#The fact people think george wanted a red flag for selfish reasons

[yesterdayiwrote]

Just to say, they INSTANTLY red flagged the race in Silverstone 22 when Zhou was caught in the catch fence because they correctly identified there was a driver safety issue and a potential need for medics (and because they could get another start out of it)

But they refused to red flag a race with a car on its side and unsighted on the racing line, where a second impact would have almost certainly killed them?

[brujahinaskirt]

@missn11​ says:

Ask and ye shall receive, fellow neonate! <3 Bear with me, because I’m about to hammer out 2000 words very quickly...

This massive rant by its topic nature is sort of Nines-critical, so lemme start by saying that, in my own way, I love Rodriguez. (I was partially self-burning in the shitpost that ignited this rant because I SEVERELY exaggerated Nines’s canonical shadiness levels in my ancient fanfiction, and for no other reason than because I was a teenage edgelord. I am appropriately embarrassed, but only by my excess and melodrama, not by Troika’s characterization. I think the writing behind VTMB’s Nines is superb.)

When it comes to Bloodlines, I think he’s one of the most psychologically interesting profiles in the game. In fact, I could never get into LA by Night because they so de-toothed Troika’s vision of him. Not to say LA by Night’s Nines was a poorly-developed character in his own right, ‘cause he wasn’t at all, but “my” Nines will always be unapologetically and only Troika’s: boiling angry, viciously pragmatic, a survivor who doesn’t let anyone too close lest they see through him, whose over-the-top confident façade cracks a little more every time his back’s against the wall. Troika’s Nines is the epitome of greater VTM’s “fallen rebel” archetype, and even though we don’t get to see it on all playthoughs, that makes it even better and more believable.

But as with all characterization in Bloodlines, we have to read between the lines and between our own play styles a bit to piece the truth of the puzzle together...

Besides the direct evidence Troika gives us—i.e. the music cues, which are a bit overbearing if I’m honest (sorry, Troika! ilu); the absence of Nines in Rosa’s prophecy re: people you can trust; and the overt warnings Camarilla-aligned characters give us about him—the biggest red flag about Rodriguez, imo? It’s twofold:

the way the characters he surrounds himself with talk about him and the type of vampire he chooses to fill his den. Namely: Nines exclusively recruits angry, spurned, mistreated people who are younger and far less experienced than he is

those messy, ugly, fleeting moments where you see his toughguy everyman personality crack

So! Starting with point one:

THE PERSONALITY CULT ITSELF

We can’t deny that Nines does not surround himself with peers. He surrounds himself with followers—people who don’t challenge him in any way, who are fanatically loyal, who openly profess their worship of him and their conviction he could never/would never do anything wrong. If you listen to how Damsel and Skelter talk about him, it’s with frightening adulation, often repeating Nines’s lines word-for-word without truly understanding the argumentation behind them. (Damsel’s the main offender here with her “IT’S A PYRAMID SCHEME… it just makes sense, you know? It just makes sense!” And then, of course, she gets pissed and refuses to speak to you when you push her into elaborating.)

Nines has clearly made himself much more than just a friend-figure or a Sire-figure to them. He’s utterly and completely mythologized by the LA Anarchs, held up next to other politically mythologized names like George Washington and Ho Chi Minh. His followers love him… but there’s a pecking order, and like good body shields, they believe their lives don’t matter as much as he matters. And they love that, too. They want to die for Nines. They’re not just willing to or resigned to it; they’re eager to die. Damsel will volunteer this information the first time you meet her. She just can’t wait to prove herself by taking a bullet for goddamn Nines Rodriguez. It’s literally how she introduces herself to new people.

And yet Nines deliberately withholds his attention and time from his followers. He uses his attention as a reward, as incentive. He rations some care and reassurance and help—makes you feel good and gives you reason to crave his attention—and then he pushes you away, back into his adoring ranks until the next “two minutes” you earn from him in which you’re special enough for such an exceptional, important, cool guy to talk to. That’s a classic manipulation tactic, and a classic personality cult tell.

And Troika is so damn fuckin’ brilliant about it because they don’t stop at showing us that an Anarch-aligned fledgling might feel this way—no, they make the PLAYER also feel this way. On our first playthrough of Bloodlines, we’re desperate to talk to Nines. We want the reward. “Let me finish the plaguebearer quests… let me run to the Elizabeth Dane… I hope Nines talks to me again now! Quick, to the Last Round! Maybe if I say the right thing to make him like me, he’ll give me another free EXPERIENCE POINT!” (iirc he’s one of two characters who will do so, and the only one who gives multiple points.)

But at the end of the day, Nines is indisputably the leader of the Anarchs, and even fledgling figures that out. (“Sounds like you’re the Prince of the Anarchs.”) He’s very much the Baron of Downtown LA, even if he won’t use that language. As for the grating day-to-day management and leadership stuff that might make him somewhat unpopular among the Anarchs, though? He fobs all that stuff off on Damsel!

Damsel, his Minion No. 1—whom a lot of players will hate on their early playthroughs, because she assigns tough missions with little to no reward. Damsel, who has no real power role in the Anarchs and functions only to serve Nines. You help Damsel, and you do Nines’s work—i.e. you do the work of the Barony of LA—and he doesn’t even have to take the admiration hit by having to ask you himself.

There’s only one non-follower of note around Nines. It’s Jack, and by his own words, he’s not one of Nines’s people; he disparages them, in fact. And we’ll notice that Jack—who is stronger, older, and wiser than Nines—very much doesn’t talk about Nines the same way Nines’s followers do. While Jack doesn’t directly insult him and occasionally defends him, Jack also has a downright shocking response to the announcement of the Blood Hunt. When fledgling desperately asks what they can do to help Nines—Jack says, word-for-word: I could give a damn.

Something ain’t quite right about this place.

Moving right along:

NINES IS A FAKE ALPHA MALE WHO KNOWS HE’S GOING TO DIE

Part of why Nines is so attractive to someone scared and weak like our fledgling (or Skelter or Damsel) is that he seems utterly fucking untouchable—like nothing scares him, and that must be reassuring when two of your age-old enemies are moving into town. But Nines’s tough, cool, Devil-may-care persona outs itself as a protective shell, too… and this is another thing I think Troika handled so subtly and so well.

You’ll notice that even Nines’s voice is dramatically different in a couple different situations: when Ming Xiao is borrowing his body, when he’s afraid, and when he’s distracted or deeply disturbed. (A successful Malkavian mind read will really slam a crack in his coolguy persona. For a second, the nonchalance shatters and he childishly screams SHUT UP!)

But whether you Malk him or not: In those isolated moments, the Coolguy Nines Rodriguez we normally see frays. Physically, even! His accent loses its burr (that ballsy rural American everyman accent), shoots up to a higher register—and reveals a much softer voice than the one he uses in front of other people. No wonder; part of Nines’s charisma comes from his performance of masculine confidence, and even if it’s not a toxically patriarchal masculinity in the way we often picture it, the fact this performance cracks at all shows it’s not his genuine self. He’s acting. In the way a lot of toughguy men do—but for Nines, whose survival depends upon attraction now, he’s acting toughguy for his very life.

I think those little fray-under-pressure moments are the “real” Nines, or as close as we’re going to get: scared, desperate, worn-down, and very aware of his doom.

Now, all that said…

BLATANT FALLEN REBEL CONCEPT APOLOGISM

I don’t think we can quite throw Rodriguez into the same Mean Monster Morality Dungeon for Evil Vampires as other Big Bads in LA. This is where motivation comes into play, at least for me. We know Nines can be merciless and violent, and he doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice his own soldiers (namely, um, US!) to protect his holdings. But he does seem to have a twinge of genuine anger over injustices wrought upon “little people” (look no further than Nocturne)—one that seems like it stems from a sense of right v. wrong rather than sheer pragmatism. This stands in stark opposition to the rationed pacificism of characters like LaCroix, who simply doesn’t want the headache of cleaning up a pile of dead humans on his nightly to-do list.

Nines also, of course, just doesn’t have the same kind of disaster reach other Bloodlines Big Bads do in how much harm he can cause. When LaCroix gets up to some bullshit, he crashes the national economy. Nines, like, crashes a car into a corporate office window or takes over a street or something. Can’t really compare the two when it comes to the scale of damage done.

And even Nines Rodriguez is, for all his strategy, still an honestly angry person. Not all of him is fake—what’s troubling about him is what he’s willing to sacrifice and do to satiate his anger-passion. It’s the standard Brujah emotional-moral struggle. Even though I agree with much of what he says about bloodsucking late capitalist vampires (tbh he seems to hate vampires in general!), one wonders if it’s not partially the anger-passion that’s warped him into the façade of a noble leader he’s become. It’s not a pure anger anymore; he’s weaponized it in selfish, unhealthy, destructive ways.

But if he’s a fallen rebel—and since he is still apparently capable of some genuine anger and sadness—then we can infer he wasn’t always like this. He fell, and narratively, that’s key to understanding Clan Brujah. Maybe he fell in a way all of us angry rebel-types risk falling if we let our hatred of the bloodsuckers in real life outgrow and consume our care for the real-world little people.

I think we also have to appreciate that—as far as we know—the shady shit Nines does, he primarily does to prolong his power. But for a threatened Anarch like Nines, power doesn’t mean expansion or accumulation as it might for an ascending Ventrue; it primarily means survival. The Camarilla and Kuei-jin incursions into LA have numbered his days, and he can’t possibly have any delusions about this, no matter how much he swaggers. So he does what he can do with the skills and limited resources he has. He corrupts vulnerable, angry, abused people by giving them the appearance of friendship, family, and hope they can become stronger—much like effective gang leaders do.

If he’s morally nastier than other power-players like LaCroix in some way, imo, it’s here. It’s the intimacy with which he manipulates the people around him. LaCroix may lie to you; Strauss may withhold information from you; Ming Xiao may double-cross you. But none of them ask that you love them. That’s not their goal; that’s not how they operate. None of them expect or encourage anyone to happily die for them of their own free will. If they get you killed, you’ll die resenting them—resenting that you had to die, at all.

But when you die for people like Nines Rodriguez, you do it willingly, if only because you believed he cared somehow and that he’d fight tooth-and-nail for you, too. You believed that you were a member of his little outcast family—or that you would be, if you just proved yourself a little bit more. If you just fought a little harder. If you were just a little happier about having the chance to die for the cause. Maybe if you die for Nines, then Nines will love you, too.

I don’t think he does. I don’t think he will. If he’s a true fallen rebel archetype, I don’t know if he can anymore.

That’s enough Anarchs for now! I’m gonna peace out with some copy/pasted lyrics from the theme song of Nines’s den: the ballad of the charming and vengeful Lecher Bitch. Stay sharp, my little Bloodlines fanatics!

