#once she said that women were inherently better and so if we made all presidents women there wouldnt be any more wars

[elipsi]

sometimes i think about the swedish roommate and i realize i was completely right about being annoyed by all that

#she was thee worst hashtag girlboss feminist #once she said that women were inherently better and so if we made all presidents women there wouldnt be any more wars #there were occasional rants about how activists at her school were weird and focused too much on lgbt rights #(and she kept misgendering the nb activist) #and oh my god she was so patronizing #'do you have gay marriage in italy? no? oh that's so sad and backwards :(' #she was annoying!! and i felt a little guilty of being annoyed but no more

[not-all-dead]

"It’s not a surprise when the Chief of Police comes out. There have been betting pools for years, and the announcement is met with mostly indifference. What is a surprise, however, is the interview that comes out alongside the announcement. The interview that is complete with a photoshoot of Lin Beifong in civilian clothes, talking about the challenges of her position. No one can remember the last time the Chief has given an interview, and the photo becomes the talk of the town."

How do you think the interview goes? What would Lin say?

link to (what i believe was) the original post of this! with some amazing art that VERY much helped me write this :DD (by @mgthejerkbender)

i was originally just gonna write a dialogue or notes for this but uh- i got a little carried away so here’s a 3687 word fic of the interview oops

CW: implications of past trauma (mentions of r@pe/s*xual assa*lt, public humiliation, not graphic at all), homophobia, sexism

fic under the cut :)

Lin walked into the room in a soft green turtleneck and dark brown pants that almost looked black without the light. There was sound equipment set up all over the place, with two armchairs in the middle of it all. A desk sat over to the side, a typewriter and paper sitting atop it. Quite a few people were rushing around, making sure that everything was in place for the broadcast. She watched a young woman sit at the desk, prepping the typewriter to transcribe the entire thing.

“Oh good, you’re here,” Lin turned to see a man in his early forties standing with a small journal behind her.

He wore a plain suit with a pale orange tie, his greying hair slicked back neatly. His eyes flitted around the room, checking things briefly for himself before focusing on Lin. He opened the notebook to a page about a quarter of the way through and smiled at Lin, nodding at the chairs behind her.

“Care to sit?” he asked, moving toward the chairs.

She took the seat farthest from where they’d just been standing, shifting to get comfortable while she waited for him to sit and get things rolling. She didn’t want to admit it, but her heart was racing. She hadn’t done anything like this is ages, especially not so casually. The topic of discussion also made her nervous, both because her job was something she rarely spoke of with anyone outside a professional context, and because of the announcement that would come with the interview. She’d encountered plenty of bigoted people in the past, and had no doubt that her officially coming out would only press them to question her position more than usual.

She picked idly at the fuzzballs on her turtleneck until the man sitting beside her cleared his throat. Her head snapped up to look at him, her body tensing briefly before seeing that he was testing the microphones. She sighed and relaxed slightly, speaking into the microphone placed before her when the sound technician prompted her to do so. Once everything seemed to be in place and ready to go, the broadcast started.

“Welcome, listeners, to tonight’s special program. I’m your host, Kaja Posicopolis, here with our esteemed Chief of Police, Lin Beifong. So, Chief, how are you on this fine night?” he started, putting on his radio voice.

“Good, I’m good,” Lin responded, leaning slightly forwards in her seat.

“That’s good to hear. I think I’ll launch right into our questions if you don’t mind, we’ve got a lot to get through tonight,” Lin nodded when he looked over to her, giving him the go ahead.

“Why don’t we start with something positive. What’s your favourite thing about your position as Chief? What about the job brings you the most joy?” he turned to watch her while waiting for her answer.

She looked at the floor for a moment, thinking before speaking.

“I think I’d have to say getting to help people. Ever since I was young I’ve wanted to protect others as much as possible, and being Chief makes that a lot easier and a lot more… legal,” he joined her when she chuckled lightly, but her smile only lasted a moment.

“Of course, I’m not perfect, and there are always times when things go wrong. I can’t say that those times don’t affect me, but I try to think of the people we as a force have helped over the years and that keeps me going,” she took a deep breath and looked to Kaja as he glanced at his notepad.

“That leads right into my next question; how do you do it? Not even your infamous mother was Chief for as long as you’ve been, and her time was already impressive. You’ve given so much to Republic City already, why, and how, do you keep giving?” there was a look of wonder and admiration on his face when he finished the question.

“I grew up in Republic City. It always has been, and will be, my home. And who doesn’t want to protect their home? I think that as long as I live here, I’ll be working to do anything in my power to help the city. I hate watching neighborhoods suffer… actually, I’m working on a plan with President Moon at the moment with the hopes of helping out the poorer parts of the city, providing homes for the homeless, all that good stuff. I just want to see Republic City thriving, and I want to help it get to that point. As I said before, it’s my home; everyone here is part of a community, a family, if you will, and that means everything to me,” Lin leaned back, resting against the cushion behind her, setting her right foot on her left knee.

“That’s a beautiful sentiment, thank you. I love the idea of the city being one big family, and that project sounds like it’ll be very good for the future of Republic City,” Kaja turned his gaze back to his notes, stopping the conversation briefly.

“The next question I have here is less uppity; what has your biggest struggle been with regards to your job?”

“That’s a hard one,” she paused. “I’ve had many struggles with work over my years as Chief, but I think of everything that’s happened… being a woman, and a queer one at that, has definetly taken it’s toll. Other things have been more directly challenging, but that’s been present since day one.”

“Would you care to elaborate on that?” he prompted leaning slightly towards her.

She inhaled and held her breath for a split second before sighing lightly.

“Sure, why not,” she gave a small smile to Kaja before starting.

“When I was much younger, just starting out in the force, I could already see the inherent bias against women that so many male officers held. My mother wasn’t immune to their verbal attacks, though she would give them a good… sparring match, lets say, if they ever so much as laid a finger on her. After a few times, that generally stopped happening, but people would still talk. The number of disgusting, awful things I heard coming from some of those men…” she huffed and shifted in her seat, putting one elbow on her armrest and resting her head on her hand.

“Anyway, I started to pay attention to every little thing. I noticed how many male politicians talked down to my mother, and not because of her blindness. Even a few of the men on our own council at the time would treat her as less-than for no apparent reason.

“I saw it happening in my own life and career, too. How my male counterparts got the promotion before I was even considered, despite performing just as well as them, if not better. How I was never asked for input on supposedly collective decisions or plans, and if I was or tried to interject, I was almost always dismissed. It seemed like any man of higher or equal rank to me thought I was some… assistant to bring him coffee and reports and not do any actual work.

“Seeing that attitude so often pissed me off. I made it my mission to prove myself beyond what was necessary. I wanted to show them that I could do anything they could just as well, sometimes even better. My work paid off eventually and I began to climb the ranks, not letting myself rest for a second. And I wanted to help people as well, of course, but it started out more as wanting to teach those bastards a lesson,” she moved again, uncrossing her legs and leaning forward on her elbows.

“Once I became Chief, a lot of people seemed determined to put me down. Practically every man, be he politician or merchant on the street, told me something insinuating that I was handed the position just because my mother was Chief before me. Every time I wanted to yell at them, to show them records of how hard I’d worked to get there, how much harder I’d had to work than most of my colleagues. With the politicians and other major figureheads, how much harder I’d had to work than they probably had.

“It was frustrating, but I got used to it. It was a constant that came with working a so-called, and I’m not making this up, it’s been said directly to my face before, ‘Man’s job’,” she stopped for a moment and looked over at Kaja, who was staring at her in disbelief.

She couldn’t help but let out a small laugh at his expression before looking back down and continuing.

“There was also the issue of my queerness,” she shook her head and took a deep breath, sitting back as she continued.

“I started working as a proper officer when I was about eighteen. Within my first year working, I was-,” she closed her eyes and clenched her teeth for a second.

“I had an encounter with a man, an older officer who was overseeing the training group I was a part of. He tried to initiate certain… activities with me, none of which I wanted to partake in. I did manage to get rid of him and filed a report against him, but it wasn’t the last time it happened.

“I was a pretty regular customer at a few of the underground bars for people like me at the time. I did my best to hide my face when I left, but there were always times I was careless, or somebody saw me in the seconds I let my guard down. Usually it was no big deal, but occasionally it was someone from work. Once, it was that man.

“He found me at work the next day and asked me about it. Yelled at me, really. He tried to make it seem like that’s why I’d denied him, and the names he called me weren’t pretty to say the least. He started to physically attack me, throwing punch after punch and not giving me the slightest chance to fight back.

“After that day, I stopped going to those bars altogether. The first time I went back to one was actually just a few years ago. I started dating Tenzin a few years later, and though people weren’t so outwardly expressive of their opinions on my relationships, the disapproval was still present.

“By the time Tenzin and I split up, I think some people still suspected my queerness, but it wasn’t a widely adopted theory. I had my fair share of men approach me, some with better intentions than others, and turned down most of them. Some of them didn’t react all that well, and I ended up filing several more reports. I don’t think any of them actually got charged, though.

“I entertained short romances with some men, some women too. Nothing stuck, not really anyway. I kept every relationship very quiet, including those with men, just for the sake of privacy. When I was with women, it was also to avoid getting hate-crimed, but I really did prefer to keep at least some things private.

“In the context of work, there were also challenges. That first superior to try getting at me like that must’ve talked, telling anyone who would listen about my excursions to the underground bars. People looked at me oddly in just about any shared workspace there was, though a few times I made friends because of it. Those were always good times, even if few and far between.

“Some people just gave a judgemental stare or vaguely rude comment every so often, but a few others took it further. Much further,” she looked up to the ceiling as she recalled another story.

“I had a supervisor when I was probably about, oh, twenty seven or so. He was a few ranks below my mother, and I one below him. He decided that one day it would be absolutely hysterical to cover my desk in obscene printed images of women I didn’t recognize, along with toys of a certain nature. I was mortified when I came in and saw the spectacle. The worst part was that almost everyone working in that part of the building at the time laughed with him, and those who didn’t weren’t exactly helpful.

“I didn’t come back to work for a week after that. It was awful, his stupid prank making me so shamed of who I was, who I loved. I know now that my loving both women and men isn’t a bad thing, and is simply part of me. It was harder to accept that, to accept myself, when I saw people like him in positions of power over me.

“I kept working though, and there was never an incident quite like that one again. A few others were more directly hateful than most, but it was easier to deal with. As with people treating me as less because of my gender, I got used to it,” she turned to Kaja, a hint of guilt on her face after talking for so long.

He shook his head, disbelief still spread across his face. His eyes flitted back and forth between floor tiles as he searched for the right words to respond.

“That sounds awful. I’m so sorry you had to deal with people like that,” he looked back up at Lin.

“So am I,” she scoffed, her fingers picking at her turtleneck again.

There was a small silence before Kaja looked back down at his notepad and then at the clock on the wall.

“We’ve got enough time for one last question, so is there anything you’d like to tell young women and queer people living in the city?” His expression was almost hopeful now, desperate to end off on a lighter note.

Lin smiled in amusement at him before looking down at her hands, fiddling her thumbs in her lap. After a moment, she looked back up at him and started speaking again.

“Absolutely,” she began, her gaze drifting around the room and landing on each individual at least once.

“To all the women working your asses off in the workforce: stand up for yourself. Don’t let any man devalue you because of your gender. Be the best you can be and wipe the smiles clean off their faces as you do it. Start your own businesses, get that promotion, set goals for yourself and fly past them. You can do just about anything you put your mind to, despite what many men might say,” her voice was strong, almost commanding as she began her final statement.

“And to all the young queer people out there; you are so, so strong. Keep loving each other, keep being yourselves. I know how awful people can be, but their opinions do not define you. You are perfect exactly as you are, and nothing can change that. It might seem like it’ll never be true, but I believe we will live in a time when acceptance is the norm. I believe that that time, with hard work and patience with those who need teaching, will be here soon.”

