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quantumcartography · 4 months

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Eventually I'm gonna do a deep dive on every name in the Locked Tomb series but I've been sitting on this dissection of The Emperor's chosen name for a long time and I want to put it into the world. So, here it is.

The Emperor John Gaius, His Celestial Kindliness, the First Reborn, King of the Nine Renewals, Necromancer Divine, our Resurrector, and The Necrolord Prime

“NOTE: He’s just some guy, you know?

NOTE II: Gaius was not the name John was born with. He picked it for himself circa Y100 of his reign.”

These two names have so much potential meaning tied up in them so buckle up.

First, the literal translations. John is a derivative of the Biblical Hebrew Yohanan which is in turn derived from the Yehohanan, which means literally “Yahweh has been gracious.” Gaius is a Latin name that likely derives from the latin gaudere “to rejoice.” This more or less makes the name say “Huzzah! God has been good!” Now, there is one other tweak to this. Gaia is the Greek personification of the Earth (Terra is the Roman equivalent) and if you slapped the Latin masculine ending on it, it would become Gaius. This does provide a tie to the planet Earth in his name (which is far more obvious in Gideon’s name of Kiriona Gaia) and would make sense if he picked it as a memorial to the dead Earth to which he could never return.

Next, modern social interpretation. John for a long time held the title of “most common name in the English speaking world.” I believe it’s since been surpassed by James, but it’s still up there. Gaius, funnily enough, was the Ancient Roman equivalent of John. It was one of the most common given names for so long that it became semi-synonymous with saying “some guy” similar to the phrase “Tom, Dick, and Harry” or “don’t know him from Adam.” These two names make his name something like “John John” or “Jon Doe” or “James Q. Public.”

Next: the strictly biblical interpretation. The most obvious link here is to the book of the New Testament, John 3. This is a letter by one of the many biblical Johns to a man named Gaius concerning some pretty mundane church business of the time and thanking Gaius for looking after some poor missionaries. It’s honestly a supremely drab book of the bible and doesn’t really get into doctrine or legends or exciting apocalypse stuff. It’s just a letter from a church leader to a rich patron. If someone more versed in Biblical history and literature can shed some light on this book, I’d be very thankful.

Next: some name associations. Being two of the most common names in history, we kinda have a wealth of options to pick from. Saint John the Apostle was the one who actually walked with Jesus and was the brother of the Apostle James with whom they made up the Boanerges, the Sons of Thunder. John of Patmos was the likely author of the Book of Revelation and maybe the same as John the Apostle (but probably not.) The author who wrote about the apocalypse seems pretty fitting. Gaius was also the praenomen (given name) of the two Caesars responsible for the death of the Roman Republic and the birth of the Roman Empire: Gaius Julius Caesar and Gaius Octavius who became Caesar Augustus.

Julius Caesar is definitely the most well known Emperor of Rome/salad inventor and also second dictator for life (Sulla was the first so Caesar can’t take that title.) He was an incredibly popular general who was part of an alliance of three figures (him, Pompey, and Crassus) to increase their own power, wealth, and standing. When Crassus died, tensions formed between Pompey and Caesar until Pompey had the senate recall Caesar from his war in Gaul to be removed from command. Caesar knew this would lead to his execution at the hands of his rival so he made his own play, marching his troops into Rome (an act tantamount to sacrilege) to try and capture Pompey which spoiler he didn’t. It sparked a civil war that raged all the way around the Mediterranean for four years and left Caesar as the de facto ruler of the Roman Republic up until an unfortunate accident in the senate where he fell into knives 23 times. He had it coming. This idea of attacking his enemy before they have a chance to attack you only to have your enemy slip away is a notable parallel.

Gaius Octavius had been named as Caesar’s successor in his will and would go on to become the first proper Roman Emperor. He used the newfound power from his great-uncle’s death to form a new three person alliance (him, Lepidus, and Mark Antony) and hunt down Julius Caesar’s assassins and rake in treasure while cementing their political power. Surprise surprise though because Caesar Augustus (the name given Gaius Octavius after he became the Emperor) managed to politically, militarily, and psychologically out maneuver his two fellow rulers and within seven years he had metaphorically put Lepidus in the ground and literally put Mark Antony in the ground. Now, while in life Julius Caesar made a lot of moves to imply that he wanted to be the king of Rome, not least of which was modeling himself as descended from the gods and enshrining himself alongside them as equals. Augustus doubled down on this by starting a massive and complex propaganda machine to make himself equally divine, even within his own lifetime and immediately afterwards.

Both of these men led the Romans into civil wars that ravaged the empire. Both of them committed acts of sacrilege in the ancient world to further their political games of revenge. Both of them lied, cheated, stole, killed, and manipulated to gain more power and remake the world to be what they wanted. They were geniuses who may have even had good intentions and put an end to a long period of political instability, but through blood and steel and no small part vengeance.

Now I would be remiss if I didn’t address the elephant in the room that is Homestuck. I will say that my adoration of The Locked Tomb series has sent me down innumerable rabbit holes. I have researched paper manufacturing, the magnetic forces of Jupiter, Catholic prayers, polygenic phenotyping, Ancient Greek and Roman poetry, national anthems of nations of the world, and the psychology of Among Us. But the rabbit hole that is the MS Paint Adventures Wiki is one too daunting for even me. But in any case, I have no doubt that these characters sharing a name is no coincidence.

Lastly, the use of a Hebrew and Latin name makes this fascinating marriage of opposites. To massively understate it, Romans and Christians did not get along for a long time. Obviously now, the Catholic Church is seated in Rome, but for a BIG portion of the early Christian ministry, the Romans were the ones who captured them and set them on fire or crucified them or other fun and exciting means of execution. More than that, an apostle to Jesus’ monotheistic peace-loving and merciful message being linked with two deified and bloody conquerors of Ancient Rome does create this interesting tension. This tension is something very interesting in modern Catholicism as well as the Locked Tomb’s Empire.

