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traumatized-motherfuckers · 4 years

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CPTSD relationship patterns on repeat

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Things I’ve gotten good at throughout this Trauma journey:

Seeing connections between where I’m from and where I am

Thinking for the first time about where I’m going

Letting myself have emotions

Letting those emotions go

Redirecting my energy and attention away from ruminating

Being accountable for my own feelings

Being accountable for times of being a shithead

Listening and validating other humans

Listening and validating myself

Recognizing what circumstances do/don’t work for me

Realizing how my codependency plays with relationships

Letting go of self-hate inner critic talk

Reframing events with reasonable views

Accepting myself, even when I first want to thrash myself

Semi-consistently caring for myself

Setting realistic boundaries and goals

Sleeping

Things I’m still shitty at:

Letting my overwhelm skew reality

Anxious self-slave-driving

Being a snarky turd when my head is overloaded

Taking on other people’s energies and emotions

Trusting myself in all areas of life

Forming healthy relationships.

Okay, it’s that last one that has me most perpetually fighting feelings of panic and doom.

This seems like an apt way to kick off the new year. I think a lot of us have questions about relationships and would like to improve our operations in 2021. I can also tell you, this one is extremely appropriate looking back at the last year of my life.

One of the biggest lessons I've learned in the past few spins around the sun has been how romance does - and definitely doesn't - fit into my life. I think 2020 was particularly packed full of important lectures and pop quizzes, many of which I failed. It felt like knowing that the correct answer was C, but finding my hand filling in the circle for A every time, anyways.

This is a terrible ideaaaa... and I'm doing it. Pause for about 2 months. Now I'm upset that it was a terrible idea.

Yeah, it's been great. But I have no one to blame but myself. Because as much as I've worked on this trauma management life of mine, I haven't done a good job of working on the relationship aspect of it. I've let my usual patterns dominate. And that's what needs to be examined today.

I mean. Can someone tell me about healthy relationships in functional terms? What IS that even?

Look, I’m not hoping that someone will pop up and share some, “mutual respect, good communication, trust, support, care, similar goals, similar beliefs…” sort of shit. I fucking KNOW about the idealistic, flowery terms that all the light-hearted couples counselors recommend establishing for a happy relationship. I get it.

I’m not ignorant when it comes to the ways humans should interact. I’ve had enough experience with friendships and relationships, alike, to understand the basics of person-to-person interactions. I know I talk about myself like I’ve been a feral child locked in a cage for 20 years, but the truth is that if you met me on the streets I’d probably seem like a normal, well-adapted, personable human being. That Leo Ascendant component of my personality tricks people into actually thinking I’m an extrovert who wants attention. (Hilarious, explains a lot of comments I’ve gotten in my past)

Nah, I’m not asking for the trite descriptions of a healthy partnership that everyone who’s ever been friends on a basic girl’s Facebook has seen before in cursive writing on top of a washed-out pink-tinted field. Those are empty sounding words that I don’t believe most couples manage to put into action, no matter how many selfies they take together or labradoodles they adopt.

For me, Fuckers, the mystery isn’t, “in a fairytale world, how do two humans interact to have a lifelong bliss factory?” Respect, trust, appreciation, mutual understanding… blah blah blah. What the fuck ever.

The real question is how.

And, shit, let me just be honest with all of you - not just the Patrons who’ve already heard my personal bitching - it’s on my mind because I did a thing I definitely should not have… recently, I got into a new romantic relationship that I definitely was not looking for. I’ll spare you all the details today, but know that I’ve entered it kicking and screaming, and it’s caused me a lot of grief already.

Let the life shittery begin! Can’t wait to be destroyed.

Today, I want to bring this personal fire burning in my gut into the podcast. Motherfuck me, if it hasn’t become difficult to ignore… plus, I know that a lot of us Traumatized folks are in a similar boat when it comes to relationship confusion, unhealth, and destruction. So let’s just count the ways that I have no idea how to do this right and I’m destined to be let down by my poor choices.

This time around, I'm bringing you a list of all the ways I tend to fuck things up with other humans. In part, due to Complex Trauma. In other part, probably due to my own personal shortcomings. Listed in no particular order. On a later date, I'm going to be revisiting a lot of these patterns as I examine how early life set a lot of us up for a lot of abuse acceptance in greater detail. Stick around for those continuations on romantic disaster, if this sounds like you, too.

I'm talking about:

Partner choice: Musicians, narcissists, and addicts

Emotional codependency

Mistrust

… That turns into willful blind belief of their words

Inadequacy

Parenting analogues

Authority figures & disappointment

Misdirected commitment

Learned helplessness

Partner choice: Musicians, narcissists and addicts

Who has bad taste in partners? Over and over and over again? It’s me! And probably a lot of you.

Maybe that’s not fair. Maybe they’ve been wonderful guys who just didn’t mesh well with my inner or outer world… but I can tell you, there have been some similarities, and they don’t bode well for a happy future together.

You know me by now. Difficulty connecting with “normal” humans, no interest in small talk, a huge fan of deep emotional honesty, a bit gritty and assholeish, tends to be repelled by anything too widely embraced by the general public, definitely comes with a difficult past, fears of the future, and ongoing challenges in the present.

So, who do you think I get along with? Ivy leaguers with stable, supportive families, an optimistic outlook, and a 20-year plan? Or equally messy and complex humans with a set of neuroses handed down from their unexamined early traumas that make them similarly bitter and disillusioned with life? Just… probably hidden from immediate sight.

Grown men who’ve responsibly built a life for themselves with ambition, personal insight, and balance? Or man-children who’re still figuring out that they can’t drink every night of the week if they want to be functional in life and financially sound? But... with their addictions hidden behind “an appreciation for fine whiskies” or a necessity to sample the craft beer they brew.

Independent, confident humans who have no problem running their own world like a boss and trust that I’m capable of doing the same, with integrity and respect? Or distrustful turds who need me to be in their sight, half-directing their lives at all times unless I’m aiming to be accused of cheating, lying, and being unable to care for myself? Only… they hide their controlling and aggressive tendencies behind go-with-the-flow facades in the beginning.

If you guessed “B” in all three examples, you are correct!

Plus... so, so many musicians. Like, the last 6 of them have either subscribed to guitar or drum camp. And that hasn't been a purposeful decision - those are just the men I get along with until we hate each other.

It's always a rapid connection, a mutual respect for our interests in the arts, and a shared shitty attitude that starts out directed at the world and ends directed at each other. So many emotions. So many ups and downs. So many proclamations of "I can't live without you!" until the day we run in opposite directions and never look back.

Is that a coincidence? Or are all musical folk a bit wild? I hate to generalize, but I can tell you with great amusement that if you start typing "Are all musicians..." into Google, it will autocomplete with "cheaters, narcissists, and crazy." It also suggests "rich," but I can tell you for a fact that isn't true. The narcissist thing... uh.... very well might be correct. But I'll leave that for someone else to study.

So, I don't know what to make of this trend. There do seem to be some commonalities between the musicians in my past life - and they do seem to be categorized by the instrument of choice. For instance, drummers are never concerned with my time, and guitarists are emotional catastrophes. But what do I know? Can't make sweeping conclusions... I, at least, need a larger sample size. With my track record, I'm sure I'll have the numbers soon enough.

Congratulations if you predicted nothing but unstable disasters in my past. It's true, I’m an idiot. Okay, that’s not fair. No inner critic talk. Get out of here, Pam and Karen.

The fact of the matter is, I am a terrible judge of character when I start sensing a connection. I tend to connect with people who have complicated lives and inner worlds, just like I do. And from what I can tell, that is always my downfall.

Challenging connections

Let’s go ahead and chalk this one up to never having close connections or support growing up.

You know what I always wanted, hoped for, and idealized as a kid? Someone loving me. Another human actually understanding my weirdness and signing on for more. The idea of a human who wanted to know what I thought and felt. The option of spending time with someone and feeling cared for. Also, somebody finding me attractive, instead of being repulsed by my ass-length ginger hair, flat chest, dorky hand-me-downs, bleach-stained horse sweaters, and buck teeth... also would have been a dream come true.

I’m pretty sure that growing up lonely didn’t help me in any regard when it came to my later-in-life relationship problems. Starving for connection apparently puts you in a state of deprivation, where you’re likely to think anything is better than the empty feeling inside. You know, just for the rest of your life or so.

To this day, if I meet someone and we’re able to converse without abundant clarifications or apologies for the prickly things that come out of my mouth as dry humor or unbendable opinions… we’re on a roll. If we can connect over shared perspectives on humans, life, and psychology… things are getting more serious. If we can honestly talk about the ways we’re horrible to ourselves and joke about our shared challenges in figuring out what the point of this shitty slip-and-slide of life is about… uh oh, this might be a real connection.

And so, it makes sense that I connect with all the most complicated people you’d ever meet. And we connect INTENSELY. I’m complicated, myself, and I look for folks who can accept it without their heads exploding. I’m never going to be happy holding conversations with Sports Bar Joe or Pretty Boy Blaine. They’re never going to understand the internal strife that dominates my world. I’m never going to understand how they can be all *happy,* *close with their families,* and *laid back about life.*

Gross. I can’t even say the words.

But give me the angstiest, most anxious, most misunderstood dude on the block, and we’re likely to get along swimmingly. We’ll talk over beers until the birds start to chirp. We’ll joke in our native tongues, playing with words, obscure references, and dry humor as if we’ve known each other for 25 years. We’ll share secrets about our tumultuous inner worlds and the ways that we can’t seem to get our heads on straight enough to keep our ships on course.

And the next thing you know, we’ll be incestuously connected with a somewhat false sense of intimacy that erupts out of the gates. “No one has ever understood me the way you do. I can really be myself around you. I’ve never had such easy conversations about this shit before.”

… That’s about the point when I lose all perspective. There’s a tunnel running from my face to this dude’s heart. I stop seeing things for what they are. I project a kinder, gentler, more well-intended personality on the subject of my feels. I quickly turn a blind eye to all the shit they’re doing that I wholeheartedly hate or otherwise cause my red flags to be unpacked.

I feel like I know them, inside and out. I feel like I can help them - like we can help each other - to sort through this dumb world we’ve been born into and all the circumstances holding us back. A real Sid and Nancy storyline emerges. No one gets him like I do. If only they could see the things I see. We’re just two broken souls who found each other, a little rough around the edges, but we see the diamonds underneath. And we’re in this battle together from now on.

Yeah, right.

Sooooo… This is how I wind up with the unpredictable narcissists who seem like nice guys, the secret addicts who keep their substance abuse hidden from everyone, and the emotional abusers who are ready to leverage my mental health admissions against me the first time they get the chance. Dudes who have highly emotional worlds and no idea how to deal with them. Men who don’t want to explore their own shortcomings and instead choose avoidant courses in life.

And, again, the musicians. So, so many musicians. I really am coming to think that they’re the most fucked up people of all - and that's saying a lot coming from me. Generally speaking, I've seen that there’s no sense of personal responsibility, an obsession with themselves, and a hidden inferiority complex that turns them into bitchy little dogs when they feel threatened. What’s with that, anyways? Can you guys try to be more original in your plight to be the most original?

Okay, anyways. Sorry to keep dragging on musicians.

The point is, my attempts at relationships start out on the wrong foot. Choosing the wrong partner is a pretty surefire way to dash all hopes for those fluffy ideals I mentioned earlier. No one is going to respect me, listen to me, or support me when they’re too busy dealing with their own alcoholism, abandonment issues, and narcissistic flailings… or, not dealing with them, to be more specific.

We aren’t going to be able to work through things when they’re consumed with being the king of the world, hiding from all negative emotions, and trying to keep their head away from analysing their own actions. Hell, it’ll be difficult to even find the time for serious talks, since they’re so busy traveling to band practices, hustling away for barely-paying gigs, and staring at their social media while they count the ways they’re victims of the universe.

Choose imbalanced, mentally ill, self-serving partners… get unhealthy, controlling, unpredictable relationships. Pretty goddamn obvious. And yet, I still can never seem to see the full picture of the human who’s caught my attention through the fog that’s created by the connection of our shared dysfunctions.

I guess this is where that, “love yourself and get yourself healthy first,” sentiment comes into play, so the connections don’t continue to be as disasterious as your personal experience is. Hopefully I’m on the right path in my own journey, at least. Also, a lot less starved for connection. I got y’all Motherfuckers in the Discord community, for starters. And I’ve become determined to live a life where I support myself and rely on no one outside of Archie’s snuggles, for finishers.

Step one: Be careful about who you deem a good person, just because you can share self-deprecating jokes about being nutjobs and similar musical interests. Learn to choose someone who isn’t an even trashier trash human than you are. It’s a start.

Emotional codependency

Hand in hand with forming connections that include deep emotional outpourings and admissions of all the dark things we hide from the light at our office jobs… comes codependency.

I’ve said it before and let me say it again… I didn’t understand codependency until very recently.

In my mind, it was akin to those creepy couples who won’t leave the house without each other, have the same friends, interests, and opinions on everything... and possibly wear matching cat shirts. Those people who never spend time with other humans because they're too busy being shoved up their partner’s ass. The folks who call to check in on each other throughout the day when they’re at work. Gag. Particularly, I imagined those pathetic girls who cry when their boyfriend is out of sight and post 12 pictures a day of them together.

Rightfully, I scoffed and insisted that I didn't have problems with codependency. That’s not me. But it turns out, this view isn’t quite right, so much as I was being an uninformed asshole.

Codependency doesn’t mean you’re a needy, incapable human being who sucks the life power out of someone else, like I used to think. Codependency is a two-way relationship defined by poor boundaries and non-existent emotional regulation. Two humans who see their experiences as one, all the way down to how they feel and how they deal with how they feel. (i.e. turning to their significant other for comfort and emotional control in a time of need instead of working through it by themselves). Relationships where the emotions are transferred from party to party until it's unclear who’s bringing what dish to the gathering. Waking up not knowing how your day is going to be, because it depends on how someone else feels about theirs. Emotional enablement city.