“Perfect. Thank you so much for your time, Chief,” Kaja said, looking at the clock again.

“Thank you for having me,” Lin replied, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath.

“And with that, folks, we wrap up today’s special broadcast. I’ll be back in the studio tomorrow resuming our usual radio program. Until then, I’m Kaja Posicopolis, and this is eighty six point four, your favourite music station,” Kaja finished, staying silent for a few seconds until a man from across the room nodded at him.

He rolled his head around and got up from his chair, setting his notepad down behind him.

“How are you now?” he asked Lin as he stretched his arms out and cracked his back.

Lin scoffed and stood, going through a couple of her own stretches. She straightened her shirt and tucked a few stray hairs back before responding.

“I feel like I just stood naked in front of the entire city,” she said, unable to hold back a small smile when Kaja laughed.

“Well, we’re about to expose you even more. You ready for the photo shoot?” he grabbed his notebook and pen and closed them, watching Lin for an answer.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Lin sighed before following him out of the room.

They walked down several long hallways, eventually coming to a large open room. The walls and floor were a pale grey cement, and there were expensive looking lights set up all over the place. A dark green upholstered bench sat to one side of the room, a tall light shining down on it. A few people saw them coming in and rushed around, turning off almost every other light. One of them knocked on a door that was on the other end of the room, calling for someone inside.

“This seems a bit excessive,” Lin muttered, her eyes wandering the room.

“Only the best for you, Chief,” a man said from somewhere in the shadows.

Lin glanced behind her only to see Kaja talking to someone near the door. When she turned back to where the voice had come from, she had to bite back a laugh. She tried not to, but couldn’t help smiling at the absolute glow that radiated from the man in front of her.

“You like my outfit?” he asked with a grin, twirling around for her.

He had on bright red fit-and-flare pants with a stripe of gold sequins down their side; a matching red low-cut tank top; a purple feather-covered knee-length jacket; gold sparkly platform shoes that made him tower over Lin more than he already would have; and a top hat that belonged with a businessman’s black tie attire.

“It’s incredible,” Lin chuckled, crossing her arms casually over her chest.

“You look sharp yourself today, Chief,” he said with a grin, taking a few steps towards her.

Before she could object, he pulled her into a tight hug. His arms squashed her face against his lower chest, making Lin painfully aware of the extent of their height difference. She laughed and patted his arm, thankfully getting him to release her.

“I’m assuming you’re the photographer, then?” she asked, grinning up at him.

He nodded enthusiastically and spun on his heel, walking back into the darkness. She heard a couple of small crashes and a string of profanities before he came back, a large camera and it’s stand filling his arms.

“Uh- where am I going?” he asked Lin, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye.

She let out a small laugh and stepped towards him, placing her hand on his arm. She guided him towards the bench setup, stopping them near where the light stood.

“Thank you, thank you!” he exclaimed, setting down the camera’s stand first and then fastening the camera to it.

“Of course,” Lin breathed, suddenly nervous to have her photo taken.

The photographer immediately noticed her mood change and put his hands on her shoulders.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make you look,” he closed his eyes and blew a chef's kiss to the side.

Lin nodded and took a deep breath, filling her lungs as much as she could before letting it all out. The photographer made a few adjustments to the camera stand, making sure it would stay while he got her in position, and then led her to the bench. He sat her down in the middle of it and walked back to his camera, dragging the stand loudly over so he was more to her right.

“Don’t be so stiff,” he called, looking at her through the viewfinder and flapping his hand in the air.

“Just- pretend I’m not here, you’re just sitting at home listening to the radio.”

He stepped back from the camera and watched Lin as she settled her head on her left fist with her right elbow on her knee. The photographer gave her a big thumbs up, calling “Much better!” and going back to looking through his camera.

He shifted it a few times before taking any photos, wanting to get it right in as few shots as possible considering the price and rarity of film in stores. Lin looked at the camera for the first few, looking away because of her boredom growing steadily. When he seemed satisfied with the shots, he took the camera off the stand and walked over to the bench.

“Room for another?” he asked, not letting Lin answer before settling himself beside her.

The images printed slowly, one at a time. After each was out, he placed them in the shadow under the bench to protect them from overexposure. Once the last one printed, he reached down and grabbed the first. It had settled well, the colours coming out nice and bright.

“It’s perfect,” Lin gasped, staring in wonder at the photo that managed to make her alright with how she looked out-of-uniform.

The photographer grinned at her, holding the photo up.

“I agree,” he said proudly, forgetting his other photos and standing.

Lin watched as he brought the photo to Kaja, engaging the shorter man in a quick and lively discussion before handing off the photo and walking back. He grinned ear to ear at her, and she sighed before relenting and giving a small smile back.

“Nervous, Chief?” he asked, standing before her with his hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket.

Lin chuckled and shook her head.

“I just haven’t done something like this in ages… or ever, really,” she said, her hands moving to grip the edge of the bench.

“Hey,” the photographer moved to place a hand on her shoulder, prompting her to look up at him.

“You’re doing great, Chief, trust me,” Lin let out a breath and really smiled at him this time.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, meaning it with every ounce of her being.

#lin beifong #chief beifong #legend of korra #fanart #tlok lin #avatar: tlok #tlok #tlok fanart #tlok fanfic #tlokart #lok fanart #lok lin #lok #lin beifong fanfic #fan fiction #fan fic stuff #fanfic #lin fanfic #fanart for fanfic #fanfic for fanart #tlok ocs #tlok oc #oc #ocs #lin fucking beifong #wow i write too much :0 #avatar the legend of korra #avatar: the legend of korra #the legend of korra

[o-w-quinlan]

Action Comics Annual (2021) Review

A good story that sadly cannot escape the inherent classism of the fantasy tropes it uses. The best thing about it is the Superman of its era, Brandon Kent.

I think my favorite thing about it was the way it portrayed the importance of stories. In current times, Byla’s storytelling to the young Phaelosian children is portrayed as a way to hold on to not just their traditions, history and heritage, but onto the hope for a better tomorrow. In the House of El timeline, we see the difference between Brandon Kent’s reaction to the Phantom Zone (he reacts as if it was a mythical hell, long lost to legend but nonetheless real to him) and Ronan Kent’s (he reacts as if it were a piece of history, intellectually knowing it’s dangerous but not really that emotionally affected by it).

The Annual also fleshed out some of the characters from the House of El timeline beyond the vague outlines they were in Future State, particularly Alura, Khan and Brandon. The art does a very good job portraying just how in love Alura and Khan are, every bit the warrior couple we’re told they are (look at how excited Khan is when archvillain Pyrrhos crashes his wedding and challenges him to a real fight) and Brandon has this All Star Superman vibe of being the most relaxed, confident man in the world. He’s also very informal in what’s supposed to be ceremonial settings (my favorite is his comment on how Khan’s wedding gift to Alura of “every drop of blood running through his body” was the most Phaelosian thing ever), and the stubble adds to his whole aura. We see him treat the old elements of Superman lore (the Phantom Zone, Hank Henshaw) as both legendary and alive, a mythical legacy he does his best to live up to and that is so much more to him than just a history lesson. We see his leadership role in the group, his distrust of Henshaw over what he did hundreds of years ago (vindicated), but also his decision to free him from his punishment despite all that because no one deserves to be imprisoned forever. We see him as a father, his sweet relationship with his daughter Theand’r, how she’s starting to try to be independent but still can’t help but hide behind Brandon when danger arrives (until, of course, it’s her turn to save him) being all the more bittersweet in light of what we know their relationship was like in Future State. It was also a passing-of-the-torch story for him, since we see how much he holds onto the past and how he might be past his prime in the final fight, ultimately giving the title of Superman to Ronan. I can’t say I particularly liked that part (no offense to Ronan, but nothing he did in this Annual made him look like the best choice for a successor compared to, say, Alura), but it is what it is.

Speaking of characters, we also have Hank Henshaw here, his design implying he has met Clark (a legend who people doubt even existed in this time in the 30th Century) fairly recently. He has an entirely predictable arc of pretending to be reformed only to betray them in the end, though ultimately the House of El does pardon him from remaining in the Phantom Zone. He does the exposition on how the Phantom Zone has changed and even a nice moment where he describes Jor-El and Kal-El as having thrown every criminal they faced into this hellish dimension. Good to see even in the future he’s devoted to ruining Clark’s legacy as much as possible. Still not as good a “Superman shows Henshaw mercy in hopes of redeeming him” story as Action Comics 999.

Speaking of the Phantom Zone, we have the whole worldbuilding aspect of this issue. The Annual brings back Gerber’s idea of the Phantom Zone as the mind projections of a sleeping God, except now that God has awoken and warped it even further. Except for Henshaw, all of the prisoners we see have warped into Lovecraftian monsters, completely mindless beyond seeking violence or obeying the will of the Phantom Zone God. Some of these designs I liked (particularly the ones hanging from the ceiling when Henshaw starts his explanation), but the majority of them I found boring, the sort of tentacly mess that is way too overused when doing Lovecraft homages. Henshaw did speak of other prisoners who weren’t warped as much and retained their wills, even building villages (which we do see), so I hope we eventually see them.

As for the worldbuilding with the House of El… I’m not as big a fan, though it’s well-crafted. There’s this sense of royalty in almost everything the House of El does (starting with their name) that I don’t like as representative of Clark’s legacy. Speaking of which, these kinds of ceremonies would have to have started with Clark, Kara and maybe Lois and Jon, but none of those 4 are the type to want to do something like this. Kara presiding as the head of the House of El is pretty cool, but her floating above everyone else during the ceremony further emphasizing how above everyone else the House of El is just strikes me as wrong. I mean, it would be one thing if it were an OC, but it’s Kara. In the final scenes she does remain on the ground while finishing the “ceremony”, but that doesn’t change my distaste for the earlier scenes. I also didn’t like how she was easily defeated to make Pyrrhos more menacing. We had previously seen Pyrrhos be absolutely schooled by Clark, so this is implicitely putting her extremely below him in power, which I don’t agree with at this point in their lives. As for Pyrrhos… he was an 80’s cartoon villain here, not even the vague promise of something more in him like in Future State. We also have Alura’s name being Alura Van-El, which is interesting as far as speculating on the family tree goes (Alura, as in Kara’s mother, and Van-El, as in Clark’s son with Lyla Lerrol in the dream scenario in “For The Man Who Has Everything”), but also implies even this far into the future they’re still keeping the patriarchal tradition of women’s names including their father’s, something I had been hoping would change when Thao-La was introduced. We’re also told that Khan doesn't have a named house, which once again emphasizes the “The House of El socially uplifts a lower-caste man through marriage” theme that’s probably intended as progressive (they don’t care who they fall in love with!) but just comes across as classist. It also raises some questions as to current Phaelosians, because Thao-La presumably did have a House given the structure of her name. Is Thao-La's parentage more prestigious than it is implied for Khan? Are there people who do have Houses among the current Phaelosians and people who don't? Is that from Krypton itself, or something that happened over the years?

There’s also the whole imagery at the start with the dark-skinned Phaelosians being slaves constantly in chains, which is... well, troubling. I mean, it's been a thing in the past few issues of Action Comics, but never did it hit quite as hard as here, probably because there were also light-skinned Phaelosians in chains so it didn't feel necessarily racially charged. Not the case here. When PKJ said his run would adress things like racism, I did not expect this. Thankfully the vast majority features Ronan and Rowan instead, who being classical heroes are as far away from the "black person as slave" imagery as possible. Pity that still manifests as Khan, the Phaelosian representative in the future (the symbol of how far they've come) being light-skinned.

