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estes03berry · 2 years

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Why Is It Suddenly So Onerous To Buy Louis Vuitton Bags?

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owljolson-archive · 3 years

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so, it’s the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. for a while i thought about doing a scribbly comic of my memories of the whole thing, but i just don’t have it in me. i think i’ll just spew out a bunch of text under the cut to get my catharsis.

to add some background, i’m not an army brat, but my family moved around a helluva lot during my youth, all over the country, though we spent the most time in the nj/ny area. we even lived in manhattan for a year or so, across the street from where the village voice was headquartered at the time. we visited nyc a great deal as well when we could, the northeast coast has always felt like home to me because of all that. the twin towers were a very regular, very familiar sight.

in 2001, i was 16, almost 17, and we lived in northern jersey. a few months before 9/11, my parents decided to take me and my little brother to actually visit the twin towers in person. they wanted to show us the restaurant where they’d met (they both worked on wall street back in the day), so many years ago. they were so thrilled it was still there, so many years later. i can’t remember what the restaurant was called. so soon after that that trip, the place was nothing but dust and death.

i remember being in awe of the towers, how huge and full of business and people and bustle they were. the line to the elevator, and the incredibly long elevator ride up, as the tour guide chatted to us. going to the very very top, and staring down in awe at the view of the city, everything so far below. never had a view of anything like that outside of a plane before or since.

a few days before 9/11, my mom, brother and me went to nyc again. i was a hs junior, it was time to start thinking about college, so we went to wander around the pratt institute area for a bit. on our way there, we drove right past the towers, right under them. the last time i ever saw them.

my first class in the morning at that time was art class. a fun, chill way to start the day, with the radio on the shelf playing late ‘90s/early ‘00s music softly in the background. the morning of the 11th, everything so normal, and then just as class was ending and the bell for next period rang, hearing a sudden blurb on the radio on my way out, about a terrible plane crash that had just happened in nyc.

that was all i heard for a bit. then i started seeing occasional worried faces, saw the librarians clustering together in the library, concerned and whispering urgently to each other. going to lunch like normal in the cafeteria. the cafeteria with the wall-mounted tvs for students to watch as they waited in line, and that some boys turned on just in time to see the terrible footage unfolding.

it’s one of the moments from 9/11 that’s still burned clearly in my memory. seeing the news go up on the cafeteria tv, seeing the awful destruction and trying to come to terms with what unbelievable things i was suddenly seeing and hearing. the cluster of students slowly gathering around the tv and silently standing like statues, staring up at it, until a teacher hurriedly came over and turned the tv off, and told everybody to calm down and go about their business.

it’s hard to go about your business when you live 40ish minutes away from nyc, and many of the students in the school had parents and relatives who commuted to the city for work. my grandmother still lived in nyc at the time. i spent a good chunk of that day desperately wondering if she was okay. wondering about other students’ parents. in the end, one of our local residents did die that day: jeremy glick, one of the people who stormed the cockpit on flight 93. so many people died that day, in so many awful ways. my 16-year old mind struggled to process it all.

after that crystal clear lunch period, most of the rest of the school day is a blur to me. the news eventually made its way around the school fully, and the only other clear memory i have is us sitting at our desks in a semi-circle in ap english class, all of us and our teacher just looking at each other. old mrs. valentine, looking so sad and at a loss, quietly telling us she didn’t know what to say.

usually i took the bus home from school, but that day my dad came and picked me up. i remember his quiet, seething anger. him going, ‘we’ll get them for this.’ the man had always been a hardcore conservative, but from that day onward he spiralled even further.

the rest of the day is a blur as well. my mom sitting on the edge of her seat on the couch, watching the news intently. i think we managed to get in touch with my grandma, made sure she was okay in her part of the city. i remember a thread about it on the forum i hung out on at the time, and one of the european members going good, she was kind of glad, america deserved to have all those citizens die.

i’ve always been prone to being an insomniac with sleeping issues, but that night i was so utterly overwhelmed, it was one of the few times in my life i just immediately passed out almost as soon as i lay down. pure black dreamless sleep. the weeks after being a blur of military bombing footage, war declarations, horrifying photos, charity memorial concerts. david bowie sadly singing simon & garfunkle’s america on the tv, the only time i think my homophobic parents ever willingly watched/listened to him perform.

there are so many people alive now who were small children or who were not even born yet when 9/11 happened, people who are now adults. i wish i could get across what a sudden, searing experience it was to watch such an awful piece of major history unfold in real time, especially when young. i guess this pandemic is something like that experience, just dragged out achingly slow over time. this was a quick, sharp, painful shock.

the world has always been a fucked-up, imperfect place, no question there, but me and so many people around my age, us millenials and ‘90s Kids, remember how things Used To Be. how the ‘90s had seemed like such a quiet, safe decade, as children. we were only vaguely aware of distant conflicts and oj simpson and the various -isms and -ists and -phobias, they weren’t fully real. life was okay, life was normal. 9/11 changed things overnight, it was a childhood-ender, it made us realize that things were not okay and normal, and if they had ever been, they never would be again. people got angrier, louder, more paranoid. news became 24/7, ever-present, sensationalist. us versus them became the rule of the day, politics became more vicious, more petty, more unbearable. the internet exploded and came into its own, it grew and grew and became a hotbed for so many things, and made sure we never, ever stopped being aware of fucked-up imperfection ever again. there’s a certain sort of civility and thoughtfulness that literally vanished from the country and its discourse overnight.

i remember some years later, visiting nyc again with my boyfriend at the time. at one point we went to where the towers used to be. looked through the wire fencing at the unbelievably massive pit in the ground, street vendors hocking knock-off memorial Never Forget merchandise to tourists. i haven’t been back since. i hear it’s a fairly lovely place for the most part now, but still not finished being rebuilt.

i’m not sure that i have any real advice, or any pithy sayings to insert here. just that i needed to write all this down, and get it out of me. i can’t believe it’s been twenty years. two whole decades, me being just shy of 17 at the time, and me being just shy of 37 now. how my life, and the life of so many others, has such a clear Before and After division because of it. 9/11 has haunted us for twenty years, has haunted and corrupted this country and everything about it, and feels like it always will.

but i hope it doesn’t. people born near to and after 9/11 are adults now. and there’s more of them every day. they’re further and further removed from the baggage, the anger, the mind-fog of the trauma. they can see more clearly, and i hope that some day they’ll exorcise the haunting.

#real life #cw: 9/11 #memories #long post

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thiswasinevitableid · 3 years

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77. a prophecy said that we’ll save the world together but I’ll be damned if I enjoy your company while we do because you insulted my best friend the first time we met

Ot4, sfw, please!

Here you go! I'm very pleased with this one

The drive hasn’t changed. The road into Kepler goes under the same covered bridges and winds up the same hills it always has. Even the views from driveway to the October House are the same one’s he watched through back windows with rising delight. He’d hoped to get here when the fall colors were still crisp and bright, but they droop from the branches like mourners from the weight of the grey rain.

No one batted an eye when he said he was moving North on Joe’s invitation; Joseph Stern inherited the ancestral home in Vermont, with its sprawling grounds and stately decay. It would make sense that he’d ask the friend who spent so many summers with him there to take up the role of groundskeeper.

Duck pulls his truck into the carport next to a languishing Chrysler Imperial. He runs his finger over the black curves, raindrops plinking on the tin roof as he wonders whether he could coax Joe into taking him for a ride.

He leaves his bags in the car for now. Letting his friend know he’s here is the top priority.

The house is just as tall and mismatched as he remembers, turrets and wide windows mixed with sloping eaves and a sun room. It’s patchwork quilt character extends to it’s color; some walls are red, others goldenrod, and the door is bright as a ripe pumpkin.

Joe christened it the October House the first summer he and Duck visited there. Joseph’s aunt, a proud spinster, suggested his transplant parents send him to the family farm for a few months of growth. When Joe showed his characteristic skepticism about spending his summer alone in Vermont, she offered to let him bring a friend. He chose Duck every year.

The October House was the last thing they spoke about the night before Duck left for basic training (and, soon after, Normandy). Joe was already slipping off the map, recruited for secret purposes by men who valued his intelligence over his humanity. He told Duck to remember the summer they were thirteen, to remember he was brave.

It wasn’t Duck Newton’s first war, but it was for damn sure his last.

He opens the door with the tarnished key Joe sent him. Anywhere else, he’d call out to find his host. But he knows where he’ll be.

One flight of creaking stairs, a left turn down the hallway of faded photos, a right into the room with the mural of Noah’s Ark on the wall, and there he is. Black hair slicked back, blue silk robe covering old scars and new, and eyes that are bluer still turning to take him in.

That’s Joe alright; immaculate even in his madness.

“You’re here.” He stands, dazzling smile reflecting the firelight.

“Told you I’d come. Can’t leave you here to get buried alive in books.” He opens his arms, unsure even as he commits to the movement. Joe hesitates, then steps across crumpled maps of stars and seas to hug him.

“I missed you.” He whispers. Duck doesn’t mention that Joe was the one to disappear once the war was over. They had one night in Huntington celebrating the boys who made it home; Joe’s smile stayed painted on the whole time, but Duck couldn’t get him alone to ask why. Then he fled north and didn’t respond to letters.

“Missed you too, Joe.” He peers over the taller man’s shoulder, takes in the mural and all the materials on the floor. Duck steps from the hug, paper crunching under his boots as he goes to trace the door of the ark, “you’re tryin to go back.”

“I want proof Sylvain was real. I, I want to see it again, to know we didn’t dream it.”

“Got a scar on belly that says we didn’t.” Duck turns, slips his hands into his pockets, “why are you really tryin to go back? They told us we couldn’t, said that if we came home the gate would shut for good.”

Joe doesn’t answer right away, runs his fingers over the badgers and bears fleeing the flood, “Do you ever wish we’d stayed?”

Duck thinks about bloody sand. Then about Jane getting married. His folks celebrating their twentieth anniversary.

“No. Christ, Joe, we were thirteen. It was fucked up to ask us to. Who the fuck asks two kids to rule a kingdom?”

A weak laugh, “and people say I’m the smart one.”

“You are.” Duck touches his shoulder, “now c’mon, smart guy, you don’t show me where my room is, I’m takin yours.”

------------------------------------------------

“You sure this is the spot?” Barclay keeps a close eye on the gathering darkness for any bursts of sickly white.

“Yes. The maps align with the stories that they emerged near “a stone like that of a broken heart.” Indrid draws hurriedly in the dirt with his claws, his lower hands uncorking bottles as he does, “come closer, if this catalyzes before I expect, I do not want you to be left behind.”

Barclay sets a hand on his shoulder. Feels his feathers shudder as he inhales.

“It’s time. I, if this does not work, I am sorry.”

He bends, kisses Indrid between his antenna, “I trust you, little moth.”

Indrid hums as amber light fills the clearing, and then everything he knows and loves dissolves into heat and empty air.

---------------------------------------------------

It's the same static, the rush of heat like wind in a wildfire. The hairs on Duck’s arm snap to attention as Joe leaps from his chair. The door on the ark shimmers and glows with alien majesty. Then two figures fall face-first on the floor and the light is gone.

“Are you alright?” Joe bends to help the first, feathered shape but it stands in a flurry of down, the hairy figure following suit.

“Yesyes, we are fine.” The feathery one looks like a massive moth with some human features.

“Oh.” Joe grins, “I’ve never seen a Sylph like you before. This, this is incredible.”

“You know what we are?” The other asks hopefully.

“We do. We, I’m, I’m Joseph Stern, and this is Duck Newton-”

“Thank the stars.” The mothman bends one knee, his friend doing the same, “yes, we are humble emissaries of the kingdom of Sylvain. We have searched for months to find our way to you. You, who prophecy says will aid us, return and take your rightful place as kings, and save our home once more.”

“No. Nuh-uh, not a fuckin chance.” Duck steps back, spots conflict in Joe’s eyes.

“What do you mean?” The mothman stands, “you, the prophecy, my visions showed you-”

“Then they showed fuckin wrong. I just got my life into some kind of order, I’m not letting you and some giant fuckin ape-thing drag me into another mess.”

Red eyes narrow, “Do not speak of Barclay that way.”

“I’ll speak about him however I damn well please because this is my house!”

