#it's not that hard actually. It's just that Rama has to use the most polite form all the time which is hard help

[naresnani]

on Violence

Chapter 5

Chapters: [1] , [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]

Fandom: Ikemen Prince | Nokto Klein / Adam Kain | Words: 2k

Tags: Scriptfic, screenplay format, Political stuff, Slow burn, Route spoilers

Summary :

Confrontation.

tagging: @altairring @tiny-wooden-robot @kissmetwicekissmedeadly

notes: Just for clarification, in my format the underline is for emphasis, while italic means something is said in another language besides Rhodolitian. When something is said in Yashpari, it's actually in Javanese. The translation would be right below the sentence.

ACT FIVE

INT. THE OUTSIDE OF ADAM'S CELL - MIDNIGHT 

A warden lays unconscious on the floor. No one dares to approach the door towards the stairs, not even to check on him. 

Because, they’ve been told that...

Prince Nokto is inside with his arms up, and a person disguised as a guard had a gun pointed at him. They want the other Rhodolite princes. If anyone else attempts to get inside… it’s his life on the line.

Sweat running through his skin, he could only see Adam standing behind his cell door, having all the power in the room.

NOKTO

You planned for this.

ADAM

...A little.

NOKTO

You’re a bunch of Obsidianites, after all, huh? I should’ve known.

ADAM

No. Sura doesn't speak Rhodolitian. At least she’s willing to compromise with a language you’ll understand.

NOKTO

She?

The person behind him did not sound like a woman. Before he could care any further, the door to the cell block blasts open, letting in numerous heavy footsteps inside.

In the instant that Nokto turned around, Sura had already stepped behind him again, now pointing their gun towards his befuddled brothers that had just witnessed the scene. 

He saw Licht amongst them first.

LICHT

Nokto!

NOKTO

Licht, don’t step closer!

Someone steps closer anyway. There’s no other man that silhouette could belong to but Chevalier Michel. He draws his sword faster than Nokto’s eyes could register.

BANG!

The gun’s explosion blows right past Nokto’s ears. His heart stopped dead. But Chevalier’s sword hitting the ground sounds more deafening.

CLANG! The bullet had shattered the sword hilt, missed his fingers by a miracle. The blade then lands behind him.

ADAM

There are six round bullets in the chamber. That was the first. There are five of you in the room.

All attention points straight towards Adam, and his shooter. That small, peculiar firearm produces so much smoke, it’s engulfing the nose, eyes, and throat. Noone had seen something that compact making that sort of sound, much less an explosion. Chevalier, Licht, Leon, and Clavis, they all stare with faces just as shocked. Who knows where the rest of them are. Nokto couldn’t hold in his coughs— Licht wants to jump towards him before he is immediately restrained by Leon.

ADAM

—Five. It’s enough for each of you. Now listen carefully.

[Read more on AO3]

[novelconcepts]

I’m sure I’m not the only one hoping you’ll expand on your earlier post about the greenhouse “flat above the pub” flirt-o-Rama if Flora hadn’t...gone and been possessed and all.

“You know I live above that pub, right? Told you that already. Got a little flat right above the boring little pub.”

She knows what she’s doing, is the thing Jamie can’t quite wrap her head around. She absolutely knows what she’s doing. Where on earth is the woman from five days ago, the one who looked at her with such bruised eyes and swollen lips and tried plaintively to pull at her jacket? Where did she go, and who is this bold version in her place?

Dangerous, probably. Already, she’s lowering whatever meager defenses Jamie had managed to craft over the past week. Already, she’s blowing right past them as though never there at all, and Jamie doesn’t fully understand this. She’s never had trouble blocking someone out before--at least, not someone like Dani, who makes her feel...makes her feel...

Good. Makes her feel like the brightest thing in the room, most days. Makes her feel like no one has ever wanted her there so badly before. 

The woman’s only kissed her once, and already it feels like she’s made a home for Jamie somewhere in her heart. Somewhere under all the bad she’s carrying, under all the flinching she’s done, all the death and loss and fear, there’s a place for Jamie. If she wants it.

She’s looking at Jamie now like she’s proud of how she walked in here this morning. Like she’s proud of how closely she’s standing, how she’s biting her lips now to hold back a grin so enormous, Jamie can’t help but return it. Five days away, and she returns to someone who knows what she’s doing--and what she’s doing is flirting so hard, it’s a wonder the table doesn’t catch fire.

Did that on purpose, she thinks wonderingly. What the fuck is happening. 

***

The coffee, in its own way, worked. Not that she thought Jamie would actually like it, because honestly, it’s bad coffee--and Jamie is just too British for words--but the thing is, it was never meant to be liked. It was only meant to make Jamie smile.

Which it did. Eventually.

Or, she did. Is doing. Right now, as the words tumble out of her--Would you wanna get a drink? Away from the house. Away from all this. That could be kinda boring, right?--a part of her is desperately terrified to realize, she is doing this. She is leaning against this table, clutching a mug of truly toxic coffee, watching Jamie suck in her cheeks like it’s doing a damn thing to erase that smile. She is saying the words she’s been playing over and over in her head for five days running:

“You. And me. Could get a boring old drink. In a boring old pub.” God, her heart is sprinting. It’s entirely possible she won’t get out of this sentence, with all its halting hesitation, alive, much less this greenhouse. “And see where that takes us.”

And this is the part where Jamie will melt, she hopes. Swoon, even. The part the coffee laid road leading to, a glorious red herring approach. Here, where Jamie will see that she means what she says, and she’ll grow faint with whatever affection Dani has earned, and this will all be--

She’s grinning. Jamie, not quite facing her, is grinning. 

“You know I live above that pub, right?” This is not, Dani recognizes, exactly what one might call a swoon. This is the expression of a woman who has done extremely quick math and come up with a calculation Dani had sort of hoped she’d swing right past. When she’d swoon. 

She is not swooning. She is, instead, leaning slightly back, eyebrows raised appraisingly, reminding Dani in one fell swoop that there are people who are eager to flirt and people who are good at the art. And that Jamie, for all her glower and loner tendencies, is very, very good at the art. 

“Told you that already, didn’t I?” Her voice is almost soft, definitely teasing, her expression perfectly arranged to say this is my territory, Poppins, and you had best be careful how you tread in my garden. “Got a little flat. Right above the boring little pub.”

And then she’s...turning back to the work. Turning away, not a blush to be found, not even the hint of a swoon. Dani’s expression, so carefully schooled into neutrality, is breaking into the biggest grin of her life and Jamie has the temerity to not even keep eye contact.

“I mean--you maybe...mentioned it--”

“Only,” Jamie goes on, still focused on the task at hand--which Dani does not in the least understand, though there’s something to be said for Jamie in profile: head bent, eyes attentive, hands working into soil. Jamie never quite looks so alive as when she’s working, as though it is only in garden or greenhouse that she truly allows herself to flourish. 

Would she look that alive, Dani wonders with unbidden curiosity, anywhere else? Maybe in the boring little flat, maybe with me, maybe--

“Only,” Jamie repeats, darting a small glance her way. Dani realizes she’s staring, closes her mouth. “I figure there are plenty of places two people could go on a date. Which is, if I’m not mistaken, what you’re suggesting. Isn’t it?”

“It...I--yes.” No point denying it. No point trying to wash away the simple brazen fact. A boring little date. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t have to be a big--

“So,” Jamie says, her voice still doing that dangerous thing Dani doesn’t quite understand and can’t quite turn her attention from. That dangerous half-soft, half-amused thing that is all accent, all in control, all turning Dani’s own courage back on her like a firehose. “We could do it anywhere, couldn’t we? Doesn’t have to be the pub.”

“I--” Dani resists the urge to close her eyes. She’s going to make me say it. She really is. This wasn’t the plan, exactly. The plan had been so much simpler. It had not taken into account Jamie, who is going down into this thing with her willingly--but maybe not easily. “I mean, I just--”

“Just curious,” Jamie goes on breezily, drawing her hands from the soil at last and taking a slow step closer. The space between, already limited at best, reduces to nearly nothing in that single motion. Dani swallows.

“About?”

“It’s particular,” Jamie points out. A slight shift of hips, a nearly negligible twist of the waist, and she’s got Dani backed into a corner. Or, more accurately, against a table. “The pub. Bit curious, is all, why you’d want to get me into that pub.”

***

This poor woman is going to burst into flames, Jamie thinks, and maybe they’ll both deserve it. She isn’t upset with Dani anymore--has found in the span of about five minutes that there’s no staying upset with Dani when she turns those huge blue eyes on full-force, stands just so, puts on the bravest face Jamie has seen her wear since stalking Peter Quint through the night. She isn’t upset, exactly.

But Dani seems to think this was going to be easy. A cup of coffee. A slick line. She seems to think Jamie was just going to lean into it. 

Which she is. In her own way.

She’s careful not to touch Dani, not to press in with her body to such a degree that Dani will feel trapped. She’s only standing, a tiny width of space between them, her hands loose at her sides. Only standing, polite, smiling, waiting for an answer.

“Bit curious, is all, why you’d want to get me into that pub.”

“I don’t--I think--I mean--” Dani shakes her head slowly, her eyes wide and imploring. “Do you not...want to get a drink...”

“Didn’t say that.” The last five days haven’t been enjoyable. Burning sick days, pretending to be too ill to check in on the house, had felt cowardly. The shame in her stomach, twisting like acid around the hot desire of the memory, had felt familiar in the worst way--like being seventeen again, not knowing where to put all of these too-fierce feelings. Anger would have been easier. Disappointment, shame, embarrassment--each too heavy to put down on its own--had made for the worst kind of cocktail.

This, though. Dani looking at her--not needing to tip her head back, not needing to peer down, simply looking straight ahead and making perfect eye contact--feels good. Feels better than good. Feels like she’d felt in the moments before the flinch, when Dani had grinned into her mouth and pushed hard against her like she’d been waiting for this moment for days. This, Dani drawing deep breaths, clutching her mug, feels liking picking up right where they’d left off. 

Dangerous, she thinks again. Dangerous, to let Dani in this way. Dangerous, to admit how alive she feels, teasing her this way. 

Dangerous, every time Dani’s eyes flick to her lips and back again. 

“You’re really not going to say it,” she says, shaking her head in a parody of disappointment, reaching in gently to pluck the mug from her hands and set it aside. “Poppins. Really. First rule of flirting.”

“What’s that?” There’s a challenge in Dani’s smile, she thinks. A challenge so light and so free--and so intoxicating in its authenticity--she can’t help but laugh. She makes a show of leaning close, watching Dani’s eyes darken, watching Dani’s breath catch.

“Always be ready to commit.”

***

She’s going to kiss me, Dani thinks. Here. Now. Six in the morning, she’s going to do it. 

But, of course, Jamie doesn’t. Jamie, who thought it had been her Dani was trying to get away from the other night. Jamie, who took it so to heart she hadn’t even come back for nearly a week. 

It’s been so strange, going through the motions without Jamie around. Strange and hollow, and Dani knows--the way you know you can’t keep holding your breath much longer--life will never feel quite as vibrant without Jamie in it. 

Didn’t take long at all, she thinks, remembering the shadow of a young man standing before a dying fire. Didn’t take long at all, but I can’t not know that. 

Jamie’s here now, a crooked little half-smile on her lips, her eyes bright, but there’s something she’s still holding back. Something she’s still not absolutely sure Dani won’t let fall, split upon collision with the ground. 

She isn’t going to kiss Dani. She’s just going to stand here, making her crazy, smiling exactly like that. 

“Always be ready to commit.”

And there are other things Dani could do, it’s true--laugh, push at her shoulder, make another horrific stab at imitating her accent. There is plenty Dani could do.

But just now, with Jamie standing this close, with the air crisp and this single room so different than it had felt days ago, she’s not sure she can be blamed for what she settles on.

Not sure anyone could blame her for sliding a hand around Jamie’s middle, pushing off the table, using the momentum to twist until it’s Jamie backed against the table, Jamie looking at her with genuine surprise on her face.

That, Dani thinks with terrified glee. That’s the look I was going for. 

"Consider me committed,” she says, and though Jamie had been careful not to touch her, she finds herself unable to do the same. Her hips press Jamie backward, one hand clenching at the small of Jamie’s back. The other finds Jamie’s sleeve, less for contact, more a desperate bid for balance.

“Touché,” Jamie says in a low voice--not that easy flirtation tone this time, but something less in control. “My, ah. Hands are dirty.”

“Do you want me to come back later?” 

Jamie laughs, leans forward, shakes her head. “Didn’t say that.”

It wasn’t the plan, to kiss her here. She’d meant only to apologize--or, not apologize, but make clear that she was sorry how it had gone, that there are paths she very badly wants this to take that are the right way, the best way, the way it should have been all along. She’d meant only to make that clear, to land her proposal, to make Jamie feel a fraction as giddy as Jamie makes her every damn day.

And yet, with Jamie kissing back, Jamie making a helpless sound of frustration as her hands tip backward to grip the table behind her instead of ruining Dani’s coat, it feels right. It feels like meaning what she’s said. It feels like commitment. 

“For the record,” she adds, pulling away to breathe. Jamie’s knuckles are stark around the table, her elbows bent, her chest heaving. “This is why I’d like to get you into that pub. Or your boring little flat. More of this.”

“Could’ve just said so,” Jamie says, and maybe it’s not swooning, exactly--but the flush in her face is deeply satisfying all the same, particularly when she tips her head back to allow Dani access to her neck. 

“I thought I’d be polite about my desire to get you into bed, thank you.”

“Polite,” Jamie repeats, her voice sharpening when Dani slips a hand into her hair and kisses just above the collar of her jumpsuit. “Right. Completely slipped my mind.”

“I am,” Dani insists, pushing her harder against the table, “very polite.”

She is alive, here in this greenhouse, choosing Jamie. She is alive, and she is free, and she is all but breathless when Jamie--patience giving at last like the final strand of a snapping rope--slips both hands into her coat and clenches her hips. Jamie, who is so alive with her hands at work, and so much more so now, kissing until Dani is sure they’re both going to give up the idea of a date altogether and just settle for that rumpled little couch.

“Okay,” Jamie says at last, tipping her head away. Her hands are under Dani’s sweater, tracing the warm skin of her back, and Dani finds she couldn't care less about the dirt. “Okay. You’ve made your point, Poppins.”

“I have?”

“Mm.” Jamie leans her head down against Dani’s shoulder, exhales almost shakily. “No scary-bug flinch. Very good. Best save the rest for the boring little pub, yeah?”

Dani doesn’t want her to go. Doesn’t want her to pull free, put those hands back to work with plant and seed and root. Jamie is grinning again, brighter than anything Dani has seen in days, and Dani wants to stay within sight of that smile for the rest of her life. 

“You’ve got kids to wake. And I’ve got...um...things.”

“Things,” Dani repeats. Jamie nods. 

“Important things. With...plants...the work.” She reaches vaguely for a trowel, gestures with it like she’s considering bringing it to war. “Look, it’s early, I was not prepared for any of this, Poppins.”

Dani laughs, extricating herself at last and recovering her mug. Leaving is the last thing she’d like just now, but Jamie isn’t wrong--the kids will be up soon, and the day will fall into its usual register. Except, this time, she’ll know Jamie is out here, thinking about boring pubs and boring dates and the least boring kiss of Dani’s life. 

“Would,” she says, pausing at the door to glance back, “you call what you’re feeling now a swoon, by chance?”

Jamie blinks. “I--um.”

“Never mind.” The answer, Dani decides, is almost certainly yes. 

***

Honestly, thinks Jamie, watching her stroll--stroll! as if Dani Clayton strolls anywhere!--out the door, she did every last bit of that on purpose. 

“Swoon,” she mumbles, shaking her head. “Don’t fuckin’ swoon.”

It would, she thinks as she tries in vain to remember where she’d left off, explain the vague sense she might at any moment pass out--but Dani doesn’t need to know that.

If she gets any more brazen, after all, Jamie is going to be in serious fucking trouble.

[senjuhashirama]

One thing I wish canon could have given us was a fleshing-out of Hashirama's family life and his relationship with Mito. The first Hokage and the first jinchuriki for Kurama--if not the first jinchuriki period--what an intriguing marriage that must have been! Do you have any headcanons as to what their dynamic could have been like? Thanks again!

Hello ♥  thank you for the ask! I have so many headcanons that this took me some time to write, so I’m sorry for the wait! This is just a part of my what I remember and I have much more. I will also use the - in names for now so it doesn’t appear in tags. 

I love HashiMito. The only problem is that it’s basically always Hash-ramaxOCwife. She can be mean, she can be outgoing, she can be shy, she can be like Kushina – so it’s sometimes hard for me to tell I ship it, because it depends on portrayal, although I do firmly believe that it was a marriage out of love. Even if they arranged it, I don’t think Hash-rama would marry someone he wouldn’t love. So even i fit was political, Hash-rama was in love with Mito.

I usually headcanon they met maybe ~ ten months after Mad-ra left Konoha, so Hash-rama must have been 27-29. Hash-rama wasn’t doing very good and was often grief stricken. And then Mito came and painted Hash-rama’s world.

I headcanon that before meeting Mito (and this is one of my oldest headcanons) Hash-rama wasn’t able to create beautiful details with mokuton. He tried, but it was never like he could do some jewerly, wooden brooch, or create an ornamental furniture – that’s why his hobby is wood sculpting, because he wasn’t able to do it just with chakra. And after meeting her, somehow, it worked, like he was a source of peace and inspiration for him.

Now, my headcanons about how they were and how arranged the marriage was, differs from universe to universe. I roleplayed with a few Mitos and each one was different. Since I actually had Mito when I started to rp Hash-rama, before I even understood him properly, this person’s roleplay affected my headcanons a lot (I also had Mad-ra who affected my headcanons and rp from this angle.)

Generally, I have two alternative headcanons for Mito’s behavior.

(1)    The strong type that grounds Hash-rama and has none of his shit. She sees through him and if he goes to a pub, she will make sure he doesn’t have more money than he can afford to lose. She calls him out on his behaviour and actually knows him. It’s a tough love, but Hash-rama needs it. She knows more about Hash-rama than he knows about himself and knows that he is sometimes delusional and lives in a complete denial, even about his feelings towards Mad-ra. This is where Hash-rama feels seen and understood and respects Mito a lot. 

(2)    The type that loves Hash-rama, but doesn’t see through him and lives in her own version of denial even when he tries to tell her once he has a moment of weakness. If Hash-rama would tell her he loves Mad-ra by some accident, she would tell him that she knows that he loves him as a friend. This  universe is not that happy for Hash-rama as he feels like his needs are ignored even if he’s doing his best to communicate them – his best isn’t good enough though.

My alternative headcanons on how they met:

(1)    It was an arranged marriage. Hash-rama went to see her to the Whirlpool village, but didn’t think he would like this girl enough to marry her. Then, he saw her, talked to her the whole night, and in the morning knew that he wants to be with her forever.

(2)    This is where they met once when they were younger. He pretended to be a sailor and thought she is some beautiful sirene from the sea. But they don’t get each other’s names. After a few years, when Mad-ra is in village, Mito’s father approaches Konoha and asks  for an arranged marriage between them, but Hash-rama refuses, because he wants to live his single life with Mad-ra and party hard with Mad-ra. Plus, he doesn’t know it’s the girl he saw once. So, Mito’s father arranges a marriage between her and feudal lord. After Mad-ra leaves, Hash-rama is invited to the engagement celebration. He realizes Mito is the girl he once saw and that he refused to marry her before and now she has to marry the feudal lord. The problem is, Mito doesn’t like the feudal lord, so Hash-rama tells her to run away with him and they run away to Konoha, breaking the engagement. Mito’s parents then have to pay penalty which is ruining the Whirlpool country (for the future drama) 

Other headcanons:

(1)    Mito’s father is the leader of Whirlpool village (not very original, but hey!)

(2)    They have six children and they both love them.

(3)    https://oh-my-Hash-rama.tumblr.com/post/190474408495/i-have-a-melodramatic-headcanon-that-mito-was Mito and Kyuubi - headcanon (I swear I saw this being used in some fic after I published this and idk if it’s a coincidence or not? Is it that obvious? I’d just like to know) tw abortion

(4)    They have a big house in Konoha that Mito’s father paid for

(5)    Before Hash-rama died, he started to build a room for Mito in the attick where she would relax and read and take a break from the children. He created bookshelves with his mokuton, made beautiful libraries, bought her books and paid people to make a beutiful chairs and coaches. He spent lot of time on it, so much that Mito thought he’s trying to avoid her. He planned to give it to her on her birthday, May 3rd. But before her birthday came, Hash-rama died.

So Mito discovered the room after his death. And it was a place she grieved him the most. One day she realized that she can see his face on the mountain from the window and that the sun shines on it right before the sunset. 

(6) Tob-rama has quite a crush on her and really respects her.  

[gaslightgallows]

A ficlet prompt if you're interested: “Tell me, when you are alone with him, does he take off his face and reveal his mask?” The pairing would be Loki/Val, but the conversation would be btw Thor and Val.

(Hopefully, an antidote to yesterday's Valkiangst-o-rama...) (Read at AO3)

Thor looked up at Valkyrie entered the tavern and waved aninvitation to join him at his table. "Alone again?"

Valkyrie took the bottle and, for the sake of politeness,poured herself a glass rather than just taking a giant swig. There were otherpeople in the tavern, after all, and you had to be at least a littledeferential to the king, even if he was someone you'd fought the undead withand shared some of the most unimaginable swill in the known universe with."Loki begged off. Said he had paperwork to do."

"He never wants to join me in the evenings now,"said Thor, rather sadly. "I'd hoped, after everything that's happened,that we could mend our friendship, even if we couldn't ever be the brothers weonce were..."

"It's not that," Valkyrie said, feeling more thana little uncomfortable discussing this in public. Something about her posturemust have communicated itself to the people nearby, because as one, they allgot up and moved over to the bar, leaving her and Thor with a bit more privacy."It's... well, it's the whole 'tavern' thing."

"...I don't follow."

"You know. Taverns, drinking, rowdy drunk people? He,uh..." She searched for a tactful way of expressing the things Loki hadtold her as well as the things he had not but which she knew via osmosis andgossip anyway. "He had his fill of all of that. On Sakaar."

Thor's expression changed, and Valkyrie actually felt alittle chilled. "He won't speak of Sakaar to me," he said, his voicea low, unhappy rumble in his chest. "I have, uh, well, anidea of what happened to him while he was there,but..."

"That idea is probably just the tip of the iceberg. I'mnot surprised he won't talk about it with you. This won't be news, but yourbrother has one hell of an identity complex, where you're concerned."

"Yes, I'm aware. Thanks for that." Thor grabbedthe bottle and upended its contents into his giant glass mug. "But... hetalks to you?"

"We talk a lot, yeah. He talks, anyway. I don't say toomuch. Not sure why he decided I'd be the best person to unload his personaldemons onto, but," she shrugged, "at least he doesn't expect me to doanything about them."

"He hides from me," Thor muttered. "Still. Hehas the same face as always and he is helpful and hard-working and loyal. It'salmost like having my brother back, after all these years of fighting andtorment. But he is not the same. The face he shows me and the rest of theworld, it's nothing but a mask."

Valkyrie didn't want to agree, if only because she feltincreasingly awkward having this conversation at all, but she couldn't denythat Thor was right. "Loki... has a lot of masks," she said finally."Just mask stacked over mask. I'm not even sure he knows which one is hisactual face, anymore. Or if he has one."

"But he shows you those masks?"

"He does." For all that they butted headsconstantly, and sometimes literally, in public, their time on Sakaar - Loki'squick and intense and destructive, Valkyrie's drawn-out and soul-numbing - leftthem standing a little apart from the rest of the Asgardians, and even from theremaining gladiators who had come to Earth with them.