I just spend quite a lot of time complaining, but I did find it an overall good story. Even all my complains about the inherent classism has to acknowledge that it was a technically good, very multilayered portrayal of something I hate. I did like the theme of stories and legends and almost everything with Brandon and Theand’r, and despite my distaste for the classism I did like how Alura’s and Khan’s relationship was portrayed. Overall, though, it’s not as exciting as PKJ’s regular issues of Action Comics, and certainly more troubling than them in a lot of ways.

Here’s my favorite panels:

#Superman #Action Comics

[mst3kproject]

Sorority Girl

 It can be hard to find this specific movie, since several others have been made with the same title, even as recently as the nineties.  Us MSTies, however, demand the original – the one with Susan Cabot and June Kenney from The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent and Dick Miller from Gunslinger and It Conquered the World.  It was produced and directed by the reliably awful Roger Corman, and Ms. Cabot has apparently said in interviews that they didn’t really have a script, just a list of stuff that was supposed to happen.  Sorority Girl is a step up from Curse of Bigfoot, but that’s praise so faint that you’d need the Hubble Space Telescope to pick it out.

College student Sabra is a colossal bitch and nobody likes her.  Unsurprisingly, the only person who doesn’t understand the correlation between these two facts is Sabra herself.  Determined that others should suffer the way she has, she plays her sorority sisters against each other until her mind games drive one of them to attempt suicide. Then I think she drowns herself. The end.

On a technical level, Sorority Girl looks and sounds very nice – the photography is crisp and the blocking and direction, while nothing spectacular, tell us what we need to know. You can tell who’s who and remember everybody’s names, and the costume designer did a good job of suggesting everybody’s personalities and goals through their clothing.  The soundtrack puts both music and silence to pretty good use. The only glaring flaw in the film itself is a scene in which the sound of rolling waves almost drowns out the dialogue, but that might just be my sound system.

It’s sufficiently well put-together that it makes me kind of angry, because all that relative competence is in the service of this nasty, depressing movie that hates everybody and everything.  Watching it makes you feel like you need a shower. The movie is here to show us women being horrible and spanking each other (no, really), but it’s not even over-the-top enough to be any fun.

I don’t understand who we’re supposed to root for in this movie.  It can’t be Sabra herself, because she’s thoroughly horrible and there’s not even any reason for her to be doing what she does.  It’s not like the others have wronged her in any way – if they had, perhaps we could take some nasty joy in her revenge but we can’t. If the rest of the girls had any sort of spine we could root for them, but they’re nonentities.  Future student president Rita stands up tall in front of voters but is a pushover in a crunch.  Shy Ellie is nothing but Sabra’s punching bag and we feel sorry for her but she’s too pathetic to actually like.  Troubled Tina is pregnant and we feel for her predicament but she, too, is more an object of pity than a heroine.  Sabra’s mother seems to love her but doesn’t understand what she needs.

Sabra’s motivations remain a mystery even to herself. She makes various excuses for them throughout the movie – she claims she wants revenge on Rita’s boyfriend Mort for snubbing her.  She gets Tina to join her in her blackmail scheme because she says they both need money. At the end she yells at everybody, saying she was driven to this because they wouldn’t let her into their clique. No sort of excuse is ever given for her appalling cruelty to Ellie, who really does seem to look up to her.  In Sabra’s own words, she just feels driven to hurt people and doesn’t know why.

All her schemes fail anyway.  She doesn’t manage to take Mort away from Rita.  She doesn’t manage to get the money she tries to blackmail him for.  She doesn’t even succeed in staying out of trouble for the shit she’s already pulled, since at the end everybody gets together, agrees she’s terrible, and turns her in.  We’re left feeling like this whole story went by and nothing was ever accomplished. The other characters’ stories don’t come to any conclusion either.  We don’t find out if Rita won the election or if she and Mort will get married.  We don’t find out what’s going to happen to Tina other than that her parents are coming to pick her up.  We don’t find out if Ellie got a life.  Everything is just left dangling.

It is never explicit how old any of these characters are supposed to be, but both Sabra and Tina are said to be financially dependent on their parents, and the movie seems to be going for some sort of statement about young people getting into trouble when unsupervised, so I’m going to assume they’re undergraduates.  All the actors are, of course, about thirty.  Some of them, like June Kenney as Tina, look younger.  Some, like Barbara Cowan as Ellie, are trying to look younger and failing.  Others, like Dick Miller as Mort, look older.  The biggest casting mistake was forty-year-old Fay Baker as Sabra’s mother. She’s just barely old enough to have a college-aged child, but Susan Cabot is in no way young enough to be that child. I could buy Baker as Cabot’s stepmother, but when she’s supposed to be her actual mother I just keep thinking of Space Mutiny.

Perhaps it’s not fair to complain about Mort’s age, since he manages the campus pub and may not be a student.  If that’s the case, though, it does make one wonder about his relationship with undergraduate Rita… and the string of prior student girlfriends he’s mentioned… so let’s just not go there.

We get hints that Sabra may be mentally ill. She seems to be upset by her own inability to stop doing terrible things, and at one point reaches out to her mother for help.  Her mother assumes she just wants money, and brushes her off.  Perhaps we’re meant to think Sabra feels ignored and powerless, and therefore seeks power in whatever form she can get it.  We’re probably supposed to feel sorry for her but other than the one visit to her mother she never seems to make any real attempt to better herself.  She gives up, goes back to school, and resumes trying to ruin everybody’s life.  It’s really quite appropriate that the movie is bookended by Sabra sitting on the beach whining about how she wishes she could start over, because it ends exactly where it began.  Sabra is still a colossal bitch and nobody likes her.

If this movie were going to have any sort of punch, I really think it needed to be just a tiny bit longer.  Rather than watching Sabra just sit and cry on the seashore, we needed to see her face the consequences of her actions, whether that was arrest, expulsion, disownment, or some combination of the above.  Her implied suicide is just a means whereby both she and the writers can avoid any thought of consequences, and is inherently unsatisfying.

Watching the movie for the first time, I really expected Tina to jump and for the truth to come out only after she was dead.  Realizing she had somebody’s blood on her hands might have been enough to shock Sabra out of her self-absorbed haze and actually try to be a better person, only to find it was far too late.  That this does not happen is in some ways a relief, but it also kind of feels like the movie chickened out.  Tina dying would certainly not have made Sorority Girl into a good movie, but it would have been a far more impactful one.

On the other hand, Tina not dying includes the single detail in this entire movie that I actually liked.  Throughout the movie, Tina has been sitting on her terrible secret and wondering what to do about it.  She never tells a soul – Sabra only finds out because Ellie, Tina’s room-mate, heard her talking in her sleep – out of fear that she’ll be branded a slut and treated as an outcast.  Such was the 50’s.  Certainly the thought of telling her parents never even seems to occur to her.

But the movie never treats the situation as Tina’s fault.  Her pregnancy is not a punishment as Paula’s was in The Violent Years, it’s just a problem that exists and one Tina isn’t coping with very well.  Other than Sabra, everybody who finds out about it takes steps to help.  Ellie immediately tells Sabra because she believes that Sabra will know what to do – and when Sabra orders her to keep the secret for Tina’s sake, Ellie does so even when interrogated by the house mother.  Sabra, being the colossal bitch she is, then blackmails Tina into blackmailing Mort, threatening to tell everybody he’s the father unless he gives her money.  Mort refuses to be blackmailed but he doesn’t judge Tina for being pregnant.  Instead, once she’s gone he gets in touch with her parents for her… and they don’t judge her either, but immediately come to her aid. So good on the writers, if there were any, for that!

This solidarity also makes the point that all the girls in this sorority really are there for each other and it’s literally just Sabra who is the reason they can’t have nice things.  I still don’t know if we’re really supposed to feel sorry for Sabra but this particular detail makes it even harder.

Of all the movies that were ever on MST3K, the one Sorority Girl most reminds me of is The Sidehackers.  They don’t have anything in common plot-wise, but both have endings in which nobody wins and it seems like there was no point besides to make the audience feel crummy and lose all faith in the human race.  I don’t know what was going on in the year 1957, but here in 2020 we do not need help with that shit.  I’m gonna go watch Pixar movies for the rest of the week.

#mst3k #reviews #sorority girl #episodes that never were #tw: suicide #fuck this movie #50s

[questionthebox]

Poets Diary

before I go to sleep, I want to put this forward, as ive been reading many of the essays, on black agenda report, which are a boon, of revelations, to understanding things, especially, as I feel for myself, I could never write the way those people write, in essence as they are scribes, and heroes like myself, frankly don’t process information the way scribes do, and those scribes act almost as a left wing priest and priestess class, giving us slaves, this sort of magic that keys our development, 

this being said, I was reading their essays on Clarence Thomas & President Obama, who in my reading are more similar, in this way which isn’t ever understood about black people, and what its frankly like to be a person of color really, its what I'll call the “weirdo factor” of the insularities and insecurities stemming from growing up as an other in a horribly oppressive truly hateful, Earth-society, 

these isolated weirdos like Obama and Thomas, every part of their thought and ideas goes to a very rudimentary sense of their material experience, a lot of it is sexual, what I mean by this, is something ive long understood since I was a kid, about people of color in the United States and perhaps elsewhere, this also applies to white folks to but I won’t get into that, but a lot of people of color because of their “weirdness” experience, delayed sexual experience or odd sexual experiences or neutered sexual experiences or violent sexual experiences, my mothers insanity stems mostly from the constant rapes she endured as a light skin black girl in her youth, it fundamentally shattered her, I would say, if we could ever get Obama and Thomas in a room and ask them truthfully about their experiences we’d find things along the same spectrum, further in this, I wasn’t fully candid about my experience with that black girl I grew up with in Long Beach who I ended up rejecting, who told me she was still a virgin at age 28, I rejected her frankly because I sensed in her that aspect, that “weirdo being” which frankly is the mark of a Slave, 

in this, I understand and have no problem presenting my identity as mixed race, mixed class, the rogue pirate other, the romantic other, of which I know my white girlfriends seem to like the most, I don’t deny this within myself, but I do believe it makes me the best vessel for liberation for my people, which includes blacks, because I don’t share the full black experience, that ive seen it from afar that at times ive seen it intimately, I being the mixed raced, educated rogue, I can better articulate it, because I was frankly never a slave, I was frankly always “ancient Egypt” do you know what I mean ? 

you cannot and this even goes to the scribes I mentioned, but you can never trust people any of these people who have had their souls marked by slavery, yes they can reveal things that align truth together, but those people aren’t ever revolutionaries or visionaries, in this I'll be honest I'm breaking away from a solidarity with “slaves” I'm not going to listen to them anymore, because most want to wallow, meaning they want to present their abstract slave identities up front, when what should be focused is, what I saw working for the Census, going into the black projects, seeing dark skin black boys, half naked, literally playing in piles of filth, with their only hope, being the NFL or NBA, or this recent boon in interracial pornography, no non binary dyke black or Latina lesbian bitch, is ever going to discuss those conditions adequately in destroying them, violently confronting these sadistic white rulers who own everything on planet earth, they’re just not going to do it, they don’t have it in them, because they’re slaves, you cannot unslave people, through what its being presented, the only way to unslave people, is to violently destroy everything, and rebuild everyone and everything, to then they can choose who they authentically are, these new alternative identities so popular now, aren’t authentic, that’s why there's pushback intirnsically from normal people, from bigots, and from some leftists who want to be abstract and say “we have to stop using identity politics” 

everything goes back to a question of authenticity, even Obama and Thomas deal with this in their writings without realizing it, they anguish in their lack of authenticity, Obama pursues it by being a coward, probably because his white mother and white grandparents who raised him, told him to not “misbehave” 

authenticity died, 

when my fathers ancestors Lol, Spaniards, other Europeans, got on their ships, and sailed around the world, fucking other people, I want to key that point, its not that they enslaved other people, funny thing to note I watched this interview with the great historian Gerald Horne, and he pointed out in the heyday of slavery, europeans would abduct all dark skin people the world over and put them in different parts of the world, quite fascinating really, they essentially made a skin tone a byword for a condition, but anyway its was that they FUCKED the people the conquered, they fucked them all, women, older women, young girls, little girls, boys, teenage boys, little boys, men, older men, I mean FUCKING was the essential ingredient to it all, that everyone overlooks, but its why sex tourism exists, its why things such as the sexually exotic mixed race woman are celebrated in mass media, its why ladyboys exist, I mean I could go on, the identities that are called alternative, only exist because of European colonialism, they aren’t truly authentic ! why don’t people get that, 

there’s a taboo, in modernity, what I’ll call the instisintnce of niceness and decorum, I as a mixed race person, just shit on that, I remember my former male mentor who was a criminal once told me that our ancestors were pirates, he too was mixed race, and he always used to stress to me “what do you know about human nature” in the context of him saying that, it came from us watching 12 years of a slave, me being in my early 20′s at the time, could not accept the depiction of a black woman willingly married to a white slave owner, living in bliss, my inherent polite liberal decorum, wouldn’t allow me to see the world as it really is, 

the world that is this, piracy, prostitution, ignorance, childishness, mediocrity, the world of New Orleans in the 19th century, where ignorant lumpens interacted with each other through music, sex, and food, that is the real world, where some red headed Irish bitch fresh off the boat, gets work at a New Orleans brothel, falls in love with some creole fast talking criminal, they have a kid they both abandon, who plays jazz music, but also has to hustle by selling his ass in homosexual dalliances, with rich white patrons, 

