheese, and mushrooms on bread, which she proceeded to toast carefully over a palmful of low flame. She handed Fayrl a portion.

“Thank you,” Fayrl said as he accepted the hot meal.

“Would Fayrl be interested in learning Ta’agra?” Ma'zurah asked after a comfortable silence.

“Will you be teaching me dirty words to say in the place of polite ones to make me look a fool?”

“No, that would defeat the purpose of giving us another method to communicate. But Ma'zurah will teach Fayrl the dirty words.”

Fayrl reached forward and tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. “I would love for you to teach me Ta’agra. Qau-dar always said there is a lot of tail and ear movements needed that I was lacking when I asked him to teach me some before.”

Fayrl hoped that Qau-dar and little Khes would have had good, long lasting lives. He missed them. He missed them more than he wanted to admit to himself.

Ma'zurah blinked at him. “This Qau-dar must not have wanted to teach Fayrl then. True, Fayrl will sound a bit flat and have to use more words to convey his meaning, but no more so than any Khajiit who has lost their tail or the Ohmes. The Ohmes tend to make up for it with large hand gestures.”

Fayrl looked wistfully toward the horizon. “He did always have a habit of thinking Khajiit were superior to non-Khajiit. He teased me mercilessly about one Ta’agra song I learned from a patron. I think hearing the words from a non-Khajiit just couldn't sound correct to him, no matter what else happened. It was one of his little quirks.”

Fayrl gave a deep sigh. He could remember the way Qau-dar often teased him about what he did that was different. Always saying how beautiful and perfect all Khajiit were. He never could figure out his daelekil. Even after all those months on the road. “To be honest, he never offered to teach me. And I never truly asked.”

Ma'zurah mumbled something unflattering under her breath. “You know what? Ma'zurah thinks maybe she does not like this Qau-dar. She has never liked anyone who thinks themselves superior on the basis of race, and this Qau-dar must either be a blind idiot or an uncaring s’wit not to see your interest in the language--not to mention him!” She cut herself off from further comment by shoving the last of her food in her mouth in one large bite, but her expression remained stormy.

Fayrl was taken aback. He had never meant for it to come off as though Qau-dar was unkind or close minded. He was sheltered and naive perhaps, but there was no malicious intent to his words or deeds.

“Qau-dar is my husband, Ma’zurah,” he said gently. “I mean, it is true he has not understood or not been interested in my advances. But you must understand, he had not had much exposure in his tribe to other races. It was his first time traveling away from home. I met him almost immediately after he had arrived in Skyrim. I was the first person to show him kindness since he left his family behind. He did not even understand what I was implying when I asked him to share my bed. His Cyrodiilic has improved much from when we first met. I spent so long having to explain various concepts. He did not even know or understand what slaves were; he probably still does not.” Fayrl sighed fondly, then sadly.

“Please do not be angry at him. He is a wonderful person. I’ve always found his way of thinking charming. It is so foreign to my own. Besides, it is not as though I am in love with him.”

Ma'zurah flashed Fayrl a skeptical look and swallowed her food. “So Fayrl says . What say we try to make that village up there before nightfall?” She gestured toward the indistinct rooftops nestled in the rocky rise to the north.

Fayrl saw that Ma’zurah could not be persuaded. He felt as though he had done a grave disservice to Qau-dar. Why couldn't she see from his description how wonderful he was? Perhaps he should have described Qau-dar’s beauty instead?

“As you say,” he replied. If Ma’zurah did not wish to discuss his husband any further, then so be it. He would rather not risk making him sound less wonderful than he was.

Ma'zurah remained quiet as Fayrl helped her remount their horse. In a sudden moment of introspection, she had begun to realize that she was in danger of falling for this mer, and she had no idea what to think. She had never needed to restrain her emotions like this before, and she recognized her protectiveness for what it was.

He had been nothing but deferential and kind to her--protective even. She found him immensely attractive and arousing, and she enjoyed talking to him. He had similar religious beliefs to her, and he seemed to hold the same attitudes about free sexuality that many Khajiit did. He did not carry the same racist attitudes as so many of his kin, and he had apparently accepted both her unusual biology and the worst of her personality and experiences without question when she had inadvertently shared them with him. It was hard to stop these feelings of protectiveness and the other strong emotions that accompanied them. She wasn't even sure she wanted to try.

She was fucked, she decided. So fucked. She sighed and rested her head against the back of his shoulder. She could only continue to do what she thought was right.

Fayrl stayed quiet as they remounted. He was worried she might be upset at him as well. It was a silly notion, he knew that, but he felt he was at fault. It was a strange feeling. He was used to having control over what others thought or believed about him.

When her head came to rest on his shoulder, he pretended to busy himself with adjusting the reigns and checking he had everything prepared to ride. The physical contact felt soothing, he wanted to stay connected like this longer. Yet it would do no good if they lost the light.

“Ready?” he asked her.

“Yes.” She nodded against his shoulder. Introspection made her tired, and they’d had a long day. She was ready to find a bed soon. She held Fayrl around the waist as he urged the horse into a trot.

End Notes:

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Ta’agra Translation Source   Kaaka rabi, raba. = What [I] have, [you] have.

Fayrl’s tumblr: @talldarkandroguesome

Fayrl’s husband, Qau-dar, belongs to @warmsandstraveler. Fayrl’s author has an ongoing, publically available RP going with him and several other people in an alternate timeline in which nobody gets lost in time.

You can read the journal of Fayrl’s ‘brother’ Avon at @avon-m-dunaag. He participates in the ongoing, publically available RP with Fayrl, though his updates are not nearly as frequent.

Screenshot of Fayrl Screenshot of Ma’zurah Check out my art tag for more pictures of Fayrl and Ma’zurah.

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