#and it would make sense for the belief aspect of the 'martyr' definition

[silhouettecrow]

365 Days of Writing Prompts: Day 224

Adjective: Daring

Noun: Martyr

Definitions for those who need/want them:

Daring: (of a person or action) adventurous or audaciously bold; boldly unconventional

Martyr: a person who is killed because of their religious or other beliefs; a person who displays or exaggerates their discomfort or distress in order to obtain sympathy or admiration; a constant sufferer from (an ailment)

[fialleril]

i'm not christian so i apologize if this is a gross overgeneralization but it's weird how Certain Types of christians seem to exclusively prefer to depict and refer to jesus as a baby or a dying/dead martyr... almost like Alive Adult Jesus might have some opinions that don't gel with their lifestyles lmao

You are definitely not alone in observing this, anon! In fact it’s a perennial discussion both among academic theologians and in the pastoral community.

If you’re into Christian history, there are definitely periodic trends in terms of which aspect(s) of Jesus are most emphasized, and they are unsurprisingly very much related to the social and cultural context of the people “doing theology.”

So for example, I’m personally most familiar with early/classical and early medieval Christian history. The earliest Christology was focused primarily on the resurrection (with Jesus’ death seen as an important step on the road to resurrection, but the emphasis always being on resurrection, not the death in and of itself), and the language used by the early church was explicitly the language of liberation. Salvation meant freedom from sin and death, and crucially, sin included what we might now call “social sin”: that is, the sin of inequality in this life. The first Christians preached resurrection, and as a direct result of that, they also preached communal living and a welfare system that would see every member of the Body of Christ taken care of.

They certainly didn’t get everything right. St. Paul encouraged Christian slave owners to free their Christian slaves and consider them siblings, but he never actually called for an end to the institution of slavery or acknowledged it as inherently evil. But we have historical records of Christian communities where the common social divisions of classical Rome were more or less completely broken down, where slaves and free, men and women, people of different cultural and class backgrounds all interacted as equals. In fact, the oldest versions of Christian baptismal creeds we have (which can be found as quoted bits of poetry in a couple of Paul’s letters) make explicit reference to egalitarianism as the greatest hallmark of Christian life.

And that was what worried the Romans. If you grow up in almost any Christian tradition, you’ll hear stories of the martyrs. Christians love our martyrdom stories, you’re absolutely right about that, anon. But all too often we miss the actual reason for the early martyrs’ deaths. They weren’t killed for being “followers of Christ” in the kind of generic, near-meaningless sense of “belief” that so many American Christians often consider to be “following Christ.” The Roman imperial authority, as a rule, did not particularly care who its subjects worshiped, so long as they paid their taxes, didn’t rebel against Rome, and didn’t rock the social boat. The majority of early Christian martyrs were killed for things like refusing to sacrifice to the emperor (which was seen as a symbolic act of rebellion against Rome, as making sacrifices to the emperor was a pledge of political loyalty), refusing to serve in the Roman military, rejecting the authority of Roman governors, upsetting the social order (with all that egalitarianism), and, in the case of the vast majority of women martyrs, refusing to get married (which is another form of upsetting the social order, and a particularly dangerous one because it represented a statement of female independence, both socially and financially).

In the early church there was a heavy emphasis on the the death and resurrection of Jesus, but that doesn’t actually mean that his life was overlooked. It would be truer to say that, for those early martyrs, his life and teachings were intimately tied up with his death and resurrection.

Because here’s the thing that we American Christians, in particular, often either gloss over or entirely forget: Jesus, too, was killed by the Romans. He lived as a second class non-citizen in an occupied country, and he was killed by the occupying authority because he was seen as a threat to that occupation. That’s a historical fact that gets covered over for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that the gospels themselves actively attempt to disguise it. (Why? Because the gospels were written by and for people who were still living under that occupying authority, and who were therefore concerned to make it clear that they were not, in fact, an existential threat to Roman power and did not need to be eliminated.)

And, of course, once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it was also in a position to benefit from the privilege of imperial power.

Jesus’ life - and his death - were profoundly anti-imperial. That’s...a really awkward fact for a religion that has become the backbone of empire to reckon with. So the emphasis of Christology changed. The emphasis now was on Christ as heavenly king, conqueror, ruler of a kingdom of God which looked, for all intents and purposes, exactly like a heavenly version of the Roman Empire.

And American Christians are very much in the position of those imperial Roman Christians. America is an empire. We have vast wealth and resources, much of which we’ve obtained through war and colonial exploitation. We are literally a country built on the backs of slaves, and we used the Christian scriptures to justify that slavery. We use it to justify slavery still. We have a thousand metaphorical explanations for what Jesus may have meant by “sell all you have and give it to the poor, then come and follow me,” because we are terrified of taking him literally. We are profoundly concerned with policing sexuality and gender because that early message of Christian egalitarianism, where there is in Christ no slave or free, no male or female, but all are one is every bit as threatening to the American social order as it was to the Roman order two thousand years ago. We don’t like to talk about Jesus’ cry for justice, about his eager anticipation of the toppling of empire, because we are that empire.

But that’s conservative white American theology. The liberation theology of Latin American, the post-colonial theology of Africa, the womanist theology and the poor people’s campaign arising out of the African American experience of Christianity - it’s no accident that these theologies are far more focused on the life and teachings of Jesus. Because any attentive reading of the gospels cannot fail to notice that, more than any other topic - practically to the exclusion of any other topic - Jesus is profoundly concerned with the liberation of the poor and oppressed.

[birb-tangleblog]

Hey, i've seen people talking about what if Varian died because of the mindtrapped brotherhood, but, what if he died during cassandras revenge? He was thrown around a lot, and his ribs were at a risk of being broken. (Which could've potentially impaled his lungs and killed him. Also its more angsty, and cassandra would have to process the fact that she just killed Varian with her own hands. (Also, what if the brotherhood found out. Adira, Hector, Edmund, and Adira would be pissed.) + Eugene.

I've def seen this concept explored before! Or at least many fans treating his injuries from that episode more seriously.

But I feel like w/ AUs or what-ifs where Var dies, there tends to be a lot of focus on just the angst/suffering aspect, which is honestly too bleak for me. And unsatisfying if that's the long and short of it?

So I'd be more interested in this question in relation to the aftermath and how other characters would be affected by the Varian-shaped hole in their lives.

Varian dying before figuring out the Demanitus scroll would actually change a lot and really throw off the plot, b/c Ziti's plan to free herself would be set back without him to translate the second sun incantation for Raps. That’d be a whole diff thing to consider... but if he DID give them the incantation, and didn't make it due to injuries, things would prob proceed much as in canon. Just more somber.

Unintentionally killing someone would really be an event horizon for Cass; it could make her realize this isn't what she wants, leading her to relinquish the moonstone early, or maybe fleeing Corona, and wanting to atone. Alternatively, she could double down on the path she's on and become completely unreachable, b/c this kid dying really confirms her fear that she’s gone too far to turn back- but no matter how she processed and responded to it, I think she'd struggle with deep regret and be pretty horrified. (B/c there IS a big diff btwn Cass killing someone in cold blood and her accidentally fatally injuring them b/c she doesn't know her own strength. Of the cast, besides his dad she might be MOST affected.)

The other characters' reactions are interesting to consider.

Smth that I don't see touched on as much is that in an AU where Varian- the youngest of the group- dies, Raps and Eugene would probably also have a lot of guilt to work through in addition to their grief. They did directly involve him, or allow him to be involved. They'd blame themselves too. 

I think Varian would be seen as a hero or martyr, with lots of posthumous honors for his sacrifice. Post-series I can see them naming a library or academy/scientific institute after him, and maybe Raps/Eugene remembering him by naming one of their children after him

Quirin losing his only son to the same force that claimed his homeland and much of his life would be deeply tragic, and I don’t know if his spirit could ever truly recover.

The Brotherhood obviously should've been involved in canon, but smth like this happening in an AU would validate/confirm their fears and beliefs abt the danger of the moonstone and definitely lead to them joining the fight. And yeah they'd be angry? But I think there'd be more sadness than anything.

(Privately, I think Hector might believe this outcome should've been expected, even if it's a tragedy... but I think even he would have the sensitivity and awareness to not to say that.)

Me being me, my take is that grief would bring them together and Hector + Adira would step in to support Quirin in their own ways. The other Old Coronans could rally and manage his farm while he mourned, too. 

And then in AUs where something in his life goes seriously awry, I tend to see Quirin traveling back to the DK post-series instead of staying in Corona, b/c it'd be less painful and he'd have an increased sense of purpose there.

Tl;dr I feel like an AU like this would actually be less about Var angst, b/c it isn’t really ABOUT him- he’s just a catalyst, and the real area of interest is his friends and family dealing with loss.

[simpingforthisonedeer]

For the oc ask #4 past, #4 present, #3 future, please. Thanks.

Coming at me again with some really interesting questions thank you talpup 😎😎😎

Past #4 What was the most common argument between them and whoever raised them?

Aika used to have general child-parent arguments but nothing too serious, except when she was 10.

When she turned ten, her parents finally decided to to tell her that she was adopted. She was incredibly upset about it. Then, her mother gave her a choice to do a ritual that would make her their daughter. It was of course a forbidden ritual but Aika didn’t know at the time but her dads did. They didn’t want her mom to do the ritual while Aika was adamant about it. She desperately wanted to be a part of her family.

Eventually she won the argument, but her dads were upset at her mom for even enabling this situation in the first place. She did the ritual and overtime, she started looking more and more like her mom.

Another major argument was about dating astkgdkyvuho she saw this noble boy visit her village when she was 12 and developed a massive crush on him. She just thought he had the most adorable smile, beautiful eyes and hair she would just want to run her hands through.

But ofc her parents said no. Even her brother was like 🤨 and she was upset about it for weeks but it certainly made her idealize him even more and it even shaped her type afshdhdufkggk

Present #4 Do they have any enemy factions or groups? Why and how are they opposed, and how do they feel about it?

Well, there were some unnamed groups of people and sometimes, even countries, that sought after Aika for her Time Magic because it was OP asf but as I’ll explain in the next chapter, Arthur comes along and changes the memories of nearly everyone to forget she even had Time Magic in the first place. But these countries were already preparing to go to war and stuff and for their memories to make sense and match with reality, they had to go to war with other countries for serious or superficial reasons.

That is the price of asking Arthur for a favor. He didn’t do it on purpose because in the end, he is the one who has to mediate peace as the head of the Pascere Syndicate, but that was the only way the their new memories would make sense.

Aika hated that era of her life and carries a world of guilt from it because many of her friends died fighting in the subsequent wars while she was stuck being pregnant for nine months. Right now, though, her life is way better and she has enemies for different reasons.

Future #3 How would their beliefs or morals change in the future, if at all?

Aika is about to turn 36 in the fic soon. She is a grown woman who wouldn’t have changed as much if Julius hadn’t come along.

Before she even met Julius, she had just gotten better at dealing with her depression and anger issues but not much. She still has bouts of anger and ruthlessness, has self-confidence issues(which she hides very well) and doesn’t smile as much. In fact, people who had known her for years would find it strange if they see her smiling(well, everyone except Arthur). But Julius comes along and makes her smile as if everyday was Christmas. He’s such a positive influence in her and she even tries to model some aspects of her behavior after Julius.

Another thing about Aika is that she would never sacrifice her life for anyone. Not even her own daughter. She only surrounds herself with people who believes are capable and strong. She raised her daughter with high standards and ensured that she was strong. Holly had to grow up quickly because of it and she doesn’t complain now(but definitely will in the future). She wouldn’t put her life on the line but she would definitely save anyone from a tough situation. She just refuses to be a martyr and sacrifice her life.

Aika understands why anyone else would sacrifice their own lives for their loved ones or their kingdom and is perfectly content with Julius if he did want to die for his kingdom(cough). But that doesn’t mean that when the time comes, she wouldn’t be there to save him(well not exactly but I can’t say further than that bc then it would be spoilers 😏) but because of him, she learns that sacrifice is actually really satisfying and fulfilling and because of him, she learns to be a better mother.

[jinruihokankeikaku]

Well, since we are already talking about knights, what about a knight of hope?

Oh hello!! That’s my Classpect, right there!! Fancy that. I’m sayin this partly 8ecause I think my Role is pretty damn cool and partly as a wwarnin up front that yeah, there’s 8ound to 8e a 8it of 8ias in this here analysis. I wwill say that I’m fairly proud of my original analysis a this Role, so I’ll be drawwin on that fairly heavvily for this one. Anyhoww, wwithout further ado, here’s the…

Title: Knight of Hope

Title Breakdown: [Expert Catalyst] of [Epistemic Culmination]

Class: Knight. Generally considered to be either a “defender” or a “wielder”, the Knight is a sort of jack-of-all-trades Class characterized by both insecurity and tremendous force of will. Knights arm themselves with their Aspect and use it as a barrier between themselves and the world, as they attempt to take on as many tasks as possible in order to address, ameliorate, or compensate for that which is diminished or absent in the makeup of their Session. The Knight’s complement/opposite is the Rogue [the Expert Carrier], and it is analogous to the Thief [the Expert Commander] and the Page [the Expert Counselor]. They are most likely to work well with Maids [Catalytic Engineers] and Mages [Esoteric Catalysts]. 

Aspect: Hope. An Aspect associated with the conflict between one’s most salient conscious desires - personal, psycho-sexual, socio-political, or whatever else - and one’s better angels, so to speak - in simpler terms, the conflict between the ego and the superego - Hope represents the sum of one’s beliefs and ideals. It’s for this reason that Hope is tied to religious imagery and especially to angelic imagery. Additionally, Hope is associated with the double-edged sword of idealization - of people (both individuals and sorts of people) and of goals or aspirations towards heroism, adulation, happiness, moral rectitude, and success or victory. Finally, Hope can be interpreted as encompassing such things as one knows without evidence - epistemic leaps of faith. Hope stands opposed to, and represents a complement to, Rage [Epistemic Incipience], and is analogous to Light [Epistemic Communication] and Void [Epistemic Integration]. It manifests most intensely in concert with Time [Ontological Culmination] and Doom [Ethical-Aesthetic Culmination].

Mechanical Profile: Hope is the most powerful Aspect (and yes, I’m going to remind you all of that at every opportunity). However, it’s also the hardest Aspect to “control” (or at least, it’s tied with Rage on that count), so all those Hope-bound are, well, bound to have their work cut out for them in terms of developing their Aspect-linked faculties. Knights, to, have their work cut out for them, both due to the stumbling-block of the...distinctive...mechanisms by which they cope with their insecurities, and due to the tendency of their Class towards jack-of-all-trades-ism. The Knight of Hope will best serve their session by finding all those places whereat Hope is lacking, and allowing what little Hope there remains to become most efficacious. This can be differentiated from the manner in which, say, a Sylph, would ameliorate a dearth of their Aspect by creating more of it - the Knight does not, and cannot, create or repair Hope. The Hope they find must, alas, remain as fragile or broken as it stands - the Knights power and responsibility lies in allowing the faint Hope - dangling, as it may be, by a string - to effect as much change as possible, despite its diminution or fragility.