“Technically, it’s my house.” Joe sighs, “But Duck is right. We almost died saving Sylvain once before. As, as much as I miss it, I’m not sure I can go back if it means risking our lives again. I was sort of hoping for a middle ground between being stuck here and a near-death adventure.”

“Please-” Barclay steps towards Joe.

“Hey, he said no, so fuck off.” Duck growls. The Sylph growls back.

“Buddy, do you have any idea how much we risked to get here? How much energy Indrid just used to open the gate. Oh, and, by the way, without the stuff we came here for we can’t go home. We’ll be stuck here.”

“Then you shoulda had a back-up plan instead of assumin you could just say a few fancy words and get us to go back. Oughta get some brains to go with the brawn there, big fella.”

“Enough” Indrid hisses, glaring at Duck. “I do not care if you are a chosen one, nothing gives you the right to speak to him, or to me, so callously. We came to you, you who are--if I did not make it clear--our last hope, and you respond with cruelty. I ought to teach you manners, but I will restrain myself.”

“Like to see you try.” He turns to where Joe is carding a hand through his hair, expression lost, “it’s your place, so you decide how we get rid of ‘em. But I’m done here.” With that, he stomps down the stairs, already suspecting Joe will let the Sylphs stay. When it becomes clear that’s the plan, Duck heads into the garden to work and stays there until all the lights are off.

It’s just after midnight when he wakes from a dream, slicing at the air while weak cries die on his tongue. He sits up, then goes gravestone still as the door opens. Indrid’s eyes are warning lights in the dark hall.

“Are you hurt? It did not seem fair to leave your calls unanswered.”

“No. Just had a, uh, a bad dream.”

The Sylph steps through the door, turning on the small, standing lamp, “It is strange to be the only one not waking in terror for once. Well, I suppose Barclay doesn’t.”

Duck tosses off the blanket, “Fuck, is Joe-”

“He is fine now. Barclay was up looking at cookbooks when he started screaming and went to him. Your friend did not wish to wake you, but was so shaken Barclay offered to stay with him.” A little smile, “he is very comforting. Soft, too.”

“You’re sure he was just dreamin? Not sick or anythin?”

“Positive. He was yelling in some other language.” Indrid fiddles with the knick-knacks on a shelf.

Duck runs a hand across his face, “Probably German.”

Indrid cocks his head.

“He had to learn it when he was a, uh, a spy in the last war. The one here. He...he got caught, I only know that because everyone talked about how miraculous it was that he escaped. Joe never talks about it.”

“One can imagine why.” Indrid murmurs.

“Then ‘one’ can probably imagine why I don’t want either of us near a goddamn battlefield.” Duck snaps.

“Is...oh dear, you think that is what we’re asking of you? Nono, we came here for help in preventing a war, one that may destroy both our worlds.”

“You coulda led with that, y’know?”

“I suppose. I, I am, or was, the court seer. But as the evil spread across our kingdom, it disrupted my powers. Now they’re gone entirely. It’s as if I am navigating the woods with no compass and no stars.” His antenna droop. Duck turns the chair near his bed in invitation. The Sylph moves quietly across the worn boards, “The last vision I received before they disappeared was of you two helping us; I saw a new timeline of futures, bright and hopeful, unfurl before it was gone. When you said you would not help us, it was like ripping my wings from my body mid-flight. That is why I was angry. Well, that and how you spoke to Barclay.”

“Sorry about that.” Duck scratches the back of his neck, “I just...when y’all showed up, all I could think about was bein back in the middle of a fight. Of, of seein Joe die.”

“I am sorry too. I did not know you had suffered such things.” Indrid picks at the blanket with chipped claws, “I cannot promise there would not be danger if you aid us. But I give you my word that you shall hear no more of it from me. I only wish for you to accept this quest if you wish to.”

“Thanks. That already puts you ahead of the last time.”

Indrid hums, then peers at Duck’s arm where a tattoo peeks from his shirt, “What is that?”

Duck rolls up his sleeve to reveal the pine tree, “got it because it helped me think of home.”

“Yes but how? To wear art on one’s skin, that is amazing. Do you think they could do it on mine?” He holds out his upper right arm. Duck runs a finger up it, thinking of the polished cherrywood on the table downstairs.

“Might be tricky. You need skin for it to work.”

“Blast.” Wings flutter once, “do you have more I may see?”

Duck unbuttons his shirt as Indrid scoots closer; if he’s not going to sleep tonight, at the very least he can make someone happy.

-------------------------------------

“Gotta say, y’all bein’ here is doin’ wonders for him.” Duck hands Barclay a glass of water as he joins him on the porch. Joseph and Indrid are sitting on a sunny path of lawn, Indrid showing the human his wings and explaining them in detail so he can make notes.

“Seems to go both ways. Indrid hasn’t been this animated since we left to find you two. He’s even more talkative.”

“Joe’s always been good at that. He can get anyone talkin, and can make almost anythin sound interestin.”

Barclay sneaks a glance at the human; he’s much friendlier these last two weeks, but his protectiveness of Joseph hasn’t waned.

“I wouldn’t say him cheering up is all on us. From what he told me, the week you got here made him feel like his cares were washing away.”

“Really?”

Barclay nods.

Duck sips his water, rubs the condensation with his thumb, “In, uh, in Sylvain, am I rememberin right that men could marry men? Ain’t always easy to tell when there’s so many kinds of beings runnin’ around.”

“Why wouldn’t that be okay? Some kinds of Sylphs, like Indrid’s, don’t even have things like men and women. I mean, when they offered you and Joseph a chance to rule as kings, the records make it sound like the two of you would have gotten married.”

Duck chokes on his water, splutters as Barclay pats his back, “I, fuck, I’d never, we’d never, I, fuck, definitely never ever didn’t think about it.”

Barclay lets the horrible excuse for a lie slide, “It’s a way bigger deal that Indrid chose me for this; being a seer makes him noble and I’m just a cook. Going off into the wild with me? Trusting me? Thought some of the ministers were gonna faint.”

“Was it just you helpin him or are you two, uh, y’know?”

“Yeah, I do. Can you blame me? Look at him” he gestures to where Indrid is spreading his wings so Joseph can study them. Stars would he like to go down there and hold the human tight while he taught him how to make Indrid purr.

“He really is somethin.” By the look on his face, Duck wants to do the same thing, just in reverse. After a moment, he murmurs, “the night before we were supposed to face the Red Devourer Joe and I were in the tent by the battlefield. Curled back to front, my arms around him and I could feel his heart beating hard as mine. Shoulda been thinkin about strategy, or prayin, or somethin’ like that, but all I could think was that I oughta kiss him, just in case we didn’t survive. But I didn’t. There were chances after that. I never took ‘em.”

“It’s not too late.”

“If you found out Indrid wanted to kiss you for years and was too chicken to, even when he thought he was gonna die, would you really let him?”

Barclay thinks of claws in his fur, of Indrid huddled against him and chirping softly when Barclay asked to kiss him.

“Of course I would.”

--------------------------------

“How long until the summer?” Indrid tosses the wool scarf Duck lent him over one wing.

“Months. Y’all got here in October, which means we ain’t even into the worst of the winter yet.”

An annoyed chirr, “We need more blankets.”

“Get you more when we’re in town tomorrow, fluffball. Hah, here’s some.” Duck kneels to cut some surviving leaves from a wild yarrow. They’re out in the woods because Indrid is running low on his feather oil, which keeps him from being miserable and itchy. He described what it did and let Duck smell some (it’s a bit like aloe and vanilla) so the human could reverse engineer what earth plants might do the trick.

Duck brushes off his pants, looks around, “Huh, we made it to the Maples. Joe’s aunt said she never got much from ‘em, but I don’t think she ever really tried.”

“What is special about them?”

“It’s how you get maple syrup. It’s in these trees.” Duck smirks, remembering Indrid licking the dregs from the bottle at the house with his long, long tongue.

Crunch

He whirls to his left, finds Indrid with both rows of teeth sunk into a maple branch. He giggles, then guffaws as the Sylph pulls off with an indignant chirp.

“You, you gotta, hee, you gotta tap the trunk, n-hee” he doubles over as Indrid bites the same branch while drumming his claws on the trunk, “not quite, need some other tools.”

“Perhaps lead with that?” Indrid grumbles, wiping bark from his face.

“S-sorry just, just didn’t expect you to go to town on it like that, heee”

Indrid grins, “It was worth it to hear you laugh like this.”

God, when was the last time he laughed this hard? The thought sobers him, his joy faltering like a bird in a storm. Then he cackles as four spindly arms hoist him into the air.

“ACKhey, put me down fluffball! Ahhno thatheee, that tickles.” He laughs louder as Indrid holds him to his chest and rubs his fuzzy face against his neck.

“I thought that might do the trick” Indrid purrs, nuzzles his cheek, “no more despair, Duck Newton. Not today.”

Duck turns his face so they’re eye to eye, pine green to ruby red, “Deal.”

---------------------------------------------

“I found everything on the list.” Joseph crumples the note paper and tosses it away as Barclay gleefully unpacks the shopping bags.

“This is so fucking great, I can’t wait for you guys to try this, and Indrid is going to lose his mind when he sees what I made. This dessert is his favorite.” He tucks the heavy cream and pears into the fridge.

“I’m excited to try it. We definitely didn’t eat any tarts when we were in Sylvain. The badgers who hid us from the red mist were, I think, pretty poor.”

“Yeah, the borderlands were bad off in those days. I was just a kid too but I remember digging out roots to try and make some kind of soup.” The Sylph turns those endearing brown eyes on him, “up for being my kitchen assistant again?”

“Always.” Joseph tucks a dishcloth into his belt. He’s very proud of himself for finding earth equivalents to all the ingredients Barclay needed to make a fall dinner from home. Having the Sylphs living with them means he goes into Kepler more often for groceries or goods to fix up the house. Everyone in town thinks his childhood friend is a good influence, getting him out of the stuffy confines of the October House.

They’re not wrong. When Joseph saw Duck in the doorway, a little world-worn but just as kind, just as practical as he always was, he decided that if the other man didn’t want to return to Sylvain, Joseph would set the project aside. He’d focus on the world he was in, because with Duck there he might yet find things to marvel at, things to discover that weren’t mired in the mundanity of human evil. They’d make the October House into a home, live out their days as bachelors.

Then Barclay had come through, auburn-furred and so gentle Joseph wanted to make like butter in the sun and melt. And Indrid, magnificent and vulnerable (and very infatuated with Duck). When Duck announced he’d help them look for clues to stopping the war, Joseph felt buried bits of his mind rising to the light of the new challenge.

After dinner, they take a pot of coffee into the living room. Indrid is delighted by records, is already putting one on as Barclay puts wood on the fire. The seer lays on the rug, head in his lovers lap and purring low.

Love me like there's no tomorrow

kiss me like it's goin' out of style

“You know, I wonder how one dances to this. It is not fast, but the rhythm is not like the formal dances at court.”

“Here, I’ll show you.” Duck stands, offering Joseph his hand. Lord, he’s pictured this so many times but still has to coax his own hand to move, “Joe, you’re leadin.”

He settles his hand on Duck’s hip and holds the other, concentrates on swaying them to the beat.

Hold me like you're afraid I might get away

Love like I've been gone for quite a while

“You can come closer, Joe. I ain’t gonna bite. Not in front of company.”

“I’m holding you to that.” He presses closer, prays for Duck to rest his head on his shoulder.

Take and wrap me in the package

my future my presence and my past

And love me like there's no tomorrow

and each day might be our last

“Dearest, I am rather tired from that lovely meal you made. Shall we retire?”

“Good thinking, little moth.”

Love me like there's no tomorrow

Make each night one more remembered

we will let the heaven be our guide

“Seems they didn’t need much of a demonstration.”

“Not sure that was Indrid’s endgame.”

Just love me like there's no tomorrow

and keep me right by your side

Joseph tips his head down, whispering, “What was?”

Keep me right by your side

“Duck?”

In the crackle of silence between songs, Duck brings their lips together. Joseph forgoes their stance and pulls him against him, their hearts magnets that were finally turned the right way. Then his feet stumble on the rug, Duck pushing him back with a ferocity he didn’t know he possessed.

Joseph drops into the chair, Duck pouncing before as he breathes. Joseph growls, the hunger that’s been chained threatening to crack his chest from the inside, and nips Duck’s lower lip.

