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theyearoftheking · 4 years

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Book 1: Carrie

I wish I could write you a melody so plain

That would save you, dear lady, from going insane

That would ease you and cool you and cease the pain

Of your useless and pointless knowledge...

-Bob Dylan

I first read Carrie seven years ago as part of the Rory Gilmore reading challenge (sense a trend yet?). Despite reading a handful of books in the challenge, I quickly gave up because the prospect of reading Finnegan’s Wake was just too much. Even as an English major, I just can’t stomach Joyce. But I digress, and promise to stick with this challenge until the bitter end. Besides, I have a blog. I’m obviously big time now.

Carrie was first published in 1974 and the overriding theme for me was relevance. What’s old is new again, human beings never really learn lessons and bullying is a tale as old as time. Let’s do a deep-ish dive, shall we?

The book opens with a pretty embarrassing scene set inside high school hell: the girl’s locker room. Carrie is showering after gym class, and gets her period for the first time, blood streaming down her legs. She’s scared as hell,and has no idea what’s happening, because she was raised by an evangelical crazy woman. Her classmates lose their shit, begin throwing menstrual products at her, and yelling, “plug it up!”

So cringy.

But on the bright side, this didn’t happen during the age of social media. This would have made Snapchat, Insta, TikTok, or whatever social media thing the kids are into. But you could still see it happening in 2020. Hell is other people, particularly high school girls of a certain bitchy persuasion.

After this humiliating moment, Carrie heads home to lick her wounds, and wonder why her mother, Margaret, never talked to her about menstruation. Her mother informs her, “And God made Eve from the rib of Adam...Get up, woman. Let us get in and pray. Let’s us pray to Jesus for our woman-weak, wicked, sinning souls...”

At this moment, my blood ran cold. This statement should sound like the ramblings of a crazy person. But instead it reminded me of another matriarch...

Yeah. Michelle Duggar of 19 Kids and Counting, and Counting On fame. Michelle with her crazy eyes and crunchy perm, who believes women shouldn’t be cutting their hair, wearing pants, or bikinis, or any article of clothing that might entice men to think wicked thoughts; because apparently women do nothing but illicit sinful thoughts in men. It would be funny, if it wasn’t for the legions of fans and multiple babies she and her evangelical brood keep popping out on their living room couches with alarming frequency. We won’t even get into the whole, “covering up the fact her son molested several of her daughters and brushed it under the rug, because... Jesus”.

Shudder.

After Carrie’s locker room situation, the school administrators try to punish several of the girls responsible for the tampons/pads attack. One of the ringleaders, Chris Hargensen is a right little bitch, and sends daddy into the principal’s office to plead on her behalf so she won’t miss prom. He and the principal get chippy with each other, and Mr. Hargensen says, “I don’t intend... to sit here and listen to a tissue of half-truths or your standard schoolmaster lecture, Mr. Grayle. I know my daughter well enough...”

This whole interaction between Mr. Hargensen and Principal Grayle cracked me up. Millennials (of which I am not) get a bad wrap for not being held accountable for anything. They are stereotyped as special snowflakes who need participation trophies, and their parents make excuses for all their bad behaviors.

Bro.

Tale as old as time. Need I remind you this book was published in 1974?

Ok, Boomer?

The story progresses with Sue Snell, one of the ringleaders of the Plug It Up debacle feeling guilty for her actions, and convincing her boyfriend, Tommy Ross to ask Carrie to prom. Tommy loves Sue, and agrees to do it. Carrie sews herself a crushed velvet prom dress, her mom repeatedly calls her a slut, and Carrie ends up looking beautiful. I imagine it much like Rachel Leigh Cook’s “startling” transformation in She’s All That.

Tommy and Carrie go to prom, and he realizes she’s actually kinda pretty, which makes her worthy of his respect. The crushed velvet dress gets all the compliments, and the night doesn’t start out as a total disaster. Well, bitchy Chris Hargensen isn’t having it. She convinces Billy Nolan, her greaser boyfriend, to pull off some kind of spectacular prank at prom to put Carrie in her place and remind her of her station.

Billy and his crew of greasers go to a local farm, kill two pigs, and collect the blood. Later on at prom when Carrie and Tommy are announced king and queen, Chris pulls the cord rigged to the buckets of pig blood, and douses them both. Carrie loses her shit, and uses her telekinetic powers (did I forget to mention that’s a thing she has?) to blow up the school, kill her classmates and destroy the lovely town of Chamberlain, Maine. After prom, she walks home, where Michelle Duggar, Mama White is waiting with a knife, and stabs Carrie in the chest. Carrie uses her powers to slow Michelle Duggar Mama White’s heart down, until she’s dead. Then (with the knife still stuck in her chest), Carrie heads back into town to finish her reign of terror and kill Chris and Billy. Then she dies.

And they all lived happily ever after. Well, Sue Snell kind of does, since she’s one of the only ones to make it out alive. No good deed goes unpunished, am I right?

A few notable, funny moments...

1. Early on in the novel, a reference is made to a letter Michelle Duggar Mama White wrote to a friend in Kenosha, Wisconsin. How did Steve decide on Kenosha? Such a strange city in Wisconsin to choose... Did he look at a map and randomly pick a city? Had he made a stop at the Mars Cheese Castle once and it left an impression? Did he throw a dart at a map of Wisconsin? Does he know Kenosha doesn’t have an especially high evangelical population? So many questions. As a Sconnie Cheesehead Homer, I’ll be keeping a Wisconsin Mentions tally throughout the challenge.

2. At one point in the novel, a fictitious scientific article compares the genetic-recessive characteristics of telekinesis to hemophilia. Hemophilia is referred to as, “King’s Evil”, I couldn’t help with wonder if Steve threw this fact in here just to use the term, “King’s Evil”. Random observation

I enjoyed re-reading Carrie, and still find it relevant and timely. And I think it speaks to King’s talent as a writer that he’s able to create a character like Carrie, who blows up a whole damn town and kills almost everyone, and you still feel sorry for her. She’s not quite a villain, but she’s not far off.

In summation:

Total King Wisconsin Mentions: 1

Dark Tower References: 0

Book Grade: B+

Now, time for Salem’s Lot. It’s been on my to-be-read list for quite a while, and I’m looking forward to diving into it. Be patient, it’s 700 pages, compared to Carrie’s 290.

I should mention, I’m reading all of these books in actual BOOK form, no e-books. I find when I use my Kindle, I get distracted by marathon games of Candy Crush, and lose focus. But with an actual book? No candy to be crushed, no FB messages to check, no cute dog pictures to upload.

Speaking of dogs, Steve has Molly, The Thing of Evil. I have Biscuit Beast the Beagle.

You can see her handiwork here on a bookmark a friend was nice enough to bring back from The Stanley.

Beagles... to know them is to love them.

Until next time- long days and pleasant nights, readers!

Rebecca

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cartoonessays · 6 years

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The Problem With The Simpsons

As of this writing, the most recent episode of The Simpsons is “No Good Read Goes Unpunished”, in which they briefly offered a response to comedian Hari Kondabolu’s documentary The Problem With Apu. The documentary used the Apu character as a jump-off point to discuss the marginalization and the extremely reductive view of South Asians in popular media, particularly drawing on his experience as an Indian-American forced to reckon with a greater population who didn’t view his cultural heritage beyond Apu behind the checkout counter at the Kwik-E-Mart saying “thank you, come again”.

In “No Good Read Goes Unpunished”, the B-plot involves Marge rediscovering a beloved book from her childhood called The Princess in the Garden, only to realize how racist and imperialistic it was in an attempt to read it to Lisa. Marge later attempts to make edits to the book in order for it to fit current-day sensibilities, or in Marge’s words, “It takes a lot of work to take the spirit and character out of a book, but now it’s as inoffensive as a Sunday in Cincinnati”. Lisa quickly recognizes that Marge’s changes to the story sanitize the whole plot and calls it out, leaving a frustrated Marge to ask what she’s supposed to do. Lisa breaks the fourth wall and replies:

Something that started decades ago, and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect. What can you do?

As she says this, the camera pans down to a portrait of Apu with the caption “don’t have a cow!”. Marge responds by saying “Some things will be dealt with at a later date,” with Lisa quipping “If at all” as they both stare directly in the camera.

A lot of the response The Simpsons has gotten to this has been negative.

And for good fucking reason too.

This response to The Problem With Apu is bullshit; I’m not gonna mince words. These writers are better than this and these writers know they’re better than this. Pulling out the banal “PC gone mad” canard is the refuge of a comedic hack.

First of all, The Problem With Apu highlights how Apu Nahasapeemapetilon’s conception as a character is based off of various South Asian stereotypes that include but aren’t limited to his voice being performed by a white man (Hank Azaria) doing an impression of another white man (Peter Sellers) doing an Indian accent, his job being at a 7-Eleven type of convenience store, and the fact that his name “Nahasapeemapetilon” is just foreign sounding gibberish and not actually a name. Kondabolu and various other South Asian actors and comedians discuss how growing up they were bullied and picked on by being called “Apu” and his catchphrase “thank you, come again” was used against them as a slur. They also talked about how the roles they get offered for shows and movies hardly go beyond stereotypes and cliches that draw a lot of parallels to Apu. And the Simpsons writers responded to all of this with a dismissive and tired ass whine about political correctness.

It’s particularly disingenuous of them to use Lisa as their mouthpiece to voice this response, considering her statement is a dismissive retort of her whole existence as a character.

The season 5 episode “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” is all about Lisa taking the makers of Malibu Stacy dolls to task over its reinforcement of sexist stereotypes, noting how popular and influential the dolls are to girls around the world. A lot of striking parallels to Kondabolu’s documentary about Apu, aren’t there? The show didn’t treat Lisa’s concerns about Malibu Stacy’s sexism as trivial or a non-issue; she was framed as the hero in this episode. Lisa’s statement in “No Good Read Goes Unpunished” is a complete 180-turn from “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy”.

Most of the negative critiques that have been written about “No Good Read Goes Unpunished” have focused specifically on moments where Lisa and Marge break the fourth wall. But I want to discuss the framing around that moment in the episode more because it is also terrible and makes that particular moment even worse in context. In Marge’s changes to the book she grew up with, she changed the protagonist from a little girl who happily revels in Britain’s colonization of South America to a “cisgender girl who fights for wild horse rescue and net neutrality”. Let’s see how many liberal strawmen are in this sentence. There’s a strawman related to the language used by transgender rights activists and allies, another strawman related to animal rights, and are they seriously framing net neutrality as something you can write off as some shallow identifier of politically correct liberals? Are there a lot of people who brush off the net neutrality issue as political correctness?

And once Marge began telling her re-edited story, Lisa was quick to point out that all the re-edits stripped the story of the emotional journey the protagonist goes through. First of all, how the hell would Lisa know about the protagonist’s emotional journey or how the racial stereotypes play into it? She hasn’t read the damn book! Second of all, this is a false dichotomy the episode sets up to give weight to its dismissal of The Problem With Apu. Indulgence in racist stereotypes aren’t an inherent function of character arcs in stories. Why does Marge specifically say “It takes a lot of work to take the spirit and character out of a book, but now it’s as inoffensive as a Sunday in Cincinnati”? Her objection in the first place was the book’s racism, not that it had spirit and character. Why are they now framing racism and pro-colonialism as “spirit and character”? Perhaps The Princess in the Garden is some kind of allusion to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and controversy surrounding its banning/censoring in various schools and libraries? If that is the case, the rest of the episode does not make that clear.

In fact, when I watched the full episode, I was surprised to see the rest of B-plot actually admonished the book’s racist stereotyping. The first part of this plot sets up its racial and ethnic stereotyping as really over-the-top and mean-spirited (and giving no allusions of how it related to an emotional arc later in the story). The last part of this plot mocks historians of The Princess in the Garden’s author who act as apologists for her racism through ridiculous reasoning that they don’t even really believe (they call her racism “self-consciously ironic protest against [the author’s] own oppression” due to her being a lesbian). So on top of this episode’s response to The Problem With Apu being built from various strawmen, dishonestly framing a dichotomy between creating a character with an emotional arc and not promoting racial stereotypes, and just being really heavy-handed (they both stare directly at the viewers for crying out loud), it was completely in contrast with the rest of the plot.

I can’t read this as anything else but a petty “fuck you” to Hari Kondabolu. And that is really sad. These writers are better than this.

Or maybe they’re not better than this.

The Simpsons has always been an overwhelmingly white show with very little representation of people of color. In fact, the only characters of color I can think of that has been explored beyond their on-the-surface personality quirks in the show’s almost thirty year tenure are Apu and Carl in only one episode. This show hasn’t really grappled with racism in any of their episodes outside a character making a small quip about it once in a blue moon or “Much Apu About Nothing” (although that was more about xenophobia than racism). It seems to be an issue the writers of the show have never been comfortable in tackling. They nonetheless open themselves up to scrutiny by ignoring it, especially when they conceive a foreign character based on stereotypes they find funny (Simpsons writer Dana Gould admitted to that in Kondabolu’s documentary).

I’m not even necessarily saying that they should kill off Apu or something like that. I like Apu and I personally wouldn’t want to see him go (but hey, I’m not Indian). But I would have liked to see the writers honestly reckon with the stereotypical character they created and how the decades-long ubiquity of the show has helped shape the broader collective view of South Asians in media.

