#capitalistic identity politics are my nightmare

[alatabouleau]

Ok, I think I blew this one out of proportion a bit. Though I still stand behind this metaphor, it should be mentioned that queer folks are not the only ones who experience this and not even the ones who get the least. And you also see this in good Omens: In the script book for the first season, Neil Gaiman only wrote in two places suggestions for the cast: He wrote "I would not make Adam and Eve white" and that the angels and demons should be casted through all ethnicities and gender. Well, we got the "Adam and Eve" bit. But for the angels? We've got four angels beside Aziraphale in season 1 from which two are played by women and one is black. Congratulations. Also, casting the only Asian person as the embodiment of pollution, Idk...? This was also something I hoped for season 2, that they'd follow Gaiman's vision here a bit more. And yet, beside Uriel, every other Angels is still white, though props for casting a disabled person. And with the new cast of Beelzebub, we now have someone with Asian background (beside other) in a leading role. Yet it still feels... icky to me that Eric, the "disposable demon" and only other not-white-demon beside Beelzebub this season, is the punching ball of everyone around him. Like, watching all the white demons constantly bullying that one brown demon, it's... unfortunate. But at least in the human world, it gets more diverse with Nina Sosanya in a leading role and the shop-owners's meeting being the hot pot of ethnic and gender diversity with a Chinese woman, an Armenian woman, a black man and one nonbinary person. And still, I'm happy for what we have and yet, they could do better in this department regarding leading roles imo. And I hope it now becomes unarguably clear that all of this is a problem I have with AMAZON not with the writers of the show, who were probably not responsible for casting and all of that. Because Amazon has those really weird diversity-rules (and for anyone who's able to speak German, I'd highly recommend Wolfgang Schmitt's video regarding the topic) and they don't exist because Amazon cares so much. No, they exist so that they can appear inclusive and use this for their profit. They don't care about the quality, only about the quantity, yet have rules about how you are supposed to present certain topics that feel quite restrictive for the arts. Yet somewhow, Good Omens already managed to sneak past them since Michael Sheen and David Tennant get to kiss each other without one of them being openly queer. Lots of actors get to portray, as angels and demons, rather genderless entities without identifying as such themselves. And yes, I think that's a good thing, because being an actor means that portray something you are not. So many gay actors successfully portrayed straight people and Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal made a heartbreaking portrayal of two men in love in still one of my favourite movies. So, that's something that makes Good Omens pretty queer since the fundamental idea of being queer is that identity is fluid. It's not written in stone. It's about playing with presentation. And well, that's something Good Omens manages at least to some degree despite Amazon's policy.

(4): (SPOILERS) And now you’re going to say “Oh, it makes sense for their arcs, you just have to be patient, in season 3, we’ll get all this.” and that’s my point. We want there to be a good reason for it in-universe. Because we want this representation, and we want it to be good because that’s all we have and from what we get so little. We thank and praise production teams continuously for doing the bare minimum because we are used of getting crumbs. We are the unfavoured children working at a factory. Because of something that sets us apart, we watch the other kids getting wholesome meals three times a day while we are used to search under the table for their scraps. We are conditioned to think that this is normal, it’s how it’s always been and we’re already grateful that we haven’t been kicked out of the house yet. But some children didn’t accept this. Some stood up and demanded better which gave us all the courage to follow their example. This was when the factory owner realised something… so, they changed the plan. They started to give us our own meal. And we were so happy of finally being fed, cried tears of joy over our first portion, that we didn’t understand that they still haven’t given us the same as the other children. Our meals contain roughly everything you need to survive. Nothing more. And they didn’t give it to us because they cared about us. Maybe the cooks of the meals do, but the owner allows this because like this, we get more productive. More food means more strength which means more workforce, more profit in their factory. And when the parents of the other children, sponsors of the factory complain about us getting food, he can show them that there’s still a difference. In this perfidious scheme of them, we’ll never know how little they give us unless someone else comes along, another cook who takes up the courage to give us the same meal as the others. Until that moment, we never would have known how it feels to have a full stomach for once. But once you do, it’s hard, almost unbearable to go back getting fed the bare minimum. And this is where the revolution would begin, or at least an uproar. Not against the cooks, not against the other children at the factory, but the owner. Because for a moment, think about what this season could have been. You don’t have to go long, you just have to look up fan-media working with what we had in the spoilers. There is no written-in-stone need for Crowley to live in his car and not with Aziraphale. There is no logical reason why they must still dance around each other and not being an item. This season’s story doesn’t follow up with what the season 1 finale implied.

[woman-loving]

A History of US Bear Subculture

Selection from “A Concise History of Self-Identifying Bears,” by Les Wright, published in The Bear Book: Readings in the History and Evolution of a Gay Male Subculture, edited by Les Wright, 1997.

Roots In his 1991 introduction to The Bear Cult: Photography by Chris Nelson,[1] Edward Lucie-Smith attributes iconographic sources of bears to the 1950s gladiator movies starring bodybuilder Steve Reeves. Gay “physique studios” of the time reflected the predominant fashion of closely shaven faces and bodies. “Old Reliable,” a Los Angeles-based photographer of homoerotic wrestling, specialized in “natural” men, soliciting hustlers, punks, ex-cons, and other truly “rough trade” types off the streets (from the 1950s-1990s) to pose for his camera. Old Reliable’s models were street-smart scrappers, perhaps shabby, perhaps defiant, unquestionably blue-collar, or lower, class. A fat cigar in one hand and the middle finger of the other hand thrust into the camera’s face is the signature pose for Old Reliable’s models. John Rechy’s novels, especially 1963 best-seller City of the Night, serve as a record of gay male engenderment of this particular type in the urban subcultures of the late 1950s and 1960s.

Another informant, living in the Miami, Florida area during the 1970s, reports that when he first started coming out into the bar scene in his mid-twenties he encountered a cluster of “bears” that congregated in the Tool Room, a back bar area of Warehouse VIII, a “disco place.”

“[i]n the meantime, some counter-culture tabloid I read occasionally ran a cryptic personal ad for a Bears party, which would gather at a men’s bar called The Ramrod on a particular evening and time, so I bit. Not knowing the bar’s whereabouts, then learning the address and trying to find the unmarked place in the downtown darkness, I was late but not too late. A dozen of so men with beards, most of them husky, were piling out of the bar door as I was walking in. Two of them grabbed me by each arm, and one said “Great! You’re the even number!” Now I was just in the first stages of coming out, even to myself, but I let myself get swept away (with an alarmed smile on my face). I thought I was headed for my first orgy (gay or straight), but it turned out to be a real party at a home on one of the causeway islands between Miami and Miami Beach. Real men having a hell of a good time without a woman in sight. Imagine!! We watched the second half of the Dolphins game, played some cards, then sat outside under the moonlight, slowly pairing off and disappearing back indoors or off into tropical hiding places behind the patio.

I was out. I started hanging out regularly at the Ramrod, where any bearded local was greeted as “Hey, Brother Bear!” I checked out The Rack, a leather saloon, but the bear camaraderie was not present. A few Rack regulars were good-looking, beefy, bearded guys, but their bikes and image were their focus, not the bears among them. The bears continued to patronize the Ramrod and the Tool Room, or a larger bar in Fort Lauderdale called Tacky’s, but could be found in lots of neighborhood bars, too, like The Hamlet and The Everglades. Not only did we refer to ourselves as bears, but the term caught on among non-bears too.

It was too early in beardom, I guess, to have a Bears club or organization of any kind. Nobody thought of it. There were spontaneous parties arranged by word-of-mouth, picnics, beach volleyball. We even loaded three vans full of bears and invaded Key West.

You might think of Florida as an unlikely place to find bears, but bearded men were very common there in the 60s and 70s. When the disco era streamrollered fashion for straight and queer alike, it became less common. Many bears kept our beards, many left only a moustache. The Ramrod faltered and closed, 13 Buttons and The Copa flourished, as did all the big discos of the day. I became more private whit three bear affairs over five years, then finally met a cowboy in New Orleans on Mardi Gras and left Florida forever. We moved to Colorado in 1981 and had five great years together. I've been in Denver since 1986 and was later a founding member of one of the oldest bear clubs in the country, Front Range Bears.

But that’s another story.”[2]

Larry Reams has unearthed the first documented apparent uses of “bear” in the current sense. He has found among records of the Los Angeles-based Satyrs’ MC club the formation of a “bear” club mentioned in two entries from 1966.[3] Another source cites anecdotally a group of lovers of a “Papa Bear” in Dallas, Texas, as the start of the “bear community” “well before 1975.”[4] Several undocumented sources have related similar anecdotes of private circle or bar circles of self-identifying bears.

The first published description of gay “bears” appeared in a whimsical article called “Who’s Who in the Zoo: A Glossary of Gay Animals,” penned by George Mazzei in the Advocate, July 26, 1979. Larry Reams reports that he and his friend, the author,

“were standing in Griffs’, a Los Angeles leather bar, one evening discussing the types of men we were and those to whom we were attracted. We decided we were Bears and continued on to formulate what we thought constitutes a Bear. Once we had described Bears it was an easy step to look around the bar and create the rest of the article.”[5]

Because the type so strongly suggests aspects of both bear attitude and bear image, it is worth quoting in its entirety:

“Bears are usually hunky, chunky types reminiscent of railroad engineers and former football greats. They have larger chests and bellies than average, and notably muscular legs. Some Italian-American Bears, however, are leaner and smaller; it’s attitude that makes a Bear.

General Characteristics: Hair. Their tangled bears often present no discernible place to insert a comb. Laughter. Bears laugh a lot and are generally good natured. They make wonderful companions since they are prone to reach for the check, buy the next round and keep abreast of when the Trocadero is dancing this season. Their good humor can turn threatening if you attempt to cruise their trick and you will hear about if for weeks afterward. [...]”

Jack Fritscher was creating and documenting a similar impulse in San Francisco contemporaneous to this Los Angeles subculture. Those pre-AIDS years in the Castro and South-of-Market subculture are documented in the roman à clef Some Dance to Remember. Recorded in the novel is an account of Fritscher’s short-lived underground magazine called Man2Man, a direct precursor to the first incarnation of BEAR magazine. The “homomasculinity” of Fritscher’s philosophical quest was summed up in the magazine’s subtitle: “What you’re looking for is looking for you!”

First-Wave Bears of the Zeitgeist, 1986-1989

The energy that called itself “bear” appeared as one of the signs of reemerging gay communal life following the arrival of AIDS in the 1980s. After several years in a state of shock, emotional devastation, eating more, perhaps exercising less, continuing to age, and ready for a somewhat slower and more compassionate pace of gay sex and gay social life, “hibernating” clones, leathermen, and many other self-identifying types came back to gay public spheres as “bears.” AIDS led many of us to put on extra padding and to eroticize (or publicly admit to our erotic desire for) male bulk. Feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly, had articulated the mechanisms of patriarchal/capitalist subjugation through the “beauty myth.” The tyranny of the “Castro (or Christopher) Street clone” had been breached.

Since the late 1970s, in counterpoint to the “endless party” spirit of gay life, increasing numbers of gay men were burning out on the alcohol and recreational drugs. Alcoholism has been, and remains, a serious problem in the gay community. The drug experimentation of the “love generation” had turned into a nightmare before AIDS arrived. Now, for the first time, many were experiencing another sense of self, a “sober self,” a discovery of self-respect, which allowed them to bring to a halt these self-destructive behaviors. Across the country sobriety became not only fashionable, but even “politically correct.” Discussion of the uses and misuses of the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous belongs elsewhere. Relevant to bears is the rise of self-esteem among gays--whether through sexual “liberation” or adoption of cultural norms of the moment.

The self-empowerment movements of the 1970s, the nurturance and “safe space” strategies of 1970s feminism, the ever greener alternative impulses of rural gays, Radical Faeries, and nongay-identifing men-loving men (as disseminated, for example, through RFD magazine), and the fundamental strategy of Stonewall politics--coming out--prepared the way. For gay men, who had come out as gay, as sober, as HIV positive, as leathermen, it would seem “natural” to come out--yet again--as a bear. On the one hand, Stonewall-era identity politics shaped the Zeitgeist. On the other hand, for many men-loving men who did not identify with any of the images of gay men in the gay press or with (usually) urban gay men they had encountered on trips to a city, their first encounter with the idea or an embodiment of a “bear” would strike pay dirt. Many have reported immediate identification, sometimes after years or decade of not “fitting in.” Twelve-stepping and two-stepping were new venues for socializing, for being in community without an explicit exhortation to sex. It gave us another chance, a utopian moment, in which to reinvent ourselves and our community.