    In terms of Magic Powers, the Knight of Hope does have a bit of an edge, for despite Knights’ lack of outstanding aptitude with the more abstract-ergo-magical facets of their Aspects, Hope as an Aspect conceptually encompasses all things magical, by which I mean all things predicated on belief. This is the Class that has a sword and shield so long as - and only so long as - they believe themselves to have a sword and a shield. There’s an element of literal “plot armor” here - Hope’s link to constructed or idealized narratives (the Game Master’s proverbial railroad) channelled through the Knight’s lens of “protecting the self/loved ones/the session itself”. This Role could prove instrumental to a Session’s success, provided the player assigned it doesn’t succumb to certain unfortunate tendencies - the martyr/messiah complex, the escapist’s propensity for to seek oblivion by way of substances and other such worldly vices, and of course, the Hope player’s resolute urgency which all-too-often metamorphoses into cocksure arrogance (which arrogance, then, becomes that much more of a liability in concert with the sort of dependence and insecurity to which Knights are given.)

    Before I diverge too much further into such content as belongs in the next section, I’ll close this one with a brief comment on the Knight’s path to Ascension, and the powers such Ascension might confer. The Knight of Hope has a fairly clear path to Ascension - the question is whether the Knight has the willpower to walk it. To Ascend, one must first die, and while our Knight of Hope would surely be the first to profess their willingness to die for the good of their fellows/the advancement of their cause/the pursuit of perfection (take your pick), the follow-through’s the rub here - recall the moment at which Dave, a player cast unto a rather similar Mythological Role, is first met with the opportunity to Ascend. I’d speculate that the average Knight of Hope would be...similarly hesitant. Should they follow through, however, the unification of the dream-self with the waking self would enhance the Knight’s powers tremendously, given the fact that the unification of the ideal and the real is, essentially, the foremost goal and function of a Knight of Hope (at least within the context of the Game). Hope’s power is limited only by a given Hope-bound player’s own mental limitations - what they are and aren’t willing to believe. The Ascended Knight of Hope would be nigh invulnerable, and armed with the ability to veritably elevate their own Hume Level (that is to say, bend the definition of the Game’s “reality”, to a degree proportional to the difference between their Hume Level and that of their environment), so long as their confidence and self-control hold out. The first shouldn’t be a problem. The second is….another matter entirely. Which brings us to...

Personality: So, Hope players and Knights are both big-time projectors. To clarify, Knights (like Thieves and Pages, their analogues) are largely defined by their aspirations; all four Expert Classes are characterized by starting out with a dearth of identity outside of the identities of their actual or fictional idealized role models. Likewise, Hope players (like Light and Void players - notice a pattern?) have a tendency to externalize their sense of identity, tethering the image they present to the world to people or ideas outside of themselves. Just as Light players tether themselves to actualities (real individuals, information perceived as objectively true, or concrete objects) and Void players tether themselves to abstractions (social constructs or perceived obligations), Hope players tether themselves to ideals - concepts, images, or qualities seen as supreme, quintessential, or otherwise larger-than-life (for example, Jake’s idealized vision of Dirk, or Eridan’s invented - and strikingly meta - interpretation of his role as Prince of Hope). All of this is to say that the Knight of Hope is likely to protect their ego by concealing the characteristics about which they’re insecure behind idealized “perfect” versions of those characteristics - if they see their faith as weak, they will project sanctimony and “saintliness”; if they see their confidence as faltering, they will present as a primadonna; if they see themselves as inconstant, lazy, or given to prevarication, they will do their damnedest to be seen as The Determinator.

    As a final note, the Knight of Hope is an Active Hope player (yes, we’re still doing the Active Knight deal here), so they’re almost certain to be optimistic to a fault. Even if they try to mask it in some attempt to preserve an image of reason, “cool”, or humility, they’ll be resolute in their conviction that they’re on the right track, and may be quietly dismissive of any assertion to the contrary. Their personal development is predicated on that thing to which Knights are nigh-universally averse - introspection and differentiation between the Actual and the Ideal. Read the Serenity Prayer once or twice, friend. You can’t make everything perfect all the time, and you and those around you alike will be that much better off for your taking that on board.

~

8oy, that one wwas fun. I might’vve gotten uhhhhhhhh 8it carried awway - hope ye don’t mind. And as a final note, I’ll remind those readin that this is my Role, and so it’s 8ound to 8e evver-so-slightly tinted 8y my ego. Caveat emptor an so on an so forth ::::p

Oh, an one more thing!! I’vve done this one 8efore, like I said in the introduction. So here’s Past Sasha’s take, if you’d like to check that out. It says some things wwith wwhich I still agree, 8ut couldn’t fit in here.

~ P L U R ~

[calleo-bricriu]

Hey there! I just found you and honestly your readings are soooo coool, may I have one about my future love life too? Will I meet someone and how will they be? Possible star sign? AND ALSO PLEASE THIS IS IMPORTANT : when i first made the sorting hat Test I was a Ravenclaw but after a couple years it started changing to gryffndor and then back to ravenclaw and I’m having the biggest identity crisis.. can you help me on this? What house am I? Hope this is not to much..if it is just ignore me haha

Oh also i don’t know if you need this but I’m 23 male and a libra! Btw I don’t see a sign that reading are open on your blog and got a bit ahead of myself so if they’re closed right now I’m very sorry, I mean no offense! Thank you anyways and have a great day! :)

Oh, I just do these for fun.

That said, your house is not an identity nor is it any sort of useful personality trait; once you're not at school any longer it's 100% irrelevant.

Star signs are also not a personality trait nor are they relevant to any aspect of your life (that's just something people use to try and excuse poor behaviour on their part; you didn't do the thing because you're a Gemini or a Scorpio or an Ares or any other sign, you did it because you were being inconsiderate and not thinking your actions or words through; you're not incompatible with someone because of their sign either, you're incompatible with them due to basic personality conflicts or conflicting wants/needs out of a relationship), they're just little tidbits of facts and have no actual influence or impact on anything.

If you're referring to 'quizzes' that tell you what house you ought to be in, I'd invite you to read up on confirmation bias. That applies to thinking you're a certain way because of your star sign; confirmation bias will give you that truth because you want it to be the truth,

Those are designed to be easily manipulated to give the answers the person taking them wants based on their mood at the time; I can guarantee you I could take any one and get a different result based on my mood at the time of taking them.

Do not base any part of your identity around a house at a school or your zodiac sign, it doesn't make you somehow more interesting or desirable; if anything, it's a red flag that indicates you aren't willing or capable of taking responsibility for your own actions or reactions.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably getting paid to tell you otherwise.

Remember: If you're paying them, they'll want to keep you as a repeat customer and will likely tell you what they know you want to hear.

In this case, what you want to hear is that you'll meet your soulmate soon and that you're definitely Ravenclaw.

I doubt the latter given your belief that it matters in the slightest and, as I'm not getting paid, I couldn't possibly care less whether or not you'll meet someone, what they'll be like, or their star sign (which is, of course, completely irrelevant).

Just to give an example, from what you said in these I already know several things about you and, were you paying me, would be able to easily tailor a reading to play into exactly what you want to hear.

Things that were made clear by information you voluntarily offered:

- You're a bit on the insecure side. - You're a bit immature, which is indicated clearly by you being well beyond school age and borderline obsessing over your house. - You're single, obviously. - And you don't want to be.

Cards weren't necessary to give me that information, you offered it up freely, and when you're paying someone, they will absolutely tell you what you want to hear to keep you coming back as a customer.

Be extremely wary of people who make you pay to do tarot/rune/other readings; they take seconds to do and, with the information provided the customer, are extremely low effort.

At least, they are for me.

Similarly, be wary of anyone who wants you to pay for them to perform a spell or ritual for you; it likely won't do anything at all beyond a placebo effect as the rituals/spells they offer are things that you need to do yourself if you want them to benefit you and not the one casting them.

That, and if you're trying to put something negative out there, most will know how to rework it so any negative consequences they might get hit with for doing that sort of thing hit you and not them.

At any rate, the way this deck often prattles on, it spends the first few cards confirming who we're talking about, and that's what it's done here.

I was right in that little list.

You're insecure, likely have abandonment issues due to past relationships (romantic, platonic, familial, or otherwise), have a hard time trusting people, have a tendency to be overly dramatic which can and will drive people away eventually, if you have had relationships in the past you're either not over them or are still damaged from how they ended and haven't taken steps to heal and move on, and that, where relationships are concerned while you can be exciting and spontaneous, you can also be incredibly fickle and very likely aren't at a place in terms of mental health or maturity to handle a commitment.

This is where it starts to bridge out into what you asked and it starts, where the Fool left off in the paragraph above, by indicating that, for the time being, all you're likely to find are what amounts to whirlwind romances that don't last all that long.

The Nine of Wands backs that up in terms of future romance, and also goes back to mentioning that you need to deal with all of those issues above before anyone is going to be able to put up with you long term.

Six of Cups typically revolves around immaturity and occasionally an ex or someone you had wanted to have a relationship with coming back into your life.

Three of Cups backs up that, "Someone from your past returning" or a dry spell, as it were, ending.

You'll need to start working on your issues if you want anything to last, however.

Hm. The deck doesn't seem to want to move on, it's repeating itself in the sense of, "Fix your issues, even the ones you're in denial about or don't want to face." That includes fear of rejection (that would be the Two of Swords in this case).

While the Two of Cups does indicate you'll meet someone with whom you have a strong connection and mutual attraction, cards in a reading are not islands; the cards around them matter, and all of the previous cards to this one were very, very clear in that you need to get yourself together, likely via professional means, before even the most attracted to you person is going to be able to tolerate the level of insecurity, drama, and baggage you'll also bring to the table.

This isn't, "you need to love yourself" nonsense, it's, "you need to deal with your mental health, your tendency to be overly dramatic where no drama is necessary, and self esteem issues so you're on relatively stable ground."

The Ace of Wands following the Two of Cups is a fairly blunt statement to forget any fear of rejection and let the other person know you're interested. If you sit around waiting for someone to just turn up for you, you're probably going to be waiting for a very long time as reality just doesn't work that way very often.

And it's finally moved on to the second bit you were asking about: What that person will be like.

Unfortunately for you, the old proverb "in cauda venenum" applies to this person. They'll initially come off as generous, completely devoted, doting, giving you everything you could possibly want. They'll give you all the support, stability, and positive influence you could ever ask for.

...and then they'll either get bored or get tired of having to play the part of your partner and therapist (see everything above) and leave. The  Five of Swords also has heavy connotations around abuse so it's equally possible that they were never the kind, loving person they let you think they were until they knew they had their claws firmly into you and, once they know you're too wrapped around their finger to ever leave, they'll start with slow, subtle abuse, gaslighting, making you feel like they're the only one who will ever love you, etc...of course, to the public, they'll be a loving, kind martyr who puts up with what they'll tell others is YOUR poor behaviour because they love you that much, all of which can eventually lead to physical abuse, especially if they get the feeling that you're going to try and leave.

Whichever it is, the Five of Swords in terms of relationships is never a good thing.

The star sign of this person is irrelevant, but one typically sees behaviour like that in people who take star signs far too seriously and are also Gemini, Scorpio, literally any fire sign, and Libra.

All in all,  you need to work on yourself before you start jumping into relationships in any serious capacity. If you're not already getting professional mental health help that includes therapy, start as soon as possible.

As for the House thing, again, it's entirely irrelevant, you're 23, you've not been school age for some time now. Absolutely and literally nobody cares what your house is past the time you left school. It has no bearing on identity.

Ordinarily, I'd be able to tell you that based on the deck's description of you but there is no house that has an encompassing trait of, "complete mess", so I'll see if it'll give me a little more clarity.

...and it's given me a muddled mess of repeating itself but under the pervasive traits that keep getting repeated throughout the last--however many cards I've drawn now--a recurring theme, though usually in the negative sense of holding on to things that should have been long since let go and moved on from, is loyalty to those you choose to be loyal to even when it becomes self-destructive, and hard work, primarily to avoid having to let go. Keep in mind that any positive trait can easily turn dark, as it were, when misapplied or taken to the level of obsession.

That would indicate Hufflepuff but, let's see if I can get the deck to stop twisting the knife as we've already been over enough of that.

Devoted, compassionate, caring, generous, with the Wheel and Two of Pentacles indicating that this isn't the answer you wanted, which I also could have told you because you seemed hellbent on hearing Ravenclaw or Gryffindor.

While the Page of Swords has some brief flashes of Ravenclaw traits (inquisitive, curious, etc...) as before, cards do not stand on their own in a reading and nearly everyone has those fairly generic traits.

It moves on going back to more traits that point toward Hufflepuff: Down to earth, sensible in general, a nurturing/caretaker type, loyalty, being able to easily make people feel welcome.

The Queen of Swords backs that up in both traits along the lines of being empathetic, welcoming, fair, and, when representing a person, an air sign.

Libra, as I'm sure you know, is an air sign.

Sounds like Hufflepuff to me.

[scriptlgbt]

I have a question about byg. From what I understand it's not byg if you have several other characters of the same orientation but I want to make sure my specific situation is okay because the death is kind of connected to her sexuality. Basically one of my lesbian characters sacrifices herself for my MC (who is also a lesbian) because she loves and believes in her. There are 5 other lesbians in the story (including the MC). Is this still byg b/c of the circumstance?

As a general rule, the mod team don’t have universal stances on what constitutes BYG. Personally, I am of the belief that in every situation that an LGBT+ character dies within the story, it is BYG (unless they die of old age). But some folks think something can only be called a trope if it has other unethical aspects attached to it. The amount of lesbians in a story doesn’t absolve this particular issue. If you have one lesbian villain and other lesbian rep that isn’t villainous, then that might balance it out and make it okay. But a dead lesbian is not balanced out by another one being alive. It might lessen the blow but it doesn’t necessarily absolve it exactly. Proportionately, the only thing that would make sense (to me) is if you are killing your straight characters in the same or more population proportions as your lesbian characters. If 1 out of 5, or 20% of your straight characters also sacrifice themselves, that would maybe lessen the blow. Resurrecting your character would also make it better. Pretty much, if your character must die, it’s about harm reduction. Figure out the impact it will have on audience members who relate to that character. Who may already be at risk for thinking their lives are only valuable in death.

But your dying character being part of a relationship dynamic also makes it not okay. This reply by @sensicalabsurdities to this post covered this idea perfectly:

sensicalabsurdities said: i would say another thing as far as quantity goes is to also think of gay relationships as single units. If you have two gay male characters who are uninvolved and one of them dies, you have a ‘we’re not killing all the rep’ situation, but if those two are dating and it’s your only gay mlm relationship, suddenly you’re in the ‘gay relationships never end non-tragically’ area

I would say that what you are describing is a BYG situation, especially because it is connected to her love life. It is generally the case that LGBT+ characters are automatically put into self-sacrificial roles and die for entertainment value. (Think: those queens from The Dragon Prince season 2. I think someone told my Buffy had something like that too? But I haven’t seen that part of the series yet.)