Instead they chose to respond like this:

youtube

And it’s not only beneath them, it’s pathetic.

P.S. This episode offers much better insight on the debate between artistic freedom vs. calling out objectionable content in media anyway.

#the simpsons #apu #hari kondabolu #the problem with apu #racism #stereotypes #political correctness #cartoon essays #just my thoughts

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scripttorture · 6 years

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1/2 Hi! I'm the one who asked about the magical "truth serum." Thanks for answering my original question! I don't know if this changes things, but the police and the laws themselves have been portrayed as ineffective and often brutal, and the society that I'm writing about is already shaking itself apart because of huge injustices. The only times I've shown the spell in action, it's with people who were eager to co-operate anyway, and when it started to hurt the interrogation fell apart.

2/2 My MC does have lasting psychological damage from his encounters with them. If the way to proceed is to show that this technique is worse than useless, that it's one more reason why the prisons are filled with unjustly convicted people, and that the police who do this are torturers with everything that goes with that, I do think I'm in a position to write that.

For readers generally theoriginal ask with my original response is here.

Yes that contextchanges things. It means that I think I completely misunderstood the originalask. That happens occasionally and I’m sorry about that. Thank you for being sounderstanding.

A lot of askers tend toapologise for sending in long asks but honestly more information is morehelpful for me. Having wider context for the story helps. We’re tackling toughsubjects here and I think detail and nuance is incredibly important

Knowing that you’reshowing this as ineffective makes all the difference.

The original ask wasabout effects, both on the victims and society more generally. I’m going tostart with the MC, this is going to apply to victims generally though.

I’ve got a summary ofthe commonpsychological effects of torture here. Symptoms are generally the same nomatter what technique is used (there are a few exceptions but even thoseinclude the common symptoms on the list). Victims won’t all experience the samesymptoms and it’s impossible to predict who will experience which symptoms.

As a result I tend tosuggest picking symptoms based on what the author feels fits the character andoverall story best.

Given the way you’reusing this magic I think memory problems would be an excellent fit for thestory.

In the long term aftertorture memory problems can manifest in several different ways and theseproblems can occur separate or together. Broadly speaking they come in aboutthree categories: memory loss, intrusive memories and inaccurate memories.

Memory loss can mean forgetting the traumatic incidententirely but that’s not a very common form of problem. More commonly what itmeans is forgetting chunks of time immediately before and immediately aftertorture. It can also mean a sort of long term forgetfulness which makeseveryday life much more difficult. Learning new things, remembering wherethings are, being on time- simple everyday things like that become a lot moredifficult.

That sort memoryproblem is incredibly common and rarely shown in fiction. I’ve actually had afew survivors contact me to say they weren’t even aware what they wereexperiencing was a symptom.

Intrusive memories are alot easier to explicitly link to torture. They’re basically continuallyremembering and going over a traumatic event. It means that the character isconstantly reminded of torture, by small everyday things. And those remindersprompt an extremely vivid, detailed memory of the abuse they suffered. It meansthinking about what they survived almost all the time.

Inaccurate memories aremuch harder to identify as a problem from ‘inside’. They feel like normalmemories and people experience them generally are convinced that their memoryis accurate.

They usually affectmemories of and around torture and they’re often about details. Someone mightsay that the door of the room they were tortured in was on the left, when infact it was on the right. They can affect things like remembering exactly whodid what when and in what order.

This can makeprosecuting a torture case extremely difficult.

For your story inparticularly I want to highlight the work Morgan et al did with US soldiers.The soldiers, who all had years of front line combat experience, went through afake capture scenario as part of a ‘training exercise’. Some of them were thenput through a ‘high stress’ interrogation which included shouting, abuse andthe sorts of clean beating US rules allowed at the time. The other had a‘low-stress’ interrogation, a chat over a hot drink.

Morgan then tested themthe next day to see who recognised their interrogator. Depending on how theywere asked to identify the interrogator between 51-68% identified the wrong person. Most of them wereconfident they’d gotten the right person. (The paper can be found here: C AMorgan et al, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry in 2004, 27, 265-279pgs)

The interrogations werearound four hours and I think this study is really relevant to what you want towrite. Don’t worry too much if you can’t access the paper itself. The generalpicture of memory problems are more important than the in-depth statistical andmethod analysis the paper concentrates on.

I’ve stressed all ofthese memory problems for a reason: I think you should show this magic as worsethan useless and I think this is the most sensible way to tackle it. It’s not alie if you honestly think it’s true and our memories are incredibly prone toflaws especially when we’re stressed or in pain.

To put that a bit morebluntly: what we think is factually true canchange if we’re in pain.

And those falsememories can persist and feel just as ‘true’ as accurate memories.

The next thing I thinkyou really need to consider are the police officers themselves. There’s lessresearch on torturers then torture victims but what we have overwhelminglysuggests that torturing other people causes severe mental illness in thetorturer.

Idiscuss the kinds of effects it has in another ask here (the questionitself involves mentions of rape and sexual abuse but there are no graphicdescriptions in the question or answer).

Have a read through ofthat because whether you focus on any of the police as characters or not ifthis system comes down that’s a lot ofpeople with those symptoms who will be out of work. Their society is goingto have to come up with a way of coping with that.

That can take a lot ofdifferent forms. In Soviet Russia it was lethal purges. In South Africa it wasthe Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In the aftermath of the Bosnian war it’sbeen one of the most successful series of war crimes trials in history.

On the nicer end you’relooking at long term mental health programs and re-training programs, jailsentences for the worst offenders and a structured plan to get these peopleback into the community in a healthy way.

On the worse end it’signoring the problem and ending up with a lotof people who are violent, traumatised and can’t hold down a job anymore. Thatmeans a massive uptick in homelessness and problems related to addiction (iemore demand for health services then the set up can support).

Those are problems forthis society afterwards. During all of this the problems are gonna be a littledifferent.

This system will haveabsolutely destroyed the public’s trust in the police force. In a way that goesbeyond the ways torture normally destroys the public’s trust in the policeforce. There is normally a drop in people volunteering information to thepolice when the police torture but in most scenarios that’s because they’reafraid people they know will be tortured not because informants are at risk oftorture themselves. But everyone istortured in this scenario, including the witnesses and the people who reportcrimes.

Simply put people willstop reporting crimes.

The police might usethat to argue that crime has dropped and what they’re doing works.

In fact you’ll have asystem of more or less complete collapse. I don’t know whether crime wouldactually rise but it would certainly go unpunished.

With no onevolunteering information and a general culture of silence the police wouldprobably respond by arresting people at random. This is pretty common inpolicing systems that have come to rely on torture.

Not only does this meanmore brutalised, injured people and less trust in the police it also creates aculture of fear. Because under these circumstances people tend to assume that there is a reason the police took the peoplethey did. They assume the raids and the disappearances are to do with someunder lying logic even when none exists.

I think the best thingto read for the sort of societal affects you might see is Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. And luckily it’snow available for free over here.

The only parts of Fanon’sbook I’ve read in detail are his psychiatric notes on patients he treatedduring and after the Franco-Algerian war. These included torture victims,torturers and the families of both groups.

But the majority of thebook is about the injustice of colonialism, shaped by Fanon’s experience of France’sbloody, unjust policy of mass detention and torture of Algerians during thewar. (For further reading on France’s torture practices in Algeria see H Alleg’sThe Question)

You’ve essentially gota society where there is no law enforcement and at the same time citizens areperiodically and randomly pulled off the street and tortured. There’s going tobe a lot of fear and a lot of distrust of authority. People may or may not haveformed their own parallel social systems already (with their own law enforcersand their own back-room courts).

And that’s now edgingtowards @scriptsociology’s area of expertise. This is going to be an intensely fracturedsociety with a lot of genuine grievances and a lot of really profoundly illpeople who’ll need help. I strongly suggest consulting @scriptsociology if youwant this society to be rebuilt or come together, because it’s a lot easier forsocieties in this situation to fall apart rather than come back together.

That may not havecovered anything but I think it’s a decent broad overview. If you’ve got any morequestions feel free to ask as soon as the box is open again. :)

Disclaimer

#tw torture #tw police brutality #fantasy ask #police torture #effect of torture on victims #effect of torture on torturers #psychological effects of torture #effects of torture on society #effects of torture on public trust #Anonymous

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thebearwitchproject · 6 years

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Ghosts Stories of the Allegheny Mountains

This is the third post in a collection of posts take from the article “Folk-lore of the Mountain Whites of the Alleghenie” by J. Hampden Porter. Check the links at the end of this post to read others from the collection.

Ghosts & Specters of the Allegheny Mountains

Supernatural manifestations are very common in these highlands. Three blows struck by an invisible hand upon the door signifies that death is near the hearer, or some member of his or her family. Doors that open of themselves, the howling of a dog, three barks of a red fox, also prognosticate disaster and death. A wild bird flying into the house and perching there, does the same, and a sight of the black dog that haunts the vale of Chatata, the white stag who roams the heights above the great Sequatchie Valley, the headless bull of those forests in the southeastern angle of Tennessee, or the bleeding horse met with among the ravines of the Smoky Mountains in Georgia, all convey the same fatal augury.

Some spectral appearances have no special significance. To these belong the gray wolf seen at midnight where the road from West Virginia crosses Piney Ridge, and that nondescript goblin animal, now one thing, then another, who goes before the traveller though Haunted Hollow, near Green Hill in Rockingham County. Illuminations of houses that have been deserted and become ruinous because of ghosts come under the same category, together with those sights and sounds which many have seen and heard within them--corpses laid out in the empty rooms, phantoms gliding through their open doors, the sound of bodies falling on their floors, and the moans and shrieks of miserable spirits within.

The following personal experiences were unattended by any consequences apart from fright.

Mrs. S-- was accustomed to visit her sister's farm by a path that led along Trout Run. Here, at dusk one evening, she saw small white dog trotting along in advance, but paid no attention it until the form suddenly disappeared at a spot where there was cover. This happened several times, and she put salt in her shoes and said an abundance of prayers. Then the spectre followed her.

Miss F , who was not born on Christmas week, and therefore had no natural power of seeing spirits, related the apparition of brother's first wife. This lady was devotedly attached to her husband, and when in the last stage of consumption could not die until he made oath to remain single for the remainder of his life. Not long after he perjured himself, but the peace of that household was gone. Ever after there was " a sense of something moving and fro" upon them all. His sister, in common with the rest, heard the sighs and sobs of the disconsolate ghost, she saw her dim figure floating through the dusk, and was chilled to the heart by its atmosphere as the spirit went by in passages or upon the stairs.

Mrs. H- , riding on a pillion behind her father from camp-meeting, saw a tall white form rise beside the horse. It was not terrified, however, as often happens in such cases. Her father did see the phantom, and was very deaf. She remained motionless from fear while the spectre moved along beside them. Soon a running stream was reached, and it vanished upon its brink.

Mr. B , going home one night by Crackwhip Furnace, then abandoned, beheld the likeness of a black bear in front, but it screamed horribly at him with a human voice. His horse was terrified, and when the thing came nearer and screamed again, he rode for his life. Half a mile away from the spot this same dreadful cry sounded in his ears shriller and more appalling than before.

Mr. C-, riding on the same road one dark autumnal evening, suddenly found his mare attacked by an invisible adversary. Blows were struck at her head, but the animal, though snorting, plunging, and rearing in terror, could not stir from the place; something met it at every turn. The rider tried to pray, but in vain. He was able to think the words, yet not to utter them. In his extremity the name of God at last burst from his lips. At once the horse sprang forward, and clasping its neck the pair dashed down hill into a brook. Whatever it was that beset them could not follow across flowing water, but a shriek that shook his heart swept by him as fled.

Where men have been murdered, and such spots are too often come upon, they, and the wraiths of those whose other wrongs re- main unavenged, wander around their graves as moving lights. A spirit similar to the Celtic Faire-chloidh watches at lonely tombs. Another, resembling the Dourdognese La Vivre, inveigles wayfarers within reach of demons and witches, like its counterpart of the Cote d'Or. The Ignis fatuus, or Jack-a-lantern of the seaboard States, is here called Jack Polant. This is not the "faithless phantom" which lures travellers to their doom, but a spirit of the waste whom they are compelled to follow.

Ghostly Revenge Stories & The Headless Horseman of Indian Fort

Sometimes an apparition comes on a mission of justice; at others, ghosts revisit "the glimpses of the moon," inspired with the desire for vengeance. Before the separation of West Virginia from the mother State, Colonel --- murdered one of his negro women with aggravated circumstances of cruelty. The crime could not be proved against him, and his act remained unpunished by law. But when investigation was at an end, and it became evident that nothing would be done, a white dog made its appearance upon the estate. Numbers saw it, and knew it for a spectre by its vanishing while in full view. This goblin brute hunted the man to death. It followed and went before him, came into his room, haunted the guilty being night and day, until he pined away, and, having made a confession, died.

