#it's about defying destiny at least as far as destiny is defined as being an outside force and not something internal and true
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The Power of Waking and how I believe it affects Sora, Young Xehanort, Luxu, the Master of Masters and destiny.
So I was GOING to say all this in an answer to an ask. But I decided to post it as it’s own so that I can cover more topics then the question itself. And then, I’ll go back to questions in my inbox and answer them with reference to this post.
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Sora and the Power of Waking
Before I say anything, I want to list off the rules of time travel stated by Young Xehanort in Dream Drop Distance
First, you must leave your body behind to do it.
Then, there must be a version of you waiting at the destination.
Upon arrival, you can only move forward as per the laws of time.
And you cannot rewrite the events that are destined to happen.
The Power of Waking has let Sora reverse time and change events that were fated to happen. This goes directly against the fourth rule. Young Xehanort has always been able to travel with his body intact, and that goes against the second rule. So how are these laws, these restrictions, able to be broken? I believe that the Power of Waking is a power that allows you to break the restrictions of time travel, and it is a power that Young Xehanort has used (or still uses) himself (and possibly forgets about when he returns to his own time to grow into Master Xehanort, as MX never mentions it once ever). Let’s see word for word how Young Xehanort describes the Power of Waking after Sora fights the Lich:
“It’s for traversing hearts to reach worlds, not for traversing worlds to reach hearts.”
Something we need to ask ourselves is- how does YX know this? Even Yen Sid describes the Power of Waking as simply that- the power to awaken people’s hearts. But YX clearly knows more about how it works and how it can affect other things.
Let’s take a look at each technique. “Traversing worlds to each hearts” is what Sora had just done before this conversation. He traverses the Stations of Awakening of worlds to reach his friends’ hearts and recovers them. That in turn, saves them from the destiny of “light expiring” like the prophecy states. I think it’s important to note that the worlds he arrives in may not actually be those worlds though, but rather something similar to say, the world revisits in The End of the World in KH1. I’ll expand more about KH1 in the next paragraph.
Now let’s take a took at “Traversing hearts to reach worlds”. In my opinion, this is like Sora opening a portal in Master Xehanort to reach Scala ad Caelum. But I don’t think that was actual Scala ad Caelum, but rather a memory or dream of it. Similar to Riku opening a portal in Sora to reach his memory/dream of Destiny Islands. [[ And I also think this is similar to another instance of KH1: Sora having a flashback to Kairi in Hollow Bastion with her grandmother. I recognized instantly from KH3 the Sora gliding through the star field sort of thing. I said “Hey this is like when he see’s Kairi’s memory in KH1!” and sure enough, later he does it and once again is joined by Kairi herself. My point here is, these two scenes of Sora gliding through that space in KH3, I believe is Nomura trying to hint at us that Sora traversed through Kairi’s heart to reach her memory/dream of Hollow Bastion in KH1. In other words, Sora’s been able to use the Power of Awakening since KH1 ]]
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The Master of Masters and Destiny
Before I said that the Power of Waking has let Sora change events that were fated to happen. Sora changed destiny, and supposedly there were repercussions to that. But why? Let’s look at what Kingdom Hearts defines destiny as. One of the best examples is Xehanort during his final speech in KH3:
“The World needs someone to stand up and lead. Someone strong, to stop the weak from polluting the World with their endless darkness. Someone to dictate their destiny.”
This connects to Xehanort’s past revelations in his reports:
Xehanort’s Report IV excerpt:
And when Kingdom Hearts is complete, it is said the one who opens its door will bring about the creation of the Next World. Such a feat is above any human. Or, to put it a different way: whoever opens that door will be reborn as something far greater than human.
Xehanort’s Report VI excerpt:
And, as stated before, opening this door arguably gives that person control over all worlds and all people.
Xehanort’s statements say that the person who opens Kingdom Hearts will give them supernatural powers, allowing them to oversee the World and it’s destiny.
Now tell me, who does that sound like to you?
I could be wrong, but at the moment I believe that long ago, the Master of Masters was the last person to open Kingdom Hearts, and since then has overseen destiny. This is backed up by various lines of KHX, Ava asking Luxu if this was all the Master’s “intentions” the whole time. In Luxu’s Observation excerpts, asking “Are these new events just another phase in the Master’s grand plan?”
Taking this into account, Sora defying destiny and changing it is seen differently. Sora isn’t defying some insentient force. Sora is defying a person- a person with a plan that they desire to come to fruition.
And I think that is the repercussion. I believe, that Sora won’t just fade away because it’s the law of the universe that if you disobey destiny too many times you’ll be punished. I think that when the MoM returns, he himself will punish Sora for defying his will. That is what Young Xehanort is playfully warning him about.
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Young Xehanort and Luxu
So what about Young Xehanort? He’s able to time travel with his body. He knows about the potential of the Power of Waking, and he warns Sora about repercussions [not to help Sora, but more to amuse himself], and not at all worried about himself.
I think Young Xehanort is purposely following the Master’s destiny rather than defying it like Sora. I think somehow, Young Xehanort has a piece of vital information that he forgets when he returns to his time. So there is something that Young Xehanort knows, that Master Xehanort does not. And I believe it is Luxu who tells him, possibly during the time that YX traveled with him during DDD.
I think for this, it’s good to refer back to Luxu’s Observation excerpts form KH3:
Observations excerpt 2
“Somewhere in this cyclical history of bequeathings, a chosen one will appear and reenact the Keyblade War. When this scapegoat arrives and takes my Keyblade in hand, that will be the time to take the stage and finish my role.”
Observations’s third excerpt is interesting to me, as it seems to be written at different points of time. Here is the entire excerpt. I will bold important words.
Observations excerpt 3
It seems this body, this name will be my last. The lives I have lived over the ages could fill volumes, but for now I must focus on what matters most.
The Keyblade has been successfully passed down, generation to generation, and it seems a Keyblade Master devoted to the darkness may finally arise. Until now, I have watched over the course of events from a distance. Perhaps the time has come to intervene. I need only play the role of a fool desirous of the Keyblade’s power. I will don the mask of his ally in order to keep watch over my Keyblade from close by.
The Gazing Eye: a Keyblade forged from the eye of the Master of Masters. He passed it to me, as I have to others, and through it he can see the future – all that will ever come to pass. Spanning the ages in body after body, life after life, my task has been to keep vigil over the Eye as it passes from hand to hand. It has been a long time. Longer than I can express.
But now at last the Keyblade War has begun, and Kingdom Hearts will open – a true and complete Kingdom Hearts, born of the clash between darkness and light. I will soon be reunited with my old companions, and in that moment my long vigil will reach its end. He will return…
Excerpt 3 starts off sounding like it’s written during BbS, when Braig meets Xehanort. But then it says the Keyblade War HAS begun. Perhaps Braig is only referring to when Terra, Ven, and Aqua are fighting in BbS’s ending. But I think Luxu knows better, I think he knows it’s the next battle at the Keyblade War that reunites him with his old companions.
I think this Observation was written around the time of Re:Coded’s secret ending, titled ‘Destiny’. That cutscene takes place during DDD, before Lea and the others wake up as somebodies again. However, the Braig we see is his BbS appearance, not his DDD appearance as Xigbar. So we know this Braig time traveled, and being accompanied by Young Xehanort, we can assume they traveled together (notice neither had to give up their hearts). I believe that is why Young Xehanort appears in Birth by Sleep as the Mysterious Figure, to visit Luxu during the time of BbS. And it is AFTER Young Xehanort’s visit in BbS is when ‘Destiny’ takes place.
Why do I say after and not before? Because in BbS Young Xehanort does not use a keyblade (We are given a keyblade when beating him, but it is noticeably different). In ‘Destiny’ Young Xehanort says him having MoM’s No Name is yet to be a reality. BUT, Young Xehanort DOES have a keyblade in DDD, which, like I said, takes place soon after ‘Destiny’. And not only that, his keyblade (notably also named No Name) in DDD is the one we recieve from him in BbS- but now has decorations similar to that of the MoM’s No Name- a goat head and the gazing eye. After ‘Destiny’ Luxu (as BbS Braig, not DDD Xigbar) gives Young Xehanort that keyblade.