#tlt #the locked tomb #gtn #gtn spoilers #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #htn #htn spoilers #nona the ninth #ntn #ntn spoilers #john gaius #the necrolord prime #the emperor undying #i dunno im fascinated by his name #like it is a fascinating choice #long post #sorry

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licncourt · 1 year

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what are your most favorite caesar facts :-) (<- for brain distraction)

POV you asked an overexcited little boy to show you his favorite hot wheels

Despite the common English pronunciation, Caesar would have said his name something like "kai-oos you-lee-us kay-zhar". This pronunciation is the origin of the king's titles kaiser (German/Prussian) and czar/tsar (Russian)

On that note, his famous quote "veni, vidi, vici" would have been said "whey-nee wee-dee whee-key" which is less cool for gym bros to get tattooed. And while he probably didn't have any "last words" besides an exclamation of initial shock, the other most likely is the Greek "kai su teknon", meaning "you too, child", directed at Brutus. This is often assumed to be an expression of hurt and betrayal, but the wording is actually the same as known curse tablets and was probably more along the lines of a snide "and the same to you, boy"

He shaved his dick and balls and it made Cicero really mad

Had his co-consul thrown in animal manure in front of a crowd he'd gathered to watch. Later he had the guy jumped which scared him so much that he didn't leave his house for the rest of their term. This led to the common saying at the time that Rome was "under the consulship of Julius and Caesar"

His number one political rival Cato accused him of being part of a conspiracy when he got a letter covertly delivered to him in a senate meeting, but it was read aloud and was actually an ancient sext from Brutus' mom

He was probably part of the conspiracy too tbh but no one can for sure prove it

Helped his friend Clodius (noted crossdresser for pussy) get adopted by a guy younger than him to run a political scam

People called him the Queen of Bithynia because everyone liked to say he fucked Mithridates II of Bosporus, and he was often called "every woman's man and every man's woman". The poet Catiline also wrote a little ditty about how Caesar is a flaming gay who takes it up the ass

Not really a fun fact, but Caesar managed to kill off 1/3 of the Gallic population (about a million people) in eight years, putting him only a couple spots below the top ten most prolific killers in history

Caesar did not conquer Britain. They kicked his ass all the way back to Rome

Despite his reputation as the first emperor, Caesar never held the title of princeps. The first emperor was his adopted son and successor, Augustus. The only non-standard military titles he ever held were consul and dictator (not the current meaning of the term).

If you're interested in knowing what Caesar looked like, the Tusculum Portrait is the only image of him that can be confidently dated to his lifetime and was probably sculpted from life as well. Don't believe the later George Clooney looking busts

#men on tiktok don't even come close to thinking about the roman empire as much as i go #rookie numbers #answered #flora.txt

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linipikk · 2 months

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I was doing my silly lurking bit in twitter and this gem appeared:

and you know what? I am gonna say it:

His name was Giorgio Vasari , the renaissance painter, and I, personally, fucking hate that guy.

He was the one silly man to bring to modernity (well to the more modern times in the 1500s) the idea that artists had this "natural creative divine talent". It is his goddamn fault that artist is given the Born Genius treatment. Not sure he invented the myth, but he did the whole bit of "this poor little shepherd kid is drawing fruit so realistic with a stick in the mud flies are drawn to his scribbles, God gave him the innate artistic skills to fool nature with his Gift so he must follow his true calling as an Artist" and brought it back to the public imaginary.

You see, back in the more medieval days being a renowned artist was not common or looked after, but then many things happened, the printing press and money flowing to different classes in society, the pictorial interest shifted to imitating nature, blablabla, and, within the renaissance, Giorgio wrote this cursed thing: Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. A selected group of biographies of artists that created this narrative that artists are born and that talent was necessary to be an Excelent artist.

Long story short, this collection of biograpgies was for a long time, the primary source of the biography of many Renaissance artists and the base for writing about artists since "the guy who wrote it was an artist himself so he must be right ", making it the be all end all in terms of who is who in the history of art... And well, it is just full of Florentine and Roman artists that Giorgio liked very much himself. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Giotto, etc, some contemporaries of him, but it also included the ones that lived before him, and he knew nothing about it. Girogio did his research and wrote his book filled with his personal heroes.

My guy Vasari basically invented Art History as a Subject with capital S, but, as all guys set in a historical period, his views were painfully biased. Filling his book with anecdotes that were closer to gossip and in line with the idea of the renaissance at full speed, remarking the existance of this set progressive timeline where art evolves to imitate nature, elevating artists to an exceptional born-talented person who was put on this earth because, idk, the Holy Spirit illuminated them to partake in the adoration of God's perfect creation from the moment they exited the womb by drawing perfectly?? Not sure, I read it long ago. still, you get the point.

But, as we gotta do from our postmodernist perspective, we gotta ask about the context, the point of view: who was writing those biographies and why. And Vasari , helpfully, in his book of Most Excellent Artists... included himself. He positioned himself among his heroes, placing himself in the middle of his own narrative. He said, "Look at them and look at me." He had the political agenda to set his homestate (Florence and Rome ) and himself as the cradle and centre of the Good Arts and "not like those barbarian others. " Even if this belief was widely spread at the time, having it on print solidified it as some kind of undeniable truth. He was the first to write about it, widely publish it and subsequently he fucked up how people wrote about artists for the next centuries.

And if you ask yourself, "Who invented the idea that artists are jealous of each other and compete to get the attention of the rich and powerful and are nasty and cocky about it?" ..it was also him.

Fuck Vasari.

#giorgio vasari #rants in art history and theory #my goddamn professor would be proud of me but would still make my life hell #lini writes #italian men ruining my life since 1550 #i would throw hands with him

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authorhjk1 · 2 months

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What are some of your most successful stories you have written! Eg those who perhaps have reached 1k notes , and what are some of your fav stories you perhaps have enjoyed writing the most !

Hi there!

Thanks for the great question.

I think the December special series includes some of my most successful stories. The last chapter, Midnight, is at over 1560 notes as of right now and with that probably the story with the most notes overall.

Another noticeable one would be "Mirror mirror on the wall..." with Karina and Yeji. I'm surprised so many of you guys liked it and I do have the second part in my drafts, but I'm currently focusing on the first chapter of the new series.

What I've enjoyed writing the most?

Probably "Dea Romana" from Sana's "The Roman goddess" series. I really love history. Especially ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. This was the first time I actually wrote this kind of historical based fic and I'm happy so many people liked it. I was glad I could incorporate a lot of actual historical facts, but please don't take everything in there as a 100% accurate. Let me know if you guys want to read more stuff like this and maybe even learn a little more about history. There will definitely be more history inspired fics.

I had fun answering. Feel free to send more questions like this. I will answer, when I have the time.

#ask #anon

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theabstruseone · 2 years

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Recently I've been on a kick learning about classical era history, so I'm going to be That Guy and explain a bunch of stuff I recently learned as if it's some grand revelation nobody has ever heard of before. Anyway, some Fun Facts about the Assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar!