It was a bizarre aping of friendship, but she couldn't denythat Loki's pain called to her, in the same way that hers had piqued hisinterest. She didn't want to examine it, for fear that it would crumble if shetried to actually make sense of it, but it was real and it was something tolean on, for both of them.

"And..." Thor traced lined in the frost riming hismug. "Is he still in there, do you think? Under all of those faces, all ofthose masks, is there still a person?"

"If any of us can say we're still people under all ofour masks... then yes."

[patriotsnet]

How Often Does Joe Manchin Vote With Republicans

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-often-does-joe-manchin-vote-with-republicans/

How Often Does Joe Manchin Vote With Republicans

The West Virginia Senator Was Cozy With Trump For Political Reasons But Hes Less Of An Obstacle To An Ambitious Agenda Than An Organized Gang Of Senate Moderates

There is now a new most powerful person in the United States: Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. With the Senate evenly split, Manchin, a Democrat representing a state in which nearly 70 percent of the votes cast in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections went to Donald Trump, has the power to break a tied vote on almost any legislative business requiring a simple majority to pass. He can even decide which bills to be passed with a simple majority.

For some liberals, this is a disheartening prospect. Manchin voted with Trump more than any other Senate Democrat, opting to confirm two of the former presidents three Supreme Court nominees and evenflirting with endorsing Trumps reelection campaign.* If the new Democratic majority is forced to craft legislation designed to win over Manchin, it could all but guarantee a watered-down and compromised version of the big and transformative agenda Joe Biden began promising last year.

But, honestly, negotiating with Manchin may not be as difficult as liberals fear. A much more worrying alternative is not just possible but may be taking shape at this very moment.

Joe Manchin is, considering his circumstances, by no means the worst Democratic senator. He is quietly a semi-reliable partisan who opposed the GOPs tax bill and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. And while he later suggested to the press that he would consider endorsing Trump, Manchin did vote to oust him in his first impeachment.

Stop The Steal Unfolding In Plain Sight

But you know who would gladly use a wacked out video clip to contest a free and fair election? Republican state legislators, local officials and members of Congress.

Much like the Jan. 6 insurrection, the GOP plan to steal the next presidential election is unfolding in plain sight. The goal isnt just to make it harder to vote but to also undermine the administration of elections, remove any official who stood in the way of Trumps attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, and then give Republican legislatures new powers to interfere in elections when they dont like the results. 

This is happening as Republicans are preparing new electoral maps that will almost surely allow them to take back the House, while earning far fewer votes than their opponents. And if Republicans control Congress, the chances of a duly elected Democratic president having a victory accepted in both the House and Senate are plunging toward zero.  

Faced with what Ari Berman, author of the book “Give Us The Ballot,” calls a concerted attempt to end the second Reconstruction, whats Manchin thinking about? 

In an op-ed Sunday, Manchin insisted, The right to vote is fundamental to our American democracy and protecting that right should not be about party or politics. This sentence should be the foundation of a stinging rebuke to Republicans who are undermining that right across the country, but the West Virginia senator used it to slam his fellow Democrats. 

How Does The John Lewis Act Differ From The For The People Act

Descriptions of the two pieces of legislation are often boiled down to the For the People Act as broad and the John Lewis Act as narrow. Thats true, but the bigger difference is that the For the People Act is a highly prescriptive bill that preempts state voting and election laws, mandates many practices and prohibits many others .

The John Lewis Act would create procedural rules governing voting-rights violations. This is similar to Section 2 of the original Voting Rights Act, which established legal grounds for private parties or the federal government to challenge state laws that are intended to, or have the effect of, diluting minority voting rights. . The far more powerful Sections 4 and 5 created a system whereby jurisdictions with a history of discriminatory practices would have to submit changes in voting and election laws to the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department for review and preclearance as non-discriminatory before they could take effect. It was Section 4, which set up a formula for determining which jurisdictions fell under the Section 5 preclearance requirement, that the Court killed largely killed in its 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling, claiming it was based on outdated evidence of discriminatory practices.

Despite Manchins Continued Demands For Voter Id Rules And Against Mail

After an all-night vote-a-rama on the Democrats $3.5 trillion budget resolution, the Senate early this morning took a step forward on voting rights legislation, with a 50-49 party line vote that discharged the For the People Act, also known as S. 1, from the Rules Committee. The vote was designed to give Senate Republicans a chance to support the process of moving forward, or to demonstrate to Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., that Republicans had no such intentions.

The vote came after weeks of negotiation with Manchin over S. 1, in which he arrived at a place where he was ready to support the legislation, just as long as it wasnt the full bill that he had already vowed to oppose. Manchin often extracts a round of concessions before offering his support to the party, and he appears to have done so again on S. 1.

I have made it crystal clear that I do not support the For the People Act, Manchin said on the Senate floor, referring to Oregon Democrat Sen. Jeff Merkleys flagship reforms to protect democracy. I have worked to eliminate the far-reaching aspects of that bill and amend the legislation to make sure our elections are fair, accessible, and secure.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., nevertheless admonished the proposal as an illicit attempt to advantage Democrats in elections.

Joe Manchin Opposes Voting Rights Bill And Defends Filibuster In Blow To Democrats

Senator key to progress cites Republican opposition as reason

In a huge blow to Democrats hopes of passing sweeping voting rights protections, the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said on Sunday he would not support his partys flagship bill because of Republican opposition to it.

The West Virginia senator is considered a key vote to pass the For the People Act, which would ensure automatic and same-day registration, place limits on gerrymandering and restore voting rights for felons.

Many Democrats see the bill as essential to counter efforts by Republicans in state government to restrict access to the ballot and to make it more easy to overturn election results.

It would also present voters with a forceful answer to Donald Trumps continued lies about electoral fraud, which the former president rehearsed in a speech in North Carolina on Saturday.

In a column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin said: I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act.

Manchins opposition to the bill also known as HR1 could prove crucial in the evenly split Senate. His argument against the legislation focused on Republican opposition to the bill and did not specify any issues with its contents.

Manchins op-ed might as well be titled, Why Ill vote to preserve Jim Crow

Havent you empowered Republicans to be obstructionists? Wallace asked.

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Despite Trumps recent criticisms of him, Manchin maintains a line with Trump. They last talked two weeks ago after Trump teased him in front of GOP senators and the Democratic senator is hopeful that Trump will treat him with kid gloves this fall. In Manchins estimation, he is often the only thing keeping the president from becoming a down-the-line partisan.

At times, Manchin was the only Democrat who clapped during Trumps State of the Union address. This spring, Manchin killed liberals hopes of blocking Gina Haspel for CIA director by getting behind her early. Manchin supported Trumps Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, voted for now-embattled EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and even backed the presidents hard-line immigration proposal.

Im with him sometimes more than other Republican senators are with him, Manchin said.

But Manchin has been frustrated that every time he thinks he’s got the president in a moderate place on immigration or background checks for guns, Trump goes to the right. And he hasnt always been there for Trump, most conspicuously on the GOPs tax reform bill, which attracted no Democratic votes. He also voted against Betsy DeVos to be education secretary, Tom Price to lead the Health and Human Services Department and Obamacare repeal.

Summing up his predicament, Manchin said, Washington Democrats are making it more difficult for me to be a West Virginia Democrat.

Joe Biden Wrong About Voting Records Of Joe Manchin Kyrsten Sinema

If Your Time is short

Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema support the continued use of the Senates filibuster rule. This stance imperils the prospects for key elements of Bidens agenda. 

However, on actual votes taken in the Senate, both Manchin and Sinema supported Bidens position 100% of the time. 

In a speech marking 100 years since a race massacre in Tulsa, President Joe Biden gave a rhetorical nudge to two senators hed like to see greater support from.

“June should be a month of action on Capitol Hill,” Biden said in Tulsa on June 1. “I hear all the folks on TV saying, Why doesnt Biden get this done? Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends. But were not giving up.”

Biden didnt specify which Democratic senators he had in mind, and the White House didnt respond to an inquiry for this article. But observerswidelyassumed that he was referring to Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, whose words and positions have not always been in lockstep with Bidens.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., surrounded by reporters at the Capitol on May 26, 2021.

However, in his Tulsa remarks, Biden was wrong to say that Manchin and Sinema or any other Senate Democrat, for that matter “voted more” with Republicans than with Biden.

Featured Fact-check

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., outside the Capitol on Feb. 5, 2020.

Joe Manchins Hard No On Voting Bill Leaves Democrats Seeking New Path

The West Virginia senator has stated, in an op-ed, that he will not back the For the People Act unless it has bipartisan support

For months, Democrats in the US Senate have danced delicately around Joe Manchin, giving him space and holding out hope that the West Virginia Democrat would eventually come around and give his must-win vote to legislation that would amount to the most sweeping voting rights protections in a generation.

That detente effectively ended on Sunday, when Manchin authored an op-ed making it clear he will not vote for the bill, leaving Democrats to find a new path forward that is, if there is one at all.

Manchin did not raise substantive concerns about the legislation, the For the People Act, in the Senate but rather said that he would only support it if it was bipartisan. He also reiterated his resistance to eliminating the filibuster, a legislative rule that requires 60 votes to move most legislation forward in the Senate. Getting 10 Republicans to sign on to voting rights legislation is a fools errand, many observers say, pointing to how the party has embraced Trumps baseless lies about the election and is actively trying to make it harder to vote.

Republican intransigence on voting rights is not an excuse for inaction and Senator Manchin must wake up to this fact, said Karen Hobart Flynn, the president of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, which backs the bill.

The Middle Ground Could Be Found

Manchins upbringing centered on understanding and hard work.

For a long time in the state, it was Republicans, not Democrats, who needed to find political friends on the left to get anything done. And as Manchin rose through local politics, first as a member of the House of Delegates, then as a state senator, secretary of state and finally governor, Manchin was known for including Republicans in negotiations, even if Democrats enjoyed sizable majorities in the state.

He told me one time, I will never forget, if you have an issue where you cannot get one vote to go with you from the other party, regardless of who is in the majority it is probably a bad idea, recalled Mike Caputo, a Democratic state senator in West Virginia who served as majority whip in the House of Delegates during Manchins time as governor.

He added: Joe has always been the kind of guy that has always believed you can find common ground if you work hard enough. I know when he was governor, we had major disagreements, but he always believed that if we talked long enough and both sides wanted to find a resolution, the middle ground could be found.

Manchin signaled this position remains inside him in an interview on Thursday, telling CNNs Manu Raju that he was not ready to get rid of the Senate legislative filibuster, a move that would allow Democrats to do more without Republican support.

Manchin Goes Full Maga

The vulnerable West Virginia Democrat is embracing Donald Trump, figuratively and literally: We just kind of do the man-bump type thing.

06/06/2018 04:02 AM EDT

Sen. Joe Manchin talks with a local reporter on June 5 in Ranson, W.Va. The president’s popularity in the state has Republicans salivating over the prospect of knocking off the 70-year-old senator this fall. | John Shinkle/POLITICO

RANSON, W.Va. Joe Manchin wants you to know he really likes Donald Trump.

The West Virginia senator doesnt put it quite that way. But more than any other Democrat in Congress, he’s positioned himself as a vocal Trump ally. In fact, the senator, up for reelection in a state Trump won by more than 40 points, told POLITICO he isnt ruling out endorsing Trump for reelection in 2020 a position practically unheard of for a politician with a D next to his name.

Im open to supporting the person who I think is best for my country and my state, Manchin said this week from the drivers seat of his Grand Cherokee, insisting hes game to work with any president of either party. If his policies are best, Ill be right there.

The president recently mocked Manchin in front of the Senate GOP caucus as trying to hug him all the time only a slight exaggeration, by Manchins telling.

We just kind of do the man-bump type thing. Thats it. And I think hes pulling me as much as Im pulling him, Manchin said in describing his physical embraces with the president.

Can The John Lewis Act Conceivably Get Through Congress Without Being Filibustered

The premise of Joe Manchins argument for making the John Lewis Act rather than the For the People Act the main vehicle for voting rights action in Congress is that the Voting Rights Act was last extended by a unanimous Senate vote and a Republican president . Thus legislation to restore it should command considerable bipartisan support. The trouble is, it doesnt. When the bill passed the House in 2019, only one Republican voted for it. As noted above, no Republicans voted for the new version.

It is true, perhaps, that killing the John Lewis Act would be marginally more embarrassing to the GOP than killing the For the People Act, given the partys past support for the VRA. But theres little doubt Republicans will find a way to justify doing it in, by either taking the Supreme Courts position a bit further and arguing racial discrimination in voting simply no longer exists, or arguing any voting-rights legislation must include election integrity provisions addressing their phony-baloney fraud claims. Whataboutism has become the standard Republican excuse for refusing to do the right thing. So actual passage of anything like the John Lewis Act remains impossible for the foreseeable future, at least so long as Democrats cannot muster the internal Senate support to kill or modify the filibuster.

This piece has been updated.

Joe Manchin Was Never A Mystery

Its always been pretty obvious who he is: a middle-of-the-road guy with good electoral instincts, decent intentions, and bad ideas.

About the author: David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

The failure of the For the People Act in the Senate yesterday evening didnt provide much drama. All 50 Democrats backed the voting-rights bill, but with no Republican support, they didnt have enough votes to break a filibuster. That Democrats didnt have the votes was clear from the start of the Congress.

But journalism requires drama, which means that over the past few months Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has been the subject of extensive coverage. The problem with this coverage is not that Manchin is unimportant; as the most moderate Democrat in a 50-person caucus, he is crucial. Its that there is no mystery to him.

Trying to figure out who Manchin is and what he wants, or how hes changedthe natural and reasonable defaults of political-profile writingassumes theres something more than meets the eye. Really, though, Manchin is who hes always been: a middle-of-the-road guy with good electoral instincts, decent intentions, and bad ideas.

Reporters and pundits engaged in a frenzied hermeneutic quest to decode what Manchin wanted and what hed allow. But trying to make sense of it all was a waste of time. The important thing was he was against nuking the filibuster then, and he is now.

Why Democrats Were Desperate To Win Joe Manchin’s Vote For An Already

Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large

On Tuesday night, the “For the People” Act will fail.

fait accompli Every single Democrat wanted to make elections more fair and open. And every single Republican stood in opposition to that effort.“Today’s debate about how to best protect our right to vote and to hold elections, however, is not about finding common ground, but seeking partisan advantage. Whether it is state laws that seek to needlessly restrict voting or politicians who ignore the need to secure our elections, partisan policy-making won’t instill confidence in our democracy â it will destroy it.“As such, congressional action on federal voting rights legislation must be the result of both Democrats and Republicans coming together to find a pathway forward or we risk further dividing and destroying the republic we swore to protect and defend as elected officials.”

Whats In It For Republicans

Manchin has suggested that any voting rights reforms must be bipartisan, and hes resisted filibuster reform in the past. So even Manchins somewhat watered-down voting rights proposals face a tough road in the Senate unless hes willing to reconsider his desire to secure Republican votes.

That said, Manchins proposal does include a few ideas that may prove enticing to some GOP senators.

He would impose a nationwide voter ID requirement meaning voters would be required to show some form of identification before casting a ballot. Such laws enjoy broad support from Republicans, who often claim they are necessary to combat voter fraud.

In reality, such fraud is virtually nonexistent, and many voting rights advocates fear that voter ID prevents left-leaning groups, such as students, low-income voters, and voters of color, from casting a ballot because these groups are less likely to have ID.

New research, however, suggests that voter ID laws may not have much of an impact at all that is, they neither prevent fraud nor do much to disenfranchise voters. And Manchin also proposes a fairly permissive form of voter ID. While some states have strict voter ID laws that require voters to show specific forms of photo identification, Manchin would permit voters to cast a ballot if they show alternative forms of ID, such as a utility bill with their name and address on it.

Dc And Puerto Rico Statehood

In a November 10, 2020, interview, Manchin said that he did not “see the need for the D.C. statehood with the type of services that we’re getting in D.C. right now” and that he was “not convinced that’s the way to go.” Of Puerto Rico statehood, Manchin said that he opposed it but was open to discussion. In a January 10, 2021 interview, he did not affirm his opposition to statehood for D.C. or Puerto Rico, saying only, “I don’t know enough about that yet. I want to see the pros and cons. So I’m waiting to see all the facts. I’m open up to see everything”. On April 30, 2021, Manchin came out against the D.C. Statehood bill that had passed the House of Representatives, suggesting that D.C. could instead be given statehood by constitutional amendment.

The Deal Hes Pitching To Replace Hr1 Isnt Much Of A Deal At All

WSJOpinion

Senate Democrats tried and failed Tuesday to move their version of H.R.1, the bill to impose a federal election code on all 50 states. That 800-page travesty was doomed once West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin came out against it. But now Democrats are rallying around Plan B, which is based on a three-page memo circulated by Mr. Manchins office.

Its a curious document. The preamble insists that any voting bill must be the result of both Democrats and Republicans coming together. But then it suggests an H.R.1 compromise that is no bipartisan kumbaya. As Republican leader Mitch McConnell said last week in ruling out Mr. Manchins wish list, it still involves an assault on the fundamental idea that states, not the federal government, should decide how to run their own elections.

To start, Mr. Manchins memo suggests mandating at least 15 consecutive days of early voting. Yet one prominent Democratic opponent of H.R.1., New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, has objected that his states constitution dates to 1783, and it requires that a voter must be present on Election Day unless absent from the town or city, or physically disabled. Yet New Hampshire, he added, has had the third highest voter turnout in the country for each of the last four presidential elections.

The Pressure Of Legacy

Another lens through which West Virginians understand Manchin that national media tend to overlook is by knowing who came before. Manchin holds the seat of the longest-serving senator in U.S. history, Democrat Robert C. Byrd, and served alongside another Senate great, Jay Rockefeller. 

For Manchin, the shadows of these two men surely loom large. Both were known for their commitment to working in a bipartisan manner, bringing members of their chamber together across the aisle to do what was right for the country. 

Both rallied Congress around significant shifts in policy in their time. Byrd was known as the rules man; he essentially wrote and rewrote Senate rules on order and the filibuster in his 51 years in the body, and also knew better than anyone how to work the system to bring millions of dollars of federal investments to the state to the continued benefit of West Virginians. 

Rockefeller, who spent 31 years in the chamber, has said his most prized accomplishments included authoring legislation to create CHIP and helping shepherd the passage of the Affordable Care Act, just to name a few of the more than 2,000 pieces of just health care-related policy he had his hands on.

Both were true statesmena designation that I would argue few politicians in Washington and any other Capitol deserve today. The legacy of both, and how his own legacy will compare, must weigh heavy on Manchin.

[thebibliomancer]

Essential Avengers: Avengers #130: The Reality Problem!

December, 1974

Not sure what this title means.

And I think “one of the greatest battle issues ever!!” is maybe overselling it a bit. But I appreciate that your own stories excite you, Steve Englehart.

Last time: Kang kidnapped Mantis, Scarlet Witch, Agatha Harkness because one of them was destined to be the Celestial Madonna (it was Mantis) and Thor, Iron Man, and the Vision to stuff into Macrobots to cause World War III. Swordsman, Hawkeye, and Pharaoh Rama-Tut freed the other Avengers but at the cost of Swordsman’s life and Rama-Tut and Kang disappeared into the time stream after slightly nudging a lever.

This time: A bunch of villains interrupt a perfectly good funeral.

But the splash page was a bit ahead of where the story actually starts. After thwarting Kang in China, the Avengers have returned to Avengers Mansion to catch up.

Hawkeye tells the Avengers (and Agatha Harkness who is sitting in on the meeting and distracting Wanda with her cat) that Captain America has become Nomad. They’re all just thrilled that Cap is getting back out there into the game of punching people in the face after he was so disillusioned post-Secret Empire.

Iron Man assumes that Hawkeye is going to be rejoining but Hawkeye is non-committal.

Then Mantis comes in and tells them that this is goodbye. She doesn’t feel she can remain with the Avengers after her actions dishonored them. She’s going to return to Vietnam and try to figure out her past. And she only asks she be allowed to take the Swordsman’s body to bury it in Vietnam.

As far as she knows, it is where he was the happiest.

It occurs to me that because of the nature of the biz, they are going to bury him without knowing his real name (Jacques Duquesne). Or his life outside the mask at all. It actually turns out that he had a daughter and although he never really raised her, apparently swording is genetic because she became a master of the blade too. But because Swordsman never told even Mantis anything outside the swashbuckling persona he wanted for himself, the Avengers don’t learn about her until 2014. And who knows how many years that is in sliding timescale time.

Just goes to show. If you’re a superhero with a secret identity, make arrangements. You could die during the next big event. Although it might later turn out that you weren’t dead or you may be resurrected so it could be hard to make any kind of arrangements you’ll be happy coming back to.

Anyway.

Thor says that they were holding off on burial arrangements because they were waiting to see what her wishes were. And says thee nay to goodbye. Obviously the Avengers are going to the funeral.

Mantis is shocked that the Avengers are sticking with her after the terrible way she acted but Thor says “thy chastened demeanor doth reflect a penitent soul.” I guess as long as you know you goofed up?

Scarlet Witch can’t go though. Agatha Harkness insists that she get back to her witchcraft studies. And although she doesn’t say anything out loud (because it would be in poor taste) she wishes Vision would stay with her because she still doesn’t trust Mantis around him.

Vision does initially decide to remain. But because he no longer trusts himself. He has frozen up in the middle of battle three times now: once against Dormammu, once against Zodiac, and now once against Kang. He doesn’t feel fit company for the Avengers.

But Iron Man and Thor talk him into coming. Its better that he be along where they can aid him if necessary than cooped up alone in the mansion, since Wanda is going to be sequestered.

ELSEWHERE, the Saigon Diamond Exchange. A probably-ex-GI has covered himself with razor blades and called himself the Slasher. I’m not sure how he feels about shipping but he’s slashing prices down to nothing!

... he’s stealing the diamonds.

And he means business. When a security guard tries to intervene, the Slasher back hands him across the face, causing several spurts of blood.

And then he runs off with the diamonds. And since nobody can block his way without getting cut, he escapes easily. THE PERFECT CRIME.

Hours later, the Avengers Quinjet over to the abandoned temple of the Priests of Pama.

Mantis chose this spot for the Swordsman’s burial. BUT ONLY BECAUSE IT FILLS HER WITH AN OVERWHELMING SENSE OF TRANQUILITY. Its not like she believes that she was raised here.

(I think there’s a somewhat darker reason she chose this location but we’ll get to that a moderate amount down the line)

And then the burial.

Hawkeye thinks something that I had been thinking. That Swordsman was basically a Hawkeye that never got the breaks. And with that realization, Hawkeye is sorry for giving him so much grief.

Mantis lets her feelings out in a chant of lament and then asks Thor to speak for Swordsman as a god, despite not knowing Swordsman’s chosen faith. But hey, if he was Norse, he definitely earned a place in Valhalla. Died in battle.

Thor: “All Father Odin, we who be immortal are ofttimes tempted to forget the meaning of mortality -- that life is but a temporary gift for most. A man cannot exist without the knowledge that he may forfeit that gift whenever he places himself in the path of peril... yet men do risk their lives, and sometimes lose them, for many and varied reasons... and the greatest of these... is love.”

And then they bury the Swordsman.

So he’s gone forever.

And then the Avengers hear a scream from outside the temple and go rushing into action. They’d have liked to mourn the Swordsman much longer but being an Avenger means running towards the screaming.

And they find Iron Man foes the Titanium Man and the Crimson Dynamo and Thor villain and Master of Evil the Radioactive Man chasing a man out of the jungle.

The man sees the Avengers and hopes they’ll save him but he doesn’t make it before Crimson Dynamo and Titanium Man start blasting him.

But they’re not killing him. They say they are only teaching him a lesson. For this man, Sen Fa, struck his wife so hard that she died of it.

The Avengers run to intervene but Crimson Dynamo goes Red Light. This is their business, the business of the Titanic Three. And the Avengers have no authority here.