THAT is when Luxu writes Observation 3. “Keyblade Master devoted to the darkness may finally arise.” Refers to Young Xehanort, even if he’s in modern times. “I need only play the role of a fool desirous of the Keyblade’s power.” Refers to the way he behaves in ‘Destiny’ and in BbS when he returns. And “But now at last the Keyblade War has begun” refers to the situation of all 12 darkness being assembled (think back to his line in Destiny when he says “The party’s already begun, huh?”).
This is what leads me to believe that whatever Young Xehanort learns that Master Xehanort does not, he was taught to it by Luxu. And what was Young Xehanort taught? We see in KH3 he now knows about the Power of Waking, he continuously teases Sora about his dark fate. I believe Luxu tells Young Xehanort about The Master of Masters and the role he gave him. Even if Luxu returns back to the time of BbS, YX remains with this new information until Sora defeats him near the end of KH3.
We MUST remember this however: Young Xehanort was still able to time travel to BbS in the first place as the mysterious figure. Which means there is an event during the times of Young Xehanort and Young Eraqus at Scala ad Caelum that sets all these events in motion, as Ansem the Seeker of Darkness did not make it so YX could time travel like fan speculation suggests. I believe all Ansem did was give YX the opportunity to cross worlds, leaving Destiny Islands and arrive in Scala ad Caelum.
We must also remember that Xigbar (not BbS Braig) says in DDD that he is already half Xehanort, with an emphasis on his golden eye. We never completely defeated Xigbar in KH3, and he still has his golden eye in KH3′s epilogue. So, Young Xehanort could very well be able to travel forward past KH3. If we find out that he for sure does, it will explain why YX knows so much about Sora’s tragic fate that he warns him about many times in KH3.
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The conclusion
I practically spent all day writing this post. I understand that the Young Xehanort/Luxu part is by far the longest, and for that I apologize. I wrote the other two sections a couple times before in drafts (now deleted) so I already had a better idea on how to condense all that important information. I was realizing things about YX and Luxu while writing this, and that’s why those details seem much longer.
I have a headache now so I’m not really in the mood to properly close this off, I hope you’ll forgive me :’) but now, i WILL answer other asks about this. So if you want more, look at my tag #analysis
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Why Rajan/Kala/Wolfgang does not work in the Sense8 Finale
Warning : I apologize in advance for my English, please bear with me as it is not my first language.
I would like to preface this by saying: I liked the finale. Even more so: I LOVED the finale, which came as a strange surprise to me. I was spoiled some time ago, as many in this fandom after the premiere in May, and to be honest, I was not anticipating the Sense8 Finale as frantically as I would otherwise have. I was not even excited, and I was ready to wait a few days for the hype to go down before watching it – and to think that last year, I was furious, enraged and crying after the cancellation and that after that, I danced and screamed with my siblings when I heard there was going to be more Sense8… But the Kalagang spoiler quite tampered my enthusiasm, and I went from passionate to downright skeptic. But Friday night, my father came home with a bottle of white wine, and as he is a Wachowski Superfan, he insisted to watch the finale – so we sat down together to drink and watch the finale.
I had a great time. I was surprised by how much I still felt so strongly about these characters, the story, and most importantly, I found the “Sense8 feeling” again: a sense of euphoria, excitement and wonder that no other show could radiate for me.
I cried several times, and I have to admit: Lana Wachowski has a unique gift for transmitting the feeling, untamed, the raw and pure emotion, and blissful happiness. The transcendence of feeling, the great wave of being. The miracle of love that is not a utopia, but a power most real and palpable. The Wachowskis made me grateful for my human existence and experience. I cannot thank them enough for that.
That being said, I still have some criticism, and while it did not spoil my enjoyment of the finale, I found afterwards that my concerns were still valid.
In most of their filmography, the Wachowskis have this one weakness: they tend to prioritize discourse over story. Most people say about Sense8 that it is more about the characters than the plot, which is true in a sense – but to be more exact, the Wachowskis prioritize ideas over plot. Everything is an illustration, a demonstration in service of a great idea, an existential message about our perception of reality and the world we live in. Nothing with them is left hanging, nothing is implicit or ambiguous. Part of their charm for me, and part of what makes them unsubtle, broad or naïve for others, is that nothing is left in silence: everything is articulated, every purpose of a scene, an arc, a character, is said out loud and exposed in the open. The Wachowskis characters are walking philosophers and comment the meaning of their own action all the time. And, personally, especially in Sense8, it was one of the aspects that I loved.
But sometimes, the downside with it is: the big idea takes precedence over the character’s and the story’s inner coherence.
Lana Wachowski has a big idea, uses this character to illustrate it, but in doing so she’s taking the risk of ruining said character, by making him or her do something that does not fit with the pattern and the personality previously established. Discourse plastered over characters, regardless of the story’s coherence, is never a good thing. It is a subtle and frankly quite a hard balance to maintain between the creator’s purpose and the character that takes a life of his own, with his own and strange independent growth.
And unfortunately, Kala’s arc was sacrificed to demonstrate the show’s final point. There were a few other incoherencies in the finale, but her character is where this problem was the most obvious.
I understand that Lana and the other writers wanted, for this miraculous finale, a happy ending for everybody. But good intentions do not always equate good storytelling. I am myself a strong believer in happy endings, but in coherent ones, not scattered and confused like the Kala/Wolfgang situation.
And before anyone accuses me of conservatism, or whatever: it’s not a question of polyamory. You may say: representation is important, and I completely agree. But when you decide to provide some representation, I hope you always do it with care, even more so if it is something that means so much, like for the LGBT community for instance. Precious representation should be treated as such. Here, I cannot think of another word than “careless”. I recognize all the good will, the originality of the twist, but it is at the expense of two seasons worth of storytelling and character-building. It was rash and unwarranted.
I kind of get what they were going for, and I think the key to understanding the meaning behind the Kala/Rajan/Wolfgang “throuple” is to find in the words of River El-Sadaawi at the Nomanita wedding, a speech that is a sort of manifesto, an afterword by Lana Wachowski for the show and its significance:
“No one thing is one thing only. How people endow what is familiar with new, ever-evolving meaning and by doing so, release us from the expected, the familiar, into something unforeseeable. It is in this unfamiliar realm, we find new possibilities. It is in the unknown, we find hope.”
And so, Kala’s dilemma found an unexpected solution within a new, unfamiliar realm. Instead of opting for the traditional route taken in similar romantic plots, Lana Wachowski resolved the problem by changing the perspective, cancelling the structure of the love triangle itself by rejecting its rules, and enter a new possibility we never even considered, far more satisfying, on the surface at least.
I fully recognize the merit of such an undertaking, but the end result was nevertheless underwhelming, instead of filling me with the intended sense of relief and triumph. I expected a triumphant love, what I got felt like a tepid compromise.
And more importantly, I feel like Lana involuntarily ruined what was always a cornerstone in the Wachowski philosophy: we are our choices.
“Is it we that make the choice or the choice that makes us?”
Kala has always been avoiding the responsibility of the choice that presented itself to her, the choice that would define her as a human being. Her whole arc was to get her to that choice, to find the courage to make it, at last. Her challenge was not the fear the choice, but to embrace it wholeheartedly. To be brave. To have the courage to determine her own destiny.
It is no coincidence that Wolfgang represented that for her. By choosing him, she’s awakening her own courage. Wolfgang is the one who awakens her to her warrior side, who unveils the power of the woman inside her. He’s the one who gives the fearful and hesitant Kala the strength to be brave and determined, just as she makes him vulnerable and trusting. He IS her courage, just as she IS his faith.
But here, in the finale, Kala escapes her choice. It is left open, hanging in uncertainty, and we were instead served with contentment on all sides: everyone supposedly got what they wanted.
But sometimes, I say: you don’t always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes you get what you need.
Kala got what she wanted, the cancellation of her choice, but not what she needed: to face her fears, the image of herself that this choice reflected back to her, and embrace it. This choice was a necessary threshold for Kala as a woman, but now I feel like she’s stuck in limbo. “No rules” does not equal no choice.