THAT is the real world, 

how to destroy that world, and reset the world, with no hierarchy, with no prejudice, or exploitation, that is the key, but to do that, will take violence, you have to violently overthrow the europeans, and it also has to be decentralized, it has to be democratic, it has to be frankly communism-anarchism, it cannot be anything else, it also has to be fundamentally feminist, but it also has to have beauty, you have to present something people will actually like doing, for example, instead of having McDonalds, why don’t we educate the citizens of the world to build spaceships, or to utilize the biology of the planet with technology, you have to incorporate everyones neat gift for creativity, something I realized by looking at CAVE PAINTINGS. 

look at cave paintings, look at how detailed they are, they look like they were painted by master painters who had years of experience, instead they were painted by the first of us, who didn’t know anything about the technical aspects of art, and these things still came out TOP NOTCH, 

#poets on tumblr #writers on tumblr #my thoughts #leftist #anarchist #prose

[sowingseedsandshootinghoops]

How to Find Ways to Acknowledge the Experience of an “Other”

Note on the text: Self Made Man: One Woman’s Year as a Man by Norah Vincent as published by Penguin Books in 2007

Everyone has probably wondered at some time or another what it would feel like to be a member of the opposite sex. That’s what pushed Norah to create the character of Ned, and for a whole year she got a taste of what it feels like to be a man in the modern world. Now as someone who is a man, none of her revelations really surprised me. What did surprise me was her humility, specifically her ability to admit that even after a year of going through the world as a male that she still did not fully understand what the male experience is. 

Let me try to be more specific. We live in a world full of people who are struggling to understand and empathize with each other. It seems like a lot of people’s knee jerk reaction these days is to simply discount and/or ignore what they cannot understand. So if one person comes forward and talks about his or her experience of the world, and that experience does not line up with another person’s experience of it, that second person is liable to do whatever they can to discredit the experience of the first. To call them crazy, or say that they are somehow mistaken, or that there is a another, easier explanation for what happened to that person that does not involve radically one’s word view. 

It’s not had to see real world examples of this. In 2017 when the #MeToo movement took it really exposed the dark underbelly of American society. Everyone, especially men, were deeply disturbed at the amount of sexism faced by women every day. More than the acts themselves however, these stories revealed just how different a woman’s experience of the world is from a man’s. How their perception of the world, as a result of those experiences, differs greatly from ours. For too long, men have found ways to ignore the women who were brave enough to come forward and tell their stories. The stories they were telling did not match up with our experiences of men, and who we thought men were, and rather than try to adapt ourselves in such a way that we could account for their world view we just ignored it. It was easier that way. It was easier to ignore what the women were saying than it was to admit that there was a possibility that we were wrong, or that at least our perception of what men were was somehow incomplete. So we said that they were exaggerating, or that they needed to dress more conservatively, or that they were somehow “asking for it”. We even sought to blame them for men’s lustful thoughts. Which is just terrible. We thought that because we live in the same world as women, and encounter the same men that they do, that we knew what their experience of the world was, and that therefore we had the authority to simply discount any account of the world that did not line up with ours. Which, in case it wasn’t obvious, we don’t. Every person has a unique perception of the world because of the way in which they experience it, and that perception of the world is neither better nor worse than anyone else’s. Everyone’s experience of the world is equally valid, and to simply ignore another person’s account of the world because it does not line up with our own is extremely unjust.

A similar thing happened more recently in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement. Although many people, including white people, were horrified when they saw the video of George Floyd, a defenseless black man, being murdered by a white cop, there were plenty of white people who struggled with who to incorporate what they saw on that video screen, and what other black people were telling them about their experiences with cops, with what they had experiences with cops were and what they “knew” cops to be. But again, rather than adapt their world view in such a way that they could incorporate what black people were saying about cops into their worldview regarding said cops, it was easier for those white people (again  it was not all white people) to simply ignore the information that was being presented to them. They started saying things like “He must have done something to provoke those cops”, or “Racism? That’s not a thing anymore. We had a black president”. Again, any experience or worldview that does not line up with our own simply gets thrown out. Again, we assume that because we walk in the same world as black people physically, and even have experiences with the same cops that they do, that our experience with those cops must be the same as theirs and if it isn’t than it means that they are somehow wrong.

As a side note, before diving into the book itself, I’ve never understood how people can be so arrogant as to believe that they are right and everyone else is wrong. Such an extreme level of arrogance is both extremely infuriating and a more than a little confusing to me. I was in a record store once and stumbled upon a compilation album entitled “50,000,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong”. Clearly there are people out there who disagree. But I’ve never understood how someone can be so confident in what they think they know that they are willing to completely discredit, and outright ignore, what is being told to them by tens of thousands of others. Do they really think that every black person, every woman etc in the world has gotten together and conspired to them all the same lie? Isn’t easier to assume instead that there must be some truth to what they are saying even if you cannot understand it? Doesn’t Occam’s razor apply as much here as it does anywhere else? I simply don’t understand. . . .

Regardless, I doubt anyone has gone through the same amount of trouble to put themselves in the shoes of another person as Norah did. For her to spend a year living as a male in order that she might be understand the male experience is extraordinary. So it surprise me to see the level of humility that she showed when describing what she experienced as Ned. She knew that her experiences were her own, that her perception of what it means to be a man were her own, and she didn’t use her own experience to discredit the experience of other people, especially other men: 

Nothing I say here will have any value other except as one person’s observations about her own experience. What follows is just my view of things, myopic, and certain inapplicable to something [as] grand as a pronouncement of gender in American society. My observations are full of my own prejudice and preconceptions though I have tried as much as possible to qualify them accordingly. This book is a travelogue. . . a woman’s eye view of one guy’s approximated life, not an authoritative guide to the vast and variegated terrain of manhood in America (17). 

In other words she knows and is willing to admit that, despite her intense amount of research and the way that she completely submerged herself in this research project, that she does not have the right to discount the experiences of others, especially other males, even if those experiences directly contradict her own. This is surprising especially when you consider the fact that there are a lot of people out there that are not willing to make the same concession despite the fact that they have never even tried to actually walk in the shoes of another person. Those people who discount the experiences of black people, women, members of the LGBT community etc, have never tried as hard to walk around in their world as Norah did to try and walk around in the world of men. To some extent, it would have made sense if she wanted to pound her chest and declare that she had learned something absolute about the world of men and that anyone who disagreed with her was wrong. The fact that she didn’t is extremely impressive. 

It is high time to stop  discrediting the experiences of those who are different to us. It’s hard sometimes to incorporate those worldviews and merge them with our own, but that does not mean that they should be ignored. No one person’s worldview is inherently better than another’s. They’re just different. There’s a story about a bunch of men who enter into a cave that is pitch black to touch an elephant. Every man touches a different part, one touches the tusks, another the ears, another the elephant’s feet etc, and when they get out they all have contradictory opinions of what an elephant is based on the part of the elephant that they touched. They all had a distinctly different experience of the elephant, but none of them were really wrong. They were just limited by the amount of information given to them through their experience, just as we all are. We are all limited in the number of things that we can experience about the world, and therefore are limited in what we can directly learn about it. That is why it is so important than we listen to each other and not simply ignore what the other person says. They might simply be touching a different part of the elephant called life

#norahvincent #metoo #blm #georgefloyd #experience #listentoeachother #everyoneisunique #selfmademan

[helloitsthecynincalaesthete-blog]

The Handmaid’s Tale: Prophecy or Inevitably?

Lydia Cole-November 2018

“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.” It’s amazing how much the world has changed within the past decade, and even within the last few years. Eleven years ago, the first iPhone was released. Ten years ago, Obama was sworn in as the first African American President of the United States. Scientists are close to figuring out how to edit human DNA. Twenty-seven countries have legalized same sex marriage. This is truly the era of change. Sometimes, change happens so quickly that we don’t even really realize that life is different from what it was before.

The Handmaid’s Tale, a thrilling show set in a near future dystopia is all about change, big or small. The story itself isn’t new: it’s been around for over 30 years, since Margaret Atwood’s novel (by the same name) was published in 1985. Bruce Miller has done a better justice to the harrowing themes in Atwood’s novel than any other adaptation has; Atwood herself even stated that the realness of Miller’s story was too horrific to watch at times. It draws inspiration from different historical avenues: Lebensborn (a Nazi program that encouraged higher birth rates), America’s Puritan roots, and East Germany/The Iron Curtain, to name a few. The greatest accomplishment of Miller’s show is that it’s a feminist driven shock value, meant to prevent us from making the increasing anguish throughout the world our  new normal.                                                                 The Handmaid’s Tale is set in the Republic of Gilead, which was formerly the United States. The world is plagued with environmental disasters, as well as low fertility and birth rates. A religious extremist group took it upon themselves to make America great again; They made it look like their actions to abolish the government were the acts of Islamic terrorist groups. Once the religious extremists gained power, they forcibly separated fertile women from their families to create reproductive slaves or forced surrogates or ‘handmaids’. These handmaids are captives in the houses of a specific commander and his wife, who cannot bear children.  Once a month, these women are held down and raped during ‘The Ceremony’. It was either this or exile to the Colonies, where these women would spend the rest of their lives cleaning up nuclear waste from the waging war.

Moss leads the cast as the protagonist, Offred, a feisty feminist trapped as a handmaid in a society where a single toe out of line could end her life. She can’t let that happen though. She has to stay alive so that she can find her daughter, Hannah, who was taken from her. Moss’s narration gives us an insight to all Offred’s snarky thoughts. Many people tend to find voice-over narration an example of lazy writing, or unnecessary exposition. But for a character who is allowed to speak very little (mostly in repeated phrases) the voice-over is a welcomed device.    

We get to know Offred quite well throughout the show: not just through the narration of her thoughts, but also through flashbacks to her life before, with her family. These flashbacks allow the audience to piece together how not just Offred ended up in Gilead but also how little changes led to America becoming Gilead. . We see her and her colleagues being escorted out of the office because women can’t earn an income anymore. She can’t withdraw from an ATM or even use her debit card to pay for coffee. Flashbacks also tend to be an annoying narrative.  But in this case, they work in favor of the story rather than against it.