Oh, yeah, when you put it like that, I definitely have issues with codependency.

For me, the codependency is largely going to be emotional. In the past, I didn’t know how to have a relationship of any sort without having a third influence in the mix. There was the person, myself, and our shared emotions... that often called more shots than either of us did.

Because I tend to be on the empath scale (although I do everything I can to fight it out of defense), I think I’m naturally tuned into other people’s emotional and energetic states, for better or for worse. When someone walks into the room with a bad vibe, I feel it to my core. I become so uncomfortable that I take it on myself to try to “fix” the problem for them, and in doing so, I avoid the negative sensation, myself. This is negative reinforcement, if anyone wanted to ABA with me.

That being said, clearly if my boo is having a hard time… it’s not okay. They’re in a shit place and therefore so am I. I must do whatever I can to make it better. To sit down and talk in circles with them, if that’s what relieves some of their tension. To commiserate about how unfair the circumstances are. To validate the negativity that they’re projecting and wallowing in.

Don’t worry though, this goes the other way, too. In the past, I have fully expected my romantic partners to alleviate any inner discomfort that I’ve felt. If I was having a low-down day, I wanted them to cheer me up. If I was full of anxiety, I wanted them to find a way to release it. If I was frustrated with a work situation or coworker, I wanted them to be as angry and indignant as I felt.

So… I guess that doesn’t even sound too off-base to me, at least not when I’m leaning on my teenage expectations of what relationships are supposed to be. In my head, it was always completely ideal that I would wind up with someone who could essentially read my thoughts and comfort me like my family never did. I just wanted someone who would be by my side, thinking about me all the time, and working double time to make sure I was keeping my depression and anxiety on the up-and-up. Is that too much to ask? Uh… yeah, it is.

Maybe in a fairytale love story like the ones I saw in teenage romance movies growing up, this is the perfect way for two broken misfits to interact. “We’re both so damaged and hurt that no one has ever really seen us - but now we have each other to lick our shared wounds.” Yeah, romantic. Also really fucked up and dangerous in the real world.

The problem is, after a few months of this, it gets pretty hard to determine what’s my experience and what’s yours. The emotions become so transitive that it can be invigorating, immersive, overwhelming, and exhausting to be in each other’s company, depending on the day and the event. Living together or essentially sharing a residence makes it much worse - there’s no physical barrier between us, so that emotional barrier is even less existent. We don't have to try to text about our woes, we can just unleash them the moment we step foot in the door. Ready or not, your night is about to be ruined by my day, and vice-versa.

How does this go wrong? Uh, let’s count the ways.

1. My emotional management was never up to par, in the first place. Having your feelings catapulted my way effectively pushes me off the balance beam that I was already wobbling on. If I was having a difficult day but holding it together on my own through coping techniques and reasonable thinking - fucking forget it, that’s over now. We’re both in a shitty state now. Great. In the context of trying to recover from mental health issues… yeah, it’s a fucking disaster. Being retriggered by your partner or sucked into a depressive undertow when you’re trying to make positive change is a losing battle.

2. I never learned how to cope with my own emotions. There was generally someone else for me to hurtle them at, and our subsequent hours of bitching would give me the comfort I was looking for. I didn’t need to learn to manage my feelings - I always had a glorified babysitter to keep me alive. I never had to be accountable for my inner world. I never had to look at things with logic or reason. I could let myself spiral and trust that my best friend or boyfriend would catch me before I slipped down the drain.

3. It becomes impossible to talk about issues - personal or shared. When you’re already sharing emotions there’s an explosive effect when conflict is brought up. Neither one of us knows how to handle our shit, we expect the other person to hold us up with kid gloves, annnd now that person is the source of my distress? We’re both completely beside ourselves, upset, hurt, and angry… and it’s towards each other? Now who the fuck do we call? There's a huge sense of confusion and betrayal. No one has the skills to de-escalate the argument or return to a normal emotional state.

4. How do you break up when half of your existence is in the body of another human? You can’t mentally or emotionally separate yourself from them. Physically separating yourself feels like ripping out a few of your organs and leaving them on the streets. And, who’s going to keep you afloat when you’re going through the pain of the break up? That’s the job of your partner, afterall… can’t have a vacant desk sitting here. It’s best to just suck it up and stick with it. No one would understand what you’ve both been through together, anyways.

In a word, that’s codependency.

Not what people think it is. Not what our culture describes it as. Not so easy to spot until you’re educated and honest with yourself… plus, probably viewing things through the lenses of hindsight.

Definitely a sneaky recipe for disaster when you let it take over a well-intended, emotionally transparent, highly connective relationship. And, Motherfuckers, I’ve always tended to.

Head to t-mfrs.com for more!

#cptsd #healcptsd #just cptsd things #cptsdsurvivor #cptsdwarrior #cptsd problems #cptsd romance #trauma #ptsd #childhood ptsd #childhoodtraumarecovery #healingcomplextrauma #relationships

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sortyourlifeoutmate · 4 years

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“If it has turned its attention our way once more then we are naught but food for the gods! Food for the gods!”

I know the ship sailed on this years and years ago but I still infinitely prefer the Oldcons. And I have reasons for this.

Ahem.

You see, the Oldcons, as they were, serve as both a foil to the Tyranids and to Chaos, and also sit as another existential threat in the 40K universe (as though there needed to be more).

I’ve thought about this much more articulately on my walk to work but I’ll do my best to vomit my thoughts out here, for the edification of no-one.

(This worked out way longer than I initially thought it might, so I’m putting in a cut.)

SETUP

The basic schtick of the Oldcons - and I can’t remember how much and how little of this passed over intact in the retcot, quite a lot as I recall - was that the Necrontyr, a long, long, long fuckin’ time ago, were on a planet dying a lot. They had super-good technology but their sun basically fried them to death, so their lives sucked.

Then one day they met the Old Ones, classical precursors of the 40K universe and Those Who Shall Not Be Seen. The Old Ones were basically immortal and liked to cruise around space through their webway, seeding life and generally just being precursors.

The Necrontyr got mad about this because, well, they were bitter and angry that these guys got to live forever and they didn’t, so they had a war. That’s maybe an oversimplification but a war did happen.

Now the Necrontyr had super-good technology, as said, so did very well for themselves all things considered, but the Old Ones had access to the webway and mastery of the warp and basically just ran rings around the Necrontyr and kicked the shit out of them so much the war fizzled to nothing and the Necrontyr were pushed to one podunk corner of the galaxy to sit and get even angrier.

The Old Ones pretty much forgot about them at that point.

Meanwhile, the Necrontyr had been studying stars. This was partly because, as they had a somewhat rocky relationship with their own sun they kind of hoped they might have found a way to make their lives less blighted and shitty, and partly on the off-chance they’d find something useful to go fuck with the Old Ones.

The former didn’t work out, the latter most certainly did.

To cut a long story short they found the C’tan, star gods. These ancient, ancient, formed-at-the-start-of-the-universe entities that lurked around old stars feeding off them.

For some reason the Nectrontyr immediately knew that this was a key turning point? I don’t know. Guess they knew they were powerful somehow (they were).

But! Since the C’tan at this point were just enormous, planet-sized diffuse clouds of energy they couldn’t really relate to the world as the Necrontyr were aware of it. They needed bodies. And so the Necrontyr built them bodies, using the same super-duper living metal they used to make their super-duper spaceships.

This was one of those points where things - already not great - started getting worse.

The C’tan (in a process you shouldn’t think about too hard) poured themselves into these fancy-pants new bodies and in the process got a new, different understanding of the world and how things worked. And they liked it. To quote the codex:

“As the C’tan became ever more manifest with the focusing of the their consciousness, they began to appreciate the subtleties and pleasures of both matter and life. The close weaves of dancing particles enthralled them and the deliciously focused tickles of electromagnetism leaked by the mortal bodies of the Necrontyr about them awoke a hunger in the C’tan quite unlike the one they had sated among the raging torrents of stars.”

As you might not need me to tell you that last part is kind of important.

So these star-devouring things had bodies now, and were basically gods. They could do all sorts of reality-bending shit (don’t look into the hows or whys, they just can) and they got a real taste for being the object of adulation for their mortal subjects.

The next part always kind of confused me, but here we go.

So with their super-duper technology and ships that could cross the galaxy in the blink of an eye and their own GODS walking around and willing to pitch in, the Necrontyr were ready to get the war started again, but before they did the C’tan came to them with an offer.

The offer boiled down to “Hey, do you want indestructible, eternal, metal bodies so you can be our servants forever? You’ll totally get to kill the Old Ones!” The Necrontyr leapt at the chance but - surprise! - they weren’t told the whole story. While they did get their shiny bodies, they also basically had the whole essence of their species devoured by their ravenous gods, almost all of them ending up as blank, hollow shells that existed only to serve and a slim handful retaining only a glimmer of their former selves.

Why this always confused me was because there aren’t many details provided about the process, what it involved and why it was even the C’tan who floated the idea - they’re not the ones who made all the technology, after all, were they? Why weren’t the Necrontyr the ones who cooked up the ‘transfer ourselves into everliving bodies’ plan? And what was it the C’tan ate? Their souls? Or just their vague ‘life energy’?

(This ‘What is it C’tan actually eat?’ question is another one that always bugs me, but I don’t think it matters especially - souls or the bio-electrical energy of living beings they eat people one way or another and that’s what counts.)

So the Necrontyr are now the Necrons, the C’tan have vast legions of unkillable, implacable, mechanical doomtroops and technology the likes of which can be scarcely imagined. The war kicks off again, and this time the Old Ones are the ones getting their arses handed to them. They’ve still got the webway and their warp magic but the C’tan and their Necrons are more-or-less unbeatable in the real, physical world.

Things get worse from here.

The Old Ones are pushed into a few isolated spaces and barely hold onto these. Meanwhile, elsewhere, everywhere else in the galaxy the Necrons and the C’tan are in charge and they run the place about as well as gluttonous, capricious gods who feed on life itself can be expected to run the place - that is to say, badly. Planetary populations are harvested to sate the hunger of the C’tan, whole species made into cattle, etcetera.

And even that’s not enough! Not enough to satisfy the C’tan! So greedy are the C’tan that they start turning on one another, eating each other even as the war continues.

It’s worth bearing in mind for later that the C’tan don’t need to do this. They just want to do this.

The Old Ones, with their backs to the wall, start getting desperate. They start engineering species to act as living weapons in the war, species that can use the warp given that it’s their main edge. This is where Eldar come from, explicitly, and I think it’s also implied this is where psychic potential got put into humans (Necrons also put the Pariah gene in here, but I don’t know if that’s still true).

Oh, and Orks also got invented. Maybe. It’s less clear but I like to think it’s true that they made the Orks towards the end and never got around to finishing them properly. But that’s me.

So now you’ve got a galaxy teeming with life, all of it tapping into the warp in a millennia-spanning, apocalyptic conflict for the fate of the galaxy itself. This is when the warp starts getting bad, because it’s being fucked around with so much. Beforehand the warp was actually fairly sedate, but now since it’s being swung around like a big stick for years and years and years it start getting messy. It starts getting angry. Nasty things start appearing in it.

The C’tan have a plan for this, it should be said, and that plan is to seal off the material world from the warp. Completely. What this would mean in practise is unclear but as far as they were concerned it would just fuck over the Old Ones and that’s what counts.

And then things get WORSE.

Enslavers appear. You may have heard about these. Weirdo warp beasts. Possess those with psychic potential, melt their bodies down into gristly flesh gates that more Enslavers can come through, enslave everyone to make this easier and defend against threats that might want to stop it, repeat across whole population across whole planet, repeat across whole system, etcetera.

EVERYTHING STARTS TO DIE.

The C’tan have eaten themselves down to a nub at this point and there’s only a handful of them left. The Old Ones are basically done too, the webway is breached, their uplifted races are in disarray, shit’s fucked. Across the galaxy Enslavers are just wiping out whole populations, everyone and everything is dying.

But the C’tan don’t really care. The Old Ones have lost at this point and that’s the only thing that really matters. That all life is dying out is just a passing thing, they can ride that out and come back later. The C’tan plan to settle in and have a nap. In a few million years the Enslavers will be gone and the galaxy will have produced new life and they can get restarted on their ‘Seal off the warp, feed on life forever’ plan.

And, millions of years later, 40K happens.

That’s it in broad strokes.

OLDCONS

If you followed any of that congratulations.

The practical upshot is this:

A) The Necrons are an undying, soulless race of borderline indestructible machines that are the slaves of the C’tan B) The C’tan are immeasurably ancient, star-eating beings given physical form by the the Necrons and who really, really, really like having physical form C) Neither the C’tan or the Necrons have anything to do with the warp other than not liking it. They are NOT PSYCHIC, they have zero presence in the warp. It has nothing to do with them other than being an obstacle.

Now I’ll tell you why I like this and why I think they serve as a good foil to a couple other factions in 40K.

GOALS

Broadly speaking, every faction in 40K has their own little motivation, right?

Orks want to fight forever. The Imperium basically wants to survive and kill everything that looks at them funny. The Tau want to expand and spread their philosophy. The Eldar want to cling on for just another day please just another day (and also fuck chaos and Necrons). The Tyranids want to eat everything and then leave. Chaos wants to sunder reality and just sink into a mire of mindless chaotic indulgence forever, maybe, kind of, whatever it’s chaos.

And so on.

The Necrons (as a faction) I always liked to think of having some distinct lines that run close to some of the others, but don’t cross over.

So let’s, uh, talk about that.

CHAOS

Necrons are associated with sterility, lifeless sterility. They are associated with order - serried ranks of mindless machines marching in lockstep across the surface of dead worlds; towering, silent monoliths of black stone built to sever the material world from the immaterial, to eliminate variables and ensure that everything runs as desired for eternity.