Tell me your story Don't worry, I've been there Crown me your savior Don't worry, I'll be there

[Chorus] I said hey You're coming all the way I've got some hell to pay I'm diggin' all the way All the way down I said hey You're coming all the way I've got some hell to pay Gonna rip you every way On the way down again [Bridge] Don't belong lording above me Won't be hard to pull you underground It won't be long 'til you love me And I'll be coming at your back To break it down

[westboast]

San Clemente

Whenever I’m home for Christmas, I go to church with my grandmother on Christmas Eve. She has always gone. It’s our family church, Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, in Perryville, Maryland. A little town. It’s a white church plastered in stucco, surrounded by deciduous trees which go gray and leafless by December. My grandmother and I walk through the graveyard to see her brother’s grave. He died three years ago. Etched on the tombstone is the image of him and my aunt in a boat. I walk a few paces to the left and find myself on an empty rectangle of grass. Each corner is adorned with a little granite block. Etched on each of the blocks is the name AMATO. The Amato plot. I realize that if I suddenly die, this is where my body will go. I feel terrified and look to my grandmother, who recognizes my fear and waves for us to leave this place and enter the church.

On Christmas Eve in 1992, my cousin Mark, then twenty-eight, died as a result of AIDS. I was six months old at the time. My mother was nineteen years old. My grandmother and aunt went to church anyway that night. During the service, right after the Eucharist, the lights were dimmed, as they still are. Everyone turned on an electric candle, as they still do, and together they sang “Silent Night.”

The women in my family—my dad’s side—are not sentimental like the men are. My mother is sentimental, but she is from the Virginian, Lutheran side. Southerners are sappy, like molasses. The northerners are Anglican and tight-lipped. As far as my dad’s side goes, I have never seen my grandmother or aunt get emotional except during “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve at Saint Mark’s. Even then, tears form in their eyes, but they do not cry.

I think about Mark a lot, even though I was an infant when he died. He played tennis. I played tennis. He’s gay. I’m gay. He was the eldest cousin. I am the eldest cousin. He read alone on the beach while the boy cousins played in the water. Then he would return to the house to watch soap operas.

I have inherited my aunt’s and grandmother’s grief for him. This year, when “Silent Night” began and the lights dimmed, my aunt and grandmother looked dead ahead. I saw their lips moving to the lyrics. I gripped the pew in front of me and gasped. The only light in the room came from the little battery-powered candles. I forced myself not to cry, because I never even knew him and I thought it would be selfish to cry in front of the women who did. I was amazed that they were able to sing through their grief, because I could only get out every other word. I knew the words but I was choking on them in the dark. By candlelight I could see my aunt’s and grandmother’s tears and I forced out the words as best as I could, out of duty.

The next night, Christmas, at my aunt’s house, I felt a wave of jet-lag and asked if I could lie down somewhere. My aunt said yes.

“You can go rest in Mark’s room,” she says.

I walk up the hardwood stairs to his room. It is much the way it was when he died, I guess. The bed is made. His tennis rackets are there, and a Les Miserables poster. I lie on his bed and fall asleep clutching his pillow. I never knew him but I wish he was here. In my family I am walking along his path, but there is no one to lead me. I want him to lead me.

I wake up because my college-aged cousin is yelling downstairs. She has a booming voice, a commanding voice. She studies history at a college in southern Maryland. I have a feeling she’ll run for office one day.

“White privilege is a real, proven, indisputable fact!” she is shouting. “Where is David? He’ll back me up!”

At this point I am face down in Mark’s pillow, crying. This is where he slept. What? White privilege. Right. I remember being in college and having these kinds of arguments with family members. Back then I was more righteous. I was listening to my cousin and she was being mostly convincing. I didn’t want to bail her out because I thought she needed to struggle a bit. That’s part of it. Trying to argue the existence or relevance of white privilege in a place like Cecil County, Maryland, is very admirable. It’s like throwing a Tupperware party, except it’s not Tupperware but a loaded polio vaccine and the audience is Jenny McCarthy.

I come down the stairs and find my cousin, Caesar-like, commanding her Senate.

“Back me up, David!”

“One sec,” I say, giving her the thumbs up and exiting quickly. She has it under control. Mostly. She is impassioned, but she hasn’t realized that the trick is to let the other person yell themselves exhausted. At that point you swoop in with a reasoned argument once they’ve run out of steam. They’re too tired to fight back. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is quite good at this. Tammy Duckworth nailed it in her Senate campaign too, when her opponent made a racist comment about her family during a debate and she just took a drink of water as a response. Now she’s a senator and that guy isn’t.

Nice.

I make eye contact with my grandmother, wearing a tolerant half-smile that I’ve also inherited. I’m just here, it says. She is sprawled on the couch, listening. Sort of. She may or may not have her hearing aid turned on. I wonder if Mark was very political. He was probably too sick.

My aunt, in the kitchen, is wearing the same smile as my grandmother.

“Is there more mac ‘n’ cheese?” I say, bending over the counter.

“Yeah, Dave, help yourself.”

The only people who call me Dave are my family members and my best friend in Baltimore. I never ask people to call me Dave, because it sounds like a realtor’s name. But when they elect to do so themselves it makes me feel comfortable. My mom’s nickname for me is Detour Dave, after a traffic announcer on the Baltimore radio station 98 Rock. I get myself a scoop of mac ‘n’ cheese and put it in the microwave. I would vote for my cousin, I think as I lean on the counter and the food spins in the microwave. She’d be a good Democrat. I’m too neurotic and self-absorbed for something like that.

The microwave beeps.

The white privilege shout-off, featuring exclusively white people, concludes, and people start going home. I stick around with my mac ‘n’ cheese and sit down on the couches with my aunt and grandmother. They’re lovely couches, overstuffed with checkered red upholstery.

“There was a time when a family could have Republicans and Democrats in it and it wasn’t a big deal,” my grandmother says. “Not now.”

This time last year we were walking to dinner at a crabhouse, and she said to me, “David, I’ve never seen the country like this.” She was alive and aware in the sixties, bear in mind. And so I found this statement especially unsettling. What’s going to happen, I thought. Is anyone else worried that the whole thing is going to fall apart?

I am.

Later that night we were at dinner. I had crabcakes, of course. One of my relatives walked up behind me, his cane tapping on the floor. He’s a Republican. He leaned close to me.

“How do you like your new country, David?”

Come back.

My brother sits down with us on the red couches and does most of the talking. He’s the gregarious one. He lived on Edmondson Avenue in Baltimore in 2015 and from his porch watched the National Guard roll in during the Freddie Gray uprising. I can see him on that porch now, smoking with his housemates as the tanks passed, as the smoke rolled toward the sky from downtown. At the time I was at an elementary school in Anacortes, Washington, with YouTube open and my jaw on the floor.

Come back.

When it’s time to go home I crouch down at the front door to tie my shoes. My aunt and grandmother wait for me. They are standing over me, watching me.

I stand up and say, “I really hate Donald Trump.”

“No one here is going to argue with you,” my aunt says.

I look down at the floor and see a little knot of silver under the dessert table. I pick it up.

“What’s this?” I say.

“It’s my necklace,” my aunt says. “The knot is too tight. I’m going to take it to the jeweler to get it out.”

“Let me try,” I say.

I struggle for a few minutes. They are still watching me. I’m worried that I have set myself up for failure, so I really focus. I’ve bitten my nails down, so I have to softly tease the knot apart with my fingertips. Eventually I manage to get it out. It’s a fine, delicate silver chain.

“Thanks, Dave,” my aunt says. I hand it to her and kiss her goodbye.

My brother is outside smoking. He drives us home. We smoke Newports out the windows as we fly up Route 40. There is very little on that road. He speeds, I think. Who cares. It’s Maryland, so on the radio we toggle between country and hip hop. We pass billboards. We pass an Amazon facility that was built but never staffed. Imagine that kind of money, to build something but then leave it totally empty.

We pass American flags, at half-staff for the recently-deceased George H.W. Bush. He was the president when I was born. He was the president when Mark died.

My aunt, my grandmother, and I are staunch Democrats.

***

I feel like everything has already been said about Southern California. Even the future has been documented in Southern California. It’s been imagined many times. California on fire, or underwater, mega-urban, Bladerunner-style. Why does everyone fantasize about destroying Southern California? Maybe it’s because it shouldn’t have been settled like this. Of course it should not have been colonized, but after that even—why build a city where there should not, cannot, be a city? Did anyone stop and think of that? It’s a desert, but they tried to build Eden.

Even the word California is fantastical. It is believed to come from the sixteenth century Spanish novel Las Sergas de Esplandián, by García Rodríguez de Montalvo. The novel describes a mythical island called California, “on the right hand from the Indies…very close to a side of the Earthly Paradise; and it was populated by black women, without any man existing there, because they lived in the way of the Amazons.” Their queen was named Calafia.

When I arrive in Los Angeles I take the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner from Union Station to San Juan Capistrano. I almost miss the last train. I have to run to Platform 13 and nearly suffocate trying to board in time. I sit in a dark car and watch the darkness outside.

I am going to Heidi’s house—her mom’s house—in Orange County. Heidi and I met in Japan. She has to go to work in the mornings, so when she’s gone I shuffle downstairs and make coffee in her mom’s Keurig. I feel kind of evil every time I make coffee in that thing, because every coffee “pod” represents one more little tile in the mosaic of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But I don’t feel guilt. I’m not going to stop drinking it. Heidi and her mom don’t drink as much coffee as I do. I blow through those pods pretty fast. I think about offering to buy more, but I’m unsure of the etiquette involved. Guests get unlimited coffee, right? Like at car dealerships. I think that if I offer to buy more they will think I’m calling them cheap. But I also don’t want to seem like a mooch. I resolve to do nothing and keep drinking the coffee instead of seeking an appropriate solution.

I go outside to the patio. The sun is pouring over me. California forces you to be accurate. California looks nothing like the East Coast. On the East Coast and in Chicago the buildings look like tombstones. They are ashen fortifications against the harsh outdoors. But in California the houses are flat, adobe-inspired, stuccoed, surrounded by plants. Cacti and succulents. There are fruit trees. I remember Gretchen’s orange tree in Palo Alto, how amazing I thought it was that oranges could grow in someone’s backyard. Heidi’s patio has a palm tree in each corner, making it look like an Egyptian temple instead of a porch. The columnar trees spread their canopic fronds against the sun and the blue sky.

There is a drought in California. Heidi says not to leave the water running. There are signs in public parks which say not to drink water from the drinking fountains. Sometimes the faucet runs slow. I think twice before taking a shower and a third time before shaving.

