#they also want to set a number on how many immigrants we take a year

[autistook]

heard rumors from the radio that our government wants to overturn equal pays for men and women 👍👍👍

[ahti-the-janitor]

I am a Canadian that is very interested in Finland and Finnish culture. Would you be willing to explain what you mean when you say you're not happy with where your country is headed?

Love the Finnish shitposting!

Hi!! Of course, it's no problem! And if you're interested in anything else and wanna ask something else, feel free to DM me or send more asks and I'll answer the best I can! And I'm glad you're enjoying the Finnish shitposting haha!

This will be a long post, so I'm very sorry haha. And sorry for the somewhat late reply.

So, my country. In Europe in general we have been seeing the rise of the far-right and I find it concerning, and the same is unfortunately true in Finland. Our goverment/parliament is more on the right than it has been in years. The biggest party in our Parliament is a center-right Kokoomus which basically is a party for wealthy people, only cares about money, and wants to make things easier for rich people. The second largest party is Perussuomalaiset (PS)... a party that is very far right-wing, conservative party. They are a party with extremely racist, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ ideals. For example, a member of their party is our finance minister. She has made comments on wanting to beat up immigrant children (she used racial slurs to describe them) and wanting to shoot immigrants on the train. Along with many other things. She initially refused to apologize for the comments, but eventually did. But she has not changed and her being a Perussuomalaiset member is a testament to that. Upholding racism is the core part of their ideals, so it is not a "one bad apple ruins the bunch" case.

And she is not the only one. One recent example is from the 6th, our Independence Day. A member of the Parliament (a Perussuomalaiset member), Teemu Keskisarja (who has had numerous other controversies as well) took part and gave a speech in a march. It is a far-right, nationalist (they are fascists and neo-nazis, let's be real. Even if some claim otherwise) torch march 612, held on Indepence Day. Riikka Purra defended him.

There are so many horrid people in charge of our country. They are also NOT keeping the promises they gave when running for parliament. They made promises they wouldn't make cuts to certain things yet they have.

Finland has been a welfare state that takes care of its people but that is being torn apart.

There have been cuts made to our healthcare. There is a new system set up that will bring a lot of people trouble and make it harder to get access to healthcare faster. Wealthy people can get faster treatment since they have money to go to private clinics. There are cuts made to other parts welfare protection and education. Finland used to take care of people who had trouble, now we are going into another direction. Some might call it Americanization. There are decisions being made that benefit the wealthy while the poor are becoming poorer and more disadvantaged. Disabled people are facing cuts too, and other marginalized groups as well.

Yet Finland is supporting fur farming and big companies monetarily. They are making cuts to the funding of the field of culture despite it employing more people than the fur industry. Museums are being shut down. Very little value is put on culture and other things that people don't see immediate monetary gain from. Finland has had one of the best education in the world for a long time but it has been going worse.

Finnish well-being in general is in decline. Mental health issues are a huge problem and getting treatment is hard, at least from what I have experienced and seen around me.

There are also big problems with gendered violence. A recent study showed that every 4th man under 35 think women can deserve the violence she faces. Of every man it is every 5th who believes so. Of course this is not a recent issue but those numbers are harrowing and proved just how bad it is. There has been quite a lot of violence lately -- especially violence amidst of young people is on the rise. We had a school shooting this year where the shooter was only 12 years old. Other threats have been made in schools.Far-right movements are on the rise too.

There are honestly SO many things and this is only scratching the surface. I could write a whole book on this. I might have forgotten something really important too since there are a lot of things. Also, if things are said in a vague way or not worded well, my apologies! Sometimes explaining things like this in depth in English is a bit tough haha.

I also acknowledge that I am still in a privileged position and things are way worse in many countries. But Finland has been so proud of taking care of people who need it, of our level of education, of things like that, only for that to be ripped apart. I love this country and it is terrible to see the foundation of it being torn apart and what makes me proud being destroyed. I know it has not been perfect in the past either but things are going downhill VERY rapidly.

Extremely long story short: the welfare state system is being torn apart. Far-right parties are in power. Promises are being broken and more and more people are struggling.

[lvenvs3000f23]

Week 5: Bird Banding

Prompt: No prompt - write about anything! Welcome back everyone,

Since I have the freedom to write about anything I want, I wanted to talk about my experiences doing research and work with birds! To start off, birds are my passion if not already obvious! They mean a lot to me and are the thing that makes me truly happy. As a kid, I always loved them, and that love has grown more and more as the years have gone on to where I am today.

I was really lucky this summer to be able to start my experience in doing research with birds, where I was learning bird banding and migration monitoring with the TRCA in Toronto. I would wake up at a crisp 4 in the morning to drive down to the park before sunrise - people always gawk at that timing but birds are always up so early, so we have to get there before they do. We head into the park and set up big nets called mist nets - they have large pockets that birds will be caught in when they fly into. We head into the research station and check the nets every half an hour. When we come across a bird caught in our nets, we carefully extract them and place them into bags to be banded. We head back to the station and start the process of giving each bird their own unique ID band and then releasing them. 

The purpose of banding birds is to track a lot of things, especially migration. The tags are incredibly unique and only correspond to one singular bird, so if it migrates, you are able to track where it’s been since birds stop to rest while migrating. A lot of data is kept, such as species, age, sex, ID number, the amount of fat they have on their bodies (which can tell us about migration habits), and wing length. We use specialized tools for these, and while stressful, is a harmless process for the birds. Sometimes, other research is tied in as well. When I was volunteering, we were also plucking tail feathers on birds to use in research studying isotopes found in those feathers. This research is used in many ways such as finding breeding grounds of birds, studying diet, immigration of populations, just to name a few. 

Banding in general is incredibly important as a science since it is the only way we really know about migration habits. We can learn where they go, how long it takes them to get there, and where they stay over the winter. Especially in modern day, this also heavily contributes towards conservation efforts since songbirds especially have been rapidly declining for decades. 

My experience was extremely pleasant and I am happy to continue doing this and being able to teach others about birds and helping others learn in workshops.

[wesetupbusiness]

How to Setup Business in Dubai from Home Country?

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Yes, you heard it right! You can start your business in the UAE from the comfort of your home. Setup Business in Dubai involves several steps that must be carefully followed. You can learn about the process in our comprehensive guide. However, if we put it simple, here is the process of starting your business in Dubai, UAE while being in your home country.

WeSetupBusiness provides the complete consultancy and support in the whole process and make the complete process hassle-free for you.

Defining the Nature of Business

Before starting your business, you need to define the nature of your business. You need to have a proper business plan that defines your business activities that must adhere to the rules and regulation of the UAE. This involves carefully selecting business activities, products and services that not only meet legal requirements but also have a good scope in the UAE market.

Though it seems simple, but it must be carefully selected otherwise your business may face legal complications and requires extra fees to make adjustments.

Proposed Company Names

Once you have a clear business plan and a good understanding of the type of business you want to start, the next step is to choose three proposed names for your business. These names will represent your brand and business identity. You should list them in order of preference. This is important because your business will be officially registered under one of these names, depending on availability and approval.

Official documents of shareholders

Now you have to submit the official documents of the shareholders of the company. This includes Scanned color Photocopies of all the shareholders of the company.

Mobile Number, Email, and Home Address

The last things required to start the process of your business setup in UAE are your mobile number, email address, and the home address of your residence.

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Once you provide us all the above-mentioned required details and documents, we will start the business setup process. And within just 2–3 working days, we will issue your trade license from the UAE government. After your business is set up, we will start your visa process, which is also known as investor visa. For that, we will get your entry permit, that you will use to travel to the UAE. On your arrival, we will arrange your medical test and the fingerprints needed for your Emirates ID.

After your fitness test is complete, we will start the visa process with the immigration authorities. Once you get approval, which usually takes 3 to 5 working days, you will receive your Emirates ID in just 3 working days. At this stage, you have become a UAE resident for 2 years.

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WeSetupBusiness is your trusted partner for all your business-related needs. We will take care of the entire process for you, so you can invest your time growing your business, leaving everything else to us. Enjoy the luxury lifestyle in Dubai with your family and run a successful business in a tax-friendly environment.

[whileiamdying]

We Have Our State, out of Golda Meir's "My Life"

If 1946 was difficult, then I can only describe 1947 as the year in which the situation in Palestine got completely out of hand as far as the British were concerned. In the course of that year, the battle against Jewish immigration turned into open warfare, not only against the entire yishuv[1] as such, but also against the refugees themselves. It was as though Ernest Bevin had nothing else whatsoever on his mind except how to keep Jewish refugees out of the Jewish homeland. The fact that we refused to solve this problem for him apparently infuriated him so that he eventually lost control altogether, and I honestly believe that some of the decisions he made regarding Palestine could only have been the result of his intense personal rage against the Jews because they could not and would not accept the judgment of the British foreign secretary as to how or where they should live.

I don't know (nor does it really matter anymore) whether Bevin was a little insane, or just antisemitic, or both. What I do know is that he insisted on pitting the strength of the British Empire against the will of the Jews to live and that by so doing he not only brought great suffering to people who had already suffered enormously, but also forced upon thousands of British soldiers and sailors a role that must have filled them with horror. I remember staring at some of the young Englishmen who guarded the DP detention camps on Cyprus—when I went there myself in 1947and wondering how on earth they managed to reconcile themselves to the fact that not so long ago they were liberating from Nazi camps the very same people whom they now kept penned behind barbed wire on Cyprus only because these people found it impossible to go on living anywhere except Palestine. I looked at those nice young English boys and was filled with pity for them. I couldn't help thinking that they were no less victims of Bevin's obsession than the men, women and children on whom their guns were now trained night and day.

I had gone to Cyprus to see what, if anything, could be done about the hundreds of children who were being kept there. At that point about 40,000 Jews were living in the Cyprus camps.

Each month, with great precision, the British allowed exactly 1,500 Jews to enter Palestine: 750 from the camps of Europe and 750 from Cyprus. The principle under which this policy operated in Cyprus was “first in, first out,” which meant that, inevitably, many small children were doomed to live under very difficult conditions for months. Our doctors in the Cyprus camps were very concerned about this, and one day a delegation of physicians appeared in my office in Jerusalem.

“We can take no further responsibility for the health of the infants if they stay in the camps for one more winter,” they informed me. So, I began to negotiate with the Palestine government. What we suggested was some scheme that would permit DP families with a child under the age of one year to leave Cyprus “out of turn” and then subtract their number from the DPs who left “in turn.” This meant persuading the Palestine government to be both flexible and reasonable—at a time when it was neither and also persuading the DPs themselves to set up a special system of priorities. It took quite a time for me to work something out with the government, but in the end, I managed to do so and even got permission for orphaned children to leave as soon as possible.

The next step was obviously for me to go to Cyprus and talk to the DPs. “They'll never listen to you,” my friends warned me.

“You will only be sticking your neck out and asking for trouble.

The one thing that these people are waiting for is to get out of Cyprus, and now you want to ask them to agree to let some people who may have only been there for a week or two jump to the head of the queue. It won't work!” But I couldn't see it that way. I thought that at least it had to be tried, so I went.

When I got to Cyprus, I immediately reported to the office of the British commandant of the camp, an elderly, tall, thin Englishman who had served for years with the army in India. It was what you might call a courtesy call. I told him briefly who I was and what I wanted and asked whether he had any objection to my touring the camps the next day.

He listened to me very stiffly and then said, “I know all about the families with babies, but I haven't received any instructions about orphans.”

“But that was part of the agreement I made with the chief secretary,” I said.

“Well, I'll have to check it,” he answered rather unpleasantly.

Nonetheless, we went on talking, and after a while he said suddenly, “Oh, very well then. Include the orphans.” I couldn't understand why he had surrendered so quickly, but in the morning I discovered that he had received a telegram from the chief secretariat in Jerusalem that read: BEWARE OF MRS. MEYERSON. SHE IS A FORMIDABLE PERSON! And, I suppose, he decided on the spot to take the advice seriously.

The camps themselves were even more depressing than I had expected, in a way worse than the camps for DPs that were being run in Germany by the U.S. authorities. They looked like prison camps, ugly clusters of huts and tents—with a watchtower at each end—set down on the sand, with nothing green or growing anywhere in sight. There wasn't nearly enough water for drinking and even less for bathing, despite the heat. Although the camps were right on the shore, none of the refugees was allowed to go swimming, and they spent their time, for the most part, sitting in those filthy, stifling tents, which, if nothing else, protected them from the glaring sun. As I walked through the camps, the DPs pressed up against the barbed wire fences that surrounded them to welcome me, and at one camp two tiny little children came up with a bouquet of paper flowers for me. I have been given a great many bouquets of flowers since then, but I have never been as moved by any of them as I was by those flowers presented to me in Cyprus by children who had probably forgotten if they ever knew what real flowers looked like and who had been helped in making those pathetic bouquets by nursery school teachers whom we had sent to the camps. Incidentally, one of the Palestinian Jews in Cyprus then though she later escaped—was a girl named Ayan, an attractive young radio operator from a captured Haganah ship who is today a child psychiatrist in Tel Aviv and my daughter-in-law.

At any rate, the first item on the agenda was a meeting at which I explained my mission to the committee representing all the detainees. This was followed by an open-air meeting with most of the detainees themselves. I told them that I was sure that they would not have to remain on Cyprus for long and that eventually everyone would be released; but until this time came, I needed their cooperation in order to save the children. The Irgun Zvai Le'umi sympathizers in the camps objected violently to the agreement I had made with the British. It was all or nothing, they shouted, and there was even an attempt to attack me physically.

But finally, they calmed down, and we made the necessary arrangements.

There was still one problem bothering me. We had asked that “orphans” be allowed to enter Palestine “out of turn,” but what about the children on Cyprus who had only one surviving parent?

When I got back to Jerusalem, I went to see the high commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, and thanked him for what he had done. Then I said, “But there is one very tragic aspect of our agreement. It seems terribly unfair that a child whose mother or father was killed in Europe should have to stay on Cyprus when a friend who may have been 'lucky' enough to have lost both parents is able to leave. Is there anything at all that we can do about this?”

Cunningham—who was to be the last British high commissioner to Palestine and who was an extremely kind and decent man— shook his head rather unhappily. Then he heaved a resigned sigh, smiled and said, “Don't worry. I'll take care of that at once, Mrs. Meyerson.”

I used to see him from time to time, and however tense or chaotic the situation in Palestine was, he and I were always able to talk to each other like friends. After Cunningham left Palestine on May 14, 1948, I didn't expect to hear from him ever again. But one day several months after I became prime minister, I got a letter from him. It was written by hand from the country place in England to which he had retired, and its essence was that however great the pressures on us, Israel should not budge from any of the territories we had taken in the Six-Day War, unless and until we were guaranteed secure and defensible borders. I was very touched indeed by his letter.

A less pleasant reminder of those days was the ceremony I attended in Haifa in 1970, when the bodies of 100 children who had died in those dreadful camps were brought to Haifa for reburial in the lovely foothills of Mount Carmel. I tried to shake off the thought, but I couldn't help wondering if the two little girls who had so solemnly handed me those flowers in 1947 were not among them. On the other hand, I often bumped into people who had attended that meeting in Cyprus and remembered it well. About five years ago, for instance, I was visiting a kibbutz in the Negev when a middle-aged woman came up to me very hesitantly. “Excuse me for bothering you,” she said, “but this is the first opportunity I have had in all these years to thank you.”

“For what?” I asked.

“I was on Cyprus with a baby in 1947,” she replied, “and you saved us. Now, I'd like you to meet that baby’” The “baby” was a sturdy, pretty girl of twenty who had just finished her military service and obviously thought I had taken leave of my senses when I gave her a great big kiss in front of everybody—without a word of explanation.

At the Zionist Congress in Basel in 1946 it had been decided that Moshe Sharett should head the Political Department of the Jewish Agency from Washington and that I should remain its head in Jerusalem. But by 1947 living in Jerusalem was like living in a city occupied by an extremely hostile foreign power. The British shut themselves up in what was actually an improvised fortress—a heavily guarded compound (we called it Bevingrad) right in the middle of town sent their tanks rumbling through the streets at the slightest provocation and forbade their troops to have anything to do with the Jews. Whenever the Irgun Zvai Le'umi and the Stern Group took the law into their own hands— which, most unfortunately, they did fairly regularly the British responded with retaliatory actions that were aimed at the entire yishuv, particularly at the Haganah, and hardly a week went by without some sort of crisis arms searches, mass arrests, curfews that lasted for days and paralyzed everyday life and, finally, the deportation of Jews without even a charge, let alone a trial. When the British began flogging members of the Irgun or Sternists whom they caught, the two dissident organizations responded by kidnapping and even executing two British soldiers—and all this while our battle for free immigration and land settlement was in full force.

Looking back at that period, I can see, of course, that almost any other colonial power imposing itself on a rebellious native population (which is how the British saw us) would probably have behaved in an even harsher manner. But the British were harsh enough. It wasn't only their often very cruel punitive, measures that made the situation so intolerable; it was also our knowledge that whenever possible, they aided and abetted the Arabs, not to speak of inciting them against us. On the other hand, the idea of a perpetual bloodbath in Palestine was also not very appealing to Britain least of all in its postwar mood—and in February 1947, Mr. Bevin himself decided that his government was tired of the whole thing and said so in the House of Commons. Let the United Nations deal with the Palestine problem. The British had had enough. I can't imagine that the United Nations was overjoyed at having this responsibility dumped on it, but it couldn't very well refuse to accept it.

The UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) arrived in the country in June. According to its terms of reference, it was to report back to the UN General Assembly by September 1, 1947, with some sort of concrete proposal for a solution. The Palestinian Arabs, as usual, refused to cooperate with it in any way, but everyone else did, though a little wearily: the leaders of the yishuv, the Palestine government and later even the leaders of some of the Arab states. I spent a lot of time with the eleven members of the committee and was horrified to discover how little they knew of the history of Palestine or of Zionism, for that matter. But since it was essential that they learn—and as quickly as possible—we began to explain and expound as we had done so often before, and eventually they started to grasp what all the fuss was about and why we were not prepared to give up our right to bring the survivors of the Holocaust to Palestine.

Then, for reasons which will never be understood by me—nor, I suspect, by anyone else just before UNSCOP was scheduled to leave Palestine, the British chose to demonstrate in the most unmistakable way just how brutally and tyrannically they were dealing with us and with the question of Jewish immigration. Before the shocked eyes of the members of UNSCOP they forcibly caged and returned to Germany the 4,500 refugees who had come to Palestine aboard the Haganah ship Exodus 1947, and I think that by so doing, they actually contributed considerably to UNSCOP's final recommendations. If I live to be a hundred, I shall never erase from my mind the gruesome picture of hundreds of British soldiers in full combat dress, bearing and using clubs, pistols and grenades against the wretched refugees on the Exodus, 400 of whom were pregnant women determined to give birth to their babies in Palestine. Nor will I ever be able to forget the revulsion with which I heard that these people were actually going to be shipped back, like animals in their wire cages, to DP camps in the one country that symbolized the graveyard of European Jewry.

Speaking at a meeting of the Va'ad Le'umi only a few days before the passengers of the Exodus left on their grim journey to Hamburg, I tried to express the disgust and grief of the yishuv, as well as its flickering hope that somehow, someone, somewhere would intervene to save the refugees from this new torment:

The British hope that through deportation of the Exodus 1947 they will succeed in frightening the Jews of the DP camps and terrify us. There can be only one answer on our part: this flow of boats will not cease. I am aware that the Jews seeking to immigrate to Palestine and those assisting them now face terrible difficulties, with all the forces of the British Empire concentrated for one purpose: to attack these creaking boats laden with human suffering.

Nevertheless, I believe that there can be only one effective answer: the uninterrupted flow of the “illegal” ships. I have no doubts about the stand of the Jews of the camps; they are ready for all perils in order to leave the camps. The Jewish survivors of many European countries cannot remain where they are.

If we in Palestine, together with American, South African and British Jewry, do not let ourselves be frightened, the boats will continue to come. With much travail, greater than in the past but come they will. I do not, for one moment, disregard what the thousands of these boats will face in the coming days. I know that each one of us would deem himself happy if he could be with them. Each one of us worries over what may happen when the Jews on the Exodus are brought to Germany ... with the British forces completely free to teach these lawbreakers a lesson. There can be no doubt that they will be steadfast, as they have been until now. The question is only whether there is no hope for some lastminute change of heart on the part of the British.

Since we are incapable of despair, we wish at this moment, from this place, once more to address our call to the world, to the nations—to the many who suffered so much during the war, to those on many of whose fronts Jews fought and helped in their liberation. To these nations we issue this lastminute appeal. Is it possible that no voice will be raised, that the British government will not be told: Remove the whip and the rifle from over the heads of the Jews on the Exodus? And to Britain we must say: it is a great illusion to believe us to be weak. Let Great Britain with her mighty fleet and her many guns and planes know that this people is not so weak and that its strength will yet stand it in good stead....

