#obviously. it is all his personal life and sure. the abuse is alleged.

[babygirltangerine]

ah. so aaron deactivated his instagram. and the people that harass him in his comments section and laugh about his abuse to his face are going to act like they're not part of the problem. haha just grandma being evil again, right? because being absolutely horrendous about his life in his comments won't cause him to rely on her further? because we are all so caught up in the joy of having a laugh at his wife that we will do it without thought of the consequences they will have for him personally? because we care more about him as an entertainer than we do about the fact that he's a person? and a victim? right? haha? we're not part of the problem no of course not, it's all because his mean old ugly wife is old and ugly and that's sooo bizarre and we all deserve to fuck him more than her so we can say whatever we want and hurt him when he's vulnerable. can you people be smart about this for two fucking seconds haha fucking PLEASE??? i'm so tired.

the fact that he was even on social media in the first place was a blessing. he's been run off before and of course it happened again. he's talked about how it hurts, he sees that shit guys, and making mean-spirited jokes about his life is not the intervention you think it is. it hurts more than helps. but i'm glad you had fun i guess.

[keefechambers]

I wanna be blunt about this ongoing James somerton suicide threat issue but I don't want to connect it to my IRL Twitter to comment on the dogshit takes I'm seeing there or the good and well meaning but maybe too kind takes I'm seeing here.

Obviously, I hope that this is a false alarm cry for help fake threat. Yes, it would reinforce that Somerton is a self-centered egomaniac who can't handle consequences but that's preferable to dead.

But I work in local news and let me tell you something. I've covered half a dozen family annihilating murder suicides and heard hundreds of men making suicide threats over police scanners and a huge swath of these don't happen because they're depressed or because people are mean to them on the Internet. They're punishment. A person with an enormous amount of entitlement towards people around them gets backed into a corner and they punish the people closest to them by killing themselves or threatening to kill themselves.

No one wants to talk about this feature of suicide because...you want to help people who are struggling and guide them away from this path and being blunt about the fact that sometimes people die of suicide as a consequence of their own shittiness towards the world does not really help actively suicidal people. But suicide rates are higher in men not just because they have higher rates of untreated mental illness (a societal issue we must address for the sake of all) but because some people, often men, use suicide (but more often the threat of suicide) as a tool of abuse and control.

I'm not saying somerton is like, an icky abuser bad guy, he's just a run of the mill grifter scumbag, but his actions in the past show a clear pattern of escalating behavior that aligns with this.

Somerton gets called out -> somerton alleges physical threats of violence against himself and his fans rally around him supportively -> Harry calls somerton out in a bigger way -> Somerton says he's hospitalized but there are inconsistencies with the story but no one wants to talk about that because you wanna be nice-ish about a guy who just tried to kill himself and now he's trying to be framed as tragic but it doesn't really stick -> somerton apologizes again but his apology is rightly called out for lies and manipulative framing as well as his continuing attempts to profit off the community he betrayed -> James posts a suicide note publicly putting the onus of his own suicide on the loss of his friend Nick who he repeatedly threw under the bus and now everyone is rallying to say nice-ish shit and wring their hands in concern over poor james -> indefinitely repeat this vicious cycle forever until he actually does die or finally gives up and gets real, intensive therapy and a day job.

Thats not to say anyone's concern is misplaced, it's 100% better for him to be a living scumbag than a dead one. He deserves the chance to grow and learn and have a life outside of youtube.

But you don't have to portray this as the action of a sad depressed man who got bullied off the Internet. It's manipulation, whether he intended to go through with it or not and whether someone intervened or not. Not denying that internet bullying is a thing, I'm sure there were some people who were shitty directly to James but he made the choice to not unplug from this and to try and keep being a public figure rather than taking care of himself. He could have deleted Twitter, blocked anyone who was an asshole, gone to therapy and tried to move on with his life but if he'd deleted his channel he'd have lost monetization... Can't have that, right? So he posts some apology videos so his channel stays active and then complains about how ruinous this is while never trying to take real accountability.

But the reality is that people would have forgotten about him so quickly and maybe his job prospects would've been impacted but...that's on him, and that's for him to figure out but it's not actually life ruining. He chose to continue to engage knowing he'd get backlash and hate and he'd feel worse and worse and things would never get better without the time and space for people to forget.

He made the choice to make a public spectacle of his own alleged suicide. That is the action of someone who wants to put the weight of their suicide on someone else's shoulders and is morally wrong. He can be held to account for that, alive or dead.

[piratecaptainscaptainpirates]

One of the things that still really frustrates me is how we know the crew of OFMD were so intentional with cutting off any "Ed is abusive!" allegations at the knees.

There are three things from Ed's kraken spiral that we know for a fact did not make it into the show. One of them (the scene of Ed throwing a knife at Izzy) even made it into the trailer before it was cut; the other two I'm thinking of are the bts footage we have of Ed drinking heavily the night he has his last fantasy of looking at the cake toppers and a still of Ed making the bride cake topper push around the groom.

I think all three of these things were very wise to cut and it's obvious why they did it. The drinking and throwing stuff ran the risk of making Ed look too much like his abusive dad (not to mention heavy drinking tied to abusive behavior runs into deeply uncomfortable stereotypes about indigenous men like Ed), and when all we see of Ed is him gently caressing the cake topper that reminds him of Stede, it reinforces a core aspect of Ed as a person, which is how he would never, ever hurt Stede and wants nothing but gentleness and tenderness for and from him.

And it's incredibly frustrating that these things weren't enough. We're shown over and over again that Ed during the kraken spiral, right up until his mutiny-as-a-suicide-attempt, is doing normal piracy (that's why Archie is here! The only characters who are emotionally affected are the ones who know what life was like on Stede's ship!), and the only person who is actually physically harmed is Izzy (for good reason in Ed's mind; he was the trigger for the whole thing and Ed lists him along with booze and drugs as destructive influences on his life). We even get other characters say things to Stede like "do you think Blackbeard is gonna murder you" and Stede, who explicitly knows Ed better than anyone, is always like "what the fuck are you talking about? Of course not," and he's obviously right.

It's just so disheartening that there can be this much intentionality in making sure it's next to impossible to read a man of color as abusive and it will still happen. White fandom has such a tendency to center itself and white characters that it doesn't even matter how much effort they put into taking the audience by the shoulders and saying "this guy isn't abusive, he's being an imperfect victim in response to being abused himself," up to and including having the white guy in question say on his deathbed "sorry for abusing you for years." And people still wonder why fans of color are sick and tired of this shit to the point where some of us just want to leave fandom altogether.

[faye3414]

I am going to be addressing the Wilbur Soot allegations. The reason I am talking about this is because I've looked up to him a lot in the past plus this is a serious topic and I think it is important to talk about. Ok, I personally, am not taking any sides just yet until further thoughts from different people, different perspectives to look at, just to kinda get a better view on everything, to really look at it all. Cause this situation has only started to be talked about recently. Yes, there is full evidence Wilbur did what he did, Wilbur "apologized" and admit he hurt Shelby so yes, obviously, this did happen, which is really shitty. However, it is still good to get full detail on perspectives. And I just want to say, for all victims, I am so sorry for what anyone have had to gone through. Another thing I am sorry about is how many of you, myself included, have been a fan of Wilbur Soot for a few years or longer. I have, and I know a lot of you also have, found comfort in Wilbur's content and who he was or who we all thought he was as a person. Like a lot of people, this is a genuine shock to me as I know it is for a lot of people who know Wilbur personally, seeing as he originally seemed like a very genuine, kind, and good-hearted person. I really looked up to Wilbur. I've been watching Wilbur for a few years now; his content helped me through a ton of different tough times, I found comfort in a lot of his streams and the things that he has posted, I thought he was a good person. This is just disappointing and it pisses me off how first of all, quite a few of you people are defending this situation and justifying or trying to justify Wilbur's actions, even though, as I'm sure most of you have seen (if you haven't, go watch), what Aimsey said on their thoughts on the allegations, they are right, this isn't some damn Twitter drama. This is real life shit that needs to be talked about and taken seriously. Don't defend Wilbur, support Shelby and all other victims of any kind of abuse. Another thing: I want to reassure all of you, all of you who have supported Wilbur and found comfort in him and his content, you are NOT a bad person for that. None of us knew he was a bad person until recently; that isn't your fault, you're not a bad person for that, none of us could've predicted that this had happened. Last thing: Kudos to Ranboo, Aimsey, Tubbo, Jack, and everyone who has shared their thoughts on this for taking this seriously and addressing the main issues here. Thank you for anyone who read through this. Have a lovely day/night. :) Remember, support the victims. Take care.

[stromuprisahat]

I always wondered how it was possible that Alina immediately believed what Baghra told her about Aleks, without having the slightest doubt? It's completely ridiculous. Who would trust a woman who has been nothing but rude to you? Verbally degrading/insulting you at every opportunity, and fucking kicking you during your lessons? Yes, who would trust that, rather than the man you spent 6 months building a relationship with, who encourages and values ​​you and who you have feelings for? I don't understand. Especially without any proof?! The painting they added to the series will always make me laugh. Doesn't it even look particularly old? How is that proof? And all the Baghra talk about the Darkling having had centuries to learn how to properly manipulate people... I mean. Girl. You just learned that this woman is his mother. His mother, who raised him and who is undoubtedly older than him. You do not tell yourself that it is she who could be manipulating you? Oh. Of course not seeing that Leigh Bardugo is trying to push that bullshit of "women do no harm." completely knew how the king and queen would behave, seemingly taking the blame off them?! There are two ways to deal with this stupid revelation from Baghra. Number one, that Alina just fucked him. (the most realistic and logical thing). Or second, Alina realizes in the sequels that she was stupid to believe Baghra and realizes her gullibility/naivety. But obviously, we had neither. The worst thing is that a friend of mine literally told me that she would have also directly believed Baghra, which... is completely stupid? Her response was that she basically trusts no one. Well very well. But why trust the person who treated you like shit over the person who was good to you? On the contrary, if you are paranoid you generally don't listen to the person who has been a mess with you.

I could sum the answer up into three points:

Aleksander and Alina didn't really have a relationship in books. Sure, there was the journey on the horseback, then they talked like three times (and always shortly), before the most awkward immortal kiss ever. The Darkling's away most of the time, or busy with his duties. No riding together, no midnight flirting like in the show. That's also, why are the antis' common notions about manipulation or even grooming so off the mark. He simply wasn't around for any of it.

Alina is pretty prejudiced. She doesn't trust the Darkling since the beginning even though he's only been kind to her. Thanks to her low self-esteem, even his attention seems like a good reason to wait for the other shoe to drop. Hell, when he wants to ask her about her first day, she's expecting torture! Learning she's been right all along, and he isn't honest about his interest in her is self fulfilling prophecy.

Alina has a gigantic blind spot, when older female figures are concerned. She was raised by a woman, who's been anything but kind, yet she idolizes her childhood and their relationship. Seeing another (shitty) mother immendiately triggers "obedient good orphan" response, and Baghra's claims become The Word Of God™.

In the show, Alina looks simply stupid. She's older than her book counterpart, she acts more confident, yet her actions are more immature. If your reaction to claims of an abusive woman, regarding her alleged son you're intersted in romantically, is to run away instead of confronting him, you might not be fit for that kind of emotional commitment. And he deserves better luck with women in his life.

[bisexual-magneto]

tbh what I can't help but notice about these actors unliking Johnny Depp's post is how quick they are and how calculated the choice was and how they attribute the same value to this gesture. I admit, I'm not actually keeping up with this stuff, I just found out about it yesterday.

The fact that they're disliking it tells me several things:

a) liking stuff like this is a calculated decision. I might scroll through my feed and like this or that - and I will probably forget about it the next moment. The fact that they remember liking it and scroll back to that particular post suggests to me that it was a calculated decision to like it, not just a casual scrolling-past-and-hitting-heart-button like. They very much kept up with this trial, they very much attributed meaning to its outcome, and they very much attributed meaning to liking this post. (In fact, I doubt Depp or his team would have made this post if they thought no one from the industry would like it)

b) As I said, I don't keep up with this stuff like these new unsealed documents. Obviously, the trial was a big deal and I'm not surprised that celebrities kept up with that - but so far, this latest shit hasn't really hit the big fan yet. It's not the big newspapers reporting about it. It didn't even make the twitter trends in my country. The fact that these people already unliking this suggests to me that they're actually very aware of what is going on in the media-sphere around them and they're very quick to act if it means protecting themselves - or their agents and staff do it. Which puts a huge question mark behind any 'I didn't know about it' defences by any celebrities ever about anything.

c) Since I don't really care about celebrities and their personal lives, I don't know much about Johnny Depp's private life except that he's a violent weirdo who hates women and poor people and thinks his fans are pathetic. But somehow I doubt that all these celebrities liking and unliking this are all his bestest buddies in the world. I doubt that they all had a chicken in that race personally. Johnny Depp was simply always the more popular figure in this trial and Amber Heard was subject to hatred and ridicule for months. Siding with Depp was the more popular decision, if you wanted to avoid the mob. (again, I'm pretty sure liking this post was in most cases (probably less so with Jason Mamoa) a very calculated decision, as proven by the fact that they remembered to unlike it which means they either noticed the great value attributed to these likes in the media and react accordingly - OR they intended it to have exactly this symbolic character to begin with).

That's why the fact that they're unliking it now, for me, doesn't read: "Wow what shocking news! How could my best friend Johnny do this!" to me - but rather: "Oh, siding with my more popular co-worker is probably no longer going to safe position but might actually harm my career, better remove that statement I made on Instagram and pretend I didn't know of anything." It's not like they're trying to score popularity points by disliking, because that would be a lot more vocal and public to milk that PR opportunity.

We know celebrities protect each other. One of the biggest examples is definitely Polanski. Many actors supported him or are still supporting him. And what Polanski shows us and what these calculated decisions to like and unlike show us is that these celebrities are a very closely-knit community of their own - they're an in-group.

There are other examples - for example, Jimmy Savile - where it becomes clear if you take a close read, that the allegations made against these people were long-since known. It's never a secret. In some of these cases, it's an open secret decades before it really gets out. People around them know. It's not a secret in the industry. Another, very recent example is Jennette McCurdy coming forward about being offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep quiet about the abuse and sexual misconduct she suffered. To pay someone off like that isn't a decision made lightly. It's also not a decision made by one guy who would have handed her a suitcase full of dollar bills in a dark alley behind the studio - this was a decision made by a bunch of adults in the industry who knew their 'Creator' was indecently touching a young girl. While filming a kids show on a kids channel. And made the calculated decision to put a price tag on her silence and was willing to put funds into that. That money doesn't come from no where and sums of these sizes don't just exchange hands without a bunch of people knowing.

Johnny Depp was already known as a creep and known for being horrible to personnel and ordinary people. And since we know that celebrities keep up with the reports and news about each other's fuck-ups, we know they're happy to spend time and share publicity with violent people, with abusive people, with sexual abusers - they are fine with that. ...as long as they're abusing poor people that no one listens to.

I think what really changed during the era of MeToo is that more and more famous people came forward about being assaulted by other famous peopple. That's why Marilyn Manson and Johnny Depp talk about Evan Rachel Wood as Amber 2.0. The membrane protecting the bubble of celebrities from the mob is becoming thinner and thinner in the age of social media - anyone can be a celebrity and studios, agents etc. have less and less control over their charges and about the information about them - what they do, what gets leaked, who has access, and how much any person who has access can share. Who takes pictures or videos of them. Saving evidence becomes easier and easier (Think of the big role that pictures and audio files etc. played in the Depp v Hear trial)

What is happening is that for decades, Hollywood made everything go away for these people. Sex scandals, drug scandals, DUIs, violent abuse of camera crews, hotel rooms trashed, whatever. That's why there is so much dirt coming up - rich people unafraid of consequences thinking they're modern gods and better than ordinary people doing their thing. But this only works if they're sticking together. But the more people actually come forward about being hurt or being abused - while they're already famous and have their own reach in the media, the more danger are they all in. Because now, they cannot trust anyone anymore. They can no longer brush it off with 'this is a poor person who just wants attention/money' or 'the tabloids are making things up!'.

Now, this is speculation but I imagine it is somewhat of the mindset you encounter in older people who argue like: "I got beaten when I was a kid, so now I get to beat others and they don't get to complain." - these kinds of scandals reach back decades. You want to become famous, you have to let people treat you like shit and be handled like meat. You are famous - you get to do that to others.

But now, with (as I said) the connection between the celebrity-sphere and the rest of the world thinner than ever, you have rich people, famous people join in on things like MeToo - people turning to the public, not their agent or manager or studio to fix things or pay someone off. And that's gotta be pretty damn terrifying and confusing for them.

[henry-rex]

What would you say is the most accurate portrayal of Henry VIII? 💙

Oh goodness…

Okay I’ll admit that it’s been a while since I watched any Tudor media and I haven’t seen every depiction of him.

So if you follow my Anne Boleyn blog then you’ll know that I don’t think there’s really any depiction of her that’s wholly accurate and I feel that way about depictions of Henry as well.

I think Wolf Hall is really good. I haven’t actually watched the whole series and I haven’t read the books but from what I did see…I like that he was kind of soft-spoken and not this ultra-masculine tough guy (like JRM in season 1 of The Tudors). Especially because that series takes place in the 1520s-30s after Henry had calmed down from his rambunctious teenage years but before shit really hit the fan. I also liked the way they showed his devotion to Anne (what’s funny is that depiction of Anne is horrible so why would someone be devoted to her) but in terms of real life, there’s that moment in whatever episode I can’t remember where they’re talking about what happens ifAnne predeceases Henry and, I can’t remember the exact quote but it’s something like “I would never replace you” or something like that and I just think that’s a really nice and tender thing because, I feel like, most of the time Henry is depicted as being obsessed with Anne in a domineering and bad way rather than just being devoted to her because he was really in love with her.

And here I am making it all about Anne again 🙄

Anyway, I just like that Henry in Woof Hall isn’t so masculine and testosterone filled because I feel like that’s generally how he’s thought of because of the wives and all the alleged mistresses and all that. And yes he was athletic in his youth and he obviously still enjoyed jousting into his 40s so he was fit and muscular, but he wasn’t like a Richard the Lionheart or Henry V where he was just, like, a war machine living and breathing fighting. Henry loved poetry and philosophy and all these other ‘soft’ pursuits.

I think The Tudors did a pretty decent job showing Henry’s religious beliefs and how he was never really Protestant but also not completely Catholic either. I mean, I know people think that if it wasn’t for the Pope denying him his divorce he would’ve never reformed the Church but if that’s the case, why did he continue church reforms after he got his divorce and, even more so, after Anne’s death? Surely, if he was Catholic throigh and through, after Anne died he would’ve just been like “alright, that’s it, all this reformation stuff is over now” But the fact that it carried on and the fact that he raised both Edward and Elizabeth as Protestants makes me think he clearly had some interest in it and thought there were some merits to it. But at the same time, I don’t think he ever really fully let go of a lot of the old Catholic traditions and beliefs. What I also like about The Tudors is I think it was pretty well-balanced re: Henry’s personality. I feel like a lot of depictions of him just go straight for the ‘tyrant’ trope and don’t even bother trying to show him as a complex character whereas The Tudors did show him being loving and charming, but also showed how he could just turn on someone on a dime and—to make it abou Anne again (🙄 ugh here I go again)—in season 1 you see how completely in love with and devoted to Anne he is which just makes i so much more heartbreaking when, in season 2, he just acts so cold to her.

Um what are some other depictions of him? The Other Boleyn Girl/The Spanish Princess…um he had red hair and was tall in TSP? He was just such a whiny man child in TSP I can’t think of anything thatI liked. And don’t even get me started on TOBG. I mean, the whole premise of the book is that this King (who apparently thinks only with his penis) decides to use and abuse one sister then abandon her to use and abuse the other sister but instead of the sisters blaming the king for being dickbrained they blame each other! What the fuck is that! Like there’s that one scene in the film (don’t know if it’s in the book) where Henry is asking Mary if Anne is trustworthy and he’s like “she has a power over me” and I’m just like fucking hell.

What else? Anne of the Thousand Days? Hate it. He’s such a whiny man child in that too. Although at least that acknowledges his marriage to Catherine probably wasn’t a love match like a lot of people claim. Although I feel like it does that only because that’s Anne’s story so that’s their way of propping her up and making her seem more justified…or something.

The Private Life of Henry VIII? I know it’s supposed to be a comedy but I couldn’t even finish it…

There’s a smattering of other depictions like Henry VIII (2003) and other ones like that…

As for Keith Michell (did you think I’d forgotten about him? Well I did…a little bit. I’m a bit scatter-brained today), I kind of have the same feelings about him that I do for Wolf Hall. I like that his Henry isn’t a big macho man. It’s been a long time since I watched his iterations…I feel like there was something about him I didn’t like but I can’t remember exactly what that was. But I think his is probably the closest to the real Henry (man, I could’ve just said that at the beginning and saved you from all this rambling).

Those are all the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I feel like I covered most of the famous ones. (God now I have to spell-check this rambly mess.)

[cloudedmist]

Waking up in cold sweat

Because I always fear being misunderstood, and blamed for things I’ve never done.

How the lies of recalcitrants always seem to entertain the ears of sinful people.

I woke thinking of how the lies of Callistar Chen Zhi Bin has affected not just me, but surely, many others.

By looking at how his mother talks and do things, we can also tell that he, a divorced mother’s child, have his character and mind from his mother - a manipulative, lying, mind.

So why do I fear? Because in the minds of such people, there is no fear. Think about the times when she blatantly lied continuously to the police of the things I had done (damaging her property, taking drugs and having drugs in my bag). She had no fear. She was not afraid of what would happen if her lies were caught. And true enough… nothing happens to her.

So from her divorce with her husband… who knows if it was really his fault. No one can find out. After all, the stories of what he did may have been fabricated in the first place.

In the same way, I can imagine that Callistar Chen Zhi bin will try to lie his way into causing problems for others.

but if one thinks proper and in-depth, what he says will make no sense. After months of such distress, I can think of penetration in 2 ways.

The anus, or the mouth. Both of which, are ridiculous to have been done with snowball jumping on every human who stands and walks around my room. On top of that, everyone can testify to the fact that my room is packed to an unwalkable state. Just sufficient for one to step in, sit on a chair, and do their work. It’s been this way for over what? 20 years now? And my bed is out of bounds to any misconduct because of a window, where the opposite side of the block can see right into.

So unless he thinks he is a flying angel, able to have sexual penetration in the air, or that he is a prostitute who is open to being seen naked by the whole world in the opposite block, his allegation is ridiculous.

Besides, let’s just suppose he was really abused sexually… check his passport. If I recall, 2-4 weeks after I gave up on this useless abnormal human, he went alone overseas to Genting highlands with a guy, and they stayed in a single room. Why does this matter? Because obviously you must have read many times before how abused people no longer trust the gender that abused them.

Even during the alleged abused period, this abnormal person Callistar Chen Zhi Bin was sneaking out constantly to be with other guys who would fetch him around in a car (can’t recall bmw, or Audi). So what do 2 males in a car do, riding constantly up and down the expressway every night? 🧐

And recall how he met me multiple times after I gave up on him, just to wait on shoes, and to ask me to help him buy a shaver. Lol… if I were really a monster, he would have asked any of his car sugar daddies, or Escoot hangouts or cigarette buddies to give him $14 to buy a shaver. Logic breakdown again.

Finally, if I recall, the alleged story claimed it happened in 2017… and it took me a long time to realise this, but I realise that in 2017, he was pri 6. And any of his friends who know me, know we met only around Nov 2017. During that time, check the cctvs. I am very sure he wasn’t even at my place before, and we were not allowed in his. So his story breaks down again.

I figure, yet reason why he would quote that year, is because back then when he made the allegation, he did not think of the details. He thought of the story of how a penetration happens, but did not think of the details of how everything would fit into the grand scale of life, situation, condition of the environment etc.

Furthermore, the younger he claim the incident happened, he has better reason to feign forgetting things, and he can “increase” the severity. So he thought of the short term stories. And I’m very sure he keeps to them well (how else does this abnormal human, a master manipulator, escape the school’s punishment, and the law for so many years?).

[xhxhxhx]

I keep returning to Renata Adler’s introduction to Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001), a moving and revealing piece on how the New York Times works. I’ve sent excerpts to a few people, but it’s worth reading in full. 

It’s not online anywhere, so I’m posting it here, with Adler’s 12,500 words on the New York Times and what it can do to the people it covers:

Along with every other viewer of television during Operation Desert Storm, the Gulf War of 1991, I believed that I saw, time after time, American Patriot missiles knocking Iraqi Scuds out of the sky. Every major television reporter obviously shared this belief, along with a certainty that these Patriots were offering protection to the population of Israel—which the Desert Storm alliance, for political reasons, had kept from active participation in the war. Commentators actually cheered, with exclamations like “Bull’s-eye! No more Scud!” at each such interception by a Patriot of a Scud. Weeks earlier, I had read newspaper accounts of testimony before a committee of the Congress by a tearful young woman who claimed to have witnessed Iraqi soldiers enter Kuwaiti hospitals, take babies out of their incubators, hurl the newborns to the floor, and steal the incubators. I believed this, too.

Only much later did I learn that not a single Patriot effectively hit a single Scud. The scenes on television were in fact repetitions of images from one film, made by the Pentagon in order to persuade Congress to allocate more money to the Patriot, an almost thirty-year-old weapon designed, in any case, not to destroy missiles but to intercept airplanes. In his exuberance, a high military official announced that Patriots had even managed to destroy “eighty-one Scud launchers”—interesting not only because the total number of Scud launchers previously ascribed to Iraq was fifty, but also because there is and was no such thing as a “Scud launcher.” The vehicles in question were old trucks, which had broken down.

What was at issue, in other words, was not even pro-American propaganda, which could be justified in time of war. It was domestic advertising for a product—not just harmlessly deceptive advertising, either. The Patriots, as it turned out, did more damage to the allied forces, and to Israel, than if they had not been used at all. The weeping young woman who had testified about the incubator thefts turned out to be the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington; she had not, obviously, witnessed any such event. Whatever else the Iraqi invaders and occupiers may have done, this particular incident was a fabrication—invented by an American public relations firm in the employ of the Kuwaiti government.

During Operation Desert Storm itself, the American press corps, as it also turns out, accepted an arrangement with the U.S. military, whereby only a “pool” of journalists would be permitted to cover the war directly. That pool went wherever the American military press officer chose to take it. Nowhere near the front, if there was a front. Somehow, the pool and its military press guides often got lost. When other reporters, trying to get independent information, set out on their own, members of the pool actually berated them for jeopardizing the entire news-gathering arrangement.

It would have been difficult to learn all this, or any of it, from the press. I learned it from a very carefully researched and documented book, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, by John R. MacArthur. The book, published in 1992, was well enough reviewed. But it was neither prominently reviewed nor treated as “news” or even information. A review, after all, is regarded only as a cultural and not a real—least of all a journalistic—event. It was not surprising that the Pentagon, after its experience in Vietnam, should want to keep the press at the greatest possible distance from any war. It was not surprising, either, that reporters, having after all not that much choice, should submit so readily to being confined to a pool, or even that reporters in that pool should resent any competitor who tried to work outside it. This is the position of a favored collaborator in any bureaucratic and coercive enterprise.

What was, if not surprising, a disturbing matter, and a symptom of what was to come, was this: The press did not report the utter failure of the Patriot, nor did it report the degree to which the press itself, and then its audience and readership, had been misled. This is not to suggest that the press, out of patriotism or for any other reason, printed propaganda to serve the purposes of the government—or even that it would be unworthy to do so. But millions of Americans surely still believe that Patriots destroyed the Scuds, and in the process saved, or at least defended, Israel. There seemed, in this instance, no reason why the press, any more than any person or other institution, should be eager to report failures of its own.

Almost all the pieces in this book have to do, in one way or another, with what I regard as misrepresentation, coercion, and abuse of public process, and, to a degree, the journalist’s role in it. At the time of the Vietnam War, it could be argued that the press had become too reflexively adversarial and skeptical of the policies of government. Now I believe the reverse is true. All bureaucracies have certain interests in common: self-perpetuation, ritual, dogma, a reluctance to take responsibility for their actions, a determination to eradicate dissent, a commitment to a notion of infallibility. As I write this, the Supreme Court has, in spite of eloquent and highly principled dissents, so far and so cynically exceeded any conceivable exercise of its constitutional powers as to choose, by one vote, its own preferred candidate for President. Some reporters, notably Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times, have written intelligently and admirably about this. For the most part, however, the press itself has become a bureaucracy, quasi-governmental, and, far from calling attention to the collapse of public process, in particular to prosecutorial abuses, it has become an instrument of intimidation, an instrumentality even of the police function of the state.

Let us begin by acknowledging that, in our public life, this has been a period of unaccountable bitterness and absurdity. To begin with the attempts to impeach President Clinton. There is no question that the two sets of allegations, regarding Paula Jones and regarding Whitewater, with which the process began could not, as a matter of fact or law or for any other reason, constitute grounds for impeachment. Whatever they were, they preceded his presidency, and no President can be impeached for his prior acts. That was that. Then the Supreme Court, in what was certainly one of the silliest decisions in its history, ruled that the civil lawsuit by Paula Jones could proceed without delay because, in spite of the acknowledged importance of the President’s office, it appeared “highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of his time.” In 1994 a Special Prosecutor (for some reason, this office is still called the Independent Counsel) was appointed to investigate Whitewater—a press-generated inquiry, which could not possibly be material for a Special Prosecutor, no matter how defined, since it had nothing whatever to do with presidential conduct. Nonetheless, the first Special Prosecutor, Robert Fiske, investigated and found nothing. A three-judge panel, appointed, under the Independent Counsel statute, by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, fired Fiske. As head of the three-judge panel, Rehnquist had passed over several more senior judges, to choose Judge David Bryan Sentelle.

Judge Sentelle consulted at lunch with two ultra-right-wing senators from his own home state of North Carolina: Lauch Faircloth, who was convinced, among other things, that Vincent Foster, a White House counsel, had been murdered; and Jesse Helms, whose beliefs and powers would not be described by anyone as moderate. Judge Sentelle appointed as Fiske’s successor Kenneth W. Starr. North Carolina is, of course, a tobacco-growing state. Kenneth Starr had been, and remained virtually throughout his tenure as Special Prosecutor, a major, and very highly paid, attorney for the tobacco companies. He had also once drafted a pro bono amicus brief on behalf of Paula Jones.

The Office of Special Prosecutor—true conservatives said this from the first—had always been a constitutional abomination. To begin with, it impermissibly straddled the three branches of government. If President Nixon had not been in dire straits, he would never have permitted such an office, in the person of Archibald Cox, to exist. If President Clinton had not been sure of his innocence and—far more dangerously—overly certain of his charm, he would never have consented to such an appointment.

The press, however, loves Special Prosecutors. They can generate stories for each other. That something did not happen is not a story. That something does not matter is not a story. That an anecdote or an accusation is unfounded is not a story. There is this further commonality of interest. Leaks, anonymous sources, informers, agents, rumormongers, appear to offer stories—and possibilities for offers, pressures, threats, rewards. The journalist’s exchange of an attractive portrayal for a good story. There we are. The reporter and the prosecutor (the Special Prosecutor, that is; not as often the genuine prosecutor) are in each other’s pockets.

Starr did not find anything, either. Certainly no crime. He sent his staff to Little Rock, generated enormous legal expenses for people interviewed there, threw one unobliging witness (Susan McDougal) into jail for well over a year, indicted others (Webster Hubbell, for example) for offenses unrelated to the Clintons, convicted and jailed witnesses in hopes of getting testimony damaging to President Clinton, tried, after the release of those witnesses, to jail them again to get such testimony. Still no crime. So his people tried to generate one. This is not unusual behavior on the part of prosecutors going after hardened criminals: stings, indictments of racketeers and murderers for income tax offenses. But here was something new. Starr’s staff, for a time, counted heavily on sexual embarrassment: philandering, Monica Lewinsky. They even had a source, Linda Tripp. Ms. Tripp had testified for Special Prosecutor Fiske and later for Starr. She had testified in response to questions from her sympathetic interlocutor Senator Lauch Faircloth before Senator D’Amato’s Whitewater Committee. She had testified to agents of the FBI right in the Special Prosecutor’s office at least as early as April 12, 1994. An ultra-right-wing Republican herself, she not only believed White House Counsel Vincent Foster was murdered, she claimed to fear for her own life. She somehow had on the wall above her desk at the Pentagon, where her desk adjoined Monica Lewinsky’s, huge posters of President Clinton—which, perhaps not utterly surprisingly, drew Ms. Lewinsky’s attention. Somehow, in the fall of 1996 Ms. Tripp found herself eliciting, and taping, confidences from Ms. Lewinsky. In January of 1997, Ms. Tripp—who by her own account had previously abetted another White House volunteer, Kathleen Willey, in making sexual overtures to President Clinton—counseled Ms. Lewinsky to try again to visit President Clinton. By the end of February 1997, Ms. Lewinsky, who had not seen the President in more than eleven months, managed to arrange such a visit. Somehow, that visit was the only one in which she persuaded the President to ejaculate. Somehow, adept as Ms. Lewinsky claimed to be at fellatio, semen found its way onto her dress. Somehow, Ms. Tripp persuaded Ms. Lewinsky, who perhaps did not require much persuasion, to save that dress. Somehow, the Special Prosecutor got the dress. And somehow (absurdity of absurdities), there was the spectacle of the Special Prosecutor’s agents taking blood from the President to match the DNA on a dress.

Now, whatever other mistakes President Clinton may have made, in this or any other matter, he, too, had made utterly absurd mistakes of constitutional proportions. He had no obligation at all to go before the grand jury. It was a violation of the separation of powers and a mistake. Once again, he may have overestimated his charm. Charm gets you nowhere with prosecutors’ questions, answered before a grand jury under oath. And of course, Mr. Starr had managed to arrange questions—illegally, disingenuously, at the absolute last minute—which were calculated to make the President testify falsely at his deposition in the case of Paula Jones. Whether or not the President did testify falsely, the notion that “perjury” or even “obstruction of justice” in such a case could rise to the level of “Treason, Bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” the sole constitutional grounds for impeachment, had no basis in history or in law.

One need not dwell on every aspect of the matter to realize this much: As sanctimonious as lawyers, congressmen, and even judges may be, most legal cases are simply not decided on arcane legal grounds. Most turn on conflicting evidence, conflicting testimony. And this conflict cannot, surely, in every case or even in most cases, be ascribed either to Rashomon phenomena or to memory lapses. In most cases—there is no other way to put it—one litigant or the other, and usually both, are lying. If this were to be treated as “perjury” or “obstruction of justice,” then, alas, most losers in litigation would be subject to indictment. Anyone who has studied grounds for impeachment at all knows that “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” refers, in any event, only to crimes committed in the President’s official capacity and in the actual conduct of his office.

And now the press. Perhaps the most curious phenomenon in the recent affinity of the press with prosecutors has been a reversal, an inversion so acute that it passes any question of “blaming the victim.” It actually consists in casting persecutors as victims, and vilifying victims as persecutors. The New York Times is not alone in this, but it has been, until recently, the most respected of newspapers, and it has been, of late, the prime offender. A series of recent events there gives an indication of what is at stake.

In a retreat in Tarrytown, in mid-September, Joseph Lelyveld—in his time a distinguished reporter, now executive editor of the Times—gave a speech to eighty assembled Times newsroom editors, plus two editors of other publications, The New Yorker and Newsday. The ostensible subject of the retreat was “Competition.” Mr. Lelyveld’s purpose, he said, was to point out “imperfections in what I proudly believe to be the best New York Times ever—the best written, most consistent, and ambitious newspaper Times readers have ever had.” This was, in itself, an extraordinary assertion. It might have been just a mollifying tribute, a prelude to criticism of some kind. And so it was.

“I’m just driven by all the big stuff we’ve accomplished in recent years—our strong enterprise reporting, our competitive edge, our successful recruiting, our multimedia forays, our sheer ambition,” Lelyveld went on, “to worry” about “the small stuff,” particularly “the really big small stuff.” “I especially want to talk to you,” he said, “about corrections, and in particular, the malignancy of misspelled names, which, if you haven’t noticed, has become one of the great themes of our Corrections column.”

He might have been joking, but he wasn’t. “Did you know we’ve misspelled Katharine Graham’s name fourteen times? Or that we've misspelled the Madeleine in Madeleine Albright forty-nine times—even while running three corrections on each? … So far this year … there have been a hundred and ninety-eight corrections for misspelled given names and surnames, the overwhelming majority easily checkable on the Internet. … I want to argue that our commitment to being excellent and reliable in these matters is as vital to the impression we leave on readers, and the service we perform for them, as the brilliant things we accomplish most days on our front page and on our section-front displays.”

Lelyveld recalled the time, thirty years ago, when he had first come to the newspaper (a better paper, as it happens, an incomparably better paper, under his predecessors, whom present members of the staff tend to demonize). “Just about everything else we do today, it seems to me, we do better than they did then.” But, in view of “the brilliant things we accomplish most days” (”We don’t just claim to be a team. We don’t just aspire to be a team. Finally, I think we can say, we function as a team. We are a team”), he did want to talk about what he regarded as a matter of some importance: “Finally … there’s the matter of corrections (I almost said the ‘festering matter’ of corrections). As I see it, this is really big small stuff.”

A recent correction about a photo confusing monarch and queen butterflies, he said, might seem amusing—”amusing if you don’t much mind the fact that scores of lepidopterists are now likely to mistrust us on areas outside their specialty.”

And that, alas, turned out to be the point. This parody, this misplaced punctiliousness, was meant to reassure readers—lepidopterists, whomever—that whatever else appeared in the newspaper could be trusted and was true. Correction of “malignant” misspellings, of “given names and surnames,” middle initials, captions, headlines, the “overwhelming majority” of which, as Lelyveld put it, would have been “easily checkable on the Internet” was the Times’ substitute for conscience, and the basis of its assurance to readers that in every other respect it was an accurate paper, better than it had ever been, more worthy of their trust. Stendhal, for instance, had recently been misspelled, misidentified, and given a first name: Robert. “A visit to Amazon.com, just a couple of clicks away, could have cleared up the confusion.” Maybe so.

The trivial, as it happens often truly comic, corrections, persist, in quantity. The deep and consequential errors, inevitable in any enterprise, particularly those with deadlines, go unacknowledged. By this pedantic travesty of good faith, which is, in fact, a classic method of deception, the Times conceals not just every important error it makes but that it makes errors at all. It wants that poor trusting lepidopterist to think that, with the exception of this little lapse (now corrected), the paper is conscientious and infallible.

There exists, to this end, a wonderful set of locutions, euphemisms, conventions, codes, and explanations: “misspelled,” “misstated,” “referred imprecisely,” “referred incorrectly,” and recently—in some ways most mystifyingly—”paraphrase.”

On September 19, 2000, “An article on September 17 about a program of intellectual seminars organized by Mayor Jerry Brown of Oakland, California, referred imprecisely to some criticisms of the series. The terms ‘Jerrification’ and ‘pointy-headed table talk’ were the article’s paraphrase of local critics, not the words of Willa White, president of the Jack London Association.”

On October 5, 2000, “A news analysis yesterday about the performances of Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas in their first debate referred imprecisely in some copies to a criticism of the candidates. The observation that they ‘took too much time niggling over details’ was a paraphrase of comments by former Mayor Pete Flaherty of Pittsburgh, not a quotation.”

On November 9, 2000, “An article on Sunday about the campaign for the Senate in Missouri said the Governor had ‘wondered’ about the decision of the late candidate’s wife to run for the Senate. But he did not use the words ‘I’m bothered somewhat by the idea of voting for a dead person’s wife, simply because she is a widow.’ That was a paraphrase of Mr. Wilson’s views and should not have appeared in quotation marks.”

On December 16, 2000, “Because of an editing error, an article yesterday referred erroneously to a comment by a board member,” about a recount. “‘A man has to do what a man has to do’ was a paraphrase of Mr. Torre’s views and should not have appeared in quotation marks.”

Apart from the obvious questions—What is the Times’ idea of “paraphrase"? What were the actual words being paraphrased? What can “Jerrification,” “pointy-headed table talk,” “niggling,” and even “A man has to do what a man has to do” possibly be paraphrases of—what purpose is served by these corrections? Is the implication that all other words, in the Times, attributed in quotation marks to speakers are accurate, verbatim quotations? I’m afraid the implication is inescapably that. That such an implication is preposterous is revealed by the very nature of these corrections. There is no quotation of which “Jerrification” and the rest can possibly be a paraphrase. Nor can the reporter have simply misheard anything that was actually said, nor can the result be characterized as having “referred imprecisely” or “referred erroneously,” let alone be the result of “an editing error.”

It cannot be. What is at issue in these miniscule corrections is the Times’ notion of what matters, its professionalism, its good faith, even its perception of what constitute accuracy and the truth. The overriding value is, after all, to allay the mistrust of readers, lepidopterists, colleagues. Within the newspaper, this sense of itself—trust us, the only errors we make are essentially typos, and we correct them; we never even misquote, we paraphrase—appears even in its columns.

In a column published in the Times on July 20, 2000, Martin Arnold of the Arts/Culture desk, for example, wrote unhesitatingly that, compared with book publishing, “Journalism has a more rigorous standard: What is printed is believed to be true, not merely unsuspected of being false. The first rule of journalism,” he wrote, “is don’t invent.”

“Except in the most scholarly work,” Mr. Arnold went on, “no such absolutes apply to book publishing. … A book writer is … not subject to the same discipline as a news reporter, for instance, who is an employee and whose integrity is a condition of his employment … a newspaper … is a brand name, and the reader knows exactly what to expect from the brand.” If book publishers, Mr. Arnold concluded, “seem lethargic” about “whether a book is right or wrong, it maybe [sic] because readers will cut books slack they don’t give their favorite newspaper.”

In this wonderful piece of self-regarding fatuity, Mr. Arnold has expressed the essence of the “team’s” view of its claim: The Times requires no “slack.” It readily makes its own corrections:

The Making Books column yesterday misspelled the name of the television host. … She is Oprah Winfrey, not Opra.

An article about Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Al Gore used a misspelled name and a non-existent name for the author of The Red and the Black. . . . The pen name is Stendhal, not Stendahl; Robert is not part of it.

The Advertising column in Business on Friday misspelled the surname of a singer and actress. … She is Lena Horne, not Horn.

An article about an accident in which a brick fell from a construction site atop the YMCA building on West 63rd Street, slightly injuring a woman, included an erroneous address from the police for the building near which she was standing. It was 25 Central Park West. (There is no No. 35). Because of an editing error, the Making Books column on Thursday … misstated the name of the publisher of a thriller by Tom Clancy. It is G. P. Putnam, not G. F.

An article on Monday about charges that Kathleen Hagen murdered her parents, Idella and James Hagen, at their home in Chatham Township, N.J., misspelled the street where they lived. It is Fairmount Avenue, not Fairmont.

And so on. Endlessly.

What is the reasoning, the intelligence, behind this daily travesty of concern for what is truthful? Mr. Arnold has the cant just about right. “Don’t invent.” (Pointy-headed table talk? Jerrification? Niggling? Paraphrase?) “Discipline”? “Integrity”? “Rigorous standard”? Not in a long time. “A newspaper is a brand name, and the reader knows exactly what to expect from the brand.” Well, there is the problem. Part of it is the delusion of punctilio. But there is something more. Every acknowledgment of an inconsequential error (and they are never identified as reporting errors, only errors of “editing,” or “production,” or “transmission,” and so forth), in the absence of acknowledgment of any major error, creates at best a newspaper that is closed to genuine inquiry. It declines responsibility for real errors, and creates as well an affinity for all orthodoxies. And when there is a subject genuinely suited to its professional skills and obligations, it abdicates. It almost reflexively shuns responsibility and delegates it to another institution.

Within a few weeks of its small retreat at Tarrytown, the Times, on two separate occasions, so seriously failed in its fundamental journalistic obligations as to call into question not just its judgment and good faith but whether it is still a newspaper at all. The first occasion returns in a way to the subject with which this introduction began: a pool.

On election night, television, it was generally acknowledged, had made an enormous error by delegating to a single consortium, the Voter News Service, the responsibility for both voter exit polls and calling the election results. The very existence of such a consortium of broadcasters raised questions in anti-trust, and VNS called its results wrongly, but that was not the point. The point was that the value of a free press in our society was always held to lie in competition. By a healthy competition among reporters, from media of every political point of view, the public would have access to reliable information, and a real basis on which to choose. A single monolithic, unitary voice, on the other hand, is anathema to any democratic society. It becomes the voice of every oppressive or totalitarian system of government.

The Times duly reported, and in its own way deplored, the results of the VNS debacle. Then, along with colleagues in the press (the Washington Post, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, ABC, AP, the Tribune Company), it promptly emulated it. This new consortium hired an organization called the National Opinion Research Center to undertake, on its behalf, a manual recount of Florida ballots for the presidential election. The Miami Herald, which had already been counting the votes for several weeks, was apparently the only publication to exercise its function as an independent newspaper. It refused to join the consortium. It had already hired an excellent accounting firm, BDO Seidman, to assist its examination of the ballots. NORC, by contrast, was not even an auditing firm but a survey group, much of whose work is for government projects.

The Times justified its (there seems no other word for it) hiding, along with seven collegial bureaucracies, behind a single entity, NORC, on economic grounds. Proceeding independently, it said, would have cost between $500,000 and $1 million. The Times, it may be noted, had put fifteen of its reporters to work for a solid year on a series called “Living Race in America.” If it had devoted just some of those resources and that cost to a genuine, even historic, issue of fact, it would have exercised its independent competitive function in a free society and produced something of value. There seems no question that is what the Times under any previous publisher or editors would have done.

In refusing to join the consortium, the Miami Herald said the recount was taking place, after all, “in our own back yard.” It was, of course, America’s backyard, and hardly any other members of the press could be troubled with their own resources and staff to enter it.

The second failure of judgment and good faith was in some ways more egregious. In late September of 2000 there was the Times’ appraisal of its coverage (more accurately, the Times’ response to other people’s reaction to its coverage) of the case of Wen Ho Lee.

For some days, there had been rumors that the Times was going to address in some way its coverage of the case of Wen Ho Lee, a sixty- year-old nuclear scientist at Los Alamos who had been held, shackled and without bail, in solitary confinement, for nine months—on the basis, in part, of testimony, which an FBI agent had since admitted to be false, that Lee had passed American nuclear secrets to China; and testimony, also false, that he had flunked a lie detector test about the matter; and testimony, false and in some ways most egregious, that granting him bail would constitute a “grave threat” to “hundreds of millions of lives” and the “nuclear balance” of the world. As part of a plea bargain, in which Lee acknowledged a minor offense, the government, on September 14, 2000, withdrew fifty-eight of its fifty-nine original charges. The Federal District Judge, James A. Parker, a Reagan appointee, apologized to Lee for the prosecutorial conduct of the government.

The Times had broken the story of the alleged espionage on March 6 of 1999, and pursued it both editorially and in its news columns for seventeen months. A correction, perhaps even an apology, was expected to appear in the Week in Review section, on Sunday, September 24, 2000. Two Times reporters flew up from Washington to register objections. The piece, whatever it had been originally, was edited and postponed until the following Tuesday. (The Sunday Times has nearly twice the readership of the daily paper.) Readers of the Week in Review section of Sunday, September 24, 1999, however, did find a correction. It was this:

An Ideas & Trends article last Sunday about a trend toward increasing size of women’s breasts referred incorrectly to the actress Demi Moore. She underwent breast augmentation surgery, but has not had the implants removed.

In the meantime, however, on Friday, September 22, 2000, there appeared an op-ed piece, “No One Won the Whitewater Case,” by James B. Stewart, in which the paper’s affinity with prosecution—in particular the Special Prosecutor—and the writer’s solidarity with the Times reporters most attuned to leaks from government accusers found almost bizarre expression. Stewart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Blood Sport, wrote of Washington, during the Clinton administration, as a “culture of mutual political destruction.” In what sense the “destruction” could be deemed “mutual” was not entirely clear. Mr. Stewart praised an article about Whitewater, on March 8, 1992, written by Jeff Gerth (one of the original writers of the Wen Ho Lee pieces) as “a model of investigative reporting.” He wrote of “rabid Clinton haters” who believed that Vincent Foster was “murdered, preferably by Hillary Clinton herself”; he added, however, the Clintons “continued to stonewall,” providing “ample fodder for those opposed to the President.”

“The Independent Counsel’s mission,” he wrote, “was to get to the bottom of the morass.” No, it wasn’t. What morass? Then came this formulation:

Kenneth Starr and his top deputies were not instinctive politicians, and they became caught up in a political war for which they were woefully unprepared and ill-suited. The White House and its allies relentlessly attacked the Independent Counsel for what they thought were both illegal and unprincipled tactics, like intimidating witnesses and leaking to the press. Mr. Starr has been vindicated in the courts in nearly every instance, and he and his allies were maligned to a degree that will someday be seen as grossly unfair.

One’s heart of course goes out to these people incarcerating Susan McDougal; illegally detaining and threatening Monica Lewinsky; threatening a witness who refused to lie for them, by implying that her adoption of a small child was illegal; misleading the courts, the grand jury, the press, the witnesses about their actions. Persecuted victims, these prosecutors—”caught up,” “woefully unprepared,” “relentlessly attacked,” “maligned.”

The investigation unfolded with inexorable logic that made sense at every turn, yet lost all sight of the public purpose it was meant to serve. Mr. Starr’s failure was not one of logic or law but of simple common sense.

Quite apart from whatever he means by “public purpose,” what could Mr. Stewart possibly mean by “common sense”?

From early on, it should have been apparent that a criminal case could never be made against the Clintons. Who would testify against them?

Who indeed? Countless people, as the Times checkers, if it had any, might have told him—alleging rape, murder, threats, blackmail, drug abuse, bribery, and abductions of pet cats.

“The investigation does not clear the Clintons in all respects,” Mr. Stewart wrote, as though clearing people, especially in all respects, were the purpose of prosecutions. “The Independent Counsel law is already a casualty of Whitewater and its excesses.” What? What can this possibly mean? What “it,” for example, precedes “its excesses”? Whitewater’s excesses?

But as long as a culture of mutual political destruction reigns in Washington, the need for some independent resolution of charges against top officials, especially the President, will not go away. [A reigning culture of mutual destruction evidently needs another Special Prosecutor, to make charges go away.] After all, we did get something for our nearly $60 million. The charges against the Clintons were credibly resolved.

An extraordinary piece, certainly. Four days later, on Tuesday, September 26, 2000, the Times ran its long-awaited assessment, “From the Editors.” It was entitled “The Times and Wen Ho Lee.”

Certainly, the paper had never before published anything like this assessment. A break with tradition, however, is not an apology. What the Times did was to apportion blame elsewhere, endorse its own work, and cast itself as essentially a victim, having “attracted criticism” from three categories of persons: “competing journalists,” “media critics,” and “defenders of Dr. Lee.” Though there may, in hindsight, have been “flaws”—for example, a few other lines of investigation the Times might have pursued, “to humanize” Dr. Lee—the editors seemed basically to think they had produced what Mr. Stewart, in his op-ed piece, might have characterized as “a model of investigative reporting.” Other journalists interpreted this piece one way and another, but to a reader of ordinary intelligence and understanding there was no contrition in it. That evidently left the Times, however, with a variant of what might be called the underlying corrections problem: the lepidopterist and his trust. “Accusations leveled at this newspaper,” the editors wrote, “may have left many readers with questions about our coverage. That confusion—and the stakes involved, a man’s liberty and reputation—convince us that a public accounting is warranted.” The readers’ “confusion” is the issue. The “stakes,” in dashes, are an afterthought.

“On the whole,” the public accounting said, “we remain proud of work that brought into the open a major national security problem. Our review found careful reporting that included extensive cross-checking and vetting of multiple sources, despite enormous obstacles of official secrecy and government efforts to identify the Times’ sources.”

And right there is the nub of it, one nub of it anyway: the “efforts to identify the Times’ sources.” Because in this case, the sources were precisely governmental—the FBI, for example, in its attempt to intimidate Wen Ho Lee. The rest of the piece, with a few unconvincing afterthoughts about what the paper might have done differently, is self-serving and even overtly deceptive. “The Times stories—echoed and often oversimplified by politicians and other news organizations—touched off a fierce public debate”; “Now the Times neither imagined the security breach nor initiated the prosecution of Wen Ho Lee”; “That concern had previously been reported in the Wall Street Journal, but without the details provided by the Times in a painstaking narrative”; “Nothing in this experience undermines our faith in any of our reporters, who remained persistent and fair-minded in their news-gathering in the face of some fierce attacks.”

And there it is again: Wen Ho Lee in jail, alone, shackled, without bail—and yet it is the Times that is subject to “accusations,” Times reporters who were subjected to those “fierce attacks.”

The editors did express a reservation about their “tone.” “In place of a tone of journalistic detachment,” they wrote, they had perhaps echoed the alarmism of their sources. Anyone who has read the Times in recent years—let alone been a subject of its pieces—knows that “a tone of journalistic detachment” in the paper is almost entirely a thing of the past. What is so remarkable, however, is not only how completely the Times identifies with the prosecution, but also how clearly the inversion of hunter and prey has taken hold. The injustice, the editors clearly feel, has been done not to Dr. Lee (although they say at one point that they may not have given him, imagine, “the full benefit of the doubt”) but to the reporters, and the editors, and the institution itself.

Two days later, the editorial section checked in, with “An Overview: The Wen Ho Lee Case.” Some of it, oddly enough, was another attack on Wen Ho Lee, whose activities it described as “suspicious and ultimately illegal,” “beyond reasonable dispute.” It described the director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, and Attorney General Janet Reno as being under “sharp attack.” The editorial was not free of self-justification; it was not open about its own contribution to the damage; it did seem concerned with “racial profiling”—a frequent preoccupation of the editorial page, in any case. The oddest sentences were these: “Moreover, transfer of technology to China and nuclear weapons security had been constant government concerns throughout this period. To withhold this information from readers is an unthinkable violation of the fundamental contract between a newspaper and its audience.” It had previously used a similar construction, for the prosecutors: “For the F.B.I. … not to react to Dr. Lee’s [conduct] would have been a dereliction of duty.” But the question was not whether the FBI should react (or not) but how, within our system, legally, ethically, constitutionally, to do so. And no one was asking the Times to “withhold information” about “government concerns,” least of all regarding alleged “transfer of technology to China” or “nuclear weapons security.” If the Times were asked to do anything in this matter, it might be to refrain from passing on, and repeating, and scolding, and generally presenting as “investigative reporting” what were in fact malign and exceedingly improper allegations, by “anonymous sources” with prosecutorial agendas, against virtually defenseless individuals.

There was—perhaps this goes without saying—no apology whatever to Wen Ho Lee. “The unthinkable violation of the fundamental contract between a newspaper and its audience” did not, obviously, extend to him. Lelyveld, too, had referred to a Corrections policy “to make our contract with readers more enforceable.” What “contract”? To rectify malignant misspelling of names? This concern, too, was not with facts, or substance, or subject, but to sustain, without earning or reciprocating, the trust of “readers.” The basis of “trust” was evidently quite tenuous. What had increased, perhaps in its stead, was this sense of being misunderstood, unfairly maligned, along with those other victims: FBI agents, informers, and all manner of prosecutors. No sympathy, no apology, certainly, for the man whom many, including in the end the judge, considered a victim—not least a victim of the Times.

That Times editors are by no means incapable of apology became clear on September 28, 2000, the same day as the editorial Overview. On that day, Bill Keller, the managing editor of the Times, posted a “Memorandum to the Staff,” which he sent as well to “media critics,” and which he said all staff members were “free to share outside the paper.”

It was an apology, and it was abject. “When we published our appraisal of our Wen Ho Lee coverage,” it said, “we anticipated that some people would misread it, and we figured that misreading was beyond our control. But one misreading is so agonizing to me that it requires a follow-up.”

“Through most of its many drafts,” Keller continued, the message had contained the words “of us” in a place where any reader of ordinary intelligence and understanding, one would have thought, would have known what was meant, since the words “to us” appear later in the same sentence. “Somewhere in the multiple scrubbings of this document,” however,

the words “of us” got lost. And that has led some people on the staff to a notion that never occurred to me—that the note meant to single out Steve Engelberg, who managed this coverage so masterfully, as the scapegoat for the shortcomings we acknowledged.

My reaction the first time I heard this theory was to laugh it off as preposterous. Joe and I tried to make clear in meetings with staff … that the paragraph referred to ourselves. … In the very specific sense that we laid our hands on these articles, and we overlooked some opportunities in our own direction of the coverage. We went to some lengths to assure that no one would take our message as a repudiation of our reporters, but I'm heartsick to discover that we failed to make the same clear point about one of the finest editors I know. Let the record show that we stand behind Steve and the other editors who played roles in developing this coverage. Coverage, as the message to readers said, of which we remain proud.

Bureaucracy at its purest. Reporters, editors, “masterfully directed” coverage, at worst some “opportunities” “overlooked.” The buck stops nowhere. “We remain proud” of the coverage in question, only “agonized” and “heartsick” at having been understood to fail to exonerate a member of this staff. The only man characterized as “the scapegoat” in the whole matter is—this is hardly worth remarking—one of the directors of the coverage, some might say the hounding, of Wen Ho Lee.

Something is obviously wrong here. Howell Raines, the editor of the editorial page (and the writer of the Overview) was, like Joe Lelyveld, a distinguished reporter. Editing and reporting are, of course, by no means the same. But one difficulty, perhaps with Keller as well, is that in an editing hierarchy, unqualified loyalty to staff, along with many other manifestations of the wish to be liked, can become a failing—intellectual, professional, moral. It may be that the editors’ wish for popularity with the staff has caused the perceptible and perhaps irreversible decline in the paper. There is, I think, something more profoundly wrong—not just the contrast between its utter solidarity, its self-regard, its sense of victimization and tender sympathy with its own, and its unconsciousness of its own weight as an institution, in the stories it claims to cover. Something else, perhaps more important, two developments actually—the emergence of the print reporter as celebrity and the proliferation of the anonymous source. There is an indication of where this has led us even in the Times editors’ own listing, among the “enormous obstacles” its reporters faced, of “government efforts to identify the Times’ sources.” The “sources” in question were, of course, precisely governmental. The Times should never have relied upon them, not just because they were, as they turned out to be, false, but because they were prosecutorial-—and they were turning the Times into their instrument.

In an earlier day, the Times would have had a safeguard against its own misreporting, including its “accounting” and its Overview of its coverage of the case of Wen Ho Lee. The paper used to publish in its pages long, unedited transcripts of important documents. The transcript of the FBI’s interrogation of Dr. Lee—on March 7, 1999, the day after the first of the Times articles appeared—exists. It runs to thirty-seven pages. Three agents have summoned Dr. Lee to their offices in “a cleared building facility.” They have refused him not only the presence of anybody known to him but permission to have lunch. They keep talking ominously of a “package” they have, and telephone calls they have been making about it to Washington. The contents of the package includes yesterday’s New York Times. They allude to it more than fifty times:

“You read that and it’s on the next page as well, Wen Ho. And let me call Washington real quick while you read that.”

“The important part is that, uh, basically that is indicating that there is a person at the laboratory that’s committed espionage and that points to you.”

“You, you read it. It’s not good, Wen Ho.”

“You know, this is, this is a big problem, but uh-mm, I think you need to read this article. Take a couple of minutes and, and read this article because there’s some things that have been raised by Washington that we’ve got to get resolved.”

And they resume:

“It might not even be a classified issue. … but Washington right now is under the impression that you’re a spy. And this newspaper article is, is doing everything except for coming out with your name … everything points to you. People in the community and people at the laboratory tomorrow are going to know. That this article is referring to you. …”

The agents tell him he is going to be fired (he is fired two days later), that his wages will be garnished, that he will lose his retirement, his clearance, his chance for other employment, his friends, his freedom. The only thing they mention more frequently than the article in the Times is his polygraph, and every mention of it is something they know to be false: that he “failed” it. They tell him this lie more than thirty times. Sometimes they mention it in conjunction with the Times article:

“You know, Wen Ho, this, it’s bad. I mean look at this newspaper article! I mean, ‘China Stole Secrets for Bombs.’ It all but says your name in here. The polygraph reports all say you’re failing … Pretty soon you’re going to have reporters knocking on your door.”

Then they get to the Rosenbergs:

“The Rosenbergs are the only people that never cooperated with the federal government in an espionage case. You know what happened to them? They electrocuted them, Wen Ho.”

“You know Aldrich Ames? He’s going to rot in jail! … He’s going to spend his dying days in jail.”

“Okay? Do you want to go down in history? Whether you’re professing your innocence like the Rosenbergs to the day they take you to the electric chair…”

Dr. Lee pleads with them, several times, not to interrupt him when he is trying to answer a question: “You want me, you want to listen two minutes from my explanation?” Not a chance:

“No, you stop a minute, Wen Ho. … Compared to what’s going to happen to you with this newspaper article…”

“The Rosenbergs are dead.”

“This is what’s going to do you more damage than anything. … Do you think the press prints everything that’s true? Do you think that everything that’s in this article is true? … The press doesn’t care.”

Now, it may be that the editors of the Times do not find this newsworthy, or that they believe their readers would have no interest in the fact that the FBI conducts its interrogations in this way. The Times might also, fairly, claim that it has no responsibility for the uses to which its front-page articles may be put, by the FBI or any other agency of government. Except for this. In both the editorial Overview and the “Note from the Editors,” as in Mr. Stewart’s op-ed piece, the Times’ sympathies are clearly with the forces of prosecution and the FBI. “Dr. Lee had already taken a lie detector test,” the editors write, for example, in their assessment, and “F.B.I. investigators believed that it showed deception when he was asked whether he had leaked secrets.”

In the days when the Times still published transcripts, the reader could have judged for himself. Nothing could be clearer than that the FBI investigators believed nothing of the kind. As they knew, Dr. Lee had, on the contrary, passed his polygraph—which is why, in his interrogation, they try so obsessively to convince him that he failed it. Even the editorial Overview, shorter and perhaps for that reason less misleading, shows where the Times’ sense of who is victimized resides. After two paragraphs of describing various activities of Dr. Lee’s as “improper and illegal,” “beyond reasonable dispute,” it describes, of all people, Louis Freeh, the director of the FBI (and Janet Reno, the attorney general) as being “under sharp attack.” Freeh was FBI director when agents of the Bureau, illegally detaining Monica Lewinsky, were conducting “investigations” of the same sort for the Office of the Independent Counsel. Freeh was also advocating, not just in government but directly to the press, more Special Prosecutors for more matters of all kinds.

But enough. The Times feels a responsibility to correct misimpressions it may have generated in readers—how names are spelled, what middle initials are, who is standing miscaptioned on which side of a photograph, which butterfly is which—is satisfied, in an important way, in its corrections. For the rest, it has looked at its coverage and found it good. The underlying fact, however, is this: For years readers have looked in the Times for what was once its unsurpassed strength: the uninflected coverage of the news. You can look and look, now, and you will not find it there. Some politically correct series and group therapy reflections on race relations perhaps. These appear harmless. They may even win prizes. Fifteen reporters working for one year might, perhaps, have been more usefully employed on some genuine issue of fact. More egregious, however, and in some ways more malign, was an article that appeared, on November 5, 2000, in the Sunday Times Magazine.

The piece was a cover story about Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Everyone makes mistakes. This piece, blandly certain of its intelligence, actually consisted of them. Everything was wrong. At the most trivial level, the piece said Moynihan had held no hearings about President Clinton’s health plan and no meetings with him to discuss welfare. (In fact, the senator had held twenty-nine such hearings in committee and many such discussions with the President.) At the level of theory, it misapprehended the history, content, purpose, and fate of Moynihan’s proposal for a guaranteed annual income. It would require a book to set right what was wrong in the piece—and in fact, such a book existed, at least about the guaranteed annual income. But what was, in a way, most remarkable about what the New York Times has become appeared, once again, in the way it treated its own coverage.

The Sunday Magazine’s editors limited themselves to a little self- congratulatory note. The article, they reported, had “prompted a storm of protest.” “But many said that we got it right, and that our writer said what had long seemed to be unspeakable.” (”Unspeakable” may not be what they mean. Perhaps it was a paraphrase.) They published just one letter, which praised the piece as “incisive.”

The Corrections column, however, when it came, was a gem. “An article in the Times Magazine last Sunday about the legacy of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan,” it began, “misidentified a former senator who was an expert on military affairs. He was Richard Russell, not Russell Long.”

The “article also,” the correction went on, had “referred imprecisely” (a fine way to put it) to the senator’s committee hearings on President Clinton’s health care. (Not a word about welfare.) But the Corrections column saved for last what the Times evidently regarded as most important. “The article also overstated [another fine word] Senator Moynihan’s English leanings while he attended the London School of Economics. Bowler, yes. Umbrella, yes. Monocle, no.”

No “malignant” misspellings here. But nothing a reader can trust any longer, either. Certainly no reliable, uninflected coverage of anything, least of all the news. The enterprise, whatever else it is, has almost ceased altogether to be a newspaper. It is still a habit. People glance at it and, on Sundays, complain about its weight. For news they must look elsewhere. What can have happened here?

“The turning point at the paper,” I once wrote, in a piece of fiction, “was the introduction of the byline.” I still believe that to be true. I simply had no idea how radical the consequences of that turning point were going to be. Until the early seventies, it was a mark of professionalism in reporters for newspapers, wire services, newsmagazines, to have their pieces speak, as it were, for themselves, with all the credibility and authority of the publication in which they anonymously appeared. Reviews, essays, regular columns were of course signed. They were expressions of opinion, as distinct from reporting, and readers had to know and evaluate whose opinion it was. But when a reader said of a piece of information, “The Times says,” or “The Wall Street Journal says,” he was relying on the credibility of the institution. With occasional exceptions— correspondents, syndicated columnists, or sportswriters whose names were household words, or in attributing a scoop of extraordinary historical importance—the reporter’s byline would have seemed intrusive and unprofessional.

In television reporting, of course, every element of the situation was different. It would be absurd to say “CBS (or ABC, NBC, or even CNN) says” or even “I saw it on” one network or another. It had to be Walter Cronkite, later Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings—not just because no television network or station had the authority of any favorite and trusted publication, but because seeing and hearing the person who conveyed the news (impossible, obviously, with the printed byline) was precisely the basis, for television viewers, of trust.

Once television reporters became celebrities, it was perhaps inevitable that print reporters would want at least their names known; and there were, especially at first, stories one did well to read on the basis of a trusted byline. There still existed what Mary McCarthy, in another context, called “the last of the tall timber.” But the tall timber in journalism is largely gone—replaced, as in many fields, by the phenomenon of celebrity. And gradually, in print journalism, the celebrity of the reporter began to overtake and then to undermine the reliability of pieces. Readers still say, “The Times says,” or “I read it in the Post” (so far as I can tell, except in the special case of gossip columns, readers hardly ever mention, or even notice, bylines), but trust in even once favorite newspapers has almost vanished. One is left with this oddly convoluted paradox: As survey after survey confirms, people generally despise journalists; yet they cite, as a source of information, newspapers. And though they have come, with good reason, to distrust newspapers as a whole, they still tend to believe each individual story as they read it. We all do. Though I may know a piece to be downright false, internally contradictory, in some profound and obvious way corrupted, I still, for a moment anyway, believe it. Believe the most obviously manufactured quotes, the slant, the spin, the prose, the argument with no capacity even to frame an issue and no underlying sense of what follows from what.

At the same time, a development in criticism, perhaps especially movie criticism, affected print journalism of every kind. It used to be that the celebrities featured on billboards and foremost in public consciousness were the movie stars themselves. For a while, it became auteurs, directors. Then, bizarrely but for a period of many years, it became critics, who starred in the discussion of movies. That period seems, fortunately, to have passed. But somehow, the journalist’s byline, influenced perhaps by the critic’s, began to bring with it a blurring of genres: reporting, essay, memoir, personal statement, anecdote, judgmental or critical review. Most of all, critical review—which is why government officials and citizens alike treat reporters in the same way artists regard most critics—with mixed fear and dismay. It is also why the subjects of news stories read each “news” piece as if it were a review on opening night.

There is no longer even a vestige or pretense, on the part of the print journalist, of any professional commitment to uninflected coverage of the news. The ambition is rather, under their bylines, to express themselves, their writing styles. Days pass without a single piece of what used to be called “hard news.” The celebrityhood, or even the aspiration to celebrity, of print reporters, not just in print but also on talk shows, has been perhaps the single most damaging development in the history of print journalism.

The second, less obvious, cause of decline in the very notion of reliable information was the proliferation of the “anonymous source”—especially as embodied, or rather disembodied, in Deep Throat. Many people have speculated about the “identity” of this phantom. Others have shown, more or less conclusively, that at least as described in All the President’s Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, he did not, in fact could not, exist. Initially introduced as a narrative device, to hold together book and movie, this improbable creature was obviously both a composite, which Woodward, the only one who claims to have known and have consulted him, denies, and an utter fiction, which is denied by both Woodward and Bernstein—the better writer, who had, from the start, a “friend,” whose information in almost every significant respect coincides with, and even predates, Deep Throat’s. But the influence of this combination, the celebrity reporter and the chimera to whom the reporter alone has access, has been incalculable.

The implausibility of the saga of Deep Throat has been frequently pointed out. Virtually every element of the story—the all-night séances in garages; the signals conveyed by moved flowerpots on windowsills and drawings of clocks in newspapers; the notes left by prearrangement on ledges and pipes in those garages; the unidiomatic and essentially uninformative speech—has been demolished. Apart from its inherent impractibilities, for a man requiring secrecy and fearing for his life and the reporter’s, the strategy seems less like tradecraft than a series of attention- getting mechanisms. This is by no means to deny that Woodward and Bernstein had “sources,” some but far from all of whom preferred to remain anonymous. From the evidence in the book they include at least Fred Buzhardt, Hugh Sloan, John Sears, Mark Felt and other FBI agents, Leonard Garment, and, perhaps above all, the ubiquitous and not infrequently treacherous Alexander Haig. None of these qualify as Deep Throat, nor does anyone, as depicted in the movie or book. Woodward’s new rationale is this: the secret of the phantom’s name must be kept until the phantom himself reveals it—or else dies. Woodward is prepared, however, to disqualify candidates whom others—most recently Leonard Garment, in an entire book devoted to such speculation—may suggest, by telling, instance by instance, who Deep Throat is not. A long list, obviously, which embraces everyone.

It is no wonder that Woodward, having risked the logic of this, would risk as well an account of a mythical visit to the hospital bedside of former CIA Director William Casey, who was dying and who, according to doctors, had lost all power of speech. Casey’s hospital room was closely guarded against visits from all but his immediate family. Woodward claims to have entered the hospital room, asked Casey a question, observed him “nod,” and quotes him as saying, “I believed.”

There is more. Woodward now claims that the “anonymous source” for another book, The Brethren, was Justice Potter Stewart. Justice Stewart, perhaps needless to say, is dead. He was a highly respected and distinguished Justice. But that does not satisfactorily resolve the matter, because Justice Stewart can and does bear a sort of witness here. He wrote some important opinions. Some of the opinions most seriously misunderstood, misrepresented, and even misquoted in The Brethren are Potter Stewart’s. And nothing could be more obvious from the book than the fact that, apart from the clerks, Woodward’s primary source was in fact Justice Rehnquist.

The ramifications of this cult of the anonymous source—particularly as Deep Throat, this oracle to whom only a single priest, or acolyte, has access, have been, for journalism, enormous. No need any longer to publish long transcripts. Why bother? No need even to read them, or anything—public documents, the novels of Robert Stendahl. Two clicks to Amazon.com will give you spellings. And an “anonymous source” will either provide you with “information” or provide what your editors will accept as “cross-checking” for what you have already said. The celebrity reporter has created, beginning with Deep Throat, what one would have thought a journalistic oxymoron: a celebrity anonymous source. More than that: a celebrity anonymous source who does not even exist. As late as page 207 of Leonard Garment’s book, In Search of Deep Throat, Mr. Garment actually writes:

I was doggedly confident that Woodward, Bernstein, and, above all, their editor … would not have put themselves out on a long limb for a gimmick that would eventually be revealed and denounced as a journalistic fraud of historic proportions.

Not a gimmick. A device. When Woodward produced the noumenal encounter between the anonymous source and the celebrity reporter, it turns out, a religion was born, which has grown to affect not just journalism but the entire culture. In print journalism, you can usually tell, when such a source exists at all, who it is: the person most kindly treated in the story. And the religion, with all its corollaries, dogmas, and implications, has made of reporters not fallible individuals competing for facts and stories in the real world but fellow members of the cult. Whomever or whatever they go after—Wen Ho Lee, Whitewater, or “scandals” that did not pan out—or whomever they equally baselessly support— Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, Chairman Henry Hyde of the House Judiciary Committee, and FBI Director Louis Freeh—they tend to support dogmatically, and as one. Best of all, they like to consult and to write approvingly of one another and even, if need be, themselves. Administrations come and go. Quasi-governmental bureaucracies, with their hierarchies and often interlocking cults and interests, persist.

The convergence of the anonymous source with the celebrity reporter now has ramifications that could not have been foreseen. A certain journalistic laziness was perhaps predictable—phoning around as a form of “legwork,” attributing information to “sources,” in quotes, which no one was equipped either to verify or to deny. But the serious result, which no one could have foreseen, is this: The whole purpose of the “anonymous source” has been precisely reversed. The reason there exists a First Amendment protection for journalists’ confidential sources has always been to permit citizens—the weak, the vulnerable, the isolated—to be heard publicly, without fear of retaliation by the strong—by their employer, for example, or by the forces of government. The whistleblower or the innocent accused were to be protected. Instead, almost every “anonymous source” in the press, in recent years, has been an official of some kind, or a person in the course of a vendetta speaking from a position of power.

More disturbing, in spite of what has been at least since Vietnam an almost instinctive press hostility to the elected government (an adversarial position that can be healthy in a free society), the press now has an unmistakeable affinity with official accusers, in particular the Special Prosecutors and the FBI. And when those powerful institutions are allowed to “leak”—that is, become the press’s “anonymous sources”— the press becomes not an adversary but an instrument of all that is most secret and coercive—in attacks, not infrequently, with an elected administration but also with truly nameless individuals, those who have neither power nor celebrity of any kind, and who have no means of access, least of all as “anonymous sources,” to the press.

The press, in these matters, has become far more unified. There may be competition among those who will get the first interview of some celebrity or other, or first access to a treasured “anonymous source.” But it is the same celebrities and the same sources that journalists pursue, not excluding interviews with one another. Even among the apparently most irate and shouting television personalities whom Calvin Trillin has so memorably characterized as “Sabbath gasbags,” there is a sameness. Political views are permitted, routinely, along a spectrum from left to right; but the views of each participant, on virtually any subject, can be predicted from week to week.

The worst, however, is the mystique of the “sources.” Citizens of a democracy require reliable information. How can they check “sources”? What possible basis is there for relying on them? The word of the celebrity reporter who cannot bring himself to name them? What sort of reliability, what sort of information, what sort of journalism is this? Especially since there seems to be, among “investigative reporters” and the institutions that support them, a stubborn loyalty to and solidarity with sources—even when a source (as in the recent case of Charles Bakaly of the Special Prosecutor’s office) admits that he is the previously “anonymous source” in question, or, more puzzlingly, when the “source” has demonstrably deceived the reporter himself. In what may be a journalistic variant of the Stockholm syndrome (whereby hostages become extremely loyal to their captors), journalists and their editors defend and protect the anonymity, and even the reliability, of their sources, even when they have been most seriously misled. A sacred covenant, apparently. But what of the trust and “contract” with the reader? Forgotten, secular, a matter of spelling and perhaps the small stuff. There, for instance, is the Times, in its “assessment,” trying to establish the basis for a now utterly discredited story as “cross-checking sources” and resisting “obstacles” posed by other people’s having tried to “identify our sources.” Would this not have been the occasion to name at least the sources who deliberately misled them? Are the identities of self-serving liars, and particularly liars of this sort, who use the newspaper story as a weapon of intimidation, to be protected? Four months later, in February of 2001, the Times again reappraised its coverage of Wen Ho Lee. The pieces somehow, under a lot of cosmic obfuscation, seemed to have missed their underlying points: (1) that there was no evidence of spying by anyone at Los Alamos; (2) that there was no evidence of any spying by Wen Ho Lee. The suspicion of him rested largely on two incidents: that he had once telephoned a man under suspicion of something undefined and offered to help him, and that he had once entered, uninvited, a meeting at Los Alamos, and hugged a major Chinese scientist there. Typical spy behavior: a phone call and a hug.

If so, then you are speaking inescapably of the instruments of a police state, with secret informers, and the press just one in a set of interlocking and secretive bureaucracies. The alternative, it seems to me, is to proceed in a more diligent way, one by one, in the press, on the street, in the academy, to look for information and try to draw reasonable inferences from it. A combination of research and thinking and consulting, if need be, a genuine source—that is, someone who has information and is willing to impart it. No professional ideologies that paradoxically combine political correctness with self-serving orthodoxies and an affinity for prosecutors. No faith in Delphic utterances from unidentified persons. In spite of what might have affected generations of aspiring reporters, no one is going to contrive an absurd set of signals for you, meet you secretly and regularly and undetected by others in a garage by night and tell you anything worth knowing.

Pools, informers, leaks from prosecutors, celebrity reporters with anonymous sources—all of these are forms simultaneously of consolidation and of hiding, facets of what the enterprise has become. Consider the celebrity reporter, the particular powers of celebrity in a celebrity culture, especially when his nominal profession, after all, is the purveying of information, the dissemination of what the society will know about itself. Consider the prosecutorial affinity, which is both easy and immensely destructive. Wen Ho Lee, as it turned out, had nearly miraculous access, in the end, to good, pro bono lawyers. Most noncelebrity citizens simply have no such access—either to lawyers or to the press. They are not just truly anonymous. They are plain unheard.

Consider as well the use of pools. Not the imposed pools of the military, but voluntary, self-satisfied, bonded bureaucracies and consortiums. To use saving money as an excuse for not having the independence, the interest, the curiosity and inclination to go out there and see for yourself—it is simply not reconcilable with any notion of the working journalist. Under the First Amendment, the press enjoys special protections so that the public will hear from many competing individual and institutional voices, and so that debate, as Harry Kalven put it, can be “free, robust, and wide open.” Journalism has to be competitive or it is nothing. Television's mistake in using its consortium was understandable and should have been instructive. But television that night was in the business of prediction. In Florida, where something already existing is in dispute—in a state with sunshine laws specifically making facts available for public information—to send a surrogate institution is indefensible. For one thing, it virtually guarantees that the sunshine laws will atrophy. For another, it guarantees that the public will never know what the real count was. In lieu of NORC, it would have been better to send in, if not professional auditors, a group of diligent fourth-grade children who can count.

All monopolists collaborating in restraint of trade say they are cooperating to save everybody money. In this case, another unmistakeable and crucial motive has been to hide. That hiding reflects fear. Fear of being alone, fear of being out of step with the prevailing view. Fear even of being right when everyone else is wrong. So hide yourself in an orthodoxy and a group. Let no independent reporters and, lord help us, no independent newspaper in there. Try to co-opt the Miami Herald. Let the sociologists from NORC handle it. The administration, the government, will not be offended. At least not with us.

Oddly enough, even the policy of Corrections is a form simultaneously of consolidation of power and of hiding. The orthodoxy is: We are so scrupulous we correct even the smallest thing. Therefore, you can trust us as you would Mao, the Scripture, the Politburo. It is a form of Fundamentalism, it protects the ideology. Nothing more clearly exposed the essence of that Corrections policy than the Editors’ Note about Wen Ho Lee. They misrepresented what they had actually said. They defended, in glowing terms, what they did say. They gave themselves credit for “calling attention to the problem.” Much like those charities a few years ago when the child, who had been photographed so movingly and had corresponded so faithfully with its “adopted” parents, who sent ten dollars a month, turned out to have been long dead or not even to exist. The charities, too, said, “We were just calling attention to the problem.” If you do a textual analysis of what the Times did say, over a period of many months, and how its “accounting” or “assessment” now describes it, you have not just disinformation but an indication of what much of journalism has become. We were first, but we blame it on the Wall Street Journal, which was earlier, and on the misrepresentations of others, who came later. On the whole, we are proud. And the only one to whom we genuinely owe an apology is one of our staff, the editor of the series in question, “the scapegoat,” whom we must now praise in the most extravagant terms. And about whom we are abject, agonized, heartsick.

I know nothing about the editor in question. I did read, months ago, his irate and patronizing response, defending those very articles, to someone who had ventured, in Brill’s Content, to criticize them. There is, in general, in newspapers at least, almost no reliable, uninflected coverage of the news. No celebrity journalists seem even to aspire to it. There is opinion, a verdict, an assumption of the role—how to put it?—of critic to the day’s events. A verdict. We do not need a verdict. We need an account.

That is where the absence of those once long, verbatim transcripts is of great importance. The transcripts permitted none of that judging or tilting or hiding. They were straightforward. They were something that television, for example, with its scheduling and time constraints, could not do. Nor could tabloids.

Consolidating with others and going secret. From the anonymous source, to the prosecutor’s office, to the consortium, all are just steps. And correcting—either typos, or misspellings, or things everyone knows already or that matter to no one, or that correct themselves on a daily basis—is just the mask, the surface of the decay. One more indication of moral and factual authority—and, in consequence, another source of power. It may be, it is virtually certain, that newspapers, to regain their honor, will have to relinquish something of their power and think again.

The whole constitutional system had been, for some time, under attack by all three branches of government. There has been the behavior of the executive, as embodied not just by the President in his understanding of his office, but, paradoxically, by the Independent Counsel in his prosecutions. There has been the behavior of the legislature, in its lascivious travesty of the impeachment process. There has been the conduct of the Supreme Court, intruding on the province of the executive, the legislative, the states, and finally on the rights of every citizen. By making its decision in Gore v. Bush, explicitly, unique—to be regarded as having no precedent and setting none—it undermined the whole basis of Anglo Saxon law, which is grounded in the notion that the decisions derive their validity from being built upon, and in turn relied upon, as precedents.

The Supreme Court, in its power of judicial review, is regarded as nearly sacred within the system and beyond appeal—with one exception: the press. Judicial review is trumped by press review. The Justices are highly aware of this. Judges who claimed to be conservatives, even as they struck most radically at the Constitution, the balance of powers, federalism, the fundamental understandings of the society, played to journalists. Virtually the only decisions of this Court upholding freedoms, under the First Amendment, for example, have been decisions in favor of the press. The press seems less aware of this—still describing the most radical judges, obligingly, as “conservatives.” Somehow, comfortable and serene as the system still seems to be, and as though political life were still in some sense normal, the whole question of legitimacy seemed to rest on so few public officials—until recently Senator Moynihan, for example, and now Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter, Breyer. There is always the possibility that there will be heroes, or that the system is self-correcting. But it will not do for the press, with very few exceptions, simply to join all other bureaucracies, to correct spellings or give us their impressions about race (there are still “tensions”) while, in the ultimate abdication, they miss the factual. Independent journalists have obligations of their own.

-2001

[sepublic]

Isaac’s Coming-of-Age Moment

           I find Isaac’s talk with the Captain in Season 3 weirdly… sweet, in a sense?

           Like… I kind of get this vibe from Isaac during their conversation that he’s basically some hot-headed, emotional youth, who is confused in a lot of ways, basically a teenager, and he just really needs some actual guidance, a positive adult/parental figure in his life that he can actually count on! Which, I don’t want to infantilize Isaac, but then again he does refer to himself and Hector as children who need to grow up in Season 4, so maybe I’m not too far off.

           I dunno, I just get the feel that as someone who’s been alone for a LONG while, without any real positive interactions with people or older figures… Isaac’s just in a kind of generally moody, angsty sort of headspace akin to an angsty teenager, obviously unreasonable in some regards, but not truly, his feelings are valid and you can tell that by the end of the day, he just wants to be left alone and in peace.

           So it feels really sweet to have Isaac actually like- Talk to an older figure who for once is acting as a mentor, passing on some real wisdom and guidance. The Captain can tell that Isaac needs someone to help him through what is a VERY confusing part of his life, a part that will decide a lot for him –again, like a teenager- and he’s very patiently and considerately advising Isaac; But at the same time, he’s not condescendingly lecturing him either. The Captain shows Isaac a lot of respect and consideration, and is both talking to him as an equal, but also as a mentor if that makes sense.

           And to me, that’s just really nice and heartwarming to watch, because with Dracula also in mind, I’m lowkey getting the impression of Isaac as this like; Jaded youth who secretly yearns for approval by someone for once, we can kind of see this from his abuser in the flashback. 

          Isaac hasn’t quite completely gotten over this, but with the Captain, Isaac can finally get that validation and support that he really needs and craves from an older figure, in a way that isn’t toxic and unhealthy. And I love Dracula and I will always applaud his decision to save Isaac’s life at the end of Season 2, how THAT led to Isaac learning to live for himself, I will forever love that moment even more from now on;

           But I think Dracula and I can both agree that he’s not, like. The healthiest role model nor person for Isaac to look up to, nor dedicate himself towards. Really, nobody is the healthiest person for Isaac to dedicate himself towards, he needs to live for himself after all! So it really was for the best that Isaac had himself cut off from that sort of toxic dependency; Dracula is an ENORMOUS step-up from Isaac’s abuser, sure, but he still represented Isaac’s refusal to really value himself, only just in relation to others.

           Anyhow, I really appreciate that talk where Isaac low-key finds a bit of a Father Figure in the Captain. Maybe I’m just protecting a little, but I found it very endearing how the Captain talks directly to Isaac as a person, in many ways he’s kind of firm and fair, but in a way that shows that he actually CARES about Isaac, and not that he’s just trying to get his own way. 

          Like, the Captain is interested in seeing Isaac prosper, but he’s not toxically dedicating himself to Isaac, the way Isaac would’ve done to Dracula’s memory; And that ability to help others and invest in them, while still being yourself, was no doubt enlightening for Isaac.

           Just… that side-eye glance of Isaac’s bear the end, actually stopping to think and consider, when the Captain tells him that hey, you can be a ruler! An almost endearing kind of immature desire to deny this in a rather “It’s not a PHASE” type of way, but it is in fact clearly getting to him, whether he likes to admit or not, and it’s kind of flustering Isaac. When the Captain gives him no shit but still treats him like a person. In general, all of Isaac’s interactions in Season 3 came from older figures who were a lot more experienced than him, which I think just adds to this idea that… 

          He really is kind of young and inexperienced in a lot of ways. And he really needs some second opinions to surround himself with, perspectives that are at times differing; Which I think is a neat contrast with Carmilla, who mostly relies on an echo chamber of her sisters and isn’t very receptive to different opinions.

           But yeah, Isaac is an utter mood, basically a moody, edgy teenager, who just needs some love and cherishing, some real mentorship and guidance, provided with actual respect and consideration, so he can get through what is an incredibly confusing AND formative period of his life. 

          It makes me all the more happy that it turns out for the best for him, and I really want to see a fic where like; Him and Hector encounter Dracula and Lisa, with all four on healthier terms, and Dracula’s sort of joy at seeing his other two sons being happy and living for themselves like he’d hoped- While Hector and Isaac are lowkey like, “See Dad! See how we’ve really become our own person, isn’t that really cool?” In that sort of excited, endearing way where they show a lot of respect and admiration, and place a lot of faith and trust in Vlad’s opinion. 

          Because even if they aren’t dependent on Dracula’s opinion, it’s still nice to see him validated and swell with pride, to actually see his Forge Masters get along as he’d always hoped. Like a sort of Coming of Age moment where they happily reflect on how much they’ve grown, to people who’d really respect and appreciate it, telling them that hey, your love for me, it paid off- It really meant a lot and I’m happy to tell the both of us that it wasn’t for nothing, it really meant SO much to me and helped, thank you!

           It’s just… Really endearing how we can see Isaac comfortably, in a safe space and level of interaction that isn’t plagued by threat nor violence; Afford to get snappy with someone else, like he can actually express his feelings at the Captain, but he doesn’t have to worry about holding himself to a subordinate level like with Dracula. Isaac can just be himself without having to constantly brace himself for the possibility of conflict or bloodshed, he can just comfortably exist in this space with a stranger and actually, fully, talk with someone who he feels actually gets and understands him on some level.

          Isaac is in a good environment where he can just let himself out, and it’s incredibly refreshing to watch- It was no doubt extremely cathartic to Isaac, I imagine. And it really stands to show that just as Lisa advised Dracula, traveling around the world really can be good for your health, for opening your mind and worldview; So it’s sweet to see that Dracula ended up passing on and applying Lisa’s wisdom to his low-key son, and that wisdom DID end up working out for him in the end! Thanks, Lisa.

         Now I can only imagine Isaac talking to Lisa about this and feeling really grateful, because she ended up inspiring HIM as well… And Lisa just looks wryly at Dracula like, Oh so you DID take my advice, and not only that, passed it onto others as well?

         And THAT just makes me imagine an older Isaac who continues the cycle of not abuse, but growth and guidance, who sees himself later on in another angry youth who reminds him a lot of himself, and then guides them to be more constructive- Because believe it or not, this wise King DOES understand what it’s like.

         He chuckles to himself when he realizes how the tables have turned, how HE’s the one giving The Talk to some kid, and he kindly, nostalgically, gratefully reflects on the Captain’s wisdom, and how it lives on through him and now this youth. Isaac and the kid are not so different and this realization of similarity and common ground just helps Isaac with accepting that human part of himself, and reaching out compassionately.

         Isaac is joked with and given much-needed fun and levity, while still taken seriously and respected as an individual; And I’m sure it means a lot to him, not that he fully realizes it yet. The Captain really expresses faith and belief in Isaac to grow up and support others through his own wisdom, the Captain sees himself in Isaac and that’s really fascinating- How this stranger is acting on this empathy to talk to Isaac and relate to him, to humanize him as a person for once. And it’s kind of shocking for Isaac to realize that others can actually relate to and see themselves in him, this alleged ‘monster’ and ‘thing’.

         It’s just neat to see an older figure express belief and expectation in Isaac to be something good because he thinks the best of him, rather than Isaac dedicating his belief to someone else, and it kind of inspires and incentivizes Isaac to do better with his life. That maybe he CAN grow and this isn’t the end for him, and one day teach others- Because maybe he DOES have something valuable to offer! The Captain recognizes Isaac as someone with potential and growth, and the ability to nurture and be positive, and I love that. 

         Especially with how Isaac dedicates himself to Dracula and his ‘wisdom of ages’, only for the Captain to turn around and suggest that Isaac himself has his own knowledge worth passing on, and that’s more than enough reason for Isaac to live for himself, then. It’s very nice to see Isaac lowkey latch onto a positive authority figure and actually be emotionally rewarded for it like he needs and deserves. And it’s even sweeter how Isaac leaves the Captain with an amicable farewell wave, and even AFTER an immediate negative experience, Isaac still decides to do better, showing that his lessons really can apply and retain underneath hardship.

         Isaac is challenged but in a healthy way that he can actually engage with and really apply himself towards, because he is a very clever person, he’s allowed to think and be rewarded for it. And it makes it all the more interesting how Isaac in Season 4 does see himself as a holy figure in a sense, not necessarily out of arrogance I feel, but from a real understanding that he’s worth a lot himself. And now Isaac can embrace happily his own self-value and what he has to offer, and his ability to do good, that maybe he ISN’T a monster but in some ways a hero, imagine that!

           (Actually, maybe Castlevania really IS a Coming-of-Age tale in a sense. Hector and Isaac’s growth are obvious, we know Trevor and Alucard is admittedly kind of emotionally stunted teenagers who learn to open up and trust, and even Sypha has her moments where she sees how the world can really suck –like the end of Season 3- before deciding for herself to have agency and initiative, and not be a bit player in someone else’s story regardless, in addition to openly defying some Speaker traditions like a rebellious teenager, because good for her! A narrative about really learning to take initiative and control of your own story, to live life for yourself, DOES seem very Coming-of-Age now does it?)

[mc-critical]

I really don’t understand the amount of people who apparently dislike Mihrimah for not giving Rüstem a chance/not having Rüstem grow on her. I don’t know entirely how I feel about Mihrimah as a character but I feel like if you were to dislike her that’d be a silly reason. It was a opportunistic marriage, one she never wanted and to a man she never loved. Not to mention he was also borderline pedophilic (when he said to her on her wedding night that he had been “waiting for this moment for years” when she was 17..okay) and then coercing her into consumating the marriage through the threat of suicide. Sure, the circumstances of Rüstem’s life were sad, but I don’t understand how that entails him being *entitled* to Mihrimah’s love or affection. And if anything I found Rüstem to be misogynistic and possibly even abusive, which likely made marriage to him all the worse. Mihrimah’s definitely not perfect or above criticism, but that doesn’t mean she owed any man love, sex or affection, royal borne woman or not.

I don't understand them, either. Because this is the last thing Mihrimah should be disliked for.

Rüstem is a very odious character with minimal redeeming qualities. His supposed love for Mihrimah is established disturbingly early on and while that may have fled over the audience's heads (it sure did fly over my head when I first watched the show!) because their marriage is a historical fact and as such, is automatically considered the normal course of things - the questionable pedophilic implications are definitely there and send off the alarming signs of utterly problematic behavior. Sure, he's done his duty by saving her after she fell off a horse and (little!) Mihrimah thanked him for it, but it is clearly seen in his eyes by the second episode he's on-screen that there's something more and something baffling when the girl is so young. And it only escalated from there.

Obviously, most of his fanbase ignores or flat out misses this aspect of his character, but I also find people that think that his attitude to Mihrimah is the only bad thing about Rüstem when I find most of his negative traits to be present outside of Mihrimah, but with her witnessing them. I feel the connection to Iskender Çelebi and the way he bacame the stable-man of the castle are his most important character establishing moments: they shine a light into his sneakiness and ability to play dirty, but also reveal his immediate prejudice against Ibrahim. The ambition, similar to Hürrem's, but not for the same reasons, is set up from the get-go. He's seemingly following Iskender, just like he comes to seemigly follow Hürrem, but he always forges his own path for his own gain. His alleged "loyalty" is the thing that Rüstem usually gets the most credit for, but while he begins to look like Hürrem's loyal companion that shall fulfill her every order, this whole facade is deconstructed and ultimately, totally broken apart in S04. His character establishing moments recontextualize all the decisions he makes in that season and show the true nature of his ambition: he followed Hürrem when she prevailed over everyone, he followed her when she seemingly gave him the world and all the desired power and when she and the one she wanted for the throne were put into a disadvantaged position and Selim got the upper hand, he ran straight for the opportunity, despite of him making an oath in front of the Quran not to do that. He turns out to be simply an opportunist hyena who works only for his own gain. Nothing more. Just like he saw the opportunity to get rid of the stable-man before him in the past, now he sees the opportunity to be on the winning side again with Selim. He doesn't care who is he in front of and who he promised what, as long as they're of no use to him, he bails. His "loyalty" immediately disappears from his positive traits, because it turns out he never had it in the first place. People praise him for his loyalty for Mihrimah, but that "loyalty" also lasted so long - when he found out that she wouldn't ever come to love him, he began to bang with Gracia Mendez, in conjunction with the betrayal of what Hürrem stood up for. Now, tell me, how can Mihrimah love such a guy? That was one of the only reasons she tolerated him and when even that was lost, how can she still keep her ties with him?

[His backstory is sad indeed, but the only thing it does is put his actions into perspective, not justify them or make him likeable somehow. Especially when what that "character lore dump" specifically explains is his refusal to tell Nigar where her daughter is - the backstory makes that action logical for his character, but it's still framed as nothing short of spiteful. That said, he still does have some soft sides and the arc with his brother is where I found him the most sympathetic - this is the time Rüstem actually showed vulnerability without false alarms or disguise and his brother was probably the only thing that was precious to him and stayed precious after all these years, consistently throughout his screentime. What helps even more, is the brother's role as a moral compass and the last bridge between the past/his loyalties and the future/the victories he would achieve through opportunism. That was the last gasp of what was left of his possible humanity and after his brother was killed, he let it go almost instantly, because... well, after he willingly chose his own life in the saray, he might as well continue to live it, right? Him saving a boy in S03 without any hesitation whatsoever, was also respectable. But these demonstrations of a softer side of his being are also taking place outside of Mihrimah, but with her not witnessing them altogether. And they do little in changing the general impression of Rüstem's character and his relationship with Mihrimah.]

We have to keep in mind that Mihrimah's whole S03 arc was finding purpose in her life and finding true love. She had many love stories throughout the series with different people, different personalities and different motives to try to make it work with them. No matter what they've went through together and despite of them all having the same outcomes due to different outside (and inside) factors, there is a reason she fell for these people in the first place. Okay, while for Bali Bey it was a bizarre, puppy, immature, childish love, for Taşlicalı something truly genuine began to flourish with all the glances, poems, dedication (Mahidevran succeeded to break them up, but it's not to be denied that Taşlicalı was very hard to convince and he was still thinking of her afterwards) and sweet words. She got a call for a new adventure with him. Bali Bey, on the other hand, was adored by her mostly for his handsomeness, I feel, but even when he tore all her dreams apart, he showed tact and respect. What I mean to say is, if Rüstem has qualities that are "worthy of Mihrimah", wouldn't she see them? Wouldn't she see all these virtues? Because all she sees before the marriage are his words that she will marry him, that she will be his and that's it. The best she sees of him is his good manners when he asks her whether she wants something or stuff, but he could do that with everyone else, knowing his post, and the previous implications make even that alone head scratching. Why would she want a man like that? I agree with all your points. Are you, people, denying Mihrimah her feelings? She realized the potential advantages of this marriage and agreed to do it regardless, why does she have to come to love him when he truly gives her no real reasons to, even before she married him?

I believe Rüstem cares about Mihrimah, albeit in his own distorted, toxic way, but in reality, he didn't do her any good. His relationship with Mihrimah revels in manipulation and facades for her to keep, because she has to "protect" her brothers. Rüstem never actually took account of her own feelings or opinions on matters, especially when what she proposed wasn't an opportunistic enough option for him to afford. Their interactions are mostly focused on the survival of the game and the actions that have to be taken to achieve that. He often puts an unbelievable amount of pressure on her, which while given because of the system they live in, hurt more than it helped. Their relationship was never allowed to flourish in a healthy manner and Mihrimah could never be truly herself in it, not even for a moment. The castle she lived in, her home, was merely full of tension every day, not a source of comfort. His stoic, serious cunning contrasts with her own spirit. Not to mention that it always seemed he considered his marriage to Mihrimah as a price, a goal he had finally achieved and I doubt that she wasn't aware of it to some extent. The root of the marriage is only political opportunism and no matter how hard you try, you simply cannot force a person to love someone they're with only out of sheer necessity, only for a purpose for "the greater good". Rüstem never did anything to earn Mihrimah's love and she shouldn't be hated for not loving him. This is what MC Rüstem is as a character, whether we like it or not, and he isn't a healthy person for Mihrimah. If she couldn't warm up to him when she fully got to know him in their alone time, that means something is missing. That means he just isn't for her and. that's. OKAY.

But there may be reasons why some people could dislike Mihrimah because of it. I offer my experience with cases I've encountered in forums: these people are usually very invested in Hürrem's character to the point they view everything she does as excusable, at the least, so of course they would want to justify Hürrem marrying Mihrimah to Rüstem. But plainly selfish political gain is no justification and that may leave cracks in their view of Hürrem and it all may disturb them to a great amount. That's why they channel this ire on Mihrimah and perhaps demand for her to warm up to Rüstem, so they get the justification Hürrem supposedly deserves, especially paralleled with Valide and Mahidevran's previous attempt to marry Aybige and Mustafa, who.. surprise, surprise (but not really), didn't love each other. There's another facet to this, with people seeing or wanting to see Mihri only as "her mother's daughter" and not wanting to marry, not loving Rüstem destroys that picture, because there's a "crack in the system", she doesn't listen to her mother, who obviously knows better and that could be disappointing or demotivating, given the expectations she has set when she defended her in E84. Or maybe they dislike Mihrimah for not loving Rüstem, because they do find something in him. They love "bad boys" and genuinely don't know why Mihrimah doesn't, either and that could make them see her as an annoyance. Or maybe they just anticipate more juicy scenes between her and Rüstem because of the probable chemistry between the two actors and if they watch it only for the spectacle (believe me, such people really exist!), they may insist that Mihrimah is only spoiled and ruined everything for them. Or maybe, again, people may find this insulting to the historical facts or whatnot and if Mihrimah didn't not stand him, this "mess" of writing could be fixed a little. The writers have ruined her character along with the history, according to them. It's absurd, I know and I don't get it, either, but the reasons are there, as far as I'm concerned. That still doesn't take away from the fact that this is the weirdest accusation you could throw at Mihrimah, with how Rüstem himself is.

You're right that Mihrimah has many other, vastly more offputting traits that she could be disliked for. Little Mihrimah is very brash and spoiled and entitled, to the point she gave her own mother a run for her money. That was gone when she grew up, but it would be understandable if some didn't actually believe the change, especially when she shows this side of hers again every now and then. She could be perceptive, but could also be prone to influence at the same time, sometimes to an annoying degree. There have been times where she has let her own bias lead her and that clouded her judgement in several occasions. She came to idealize her mother too much sometimes, as well. She was terribly insistent on her infatuation with Bali Bey and letting go of it took her very long. She didn't want to listen much to the enemies of her own mother. Her huge love for Bayezid prevented her from viewing Selim as objectively. She could be vengeful. She could be bossy. She couldn't fully face someone calling her out on her mistakes. (the confrontation with Selim in E139) She became so engrained to her castle life that when she was offered a way out, she didn't follow it. All these are very interesting character flaws for me, but I get why they might be a dealbreaker. But disliking or hating her for not loving Rüstem? Heck, hating her for her contribution to Mustafa's death alone is more valid than that! Disliking her for all these flaws piling up together is perfectly reasonable. But for this? It's strange.

[theunderdogwrites]

In Defense of Marilyn Manson

Just kidding.

This is another one of those ‘if you live under a rock, you might not know what is going on’ pieces. But because this story appears to be unfolding daily, I’d think you’ve heard a murmur here or there even if you haven’t really paid too much attention to it because for many, I think this may fall into the “that guy has been a messed-up weirdo for years so I’m not surprised” category.

Please note that in NO WAY I am making fun of this situation, but I learned a long time ago that I require a certain amount of humor to be able to digest much of what this world presents to me.

As always, let me give you the Coles Notes version with the hopes you will go and do your own reading as well.

On February 1 actress Evan Rachel Wood posted this on her Instagram:

"The name of my abuser is Brian Warner, also known to the world as Marilyn Manson. He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years. I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission. I am done living in fear of retaliation, slander or blackmail. I am here to expose this dangerous man and call out the many industries that have enabled him, before he ruins any more lives. I stand with the many victims who will no longer be silent."

Quick history lesson – They started dating in 2007 when she was 18 and he was 34 and were engaged for a brief time in 2010.

This was Manson’s response to what she wrote:

"Obviously, my art and my life have long been magnets for controversy, but these recent claims about me are horrible distortions of reality. My intimate relationships have always been entirely consensual with like-minded partners. Regardless of how - and why - others are now choosing to misrepresent the past, that is the truth."

Since the original statement on February 1 a number of women have come forward with stories of their own ranging from physical and emotional abuse to human trafficking. And everyday something new is revealed. Evan Rachel Woods is feverishly posting on her Insta-Story and is slowly burying Manson in an ocean of consequences. She isn’t “fired up” or “a woman scorned”, she is a victim rising above the shame she has felt and the fear of what others will say about her to tell her story and encourage others to do the same. She is the voice that started the ball rolling. The ball that is about to crush Marilyn Manson.

Whenever I write stuff that is currently being heavily featured in the media, I always dive into articles so I can get as much information as possible. But more importantly, I plunge my sensitive little soul into the murky depths known as “the comments section”. I do this because unlike those polished, finished pieces the comments section will give you a better idea of what your fellow human beings think and feel about the topic at hand. And it is never polished or even polite. And often not for the faint at heart. In case you didn’t already know – people can be quite terrible.

The comments section is the modern-day gladiator pit. Only most (not all) of the participants are not ripped, athletic warriors but rather drooling basement dwellers with one hand down their pants (not gender specific by the way) and the other hand maltreating the letters on their keyboard.

Side note: Look, I am not the grammar police as I often just push past all the warnings from the Gestapo editing program in Microsoft Word. BUT I know the value of proper spelling, well placed punctuation and valid attempts to appear smarter than a domesticated turkey by making sure sentences are well-thought out and complete. Raising your argument doesn’t mean USING ALL CAPS AND ABUSING THESE THINGS -> !!!

I just deleted three paragraphs going over the recent “reckoning” that has taken place in the past few years with regards to sexual and physical abuse accusations against (mostly) men in positions of some kind of power. I eliminated all that writing because I started to tumble off topic. I’m not writing about all the dicks now getting their comeuppance, but rather the reactions to it being Marilyn Manson’s turn in the chamber.

Victim shaming is sadly a real thing.

The easiest way I can explain this to you – if a person gets pickpocketed and then blamed because they should’ve known better than to carry their wallet in their back pocket.

Evan Rachel Woods and others have come out to accuse Manson of some pretty appalling acts of abuse and what I’ve found to be the biggest reaction is, “How did they not know he was a bad guy? His music is so graphic and they thought it was all an act? Why did they stay so long?”. As innocent as those questions might seem, and I say that because our brains don’t always serve us or others well, it is a form of discrediting those women. Let’s be honest here… it’s hard to look at Marilyn Manson and his art form and not say, “What the fuck, this guy has bad idea written all over him!”. I feel that is a perfectly reasonable response, but that is where it should end. I think it is fair to pause and attempt to understand the choices of others, but it’s heartless to minimize their experience by placing blame on them for a situation we couldn’t possibly understand if it has never happened to us.

And like I’ve quoted before: People only understand from their level of perception. But that doesn’t stop them from laying on the judgement and damaging already fragile individuals with their inability to show compassion for a fellow human being. Reading through comment sections isn’t just maddening, it’s disappointing and sad but also a real look into how awful many people feel about themselves… to the point where they seem to derive some pleasure or satisfaction from condemning a rape victim for wearing a short skirt and getting drunk.

So… we have to touch on this to be balanced: innocent until proven guilty. Only these days it’s an automatic trial by media with the public acting as judge, jury and executioner. This is where “cancel culture” steps in and within days can destroy an entire career / life. I am not a fan of cancel culture. It does not give people a chance to learn from their mistakes or make amends as it immediately harms their very existence. Often times even before any proof has surfaced. I don’t think I need to tell you how dangerous this is… the fact that just an accusation could ruin your life.

Let me make this clear: if someone comes forward and claims they’ve been sexually assaulted/abused, they need to be taken seriously and not dismissed based upon the circumstances, their gender identity, the color of their skin, their economic position or profession or the person they’re accusing. In turn, the individual being accused should be given time to address the claims before the public begins demolishing their life.

A reoccurring comment in almost all these cases where someone comes forward and alleges abuse YEARS after it happened, is – “Why did they wait so long to come forward?”.

Is this a fair question? Sure. And I feel it is asked because our brain needs to find a way to understand the information we are being given. Because while we’d all like to think that if in the same situation we’d be unfuckable with and anyone who dared to bring damage to our doorstep would immediately suffer the consequences, we actually cannot predict our reaction. There are too many unknown variables to be able to confidently say we’d instantly speak up and seek retribution.

The fear of not being believed. The fear of being blamed. The fear of rejection. The fear of retaliation from the person being accused. The fear of being forever defined by your experience. The fear.

It does not matter the why, what matters is the chance they’ve taken by speaking up at all. Those who come forward should be embraced, not ridiculed. Not abandoned. Not criticized.

“Don’t ask why victims wait so long to speak up. Ask what systems were in place to keep them quiet”. Anonymous

I own a few Marilyn Manson CD’s. And I’ve even attended one of his concerts. Would I say I am a fan? Probably a number of years ago I was but truthfully, I’ve not paid attention to any of his music in recent years because I feel it devolved while my taste evolved. That’s not a slam against him or anyone who fancies his work, it’s more a statement on how I’ve matured and now seek out music that feels authentic to me.

The one concert I attended was opened by Courtney Love. I know, what a duo to pay money to see. Near the end of Manson’s set he made a disparaging remark about Love and trashed her music. At the time he was wearing some pretty hefty platform shoes so it made it all the more hilarious when from out of nowhere she charged like a rhino and tackled him to the stage; throwing punches at his head all the way down. When he finally was able to get up, he announced the show was over. There would be no encore and then him and his bandmates trashed the stage in a temper tantrum worthy of a toddler Napoleon. Still makes me laugh to this day.

Shoutout to Evan Rachel Wood and her most recent movie ‘Kajillionaire’. Watched it on demand about a month ago and it’s a brilliant comedy that will also pull at your heart. I highly recommend you give it a chance.

Check out the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiMPCevu8Wk

[taglegend]

Tag Fact #3 -  I’ve come to realize I’ve always been a fan artist more than I thought. so here is a timeline of influences that shaped my childhood to now. from nostalgic times, to sad changes, to great loss, to strange rises to fame and phases, to stepping stones and finally a laughing place. all the things that make up your favorite fan artist Tag.

1. Rayman (bumped into this in the year of 1999) was actually the first fandom (with crossovers) I bumped into when I was 9. although the internet wasn’t available at the time it was still fun to dwell in home amusements. I remember the storylines and the OC’s I made but they’re kind of embarrassing and it’s probably a good thing there was no internet. I’ve done fanart and comic crossovers of Rayman with Calvin and Hobbs and Nights Into Dreams, spinoffs of Sonic the Hedgehog OC’s, Yoshi with Pikachu, and the Pokemon/Digimon craze with OC’s and other Nintendo comic shorts. but the drawings and comics are long gone and disappeared in the garage in a backpack due to suspecting my sister’s dad accidentally throwing them away. years later towards the year 2018 (now 28), we decided to move to North Carolina and it was my chance to find them again. unfortunately the backpack was gone just like I suspected (my main stuff), but for some reason I found my Pokemon/Digimon fanart, a good batch of Super Mario drawings (vaguely remember doing these), my sister’s drawings and some other neighborhood kids’ drawings in a dirty box. I was partially happy I found something at least but it was the backpack I wanted the most. sometimes I regret not looking for the backpack (’cause I was too busy being a kid) but it’s alright, noone needs to see that shit anyway, ha ha. anyways, I recall being a fan of Rayman from 1999 ‘til 2002.

2. Sonic Adventure 2 Battle (bumped into this in the year of 2003) my second fandom I bumped into when I was 12 going on 13. at the time, my sister and I both liked the Sonic The Hedgehog Franchise based on the Battle remake and ended up making our own secret fanart club that consisted of only us two members. she liked Sonic (and that was her boyfriend, ha ha) and I liked Knuckles (and he was my boyfriend, ha ha) and we were crazy in love about Shadow’s backstory. we listened to the game’s soundtracks as we drew fanart and comics after school and man, those were good times. however, as we grew older towards the year of 2005, we ended up having separate rooms and I believe it played a part in disconnecting on the same interest. then one day, I asked her why she wasn’t into Sonic anymore and she replied, “Because I grew up.” I was sad after that and slowly observed that she was influenced by the emo culture and the new friends she’s made. I was the only member of our little club for a little longer...but eventually I moved on too. I still have some surviving fanart we did together but it doesn’t mean shit anymore since she turned out to be an abusive mother from the last I’ve heard of her. 

3. Gorillaz (bumped into this in the year of 2006). as the Sonic years were at its end, I first heard the song “Feel Good Inc” on Music Choice and seeing the first image of them as displayed on this post (except the fan-made background doesn’t count since I can’t find the original artwork). this was my third fandom and later had proper access to the internet to the website I still currently use called DeviantArt. at first I liked 2D but eventually fell for Murdoc and developed a spiritual connection towards the character as obviously seen in my old fanart and rare photos of my devotion shrines on Valentine’s Day and his birthday every year. for the longest time since being a permanent fan from 2006-2017 (11 1/2 years) I had no knowledge that it was a political propaganda band and other realizations I don’t want to talk about. I only followed them because it was a cartoon and not the bullshit behind the musical project. the world I’ve built and support for them for all those 11 1/2 years shattered the fuck out of me and I just wanted to be left alone to find myself again, somehow. activity stopped on all my profiles, the flow of fanart stopped since I now cringe from the fan service and felt I was used for my talent. I didn’t want to be reminded of it all so I took down all my Gorillaz fanart and archived them for old followers’ nostalgia but also in the hopes they’ll be forgotten in my timeline. I ceased to exist in the fandom for huge personal reasons but it’s best to not say why. I know for sure that the fandom wonders what happened but it’s none of their business. THE END.

4. Waluigi (although I knew he’s been around since 2000 during childhood, I took deep interest once I revisited the character again in the year of December 2013). as silly as this sounds, when I revisited him again, the character was so bizarre that I ended up staying up 3 nights and 3 days in a row just looking all over the internet on everything about him and the questionable “hush-hush” absence of a backstory. despite there being no backstory he slowly gained a cult following and in many ways it’s a good thing. however, since the early 2010′s tension has been building up between Nintendo and its fans about him starring in a main game but everyone hasn’t fully gotten it in their heads that it’s not gonna happen. as long as Nintendo is in control of that, the fandom will not win, I’m sorry to say. on the other hand, if it’s going to be this way, then that’s what fanart and comic projects are for. as for me, I am doing my very best to get my comic project “Waluigi Land” going. again, I apologize if it’s taking very long to get Chapter 2 going if you’ve been keeping track but aha moments need to develop before I start permanent drawing (since concepts, character design and storyline needed improvement badly). as of right now I am still a Waluigi fan and I will not quit on him.

5. Turbo from Wreck-It-Ralph (although it debuted in 2012, I watched the movie two years later into the year 2014). for some bizarro reason, I had an unhealthy obsession with this character to the point where I dressed up as him for Halloween 2014. only 2 fanarts of him and the Turbo Twins exist on my profiles, mainly because my mind was more focused on just ‘thinking about him’ or ‘being him’ rather than drawing physical drawings. luckily, this supposed alleged fandom didn’t last long a little after Halloween so I chalk it up as a very short phase. to this day I don’t know what has gotten over me about him. the only thing I can think of now is that I think it’s because the character had yellow eyes and teeth but I don’t know. now that I think of it, that little fucker was ugly as hell and I STILL don’t know what had gotten over me. one day, my brother mentioned what that was about, and I said to him, “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

6. Undertale (although it debuted in 2015, I later took interest in it in 2016). It was all about Sans and Papyrus. I couldn’t get enough of the skeleton bros. eventually Toriel and Mettaton EX became my favorites but it took a long time to draw more of all 4 of them because I had other important things to do in my life plus I was still waiting for the next Gorillaz album to revive my imaginative juices (or so I thought). I really want to have this as one of my frequent fandoms but I just don’t have time for it anymore. it’s still in the back of my head to want to draw them but at this point I still have other better interests to be in. and besides, I’m lazy just like Sans.

7. Cuphead (June 28th, 2017 was the official day I called quits on the British-based band Gorillaz due to the bullshit behind it. since that date I was lost, had no inspiration to look forward to and no cartoon guy to make me smile...but lo and behold of the same year, I took an interest in playing the game Cuphead and man...that shit was a frightening exaggerated metaphor for being on that one drug (forgot the name though) and having sex at the same time but man that was the best fun I’ve had in years. I mean, it’s like, enemies are just so happy to murder you and that scared the shit outta me. and the facial exaggeration?....I think I should stop, ha ha. anyways, the Moldenhauers saved my ass from spiraling down, they have no clue. anyways, eventually I became a permanent fan of their work so to ease the hurt and erase my past from the G-fandom I had to re-wire my brain into a different cartoon category that’s a rather more American, so anything Toon related like Roger Rabbit, Felix the Cat or another favorite that’s a western-based cartoon makes me feel better, especially my new man .......King Dice <3 <3<3<3. however, there was something about this new fandom category I still didn’t quite understand until the date March 14th, 2020. I finally understood what it was but I feel I shouldn’t bring it up. anyways, Cuphead and anything western or rubber hose is my last stop in inspiration for the remaining years of my life. many say never say never but I believe I’ve found my laughing place and that’s all that matters.

[kinetic-elaboration]

February 13: Star Trek Beyond

Some attempted thoughts on Star Trek Beyond.

So first it was bad lol. It is the worst. I thought maybe it would be less the worst than I had previously thought but it really, really is just irredeemably bad.

Trying to keep up with what was actually happening and talk in the group chat was too difficult and I now feel very exhausted lol. And I’m not even sure what I watched.

I liked Jaylah a lot, including her back story, characterization, “house,” traps, and cool mirror tricks.

I also like Kirk in that emergency uniform with the jacket unzipped.

That’s it! That’s all I liked.

In the past I’ve also said I liked the Spock and Bones parts but I honestly wasn’t a fan of them either this time around!

None of the characters felt IC and none of the relationships felt true or were compelling. Which is particularly egregious given that the alleged theme was strength in unity.

The movie was especially lacking in K/S content or even K & S interaction, which obviously didn’t please me. And it’s definitely the worst Kirk characterization I’ve ever seen. There’s no excuse for that either because it’s halfway through the 5YM, which means he should be pretty close to TOS Kirk--yes, he has a different set of experiences, so there’s going to be some variation, but there’s comparatively less excuse for a radically different characterization than in STXI and STID. They should have had Shatner read the script and make notes lol because whatever else you might say about him he KNOWS Captain Kirk.

Like, he (Kirk) lacked humor and charm and, often, confidence. He had moments when he was very smart and moments when he had a commanding presence. But he had just as many moments when he was whiny or bored and his Captain’s log??? I deserve financial compensation for every time I’ve listened to that. Bored of space?? No, this man is bored when he’s stuck on Earth. He stagnates in desk jobs. He is an adventurer and explorer before he’s ANYTHING else; if you don’t get that, you don’t need to be writing Star Trek.

Also, as I have frequently complained, I’m tired of him having no internal conflict or emotional complexity past his father issues. First reboot movie: dealing with his dead father’s memory and his step-father’s abuse. Fine, that makes sense for how they set up the AU. Second reboot movie: entirely motivated by the need for Manly Vengeance upon the person who killed his father figure. And for this redundant story line (in many sense) we had to lose Pike? Third reboot movie: you’d think he’d finally be ready to move on to other conflicts but actually no this time he’s sad about his birthday and having a longer life span than his...you guessed it!! father!! Yet again.

What else has ever motivated him? Legitimate question.

The destruction of the Enterprise was truly horrific. Long, boring, unwarranted, and without any emotional punch. As if it were just any ship! No, she’s a character in her own right and she’s not to be sacrificed like that but please tell me again how Simon Pegg is a true fan who brought the franchise back to its roots?

B said he did like that they split up the crew into unusual units but I have mixed feelings about it. I don’t entirely disagree, but I don’t think they did a lot that was interesting with any of those separated units. Uhura and Sulu are a cool pair (but this would have been a good opportunity to include Sulu’s semi-canonical crush on Uhura but whatever... a different rant) and they almost did some interesting stuff with them. There were glimmers of a caper in that story line and times when I could tell they were straining especially hard to make Uhura, their Sole Female Main--now that they cut out Rand, Chapel, and even Carol Marcus--into something Feminist and Interesting. But it didn’t quite gel for me. Like, Uhura would be having almost interesting dialogue with the villain and holding her own...and then she loses track of her colleague and has to watch that person die, thus undercutting everything she just said about unity and seeming to prove the villain’s point. Is she competent or not?

Bones and Spock are a pair I care about and like but again I think their canonical relationship in TOS is more interesting than STB showed. I personally read them as like...reluctant best friends who originally just had one person in common, and then realized they also like each other too, but they’ll never really say it. They understand each other but pretend not to. They have fun with the barbs they throw at each other. They both deeply love Jim but in different ways. They enjoy their intellectual debates. (That’s one thing that was definitely missing from them here! The intellectual debates!) So again, there was something there but not enough.

And Kirk and Chekov just happened to land near each other; nothing was done with that relationship per se. They really aren’t people who have much of a relationship in TOS so there’s not a lot to work off of but then on the other hand there IS an opportunity to create something new. Maybe I’m being too harsh and too vague but it just didn’t gel for me. The only specific K and C moment I remember was that supremely un-funny joke about Kirk’s aim as he sets off the “wery large bomb.”

But like there are possibilities.. they’re both pretty horny and Chekov is a whiz kid and Kirk is also very smart and has always been smart... Like in other words people Chekov’s age don’t end up on the bridge crew, in either ‘verse, without the Captain’s say, so even though he’s TOS!Spock’s and AOS!Scotty’s protege, Kirk is important to his life. Something with that maybe??

I’m upset that Spock’s individual story line was about whether or not he should go off and make baby Vulcans because, again as I have complained many times before, that was a conflict he faced and resolved in ten minutes two movies ago, and it doesn’t make sense to me for him to bring it up again now just because the Ambassador is dead. Like... the Ambassador told him to stay in Starfleet!! “Ah, yes, I will honor him by doing precisely the opposite of what he wanted me to do.”

Also--if they had made his motivation different or gone into it more, I would have been more into it. Make it about New Vulcan! Say there’s news from New Vulcan that it’s not doing well. Or what if T’Pring got in contact with him? Or what if we used this as an excuse to bring in Sarek?