In this they’re fairly obviously set against Chaos.

Chaos! The Chaos gods! Beings born from both the unrelenting, brutal psychic warfare of the War in Heaven (as the war between the Old Ones and the Necrons was called) and from the constant, churning wants and desires of the countless beings in the galaxy.

The Chaos gods are distinct, separate beings but they are also intimately tied to the souls they were born from. They’re individuals, yes, but they’re individuals born from very specific things. They have purviews, they have domains. They are - and are for - these things.

Khorne is as much an incarnate desire for bloodshed and furious anger as he is also a sapient entity who happens to enjoy those things.

If you can follow that?

By contrast, the C’tan existed first. They weren’t born from the desires of mortals, they were just there, sucking on stars until they were put into bodies. They exist separately from mortals. They don’t need mortals, they just want them so they can eat them.

The Chaos gods, for all their cruelty (the extent of which is the result of the War in Heaven is kind of an open thing), want and need mortals. They need mortals to act in certain, often contradictory ways. They need mortals to be chaotic, to give into their desires, to want things.

The C’tan need mortals to eat them. And that’s it. Maybe to do things they don’t want to do, but mainly to eat them since, hey, they’ve got the Necrons if they want stuff done anyway.

So while the Chaos gods would, ideally, like a galaxy overrun with (appropriately enough) chaos so that the endless roaring conflict can generate a lot of that sweet, sweet tumult they thrive on, the C’tan want a nice, quiet galaxy where they can eat in peace.

Order and Chaos, see? Foil!

Oh, and of course the other part about Chaos being All About the warp while the C’tan are All About the physical, real world. Gods both, but on the flipside, yo.

Tyranids

Now I’ve mentioned a lot that the C’tan like to eat people, and you might (rightly) be thinking “Hang on, eating people? Isn’t that the schtick of the Tyranids?” and, again, this is one of those things where they run close, but don’t cross, and in an interesting way.

See, the difference is in the approach. Or something.

The Tyranids are ravenous, the C’tan are gluttonous. To put it simply.

The Tyranids come in a great, all-consuming swarm to strip worlds completely, down to the bedrock, just everything. They do this world by world, system by system just across all of space. They leave nothing. And their hunger won’t ever let them stop, they’re always pushed forward by it. Their hunger is their defining characteristic.

The C’tan specifically eat living beings. They savour the flavour. What’s more, like I said before, they don’t need to eat people. They could easily go back to being sun-sucking energy clouds and get by just fine. The point is they don’t want to.

See? Ravenous versus gluttonous. The Tyranids are pushed by constant hunger to devour everything and have no future planning beyond moving on to the next meal, the C’tan want to arrange the galaxy so they can a specific thing without interruption forever.

So that’s the difference. The Tyranids would leave the galaxy utterly stripped and barren and dead because of their hunger, while the C’tan would have the galaxy turned into an eternal farm-stroke-slaughterhouse-stroke-whatever because of their desire to eat.

TO SUM UP

Chaos: The galaxy as an anarchic maelstrom of reality-bending madness forever

Tyranids: Eat everything move on.

Necrons: A sterile galaxy, severed from the warp, everything in it as food for the gods, forever

IN CONCLUSION

I know why they did what they did. The Necrons did come across kind of bland.

Their only characters were two C’tan (one of whom didn’t say anything), all of their fluff was written from the perspective of other factions (like the Tyranids, actually, but again that’s another reason to change them around) and there was just kind of a...sterility, I suppose.

Appropriate, really.

And while I like that - indeed, it’s the whole reason I like them, as you might have picked up on - I guess others didn’t, and it didn’t really give the writers anything to work with.

So now they’re basically a fallen alien empire that wants to reclaim its glory. The C’tan have been jobbed out and the Necrons have leaders with personalities now, internal factions, competing interests, the capability of having plans beyond SERVING THEIR HUNGRY GODS and so on.

Which I can see the appeal of, I really can. And they’ve also left in Oldcons after a fashion, saying that some are still like that, but that’s a sop for me - it’s all or nothing.

But it’s all water the bridge now anyway, no going back. I just liked them the way they were. Oh well.

The new fluff for the flayed ones is dumb though, I hate it.

Or do I like it? I can’t remember.

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thenixkat · 4 years

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Cassie in name only

-A fun story shared at every family reunion is about how her great great grandmother escaped slavery and got the family the land they live on. That their ancestor, how couldn’t read or write but was smart as a whip used to kill her master’s children, not all of them of course just one for every child she lost b/c it was only fair, who organized a revolt when they Union army was getting close that kept the whites distracted with folks trying to runaway that let them to be drugged, cut and fed to the hogs and how she headed out west as soon as she was sure the master’s family was dead.

A fun story that got her in trouble at school when she shared it during Black History month.

And one of many reason why she believes that anyone (human or alien) who owns slaves does not deserve to live.

-Land land her family owns is evenly divided amongst her mom and her mom’s siblings. That land borders the nearby national park. Lots of people have tried to get their land for lots of reasons in lots of ways but they’ve managed to keep holding onto it.

Her parents farm is still in use, they grow and sell hay and breed feeder rodents and rabbits, and raise chickens and keep horses. They save a little money growing their own food.

Their man money comes from both of her parents’ veterinary work. Her mom still with The Gardens (which is better structured than in canon b/c like fuck is there just a fucking crocodile pit that people can straight up fall into), her dad does veterinary care for farm animals he just kinda drives out to where he’s needed.

The clinic still operates at about the same level but there’s more people working in there b/w Cassie and her dad and her sister and her brother-in-law. Plus the volunteers. There tends to be someone in there. But added bonus of an actual clean and sterile room for doing surgery as well as an incinerator for deceased patients that really shouldn’t be turned into food/animal feed for one reason or another.

The barn is not a good place for secret team meetings.

-She is definitely chubby, probably fat, because her family makes sure people eat well and eat the kinda stuff that’ll give them the energy to work all day. She is also very strong and has quite a bit of stamina. She’s not necessarily fast, short legs are the enemy of speed, but you will not escape if she decides to chase you down, you will run out of steam first.

She however does not walk around wearing clothes covered in animals shit because that’s both unprofessional and unsanitary. She’s not about to embarrass her family walking around dirty and she’s not about to give some racist fuckwit a freebie to act like Black people are filthy. Her parents raised her better than that. She’s got aprons to use. After doing her chores in the morning she changes out of her work clothes, washes, and gets dressed in her school clothes. Are they fashionable? No. Are they hand-me-downs and/or comfortable? yes. Are they practical in case she need to do labor in them? Also yes and if she gets them messy she knows how to wash her own clothes.

-She doesn’t object to using morphs of ‘smart’ animals, lots of animals are more intelligent than people give them credit for and that doesn’t mean its wrong to use or eat them. Humans are animals just like any other. She does object to just acquiring people and morphing them (yes even hork-bajir and taxxons), mostly b/c wearing someone’s face could probably get that person killed, enslaved, or worse and also people tend to know what their coworkers look like and when somethings off. If they’re gonna have morphs of straight up sapient beings they’re gonna be frolis-ing some shit.

-She’s still an estreen but not because of some unknown talent, she just knows a lot about comparative anatomy. Earth animals, especially vertebrates? Her morphing is smooth is fuck. No knees turning the wrong direction to turn into heels, no finger turning into feathers, she knows what goes where and how. Inverts? A bit messier but nowhere near as bad as the others. Aliens? Does her best guess and the rest is wibbly (if she ever got her hands on info about the internal anatomy of these aliens she’d be sudsy tho). Cassie (in name only) @ the others: I’m begging you to look at an anatomy textbook.

Marco’s a lot better at the frolis maneuver without training but Cassie is better at figuring out the best way to blend animals together.

- Cassie’s family has a lot of land and she knows the neighboring forest very well. There are places that you could say.. hide a lot of people for a few years without anyone noticing. She knows that you can’t just liberate someone without a plan as to what to do next. Rachel’s dad leaving is something that is a very useful opportunity.

-When she finds out about the chee it makes her absolutely livid that these assholes refuse to use their considerable amount of skills to free enslaved people. She and Rachel are of one mind chewing these bitches out for being lazy assholes.

She is also very much not ok with the chee torturing their captive yeerks when they could either kill them or since they have the technology just put them in a pool when they don’t need them. It’s excessively cruel.

-She checks on the free hork-bajir frequently, offers what food and medical supplies she can, gives a helping hand when they start to build. She listens to their stories and shares those of her own ancestors.

-She feels equally guilty whenever a hork-bajir or taxxon falls to her fangs as she does killing humans. Especially after finding out about Melissa’s dad and why Chapman is a ‘voluntary’ host. They look different but they’re still people, just as much as Elfangor and Aximili and Gaf and Mertil are people (even if the andalites show a startling tendency to be racist fuckwits). She does her best not to kill anyone and later favors a hork-bajir morph so she can use dracons to drop and stun opponents.

-Without meaning to, she becomes the one to question Rachel’s plans if they feel too impulsive. Someone has to and as much as she likes Jake he doesn’t really have any strong opinions and neither does Tobias and Marco’s just a tad too aggressive. And the andalites are all... andalites.

They’ve got to think both long term and much bigger than just Earth, especially once the team finds out exactly what andalites are like b/c the yeerks aren’t their only enemy. And Cassie definitely plans to help out her hork-bajir family once the threat to Earth has been managed.

-When a yeerk controlling a little girl named Karen follows her home she mentally kicks herself in the ass and resolves to get smarter about leaving the battlefield and will certainly be having a conversation with the rest about it too.

She does not play mind games with the yeerk, she just disarms the host and takes them to the place that the team starves yeerks out of their hosts. She gives the yeerk an ultimatum and refuses to give a singular shit about what justifications Aftran has for keeping a seven year old girl as a slave and torturing her. She tells Aftran about how her ancestors murdered their slave masters and about all the weird and wonderful forms of life and why the propaganda she’s spewing is bullshit. And that its no one’s job but their own to be a good person. And that Aftran will absolutely die if she continues to be an asshole.

In the end Aftran gives up and in a surprise Karen decides to spare her life so Aftran gets to live as a prisoner in the rebel yeerk pool until her fellow yeerks who aren’t jackasses decide that she’s served her time. The Yeerk Peace Movement gets Karen cleared from the Empire’s records.

-Cassie was not surprised to learn that the yeerks had abolitionists among them. She was surprised to find the free hork-bajir working with them but when she stopped to think about it if the hork-bajir could work with the andalites in their team, the people who committed genocide against their people and were generally racist dickbags, its not that much a stretch that they could work with yeerks too.

#nix meows #aus #animorphs

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sometimesrosy · 6 years

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So, this is a question regarding writing choices and not a ship thing at all so I hope answering it doesn't get you any hate. What do you think of the decision to give us Echo's "backstory" and issues with her past in season 6 and not sooner? Do you think it was always the plan, or is this a response to the backlash regarding her characterization in season 5? It just seems kind of odd to me pacing wise, unless we're getting her death or some other dramatic change from her in s6.

I think that fandom’s belief in their effect on the story is greatly exaggerated. I just don’t think that the writer’s responses to fandom’s upsets are all that important. Yes they do respond to what fandom does. But I don’t really see that in major storylines, but rather in smaller gestures, minor storylines that don’t affect the plot or themes or main relationships. They adjust, they don’t really change.

I think also that people are incorrect about the writer’s intentions in regards to Echo. We get a lot of “they wanted us to be invested in B/E,” but as far as I can see, if they wanted us to be invested in endgame B/E, they would have shown us how it happened, how they were together, rather than dropping it in our laps in OPPOSITION to 30 minutes of Clarke being alone and tortured and missing Bellamy and wanting him back. Compare and contrast the the storylines. How do they affect each other? If they spend the first half of the episode ENTIRELY on Clarke’s pov, they are not telling you that Echo’s romance is the thing to be rooting for.. They want your response to be, “OH NO! Clarke!”

They are COURTING that. And to make it a REAL worry, they have to make B/E a REAL danger. It has to be a REAL relationship. Not as primary as Bellarke, but real to Bellamy. So we see his investment in it, we see them treating each other well, but we don’t really see how it developed or their tie.

STILL, we’re seeing Clarke’s reaction to B/E. We’re seeing Octavia’s reaction to B/E, and THOSE are the most important reactions. Because it’s about Bellamy’s relationship with Clarke and with Octavia and how Echo is an obstacle to BOTH. How do they feel about it? Shock. Anger. Sorrow. Loss. Loneliness. Betrayal. Hate. How does Echo feel about them? She’s worried about Octavia and has NO reaction to Clarke and Bellamy.

What is the story about? Clarke. Octavia. Bellarke. The Blake Siblings.

Why give backstory in season 6? Because it’s part of the story? Did people expect Echo to disappear because they didn’t want her to be with Bellamy? Well I know for a fact they did, because before season 5 even started, people said they were going to stop watching until she did. They tried to erase her from the narrative completely and when that didn’t work, they tried to say that she was evil, wrong, bad, a villain, and Bellamy was OOC for the simple act of protecting her and being loyal as if she was family. So. People thought that OOC means his IN CHARACTER loyalty and protectiveness was OOC if it was directed towards someone they didn’t like. That’s not how character works.

There are actually A LOT of storylines that have not been fully explored in season 5. And I think there’s a simple reason for that. Because they are telling story of the reunion of all our heroes over the course of TWO seasons. Bellarke, The Blake siblings, Kabby, Memori, Marper, Zaven, Princess Mechanic, Team Cockroach, B/E, Bellamy x Miller, Clarke x Madi, Bellamy x Madi, Clarke x Madi x Bellamy, Madi x spacekru. All these relationship stories are being stretched out over two seasons.

