#but they treat his death so unseriously in universe

[starrycomics]

Duke giving Bruce shit for eating a burger with a knife and fork while Jason and Damian fight in the background: Now That’s What I Call Family

[kexing]

And at last we head into the finale with Triage ep 12-13:

Tol: If I fail this loop Tin’s gonna end up dating DEAR and not ME, this is the WORST

Jinta: Or he could still, you know, die

And we’ve come full circle with having Fang help with a matchmaking lunch, this time with Tol getting a surprisingly big brain play to directly ask her for help hitting on Tin. (With I think only one previous interaction in the bank with her. In a previous loop)

Oh don’t bother growing a spine now, Evil Gopher. It’s not like I’m gonna believe you’re suddenly not down for all the murder in your side gig.

HA, Tol is so happy about how getting the parents involved turned out. Tin’s all stunned over getting strong-armed into a study session sleepover while Tol is giddily in the corner like “That’s right, your ass just got entrapped, babe!” (also I couldn’t find anything when I looked it up, but Tol’s dad is definitely the dad from Ghost Host Ghost House right?)

You know the kisses very well might be bringing the memories back, but I find it so much funnier to think that that theory was Tin just making some romantic jot notes like he was scribbling in his diary and then Tol latched onto it with both hands all “So True Love’s Kiss will break the spell? I’M ON IT.”

Awww, Singgap get their own pinky promise moment.

Regressed!Tin’s been so angsty that Professor and Gopher are actually seeing him as a potential recruit for the side of evil.

Can Varit just catch a break? I know everybody’s going through it in this show but the boy was finally in a loop where he’s getting recognition and he wants to live and the plot still won’t leave him alone.

-

Oh come on it’s even worse for Varit! Poison?!

I love how all of Tol’s plans are, to put it mildly, not the most well thought out, but damn if he doesn’t throw his all into them.

Evil Professor watching Tin get thanked by the patient’s mother: ah dang it he’s getting his conscience and compassion back. This totally ruins my organ stealing job offer

Tol’s main thought process has essentially been “Can we kiss now? Or now? How’s about now? Is now good?” And when he finally has a chance of it actually working he gets INTERRUPTED CURSE YOU EVIL PROFESSOR

Everybody in this hostage situation is taking a moment to remark on how stupid Evil Gopher’s plan is.

Oh I could watch Gap conk Evil Gopher in the face with that pole 100 times.

Tin has gotta stop saying “We’re in this together and I’m not going anywhere.” He knows the universe has a twisted sense of humor and he’s basically DARING it to jinx him.

I just love Jinta so goddamn much.

Evil Professor’s dead, Evil Gopher’s snapped and locked up, Varit’s thriving, Singgap are flirting in front of patients (amusing Doi and annoying Pin), Mai’s mom woke up! Happy endings all around!

This show really set up a coy “Oh no, we’re totally gonna have a bittersweet open ending where it’s uncertain whether they’re gonna meet again~” but nope! Hella Big Damn Kiss at the magic love clock tower! Same energy as Tin rocking up all “Oh I don’t think I really remember... but maybe some of that True Love’s Kiss action will help?~” I mean I had the biggest dopiest smile on my face so I can’t complain 😁

And a little bone throw for the Manner of Death crowd, nice.

Whew! Holy cow MJ, this was a show and half of an amazing time. This is undoubtedly up there in the top tier of top tiers. I hope the holidays treat you well to match this gift you brought me 💜

yay!!!! YOU’VE MADE IT!!! merry christmas!!! ❤️💙

TOL HAS PRIORITIES LIKE HIS UNDYING JEALOUSY AKJDSKJDKSKDKSDKSK

tol @ fang “i know we don’t talk but you GOTTA help me date your friend. please it’s a matter of life and death”

lmaooo right!! after so much shit!!!

tol’s loop is SOOOO funny akdjkskd like. at the beginning of the show he’s so cool and detached but by the end of the show he’s fake drowning to get a doctor to kiss him. so unserious

and yes!! i think it’s the same dad!!

tol was like “so is anyone going to kiss this man to break the goddamn time loop cycle???” and did not wait for an answer

singgap my beloveds!!!!!! 🥰🥰🥰

REGRESSED TIN IS A MENACE AKDKSKKDKSKSDK

LET VARIT CATCH A BREAK CHALLENGE!!!!

right 😩😩😩 wtffff

TOL IS A MESS AND A HALF BUT HE HAS THE SPIRIT

CACKLING. noooo tin! don’t get your feelings back, you’re so sexy ha ha

tol just wants to kiss that man, why’s it so hard 😩😩😩

it is stupid lmaoo GAP IS A BADASS IN DISGUISE OKAY

true that tho. every time tin promises not to leave tol, the universe is like BITCH! YOU THOUGHT! and separates them

jinta, the protector of the dumbass queers. gotta love him

happy ending very well deserved!!!! 🥳🥳🥳🥳 tho they gotta drag tintol’s happiness like PLEASE HAVE WE NOT SUFFERED ENOUGH

but aaaaaaaa YES!!! the clock tower kiss is legendary. we gotta love how they wrapped it up so nicely! NO BITTERSWEET ENDING IN THIS HOUSE NO SIR!

mod always!!!