I feel like there has been a great misunderstanding: Kala’s struggle was indeed linked with all the rules she internalized and the pressure she put upon herself (for her family is obviously very loving and gave her the freedom to make her own decisions). The societal rules were never a direct oppression, but more something she, a person with a high sense of responsibility, integrated on her own. She was, in a sense, her own persecutor, her own moral oppressor. It is interesting to see that as a woman, her first priority was to accommodate everybody before herself, and Rajan never questioned during the first season whether or not she reciprocated her feelings. To be fair, she never even dared to prioritize her own emotions in the first place. Because she still has a sense of obligation, to follow the scenario set by society and expected by the man in front on her, and in the end she does not dare to upset anybody.
The question of choice is the question of one’s own free will: it makes sense that in the end, Kala defies the rules she felt compelled to follow, the pressure to follow society and man’s desires and expectations before her own. But to make the choice, to be truly free, each one of us also has to let go of some part of ourselves: we have to let go to become something greater, and to live is always to die a little. Kala had to let the dream of being Rajan’s wife die, to embrace what she truly strives for.
But here, the alternative is: maintain everything. Maintain the status quo.
It does not work. The rule Kala should have let go was not the idea of exclusivity in marriage, but the idea of holding on to the structures that bound her to a man she did not love, because she internalized the societal pressure and felt compelled to respond to his advances. That the solution, in the end, is to say: “you will come to love him after he proves himself to you” sounds quite ridiculous in that sense.
Kala needed to find her own voice, articulate her own desires, not settle in a “in-between” space. She does not end with two full relationships, but a cheapened version of both. It is not in favor of Wolfgang, it is also not in favor of Rajan, a character I really enjoyed.
I think the fact that Rajan evolved, changed his perspective, went from a rich nice guy who pursued the woman he loved without asking if she loved him back and said “you look so beautiful when you’re angry” when said woman confronted him with his shortcomings, to the ride-or-die husband, ready to change and accept anything, was supposed the change the setting. If Rajan could change, the marriage could change and the rules with it.
But quite frankly, it cheapens the character of Rajan. I really like him, and he, like Kala, deserved better.
And it gets even more absurd with Wolfgang: Wolfgang Bodganow, the man that always confronted Kala with her own contradictions, who never compromised on his own feelings, always told the “ugly truth” that she avoided but needed to hear, that man gets on with it? In what universe is that believable?
The cornerstone of their relationship is: “What the fuck are you doing? You’re not in love with him.”
Sometimes, it’s as simple as that. “You’re not in love with him”.
What is a lover ? Because I do not question the fact that, in the end, she does love Rajan after a fashion. He comes to earn her respect, her gratitude, her estime. He is “more than the man (she) thought she married”. All that is true. It is love, a great love even, but in my opinion it is not the kind that builds and sustains a couple. It makes for a strong and faithful friendship, an undying loyalty, a partner. But not a lover. Rajan and Kala are not lovers.
And nobody will ever convince me that Rajan & Wolfgang will work within this arrangement. I will not even address that. It’s nonsense.
What makes me kind of sad, is that I truly enjoyed Rajan in this series finale. But he was reduced to a poor third wheel in a relationship that goes far beyond him. He deserves better.
I mean... What compare to this ?
Kala needed to find her voice of courage. She still needs to take a true leap in the unknown. A leap of faith.
I think that Lana is aware of that, in a way, because nothing seemed definitive in the finale. The only conclusion to which came Wolfgang and Kala was: “I don’t know”.
So that choice is still before her.
But, in the end, I still wanted to thank Lana Wachowski. Her love and dedication was truly palpable in this series finale.
And by the way, I refuse to consider this a series finale. So I say, until the next time, Cluster-family, and until the next time, dear Lana. You brought much joy to us.
Thank you.
#sense8#series finale#amor vincit omnia#kala dandekar#kala rasal#wolfgang bogdanow#rajan rasal#kalagang#kala x wolfgang#kala x rajan#kala x rajan x wolfgang#rajalagang#lana wachowski#meta
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Kraken, who is called Specimen
From the Book of Names, as written by the Rats of Fortitude
[Note: Italics represent handwritten additions]
Kraken, who is named Specimen, is a vast mass of dead flesh preserved behind glass. Surrounded by the Institute and by its court of scientist-observer-slave-tendrils, it is exactly what it is understood to be, and sends forth its people-limbs to share this exalted state.
The Institute seems at first a respite - an island in the Far Roofs where no wonders or terrors lurk, where there is time to rest and catch your breath. It is safe, and clean, and unsurprising. Everything there is understandable and understood, more so the closer you approach to its heart.
The lair of Kraken is a bright, clean and shining laboratory, walled with sterile cages and glass cases. In these are kept collections, displayed in order to be known - dead creatures preserved in liquid, their anatomy pinned open to be seen, and live ones fed and watered so that their instincts may be understood.
There are no people in Kraken’s collection; but brave Larissa, questing to rescue her lost brother Mercutio, was saved from capture by a freed lab-animal chewing through a vital wire - a rat that wore a face she knew, but with none of the personality she loved.
The name of Kraken is:
Specimen: the being bound, shaped and preserved as a lifeless thing of knowledge, where nothing remains of what it was.
The heralds of Kraken are:
the stink of preservative; the grinding of glass on stone; things seen or seen as if through glass. Mundanity where you expect mystery
The weapons of Kraken are:
glass, scalpels, preservatives, scientists, and things with many arms. Those who see questions as an affront and answers, once known, as mundane.
You turn Kraken aside by:
finding wonder in the known; by displaying all the secrets of your kind; by being prosaic and explicable
Kraken kills you by:
dissection, preservation and display; as a side effect of its efforts to transform you into a thing known, a thing defined, and a definition.
Kraken is drawn to:
the unknown; to learning; to enticing mysteries that tease understanding; to things displayed, that they might be understood; to things that defy or define their type.
Kraken hungers for:
knowledge; for understanding; those things that give up the secrets of their hearts it merely confines, while those that hold jealously to their central mysteries it will open up that every little detail might be seen.
You may kill Kraken by:
smashing its tank and consigning the corpse within to the depths; by bringing it to life. or by making of it a legend.
Kraken is reborn when:
the corpse of a vast beast from the depths of Big Lake is brought to the surface, contained and studied; when one of the faithful loses faith and hides from the world behind glass. when something mysterious and wonderful is revealed to have an entirely mundane explanation
You may escape the attention of Kraken by offering a perfect specimen to be dissected; by studying every detail of some aspect of the world;
OOC AUTHOR COMMENTARY
This is one of my standard-issue first-ish drafts that I probably won’t do another pass on.
Thanks to the Morandom chat for helping me get inspiration for some of this! Apologies, of course, to China Mieville for ripping off his novel Kraken and completely missing the point. As I’ve tried to get across, this Mystery says that understanding is a soulless thing, but that’s part of the monster, not part of the world.
It’s very much in opposition to the Far Roofs; it says that wonder and mystery don’t exist, that the world is prosaic and uninteresting. The intended tone here is a kind of creeping (existential?) horror - it lessens the things it infects, for all its claims to be displaying them.
Mechanically in CMWGE: Become Somebody is absolutely perfect for Kraken’s infectious worldview. Kraken is on display or possibly understood or explicable. Its failing is that it is a wondrous thing - despite everything, for all it’s just a rubbery mass of dead flesh, a preserved giant squid is awe-inspiring. Its role is the specimen of specimens; the example that allows us to understand specimenhood.
Awakening allows a character to be revealed as merely a limb of Kraken, and to bring other people into the soulless knowledge-quest it represents. Again, just what we wanted.
I mused about Creature of Fable for letting you reveal everyone else’s magic to be fake, but I’m not convinced Kraken needs that - Become Somebody probably does the trick. Still, one to consider.
It’s no accident that Kraken is turning out to be Actual-shaped. It’s a bottled intrusion into the world, working on prosaic laws that contain nothing of the wishing power of the heart or the beauty of what can be; it’s its own context, and in its quest to understand the miraculous it destroys wonder and leaves behind itself.
