Anghraine

Hey all. :\

I have a post on Tumblr about it that I imagine most of you have already seen. The short version would be that this doesn't feel as bad as Trump's first victory did—I had told myself over and over that this could happen, that it would come down to political trends thousands of miles away from where I live, etc. But my brain is telling me it's actually much worse. Trump scraped a victory in 2016 with a deck stacked very heavily in his favor, and without certainty about what his administration would really look like given that he's a lying blowhard, via the electoral college but against the will of the greater number of voters. That didn't mean he wasn't president, but getting fucked over by outdated mechanics of government set up by long-dead men is not the same as getting fucked over by fellow citizens who are very much alive and who know, or have the ability to easily find out, about the policies of the first Trump administration. Kamala Harris, whatever her faults, did not have anything like the baggage of HRC and yet the people of this country were far more willing to vote for Trump against her.

I've been quietly enraged for hours in a way I don't often get—I get annoyed, and sometimes I get normal angry, but like ... in 2016 I broke down crying over and over, and I haven't done anything of that. I feel cold but not numb. The last time I felt this kind of frozen hatred was when a relative told me he'd struck a plea bargain about statutory rape with a sixteen-year-old student and was telling me so I didn't find out about it in the news. I didn't get upset as such, or feel immediately angry, or fight with him about it. I simply didn't care whether he lived or died for years afterwards.

There's this awful review of The Borgias that condemns Jeremy Irons's performance as Alexander VI/Rodrigo Borgia, because the reviewer claimed Irons lacks the appropriate "fire" to play Rodrigo—he admits that Irons does play him with a kind of fire, but says that Irons "burns with the steely flame of the North, not Latin fire." I thought this was a hilarious and very stupid characterization of both Alexander VI and Jeremy Irons, and told my best friend J about it, and it's entered our friendship lexicon. But he (my bff) has remarked a couple times that when I get truly, genuinely angry, it is absolutely a Steely Flame of the North situation. And I'm definitely feeling that now—not numb, not sad, not shocked, not screaming, just kind of hard.

I will say that, despite dutifully voting for him in the primaries, Bernie's "this is happening because of the Democrats turning their backs on working-class people, they lost the white ones to Trump and now they're deservingly losing Latino and Black ones" shtick is even more contemptible than usual IMO. Yeah, he's hammering it into his The Class War Is The Only War constant replay loop, but I don't know why the fuck he's associating this with Black voters. From what data we have at this point, the talk about Black men switching from Biden to Trump came out to a shift of four points from 2020 in exit polls (which, while done carefully, are known to be rough estimates—that's in the realm of statistical noise) and even if you did treat them as 100% accurate, the exit polls have Black female support for Trump actually dropping three points from 2020. (Union households favored Harris, btw.) Maybe he referenced Black voters to avoid sounding like he's scapegoating Latine voters specifically (who did shift towards Trump, especially men), maybe he's talking about lower turnout, but I think it's honestly super shitty to associate Black voters with this loss when a) there are many other more proximate causes, b) many Black voters are deliberately disenfranchised by their state governments and deal with more obstacles to voting than virtually any other group, and c) Black voters have been and remain unambiguously the most stalwart Democratic demographic apart from LGBT people (iirc the only group even slightly close is Jewish people—the same exit polls have them at 78% Democratic to Black voters' 85%, with Black women specifically at 91% for Harris). Lumping Black voters in with almost anyone else flattens a truly vast divide.

For context: my best friend J is an ultra-ultra-dedicated Star Trek fan. I saw re-runs as a kid and had a lot of lingering goodwill towards TNG in particular, but not especially clear memories apart from First Contact (J and I had a beloved English teacher in high school who assigned it to our class :D). I haven't watched much of the newer stuff, even. I saw two JJ Abrams films (the first seemed a perfectly fine film if slightly vacuous—it felt rather more like SW than ST in some ways, but not enough to be fully satisfying as either, while the sequel sucked in a "we should have seen TROS coming" way). I haven't seen any Discovery, Prodigy, Lower Decks, or Picard episodes, just two episodes of SNW that were okay, but not really my thing. They're polished, but struck me as rather unambitious in a ST context. That said, J really, really loves other ST (he considers it basically his religion, despite decidedly rough patches such as Picard) and I hadn't seen any of the older stuff in ages, so I was thinking vaguely of catching up with some old school ST.

