#it is their retribution for the souls of immigrants and working people they have taken

[firstkillers]

Anyways this whole submarine thing has proven that people on this site aren’t actually able to commit to eating the rich.

[ruminativerabbi]

Ghost DNA

Joe Biden seems clearly to have won the election and, barring the unimaginable, will become our nation’s next president in January. But the election itself is worth considering in its own right, and particularly in terms of what it has to say about our riven nation. No matter who you personally supported, after all, not millions but scores of millions of Americans voted for the other guy. And if President-Elect Biden, with more than 76 million votes, is now the presidential candidate with the most popular votes in U.S. history, President Trump, with more than 71 million votes, is still the candidate with the second most popular votes in the history of the nation. (By way of comparison, President Obama won in 2008 with 69.5 million votes. Abraham Lincoln won with a mere 2.2 million votes in 1864, fewer than the number of people who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000.) So to focus solely on who won and to ignore the fact that both candidates cleared the 70 million vote barrier, something no one in the nation’s history had ever managed previously to accomplish, is really to focus on the simple part of the story and to ignore the complicated part. Yes, there are way more eligible voters now than there were in 1864. But that’s not really the point.

Both Democrats and Republicans took to referencing this election as a kind of battle for the nation’s soul. Neither side provided a clear definition of what that actually meant, however. And so, a few weeks ago, I wrote to you about a long poem by Walt Whitman in which the poet attempted clearly to say what he considered to constitute the parts of the soul of the American republic. His answers—individualism, mutual respect, friendship untied to social class or race or ethnicity, and a shared sense of national destiny—were stirring but also quaint: I doubt if many readers would have come up with those precise things, and particularly not the last one, if challenged to answer that same question. But if we reject Whitman’s answer as too rooted in nineteenth century romanticism to resonate much with Americans today, then that leaves us challenged to say what precisely we do feel is motivating the intense feelings on both sides of the ballot. Is it just the issues themselves that divide us? Or is there something else tugging at our national heartstrings and pulling us off in different directions?

As readers know, I generally grant Whitman the last word on more or less everything. But this time ’round, I found myself pondering how an entire nation can look at the same television screens and wonder, as one, how those people can feel that strongly about the candidate of their choice and his running mate. Nor did it seem to me that it was the differences of opinion about specific issues that was moving us forward to Election Day, but rather energy created by the intensity of the disrespect for the unchosen candidate and the angry, intemperate scorn directed at his supporters. It struck me almost as though there were unseen players in the room, a raft of ghostly presences just off camera influencing the demonstrators and the slogan-chanters, the disaffected and the jubilant, and also the rest of everybody sporting their pasted-on “I Voted” stickers. And that thought—that there were more people here than I could see on my screen—that thought led me off in the direction I’d like to write about this week.

When Joan and I were in Maine last summer, I read a series of truly intriguing articles about something called “ghost DNA.”

To understand the concept, you need to know that there was a time when different species and subspecies of human being wandered the earth. (This is not at all how things are today when the sole variety of human being is us, Homo sapiens.) Those different species interbred with each other too, as a result of which scientists have determined that modern Europeans—or at least the kind whose ancient ancestors lived in Europe and whose families have remained rooted to that continent ever since—that that kind of modern European has a few dollops of Neanderthal genetic heritage in their DNA, just as native Australians and Polynesians have some traces of the Denisovans, another type of ancient humanoid species. (For more on the Denisovans, click here.) And now Arun Durvasula and Sriram Sankararaman, two computational biologists at the University of Southern California, have taken the idea one step further by analyzing the DNA of four different groups of West Africans (two from Nigeria and one each from Sierra Leone and Gambia), and concluding that they almost universally carry the genetic heritage—ranging from 2% to 19% of any specific individual’s genetic code—of an unknown group of archaic human species. And since nothing is known of this subspecies, the researchers used the term “ghost population” to describe this humanoid species that appears to have to have existed but who have left behind no trace of any sort other than their “ghost DNA.” (For more about Durvasula and Sankararaman’s work, click here and here. For their own essay on the topic, written in scientific jargon that will be difficult for most to decipher, click here.)

When considered carefully, this really is a remarkable idea—that human beings have two kinds of genetic ancestry: the kind they can identify (e.g., the Finnish ancestors of the Finns and the Samoan ancestors of the Samoans, etc.) and the ghostly, spectral kind that survives today only as genetic code that had to come from somewhere but about the origins of which nothing at all is known. And that led me to the idea that the reason we are so divided—to the point at which we seem unable to develop even something as inarguably essential as a unified national approach to the pandemic—that the reason we are so riven has to do with the ghost DNA bequeathed to us by people long gone from the scene and present now only as part of the national genome. But who are these people that are present and absent in our national psyche as we try to negotiate these strange straits in which we suddenly find ourselves?