So I would refrain. It’s also really toxic to martyr LGBT+ characters, whose lives are already far too often deemed disposable. Making a decision to sacrifice yourself is not something you want to encourage in your LGBT+ readers. We are already treated like burdens and broken and problems as people.

tl;dr this is definitely Bury Your Gays, in my opinion, and I strongly advise against this.

- mod nat

[southposting]

‘Doubling Down’ Rant.

I feel like one of the most prominent aspects of this episode was the portrayal of the characters’ psychology, the writing and the dialogue did a great job portraying how people spiral into toxic relationships on the first place, and why it is difficult for them to get away once they've fallen in.

Kyle for one, is portrayed as a caring and moral-ridden individual that although reasonable, lets his emotions get in the way of his course of action. Kyle wanted to intervene because he considered it to be the right thing to do, never once entertaining the idea of an ulterior motive with Heidi until the other girls proposed it to him. While all the other boys aknowledged Cartman’s poor treatment of Heidi, none of them were willing to get themselves involved.

This takes us to Kyle's initiative and how his and Cartman's dynamic plays out throghout the episode. Kyle has consistently been responsible for challenging Cartman’s attitude, positioning himself as ‘good’ and Cartman as 'evil’, this relationship that has ultimately served to feed both Cartman’s enthusiasm to torture him, and Kyle’s sense of selfrighteousness and tendency to see himself as a martyr, victimization is something Kyle has in common with Cartman, but to quote, 'We all wrongly see ourselves as the victim sometimes, but Cartman sees himself as the victim ALL the time’. Kyle differentiates himself in being able to aknowledge his mistakes and learn from them.

To get some insight into Kyle’s remark: 'In a way, I feel like we’re all going out with Cartman right now’ reflecting on how all of them are, at some degree, and specially Kyle, always been involved in a toxic relationship with Cartman’s mind games. Kyle has been, for a long time now, Cartman’s main sympathizer, he can’t help but look out for his personal improvement, often attempting to get him to do the right thing and aknowledge the fault in his ways, a cause that Cartman hasn't hesitated to take advantage of, tricking Kyle into commiting to a mean if he can profit from his support.

In this episode, Kyle appears to have come to the conclussion that Cartman is beyond help, and that neither he nor Heidi can do anything to change that, for the best thing they can do for him is not to feed his sociopathic needs, furthermore demonstrated by their encounter on the hallway, with Kyle continuously trying to reason with him and assure him it was all for his own good, Cartman making deaf ears to his claims, finally leaving Kyle no choice but to knock him out in self defense, who apologizes regretful.

Cartman, on the other side, is miserable with Heidi, but also without her. As I stated on my last post concerning their relationship:

'He can’t bring himself to end the relationship and thus giving Heidi freedom of choice, she’s his property and so Cartman can’t stand the idea of his belongings moving onto other people. Cartman thinks of Heidi as a tool that exists with the only purpose of being at his disposition to give him attention and validation on command, no more and no less.

Simultaneously, Cartman can’t stand Heidi, because she doesn’t Cartman’s idealized image of her. Naturally, Heidi isn’t the tool Cartman expects her to be, she is an human being with her own individual needs. Whereas Cartman seeks a relationship where he is prioritized over all, never giving anything in return, and a partner willing to follow him blindly against all the odds, without him having to worry about losing their support; Heidi looks for a functional, healthy romantic relationship, were all the parties involved contribute their part. Cartman is unwilling to fulfill this role, because doing so would position him as an equal of Heidi’s, which means, to him, degrade him from his high-entity status.’

Nearing the end we realize Cartman has found a way of manipulating Heidi into believing she’s in the relationship she's craved for, and thus avoiding any sign of resistance on her behalf. He has learned that if he wants to manipulate Heidi successfully, he needs to put a little effort on the relationship every now and then, offering her occasional reassurance when things seem grim. This way, Cartman can act selfishly while at the same time 'rewarding’ Heidi for her subservience, throwing away any doubt she might've had in him. He fools her into believing his toxic behaviour is a necessary mean that needs to exist in order to keep improving himself.

Heidi is someone who wishes to aid the needy, she cannot bring herself to refuse someone’s cries for help, which is, besides the ironic effects of peer pressure, the main reason she continues to be stuck with Cartman and allows herself to be manipulated by him. He sees in Cartman someone who takes bad decisions, but is fundamentally kindhearted. Someone who is in need for her guidance. Even when ditching Kyle after being gaslighted by Cartman, her kind nature is a definitive trait of her character. Cartman was persuasive enough to make Heidi compromise with his beliefs, he made sure his words appeared to be reasonable. He told her what she wanted to hear when she was feeling the most guilty, deflecting the blame for the failure of their relationship unto Kyle instead, but reassuring her by telling her he hadn’t been counscious of his actions. He convinced her of attributing her own supposed flaws ('being moody’) to her ethnic background, and this way implying she has no control over ever improving herself, comforting her but making her feel helpess over her situation at the same time, this serves to Cartman as a mechanism to increase her emotional dependence to him, by making her feel he’s the only one who will ever love her despite her imperfections.

Regarding Cartman’s idea of Kyle, I feel like Cartman projects all of his own corruption unto Kyle. He subcounsciously thinks of Kyle as his equal, although he cannot recognize the corruption from within. Kyle’s intentions are never pure in Cartman’s mind, he must always be plotting something against him the same way he himself does to him. To him, Kyle’s purpose in life is to get in Cartman’s way. As the series progressed, we’ve seen Cartman gradually watering down his hostility towards Kyle in latter seasons the more time they spent together, and instead replacing it with an odd sense of familiarity and trust, until this point, Cartman’s friendly demeanor towards Kyle that even manifested itself at one point earlier in the episode, takes a sudden turn the moment Cartman finds out he might have been responsible for his breakup with Heidi. Following this event, we see Cartman’s hatred towards Kyle reach its peak when he goes batshit after his trippy jewish dream sequence, spewing all his resentments against Kyle in spite of the latter’s attempts to excuse himself, Cartman feeling betrayed after letting himself 'fall into Kyle’s claws’ by allowing him the benefit of the doubt previously.

Having stated all this, I think Cartman has taken care of the problems he had with Heidi, and now that the challenge is over, the last scene leads me to believe he has shifted his interest from the pleasure he obtains from having domain over her, to the impact his behaviour towards her has on Kyle instead. He’s using his influence on the people around Kyle to make them into proxys as a mean to inflict pain onto him. Heidi is no longer the tool, his entire relationship with her is now a tool on itself.

It was also interesting to see the conection between B plot and A plot relying on the parallel of the toxic relationship between Cartman, Kyle and Heidi, and that of politicians with their supporters, instead of having each storyline intersecting with the other, though I don’t have a strong stand on the matter, since I’m for the most part ignorant concerning the USA political status.

The weakest point of the episode in my opinion was the introduction of elements that seemingly served no purpose in the narrative, and ultimately aimed for a specific purpose in order to lead the plot in a certain direction. For example, Cartman’s dialogue when making fun of Heidi for gaining weight after tricking her into introducing meat into her vegan diet, indicated he had a goal in mind by doing this, though we never get any insight on what this particular goal may be other than to reassure his dominance over her. Besides this being a dangerous move for Cartman to make just after getting Heidi’s trust back, it seemed like it didn’t serve any purpose other than to incite Kyle into intervening in the relationship. Another example would be Cartman visiting Token’s house, there wasn’t really a point for Cartman to do this besides giving him the chance to make racial remarks some more. Finding out about Kyle being responsible for his breakup with Heidi through Token’s dad seemed too coincidental, though I don’t really mind, even less after being presented with Cartman’s fantastic Kyle delirium sequence.

I really enjoyed the execution of the humor, there were some great jokes, the animation team did an amazing job and overall I think this was a fantastic episode with a rather dark thematic.

[anthonychiozza]

Cultural Atheism: Response To A “None”

By: Anthony Chiozza

Illustration Source: Professor Mark Thornhill granted permission to run his cartoon via email.

Reprint from: 10/16/2017

I Am A Sinner About two years ago I wrote a commentary on the current social moral order called, “Cultural Atheism and The Death of The West.” This is a response to one of the comments I received. I was not aware that the piece had any comments at all. I apologize for not responding in a timely manner.There is quite a bit to unpack, so I have broken his comment down into sections in which I respond to his question, or statement. Question: In the spirit of open debate. How are we to know you are not damaged? Response:   I am damaged. I am the worst sinner I know. We are all damaged to varying degrees because of the fallen state of man. Whether you accept the pretense of the fall in the Garden of Eden, or not, if one cannot recognize that one's self is inclined towards things that are not good for the self, or others necessarily, then that person will lead a very hard life. I am inclined to stay in a state of Grace as much as possible. I frequent confession as much as I can. Question:  In your closing you stated “These poor souls, addicted, brain damaged, and increasingly programming themselves to continue in the downward spiral are truly not fit by their own evolutionary faith.” Where have you been given the moral authority to make this assessment? Response: I am also a poor soul, and in much need of prayers. I am glad you brought this point up because something is in grave need of clarification. I am in no way judging any individual on their internal moral standing with God. I am observing the general actions of society, the rejection of the Church and her Bride Jesus Christ. This results in a judgement based on those external actions compared to God’s Law. Specifically, that moral authority comes from Jesus, when He gave that same authority to Peter with the Keys to Heaven, and to the other apostles as well in the form of forgiving, or retaining sins. The Church, which has been granted the same authority Jesus had, expects me to preach the Truth of Love through actions. I must use the talents God gave me to point to the Truth. I would be a coward otherwise.   Faith and Reason Further, I am grateful for your courage to ask the difficult questions. I am well aware that this answer may not suffice to someone that does not believe in dogma. I myself believe that the Logos made Himself Truly manifest as the second person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ. He did this because He does, in fact, love us. My Faith is based not on pure blindness, but also on reason. The Church believes in the use of both Faith and reason. Either one standing alone is a grave error. Thus, my authority to speak on the morality of the West comes from Faith and reason. Part of my reasoning is based on well respected scholars in academia which have confirmed that documents such Ignatius of Antioch’s letters, Polycarp’s letters, and Just Martyrs works are in fact legitimate historical documents. This is further evidence to support the historical Jesus than evidence for someone like Alexander the Great, and other well known historical figures. We also have the writings of the historian Josephus on Jesus and the fall of the Jewish Temple in 70 AD. I am well aware that even with the historical evidence, I am still accepting on Faith that Jesus is in fact who He said He was. The Logos. The Son of God in the flesh. A Thought Experiment  Another example of my reasoning is based on the actions of early Catholics. One can reason that Early Christians, the first apostles included, were willing to suffer and die for a belief which essentially outlines eternal joy. However, this religion also made heavy demands on the early Catholics to carry their cross. Catholics can not give into certain illegitimate pleasures. This task of keeping oneself pure, confessing, being humble, and in many cases being butchered as a martyr seems very unreasonable, unless the miracles that converted the pagans were real. Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Let us suppose I walk into a rowdy bar one evening where all kinds of drinking, drug use, and impure behavior is taking place. I stand up on the table, and I yell that everyone should knock it off right now, or they will go to hell. In absence of a miracle to prove my point, I would be thrown out of the bar, and probably beaten for good measure by people that are of an equivalent mindset of the very pagans that were converted in Rome. A good Priest I know gave just this example. Falsifiable Scientific Confirmation & Conversion

​A final and more definitive example of why it is reasonable to believe is because of the Eucharistic miracle in Lanciano, Italy. Then over one thousand years later the example of the Eucharistic miracle in Poland. The Eucharist, otherwise known as what appears to be bread and wine after Consecration, is in fact really the body and blood of Jesus Christ made truly present for us to become one with Him.This is taken on Faith, but God knows that the weakness of our own state of being will prevent us from seeing this Truth. Doubting Thomas needed to put his fingers into Christ's wounds before he would believe. Jesus has done no less for us modern men. Thus, the scientific study conducted by highly skeptical, atheist scientists identified that both sets of DNA from these two separate events were exact matches. This lead to at least one scientist's decision to leave atheism behind and become Catholic. I am aware for most people this is still not enough evidence, through reason, to explain where I get my authority to make such a general judgement on Western society, but I would simply ask them a question in return. Where do you get your authority to make judgments on the moral standing of other individuals' actions, and your own? If one is honest with the self, that is a difficult question to answer. The Founding Fathers Are Not Impeccable Question: I am a Pagan I believe in our country’s preamble to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Where is it written that to pursue pleasure is a satanic act? Response: I don’t personally grant any sense of infallibility, and impeccability to the Founding Fathers of the United States.  Although some of Christendom's principles were retained regarding some laws when the founders created the Constitution they failed to recognize all of God's Law and authority. Obviously, you can’t murder even though some find it pleasurable, and pursue that very act for their own pleasure. These sets of moreys go back to the Greeks and elsewhere in various civilizations, but these ideas were certainly vastly improved on by Christendom. I consider this lack of clarification on religion, and morality to be one of the Founding Father’s biggest mistakes, and one that will lead to the downfall of this nation. Other scholars of that time in the University system, protestant and Catholic alike agreed with that opinion. Error Has No Rights ​ Question: Are you asserting that life is misery and suffering and that only by understanding that can we be spiritually free? Response: No. That is another heresy Catholicism had to deal with when converting pagans. Pleasure is something we derive from an act, or thought. That act, or thought has to meet right reason. Right reason consists of following certain moral principles laid out by the Church God gave authority to. If I engage in the marital act with my wife in order to be united with her in Love, and to produce children, that act meets right reason. Even if the act is solely for the unitive purpose, because we know she is not at a time of month where she will bear a child, it still meets right reason. If we choose to avoid pregnancy using NFP because of some dire circumstances, which the Church has explained, we are still using right reason. If I go seek pleasure in another woman, destroy my family, and the hearts of my children, this does not meet right reason. If I eat three pieces of cake a day this does not meet right reason. If I eat one small piece a day, enjoy that pleasure, and do not continue to indulge, it meets right reason. God wants us to have pleasure, but just as science has shown regarding the human brain, the pleasure center over indulged, will lead to serious problems. I am sure you know individuals you might have judged to be selfish. What is it that makes them this way? Statement: If so I believe you are headed towards the Buddhist school of thought.

Response: Some Buddhism does overlap with the Catholic Faith, but the more correct way of saying it would be that Buddhism is correct in some aspects, and wrong in many others. The most obvious being that you can’t pull yourself up by your own bootstraps spiritually, because this in itself is an act of pride relying on self. You must ask for the help of something outside of yourself. This is precisely why we see certain archetypes in some of the literature I am sure you have read. Question: Also you state in your article ” This is best demonstrated by simply suggesting that, perhaps, God does exist. Maybe, just maybe, there might be some evidence for that. ” Which would squarely put these people in the camp of agnosticism. Response:  I am not saying they are agnostic. The point is that there is typically an anger response rather than a reasoned response. Perhaps they claim atheism, but quietly are agnostic and this is the reason for that emotional lashing out. I am aware of the difference. The general premise of this article is that, practically speaking, most people behave like someone that would truly manifest atheism brought to its logical conclusion philosophically. That conclusion being, I am my moral authority, and those morals can change on a dime to suit my whim. Thus, we have the idea of moral relativism which is expressed on some spectrum by many individuals within society. Statement: Agnostics are not moral relativist. They are people who have chosen to believe much like I have that dogma is not the answer. Dogma in itself is what separates the religions. ( I realize that is merely a statement of fact.) Response: Agnostics certainly are moral relativists. By choosing to believe what you believe to be correct morally, based on your own thoughts, or even the thoughts of other men, is moral relativism from the view of Christ's Church. You may live your life by a certain code of conduct, and even manage not to flip on a dime, but from Christ's lens the rejection of some His Laws is moral relativism.  Jung, for example, has some good ideas, but to follow a man that claimed just to be a man as a moral authority seems like a mistake. 