   It is not the flashbacks, narration, or dialogue, that shows off Moss’s spectacular acting. Rather, it’s the silence in between, the expressions on her face, the defiance that shows in Offred’s eyes as she is being slapped or tazed or whipped. Moss does have some of her work cut out for her because Offred is a brilliantly written character. I mean, what kind of person cracks jokes while looking at the dead bodies hanging above her? But Moss’s choice to play the character with astonishing nonchalance is audacious and sensational; her performance carries the show. You can’t have a well written protagonist without an equally enthralling villain. Or in this case, villains. We can say that the obvious villain is the patriarchy, or the system that designed the role of handmaids in the first place. But these are just ideas, mentalities.  The Handmaid’s Tale is less about the  patriarchy itself and more about the women who uphold it.

Acting alongside Moss is Yvonne Strahovski (Chuck) as Mrs. Waterford and Ann Dowd (Compliance) as Aunt Lydia, the tormenting handmaid handler. Neither of them are inherently evil. They believe that what they are doing is for the greater good of Gilead. What makes them great villains is the fact that they aren’t far off figures, like ‘Big Brother’, or whimsical in their villainy like Captain Hook. They’re written well because they’re so real, so raw. Mrs. Waterford helped create Gilead because she believes in love and in family. All she wants more than anything is a child. Aunt Lydia, though harsh and unwavering in her punishments, truly cares for the handmaids, ‘her girls’. She is a twisted motherlike figure; she punishes but only to ready the handmaids for their divine purpose. Miller has effectively created villains that you will love to hate.

Although the show has many strong points, there are many people that argue that it’s distastefully explicit. Even if you know it’s coming, there’s something new and unnerving about watching Offred lay on the lap of Mrs. Waterford while she is being raped by the Commander. We see the handmaids casually observe the bodies of hanging men, marked by their crimes: Catholic, gay, abortion clinic worker. There is a woman who is repeatedly shamed until she believes that it was her fault that she was gang-raped. These scenes don’t show everything, but they show enough.  Margaret Atwood herself  said that there were a few times where she had to avert her eyes because it was a scene was so horrific.  The show tells a fantastic story but the violence show on screen is what’s preventing a wider audience from tuning in. it’s not a show for the faint of heart.

The show would be unwatchable if it was all doom and gloom; American Horror Story being the example that springs to mind. But, it isn’t. Just like in every story of oppression, there is resistance. There is a spark, hope, that crackles in the darkness. Many of the handmaids come together in resistance, the taste of freedom on the tip of their tongues. In our society, women resist by speaking up: they post on social media, they petition, they protest, and they march. They make themselves known, because how else will they make change happen?. But in Gilead, resistance is a quiet whisper that is carried on the wind: Mayday. Hope. Freedom. Reunion. It is human nature to resist oppression, and the Handmaid’s Tale provides a splendid exhibition of that fact.

The most horrific part of this show does not lie in its explicit nature.. It’s the extreme similarities  to the reality that we live in, even though the story is based off of events that happened 30+ years ago. Moss herself thinks that using the violent nature of the show as a reason not to watch it is a weak excuse. She said, “I hate hearing that someone couldn’t watch it because it was too scary[…] I’m like, ‘Really? You don’t have the balls to watch a TV show? This is happening in your real life. Wake up, people. Wake up.’” The show’s timely premiere, close in hand with Trump’s inauguration seems coincidental. Was it? Either way, women have started dressing up in the iconic red robes and white bonnets worn by the handmaids when attending various women’s rights marches. Trump’s new policies, especially those in favor of anti-abortion, are being perceived as threatening to women. Discrimination against working mothers and women who choose not to be mothers are still battles that women continue to fight.

This ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ wasn’t written to be some urgent prophecy, but still as a potential warning of what might come to past. Aunt Lydia, a strong believer in the ‘greater good’ said it best: “Things may not seem ordinary to you right now. But they will.” It’s a dictation of the process that humans go through when they start to numb themselves towards the harrowing atrocities happening around the world, to the point where it’s becoming normal. It’s only when we look back on ‘the good ole days’ will we realize that it’s too late.  

#the handmaid's tale #prophecy #abortion #trump #elizabeth moss #review #tv show #margaret atwood #book

[rootfauna]

A Handmaiden’s Tale. Specifically, Mine.

I’e been debating on whether or not to make this post for a while now, and I’ve decided that the benefits of saying my piece outweigh any hate I’ll get for this. It’s really long but I have no more fucks to give. 

I am so, so, sick of the trend in radical feminism of calling women who aren’t radical feminists “cocksuckers” “wastes of time” “dick riders” “sellouts” “cowards” and “handmaidens”. Anti feminist women and liberal feminist women can be incredibly annoying and have made me want to put my head through a wall, and I honestly can’t blame anyone for making a snide remark about them here or there. But I absolutely cannot wrap my mind around the fact that a group of women who supposedly A) understands the misogyny of using a woman’s (real of hypothetical) sexual interactions with a man as an insult against her, B) acknowledges the realities of female socialization in a patriarchal society and C) understands the potential dangerous outcomes of a woman speaking up against misogyny, can go around unabashedly talking about women this way. Every time I scroll through my dash I’ll come across at least one post lamenting how young girls are indoctrinated into believing their worth lies in their beauty, femininity, and (hetero)sexuality. Why then, do I see so much vitriol directed at the ones who believed it? 

The last time I spoke about this I was accused of ‘making it all about myself’ because I shared a snippet of my personal experience. Well, I’m about to share more than a snippet. Yet this isn’t about me, and I will be the first one to tell you that I am nowhere near unique in this sense. So I guess this is actually the experience of thousands and thousands of women, this is just how it happened to me:

To start with, y’all need to understand where I grew up. If the ‘y’all’ wasn’t a big enough clue, I grew up in bumfuck nowhere USA. Here’s another fact that’s vital to my story: I was born in 1991. That fact, coupled with my geographic location, meant that when I started school in 1996, corporal punishment was still legal (to be carried out by the principal) and up until around that time my mother could still legally sign documents as “mrs” *insert my father’s name*. 

Growing up in this environment meant that gender roles were highly enforced around me and that at an early age I saw deviance from them met with hatred and scorn. I could name plenty of examples, but really, haven’t we all seen that? Even the respectable women who dared not be housewives never rose to a more prominent position than a teacher, bank clerk, or selling Mary Kay. Before the age of about 10 I have absolutely no memory of seeing a woman in a position of skill and power beyond these things except for Terry Irwin on tv. It might be noted that I grew up wanting to be a zookeeper. I don’t remember the first time I heard the word “feminist” but from my earliest recollection it was not a good word. Then, as today in my neck of the woods, “feminist” is an insult. I can remember sitting in the back seat of the car listening to my father and his friend ranting about something they heard on the radio about how “the feminists” (word spat out like tobacco juice) were ruining something or other. It was clear to me that whatever these feminists were, they were bad. 

Things really kicked into gear once I got into middle school. What had been a vague concept in the back of my mind was now pulled to the front of the classroom. I distinctly remember sitting in 7th grade biology and learning about the inherent differences between male and female brains. The teacher explained how our brains were wired differently, and that male brains were designed so that logical and analytical thought came naturally to them, but expressing emotion and communicating did not. This, the teacher said, is why men often erupt into fits of anger rather than say how they feel. On the other hand, female brains were designed to have ease of communication, and to be more aware of our own emotions and those of others. They were not designed for quick, logical, rational thinking. Don’t get me wrong; it was never taught to me that women were incapable of logical, rational, thinking, just that we were biologically at a disadvantage to men in that regard. I tried (like other girls in the class) to have some pride in my lady-brain. I’m wired to be better at something than a boy! Ha! Though it was around this time I began to shift my focus away from scientific pursuits and towards the arts. 7th grade was also the beginning of outright public sexual harassment that no adult seemed to give a shit about. There was “thong Thursday”, for example. We 12-13 year old girls were encouraged by the boys to wear thongs and lean over so that they could see the tops of them, or to wear our jeans low enough for them to peek over. This happened openly in the halls, but never once addressed by the adults. And woe to any girl who spoke out about it. That much feared “feminist!” accusation could be hurled at her, and she’d be publicly humiliated and mocked, and no one would dare help her lest they be feminist by association. There was also ‘grab-ass Wednesday’ which makes absolutely no sense but is exactly what you’re thinking. 

The official school lesson on male and female brains resurfaced again, this time in 10th grade sociology class. This time in addition to the physical differences in the brains, we learned about inherent differences in behavior and societal roles. It was honestly something taken straight from some MRA’s drivel; men evolved to be the Strong Hunter Protector of the species, brain different, this why big words make man ANGRY he hit you because his brain can’t make his mouth talk feelings he want to BREED. Woman want BABY lots of emotions need man to protec blah blah blah. To us at this point, all of this was objective fact. Also at this point, the effects and impact of female socialization were starting to become disgustingly apparent. Around this time the security officer at the school was fired for ‘having sex’ with a fourteen year old freshman. It was so SCANDALOUS because...what a SLUT! It would not occur to me until YEARS later that maybe sex between a 14 year old girl and the adult male security officer hired to protect her was...uh, rape. As high school continued, so did the development of our female anti-feminism. I’ve seen radfems on here discuss how men are socialized to think that their thoughts and emotions are objective fact, but I’ve never seen it pointed out that women are socialized to believe so, too. As interactions with boys became more frequent their attention became more and more prized. When a boy said “you’re beautiful” or “you’re not like the other girls” or “you’re smart” it was seen as a pure and shining compliment, a shining nugget of truth. If a girl said the same thing? You never knew, she could just be two-faced, she would change her mind in a matter of seconds, or just be on her period. Of course, we began to strive to receive more compliments from boys because what teenager DOESN’T want to be respected and valued by their peers? 

By the end of high school several of my peers were married and/or had a baby already. I had intended to go to school for journalism, but in a sudden fit of either teenage rebellion or wisdom, I took the plunge into working with animals. This saw me moving about a thousand miles away from my home town, my parents, friends, and all forms of social support. As it turns out, animal training and handling, particularly dog training and handling, is an incredibly male dominated field. Even compared to my previous life experience, it was extremely misogynistic. I found myself working long shifts at night, often with only male coworkers who were near universally older, larger, and stronger than I was. Here, I was expected to laugh it off when one of them said that if the world were about to end, the first thing he’d do was rape me. Or when my boss joked about raping me. Or when one of them (more or less out of nowhere) said that he didn’t think there would ever be a female president because “when I think “president” I think “man””. I did what I was supposed to do and took some satisfaction in their approval despite my first, suppressed, twinge of discomfort. In a strange city, in a strange area of the country, sleeping during the day and working long hours, I had little elsewhere to look for friendship and social interaction. So I made friends. Long night shifts with no one else to talk to and little else to do will do that to people. Of course, I wasn’t the ONLY woman at my place of work. I was friendly with the other women but the lifelong effects of being socialized to view women as inferior kept any of us from growing too close to each other. After all, despite growing up elsewhere they had similar upbringings. When they weren’t present the men openly chatted about who they thought the woman had slept with, how smelly her vagina must be, what her nipples probably looked like, and I held my tongue still under the delusion that if I was Good and Not Like the Other Girls, they wouldn’t speak like that about me behind my back. Feminism was only mentioned to mock women, or, more importantly, to bring up how the the country was sexist against men. The men lamented about how “in this country a man can’t be raped I guess” and “female special privileges” and “the DRAFT” and I believed them, because I didn’t have much of a reason or incentive not to. Women were viewed and treated as walking cries of rape unless they laughed when groped. 