But the fate of the Exodus had already been sealed, and the ship returned to Germany.

The summer of 1947 dragged on and on. Despite the fact that the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road was increasingly coming under the control of armed Arab bands, who shot at all Jewish transport from the hills above it, there was no alternative other than for me to ferry back and forth between the two cities and rely on the young Haganah guards who accompanied me. What was really at stake was not whether I would be killed or wounded traveling to Tel Aviv and back, but whether the Arabs would succeed in their proclaimed intention of cutting the road altogether and thus starving out the Jews of Jerusalem. And I was certainly not about to help them achieve this aim by refraining from using the one road that connected Jerusalem to the Jewish centers of the country. Once or twice a bullet whizzed through the window of the Jewish Agency car in which I used to travel, and once we took a wrong turn and arrived in an Arab village that I knew to be a nest of cutthroats; but we escaped without a scratch.

Sometimes there were also “adventures” of a different nature.

For instance, one-time British soldiers searched my car for arms just after I had been promised by the chief secretary himself that these searches would end, in view of the growing danger to Jewish traffic on the roads. My protests did no good at all. A gun was found on one of the Haganah escorts and she was promptly arrested.

“Where are you dragging her to?” I asked the officer in charge of this great operation.

“To Majdal,” he said.

Majdal, an Arab town, was certainly no place for a young girl to spend the night, and I told the captain that if she were taken there, I would insist on going with her. By then he knew who I was, and I don't think he looked forward at all to explaining to his superiors why a member of the Jewish Agency Executive had gone to sleep in Majdal, so he changed his mind, and we all went off to a police station in a nearby Jewish town. By then it was midnight, but I still had to get to Tel Aviv—which I duly did, royally escorted by British policemen and the Haganah girl, who was hastily released. Others, however, were not so lucky. The death toll on the roads rose weekly, and by November 1947, the Arabs in full view of the British had begun to lay siege to Jerusalem.

On August 31—only a minute or two before their deadline expired—the eleven gentlemen of UNSCOP[2], convened in Geneva, turned in their report on Palestine. Eight members of the committee recommended—as the Peel Commission had—that the country be partitioned into an Arab state and a Jewish state, plus an international enclave that would take in Jerusalem and its immediate vicinity. The minority (consisting, among others, of the representatives of India, Iran and Yugoslavia all of which had large Moslem populations) suggested a federal Arab-Jewish state.

It was now up to the UN General Assembly to decide. In the meantime, all the parties concerned made their responses known, and I can't say that any surprises awaited the United Nations in this respect. We accepted the plan, of course—without much elation but with great relief. and demanded that the mandate come to an end at once. All the Arabs said that they would have nothing to do with either set of recommendations and threatened war unless all Palestine was made an Arab state. The British made clear that they would not cooperate with the implementation of any partition plan unless both the Jews and the Arabs were enthusiastic about it, and we all knew what that meant. And the Americans and the Russians each published statements in favor of the majority recommendation.

The next day I held a press conference in Jerusalem. In addition to thanking the committee for having worked so rapidly, I stressed that “we could hardly imagine a Jewish state without Jerusalem” and that “we still hoped that this wrong would be rectified by the UN Assembly.” We were also very unhappy, I said, about the exclusion of western Galilee from the Jewish state and assumed that this would be taken up at the Assembly, too. But the most important point I wanted to make was that we were extremely anxious to establish a new and different relationship with the Arabs— of whom; I thought, there would be some 500,000 in the Jewish state. “A Jewish state in this part of the world,” I told the press, “is not only a solution for us. It should and can be a great aid for everyone in the Middle East.” It is heartrending now to think that we were using those words—to no avail—as long ago as 1947!

The voting took place at Lake Success in New York on November 29. Like everyone else in the yishuv, I was glued to the radio, with pencil and paper, writing down the votes as they came through. Finally, at about midnight our time, the results were announced: Thirty-three nations (including the United States and the Soviet Union) were in favor of the partition plan; thirteen, including all the Arab states, opposed it; ten, including Great Britain, abstained. I immediately went to the compound of the Jewish Agency building, which was already jammed with people. It was an incredible sight: hundreds of people, British soldiers among them, holding hands, singing and dancing, with truckloads of more people arriving at the compound all the time. I remember walking up to my office alone, unable to share in the general festivity. The Arabs had turned the plan down and talked only of war. The crowd, drunk with happiness, wanted a speech, and I thought it would be wicked to dampen the mood by refusing. So, from the balcony of my office I spoke for a few minutes.

But it was not really to the mass of people below me that I talked; it was, once again, to the Arabs.

“You have fought your battle against us in the United Nations,” I said. “The United Nations the majority of countries in the world have had their say. The partition plan is a compromise: not what you wanted, not what we wanted. But let us now live in friendship and peace together.” That speech was hardly the solution for our situation. Arab riots broke out all over Palestine the next day (seven Jews were killed in an Arab ambush on a bus) and on December 2 an Arab mob set the Jewish commercial center in Jerusalem on fire, while British police stood by, interfering only when the Haganah tried to take action.

We were of course, totally unprepared for war. That we had managed for so long to hold the local Arabs at bay, more or less, didn't mean that we could cope with regular armies. We needed weapons urgently, if we could find anyone willing to sell them to us; but before we could buy anything, we needed money—not the sort of money which had helped us to afforest the country or bring in refugees, but millions of dollars. And there was only one group of people in the whole world that we had any chance of getting these dollars from: the Jews of America. There was simply nowhere else to go and no one else to go to.

It was, of course, out of the question for Ben-Gurion to leave Palestine then. His role was absolutely central. I think that he himself felt that no one else could possibly raise the kind of money that was being discussed in the series of secret meetings we held in Tel Aviv in December 1947, and the early part of January 1948, and I certainly agreed with him. But he had to stay in the country.

So, who would go? At one of these meetings, I looked around the table at my colleagues, so tired and harassed, and wondered for the first time whether I ought not to volunteer for the mission. After all, I had done some fund raising in the States before, and I spoke English fluently. My services in Palestine could certainly be dispensed with for a few weeks, and though I wasn't used to proposing myself, I began to feel that I should suggest this to Ben-Gurion. At first, he wouldn't hear of it. He was going, he said, and was taking with him Eliezer Kaplan, the treasurer of the Jewish Agency.

“But no one can take your place here,” I argued, “while I may be able to do what you can do in the United States.” He was adamant.

“No. I need you here.”

“Then let's put it to the vote,” I said. He looked at me for a second, then nodded. The vote was in favor of my going.

“But at once,” Ben-Gurion said. “Don't even try to get back to Jerusalem.” So, I flew to the States that day—without any luggage, wearing the dress I had worn to the meeting with a winter coat over it.

The first appearance I made in 1948 before American Jewry was unscheduled, unrehearsed and, of course, unannounced.

Also, I was quite unknown to the people I addressed. It was in Chicago on January 21, at the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, which were non-Zionist organizations. Palestine, in fact, was not on the agenda at all. But this was a meeting of professional fund raisers, of the tough experienced men who controlled the Jewish fundraising machinery in the United States and I knew that if I could get through to them, there was some chance of getting the money that was the key to our ability to defend ourselves. I didn't speak for long, but I said everything that was in my heart. I described the situation as it had been the day I left Palestine, and then I said:

The Jewish community in Palestine is going to fight to the very end. If we have arms to fight with, we will fight with them. If not, we will fight with stones in our hands.

I want you to believe me when I say that I came on this special mission to the United States today not to save seven hundred thousand Jews. During the last few years, the Jewish people lost six million Jews, and it would be audacity on our part to worry Jews throughout the world because a few hundred thousand more Jews are in danger.

That is not the issue. The issue is that if these seven hundred thousand Jews in Palestine can remain alive, then the Jewish people as such is alive and Jewish independence assured. If these seven hundred thousand people are killed off, then for centuries we are through with the dream of a Jewish people and a Jewish homeland.

My friends, we are at war. There is no Jew in Palestine who does not believe that finally we will be victorious. That is the spirit of the country... But this valiant spirit alone cannot face rifles and machine guns. Rifles and machine guns without spirit are not worth very much, but spirit without arms can, in time, be broken together with the body.

Our problem is time. ... The question is what can we get immediately. And, when I say immediately, I do not mean next month. I do not mean two months from now. I mean now.

I have come here to try to impress Jews in the United States with the fact that within a very short period, a couple of weeks, we mi 460 in cash between twenty-five and thirty million dollars.

In the next two or three weeks we can establish ourselves. Of that we are convinced.

The Egyptian government can vote a budget to aid our antagonists. The Syrian government can do the same. We have no governments. But we have millions of Jews in the Diaspora, and exactly as we have faith in our youngsters in Palestine so I have faith in the Jews of the United States; I believe that they will realize the peril of our situation and do what they have to do.

I know that we are not asking for something easy. I myself have sometimes been active in various campaigns and fund collections, and I know that collecting at once a sum such as I ask is not simple. But I have seen our people at home. I have seen them come from the offices to the clinics when we called the community to give their blood for a blood bank to treat the wounded. I have seen them lined up for hours, waiting so that some of their blood can be added to this bank. It is blood plus money that is being given in Palestine...

We are not a better breed; we are not the best Jews of the Jewish people. It so happened that we are there and you are here. I am certain that if you were in Palestine and we were in the United States, you would be doing what we are doing there, and you would ask us here to do what you will have to do.

I want to close by paraphrasing one of the greatest speeches that was made during the Second World War—the words of Churchill. I am not exaggerating when I say that the yishuv in Palestine will fight in the Negev and will fight in Galilee and will fight on the outskirts of Jerusalem until the very end.

You cannot decide whether we should fight or not. We will. The Jewish community in Palestine will raise no white flag for the mufti. That decision is taken. Nobody can change it. You can only decide one thing: whether we shall be victorious in this fight or whether the mufti will be victorious. That decision American Jews can make. It has to be made quickly, within hours, within days.

And I beg of you—don't be too late. Don't be bitterly sorry three months from now for what you failed to do today. The time is now.

They listened, and they wept, and they pledged money in amounts that no community had ever given before. I stayed in the United States for as long as I could bear to be away from home, for about six weeks, and the Jews all over the country listened, wept and gave money—and, when they had to, took loans from banks in order. to cover their pledges. By the time I came back to Palestine in March I had raised $50,000,000, which was turned over at once for the Haganah's secret purchase of arms in Europe.

But I never deceived myself—not even when upon my return Ben-Gurion said to me, “Someday when history will be written, it will be said that there was a Jewish woman who got the money which made the state possible.” I always knew that these dollars were given not to me, but to Israel.

That journey to the States, however, was only one of the journeys I made that year. In the six months that preceded the establishment of the state, I met twice with King Abdullah of Transjordan, who was King Hussein's grandfather. Although both those talks remained closely guarded secrets for many yearslong after Abdullah's assassination by his Arab enemies (probably the mufti's henchmen) in Jerusalem in 1951—no one knows to this day to what extent rumors about them were responsible for his death.

Assassination is an endemic disease in the Arab world, and one of the first lessons that most Arab rulers learn is the connection between secrecy and longevity. Abdullah's murder made a lasting impression on all subsequent Arab leaders, and I remember that Nasser once said to an intermediary whom we dispatched to Cairo, “If Ben-Gurion came to Egypt to talk to me, he would return home as a conquering hero. But if I went to him, I would be shot when I came back.” And I am afraid that is still the situation.

The first time I met King Abdullah was early in November 1947. He had agreed to meet me—in my capacity as head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency—in a house at Naharayim (on the Jordan), where the Palestine Electric Corporation ran a hydroelectric power station. I came to Naharayim with one of our Arab experts Eliahu Sasson. We drank the usual ceremonial cups of coffee, and then we began to talk. Abdullah was a small, very poised man with great charm. He soon made the heart of the matter clear: He would not join in any Arab attack on us.

He would always remain our friend, he said, and like us, he wanted peace more than anything else. After all, we had a common foe, the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El-Husseini. Not only that, but he suggested that we meet again, after the United Nations vote.

On the way back to Tel Aviv, Ezra Danin, who had met with Abdullah often before, filled me in on the king's general concept of the role of the Jews. It was that Providence had scattered the Jews throughout the Western world in order that they might absorb European culture and bring it back to the Middle East with them, thus reviving the area. As for his reliability, Danin was dubious. It was not, he told me, that Abdullah was a liar, but that he was a Bedouin, and that the Bedouin had their own ideas about truth which they saw as something much less absolute than we did. At any rate, he said, Abdullah was certainly sincere in his expressions of friendship, although they would not necessarily be at all binding on him.

Throughout January and February, we maintained contact with Abdullah, as a rule through the good offices of a mutual friend, through whom I was able to send direct messages to the king. As the weeks passed, my messages became more worried. The air was thick with conjecture, and there were reports that despite his promise to me, Abdullah was about to join the Arab League. Was this indeed so? I asked. The reply from Amman was prompt and negative. King Abdullah was astonished and hurt by my question.

He asked me to remember three things: that he was a Bedouin and therefore a man of honor; that he was a king and therefore doubly an honorable man; and finally, that he would never break a promise made to a woman. So, there could not possibly be any justification for my concern.

But we knew differently. By the first week of May there was no doubt that for all his assurances, Abdullah had, in fact, thrown his lot in with the Arab League. We debated the pros and cons of requesting another meeting before it was too late. Perhaps he could be persuaded to change his mind at the last minute. If not, perhaps we could at least find out from him just how deeply he had committed himself and his British-trained and officered Arab Legion to the war against us. A great deal hung in the balance: Not only was the legion by far the best Arab army in the area, but there was also another vital consideration. If, by some miracle, Transjordan stayed out of the war, it would be much harder for the Iraqi army to cross over into Palestine and join in the attack on us. Ben-Gurion was of the opinion that we could lose nothing by trying again, so I requested a second meeting, and asked Ezra Danin to accompany me.

This time, however, Abdullah refused to come to Naharayim. It was too dangerous, he told us through his emissary. If I wanted to see him, I would have to come to Amman, and the risk would have to be entirely mine. He could not be expected, he informed us, to alert the legion to the fact that he awaited Jewish guests from Palestine, and he would take no responsibility for anything that might happen to us en route. The first problem was to get to Tel Aviv, which at that point was almost as difficult as getting to Amman itself. I waited in Jerusalem from early in the morning until 7 p.m. for a plane to arrive from Tel Aviv, and when it finally turned up, it was so windy that we could hardly take off. Under normal conditions I would have tried to postpone the trip for another day, but there were no days left. It was already May 10 and the Jewish state would be proclaimed on May 14. This was our very last chance to talk to Abdullah. So, I insisted that we try to reach Tel Aviv even in that Piper Cub, which looked as though it would collapse even in a strong breeze, let alone a gale. After we left, a message arrived at the airstrip in Jerusalem to say that the weather was far too bad for us to attempt the flight, but we were already on our way by then.

The next morning, I set out by car for Haifa, where Ezra and I were to meet. It had already been decided that he would not disguise himself other than by wearing traditional Arab headgear.

He spoke fluent Arabic, was familiar with Arab customs and could easily be taken for an Arab. As for me, I would travel in the traditional dark and voluminous robes of an Arab woman. I spoke no Arabic at all, but as a Moslem wife accompanying her husband, it was most unlikely that I would be called on to say anything to anyone. The Arab dress and veils I needed had already been ordered and Ezra explained the route to me. We would change several times, he said, in order to be sure that we were not followed, and at a given point that night someone would turn up not far from the king's palace to lead us to Abdullah. The major problem was to avoid arousing the suspicions of the Arab legionnaires at the various check posts we had to past before we got to the place, where our guide was to meet us.

It was a long, long series of rides through the night. First into one car, then out of it, and into another for a few more miles and then, at Naharayim into a third car. We didn't talk to each other at all during the journey. I had perfect faith in Ezra's ability to get us through the enemy lines safely, and I was much too concerned with the outcome of our mission to think about what would happen if, God forbid, we were caught. Luckily, although we had to identify ourselves several times, we got to our appointed meeting place on time and undetected. The man who was to take us to Abdullah was one of his most trusted associates, a Bedouin whom the king had adopted and reared since childhood and who was used to running perilous errands for his master.

In his car, its windows covered with heavy black material, he drove Ezra and myself to his house. While we waited for Abdullah to appear, I talked to our guide's attractive and intelligent wife, who came from a well-to-do Turkish family and complained to me bitterly about the terrible monotony of her life in Transjordan. I remember thinking that I could have done with some monotony myself at that point, but I only nodded my head sympathetically.

Then Abdullah entered the room. He was very pale and seemed under great strain. Ezra interpreted for us, and we talked for about an hour. I started the conversation by coming to the point at once. “Have you broken your promise to me, after all?” I asked him.

He didn't answer my question directly. Instead, he said, “When I made that promise, I thought I was in control of my own destiny and could do what I thought right, but since then I have learned otherwise.” Then he went on to say that before he had been alone, but now, “I am one of five,” the other four, we gathered, being Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. Still, he thought war could be averted.

“Why are you in such a hurry to proclaim your state?” he asked me. “What is the rush? You are so impatient!” I told him that I didn't think that a people who had waited 2,000 years should be described as being “in a hurry,” and he seemed to accept that.

“Don't you understand,” I said, “that we are your only allies in this region? The others are all your enemies.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know that. But what can I do? It is not up to me.”

So, then I said to him, “You must know that if war is forced upon us, we will fight and we will win.”

He sighed and again said, “Yes. I know that. It is your duty to fight. But why don't you wait a few years? Drop your demands for free immigration. I will take over the whole country and you will be represented in my parliament. I will treat you very well, and there will be no war.”

I tried to explain to him that this plan was impossible. “You know all that we have done and how hard we have worked,” I said. “Do you think we did all that just to be represented in a foreign parliament? You know what we want and to what we aspire.

If you can offer us nothing more than you have just done, then there will be a war and we will win it. But perhaps we can meet again—after the war and after there is a Jewish state.”

“You place much too much reliance on your tanks,” Danin said.

“You have no real friends in the Arab world, and we will smash your tanks as the Maginot Line was smashed.” They were very brave words, particularly since Danin knew exactly what the state of our armor was. But Abdullah looked even graver and said again that he knew that we had to do our duty. He also added, unhappily I thought, that events would just have to run their course.

All of us would know eventually what fate had in store for us.

There was obviously no more to say. I wanted to leave, but Danin and Abdullah had begun a new conversation.

“I hope we will stay in touch even after the war starts,” Danin said.

“Of course,” Abdullah answered. “You must come to see me.”

“But how will I be able to get to you?” asked Danin.

“Oh, I trust you to find a way,” Abdullah said with a smile.

Then Danin chided him for not taking adequate precautions.

“You worship at the mosque,” he said to Abdullah, “and permit your subjects to kiss the hem of your garments. One day some evildoer will harm you. The time has come for you to forbid the custom, for safety's sake.”

Abdullah was visibly shocked. “I shall never become the prisoner of my own guards,” he said very sternly to Danin. “I was born a Sedouin, a free man, and I shall remain free. Let those who wish to kill me try to do so. I will not put myself in chains.” Then he bid farewell and left.

Our host's wife invited us to eat. At one end of the room there is an enormous table laden with food. I wasn't at all hungry, but be represented in my parliament. I will treat you very well, and there will be no war.”

I tried to explain to him that this plan was impossible. “You know all that we have done and how hard we have worked,” I said. “Do you think we did all that just to be represented in a foreign parliament? You know what we want and to what we aspire.

If you can offer us nothing more than you have just done, then there will be a war and we will win it. But perhaps we can meet again—after the war and after there is a Jewish state.”

“You place much too much reliance on your tanks,” Danin said.

“You have no real friends in the Arab world, and we will smash your tanks as the Maginot Line was smashed.” They were very brave words, particularly since Danin knew exactly what the state of our armor was. But Abdullah looked even graver and said again that he knew that we had to do our duty. He also added, unhappily I thought, that events would just have to run their course.

All of us would know eventually what fate had in store for us.

There was obviously no more to say. I wanted to leave, but Danin and Abdullah had begun a new conversation.

“I hope we will stay in touch even after the war starts,” Danin said.

“Of course,” Abdullah answered. “You must come to see me.”

“But how will I be able to get to you?” asked Danin.

“Oh, I trust you to find a way,” Abdullah said with a smile.

Then Danin chided him for not taking adequate precautions.

“You worship at the mosque,” he said to Abdullah, “and permit your subjects to kiss the hem of your garments. One day some evildoer will harm you. The time has come for you to forbid the custom, for safety's sake.”

Abdullah was visibly shocked. “I shall never become the prisoner of my own guards,” he said very sternly to Danin. “I was born a Bedouin, a free man, and I shall remain free. Let those who wish to kill me try to do so. I will not put myself in chains.” Then he bid us farewell and left.

Our host's wife invited us to eat. At one end of the room there was an enormous table laden with food. I wasn't at all hungry, but Danin told me that I must fill my plate—whether I ate or not— because otherwise it would appear that I was abstaining from accepting Arab hospitality. So, I heaped the plate but only toyed with the food. There was no doubt left in my mind that Abdullah would wage war against us. And for all of Danin's bravado, I knew that the legion's tanks were no joke, and my heart sank at the thought of the news I would have to bring back to Tel Aviv. It was now nearly midnight. We still had a long and dangerous trip ahead of us—and this time we wouldn't be bolstered by any false hopes.

After a few minutes we took our leave and departed. It was a very dark night, and the Arab driver who was to take us back to Naharayim (from there we would drive to Haifa) was terrified each time the car was stopped at a legion check post. In the end he made us get out some distance before we reached the power station. By now it was two or three o'clock in the morning, and we were faced with having to find our way back alone. Neither of us was armed, and I must admit that I was very frightened, as well as very depressed. From the windows of the car, we had seen the Iraqi forces massing at Camp Mafraq and had talked in whispers of what would happen on May 14. I remember my heart pounding when Danin said, “If we are lucky—and victorious—we will only lose ten thousand men. If we are unlucky, we may have up to fifty thousand casualties.” I was so upset by this that by common consent we changed the subject, and for the rest of the trip we talked about Moslem tradition and Arab cuisine. But stumbling around in the dark, we couldn't talk at all. In fact, we didn't even dare breathe too loudly. I was badly hampered by the clothes I was wearing, not at all sure that we were going in the right direction and unable to shake off my depression and sense of failure about the talk with Abdullah.

I suppose Danin and I must have been walking for about half an hour when the young Haganah member from Naharayim who had been waiting for us in a fever of anxiety all night—suddenly spotted us. I couldn't see his face in the dark, but I don't think I ever held onto anyone's hand so tightly or with such relief.

Anyhow, he led us effortlessly over the hills and across the wadis to Naharayim. I saw him again only a few years ago when a middle-aged man came up to me in the lobby of a Jerusalem hotel.

“Mrs. Meir,” he said, “don't you recognize me?” I searched my mind but couldn't place him at all until he grinned at me very sweetly and said, “It was I who showed you the way back to Naharayim that night.”

But I never saw Abdullah again, although after the War of Independence there were prolonged negotiations with him. Later I was told that he said about me, “If any one person was responsible for the war, it was she, because she was too proud to accept the offer I made her.” I must say that when I think of what would have befallen us as a “protected” minority in the kingdom of an Arab ruler who was himself murdered by Arabs within just over two years, I can't bring myself to regret the fact that I disappointed Abdullah so much that night. But I wish that he had been brave enough to stay out of the war. It would have been so much better for him—and for us—if he had been a little prouder.

At all events, from Naharayim, I was driven straight back to Tel Aviv. The next morning there was to be a meeting at the headquarters of the Mapaial most incessant rounds of meetings were going on, of course, all that week—and I knew that Ben-Gurion would be there. When I entered the room, he lifted his head, looked at me and said, “Nu?” I sat down and scribbled a note. “It didn't work,” I wrote. “There will be war. From Mafraq Ezra and I saw the troop concentrations and the lights.” I could hardly bear to watch Ben-Gurion's face as he read the note, but thank God, he didn't change his mind—or ours.

Within two days the final decision had to be taken: Should a Jewish state be proclaimed or not? After I had reported on my conversation with Abdullah, a number of people on the Minhelet Haam (literally the People's Administration), made up of members of the Jewish Agency, the Vaad Leumi and various small parties and groups which later became the provisional government of Israel, pressed Ben-Gurion for one last evaluation of the situation. They wanted to know what the Haganah's assessment was at zero hour. So, Ben-Gurion called in two men: Yigael Yadin, who was the Haganah's chief of operations, and Yisrael Galili, who was its de facto commander in chief. Their answers were virtually identical—and terrifying. We could be sure of only two things, they said: The British would pull out, and the Arabs would invade. And then? They were both silent. But after a minute Yadin said, “The best we can tell you is that we have a fifty-fifty chance. We are as likely to win as we are to be defeated.” So it was on that bright note that the final decision was made.

On Friday, May 14, 1948 (the fifth of Iyar, 5708, according to the Hebrew calendar), the Jewish state would come into being, its population numbering 650,000, its chance of surviving its birth depending on whether or not the yishuv could possibly meet the assault of five regular Arab armies actively aided by Palestine's 1,000,000 Arabs.

According to the original plan, I was to return to Jerusalem on Thursday and remain there for the duration. Needless to say, I very much wanted to stay in Tel Aviv, at least for long enough to attend the proclamation ceremony the time and place of which were being kept secret (except for the 200odd invitees) until about an hour before the event. All day Wednesday I hoped against hope that Ben-Gurion would relent, but he was adamant.

“You must go back to Jerusalem,” he said. So, on Thursday, May 13, I was back in that little Piper Cub again. The pilot's orders were to take me to Jerusalem and return to Tel Aviv at once with Yitzhak Gruenbaum, who was to be the minister of interior in the provisional government. But as soon as we got past the coastal plain and reached the Judean Hills, the engine began to act up in the most alarming way. I was sitting next to the pilot (those tiny planes, which we affectionately called Primuses, boasted only two seats), and I could see that even he was very nervous. The engine began to sound as though it were about to break away from the plane altogether, and I wasn't really surprised when the pilot said, apologetically, “I'm awfully sorry, but I don't think I can clear the hills. I'll have to go back.” He turned the plane around; but the engine went on making dreadful sounds, and I noticed that the pilot was looking around below. I didn't say a word, yet after a while the engine picked up a bit and he asked me, “Do you know what is happening?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“I was looking,” he said, “for the most likely Arab village where we could land.” This was on May 13, mind you. Then he added, “But now I think I can put down in Ben Shemen.” At that point, the engine improved a bit more. “No,” he said, “I think we can make it back to Tel Aviv.”

So, I was able to attend the ceremony after all, and poor Yitzhak Gruenbaum had to stay in Jerusalem and couldn't sign the Declaration of Independence until after the first ceasefire.

On the morning of May 14, I participated in a meeting of the People's Council at which we were to decide on the name of the state and on the final formulation of the declaration. The name was less of a problem than the declaration because there was a lastminute argument about the inclusion of a reference to God.

Actually, the issue had been brought up the day before. The very last sentence, as finally submitted to the small subcommittee charged with producing the final version of the proclamation, began with the words “With trust in the Rock of Israel, we set our hands in witness to this Proclamation. ...” Ben-Gurion had hoped that the phrase “Rock of Israel” was sufficiently ambiguous to satisfy those Jews for whom it was inconceivable that the document which established the Jewish state should not contain any reference to God, as well as those who were certain to object strenuously to even the least hint of clericalism in the proclamation.

But the compromise was not so easily accepted. The spokesman of the religious parties, Rabbi Fishman Maimon, demanded that the reference to God be unequivocal and said that he would approve of the “Rock of Israel” only if the words “and its Redeemer” were added, while Aaron Zisling of the left wing of the Labor Party was just as determined in the opposite direction. “I cannot sign a document referring in any way to a God in whom I do not believe,” he said. It took Ben-Gurion most of the morning to persuade Maimon and Zisling that the meaning of the “Rock of Israel” was actually twofold: While it signified “God” for a great many.

Jews, perhaps for most, it could also be considered a symbolic and secular reference to the “strength of the Jewish people.” In the end Maimon agreed that the word “Redeemer” should be left out of the text, though, funnily enough, the first English language translation of the proclamation, released for publication abroad that day, contained no reference at all to the “Rock of Israel” since the military censor had struck out the entire last paragraph as a security precaution because it mentioned the time and place of the ceremony.

The argument itself, however, although it was perhaps not exactly what one would have expected a prime minister designate to be spending his time on only a few hours before proclaiming the independence of a new state particularly one threatened by immediate invasion was far from being just an argument about terminology. We were all deeply aware of the fact that the proclamation not only spelled the formal end to 2,000 years of Jewish homelessness, but also gave expression to the most fundamental principles of the State of Israel. For this reason, each and every word mattered greatly. Incidentally, my good friend Zeev Sharef, the first secretary of the government to-be (who laid the foundations for the machinery of government), even found time to see to it that the scroll we were about to sign that afternoon should be rushed to the vaults of the Anglo Palestine Bank after the ceremony, so that it could at least be preserved for posterity even if the state and we ourselves did not survive for very long.

At about 2 P.M. I went back to my hotel on the seashore, washed my hair and changed into my best black dress. Then I sat down for a few minutes, partly to catch my breath, partly to think for the first time in the past two or three days—about the children.

Menachem was in the United States then—a student at the Manhattan School of Music. I knew that he would come back now that war was inevitable, and I wondered when and how we would meet again. Sarah was in Revivim, and although not so very far away, as the crow flies, we were quite cut off from each other. Months ago, gangs of Palestinian Arabs and armed infiltrators from Egypt had blocked the road that connected the Negev to the rest of the country and were still systematically blowing up or cutting most of the pipelines that brought water to the twenty-seven Jewish settlements that then dotted the Negev. The Haganah had done its best to break the siege. It had opened a dirt track, parallel to the main road, on which convoys managed, now and then, to bring food and water to the 1,000odd settlers in the south. But who knew what would happen to Revivim or any other of the small, ill-armed ill-equipped Negev settlements when the full-scale Egyptian invasion of Israel began, as it almost certainly would, within only a few hours? Both Sarah and her Zechariah were wireless operators in Revivim, and I had been able to keep in touch with them up till then. But I hadn't heard about or from either of them for several days, and I was extremely worried. It was on youngsters like them, their spirit and their courage, that the future of the Negev and, therefore, of Israel depended, and I shuddered at the thought of their having to face the invading troops of the Egyptian army.

I was so lost in my thoughts about the children that I can remember being momentarily surprised when the phone rang in my room and I was told that a car was waiting to take me to the museum. It had been decided to hold the ceremony at the Tel Aviv museum on Rothschild Boulevard, not because it was such an imposing building (which it wasn't), but because it was small enough to be easily guarded. One of the oldest buildings in Tel Aviv, it had originally belonged to the city's first mayor, who had willed it to the citizens of Tel Aviv for use as an art museum. The grand total of about $200 had been allocated for decorating it suitably for the ceremony; the floors had been scrubbed, the nude paintings on the walls modestly draped, the windows blacked out in case of an air raid and a large picture of Theodor Herzl hung behind the table at which the thirteen members of the provisional government were to sit. Although supposedly only the 200odd people who had been invited to participate knew the details, a large crowd was already waiting outside the museum by the time I arrived there.

A few minutes later, at exactly 4 P.M., the ceremony began.

Ben-Gurion, wearing a dark suit and tie, stood up and rapped a gavel. According to the plan, this was to be the signal for the orchestra, tucked away in a second-floor gallery, to play “Hatikvah.” But something went wrong, and there was no music. Spontaneously, we rose to our feet and sang our national anthem. Then Ben-Gurion cleared his throat and said quietly, “I shall now read the Scroll of Independence.” It took him only a quarter of an hour to read the entire proclamation. He read it slowly and very clearly, and I remember his voice changing and rising a little as he came to the eleventh paragraph:

Accordingly we, the members of the National Council, representing the Jewish people in the Land of Israel and the Zionist movement, have assembled on the day of the termination of the British mandate for Palestine, and, by virtue of our natural and historic right and of the resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations, do hereby proclaim the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel the State of Israel.

The State of Israel! My eyes filled with tears, and my hands shook. We had done it. We had brought the Jewish state into existence—and I, Golda Mabovitch Meyerson, had lived to see the day. Whatever happened now, whatever price any of us would have to pay for it, we had recreated the Jewish national home. The long. exile was over. From this day on we would no longer live on sufferance in the land of our forefathers. Now we were a nation like other nations, master—for the first time in twenty centuries of our own destiny. The dream had come true—too late to save those who had perished in the Holocaust, but not too late for the generations to come. Almost exactly fifty years ago, at the close of the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Theodor Herzl had written in his diary: “At Basel, I founded the Jewish state. If I were to say this today, I would be greeted with laughter. In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty, everyone will see it.” And so, it had come to pass.

As Ben-Gurion read, I thought again about my children and the children that they would have, how different their lives would be from mine and how different my own life would be from what it had been in the past, and I thought about my colleagues in besieged Jerusalem, gathered in the offices of the Jewish Agency, listening to the ceremony through static on the radio, while I, by sheer accident, was in the museum itself. It seemed to me that no Jew on earth had ever been more privileged than I was that Friday afternoon.

Then, as though a signal had been given, we rose to our feet, crying and clapping, while Ben-Gurion, his voice breaking for the only time, read: “The State of Israel will be open to Jewish immigration and the ingathering of exiles.” This was the very heart of the proclamation, the reason for the state and the point of it all. I remember sobbing out loud when I heard those words spoken in that hot, packed little hall. But Ben-Gurion just rapped his gavel again for order and went on reading:

“Even amidst the violent attacks launched against us for months past, we call upon the sons of the Arab people dwelling in Israel to keep the peace and to play their part in building the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its institutions, provisional and permanent.”

And: “We extend the hand of peace and good neighborliness to all the states around us and to their peoples, and we call upon them to cooperate in mutual helpfulness with the independent Jewish nation in its land. The State of Israel is prepared to make its contribution in a concerted effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.”

When he finished reading the 979 Hebrew words of the proclamation, he asked us to stand and “adopt the scroll establishing the Jewish state,” so once again we rose to our feet. Then, something quite unscheduled and very moving happened. All of a sudden Rabbi Fishman Maimon stood up and, in a trembling voice, pronounced the traditional Hebrew prayer of thanksgiving. “Blessed be Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has kept us alive and made us endure and brought us to this day. Amen.” It was a prayer that I had heard often, but it had never held such meaning for me as it did that day.

Before we came up, each in turn, in alphabetical order, to sign the proclamation, there was one other point of “business” that required our attention. Ben-Gurion read the first decrees of the new state. The White Paper was declared null and void, while, to avoid a legal vacuum, all the other mandatory rules and regulations were declared valid and in temporary effect. Then the signing began. As I got up from my seat to sign my name to the scroll, I caught sight of Ada Golomb, standing not far away. I wanted to go over to her, take her in my arms and tell her that I knew that Eliahu and Dov should have been there in my place, but I couldn't hold up the line of the signatories, so I walked straight to the middle of the table, where Ben-Gurion and Sharett sat with the scroll between them. All I recall about my actual signing of the proclamation is that I was crying openly, not able even to wipe the tears from my face, and I remember that as Sharett held the scroll in place for me, a man called David Zvi Pincus, who belonged to the religious Mizrachi Party, came over to try and calm me. “Why do you weep so much, Golda?” he asked me.

“Because it breaks my heart to think of all those who should have been here today and are not,” I replied, but I still couldn't stop crying.

Only twenty-five members of the People's Council signed the proclamation on May 14. Eleven others were in Jerusalem, and one was in the States. The last to sign was Moshe Sharett. He looked very controlled and calm compared to me—as though he were merely performing a standard duty. Later, when once we talked about that day, he told me that when he wrote his name on the scroll, he felt as though he were standing on a cliff with a gale blowing up all around him and nothing to hold on to except his determination not to be blown over into the raging sea below— but none of this showed at the time.

After the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra played “Hatikvah,” Ben-Gurion rapped his gavel for the third time. “The State of Israel is established. This meeting is ended.” We all shook hands and embraced each other. The ceremony was over. Israel was a reality.

Not unexpectedly, the evening was filled with suspense. I stayed in the hotel, talking to friends. Someone opened a bottle of wine, and we drank a toast to the state. A few of the guests and their young Haganah escorts sang and danced, and we heard people laughing and singing in the street. But we knew that at midnight the mandate would terminate, the British high commissioner would sail away, the last British soldier would leave Palestine, and we were certain that the Arab armies would march across the borders of the state we had just founded. We were independent now, but in a few hours, we would be at war. Not only was I not gay, but I was very frightened—and with good reason. Still, there is a great difference between being frightened and lacking faith, and although the entire Jewish population of the reborn state numbered only 650,000, I knew for certain that night that we had dug in and that no one would be able to disperse or displace us ever again.

But I think it was only on the following day that I really grasped what had happened in the Tel Aviv Museum. Three separate but very closely linked events brought the truth home to me as nothing else could have done, and I realized, perhaps for the first time, that nothing would ever be the same again. Not for me, not for the Jewish people, not for the Middle East. To begin with, just before dawn on Saturday, I saw for myself through the windows of my room what might be called the formal start of the War of Independence: four Egyptian Spitfires zooming across the city on their way to bomb Tel Aviv's power station and airport in what was the first air raid of the war. Then, a little later, I watched the first boatload of Jewish immigrants—no longer “illegals” enter the port of Tel Aviv, freely and proudly. No one hunted them down anymore or chased them or punished them for coming home. The shameful era of the “certificates” and the human arithmetic had ended, and as I stood there in the sun, my eyes fixed on that ship (an old Greek vessel called the SS Teti), I felt that no price demanded of us for this gift could possibly be too high. The first legal immigrant to land in the State of Israel was a tired, shabby old man called Samuel Brand, a survivor of Buchenwald. In his hand he clutched a crumpled slip of paper. It said only, “The right to settle in Israel is hereby given;” but it was signed by the “Immigration Department” of the state, and it was the first visa we ever issued.

And then, of course, there was the wonderful moment of our formal entry into the family of nations. A few minutes after midnight on the night of May 14, my phone rang. It had been ringing all evening, and as I ran to answer it, I wondered what bad news I would hear now. But the voice at the other end of the phone sounded jubilant. “Golda? Are you listening? Truman has recognized us!” I can't remember what I said or did, but I remember how I felt. It was like a miracle coming at the time of our greatest vulnerability, on the eve of the invasion, and I was filled with joy and relief. In a way, although all Israel rejoiced and gave thanks, I think that what President Truman did that night may have meant more to me than to most of my colleagues because I was the

“American” among us, the one who knew most about the United States, its history and its people, the only one who had grown up in that great democracy. And although I was as astonished as everyone else by the speed of the recognition, I was not at all surprised by the generous and good impulse that had brought it about. In retrospect, I think that like most miracles, this one was probably triggered by two very simple things: the fact that Harry Truman understood and respected our drive for independence because he was the sort of man who, under different circumstances, might well have been one of us himself, and the profound impression made on him by Chaim Weizmann, whom he had received in Washington and who had pleaded our cause and explained our situation in a way that no one had ever done in the White House before. Weizmann's work was of incalculable value.

American recognition was the greatest thing that could have happened to us that night.

As for the Soviet recognition of Israel, which followed the American recognition, that had other roots. There is now no doubt in my mind that the primary Soviet consideration was to get the British out of the Middle East. But all through the debates that had taken place at the United Nations in the autumn of 1947, it had seemed to me that the Soviet bloc was supporting us also because of the terrible toll that the Russians themselves had paid in the world war and their resultantly deep feeling that the Jews, who had also suffered so bitterly at the hands of the Nazis, deserved to have their state. However radically the Soviet attitude has changed in the intervening two and a half decades, I cannot now falsify the picture as I saw it then. Had it not been for the arms and ammunition that we were able to buy in Czechoslovakia and transport through Yugoslavia and other Balkan countries in those dark days at the start of the war, I do not know whether we actually could have held out until the tide changed, as it did by June 1948. For the first six weeks of the War of Independence, we relied largely (though not, of course, entirely) on the shells, machine guns, bullets—and even planes—that the Haganah had been able to purchase in Eastern Europe at a time when even the United States had declared an embargo on the sale or shipment of arms to the Middle East. One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present, and the fact remains that although the Soviet Union was to turn so savagely against and upon us in the years to come, the Soviet recognition of the State of Israel on May 18 was of immense significance for us.

It meant that the two greatest powers in the world had come together, for the first time since World War II, to back the Jewish state, and although we were still in deadly danger, we knew, at last, that we were not alone. It was in that knowledge combined with sheer necessity—that we found the spiritual, if not the material, strength that was to lead us to victory.

Also, while I am on this subject, let me say—for the record— that the second state to offer recognition to Israel on the day of its birth was little Guatemala, whose ambassador to the United Nations, Jorge García Granados, had been one of the most active members of UNSCOP.

So now we were an accepted fact. The only question that remained—and, incredibly enough, remains to this very day—was how we would stay alive. Not “if,” but “how.” By the morning of May 15 Israel was already under armed attack by the Egyptians from the south, the Syrian and Lebanese from the north and the northeast, the Jordanians and the Iraqis from the east. On paper it seemed that week as though there might be some grounds for the Arab boast that within ten days Israel would be crushed.

The most relentless advance was that of the Egyptians—though of all the invading armies, the Egyptians certainly had least to gain. Abdullah had a reason. It was a bad one; but it was there, and he was able to define it: He wanted the whole country and especially Jerusalem. Lebanon and Syria also had a reason: They hoped to be able to divide up the Galilee between themselves. Iraq wanted to participate in the bloodletting and—as a fringe benefit—acquire an outlet to the Mediterranean, through Jordan if necessary. But Egypt had no real war aim at all—except to loot and destroy whatever the Jews had built. As a matter of fact, it has never ceased to astonish me that the Arab states have been so eager to go to war against us. Almost from the very beginning of Zionist settlement until today they have been consumed by hatred for us. The only possible explanation—and it is a ridiculous one— is that they simply cannot bear our presence or forgive us for existing, and I find it hard to believe that the leaders of all the Arab states are and always have been so hopelessly primitive in their thinking.