And that includes the character stories. Bellamy’s hero’s journey, Clarke’s hero’s journey, Murphy’s acceptance of himself, Abby’s struggle with addiction, Monty’s desire for peace, Madi’s ascension, Raven facing her failure to get them down to earth, Emori’s confidence in her skills, Kane’s desire for peace, AND ECHO’S STORY OF BELONGING AND LOYALTY AND FAMILY.

What we have here are a LOT of stories about character that have been developing in the return of humanity to the surface and the struggles over the last spot of livable earth. The battle for Eden is over, but the character and relationship journeys that started in s5, are mostly not over. Those will continue in season 6.

S5 dealt with the Bellarke reunion and the Blake reunion, memori’s relationship struggles, Madi wanting freedom from Clarke, Murphy’s self esteem problem, Monty’s desire to make algae not war, Zaven, Marper’s happily ever after ending, Bellamy’s hero’s journey

S6 has these stories on deck. Bellarke romance, B/E break up, Blake sibling reconnection. Octavia redemption (might take longer than one season.) Kabby. Princess Mechanic, Millamy. Clarke’s hero’s journey. Madi being heda, Raven’s redemption/forgiveness, Being the good guy. And what’s up with Echo.

They are PACING their stories. Some were told in season 5, like marper and memori. Some were broken up in the middle, like Bellarke and the Blakes. Some were set up for season 6, like princess mechanic, AND like Echo and b/e’s break up. First off, there are only TWO stories that could happen with b/e, because there is no conflict in their relationship, it’s in a stasis. They either choose to be with each other, or they break up. There’s no narrative tension there except for with Clarke and Octavia. So he either says, “no I choose Echo,” or he says, “I do not choose Echo.” And actually, he kind of did not choose Echo with Octavia. He chose his sister. But will he do the same w Clarke? Well, he chose Clarke over Octavia, so….This is set up. Will it be an easy choice? No. But it’s not really a head choice. It’s a heart choice, as much as he’s trying to make it a head choice.

I’m sorry. I feel like I’m going on too long, but maybe I’m not. When fandom talks about Echo, they seem to be focused on shipping and only relate her story to B/E and C/B/E and Bellarke. And they have a lot of feelings about that which take precedence.

But that’s not the story I’m seeing. B/E was used as an obstacle with the Blakes and with Bellarke. But otherwise, Echo’s story had almost nothing to do with Bellamy. She was with spacekru and raven and murphy. She was dealing with being a spy again, the past coming back, a new heda, eligius, questions of ethics and pragmatism. And a little bit of loneliness and longing for b/e, but not that much.

When people take the focus off of the main characters (Clarke, Bellamy, Octavia) and put it onto Echo, they are losing the thread of the story. They’re losing the MEANING of it. This is one of the reasons that POV is important. WHOSE STORY IS IT?

Not teling Echo’s story is a choice that keeps us focused on Clarke and Bellarke and the Blakes. Because THEY are the story. Echo is a secondary character, and apparenlty they NEED to tell her story because the fandom has no clue who she is or what her point in the story is, because when looked at from the romance story of B/E, there’s nothing. Or little. I mean, that’s because they’re not telling the romance story of B/E.

And here’s my guess. They won’t be telling it in s6 either. The story Echo has started is about BELONGING. And FAMILY. And LOYALTY. That’s what JR said it was, and that’s what is on screen.

So the backstory will be about that. And it’s going to be heavily influenced by Bellamy’s feelings for Clarke, and spacekru’s feelings for Clarke, all of whom have a closer relationship to her than Echo. KNOWING that Clarke basically gave up her place in spacekru so Echo could have it. She gave up her helmet so Echo could live. She thought she was dying, so maybe didn’t fight as hard to get back to the ship.

So here’s the thing. The pacing IS weird. That means. Step back and figure out what’s up with the pacing. The lack of Echo story in s5 did not fit a b/e romance story. So back up and check if the theory of b/e romance works. It doesn’t. BUT it DOES work if the b/e romance is the romantic obstacle leg of a c/b/e love triangle. It works very well and fits the trope perfectly. Adding in some “suddenly alive” and “widower” “the notebook” and “second chance” tropes.

It IS possible that they’re getting ready to kill off Echo, and so give her backstory to gain the audience’s empathy for her, like they did with Finn. It’s also possible that she’s getting her own backstory about loyalty, family, belonging, and HER past which was as a child soldier, prized slave assassin of azgeda. Her life was GIVEN to the throne. Like Ontari who went psychotic. And I will be honest, that if I think about who Echo’s character is in totality, not just as a love interest, then what I see is a great possibility that we’ll be dealing with the issue of slavery on the two suns planet. And they will use Echo’s backstory to give us a connection to that. And whether they give us some b/e backstory I don’t know. But we do know that there was a reaper on set last season. All the reapers are 131 years long dead. We know that Echo was captured by MW, likely by reapers. And we’ve seen the reaper connections with all of our other main characters (the only other possibility is Indra, but we don’t even know if she’ll be on the planet,) so my speculation is we’ll get Echo’s backstory before she met Bellamy in mw. It won’t be about Bellamy or b/e. It will be about Echo, and humanity, and how she was never of value, she was expendable, which has ALSO been a theme in this show.

No. I don’t think Echo’s backstory in s6 will be weird. She’s all wrapped up with multiple themes and storylines in this show and has been since s2.

#the 100 #echo #backstory #pacing #narratie pacing

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friendship-korea-japan · 3 years

Text

9.10. Summary - After Japan’s withdrawal from Korea

Question 9: Korea's situation after Japan's withdrawal › 10. Summary - After Japan’s withdrawal from Korea

Click here for table of contents

9.10. Summary - After Japan’s withdrawal from Korea

(1) Japan had left behind numerous invisible assets in Korea. It eliminated the problems of misappropriation of tax money by public officials and selling of official posts and titles by the king. It also made the yangban give up plundering, and instead, start doing their jobs. It turned the commoners and slaves who were under oppression during the era of the Joseon Dynasty to equal members of the national public. It provided opportunities for anybody to go to school. Japan left behind an environment where every person could live as a member of a modern nation.

(2) The tangible assets that Japan left behind when withdrawing from Korea include: 160,000 houses that were previously occupied by the Japanese people, more than 6,500 schools (from elementary schools to universities as well as vocational schools), many factories and banks, roadways and railroad networks constructed throughout the Korean Peninsula, telephone and other telecommunication facilities, and hospitals, all of which were non-existent in the era of the Joseon Dynasty. The total amount for them would be 122,700,000,000,000 yen + A + B + C + D in present value.

(3) In addition, the “Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea” and the “Agreement on Claims and Economic Cooperation with South Korea” were concluded to facilitate a total aid of 800 million dollars (consisting of 300 million dollars on a non-repayable basis, 200 million dollars on a repayable basis, and 300 million dollars from the private sector) to South Korea. That amount was about 2.3 times as much as the national budget of South Korea at the time.

(4) Moreover, after the normalization of Japan-South Korea diplomatic relations in 1965, about 3 trillion yen (in present value) was provided through ODA or on a non-repayable basis for as many as 113 projects to support the development of South Korea.

(5) According to a survey conducted by an American scholar who interviewed 51 elderly Korean-Americans about the reality of the situation during the era of Japanese rule, it was found that they all lived peacefully in prosperity and got along with the Japanese people without oppression or deprivation by the Japanese. This apparently demonstrates the truth of the era of Japanese rule because they had not received an anti-Japanese education by the present South Korean government.

(6) War apology statements to South Korea were issued 24 times in total, and these were made by Emperors of Japan, previous Prime Ministers and chief cabinet secretaries, as well as in the form of an apology resolution passed in the National Diet of Japan.

But, can we really say that “there was an unfortunate past between us for a period in this century” in relation to what Japan had done in Korea? It might have been unfortunate for the Japanese to have had their hard-earned tax money spent in Korea, but can’t we say that the changes made in Korea as described in Question 8 were not unfortunate?

Besides, what even was the “great suffering” being referred to in the apology statement to South Korea by a Prime Minister of Japan of “Japan brought about great suffering upon your country and its people”?

Although a Prime Minister of Japan apologized by saying, “the people of the Korean Peninsula went through unbearable pain and sorrow as a result of our country’s actions during a certain period in the past”, in actuality, the Korean people operated freely to be prosperous under Japanese rule. Did becoming prosperous cause “unbearable pain and sorrow”?

Furthermore, while a Japanese Prime Minister apologized by saying, “Japan caused, during a certain period in the past, tremendous damage and suffering to the people of the Republic of Korea through its colonial rule…”, Japan on the contrary generously invested enormous amounts of tax money, capital fund, human resources, and expertise to help improve the miserable state in the era of the Joseon Dynasty. Did it actually cause “tremendous damage and suffering” to the Korean people?

Why did the Japanese government apologize repeatedly without even fact-checking? If you apologize, your fault would be admitted as fact, and thus, you would have to accept whatever punishment is demanded by the other party; such common sense is prevalent internationally. It was well known in the Joseon Dynasty that you could be executed with a forced confession by torture even if you had not committed a crime.

(7) The claim of South Korea that “Japan had forcibly taken away Korean women” is a fiction that had been established and spread around the world through 18 stories reported by The Asahi Shimbun during an extended period of 14 years. Although The Asahi Shimbun admitted and retracted the reports as false 34 years after it was first published, at that point the story had already been recognized and spread around the world as truth. Even now, as of 2020, the “Issue of Comfort Women” remains as the focus of anti-Japanese movement in South Korea.

(8) Looking into the situation at the end of the era of the Joseon Dynasty, there were an opportunistic and irresponsible king selling official posts and titles, and senior bureaucrats who spent their time on false accusations and partisan battles. There were also widespread corruption, misappropriation, fraudulent acts, and deprivation throughout lower-ranked government officials. Even farmers and fishermen pretended to be lazy to shield themselves from exploitation and to hide behind poverty. For such a Joseon Dynasty that had sunk in a morass of corruption from the top-down, Japan worked for reformation by investing the hard-earned tax money and capital fund of the Japanese people totaling over 40 trillion yen in present value.

(9) Nonetheless, South Korea as of 2020 is trying to dig up the issues that are supposed to be already resolved and making new demands to the Japanese government, advocating that the Japanese rule of Korea in the past was illegal, unjust, and invalid, and thus the “Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea” and the “Agreement on Claims and Economic Cooperation with South Korea” shall be null and void.

(10) If the Treaty and the Agreement mentioned in the previous paragraph were null and void, then Japan should be entitled to demand restitution of assets of 122,700,000,000,000 yen + A + B + C + D as well as the paid-in 800 million dollars (1,008,000,000,000 yen in present value) from South Korea.

(11) Moreover, Japan is also entitled to make an additional claim for the following money accumulated during a period of 75 years from 1945 to 2020 in accordance with Article 4 (a) of the Treaty of Peace with Japan.

(i) The surplus amount accumulated during the 75 years after deducting the expenses in the electricity charges for the electric power as of 1945

(ii) The amount accumulated during the 75 years attributed to the increase of harvest from the cropland the area of which had doubled since 1945, deducting the expenses for farmers, as well as the amount corresponding to Japan’s contribution for breed improvement leading to increased revenue per unit area

(iii) The profit accumulated during the 75 years from the railroad fare as of 1945, deducting the expenses

(iv) The benefit of sale accumulated during the 75 years of the products manufactured in various factories that Japan left behind

(v) The profit accumulated during the 75 years from facilities, as of 1945, for telecommunication, aquaculture, and silk products that had been developed under the leadership of Japanese experts

(12) After the Treaty on Japan-South Korea Basic Relations was concluded in 1965 in relation to the Japan’s withdrawal from Korea, Japan had reestablished close relationships with South Korean companies. Japan provided a huge amount of financial assistance and full-scale technical support to Korean companies, and that, in combination with competent Korean businesspeople, helped many Korean companies grow into global enterprises. Samsung and POSCO are good examples.

We think Japan is able to claim the amount listed above after scrutinizing and collecting more information about each item and the related amount. But the Japanese government has not made a claim to South Korea at this point because the Treaty on Japan-South Korea Basic Relations and the Agreement on Claims and Economic Cooperation with South Korea are effective, and also because Japan apparently wishes to maintain and enhance her friendly relationship with South Korea.

Nonetheless, for some reason, the South Korean government along with the media, some civilian groups, as well as some school teachers are advocating anti-Japanese movement as if that is the national cause, treating the pro-Japanese as traitors to the country. They advocate elimination of any Japanese legacy as well.

Why does South Korea so persistently maintain the anti-Japanese movement as if it is a fundamental ideology of the nation? One possible cause may be the underlying and still-unclosed perception gap between Japan and South Korea of the legality of the Japanese annexation of Korea that was brought up in the bilateral negotiations that started in 1952. In the negotiations, South Korea insisted the Japanese annexation of Korea was illegal and unjust while Japan countered that it was legal and legitimate.

Japan has faithfully adhered to the provisions in the Japan-Korea Treaties executed between 1904 and 1907 as well as the Japanese-Korea Annexation Treaty. As a result, Japan had brought in irreversible transformation and wealth to Korea as discussed at full length in sections (1) to (26) in Question 8, and left behind tangible assets described in Sections 2. (1) to (21) as well as gave intangible influences as stated in Sections 3. (1) to (26). They include: the establishment of social and economic order by abolishing the class system in Korea, administering fair trials, abolishing whipping, improving prison, cleaning up the custom of bribery, disabling the system for exploitation and misappropriation, enabling the private ownership system, and adopting free choices of employment and location of residence; the vitalization and development of economy with the construction of railroads, roadways, bridges, waterworks, and sewage systems, urban reform, and the provision of electricity and other infrastructure; the development of agriculture and fisheries; the spread of education; the modernization of the medical system; and the establishment of disease prevention. All of these measures have provided opportunities for every Korean person to act freely, made Korea a modern nation, brought in irreversible and significant transformation, and left behind a national foundation for further development.