Who will have the last drop in California?

Heidi’s mom comes downstairs. She is originally from Boston and has retained her Eastern shell, which I appreciate. One morning she makes me an omelette. In California it is standard to ask “Do you have any dietary restrictions?” before making food for someone or inviting them to dinner. Heidi’s mom asks me before she makes me the omelette. But I’ll eat anything. I am not picky. I’ll eat anything you want me to eat. The sky, the succulents.

She uses some goat cheese that Heidi and I picked up from Trader Joe’s. “This is Heidi’s cheese,” she says. “I would never buy it, but it’s great in omelettes.” She serves the omelette with buttered toast and blackberries on the side. I press my fork into the omelette but hesitate when I see her scoop hers up and place it on her toast. I follow suit, chopping mine in half and putting it on my toast.

“Remind me where you’re from one more time,” she says, biting into the omelette. “Chicago?”

“Maryland. But not Baltimore. The hillbilly part.”

She nods.

“So I guess you’ve got the travel bug like Heidi?”

“Sometimes. Right now I have the settle-down bug. But I still have seven months in Japan.”

“And you’re over it. Right? You’re over it.”

“I’m over it.”

“July’s not that far off,” she says. “You can hang in there.”

She’s right. I hope she’s right. She’s a therapist and I trust her. I have the feeling that she is reading my mind. I think all therapists are clairvoyant. Maybe she can divine the expression on my face like a fortune teller reading tea leaves. Maybe she can intuit how terrified I am of loneliness based on the shape of my mouth. Maybe she already knows everything about me. Maybe I am not as special as I think I am. Maybe I am just a predictable gumbo of neuroses.

There is no omelette the next morning. Heidi’s mom just says, “I already ate.” That’s it. It’s just a fact. I love that about people from the East Coast—their directness. I miss that. She sits down at her computer, a huge Mac desktop next to the sliding glass door. She types while I jostle the door open and shut all morning, unable to stay either inside or outside for too long.

I drink coffee and smoke on the patio. When noon hits I get to work on the box of Trader Joe’s cabernet that Heidi and I also bought. I spend the next several afternoons nursing it while Heidi is at work. Her brother and mom are either startled or impressed by this, watching this stranger sip boxed wine on their patio at noon on a weekday, day after day. They’re definitely confused. I feel kind of weird doing it, but I also feel detached enough from reality in Orange County to assume that it doesn’t matter. I don’t even know what day it is.

Heidi’s mom has two pugs. I can’t remember their names, so I just call them Grimes and Elon. She is in the kitchen doing dishes and I don’t want the smoke to bother her, so I decide to go out into the driveway. Grimes and Elon are sleeping peacefully in their little plush basket. I hope that Heidi’s mom doesn’t mind that I am leaving them unsupervised. Maybe one of them will do me the favor of eating my notebook and freeing me from the catalogue of my thoughts. I unlatch the gate and go out to the driveway that connects the houses to one another. The air is clean but looks a little bit fuzzy or sparkly. The houses all look the same, with stucco walls and red roofs. The trees are green but because of the drought the tips of the leaves are brown. They look burnt, singed. I imagine the palm fronds reaching too close to the burner on a gas stove. 

One of the houses on the next block has an American flag hanging out front, obscured a little bit by the haze. Or my imagination. For some reason I think that the flag looks out of place in Orange County. I don’t know where the “real America” is, but I don’t think it’s here. It’s not in Cecil County either though. Where the hell is it?

I look around. I didn’t grow up in the suburbs, so places like this always seem exotic to me. I feel as though I suddenly understand pop punk—the entire genre. Also Ska. I can imagine how Gwen Stefani would have been considered “edgy” in a place like this. I wonder how many pills are on this block alone. Hundreds? Thousands? How many affairs are going on? How many lawyers and therapists does it take to keep this one little block chugging along?

I hear a garage door open. I turn to my left and see an old woman with black-dyed hair wearing a red silk pajama suit shuffling into the driveway. She looks ahead vacantly and says nothing as she slowly bends down to pick up the newspaper. She turns back around just as slowly and shuffles back into the garage. The door clicks and retracts back down, sealing her inside. How long has she lived there? Heidi knows none of her neighbors’ names and has no intention of changing that, so there is no use asking her about the ghostly woman in red. Heidi’s neighbors only ever see her when she begrudgingly takes Elon and Grimes for walks, or when she exhales plumes of vaporized THC from her bedroom window at night like a stoned Rapunzel.

This morning I ate an omelette and last night I made a fire in Heidi’s fireplace. The Boy Scouts taught me to breathe fire. A fire is heat, fuel, and oxygen. I am holding a fire in my fingers. No one should try to eat fire. I take it back: fire is what I cannot eat. My dietary restriction is fire, okay? I’ve Californized. The whole state is on fire. It was, anyway. I don’t know if it is now.

I put the match to the kindling that Heidi and I have gathered from the woods near her house. I crouch toward the fireplace and ignite the kindling with my breath.

“There’s someone lucky waiting for you,” says Heidi’s boyfriend.

Maybe, I think. As long as he can breathe fire.

One night we go to dinner with Heidi’s friends, a couple. They are talking about the first time they said “I love you” to one another. I’m two drinks into happy hour and decide I might as well tell someone that I love them. Maybe this will be my big moment! So I go to the bathroom and text “Whatever I love you” to someone who I know full well does not love me back. That’ll do it, I think. I won’t be hearing from him again. An ethereal sense of relief then floats up through the heartbreak. All I really wanted was to say it.

When my grandmother was dating my grandfather in the sixties, it was kind of naughty, because she was Episcopalian and he was Catholic. “I just love bad boys,” she once said to me. She and my grandfather lived in Cecil County but his cousins lived in Baltimore. The first Amato to disembark there was named Leonardo, I think. “I would go down to Baltimore to see Bobby’s cousins. They were Catholic and lived over [wherever they lived—not somewhere nice]. They would bring me to their room, and then they would go into the closet and pull out mink coats and gin and silver cigarette stems. They couldn’t afford them. We would put on the coats and smoke out the windows.”

The stories I was told as a child are revealing themselves to be more and more intricate as the years pass. They look like the golden altar of the Serra Chapel at San Juan Capistrano Mission, “the jewel of the Missions.” You could look at that altar forever. Like the jewels of the South the Missions are testimony to slaughter.

You can get married there.

Heidi says that winter sunsets are the most spectacular in California. I don’t know why. In Japan she always longed for the sunset. She found the closest approximation possible to a California sunset at a beach on the northern coast of Oita prefecture, where we lived together for two years. The beach was barricaded by a seawall and was not really inviting of swimmers.

In San Clemente we go to a spot overlooking the ocean and find dozens of other people longing for the sunset. Heidi is home, where she is meant to be, her context. I think of my own context, my own longing. My spot is on a granite wall in North East running along the graveyard of a church near my house. When I was a teenager I would sit at the end, dangling my feet over the murky river. I still do that whenever I go home. I watch the Canada geese as they float, bob, spread their wings, and take off in formation toward the leafless trees.

In the California afternoon I will sit on the beach and read. The most interesting stories are about people who could never figure out what they wanted. Heidi drops me off at North Beach in San Clemente. I walk the beach trail along the Pacific Ocean and listen to music. The waves curl enormously and crash in huge eruptions of surf. I see teenage couples holding hands on lifeguard stands. At sunset I sit down on the sand and watch the sun dissipate through the cloud bank. The sky turns pink and orange. I try to identify what I am feeling. It’s something close to contentment but not exactly. I want to laugh. The moment feels funny for some reason. Everything feels funny and pointless, and watching the waves crash I feel like I can stop worrying so much. 

The next morning I return to the patio. I sit beneath the sun. The light dances along the leaves of the fruit trees. I drink the wine and lean back, feel myself warm and pretty. I close my eyes and pretend I am in Italy, among the mysterious groves of my ancestors.

—California

[thaliberator]

The Clownish Way to Doom A Generation

By following Colin Kaepernick’s “they’re both the same, why vote” philosophy and skipping the 2016 election, progressives and Black abstainers opened the door for Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell to reshape the federal judiciary in a way that’s set to have dire consequences for Black people and progressives for the next 30 years.

Late in August 2016 as the American National Anthem blared through the Levi’s Stadium loudspeakers, reporter Jennifer Lee Chan tweeted a relatively innocuous photo shot from high above the field where the San Francisco 49ers and Green Bay Packers were set to engage in a preseason contest.

A then minor detail captured in the picture confirmed the impetus for a story Chan’s colleague Steve Wyche had been keeping his eye on for the past couple of weeks. What it showed was 49ers backup quarterback Colin Kaepernick sitting during the playing of the anthem while everyone else in view of the lens stood. In and of itself, standing for the playing of the national anthem before a sporting event is a peculiar ceremonial ritual so boring that it only makes it to the TV broadcast for title games and big-time celebrity performances.

But once Kaepernick explained his rationale for not standing, and eventually kneeling, during the anthem, suddenly those two minutes of pre-kickoff pomp and circumstance became the biggest thing in sports.

As he would later go on to explain many times across multiple platforms, Kaepernick’s decision came in the wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Oscar Grant, and the ongoing systemic oppression faced by Black people in America.

"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color," Kaepernick told Wyche. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

From the moment Kaepernick made known the reason for his protests the backlash was as predictable as the outcome, and thus his fate as an NFL quarterback was sealed in such a way that only an MVP-caliber performance could have extended his run. That didn’t happen and he hasn’t played another down in the NFL in nearly four years.

Kaepernick’s on-field performance in 2016 and 2017 left a lot to be desired. After being relegated to backup quarterback he was thrust back into the starting role after the team got off to a 1-4 start. His presence under center didn’t really change 49er-fortune as the team won only one of its remaining 11 games.

While statistics suggest Kaepernick’s performance wasn’t atrocious, it wasn’t good enough for the 49ers to make a long-term investment in him either. At the end of the season, the 29-year-old decided to opt-out of his contract and try his hand as a free agent, a designation that would allow any interested team to add him to their roster.

But despite having guided his team to a Super Bowl appearance just four years earlier and having declining but decent stats, not one of the NFL’s 32 teams took a serious look at Kaepernick. A few coaches and front office people made statements that someone should definitely pick up Kaepernick, just not their teams.

Was his performance poor? Yes. Was his performance so poor that 31 other teams couldn’t find a spot for him even as a third-string quarterback? No. Clearly the controversy-averse NFL owners, even if not overtly expressed, were in cahoots to ensure Kaepernick never received another shot in the league — a theory born out by the fact that in 2019 the NFL and Kaepernick reached a confidential monetary settlement regarding his claims that owners colluded to keep him unemployed.

