#liberalism causes gun deaths
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Liberalism is a public health issue.
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FTH 2024: Supported Nonprofit Organizations
Here are the nonprofit organizations that will be supported by this year's FTH auction. Many of these orgs will be familiar from last year's list, but we've cycled in some new groups as well. In particular, because it's a major election year in the US, we've brought in (or brought back) organations focusing on voter enfranchisement.
If you are a FTH creator and you want to ask your bidders to support an organization that’s not on the list, please read our policy on outside organizations here.
Bellingcat *
Bellingcat is an independent investigative collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists brought together by a passion for open source research in the public interest.
Civil Rights Education and Enforcement Center *
The Civil Rights Education and Enforcement Center (CREEC) is a nonprofit legal organization that fights for liberation and equity through the lens of intersectional disability justice.
In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda *
A national-state partnership focused on lifting up the voices of Black women leaders at the national and regional levels in our fight to secure Reproductive Justice for all women, girls, and gender-expansive individuals, NBWRJA delivers proactive advocacy and policy solutions to address issues at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexual orientation and gender identity.
Life After Hate
LAH provides support to people leaving hate groups, and providing pluralism education and training to vulnerable young people.
Middle East Children's Alliance *
MECA is a nonprofit organization working for the rights and the well-being of children in the Middle East. They collect funds in order to provide direct aid, financial support for community projects, water purification systems, and university scholarships, and also create educational and cultural programs in the US and internationally to increase cultural understanding.
National Network to End Domestic Violence *
NNEDV offers a range of programs and initiatives to address the complex causes and far-reaching consequences of domestic violence.
Never Again Action *
A Jewish-led mobilization against the persecution, detention, and deportation of immigrants in the United States, NAA takes on campaigns against detention centers and ICE training programs, and organizes mutual aid and deportation defense.
Razom *
Razom initiates short and long-term projects, or collaborates on existing projects with partner organizations, which help Ukraine stay on the path of fostering democracy and prosperity
Sherlock’s Homes Foundation *
SHF provides housing, employment opportunities, and a loving support system for homeless LGBTQ+ young adults so that they can live fearlessly as their authentic selves. Within these homes, young adults learn about responsibility, accountability, financial independence, life skills, and how to love themselves
Spread the Vote
STV helps eligible voters make their voices heard through voter education, supporting voters through the process of getting necessary ID, and advocating against voter suppression laws.
Violence Policy Center *
VPC works to stop gun death and injury through research, education, advocacy, and collaboration; exposes the profit-driven marketing and lobbying activities of the firearms industry and gun lobby, and offers unique technical expertise to policymakers, organizations, and advocates.
VoteRiders
VR works to help all citizens exercise their right to vote. It informs and helps citizens to secure their voter ID as well as inspires and supports organizations, local volunteers, and communities to sustain voter ID education and assistance efforts.
Umbrella: Environmental orgs
For the past four years, FTH has supported one “umbrella” cause: we invite participants to donate to their own local grassroots organization, while also suggesting a handful of exemplary organizations working in communities where the need is especially acute. This year our umbrella category is environmental organizations.
Pollinator Partnership *
Deploy/Us *
Together Bay Area
Wildlands Restoration Volunteers
Coral Restoration Foundation *
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Organizations marked with an asterisk (*) allow for international donations directly through their websites. The orgs without asterisks may take international donations through a paypal or venmo account. If you are a non-US-based bidder/donor and you are having trouble finding an organization to which you can donate, please email us directly at fandomtrumpshate @ gmail . com.
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I want to get into Marxist theory and I agree with everything on principle. But, I am iffy about stuff like reeducation/labor camps, or the idea of needing censorship for everything, or needing to murder civilians (bourgeoisie, non military ppl). Like I am not naive in thinking that revolution is bloodless but I am still uncomfortable about it. I thought to do the thing that I always do is to simply repress my feelings while holding into these ideas but I don't think that is sustainable. Do you have any tips on like overcoming these feelings, or am I like a lost cause?
Like the other anon who sent something in similar, I would first advise delving into the philosophy of dialectics and of materialism. Moralistic idealism, which is essentially the philosophical background of liberalism, puts weight on 'good' or 'bad' things and actions, which often times is useless and holds back change (in the abstract sense). On Contradiction is a good, short intro into the Marxist way of thinking.
Marxist theory/framework is also extremely useful for organizing irl and understanding the world in a clear, materialist manner which lets you critically analyze world events, their driving forces, and their possible outcomes. Even if you don't want to fight in the proletarian army, having it in your back pocket is helpful.
The final point is that the bourgeoisie as the class is waging war against your class, the proletariat. It does this by using the violence of the state, as justified through liberalism, to commit heinous crimes across the world (to put it simply). They are, in effect, holding you hostage at gunpoint to force you to work otherwise they will shoot you with the gun that kills you through homelessness, hunger, lack of healthcare, etc., etc. On top of that, they hold the world hostage, pointing a gun that kills global south people through invasions, sanctions, death squads, coups, and genocide just to steal all of their resources and labor. The bourgeoisie employ re-education/labor camps on scales which dwarf that in the Soviet Union or the PRC; over a quarter of the world's prison population is in the united states who work them as slaves. What was abu gharib and what is guantanmo bay if they aren't modern day torture centers and political prisons. Censorship exists on a grand scale due to bourgeois ideological superstructure. They lie through omission as much as they do through misrepresentation or outright falsehoods. In the face of this overwhelming violence and class war, the proletarian revolution cannot constitute violence for violence's sake; it is a matter of self defense.
If you can't square the circle of self defense, then I don't have much else to say other than your abstracted morality is gravely at risk of being exploited by those who seek to distort the world in service of the reaction.
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Band of Brothers Easy Company Sorted Between Surviving and Not Surviving WWII: Part 1 of 2
Hey all! Here is part 1 of my big BoB post!!! I still have some work to do on part 2 but I will try to have it up as soon as I can. I hope you all find this useful and also a little bit interesting. I had so much fun doing the research for it. 🙂❤️
Enjoy!!! xoxo
Died During the War:
Company Commanders:
First Lieutenant Thomas Meehan III
Born: July 8th, 1921 (Philadelphia, PA)
Enlisted: March 16th, 1941 (Philadelphia, PA)
Died: June 6th, 1944/ D-Day (Normandy, France)
Age at Death: 22 years old
Cause of Death: Plane shot down and crashed after being hit by German anti-aircraft fire.
• His remains were finally returned to the U.S. in 1952 and he is currently buried at the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery just south of St. Louis, Missouri
Awards/Medals:
• Parachutists Badge (aka Jump Wings)
• Combat Infantry Badge
• American Campaign Medal
• Purple Heart
• European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal (with 2 service stars)
• World War II Victory Medal
• French Liberation Medal
• Croix de guerre with palm
Wounded?: No (died before seeing any combat)
Family:
• Thomas Meehan II (Father)
• Marion Opp Meehan (Mother)
• Anne Shore (Wife)
• Barrie Meehan Meller (Daughter)
Non-commissioned Officers:
Sergeant Warren Harold "Skip" Muck
Born: January 31st, 1922 (Tonawanda, NY)
Enlisted: August 17th, 1942 (Buffalo, NY)
Died: January 10th, 1945 (Foy, Bastogne, Belgium)
Age at Death: 22 years old
Cause of Death: Killed when an artillery round hit his foxhole, shared with Alex Penkala, and exploded.
• Skip Muck is buried at the Luxembourg American Cemetery in Hamm, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg.
Awards/Medals:
• Parachutists Badge (aka Jump Wings) with 2 combat stars
• Combat Infantryman Badge
• Bronze Star
• Purple Heart
• Presidential Unit Citation (with one Oak Leaf Cluster)
• European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal (with 3 service stars and arrow device)
• World War II Victory Medal
• Army of Occupation Medal
• Croix de guerre with palm
• French Liberation Medal
• Belgian World War II Service Medal
Fought:
• D-Day/Battle of Normandy (Normandy, France)
• Operation Market Garden (Einhoven, Holland)
• Battle of the Bulge (Ardennes Forrest, Bastogne, Belgium)
Wounded?: Never wounded until KIA in Bastogne
Family:
• Elmer Julius Muck Sr. (Father)
• Loretta M. Muck (Mother)
• Elmer J. Muck Jr. (Older Brother)
• Ruth Muck (Younger Sister)
• Faye Tanner (Fiancée)
Enlisted Men:
Corporal Donald B. "Hoob" Hoobler
Born: June 28th, 1922 (Manchester, OH)
Enlisted: July 22nd, 1942 (Fort Thomas, KY)
• Joined the Ohio National Guard on October 15th, 1940 and served until October 1941.
Died: January 3rd, 1945 (Bastogne, Belgium)
• Don Hoobler is buried at Manchester IOOF Cemetery with his father (d. 1941), mother (d. 1976), and brother George (d. 1932).
Age at Death: 22 years old
Cause of Death: After acquiring a German Luger and placing the gun in his pocket the gun discharged due to the pressure of the multiple layers of clothing he was wearing and severed the femoral artery in his right leg. He bled out and died before he was able to be transported to an aid station.
Awards/Medals:
• Parachutists Badge (aka Jump Wings)
• Combat Infantryman Badge
• Purple Heart
• American Defense Medal
• European Theater of Operations Ribbon
Fought:
• Battle of Normandy/D-Day (Normandy, France)
• Operation Market Garden (Einhoven, Holland)
• Battle of the Bulge (Ardennes Forrest, Bastogne, Belgium)
Wounded?: No. Not until his fatal non-combat related gunshot wound to his leg in Bastogne.
Family:
• Sergeant Ralph Brenton Hoobler (Father)
• Kathryn Phyllis [Carrigan] Hoobler (Mother)
• John R. Hoobler (Brother)
• George B. Hoobler (Brother)
• Mary Kathryn [Hoobler] Lane (Sister)
Private First Class Alex Mike Penkala Jr.
Born: August 30th, 1924 (Niles, Michigan)
Drafted: February 27th, 1942 (Toledo, OH)
Died: January 10th, 1945 (Foy, Bastogne, Belgium)
Age at Death: 20 years old
Cause of Death: Killed when an artillery round hit his foxhole, shared with Skip Muck, and exploded.
• Alex Penkala is buried at the Luxembourg American Cemetery in Hamm, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg.
Awards/Medals:
• Parachutists Badge (aka Jump Wings)
• Combat Infantryman Badge
• Purple Heart
• Bronze Star
• American Campaign Medal
• European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal (with 3 service stars and arrowhead)
• World War Two Victory Medal
• Reconnaissance de la France Libérée
• Croix de guerre with palm
• Médaille commémorative de la Guerre
• Good Conduct Medal
Fought:
• Battle of Normandy/D-Day (Normandy, France)
• Operation Market Garden (Einhoven, Holland)
• Battle of the Bulge (Ardennes Forrest, Bastogne, Belgium)
Wounded?: Wounded by a mortar explosion in the arm in Bastogne.
Family: Alex Penkala's parents emigrated from Poland in 1906 and his father barely spoke English. All the Penkala children (including Alex) were fluent in Polish.
• Alexander Penkala Sr. (Father)
• Mary [Kinski] Penkala (Mother) *died in childbirth in 1927 delivering her 13th child
• Angela M. [Penkala] Sobczyk (Oldest Sister)
• Mary [Penkala] Setlak (2nd Oldest Sister)
• Helen E. [Penkala] Hawblitzel (3rd Oldest Sister)
• Matilda V. [Penkala] Budney (4th Oldest Sister)
• Genevieve A. [Penkala] Glujas (5th Oldest Sister)
• Edward F. Penkala (Oldest Brother)
• Clem J. Penkala (2nd Oldest Brother)
• Evelyn A. [Penkala] Tatay (6th Oldest Sister)
• Irene [Penkala] Lichatowich (7th Oldest Sister)
• Rose L. [Penkala] Kaczmarczyk (2nd Youngest Sister)
• Gertrude E. [Penkala] Picking (Youngest Sister)
• Sylvia (Girlfriend)
Survived the War:
Company Commanders:
Captain Herbert Maxwell Sobel
Born: January 26th, 1912 (Chicago, IL)
Enlisted: March, 7th 1941
Died: September 30th, 1987 (Waukegan, IL)
Age at Death: 75 years old
Cause of Death: Malnutrition
• In 1970 Sobal shot himself in the head in an attempted suicide. The bullet entered his temple and severed his optic nerve rendering him blind for the rest of his life.
• He died a Lieutenant Colonel; serving in both WWII & Korea
• Sobel was cremated after his death
• Sobel is buried at Montrose Cemetery-Crematorium in Chicago, IL
• No one attended his funeral
Awards/Medals:
• Parachutists Badge (aka Jump Wings)
• Combat Infantryman Badge
• Bronze Star Medal
• American Campaign Medal
• European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal
• World War II Victory Medal
• Croix de guerre (France)
Fought:
• Battle of Normandy/D-Day (Normandy, France)
• Operation Market Garden (Einhoven, Holland)
• Battle of the Bulge (Ardennes Forrest, Bastogne, Belgium)
Wounded?: No
After the War: Worked as a credit manager for a telephone equipment company in Chicago.
• Sobel was born into a Jewish family, his wife was devoutly Catholic. This was a major problem for his family.
• Sobel and his wife divorced sometime in the late 1960s and he became estranged from his family shortly after.
Family:
• Max H. Sobel (Father)
• Dora Friedman (Mother)
• Julian Sobel (Brother)
• Maxine Sobel (Brother)
• Ruth Sobel (Sister)
• Rose Sobel (Wife)
• Michael Sobel (Son)
• Herbert Sobel Jr. (Son)
• Rick Sobel (Son)
• 1 daughter (died a few days after birth)
Major Richard Davis "Dick" Winters
Born: January 21st, 1918 (New Holland, PA)
Enlisted: August 25th, 1941 (place unknown)
Died: January 2nd, 2011 (Campbelltown, PA)
Age at Death: 92 years old
Cause of Death: Parkinson's disease
• Dick is buried at Bergstrasse Evangelical Lutheran Church, Ephrata Township, PA and was laid to rest on January 8th, 2011.
Awards/Medals:
• Parachutists Badge (with 2 Combat Stars)
• Combat Infantryman Badge
• Medal of the City of Einhoven
• Distinguish Service Cross [The second highest medal awarded by the US Military]
• Bronze Star with one Oak Leaf Cluster
• Purple Heart
• Presidential Unit Citation with one Oak Leaf Cluster
• American Defense Medal
• National Defense Medal
• European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal
• World War II Victory Medal
• Army of Occupation Medal
• Croix de guerre with palm
• French Liberation Medal
• War Cross (Belgium) with palm
• Belgian World War II Medal
Fought:
• Battle of Normandy/D-Day (Normandy, France)
• Operation Market Garden (Einhoven, Holland)
• Battle of the Bulge (Ardennes Forrest, Bastogne, Belgium)
• Western Allied invasion of Germany
Wounded?: Took a ricochet sniper bullet to the leg in Carentan.
After the War: Became a production assistant at Nixon Nitration Works, a plastics adhesive factory, in Raritan, NJ
Family:
• Richard Winters (Father)
• Edith Winters (Mother)
• Beatrice Winters (Sister)
• Ann Sheehan (Younger Sister)
• Ethel Estoppey Winters (Wife)
• Richard T. Winters (Son)
• Jill Peckelun (Daughter)
First Lieutenant Frederick Theodore "Moose" Heyliger
Born: June 23rd, 1916 (Acton, MA)
Enlisted: November 25th, 1940
Died: November 3rd, 2001 (Concord, MA)
• Moose is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
Age at Death: 85 years old
Cause of Death: Stroke
Awards/Medals:
• Parachutists Badge (aka Jump Wings)
• Bronze Star
• Purple Heart
• American Campaign Medal
• European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal
• Military Cross
Fought:
• Battle of Normandy/D-Day (Normandy, France)
• Operation Market Garden (Einhoven, Holland)
Wounded?: Was accidentally shot by one of his own men (a replacement) on October 31st, 1944. His wounds caused him to need to undergo skin and nerve grafts. He was discharged from the army in February 1947 after being in military hospitals for nearly 3 years.
After the War: Worked as a salesman for landscape and agriculture chemical companies.
Family:
• Theodore Godet Heyliger (Father)
• Bertha Louise Heyliger (Mother)
• Johannes Almon Heyliger (Older Brother)
• Pauline Louise Heyliger (Older Sister)
• Howard Francis Heyliger (2nd Oldest Brother)
• Vic Heyliger (Younger Brother)
• Evelyn Davis (First Wife) [divorced early 1960s]
• Frederick Heyliger Jr. (Son)
• Diane Heyliger (Daughter)
• Mary Heyliger (Second Wife)
• Jon Heyliger (Son)
First Lieutenant Norman Staunton "Foxhole Norman" Dike Jr.