AAAAAAAAAAA I’M SO GLAD YOU LOVED IT TOO!!! i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again: triage is top 10 bls of all time. it’s just sooooo good!!!!!

thank you for watching it!!! (she says like she made the show akskaksksk) we’re here to share good things!!!

happy holidays beloved!!! may 2023 be a wonderful year for you!!!! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️💙💙💙💙💙💙

[charle1515]

Watched Thor: Love and Thunder. It's honestly not as bad as people make it out to be, but definitely not as good as Ragnarok.

here are my random thoughts below:

Gorr the God Killer stole every scene he was in. He's one hell of a villain, and that intro scene? Perfection.

The movie absolutely underutilized him. It should have shown him doing more god killing.

Also, I wish they were more creative with his shadow powers. Most of the time he used them to summon big CGI monsters to fight in big, boring CGI battles. The moments where he teleported or emerged from the shadows kicked ass.

The guy playing Gorr is acting his heart out and loving every minute of it

The goats stopped being funny immediately after they were introduced. They should have been a one-off gag. Every time they did that stupid scream I mentally dropped the movie's rating. A part of me died when I realized they were going to be the "funny" animal companions for the rest of the movie.

Really surprised they brought back natalie portman's character. Nice to know that there's still continuity.

THEY BUILT A THANOS-THEMED RESTAURANT IN THE NEW ASGARD TOWN???? In-universe, wouldn't that be in very bad taste???

WAIT YEAH THANOS MURDERED A BUNCH OF ASGARDIANS IN FRONT OF EVERYONE WHY IS THERE A THANOS RESTAURANT IN THEIR NEW HOME????

A criticism I read before watching this was that Zeus's portrayal was lame. I disagree, I loved Zeus being portrayed as a sleazy, corrupt, arrogant windbag.

However, the fight with Zeus's guards was lame and would have greatly benefited from practical effects. I mean come on, why did the guards have to be CGI?

Someone I follow mentioned one time that CGI fights feel really floaty and weightless. You can absolutely feel that here. It's glaringly obvious that the actors are swinging their weapons at nothing.

Thor killing Zeus was great, but I agree with the sentiment that it would have added more weight (and tension) to the story if Gorr had arrived in the secret god bunker and killed him instead. Once again, Gorr needed to do more on-screen god killing.

Another criticism I read is that Taika Waititi was way too unserious when it came to writing this movie, and I have to agree. There are scenes in this movie that should have been treated seriously, but get undercut by unnecessary gags.

The pacing of the final act was kind of everywhere. Like I'm sorry Thor, but there are kidnapped children to save and Gorr got the key to kill all gods in existence at once. Why are you sitting down to have a deep heart-to-heart with your dying girlfriend about death and attachment? Don't get me wrong, it's a great scene and the message is good, but why is it inserted between the two final boss fights?

However, the plotline of Lady Thor dying of cancer and trying to use superpowers to stave it off, only to find out that the superpowers are accelerating her death, is good shit.

THOR WHY ARE YOU MAKING THE CHILDREN FIGHT THE CGI SHADOW MONSTERS???

THOR'S ARMY OF CHILD SOLDIERS

I won't lie, if I were a kid I would totally let my imagination run wild inserting myself into the big cgi fight

This movie is really empowering for kids

I know it's cheesy but Gorr being redeemed by the power of love is also good shit

Thor as a dad is cute

Oh yeah rock guy Waititi was there too and I liked him

I won't lie the extra credits scene where Zeus is planning to invade earth and kill superheroes got me a little hyped. It's the MCU though so how good could it be?

People saying Waititi ruined Thor in this movie are giant piss babies who probably collect funko pops and call it a hobby

The goats should have died

I'd give it a 6/10. Good to watch once if you want to catch up on Thor's story.

[syrupwit]

Letter for Trick or Treat 2019

-

Dear Reader: 

Hello, and welcome to my letter for Trick or Treat 2019. Thank you for considering making a work for me!

The primary purpose of this letter is to provide additional inspiration and creative direction. If it’s not doing that for you, feel free to disregard it.

Navigation:

Do Not Want (DNW)

Long List of Likes

For this exchange, I have requested fic only, Tricks and Treats, for the following fandoms:

Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft

Dishonored

Doom Patrol (TV)

Invader Zim

Marvel Cinematic Universe

The Umbrella Academy (TV)

Here we go...

Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft

It’s various-degrees-of-doomed!narrators -- plus Danforth! Lovecraft is great at the doomed narrator thing. What other sorts of terrible or wondrous things can happen to these seekers after forbidden knowledge?

Characters Requested:

Danforth

The Hound Narrator

Robert Harrison Blake

The Shadow Over Innsmouth Narrator

William Dyer

Re: Shipping, If That Interests You: I’m fine with any pairings for this fandom.

Dishonored

It’s creepy whales, trickster gods, and lots of minor characters! This is one of my favorite games of all time. I love the detailed worldbuilding / lore and the many opportunities for filling in backstories and missing parts of canon.

Characters Requested:

Adelle White (yes, the moth from Lady Boyle’s Last Party)

Billie Lurk | Meagan Foster

Daud

Daud’s Mother

The Outsider

Thalia Timsh

Vera Moray | Granny Rags

Waverly Boyle

Re: Shipping, If That Interests You: I’m fine with any pairings for this fandom -- seriously, go wild. On a specific note, I’ve recently become fully awakened to the appeal of Billie/Daud, and am intrigued by the idea of Billie Lurk/Thalia Timsh, Adelle White/Waverly Boyle, and Adelle White/Abigail Ames (look, it could work -- the disgraced noblewoman and the ruthless mole, okay?).