A miser, whose ruined house still stands, disappeared and was never seen again. Two single women, living in a poor way in the neighborhood, suddenly came into possession of money, concerning which they gave an improbable account. Inquiry was made, but it came to naught. The dead man's ghost, however, headless and bleeding, walked upon the hill where their cottage stood. It passed along the garden fence between sunset and dark, and the elder of these murderesses was soon literally frightened to death. Her companion lived longer and suffered more. She wasted away, said one of the many persons from whom I heard this tale, " till nothing of her was left but a little pile of bones." Then death came, and it took four strong men to lift the coffin in which her body was enclosed. The hidden money was there.

A headless horseman rides upon the road near Indian Fort, in the foothills of Cumberland Mountain. His story is unknown, and this phantom's wanderings are apparently objectless. Nevertheless he is ill to meet, for unlike the same kind of an apparition described by Crofton Croker in the south of Ireland, this brings misfortune, and those who have seen it had reason to regret their encounter.

For more in this series of Scot-Irish Folklore check out the previous posts:

Lycanthropy Lore of the Allegheny Mountains

Witchlore of the Allegheny Mountains

#folklore #virginiafolklore #allegheny mountain lore #ghosts #american folklore

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shaledirectory · 6 years

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FERC to Constitution Pipeline: A Year Means A Year, You Shoulda Fought

Tom Shepstone Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

Sadly, FERC has once again refused to help Constitution Pipeline avoid the consequences of letting itself be double-crossed by Gov. Andrew Corruptocrat.

FERC, in a decision released yesterday, has denied the Constitution Pipeline. This time it was the rejection of an excellently drafted request for a rehearing on the basis that the New York State DEC’s two refiling requests were nothing but a ruse to delay and ultimately deny the project. The DEC, which does nothing significant that is not at the direction of Governor Corruptocrat, clearly manipulated the Constitution Pipeline folks. FERC, though, which knows exactly what DEC is doing, wasn’t sympathetic. It’s effectively said “you should have known better.” And, unfortunately, who can blame them? Everyone who’s done business in or within New York knows everything is political and nothing is not corrupt. Everyone but the naive well-meaning people at the Constitution Pipeline, that is.

The heart of the decision follows:

Constitution repeats a series of arguments from its petition for declaratory order to the effect that New York DEC admitted that Constitution’s second withdrawal and Third Application were an “unwarranted fiction” to extend the time for review of the application beyond the time allowed under any interpretation of Section 401. Constitution contends that the maximum reasonable period of time for New York DEC’s decision expired on May 9, 2015, one year after receipt of the Second Application and eleven months before New York DEC’s denial on April 22, 2016. Constitution asserts that the Commission’s interpretation of Section 401 allows state agencies to skirt hard choices and engage in legalistic gamesmanship by insisting that applicants reapply by simply resubmitting their existing applications, thus “fostering a regulatory scheme that is detrimental to the public interest.”

As we explained in the Declaratory Order, a comparison of the contents of Constitution’s Second Application and Third Application is not material to our analysis. The statute speaks solely to a state’s action or inaction on an application, not to the repeated withdrawal and resubmission of applications.41 We reaffirm our conclusion that once an application for a Section 401 water quality certification is withdrawn, no matter how formulaic or perfunctory the process of withdrawal and resubmission is, the refiling of an application restarts the one-year waiver period under Section 401(a)(1). In the Declaratory Order, we noted our continuing concern that when states and project sponsors engage in repeated withdrawal and refiling of applications for water quality certifications, they act, in many cases, contrary to the public interest and to the spirit of the Clean Water Act by failing to provide reasonably expeditious state decisions. Even so, we did not conclude that the practice violates the letter of the statute.

We explained in the Declaratory Order that the Commission’s interpretation of Section 401 strikes the appropriate balance between the interests of the applicant and the certifying agency.45 An applicant is guaranteed an avenue for recourse after a year of inaction by filing a petition for a waiver determination before the Commission (as did the applicant in Millennium Pipeline Company, L.L.C.), or after a denial by filing a petition for review in the court of appeals. A state certifying agency remains free to deny the request for certification within one year if the agency determines that an applicant has failed to fully comply with the state’s filing or informational requirements. These options do not preclude a state from assisting applicants with revising their submissions, do not harm the process of public notice and comment, and do not increase an applicant’s incentive to litigate.

Because Constitution’s withdrawal and resubmission of its application presented New York DEC with new deadlines, we deny the company’s claim that the receipt of the initial application should be an anchor point for setting the state’s review deadline regardless of Constitutions decision to repeatedly withdraw and refile its application.

As good as the Constitution Pipeline filings were, they were not good enough to overcome FERC’s view it should have known better than attempt to play softball with New York. The between the lines message from FERC is simply this — “you shoulda fought.” FERC is telling the Constitution Pipeline and other pipeline companies they needed to play hardball and fight like Millennium.They needed to challeng DEC in court at the first opportunity and/or force decisions within the one-year deadline they could immediately be appealed to what are, one hopes, non-political courts.

That the Constitution Pipeline was conned is obvious from a Jim Willis guest post published here in early 2015. Jim included these excerpts from a quarterly analyst call (MDN is always the place to go for this kind of detail) about the progress of the pipeline:

I think everybody is aware that sometime ago we got our FERC certificate for this project, but as Alan pointed out, some of the permitting had been delegated to the state of New York. We have most everything we need other than the New York DEC final permit on this project. We do have all of our land and right-of-way now secured.

We are what I would call in the final throes of working through some final details on some wetlands issues, and the New York DEC I feel like it really rolled up their sleeves and is working with us very closely on trying to get the remaining questions answered and we’re very optimistic that we’re going to be getting a permit here in the next couple of months and I believe there is also core engineer permit that would follow that, but that’s more of a sequencing issue than an issue where we expect any type of dispute or anything like that…

This latest re-filing that we did with New York DEC was merely procedural–in fact the year prior we had done the exact same thing but we basically canceled and re-filed with all the existing information that we’ve been building up in the project. And in fact the New York DEC came out and said, they required to have this open comments period, but they said look we’ve already commented. We got your comment, we’re going to be using and considering all the previous comments that have been supplied. So the additional 14 day period would be for if there are any new comments that hadn’t already been covered by the previous comment period than those would come in. But I think all of that’s has been run down to ground pretty sufficiently and I don’t really see that as introducing any new risk into the timeline that we see before us now.

Reading that response now, over three years later, makes anyone who worked hard to bring about the much-needed Constitution Pipeline want to cry. So much naïveté and, of course, no good deed goes unpunished.

There are still options, though, beginning with resubmission of the application and a fight to finish between a now-educated Constitution Pipeline outfit and a dirty DEC sooner rather than later. The FERC decision also offers a not so subtle message to the President and Congress that New York State is gaming the system and needs to be throttled. Let’s hope something happens on that front as well. It’s time.