“Bears” have been emerging as successor to the “clone” and as transmutated variant of “leatherman,” as an integration into gay mainstream social life of “girth-and-mirthers.” In many ways, it was a humanizing response to what clones had been. Martin P. Levine, in his study “The Life and Death of Gay Clones,” focuses on the urban enclave of West Village clones (Manhattan), noting that “AIDS, gay liberation, male gender roles, and the ethics of self-fulfillment, constraint, and commitment”[7] were the sociocultural shapers, creating and destroying this gay male subculture. Bears, during the 1980s, represented a break with the competitive and objectifying tendencies which had alienated so many Stonewall-era gay men. Bears continued the tradition of masculine identification, the social identity politics of gay liberation, and basic Enlightenment values of equality, self-determination, and self-fulfillment. Bears sought to ameliorate between socially isolating cliques and creating safe social spaces, comingling social and sexual spheres, merging rough, unkempt masculine iconography with the emotional nurturing lacking in the clone subculture and the caretaking many gay men felt called to as a direct result of the AIDS epidemic.

The point of titration came in 1987. The “Bear Hugs” parties, the advent of BEAR magazine, and developments in electronic communications were the catalysts that sparked the concept of the self-aware, self-identifying bear across communities. First, computer bulletin boards and then listservres and moderated mailing lists made communications instantaneous and were collectively dubbed “cybearspace.” All three significant events took place or are tracable back to San Fransisco, independent each other but with an unexpectedly synergistic effect all together. All three represented, each in its own way, a “safe space” for bears.

Play Parties A group of friends began organizing private “play parties” in Berkeley and San Francisco in 1987, as safe and warm gatherings--social and sexual for their friends and friends of friends. Private, invitation-only “jack-off circles” became popular during the AIDS sexual freeze, but these were an alternative social and sexual space for gay men who felt “left out”--out because they did not fit, or felt like they did not fit, the gay media images of “beauty”--young, tanned, smooth-skinned, blond LA surfer boy “twinks.” Their “difference” was both physical and perceptual, and was expressed through a social and sexual inclusiveness--men in their thirties, forties, and fifties, ranging from slender to stocky to chubby (though generally on the heavier side), usually with beards and perhaps body hair, and from a range of social classes. The common mold was a warm, nurturing, affectionate attitude toward each other. The intimacy of the early days changed, however, when the gatherings grew to over 100. By 1989, a larger space and a more formalized “guest list” became necessary.

This San Francisco group was the spawning ground for several later developments. Among them were Bear Fax Enterprises, a business privately owned by Ben Bruner and Bill Martin. The International Bear Expo, which ran for three years in San Francisco (1992, 1993, and 1994), the effort of dozens of local bears, was overseen by a steering committee, many of whom later founded the Bears of San Francisco and the International Bear Rendezvous. The “International Mr. Bear” competition and title were introduced at Expo ‘92; John Caldera, the first title holder, eventually acquired ownership of the tile, and the contest has been held annually ever since.

“Bear soup” became a widely adopted idea. In many places it refers specially to hot tub parties, though often with the implication of an orgy or private sexual pairings later in the evening. Sometimes “bear soup” seems to refer merely to a crowded space full of bears. The Bear Hugs group in Great Britain is a strictly social organization.

Similar groups, such as the OzBears of Sydney, Australia, and the Bear Cave parties in Manhattan, had started up for purposes of private socializing, and formed the basis of new groups that developed into bear clubs dedicated to social activities or even community work. As organized bear clubs have arisen and sex clubs started advertising a weekly “bear night,” these play parties have all but disappeared.

BEAR Magazine At about the same time, Bart Thomas began putting together a small, photocopied underground magazine he called BEAR . The magazine was, at first, local to San Francisco. It consisted of jack-off photos and personal ads. The reader could send in appropriate photos of himself or stop by the BEAR office and pose for the magazine. In some ways, BEAR may be seen as the direct successor of Jack Fritscher’s Man2Man underground magazine of nearly a decade before. Before he could actually launch the magazine, Thomas succumbed to complications form AIDS, but not before passing the torch to his friend Richard Bulger.

Bulger’s vision of a lifestyle magazine, articulating this masculinity, with a leftist sexual political slant, and embedded anthropological underpinnings, not to wax abstractly, but to act, to embody the principles through practice and a level of discourse clear to any blue-collar man. In a few years’ time the magazine expanded in size and status, and from word-of-mouth circulation to international commercial distribution, with a full line of videotapes, photo sets, and accessories.

In this 1993 study of BEAR magazine, Joe Policarpio describes the dual aspects of image and attitude stressed by publisher Richard Bulger through his choice of models and editorial content. The general profile of a “bear” includes at least some facial hair and some body hair (”usually the more the better”), a “musky animality,” a blend of traditionally masculine aggressiveness and (feminine) desire to cuddle, muscles by Nautilus or physical labor, and a tendency to be older than the models found in most other gay male porn magazines. “The most important point is these men are presented as fitting an ideological pattern the magazine espouses. This is one of freewheeling, playful and positive attitude toward sexuality between men. He is comfortable in his body and exudes a sense of self-assurance.”[8]

Because of personal ties, BEAR magazine was from the start intimately connected with the South-of-Market bar scene. The original Lone Star Saloon was the first “bear bar,” and followed the tradition of the Ambush and the Balcony, both of which had gone out of business early in the AIDS epidemic. These “sleaze bars” all developed an international reputation. They all offered a free-spirited, anarchic, anything-goes ambience, drawing in blue-collar types who disdained the middle-class pretensions of mainstream gay culture, those who sensibility combined social rough edges with the loyalty ethic of the American lower classes, and misfits, eccentrics, and other “rugged individual” types historically drawn to frontier towns and their saloons.

“Cybearspace” Direct electronic communications over the Internet developed and proliferated during the 1980s and 1990s. Word-of-mouth knowledge of bears spread very rapidly across the Internet. The preponderance of bears on-line or in computer fields is traceable back, in part, to this. One of the most often used private or personal uses of the Internet, regardless of sexual orientation, is for communications of a sexual nature. The lines of communication are numerous and diverse: live chat lines (IRC), BBS (electronic bulletin boards), unmoderated (echoed) an moderated mailing lists, websites, CU See ME (live video transmission), and e-mail. Altogether an individual can transmit or receive text, images (such as gif or jpeg), sound, and video images (nearly) instantaneously. The Internet allows for establishing and maintaining contact anonymously, for uncensored communication, for the exchange of visual images (yourself, your friends, your favorite sexual icon), and for echoed messages (broadcasting to all subscribers of a mailing list of a global mailing to everyone in your e-mail address book). Certain mediums (such as the IRC) can guarantee anonymity (no clues as to personal identity or physical appearance). The question of subverting prejudgment on the basis of appearance becomes moot, however, when we consider the proliferation of visual mediums, such as webpages, archived gif and jpegs, or CU SeeMe, which permit blatant self-advertising based on one’s appearance without revealing one’s name or location.

Early on, circa 1985-1988, there were several bear-dedicated bulletin boards, such as the PC Bear’s Lair (sysop Les Kooyman). The bearcave chat room on the IRC has been a very popular site in cybearspace for live conversation. While the option of remaining anonymous is always available (everyone uses a “handle,” or pseudonym), cyber-communities have evolved over time. This may range from sexual encounters to personal friendships to life partners.

By far the most popular cybearspace is the Bears Mailing List, or BML. Founded by Steve Dyer and Brian Gollum in 1988, it grew from a small, friendly, safe-feeling cybergathering of several dozen bears to a heavily subscribed, largely anonymous, and often fractious, moderated exchange of over 3,000 subscribers. Since 1995 Henry Mensch and Roger Klorese have been moderating the BML and introducing changes to accommodate the dramatic shift in tenor and purpose of the list. Subscribers are drawn from all fifty states and several dozen nations worldwide. English is the lingua franca although everything, including whether to have and who should determine a common language (and how), has been brought up for discussion. Bob Donahue’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek rough guide to “bear codes,” which was accessible from the BML archives, is the source of subspecies terminology within the bear community, such a cub, otter, behr, and the like. Numerous individuals have taken the code in all seriousness and this has become a source of contention, quoted by both sides in disputes over what is a “real” bear. [...]

Although not the only cybear group to do so, the BML has staged several informal, in-person gatherings of its subscribers  During Stonewall 25 in New York City, for example, some sixty to seventy BMLers gathered at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park on the day before the parade. Consensus determined the group should form a spontaneous contingent and march in the parade. And thus on Sunday, Stonewall 25 included a sizable contingent of mostly bearded, bearish-appearing gay men from all across the country and from abroad.

Second Wave: formalizing, 1989-1994

Bear Clubs As the concept of bear circulated between gay communities across the country and “news of recent developments in the gay capital” was drawing more comers to San Francisco, localized efforts to promote and organize bears appeared everywhere. The Bear Paws of Iowa, co-founded by Dave Annis and Larry Toothman in 1989, was the first bear club. By 1992, Bear Expo organizers were aware of four such clubs. Two years later, there were forty. According to the International Directory of Bear Organizations, maintained by The Tidewater Bears (Virginia), as of January 1996, there were 137 bear clubs or explicitly bear-friendly (girth-and-mirth and leather) clubs worldwide.

Bear clubs have generally followed along the lines of their older cousins, the lather motorcycle clubs. In some places this means an informal club that schedules periodic social events. In other places, this has translated into a great deal of fundraising and gay community civic activities. As the club model has gained wider acceptance, it has drawn long-standing problems endemic throughout the gay community into its sphere.

A formal club membership structures creates automatically an insider/outsider division, even if membership is “open to all” (usually defined as “bears and their admires”). Having a club also invites quibbling over definitions of who is a “real” bear. (This is borne out by regional differences, whether emphasis has been placed on body hair, on body weight, or on “attitude,” though a beard or moustache seems to be universally required). Clubs and organizers of events, such as the OctoBearFest (Denver), Orlando Bear Bust, Bear Pride (Chicago), European Big Men’s Conference, or the International Bear Rendezvous (San Francisco) have created bear contests, which engenders the very hierarchical system the earlier bear impulse had been resisting.

Finally, the disjunctive ideals of bears as working-class masculinity and bears as an increasingly distinct subculture within mainstream gay culture bring into sharp relief the larger issues of gay community. If bears began in a spirit of inclusiveness and egalitarian-mindedness, sex positive and relatively “anti-looks-ist,” then what is to be made of the increasingly conformist, consumerist, competitiveness that has take over? As the idea of bears has spread, the opportunities to travel far and wide, to purchase ever more and ever more costly bearphernalia, to update an expand one’s computer sources are generating another, unanticipated dividing line-between bear haves and bear have-nots. to what extent does having money now calculate into the formulas of who is a “real” bear?

Expanded Print Media As BEAR magazine rapidly grew in format, production values, and circulation, reception among gay mainstream media remained very lower. The first published serious essay on bears was a piece I wrote in 1989. It appeared in its entirety in Seattle Gay News, an abbreviated version in the San Francisco Sentinel, and Drummer magazine carried the “Sociology of the Urban Bear” as the first bear cover story in 1990. (It was reprinted in Classic Bear, February 1996.)

What became known as bear types had been featured, in one way or another, in RFD (rural), in Chiron Rising (”mature”), in leather/SM-oriented, and girth-and-mirth publications. Numerous niche-crossover magazines sprang up in the early 1990s--Bulk Male, The Big Ad, Husky, Daddy, Daddybear, GRUF. Bearish models began staring back at the reader from the pages of Advocate Men, Honcho, In Touch, and other gay mainstream glossies. BEAR magazine’s direct competitor American Bear, published by Tim Martin (Louisville, KY) took advantage of a lacuna left by BEAR magazine’s retreat from Bulger’s philosophical lifestyle magazine publishing. With the establishment of the bear icon in the gay community and the world of mainstream-gay print advertising, gay bears had become a local presence everywhere (not just in San Fransisco). And with interests, at least sometimes, beyond immediate sexual gratification, this translated into new niche markets. While American Bear Features a regular column on dissonant (HIV-positive/negative) couples (Bulger adamantly refused to mention AIDS in his magazine), a how-to column on accessing the Internet, and other features, none of the bear magazines have attained Playboy-calibre intellectual content.

In the early 1990s “bear war” broke out when Bulger, then owner-publisher of BEAR, sought to gain sole ownership of the word “bear” as his company’s trademark. Needless to say, this led to a lot of bad feelings and was widely followed and criticized in cybearspace. The Advocate even mentioned it in print. At the time, the Bear Hug group’s informal newsletter the Bear Fax had been expanded into a full-fledged magazine by Bill Martin. The lingering legacy of this “war” was a schism, based on a difference in basic body types typically portrayed in each magazine, between “fat bears” and “skinny bears.” Since this time, personals ads have proven far more profitable, and the bulk of the magazine currently consisted of personals ads, photo spreads, and commercial advertising.[9] The magazine was sold to Bear-Dog Hoffman in 1994 and is currently under Joseph Bean’s editorship. It is not clear which direction the magazine will go. It is clear that BEAR is the voice of authority in matters of bear community and sensibility.

Print media as gone a long way in generating a prototypical bear icon--full-bearded, fairly to very hairy, beefy to chunky GWM baby-boomer, probably of Irish, Jewish, Italian, Scandinavian, or Armenian heritage. In reality, the question of race, presence or absence of body hair, body build, social class, or outlook on life is anything but so neatly compartmentalized. BEAR magazine introduced the serious photographic work of Chris Nelson (as Brahman Studio) and Steve Sutton (who succumbed to complications from AIDS in 1994). Lynn Ludwig has established himself as the documenter of the San Francisco bear community. And, perhaps, the most gifted photographer of bears is Los Angeles-based John Rand, whose work is included in this book.