See, this is after the Vietnam War cease-fire but before the fall of Saigon. And in North Vietnam (which is where the temple is, I guess) the Titanic Three are the superheroes.

Radioactive Man recaps their origin. He was sent to America by his Chinese masters and then joined the Masters of Evil but he met defeat each time. Likewise, Titanium Man fought Iron Man several times for the Russians and always lost. His final mission was to persuade the exiled Crimson Dynamo to return to Russia. Instead, Titanium Man joined Crimson Dynamo as an independent agent. And hearing about it, Radioactive Man broke out of prison to join them.

The three allied themselves with the Viet Cong, the only popular front in Vietnam, because none of the superpowers could touch them without political complications. And together they became the TITANIC THREE!

Here, they are the LAW. And the Avengers are trespassers. So kindly gtfo.

Now this is a fascinating concept. I always like for non-America countries to have their own superheroes. Because you’d think that logically, the same amount of weird lab accidents, mutations, and inventing would happen outside America and create superheroes and villains.

Failing that, during the Cold War, a lot of comic villains were enemy agents sent by Russia or China to America to steal plans or sabotage or fight American superheroes or whatever. If they would just stay home, they could be the Russian Avengers. (The Russians do get a superhero team later which includes a guy who turns into a BEAR!)

But with the Titanic Three you get the added wrinkle that they’re all devoted communists but tired of how their homelands treated them so they all moved to Vietnam to be superheroes there. Still half-communistic but independentish from China and Russia.

And they may not act like the Avengers would view superheroes (clearly torturing a helpless captive) but on the other hand, they tracked an abuser and murderer through the jungle to bring him to justice. On some level, they do seem committed to the idea of being heroes. Maybe if only to put some tallies in the win column for a change.

I expect it only to last until someone wants to use one of the three as a villain of the month.

Anyway, Iron Man takes great exception to being told to leave. Titanium Man and Crimson Dynamo were responsible for the death of a woman he loved and the Viet Cong was responsible for him becoming Iron Man. So he is itching to pick a fight.

Thor holds him back.

Thor: “‘Tis their land now, and even as we may not follow Dr. Doom into his kingdom of Latveria -- so are we powerless here!”

Well, the Avengers did go into Latveria once, although they were lured into a trap so it probably doesn’t count.

Iron Man then attacks Thor to get him out of the way.

It goes about how you’d expect.

Thor is mostly embarrassed that Iron Man is making him settle this dispute so publicly. And in front of their villains, no less! Geez, Tony.

Anyway they agree to leave and head for Saigon to investigate Mantis’ past. Since Captain Marvel is Kree, they broadcast a worldwide signal for him or Rick Jones but they’re both busy in Captain Marvel’s own book so the Avengers go to do some legwork.

Mantis goes to a house she remembers living in when she was young but the inhabitants tell her the house was only built two years ago.

Leaving Mantis to realize she may be mistaken about her whole life and being.

Hawkeye asks whats the deal with Mantis anyway and Vision recaps all the Mantis highlights, which is handy for any readers just tuning in. Although because he’s a gentleman he doesn’t share that Mantis was aggressively flirting with him before Swordsman’s death.

Mantis leads the Avengers to other landmarks from her youth but nobody at those places remembers her. And her spirits sink lower and lower.

The tour just so happens to go by the Slasher’s hiding spot (oh yeah, he was set up in this issue, wasn’t he?) and he instantly assumes that they’re looking for him. Because he has an over-inflated sense of his own importance and a little bit of paranoia.

Initially, he plans to just lay low until his fence arrives so he can palm the jewels off on him. But then he happens to spot the Titanic Three walking around on another street.

Because they can just visit Saigon whenever they want because nobody can prove they’re with the Viet Cong and they probably beat up anyone that accuses them.

But that gives the Slasher an idea.

Meanwhile, some brief Mantis self-doubt. Her whole life as she knows it is probably a lie, implanted memories by the dead Kree priests. And she doesn’t see herself as any kind of Madonna, not after how she treated Swordsman and tried seducing a man already in a relationship. And if she is the Celestial Madonna, then who is her mate supposed to be?

And then this character moment is interrupted by an action scene.

The Titanic Three show up with the Slasher yelling about the Avengers abusing their privileges. And now that they’re not in North Vietnam, Thor has no problem throwing down.

Thor gets into it with Titanium Man who blasts Thor and then tries to hold him down, accusing him of bothering a Viet Cong sympathizer. Thor just hammers him.

Crimson Dynamo tackles Iron Man claiming that the armored Avenger only blames him for Janice Cord’s death to spare himself. And then Iron Man blasts him in the face.

Crimson Dynamo realizes that Iron Man is even stronger than last they fought and decides on a strategic retreat down an alley but a hooded figure swings from a rooftop and kicks him off his feet. Which Crimson Dynamo is kind of befuddled by. Dude knocked him on his ass with his bare feet.

Meanwhile, Hawkeye shoots Radioactive Man in the face with a FOOM! arrow because he’s bored of talking politics.

Meanwhile meanwhile, Mantis engages the Slasher. But she’s out of sorts what with Swordsman’s death and learning that her past is a lie. In a brief exchange, the Slasher gets the better of her, BOP!ing her across the face. Thankfully without using any of the many blades glued to him.

And then Vision steps in.

Slasher tries to tackle him but Vision just goes diamond-hard and Slasher bounces off. Some of his little blades even break off in the impact. It’s pretty great.

It’s stuff like this why Vision has one of my favorite power sets.

Anyway, Vision then uses Solar Beam which was Super Effective because it knocked Slasher’s diamond sack loose. The not-so-sharp sharp guy goes scrabbling for the diamonds.

But Titanium Man calls the fight to an end. See, the Slasher told the Titanic Three that the Avengers were harassing him with trumped up theft charges. But he really did have stolen jewels!

Plus, Thor says that the Avengers didn’t even know of the Slasher’s existence until his fight.

Titanium Man: “So! We have been duped! He is a thief -- and as such, he deserves no aid from any decent man!”

The Slasher: “Decent man? You? YOU’RE A COMMIE!”

Titanium Man: “Come, comrades. We need not listen to this filth. We have no further business here.”

The Slasher: “No! Come back! You can’t leave me -- to them!”

Thor: “This man did precipitate battle most foul between two bands of super-beings! To think that one such as he could do that.”

The Vision: “But isn’t that always the way, Thor? Whenever a war is fought, it is never the people who must fight it -- who have any reason to bring it about.”

You sure said a thing, the Vision. A thing that is probably relevant to the country you’re currently in. A thing about a Western guy causing a war in Vietnam after trying to rob the country.

Anyway, the issue felt kind of fillery. Like Englehart needed some Mantis exploring her past before what happens next issue but didn’t want an issue with just with that. So we get a little engineered conflict between the Avengers and the Titanic Three so the action buffs have something.

Still, it gave us the Titanic Three.

Oh. Also, back in the post for issue #126, I said I’d never find out why Klaw teamed up with Solarr. I was wrong. The letters page included in this issue has what I guess was the winning fan theory.

“While Klaw was in a Rudyarda prison, he requested for privileges to get American newspapers, seeking perhaps, an ally to free him. The permission granted, strangely, he read of Solarr’s battles with Cap. Solarr, a maniac with no scruples, who would murder without remorse, was the perfect ally. Calling a human contact on the outside, Klaw set up the freeing of Solarr. Solarr, grateful and anxious for another chance to kill and pick up a few thou, springs Klaw from the Rudyardan slammer, and the end result, AVENGERS #126!”

[holmjanson-blog]

The sun dips down in the sky disappearing into the Atlantic Ocean. I seldom have watched a sunset so intently; waiting, waiting, waiting for that last little sliver to disappear. So much rested on that last sliver. My gaze moved from the sliver of sun to the restaurant around me.  Families and couples sat at the tables with a platter of water, orange juice, a hard-boiled egg, and some bread in front of them.  It was then that I realized that traveling during Ramadan in Morocco was a real learning experience.

This wasn’t the first time I was in a predominantly Muslim country during Ramadan.  In fact, I still remember being in Zanzibar in 2006 on my career break travels when the hotel owner warned my sister and I not to go out right after sunset because it was Ramadan and the streets would be empty.  I didn’t really understand what he meant – but we did take his advice.  I was also in Istanbul Turkey one hot July during Ramadan; I was intrigued with the holiday, but I didn’t really try to learn much about it – until now.

A man sits in a mosque and reads the Quran in Turkey

When I arrived in Morocco, I had no idea Ramadan was supposed to start in 3 days. Unlike Christmas that falls on the same day every year, Ramadan changes days every year.  The Islamic calendar has only 29 or 30 days in each month; therefore, Ramadan changes by 13 days every year. That was the first of many surprises that I encountered regarding Ramadan in Morocco. 

For some reason I always equated Ramadan as the big Muslim holiday, similar to Christian Christmas, but I learned that this holiday was far from joyous, in fact it seemed like more torture than ‘joy to the world’.   Yet I also learned that Ramadan had more in common with Christmas than I first thought. 

Ramadan in Morocco

I took a lot of time on this trip to learn more about this important time.  And it was interesting being there at the beginning seeing the daily life go from normal to Ramadan.  95% of the population of Morocco is Muslim, so this holiday affects pretty much everyone.  However, I wanted to also understand how it affected travelers like me and ultimately answer the question – should you travel to a country when they are celebrating Ramadan?

But first – some background.

What is Ramadan?

Ramadan is the month in the Islamic calendar when the Quran was messaged to the prophet.

Mosque in Casablance

Praying in Turkey

Mosque in Casablanca

At this time Muslims fast from eating, drinking (even water!), smoking, and sex from sun up to sun down.  Depending on the time of year the month falls, this can be up to 16 hours of fasting a day!  They do this in order to know and feel the hunger pains of the less fortunate and be grateful for what they have. It’s a time to remember the poor and destitute. It is supposed to be a time when you work hard and focus more on religion and God. Muslims spend more time at the mosque and more time praying.  And they always go to Friday prayers.

How is Ramadan Celebrated Today?

Ramadan is powerful…so powerful it has the ability to turn back time! On the night before Ramadan started our guide told us the clocks would be changing by an hour.  No – this wasn’t some sort of daylight savings time – this was Ramadan time.  By moving the clocks back an hour it allowed people to break their fast a little earlier in the evening.  It will change back after the month is done.

Upon searching – I did find a lot of food pictures!

“Ramadan can be hypocritical,” our guide Rasheed told me.  “Normally people aren’t in the mosque, but during Ramadan it’s full, you can’t even find space to pray!”  It’s true – many times as we walked around the cities, we saw people praying outside the mosque as there wasn’t room inside. It seems as if Christmas and Ramadan have more in common than I thought!  What church doesn’t have to pull the folding chairs out of storage every December 24th for the extra people at the services they only see once a year?

And also, like Christmas, according to Rasheed it seems that Ramadan has also gotten caught up in modern day commercialism, straying from the original meaning and origins. Families and restaurants often have huge dinners on display for after sunset – going the other extreme to overabundance. I did see plenty of ads for ‘breaking of the fast’ dinners at fancy hotels around the area while staying in various cities in Morocco. It seems that even Ramadan has been swallowed up by social media and marketing.

Fasting and other Hardships

The abstinence includes food, drink, sex, and smoking.  I’m not a smoker, so I personally think that the not drinking any liquid would be the real challenge.  Especially considering it was well into the 90’s while I was in Morocco and I can’t imagine 15 hours without any water in that heat.  Plus, we were traveling around the Sahara Desert; it sounds like a bad horror movie – not being able to drink in the desert!

Rasheed said that the first 2 or 3 days of fasting are the hardest as your body adjusts to a new schedule.  I personally can’t imagine how hard it must be in the beginning, especially if you have to be around people eating like our poor guide. He would normally get us to lunch and then go in the back and take a nap or read the paper.

He also mentioned that this is a month where you get very little sleep since in the dark hours you are also making sure you are drinking a sufficient amount and waking up early to eat. He normally drinks 3 Liters of water at night; he’s up all night peeing.

Breaking Fast

This is where we get the term breakfast, and breaking fast at sunset is a pretty welcome experience as you would guess! I noticed that people go about this in different ways; some load up on food, and some start really light with water and soup.  But the thing that is consistent among everyone is that they are inside eating something at sunset.  This is when the entire place full of hustle bustle just minutes before, turns into a ghost town for an hour; vendors close up their shops, and the streets are quiet.  It’s actually an eerie experience to see the streets of Marrakech go from full to empty as if the zombie apocalypse is coming and no one gave me the message.

One of my favorite evenings was sitting at the Casablanca beach restaurant watching the sun go down.  I could sort of feel the energy in the air as families and couple came into the restaurant to sit down and wait.  The waiter was calm and collected as he placed trays of water, orange juice, bread, and egg in front of them.  I noticed that not many people were even watching the sunset.  I had expected that everyone would be facing the setting sun just waiting for it to disappear – because that’s what I would be doing if it were me! But to my surprise most people weren’t even watching the sunset. They weren’t really talking either; most just sat in a zombie state quietly.

I was also expecting everyone to open their water and chug it as soon as the sun disappeared. Or maybe quickly shoving the bread and egg in their mouth with a feeling of relief. However, it wasn’t like that at all; the people in the restaurant just got up and went the buffet at the restaurant and filled their plates.  It was all very civil.  I was astonished at why they didn’t open their bottle of water or drink their orange juice first.  I’m pretty sure I’d be ravaging after 15 hours of nothing.

Travel Considerations for Ramadan

During this time of fasting, I think you have to be considerate as a traveler, but it doesn’t mean that all tourism stops.  There were a few times on this trip where I hit my ‘hangry stage’, my stomach was growling, it was hot, and it was taking us forever to walk for lunch.  I had to stick with the schedule and the group which irritated me in my angry, hungry state.

My anger turned to our guide who was walking too slow for my liking. My stomach growled again as I took a drink from my water bottle and studied our guide walking slowly in his djellaba (long robe). He hadn’t even had breakfast or a sip of water on this hot day, and he was slowly plodding along doing his job leading us as he had been all morning in this heat. My hanger suddenly softened a bit and gave me a whole new respect to what they were going through.  While I was having a childlike temper tantrum inside my head thanks to my hunger, they were total professionals; you never would have noticed any discomfort on their part.

I thought a lot about how hard it would be to work in the service industry during Ramadan.  I don’t think I could do it!  Having to be accommodating and polite while not eating OR DRINKING all day was unimaginable to me. I think as a traveler though it is important to have patience and understanding for the people fasting while also working all day.

Travel Tips for Ramadan

1. Be patient People may be a bit more tired or irritable (especially the smokers!), but once you understand they ‘why’ behind it – I think your tolerance and understand increases too.

2. Plan your dinner before or after breaking fast The sunset hour of breaking fast minorly affects you as people tend to disappear for a little bit at that time such as hotel staff, shopkeepers and taxi drivers. You’ll have to plan accordingly and eat about an hour before or after sunset at any restaurant. I was at the bar in my hotel when the bartender came over and settled up the tab right before sunset and made sure that I had everything I needed for a little while; he said he was getting ready to go eat.

3. Stay off the empty streets during breaking fast Locals have warned me to not go out on the streets when they are empty for fear of theft. I always found that odd, as I thought everyone would be inside eating and I’d be safer! However, once I walked around an empty Marrakech I totally understood what they meant. You feel pretty vulnerable with no one around, and I made sure to follow their advice after that.

A busy souk in Morocco

The streets in Marrakesh during breaking fast

Should you travel to a country During Ramadan?

As a traveler, Ramadan is a minor disturbance, but it’s not enough to change your travel plans.

If you are someone who enjoys cultural travel and is curious about other cultures, then I think it’s a great time to travel! It’s a chance to see another side of a country and learn more about a religion and holiday that is celebrated all over the world. However, if you are expecting everything to run smoothly without any issues, then you might want to skip this time. But then again, if you expect everything to run smoothly with no issues on a trip, then you might as well burn your passport and stay home regardless!

In the end, I came back home more knowledgeable about a big part of the world culture – and isn’t that what travel is really about? Learning about each other, sharing, and understanding are the elements of a successful trip in my world!

Follow my Travels

The post Understanding Ramadan in Morocco appeared first on Ottsworld Unique Travel Experiences.

[sewingscars]

Diversion!!!

To all the trans military and veterans who have fought for our freedom, WE SEE YOU AND WE THANK YOU!!! . 

We will NOT be posting any articles about the Anus-Mouthed-Leathery-Tangerine's tweets from his shitter. This is not to devalue or distract from this mornings news. On the contrary, it is simply a reminder.

 This piece of shit H.R.2796 - Civil Rights Uniformity Act of 2017 was introduced into Congress on 6-7-2017. 

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2796 

.Civil Rights Uniformity Act of 2017 

This bill prohibits the word "sex" or "gender" from being interpreted to mean "gender identity," and requires "man" or "woman" to be interpreted to refer exclusively to a person's genetic sex, for purposes determining the meaning of federal civil rights laws or related federal administrative agency regulations or guidance. 

No federal civil rights law shall be interpreted to treat gender identity or transgender status as a protected class unless it expressly designates "gender identity" or "transgender status" as a protected class. 

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YESTERDAY DAY 187- 1/ Senate Republicans secured the 51 votes needed to advance their health care bill after Pence cast the tie-breaking vote. The Senate will now begin debating, amending, and ultimately voting in the coming days on the future of Obamacare. The vote was too close to call until the last moments, when several Republican holdouts announced their support, including Rand Paul, Dean Heller, Rob Portman, and Shelley Moore Capito. Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski both voted against the motion to proceed. (New York Times / Washington Post / CNN)

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 2/ The Senate will now have 20 hours of debate the health care bill, evenly split between the two sides. Senators can bring up and debate an unlimited number of amendments to the bill as long as they are “germane” to the bill and would not add to the budget deficit. Then a period known as vote-a-rama happens, where Senators votes on the amendments. The first amendment will be the Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act, which repeals most of the Affordable Care Act without a replacement. If that fails (as is expected), Senators will then vote on the Better Care Reconciliation Act, which cuts massive portions of the ACA. Because of reconciliation rules, these amendments would require 60 votes to pass. If BCRA fails, Senators will consider what is being called a “skinny repeal,” which repeals the individual mandate penalty, the employer mandate penalty, and the tax on medical devices. (New York Times / Vox / Time / NBC News) John McCain returned to the Senate for the health care vote after being diagnosed with brain cancer last week. McCain’s vote is critical to today’s procedural vote. His absence would have left Senate Republicans with no margin of error. (Washington Post / Politico) Senate Republicans don’t know what’s in their health care plan, but they voted anyway on the motion to proceed. About a half-dozen senators were publicly undecided about whether to start debate on rolling back the Affordable Care Act. Several senators have said they want a “replace” plan ready to go before voting “yes.” An agreed upon replace plan is not in place. The bill will have to pass the House before making its way to Trump’s desk. McConnell forced the procedural vote to put every senator on record. (Politico / Vox / CNN). 

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 3/ Trump ripped Jeff Sessions on Twitter, calling him “very weak” when it comes to investigating Hillary Clinton. Trump has repeatedly taken aim at Sessions in recent days, leading to speculation that it’s just a matter of time before the attorney general resigns or is fired. The recent tweets come a day after Trump publicly described Sessions as “beleaguered.” (NBC News / CNN) 

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 4/ Later in the day, Trump added that he is “very disappointed in Jeff Sessions” but won’t say if he’ll fire him. Trump has previously discussed replacing Jeff Sessions in a move viewed by some of Trump’s advisors as part of a strategy for firing special counsel Robert Mueller in order to end his investigation into the campaign’s efforts to coordinate with the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election. Sessions recently asked White House staff how he could patch up relations with Trump, but that went nowhere. Instead, Trump floated longtime ally Rudy Giuliani as a possible replacement for Sessions. (Wall Street Journal / Washington Post / Associated Press)

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 5/ Sessions is “pissed” at Trump for the attacks, but doesn’t plan to quit. Senate Republicans have said that attacks on Sessions, who spent 20 years in the Senate, strain their relationship with Trump. Many GOP senators have expressed annoyance with Trump’s tweets, saying “I really have a hard time with this” and "I’d prefer that he didn’t do that. We’d like Jeff to be treated fairly.” Senators have also been nonplussed by Trump’s criticism of Sessions’ decision to recuse himself, saying “Jeff made the right decision. It’s not only a legal decision, but it’s the right decision.“ Trump’s senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon also support Sessions. (The Daily Beast / McClatchy DC)

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 6/ Anthony Scaramucci says it’s "probably” correct that Trump wants Sessions gone. The new White House communications director didn’t want to speak for the president, but said he thinks Trump has a “certain style” and he is “obviously frustrated.” (The Hill)

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 7/ Senate Democrats are planning a procedural move to prevent Trump from making recess appointments by forcing the Senate to hold “pro forma” sessions – brief meetings, often only a few minutes. Democrats are worried Trump could attempt to bypass Congress and appoint a new attorney general and undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing probe into alleged Russian meddling in the US election during the planned August recess. (CNN / Reuters) 

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 8/ The Senate Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena to Paul Manafort to testify in its Russia probe. Manafort had agreed to provide notes of the meeting at Trump Tower last year with the Russian lawyer, according to a person close to the investigation. Committee chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking member Dianne Feinstein said they had been “unable to reach an agreement for a voluntary transcribed interview with the Judiciary Committee” with Manafort. (ABC News / Politico) . UPDATE: **The Senate Judiciary Committee has dropped the subpoena against Paul Manafort **and plans are underway for the former Trump campaign chairman to speak to investigators. (Politico) 

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9/ Parents are angry after Trump delivered a politicized speech to tens of thousands of boy scouts. Over 35 minutes, Trump threatened to fire one of his Cabinet members, attacked Obama, dissed Hillary Clinton, marveled at the size of the crowd, warned the boys about the “fake media,” mocked the polls, and said more people would say “Merry Christmas.“ Responding to criticism, the Boy Scouts of America insisted it was "wholly non-partisan and does not promote any one position, product, service, political candidate or philosophy.” (Washington Post / BBC) Trump joked he would fire Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price if the health care bill doesn’t pass. “Hopefully he’s going to get the votes tomorrow to start on the path to kill this thing called ObamaCare that’s really hurting us,” Trump said during a speech to Boy Scouts at the 2017 National Jamboree. “He better get them, otherwise I’ll say, ‘Tom, you’re fired.’” (The Hill) 

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10/ Trump confirmed a covert CIA program while tweeting that the Washington Post had “fabricated the facts” about his decision to end a program aiding Syrian rebels fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Trump was referring to a story about ending an Obama program where the CIA armed and trained moderate Syrian rebels, a move long sought by the Russian government. (Washington Post / Politico) 

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 11/ A federal judge ruled that Trump’s voter fraud commission may request voter roll data from states. Opponents contend the effort could infringe on privacy rights. The judge said the lawsuit did not have grounds for an injunction because the commission was not technically an action by a government agency – the commission is an advisory body that does not have legal authority to compel states to hand over the data. (Reuters) 

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12/ Jared Kushner bought real estate from an oligarch’s firm represented by the Russian lawyer. Lev Leviev was a business partner at Prevezon Holdings, where Natalia Veselnitskaya acted as legal counsel. Prevezon was being investigated by Preet Bharara for money laundering before he was fired by Trump in March. Prevezon Holdings attempted to use Manhattan real estate deals to launder money stolen from the Russian treasury. In 2015, Kushner paid $295m to acquire several floors of the old New York Times building at 43rd street in Manhattan from the US branch of Leviev’s company. The Prevezon case was abruptly settled two days before it was due in open court in May for $6 million with no admission of guilt on the part of the defendants. (The Guardian) 

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13/ A White House press aide resigned after Anthony Scaramucci said he planned to fire him over alleged leaks. Michael Short is the first to leave after Scaramucci promised all aides “a clean slate” and “amnesty” to prove that they were not leaking. “This is the problem with the leaking,” Scaramucci told reporters outside the White House. “This is actually a terrible thing. Let’s say I’m firing Michael Short today. The fact that you guys know about it before he does really upsets me as a human being and as a Roman Catholic.” Short, who initially said Tuesday that he hadn’t yet been informed of any decision, resigned Tuesday afternoon. (Washington Post / Politico / The Hill) 

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DAY188 - Trump TWEETS ( NO official report, NO press release, NO executive order) that trans people are banned from the military. The Internet explodes. Everything that has been happening is no longer discussed. His diversion has been executed perfectly. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. #lightingahellfiretocoverashitstorm

[kendrixtermina]

Kenny Reacts to: Ramayana (& Hindu Mythology in General)

So, for those who don’t know, “Ramayana” is one of the big epics of Hindu Mythology, comparable to the Illiad or other legendary Kings such as David or Arthur, centering around Prince/King Ramchandr, one of the Avatars of Vishnu

My boyfriend (who happens to be Indian) introuced me to a TV show based on it, and I, being a mythology nerd, couldn’t resist...