But that part of the story we know.

They're All The Same?

As the Kaepernick controversy ballooned in 2016, the quarterback became the avatar for everything from the opposition of systemic racial oppression, the opposition of police brutality, and opposition of institutional racism to disrespect of the flag, disrespect of the country, and even (bizarrely) disrespect of the military.

The opportunity to drive a golf wedge into America’s racial fissures and exploit the emerging culture war wasn’t missed by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump who infamously said to an approving crowd of hootin’ n hollerin’ red state whites, “Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners when someone disrespects our flag to say, 'get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He's fired. He's fired!”

With the presidential campaign coming to a head, football season well underway, and the pro and anti-kneeling camps firmly entrenched, reporters asked Kaepernick to weigh in on the race between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Kaepernick, clearly the most prominent voice in professional sports at the moment surprised many when he said he didn’t plan to vote because essentially all politicians are the same, including Clinton and Trump.

Specifically, he said, “Both are proven liars and it almost seems like they’re trying to debate who’s less racist. At this point, in talking to one of my friends, you have to pick the lesser of two evils, but the end is still evil.

"I think the two presidential candidates that we currently have also represent the issues that we have in this country right now," Kaepernick said. "You have Hillary, who has called Black teens or Black kids super predators. You have Donald Trump, who is openly racist.

"He always says, 'Make America Great Again.' Well, America's never been great for people of color," Kaepernick said. "And that's something that needs to be addressed. Let's make America great for the first time."

And that was the gist of his abstinence rationale —they’re all the same, so I’m not voting.

It’s a relatively juvenile argument most often posited by people who don’t want to do the work required to actually change the reality of their political choices. And not only was Kaepernick not going to vote, turns out he never even registered to vote in 2016 or ever as far as any records show.

However, to his credit, Kaepernick is not your average apathetic abstainer. In the years that he has been out of football, he has become a high-profile activist, highlighting the issues that led to his anthem protest, held forums on a variety of social justice-related topics, and raised and donated millions of dollars for various causes.

He even started the Know Your Rights Camp, a non-profit organization that holds seminars for young people across the country to “advance the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown communities through education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization and the creation of new systems that elevate the next generation of change leaders.”

He even managed to get one of America’s most beloved brands, Nike, to side with his efforts. According to various financial news outlets, Kaepernick’s partnership with Nike for their 30th Anniversary “Just Do it” campaign resulted in $163 million in earned media, a $6 billion brand value increase, and a 31% boost in sales, which includes the $50 t-shirts and $150 jerseys that routinely sell out in hours, with a portion of proceeds going to charity.

But corporate sales numbers aren’t really the ones that matter.

Inside The Numbers

When the dust settled on the 2016 presidential campaign Hillary Clinton received 65,853,516 votes to Donald Trump’s 62,984,825 but lost the election thanks to the Electoral College, a holdover from a bygone era that lifted two of the last three presidents who received fewer actual votes than their opponent (George W. Bush and Donald Trump) into the White House.

Having long outlived its usefulness and practicality as a means to ensure less populous states have a voice in the election outcome, the Electoral College process has shifted focus away from states with the most people and onto a handful of smaller “swing states” whose election-day results typically determine who becomes president.

In 2016 it didn’t matter that Hillary received nearly three million more votes than Trump because Trump received 306 of the possible 538 electoral votes to Hillary’s 232.

Despite the electoral vote total, a closer look at the numbers shows just how close America was to avoiding the four-year national nightmare/embarrassment/sideshow that has been the Trump presidency.

In Pennsylvania, Hillary lost the popular vote 2,970,733 to 2,926,441, a difference of 44,292 votes that resulted in Trump receiving the state’s 20 electoral votes.

In Wisconsin, Hillary lost the popular vote 1,405,284 to 1,382,536, a difference of 22,748 votes that resulted in Trump receiving the state’s 10 electoral votes.

In Michigan, Hillary lost the popular vote 2,279,543 to 2,268,839, a difference of 10,704 votes that resulted in Trump receiving the state’s 16 electoral votes.

Had Hillary Clinton won these three states, she would have won the presidency, leaving “shithole countries” and kids in cages for the next Mad Max movie instead of the front page of The Washington Post.

A Midwest trifecta for Hillary was plausible because it’s not as if these three states are deep Republican strongholds. Barack Obama won all three in 2008 and 2012.

Exit Stage Right and Not College-educated … and White

Exit polling showed that Donald Trump was able to pull off the biggest political upset since Truman defeated Dewey in 1948 by turning out trailer-loads of Rust Belt whites without college degrees, many of whom had never voted or previously voted for the Democratic candidate.

This so-called silent majority of disaffected white people bought into Trump’s sales pitch and promise to save them from the murderous, marauding hordes of Brown people threatening to rush the border and sack their suburban enclaves while he would simultaneously rewind the hands of time, bringing back jobs technology and environmental regulation had long-since shipped off to the Third World and China. And most importantly, he would “Make America Great Again” — a curious phrase that simultaneously causes his white followers to well up with star-spangled pride, while Black people, women, immigrants, the entire LGBT community, Muslims, and many more wonder just what great period he’s referring to because America has only very recently begun to consider treating us relatively civilly.

And while pundits point to some questionable campaign decisions made by Hillary and the underestimation of her unfavorability among the electorate, Trump’s ability to turn out record numbers of white voters without a college degree was the biggest factor in his victory.

However, an argument can be made that the biggest reason that Hillary lost is that she was unable to turn out voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania at the same level as Barack Obama.

In fact, Hillary wouldn’t have needed to worry about the white voters that jumped ship to the Republicans had she reached the Obama threshold with Black voters.

Analysis of the polling data shows that Black voters who previously voted for Obama didn’t cast a vote for Trump, instead a large percentage simply didn’t vote at all — a critical mistake.

Turning Out and Falling Off

According to the Pew Research Center, overall Black voter turnout fell from 66.6% in 2012 to 59.6% in 2016. The 7% drop might not seem like much but it represented the largest turnout decline of any racial or ethnic group in 30 years and was the first time in 20 years the Black voter turnout rate declined. 2016’s numbers represented the lowest Black turnout rate since 2000.

Even among Millennials, voter turnout increased for every single racial group except Black Millennials. The general Millennial turnout percentage increased from 46.4% in 2012 to 50.8% in 2016. The Black Millennial turnout decreased from 55% in 2012 to 50.6% in 2016.

A Slate article analyzing the 2016 election results cited a study by researchers from the University of Massachusetts and Indiana University that found the Black voter drop-off was sharpest in states where Trump’s margin of victory was less than 10 points. In Michigan and Wisconsin, Black turnout dropped by more than 12 points.

The combination of rises in white votes combined with declines for Blacks set the table for Trump to claim the electoral victories in those key states and thus win the presidency.

With all else remaining the same, had Black voters turned out in the same numbers like 2012, Hillary would have won Michigan. If white voter turnout remained at its 2012 level instead of going up, Hillary would have won Michigan and its 16 electoral votes.

In Wisconsin, the turnout rate among Black voters dropped 19% from 74% in 2012 to 55% percent in 2016. Turnout for Asians and Latinos also dropped by 6%. Coincidentally, the 2016 presidential election was the first time Wisconsin’s new voter ID requirement was in effect. Critics of the requirement and multiple studies have found that minority voters are less likely to have a driver’s license or another form of ID that satisfies the eligibility requirement. And this could be the reason Black voter turnout was disproportionately low in the state, allowing Trump to be the first Republican since Ronald Reagan to win Wisconsin.

A study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that nearly 17,000 potential voters in Milwaukee and Dane counties did not cast votes due to the voter ID requirement put in place by Republican Governor Scott Walker and backed by the majority of Republicans in the State Legislature. Hillary lost Wisconsin and its 10 electoral votes by less than 23,000 votes.

In Pennsylvania, where Black voters comprise 10% of the electorate, the .2% decline in Black voter turnout wasn’t as sharp as it was in other key states, but it was the only turnout decline recorded among the voting groups identified in the Center for American Progress study of 2016 voter trends. Had Black voter turnout matched its 2012 levels, with all other factors remaining the same, Hilary would still have lost the state because of a 4% increase among white voters without a college degree.

The election outcome proved Trump’s effectiveness at weaponizing white grievance to drive up uneducated white turnout — gains that were not offset by a necessary increase in minority voters and were assisted by the low Black turnout, even though even more Blacks were eligible to vote than in 2012.

All-Star Influencer

In terms of the pro-athlete social activist hierarchy, in late 2016, Kaepernick was king. Even four years later he remains 1 or 1A with LeBron James despite their nearly 116 million combined Twitter and Instagram follower gap. While LeBron is famous for his willingness to tackle topics and causes of importance beyond the basketball court, his legendary basketball feats remain the primary draw. With Kaepernick’s NFL days increasingly far behind him, the activism is the draw.

According to sports marketing and data analytics firm Hookit, in the months before the Green Bay game, Kaepernick was gaining approximately 50 followers per day on his Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts.

In two weeks just after his protest and the rationale behind it were revealed, Kaepernick began gaining approximately 18,000 followers a day — an increase of 35,394%.

According to Hookit, from Jan. 1 to Aug. 25, Kaepernick gained 40,372 followers on Twitter. Between August 26 and September 8, he added 98,730 Twitter followers.

In the same two-week period Kaepernick had seven unique social media posts that were liked, commented on, or shared an average of 46,553 times per post — nearly four times more activity than his posts received prior to kneeling.

His mentions were also way up, with Kaepernick’s name tagged or mentioned 235,549 on various platforms during the two weeks — nearly 10 times more mentions than in the previous eight months.

And those numbers have only increased with Kaepernick possessing 3.9 and 2.4 million followers on Instagram and Twitter respectively.

But in November 2016, long before reporters rushed to LeBron for comment on the latest racial injustice, Kaepernick was the man at the center of the storm.

With his profile, his voice, his exposure, his activism, and his traditional and social media presence increasing exponentially in short order, it’s even more baffling that Kaepernick would choose not only to not endorse a candidate but to simply not vote at all.

In hindsight, it is a move that was counterproductive and best and wildly irresponsible at worst.

Woke Dummies and The Big Problem

The so-called Woke community of activists, to whom Kaepernick and Bernie Sanders are probably patron saints, is looking to push American society far to the left concerning all aspects of public policy and social life. The progressive agenda includes defunding police departments, abolishing prisons, criminal justice reform, ending fossil fuel usage, free college, healthcare for all, universal basic income, etc.

Depending on where you stand on the political spectrum, these moves can be viewed as either necessary steps to achieve social equity and justice or pipe dreams from people disconnected with theories related to practical application.