There are lots of candidates.

There are the original native peoples of North America, decimated by disease and the victims of a kind of malign colonialism that was willing to allow them some tiny piece of the pie if they would be so kind as to abandon their own native culture, forget their native languages, convert to their oppressors’ religion, and not to mind having their land stolen out from under them. (For an eye-opening expose of just how highly developed the native civilizations of North America were before the European occupation began, I recommend Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Spoiler alert: the picture fed to everyone my age in elementary school of brave and adventurous Europeans coming to an almost empty continent inhabited solely by a handful of naked savages eager to sell their land for brightly colored beads and a few flasks of whiskey is completely false. Read Mann’s book and you’ll get the picture.)

Then, of course, there are the descendants of the 388,000 slaves taken from their native lands in Africa and sold on this side of the world starting back in 1525, a group that that had burgeoned to about 3.5 million when the Civil War began in 1861. The single greatest blot on our national escutcheon, the institution itself of chattel slavery was abolished in 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment. The fate of the emancipated—who were in most cases illiterate and untrained for work other than what they were used to doing on the plantations on which they lived—is its own horrific scandal. But what of the millions of slaves who didn’t live to see emancipation, who were dragged onto slavers’ ships in Africa after being purchased from people who didn’t own them, then sent across the sea to serve masters who felt they did own them because they had, after all, purchased them—what about the millions of souls who lived and died deprived of hope, of any rational sense of confidence in the future, of even the faint promise of a better future for their descendants in future generations? They too have left their imprint on the national genome. How could they not have?

And then there are the 20,000 Chinese immigrants who built the Transcontinental Railroad in the years following the Civil War, people who were exploited in every imaginable way, being paid salaries less than half of what white workers received and charged for their food in the labor camps that was provided free of charge to white workers.

All of these groups—the left-out and the left-behind, the downtrodden and the enslaved, the exploited and the oppressed—these long-gone groups are as invisible as the ones identified by Durvasula and Sankararaman but their presence in our national DNA is, I think, precisely what is dividing us so evenly into two sub-nations: those who feel threatened by the ghosts in our national genome and those who feel challenged by it, those who seek resolution and those who fear retribution, those whom history chastens and those whom history enrages.

The challenge facing the nation, therefore, is not to wrangle around endlessly about who won Georgia. It won’t change the outcome, anyway, so let it be figured out, certified, and moved past. The far greater challenge facing Americans is to encounter our own genome and to allow the ghosts we find there to make us into sensitive and caring citizens of a truly great republic. No more than that! But also no less.

[alltheworldsrpg-blog]

WELCOME TO ROSWELL, SAVEK JAESEME!!

ADMIN CAMERON: It’s the little details that make this application strong, from things as large as the very meaning of Savek’s name to the smaller details in the quickshots, it forms a character with depth and interest I can’t wait to see around the city. 

You’ve been accepted as THE LAMINAR with the faceclaim of LESLEY ANN BRANDT. Please follow all rules and regulations as laid out by the Roswell Town Council, especially concerning any non pre-approved biologic. All UFO’s outside of city limits must be stickered or will be towed. Enjoy your stay in the first city of extraterrestrials.

OUT OF CHARACTER.

NAME/ALIAS + PRONOUNS:

Aurin + she/her/hers

AGE:

19

TIMEZONE + ACTIVITY:

Central time zone. I am probably going to be more active in the day on the weekends, the night on the weekdays, and three-five days out of every week.

TRIGGERS:

Removed for privacy

ANYTHING ELSE?:

I am a college student on summer break. I work a full time job and do some occasional shows here and there. These are the things that contribute mostly to my activity.

IN CHARACTER.

SKELETON TITLE:

The Laminar

FULL NAME:

Savek Jaeseme

GENDER + PRONOUNS:

Female + she/her/hers

SEXUAL + ROMANTIC ORIENTATION:

Omnisexual + gray-romantic

DATE OF BIRTH + AGE:

November 3rd + 31 years old

OCCUPATION:

Bartender, although very mechanically inclined from previous trades.

A little bit of an explanation:

Naturally, once Savek became of working age she sought out jobs with the least amount of human interaction. This caused her to step outside the stereotype of being technologically handicapped as a Centaurian. She started out with small trades that consisted of even smaller, impenetrable spaces, such as locomotive engineering, mine shuttle car operation, and elevator installation/repair. Doing this she got very good with her hands, perfected stamina, and grew stronger quicker than her body would show for it. However, these jobs proved bad ideas in her late twenties. The pain began to weaken her so badly she barely had time to frequent her favorite bar in the city with its mostly Centaurian patrons and it being the only place she can curse in her native language without politely animated translators giving humans the easy ear to her insults. So, she opted her isolated lifestyle for the bar’s bartending job. There she intoxicates then takes the money of the rest of the interspecies who bet she can’t turn off her own translator and speak fluid in conversation with them. They try the hardest phrases. Still she bests them. What can she say? Her mind works fast. That, matched with the skill of her hands and her hard earned strength, will undoubtedly serve a greater purpose once she completes her plan for the council.