Since a lot of people actually believe in this as a religion, first a disclaimer: I’m a complete atheist with no belief in the supernatural whatsover, but I’m a huge believer in the value of storytelling (and a writer - the more mythological references the better, at least if you’re aiming for as much of an ‘universal’ flavor as possible) and do hold that myth holds an important place in the human experience. I will be approaching this completely from a literature perspective. 

My boyfriend is not a believer either, though he used to be an actual Hindu growing up & still has it as a cultural background (I know myself that the stories you’re brought up on do influence you just by the archetypes and poetic shorthands they make available to you) - apparently he found it quite interesting to see me react to it & see it properly from start to finish. (though it has actually caused a resurgence in childhood song earworms)

So, with that out of the way, let’s get to the actual “review”

What did I watch

It’s a somewhat older show from the 80s or 90s so the special effects could have been better - but I say that only because with a concept like “Demons versus monkey people” and “battles with dark sorcery and vaguely described divine weapons” there is a lot of potential for creative visuals. 

In this implementation the style of costumes was more “historical” overall, but great care was taken nonetheless. 

Indeed, though childhood nostalgia filter my boyfriend likes this particular version because it was made by an 80 year old dude who dreamt all his life of making a TV show out of this story & worked hard to make everything ~just right~ - there have been never, fancier interpretations since but they tend to be more generic & plasticy in terms of the actual screenplay (my boyfriend, though biased by childhood exposure, says that “You don’t get the feeling that you’re looking at Ram, you’re looking at a supermodel”) whereas in this one, the director took great care to write all the songs & handpick the actors - 

Which, with those mythical, ‘archetypical’ characters is quite important, they have to have the right ‘aura’, ‘presence’ or ‘atmosphere’ around them to connect to the larger-than-life timeless ideas they’re intended to embody. They made sure to cast tall, wry dudes as the monkey people, had some really good acting, made sure supposed relatives actually look alike etc. 

This adaptation (at least insofar as I’ve watched it) seems to have gone with the “good ending”, that is, the version where the Prince & his wife live happily ever after returning to their home city (for a change, the original/older one... though it makes little sense to debate about the true version of a myth, it’s their very nature to be passed around & reinterpreted and for each listener & reteller to put their own spin on it) - there’s a second one that’s much more anal about social divisions, harder on the mysoginy and ends with him disowning her ass, though there’s some ring to the idea of the Princess returting to whence she came (mother Earth) in humiliation. It depends on what sort story you want though it doesn’t seem to fit with Ram’s characterization as the type who always looks to resolve things peacefully & reasonably & think before acting, & he may lose some of what makes him interesting if you take that away. 

Indeed the director saw the need to sanitize even the orginal “chastity test by fire” scene - more than I would have done even if I wanted the Prince to keep looking heroic, I suppose, a lot like how many Christians will explain away many inconsistencies in the bible (and pretty much everything in the book of Judges) because they need their headcanon to be consistent with what they associate with the deities. 

The Cosmology

One of the interesting parts about this particular ‘verse that got me more interested in it beyond my initial watching of that show is the rather complex makep of the world -

In most places religion has gone though certain discrete stages in accordance to the civilization that thought it up, with the various ideas (animism, polytheism, dualism, monotheistm etc.) all influecing each other subtly by the need to react to each other but in this case you had this evolution happening gradually without the previous being completely discarded.

So you have river spirits, sacret trees, elemental monsters, demons,  titan/jötnar like entities, your basic greek style deities,  a big head honcho lord of the universe, concepts of self-enlightenment and pantheist universal unity all coexisting in the same setting.

It’s basically a religion kitchen sink. (and I mean that in a good way, though I get why some may prefer the more ‘streamlined’ ideas of modern Christianity or Islam)

Impressions & Surprising things

Very interesting - because of my familiarity with mythic universals & certain shared cultural roots ( They even have their own wandering handsy thunder god! -  though he’s squarely in the middle of the cosmic hierarchy and seems to be the designated Worf Effect recipient) , I could count down all the tropes and see a lot comming but because of different cultural ideals there were many points where I REALLY didn’t know what was going to happen next

Also, it was a veritable soap opera and I did not expect the feels. The heroes were more adorable than I’d ever have thought. 

The level of “Honor Before Reason” and “Because Destiny Says so” is about comparable to the ancient greeks, but the “humble sinless all-loving hero come to earth for an ardurous mission” might remind one of Jesus, especially in the conception that “The Hero”, in the most archetypical sense, is to be not just badass but moral - though rather, Jesus resembles Ramayana because Ramayana came several centuries first; Just a sign IMHO that there myths come from the human mind and humans everywhere are more similar than different.

Funny thing is, since christian apologetics have this complex to prove how “special” their religion is (I mean it is unique in that no one has the exact same combination of traits but that’s true of every religion and the elements are universal), they spend a lot of time dismantling Islam (often with bonus racism) but usually completely dismiss Hinduism because “Well, they’re polytheists” when the two religions actually have a lot of ideas in common - indeed a lot of beievers will speak of the Hindu Trinity (or their favorite part thereof) or the Mother Godess much like the average dualist or monotheist would talk of their god, like, “O supreme being that dwells in all goodness” etc.

Unlike Jesus (who, despite his popular interpretation,  in the original bible had quite a temper) Rama’s patience & forgiveness is a bit less of an informed ability, though you do get the sense that this comes from a warrior culture as well as a very stratified society where living up to your given social role (including that of a wife) is everything - in a Western work Ram probably would’ve seized the city with the support of the citizens. XD

One could comment that Ram & his brothers are still royalty & that the focus is on that whereas Jesus deliberately took the shape of an ordinary dude, though Ram still gets to spend years as a hermit & Jesus is still convolutedly made to be descended from David - the Jesus myth being the way it is probably has more to do with the political circumstances of its origin (conquest by rome) than the nobler meanings ascribed to it later. 

Another, subtler/ less apparent aspect of the destiny trap thing is that if everyone has their fate, no one can be blamed all too badly. (Deathbed redemptions galore) Nonetheless, as the prover goes, “karma is a bitch” and these people invented it.

That said, tough still a simplistic story (that purtports there’s only one clear universal law everywhere and that the good guys always win - That’s an air castle if there ever was one, we need to work for that) I was actually surprised by the sophistication of morals & politics at times, it went into specific questions (hypocrite accusations, hypocratic oaths, how to charioteer, what a good king should be like etc. )

This is probably an artefact of being written from the PoV of royals & warriors, or just an indication of the great asian civilizations having existed so long & relatively unbroken compared to the many shifts in where things where going on in the nothwest. 

This is the first time in ANY mythical story that I’ve seen anyone raise the concern of preserving the innocent citizens of the enemy faction and how to stabilize the political situation afterwards (after dethroning the local evil overlord, they put in his turncoat brother who joined the good guys for damage control), something that I haven’t seen a SINGLE time in the Bible (and I’ve read the whole thing), though the heroes steer clear of the line to “simplistic stupid good” if you discount the “honor before reason” parts.

There’s 4 ways you can do ‘archetypical’ characters: Wholly & completely stick to the simple archetype, bring the archetype to full circle & detail while milking it for maximum symbolism, “not what they seem/contrast” and giving them depht without having them ever stop to be their archetype - it’s the latter that was done magnificiently here, especially in terms of 3Dimensional antagonists, they have enough redeeming qualities for it all to strike you as a tragic waste of life, but not enough to let go of their pride and avert the divine punishment. 

(The “wicked cultured” Dark Sorceror Evil Overlord being interesting is a given, but of all characters, the cocky big mouthed Demon Prince was the last one I expected to have hidden dephts)

[automatismoateo]

David Eller's 67 Atheism Aphorisms. Two examples: "The best argument against any religion is all the other religions" and "An atheist is not a person who knows too little about religion. An atheist is a person who knows too much about religion" via /r/atheism

Submitted August 26, 2019 at 09:02PM by PrometheanOblation (Via reddit https://ift.tt/2ZlMKgE) David Eller's 67 Atheism Aphorisms. Two examples: "The best argument against any religion is all the other religions" and "An atheist is not a person who knows too little about religion. An atheist is a person who knows too much about religion"

All from his book Atheism Advanced (2007), which I can't recommend highly enough.

1

An atheist is not a person who knows too little about religion. An atheist is a person who knows too much about religion

2

There is no such thing as religion – only religion-s

3

There is no such thing as morality – only moralit-ies

4

It has been said that if you don’t believe in god(s)

you will believe in anything

But the opposite is true

If you will believe in a god, then you will believe in anything

Belief is a habit that, once acquired, knows no limits

5

You say your god is unknowable?

But the unknowable and the non-existent

are indistinguishable

6

A cult is a religion you disapprove of.

A religion is a cult that has gained acceptance

7

A myth is somebody else’s belief.

A belief is a myth taken seriously

8

So many gods, so little reason

9

The problem with religion in the public square is that

there are so many religions but only one public square

10

If one has belief, knowledge is lacking

If one has knowledge, belief is unnecessary

11

The difference between science and religion:

When knowledge is inadequate,

science poses a question,

but religion proposes a belief

12

The trouble with leaps of faith is that there are

so many directions to leap in – most of them wrong

13

Groups are almost always irrational:

one reason why it is difficult to have atheist groups

14

Order is not necessarily by design.

Design is not necessarily good design

Good design is not necessarily benevolent design

15

If atheism is a religion, then bachelorhood is a marriage

16

If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby

17

The first reaction to human difference is usually conversion or

extermination. The second reaction is segregation.

Only the last reaction is toleration

18

Religion is not so bad – unless you believe it.

19

If people say atheism is a religion,

do they mean it as a compliment or an insult?

20

Most religions do not even have gods – they are a‧theistic

21

Science does not so much disprove god(s) as disregard god(s)

22

Tertullian said, “I believe because it is absurd.”

Did he mean that

absurdity is a sufficient reason to believe something,

Or that the only way to hold an absurd position is by belief?

23

The best argument against any religion

is all the other religions

24

Faith is not different from belief,

nor is it the basis of belief.

It is the same thing as belief:

accepting the false and unfounded as true.

25

In the absence of evidence,

The scientist says, “I do not know,”

But the religionist says, “I believe.”

26

Is a meaning only meaningful if it is universal?

Is a value only valuable if it is absolute?

Perhaps ‘local’ meaning or value is enough

-and must be, because it hat is all there is

27

‘Spirit is either a claim or a metaphor.

If a metaphor – not to be taken seriously

If a claim – not to be taken seriously

28

Great minds think alike.

Small minds believe all kinds of things

29

America is not a Christian county; it is a free country

30

If America is a Christian country

Because it was founded by Christians, is it also a white country because it was founded by whites?

A male country because it was founded by males?

31

The problem with organized religion

is not that it is organized but that it is religion

32

One can ask, “How do you know?” and expect to get reasons.

One cannot ask, “How do you believe?” at all.

Belief is how you believe

33

Spirituality is the alienation of humanity: the human

(and the best part of human) attributed to the non-human

34

You cannot believe in a generic god or a generic religion

anymore than you can speak a generic language.

You can only speak a particular language

or believe in a particular god or religion.

35

Science not only produces knowledge but solves problems

Religion neither produces knowledge nor solves problems

36

Religion is not always wrong

It just has no better chance of being correct than guessing

37

Freethought is the only kind of thought there is.

If it is not free, it is not thought at all.

38

Tertullian again: If he believes because it is absurd,

How does he decided which absurdities to believe?

There are so many to choose from.

39

The question is not whether a thing is possible.

Many false things are possible.

The question is whether there is any reason

even to seriously consider the thing in the first place.

If not, its possibility means nothing.

40

One does not have to prove a negative.

One should assume a negative.

41

Some argue that it takes perfect knowledge

to prove a universal negative.

Actually it takes perfect knowledge to prove a universal positive.

How would you know if a god knows everything or is everywhere

Unless you yourself know everything or have been everywhere?

42

Theists sometimes say that their god is possible,

but no one goes to church to worship a possibility

43

Every religion thinks it is true.

All religions cannot be true simultaneously.

but they all can be false simultaneously

44

If power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,

then wouldn’t an all powerful god be all-corrupt?

45

The claim that “evolution cannot account for complexity”

is a universal negative – and religionists like to argue

that you cannot prove a universal negative

So maybe evolution can account for complexity

46

Religion is neither all good nor all bad.

It is human

-And therefore diverse, ambiguous, and contradictory.

47

Old gods don’t get disproved.

They get forgotten

48

Since there are so many religions

and none of them can claim a majority of humanity,

whatever you believe,

you are in the minority.

49

If people are Christians because they use money with

“In God We Trust” on it, are they also Egyptians

Because they use money with a pyramid on it?

50

Religion did not invent beauty or love or awe,

nor kindness, nor hope, nor generosity.

They are all human qualities

and religion only appropriated them

51

An extreme answer is usually simple, usually appealing

-and usually false

52

Descartes should have said, “I think, therefore god isn’t

53

If the Christian god was a real human father

he would be in jail for child abuse

54

War on Christmas?

Atheists are as interested in Christmas

as Christians are interested in Ramadan or Diwali or

Buddha’s Tooth Day – which is not at all.

Atheists are not at war with Christmas;

they are indifferent to Christmas.

But to believers, indifference feels like war,

55

People argue over the religious beliefs of the “Founding Fathers.”

But their religion is less important than their politics

– and their politics was to separate church from state

56

If there is an Intelligent Designer, scientists only have to revise their

Science books. If there is no Intelligent Designer, Christians have to

throw out their Christian book. Science could live with a Designer;

Christianity would die without one. That is why

Christianity fights so hard for what it claims is a scientific idea

57

If there is no such thing as god(s), then theology is a futile and

Meaningless as unicornology or leprechaunology.

You cannot study the non-existent

58

If someone asks whether you believe in god

(or heaven or hell or soul or sin), do not say yes or no.

Say, “I don’t know what you mean – and neither do you.”

59

For those who would like to have prayer in school,

A few humble suggestions for prayers:

“There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.”

Or “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna,

Hare Hare. Hare Rama, Hare Rama

Rama Rama, Krishna Krishna.”

Or “Namo myoho renge kyo.” Or “Om.”

The moral: there is no such thing as a non-sectarian prayer.

60

Prayer is what you do when you can’t do something useful.

61

Kierkegaard once said that to believe, one must crucify the intellect

Sadly, he was right. Even more sadly, he approved

62

Jesus has been called a great teacher.

However, his own apostles often did not understand what he said,

Few people today understand or follow his teaching, and many of his

teachings are absurd or would get you killed if you followed them.

That is the mark of a failed teacher

63

“Let children acquire reason and critical thinking, then introduce

them to religion and let them choose for themselves.”

What religion has ever said that?

They would not dare.

64

There are those who insist that atheism is negative, because it is

against theism. Atheism, they say, is not for anything, just against

something. If that were true, then anti-smoking campaigns are

negative, because they are against smoking. But anti-smoking

Campaigns are not just against smoking; they are in favor of health.

True, if there were no smoking, there would be no anti-smoking

Movement. But then everyone would be a non-smoker.

If there were no theism, there would be no atheist movement

– but then everyone would be an atheist

65

The ‘new atheism’: ‘Normal’ theism operates on the god-paradigm,

but ‘normal’ atheism operates on the same paradigm

Only in the negative (arguing against gods).

The revolution in atheism, a truly new atheism,

will only come when we have a paradigm shift

– when we discard the god-paradigm

and stop speaking god-talk at all

66

Religion is less about belief than it is about habit.

So atheism is not so much refuting a belief as breaking a habit.

And belief is a habit too – a habit of mind.

67

I do not disbelieve in god(s). I do not even disprove god(s)

I disregard god(s), dismiss god(s), discredit god(s).

I am disinterested in god(s)

Atheism is – or should be – freedom from god(s)

[themastercylinder]

   SUMMARY

Ezra Cobb lives with his mother in an unidentified region of the Midwest. His mother, a religious fanatic, has indoctrinated him since childhood to hate women. Upon her death, Ezra digs her up again, believing that she is still alive. Ever more deluded each passing day, Ezra digs up various bodies, restoring them from their decomposition and even using them as home decor. Soon, Ezra’s obsessions go beyond the dead themselves, and he becomes a serial killer. Luring women into his grasp, he soon finds various other “creative” ways in which to decorate his home.

DEVELOPMENT

Made in early 73 and released by AIP, DERANGED is the most fact based film yet made based on the exploits of Wisconsin farmer/murderer/grave robber/cannibal Ed Gein. Roberts Blosson is alternately horrifying and hilarious as the shy and polite Ezra Cobb, “the butcher of Woodside,” in this incredible truly twisted semi comedy in which Ezra/Ed jokes about his killing and grave robbing with his neighbors, has a seance with a horny widow, and rebuilds his rotting mother, who earlier describes women as “a lot of filthy, black-souled sluts with pus-filled sores…who carry more diseases than ticks!”

Deranged was originally the brainchild of producer Tom Karr. Although he was only a small child in 1957 when the discovery of Gein’s crimes appalled and fascinated the nation, the memories of the Wisconsin maniac’s exploits stayed with him for life. “I always remembered the headlines about Gein in the Chicago Tribune,” he says. “and when you see things like that on the front page every day for two or three weeks, and all your friends and neighbors are constantly talking about them, you can’t help but take notice. Something as weird as this case only comes along once in a lifetime, and I’d always kept it filed away in the back of my mind. I knew that if I ever got into the movie business, I wanted to do the Ed Gein story, because it hadn’t ever been done faithfully. I thought it would probably make a lot of money. because it was unique and exciting enough to satisfy people who like horror movies.”

Producer Tom Karr

Producer Tom Karr raised $200,000 budget from the money he earned as a concert promoter for acts such as Led Zeppelin, Three Dog Night, The Temptations and Rod Stewart.

Fortunately, he was able to hook up with a group of filmmakers who were not only young and hungry, but also talented. Anyone who’s seen the unusually clever, offbeat Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (1971) and Deathdream (1972) will recognize the names of Alan Ormsby. Jeff Gillen and Bob Clark as a stamp of quality.

“My first professional contact in the film business was a guy named Bob Kilgore,” Karr says, explaining how he came to meet the Miami based bunch. “Kilgore operated a company called Europix, which handled movies on a distribution basis for up-and-coming filmmakers.” Drive-in movie devotees will recall Europix as the banner under which low-budget favorites like Deathdream, I Dismember Mama and the Immortal Orgy of the Living Dead triple bill reached U.S. screens.

Ed Gein

“I went to an industry convention in Kansas City called the Show-A- Rama ’72 to meet with Kilgore and find out more about the movie business,” Karr continues. “Bob took that opportunity to introduce me to Alan Ormsby, who was there promoting and selling Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. They had this actor from Children walking around the place dressed up like a zombie and attracting a lot of attention. I was really impressed, and that’s when I started talking to Alan about writing a script for me.

“Since Alan already had a whole group of filmmakers associated with him, it was easy to go right into Deranged with the same people from Children and Deathdream,” Karr relates. “But before I hired any of these people, I wanted to see what they had done. After the Show-A-Rama ended, Ormsby told me they were having a screening of Children in Miami for the cast and crew. So I went down to Florida, and that’s where I met Bob Clark and Jeff Gillen and all the rest of the people. I thought Children was very good; these guys had just done the type of film that I wanted to do, and they had certainly proven that they could do it for the budget I was shooting for. In fact, Children was done on about one-third the budget of Deranged! So we started talking seriously right then and there.”

The Crew

PRODUCTION

Misconceptions about Clark’s role in the making of Deranged have been all too common in the years since its release. Clark has been incorrectly cited as the film’s director.

“Bob didn’t want his name on Deranged because he felt it was too strong for him, and it might hurt his career,” Karr says. “But he was very helpful as a mentor, because he guided Jeff and Alan in their directorial efforts. He also guided me as a producer and helped me over any hurdles I encountered. Bob didn’t want to be right out on the front lines with this picture, and I respected his decision.”

Gillen confirms Karr’s statement. “Bob was, in essence, the executive producer,” he says. “He was ultimately the one who would sign the arrangements and so forth, but he had nothing to do with directing or writing the film.”

“Jeff was originally set to direct the movie, but I wanted to go to bat for Alan, because Alan had originally talked to me about directing as well as writing the script,” Karr says. “I compromised and said they could both direct. That compromise was agreeable to everybody.”

The original screenplay for Deranged was entitled Necromania, a moniker which stayed with the film until roughly halfway through the shooting. “I basically wanted the film to present the Gein story as closely as possible,” Karr says. “I gave Alan all the original press clippings from the Chicago Tribune as well as the Life magazine coverage of the case. Alan came up with something along those lines, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted at first.”

“I wrote ’em pretty quickly in those days,” Ormsby recalls. “On Deranged, I basically used my research on the Gein case pretty straightforwardly, but I gave it a black-comedy twist. I don’t think Tom was quite prepared for the comic aspect of the script. He was worried that it would be too funny and not horrifying enough. He wanted it straighter than we played it, but he eventually accepted it.”

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Production Stills

While Karr may have conceded to Ormsby’s humorous angle on the story at the time, it was a reluctant acceptance. To this day, Karr takes issue with the film’s lighthearted approach to its heinous subject matter. “I never did want the black humor in there, or any kind of humor at all,” the producer emphatically states. “The comedy took away from the real horror of the story, and I felt it made light of a very serious subject. Alan and Jeff assured me that they thought the film was so strong that we had to put a little comic relief in there; I think their exact words were that we had to relieve the tension.’ I still don’t agree with that today, and if I had to do the story over again, I would do it with no humor whatsoever. But I must admit, a lot of people seem to like the humor, so I’m not saying they’re right or wrong.”

All of the film’s players were cast out of Toronto, with one notable exception. “The advance people went up to Canada before I did,” Karr explains. “Alan and Jeff and some others cast everybody up there, including a guy they’d selected to play the part of Ezra Cobb—but when I got there, I didn’t like him. I wanted to give it one more shot, because the entire film would revolve around this one character. We couldn’t find anybody else in Canada, So Alan and I jumped on a plane to New York and got a hold of a casting agent named Vic Ramos, who’s still in business today. Harvey Keitel and ‘Christopher Walken’ both auditioned for the role of Ezra Cobb in New York. Tom Karr felt they were a bit too young for the part though. Roberts Blossom was the last to audition and Tom knew he had his man. DERANGED was Blossom’s only lead role in a feature, although hard to see these days, is a horror classic, almost on a level with TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (which was made later). Both were inspired by the famous real Ed Gein. Blossom is excellent as Ezra Cobb, “the butcher of Woodside,” a simple minded backwoods guy with a serious mother problem. At one point he digs up his mother’s grave. He skins a woman alive, talks to mummified Corpses and wears a human skin.

“Roberts was very much a loner during the shoot,” Gillen recalls. “He had a strict regimen, and was so perfect for the part that he barely needed to be directed. He was always in character; he assumed the role completely. So from that standpoint, he was easy to work with.”