So that inclines us to look at Gatecrasher and Creature of Delirium (for now).
Gatecrasher’s workable: it reveals the hidden world of Prosaic Science, and Kraken’s specialism is along the lines of Preservation, Bottling, or Dissection. Your Special Moves are probably things you know from studying similar entities, or maybe bottled things; you get the ability to bottle increasingly improbable things. All decent, though to me this has a feel more faithful to the novel Kraken than the prosaic Mystery I’ve written here. So play the secret world of the mundane if you really want to, but I think Billy Harrow, initiate of the secret world of knacks and occultism, squid guy and bottle prophet, is more fun. ;-)
Creature of Delirium I need to think a lot more about. I suspect it has about the right shape; Kraken somehow extracts the miraculous from things, uses the hollow and prosaic shells that leaves behind as tools, and... does it do anything with the fragments of wonder it removes? I’m not convinced it does. Delirium is a very specific shape, and while the themes are close, getting them to fit the monster in my head might be a stretch too far.
However! Impresario - or at least its draft as Self-Made - has some very suitable powers. It’s got minions; it’s got messing with destiny (or rather, denying that there is destiny and just calculating what’s going to happen by prosaic science, amirite?) and as you advance further along the arc, you acquire abilities like Rest, Now (to make it difficult to do anything because the world is mundane and empty of wonder, and finally the power to reveal the inner truth of what things are - to make of them a specimen.
Become Somebody and Awakening are my first two picks, and I think Impresario is a solid third; Gatecrasher doesn’t inspire me, or rather inspires me vastly more for the Kraken that speaks of the joy and wonder in our quest to understand, rather than this more negative iteration. The fact that this results in a purple-arc Actual gently nurturing its people-limbs is... weird, but possibly interesting.
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I was wondering what you thought about soul canon for the show? I've been watching Buffy recently and trying to reflect over the difference between the vampires with and without souls and thought it would be interesting as applied to Cas. The idea being that without a soul one can only do things for selfish reasons (even if the actions are good) and you require one for a certain level of altruism. I personally think Cas grew a soul at some point, and I was wondering if you thought (1/2)
that some of his early actions on the show reflect this. For instance, the whole saving the world for Dean instead of for the fact that the world needs saving. Also just curious about your thoughts on the whole soul thing in general. :) (2/2)
I’m totally aboard the fanon train that Cas has had a soul since the end of 8x23 that hasn’t gone anywhere since, no matter what happened to him. Death said back in season 6 that souls couldn’t be broken, so I get the feeling you can’t just destroy one once you have it - Cas just keeps piling angel up on top of it. It seems to be forgotten and I’d kind of like it to stay that way unless the show is going to pull a scenario directly from a fan fic on us, because Cas is one of the only characters NOT to do a demon deal and he’s got a ruthless practicality about him that is a very bad combination when you hang out with Crowley :P If this ever comes up on the show NOT in the context of building Cas up to happy married retirement with Dean and a guinea pig, only bad will come of it :P
I’m less certain about how angels are different from not having a soul though. I’ve always understood what Anna says back in 4x10 about what angels are SUPPOSED to feel as being an order, but pretty much all the angels display emotions of some sort or another.
Actually, brief detour, but I watched 6x07 last night and was reminded that vampires in SPN work under, like, reverse Buffy rules:
Alpha Vampire: The boy with no soul. I’ve got big plans for you. It’s amazing how that pesky, little soul gets in the way. But not for you. You will be the perfect… animal.
I mean, even back in the first infodump about them ever, John told us that they mate for life in a sort of dismissive way you might describe, idk, that some animals do as well :P But if you don’t look at it like John, it seems fairly straightforward to just assume vampires have a lot of messy human baggage because they remember their past lives and still act on emotion and feel love and mate for life like HUMANS do. Later lore doubles down on this by thinking much harder about where the human soul is in all this and I guess Dabbflin’s conclusion was that vampires have to be affected by its existence inside them even if they’ve been turned (there was no wider plot reason to this line so I assume that’s just a detail one of them liked :P). 6x05 showing you can be turned back from being a vampire also suggests some complicated, arcane “dibs” system on souls between Heaven, Hell and Purgatory even more than we already knew (though it does amuse me that the next time Dean “dies” after that it’s because he’s in Purgatory :P) … idk. Point is, having ANY sort of type of soul in you, even if it’s been twisted into a monster one, still has some of the burden of having a human soul.
Cas back in season 6 made a point of telling Crowley he didn’t have a soul to trade, but, well, one of my favourite quotes about Cas is the obvious “too much heart” one and that’s from the start of season 8, referring to 99% of everything he did before he’d feasibly have a soul. I think Cas rebelled because of love back in season 4 - I think maybe a much more hard to define kind of feeling that’s still arms length from messy human emotions, but I do wonder HOW far. Unlike vampires, angels were created to be good, and to love - their final orders were to love humanity, if I’m not mistaken? And they were originally created to love God? I think they’re actually creatures OF love, just in this sort of cosmic way (but which translates down to the family squabble of the apocalypse when all’s said and done… :P)
I wonder if the difference is really just the freedom to love by choice whoever they like, and Anna fell to have that freedom… At the end of season 4 if you look at it through a non-shippy lens, Dean talks Cas over by reminding him of humanity, the original mission for the angels being to love and protect them. (I mean that still applies, but that’s also discarding all the character development between them and that Cas continually tells Dean he did everything because of him and like… the endless maintext confirmations of where Cas’s compass points :P Still, Cas’s rebellion is altruistically motivated because he chooses to believe in Dean’s greater good, not Heaven’s, so the end result is concern about humanity and who has the best idea about what to do for it.)
And then later on the angels are in a total mess because they have all strayed so far from the original mission and they’re trapped in power struggles and all the immediate problems of Heaven, and they’re so short-sighted by the need for orders and their inability to exercise freedom and choice (without lengthy character arcs to realise it) that I think you could easily say that’s behind all the angel turmoil. Raphael in season 6 literally can’t comprehend a universe where they don’t follow what was supposed to be destiny - he’s Cas’s enemy because Cas is representative of freedom and choice, and deciding NOT to do it. But once Heaven doesn’t have an apocalypse to focus on, it crumbles about what its purpose is, despite the fact the angels all theoretically know what they’re supposed to be doing…
(I do also think in season 6 Cas’s motivations are more complicated than JUST trying to save the world for Dean - he makes all his decisions through/about Dean but I think it is as much because Dean has shown him a way to live/things to believe in/a stake in the world to protect that can all be filtered through Cas’s experiences with Dean as to WHY he’s making the decisions, but just because Dean taught him to value the world in a certain way, that doesn’t mean Cas ONLY values it because Dean. He does genuinely love humanity, as much as we snark about that line about him being in love with ~humanity~)
Anyway, I see Cas as perfectly capable of making loving/altruistic choices before he has a soul, but afterwards - 9x11 through to current time - Cas is a changed angel and he chalks it up to his experience as a human, but it’s an immediate and permanent change to the softer, more vulnerable and emotive Cas we have now. I think from then on Cas does feel things much more intensely, in the messy, human way, even if he goes to great pains to pretend he doesn’t. I don’t think it changes his fundamental ability to love, but I think it changes the way he expresses it and how much sway he lets it have on his life. The end of season 9, with Metatron’s taunting, is a very good example of that. Cas has always acted on emotion but Metatron takes a great delight in pointing out that it wasn’t altruistic but selfish love that Cas acted against him for. Not for ~humanity~ but for Dean.