As discussed in Question 7, the irreversible and significant transformation could not have happened domestically by their own people under the order of the Korean Empire.

Such irreversible and significant transformation has brought in freedom, wealth, human resources, and a new economic system to Korea. Which aspect of the Japanese annexation of Korea are they saying is illegal and unjust?

Regardless of whether the Japanese annexation of Korea was illegal and unjust or not, the significant changes that Japan brought in as a consequence of the Japanese annexation of Korea, are starkly present as a fact. This fact is inerasable and irreversible even if the Korean people advocate the Japanese annexation of Korea as being illegal and unjust. Furthermore, present South Korea is a nation founded based on the inerasable historical facts. Therefore, trying to deny and erase the results of the Japanese annexation of Korea as being illegal and unjust is equivalent to denying the bases, and ultimately, the very existence of South Korea.

However, it is impossible to completely erase the traces and marks that Japan left behind in Korea, including tangible and intangible assets, as well as already-provided ODA. And it must be very difficult to visualize present-day Korea without considering all these gains such as the dramatic changes, tangible and intangible assets, the outcome of the 113 projects with ODA, and the capital fund and technical support invested in companies such as Samsung and POSCO. The anti-Japanese movement and the campaign to eliminate Japanese influences are “doing no good and a lot of harm” for South Korea.

Besides, the past is unchangeable. We can cultivate the future on our own will. We should not sacrifice our future by getting stuck in the past.

Thus, a matter of the utmost importance for South Korea now is, instead of disputing with Japan, to cherish the traces, marks, and influences of Japan that remain in South Korea as symbols of the collaborative work of the people of two countries who made efforts to modernize Korea, to free the people from the class system, and to make a prosperous country, as well as to make improvements in their bilateral relationship. We believe there is no other way to make the people of both countries happy. If the Korean people remain anti-Japanese as if it were the national cause even after learning about many of the facts discussed above, they may be regarded from all over the world as people “that return evil for good”.

We would like to ask all the people around the world whether they agree or disagree with our beliefs and perspective.

#Korea #about south korea #history of korea #korean people #korea-japan

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emperor-uncarnate · 6 years

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Old Ben: A Star Wars Story

Had some ideas for an Obi-Wan Kenobi movie I’d want to see... without Darth Maul in it. I’ve watched some Rebels and The Clone Wars but I’m gonna completely ignore them and most of the other expanded media (because let’s be real, Disney probably will too) and come up with a film synopsis that won’t end in just another lightsaber duel. I want a movie that’s gonna challenge Obi-Wan’s Jedi faith, and I think I came up with something that could be compelling. Read on and lemme know what you think:

The film opens with the familiar sight of a Star Destroyer coming out of hyperspace above Tatooine. An Imperial shuttle descends from the capital ship’s hanger and makes its way down to Mos Eisley, flying over a bustling marketplace as it nears its landing site. Down in the streets we see an awestruck trio of human children watching the shuttle pass overhead: Luke, Biggs, and Camie. The kids are around nine or ten years old at this point and they’re enamored - albeit naively - with the Galactic Empire. Camie’s mother, who we’re going to tentatively name “Diane” (mostly because I imagine her played by Diane Lane and I don’t feel like coming up with Star-Warsy names for hypothetical characters), is looking after the children for the day while she shops. Luke and Biggs, who dream of someday becoming TIE Fighter pilots, decide to slip away from Diane’s supervision while she’s haggling with a trader and go check out the shuttle at the docks. The responsible Camie objects and threatens to tattle on them but best bros Luke and Biggs can’t be deterred. They sneak near the landed vessel and observe an Imperial officer trudging menacingly down its boarding ramp. The boys overhear the officer saying something about locating a fugitive of the Empire and something else about making a deal with some shady Tatooine locals.

As the officer departs, the boys try to get a better look at the shuttle and are caught by a few Stormtroopers. The soldiers mock them and push them around, intending to arrest or otherwise harm them, until Diane arrives. She puts herself at risk and tries to protect her daughter’s friends, frantically attempting to coax the Stormtroopers into looking the other way. She fails to sway the brutish Imperials, who care nothing for the innocence of curious children, and it seems like all of them are in deep trouble when a cloaked man arrives just in time. The not-so-mysterious figure drops his hood and we get our first look at a 47-year-old Obi-Wan Kenobi. Dude’s looking grizzled with a little more than a touch of grayed hair. One Jedi mind trick later, the group is able to safely walk away and the Stormtroopers have no memory of the event. Diane thanks their rescuer and takes Camie and Biggs home while Obi-Wan, introducing himself with a smile as “Ben,” offers to take Luke home himself. Luke doesn’t know Ben very well but he knows him enough to trust him, and so they leave Mos Eisley together.

Luke is left pretty confused by the encounter. His first experience with the Empire leads him to conclude they’re not as great as he’d first thought, and Ben’s refusal to explain how he threw off the Stormtroopers left Luke with even more questions. Remember, Luke has no idea what the Force is until it’s explained to him in A New Hope. Ben delivers Luke to Owen and Beru Lars, who are grateful for Ben’s interference. At this point, Luke’s Uncle Owen has little reason to dislike Ben and is overjoyed that his nephew was returned safely.

Luke goes to his room while the adults chat (it’d be cool if little Luke was playing with the same T-16 Skyhopper toy he has later) and Ben gets to telling Owen and Beru what happened at the spaceport. He explains that the Galactic Emperor suspected Tatooine might be a possible hiding place for a Jedi named Obi-Wan and that the Empire would send a battalion to their Mos Eisley checkpoint every now and then to scope things out. Ben recounts that Obi-Wan was killed around the same time Anakin was, and he warns that Luke shouldn’t be allowed near larger settlements when the Empire is visiting (and the Empire’s presence in town was why Ben decided to keep tabs on Luke that day in the first place). According to Ben, the Empire doesn’t know Obi-Wan is dead so they’re still circling the galaxy hunting for any sign of him. Owen and Beru heed his warning but they have no idea that Ben is in fact Obi-Wan himself, and this later mirrors the way Luke is told Anakin and Vader are two separate people.

Ben goes on to offer to train Luke in the ways of the Force, stating the boy is at the ideal age to do so, but a protective Owen is hesitant to the proposal. Beru, who is much more open to the idea, convinces Owen to consider it. Owen agrees to think about it, and Ben leaves them both to ponder young Luke’s future. He mounts his eopie, a creature you might recall from the prequels, and rides off into the treacherous Jundland Wastes where he’s made his home. Unbeknownst to Ben, however, he has a follower...

Say what you will about the green milk scene in The Last Jedi but I really enjoyed the montage of self-exiled Luke’s daily routine. I’d want to see something similar here, showing us how Ben survives as a hermit in the harsh wilds of the Dune Sea. And while he’s rustling up some grub made from desert flora and fauna (maybe actual grubs?), he’s interrupted by an attractive human woman. She approaches him as a lost traveller, asking if she can take shelter in his dusty little hut for the night. She’s a little too nosy and flirtatious for Ben to trust, however, and his Jedi instincts lead him to concoct a plan. He invites her to join him in his home and share his meal before in some way calling on his classic Kenobi cleverness to reveal her true identity. Turns out she’s a Clawdite changeling, much like the one he and Anakin pursued in Attack of the Clones, and Ben’s trickery causes her to revert to her natural reptilian form. Maybe he dupes her into eating something spicy or sour and that causes her to lose concentration and shapeshift back to her real self. Something along those lines.

Ben interrogates her and tries to find out who she is and why she was trying to deceive him. The Clawdite woman explains that she was also there at the spaceport keeping an eye on the Imperials when she saw what Ben did to save Diane and the children. The changeling, who we’ll name... wait for it... “Changeling,” recognized his Jedi mind trick. Coupled with her intel that the Empire was looking for one such runaway force-user, Changeling suspected he was the one they were after. Ben is frustrated and perturbed that someone finally caught on to his true identity and asks if her intention was to turn him in to the authorities. Changeling denies this, claiming she’s in trouble with the Empire and he’s the only one who can help her (but she doesn’t say “you’re my only hope” because repeating little lines like that just feels shoehorned half the time). She only shapeshifted and lied about who she was so she could get to talk with him over dinner and confirm that he wasn’t some kind of lunatic.

Changeling gathered a great deal of information thanks to her latent transformative abilities, allowing her to spy on the Imperial officer Luke and Biggs listened in on earlier. Apparently, members of the Empire’s leadership were growing tired of sending teams all the way to the Outer Rim to look for signs of Kenobi. The Imperial High Command or the Grand Moffs or whoever would be in charge of that disagreed with Emperor Palpatine’s decision to continue searching Tatooine. They believed they were wasting resources on this insignificant desert planet because of the “baseless” inklings and hunches of their monarch. Palpatine still suspected Obi-Wan’s presence there but the Moffs and Admirals weren’t big believers in the Force, so they decided to compromise instead. The Empire was going to give the job of monitoring Tatooine to a crime syndicate they were in talks with in (the Empire and the crime syndicate definitely have to meet at a cantina called “Club Mola Ram” as a reverse reference to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). The crime syndicate, which would be comparable to the one run by the Hutts, would be able to more thoroughly keep an eye out for any Jedi activity while the Empire could spend its time and resources on efforts they considered more important.

In exchange, the Empire agreed to construct a massive slave-processing facility for the crime syndicate. Slavery, which was outlawed by the Republic, was making a return in popularity thanks to the general shittiness of the Empire. And, wouldn’t you know it, the Empire was planning on seizing land from a number of moisture farmers in order to build it. You might be wondering why the Empire wouldn’t just pick a barren, unowned patch of land since Tatooine’s really just chock full of barren, unowned patches of land. They picked the part of the desert Changeling lives in because A, it’s within range of where the crime syndicate operates, B, it’s already equipped with the moisture farming infrastructure required to maintain it, and C, they can just turn the existing residents there into their first batch of slaves. The Empire and the crime syndicate wouldn’t lose a wink sleep over that, but Changeling and the moisture farmers in her community would suffer greatly.

Ben isn’t surprised that the Empire would stoop to that, but he does question why Changeling’s first impulse wasn’t to bring him in. If she captured Ben and handed him over, the Empire wouldn’t need to hire the crime syndicate and it wouldn’t need to build the “slave station” on her land. Ben is comforted to learn that Changeling, unlike most people at the time, is a supporter of the Jedi. She knows they’re the good guys, and she thought the right thing to do would be to tell Ben and at least try to work together with him.

Ben reluctantly refuses. He can’t risk himself as one of the last Jedi and he certainly can’t risk Luke, and he assures Changeling that he absolutely cannot get involved. Still trying to protect himself and the Jedi legacy, Ben denies the allegation that he’s a Jedi and continues to pretend he’s just some aging vagabond. He apologizes to her and it’s clear that he has to resist his desire to help people because he thinks it’s for the greater good. Changeling states her disappointment that he wasn’t more willing to help, and it is at that moment Ben realizes the two of them aren’t alone. He steps outside his hut to find it is surrounded by armed moisture farmers. They’re kind of a pathetic band of desperate people, obviously unsuited to be threatening anyone. Maybe one of them isn’t even holding his blaster correctly. Ben can clearly see they’re not really fighters but after a short bout (not involving any lightsabers or Force abilities because Ben’s still denying he’s a Jedi at all) the scene ends with him being stunned and taken captive anyway.

Ben awakens in an unfamiliar little house and slowly recognizes who was making sure he was alright while he was unconscious: Diane. Despite his grogginess, you can tell Ben’s happy to see her. He learns she and Camie also live on the endangered land before meeting a number of other farmers from their sector. So now we have Ben, Diane, Camie, Changeling, and room for a few other aliens or droids in their little crew. This is where the merchandise team has some real action figure opportunity. We’re going to name them “Huey, Dewey, and Louie” because Disney joke and also because they ultimately don’t matter much beyond comic relief or having cool/useful abilities. I’m not above throwing a few characters like this into a movie just to spice things up. Anyway, Ben learns that the half-dozen or so farmers he’s with are the only ones who know about him being there, although he still won’t admit he’s a Jedi. Changeling feels as if she isn’t left with much choice, so she finally sticks Ben with an ultimatum: help them stop the deal between the Empire and the syndicate or get knocked out again and be handed over to them against his will. Diane is a little taken aback by Changeling’s threat, protesting and claiming that the deal has already been struck and the Empire’s construction crews are already gathering in Mos Eisley. The way she says it, it seems like the slave facility is going to be built either way.

While Diane, Changeling, and the other farmers squabble, Ben quietly slips away and tries to escape them. But as he reaches his exit, he comes face to face with someone who had apparently been eavesdropping on the whole group. Ben is met with the violent screech-grunting of a Tusken Raider trying to assault him. Still avoiding the use of his fantastic Jedi abilities, Ben ducks and dodges as the enraged Sand Person swings wildly at him with his traditional gaderffii weapon. The other farmers hear all the commotion and run outside to meet them, trying to stop the fight, but Ben urges them to stay back for their own safety. He fights the Tusken Raider with his bare hands until he has no choice but to Force push his adversary away. The Tusken lands on his back while the onlooking farmers finally see proof Ben is indeed a Jedi, but the fight’s not over yet. “Tusk,” as I’m going to lazily name him, leaps to his feet and whips out a blaster, forcing Ben to finally ignite his blue lightsaber for the first time in the movie. He deflects the blaster bolts and Tusken, either in his native language or otherwise, reveals his motive:

Almost fifteen years earlier, Tusk’s people were murdered by a rampaging Jedi. He was just a Sand... Child (is “Sand Child” a thing? I don’t know how this works) at the time and was the only survivor. The one who murdered everyone else in his entire village, of course, was Anakin Skywalker during Attack of the Clones. The Tusken Raiders of other villages came to fear or worship Anakin as some kind of demon, but Tusk’s own village was wiped out and he subsequently grew up among the spacefarers and merchants of Anchorhead. The orphaned Sand Child grew into a Sand Man and eventually found a place as a farmhand on one of the threatened moisture farms, but his hatred for the Jedi who slaughtered his people never faded.