Meanwhile, we were negotiating our next Media Experience awhile back, and he really wants me to watch Andor. In part, this is so we can talk about it, and in part because he genuinely thinks I'd like it apart from his admission that it handles Cassian oddly given his characterization in Rogue One, but he thinks I could overlook this in the face of the show's greatness. (He does not do social media and does not fully grasp the extent of my Rogue One!Cassian stanning.) We were talking it over and I was trying to evade committing myself to watching Andor and was suddenly struck by a burst of Machiavellian genius.

him: I think you really would love it if you'd give it a chance.
me: I have a counter-proposal, since the last thing we watched was also your idea.
him: ...yeah? A different Star Wars?
me: No. Star Trek.
him: ...
him: ...
him: O_O
him: ...like, Discovery or...?
me: No. I've been meaning to catch up with the older shows, since I don't remember them very well, except bits of The Next Generation.
him: Wow. Okay. Um, well, which one ... it can't be Deep Space Nine because we're watching that later in the summer, and Voyager is, well, I love it, but like a three-legged dog. I can't really recommend starting there. But we could watch some highlights of TNG...
me: I wasn't really thinking of a highlights reel experience...
him: O_O
him: I guess we could actually start with the original series, though there are some complications with the early episodes and multiple pilots and everything, and, well, sometimes it's extremely 60s...
me: Okay, let's see!

So while this originated in a cunning plot to evade Andor by throwing in all of Star Trek in front of him like a red flag in front of a bull, I didn't want to only be using his favorite thing as a delaying tactic, obviously. I definitely wanted to give ST a fair shot and think about it and try to engage properly, etc.

I don't always have time for it, but so far we've watched the following episodes (in this order):

( Read more... )

I reblogged this kind of hilarious map of the USA by a truck driver who's driven through most of it.

Tagged: #lmaoooo #the pnw's west side does have dry stretches but during a pretty narrow segment of the year #so i'll give him that one ;)

I've been thinking about ways in which Austen criticism has often fallen down wrt class analysis. Back in the 90s Julia Prewitt Brown wrote a "review" that is actually a guided tour through the failings of feminist analysis of Austen due to many things, but one of them was a failure of substantive class analysis in terms of gender. But I still see a lot of what she was talking about in both academia and more fandom or pop culture oriented interpretations—I'm inclined to think particularly when it comes from a contemporary US perspective.

I have way more thoughts about this than I have time to articulate, but I think US fans and academics in particular (though not exclusively) struggle to understand class in Austen's novels or other literature of the time in a way that is not simplified and enormously dependent on largely unfamiliar formal or legal categories rather than complex, sometimes contradictory or unpredictable, highly, highly striated structures that a quick consult of population breakdowns or tables of precedence is not going to explain. And at the same time, I think we (speaking as a US American!) often focus on the more (to us) exotic elements of 18th and early 19th-century British class dynamics rather than analyzing those dynamics in terms of class interests. These interests aren't purely financial (the understanding of class priorities purely in direct financial terms also seems very much a US perspective on it—maybe not exclusively again, idk).

Easy example, but: analysis of class in P&P tends to focus overwhelmingly on questions of exact legal status, precedence and large-scale categories (military, clergy, gentry, upper vs lower servants...), and reported income. And those things matter, for sure. But this tends to neglect how the characters perceive their own class interests (and how accurate their perception may or may not be), who their "natural" allies are, what larger social structures they benefit from or fail to benefit from (again, not only financially, though also that), their conflicts and alliances. Anne de Bourgh and Charlotte Lucas likely have either the same or quite similar ranks in formalized terms before Charlotte's marriage (as daughters of knights*) and are just about exact contemporaries, but the class structures around them are very different in ways that extend even beyond Anne's vast inheritance and Charlotte's lack of one. The image of Charlotte standing in the cold wind while a closely supervised Anne talks at her from her phaeton without any awareness of Charlotte's possible discomfort makes this seem especially stark.