So again I think it’s completely backwards from Buffy; that if Cas changed at all it was going from more altruistically driven love to being able to choose what he wanted to love with complete freedom: after 9x23 Cas’s choices are always directly about Dean, in a much more open way. He helps get rid of the Mark and has no other conflict of interest in the second half of season 10 (and I’d argue the Hannah stuff in the first half shows as a mirror to Cas that he is letting go of this conflict of interest and following the “human things” that matter to him instead of Heaven’s orders for once) and in season 11 his relationship with Dean is at the centre of the PTSD and feelings of worthlessness that lead him to saying yes to Lucifer (of his own free choice as a being capable of being possessed and having to consent to an angel) - from 11x14 onwards he’s only still possessed because he wanted to use Lucifer to save Dean. In season 12 he’s dealing with some shit but it seems from the fact he has to leave (handled much better than all the other leaving in the 3rd episode times lately for some reason :P) seems to be very much about a hurdle to get over before he can feel at home and it looks like it’s going to be super personal again in the second half of the season…
And I think the ability to love selfishly is a much more human thing at least by Supernatural’s rules, because it’s being able to choose something for yourself, and for an angel, to defy the orders of the unconditional and impersonal love they were supposed to have. Since to me that IS the most human thing (which the show always has triple underlined as free will), and the way Cas changes after when I think he would have a soul even while being an angel, I think that’s much more a sign he has a soul BECAUSE his love is selfish now? (Selfish in the sense of “being about himself” not that he’s doing bad things to hoard that love all for himself or something :P)
#Asks#ironically this all starts for Cas when he is a 'vampire' eating other angels' grace#if you want to go back to the earlier metaphor :P#Destiel#Caaas#Cas analysis#angels#i feel like Yuri!!! on Ice has maybe affected my general knowledge of how the different sort of loves all work now :P#my stuff
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One of the most important legacies of LeBron James’s remarkable career will be one of player autonomy. He set the standard for an era of perceived labor power in pro sports. We now believe athletes should have greater agency to set the terms of their employment.
At three critical junctures in his career, James dictated the terms of his employment to the league’s billionaire owners. During his second stint playing for the Cleveland Cavaliers, he exercised self-determination to an unprecedented degree, wresting control of much of the team’s future away from its owner. On a recent podcast, after James said this week he would sign with the Los Angeles Lakers, the Ringer’s Chris Ryan said he thought of LeBron as the first “post-team” player in the NBA.
But James’s career also reveals the limits of labor autonomy in an infrastructure with such a power imbalance. NBA players have negotiated terms from their ownership that are far superior to America’s biggest sports league, the NFL. But their contract can still prevent somebody like LeBron — even the greatest player in the world — from playing for his real market value.
The max salary prohibits James from realizing his full worth. And it’s also helped establish the Golden State team juggernaut that has beaten LeBron for the NBA title in three of the past four seasons. The Warriors just added DeMarcus Cousins this week to a two-time-defending-champion core of Kevin Durant, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, and Steph Curry. The team’s owner is able to keep this group together, at least in part, because there is a limit to how much those highly skilled players can be paid.
These are the working conditions of perhaps the most singularly gifted worker in America at a time when the Supreme Court is rolling back the collective bargaining rights of public workers who will never attain even the limited autonomy that James’s superstardom has afforded him.
“You can be a superstar basketball player,” Richard Yeselson, a contributor editor for Dissent who has commented extensively on labor issues over the years, told me. “You can’t be a superstar steelworker or nurse or bookstore clerk or elementary school teacher.”
Those will be LeBron’s twin legacies in terms of pro sports’ labor rights: He pushed the boundaries of player agency more than anybody before him, but the inherent restrictions and inequalities of the system he worked under helped create a team that even he, perhaps the greatest player in the sport’s history, couldn’t beat.
James’s career ushered in a new norm of player sovereignty in professional basketball. After years of watching his owner and management team fail to build a winner in Cleveland, he engineered the birth of a new superteam in Miami in 2010. He defied Miami’s front office a few years later to return to Cleveland. Upon his homecoming in Ohio — and with the letter penned by Cavs owner Dan Gilbert, poisoned by contempt for his employee, having aged far worse in the public consciousness than LeBron’s decision to leave — James refused to give up leverage.
He signed a series of one-year deals, using the constant threat of his leaving to force Gilbert — who was gifted a second chance after his team lost one-quarter of its value when James left the first time — to spend exorbitantly on the team to put a championship contender on the floor. Gilbert did, and the Cavs won a title, helping James erase the one conceivable blemish on his personal playing legacy, now made up of four MVP awards and three championship rings.
This is how Will Leitch summed up the influence of LeBron’s decisions, particularly that first move to seize control of his destiny and move to Miami, for NBC News:
Indeed, in the eight years since James’ decision, the idea of athlete autonomy — of a player having more control and power over his or her own career, of not just being an employee of an owner who is not the one out running and dunking — has caught on in the public consciousness in a way it had failed to before. James’ move was the instigating act.
“What LeBron has done now twice — starting with the ‘big three’ in Miami which he pulled together — is to maximize his personal leverage within the overall rules of the NBA road,” Yeselson told me. “And because the NBA contract is the most player friendly and he is the greatest player, he can really maximize his leverage.”
LeBron has been bolstered, as Yeselson notes, by one of the more player-friendly collective bargaining contracts in professional sports. There is nothing as egregiously anti-labor as the franchise tag in the NFL dictating James’s fate; that tag quite literally prevents a player from leaving the team that controls his interests. He also has more freedom than Michael Jordan, to whom James is always compared, who tried and failed in the 1990s to challenge the NBA’s free agency restrictions under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
But that freedom is not absolute. And the restrictions that NBA owners have put on their players bear direct responsibility for the construction of the five-All-Star monstrosity in San Francisco, a team that not even LeBron, for all his individual greatness, seems to have any hope of beating.
The culprit is the NBA’s maximum salary. A player with James’s tenure cannot be paid more than 35 percent of the league’s salary cap, or $35.7 million, next season. The league’s CBA also allows teams that currently control a player’s interest to pay them slightly more, giving teams a financial carrot to dangle over their players to retain them. By any empirical metric, LeBron is worth a lot more than $36 million: When he left Cleveland in 2010, the Cavs lost about $120 million of their value and Miami, his new team, gained another $60 million in worth for its owners, per Forbes.
That fundamental piece of the NBA labor infrastructure has helped Golden State — which also benefitted from great drafting, the archaic ritual that gives teams the opportunity to claim a player’s rights by no more than chance, a literal lottery — build its super-team.
The Warriors had Curry, Thompson, and Green locked up for years on cost-controlled contracts. They were literally the best bargain in sports. Then the max salary — paired with a historic spike in the salary cap as the game grew more popular — gave Kevin Durant an opening to join them. He was going to be paid roughly what he was in Golden State, about $25 million, no matter where he played. Why not join the best team in the league, if the pay is the same, and win a few legacy-defining championships?
“There is so much more money as a result of TV deals that elite players can move without incurring too much of a markdown to intrinsic value,” Michael LeRoy, a professor at the University of Illinois who has studied sports and labor, told me.
But the max salary is the tool that owners have used to assemble such a gaudy collection of talent as we’re seeing in Golden State. Now they’re adding DeMarcus Cousins, an All-NBA center coming off a serious injury, who is signing a LeBron-esque one-year $5 million contract with an eye toward increasing his value, and exercising his right to choose an employer, in 2019.
If the New York Knicks, a bedeviled but historic and wealthy franchise that Durant reportedly might be interested in helping to revive at some point in his career, could offer the two-time NBA Finals MVP an unlimited amount of money, Durant might have left the Warriors already or never gone there in the first place. That’s if New York could have given him a $50 million-per-year contract. He, like LeBron had before him, is keeping his options open with a series of one-year contracts.
But for now, Durant has little reason to leave the best team in the league, maybe the best team in league history, beyond his own whims and competitive desires. The financial incentive is not really a concern, because the owners have artificially restrained how much players, even those of Durant’s caliber, can make.
“Even LeBron can’t get what’s he’s really worth to franchises who increase their market value every year,” Yeselson told me. “There are still maximum contracts, both in salary per year and in lengths — LeBron is probably worth a lot more money than whatever the given maximum is.”