    The same could be said about my own set of beliefs, given Jesus was not who He said He was. I do believe He is in Fact the Logos made manifest. This is where the very authority comes from that gives me the ability to say, “I am not the one that is the moral relativist.” Further, dogma must exist for the idea of moral relativism to exist outside of a culturally subjective form, because otherwise there is no constant to compare relativistic thought to in its absence. The Faith in the Law we were handed from Moses came from the Trinity. Moses never said this is the Law I created, or this is my Law. He said it was the Law God gave him. Jesus further points out in the New Testament that the Pharisees themselves do not believe that Moses wrote the Old Testament. If they had believed, they would have lead their lives very differently. It can thus be said that the Pharisees were morally relativistic as well. They followed the letter of the Law for their own gain, but not the heart of the Law. I am well aware of the general definition of moral relativism being subjective based on one being a part of a particular culture, but that is clearly not what I am speaking about here. Further, I have listed reasonable criteria to believe the Catholic Church has the authority of God behind it.

Statement: It is my personal belief that Carl Jung was the most correct when he assigned archetypes to the great humanistic experience. This is to understand that God (which I refer to as the universal energy or spirit) Appears different to all individuals egos based on their current residence in the space time continuum. Meaning the more time and experiences you actually have in this universe the greater your difference of opinion about what God truly is will be from your contemporaries. Agnostics that find a belief in a higher power are not satanist. The only reject dogma in a logical search for a personal contact with a living holy spirit which is the creator or architect of the universe.

Response: “Any that reject Jesus Christ and His Church are the first born of satan.” This paraphrase was said by some of the early Church Fathers. That does not necessarily mean that someone engaged in the honest exploration of the Truth is the first born of Satan. For example, we would never say that about Saint Augustine on his journey to grasp at the Truth honestly. Surely he was a sinful man like anyone else, but that reference would never be used because he converted. There are many other cases like his, but someone that knows precisely what the Church teaches, has been a witness to the Truth of Love in its fullness. If they continue to openly reject it, they are in fact in Satan’s camp whether they like to admit it to themselves, or not. I don’t say this out of false charity, but out of Love. I know my assessments are correct for other reasons as well. Specifically, when I read the Ten Commandments, and works like that of Thomas Aquinas, I know that by following God's Laws I am fulfilling the  greatest expression of God’s Love in the world.  I see how breaking that Law is for my pleasure, and how that doing the opposite of those Commandments causes someone else pain. The Church and Scripture further break down those Ten Commandments into their nuanced components that are missed by many that claim to be Christian. There are many things that are actually sinful, which are a part of those Ten Commandments, that many people miss without the guidance of the Church. In short, my pleasure, which does not meet right reason, will cause myself, or another person's pain. Some people may consider it arrogant to tell others how they should consider living their lives. However, if you find yourself on the opposite side of a Christian trying to explain their Faith, and possibly charitably correcting you, of all people, consider two things. One, it is incredibly difficult to actually explain to someone else how they should live their life because you are terrified of the typical reaction you know you are going to receive. You will not win any popularity contests, and find yourself quite friendless. Two, if someone really considers themselves a Christian look at it from Penn’s perspective from comic duo, “Penn and Teller.” Penn says you should be offended if a Christian does not approach you and nicely tell you about their Faith. In light of what they supposedly believe it means they don’t really care about you, and could hardly really be considered a Christian. His exact words were, “How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize?”

The fact is I know the Faith I hold to, and the authority it carries, comes with a cross for each individual. Jesus said if we were to follow Him we must pick up our cross. He even said if we love our parents, wives, or children more than Him, which means loving them more than His Law, we are not fit for His Kingdom. You see, if we don’t love His Law first, we can’t really love them because we are not being honest. It is a false love we show, which is simply a going along to get along mentality. Sometimes, the most difficult aspect of following Christ’s Way is charitably correcting our own family, when we know the reaction will not be good no matter how nice we are about it. Choosing to be Catholic is not easy. It makes serious demands, and it takes a lot of courage to constantly assess your own interior motives. It takes further courage to explain the Truth to others. Christ's authority was rejected as well, and He was crucified. How many souls could someone as sinful as myself possibly convince, if Jesus Himself was put to death by the crowd? I expect nothing less for myself. ​I am a fallen human being myself,  in need of Communion, and confession, because even though I see this Truth, I still need God’s help to live His Truth. Please pray for me brothers and sisters. God bless.

[homestuck-session-analysis]

Hi, I have a crappy memory and can't remember if I asked for a session request (I don't wanna rush you or anything I just can't remember if I sent it before) It was for a Knight of breath, Mage of time, Heir of space, Seer of void, Sylph of heart, Prince of hope, Page of Life and Thief of rage and quadrants if you do them (Especially for the Knight, Mage and Heir) You don't have to,like, answer this right now, I just wanted to know if I sent it, sorry to bother !

It’s been seven days since Mod Nix spoke to a human being.  Her hands are dry and her knuckles itch. 

Binary checklist: Master aspects: Present. Unrepeated classpects: Present. 

Mage of Time: “One who guides themselves through knowledge pertaining to and through timelines, progression, and Time itself.”  Along with the Witch and thefully-realized Page, the Mage of Time is definitely one of the bestpossible Time players a session can have.  This player knowseverything there is to know about time, timelines, and time travel,and although it begins to infringe on Mind, they likely have a solidgrasp on cycles of causation.  Your Mage has an inherent sense ofTime, a perfect internal clock; however, because of the Mage’sCurse, for all their efforts they may be constantly too slow toeffect what they wish to effect, late to all their appointments forreasons not their fault.  Hopefully they’re not an easilyfrustrated person.  They have about the average capacity forbetrayal, especially if they feel like they’re the ones doing allthe work in the session, with their teammates just lounging about.

Heir of Space: “One who inherits, embodies, and is protected by artwork, creation, and physicality.”  The Heir of Space is a natural at the interpretation of fine art, worldbuilding, and the generation of ideas, although they rarely bother to put in the effort necessary to actually produce any finished works of their own.  Given their protection by Space, the Genesis Frog should already be accounted for.  They might have an unfairly efficient metabolism, given their entitlement, and are almost certainly middle-upper class to unnecessarily rich.  Despite their tendency toward athletics, it’s unlikely this player is on any teams, since they’re used to not having to try for their skill.  There’s very little chance they’d outright work against the team, although they might get annoyed if they feel unappreciated. 

Knight of Breath: “One who exploits to the utmost freedom, pathways, and chaos, and wields it as a weapon.”  The Knight of Breath is a revolutionary, they’re a democrat from the Golden Age of Greece, and they flourish when the people are being restricted.  In the beginning of their session, when the lack of Breath they bring is most pronounced, the focus is on fighting restrictions (and all the self-sacrifice and determination that comes with it).  As a Knight, this player may be a little too engaged with becoming a martyr; again, their activity will be most pronounced in the earlier stages of the session.  Although certain facets of Sburban mechanics are made to be easily broken or bent, bu a determined Mage or any Witch, watch out trying to do anything of the sort here without this player to correct you; due to the natural deficit of Breath in your session, arbitrary rules may be immovable without a realized Knight of Breath exploiting what small amount of Breath remains present to return the restrictions to their usual status.  I see this player being not overly taken with the team; they’ll be more concerned with their own affairs on their land.  They have some propensity for abandonment, but not betrayal. 

Sylph of Heart: “One who heals or heals through identity, self-expression, and romantic relationships.”  This player is a matchmaker, and has probably written at least two self-help pamphlets.  May or may not be the author of Eat, Pray, Love.  They’re a romantic, taking refuge in knowing who they are and encouraging others to do the same.  Having said that, their intervention isn’t positive per se; while the rest of their team is unrealized, encouraging them to follow their instincts may do more damage than good by pushing the players toward the flawed parts of their personality as well as the satisfactory.  On the flip side, upon the realization of all players, identity crises will happen much less often; this player, who’s always defined themselves by their role as a healer, may find themselves apparently isolated.  They might get annoyed, but are too focused on helping to really do anything whatsoever against the team, including just leaving home base. 

Prince of Hope: “One who destroys or destroys through a flood of faith, belief, and success.”  Eridan Ampora.  Pick a crusader or televangelist.  This is one of the aspects in which the Prince is not necessarily realized before they begin destroying through it, rather than destroying it. Evidence does not stand in their way; they likely pick and choose what to believe based on what feels best to them or relieves the most anxiety, which makes the Sylph of Heart particularly dangerous around them.  Hopefully your Thief will temper this somewhat, and if your Page of Life successfully realizes, they can force the Prince onto a more productive track, destroying not through blind faith or personal beliefs but through faith in their peers and chances of success.  Among Princes, this is a particularly powerful one that can make or break a session.  Before they’re realized, I would suggest they have an absolute chance of betrayal if the Thief isn’t constantly stealing their motivation.  Of course, their presence will inflate chances of success greatly -- at least, in the beginning. 

Page of Life: “One who creates, encompasses, and fulfills life energy, maturation, and personal growth.”  The Page of Life is a fucking savior because, frankly, a Mage of Time, Prince of Hope, and Thief of Rage give me little hope (even with the flood the Prince’s presence produces).  Imagine a coefficient given for each player representing their chance of realization.  An Heir of Life’s is 1 (100%).  The average Page’s might be 0.1.  Square that and you’ve got the coefficient for a Page of Life: 0.01.  Good chances.  They’ll start out, naturally, with a complete deficit of their aspect (the least mature person one could ever suffer).  They’re probably also sick half the time, or at least sleep way less than they should, whether that’s their own fault or not.  (They certainly don’t do anything productive with that time.)  If they do mange to realize, I use no irony when I say they will be able to force the rest of your team to realize immediately, with circumstantially simultaneous epiphanies for the whole ectobiological family and a good ive cases for your Sylph at least.  Frankly, although they’ll be uberpowerful post-realization, I can’t see them doing anything against the team beforehand just because they have so little ability. 

Thief of Rage: “One who steals and redistributes passion, drive, and emotions to and in order to benefit themselves.”  The Thief of Rage is the life of the party, bouncing off the walls, perpetually in the spotlight, and tiring everyone else the fuck out.  Living with them before they’ve realized produces a depressive lack of willpower; there’s no point trying to stop them because they always take things too far and have no intention of stopping now.  The good news is that, since they’re stealing the motivation of everyone around them, they should realize quickly (assuming they don’t make any horribly rash decisions borne of their personal frenzy beforehand which, admittedly, is a big assumption.  Hopefully your Mage will fix their mistakes).  At that point, they’ll be much more capable of taking control of their abilities and redirecting them at Dersite enemies, and will probably become the leader of the team, if only because they’re the only one who wants to be.  Given their quick (poor) judgment, they probably wouldn’t last long betraying the team, but they don’t want to, anyway. 

Seer of Void: “One who guides others through and through knowledge pertaining to secrets, ignorance, and the Furthest Ring.”  Though the Thief will lead the session, this Seer is a more localized version of the Chessmaster, executing their plans on a personal basis and using their knowledge of what everyone else doesn’t know to benefit the team.  Having said that, they likely have some bias to their thinking on Void; take Albus Dumbledore, a man hated in some parts of the HP fandom for his manipulation.  The most obvious potential bias, and the one easiest for this player to fell prey to, is the belief that they’re protecting others by withholding information from them, something that perseveres in the face of mounting opposite evidence.  By the time of their completed realization, though, they’ll have thrown it off, more fully understanding the possible negative facets of Void as well as those positive facets they’ve always extolled.  They’re also at slightly higher risk of falling under the influence of Horrorterrors, if you believe that gazing long into an abyss leads to the abyss also gazing into you.  (Only chance of betrayal is due to grimdarkness.) 

Overall: Frog Hunt: Despite the Knight and Mage, your Prince and Heir should be enough to vastly overcompensate.  95%. Black King: With the Mage and Knight as combined strategists and offensive players, the Seer on strategy, the Prince, page, and Thief on offense, and your Sylph healing, you’ve got a good team.  (I’m going to assume complete loyalty and team realization here and correct for it in the loyalty section.)  The Page is also a great healer.  95%. Loyalty: Up ‘till now I’ve been giving the highest possible chances I’m willing to, but here we run into trouble.  Chances are, your Page won’t realize.  The Prince will probably go AWOL, and your Thief will be too self-absorbed to really do much for the beginning of the session.  15% you won’t destroy yourself.

Winning: I’d like to give you something high, but that loyalty stat is killing you, plus the presence of a player Time hates.  Chances of success with anyone surviving is 60%.  Success with everyone surviving is 10% (which is generous in itself). 

~{o-o~}  Nix  {~o-o}~

PS

From Mod Rae: Mage ♦ Heir       Mage ♥ Thief      Heir ♥ Page       Heir ♠ PrinceKnight ♦ Thief    Knight ♥ Seer     Sylph ♦ Page     Prince ♥ Thief      Thief ♠ Seer

Remember that these are all possibilities, not inevitabilities. 