I called one of these male friends one night, in tears. My kitten, a tiny little thing named Ginkgo, had escaped from my apartment and I pleaded with him to help me search for her. He came over and we searched in vain for her. I was heartbroken, sobbing, and desperate for comfort and when the hug I was given became lustful I tried to refuse. He argued that I had woken him up in the middle of the night to come all the way to my home to look for a lost kitten; I owed it to him. That it wasn’t fair for me to refuse him and that it was selfish of me to expect compassion and company for nothing in return. And at that time in my life, I believed him. It was only fair. Afterwards, alone in my apartment, I was confronted with the reality that the only reason anyone would ever show me compassion, love, or kindness was because I was female and therefore potential sex. At the time, I was beginning to realize I was asexual (though it would be many years before I had a word for it). It was like I had been shown that my worth, my worthiness of love and life, and all my achievements were housed in my sensuality and sexuality. And I didn’t posses either. Dark times, I tell ya. Of course, there was no chance of me seeking sympathy from any female friends or acquaintances for what took place. Years later when a man in a bar shoved his finger inside me and I smashed a beer mug over his head I was berated by my female companions for overreacting and ruining the night. Further blows to any sense of being anything other than “woman” came in the form, ironically, of my achievements. I excelled at dog handling, particularly scent detection and received many an award for it, each time being told by my male peers that the only reason I received it was because I was a woman. I took my awards with a pinch of shame, believing I had taken it from a more deserving man. 

 It was around this time I first dipped my toes in the shallow end of feminism. I got a Tumblr! I was about 23. The internet wasn’t too big a thing when I was growing up and I got my first social media account when I was 17, the year I moved out. Until I logged onto the blue hell site, I didn’t use the internet outside of facebook (with only my irl friends there to form an echo chamber) and looking up definitions of words. Now, for the first time, I discovered that feminism wasn’t taboo everywhere. Fascinating! Of course, the “feminism” I found was pretty much identical to the patriarchal world I lived in, just with more lipstick. But it was a step. Secret radfem blog? Shit, I had a secret libfem blog and was still terrified of being found out by people I knew. I had good reason, too. When I tried to, very tentatively, voice some opinions that were not male-approved, I was met with swift and immediate backlash. I mentioned to a male coworker that I didn’t want children, which ended with him screaming at me to go out and have a hysterectomy right now if I really didn’t want any because I was being stupid and of course I wasn’t serious otherwise I’d just rip my uterus out. Or when I voiced concern over that one politician that said women should be forced to deliver stillbirths naturally because that’s what happened on his farm and was publicly berated for being a crybaby and a little girl, freaking out over ‘one weird fluke’. Still, I grew more and more interested in feminism. I spent a year deeeep in the libbiest-of libfem glitter-choked hells until one fateful day: I saw a study that proved there was no such thing as brainsex. 

My entire perception of reality was irreparably shattered. Over the course of a few days, I was forced to realize that I had been lied to my entire life. I had been lied to by my teachers and the adults in my life as a kid, I was forced to realize how deeply sexist and inappropriate the boys at schools were being, that I was taught in school to excuse male violence as not their fault, that no one ever owed anyone sex, that what my coworkers and ‘friends’ were saying was blatantly false and not ok, that I was just as capable of pursuing a scientific field as a man, to realize just how much the most important people in my life really hated me. And I was forced to confront the fact that I had backed myself into a corner, cut off any escape routes, and that I relied on the acceptance of these men for my safety and job security. That made the next few years......uncomfortable. And yet, bit by bit, little by little, I’ve pulled myself away from that world and set up a new life for myself. I’ve said goodbye to a lot of people. I’ve hurt a lot. I’ve cringed a lot. The antifeminist keyboard smashing seen on radfem posts is something I could have (and probably would have) typed myself back then, safe in the conviction that I was right. 

“No one held a gun to your head and forced you to be an antifeminist” I’ve been told. That’s true, I guess. At nine, after riding my bike to the one small library in town I could have checked out a book by Dworkin (whom I’d never heard of) from the feminist section (which may or may not have existed) instead of Animorphs. I could have walked around shouting “hey, anyone want to be a feminist so I can see how it’s done?” to try and find someone to look up to. I could have, upon getting internet in my late teens, immediately googled “how to be a feminist”, but I didn’t so my bad. Certainly there were girls who grew up in similar circumstances who were always feminists, and certainly there are women who grew up with outlets for feminism that are antifeminist, but I feel my story is a much more common one and in the end at least I made it. I think most radfems have had a libfem phase and I think most of us would cringe at it, but in so many ways I’m grateful for it. Not only did it introduce me to the movement that would change my life, but it was inviting and welcoming. I cannot, and DO NOT want to imagine what would have happened if, seeking to find voice for my discomfort, I had come across radical feminism first and saw the words that were beginning to cut so deeply echoed by the women who claimed to be for women. Cocksucker. Waste of time. Stupid. Coward. Being told I ‘lapped it all up’. The thought of it really makes me uncomfortable, and I think the only message it all would have sent was “Your entire world is against you and hates you but also you wanted it and it’s your fault.”. 

I see radfems speak often about non western women and how they face and view sexism. It’s quite universally accepted that non western women are acutely aware of biological sex and wouldn’t stand for this gemgender floridesexual nonsense and that’s lauded as a sort of....kinship I guess. When I see radfems speak about non western women in this way, I feel they have a sense of kinship with them, like they’re one of the radfem crowd. I wonder, however, what the women who grew up and lived in those environments would really think about everything radical feminism stands for? Surely some would agree completely, but how often do you see women in these situations agree that rape is sometimes (or always) the girl’s fault? Or that women should not be educated? Are they still our sisters, or cock sucking cowards? And is the extension of sisterhood dependent on their hypothetical ability to, if they hold these beliefs, listen to what feminists have to say and change their minds to agree? Let’s say the woman in your gifsets is presented with these resources and never changes her mind. What then? Even still I've seen it said that anti feminist women will never change so there’s no point in trying. I see libfems pointing to non western cultures with ‘other’ genders and saying ‘see? see? THEY agree with me! They’d agree with liberal feminism!’ and I see radfems pointing to non western women and saying ‘see? see? THEY agree with me! They’d agree with radical feminism!’ and I can’t help but see these cultures and women within them being pressed into an ideal of one argument or the other purely for internet posturing. 

I’m very disheartened to see the movement which once seemed so academic and helpful to me seeming to become a ‘cool girls’ club. Sisterhood, compassion, and help, but only for women who think the way we do. Others are there to be mocked. It’s eerily similar to the way we laughed at the ‘other’ girls in high school, completely full of ourselves and thinking we were so much better. 

When I think of anti feminist women, I see the little girl being told men were prone to violence instead of talking because that’s how they were built, I see the girl being called a whore for being raped by someone she was told to trust, and I see the women pitted against each other, who have never had a feminist role model, and the girls who harbor a strange feeling of discontent and isolation they can’t articulate. I don’t see wastes of time. 

If you’re still reading, thank you. 

#hooooooboy #that was long

[billyagogo]

Hillary in Midair

New Post has been published on https://newsprofixpro.com/moxie/2021/02/11/hillary-in-midair/

Hillary in Midair

Photo: Douglas Friedman/Trunk Archive

For four years, Hillary Rodham Clinton flew around the world as President Barack Obama’s secretary of State, while her husband, the former president Bill Clinton, lived a parallel life of speeches and conferences in other hemispheres. They communicated almost entirely by phone. They were seldom on the same continent, let alone in the same house.

But this year, all that has changed: For the first time in decades, neither one is in elected office, or running for one. Both are working in the family business, in the newly renamed nonprofit that once bore only Bill’s name but is now called the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which will hold its annual conference in New York next week.

“We get to be at home together a lot more now than we used to in the last few years,” says Hillary Clinton. “We have a great time; we laugh at our dogs; we watch stupid movies; we take long walks; we go for a swim.

“You know,” she says, “just ordinary, everyday pleasures.”

In the world of the Clintons, of course, what constitutes ordinary and everyday has never been either. So the question was inevitable: Given who he is, and who she is, does Bill, among their guffaws over the dogs and stupid movies, harangue her daily about running for president?

To this, Hillary Rodham Clinton lets loose one of her loud, head-tilted-back laughs. “I don’t think even he is, you know, focused on that right now,” she says. “Right now, we’re trying to just have the best time we can have doin’ what we’re doin’. ”

There’s a weightlessness about Hillary Clinton these days. She’s in midair, launched from the State Department toward … what? For the first time since 1992, unencumbered by the demands of a national political campaign or public office, she is saddled only with expectations about what she’s going to do next. And she is clearly enjoying it.

“It feels great,” she says, “because I have been on this high wire for twenty years, and I was really yearning to just have more control over my time and my life, spend a lot of that time with my family and my friends, do things that I find relaxing and enjoyable, and return to the work that I had done for most of my life.”

Relaxing, for a Clinton, especially one who, should she decide to run, is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in 2016, does not seem exactly restful. The day before we speak, she was awarded the Liberty Medal by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia—presented by Jeb Bush, another politician weighted with dynastic expectations and family intrigue, who took the opportunity to jest that both he and Clinton cared deeply about Americans—especially those in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

Afterward, Clinton stepped backstage, a red-white-and-blue ribbon around her neck pulled taut by a saucer-size gold medal. “It is really heavy,” she said, with that plain-home midwestern tone she deploys when she wants to not appear the heavy herself. In the room with her were some of her close advisers—Nick Merrill, a communications staffer and acolyte of Hillary’s suffering top aide, Huma Abedin; and Dan Schwerin, the 31-year-old speechwriter who wrote all the words she had spoken moments ago. Local policemen with whom Clinton had posed for photos milled about behind her.

Outside was the usual chorus accompanying a Clinton appearance, befitting her status as the most popular Democrat in America: news helicopters buzzing overhead and protesters amassed across the street who raised signs that read benghazi in bloodred paint and chanted antiwar slogans directly at her as she spoke at the outdoor lectern.

Though she was officially out of the government, it was not as if she could leave it, even if she wanted to. That week Clinton had met with Obama in the White House to discuss the ongoing Syria crisis, and now Obama was on TV that very evening announcing a diplomatic reprieve from a missile attack on Syria—a series of decisions that Clinton had lent her support to every step of the way. “I’ve been down this road with them,” she tells me the next day. “I know how challenging it is to ever get [the Russians] to a ‘yes’ that they actually execute on, but it can be done. I think we have to push hard.”

Clinton has taken a press hiatus since she left the State Department in January—“I’ve been successful at avoiding you ­people for many months now!” she says, laughing. She is tentative and careful, tiptoeing into every question, keenly aware that the lines she speaks will be read between. In our interview, she emphasizes her “personal friendship” with Obama, with whom she had developed a kind of bond of pragmatism and respect—one based on shared goals, both political and strategic. “I feel comfortable raising issues with him,” she says. “I had a very positive set of interactions, even when I disagreed, which obviously occurred, because obviously I have my own opinions, my own views.”

Hillary Clinton receiving the Liberty Medal in Philadelphia, September 10. Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine

The killing of bin Laden, she says, was a bonding experience. Obama’s Cabinet had been split on whether to attempt the mission, but Clinton backed it and sweated out the decision with the commander-in-chief. “I’ve seen the president in a lot of intense and difficult settings,” she says, “and I’ve watched him make hard decisions. Obviously, talking to you on September 11 as we are, the bin Laden decision-making process is certainly at the forefront of my mind.”

The statement cuts two ways—praise for her president and evidence of her deep experience in and around the Oval Office—including the most successful military endeavor of the Obama presidency. As a Cabinet member, she says, “I’ve had a unique, close, and personal front-row seat. And I think these last four years have certainly deepened and broadened my understanding of the challenges and the opportunities that we face in the world today.”

Political campaigns are built of personal narratives—and it works much better if the stories are true. The current arc of Hillary’s story is one of transformation. Being secretary of State was more than a job. Her closest aides describe the experience as a kind of cleansing event, drawing a sharp line between the present and her multiple pasts—as First Lady, later as the Democratic front-runner in 2008, derailed by the transformative campaign of Barack Obama but also by a dysfunctional staff, the campaign-trail intrusions of her husband, and the inherent weaknesses of the fractious, bickering American institution that has become known as Clintonworld.