Original Source -> LeBron James and the NBA teach us a lot about labor in America
via The Conservative Brief
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Chapter 4 - BANNON
BANNON
Steve Bannon was the first Trump senior staffer in the White House after Trump was sworn in. On the inauguration march, he had grabbed the newly appointed deputy chief of staff, Katie Walsh, Reince Priebus’s deputy at the RNC, and together they had peeled off to inspect the now vacant West Wing. The carpet had been shampooed, but little else had changed. It was a warren of tiny offices in need of paint, not rigorously cleaned on a regular basis, the décor something like an admissions office at a public university. Bannon claimed the nondescript office across from the much grander chief of staff’s suite, and he immediately requisitioned the white boards on which he intended to chart the first hundred days of the Trump administration. And right away he began moving furniture out. The point was to leave no room for anyone to sit. There were to be no meetings, at least no meetings where people could get comfortable. Limit discussion. Limit debate. This was war. This was a war room.
Many who had worked with Bannon on the campaign and through the transition shortly noticed a certain change. Having achieved one goal, he was clearly on to another. An intense man, he was suddenly at an even higher level of focus and determination.
“What’s up with Steve?” Kushner began to ask. And then, “Is something wrong with Steve?” And then finally, “I don’t understand. We were so close.”
Within the first week, Bannon seemed to have put away the camaraderie of Trump Tower—including a willingness to talk at length at any hour—and become far more remote, if not unreachable. He was “focused on my shit.” He was just getting things done. But many felt that getting things done was was more about him hatching plots against them. And certainly, among his basic character notes, Steve Bannon was a plotter. Strike before being struck. Anticipate the moves of others—counter them before they can make their moves. To him this was seeing things ahead, focusing on a set of goals. The first goal was the election of Donald Trump, the second the staffing of the Trump government. Now it was capturing the soul of the Trump White House, and he understood what others did not yet: this would be a mortal competition.
* * *
In the early days of the transition, Bannon had encouraged the Trump team to read David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. (One of the few people who seem actually to have taken him up on this reading assignment was Jared Kushner.) “A very moving experience reading this book. It makes the world clear, amazing characters and all true,” Bannon enthused.
This was a personal bit of branding—Bannon made sure to exhibit the book to many of the liberal reporters he was courting. But he was also trying to make a point, an important one considering the slapdash nature of the transition team’s staffing protocols: be careful who you hire.
Halberstam’s book, published in 1972, is a Tolstoyan effort to understand how great figures of the academic, intellectual, and military world who had served during the Kennedy and Johnson years had so grievously misapprehended the nature of the Vietnam War and mishandled its prosecution. The Best and the Brightest was a cautionary tale about the 1960s establishment—the precursor of the establishment that Trump and Bannon were now so aggressively challenging.
But the book also served as a reverential guide to the establishment. For the 1970s generation of future policy experts, would-be world leaders, and Ivy League journalists aiming for big-time careers—though it was Bannon’s generation, he was far outside this self-selected elite circle—The Best and the Brightest was a handbook about the characteristics of American power and the routes to it. Not just the right schools and right backgrounds, although that, too, but the attitudes, conceits, affect, and language that would be most conducive to finding your way into the American power structure. Many saw the book as a set of prescriptions about how to get ahead, rather than, as intended, what not to do when you are ahead. The Best and the Brightest described the people who should be in power. A college-age Barack Obama was smitten with the book, as was Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton.
Halberstam’s book defined the look and feel of White House power. His language, resonant and imposing and, often, boffo pompous, had set the tone for the next half century of official presidential journalism. Even scandalous or unsuccessful tenants of the White House were treated as unique figures who had risen to the greatest heights after mastering a Darwinian political process. Bob Woodward, who helped bring Nixon down—and who himself became a figure of unchallengeable presidential mythmaking—wrote a long shelf of books in which even the most misguided presidential actions seemed part of an epochal march of ultimate responsibility and life-and-death decision making. Only the most hardhearted reader would not entertain a daydream in which he or she was not part of this awesome pageant.
Steve Bannon was such a daydreamer.
* * *
But if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it—and defiled it. Not a single attribute would place him credibly in the revered circle of American presidential character and power. Which was, in a curious reversal of the book’s premise, just what created Steve Bannon’s opportunity.
The less likely a presidential candidate is, the more unlikely, and, often, inexperienced, his aides are—that is, an unlikely candidate can attract only unlikely aides, as the likely ones go to the more likely candidates. When an unlikely candidate wins—and as outsiders become ever more the quadrennial flavor of the month, the more likely an unlikely candidate is to get elected—ever more peculiar people fill the White House. Of course, a point about the Halberstam book and about the Trump campaign was that the most obvious players make grievous mistakes, too. Hence, in the Trump narrative, unlikely players far outside the establishment hold the true genius.
Still, few have been more unlikely than Steve Bannon.
At sixty-three, Bannon took his first formal job in politics when he joined the Trump campaign. Chief Strategist—his title in the new administration—was his first job not just in the federal government but in the public sector. (“Strategist!” scoffed Roger Stone, who, before Bannon, had been one of Trump’s chief strategists.) Other than Trump himself, Bannon was certainly the oldest inexperienced person ever to work in the White House.
It was a flaky career that got him here.
Catholic school in Richmond, Virginia. Then a local college, Virginia Tech. Then seven years in the Navy, a lieutenant on ship duty and then in the Pentagon. While on active duty, he got a master’s degree at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, but then he washed out of his naval career. Then an MBA from Harvard Business School. Then four years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs—his final two years focusing on the media industry in Los Angeles—but not rising above a midlevel position.
In 1990, at the age of thirty-seven, Bannon entered peripatetic entre-preneurhood under the auspices of Bannon & Co., a financial advisory firm to the entertainment industry. This was something of a hustler’s shell company, hanging out a shingle in an industry with a small center of success and concentric rings radiating out of rising, aspiring, falling, and failing strivers. Bannon & Co., skirting falling and failing, made it to aspiring by raising small amounts of money for independent film projects—none a hit.
Bannon was rather a movie figure himself. A type. Alcohol. Bad marriages. Cash-strapped in a business where the measure of success is excesses of riches. Ever scheming. Ever disappointed.
For a man with a strong sense of his own destiny, he tended to be hardly noticed. Jon Corzine, the former Goldman chief and future United States senator and governor of New Jersey, climbing the Goldman ranks when Bannon was at the firm, was unaware of Bannon. When Bannon was appointed head of the Trump campaign and became an overnight press sensation—or question mark—his credentials suddenly included a convoluted story about how Bannon & Co. had acquired a stake in the megahit show Seinfeld and hence its twenty-year run of residual profits. But none of the Seinfeld principals, creators, or producers seem ever to have heard of him.
Mike Murphy, the Republican media consultant who ran Jeb Bush’s PAC and became a leading anti-Trump movement figure, has the vaguest recollection of Bannon’s seeking PR services from Murphy’s firm for a film Bannon was producing a decade or so ago. “I’m told he was in the meeting, but I honestly can’t get a picture of him.”
The New Yorker magazine, dwelling on the Bannon enigma—one that basically translated to: How is it that the media has been almost wholly unaware of someone who is suddenly among the most powerful people in government?—tried to trace his steps in Hollywood and largely failed to find him. The Washington Post traced his many addresses to no clear conclusion, except a suggestion of possible misdemeanor voter fraud.
In the midnineties, he inserted himself in a significant role into Biosphere 2, a project copiously funded by Edward Bass, one of the Bass family oil heirs, about sustaining life in space, and dubbed by Time one of the hundred worst ideas of the century—a rich man’s folly. Bannon, having to find his opportunities in distress situations, stepped into the project amid its collapse only to provoke further breakdown and litigation, including harassment and vandalism charges.
After the Biosphere 2 disaster, he participated in raising financing for a virtual currency scheme (MMORPGs, or MMOs) called Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE). This was a successor company to Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), a dot-com burnout, whose principals included the former child star Brock Pierce (The Mighty Ducks) who went on to be the founder of IGE, but was then pushed out. Bannon was put in as CEO, and the company was subsumed by endless litigation.
Distress is an opportunistic business play. But some distress is better than others. The kinds of situations available to Bannon involved managing conflict, nastiness, and relative hopelessness—in essence managing and taking a small profit on dwindling cash. It’s a living at the margins of people who are making a much better living. Bannon kept trying to make a killing but never found the killing sweet spot.
