#I’m just tired of this belief that people up north seem to have about southerners as default conservative

[narrowtriangle33-blog]

Please share this article, it important that you do so. These truths have to be told.

"Bethune’s name appeared in six reports in the House Committee on Un-American Activities and five times in Senate reports on people suspected of communist activity. While she was cleared of any involvement, the message was clear: Confronting racism and white supremacy is un-American."

"This is why white people are my bellwether."

"Whenever I am trying to decide whether or not a particular movement, policy or person benefits Black America, I wait and see what white people think. While that might sound racist, there has never been a movement, policy or person that benefitted Black America who was simultaneously embraced by white America. In this country, a stance against the trauma-inducing brickbat of whiteness is perceived as a stance against America. And anyone who disagrees can feel free to prove me wrong. Name one person who fought for Black liberation who white people agreed with."

"Whenever anyone does anything that includes the word “Black,” it immediately falls under the classification of Marxist and anti-whiteness. White people hate being left out, even though they are acutely aware that there is nothing more valuable in the known universe than a white life. White people will slit a Black baby’s neck for a white woman’s life."

"Let’s just say they will beat a Black baby to a bloody pulp, tie him to an industrial fan with barbed wire and toss his lifeless body off a bridge. Is that better?"

"But I understand why they vilify Black movements with Marxism."

"White people don’t know what Marxism is."

"According to a 1970 Harris Poll, 64 percent of Black Americans had a favorable view of the Panthers, while 92 percent of white Americans had a negative view. It’s probably because a lot of members of the Black Panther were Marxists, which is different from communism. Basically, Marxism is a way to examine history, economics and societies through the lens of class, while communism is actually Marx’s economic and political theory in which...wait. For a second I started to believe that there was some logic to white supremacy."

"White people hated the Panthers because they had guns and pushed for armed self-defense. For some reason, those America-hating negroes believed “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”"

"I have no idea where they got that crazy idea from."

"Black people voting"

"Why white people don’t like it: States’ rights, something something, communism, something something it was a different time."

"When Black people marched on Selma for voting rights, they were called “communists.” The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was called “Un-American.” Of course, the 2020 election was about “socialism” because so many Black people voted."

"Southerners, conservatives and white people, in general, have never pushed for a single law to expand the electorate because they are the only true Americans."

"Critical Race Theory"

"Why white people didn’t like it: Because they don’t know what it is."

"This one is easy."

"The one thing that dumbfounds me about white supremacy is how much white people trust each other. They just trust the explanations for their fellow white people. In all this debate about CRT, I have yet to see one person who opposes CRT who can also explain what CRT is. And many of the legislators who are against funding K-12 teachers who absolutely do not teach CRT are already funding the leaders’ movement, such as Richard Delgado, the professor at state-supported Alabama Law School who wrote a little book called Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. "

"All they know is that it has the word “race” in it, so it must be bad."

"Legislators opposed the Civil Rights Act because it was “Marxist.” The House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for communism. The FBI did, too."

"In a 1964 New York Times survey, a majority of white people said that the “Negro civil rights movement had gone too far,” and a quarter of those people said their resentment was growing. They were right. Two years later, a 1966 Harris Survey, revealed that 85 percent of white respondents thought civil rights demonstrations “hurts the negro.”"

"Apparently, to white people, fighting racism is worse than racism."

"And if you think I’m kidding about white people not thinking Black people were smart, according to the National Opinion Research Center, it was not until 1963 that 50 percent of white people believed “Negroes” were born with the same intelligence as whites."

"History"

"Why white people don’t like it: Because white people might find out about some of the things white people did, which is racist."

"The fight against what politicians have deemed the Marxist, Un-American 1619 Project is actually a fight against teaching the history of slavery more accurately. And it is not new. White people said the same thing about teaching abolition. The United Daughters of the Confederacy said the same thing about the Civil War. White school districts in the North and South said the same thing about Jim Crow. And Black History Month."

"Plus if white kids learn about America’s racist past, they might start saying: “I’m not going to do that again,” and then, what will happen to white people?"

"Martin Luther King Jr."

"Why white people didn’t like him: He was a communist. He was anti-white. He was a Marxist."

"In 1966, a majority of white Americans had a negative opinion of King. When he died in 1968, 75 percent of Americans disapproved of him. Now they love him..."

"Because he’s dead."

"This is why we must never ignore white people."

"While we should never, ever do what white people collectively want, history has shown us that if something is good for Black people, white people will hate it. And if they vilify something as racist, communist or anti-white, you should take a second look because, nine times out of 10, it might be worth considering. When it comes to freedom and equality, the easiest thing to do is to see what white people have to say...

Then do the opposite."

I copied a lot of his article word for word those are Michael Harriot's words not my own.

The word's of people who commented.

"I was asking one of the few people on the Right side of politics I am still in touch with about why he hates CRT, and he sent me a link to a whole essay. It boiled down to a few leaps in logic:"

"1) the USSR used US race relations as a shield to deflect criticism of their own human rights record (“And in the USA, they hang n-words”)"

"2) therefore, any criticism of race relations was caused by Soviet propaganda (not, you know, by actually HANGING BLACK PEOPLE)"

"3) therefore any discussion of race relations was commie propaganda."

"4) therefore, any movement that calls attention to race is communist."

"It’s very similar to how the Communist League fired the original writer of The Communist Manifesto because he brought up ethnic minorities and racism and replaced him with Marx, outright rejecting any factor that so much as complicated their preconceived model. It also shares many of the issues raised in the “grievance studies” affair, being exegesis to elaborate and propound upon a founding scripture."

"That’s the most idiotic line of reasoning I ever heard. It’s so typical of white people as a group in this country that when someone points out some shit they did that’s fucked up that instead of you know, stopping the fucked up thing they basically say that the entity pointing out their fucked up shit is bad therefore bringing up solutions to the fucked up thing they did is wrong."

"Fuck the trolls, but if anyone is actually confused about the likelihood of any white person to trust any other white person over anyone at all who is even POSSIBLY not white, please refresh your memories regarding the multiple instances in the last several years of a Black person being anywhere near a house or building, then being approached by either a white guard, cop, or other self-important deputy of white fragility."

"In these instances, Black people are often believed to be up to no good even after they show ID proving they live in the building some white person has decided they don’t belong in. No amount of proof will have a fragile white self-deputy believing that even state-issued IDs are a real thing and this Black person lives in their own home."

"But when any white person walks by and says “Oh, this is _____, they live here”, immediately, that’s good enough to let this perceived criminal go into their home."

"Because any white stranger vouched in any sort of way."

"Literal evidence of address means nothing, but the word of ANY white person, with no proof of their authority, no hassle about “Well what are YOU doing here?!?”, just...instant belief of any white skin."

"Also, the main difference between Angela Davis and Assata Shakur is that Ms. Davis beat the system at its own game, the “proper” way. Racism couldn’t even beat her at their heavily-rigged game. Ms. Shakur ALSO beat the system, but because she didn’t get to win at a fully-rigged game, she found her own loophole and got out of this racist hellhole."

"Not that it matters, because they’re both the same to any racist. To me, they’re both brilliant heroes."

"If you asked these mouth breathers what they hate about CRT not only could they not tell you, they would call you “the real racist” for asking. There is no winning with these people because they refuse to see themselves as ANYTHING other than the good guys in any situation. It is fucking tiring to deal with this shit and yet they seem to not understand that we are more fucking tired than they are. With each comment, committee and talking point they pretty much prove that no white person could handle being anything other than well, white."

"To admit anything else would result in a reckoning. It will never happen and America will remain a racist society, with white culture pushing back and getting more extreme as each generation of BIPOC become more aware and angry over white supremacy. America will implode and whatever rises from the ashes will either be that reckoning with real change or a third world country."