“I said no bitin.”

“You said you wouldn’t bite.”

“You're right, darlin’” Duck cups his cheek as Joseph grips his thighs, “I’m gonna do so much more than bite.”

----------------------------------------

It never gets easier, waking from these dreams steeped in shame, fear, and sweat. Except this time someone’s arms are around him.

“I’m right here Joe, we’re here, we’re safe.”

“Very safe.” Indrid stands behind Barclay in the doorway, “another dream?’

“Yes. I, um, I-” he reaches for Barclay without meaning to, is ready to apologize when the Sylph slides into bed beside him.

“Is this okay?” It’s directed at both the humans.

“Yes.”

“Uh huh.”

Barclay adjusts so Joseph can hide his face in his chest. He should ask Indrid if he wants to be on the bed as well, the poor Sylph might think he’s not wanted-

“C’mon fluffball, my back is gettin cold.”

A delighted chirp and then a wing, black with a grey and red eyespot, drapes across him and Duck.

“Mmmmmm, I knew you would be lovely to hold.”

“Aim to please, sugar.”

“What happens now?” Barclay murmurs.

“My vote is we all get some sleep and work out the particulars in the mornin’.”

“Seconded” Joseph mumbles.

“We will need a good night’s rest; tomorrow I make the disguises for myself and Barclay so that we may begin our wider search.”

“Hope you guys like them.”

Joseph squeezes Barclay, smiling as Duck wiggles closer and Indrid’s wing grows heavier, “We’ll love them no matter what, big guy.”

#OT4: Government men and their cryptid boyfriends #sternclay #indruck #inclay #agent stern/duck newton #meet ugly #taz amnesty #agent stern/ barclay

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seeselfblack · 3 years

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Martin Luther King Day bill signed

On this date in 1983, the legislative bill establishing Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday was signed.

The official holiday, on the third Monday of January, began in 1986. It was the first new American holiday since 1948, when Memorial Day was created as a "prayer for peace" day. Also it was only the second national holiday in the twentieth century (the other was Veterans Day, created as Armistice Day in 1926 to honor those who died in World War I). King is not the only American besides George Washington to have a national holiday designated for his birthday (those of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee and others are celebrated in some states but not nationwide). George Washington Carver Day was signed in 1945 by President Truman.

Internationally, King was one of the few social leaders of any country to be honored with a holiday (Mahatma Gandhi's birthday is observed in India). Such standing by a member of a country's racial minority is almost unheard of. Usually, the honor is reserved for military or religious figures. When President Ronald Reagan signed legislation creating the holiday, it marked the end of a persistent, highly organized lobbying effort across the nation that lasted 15 years. "We worked hard to put together a national effort and make a powerful network," said Cedric Hendricks, legislative aide to Rep. John Conyers, Michigan Democrat.

It was Conyers who, four days after King was assassinated in Memphis, submitted the first legislation to commemorate his birthday. Petitions carrying more than 6 million signatures said to be the largest petition drive in history were submitted to Congress in 1970. With help from New York Democratic Rep. Shirley Chisholm, Conyers resubmitted the legislation during each congressional session. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which coordinated the petition campaign, also kept continuous pressure on Congress for the holiday. Mass marches in 1982 for voting rights and 1983 to mark the 20th anniversary of King's speech in Washington, D. C., also were a factor.

It took bipartisan support to overcome the opposition of Sen. Jesse Helms, R-North Carolina, who called King a Communist, and President Reagan's lukewarm feelings toward the legislation. In the final analysis, what may have sealed approval of the holiday was a compromise offered by Rep. Katie Hall, Indiana Democrat who marshaled support in the House for the legislation.

Hall, responding to criticism that the holiday would be too close to the Christmas/New Year's week, moved its observance to the third Monday of the month. The notion of a three-day weekend, plus the fact that the third Monday (at the time) followed Super Bowl Sunday, helped push the measure through.

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ruminativerabbi · 3 years

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9/11 Twenty Years On

There are days that come to serve as historical pivot-points to the extent that it feels reasonable to refer to divide the history of the nation with respect to them into time-before and time-after. April 15, 1865, the day Abraham Lincoln died, feels that way to me. So does December 7, 1941, the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor. And so too does November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated. Others, I’m sure, will have their own dates to add. (What is true on the national level is also true on the personal, of course: which of us would not add in his or her wedding date as one of those pivot-point dates or the date on which any of us became parents for the first time? But I speak here of the nation, not of its individual citizens.) And I think most Americans would agree that September 11, 2001, is in that category as well—and not just because something horrific occurred on that date, but because it has transcended its own news cycle and become part of our national culture. There are no college students (except maybe older, “returning” students) who remember 9/11 personally: the freshman and sophomores were born after that awful day and the juniors and seniors were babies or toddlers in 2001. And yet there is no newspaper or website in the nation that feels obliged to explain what it means when it references 9/11 without mentioning the year or the events of that day. Everybody just knows. That is, I suppose, what it means for a day to serve as a pivot-point in history: everybody, including people born after the fact, know precisely what is being referenced without any further explanation needed.

This Shabbat marks the twentieth anniversary of that horrific day. Like all of you, I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news that an airplane had crashed into the North Tower. (It was a quarter to six in the morning in California, but I’m an early riser and always check a few news websites before I get down to my day’s work.) And I remember too that stomach-turning moment just twenty minutes later when the second airplane crashed into the South Tower and it suddenly became obvious that we were dealing not with a single tragic aviation accident that had just happened, but rather with a fully intentional act of violent barbarism intended to kill as many random Americans as possible at once as a way of making some sort of perverse political statement. By the time most Californians were waking up, the third plane had crashed into the Pentagon and no one knew what might not happen next. In retrospect, it seems odd that we took our kids to school that morning as though it were a normal school day—but we did and then we went right back home to watch CNN and try to understand what was going on.

So much has been written about that day and its aftermath that I won’t attempt to say something new or to share some insight that no one but myself has had over these last two decades. Instead, and with the full understanding that this Saturday is the yahrtzeit of almost three thousand innocents whose lives were cut short by an act of insane savagery, I would like to offer an image from the past that has comforted me over these years…and particularly once we moved from California to New York just a year after 9/11 and settled into our new home not twenty-five miles from the ruins of the World Trade Center buildings in lower Manhattan.

The image derives from one of Walt Whitman’s most famous poems. The poet, originally from Huntington but by 1883 a veteran Brooklynite, is looking out at Lower Manhattan from his perch in Brooklyn Heights. He takes note of the ongoing effort to build the Brooklyn Bridge (which was completed later that same year, the year of my maternal grandmother’s birth), then shifts his gaze and focuses instead on the ferry boats that in his day brought commuters back and forth from Manhattan to Brooklyn all day long for all the years before any bridge linked Long Island to Manhattan. (And there were a lot of them, too: the first grant for a commercial ferry linking Brooklyn and Manhattan was issued by the New Amsterdam authorities to one Cornelis Dircksen in 1642, a cool 241 years before the Brooklyn Bridge was built. For more details, click here.) But this is a nineteenth-century image I’m trying to conjure up, not a seventeenth-century one. And by Whitman’s day the ferry is a real thing, a regular part of New York life, something ordinary and banal. Yet, as the poet looks out at the harbor, he is struck by the timelessness of the scene before his eyes, by the simultaneous in-history and outside-of-history aspects to the scene before his eyes, by the ability of the city to transcend the life of its own citizens. The poem is wistful and sober; for me, it as if the poet had some sort of preternatural ability to see the Towers absent, then present, then absent again as he somehow understood something of what would one day happen to the vista stretched out before his eyes as he gazed across New York Harbor on a sunny day in the 1880s.

The poem is called “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and is about the strange way people live within time and outside it, each of us living a life bounded by the dates of fortunate birth and inexorable death but also living in a world in which life transcends the lives of the living, thus making each living soul part of a grand scheme of history that exists independently of the details of their own lives. And then the poet looks (at least in my mind’s eye) directly at the patch of ground on which the World Trade Center will one day rise and somehow sees growth and loss, tragedy and rebirth, a city that both is its inhabitants but which also exists independently of them:

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,

Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,

Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,

Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

And in that idea—that the city, and by extension the nation, somehow both exist anchored in time but also fully capable of transcending time, and thus capable also of surviving even the most horrific disasters and tragedies because those events are by definition time-bound whereas the nation is specifically not—within that single idea lies, at least for me, some comfort as I think back to that September two decades ago and seek some kind of context for thinking about our terrible losses on that terrible day.

Sitting in the warm sunlight, Whitman saw darkness in Lower Manhattan across the bay and felt a prophetic frisson of looming disaster:

It is not you alone the dark patches fall,

The dark threw its dark patches down upon me also,

The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious.

My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil.

The man was a poet, not a prophet. He certainly couldn’t have imagined the World Trade Center buildings. (The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, the nation’s first “skyscraper,” opened just three years before Whitman wrote “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and was all of ten stories tall.) Yet the evil that would befall so many in that spot was somehow palpable to the poet as he sat in the warm light of a Brooklyn afternoon and gazed out at the site on which one day the WTC would stand, developing his sense that cities and nations truly do exist outside of time and can therefore flourish and grow even despite the evil that befalls them. In that thought, lie the seeds of comfort for a stricken city and a stricken nation.

There’s also something deeply Jewish about this line of thinking. The eternal people isn’t eternal, after all, because individual men and women live forever, but because they live their lives as individuals but also as part of a collective whole that transcends the details of their lives: that is what the prophet meant when he used the phrase am olam to describe the Jewish people and it’s what we mean today when we talk about the weird paradox that, despite everything, the most powerful of our enemies (the Romans, the Crusaders, the Inquisitors, the Cossacks, the Nazis, the Soviets) have vanished from the stage of world history and the Jewish people has somehow remained. And the same is true of our American nation, that it exists independent of its citizens and that it endures regardless of what happens to any of us. The thousands who died in Iraq and Afghanistan are certainly in that category, but so are the dead of 9/11: individuals whose lives were cruelly cut short, but who live on in the idea of a nation that transcends the life stories of its citizens and exists in its own right. May their memory be a blessing for us all! And may they all—the dead in the airplanes and on the ground in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania—may they all rest in peace.

#9/11 #Walt Whitman #Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

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xtruss · 3 years

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Does the Great Retreat from Afghanistan 🇦🇫 Mark the End of the American 🇺🇸 Era?

It’s a dishonorable end that weakens U.S. standing in the world, perhaps irrevocably.

— By Robin Wright | August 15, 2021 | The New Yorker

The humiliating U.S. retreat from Afghanistan is now part of an unnerving American pattern. Photograph from EPA-EFE / Shutterstock

History will surely note this absurdly ill-timed tweet. On Monday, August 9th, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul posed a question to its four hundred thousand followers: “This #PeaceMonday, we want to hear from you. What do you wish to tell the negotiating parties in Doha about your hopes for a political settlement? #PeaceForAfghanistan.” The message reflected the delusion of American policy. With the Taliban sweeping across the country, storming one provincial capital after another, the prospect that diplomacy would work a year after U.S.-backed talks in Qatar began—and quickly stalled—was illusory. By Thursday, the Afghan government controlled only three major cities. President Joe Biden, the leader of the world’s most powerful nation, announced that he was dispatching three thousand U.S. troops to Afghanistan to pull hundreds of its diplomats and staff out of that Embassy. And, by Sunday, it was all over—before dusk. President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, his government collapsed, and the U.S.-trained Afghan security forces simply melted away as the Taliban moved into the capital. American diplomats—having evacuated the fortress-like U.S. Embassy—were forced to shelter in place at the airport as they waited to be evacuated. America’s two-decade-long misadventure in Afghanistan has ended. For Americans, Afghanistan looks a little, maybe a lot, like a trillion-dollar throwaway. Meanwhile, Afghans are left in free fall.

It’s not just an epic defeat for the United States. The fall of Kabul may serve as a bookend for the era of U.S. global power. In the nineteen-forties, the United States launched the Great Rescue to help liberate Western Europe from the powerful Nazi war machine. It then used its vast land, sea, and air power to defeat the formidable Japanese empire in East Asia. Eighty years later, the U.S. is engaged in what historians may someday call a Great Retreat from a ragtag militia that has no air power or significant armor and artillery, in one of the poorest countries in the world.