[katebushwick]

The Political Lives of Dead Bodies

To ask this question exposes one to a flourishing literature on “the body,” much of it inspired by feminist theory and philosophy,11 as well as potentially to poststructuralist theories about language and “floating signifiers.” I will not take up the challenge of this literature here but will limit myself instead to some observations about bodies as symbolic vehicles that I think illuminate their presence in postsocialist politics.12 Bones and corpses, coffins and cremation urns, are material objects. Most of the time, they are indisputably there, as our senses of sight, touch, and smell can confirm. As such, a body’s materiality can be critical to its symbolic efficacy: unlike notions such as “patriotism” or “civil society,” for instance, a corpse can be moved around, displayed, and strategically located in specific places. Bodies have the advantage of concreteness that nonetheless transcends time, making past immediately present. Their “thereness” undergirded the founding and continuity of medieval monasteries, providing tangible evidence of a monastery’s property right to donated lands.13 That is, their corporeality makes them important means of localizing a claim (something they still do today, as I suggest in chapter 3). They state unequivocally, as Peter Brown notes, “Hic locus est.”14 This quality also grounded their value as relics. The example of relics, however, immediately complicates arguments based on the body’s materiality: if one added together all the relics of St. Francis of Assisi, for instance, one would get rather more than the material remains of one dead man. So it is not a relic’s actual derivation from a specific body that makes it effective but people’s belief in that derivation. In short, the significance of corpses has less to do with their concreteness than with how people think about them. A dead body is meaningful not in itself but through culturally established relations to death and through the way a specific dead person’s importance is (variously) construed.15 Therefore, I turn to the properties of corpses that make them, in LéviStrauss��s words, “good to think” as symbols. Bodies—especially those of political leaders—have served in many times and places worldwide as symbols of political order. Literature in both historiography and anthropology is rife with instances of a king’s death calling into question the survival of the polity. More generally, political transformation is often symbolized through manipulating bodies (cutting off the head of the king, removing communist leaders from mausoleums). We, too, exhibit this conception, in idioms such as “the body politic.” A body’s symbolic effectiveness does not depend on its standing for one particular thing, however, for among the most important properties of bodies, especially dead ones, is their ambiguity, multivocality, or polysemy. Remains are concrete, yet protean; they do not have a single meaning but are open to many different readings. Because corpses suggest the lived lives of complex human beings, they can be evaluated from many angles and assigned perhaps contradictory virtues, vices, and intentions. While alive, these bodies produced complex behaviors subject to much debate that produces further ambiguity. As with all human beings, one’s assessment of them depends on one’s disposition, the context one places them in (brave or cowardly compared with whom, for instance), the selection one makes from their behaviors in order to outline their “story,” and so on. Dead people come with a curriculum vitae or résumé—several possible résumés, depending on which aspect of their life is being considered. They lend themselves to analogy with other people’s résumés. That is, they encourage identification with their life story, from several possible vantage points. Their complexity makes it fairly easy to discern different sets of emphasis, extract different stories, and thus rewrite history. Dead bodies have another great advantage as symbols: they don’t talk much on their own (though they did once). Words can be put into their mouths—often quite ambiguous words—or their own actual words can be ambiguated by quoting them out of context. It is thus easier to rewrite history with dead people than with other kinds of symbols that are speechless. Yet because they have a single name and a single body, they present the illusion of having only one significance. Fortifying that illusion is their materiality, which implies their having a single meaning that is solidly “grounded,” even though in fact they have no such single meaning. Different people can invoke corpses as symbols, thinking those corpses mean the same thing to all present, whereas in fact they may mean different things to each. All that is shared is everyone’s recognition of this dead person as somehow important. In other words, what gives a dead body symbolic effectiveness in politics is precisely its ambiguity, its capacity to evoke a variety of understandings.16 Let me give an example. On June ,, a quarter of a million Hungarians assembled in downtown Budapest for the reburial of Imre Nagy, Hungary’s communist prime minister at the time of the  revolution.17 For his attempts to reform socialism he had been hanged in , along with four members of his government, and buried with them in unmarked graves, without coffins, facedown. From the Hungarian point of view, this is a pretty ignominious end.18 Yet now he and those executed with him were reburied, faceup in coffins, with full honors and with tens of thousands in attendance. Anyone watching Hungarian television on that June  would have seen a huge, solemn festivity, carefully orchestrated, with many foreign dignitaries as well as three Communist Party leaders standing near the coffins (the Communist Party of Hungary had not yet itself become a corpse). The occasion definitely looked official (in fact it was organized privately), and it rewrote the history—given only one official meaning for forty years— of Nagy’s relation to the Hungarian people. Although the media presented a unified image of him, there was no consensus on what Nagy’s reburied corpse in fact meant. Susan Gal, analyzing the political rhetoric around the event, finds five distinct clusters of imagery, some of it associated with specific political parties or groups:20 () nationalist images emphasizing national unity around a hero of the nation (nationalist parties soon found these very handy); () religious images (which could be combined with the nationalist ones) emphasizing rebirth, reconciliation, and forgiveness, and presenting Nagy as a martyr rather than a hero; (3) various images of him as a communist, as the first reform communist, and as a true man of the people, his reburial symbolizing the triumph of a humane socialist option and the death of a cruel Stalinist one; () generational images, presenting him as the symbol of the younger generation whose life chances had been lost with his execution (this group would soon become the Party of Young Democrats); and () images associated with the ideas of truth, conscience, and rehabilitation, so that his reburial signified clearing one’s name and telling the story of one ’s persecution—an opportunity to rewrite one ’s personal history. (That some people presented communist Prime Minister Nagy as an anticommunist hero shows just how complex his significances could be.) Perhaps attendance at Nagy’s funeral was so large, then, because he brought together diverse segments of the population, all resonating differently to various aspects of his life. And perhaps so many political formations were able to participate because all could legitimate a claim of some kind through him, even though the claims themselves varied greatly.21 This, it seems to me, is the mark of a good political symbol: it has legitimating effects not because everyone agrees on its meaning but because it compels interest despite (because of?) divergent views of what it means. Aside from their evident materiality and their surfeit of ambiguity, dead bodies have an additional advantage as symbols: they evoke the awe, uncertainty, and fear associated with “cosmic” concerns, such as the meaning of life and death.22 For human beings, death is the quintessential cosmic issue, one that brings us all face to face with ultimate questions about what it means to be—and to stop being—human, about where we have come from and where we are going. For this reason, corpses lend themselves particularly well to politics in times of major upheaval, such as the postsocialist period. The revised status of religious institutions in postsocialist Eastern Europe reinforces that connection, for religions have long specialized in dealing with ultimate questions. Moreover, religions monopolize the practices associated with death, including both formal notions of burial and the “folk superstitions” that all the major faiths so skillfully integrated into their rituals. Except in the socialist period, East Europeans over two millennia have associated death with religious practices. A religious reburial nourishes the dead person both with these religious associations and with the rejection of “atheist” communism. Politics around a reburied corpse thus benefits from the aura of sanctity the corpse is presumed to bear, and from the implicit suggestion that a reburial (re)sacralizes the political order represented by those who carry it out. Their sacred associations contribute to another quality of dead bodies as symbols: their connection with affect, a significant problem for social analysis. Anthropologists have long asked, Wherein lies the efficacy of symbols? How do they engage emotions?23 The same question troubles other social sciences as well: Why do some things and not others work emotionally in the political realm? It is asked particularly about symbols used to evoke national identifications; Benedict Anderson, for instance, inquires why national meanings command such deep emotional responses and why people are “ready to die for these inventions.”24 The link of dead bodies to the sacred and the cosmic—to the feelings of awe aroused by contact with death—seems clearly part of their symbolic efficacy. One might imagine that another affective dimension to corpses is their being not just any old symbol: unlike a tomato can or a dead bird, they were once human beings with lives that are to be valued. They are heavy symbols because people cared about them when they were alive, and identify with them. This explanation works best for contemporary deaths, such as the Yugoslav ones I discuss in chapter 3. Many political corpses, however, were known and loved in life by only a small circle of people; or— like Serbia’s Prince Lazar or Romania’s bishop Inochentie Micu (whose case I examine in the next chapter)—they lived so long ago that any feelings they arouse can have nothing to do with them as loved individuals. Therefore I find it insufficient to explain their emotional efficacy merely by their having been human beings. Perhaps more to the point is their ineluctable self-referentiality as symbols: because all people have bodies, any manipulation of a corpse directly enables one’s identification with it through one’s own body, thereby tapping into one’s reservoirs of feeling. In addition (or as a result), such manipulations may mobilize preexisting affect by evoking one’s own personal losses or one’s identification with specific aspects of the dead person’s biography. This possibility increases wherever national ideologies emphasize ideas about suffering and victimhood, as do nearly all in Eastern Europe.25 These kinds of emotional effects are likely enhanced when death’s “ultimate questions,” fear, awe, and personal identifications are experienced in public settings—for example, mass reburials like those of Imre Nagy or the Yugoslav skeletons from World War II. Finally, I believe the strong affective dimension of dead-body politics also stems from ideas about kinship and proper burial. Kinship notions are powerful organizers of feeling in all human societies; other social forms (such as national ideologies) that harness kinship idioms profit from their power. Ideas about proper burial often tie kinship to cosmic questions concerning order in the universe, as well. I will further elaborate on this suggestion later in this chapter and in chapter 3. Dead bodies, I have argued, have properties that make them particularly effective political symbols. They are thus excellent means for accumulating something essential to political transformation: symbolic capital.26 (Given the shortage of investment capital in postsocialist countries and the difficulties of economic reform, perhaps the symbolic variety takes on special significance!) The fall of communist parties devalued much of what had served as political or symbolic capital, opening a wide field for competition in which success depends on finding and accumulating new capital resources. Dead bodies, in short, can be a site of political profit. In saying this, I am partly talking about the process of establishing political legitimacy, but by emphasizing symbolic capital I mean to keep at the forefront of my discussion the symbolic elements of that process. R E O R D E R I N G WO R L D S O F M E A N I N G In considering the symbolic properties of corpses, I have returned repeatedly to their “cosmic” dimension.27 I do so because I believe this emphasis suits what I observed earlier about the significance of the events of 1989: they mark an epochal shift in the international system, one whose effects pose fundamental challenges to people ’s hitherto meaningful existence. This is true worldwide, but especially in the former socialist bloc. All human beings act within certain culturally shaped background expectations and understandings, often not conscious, about what “reality” is.28 One might call these their sense of cosmic order, or their general understanding of their place in the universe.29 By this I mean, for instance, ideas about where people in general and our people in particular came from; who are the most important kinds of people, and how one should behave with them; what makes conduct moral or immoral; what are the essential attributes of a “person”; what is time, and how does it flow (or not); and so on. Following current anthropological wisdom, however, I do not see these cosmic conceptions strictly as “ideas,” in the cognitive realm alone. Rather, they are inseparable from action in the world—they are beliefs and ideas materialized in action. This is one way (the way I prefer) of defining culture. Unfortunately, nearly all nonanthropologists understand “culture” as cognition, ideas—a meaning I want to avoid.30 Hence, instead of using “culture,” I speak of “worlds of meaning” or simply “worlds” (though not in the sense of “lifeworld” that is specific to phenomenology and the recent work of Jürgen Habermas). “World,” as I intend it, seeks to capture a combination of “worldview” and associated action-in-the-world, people’s sense of a meaningful universe in which they also act. Their ideas and their action constantly influence one another in a dynamic way. In moments of major transformation, people may find that new forms of action are more productive than the ones they are used to, or that older forms make sense in a different way, or that ideals they could only aspire to before are now realizable. Such moments lead to reconfiguring one’s world; the process can be individual and collective, and it is often driven by the activities of would-be elites (in competition with one another). Students of the demise of Soviet-style party-states have tended to pose the problems of postsocialist transformation as creating markets, making private property, and constructing democracy. This frame permits two things: one can absorb the postsocialist examples into a worldwide “transition to democracy,” and one can emphasize technical solutions to the difficulties encountered (“shock therapy,” writing constitutions, electionmanagement consulting, training people in new ways of bookkeeping, etc.). I believe the postsocialist change is much bigger. It is a problem of reorganization on a cosmic scale, and it involves the redefinition of virtually everything, including morality, social relations, and basic meanings. It means a reordering of people’s entire meaningful worlds.31 Although my phrasing may seem exaggerated, without this perspective I doubt that we can grasp the magnitude of what 1989 has meant for those living through it: a rupture in their worlds of meaning, their sense of cosmic order. The end of Party rule was a great shock to people living in the former socialist countries. This was not because everyone had internalized the Communist Party’s own cosmology and organization of things: far from it. The history of Party rule throughout the region was a long struggle between what Party leaders wanted and what everyone else was prepared to live with. Practices, expectations, and beliefs quite antithetical to the Party’s dictates jostled with those the Party promoted. Nevertheless, daily life proceeded within or against certain constraints, opportunities, and rules of the game that the political system had established, and these formed a set of background expectations framing people’s lives. The events of 1989 disrupted these background expectations in ways that many people in the region found disorienting (even if some of them also found therein new opportunities). They could no longer be sure what to say in what contexts, how to conduct politics with more than one political party, how to make a living in the absence of socialist subsidies and against spiraling inflation, and so on. They found their leisurely sense of time’s passage wholly unsuited to the sudden crunch of tasks they had to do. Moreover, their accustomed relations with other people became suddenly tense. Quarrels over property, for example, severed long-amicable bonds between siblings and neighbors; new possibilities for enrichment altered friendships; and increasing numbers of parents saw their plans for security and retirement evaporate as more of their children headed abroad. In these circumstances, people of all kinds could no longer count on their previous grasp of how the world works. Whether consciously or not, they became open to reconsidering (either on their own or with the help of political, cultural, and religious elites) their social relations and their worlds of meaning. This is what I mean when I speak of reordering meaningful worlds. I believe deadbody politics plays a part in that process, and that to examine it will clarify my project of animating the study of politics. My conceptualization here resonates with Durkheim’s, particularly the Durkheim of the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, which is among other things a treatise on the possibilities for moral regeneration in human societies.32 The resemblance is not fortuitous. First, Durkheim wrote during a time of great moral ferment in France; his work aimed expressly to comment upon that ferment and contribute to quieting it. His situation then reminds one of the s postsocialist situation. Second (and for that very reason), some scholars consider Durkheim the only major theorist apt for thinking about political and moral renewal.33 Although I gladly second him in that endeavor, and although some of my proposals in this book (such as the theme of proper burial) hint at a Durkheimian reflex, I part company with him in regard to the conscience collective; I look not for shared mentalities but for conflict among groups over social meanings. Reordering worlds can consist of almost anything—that’s what a “world” means. To reorder worlds of meaning implicates all realms of activity: social relations, political ideas and behavior, worldviews, economic action. Far more domains of life might be included under this rubric than I have time to explore, and dead bodies can serve as loci for struggling over new meanings in any of them. For my purposes in this book, I will emphasize their role in the following areas: struggles to endow authority and politics with sacrality or a “sacred” dimension; contests over what might make the postsocialist order a moral one; competing politicizations of space and time; and reassessments of identities (especially national ones) and social relations. I discuss a fifth possible domain central to postsocialist transformation—property relations—together with the others, for it enters into all of them. Yet another domain that figures centrally in Eastern Europe’s transformation but cannot be treated here is the obverse of death, namely [re]birth. The politics of abortion, for instance, has agitated nearly all postsocialist