Distress is also a contrarian’s game. And the contrarian’s impulse—equal parts personal dissatisfaction, general resentment, and gambler’s instinct—started to ever more strongly fuel Bannon. Part of the background for his contrarian impulse lay in an Irish Catholic union family, Catholic schools, and three unhappy marriages and bad divorces (journalists would make much of the recriminations in his second wife’s divorce filings).
Not so long ago, Bannon might have been a recognizably modern figure, something of a romantic antihero, an ex-military and up-from-the-working-class guy, striving, through multiple marriages and various careers, to make it, but never finding much comfort in the establishment world, wanting to be part of it and wanting to blow it up at the same time—a character for Richard Ford, or John Updike, or Harry Crews. An American man’s story. But now such stories have crossed a political line. The American man story is a right-wing story. Bannon found his models in political infighters like Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove. All were larger-than-life American characters doing battle with conformity and modernity, relishing ways to violate liberal sensibilities.
The other point is that Bannon, however smart and even charismatic, however much he extolled the virtue of being a “stand-up guy,” was not necessarily a nice guy. Several decades as a grasping entrepreneur without a satisfying success story doesn’t smooth the hustle in hustler. One competitor in the conservative media business, while acknowledging his intelligence and the ambitiousness of his ideas, also noted, “He’s mean, dishonest, and incapable of caring about other people. His eyes dart around like he’s always looking for a weapon with which to bludgeon or gouge you.”
Conservative media fit not only his angry, contrarian, and Roman Catholic side, but it had low barriers to entry—liberal media, by contrast, with its corporate hierarchies, was much harder to break into. What’s more, conservative media is a highly lucrative target market category, with books (often dominating the bestseller lists), videos, and other products available through direct sales avenues that can circumvent more expensive distribution channels.
In the early 2000s, Bannon became a purveyor of conservative books products and media. His partner in this enterprise was David Bossie, the far-right pamphleteer and congressional committee investigator into the Clintons’ Whitewater affair, who would join him as deputy campaign manager on the Trump campaign. Bannon met Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart at a screening of one of the Bannon-Bossie documentaries In the Face of Evil (billed as “Ronald Reagan’s crusade to destroy the most tyrannical and depraved political systems the world has ever known”), which in turn led to a relationship with the man who offered Bannon the ultimate opportunity: Robert Mercer.
* * *
In this regard, Bannon was not so much an entrepreneur of vision or even business discipline, he was more simply following the money—or trying to separate a fool from his money. He could not have done better than Bob and Rebekah Mercer. Bannon focused his entrepreneurial talents on becoming courtier, Svengali, and political investment adviser to father and daughter.
Theirs was a consciously quixotic mission. They would devote vast sums—albeit still just a small part of Bob Mercer’s many billions—to trying to build a radical free-market, small-government, home-schooling, antiliberal, gold-standard, pro-death-penalty, anti-Muslim, pro-Christian, monetarist, anti-civil-rights political movement in the United States.
Bob Mercer is an ultimate quant, an engineer who designs investment algorithms and became a co-CEO of one of the most successful hedge funds, Renaissance Technologies. With his daughter, Rebekah, Mercer set up what is in effect a private Tea Party movement, self-funding whatever Tea Party or alt-right project took their fancy. Bob Mercer is almost nonverbal, looking at you with a dead stare and either not talking or offering only minimal response. He had a Steinway baby grand on his yacht; after inviting friends and colleagues on the boat, he would spend the time playing the piano, wholly disengaged from his guests. And yet his political beliefs, to the extent they could be discerned, were generally Bush-like, and his political discussions, to the extent that you could get him to be responsive, were about issues involving ground game and data gathering. It was Rebekah Mercer—who had bonded with Bannon, and whose politics were grim, unyielding, and doctrinaire—who defined the family. “She’s . . . like whoa, ideologically there is no conversation with her,” said one senior Trump White House staffer.
With the death of Andrew Breitbart in 2012, Bannon, in essence holding the proxy of the Mercers’ investment in the site, took over the Breitbart business. He leveraged his gaming experience into using Gamergate—a precursor alt-right movement that coalesced around an antipathy toward, and harassment of, women working in the online gaming industry—to build vast amounts of traffic through the virality of political memes. (After hours one night in the White House, Bannon would argue that he knew exactly how to build a Breitbart for the left. And he would have the key advantage because “people on the left want to win Pulitzers, whereas I want to be Pulitzer!”)
Working out of—and living in—the town house Breitbart rented on Capitol Hill, Bannon became one of the growing number of notable Tea Party figures in Washington, the Mercers’ consigliere. But a seeming measure of his marginality was that his big project was the career of Jeff Sessions—“Beauregard,” Sessions’s middle name, in Bannon’s affectionate moniker and evocation of the Confederate general—among the least mainstream and most peculiar people in the Senate, whom Bannon tried to promote to run for president in 2012.
Donald Trump was a step up—and early in the 2016 race, Trump became the Breitbart totem. (Many of Trump’s positions in the campaign were taken from the Breitbart articles he had printed out for him.) Indeed, Bannon began to suggest to people that he, like Ailes had been at Fox, was the true force behind his chosen candidate.
Bannon didn’t much question Donald Trump’s bona fides, or behavior, or electability, because, in part, Trump was just his latest rich man. The rich man is a fixed fact, which you have to accept and deal with in an entrepreneurial world—at least a lower-level entrepreneurial world. And, of course, if Trump had had firmer bona fides, better behavior, and clear electability, Bannon would not have had his chance.
However much a marginal, invisible, small-time hustler Bannon had been—something of an Elmore Leonard character—he was suddenly transformed inside Trump Tower, an office he entered on August 15, and for practical purposes, did not exit, save for a few hours a night (and not every night) in his temporary midtown Manhattan accommodations, until January 17, when the transition team moved to Washington. There was no competition in Trump Tower for being the brains of the operation. Of the dominant figures in the transition, neither Kushner, Priebus, nor Conway, and certainly not the president-elect, had the ability to express any kind of coherent perception or narrative. By default, everybody had to look to the voluble, aphoristic, shambolic, witty, off-the-cuff figure who was both ever present on the premises and who had, in an unlikely attribute, read a book or two.
And indeed who, during the campaign, turned out to be able to harness the Trump operation, not to mention its philosophic disarray, to a single political view: that the path to victory was an economic and cultural message to the white working class in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
* * *
Bannon collected enemies. Few fueled his savagery and rancor toward the standard-issue Republican world as much as Rupert Murdoch—not least because Murdoch had Donald Trump’s ear. It was one of the key elements of Bannon’s understanding of Trump: the last person Trump spoke to ended up with enormous influence. Trump would brag that Murdoch was always calling him; Murdoch, for his part, would complain that he couldn’t get Trump off the phone.
“He doesn’t know anything about American politics, and has no feel for the American people,” said Bannon to Trump, always eager to point out that Murdoch wasn’t an American. But Trump couldn’t get enough of him. With his love of “winners”—and he saw Murdoch as the ultimate winner—Trump was suddenly bad-mouthing his friend Ailes as a “loser.”
And yet in one regard Murdoch’s message was useful to Bannon. Having known every president since Harry Truman—as Murdoch took frequent opportunities to point out—and, he conjectured, as many heads of state as anyone living, Murdoch believed he understood better than younger men, even seventy-year-old Trump, that political power was fleeting. (This was in fact the same message he had imparted to Barack Obama.) A president really had only, max, six months to make an impact on the public and set his agenda, and he’d be lucky to get six months. After that it was just putting out fires and battling the opposition.
This was the message whose urgency Bannon himself had been trying to impress on an often distracted Trump. Indeed, in his first weeks in the White House, an inattentive Trump was already trying to curtail his schedule of meetings, limit his hours in the office, and keep his normal golf habits.
Bannon’s strategic view of government was shock and awe. Dominate rather than negotiate. Having daydreamed his way into ultimate bureaucratic power, he did not want to see himself as a bureaucrat. He was of a higher purpose and moral order. He was an avenger. He was also, he believed, a straight shooter. There was a moral order in aligning language and action—if you said you were going to do something, you do it.