Born: May 19th, 1918 (Brooklyn, NY)
Enlisted: January 22nd, 1942
Died: June 23rd, 1989 (Rolle, Switzerland)
• Dike is buried at West Thompson Cemetery, Thompson Windham County, North Grosvenor Dale, Connecticut.
Age at Death: 71 years old
Cause of Death: "A long illness" is all the info I could find
Awards/Medals:
• Silver Star
• Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster
• Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster
• Order of Orange-Nassau Netherlands 2nd class
Fought:
• Operation Market Garden
• Battle of the Bulge
Wounded?: Shot in the right shoulder in Foy
After the War: Dike opened his own law practice in Switzerland
Family:
• Norman S. Dike Sr. (Father)
• Evelyn M. Biddle (Mother)
• Barbra Tredick Dimmick McIntire (Wife) (m. June 20th 1942 - divorced June 1946)
• Catherine Pochon (2nd Wife) (m. March 12th, 1957)
• Anthony Randolph Dike (Son)
• Robin Dike Auchincloss (Daughter)
• Barbra Matilda Dike (Daughter)
• Deborah Ann Dike (Daughter)
Captain Ronald Charles Speirs
Born: April 20th, 1920 (Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
Enlisted: April 11th 1942
Died: April 11th, 2007 (Saint Marie, Montana)
Age at Death: 86 years old
Cause of Death: Died suddenly; cause unknown
• Burial details unknown
Awards/Medals:
• Master Parachutist Badge with 4 combat jump devices (stars)
• Combat Infantry Badge 2nd Award
• Silver star
• Legion of Merit
• Bronze Star with 2 Oak Leaf Clusters
• Purple Heart with ne Oak Leaf Clusters
• Army Commendation Medal
• Presidential Unit Citation with one Oak Leaf Cluster
• American Campaign Medal
• European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with four Service Stars and Arrowhead Device
• World War II Victory Medal
• Army of Occupation Medal
• National Defense Service Medal with Service Star
• Korean Service Medal with four Service Stars and Arrowhead Device
• Croix de Guerre with palm
• French Liberation Medal
• Republic of Korea Presidential Unit Citation
• United Nations Korea Medal
• Korean War Service Medal
Fought:
• Battle of Normandy/DDay
• Operation Market Garden
• Battle of the Bulge
Wounded?: Wounded by fire from an enemy machine gun in Rendijk, Holland
After the War: After WWII Spiers stayed in the army for 22 years and served in both the Korean and Cold Wars. Once out of the army Speirs served as the Governor of Spandau Prison (where Nazi war criminals were held).
Family:
• Robert Spiers (Father)
• Martha McNeil (Mother)
• Margaret Griffiths (Wife) (m. May 20th, 1944 - 1946) * Divorced bc she was British and didnt't want to move to America with him.
• Leonie Gertrude Hume Fritz (2nd Wife) (m. 1958)
• Ramona Dolores Pujol Strumph (3rd Wife) (m. 1987)
• Robert (Son from 1st wife)
Junior Officers:
Captain Lewis Nixon
Born: September 30th, 1918 (New York, NY)
Enlisted: January 14th, 1941 (Trenton, NJ)
Died: January 11th, 1995 (Los Angeles, CA)
Age at Death: 76 years old
Cause of Death: Complications from diabetes
• Lew is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills
Awards/Medals:
• Parachutist Badge (Jump Wings) with 3 combat stars
• Combat Infantyman Badge
• Purple Heart
• American Defense Medal
• European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Ribbion with 3 Battle Stars and a Bronze Arrowhead
• World War Two Victory Medal
• World Was Two Army of Occupation Award with Germany Clasp
• French Criox de Guerre (Cross of Valor)
• Presidential Unit Citation with Bronze Oak Leaf
• 5 Overseas Service Stripes
• Ruptured Duck Patch (WWII Discharge Patch)
Fought:
• Battle of Normandy/DDay
• Operation Market Garden
• Battle of the Bulge
• Operation Varsity
Wounded?: In the Netherlands he was hit by a bullet from a German MG 42 machine gun. The bullet went through his helmet, grazed his forehead, and left a burn mark.
After the War: Nix worked at his family's Nixon Nitration Works in Edison, New Jersey alongside his father and friend Dick Winters.
Family:
• Stanhope Wood Nixon (father)
• Doris Ryer Nixon (mother)
• Fletcher Ryer Nixon (brother)
• Blanche Nixon (sister)
• Katharine Page (1st Wife) (m. December 20th, 1941 - 1944)
• Irene Miller (2nd Wife) (m. June 1946 - 1962)
• Grace Umezawa (3rd Wife) (m. 1962)
• Michael Nixon (Son with 1st Wife)
First Lieutenant Lynn Davis "Buck" Compton
Born: December 31st, 1921 (Los Angeles, CA)
Enlisted: Was already ROTC (started 1940) when the war broke out (graduated in 1943 and assigned to the 176th Infantry Regiment)
Died: February 25th, 2012 (Burlington, WA)
Age at Death: 90 years old
Cause of Death: Complications from a heart attack he had in January 2012
• Buck was cremated after his death and his ashes were given to his family
Awards/Medals:
• Parachutist Badge (Jump Wings) with 2 jump stars
• Combat Infantryman Badge
• Silver Star
• Bronze Star
• Purple Heart
• Presidential Unit Citation with one Oak Leaf Cluster
• American Defense Service Medal
• American Campaign Medal
• European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with arrow device (airborne assult) and 3 campaign stars
• World War II Victory Medal
• Army of Occupation Medal
• French Croix de guere with palm
• French Liberation Medal
Fought:
• Battle of Normandy/DDay
• Operation Market Garden
• Battle of the Bulge
Wounded?: In 1944, during Operation Market Garden, Buck was shot in the backside. Then, in January 1945, Buck suffered severe battle fatigue after witnessing two close friends (Joe Toye and Bill Guarnere) badly wounded by artillery fire.
After the War: He attended Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and joined the LA Police Department in 1946 becoming a detective in the Central Burglary Division. He left the LAPD for the District Attorney's office in 1951 as a deputy district attorney. He was promoted in 1964 to chief deputy district attorney. In 1970, Governor Ronald Reagan appointed him an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. He retired in 1990.
• (Fun Fact/Before the War) Buck played as the catcher on his college baseball team his junior year. One of his teammates was Jackie Robinson. Also, Bucks mother worked on movies and Buck was present on set with his mother and met actor Charlie Chaplin. Buck, being a child at the time, was so rowdy and disruptive that Charlie Chaplin kicked him off set.
Family:
• Roby Franks Compton (Father)
• Ethel Camille Compton (Mother)
• Geraldine Compton (1st Wife)
• Donna Faye Newman Compton (2nd Wife)
• Tracy Compton (adopted daughter w/ 2nd wife)
• Syndee Compton (adopted daughter w/ 2nd wife)
#band of brothers#thomas meehan#skip muck#donald hoobler#alex penkala#herbert sobel#dick winters#moose heyliger#norman dike#ronald speirs#lewis nixon#buck compton#part 1#alyygx
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A Stitch In Time First Read Reactions & Thoughts Monster Post Part 3
Stumbling over the finish line if not in style then with enthusiasm!
Part 1, Part 2
- Odo looked as if he could use a spell in his bucket; I had rarely seen him looking so run-down.
<3 I love one goo man
“I’d better get this information to Captain Sisko,” Odo decided.
“Would you rather I tell him?” I offered. Odo looked positively drained; he needed to return to his liquid state.
Every time Odo is changeling-sleep deprived Garak starts to hear kill bill sirens and flash back to ‘the die is cast’. It is kind of sweet that he seems to be worried for his friend and not trying to gain an advantage or sneak around here tho.
The ironies of the situation both amused and irritated me. Here I was, the invaluable decoder of Cardassian encryptions containing life-and-death information for the Federation—and they won’t trust me with the code to wake up Captain Sisko. Ah well, it was never easy being a Cardassian on this suspended chunk of desolation. And then I laughed out loud. But what about Odo? The last time I looked he was a changeling, a member of the race of Founders that was determined to destroy the Alpha Quadrant. Not only did he have the captain’s wake-up code, he also slept with the station’s second-in-command.
LMAO you know what fair fucking point garak. Tbf I’m sure there are some people who’ve been assuming you’ve been fucking the chief medical officer too
But if Damar had thrown his support to the rebels … if it wasn’t a ploy… I wanted my revenge on him, yes, but not at the expense of liberating Cardassia. And it wasn’t just liberating the planet from the control of a foreign power. It was closer… more personal. I wanted something that was even more difficult to attain—redemption.
The doors opened, and once again I was alert as I stepped into the deserted corridor and moved past the sleeping quarters to my own. It was time, I kept repeating in my head. It was time to take our place among the planets and peoples of the Alpha Quadrant as a civilized and open society. It was time to repair the damage. “A stitch in time saves….” What? What was that expression?
*pats him very gently and lovingly on the head* This man can unironically fit so much character development in him
“You’re Khon-Ma, aren’t you?” She didn’t respond. “Being the only Cardassian on this station, I expected you a long time ago. What kept you?”
She should shoot you actually just for this
I stopped. What’s the point, I thought. All the stories were beginning to run together and they all had the same ending.
Smoking gun of ‘hm I think there might be some unreliable narration still lingering here’ lol. In a way all but openly admitting that like this is probably more like telling the truth for garak than telling the actual truth would be. From how we see him interact with Toran in the show I buy that the emotional truth about this is basically as he tells it tho — I think he’s angry and disgusted with himself more for having been unable to stop something from happening and taking that as being as responsible for it as the asshole who caused it, rather than actively making it happen himself. That’s the kind of pattern he has in so many other places in his life too, trying to navigate in the very limited space and with the very limited agency being submissive to personalities like Tain and Toran leaves you.
“And they were all killed,” she said even more softly.
“End of story, Remara.” I considered telling her how I had exacted my own revenge upon Toran, and that my only regret was that his death hadn’t come sooner… but what was the point? Another treacherous opportunist dies after tearing another hole in the fabric. What’s gained except the potential for more damage? I rose. The station’s gravity felt like it had increased threefold.
“If you’re going to kill me, get it over with. One way or the other I’d like to go to sleep.”
“Who gave the order?” she asked.
“What difference does it make? I did, if you like.”
Remara just looked at me. She lowered the phaser. Part of me was deeply disappointed.
The ‘has he been thinking with his horny brain this whole time or is he passive-actively suicidal’ conundrum. I suppose there’s nothing saying it can’t be both but I also think it’s more on the second side than he’d like anyone to know. I guess there’s no easy way to tell the guy who saved your life that you don’t really care that much for said life most days, and if you were offered some plausible deniability…
“You’re going to have to leave this station. They’ll keep coming after you until someone succeeds. Goodbye, Elim.” She put her hand against the side of my face, and I felt the heat coming through. Perhaps her passion was a curse as a terrorist, but she was a whole person … and she had found redemption.
Chewing on the idea of being a whole person vs. ‘unfinished man’ and ‘mosaic person’
- Gul Toran is someone Tain has warned me to monitor periodically.
Ah so Four Lubak is the future Gul Toran (the asshole in the Natima Lang ep if I remember correctly)! I see. That also means his snarking about Toran being made Gul is entirely performative he’s known about it for years lmao that was literally just to be a bitch yes wonderful
- The fact that Tain has an evil Romulan twin/soulmate and they hate each other fdskjfhdsa
- So interesting that it does take until middle-age and Palandine’s extended presence in his life before Garak’s sense of humor really emerges fully. It seems such an integral part of him in the show, it sure is Something that it basically had to be carefully tended to and supported like a lil flower by careful gardener’s hands (thank you Palandine I’m sorry your life is a nightmare)
- But I must confess that the toast proposed by proconsul Merrok left me feeling much better about the whole affair.
. . .
“At first I couldn’t think why you hated him,” I confessed.
“I don’t hate anyone, Elim,” he carefully explained. “I have a job to do—and sometimes it’s necessary to eliminate those enemies who can’t otherwise be dissuaded. And he was determined to block our interests at every juncture.”
“I don’t hate anyone” says man composed of about 98% hate per volume
“Oh yes, my boy—yes, you did excellent work. A job well done.” He had never complimented me with such unconditional enthusiasm. It was almost a demonstration of paternal pride.
“You see, I had this planned for a long time, Elim. But Tolan wouldn’t agree. He wouldn’t take on the assignment, and he wouldn’t pass on the information. But thankfully he trusted you, Elim.” Tain patted me on the shoulder, which meant I was dismissed.
Weaponizing Tolan’s memory against him. Fucked Up.
- Fear and isolation, Doctor. You can’t have one without the other. Fear isolates and isolation is fear’s natural home. Just as my orchids need carefully prepared soil to protect them against disease and pests, fear needs the isolated circumstances to deepen and grow without connective or relational interference. When fear is allowed to flourish in its dark and lonely medium, then any evil that can be conceived by the fearful imagination will emerge.<
This whole chapter is so fucking good, and it starts slapping right from the beginning. The way this works not only as a description of the larger crimes of Cardassia, but also the shape of his own life.
‘My orchids’ is very sweet, and a phrasing that occurs several times.
My feelings are spent, my moral rationalizations are empty, and I can’t say it’s not my problem when I’m pulling and lifting and throwing bodies of people who once only wanted to go about the business of their lives.
His life has been a series of violent deconstruction followed by reassembly of the broken pieces, and this should have been the most shattering of all but it comes across as almost peaceful. He finally gets to have his soul to himself enough to make something meaningful with it and put it together in his own time and in the shape of his own truth, even in the middle of such a painful realization.
Colonel Kira once told me how many Bajorans died during the Cardassian Occupation, and my mind rejected the figure like a piece of garbage. We’d been in the service of the state, I had told myself, and the state had determined what was necessary. But now I understand why she hated me. More important, I now understand that constant burning, almost insane look in her eyes.
. . .
Most of us who are left, Doctor, are insane. We have to be in order to survive and emerge from our isolation. It’s the only way we can live with the pain of what we did. Or didn’t. Each of us accepts the amount of responsibility we are capable of bearing. Some accept nothing, and these people are quickly swallowed by their isolation, their insanity transformed into a rationalized evil. A smaller group accepts total responsibility, and their insanity is an unbearable burden that cripples and eventually grinds them down. The rest of us carry what we can and leave the rest. For myself, Doctor, when a corpse is too heavy to bury I try to remember to ask someone to help me.
This man can hold so much fucking character development 2 electric boogaloo and HOW!! Imagine early seasons Garak saying anything like this! Even while I’ll also buy that early seasons Garak does have the capacity to get to this point in the end after enough work. AND the way it goes with his dream of Cardassia as a mass grave earlier/later on in the book — which also sort of indicates that the person he’s asked to ‘bury these bodies with’, as it were, before, was specifically Bashir. ‘You taught me to ask for help’. I’m so fucking soft for all the ways Garak is showing him that he touched his life in the very best and most beautiful way anyone could, no matter where they go from here.
- “I don’t know. I suppose I’m just trying to reconcile statistical analysis with Romulan gardens.” We lapsed into a long, stony silence. Usually she knew better than to expect a real answer when she did ask about my working life. We both tried not to venture into certain personal spaces; often the attempt functioned as a barrier. I’m sure she knew that I was more than a data analyst at the Hall of Records. She also understood that the less she knew about what I did the more chance our relationship had to survive. For the same reason I never asked about Lokar. The less information, the less damage if either one of us was betrayed.
Garak that’s kind of sloppy, of course she knows something’s up if you’re making it that easy to figure out lol
Another interesting detail: Palandine seemingly never learns that Tain is Garak’s biological father, then. Very emblematic of the way all those secrets were still getting between them despite their best efforts. And lending even more meaning to the fact that many years later he lets Julian find out in uh perhaps the most direct way possible haha.
“I’m of two minds. I know, that’s just another way of saying that I’m confused.”
Huh. I wonder if the way this is phrased suggests that that’s not a common expression in Cardassian and he’s translating it directly from Standard or something, or that his uh. Mental confusion/dissociation/fragmentation pops up enough that she’s familiar with it already here?
“Yes. What if they’re right? What if they could help us reclaim something noble in ourselves? Where does that leave us?” We stood looking at each other. The night wind gusted through the foliage and I wondered where I’d be if I didn’t have this woman’s friendship.
What a soft way to describe it. Really drives home the like. Wholeness of what she meant to him.
“It was a while ago, Palandine. I don’t know if they’re in the same place … or if they even meet tonight.” Her enthusiasm rendered me as helpless as it did when I first met her.