Again I quoted these people

[katecarteir]

i took too many hits off this memory (i need to come down)

pairing: eddie kaspbrak/richie tozier [reddie]  rating: teen audiences and up chapter warnings: mentions of past drug abuse, mentions of past child abuse in terms of s*nia kaspbrak, mentions of minor character death/near death word count: 3,515 chapter count: 4 of ? summary: Eddie Kaspbrak doesn’t remember much from his childhood. He doesn’t really know he doesn’t remember. He also doesn’t know why he’s so drawn this terrible comedian on tv, but when Eddie runs into him in a bar, and they spend the night together, Eddie’s life is changed forever. It’s finally back on track- and he doesn’t know anything about it

read on ao3. moodboard by @isaacslaheys​​

perma taglist: @jwilliambyers​, @stebbins​, @isaacslaheys​, @s-s-georgie​, @transrich​@eddiefuckinkaspbrak​, @edstozler​, @emgays​, @anellope​, @thorn-harvester-ven​, @wheezyeds​, @vipertooth​, @tozierking​​, @billdenbrough​​, @starrystoziers​​, @trashmouthtozierr​​, @willelbyers​​  @loserslibrary​​ (let me know if you want added!)

June 5 2009

Richie wasn’t sure how to tell his manager that he didn’t want to do stand up anymore. That maybe he’d never really wanted to do stand up. He liked making people laugh, and he vaguely remembered wanting to be a vanquilist when he was a kid but he’d never been able to stop his mouth from moving with the words. It was fitting that now, Richie’s job was almost just exclusively moving his mouth. Richie had gotten terrifyingly good at walking on stage, flicking off his brain and transforming into Trashmouth™. That had long since stopped bothering him, but as his career took off, Richie found himself having to be Trashmouth™ more and more and Richie less and less. He was suddenly surrounded by people who only really saw him as the foul mouthed, sex crazed misogynist his ghost writers had him portrayed as on stage. They’d promised him that kind of shit sold, and they’d been right, but suddenly all his friends actually thought and spoke like Trashmouth™ and it made him queasy. He could only handle sitting through so many homophobic and sexist conversations before he felt Richie would melt right out of him and Trashmouth™ would be all that was left of him. He couldn’t let that happen… he just didn’t know how to tell anybody. 

He was doing a string of shows in Georgia, because Richie’s shows always sold better the further south he went. Richie hated the South, and not just because of his whole bisexuality thing, but because the weather sucked, the accents annoyed him and Richie Tozier did not belong anywhere where the potential of rodeo or circus existed. (Richie Tozier didn’t know anything about the Southern United States). 

Richie had been born in Maine, one of the coldest states in this god forsaken country, and in 1992 his family had moved up north of the border. Richie had come back to the United States after university, because everybody told him that he would be better off getting a job in show business in America rather than Canada. He hadn’t been totally sure that was true, but he’d gotten successful pretty quickly after moving back down here so he wasn’t about to argue it. 

“I don’t know what you’re upset about.” Audra Phillips, one of Richie’s few true friends, was saying to him while packing up Richie’s hotel room. He was so ready to leave the Devil behind, and get started on his break. He was fully debating on going to Canada to see his parents, it had been too long and every phone conversation with his mom felt like a guilty knife to the chest, but Richie had things he needed to take care of.

“You’ve been doing this for years, Rich.” Audra carried on, scowling at one Richie’s ratty overshirts before tossing it directly into the hotel bedside garbage. “You’re good at it, you’re making great money, you get to stay in the nicest hotels and see the country. What else could you possibly want? You’re doing things most people dream of.”

Richie huffed out an aggravated breath. “You’re telling me you never think of leaving all this behind? Not even when paparazzi follow you around the grocery store or TMZ leaks half truths that destroy your relationships.” 

Audra crossed her arms over her chest. “First of all, no, I don’t. I’m living my dreams, Richie, that’s more than most people can say! And when was the last time Paparazzi followed you anywhere? Never? What’s really bugging you out, Richie?”

“I don’t know,” Richie said, only half-lying. “It’s like… sure, I’m doing great financially, and it’s nice that people want to see my shows but it’s not like they actually like me. The person they’re coming to see is basically the anti Richie. If I come out, I will lose all my fans because they’re a bunch of homophobic asstwats because that’s the audience I have to cater to.”

“Are you thinking of coming out?” Audra asked.

“Not like… tomorrow, but someday, yeah.” Richie said quietly. “I’m not going to live my life in the closet. It’s not like it’s the 1980s anymore. Honestly, if it wasn’t for my shows and how coming out would basically make all my content unuseable, I probably would have come out already. Or at least not been so hard on sneaking around.”

Audra dropped down on the hotel bed and smiled sadly up at him. “You shouldn’t have to live a lie forever, Richie, but you’ve got to be reasonable about this, too. You can’t just up and quit, you know that. You’re on a contract, Steve will not hesitate to sue the fuck out of you if you try to skimp out-” 

“My contract ends with this tour,” Richie said. “That’s why I’ve been thinking about it so much, they’re trying to get me to sign  on for another three years and I just… I’m 30, Auds. I don’t want to spend another three years of my life touring around to states to hate, telling jokes I don’t relate to and letting people think I can for things that I don’t. I hate that people can use my acts to justify their bullshit, you know? Three more years of that would literally make me want to kill myself.”

Audra froze for a moment, then shook her head. “If you’re having thoughts again then we can-”

“No.” Richie snapped. “It’s not like that, and before you ask- no, I’m not using anymore. I’m not going down any sort of self destructive path. I’m just… tired. I’m 30, and I’m in the closet and I’m tired.” 

Audra nodded slowly. “Okay, then here’s what you’ve got to do, then. Go to talk to somebody at your bank today before you head out, just see what you’re looking at financially. Figure out how long you can bank on your ass without working while you figure out what you want to do. Then go home and see your momma, because she probably misses you, and tell Steve that you will give them an answer to resigning when you get back.”

“And what if I don’t want to come back?” Richie asked quietly.

“Then you don’t have to.” Audra said simply. “But Steve the bullshit excuse anyway. It’ll get you across the border way easier then if you tell him that you tell him to go fuck himself and that his biggest profit client is leaving him.”

There was only one branch of Richie’s bank in Atlanta, and Richie took a moment to appreciate Steve’s power as he was ushered through the bank and immediately back to meet with one of their accountants. The man on the other side of the desk wore a simple grey suit with the jacket draped over the back of his chair. His white button up shirt was rolled up to his elbows, and his hair was in tight, proper brown curls around his head. He was, in short, somebody who usually made Richie’s mouth water just at the sight but for some reason, he wasn’t attracted to the man despite how his energy put Richie immediately at ease.

STANLEY URIS, according to the sign on his desk, gave Richie a polite smile. “So, Mr. Tozier, what can we help you with today?”

Richie let out a long, slow sigh. “I’m gonna be honest with you. I’m here because I wanna quit my job, but my best friend told me that I should make sure that isn’t the world’s worst idea ever.”

Stanley Uris chuckled, and clicked on a few things on his computer. “I’m not usually prone to telling people to quit their jobs, but based on your accounts here, you’d be able to make due for at least a year if not more on your savings only. Permitting you don’t go around making any outrageous and sentrous purchases. Basic costs of living wouldn’t be a concern for a while.”

Richie had already known that, mostly. He’d only agreed to come here to soothe Audra’s nerves. Money hadn’t been a concern of Richie’s in many years, but it was nice to know he’d be okay for a while while he figured out what it was he wanted from life. What he could do. 