Caesar was assassinated because people feared he'd set himself up as a king. He'd taken to wearing a purple toga picta everywhere (which is something only allowed for a general during a triumph aka a parade in honor of conquering new territory for Rome), he'd had a gilded chair installed in the Forum to sit in and preside over Senate meetings even though he wasn't Consul. And Marc Antony during a religious ceremony (that involved the priests running naked through the streets with a freshly-made whip attempting to spank women to grant them fertility) offered a crown to Caesar which he refused. Why he refused is disputed, with some saying it was because he wanted to be seen publicly refusing the crown, some saying it was because he wanted to test the waters and see if Rome would accept him being crowned. Either way, this event was on February 15 so it kind of accelerated the conspirators' plans.

The reason this was a big deal was the Romans HATED the concept of a King. This comes after the (possibly mythical) story of the overthrow of the first King of Rome by Lucius Junius Brutus. Which was why the conspirators wanted Marcus Junius Brutus involved in their conspiracy to assassinate Caesar. That Brutus was an ancestor of the other Brutus and felt it would lend legitimacy to their claims of assassinating Caesar to save the republic from a king.

Caesar was warned the assassination was coming. Not by a soothsayer telling him "Beware the Ides of March" as written by Shakespeare - he got that from Plutarch who wrote about it almost a century after the fact - but likely by one of the wives of the conspirators. So it wasn't some oracle trying to give him a divine warning, it was someone trying to sell out the conspirators in a subtle way and was ignored.

The Ides of March (as in the date itself) has a bit of confusion around it. We're not sure exactly what the calendar was at the time as there were a lot of changes over the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE. March was originally the first month of the year when the year had ten months, but there's some confusion whether January and February were at the start or end of the year at the time. Ovid (the Andrew Tate of Ancient Rome who lived during the time of the transition of the Republic to the Empire) wrote that January was the first month and February was the last while Livy (who was also alive during this time) said that the start of the year switched to January around 120 BCE to shuffle in new Consuls, so it's a bit confusing. Either way, it was still pretty significant because...

The Ides of March was a soft deadline for assassinating Caesar. Now that he had solidified his power, he planned to go to war with Parthia and planned to leave soon after the Ides of March as that was prime campaigning season (don't want to go tromping off so you get stuck in the mountains in winter on the way back, huh Marcus Antony?) So the significance of the date being the former start of a Consul's new term combined with Caesar about to head out on campaign with his army meant they had to get it done by then.

The assassination did not happen in the Forum, but in the Curia of Pompey. The Forum was undergoing an expansion so the Senate had taken to meeting at various places around the city. Not only was the Curia of Pompey ironic as it was the theater built by the man Caesar defeated in the Civil War (the iconic "the die is cast" and crossing the Rubicon), but it was outside the Pomerium. Which was the location of the original walls of Rome and an area where no weapons were allowed with a death penalty attached to taking a weapon across the Pomerium. The Pomerium was a huge deal in Rome and there were a bunch of laws and traditions around it, so this was a big deal.

There's no evidence Caesar said "Et tu, Brute?" That was a flourish of Shakespeare. And he got it from other playwrights where it was part of a couplet "And you, Brutus?" "Then fall, Caesar" The line reported by Suetonius (again, born a century after the events) were in Greek "Kai sy, teknon" ("And you, my child?"). Plutarch (again, writing after the fact but more recently that Suetonius) did not report this but rather that Caesar shouted after being pinned down by Cimbur "Ista quidem vis est!" ("This is violence!", a reminder that violence in the Senate was a death penalty offense). Then Caesa stabbed at his neck (and may have missed or barely nicked him), when Caesar shouted (again in Latin) "Casca, you villain, what are you doing?". Then he was stabbed by Cassius, Titiedius, Decimus, then Cassius missed and accidentally stabbed Brutus in the hand, then Brutus stabbed Caesar in the dick (seriously, and it was intentional because Caesar was already on the ground bleeding out). Caesar pulled his toga over his face and he died.

Estimates for the number of conspirators was up to 60. In what may have been the first post-mortem in recorded history, a physician noted that Caesar was only stabbed 23 times. Meaning that as many as 37 of the conspirators didn't participate in the assassination. And if you notice the description above, I only mentioned Casca, Cassius, Titiedius, Decimus, and Brutus as stabbing him while he was alive. So the rest walked up after the fact and just stabbed the already-dead body. So yes, the group project meme about the assassination is even worse than you thought.

The conspirators left and Brutus began shouting in the streets "People of Rome, we are once again free!" But because they spent so much time afterward dealing with what they'd just done, the people outside the Curia of Pompey had spread the news. And instead of the cheering crowds greeting them as liberators, they were met with silence as everyone had locked their doors and hidden in their homes. For good reason...

Brutus tried to give a speech, but it failed and things were getting bad because Caesar was popular with the people. His whole "No one has been murdered, a tyrant has been killed!" speech didn't work as they didn't really have a plan. It was literally just Step One: Assassinate Caesar, Step Two: ???, Step Three: Restore the Republic! and they had no idea what to do next...

The "Friends, Romans, Countryman, Lend me your ears!" speech from the play is legendary, but it doesn't hold a candle to how weird and fucked up Mark Antony's actual speech was. He propped up the toga Caesar wore still stained with his blood on a spear next to his body. Antony would then list his achievements one by one, then motion to the body after each of them. Then pointed out how the Senate took an oath to protect Caesar's life and called out the conspirators for violating that oath (this is likely because Cassius threatened Antony after they'd negotiated a tense peace and Antony was not pleased). Then he showed off a wax figure of Caesar's mutilated body showing how he'd been killed in graphic detail. And that set off a full-on riot that started burning the city in a massive funeral pyre.

BTW, there were no "good guys" in this situation. Caesar was the reason we assign the meaning we do to "dictator" (which originally just meant "leader with emergency powers") and "tyrant" (which was just Greek for "king"). He was popular with the people because he basically bribed them constantly with land grants and public projects financed by money he looted from seized treasuries and of the Roman Senate itself. Cassius, Brutus, and Decimus (the primary conspirators) were wealthy land-owners who were defending the interests of other wealthy land-owners in opposing Caesar who felt if they got rid of Caesar, they'd be able to exploit their power once again "democratically" (meaning bribing and threatening everyone to going with what they want) and undo all his reforms. Everybody in this story is an asshole.

And there we go, everything I can think of off the top of my head that I found interesting to learn about the assassination of Julius Caesar. Looking forward to the additions and corrections in the notes!

#ides of march #history

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incandesang · 1 year

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every day i remember anne rice’s Decisions regarding ancient rome (and the people the ancient romans called ‘barbarians’ lol) and it gets harder and harder to just not become an arsonist.

i say this bc i’m doing a paper on ‘ancient barbarians’ rn and i personally think marius’ story would’ve been a million times more interesting if anne had actually like. idk read anything by jordanes lmao bc marius was in a similar position to him!! he was both a roman and someone the romans viewed as a barbarian!!

for context on jordanes he was a goth who self-identified as roman, and lived in a roman province in southern italy (i think) and he wrote a history of the goths that was very pro-goth at the height of the rome v goth conflict of the 6th century. in this history he very subtly talked about the struggle with being both a goth and a roman, and his desires for the two cultures to be able to coexist peacefully (if you read it like that lmao some ppl just think it’s like. some guy writing a history book. i think NOT but that’s just my opinion)

anyways back to marius!! it would’ve been interesting to get a little more of marius’ position as an ‘outsider’ in roman culture before he became an outsider to humanity. it wouldn’t obviously make him a better person but it would’ve made his backstory less of a drag to get through lmao

#vampire chronicles #marius de romanus #this is just a shitpost don’t take it too seriously

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caesarsaladinn · 1 year

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Greetings comrade. Any good history books/articles/yt channel recommendations? I would really appreciate it :)

Ur blog is amazing ❤️

Beginner:

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford (great read; given its importance, the details and internal story of the Mongol Empire are often ignored. but they are riveting! accessible style.)

anything by Tom Holland (he’s pretty surface-level and really annoying to read if you know more about the period than him—but if you know less than he does, he’s a very effective communicator. and if you're not sure, give him a try! I think his Roman history books are the best, because that's where his expertise is.)

Intermediate:

History of Rome podcast (disclosure that it was made by a non-expert, and thus has some minor inaccuracies that make it unsuitable for academic research, but if you're not citing it in an essay, it's great. fairly accessible, straightforward linear history, and very thorough. you can listen to it on long walks, drives, or chores, which makes it easy to get through.)

anything by Anthony Kaldellis (somehow both a Byzantinist and a good communicator. he has a huge history of the whole empire coming out this fall, but also a variety of narrative histories (Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood is the one I have) that are well written and very well researched. and a podcast.)

Grant by Ron Chernow. good read on a man who is interesting for somehow being both excellent and completely ordinary, which is a pretty rare combination for a biography. plus the Civil War was filled with weird people who wrote colorful letters and saved them all, so there is very little guesswork and a lot of first-person testimony, which is a welcome change from the rest of this list. also John Rawlins is in it, and I think he's neat.

Advanced:

any of the famous ancient historians. Livy is my favorite, because he writes very vivid battles, but Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Suetonius, and the like are all good. are they correct? no, not necessarily. but they're interesting for sure. and all these guys have well-annotated English translations too, so you get guidance through the incredible or confusing parts.

genuinely, just google something you're interested in, and read an paper about it. that's where some of the weirdest, most interesting information is.

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wack-ashimself · 2 years

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'Weird: The Al Yankovic Story' may be one of the best parody movies ever. So much so, Weird Al may be known more for this movie than his music career.

I am trying to make this as spoiler free as possible, because it goes EVERYWHERE, but...god damn. I was laughing at...the weirdest times. He made a movie about himself that...never happened. But here's my favs. SPOILERS still tho.

1-The news interrupting a presidential speech for weird al having a TMZ type incident. They would probably not even do that for the queen, may god have absolutely no mercy on her soul. But for WEIRD AL? THAT'S hilarious.

2-The movie being narrated by one guy, weird al played by 3 different actors thru his life, weird al voice dubbed every singing scene, then weird al played a record producer in the movie AND showed himself in the old videos of his songs? It's like meta to the 7th power.

3-It went off the deep end in the 3rd act, but as I said on a previous post, if they were gonna do a parody of the innocent guy who made parodies...you go all out. Just...him killing Pablo Escobar? NOT on my checklist of things I expected to see. Both WTF and 'haha. okay. Whatever. Roll with it.'

4-The running joke of them never knowing what they made at his dad's factory (YOU NEVER FIND OUT). It seems like a joke, but to me it goes deeper on the whole (cuz his dad saw someone die, and personally lost a hand at the job) how we will do mindless, pointless, dangerous jobs, have little to nothing to show for it, and never question if what we are doing has any true value or meaningful impact on the world.

5-Weird Al originally coming up with eat it (and later on Amish paradise), michael jackson parodies weird al's song, and then the world sees al as...bigger than any star in all of human history (they do a scene where every song on the radio is him. That would freak me out). I think that's why we love this movie's shoot for the moon: we all know weird al in real life is a funny, smart, sweet, humble guy who...probably isn't even that rich, honestly. So...make him a stupid rich egotistical mega star, and see how that would play out? I mean, the shit in his mansion alone stroking his ego was so cheesily done, you almost would hate any celeb that could get close to it in real life. It's...tasteless. No one has a bust of their own head that...isn't from Rome.

I found this movie perfect because it was NOT perfect. There was many cheap laughs, mean attitudes for nothing but someone to provoke the others, and so many 'there is no fucking way that got close to happening' bull shit scenes, it was a mess story line wise. It was...weird al's fever dream of what his life could have been. BUT knowing weird al wrote it, helped craft it, and NONE of it as it is portrayed <at all> basically happened made it a wild ride of just...fun. You have to like weird al, know his past, and his sense of humor, but if you got all those 3, you'll love this movie. It's clearly his baby.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story: One of the few times IMDB gave it a fair score. 7.2. I would say 7.4.

ps-fav part? The ending. I mean, it wasn't the funniest nor had the best lines (there were some fucking amazing one liners in this movie) but....I stayed in the credits, writing this whole thing, JUST in case they did a mid/post credits scene. They did. It was art. MEGA SPOILERS.

Madonna is now a world renown scarred drug lord, visiting weird al's grave (she had him killed: told you it goes fucking bonkers) and, like the famous ending of the original carrie, his hand comes out from the grave and grabs her. I am sorry, but there's SO much to unpack there, it...ya gotta watch it to understand HOW THE FUCK this movie got to where it did. They basically just said 'we're gonna...do whatever we want, whenever we want, and figure out later how to tie it together later.' And somebody wrote a check. lol I've seen a lot of bad movies; this ain't one of them. It's...different....and to be on the nose: weird.

#Weird: The Al Yankovic Story #weird al #mmusic #parody

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semper-legens · 1 year

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37. Contested Will, by James Shapiro

Owned: No, library Page count: 316 My summary: The Shakespeare authorship question, as told by someone who doesn’t believe in it. Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare? (Yes.) Or were his plays written by someone else, like Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford? (No.) Find out the thrilling answer! (It was Shakespeare.) My rating: 5/5 My commentary:

Ah, the Shakespeare authorship question. One that can be answered very simply. Did William Shakespeare write all the plays attributed to William Shakespeare? Yes. Yes, he did. He did do that. Despite its ridiculousness, I've long been fascinated by the Shakespeare authorship question and exactly how it came about. After all, we've got no evidence that anyone doubted that Shakespeare wrote his plays at the time; it's only a few hundred years later that people began to doubt. And their evidence for that is...scant. Basically, the argument boils down to this - how could Willian Shakespeare, a glover's son from Stratford who was not university educated, write these plays that are obviously such proof of divine genius? How could he have knowledge of far-off locales, the workings of high society, falconry, history? Basically, in the immortal words of Kyle Kalgren, how can art if not posh?

The answer to this is obvious, of course. William Shakespeare was a writer, and came up with these ideas out of his imagination. Or he was adapting older, pre-existing stories. This talk of Shakespeare having intricate knowledge of subjects outside a glover's son's remit is muddied by his mistakes - he seemed to think clocks existed in Ancient Rome, Bohemia has a coastline, and gunpowder existed in Ancient Greece. Add that to the fact that Shakespeare worked in noble houses and had access to books about other places and experiences, and you explain how he could namedrop such details. That, and the fact that he was educated - not university educated, but there was a free grammar school in Stratford that would have taught the young Shakespeare Greek and Latin. Part of this misconception, of course, is our fault. As modern readers, we have a habit of mythologising Shakespeare's plays, to the point where we assume everything he wrote was a Work Of Pure Genius. And that then leads to the idea that only someone of noble blood could have possibly written such a work, with proponents of the idea bending over backwards to justify how a particular nobleman, usually Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, could have written all of the plays. Despite, in de Vere's case, having died before Shakespeare stopped writing.

Anyway, this book is a great overview of the 'anti-Stratfordian' movement, and the motives behind it. People just really wanna read conspiracy into everything, huh. The most ludicrous of the claims is that de Vere, as well as writing from beyond the grave, was the bastard child of the Queen who then fathered another bastard child, who was the real Prince Tudor who could have carried on the lineage. Which is of course simpler than 'some guy wrote some plays that people decided were good'. The why of this conspiracy is really what I was interested in, and this book certainly delivers. Shapiro delivers a pretty fair look at the concept, not shying away from debunking the claims of the movement, but also delving into what those claims actually are, as well as laying out a compelling case that Shakespeare did, in fact, write the works of William Shakespeare. It's certainly satisfied my itch for this particular conspiracy theory! I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested.

Next up - come on grab your friends, again!

#Contested Will #James Shapiro #bookblr #book blog #book blogging #5

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The Future of Democracy: The Last Time Democracy Almost Died

Learning From the Upheaval of the Nineteen-Thirties.

— By Jill Lepore | Published: January 27, 2020 | Sunday October 8, 2023

It’s a paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to argue about it.Illustration by Joan Wong; Photograph by Massimo Lama/Getty Images

The Last Time Democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. “The future of democracy is topic number one in the animated discussion going on all over America,” a contributor to the New York Times wrote in 1937. “In the Legislatures, over the radio, at the luncheon table, in the drawing rooms, at meetings of forums and in all kinds of groups of citizens everywhere, people are talking about the democratic way of life.” People bickered and people hollered, and they also made rules. “You are a liar!” one guy shouted from the audience during a political debate heard on the radio by ten million Americans, from Missoula to Tallahassee. “Now, now, we don’t allow that,” the moderator said, calmly, and asked him to leave.

In the nineteen-thirties, you could count on the Yankees winning the World Series, dust storms plaguing the prairies, evangelicals preaching on the radio, Franklin Delano Roosevelt residing in the White House, people lining up for blocks to get scraps of food, and democracies dying, from the Andes to the Urals and the Alps.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson’s Administration had promised that winning the Great War would “make the world safe for democracy.” The peace carved nearly a dozen new states out of the former Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian empires. The number of democracies in the world rose; the spread of liberal-democratic governance began to appear inevitable. But this was no more than a reverie. Infant democracies grew, toddled, wobbled, and fell: Hungary, Albania, Poland, Lithuania, Yugoslavia. In older states, too, the desperate masses turned to authoritarianism. Benito Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922. It had taken a century and a half for European monarchs who ruled by divine right and brute force to be replaced by constitutional democracies and the rule of law. Now Fascism and Communism toppled these governments in a matter of months, even before the stock-market crash of 1929 and the misery that ensued.

“Epitaphs for democracy are the fashion of the day,” the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, dismally, in 1930. The annus horribilis that followed differed from every other year in the history of the world, according to the British historian Arnold Toynbee: “In 1931, men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of Society might break down and cease to work.” When Japan invaded Manchuria, the League of Nations condemned the annexation, to no avail. “The liberal state is destined to perish,” Mussolini predicted in 1932. “All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal.” By 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann was telling an audience of students at Berkeley that “the old relationships among the great masses of the people of the earth have disappeared.” What next? More epitaphs: Greece, Romania, Estonia, and Latvia. Authoritarians multiplied in Portugal, Uruguay, Spain. Japan invaded Shanghai. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. “The present century is the century of authority,” he declared, “a century of the Right, a Fascist century.”

In 1922, Benito Mussolini (Center) marched on Rome. A decade later, he declared, “The liberal state is destined to perish.” Photograph from Getty Images

American democracy, too, staggered, weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation. “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,” F.D.R. said in his first Inaugural Address, telling Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. But there was more to be afraid of, including Americans’ own declining faith in self-government. “What Does Democracy Mean?” NBC radio asked listeners. “Do we Negroes believe in democracy?” W. E. B. Du Bois asked the readers of his newspaper column. Could it happen here? Sinclair Lewis asked in 1935. Americans suffered, and hungered, and wondered. The historian Charles Beard, in the inevitable essay on “The Future of Democracy in the United States,” predicted that American democracy would endure, if only because “there is in America, no Rome, no Berlin to march on.” Some Americans turned to Communism. Some turned to Fascism. And a lot of people, worried about whether American democracy could survive past the end of the decade, strove to save it.