It’s now part of an unnerving American pattern, dating back to the nineteen-seventies. On Sunday, social-media posts of side-by-side photos evoked painful memories. One captured a desperate crowd climbing up a ladder to the rooftop of a building near the U.S. Embassy in Saigon to get on one of the last helicopters out in 1975, during the Ford Administration. The other showed a Chinook helicopter hovering over the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on Sunday. “This is manifestly not Saigon,” the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, tried to argue on Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week.” It didn’t wash. And there are other episodes. In 1984, the Reagan Administration withdrew the U.S. Marine peacekeepers from Beirut after a suicide bomber from a nascent cell of what became Hezbollah killed more than two hundred and forty military personnel—the largest loss for the Marines in a single incident since the Second World War. In 2011, the United States pulled out of Iraq, opening the way for the emergence of isis. The repeated miscalculations challenge basic Washington policy-making as well as U.S. military strategy and intelligence capabilities. Why wasn’t this looming calamity—or any of the earlier ones—anticipated? Or the exits better planned? Or the country not left in the hands of a former enemy? It is a dishonorable end.

Whatever the historic truth decades from now, the U.S. will be widely perceived by the world today as having lost what George W. Bush dubbed the “war on terror”—despite having mobilized nato for its first deployment outside Europe or North America, a hundred and thirty-six countries to provide various types of military assistance, and twenty-three countries to host U.S. forces deployed in offensive operations. America’s vast tools and tactics proved ill-equipped to counter the will and endurance of the Taliban and their Pakistani backers. In the long term, its missiles and warplanes were unable to vanquish a movement of sixty thousand core fighters in a country about as big as Texas.

There are many repercussions that will endure long after the U.S. withdrawal. First, jihadism has won a key battle against democracy. The West believed that its armor and steel, backed by a generous infusion of aid, could defeat a hard-line ideology with a strong local following. The Taliban are likely, once again, to install Sharia as law of the land. Afghanistan will again, almost certainly, become a haven for like-minded militants, be they members of Al Qaeda or others in search of a haven or a sponsor. It’s a gloomy prospect as Americans prepare to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks next month. Since 2001, Al Qaeda, isis, and other jihadi extremists have seeded franchises on all six inhabited continents. Last month, the United States sanctioned an isis branch as far afield as Mozambique, the former Portuguese colony in southern Africa where almost sixty per cent of the population is Christian.

Second, both Afghanistan and Iraq have proved that the United States can neither build nations nor create armies out of scratch, especially in countries that have a limited middle class and low education rates, over a decade or two. It takes generations. Not enough people have the knowledge or experience to navigate whole new ways of life, whatever they want in principle. Ethnic and sectarian divisions thwart attempts to overhaul political, social, and economic life all at the same time. The United States spent eighty-three billion dollars training and arming an Afghan force of some three hundred thousand—more than four times the size of the Taliban’s militia. “This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day,” Mark Milley told reporters back in 2013. He is now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet, by March, when I was last in Kabul, the Taliban controlled half of the country. Between May and mid-August, it took the other half—most just during the past week. Last month, Biden said that he trusted “the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped and more competent in terms of conducting war.” In the end, the Taliban basically walked into Kabul—and the Presidential palace—on Sunday.

Third, America’s standing abroad is profoundly weakened, symbolized by the U.S. Embassy’s lowering the Stars and Stripes for the final time on Sunday. Smoke was seen rising from the grounds of the Embassy—which cost almost eight hundred million dollars to expand just five years ago—as matériel was burned in the rush to exit. Washington will have a hard time mobilizing its allies to act in concert again—whether for the kind of broad and unified alliance, one of the largest in world history, that formed in Afghanistan after 9/11, or for the type of meagre cobbled-together “coalition of the willing” for the war in Iraq. The United States is still the dominant power in the West, but largely by default. There aren’t many other powers or leaders offering alternatives. It’s hard to see how the United States salvages its reputation or position anytime soon.

America’s Great Retreat is at least as humiliating as the Soviet Union’s withdrawal in 1989, an event that contributed to the end of its empire and Communist rule. The United States was in Afghanistan twice as long and spent far more. The Soviet Union is estimated to have spent about fifty billion dollars during the first seven of its ten years occupying the mountainous country. Yes, the United States fostered the birth of a rich civil society, the education of girls, and an independent media. It facilitated democratic elections more than once and witnessed the transfer of power. Thirty-seven per cent of Afghan girls are now able to read, according to Human Rights Watch. The tolo channel hosted eighteen seasons of “Afghan Star,” a singing competition much like “American Idol.” Zahra Elham, a twentysomething member of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority, became the first woman to win, in 2019. But untold numbers of the Afghans encouraged by the United States are desperately searching for ways out of the country as the Taliban move in. Women have pulled out their blue burqas again. And the enduring imagery of the Americans flying out on their helicopters will be no different than Soviet troops marching across the Friendship Bridge from Afghanistan to the then Soviet Union on February 15, 1989. Both of the big powers withdrew as losers, with their tails between their legs, leaving behind chaos.

For the United States, the costs do not end with its withdrawal from either Afghanistan or Iraq. It could cost another two trillion dollars just to pay for the health care and disability of veterans from those wars. And those costs may not peak until 2048. America’s longest war will be a lot longer than anyone anticipated two decades ago—or even as it ends. In all, forty-seven thousand civilians have died, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. More than twenty-four hundred were U.S. military personnel, and almost four thousand were U.S. contractors.

I first went to Afghanistan in 1999, during the original Taliban rule. I drove through the breathtaking Khyber Pass from Pakistan, past the fortified estates of the drug lords along the border, on the rutted, axle-destroying roads to Kabul. The images of the Taliban’s repressive rule—little kids working on the streets of Afghan towns to support widowed mothers not allowed in public, checkpoints festooned with confiscated audio and video tapes—are indelible. I went back with Secretary of State Colin Powell on his first trip after the fall of the Taliban. There was hope then of something different, even as the prospect of it often seemed elusive, and the idea sullied by the country’s corrupt new rulers. I’ve been back several times since, including in March with General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, Jr., the head of Central Command, who is now overseeing the final U.S. military operations. On Sunday, as America erased its presence in Afghanistan in a race to get out, I wondered: Was it all for naught? What other consequences will America face from its failed campaign in Afghanistan decades from now? We barely know the answers.

— Robin Wright, a contributing writer and columnist, has written for The New Yorker since 1988. She is the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World.”

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taiwanpuppetryproudthunderbolt · 4 years

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May 1, 1988

“Doc” Chamberlain and the Wallenberg challenge

At the end of the World War Two in 1945, 100,000 people destined to die were still alive thanks to the efforts of one man. In six short months this man achieved a miracle. By a blend of courage, audacity and ingenuity, he was able to save the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who had been earmarked for Nazi concentration camps and certain death. Then he disappeared.

This man was Raoul Wallenberg. Until recently his name meant nothing around the world and even today few people have heard of his bravery. But this week a new two-part mini-series on TV, starring Richard Chamberlain, brings to light an extraordinary story. The chance to play Wallenberg was sought avidly by Chamberlain.

As the war progressed Raoul became increasingly alarmed about the persecution of the Jews. At the time the full horror of Nazi policy was not widely known. Rumours and dreadful stories were seeping out of Germany, but the implications were so terrible that many people could not take them seriously. They couldn’t believe that even Hitler would be mad enough to try an exterminate an entire race. However, Raoul Wallenberg was prepared to believe it. In 1944, Wallenberg was given instant diplomatic status by Sweden and dispatched to the Swedish Legion in Budapest with instructions to do whatever he considered necessary to save lives. It was a delicate situation to be launched into. Wallenberg’s mission brough him into direct conflict with the notorious Adolf Eichmann who had already despatched 400,000 Hungarian Jews and was planning to rid himself as quickly as possible of the 230,000 still living in Budapest…

There’s one other person who rubs his hands with glee when Richard Chamberlain chooses a new part. His travel agent. Foreign parts are the ones Chamberlain likes best, and for the past few years his feet have hardly touched the ground in the homes he keeps in Los Angeles, New York and Hawaii.

He has worked in Spain, Italy, Britain, Austrailia, Japan, Canad, Greenland, Yugoslavia and South Africa and holidayed in Greece, North Africa and South America.

He’s filming in Zimbabwe at the moment on a remake of King Solomon’s Mine, and when he comes ‘home’ to California, he’ll go straight to Oregon to start work on a western mini-series. After that he guarantees his itchy feet and tireless travel agent will be sending him off to another far-flung location.

Since last summer, when he started research in New York and Yugoslavia on Wallenberg, Chamberlain has travelled non-stop. It can be a lonely life -not the most gregarious type, he doesn’t socialise night and day with his co-stars- but he has it all worked out to a fine art.

“Because I travel and live in hotels so much, I’ve figured out a way to turn my room into a gym,” he says. “I do pull-ups on the door, lift chairs, and take an exercise mat with me. It’s easy to eat as if you were at home -fruit, vegetables, rice. And everywhere I go I collect things for my homes: paintings, furniture, antiques, sculpture. Sometimes, like the time I was making the Shogun series in Japan, the country and its culture take over. I got back to Los Angeles, tore my house apart and turned it into a Japanese-style house with everything I’d brought back.” It took him so long to do, he had to rent the house next door to live in while work went on at his house.

His fame as television heart-throb Dr Kildare still follows him around the world however hard he tries to shake it off and, 23 years after the series was first seen, it’s now being re-run on British television. Chamberlain cites six weeks in Peru in 1982 as the only time he has been able to enjoy real anonymity. “A bunch of us, about 20 people mostly outside showbusiness, stayed overnight in monasteries and real out-of-the-way places. I was able to enjoy immediately the kind of person-to-person contact that takes longer to establish when you’ve got to get past my public identity.” Only once, in Lima, was he bothered by a photographer chasing him around.

You get the feeling he could do with more holidays like that, for he is polite, shy and earnest, an intensely private man who still finds it difficult living in the public spotlight. Born to a middle-class family in Los Angeles, he was something of a loner and a poor student -art was the only subject he was interested in- and at 16 he was voted the most reserved, courteous and sophisticated person in class. His parents thought he would join the family manufacturing business, like his older brother, Bill. Instead he became an artist and sculptor -his work sold well- and then turned to acting, a decision that surprised everyone, as his only interest in drama had been a brief appearance in a school play.

The Raoul Wallenberg story is one that has fascinated Chamberlain for a long time. An actor who has planned his career as much for challenge and variety as the travel opportunities it offers, he started agitating for the role four years ago. “Sometimes it seems that anything I really want takes three years to come my way,” he said, once he knew he had the part. “I waited that long to get John Blackthorne in Shogun and almost as long for my role in The Thorn Birds.”

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Wallenberg’s disappearance, and Chamberlain says his wildest dream is that the mini-series will provide some sort of answer to the mystery. “My goal is to help influence public opinion, to apply as much diplomatic pressure as possible to find out if Wallenberg is still alive.”

Most of Chamberlain’s TV roles in recent years -like Wallenberg- have been ones that have stretched him. There was Dr. Cook in the 1984 TV movie Cook and Peary: The Race to the Pole, a man who was obsessed with his desire to become first to reach the North Pole; the Elizabethian sea captain who becomes the legendary samurai warrior in Shogun, the complex Father Ralph de Bricassart, torn between his religion and his love for Maggie Cleary, in The Thorn Birds.

Now, Wallenberg -a role well worth the wait. He smiles at his nickname -“king of the mini-series”- but such work has earned him three Emmy nominations in the past nine years. He is proud of that track record -even if he has yet to win. He did allow himself to get excited about his award chance for The Thorn Birds but was beaten by Tommy Lee Jones in The Executioner’s Song.

A confirmed bachelor, he is the first to agree that his work is the most important thing in his life. His mother worries about him being lonely -his father died recently- but he claims it isn’t a problem. “I have a lot of wonderful friends. This is a very heavily populated time in my life.”

“I’m easily amused. I like to go to the movies and to the theatre. I like to spend time with friends. I like to have a few people over for dinner. I like to go out to dinner, to go camping and I love to travel.”

Wallenberg involved him so deeply it took him a long time to recover. He still talks about the chilling research he was involved with.

“In New York I met a woman who, as a child, was literally snatched from a death march by Wallenberg. Her story was one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever heard.”