Tusk still had the image of a robed man with a blue lightsaber burned into his mind and suddenly there was one right in front of him. After he tells his tale in a little flashback, he angrily asks Ben if he was the one who did it all those years ago. Ben didn’t kill the Tusken Raiders, of course, but he knows Anakin did (somebody told him about it, but I’ll get to that). Still feeling guilty for failing Anakin ten years earlier, so to does Ben feel responsible for the deaths of Tusk’s people. And now here’s the kicker... Tusk senses Ben’s guilt with the Force. Tusk has no idea what the Force is and he thinks what he’s picking up is just his ancestors or something helping him seek the truth, but he can actually sense the shame Ben feels and that convinces him Ben is the murderer. Believing he’d found his chance at revenge, Tusk lashes out again with his gaderffii stick, forcing Ben to block with his lightsaber. That’s when we learn what Tusk has made his ceremonial weapon out of: cortosis. It hasn’t showed up in the films yet, but cortosis is a metal that can short out a lightsaber if it comes in contact with its energy blade. Ben’s lightsaber is extinguished and he can’t turn it back on right away, catching him by surprise and nearly costing him his life. But thanks to his Force powers and the help of Huey, Dewey, and/or Louie, Ben incapacitates Tusk and he’s locked up in some kind of storage unit as a makeshift jail cell.

The jig is up for Ben, who is at last revealed to actually be the Jedi they thought he was. He assures the rest of the group that he didn’t kill all those Sand People, and they choose to believe him since he made no attempt to kill Tusk in the skirmish earlier. Ben learns from the farmers that Tusk is known to be hot-headed and aggressive at times but is also considered a decent member of their farming community. The other farmers seem to know he has a troubled past involving Jedi and they knew it wouldn’t be a good idea to have him meet Ben, so they excluded him from their meeting. They didn’t expect Tusk to show up at their door like that, and Ben wonders if it was Tusk’s Force-sensitivity that guided him there. The farmers thank Ben for refraining from utterly slicing and dicing Tusk and Ben finally agrees to help them with their Empire problem.

Ben is staying with the moisture farmers for the night but he just can’t manage to catch some sleep. Troubled and uncertain, Ben is visited by the ghost of his former master, Qui-Gon Jinn (and you know it’s gotta be Liam Neeson reprising the role). The spectral Jedi Master sought to console his doubtful former apprentice, who was reflecting on all the pain and destruction Anakin and Darth Vader had dealt to the galaxy (there would definitely be some echoes to Force ghost Yoda visiting Luke in The Last Jedi here). Even ten years later, Ben still wonders where he went so wrong with his padawan that Palpatine could so effectively turn him to the dark side. Also, were you wondering how Ben knew about what Anakin did to the Sand People? Anakin wouldn’t have told Obi-Wan about that, but it’s mentioned in this scene that Qui-Gon’s ghost told Ben what Anakin did before the events of the film. Continuity! Anyway, Qui-Gon tries to reassure Ben and give him some words of wisdom and encouragement just before Diane unexpectedly arrives.

Qui-Gon’s spirit disappears and Diane says she came by because she saw the eerie glow of the ghost and wanted to investigate. She sees Ben can’t sleep and offers to make him some tea, or whatever they drink there, and the two stay up into the night talking. Diane eventually asks Ben about Luke and he momentarily lets his guard down to regale the story of his old friend Anakin Skywalker. Remember the story Ben tells nineteen-year-old Luke in A New Hope? She gets that same altered story but you can more obviously discern Ben’s censoring himself. He can barely keep the lie going but the subject of their conversation veers towards the celibacy of Jedi and how Luke came to be. During the conversation we learn that Camie’s father is no longer in Diane’s life and it leads Ben to question his sacred vows what with the Jedi Order as a thing of the past. Diane feels some type of way about Ben and they both know it, but he sees this as a test of his faith. Ben excuses himself before either one of them can make a move and says goodnight, finally getting a little sleep before he wakes up and learns...

...Tusk is gone. Guy somehow flew the coop in the middle of the night, hopping on his wooly Bantha steed and peacing the fuck out. The farmers kind of panic for a moment, realizing that he very well could’ve set off towards the Empire to report Ben. They figured Tusk would do that in an effort to simultaneously save their land and have his revenge, but perhaps Tusk overlooked the fact that the Imperials would kill them all for harboring a fugitive. They determine what time during the night Tusk must’ve left, and they realize that his slow-moving Bantha gave them a chance to head him off in time. Ben, Huey, and company board a landspeeder and go forth at blazing speeds across the desert with Dewey using his alien/droid abilities to track the Bantha (whatever those abilities may be). Take note - the farmers did have a ship at their disposal but Changeling said she had to stay behind and make repairs before they could fly it. Diane and Camie stay at the farm with her, leaving Ben and his inexperienced farmer companions to go out into the Dune Sea.

Unfortunately, a patrolling group of crime syndicate thugs catch them out in the open desert. A whole squadron of enemy speeders give chase, and I’m totally picturing Star War’s version of Mad Max: Fury Road. Imagine someone throwing Ben a blaster and asking “you ever use one of these before?” to which he casually replies “oh, once or twice.” Ben fights valiantly without using his Force powers until his landspeeder, driven expertly by Louie, is about to get wrecked. I’m imagining Ben would pull off some crazy maneuver with the Force, demonstrating the true mastery of his powers he’s refined over his years in solitude. He gets his lightsaber going too and it’d be quite the spectacle. I’d pay some seriously good money to see a scene like that, I dunno about you guys. I also wouldn’t say no to a scene where Ben hijacks one of the syndicate speeder bikes a la Luke in Return of the Jedi and I’m not going to pretend I don’t remember this awesome clip (I said I was gonna ignore Star Wars: The Clone Wars, never said anything about Star Wars: Clone Wars). Watch the clip, it’s great and Obi-Wan does the thing from Akira.

The chase scene ends with them entering a canyon, maybe even the same one from The Phantom Menace’s Boonta-Eve Classic if you want to throw in an extra easter egg. The criminals are killed or otherwise ejected from the chase one at a time until there are none left, you know how it goes. You see one of the syndicate thugs sending a signal to the Empire before it’s all over, letting them know Kenobi is located and is working with people from the farm. Ben on his stolen speeder bike and Huey, Dewey, and Louie in their landspeeder finally reach the wandering Bantha and are surprised to see it’s alone. Tusk’s not riding it, and that’s when Ben’s Jedi-sense gets tingling... Tusk’s not riding his Bantha because Tusk never left the farm.

Tusk sent his Bantha off alone, which would normally be a pretty serious offense in Tusken Raider culture. Sand People are bonded to their faithful Banthas for life, but Tusk sent his away so he could avenge his village and exact what he believed to be justice. He waited until Changeling had repaired her ship and taken off so he could kidnap Diane and Camie, knowing he could only do so if the other people in their group were led elsewhere. It was never his intention to go to the Empire because he desires to kill Ben himself.

Ben freaks when he realizes this and turns his bike around, zooming back towards the farm. Our trio of aliens/droids/whatever tries to go with him in their landspeeder but, conveniently, it breaks down and they have to wait for Changeling to swoop in for pickup with their ship. Ben makes it back to the farm and finds it empty. He discovers Tusk left a small tracking device behind for Ben to use, and so he immediately hops back on his bike and follows it despite knowing it’ll most likely be a trap. After Ben has left the farm again, Changeling and everyone on their ship make it back there too but they’re only inside for a few minutes before they hear the howls of incoming TIE Fighters. Their airspace is surrounded by several TIEs while that Imperial officer from earlier flies in on his shuttle. A platoon of Stromtroopers march out with the officer, who commands Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi exit the farmhouse. Little do they know, the real Ben is closing in on Tusk somewhere else entirely. Changeling decides to do something heroic, shapeshifting into Ben and making a daring escape. Diane’s farmhouse sustains heavy damage in the process but Changeling narrowly makes it to her ship, making sure to be seen in her Ben form and provoking the Imperial forces into chasing her. She pilots her small freighter away from the planet, drawing the Empire off the farm. Changeling thinks she can string them along and somehow make it back alive but she’s outnumbered and cannot escape them. Her ship is blown to smithereens, close enough to the planet’s atmosphere that the onlooking Huey, Dewey, and Louie see the explosion in the distance and cry alien/droid/duck tears. Sad time, but it leads the Empire to at long last confirm the fatality of the legendary Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Meanwhile, the tracking device leads actual Ben to this craggy, desolate wasteland. He finds Tusk, who is waiting for him at the edge of a cave along with an ensnared Diane and Camie. Classic “you killed the people I love so now I’m gonna kill the people you love” situation. Ben tries to ease Tusk into standing down and giving up the innocent woman and her child, even offering up his own lightsaber for their safe return. The enraged Tusken Raider rejects the lightsaber before the desperate Jedi Master also offers to train him in the Force. Ben levitates his lightsaber into Tusk’s hands, promising he’d find peace in learning the ways of the Force, but Tusk is hell-bent on revenge and won’t give up. He goes against Tusken Raider culture yet again, this time removing his head coverings and baring his face (gross) and his dark side-tainted eyes. Now consumed by the dark side of the Force, Tusk roars into the cave and receives a roar in return from what sounds like a large creature. Ben suddenly regrets giving up his lightsaber just as a titanic Krayt Dragon, a monstrous reptilian behemoth native to Tatooine, emerges from the cave. The beast is about to chow down on Diane but Ben uses the Force to demand its attention. He keeps the ravenous dragon focused on him while he evades its many attacks (including its acidic venom) until he finally is able to use enough Force mojo to pacify it.

Just when the hulking, hundred-meter lizard is calming down, a furious Tusk leaps into the fray, disrupting Ben’s attempt to placate it. This turns into a chaotic three-way battle between Ben, Tusk, and the overwhelmingly strong Krayt Dragon. Though already exhausted, Ben manages to get his lightsaber back but is careful not to let it connect with Tusk’s cortosis gaderffii stick. This proves to be challenging, pushing Ben’s middle-aged agility to its limits. The old Jedi Master eventually falters when his lightsaber is fizzled out by the brittle cortosis weapon and he drops it, leaving him open to be swatted away by the dragon’s whip-like tail. Then the monster disarms and pins Tusk down, ready to bite his fucking face off, when Ben uses the Force to lift the gaderffii and send the sharp end of it through the beast’s skull like a missile. The beast is instantly killed and collapses but an injured Ben can barely stand or defend himself anymore.

Tusk picks up Ben’s lightsaber just as the cortosis’ disabling effect wears off and he turns it back on. Sure looks like Tusk is about to finish Ben with his own weapon, but instead he slashes at the Krayt Dragon’s side and makes a deep gash. Tusk reaches into the dead wyrm’s guts and retrieves a dazzling, almost luminous pearl. He hands it and the lightsaber back to Ben and expresses his newfound understanding. During the whole battle, there was no point at which Ben tried to kill Tusk, and Ben even saved Tusk from certain death in the end. It was then that the remorseful Tusken Raider could sense the truth, and that his opponent was innocent. Ben apologizes despite being vindicated, telling Tusk is was his failure as a mentor that led to the tragedy of his village. He kind of vents his guilt to Tusk, who turns around and reveals a glob of acid venom burning through his back, slowly killing him. With his dying breaths, Tusk forgives Ben and voices his regret for sending his Bantha away and for going against the traditions of his people. He urges Ben not to make that same mistake, not for anything, and he ultimately helps Ben reaffirm his faith in the Jedi. Quelling the dark side within Tusk makes Ben think of redeeming Vader and how possible or not that might be.

Everyone regroups and they mourn Changeling’s sacrifice. The Empire believes Obi-Wan has been eliminated so they pack up and leave Tatooine, forsaking their deal with the crime syndicate, which is left in shambles after losing so many thugs in the desert chase. Tusk’s Bantha, who was spiritually linked to Tusk, is found to have died right when his master did. Spooky. Ben gives the valuable Krayt Dragon pearl to Diane, Huey, Dewey, and Louie so they can sell it and use the profits for their farms. The farmers explain that slaying a Krayt Dragon and claiming its pearl are actual rites of passage for young Tusken men, so Ben and Tusk inadvertently completed that ritual in a sense. Anyway, the farmers consider hiring some enforcers of their own to stave off the remnants of the syndicate and decide to pay to rebuild Diane’s farmhouse. Owen Lars later comes to learn that Ben was responsible for the destruction of Diane’s property, not believing the explanation that it was actually Changeling posing as him (and it was really the TIE Fighters’ faults anyway). Owen refuses to allow such a dangerous individual around his nephew or the Lars family farm and so Luke doesn’t really see Ben again for another decade. And by the time they meet again in A New Hope, Ben’s perfected his Krayt Dragon call... I think?