Julian/Palandine parallels time yet again
I looked at Palandine, and she now radiated with such light that I turned away, inexplicably embarrassed as if I had seen something I shouldn’t.
So sad somehow that they kind of drift apart in this scene, where Palandine finds something that helps her and he mostly seems to come away lost and confused, if cleansed. (and he still can’t cry with someone else in the room)
After Palandine had left, I had spent the rest of the night sitting in the Grounds near the children’s area.
How is this so goddamn sad fhkjshfa. They’re still just children, and no one is going to come pick them up from the playground, no one is going to protect them
- “Yes, of course,” I replied. I took a deep breath, and my disparate parts began to snap back.
Adrift from himseeelf. This is kind of what I meant about Palandine maybe picking up on some of his — this stuff. Which structurally pops back up in The Wire too, with how he tells the stories.
“You look like you’re not eating anything,” Prang observed. If Tain was the father of the Obsidian Order, Prang was its mother.
LMAO. And he’s constantly worried about his saddest son I guess. Tain/Prang most cursed DS9 rarepair idea???
- His other hand was now probing my skull behind the right ear. The man’s ambidexterity was impressive.
Lol diversity win: the mad doctor about to implant you with experimental tech is ambidextrous!
Oh. Oh no it’s the wire time. The fact that he’s one of the first agents fitted with it b/c his hindbrain distress tolerance is too worryingly low for their comfort…
When I tell you that this wire will give you no trouble, as long as you don’t meddle with it, you can believe me. You know that, don’t you, Elim?”
“Yes, I do, Mindur.” The man had never given me anything but superb technology and sound advice. “Please continue,” I submitted.
“Good boy.” Timor thumped my shoulder again.
HORROR SHOW CULTURE ONCE MORE and also. Praise kink revisited and made more interestingly fucked up. Also submission theme thread.
Do you think he’d meddle with the wire eventually even if he hadn’t been exiled. I feel like there’s a non-zero chance of that.
- I remembered the Hebitian frieze and its lush background. Of course we were different people: it was a different world. The more the forests receded, it seems, the more we covered ourselves. Their world didn’t need an agent of the Obsidian Order to investigate a group of prominent Cardassians who “happened” to be spending their vacation together. It didn’t have Enabran Tain targeting one of his bitterest enemies, Procal Dukat, a powerful member of the Central Command. And I’m certain it didn’t have fathers who refused to acknowledge their sons. If we lived on the next spiral of the cycle of life, how did we know it wasn’t going downward?
a) ‘what if the glass is not only half-empty but also leaking’ yes very cheery Garak and b) one of the rare times he lets not just his bitterness with Tain but also his longing to be acknowledged by him fully shine through. To me it seems like that’s the one thing that’s still too raw for him to dwell on in this narrative. He mostly doesn’t get into or sit with the pretty obvious fact that he loved Tain, and desperately wanted Tain to love him too. You can see the traces through the whole thing of just how angry he is with him now that he’s dead (GOOD! HE SHOULD BE! HE SHOULD BE ANGRIER; IF ANYTHING!), but that particular element of it seems too vulnerable to keep in sight most times
- PYTHAS IS BACK BA-BEY!
His grace was even more refined as he moved to the small house that was our assigned base of operations. If anything could have taken my mind off downward spirals it was the appearance of Pythas.
And the mutual crush endures (also with me I love a sneaky little twink)
“What was good for you, Elim, was usually agreeable to me as well,” he wryly observed.
The way Pythas is like Garak’s shadow — except in Garak’s eyes he does everything ‘right’, he doesn’t seem to have that same aching need for connection, he follows his orders easily, he’s perfect and he reaps the rewards Garak never gets. Garak never even resents or begrudges him any of it. And yet they end up in basically the same place when all’s said and done, in the ruins of Cardassia, and Garak might even win out b/c his trials with the mortifying ordeal of being known mean he has some people in his life he’s starting to truly trust, the way Pythas seems to with Nal as well. Thinking. A lot of things.
Over the years, his modest demeanor and quiet ways had turned him into more of a solitary person than I ever was. I had learned to withdraw my presence as a tool, but I was always aware of my need for contact, and that my value as an operative lay in my ability to engage others in a nonthreatening manner that drew them out. Pythas had learned to withdraw his presence as a way of life—and he moved through the world like a shadow. I was not surprised that Tain had recruited him for the “invisibles.” It took a special person to be able to operate in such unrelentingly anonymous circumstances—no family, no fixed base or identity—and there was no doubt in my mind that he was one of the most brilliant agents in the Order. Our relationship picked right up where it had left off at Bamarren. Other than Prang, I have never met anyone where so much was communicated with so few words. His eyes had a depth and eloquence that told me everything I wanted to know. How ironic that my lust for conversation was satisfied by someone who rarely spoke.
Ah, so if Palandine is the proto-Julian, as it were (and Parmak is the silver fox Ersatz Julian), Pythas is definitely the anti-Julian as well as Garak’s shadow hahaha.
- Garak is undeniably a city boy at the end of the day haha. Pythas help him out there in the jungle he doesn’t belong here I understand why you’re so worried
- In a way it was touching: the old man reverting to the mind control exercises he had learned as a child.
Garak. The warning bells. Should they perhaps be ringing merrily in your mind at this combination of words and letters. Oh well.
- “Yes, it’s me.” I squatted so that I was at eye level. I tried to soften myself, round off all the sharp edges.
Yes yes yes this is such a good description of that Thing he does. His ‘just a lil guy/tailor/gardener/funny spy man’ move
‘Carriers of disease’ and spreading poison motifs are back. Dukat Sr. uses it here to describe cowardice/Federation ideals/hashtag the SJWs/the forces that threaten to disrupt the status quo of the fascist state.
- I left the containment field in place and stepped outside to clear my head. No matter how objective I tried to remain, I could never remain totally unaffected by another man’s horror. Fear was a contagious disease.
This seems right to me — I don’t think anyone who could truly shrug off other people’s suffering would have to make up such webs of justification and alienation as Garak does to do what he does. Maybe that empathy is why he’s so good at it and also why it messes him up so bad over time
His *Working 9-5 slowed down & with reverb plays softly in the background* vibe about it is undeniably kind of funny tho
Contagious disease thread cont too, and not the first time fear is spoken of that way
“Who are you?” he asked for the second time, fighting against the toxin’s effect. This was one tough old warrior.
“Your worst nightmare,” I replied.
“Ah,” he croaked. “Then Tain sent you.”
- YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE fhdkjshasjh good for you Pythas isn’t there to hear it that is so embarrassing Garak (affectionate)
- Garak dreaming of being buried with the still-whispering mass grave of Old Cardassia… what the fuck I don’t think I’d sleep ever again after that haha
Of all of the people he dreams of, most of them are dead (or potentially soon about to be dead? Not entirely sure how that works out for Mila in particular. And I guess we technically don’t know if Calyx is dead, but after so long it seems very likely), except as we find out later Pythas. And Palandine isn’t there.
NO. NO YOU CANNOT TELL ME THE FIRST THING HE DOES IS CALL JULIAN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING NIGHT W H A T
“It’s not a medical emergency. Please, I realize this is an imposition.” There was a silence and I heard another voice in the background. Ezri Dax. A muffled conversation. The Doctor cleared his throat again.
“I’ll be right over,” he said.
This is so melancholy I want to disappear into a puddle of quiet yearning and never come back to solid form just put me in a bucket like the Odo.
This is also the first time in this book Garak has asked Julian for help rather than Julian trying to approach him to give him help (and being rebuffed). He’s called for and he comes :’)
He gave me his puzzled look, which wrinkled his brow. I was always amazed at how deep the furrows were for one so young.
Soft little detail time yet again. Garak has been sitting across Julian for years just looking at this face and picking out new details.
“ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’” he quoted.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Shakespeare,” the Doctor replied.
“Hmmh.” I nodded in agreement, surprised that for once the author of the politically misguided Julius Caesar made sense.
Fhdskhfskjdfhsdjak you say that as if you didn’t quote the politically misguided Julius Caesar to your father’s face on a burning spaceship as you for the first time truly saw that he was as fallible as anyone else and invoking Bashir’s name in the process Garak
“Of who we are, Doctor. Our being. Human being. Cardassian being. But we have become these beings—are becoming, always in the process of becoming—on these other dimensional levels that are not limited by the measures of time and space. And the great determining factor of our becoming is relationship. Unrelated, I become unrelated. Alienated. Opposed, I become an antagonist. Unified, I become integrated. A functioning member of the whole.” The Doctor was thoughtful; his previous agitation had dissolved.
“You’re a scientist, Doctor. You have a deep understanding of this level. I don’t mean just the mechanics. You understand about relationship, the laws that attract and repel, the combinations that nurture and poison. Health and disease. Integrity and breakdown.”
“In your dream,” he said, “I presided over the burial of yourself and the people you were most intimately related to. Why?”
“You said, ‘for the good of the quadrant…. they must never be allowed to return.’ Why would you say that?” I asked.
“I can only think that….” He stopped and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Garak. This is not easy for me. I still can’t help thinking this was your dream. Even if I was invited … you were the playwright.”
“Yes, but put yourself in that part. Why would you bury these people and cover up the pit?” The Doctor looked at me in frustration. “Please. Indulge me. It’s vital that I have your answer.”
“If you and the others were carriers of some disease,” he shrugged. “In our fourteenth century on Earth there was a terrible plague, the Black Plague, which wiped out half of Europe’s population. People believed that the dead bodies had to be destroyed, burned … buried … because it was the only way to prevent the spread of the disease….”
. . .
The Doctor was studying me with an interest in his face I hadn’t seen in years.
“Well? Is it the Black Plague, Doctor? Or just the ramblings of an old spy on the eve of battle?”
“You’re an amazing man, Garak.”
“And my gratitude to you can never be adequately expressed. But I shall try,” I promised.
“Please. What have I done?” he asked genuinely.
“That time you extended yourself so generously and found a way to remove the wire from my brain without killing me …”
“I would have done that for anyone,” the Doctor interrupted.
“I’m sure that’s true, but that’s not what I mean. All during the time the device was deteriorating, I was convinced I was going to die.”
“You were even resigned to it,” he reminded me.
“I was also convinced that it was all a dream, and I kept asking myself what you were doing there.”
The Doctor was puzzled. “But what you just told me, that our dreams are just another way we relate … ?”
“I had forgotten. That point of my life was perhaps the lowest. I had forgotten many things. When I ‘woke up’ and realized that because of you I was going to live—at that moment, I began to recollect some valuable information.”
“About dreams?” he asked.
“Yes. But specifically about relationships, and how they set the course of our lives. You not only ’saved’ my life, you also made it possible for me to live it.” The Doctor’s face darkened.
“What is it, Doctor?”
“The time I wounded you in that holosuite program ….”
“Yes,” I prompted expectantly.
“I never apologized for my action.”
“And you must never apologize!” I urged.
“Please, Garak. This is not the time to give me a lesson on how to behave like a hardened spy….”
“No, no, no. On the contrary, when you shot me, my dear friend, that was the next step in my process of remembering. I was going to sacrifice the others, the people you considered your friends, because that was the only way I could be sure to save myself. You opposed me. Indeed, you would have killed me if necessary.”
“I’m sure it would never have gotten to that point,” the Doctor muttered.
“You would have killed me,” I repeated. “For the greater good.” The cliche suddenly had another meaning for both of us. “This is my last trip to Cardassia. I’m not returning. You were in the dream for a very specific reason. Once again, you helped me remember. Thank you, Julian.” I put my hand on his shoulder.
“You’re welcome,” he smiled warmly. “And by the way. It wasn’t the dead bodies that carried the disease. It was later determined that it was the rats feeding on the bodies who were the transmitters.”
“Then I guess we’ll go to Cardassia and look for the rats,” I said.
“Be careful, Garak. And look after my hot-headed friend, will you?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll look after each other,” I answered him. He moved to the door. “Did you really have a dream about Hippocrates?” I asked.
“Yes. Actually I did.”
“Why am I not surprised?” I replied.
First name use…
Disease contagion imagery, and this time it’s very clearly symbolizing y’know the fascism of it all. Weirdly moving that Julian takes a moment to gently imply that the disease isn’t inherent in the people Garak loves and has loved (or in him, for that matter), but in the conditions that created them.
There’s so much going on here idk if I could start to pick it apart yet, I may need to let this percolate in my skull for a while before I know what to say haha. I think part of it is Garak telling Julian to never apologize for showing him the full truth of himself (not least because that also lets Garak see the full truth of himself in turn), and Julian finally relaxing about. Something. He’s been ashamed about something he can finally let go of.
‘I thought it was a dream, and kept asking myself what you were doing there’.......I will never emotionally recover from this I want to write fic specifically about this lord have mercy on me
- *Tain Voice* with your hippie bullshit and your women!
*tiny garak voice* woman…
Over the years we rarely met outside his office; only an emergency or drastic change of plan would alter the routine. Now as we walked through the late morning sun and pedestrians at a leisurely pace I experienced a connection to the surrounding bustle and energy in a way that felt almost normal. A father and his son taking a stroll. Tain was heavier, and I could hear his breathing labor with the effort. He’s an old man, I thought. He’s mortal. I’d never thought about Tain in this way, and I became protective as we approached an aggressive knot of pedestrians at the edge of the Coranum Sector. One man was about to run Tain down when I intercepted his path and bumped him to the side. I ignored his challenge as we continued. “Yes, Elim. I’m getting old.” It wasn’t the first time he picked up my thoughts; this was how our conversations usually went.
HE BECAME PROTECTIVE
You know the way he keeps touching Tain’s arm and shoulder in The Die is Cast, like he’s steadying him or about to step in front of him to protect him or something? Yeah… he burns his hands on this stove over and over and over but he can’t stop trying to touch it :(
This was so typical of his manipulation. Just moments ago I was feeling protective of this benign old man, my father. And now… the irony filled my mouth with a bitter taste.
This is always & forever first and foremost an Enabran Tain hate zone
He moved to the covered seating area, where the sun filtered through the old vegetation. I had never been here with anyone but Palandine. With a long sigh he settled into a patch of sunlight on the low bench.
He’s like a fucking strangle vine he just winds himself into every single part of garak’s existence and chokes the life out of it
“Yes,” I answered. The benign mask was slipping, and I began to see the depth of his anger.
. . .
“You don’t know!” he repeated with a disgust I hadn’t heard since I was a boy and failed to record all the details of one of our walks.
Oof. Ow. Ack.
“And all this while, instead of giving up your life to the work, hardening yourself into a leader who could inspire others and expand the vision, you’re playing out Hebitian fantasies with another man’s wife!”
“Yes. Just like Tolan!” I exploded. “Perhaps he was my real father after all.”
Tain rose like a man many years younger and grabbed my shoulder in a powerful grip. His anger was now a murderous fury and it was all I could do to hold my stance against the pain of his grip. His cold eyes told me I had betrayed him. Worse, I had failed him. He let go of my shoulder and turned away from me. My entire body trembled. When he turned back he had regained his composure.
The biggest sin Garak could commit in Tain’s eyes is to dare to separate himself from him in any way; to be anything but his mirror, to act as if he has any claim to his own soul. I feel like more than what happens with Barkan right after this, this is what Tain considers the real betrayal.
Tain has never needed to hit him or become physically violent with him to keep him under control ever since he was a very small child, he’s relied on the terrorizing force of emotional violence. And as is so often the case with emotional violence, it’s been insidious and hidden enough, kept to private spaces and in the shadows, that Tain can pretend at plausible deniability b/c like. Who’s Garak even going to tell about it, for the longest time, if a miracle happened and he even found he could? Mila, who has joined the war on emotional violence on the side of emotional violence since probably before Garak was even born? (For understandable psychological reasons, but in unforgivable ways in the role of a parent.) I wonder if ‘making him’ lose control and expose himself and his violence for what it is like this (in public, even!) is also part of what he can’t forgive Garak for. This ah ‘slip-up’ is the first big crack we see in Tain’s image of perfect implacable control (which is very much still the impression you’re left with in Garak’s stories in The Wire too), in the same way that Improbable Cause/The Die Is Cast completely breaks that image down. He is getting old. He stayed in the game too long in the end and his iron grip is starting to slip and everything he’s forced to stay in place starts to slip out of that order with it.
Characterizing what Tolan was doing as ‘living with another man’s wife’ is SUCH a subtle burn tho lol like yeah maybe after the strictures of our society you SHOULD have married the mother of your child instead of outsourcing all your decency to the said mother’s BROTHER, Tain
Aside from anything else going on here (and there is a lot going on)... does Tain even know who Garak is at all, just on a personal level? Why, after knowing him for like 40+ years at this point, presumably, would you expect him to have aspirations or the natural inclination towards leadership, have you ever met him??? He’s one of nature’s perfect right hand men (well. Maybe not entirely nature’s, Tain did this to him very deliberately on top of some basic natural tendencies lol), he’ll get you whatever you ask of him and I think organizing a team under him for you could be part of that when need be, but never has he shown the least inclination towards leadership. (In fact, despite longing for the recognition coming out on top would get him from daddy I mean his peers, he seems vaguely relieved each time Pythas gets to sit in the big important chair instead of him.) He isn’t Tain’s mirror, for all he dutifully tries to move in the ways that make it seem like he is. And Tain should be smart enough to know that, if the narcissism didn’t completely blot out his sight in this situation, and/or it’s just the ‘setting him up to fail and then acting outraged when he does’ pure maliciousness reaching its apex.
(In a kinder time and a kinder world I think Garak could have a real nice time being one of nature’s extremely devoted Partners rather than simply right hand man. And I would like to see it please)
“From now on you will report to Corbin Entek.”
Oh, that’s the Entek of Second Skin, probably. Wish you a very ‘get vaporized for not knowing when to quit’ in the future entek
As I watched him leave, I felt completely empty and wondered how I could feel such emptiness. This sudden, wrenching reversal of fortune … everything changed beyond recognition…. And yet … there was no anger, no self-pity … no fear. Only release. Release from the secrets. Release from the limbo where, ever since I was a boy, I had been trapped between imposed obligations and feelings of mysterious longing mixed with shame. I felt empty … and free.
Listen to that voice maybe garak (not that I think there IS any way out at this point or that there ever has been in truth, that’s kind of the tragedy of the whole thing, tain would never ever have let go of him)
- Mila goodbye time:
“I’m afraid we’re not leaving you much,” she said. “The furnishings have already been taken away.”
“I wasn’t expecting anything.” I tried to keep all irony out of my tone.
“It’s your choice, Elim.” Her voice was just as neutral. “The house is yours to live in.”
Mother and son having a Carefully Extremely Civil conversation lol
“Do you know the circumstances … Mila?”
She looked at me. It was the first real contact we’d had in many years. She nodded slowly.
“Before I make my ‘choice,’ I need your help,” I said, surprised that the request emerged so simply. I wasn’t as angry with her as I wanted to be. Mila saw this and softened perceptibly.
This running thread that almost despite himself he understands and empathizes with her and her situation too much to be as angry with her as he probably should be. He understands her better than she understands him (than she could allow herself to understand him, even if she had the ability to).
I think that these apparently contradictory elements of his personality are part of what makes him feel so real in some ways, too — interpersonally he can be incredibly petty and jealous and judgemental AND almost absurdly forgiving and generous, sometimes seemingly simultaneously, somehow. The classic containing multitudes meme but like forreals tho haha. That is what real people are like too.
“I love her, Mila.”
“You’re a grown man, Elim.” I couldn’t decide whether she thought I didn’t know this or was seeing it for the first time herself.
“And Palandine’s a grown woman,” I replied.
“I don’t care about her. It’s you! You have to learn…” She broke off and passed me a cup which exuded the herbal aroma I’ve always associated with her and Tolan. Bitterbark and sweet groundroot. Moist rich soil.
“To control myself?” Mila blew on her tea. I shrugged at the obvious irony; I didn’t want to get into a fight.
. . .
Mila sat on a bin and sipped her tea. She avoided my look. As I positioned another bin across from her, I experienced a deep pain in my shoulder. It was still throbbing.
“Tain’s angry … with me. He wants me never to see her again and … to kill Barkan.” Still she avoided looking at me. “But you know this, don’t you? And you know what’s possible. Because you have your own … thoughts about this. Don’t you Mila?” I persisted.
Again she jerked away from me. Tea from her cup slopped onto the floor. “There’s no time, Elim.” She put the cup down, wiped her hands on the protective smock she wore, and looked for something to clean the floor with. “There’s no time for this.”
The mother/child relationship here is… y’know I talk a lot about Garak’s daddy issues for obvious reasons, but the fact that his mother recoils in fear when he tries to engage some sliver of real emotional intimacy with her prrrrrobably did some similar amounts of shaping him huh haha. (and he does this too in many ways — that’s partially where his trouble with Julian comes from in this book, whenever Julian tries to get too close Garak flinches away or counterattacks, for all that he clearly longs for it as well.)
The roundabout way you can tell her love for him even so tho. ‘I don’t care about her’. Palandine is not her baby, Elim, you are. Mila hasn’t been left with the luxury of love to spare for someone she doesn’t even know when you’re setting yourself up for destruction right in front of her eyes….
“I mean it, Mila. I would. But I think about her, feel her, all the time. Especially when I’m alone.”
Palandine/Bashir parallels once more and I really mean it!! There used to be a little Palandine in his head the way there’s a little Julian in there now. (and sadly she doesn’t seem to be there anymore, or maybe he’s just integrated what he got from her and let the rest go for both of their sakes, the same way he let Mila the regnar go when it was time.)
“Sacrifices?” In frustration Mila took off her smock to wipe the tea from the floor. “Elim, you amaze me.” Shaking her head, she got down on her knees and began scrubbing vigorously, as if the spilled drops of tea were hostile agents capable of spreading disease and destruction.
“Really? Well, I’m pleased I still have the ability—”
“Sacrifices,” she hissed, her control escaping like steam from a narrow rift. “What was the name of that book you once gave me? When you first came back from Bamarren. The one you proclaimed as the greatest Cardassian novel ever written and insisted that we read it.” Mila was still on her knees, but now I was the offending spot she vigorously rubbed with her words and eyes. “Generations of one family, each faced with the same choice at a crucial moment. Do they serve their personal needs or do they serve future generations? Do they choose the comfort of their own lives over the life of the state and its mission? I read it, Elim. You told me to and I did.”
“The Never-Ending Sacrifice,” I answered.
“Yes. That’s the one.” She made a sighing sound as she stood up. Mila was heavier now, and moved with greater deliberation. She, too, had grown old. “I suggest you reread it.”
“Tain always came first, didn’t he? I suppose that was your never-ending sacrifice.” I no longer reined in the irony.
I’m CRYING this is SUCH a mom thing to do. Her teen son came home with a book he waxed poetic about and she read it to try to understand him and never told him until now.
Also: disease contagion theme thread! To Mila, it seems to be tied in with the sentiment reading of it — the way her child’s suffering stains all her safe stable justifications and rationalizations that she needs to stay alive in this system. The remaining humanity that can’t be completely stamped out, even by Tain and a lifetime of fuckery. The ‘imperfections’ of life that can’t be subsumed completely into order.
Garak I think it’s better if you don’t recommend that book to people it clearly leads to disappointing interpersonal outcomes every time haha
“Tolan understood and accepted his obligations,” Mila said coldly. “But he was sentimental. Like you. That was the one thing Enabran worried about.”
I smiled in sad recognition. Sentimental. Yes, Tain and Mila had definitely shared their confidences and judgments with each other.
“But I don’t blame Tolan. He was a good man.” Mila watched me as I rose.
“Yes. So you keep saying.” I wanted to leave.
“She’s nothing but trouble for you, Elim. End it now. Do what Enabran says and reclaim your rightful place.”
“My place,” I repeated.
“Now, Elim. Otherwise you’re in real danger,” she warned with a certainty that reminded me of the time she’d brought me to Tain after I’d left Bamarren. Mila always knew what was at the heart of the never-ending sacrifice.
“Thank you for your help,” I said, too weary for irony.
“What did you expect from me?”
“To be honest, I can’t remember,” I answered. “Have a pleasant trip.” I smiled and bowed.
“What did you expect from me?”/“To be honest, I can’t remember,” is THE realest description I’ve seen of a mother/child relationship. This might say more about me than I should be comfortable with probably but still.
“Let Limor know if you’ll be living here.” I nodded. Yes, I thought, that would be my answer. My choice. She shook out her smock to determine whether or not to put it back on.
“Mila.” She looked at me and took a deep breath, as if preparing herself for my question.
“Who was Tolan?”
“My brother.” She decided to wear the smock, and I left.
I am SO FUCKING SAD. She puts the smock back on. That’s the closest thing to keeping either of them she gets to have, just the second hand reminder that they were there, small and innocuous enough that no one will know and no one can blame her. In the end Tain takes everything else, and she lets him because it’s the only way to survive him. GET OUT OF THERE ELIM PLEASE
- On an impulse, instead of leaving immediately, I went down the corridor to Tain’s old office. The door was open, and I stopped at the threshold just as Pythas looked up from a now much cleaner desk. He smiled shyly and stood up.
“Please come in, Elim,” he offered. What surprised me was how pleased I was to see him. Just as I had felt he was the only other person who deserved to be One Lubak, I now believed he was the only other person who deserved to occupy this office.
He smiled shyly did he fhskja. Also Garak’s enduring lack of bitterness towards Pythas is amazing. ‘Yeah I would be mad but he really is that good if it had to be anyone it should be him’
- She stopped just short of my covering shrub, and the sight of her face shocked me. It was swollen and bruised. One eye was completely closed, and the other contained enough pain for ten. It took every bit of my willpower not to reach out and hold her. Her one eye held mine, I knew she wanted to tell me something so important that she was willing to wait all night if necessary.
I’m so fucking glad Barkan is about to eat it for good. I only wish it could have gone slower and more painfully for him.
I wanted to laugh, and it took a concerted effort to gather my disparate parts in order to integrate my will.
‘Disparate parts’ motif (dare we say mosaic motif?) detected
“At least the smile’s gone,” the first voice said. I was fully awake now.
Barkan’s life is just being haunted by fifty shades of Garak’s shit eating grin apparently
“Flaunting your ‘relationship’ in public like infatuated schoolchildren.”
“Yes, I suppose it would have been wiser to behave like experienced adulterers,” I replied with a sigh.
“You’re the lowest form of scavenger, Elim. You have no attachments of your own, and so you feed on the emotional vulnerabilities of others.
. . .
“But you’re a failure, Elim. You even failed in your attempt to assassinate me.”
“I didn’t fail with Palandine,” I said quietly.
LMAO gottem
The chemical makeup of Garak’s brain during Barkan’s beating should probably have been studied by science it must be the strangest rave in there
The others were there—my fellow travelers, their voices murmuring tonelessly, producing a steady sound that permeated the medium and intensified our connection. Their voices speaking to me. Their faces, serene and loving, illuminating the darkness as they floated by. Everyone I have ever known. Family. Faces from childhood. Bamarren. People I had known briefly. People I have known forever. Loved. Hated. We were all just together now, sharing the same nurturing medium as we traveled along our currents until we gradually separated.
This… near-death hallucination or spiritual experience or whatever it is vs. his mass grave dream later… very birth vs. death themed
Faces formed and reformed. Each one superimposed on the next in a long line emerging from blackness. Maladek. Merrok…. The molecular structure of one giving way to the next…. Procal Dukat. Tolan. Floating into focus, receding back into the darkness. I shook my head, trying to stop the flow. The Hebitian mask. My face. I grabbed my “face” and screamed into it. The flow stopped. The molecules rushed together and instantly formed Barkan Lokar’s death mask.
I think maybe something came a tiny little bit completely untethered in his head in a way it’s been threatening to for a long time in this moment. It may just be my imagination tho who’s to say
- “Elim Garak. How the mighty have fallen. Welcome to Terok Nor.”
“Oh, I try to visit even our humblest outposts, Dukat.”
“This is going to be more than a visit, trust me. You’ll soon wish that the execution had not been commuted.”
a) ah garak/dukat sniping my old friend b) It seems Tain never spoke to him in that whole process, so that time in the park was probably the last time before ‘Improbable Cause’?. I’m only surprised he didn’t give Dukat the neutral face of displeasure to convey to Garak second hand honestly
- “I’m sure you gave him a more ennobling position,” I said.
“He was executed,” the toady replied.
“A promotion of sorts,” I muttered. “Certainly in this place.”
The passionate enduring Garak/Terok Nor hateship off to an immediate and roaring start
- Real ‘he gave them the heebie jeebies. He had nothing else left to give’ vibes on garak in this part of his life
- He arched his brows in a manner that told me he’d worked long and hard in front of a mirror.
There’s always time to appreciate some good Dukat dunking
“Your life means nothing to me. Just as my father’s meant nothing to you.”
“I beg your pardon? Do I know your father?” Dukat made a move to grab me and immediately stopped himself. I was impressed by his self-control; I knew how much energy fueled his hatred.
“No offense,” I went on, further testing his control. “Of course, Procal Dukat was a famous military figure. We all mourned his passing. But I never had the pleasure personally….”
At his most miserable, but also his funniest. It IS really interesting that his humor only really reaches its current state here, when he’s lost Palandine and everything else in his life. It’s almost like the only remaining way to be close to her.
No, I decided that I was not going to sacrifice myself to Dukat’s desire for revenge. I would do this work; I would do it so well as to become indispensable to the station… and I would survive. I refused to be buried alive in this humiliation.
‘Sort of suicidal: yes; willing to go down in history as one of Dukat’s Ws… fuck no’
- I pick up their garments and mend them flawlessly. When they complain that the price is steep (because I’m treated like a slave doesn’t mean I’m going to start undervaluing my work), I just give them the smile—the smile she taught me.
Fdsahfasj hilarious. You go Garak you know your worth
- (About Pythas and Palandine) At this moment I am almost afraid to discover that they’d survived. A part of me has wanted to bury that part of my life. The defenses I set up to survive my exile are obviously still intact.
I am often joined on my walks by Dr. Parmak. He’s a charming conversationalist, with a first-rate mind. His perspectives are always provocative. He does, however, have a tendency to proselytize for Alon Ghemor and the “Reunion Project” (the name they’ve given their group to remind people of the principles that formed the original Union). Whenever we encounter other pedestrians along our route, Parmak engages them and attempts to win them over to the Reunion side. This often makes for spirited exchanges, and although I am subjected to the opinions of people who should be given a new brain, I rather enjoy this peripatetic politicking. It’s something I would never have done on my own. In some respects he is so much like you, Doctor. If I’ve found someone’s opinion insufferably boring, he’ll kindly but sternly lecture me on the value of tolerance.
The wistful longing of ‘in some respects he’s so much like you’. ‘Although i am subjected to the opinions of people who should be given a new brain’. ‘Charming conversationalist’, is he. Garak you are a nonsense person and I adore you
One day I asked him how he had been brought to Enabran Tain’s attention. He never struck me as being a dangerous radical. It turns out that he was Tain’s personal physician, and that the great man had him interrogated because, the Doctor assumed, “he was concerned that I was in an ideal position to assassinate him.”
“I think he was more threatened by the fact that you were intimate with his weaknesses,” I pointed out.
“Well, certainly his physical infirmities,” he admitted.
“Which are also a man’s weaknesses,” I reminded him.
“The paranoia, the secrets, the power he held….” The doctor shook his head. “He must have been a difficult man to work for.” I smiled at his understated tact.
“He once tried to have me killed,” I said.
“Really? What did you do, Elim?”
“I survived.” The Doctor gave me a confused look.
“Survived … what?” he asked.
“Working for my father,” I replied. The Doctor stopped and just looked at me. His former fear of my eyes was long gone.
“A father who would murder his own son?” The idea horrified him. We were in the Barvonok Sector, where the tall structures of business and finance once dominated. “Oh, my dear Elim,” he said, this time with an empathy that stripped me of any illusions I had about Enabran Tain as a father. Surrounded by the piles of debris, oppressed by the low leaden sky, I finally began to surrender to the loneliness and loss that has preyed upon my dreams ever since I can remember. Even nothing is better than the ideas that have brought us here.
Go on without me I’ll be over here crying my eyes out
- I wonder if Limor Prang was one of the people killed in Tain’s Obsidian Order purge in Improbable Cause. If he was still alive that seems pretty likely huh. Well. RIP terrifying team mom I guess.
- Garak got his business up and running for real through a deal with Quark! Puts some of their interactions into perspective haha
I don’t do well with the kind of emotional exchanges humans seem to engage in regularly, and I have little sympathy for those who confuse the responsibilities of family with their duty to the state; but I confess that I am deeply moved by this woman’s plight.
Well it’s good the guy you have a thing for was raised British then he’ll probably feel pretty much the same way you’re perfect for each other
At one point she looked at me and asked me to hold her. I did. As I tentatively put my arms around her, I was so afraid of her need that I tried to keep her body at a distance. She would have none of it. She collapsed against me, and the sobs that convulsed and rolled through her body found correspondence in mine. I bit my tongue until I could taste blood in the effort not to surrender. Gratefully, the door to the Promenade was closed.