FACECLAIM:

Lesley Ann Brandt

BIOGRAPHY:

(tw: sickness, death, suicide)

Savek is no alien. She is no immigrant. She is no ally. Though extra she might be, she is not terrestrial. Especially not of this planet. And last but not least, she is not yours. However, connotation of that word your planet entertains, however customs they’ve attached to it, and however highly they regard it and the “honor” of being owned, it only takes one factor for Savek to define one’s existence as slavery. That is the bending of your own will. Humans, come to find out, regard the mildest form of that as love, but they are never the first to bend their own. No, they’d much rather break the backs of the rest of the inter-species, all the while using the term integration to veil an invasion.

That’s how Savek feels about the human race, and she is not afraid to say it. But you won’t take her seriously because she’s such a small, petite little thing. It doesn’t even seem like she’s grown out of the ten-year-old body Proxima Centauri B last hosted, or the one Earth welcomed only to break the heart of. But what many fail to realize is, though small she may be, she is much smaller compared to her contempt for human life.

Humans—the conquerers. They themselves are the things they fear most. Their own weakness and ignorance piloted the vessels they used to master the unknown. They are too self-absorbed to think of any reason why what’s unfamiliar to them isn’t actually unfamiliar objectively, of why what is not theirs should not be owned definitively. And they taught her these lessons long before she could even think to make friends on her new planet. She’d already had friends on Proxima. They were her family, cousins and half-siblings that she would know the whereabouts of today if they hadn’t played into the promise of a new world. One no longer divided by space and time. A new world combined with the great (humans) and the great unknown (everyone else). Savek laughs at the sentiment of integration now. She finds it so funny how small minds and big ideas meet. Everyone gets so focused on the big idea they never consider the small, itty bitty mind that intends to control it, and by the time anyone wakes up to find the wrong man in charge they’re already ïmµhftµed (translation: fucked).

On Earth, the days never change for her. Every day, Savek wakes up content, her lids having served as refuge from the world she hates. She yawns with the smile of a newborn, stands to her feet with attention, and turns to her bedroom window completely out of custom. But then she sees the orange-red delight Centaurian skies once blessed her with replaced by a pale, wonderless blue one. She wakes every morning to find her favorite sign of home has been traded for a sky she can no longer be amazed by—not since all illusion shattered that day the ships sailed her into them. It is a heartbreaking reminder—and proof they should’ve never came. Not them to her. Not her to them. And she knew this before it happened, as well as her mother, a Starweaver more powerful than most Centaurians had ever seen.

Savek still remembers that feeling of regret underlying the buzz in her country air the same day news got out about human contact. Some dainty human aristocrats, all eager and none the wiser for it, had landed sinisterly on Centaurian soil, but it had only been sinister to a few it seemed. Surely not her father, a wishful man who was particularly excited about the crossover.

           “Oh, what a day! What a day!” he’d exclaimed.

“Oh hell” she remembers thinking in response. “Oh hell” is what she says in the mornings. And hell is the vision her and her mother shared that day in the Universe’s will.

It is true, they saw the great new world. They saw the mass immigration. They saw the budding war, perpetuated by riots and violent attacks. Yet, they also saw the laughter amongst humans and Tau Cetians at bars. They saw the excitement and they saw the allure Earth marketed and sold to their people, but only Savek saw the vision that tipped the scale between her world rejuvenated and her world resented. She saw her mother’s death at the hands of a disease she’d never heard of before—a disease her home’s ecosystems could’ve never fostered, let alone let manifest in the bosom of her favorite, favorite soul. Not alien. Not out-lander. Soul.

After ignoring the prophecy and foolishly choosing optimism as her parents had, she greeted Earth with a sort of semi-hopefulness. She didn’t tell her mother about what she knew to be inevitable, afraid telling her would secure the tragedy’s place in the universe’s will. But it turns out it didn’t need words to come to fruition. It only needed time, and nonetheless one year later Savek’s mother was dead, her father was fighting a depression that would ultimately drive him to self-inflicted demise, and Savek had finally made her mind up about Earth and its humans. The humans are a virus and this Earth is a curse, one that if Savek had had the courage to speak against she might still have her family, faith in her starweaving, or even just a slither of happiness to seek instead of retribution

That is why, when it comes to Savek, you can save the welcome banners. You can save that popular alien movie phrase, “We come in peace.”. And you can save the ravaging of her home, the false hope, the colonization, and the blatant disrespect of her people. You can save it until she takes it—till she becomes the ravager of the human’s peace of mind, the conquerer of what she knows to be evil, and the entity that gets to decide how and when it will poison your people. Savek has revoked her own invitation to planet Earth and the “amity” that supposedly comes along with it. She does not want your welcome because she does not come in peace. She comes indignant with her heart in flames. She is a wrath quelled the same amount each day by her own meditated vengeance.