At last, Ben is ready to say his goodbyes to Diane. She’s not upset with him about her farm, but she’s more upset that Tusk would so spontaneously give in to the dark side. Ben explains how quickly revenge can turn someone Force-sensitive to the path of violence, and it wasn’t so surprising someone who’d vowed revenge for all those years could succumb to it. “Revenge, anger, ...and attachment.” With that, she understands what Ben is having difficulty saying: they simply cannot be together. She agrees with him, expressing her newfound fear and misunderstanding of the Force and its vast influence. Diane says she can see how difficult it would’ve been to watch Anakin go through that, and she wishes one day Ben can do for Anakin what he did for Tusk. Diane kisses him... nothing intense, more of a “thank you” than anything else. I think she’d feel kind of sorry for him that she can see he’s such a noble person and he’s so devoted to his values but he won’t allow himself what would likely make him happy. With that somber gesture, Ben tells her his true name is Obi-Wan, gets back on his speeder bike, and goes back to his hut. The end! Can’t believe you made it this far. In my head this was gonna be one page tops but whoops I guess its nine. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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somepoorsod · 8 years

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Akhilleus & Patroklos; or, this post won’t be very popular

One of those vague posts I make every so often where I know I have a reaction to something, and have clues as to why, but haven’t actually explored then. So I start typing and hopefully find out, my thoughts being forced to organise themselves by being written down and by me looking things up which I only recollect in the general sense. This is for catharsis and self-exploration, and is necessarily opinionated and subjective. It is directed at me, not anyone who happens to post about this topic, so please don’t feel called out. (That said, you are absolutely and entirely free to not enjoy it, to disagree, and to argue with me, and it may well be that you do so). I have no doubt that by the time I’m finished it will have raised the spectre of elitism thoroughly. I will promise no homophobia, though, at least consciously.

So, why does something twitch within me, causing the screeching sound of nails on a blackboard, when I see yet another ‘Akhilleus and Patroklos were the truest bestest love ever’ and ‘The Iliad is being CENSORED’ post go crawling across my dash?

A) The Song of Achilles. This was neatly described (by someone who has since deleted the post, so I shan’t name them) as turning a ‘morally complex war story into twee teen porno fanfic’ and, my word, does it grate on me when people mistake the story and characterisation of the second for what goes on in the first. I am a fervent admirer of the Iliad in all its depth, and while TSOA is perfectly good as twee teen porn and has at least some merits in the re-interpretation arena, it really isn’t reflective of the epic.

B) Fundamentally, in the Iliad, both Patroklos and Akhilleus sleep with women and don’t sleep with each other.1 They don’t kiss each other. Frankly, until he’s dead, Akhilleus barely manages to show any affection for Patroklos at all, platonic or otherwise. The last conversation they have begins as a shouting match in which Akhilleus calls Patroklos a cowering girl and is told he’s a psychopath in return,2 and then goes on to demand Patroklos not actually defeat the Trojans because Akhilleus is still waiting until the Greeks are even more screwed to intervene and to be hailed as the glorious saviour.3 It is absolutely true that other Greek writers and artists (re-)interpreted their relationship as romantic, but reading that into the Iliad itself gets my goat up. I won’t go so far as to say it’s indefensibly wrong, but I think it is indubitably subjective, and would even say you have to stretch for it. Therefore, absolute statements which specifically invoke the Iliad (clashing with my own subjective interpretation of the epic) irk me. Furthermore, we have the Iliad, in which the two characters are actually explored to this extent, and we don’t have Aiskhylos’ trilogy which actually made an explicit romantic relationship out of their bond, nor really any other full work of literature which took that tack. It bothers me when so much actual text is brushed aside in favour of what people just want to happen. It feels terribly ... lazy.

C) Briseis. Oh, you poor woman. Her role gets annihilated by almost any discussion which has the hots for the Akhilleus/Patroklos pair. She’s intrusive and threatening to the ship, and therefore has to be ignored or dismissed. And that sucks. Homer writes some great female characters in the Iliad - Helen probably above all, but also Andromakhe, Hera, Athene, and others. Briseis doesn’t match them, I think, but she deserves some bloody consideration, deserves a chance. I have no desire to co-operate with the longstanding patriarchal erasure of women from mythos and the simplification of epic to MANLY MEN FIGHT MANLYLYLY. Ovid did not write the Heroides for this. It also makes the emotional milieu for Akhilleus’ decisions in 1, 9, 16, 19, and 24 significantly less complex if you immediately deride the idea that he actually cares for Briseis. Working that out, and how much it dominates him - compared to e.g. his offended pride, or his dissatisfaction with the whole timē/geras culture - is a really interesting question, which deserves attention. Akhilleus gives a powerful little speech about how Briseis is his “heart’s beloved” 4 - in spite of all that conspires against it - like Helen is to Menelaus, which one should not just disregard because it fails to fit the headcanon.

D) The stupid, cursed arguments we’ve inherited from the ancients about the erastes and eromenos. Partly because it’s such a hideous projection of classical Athenian cultural mores and sterotypes onto a text that doesn’t fit it. Akhilleus may be younger5 (*cough*, TSOA) but he’s also old enough to have a shaggy chest.6 He doesn’t fit the eromenos role either, and jamming him into that pigeonhole is, I think, just another part of how Phaedros is portrayed as a bit of an idiot in the Symposion. Partly, because it’s also a hideous projection of modern cultural sterotypes on a text that doesn’t fit it - and far too often I feel like I’m seeing this from people who were introduced to gay men via the artificial, exaggerated idea of uke and seme in Japanese porn and continue to see things, even want to see things, through that particular lens.

E) Not unrelatedly - and this also goes back to the TSOA point - the fulfilling of the impulsive human categorisation demand. The manifestation here being one that always frustrates me in media: a requirement that people with a strong emotional bond must be romantically related if they’re of anything like a similar age and aren’t blood related. (Patroklos and Akhilleus are, of course, pretty close blood relations, being first cousins once removed, but this is swept under the rug most of the time). To me, this cheapens how strong bonds of actual friendship are, and diminishes the emotional range and depth available to be portrayed and found in a work. Do you know how bloody pleased I was that Mako and Raleigh didn’t kiss at the end of Pacific Rim when all my expectations were that it was coming with an absolute inevitability? (There is a similar syndrome afflicting Hektor and Akhilleus whereby, because they’re rivals, the Trojan hero must be the next best fighter on the battlefield - despite the fact that Homer is actually doing all sorts of interesting things with Telamonian Aias as an Akhilleus cipher that get completely rolled over by that wretchedly simplistic idea).7

F) English. In more depth, there are (unavoidable) problems with people working from translation. For example, Lattimore’s 18.81-2 renders ‘τὸν ἐγὼ περὶ πάντων τῖον ἑταίρων, ἶσον ἐμῇ κεφαλῇ’ as ‘whom I loved beyond all other companions, as well as my own life’. Which I think is reasonably fair in that emotional context, though there is perhaps needless ambiguity in making ‘ ἶσον’ ‘as well as’. Yet the number of people who jump on this as a declaration of confirmed romantic intent, when the Greek τίω is fundamentally ‘I value’ being translated in a powerful way, frustrates me deeply. τίω is so frequently mercantile in the Iliad,8 to the extent that I think it’s even fair for someone uncharitable to continue to read an unconscious self-centredness into Akhilleus here and take it as Patroklos being more beneficial for Akhilleus than anyone else was. And yet this act of sensitive translation has led people to assume we have steaming eros and nightly rogering sessions going on. It can’t be helped, but it’s still wrong.

1 αὐτὰρ Ἀχιλλεὺς εὗδε μυχῷ κλισίης εὐπήκτου: τῷ δ᾽ ἄρα παρκατέλεκτο γυνή, τὴν Λεσβόθεν ἦγε, Φόρβαντος θυγάτηρ Διομήδη καλλιπάρῃος. Πάτροκλος δ᾽ ἑτέρωθεν ἐλέξατο: πὰρ δ᾽ ἄρα καὶ τῷ Ἶφις ἐΰζωνος, τήν οἱ πόρε δῖος Ἀχιλλεὺς Σκῦρον ἑλὼν αἰπεῖαν Ἐνυῆος πτολίεθρον.

But Akhilleus slept in the farthest corner of the well-built hut; and a woman laid down there with him, one he had brought from Lesbos - Diomede with her beautiful cheeks, daughter of Phorbas. And on its opposite side, Patroklos laid down; and another slept with him - Iphis of the lovely girdle, one whom godlike Akhilleus provided him after he conquered steep Skyros, the citadel of Enyeus. (Il. 9.663-669) ↩

2 16.1-35, which I translated here. ↩

3 μὴ σύ γ᾽ ἄνευθεν ἐμεῖο λιλαίεσθαι πολεμίζειν Τρωσὶ φιλοπτολέμοισιν: ἀτιμότερον δέ με θήσεις:

Don't be eager to fight without me against the warloving Trojans: you will make me less honoured. (Il. 16.89-90) ↩

4 … τί δὲ λαὸν ἀνήγαγεν ἐνθάδ᾽ ἀγείρας Ἀτρεΐδης; ἦ οὐχ Ἑλένης ἕνεκ᾽ ἠϋκόμοιο; ἦ μοῦνοι φιλέουσ᾽ ἀλόχους μερόπων ἀνθρώπων Ἀτρεΐδαι; ἐπεὶ ὅς τις ἀνὴρ ἀγαθὸς καὶ ἐχέφρων τὴν αὐτοῦ φιλέει καὶ κήδεται, ὡς καὶ ἐγὼ τὴν ἐκ θυμοῦ φίλεον δουρικτητήν περ ἐοῦσαν.

… Why has he lead his summoned warhost here, that son of Atreus? Was it not for the sake of Helen and her fair hair? Or do they alone among mortal men love their wives, these sons of Atreus? Hardly: any good and sensible man loves his woman and cares for her, as I too did for her, my heart’s beloved, though she had been merely the slave won by my spear. (Il. 9.338-343) ↩

5 τέκνον ἐμὸν γενεῇ μὲν ὑπέρτερός ἐστιν Ἀχιλλεύς, πρεσβύτερος δὲ σύ ἐσσι

“My child, it may be that Akhilleus is your better, but you are the elder." (Il. 9.586-7) ↩

6 στήθεσσιν λασίοισι e.g. as in 1.189. ↩

7 Seriously, this is practically the entire point of Book 7. ↩

8 It most frequently appears in 23, to equate all the prizes Akhilleus is giving out with their equivalent in cattle. See, e.g., 23.702-5:

τῷ μὲν νικήσαντι μέγαν τρίποδ᾽ ἐμπυριβήτην, τὸν δὲ δυωδεκάβοιον ἐνὶ σφίσι τῖον Ἀχαιοί: ἀνδρὶ δὲ νικηθέντι γυναῖκ᾽ ἐς μέσσον ἔθηκε, πολλὰ δ᾽ ἐπίστατο ἔργα, τίον δέ ἑ τεσσαράβοιον.

For the victor, a great tripod made to put over the fire, which the Akhaians valued among themselves at twelve oxen; for the defeated man, he put up as a prize a woman, skilled in many kinds of work, whom they valued at four oxen. ↩

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thesnhuup · 5 years

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Pop Picks – March 28, 2019

March 28, 2019

What I’m listening to:

There is a lovely piece played in a scene from A Place Called Home that I tracked down. It’s Erik Satie’s 3 Gymnopédies: Gymnopédie No. 1, played by the wonderful pianist Klára Körmendi. Satie composed this piece in 1888 and it was considered avant-garde and anti-Romantic. It’s minimalism and bit of dissonance sound fresh and contemporary to my ears and while not a huge Classical music fan, I’ve fallen in love with the Körmendi playlist on Spotify. When you need an alternative to hours of Cardi B.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Esi Edugyan’s 2018 novel Washington Black. Starting on a slave plantation in Barbados, it is a picaresque novel that has elements of Jules Verne, Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. Yes, it strains credulity and there are moments of “huh?”, but I loved it (disclosure: I was in the minority among my fellow book club members) and the first third is a searing depiction of slavery. It’s audacious, sprawling (from Barbados to the Arctic to London to Africa), and the writing, especially about nature, luminous.

What I’m watching:

A soap opera. Yes, I’d like to pretend it’s something else, but we are 31 episodes into the Australian drama A Place Called Home and we are so, so addicted. Like “It’s AM, but can’t we watch just one more episode?” addicted. Despite all the secrets, cliff hangers, intrigue, and “did that just happen?” moments, the core ingredients of any good soap opera, APCH has superb acting, real heft in terms of subject matter (including homophobia, anti-Semitism, sexual assault, and class), touches of our beloved Downton Abbey, and great cars. Beware. If you start, you won’t stop.

Archive

February 11, 2019

What I’m listening to:

Raphael Saadiq has been around for quite a while, as a musician, writer, and producer. He’s new to me and I love his old school R&B sound. Like Leon Bridges, he brings a contemporary freshness to the genre, sounding like a young Stevie Wonder (listen to “You’re The One That I Like”). Rock and Roll may be largely dead, but R&B persists – maybe because the former was derivative of the latter and never as good (and I say that as a Rock and Roll fan). I’m embarrassed to only have discovered Saadiq so late in his career, but it’s a delight to have done so.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Marilynne Robinson’s Home, part of her trilogy that includes the Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, Gilead, and the book after Home, Lila. Robinson is often described as a Christian writer, but not in a conventional sense. In this case, she gives us a modern version of the prodigal son and tells the story of what comes after he is welcomed back home. It’s not pretty. Robinson is a self-described Calvinist, thus character begets fate in Robinson’s world view and redemption is at best a question. There is something of Faulkner in her work (I am much taken with his famous “The past is never past” quote after a week in the deep South), her style is masterful, and like Faulkner, she builds with these three novels a whole universe in the small town of Gilead. Start with Gilead to better enjoy Home.

What I’m watching:

Sex Education was the most fun series we’ve seen in ages and we binged watched it on Netflix. A British homage to John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, it feels like a mash up of American and British high schools. Focusing on the relationship of Maeve, the smart bad girl, and Otis, the virginal and awkward son of a sex therapist (played with brilliance by Gillian Anderson), it is laugh aloud funny and also evolves into more substance and depth (the abortion episode is genius). The sex scenes are somehow raunchy and charming and inoffensive at the same time and while ostensibly about teenagers (it feels like it is explaining contemporary teens to adults in many ways), the adults are compelling in their good and bad ways. It has been renewed for a second season, which is a gift.

