#but i feel that impotent rage now towards a lot of political structures

[junewongapologia]

The fact is tho that no matter how you look at it, no matter how insufferable she is, no matter how Out Of Touch, regardless of whether she’s doing herself no favours: Eloise is right about society and just about everyone else in the show is wrong.

Like, she’s not got the full picture, she’s blinkered and her political philosophy is not very in depth or well thought out. But she’s right, and I think that’s why a lot of people watching really don’t like her because she’s breaking the illusion. All in all, the 1810s were a shit time to be alive for most people, and you can “well actually” it all you like, but the Luddite movement existed for a reason, the Chartists existed for a reason, Porto-feminist writers like Wollstonecraft and de Gouges wrote what they did for a reason.

So when you keep being reminded that it was a terrible social order for women - in a show targeted mainly towards women for escapist purposes then that character is going to come across as irritating, because she’s ruining the immersion.

Really, her attitude isn’t more anachronistic than the dresses, or the hairdos, or the diamond necklaces (men and women had been advocating women’s right to vote since before Eloise was born, lads), but it’s a problem because people are watching the show for the sweeping romances and the general regency vibe, they don’t want to think about how the regency was for most people. Which inevitably leads to some incredible projection, when watchers of a show with the central conceit of only being interested in the love lives of the top one percent of the one percent of the British aristocracy acting as though Eloise is the only privileged person on the show.

And yeah, she is better off than most of the people who exist in all of Regency Britain (though if you were to take the show as read, Britain is made up of about 70% aristocracy, 1% gentry, 5% urban bourgeoisie and 24% urban workers), but she’s the only one whose privilege is harped on out of her whole family and social circle. 99% of the speaking characters in the show come from a posher background than Beau fucking Brummell.

And! Eloise is literally just about the only main character who ever has to question her privilege! And when she is in season 2 she doesn’t throw a shitfit, she’s willing to learn! She goes out of her way to hear perspectives that she wouldn’t have heard in her social circle! But the narrative punishes her for that, and that’s because for all the criticism she gets about needing her privilege checked, they don’t actually want her to learn, they just want her to shut up and enjoy the trappings of regency decadence as much as they do.

Also - I know it’s really fashionable to rag on “pick-mes” and “Not Like Other Girls” - but actually, no, “traditional femininity” has never been socially unacceptable for women the way being GNC is, and it is in fact ruthlessly socially enforced against GNC women, even more so in the 1810s. Eloise is a teenaged girl in a society that stigmatises her for her wish for more legal autonomy, the idea that she’s somehow the villain for not being able to enjoy “feminine” hobbies without seeing them as just another element of the way women’s education is trivialised as ornamental, is farcical. “Sewing is a valuable and useful skill” so is cooking, but there’s a reason my mam, and not my dad, had home economics lessons, and that reason is still misogyny, despite the fact that it set her up better for being able to operate independently as an adult.

Idk I’m just kind of uncomfortable that in a world of rising reactionary political sentiment towards women, and this seemingly increasingly re-normalised view that women need to be wives and homemakers, people feel that the person on the show who needs to do the most introspection regarding their politics is an eighteen-year-old who is vocal about the fact that she has limited legal rights, and not any of the adult men in the show (a lot of whom probably have seats in the Upper House!!!) who never mention politics at all.

And frankly, given the shower who were Having Political Opinions in the long eighteenth century, Eloise’s brand of semi-anachronistic protofeminism is infinitely preferable to Hannah “I refuse to teach the poor how to write in my schools” More, or Edmund “don’t read my big thesis on revolutions too closely it’s definitely not all lies and junk history” Burke, or even a load of prominent members of the Bluestocking Society.

[chiseler]

“All I Know Is That First, You’ve Got to Get Mad.”

I thought I was in an unusually, even inexplicably good mood during the pandemic. That whole pre-apocalyptic vibe just set my toes to tapping. Who the hell knew things would get this wildly entertaining? I don’t know why, but the thought of cop cars ablaze just makes me a little giddy.

Wait, I take that back. I know exactly why.

I’m writing this on a Sunday morning following the third night of violent protests in New York and every other major city in the country—a night in which, among other things, an NYPD SUV intentionally plowed into a group of protesters in Brooklyn and an upstate woman was booked on federal attempted murder charges for throwing a Molotov Cocktail at a police cruiser full of cops. I suspect by the time this runs, the protests will have either burned themselves out or been crushed under the boot heel of State power. If I’m mistaken about that and things are still rolling merrily along, well then shut my mouth for being a pessimist. And if all I write here is old news by the time you read it, I apologize, though it’s worth repeating.

The mistake everyone in the media made when reporting on the spreading violence was insisting all the carnage was in direct reaction to the murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis cops.

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

Do you honestly think the riots in goddamn Des Moimnes and Salt Lake City had anything to do with George Floyd? Bullshit. The Flloyd murder was merely the immediate excuse, the long-overdue spark that ignited a pile of dry kindling that had been growing for the past thirty years. It was a perfectly predictable, inevitable reaction when so many contributing factors came together in one instant.