So, yes. At the start of each day she is sad. But once she is done cringing at the sun’s duplicity, she closes her eyes and almost smiles at her place in the great new world, figuring she has come one day closer to taking more than what her people are owed from the creatures who have taken more than she could ever live—or love—without.

MUSING + HEAD-CANONS.

HEAD-CANONS:

Savek achieved puberty on planet Earth after her mother’s death. She named herself Savek in a twist of narcissistic irony. In her planet’s language, her name roughly translates to “slave”, the very thing she feels the new world has turned her into. It isn’t something many point out upon hearing it, but she knows better than any of them the meaning behind it. Until she can find a way to exact her revenge she is going to call herself this, and after the Vector and her succeed in their strike against the council, Savek will change her name for good. She will probably change it to something like Yael or Sorscha—names of ancient warriors her mother would read to her about when she was young. Only then will she truly feel connected to her family and home again.

Savek hasn’t wholeheartedly given up on her starweaving. She still sees the Universe’s will in bits and pieces, although it has lessened in time. She just doesn’t actively practice it or admit she is one because she doesn’t feel like she deserves to be revered in such a way. Especially not by her own people. She couldn’t save her own mother with this ability, so she won’t let them think she can save them by it either. She sees what she sees and, honestly, there hasn’t been much to tell lately. Just spots of home years before she was born and quick glimpses of minor setbacks to prepare for in the next day or so—like delays on the trains to and from the city. However, the day she sees something worth telling she is going to scream from the mountain tops to whoever will listen. She can’t risk another unwanted death on her conscience

Despite Savek’s outlook on life, heartache, and vengeance plan, she is not a hateful person. Not towards non-humans at least. Her troubled past humbled her in a sense, even while it hardened her towards the very air she breathes. She understands what she has lost can be the same for any other Centaurian or Tau Cetian or Luytan for that matter. Therefore, she softens most often around extraterrestrials, speaking in their language instead of English or her own and giving them free mag-lev bike repairs. She gives as much as she can to them, until she can give it all back to her people. She often thinks about what she can do for the other extraterrestrials too and what can come of her revenge for their benefit.

If you are ever so unfortunate to be human and populate her bar simultaneously, expect to be overcharged, have your cup filled only half full, and receive cutting stares from Savek across the dive. There are little to no humans she can tolerate and none she truly likes, so the drunk college humans who stumble into her bar are liable to be served a half shot of the cheap stuff only—and when they complain, she cuts them a deal. A free bottle if they can turn off their translators and say something even remotely intelligible in her language. If not, they owe her the (over-) price of said free bottle and can never complain again. The majority of them don’t entertain the bet at all while the ones who try fail and both only serve to prove her point. Humans are selfish. They are uncultured. They are insensitive. And they think the new world still revolves around them. How original.  

QUICKSHOTS:

The term “alien” is insulting to Savek. Too many humans treat it like a handicap and/or have already attached their media-enthused biases to the word. She is very sensitive to the term and if heard from the breath of a human lung she will make a personal target out of that chest cavity with her fists.

Savek is very encouraging of nicknames such as Sav or Vek. She actually likes when people decide personal aliases for her.

Savek is big on fashion but very small on spending money. You’d be surprised how well this seems to work out for her.

Think of the self-groomed cut on her left eyebrow as a tattoo of some sorts. It is her favorite identifier after all.

PLOTS + CONNECTIONS:

I would like my character to have a very real moment confronting the death of her mother through means of assassinating a council member. Savek got good with her hands for a reason, she is a fast learner, and she is fervent about retribution. I want her to think it is going to be easy, just an eye for an eye, just what she’d been dreaming of her entire life. Then once she does it, she feels what it is like to have yet another life on her conscience—only this time it is one she thought she wanted. I want her to undergo some kind of psychotic break, one that, once she divulges what she’s done to a trusted ally and how it feels to have done it, will really test the strength of their alliance. I want a friend to comfort her without really knowing what’s going on, only to find out the moment news gets out what she’s done and what she’s been planning this entire time. I kind of want her world to fall apart—for her to really have to choose between devoting her life to vengeance or just letting it all go. I won’t say now what she’ll choose, however.

I also want her to have some sexual or even romantic involvement with a human, but who knows what she’ll do to them the morning after. She probably won’t even know what to do with herself.

ETC:

Her anthem for total domination: Terrified by Childish Gambino.