This is part of a larger point for me which is that STXI set up a really cool AU and STID tried to do something with it--a little hit or miss, but it tried--and instead of pushing even more at the AU and developing it more and doing more with it... STB just ignored it! Was that part of what Paramount was warning about with making it “not too Star Trek-y?” Was it SUPPOSED to be a movie you could watch without having seen the last two? If so they did succeed but like.. .why? They made the supremely ballsy move of blowing up a founding Federation planet two movies ago and now they’ve just forgotten about that and all the reverberations that would necessarily have?

But of course we got a call back to Kirk being a Beastie Boys fan so.... Guess it was Deep all along.

We all three agreed that the core story of this film was potentially interesting but could have been done as a 50-some minute episode of a TV series rather than a whole-ass 2 hour movie. First off, cutting or cutting down the action sequences would have shaved off half an hour easily.

I’m frustrated in large part because there are certain things that are interesting here. I do like the concept of the crew being pulled on to an alien planet by a ship of former Federation crew, from the early days of the Federation/deep space flight, who were presumed missing but are somehow still alive because they have turned into aliens/used alien tech to prolong life, and who have also captured other aliens, like Jaylah, for the main crew to interact with. All of that was cool.

I would even be okay with these old Federation crew being villains but I don’t think that’s necessary or even the most interesting take.

But...first of all, as my mom pointed out, Krall was basically Nero in his illogical motivations: feeling aggrieved because someone who couldn’t help him didn’t help him and then just maniacally wanting revenge. It made more sense to me with Nero in a way. Maybe that was because he was better characterized, maybe it was because his anger was more personal (the loss of his wife), maybe--probably--it was because he was angry at Spock and Spock had actually promised to help, so there was some kernel of logic in his sense of betrayal, even if it was out of proportion etc. Also, Nero’s mania was portrayed as mania--we were all supposed to recognize that the strength of his emotion was warranted but his logic was deeply flawed. I think we were supposed to think Krall had some kinda... real criticism of the Federation, but in fact he doesn’t! He’s wrong! So like if he’d been angry with the Federation for abandoning him but the narrative and the other characters explicitly recognize that he’s wrong--the Federation tried but he was just doing something very dangerous and he recognized that danger on signing on--that might have been more palatable to me.

I’m not sure I’m making sense here entirely or explaining myself as well as I could.

I just don’t entirely get Krall’s beef with the Federation. I don’t get that whole “being a soldier and having conflict makes you strong and having people you can rely on and connections and community makes you weak.” That seems pretty obviously false. It also doesn’t really seem, not that I’m an expert, but particularly in line with military ethos either.

BUT the idea that he had a life that was comfortable to him as a soldier and then the Federation comes in and forms Starfleet and says, actually, we’re going to pull back on the soldiering and up the diplomacy and the exploration and the science--yeah, I could see that. I DO think Starfleet is military but even if you must insist it’s not, it’s clearly based on and formed from the military, and it has certain military functions. So obviously the first people to join or be folded into Starfleet probably were more explicitly military.

So he’s one of those people. Now he’s supposed to be a scientist and a diplomat and an explorer and he doesn’t like that. He’s given this very prestigious and interesting mission and jumps at it. Starfleet warns him, you might go beyond where we can reach, we might not be able to help you. That’s fine. But then when his ship is stranded and he is lost, he gets angry--maybe somewhat irrationally, but understandably--why?? Why did the Federation do this to him? What was even the point? When he put himself in danger before, at least he knew why. But just flying around space for the hell of it, and this is the cost? So that’s what creates his anger.

I thin this could be tied into Kirk’s diplomacy at the beginning--if the scene were written to not be a comedy bit where Kirk looks like an incompetent buffoon and is completely disrespectful the whole time. He’s good at this job and we should say it. But we could emphasize that this IS a diplomatic mission often, just as often as it’s a military or scientific mission. Maybe we could include other bits of their missions, too, to play up the variety of things they do and roles they play.

Another thing I think could be interesting, going back to my point about Spock, Vulcan, and using the first two movies and expanding on the world building... what if Spock wanted to leave Starfleet for better, more well-defined reasons, and we used that? Paralleled the two? Connected the two?

Because I think Vulcan in the AOS verse is very interesting and the movies didn’t do nearly enough with it. First, we have the Romulans showing up way earlier, at least visibly: in TOS, no one knew what they looked like or their connection to Vulcans until Spock is in his late 30s. In AOS, it happens not long after he’s born. So he’s growing up probably with more anti-Vulcan racism floating around the Federation. THEN Vulcan is destroyed. Now it has nothing and it needs to rely on the rest of the Federation, which must be both humbling and frustrating to many Vulcans, on top of the extreme tragedy of losing everything. Most of their population, a lot of their history, their manufacturing, their scientific facilities, their resources, their animals, literally whatever else you can think of that a planet has--all gone. Now all of the survivors have lived some period on an alien planet, by definition, and they’re probably very dependent on the Federation not just to set up the new colony, but to replace all of the resources--natural and Vulcan-made--that they lost. And they’re a founding Federation member, Earth’s first contact. They’re especially important. And now they’re weak, and reliant on others.

So maybe Spock, early on, hears from New Vulcan and they’re not doing well. Maybe we hear from Sarek or T’Pring (...I’d just like to see reboot T’Pring). Maybe it’s not about, or just about, having children, but about being from an important and ancient family, and being seen as a hero for his part in the Narada mission, that makes him want to go and help rebuild their government (taking his mother’s place perhaps? she was on the High Council) or their scientific facilities, or the VSA, or their space travel capabilities--you know Vulcan had space ships of their own, outside of Federation ships. This would be the perfect place to showcase that tension between wanting to be independent--out of pride, out of fear, even--and needing help, because Vulcan could not survive without the Federation, probably less than 10 years out from the original planet’s destruction.

And then you feed it back into Krall.

So I could see like... well the tension, and then Krall comes in, and he's angry that the Federation "abandoned" him, but we actually explicitly address this. Maybe Spock gets to interact with him and say "I get it. You had a life and a mission and a purpose that was comfortable for you. Then the Federation came in and changed everything. A lot of my people are also feeling upset for similar reasons. But here's why actually you're wrong."

So anyway as you can see I’m smarter and more interesting than Simon Pegg.

I also hated, speaking of writers of this movie, the gay Sulu thing and HEAR ME OUT on this. It’s homophobic. His husband doesn’t have a name? Might not be his husband at all? Looks like he could be his nanny or his brother? As B said “at least grab his butt or something.” That was the most sanitized, no-homo depiction of a gay person I’ve ever seen. He’s gay (see, progressives and queers! gay! you like that right!) but DON’T WORRY STRAIGHTS--he’s in a monogamous relationship and has a child, he’ll show nothing but the most platonic physical affection with his male significant other, and the plot point will be so minuscule you’ll need a microscope to detect it. Also, we’ll throw in a no homo joke about two male characters not wanting to hug and we’ll make sure Kirk and Spock interact as little as possible, because we know they give off Big Queer Vibes every time they’re together.

Yes the last point is a little unfair but can you blame me for being angry about all the “look how hip to the times we are” back-patting that went on in 2016 when canonical bisexual Kirk is RIGHT THERE and we could have had ex-boyfriend Gary Mitchell instead of Unnamed Nanny??

Also Sulu is a hella random choice because again, like... he may not have had an s.o. in TOS but nor was there any indication he was gay. So it seems a LITTLE like they picked him because (1) his original actor is gay and gay people can’t play straight people duh so probably Sulu was Gay All Along I mean did you not get vibes???; and/or (2) asexual Asian stereotypes preclude giving Sulu any kind of love interest, male or female, that is actually... sexual, outright romantic, anything.

Anyway I can’t remember if I had any other thoughts, but I’ve said quite enough I think.

I miss Kirk so much... real Kirk... even my version of AOS Kirk who is probably not even characterized that well but at least I worked with love!!!

[sinnabonka]

Hey Hun! Lots of love to you. For starters I wanted to say that there should be no cell in your body blaming yself in any way. You and your blog were hope for so many people. You were the "you are not crazy" of the final weeks, and I'm forever grateful to you. Instead of dying of anxiety I managed to have a blast in this time of waiting, thanks to you. I passed my master thesis, because you gave me strength to see past the fear. I laughed in those weeks more than in last 5 years, and all of it because of the hope you gave me.

The rest of the msg is going to be pretty emotional rant about the awfulness of it all, and I know my opinion doesn't matter to anyone but I wanted someone important to me to hear my thoughts, if that's ok. It's also ok if you don't want to read it ofc. It's like my breakup letter to the show.

I hear many people cheering for the finale and i find it really hard to deal with. I always considered myself an open person who fights for healthy love as the only redeeming quality of the universe. I could see people's point of view, even if it didn't sit well with mine, and I would always try to hear them out respectfully until they weren't being respectful themselves. That said, I'm fully unable to understand cheering for this type of spiteful content and hearing those cheers makes me feel like the entire world is listening to "this is how you treat your fans, this is how to abuse your power over naive sheep, this is how to keep dumb, hopeful minorities in check" and taking notes.

It also upsets me that the people who gave this show all of themselves and tried to understand it to the core are given no resolution, are spitted on and buried under the rug for doing their best to appreciate the art and the story it was telling. Yet people, who just hang around and watch the show doing the dishes, with no consideration to it's story or characters, got as nonsensical ending as their whole idea of character development in SPN.

I know people say that it was good enough, because it leaves space for guessing and own interpretation, but I feel it's really undermining the extend to which the finale was awful and hurtful to the fans. There is no end that realistically could stop fanfic writers from finding way around it in the world of Supernatural, so saying it was thoughtful of them Is like excusing abusive partner because "they could hit me harder, but they didn't. That means they care"

Lose ends, characters being written in a way that is totally not true to them and their development (personally my biggest allegation), dismissing years of story development, proving that it was all 'queerbaiting' in big part in the end (hell, even the whole "Cas is in heaven so do with it what you will" is a shameful way of appalling to LGBTQ community after using them so hard.

In the pie scene, the roles should be swapped, it's Dean who should say that Cas is on his mind and Sam explaining him that it's only right to keep on living doing good in their name. That's what Dean told Sam at the beginning of the season, when Sam lost Rowena, so it would be at least a bit poetic. This would at least give us some truth from Dean for once, but he died how he lived, in shadow of his fear to be true towards his feelings and needs. And as he died, he bound his little brother to the hunting till the end of his days, by guilting him into it on his deathbed. Guess Dean took after his father.

Have you realised what that emotional "love speech" from Dean to Sam resulted in? It was writers taking back Cas' confession after they didn't need our viewership anymore.

They basically gave us love confession to get us to follow the finale and when they didn't need us anymore, not only they didn't commit to the confession, but they undermined it by having Dean's speech to Sam go the way it did with obviously higher emotional charge, successfully taking back the value of Cas' confession and making it about a bait for "Tumblr idiots"

Finale killed my feelings towards Destiel, not because it wasn't confirmed canon, but because from what I see in the episode, they canonically confirmed that

- for Dean, Cas was only means to an end, which is such an awful way of ending Cas' character arc. They gave him everything he was scared of and nothing close to consolation price and they dare to tell us he had a happy ending, "because they said so". Well, I didn't see him being happy, and knowing what i textually know i can empathise enough to say that he faced a miserable finish. Even Chuck got an end that was better than Cas' fate.

- Dean, given power to do anything he could dream of, chooses to not even greet Cas, after Cas gave his whole life to Dean, told him he loved him and died for him. I know some people consider the little smirk of Dean confirmation of his feelings, but let's be real for just a second. If someone you deeply loved for years confessed to you, told you they thought you don't love them back, you would be freaking running to see them and tell them how much you love them. That smirk to me reads as "I'm relieved to know you're not going to spend eternity in mega hell that i left you in" and we really need to stop giving credit to writers for scraps like this when it's the last episode ever and we know this isn't going anywhere.

Not to mention that by having Jack bring Cas back behind the scenes it just highlights the fact that Dean didn't ask him to do that in episode 19.

As result, I'm unable to look at any Destiel scene and not think "in here Cas already loved him and in here Dean already abuses the power he had over Cas, because of his one-sided love"

And yet, the episode and endgames for everyone (maybe not Sam, but he was seriously pinning for Dean his entire life. Wincest much?) managed to be so bad, that not even bringing Cas back or following up on Destiel would make a difference in my eyes. I know you believe that Destiel would save it, but for me as much as it would be a redeeming quality, it wouldn't be enough to save this awfulness that writer doomed characters with.

And all the Wincest scenes in the finale... I low key expected them to make out and it made me feel physically sick. Also, cutting Misha out because of coronavirus is a cheap excuse. We all know better than to believe that, so let's not fall for the self pity play from the abuser.

If you managed to stay with me till this point, thank you so much for hearing me out. I hope i didn't anger you with my monologue. I will always think of the lamp when i think of you. The reality is that you were the lamp for so many of us in this darkness.

Love you so much, wish all the best to you, take care of yourself and stay safe!

Oh my god, if I didn’t cry with the final, I definitely am crying now. And now I have to explain my partner why I’m staring at my laptop and sobbing ugly. What have you done? 

First of all, I hear you pain, my friend! I share it! I didn’t spend a second after the final without the feeling of my heart being shuttered into million pieces, being stitched back just to break again, and so on and so on. 

I had my first panic attack in two years yesterday, when I kept thinking about the message the show sent to the fandom via Dean’s fate. I have a few posts in my draft on the matter, but I am not sure I will ever share them, because it is one strong depresso, and I don’t think people following me should see how fucked up it really is (if they didn’t get it by themselves, of course). 

I want to remind you, my gentle soul, that the story belongs to us. We know Dean, we know Cas, we know Sam and others. We know that the final is not who they are! I know it’s hard to ignore the text, the canon, because it’s kinda godsent, but the truth is essential. And the final is not the truth.

The truth: 

Cas loves Dean, he sacrificed himself for him, he saved his life on multiple occasions, he told all those beautiful things and he meant every word.

Dean loves Cas, he was on his lowest every time he lost him, Cas was his “big win”, his best friend, his brother, his white light that lead him out of his anger, hatred and despair. He took a dog and called it Miracle, he was looking for a job to retire from hunting, he didn’t kill Chuck - all of that, because the sacrifice Cas made was not in vain! The message was clear. 

I choose to ignore the “Carry on”, the only attention it is going to get is me creating 20 more mails just to put a one star review there and to drop some more salty or bitter comments with it. Maybe I will read through some reviews, too, add them to my collection. 

Maybe I will one day write here an article from scriptwriting perspective how fucked up in was, because that’s what I can do about it, without throwing up. 

If you can’t ignore it, I understand it. It is painful, it is disrespectful, I hate it as much as you do, probably. 

If there’s anything I can do for you to feel better, just drop me a message, we can talk about it. I am on the lowest, too, but maybe we can help each other.

You say I was your lamp. Let me lead you our of the darkness one more time <3 

CW can suck my metaphorical dick (I’m tagging every angry post with it), but Supernatural is not just the show on CW, it’s a big family. 

And you can’t give up on it! You can’t give up on Dean and Cas, you can’t give up on Destiel! It’s so much bigger then the show itself.

Rediscover the show for yourself, remind yourself that Dean and Cas are real, it was never one sided, it was always something amazing. 

What is real? We are.

Don’t you ever change.

I rather have you, cursed or not.

It’s love, hun, and love always wins. 

[khaotungsfirst]

hi ali! i saw your question about woojin & as someone who's been a stay since debut, i figured i'd put in my two cents ^-^ when woojin left in 2019 no real reason as to why he was leaving was given, neither by him nor by jype & it left all of us sad & confused, but the strange thing abt his departure was that he didn't only leave skz he also left jype – a lot of remained in the dark until that one twitter acc popped up and accused him of sexual abuse, of course a lot of us immediately supported the victim but there were a lot of ppl who doubted those claims (they are valid in their opinions, even though i immediately supported the victim) – ever since then a shit ton of rumors have been going around: that he did more than what he was accused for, that he didn't do it all, that he left skz for health reasons (i don't think this is true bc if he did leave for health reasons, i'm pretty sure he wouldn't have left jype), that he made up a company to deny all rumors, that he's been blacklisted bc he was kicked out of jype, etc, etc. the thing is, none of those have been proven true (nor have the allegations) BUT i, having been victim to men's groping hands too many times, would rather believe a liar than a creep ! i do believe the whole situation to be sketchy af, especially with 10X ent (all ent companies have sns, it's kinda shady that 10X didn't until woojin made his apology statement - here's a thread about that) if it turns out not to be true, i'll be relieved to know that he's not who everyone is making him out to be, but if it turns out to be true, well.... anyways, as of right now it's probably best not to really "stan" him as the entire situation is sketchy af & leads to way too many dead ends

omg hi em!! thank you so much for explaining this to me! 

yeah so i was confused when the other anon said he left for health reasons cause i couldn’t find any other explanation other than the jype statement that said he left “due to personal circumstances”. so combined with all the other evidence it does seem kind of sketchy to me. also the whole company thing is so funny to me aksjdkjfdg like if that’s true he clowned himself big time. and those poor djs from chicago who had to release a statement adjkfgdjkf 

honestly.... i’m kinda glad i don’t have to pretend to like him cause as a new stay i never cared abt him to begin with askjghkdf like when i first got into skz it took me like a week before i found out that they used to be 9 instead of 8. obviously tho, the way it went down isn’t funny and i hope the victim is living their best life and that the band has moved on from this ❤️