“If I can play people like Wallenberg on television, I don’t feel anything is missing from my life. I don’t need anything else.”

Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story

Directed by

Lamont Johnson

An Emmy Award-winning drama about Raoul Wallenberg, one of the most exemplary individuals of the twentieth century.

Wallenberg was born into the wealthiest family in Sweden. He was an aristocrat and a Lutheran. His country had remained neutral throughout World War II, and the fighting would be over within a year. Yet he was willing to leave everything behind and go to the storm center of war-torn Europe on a dangerous and purely humanitarian mission to rescue Hungary’s besieged Jews. He courageously — often individually — confronted the last gasp of Nazi terror.

He is credited with saving nearly 100,000 lives, one-eighth of Hungary’s Jewish community, more people than were rescued by any other individual or institution in Europe. He demonstrated a boundless talent for compassion.

Richard Chamberlain stars as Wallenberg. Others in the outstanding international cast are Bibi Andersson, Alice Krige, Kenneth Colley, Melanie Mayron, and Stuart Wilson. Lamont Johnson, who is the co-producer with Richard Irving, directs from a screenplay by Emmy Award-winner Gerald Green (Holocaust).

The Story

In April 1944, Germany has retreated from Russia. In occupied Hungary, the Nazis plan to complete the “Final Solution,” the extermination of Europe’s Jews. They are supported by the Arrow Cross, a Hungarian fascist and anti-Semitic organization. Within two months, 400,000 Jews are deported from the Hungarian provinces to the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps.

SS Lt. Col. Adolf Eichmann (Kenneth Colley), chief of the Gestapo’s Jewish section, is supervising the campaign against the Jews of Budapest, one of the largest Jewish communities remaining in Europe. The Nazi bureaucrat attends a party hosted by Admiral Nikolas Horthy (Guy Deghy), the Regent of Hungary, and expresses his displeasure at the Hungarian’s protection of some Jews. Meanwhile in the city, Arrow Cross youth are burning a synagogue. Teicholz (Ralph Arliss) and Nikki Fodor (Mark Rylance), who are active in the Jewish resistance, warn the Jewish musical society, including Hannah (Georgia Slowe) and her father Tibor Moritz (Olaf Pooley), to stay off the streets.

In Sweden, at the country estate of the Wallenbergs, a rich and illustrious banking family, the scene is very different as they celebrate the beginning of spring. Maj von Dardel (Bibi Andersson) is the mother of 32-year-old Raoul Wallenberg (Richard Chamberlain), who has studied architecture in America and is now working in the import-export business. Both she and Uncle Jacob (Keve Hjelm) are embarrassed when Raoul does a satirical impersonation of Hitler in front of a German guest. Raoul’s humor masks a deeply felt anger at the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the indifference of his fellow Swedes to their fate.

When Wallenberg is approached to head a rescue mission for Hungary’s Jews sponsored by America’s War Refugee Board, he immediately realizes it is his opportunity to make a difference. He is given diplomatic rank as a secretary in the Royal Swedish Legation in Budapest. The Swedish Foreign Ministry agrees that he will be free to use unorthodox methods if necessary to save Jews.

Arriving in Budapest in early July 1944, Wallenberg is briefed by Per Anger (David Robb), a Swedish diplomat who has initiated a modest rescue operation by distributing protective passes to Jews who can establish a family or business connection in Sweden. Eichmann has begun mass arrests and deportations in Budapest, and the Embassy is swamped with requests for the passes.

After a meeting in which Eichmann tries to smooth talk the Jewish Council into providing volunteer workers for the German war effort, he is enraged to learn that Horthy, responding to an appeal from Sweden’s King Gustav delivered by Wallenberg, has turned back a train carrying 12,000 Jews to the concentration camps. Later, at a nightclub, Eichmann meets his newly arrived adversary and scoffs at his humanitarian mission. The Swede realizes why the Nazi has been nicknamed “the Bloodhound.”

Wallenberg sets up headquarters and staffs his operation with Jews, including Sonya (Melanie Mayron), a former teacher with a young son. The old protective passes are redesigned to look more official and to give the bearer the full protection of the Royal Swedish Legation. Wallenberg convinces Horthy to recognize the validity of 4,500 of these “schutz-passes” for Budapest Jews. Nikki Fodor obtains one pass, and the Jewish resistance begins forging copies.

Wallenberg arranges sanctuary for the protected Jews in “safe houses” flying the Swedish flag. Food and clothing are gathered for the refugees. His example inspires other neutral diplomats from Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and the Vatican to provide shelter and issue passes of their own. When Eichmann abruptly leaves for Germany in late August, Wallenberg and Anger wonder if they might be making progress in their fight.

All the combined efforts are jeopardized, however, when in October 1944 Horthy is forced to abdicate and the Germans move into Hungary in greater strength. Colonel Ferencz Szalasi (Aubrey Morris), head of the Arrow Cross, assumes power. Members of his party begin executing Jews in the streets. The neutral countries’ protective passes are declared invalid. Eichmann returns and announces to the Jewish Council that Jews are needed in the labor camps and will be marched there.

Wallenberg is undaunted. Armed only with books containing the names of those who have been given Swedish passes, he goes to a work brigade and demands that protected Jews be released to him. As Nikki, Hannah and Tibor Moritz watch, he stares down the SS captain standing in his way.

When the Nazi persecution and Arrow Cross atrocities increase, Wallenberg uses diplomatic ploys, ruses and bluffs to pull Jews out of the work camps. He turns to a new ally, Baroness Liesl Kemeny (Alice Krige), the young Catholic wife of Foreign Minister Baron Gabor Kemeny (Stuart Wilson). She is shocked by his account of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews and alarmed when he warns that her husband could be executed as a war criminal if he continues to support the Arrow Cross and Nazi policies. She persuades the Baron to have the validity of the protective passes re-established.

In a face-to-face encounter with Eichmann. Wallenberg demands that he stop the deportations. The German is unmoved by appeals or threats. He orders Wallenberg killed, but the attempt fails.

The death marches commence in early November. Thousands of Jews are herded out of the city by SS and Arrow Cross guards. Sonya and her son are among those forced from one of the Swedish safe houses. In a desperate attempt to save them and some 400 other Jews, Wallenberg and Anger drive to the train station. After bribing the guards, they literally pull the Jews off the train. Later, Raoul bids farewell to Baroness Kemeny, who has been exiled to Italy. The Russians are just outside Budapest.

Wallenberg and Eichmann meet again. The Nazi boasts about his accomplishments when asked once again to spare the Jews. He leaves for Vienna after instructing his men to kill the Jews in Budapest’s central ghetto. Wallenberg intervenes and convinces the SS general in charge to countermand the order.

Russian troops enter the city. Wallenberg has designed a relief plan for Budapest and prepares now to take it to the Russian command. On the way to Debrecen, his car is stopped. On January 17, 1945, Raoul Wallenberg is taken into Russian custody. No explanation for this action is given.

Wallenberg’s Legacy

After Wallenberg was taken into what was later termed “protective custody” by the Russians as Budapest was being liberated, he disappeared into the Russian prison system. What happened to him there was never determined to the satisfaction of his family and friends. After repeated requests for information about him, the Soviet Union in 1957 announced that he died in July 1947. No evidence was produced to support the claims, and it was stated that all persons witness to his death were also dead. Nevertheless, reports from prisoners coming out of the Soviet gulag have led some to believe that Wallenberg was alive through the 1970s.

Although his fate is unknown, Wallenberg’s legacy is secure — not only in the lives of those he saved, but also in his example of compassion and courage. On the way to the Holocaust Museum on the western outskirts of Jerusalem is an avenue of trees. Each tree commemorates a Gentile who risked his or her life to save Jews during the Hitler years. The medal identifying each “Righteous Gentile” contains a Talmudic inscription: “Whoever saves a single soul, it is as if he saved the whole world.” One of them is the Raoul Wallenberg tree.

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thephotograph-kiaraknight · 6 years

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Comparing Two Photographers

In my comparison I am going to compare two photographers and give my opinion on who I like better and what photographer’s work and style I prefer. One photographer is a modern photographer and the other photographer is an historical photographer who doesn't use digital camera's but uses film. I will be showing their work in this comparison essay and will give my views on them.

The first photographer is Irving Penn, Penn was an American photographer known for his fashion photography, portraits and still life's. His career included work at vogue magazine and independent advertising work for clients including Issey Miyake and Clinique. Penn was among the first photographers to pose subjects against a simple grey or white backdrop and he effectively used this simplicity. Expanding his austere studio surroundings, Penn constructed a set of upright angled backdrops, to form a stark, acute corner. Subjects photographed with this technique included Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O,Keeffe, W.H.Auden and Igor Stravinsky. Penn's first photographic cover for Vogue magazine appeared in October 1943. Penn continued to work at the magazine throughout his career, photographing covers, portraits, still lifes, fashion and photographic essays. In the 1950's, Penn founded his own studio in New York and began making advertising photographs. Best known for his fashion photography, Penn's repertoire also includes portraits of creative photographs from around the world, modernist still lifes of food, bones, bottles, metal and found objects and photographic travel essays. Penn’s still life compositions are sparse and highly organized assemblages of food or objects that articulate the abstract interplay of line and volume. Penn's photographs are composed with a great attention to detail, which continues into his craft of developing and making prints of his photographs. Penn experimented with many printing techniques, including prints made on aluminium sheets coated with a platinum emulsion rendering the image with a warmth that under toned silver prints lacked. His black and white prints are notable for their deep contrast, giving them a clean, crisp look. Penn was one of the twentieth century's great photographers, known for his arresting images and masterful printmaking. Although he was celebrated as one of Vogue magazines top photographers for more than sixty years, Penn was an intensely private man who avoided the limelight and pursued his work with quiet and relentless dedication. At a time when photography was primarily understood as a means of communication, he approached with an artist's eye and expanded the creative potential of the medium, both in his professional and personal work.

This photograph is an example of the type of work he did. This also shows his studio set up when he constructed a set of upright angled backdrops in an acute corner. This photograph I like because the model is weirdly positioned on a chair and I have not seen this type of position before. I also like how the photo is not positioned correctly so that the edges of the studio are in the photograph. Most photographers do not like to show behind the studio or have the edges in the photograph because it will make the photograph look unprofessional and untidy but Penn has his own way to photograph and this is clearly his style of photographing in his own studio. Irving could also be giving his viewers a message by photographing this or he just prefered the look of this photo to have the edges of the studio in the photograph.

The second photographer I will be comparing with, will be a photographer called Rankin. He is a more modern photographer and has photographed many celebrities including David Bowie and Rita Ora. Rankins lense captures, creates and unveils icons. Rankin made his name in publishing, founding the seminal monthly magazine Dazed and Confused with Jefferson Hack in 1992. It provided a platform for innovation for emerging stylists, designers, photographers and writers. The magazine went on to forge a distinctive mark in the arts and publishing spheres, and developing a cult status forming and moulding trends, and bringing lights in fashion to the foreground. Rankin has created landmark editorial and advertising campaigns. His body of work features some of the most celebrated publications, biggest brands and pioneering charities, including Nike, Swatch, Dove, Pantene, Diageo, Womans Aid, and Breakthrough Breast Cancer. He has shot covers for Elle, German Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Esquire, GQ, Rolling Stone and Wonderland. His work has always endeavoured to question social norms and ideas of beauty and in late 2000, Rankin published the heteroclite quarterly Rank, an experimental anti-fashion magazine celebrating the unconventional. In 2001, Jefferson and Rankin launched AnOther Magazine. With a focus on fashion, originality and distinction. In response to the expanding menswear market, in 2005 AnOther Man was introduced, combining intelligent editotrial with groundbreaking design and style. More recently, the Dazed and Confused 20th anniversary, shooting 20 front covers of Dazed favourites and in 20 inside covers of the next generation of talent, for the December 2011 issue.