This is even more glaringly apparent in something like William Godwin's Caleb Williams, in which the terrifying, relentless extent of aristocratic power over common people is represented by a country squire with six thousand a year. Legally that squire, Falkland, is no less a commoner than Caleb himself (relatedly, every member of the extended Fitzwilliam family appearing in P&P are also legally commoners). But that doesn't tell you anything about the sheer degree of power afforded Falkland and what six thousand a year signifies beyond direct buying power (that is very wealthy for the country gentry of the 1790s; it turns out a major part of his income, significantly, derives from slave plantations rather than his property in England; moreover, Falkland is able to bring power to bear everywhere Caleb goes in a way that only partly involves direct purchases).

I do seriously have to go write other things, but I wanted to get some part of this out of my head before I forget.

*Anne de Bourgh could be the daughter of a baronet rather than a knight, and thus higher-ranking than Charlotte in terms of strict precedence, but a) the distinction in precedence is so unimportant to understanding what she represents in class terms that we aren't told, and b) Sir Lewis is more likely to have been a knight than baronet IMO from what contextual information we do have.

I reblogged a screenshot of an official Tweet from Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA), which includes a photograph of him standing next to his senatorial office in the Capitol with his name by the door. In the Tweet, he remarks that he was being arrested by the Capitol police for nonviolent protest the previous time he was there, and this time they were just showing him to his office there.

Tagged: #:D

Mood is currently a mix of “phew” and “FUCK YEAH”

Tagged: #trifecta!!!

I reblogged this and added:

And, other events aside, congratulations to Sen.-elect Jon Ossoff (D-GA)!!!!

I just noticed that my Facebook background is still Portland, which is … not where I actually live these days, but also I’m in exile and I suffer

Tagged: #i like wa better than or but portland better than literally anything in wa ... idk #cascadia ftw #i do love it all! just ... portland ;_;

I’m kind of morbidly curious if the Joseph Epstein arguing today that Jill Biden shouldn’t call herself “Dr Biden” is the same Joseph Epstein who called Stephen Greenblatt a brain tumor on academia in the 90s.

Tagged: #i mentioned the latter in passing in my 16th cent exam and suddenly saw the name again and was like... the fuck? #and it went down from there

LOL, the previous post suddenly made me think that part of the reason I’m so amused by the idea that all the different branches of Darcy’s family slightly look down on each other is that it’s pretty much what my family is like?

Mother’s family: both sides are English, but some come from … like, “at some point we were important but fell on hard times for four generations” and look down on the “we were coal miners in Derbyshire and kept dying so we ended up here” side, who think the former group are pretentious assholes.

Both sides look down on my adoptive father’s side, because they’re racist and he’s Mexican. They prefer my bio father, who has a Very Checkered Past, since he’s white, although they also have issues with his mother being Greek and used to “joke” with her about it (Anglo grandma: but she never laughed, weird).

Bio father’s family: mix of Irish and Greek. Apparently the Greek side didn’t want Grandma to marry my grandfather bc he wasn’t Greek, while the Irish side didn’t want him to marry Grandma because she is, and her parents were immigrants. To this day, most of the Irish side doesn’t associate with the Irish-Greek side bc they’re somehow still hung up on it. Grandma, meanwhile, looks down on Mother’s family as trashy.

It’s all some mix of entertaining and exhausting.

Tagged: #i do have other reasons for the headcanon but like... i've never pretended i don't project onto darcy #i hadn't really thought about it in this way though #austen blogging #but mostly just my family blogging