In his head, Bannon carried a set of decisive actions that would not just mark the new administration’s opening days, but make it clear that nothing ever again would be the same. At the age of sixty-three, he was in a hurry.
* * *
Bannon had delved deeply into the nature of executive orders—EOs. You can’t rule by decree in the United States, except you really can. The irony here was that it was the Obama administration, with a recalcitrant Republican Congress, that had pushed the EO envelope. Now, in something of a zero-sum game, Trump’s EOs would undo Obama’s EOs.
During the transition, Bannon and Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide who had earlier joined the Trump campaign and then become Bannon’s effective assistant and researcher, assembled a list of more than two hundred EOs to issue in the first hundred days.
But the first step in the new Trump administration had to be immigration, in Bannon’s certain view. Foreigners were the ne plus ultra mania of Trumpism. An issue often dismissed as living on the one-track-mind fringe—Jeff Sessions was one of its cranky exponents—it was Trump’s firm belief that a lot of people had had it up to here with foreigners. Before Trump, Bannon had bonded with Sessions on the issue. The Trump campaign became a sudden opportunity to see if nativism really had legs. And then when they won, Bannon understood there could be no hesitation about declaring their ethnocentric heart and soul.
To boot, it was an issue that made liberals bat-shit mad.
Laxly enforced immigration laws reached to the center of the new liberal philosophy and, for Bannon, exposed its hypocrisy. In the liberal worldview, diversity was an absolute good, whereas Bannon believed any reasonable person who was not wholly blinded by the liberal light could see that waves of immigrants came with a load of problems—just look at Europe. And these were problems borne not by cosseted liberals but by the more exposed citizens at the other end of the economic scale.
It was out of some instinctive or idiot-savant-like political understanding that Trump had made this issue his own, frequently observing, Wasn’t anybody an American anymore? In some of his earliest political outings, even before Obama’s election in 2008, Trump talked with bewilderment and resentment about strict quotas on European immigration and the deluge from “Asia and other places.” (This deluge, as liberals would be quick to fact-check, was, even as it had grown, still quite a modest stream.) His obsessive focus on Obama’s birth certificate was in part about the scourge of non-European foreignness—a certain race-baiting. Who were these people? Why were they here?
The campaign sometimes shared a striking graphic. It showed a map of the country reflecting dominant immigration trends in each state from fifty years ago—here was a multitude of countries, many European. Today, the equivalent map showed that every state in the United States was now dominated by Mexican immigration. This was the daily reality of the American workingman, in Bannon’s view, the ever growing presence of an alternative, discount workforce.
Bannon’s entire political career, such as it was, had been in political media. It was also in Internet media—that is, media ruled by immediate response. The Breitbart formula was to so appall the liberals that the base was doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet of disgust and delight. You defined yourself by your enemy’s reaction. Conflict was the media bait—hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.
The real goal was to expose the hypocrisy of the liberal view. Somehow, despite laws, rules, and customs, liberal globalists had pushed a myth of more or less open immigration. It was a double liberal hypocrisy, because, sotto voce, the Obama administration had been quite aggressive in deporting illegal aliens—except don’t tell the liberals that.
“People want their countries back,” said Bannon. “A simple thing.”
* * *
Bannon meant his EO to strip away the liberal conceits on an already illiberal process. Rather than seeking to accomplish his goals with the least amount of upset—keeping liberal fig leaves in place—he sought the most.
Why would you? was the logical question of anyone who saw the higher function of government as avoiding conflict.
This included most people in office. The new appointees in place at the affected agencies and departments, among them Homeland Security and State—General John Kelly, then the director of Homeland Security, would carry a grudge about the disarray caused by the immigration EO—wanted nothing more than a moment to get their footing before they might even consider dramatic and contentious new policies. Old appointees—Obama appointees who still occupied most executive branch jobs—found it unfathomable that the new administration would go out of its way to take procedures that largely already existed and to restate them in incendiary, red-flag, and ad hominem terms, such that liberals would have to oppose them.
Bannon’s mission was to puncture the global-liberal-emperor-wears-no-clothes bubble, nowhere, in his view, as ludicrously demonstrated as the refusal to see the colossally difficult and costly effects of uncontrolled immigration. He wanted to force liberals to acknowledge that even liberal governments, even the Obama government, were engaged in the real politics of slowing immigration—ever hampered by the liberal refusal to acknowledge this effort.
The EO would be drafted to remorselessly express the administration’s (or Bannon’s) pitiless view. The problem was, Bannon really didn’t know how to do this—change rules and laws. This limitation, Bannon understood, might easily be used to thwart them. Process was their enemy. But just doing it—the hell with how—and doing it immediately, could be a powerful countermeasure.
Just doing things became a Bannon principle, the sweeping antidote to bureaucratic and establishment ennui and resistance. It was the chaos of just doing things that actually got things done. Except, even if you assumed that not knowing how to do things didn’t much matter if you just did them, it was still not clear who was going to do what you wanted to do. Or, a corollary, because nobody in the Trump administration really knew how to do anything, it was therefore not clear what anyone did.
Sean Spicer, whose job was literally to explain what people did and why, often simply could not—because nobody really had a job, because nobody could do a job.
Priebus, as chief of staff, had to organize meetings, schedules, and the hiring of staff; he also had to oversee the individual functions of the executive office departments. But Bannon, Kushner, Conway, and the president’s daughter actually had no specific responsibilities—they could make it up as they went along. They did what they wanted. They would seize the day if they could—even if they really didn’t know how to do what they wanted to do.
Bannon, for instance, even driven by his imperative just to get things done, did not use a computer. How did he do anything? Katie Walsh wondered. But that was the difference between big visions and small. Process was bunk. Expertise was the last refuge of liberals, ever defeated by the big picture. The will to get big things done was how big things got done. “Don’t sweat the small stuff” was a pretty good gist of Donald Trump’s—and Steve Bannon’s—worldview. “Chaos was Steve’s strategy,” said Walsh.
Bannon got Stephen Miller to write the immigration EO. Miller, a fifty-five-year-old trapped in a thirty-two-year-old’s body, was a former Jeff Sessions staffer brought on to the Trump campaign for his political experience. Except, other than being a dedicated far-right conservative, it was unclear what particular abilities accompanied Miller’s political views. He was supposed to be a speechwriter, but if so, he seemed restricted to bullet points and unable to construct sentences. He was supposed to be a policy adviser but knew little about policy. He was supposed to be the house intellectual but was purposely unread. He was supposed to be a communications specialist, but he antagonized almost everyone. Bannon, during the transition, sent him to the Internet to learn about and to try to draft the EO.
By the time he arrived in the White House, Bannon had his back-of-the-envelope executive order on immigration and his travel ban, a sweeping, Trumpian exclusion of most Muslims from the United States, only begrudgingly whittled down, in part at Priebus’s urging, to what would shortly be perceived as merely draconian.
In the mania to seize the day, with an almost total lack of knowing how, the nutty inaugural crowd numbers and the wacky CIA speech were followed, without almost anybody in the federal government having seen it or even being aware of it, by an executive order overhauling U.S. immigration policy. Bypassing lawyers, regulators, and the agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it, President Trump—with Bannon’s low, intense voice behind him, offering a rush of complex information—signed what was put in front of him.
On Friday, January 27, the travel ban was signed and took immediate effect. The result was an emotional outpouring of horror and indignation from liberal media, terror in immigrant communities, tumultuous protests at major airports, confusion throughout the government, and, in the White House, an inundation of lectures, warnings, and opprobrium from friends and family. What have you done? Do you know what you’re doing? You have to undo this! You’re finished before you even start! Who is in charge there?
But Steve Bannon was satisfied. He could not have hoped to draw a more vivid line between the two Americas—Trump’s and liberals’—and between his White House and the White House inhabited by those not yet ready to burn the place down.
Why did we do this on a Friday when it would hit the airports hardest and bring out the most protesters? almost the entire White House staff demanded to know.
“Errr . . . that’s why,” said Bannon. “So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.” That was the way to crush the liberals: make them crazy and drag them to the left.
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