Tapping into the consciousness of the 90’s and 00’s with his intimate approach and playful sense of humour, rankin became known for his portraiture of bands, artists, supermodels and politicians. Having photographed everyone from the Queen of England to the Queen of Pop, Rankin is often seen as a celebrity photographer. However, his plethora of campaigns and projects featuring ‘real woman’ marked him out as a genuinely passionate portrait photographer, no matter who the subject. Always pursuing personal projects which push his limits, high impact charity projects and groundbreaking commercial campaigns, Rankin has stood out for his creative fearlessness. His first major worldwide and award-winning campaign- Doves‘real woman’- epitomised his approach: to reveal the honesty of the connection and collabrorative process between photographer and subject. Personal or commercial, Rankins images have become part of contemporary iconography, evidence of his frankness and passion for all aspects of modern culture, and its representation in the photographed image. Rankin published over 30 books, and it is regularly exhibited in galleries aound the world as well as his own London gallery. His measuem scale exhibition “show off” opened at NRW Dusseldorf in September 2012, pulling in over 30, 000 visitors in 3 months.

In this photograph you can see that Rankin has been creative with this portrait. He has been creative by what Miley Cyrus is wearing but instead of using actual clothes he has used body glitter, this has brought attention to Miley because of the lighting reflecting on the glitter. This portrait would be nice in a magazine or on one of Miley Cyrus’s album covers as it would bring people’s attention to it. This photo looks as though Rankin has used a ring flash because of how the lighting is on and around Miley. Ring flash usually brings out peoples eyes too and Mileys eyes have been brought out and are very noticeable.

The cameras Rankin uses are Phase One PDF with Phase One Backs, Mamiya Rz, Canon 1DS mark 3, canon 5 and 7D’s. Phase One PDF is a digital camera. Mamiya is anther digital camera but has quite an old look to it and it can be used for film. Rankin uses a mixture of film and digital in his photoshoots. When he recreated some photographs from past photographers, he used film and digital to give it his own look and to try and recreate it exactly the same by using film, depending on if the photographer he recreated used film or not which could be likely due to Rankin recreating old styled photographers such as Erwin Blumenfeld.

After looking into both of the photographers and looking at both of their work produced, I have found that these two photographers are quite the same. They both do portraits and fashion photography and they have been noticed mainly for those type of photographs. I have found that with Irving being an older photographer than Rankin, Irving has done some amazing photographs with using film due to not having digital. Irving died in October 2009 so he could have possibly used a bit of digital but after looking at his work it seems to me that most of his work has been taken using film. With Rankin, I love how he has been able to use film and a digital camera. I have enjoyed looking at his recreations the most because of him using film to create an almost identical portrait of what the photographer he has chosen to photograph. I have also enjoyed seeing his own version where he has used a digital camera, it has been nice to see the difference between the two types of cameras, film and digital. I would have to say that Rankin has been the most interesting photographer because he is quite modern and I have liked seeing the photographs and the different styles of the photographs of celebrities and The Royal Family. I have enjoyed looking at Irving’s work because of the time he was based around and that was the time before digital cameras were properly around so it was nice to see the film work produced. You can also tell the difference in the two photographers of the cameras and how they have their own style to make the photographs they want to create.

Rankin and Irving are both amazing photographers and I love both of their work. However, if I was to pick one I would choose Rankin due to him using digital cameras. I love using digital cameras myself and I love the outcome of the photographs after using a digital camera. Rankins photographs are well taken and I love that he doesn’t just use a digital camera and that he has used film in some of his portraits. I also love the fact that he used a ring light in Mileys portrait because it has brought the glitter and her eyes out really well and it has made everything stand out. Irving would have been a first choice but because of his style I wasn’t too keen on picking him. I love that he is different to other photographers with his studio set up and how he left the side of the studio set up and the background of the studio set up in the photographs, like the photo above. I like the look of film photographs but, personally, I prefer the look of digital camera photographs. I liked Irvings photograph above because of the natural lighting, also I liked the fact that it is black and white due to it being in an old time during the film cameras being used. This gives his photograph a sort of cold effect to veiwers and the photograph makes you wonder what is happening in the photograph or what Irving was trying to create.

Biblography Website-The Irving Penn Foundation Wkikpedia (for finding out his birthday only) Website-RANKIN.co.uk Youtube

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notbrianeno · 4 years

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#290: Mew - Frengers

There’s a chicken-and-egg situation with Scandinavian music (yeah, sorry, get ready for some terrible and terribly broad regional generalisations, if not outright stereotypes), or at least that portion of it that reaches the English-speaking world. Or, well, the primarily- and often-only-English-speaking world. Most Scandinavians speak English very well; the difference being that most countries that speak English as a primary or official language are reluctant to make a significant effort to teach their young any other languages with any consistency or proficiency. Je m’appelle Tom, et j’habite dans Chicago.

It’s frustrating; I can’t imagine, say, Built To Spill or Tame Impala writing a song as powerful and rich in imagery as Her Voice Is Beyond Her Years in Danish, yet we insist that our breakthrough Scandi-Nordic bands have either perfect English diction, or else blast us with glossolalic gibberish or impenetrable death growls...

I’m drifting; this wasn’t going to be about language, but about atmosphere. Here’s the chicken: Anglophone expectations of Nordic/North-eastern-Atlantic music to be deeply atmospheric, reflecting dark, misty mornings, endless dusk, and either absolute shitloads of trees or an unsettling, utter absence of any foliage larger than a few hardy colonies of moss. Here’s the egg: a lot of that music is, well, a good reflection of absolutely that environment. Of course, it feels like a stretch to lump Sigur Rós, Dimmu Borgir, and Of Monsters And Men into any kind of shared bucket (also vaguely ironic, potentially insensitive to harp on Icelandic music in a piece about a Danish band) BUT the common atmospheric thread prevails. My argument for extreme metal as a member of the ambient family of genres will wait for another time, but don’t deny that it makes sense. Drop the playback volume down a little, and black metal becomes a textural experience rather than a purely visceral one.

There’s a crack in the egg, of course, it is filled with all the pop, angular indie (like, say, Mew’s later work when they started hanging out with J Mascis), jazz, folk, hip hop and other genres that are brewing in those frosty locales just as much as anywhere else because we have the internet, we’re human, we love music, we love a variety of music, and it’s reductive and arrogant to assume a region (of several distinct countries with intertwined but independent histories, cultures, hopes and fears and shames) will produce a single kind of music for global consumption.

In summary, I wonder how much we assume Scandinavian music to be atmospheric and moody is to do with our expectations, and just how dominant that sound is in the region’s music scenes as a whole. I sometimes need to remind myself to stay on track because I get excited about the opportunity to explore my thoughts about music and drift off onto other tracks; it’s like trying to clean out an attic or a storage locker, you get distracted by something shiny that you loved for many years, many years ago, and you lose hours to the re-examination of the Thing, and the Person that you were when the Thing was in your life, and the Person you are now, and how the Thing relates to this newer version of the Person, and before you know it, the sun is creeping down past the skylight and you’ve only made the mess worse, and you clamber back down the ladder with a lot of complicated thoughts that are in no way conducive to getting shit done, so you spend the rest of the night sitting on a chair from your childhood, turning the Thing over and over in your hands and thinking about what it means, if it means anything, and whether it’s OK for it to mean nothing at all any more.

Frengers is not like that at all; it’s no relic to be revisited but a living part of my cultural psyche. This is an album that I’ve been playing consistently for, Jesus, almost seventeen years. June 2003, me and Paul Harvey (my teenage friend, not the radio guy) took a train to Nottingham to see OK Go. Mew were opening, which was an utterly bizarre pairing, but one I was glad to see. I knew nothing about them, and I have never seen an opener so truly mind-blowing and powerful before or since. Just listen to the damn album. OK Go were also great, but a different kind of thing. They covered Toto’s Hold The Line, which was great. The show was at The Rescue Rooms, where I also saw Death Cab For Cutie that same year. We missed the last train and had to get a bus back to Loughborough that took twice as long. I had a nice night with a good friend who I haven’t spoken to in too long. I should send Paul a message.

But Mew. I haunted The Left-Legged Pineapple* for weeks until they got in a copy of the Mew album, and it has been a fixture in my ears ever since then, almost exclusively between November and March. It will always be my going-for-a-walk-in-the-first-snow-of-the-season album, which if I’m being honest probably means it’s as close to my favourite album as I could ever settle on. It’s atmospheric, but it’s dynamic, there’s a good variety of tempos to keep it interesting, but not enough to be tiring or feel inconsistent or like more of a collage than a fine oil on canvas. There is loneliness and empathy in the lyrics. There is a Christmas song that feels OK to play before December. And it is bookended by what I believe to be both the best opening and best closing songs of any album, Born To Run included. It’s frankly unfair to every other band that they monopolise both ends of the bookshelf with such classics. I am a person who believes that the album, being a collection of interrelated songs no longer than 74 minutes in total (sorry, I’m a child of the CD age) but ideally as close to exactly 45 minutes as possible (i.e. to fit on one side of a standard audio cassette tape, so you can pair it with another thematically-appropriate album on side 2), is the absolute ideal art form. I will defend it from every angle against your Picassos, your Swan Lakes, your Hamiltons, your Lascaux cave paintings, your Moby Dicks, your Whitman anthologies and all the damn Shakespeare you can cram into a paper brick. A flat lump of plastic with minute grooves carved into a spiral, or a hand-span mirror digitally encoded with microscopic pips, or a magnetically-charged ribbon on a fragile, transparent spool, or nothing with any physical presence at all, a packet of data sent from a server through the air to a slab in your pocket and thence to an artificial vibrating membrane adjacent to the natural vibrating membrane of your inner ear... that’s the good shit, my friends.

Where was I? oh, right. Mew. Albums. I’ve been lucky enough to see a few of my favourite albums performed in full. Without shame, and in total disrespect of an artists’ recent output, I love the anniversary album tour gimmick. The best format for a live show is the “an evening with...” format. You play an album in full, then you play a greatest hits set from the rest of your catalog. Perfect. A couple of these full album shows stand out to me. Okkervil River on the 10th anniversary of Black Sheep Boy - pure catharsis to hear the songs of an album I loved, I lived by for many months, and which at the time I no longer needed in my life. It felt like closure, victory, escape, somehow. That same year, I saw the Manic Street Preachers doing The Holy Bible in full (the twentieth anniversary tour bleeding into the twenty-first anniversary). This was a different kind of feeling; just as with Black Sheep Boy, this was an album I needed and spent years walking to its tempos, but it felt so far away, so deep in the past that I felt nothing hearing the songs live. I was an entirely different person back then, whereas I guess during the period where Black Sheep Boy was my beacon, I was just a worse version of who I am now, so there was something relatable.

In 2018, I got to see Mew performing Frengers in full for its fifteen anniversary. They opened with a mix of songs from other albums, then took a break and came back for Frengers, which was the perfect move because how could you possibly come back to the stage after the final notes of Comforting Sounds have died out? Unlike Okkervil River, unlike the Manics, this show was as thrilling, relevant and epochal as the first time I heard these songs in a red-lit Nottingham dive.

*at the time, one of two great independent record shops in Loughborough, the other being Castle Records, both long gone, sadly; I’ll have to write about them both sometime. Expect a story about Castle when I get into some other R.E.M. albums, and Left Legged when the randomiser turns up some of my Manic Street Preachers singles

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armeniaitn · 4 years

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Armenia Culture News Digest for Thursday, February 20, 2020

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/daily-digests/culture-digests/armenia-culture-news-digest-for-thursday-february-20-2020-2853-20-02-2020/

Armenia Culture News Digest for Thursday, February 20, 2020

This is the Daily Digest of culture news for Armenia for Thursday, February 20, 2020. The notable articles are (we hope you enjoy them):

Houri Berberian to Present ‘Roving Revolutionaries’ in Columbia Lecture

Houri Berberian’s “Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds”

NEW YORK—Professor Houri Berberian of the University of California, Irvine, will give a book talk entitled “Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds” at Columbia University. The talk will be held on Thursday, February 27 at 6:10 p.m. at the University’s Knox Hall, Conference Room 208, located at 606 West 122nd St., New York, NY 10027.

The program is co-sponsored by the Columbia University Armenian Center, Columbia University Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, and the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research.

Houri Berberian is Professor of History, Meghrouni Family Presidential Chair in Armenian Studies, and Director of the Armenian Studies Program at UCI. Her talk will be based on her new book, “Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds” (Univ. of Calif. Press, 2019). The talk explores three of the formative revolutions that shook the early twentieth-century world, occuring almost simultaneously in regions bordering each other.