He keeps claiming he doesn’t care for the human tendency towards displays of emotionality even as we see it draw him in like a stupid horny sentimental moth to the flame repeatedly. The lizard doth protest too much methinks
- Unless I have business I rarely go to Quark’s; I have little tolerance for noise and stupidity. So when he saw me he assumed that I had another proposition, and I observed him shift into his engage mode.
Fun to see how this changes over the years, then! By the ca. Season 7 part of the book he has a few regular tables and everything. Also isn’t it so sweet that his kind of snotty attitude about this has not changed at all since Bamarren haha <3
- “The dead are dead. Those of us left—who believe in the ideals that have guided our race for millennia—are faced with the threat of utter annihilation by the very disease that has brought us to this sad place. Federation ideas will finish the work the Dominion began.”
Disease/contagion imagery (This is Legate Parn speaking, and he’s basically espousing the same view as Dukat Sr. As far as he’s concerned the call is not and never has been coming from inside the house thank you ever so much lol)
On the other side of Madred was Nal Dejar, a sharp-faced, saturnine woman who had been a member of my last cell at the Order. She once came to Deep Space 9 on an assignment with two scientists, and refused to make any contact with me. Judging from her averted look, she was still refusing. Next to her was a man with a severely disfigured face that was still recovering from what appeared to be burns. One eye was completely covered, and I was careful not to be rude in my inspection.
OH so it’s the lady who came along with Gilora and Ulani! The one who does not care for foreign food
Gul Ocett was persuasive in her quiet and reasoned strength. Indeed, the irony, Doctor, is that she was espousing the very argument I had made to you any number of times. Even now there was a part of me that accepted the logic of her argument, especially when coming from someone who was neither a fool nor an opportunist.
While you were stealth mentoring Julian in having enough spysmarts not go and get his beautiful twink ass killed at the first opportunity he was stealth mentoring you in the political and ideological underpinnings of democracy and the possibility of being loved BITCH!!!!
I simply smiled at him, genuinely amused by his amateur attempts to discredit me. I was surprised by my responses. I was here to play the role of double agent, and I found that as the meeting went on I didn’t have the energy for the requisite guile and misdirection.
Fdkjfhdsa ‘Aw. That’s cute’. He just doesn’t have it in him to work up the energy for cloak and dagger bullshit and it’s so good and so funny
And then a strange sensation went through me, Doctor. I looked at the faces of these people. Here we are, I thought, sitting in the basement of a ruined civilization and conducting business as if nothing significant had changed. The enemies were still the same, somewhere “out there,” plotting how to “destroy our character” and colonize us with their political system. And we were down in the basement with our own plots and shifting alliances, tenaciously holding on to the very ideas that had brought us here. But what ideas, Doctor? There’s nothing left. Only fantasies of power. These faces with their masks. With the ironic exception of the disfigured face, the masks hadn’t changed. They reflected the usual range of hidden agendas, each competing for dominance and ascendancy with an energy commensurate to the amount of fear and self-loathing that fueled and motivated that person. I started to laugh.
Amazing showstopping revolutionary good for you Garak
It was him, Doctor. It was Pythas.
EIGHT MY BELOVED WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE
“Thank you, Gul Madred, but I can find my way out.” I bowed to the company, and turned my back on them.
I continue to be so proud of him I have no words. And also this is why I don’t like Castellan Garak as a concept AT ALL. Leave him alone to his orchids and sewing and doctor fucking he’s been through enough he doesn’t need that in his life anymore he can do other things to help. Parmak and Julian would stage an intervention.
- Oh my GOD the cardassians literally just left terok nor without him overnight like Sid’s family in Ice Age fhdskjafh
Garak has been combining the wire AND being a barely functional alcoholic all this time. So at any given time in the first two season the chances that he is not only high but also profoundly drunk are overwhelmingly likely. This explains a lot.
Rom had a sensitivity, almost a delicacy that was totally lacking in his brother. Was there such a thing as a typical Ferengi? Most people judged him to be simple, as if simplicity was somehow a substandard quality.
Aw. Also maybe some hints as to his reconciliation with Tolan’s memory.
“Well, Rom, the trousers and tunic fit quite well, don’t you think?” I pulled the tunic down at the back. “Don’t wear it so far up on the neck; it ruins the line. And I’d be grateful if you’d tell any interested parties that indeed I’m still here and very much open for business.”
“Oh, yes … yes! And I like….” Rom made a broad, awkward gesture toward his new ensemble. I thanked him, and we walked out onto the Promenade, as if it were just another business day. We said goodbye, and I watched him march proudly through the ragged celebrants. I had a fondness for him. It was an odd relief, especially at this moment, to converse with someone who literally meant everything he said.
T________________________T surprise most wholesome dynamic continues to wreck me.
He stood for a moment, studying me, trying to divine why I had not been allowed to join the withdrawal. Unlike the others who assumed that because I was a Cardassian I had a choice, Odo knew that I’d been abandoned.
“Was there any damage or theft?” he asked.
“No,” I answered. I knew little about Constable Odo, but I was confident that he would never ask me questions that went beyond his function as security chief. He kept his distance and carried himself like someone who understood exile.
Odo appreciation moment as this is his last appearance in the book. Here’s to the small part of the fascist hivemind that harnessed those impulses towards the aim of becoming the world’s best and beigest mall cop. Unproblematic? No. But sometimes you simply love a good problem.
The fact that the narrative of this section ends right before Garak meets Julian. Probably a matter of weeks, max. You big sentimental sap lmao
- Parmak, Ghemor, and I stood silently among the formations, inspecting the results of our work in the first light.“I mean no disrespect, Elim,” the Doctor said, “but the memorial looks even better.” I nodded in agreement.
“Please, Doctor,” I replied. “ ‘Restoration’ is fine for artifacts and museum pieces. When it comes to building a new community, I think what we did tonight is more to the point.”
“And we did it without murdering each other,” Ghemor added.
“How un-Cardassian of us,” I observed.
This all rules btw . Restoration is fine for artifacts and museum pieces it’s not for things that are alive. Gardener vs. architect/collector, Tolan vs. Tain.
Alon said: “I think we should get some rest before the competition begins. We’ve done what we can.” It was a wise suggestion, but each of us knew that we were taking a step into the unknown, and sleep at this point was not really a choice. We had done what we could, and probably it was best if each of us retired to the privacy of his own thoughts. We said our goodnights, and as I watched them leave I felt an enormous gratitude that I had been given the opportunity to work with these men. Once again in my life I felt that I had been resurrected from the dead.
Nodding and crying gif. Yeah. Yeah… you’ve done all you could and no one could ask anything more of you.
- “You know, Elim, I’m neither a soldier nor a politician. I’m a doctor.”
“I do know that. I also know that we’ve been betrayed by our previous leaders. Our only hope is that men like yourself can offer an alternative.”
“But you have the expertise that can….”
“Doctor, I have the expertise that comes from survival and compromise. There’s already plenty of that on the other side … and it’s not an alternative that will create a new and lasting union.”
“No, I suppose you’re right,” he conceded.
“You’re a doctor, yes, and that’s your strength. I’ve learned something about your profession over the past several years. Don’t think like a politician. Think of the planet as a patient barely hanging on to life. Think like a doctor. How would you save this planet?” He considered what I’d said in his careful manner.
Just as it is vital for a person like Garak to have a little Julian Bashir who lives in his head, it’s probably also good for the Bashirs and Parmaks of the world to develop a little Garak who lives in their heads to go ‘yeah that sounds real nice in theory but now imagine that there are in fact bad people in this world (I should know) who’ll interact with that theory and then act accordingly’ . Garak realizing where he belongs in this whole process tho…
“Ah, Doctor,” I stopped him. “You can’t go to your meeting like that.”
“Like what?” he asked with a puzzled look. Without explaining, I helped him out of his worn outer coat and showed him a ragged tear in the fabric. Despite his protests, I made him sit down and wait while I gathered my sewing kit and repaired the tear.
“Appearances are very important to these people. You can’t let them think you’re oblivious to details,” I said, as I reunited the torn and separated threads.
The Mila fussing-as-a-love language of it all…
- (About Pythas) The thought occurred to me that perhaps I should include him in a chant for the dead.
DAMN but also YEAH
- I moved to the constructed formation that stood in the space formerly occupied by Tain’s study and almost directly above where Mila’s body had been sadly abandoned in the basement. When I was a boy, I had unending dreams that centered around the memorials of Tarlak. As I lay on my pallet in the basement of Tain’s house, I would plan the scenario that would play out when Tolan took me with him to Tarlak. It would always involve me as the hero paying homage to a comrade fallen in a battle where we had both distinguished ourselves. I would tell the gathered assembly of notables every detail of the battle; people would weep, cheer, listen in stunned amazement as I explained how we had saved the Union from certain destruction. When I had finished, Mila and Tolan would escort me through the adoring crowd. What a terrible irony, Doctor, that those forbidding, impersonal memorials to the heroes of the Cardassian Union should ultimately become transformed into these ragged formations on the grounds of my childhood home … and that I would sit here, a middle-aged man, trying to mourn a fallen comrade who was still standing but barely recognizable. And yet, the irony of a Cardassia reborn with the help of a memorial built from the remains of Tain’s home didn’t escape me either.
Taking immense psychic damage with every word. When do you stop wanting your mom and dad to come pick you up and take you home, even when they’re both dead and kind of not your parents anymore in two different ways even before that? Never, probably
- “What changed your mind?”
“Your friends, Elim. Very impressive people … and persuasive.”
“What had you expected?” I asked.
“The usual amateurs who never understood what was at stake … the hard choices that had to be made,” [Pythas] explained. “To be honest, I had thought your attachment to this Reunion Project was….”
“Sentimental,” I finished. He smiled knowingly at the reference.
CACKLING. All but openly saying ‘yeah I thought it’s was because you’re fucking the doctor and I know exactly what a god-awful simp you are’ fhskdjafhaskjdh
“As I listened to him speak of the responsibility that we had as survivors to the life that remained, I also realized how bitter and hardened I had become.” He stopped and looked back to Nal Dejar, as if he were making sure she was still there. She met his eyes with a communication I couldn’t decipher, and he nodded. “Nal nursed me back to where I could function … part of me wished she hadn’t. Until your doctor spoke about healing … on every level. It’s what the body wants, he told us … unless we choose otherwise.” Pythas sat with his head bowed for a long moment. “I’d become very bitter, Elim.” I sat on a rock across from him and gently put my hand on his. What was it about this place, I wondered.
Hmngh. ‘I’d become very bitter, Elim’. No matter what choices they made along the way, where they fucked up or where they did everything right, they both ended up in basically the same place, embittered and broken, until someone touched their life with kindness. Nal is Pythas’ Julian Bashir. Coming back to life not as an act of will but because there’s someone waiting for you there saying ‘I’ll help you through it’.
“Do you know where Palandine is?” I asked. He just looked at me. “Is she still alive?”
In the darkness, it was difficult to read the expression in his one good eye. The silence that followed my question was broken only by his rasping breath. Behind her mask of disinterest Nal Dejar was studying me carefully. Even when she was a probe I was impressed by the strength of her focus. Pythas was fortunate to have her care and devotion.
I think Pythas and Nal Dejar’s whole deal could make for a really interesting story all on its own. Presumably they’ve known or at least known about each other for a long time now, since Garak has seen Nal around even though they’ve never worked together closely
- Just enough light for lovers; just enough light to begin he says, only to open the next chapter/epilogue with ‘My dear Doctor’ and explaining how he finally decided to send the letter. Healing on every level? Maybe? If we’re real lucky???
- My dear Doctor:
Again, forgive my further tardiness in sending this—I don’t even know what to call it. Memoirs of a Cardassian tailor? I suppose that’s as accurate a description as any. You see, Doctor, I seriously debated whether or not I should send this to you. As I went over it I wondered who this mawkish and self-serving person was. Grow up! I wanted to tell him. Get on with your life.
Well, I am; and sending this to you is going to further that cause. As I said, I’m an unfinished man reassembling the pieces of a broken world, and I have asked you to be a witness because you would never judge me as harshly as I judge myself. You would never deny me the opportunity of a second chance.
I feel like those last two sentences are the most important ones in this whole book — it’s what all the rest of it is built on, what made any of it possible. And also it will haunt me for the rest of my days but like in a good life-affirming way lol
His playful grousing about ugh your vaunted democracy *eyeroll* <3<3<3<3 come down to cardassia so you can have spirited debates turned makeout sessions/foreplay about it already julian please he’s setting you up for so many slam dunks here
I live with my orchids, which have unified and softened the increasingly popular grounds of my home. Their beguiling blooms, and the presence of children who come to play among the structures (as I did in Tarlak), help to dispel the somber mood that initially hung like those clouds of dust over our world. The sounds of their voices as they play function as a music that never fails to lighten my work. The children call it the “tailor’s grounds,” and the name has caught on. Yes, Doctor, I continue to work at my “new” profession. As you can imagine, there’s a good deal of mending to be done.
TAIN’S HOUSE TURNED INTO JUST ‘THE TAILOR’S GROUNDS’ BY THE VOICES OF PLAYING CHILDREN Y_____Y I hope enabran ‘let history be my judge’ tain gets forgotten for anything but his massive fuckup and that garak works some magic with what little fabric he has at his disposal to make the neighbourhood kids like. Stuffed toys he sews clothes for and he’s known as the person to go to when one is damaged so he can patch it back up good as new while teary little faces watch intently and then brighten. Julian seriously pretends to be his medical consultant as they perform teddy bear operations, what with his extensive expertise in the field and excellent bedside manner. No arm is too amputated to be reattached and we can always find a good button to replace Mr. Tinny’s missing eye in fact he’ll see even better now. I have such hopes for them I have such dreams
I have expanded my shed in the never-ending quest to find my place. I feel that I’m getting closer, Doctor, especially as I continue to refine the structures. One, which began as a memorial to Tolan, has a crude but effective representation of the winged creature from the Hebitian sun disc—turned toward the radiating sun, reaching, striving, while the sun-fed filaments stream down from the body and connect with the bodies of people standing on a globe and looking up to the creature for this divine connection…. I’ve attached the recitation mask he gave me to the creature’s face, and somehow it has become my personal totem. I hope that someday you’ll have the opportunity to see it. Nothing would please me more. You’re always welcome, Doctor.
You are always welcome, Doctor is one of those ‘you could slap that on my gravestone and I’d be happy about it’ lines. What a ride huh
Aside from anything else about this book (I think we can safely let this absolute monster of a three part reaction post be testament to my enjoyment and admiration right I hope I have made no secret of it lol) I want to congratulate Andrew Robinson for getting a novel-length character study written in first person (my beloved) published — as I understand it that’s normally a pretty hard sell in the publishing industry haha he was living the dream I one day fervently hope to as well and the results rule
#a stitch in time#asit#garashir#elim garak#star trek#star trek ds9#ds9#julian bashir#The great ASIT first read adventure#ds9 meta#and there we go! now to think about the little julian bashir that lives in garak's head forever probably
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I wonder how many people who scream at mall Santas or whatever would support Palestinian liberation if they knew how this particular round of bombardment started.
To be clear I'm in support of Palestinian liberation but it also seems to me like a lot of terminally on line purity politics types have taken up this cause because the blockade and bombing campaigns are very clearly targeting children since about 50% of the people in Gaza are kids and some of you guys want a perfect victim to rally behind. That's not real support, is it?
Anyway the current situation in simple Tumblr post terms is that Gaza for a couple of decades has been in a situation where Israel controls what and who goes in and out of the Gaza strip with an iron fist, but there was a ceasefire so they weren't actively being bombed. There was still military enforcement of the blockade but not like what we're seeing now. Then Hamas, which is a sunni islamic religious fundamentalist political organization with a paramilitary wing, launched an attack targeting the border checkpoints, this attack was unprecedented because it was one of the first conflicts in a very very long time to have a higher Israeli death toll than Palestinian death toll. They took a bunch of hostages to use as a bargaining chip with Israel. Israel responded by jumpstarting a second Nakba. Hamas has a lot of popular support in Gaza specifically because they're the biggest Palestinian paramilitary group and they bother to step to the IDF in a meaningful way. As we all know military attacks tend to increase support for governments that are perceived as protecting civilians. Whatever you think of Hamas that's what they are right now in the Gaza strip.
I don't say this to dissuade you from opposing genocide. Quite the opposite actually. I want you to be aware of the geopolitical situation and to not waver when you learn more about it. I see people talking absolutely insane about Ukraine calling it a racist country (which yeah so is Russia that doesn't justify civilian casualties) when last year they had fucking Ukraine flag pfps. I don't think you should stop caring about the bombing campaigns when you find out that the Palestinians also have guns
Basically stop looking for a perfect victim because you won't find one. You still need to oppose enthonationalism and genocide.