“It’s not too late,” Jimmy Stewart pleaded with Congress, rasping, exhausted, in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” in 1939. “Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light.” It wasn’t too late. It’s still not too late.

There’s a Kind of Likeness you see in family photographs, generation after generation. The same ears, the same funny nose. Sometimes now looks a lot like then. Still, it can be hard to tell whether the likeness is more than skin deep.

In the nineteen-nineties, with the end of the Cold War, democracies grew more plentiful, much as they had after the end of the First World War. As ever, the infant-mortality rate for democracies was high: baby democracies tend to die in their cradles. Starting in about 2005, the number of democracies around the world began to fall, as it had in the nineteen-thirties. Authoritarians rose to power: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Donald J. Trump in the United States.

“American democracy,” as a matter of history, is democracy with an asterisk, the symbol A-Rod’s name would need if he were ever inducted into the Hall of Fame. Not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act can the United States be said to have met the basic conditions for political equality requisite in a democracy. All the same, measured not against its past but against its contemporaries, American democracy in the twenty-first century is withering. The Democracy Index rates a hundred and sixty-seven countries, every year, on a scale that ranges from “full democracy” to “authoritarian regime.” In 2006, the U.S. was a “full democracy,” the seventeenth most democratic nation in the world. In 2016, the index for the first time rated the United States a “flawed democracy,” and since then American democracy has gotten only more flawed. True, the United States still doesn’t have a Rome or a Berlin to march on. That hasn’t saved the nation from misinformation, tribalization, domestic terrorism, human-rights abuses, political intolerance, social-media mob rule, white nationalism, a criminal President, the nobbling of Congress, a corrupt Presidential Administration, assaults on the press, crippling polarization, the undermining of elections, and an epistemological chaos that is the only air that totalitarianism can breathe.

Nothing so sharpens one’s appreciation for democracy as bearing witness to its demolition. Mussolini called Italy and Germany “the greatest and soundest democracies which exist in the world today,” and Hitler liked to say that, with Nazi Germany, he had achieved a “beautiful democracy,” prompting the American political columnist Dorothy Thompson to remark of the Fascist state, “If it is going to call itself democratic we had better find another word for what we have and what we want.” In the nineteen-thirties, Americans didn’t find another word. But they did work to decide what they wanted, and to imagine and to build it. Thompson, who had been a foreign correspondent in Germany and Austria and had interviewed the Führer, said, in a column that reached eight million readers, “Be sure you know what you prepare to defend.”

It’s a paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to attack it, to ask more of it, by way of criticism, protest, and dissent. American democracy in the nineteen-thirties had plenty of critics, left and right, from Mexican-Americans who objected to a brutal regime of forced deportations to businessmen who believed the New Deal to be unconstitutional. W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that, unless the United States met its obligations to the dignity and equality of all its citizens and ended its enthrallment to corporations, American democracy would fail: “If it is going to use this power to force the world into color prejudice and race antagonism; if it is going to use it to manufacture millionaires, increase the rule of wealth, and break down democratic government everywhere; if it is going increasingly to stand for reaction, fascism, white supremacy and imperialism; if it is going to promote war and not peace; then America will go the way of the Roman Empire.”

The historian Mary Ritter Beard warned that American democracy would make no headway against its “ruthless enemies—war, fascism, ignorance, poverty, scarcity, unemployment, sadistic criminality, racial persecution, man’s lust for power and woman’s miserable trailing in the shadow of his frightful ways”—unless Americans could imagine a future democracy in which women would no longer be barred from positions of leadership: “If we will not so envisage our future, no Bill of Rights, man’s or woman’s, is worth the paper on which it is printed.”

If the United States hasn’t gone the way of the Roman Empire and the Bill of Rights is still worth more than the paper on which it’s printed, that’s because so many people have been, ever since, fighting the fights Du Bois and Ritter Beard fought. There have been wins and losses. The fight goes on.

In the thirties, community leaders across the country ignited debate on the meaning and the future of democracy, inviting Americans to assemble in the same room and argue with one another—to stretch their civic muscles. Courtesy Library of Congress

Could no system of rule but extremism hold back the chaos of economic decline? In the nineteen-thirties, people all over the world, liberals, hoped that the United States would be able to find a middle road, somewhere between the malignity of a state-run economy and the mercilessness of laissez-faire capitalism. Roosevelt campaigned in 1932 on the promise to rescue American democracy by way of a “new deal for the American people,” his version of that third way: relief, recovery, and reform. He won forty-two of forty-eight states, and trounced the incumbent, Herbert Hoover, in the Electoral College 472 to 59. Given the national emergency in which Roosevelt took office, Congress granted him an almost entirely free hand, even as critics raised concerns that the powers he assumed were barely short of dictatorial.

New Dealers were trying to save the economy; they ended up saving democracy. They built a new America; they told a new American story. On New Deal projects, people from different parts of the country labored side by side, constructing roads and bridges and dams, everything from the Lincoln Tunnel to the Hoover Dam, joining together in a common endeavor, shoulder to the wheel, hand to the forge. Many of those public-works projects, like better transportation and better electrification, also brought far-flung communities, down to the littlest town or the remotest farm, into a national culture, one enriched with new funds for the arts, theatre, music, and storytelling. With radio, more than with any other technology of communication, before or since, Americans gained a sense of their shared suffering, and shared ideals: they listened to one another’s voices.

This didn’t happen by accident. Writers and actors and directors and broadcasters made it happen. They dedicated themselves to using the medium to bring people together. Beginning in 1938, for instance, F.D.R.’s Works Progress Administration produced a twenty-six-week radio-drama series for CBS called “Americans All, Immigrants All,” written by Gilbert Seldes, the former editor of The Dial. “What brought people to this country from the four corners of the earth?” a pamphlet distributed to schoolteachers explaining the series asked. “What gifts did they bear? What were their problems? What problems remain unsolved?” The finale celebrated the American experiment: “The story of magnificent adventure! The record of an unparalleled event in the history of mankind!”

There is no twenty-first-century equivalent of Seldes’s “Americans All, Immigrants All,” because it is no longer acceptable for a serious artist to write in this vein, and for this audience, and for this purpose. (In some quarters, it was barely acceptable even then.) Love of the ordinary, affection for the common people, concern for the commonweal: these were features of the best writing and art of the nineteen-thirties. They are not so often features lately.