The problem for supporters of these issues aren’t the issues themselves, but the fact that enactment of any of them requires a political solution, and when challenged, a legal outcome favorable to the proponents.

By adopting the Kaepernick, “I’m not going to vote because they’re all the same” position, abstaining progressives ceded critical political and legal ground to the Republicans who, in the past four years, have plowed ahead making moves that will entrench their policy positions as law to be upheld by the conservative judges they’ve helped install — for decades to come.

If we reverse engineer the Republican masterplan, we can start with the U.S. Supreme Court, where President Trump has successfully appointed three justices to life terms. With his latest appointment of Amy Coney Barrett, who replaces liberal stalwart Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the balance of the court has shifted 6-3 in favor of the conservative and ultra-conservative wings.

What this means for progressives like Kaepernick is that any law that seeks to fundamentally change or challenge the status quo or anything not rubber-stamped by a conservative think tank is likely to be struck down by a court packed with justices who believe the words written by slaveholding, sexist, landowning, rich white men in frilly tops, writing with quills, are still the standard by which rulings should be made almost 250 years later.

And again, Supreme Court justices are appointed for life, with most serving well into their 80s. The three Trump-appointed justices, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett are 53, 55, and 48 years old respectively, meaning they will likely be ruling against progressive interests for the next 20-30 years, dooming a generation.

But that presumes the cases even reach the high court. The path to the Supreme Court winds through federal courts where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been hard at work for the past six years working to ensure his insidious plan to put a conservative stranglehold on the federal judiciary came to fruition.

When Donald Trump began his presidency 105 empty federal judgeships had not been filled by President Obama — and that was by Republican design.

When Republicans won back control of the Senate in 2014 they obtained the final say on who got to fill or not fill the federal court vacancies.

In the two years before Republicans took the Senate, nearly 90% of Obama’s nominees were confirmed. After McConnell and the Republicans took over, that rate fell to 28%.

To achieve this result Republican senators used various tactics to either obstruct or delay the confirmation process. A Democrat-sponsored effort in 2013 removed the filibuster, a classic delay tactic often used by the minority party to continue debating an issue to prevent a vote, as it pertained to nominations to executive branch positions and federal judgeships.

This led to the Senate confirming more of Obama’s nominees at a higher rate because they only needed a majority of senators to vote to end debate and move on to the confirmation vote. While Senate Democrats confirmed many of Obama’s nominees, many judgeships were left vacant because a backlog of potential federal judges was created by the Republican stall tactics.

However, in 2014, when Republicans gained control of the Senate, it became clear that the “nuclear option” to eliminate the filibuster was going to come back and bite Democrats in the ass — and boy did it ever.

When McConnell became majority leader confirmation of Obama nominees ground to a near halt, culminating in the prevention of a confirmation hearing for Merrick Garland, Obama’s pick to replace Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who died in February 2016.

In what would turn out to be perhaps the millennium’s boldest act of hypocrisy, McConnell justified holding no hearings for Garland claiming that in an election year the American people should have the chance to weigh in on the decision by allowing the next president to fill the vacancy — despite the election being nine months away.

Once Trump was elected McConnell shifted his plans for the federal judiciary into high gear and the Senate began moving to fill every vacancy with what Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee member Diane Feinstein called, “young conservative ideologues, many of whom lack basic judicial qualifications.”

From expressed opposition to everything from the Affordable Care Act to Abortion Rights to equal rights for LGBT Americans to environmental regulations to voting rights, and much much more, Trump appointees check nearly all of the boxes the religious right, conservative fringe, and a sizable number of racists have been waiting for generations to see reflected in the federal courts.

And in the off chance some progressive policy enacted into law in a blue state gets challenged and lands before the Supreme Court, McConnell’s machinations will likely result in the court striking it down with the approval of the six conservative justices, including Barrett, who McConnell saw sworn in just days before the 2020 election, forgoing all that stuff he said in 2016 about not confirming nominees in an election year.

Do you Really Care?

It would be one thing if Kaepernick didn’t care about social justice or Black people or right and wrong. But the fact that he clearly cares about those things makes his “I don’t vote, they’re all the same” position even more infuriating because, again, every progressive idea he supports requires a political and legal solution to be put into effect.

And once they’re put in place, they aren’t necessarily safe from political or legal processes.

For example:

The Affordable Care Act — The Supreme Court full of conservative justices will decide the fate of the Affordable Care Act as Republicans seek to strip away the means through which millions of Americans are able to receive health care during a deadly global pandemic.

Police Abuse — The decision to bring criminal charges against police officers who abuse and murder Black people or any people is made by the district attorney, an elected official, or, as in the case of the killing of George Floyd, the state attorney general, also an elected official.

Elimination of Qualified Immunity — Qualified immunity is the doctrine that prevents government officials, police officers in particular, from being held personally liable for misconduct on the job that would get the average person locked up for life or paying a huge monetary settlement. In 1982 the Supreme Court expanded the definition of qualified immunity ( https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/457/800/ ) and police unions and prosecutors have used it for decades to justify a lack of criminal accountability in scores of cases involving claims of police abuse.

A Reuters investigation examined how qualified immunity has made it extremely difficult to hold police officers accountable for misconduct and abusive behavior.

In one incident, qualified immunity was invoked after a police officer in Utah gave an unarmed man brain damage after slamming him to the ground during a traffic stop.

In 2010 a Houston officer shot Ricardo Salazar-Limon in the back during a traffic stop after claiming he thought the man was reaching for a gun. There was no gun.

Salazar-Limon claimed his constitutional rights were violated and sued the city of Houston and the officer who shot him. In federal court, the defense argued that the officer was protected by qualified immunity, the courts agreed, a summary judgment was entered, and the matter never went before a jury.

When the case reached the Supreme Court, a majority of justices agreed with the granting of qualified immunity to the officer.

In the dissenting opinion Justice Sonia Sotomayor was joined by Ginsburg in stating, “Only Thompson and Salazar-Limon know what happened on that overpass on October 29, 2010 … What is clear is that our legal system does not entrust the resolution of this dispute to a judge faced with competing affidavits. The evenhanded administration of justice does not permit such a shortcut.

“Our failure to correct the error made by the courts below leaves in place a judgment that accepts the word of one party over the word of another. We have not hesitated to summarily reverse courts for wrongly denying officers the protection of qualified immunity in cases involving the use of force. But we rarely intervene where courts wrongly afford officers the benefit of qualified immunity in these same cases.”

Restrictions to the application of qualified immunity would require the Supreme Court to hear a related case and come to a different conclusion, thereby setting a precedent for lower court rulings.

Voting Rights — Efforts to suppress the votes of Black people in particular and people of color generally have deep roots in America. In recent years Republicans across the country have led efforts critics have said are specifically aimed at suppressing or denying the votes of African-Americans. The reduction of the number of polling places in predominantly Black communities leads to hours-long waits to vote. Voter ID laws disproportionately impact minority voters who are statistically less likely to have the necessary documentation. The attempt to reduce the number of ballot drop-off locations in densely populated urban areas disproportionately impacts minority voters. Solutions and corrections to all of these issues require a political or legal solution and sometimes both.

Gerrymandering — Gerrymandering is the process by which politicians draw voting district lines to create districts in which one party is all but guaranteed to hold power indefinitely and doesn’t need to be responsive to anyone other than members of their own party. This has been a crucial tactic for Republicans looking to maintain power even as political shifts show more people moving away from their party. Bringing an end to gerrymandering or even drawing districts in a more logical, straightforward fashion requires a political solution that will almost certainly be challenged in federal court.

Abortion — This is the Holy Grail for conservatives who have been waiting for nearly 50 years to get enough right-leaning justices on the court to reverse the landmark ruling that protected a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. With a court now full of conservative Catholics, that dream is closer to fruition than ever.

The Census — Conducted once a decade, the U.S. government uses the census to count the number of people living in the country. The census results determine how many representatives each state has in the U.S. House of Representatives, how an estimated $1.5 trillion a year in federal funding is distributed for the next 10 years, and how many electoral college votes each state is allocated. The Trump administration made repeated attempts to undermine the census, most notably by trying to add a citizenship question to the census intended to scare undocumented people away from participating, thus driving down the population totals in key Democratic states such as California and New York, diminishing their political power. Even though COVID-19 and social distancing restrictions made collecting census data more difficult the Trump administration successfully fought to cut the count short. That decision was upheld by the Supreme Court despite the argument that the decision will prevent a fair and accurate count.

Felons Voting — In 2018, Florida voters passed Amendment A that restored voting rights to people convicted of a felony who served their sentences. Many expected that a large portion of the 1.4 million newly eligible voters would vote Democratic but we may never know because the Republican governor and lawmakers quickly passed a law in response to Amendment A requiring people convicted of felonies to fully pay back fines and fees to the courts before they become eligible to vote. Depending on the person, the cost could range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars — effectively nullifying their voting rights.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit claiming the new law was unconstitutional because it created a financial barrier for people attempting to exercise their right to vote. In 2019 a federal judge sided with the plaintiffs and agreed that the law amounted to a poll tax and was unconstitutional.

But in September 2020, just two months before the presidential election, a federal appeals court overturned the previous ruling that will prevent any former felons who have not paid all of their back fines and fees from voting. Five of the six votes to overturn the ruling came from federal judges appointed to the court by President Trump.

Republicans know that Florida is arguably the most crucial state in their bid to capture the presidency. If Joe Biden or any other Democratic presidential candidate were to win Florida, the handwringing over states like Michigan and Wisconsin goes away because of the Sunshine State’s 29 electoral votes. Hillary Clinton lost Florida by 112,911 votes, a number that seems minuscule if you consider a pool of 1.4 million new voters, a majority of whom may lean Democratic.

Good intentions Meet Reality

While Colin Kaepernick is clearly well-meaning and puts his time, energy, and effort behind the causes he supports, it was unimaginably negligent of him to brag and boldly promote the fact that he does not vote, didn’t intend to vote, and voting doesn't matter because all the candidates were the same.

The margin of victory was so narrow for Donald Trump that there is no reason to think Kaepernick couldn't have moved the needle by choosing to use the soapbox upon which he stood in 2016 and the social media megaphone he wielded to push and encourage his hundreds of thousands of supporters to vote.

Is it improbable to think that the most prominent and popular politically active Black athlete could not have convinced a large number of Black people to cast a vote instead of sitting the election out?

And if you still think voting doesn’t matter, consider this as we continue to live altered lives under the cloud of a deadly global pandemic: In 2009, after multiple recounts and legal challenges, Al Franken became the certified winner of the Minnesota Senate election by 312 votes and became the 60th Democratic senator, a key number that allowed Democrats to end the Republican filibuster and vote to pass the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare aka the only reason many millions of Americans have healthcare access.