Stanley turned in his chair and met Richie’s gaze with a wiry look. “I’m not prone to getting involved with my consults personal lives, but I have to ask Mr Tozier- why are you thinking of quitting your job? I won’t pretend your particular brand of comedy is up my alley, but you seem to have made a name for yourself in the business. Is it wise of you to walk away now?”

Richie blinked. “I don’t know anything about what’s wise or what isn’t, I never have. But I do know that this name I’ve made for myself, like you said, isn’t the name I want to carry forever. It isn’t me, and I guess I want the world to see me for who I am now.” 

“Well.” Stanley’s lips twitched up in a hint of smile. “As you inquired, you’d certainly be able to make due for a quite a while figuring out what it is you want your name to be, Mr. Tozier. And a piece of advice, if I may?” Richie nodded. “There’s nothing wrong with trying to find yourself, Richie. I went through most of my life mocked for who I was, or who I hung around, or what my religious beliefs were. And it stung for a long time, but I’m glad that I stuck it out. I’m a loser and I always fucking will be. It’s often not worth it to put on a mask and pretend all the time. Be who you want to be, be proud.” 

Richie definitely was not tearing up in the middle of a bank office. This strange accountant had somehow struck something deep within Richie that not even his trained therapist or NA sponsors had ever been able to reach. Almost like he knew… but that wasn’t possible.

“Yeah.” Richie said through a voice crack. “Thanks, Stan the Man. I’ll do that.”

Richie made a quick exit from the bank, truly worried for a moment that he might begin to cry in the middle of this poor man’s office. He made a rushed phone call to Steve, just Audra had advised, telling him that he needed some time to clear his head and he was going back to Canada for the short while between legs of his stand up tour. That he’d have an answer for Steve regarding his contract when he got back. Steve hadn’t been thrilled with the whole thing, but Richie supposed he was thankful that it wasn’t a straight up no. Previous attempts at negotiation hadn’t looked good, and Richie knew that. 

As Richie was getting onto the plane, his phone buzzed. He pulled it out, ready to turn the device off as he boarded and he frowned at the notification. Steve had said he was going to give Richie the space he’d requested and he usually waited a couple days before he broke those promises.

Hey Richie. I know you said you needed time but SNL is interested in signing you as a full time cast member when your tour is over. Call me when you land. -Steve. 

“Aren’t you worried about the cold?” Eddie Kaspbrak asked, legs draped over Richie’s in the front steps of the Tozier house. It was nearly completely packed up, the family only waiting for the school year to finish out before they took off. They wouldn’t even be staying for the summer. Eddie wished he’d known that last summer was truly going to be their last summer. 

“Why would I be worried about the cold?” Richie replied with a snort. “We live in Maine, Eddie boy! I’m used to the cold by now.”

Eddie wrinkled his nose and smacked Richie in the shoulder. “In the winter, sure! But Canada- That’s winter all year ‘round, isn’t it? Won’t you miss swimming and shorts? How are people supposed to know that you have terrible fashion sense if you have to dress in parkas all year long?”

Richie laughed, and it made Eddie’s heart flutter in his chest. “Canada has four seasons just like every other country, Eds! My momma says that their summers can even get pretty hot. It’s not a land of make belief, or anything. Why are you hating on it so bad?”

“I’m not hating on anything.” But Eddie thought maybe he did hate Canada, a little bit. He hated that Richie was moving to Canada, a whole other country. It was hard enough when Beverly moved to Portland and Ben moved to another state. Another country might as well be an entire other world. Mike believed that the further people got away from Derry, the more they forgot and Eddie was having a particularly hard time thinking about Richie forgetting him while possibly living in a snowbank.

“Stop.” Richie suddenly groaned. He reached out and shook Eddie’s shoulders. “Stop thinking so damn hard, you’re making my head hurt. I don’t wanna think about it, and I don’t want you thinking about it! We can’t stop it, so can we please just spend the next month having fun and being us and NOT thinking about it?”

Eddie sighed and in a moment of weakness, dropped his head down to rest on Richie’s shoulders. He knew they were out in the open, that anybody could walk past and just… see them like this. It wasn’t safe, but for the moment, Eddie didn’t care. Derry was already hell, and nothing could make it worse than Richie leaving. 

“I’m not trying to dwell on it.” Eddie said quietly, curling up into Richie’s side fully. “I’m not, it’s just…”

“Nah, yeah, I get it.” Richie wrapped an arm around Eddie’s shoulder and jostled him slightly. “But there’s no sense stressing about the things we can’t control, you know? Life in the moment, Eddie my love!” 

Eddie exhaled hard. “Richie… I need to tell you something.” 

August 10 2009

Eddie Kaspbrak hated airports. There was something about the energy in the place that just made Eddie feel wild and horrible. He always drove himself, always. No matter how many times people told him that flying was safer than driving, that it was stupid to drive across country when flying could get him somewhere within a day. Eddie Kaspbrak hadn’t flown since 1999 on a forced family vacation with his mother and aunts. Until today. 

Eddie would much rather be making the drive to Derry rather than getting on a plane at JFK but his aunt Darlene had insisted that Eddie fly out to Bangor, that six hours was much too long. His mother might not last that long, and Eddie would so regret it if he wasn’t there with her when she passed. Eddie wasn’t sure if that was true, but he’d bought the last minute plane ticket anyway. He wasn’t too sure what a difference five hours would make, but it was never worth it arguing with his mother or his aunts. 

From what Aunt Darlene had told him, Sonia Kaspbrak was as good as gone already. A stroke, late last night. The doctors weren’t hopeful for any recovery, or even for the woman to regain consciousness. It left a sick feeling in Eddie’s stomach, thinking of his mother in a hospital bed, as good as gone and being kept alive by machines. It made him feel even sicker to know that it was exactly how she’d want to go, holding onto life and sucking up resources and doctor’s time right up until the very end. Eddie had kept his mother at a distance as much as possible since leaving home for college, and in the last two years he hadn’t spoken to her at all. He’d felt no desire to. She’d made his life hard, so much harder than it had ever needed to be. He was certain that if it hadn’t been for her, he would have come out long before he did. Myra would never have happened. To this day, at 30 years old, Eddie was still trying to figure out what things are true and what are lies from her influence. He wasn’t sure he ever wasn’t going to fuck up from her, and maybe she didn’t deserve him by her bedside at all. Kay had told him that she didn’t, that Eddie shouldn’t put himself through it. He didn’t owe her a goddamn thing, and Eddie knew she was right.

Eddie Kaspbrak hated airports, he hated flying, he hated goddamn Maine and he fucking hated his mother. His plane was going to start to board any minute and Eddie was still sitting in the waiting area with his emergency overnight bag tightly in his grip. He was rapidly running out of time to make good on this plane ticket that he’d bought on his messley cab driver salary. 

“Well, I’ll be damned.” A familiar voice carried over to Eddie through the waiting room. “Is that Eddie fucking Kaspbrak?”

Eddie turned in his seat, and grinned when he noticed none other than Richie Tozier walking towards him. His clothes were rumbled and he had a five o’clock shadow around his jaw that made Eddie’s stomach tighten. It was almost weird how little Richie Tozier crossed his mind, despite how intense his reaction was every time he saw him or even thought about him for too long. 

“Richie Tozier,” Eddie said slowly, face breaking into a grin. He stood and walked over to Richie, with his overnight slung over his shoulder. “Back in the world of the living I see. I think your fans were starting to think you died somewhere.”

“Awe, Eds. You been keeping tabs on lil ol’ me?” Richie chuckled, reaching out to pinch at Eddie’s cheeks. “No need to worry, Eddie boy. I was merely taking some me time in the great white North. My parents live in Canada, I went to visit them and clear my head.” 