Bear Contests The bear calendar includes many regional gatherings, as mentioned above, as well as annual bear contests as the local club level. The highlight of such events is often the bear content. As Lurch, a popular bear icon, stand-up comic, TV actor, and psychiatric nurse, has put it, “I prefer to say ‘titleholder.’ ‘Winner’ implies ‘losers,’ and none of us are losers.”[10] Successful bear contest titleholders may be expected to organize or work a number of fund-raisers, go on public speaking engagements and represent their hometown or club on the road. In other places, the local bear club may be one of the few, or even the only social outlet, and merely being a known presence in the local community is the extent of the titleholder’s “duties.”

The emergence of bear contents has tended to straddle the fence between two sides--parodying traditional gay ideals of beauty while striving to establish a new, legitimate bear ideal. The International Mr. Bear contest, a component part of the San Francisco-based International Bear Expo, evolved in its first three year from poking somewhat self-conscious fun at traditional gay values to striving in an increasingly serious manner to project an image of a self-confident bear ideal, a new icon assuming its place among the archetypes of male beauty. From the beginning there has been an emphasis on personal warmth, a compassionate nature, civic-mindedness in the gay community, and spiritual playfulness. Titleholders John Caldera (IMB ‘92) and Steve Heyl (IMB ‘93) worked hard during their “reign,” and have remained genuinely and deeply committed to the bear community. Yet, in the progression of titleholders and the proliferation of bear contests in recent years, here has been an increasing tendency toward consolidating a bear image, and away from qualities intangible or at least invisible to the camera.

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

Hey, i binged the first 14 episodes of Supernatural just last week and enjoyed it so far. But have struggled to hype myself up to finish the series. I found out the last episodes are coming out in October and think it would be cool to catch up by then so i can watch the last ones as soon as they come out. Could you give a (as spoiler free as possible?) list of what about the show make it great to you overall? Things to look forward to, cool plot development, favorite characters, whichever...

hi, anon! 

i don’t know, anon, when i first heard i have these nightmares--and sometimes they come true in early s1 and as long as I’m there nothing bad’s gonna happen to you at the end of 1.14  back in the day, i was pretty hyped af to find out what happened next. but to be fair, 2006 was a different era altogether and some vaguely defined potential Special Ability that doesn’t even work unless Certain People are involved isn’t too exciting when every show these days with two pennies to scrape together for a VFX budget has its characters move things with their mind while shooting blue lightning out their ass.

sorry, i digress. i don’t really know how to sell this unwieldy chimera of a show to you--or if i even should--but let me give it the old college try:

1. for such a long-running show, spn has a tiny list of dramatis personae. on one hand, this means that it can feel intimate and its emotional beats deeply resonant, with long and complicated character arcs and interpersonal dynamics; but on the other hand, if you don’t find them interesting or they’re just, you know, actively annoying, you’re fucked, because there are only ever three or four main characters at any point on the show and two of them never. change. 

1.5. spn has also demonstrated--inadvertently perhaps--that having fewer characters to divide fannish devotion means more stans per character and more friction between these large groups of character stans. somewhere along the way the terms samgirl and deangirl have come to symbolise more than just a mere preference for one character over the other; it’s become a fandom shorthand for personality much in the way of astrological signs or MBTI types: utterly meaningless, but people insist on defining their identity that way anyway. 

(i say this not just as a card-carrying samgirl, but a bitter samgirl).

2. it’s also quite claustrophobic at times. sam and dean are ostensibly driving all around small-town america, but what we usually see is One Possibly Canadian Town indistinguishable from the other. as i mentioned before, the characters are few and spn rarely attempts to relate to current events or make any kind of subtle/meaningful social or political commentary (tho others may disagree with me on this). but this also means that the stories that it deals with have a timeless quality to them: family and trauma and existential angst and the Power of Love and the ways all of them can fuck you up. spn is at its absolute best when it’s dealing with stories on a deeply personal level, sometimes literally burrowing into their characters’ heads and having the entire universe mirror the dynamics of its central relationship. 

2.5. this can be a liiiitle hard to reconcile with how the show keeps raising its stakes with every season, but again, when spn is really on its game, it keeps finding new and creative ways to explore the personal with the universal, and when it’s not, you have supposedly cosmic entities reduced to the most boring metaphor imaginable for modern-day capitalist culture.

3. there’s something that spn does that i love which is turn really absurd premises into a thin veneer over a dark abyss of existential trauma which is something it doesn’t do nearly enough in the latter seasons, which is a great pity.

4. a quick rundown of the seasons:

1 - looks pretty and ends very strongly but also suffers from a case of early 00s uninspired-genre-television-itis

2 - Now This Is Where Things Get Interesting; sets up themes that are explored repeatedly for the next 13 years; please look out for ava wilson, an actual Queen

3 - a reminder that this show has been around long enough to actually have a season that was truncated by the 08 writers’ strike; plus, it contains my favourite episode of the whole show and possibly my favourite episode of television ever

4 - A MAGNIFICENT SEASON that gets better with every rewatch. the closest to flawless this show has ever gotten

5 - contains a number of the show’s best and most iconic episodes, but also sets up a lot of the show’s more... problematic motifs

6 - a HUGELY underrated season depicting some of the most delightfully creative explorations of the aftermath of deep and unusual trauma that i’ve seen, dark and thorny and uncomfortable but so goddamned sharp

7 - kind of gave up on itself halfway through; the last time this show ever took any risks/bold choices with respect to its world-building

8 - you know how these days even the most hotshot, rebellious, high-spirited, come-out-of-nowhere-with-nothing-but-heart-and-ill-advised-amounts-of-courage hero is revealed to have actually descended from some important Hero Bloodline and whoops did you think even fiction was going to indulge in the fantasy that just anybody could change the world? yeah.

9 - should’ve been this show’s turning point, except it turned a whole 360 degrees. still has some really iconic episodes, tho.

10 - eh. skippable after the first few episodes.

11 - the point where i stopped watching regularly. still horrifying but more bleak and despairing than jump-scare-and-gore

12 - this season is a black hole for me. for the life of me i can’t remember what happened in s12 - did it exist? or did spn just skip that number like some hotels skip a floor number entirely? huh.

13 + 14 - Listen It’s A Very Competitive Market And The Only Strong Thing Going For Us Is Our Large And Devoted Fandom So Let’s Obliterate The Fourth Wall Altogether And Go Full Meta, Who Gives A Shit? it’s spn back to being absurd to cover up a pit of howling, abyssal horror, and frankly it’s delightful.

5. the fandom, man. i’ve been spoiled rotten. there is nothing that can’t be found in spn fandom, no matter how brilliant or terrible or eye-searingly horrifying, and this is something i’ve chased in other fandoms with no success. 

In conclusion:  watch it if you like, it can be a cool show. But That’s Just My Opinion, Bro.

[chiripepe]

I could hear what sounded like thunder in the distance while sitting on my porch earlier tonight. But it couldn't be. The booms were to closely timed. I'm pretty sure that there's protests going on in Tampa tonight but they're not being covered.

A couple of weeks ago a protest nearby on Sligh and 56th was covered as just a random large gathering of four hundred people that ended up with four gunshots.

This is crazy.

I wonder what happens when a repressive state feels that protestors on the streets will all be labeled rioters and looters by the media or altogether ignored. They can do all they want to them. Unleash all their fancy anti personnel weaponry on the populace. First amendment rights be damned.

I remember the reason I found out how massive the Ferguson riots were was because they were all being covered here and the live stream links being posted here on Tumblr.

There's so many protests and so many police shootings of unarmed black and brown men, an out of control pandemic and a crashing economy... and an inadequate private sector to deal with any of these issues after finally getting their way and destroying our federal democratic government***.

Like what a nightmare moment this is. What an absolute scandal.

All the good people left from on here with the porn tbh cuz Tumblr just fucking sucks now.

Liberalism kills. Stupid dumbed down identity politics and representation politics are shit. The obsession with validating superficial identities instead of concentrating primarily on the material impacts this system of capitalist coercion and control that cuts all of us down across the board is a mistake. Not concentrating on and naming this capitalist machine of abject exploitation and dehumanization is a mistake. This death machine especially performs massive material violence on those who are disproportionally marginalized by their positionalities within this capitalist culture it itself produces thru its institutions. Not focusing on the bigger picture is a mistake.

These are all the fucking politics I see on here now and I'm bored. I'm bored cuz I didn't fucking sit thru Harry Potter or Steven Faggotverse. This shit affects my life for real and most of our lives period. Like were living thru the shit right now.

There's no linking of capitalism, neoliberalism, its 'invisible hand' to all of these conjoined and interacting issues. Again, intersectionality is just a word. What it implies, what it describes, intersectionality as a tool for mass mobilization that centers capitalism as the source of and main engine that maintains these social issues just... That link isn't made. That description is never articulated, the adversary is never named and it blows to see it.

I might take a break from Tumblr or I might just need to refresh my follows or do a whole reset of my relation to this platform cuz its getting stupid on here.

[gunnerpalace]

Hi! Same anon as the previous one. Tbh, I agree wholeheartedly with you. Y'see I do ask rhetorically,too but i could really accept and understand how and why ppl can be oblivious to IchiRuki, and somehow felt that the 'canon' should suffice, even the most excruciating of all is the fact a number found the ending even acceptable (ships aside, too). Again, I could respect that. But it's my greatest bane when ppl ask 'why' and not be clear they are asking rhetorically because I literally will

provide you an actual answer. And I get it, it’s the reason why ppl find shipping wars toxic and silly. But then again, as human, conflicts are always part of us (partly because as social psych explains so, we are gravitated to the negative for that allows us to change and survive), and the reason why “logical fallacies” are coined in the first place. Human will always debate, and argue about something; the only thing we could change is how we approach the opposing views.

Again, I dont condone any way, shape or form of abuse and harm. In some certain extent, I could perhaps understand it’s much harder for some IH to approach the actual argument being there’s either too much noise, and trapped in their own island between sea of salt. Thus becoming too acquianted w/ few IH who shared the same thought until it became their views as the only truth (see, that’s why its important to have debates! it is what keep us grounded and fair! Just like you said)

Who am I to speak though? I never ever challenged anyone anyways. And as you said, you just have to understand things in every way you could possibly think of–endless ‘whys’. Which is where I agree in your reply the most–this silly fandom wars is just the black mirror to every truth that lies beneath human psyche–the dark and the grimy. Heck, being a psych major is like staring at dark hole–at times, good, but most just plain confusing, revolting even or just heartbreaking.

Sorry it’s been long, but for the final of this ask: let me tell how glad I was with IchiRuki fandom I found in tumblr. It was the saltiest I’ve ever been (im not generally a fandom person anyways) but it’s the himalayan salt–expensive and actually nutritive it really deepened my desire to become wiser in general. And you for your wonderful essays, critiques and whatnot. I definitively would love to talk with you more not only about IchiRuki but the wonders and nightmare that us humans! Kudos!

I have sitting in my drafts a post spelling out my thoughts on “canon” (and thus, the people who cling to it) in that as a concept it privileges:

officiality over quality when it comes to validity (thus violating Sturgeon’s law)

corporations (intellectual property rights holders) over fans, and thus capitalists over proletarians

hierarchical dominance over mutualist networking within fandom

curative fandom over transformative fandom

genre over literary content

plot over characters

events over emotions

It is notable that (1) generally degrades art as a whole, (2) generally advances the capitalist agenda, and (3–7) generally advances the dominance of men over women (as the genders tend to be instructed by society to view these as A. dichotomies rather than spectrums, and B. to ascribe gender to them and make them polarities). These form the sides of a mutually reinforcing power structure (in the typical “Iron Triangle” fashion) designed to preserve and maintain the status quo.

Who really benefits from say, the policing of what is or is not “canon” in Star Wars? Disney, first and foremost. And then whomever (almost certainly male) decides to dedicate their time to memorizing the minutiae of whatever that corporation has decided is “legitimate.”

One can imagine a universe in which fan fic is recognized by companies for what it is: free advertising. (Much like fan art already is.) Instead, it is specifically targeted by demonetization efforts in a way that fan art isn’t. Why? Because it demonstrates that corporate control and “official” sanction has no bearing on quality, and it is thus viewed as undermining the official products.

In the same way, by demonstrating that most “canonical” works are frankly shit, it undermines the investiture of fans in focusing on details that are ultimately errata (the events, the plot, the genre), which is the core function of curative fandom and the reason for its hierarchical structure. The people who “know the most” are at the top, but what they “know” is basically useless garbage. And those people so-engaged are, of course, usually male.

To “destroy” the basis of their credibility, and indeed the very purpose of their community, is naturally viewed by them as an attack.