Every single progressive cause Kaepernick advocates for can be broken down to a simple equation:

Progressive Idea + Progressive Activism + Progressive Political Action + Progressive Legal Victories = Progressive Laws that move America closer to the fair, just, and equal society we should all be aspiring to.

Remove one part of the equation and things fall apart.

The idea that voting doesn’t matter and all politicians are the same is a position that is factually wrong, strategically incompetent, and downright imbecilic. That position makes Kaepernick and the abstainers just as responsible for Trump’s 220 judges and the decades of judicial beatings liberals and progressives will face as the MAGA hat-wearing racist Proud Boy.

Do not make the same mistake twice.

Do not be that stupid.

Go vote!

[imaginezimbits]

Oh my god I love all of your fics! They're all amazing! I was wondering if you could do a over-protective/jealous zimbits? Idc who is the possessive one or if it turns to fluff or nsfw but I'd just love a happy ending. You're great btw!

!!!! You’re too sweet!  Here’s some jealous zimbits with just a hint of [redacted] for you

Eric is not the jealous type, which has definitely been in the best interests of his and Jack’s relationship.  The way attraction works for Jack is just so slow that by the time he gets around to dating someone, they’re usually friends too.  Which leads to things like standing lunch plans with Camilla Collins whenever she comes to visit her sister at Brown or hanging out at alumni events together.  Even he and Kent have finally started to be friends again, a development largely facilitated by Eric himself.  Add to that the amount of time Jack spends with beautiful people hanging on him at bars after a win or at Falcs events, it’s enough to drive a lesser man mad, but Eric can always brush it off.

“Oh baby, I don’t mind.  I know you’re as loyal as they come.  And besides, why would I be jealous of someone talking to you at some boring fundraiser when you’re coming back to our bed, hm?”

Jack really wishes he could think like that; that he could be content just knowing that he’s loved above all else and not concerning himself with the rest.  Because it’s not that he thinks Eric would ever in a million years cheat.  He knows that when Eric first came out to his parents he had a very long talk with his mother that ended with a “Dicky’s Wedding

But Jack is, in fact, the jealous type.  It’s just another part of his anxiety that he hates, the way that it sometimes makes him so selfish and attention-seeking.  He’s not worried about his boyfriend cheating on him, he’s worried that Eric just doesn’t realize he exists right now.  It’s ridiculous, he knows.  After all, the only reason they’re here at all is because You Can Play was hosting a fundraiser and George had asked Jack to be there.  But Eric had been locked deep in conversation with a donor and the Aces’ AGM for the past hour and he was starting to get antsy, wanting Bitty’s smile aimed at him, to press his hand to the small of his back, to see the champagne flush on his cheeks up close.  He leans back against the bar, sipping his seltzer and lime, taking in the line of Eric’s throat as he throws his head back and laughs.

“Why am I not surprised to find you lurking in the corner?”  Jack turns to find Kent beside him, flagging down the bartender and gesturing for another of whatever fruity cocktail he’s drinking.

“I’m not lurking,” he protests.  “Just wanted a break.  You know how I feel about these things.”

“Yeah, you think these people are a bunch of insincere assholes.”

“Well, aren’t they?”

“Some of ‘em, yeah.”  Kent takes his new drink from the bartender with a nod and sips at the straw.  “Sounds like your boy’s found a nice one.”

“Yup.”  Jack looks down at the ice in his glass, then glances back at Eric.  Kent frowns.

“What?  Did I say something?”

“No, nothing.  Just - He’s just been over there awhile.”  Kent rolls his eyes, a knowing smile pulling at his lips.

“Jeez Zimms, if you miss him so bad, just go over there.”  Jack shakes his head, bangs shifting across his forehead.

“No, no.  I shouldn’t interrupt.”

“Then get him to come over here.”  With that, Kent reaches into the pocket of Jack’s suit jacket and snags his phone.  He elbows Jack out of the way when he tries to make a grab for it, unlocking it with his free hand.

“How do you know my password?” Jack demands, making another feeble bid to take his phone back without drawing attention to their scuffle.

“Because you use your freakin anniversary, like a moron.”  Resigned, Jack watches as Kent opens his message thread with Bitty and sends a brief thanks to the universe when the most recent messages are their exchange about dinner.  Kent taps out a quick message and hit send.

Hey sexy, turn around ;)

“You’re so immature, he’s clearly going to know that’s not me!”  Jack snatches his phone back just in time for Eric to excuse himself and check the notification.  He turns around, ears burning red.  When he catches sight of Jack and Kent at the bar, Jack can feel himself flushing in response and points at Kent accusingly.  Kent just raises his drink to Bitty, shooting him a wink.  Eric rolls his eyes and taps something quick out on his phone before pocketing it and returning to his conversation.

Kent’s phone buzzes.

“He gave me the finger!”

“You deserve it.”  Jack glances at Bitty again, whose ears have returned to a normal color.  He feels a pang of wanting again.  Kent’s text had been stupid, but the principle of it had worked, so Jack unlocks his phone again and taps out a new message.

I miss you.

Across the room, Jack sees Eric pull out his phone again, a tight irritated set to his shoulders that runs out of them when he reads the message.  He looks back over his shoulder with soft eyes, and Jack lets himself broadcast how lonely his is.  His phone vibrates.

Well then come over here, silly!

Jack bites his lip, trying to figure out how to tell Eric that he’s jealous of anyone who’s taking Eric’s focus away from him without sounding needy and crazy.  He’s been assured that it doesn’t bother Bitty when he has to reassure Jack, that he’d gladly tell him a hundred times a day how much he’s loved.  It still never gets easier to admit the days that he kind of needs to be at the front of Bitty’s mind like that.

Or you could come over here

Jack, you know we’re supposed to be talking to the donors.

I needed a little break from the people.  I really just want to be with you.

He kind of regrets the last text just after he sends it, too cloyingly honest.  But then Eric is excusing himself from the people he’s been talking to and starts making his way out of the banquet hall.  Jack watches him go, then eyes the door next to the bar.  Kent elbows him.

“You do realize it’s going to be pretty conspicuous if two of the three out players here disappear for a while?”  Jack fixes him with a stare, and after a moment’s interpretation, Kent sighs and pushes away from the bar.  “Right, and you don’t care.  Fine, I’ll cover for you.  But only because I’m the best    ex-boyfriend ever.

"That you are,” Jack agrees, promptly ditches the rest of his drink on his way after Bitty.

When Jack pushes open the door to the bathroom, Eric is standing at one of the sink mirrors fixing his hair.  He turns at the creak of hinges and goes to Jack, the two of them drawn together like magnets.  

“Is there anyone -” Jack starts.

“No, it’s just us,” Eric interrupts, stepping into Jack’s space, their chests pressing together.  Jack feels his pulse kick up.  He hadn’t really been thinking of anything specific beyond getting close to his boyfriend, but reaching out and getting his arms around Eric’s waist is suddenly bringing up ideas.  It’s effortless to get Bitty pressed against the door, he goes easily, reading Jack’s intentions in an instant and dragging him into a kiss, slow and dirty.  Jack wastes no time slotting a leg between Bitty’s, pulling a stuttered gasp from his lungs.  “Oh sweetheart, I wish we could, but we really don’t have time.”  Jack starts kissing across his jaw, one against his forehead, down the bridge of his nose.

“We’ll make time.”

“Jack, I know we’re good, but we’d still need considerably longer than the average pee.”  A gentle nip just below Eric’s ear has him swallowing down a moan.

“Then I guess I’ll just have to give you a good reason to take me home early.”

“Wha -” Jack drops to his knees, and Eric’s head falls back against the door.  He really can’t bear the sight, it’s too overwhelming.  Really, a boy ought to be able to prepare for this, his poor heart.  “Jack, we so don’t have time for-”  He can’t catch the sound this time as Jack noses at the fabric covering his hardening cock.  “Oh lord,” he sighs.  Well, hopefully nobody’s heading to this particular men’s room at them moment, because Jack doesn’t let up on the teasing, trailing his lips and the tip of his nose in teasing strokes as Eric hardens in his slacks, panting above him and occasionally stealing glances down with eyes that are somehow bigger and darker than usual.  

Years of being together has left Jack keenly attuned to Bitty and the ways his body moves, so he teases just enough, just until he can sense him reaching the edge of desperate, and pulls away, getting to his feet and pressing one more searing kiss to his boyfriend’s slack lips.

“Hm?  Baby?” Eric mumbles against his mouth, confused.

“Hi,” Jack smiles at him.  “We’d better get back.  Or else your new friends are going to get suspicious.”

“Jack are you - Huh?”  Jack steps away, and Bitty blinks rapidly, clearing the fog from his vision.  “Are you serious?  You’re serious!”

“I’m Jack Zimmermann.  I’m always serious.”  Eric gapes at his boyfriend.  “Unless of course you’ve changed your mind about wanting to go back to the party?”

“Oh my god, you tricked me!” He accuses.

“I prefer…led you around by the dick.”  Eric shakes his head in wonder, reaching to cup Jack’s cheek.

“Damn those eyes of yours.”  Jack smiled his chirping smile back at him, and Eric surged up to kiss it off.  “Say your goodbyes and meet me at coat check in twenty minutes.  You win.” 

[lodelss]

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | February 2019 | 10 minutes (2,439 words)

“Maroon 5 is just Red Hot Chili Peppers for virgins.” “This is the Fyre Festival of halftime shows.” “Anyone else think Adam Levine looks like an Ed Hardy T-shirt?” The Super Bowl halftime show was worth it for the social media stream it kicked off; otherwise, it was notable only for the fact that Maroon 5 (along with Big Boi and Travis Scott) turned up at all when so many others (Rihanna and Pink and Cardi B) turned the gig down. “I got to sacrifice a lot of money to perform,” Cardi B said. “But there’s a man who sacrificed his job for us, so we got to stand behind him.” Though she ended up appearing in a Pepsi commercial anyway, Cardi’s heart seemed to be in the right place, which is to say the place where protesting injustice is an obligation rather than a choice (of her other appearances around the Super Bowl, she said, “if the NFL could benefit off from us, then I’m going to benefit off y’all”). The man she was referring to was, of course, quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who took a knee in 2016 during the national anthem to protest systemic oppression in America and has gone unsigned since opting out of his contract. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” the ex-San Francisco 49er said. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.”