Americans reëlected F.D.R. in 1936 by one of the widest margins in the country’s history. American magazines continued the trend from the twenties, in which hardly a month went by without their taking stock: “Is Democracy Doomed?” “Can Democracy Survive?” (Those were the past century’s versions of more recent titles, such as “How Democracy Ends,” “Why Liberalism Failed,” “How the Right Lost Its Mind,” and “How Democracies Die.” The same ears, that same funny nose.) In 1934, the Christian Science Monitor published a debate called “Whither Democracy?,” addressed “to everyone who has been thinking about the future of democracy—and who hasn’t.” It staked, as adversaries, two British scholars: Alfred Zimmern, a historian from Oxford, on the right, and Harold Laski, a political theorist from the London School of Economics, on the left. “Dr. Zimmern says in effect that where democracy has failed it has not been really tried,” the editors explained. “Professor Laski sees an irrepressible conflict between the idea of political equality in democracy and the fact of economic inequality in capitalism, and expects at least a temporary resort to Fascism or a capitalistic dictatorship.” On the one hand, American democracy is safe; on the other hand, American democracy is not safe.

In 1939, the World’s Fair opened in Queens, New York, featuring an exhibit called the Democracity, a model of utopia that was in keeping with the event’s chipper motto, “The World of Tomorrow.” Photograph by Fritz Goro/Getty Images

Zimmern and Laski went on speaking tours of the United States, part of a long parade of visiting professors brought here to prognosticate on the future of democracy. Laski spoke to a crowd three thousand strong, in Washington’s Constitution Hall. “laski tells how to save democracy,” the Washington Post reported. Zimmern delivered a series of lectures titled “The Future of Democracy,” at the University of Buffalo, in which he warned that democracy had been undermined by a new aristocracy of self-professed experts. “I am no more ready to be governed by experts than I am to be governed by the ex-Kaiser,” he professed, expertly.

The year 1935 happened to mark the centennial of the publication of Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” an occasion that elicited still more lectures from European intellectuals coming to the United States to remark on its system of government and the character of its people, close on Tocqueville’s heels. Heinrich Brüning, a scholar and a former Chancellor of Germany, lectured at Princeton on “The Crisis of Democracy”; the Swiss political theorist William Rappard gave the same title to a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Chicago. In “The Prospects for Democracy,” the Scottish historian and later BBC radio quiz-show panelist Denis W. Brogan offered little but gloom: “The defenders of democracy, the thinkers and writers who still believe in its merits, are in danger of suffering the fate of Aristotle, who kept his eyes fixedly on the city-state at a time when that form of government was being reduced to a shadow by the rise of Alexander’s world empire.” Brogan hedged his bets by predicting the worst. It’s an old trick.

The endless train of academics were also called upon to contribute to the nation’s growing number of periodicals. In 1937, The New Republic, arguing that “at no time since the rise of political democracy have its tenets been so seriously challenged as they are today,” ran a series on “The Future of Democracy,” featuring pieces by the likes of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. “Do you think that political democracy is now on the wane?” the editors asked each writer. The series’ lead contributor, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, took issue with the question, as philosophers, thankfully, do. “I call this kind of question ‘meteorological,’ ” he grumbled. “It is like asking, ‘Do you think that it is going to rain today? Had I better take my umbrella?’ ” The trouble, Croce explained, is that political problems are not external forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. “We need solely to make up our own minds and to act.”

Don’t ask whether you need an umbrella. Go outside and stop the rain.

Here are Some of the Sorts of people who went out and stopped the rain in the nineteen-thirties: schoolteachers, city councillors, librarians, poets, union organizers, artists, precinct workers, soldiers, civil-rights activists, and investigative reporters. They knew what they were prepared to defend and they defended it, even though they also knew that they risked attack from both the left and the right. Charles Beard (Mary Ritter’s husband) spoke out against the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, when he smeared scholars and teachers as Communists. “The people who are doing the most damage to American democracy are men like Charles A. Beard,” said a historian at Trinity College in Hartford, speaking at a high school on the subject of “Democracy and the Future,” and warning against reading Beard’s books—at a time when Nazis in Germany and Austria were burning “un-German” books in public squares. That did not exactly happen here, but in the nineteen-thirties four of five American superintendents of schools recommended assigning only those U.S. history textbooks which “omit any facts likely to arouse in the minds of the students question or doubt concerning the justice of our social order and government.” Beard’s books, God bless them, raised doubts.

Beard didn’t back down. Nor did W.P.A. muralists and artists, who were subject to the same attack. Instead, Beard took pains to point out that Americans liked to think of themselves as good talkers and good arguers, people with a particular kind of smarts. Not necessarily book learning, but street smarts—reasonableness, open-mindedness, level-headedness. “The kind of universal intellectual prostration required by Bolshevism and Fascism is decidedly foreign to American ‘intelligence,’ ” Beard wrote. Possibly, he allowed, you could call this a stubborn independence of mind, or even mulishness. “Whatever the interpretation, our wisdom or ignorance stands in the way of our accepting the totalitarian assumption of Omniscience,” he insisted. “And to this extent it contributes to the continuance of the arguing, debating, never-settling-anything-finally methods of political democracy.” Maybe that was whistling in the dark, but sometimes a whistle is all you’ve got.

The more argument the better is what the North Carolina-born George V. Denny, Jr., was banking on, anyway, after a neighbor of his, in Scarsdale, declared that he so strongly disagreed with F.D.R. that he never listened to him. Denny, who helped run something called the League for Political Education, thought that was nuts. In 1935, he launched “America’s Town Meeting of the Air,” an hour-long debate program, broadcast nationally on NBC’s Blue Network. Each episode opened with a town crier ringing a bell and hollering, “Town meeting tonight! Town meeting tonight!” Then Denny moderated a debate, usually among three or four panelists, on a controversial subject (Does the U.S. have a truly free press? Should schools teach politics?), before opening the discussion up to questions from an audience of more than a thousand people. The debates were conducted at a lecture hall, usually in New York, and broadcast to listeners gathered in public libraries all over the country, so that they could hold their own debates once the show ended. “We are living today on the thin edge of history,” Max Lerner, the editor of The Nation, said in 1938, during a “Town Meeting of the Air” debate on the meaning of democracy. His panel included a Communist, an exile from the Spanish Civil War, a conservative American political economist, and a Russian columnist. “We didn’t expect to settle anything, and therefore we succeeded,” the Spanish exile said at the end of the hour, offering this definition: “A democracy is a place where a ‘Town Meeting of the Air’ can take place.”