Doom Patrol (TV)

It’s Exchange Patrol! This series is so wonderfully chaotic and ridiculous. I love how messed up the characters are + the ways they support and clash with each other, and how it feels like anything can happen.

Characters Requested:

Crazy Jane

Danny the Street

Rita Farr

Cliff Steele

Victor Stone

Re: Shipping, If That Interests You: I’m fine with any pairings for this fandom. Gen-wise, I’m really fond of Victor’s relationship with his dad.

Invader Zim

It’s my recently revived obsession, back with a vengeance! After a decade and change, the movie reeled me right back in. I love this canon’s particular brand of dark comedy and pessimism mixed with... uh... zaniness.

Characters Requested:

Dib

Gaz

GIR 

Foodio 3000

Invader Skoodge 

Tak

Countess von Verminstrasser

Zim

Re: Shipping, If That Interests You: Dib/Zim | ZaDR is my OTP. I’m also pretty intrigued by the idea of Ms. Bitters/Countess von Verminstrasser. Otherwise, no preferences -- anything is fine.

Marvel Cinematic Universe

It’s the megafandom, or a tiny slice thereof! Since this canon is so darn expansive, I’ll discuss each of these characters separately rather than summarize my interest in the fandom as a whole.

Characters Requested:

Mantis

Mantis! I enjoy her earnestness, her goofier side (“kick names, take ass”; jumping to test the gravity on Titan in Infinity War), and the way her powers’ potential array of uses ranges from tooth-achingly sweet to Thanos-topplingly strong to skin-crawlingly disturbing. I am also a huge, huge sucker for sheltered and socially awkward characters learning to get along with others, and for characters with unhealthy or abusive upbringings coming to terms with the past, and for characters in space exploring space. Basically, though, I’d just like to see more Mantis.

Peter Parker

All iterations of this character have a fond place in my heart, and MCU Peter occupies a particular part of it. I am interested in the pure-hearted hero bit as well as his angstier/darker potential (getting a building dropped on him, getting pushed in front of a train, Mysterio’s illusions, the FFH post-credits scene, the classic Spider-Man backstory that has so far been left untold except through implication).

Flash Thompson

The MCU reinterpretation of Flash as a rich, douchey nerd is very intriguing to me. When he isn’t bullying Peter or playing the butt of a joke, what is he like? ...What do his social media followers actually think of him, anyway?

Re: Shipping, If That Interests You: I’m fine with any pairings for any of these characters, though I am also specifically interested in Mantis/Nebula, Mantis/Gamora, Mantis/Peter Parker, Peter Parker/Tony Stark, and Peter Parker/Flash Thompson.

The Umbrella Academy (TV)

It’s the end of the world, probably! I love this show’s tone and the genre trappings and the complicated family/team drama. Just, all of it.

Characters Requested (Any):

Allison Hargreeves

Ben Hargreeves

Diego Hargreeves

Klaus Hargreeves

Luther Hargreeves

Number Five | The Boy

Vanya Hargreeves

Hazel

Re: Shipping, If That Interests You: I’m fine with any pairings for this fandom, though I will admit to a particular fondness for Allison/Vanya and Allison/Luther.

Do Not Want (DNW)

Character or ship bashing

Non-canonical permanent major character death, *EXCEPT* for the Cthulhu Mythos

Non-canonical permanent body modification (ex. amputation)

Harm to pet animals (if a giant space squid is attacking the character's ship and they have to fight it or something, that's fine)

Parent/child incest

Non-canonical child characters

Extended discussion of Twelve-Step recovery programs (mentions are fine)

Characters in romantic relationships being written as asexual/aromantic

Smut DNWs: A/B/O, master/slave, heavily ritualized/formal BDSM, bestiality, necrophilia, scat, vore, sounding

Long List of Likes (LLL)

Humor: hijinks; absurdity; surreality; comedy of errors; ludicrous/cracky premises treated seriously or unseriously; Rashomon situations where each character shares their uniquely biased perception of an event; that trope where found documents or outsider POV seriously misinterpret canon events/characters; Ember Island Players trope. 

Horror: dark comedy; gallows humor; fridge horror; Monkey’s Paw situations; parapsychology; mad scientists; witches; ghosts; ghost hunters; cryptids; zombies; THE WALKING DEAD; revenants; cultists; rituals; eldritch beings; dying gods; possession; Dark Carnivals; cursed objects; creepy little shops peddling dubious merchandise; secluded or remote locations; big scary buildings with tragic histories; haunted mansions, ships, spaceships, houses, “haunted house” attractions, hayrides, forests, marshes, beaches, islands, etc.; that trope where you aren’t sure if there was really a supernatural occurrence or if it was a trick of the mind, ooohh scary.

Slice of Life: a day in the life of $character; dealing with the everyday challenges of life in a non-mundane universe; worldbuilding elements; missing moments; domesticity; character studies told through small details.

Action/Adventure: missions/cases and snippets thereof; escaping from captivity together; unusual team-ups; undercover as XYZ; identity porn; road trips of the terrestrial, extraterrestrial, aquatic, and supernatural varieties; space travel; visiting other planets; wilderness survival; climactic warehouse confrontations; wacky foes / locations / circumstances for battles; bar fights; fighting back to back.