Eddie’s chest twinged. “Well, welcome back to civilization then, I guess.”

“You’ve always been Canadianphobic huh, Eds?” Richie laughed but Eddie frowned deeply.

“What do you mean always?” 

Eddie and Richie looked at each other for a long moment, before Richie shook his head. “I don’t know, you just strike me as the type, I guess. What are you doing here? You don’t really strike me as the flying type.”

Eddie shuddered. “God, I’m not.” He said honestly. “But my mom is dying or some shit, and my aunt is pitching some drama fit about how a six hour car drive is too long so I have to take the plane.” 

Richie froze for a moment, mouth half open and eyes wide. Eddie braced himself for the evitable awkward apologies and sympathies that always came with the whole dead parent card. 

“That sucks man.” Richie said finally, with a shrug. “You going back to Derry all by yourself?”

Eddie had given up on trying to figure out how Richie just seemed to know things about him. It wasn’t even that weird anymore. “Yeah.” He answered with a sigh. “If I get my shit together and actually catch my plane. I’m cutting it pretty close.”

“Well…” Richie gave Eddie a soft smile. “If you didn’t want to take the trip alone, I’m not doing anything interesting. I’m supposed to be settling into my new apartment but that’s boring and I think it would be way more to go back to Derry with you and wreak havoc on your aunts.” 

“You’re moving to New York?” Eddie asked with wide eyes. He tried not to think about how a big reason he and Richie had never really been together was the constant distance and Richie’s travelling. He wasn’t sure Richie had even had a home before. 

“Yeah.” Richie suddenly seemed embarrassed. “I was trying to get out of the whole stand up game, and my manager got me a steady gig on Saturday Night Live.” 

“SNL?” Eddie gasped. “Richie! That’s huge! Congratulations!”

Richie’s cheeks reddened. “Thanks, man. But I’m serious about the offer. It’s no skin off my back at all. We can go see if they have tickets left, how many people could possibly be going to fucking Maine?”

Eddie should say no. It couldn’t bring Richie home with him, to his crazy aunts and his dead mother. To Derry at all. Eddie barely remembered Derry, outside of spending almost all his time locked up in his bedroom. But he remembered enough to know that it was a horrible place, almost like it was permanently stuck in the 1950s and there was something… evil about that place. Just thinking of it made Eddie’s palms sweat and knees shake. But on the other hand…

“It wouldn’t be good for our friendship for me to reject you twice at this stupid airport.” Eddie said, forcing his voice to be light. “Let’s go.” 

[jumphq]

Post-Mortem, Sparrow Tour 2018

This was a month that felt like four months. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean that in the amazing way that doing all sorts of brand-new things and being very much in the moment seems to slow down time. There are articles written about this phenomena, actually: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-empowerment-diary/201705/how-slow-down-time. According to this article, the reason September went by so freaking meaningfully is that we were bombarding ourselves with Firsts. First big tour in support of Sparrow. First time in a long time heading back to the Northeast and Midwest. First time I had to add an actual keyboard to the list of instruments I bring on stage, and within that one instrument there were dozens of sounds I had to reproduce. Etcetera, etcetera.

We worked hard. I don’t know if it’s readily ascertainable that being in a rock and roll band is tons of work by looking at one. It’s fun work, usually, but has its moments of being very intense. Especially when a new album comes out. There is radio to do in the mornings, interviews scattered during the day, loading in and out of venues, and we added soundcheck meet & greets that meant that once we arrived in a city, we were going to be working from then until show, basically.

It’s so fulfilling, though. I am the kind of person that works hard, all the time. I push and push myself (sometimes for no seeming reason), and am frustrated and disappointed with myself when I don’t get enough done. I would be classified as a “type-A” person, and I don’t mind. But sometimes I’m just working on “things” that I’m not as passionate about. An eight hour day of working on something I’m not emotionally connected to is much more tiring than working sixteen hours a day on something I believe in and care about. Being in JLC is that kind of job.

We needed every second that we had to put this tour together. These new songs are hardto play. There is so much going on in each and every song on Sparrow. Not necessarily more than on earlier recordings, but keep in mind that we never had to re-learn songs after other albums; we had been playing them live forever before we got to the studio and didn’t change them much after. There has always been a “live version” and a “studio version” of early Jump songs.

Not this time. Jay spent a crazy amount of time accessing the original recording files and turning his voice and Ward’s cello parts into samples that I could play on the keytar. While Evan didn’t really want to play to tracks, he add some electronic drums to his repertoire to approximate some of the parts live. Ward brought two guitars on tour for the first time, and Johnny played not only electric bass but a beloved new Moog Phatty. It was complicated, felt a little bit fragile, at first, but once we got the hang of things it was fun.

Hurricane Florence, while not visiting Charleston, still brought chaos to the city. There was anxiety felt wondering whether we’d be hit and how that would affect our practice. Shops and roads started closing down and we made a move so the entire band could be close by in case of flooding. In the end we were very very lucky, but there were still repercussions for us. We were trying to fulfill our PledgeMusic items, to get them sent out before tour, but this didn’t happen because mail basically shut down in NC, SC, and GA. This put us a full week behind, and we spent the rest of the month trying to catch up on many things.

Even in the last few days of rehearsal we were all feeling a bit overwhelmed. We camped out at the Footlight Player’s Theatre and the goal was to have a “listening party”, a final rehearsal before we hit the road, and that night, to be honest, I was not ready. Lyrics weren’t memorized and I had to think way too much about parts and how to play them. We were being hard on ourselves, though, and the response was so encouraging afterwards I didn’t mind spending the rest of that week’s dinner breaks to get in some extra practice so that the songs could feel comfortable.

Once the shows began, a quick weekend to some of our favorites: Charlotte, Atlanta, Columbia, where we were starting to find our groove. Raleigh, though, and the Lincoln Theatre, was a special surprise. It was Sunday, we hadn’t had a day off in three weeks, we were exhausted. It wasn’t the largest crowd we’ve played to, but that show was so much fun. People there were there to have a good time, and it put us into overdrive. Thank you so much, Raleigh.

The next leg was in the Northeast (and DC, where I insulted many a mid-Atlantic inhabitant). We hadn’t been there in fifteen years, but every show was sold out or nearly so, and that made us feel so great. These shows were our first of the City Winery gigs, and they were good to us. Great sound, great food. There were many highlights, for me, up North. We had a duo of ASL interpreters in DC that had mad sign-singing skills, and were more fun to watch than we were. Our show at Le Poisson Rouge made us feel so sexy to sell out such a great place in the Big Apple. Performance-wise, the NYC show was my favorite performance-wise; I felt really “on” that night. The super-intimate punk-rock feel of Union Pool in Brooklyn was refreshing after the lovely but slightly clinical City Wineries. We had to put Wardie in a corner to fit on stage, and many Dirty Dancing jokes were necessary. Our old pal the Mommyheads came to play with us, and they were as good as they were 20 years ago. Lots of our fans came just to see them that night and I didn’t mind at all. We had a lovely evening off with three people that pledged for the album and got to go to a Dr. Who-themed bar with us. The trio couldn’t have been more interesting and fun to hang out with: the professional bassoonist, the research monitor, and the Facebook developer. Loved that evening, and Ward got to show off his hipster Brooklyn knowledge by taking us to great places for dinner and dessert.

And Chicago! My kind of town. Chicago was a big deal for me personally, because I knew that the audience was going to be made up of a lot of friends and family that had never seen the band before, never seen me in that light, literally. I was a little nervous about that show, and I rarely get nervous. I also wanted very much for Chicago to be the show that was 100% accessible to the d/Deaf and hard of hearing. City Winery worked so hard with me to provide CART real-time captioning for all the goofy stuff we said in-between songs. And the captioning of the lyrics was provided by my other passion job, CaptionPoint, built by my wife Lindsay and run by my dear friend Lora. It was even more successful than I had hoped, the captions looked great on both sides of the stage. It was the first time Lindsay had ever been able to fully experience a JLC show; I am sure that our stage patter was absolutely worth the wait.