Public forums that began in Des Moines grew so popular that the programming became a part of the New Deal. The federal government paid for it, but everything else fell under local control, and ordinary people made it work. Photograph from Alamy

No one expected anyone to come up with an undisputable definition of democracy, since the point was disputation. Asking people about the meaning and the future of democracy and listening to them argue it out was really only a way to get people to stretch their civic muscles. “Democracy can only be saved by democratic men and women,” Dorothy Thompson once said. “The war against democracy begins by the destruction of the democratic temper, the democratic method and the democratic heart. If the democratic temper be exacerbated into wanton unreasonableness, which is the essence of the evil, then a victory has been won for the evil we despise and prepare to defend ourselves against, even though it’s 3,000 miles away and has never moved.”

The most ambitious plan to get Americans to show up in the same room and argue with one another in the nineteen-thirties came out of Des Moines, Iowa, from a one-eyed former bricklayer named John W. Studebaker, who had become the superintendent of the city’s schools. Studebaker, who after the Second World War helped create the G.I. Bill, had the idea of opening those schools up at night, so that citizens could hold debates. In 1933, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation and support from the American Association for Adult Education, he started a five-year experiment in civic education.

The meetings began at a quarter to eight, with a fifteen-minute news update, followed by a forty-five-minute lecture, and thirty minutes of debate. The idea was that “the people of the community of every political affiliation, creed, and economic view have an opportunity to participate freely.” When Senator Guy Gillette, a Democrat from Iowa, talked about “Why I Support the New Deal,” Senator Lester Dickinson, a Republican from Iowa, talked about “Why I Oppose the New Deal.” Speakers defended Fascism. They attacked capitalism. They attacked Fascism. They defended capitalism. Within the first nine months of the program, thirteen thousand of Des Moines’s seventy-six thousand adults had attended a forum. The program got so popular that in 1934 F.D.R. appointed Studebaker the U.S. Commissioner of Education and, with the eventual help of Eleanor Roosevelt, the program became a part of the New Deal, and received federal funding. The federal forum program started out in ten test sites—from Orange County, California, to Sedgwick County, Kansas, and Pulaski County, Arkansas. It came to include almost five hundred forums in forty-three states and involved two and a half million Americans. Even people who had steadfastly predicted the demise of democracy participated. “It seems to me the only method by which we are going to achieve democracy in the United States,” Du Bois wrote, in 1937.

The federal government paid for it, but everything else fell under local control, and ordinary people made it work, by showing up and participating. Usually, school districts found the speakers and decided on the topics after collecting ballots from the community. In some parts of the country, even in rural areas, meetings were held four and five times a week. They started in schools and spread to Y.M.C.A.s and Y.W.C.A.s, labor halls, libraries, settlement houses, and businesses, during lunch hours. Many of the meetings were broadcast by radio. People who went to those meetings debated all sorts of things:

Should the Power of the Supreme Court Be Altered?

Do Company Unions Help Labor?

Do Machines Oust Men?

Must the West Get Out of the East?

Can We Conquer Poverty?

Should Capital Punishment Be Abolished?

Is Propaganda a Menace?

Do We Need a New Constitution?

Should Women Work?

Is America a Good Neighbor?

Can It Happen Here?

These efforts don’t always work. Still, trying them is better than talking about the weather, and waiting for someone to hand you an umbrella.

When a Terrible Hurricane hit New England in 1938, Dr. Lorine Pruette, a Tennessee-born psychologist who had written an essay called “Why Women Fail,” and who had urged F.D.R. to name only women to his Cabinet, found herself marooned at a farm in New Hampshire with a young neighbor, sixteen-year-old Alice Hooper, a high-school sophomore. Waiting out the storm, they had nothing to do except listen to the news, which, needless to say, concerned the future of democracy. Alice asked Pruette a question: “What is it everyone on the radio is talking about—what is this democracy—what does it mean?” Somehow, in the end, NBC arranged a coast-to-coast broadcast, in which eight prominent thinkers—two ministers, three professors, a former ambassador, a poet, and a journalist—tried to explain to Alice the meaning of democracy. American democracy had found its “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” moment, except that it was messier, and more interesting, because those eight people didn’t agree on the answer. Democracy, Alice, is the darnedest thing.

That broadcast was made possible by the workers who brought electricity to rural New Hampshire; the legislators who signed the 1934 federal Communications Act, mandating public-interest broadcasting; the executives at NBC who decided that it was important to run this program; the two ministers, the three professors, the former ambassador, the poet, and the journalist who gave their time, for free, to a public forum, and agreed to disagree without acting like asses; and a whole lot of Americans who took the time to listen, carefully, even though they had plenty of other things to do. Getting out of our current jam will likely require something different, but not entirely different. And it will be worth doing.

A decade-long debate about the future of democracy came to a close at the end of the nineteen-thirties—but not because it had been settled. In 1939, the World’s Fair opened in Queens, with a main exhibit featuring the saga of democracy and a chipper motto: “The World of Tomorrow.” The fairgrounds included a Court of Peace, with pavilions for every nation. By the time the fair opened, Czechoslovakia had fallen to Germany, though, and its pavilion couldn’t open. Shortly afterward, Edvard Beneš, the exiled President of Czechoslovakia, delivered a series of lectures at the University of Chicago on, yes, the future of democracy, though he spoke less about the future than about the past, and especially about the terrible present, a time of violently unmoored traditions and laws and agreements, a time “of moral and intellectual crisis and chaos.” Soon, more funereal bunting was brought to the World’s Fair, to cover Poland, Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. By the time the World of Tomorrow closed, in 1940, half the European hall lay under a shroud of black.

The federal government stopped funding the forum program in 1941. Americans would take up their debate about the future of democracy, in a different form, only after the defeat of the Axis. For now, there was a war to fight. And there were still essays to publish, if not about the future, then about the present. In 1943, E. B. White got a letter in the mail, from the Writers’ War Board, asking him to write a statement about “The Meaning of Democracy.” He was a little weary of these pieces, but he knew how much they mattered. He wrote back, “Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.” It meant something once. And, the thing is, it still does. ♦

#Future of Democracy #Jill Lepore #The New Yorker

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