Gen Relationships: frenemies; reluctant allies; forced to work together; parent-child or sibling-sibling relationships where things may be complicated but they care about each other deeply in the end even if they’re not always great at expressing it; cooperation, camaraderie, and loyalty between characters; lonely/isolated characters taking steps toward opening up to others.

Romance: first times; get-together; feelings realization; friends to lovers; frenemies to lovers; UST; one-sided pining; mutual pining; flirting where one character doesn’t think the other is serious but they totally are; possessiveness and jealousy where the possessive / jealous character feels guilty or the target of the possessiveness / jealousy is into it; monster on a leash.

Smut: characters feeling overwhelmed; lots of emotions; touch-starved; awkwardness; praise kink; xeno; unexpectedly compatible; kink discovery / exploration; characters being really into their partner or what they’re doing or how into what they’re doing their partner is; “I shouldn’t be so into this”; friends with benefits where both characters are pining but feel more comfortable having sex than talking about their feelings.

Miscellany: holidays; holiday traditions; seasons; weather; thunderstorms; getting caught in the rain; stargazing; appetizing descriptions of food; diners, drive-ins, and dives; tea; candles; cats; metafiction; unconventional formats.

[richmegavideo]

Does Democracy Demand the Tolerance of the Intolerant? Karl Popper’s Paradox

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

In the past few years, when far-right nationalists are banned from social media, violent extremists face boycotts, or institutions refuse to give a platform to racists, a faux-outraged moan has gone up: “So much for the tolerant left!” “So much for liberal tolerance!” The complaint became so hackneyed it turned into an already-hackneyed meme. It’s a wonder anyone thinks this line has any rhetorical force. The equation of tolerance with acquiescence, passivity, or a total lack of boundaries is a reductio ad absurdum that denudes the word of meaning. One can only laugh at unserious characterizations that do such violence to reason.

The concept of toleration has a long and complicated history in moral and political philosophy precisely because of the many problems that arise when the word is used without critical context. In some absurd, 21st century usages, tolerance is even conflated with acceptance, approval, and love. But it has historically meant the opposite—noninterference with something one dislikes or despises. Such noninterference must have limits. As Goethe wrote in 1829, “tolerance should be a temporary attitude only; it must lead to recognition. To tolerate means to insult." Tolerance by nature exists in a state of social tension.

According to virtually every conception of liberal democracy, a free and open society requires tense debate and verbal conflict. Society, the argument goes, is only strengthened by the oft-contentious interplay of differing, even intolerant, points of view. So, when do such views approach the limits of toleration? One of the most well-known paradoxes of tolerance was outlined by Austrian philosopher Karl Popper in his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Popper was a non-religious Jew who witnessed the rise of Nazism in the 20s in his hometown of Vienna and fled to England, then in 1937, to Christchurch, New Zealand, where he was appointed lecturer at Canterbury College (now the University of Canterbury). There, he wrote The Open Society, where the famous passage appears in a footnote:

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.?—?In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

This last sentence has “been printed on thousands of bumper stickers and fridge magnets,” writes Will Harvie at Stuff. The quote might become almost as ubiquitous as Voltaire’s line about “defending to the death” the right of free speech (words actually penned by English writer Beatrice Evelyn Hall). Popper saw how fascism cynically used liberal toleration to gain a foothold and incite persecution, violent attacks, and eventually genocide. As he writes in his autobiography, he had seen how "competing parties of the Right were outbidding each other in their hostility towards the Jews.”

Popper’s formulation has been been used across the political spectrum, and sometimes applied in arguments against civil protections for some religious sects who hold intolerant views—a category that includes practitioners of nearly every major faith. But this is misleading. The line for Popper is not the mere existence of exclusionary or intolerant beliefs or philosophies, however reactionary or contemptible, but the open incitement to persecution and violence against others, which should be treated as criminal, he argued, and suppressed, “if necessary," he continues in the footnote, "even by force" if public disapproval is not enough.

By this line of reasoning, vigorous resistance to those who call for and enact racial violence and ethnic cleansing is a necessary defense of a tolerant society. Ignoring or allowing such acts to continue in the name of tolerance leads to the nightmare events Popper escaped in Europe, or to the horrific mass killings at two mosques in Christchurch this month that deliberately echoed Nazi atrocities. There are too many such echoes, from mass murders at synagogues to concentration camps for kidnapped children, all surrounded by an echo chamber of wildly unchecked incitement by state and non-state actors alike.

Popper recognized the inevitability and healthy necessity of social conflict, but he also affirmed the values of cooperation and mutual recognition, without which a liberal democracy cannot survive. Since the publication of The Open Society and its Enemies, his paradox of tolerance has weathered decades of criticism and revision. As John Horgan wrote in an introduction to a 1992 interview with the thinker, two years before his death, “an old joke about Popper” retitles the book “The Open Society by One of its Enemies.”

With less than good humor, critics have derided Popper’s liberalism as dogmatic and itself a fascist ideology that inevitably tends to intolerance against minorities. Question about who gets to decide which views should be suppressed and how are not easy to answer. Popper liked to say he welcomed the criticism, but he refused to tolerate views that reject reason, fact, and argument in order to incite and perpetrate violence and persecution. It’s difficult to imagine any democratic society surviving for long if it decides that, while maybe objectionable, such tolerance is tolerable. The question, “these days,” writes Harvie, is “can a tolerant society survive the internet?”