Though the Russian, Iranian, and Young Turk Revolutions all exploded between 1904 and 1911, they have never been studied through their linkages until now. “Roving Revolutionaries” probes the interconnected aspects of these three revolutions through the involvement of the Armenian revolutionaries – minorities in all of these empires – whose movements and participation within and across frontiers tell us a great deal about the global transformations that were taking shape. Exploring the geographical and ideological boundary crossings that occurred, Berberian’s archivally grounded analysis of the circulation of revolutionaries, ideas, and print tells the story of peoples and ideologies in upheaval and collaborating with each other, and, in doing so, it illuminates our understanding of revolutions and movements.

This event is open to the public and copies of “Roving Revolutionaries” will be available for purchase. For more information, please contact Professor Khatchig Mouradian at [email protected].

Read original article here.

Armenian composer honors Iran plane crash victims with new requiem

February 20, 2020 – 12:32 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net – The legendary Iranian-Armenian composer and conductor Loris Tjeknavorian has composed a piece of music in commemoration of the victims of a Ukrainian plane that was downed in Iran in January, IRNA reports.

The Ukrainian Boeing 737 was “unintentionally” shot down by Iran’s military near Tehran minutes after takeoff.

“Requiem for UIA Flight 752” has been written to lament over the demise of the passengers on board the plane.

Razmik Ohanian, Yarta Yaran, Ehsan Beiraghdar, Alireza Rad, Shahu Zandi, Naser Izadi as well as Bardia Sadr Nouri have collaborated on the project.

Commenting on the creation of the artwork, Tjeknavorian said that converting his deep sorrow over the incident into a piece of art in no time was “a miracle”.

Loris Tjeknavorian, born on 13 October 1937 in Borujerd, is an Iranian Armenian composer and conductor.

As one of the leading conductors of his generation, he has led international orchestras throughout the world such as in Austria, the UK, the USA, Canada, Hungary, Copenhagen, Iran, Finland, Russia, Armenia, Thailand, Hong Kong, South Africa, and Denmark.

Read original article here

Loris Tjeknavorian composes music in memory of Ukraine plane crash victims

The legendary Iranian-Armenian composer and conductor Loris Tjeknavorian has composed a piece of music in commemoration of Ukraine plane crash victims, IRNA reports.

The song entitled “Requiem for UIA Flight 752” has been written to lament over the demise of the passengers of the plane.

Razmik Ohanian, Yarta Yaran, Ehsan Beiraghdar, Alireza Rad, Shahu Zandi, Naser Izadi as well as Bardia Sadr Nouri have collaborated on the project.

Commenting on the creation of the artwork, Tjeknavorian stated that converting his deep sorrow over the incident into a piece of art in no time was “a miracle.”

Loris Tjeknavorian, born on 13 October 1937 in Borujerd, is an Iranian Armenian composer and conductor.

The Ukrainian Boeing 737 was shot down near Tehran minutes after takeoff.

Iranian officials admitted that human error was the cause of downing the passenger plane and expressed regret and apologized for the tragedy.

Read original article here.

Actor Yervand Manaryan dies aged 95

Prominent Armenian actor Yervand Manaryan has passed away aged 95.

Manaryan was born in Arak, Iran in 1924 in a family from Agulis, Nakhichevan. In 1946 his family repatriated to Soviet Armenia along with thousands of other Iranian Armenians.

He studied at the Yerevan Institute of Fine Arts and Theater, and graduated from the Faculty of Directing in 1952.

He worked as an actor and director at the Paronyan Musical Comedy Theater and the Sundukyan Theater in Yerevan. In 1957-1959 he was the principal director of the Puppet Theater after Hovhannes Tumanyan, and from 1988 he was the artistic director of the Agulis Puppet Theater Studio.

In 1959-1961 he held the same position at the Goris Theater, and since 2007 he is the founding-artistic director of the Armenian Puppet Theater in Kiev. Later he worked at Yerevan Documentary Film Studio and Yerevan Cinema. He was one of the directors of the Yerevan State Puppet Theater.

He prouced a number of documentary and feature films, such as “Armenian Miniature”, “Michael Nalbandian”, “Kiosk”, “Light”, “The Birth of Drugs”, “The Summer Comes” and more.

He is best known for the roles in films such as “Bride from the North”, “Bride from Jermuk”, “Tzhvzik”, “Morgan’s Niece” and others.

Read original article here.

Armenia celebrates Book-Giving Day

On February 19, Hovhannes Tumanyan’s birthday, Armenia celebrates Book-Giving Day.

The Day was initiated by the late President of the Writers’ Union Levon Ananyan and has been celebrated since 2008, according to a government decision.

On this day the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport and the Writers’ Union distribute books published and supported by the government to regional and community libraries, as well as the libraries of Artsakh and Javakhk.

Armenian communities worldwide hold a number of events: books are being donated to libraries, orphanages, schools in an attempt to restore the once important meaning of the book.

Today marks the 151st birth anniversary of poet, writer, translator Hovhannes Tumanyan.

Born in the the village of Dsegh in Armenia’s Lori region, Tumanyan moved to Tiflis (now Tbilisi), which was the center of Armenian culture during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Tumanyan started writing when he was 10-11 years old, but only became known as a poet in 1890, when his first poetry collection was published.

Tumanyan’s first collection, Poems, published in Moscow in 1890, was a great success with literary critics.

Subsequently, all his collections would have the same generic title, with the exception of Harmonies, published in Tbilisi in 1896. Each volume included a number of previously published poems, to which new ones were added.

The literary technique, unique to Tumanyan, makes him an outstanding storyteller, who masterfully commands verse and word.

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These are a few tweets about Armenia. Contact us via Twitter if you want to be part of this Twitter list. We retweet occasionally.

Armenia @armenia·

13h

According to preliminary data, @Armenia registered 7.6% economic growth for 2019, which is the highest record since 2008

Armenia @Armenia_Better·

16h

#StopGenocide

#Armenian Genocide, #Turkey

Viktor Pietschmann (1881-1956) Austrian

Served in Austrian army in World War I in Turkey

Witnessed Armenian Genocide & took many photographs of the deportees

In Erzurum, witnessed Armenian Genocide carried out by the local government

Armenia Mission to UN@ArmeniaUN·

19 Feb

PR of #ArmeniaChair of #CSW64 Mher Margaryan met with @UN_PGA Tijjani Muhammad-Bande, discussing #genderequality agenda across #SDGs in the #Decadeofaction. Upcoming anniversaries of #Beijing25, #SDG5 should serve as momentum for accelerated action for all #women & girls

JAMnews@JAMnewsCaucasus·

13h

Journalist Irina Keleshaeva stands accused of slander against the #SouthOssetia|n authorities – this isn’t the first time she’s come under the gun

https://jam-news.net/trial-in-south-ossetia-minister-of-justice-v-journalist/

Armenia at NATO@armmission_nato·

13h

Thank you @GermanyNATO for hosting our colleagues from #Armenia and consistent engagement with @NATO partners.

Artsakh Parliament@Artsakh_Parl·

13 Feb

32 years ago, these days, the #Karabakhmovement began. With mass demonstration the people of #Artsakh demanded from the Soviet Union the withdrawal of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) from the #Azerbaijan SSR and its reunion with the Soviet #Armenia. #selfdetermination

Armenia Ombudsman@OmbudsArmenia·

18h

On February 19, #Armenia celebrates #Book-Giving Day. On this occasion, the Human Rights Defender Mr. Arman Tatoyan @atatoyan gave an interview to #Armenpress correspondent. @armenpress https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1005384.html?fbclid=IwAR20z8u__Q3U6P_hM6BmRG7xwQDU466ioxqFqE-DKvKvuQm6IvmPdmR2fJc

USC Armenian Studies@ArmenianStudies·

From the #Archives: A promotional drawing from the 1974 US Tour of the #Armenian State #Dance Ensemble (#Հայաստան|ի Պարի Պետակական Անսամբլ)

ArtsakhPress Agency@ArtsakhPress·

11h

The result of the #Karabakh #movement is today’s Republic of #Artsakh. Ashot Ghulyan https://artsakhpress.am/eng/news/121494/the-result-of-the-karabakh-movement-is-today%E2%80%99s-republic-of-artsakh-ashot-ghulyan.html

#Armenia #Armenians #Artsakh #Karabakh #Yerevan #Culture Digests

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newyorktheater · 4 years

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Michael Benjamin Washington

It would be hard to overstate the city-wide trauma that occurred in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in August, 1991, nor the power of “Fires in the Mirror,” the groundbreaking documentary play about it nine months later at the Public, which introduced New York theatergoers to the astonishing theater artist Anna Deavere Smith. That trauma and that power come roaring back in a revival at Signature that, for the first time, features an actor other than Smith. On August 19, 1991, Gavin Cato, the seven-year-old son of immigrants from Guyana, was fixing his bicycle on the sidewalk in front of his home on President St., when the driver of a car in the motorcade of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the rebbe of the Lubavitcher Hasidic Dynasty, lost control of his vehicle and plowed into Gavin, killing him. The tension between black and Jewish residents of the neighborhood ignited into riot, and a day later, Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old Australian studying in New York for his PhD. , was walking in the neighborhood when he was surrounded by young black men, and stabbed and beaten to death. “When things are upside down,” Anna Deavere Smith explained at the time, “there is an opening for a person like me” – by which she meant for an artist.

Smith recorded interviews with more than 100 people about the events in Crown Heights, and about the myriad complex issues that they raised, such as the meaning of identity and community and race. She presented more than two dozen of the people as characters on stage, portrayals that reproduced verbatim not just their words, but their verbal tics and gestures. Her performance was extraordinary. A film adaptation of it directed by George C. Wolfe, is available on YouTube

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How much of the show’s power was a result of her unique talents as an actor? That was my question before attending the revival of “Fires in the Mirror.” Michael Benjamin Washington answers that question, giving a fine performance and at the same time demonstrating the intrinsic strength and artistry of Smith’s work.

“Fires in the Mirror” offers, without judgment and with implicit compassion, a breadth of personalities — rabbis and reverends, activists and everyday residents — with views that conflict, contradict, supplement or concur. But how they present themselves and what they say also often resonate way beyond what happened in Crown Heights. Indeed, the playwright waits until almost halfway through the nearly two hour running time to bring up the events at all. The first to speak is playwright Ntozake Shange (who died last year) who discusses what identity means, followed soon thereafter with another playwright George C. Wolfe (then artistic director of the Public Theater) on what it means to be black, keeping intact their mix of eloquence and incoherence, and even slips of the tongue: Wolfe says: “I mean I grew up on a black – a one-block street – that was black.” In-between the two playwrights is an anonymous Lubavitcher woman who tells a long, hilarious story of enlisting a non-Jewish boy from the neighborhood to turn off her radio during the Sabbath. There are many subtle juxtapositions that explore both similarities and differences, and suggest a bit of hopefulness among all the tragic disagreements and misunderstandings . When we first meet the activist Al Sharpton, he talks only about why his hair is the way it is — he made a promise to his mentor and friend the singer James Brown to keep it that way for the rest of his life. Sharpton is followed immediately by Rivkah Siegal, a graphic designer and Lubavitcher who talks about the five wigs she wears, and the religious reasons for doing so, and how she’s ambivalent about it all.

These portraits, none lasting more than a few minutes, offer a context for the events when we hear about them, devastating monologues from such devastated figures as Gavin Cato’s father and Yankel Rosenbaum’s brother.

It is easy to feel that “Fires in the Mirror” transcends the particulars of its immediate subject, and see the Crown Heights conflict as a lesson from the past bracingly relevant to more urgent matters today. But we’re fooling ourselves if we think what happened in Crown Heights is safely in the past. At a talkback I attended after the play, two proud residents of the neighborhood (one black, one Jewish) told how irksome it is that every article about Crown Heights, no matter what the subject, seems to mention the riot in the first paragraph. On the other hand, as recently as 2011 I attended an art exhibition called “Crown Heights Gold” at the Skylight Gallery of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, in which 23 Brooklyn artists tried to make sense of the riot on its twentieth anniversary. Photographer Jamal Shabazz exhibited two photographs of happy families: one Hasidic in a park, another Afro-Caribbean on a stoop. Both were entitled “What If?” — meaning, what if Gavin Cato and Yankel Rosenbaum had lived? What would they and their families look like?