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I think part of the reason I tend to get so argumentative nowadays about "what your side proposes kills people" -type political talking points is that it seems that this is being used more and more frequently as a rhetorical bludgeon, mainly (though not entirely) from the Left. There's a lot of shutting down of arguments based on "but HUMAN LIVES", and it's begun to feel to me like a disturbing trend. For instance, a good bit of the rhetoric in favor of shutting down schools in 2020-2021 seemed to center on "here, look at my computation that the expected value of children's lives lost if we don't shut down schools is greater than zero; anyone who disagrees with us doesn't VALUE HUMAN LIVES", with the effect that a lot of us (including to some extent me) were blinded for a long time to the absolutely devastating effect such extensive school shutdowns (in some geographic areas) had on children and their whole families, an effect that is still scarring them today. I'm not saying anything about whether or how far those school shutdown policies went wrong, just that they had very substantial harmful effects that don't vanish relative to the VALUE OF HUMAN LIVES.
Then there's the now-everyday claim that the anti-trans culture warriors "ARE KILLING US [TRANS PEOPLE]", which is true under a particular interpretation of "killing" and tragically true to an extent pretty well beyond some vanishingly rare extreme cases but is also transparently being used to drown out most other aspects of the debates around trans issues. Much more disturbing still is the accusation I now semi-regularly see casually flung that conservatives "actively want us [trans or LGBT+ people in general] dead" (I think I've occasionally seen left-wing variations on this that aren't even about LGBT+ people). A couple of months ago I called it "stomach-turning" ("it" being both the content of the accusation itself and the fact that so many people in our cultural discourse have seen fit to use it; this of course was semi-willfully misinterpreted by someone as my saying that trans people turn my stomach), and I reiterate now that it's still completely turning my stomach. This example is different from others in some fundamental ways, some of which make me more sympathetic with why people feel driven to use it (and it's not being used to drown out completely unrelated issues, for instance, like the guns thing is), and the general rhetorical weapon of "the other side wants to kill us" deserves its own effortpost which I intend to write later this summer.
So anyway, yeah, I'm also getting a kind of short fuse around insinuations of "what they show kids in school won't kill them, but guns could, so that's the only issue involving schoolchildren that anyone should care about" that I now see daily.
Of course, invocations of "my cause is the one whose stakes directly involve life or death so it outranks everything else" isn't exclusive to the Left at all. The Right has been doing it for decades with abortion to shut down both the abortion debate and whatever unrelated debate they didn't want to have ("millions of babies are being MURDERED each year, while liberals obsess over [women's bodies] [or] [just about any totally unrelated issue which appears frivolous next to MURDER]"). I also vaguely remember something that sounded like this in the post-9/11 years ("we're the ones looking out for Americans who might be KILLED in the next terrorist attack, that has to be the only priority right now"). And there was that bizarre "death panels" accusation around 2010-2011 when Obamacare was being debated which I guess might also count.
Only loosely related, but I'm reminded of a moment in the very first vice presidential debate, between Bob Dole and Walter Mondale in 1976, where Dole invoked a computation of the number of deaths in wars the US engaged in under Democratic versus Republican presidents, and apparently he got a lot of blowback from how underhanded this rhetorical move came across.
#political discourse#death#suicide#covid pandemic#school shutdowns#trans issues#gun control#abortion#terrorism#universal health care#american presidential politics
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On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments over whether a Texas man under a domestic violence restraining order has a Second Amendment right to own guns. We’re in this hell because the court decided in June 2022 that modern gun laws are unconstitutional unless there’s a historical basis for them—meaning, would a bunch of 18th-century white guys agree with it or not?
United States v. Rahimi is one of the biggest cases of this Supreme Court term and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito sounded very concerned that courts are stripping away a fundamental right from men who judges agree are abusive, while the other justices sounded very skeptical of the argument. But since it’s a blockbuster case, we likely won’t get a decision until late June 2024, which is when the court typically rules on the biggest appeals—regardless of when they were first argued. So we have a good seven months to worry about it.
Domestic violence groups have made the stakes crystal clear with their amicus briefs, noting that removing guns from domestic abusers saves lives. And according to gun safety group Everytown, 70 women are shot and killed every month by current or former partners. In her opening comments, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar—the person tasked with defending the law—made the same point. Prelogar said that the court recognized in a 2014 case that “all too often, the only difference between a battered woman and a dead woman is the presence of a gun.” Prelogar said the U.S. does have a long tradition of disarming people who are considered a danger to society. She also noted that domestic violence wasn’t considered a problem at the time of the founding, but that shouldn’t prevent governments from passing laws against it now. After all, modern laws ban guns in schools even though there isn’t a historical analog.
The three liberal justices all seemed like they’d vote to uphold the law and even Justices John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorusch sounded like they disagreed with the arguments that Rahimi’s federal public defender was making.
But Justice Thomas and Alito were concerned that it’s too easy for state courts to take guns away from people accused of domestic violence but not convicted of a crime. “If this were a criminal proceeding, then you would have a determination of what you’re talking about—someone would be convicted of a crime, a felony assault or something,” Thomas said. “But here you have something that’s anticipatory or predictive, where a civil court is making the determination.” Justice Alito then posed a hypothetical showing he’s much more worried about people’s right to possess a gun than the dangers that gun could pose to others. “If the person [under the restraining order] thinks that he or she is in danger and wants to have a firearm, is that person’s only recourse to possess the firearm and take their chances if they get prosecuted?” Alito asked.
It’s horrifying to think about these arguments coming from the same Justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade—and Alito wrote that opinion himself. Homicide is the number one cause of death for pregnant people. Domestic violence hotlines have seen a spike in calls since the fall of Roe. We’ve seen stories in the last year of men shooting their partners because they did or didn’t get abortions.
If the Supreme Court eventually rules against Rahimi and strikes down the appeals court decision, it will be a win—but that doesn’t mean the court is suddenly reasonable, it just means their 2022 Bruen decision was so nuts that they have to put guardrails on it. It’s still absurd that this case even made it to the court in the first place.
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If you feel inspired at all to write a snippet today, can you let me know what happened here?
What caused the dramatic music, the red tinted room, the dangerous smirk, the erotic tension, the nonchalant smoking?
Full video here.
As you wish, @awesomefringey! Also inspired by my earlier tags: #that is a baby #who has shotgunned from his mans #many a time
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Habit by indiaalphawhiskey
The room was dark; so dark that it was too hard to tell if the scarlet glow illuminating the sparse furniture really was light or a trick of the eye – its desperate attempt to see anything other than shadow.
Louis leaned forward, looking down his nose at the cigarette between his lips. And, as he cupped his hand over the tip, watching it come alive by the light of his match, he realized, hand to God, he couldn’t tell you what the color of the chaise he was sitting on was.
It made him chuckle a little, the fact that someone could hold a gun to his head right now, asking him to name the color of the coffee table, the carpet, the stage, and all he would be able to do was laugh and accept his inevitable fate. It wasn’t the interiors he came here for anyway.
He pulled the cigarette from his lips, held the smoke in his chest with practiced ease, and spared a thought to how much he hated being a cliche. Mr. Too-much-time, Too-much-money, Too-much-common-sense.
Ironically though, not enough to keep him from this place. Not that anything could; not with what it held inside – with whom.
The thought made him raise the cigarette to his lips again, the drag he took sweet – full.
“Nasty habit,” a voice taunted from behind him.
Louis’ smirk curled upward, slow and satisfied, and he took his time liberating the stream of smoke from his lips, before, “I’ve got a lot of those.”
“This one’s got a fine.”
“Paid it.”
The response was immediate – an unimpressed scoff. “Well, I guess that makes it alright.” Even wrapped in a reprimand, his voice was pretty; sweet and stinging in even parts, bitter like dark chocolate; warm like bourbon. Loaded, just like the sound of the heavy curtain swishing closed after him.
Louis listened for the familiar steps on the carpet, one… two… three… four. “Money makes everything alright,” he said back, unapologetic, over the muffled jazz playing in the other room.
Another scoff before that perfect silhouette came into full view, hip cocked, one obscenely tempting stockinged leg kicked out, just for the hell of it. “Only for people with money.”
Even barely backlit by the red lights, Louis smiled, recognizing the outline of his favorite little number. It had cost him a pretty penny, that black trench coat, but he couldn’t bring himself to regret it. He liked seeing his baby all gussied up for him; liked the way it felt on his lap, trapped under the weight of those gorgeous thighs, loved sliding his hand up… up… up… into that tempting little gap to find lace, or silk, or… nothing at all…
Patience, Louis sang in his head, busying himself instead with dragging the heat of his gaze away from those godforsaken legs and up to twinkling green eyes, because that color – that, he could name, anytime.
Louis took another slow drag from his cigarette without taking his eyes off him. He reached out and caught the hem of the trench coat in his fingers, smirking up at the love of his life right before he tugged hard.
The sweet waif of a thing tumbled straight into his lap.
“Lou—” he gasped out in soft protest, an errant giggle, and the way he had already wrapped his arms around Louis’ neck, dampening his feigned attempts to escape. Louis held him in place, hand solid – hot and high on that darling thigh.
“You don’t want money,” Louis said seriously, into the sliver of space between them. Those green eyes sparkled mischievously, knowing that was the truth, even when Louis added, “I know. I know because I offered – offered you anything. Everything.”
And god in heaven, that smile – it would be the death of Louis one day; much, much sooner than the goddamn cigarettes.
“S’not true,” he pretended to pout. A beat, and then another coquettish little grin. “Haven’t offered me a drag,” he said, already reaching for the cig.
Louis bracketed his back with a strong arm to keep him from falling, all while he kept the cigarette out of reach. “Uh-uh.” Louis said, shaking his head. “Filthy habit, this.”
And that coy, devastating smile morphed into an amused giggle. “Aw, Daddy,” he cooed, the familiar pet name blowing softly on the embers already burning, low and heavy, in Louis’ belly, as he teased, “You protecting me or sumthin’?” He leaned in close then, so close each of his syllables skated over the skin of Louis’ lips as he whispered, all innocent doe eyes, and long lashes, and earnestness, “‘M a big girl. I can handle it.”
Louis pretended to consider it, humming thoughtfully as he leaned away.
Carefully, he placed the cigarette in front of his own mouth and took a long, deep drag.
He held the smoke behind his teeth, and watched as bright green eyes darkened, grew heavy and hooded with lust and understanding. Plush, plump, pink lips parted just enough for Louis to lean in, his mouth hovering. The pretty little thing in his lap squirmed desperately, his nails digging into the hair on the nape of Louis’ neck, and then…
Louis exhaled, slow, careful and controlled, sharing the warm wisps of smoke, his tongue desperate to follow them through to gates of heaven; twist and tangle and curl into that lovely, lovely mouth.
“Ngh.” It was a soft whine, delicious; a whine of hunger, of more, of please, Daddy.
Yes, Louis had a lot of nasty habits. But this one… Harry…
Harry was his favourite.
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The previous part of this series, Part 2, is available here.
In the world of internal Democratic Party politics, the chosen party of the professional-managerial class, fighting for a role in the party hierarchy is done by resume-padding. You have to have worked the correct jobs under the right managers with subsequent letters of recommendation from your patrons, showing both that you care but your primary commitment is to the job itself, not to the cause you were purportedly fighting for in that position. In that sense, Allard Lowenstein fits the bill as a typical upwardly mobile member of the party in the same way Pete Buttigieg does today. If America knows Lowenstein at all, it's from his role in the popular PBS documentary series on the civil rights movement Eyes on the Prize, especially episode 5. The emotional climax of the episode comes over the party machinations to keep the alternative slate of black voters from being seated at the 1964 Democratic convention, which LBJ, Hubert Humphrey, and his protege Walter Mondale succeeded in because of their superior knowledge of debate club tactics. A series of copyright claims by rightsholders for whom licenses had expired kept this show off the air in the 90s, but early filesharing advocates got to work promoting the show across the internet. After all, if they were trying to ban it, it must be important. The clip here is from that episode.
Lowenstein got his law degree at Yale, did his stint in the military like an honorable American, and then got a job from Eleanor Roosevelt directly, always the most powerful player in the party from her husband's death to 1960. However, Lowenstein also cared to an extent. He wanted the black people of the American south to have a chance to vote, based to a large extent on what he witnessed on a fact-finding tour of Namibia, then an internal colony of Apartheid South Africa. His passion was such that he was a major player in the movement to prevent LBJ from being renominated in 1968, recruiting Eugene McCarthy to run against him. This was because they were both politics nerds in the West Wing sense. Young guns, they believed they knew better than the Democratic machine politicians what voters wanted. They knew the people wanted an anti-war candidate who satisfied liberal pieties and who thumbed his nose at the old hierarchies. The result was three unsuccessful campaigns for presidential nomination and Lowenstein himself becoming a one-term congressman. As Gus Tyler, president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (himself a young rebel against an old guard at one point, now an old man leading younger women) said, Lowenstein was leading politics "away from economics to ethics and aesthetics, to morality and culture", and ultimately "to the Republican Wolves".
The problem here wasn't that Lowenstein cared too much, as most of his contemporaries wrote. Rather, he'd performed like a racer trying to slipstream/draft who had spun out of control. This was because of Lowenstein's background and training. As the consummate liberal striver, he'd managed to become president of the National Student Association in 1951 (note this in particular for future posts). This was a union of students' unions, which was basically the debate club to end all debate clubs because that's all student unions are. Even today, but especially so in the 40s and 50s, the only reason to get involved in student politics was because it was a training ground for how parliaments and congresses work. All they do is argue over arcane resolutions on mundane subject matter, until one manages to land a blow strong enough to gain a majority in favour. It's a weirdo politics junkie's dream.
Lowenstein brought that energy to organizing black people in the American South. Even before his role in organizing 1964's Freedom Summer in Mississippi, the project for which Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered, he was already getting on the nerves of more radical black people. James Forman, right of MLK in the pic below, ended up on the wrong side of Lowenstein at the 1956 NSA convention. Lowenstein didn't want passage of a more progressive civil rights platform than the one the Democratic Party had adopted. At one point, he literally shoved a black man to the microphone to speak on his behalf, according to Forman. He won, of course, because he knew his debate club tactics better.
7 years later, Lowenstein and Forman butted heads over the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's work in Mississippi and Alabama. Forman notes that he arrived almost unannounced, and yet many of the white volunteers suddenly claimed that they were under his orders to do what they were doing, including going to towns that were centres of white violence and had no organizing done. As a Yale alumni, Lowenstein probably had links to major white supremacist orgs to protect these people given that Yale was the university of choice for white southerners in the Ivy Leagues. On the other hand, Lowenstein's line was against black radical politics and towards conciliation. Forman found that Lowenstein often worked hand-in-hand with Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, and John Lewis (far right in the pic above), and were close to Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington's Socialist Party (eventually Democratic Socialists of America), bankrolled by Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers union. He was particularly piqued when they went to the Dominican Republic as supposedly independent observers and certified the election of the pro-American candidate not long after an American invasion, despite the well-known popularity of his opponent Juan Bosch.
This rankled Forman because the struggle in America for the civil rights of black people was part and parcel of the decolonization struggle abroad, or so he thought. To have America going around and imposing governments on nations through its military industrial complex and arcane intelligence apparatus reeked of what South Africa was doing in Namibia. After all, there was a reason the SNCC had adopted the phrase "one man, one vote" for its 1964 Freedom Summer campaign: it had been a slogan of the 1958 All African Peoples' Conference, the first meeting of black revolutionaries from all of Africa in history.
This conference was convened by the newly independent Ghana, the eighth independent nation in Africa and the first of a long wave which gained independence between 1958 and 1994. The resounding waves of this action were felt in America. Martin Luther King Jr explained in an interview that year "This event will give impetus to oppressed peoples all over the world. I think it will have worldwide implications and repercussions—not only for Asia and Africa, but also for America… At bottom, both segregation in America and colonialism in Africa are based on the same thing—white supremacy and contempt for life". But "Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent", incoming Ghanian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah declared, which is why the All African Peoples' Conference had to be held.
Nkrumah did not learn his debating skills from the NSA. As a student in America in the 30s, he'd given sermons in churches across New York City and Philadelphia, talking always about Africa. Yet it was his experience of American segregation that radicalized him. Being told he was only fit to drink from a spittoon was one of many insults he faced from white Americans. At times, he would buy a subway ticket so that he had a place to sleep. He knew the civil rights struggle was the same as his own, and this followed to the rest of his government. When Ghana became independent, it had virtually no skilled workers because universities in the country barred black students and everybody who had the ability travelled to America to learn. In 1958, Nkrumah spoke at an NAACP dinner in Harlem, telling black American dignitaries that the next step in their fight for civil rights was to send their well educated members back to Ghana, where they would receive a warm welcome and teach their fellow Africans to build a strong, independent nation that could one day bring together a united Africa to rival America.