At State, she was the head of a smoothly running 70,000-person institution, and fully her own woman, whose marriage to a former president was, when it was mentioned, purely an asset. And now that she’s left State, Clintonworld is being refashioned along new lines, rationalized and harmonized. The signal event of this is the refurbishing of the Clinton Foundation, formerly Bill’s province, to accommodate all three Clintons, with Chelsea, newly elevated, playing a leading role. The move has ruffled certain Clintonworld feathers—a front-page article in the New York Times about the financial travails of the foundation as managed by Bill Clinton brought sharp pushback—but most of those close to the Clintons acknowledge that to succeed in the coming years, Hillary will have to absorb the lessons of 2008. Currently, it’s a topline talking point among her closest aides.

“She doesn’t repeat her mistakes,” says Melanne Verveer, an aide to the First Lady who then served in the State Department as Hillary’s ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. “She really learns from her mistakes. It’s like, you want to grow a best practice and then always operate on that. She analyzes, ‘What went wrong here?’ ”

Of course, if Hillary’s future were to be an author, or a pundit, or a retiree, learning from mistakes wouldn’t be an issue. But other outcomes, where executive talents are prized, seem more likely. I ask Clinton the question that trails her like a thought bubble: Does she wrestle with running for president?

“I do,” she says, “but I’m both pragmatic and realistic. I think I have a pretty good idea of the political and governmental challenges that are facing our leaders, and I’ll do whatever I can from whatever position I find myself in to advocate for the values and the policies I think are right for the country. I will just continue to weigh what the factors are that would influence me making a decision one way or the other.”

Clintonworld, however, speaks with many voices­—albeit many of them not for attribution. Some of her close confidants, including many people with whom her own staff put me in touch, are far less circumspect than she is. “She’s running, but she doesn’t know it yet,” one such person put it to me. “It’s just like a force of history. It’s inexorable, it’s gravitational. I think she actually believes she has more say in it than she actually does.”

And a longtime friend concurs. “She’s doing a very Clintonian thing. In her mind, she’s running for it, and she’s also convinced herself she hasn’t made up her mind. She’s going to run for president. It’s a foregone conclusion.”

When president-elect Barack Obama asked Clinton to be secretary of State, they had a series of private conversations about her role for the next four years. What would the job entail? How much power would she have? How would it be managed?

Or to restate the questions as they were understood by everyone involved in the negotiation: What would Hillary Clinton get in return for supporting Obama after the brutal primary and helping him defeat John McCain?

Though she had ended her losing campaign on a triumphal note, gracefully accepting the role of secretary of State and agreeing to be a trouble-free team player in Obama’s Cabinet, the 2008 primary loss left deep wounds to her core staff—at least among those members who had not been excommunicated. They would discuss what happened during long trips to Asia and Europe, sounding like post-traumatic-stress victims. “The experience was very searing for them, and they would go through it with great detail,” says a former State Department colleague.

Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine

The problems of that campaign were crucial to how Clinton would decide to lead the State Department. In accepting the State job, Clinton insisted on hiring her own staff. In addition to her top aides, Huma Abedin and Philippe Reines, she enlisted stalwarts of campaigns and administrations past: Maggie Williams, Cheryl Mills, and Verveer, who have been with her since her days in Bill Clinton’s White House. Among Hillary’s inner circle, this is viewed as a returning lineup of all-stars who were iced out of her campaign by a five-person team led by Patti Solis-Doyle, a group who in their telling became the agents of the campaign’s troubles. “They’re the A-team,” says a top aide. “They weren’t the B-team that got elevated. They were the A-team that got deposed by [Solis-Doyle].”

The 2008 campaign was seen by many as an echo chamber, closed off from the best advice, and the lesson for Clinton was clear: “The takeaway is, ‘Don’t only listen to five people,’ ” says the aide.

When she arrived, Clinton did a kind of institutional listening tour at the State Department. “She felt like she was too closed off from what was happening across the expanse of the [2008] campaign,” says a close aide at the State Department, “and that became a hallmark with the leadership in the State Department, and it served her incredibly well.”

To keep things operating smoothly, she hired Tom Nides, the COO of Morgan Stanley, who’d contributed heavily to Clinton’s past campaigns. Even Nides was wary of the Clinton drama he might be stepping into. “I had heard all these stories about the Clinton world and what all that meant and ‘Did you really want to get wrapped up in that?’ ” he says. But he reports that “all of the stuff did not exist at the State Department for the last four years.

“The relationship between the State Department and the White House and the State Department and the Defense Department was probably the best it’s ever been in 50 years,” he adds. “That starts from the top. No drama. And that was started by her.”

Among Hillary Clinton’s greatest hits at State were the new focus on Asia, pushing for the overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, and building a coalition for strong sanctions against Iran. But she also saw the job as a kind of reformatting of the State Department itself to prepare for the longer-run issues. “I’d been told that it was a choice that had to be made: You could either do what had to be done around the world, or you could organize and focus the work that was done inside State and the Agency for International Development, but I rejected that,” says Clinton. “I thought it was essential that as we restore America’s standing in the world and strengthen our global leadership again, we needed what I took to calling ‘smart power’ to elevate American diplomacy and development and reposition them for the 21st century … That meant that we had to take a hard look at how both State and A.I.D. operated. I did work to increase their funding after a very difficult period when they were political footballs to some extent and they didn’t have the resources to do what was demanded of them.”

Clinton’s State team argues that Clinton was a great stateswoman, her ambition to touch down in as many countries as possible a meter of how much repair work she did to the nation’s image abroad. Along the way, she embraced with good humor a parody Tumblr account, Texts From Hillary, that featured a picture of her in the iconic sunglasses looking cool and queenly. “She insisted on having a personality,” says Jake Sullivan, her former deputy chief of staff and now the national-security adviser to Vice-President Joe Biden. “And on stating her opinion.”

For foreign-policy critics, some of this could look like wheel spinning. The major critique was that she didn’t take on any big issues, like brokering peace between Israel and the Palestinians, or negotiating the nuclear disarmament of North Korea. And the suspicion was that she didn’t want to be associated with any big failures as she prepared for 2016. She was, after all, under the tight grip of the Obama White House, which directed major foreign-policy decisions from the Oval Office.

“Whatever one says about how [Secretary of State] John Kerry is doing,” says the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, “he has nothing left to lose. You can see he takes risks. He’s plowing into the Middle East stuff when people are saying this isn’t going to get you anywhere. Hillary never would have done any of this stuff.”

Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine

Her former staffers argue that she managed a host of important, if underrecognized, global flare-ups along the way, from freeing a dissident in China to brokering the easing of sanctions against Burma. “She helped avert a second war in Gaza by going out and pulling off that cease-fire,” recalls Sullivan of the deal she hashed out between Israel and Hamas after a week of fighting, “which holds to this day. And you don’t get a lot of credit for preventing something. Those are things that you aren’t going to measure how successful they are for another ten or twenty years.”

At the same time, Hillary used her tenure at State for a more intimate purpose: to shift the balance of power in the most celebrated political marriage in American history. Bill Clinton was an overwhelming force in Hillary’s 2008 campaign, instrumental in vouching for Mark Penn, the strategist whose idea it was for Hillary to cling to her war vote on Iraq and to sell her as an iron-sided insider whose experience outweighed the need to project mere humanity. Bill also freelanced his own negative attacks, some of which backfired. Because his staff was not coordinating with Hillary’s, her staff came to regard him as a wild card who couldn’t be managed.

But not in the State Department. “Not a presence,” says a close State aide. “And I don’t mean that just literally. But not someone who was built into the system in any way. He had a very minimal presence in her time at the State Department.

“It’s kind of jarring when she says ‘Bill,’ ” this person adds, recalling meetings with Hillary Clinton. “Well, who’s Bill? And then you realize that she’s talking about her husband. It happened so infrequently that you were kind of like, Oh, the president.”

Part of it, of course, was logistical. Though they spoke frequently by phone, Bill and Hillary were rarely in the same country. By chance, their paths crossed in Bogotá, where they had dinner together—then, owing to their massive entourages, returned to their respective hotels. “Love conquers all except logistics,” says an aide.

“I could probably count on one hand the times she came to a meeting and either invoked his name or suggested something that Bill had said,” says Nides. “I probably did it more about my wife telling me what to do.”

Hillary might have left the State Department unsullied by controversy if not for the Benghazi episode, in which the ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three other consulate staffers were killed in an attack on the U.S. consulate. The NATO intervention in Libya was the most important foreign intervention of her tenure, and a seemingly successful one, but the lack of security in Benghazi and the confusion over how the incident occurred set off a heated Republican attack on Clinton’s handling of the disaster, and she was roasted on the cable-news spit for weeks. In January, she took responsibility for the deaths of the four Americans before Congress—while also questioning her inquisition, snapping at a Republican congressman, “What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.”

Benghazi will be the go-to bludgeon for Republicans if and when Clinton tries using her experience at State to run for president. It is a reminder that Clinton, despite the cool, centrist façade she has developed in the past four years, is only a misstep away from being a target of partisan rage once again.

Regardless of the facts, Republicans are liable to use Benghazi as a wedge to pry back her stately exterior, goading her into an outburst, once again revealing the polarizing figure who saw vast right-wing conspiracies and tried ginning up government health care against the political tides of Newt Gingrich.

When asked for her prescription for partisan gridlock, Clinton sees an opportunity not unlike what Obama saw in 2008. ­“People are stereotypes, they are caricaturized,” says Clinton. “It comes from both sides of the political aisle, it comes from the press. It’s all about conflict, it’s all about personality, and there are huge stakes in the policies that are being debated, and I think there’s a hunger amongst a very significant, maybe even a critical mass of Americans, clustered on the left, right, and center, to have an adult conversation about how we’re going to solve these problems … but it’s not for the fainthearted.” For now, Hillary’s strategy is to sail above these conflicts, mostly by saying nothing to inflame them. “I have a lot of reason to believe, as we saw in the 2012 election, most Americans don’t agree with the extremists on any side of an issue,” says Clinton, “but there needs to continue to be an effort to find common ground, or even take it to higher ground on behalf of the future.”

At the Sheraton Ballroom in Chicago last spring, Bill Clinton appeared before an eager crowd of Clinton groupies at the Clinton Global Initiative America, a special conference focused on domestic issues and set in Hillary’s hometown. Onstage, the former president looked older than in the past—thinner, stooped, more subdued, his hands trembling while he held his notes at the podium. Haloed in blue light, he spoke about the “still embattled American Dream” and then introduced his wife as his new partner in the foundation, the woman who “taught me everything I know about NGOs.”

Her appearance made for a stark contrast. When she emerged from behind the curtain, she appeared much more youthful—smiling, upright, beaming in a turquoise pantsuit; she received huge applause and a standing ovation that dwarfed the response to Bill.

On her first major public stage since leaving the State Department, Hillary told the crowd that the foundation will be a “full partnership between the three of us,” including her daughter, Chelsea. But this was clearly Hillary Clinton’s show. That week, she had launched her Twitter account, complete with a tongue-in-cheek description of her as a “glass ceiling cracker,” her future “TBD.” Clearly, her foundation work, as important as it is to her, wasn’t everything. And Chicago was a perfect site for the start of this new chapter. It was where she was from, the launchpad for her career in politics and early-childhood education and women’s empowerment, what she called the “great unfinished business of this century.” “When women participate in politics,” she said, “it ripples out to the entire society … Women are the world’s most underused resource.”

If you wanted to read her speech as an opening salvo for a 2016 run for the presidency, it wasn’t hard to do as she talked about all that she’d learned as she traveled the globe. Whatever country or situation they found themselves in, “what people wanted was a good job.”

The rechristening of the foundation marked the first time the Clintons had come under the same institutional roof since the nineties. For Hillary, it made sense, because she didn’t have to compete with her husband for donors at her own foundation. It would also allow her to warm up donors for future initiatives—like, just for instance, a 2016 campaign. Two days later, the family would appear together onstage, a picture-perfect photo op of what Bill Clinton called “our little family.”