Like it or not, the Crown Heights riot continues to affect us in ways direct, and indirect, and strange. Many blame the riot for the defeat of Mayor David Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York, by a former federal prosecutor, Rudy Giuliani; that first election is arguably what set off the sequence of events that has him currently all over the news.

Those three dozen works of arts at that Crown Heights exhibition were asking the same questions that “Fires in the Mirror” continues to ask, among them: How do you turn death into art? Can that art heal?

Fires in the Mirror Signature By Anna Deavere Smith. Directed by Saheem Ali. Scenic design by Arnulfo Maldonado, costume design by Dede M. Ayite, lighting design by Alan C. Edwards, sound design by Mikaal Sulaiman, projection design by Hannah Wasileski, dialect coach Dawn Elin-Fraser. Cast: Michael Benjamin Washington Running time: One hour and 50 minutes, with no intermission. Tickets: $40-$80 Fires in the Mirror is on stage through December 15, 2019

Fires in the Mirror. Revisiting the Crown Heights Riots and the birth of Anna Deavere Smith’s new theatrical genre It would be hard to overstate the city-wide trauma that occurred in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in August, 1991, nor the power of “Fires in the Mirror,” the groundbreaking documentary play about it nine months later at the Public, which introduced New York theatergoers to the astonishing theater artist Anna Deavere Smith.

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omginstantpaperbouquetblr · 6 years

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by Andrew Levine / Counterpunch.

Photo by Busy Beaver Button Museum | CC BY 2.0

Jerry Rubin, a “founding father” of the Yippies, is widely credited with having come up with the slogan “don’t trust anyone over thirty.” He no doubt did say that, many times back in the day, but it was Jack Weinberg, another leader of the 1964-5 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, who said it first.

Being old enough to remember a time when that precept rang true, I am finding it difficult to deal with the fact that fifty years have now passed since 1968, the watershed year of the fabled “sixties.” But even in Trump’s America, facts are facts; there is no denying that the commemorations taking place this year of the events of that year mark “golden anniversaries.”

I trust that I am not the only one who feels this way; that almost everyone who lived through the major political events of that year, as a participant or observer, does as well.

In the United States, 1968 was about race relations and the Vietnam War. Elsewhere, the concerns were different, but the spirit everywhere, on all the four corners of the earth, was the same. The imagination was in power.

Many a soixante-huitard, as the French say, has died since then, and many have become decrepit. By ordinary human standards, 1968 was a long time ago. Nevertheless, to me and, I presume, to many others, the events of that year feel like they happened yesterday.

The events of fifty years before 1968 felt like ancient history back then. Is 1968 ancient history for political militants under thirty today?

Oldsters can hardly get inside the minds of youngsters, much less speak for them. But I would nevertheless hazard that, for example, the high school students now leading the struggle for saner (or less insane) gun laws since the Parkland shootings feel a lot more connected to their counterparts in 1968 than we, back then, did to our counterparts in 1918.

And although it is even more hazardous for an aging white man to speak for young militants of color, I would venture too that much the same holds for them as well – for Black Lives Matter and similar movements in other communities suffering from police brutality and murderous violence.

How possibly could the civil rights and black liberation struggles of the fifties and sixties and the student (and broader youth) movements of that period seem as remote to young militants today – white, black, or brown — as the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and all that followed in its wake seemed to us fifty years ago?

The idea that they could think of events still vivid in our minds the way we thought of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, or of the British and French empires in the decades preceding their dissolution, seems absurd at least to me and, I would hazard, to everyone else who used to be wary of people over thirty.

If I am right about that, why would this be? It cannot just be because there is less of a “generation gap” than there was fifty years ago, or because people nowadays live slightly longer.

The pace of scientific and technological progress in the ambient culture surely has something to do with it. Physicists, biologists and others in scientific and technological fields have learned a lot more in the fifty years since 1968 than in the fifty years before. However, the consequences for daily life – for communication, transport, commerce and so on – have been less far-reaching. A Rip Van Winkle who just now awoke after fifty years of slumber would find daily life today more familiar than one who fell asleep in 1918 and woke up in 1968.

It is surely also relevant that the changes for which 1968 now seems emblematic had more to do with the ambient culture than geopolitics or political economy. Beyond the sex, drugs, and rock and roll that people nowadays associate with the sixties, 1968 made gender and sexuality and diversity political issues in ways they had not been before and have been ever since. But even with the Soviet Union gone, and China careening down “the capitalist road,” the world order is not all that much changed, and capitalism seems as deeply entrenched as ever.

That is one reason why many of the changed cultural understandings and practices associated with 1968 were effectively absorbed back into the old order. Those changes had far-reaching social effects, but politically there seems to have been nothing revolutionary about them at all.

On the other hand, in 1918, revolutionary challenges to the anciens régimesof Europe and much of the rest of the world were still unfolding, their political consequences – and world historical significance — only slightly mitigated by the fact that all but one of them, the Bolshevik Revolution, were already on the brink of failure.

Cultural changes matter, but geopolitical transformations and developments in the material world are more consequential by far. This was well understood by militants in all currents of the historical Left, as it existed from the time of the French Revolution through the decline and fall of the great revolutionary transformations of the twentieth century.

Politics ventures that focus on identity issues don’t cut it to nearly the same extent. They are not radical enough; they don’t go to the root.

Fifty years after 1968, it is becoming increasingly clear that those of us who have been insisting on this point – and on maintaining the old, ostensibly superseded perspectives that were still current in 1968 — are not quite the dinosaurs we have lately been made out to be.

The more politically active millennials think along similar lines, the more they identify with 1968 and, more broadly, with the historical Left, the easier it will be for them to recover those venerable, increasingly timely, understandings – up-dated, of course, to take into account the many ways that the world has changed over the course of fifty long years.

***

In 1968, there were no smart phones; demonstrations were organized the old fashioned way – by word of mouth, telephone, and mimeographed leaflets.

Nowadays, everyone has smart phones, and everyone under thirty knows how to use them in ways that no one fifty years ago could have imagined. Even people who came of age in the final decades of the last century have a hard time imagining.

It is not just that things that were done or that could have been done in 1968 (and for many years thereafter) are now doable more rapidly and easily. It is also, as militants back then understood, that “the medium is the message.”

Pundits marvel at how “media savvy” the teenage veterans of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shootings, are. They are indeed, but not just because they understand how to use social media better than Donald Trump.

Their skills in that department have put gun control back on the political agenda in a way that it has not been since the late eighties. Beyond that, however, they are figuring out not just how to use social media to change the national “conversation” and to get candidates elected, but also how to hold the candidates they help elect, in part because they are talking about the right things, accountable to the people they purport to serve.

Even before the Obama era, political operatives had figured out how to use social media to peddle their issues and candidates to voters, and even before Trump’s run for the White House, they had discovered how useful social media could be for spreading “fake news.”

Needless to say, their antics make a mockery of democratic notions of rational, public deliberation and debate. But our politicians have been making a mockery of democracy from time immemorial.

The difference now is that social media accelerate the process – to a degree that suggests the applicability of the venerable dialectical trope about quantity turning into quality.

This is not the whole story, however: digital technologies have made what passes for democracy worse, but they have also made it better — by reaching people more directly and immediately than would otherwise be possible in ways that maintain political engagement when elections are not immediately in the offing.

Social movements can hold legislators accountable. Organized labor does that to some extent even now; when it was stronger, and the Democratic Party, was less thoroughly owned by Wall Street financiers and boards of directors of major corporations than it now is, it did it a lot more.

The organizing efforts that began with the Parkland students are also about holding elected representatives accountable. Calling town meetings during Spring Break in districts represented by bought and paid for NRA flunkies was a stroke of genius. The flunkies refused to show up, of course; their opponents, many of them newly recruited to run for elected offices and therefore still untainted by longstanding connections to the leaders of the less odious duopoly party, often did.

The problem is that, except when elections are imminent, there is almost nothing that citizens are called upon to do. Even with elections on the immediate horizon, the only thing to do is vote – and perhaps also to encourage others to do the same.

The Parkland students, along with countless other high school students around the country, figured out something else for them to do over Spring Break. With their social media savvy, they made it happen.

There is much more to figure out, but, thanks to those students, the journey has begun.

In the future, if all goes well, holding representatives accountable will be at least as important as getting them elected. As per the slogan often heard in demonstrations, this is what democracy looks like.

Notwithstanding the views of the great democratic theorists of the past several centuries, what legislators in self-identified democracies want is seldom, if ever, the public good. It is some combination of power and money – money as needed to obtain or retain power, and power to be able, if and when the time comes, to cash in on the wealth their connections can buy.

But for that, they need to be reelected, whenever they run again for the offices they hold.

Thanks to successful, “bipartisan” efforts to depoliticize the body politic, all “we, the people” can do to keep a flicker of democracy alive is boot venal, refractory, and corrupt politicians out of office when their terms expire; and even that measure of control is more formal than real when, as is almost always the case, there are no less odious, but still feasible, alternatives.

Elections held at fixed two, four, and six year intervals are as poor a way as can be imagined to hold the peoples’ representatives accountable; it might almost be better to abandon democratic pretenses altogether.

A better, more democratic way would be to force elected officials to engage not just with their “donors,” the people they actually work for, but with the voters, the people they purport to represent.

Media savvy teenagers are figuring out ways to do this; there is a lot that those of us who are longer in the tooth, by a little or a lot, can learn from them.

Who knows but maybe, before long, for the first time since a few months into Nobel laureate Obama’s first term, even such utterly besmirched words as “hope” and “change” will again be possible to say without gagging.

***

This is happening, however, in the aftermath of a break from a nearly two hundred year long historical epoch that 1968 seems, in retrospect, to have culminated.

The end of the historical Left did not entirely come into view until 1989 when Communists abandoned Communism; and then in 1991, when the Soviet Union imploded. Even so, it would be fair to say that 1968 marked the beginning of the end of the saga; its last hurrah.

After that, there were, of course, additional last gasps, crises and defeats; and then nothing at all except dissolution or, as in China, where some of the old words and governing structures survived, nothing that bore any substantive connection with what had come before.

And so, long established understandings were abandoned and a treasure-trove of historical knowledge was, for all practical purposes, forgotten.

Writing at the turn of the century, Perry Anderson noted that: “virtually the entire horizon of reference in which the generation of the sixties grew up has been wiped away – the landmarks of reformist and revolutionary socialism in equal measure….”

He went on to say: “For most students, the roster of Bebel, Bernstein, Luxemburg, Kautsky, Jaurès, Luckács, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci have become names as remote as a list of Arian bishops…”

This is the world that the Parkland students were born into; the militants of Black Lives Matter too, though their historical connections with strains of the tradition that focused mainly on racial oppression were less compromised by the time their movement emerged.

Thus it can sometimes seem that militants from the so-called millennial generation are reinventing the wheel. That can be a serious disability.

On the other hand, it can also be a blessing in disguise if what is invented in place of moorings lost corrects for some of their defects.

But, on balance, it is surely less of a blessing than a curse.

After all, in the absence of a mature Left theory and practice, it is hard to see how, for example, problems associated with school safety fit systemically into the larger social and political landscape.

The problem that the shootings in Parkland epitomized is not just that the United States has stupid gun laws – thanks partly to the odd reading that the Supreme Court has given to the Constitution’s Second Amendment, and thanks partly to the lobbying successes of the National Rifle Association, the NRA.

A deeper problem is that the United States is encumbered by a political, economic and military regime that normalizes murderous violence.

But how can this plain fact be appreciated or even acknowledged in the absence of an over-arching systemic understanding of the factors that keep our politics on its present, disastrous course.?

Now that the United States is mired down in perpetual wars against vaguely defined enemies, wars with no front lines where the enemy can be, and often is, everywhere, the violence that we are disabled from understanding becomes increasingly pervasive and deadly.

Connections between the war machine and everyday violence in America were easier to see in 1968 because, at the time, there was still a vast, multifaceted theoretical and political culture that focused not just on immediate problems, but also on their underlying causes and connections. We don’t have that anymore to nearly the same extent.

Militants on the front lines used to understand these interconnections reflexively; now they have to be relearned. This is not an insurmountable obstacle to moving forward, but it is a serious, potentially debilitating, impediment.

The task at hand is to overcome that impediment – not just to address grave problems immediately at hand, but also to restore the idea, formerly at risk of becoming lost, that there is a world to win.

ANDREW LEVINE is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

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