The opening salvo in this project was the call for all freedom fighters of Africa to send representatives to the AAPC. Nkrumah welcomed them personally. First came Tom Mboya (keep your eyes on this guy) from Kenya, a trade unionist official and future Minister of Justice who one day soon would ensure a member of his tribe, Barack Obama Senior, made his way to America to attend university. Future successful and failed revolutionaries like Joshua Nkomo, George Padmore, Kenneth Kaunda, Hastings Banda, Frantz Fanon, Dr. Felix-Roland Moumie, and Holden Roberto, as well as notable black US Congressman Charles Diggs, were among 300 delegates. Perhaps the most important delegate was accidental. Joseph Kasavubu had initially been invited as the representative from the Congo. However, when the plane to Ghana stopped in Leopoldville/Kinshasa, Belgian authorities had stopped him from getting on, recognizing him from anti-colonial speeches earlier. However, they did allow Patrice Lumumba and two comrades who had impressed the plane's passengers with their rhetoric at a bar to join in. When Nkrumah met Lumumba, he was deeply impressed and called for a photographer to record the moment.
Also among them was Horace Mann Bond as a representative of the African American Institute, a group funded by western mining interests but staffed with academics from major American black universities like Howard and Lincoln. He brought along a reporter named Bob Keith, who was arrested during a closed session of the congress with bugging equipment. Bond was also president of the American Society of African Culture. AMSAC had deep pursestrings, bailing out a number of black groups soon after it was founded, and sponsored Bond as well as CUNY professor John Aubrey Davis, who reported on all the proceedings to former National Student Association president and current AMSAC leader James Theodore Harris Jr, according to AMSAC's archives. A third group that attended the conference was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, who sent white AFL-CIO leader Irving Brown. AFL-CIO in turn sponsored International Ladies' Garment Workers Union member Maida Springer, one of the few black women. One thing that AAI, AMSAC, AFL-CIO, and CCF shared was an explicit commitment to anticommunism in their charters, even as some claimed apoliticality otherwise. CCF sent its future president, South African poet Ezekiel Mphaphele. Some CCF funding came from the Fairfield Foundation, a charitable organization that sent its own observer Patrick Duncan, a white member of the South African Liberal Party. Other funding came from the Ford Foundation, which sent white University of California Santa Cruz professor John A. Marcum on its own. Marcum and Brown helpfully offered to translate ad hoc between French (spoken by Lumumba) and English (spoken by Nkrumah), and the two report an unknown American helping them with all their conversations.
I note these people because they or the organizations that sponsored them were all revealed to be CIA fronts or conduits by the magazine Ramparts in 1967 (Brown's one time boss at the CIA's International Organizations Division, Thomas Braden, wrote a response entitled "I'm glad the CIA is 'immoral'"). Many of them defended themselves by saying they were unaware of where the money was coming from or that they did not know the people they reported to were compromised. As Ramparts was drawing primarily on IRS information that had been leaked as well as corroborating testimony, they did not know the full extent of their integration into the intelligence apparatus. As many of these organizations folded in the 70s and 80s after these revelations their archives were given over to universities for preservation. They were rarely perused, two notable exceptions being by Frances Stonor Saunders and Hugh Wilford in the 90s and 2000s respectively. What they revealed was not wholesale domination or complete innocence, but rather a joy that the CIA was funding them to do what they knew was the right thing combined with strident insistence to the conduits for their funding that they not be forced to do anything that would contradict with their politics. When Farmer, of Forman's Lowenstein faction at CORE and SNCC, went on an AMSAC-sponsored tour of Africa, he criticized Malcolm X's beliefs as "apartheid and… worse", then got into arguments with diplomatic staff for his criticisms of American policies towards South Africa, Portugese Africa, and most of all the Congo. He later claimed that seeing apartheid abroad helped to calcify his opinion the American government. When Brown became harshly critical of Nkrumah, Springer, his subordinate and mentee at AFL-CIO, explained decades later that the 1958 conference gave her "goosebumps" and was more significant than the fall of the Berlin Wall in her opinion.
Evidently, many of these liberals, like the more radical leftists they battled, viewed the American civil rights struggle as an anti-colonial one. So too did the CIA, given the similar manner in which they infiltrated both through the liberals. However, portrayals of the struggle in popular culture like Eyes on the Prize show nothing of the sort. They tend to show a struggle from the streets right into the Democratic Party. This pattern also befits all of the above named associated with the CIA, albeit with the ones less inclined to support whoever the current president was also ending up becoming less powerful. Typically, they emerged in academia rather than politics, ie the other glorified debate club. In contrast, the radicals tended to find themselves sidelined or shot. Forman was an early supporter of the Black Panthers along with his associate at the SNCC Stokely Carmichael, but as the group descended into factional infighting, his former comrade stuffed a pistol in his mouth and threatened to shoot, giving him a nervous breakdown. He went into academia and helped ensure his son, now a Yale Law professor, could do the same. To co-author his autobiography, "The Making of Black Revolutionaries", Forman picked Julian Bond, son of Horace Mann Bond.
‘Irving Brown was never a CIA agent’, said Cord Meyer, the head of the International Organizations Division of the CIA. ‘The very notion is laughable. He was as independent as you could get, and very strong-willed. What the CIA did was to help him finance his major projects when they were crucial to the Western cause. But in his operations he was totally on his own’.
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🌙 * ― 𝐁𝐄𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐘 𝐈𝐍 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐇 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐓 𝐎𝐍𝐄 ( sentence starters from chase atlantic’s album beauty in death. feel free to change pronouns & wording as needed. trigger warnings: drugs, guns, violence, sex. )
𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐎𝐈𝐃.
❛ I'm three pills down and wide the fuck awake. ❜
❛ God forgive me if I sin. ❜
❛ Now I’m lying here awake sipping hennessy to wash away the pain. ❜
❛ Take the gun right out the safe. ❜
❛ Put it up against my head and blow my brains. ❜
❛ I’m paranoid. ❜
❛ The blood is dripping down my throat. ❜
❛ I can hear them knocking. ❜
❛ I got demons at my door. ❜
❛ Just promise me you won’t let them inside. ❜
❛ I don’t deal with situations lightly. ❜
❛ I’ve never been the type to run and hide. ❜
𝐏𝐋𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐄𝐗𝐀𝐍𝐍𝐘.
❛ Feel the affection through a chemical rush. ❜
❛ Baby hold my hand we can slow dance. ❜
❛ I didn’t need much yet I wonder If it’s ever enough. ❜
❛ I can tell that the anxiety Is tearing me apart. ❜
❛ Go on break up my relationships and break my fucking heart. ❜
❛ ____ you can’t leave without me again. ❜
❛ Pick me up and leave me face down bleeding. ❜
❛ Life with you is just a life without a meaning. ❜
❛ I don’t want to live in fear, ____ ❜
❛ I hate that I depend on you when life gets hard. ❜
❛ You got me singing please, I’m such a fiend, ____ ❜
❛ My life can only get better when I break you in half. ❜
𝐎𝐔𝐓 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐑𝐎𝐎𝐅.
❛ Please don’t try this shit at home. ❜
❛ We send souls up to the sky. ❜
❛ I’ma scotch every motherfucker in the game. ❜
❛ You know I’m feeling bulletproof. ❜
❛ Why waste time when you get high on the weekend? ❜
❛ Why waste time when you get high when you can? ❜
❛ Cause there’s nothing left to do. ❜
❛ I’ma put the burner on his ass. ❜
𝐒𝐋𝐈𝐃𝐄.
❛ I think the nitrous did damage. ❜
❛ I can’t feel my legs, yet I’m standing. ❜
❛ I barely make it down the stairs without panic. ❜
❛ I can see the pain in your eyes. ❜
❛ I’ll take you to heaven if you die. ❜
❛ Caught in a daze I persuade her with my own complications. ❜
❛ Says I’m stuck in my ways, that’s understated. ❜
❛ I can’t even hear you through the speaker. ❜
❛ Lyin’ to me baby, make it worth it. ❜
❛ Hop right on the ledge, jump right off the edge. ❜
❛ I could say the same ‘bout my life. ❜
❛ Promise, baby, I’ll take you to heaven if you want it. ❜
𝐁𝐄𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐘 𝐈𝐍 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐇.
❛ It’s hard to wipe that smile off her face. ❜
❛ Don’t base the emotion off fear. ❜
❛ There’s beauty in death sometimes. ❜
❛ You should see her on a bad day. ❜
❛ Tell me, what’s up with the sad face? ❜
❛ Lights they lead me home, they lead my loneliness. ❜
❛ I’ll make sure to make it by, for one night. ❜
❛ It might make you lose your mind. ❜
❛ I don’t wanna waste your time. ❜
❛ That’s why there’s angels in the sky. ❜
𝐏𝐋𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐄 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐁𝐘.
❛ Tell me I can’t have it, bitch. ❜
❛ Got respect on my neck ‘cause I stay focused. ❜
❛ Worked that nine-to-five, had my head low. ❜
❛ To be honest I won’t live long. ❜
❛ So liberated, give a damn what you say. ❜
❛ No, I do not fuck with you losers. ❜
❛ Play with me I’ll get you stuck. ❜
❛ I’m gon’ get tired of fucking and rolling. ❜
❛ The city go high at two in the morning. ❜
#rp meme#rp memes#ask meme#roleplay meme#roleplay memes#dialogue prompts#writing prompts#lyrics meme#lyrics memes#lyrics prompts
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Through The Valley|| Jacob Seed Ft John Seed (Special Scene Of "Radio Calls")
Song Inspired By: Through The Valley - Ashley Johnson (The Last Of Us)
Summary: || A couple of days ago, the Deputy hasn't shown up to help with the resistance to liberate any part of the cult outpost. so she is hidden in some cabin in the region of Jacob, only that soldier knows how to hunt her prey and confronts her to talk about what the Deputy and John talked about ||
Deputy: *she is sitting on the bed with the guitar on her lap, then she strums a bit and it sounds different, she moves the peg a bit then she strums again and then she starts playing the guitar, now singing.* I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and I fear no evil because i'm blind to it all. And my mind and my gun they comfort me, because I know I'll kill my enemies when they come. . . . *The Deputy feels on her head a drop of sweat combined with blood falling almost halfway down her cheek.* Surely, goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and i will dwell on this earth forevermore. . .Said I walk beside the still waters and they restore my soul. But I can't walk on the path of the right, because i'm wrong.
||At that moment while the deputy sings with her guitar, two people arrive at the cabin looking at a horrible scene in seeing their men lying on the ground, some with a bullet in the head, others with a cut in their throat and a few with Molotov cocktails and knives, Jacob tells John to stay while he goes into the cabin to look for the deputy, at that moment the soldier must be careful not to make noise so as not to alert the deputy, he takes out his red pistol looking at the mess in the cabin, he walks down the corridor until he stops to see a man with a shot in the head in the bathroom, then he looks the direction of a room where he hears the voice of the deputy singing.||
Deputy: Well, I came upon a man at the top of a hill, Called himself the saviour of the human race. Said he come to save the world from destruction and pain, but i said, "how can you save the world from itself?" *she starts to whistle following the rhythm of the song*
||The soldier carefully stands in front of the entrance to the room's door, leans on it to look at the deputy where he surely senses that she is in conflict with the situation of the war between the resistance and the cult. Jacob must solve the matter that the deputy has, because she does not want to kill them but to leave them alone. . .||
Deputy: Cause I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and I fear no evil because i'm blind. Oh, and I walk beside the still waters and they restore my soul. But I know when I die my soul is damned. . . But I know when I die, My soul is damned.
||When she finishes singing, The Deputy doesn't look back to see who is at the door, then sets the guitar aside on the bed, where she listens to Jacob's deep breath as he begins to speak.||
Jacob: What are you doing pup? *He ask her when she doesn't said nothing* do you really want to go through with this?
Deputy: I am tired, tired of this war, tired of killing, tired of continuing to help with the resistance. . .I should have died in that accident, I should have walked away. *Then she looks at Jacob coldly* but that doesn't matter now, I think you saw that I killed your men including John's, since he also sent them to capture me
Jacob: I don't care that you killed them, we just want to talk to you.
Deputy: "We" Don't tell me John came with you? *she asked Jacob and sighed frustratingly* Of course, he wants to talk about what we talked about on the radio. . . He told you right?
Jacob: I was with him at his ranch, I listened to everything, I know you have conflicts, maybe you should move those conflicts away, I know you're tired, but. . . Do you think your people care about you? you are just a tool for them, you are not their hero. *he says as he carefully approaches her, kneeling down looking at her.* I know you don't want to harm or kill us, why?
Deputy: *she gets up from the bed, steps forward with her back to the soldier.* Because I don't want to have this suffering and this pain in killing you, but I don't want that to happen. The song you heard is what identifies me, and it is what identifies everything that is happening. *Suddenly she hears footsteps approaching her, feeling her back against Jacob's chest, he wraps his arms around her waist.* this feeling kills me Jacob.
Jacob: Then. . .Join us, leave these people, leave this war, do you think that they matter your life of what you do with them? Do you think they will thank you? You are a tool Deputy. *He said softly* With me, with John, with Faith and with Joseph you will be protected, they will know that this war was in vain, it was a mistake, a mistake and a weakness that they could not win.
||At that moment, footsteps are heard and they look back to see John present with a calm look, walk to the room, and Jacob is still hugging the agent, suddenly John sits on the bed||
John: I know what you're thinking, and I'll listen everything whatever you talk, I know you're afraid of losing us in not wanting to kill us. So we beg you to leave these sinners and join us, the Eden's Gate will open for you.
Deputy: *She turns away from Jacob to walk to the window to look outside, letting out a sigh, hugging herself.* And yet you want me to confess my sins to you so I can say "yes". ? Oh but I remembre, I already did say yes but i didn't confess my sins with you, maybe in time i will.
John: Does that mean you're not going to kill our people anymore?.
Deputy: Look, maybe I should disappear for a while, hiding my identity without everyone knowing of my existence, only you guys and your brother Joseph and your sister Faith can know.
John: Do you want to disappear so that no one knows where you are?.
Deputy: It's for the best, I just want both of you to live, spread rumors or say that you found my body, I don't know, as I told Jacob, I'm tired of doing these jobs. *she said with stress that she can no longer deal with the war in ending the cult of Joseph and his family.*
John: *He watches the deputy and thinks about what she said until suddenly for now he understands why she wants to protect them and not kill them. The deputy has feelings for him and Jacob.* Now I understand, you have feelings, for me and my brother jacob.
Deputy: *She tenses up when John says that and turns sharply to escape there, but Jacob stops her by grabbing her arm very tightly.* Let me go Jacob. You are hurting me.
Jacob: So is it true?, do you have feelings for us?
Deputy: That has nothing to do with whether or not I am in love with both of you. what matters is that I have to keep my profile down, do you understand? *she says sternly looking at Jacob annoyed trying to free her arm from his hand* you want the whole town of hope county to know about me. . .The Deputy who is in love with two Seed brothers.? *she lets out a self-centered laugh, shaking her head* They will think that I am a traitor and that I am giving them some valuable information for you, so it is better to give up and find a place where I can rest in peace.
John: What if we protect you? No one will know that you will be at my ranch or Jacob's at his veterans center.
Deputy: That won't be easy John, you must understand that all the resistance will find out sooner or later, they're going to suspect that I'm talking to you on the radio or in person like now. *She released Jacob's hold on her arm, then stepped back, looking at them.* I just want to end this and be able to rest.
John: So let us help you, we'll talk to Joseph about leaving this war for a few days and you'll rest as soon as possible. *He takes a few steps further, approaching the deputy, raising his hand to put it on her cheek where she accepts his touch* You will see that nothing bad will happen to the resistance.
Deputy: *nodded to accept his proposal* Fine, but I don't want a betrayal John, and neither you Jacob. Because if I find out something behind my back, I will never forgive you and I will provoke more war than both of you will ever imagine.
John: Okay, now we have to go to Joseph, will you be okay with Jacob?
Deputy: *I look at Jacob for a moment and nod* What other option is there? Also I hope he don't put me in the cage to brainwash me.
Jacob: *He snorts with laughter, smiling a little looking at the Deputy* I do not promise anything, although you must learn to behave like a soldier, not a capricious and immature girl.
Deputy: Of course, whatever you say old man. *She rolls her eyes and leaves the room to wait for the Seed brothers outside the cabin* I'll wait for you guys outside, don't be long.
||When the Deputy is out. Jacob looks at his brother John where he does not take his eyes off where the Deputy has gone*
Jacob: Don't even think about it brother, you're not the type of man she's looking for.