Blossom also added some amusing improvisational touches to his character. For instance, in one scene the screenplay specified that Ez is eating crackers, peanut butter and chicken while talking to his mother’s corpse. To further enhance the dementia, Blossom came up with the idea of Ezra actually dipping the chicken in the peanut butter during his hilarious soliloquy on the virtues of an obese woman.

You’ve seen that? That was made in Canada. Shot in Oshawa (just outside of Toronto) over a month. I believe I saw it once. I remember it went smoothly and they were very satisfied with a couple of takes. I took it because I needed the money. I wasn’t entirely proud of the script. I found it a funny script though. But I didn’t think it was supposed to be funny when I first read it. The author said to me, ‘Oh yes, you can laugh.” And I thought, “Oh. It was a true story by the way, did you know that? Happened in Wisconsin. Some people liked it. I didn’t.” Blossom used a frequent facial twitch for Ezra. “I think it just came to me and I was pleased with how I looked, so I kept it. The humor just came out of the performance. I was trying to find the truth of the man. I don’t think any murderer thinks, “I’m a murderer and I like it,” I don’t think that’s part of the psyche. It’s more complicated.” – Robert Blossom

LOCATION

Karr wanted to shoot in Ed Gein’s hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin to give it the real feel needed with lots of snow. The town council there told Tom they would never okay it since the town already had enough notoriety over the murders there. Tom then tried other towns in Wisconsin and was basically told to never come back. It was then that he talked to Bob Clark about filming in Ontario, Canada for the tax benefits and because of the snowy resemblance to Wisconsin. “Since it was deer hunting season when the story broke, we needed snow, and the only place we could be sure of having snow was Canada,” Karr explains. According to Gillen, there were several other factors that helped make Deranged a Canadian event. “Bob Clark had an editing deal in Canada at the time (for Deathdream), and he’d also found the Ukrainian film studio where we built most of the sets, along with the farmhouse location. There was also a financial advantage at the time to shooting films in Canada.”

The interiors of Ezra’s house were all constructed within the studio’s walls. For a bar scene, the filmmakers used the basement lounge of the hotel where the cast and crew resided. Other locations included a hardware store (in real life, Gein was convicted of murdering hardware store owner Bernice Worden) and an abandoned farmhouse which was used solely for exteriors. Art director Albert Fisher dressed the Deranged Set based on news reports describing the inside of Gein’s farmhouse, even including such details as the stacks of old crime and girlie magazines which Gein was fond of perusing. “Fisher was brilliant,” Karr raves. “I didn’t provide him with any photos of Gein’s farmhouse, but he came up with something realistic just based on verbal descriptions.”

SPECIAL EFFECTS

Once more, Ormsby employed the help of Tom Savini, this time getting his first solo makeup effects credit. Savini did some incredible work, much of it visible only in the uncut version.

Tom Savini had just come off the set of Deathdream, where he served as Ormsby’s assistant, when he was hired to head the makeup crew on Deranged. Savini was assisted by Ormsby’s friend Jerome Bergson on such tasks as creating a roomful of decomposing bodies and such morbid artifacts as a “belly drum.” “I remember that the weather was extremely cold, and the snow outside the studio door was always red,”

  Savini says of the Deranged shoot. “We were constantly mixing up blood in the kitchen, trying out different formulas. Alan suggested adding peanut butter at one point to thicken the blood mixture. Later on, I got a hold of Dick Smith, and I’ve been using his formula ever since.” When asked how he feels now about his work on Deranged, Savini good-naturedly replies, “It looks pretty good. The effects were very crude, but back then I didn’t know any better. Today, if you wanted a body made, you’d order a skeleton and decorate it, but back then we built them out of chicken wire, dowel rods, latex and cotton!”

  The most outrageous gore set piece in Deranged occurs when Ezra brings Miss Johnson’s decapitated head back to his home workshop for some Gein-style “repairs.” In a truly jaw-dropping display of grue, the good-natured ghoul shoves a spoon into the dead woman’s eye socket, removes an eyeball, saws off the top of the head, scoops out the brains and crafts a skin mask from the remaining flesh. True. it’s not in good taste, but then again, neither were the Gein crimes themselves…and besides, anyone out to make an exploitation film is not going to be concerned with “good taste.”

  Missing for years from prints of the film, the sequence has recently been restored and gives H.G. Lewis a run for his money in the splatter sweepstakes.

  “That head was just thick latex molded around a plastic skull with a wig attached to it; I think the brains were made out of Jell-o!” Savini reveals. I can’t believe how crude that stuff was!” Crude, yes, but certainly effective; just try and suppress the nausea when Ma Cobb (Cosette Lee) has an on-camera hemorrhage while the dim-witted Ez attempts to spoon pea soup into her blood-spewing maw. This particular scene was accomplished in one take using a simple rubber-hose rig attached to an off-camera blood pump.

    Bob Clark Interview

There’s a lot of confusion around your next project, Deranged. You’ve been listed in the credits as producer, producer and director and not listed at all.

CLARK:: Alan directed it and I produced it. But I decided to take my name off it. It was too good. It was so real and so horrible as it was played.

But you liked it?

CLARK:: I thought the look of the film was remarkably good. We were going for a Police Gazette look and I think we achieved it.

What exactly prompted you to take your name off it?

CLARK:: It was based on Ed Gein, the man who was also the basis for Psycho. In Deranged you feel for this character because he doesn’t know he’s murdering people. He thinks he’s killing and skinning deer, and you see that in the film. That’s where I had trouble with the film. You feel for him. It’s chilling, because when he kills and mutilates people, you do feel something for him. It was too much. The film is Alan Ormsby at his drollest, it’s got some brilliant black, black comedy in it. But the end of the film is absolutely brutal, to the point where I was quite horrified personally.

The film’s climax, wherein our hero hunts down a young woman at length and then kills and disembowels her was originally going to be intercut with shots of a deer being gutted to establish the fact that Gein was a schizophrenic, who believed that the human meat he ate (and reportedly gave to his neighbors as Xmas presents) was venison.

Was the ending changed?

CLARK:: There were supposed to be subliminal shots of the deer being gutted, with shots of the girl, to show what the murderer saw. But we couldn’t get a deer. We simply couldn’t get one and we weren’t willing to get someone to shoot one. We tried to get one that had been hit by a car. That ending would have softened it considerably for me. It would have shown his state of mind. A deer to him was no different. As it is, it’s considerably more horrible. Robert Blossom also did a marvelous job with the character, so that makes it even worse.

  Without that device to soften the finale’s disturbing tone, and the fact that the audience winds up sympathizing, even liking the lead character, unsettled Bob enough to take his name off the credits. To avoid much confusion once and for all, Alan wrote the film and directed it with Clark regular, Jeff Gillen and Bob produced with Tom Karr.

Did it do well when it was released?

CLARK:: Not really. It was just too horrible for people. AIP released it. But I didn’t want to be associated with it. Actually, Vincent Canby (of the New York Times) did a review of that film. He saw the film and thought, where did that movie come from? He talked about the consciousness behind the film, which is interesting because clearly the film works on several levels.

POST PRODUCTION

The filmmakers also saved money by relentlessly using the same piece of droning music (“The Old Rugged Cross”) over numerous scenes in the movie. While this may seem nerve-racking to some viewers, it adds to the general tone of gonzo American Gothic which pervades the entire film.

“Carl Zittrer did the music for Deranged,” Gillen recalls, “and was also working on the soundtrack for Deathdream, which Bob Clark was editing. I think it was actually Carl who said, ‘Let’s use “The Old Rugged Cross,” which influenced us a lot. There was quite a bit of that going on with our group; everybody made suggestions.”

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Lobby Cards

Deranged’s credits list no editor which points to some behind-the scenes confusion. “Alan and I thought we were going to edit the film,” Gillen says. “We went back to Toronto after the movie was done. But for a number of reasons, it was made difficult for us to stay in Canada, and we left.” Ultimately, it was Clark who took over the final cut of Deranged. “Bob and I had a falling out at some point, and I left,” Ormsby recalls. “We disagreed about how the editing should be done. He cut some stuff out, and one of the reasons he gave me was that it was too good for the movie. So I was locked out of the final cut.

DISTRIBUTION

Karr’s early attempts to sell Deranged to distributors didn’t result in immediate success. “I took the film to LA, and brought it to (exploitation legend) Joe Solomon, who had just had a big success with Evel Knievel,” the producer recalls. “Solomon and I went to a screening room, where he taught me one of my first lessons in selling a film: He only wanted to see the first and the last reel. I remember thinking that I wasn’t sure if I should be insulted by that or not, but I brought the two reels up to the projection booth. Joe sat down with a big cigar, and after watching the beginning and end, he said it was too rough for him. That was the end of Joe Solomon,”

Solomon was not the only Hollywood huckster to be repulsed by the film’s graphic content, as Karr recalls. “I remember showing Deranged to a guy at the William Morris Agency in hopes of getting myself an agent,” he says. “And this guy was talking on the phone in the screening room while watching the movie. When the scene came up where Ezra scoops the brains out of the severed head, he put his hand over the telephone receiver, turned to me and said, I can’t believe what I’m seeing!’ Then he went back to his phone conversation. So that’s your typical William Morris agent, a guy who can talk on the phone and watch a movie at the same time!”

Other distributors who passed on Deranged included Crown International and Fanfare. Eventually. Karr was able to attract the interest of American International Pictures, who released the film in February 1974. Deranged went out to theaters with an R rating, which meant the removal of the infamous dissection scene and the trimming down of Ezra’s antics with Mary Ransom (minor blood and nudity).

CREDITS

Directed by Jeff Gillen/Alan Ormsby

Produced by Tom Karr

Written by Alan Ormsby

Starring

Roberts Blossom

Cosette Lee

Leslie Carlson

Robert Warner

Music by Carl Zittrer

REFERENCES and SOURCES

Psychotronic Video 14

Fangoria 131

Wikipedia

  Bob Clark Director Profile Part Three  SUMMARY Ezra Cobb lives with his mother in an unidentified region of the Midwest. His mother, a religious fanatic, has indoctrinated him since childhood to hate women.

[friend-clarity]

Trudeau worshiping at a shrine to Ghandi

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, their daughter Ella Grace, and son Xavier dress in Indian style during their visit to India, Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018

http://nationalpost.com/news/is-trudeau-hobnobbing-with-terrorists-why-india-doesnt-trust-canada-all-that-much

Ghandi was no saint and certaily not a man to be admired ... 

While Gandhi, in South Africa, fought furiously to have Indians recognized as loyal subjects of the British empire, and to have them enjoy the full rights of Englishmen, he had no concern for blacks whatever. In fact, during one of the “Kaffir Wars” he volunteered to organize a brigade of Indians to put down a Zulu rising, and was decorated himself for valor under fire. ...

But Gandhi’s monstrous behavior to his own family is notorious. He denied his sons education—to which he was bitterly hostile. His wife remained illiterate. Once when she was very sick, hemorrhaging badly, and seemed to be dying, he wrote to her from jail icily: “My struggle is not merely political. It is religious and therefore quite pure. It does not matter much whether one dies in it or lives. I hope and expect that you will also think likewise and not be unhappy.” To die, that is. On another occasion he wrote, speaking about her: “I simply cannot bear to look at Ba’s face. The expression is often like that on the face of a meek cow and gives one the feeling, as a cow occasionally does, that in her own dumb manner she is saying something. I see, too, that there is selfishness in this suffering of hers. . . .” And in the end he let her die, as I have said, rather than allow British doctors to give her a shot of penicillin (while his inner voice told him that it would be all right for him to take quinine). He disowned his oldest son, Harilal, for wishing to marry. He banished his second son for giving his struggling older brother a small sum of money. Harilal grew quite wild with rage against his father, attacked him in print, converted to Islam, took to women, drink, and died an alcoholic in 1948. The Mahatma attacked him right back in his pious way, proclaiming modestly in an open letter in Young India, “Men may be good, not necessarily their children.”

The Gandhi Nobody Knows

I had the singular honor of attending an early private screening of Gandhi with an audience of invited guests from…

RICHARD GRENIER / MAR. 1, 1983

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/mr-spielberg-goes-washington/

I had the singular honor of attending an early private screening of Gandhi with an audience of invited guests from the National Council of Churches. At the end of the three-hour movie there was hardly, as they say, a dry eye in the house. When the lights came up I fell into conversation with a young woman who observed, reverently, that Gandhi’s last words were “Oh, God,” causing me to remark regretfully that the real Gandhi had not spoken in English, but had cried, Hai Rama! (“Oh, Rama”). Well, Rama was just Indian for God, she replied, at which I felt compelled to explain that, alas, Rama, collectively with his three half-brothers, represented the seventh reincarnation of Vishnu. The young woman, who seemed to have been under the impression that Hinduism was Christianity under another name, sensed somehow that she had fallen on an uncongenial spirit, and the conversation ended.

At a dinner party shortly afterward, a friend of mine, who had visited India many times and even gone to the trouble of learning Hindi, objected strenuously that the picture of Gandhi that emerges in the movie is grossly inaccurate, omitting, as one of many examples, that when Gandhi’s wife lay dying of pneumonia and British doctors insisted that a shot of penicillin would save her, Gandhi refused to have this alien medicine injected in her body and simply let her die. (It must be noted that when Gandhi contracted malaria shortly afterward he accepted for himself the alien medicine quinine, and that when he had appendicitis he allowed British doctors to perform on him the alien outrage of an appendectomy.) All of this produced a wistful mooing from an editor of a major newspaper and a recalcitrant, “But still. . . .” I would prefer to explicate things more substantial than a wistful mooing, but there is little doubt it meant the editor in question felt that even if the real Mohandas K. Gandhi had been different from the Gandhi of the movie it would have been nice if he had been like the movie-Gandhi, and that presenting him in this admittedly false manner was beautiful, stirring, and perhaps socially beneficial.

An important step in the canonization of this movie-Gandhi was taken by the New York Film Critics Circle, which not only awarded the picture its prize as best film of 1982, but awarded Ben Kingsley, who played Gandhi (a remarkably good performance), its prize as best actor of the year. But I cannot believe for one second that these awards were made independently of the film’s content—which, not to put too fine a point on it, is an all-out appeal for pacifism—or in anything but the most shameful ignorance of the historical Gandhi.

Now it does not bother me that Shakespeare omitted from his King John the signing of the Magna Charta—by far the most important event in John’s reign. All Shakespeare’s “histories” are strewn with errors and inventions. Shifting to the cinema and to more recent times, it is hard for me to work up much indignation over the fact that neither Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin nor his October recounts historical episodes in anything like the manner in which they actually occurred (the famous march of the White Guards down the steps at Odessa—artistically one of the greatest sequences in film history—simply did not take place). As we draw closer to the present, however, the problem becomes much more difficult. If the Soviet Union were to make an artistically wondrous film about the entry of Russian tanks into Prague in 1968 (an event I happened to witness), and show them being greeted with flowers by a grateful populace, the Czechs dancing in the streets with joy, I do not guarantee that I would maintain my serene aloofness. A great deal depends on whether the historical events represented in a movie are intended to be taken as substantially true, and also on whether—separated from us by some decades or occurring yesterday—they are seen as having a direct bearing on courses of action now open to us.

On my second viewing of Gandhi, this time at a public showing at the end of the Christmas season, I happened to leave the theater behind three teenage girls, apparently from one of Manhattan’s fashionable private schools. “Gandhi was pretty much an FDR,” one opined, astonishing me almost as much by her breezy use of initials to invoke a President who died almost a quarter-century before her birth as by the stupefying nature of the comparison. “But he was a religious figure, too,” corrected one of her friends, adding somewhat smugly, “It’s not in our historical tradition to honor spiritual leaders.” Since her schoolteachers had clearly not led her to consider Jonathan Edwards and Roger Williams as spiritual leaders, let alone Joseph Smith and William Jennings Bryan, the intimation seemed to be that we are a society with poorer spiritual values than, let’s say, India. There can be no question, in any event, that the girls felt they had just been shown the historical Gandhi—an attitude shared by Ralph Nader, who at last account had seen the film three times. Nader has conceived the most extraordinary notion that Gandhi’s symbolic flouting of the British salt tax was a “consumer issue” which he later expanded into the wider one of Indian independence. A modern parallel to Gandhi’s program of home-spinning and home-weaving, another “consumer issue” says Nader, might be the use of solar energy to free us from the “giant multinational oil corporations.”

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As it happens, the government of India openly admits to having provided one-third of the financing of Gandhi out of state funds, straight out of the national treasury—and after close study of the finished product I would not be a bit surprised to hear that it was 100 percent. If Pandit Nehru is portrayed flatteringly in the film, one must remember that Nehru himself took part in the initial story conferences (he originally wanted Gandhi to be played by Alec Guinness) and that his daughter Indira Gandhi is, after all, Prime Minister of India (though no relation to Mohandas Gandhi). The screenplay was checked and rechecked by Indian officials at every stage, often by the Prime Minister herself, with close consultations on plot and even casting. If the movie contains a particularly poisonous portrait of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, the Indian reply, I suppose, would be that if the Pakistanis want an attractive portrayal of Jinnah let them pay for their own movie. A friend of mine, highly sophisticated in political matters but innocent about film-making, declared that Gandhi should be preceded by the legend: The following film is a paid political advertisement by the government of India.

Gandhi, then, is a large, pious, historical morality tale centered on a saintly, sanitized Mahatma Gandhi cleansed of anything too embarrassingly Hindu (the word “caste” is not mentioned from one end of the film to the other) and, indeed, of most of the rest of Gandhi’s life, much of which would drastically diminish his saintliness in Western eyes. There is little to indicate that the India of today has followed Gandhi’s precepts in almost nothing. There is little, in fact, to indicate that India is even India. The spectator realizes the scene is the Indian subcontinent because there are thousands of extras dressed in dhotis and saris. The characters go about talking in these quaint Peter Sellers accents. We have occasional shots of India’s holy poverty, holy hovels, some landscapes, many of them photographed quite beautifully, for those who like travelogues. We have a character called Lord Mountbatten (India’s last Viceroy); a composite American journalist (assembled from Vincent Sheehan, William L. Shirer, Louis Fischer, and straight fiction); a character called simply “Viceroy” (presumably another composite); an assemblage of Gandhi’s Indian followers under the name of one of them (Patel); and of course Nehru.

I sorely missed the fabulous Annie Besant, that English clergyman’s wife, turned atheist, turned Theo-sophist, turned Indian nationalist, who actually became president of the Indian National Congress and had a terrific falling out with Gandhi, becoming his fierce opponent. And if the producers felt they had to work in a cameo role for an American star to add to the film’s appeal in the United States, it is positively embarrassing that they should have brought in the photographer Margaret Bourke-White, a person of no importance whatever in Gandhi’s life and a role Candice Bergen plays with a repellant unctuousness. If the film-makers had been interested in drama and not hagiography, it is hard to see how they could have resisted the awesome confrontation between Gandhi and, yes, Margaret Sanger. For the two did meet. Now there was a meeting of East and West, and may the better person win! (She did. Margaret Sanger argued her views on birth control with such vigor that Gandhi had a nervous breakdown.)

I cannot honestly say I had any reasonable expectation that the film would show scenes of Gandhi’s pretty teenage girl followers fighting “hysterically” (the word was used) for the honor of sleeping naked with the Mahatma and cuddling the nude septuagenarian in their arms. (Gandhi was “testing” his vow of chastity in order to gain moral strength for his mighty struggle with Jinnah.) When told there was a man named Freud who said that, despite his declared intention, Gandhi might actually be enjoying the caresses of the naked girls, Gandhi continued, unperturbed. Nor, frankly, did I expect to see Gandhi giving daily enemas to all the young girls in his ashrams (his daily greeting was, “Have you had a good bowel movement this morning, sisters?”), nor see the girls giving him his daily enema. Although Gandhi seems to have written less about home rule for India than he did about enemas, and excrement, and latrine cleaning (“The bathroom is a temple. It should be so clean and inviting that anyone would enjoy eating there”), I confess such scenes might pose problems for a Western director.

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Gandhi, therefore, the film, this paid political advertisement for the government of India, is organized around three axes: (1) Anti-racism—all men are equal regardless of race, color, creed, etc.; (2) anti-colonialism, which in present terms translates as support for the Third World, including, most eminently, India; (3) nonviolence, presented as an absolutist pacifism. There are other, secondary precepts and subheadings. Gandhi is portrayed as the quintessence of tolerance (“I am a Hindu and a Muslim and a Christian and a Jew”), of basic friendliness to Britain (“The British have been with us for a long time and when they leave we want them to leave as friends”), of devotion to his wife and family. His vow of chastity is represented as something selfless and holy, rather like the celibacy of the Catholic clergy. But, above all, Gandhi’s life and teachings are presented as having great import for us today. We must learn from Gandhi.

I propose to demonstrate that the film grotesquely distorts both Gandhi’s life and character to the point that it is nothing more than a pious fraud, and a fraud of the most egregious kind. Hackneyed Indian falsehoods such as that “the British keep trying to break India up” (as if Britain didn’t give India a unity it had never enjoyed in history), or that the British created Indian poverty (a poverty which had not only existed since time immemorial but had been considered holy), almost pass unnoticed in the tide of adulation for our fictional saint. Gandhi, admittedly, being a devout Hindu, was far more self-contradictory than most public men. Sanskrit scholars tell me that flat self-contradiction is even considered an element of “Sanskrit rhetoric.” Perhaps it is thought to show profundity.

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Gandhi rose early, usually at three-thirty, and before his first bowel movement (during which he received visitors, although possibly not Margaret Bourke-White) he spent two hours in meditation, listening to his “inner voice.” Now Gandhi was an extremely vocal individual, and in addition to spending an hour each day in vigorous walking, another hour spinning at his primitive spinning wheel, another hour at further prayers, another hour being massaged nude by teenage girls, and many hours deciding such things as affairs of state, he produced a quite unconscionable number of articles and speeches and wrote an average of sixty letters a day. All considered, it is not really surprising that his inner voice said different things to him at different times. Despising consistency and never checking his earlier statements, and yet inhumanly obstinate about his position at any given moment, Gandhi is thought by some Indians today (according to V.S. Naipaul) to have been so erratic and unpredictable that he may have delayed Indian independence for twenty-five years.

For Gandhi was an extremely difficult man to work with. He had no partners, only disciples. For members of his ashrams, he dictated every minute of their days, and not only every morsel of food they should eat but when they should eat it. Without ever having heard of a protein or a vitamin, he considered himself an expert on diet, as on most things, and was constantly experimenting. Once when he fell ill, he was found to have been living on a diet of ground-nut butter and lemon juice; British doctors called it malnutrition. And Gandhi had even greater confidence in his abilities as a “nature doctor,” prescribing obligatory cures for his ashramites, such as dried cow-dung powder and various concoctions containing cow dung (the cow, of course, being sacred to the Hindu). And to those he really loved he gave enemas—but again, alas, not to Margaret Bourke-White. Which is too bad, really. For admiring Candice Bergen’s work as I do, I would have been most interested in seeing how she would have experienced this beatitude. The scene might have lived in film history.

There are 400 biographies of Gandhi, and his writings run to 80 volumes, and since he lived to be seventy-nine, and rarely fell silent, there are, as I have indicated, quite a few inconsistencies. The authors of the present movie even acknowledge in a little-noticed opening title that they have made a film only true to Gandhi’s “spirit.” For my part, I do not intend to pick through Gandhi’s writings to make him look like Attila the Hun (although the thought is tempting), but to give a fair, weighted balance of his views, laying stress above all on his actions, and on what he told other men to do when the time for action had come.