countries, as pro-natalist nationalists strive for demographic renewal of their nations following what they see to be socialism’s “murderous” abortion policies.34 In each of these domains, dead bodies serve as sites of political conflict related to the process of reordering the meaningful universe. The conflicts involve elites of many kinds and the populations they seek to influence, in the altered balance of power that characterizes the period since 1989. I will explain what I intend by these rubrics, briefly for the first three and at greater length for the fourth. Authority, Politics, and the Sacred The meaningful worlds of human beings generally include sets of values concerning authority—values like the monarch’s divinity, orderly bureaucratic procedure, a leader’s charisma, full democratic participation, the scientific laws of progress, and so on. Like Weber, we can speak of different ways of acknowledging authority as modes of legitimation, and in considering social change we can ask how one group of legitimating values gives way to another. Unlike Weber, who tended to see the sacred as part of only some modes of authority, I (and many other anthropologists) would hold that authority always has a “sacred” component, even if it is reduced merely to holding “as sacred” certain secular values. This was certainly true of socialist regimes, which sought assiduously to sacralize themselves as guardians of secular values, especially the scientific laws of historical progress. Because their language omitted notions of the sacred, however, both outsiders and their own populations tended to view them as lacking a sacred dimension.35 Part of reordering meaningful worlds since 1989, then, is to sacralize authority and politics in new ways. A ready means of presenting the postsocialist order as something different from before has been to reinsert expressly sacred values into political discourse. In many cases, this has meant a new relation between religion and the state, along with a renewal of religious faith.36 Reestablishing faith or relations with a church enables both political parties and individuals to symbolize their anticommunism and their return to precommunist values. This replaces the kind of sacredness that undergirded the authority of communist parties and serves to sacralize politics in new ways. In chapter  I describe a conflict that has arisen around the connection of church with politics in Romania (and other Orthodox countries). Among the conflict’s many facets are struggles over the sacralization of politics, and reburying a dead body is part of them. Moral Order Use of religious idioms may also be part of remaking the world as a moral place. Because communist parties proclaimed themselves custodians of a particular moral order, the supersession of communism reopens concepts of political morality, both for politicians and others who want to claim it, and for ordinary citizens concerned with the behavior of those they live among. In the first few years following , the route to new moral orders passed chiefly through stigmatizing the communist one: all who presented themselves either as opposed to communism or as its victims were ipso facto making a moral claim. Many of these claims led to attempts at assessing blame or accountability and at achieving revenge, compensation, or restitution. Depending on who organizes and executes the process, the moral order implied in pursuing accountability can strengthen a new government, garner international support for a party to a dispute, or restore dignity to individual victims and their families. Society’s members may see enforcing accountability as part of moral “purification”: the guilty are no longer shielded, the victims can tell of their suffering, and the punishment purifies a public space that the guilty had made impure. Alternatively, the moral outcome may be seen as lying not in purification but in compensation for wrongs acknowledged. Foremost among the means for this was the question of restoring private property ownership, as something morally essential to a new anticommunist order. Efforts to establish accountability thus served to draw up a moral balance sheet, to settle accounts, as a condition of making the postsocialist order a moral one. Assessing blame and demanding accountability can occur at many sites, one of them being dead bodies. (In chapter 3, I discuss a particularly stark instance of this, former Yugoslavia, where rival exhumations produced reciprocal charges of genocide and acts of revenge that fueled the breakup of the Yugoslav state.) Another form of “accounting” that implicates dead bodies involves efforts to determine “historical truth,” which many accuse socialism of having suppressed. An example is the reburial of Imre Nagy, mentioned above, which sought to reestablish historical truth about Nagy’s place in Hungarian history, as part of creating a new moral universe. His example leads us to an additional means of reordering worlds, namely, giving new values to space and time. Reconfiguring Space and Time As scholars ranging from Durkheim to Elias to Leach have argued, what we call space and time are social constructs.37 All human societies show characteristic ways of conceptualizing and organizing them; any one society may contain multiple ways, perhaps differentiated by activity or social group.38 When I speak of how space and time can be resignified, I have in mind two distinct possibilities: the more modest one of changing how space and time are marked or punctuated, and the more momentous one of transforming spatiality and temporality themselves. Socialism attempted both, the latter by imposing entirely new rules on the uses of space and creating temporalities that were arrhythmic and apocalyptic instead of the cyclical and linear rhythms they displaced.39 I will leave that subject to chapter 3 and will briefly discuss changes in temporal and spatial punctuation now. We might think of both space and time using the metaphor of a geological landscape. Any landscape contains more potential landmarks than are noted by those who pass through it. When I speak of “punctuating” or “marking” space and time, I mean highlighting a specific set of landmarks—using this rock or that hill (or date, or event) as a point of reference, instead of some other rock or hill (or date or event), or some other feature altogether, such as a railway crossing. Influencing the kinds of features selected are such things as one’s position relative to them (a rock is a useful landmark only from a certain angle or distance), cultural factors (some groups find trees more meaningful than rocks), local economies (hunter-gatherers will notice items a traveling salesman will miss), and so on. If we put our landscape on “fast forward,” the landscape itself transforms, hills and mountains rising up or subsiding while valleys are etched and floras change type. The constantly changing relief presents still other possibilities for establishing landmarks. I think of such spatiotemporal landmarks as aspects of people’s meaningful worlds; modifying the landmarks is part of reordering those worlds. For example, as I observed in the introduction, among the most common ways in which political regimes mark space are by placing particular statues in particular places and by renaming landmarks such as streets, public squares, and buildings. These provide contour to landscapes, socializing them and saturating them with specific political values: they signify space in specific ways. Raising and tearing down statues gives new values to space (resignifies it), just as does renaming streets and buildings. Another form of resignifying space comes from changes in property ownership, which may require adding border stones and other markers to differentiate landscapes that socialism had homogenized. Where the political change includes creating entire nation-states, as in ex-Yugoslavia and parts of the Soviet Union, resignifying space extends further: to marking territories as “ours” and setting firm international borders to distinguish “ours” from “theirs.” The location of those borders is part of the politics of space, and dead bodies have been active in it. As for time, among the usual ways of altering its political values are by creating wholly new calendars, as in the French Revolution (whose first casualties included clocks themselves40); by establishing holidays to punctuate time differently; by promoting activities that have new work rhythms or time discipline; and by giving new contours to the “past” through revising genealogies and rewriting history.41 Since 1989, the last of these has been very prominent in “overcoming” the socialist past and (as some people see it) returning to a “normal” history. I view this historical revision, too, as an aspect of reordering worlds, and one important means of doing it has been to reposition dead bodies. National Identities and Social Relations The worlds of meaning that human beings inhabit include characteristic organizations of what we call “identities.”42 In the contemporary United States, people are thought to hold several identities, the most commonly mentioned being class, occupation, race, gender, and ethnic identity; in other times and places, these would have been less salient than kin-based identifications, or rank in a system of feudal estates. Especially prominent in the East European region have been national identifications. Contrary to popular opinion, I and others have argued that socialism did not suppress these identifications but reinforced them in specific ways.43 They remain prominent in the postsocialist period, as groups seek to reorganize their interrelations following the demise of their putative identities as “socialist men,” now superseded by “anticommunist” as a basic political identification. Sharp conflict around national identities has arisen above all from the dissolution of the Yugoslav and Soviet federations, as new nation-states take their place. Conflicts to (re)define national identities implicate contests over time and space, for statues and revised histories often celebrate specific sites and dates as national. I find it helpful to assimilate national identities into the larger category of social relations within which I think they belong: kinship. In my view, the identities produced in nation-building processes do not displace those based in kinship but—as any inspection of national rhetorics will confirm—reinforce and are parasitic upon them. National ideologies are saturated with kinship metaphors: fatherland and motherland, sons of the nation and their brothers, mothers of these worthy sons, and occasionally daughters. Many national ideologies present their nations as large, mostly patrilineal kinship (descent) groups that celebrate founders, great politicians, and cultural figures as not just heroes but veritable “progenitors,” forefathers—that is, as ancestors. Think of George Washington, “Father of His Country,” and Atatürk, “Father Turk.” (I say “patrilineal” because, as numerous scholars have observed, nearly all the “ancestors” recognized in national ideologies are male.44) Nationalism is thus a kind of ancestor worship, a system of patrilineal kinship, in which national heroes occupy the place of clan elders in defining a nation as a noble lineage. This view is not original with me. It appears in the work of anthropologists Edmund Leach, David Schneider, and Meyer Fortes,45 and in Benedict Anderson’s suggestion that we treat nationalism “as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ and ‘religion,’ rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism.’ ”46 Given this view, the work of contesting national histories and repositioning temporal landmarks implies far more than merely “restoring truth”: it challenges the entire national genealogy. This happens quite visibly in reburying a dead body, an act that inserts the dead person differently as an ancestor (more central or more peripheral) within the lineage of honored forebears. My focus on corpses enables me to push this argument even further and to speak of the proper burials of ancestors, which include revering them as cultural treasures.  Any human community consists not only of those now living in it but also, potentially, of both ancestors and anticipated descendants. In a wry statement by a Montenegrin poet we see part of this nicely: “We Montenegrins are a small population even if you count our dead.” Different human groupings place different emphases on these three segments of possible community—dead, living, and yetunborn. Imperial China, for example, is renowned for having made ancestors into real actors in the world of the living, while in other societies ancestors are crucial points of reference for the living but inhabit their own world (though they may enter ours on occasion). Pro-natalist nationalist ideologies, by contrast, are preoccupied with descendants, connected to ancestors in an endless chain through time. In many human communities, to set up right relations between living human communities and their ancestors depends critically on proper burial.47 Because the living not only mourn their dead but also fear them as sources of possible harm, special efforts are made to propitiate them by burying them properly. The literature of anthropology contains many examples of burial practices designed to set relations with dead ancestors on the right path, so that the human community—which includes both dead and living—will be in harmony. Gillian Feeley-Harnik writes of such ancestor practices in Madagascar: “Ancestors are made from remembering them. Remembering creates a difference between the deadliness of corpses and the fruitfulness of ancestors. The ancestors respond by blessing their descendants with fertility and prosperity.”48 Their harmonious coexistence is about more than just getting along: it is part of an entire cosmology, part of maintaining order in the universe. All human groups have ideas and practices concerning what constitutes a “good death,” how dead people should be treated, and what will happen if they are not properly cared for. In what direction should the feet of the corpse be pointed? Who should wash it, and how should it be dressed? Can one say the name of the deceased person or not? How much time should elapse before burial? Is alcohol allowed at the wake? May the body be cremated without killing the person’s chances for resurrection? What things must be said at the funeral? What kinds of gifts should be exchanged, and with whom? If one of these things is not done correctly, what will happen? Proper burials have myriad rules and requirements, and these are of great moment, for they affect the relations of both living and dead to the universe that all inhabit. Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe offer many examples of such conceptual worlds.49 Although specific beliefs and practices vary DEAD BODIES ANIMATE THE STUDY OF POLITICS  widely across the region, for illustrative purposes they display sufficient commonalities to be treated together. What goes into a proper burial? Kligman, Lampland, and Rév report50 from contemporary Transylvanian and Hungarian ethnography that villagers there believe the soul of the deceased person watches the funeral, and if it is dissatisfied, it will return and punish the living by creating havoc, often in the form of illness. Was enough money thrown into the coffin? Were the burial clothes fine and comfortable? Was the deceased’s favorite pipe put into the casket? If the person died unmarried, was a wedding also performed at his funeral? Various parts of the funeral ritual (the orientation of the body as it leaves the house, the reciprocal asking of forgiveness between living and dead, etc.) aim specifically to prevent a disgruntled soul from coming back. The possibilities for mayhem are much graver if the deceased had no burial at all. In addition, for months and years after the funeral these villagers offer regular prayers and ritual meals to propitiate the dead and keep them quiet, believing that a well-fed, contented soul will protect its earthly kin.51 One still finds ritual practices of this kind, for instance, in Transylvania and the former Yugoslavia. Every year a week after Easter, villagers go to the graves of kin in the cemetery, bearing special food cooked for the occasion; they sit on the graves and eat, offering the food to their dead.52 For these people it is not enough that the dead be properly buried: the living must keep feeding their dead kin so as to ensure the ancestors’ blessing and continued goodwill, which are essential to a well-ordered universe.53 From research in the Polish/Ukrainian borderland, Oltenia (Romania), and elsewhere we learn that a dead person who does not receive a proper burial has a number of options.54 He may become a “walking dead man,” annoy his family members, try to sleep with his wife, and seek to inflict retribution on those who wronged him. Or he may become a vampire. (These job choices are the preserve chiefly of males; unhappy dead females take on other forms.) One way or another, he makes the lives of his earthly relatives and neighbors unpleasant; they must either give him a proper burial (if he had none) or (if already buried) dig him up and cut off his head or drive a stake through his heart. Concern for the well-being of ancestors and other dead is thus crucial to peaceful living and to an orderly universe; proper burial helps to ensure these. DEAD BODIES ANIMATE THE STUDY OF POLITICS  The idea that properly treated ancestors become protective spirits (or even saints) is found from Russia westward into Hungary, as is fear that a vengeful spirit will torment the living unless suitably placated. Such notions easily acquire deeper religious significance. Tumarkin describes, for instance, the link between the souls of ancestors and saints: in a Russian peasant house, icons often hang opposite the hearth, where the ancestors’ souls are thought to reside. Russian Christianity absorbed forms of ancestor worship, which became an important part of cults of the saints; indeed, Russian peasants have long understood saints to be their adored forefathers who sacrificed themselves for future generations. “To light a candle for the saints,” Tumarkin observes, “was to enter into spiritual discourse with the protective spirits of the past.”55 Ideas about proper burial figure even in present-day dead-body politics. An example is the debates around whether to remove Lenin’s mummy from its mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square. Like the corpse of Imre Nagy, Lenin’s has been the object of much politicking. Although the idea of removing him and burying him somewhere else56 is not new, starting in  it was proposed and debated with increasing vigor. (The debate was briefly sidetracked by a report in Forbes magazine, also carried on U.S. TV programs such as ABC’s Evening News, that Lenin was to be sold for hard currency at international auction.57) Having initially opposed the idea, Yeltsin later changed his mind, suggesting in 3 and again that Lenin be removed from Red Square for burial.58 Then came the attacks on the statues of Tsar Nicholas and Peter the Great, fatal in the former instance; both were motivated, as I said, by opposition to Lenin’s burial. The Russian Orthodox Church came out on the side of burying Lenin but refrained from stating whether the church would bury him as a “Christian.” Meanwhile, the Duma voted to denounce the project for his removal, and the question of who (Yeltsin by presidential decree, the Federal Assembly, or the people by referendum) should make the final decision was tossed around like a hot potato. A poll taken in June showed clearly who favored burial and who did not:  percent supported the idea, and 3 percent opposed it; the latter were concentrated among supporters of Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov and some nationalists.59 One could say a great deal more on the politics behind Lenin’s mummy (as does Vladislav Todorov, in a lengthy and often hilarious discussion60). DEAD BODIES ANIMATE THE STUDY OF POLITICS  Market forces also have their effect. The embalmers who own the secret formula for Lenin reportedly took on after-hours work, catering to the fashions of newly wealthy Russians wanting to be embalmed; this moonlighting gives them another source of income, now that state funds for tending Lenin’s mummy have dried up, and subsidizes their continuing to work on him.61 But also important to determining Lenin’s fate are ideas about what makes for a proper burial. Their relevance comes from the decidedly religious underpinnings of the Lenin cult, and from notions about the divine origin of the authority of the tsars (to whom Lenin