John: And you are the type that she desires? Please Jake, she'll be at my ranch, not your veteran center. But we'll see what happens these days. . .
Deputy: Hey, hurry up before someone sees us. *She yells it from outside the cabin*
John: Come on brother, we must not let her wait for our little llamb. *He leaves the room with an innocent smile leaving Jacob alone in the room*
Jacob: Let's see whose side our Deputy will be on, Little Brother.
†††††††††††††††
Uh oh, looks like Jacob And John want to compete for the Deputy's heart. . . Who would you choose, Jacob or John? 🤭
Soon I will update the next chapter ❤️
#john seed#joseph seed#faith seed#jacob seed#far cry 5 x reader#john seed x reader#joseph seed x reader#jacob seed x reader#seed family#far cry 5#Spotify
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♦️ National Resistance Brigades (Martyr Omar Al-Qasim Forces) spokesman, Abu Khaled:
—
"Our forces are confronting the occupation forces in Khan Yunis, Jabalia, east of Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, and other areas."
Abu Khaled, the spokesman for the "Martyr Omar Al-Qasim Forces" (the military wing of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine), issued a military statement about the combat operations of the Martyr Omar Al-Qasim Forces during the past 24 hours in the Gaza Strip, stating:
Firstly: Our forces engaged in fierce battles with the invading "israeli" enemy forces around the town of Jabalia, using machine guns, anti-personnel shells, and hand grenades. They succeeded in inflicting a number of deaths and injuries among the enemy ranks and withdrew to their positions safely.
Secondly: The Martyr Omar Al-Qasim Forces confronted one of the "israeli" enemy groups infiltrating east of Sheikh Radwan neighborhood. They fought a fierce battle against it, employing individual weapons, including machine guns, anti-personnel shells, and hand grenades. They succeeded in targeting several enemy officers and soldiers, causing both deaths and injuries, and returned to their positions safely.
Thirdly: In the Al-Manara area in Khan Yunis, the Martyr Omar Al-Qasim Forces confronted the enemy forces attempting to infiltrate the area, halting their advance and inflicting significant losses in both equipment and personnel, including deaths and injuries.
Martyr Omar Al-Qasim Forces – The Military Wing of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Military Media
18-1-2024
t.me/PalestineResist
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By Kirk Swearingen
In the face of what seems like endless gun carnage in the U.S., Republican politicians call for more mental health funding even while withholding it. Not only are there now more guns than people in this country, many Republicans and the right-wing media continue to profit by leading people, especially younger men, to despair.
They're projecting their own unexamined mental health issues on others. As Salon's Amanda Marcotte has often pointed out, for Republicans it seems that every accusation is a confession.
When Donald Trump and his confederates claim that Democrats cheat in elections, that's what is known as a tell, since cheating at elections is precisely what they themselves are trying their best (or worst) to do.
When Ivy League–educated Republicans attack the liberal "elite." When Trump Republicans profess outrage about the "Biden crime family." When the malignant narcissist who formerly occupied the White House claims that liberals (whom he claims are "socialists," "radicals" or "Marxists") are out to destroy the country. Every accusation is a confession.
So Republican politicians and their media allies call for more mental health spending as a supposed solution to the gun violence crisis, one suspects that's a reflection of their own mental strain in championing an absurd interpretation of the Second Amendment and steadfastly ignoring the fact that people in other large Western nations have issues with mental health too, but for some reason don't shoot each other, or themselves, nearly as often.
Many men who vote Republican, it seems, are too focused on propping up their fragile masculinity to seek help in any case. (It might make them look like "betas.") Far too often, a right-wing man gets so worked up about a perceived threat to his manliness that he goes on a shooting rampage with assault-style weapons, which the Supreme Court has helpfully explained is every American's God-given right, under the twisted logic that there was no "history or tradition" in the 18th century of prohibiting high-powered firearms that hadn't been invented.
So many American conservatives live in a seemingly incessant state of fear — about books and experts and science and liberals and immigrants and independent women and people of color and people with different sexual preferences or gender identities — that it's no wonder they appear mentally and emotionally unhealthy. Then there are the evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who form the most reliable MAGA Republican base: Their alleged belief in Jesus Christ has become so warped they now perceive their savior in the person of our twice-impeached, four-times-indicted ex-president. None of this signals a group of well-adjusted human beings. The HBO series "The Righteous Gemstones," a dark comedy about shallow, grifting televangelists stunted and spoiled by wealth, has to work hard to outdo what we see at Trump rallies.
Come on, it's not like we weren't warned about all this. Remember Trump's infamous 2016 response to Hillary Clinton: "No puppet, no puppet … You're the puppet!" Did that sound like a mentally well-adjusted adult? Or an adult of any kind? How about this lovely Mother's Day greeting, earlier this year. Who defends themselves against allegations of criminal actions by saying, "I'm a legitimate person"? Who frequently posts in all caps on social media, flinging incomprehensible accusations at political opponents?
As for anti-"woke" warrior Ron DeSantis, his campaign against Trump appears to be a spectacular failure, even as he apparently mimics Trump's fragile ego, accompanying vindictiveness and bizarre obsession with manliness. Like "personality" Tucker Carlson's 2022 special on "The End of Men," DeSantis' anti-Pride video was pretty darned homoerotic.
Along with the right-wing cable news machine profiting by actively diminishing the mental acuity of its viewers, "manfluencer" grifters like Andrew Tate, selling "alpha male" misogyny to lonely, insecure young men, have made fortunes encouraging them to become misogynistic white nationalists — essentially mini-Trumps, but with actual muscle tone (not just in risible fantasy). It's good to see some mentally healthy young people fight back with satire.
When a serial liar and hatemonger like Trump remains the choice of a large majority of Republican voters even after two impeachments, an ever-growing count of felony indictments and an ongoing attempted coup; when voters send deeply unserious, dysfunctional or delusional individuals to Congress as their representatives; when fascist-fanboy Governors like DeSantis and Greg Abbott model their states after authoritarian regimes and deploy stochastic terrorism to put marginalized populations at risk of violence, is it any wonder that ordinary citizens feel permanently on edge, in a state of chronic existential dread?
But the right won't give up — I don't mean on issues of principle or policy, since it doesn't have any, but in its crusade to "own the libs," take rights away from people who are not like them and enforce theocratic minority rule. In fact, that mean-spirited crusade is the basis of the right's tribal identity. As Adam Serwer of The Atlantic famously pointed out some time ago, the cruelty is the point:
“Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.”
As I reread those lines, I think back to the cheering and laughter of the Trump supporters during CNN's pathetic "town hall" rally for Trump in May, as he turned in his typical shameless performance of lies, bluster, bullying and whining. Here's a suggested campaign slogan: "Trump 2024: Come for the Lying, Stay for the Crying." As Salon contributor Mike Lofgren has observed, the GOP's "heart of darkness" has moved beyond just whining; They want retribution, payback for all the real or perceived slights they have suffered, and they believe only their cult leader can deliver it.
Brian Klaas, a professor of global politics at University College London, writes that we end up with bad people in power so often for three main reasons: power acts as a magnet for corruptible people (often "Machiavellian narcissists, perhaps with a dash of psychopathy thrown in too"); holding power tends to corrupt people; we tend to give people power for the wrong reasons.
"Corruptible people are disproportionately drawn to power, disproportionately good at wriggling their way into it and disproportionately likely to cling to it once they've got it," Klaas notes. We can fix this, he argues, by fixing our political system, recruiting better candidates and instituting real accountability for wrongdoing. Good systems, he says, attract good people. Fighting corruption is an integral part of the Democratic Playbook published by the Brookings Institution. A political system dominated by money, "dark" or otherwise, is not working.
Most politicians would not entertain the thought that they are mentally unwell. They are simply playing the game; looking to gain advantage in any way that works and is not blatantly illegal (with some notable exceptions. But does that kind of Machiavellian behavior, part of the "dark triad," suggest a well-functioning mind and spirit? We too often shrug at politics, accepting the narrative that it's just a game. But it's not; it is freedom or tyranny, dignity or subjugation, life or death.
Those who dehumanize their political opponents by referring to them as enemies and who call teachers, librarians and parents "groomers" have mental health issues far exceeding those of young people struggling with questions of sexual orientation or gender identity. Men who work to limit women's autonomy over their own bodies, or for that matter conservative women who punch down to bolster their fragile status have serious issues to work on and should quit afflicting them on the rest of us.
To be fair, a great many of us in America face our own mental health issues across the political spectrum. More of us, almost certainly, should seek the counsel of friends and professionals. We are chronically depressed and lonely. Political polarization has separated friends and family members from each other. The religious right has embraced an evangelism of intolerance against other people whose mental and emotional struggles they don't understand. While Republicans play-act as defenders of the working class, they labor tirelessly to drive working people deeper into lives of endless labor and debt servitude.
As the late, great American novelist Kurt Vonnegut would have said, about this and about his currently banned books: "So it goes." I don't think he meant to indicate cynical acceptance, more like an acknowledgment of humanity's deep history of stupidity and intolerance — and the need to carry on nonetheless. So we work diligently to maintain our own sense of self, our fragile balance, our purpose and our will — even in a country where, far too often, the inmates are running the asylum.
#us politics#news#salon#republicans#conservatives#gop#gun violence#gun control#gun rights#mass shootings#op eds#Kirk Swearingen#mental health#mental illness#white nationalists#alt right#Adam Serwer#the Atlantic#Mike Lofgren#Brian Klaas#Kurt Vonnegut#incels#misogyny#2023
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After reading your tags on the culture shock poll, I'm shook. I always thought southern states were basically 90% conservative and everyone else there should just leave. Feeling kinda stupid now after I looked some stuff up. I didn't realize Texas has one of the highest populations of trans people in the nation. I feel so bad for them :(
Ah, that was more or less a personal ramble but I'm always glad to hear my words had a positive effect on someone. Good on you for being willing to learn and use that information to evolve your views. Don't feel stupid, that required a lot of humility and I'm glad you cared enough to say something about it.
I hear a lot of people expressing sentiments that imply or outright say Southern red states are a lost cause. After coming of age as a queer person in Texas, I don't accept that. The South has a very complicated, often ugly history and a lot of the current culture is still influenced by the far-reaching effects of the Civil War, among other things. Texas in particular is a special case, due to its very messy origin story.
But ultimately, it's important to remember that the population of any red state is made up of real, diverse human beings. These places aren't monoliths of gun-toting, Trump-loving, alt-right Republicans. Hell, a surprising amount of Southern folks are liberal, and even more are "moderate" enough to be reasoned with and are capable of changing their views, when given the right opportunity. Just look at Texas' recent elections--Beto O'Rourke, a Democrat, won 43.8% of the latest vote for governor. Almost half the voting population voted for a pro-gun control, pro-choice, pro-LGBT+ candidate. Let that sink in.
These states are largely controlled by Republicans and their political maps are drawn by Republicans, which means the right can almost always manipulate things in their favor. Texas has an almost total abortion ban now and they're a huge participant of the current wave of anti-trans legislation. That doesn't mean the majority population wants that and a number of people are experiencing real pain, suffering, and even death as a consequence. When I talk about these things, I'm often asked why I didn't stay and fight. My answer usually comes back to a simple "I didn't like the weather." I moved for my health to a climate my body is better suited to handle. That just happened to come with the benefit of living in a state that protects my civil rights as a trans-spectrum individual capable of pregnancy. Meanwhile, my new state has taken multiple steps to become a refuge for reproductive freedom and gender-affirming care. We've not only protected those rights, we've also recently passed a bill that bars state officials from cooperating with other states' investigations when their residents come here to access those services. I couldn't be happier about it. Yet, I still miss so much of the culture I grew up with. I miss the food, the music, the wildflower meadows in the spring, the fireflies and dewberry vines in the summer, the autumn bonfire parties where we'd tack up the horses and watch the kiddos' faces light up when we put them in the saddle, the winter afternoons eating hot chili and listening to everyone complain about the forty-degree cold as if it were the end of days--without a speck of snow to be seen. "Y'ain't" is a common word in my vocabulary and I still wear cowboy boots built for riding. I grew up rural Southern and I loved a lot about it, it'll always be part of who I am.
Now, if I were still in Texas and my health wasn't a concern, would I move for political reasons now that things have gotten so bad? Absolutely. I don't need to justify that. Texas doesn't just have one of the highest populations of trans people in the USA, it also has one of the highest trans homicide and suicide rates. The things I love about my home state don't outweigh the danger of losing my life for expressing my genderfluidity or the risk of being forced to have a child I don't want. In fact, we're seeing the start of outreach efforts to railroad at-risk trans people and people needing abortions out of red states, to states where they can safely access the care they need and escape dangerous environments. That illustrates the crux of the issue: not everyone can "just" leave. My cross-country move cost almost $5k up front. Leaving requires money, finding suitable work and housing, traveling a long distance, and it often means leaving family and friends behind, sometimes pets too. Relationships will weaken or be lost under the strain of long-distance communication. Moving means uprooting your entire life to establish a new one somewhere else, and a positive result isn't guaranteed. Then there's the fact that not everyone wants to leave. Saying the only solution is "just leave," is not only inconsiderate and a cruel demand that people leave their entire support system behind so they stop complaining, it's also inherently classist. Poverty is a driving factor for the politics of Southern states. The minimum wage is $7.25, workers' rights are practically non-existent, food deserts are all over, the education system is underfunded, and the infrastructure is barely holding itself together. I grew up impoverished and I've even been homeless. I only got out of poverty because I married into the middle class. Remember: Republicans in power want to keep their constituents poor and under-educated so they're easy to control. That's how fascism operates.
Southern states need members of the left-wing to stay and work to change things. However, at-risk populations shouldn't bear that responsibility alone, and they shouldn't feel pressured to do so at the risk of their own lives. We've had enough martyrs for a lifetime. Don't slip into the mindset of blaming victims for the fascism they've suffered, as not one of them asked for this. Next time you hear about a horrible bill out of a red state, please respond with support and sympathy for the people who'd do anything to change it, but can't.
Anyway, this turned into a huge post. That tends to happen as a result of me being a sociology student who's very invested in politics. Additions to this post are quite welcome, if anyone else would like to contribute to the conversation.
#anon#logan answers#us politics#texas#red states#american south#antifascist#on politics#vampirepunks lore
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Americans die younger in conservative states than in those governed by liberals, a new study has found.
The authors wrote: “Simulations indicate that changing all policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation might have saved 171,030 lives in 2019, while changing them to a fully conservative orientation might have cost 217,635 lives.”
The study was published on Plos One, “an inclusive journal community working together to advance science for the benefit of society, now and in the future”.
The authors are from Syracuse University in New York, Harvard in Massachusetts, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Washington, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Western Ontario, in Canada.
They wrote: “Results show that the policy domains were associated with working-age mortality.”
Bucking the trend, the study found that “more conservative marijuana policies” were associated with lower mortality rates.
But it also found that “more liberal policies on the environment, gun safety, labour, economic taxes and tobacco taxes in a state were associated with lower mortality in that state”.
They added: “Especially strong associations were observed between certain domains and specific causes of death: between the gun safety domain and suicide mortality among men, between the labour domain and alcohol-induced mortality, and between both the economic tax and tobacco tax domains and CVD [cardiovascular] mortality.”
According to the National Council of State Legislatures, as of June this year Republicans controlled 61% of state legislatures and Democrats 35%. In terms of whole state governments, Republicans controlled 46% and Democrats 12%, with 12 states divided.
The study authors also noted that American life expectancy as a whole is lower than in most high-income countries, “fall[ing] between … Cuba and Albania”.
They wrote: “The rise in working-age mortality rates in the US in recent decades largely reflects stalled declines in cardiovascular disease mortality alongside rising mortality from alcohol-induced causes, suicide and drug poisoning; and it has been especially severe in some US states. Building on recent work, this study examined whether US state policy contexts may be a central explanation.”
With federal and state midterm elections less than two weeks away, increased social spending in legislation passed by Democrats in Congress and the Biden administration has become a key issue in voters’ minds.
Joe Biden and other senior Democrats have sought to emphasise the success and necessity of such measures. But Republicans, who have presented such measures as irresponsible and contributing to inflation, are poised to retake the House and perhaps the Senate.
The study authors wrote: “One study found that US life expectancy could increase by nearly four years if the country matched the average level of social policy generosity offered in 17 other high-income countries.
“More recent research has turned attention to policies and politics at the US state level, given the federalist structure of the US political system and the large size and geographical spread of the population. This new work suggests that changes in state policies and politics may have played a contributory role in producing the troubling US mortality trends.”
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