On the other hand, what have we ever done to threaten the Arab states? True, we have not stood in line to return territory we won in wars they started, but territory, after all, has never ever been what Arab aggression is all about—and in 1948 it was certainly not a need for more land that drove the Egyptians northward in the hope of reaching and destroying Tel Aviv and Jewish Jerusalem. So, what was it? An overpowering irrational urge to eliminate us physically? Fear of the progress we might introduce in the Middle East? A distaste for Western civilization? Who knows? Whatever it was, it has lasted—but then so have we—and the solution will probably not be found for many years, although I have no doubt at all that the time will come when the Arab states will accept us—as we are and for what we are. In a nutshell, peace is—and always has been dependent entirely on only one thing:

The Arab leaders must acquiesce in our being here.

In 1948, however, it was understandable that the Arab states— given in any case to chronic flights of fancy—saw themselves as racing through what was now Israel in a matter of days. To begin with, they had begun the war, which gave them great tactical superiority. Secondly, they had easy, not to say effortless, overland access to Palestine, with its Arab population, which had been incited against the Jews for years. Thirdly, the Arabs could move without any problems from one part of the country to the other.

Fourthly, the Arabs controlled most of the hilly regions of Palestine from which our lowland settlements could be attacked without much difficulty. Finally, the Arabs had an absolute superiority of manpower and arms and had been given considerable help by the British in various ways, both direct and indirect.

And what did we have? Not much of anything—and even that is an exaggeration. A few thousand rifles, a few hundred machine guns, an assortment of other firearms, but on May 14, 1948, not a single cannon or tank, although we had all of nine planes (never mind that only one had two engines!). The machinery for making arms had been bought abroad—thanks to Ben-Gurion's amazing foresight—but couldn't be brought into Israel until the British had left, and then it had to be assembled and run in. Our trained manpower situation was also very unimpressive, as far as statistics were concerned. There were about 45,000 men, women and teenagers in the Haganah, a few thousand members of the two dissident underground organizations and a few hundred recent arrivals who had been given some training with wooden rifles and dummy bullets—in the DP camps of Germany and the detention camps of Cyprus and after independence, another few thousand Jewish and non-Jewish volunteers from abroad. That was all. But we couldn't afford the luxury of pessimism either, so we made an altogether different kind of calculation based on the fact that the 650,000 of us were more highly motivated to stay alive than anyone outside Israel could be expected to understand and that the only option available to us, if we didn't want to be pushed into the sea, was to win the war. So, we won it. But it wasn't easy, it wasn't quick, and it wasn't cheap. From the day that the UN resolution to partition Palestine was passed (November 29, 1947) until the day that the first armistice agreement was signed by Israel and Egypt (February 24, 1949) 6,000 young Israelis were killed, 1 percent of our entire population, and although we couldn't have known it then, we hadn't even bought peace with all those lives.

For me to have had to leave Israel the moment the state was established was more difficult than I can say. The very last thing I wanted to do was to go abroad, but on Sunday, May 16, a cable came from Henry Montor, vice-president of the United Jewish Appeal. American Jewry had been profoundly moved by what had happened. There were no limits to its excitement or its pride.

If I came back, even for a short tour, he thought we might raise another $50,000,000. No one knew better than I what that kind of money would mean to Israel, how desperately we needed the arms it would buy or how much it would cost to move and settle the 30,000 Jews penned up in Cyprus, who had waited so long to come to Israel. My heart sank at the thought of tearing myself away from the country, but there was no real choice at all. After discussing the matter with Ben-Gurion, I cabled back at once that I would leave on the first plane. Luckily, there were no preparations to make for the trip. My clothes, such as they were, were all in Jerusalem, as out of reach as though they were on the moon, so all I had to “pack” was a hairbrush, a toothbrush and a clean blouse, though when I got to New York, I discovered that the veil I had worn to Amman was still in my bag! I managed to speak to Sarah briefly and tell her that I would be back in a month at the very most and to receive a hastily produced laissez-passer, which was, in fact, the first travel document to be given any citizen of the State of Israel. Then I left on the very first plane that was available.

In the States I was greeted as though I were the personification of Israel. Over and over again I told the story of the proclamation, of the beginning of the war, of the continuing siege of Jerusalem, and over and over again I assured the Jews of America that with their help Israel would prevail. I spoke in city after city throughout the States, at UJA lunches, dinners and teas and at parlor meetings in people's homes. Whenever I felt overwhelmed by fatigue—which was often—all I had to do was to remind myself that I was now talking as an emissary of a Jewish state, and my tiredness. simply drained away. It even took me weeks to accustom myself to the sound of the word “Israel” and to the fact that I now had a new nationality. But the purpose of my journey was not in the least sentimental. I had come to raise money, as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, and my message was as blunt in May as it had been in January. The State of Israel, I told Jews all over America, could not survive on applause. The war would not be won by speeches or declarations or even tears of happiness.

And time was of the essence, or there would be nothing to applaud.

“We cannot go on without your help,” I said in dozens of public and private appearances. “What we ask of you is that you share in our responsibility, with everything that this implies— difficulties, problems, hardships and joys. Surely what is happening in the Jewish world today is so important, so vital that you, too, can change your way of life for a year, or two, or three until together we have put Israel on its feet. Make up your minds and give me your answers.”

They answered me with unprecedented generosity and speed, with their whole hearts and souls. Nothing was too much or too good, and by their response they reaffirmed their sense of partnership with us, as I had hoped they would. Although there was as yet no separate drive for Israel, and although less than 50 percent of the $150,000,000 raised for the UJA in 1948 actually went to Israel (the rest was turned over to the Joint Distribution Committee for aid to Jews in European countries), that 50 percent unquestionably helped us win the war. It also taught us that the involvement of American Jewry in the State of Israel was a factor on which we could count.

As I traveled, I met many people who were themselves later to become “spokesmen” of the state, men who had not been intimately involved in the Zionist effort before 1948, but who now were moved to make Israel their life's work—and who were to be my close associates in the founding of the Israel Bond Organization in 1950. In the past, whenever I had come to the United States, it had been on missions for the Histadrut, and I had spent my time almost entirely with Labor Zionists. But in 1948 I met a new kind of American Jew—well-to-do, super-efficient and totally committed. In the first instance there was, of course, Henry Montor himself, brusque, gifted and deeply concerned with Israel, a slave driver who mercilessly drove himself as well as others in the attempt to raise ever larger sums of money. But there were also businessmen, hardheaded, experienced industrialists like Bill Rosenwald, Sam Rothberg, Lou Boyar and Harold Goldenberg, to name just a few of the men with whom I found time to talk hurriedly on that whirlwind tour about the possibility of selling bonds for Israel, as well as making appeals for philanthropy.

But all the time I waited anxiously for the moment when I could return home, although I already knew that the newly created Foreign Office, particularly the new foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, had other plans for me. The day before I left for the States, Sharett and I had met in my hotel, and he had spoken to me of the problems of manning the embassies and consulates that Israel would have to establish in those countries that had either already recognized it or were likely to do so within a few weeks.

“I have no one for Moscow,” he said in a very worried voice.

“Well, thank God, you can't offer it to me,” I replied. “My Russian is almost nonexistent.”

“As a matter of fact, that isn't what matters,” he answered. But he didn't pursue the topic and I tried to dismiss it as a good joke.

Although I sometimes thought about that conversation when I was flying from one place to another in the States, I fervently hoped that Sharett himself had forgotten all about it.

One day, however, a cable came from Tel Aviv. I glanced at the signature before I read the text to make sure that it wasn't about Sarah or Menachem (already with his brigade and in combat). But when I saw the name Moshe, I knew that it was about Moscow, and I had to steel myself to read the message. The state was not even a month old. The war was not over. The children were not yet safe. I had a family and dear friends in Israel, and it seemed to me that it was grossly unfair to ask me to pack my bags again so soon and take off for such a remote and essentially unknown post.

“Why is it always me?” I thought, in a burst of self-pity. There were plenty of other people who could do the job as well, better in fact. And Russia of all places, the country I had left as a little girl and of which I had not a single pleasant memory. At least in America I was doing something real, concrete and practical, but what did I know or care about diplomacy? Of all my comrades, I thought, I was surely the least suited to diplomatic life. But I also knew that Sharett must have secured Ben-Gurion's consent to the appointment, and Ben-Gurion was certainly not likely to be swayed by any personal appeals. And then there was the matter of discipline. Who was I to disobey or even demur at a time when each day brought news of fresh casualties? One's duty was one's duty—and it had nothing to do with justice. So, what if I longed to be in Israel? Other people longed for their children to be alive or whole again. So, after a few more cables and telephone calls, I answered Sharett's cable, not very enthusiastically but affirmatively.

“When I get back to Israel, I will try to persuade Moshe and Ben-Gurion that they have made a mistake,” I promised myself.

At the end of the first week of June, however, my appointment as Israel's minister to Moscow was made public.

I took a day off to see old friends in New York and say goodbye to new ones. I was determined to visit Fanny and Jacob Goodman before I left. Neither the children nor I had ever lost touch with them, and I thought it would cheer me up to spend an hour or two with them, telling them about Sarah and Zechariah and Sheyna's children, whom they hadn't seen for so long. But I never got to their house. On the way to Brooklyn a car crashed into my cab, and the next thing I knew I had a badly fractured leg enveloped in a gigantic plaster cast and my address for the next few weeks was neither Moscow nor Tel Aviv, but the New York Hospital for Joint Diseases! Looking back at the times and at my mood, I think that nothing including the blessing of the phlebitis and blood clots I developed) could have kept me in that hospital had it not been for the fact that on June 11, the fighting had temporarily ended in Israel.

By June 11, the progress of the Arab invasion had been halted.

The Egyptian attempt to conquer Tel Aviv and Jerusalem had failed, although the Jordanians were still battering away at Jerusalem from the east and the north, and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City had fallen to Abdullah's Arab Legion. The Syrians, although their advance in the north had been stopped, still held a bridgehead on the Jordan River, and the Iraqis were still poised against the narrowest part of the country in Samaria. The United Nations had been trying for weeks to impose a truce, but as long as they had some hope of defeating Israel, the Arabs were not at all interested. However, as soon as it became quite clear to them, as well as to us, that this was not about to happen, they agreed to a ceasefire—to the first truce, which was to last for twenty-eight days and gave us a chance to rest, rally and plan the major offensives that in July removed the last threats to Tel Aviv and the coastal plain, lifted the siege on Jerusalem and destroyed all the major Arab bases in the Galilee.

So, in theory, pain or no pain, I might have caught my breath a bit in the hospital—both physically and emotionally—but actually I was under enormous pressure there all the time. To begin with, there were the television cameras and the newspapermen. A woman minister to Moscow would have been a novelty in any case in 1948, but a woman minister to Moscow who represented the tiny embattled State of Israel and who was totally immobilized in New York must have been a real bargain. I suppose I could have refused to be interviewed—and today, of course, that is just what I would do under such circumstances. But at that time, I thought it would be good for Israel if we got a lot of publicity, and I felt that I mustn't turn down a single request from the press although the various members of the family, especially Clara, were absolutely appalled by the three-ring circus going on in my room.

What was much worse, though, was the pressure I was under to get to Moscow. I was literally bombarded with cables from Israel.

WHEN CAN YOU LEAVE NEW YORK? WHEN CAN YOU TAKE OVER? HOW DO YOU FEEL? Rumors had spread in Israel that this was a “diplomatic” illness and that nothing was really wrong with me except that I didn't want to go to Russia. But as if this disgusting whispering campaign was not bad enough, there were also indications that the Soviet government was offended by my supposed “malingering,” which was “actually” a tactic designed to delay the exchange of ministers so that the U.S. ambassador to Israel could arrive first and thus become dean of the diplomatic corps. All this was something I had to take very seriously, regardless of my state of health. So, there was nothing I could do except start tormenting my doctors for permission to leave the hospital. It was, need I say, the wrong thing to have done. I should have remained in New York until I was completely well. Both our Foreign Office and the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs would have survived without me for a few more weeks and I would have spared myself a great deal of misery and at least one operation later on. But one of the penalties of public office is that one loses one's sense of proportion in certain respects, and I was convinced that there would be some kind of terrible crisis unless I turned up in Moscow as soon as possible.

I did make one attempt, when I got back to Israel, to talk Sharett out of the whole thing, but by then it wasn't a very wholehearted attempt. One day I heard an interesting story that cheered me up: Ehud Avriel, one of the Haganah men who had done most to secure arms for us in Czechoslovakia and who later became Israel's first minister to Prague, had been invited for a talk with the Soviet ambassador in that city. In the course of the conversation the Russian said to Avriel, “I suppose your people are looking around for someone to send to Moscow. Don't feel that it has to be a person whose Russian is fluent or who is an expert on Marxism and Leninism. Neither of these qualifications is important.” Then, after a while, as though à propos of nothing, he said to Avriel, “By the way, what is happening to Mrs. Meyerson? Is she going to stay in Israel or does she have other plans?” From this my friends including Sharett gathered that the Russians had more or less asked for me, in their own way, and I began to feel differently about going.

Also, one of the few pleasant things that had occurred while I was in the hospital was that one morning I got a cable from Tel Aviv: DO YOU HAVE ANY OBJECTION TO APPOINTMENT OF SARAH AND ZECHARIAH AS RADIO OPERATORS IN MOSCOW EMBASSY? I was very touched—and grateful. To have Sarah and Zechariah with me in Russia was almost worth the exile from Israel. One of my first projects when I came back to Tel Aviv was to ask Sheyna if Sarah and Zechariah could be married in the small house which Shamai and she had bought years ago. We decided it would be a real family wedding, with only a few “outside” guests. My father had died in 1946—another of the people who were most dear to me and who had not lived to see the state and my mother, poor soul, had been incapacitated for several years, her memory gone, her eyesight bad, her personality quite faded away, leaving almost not race of the critical, energetic, peppery woman she had been. But Morris was there, as gentle as ever and beaming with pride, and so were Zechariah's parents. His father had come to Palestine from Yemen when the Turks still ruled the country. He was very poor, very religious and not formally educated, except in the Torah, but he had brought up a wonderful and loving family though Zechariah himself by now was quite removed from Yemenite customs and traditions.

I settled in again at the hotel on the seashore. Sarah flew from Revivim to Tel Aviv and moved in with me for a few days, and Zechariah, who had been very ill and in a hospital near Tel Aviv for weeks, was finally discharged. Of our immediate family, only Clara and Menachem were missing at the wedding in Sheyna's garden. I couldn't help thinking how different my own wedding had been under what different circumstances it had taken place and how differently Morris and I had started out on life together.

There was no point to wondering now who had been to blame or why our marriage had fallen apart, but I felt (and rightly it turned out) that Sarah and Zechariah, although they were the same age that we had been when we stood under that bridal canopy in Milwaukee, were more mature and better suited to each other and that they would succeed where Morris and I had failed.

In between rushing around to party meetings, being briefed on the Soviet Union and making plans for our departure, I concentrated on thinking about the kind of representation that Israel should have in the Soviet Union. How did we want to show ourselves abroad? What did we want the world in general and the USSR in particular to think about Israel? What sort of state were we in the process of creating, and how could we best reflect its quality? The more I thought about it, the less I thought that our legations should mimic those of other countries. Israel was small, poor and still at war. Its government was still a provisional government (the first elections to the Knesset took place only in January 1949), but the majority of its members would certainly represent the labor movement. The face we turned to the world, I was convinced, needed no makeup at all. We had established a pioneering state in a sorely beleaguered country, devoid of natural resources or any wealth, a state to which hundreds of thousands of DPs—who also had nothing were already streaming in the hope of making a new life for themselves. If we wanted to be understood and respected by other states, we would have to be abroad what we were at home. Lavish entertaining, grand apartments, conspicuous consumption of any kind were not for us.

Austerity, modesty and a sense of our own worth and purpose were what we had to offer, and anything else would be false.

There was something at the back of my mind all the time that I was thinking along these lines, and then one day I found it. The legation in Moscow would be run in the most typically Israeli style I knew: like a kibbutz. We would work together, eat together, get the same amount of pocket money and take turns doing whatever chores had to be done. As in Merhavia or Revivim, people would do the work that they were trained for and suited to in the opinion of our Foreign Office but the spirit of the legation, its atmosphere and flavor would be that of a collective settlement—which, apart from any other consideration, ought, I believed, to be especially attractive to the Russians (not that their own brand of collectivism was or is anything to write home about). We were to be twenty-six people in all, including Sarah, Zechariah and myself, and the legation's counselor, Mordechai Namir, a widower who brought his fifteen-year-old daughter, Yael, with him. (Namir afterward served as Israel's ambassador to the USSR, then as minister of labor and, for ten years, as mayor of Tel Aviv.) As my personal assistant I chose a most charming woman, Eiga Shapiro, who not only spoke Russian, but also knew much more about the niceties of life than I did and who could be entrusted, I was sure, with such (to me terrifying) missions as deciding what furniture and clothing legation personnel and the minister would need.

Even before I returned to Tel Aviv, I wrote to Eiga to ask her to join me, if and when I indeed went to Moscow and to my delight she agreed at once. One of the notes she sent to New York at the end of June is before me now, and it tells something, I think, of what was involved in sending a woman to a top diplomatic post—particularly a woman like myself who was so determined to live in Russia in much the same way she lived at home. She wrote:

I have had a talk with Ehud. He tells me that we shall have to be very comme il faut. So please, Golda, what about a fur coat for yourself? It is very cold in the place to which you are traveling, and most people there wear fur coats in the winter. You need not buy yourself mink, but a good Persian lamb will be very serviceable... You will also need a few evening dresses, and buy yourself woollies—warm nightgowns, woolen stockings and woolen underwear. And please get yourself a pair of good snowshoes.

The question of dress was obviously not uppermost in my mind, but for a while I regretted that we had no national costume which would have solved at least one problem for me, as it did for Mrs. Pandit, the only other woman diplomat in Moscow, who wore her sari, of course, on all ceremonial occasions. In the end Eiga and I agreed that when I presented my credentials, I would wear a long black dress sewn for me in Tel Aviv and that, when necessary, I would wear a small black velvet turban with it. As far as furnishing the legation was concerned, Eiga undertook to do that in Scandinavia as soon as we found permanent accommodation in Moscow. In the interim, we would establish our “kibbutz” in a hotel. There was also the question of finding and taking with us to Russia someone whose French was absolutely perfect, since it had been decided that French would be Israel's diplomatic language. Eiga introduced me to a bright, amusing, painfully thin young woman called Lou Kaddar, who was born in Paris, whose French was beyond reproach and who had lived in Jerusalem all through the siege and had been badly wounded. I liked her the moment I set eyes on her—and it was just as well that I did, because for the better part of the next twenty-seven years Lou was my close friend, my indispensable assistant and, more often than not, my travel companion. At all events, she agreed to go with us to Russia.

I stayed in Israel long enough that summer to welcome the first U.S. ambassador to Israel, that delightfully frank and warm gentleman James G. McDonald, whom I had met before, and to meet the Russian minister, Pavel I. Yershov. It was typical of the newness of the state and of its lack of proper housing that the American and Soviet missions in Tel Aviv made their first home in the same hotel, not far from mine, and I never quite got used to seeing the stars and stripes fly from one end of the hotel roof and the hammer and sickle from the other. There were all sorts of “incidents” during the first weeks of this “coexistence.” I remember, for instance, a gala performance of the Israel National Opera at which the orchestra opened with first “Hatikvah” and then, in McDonald's honor, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but not the “Internationale,” though Yershov's counselor was present—at least until the intermission, when he and his party rather noisily walked out. Everyone in our Foreign Office was reduced to trembling in his boots until Yershov himself agreed to accept our explanation that had he been there, the Soviet anthem would have certainly been played. Today these minor disasters seem funny, but at the time we all took them very seriously. Nothing ever appeared unimportant to us, and Sharett, by nature, was both exacting and sensitive to a remarkable degree and felt—as did the Russians themselves, by the way—that protocol was of the utmost importance, although I could never see why it mattered so much.

A second truce began on July 19, signaling the start of a long, painful round of negotiations over the Negev, which Count Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish UN mediator, recommended be handed over to the Arabs. Considering the fact that he was really a referee, his position was amazingly lacking in neutrality, and he became extremely unpopular particularly when he added insult to injury by advocating also that Jerusalem be torn away from the Jewish state and that the UN supervise Israel's air and seaports.