was often compared).62 An embalmed and not-buried Lenin offends Russian Orthodox sensibility, according to which every dead person should be interred, with very specific rites.63 For Russians, as for others discussed above, if someone is not buried or is buried improperly (or if abnormal people are given a “normal” burial), then bad things will happen.64 Because an unburied body is a source of things not being quite right in the cosmos, this is in itself sufficient reason to place Lenin firmly in the soil. But the debate is complicated by another set of beliefs, one having to do with saints. In Russian Orthodox doctrine, a dead person is revealed to be a saint not only through miracles but also because the corpse does not putrefy. As is true in many parts of the world,65 it used to be common Orthodox practice to exhume the dead after a certain time (three, five, or seven years was customary), wash the bones, and rebury them with a special liturgy. This ritual is still performed in some areas, including rural Greece.66 If upon digging up a Russian corpse one found that it had not decayed, its preservation was a clear sign of sainthood.67 Even though the incorruptibility of Lenin’s corpse is a human achievement, he is still touched by these associations: dead people whose bodies have not decayed are holy.68 From the religious point of view, then, one can see that Lenin’s mummy should be buried, lest bad things happen, and at the same time that it should not be buried but be exposed under glass, as befits a saint. In either case, the rationale has not just religious backing but roots in ideas about ongoing relations between the living and their dead. The only group excluded from arguments of this kind is the Communist Party, but it has ingeniously exploited other aspects of popular belief. In the parliamentary debate over what to do with Lenin, one of the communist participants reminded his DEAD BODIES ANIMATE THE STUDY OF POLITICS  audience that in  Russian archaeologists had dug up the body of Tamerlane, about whom it was said that anyone who disturbed his grave would be cursed. Shortly thereafter, the Nazis overran the Soviet Union. The deputy concluded by asking what might happen if they now disturbed Lenin’s casket to bury him!69 All these different and contradictory views about reburial are available for use in a political contest that I believe is enriched by including them, to enchant the kind of political analysis we might do on Lenin’s corpse.70 I should clarify my aims in making these points about “proper burial”: I both am and am not making an argument about the continuity of older beliefs and practices. Given that years of official atheism and relentless modernization have eroded many beliefs recorded in earlier ethnographic work, I would be foolish to presume continuity. Nonetheless, as Gail Kligman’s wonderful book The Wedding of the Dead shows clearly for northern Romania in the s, popular ideas such as those I have described were not erased during the socialist period.71 Even Moscow intellectuals who think themselves beyond such “superstitions” can feel that there is something uncomfortably out of order about Lenin’s unburied corpse.72 But we should think about these seeming continuities carefully. Some practices that appear to be constant may actually have changed: for example, Andreesco and Bacou describe the modifications that distinguish burial practices in Oltenia (southern Romania) today from those of decades ago.73 Assuming the trappings of modernity may mean that people no longer feed their ancestors, but they may still think it important to recognize them. More important, however, is that some “traditional” practices are in fact reinforced (if not, indeed, invented, in Hobsbawm and Ranger’s famous formulation74) by their present setting. Andreesco and Bacou indicate that far from suppressing older burial practices, Romanian socialism amplified some of them.75 One reason might be that because religious burial violated official atheism, to bury one ’s dead properly was a form of resistance to official religious policy. A similar point emerges from a  article in the New York Times, which reported that in Serbia as of the s, practices involving hospitality and feasting in connection with the dead increased, as villagers began building entire houses on the graves of their relatives. These often lavish structures, with a coffin in the basement and DEAD BODIES ANIMATE THE STUDY OF POLITICS  regular feasting above, “so the spirit of the deceased has something to eat and drink,” had less to do with tradition than with competitive displays among neighbors and against the Party elite.76 Thus, by invoking older beliefs and practices, I am not affirming unbroken continuity; the practices may be rejuvenated, attenuated, or simply invoked in discourse. What is most important about them is that those changes or invocations refer to practices that have a history (or histories). That history makes available numerous associations derived from earlier, precommunist times, forming a broader cultural system that shapes the possibilities for present political action. Political transformation may give “traditional” ideas new urgency—for example, proper burial and harmonious relations among kin may be especially powerful politically for those living through postsocialist times that have wrought such havoc on social relations among kinsmen, owing to conflicts over property restitution (which implicates kin above all others77). Ideas about proper burial, then, even if no longer held in a form identical to ideas from the past, enter into the penumbra of meanings that politicians and others can draw upon, alter, and intensify. These ideas and practices thereby inflect what can be done with dead-body symbolism.78 The great stability of mortuary practices, mentioned earlier, lends further credence to this claim. I have one final point to make about proper burial. The point is specific to the cases of famous dead, such as Bartók, the heart of Bulgaria’s Tsar Boris, and Romanian bishop Inochentie Micu (see chapter ), who have returned from abroad. And I believe it applies to such cases not just in Eastern Europe but elsewhere as well. Even when ideas about vampires and the undead have gone out of style, one common rule about proper burial still in force is that our “sons” must be buried on “our” soil, lest we be plagued by misfortune arising from the soul’s continued distress. The notion of repossessing “our” dead is common worldwide, as is evident from customs of warfare that return dead soldiers to their home countries. (Think of the ongoing preoccupation, in U.S. politics, with MIAs from the Korean and Vietnamese wars.) In such cases reburial at home may be presented simply as a matter DEAD BODIES ANIMATE THE STUDY OF POLITICS  of proper rest for the deceased, the idea that it prevents misfortune remaining at best implicit. We see this with a home-bound skeleton of a very different sort, that of the Sioux chief Long Wolf, brought back in September  from London (where he had been “stranded” for  years) to his ancestral burial grounds in South Dakota. One of the Sioux who traveled to London to retrieve him observed after the funeral, “It means he’s set free. He’ll be among his own people. His bones will remain with us. The spirit remains with the bones, and the bones will finally be at rest among his own.”79 What interests me in cases like this one and similar postsocialist examples is their perhaps unexpected link with national identities, the subject with which I began this section. That link is through the contemporary vogue, worldwide, for the return of cultural property or “heritage,” an increasingly important part of building modern national identities. Over recent decades we have grown accustomed to peoples and countries, especially former colonies, petitioning to retrieve items of their cultural heritage or patrimony, often held by former colonial powers. Even Winniethe-Pooh, Piglet, et al. have entered into the corpus of contested objects.80 Efforts to define or redefine national identities seem increasingly to involve the notion that the “health” of a people is greatest when it has all its valued things at hand, rather than lying in museums or improper graves elsewhere. Perhaps the cases best known to residents of the United States involve the repatriation of Native American heritage—meaning both sacred objects and ancestral bones. The very word “repatriation” is eloquent: valued objects and remains are returning to the father- or homeland, where they should be. In her fascinating book The Return of Cultural Treasures, Jeanette Greenfield observes that in the nineteenth century, cultural property of many kinds was “centralized,” brought from its places of origin into museums in the major colonial centers.81 We are now witnessing the opposite movement, as more and more museums are forced or volunteer to return their treasures to the places whence these were taken. Not every relic or object that moves is part of this aspect of postcolonialism, and not all bodies and objects are equally worth retrieving. The ones that are, however, are usually the bodies of persons thought to have contributed something DEAD BODIES ANIMATE THE STUDY OF POLITICS  special to their national history or culture. Adapting Greenfield, I would call them “cultural treasures.” In many parts of the world it seems to have become very important to bring “our” treasures—whether they are valued objects or physical remains—back home where they “belong.” The imagery of possession so often used inclines me to assimilate them to a worldwide concern with property rights—in this case, rights to cultural property. This argument suggests that repatriating dead bodies in the postsocialist period is part of refurbishing (and fighting over) national identities by bringing “our cultural treasures” home for a proper burial—a burial that binds people to their national territories in an orderly universe.82 These repatriations refurbish national identities by “nationalizing” symbolic capital that had entered global circuits, thus affirming the individuality of East European nation-states too long seen from without as barely distinguishable clones of international Soviet-style communism. Where the repatriates are world-famous, they may bring world respect, countering the arrogance of foreigners inclined to say, for instance, “Who would have thought that Romania, of all places, could produce cultural geniuses like Ionesco, Enescu, Eliade, and Brâncus¸i!” This outcome is especially likely where the dead person himself has requested the homecoming (usually in a will), as is true of a number of the repatriated corpses. Perhaps the more respectable image they bring thereby will help their countries to be judged “European” and, thus, worthy of EU membership. No matter whence the impetus for repatriations—from families of the deceased wanting royalties (as with Bartók; see introduction, note ), from wills, or from governing parties hoping to consolidate a reputation as guardians of the national heritage—they draw wider notice and enhance the nation’s global image. It is as if repatriating these cultural treasures and giving them proper burial localizes part of the symbolic capital they contain, just as postsocialist economies seek to attach themselves to international circuits in ways that will enable them to hold onto some of the profits for themselves. As I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, the corporeality of dead bodies facilitates such localizing claims. Their reburial participates in reordering meaningful worlds that are simultaneously conceptual, political, and economic. …the ordering principles of daily life and the basic rules of the game in Soviet-bloc politics ceased to hold. The result was a high level of political conflict and disagreement as newly forming groups with vulnerable constituencies jockeyed for advantage in new political fields. An always fragile balance of political forces now underwent a profound shift, a shift so momentous that it warranted truly cosmic imagery and raised all manner of culturally deep concerns. What is the order of our world now that the Communist Party has fallen? Whom do we wish to recognize as our ancestors, now that Marx, Lenin, and local communists are out, and what genealogies do we wish to rewrite? How should we position ourselves relative to other people—who, that is, are our kin and trusted associates? How can we reset our moral compass? Who is to blame for what has happened, and how should they be punished? Trying to resolve questions of this kind is what it means to reorder meaningful worlds. I have emphasized here the following aspects of that process: endowing postsocialist politics with a sense of the sacred, working toward a new moral order, assessing blame and seeking compensation, resignifying spatial and temporal landmarks and international borders, seeking modes of national self-affirmation and of connection with ancestors. Given all this, I think it is not too much to speak of reordering worlds of meaning as what is at stake in reburying the dead. CONCLUSION Let me recapitulate the arguments I have been making. My aims in the book as a whole are the descriptive one of presenting some material about the political “lives” of dead bodies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and the analytical one of showing how we might think about that material within an enchanted, enlivened sense of politics. I see dead bodies as one of many vehicles through which people in postsocialist societies reconfigure their worlds of meaning in the wake of what I (and, I believe, they) regard as a profoundly disorienting change in their surroundings. The widespread disorientation offered tremendous opportunity to people seeking power, as well; the challenge for them was to form new political arenas, invent new rules of the game, and build new political identifications, all in fierce competition with other would-be elites. None DEAD BODIES ANIMATE THE STUDY OF POLITICS  of these outcomes, however, could simply be imposed. Only an alchemy mixing new political strategies with meanings already available would produce alternative political arrangements. I have suggested that the meanings already available included ideas about kinship, history, proper burial, and national identity; about authority, morality, space, and time. All these are important sites of new meaning-creation, by means of which political opportunists and disoriented citizens alike strive to reorder their meaningful worlds; moreover, dead bodies connect with all of them. Not every theme I have raised is relevant to every politicized corpse: different themes illuminate different cases, as I try to show in my handling of the cases I discuss in chapters  and . There is no uniform interpretation of the political lives of dead bodies. My aim in this chapter has been to suggest a variety of ways for thinking about dead-body politics, to offer a loose framework for approaching examples whose details vary. Only sometimes will we clarify the meaning of one or another case through ideas about proper burial, for example, or through looking at the multiple résumés of their lives, as in the case of Nagy. Many things make Nagy’s case unique in comparison with other reburials.83To understand any given case, one might find it helpful to ask what in present and past contexts gives what multiplicity of meanings to the résumé of that particular corpse: How does his complex biography make him a good instrument for revising history? What in his manifold activities encourages identification from a variety of people? Answering such questions will often, but not always, elucidate why some dead bodies rather than others become useful political symbols in transitional moments. Why, you might inquire, do I go to such lengths to interpret dead bodies? Why isn’t it sufficient to see them simply as part of legitimating postsocialist polities?84 What is the payoff of all my talk about “meaningful worlds” and ancestor worship and burial practices, especially given my reluctance to see such practices as having continuity throughout communist rule? I believe I am in part discussing processes of legitimation, attempting to state more precisely what goes into them. But many of the reburials I discuss were initiated not by political leaders eager to establish new legitimacies but by humbler people hoping to rectify their worlds. Moreover, to label an event “legitimating” does not end the inquiry; it invites us to ask how that event legitimates what, and at whose initiative. In DEAD BODIES ANIMATE THE STUDY OF POLITICS  trying to explain why and how dead bodies work in postsocialist politics, I have presented legitimation as a process that employs symbols; in speaking of dead bodies as unusually ambiguous, protean symbols, I have pointed to the multiple possibilities lodged in a given corpse-qua-symbol that make it unusually effective in politics; and in discussing ancestors and burial rites, I have stressed that these symbols have histories, often deep ones, that further multiply the associations they provide as resources for creating meaning and legitimacy in moments of political contention. Thus my argument throughout this book concerns how we might think of legitimation in less rationalistic and more suitably “cosmic” terms, showing it as rich, complex, and disputatious processes of political meaning-creation—that is, as politics animated. Is anything in these processes specific to the postsocialist context, distinguishing its many instances from uses of dead bodies elsewhere? I see three ways of answering this question in the affirmative. First, although corpses can be effective political symbols anywhere, they are pressed into the service of political issues specific to a given polity. For postsocialism, this means issues such as property restitution, political pluralization, religious renewal, and national conflicts tied to building nation-states. Such issues are found in other contexts, too, but in most postsocialist ones they occur simultaneously. This is an obvious argument for the specificity of postsocialist dead bodies, but not a strong one. Second, dead bodies— inherently yoking past with present—are especially useful and effective symbols for revising the past. To be sure, political transformation often involves such revision: indeed, communist parties revised pasts extensively. In Eastern Europe, however, rewriting history has been perhaps unusually necessary because of powerful pressures to create political identities based expressly on rejecting the immediate past. The pressures came not just from popular revulsion with communism but also from desires to persuade Western audiences to contribute the aid and investment essential to reconstruction. The revisionist histories that corpses and bones embodied were therefore central to dramatizing the end of Communist Party rule. Finally, I believe dead bodies are uncommonly lively in the former socialist bloc because of the vastness of the transformations there that make bodies worth fighting over, annexing, and resignifying. The speciDEAD BODIES ANIMATE THE STUDY OF POLITICS  ficity of postsocialist corpses lies in the magnitude of the change that has animated them. The axis mundi has shifted; whole fields of the past await the plowshare of revisionist pens, as well as the tears of those whose dead lie there insufficiently mourned. A change so momentous and far-reaching requires especially heavy, effective symbols, symbols such as dead bodies. I am suggesting, then, that the specificity of postsocialist deadbody politics, compared with examples from elsewhere, is a matter not of kind but of degree. The remaining two chapters treat specific cases with the tools I think best suited to them from those I have mentioned. The two chapters are organized very differently: one in the manner of a chronological narrative and the other more like a network of ideas that double back on themselves; the differences in organization are part of the message I hope to convey by the end of the book. In both chapters I strive to bring in the delights of anthropology, too often ignored in the literature on postsocialism: a respect for wide variability on a small scale; close attention to how these particulars intersect with contemporary global processes—how everyday and large-scale forces intersect in particular skeletons in the wake of communism’s collapse; and ideas about ancestors, about “proper burial,” about the cosmos, morality, and blame, about time and space, and about death and rebirth. I hope the result will demonstrate how we might enchant our sense of the political and enliven our understanding of politics in the postsocialist world.