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Anti-racism: the reader will have noticed that in the present-day community of nations South Africa is a pariah. So it is an absolutely amazing piece of good fortune that Gandhi, born the son of the Prime Minister of a tiny Indian principality and received as an attorney at the bar of the Middle Temple in London, should have begun his climb to greatness as a member of the small Indian community in, precisely, South Africa. Natal, then a separate colony, wanted to limit Indian immigration and, as part of the government program, ordered Indians to carry identity papers (an action not without similarities to measures under consideration in the U.S. today to control illegal immigration). The film’s lengthy opening sequences are devoted to Gandhi’s leadership in the fight against Indians carrying their identity papers (burning their registration cards), with for good measure Gandhi being expelled from the first-class section of a railway train, and Gandhi being asked by whites to step off the sidewalk. This inspired young Indian leader calls, in the film, for interracial harmony, for people to “live together.”

Now the time is 1893, and Gandhi is a “caste” Hindu, and from one of the higher castes. Although, later, he was to call for improving the lot of India’s Untouchables, he was not to have any serious misgivings about the fundamentals of the caste system for about another thirty years, and even then his doubts, to my way of thinking, were rather minor. In the India in which Gandhi grew up, and had only recently left, some castes could enter the courtyards of certain Hindu temples, while others could not. Some castes were forbidden to use the village well. Others were compelled to live outside the village, still others to leave the road at the approach of a person of higher caste and perpetually to call out, giving warning, so that no one would be polluted by their proximity. The endless intricacies of Hindu caste by-laws varied somewhat region by region, but in Madras, where most South African Indians were from, while a Nayar could pollute a man of higher caste only by touching him, Kammalans polluted at a distance of 24 feet, toddy drawers at 36 feet, Pulayans and Cherumans at 48 feet, and beef-eating Paraiyans at 64 feet. All castes and the thousands of sub-castes were forbidden, needless to say, to marry, eat, or engage in social activity with any but members of their own group. In Gandhi’s native Gujarat a caste Hindu who had been polluted by touch had to perform extensive ritual ablutions or purify himself by drinking a holy beverage composed of milk, whey, and (what else?) cow dung.

Low-caste Hindus, in short, suffered humiliations in their native India compared to which the carrying of identity cards in South Africa was almost trivial. In fact, Gandhi, to his credit, was to campaign strenuously in his later life for the reduction of caste barriers in India—a campaign almost invisible in the movie, of course, conveyed in only two glancing references, leaving the audience with the officially sponsored if historically astonishing notion that racism was introduced into India by the British. To present the Gandhi of 1893, a conventional caste Hindu, fresh from caste-ridden India where a Paraiyan could pollute at 64 feet, as the champion of interracial equalitariansim is one of the most brazen hypocrisies I have ever encountered in a serious movie.

The film, moreover, does not give the slightest hint as to Gandhi’s attitude toward blacks, and the viewers of Gandhi would naturally suppose that, since the future Great Soul opposed South African discrimination against Indians, he would also oppose South African discrimination against black people. But this is not so. While Gandhi, in South Africa, fought furiously to have Indians recognized as loyal subjects of the British empire, and to have them enjoy the full rights of Englishmen, he had no concern for blacks whatever. In fact, during one of the “Kaffir Wars” he volunteered to organize a brigade of Indians to put down a Zulu rising, and was decorated himself for valor under fire.

For, yes, Gandhi (Sergeant-Major Gandhi) was awarded Victoria’s coveted War Medal. Throughout most of his life Gandhi had the most inordinate admiration for British soldiers, their sense of duty, their discipline and stoicism in defeat (a trait he emulated himself). He marveled that they retreated with heads high, like victors. There was even a time in his life when Gandhi, hardly to be distinguished from Kipling’s Gunga Din, wanted nothing so much as to be a Soldier of the Queen. Since this is not in keeping with the “spirit” of Gandhi, as decided by Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi, it is naturally omitted from the movie.

Anti-colonialism: as almost always with historical films, even those more honest than Gandhi, the historical personage on which the movie is based is not only more complex but more interesting than the character shown on the screen. During his entire South African period, and for some time after, until he was about fifty, Gandhi was nothing more or less than an imperial loyalist, claiming for Indians the rights of Englishmen but unshakably loyal to the crown. He supported the empire ardently in no fewer than three wars: the Boer War, the “Kaffir War,” and, with the most extreme zeal, World War I. If Gandhi’s mind were of the modern European sort, this would seem to suggest that his later attitude toward Britain was the product of unrequited love: he had wanted to be an Englishman; Britain had rejected him and his people; very well then, they would have their own country. But this would imply a point of “agonizing reappraisal,” a moment when Gandhi’s most fundamental political beliefs were reexamined and, after the most bitter soul-searching, repudiated. But I have studied the literature and cannot find this moment of bitter soul-searching. Instead, listening to his “inner voice” (which in the case of divines of all countries often speaks in the tones of holy opportunism), Gandhi simply, tranquilly, without announcing any sharp break, set off in a new direction.

It should be understood that it is unlikely Gandhi ever truly conceived of “becoming” an Englishman, first, because he was a Hindu to the marrow of his bones, and also, perhaps, because his democratic instincts were really quite weak. He was a man of the most extreme, autocratic temperament, tyrannical, unyielding even regarding things he knew nothing about, totally intolerant of all opinions but his own. He was, furthermore, in the highest degree reactionary, permitting in India no change in the relationship between the feudal lord and his peasants or servants, the rich and the poor. In his The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi, the best and least hagiographic of the full-length studies, Robert Payne, although admiring Gandhi greatly, explains Gandhi’s “new direction” on his return to India from South Africa as follows:

He spoke in generalities, but he was searching for a single cause, a single hard-edged task to which he would devote the remaining years of his life. He wanted to repeat his triumph in South Africa on Indian soil. He dreamed of assembling a small army of dedicated men around him, issuing stern commands and leading them to some almost unobtainable goal.

Gandhi, in short, was a leader looking for a cause. He found it, of course, in home rule for India and, ultimately, in independence.

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We are therefore presented with the seeming anomaly of a Gandhi who, in Britain when war broke out in August 1914, instantly contacted the War Office, swore that he would stand by England in its hour of need, and created the Indian Volunteer Corps, which he might have commanded if he hadn’t fallen ill with pleurisy. In 1915, back in India, he made a memorable speech in Madras in which he proclaimed, “I discovered that the British empire had certain ideals with which I have fallen in love. . . .” In early 1918, as the war in Europe entered its final crisis, he wrote to the Viceroy of India, “I have an idea that if I become your recruiting agent-in-chief, I might rain men upon you,” and he proclaimed in a speech in Kheda that the British “love justice; they have shielded men against oppression.” Again, he wrote to the Viceroy, “I would make India offer all her able-bodied sons as a sacrifice to the empire at this critical moment. . . .” To some of his pacifist friends, who were horrified, Gandhi replied by appealing to the Bhagavad Gita and to the endless wars recounted in the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, adding further to the pacifists’ horror by declaring that Indians “have always been warlike, and the finest hymn composed by Tulsidas in praise of Rama gives the first place to his ability to strike down the enemy.”

This was in contradiction to the interpretation of sacred Hindu scriptures Gandhi had offered on earlier occasions (and would offer later), which was that they did not recount military struggles but spiritual struggles; but, unusual for him, he strove to find some kind of synthesis. “I do not say, ‘Let us go and kill the Germans,’” Gandhi explained. “I say, ‘Let us go and die for the sake of India and the empire.’” And yet within two years, the time having come for swaraj (home rule), Gandhi’s inner voice spoke again, and, the leader having found his cause, Gandhi proclaimed resoundingly: “The British empire today represents Satanism, and they who love God can afford to have no love for Satan.”

The idea of swaraj, originated by others, crept into Gandhi’s mind gradually. With a fair amount of winding about, Gandhi, roughly, passed through three phases. First, he was entirely pro-British, and merely wanted for Indians the rights of Englishmen (as he understood them). Second, he was still pro-British, but with the belief that, having proved their loyalty to the empire, Indians would be granted some degree of swaraj. Third, as the home-rule movement gathered momentum, it was the swaraj, the whole swaraj, and nothing but the swaraj, and he turned relentlessly against the crown. The movie to the contrary, he caused the British no end of trouble in their struggles during World War II.

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But it should not be thought for one second that Gandhi’s finally full-blown desire to detach India from the British empire gave him the slightest sympathy with other colonial peoples pursuing similar objectives. Throughout his entire life Gandhi displayed the most spectacular inability to understand or even really take in people unlike himself—a trait which V.S. Naipaul considers specifically Hindu, and I am inclined to agree. Just as Gandhi had been totally unconcerned with the situation of South Africa’s blacks (he hardly noticed they were there until they rebelled), so now he was totally unconcerned with other Asians or Africans. In fact, he was adamantly opposed to certain Arab movements within the Ottoman empire for reasons of internal Indian politics.

At the close of World War I, the Muslims of India were deeply absorbed in what they called the “Khilafat” movement—“Khilafat” being their corruption of “Caliphate,” the Caliph in question being the Ottoman Sultan. In addition to his temporal powers, the Sultan of the Ottoman empire held the spiritual position of Caliph, supreme leader of the world’s Muslims and successor to the Prophet Muhammad. At the defeat of the Central Powers (Germany, Austria, Turkey), the Sultan was a prisoner in his palace in Constantinople, shorn of his religious as well as his political authority, and the Muslims of India were incensed. It so happened that the former subject peoples of the Ottoman empire, principally Arabs, were perfectly happy to be rid of this Caliph, and even the Turks were glad to be rid of him, but this made no impression at all on the Muslims of India, for whom the issue was essentially a club with which to beat the British. Until this odd historical moment, Indian Muslims had felt little real allegiance to the Ottoman Sultan either, but now that he had fallen, the British had done it! The British had taken away their Khilafat! And one of the most ardent supporters of this Indian Muslim movement was the new Hindu leader, Gandhi.

No one questions that the formative period for Gandhi as a political leader was his time in South Africa. Throughout history Indians, divided into 1,500 language and dialect groups (India today has 15 official languages), had little sense of themselves as a nation. Muslim Indians and Hindu Indians felt about as close as Christians and Moors during their 700 years of cohabitation in Spain. In addition to which, the Hindus were divided into thousands of castes and sub-castes, and there were also Parsees, Sikhs, Jains. But in South Africa officials had thrown them all in together, and in the mind of Gandhi (another one of those examples of nationalism being born in exile) grew the idea of India as a nation, and Muslim-Hindu friendship became one of the few positions on which he never really reversed himself. So Gandhi—ignoring Arabs and Turks—became an adamant supporter of the Khilafat movement out of strident Indian nationalism. He had become a national figure in India for having unified 13,000 Indians of all faiths in South Africa, and now he was determined to reach new heights by unifying hundreds of millions of Indians of all faiths in India itself. But this nationalism did not please everyone, particularly Tolstoy, who in his last years carried on a curious correspondence with the new Indian leader. For Tolstoy, Gandhi’s Indian nationalism “spoils everything.”

As for the “anti-colonialism” of the nationalist Indian state since independence, Indira Gandhi, India’s present Prime Minister, hears an inner voice of her own, it would appear, and this inner voice told her to justify the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as produced by provocative maneuvers on the part of the U.S. and China, as well as to be the first country outside the Soviet bloc to recognize the Hanoi puppet regime in Cambodia. So everything plainly depends on who is colonizing whom, and Mrs. Gandhi’s voice perhaps tells her that the subjection of Afghanistan and Cambodia to foreign rule is “defensive” colonialism. And the movie’s message that Mahatma Gandhi, and by plain implication India (the country for which he plays the role of Joan of Arc), have taken a holy, unchanging stance against the colonization of nation by nation is just another of its hypocrisies. For India, when it comes to colonialism or anti-colonialism, it has been Realpolitik all the way.

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Nonviolence: but the real center and raison d’être of Gandhi is ahimsa, nonviolence, which principle when incorporated into vast campaigns of noncooperation with British rule the Mahatma called by an odd name he made up himself, satyagraha, which means something like “truth-striving.” During the key part of his life, Gandhi devoted a great deal of time explaining the moral and philosophical meanings of both ahimsa and satyagraha. But much as the film sanitizes Gandhi to the point where one would mistake him for a Christian saint, and sanitizes India to the point where one would take it for Shangri-la, it quite sweeps away Gandhi’s ethical and religious ponderings, his complexities, his qualifications, and certainly his vacillations, which simplifying process leaves us with our old European friend: pacifism. It is true that Gandhi was much impressed by the Sermon on the Mount, his favorite passage in the Bible, which he read over and over again. But for all the Sermon’s inspirational value, and its service as an ideal in relations among individual human beings, no Christian state which survived has ever based its policies on the Sermon on the Mount since Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire. And no modern Western state which survives can ever base its policies on pacifism. And no Hindu state will ever base its policies on ahimsa. Gandhi himself—although the film dishonestly conceals this from us—many times conceded that in dire circumstances “war may have to be resorted to as a necessary evil.”

It is something of an anomaly that Gandhi, held in popular myth to be a pure pacifist (a myth which governments of India have always been at great pains to sustain in the belief that it will reflect credit on India itself, and to which the present movie adheres slavishly), was until fifty not ill-disposed to war at all. As I have already noted, in three wars, no sooner had the bugles sounded than Gandhi not only gave his support, but was clamoring for arms. To form new regiments! To fight! To destroy the enemies of the empire I Regular Indian army units fought in both the Boer War and World War I, but this was not enough for Gandhi. He wanted to raise new troops, even, in the case of the Boer and Kaffir Wars, from the tiny Indian colony in South Africa. British military authorities thought it not really worth the trouble to train such a small body of Indians as soldiers, and were even resistant to training them as an auxiliary medical corps (“stretcher bearers”), but finally yielded to Gandhi’s relentless importuning. As first instructed, the Indian Volunteer Corps was not supposed actually to go into combat, but Gandhi, adamant, led his Indian volunteers into the thick of battle. When the British commanding officer was mortally wounded during an engagement in the Kaffir War, Gandhi—though his corps’ deputy commander—carried the officer’s stretcher himself from the battlefield and for miles over the sun-baked veldt. The British empire’s War Medal did not have its name for nothing, and it was generally earned.

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Anyone who wants to wade through Gandhi’s endless ruminations about himsa and ahimsa (violence and nonviolence) is welcome to do so, but it is impossible for the skeptical reader to avoid the conclusion—let us say in 1920, when swaraj (home rule) was all the rage and Gandhi’s inner voice started telling him that ahimsa was the thing—that this inner voice knew what it was talking about. By this I mean that, though Gandhi talked with the tongue of Hindu gods and sacred scriptures, his inner voice had a strong sense of expediency. Britain, if only comparatively speaking, was a moral nation, and nonviolent civil disobedience was plainly the best and most effective way of achieving Indian independence. Skeptics might also not be surprised to learn that as independence approached, Gandhi’s inner voice began to change its tune. It has been reported that Gandhi “half-welcomed” the civil war that broke out in the last days. Even a fratricidal “bloodbath” (Gandhi’s word) would be preferable to the British.

And suddenly Gandhi began endorsing violence left, right, and center. During the fearsome rioting in Calcutta he gave his approval to men “using violence in a moral cause.” How could he tell them that violence was wrong, he asked, “unless I demonstrate that nonviolence is more effective?” He blessed the Nawab of Maler Kotla when he gave orders to shoot ten Muslims for every Hindu killed in his state. He sang the praises of Subhas Chandra Bose, who, sponsored by first the Nazis and then the Japanese, organized in Singapore an Indian National Army with which he hoped to conquer India with Japanese support, establishing a totalitarian dictatorship. Meanwhile, after independence in 1947, the armies of the India that Gandhi had created immediately marched into battle, incorporating the state of Hyderabad by force and making war in Kashmir on secessionist Pakistan. When Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist in January 1948 he was honored by the new state with a vast military funeral—in my view by no means inapposite.

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But it is not widely realized (nor will this film tell you) how much violence was associated with Gandhi’s so-called “nonviolent” movement from the very beginning. India’s Nobel Prize-winning poet, Rabindranath Tagore, had sensed a strong current of nihilism in Gandhi almost from his first days, and as early as 1920 wrote of Gandhi’s “fierce joy of annihilation,” which Tagore feared would lead India into hideous orgies of devastation—which ultimately proved to be the case. Robert Payne has said that there was unquestionably an “unhealthy atmosphere” among many of Gandhi’s fanatic followers, and that Gandhi’s habit of going to the edge of violence and then suddenly retreating was fraught with danger. “In matters of conscience I am uncompromising,” proclaimed Gandhi proudly. “Nobody can make me yield.” The judgment of Tagore was categorical. Much as he might revere Gandhi as a holy man, he quite detested him as a politician and considered that his campaigns were almost always so close to violence that it was utterly disingenuous to call them nonviolent.

For every satyagraha true believer, moreover, sworn not to harm the adversary or even to lift a finger in his own defense, there were sometimes thousands of incensed freebooters and skirmishers bound by no such vow. Gandhi, to be fair, was aware of this, and nominally deplored it—but with nothing like the consistency shown in the movie. The film leads the audience to believe that Gandhi’s first “fast unto death,” for example, was in protest against an act of barbarous violence, the slaughter by an Indian crowd of a detachment of police constables. But in actual fact Gandhi reserved this “ultimate weapon” of his to interdict a 1931 British proposal to grant Untouchables a “separate electorate” in the Indian national legislature—in effect a kind of affirmative-action program for Untouchables. For reasons I have not been able to decrypt, Gandhi was dead set against the project, but I confess it is another scene I would like to have seen in the movie: Gandhi almost starving himself to death to block affirmative action for Untouchables.

From what I have been able to decipher, Gandhi’s main preoccupation in this particular struggle was not even the British. Benefiting from the immense publicity, he wanted to induce Hindus, overnight, ecstatically, and without any of these British legalisms, to “open their hearts” to Untouchables. For a whole week Hindu India was caught up in a joyous delirium. No more would the Untouchables be scavengers and sweepers! No more would they be banned from Hindu temples! No more would they pollute at 64 feet! It lasted just a week. Then the temple doors swung shut again, and all was as before. Meanwhile, on the passionate subject of swaraj, Gandhi was crying, “I would not flinch from sacrificing a million lives for India’s liberty!” The million Indian lives were indeed sacrificed, and in full. They fell, however, not to the bullets of British soldiers but to the knives and clubs of their fellow Indians in savage butcheries when the British finally withdrew.

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Although the movie sneers at this reasoning as being the flimsiest of pretexts, I cannot imagine an impartial person studying the subject without concluding that concern for Indian religious minorities was one of the principal reasons Britain stayed in India as long as it did. When it finally withdrew, blood-maddened mobs surged through the streets from one end of India to the other, the majority group in each area, Hindu or Muslim, slaughtering the defenseless minority without mercy in one of the most hideous periods of carnage of modern history.

A comparison is in order. At the famous Amritsar massacre of 1919, shot in elaborate and loving detail in the present movie and treated by post-independence Indian historians as if it were Auschwitz, Ghurka troops under the command of a British officer, General Dyer, fired into an unarmed crowd of Indians defying a ban and demonstrating for Indian independence. The crowd contained women and children; 379 persons died; it was all quite horrible. Dyer was court-martialed and cashiered, but the incident lay heavily on British consciences for the next three decades, producing a severe inhibiting effect. Never again would the British empire commit another Amritsar, anywhere.

As soon as the oppressive British were gone, however, the Indians—gentle, tolerant people that they are—gave themselves over to an orgy of bloodletting. Trained troops did not pick off targets at a distance with Enfield rifles. Blood-crazed Hindus, or Muslims, ran through the streets with knives, beheading babies, stabbing women, old people. Interestingly, our movie shows none of this on camera (the oldest way of stacking the deck in Hollywood). All we see is the aged Gandhi, grieving, and of course fasting, at these terrible reports of riots. And, naturally, the film doesn’t whisper a clue as to the total number of dead, which might spoil the mood somehow. The fact is that we will never know how many Indians were murdered by other Indians during the country’s Independence Massacres, but almost all serious studies place the figure over a million, and some, such as Payne’s sources, go to 4 million. So, for those who like round numbers, the British killed some 400 seditious colonials at Amritsar and the name Amritsar lives in infamy, while Indians may have killed some 4 million of their own countrymen for no other reason than that they were of a different religious faith and people think their great leader would make an inspirational subject for a movie. Ahimsa, as can be seen, then, had an absolutely tremendous moral effect when used against Britain, but not only would it not have worked against Nazi Germany (the most obvious reproach, and of course quite true), but, the crowning irony, it had virtually no effect whatever when Gandhi tried to bring it into play against violent Indians.

Despite this at best patchy record, the film-makers have gone to great lengths to imply that this same prinicple of ahimsa—presented in the movie as the purest form of pacifism—is universally effective, yesterday, today, here, there, everywhere. We hear no talk from Gandhi of war sometimes being a “necessary evil,” but only him announcing—and more than once—“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” In a scene very near the end of the movie, we hear Gandhi say, as if after deep reflection: “Tyrants and murderers can seem invincible at the time, but in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always.” During the last scene of the movie, following the assassination, Margaret Bourke-White is keening over the death of the Great Soul with an English admiral’s daughter named Madeleine Slade, in whose bowel movements Gandhi took the deepest interest (see their correspondence), and Miss Slade remarks incredulously that Gandhi felt that he had failed. They are then both incredulous for a moment, after which Miss Slade observes mournfully, “When we most needed it [presumably meaning during World War II], he offered the world a way out of madness. But the world didn’t see it.” Then we hear once again the assassin’s shots, Gandhi’s “Oh, God,” and last, in case we missed them the first time, Gandhi’s words (over the shimmering waters of the Ganges?): “Tyrants and murderers can seem invincible at the time, but in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always.” This is the end of the picture.

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Now, as it happens, I have been thinking about tyrants and murderers for some time. But the fact that in the end they always fall has never given me much comfort, partly because, not being a Hindu and not expecting reincarnation after reincarnation, I am simply not prepared to wait them out. It always occurs to me that, while I am waiting around for them to fall, they might do something mean to me, like fling me into a gas oven or send me off to a Gulag. Unlike a Hindu and not worshipping stasis, I am also given to wondering who is to bring these murderers and tyrants down, it being all too risky a process to wait for them and the regimes they establish simply to die of old age. The fact that a few reincarnations from now they will all have turned to dust somehow does not seem to suggest a rational strategy for dealing with the problem.

Since the movie’s Madeleine Slade specifically invites us to revere the “way out of madness” that Gandhi offered the world at the time of World War II, I am under the embarrassing obligation of recording exactly what courses of action the Great Soul recommended to the various parties involved in that crisis. For Gandhi was never stinting in his advice. Indeed, the less he knew about a subject, the less he stinted.

I am aware that for many not privileged to have visited the former British Raj, the names Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Deccan are simply words. But other names, such as Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, somehow have a harder profile. The term “Jew,” also, has a reasonably hard profile, and I feel all Jews sitting emotionally at the movie Gandhi should be apprised of the advice that the Mahatma offered their coreligionists when faced with the Nazi peril: they should commit collective suicide. If only the Jews of Germany had the good sense to offer their throats willingly to the Nazi butchers’ knives and throw themselves into the sea from cliffs they would arouse world public opinion, Gandhi was convinced, and their moral triumph would be remembered for “ages to come.” If they would only pray for Hitler (as their throats were cut, presumably), they would leave a “rich heritage to mankind.” Although Gandhi had known Jews from his earliest days in South Africa—where his three staunchest white supporters were Jews, every one—he disapproved of how rarely they loved their enemies. And he never repented of his recommendation of collective suicide. Even after the war, when the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed, Gandhi told Louis Fischer, one of his biographers, that the Jews died anyway, didn’t they? They might as well have died significantly.

Gandhi’s views on the European crisis were not entirely consistent. He vigorously opposed Munich, distrusting Chamberlain. “Europe has sold her soul for the sake of a seven days’ earthly existence,” he declared. “The peace that Europe gained at Munich is a triumph of violence.” But when the Germans moved into the Bohemian heartland, he was back to urging nonviolent resistance, exhorting the Czechs to go forth, unarmed, against the Wehrmacht, perishing gloriously—collective suicide again. He had Madeleine Slade draw up two letters to President Eduard Beneš of Czechoslovakia, instructing him on the proper conduct of Czechoslovak satyagrahi when facing the Nazis.