(This is not to say that efforts to tear down internal consistency within established cultural properties are good unto themselves, or even desirable. For example, efforts to redefine properties such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Ghostbusters, for the sake of a identity-politics agenda have largely A. failed as art, B. failed as entertainment, C. failed to attract the supposedly intended audience, and D. failed to advance the agenda in question. Trying to repurpose extant media in the name of culture wars is essentially always doomed to failure unless it is done deftly and gradually.)

(At the same time, this also shows what I was talking about last time, with regard to people seeing whatever they want to see. You will see people complain that Star Trek and Doctor Who didn’t “used to be so political,” which is obviously nonsense. These shows were always political. What changed was how their politics were presented. For example, Star Trek has, since TNG, always shown a nominally socialist or outright communist future, but was beloved by plenty of conservatives because they could [somehow] ignore that aspect of it.)

Of course, almost no one is seriously suggesting that one side of the spectrums outlined above be destroyed, rather merely that a new balance be struck upon the spectrum. But, as we have seen time and again in society, any threat to the status quo, whether that be 20% of Hugo Awards going to non-white male authors or the top income tax rate in America being increased by a measly 5.3% (from 28.7% to 34%… when the all-time high was 94% and for over 50 years it was above 50%) is a threat. This is why, for example, Republicans are out there branding AOC as a “socialist” when her policies are really no different at all from a 1960 Democrat who believed in FDR’s New Deal. (Which they, of course, have also demonized as “socialism.”)

(As an aside, all this ignores the fact that most of the “literary canon” of Western civilization, or at least English literature… is Biblical or historical fan fic.)

And this is when I finally get to my point.

Those people out there who denigrate and mock shippers and shipping, the people who hurl “it reads like fan fiction” as an insult, and so on, are the people who benefit from and enjoy the extant power structure. You will see the same thing with self-identified “gamers” complaining about “fake girl gamers.” Admitting that the hobby has a lot of women in it, and a lot of “casuals,” and is indeed increasingly dominated by “non-traditional demographics” is an affront to the constructed identity of being a “gamer.” They are “losing control.” And they don’t like it.

This exact same sort of population is what the “fanbase” of Bleach has been largely reduced down to through a slow boiling off of any actual quality. Of course they’re dismissive of people who are looking for anything of substance: their identity, their “personal relationship” with the franchise, is founded on a superficial appreciation of it: things happening, flashy attacks, eye-catching character designs, fights, etc.

(What this really boils down to, at heart, is that society at large has generally told men that emotions are bad, romance and relationships of all kinds are gross, and that thinking and reflecting on things is stupid. So of course they not only don’t care about such things, but actively sneer at them as “girly” or “feminine,” which is again defined by society at large as strictly inferior. And this gender divide and misogyny is of course promulgated and reinforced by the powers that be, the capitalists, to facilitate class divisions just like say racism generally is.)

(The latest trick of these corporate overlords has been the weaponization of “woke” culture to continue to play the people off one another all the time. “If you don’t like this [poorly written, dimensionless Mary Sue] Strong Female Character, then you are a racist misogynist!” They are always only ever playing both sides for profit, not advancing an actual ideological position. It is worth noting that there was a push by IH some years ago to define IR as “anti-feminist” for critiquing Orihime for essentially the exact same reasons [admittedly, not for profit, but still as critical cover].)

Which makes it very curious, therefore, that the most ardent IH supporters tend to be women. (Though there are more than a few men, they seem to tend to support it because it is “canon” and to attack it is to attack “canon” and thus trigger all of the above, rather than out of any real investment.) I think there are a number of reasons for this (which I have detailed before) and at any rate it is not particularly surprising; 53% of white women voted for Trump, after all.

What we are really seeing in fandom, are again the exact same dynamics that we see at larger and larger scales, for the exact same reasons. The stakes are smaller, but the perception of the power struggle is exactly the same.

Of course, the people who are involved in these things rarely think to interrogate themselves as to the true dimensions and root causes of their motivations. People rarely do that in general.

Putting all that aside, I’m glad that you have found a place you enjoy and feel comfortable, and thank you for the kind words, although I am not of the opinion that there is anything poignant about the non-fiction I write. It is, as I keep trying to emphasize, all there to be seen. One just has to open their eyes. So, it’s hard for me to accept appreciation of it.

Anyway, don’t feel shy about coming off of anon rather than continuing to send asks. We don’t really bite.

[qqueenofhades]

I love the term militant idealism from your last post. I wonder how you think about the ongoing removal of names on buildings and statues as Americans become woke about eugenics, systemic racism and sexism, and other fuck ups across white American history?

A couple years ago in August 2017, at the height of the furor over removing Confederate statues/imagery from public places, and after the Charlottesville white supremacist riots, I wrote this post in response to a similar question. It outlined extensively what the rationale for the “we should preserve history and keep those statues up!!!” defense is (i.e. racism and systematic amnesia). My position hasn’t changed much, and I think it demonstrates the depths of white fragility in this country and the utter inability of white Americans to think about what their history really consists of and what the construction of this geopolity has entailed, apart from all the fuzzy feel-good stuff and giant flags and slogans about Freedum!! and so forth. We… we realize that we live in a hyper-capitalist fasciso-patriotic militarized nightmare land, right? The giant flags and flyovers and the fact that the entire month of November in the National Football League is now “Salute to Service,” after they couldn’t stand one black man taking a knee for the national anthem? Where coaches wear camo on the sidelines and everyone acts like they actually give a crap about veterans aside from their use as convenient propaganda? We… we know this isn’t normal, right?

See, I do think there is a useful application and a genuine need for militant idealism. It just isn’t in throwing slogans or personal attacks at each other on the Twitter echo chamber, or any argument at all on social media about politics, culture, entertainment, fictional ships, etc. Most people picking fights on social media really aren’t doing a whole fuck of a lot of anything useful in the real world. The internet has brought a lot of use into our lives, and indeed we cannot function without it, which is a little terrifying (turn off the internet for 24 hours across the entire world and welp, nice knowing you civilization). But it’s also morphed into a giant, ravenous beast that you really, really have to approach with caution in a whole different way from the “oh no you might meet a pedophile” panics of the 90s. (And I mean, there are still trash men everywhere, so it’s just with extra Terrible now. Winning?) You are not going to change this overwhelming, violent, omnipresent system by holding hands, playing nice, and singing Kumbaya. Sometimes, a little violence and militancy is needed in return. You need to stand up and play hard and not back down. And since the general liberal ethos is that “violence is always bad!!!/if you use violence you’re Just As Bad As Them!!!”, that is cut off and stigmatized in the name of social order.

The thing is, this is the first time in American history that there has been even any kind of visible and sustained public debate on whether these things that we’ve just all gone with for so long are actually acceptable. That’s why we have “OK Boomer” and similar movements, because young people are taking a long hard look at what they’ve been left with and are understandably being like are you fucking kidding me. But as I have also been discussing, a certain subset of young people are also extremely insistent on having the Right Opinion and Only The Right Opinion, and that demonstrating any uncertainty or looking like they’re not sufficiently Woke is Unacceptable. This is why I can never get students to talk in class. They have been raised in a culture where they will be mercilessly punished for being Wrong, and it’s hard to conceptualize a space, i.e. a university classroom, where you’re allowed to start at zero and work your way up with dialogue and engagement. That just isn’t how it works anymore, and frankly, we have to blame social media for a lot of it. Especially when combined with CEOs (why yes, I am looking at you, Twitter not banning Nazis and just all of Mark Zuckerberg) who are more willing to cater to the alt-right in the name of “freedom” than to enforce any kind of standards for public discourse or try to tell 21st-century Americans that they can’t have something they want. Our society is built on the maxim that All Consumption Is Good Consumption, Consume More Now. And… that’s a problem.

I feel like I may be getting away from the point of what exactly you asked, but these things are all interconnected. If someone is going to actually translate internet outrage to real-world action, and actually put some skin in the game and fight against the terrifying normalization of these narratives: please. We need more people to do that. But real life is scary in a way that the internet isn’t. You might face immediate consequences for something. You might have someone tell you that you’re wrong and you can’t just block or mute them. How do you change someone’s mind without the two of you just yelling pithy, polarized slogans at each other? It’s fuckin’ hard work. So it’s easier to just retweet someone that you agree with, to other people who agree with you. And so the cycle goes.

Obviously, I 100% support any and all efforts to bring to the collective American conscience just how fucked up American history actually is. But I sometimes worry that the shortcomings in the methods used to do so make it easier for the tired old class of establishment bigots to dismiss as “snowflakes.” After all, I’ve just been ripping into the self-righteous infighting and tendency to rigid ideological purity and insularism in the left, and… what do we do about that? I don’t know. We can’t just immediately remove people from the entire contextualising framework in which they’ve grown up and made meaning and understood themselves. We can try to educate them, but presenting people who have already made up their minds with conflicting information really does not do much. It usually makes them double down on the positions they already hold, because they can feel unfairly victimized by the people who Just Don’t Get It. It can oftentimes feel hopeless, but we have to do it anyway.

So yes. We should take down statues of Confederate generals. This goes without saying. The “we shouldn’t pretend it never happened” defense is functional only to a point. As I said in the other post, Confederate statues can go into storage. They don’t have to be destroyed, if it’s really so vital that we keep them. But their enforced presence in public life is an act of white supremacist violence, and their defenders know it. Besides, how about, uh, we try goddamn being able to talk about what the Confederacy really stood for first, instead of clinging to it as a token that is specifically intended to deflect public debate or constructive discourse on the issue?

This also reminds me of the recent backlash happening on historic plantations in the South. These are often beautiful manor houses with grounds, and they are tourist attractions. They are also, brace yourself for grossness, popular locations for weddings. (I don’t know why, but White People.) The tour guides at these places have finally been empowered to talk somewhat more honestly about how all this beauty was built by slave labor, and white tourists hate it. They tie themselves into knots about how slavery wasn’t that bad or how the Civil War was about “states’ rights” or why are you bringing this up now, that was Just What Our Bad Ancestors Did. This… this is the level we are still at. It’s bad. The white tourists seem to feel that they can go to, again, a plantation in the South and just enjoy the beauty and not to be “forced” to hear about slavery. It spoils the illusion. They want to keep living this way, so they throw fits, and why shouldn’t they? The entire establishment of this country thus far has supported them. It threatens their whole identity. It must be destroyed. And I just… sigh.

Anyway. This has gotten away from me, and I’m still not sure if I answered your question. Sorry. But there you have it.

[un-enfant-immature]

Health class is outdated, so Lessonbee wants to fix it

Sex education in the United States is complicated.

One example: For decades, the United States invested billions into abstinence-only programs. Eventually, schools rejected government funding for these programs and pushed a more comprehensive and medically accurate agenda. Even with progress, schools across the country continue to reckon with a legacy of inaccuracy. And the government is still funding abstinence-only programs.

It’s bad news for students, and for founder of Lessonbee Reva McPollom, a change is long overdue. She can personally vouch for how non-comprehensive education in health classes can isolate students.

As a child, McPollom said she was called a tomboy and felt confused because she identified as a female. There was no lesson teaching the danger of gender stereotypes and norms.

“I felt wrong for liking sports, for wanting to play drums, I felt wrong for everything that I loved or liked or attached myself too as part of my identity,” she said.

The silent suffering, she says, continued through high school: “If you look at my senior yearbook, like I’m not even in it, I just totally erased myself by that point.”

Reva McPollom, the founder of Lessonbee (Image Source: Lessonbee)

After working as a journalist, digital marketer and a software engineer, McPollom returned to her past with a new idea. She founded Lessonbee, a more comprehensive health education curriculum provider to express diverse scenarios in schools. The company’s goal is to help students avoid what she had to go through: missing out on the joy of education and feeling worthy enough to learn.

The company sells a curriculum that covers a range of topics, from sex education to race to mental health, that integrates into existing K-12 school districts as a separate standalone course. The topics themselves then break down into smaller focus areas. For example, with the race unit launching soon Lessonbee will tackle the effects of race and ethnicity on quality of care, maternal health and food insecurity.

Lessonbee has hundreds of educational videos and interactive lessons created by teachers and the company, updated regularly. Each lesson also comes with a downloadable guide that describes content, objectives and recommendations for homework and quizzes. Lessonbee gives a guide for how to create culturally inclusive education, in line with standards put out by National Health Education and National Sexuality Education.

Image Source: Lessonbee

“It needs to meet all types of kids, regardless of where they’re at,” McPollom said.

One example scenario in the curriculum includes a student who starts having sex and then misses her period. Learners are then responsible for choosing what to do next, who to talk to and what they should do next time. It’s a “choose your adventure”-style learning experience.

Students can log onto the platform and take self-paced classes on different health units, ranging from sex education to mental health and racism. The lessons are taught through text-message scenarios or gamified situations to make sure students are actively engaging with the content, McPollom tells TechCrunch.

Image Source: Lessonbee

State policy regarding education is often a nightmare of intricacies and politics. This is part of the reason so few startups try to solve it. If Lessonbee were to pull off its goal, it would initiate bigger conversations around racism and health into a kid’s day-to-day.

McPollom is currently pitching the service to school districts, which have tight budgets, and venture capitalists, who say they are open for business. So far, the company has 600 registered schools on its platform.

“It’s a non-core academic subject so it’s the last priority, and there’s just inequity all over the place,” she said. “There’s a mismatch of privacy policies across the United States handled differently and it kind of dictates the quality of health education that you’re going to receive.”

Lessonbee subscription is priced low to be more accessible, starting at $16 per learner annually. Individual courses start at $8 per learner annually.

Today, McPollom announced that she has raised $920,000 in financing.

As for the future, McPollom views her go-to market health class strategy as Lessonbee’s “Trojan horse.” She wants to integrate the culturally diverse curriculum into social studies or science classes, and cover how interconnected the subjects are and their ties to inequity and health.

McPollam says the team is developing an anti-racism course to introduce for the fall in the wake of the recent protests against police brutality. Topics in the anti-racism course include the effect of race and ethnicity on quality of care, ways racism impacts maternal health and structural racism and food insecurity.

“We’re hoping to evolve to this idea of health across the curriculum,” she said. “For health to be effective, for you to actually move the needle, health needs to be holistic.”

[decolonizejewish]

a selective decolonial history of Jews in France

basically France has been playing Jews against Muslims and Muslims against Jews for years, since way before Israel was created, during colonial times. 

for example in colonial Algeria, the native population of Algeria (both Jewish and Muslim) was initially under the "indigenous" status which meant they were second-class citizen in the colonial legal regime. and then in 1870 the Jews of Algeria were granted full national rights as French citizens by default, which suddenly gave them privilege over Muslim Algerians who were still under the "indigenous" status. 

this divide and conquer strategy made the Jews of Algeria suspect of being on the side of colonial power - which was partly true. many were in favor of Algerian independance and participated in the national liberation movement and resistance against colonialism, but in terms of privilege, they had indeed gained a superior social, legal and economic status. and many therefore sided with the French because that is what served their material interests.

before the "Décret Crémieux" (the 1870 law that made all Jews of Algeria French), there was also a long process of assimilation of North African Jews into French culture, which was a deliberate process mainly implemented through colonial Jewish schools created by the "Alliance Israelite Universelle". these schools had the explicit purpose of "civilizing" the Jews living in these "barbarian" and "savage" lands, to enlighten them with the modern French culture etc, so they were very quickly and forcibly assimilated with European clothes, French first names, and of course repression of the use of Arabic language. these schools did the job within one generation. Arabic / Judeo-Arabic speaking parents sent their kids to schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle where they were taught in French and became assimilated and lost their cultures. my father was raised in a French colonial school in Tunisia and he never even learnt Arabic although his grandparents spoke Arabic at home, and his parents understood it perfectly. 

after the decolonization, most of Jews of North Africa were forced to leave because they had been given this special status that made them suspects of double allegiance in the eyes of the rest of the population, they were considered traitors, they were not considered as fully Tunisian/Algerian/Moroccan anymore, so some didn’t feel like they had a place there anymore post-decolonization. some had been given subaltern jobs in the colonial administration, they had been hired to do France's dirty jobs, so now that the countries had gained independance the colonial administration was gone and they lost their jobs. France's Jewish population is i think majority descendents of post-colonial immigrants - although it's just my impression but i might be wrong.

it must be noted that Adolphe Crémieux (the parliament member who passed that decree in 1870) and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the organization who began this forced assimilation of Jews from colonized lands, were white French Zionist Jews. and they held really fucked up racist and colonialist positions. they stole our North African, Maghrebi, Arab/Amazigh Jewish cultures to homogenize all Jewish cultures to look like, sound like, smell like, feel like and taste like French European Jewish culture. their writing really reflect the “white man’s burden” type of mentality, they felt like they had to “save” Arab/Amazigh Jews and educate them and civilize them. just like Israel has been doing too, inventing a monolithic Jewish culture that is so colonial and so European and so Islamophobic and anti-Arab, negating all diversity of Jewish cultures, and creating a new language (modern Hebrew), new names (Tal, Dor, Or, Ronit), just stripping Jews from their cultures of origin and pretending they all have the same “neutral” Israeli culture... anyway. 

many had left, but many Jews had chosen remained in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco after the independence. they belonged in their countries and were attached to them, they felt fully Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan. But after the creation of Israel, antisemitic hostility grew. in 1967, after the 6-days War, there were violent anti-Jew riots in Tunisia for example, the synagogue burned, the whole community left and came to France. unlike Moroccan Jews who massively went to Israel through shady zionist displacement programmes, most Algerian & Tunisian Jews had no interest in Israel and felt deeply Tunisian & Algerian. They didn’t go to Israel when they were forced to flee, but instead they went to France, to escape the rising antisemitism in their home countries, in which they had been existing as communities since before even the Arab Conquest. 

There have been Jews in North Africa since before Islamization, since before the Romans. We are indigenous to North Africa, as most Jews of the Maghreb are Amazigh (also known as "Berber"). for example in Morocco most Jews are Chleh (an amazigh people of Morocco, of which some are Muslims and some are Jews and were all living in the same villages, speaking the same languages, before the creation of Israel and massive displacement). 

now the Jewish communities of Tunisia & Algeria are almost extinct, and they all went to live in France were they assimilated after a while, but still many of them live in racially & socially segregated neighborhoods along with North African Muslims. but after decolonization and immigration, France did not stop its colonial practise of trying to create tension. so now the government and the media use Jews as ammunition against Muslims in the Islamophobic propaganda. and everybody knows France is pretty much a laboratory of islamophobia. so then because public officials use Jews against Muslims so much, its just stirs hatred and they play dangerously with fire, and Jews end up being considered allies of white power. basically capitalism and white supremacy use Jews as a human shield, a scapegoat to receive all the resentment and anger of poor people and people of color. you don't have money? it's because of the Jews. you are being exploited? it's the Jews. as a Muslim you are denied your rights in this country? look at the Jews, they are not treated as bad as you are, they do not get the same treatment because they are France’s “favorite child”. etc. which then designates Jews as an easy target for terrorism, for hatred, for anger, etc. ‘cause of course if a parent keeps designating one of his kids as the favorite, and conspicuously treating his two kids with double standards, of course the “good treatment” from the parent will ‘cause anger, jealousy and resentment from the sibling who feels neglected and treated unfairly. it is an intentional policy in the case of France and its two religious minorities, to cause oppressed people to misdirect anger and social unrest at the “favorite sibling” instead of lookin at the oppressor. and of course the government and the media also keep repeating that there is no antisemitism in France, except for the one imported by the immigration from North Africa, that antisemitism is inherent to Islam, that all North African Muslims are antisemitic, etc, that it is very dangerous to be Jewish in neighborhoods with lots of immigrants, etc, so that Jews will start being more islamophobic and distrustful of Muslims, etc. the whole thing becomes performative. they just repeat and repeat and repeat those lies until they become truths. it's just a horrible mess. the more state Islamophobia grows, the more popular antisemitism is growing too, and there are crazy people making a lot of money and feeding it... it's just a nightmare for all of us, Jews and Muslims of color being used against each other by white supremacy and being victims of its plotting against us all. 

the main French Jewish organization, the CRIF, is even more problematic than AIPAC. extremely Zionist, extremely Islamophobic, right-wing, and dominated by rich white/Ashkenazi Jews. they get to be the voice of Jews in France although they do not really represent what most French Jews believe, but they have coopted Jewish identity here so much that the French Jews who DON'T agree with them have almost given up on feeling Jewish, they/we feel almost ashamed to be Jewish, it is very hard to still want to identify as Jewish when that is what Jewish has come to mean in France in public discourse and in the media : Islamophobic, anti-Arab, Ashkenazi, White Supremacist, assimilationist, capitalist right-wing conservative, etc. All the Jews that have a voice as intellectuals in the mainstream media, Bernard Henry Levy, Elizabeth Levy, Eric Zemmour, Alain Finkielkraut, Gilles William Goldnadel, are extremely Zionist, racist, nationalist, and/or bordering on extreme right wing. the only ones i can think of who claim a visible Arab/North African Jewish identity/culture are all comedians/buffoons/clowns - Gad Elmaleh, Cyril Hanouna, and Michel Boujenah, so not political or intellectual or cultural commentors, they are not taken seriously.

this is an unfinished draft for an article that i might someday write 

[trusswork]

on transgenderism & metaphysics. ?

"But when trans folks are systematically reviled, mocked and disempowered; when they are disproportionately harassed by police, arrested and brutalized -- both on the street and in custody -- and when there are active campaigns or existing laws in many countries to deny them basic human rights, one cannot merely have a polite discussion about the nature of gender and sex. ... It is complicity with systemic violence and active encouragement of oppression. ...

It is not permissible to debate the lives of people who are oppressed and murdered. Those who treat this like an intellectual game should not be engaged with. They should be told to [unprintable here] [...] Every time.”

- Mark Lance, "Taking Trans Lives Seriously,” InsideHigherEd

When individuals are discriminated against in protected contexts -- for example law enforcement, education or medicine -- because of metaphysical claims that they make, this is unjust; we owe it to them to remedy the discriminatory behavior. But it is not illegitimate for us also to debate the sense and validity of the metaphysical claims, or to argue what nondiscriminatory consequences those claims may have.

Law enforcement and medicine, for example, can be held to proper standards of practice and care, with or without endorsing a metaphysics. (This can even extend to the courtesy and the grant of dignity involved in using preferred names and pronouns as reasonably possible (on pronouns, see more below) - the uproar over the inviolable sacredness of transgender names and pronouns, however, loses ground.  

My claim here, of course, is that while transgender persons’ claims to equitable treatment by law enforcement, doctors, schools, etc., are entirely legitimate, and should be enforced, transgender claims (and this, I think, is distinct from claims made by the gay community, for example, or by ethnic groups) generally go an additional step to become metaphysical in nature: after all, these claims are not, or not only, about feeling or thought, but also about reality; not about gender identity, but about (nonsubjective) gender itself. It is always secondary that the transwoman, for example, feels like woman, dresses as one, lives as one, or perhaps undergoes surgery to do so; the most important claim is that she IS one (that "transwomen are women, period” ...). Despite the deeply subjective experience of trans identity, the claim always ends by being objective.*

It is not enough, as with gay persons, to guarantee to trans persons the negative freedoms to love, to express themselves publicly, to cohabit, enjoy spousal benefits, marry, raise children; trans people want to do all of these things as well, but they want one thing more - to be regarded, in language as a marker of objective fact, as their transgender. “Homosexuality," by contrast, names a biological and/or psychological orientation, something certified potentially both by subjective expression and by evidence of behavior.````   “Transgenderism” somehow demands more: that, after an initial certification by the transgendered individual, those around the individual re-certify the individual's status from without, not via connections in evidence, but via a running show of respect for and belief in their declaration. Famously, this involves the use of the requested gendered names, words and pronouns -- including newly minted pronouns (zhe/zher are not the only ones expected in some quarters) -- to suit the case. Most famously, it involves public recognition of gender by admission to single-gender spaces (bathrooms, etc.). In short, this certification cannot take place unless, always and everywhere, the right language is used and the right positive permissions are given. Any withholding of this certification, in opinions such as Dr. Lance’s, is tantamount to violent assault; is any doubt and discussion to be regarded as mockery or abuse?^^^

Homosexual persons seek no such positive intervention:** letting them "be who they are” is a matter of classic liberal freedom and privacy, of leaving them in peace and all appropriate autonomy to live their lives. The gay individual does not expect to be positively (determinately) treated according to a special self-conception, as if some fact about him/herself (which might well be confusing or ambiguous to others) needs to be reflected back to him/her in language and programmed space. He/she expects to be let alone, more or less, to get on with things, as heterosexual persons are permitted to do.

Many African-Americans, to take another example, are even less eager for any metaphysics to be attached to their being (and this is true even where they are concerned with an identity politics of cultural cohesion and distinctiveness); such a metaphysics was, after all, the nightmare of the American nineteenth century, with its notions of the three-fifths person, its ethnologies of a race deemed less departed from animal ancestors, and so on. Respect and self-realization, for many African-Americans, involves being let alone in the freedoms and rights enjoyed by those around them - treated, if anything, less as though their skin color and ancestry comes with some special status of essential being.

But transgendered persons seem to require just such reflection to successfully be or become themselves,^ and the most interesting case is that of the pronoun. He/him, she/her, zhe/zher, and so on: the most important fact about all of them is that they are pronouns in the third person. They are used when an individual is spoken of, not spoken to (in which case the genderless, numberless “you” is still held to be appropriate). It is possible, of course, to contemplate many situations in which one would use the third person with the referent transgender person present: A says to B, in trans C’s presence, “C will help you with this job.” But fundamentally -- grammatically, logically and metaphysically -- the third person presumes the immediate absence of its referent. And so, when transgender person C is not so present, we are asked (never mind if the asking is too often a demand), by C or in C’s name, to use the requested pronouns. To police ourselves always to respect the metaphysics of that which we have learned that someone is -- an objective metaphysics which can only ever proceed from subjective certification (for no one can know for anyone else that they are transgender), from psychological certainty not just about feeling but about reality -- from what psychoanalysis called “fantasy”. (A transgender person may dress as their transgender, but need not; may undertake surgical alteration to approach as far as possible their transgender’s physiology, but need not; and so on. There are no sufficient outward facts that can deliver the truth of an individual’s transgenderism -- only the subjective say-so [not a fiat but an est] of the individual can do this; in the hazardous terms we have been forced to coin for children in this context, a say-so which is “ consistent, persistent, and insistent.” And yet, once the inward, subjective fact of transgenderism has been delivered, all of human reality must objectively reflect this fact in the objective worlds of language and space. This is a demand not simply for respect, but for belief - which can be defined, in a medieval-Aristotelian mode which seems to fit here, as metaphysical certainty, in this case not so different than that surrounding transubstantiation: a conviction that one is literally another.)

If we can adapt and truncate Nicolas Chamfort’s notion that “love is the exchange of two fantasies,” we can begin to see what is asked for at this extent by the transgendered individual: that we negatively free them from unjust restraint, yes; that we render them all “basic human rights”, yes; but also that we join in their fantasy, their psychological certainty (physically and behaviorally reflected more, or less, or even not at all) about the metaphysics of their being. It is not enough to treat a transwoman as a woman (indeed, this alone would be condescending) -- we must believe that she (she) is a woman. The transgendered individual is, by Chamfort’s lights, asking of society at large what the gay individual does not ask: to be not merely let alone, not merely protected, but lovedin their reality. Believed. I will say that you are a capitalist, a mother, a teacher, a ruler, a criminal, a victim, a soldier, a seeker, a child of God, a miraculous mass of cells and water and energy, if you will say that I am woman or that I am a man. This is the exchange of fantasies. And who is to say that the mutual owing of such belief is not the future. It is very painful, after all, to have one’s vision of reality denied - to be disbelieved, for example, that this event happened, or happened in this way. How much more painful to be disbelieved, not when one says I feel like this person (for this statement, assuming good faith, can never be disbelieved, because it can never be inaccurate), but when one says I AM this person, or that I am this person in this way (a definition of gender).^^

Here, for now, we can pause in the “complicit[y]” and the “intellectual game” about which Dr. Lance frets. (And if this kind of discussion is an intellectual game, certainly Dr. Lance condemns all of philosophy, whether the social stakes are high or low; perhaps only discussions of abstruse topics like Kantian metaphysics, for example, are safe from this terrible complicity in oppression; and yet it is metaphysics we have been debating ...)