Wow. As I’m writing this I realize again how relatively short the tour was: after Chicago there were only three more dates. But it felt like we did so much. We saw so many of you, talked to everyone as long as we could and took pictures. The “soundcheck parties” were so fun for us. Seeing everyone again was energizing, to me. I wished at times that I could have spent more time. You said such wonderful, heartfelt things, things that I heard very clearly and appreciated completely. I am honored that this band and music and community has meant so much to you over the years; you mean everything to us. When people told me that they liked Sparrow I knew they were telling the truth and not just making conversation. Nothing could have made us happier. Like I said: fulfilling.

Athens was a highlight: we hadn’t seen the GA Theatre since it burned in 2009. The renovation was beautiful. They managed to keep the vibe of the place while making it all so much…better. But the fans in Athens have always been a special breed and we could have played on the streets if that was the only way to get to them. In the new GA Theatre we didn’t have to.

And finally, the Charleston Music Hall. Our new home. Our new “Dock Street”, a place that just makes us feel like the chamber-pop stars we are. We will see you soon, CMH.

This post is a marathon. If you’ve gotten this far, you must be a fan of the band, so I appreciate it. I want to thank many people for making this tour and this year possible, because…contrary to pop belief, we are not a famous rock band with loads of cash and there were many many donated hours that made this tour work.

Our manager Vance’s sidekicks on the Crew were Nick Stewart, the Ultimate Intern, hazed by his boss into oblivion and seemed to love every minute. He sold you tee shirts this time, but he’s going to be running something big someday. Herbie Jeffcoat, monitors and front-of-house, the sweetest “country boy” (his words, but also true) you could want on your team. Especially funny this time was hearing Herbie converse in his potent Southern accent with the FOH in Boston with a potent accent of his own. Translators were required.

Mike Rogers: what a treat it is to have gotten to know you both as a professional sound engineer and family member. I think that if Dad and your Mom had a reason to work with each other growing up like Evan and I have with you, our families would be closer than they are. Let’s keep working at it.

Alison Kendrick! The person that would be sooo bad at being a ninja because she simply wouldn’t be able to be quiet because life is just SO MUCH FUN and worth every giggle: thank you. Teasing aside, Alison is a complete and utter professional, a doer but more importantly a Problem Solver, and I truly would not have been able to do all the things internet-related without you. Thank you for being a mentor and a real friend. If you’d like to work with Alison yourself, please go to akshouts.com

Our uncomfortably attractive lawyer Gabe Fleet is genuinely fun to hang out with, giving attorneys a good name. Old pal Josh Terry and his amazing team in Maddison and Jen at Workshop Management opened doors that are closed to most people so thank you for helping us walk through them. New friends Sue, Lindsay and Tyler at Stunt Company put us in front of the movers and shakers and some (NPR, Paste, American Songwriter) actually liked what they heard.

Chris Slack, you hold all the archival keys to our kingdom and are dear to us for much more than that. Nate Baerreis and Ed and Val Schooling Brantley made us look so cool, so often. How, we will never know. Thank you.

Thanks to our families who let us be gone as much as we have been, this year. Some of you haven’t experienced not having us around, and I know it was hard, but thank you for being so supportive. We love you.

And Chief “Not-Getting-Paid-What-He’s-Worth” is Vance McNabb, who is still working on this tour two weeks later and won’t be done for a while. There are no ways to thank you, V, except perhaps to find a way to make Sparrow huge so you can get a massive raise and hire tons of people to help you. So, we’ll work on that.

Actually…will y’all please help us work on that? If not for us, for Vance? Thank you. And thank you most of all, for letting us make this album. Sparrow is a beautiful thing to us and we’re so lucky that you wanted to hear it. We are lucky that we got to make it. But it isn’t over, is it? There are ways we can try to keep this machine going, if you are willing. More in another post.

[bixshits]

Lost Odyssey - A Thousand Years of Dreams - Story Seven Transcript

The Upstreamers

Strong winds have always blown across this vast grassy plain.

Perhaps the area's topography has something to do with it, but the direction of the wind remains constant, irrespective of the time or season:

From east to west, from the horizon where the sun rises to the horizon where the sun sets. Swept by the unceasing winds, the misshapen trunks and branches of shrubs all incline to the west. Tall grasses do not grow here, and the grasses that do grow all lie flat on the ground, bending westward.

Caravans and herding folk traverse the single road that crosses the plain. They do not “come and go,” they only go, moving from east to west, using the wind at their backs to gain distance. Travelers heading west to east always use the circuitous route that snakes around the southern mountains. It is much farther that way, but much faster than crossing the plain head-on into the wind. The road across the plain is called the Wind Stream. Just as the flow of a great river never changes direction, the footsteps of those who use the road have not changed direction since the distant past, nor are they likely to change far into the future: from east to west.

Human shapes that appear from the horizon where the sun rises disappear over the horizon where the sun sets.

They never pass oncoming travelers—with only the rarest exceptions. The first time she passed Kaim on the Wind Stream, the girls was just an infant.

“So, my grandmother was alive then?”

In response to the girl's untroubled question, Kaim smiles and answers,

“She was. And I remember what a nice old lady she was, too.”

Looking back down the road, the girl points toward the line of hills fading off into the distance.

“My grandmother crossed seven hills on her journey.” “Is seven a lot?”

“Uh-huh. Grandma lived a long time. Most people end their journeys after five hills. The people they leave behind build a little grave where they ended their journey, and then they keep traveling...”

The girl points down at the ground where she is standing.

“This is as far as I've come,” she says with a proud, happy smile.

The religion of the girl and her family professes a pious believe that if they devote their lives to walking eastward, against the flow of the Wind Stream, they will arrive at the easternmost source of the Stream itself. People call believers in that religion, “The Upstreamers.”

The word carries a hint of fear and sadness, but also a trace of contempt and scorn.

The Upstreamers are devoid of worldly desires. They live their lives for no greater purpose than traveling eastward on foot. They are free of doubt. They give birth to children en route, and they continue their journey while raising their children. When they age and their strength gives out, their journey ends. But their family's journey continues.

From child to grandchild to great-grandchild, their belief is carried on. The journey of this girl's family was begun by her late grandmother, who began walking from the Wind Stream's western verge with her son, who was then the age the girl is now.

The Upstreamers do not walk for the entire year, of course. During the season when the winds are especially strong—from the late autumn to early spring—they take up residence in various post towns scattered along the road and earn day wages by performing tasks that the townsfolk themselves refuse to do. Some Upstreamers choose to stay in the towns, while others, conversely, take townspeople with them when they return to the road in the spring.

These are people who have fallen in love during the long winter,

Or boys who dream of travel,

or grown-ups who have tired of town life. Such are the reasons the townsfolk look upon the Upstreamers with complicated gazes.

The little girl's mother was one of those who joined the journey mid-way, and he girl herself, some years from now, might fall in love with someone in a post town somewhere. She might choose to live in the town, or she could just as well invite her lover to join her on the road.

She has no idea at this point what lies in store for her. The girl's father calls out to her: “Time to go!”

Their brief rest is over.

She seems sorry to leave and stands up reluctantly. “Too bad,” she says. “I wish I could have talked to you more. But we have to get to the next town by the time the snows start.”

Constantly exposed to upwinds, her cheeks are red and cracked, her lips chapped, but her smile is wonderful a she wishes Kaim a safe journey.