God knows that these recommendations were unacceptable and that they proved only that Bernadotte really never understood what the State of Israel was all about. But it is certainly no crime to be obtuse, and I was horrified when, on September 17, only two weeks after I arrived in Moscow, I learned that Bernadotte had been shot to death on a quiet street in Jerusalem. Although his assailants were never identified, we knew it would be assumed that they were Jews. I thought the end of the world had come, and I would have given anything to have been able to fly home and be there during the ensuing crisis, but by then I was already deeply involved in a totally new and very demanding way of life.

Works Cited

Meir, G. (1975). My Life. New York, NY, United States of America: Putnam.

[1] Yishuv (ישוב) denote the body of Jewish residents in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

[2] United Nations Special Committee on Palestine.

[ausetkmt]

Protesters say refugees and migrants are welcome on UN anti-racism day (picture: Guy Smallman)

Tory and Labour leaders might argue over migration, but they are united in making racist arguments for keeping Britain’s borders closed.  Official figures for net migration last year—set to be released this week—were expected to reach an all-time high. 

That’s not a problem. Migrants don’t raise prices or cut jobs. They don’t wreck the NHS. In fact the health service depends on migrants. But the Tories will use the figures to ramp up racism.

Under pressure from business, the Tories are split over whether they should further shut the borders or give out more visas. We couldn’t know whether the Tories would band together or continue to rip themselves apart.

But given the convenient timing of the revelations about home secretary Suella Braverman’s speeding offences, she might be the one to take the hit. The Labour Party is also spinning in circles while trying to work out its line on immigration. More overseas workers but less migration seems to be its bizarre goal.

Leader Keir Starmer said that his “direction of travel” would be for migration to come down. He explained he “would expect” net migration to drop below 500,000—the figure for last July.

“But I’m not going to put a number on it,” he said. “I would like and want to see the number coming down”. For Starmer that reduction “would be more” than a few thousand people. Starmer did add that migration figures “will depend” on getting a skills agenda sorted and building up the NHS workforce. 

That’s despite previous comments about building the health service with non-foreign workers. Meanwhile shadow equalities minister Anneliese Dodds said Labour could push immigration even higher in the short term to bring workers in with the “right” skills.

But shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said Labour “wouldn’t turn to immigration as the easy answer” for shortages.

In an eerily similar stance to Braverman, Reeves wants to see “people who are already in Britain being trained up” to fill the gaps. “There are many people who are not in work with the right support, could get into work,” she thinks. The Tories took power under Boris Johnson’s manifesto pledge to reduce net migration. 

At the time, that figure was 271,000. With net migration at 500,000 by July last year, and the expectation of it being more than 700,000 by December, Starmer will jeer at the Tories.

But even within his own party, how to fill workforce shortages, whether to reduce migration and the best plan of action for Britain’s borders is contested. Either way, socialists must resist the racism rooted in these debates, which plays a role for our rulers. We say open the borders—let in every migrant and refugee.

[revenge-of-the-shit]

Writing Chinese characters set within Western worlds

If you don’t want to read it on tumblr, go check this out on medium or go follow me on instagram at @annessarose_writes!

Alright. You know what. I’ve seen plenty of stereotypes in fiction (and in social media) that are so incredibly pervasive I’ve seen many Chinese people within the western world internalize it themselves. So here’s a rough guide on writing Chinese characters in an English-speaking Western setting, written by me, a Chinese Canadian woman.

If you’re here to say something racist fuck off. Otherwise, welcome! This is not a comprehensive guide by any means. This is merely a brief overview based on my own experiences. My experience (as someone in North America) will differ from someone living in, say, Europe or South America. I’m not representative of every Chinese person because everyone’s experience is unique. So here were are.

1. Our names

Chinese names are usually written as follows: [family name] [name]. Let’s take a Canadian historical figure as an example: 黃寬先. In Chinese, it’s pronounced “Wong Foon Sien.” On Canadian documents — which are written [First name] [Last name], he’d be called “Foon Sien Wong.” He went by “Foon Sien” for most of his life. That’s his full “first name.” Nobody would call him Foon because that’s just half of his name (unless given permission). It’d be like meeting a stranger called Alex and calling them “Al” right off the bat. Sure, they could go by Al, but you don’t know that.

For those of us living in the Western world, some of us have both a Chinese name and an English name. In these cases, our Chinese name becomes our middle name in English (e.g. a character could be called John Heen-Gwong Lee).

For some people who immigrated to the Western world but were born in China, their legal name would be their Chinese name. Some choose to keep that name. Some choose an English name as their “preferred” name but keep their Chinese name on legal documents. It varies.

2. Parents & Stereotypes

There’s two stereotypes which are so pervasive I see it being used over and over in jokes even within Chinese (and, to a larger extent, asian) communities:

The [abusive] tiger mom and the meek/absent dad

Both parents are unreasonably strict/abusive and they suck

I have yet to see any fiction stories with Chinese parents where they’re depicted as kind/loving/supportive/understanding (if you have recommendations — please do send them my way). Not all Chinese parents are tiger parents. Chinese parents — like all parents — are human. Good god. YES, they’re human! YES, they have flaws! YES, they are influenced by the culture they grew up in!

That isn’t to say there aren’t parents like those tropes. There are. I know this because I grew up in a predominantly Chinese community where I had many a friend’s parent who was like this. Parents who compare their kids to the best kid in class. Parents who force kids into private lessons and competitions that the kid despises because the parents think it’s for the best. Parents who have literally called their kid a disappointment because they didn’t get 100%.

But please, also consider: there’s parents who support their child’s goals and who listen. Not all parents force their kid into the stereotypical trifecta of lawyer/doctor/engineer — I know of a good number who support their child in choosing the path they want. There’s parents who make mistakes and learn and try their best to support their child. So please, for the love of god, if you write a Chinese character, don’t reduce their parents to stereotypes.

3. Language & Learning

When I first read The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan, I was so excited to see a Chinese Canadian character in Frank Zhang. Finally, there was someone like me. Finally, there was representation in well-known western media.

While I do appreciate that RR added in Frank Zhang, it’s pretty obvious that he didn’t really know how to write a Chinese Canadian character. One of the most glaring examples: in The Son of Neptune, Frank reveals he can’t really read Chinese. In like, the next book (I think — it’s been a while since I read it), Frank is suddenly able to read Chinese because he “learned” it in two week’s time.

Nope. Nuh-uh. Learning Chinese is a pain, let me tell you. There’s thousands of different characters and it is something you need to devote a lot of time to learning (especially if you’re progressed past the best childhood years for learning a language). So if you’re writing about a Chinese character living in the western world, here’s what you need to know:

A character who was born and raised in the western world does not necessarily know how to read/write in Chinese.

If they were raised by their own family, the character would very likely know how to speak their own dialect. They’d be able to understand the language used in movies/TV and they sound like a native speaker, but they may not know how to use language outside of certain contexts (the term for this is heritage speaker).

They probably went to Chinese school. They probably hated it. Chinese school is usually universally hated and does not teach you jack shit other than a hatred for the place and a vague memory of learning how to read the language without actually retaining knowledge of what you learned.

Most of my friends who know how to read/write in Chinese learned from tutors, parents, or were born in China.

There’s two main types of written Chinese: Traditional (used by Cantonese speakers) and Simplified (used by Mandarin speakers).

There are MANY other dialects (which I don’t know much about). The most common ones are Mandarin (usually spoken by people from the mainland), then Cantonese (usually spoken by people from Hong Kong).

4. Fitting into the community

Usually, the story is one of two things: they’re the only Asian kid in the entire school, or they grew up in a predominantly East Asian community. Things to consider for both of these when you’re writing:

Growing up the only Asian kid

They’re “that Asian kid.” They’re different. They walk into a class and feel weird and out of place.

They bring food from home (usually ethnic cuisine) to school. Other classmates stare at it, make fun of it, demand what that strange food is.

“Where are you from?” “Here.” “No, like, where are you really from?”

“Your name is funny.”

People literally never getting the character’s name right.

And that horrible, horrible feeling: wishing that they were white so they could avoid all of this.

Growing up in a predominantly East Asian community

It’s not uncommon for Chinese cuisine to mix with other east Asian cuisines. For special occasions (or just for a casual night out), your character could very well go out to get some sushi, or go for some KBBQ, or get some Vietnamese noodles.

Screaming “AIYAA” at/with their friends unironically if they’re annoyed (I’ve done this a lot with Cantonese friends. Less so with Mandarin friends).

Slipping into Chinese for like, two words, during a mostly-English conversation to talk about food or some other topic that can’t be adequately conveyed in English.

Reading books by white authors and learning about white history and growing up thinking white names, white books, and white history is the norm and standard even though the community is surrounded by East Asian people.

When the character leaves this community, there’s a brief culture shock when they realize how sheltered they’ve been.

Things in common for both of these:

The character has grown up on ethnic cuisine. Yes, Chinese people do eat rice with many of our meals. Yes, boba (bubble) tea is extremely popular. No, rice isn’t the only thing we eat. No, not all Chinese people love boba (though as a Chinese person I admit this sounds sacrilegious to say…)

The character likely grew up watching film/TVthat originates from East Asia. It’s not uncommon to watch Studio Ghibli films. It’s not uncommon to watch Japanese or Korean shows with canto/mando dub (examples: Ultraman, Kamen Rider). If you want to see a classic Chinese film from Hong Kong that’s fucking hilarious, watch Kung Fu Hustle.

The character has felt or been told that they’re “too westernized to be Chinese, but too Chinese to fit into the western world.” They’re torn between the two.

5. General portrayal

It’s quite simple, really. We’re human. We’re regular people. We have regular hobbies like all people do. We’re good at some subjects and bad at others. We have likes and dislikes like all people do. So here’s a list of stereotypes you can avoid.

STEREOTYPES TO AVOID BECAUSE WE’RE REGULAR HUMANS AND WE DON’T FIT INTO A SINGLE COOKIE CUTTER SHAPE, DAMMIT.

The character is a maths whiz and perfect at all things STEM.

The character is a straight-A+ gifted/IB/AP student.

The character is the next coming of Mozart and is amazing at piano/violin.

The character’s free time is spent only studying.

The character is insanely good at martial arts.

The character is either meek and submissive or an explosive, dangerous force.

I’m not going to mention the other stereotypes. You know, those ones. The really obvious ones that make fun of and demonize (sometimes through multiple untruths) how we look and how we live our lives. You should know.

Of course, there are people who fit into one or more of these. That’s not the point. The point is: molding all Chinese characters to these stereotypes (which white media tends to do) is harmful and reductionist. We’re more than stereotypes.

—

6. Conclusion

We need more diversity in portrayal of Chinese characters. Reducing us into one-dimensional caricatures has done nothing but harm us — look at what’s happening now. This guide is by no means comprehensive, but I hope it has helped you by providing a quick overview.

If you want to accurately portray Chinese characters, do your research. Read Chinese fiction. Watch Chinese films/TV. Initiate a conversation with the community. Portray us accurately. Quit turning us into caricatures.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Being an Immigrant

WIth things a little more set up for this evening’s D&D session, I did a thing that was either going to depress me too much to play at all or really put me in the mood to go full-on feral: I looked at the news.

The Tories are ... bad, okay? They’re mega-super-ultra bad. Problem is, Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, is giving worse and worse takes on everything, every time he turns around. He keeps going on about how he will Make Brexit Work, without actually explaining how, and I tolerated it only because I was hoping he was saving the “I’m going to at least get us back into the single market if the EU can ever forgive us the Tory issues” bombshell for when he was safe in office. He keeps going on about how strikes shouldn’t be happening and Labour MPs should not be on the picket lines, never mind that the entire fucking Labour party was started by labour unions; that is why they are the Labour party, because I was hoping that he was saving the “Everybody needs to sit down, shut up, and make sure people get proper pay and job security, and they shouldn’t need strikes to make their voices heard” bombshell for when he was safe in office. I tolerated a lot because frankly he seemed - and honestly still somewhat seems - better than the alternative.

Thing is, his issue today is ... well, the NHS. Because it always comes back to the NHS. Or, more specifically, using the NHS to underline, highlight, and carve in stone how much he’s actually supporting the mess of a Brexit we have. Because his comment has been, “We’re recruiting too many people from overseas! We don’t want open borders! Points-based system! Freedom of Movement is gone and it’s never coming back, so it’s time to hire BRITISH!”

...’scuse me? Sir? That’s going to be a problem. Here are the reasons why, from someone who has worked in or at least with the NHS for decades:

While not at US level yet, UK university costs more than just about anywhere in Europe. Interest rates are sky-high, making loans a problematic prospect at best. Add to that the cost of living increase, which is going to hit university students particularly hard, and the number of people who can actually qualify to work in the health care sector drops dramatically.

So let’s talk about nurses. There used to be bursaries for people to qualify for nursing, free of charge. I know because I was actively considering it at one point. Then the Tories nuked it. Unless you want to bring that back, welp, we’re still screwed in terms of the financial outlay required for nursing training.

“Ah,” I hear you say, “but the wealthy could do it!” Except ... why would they want to? We have all heard the stories about the NHS and how the government has been treating it - everyone. The pay’s crap (which is why so many doctors also run private practices, which reduces the overall availability of doctors), the stress is unbelievable, the hours expected are ludicrous, and the government has a tendency to try to make their lives even more miserable in the name of false economy. So the wealthy will probably want cushier jobs, since ‘doctor’ is not a profession that denotes wealth, status, and prestige anymore. As for nursing? I can’t see that at all, given what a nurse has to do day-to-day.

Even if all of those issues were fixed tomorrow (AND THEY WON’T BE; WE ALL KNOW THIS), training up medical professionals takes time. Years of study, more years being shadowed by senior doctors before real, proper qualification happens. Rush that, and you’re risking people’s lives. So it will be minimum 5-10 years before a meaningful number of British people could qualify to work as healthcare professionals even with abolition of university fees, the return of the university grant, and the salvation of the economy from its current shambles. We can’t wait a decade to fix this. Therefore, our only hope is to get already trained people in the interim and then we can talk about how to get more British people qualified to work in the health sector.

Starmer has to learn that waving the Brexit flag is not going to have the desired effect. Yeah, the people who still support Brexit are either exceedingly loud or, worse, quiet but powerful (say, the ERG). But just because they’re loud doesn’t mean there are all that many of them. A lot of people who were for Brexit during the vote are starting to rethink now, especially when at least one expert made no bones about stating, loudly and clearly, how much Brexit has to do with our current economic shambles.

“Labour has pledged to take on an extra 7.5k medical students every year if their party wins the next general election”, they say. Okay ... how? Who pays for it? What’s the economy going to look like in two years that means that this is possible? Even if the numbers can somehow be massaged to make that possible, that’s extra medical students who have only just started training. See above re: it takes time to train a doctor.

You know, this country keeps making it clearer and clearer how much it hates me. It hates me because I’m disabled. It hates me because I’m queer in any way you care to name. And, for all “they don’t mean me” because I’m white, they hate that I wasn’t born here. My paternal grandparents were, sure, but I was not. So every time they talk about immigrants, they are talking about me. I don’t care if they mean ‘the bad ones’; the ones who don’t speak English as their first language, or are darker of skin tone, or live in a country just across the Channel that they keep insulting at every turn. I am an immigrant, and I’m not even a citizen, so everything they are saying, they are saying about me. Because I am no different than anyone else who lives and works here but wasn’t born here. In fact, I’m nowhere near as well-educated or well-qualified as most of them.

I mean, I hate it here anyway. I hate this country as much as it hates me. So maybe I shouldn’t care. But I do. I know a lot of people can relate to feeling like their country hates them because of who they are. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse if the country isn’t even yours but you’re stuck in it, with it hating you the whole way.

Suffice to say, I’m still going to vote Labour but only because the Tories are still, unbelievably, worse, and voting for anyone else guarantees the Tories a win. Especially given that the next general election is going to involve voter ID and government oversight over the Elections Committee, and when you add that to First Past The Post, shaking the Tories is going to be hard enough without trying to swing Lib Dem or the Greens into 10 Downing Street. We’re a two-party system in all but name, honestly. Besides, Lib Dem and the Greens have been keeping their heads down lately. I have a feeling that neither of them really want to win the next election because whoever does is going to have the hugest mess to clean up and no one really wants it. Except the Tories, probably, who are profiting off of making it worse.

Still not sure if angry or too depressed to cope. But at least there’ll be some fun later. Time for a trip to the shops, food, and painkillers, I think.

[thetriggeredhappy]

can I request sniper and scout planning a little secret symbolic wedding for themselves? its just self indulgent, since they wanna have this connection so they do a tiny intimate thing for the two of them but then all the two teams show up, ms pauling, sniper's parents and scout's family to celebrate too, and they all have a happy day

i dunno if this one will be coherent or and i dont have a joke for ya so thats where we’re at today

(no warnings)

-

He notices Scout looking at things just a little longer. Scout was a man of motion, of emotion, of elation, so seeing him pause, ever, for any length of time, was enough to pique Sniper’s interest. It had to be a big deal, of Scout was looking at it, and he prided himself on being observant.

So seeing the things he paused in front of—jewelry stores, boutiques, flower shops, at first it confused him, but then he saw what Scout was looking at in them. The flower shops had pretty arrangements right in front, labeled vaguely in some with phrases like ‘arrangements for your special day!’ and less vaguely in others as ‘wedding arrangements available’. The boutiques often with white dresses towards the front, and pictures of smiling couples nearby.

Little cards in the display of the jewelry store window proclaiming ‘engagement rings’.

It didn’t take long to piece together.

A number of issues were present. The concept of legal marriage alone was a big one. First because they were two men, one of whom was shaky in terms of immigration and two of whom were shaky in terms of being legally defined as criminals of the highest degree, potentially legally dead in some ways, and certainly smart enough to not walk into a courthouse. Besides that, the paperwork involved, the idea of getting either of their families around when Scout’s family was constantly on the wind in at least one corner and his own hardly on speaking terms with him, the heartbreak—

But Scout paused when he looked at the engagement rings.

Sniper was increasingly exasperated and helpless against the little voice in his head that seemed to watch out for Scout’s well-being, that said, well, couldn’t he at least try and figure something else out?

So it took some thinking. Some rehearsing his words in his own head. Some justifications being made, torn down, analyzed and readdressed with a clearer mind. And he came to a decision.

And when he next got the chance, he called his mum and had a talk with her about a lot of things, so many of them at least a decade and a half in the making. And she didn’t understand, not at all, not on that first phone call, not on the second. But on the third she took care to assure him that she would try, she really would, she really would, and finally gave him permission to use the old family heirloom engagement ring.

And it was subtle and sudden when Sniper proposed. Scout was sat on the steps of the camper, using Sniper’s pocket knife to pick mud out of the soles of his shoes, and Sniper took a seat next to him, plonked a pair of bottles between them. Scout leaned over to bump their shoulders together, grinning at him, and Sniper smiled too, started drinking his own.

Out clear on the horizon line, most of the clouds hadn’t quite blown far enough to obscure the sun. It would be setting soon, and then Scout would be off to eat with the rest of the team and Sniper would get to his own routine. It was a nice night, though.

Finally Scout flicked the knife closed, tucked it into his pocket best he could, reached for the bottle still sitting next to him, popped it and started drinking before it could foam over (he didn’t know how it always did that, he just had awful luck, apparently).

Sniper finished his own drink before Scout could get very far into his own. Stared out across the desert.

“You good?” Scout finally asked, picking idly at the label. “You seem, uh... I dunno. Sad, maybe. One’a those?”

“No, er... just...” Sniper tried, cleared his throat. Now Scout’s eyebrows were raised. “Nervous, is all.”

“Oh, one’a those,” Scout said, and frowned when Sniper shook his head again, drawing a hand down his face, taking a deep breath. “Is... is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Sniper nodded, took another deep breath. “Yeah. Just...”

He paused for a long few moments. Reached to fish through the pocket of his vest, held his closed fist out to Scout. Scout freed up a hand to hold a hand out, palm-up, still frowning, and pulled it back to look at the item Sniper had dropped in his palm.

Blinked. Blinked. Sniper gulped, wishing he had a drink still, something to help with how dry his mouth had gone all of a sudden, watching Scout’s expression carefully.

“Oh,” Scout whispered. Barked a laugh, like shock more than humor, the volume abrupt. “Oh.”

Sniper gulped hard again, looked away, looked back. Scout’s expression didn’t change in the time he wasn’t watching it. “You seem, er... surprised,” Sniper said carefully.

“Well, yeah, duh, yeah, I didn’t—“ Scout said all in a stumbling rush, and took a breath, and seemed to hold it. His eyes hadn’t moved from the ring since he first saw it. He blinked a few times, barked that laugh again. “I didn’t think you’d want...”

“I do,” Sniper said, voice tight, and Scout looked up at him for the first time in a while, and his eyes widened in even more surprise.

“Oh, shit,” he said quickly, seeming to finally register the nervousness, the fear, the worry, and he surged forward, hands on Sniper’s shoulders, one wrapped in half a fist around the ring. “I, yeah, yes, I, yes to the—yes! I’m—“

And then he kissed Sniper, hard, almost bruising, and it didn’t get particularly far before it was broken by another huff of air against Sniper’s lips, and when he pulled back Scout’s grin was a little weak.

“Just never thought you’d ask me, not in a million years,” he admitted.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to cry,” Sniper teased, entire body awash with a sense of relief.

“Oh, fuck off, you’re the one with the watery eyes here,” Scout scoffed, and kissed him again.

And they both made sure to note that they knew there were more conversations to be had, but those could wait until both of them had a clearer head again, which took damn near a week and a half, both so much more giddy than they’d expected to be, then another week when Sniper next saw the ring, hung on a little chain usually tucked beneath Scout’s shirt, worn around his neck apparently since the day he got it.

He liked the word fiancée more than he’d expected to, and he’d expected to like it a lot, and even then, Scout seemed to like it even more.

And Scout admitted half his surprise up front had been because he himself had no real idea how this was going to work, it was just that the idea of being married made him really really happy. He liked weddings, loved weddings, loved the idea of... of settling into something. That really, marriage was the only kind of settling down that he’d ever liked the idea of. And even if it was just... just something quiet, just the two of them, that was fine by him.

And Sniper had nodded, and there had been a pause, but then suddenly Scout spoke up again with a ‘but, I mean, my Ma is always going on about wanting to see me get married, so I kinda have to invite her to whatever we do’.

That was a good start for the plans they had. No particular pressure on it, really, considering they decided not to tell anyone at first. Sniper started trying to figure out where might be a good place to hold... something, maybe not a whole ceremony, but something. Scout started trying to figure out where to get a suit, and where Sniper could get his own tailored, but they weren’t in a rush, and a few months passed without making much progress at all, nothing even feeling like it had changed except that now Sniper would catch Scout fidgeting with the chain he kept the ring on and grinning.

The first real change came when someone else noticed too.

Pyro, stood in-between matches and pointing at the chain around Scout’s neck as he switched into a less charred shirt and mumbling a question, made Scout stammer. Scout stammering made most of the team turn to look. Then more of them saw the chain there, saw the ring there, and some of the more perceptive ones pieced together a few things rather quickly. It was Demo who first said something, outright asking ‘is that an engagement ring?’.

A beat of silence where all were frozen, then the voice over the intercom rang out telling them they had ten seconds until battle, and Scout was off like a shot towards the gate.

In his absence, eyes turned to Sniper instead, who proved to be even less helpful in that he stuttered his way through all ten of those seconds and the team had no choice but to follow Scout’s lead and leave it for later.

Sniper was hoping that he’d be able to escape the team’s questions after battle if he could make it through the Resupply room before everyone else did. But he realized very quickly that would also mean throwing Scout to the proverbial wolves, and besides that, he couldn’t run from this forever. So instead he kicked around the Resupply for a few minutes waiting for the team to come back from chasing down the other team in the humiliation round, and wasn’t entirely surprised when Scout was one of the first back, expression tight with nerves up until the exact moment that Demo and Soldier came wandering in, elbowing at each other and chatting at well above speaking volume.

Neither of them, apparently, had much to say, besides Demo clapping Sniper hard on the shoulder and proclaiming that it took them long enough, and Soldier brushing off their ‘fraternizing nonsense’ in favor of continuing his argument with Demo. Pyro was in the room next, talking and gesturing enthusiastically, and while Scout was trying to translate to Sniper the Engineer came in and shoo’d Pyro along, telling them to mind their business, albiet with what Sniper would almost refer to as a proud smile aimed in Scout’s direction. Medic and Heavy were in the room next, and all that Heavy seemed to be confused about was the legality surrounding marriage between anyone besides a man and a woman in the United States, with Medic attempting to explain but also largely clueless to the actual logistics of the thing. Spy only stuck around long enough to quip that it was a little ridiculous for any of them to worry about legality of all things, which Sniper wasn’t entirely sure how to interpret.

Demo, across the room, in the middle of trying to unstick his jacket from himself with all the mud coating one side of it, quipped that he’d better be invited, and asked what he had to do to get the best man position. From there, a series of what Sniper interpreted as mostly jokes followed, the team chiming in about their attendance, including a number of them laughing that they weren’t exactly allowed in any churches and Pyro insisting that they wanted to be the one throwing the flowers (and no they would not in fact set any on fire) and Heavy saying that if they couldn’t find a good glass to stomp on then Medic had plenty of spare beakers that he wasn’t using for anything, much to the doctor’s protest.

This became the team running joke for a while, was everyone constantly bringing up the wedding. When Spy stomped into the room fuming because of another perfectly good shirt ruined by the base’s washing machine, the Engineer quipped that oh no, what would he wear to the wedding now? When Soldier got into an argument with Pyro, Demo referred to it as a spat between groomsmen. When Sniper was acting particularly cranky one day (not his fault, the base’s coffee machine was awful and they really needed to replace it one of these days), Spy muttered into his tea that it was a shame Scout had to put up with such a bridezilla, a joke Medic chortled about well into the afternoon.

It might have gotten out of hand around the time that poor Pauling had to hear about it, just trying her best to oversee delivering a set of brand new weapons and explaining their assorted bells and whistles, accosted through her entire explanation by jokes that this was a bit extravagant for a wedding gift, that hopefully she’d at least get time off to attend the reception, that competition for maid of honor wasn’t exactly steep but she’d probably be winning anyways, until finally she snapped that if Sniper and Scout were actually going to get married then they needed to note that on their upcoming contract renewals but to otherwise stop talking to her about it so damn much.

This, Scout said, is when he started feeling bad for not talking to his Ma about it yet. Miss Pauling knowing he was getting married before his own mother felt wrong, he said, and so he spent the afternoon steeling himself to make the phone call.

From the combination of relief and vague dismay on Scout’s face when he came back, Sniper could tell something was up, and it was with a number of pauses in the middle of speaking that Scout explained that he’d barely gotten through the news before Ma had started calling over various brothers to tell them the news too, each taking a turn on the phone to get halfway through some kind of third degree that they needed to pass along to Sniper before actually congratulating him, each asking when they’d need to get down there for the wedding in turn. Apparently he’d accidentally called when some of his brothers were over for dinner, and so he explained to Sniper that word was as good as out, because as much as he loved his brothers, not a single one of them could keep their mouths shut to each other.

And so they both sat down with a calendar and had to pick an actual date for a wedding.

Altogether, the date they picked was a little over a year since Sniper proposed, which felt appropriate, and only a few months from then, just long enough for Scout’s brothers to get time off of work. They decided against a whole entire proper ceremony with a priest and vows and all, mostly because legality being an issue, they didn’t have much a reason to stick to tradition. A few things would end up sticking, though. They’d have seating, because Sniper’s mum wasn’t up for standing around for long periods of time anymore and one of Scout’s brothers had that bad leg and cane from his time in the army. They’d dress up for it, because Scout was truly looking forward to that part, to looking nice on the actual day. Vows weren’t necessarily going to be on-script, but they’d both take a moment to say something to each other, and there would be a kiss, and then they’d have a bit of time set aside for if either of their families brought up any traditions they truly wanted to do. And, of course, there’d be some kind of party afterwards, because they both knew that the team would make there be a party afterwards either way.

What they didn’t expect was how quickly the team jumped to help as soon as they mentioned they’d set an actual date in stone to some degree. The Engineer was quick to offer to help with setting up chairs and tables, carting things around if they needed it, having a truck and all. Soldier was happy to offer suggestions for if they wanted catering, having eaten at and subsequently been banned from every eatery in the county, and Pyro started baking at an until then unprecedented clip as they tried to find the exact right recipe for a good wedding cake because they had to have a wedding cake and it had to be perfect. Heavy, to his credit, pointed out a few logistical issues with having the wedding, namely that it couldn’t be anywhere on the base and that they weren’t allowed in the town of Teufort, and Demo was so kind as to offer up his own house and property, given that it had so much space and he knew his mother wouldn’t mind it and besides that, it was a very pretty place.

And then Spy found in the mail the magazines Sniper was looking through when trying to pick out something suit-adjacent, and he could tell Spy was gearing up to really lay into him about it before Sniper pointed out that Spy should really just stop snooping through other people’s mail, and by the next day he found a pair of order forms in his camper on the table, almost entirely filled out except for a few of the fields regarding things like the color of the suits and payment information.

And then he and Scout were trying on suits, and figuring out which hotels were close enough for Scout and Sniper’s families to stay in, and looking at flowers, and figuring out how many days they should schedule off of work and whether the team would be doing the same—

—and then it was the week before, and one night Sniper found himself standing in the camper with Scout, late at night, half-exhausted and stressed out and more terrified than he’d expected to be, arms tight around Scout’s waist. And Scout held on just as tight, and inhaled, and exhaled, shifting with that breath in Sniper’s grip. And Sniper found himself breathing out apologies, so quiet they didn’t quite catch against the grit in his voice, for causing such a fuss about all this, for things getting so out of hand. And Scout had laughed, had squeezed him tight in arms usually used for hurting people to instead give him so much comfort in that moment, and said that he wouldn’t want it any other way. Anything else and it wouldn’t exactly feel like them.

And the two days before the wedding stretched out infinitely, a mix of terror and impatience lacing his every move, and then the day of the wedding itself felt like it took no time at all.

The sun didn’t quite beat down upon them, a blessing even with them wearing simple vests as opposed to full suits, a scattering of cloud cover making the heat bearable and throwing the sunshine out away from them. And the grass around the DeGroot residence was slippery in the morning, slick under their shoes, and Sniper watched nervously across towards his mum and dad as his dad squinted suspiciously around at things and his mum patted him consolingly about only god knew what. And one of Scout’s brothers had brought a camera and was dashing around taking pictures, and most of the team had managed to dig up assorted formal wear, and the Engineer bustled trying to make sure everything was set up just right as Soldier helped Pyro with carrying the frankly ludicrous cake towards the table somewhere. And on one side was Scout’s family, all rowdy, and on the other was the team, even rowdier, his parents squashed between and being vaguely protected from the team by the more generally responsible ones (namely Heavy, who Sniper’s father clearly approved of in some way for being so imposing, and Spy, who Sniper’s mother approved of on the basis of him being entirely polite). And Miss Pauling was there much to Sniper’s surprise, claiming that she was meant to oversee off-base activities (although he suspected she just wanted the time off and was glad to watch the final nail go into the coffin of Scout’s long-gone infatuation with her). And Medic was so kind as to let Sniper know the other team had left a present at the base for them that morning—assuring him, at his alarmed look, that it was merely a prank dummy bomb set to tick as loudly as possible within the packaging, and a note thanking them for the free time off. That was as much a relief as the cloud cover.

And then the ceremony itself happened, so long before Sniper was ready, as if he could ever truly be ready. And he’d seen Scout’s vest already, but not worn, not standing across from him with a glitter in his eyes and a watery smile and hands fidgeting nervously with grip tape that wasn’t there, face red. And Sniper’s hands were sweaty and clammy, and his voice cracked from the very first word of what he had been rehearsing in his head over and over since he proposed, but the way Scout’s expression shone with pride and love had made so much of that nervousness disappear, and he couldn’t find it in him to be nervous, to worry about the team.

He didn’t have it written down, felt that note cards would make this feel stiff, and he wasn’t all that good at writing down his thoughts regardless. But Scout was sniffling by the end of it, and his own voice had gone rough as he just barely kept it together, so he at least knew he was doing something right. 
And Scout didn’t have anything written down either, and when his turn to speak came, there were a few long moments where Sniper worried he’d blanked, forgotten what he wanted to say. But Scout got there, voice surprisingly steady, surprisingly level. And he didn’t remember all of it, but he remembered some in the middle.

“I still can’t believe you love me, that you wanna stay with me for as long as we can, that you trust me and care about me,” Scout said, “but I’m gonna try, I’m gonna try so hard, and I’m gonna do whatever I gotta do to make sure you know I love you too, every single day, and to earn it. I promise. That’s what this is, is me promising. I promise.” 
And that’s when Sniper broke, the first tears falling, needing to wipe at his face gingerly with his sleeve and accompanied by a general ‘aww’ and chuckles from the crowd of loved ones gathered there, and Scout smiled all the wider.

And Sniper did end up stomping on a glass (not one of Medic’s beakers), and both of them were all but showered in assorted confetti by the family they’d somehow gathered over the years, and there was eating, and dancing, and drinking, and dancing, and by the time the sun started to set down beyond the horizon line he found himself stood there with Scout in the middle of it all, kissing him over, and over, and over again, each and every one a promise that he very much intended to keep, come what may.

“I love you,” he said, again, again, and Scout never once stopped smiling.

[paralleljulieverse]

‘Gentlemen like you are few...’: A Supercentenary Tribute to Irwin Kostal

1 October 2021 marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of Irwin Kostal, the musical arranger, orchestrator and conductor whose work helped shape the sound of the post-war American stage and screen musical. In this post we look back at the career of this remarkable 'music man’ with a particular focus on his collaborations with the equally remarkable Julie Andrews -- who, as it happens, shares the same birthday, so this post is doing double birthday honours.

A gentle, unassuming man, Kostal or ‘Irv’ as he was known by associates, was not one for the limelight. It’s possibly why he gravitated to the ‘behind-the-scenes’ art of musical arranging. Unlike composers, performers, or even conductors, arrangers seldom loom large in public perceptions of professional musicianship. They are, for the most part, the ‘invisible artists’ of the music industry: their contributions to the sound and experience of music are immense, but they remain largely ‘uncredited in records, liner notes or books or records’ (Niles 2104, p. 4). That Irwin Kostal would ultimately prove a rare exception to this tradition of thankless anonymity -- becoming sufficiently well-known to have his own name not only included on recordings, but emblazoned on the front cover alongside those of the ‘star’ vocalists with whom he worked -- is a testament to the singularity of his talents. 

Born the son of first generation immigrant parents in Chicago in 1911, Kostal claimed he was instantly ‘smitten’ by music when he saw a piano at the age of two-and-a-half, but his family was too poor to afford such luxuries. Moreover, his father -- a hard-drinking Czech with a fiery temper -- was ‘rigidly opposed’ to his interests in music and ‘could see no future in it’ (’Irwin’ 1962, p. 70). So Kostal initially had to content himself with listening and absorbing as much musical knowledge as he could indirectly. When he was eleven, his father finally brought home a broken player piano salvaged from a removals job and it provided the young Kostal with the launch pad he needed. 

Kostal devoted himself to his musical education with single-minded zeal. His formal training was intermittent -- enabled by a supportive mother who ‘surreptitiously managed to save money from her weekly allowance for my musical instruction’ (’Irwin’ 1962, p. 70) -- but he was a passionate autodidact who would spend countless hours studying and practising on his own. By age 15, he was already playing professionally with local touring bands, while also offering his own services as a piano teacher with, at one point, more than 40 pupils (ibid.).

When he wasn’t playing, Kostal would be found in the local library poring over musical scores and reading about the greats of the classical canon. He was particularly intrigued by orchestration and the possibilities it offered for varying the sound and feel of music. He recalls how he would take orchestral scores home and study all the parts learning ‘about musical instruments I never knew existed’ (Suskin 2009, p. 56).  He progressively worked his way through the music of the masters, going alphabetically: 

‘Bach...Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Elgar, Frank, Gounod, on and on through the alphabet...I tried to absorb everything. By the time I came to Ravel, Tchaikovsky and Wagner, I knew quite a lot about music in a jumbled way’ (Suskin 2009, p. 57).

While still in his teens, Kostal started to experiment with arrangements of his own, scoring a high school production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin with multiple variations on the American folk melody ‘Way Down upon the Swanee River’. ‘By taking away the rhythmic aspects and playing it in a minor key,’ he recounts, ‘I found lots of ways to play this song, making it fit the dramatics of the half-hour long story’ (ibid., p. 56). Thus, Irwin Kostal the arranger was born.

Throughout the 1930s and early-40s, Kostal honed his talents in a professional capacity, working with various big bands, before finally landing a job as a resident arranger for an NBC radio affiliate in Chicago. Following the war, Kostal moved to New York where, after a rocky start, he secured regular work as conductor and arranger on a number of long-running radio and TV variety shows including Your Show of Shows (1950-54), Max Liebman Presents (1954-56), and The Garry Moore Show (1959-63). It was demanding, fast-paced work with Kostal having to arrange and orchestrate hundreds of score pages a week, but it consolidated his musical versatility and capacity to work across a wide range of styles and forms (Suskin 2009, pp. 57-60).

Throughout this period, Kostal was also orchestrating for Broadway shows, racking up over 52 credits on theatre productions big and small (Allen 1995, p. 18). Many of these assignments were done in a ‘ghost-writer’ capacity including contributing work to such classic musicals as Wonderful Town (1953), The Pajama Game (1953) and Silk Stockings (1955). A major breakthrough came when Kostal was contracted to work in a credited capacity as co-orchestrator on the original Broadway production of West Side Story (1958) -- collaborating with Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Sid Ramin. It earned him his first Grammy Award and a subsequent invitation to arrange and orchestrate a string of other big Broadway musicals including Fiorello! (1959), Sail Away (1961) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962).

The success of West Side Story also saw Kostal do repeat honours on the film version (1961) which would, in turn, earn him an Academy Award and kickstart a hugely successful Hollywood career. In 1963, Kostal was invited by none other than Walt Disney to take on the major job of arranging the songs for Mary Poppins (1964) which had been written by the in-house Disney composing team of Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman. The Sherman Brothers claim to have suggested Kostal because they were fans of his Broadway work and they wanted a bright theatrical sound for the score. However, Walt Disney demurred. He reasoned it was a period film and they needed someone who could write music for any style or era, suggesting they get the musical director from The Garry Moore Show instead. Cue mutual delight when it was discovered they were all referring to the same man, Irwin Kostal (Sherman & Sherman 1998; Suskin 2009, p. 65).

Kostal’s work on Mary Poppins catapulted him to new heights of mainstream success. It not only secured him another Academy Award nomination -- he lost to Andre Previn for his work on My Fair Lady -- but it also brought him a tidy fortune in royalties from the film’s best-selling soundtrack album (’Kostal’s’ $65,000′, 57). His fame -- and fortune -- skyrocketed even further the following year when Kostal was contracted to arrange the score for The Sound of Music (1965). His dazzling efforts on this box-office blockbuster confirmed Kostal’s status as Hollywood’s presiding musical wonder-boy and saw him walk home with his second Oscar. A string of other big screen musicals followed including Half a Sixpence (1967), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). 

Many of these films were repeat collaborations because Kostal favoured working with people he knew and with whom he clicked personally and creatively. He would for example continue as the de facto ‘house’ arranger for Disney well into the 1980s, working on various assignments for the studio including Pete’s Dragon (1978), Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983) and the controversial re-recorded 1982 release of Fantasia (1940/1982) (Tietyan 1990). Kostal would also maintain a long association with the Sherman Brothers, acting as musical arranger for all their big screen musicals including the aforementioned Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), as well as Tom Sawyer (1973); Charlotte’s Web (1973); and The Magic of Lassie (1978) (Sherman & Sherman 1998).

The other great collaboration of Kostal’s career was of course with Julie Andrews. Perhaps it was the fact that the pair shared the same birthday but Kostal had an extraordinarily sympathetic relationship with Julie and he would work with her more than any other vocalist. Long before they teamed on Poppins and The Sound of Music, Julie and ‘Irv’ were making musical magic together. Kostal was the arranger and conductor for Julie’s first two solo albums for RCA: The Lass with the Delicate Air (1957) and Julie Andrews Sings (1958) where his sensitive facility with a wide range of musical idioms from English classical to Broadway and Tin Pan Alley came to the fore. Reviewing the first of these albums at the time of its original release, one music critic lauded it as ‘a record to charm every member of the family...[with] a combination of sincerity and simplicity and wholesome sweetness...Thank goodness arranger and conductor Irwin Kostal met the challenge and set the ballads winningly without overpowering Miss Andrews’ light pure tones’ (RRS 1958, p. 5A). In a similar vein, another reviewer praised the second album for ‘its charming unforced version of standards, well known and almost forgotten...Miss Andrews still sings naturally and purely [and] the deft accompaniments played by an orchestra under Irwin Kostal are agreeably restrained’ (Masters 1959, p. 11).

In this early period Kostal also worked with Julie as guest star on several episodes of The Garry Moore Show, where he was resident musical director. In this context, Kostal was pivotal in helping establish the legendary teaming of Julie and Carol Burnett which came out of the Garry Moore appearances. He would go on to act as musical director for their breakout 1962 TV special Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall which would earn Kostal his first Emmy (Taraborelli 1988, pp. 172-79). He would secure his second Emmy a few years later working with Julie again on the 1965 variety special, The Julie Andrews Show (1965) where, among other highlights, Kostal scored a series of stellar song-and-dance medleys for Julie and guest star Gene Kelly. The same year, Kostal teamed up with Julie on yet another recording with the 1965 edition of the annual Firestone Christmas albums. 

It was however their combined work on the two big musical mega-hits, Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, that secured the Kostal-Andrews partnership a place in the history books. A cultural phenomenon of the highest order, the soundtrack recordings for these two films remain among the most successful albums of all time. Mary Poppins held the #1 spot on the US national music charts for 14 consecutive weeks in 1964, beating out Elvis Presley and The Beatles (Hollis and Erhbar 2006, pp.72ff). The album for The Sound of Music sold over 9 million copies in its first four years of release alone, remaining in the Billboard Top 100 for an unbelievable five-and-a-half years, and becoming the highest selling LP of all-time in the US up to that date (Murrells, 1978)  The Sound of Music continued its record-breaking run abroad, dominating the international charts and holding the #1 spot for 75 weeks in Australia, 73 weeks in Norway and 70 weeks in the UK, becoming in the process the single biggest selling album worldwide of the 1960s (Harker, 1992, pp. 189-91).

Commentators have frequently singled out the combination of Julie Andrews’ soaring vocals and Kostal’s dynamic arrangements as instrumental to the phenomenal success of these two albums. ‘Miss Andrews glows--positively glows--right through the record groove, vinyl disc, amplifiers, speakers, and all other mechanical barriers,’ enthused one contemporary reviewer of the Mary Poppins soundtrack, noting how the ‘songs that Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman have written’ and ‘the handsome arrangements by Irwin Kostal have the perfect balance ‘of lilt and flair to provide Miss Andrews with an effective working basis’ (Wilson 1965, p. 109). Apropos The Sound of Music, another critic pronounced it ‘as good a reproduction of a score as has ever been made’, noting how it ‘presents Julie in a most appealing role and given the splendid musical direction of Irwin Kostal, her talent comes shining through...as a treat beyond measure’ (Moore 1965, p. B6). 

In total, Julie Andrews and Irwin Kostal would work together on six recordings, two musical motion pictures, two television specials, and a host of other TV appearances representing some of the very best of Julie’s musical work during her heyday of the 1960s. Considered alongside the wealth of Kostal’s other work across film, stage, television and recording, it’s hard not to concur with Disney’s Nelson Meecham who, on the occasion of Kostal’s passing in 1994, eulogised: ‘He brought the joy of music to more people than it is possible to count’ (Allen, p. 19).

Sources:

Allen, John F 1995. ‘Remembering a Music Man: On the life and work of Irwin Kostal.’ Boxoffice. August: pp. 18-19.

Harker, Dave 1992. ‘Still Crazy After All These Years: What was popular music in the 1960s?” Cultural Revolution? The challenge of the arts in the 1960s. Bart Moore-Gilbert and John Seed, eds. Routledge, London and New York: pp. 186-200.

Hollis, Tim and Erhbar, Greg 2006. Mouse Tracks: The Story of Walt Disney Records. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

‘Irwin Kostal: Music in all its many forms is his life.’ (1962). The Province. 2 June: p. 70.

’Kostal’s’ $65,000 Poppins Score’ 1965. Variety. 10 March: p. 57

Levy, Charles 1964. Mary Poppins: About the stars and photo-story features [Press kit]. Buena Vista Distribution, New York. 

Masters, John 1959. ‘Off the Record: Enchanting Music.’ The Age. 7 January: p. 11.

Moore, Robert 1965. ‘Record Turntable: Julie Andrews out in front again in film album of”Sound of Music”.’ The Arizona Daily Star. 7 March: p. B6.

Murrells, Joseph, ed. 1978. Book of Golden Discs: Records that sold a million. Barrie & Jenkins, New York.

Niles, Richard 2014. The Invisible Artist: Arrangers in popular music (1950-2000). BMI, London.

Oliver, Myrna. 1994. ‘Obituaries: Irwin Kostal; Film, TV Orchestrator.’ The Los Angeles Times. 1 December: P. B8.

RRS 1958. ‘On the Record: ‘Lass with the Delicate Air.’ Bristol Herald Courier. 9 February: p. 5A.

Sherman, Robert B &  Sherman, Richard M 1998. Walt's Time: From before to beyond. Camphor Tree, Santa Clarita, CA.

Suskin, Steven 2009. The Sound of Broadway Music: A book of orchestrators and orchestrations, Oxford University Press, New York.

Taraborelli, J. Randy 1988. Laughing Till It Hurts: The complete life and career of Carol Burnett. William Morrow & Co, New York.

Tietyan, David 1990. The Musical World of Walt Disney. H. Leonard, Milwaukee, Wis. 

Wilson, John S. 1965. ‘The Lighter Side’. High Fidelity Magazine. 15: 4: pp. 107-111.

© 2021, Brett Farmer. All Rights Reserved.

[simonalkenmayer]

are there any parts of history that the history books have completely wrong? like events that are told absolutely incorrectly that you know about first hand?

Many. I was talking about one just today. It can’t be helped. History is written by the winners. From small to large, there are many things that could be corrected. I see no point in it though, because when I do, people want to argue with me, and such is the nature of this interaction, that I cannot say anything but “believe me if you like, and don’t, if it suits you.”

I can give a small sample, as per the thing I discussed just today. I was discussing the great plague in London. Modern historians estimate certain numbers of the dead. They do this by meshing a few figures: the total number of plague pits found and bodies within them, the recorded dead among the parishes (in those days the law said one had to be a member of a church and most life events including birth and death were recorded solely through the church records), and the various reports of dead by chroniclers. These figures are wrong. I have never seen an adequate estimate, and I know precisely why, but when I say as much, people will contest it. This particular set of evidence, they may choose to contest if they like. I don’t much care.

At the time, it was a commonly held belief that the body was necessary. People were buried and returned to dust, because the body was needed for judgement day. Every so often, when the charnel houses and burial grounds were full, they’d be dug up and refilled and the old bodies moved. This is why we have things like the Paris catacombs.

When the plague hit, the city was very crowded. The total number of inhabitants is vastly underestimated because many poor and immigrant groups did not belong to parishes in spite of the law. It hit so hard and so fast, that we ran out of space on the kirkyards. This is why we began the plague pits. These were dug just outside the city, outside the medieval walls. However, the number of dead rose so swiftly, and so few people could or were willing to handle the dead, that a decision was made in secret. We were asked to take the bodies out and burn them. And this we did. Now it’s true, that this would not get rid of the evidence completely, but then a year later, the great fire hit, and no one was the wiser.

If ever discovery was made of these dead, I haven’t heard of it. It’s also true that the great fire death toll is underestimated, and I dispute it to this day. It burned hot enough to melt the roof right off St Paul’s. I defy anyone to account for the dead in any meaningful way given the white ashen devastation that lay behind. There were far more than six dead. That I can promise you, but the historians have no record, and so they err on the side of documents. Truth be told, no one in the government wanted the fallout from an accurate assessment, given how many were displaced, myself included, at that time.

So, I see little point in contesting it. I know where all the plague pits are, and many of them have been found. Some of them have not. Eventually they will, when some new foundation goes deep enough. I’m sure it will all be uncovered. Doesn’t much matter anymore.

Then there’s many of the injustices done to native peoples, slaves, and so forth, and luckily, enough oral tradition survives to undo some of that. I’m sure there’s yet quite a bit more. I was thinking just today about King Philip’s war, and how absolutely wrong some of the history was regarding that. The real history is mostly known, it’s just ignored.

History is history. It’s recorded by the winners, but it’s never quite forgotten by the losers either.

[roselightfairy]

If you're still doing fic recs, do you have any favorite AUs?

Oh, do I!! This is an EXCELLENT prompt, and I’ve had a lot of fun compiling this list tonight. I’ve ended up grouping it into two different sections: modern AU (because there are a lot of those!) and “other,” which are…non-modern AU, haha. For the most part I’ve left out UA (universe alteration, in which the universe is the same but something about the story changes), because I can’t think of any of those right now – but I know there are some really good ones of that as well!

So:

Modern:

like, comment, subscribe by DeHeerKonijn

Summary: A collection of fics that take place in my modern ‘verse, wherein Minas Tirith is a bustling city, Gimli is a professor at the university, and Legolas is a model-slash-influencer-slash-layabout.

…

Come on, you all knew this was going to be first on the list. The amount of worldbuilding @deheerkonijn has put into this series is absolutely breathtaking, and what you see on Tumblr is probably only the half of it. (Go stalk her Twitter, even if you don’t have a profile – I do it all the time!) This series is all she’s written for it so far, plus the fic that we cowrote about the OC roommates. But aside from that, the series has a whole assortment of always sexy, always funny, always sweet stories about Legolas and Gimli; go read them all!

No Place Like HoME by Flamebyrd

Summary: In which our heroes play a MMORPG called Heroes of Middle-Earth.

…

THIS IS SO GOOD. I love this premise so much, haha – Legolas and Gimli are just regular humans (with regular names, even!) and a rivalry they don’t even know about – but it turns out they’ve been playing each other in a game for quite awhile! It’s cute, fun, and creative, and I wish there were more.

life’s just a game (and it’s just your turn) by plinys

Summary: Legolas and Gimli try to have phone sex (or well, headset sex) with some unforeseen consequences.

…

I ADORE that these two as gamers is a fic idea that exists more than once, and this one is so fluffy with just a hint of spice (and a hefty dose of embarrassment, haha, but they deserved it!). Read it and grin!

Hold My Number by katajainen

Summary: It's a Saturday night at the A&E, and Gimli only wants to get to the triage nurse and be done with this whole stupid business.

That is, until he meets a tall, dark stranger (a ridiculously pretty one).

…

I LOVE THIS FIC SO MUCH. The crowning glory of meet-cutes (though it’s more of a meet-ugly, really), in which Legolas and Gimli meet at the emergency room for very embarrassing reasons . . . and hit it off right away, in a way that is adorable, delightful, and funny to watch. Read for their embarrassing stories, their adorable dorkiness (they’re gamers again!), and their undeniable chemistry.

Perfect Fit by mssileas

Summary: "Both of them were painfully aware that their physical differences were shockingly obvious – much more so than their also very different personalities. And that they usually led people to assumptions they weren't shy of declaring."

Or, Legolas single-handedly disproves all prejudice, and Gimli loves it.

…

This is a lovely (and smutty, so be warned) modern AU oneshot that challenges the stereotypes of these two based on how they look – and how they would probably be treated, if they were a couple in our world. If you’re interested in the modern AU premise but not the smut, there’s another oneshot set in this ‘verse, Christmas Body, that is mostly just fluff!

Other (non-modern):

The Earth Moves Under Our Feet (It’s A Loco Motion) by notanightlight

Summary: The West is still Wild. Gimli is working on the railway, Legolas is a gunslinger, and someone needs to turn this train around.

…

WILD WEST AU WILD WEST AU!! This story is one of my favorite things ever because it’s a WILD WEST AU and Gimli is an Irish immigrant and Legolas is an outlaw and they meet in a near-death situation and bond! It has wonderful worldbuilding, excellent banter, and little moments of flirting that almost hide below the surface of the aforementioned near-death situation, but not quite. ;) Please go read it, or listen to the amazing accompanying podfic by Morvidra, which is an astounding performance.

Nothing Doth Fade (But Suffers a Sea-Change) by notanightlight

Summary: Gimli has always heard stories about the seals that lived near the cliffs of Castle Durin. “They aren’t what they seem,” they’d tell him. Gimli never knew what to think of those stories, until the night he met a stranger on the shore, with the sea in his eyes and moonlight on his skin.

…

@notanightlight has too many amazing AUs to list them all here, but I have to give a shout-out to this one because SELKIES but also ANGST and SORROW and BETRAYAL but FORGIVENESS and HOPE and – I don’t know. It plays with a common and really sad trope, but gives our characters a way through that is hard and painful, but worth it, in the end – a story in which everything is not all okay, but in which that doesn’t have to be the end, if everyone is willing to work. Plus, Thranduil makes an appearance and he is magnificent.

Wild Hunt by consumptive_sphinx

Summary: There’s a knock on the door.

It isn’t quite dusk; it isn’t too dangerous yet. But still, it’s late to be out on Midwinter’s Night. What if he was held up somewhere?

Legolas takes a nail with him when he opens the door. “Gimli. It’s late.”

…

Fae AU!! consumptive_sphinx has many wonderful AUs and you should check out their whole profile, but I had to give this one a shout-out. It’s mysterious and tender and packs a whole lot of story between the lines of its 917 words and made me yearn for more!

The Monstrous Fellowship by IchijouKenichiro

Summary: Astrin's cousins Fíli and Kíli left to fight the forces of Mordor over two years ago, but there's been no word from them for the last six months. Being a woman of action and the one who always is there to get them out of trouble, Astrin disguises herself as the male warrior Gimli and joins the army to fight for them. But the regiment she joins is anything but typical. With troublesome hobbits, a religious fanatic, the undead, a golem, and even an elf, are the greatest dangers to come from her fellow man? And what secrets are they all holding onto?

A parody of Terry Prachett's "A Monstrous Regiment"

…

THIS IS NOT A DRILL. This is ACTUALLY a Monstrous Regiment rewrite of LOTR, with the Fellowship in the place of the Regiment, and the characters are – actually matched up really, really well. Full disclosure: I read this before I read Monstrous Regiment and went in fully prepared to ship Polly and Maladict… but it turns out they were extremely shippable anyway, so that turned out all right. ;) Seriously – this is an excellent fic, such a fun story, and such a good homage!

Aulë’s Gift by daisynorbury

Summary: "Our friendship endures these strange periods of inequality. You can't remember, and I can't forget."

A new chapter in Adina's classic Back to the Beginning cycle, wherein Aulë granted Gimli perpetual reincarnation. Two thousand years into the Fourth Age, Legolas meets the ninth version of his dearest friend. Told mostly from Gimli's amnesiac POV.

…

I don’t know if this story fully counts as an AU, but I’ve been longing to rec it for several lists and just – couldn’t ever quite find a category it fit into. AU is close enough, since even though the world is meant to be Middle-earth far in the future, it’s different enough to feel like another world. This is a reincarnation story of Legolas and Gimli set in the series referenced above (and recommended in a different list), and it deals with the extreme complication of the situation with so much sensitivity and grace that it rivets me. Even if I didn���t know @daisyfornost, it would be so obvious to me that an absolutely unbelievable amount of thought and care went into the worldbuilding, the writing, the creation of this story. It is such a labor of love, and that love is evident throughout the whole thing. Please go read it, but I warn you that you will have lots of feelings.

…

Thank you again for this amazing prompt, anon! Reminder to all that this is in no way a comprehensive list – I’m sure I’ve left out so many other wonderful stories. Please feel free to add your own, if you reblog this! And my usual reminder to please leave the author a comment if you read any of these and enjoy it. <3

[gaemkyuu]

The Meeting

Warnings: implied intercourse, but not described A/N: First story that I am posting! I have four more parts, so if you like it, leave me a comment and I will post the others :) Disclaimer: This is a FICITONAL writing piece on Charlie Gillespie. In no way do I claim or declare that Charlie’s portrayal is accurate to real life. I do however, own Teagan Valencia :)

Masterlist

The Teagan Valencia Series: The Meeting  / The Fight / The Proposal / The Present / The Recovery / The Future 

The Meeting

“Quiet on set...! And...Action!”

Teagan watched in silent adoration as Charlie delivered his lines. She didn’t always have the opportunity to sneak away from work to watch him work, but today was an exception. The second season was well underway in the filming process and their popularity was increasing. Kenny noticed Teagan out of the corner of his eye and motioned her over so that she could watch the scene from the monitor. She was amazed at how Charlie looked playing Luke. She had met him three years ago when he was filming Season 1, but yet the boy on camera looked exactly like he did that same day three years ago.

***

Teagan had been visiting Vancouver that weekend to visit family and help her sister get settled. Her little sister had been accepted into the University of British Columbia in the Business program studying Accounting and Finance. She was the pride and joy of filipino immigrant parents as she was attending an esteemed university and getting a degree. All the while their oldest, Teagan, had opted for a non traditional method of getting into the marketing industry by working for a popular canadian clothing brand. Her sister was going to be a university graduate while Teagan worked her way up the ladder in a retail store. Teagan always knew that going to school wasn’t where her path was taking her, but she always knew that hard work, determination and experience were valuable assets in the job market. Something her parents would never understand.

“Charlie watch out!”

They were walking around Gastown in their cute summer dresses killing time before their dinner reservation, when Teagan was knocked over by another person. As she got her bearings, she felt cold liquid on her chest and the weight of another body. The other person quickly scrambled to their feet and profusely apologized, helping her stand as her cousins stood there in shock. She heard a couple more footsteps rush over to where she were standing, dusting off her butt and looking her tackler in the face. In an instant, Teagan had forgotten what had happened as she got lost in the deep green pools of the man in front of her. It wasn’t the eye colour that stole her focus, but rather the intensity of emotions that he conveyed through them. Teagan could see and feel the embarrassment, regret and sincerity of the man.

“Teags?”

Her cousin’s voice broke her trance and she blushed when she realized she had been staring. She noticed that two other people stood behind him, in which she assumed was her friend. One was fairly tall and blonde and the female with long auburn hair and a beanie. Teagan forced herself to focus on what the man was saying rather than the beautiful eyes in front of her.

“I am so so so sorry. I completely didn’t see you and didn’t mean to ruin your dress or tackle you to the floor” Teagan looked down at her once cute summer dress covered in iced coffee from Starbucks. “Is there any way I can make it up to you?” Teagan stood there speechless.

“Uh-uhm- D-Don’t worry about it! It’s totally fine” Teagan felt slightly flustered and out of breath, her blush deepening as she heard her cousin scoff on the side. “I can quickly just go and buy something else to wear”

“Please let us pay for it! We feel horrible!” the man’s female friend offered coming closer to Teagan motioning the other two males as well.

“Seriously, it’s fine! I’m totally fine! Don’t worry about it!” Teagan couldn’t quite understand why she felt embarrassed when they were the ones who were at fault. “What happened anyway?”

“Our friend thought it would be funny to run away with my iced coffee and wasn’t looking where he was running. It’s my fault too because I was chasing after him” the blonde one shyly confessed, rubbing his neck apologetically. “I hope we didn’t ruin your night”

“We were just killing time waiting for our reservation. It isn’t for another half an hour, so we have ample time to grab Teagan a new dress” Teagan silently thanked her cousin as her brain was malfunctioning at the handsome man in front of her. 

“We seriously feel so bad, can we please make it up to you somehow?” the female tried to offer some sort of compensation again.

“It’s totally fine, no hard feelings. It wasn’t like it was on purpose right?” Teagan’s brain started to slowly function as she declined the offer of the female.

“Seriously, we need to make this up to you two. I won’t take no for an answer and if you do say no, I’ll just follow you around until you say yes” The handsome man took a step closer to Teagan, causing her breath to catch and swallow deeply.

“Uhm, okay! I mean, if you won’t take No, I’d much rather just make new friends instead of gaining a stalker!” Teagan could feel her words tumble clumsily out of her mouth. Thus began the start of a new friendship. Teagan, her cousin and their new friends ventured to the nearest H&M to find something else for her to wear. Turns out that the other female, Savannah, had excellent taste in clothing. They all came to learn that they were all in the same age range, with Tegan being born in 1997 and Owen, the blonde being born in 2000. Teagan also came to learn that her handsome tackler’s name was Charlie and that all three of them were actors for a new Netflix project that was scheduled to air in the New Year. The three ladies got along incredibly and their shopping trip turned into all five of them going to dinner. They had lucked out when a table of 5 before them no-showed the restaurant. They spent the evening getting to know one another and a deep friendship was easily formed. Throughout the night, Charlie and Teagan connected on several levels and at times forgot there were three other people at the table. Occasionally the two would banter or tease each other, even though they had met that day. As their dinner came to an end and bills were paid by none other than Charlie, the girls exchanged contact information, planning to hangout on their next day off. But before Teagan could walk away for the night, Charlie slipped a piece of paper in Teagan’s hand apologizing one more time for running into her.

‘Coffee? This time I won’t spill it on you’ was messily written on the one side, with his phone number on the other. Teagan’s cousin didn’t notice the smile that lit up her face, but she quickly snapped a picture of it and tucked it in her purse for safe keeping.

That coffee date with Charlie ended up becoming a regular occurrence, though the only one who would be drinking coffee would be Teagan as Charlie always settled for tea or whatever dessert or smoothie he wanted to explore that day. She appreciated his adventurous side as she was creature of habit at times. She learned a lot about the industry and the many quirks of Charlie Gillespie.  Soon, coffee dates turned into dinner dates and dinner dates turned into weekend cuddles and relaxation, but filming would eventually wrap and the holidays approached, leaving Teagan and Charlie to make a definitive decision in their relationship. Teagan didn’t expect to extend her Vancouver visit from a week to about a month and a half. Reality was coming fast ans soon Charlie would be back to LA and Teagan working in Edmonton.

“Charlie, what are we?” she asked him as both sat on the couch of his apartment. Mama Mia played softly in the background on the TV as she turned to face him.

“Well what do you want to be?” he cheekily asked her, flashing one of his killer smiles.

“Je suis sérieuse. Tu retournes à LA toute suite et moi à Edmonton. C’est quoi ça?" Charlie knew that when Teagan spoke to her in french she was serious. It was one of the things he learned early on about Teagan. He was pleased to know that she was fluent in french, having taken an IB course in high school, but they often bantered about their accents. She understood how french was a huge part of who he was and she didn’t speak to him in french unless it was important. She knew it got his attention right away since he was so used to being around people who only spoke english.

He paused the TV, complete silence filling the room, both of them facing one another. Charlie was off to Vietnam for the holidays and Teagan planned to spend hers with her family in Edmonton, seeing as she had made an impromptu extension to her trip in Vancouver. He knew that the next time they would be seeing one another they would be crossing borders to visit one another and to be honest the distance felt a bit overwhelming. But Charlie couldn’t shake the fact that there was something about Teagan that he didn’t want to let go. 

“What’s going to happen when we both go back to living the way we were before one another?” Charlie chuckled softly to himself, knowing his decision. Teagan cocked an eyebrow at his response.

“Well nothing’s going to go back to the way it was before Teags” she loved hearing Charlie use her nickname. He said it in a way that sounded so comforting to her ears. “You’re mine right?”

“Define: mine” Teagan smiled coyly at Charlie, already understanding what he meant. “I need help understanding you. I don’t speak Charlie Gillespie Language” Charlie rolled his eyes and got down in front of Teagan, settling in between her legs.

“Teagan Jillian Valencia, will you be my girlfriend?” He jutted his lips forward ever so slightly to create the perfect pouty lips and then he comboed them with his best puppy eyes. Teagan shook her head at the dramatics of the man in front of her and kissed him on the lips, pulling him up and forward. “So, that’s a yes?”

She nodded and kissed him again, this time a little more aggressively. Charlie took the hint and started getting all handsy, but Teagan broke their kiss. “As much as I would love to do this right now, Owen comes home in 30 minutes and I would much rather him not walking in on us, again”

“Well let’s make this quick and move to the bedroom!”

[sapphia]

the discussion around the wellerman being a colonialist song makes me think a lot about early immigration from great britain

it makes me think about how australia was a penal colony, where prisoners were sent in lieu of the death penalty to serve years or even decades of hard labour halfway around the world, 20,000 km from their homes and families, if they had one. it makes me think about why great britain needed penal colonies at all - how the industrial revolution created a generation of urban poor, who had to steal to survive or to feed their family because they had no work. and how the majority of convicts had committed poverty crimes like stealing - but notably there was also large number of political prisoners from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and a range of class revolutionaries like the Luddites, trying to stand up to tyrannical oppression and unjust laws. and i think about how many of these people chose to stay on in australia and the reasons for that; because in the 7 years they'd been enslaved, their country had moved on. because the trip back was 100 days by ship. because the crimes they committed had been to survive starvation and poverty and tyranny in their home countries, and that the australian "ticket" release system and lower social stigma for convicts gave them some hope of a life and profession after serving their sentence.

i think about america and how that, too, began as a penal colony, though that stopped after the revolution. how it became known as the land of the free because the disenfranchised poor in great britain, but especially in ireland, were given hope that they could escape the class system and build a life for themselves. and i think about between 1845 and 1855 ireland's population went from 8 million to 6 million due to the potato famine, and estimates of emigration to america place the figures at 1.5 million. 1.5 million people fled the famine in their homeland, a famine that could have been alleviated by assistance from england (but never was). and I think about how 1.5 million people left, but a further 1 million people died, and the only reason that it wasn't 2.5 million people who died was that some of them managed to get out.

and i think about how the wellerman is a song about early whalers in new zealand, stranded on an island unable to leave. how they came seeking work and rich men owning immoral companies used their desperation to survive to trap them on an island with no means of escape save to settle there and leave the whaling life and the little comforts it provided. it makes me think of my own history, how my cousin did up our family tree and traced our passage to new zealand from great britain. how my grandfather was a coal miner and my great grandfather was a coal miner and how it likely goes back for generations, because we looked at the emigration records as our ancestors moved from coal mining town to coal mining town, from ireland to scotland to england to the west coast of new zealand, all in the search for the very work that would take their lives. i think about how my grandfather died of tuberculosis caused by coal dust, and how my great grandfather died in a mine disaster that killed 18 other men, and how my great grandmother's family moved out to new zealand from britain after her two brothers died in a gas leak that came from a nearby mine.

and i don't want to dismiss the harm that colonialism has done, or the rightful anger of the indigenous people who suffered, and who still suffer to this day. but i also want people to think about how  the bulk of colonialist settlers didn't come to profit. they came to survive, and to escape. and those that did make a profit were too often the ones that were already rich; the businessmen who set up whaling companies and mines and large-scale farms, and who squeezed labour and money from any poor people desperate enough to follow. i want people to think about the nuance of how class and colonialism intersect and how colonisers profited from exploiting indigenous people while simultaneously exploiting the poor and the desperate.

[mercurygray]

Making Of Featurette - Build An OC

Some of you may have seen my post yesterday about how to introduce an OC  and met my new gal, Phyl, who seems to have broken a land speed record on acquiring fans.

The challenge posed yesterday - or more, the question - was how to introduce an original character, but it was also sort of a fun exercise for me to take a look at my process for creating a character from scratch at the same time.

There was some discussion about whether including the Toccoa training sequence was necessary, and while that applies to a large number of BoB OCs, many of whom find themselves included in the unit for various and sundry reasons, it doesn't apply to all of them, so part of the spec was also to create someone to whom that rule wouldn’t apply.

But why ask that question? The opening scenes at Toccoa serve a specific storytelling purpose - they establish the relationship between Sobel and his men, paint a picture of a difficult training program, and create an environment to explain why these men bonded like they did. 

The larger issue here, then, isn't about whether training was important, but rather 'Have your given your character believable context and backstory and set them up for success within the narrative?' For some original characters who are being included in the unit, that context and their integration is essential to the story. For others, that context will need to come from somewhere else.

We also talked about a character's 'purpose' within the narrative. For most of my fics, I start with a specific romantic purpose in mind, but I didn't have one of those here, so I started with a wartime service - the WAAF - and a name. I used common 1920s UK name lists and a random name generator to assemble some possibilities. Having a name to roll around with helps a little, sometimes and can change, too!

The Women's Auxiliary Air Force fills a wide variety of roles within the RAF, but a great number of jobs for women are in technical positions, learning new technologies like radar and range-finding. Assignments at stations closer to the channel would be much busier than those further inland, which solves two problems. One, it means my OC is closer to Aldbourne, which is in Wiltshire, well out of the way, and two, a sleepy station allows for much less technical knowledge because I don't have to describe people actually using the equipment they're seated next to.

So - Air Aux, very technical, (so she's smart) slow assignment (so she's either not good at her job or she asked to be here?). People get bored all the time at work, so they bring stuff to do. My OC needed some stuff. I had a thought that the British Intelligence Services solved a recruitment problem by putting out an advertisement for people who enjoyed solving crosswords. This was a covert way to get in people who were interested in language and could see patterns and think critically. They're cheap, they're published in a lot of newspapers, they're a good way to pass time on a long shift.

Puzzles are always better with a freind, so I started writing some dialogue between unnamed OFC #1 and OFC #2, later Phyllis and Bernice.

Unkempt women, nine letters.

Us.

I think that leaves us a bit short, I said nine letters. Slatterns! Right, thirty five down, a sticker that doesn't know it's been licked - oh, a stamp.

Why do you bother asking?

Because I'm trying to be sociable, and it's helping keep me awake.

Starting in conversation is helpful to me only because people don’t exist in a vacuum - you can find out more about them, I have found, in group settings, than trying to build them away from all human contact.

As I started writing this dialogue, it came out that Phyl (reading the clues) was really good at puzzles (smart again), and Bernice, her friend, wasn't. Bernice asked why Phyl hadn't done something with that, and that question got me thinking - maybe the reason Phyl didn't go into codebreaking was because they didn't want her - because she's of a slightly lower social class. One of the books about codebreakers is called The Debs of Bletchley Park for the simple reason that a lot of upper class debutantes ended up getting posts there because they knew someone.

I fiddled around with some backstory and dropped some references in for flavor, though I'm still not sure where she's from - in my head, Phyl still speaks with an RP accent. I thought about making her from Yorkshire (thank you, All Creatures Great and Small) but McCray is a Scottish name, so her father or grandfather might have immigrated, probably for work, so I considered Hull (boat-building) Sheffield (mining) and Manchester (manufacturing) as possible cities. National Service could be and often was a great mixer of classes in the UK, and allowed women to do and see things that wouldn't have been possible before the war, so a young woman from a working class background could make something of herself with hard work.

Though this didn't make it into the sketch, the magazine I used for the crossword, MacCleans, is a periodical from Canada. I thought about putting in a reference to one or more of the pilots on their base being from Canada, but in the end it didn't work, so the reference got cut. There's actually a story in that particular issue (April 1943) about Bomber Command. A reference to other pilots or officers on base would give me some more characters to play with in later scenes, and possibly set up a romantic entanglement, if the Canadian officer gave her the magazine as a gift, knowing she liked puzzles.

I didn't do too much with this in specific, but as the scene played out, I got the sense that Phyl is older than Bernie by a few years, and has also been in the services longer - she's seen more, heard more, and done more, and is used to this life. And we sort of see that in the scene - she's prepared for the night shift with her crossword and her cup of tea, whereas Bernie is fidgeting.

In a cursory look through tumblr, I found a quote from Sergeant Anne Lowe, talking about the Battle of Britain, saying "You always knew when they were dead when they took their names off the board. (…) There were so many. They mourned each other so simply and with no fuss and went off rushing into the air again. Now at last, we began to know and understand a little and now we knew war. Always there was a sound of weeping. Every day some girl was weeping."

So, someone who had been longer in the service, who had lived through life at one of those busier coastal installations, had lived through the Battle of Britain, had watched a lot of men she'd danced with come back changed or not come back at all, would have a very different perspective than a young woman who just joined and comes with none of that baggage, and is anxious about being on a slow assignment when she could be doing something much more exciting.

The ending line of the scene - "She would learn. They all did, eventually" was supposed to be a hat tip to the fact that something has happened to Phyllis in the past, regarding boyfriends or making new friends, which would hopefully pay out when she meets the promised Americans in the next scene.

So. Started with some dialogue, let the two characters in the scene feel each other out a bit and learned more about them in the process, tried to come up with some backstory that would support them and a story going forward, tried to give them some context within the story and the larger picture of the war, hopefully gave the reader some reasons to come back for the next chapter.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

More on that Anne Lowe quote:>> http://spitfiresite.com/2010/09/battle-of-britain-1940-losses.html

[smallblueandloud]

some leverage: redemption reactions

i finished leverage redemption today! and i don't have anyone to talk to about it so, here we have my reactions for all eight episodes, both positive and negative. please feel free to reblog/comment -- discussions are what i'm here for! (under a cut because spoilers and also this ended up being 2k. whoops!)

EPISODE 1: the too many rembrandts job

the "aww, this guy is trying to pull his first heist! how cute" job

what they chose to do with nate was... interesting. it might just be that i read too many of those cracky "here's how they should explain nate's absence" posts, but i was expecting something funny. the grief permeating this episode -- it makes SENSE, but it was still weird. leverage doesn't usually have sadness like this. pain, yes, rage, certainly, but sadness? not usually

the way sophie immediately spots the signs of a con and slips into a character? phenomenal. i'm here for EXPERTS BEING EXPERTS and this show does NOT disappoint

harry wilson is a really solid character! most impressively, he's not flynn, which is impressive enough that i'm making a whole bullet point about it. i was worried that noah wyle was kinda a one-trick pony, but it appears not! good for him tbh

i'm LIVING for the ot3 moments in this episode. "what happened?" "we happened" YESSSSS!!! i wish we'd had more domesticity, but i know they did what they could

"he gets it from his father" FUCK!!!!!

the discussion about redemption in this episode is FANTASTIC but personally i am still delirious with excitement about "my nana leads a multi-denominational household" so expect those thoughts in 3-5 business days

EPISODE 2: the panamanian monkey job

the "flash electropop concert" job

BREANNA INTRODUCTION! i love her so MUCH, y'all. we only got to see her dynamic with hardison in this one episode, but man, it manages to be one of her best dynamics anyway. i just! i love her! i love the way the team works with her!

"in our field, you're one of the best. but there, you're the only one." god we have ELIOT/HARDISON rights and i am NOT OKAY. just!! them!!!!!! being supportive!!!!!! they have learned how to be sweet with each other! they work together so much better (in part because we're seeing them from harry's outsider pov instead of nate's insider pov, but STILL)

midway through this episode, i thought "huh, leverage always focuses on specific people, when really the problem is systematic, and pretending it's anything different is just an excuse to not fight for change". and then at the end harry talks about how the system itself is broken! i love knowing that john rogers and i were reading the same tweets last summer. it's a good feeling to trust the people making a piece of media

who let noah wyle speak spanish. whoever it was, they need to rescind their permission

god, the parker/hardison in this episode. THE PARKER/HARDISON IN THIS EPISODE! they KILL me friends they KILL ME!

also just like, hardison in this episode in general. he made a star trek reference! he made a doctor who reference! he decides there are other people who need him more! the way they wrote around gina bellman's maternity leave in s2 was good but this was phenomenal.

also i'm here for ot3 crumbs so "is this like the time when eliot wanted us to say no" is going on my ot3-is-canon conspiracy board

this is a tiny detail but eliot taking out the drone with a goddamn ORANGE was so good. he's so good at his job!! they're all so good at their jobs!! i know i literally just talked about this but AAA

EPISODE 3: the rollin' on the river job

the "sometimes you just want to rob a vault wearing a floofy dress, and that's valid" job

i did... not. like. how the villain in this one was an immigrant whose exploitable weakness was a "desperation" to be included in the upper crust. and the fact that they beat him with a literal southern belle who explicitly beats him BECAUSE her family has been in the area for "hundreds of years"? it just feels Iffy.

also iffy about this episode was breanna's characterization. it felt inconsistent. she feels inconsistent across the whole season, but this episode in particular... she tells harry she's only with the team because she's desperate, that she doesn't believe in hope, and then at the end of the episode she tells parker she wants to be there to change the world. and like, even in the first place, she's not here out of desperation! SHE asked to join the team! like, i can see how it all kinda fits together, but it just feels... inconsistent. idk. i think these scripts all could've benefited from an extra round or two of editing.

anyway! i loved the way they tied hardison into these episodes, even though aldis hodge couldn't be there. he has binders! breanna doesn't want to read them! parker did! he put in big letters, "when in doubt, trust the person in the van". i'm just so !!! about how much i love him and how much he loves his team and how much his team loves him. FOUND FAMILY, BABY!

all inconsistencies in breanna's characterization aside, i really liked her speech at the end. i know how she feels! it's really nice to have someone on the team who's from -- not my world, really, but a lot closer than any of the others. it's a nice feeling! i love her a lot. i hope her writing gets more consistent

lol, parker ate eliot's carrot cake. i love the parker/eliot rights we get in this show, they're so domestic and it's wonderful.

EPISODE 4: the tower job

the "hardison made his partners learn klingon" job

watching this episode was what made me go "they're not going to make us sit through a harry/sophie romance... right? right?"

i'm still not sure they're gonna let us avoid it but it COULD work so... i've decided to just not worry about it for now

i liked the number of ways the con goes wrong! it was fun to watch them work on the fly like that. i think them not having a dedicated Mastermind(tm) is a good watsonian explanation for their plans being pretty haphazard in general, but it's good, they think well on their feet

nate was a chessmaster. he had the whole situation in his mind from the beginning, accounting for every possible outcome. parker and sophie are much more adaptive, and it's cool to see. they can rely on their respective skillsets a lot more than nate could

a really solid episode! probably one of the strongest ones in the season. i liked it a lot.

(ALSO as mentioned above the klingon lines were fantastic and not just because they were a star trek reference -- every time eliot and parker both mentioned hardison, together, it added a year to my lifespan)

EPISODE 5: the paranormal hacktivity job

the "sophie was worryingly prepared to fake her death" job

i know why they characterized the client as a skeptic, i really do, and i loved the format of this episode, but also. But Also. she should've been a love interest for breanna and I'm Right.

having a girl's episode was the CORRECT choice. they do crimes in their free time! they fleece newbie, cruel criminals! it's so good!

it would've been cool to have eliot around for the assassin guy, but it was also cool to see the others take him out without having eliot to rely on. it's like getting to see how they'd take out eliot, if they were ever on opposing sides.

PARKER CANONICALLY USES SCRIPTS IT'S THE BEST THING EVER

breanna bristling about letting the criminal into the theater's electric system was so good god i love her so much. she knows hardware! i bet she likes to work with her hands. i bet she stims. i bet she has adhd

actually, sidenote, but i LOVE these headquarters. they look so nice! the stage is so nice! i loved having an episode set in and around it, it was such a good choice.

EPISODE 6: the card game job

the "FINALLY AN EXPLICITLY QUEER LEVERAGE CHARACTER" job

QUEER BREANNA QUEER BREANNA QUEER BREANNA QUEER BR

UNFOLLOW ME NOW THIS IS GONNA BE THE ONLY THING I POST ABOUT FOR THE REST OF TIME

GOD, what a good way to reveal it. it's fully about her! i love queer romances, of course i do, but i don't think i've ever seen a character come out without a romance being their reason for doing so (however indirectly). i still think she should've gotten a date with the client from 1x05, but i really liked this too.

this episode just felt like a love letter to fandom, and i love that. i love how much it shone through. i'm used to writers specifically going out of their way to make fun of fans and laugh at them, so it was just. really nice to have someone stand up and go, no, this is important for a reason! people love this for a reason! it MEANS something!

very fun to watch eliot swordfight. very fun to watch sophie recite a sonnet in her classic fashion. very fun to watch parker work at being a good mentor. breanna was so excited about the card game! they're all so good!

oh, and i guess harry's here too.

EPISODE 7: the double-edged sword job

the "harry is addicted to mobile games, which is a mood" job

hot take alert! i think this is the weakest episode of the season by a LOT. it needed so much more editing. it felt so disjointed, so all over the place. the plot was haphazard but in a muffled way, where you had no idea why they were doing what they were doing. the climax was sudden and didn't make any sense. it was just weird.

i'm not the person to comment on this but it feels kind of lazy to cast an east asian guy to play a socially-awkward tech genius. just a thought.

oh, of course jonathan frakes directed this episode. sometimes his stuff is really good but other times (ahem, ds9 3x02) it's disjointed and all over the place. i'm not even surprised it was him.

idk if i have anything else to say about this. oh! some of the team moments were great -- mostly involving eliot. i loved the moment of him recognizing the headshot, i LOVED the ten seconds of everyone teasing him. he and parker talked about the wellbeing of their friend, the woman whose ex tracked her down!

separate bulletpoint to say how much i LOVED his conversation with breanna outside the house. he's so good at reassuring! he could go deeper there, talking about being better than your worst day, but he knew when not to push! it was so good.

"first off, this guy can't TOUCH hardison" deserves its own bulletpoint because like. y'all. Y'ALL.

EPISODE 8: the mastermind job

the "eliot is more than just a pretty face" job

oh man this post is so much longer than i thought it would be. okay just one more episode and then i'm done.

the callbacks to original leverage were SO well done and made me feel emotions without feeling overbearing.

i didn't like the central premise -- that nate would share so many details with a random insurance agent -- in the first place, but i did like how it allowed them to bring back nate without actually hiring timerty mcasshole.

i liked eliot's insistence that he's more than just the muscle! he is, and it's really good to know, textually, that the writers do too!

me, watching the resolution of the episode: ah, yeah, insurance fraud. a classic!

harry bonding with his guard had "they don't even have dental!" energy and i am SUCH a fan. i know it was all for the con but also give me harry, unable to stop advising people, even when they're actively holding him hostage

parker! on the phone with hardison!!!! ADORABLE

is it just me or was someone else expecting the accountant's name to be something significant? with the way they led up to it, i was waiting for a "sterling" or something else. my sensors were pinging for another tara reveal. i'm still convinced we're gonna get this guy dramatically revealed in the season finale.

a really nice episode! i had a lot of fun with it. and now i want to rewatch the rashamon job, but tbh i ALWAYS want to rewatch the rashamon job.

and that's a wrap! overall, a fun season, i enjoyed it a lot. not as solid as original leverage, but it's the very beginning, and it was put together during a global pandemic, so i'm cutting them some slack. also levar burton is gonna show up at some point. that's a big reason of why i'm cutting them so much slack.

my personal ranking of the episodes is 1x04, 1x06, 1x08, 1x01, 1x02, 1x03, and finally last (and least), 1x07.

what did you guys think of the new season? what was your favorite episode? do you agree with any of my opinions? disagree with any? let me know, please, i'd love to discuss!