NOTES

*  One interesting specimen of buy-in to this metaphysics can be found in the mainstream western press, who are scrupulous in avoiding misgendering or “deadnaming” trans people in their reporting. Caitlyn Jenner, to use the easiest example, is always "Caitlyn" and she/her; commonsense historical references to 'when she was known as Bruce Jenner’ and the like are used, but for the most part, a vaguely Orwellian overwriting of this person’s physiological and psychological history is preferred.

````  I am indebted to Brian Leiter’s post’s remarks on potential nonsubjective aspects of homosexual identity.

^^^  Holly Lawford-Smith: “Perhaps there is simply a fundamental moral disagreement over the extent to which a person’s internally experienced identity matters, and should be respected and affirmed by others.”

Also worth considering is another remark of HLS, positing (or at least most usefully suggesting) that feminists might argue “that we should act as if trans women are truly women, even if we know they are not,” even if HLS notes that such a rationale would not pass public outrage muster, and that accepting it would demolish (could say reframe) the transgender project. Treating transwomen as if they were women, i.e., as a heuristic device, might help us to realize that ideal stated near the start of this post, that all reasonable care and responsibility can be given and taken without subscribing to a literal metaphysics -- that while it will not be possible for a doctor to examine a person with a penis as though they had female genitals, or to meaningfully and professionally discuss menstruation (and so “transwomen are women” cannot mean, “transwomen have female genitals,” the area of the discourse that tends to cross over into thick fantasy, see below), the doctor can accord all standards that comport with the anatomy and the psychology presented.

**  This is not really accurate to say: as soon as gay persons seek access to the law of marriage (thence spousal rights, etc.), which has historically been predicated on gender, they petition for a positive intervention. (Indeed, have transgender persons had a smoother road to marriage because their insistence on literal re-gendering comports with that predication; a man and a transwoman may have been easier for statute to accommodate than two men. What has the law been here?) The seeking of marriage rights for gay people does also come closest to transgendered persons seeking access to single-sex spaces (which they wish, essentially, to make single-gender spaces); the difficulty emerges because, in the gay marriage case, acquiescence of all parties is a given.

^  Hegelianism and a range of psychoanalytic theory will object that reflection is essential to selfhood of all types; while this is convincing, I suggest that such an assertion speaks of autonomous or at least emergent processes; transgender identity seems to seek positively to engineer such reflection on a comprehensive scale, and from the standpoint of a consciousness which seems, to this extent, quite already sufficiently formed ..

^^  From a philosophy of mind standpoint, feelings may of course be objective facts as well; and yet not of the same kind as gender-facts, physiological or other. Nevertheless, I do not assert that there is no room for confusion, as ever, at the subjective/objective interfaces.

[damnesdelamer]

I’m certainly not advocating actual pacifism, and I don’t think that’s what @lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers ​is suggesting either, I think we’re just aware of the risk involved in presenting proletarian resistance as solely armed conflict. It’s my view that outright pacifism amounts to neoliberal complicity in hegemonic control, and speaks of the privilege of being safe from the state violence you rightly point out. But there’s a threat in openly promoting armed revolt, to both ourselves (the threat of being labelled an extremist, whether that amounts to discrediting our voices or being imprisoned or murdered) and to any movement we support (the threat of frightening away sympathetic left-leaning potential allies, or being characterised as vigilantism, with which antifa movements have struggled globally).

I also think that espousing Maoism highlights the pitfalls of becoming the monsters we would see destroyed (to invoke a moral nihilist whose only value here is perhaps in iconoclasm). I’m not going to pretend Mao hasn’t offered us valuable rhetoric, but as ever, I believe we must prioritise praxis.

As for the state’s supposed ‘monopoly on violence’, I think it’s important to consider what kind of armed force is a necessary evil, and what is the very brutality we seek to purge from society, but above all not to glorify it. ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’, as we know from a seminal voice in Marxist-feminism. And this highlights another significant point: whose people are we serving?

It’s true that a great deal of leftist discourse essentially ignores what is now recognised as intersectionality, or the need to acknowledge separate layers of oppression and marginalisation (such as those based on cultural background or sexual identity). Indeed one of the greatest arguments against Marx himself is that his critiques don’t necessarily reflect the political economy to which subaltern groups may be subject, let us say, let alone the 21st Century as a whole.

For this reason it is vital that we engage with theoretical frameworks which speak from these other perspectives; Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci are crucial for our understanding of capitalist hegemony, but at this point a large proportion of their value is in illustrating how little has changed, while Audre Lorde, Donna Haraway, Leslie Feinberg, Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Gayatri Spivak should ideally equip us to confront the realities faced by others and selves alike in this nightmare which is late stage capitalism. I would like to offer examples that better reflect indigenous or digital age concerns, but alas I know none.

In terms of actual revolution, I think what’s most important at this juncture is (Leninist) internationalism, sharing resources (including online), establishing support networks, standing ready, ‘souffler nous-mêmes notre forge’, reiterating again and again that we must strive unflinchingly for our lofty ideals but always celebrate even the smallest of improvements. But moving forward…

Is there anything left to us but to organise and fight?

Solidarity forever.

You got any plans for starting a revolution? I think revolutions what we all want but i don't think anyone even knows how that would happen. We only really know how to protest, (it's all we've ever really learnt about in school i guess; MLK, Gandi, etc)

I definitely wouldn’t suggest I have all the answers, or even any of them.

Protest and revolution are definitely two very different things.

Someone who I very much respect said to me relatively recently that protest isn’t direct action. I am not sure this is true, but I definitely think we need to move away from protest politics and towards a longer and more sustainable movement.

I don’t know exactly what that movement would look like, but I would like to think it would involve strikes, squatting, possibly attempts to seize the means of production beyond squatting? I do think we need to redevelop the leftist class consciousness that Thatcher destroyed in the UK.

I am not advocating for violence, but I think it is inevitable that any movement of that kind will be met with violence from the state, and we need to be prepared for that.

I definitely think, from a UK centric point of view, there is an argument for looking at the IRA and their tactics (from before home rule and afterwards). I’d also look at the Russian and French revolutions- whilst bearing in mind how much technology has moved on.

If you’re not in a union (and you work) then join one. It’s also worth looking up various community based organisations in your area. Practice solidarity.

If people have thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them!

[theliterateape]

Neither Left nor Right: Eventually Embracing Ethical Universalism

By Don Hall

“You sound like that guy —Tim Allen—on that TV show. You should go to FOX and see if you could get your own show!”

“I don’t think of you as a Leftie but more like a rational person.”

“What happened to you since you moved to Vegas? Are you wearing a MAGA hat yet?”

“I told him that you were a Chicago Left kind of guy and that saying things like ‘Chinese Virus’ was going to set you off.”

“What? You mean you support the protests? I thought you weren’t a libtard!”

The strange need be a part of one side or the other like political thought is a high school football game has become more pervasive in the past decade or so. Reducing a population of 330 million individuals to the simplistic Red or Blue is no different than the ridiculous notion spawned by Robin DiAngelo and other “anti-racist” proselytizers that the very notion of individualism is a racist myth. Lump everyone into a sub-category, stereotype them, and go with that.

Friends back in Chicago believe I was a full Lefty (which is a bit like the idea from the Ben Stiller comedy Tropic Thunder that an actor should never go “full retard”) until I had my run-in with the Poisonous Latino Storyteller and her gang of Fuckheads. Not true. I was writing about the bizarre hypocrisy of the Extreme Left on my old blog years prior and due almost entirely from my experience of dating and living with a communist and racial activist.

I have never been “full retard” in this ideological gameplay. Perhaps because I’m too contrarian to ever completely follow a dogma or maybe because I’m just in love with having both sides of the coin despise me. Dunno. Don’t much care. I’m Irish, and Freud stated that the Irish cannot be psychoanalyzed so stop trying, already.

I find pretty much every single syllable of the Right Wing position on practically everything to be a bit noxious, so I’d gamble that I’m not conservative. There are conservatives who hate Donald Trump. I appreciate their hatred and that they will do their best to get rid of him but I am not on their side. 

Likewise, I find the Culture of the Woke to be equally obnoxious and hypocritical. I see a coin with White Supremacy on one side and Critical Race Theory on the other. Both equally racist, both equally separatist, two sides of the same racist coin. To posit that rationality, being objective, relying on science, and being on time are vestiges of whiteness is just a flip of the coin to state that black people are irrational, wholly subjective, anti-science, and perpetually late. That shit is flat out racist.

It occurs to me that Twitter has become the FOX News of the Left, an echo chamber, an ideological bubble used to merely spread dogma and one-sided perspective. It’s just as dishonest, just as angry. The battle has devolved in to which side gets to be Big Brother in our Orwellian nightmare.

I suppose I am so much more vocally critical of the Extreme Left because I still consider myself, well, Left. In terms of embracing a label, the most recent one that fits is from Hidden Tribes which, after taking the quiz, indicates that I am a Traditional Liberal:

Traditional Liberals (11 percent of the population) tend to be cautious, rational, and idealistic. They value tolerance and compromise. They place great faith in institutions.

I’m no longer confused at my place on the ideological spectrum. Since Newt Gingrich adopted the politics of obstruction and winning at all cost—his no-compromise solution to power—the GOP has been playing an ugly game, polarizing a base of rigid social conservatives and using those social issues (abortion, gay rights, civil rights, and immigration scares) to do their level best to roll back everything FDR did.

According to most I meet in this camp, I may as well be wearing a Hillary Clinton pantsuit and singing L'Internationale while using my phone to film the police.

The Left was fairly fractured anyway, but the Woke nonsense was at best fringe until we had a nationwide shutdown due to pandemic and everyone spent a lot more time on Twitter. Suddenly, these crackpot extremes of socialist, Marxist, and the wholesale rejection of white people, men, and heterosexuality took hold on a confined population looking for something to do with their pent up frustration.

According to most I know in this camp, I’m a Neo-Nazi, KKK-sympathizer who routinely sexually harasses women while checking up their skirts for a hidden penis.

The core of the far-right's worldview is organicism, the idea that society functions as a complete, organized and homogeneous living being. Adapted to the community they wish to constitute or reconstitute (whether based on ethnicity, nationality, religion or race), the concept leads them to reject every form of universalism.

The core of the far-left's worldview is Identity Marxism, or the idea that society is comprised of two categories, the Oppressor and the Oppressed utilized in the same manner as traditional Marxism’s duality of the Workers and the Capitalists. Adapted to the community they wish to constitute or reconstitute (whether based on ethnicity, nationality, religion or race), the concept leads them to reject every form of universalism.

I, being the Traditional Liberal I am (maybe I should start a bowling league?), favor ethical universalism, that is the position that there is a universal ethic which applies to all people, regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, sexuality or other distinguishing feature, and all the time.

To quote the late, great John Lewis “We all live in the same house, we all must be part of the effort to hold down our little house. When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just... do something about it. Say something. Have the courage. Have the backbone. Get in the way. Walk with the wind. It's all going to work out.” [Bold is all mine.]

Funny that. That belief used to get me in the Leftie Clubhouse. As the Far Left and the Far Right continue to devolve into warring factions dragging the rest of us into their vortex, it seems that those of us less gullible and more skeptical of cultspeak have no clubhouse to occupy.

It’s okay, though. By the numbers (I know—you Far Right guys think the numbers are FAKE and you Far Left guys think the numbers represent white supremacy) there are far more of we Ethical Universalists than the two of the extremes combined.

I’m alright being in that club.

[lunaspatial400]

Palaces for the People / 99% Invisible

Podcast host Roman Mars speaks with Eric Klinenberg.

This podcast by 99% Invisible has some really interesting discussion about social infrastructure, what it actually means and how important it actually is. Roman Mars chats with the author of “Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization and the Decline of Civic Life”, Eric Klinenberg. Klinenberg’s book is based on his beleif that “a healthy community is not simply held together by shared values, but by shared spaces – physical, real world locations – where people across all strata, and ages, and races, and creeds bump into each other and form connections”(Mars). Klinenberg argues that these kinds of spaces, social infrastructure, is unappreciated and overlooked. He believes social infrastructure “could help solve or at least mitigate, some of our most pressing challenges, like isolation, polarization, education, crime, and even climate change”(Mars).

The title ‘Palaces for the people’ was taken from philanthropist and capitalist Andrew Carnegie (1887–1919). Cargenie himself was an immigrant to America, and thought one of the amazing things about the countries was the institutions there which gave much better opportunities for people, allowing them to do better than they could have in their home countries. He went on to fund more than 2500 libraries around the world which he began to call ‘palaces of the people’. Cargenie’s view saw it them as places in which everyone, even those “who worked in a factory or lived in a tenement building, and experienced life as crowded, and uncomfortable, and rushed most of the time, could go and escape all of that”(Klinenberg).

Libraries could be said as the “perfect example” of social infrastructure, so what is that? During his research and exploration Klinenberg has observed that those places in which social infrastructure is invested in gain many social advantages. We become far more likely to interact with people around us, whether they are friends and family or neighbors who we haven’t gotten to know. And when we don’t invest in social infrastructure – if we neglect it, if we let it fall apart – we tend to grow more isolated”(Klinenberg).

When Klinenberg first thought of the significance of social infrastructure, it was when he studied the deadly 1995 heat wave in Chicago. He studied the death patterns, and not surprisingly the poorer and segregated neighbourhoods had higher death rates. But the peculiar pattern that he found was a few neighbourhoods that had the demographic profile of ones that would suffer badly, were actually quite resilient. There were neighbouring neighbours, separated by just streets, almost demographically identical but one had a crazy high death rate. Klinenberg went on to go and spend time in those neighbourhoods, and what he discovered was of course, those with high death rates seemed to have depleted social infrastructure, and the resilient ones had social infrastructure that was well tended to. Everything was better taken care of. As the heatwave meant it was deadly to stay home, it makes sense how in the neighbourhoods where there was not much public areas to go, that didn’t feel safe to go or were comfortable suffered the most. “ I realized that the end of that project, actually, it was social infrastructure, not the traditional hard infrastructures that we normally think of, that explained who lived and who died that week in Chicago”(Klinenberg).

A few years later when Superstorm Sandy hit New York he emphasized the importance of infrastructure that “brings people together”, stressing this to all the teams for a competition called ‘Rebuild By Design’. One team approached him and said how they’ve listened to him about the importance of social infrastructure and they explained to him this amazing idea for something called a ‘resilience centre’. What they described, he discovered, was a library.

“At first I thought it was a little crazy, but then I realized that it was completely predictable and forgivable because we live in a moment where so many people think of the library as an obsolete institution, right? We think it’s a relic from another part of our history, and that it’s not used much by anyone. Even though it turns out that nothing could be further from the truth”(Klinenberg).

Discovering a need to spend more time in libraries Klinenberg started some physical exploration, visiting libraries all over the U.S. and discovering amazing things and ways people used the library. A favourite being a wii bowling tournament for the elderly, noting that not everyone is ‘booky’. Noted that these elderly were exactly the kind of people who would have been targewted in the chi cago heatwave…

“The complaint was people used to do things together collectively in formal groups, and now everyone, like in Putnam’s nightmare from 1999, everybody was just watching television at home together in the living room. Which I now think of … Now that I have kids who have their own mobile devices, that’s like a socialist utopian fantasy to me. Like, oh my God, if only we could have a night together watching the same screen, it would be amazing”(Klinenberg).

“There are so many people who just can’t afford books, and don’t have books at home, or have parents who speak another language, and they come to the library to learn to read and to learn to love books. And that’s amazing. Probably Carnegie anticipated that. But he probably would not have seen that libraries have now become the places where people who used to be incarcerated come more than any other institution to search for a job, to get help putting a resume together. He probably would not have anticipated that libraries have become the places where there’s more instruction for English as a second language, more citizenship classes than any other public institution. He probably didn’t anticipate that libraries would do things like karaoke hours for immigrant communities that want a good place to sing together.I don’t know that he would have seen all the teenagers who come to the library at the end of the school day because it’s the safest and warmest, or if you’re in a hot place, coolest place where you can study, apply for college, or just mess around and play video games in a social way. I’ll tell you, I’ve seen so many kids come to the libraries to play games. And when they played games together there, they did it in a way that was very collective and very social. It was not the stereotypical image of a kid in a hole, in their own basement being on their own. They were socializing in this very new way. Libraries are just doing an enormous number of things”(Klinenberg”.

Note: article in Forbes magazine about libraries being knocked down and replaced with amazon stores WTF, librarians of the world bound together through twitter and the article got taken down.

Not that libraries are the only social infrastructure that exists, but “they’re just about the most effective social infrastructure that I can imagine. And it is a shame that we don’t make more of them by maintaining them or updating them in the way that they deserve”(Klinenberg).

“And one of the things that’s so striking about libraries is that the local staff has the capacity and agency to develop programs that work for the community that they’re in”(Klinenberg).

“There’s no strong hard rule that says a library has to do X, Y, or Z thing”(Klinenberg).

Note: broken windows theory, and expirement - Pennsylvania Horticultural Society - small interventions - comparing the differently ‘taken care of’ places - 40% decline in gun voilence around the treated properties.

Libraries have the power to be a collective place but also enable privacy similar to parks.

Public ownership.

“We don’t want to force people out into the public realm, but my sense right now is that it’s the publicly-accessible public realm that’s really in short supply”(Klinenberg).

Note: Philadelphia, two African American guys Starbucks case. Idea - exclusivity of commercial places. “people just know that they’re not welcome because it costs $7 for coffee, or $9 for ice cream, or they don’t take cash at all, they’re there only for people with credit cards”(Klinenberg).