It is the serene smile of one who believes completely in the purpose of her life, without the slightest doubt. “Will I see you again somewhere?” she asks.

“Probably.”

Kaim answers, smiling back at her, but he can never match that smile of hers. He is now in the midst of a journey that will take him beyond the western end of the Wind Stream. He heads to the battlefield as a mercenary, and by the time the western battle is over, a new battle will have begun in the east.

It will be a long, cruel journey, with nothing to believe in. When he meets he girl again along he way, Kaim's smile will have taken on even more shadows than it has now. Perhaps as a parting gift for him, the girl sings a few short lines for him:

This wind, where does it blow from?

Where does it start its journey here?

Does it come from where life begins?

Or does it begin where life ends?

“Goodbye, then,” the girl says, trudging on, one labored step at a time, hair streaming in the headwind.

Ten long years have flowed by when Kaim next meets the girl.

It is spring, when the grassland is dotted with lovely white flowers.

She has become the wife of a young man who does tailoring and shoe repair in one of the post towns.

“This is my third spring here,” she says, patting her swollen belly fondly.

In a few days, she will give birth to a child. She will become a mother.

“And your parents...?” Kaim asks.

She shrugs and glances eastward.

“They are continuing their journey. I'm the only one who stayed on here.” Kaim does not ask why she has done this.

Continuing he journey is one way to live, and staying in a town is another.

Neither can be judged to be more correct than the other. The only answer for the girl can be seen in her smiling face. “But never mind about me,” she says looking at him suspiciously.

“You haven't changed one little bit from the time we met so long ago.”

For the thousand-year-old Kaim, ten years is nothing but a change in season.

“Some lives are like that,” he says, straining to smile.

“Some people in this world can never grow old, no matter how long they live.”

He looks at the girl, now grown into a woman, and wonders again, 'Living through endless ages of time: is it a blessing, or a curse?' Kaim's remark hardly counts as an explanation, but the girl nods with a look of apparent understanding.

“If that's the case,” she says, “You should be the one who goes to the place where the wind begins. You'd be the perfect Upstreamer.”

She could be right: after all, the lifespan given to humans is far too short for anyone to travel against the Wind Stream as far as the starting point of the wind. Still, Kaim responds with a few slow shakes of his head.

“I'm not qualified to make the journey.”

“No? Anybody can be an Upstreamer. Anybody, that is, who wants to see where the wind starts with his or her own eyes.”

Having said this, however, the girl adds with a touch of sadness, “No one has actually seen it, though, I guess.” The place where the wind begins: that place is nowhere at all. Even if, after a long journey, one were to arrive at the eastern end of the Wind Stream, the wind would be blowing there, too. And not just an east wind. West wind, north wind, south wind: winds without limit, without end.

Human beings, who cannot live forever, daring to take a journey without end. This might be the ultimate tragedy, but it could just as well be the ultimate comedy. Kaim knows one thing, however: one cannot simply dismiss it as an exercise in futility. “How about you?” he asks the girl. “Aren't you going to continue your journey soon?”

She thinks about this for the space of a breath, and caressing her swollen belly, she cocks her head and says, “I wonder... I might want to go on living the way I am now forever. Or then again, I might feel that desire to reach the starting point of the wind.” All the Upstreamers without exception say that you can never know what might trigger a return to the journey. One day, without warning, you slough off the entire town life and start walking.

It is not always a matter of running into an Upstreamer and being lured back to the road: plenty of people set out on their own all of a sudden.

The teachings of the Upstreamers say that all human beings harbor a desire for endless travel. They probably are not aware of the desire because it is stashed away so far down in the breast that it is deeper than memory.

The instant something brings it to the surface, a person becomes and Upstreamer. “Even if you have the desire,” the girl says to Kaim.

“I wonder...”

“It's true,” she says. “No question.”

The look in her eyes is as straight-on and free of doubt as it was the last time he met her.

Fixing him with that look, she points to her own chest.

“I haven't completely lost it myself.”

“But I'm sure you're happy with your present life?”

“Of course I am.”

“Do you really think the day will come when you will want to set out on the journey even if it means giving up that happiness?”

Instead of answering, she gives him a gentle smile. Many years flow by, but every now and then, something reminds Kaim of the girl's words—that everyone harbors a desire for endless travel.

For Kaim, living itself is a journey without end.

In the course of his journey, he has witnessed countless deaths, and he has also witnessed countless births. Human life is all too short, too weak, and fleeting.

Yet, the more he dwells upon its evanescence, the more he feels, inexplicably, that words such as “eternal,” and “perpetual” apply more properly to life, finite as it is, than to anything else. Traveling down the Wind Stream for the first time in many years, Kaim spies the funeral of an Upstreamer.

A boy in mourning dress stands by the road holding out wildflowers to passing travelers, and urging them to “offer up a flower to a noble soul who has made the long journey this far.”

Kaim takes a flower and asks the boy, “Is it a member of your family?”

“Uh-huh. My grandma.”

The boy nods, his face the image of one Kaim knew so long ago.

The old woman lying in the coffin must be the girl. Kaim is sure of it.

“Grandma traveled a long, long time. She brought my daddy with her when he was just a little boy. See that hill over there? She started walking from way, way beyond it, and she got all the way here.”

So, the girl must've set out on her journey after all.

Turning her back on the town life, leading her child by the hand, she trod her way along the endless journey.

Her wish to aim for the place where the wind begins would be passed on to her child, her grandchild, and on through the succeeding generations.

To head for a land one could never hope to reach, and to do so generation after generation: this is another endless journey. Is it a tragedy?

A comedy?

Perhaps the serene smile on the face of the old woman in the coffin is the answer.

Kaim lays he flower at her feet as an offering.

The family members who have traveled with her join together in a song for the departed:

This wind, where does it blow from?

Where does it start its journey here?

Does it come from where life begins?

Or does it begin where life ends?

The wind blows.

It sweeps the vast grassland.

Kaim takes one long, slow step toward his destination.

“Have a good trip!” calls the boy.

Red and cracked as the girl's were so long ago, his cheeks soften in a smile as he waves to the departing traveler.

[nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany]

Britain After Brexit: Welcome to the Vulture Restaurant

Digital Elixir Britain After Brexit: Welcome to the Vulture Restaurant

Yves here. We pointed out some time ago that the idea that the UK would get a favorable trade deal with the UK post-Brexit, and particularly post a crash-out, was bonkers, so it’s good to have official confirmation, even if it comes from the likes of Larry Summers. The US typically dictates terms in bi-lateral trade deals, allowing at most only a bit of face-saving terms-tweaking at the margin. The power imbalance will be even more pronounced in trade negotiation in the wake of Brexit because the UK will be desperate to cinch a deal quickly, and the urgency will give the US even more leverage.

More quotes from the Summers interview on BBC Radio 4, courtesy Al Jazeera:

“I’m not sure what Britain wants from the United States that it can plausibly imagine the United States will give.”

“If Britain thinks that the American financial regulators – who have great difficulty coming together on anything – are going to come together to give greater permissions and less regulation of UK firms, I would call that belief close to delusional.”

Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal found a whimsical Brexit angle today, although it could just as easily have been spun as gallows humor: Tired of Waiting for Brexit, Britons Munch Through Nutella Stockpiles (any Northern Ireland readers may take umbrage at “Britons”):

Britain’s Brexit preppers have been stockpiling for months. Now their revolution is eating itself.

Fed up with waiting for the U.K. to leave the European Union and mindful of product expiration dates, stockpilers are using up foodstuffs they had squirreled away in case of a blunt exit leaves them cut off from imported treats, or spikes the price of necessities, like toilet paper and tea.