The post FERC to Constitution Pipeline: A Year Means A Year, You Shoulda Fought appeared first on Natural Gas Now.

https://www.shaledirectories.com/blog/ferc-to-constitution-pipeline-a-year-means-a-year-you-shoulda-fought/

#shalebusinessinformation #dailyinformationonshaleindustry #fracking

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felicezhukov · 7 years

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:: Dear Nicolas Jaar::

This is another edited entry of a previous post, I wrote it drunkenly, in despair, on Sunday night / Monday morning...

I haven’t written for a long time, my life has been a series of misadventures, mishaps, missteps and misjudgements. It’s also been an awful lot of fun, now I’m lying in bed taking 2 rest days to recoup, fast and detox and attempt to get back to level ground again. Last night I was laid out on the sofa necking cider and cramming chocolate hob nobs into my mouth whilst Sunny in Philadelphia crackled on the monitor and my ex tapped his feet in his computer chair. It was the final scene in a spiral of consumption and intoxication: on fire with emotion and insatiability, bouncing from place to place in the darkness, with knobbly gnarled knees, a scratched face and a progression of shorts and dresses as the backdrop was engulfed by thick hot sunshine, beating down over this metropolis I call home.

Field Day is this week, you’ll be here soon, they’ve been prepping for over a month, as you enter the mile end part of Victoria Park you are greeted by gates and fences for as far as the eye can see. At first it was just the large cocoon like structure they were erecting by the road, which is where I assume you’ll be playing, but now its expansive, the 3 metre tall green fence encompasses the entire length of park that I walk on my way to work. There’s a large screen at the entrance, at first it confused me on Saturday because it was displaying information about Field Day, advising not to buy tickets from touts and that Saturday was sold out, they must have been testing it.

You must travel from sphere to sphere landing in these shrines to music, where so much love and dedication is put into you being there, these structures that take weeks to erect, which only shelter you for a short time, I hope you appreciate that. There has been so much advertising for Field Day, posters seem to grace every part of London that I travel through, by my studio in Clerkenwell, in Hackney Wick as I walk to work, on the walls of the places in East London I’ve been revelling in. When I walk past the posters specifically of you, I touch your face, not because I’m in love with you Nicolas Jaar, you are now a manifestation of freedom to me.

So then, Tuesday, my open studio’s, all around the studio an energy building from the temporary structures being erected in the adjacent car parks, sheds plonked lovingly in the front and a multimedia installation by shazed dawood, arching against the side of the building. It felt exciting, many of my neighbours in the studio expressed surprise at how there seemed to be an anticipation building, a lot of money had gone into Clerkenwell design week, the audience was tidy, well presented in light flowing fabrics and glossy shimmering eye makeup.

I’d been in the studio solidly for 3 days preparing the installation that is my life, gently folding christmas decorations over heaters and sprinkling flowers under chairs, pegging my clothes up overhead. By the evening it was time to let people inside, there had been promise of a set of art based philanthropists coming to the studio, but it never surfaced and although to me this was a matter of easy come easy go I think to others it might have engendered the evening with disappointment. As I surveyed my studio at 6pm I was satisfied with what lay before me, an odd sort of forest populated by these objects that have travelled with me from place to place for so many years, it was poignant and melancholic, a sight we rarely get to see, our lives in all their finery, as decoration, suddenly making the usefulness of everything you’ve ever possessed somehow obsolete.

People came, many friends I’d contacted last minute walked into my museum, took their shoes off and sat with me on the dirty duvet covers and sofa bed which has never served the purpose it was supposed to have had. What became clear and now is startlingly apparent is that I am selling remnants to friends, no collectors or third parties have expressed any interest in buying anything thus far, it’s people that have touched my life somehow who are walking through my doors, to pick up a little memento of our time together. This is heart warming and has given me a new perspective on how my art travels, what it means and to who. I sold more than I was expecting, particularly to one woman who recently sent me a message that spoke to my soul, about what my art meant to her, about how even after fucking 2 cucumbers you still have to do your washing and tidy up. We haven’t spent a lot of time together but she means alot to me.

And I think that’s a large part of what’s happening here, for the first time in months I have the space to reach out to all the people in my life that mean something to me, invite them to come see what I have accumulated and lived with, to purchase any of it if they desire but mostly to use this piece as a backdrop to re establish relationships.

Outside of this Tuesday was a naughty, silly sort of evening, a collection of me and my neighbours convened and regressed to a childlike state. Stealing a box of prosecco and gulping it down on a bench nearby, laughing and behaving with reckless abandon. I paid for the theft the following day, as karmically no bad deed goes unpunished, at least for me anyway, but I also finally got to know the creatives that reside by me a little better and start to build the foundations for friendships that will blossom as time passes.

I wonder if the bank holiday has been a factor in the ensuing debauchery that’s taken place and the hijinks I’ve been running through. It’s not an alien topic in these letters, I’ve addressed it previously, something about bank holiday weekends just always seems fertile and strange.

On Thursday, I sold a picture of my ex husband to a complete stranger, it was one of those images that's burned into my psyche, I remember the weekend I took it as if it’s just passed. He’s lying on a pulled out sofa bed, the covers still lapping over his legs, with the laptop I’m now typing on, perched on him and an ashtray precariously placed on top of it, in his hand is a cigarette, thick plumes of smoke ebbing out of it are illuminated by the light in the background coming from a partially opened window. His face is one I recognise as I’ve seen it so often, he’s rubbing sleep from his eyes and I just know he’s at that brittle stage where he needs to be left alone or he’ll be rude.

It was at my sister and ehr ex husbands house, we went down to see them and walked about the park, drank lots of lager and wine and sat in their studio apartment talking and jesting till the early hours, then he and I went on to Alton Towers and were both to delicate to enjoy any of the rides. So instead we spent the majority of the time huddled together in the rainy gardens in matching cagoules, we won a cuddly toy each, grey and goo, matching seals and stayed in a lovely b&b in the surrounding area, which is leafy and has a fairytale like quality.

I sold the photo for £3.

Spurred on by the emotional discharge of such a transaction I went to meet a friend and go out to Alibi, a fairly notorious club in Dalston, well known for being a bit of a dive bar and for accommodating the surrounding area’s punters once kick out time has occurred. Without fail Alibi has provided me with some unique and bizarre nights and it didn’t disappoint again, we rolled through a series of interested suitors, talking to a kind man who took the time to read the last entry I wrote you, indulging in whatever was on offer and enjoying the attention we received.