“I have to say one of the most amazing things I observed in the public libraries where I spent time, is that there are places where this impossible community of people who are so different from one another, come together, and all kinds of people who have real struggles, come to because there’s just not space for them anywhere else”(Klinenberg).

Libraries are safe places. And people respect them because people know that they themselves are being treated with respect.

Mark Zuckerberg ‘Facebook as the social infrastructure’. No one has spent more money on built social infrastructure than Mark Zuckerberg at his Facebook campus for his workers. Ironically, the people who work there don’t let their children use phones because they know how dangerous it can be as social infrastructure.

“If we want to support the kind of social life that we all need, regardless of our politics, regardless of our income, regardless of where we live, that we all need to live well and be better connected with each other, we’re going to have to find a way to invest in it”(Klinenberg).

MLA:

Klinenberg, Eric and Roman Mars. “Palaces for the People”. 99% Invisible, episode 346, 19 March 2019, Poor, Nigel and Earlonne Woods, hosts. "So Long." Ear Hustle, season 2, episode 19, Radiotopia, 20 June 2018, www.earhustlesq.com/episodes/2018/6/20/so-long.

[peakwealth]

Anarchy, but how?

                  ”Un monde s’effondre devant nos yeux, un vertige.”

                                          Maurice Gourdault-Montagne,

                          French ambassador to the People’s Republic of China

                                      (after the election of Donald Trump)

Modernity, entertainment and political power

(Electronic billboard, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, 2017)

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since the American journalist Robert D. Kaplan published his celebrated essay called "The Coming Anarchy" (1). Having spent time in West-Africa, Kaplan was traumatized by the chaos and lawlessness he had seen there. Surely, he thought, it prefigured a broader chaos awaiting the rest of the world. Rereading the essay today, I was struck by the tone of foreboding if not outright panic inspired by countries like Sierra Leone and Nigeria, messed up as they were in the early nineties.

Kaplan's Afrocentrist point of view proved to be overly narrow and pessimistic. My own experience tells me how alarming African countries can be, yet Sierra Leone somehow survived atrocious civil war, AIDS, ebola and multiresistant malaria. Nigeria too faces huge challenges, including an Islamist uprising, but the state has not collapsed. And not all of Africa is as violent as Sierra Leone, Somalia or South-Sudan. Elsewhere in the world, Brazil, Pakistan or India have not become totally "ungovernable" as Kaplan feared, at least not for now.

So, crystal balls being what they are, Kaplan got it wrong from time to time. He saw Turkey rising in stature and moderation, and predicted the end of the Arab-Israeli military confrontation. He also anticipated the "peaceful dissolution of Canada" following the separation of Québec (becoming "North-America's most cohesive and crime-free nation-state (...) based on the bedrock of Roman Catholicism and Francophone identity").

Not quite.

On the other hand, it is striking how Kaplan's journalistic radar picked up much of today's global disorder as it was taking shape in the early nineties. Looked at in retrospect, it seems logical and predictable, which, of course, is often the case with things in retrospect. Put together, it provides something of an analytical grid to help us understand what is going on in the world right now.

The first sign of impending anarchy Kaplan singled out was the gathering pace of environmental decay, the scarcity of resources, dwindling water supplies, soil erosion and the rising level of the seas. Nature had started to push back against the billions of parasitical humans who were destroying their natural habitat. But most politicians didn’t see it, or they were still in denial.

Beyond the trouble with the finite nature of nature, Kaplan saw a polarized world ('bifurcated' was the word he used) where nation states would lose their grip, their authority and their monopoly on the use of armed force. "More power will fall into the hands of less educated, less sophisticated groups". One of the reasons was that 95 % of the demographic growth would occur in the poorest regions of the world. This would trigger a revenge of the poor, "the people least able to bring up children in a modern society." Some of them "to whom the comfort and stability of the middle class is utterly unknown" might be tempted by revolt and violence.

Anarchy and conflict would not only proliferate in a world exposed to "nebulous and anarchic regionalisms", they would provide an outlet for people who "find liberation in violence".  Often lacking discernible patterns, conflicts would be "influenced by the worst refuse of Western pop culture and ancient tribal hatreds". Ever-mutating chaos would result and "democracy would be less and less relevant to the larger issue of governability". In ever more fragmented societies, political power would be overtaken by that of "the international media and entertainment industry".

Kaplan identified the rise of religious fanaticism as a major source of conflict, tribal in nature, with "crime and war becoming indistinguishable". "Islam's very militancy, he wrote, makes it attractive to the downtrodden.(...) A political era driven by environmental stress, increased cultural sensitivity, unregulated urbanization, and refugee migrations is an era divinely created for the spread and intensification of Islam (...)." He imagined how "a wave of Islam" (...) "fueled by mass migrations into the cities and a soaring birth rate" would "eat away at the legitimacy" of many Arab states.

International borders would become irrelevant (or unenforceable) as war grew pervasive and central governments, unable to physically protect their citizens against criminal anarchy, withered away.

Rings a bell? Rings many bells? The original is freely available online.

The writing is on the wall, chaos big and small.

(Portugal, 2017)

Nineteen ninety-four is not ancient history. The Clinton/Gore administration was in office; more to the point, the Iranian revolution was already in its 15th year. Prophecies of gloom and dystopia weren't thin on the ground. Two years earlier, in 1992, The Atlantic had published another noted essay, Jihad vs McWorld,  in which the American political scholar Benjamin Barber (who died earlier this year), warned against the conflict between the globalized power of corporate money on one side and "parochial hatred" (as well as) "the retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed" on the other - both of course inimical to the ideals of democracy. So even though Kaplan wasn't uniquely clairvoyant, the spectre of 'ever-mutating chaos' has proved prescient. It remains profoundly unsettling. The prospect of rising oceans, freak weather and higher temperatures now seems much more palpable than it did a quarter of a century ago. Public opinion has shifted and climate change deniers are painting themselves into a corner.

As for political chaos, it is obvious that representative democracy is becoming increasingly irrelevant in many countries. Instability has spread as electorates either cannot be bothered with politics at all and abstain, or abruptly swing this way or that, only to reverse themselves within a matter of months. Legitimacy is seeping out and chaos is leaching in. Political leadership now tends towards extremes, sometimes despotic (Vladimir Putin or Xi Jing Ping, though I'm not suggesting the two are comparable) or erratic (Donald Trump) or regressive / nationalist (Viktor Orban in Hungary or Narendra Modi in India). Or it appears weak and lacking in direction as is currently the case of the UK, Italy or the European Union in general.

The EU has been in a bad way for too long now. I remember the sinking feeling on the day, in late 2009, when Herman Van Rompuy was appointed to the presidency of the European Council.  A grey, discreet consensus builder with a background in Belgian politics, Van Rompuy was about as invisible as you could get. Nigel Farage famously made wicked fun of him on the floor of the European parliament, saying he had 'the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low grade bank clerk'. Inexcusably rude as he may have been, Farage hit a nerve. At a time when the EU was in urgent need of high profile credibility and visionary leadership, Van Rompuy provided neither.

His opposite number at the Commission (the EU executive branch), the buffoonish Portuguese technocrat José Manuel Barroso was less retiring but also lacked the political clout that might have stemmed the tide of populist europhobia. It was a tragic combination. Politically impotent, Barroso and Van Rompuy relinquished the leadership of Europe to Angela Merkel who, while not exactly charismatic or given to public exuberance either, was at least perceived as a safe pair of hands. As populism and cynicism rose across Europe, 'Brussels' became a dirty word (2).

So much for Europe. But who would have imagined the nightmare of Donald Trump walking into the White house? Or the restoration of religious dogma and the fanaticism? The intermittent menace of jihadist assassins lurking in the big cities and striking at random - today's grim reapers? Who could have predicted the sheer toxicity of the Zeitgeist, the spread of belligerent unreason, of trash culture, paranoia and crackpot conspiracy theories, let alone the decline of pluralism and secularism?

Some political philosophers have argued that the convulsions of Kaplan's ‘coming anarchy’ are part of the predictable unravelling of the capitalist social order (3).  Even if that were the case, it is far less predictable how that anarchy would unfold or what exact shape it would take.

As the cracks in society widen, more people are tempted by regressive fantasies and by random acts of symbolic revenge, especially if they find a religious doctrine that will endorse their fanaticism. Jihadism has evolved into the most extreme form of disenchantment, of resistance to modernity, to Western freedoms and moral relativism (among other things). It offers its recruits the intoxicating promise of going all the way, including indiscriminate violence and the expectation of glorious self-sacrifice for the greater good. There is little defense against such pious rage, which is to say: it could have been me, or I could be next.

DV ______________________________________________________________________

(1) The Atlantic monthly, February 1994. (2) To make things worse, at the end of his ten-year mandate Barroso exited through the revolving door and went straight to work for Goldman Sachs, the very investment bank credited with showing the Greek government how to cook the books. Met with disbelief and condemned as 'revolting' (Le Monde, July 11, 2016), his move seemed to confirm all the suspicions about the self-serving big boys who ran 'Brussels'.

(3) 'How will Capitalism End?' by Wolfgang Streeck, VERSO Books, Brooklyn and London, November 2016.

[langcultureuk]

Rock n roll is our epiphany: Patrick Jones and a theatrical vision for a young Wales

In recent days, I received my copy of the 10th anniversary edition of Manic Street Preachers’ eighth studio album Send Away the Tigers. I have been collecting Manics’ special editions for some time now. While they sit outside the scope of my electronica radar, I find them musically, lyrically and aesthetically irresistible; indeed, their exceptional artwork is often the reason why I purchase their reissues, rather than James Dean Bradfield’s kitchen demos.

Last year, of course, was the 20th anniversary of their iconic (as a threesome) Everything Must Go, which followed their even more iconic The Holy Bible (when they were a foursome).

Against this backdrop, I have been reminded of my encounter with the early plays of Patrick Jones (pictured above), which I covered when I was a drama critic at the turn of the second millennium. Jones, for those who don’t know, is the older brother of Nicky Wire (real name: Nicholas Jones), feather boa-adoring bass player of the Manics. But he is also one of the most intriguing playwrights I ever came across. Given that I am dipping in and out of the Manics on iTunes these days, I thought I would share some of my writing on Jones’ first two staged plays, which I had the privilege of seeing in 1999-2000. While they were staged during the first term of Tony Blair’s government, the issues they explored seem just as relevant now, if not more so, as when they were premiered. Please bear in mind, as you read on, that the following was written in 2000.

Then came human beings. They wanted to cling but there was nothing to cling to. Albert Camus

The Sherman Theatre in Cardiff is celebrating the millennium with an urgent form of epic theatre. Fusing the wintry apocalypse of 20th century British poetry, the classical paradigm of modern American drama and the nihilistic vision of a teenage wasteland, two powerful and contrasting plays reveal Patrick Jones as a vital new British playwright. This unique voice rejects the muscular iconography of Welsh culture and instead confronts historical and topical manifestations of nationalism and fatherhood.

With the nihilistic pose of punk and the androgynous pout of glam, Manic Street Preachers have always understood the grand gesture. The generation the Welsh rock group represent is largely drawn to the shared hopelessness that Richey Edwards, their original ideologist-in-chief, articulated in a despairing, often holocaustic, lyricism. His disappearance without trace, after episodes of self-harm and anorexia, in 1995 arguably compares with the cultural and emotional significance of Princess Diana and Kurt Cobain.

Provoked by the subsequent media hysteria, Jones was anxious to find a theatrical voice that would eloquently speak out: “The press were saying that rock music is bad for young people,” he recalls. “I wanted an intellectual rebel to look around today and ask what we have become. So I started writing notes for a play about how young people grew up amongst this.” Against an urgent rock soundtrack, Jones reclaims the classical tragedy from Arthur Miller for a youth betrayed by old Wales and the New Labour government.

Libraries gave us power, then came work and made use free. What price now for a shallow piece of dignity? “A Design for Life”, Manic Street Preachers

Jones’ first play Everything Must Go* is located in Blackwood, the South Wales hometown he shares with Manic Street Preachers. Under Margaret Thatcher, the capitalist temples of Sony, Toshiba and Pot Noodle replaced the local coal industry. In Phil Clark’s production, which premiered in February 1999 at the Sherman Theatre, beautifully choreographed factory production lines hover menacingly over the stage like an Orwellian industrial nightmare. As piercing shrills of factory hooters punctuate these images, a cacophonic fanfare to the philosophy of “arbeit macht frei” is hauntingly evoked. “It’s creating theatre that works on all your senses,” insists Clark, the Sherman’s artistic director and a highly regarded champion of new plays for young people.

The production inhabits a vastly different universe from the venal commercial instincts of an Irvine Welsh stage adaptation. What transpires is a powerhouse mixture of poetic imagery and an intelligent rock score. This Brechtian model sharpens the play’s dialectic by using popular songwriting to lend immediacy to not only the political issues raised, but also the human cost involved. “We should be looking for more epic forms of theatre,” argues Clark.

Opening with “A Design for Life”, this urban hymn to the British welfare state sweeps rhapsodically over an apocalyptic scene of youth culture in the Welsh valleys. “It allows the audience to enter into the dramatic world of the play,” explains Clark. Another song called “Ready for Drowning” translates the Stevie Smith metaphor into a polemic about how recent British governments have divided communities with free market economics. This nightmarish sequence shows a group of miners leaving the pit, before being placed in front of computers they are clearly incapable of using. As frustration turns into farce, one by one, the miners pick up their monitors and throw them into the pit hole, while the light from their helmets pierces the dark auditorium. “An understanding of the working-class voice and the structures of our society has always been of use to the next generation,” reckons Clark.

Only takes one tree to make a thousand matches. Only takes one match to burn a thousand trees. “A Thousand Trees”, Stereophonics

The narrative, however, pivots around the enigmatically named A, a rebel archetype in a similar mould to Quadrophenia’s Jimmy or The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield. As the play’s title infers, a plague of retail outlets has reduced Blackwood to a shuttered fortress. Better still, an anarchist’s playground. “The dilemma Patrick brings up in the play,” Clark suggests, “is that, even though A identifies what’s wrong, he doesn’t know what to do about it.”

Politically inspired by Aneurin Bevan, A has the ideal canvas on which to graffiti the social ills he sees around him – want, ignorance, squalor, disease and idleness – which the founder of the NHS sought to eradicate. More poignantly, Bevan’s message actually sounds like a modus vivendi for a modern Wales. “The message I get from young people is more cynical than the punk vision,” adds Jones. “I want to show that, if they had A’s awareness, it would give them empowerment out of all this.”

A is originated by a remarkable young Welsh actor called Oliver Ryan, who understands the protagonist’s iconoclasm and the ambivalence of his situation. “He’s terrifyingly well read,” says Ryan. “But he has built his own world through newspaper clippings, Welsh history and Karl Marx. He has to make it seem real to him. There’s so much sadness in A because he doesn’t realize that he has a voice. Instead, he chooses to destroy in order to create, which I think is very apt for teenagers today.”

This mentality is intelligently juxtaposed with Ryan’s mesmerizingly ethereal character in Unprotected Sex, Jones’ play by Jones, which premiered at the Sherman Theatre Studio in October 1999. Appearing as a sullied glam rock angel, Denver is the victim of childhood bullying who sought refuge among the mountain ponies and found solace in their need for companionship.

Witnessing the murder of a pregnant mare by knife-wielding thugs has heightened his selfless despair: a solo choir voicing the isolation and destructiveness of this grotesque rite of male initiation.

Acting as a counterpoint to Denver’s introspection, Richard Harrington’s portrayal of Gary, a former soldier, is a sensitive antidote to the Charles Bukowski image of manhood. What social skills the army taught him are the brutalizing, if childlike, means of control used to inspire discipline through some kind of surrogate family loyalty. Abandoned by his father at a vulnerable age, he is seemingly perfect cannon fodder. But military life has denied him the full range of emotions to deal with the atrocities he witnessed in Kosovo. The war still raging inside his mental universe, he returns to Triste, his pregnant girlfriend, with only alcohol and testosterone as support.

Returning to Everything Must Go, the dominant focus of A’s rage is to avenge the loss of his father, a former miner whose death was hastened after being sacked following a decade on a production line without any explanation. “It’s about how, with a click of the mouse, his father was gone from the workforce,” says Jones. In the apotheosis, extreme personal morality, rather than sociopathic dysfunction, inexorably propels A to kill Worthington, the factory manager responsible for sacking his father. “There’s a certain rage when words are not enough,” Jones accepts. “I’m not saying that killing someone is the answer. But I don’t think there was another way, dramatically, in which he could prove his point. He’s not going to be a politician or a pop star and he cares so much about his father.”

Every day when I wake up, I thank the Lord I’m Welsh. “International Velvet”, Catatonia

The betrayal of the human spirit underpins the damning indictment of Blair’s Britain, which drives Everything Must Go. For A’s friends, empty days are filled with material dreams, petty crime and a perverse determination to survive. There’s Pip, who is more interested in the next sexual conquest than political idealism; there’s Jim, who never seems to learn from the Open University TV programmes that keep him up all night; and there’s Curtis, who, denied an identity at school, speaks only in song lyrics from époque-making groups, such as The Who, Nirvana and Oasis. “It’s brilliant you have to pay to listen to young people, telling you how they feel,” enthuses Oliver Ryan, “because this is the generation that everyone is so quick to dismiss.”

This popular cultural sensibility is employed with greater subtlety in Unprotected Sex. Admittedly, there is a hypnotic score from James Dean Bradfield of Manic Street Preachers, which resonates through this compelling example of physical theatre. Meanwhile, the lyrical sense of poetry mirrors the social disintegration of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, which, in its time, commented on a crisis in the human condition. Moreover, it convincingly evokes the claustrophobic intensity of Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams.

Jones attempts to resolve the patriarchal conundrums that – from the Rebecca Riots to the tribal machismo of the rugby field – are posed (but not exclusively) by Welsh society. In each play, a female character – both stunningly portrayed by Maria Pride – offers poignant insights into maleness and its relationship with national identity at this millennial juncture. As masculinity implodes around her in Unprotected Sex, Triste becomes the voice of hope, while Cindy in Everything Must Go has to deal with her disgust and frustration at what Wales has become through self-harm and heroin abuse. “I’m sure part of me hates a lot of the old Wales,” believes Jones. “But part of me relishes what it was. We don’t really celebrate Bevan. Instead, we’ll have the Welsh national anthem only sing on the rugby pitch by ‘real’ men with a tear in their eye.”

Dr Stephen Gregson Co-founder Language and Culture

* Although the Manics’ album Everything Must Go was released in 1996, it took its name from Jones’ play, which was in draft form at that stage.

If you enjoyed this blog, check out Fuse, a collection of plays and poetry by Patrick Jones, published by Parthian Books.