Related Content:

20,000 Americans Hold a Pro-Nazi Rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939: Chilling Video Re-Captures a Lost Chapter in US History

How Did Hitler Rise to Power? : New TED-ED Animation Provides a Case Study in How Fascists Get Democratically Elected

Rare 1940 Audio: Thomas Mann Explains the Nazis’ Ulterior Motive for Spreading Anti-Semitism

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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[how2to18]

STEVE ALMOND is the author of 12 books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times best seller Candyfreak and Against Football. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and New York Times Magazine, among others. He teaches at the Nieman Fellowship for Journalism program at Harvard University. His newest book, which occasioned this conversation, is Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country (Red Hen Press). William Giraldi is the author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, and a memoir, The Hero’s Body. His newest book is a collection of criticism, American Audacity, to be published in August. This conversation was conducted over email in January.

¤

WILLIAM GIRALDI: With many millions of my fellow baffled Americans, I’ve been trying to comprehend, as the subtitle of Bad Stories has it, what the hell just happened to our country. It wasn’t until reading your synthesis that I began to get the myriad cultural and political forces that needed to align, over several decades, in order for Trumpism to prevail in 2016. Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. Nothing comes out of nowhere. Your take on the Fairness Doctrine is one of the most riveting sections of the book, something I didn’t know about. Can you speak about the Fairness Doctrine and why it’s necessary to understand it in order to understand what’s happened?

STEVE ALMOND: To begin at the beginning, our Founding Fathers simply never envisioned the technologies that comprise our modern media. To them, the Fourth Estate consisted of broadsheets and pamphlets. When radio emerged, early in the 20th century, our leaders suddenly had to contend with a medium that could reach millions of Americans instantaneously. The smart ones were good and freaked out by that prospect. Back in 1926, the Texas lawmaker Luther Johnson said this:

American thought and American politics will be largely at the mercy of those who operate these stations, for publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a republic. And when such a weapon is placed in the hands of one person, or a single selfish group is permitted to either tacitly or otherwise acquire ownership or dominate these broadcasting stations throughout the country, then woe be to those who dare differ with them. It will be impossible to compete with them in reaching the ears of the American people.

These concerns led lawmakers to pass various measures, culminating with the Fairness Doctrine, which said that broadcasters should use the public airwaves to serve the public interest, not private gain. They had a duty to cover important issues and to provide “reasonable opportunity for opposing viewpoints.” It was basically a spoiler plate for propaganda.

Under Reagan, the head of the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, arguing that “the perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants.” I realize that sounds kind of wonky. But what he’s saying marks a precise fault line in our history as a country, the moment when our free press became, officially, a for-profit industry.

And the effect was immediate: a revolution of conservative talk radio hosts (and later Fox News anchors) who have spent three decades telling the bad stories we’ve come to associate with Trumpism. A government that seeks to redistribute wealth or curb greed is evil. Brown people are lazy and/or dangerous. White men are under assault. Elites and academics are mocking you. The mainstream media can’t be trusted. It amounts to a retailing of what the historian Richard Hofstadter calls “the paranoid style” in American politics.

This proudly ignorant aggression, which cloaks itself in the language of self-victimization, is the mindset that now animates much of our electorate. Guys like Rush Limbaugh have been indoctrinating their dittoheads for three decades. Talk like a populist and rule like a plutocrat — that’s the basic con. Trump didn’t create a movement. He simply inherited audience share.

Americans have come to accept the demented idea that for-profit demagogues have a constitutional right to use the public airwaves to spout falsehoods and propaganda. As a result, we now have a sitting president whose consciousness is guided by the caffeinated misinformation of Fox & Friends.

Which brings me to another important facet of Bad Stories: your analysis of the astounding moral vacuity of our Fourth Estate, their conscious and unconscious credo of entertainment over information. During the primaries and the election, even the outfits that were against Trump’s lunatic bluster — CNN or MSNBC, say — seemed helpless not to cover him incessantly. It was a ratings rodeo for them, and to hell with the fact that they were helping to elect him. Or consider even The New York Times giving front-page prominence to FBI director James Comey’s nothing-letter on the Clinton email nonsense, mere days before the election. You have an expert appraisal of Neil Postman and his masterwork, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Say a little about Postman and his ideas for those who might not be familiar with them.

Postman was a cultural historian. In 1984, he was asked to deliver a lecture at the Frankfurt Book Fair about Orwell’s 1984. But he argued that Reagan’s United States could be better understood by examining Huxley’s Brave New World. He saw a population mired in passivity and egoism, a republic that had devolved into an audience. The resulting book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, argues that every aspect of our culture (politics, religion, news, education, commerce) has been “transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice.” Public figures, therefore, are no longer judged on experience or competence. All they need is “a talent and a format to amuse.”

Candidate Trump’s training as a tabloid and TV star endowed him with the talent. And cable news, as you note, supplied him the format. Networks aired his speeches and fulminated against his antics and cast his tweets in shrieking chyron. They treated him like a celebrity. If they had covered him like a traditional politician — Jeb Bush, say — he never would have claimed the GOP nomination. His inexperience and erratic nature would have reduced him to a fringe candidate. He became the frontrunner because he was treated as the frontrunner.

And the networks made no secret of this double standard. The most shocking statement uttered during the entire campaign came from CBS CEO Les Moonves, who noted that Trump’s campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. […] The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” I probably don’t need to tell you that Moonves said all this at a media conference sponsored by Morgan Stanley.

This is exactly what happens when you turn a civic institution (“the Fourth Estate”) into a business. You wind up with a cash register rather than an editorial sensibility.

What’s so astounding about Postman’s book is that he saw all this coming down the pike more than 30 years ago. He knew TV news was destined to become a sewer of disinformation. He predicted the rise of parodic news programs that would convert our dysfunction into disposable laughs. He foresaw that Americans would “come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” I think about that statement every time I pull out my smart phone, and every time I get on the subway. What I see is a car full of people locked onto their tiny screens, amusing themselves to death.

Postman’s book helped me understand the 2016 election was ultimately a coup we engineered against ourselves, arising from unseriousness and bad stories.

And part of how we’re currently amusing ourselves deathly is by viewing the daily, almost hourly dramas of the White House as another reality TV show, albeit one with annihilating consequences. After Watergate, Gore Vidal pointed out that Americans had become addicted to scandal. That was nothing next to what we’re seeing now. It’s stunning to me how Trump’s every asinine tweet is treated by the media as something worthy of our attention. When a soulless and intellectually incurious entertainer with dysphasia steals the presidency with the help of a hostile foreign power, we really shouldn’t be continually surprised when he behaves like a soulless and intellectually incurious entertainer with dysphasia. One of the stories Bad Stories tells is the one about how Vladimir Putin saw his chance with Trump. Can you speak a bit about Tsar Putin?

One of the problems Americans have always had is a kind of ingrained solipsism, one born of privilege. We’ve been incredibly lucky as an empire. We have vast natural resources and weak neighbors. We’ve never been invaded, let alone occupied. Because we’ve been so sheltered we are, broadly speaking, unaware of, and incurious about, history. We live in the Capitalist Now, an era of monetized distraction, “within the context of no context,” as George W. S. Trow put it. Our national stories are either downright false (“all men are created equal”) or dangerously naïve (“the Cold War is over and we won!”). The Berlin Wall came crashing down. We all danced to shitty new wave music amid the rubble.

But what if we looked at our democracy through the eyes of Putin, a fiercely nationalistic KGB officer who was in Dresden when the Wall came down? The driving force in his life has been to restore the stature of his disgraced homeland, to Make Russia Great Again. Jump into that guy’s head and ask yourself: Is the Cold War really over?

Of course not. One of Putin’s central goals as a leader has been to attack the American empire. He’s smart enough to recognize that he can’t hope to win a military or economic war. So his attacks have come in the form of cyber-warfare and disinformation. When Russians hacked into the Democratic National Committee, they were doing the same thing as the Watergate burglars, and for the same reason: to smear the Democratic nominee.

During Watergate, the “story” was about the burglars — who had hired them and why. In 2016, journalists barely bothered to ask those questions. Instead, they eagerly spread the smears. They essentially did Putin’s dirty work for him. He knew they would, because he could see the cracks in our democracy: a free press that had degenerated into a for-profit tabloid operation, widespread voter apathy and disaffection, a conservative media complex devoted to stoking racial grievance, social media platforms that happily amplified Russian propaganda, state-sanctioned voter suppression.

For Putin, Trump represented a kind of geopolitical unicorn: the useful idiot abruptly elevated into a Manchurian candidate. His entire agenda mapped to Putin’s intentions. Trump consistently sowed discord among Americans, and undermined their faith in liberal democracy. His foreign policy called for the United States to retreat from the world stage, leaving Putin free to expand Russian ambitions. Putin also knew more about Trump’s financial entanglements than the US electorate.

Putin is a brutal autocrat. But he understands history, that empires, from the Incas to the Romans to the Mongols, ultimately collapse from within. They are made vulnerable to foreign invaders by internal divisions and delusions.

That’s the most chilling aspect of 2016. Whether or not they ever shook on it, Putin and Trump made a deal. But only one of them understood the true terms of the deal. Putin knew Trump was a long shot, given his flaws. But he could see the magnitude of the payout: the chance to elect a man capable of initiating what the Soviet Union never could — an era of permanent American decline.

One of the ways Bad Stories shines is by not being another lefty screed fueled by pharisaical grievance and holier-than-thou condemnations. It doesn’t traffic in the cliches and sanctimony and anti-art that fouls so much of what we now see coming from the commissars, and it even manages to have a goodly bit of mercy for Trump’s base. You can also be pretty critical of lefty sacred cows, among whom are the comedic minds liberal America, in its ballooning desperation, has taken for their prophets and seers. What’s your view of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert?

They’re both brilliant comedians who have used their shows to call out the bullshit that predominates our media and political classes. In doing so, they’ve trained viewers to think more critically, and helped educate lots of low-info citizens. Those are real and laudable achievements. The problem, as you observe, is these guys — our high-tech court jesters — have become the prophetic voices of our culture, the moral backstops. And that’s never good. Think of King Lear. When only the fool can speak truth to power, the kingdom is kaput.

Another way of putting it would be that these guys represent a kind of opiate for the left. While conservatives gin up votes by casting the United States as a horror film (with various dark-skinned villains — “thugs”/Muslims/immigrants …), the liberal response to our civic dysfunction is to cast the United States as a farce. Stewart and Colbert and their disciples convert our anguish and rage into disposable laughs. Look at all those corrupt politicians and pundits! What fools! It’s the same message Trump delivered over and over on the stump.

Why are we laughing at the moral erosion of our democracy? To protect ourselves from the fear and rage we should be feeling, the kind of destabilizing emotions that might force us to get off our fucking couches and take action. Meanwhile, those fools we’re laughing at are having the last laugh, because they’re the ones steering our ship of state. They’re deporting kids and slashing our safety net and strip-mining the EPA and reshaping our federal judiciary and turning our tax code into an open-air kleptocracy. Ha-ha-ha.

Again, I’m not criticizing Stewart and Colbert. Those guys are just doing their jobs. What troubles me is that we’re mistaking mockery for genuine political engagement. It’s not an act of protest to share the latest Saturday Night Live clip or Samantha Bee screed. It’s an act of therapeutic passivity. It makes us feel a little bit better about a circumstance that we shouldn’t feel better about.

Mencken once declared that “as democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

He was joking. But it’s not funny anymore.

I’m reminded of a line that’s almost always with me, from D. H. Lawrence’s characteristically seditious take on our nation’s literature. He lived in New Mexico for a spell, and he says at one point, in Studies in Classic American Literature, that he’s never been in a country where individuals are so downright terrified of one another. He saw us as a land of great violence and divide. “The essential American soul,” he says, is “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” Look, he said, at the “Orestes-like frenzy of restlessness in the Yankee soul, the inner malaise which amounts almost to madness.” Bad Stories tries to parse that inner malaise and madness. What else could have led to the election of the gilded Mafioso currently in the White House? Your book stars Trump, of course, but it isn’t specifically about him. It’s about Americans — the American soul. Do you agree with Lawrence’s take on us?

I use that very quote in my last book, to explain the predominance of violent sport in our country. But to be completely honest, it’s a reductive statement. There is no “essential American soul.” There are more than 300 million people in this country, and each of them, presumably, has a soul. What the 2016 election cast into bold relief was not some lofty, monolithic version of the American soul, but a soul in conflict with itself. After all, 70 million Americans voted for other candidates, and 65 million for Hillary Clinton. It was only a very small percentage of Trump voters whose minds and hearts were filled with violent ideation. We saw and heard a lot from them, because they make for good TV. But they were hardly stoic, or isolate. They were, in fact, emotionally wounded and lonely and desperate for a sense of belonging.

Hannah Arendt discusses this in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. She argues that totalitarianism is a kind of organized loneliness, one that takes root in societies where people feel angry and dislocated, left behind by capitalist expansion. People who lose this sense of identity and rootedness come to feel superfluous, and this makes them frantic to find a grand narrative that will grant their life meaning and direction. (As noted, conservative demagogues on the AM radio dial have been working this market for decades.) But most Republicans recognized their standard-bearer as ethically and intellectually unfit to serve. They voted for him out of an ethically enfeebled tribalism.

It’s important to note this, because it’s really another bad story to suggest that Americans are doomed to express their most savage and self-destructive impulses. I don’t believe that. I believe we can and will do better. But only if we can rouse ourselves from the thrall of hate-watching this administration.

In this sense, the book that presages the 2016 election is Moby-Dick, an epic that is entirely driven by the seductive power of wounded masculinity. Consider the moment Ahab appears on deck to announce the true nature of his mission. He’s not interested in harvesting whale blubber. He’s out for revenge.

“All visible objects […] are but pasteboard masks,” he roars. “If man will strike, strike through the mask! […] Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

Who does that sound like?

That’s what Trump channeled: the volcanic sense of grievance and spiritual poverty that lurks within America’s absurd material plenitude.

But here’s the thing about Moby-Dick: everyone goes along with Ahab. The crew signs on for his doomed crusade. That’s the most powerful analogue to the election. Whether in rapture or disgust, Americans turned away from the compass of self-governance and toward the mesmerizing drama of aggression on display, the capitalist id unchained and all that it unchained within us. Trump struck through the mask. And it was, alas, enough.

There’s another analogue to consider, too, when it comes to Ahab: Melville modeled him in large part on Milton’s Satan, the greatest poetic quester in the canon, rebellion incarnate, sublime hero of the seditious, “self-begot, self-rais’d” by his own “quick’ning power.” One of the bad stories you tell is called “Trump Was a Change Agent,” a story that tried to peddle him as an outsider, a self-begot rebel who would overthrow the greedy gods in Washington and usher in a kingdom of the neglected. We know how that story ends for Satan in Paradise Lost, and we know how it ends for Ahab. The question is: How will that bad story end for us? Your book doesn’t close with either manufactured uplift or resigned despair, but rather a levelheadedness and inwardness devoid of sloganized idealism. What’s your vision for us now?

America has always been a nation of high ideals and low behaviors, of all men are created equal and slave labor. The moral regression we’re seeing today — the overtly bigoted policy, the cronyism, the exploitation of fear and loathing — is nothing new. Just ask any woman or person of color or immigrant. Part of what I’m trying to articulate in the book is that history is cyclical. You have moral atrocities, such as slavery, which lead to moral corrections. You have the economic and social upheaval of the Great Depression, which led to the New Deal. The War on Poverty. The Great Society programs. The Civil Rights movement. Those are examples of the American people enacting their high ideals. That is still possible.

I know there are days — a lot of them — when the ravings of our current president and his congressional quislings feel like the apotheosis of a certain inexorable capitalist decadence. Maybe Mencken is right, “that the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.” But if that’s the case, it’s not because Americans are “downright morons.” It’s because too many of us have sworn allegiance to bad stories, stories that encourage us to weaponize our self-doubt, to project our destructive impulses onto others, to drown our shame in aggression. But evil is never purely borne. It is the distortion of love, not its absence.

The question is whether we can begin to tell better stories, ones in which our citizens muster the courage to confront the dire threats facing not just our democracy, but our species and planet. It’s possible to see the 2016 election as a warning and a wakeup call, a reminder that moral progress is inconvenient but not impossible.

I’m getting at a question of faith, I guess. Can we renew our faith in the basic principles of the Enlightenment — science and reason, liberty and tolerance, the common good? Can we rouse ourselves from the twin spells of cynicism and distraction? Maybe America can be made great again only by facing what we are at our weakest.

The post Bad Stories in America: A Conversation Between Steve Almond and William Giraldi appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Franz West https://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/arts/design/franz-west-influential-sculptor-dies-at-65.html Franz West, an influential Austrian sculptor with a penchant for art objects that were willfully unserious, nonideological and accessible and were displayed in Central Park and on the plaza at Lincoln Center, as well as in international exhibitions and blue-chip galleries around the world, died on Wednesday in Vienna. He was 65. His death was announced by the Franz West Foundation. He had been ill for some time. Mr. West’s work ranged from collages to furniture to large, colorful public sculptures. It consistently embodied a kind of friendly iconoclasm in which form and function were pitted against each other, and the notion of artwork as an autonomous object was frequently undermined. His homely, rough-surfaced materials, like plaster or papier-mâché, sometimes doused with color, challenged accepted taste. His efforts contributed equally to two of contemporary art’s most persistent trends: the interactive, collaboration-prone art of relational aesthetics and the cobbled-together assemblage-like objects called bricolage. He was also known for large, irreverent sculptures, like those shown in Manhattan in 2004 whose cartoonish, sausagelike shapes and patchwork surfaces, made of lacquered aluminum, parodied the usual decorum of abstract public art. Mr. West, who represented Austria at the 1990 Venice Biennale, was less a strikingly original artist who changed the course of art than an astute synthesizer and incisive adjuster. He operated on a parallel course to contemporary art, commenting and satirizing, creating a vast multimedia universe that fomented an active mingling of painting, sculpture, collage, furniture and even works (most of which he owned) by the artists he admired. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/arts/design/Franz-West-a-Sculptor-Who-Defied-Categories.html FRANKFURT — Whenever designers describe their work as “artistic,” I tend to cringe, not least because they are usually referring to flashy, barely stable, inexplicably uncomfortable furniture. And when artists talk about designing objects, I cringe again, because the outcome is likely to be just as showy and impractical. Yet there are exceptions. One is the furniture of the late Austrian sculptor Franz West, which can currently be seen in two exhibitions, “Franz West: Where Is My Eight?” — a retrospective of his career running through Oct. 13 at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, and “Mostly West,” a survey of his collaborations with other artists at Inverleith House in Edinburgh until Sept. 22. West’s furniture is as nutty, subversive and intriguing as the rest of his work. Few, if any of his chairs, tables, lights or other objects could be considered to be models of “good design,” but he did not intend them to be. When West, who died last year, made furniture, he treated it not as a design project, but as something else. Looking at the results in Frankfurt and Edinburgh made me wonder what that “something” was, and why he had succeeded in a field where so many of his fellow artists have failed. The answers are rooted in the feisty debate on the constantly changing, often contentious relationship of art and design. To most people, art is a medium of self-expression, often in work made by the artists themselves. While designers fulfill a practical role, typically defined by their clients, and delegate the making of their work to other people. Artists are admired for being purist and uncompromising, while designers are darkly suspected of kowtowing to commercial demands. http://www.skarstedt.com/artists/franz-west/ Franz West was born in Vienna in 1947. He began consolidating his particular style during the 1960s. His earliest works were collages and small sculptures made from papier-mâché. These early sculptural works (‘Adaptives’ or Paßstücke) were meant to be portable, and interacted with by the viewer. It is believed that West might have made these works in response to Actionism, an Austrian art movement that wanted to introduce more dynamism into the art-world through public displays of physicality. By the 1980s, West’s sculptures had grown in scale and were made in more permanent materials such as polyester and aluminum, to construct installations of seating and lounges that were to be used by the viewer. Through these works, West further explores the relationship between art and every day life and challenges traditional notions of the experience of the art object. Franz West has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Recent solo exhibitions of his work have been held in institutions such as Museum for Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt in 2013, Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2010, the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2008 and the MUMOK in Vienna and The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in 2007. He has also participated in exhibitions in major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and the National Museum in Oslo. West has also participated in several Venice Biennales, he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 54th Venice Biennale, and his work has been featured in multiple publications. https://youtu.be/84h_j2KaIMQ FranzWest became famous with his interactive works in the 1970s , loves for people to be interactive with what he does Many of his works are self-aware ironic and funny. Making jabs at the art world and his piece. His pieces speak to each person differently depending how you see the piece or interact with it. He encourages people to play and find purpose in his sculptures. His assistants say that he is very aware of what he's doing with his work he isnt arrogant He doesn't sketches pieces out before doing them, he decides as he goes along