January 3, 2019

What I’m listening to:

My listening choices usually refer to music, but this time I’m going with Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast on genius and the song Hallelujah. It tells the story of Leonard Cohen’s much-covered song Hallelujah and uses it as a lens on kinds of genius and creativity. Along the way, he brings in Picasso and Cézanne, Elvis Costello, and more. Gladwell is a good storyteller and if you love pop music, as I do, and Hallelujah, as I do (and you should), you’ll enjoy this podcast. We tend to celebrate the genius who seems inspired in the moment, creating new work like lightning strikes, but this podcast has me appreciating incremental creativity in a new way. It’s compelling and fun at the same time.

What I’m reading:

Just read Clay Christensen’s new book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. This was an advance copy, so soon available. Clay is an old friend and a huge influence on how we have grown SNHU and our approach to innovation. This book is so compelling, because we know attempts at development have so often been a failure and it is often puzzling to understand why some countries with desperate poverty and huge challenges somehow come to thrive (think S. Korea, Singapore, 19th C. America), while others languish. Clay offers a fresh way of thinking about development through the lens of his research on innovation and it is compelling. I bet this book gets a lot of attention, as most of his work does. I also suspect that many in the development community will hate it, as it calls into question the approach and enormous investments we have made in an attempt to lift countries out of poverty. A provocative read and, as always, Clay is a good storyteller.

What I’m watching:

Just watched Leave No Trace and should have guessed that it was directed by Debra Granik. She did Winter’s Bone, the extraordinary movie that launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career. Similarly, this movie features an amazing young actor, Thomasin McKenzie, and visits lives lived on the margins. In this case, a veteran suffering PTSD, and his 13-year-old daughter. The movie is patient, is visually lush, and justly earned 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (I have a rule to never watch anything under 82%). Everything in this film is under control and beautifully understated (aside from the visuals) – confident acting, confident directing, and so humane. I love the lack of flashbacks, the lack of sensationalism – the movie trusts the viewer, rare in this age of bombast. A lovely film.

December 4, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spending a week in New Zealand, we had endless laughs listening to the Kiwi band, Flight of the Conchords. Lots of comedic bands are funny, but the music is only okay or worse. These guys are funny – hysterical really – and the music is great. They have an uncanny ability to parody almost any style. In both New Zealand and Australia, we found a wry sense of humor that was just delightful and no better captured than with this duo. You don’t have to be in New Zealand to enjoy them.

What I’m reading:

I don’t often reread. For two reasons: A) I have so many books on my “still to be read” pile that it seems daunting to also rereadbooks I loved before, and B) it’s because I loved them once that I’m a little afraid to read them again. That said, I was recently asked to list my favorite book of all time and I answered Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But I don’t really know if that’s still true (and it’s an impossible question anyway – favorite book? On what day? In what mood?), so I’m rereading it and it feels like being with an old friend. It has one of my very favorite scenes ever: the card game between Levin and Kitty that leads to the proposal and his joyous walking the streets all night.

What I’m watching:

Blindspotting is billed as a buddy-comedy. Wow does that undersell it and the drama is often gripping. I loved Daveed Diggs in Hamilton, didn’t like his character in Black-ish, and think he is transcendent in this film he co-wrote with Rafael Casal, his co-star. The film is a love song to Oakland in many ways, but also a gut-wrenching indictment of police brutality, systemic racism and bias, and gentrification. The film has the freshness and raw visceral impact of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. A great soundtrack, genre mixing, and energy make it one of my favorite movies of 2018.

October 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We had the opportunity to see our favorite band, The National, live in Dallas two weeks ago. Just after watching Mistaken for Strangers, the documentary sort of about the band. So we’ve spent a lot of time going back into their earlier work, listening to songs we don’t know well, and reaffirming that their musicality, smarts, and sound are both original and astoundingly good. They did not disappoint in concert and it is a good thing their tour ended, as we might just spend all of our time and money following them around. Matt Berninger is a genius and his lead vocals kill me (and because they are in my range, I can actually sing along!). Their arrangements are profoundly good and go right to whatever brain/heart wiring that pulls one in and doesn’t let them go.

What I’m reading:

Who is Richard Powers and why have I only discovered him now, with his 12th book? Overstory is profoundly good, a book that is essential and powerful and makes me look at my everyday world in new ways. In short, a dizzying example of how powerful can be narrative in the hands of a master storyteller. I hesitate to say it’s the best environmental novel I’ve ever read (it is), because that would put this book in a category. It is surely about the natural world, but it is as much about we humans. It’s monumental and elegiac and wondrous at all once. Cancel your day’s schedule and read it now. Then plant a tree. A lot of them.

What I’m watching:

Bo Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade and Elsie Fisher is nothing less than amazing as its star (what’s with these new child actors; see Florida Project). It’s funny and painful and touching. It’s also the single best film treatment that I have seen of what it means to grow up in a social media shaped world. It’s a reminder that growing up is hard. Maybe harder now in a world of relentless, layered digital pressure to curate perfect lives that are far removed from the natural messy worlds and selves we actually inhabit. It’s a well-deserved 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and I wonder who dinged it for the missing 2%.

September 7, 2018

What I’m listening to:

With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.

What I’m reading:

Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.

What I’m watching:

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.

August 16, 2018

What I’m listening to:

In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.

What I’m reading:

John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.

What I’m watching:

I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching. And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.

July 23, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.

What I’m reading:

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.

What I’m watching:

Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.

June 11, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.

What I’m reading:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.

What I’m watching:

The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.

May 24, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia. It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.

What I’m watching:

I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.

April 27, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan. Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.

What I’m reading:

I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.

What I’m watching:

I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.

March 18, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.

What I’m reading:

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.

What I’m watching:

Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news.

March 8, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.

What I’m reading:

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

What I’m watching:

The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.

February 12, 2018

What I’m listening to:

So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.

What I’m reading:

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.

What I’m watching:

We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.

January 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.

What I’m reading:

A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.

What I’m watching:

David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.

December 22, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.

What I’m watching:

Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.

What I’m listening to:

A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.

November 14, 2017

What I’m watching:

Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?

What I’m reading:

Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.

What I’m listening to:

Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.

November 3, 2017

What I’m reading: Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.

What I’m watching: We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.

What I’m listening to: I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.

September 26, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.

What I’m watching:

HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.

What I’m listening to:

The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.

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junker-town · 7 years

Text

Kid Rock opening Detroit's new arena makes a mockery of the city's history

Kid Rock opened the Little Caesar’s Arena on Sept. 12, 2017. It was the first of six shows that he was contracted to do for the new home of the Detroit Pistons and Red Wings. He was also allowed to build his “Made in Detroit” restaurant on the northeast side of the stadium, facing out towards Woodward Avenue, a road known as Detroit’s main street.

The agreement with Kid Rock was criticized by many Detroiters, but especially the Detroit chapter of the National Action Network (NAN). He had played previous shows with a massive Confederate flag behind him and has been a vocal critic of Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police brutality. Having Kid Rock open a stadium that is supposed to be dedicated to the people of a city that’s more than 80 percent black seemed like an insult. Before his first show could start, protesters led by the NAN took to the street against him.

The protesters held up signs against Kid Rock and Donald Trump and chanted, “This is what democracy looks like.” Kid Rock dismissed the anger of the people beforehand on a blog post on his website, calling it “jealousy” which was “merely a reflection of disgust for your own failures and lack of positive ideas for our city.”

Many spectators came out to watch and take pictures. Some concert-goers waiting to cross the street from where I stood — across from the stadium — tried to antagonize the protesters. One police officer came over to calm them down before things escalated. A black man who I was standing next to looked at me and said, “If that was us, we would have been arrested.”

On the other side of Woodward, in front of the stadium itself, counter-protesters stood, there in support of Trump and Kid Rock. The two sides engaged and yelled at each other. All the while, one counter-protester, wearing sunglasses, stood proudly and held out the Confederate flag.

Outside .@kidrock show at grand-opening of Little Caesars Arena. http://pic.twitter.com/djJU4uQuZR

— Jim Schaefer (@DetroitReporter) September 12, 2017

Police separated the two factions quickly. A few moments later, a horde of the Highwaymen motorcycle group rode down my side of the street and revved their engines to drown out the protesters.

Afterwards, former mayoral candidate William Noakes summed up the event: “Kid Rock is an insult, but this isn't about Kid Rock.”

Detroit’s history is the history of black people’s struggle for freedom in this country. The city was codenamed “Midnight” on the Underground Railroad. Fugitive slaves found shelter in the city before crossing over to Canada, to freedom. The Second Baptist Church, the oldest African-American church in the midwest, hosted more than 5,000 fugitives. Legendary Detroiters George DeBaptiste and his friend William Lambert helped more than 30,000 of those runaways go from Detroit to Canada while another legend, Seymour Finney, hid the runaways and got their catchers drunk.

Campus Martius, a park a few minutes walk away from where the man stood holding the Confederate flag, was where the First Michigan Regiment received their colors before leaving for the Civil War. A few minutes away, in what is now Bunche Elementary School, is a plaque commemorating the 1st Michigan Colored Infantry, which was composed of 845 black men, including escaped slaves.

Detroit is black excellence. It’s Motown. It’s a city that has influenced almost every single music genre. It’s where the Nation of Islam was founded. Detroit is the Broadside Press, and where the Revolutionary Union Movement was borne. It is the city of Coleman Young, Berry Gordy Jr., Joe Louis, Ralph Bunche, Sugar Ray Robinson, Smokey Robinson, Elijah McCoy, Charles McGee, J Dilla, Rosa Parks, and too many others to name.

Symbols of white supremacy in the middle of a city like this isn’t just stupid, it’s antagonistic.

Protesters lock eyes with a lone guy holding a Confederate flag and a megaphone in front of the new Little Caesars Arena downtown Detroit. http://pic.twitter.com/1zvR6NRjhm

— Tyler Clifford (@_TylerTheTyler_) September 12, 2017

Yet, Detroit also has a history of honoring powerful men who knew better but still punished the black citizens of the city.

Woodward Avenue is named after Augustus B. Woodward, the man who devised the original plan of Detroit after the fire of 1805, then became the first chief judge of the Supreme Court of Michigan. He once ruled, in Denison V. Tucker, that four slave children in Detroit were the property of a British settler under the Jay Treaty with Great Britain. Then, contradictorily, he wrote in his opinion: “The Existence at this day of an absolute & unqualified Slavery of the human Species in the United States of America is universally and justly considered their greatest and deepest reproach.”

Woodward owned slaves until he left the Michigan territory in 1824.

The Cobo Center, Detroit’s meeting and convention space, is named after Albert Cobo, a former Detroit mayor who advocated for racist housing policies and destroyed two great black neighborhoods in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley.

From where I stood at Woodward and Adelaide, Martin Luther King Jr. — accompanied by then-Detroit mayor, Jerome Cavanaugh, Rev. C. L. Franklin (father of hometown legend and goddess Aretha Franklin), United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther, Rev. Albert Cleage, and more than 125,000 people — walked to where Woodward meets Jefferson Ave., and turned right. The Walk to Freedom of 1963 was the nation’s largest civil rights demonstration in history at that time — a trial run for the March on Washington — and it stopped at Cobo.

In Cobo Hall, MLK Jr. gave a longer version of his “I Have A Dream” speech. He spoke about the greatness of the Emancipation Proclamation and then said, “But one hundred years later, the Negro in the United States of America still isn't free.”

Noakes was right, the protest and anger was about much more than Kid Rock. It’s about a city that’s now divided into two.

One part of that division is District Detroit and the downtown core where the Little Caesars Arena is. The QLine — Detroit’s new streetcar system — only services the 3.3-mile radius of that area, where the rich have created their own suburb inside the city and housing prices are rising so fast that only transplants can actually afford to live there.

Then there’s everywhere else in the city, where the poor natives live among abandoned buildings and 40 percent of people are impoverished.

The problem isn’t Kid Rock; it’s the question of what it means to love a city. A city is not just land and opportunity, but also people and history. To love it is to love everything about it. That love also cannot be static. You can’t just say you love something and have it be so. As Ursula K. Le Guin says, “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

In his blog post where he lashed out at the potential protests, Kid Rock ended it by writing “P.P.P.P.P.S. I LOVE BLACK PEOPLE!!” During that first show, he gave a speech where he repeated that claim. Those who asked him to do those shows also proclaimed that they were remodeling the midtown/downtown area, and building the Little Caesers Arena, because they love the city.

Yet, in 2014, Christopher Ilitch, CEO of Ilitch Holdings, Inc., explained to the Detroit News exactly how his family built the arena (aside from the $344 million he got from the city to do so).

Chris said that his family had spent 15 years and $50 million buying up over 70 properties in that midtown area. Then they let those buildings and lots deteriorate to keep the prices of the surrounding properties down.

“It’s been painful to not be able to develop some of that property because every time we made a move, the price for other property would shoot way up. But we had to wait and that hurt.”

Purposely letting a part of the city rot and adding to the blight of the area to secure your vision of a new Detroit is great business. I’m just not sure that means you love the city or its people.

Empowering an artist whose come up was through black culture but now flies the symbol of black oppression, and giving him six shows and a restaurant right where one of the United States’ greatest civil rights demonstrations took place, that can’t be love. It’s insensitive to the point of being comical. It’s even worse than when Dan Gilbert’s company created a banner that read “See Detroit Like We Do” that depicted no black people.

Much discussion, many explanations, & more excuses but the alleged "full" pic from @BedrockDetroit has surfaced on social media. #AndStill http://pic.twitter.com/4kMcTQf8AS

— Karen Dumas (@karendumas) July 23, 2017

You can’t love the city of Detroit without loving black people, and you can’t love black people without being compassionate to their pains, both current and historic. The reason that Kid Rock’s performance at the crown jewel of the new Detroit is important is that he’s a symbol, and not a very good one. What the people who marched were protesting is the message that the supposed “rebirth” of Detroit has been sending them all along: That after decades of struggle, they are not welcome in their own city.

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