[glenmenlow]

Analyzing Nike’s Controversial Just Do It Campaign

Is the new Kaepernick 30th Anniversary Just Do It Campaign a smart move for the Nike brand? In this age of polarization and change, every brand owner should find it worth analyzing. For me, it’s of particular interest as I held the position of Director of Marketing Insights & Planning for Nike From 1986 – 1996 and was at the very core of Just Do It, providing the brand brief to Scott Bedbury, Nike’s Advertising Director prior to its creation.

So, let’s begin by taking a look at some of the controversial aspects of the Kaepernick JDI campaign. Perhaps the first question to ask about this campaign from a brand planners perspective is:

What is it about Colin Kaepernick’s character that Nike finds so important to attach it to the Nike brand?

Developing brand character has many things in common with screenwriting, and the attempt to develop relatable characters for film and TV. Relatable characters are drawn up as sympathetic heroes on a mission to achieve worthy goals. They’re often created as original, attractive, intelligent and provocative, and definitely not cliché, predictable or superficial. They have a definite point of view and a convincing way of getting it across. Many also have an underlying sense of humor and irony, which help makes it easy for people to relate to them. They’re frequently involved in acts of moral integrity to resolve some sort of problem or dilemma, and they speak in a distinctive voice that resonates. As their story develops, the complexity of their character emerges, often showing surprising depth. Above all, relatable characters get people talking about them.

In Nike’s current campaign, Kaepernick has certainly demonstrated that he has character, conviction about his beliefs, concern for social justice and he certainly has people talking about him. But, is he really a sympathetic hero? To segments of society struggling with experiences of social injustice he definitely is. However, to segments of society who honor the symbols of our national idea, identity and ceremonies he carries strong and negative emotional associations.

Risk Or Reward?

In launching this new campaign Nike is risking alienating a huge segment of its U.S. consumer base, perhaps as much as half. Why would they do that? Perhaps they are thinking that it will tighten the tribe with millennials, who tend to be involved in protest movements, particularly when political leaders and other authority figures are not aligned with their feelings and values. They see Kaepernick as a champion of individual rights, fighting for a sense of social justice, for not just people of color, but all minorities and people who feel at times like second class citizens.

How people are regarded and respected is of course a big issue and potentially an explosive one. High or low regard is a powerful human emotion, that can be conveyed by a tone, a look, a posture, a gesture and certainly by actions, words and behaviors that are routinely demonstrated.  To have a high regard for the people you serve, work, play or communicate with is a necessary prerequisite if you wish to achieve sympathetic resonance, relevance and salience as a brand. Low regard and low respect can be felt a mile away and sucks the energy out of the invisible brand field. These emotional forces now present a dilemma for Nike. This campaign is simultaneously projecting both high and low regard energies to different segments of the population. That is what makes this campaign so emotionally polarizing.

So, this campaign will scatter parts of the Nike tribe, of loyal American patriots and people who serve or have served in our armed forces, government or institutions that rely closely on a healthy government and national image. These people see not standing for the national anthem at a sporting event as an outward sign of disrespect for the idea of America and all the sacrifices made in the name of the nation. They see the gestures taken by Colin Kaepernick as a sign of questionable character. They see his public gestures as inappropriate and out of place.

For these reasons, I view the 30th Anniversary of ‘Just Do It’ campaign as delivering some short-term pain for the Nike brand. It will not accomplish what the original JDI campaign did.

The original Just Do It campaign was designed around the idea of celebrating the joy of the experience of participating in sports and fitness activities when they are as good as they get. It was not polarizing, it was inclusive, unifying and celebratory in tone. The original idea of celebrating the joy of all kinds of sports and fitness activities could be sympathetically interpreted for everyone, pro sports athletes to fitness amateurs, young and old, men and women, people in America, people around the world. No one was excluded.

This latest version of the Just Do It however, I predict will generate a level of social debate that, over time, will elevate greater social understanding for the risk Nike has taken with this campaign. For many urban and minority professional athletes this campaign will draw them closer to the brand. They like that Nike is supporting individual athlete rights, acts of moral conscience, conviction and protest. For the league or the nation to criticize their freedom of speech or expression is dimly viewed. But, the fact that we can have dialog about the pro’s and con’s of such an event and moment in our history, speaks loudly about American values and human values. The current debate would probably make the founding fathers of the United States proud.

The founding fathers were adept at reconciling conflict, contradiction and paradox. Sometimes the process of reconciling the opposing forces (contradiction) is referred to as the paradox process. We all have the power in our minds to meditate on the nature of any conflict. To examine the opposing forces with an eye towards reconciliation. This work is performed inside our minds, in the location of the third eye (aka the inner eye). After a sufficient period of mediation, if one is earnest in seeking a new solution, one often experiences a shift in cognition, where in a blinding flash of revelation a new solution is presented. This entire process of movement of thought from lower to higher levels is codified in a symbol found on the dollar bill. The unfinished pyramid with the all-seeing eye at the top is also a symbol for the paradox process, which our founding fathers wanted to encode into our government institutions, through debate, to help make the nation a better place.

So at the end of the first day of the campaign launch, Nike’s stock declined 3.2%.  After the initial PR storm blows over how this campaign plays out on sales and company valuation will take a quarter or two. The polarity of feelings about it will drive some people into and out of the brand.

Dan Wieden, co-founder of W+K, Nike’s Ad Agency and the originator of the Just Do It slogan once said, “to be on the cutting edge means someone or something needs to be cut”. He wasn’t afraid to take controversial chances and he loved working on Nike’s business because this was part of Nike’s brand DNA from the start.

What do I personally sense will be the result of this campaign on the Nike brand? Nike is a very ubiquitous brand. It has broad global appeal. In the U.S. market I sense this campaign will polarize its customer base and result in a loss of some business. How much is hard to say. It could be substantial if enough loyal patriots are activated to send a signal to Kaepernick and Nike for their perceived disrespect. In a global sense, this campaign will probably generate a net gain in brand sentiment. Millennials and people of different ethnic backgrounds will probably identify with the nerve that Kaepernick had to protest a perceived injustice, at risk of harming his playing career. So, in these circles, he’s perceived as a bit of a martyr for a cause bigger than himself.

The irony in this controversy, is that the idea of America, its founding values, gives Colin the right to free speech and expression. At the end of a critical analysis using the paradox process both the idea of respect for free speech, protest, American national pride and the ideal that Colin Kaepernick is fighting for (social justice) can all co-exist at the same time. To think that we have a choice of one or the other is a false choice. America is a great nation because we can speak our minds in the taking on of worthy causes, even in the face of conflicted opinions. Many times we get caught on the twin horns of a dilemma by our perception of false choices, either choosing one side or the other, not seeing with our inner eye that a solution can exist that reconciles both ends of the spectrum. After several quarters of social media dialog on this subject, I expect our collective consciousness on this topic will rise higher and advance.

My prediction: Short-term pain for Nike’s brand, but long-term gain. The social discussion around the campaign will elevate public understanding of the greatness of America and the need for more respect and regard for all people, of all colors and classes. The evolution of our understanding of this topic will in the long-term allow some defectors to come back to the Nike brand. Some, but not all. Not all people are cut out for critical thinking or the use of a problem solving tool like the Paradox Process. Critical thinking is hard work and it requires shifting perspectives, walking around issues and looking at them from all sides. Not everyone is willing or able to do this kind of work. Extolling them to ‘Just Do It’ is by itself is not enough.

So, Nike is taking a big risk by running this campaign. It’s a character defining moment for the brand. The question of course is around ‘What kind of character?’ Positive or negative. The public will ultimately decide this.

What are your thoughts? Do you think Nike is setting a positive example here or a negative one? Send us your comments, questions, insights or perspectives. Or comment below. This is a worthy social debate.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

from WordPress https://glenmenlow.wordpress.com/2018/09/05/analyzing-nikes-controversial-just-do-it-campaign/ via IFTTT

[joejstrickl]

Analyzing Nike’s Controversial Just Do It Campaign

Is the new Kaepernick 30th Anniversary Just Do It Campaign a smart move for the Nike brand? In this age of polarization and change, every brand owner should find it worth analyzing. For me, it’s of particular interest as I held the position of Director of Marketing Insights & Planning for Nike From 1986 – 1996 and was at the very core of Just Do It, providing the brand brief to Scott Bedbury, Nike’s Advertising Director prior to its creation.

So, let’s begin by taking a look at some of the controversial aspects of the Kaepernick JDI campaign. Perhaps the first question to ask about this campaign from a brand planners perspective is:

What is it about Colin Kaepernick’s character that Nike finds so important to attach it to the Nike brand?

Developing brand character has many things in common with screenwriting, and the attempt to develop relatable characters for film and TV. Relatable characters are drawn up as sympathetic heroes on a mission to achieve worthy goals. They’re often created as original, attractive, intelligent and provocative, and definitely not cliché, predictable or superficial. They have a definite point of view and a convincing way of getting it across. Many also have an underlying sense of humor and irony, which help makes it easy for people to relate to them. They’re frequently involved in acts of moral integrity to resolve some sort of problem or dilemma, and they speak in a distinctive voice that resonates. As their story develops, the complexity of their character emerges, often showing surprising depth. Above all, relatable characters get people talking about them.

In Nike’s current campaign, Kaepernick has certainly demonstrated that he has character, conviction about his beliefs, concern for social justice and he certainly has people talking about him. But, is he really a sympathetic hero? To segments of society struggling with experiences of social injustice he definitely is. However, to segments of society who honor the symbols of our national idea, identity and ceremonies he carries strong and negative emotional associations.

Risk Or Reward?

In launching this new campaign Nike is risking alienating a huge segment of its U.S. consumer base, perhaps as much as half. Why would they do that? Perhaps they are thinking that it will tighten the tribe with millennials, who tend to be involved in protest movements, particularly when political leaders and other authority figures are not aligned with their feelings and values. They see Kaepernick as a champion of individual rights, fighting for a sense of social justice, for not just people of color, but all minorities and people who feel at times like second class citizens.

How people are regarded and respected is of course a big issue and potentially an explosive one. High or low regard is a powerful human emotion, that can be conveyed by a tone, a look, a posture, a gesture and certainly by actions, words and behaviors that are routinely demonstrated.  To have a high regard for the people you serve, work, play or communicate with is a necessary prerequisite if you wish to achieve sympathetic resonance, relevance and salience as a brand. Low regard and low respect can be felt a mile away and sucks the energy out of the invisible brand field. These emotional forces now present a dilemma for Nike. This campaign is simultaneously projecting both high and low regard energies to different segments of the population. That is what makes this campaign so emotionally polarizing.

So, this campaign will scatter parts of the Nike tribe, of loyal American patriots and people who serve or have served in our armed forces, government or institutions that rely closely on a healthy government and national image. These people see not standing for the national anthem at a sporting event as an outward sign of disrespect for the idea of America and all the sacrifices made in the name of the nation. They see the gestures taken by Colin Kaepernick as a sign of questionable character. They see his public gestures as inappropriate and out of place.

For these reasons, I view the 30th Anniversary of ‘Just Do It’ campaign as delivering some short-term pain for the Nike brand. It will not accomplish what the original JDI campaign did.

The original Just Do It campaign was designed around the idea of celebrating the joy of the experience of participating in sports and fitness activities when they are as good as they get. It was not polarizing, it was inclusive, unifying and celebratory in tone. The original idea of celebrating the joy of all kinds of sports and fitness activities could be sympathetically interpreted for everyone, pro sports athletes to fitness amateurs, young and old, men and women, people in America, people around the world. No one was excluded.

This latest version of the Just Do It however, I predict will generate a level of social debate that, over time, will elevate greater social understanding for the risk Nike has taken with this campaign. For many urban and minority professional athletes this campaign will draw them closer to the brand. They like that Nike is supporting individual athlete rights, acts of moral conscience, conviction and protest. For the league or the nation to criticize their freedom of speech or expression is dimly viewed. But, the fact that we can have dialog about the pro’s and con’s of such an event and moment in our history, speaks loudly about American values and human values. The current debate would probably make the founding fathers of the United States proud.

The founding fathers were adept at reconciling conflict, contradiction and paradox. Sometimes the process of reconciling the opposing forces (contradiction) is referred to as the paradox process. We all have the power in our minds to meditate on the nature of any conflict. To examine the opposing forces with an eye towards reconciliation. This work is performed inside our minds, in the location of the third eye (aka the inner eye). After a sufficient period of mediation, if one is earnest in seeking a new solution, one often experiences a shift in cognition, where in a blinding flash of revelation a new solution is presented. This entire process of movement of thought from lower to higher levels is codified in a symbol found on the dollar bill. The unfinished pyramid with the all-seeing eye at the top is also a symbol for the paradox process, which our founding fathers wanted to encode into our government institutions, through debate, to help make the nation a better place.

So at the end of the first day of the campaign launch, Nike’s stock declined 3.2%.  After the initial PR storm blows over how this campaign plays out on sales and company valuation will take a quarter or two. The polarity of feelings about it will drive some people into and out of the brand.

Dan Wieden, co-founder of W+K, Nike’s Ad Agency and the originator of the Just Do It slogan once said, “to be on the cutting edge means someone or something needs to be cut”. He wasn’t afraid to take controversial chances and he loved working on Nike’s business because this was part of Nike’s brand DNA from the start.

What do I personally sense will be the result of this campaign on the Nike brand? Nike is a very ubiquitous brand. It has broad global appeal. In the U.S. market I sense this campaign will polarize its customer base and result in a loss of some business. How much is hard to say. It could be substantial if enough loyal patriots are activated to send a signal to Kaepernick and Nike for their perceived disrespect. In a global sense, this campaign will probably generate a net gain in brand sentiment. Millennials and people of different ethnic backgrounds will probably identify with the nerve that Kaepernick had to protest a perceived injustice, at risk of harming his playing career. So, in these circles, he’s perceived as a bit of a martyr for a cause bigger than himself.

The irony in this controversy, is that the idea of America, its founding values, gives Colin the right to free speech and expression. At the end of a critical analysis using the paradox process both the idea of respect for free speech, protest, American national pride and the ideal that Colin Kaepernick is fighting for (social justice) can all co-exist at the same time. To think that we have a choice of one or the other is a false choice. America is a great nation because we can speak our minds in the taking on of worthy causes, even in the face of conflicted opinions. Many times we get caught on the twin horns of a dilemma by our perception of false choices, either choosing one side or the other, not seeing with our inner eye that a solution can exist that reconciles both ends of the spectrum. After several quarters of social media dialog on this subject, I expect our collective consciousness on this topic will rise higher and advance.

My prediction: Short-term pain for Nike’s brand, but long-term gain. The social discussion around the campaign will elevate public understanding of the greatness of America and the need for more respect and regard for all people, of all colors and classes. The evolution of our understanding of this topic will in the long-term allow some defectors to come back to the Nike brand. Some, but not all. Not all people are cut out for critical thinking or the use of a problem solving tool like the Paradox Process. Critical thinking is hard work and it requires shifting perspectives, walking around issues and looking at them from all sides. Not everyone is willing or able to do this kind of work. Extolling them to ‘Just Do It’ is by itself is not enough.

So, Nike is taking a big risk by running this campaign. It’s a character defining moment for the brand. The question of course is around ‘What kind of character?’ Positive or negative. The public will ultimately decide this.

What are your thoughts? Do you think Nike is setting a positive example here or a negative one? Send us your comments, questions, insights or perspectives. Or comment below. This is a worthy social debate.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers