#it would be stupid to NOT use that resource and privilege if the pursuit of art and story is what i really really want

[rithmeres]

in my workhating era :/

[mysticismmess]

Hi! I am really struggling with trying to figure out religion and life and jobs. I'm doing a law degree at Oxford and it seems like the general consensus is to do corporate law. I guess a part of me agrees, like I'm already here so it would be stupid not to go for the "high-paying", "prestigious" jobs. I have loans so I owe it to my parents. It's just it makes me so miserable. I feel like it'll make me more impersonal and uncaring and the only part of my week that really makes me happy is church

Oh gosh yes this is a very familiar feeling but let me tell you from my infinite experience (lol) that doing something you hate isn't worth it unless you'd really struggle to find something you love that's well-paid enough, and I know it's not easy but you're much better off doing something where you're in your element and can actually make a difference. My dad is a judge and a Professor of Law and he does International Criminal Law (which is decried as being a no money pursuit) and he has done very well because he got into it out of conviction and dedication because he wanted to stop injustice, and it worked out! There are lots of things you can do with your degree, some of which may have nothing in the slightest to do with law. Don't limit yourself to what Oxford and wider society deem acceptable. The reality is that our job market is changing dramatically and the opportunities available have become much more diverse. Try and find your niche and make it your own! As to your parents, I'm sure they'd rather see you be fulfilled and happy than seeing you rich but miserable. Plus it's not like you're going to end up on a minimum wage job just because you're not doing corporate law. As I say, explore, get in touch with people who inspire you, speak to Careers at uni (an underrated resource honestly) and see what interests you.

By the way I also went to a "prestigious" University and you have to see it as the University is there for YOU, you are not there for the University, no matter how much people tell you what a privilege it is and how you have to earn it and represent it and all that. You have your place and now its resources are yours to do with as you please. Make use of it! I know plenty of Oxbridge grads who hated their course and are now finally happy in the wildest jobs that no one would have thought appropriate. As I say, the world is changing. Use the resources at your disposal, don't let people tell you what you should or shouldn't do, and find your niche.

Best of luck!

[marcjampole]

The social policy behind Trump GOP tax plan is to turn America into a polluted military camp of rich and poor in which ignorance reigns

Government taxation of its citizens goes back at least six thousand years, and at least as far back as the Greeks, the purpose of taxes have always been twofold: To raise revenues for the government and to guide public policy. In the case of Athens, the social policy was to go to war with other nations, as Athens would raise taxes on a temporary basis to finance war-making. But Athens also taxed every inhabitant who did not have an Athenian mother and father, which certainly advanced a public policy that has recently gained adherents in many western nations: limit immigration.

Societies and governments are much more complex than they used to be. Most industry sectors and most of the utilities that define modern life like electricity and natural gas service didn’t even exist 200 years ago. Tax policy can’t help but favor certain industries and individuals, and typically the hand-up—be it in the form of tax credits or deductions—is a conscious attempt by our leaders to make people and industries do something, or stop doing something.

The overall dynamic of the current Trump GOP tax plans is to give most people a tax break today, but heavily weigh the benefits to top wage earners, especially in the financial industry, and those whose income comes mostly from investments; the tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy are permanent, while most of the breaks for everyone else are temporary. In either of its forms, the proposed new tax system will not be revenue neutral, but raise the budget by 1.5 trillion dollars. Despite this enormous increase in the deficit, the Trump GOP tax plan still needs to raise taxes on many people and cut government programs and services to pay for what can most accurately be described as an enormous tax break for the wealthy.

Within this broad outline are the details, most of which assert a public or social policy, and they certainly are devilish. Let’s then, take a look at the public policy implicit in both the overall thrust of the plan and in its minutiae.

On the macro level, the tax plan suggests that its developers do not believe that people have any responsibility to society and that society should be a cold and inhumane place in which everyone essentially is on their own, sink or swim, with no help to the poor or disadvantaged to level the playing field of a market economy of private actors.

I understand full well the Republican line on tax cuts for the wealthy dating back to before the Great Depression, nonsense that the wealthy and corporations will reinvest their tax savings to create new jobs and that high rates of taxation harm society’s producers. But all historical evidence going back at least to the 16th century in Spain demonstrates that in the real world raising taxes on the wealthy and lowering taxes on everyone else generally produces economic growth, whereas lowering taxes on the wealthy generally causes stagnation or economic decline, especially when accompanied by raising taxes on everyone else. An analysis of the cash flow when rich folk, everyone else and the government get more money demonstrates the almost offensive illogic in believing that lowering taxes on the wealthy creates wealth that flows down to everyone else. Governments spend all the money in their coffers, sooner or later, and for most modern governments, it’s sooner. That spending becomes jobs, government contracts and benefits to the poor and middle class, which then get spent. When everyone but the rich get more money, they spend most of it and save only a little, again putting money into the economy. The rich, by contrast, will stick most of the extra money into dead assets, that is, assets that do not create wealth such as collectibles, real estate and stocks that are bought on the secondary market and not directly from companies.

Except for the stupid and the fanatical, most elected officials and certainly most of the right-wing’s well-paid horde of think-tankers know that the idea that cutting taxes on the wealthy will unleash growth is a ridiculous myth. We must therefore look behind their overheated rhetoric to understand the true public policy in the Trump GOP plan. If we judge the plan by past history and the outcomes predicted by virtually all mainstream economists, it’s clear that the public policy goes beyond laissez faire to create a society that favors the already wealthy and provides no helping hand to anyone else.

The provisions of the plan involve some radical truly social thinking. In the case of education, Ted Mitchell, President of the American Council on Education, put it best when he called the Trump GOP tax plan “a reverse GI Bill.” The GI Bill put millions of veterans of World War II through college free or at a very low cost, through government support of public higher education. By contrast, the Trump GOP plan removes many of the tax breaks that help people pay for their college education, making college even less affordable than it already is in the 21st century:

Repeals the interest deduction for student loans, which is taken by more than 12 million people.

Repeals the $2,500 tax credit that middle-class parents can take for having children in college.

Forces graduate students to pay taxes on the tuition waivers they receive, which will make many leave school.

Places a 1.4 percent excise tax on college endowments that exceed a specific limit, which will affect over 150 colleges and reduce the funds these institutions have for scholarships to needy students. Thus, in the same bill that gives corporations a tax break and continues the carried income tax break for hedge fund managers, most major universities will pay a new tax.

It’s clear that the Trump GOP do not see the benefit in providing or facilitating the educational aspirations of its citizens and see no benefit to society to educating the next generation of managers, engineers, physicians and other medical professionals, technicians, communicators, software developers, translators, urban planners, human resource professionals, teachers and the myriad other professions that require higher education. Nor do the Republicans place any value on the pursuit of knowledge or research and development.

Let’s move on to healthcare. From its many failed attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act we already know the GOP has no interest in providing low-cost universal healthcare, a birthright enjoyed by the citizens of virtually every other industrialized country of the world. Again, the GOP espouses the false idea that the marketplace will provide less expensive, higher quality healthcare, and again the facts belie this nonsense. The citizens in our private sector healthcare system pay more than those in other industrial nations and we get less, as our infant mortality and life expectancy rates are much worse. In truth, the rightwing that controls today’s Republican Party does not believe that healthcare is a birthright and questions the idea that it is in the best interests of society to keep its citizens heathy at an affordable price.

The Senate version of the tax bill reinforces the Trump GOP notion that it’s every person for himself when it comes to healthcare by ending the individual mandate that makes those who don’t buy healthcare pay a special tax. Most experts agree that ending the individual mandate will leave 13 million more people uninsured and raise premiums for everyone else by 10%. Both bills end the deduction for unusually high medical expenses. It’s clear that Trump and the GOP do not really care about the health of Americans—at least not as much as they care about giving the ultra-wealthy more money.

For decades, the federal government has encouraged support of charities and religious institutions by allowing deductions for charitable contributions. But to take the deduction, the tax filer has had to itemize deductions. By raising the standard deduction (which cuts taxes) and lowering the maximum that can be deducted, the Trump GOP plan provides less incentive to give to charities and will likely result in charities receiving less funding. Moreover, ending the estate tax will likely lead to fewer and less generous major gifts, as the wealthiest one-fifth of one percent—the lucky few whose estates are large enough to be assessed estate taxes—will no longer feel the need to give to charities to reduce their tax burden. Thus, where once the public policy of our tax system encouraged charitable giving, the public policy advanced by the Trump GOP tax bill encourages selfishness.

The GOP tax plans rescind a number of tax credits, each of which was instituted to support a public policy deemed beneficial to American society as a whole. The credits up for repeal include the adoption tax credit, the credit for the elderly and the totally and permanently disabled, the credit associated with mortgage credit certificates, and the credit for plug-in electric vehicles. The GOP prefers lining the pockets of the already privileged over encouraging adoption, helping the elderly and disabled, supporting home ownership and building the market for non-polluting vehicles. To those who argue that the temporary (!) tax cuts partially or entirely offset the loss of credits and deductions miss the point: The changes collectively replace the use of tax policy to implement public policy with a kind of brutish and brutal lack of concern for the direction of the country.

The tax plan, of course, fits together with the budget. Proposed budget cuts to keep the deficit increase under $1.5 trillion also reflect public policy. The example of our foreign policy expenditures truly represents a turn that will be dangerous to both the United States and the rest of the world. The Trump budget calls for slashing the State Department by more than 30% while adding more than a 100 billion to the already bloated defense budget, including for the development of robot weapons and more sophisticated nuclear weapons. The social policy behind this shift is easy enough to see: We now prefer to go to war or oversee wars others fight for us than to achieve diplomatic solutions to world problems and disagreements with adversaries.

Other proposed budget cuts show a disregard for the importance of research and development, public education and environmental protection.

The tax plan provides more benefits to the ultra-wealthy than to the wealthy. It favors those whose income derives from investments over those who work for a living and get paid well for it—the Trumps and Mnuchins over LeBron James and Giancarlo Stanton. What’s the social policy there? To reward capital over labor, even high-priced labor.

We could go on, but let’s take a look at the vision of the future created by these different strands of public policy: A society of rich and poor in which most people are less educated and less healthy and live in a more polluted world than now and drive on crumbling roads and bridges to crumbling schools and shoddy public spaces, a world in which the elderly, disabled and disadvantaged are left to pretty much fend for themselves and in which no one will ever know peace as we fight or support dozens of regional and civil wars around the globe. Dystopia.

The overriding policy of Trump and the Republicans is to push the country into dystopia to satisfy the greed of a handful of billionaires. Among those ultra-wealthy are the members of the Trump family, who stand to gain tens of millions from the tax breaks right away. Upon the death of Trumpty Dumpty, that amount would increase to the value of his estate, which could be anywhere from $400 million to $4 billion or more, depending on whose estimate of his net worth you use.

In the future, when most American are living from hand to mouth trying to navigate their way along potholed roads and in broken down mass transit, the air foul with particles and carbon dioxide, their tap water undrinkable, most people in debt all their lives paying off their college degrees, the entire country running on obsolete and ramshackle early 21st century technology, the billionaires won’t care. They’ll have their own computer servers, servants, concierge medical service, security staff, airplanes and real estate in the more civilized locations of Paris, Berlin and Shanghai. It’s the ultimate end game of the politics of selfishness.

[stretchjournalemerson]

Contact Zones and the Imagined Community in The Big Short

By Jake Peter 

In her essay “Arts of the Contact Zone,” New York University Professor Mary Louise Pratt defines the concept of the “contact zone” as a “social [space] where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (34).  According to Pratt, a contact zone exists where two unique parties experience conflict and an imbalance of power.

These interactions appear in Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book The Big Short, which describes the forward-thinking investors who bet against the seemingly robust U.S. housing market in 2008 with the expectation it would fail.  Against all odds, they receive enormous returns on their investments when housing prices plummet. However, their profits come at the expense of the biggest banks on Wall Street and millions of poverty-stricken Americans who could not repay their home loans.  Three examples of Pratt’s “contact zone” arise when intelligent investors and manipulative bankers encounter destitute Americans who are unaware that they are about to lose their homes.

The first contact zone appears when investors Vinny Daniel and Danny Moses, working for Steve Eisman at the investment firm Frontpoint Partners, come face-to-face with the systematic manipulation of poor, unsuspecting Americans in Miami. While there, they “wandered around empty neighborhoods built with subprime loans” (Lewis 96).  The few residents they encounter do not understand the magnitude of the problems caused by banks handing out massive loans without requiring evidence of income or employment.  Their ignorance of the harmful effects these loans have on the national economy exposes the “asymmetrical relations of power” that Pratt describes in her essay (34). The class divide illuminated by this contact zone is evidenced by the investors’ knowledge of the housing market that allows them to profit off of the banks’ manipulation of poor homeowners.

At the same time, the big banks who readily provide these loans to lower-class applicants are just as culpable as the investors.  Numerous Wall Street firms offer “homeowners with bad credit and no proof of income” loans “that could be exploited for profit” (Lewis 97).  In the book, Eisman recalls a Mexican strawberry picker with a $14,000 annual income receiving a $740,000 home loan in California and a Jamaican nurse taking out loans on six townhouses in New York.  These examples highlight the heartlessness of the big banks and the devastating effects of a contact zone in which one side is virtually powerless.  This abuse of the financial system reveals the worst possible outcome from a contact zone in which the members of the upper class constantly suppress the underprivileged.

Finally, investor Michael Burry, founder of the hedge fund Scion Capital, creates a third contact zone when he visits many of the banks on Wall Street and offers to buy insurance on their most highly rated housing bonds.  In doing so, he places bets against the banks that would bankrupt them if the housing market crashed.  He would either “be paid zero…or a billion dollars if those triple-B-rated bonds went bad” (74).  While some view Burry as an agent of justice who sought revenge on the banks for scamming American citizens, he remains guilty as well.  Though he eventually makes exponential profits when the loans he bought insurance on are not repaid, Burry hurts the U.S. economy by driving the banks into serious debt.  Though funds from the U.S. Treasury save some of the banks, their employees, shareholders, and account holders still suffer from the negative effects of Burry’s insurance contracts.  This contact zone differs from the first two because the balance of power is unbeknownst to one side.  The banks quickly accept Burry’s contracts and laugh at him for making such a supposedly stupid wager, but Burry knows that he holds the upper hand in those deals.  Not only that, but it is a unique situation because Burry has the qualities of both a hero and a villain.  Some praise him for swindling the banks that took advantage of poor Americans, but members of Wall Street and even Burry himself are critical of his contributions to the economic crisis that affected so many Americans.

Author Benedict Anderson’s concept of an “imagined community” that Pratt presents in her essay applies to the group of impoverished Americans who believe they will find fulfillment in wealth.  Those who chase this “American dream” make up a community of people who “ ‘will never know most of their fellow-members...yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ ” (qtd. in Pratt 37).  This idealistic notion unites these individuals and convinces them to blindly pursue money and home ownership in the hope that their elevated socio-economic statuses will make them successful Americans.  As Carlos Marin of McKendree University states in his essay “Reality and the American Dream,” the American dream proposes that “sacrifice will eventually derive in the life one has always aspired to.”  Millions of Americans sacrificed their financial stability hoping that their home ownership would raise their social standing, but the loans they received only resulted in inescapable debt.

Though the poor Americans of the 2008 housing crisis fit some aspects of Anderson’s description of the imagined community, they defy others.  For example, they do not embody the fraternal nature of the imagined community, which he defines as “ ‘a deep, horizontal comradeship’ for which millions of people are prepared…‘to kill as willingly to die’ ” (qtd. in Pratt 37).  These Americans yearned to leave the lower class and join the wealthy elites.  They dreamed of moving up in society and never looking back.  Unfortunately, their narcissism stemmed from the American dream that called upon them to pursue individual wealth and disregard the needs of the other members of their imagined community.

As Marin points out in his essay, the American dream is deceptive in that it convinces those who cannot attain it that it is within reach.  Contrary to the belief of lower-class Americans in 2008, the elevated socio-economic status promised by the American dream remains “a notion that translates into reality largely for those who enjoy resources that are necessary for social mobility” (Marin).  Those resources, which most impoverished citizens did not possess, included money, education, employment, and a permanent residence.  In other words, there existed “ ‘finite, if elastic boundaries’ ” standing in the way of those seeking elite financial status (qtd. in Pratt 37). While millions of Americans united in their pursuit of the American dream, the majority of them were ill-equipped to chase such an unattainable goal.  Thus, their imagined community remained limited in its power.

Arguably the most important contact zone that stemmed from the housing crisis is the conflict between Democrats and Republicans over federal housing policies.  Democrats continue to support policies like the Community Reinvestment Act, which made it possible for banks to provide loans to members of low-income communities.  However, “conservatives who argue that some aspects of federal housing policy caused the financial crisis have pushed for legislation to eliminate or restrict government programs that make homeownership more affordable for Americans” (McArthur and Edelman).  This contact zone differs from the first three because the balance of power is constantly shifting.  For example, the Republicans just increased their lead in the Senate in this year’s midterm election, but the Democrats seized the majority of the seats in the House of Representatives.  This never-ending battle between the two parties often results in a legislative tug-of-war where laws are passed by the party in power and then repealed by the opposing party when the power shifts to the other side.  Ironically, the contact zone with the most potential to produce positive change in the lives of Americans seems to exist solely for the purpose of the conflict itself.  

Since a mishandled contact zone resulted in a severe economic crisis and a balanced one has not implemented changes to prevent another disaster, it follows that only a contact zone in which the powerful side uses its privilege responsibly could protect the economy.  Today’s middle and upper-class Americans could be that responsible group by supporting the Puerto Ricans who are in the midst of a housing crisis caused by Hurricane Maria.  According to a report by the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, the values of Puerto Rican homes are dropping drastically and foreclosures have skyrocketed.  Americans can support displaced Puerto Ricans by calling for the adaptation of the “Low-Income Housing Tax Credit,” which would “support the financing of a massive purchase and rehabilitation of vacant housing units for conversion to social purposes” (Hinojosa and Meleéndez 3).  In this way, contact zones could act as forces for good when two cultures learn to support each other instead of abusing their power.

Both parties involved in a conflict zone lose when the more powerful side seeks only to satisfy its self-interests.  In all of the examples mentioned previously, the side with the upper hand fell prey to narcissism and greed that blinded it and made it apathetic towards the more vulnerable group.  Therefore, in order for contact zones on Wall Street to benefit American citizens, big banks and corporations must make decisions while balancing their own interests with those of the people.

Works Cited

Hinojosa, Jennifer, and Edwin Meléndez. The Housing Crisis In Puerto Rico And The Impact Of Hurricane Maria. Center for Puerto Rican Studies, 2018.

Lewis, Michael. The Big Short. W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Marin, Carlos. “Reality and the American Dream: Is Meritocracy Defined by

Socio-Economic Status?” McKendree University, 2018.

https://www.mckendree.edu/academics/scholars/issue14/marin.htm

McArthur, Colin, and Sarah Edelman. “The 2008 Housing Crisis.” Center for American

       Progress, 2017.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2017/04/13/430424/2008-housing-crisis/

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Modern Language Association, 1991. pp. 33-40.

[ruffoverthinksthings]

Prometheus

Short story for @screaminginternallyalleternity involving her OC of Jane’s dad.

There was always an interrogation before and after Jane’s visits to her father, Adrien Castle, or as he was more popularly known, “Professor Prometheus.”

Before, it was always questions of if she knew that “The Stars” had formally expatriated from Auradon, that they were only allowed to practice magic as they were keeping out of Auradon’s proper territories and out of sight, and that she would lose all of her rights, her privileges, and be denied contact with her mother if she defected to whichever cell, out-of-the-way hide-out, or alternate dimension he was living in at the moment.

Always, she would answer yes, yes, and yes.

After, it was questions of if she had any plans of expatriating, if she would now be practicing magic, or if she was thinking of encouraging others to do so.

Always, she would answer no, no, and no.

She wasn’t a child, though her physical form looked the part. She could understand that there was a very big, very complicated, and very dire reason why Auradon was always so concerned about “defection, propaganda, and the influence of subversive elements” like her father and the circles he ran around in.

She just didn’t know exactly why, up until the day she asked her father about it.

She didn’t ask him outright, as she knew enough to shut up about all matters involving Auradon and especially the Magic Ban whenever she was in any of the Star settlements.

But so it was that fate happened to give her a chance, and she didn’t want to waste it.

It started with her father placing an item on his worktable, what looked like a flower in a pot, except it was made of intricately carved rock, crystals, and precious jewels, the closed “petals” made of glass with finely carved inscriptions on it.

Jane marveled at it, from her position standing on a stool and her tiny hands on the edge of the table. “It’s beautiful!” she said, her voice tinny and squeaky.

“Hold your praise, I haven’t turned it on just yet,” Adrien said, smiling as he waved his hand in front of a specific section of the “pot.”

Jane gasped as the petals slowly, delicately unfolded, before the whole device began to hum with magical power, a glowing field emanating from the blooming “flower.” “What does it do...?” she asked.

“This, my Sunshine, is a miniaturized, local anti-gravity field generator, and what it does is that it holds things up in the air for as long as it’s on,” Adrien replied as he tossed a marble atop it.

The ball quickly slowed to a stop as it entered the field, until it was gently bobbing up and down in the center of it.

Jane clapped. “It’s wonderful, daddy!”

Adrien blushed, and plucked the marble out. “Wait till I show you just how much it can lift...”

So a show started, Adrien putting increasingly larger and heavier balls on the field generator: tennis balls, baseballs, soccer balls, footballs, basketballs, until finally, Jane watched him strain and grunt as he lifted an entire bowling ball up and put it atop the field.

Jane clapped her hands over her mouth as it dipped dangerously low, almost touching the glass petals… then, it slowly lifted back up, and the bowling ball was still. She giggled in delight as she clapped her hands once more.

“Great job, daddy!”

Adrien blushed. “Thank you, Sunshine!”

“How does it work?” Jane asked.

Adrien beamed. “I’m glad you asked! First, this relies heavily on the--”

The field suddenly gave out.

The two Fae watched as the bowling ball fell in slow-motion, dipping down a little, almost touching the crystal petals, until gravity got hold of it once more and it crushed the device, flower and pot and all.

Jane screamed as shards of glass, cracked crystal, and jagged chunks of rock came flying out. Adrien quickly grabbed her, hugging her to his chest as he turned away from the mess, bits crunching underneath his aged leather shoes as he ran to the counter on the opposite corner.

“Oh gods, Jane! Are you okay?” Adrien asked as he set her down and began to look her over. “Did you get cut? Do you need a hug?”

Jane sniffled, her heart racing from the fear and the panic pouring from her father. “I’m fine...” she said shakily.

Thunk. Crack.

The bowling ball rolled off the table, and made a crack on the floor. “Oh no!” Jane said. “Your invention and your floor, daddy!”

Adrien groaned. “Jane: fuck the invention and the floor! I can fix both, and if I can’t, I can just get a new workshop with a snap of my fingers, and build a brand new prototype out of my blueprints and notes!”

His voice and his face softened. “After all, I can’t replace you, sunshine.”

“Are you sure it’s not a big deal...?” Jane asked.

Adrien kissed her on the forehead, and smiled at her. “Positive. I love you more than I do any of my inventions, my possessions, or even Science and Magic itself, my Sunshine.”

Jane smiled, and sniffed. “I love you too, daddy.”

Adrien hugs her and strokes her hair. “You just wait here while I get cleaned up, Sunshine...”

Jane hums. “Okay, daddy.”

“Ah, I’m happy you didn’t get hurt, and the field failed during testing rather than during a live use of it…” He said as he picked up the bowling ball, put a wooden board over the new crater in his workshop, and swept up all the glass and rock for recycling. “I don’t want to think of what sort of chaos and unpleasantness would have happened if this was being used to move supply crates around...”

“Did you invent this for the settlement, daddy?” Jane asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “The trolls, the familiars, and the golems can only be asked to do so much before they start asking for or needing more magic than we feel comfortable giving. Gods, if this works out the way I think it will, we’d save ourselves so much time, effort, and resources, free to use them for much better pursuits!

“It’ll be leaps and bounds more efficient than anything they’re using in Auradon, that’s for sure!”

“Then why don’t you try selling it to them?” Jane asked. “Maybe they’ll make an exception like they did with the Animal Translators?”

Adrien sighs heavily as he dumps all of the shattered pieces into a bin. “I seriously doubt it. If there’s anything Auradon hates, it’s progress; just look at Camelot, with King Arthur keeping his entire state stuck in the Middle Ages!”

He grows quiet for a moment. “Frankly though, with all the things he and the others know, I can sympathize with him, even if it’s still a stupid-arsed decision...”

“What do they know…?” Jane asks.

If her mind had matched her appearance, this would have been when Adrien would have copped out with some vague, general, or woefully sterilized account to protect her innocence, and help her understand it in the first place.

As they both knew, however, her clothes, her voice, and her body were the only things even remotely child-like about Jane.

“Let’s sit down for tea,” Adrien said as he put away his dustpan and broom. “This is going to be a long conversation...”

Later, when they are seated across each other with cups of herbal tea, Adrien began his story.

“You know why I got into the business of combining science and magic, yes?”

“You wanted to make it more accessible for everyone,” Jane replied.

Adrien nodded. “Indeed...

“I thought it was the beginning of something beautiful, a miracle when Beast’s ambassadors came opening their rifts into my home realm, when the local government forged an alliance and we joined their ever growing network of dimensions sharing all the knowledge, goods, and culture they had, chattering about making a brand new, better world, together.

“It’s only too late that I realized it was the start of one massive atrocity.

“The Isle’s barrier is just part of it, my most visible failure. No, the true scope of my mistake was that and everything else I helped create.

“When the Great Uniting was said and done, the celebrations and the speeches were over, and us scientists and magicians could finally start collaborating in-person with all the new facilities, associations, and resources available to us, it felt like the start of an exciting new era for Science and Magic.

“There was nothing we couldn't do, nothing we weren't allowed to do, and we were encouraged to do everything we could... and that, my Sunshine, was where it all went to Hell.

“We could have all the resources we wanted, no supervision, no regulation, no questions asked. We had all the willing test subjects we could ask for, along with a huge population of people that nobody would really miss, the scientist's dream of completely random sample spread across ethnicity, gender, economic class, and even species.

“And we did things, Jane—TERRIBLE things.

“It was the Barrier, what I thought was supposed to be just a simple security measure until the Villains could be rehabilitated and re-released back into society.

“It was the fact that we broke the laws of nature and reality, bringing those Villains back from wherever they had ended up and here, what experiments we had to do to prove the concept let alone a completely successful result, and the horrific failures from our attempts.

“It was all the theories, the methods, and the experiments we lifted from overlord’s spellbooks, old tomes bound with mysterious leather, ancient scrolls sealed away in tombs and deep within caves.

“We should have known better. We knew what dark magic could do to mere mortals and even immortal Fae. Genie wasn’t kidding when he said raising the dead was a messy business.

“But we were arrogant, thought ourselves incorruptible, and that was our downfall.”

“What happened?” Jane asked. “Did Evi—uh, morally questionable people get past the vetting process?”

Adrien shook his head and chuckled sadly. “No. We were all good people. But you’ve no idea what happens to even the best of folks when you give them the power to play god, or worse yet, when you make them think that they are ones, like with that arrogant, pompous fool, Beast.

“We all saw the problems, the horrors, the disasters waiting to happen with what we had wrought.

“I’ll admit I wasn’t one of the first who sensed that something was wrong, but as soon as my eyes were opened, I was flooding those communication channels about emergency shut downs, regulation, and more Royal Guards with the others.

“But he refused to believe that things would ever get that bad. Too focused on building his brand new legacy. Too drunk with the idea of all the praise and the love he would receive for authorizing and spearheading these new techniques, spells, and inventions.

“Then Belle, bless her, managed to convince that bone-headed jackass to come down to the facilities and see what we were working on, and bring all the other monarchs with him, see what we were doing with all that gold from their treasuries and supplies from their kingdoms.”

Jane frowned, sensed the unease, the horror, the disgust welling up inside her father. “… What happened…?”

Adrien sighed, and hung his head. “It was the End of that glorious Era, and the start of that farce you and so many others are forced to live in.

“The Royals sensed something was wrong when on the days leading up to their visits, personnel started to go missing, entire facilities were going radio silent, and there was an aura of gloom and unease gnawing at the pits of our stomachs.

“Then, Beast ordered teams of Guards to open up the locks, force us all to show them everything we were working on—and what they found, what we all found, were things none of us will ever forget.”

Adrien raised his head, his eyes said. “This is why the Magic Ban was really instated, you know.

“It wasn’t any of that bollocks of ‘fairness’ and ‘achieving on your own merits’--it was because they finally realized what magic and science was truly capable of in this new world, when they let it run wild, even in the hands of people who were ‘Good.’

“The Ban was supposed to be temporary, until we could get things under control and bring about better regulations. But like all of his other orders, that tyrant Beast apparently decided it was better if we just swept the whole problem under the rug than mar his shining reputation with the uglier consequences of his actions.

“We protested. We fought. We saw what could be done if you were willing to admit it was there, and convince everyone to roll up their sleeves and get to work cleaning it up.

“However magic and science was abused, this was our lives’ work, and never let it be said that from great horror and tragedy, great things may rise.”

Adrien sighed once more. “I suppose we really shouldn’t have been surprised that he just banished what he could, set fire to the rest, and forced us all into secrecy. That’s what Beast does with his problems, you know: he sweeps them under the rug, or he yells, he bullies, and he threatens until you just grow tired of trying to pull that head of his out from his ass.

“It’s sad, really.

“Our vision was to let anyone have the power and the wonders that were exclusive to the Fae, the Demi-Gods, and the Mages. Erase the hierarchy of mortals being forced to bend to the will of those with power lest they be destroyed. Raise us all to the same plane, so we may all see what new heights we could achieve together.

“We were all supposed to be Stars. Instead, we all turned into slaves.”

It was silent for a long time after that, father and daughter slowly sipping their tea.

Jane put down her cup, opened her mouth, but quickly closed it.

“Something up, Sunshine?” Adrien asked.

Jane debated it for a moment, before she asked, “Do you regret it?”

Adrien chuckled. “No. Strangely enough, I don’t. My work… my work has opened up new horizons, exposed so many to the possibilities they couldn’t have fathomed, like Prometheus stealing the flame of Knowledge to give to man.

“It is an unspeakable tragedy that such potential was wasted and corrupted in such a way by men like Beast… but, I take heart in the fact Alfred Nobel invented TNT, and later started the Nobel Peace Prize.”

He smiled bitterly. “It’s only a matter of time until this farce ends—it always is.”

“Is that what keeps you going??” Jane asked.

Adrien shook his head. “Sunshine, it’s you that keeps me going. When I toil away in my laboratory and immerse myself in research, I do not think about the glory it may give me, the accolades I will receive, the royalties I can earn from patents.

“No, I think of myself as one scientist among many, slowly, gradually helping expand the knowledge of all of us, creating a better world for ourselves and for all future generations to live in.”

He started tearing up. “Jane, my Sunshine, my only Sunshine… Auradon was for you. And I am so, so sorry things turned out this way...”

Jane got up off her seat, walked over to him, and hugged him. “It’s okay daddy,” she whispers as she buries her face in his chest. “I forgive you.”

The tears start to flow as Adrien wraps his arms tight around his daughter.

He would never truly find peace, not now, not ever… but that one person forgave him was enough, if only for the moment.

[for-peace-war]

Element - Saliha; DNA - Svetlana; Fear - Arval; Yah - Nicoleta; XXX - Remco ;)

SALIHA: What is your muse “made of”, what is their character like? Courageous, loving, scared, etc.

I believe that it would be easiest to say that she is treacherous by nature, but that’d both kind of undervalue what she is and why she does what she does.  As a Follower of Set, treachery and corruption are definitely core aspects of her personality: she will betray people with little concern or care if it is advantageous and will certainly work to corrupt a system to free others from it, but at her center most concept she is someone that values family and camaraderie.  

Saliha never had a real home life worth mentioning.  It is rumored that even her adoptive father was a thrall of the Setites, so she’s been groomed and/or used for that agenda since she could first speak if such is true.  With that being said, she found herself oddly motivated to a position of nurturing when it came to the neonates and fledglings that have become her coterie.  It may well be that they are people... or were people, that treated her with not so much respect as a sense of belonging, and she rapidly accepted that to do what was necessary to protect them in some way.

Remember, Saliha truly does believe in the power and influence of Set.  Because of this, when she makes an action that some (most) would consider deceptive or cruel, it is because she values the system she is operating under.  Betraying the Sons of Liberty to protect the coterie was perhaps the most iconic sign of where her mind is.  She actually liked the Sons, and even advanced their cause for some time, but when it was no longer advantageous to be associated with them she immediately cut those ties and used what she knew to see herself and her friends advanced at their expense.  And she’d never feel remorse for that -- in fact, she probably feels she did them a favor.  They’ve learned that blind trust is stupid and that it is better to betray than to be betrayed.

Hopefully.

That said, she also has absolutely no pity for Setites that do not work together and if she is betrayed by one such person she either detaches them from her life or prepares to find a way to detach them from their own.

SVETLANA: What was your muses home life like?

If you are asking about her life as kine, then it was privileged but empty.  Her father was a part of many boards and spent little time around her and her mother was often engaged in either a social platform or some other affair.  She was never without something to do: she studied arts, literature, and the finer disciplines and as she aged she had a very active social life, but it was always without  much attachment until she met her sire, Gavrel.  Oddly, if not for the fall of the Russian Empire, it is possible he would never have embraced her but such did come to pass and within a year’s time, she was dead for it.

Which led her to her unlife.

After the Brujah killed off most anyone she knew, Svetlana retreated inward and became a recluse.  Her life was then a series of empty pursuits and distance from others, enabling her to survive in relative solitude but with little ambition for it.   After 1967, she’s gained a new family however and works hard to protect and provide for them.  As much as her operations as Nightfall dealt with hating Anarchs, she also gained valuable contacts and resources to apply toward those she cares about: the Camarilla, the coterie, and even the Vladinov family.

ARVAL:What are your muses biggest fears?

There’s really only one thing that Arval fears and that isn’t going to be a big surprise.  He’s afraid of not being good enough -- not riding, fighting, or leading well enough to be worthy the blood he was born with.  For all of his grandiose posturing and grandstanding, what makes Arval so very difficult as a person is that he isn’t an empty trope. He isn’t someone that has been born with everything and takes that for granted: he’s used his abilities naturally gained and his chances gained through money, influence, and legacy in order to become one of the greatest knights of his generation.

But it isn’t simply that he wants to be the best... he feels he has to in order to protect the people he truly cares for.  After all, the War of the Light saw so many people he knew die that he began to doubt himself to an extreme degree.  Kauthryn’s near death, Rolf’s death, the Dawnguard that fought with them, and the fact Dawnholde was assaulted all spoke to that he was not doing ‘well enough’ in his eyes, and thus he moved further away from being a kind of pompous do-gooder toward his present state of elitist prick.  He felt too much time was wasted in pursuit of empty desires: love, admiration, adulation, etc... when really it should have been centered on advancement.

He’s a count now and he has an heir (through adoption), which at the very least speaks to his legacy... but he will always be worried he hasn’t done enough or that he could do more.  He’ll need to get married properly and achieve something worthy of Ulrich Lichter before he’s willing to say he has done enough... and really, that may never happen.

NICOLETTA: Something your muse agrees on 100% of the time.

That all things are deserving of a chance.  I think that the Hunter group changed a lot in its philosophy after it missed Nicoletta/Nikolai’s story the first time, so when they went again there was much more opportunity to really delve into why that was.

Nicoletta is a tzimisce and I won’t say she’s a good person or even a great friend to have, but she’s very willing to consider the merits of something based on the appropriateness of it.  When it comes to “chances,” she will give almost anyone one: sometimes, you use it when you say your first words to her and other times it can be something so sentimental and out of the ordinary that it speaks to who and what she is.  

Kuai-Li expertly, albeit unwittingly, played upon that when she spoke in favor of Godwin/Thomas being saved, and the party did the same when they asked for Salvador to me embraced as well.  Even though she’s become much less ambitious with the demise of her brother, she still was willing to give Salvador the chance to see the world for himself before returning to her.

She lives a great deal by the belief that all things can become better than what they were because she sees herself as something so changed.  

REMCO: What’s the raunchiest thing your muse has ever done?

No good is going to come from this answer.  I mean, what we know: Remco is a germaphobe at the cutting edge of germ theory and that he seems to be passionate in a disturbingly logical way when it comes to completing his job.  That being said, it’s safe to assume that he is not “raunchy” in any fun way... because he’s a weirdo.

Remco dislikes things that are difficult to control and prefers peace and quiet.  Death, naturally, appeals to him.  He fell in love as a younger man with a woman that was dying and took comfort from her peaceful and reserved she was as her life slipped away.  As such, he has a fondness for things that mirror death but do not necessarily slip into it.  He isn’t a necrophiliac, probably, but he certainly has tendencies that mirror one that might.

He likes cleaning the bodies of those he finds himself with in the same way he took care of his dying love.  So, the ritual that is most disturbing is that he will buy a prostitute and with her consent, drug her with a barbituate.  Then, he carefully cleans her and dresses her in finery, before waiting for her to rouse from the comatose state.  In that semi-conscious world, he reenacts his love for his departed.

It is not likely he has killed many people this way.But I will not say he has never killed someone thusly. 

[ladystylestores]

Founders need stewards, not masters

“I’m just going to drive off this bridge. My wife can get the policy. My wife and daughter will be okay …”

In the world of venture capital and startups, there’s always an ongoing dialogue of value and power, perceived and real. Because founders and VCs spend all of their time in a human-behavioral cluster where the sole focus is on equity, they often act in ways that are fundamentally broken. I’m writing this today, with the blessing of a brother and friend, to call out some truth that I believe many in our industry need to hear.

My message to VCs reading this: Founders are more than their companies, and truly honoring them is not just something to think about. It’s a requirement of the role you’re privileged to have. My message to founders: You’re more than your companies. It’s that simple. While you likely have poured and will continue to pour your lifeblood into the pursuit of your vision every chance you get, you have been, you are, and you always will be more than the business.

It’s spring of 2016, and Clarence is actually breaking in. This “knock down walls” determined Black man from Decatur, Georgia is doing it. He’s taken what was just an idea and made it into a legitimate, angel-backed, startup company that’s going through Village Capital, a notable accelerator program in Washington, D.C. Not only that, but after meeting with a local VC firm with a $100 million+ fund, he’s now holding a signed and countersigned term sheet for a $4.5 million round. All the promises he made to friends, family, angels, his wife, himself … are about to pay off. Let’s go!

In venture capital I hear many of my colleagues, myself included, talk a lot about empathy. I’ve had limited experience as an operator, but I still question my own ability to truly have empathy for what founders often go through — just to get a shot at their massive, game changing, odds-stacked-against-them dream. Sure, many of us affectionately talk about the months of not taking a salary and maybe trading in a restaurant meal for some cup noodles … but I’m talking about understanding the tough conversations with a husband, partner, or wife … begging for the trust to let you do this stupid thing. I’m talking about not just going without salary, but doing so when you haven’t already “made it” … AND blowing out your savings … AND going into serious debt. I’m talking about never not working, missing out on your kids, your significant other, your health. I’m talking about the emotional exhaustion of finding a ride or die co-founder, and truly, truly being ride or die. I’m talking about accepting money from friends and family who are just betting on you for the sake of you, and knowing that for them the money they’re giving you … it’s not small. I’m talking about with every moment of doubt along the journey having to find the strength, determination, and conviction to not just carry your own emotional well-being, but that of all those who’ve trusted you.

It’s September now, and spring seems like ages ago. That being said, these venture investors are still saying they’re super excited — they just needed to clean some things up. LLC to C-Corp, some new diligence, etc. Also, now they’re saying, although they’re still “ready to rock,” the round is going to be $2.5 million … at a lower valuation … and something about $500,000 in warrants?

Over four months later this feels weak … But, after all the 100-hour weeks strung together, all promises made to the loving but frustrated wife, all the tens of thousands of dollars now in debt to chase this — it’s just one more time biting the bullet.

Right?

Anyway, Clarence is still ready to go. He’s holding up his end, and with a new signed and countersigned term sheet in hand he says, “Yo, let’s go win. Let’s do this!”

As a venture capitalist, I sit in a seat of privilege. Like many other partners at firms like mine, I talk to hundreds of startup founders a year that look to me and see someone who can open the door. Who can unlock their dreams. Who can put them in the game, and perhaps coach them or even play alongside them on their path to punching a hole in the universe. Some VCs manage this dynamic well, but many see this dynamic of real or perceived gatekeeping potential, position of power, or “benefit of supply and demand” as an opportunity to be … well … predators.

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It’s gross.

I fundamentally believe that this dance that we as VCs and founders do is all about the people. It’s all about the relationships, the trust, the crazy things we can accomplish together when 1+1 = 17, and we figure out together how to make that scale. So often, without trust and people really looking out for each other, that’s just not possible. If you’re an investor and you think “oh, so and so is less sophisticated than me, I bet I can slip in this term that I wouldn’t try with someone else,” please think about that some more. Clarence, like many diverse founders, experienced what is honestly unfortunately common among them (but certainly not exclusive to them). VCs often go straight to ROI math when they think they have something, and rather than think about “how do I honor the person who’s about to trust me with their life’s work by putting something together that’s fair and sets us both up to win,” revert quickly to “how do I extract the most value from this.”

VC is a long-term game.

Can we agree that shouldn’t just be taken into account regarding the path to liquidity?

The phone rings, and Clarence picks up. It’s the person at the firm he’s been working most closely with.

“I know we’re close, but we have a co-investor we want to bring into the deal. Can you be in D.C. tomorrow to meet with them? We’ll get this all closed soon after.”

With the ‘No Shop’ clause that comes with a signed term sheet, Clarence has been kept from talking to any other investors for six months now. Not only does he not have any other investor conversations going, but it would be really hard to explain why the round that was agreed to so long ago might not be happening now. Even though this is … ridiculous … and frustrating … what other choice does he have?

Clarence, based in Minneapolis, thinks on it for a moment, and then does what any good founder would do.

He books a red-eye flight and is there the next day. 

Often I think investors look at what founders are willing to do to get things done, and they just lean in. They look at what founders have sacrificed, or are willing to sacrifice, and they just accept it without another thought. As if all the founder had going for them was the company anyway.

Guess what?

That’s never true.

The hour a founder takes for the additional five slides you want done because of how you think a board deck should look doesn’t just come from nowhere. It comes from her kids, from his partner, from her sleep. The flight they’re willing to get on to meet in person or to show up at some networking event doesn’t just come out of the company budget. It comes from their life budget. The dilution they’re willing to take to get a deal done so you can get one more syndicate buddy in isn’t just cap table math. It’s a slice of the heart. Just because founders are willing to do whatever it takes, doesn’t mean it should take the max.

Founders need partners that approach them as stewards, not masters.

It’s now October, and Clarence gets the call he’ll never forget. He closes the door to the bathroom to get some privacy, and sits on the throne as he receives the message.

“… didn’t go well with the co-investor … things are changing … doesn’t seem like we’ll be able to make this work …”

In a state that can only be described as calm shock, Clarence let’s the words of “We’re out” wash over him as he turns over in his head all the people he needs to tell … his employees, his investors, his wife, everyone that’s going to be affected by the fact that there’s no investment coming in, six months after expecting nearly $5 million, and the company will be out of money in 3 months now.

Clarence stumbles through politely saying “okay, I understand …” and hangs up the phone. He tells his wife what happened, he kisses his daughter on the head, and he gets in the car.

Whether you’re a founder or VC reading this, I ask you to think about two words.

Stewardship and Grace.

For venture capitalists, if there’s one thing you could commit to today that I believe will make you a great partner going forward, it’s to look at founders with the intention of being a good steward of not just your resources, but theirs. Care about them enough to honor them with transparency, quick decisions, honest feedback, genuine priority of their well-being, and protection. Protection of what they could give up to pursue their dreams, but don’t need to.

And, have grace. Most founders are not as sophisticated as you on best practices, investment terms, all things “winning the deal.” Have the grace to make space for them not to be perfect negotiators, and still be able to not have to accept the worst possible offer. Honor them, before they “earn it” from you. If you want to ask me how best to be an ally of founders who are Black, Brown, or otherwise diverse, this may honestly be it. While this issue is not unique to them, they are the ones most exposed and at higher rates to this sort of mistreatment and being taken advantage of.

For founders, again, it’s simple: Be a good steward of yourself. Show yourself grace. It may not feel like it in the heat of the furnace, but you are more than your company. No one would have followed you on this crazy journey if it wasn’t true and they didn’t believe it themselves.

Tears in his eyes, pain in his chest, Clarence gets on Interstate 35 E. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” he thinks in his head. He put in so much work … He did everything he was asked to do … He was truthful … He was a good person … 

Now his family is $50,000 in debt because of him. Now his friends and family and angel investors who trusted him shouldn’t have. Now his wife, who loves and trusts him maybe did so to a fault, and is going to suffer the consequences. Now his team, who all need to feed their families too, are going to regret ever trusting him with their literal livelihood.

He’s southbound now, barreling down the highway at 130 mph. There’s a bridge coming up, he knows, with a huge drop off. 

“I’m just going to drive off this bridge. My wife can get the policy. My wife and daughter will be okay …”

He’s maybe a mile away from the bridge now. He clamps the wheel tighter, turning his Black knuckles white.

“… I’m gonna drive off. It is what it is …”

Then, out of nowhere, Clarence hears a voice.

“Slow down, you’re going to be fine.”

Startled, Clarence keeps going.

“Slow down, I got you.”

Suddenly, Clarence starts feeling the wildest sensation. He feels the gas pedal pushing back against his foot. Against him.

“You’re going to be alright. Just keep going home …”

Clarence pulls the car over and just weeps.

Truly. Weeps.

Clarence has always been a man of faith, and in that moment there’s no doubt in his mind that Jesus showed up for him.

God stepped in.

While I don’t expect everyone reading this to be a Christian, I do believe that all of us as VCs or founders consider ourselves to be good people. Whether you believe it to be God’s work, or the mission of good people, I think it’s important to recognize that stewardship and grace are paramount if you’re going to be a positive force in our work.

While it’s tough to draw clear, direct correlation between entrepreneurs and suicide risk, it’s well understood that through characteristics and experiences that founders share (i.e. impulsivity, emotional volatility, social isolation, rejection and failure), suicide is more likely a concern for them than the average person. If you’re a founder (or anyone) reading this and have had thoughts of suicide, please, please don’t go through this alone. Talk to someone you love, visit the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, and call 1-800-273-8255 to talk to someone who can listen and help. Confidentially. Completely free. That being said, far before suicide is even a question, we can find opportunities to reclaim founders’ abilities to enjoy physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.

That day in October, 2016, six months after holding that first signed term sheet, Clarence went home and wept. Today, Clarence wakes up to a life that, as a poor Black kid outside of Atlanta, he didn’t know existed.

He wakes up in a beautiful home, kisses his wife and kids, grabs a coffee, and steps outside to sit on his porch and watch the sunrise. This grinder didn’t quit grinding.

With the support of his wife, and the hard work and fortitude that only exists truly in founders, he has closed $7 million+ in venture funding with a top seed-stage venture capital firms leading his last round.

He hugs and kisses the son that would not have been born if not for him pulling over that day. If not for divine intervention.

With grace, Clarence looks back and forgives those that hurt him so badly in the past. He moves forward, unburdened, with the support of investors who love him. Who steward him. Who show him grace.

As someone who knows Clarence personally, I was truly shocked upon hearing his story today. He’s one of the most dependable, stable, bright-eyed and motivating founders I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. It’s for this reason I think it’s even more worth underlining how this grind we call entrepreneurship can get to anybody.

Clarence, I’m so honored by you. I’m honored by you letting my firm partner with you in your journey. I’m honored by you allowing me to share your story.

To all the venture capitalists out there, I hope you truly hear this. While we often forget founders are more than their companies, they are. So much more. And while we often find ourselves doing ROI math, it’s not enough. We’re all in a place of privilege in this life, and while we’re all likely to do financially well, I believe there is a right way to do well by our founders. Through stewardship and grace, and through attaching long-term thinking to the people and not just the path to liquidity, we can, should, must honor founders.

And founders …

please …

don’t ever forget.

You are more than your company.

[To read more from Mike Asem and/or to subscribe to his blog, follow this link.]

Mike Asem is a Partner at VC firm M25, which focuses on seed-stage Midwestern startups in most industries, and is a board member of BLCK VC, which connects, engages, empowers, and advances Black venture investors. 

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[topmixtrends]

LELAND BLOOM-MITTWOCH SR., cocaine in his blood and the Torah in his hands, ends his life by jumping off the roof of a Hyatt in Tampa, Florida. It’s 1999. In the moments before he leaps, he believes he sees a hand descend from the sky and call to him. It tells him he is worthy. He asks the hand if Reggie Marshall, the man he believes to be his best friend, who he believes died at the hands of a fellow drug dealer in 1973, was also worthy. The hand says yes, and he jumps. It is a prayerful moment, one that affirms Leland Sr.’s belief that he is doing the right thing. It is also tragic, like all death, but Leland Sr. seems to be at peace. Or, at least, as at peace as someone high on cocaine before noon can be.

It’s a striking beginning, made more so by its place outside of time. Rebekah Frumkin’s The Comedown is not told linearly, but through a string of chapters from the perspectives of interconnected characters from two families, the Bloom-Mittwochs and the Marshalls. A pair of family trees at the beginning of the book represents the two lineages, and each of the 14 chapters comes from someone connected to the aforementioned patriarchs, often either scorned or abandoned by them or by one of their offspring. The chapters cover huge chunks of time, from the respective characters’ births to the book’s fictional present, around 2009.

The trees and the nonlinear nature of the book create ample opportunities for dramatic irony, of which Frumkin, in her debut novel, makes wonderful use. When Leland Sr. is reflecting at the hotel in Tampa, he considers the risks involved with building relationships with other people:

He thought how there was no way to know how long loving someone could last, or whether it was even a good investment to begin with. That’s what kept people watching all those television soap operas. That’s what kept people praying in shul. They wanted to know how the other people and things they loved would turn out — whether they’d be destroyed by them or loved back.

Throughout his life, Leland Sr. did his fair share of loving and destroying, though it’s not always clear whether he sees it that way. He cheats on and then leaves his first wife and child in 1983, and then leaves his second wife a widow and his child fatherless in 1999 when he commits suicide. The woman with whom he cheats is Reggie’s estranged wife, Natasha Marshall. Their affair ends abruptly the day one of her 13-year-old sons catches them together. Even so, those he loved tended to love him back, at least for a time. Mental illness and drug addiction linked reciprocated love and eventual destruction: for Leland, the two could never be mutually exclusive. Despite the fundamental sentiment of Leland’s reflection, there seems to be little uncertainty about the inevitably tragic end to his most beloved relationships.

The exception to this rule is not a fortunate one. Reggie, who Leland Sr. frequently calls his best friend, found him to be a reprehensible character. Outside of their narrow interaction of drug dealer and drug consumer, Reggie wanted nothing to do with him. He was, as Reggie said, a “stupid ass […] the kind of stupid that couldn’t take a hint.” At times, he considered killing him:

He hated him but hurting him would feel like kicking a stray dog. He had a philosophy that the kind of person who deserved to be on the receiving end of a barrel was also the kind of person who’d been on the firing end, and Leland Sr. had never been on the firing end.

This comes first as a depressing surprise. When Leland Sr. describes their relationship, readers trust him implicitly. Every additional mention that undermines it as the book goes forward is a punch to the gut. While Leland Sr. leaves his wives and children, and ultimately humanity altogether, in his heart, he always remains true to Reggie.

This type of dissonance is the biggest return Frumkin draws out of her roving perspectives. Rarely do characters in The Comedown believe themselves to be or in the wrong, but they often are. This is clearest in a pivotal scene that takes place after Leland Sr.’s funeral. Leland Jr. confronts Diedre, his father’s second wife, and demands that she let him go to her home and take back the possessions his father took when he left, which he believes are rightfully his. Diedre, having just lost her husband, is not in a position to fight back: “She agreed to it because he wore an expensive suit and threatened to sue her if she didn’t comply.” She feels alone and scared, because Leland Jr. is trying to make her feel alone and scared. When Leland Jr. reflects on it in his chapter, though, he refers to it as “legal business” and sees his actions as justified. Importantly, his recollections erase the hostile tone that made the interaction especially horrifying the first time around. Parts of the interaction are run back again in Leland Jr.’s wife’s chapter. She sees her husband fall “into aggressive lockstep with Diedre” before he announces that he’ll be following her to her home. Her telling has compassion for her husband and recognizes how this stems from his anger at his father for abandoning him, but she can’t help but be a little horrified by Leland Jr.’s behavior. Nine years later, Diedre’s son Lee Jr. is still haunted by the memory. The event has deeply scarred him. On his 18th birthday, he drunkenly sends an email to Leland Jr. demanding the return of his family’s possessions. His mom is a manager at OfficeMax and they’re scraping by on her hourly wage while Leland Jr., much wealthier, has no real need for the valuables he took. Unsurprisingly, this is unsuccessful.

Frumkin’s technique of replaying scenes from multiple perspectives effectively gives readers a 360-degree view of how something happened. Most importantly, however, it is useful for exploring the totality of how her characters’ actions affect those around them, and how each character lives with it. The scope of The Comedown is such that everyone is in close proximity to a tragedy at all times. Frumkin’s juxtaposition makes it clear that what these characters do to one another in the book is both awful and perfectly human.

¤

The contrast born out of The Comedown’s structure also makes room for Frumkin to explore her characters’ wide-ranging sociopolitical circumstances. The differences are generational, racial, cultural, and economic, and she writes clearly on how their existence and collisions shape the lives of her characters. Aside from the aforementioned email from Lee Jr. to Leland Jr., the most compelling exploration of the tension this can bring about is the lives of Reggie and Natasha Marshall’s twins, Caleb and Aaron.

Aaron works for a real estate development company in Los Angeles while Caleb is a lawyer in their hometown of Cleveland. They’ve both found ways out of the poverty in which they grew up, but they are on divergent paths. Caleb spends his time, according to his brother, “living out his messiah dream as Lawyer for the Poor.” Caleb is only slightly more generous to himself:

The only thing keeping him in the Midwest was inertia. Inertia and what psychotherapists would probably call a savior complex. He wasn’t afraid of admitting to it. Better to be a savior than a sociopath.

The brothers share a similar impulse to ascribe pathology to what seems, on the surface, to be relatively normal moral behavior. This is made more striking by their consideration of Aaron’s job. A colleague is trying to get Aaron to help him purchase public housing complexes in Lynwood. Aaron, at the behest of his wife Netta, an accomplished artist whose work documents the lives of black subjects afflicted with poverty, is attempting to save the public housing and steer the buyer elsewhere. This despite the lingering negative feelings he has toward public complexes from his time living in one. He “hated how it felt living there, how people treated him for living there, how the other people there were always trying to beat him up and rip him off.” Neither brother takes much of a psychological interest in the origin of these feelings. For Aaron, it seems that the trauma of his childhood makes him resistant to doing the thing he knows is right, the thing that’s best for the most people and aligned with his moral position. What Frumkin is illuminating here is the manner in which pursuits that make more money — and Aaron makes a lot of money — are almost always considered more normal despite their destructive social value. That dynamic’s opposite, sacrificing money for a job that is fulfilling in a different way, is just as rational, but because it bucks capitalist logic, it requires an explanation. The fullness with which she approaches each perspective is what makes this possible.

Alongside these conflicts within the characters’ own lives, Frumkin also explores society-level phenomena. The Bloom-Mittwoch family is Jewish and the Marshall family is black, and their similarities and differences are crucial. Leland Sr., a hapless incompetent with a philosophy degree, falls backward into a job because his friend runs a scrap shop. Reggie, a much savvier person, struggling to give his children a better life than his own, finds his way into drug dealing. He’s exceptional at it, though the requisite hazards catch up to him. There’s little ambiguity about how things would have gone if their resources and privileges were flipped.

One of the issues on which the families align is on the subject of law enforcement. Reggie believes “you really [have] to pity anybody stupid enough to believe in the police” while Leland Sr. tells Leland Jr. one night that “there’s actually no such thing as a straight cop. They’re a gang. A violent gang.” Their experiences come from different places. Reggie has dealt with racist police practices his whole life, as a black man and as a drug dealer. Leland Sr. was a hippie at Kent State and saw the progressive armament of enforcers working to squelch protesters until his friends were among those eventually shot and killed. The Comedown also explores how this manifests concretely. Aaron, at 14, routinely finds himself and his friends subjected to baseless frisking.

As the book goes on, Frumkin’s narrators come from further down the family tree, which is a handy means of exposing generational divides and inheritance. Lee Jr. is the youngest family member. He is diagnosed as having bipolar disorder in a significantly less stigmatizing (though still needlessly stigmatizing) world. The illicit drugs are better, which is good and bad. More than this, though, he’s inherited a world where, unlike his father or half-brother, he doesn’t see much of a future for himself. When he begins college in 2009, the economy is in a recession and the future feels clear in its darkness. The structures that propped up the successful people in his family are not there for him, and he does not know what to do. Still, Frumkin also shows the promise ahead. Lee Jr.’s best friend in college, born Edward Jonathan Phillips but called, at different times, Tarzan, Tweety, or New Person, is a gender fluid character with a safe space for exploring and expressing their true self.

The matter-of-fact approach to writing about the complicated web of reasons why people’s lives turn out the way they do is essential to The Comedown’s success. Frumkin is also an accomplished journalist who has written about mental health, sex work, and other areas where the subjects are often mistreated or misunderstood. It shows here. The Comedown’s characters are cruel to one another and themselves for predictable reasons as well as for surprising ones. They are loving to one another and themselves in the same way. At its core, the book is about relationships and the joy and pain they bring. In that realm, and others, it’s a resounding success.

¤

Bradley Babendir is a fiction writer and critic. He has written for the New Republic, The New Inquiry, WBUR’s The ARTery, and elsewhere.

The post Family Matters: On Rebekah Frumkin’s “The Comedown” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Two American Daydreams: how a dumbed-down commonwealth failed slew of a great sentiment

As Clinton and Trump prepare to debate next week , noble principles are overwhelmed in a culture where most Americans do not know what is real anymore and the dream of equal opportunity is just a fantasy

Every child had a pretty good shot

To get at least as far as their old man got

But something happened on the best way of that place

They shed an American flag in our face.

Billy Joel, Allentown

Its one of the greatest fabrications of all time, and just like it alleges on the dollar bill novus ordo seclorum it generated an entirely new ordering in human occasions. After millennia of pharaohs, emperors, kings, kings, sultans, caesars and czars, with all their helper aristocracies and locked-down social structure, countries around the world was founded where birth and lineage didnt trouble so much, where by application of your flairs, vigour, labor and willingness to play by the rules, you could improve your substance slew in life and achieve a measure of economic security for yourself and your family. Peasants and proles could aspire to more than merely survival. Radical!

We know it today as the American Dream. The now-obscure historian James Truslow Adams coined the term in his work The Epic of America, characterizing the American reverie as TAGEND

a dream of a social order in which each man and each female shall be able to attain to the fullest prominence of which they are innately capable, and be recognised by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of delivery or position.

Adams was writing in 1931, but the nightmare was there from the beginning, in Jeffersons pursuit of happiness formulation in the Declaration of Independence, happy residing in its 18 th-century gumption of boom, expand, wellbeing.

Nobody ever came to America with a starry-eyed dream of working for famine compensations. Spate of that offered in the old country, and thats accurately why we left, escaping serfdom, peonage, lease, indenture all different iterations of what was essentially a rigged arrangement, to introduce it in current political verbiage that channeled the profits of our strive upstream to the Man. We came to America to do better, to assure for ourselves the liberation that economic insurance returns, and for millions mostly white males at first, and then slowly, sputteringly, women and people of color thats the acces it worked out , nothing less than a change in the human condition.

Upward mobility is indispensable to the American Dream, the idea that people can rise from working to middle class, and middle to upper and even higher on the prototype of a( imaginary) Horatio Alger or an( actual) Andrew Carnegie. Upward mobility across years peaked in the US in the late 19 th century. Most of the benefits of the 20 th century were achieved en masse; it wasnt so much a phenomenon of great numbers of people emerge from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising sharply for all grades. You didnt “ve got to be” extraordinary to rise. Opportunity was sufficiently broad that hard work and steadiness would do, along with tacit buy-in to the social contract, faithfulnes to the system proceeding on the assumption that the organizations of the system was mostly fair.

The biggest amplifications occurred in the post-second world war era of the GI Bill, cheap higher education, strong labor unions, and a progressive tariff system. Between the late 1940 s and early 1970 s, median household income in the US doubled. Income inequality reached historic lows. The median CEO salary was nearly 30 ages that of the lowest-paid hire, compared with todays gold-plated multiple of 370. The top excise bracket strayed in the neighborhood of 70% to 90%. Awarded, there were far fewer billionaires in those eras. Somehow the commonwealth survived.

America is a dream of greater justice and the possibilities for the average man and, if we can not acquire it, all our other accomplishments amount to good-for-nothing. So wrote Eleanor Roosevelt in her syndicated article of 6 January 1941, an apt lead-in to her husbands State of the Union address later that day in which he enumerated the four impunities necessary to American republic, among them freedom from want. In his Commonwealth of the Union address 3 years later, FDR expanded on this concept of freedom from want with its own proposal for a Second Bill of Claim, an economic bill of rights to counteract what he viewed as the growing tyranny of the modern economic guild TAGEND

This Republic had at its beginning, and thrived to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political privileges among them the right of free speech, free press, free praise As our nation has grown in width and stature, nonetheless as our industrial economy has expanded these political claims have proved inadequate to assure us equality. We have come to a clearly defined realization of the fact that genuine individual freedom cannot prevail without economic security and independence.

Political claims notwithstanding, freedom sounds exceptionally hollow when youre getting nickel-and-dimed to death in your everyday life. The Roosevelts recognized that wage peonage, or any method that inclines toward subsistence level, is simply incompatible with self-determination. Subsistence is, by definition, a held, desperate nation; ones horizon is necessarily limited to the present day, to getting enough of what their own bodies must be free to make it to the next. These days a minimum wage work in New York City clocking 40 hours a week( at$ 9 per hour) deserves $18,720 a year, well under the Federal Poverty Line of $21,775. Thats a scrambling, uneasy universe, narrowly bounded. Close to impossible to decently feed, invest, and shelter yourself on a compensation like that, far less their own families; far less buy health insurance, or save for your kids college, or are represented in any of those other good American circumstances. Down at peon grade, the endeavours of pleasure is just like a bad pun. Its “ve called the” American nightmare, George Carlin cracked, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Necessitous beings are not free beings, alleged FDR in that 1944 State of the Union speech. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are stimulate. A grim testimony, demonstrably true-blue, and specially unsettling in 2016, a point in time when the American Dream seems most viable as nostalgia than a lived phenomenon. Income inequality, opulence distribution, mortality rates: by every measure, the average individual that Eleanor Roosevelt celebrated is dropping. Exceptional parties continue to rise, but overall mobility is sluggish at best. If youre born good in Ferguson or Appalachia, risks are youre going to stay that course. Ditto if your early memories include the swimming pool at the Houston Country Club or ski assignments at Deer Valley, youre likely going to keep your roost at the top of the heap.

Income inequality, gross the gaps in resource: were to say daily, perpetually, that these are the necessary the effects of a free market, as if the market was a troop of quality on the order of weather or tides, and not the solely manmade create that it is. In light-headed of recent record, blind adoption of this sort of economics would seem to require a firm commitment to stupidity, but makes assume for the moment that its true-life, that the free market exists as a universe unto itself, as immutable in its workings as the regulations of physics. Does that universe include some ironclad principle that requires inequality of opportunity? Ive yet to discover the instance for that, though doubtless some intrepid thinktanker could construct one out of this same free-market financials, together with gusts of genetic determinism as it pertains to calibers of penalty and reputation. And “it wouldve been” bogus, that case. And more than that, sinful. That we should allow for wildly diverging possibilities due to accidents of birth can be expected to impres us as a crime equal in savagery to child abuse or molestation.

Franklin Roosevelt:[ F] reedom is no half-and-half affair. If the ordinary citizen is assure equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place. The hypothesi travels deeper than sentimentality, deeper than policy, deeper even than adherence to equality and the pursuit of gaiety as set forth in the Declaration. It cuts all the way to the nature of republic, and to the prospects for its very existence in America. We may have democracy in its own country, wrote state supreme court justice Louis Brandeis, or we may have enormous asset concentrated in the handwritings of a few, but we cant have both. Those few, in Brandeiss judgment, would unavoidably use their power to subvert the free will of the majority; the super-rich as a class plainly couldnt be trusted to do otherwise, a thesis thats being starkly behaved out in the current era of Citizens United, Super Pacs, and truckloads of dark money.

But the event for financial equality goes beyond even equations of supremacy politics. Democracys premise remains on the notion that the collective gumption of the majority of members will attest right more often than its incorrect. That have enough opportunity in the course of carrying out happiness, your population will develop its flairs, its ability, its best judgement; that over period the national capacity for discernment and self-correction will be magnified. Life will improve. The way of your uniting will be more perfect, to borrow a phrase. But if a critical mass of your population is kept in peonage? All its sparkle spent in the furrows of day-to-day existence, with insufficient opportunity to develop the full range of its modules? Then how much poorer the prospects for your democracy will be.

Economic equality can no more be divorced from the the effective functioning of democracy than the ballot. Jefferson, Brandeis, the Roosevelts all accepted this home truth. The American Dream has to be the lived world of the country, not just a fairly floor we tell ourselves.

I have always get much more advertisement than anybody else.

Donald Trump

Then theres that other American nightmare, the numbed-out, dumbed-down, make-believe nature where much of “the member states national” consciousness resides, the sum commodity of our mighty Fantasy Industrial Complex: movies, TV, internet, texts, tweets, ad saturation, personality preoccupation, plays obsession, Amazonian sewers of porn and political bullshit, the entire foray of media and messaging that is endeavouring to mark us from our brains. September 11, 2001 bombed us out of that reverie for about two minutes, but the dreaming is so elastic, so all-encompassing, that 9/11 was immediately absorbed into the the matrix of FIC. This exceedingly complex event horribly direct in research results, but a swamp when it is necessary to justifications was stripped down and binaried into a dependable fantasy narrative of us against them, good versus villainy, Christian against Muslim. The week after 9/11, Susan Sontag was practically executed for should be noted that a few iotums of historical awareness might help us understand how we came to this detail. For this modest proposition , no small number of her fellow Americans cared her dead. But if united followed her cause if wed done the hard work of digging down to the roots of the whole sickening event perhaps we wouldnt still be fighting al-Qaida and its offspring 15 years later.

An 11 -year-old girl wears Trump socks at a campaign phenomenon for the Republican campaigner at the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC. Photo: Mike Segar/ Reuters

Heres a hypothesis, ugly, uncharitable, but given our recent history it begs investigation: most of the time most Americans dont “know what i m thinking” real any more. How else to clarify Trump, a billionaire on an ego trip capturing a major partys nomination for president? Another blunt-speaking billionaire tried twice for the conference of presidents in the 1990 s and used to go in flames, but he made the mistake of guiding as himself, a recognizably flesh-and-blood human being, whereas Trump comes to us as the ultimate character, and irrefutable maestro, of the Fantasy Industrial Complex. For much of his occupation until 2004, to be precise he held status in “peoples lives” as a more or less normal personality. Larger than life, rest assured, cartoonishly lofty, shamelessly self-promoting, and reliably objectionable, but Trump didnt grown Trump until The Apprentice debuted in January 2004. The first occurrence reaped 20.7 million viewers. By similarity, Ross Perot received 19,742, 000 referendums in the 1992 presidential election yes, Im likening poll totals with Nielsen ratings but Trump prevented sucking that robust 20 million week after week. The season climax that year contacted 28 million viewers, and over the next decade, for 13 more seasons, this was how America came to know him, in that weirdly intimate channel TV has of giving celebrity into the very center of our lives.

It was this same Trump that 24 million viewers a record, of course tuned in to watch at the first Republican debate last year, the glowering, blustering, swaggering boardroom war chassis who afforded every hope of shredding the pols. One ponders if Trump would have ever been Trump if there hadnt been a JR Ewing to pave the way, to show just how dear and real a dealmaking TV charlatan could be to our nerves. Trumps performance on that night did not thwart , nor through all the debates in the long parade that followed, and if his thought for the truth has proved more erratic even than that of professional legislators, we should expect as much. In the realm of the Fantasy Industrial Complex, reality happens on a sliding magnitude. The truth is just another possibility.

I speak the password primeval.

I would give the clue of democracy ;P TAGEND

By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

In nine epoches Trump and Hillary will take the stage for their first face-to-face debate. There is likely to be blood. The bayonets are going to be out, and the ratings are bound to be, need it be said, yuge. The American Dream will no doubt be invoked from both platforms, for what true-blue patriot was ever against the American Dream? And yet for the past 30 times the Democratic nominee has worked comfortably within a party foundation thats battered the working and middle classes down to the bone. The brand-new Democrat of the Clinton era are always strong for political privileges, as long as they dont disturbed corporate Americas bottom line. Strong for ethnic and equality of the sexes, strong for LGBT rights( though that took hour ). Meanwhile this same Democratic establishment connected with the GOP to push a market- and finance-driven economic order that enriches the already rich and leaves the rest of us sucking wind.

Thats the very real wrath Trump is speaking to , no fantasy there. Bernie as well; small-minded amaze their constituencies overlapped, though Trumps declared devotion to the common man stumbles over even the simplest proofs. On whether to raise the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, Trumps moral compass has spun from an connoted no( wages are already too high ), to suggest yes( wages are too low ), to weasel words( leave it up to the states ), to yes and no in the same breather( I would leave it and heighten it somewhat ), and, ultimately, when pressed by Bill OReilly in July, to yes-but( promote it to $10, but its still better left to the states ). All this from presidential candidates whos securely in favor of abolishing the estate tax, to the great benefit of heirs of multimillionaires and none at all to the vast majority of us.

Meanwhile, the Fantasy Industrial Complex is doing just fine such elections season, thank you. Expressing at a Morgan Stanley investors seminar in March, one of the leaders of the FIC, Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS and a person whose 2015 compensation totaled $56.8 m, had this to say about the Trump campaign. It may not be good for America, but its damn good for CBS. The fund rolling in and this is fun this[ is] about to become a very good time for us. Sorry. Its a horrible act to pronounce. But fetching it on, Donald. Keep going.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

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