“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” wrote George Orwell in the 1946 essay, Why I Write. By refusing to perform at the Super Bowl, Cardi B and her peers were in fact performing two acts: acknowledging that as artists they have political power, and using that political power to support Kaepernick’s cause. By replacing them, Adam Levine did the opposite (while claiming to do nothing at all): “we are going to keep on doing what we do, hopefully without becoming politicians to make people understand, ‘We got you.'” The mistake Maroon 5’s frontman made was assuming he could isolate art from politics, which is impossible, particularly in this case — the Super Bowl was already infused with political turmoil, and to negate that was to undercut its significance. Kaepernick’s lawyer, Mark Geragos, would have preferred for Levine to be open about his position. “If you’re going to cross this ideological or intellectual picket line, then own it, and Adam Levine certainly isn’t owning it,” he said. “In fact, if anything, it’s a cop out when you start talking about, ‘I’m not a politician, I’m just doing the music.’ Most of the musicians who have any kind of consciousness whatsoever understand what’s going on here.”

By using “picket line” — a term traditionally associated with labor unions — Geragos further established the Super Bowl and its halftime show as a locus of political action. Essentially he was calling Levine a latter-day scab, an opportunist subverting others’ attempts to bring about change. Though the epithet dates back to the 18th century, when “scab” referred to workers who refused to join unions, by the next century it was used to designate workers who crossed a strike’s picket line. “Just as a scab is a physical lesion,” wrote Stephanie Smith in Household Words, “the strikebreaking scab disfigures the social body of labor — both the solidarity of workers and the dignity of work.” The musicians who refused to play the Super Bowl were expressing solidarity with Kaepernick — and the people of color on whose behalf he is protesting — and preserving the dignity of work. By crossing that invisible picket line, Levine not only broke solidarity but, paradoxically, sacrificed the dignity of work in the name of his own career.

* * *

That anyone in entertainment would feign political neutrality in the current climate is jarring enough, but the move further implies a glaring ignorance of the industry’s history. Nowhere was the politics of celebrity more literal than in Hollywood during the 1940s and ’50s. At that time, the infamous Hollywood blacklist meant that any whiff of Communism threatened your job. Self-protection required coming clean and informing on others to the House of Un-American Activities (HUAC), but a group of artists dubbed “The Hollywood Ten” protested by refusing to testify. Director Elia Kazan, however, gave HUAC eight names in 1952, helping to bury the careers of actors Morris Carnovsky and Art Smith and playwright Clifford Odets and securing his own. “I said I’d hated the Communists for many years and didn’t feel right about giving up my career to defend them,” he recalled in his memoir. But Kazan writes in the negative, as though he wasn’t actively promoting his personal cause. What he was really doing was expressing the power of his own politics in order to support his own work. His solidarity was with himself alone.

Nearly 50 years after he named names, in 1999, Kazan was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars. Actors like Nick Nolte and Amy Madigan disagreed with his actions and thus refused to applaud his art, but others, including Warren Beatty and Meryl Streep, seemed able to divorce the two. “I never discussed it with Warren, but I believe we were both standing for the same reason — out of regard for the creativity,” George Stevens, Jr. wrote in Conversations With the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. But Kazan’s creativity came at the expense of others’ creativity; to celebrate him was to celebrate the truncated careers he cut short to allow his own to thrive. This cognitive dissonance appeared, for some, to be resolved by time. Kazan was 89, how long were we supposed to hold his politics against him?

It’s funny that we never ask how long we should hold up someone’s work; our cultural memory favors the art object over the lives of the artists who make it — and their politics. Hollywood’s reaction to Kazan is reminiscent of its reaction to Roman Polanski, who was accused of drugging and pled guilty to raping a 13 year old girl in 1977 before fleeing the States (and his sentence). In 2009, more than 100 actors and filmmakers signed a petition to release Polanski after he was arrested in Switzerland on a U.S. warrant. At the time, Debra Winger, of all people, said, “We stand by him and await his release and his next masterpiece.” The consensus was that he had served his time. The past had therefore eaten up his offense, leaving behind only his art, as though this alone defined him. And even where it didn’t, it clearly did. “He’s now happily married; he has two children,” is how Sigourney Weaver explained last year why she had worked with him and would continue to. She believed she was listening to his victim by advancing “with understanding and compassion.”

Woody Allen, even more than Polanski, has been eclipsed by his work. Actors who align with him are aligning with the politics of privileging his creative output, as though such a thing existed on its own. “There are directors, producers and men of power who have for decades been awarded and applauded for their highly regarded work by both this industry and moviegoers alike,” Kate Winslet, who appeared in Allen’s Wonder Wheel in 2017, said in apology last year. “The message we received for years was that it was the highest compliment to be offered roles by these men.” The year prior, when asked if the allegations against Allen gave her pause, Winslet had said: “Having thought it all through, you put it to one side and just work with the person.” Kristen Stewart took a similar work-first approach when discussing why she appeared in Allen’s 2016 film, Café Society: “The experience of making the movie was so outside of that, it was fruitful for [me and co-star Jesse Eisenberg] to go on with it.” What this did was to elevate the work above all else, which delivered the message that the voices of regular women were secondary to the voices of creative men.

It’s impossible for one artist to work with another without their collaboration being informed by the politics of both parties. Yet Rami Malek seemed to believe he could circumvent this fact while working with director Bryan Singer — a man accused of assaulting multiple teen boys — on the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. When he was first asked about Singer at the Golden Globes, Malek responded: “There’s only one thing we needed to do, and that was to celebrate Freddie Mercury.” He claimed he didn’t know about the allegations, that he was only in it for the work. Yet implicit in the work was Singer’s labor, Singer himself. Despite his replacement by Dexter Fletcher, his presence continues to define the film. The name on Bohemian continues to be his, the accolades it receives go to him (the Baftas excepted). Every time Malek refuses to address the controversy around Singer, he chooses not to confront the realities of child abuse; and every time he appears on screen under Singer’s name, his work is a reflection of that.

Rami Malek’s stance aligns with another common myth about artists, which is that they can cast aside politics to serve the public. In the early 1980’s, the United Nations called for a boycott of South Africa over apartheid, but more than fifty musicians — including Tina Turner, Curtis Mayfield, and Isaac Hayes — ignored it. “If the people didn’t want us there, they wouldn’t come to see the shows,” said Millie Jackson. What she did not acknowledge was that performing there implied she approved of how the ruling government of South Africa was treating its people — or at least, that she didn’t actively oppose it — and that she was willing to take part in its economy and contribute to the  bank balance of a problematic government. Ten years later, blue-collar-adjacent rocker Bruce Springsteen crossed the picket line set up by a number of Tacoma, Washington, city employee unions, explaining, “I know a lot of you folks came a long way to be here tonight, so I got a commitment to be on this stage.” Once again, here was a musician who, rather than refusing to contribute his labor in solidarity with the exploited labor of others, was serving the city that oppressed them. More than the words in his songs, his actions spoke to his real allegiances.

During a writers’ strike in 2007, a string of TV hosts — from Ellen DeGeneres to Jay Leno to Jon Stewart — eventually crossed the picket line, some more sheepishly than others, with variations on the “show must go on” excuse. “It’s really hard to have to deal with where they are and where I am,” DeGeneres said, “because I’m kinda caught in the middle.” This defense could be mistaken for selflessness — she is sacrificing her own petty problems for the greater good — if it weren’t for the fact that the audience also occupies the oppressed space she upheld by performing. At least Stewart, who was one of the least comfortable crossing the picket line, used his platform to further the cause of the writers by addressing their strike on air. Still, it’s hard to sympathize when you realize, around the same time, the much less powerful Steve Carell held up taping of The Office because he refused to be a scab. Each extra moment of discomfort he conveyed to the network, each bit of pay he lost, meant more leverage afforded to the striker.

* * *

Just as the artist is not static, neither are their politics, and just as vital as acknowledging one’s alliances is acknowledging one’s changes. Last year, Natalie Portman became one of the few celebrities to openly regret signing the aforementioned Polanski petition. “We lived in a different world, and that doesn’t excuse anything,” she said. “But you can have your eyes opened and completely change the way you want to live. My eyes were not open.” Polanski was not the topic du jour, but her voice was an important reminder that as a culture we had failed to hold him to account. In a similar vein, though they could not undo working with Woody Allen, Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Hall, and Griffin Newman made amends by donating their paychecks to nonprofits like RAINN. “I learned conclusively that I cannot put my career over my morals again,” Newman said. Other artists, as Portman alluded to, have opened their eyes and are willing to learn and to admit their fallibility. Though Lorde had planned to perform in Israel, she ended up changing her mind — joining fellow boycotters Elvis Costello and Lauryn Hill — after two women wrote to her about the oppression within the country, saying, “we believe that an economic, intellectual and artistic boycott is an effective way of speaking out against these crimes.” So she spoke instead of singing, aware that in this instance her voice was stronger in that act.

Still others have literally rewritten history, proving their beliefs are so fierce that they are willing to erase their own art in the name of their politics. Michelle Williams offered to work for free in 2017 to reshoot a number of scenes for All The Money In The World with Christopher Plummer after sexual assault allegations emerged about her former co-star Kevin Spacey. “A movie is less important than a human life,” she explained at the time. This is the active approach to change, which eclipses more passive sartorial gestures like the blackout at the Golden Globes. “For years, we’ve sold these awards shows as women, with our gowns and colors and our beautiful faces and our glamour,” Time’s Up co-founder Eva Longoria said. “This time the industry can’t expect us to go up and twirl around.” It was a toothless rebellion, an objection in accessory form which fit seamlessly into the system which had been exposed in all its corruption.

More effective is direct action, such as Frances McDormand using her Oscar speech to advocate for “inclusion riders” and musicians spurning the Super Bowl to support people of color or Trump’s inauguration to reject everything he represents. Singer Rebecca Ferguson, runner up on The X Factor UK in 2010, was one of the few musicians who said she would accept an invitation to the latter — if she could perform “Strange Fruit,” the 1939 protest song about racism in America. “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,” she would sing, “Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

Trump chose the Great Talladega College Tornado Marching Band instead.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

[lodelss]

The New Scabs: Stars Who Cross the Picket Line

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | February 2019 | 10 minutes (2,439 words)

“Maroon 5 is just Red Hot Chili Peppers for virgins.” “This is the Fyre Festival of halftime shows.” “Anyone else think Adam Levine looks like an Ed Hardy T-shirt?” The Super Bowl halftime show was worth it for the social media stream it kicked off; otherwise, it was notable only for the fact that Maroon 5 (along with Big Boi and Travis Scott) turned up at all when so many others (Rihanna and Pink and Cardi B) turned the gig down. “I got to sacrifice a lot of money to perform,” Cardi B said. “But there’s a man who sacrificed his job for us, so we got to stand behind him.” Though she ended up appearing in a Pepsi commercial anyway, Cardi’s heart seemed to be in the right place, which is to say the place where protesting injustice is an obligation rather than a choice (of her other appearances around the Super Bowl, she said, “if the NFL could benefit off from us, then I’m going to benefit off y’all”). The man she was referring to was, of course, quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who took a knee in 2016 during the national anthem to protest systemic oppression in America and has gone unsigned since opting out of his contract. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” the ex-San Francisco 49er said. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.”

“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” wrote George Orwell in the 1946 essay, Why I Write. By refusing to perform at the Super Bowl, Cardi B and her peers were in fact performing two acts: acknowledging that as artists they have political power, and using that political power to support Kaepernick’s cause. By replacing them, Adam Levine did the opposite (while claiming to do nothing at all): “we are going to keep on doing what we do, hopefully without becoming politicians to make people understand, ‘We got you.'” The mistake Maroon 5’s frontman made was assuming he could isolate art from politics, which is impossible, particularly in this case — the Super Bowl was already infused with political turmoil, and to negate that was to undercut its significance. Kaepernick’s lawyer, Mark Geragos, would have preferred for Levine to be open about his position. “If you’re going to cross this ideological or intellectual picket line, then own it, and Adam Levine certainly isn’t owning it,” he said. “In fact, if anything, it’s a cop out when you start talking about, ‘I’m not a politician, I’m just doing the music.’ Most of the musicians who have any kind of consciousness whatsoever understand what’s going on here.”

By using “picket line” — a term traditionally associated with labor unions — Geragos further established the Super Bowl and its halftime show as a locus of political action. Essentially he was calling Levine a latter-day scab, an opportunist subverting others’ attempts to bring about change. Though the epithet dates back to the 18th century, when “scab” referred to workers who refused to join unions, by the next century it was used to designate workers who crossed a strike’s picket line. “Just as a scab is a physical lesion,” wrote Stephanie Smith in Household Words, “the strikebreaking scab disfigures the social body of labor — both the solidarity of workers and the dignity of work.” The musicians who refused to play the Super Bowl were expressing solidarity with Kaepernick — and the people of color on whose behalf he is protesting — and preserving the dignity of work. By crossing that invisible picket line, Levine not only broke solidarity but, paradoxically, sacrificed the dignity of work in the name of his own career.

* * *

That anyone in entertainment would feign political neutrality in the current climate is jarring enough, but the move further implies a glaring ignorance of the industry’s history. Nowhere was the politics of celebrity more literal than in Hollywood during the 1940s and ’50s. At that time, the infamous Hollywood blacklist meant that any whiff of Communism threatened your job. Self-protection required coming clean and informing on others to the House of Un-American Activities (HUAC), but a group of artists dubbed “The Hollywood Ten” protested by refusing to testify. Director Elia Kazan, however, gave HUAC eight names in 1952, helping to bury the careers of actors Morris Carnovsky and Art Smith and playwright Clifford Odets and securing his own. “I said I’d hated the Communists for many years and didn’t feel right about giving up my career to defend them,” he recalled in his memoir. But Kazan writes in the negative, as though he wasn’t actively promoting his personal cause. What he was really doing was expressing the power of his own politics in order to support his own work. His solidarity was with himself alone.

Nearly 50 years after he named names, in 1999, Kazan was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars. Actors like Nick Nolte and Amy Madigan disagreed with his actions and thus refused to applaud his art, but others, including Warren Beatty and Meryl Streep, seemed able to divorce the two. “I never discussed it with Warren, but I believe we were both standing for the same reason — out of regard for the creativity,” George Stevens, Jr. wrote in Conversations With the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. But Kazan’s creativity came at the expense of others’ creativity; to celebrate him was to celebrate the truncated careers he cut short to allow his own to thrive. This cognitive dissonance appeared, for some, to be resolved by time. Kazan was 89, how long were we supposed to hold his politics against him?

It’s funny that we never ask how long we should hold up someone’s work; our cultural memory favors the art object over the lives of the artists who make it — and their politics. Hollywood’s reaction to Kazan is reminiscent of its reaction to Roman Polanski, who was accused of drugging and pled guilty to raping a 13 year old girl in 1977 before fleeing the States (and his sentence). In 2009, more than 100 actors and filmmakers signed a petition to release Polanski after he was arrested in Switzerland on a U.S. warrant. At the time, Debra Winger, of all people, said, “We stand by him and await his release and his next masterpiece.” The consensus was that he had served his time. The past had therefore eaten up his offense, leaving behind only his art, as though this alone defined him. And even where it didn’t, it clearly did. “He’s now happily married; he has two children,” is how Sigourney Weaver explained last year why she had worked with him and would continue to. She believed she was listening to his victim by advancing “with understanding and compassion.”

Woody Allen, even more than Polanski, has been eclipsed by his work. Actors who align with him are aligning with the politics of privileging his creative output, as though such a thing existed on its own. “There are directors, producers and men of power who have for decades been awarded and applauded for their highly regarded work by both this industry and moviegoers alike,” Kate Winslet, who appeared in Allen’s Wonder Wheel in 2017, said in apology last year. “The message we received for years was that it was the highest compliment to be offered roles by these men.” The year prior, when asked if the allegations against Allen gave her pause, Winslet had said: “Having thought it all through, you put it to one side and just work with the person.” Kristen Stewart took a similar work-first approach when discussing why she appeared in Allen’s 2016 film, Café Society: “The experience of making the movie was so outside of that, it was fruitful for [me and co-star Jesse Eisenberg] to go on with it.” What this did was to elevate the work above all else, which delivered the message that the voices of regular women were secondary to the voices of creative men.

It’s impossible for one artist to work with another without their collaboration being informed by the politics of both parties. Yet Rami Malek seemed to believe he could circumvent this fact while working with director Bryan Singer — a man accused of assaulting multiple teen boys — on the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. When he was first asked about Singer at the Golden Globes, Malek responded: “There’s only one thing we needed to do, and that was to celebrate Freddie Mercury.” He claimed he didn’t know about the allegations, that he was only in it for the work. Yet implicit in the work was Singer’s labor, Singer himself. Despite his replacement by Dexter Fletcher, his presence continues to define the film. The name on Bohemian continues to be his, the accolades it receives go to him (the Baftas excepted). Every time Malek refuses to address the controversy around Singer, he chooses not to confront the realities of child abuse; and every time he appears on screen under Singer’s name, his work is a reflection of that.

Rami Malek’s stance aligns with another common myth about artists, which is that they can cast aside politics to serve the public. In the early 1980’s, the United Nations called for a boycott of South Africa over apartheid, but more than fifty musicians — including Tina Turner, Curtis Mayfield, and Isaac Hayes — ignored it. “If the people didn’t want us there, they wouldn’t come to see the shows,” said Millie Jackson. What she did not acknowledge was that performing there implied she approved of how the ruling government of South Africa was treating its people — or at least, that she didn’t actively oppose it — and that she was willing to take part in its economy and contribute to the  bank balance of a problematic government. Ten years later, blue-collar-adjacent rocker Bruce Springsteen crossed the picket line set up by a number of Tacoma, Washington, city employee unions, explaining, “I know a lot of you folks came a long way to be here tonight, so I got a commitment to be on this stage.” Once again, here was a musician who, rather than refusing to contribute his labor in solidarity with the exploited labor of others, was serving the city that oppressed them. More than the words in his songs, his actions spoke to his real allegiances.

During a writers’ strike in 2007, a string of TV hosts — from Ellen DeGeneres to Jay Leno to Jon Stewart — eventually crossed the picket line, some more sheepishly than others, with variations on the “show must go on” excuse. “It’s really hard to have to deal with where they are and where I am,” DeGeneres said, “because I’m kinda caught in the middle.” This defense could be mistaken for selflessness — she is sacrificing her own petty problems for the greater good — if it weren’t for the fact that the audience also occupies the oppressed space she upheld by performing. At least Stewart, who was one of the least comfortable crossing the picket line, used his platform to further the cause of the writers by addressing their strike on air. Still, it’s hard to sympathize when you realize, around the same time, the much less powerful Steve Carell held up taping of The Office because he refused to be a scab. Each extra moment of discomfort he conveyed to the network, each bit of pay he lost, meant more leverage afforded to the striker.

* * *

Just as the artist is not static, neither are their politics, and just as vital as acknowledging one’s alliances is acknowledging one’s changes. Last year, Natalie Portman became one of the few celebrities to openly regret signing the aforementioned Polanski petition. “We lived in a different world, and that doesn’t excuse anything,” she said. “But you can have your eyes opened and completely change the way you want to live. My eyes were not open.” Polanski was not the topic du jour, but her voice was an important reminder that as a culture we had failed to hold him to account. In a similar vein, though they could not undo working with Woody Allen, Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Hall, and Griffin Newman made amends by donating their paychecks to nonprofits like RAINN. “I learned conclusively that I cannot put my career over my morals again,” Newman said. Other artists, as Portman alluded to, have opened their eyes and are willing to learn and to admit their fallibility. Though Lorde had planned to perform in Israel, she ended up changing her mind — joining fellow boycotters Elvis Costello and Lauryn Hill — after two women wrote to her about the oppression within the country, saying, “we believe that an economic, intellectual and artistic boycott is an effective way of speaking out against these crimes.” So she spoke instead of singing, aware that in this instance her voice was stronger in that act.

Still others have literally rewritten history, proving their beliefs are so fierce that they are willing to erase their own art in the name of their politics. Michelle Williams offered to work for free in 2017 to reshoot a number of scenes for All The Money In The World with Christopher Plummer after sexual assault allegations emerged about her former co-star Kevin Spacey. “A movie is less important than a human life,” she explained at the time. This is the active approach to change, which eclipses more passive sartorial gestures like the blackout at the Golden Globes. “For years, we’ve sold these awards shows as women, with our gowns and colors and our beautiful faces and our glamour,” Time’s Up co-founder Eva Longoria said. “This time the industry can’t expect us to go up and twirl around.” It was a toothless rebellion, an objection in accessory form which fit seamlessly into the system which had been exposed in all its corruption.

More effective is direct action, such as Frances McDormand using her Oscar speech to advocate for “inclusion riders” and musicians spurning the Super Bowl to support people of color or Trump’s inauguration to reject everything he represents. Singer Rebecca Ferguson, runner up on The X Factor UK in 2010, was one of the few musicians who said she would accept an invitation to the latter — if she could perform “Strange Fruit,” the 1939 protest song about racism in America. “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,” she would sing, “Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

Trump chose the Great Talladega College Tornado Marching Band instead.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

from Blogger http://bit.ly/2tcjAOs via IFTTT