Once outside at the end of the night I found myself in the midst of a group of Frenchmen, who I hadn’t seen in the club, always the driving force for travelling onwards to an after party I encouraged them in their pursuit of the next venue and waved goodbye to my friend who disappeared into the night with the kind man. We ended up in the kitchen of a neat anthropologists house, divided into groups, I sat with a visiting financier and heckled his friends for not speaking to the host, I get bossy when I’m drunk. But they wanted to go to bed so then we ended up in Haggerston Park in crisp morning light, on the cycle tracks which I walk past daily. For a while I just ran around the track but gravity intercepted and I fell a few times, they came over to pick me up and, in a feral state I then veered into the bushes alone, allowing the inner beast to take over and guide me, for some reason this is not the first time this has happened in the same park, after a night at Alibi, I guess these whims are somehow guided and we end up repeating ourselves in the most unusual of ways.

Eventually I launched out of a bush, covered in blood from scratches and scrapes, at a lady who was taking her dog for a morning stroll. She was kind and atypical of the area we were in, having lived out her own odd creative life before becoming more settled, we spent a while together, concern rife in her face rather than horror, and then I charged my phone in a plumbing supplies shop and managed to get in touch with the frenchman I’d been with earlier, who had my bag.

He was an unusual and strangely innocent kind of man, in the throes of finding a house to move to as his 3 year relationship had ended due to his careless lifestyle. In his eyes was a gentle acceptance, a total lack of judgement or ego. We went back to the beautiful top floor flat he was staying in and spent several hours enraptured by each other, slept for a bit and had food in a local pub which was a favourite haunt of mine and my exes before we broke up. He looked at me like he was in love with me and I felt enveloped in this and safe, broken from kissing and behaving like a savage in the park it was healing to have this moment with him. Then he went on to a bar and I met my friends and hung out on her stoop listening to music and laughing for a few hours before getting back to my exes and dragging myself to bed.

I was broken on Saturday.

On Sunday I’d kept seeing some characters that exist on the perimeters of my job, I’d never seen them outside of work before, or inside of work for a while either, so seeing them twice in one day from a distance was unusual and leant an odd tint to the day. I was so broken, my face healing from kissing friction burns, my knees covered in deep scrapes, my eyes puffy and delicate, that I’d never of approached them, so instead just waved and wondered what they were upto. My friend came to visit at the end of the shift, to check out the bar I work in, which is going to be the location of a few arts based nights I want to hold and curate. We decided to go out again, the energy of the weekend still pulsing through us.

More random events and switching of locations ensued, meeting people on the canal, going to a warehouse party for a little while, wandering the streets with a horny mancunian boy and taking him to the boat under the bridge to drink my cider, wading through a downpour, powerful heavy rain which cut through the night and somehow perfectly enshrined the hot beauty of the day.

Then taking a taxi to meet my frenchman in Shoreditch at a house party in an expensive place across the road from the church. This frenchman clearly wandered in circles which were wealthier than mine I thought as we sat at another window looking out over the city whilst he despairingly mapped out the details of his finances, he earned 4x the amount I did a month, and why he had no money. Because he kept spending it on trips, parties and the excesses that go alongside such things. He said he wanted to give up but part of me was saddened by that thought, in all truth if he wants to spend his life from party to party dancing and singing songs I don’t know if I’d consider that a waste, he seemed otherwise content with his choices as far as I could tell. Anyway I got back to my exes around 5am on Monday morning, he shouted at me, I wrote you the original draft of this entry, ate crisps, I’ve eaten a lot of crisps this week, and passed out.

Then I crawled out of bed again, somehow managed to put makeup on and get out of the house and to work, fuelling myself on coca cola and alka seltzer. Last night is another story I won’t write about now.

I’m lying here now, fully accepting of the fact that I won’t be getting dressed or leaving the house, content with this and now I’ve written down the vast portion of what’s happened able to see the patterns and just why this week has not been a write off. I’ve been panicking, worried that I won’t sell all of my things, perhaps also spurred on by the fact that I haven’t produced anything this week, which is rare, essentially unheard of, for me. But being an artist is not just centred in the act of making, I remember watching a talk with your father that illustrated this point.

You have to live, observe, digest and distill what’s going on around you. I guess I’m getting better at these days of reflection but have not had a solid moment of living in quite some time, I’ve met so many people in the last few days, have messages and new contacts etched all over my phone and got to spend time with someone totally out of my normal realm who gave me a kind of unconscious care that healed and centred me, despite it being brief.

I’m happy Nicolas, I hope you are to.

#Nicolas Jaar #nicolasjaar

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themusingstranger · 7 years

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On Buchanan’s Love for Putin

So Pat Buchanan just wrote another of his ethno-nationalism, Christian-strongman-fancying essays, and as I read the diatribe paragraph by paragraph, I could not help but formulate counter-arguments in my own mind. The article asks, Is Putin the Preeminent Statesman of Our Time?, and goes on to marshal the propositions recently put forth by one Chris Caldwell, that combine into an answer in the affirmative. Buchanan can of course make a good deal of sense and coherence when highlighting some of the inconsistencies of U.S. foreign policy and their tendencies towards war, but there is this other side of him that just loves European ethno-nationalists on the old continent and the general mood that animates others like them in the broader West and Russia. This makes his bi-weekly columns a hit or a miss.

As already stated, Buchanan enlists Caldwell in the defense of both men’s preferred answer to the aforementioned query, and so the former commences with some lines from the latter:

If we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the preeminent statesman of our time.

On the world stage, who could vie with him?

Well, this might be a case of a response in need of a question. Both men already had this idea in mind and went about devising a riddle by which to reveal it. Except of course, if those are the determined conditions to first be met, Xi Jinping could just as easily qualify as a right-enough answer, and perhaps even more so. After all, China is flourishing far better economically, politically and culturally than Putin’s Russia. The Chinese economy is the second largest in the world. Internationally, where Russia is under sanctions and Western leaders are avoiding Putin as though he were plague rat, Xi makes the rounds from Buckingham Palace to state dinners in Washington. Slowly, the most successful of national film industries, Hollywood, is bending towards and tailoring itself to meet Chinese tastes. China is also an exporter of its culture, without seemingly losing any of the conditions highlighted by Caldwell’s question. Putin’s rather unique strong point here is his ubiquity and refusal to vanish from the global stage, as even in undemocratic, Communist China, presidents have fixed terms that are strictly adhered to.

Buchanan, citing Caldwell, goes on to offer:

When Putin took power in the winter of 1999-2000, his country was defenseless. It was bankrupt. It was being carved up by its new kleptocratic elites, in collusion with its old imperial rivals, the Americans. Putin changed that.

In the first decade of this century, he did what Kemal Ataturk had done in Turkey in the 1920s. Out of a crumbling empire, he resurrected a national-state, and gave it coherence and purpose. He disciplined his country’s plutocrats. He restored its military strength. And he refused, with ever blunter rhetoric, to accept for Russia a subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders. His voters credit him with having saved his country.

This is all fair enough, though again, elements listed are not unique to Putin.Still, Putin did restore stability to Russia after the tumultuous years under Boris Yeltsin. The fall of communism might have been a good and profound event for many of those under its brutal regime, and an occurrence not entirely without romance. But it was also a deeply traumatic historical moment for some, especially ethnic Russians spread across what would become new nations that emerged or re-ermerged from the Soviet Union. The writings of Svetlana Alexievich capture the subsequent fears, anxieties and other complicated emotions of ordinary people caught in the vortex of an extraordinary happening. Any restoration of order amid such chaos is a great achievement, and Putin attained that much.

But he has not been clothed in virtue in all of this, and has overseen another kind of restoration during the same time. The only plutocrats he disciplined were those who would not bend the knee; or those who were friends, then began discussing the advantages of democracy, and thus ran afoul of their president. Putin has himself become a plutocrat, and some in the business of calculating personal wealth even have him down as the richest man in the world. This hardly makes him any different from the banana republic autocrat who empties his nation’s treasury before slipping away to Europe or the Middle East. And such men also made a point of improving their military readiness, usually to deploy it against their own people.

According to Buchanan:

Putin’s approval rating, after 17 years in power, exceeds that of any rival Western leader. But while his impressive strides toward making Russia great again explain why he is revered at home and in the Russian diaspora, what explains Putin’s appeal in the West, despite a press that is every bit as savage as President Trump’s?

Answer: Putin stands against the Western progressive vision of what mankind’s future ought to be. Years ago, he aligned himself with traditionalists, nationalists and populists of the West, and against what they had come to despise in their own decadent civilization.

What they abhorred, Putin abhorred. He is a God-and-country Russian patriot. He rejects the New World Order established at the Cold War’s end by the United States. Putin puts Russia first.

And in defying the Americans he speaks for those millions of Europeans who wish to restore their national identities and recapture their lost sovereignty from the supranational European Union. Putin also stands against the progressive moral relativism of a Western elite that has cut its Christian roots to embrace secularism and hedonism.

Last things first - I can’t remember the last time I came across the word hedonism in a political essay that wasn’t written by a man whose bones had already dried up. Buchanan appears to be missing the point that Putin’s approval rating is unrivaled by any other Western leader precisely because he controls the mediums of news and information. The last political satire program in Russia was closed a long time ago, when the comedians there decided Putin was ripe for a joke. Sure, many Russians like the various moves he has made, recall the old days, appreciate the stability and generally support his policies at home and abroad. But the state’s monopoly over the means of public discourse and communication cannot be divorced from the regnant image of Putin. If one lived in a country where the leader had nothing but good press, then it is clear how the average citizen would have a positive impression of that leader. It is all they know. And of course, even in the midst of state propaganda, dissent and protests live on.

Buchanan goes on to wonder why Putin is popular in some Western circles, before giving an answer. The Russian president is a traditionalist, conservative, nationalist and god-fearing Christian, Buchanan offers. It is true that some in the United States and Western and Central Europe have developed affinity towards Putin, but I wonder if their conservatism and traditionalism includes human rights abuses. Does their Christian faith make room for ordering the assassinations of investigative journalists and democratic reformers? That Putin has admirers in the West is not proof of some virtue he possesses. In the West reside admirers of all kinds of ghoulish sorts and trends. In the 1970s, were there not the Red Brigade deranged extremists who adored Marxism and political violence? Theirs was a movement that spanned some years. Was that a sign of communist virtue? In America and Western Europe, those who admire Putin are almost always the grotesque reactionaries who despise immigrants and principles of secularism and pluralism. These are not the decent and philanthropic among us, I dare say. Putin’s Orthodox Christianity declares gays and lesbians to be unacknowledged by the state and without some fundamental rights. I am glad the American republic takes no such stance.

I suppose Buchanan figured he could not get away without a mention of Putin’s autocratic ways and crimes, and so he lists a few, while highlighting the lack of any difference between him and some of the United States’ own allies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who have also demonstrated an intolerance for dissent, democracy and human rights. This is all well and good, for I also hold criticisms of the United States in its embrace of such tyrants, but of course, Buchanan is not penning an ode to them. He is writing one to Putin; and while criticizing other despots.

Much of the hostility toward Putin stems from the fact that he not only defies the West, when standing up for Russia’s interests, he often succeeds in his defiance and goes unpunished and unrepentant.

He not only remains popular in his own country, but has admirers in nations whose political establishments are implacably hostile to him.

In December, one poll found 37 percent of all Republicans had a favorable view of the Russian leader, but only 17 percent were positive on President Barack Obama.

There is another reason Putin is viewed favorably. Millions of ethnonationalists who wish to see their nations secede from the EU see him as an ally. While Putin has openly welcomed many of these movements, America’s elite do not take even a neutral stance.

17% of Republicans having positive notions of Barack Obama where 37% have such feelings towards Putin says more about the partisan rot among Republicans than it does about either Obama or Putin. The rise in Putin’s popularity among Republicans is of course a product of their own support for Donald Trump, for such an attitude did not exist in their minds during the presidency of George W. Bush. The ethno-nationalists who cheer on Putin’s machinations to break apart the European Union might very well have a point in not wanting to live under a parliament and a bureaucracy in faraway Brussels, but they make a grave mistake if they do not recognize that Putin does not care one bit about the well-being of their countries. Putin’s instincts and his wish are to dominate them. What has inspired and animated him through the course of his presidency (indeed, presidencies) is to have the world rearranged in such a way that Russia does the exerting on Europe and even America, and not the other way around. So, if these ethno-nationalists are true patriots and lovers of their land, they would not want Putin’s hopes for said land to turn real. But of course, we can with good reason suspect why they cheer him on. The declared Christian identity, the whiffs of xenophobia, the contempt for Islam, are shared values.

Buchanan closes by once more recruiting Caldwell, who wrote, “Putin has become a symbol of national sovereignty in its battle with globalism.” Here, it is important to remember that Putin holds the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geo-strategic tragedy of the 20th Century. What was the Soviet Union if not an empire? After all, it did hold and control other nations and peoples. Was that also not a union like the European Union is one? At least there are no E.U. military forces guarding Spain and putting down protesters by force. The Soviet Union was also an instance of trans-nationalism. It was its own form of globalism. Were there not democrats who wished to secede from its iron grip? Empires are of course globalist in nature and by definition, and Putin has long mourned and continues to mourn the death of one. He is not opposed to globalism. He is opposed to a globalism in which he is not the leading figure. So Buchanan and his ilk who hold warm notions about Putin kid and delude themselves into such demented thinking.

#opinion #politics #Pat Buchanan #Vladimir Putin

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