When Hitler attacked Poland, however, Gandhi suddenly endorsed the Polish army’s military resistance, calling it “almost nonviolent.” (If this sounds like double-talk, I can only urge readers to read Gandhi.) He seemed at this point to have a rather low opinion of Hitler, but when Germany’s panzer divisions turned west, Allied armies collapsed under the ferocious onslaught, and British ships were streaming across the Straits of Dover from Dunkirk, he wrote furiously to the Viceroy of India: “This manslaughter must be stopped. You are losing; if you persist, it will only result in greater bloodshed. Hitler is not a bad man. . . .”

Gandhi also wrote an open letter to the British people, passionately urging them to surrender and accept whatever fate Hitler had prepared for them. “Let them take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds.” Since none of this had the intended effect, Gandhi, the following year, addressed an open letter to the prince of darkness himself, Adolf Hitler.

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The scene must be pictured. In late December 1941, Hitler stood at the pinnacle of his might. His armies, undefeated—anywhere—ruled Europe from the English Channel to the Volga. Rommel had entered Egypt. The Japanese had reached Singapore. The U.S. Pacific Fleet lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. At this superbly chosen moment, Mahatma Gandhi attempted to convert Adolf Hitler to the ways of nonviolence. “Dear Friend,” the letter begins, and proceeds to a heartfelt appeal to the Führer to embrace all mankind “irrespective of race, color, or creed.” Every admirer of the film Gandhi should be compelled to read this letter. Surprisingly, it is not known to have had any deep impact on Hitler. Gandhi was no doubt disappointed. He moped about, really quite depressed, but still knew he was right. When the Japanese, having cut their way through Burma, threatened India, Gandhi’s strategy was to let them occupy as much of India as they liked and then to “make them feel unwanted.” His way of helping his British “friends” was, at one of the worst points of the war, to launch massive civil-disobedience campaigns against them, paralyzing some of their efforts to defend India from the Japanese.

Here, then, is your leader, O followers of Gandhi: a man who thought Hitler’s heart would be melted by an appeal to forget race, color, and creed, and who was sure the feelings of the Japanese would be hurt if they sensed themselves unwanted. As world-class statesmen go, it is not a very good record. Madeleine Slade was right, I suppose. The world certainly didn’t listen to Gandhi. Nor, for that matter, has the modern government of India listened to Gandhi. Although all Indian politicians of all political parties claim to be Gandhians, India has blithely fought three wars against Pakistan, one against China, and even invaded and seized tiny, helpless Goa, and all without a whisper of a shadow of a thought of ahimsa. And of course India now has atomic weapons, a satyagraha technique if ever there was one.

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I am sure that almost everyone who sees the movie Gandhi is aware that, from a religious point of view, the Mahatma was something called a “Hindu”—but I do not think one in a thousand has the dimmest notion of the fundamental beliefs of the Hindu religion. The simplest example is Gandhi’s use of the word “God,” which, for members of the great Western religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all interrelated—means a personal god, a godhead. But when Gandhi said “God” in speaking English, he was merely translating from Gujarati or Hindi, and from the Hindu culture. Gandhi, in fact, simply did not believe in a personal God, and wrote in so many words, “God is not a person . . . but a force; the undefinable mysterious Power that pervades everything; a living Power that is Love. . . .” And Gandhi’s very favorite definition of God, repeated many thousands of times, was, “God is Truth,” which reduces God to some kind of abstract principle.

Like all Hindus, Gandhi also believed in the “Great Oneness,” according to which everything is part of God, meaning not just you and me and everyone else, but every living creature, every dead creature, every plant, the pitcher of milk, the milk in the pitcher, the tumbler into which the milk is poured. . . . After all of which, he could suddenly pop up with a declaration that God is “the Maker, the Law-Giver, a jealous Lord,” phrases he had probably picked up in the Bible and, with Hindu fluidity, felt he could throw in so as to embrace even more of the Great Oneness. So when Gandhi said, “I am a Hindu and a Muslim and a Christian and a Jew,” it was (from a Western standpoint) Hindu double-talk. Hindu holy men, some of them reformers like Gandhi, have actually even “converted” to Islam, then Christianity, or whatever, to worship different “aspects” of the Great Oneness, before reconverting to Hinduism. Now for Christians, fastidious in matters of doctrine, a man who converts to Islam is an apostate (or vice versa), but a Hindu is a Hindu is a Hindu. The better to experience the Great Oneness, many Hindu holy men feel they should be women as well as men, and one quite famous one even claimed he could menstruate (I will spare the reader the details).

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In this ecumenical age, it is extremely hard to shake Westerners loose from the notion that the devout of all religions, after all, worship “the one God.” But Gandhi did not worship the one God. He did not worship the God of mercy. He did not worship the God of forgiveness. And this for the simple reason that the concepts of mercy and forgiveness are absent from Hinduism. In Hinduism, men do not pray to God for forgiveness, and a man’s sins are never forgiven—indeed, there is no one out there to do the forgiving. In your next life you may be born someone higher up the caste scale, but in this life there is no hope. For Gandhi, a true Hindu, did not believe in man’s immortal soul. He believed with every ounce of his being in karma, a series, perhaps a long series, of reincarnations, and at the end, with great good fortune: mukti, liberation from suffering and the necessity of rebirth, nothingness. Gandhi once wrote to Tolstoy (of all people) that reincarnation explained “reasonably the many mysteries of life.” So if Hindus today still treat an Untouchable as barely human, this is thought to be perfectly right and fitting because of his actions in earlier lives. As can be seen, Hinduism, by its very theology, with its sacred triad of karma, reincarnation, and caste (with caste an absolutely indispensable part of the system) offers the most complacent justification of inhumanity of any of the world’s great religious faiths.

Gandhi, needless to say, was a Hindu reformer, one of many. Until well into his fifties, however, he accepted the caste system in toto as the “natural order of society,” promoting control and discipline and sanctioned by his religion. Later, in bursts of zeal, he favored moderating it in a number of ways. But he stuck by the basic varna system (the four main caste groupings plus the Untouchables) until the end of his days, insisting that a man’s position and occupation should be determined essentially by birth. Gandhi favored milder treatment of Untouchables, renaming them Harijans, “children of God,” but a Harijan was still a Harijan. Perhaps because his frenzies of compassion were so extreme (no, no, he would clean the Harijan‘s latrine), Hindu reverence for him as a holy man became immense, but his prescriptions were rarely followed. Industrialization and modernization have introduced new occupations and sizable social and political changes in India, but the caste system has dexterously adapted and remains largely intact today. The Sudras still labor. The sweepers still sweep. Max Weber, in his The Religion of India, after quoting the last line of the Communist Manifesto, suggests somewhat sardonically that low-caste Hindus, too, have “nothing to lose but their chains,” that they, too, have “a world to win”—the only problem being that they have to die first and get born again, higher, it is to be hoped, in the immutable system of caste. Hinduism in general, wrote Weber, “is characterized by a dread of the magical evil of innovation.” Its very essence is to guarantee stasis.

In addition to its literally thousands of castes and sub-castes, Hinduism has countless sects, with discordant rites and beliefs. It has no clear ecclesiastical organization and no universal body of doctrine. What I have described above is your standard, no-frills Hindu, of which in many ways Gandhi was an excellent example. With the reader’s permission I will skip over the Upanishads, Vedanta, Yoga, the Puranas, Tantra, Bhakti, the Bhagavad-Gita (which contains theistic elements), Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and the terrible Kali or Durga, to concentrate on those central beliefs that most motivated Gandhi’s behavior as a public figure.

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It should be plain by now that there is much in the Hindu culture that is distasteful to the Western mind, and consequently is largely unknown in the West—not because Hindus do not go on and on about these subjects, but because a Western squeamishness usually prevents these preoccupations from reaching print (not to mention film). When Gandhi attended his first Indian National Congress he was most distressed at seeing the Hindus—not laborers but high-caste Hindus, civic leaders—defecating all over the place, as if to pay attention to where the feces fell was somehow unclean. (For, as V.S. Naipaul puts it, in a twisted Hindu way it is unclean to clean. It is unclean even to notice. “It was the business of the sweepers to remove excrement, and until the sweepers came, people were content to live in the midst of their own excrement.”) Gandhi exhorted Indians endlessly on the subject, saying that sanitation was the first need of India, but he retained an obvious obsession with excreta, gleefully designing latrines and latrine drills for all hands at the ashram, and, all in all, what with giving and taking enemas, and his public bowel movements, and his deep concern with everyone else’s bowel movements (much correspondence), and endless dietary experiments as a function of bowel movements, he devoted a rather large share of his life to the matter. Despite his constant campaigning for sanitation, it is hard to believe that Gandhi was not permanently marked by what Arthur Koestler terms the Hindu “morbid infatuation with filth,” and what V.S. Naipaul goes as far as to call the Indian “deification of filth.” (Decades later, Krishna Menon, a Gandhian and one-time Indian Defense Minister, was still fortifying his sanctity by drinking a daily glass of urine.)

But even more important, because it is dealt with in the movie directly—if of course dishonestly—is Gandhi’s parallel obsession with brahmacharya, or sexual chastity. There is a scene late in the film in which Margaret Bourke-White (again!) asks Gandhi’s wife if he has ever broken his vow of chastity, taken, at that time, about forty years before. Gandhi’s wife, by now a sweet old lady, answers wistfully, with a pathetic little note of hope, “Not yet.” What lies behind this adorable scene is the following: Gandhi held as one of his most profound beliefs (a fundamental doctrine of Hindu medicine) that a man, as a matter of the utmost importance, must conserve his bindu, or seminal fluid. Koestler (in The Lotus and the Robot) gives a succinct account of this belief, widespread among orthodox Hindus: “A man’s vital energy is concentrated in his seminal fluid, and this is stored in a cavity in the skull. It is the most precious substance in the body . . . an elixir of life both in the physical and mystical sense, distilled from the blood. . . . A large store of bindu of pure quality guarantees health, longevity, and supernatural powers. . . . Conversely, every loss of it is a physical and spiritual impoverishment.” Gandhi himself said in so many words, “A man who is unchaste loses stamina, becomes emasculated and cowardly, while in the chaste man secretions [semen] are sublimated into a vital force pervading his whole being.” And again, still Gandhi: “Ability to retain and assimilate the vital liquid is a matter of long training. When properly conserved it is transmuted into matchless energy and strength.” Most male Hindus go ahead and have sexual relations anyway, of course, but the belief in the value of bindu leaves the whole culture in what many observers have called a permanent state of “semen anxiety.” When Gandhi once had a nocturnal emission he almost had a nervous breakdown.

Gandhi was a truly fanatical opponent of sex for pleasure, and worked it out carefully that a married couple should be allowed to have sex three or four times in a lifetime, merely to have children, and favored embodying this restriction in the law of the land. The sexual-gratification wing of the present-day feminist movement would find little to attract them in Gandhi’s doctrine, since in all his seventy-nine years it never crossed his mind once that there could be anything enjoyable in sex for women, and he was constantly enjoining Indian women to deny themselves to men, to refuse to let their husbands “abuse” them. Gandhi had been married at thirteen, and when he took his vow of chastity, after twenty-four years of sexual activity, he ordered his two oldest sons, both young men, to be totally chaste as well.

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But Gandhi’s monstrous behavior to his own family is notorious. He denied his sons education—to which he was bitterly hostile. His wife remained illiterate. Once when she was very sick, hemorrhaging badly, and seemed to be dying, he wrote to her from jail icily: “My struggle is not merely political. It is religious and therefore quite pure. It does not matter much whether one dies in it or lives. I hope and expect that you will also think likewise and not be unhappy.” To die, that is. On another occasion he wrote, speaking about her: “I simply cannot bear to look at Ba’s face. The expression is often like that on the face of a meek cow and gives one the feeling, as a cow occasionally does, that in her own dumb manner she is saying something. I see, too, that there is selfishness in this suffering of hers. . . .” And in the end he let her die, as I have said, rather than allow British doctors to give her a shot of penicillin (while his inner voice told him that it would be all right for him to take quinine). He disowned his oldest son, Harilal, for wishing to marry. He banished his second son for giving his struggling older brother a small sum of money. Harilal grew quite wild with rage against his father, attacked him in print, converted to Islam, took to women, drink, and died an alcoholic in 1948. The Mahatma attacked him right back in his pious way, proclaiming modestly in an open letter in Young India, “Men may be good, not necessarily their children.”

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If the reader thinks I have delivered unduly harsh judgments on India and Hindu civilization, I can refer him to An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization, two quite brilliant books on India by V.S. Naipaul, a Hindu, and a Brahmin, born in Trinidad. In the second, the more discursive, Naipaul writes that India “has little to offer the world except its Gandhi an concept of holy poverty and the recurring crooked comedy of its holy men, and . . . is now dependent in every practical way on other, imperfectly understood civilizations.”

Hinduism, Naipaul writes, “has given men no idea of a contract with other men, no idea of the state. It has enslaved one quarter of the population [the Untouchables] and always has left the whole fragmented and vulnerable. Its philosophy of withdrawal has diminished men intellectually and not equipped them to respond to challenge; it has stifled growth. So that again and again in India history has repeated itself: vulnerability, defeat, withdrawal.” Indians, Naipaul says, have no historical notion of the past. “Through centuries of conquest the civilization declined into an apparatus for survival, turning away from the mind . . . and creativity . . . stripping itself down, like all decaying civilizations, to its magical practices and imprisoning social forms.” He adds later, “No government can survive on Gandhian fantasy; and the spirituality, the solace of a conquered people, which Gandhi turned into a form of national assertion, has soured more obviously into the nihilism that it always was.” Naipaul condemns India again and again for its “intellectual parasitism,” its “intellectual vacuum,” its “emptiness,” the “blankness of its decayed civilization.” “Indian poverty is more dehumanizing than any machine; and, more than in any machine civilization, men in India are units, locked up in the straitest obedence by their idea of their dharma. . . . The blight of caste is not only untouchability and the consequent deification in India of filth; the blight, in an India that tries to grow, is also the overall obedience it imposes, . . . the diminishing of adventurousness, the pushing away from men of individuality and the possibility of excellence.”

Although Naipaul blames Gandhi as well as India itself for the country’s failure to develop an “ideology” adequate for the modern world, he grants him one or two magnificent moments—always, it should be noted, when responding to “other civilizations.” For Gandhi, Naipaul remarks pointedly, had matured in alien societies: Britain and South Africa. With age, back in India, he seemed from his autobiography to be headed for “lunacy,” says Naipaul, and was only rescued by external events, his reactions to which were determined in part by “his experience of the democratic ways of South Africa” [my emphasis]. For it is one of the enduring ironies of Gandhi’s story that it was in South Africa—South Africa—a country in which he became far more deeply involved than he had been in Britain, that Gandhi caught a warped glimmer of that strange institution of which he would never have seen even a reflection within Hindu society: democracy.

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Another of Gandhi’s most powerful obsessions (to which the movie alludes in such a syrupy and misleading manner that it would be quite impossible for the audience to understand it) was his visceral hatred of the modern, industrial world. He even said, more than once, that he actually wouldn’t mind if the British remained in India, to police it, conduct foreign policy, and such trivia, if it would only take away its factories and railways. And Gandhi hated, not just factories and railways, but also the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the airplane. He happened to be in England when Louis Blériot, the great French aviation pioneer, first flew the English Channel—an event which at the time stirred as much excitement as Lindbergh’s later flight across the Atlantic—and Gandhi was in a positive fury that giant crowds were acclaiming such an insignificant event. He used the telegraph extensively himself, of course, and later would broadcast daily over All-India Radio during his highly publicized fasts, but consistency was never Gandhi’s strong suit.

Gandhi’s view of the good society, about which he wrote ad nauseam, was an Arcadian vision set far in India’s past. It was the pristine Indian village, where, with all diabolical machinery and technology abolished—and with them all unhappiness—contented villagers would hand-spin their own yarn, hand-weave their own cloth, serenely follow their bullocks in the fields, tranquilly prodding them in the anus in the time-hallowed Hindu way. This was why Gandhi taught himself to spin, and why all the devout Gandhians, like monkeys, spun also. This was Gandhi’s program. Since he said it several thousand times, we have no choice but to believe that he sincerely desired the destruction of modern technology and industry and the return of India to the way of life of an idyllic (and quite likely nonexistent) past. And yet this same Mahatma Gandhi hand-picked as the first Prime Minister of an independent India Pandit Nehru, who was committed to a policy of industrialization and for whom the last word in the politico-economic organization of the state was (and remained) Beatrice Webb.

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What are we to make of this Gandhi? We are dealing with two strangenesses here, Indians and Gandhi himself. The plain fact is that both Indian leaders and the Indian people ignored Gandhi’s precepts almost as thoroughly as did Hitler. They ignored him on sexual abstinence. They ignored his modifications of the caste system. They ignored him on the evils of modern industry, the radio, the telephone. They ignored him on education. They ignored his appeals for national union, the former British Raj splitting into a Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu India. No one sought a return to the Arcadian Indian village of antiquity. They ignored him, above all, on ahimsa, nonviolence. There was always a small number of exalted satyagrahi who, martyrs, would march into the constables’ truncheons, but one of the things that alarmed the British—as Tagore indicated—was the explosions of violence that accompanied all this alleged nonviolence. Naipaul writes that with independence India discovered again that it was “cruel and horribly violent.” Jaya Prakash Narayan, the late opposition leader, once admitted, “We often behave like animals. . . . We are more likely than not to become aggressive, wild, violent. We kill and burn and loot. . . .”

Why, then, did the Hindu masses so honor this Mahatma, almost all of whose most cherished beliefs they so pointedly ignored, even during his lifetime? For Hindus, the question is not really so puzzling. Gandhi, for them, after all, was a Mahatma, a holy man. He was a symbol of sanctity, not a guide to conduct. Hinduism has a long history of holy men who, traditionally, do not offer themselves up to the public as models of general behavior but withdraw from the world, often into an ashram, to pursue their sanctity in private, a practice which all Hindus honor, if few emulate. The true oddity is that Gandhi, this holy man, having drawn from British sources his notions of nationalism and democracy, also absorbed from the British his model of virtue in public life. He was a historical original, a Hindu holy man that a British model of public service and dazzling advances in mass communications thrust out into the world, to become a great moral leader and the “father of his country.”

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Some Indians feel that after the early 1930’s, Gandhi, although by now world-famous, was in fact in sharp decline. Did he at least “get the British out of India”? Some say no. India, in the last days of the British Raj, was already largely governed by Indians (a fact one would never suspect from this movie), and it is a common view that without this irrational, wildly erratic holy man the transition to full independence might have gone both more smoothly and more swiftly. There is much evidence that in his last years Gandhi was in a kind of spiritual retreat and, with all his endless praying and fasting, was no longer pursuing (the very words seem strange in a Hindu context) “the public good.” What he was pursuing, in a strict reversion to Hindu tradition, was his personal holiness. In earlier days he had scoffed at the title accorded him, Mahatma (literally “great soul”). But toward the end, during the hideous paroxysms that accompanied independence, with some of the most unspeakable massacres taking place in Calcutta, he declared, “And if . . . the whole of Calcutta swims in blood, it will not dismay me. For it will be a willing offering of innocent blood.” And in his last days, after there had already been one attempt on his life, he was heard to say, “I am a true Mahatma.”

We can only wonder, furthermore, at a public figure who lectures half his life about the necessity of abolishing modern industry and returning India to its ancient primitiveness, and then picks a Fabian socialist, already drawing up Five-Year Plans, as the country’s first Prime Minister. Audacious as it may seem to contest the views of such heavy thinkers as Margaret Bourke-White, Ralph Nader, and J.K. Galbraith (who found the film’s Gandhi “true to the original” and endorsed the movie wholeheartedly), we have a right to reservations about such a figure as a public man.

I should not be surprised if Gandhi’s greatest real humanitarian achievement was an improvement in the treatment of Untouchables—an area where his efforts were not only assiduous, but actually bore fruit. In this, of course, he ranks well behind the British, who abolished suttee—over ferocious Hindu opposition—in 1829. The ritual immolation by fire of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, suttee had the full sanction of the Hindu religion, although it might perhaps be wrong to overrate its importance. Scholars remind us that it was never universal, only “usual.” And there was, after all, a rather extensive range of choice. In southern India the widow was flung into her husband’s fire-pit. In the valley of the Ganges she was placed on the pyre when it was already aflame. In western India, she supported the head of the corpse with her right hand, while, torch in her left, she was allowed the honor of setting the whole thing on fire herself. In the north, where perhaps women were more impious, the widow’s body was constrained on the burning pyre by long poles pressed down by her relatives, just in case, screaming in terror and choking and burning to death, she might forget her dharma. So, yes, ladies, members of the National Council of Churches, believers in the one God, mourners for that holy India before it was despoiled by those brutish British, remember suttee, that interesting, exotic practice in which Hindus, over the centuries, burned to death countless millions of helpless women in a spirit of pious devotion, crying for all I know, Hai Rama! Hai Rama!

_____________

I would like to conclude with some observations on two Englishmen, Madeleine Slade, the daughter of a British admiral, and Sir Richard Attenborough, the producer, director, and spiritual godfather of the film, Gandhi. Miss Slade was a jewel in Gandhi’s crown—a member of the British ruling class, as she was, turned fervent disciple of this Indian Mahatma. She is played in the film by Geraldine James with nobility, dignity, and a beatific manner quite up to the level of Candice Bergen, and perhaps even the Virgin Mary. I learn from Ved Mehta’s Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles, however, that Miss Slade had another master before Gandhi. In about 1917, when she was fifteen, she made contact with the spirit of Beethoven by listening to his sonatas on a player piano. “I threw myself down on my knees in the seclusion of my room,” she wrote in her autobiography, “and prayed, really prayed to God for the first time in my life: ‘Why have I been born over a century too late? Why hast Thou given me realization of him and yet put all these years in between?’”

After World War I, still seeking how best to serve Beethoven, Miss Slade felt an “infinite longing” when she visited his birthplace and grave, and, finally, at the age of thirty-two, caught up with Romain Rolland, who had partly based his renowned Jean Christophe on the composer. But Rolland had written a new book now, about a man called Gandhi, “another Christ,” and before long Miss Slade was quite literally falling on her knees before the Mahatma in India, “conscious of nothing but a sense of light.” Although one would never guess this from the film, she soon (to quote Mehta’s impression) began “to get on Gandhi’s nerves,” and he took every pretext to keep her away from him, in other ashrams, and working in schools and villages in other parts of India. She complained to Gandhi in letters about discrimination against her by orthodox Hindus, who expected her to live in rags and vile quarters during menstruation, considering her unclean and virtually untouchable. Gandhi wrote back, agreeing that women should not be treated like that, but adding that she should accept it all with grace and cheerfulness, “without thinking that the orthodox party is in any way unreasonable.” (This is as good an example as any of Gandhi’s coherence, even in his prime. Women should not be treated like that, but the people who treated them that way were in no way unreasonable.)

Some years after Gandhi’s death, Miss Slade rediscovered Beethoven, becoming conscious again “of the realization of my true self. For a while I remained lost in the world of the spirit. . . .” She soon returned to Europe and serving Beethoven, her “true calling.” When Mehta finally found her in Vienna, she told him, “Please don’t ask me any more about Bapu [Gandhi]. I now belong to van Beethoven. In matters of the spirit, there is always a call.” A polite description of Madeleine Slade is that she was an extreme eccentric. In the vernacular, she was slightly cracked.