At the same time, you have government officials from the president to the mayor of New York blaming the violence on the proverbial “outside agitators,” from Antifa to white nationalists to Russian troll bots, refusing to believe unaffiliated American citizens are capable of torching cop cars and looting chain stores on their own say-so because some black guy had been killed.

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

The question isn’t one of extremist rabblerousers—the question is, why doesn’t it happen more often?

How many unarmed black civilians had been murdered by cops and former cops over the three months prior to George Floyd? Now stretch that idea back a ways: how many had been murdered by cops and former cops since Ferguson? I’ll give you a moment to go look up the numbers.

Okay, how have people reacted to police violence over the course of the six years since the unrest in Ferguson? Just as they’ve been brainwashed to do, they’ve held peaceful protest marches and made a lot of speeches demanding this and that, vague concepts like “Justice” and “Peace.”. Now if you’re feeling really ambitious, go back to the end of the L.A. riots and add up the numbers, the incidents of cops killing and brutalizing the innocent between then and now. That’s an awful lot of peaceful, righteous protest marches and way too many ad hoc sidewalk memorials to count. And what changed as a result? Nothin!. The cops continued to go about their business the way they always have since the mid-nineteenth century, when they were nothing but a State-sanctioned street gang. And they’re going to continue behaving that way because nobody has the yarbles to try and make them do anything differently.

So it’s easy to imagine the mounting frustration and anger, right? People were protesting peacefully, making speeches just like they were supposed to, they were doing this every week somewhere in the country, it seems, and it had accomplished absolutely bupkis. It’s also easy to imagine these same people starting to think, after all those futile years with no improvements to point at for all their efforts, that maybe a little direct action might be more effective.

But a growing nationwide anti-cop sentiment finally reaching the breaking point was hardly the only factor at play in the recent hullabaloo.

Add to that a pandemic lockdown that had been going on for three months. People were a little stir crazy and bored. The frustration had built up, and some kind of release was necessary.

Add to that tens of millions out of work, people with no income, no insurance and no clue when they might conceivably reclaim either. Not only did they have too much time on their hands, they were pissed at the government doctors and scientists who recommended the lockdown, the fucking state politicians who ordered it, the bosses who laid them off, and their goddamn whining families who kept wanting to eat.

Add to that the burning gut rage fellt by roughly half the country directed at an administration overseen by a dangerous buffoon who seemed to take great delight in tossing out daily affronts to everything that seemed right and simply decent, and the inability of anyone to stop him. America was fast sliding toward despotism, and no  one who could have and should have  put an end to it was doing anything apart from wringing theier hands. That led to a dismay and anger that had been growing exponentially for three and a half years.

There was an awful lot of free-floating rage out there with no sense of direction. All of the above factors boil down to a single, very simple reality: people feel impotent (because they are), and they’re fucking pissed about it. You get a few thousand pissed, impotent people together in one place, and interesting things are going to happen.

So put all those factors together, right? Murderous cops, the lockdown, the new Depression and an administration that didn’t give a good goddamn. Then add to that not only a handy trigger in the form of the George Floyd video and, best of all, a stretch of some really nice weather, and there you have it—an eruption of collective cathartic rage at the whole fucking system. We need one of those every twenty or thirty years. It’s good for the spirit.

Thomas Jefferson, as we all recall, believed that given its very nature, the young country would witness a political revolution of, by, and for the people every twenty years ore so. I guess he was partly right, though instead of actual  revolutions with long-term effects, we just riot fore a week or so, smash windows, loot stores and torch cars, then call it a day. Of course since Jeffereson’s time the system has been reorganized in such a way that this is all we’re capable of doing.

On the downside, though, it’s not going to accomplish anything. In fact it’s going to backfire, because it always has and always will. Nothing’s going to alter cop behavior, because nothing’s going to change the psychological makeup of those no-necked thugs who decide they want to become cops. In fact, it’s only going to bolster the contempt most cops feel for anyone who’s not a cop, and the standard paranoid fantasy held dear by most police officers that they’re the real victims.

On top of that, there’s going to be a crackdown from not only an already delusional administration, but the courts and state and local officials, all of whom will enact new limitations on protests and public gatherings to ensure nothing like this ever gets so out of hand again. This is why every time it happens, the reaction from those in power guarantees it’ll happen again down the line, while pushing the country yet further from Jefferson’s ideal.

Yeah, I do get a little jingly-jangly feeling inside when I hear about young women throwing Molotov Cocktails at cop cars in NYC. But if you want to play with the power structure, you’ve got to remember the power structure plays really, really rough, and things are about to get far worse than they were a week ago. Sorry, but it’s true. Sure was fun while it lasted though.

Now I just have to wait another thirty years until it happens again. In the meantime, I think I’ll go pull out my old Feederz records and give them a spin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OvI1WIoc9w

by Jim Knipfel