The chance of a no-deal divorce hasn’t diminished and may only have been postponed until Oct. 31, but some preppers can’t resist breaking into their stashes.

Elizabeth Priest, 29, found it easy to eat into her stockpile because she had socked away delectable items such as Nutella and mozzarella from Italy, lactose-free milk from Denmark and an awful lot of tea—not, say, Spam.

“Because we bought nice things, we weren’t facing down this nasty stockpile of tinned ham,” says the writer from Hastings on Britain’s southern coast. She brewed the last of her 200 stockpiled tea bags on June 29, three months to the day after Britain was meant to leave the EU.

Returning to the theme of this post, it’s not clear what could be strip mined from the UK. Unlike Russia post the collapse of the USSR, there aren’t natural resources that to be bought on the cheap and sold in world markets. North Sea oil is largely played out. UK manufacturing capacity will become much less valuable due to post-Brexit non-tariff trade barriers. Sadly, the big wealth opportunities may lie in moves like acquiring real estate and squeeing already not-well-housed working people with higher rents, and dismantling the NHS.

By Adam Ramsay, the co-editor of openDemocracyUK and also works with Bright Green. Before, he was a full-time campaigner with People & Planet. You can follow him at @adamramsay. Originally published at openDemocracy

“Britain has no leverage, Britain is desperate … it needs an agreement very soon. When you have a desperate partner, that’s when you strike the hardest bargain.” So warned former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers on Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme this morning, as new foreign secretary Dominic Raab jets off on a tour of North America to investigate potential trade deals.

“Britain has much less to give than Europe as a whole did, therefore less reason for the United States to make concessions,” said Summers, a senior figure in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. “You make more concessions dealing with a wealthy man than you do dealing with a poor man.”

Summers is of course right. But he makes a key mistake. He assumes that Raab, Johnson and the new cabinet care about defending the interests and autonomy of most people in the UK. He seems to be under the impression that Brexit was about taking back control.

In reality, the brand of Brexit promoted by Tory hardliners has long been about pulling Britain under the shadow of American capital. Not as a 51st state, with votes and constitutional rights, but as an outhouse for US business, a sort of colder, paler version of Puerto Rico.

We will be forced to accept US-style deregulation, with its poor standards for workers and consumers. We will have our assets stripped clean off the bone. Even before Brexit, we are fast becoming a pawn in the Pentagon’s global games.

We won’t become Americans, though. We’ll have no say in the standards that will govern our new Atlantic common market. Nor will we be permitted to help decide who stands in the planet’s biggest pulpit. Nor will we have much significant say in our own foreign policy. The UK has chosen to shift from participating in one power block to sitting on the outer edges of another.

Victory of the Lobbyists

If that wasn’t clear before (though it was), the events surrounding the arrival of Boris Johnson in Downing Street have confirmed it.

During the leadership election there was, of course, the failure to defend Kim Darroch, the British ambassador to the US. Then there is the ongoing confrontation with Iran, in which Britain’s post-empire is being enlisted in the schemes of US neoconservatives. There is the revelation that a new US pro-Brexit campaign group has launched, and Steve Bannon’s insistence on ‘Today’ that Boris Johnson should deliver a “no deal, hard out”.

Over the past three years, we’ve seen Britain’s lobbying industry and think-tanks auction their access to our politicians off to US corporations and oligarchs – from the firm which ran Johnson’s leadership campaign bragging in Washington about its ability to shape Brexit for US business, to the Institute for Economic Affairs offering to broker meetings between senior ministers and US companies wishing to get their piece of the Brexit pie.

We’ve seen one former Washington lobbyist – Shanker Singham – move to London and secure unprecedented access to our politicians, even writing the so-called Malthouse compromise, while lobbyists also drove the team that ensured their preferred candidate was elected prime minister.

And now that they’ve got their Johnson in place lobbyists have taken over the cabinet.

We’ve seen Trump confirm that “everything” – including the NHS – “will be on the table” in a US trade deal, before his spin-doctors reminded him that he’s not supposed to say that out loud.

“Britain Trump”

We see it in the ascent of Johnson himself – a rise which has coincided with the arrival in the UK of the sorts of institutions and culture we’re more used to watching from a safe distance across the Atlantic. On openDemocracy, we’ve revealed how Definers Public Affairs, the smear machine which destroyed Hillary Clinton, has set up shop in the UK, how a US-style super PAC is being rolled out across Europe and how Brexit is the biggest outsourcing of public policy in British history.

Johnson, who has surfed this wave, has been anointed “Britain Trump” by his US admirer. It’s a fair nickname, not because they have the same character, but because they both epitomise the elitist myths embedded in their respective national characters. Trump is the millionaire’s son who pretends to be rich because of merit, the brash bully-boy billionaire in a culture whose dream equates wealth and cruelty with merit and success.

Johnson, on the other hand, comes from the school on whose playing fields the battle of Waterloo was mythologically won. He epitomises an Anglo-British exceptionalism built on a mystical link between nation, royalty and aristocracy: a link forged in the failed revolution of the civil war and bought with imperial plunder, and which reminds the British bourgeois of an era when you didn’t need to do your homework to attain power – you got it by dint of your nation, gender, class and skin colour.

Likewise, their identikit ideologies are the same: oligarch enrichment woven round national mythologies.

Johnson pretends to be a free trader in the way that earlier British politicians claimed to support free trade whilst using their military might to force China to buy opium, commit genocide in Tasmania and smash up cotton looms in India. Trump claims to be a protectionist just as earlier US presidents used a pretence of isolationism to pretend they weren’t building an empire, at the same time preaching that the US was manifestly and justifiably destined to conquer the whole North American continent, committing genocide against Native American peoples as they did so.

Both Trump and Johnson have been contorted by the distorting lenses of their respective nationalisms, confusing many into thinking that they ooze truth or charm or talent. Strip off those red white and blue tinted goggles and you quickly see them for what they are: rich racists willing to trample anyone to secure the world for their kind.

Ultimately, they both represent the same interwoven set of interests: oligarchs, mafiosi, disaster capitalists, Gulf oil millionaires, hedge fund speculators and any other corner of the elite which has spotted that the neoliberal era is coming to an end, they have few places left to invest and their best option is to hide away as much money as they can behind the biggest walls they can build.

This is what Johnson meant when he said “fuck business” – that he and his friends no longer have anything invested in traditional industries, so are happy to see them disappear. It is why Trump is perfectly happy to fuck America’s car industry as he slashes tax for the hyper-rich.

Useful Scraps of Empire

At openDemocracy, we’ve revealed how millions of pounds were pumped into the Leave campaigns in the first place. That money came through the same British Overseas Territory and Crown Dependency secrecy areas that the billionaires of the world use to stash the cash they can no longer figure out how to get a return from – the same post-empire that the Pentagon is so keen to get a closer grip on.

For while the UK’s network of semi-colonies is useful as a money-laundry for the world’s oligarchs, we’ve seen in recent weeks how it plays a different strategic role, too – why America might see it as a valuable asset to begin to enclose under its wings.

When the British territory of Gibraltar captured an Iranian tanker, supposedly to enforce an EU embargo against oil to Syria, it did so despite the fact that Iran isn’t in the EU, and the EU doesn’t force non-members to comply with its embargoes. The Spanish have, according to The Guardian, claimed that the UK is acting under the influence of the US, and the former Swedish prime minister and senior EU figure Carl Bilt has hinted as much. It looks very much like this wasn’t so much an act of British foreign policy as one of submission to the US Department of Defense.

Britain captured Gibraltar in 1704 because of its strategically important location. To this day, one-third of the world’s oil and gas passes through its straits. Likewise, another strategically vital waterway will define this conflict: the Gulf of Oman, which connects the Strait of Hormuz to the Arabian sea. Oman isn’t formally a British territory, but it has been a de facto UK colony since the nineteenth century, with London helping to prop up the slave-owning ruling family over two centuries. As Ian Cobain has outlined, its current sultan was put in place by an MI6 coup in 1970.

The relationship remains strong. Shell owns 30% of the national oil company and Britain’s military presence is significant. According to Duncan Campbell, the journalist who originally revealed the existence of GCHQ, the Snowden leaks revealed Oman hosts a vital British intelligence base, tapping the vast number of communications cables that run under the Gulf. Last year, the UK opened a permanent naval base in the country, and in February this year, the British government announced it had signed an historic defence agreement with the sultanate, “bringing us even closer to one of our most important partners”.

For those with long memories, this might start sounding familiar: the 45-minute claim intended to frighten the British into accepting the 2003 Iraq war was based on the claim that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction could be ready to deploy not against London, but against the British Overseas Territories in Cyprus.

If the Pentagon is to keep a firm grip on the world, Britain’s post-imperial web of semi-colonies will be vital fingerholds, and Brexit offers the US a unique opportunity to expand its control over the UK and its overseas assets.

The Great British Asset Striptease

This wasn’t inevitable. In theory, Brexit could genuinely have been about ‘taking back control’ for the British people. It would be possible to turn the UK into a new Cuba, for instance, substituting home-grown products for international imports. Not a suggestion that would please the millions of Leave voters who opted to quit the EU essentially because they wanted to become another Japan instead: wealthier than the UK, industrialised, with less income inequality, richly forested and deeply racist.

But these are not the options before us.

Instead, Brexit means plonking the corpse of post-imperial Britain in a vulture restaurant for US asset strippers, and pretending not to notice that China perches nearby, ready to pluck at whatever it fancies too.

The Great British Asset Striptease isn’t new, of course. For decades, the country has mostly stayed afloat in the world by auctioning off the plunder we accumulated through centuries of empire. As Joe Guinan and Thomas Hanna point out, the Treasury has calculated that Britain sold off 40 per cent of all assets privatised across the OECD between 1980 and 1996.

But as the new foreign secretary heads off on his ‘everything must go’ tour of North America, the people of the UK are going to have to fight hard to stop him selling the whole country to Trump and his friends. Just as thousands mobilised against the EU-US trade deal known as TTIP, we’re going to have to stand together and fight against any UK/US trade deal. We’re going to have to fight to protect our public services and our workers’ rights and our ecosystems from the new plunderers of the planet. Because Britain doesn’t have any power in its negotiations with Trump. And we have a government that will be delighted to turn the country into an offshore theme park for American, Saudi and Chinese billionaires.

Britain After Brexit: Welcome to the Vulture Restaurant

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9 Pieces Of Relationship 'Advice' That Are Just Plain Bad

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9 Pieces Of Relationship 'Advice' That Are Just Plain Bad

Think you should always tell your partner exactly how you’re feeling? Or that you’re selling yourself short if you don’t marry your soulmate? Don’t be so quick to subscribe to either piece of advice, relationship experts say.

Below, marriage therapists and other experts take to task these and other beliefs about love that should be taken with a grain of salt. 

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“Face it: Couples have fights. Sometimes those fights happen in the morning, when there’s plenty of time before bed to work things out. Sometimes they happen at night, when you’re already tired — a state that may well have contributed to you being snappish or unreasonable in the first place. Why in the world would it seem wise to stay up and fight? It’s OK — better, even — to put your conflict on hold and catch some Zs. Your feelings on the issue are likely to have lightened up overnight. If not, by morning, you’ll be clear-headed enough to address your differences effectively.” — Winifred M. Reilly, marriage and family therapist and the author of the relationship advice blog Speaking of Marriage

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“This is only true if both couples are equally invested in saving the marriage. I work with a lot of post-divorce clients who tried counseling as a last-ditch effort to save their marriage and so often, it’s too little, too late. It turns out that one spouse drags the other one there when he or she has already emotionally and mentally checked out of the relationship.” — Deb Besinger, life and relationship coach based in Raleigh, North Carolina

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“The one that bugs me the most is ‘share your feelings.’ The problem is, too often people share their feelings as a form of blame, saying things like, ‘I’m angry with you’ or ‘I’m hurt by what you said.’ Then when the other person gets defensive, they say, ‘I’m just sharing my feelings’ or ‘I have a right to my feelings.’ If your intent is to learn rather than blame, you would say, ‘I’m angry with you and I’d like to talk about it and understand what’s happening between us’ or ‘I’m hurt by what you said and I’d like to understand why you said it.’ You’re far less likely to receive a defensive response and far more likely to resolve conflict when your intent is to learn rather than to attack and blame.” —  Margaret Paul, psychotherapist and co-author of Do I Have to Give Up Me To Be Loved by You? 

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“It gets under my skin when people say married people don’t have sex. I know tons of married people that don’t ever have sex and of course, tons that do. Don’t believe this advice. Many couples say it’s something they do before they go to bed every night, just like brushing their teeth.” — Carly Spindel, dating and relationship expert based in New York City 

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“To me, one of the most irksome pieces of relationship advice is that there’s a ‘soulmate’ out there for each of us. You know, the ideal partner we perfectly connect with and who instantly completes us. That simply doesn’t exist. A great relationship isn’t an effortless thing. Rather, it’s something that’s built over time. It takes work. When we experience disconnected moments in our relationships, this idea can leave us in deep discontentment, wondering if maybe we married the wrong person and perhaps our soulmate is still out there. The thing is, in marriage, your mate has become your soulmate — imperfections, disconnected moments, and all. Period. End of story.” — Ashleigh Slater, relationship columnist and author of Team Us: Marriage Together

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“One annoyance I have around treating couples is the idea that verbal and direct communication solves everything. This often works for women but it is not in favor of most men. Some men process information slower and short circuit when verbally barraged. It’s wise for women to step back, give him time to process and then let him start a verbal dialogue. With men, patience is wisdom and realizing that can help women get the resolution and understanding they want.” — Sherrie Campbell, psychologist based in Southern California 

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“The truth is, some people experience more anxiety in the beginning of a new relationship or in the dating process than others. It’s natural to want reassurance, connection and attention from a partner and it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are insecure, afraid of being alone or unhealthy if you seek that. Knowing you have this tendency can help you find a partner who can provide reassurance and calm the brain into a less anxious state.” — Chelli Pumphrey, therapist and dating coach based in Denver, Colorado

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“Often when I’m working with a couple in a stagnant relationship, I ask, ‘When did you stop trying to change your husband or wife?’ This question is almost always greeted with a huge protest, ‘I would never try to change him or her’ or ‘You can’t change anyone else’ — to which I reply, ‘Nonsense!’ or some variation thereof. I challenge the idea that we can’t or shouldn’t change our partner. In fact, we always change our partners, with or without realizing it. This ‘change’ process involves not their personality or character, which is pretty much established by adulthood. Instead, partners help guide each other into particular relationship patterns, a nearly invisible process intrinsic to the intimate duet. We all know people — maybe ourselves — who say, referring to a past relationship, ‘I don’t like the person I became with him or her.’ That’s RP — relationship physics — in action. In fact, most of us have more power in relationships than we realize.” — Amy Begel, marriage and family therapist based in  New York City

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“While I do believe that everything happens for a reason, it doesn’t help someone who just found out his or her spouse cheated, or whose spouse just brought up divorce. While there are countless things in life we can’t control, and while there is a larger plan that we usually know nothing about, no one should forget that we have so much control over our happiness and how we choose to live our lives.” — Jackie Pilossoph, relationship columnist and author of Divorced Girl Smiling 

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