Sir Richard Attenborough, however, isn’t cracked at all. The only puzzle is how he suddenly got to be a pacifist, a fact which his press releases now proclaim to the world. Attenborough trained as a pilot in the RAF in World War II, and was released briefly to the cinema, where he had already begun his career in Noël Coward’s super-patriotic In Which We Serve. He then returned to active service, flying combat missions with the RAF. Richard Attenborough, in short—when Gandhi was pleading with the British to surrender to the Nazis, assuring them that “Hitler is not a bad man”—was fighting for his country. The Viceroy of India warned Gandhi grimly that “We are engaged in a struggle,” and Attenborough played his part in that great struggle, and proudly, too, as far as I can tell. To my knowledge he has never had a crise de conscience on the matter, or announced that he was carried away by the war fever and that Britain really should have capitulated to the Nazis—which Gandhi would have had it do.

_____________

Although the present film is handsomely done in its way, no one has ever accused Attenborough of being excessively endowed with either acting or directing talent. In the 50’s he was a popular young British entertainer, but his most singular gift appeared to be his entrepreneurial talent as a businessman, using his movie fees to launch successful London restaurants (at one time four), and other business ventures. At the present moment he is Chairman of the Board of Capital Radio (Britain’s most successful commercial station), Gold-crest Films, the British Film Institute, and Deputy Chairman of the BBC’s new Channel 4 television network. Like most members of the nouveaux riches on the rise, he has also reached out for symbols of respectability and public service, and has assembled quite a collection. He is a Trustee of the Tate Gallery, Pro-Chancellor of Sussex University, President of Britain’s Muscular Dystrophy Group, Chairman of the Actors’ Charitable Trust and, of course, Chairman of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. There may be even more, but this is a fair sampling. In 1976, quite fittingly, he was knighted, by a Labor government, but his friends say he still insists on being called “Dickie.”

It is quite general today for members of the professional classes, even when not artistic types, to despise commerce and feel that the state, the economy, and almost everything else would be better and more idealistically run by themselves rather than these loutish businessmen. Sir Dickie, however, being a highly successful businessman himself, would hardly entertain such an antipathy. But as he scrambled his way to the heights perhaps he found himself among high-minded idealists, utopians, equalitarians, and lovers of the oppressed. Now there are those who think Sir Dickie converted to pacifism when Indira Gandhi handed him a check for several million dollars. But I do not believe this. I think Sir Dickie converted to pacifism out of idealism.

_____________

His pacifism, I confess, has been more than usually muddled. In 1968, after twenty-six years in the profession, he made his directorial debut with Oh! What a Lovely War, with its superb parody of Britain’s jingoistic music-hall songs of the “Great War,” World War I. Since I had the good fortune to see Joan Littlewood’s original London stage production, which gave the work its entire style, I cannot think that Sir Dickie’s contribution was unduly large. Like most commercially successful parodies—from Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend to Broadway’s Superman, Dracula, and The Crucifier of Blood—Oh! What a Lovely War depended on the audience’s (if not Miss Littlewood’s) retaining a substantial affection for the subject being parodied: in this case, a swaggering hyper-patriotism, which recalled days when the empire was great. In any event, since Miss Littlewood identified herself as a Communist and since Communists, as far as I know, are never pacifists, Sir Dickie’s case for the production’s “pacifism” seems stymied from the other angle as well.

Sir Dickie’s next blow for pacifism was Young Winston (1973), which, the new publicity manual says, “explored how Churchill’s childhood traumas and lack of parental affection became the spurs which goaded him to . . . a position of great power.” One would think that a man who once flew combat missions under the orders of the great war leader—and who seemingly wanted his country to win—would thank God for childhood traumas and lack of parental affection if such were needed to provide a Churchill in the hour of peril. But on pressed Sir Dickie, in the year of his knighthood, with A Bridge Too Far, the story of the futile World War II assault on Arnhem, described by Sir Dickie—now, at least—as “a further plea for pacifism.”

But does Sir Richard Attenborough seriously think that, rather than go through what we did at Arnhem, we should have given in, let the Nazis be, and even—true pacifists-let them occupy Britain, Canada, the United States, contenting ourselves only with “making them feel unwanted”? At the level of idiocy to which discussions of war and peace have sunk in the West, every harebrained idealist who discovers that war is not a day at the beach seems to think he has found an irresistible argument for pacifism. Is Pearl Harbor an argument for pacifism? Bataan? Dunkirk? Dieppe? The Ardennes? Roland fell at Roncesvalles. Is the Song of Roland a pacifist epic? If so, why did William the Conqueror have it chanted to his men as they marched into battle at Hastings? Men prove their valor in defeat as well as in victory. Even Sergeant-Major Gandhi knew that. Up in the moral never-never land which Sir Dickie now inhabits, perhaps they think the Alamo led to a great wave of pacifism in Texas.

In a feat of sheer imbecility, Attenborough has dedicated Gandhi to Lord Mountbatten, who commanded the Southeast Asian Theater during World War II. Mount-batten, you might object, was hardly a pacifist—but then again he was murdered by Irish terrorists, which proves how frightful all that sort of thing is, Sir Dickie says, and how we must end it all by imitating Gandhi. Not the Gandhi who called for seas of innocent blood, you understand, but the movie-Gandhi, the nice one.

_____________

The historical Gandhi’s favorite mantra, strange to tell, was Do or Die (he called it literally that, a “mantra”). I think Sir Dickie should reflect on this, because it means, dixit Gandhi, that a man must be prepared to die for what he believes in, for, himsa or ahimsa, death is always there, and in an ultimate test men who are not prepared to face it lose. Gandhi was erratic, irrational, tyrannical, obstinate. He sometimes verged on lunacy. He believed in a religion whose ideas I find somewhat repugnant. He worshipped cows. But I still say this: he was brave. He feared no one.

On a lower level of being, I have consequently given some thought to the proper mantra for spectators of the movie Gandhi. After much reflection, in homage to Ralph Nader, I have decided on Caveat Emptor, “buyer beware.” Repeated many thousand times in a seat in the cinema it might with luck lead to Om, the Hindu dream of nothingness, the Ultimate Void.

[patriotsnet]

How Often Does Joe Manchin Vote With Republicans

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-often-does-joe-manchin-vote-with-republicans/

How Often Does Joe Manchin Vote With Republicans

The West Virginia Senator Was Cozy With Trump For Political Reasons But Hes Less Of An Obstacle To An Ambitious Agenda Than An Organized Gang Of Senate Moderates

There is now a new most powerful person in the United States: Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. With the Senate evenly split, Manchin, a Democrat representing a state in which nearly 70 percent of the votes cast in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections went to Donald Trump, has the power to break a tied vote on almost any legislative business requiring a simple majority to pass. He can even decide which bills to be passed with a simple majority.

For some liberals, this is a disheartening prospect. Manchin voted with Trump more than any other Senate Democrat, opting to confirm two of the former presidents three Supreme Court nominees and evenflirting with endorsing Trumps reelection campaign.* If the new Democratic majority is forced to craft legislation designed to win over Manchin, it could all but guarantee a watered-down and compromised version of the big and transformative agenda Joe Biden began promising last year.

But, honestly, negotiating with Manchin may not be as difficult as liberals fear. A much more worrying alternative is not just possible but may be taking shape at this very moment.

Joe Manchin is, considering his circumstances, by no means the worst Democratic senator. He is quietly a semi-reliable partisan who opposed the GOPs tax bill and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. And while he later suggested to the press that he would consider endorsing Trump, Manchin did vote to oust him in his first impeachment.

Stop The Steal Unfolding In Plain Sight

But you know who would gladly use a wacked out video clip to contest a free and fair election? Republican state legislators, local officials and members of Congress.

Much like the Jan. 6 insurrection, the GOP plan to steal the next presidential election is unfolding in plain sight. The goal isnt just to make it harder to vote but to also undermine the administration of elections, remove any official who stood in the way of Trumps attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, and then give Republican legislatures new powers to interfere in elections when they dont like the results. 

This is happening as Republicans are preparing new electoral maps that will almost surely allow them to take back the House, while earning far fewer votes than their opponents. And if Republicans control Congress, the chances of a duly elected Democratic president having a victory accepted in both the House and Senate are plunging toward zero.  

Faced with what Ari Berman, author of the book “Give Us The Ballot,” calls a concerted attempt to end the second Reconstruction, whats Manchin thinking about? 

In an op-ed Sunday, Manchin insisted, The right to vote is fundamental to our American democracy and protecting that right should not be about party or politics. This sentence should be the foundation of a stinging rebuke to Republicans who are undermining that right across the country, but the West Virginia senator used it to slam his fellow Democrats. 

How Does The John Lewis Act Differ From The For The People Act

Descriptions of the two pieces of legislation are often boiled down to the For the People Act as broad and the John Lewis Act as narrow. Thats true, but the bigger difference is that the For the People Act is a highly prescriptive bill that preempts state voting and election laws, mandates many practices and prohibits many others .

The John Lewis Act would create procedural rules governing voting-rights violations. This is similar to Section 2 of the original Voting Rights Act, which established legal grounds for private parties or the federal government to challenge state laws that are intended to, or have the effect of, diluting minority voting rights. . The far more powerful Sections 4 and 5 created a system whereby jurisdictions with a history of discriminatory practices would have to submit changes in voting and election laws to the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department for review and preclearance as non-discriminatory before they could take effect. It was Section 4, which set up a formula for determining which jurisdictions fell under the Section 5 preclearance requirement, that the Court killed largely killed in its 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling, claiming it was based on outdated evidence of discriminatory practices.

Despite Manchins Continued Demands For Voter Id Rules And Against Mail

After an all-night vote-a-rama on the Democrats $3.5 trillion budget resolution, the Senate early this morning took a step forward on voting rights legislation, with a 50-49 party line vote that discharged the For the People Act, also known as S. 1, from the Rules Committee. The vote was designed to give Senate Republicans a chance to support the process of moving forward, or to demonstrate to Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., that Republicans had no such intentions.

The vote came after weeks of negotiation with Manchin over S. 1, in which he arrived at a place where he was ready to support the legislation, just as long as it wasnt the full bill that he had already vowed to oppose. Manchin often extracts a round of concessions before offering his support to the party, and he appears to have done so again on S. 1.

I have made it crystal clear that I do not support the For the People Act, Manchin said on the Senate floor, referring to Oregon Democrat Sen. Jeff Merkleys flagship reforms to protect democracy. I have worked to eliminate the far-reaching aspects of that bill and amend the legislation to make sure our elections are fair, accessible, and secure.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., nevertheless admonished the proposal as an illicit attempt to advantage Democrats in elections.

Joe Manchin Opposes Voting Rights Bill And Defends Filibuster In Blow To Democrats

Senator key to progress cites Republican opposition as reason

In a huge blow to Democrats hopes of passing sweeping voting rights protections, the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said on Sunday he would not support his partys flagship bill because of Republican opposition to it.

The West Virginia senator is considered a key vote to pass the For the People Act, which would ensure automatic and same-day registration, place limits on gerrymandering and restore voting rights for felons.

Many Democrats see the bill as essential to counter efforts by Republicans in state government to restrict access to the ballot and to make it more easy to overturn election results.

It would also present voters with a forceful answer to Donald Trumps continued lies about electoral fraud, which the former president rehearsed in a speech in North Carolina on Saturday.

In a column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin said: I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act.

Manchins opposition to the bill also known as HR1 could prove crucial in the evenly split Senate. His argument against the legislation focused on Republican opposition to the bill and did not specify any issues with its contents.

Manchins op-ed might as well be titled, Why Ill vote to preserve Jim Crow

Havent you empowered Republicans to be obstructionists? Wallace asked.

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Despite Trumps recent criticisms of him, Manchin maintains a line with Trump. They last talked two weeks ago after Trump teased him in front of GOP senators and the Democratic senator is hopeful that Trump will treat him with kid gloves this fall. In Manchins estimation, he is often the only thing keeping the president from becoming a down-the-line partisan.

At times, Manchin was the only Democrat who clapped during Trumps State of the Union address. This spring, Manchin killed liberals hopes of blocking Gina Haspel for CIA director by getting behind her early. Manchin supported Trumps Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, voted for now-embattled EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and even backed the presidents hard-line immigration proposal.

Im with him sometimes more than other Republican senators are with him, Manchin said.

But Manchin has been frustrated that every time he thinks he’s got the president in a moderate place on immigration or background checks for guns, Trump goes to the right. And he hasnt always been there for Trump, most conspicuously on the GOPs tax reform bill, which attracted no Democratic votes. He also voted against Betsy DeVos to be education secretary, Tom Price to lead the Health and Human Services Department and Obamacare repeal.

Summing up his predicament, Manchin said, Washington Democrats are making it more difficult for me to be a West Virginia Democrat.

Joe Biden Wrong About Voting Records Of Joe Manchin Kyrsten Sinema

If Your Time is short

Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema support the continued use of the Senates filibuster rule. This stance imperils the prospects for key elements of Bidens agenda. 

However, on actual votes taken in the Senate, both Manchin and Sinema supported Bidens position 100% of the time. 

In a speech marking 100 years since a race massacre in Tulsa, President Joe Biden gave a rhetorical nudge to two senators hed like to see greater support from.

“June should be a month of action on Capitol Hill,” Biden said in Tulsa on June 1. “I hear all the folks on TV saying, Why doesnt Biden get this done? Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends. But were not giving up.”

Biden didnt specify which Democratic senators he had in mind, and the White House didnt respond to an inquiry for this article. But observerswidelyassumed that he was referring to Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, whose words and positions have not always been in lockstep with Bidens.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., surrounded by reporters at the Capitol on May 26, 2021.

However, in his Tulsa remarks, Biden was wrong to say that Manchin and Sinema or any other Senate Democrat, for that matter “voted more” with Republicans than with Biden.

Featured Fact-check

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., outside the Capitol on Feb. 5, 2020.

Joe Manchins Hard No On Voting Bill Leaves Democrats Seeking New Path

The West Virginia senator has stated, in an op-ed, that he will not back the For the People Act unless it has bipartisan support

For months, Democrats in the US Senate have danced delicately around Joe Manchin, giving him space and holding out hope that the West Virginia Democrat would eventually come around and give his must-win vote to legislation that would amount to the most sweeping voting rights protections in a generation.

That detente effectively ended on Sunday, when Manchin authored an op-ed making it clear he will not vote for the bill, leaving Democrats to find a new path forward that is, if there is one at all.

Manchin did not raise substantive concerns about the legislation, the For the People Act, in the Senate but rather said that he would only support it if it was bipartisan. He also reiterated his resistance to eliminating the filibuster, a legislative rule that requires 60 votes to move most legislation forward in the Senate. Getting 10 Republicans to sign on to voting rights legislation is a fools errand, many observers say, pointing to how the party has embraced Trumps baseless lies about the election and is actively trying to make it harder to vote.

Republican intransigence on voting rights is not an excuse for inaction and Senator Manchin must wake up to this fact, said Karen Hobart Flynn, the president of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, which backs the bill.

The Middle Ground Could Be Found

Manchins upbringing centered on understanding and hard work.

For a long time in the state, it was Republicans, not Democrats, who needed to find political friends on the left to get anything done. And as Manchin rose through local politics, first as a member of the House of Delegates, then as a state senator, secretary of state and finally governor, Manchin was known for including Republicans in negotiations, even if Democrats enjoyed sizable majorities in the state.

He told me one time, I will never forget, if you have an issue where you cannot get one vote to go with you from the other party, regardless of who is in the majority it is probably a bad idea, recalled Mike Caputo, a Democratic state senator in West Virginia who served as majority whip in the House of Delegates during Manchins time as governor.

He added: Joe has always been the kind of guy that has always believed you can find common ground if you work hard enough. I know when he was governor, we had major disagreements, but he always believed that if we talked long enough and both sides wanted to find a resolution, the middle ground could be found.

Manchin signaled this position remains inside him in an interview on Thursday, telling CNNs Manu Raju that he was not ready to get rid of the Senate legislative filibuster, a move that would allow Democrats to do more without Republican support.

Manchin Goes Full Maga

The vulnerable West Virginia Democrat is embracing Donald Trump, figuratively and literally: We just kind of do the man-bump type thing.

06/06/2018 04:02 AM EDT

Sen. Joe Manchin talks with a local reporter on June 5 in Ranson, W.Va. The president’s popularity in the state has Republicans salivating over the prospect of knocking off the 70-year-old senator this fall. | John Shinkle/POLITICO

RANSON, W.Va. Joe Manchin wants you to know he really likes Donald Trump.

The West Virginia senator doesnt put it quite that way. But more than any other Democrat in Congress, he’s positioned himself as a vocal Trump ally. In fact, the senator, up for reelection in a state Trump won by more than 40 points, told POLITICO he isnt ruling out endorsing Trump for reelection in 2020 a position practically unheard of for a politician with a D next to his name.

Im open to supporting the person who I think is best for my country and my state, Manchin said this week from the drivers seat of his Grand Cherokee, insisting hes game to work with any president of either party. If his policies are best, Ill be right there.

The president recently mocked Manchin in front of the Senate GOP caucus as trying to hug him all the time only a slight exaggeration, by Manchins telling.

We just kind of do the man-bump type thing. Thats it. And I think hes pulling me as much as Im pulling him, Manchin said in describing his physical embraces with the president.

Can The John Lewis Act Conceivably Get Through Congress Without Being Filibustered

The premise of Joe Manchins argument for making the John Lewis Act rather than the For the People Act the main vehicle for voting rights action in Congress is that the Voting Rights Act was last extended by a unanimous Senate vote and a Republican president . Thus legislation to restore it should command considerable bipartisan support. The trouble is, it doesnt. When the bill passed the House in 2019, only one Republican voted for it. As noted above, no Republicans voted for the new version.

It is true, perhaps, that killing the John Lewis Act would be marginally more embarrassing to the GOP than killing the For the People Act, given the partys past support for the VRA. But theres little doubt Republicans will find a way to justify doing it in, by either taking the Supreme Courts position a bit further and arguing racial discrimination in voting simply no longer exists, or arguing any voting-rights legislation must include election integrity provisions addressing their phony-baloney fraud claims. Whataboutism has become the standard Republican excuse for refusing to do the right thing. So actual passage of anything like the John Lewis Act remains impossible for the foreseeable future, at least so long as Democrats cannot muster the internal Senate support to kill or modify the filibuster.

This piece has been updated.

Joe Manchin Was Never A Mystery

Its always been pretty obvious who he is: a middle-of-the-road guy with good electoral instincts, decent intentions, and bad ideas.

About the author: David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

The failure of the For the People Act in the Senate yesterday evening didnt provide much drama. All 50 Democrats backed the voting-rights bill, but with no Republican support, they didnt have enough votes to break a filibuster. That Democrats didnt have the votes was clear from the start of the Congress.

But journalism requires drama, which means that over the past few months Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has been the subject of extensive coverage. The problem with this coverage is not that Manchin is unimportant; as the most moderate Democrat in a 50-person caucus, he is crucial. Its that there is no mystery to him.

Trying to figure out who Manchin is and what he wants, or how hes changedthe natural and reasonable defaults of political-profile writingassumes theres something more than meets the eye. Really, though, Manchin is who hes always been: a middle-of-the-road guy with good electoral instincts, decent intentions, and bad ideas.

Reporters and pundits engaged in a frenzied hermeneutic quest to decode what Manchin wanted and what hed allow. But trying to make sense of it all was a waste of time. The important thing was he was against nuking the filibuster then, and he is now.

Why Democrats Were Desperate To Win Joe Manchin’s Vote For An Already

Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large

On Tuesday night, the “For the People” Act will fail.

fait accompli Every single Democrat wanted to make elections more fair and open. And every single Republican stood in opposition to that effort.“Today’s debate about how to best protect our right to vote and to hold elections, however, is not about finding common ground, but seeking partisan advantage. Whether it is state laws that seek to needlessly restrict voting or politicians who ignore the need to secure our elections, partisan policy-making won’t instill confidence in our democracy â it will destroy it.“As such, congressional action on federal voting rights legislation must be the result of both Democrats and Republicans coming together to find a pathway forward or we risk further dividing and destroying the republic we swore to protect and defend as elected officials.”

Whats In It For Republicans

Manchin has suggested that any voting rights reforms must be bipartisan, and hes resisted filibuster reform in the past. So even Manchins somewhat watered-down voting rights proposals face a tough road in the Senate unless hes willing to reconsider his desire to secure Republican votes.

That said, Manchins proposal does include a few ideas that may prove enticing to some GOP senators.

He would impose a nationwide voter ID requirement meaning voters would be required to show some form of identification before casting a ballot. Such laws enjoy broad support from Republicans, who often claim they are necessary to combat voter fraud.

In reality, such fraud is virtually nonexistent, and many voting rights advocates fear that voter ID prevents left-leaning groups, such as students, low-income voters, and voters of color, from casting a ballot because these groups are less likely to have ID.

New research, however, suggests that voter ID laws may not have much of an impact at all that is, they neither prevent fraud nor do much to disenfranchise voters. And Manchin also proposes a fairly permissive form of voter ID. While some states have strict voter ID laws that require voters to show specific forms of photo identification, Manchin would permit voters to cast a ballot if they show alternative forms of ID, such as a utility bill with their name and address on it.

Dc And Puerto Rico Statehood

In a November 10, 2020, interview, Manchin said that he did not “see the need for the D.C. statehood with the type of services that we’re getting in D.C. right now” and that he was “not convinced that’s the way to go.” Of Puerto Rico statehood, Manchin said that he opposed it but was open to discussion. In a January 10, 2021 interview, he did not affirm his opposition to statehood for D.C. or Puerto Rico, saying only, “I don’t know enough about that yet. I want to see the pros and cons. So I’m waiting to see all the facts. I’m open up to see everything”. On April 30, 2021, Manchin came out against the D.C. Statehood bill that had passed the House of Representatives, suggesting that D.C. could instead be given statehood by constitutional amendment.

The Deal Hes Pitching To Replace Hr1 Isnt Much Of A Deal At All

WSJOpinion

Senate Democrats tried and failed Tuesday to move their version of H.R.1, the bill to impose a federal election code on all 50 states. That 800-page travesty was doomed once West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin came out against it. But now Democrats are rallying around Plan B, which is based on a three-page memo circulated by Mr. Manchins office.

Its a curious document. The preamble insists that any voting bill must be the result of both Democrats and Republicans coming together. But then it suggests an H.R.1 compromise that is no bipartisan kumbaya. As Republican leader Mitch McConnell said last week in ruling out Mr. Manchins wish list, it still involves an assault on the fundamental idea that states, not the federal government, should decide how to run their own elections.

To start, Mr. Manchins memo suggests mandating at least 15 consecutive days of early voting. Yet one prominent Democratic opponent of H.R.1., New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, has objected that his states constitution dates to 1783, and it requires that a voter must be present on Election Day unless absent from the town or city, or physically disabled. Yet New Hampshire, he added, has had the third highest voter turnout in the country for each of the last four presidential elections.

The Pressure Of Legacy

Another lens through which West Virginians understand Manchin that national media tend to overlook is by knowing who came before. Manchin holds the seat of the longest-serving senator in U.S. history, Democrat Robert C. Byrd, and served alongside another Senate great, Jay Rockefeller. 

For Manchin, the shadows of these two men surely loom large. Both were known for their commitment to working in a bipartisan manner, bringing members of their chamber together across the aisle to do what was right for the country. 

Both rallied Congress around significant shifts in policy in their time. Byrd was known as the rules man; he essentially wrote and rewrote Senate rules on order and the filibuster in his 51 years in the body, and also knew better than anyone how to work the system to bring millions of dollars of federal investments to the state to the continued benefit of West Virginians. 

Rockefeller, who spent 31 years in the chamber, has said his most prized accomplishments included authoring legislation to create CHIP and helping shepherd the passage of the Affordable Care Act, just to name a few of the more than 2,000 pieces of just health care-related policy he had his hands on.

Both were true statesmena designation that I would argue few politicians in Washington and any other Capitol deserve today. The legacy of both, and how his own legacy will compare, must weigh heavy on Manchin.