The Clinton Global Initiative, in addition to its work combating poverty and aids, is a kind of unofficial Clinton-alumni reunion, with friends and donors dating back to the early years in Arkansas. Sprinkled around the ballroom in Chicago were the old hands, from Bruce Lindsey, the former deputy White House counsel and CEO of the foundation, to newer faces like J. B. Pritzker, the Chicago hotel scion who was national co-chair of Hillary’s 2008 campaign and was now raising $20 million for an early-childhood-education initiative.

The Clinton network has always been both an asset and a burden. Terry ­McAuliffe, the longtime Clinton ally now running for governor of Virginia, has raised millions for the Clintons at every juncture of their careers. Then again, he’s Terry McAuliffe, the guy who left his weeping wife and newborn child in the car while he collected $1 million at a fund-raiser, then wrote about it in a memoir. “You can’t change who these people are,” says one former Hillary adviser. “It’s like any other trade. You’ve got the good, and there’s a lot of good. And you’ve got the noise.”

To harness some of the noise—what some Clinton people called “the energy”—a faction has converged around the Ready for Hillary super-PAC started by a former 2008 campaign aide named Adam Parkhomenko. Launched early this year, it has appeared to many observers to be an informal satellite of Hillary’s larger designs for the White House, but her aides say it’s a rogue operation of questionable benefit. “There is nothing they are doing that couldn’t have waited a year,” says one. “Not a single fucking thing.”

Regardless, Clinton veterans like former campaign strategist James Carville have come out supporting the super-PAC, as has former White House political director Craig Smith, Bill’s old Arkansas pal. Supporters argue that the super-PAC has Hillary’s tacit approval, especially given the involvement of Susie Tompkins Buell, a prominent Democratic donor who is among her oldest and closest friends. “It offers supporters the all-important link to click on, plus places to convene in both the digital and physical worlds,” says Tracy Sefl, an adviser to the super-PAC. “And although some perhaps just can’t quite believe it, Ready for Hillary’s name really does convey the totality of its purpose.”

One supporter of the super-PAC, who didn’t want to be identified, acknowledges that “there’s a danger there of her again becoming the front-runner. And, too, the existence of it raises her profile and puts more pressure on her to make a decision earlier than she might otherwise want to make.”

On some level, the network is almost impossible to control—Clintonworld is bigger than just the Clintons. “People do things in their name, or say they just talked to Hillary or to Bill, and the next thing you know, they’re doing something stupid,” says a former aide of Hillary’s whose interview she sanctioned. “You take the good with the bad. Hopefully, the good outweighs the bad.”

The biggest question among Hillary’s circle concerns Huma Abedin, currently chief of Hillary’s “transition office” and formerly her deputy chief of staff in the State Department. Abedin began as an intern for the First Lady in 1996, when she was 20 years old, and is, of course, married to former congressman and mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, of sexting infamy.

In the midst of her husband’s scandal, Abedin stepped down from her full-time job for a consulting contract and moved back to New York to take work with Teneo Holdings, a consulting firm and investment bank run by Bill Clinton’s longtime consigliere, Doug Band. This gave Hillary cover while also keeping Abedin plugged in. “It’s business as usual,” says a Clinton insider. “Keep your circle of advisers small, and then you structure things in a way that makes it economically possible for your close advisers to sustain themselves.”

But business as usual can be a giant target for enemies: Abedin has since become the subject of an inquiry, by a Republican congressman, into her dual consulting roles, looking for potential conflicts of interest while she served in a sensitive role in the administration. Then came a second episode of Weiner’s sexting this summer, blindsiding the Clintons, obliterating Weiner’s mayoral ambitions, and greatly complicating Abedin’s future with the Clintons. With Weiner’s ignominious loss and parting bird-flip, “Huma has a choice to make,” says a close associate of hers. “Does she go with Anthony, or does she go with Hillary?”

Leaving the Clinton bubble is almost unimaginable for those who’ve grown up in it. According to a person familiar with the conversations, Abedin has struggled to reconcile her marriage to Weiner with her role as Clinton’s top aide, traumatized by the prospect of leaving her boss’s inner circle.

In a sense, the Weiner scandal is a ghost of Clintonworld past, summoning sordid images of unruly appetites and bimbo eruptions, exactly the sort of thing that needs to be walled off and excised in a 2016 campaign. Former advisers from State say any future campaign will take a page from Clinton’s relatively peaceful past four years. “In contrast with reports of disunity in the 2008 campaign,” says Kurt Campbell, “the State Department was operated with a high degree of harmony and collegiality.”

The secret to realigning Clintonworld has been there all along. Since she received her master’s from Oxford in 2003, Chelsea Clinton had tried out different career paths, first in business consulting at McKinsey & Co., then at a hedge fund run by donors to her parents, and finally as a correspondent on NBC, with a few university postings sprinkled in. Chelsea has grown up in the Clinton bubble, the princess of Clintonworld, and getting outside of it has sometimes been difficult. She tried her hand at developing her “brand” on TV, but then, two years ago, stepped in and took over her father’s foundation, a return to the fold that portended a lot of changes. She became vice-chairman of the board. The foundation hired white-shoe law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett to perform an audit and review of the foundation’s finances and operations. And this summer, she installed a friend from McKinsey, Eric Braverman, as CEO.

Chelsea’s arrival was a clear if unspoken critique of Doug Band, who’d long been Bill Clinton’s gatekeeper in his post-presidential life. In Chelsea’s view, the foundation started by Band had become sprawling and inefficient, threatened by unchecked spending and conflicts of interest, an extension of her father’s woolly style. In 2012, a New York Post story suggested impropriety in Band’s dual role, forcing Clinton to put a bit of distance between himself and Teneo.

In a report this summer, the Times claimed the foundation operated at a deficit and was vulnerable to conflicts of interest related to Teneo Holdings—which telegraphed the message that there was a new sheriff. Chelsea, says a Hillary loyalist, “has taken a chain saw to that organization. She has not allowed these old bubbas to deal with this.”

Naturally, some of Bill Clinton’s staff at the foundation were unhappy with Chelsea’s arrival, especially the decision to include Hillary and Chelsea in the name of it. In a move that suggested intrafamily conflict, Bill Clinton stepped out to defend his comrades, insisting that Bruce Lindsey, the former CEO, who had suffered a stroke in 2011, would continue to be “intimately involved” in the foundation and that he couldn’t have accomplished “half of what I have in my post-presidency without Doug Band.”

Hillary Clinton says her daughter’s entrance into the foundation was an organic extension of everything the Clintons have ever done. “It sort of is in the DNA, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” she says. “She’s an incredibly able—obviously I’m biased—but extremely well-organized, results-oriented person, so rather than joining a lot of other groups, on which she could pursue her interests, she thought, I want to be part of continuing to build something I have worked on off and on over the years, and I really believe in it. I was thrilled to hear that.

“She comes by it naturally, don’t you think?” she adds cheerfully.

Chelsea is now the chief Bill Clinton gatekeeper. At HBO, where Martin Scorsese is making a documentary about him, Chelsea has been involved from the start and is weighing in on the production.

As the various staffs of the three Clintons come under one roof, in a headquarters in the Time-Life Building in midtown Manhattan, there are dangers of internecine conflict. “It’s all people jockeying for position,” says a person with close ties to the foundation. “This is an operation that runs on proximity to people. Now there are three people. How does all that work?”

For Bill Clinton to acknowledge flaws in his institute and relinquish control to his daughter and wife was a new twist in the family relationship. People in both Bill’s and Hillary’s camp are quick to emphasize that Bill Clinton is still the lifeblood of the foundation and its social mission. Chelsea’s arrival is ultimately about preserving the foundation for the long term as he gets older and winds down some of his activities. But the subtext of the cleanup operation is no mystery among Clinton people. Bill’s loosey-goosey world had to be straightened out if Hillary was going to run for president. “She doesn’t operate that way,” says one of her former State Department advisers. “I mean, she has all sorts of creative ideas, but that’s not how she operates. She is much more systematic.”

As part of the shifting landscape in Clintonworld, Bill Clinton got a new chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, one of the group of African-American women—including Maggie Williams and Donna Brazile—who have been close advisers to the Clintons over the years. A former policy aide at the American Federation of Teachers, Flournoy’s arrival last January was viewed by insiders as Hillary’s planting a sentinel at the office of her husband.

Bill Clinton is also a legendary politician, a brilliant tactician who won two presidential elections and reigned over the most prosperous years in America in recent memory. Some make the argument that he single-handedly won Obama reelection with his extraordinary takedown of Mitt Romney at the Democratic National Convention last year. The trick, say Clinton advocates, is to manage him effectively on behalf of his wife. “To the discredit of whoever is running a campaign, if that happens and they don’t use Bill Clinton—use his strategy, use his thoughts, take his dumb ideas and his great ideas and make sure they’re used effectively—they’re a moron,” says a person close to Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps this is where Chelsea comes in. After years of expectation, she has emerged from her chrysalis, a new power center, her father’s keeper and, maybe for Hillary … a shadow campaign manager.

In Clintonworld, wheels are turning, but no one wants them to turn too fast. Last spring, in a panel discussion at the Peterson Institute, Bill Clinton blew up, telling people to stop speculating on her presidential aspirations. It was too soon. Says Nides, “If you have every person you know say to you the following: ‘You should run for president, Madam Secretary, I love you, Madam Secretary, you’d be a great president, Madam Secretary,’ she nods. And she understands the context of that.”

Hillary is well aware of these dynamics. “I’m not in any hurry,” she tells me. “I think it’s a serious decision, not to be made lightly, but it’s also not one that has to be made soon.

“This election is more than three years away, and I just don’t think it’s good for the country,” she says. “It’s like when you meet somebody at a party and they look over your shoulder to see who else is there, and you want to talk to them about something that’s really important; in fact, maybe you came to the party to talk to that particular person, and they just want to know what’s next,” she says. “I feel like that’s our political process right now. I just don’t think it is good.”

So all the activity and planning and obsessive calculation that go into a presidential campaign take place behind a pleasant midwestern smile. Her time at State indeed transformed her—as did her 2008 campaign, and her time as a senator, and as First Lady, and on and on. Now she contains multitudes, a million contradictions. She’s a polarizing liberal with lots of Republican friends, the coolest of customers constantly at the center of swirling drama. She’s hung up on a decision over whether to run for an office she (not to mention her husband) has coveted for her entire adult life. She’s a Clinton. And what a candidate she’d make in 2016. But if that’s where she’s going, she’s not saying. “I’m somebody who gets up every day and says, ‘What am I going to do today, and how am I going to do it?’ ” she says. “I think it moves me toward some outcome I’m hoping for and also has some, you know, some joy attached to it. And I think it would be great if everybody else [took the same approach], for the foreseeable future.”

Of Hillary’s dreams, that one seems unlikely to come true.

Hillary in Midair

Read More

[valentinvolkov-blog]

location: Volkov Manor, Barvikha Luxury Village, Moscow, Russia time: 7:00 pm UTC+3:00        ( @sterlingmoran)

Valentin was standing in their walk in closet, in only their underwear, trying to decide if the Presidential Gala was occasion enough to wear the dark red suit they never had the opportunity to wear. Yana had agreed to attend with them, despite the conversation they had had, despite the fact that they were no longer sleeping in the same bed, that she spent most of her time off away from the manor, with whoever the mysterious man who she had fallen in love was.

They were standing there, trying not to think too hard about this likely being the last time they would make a public appearance together before they began the process of getting a divorce. They were standing there, when they felt a sudden presence behind them, unfamiliar, certainly not Oliver, likely not Eve. The sound of the voice confirmed that.

“Definitely the red suit,” a voice said behind him in English. The accent was strong, but unfamiliar to them. Definitely American. Barely understandable to their Russian ears.

They let out a deep sigh. 

They had known, from what Oliver said, that there were others, but they still hadn’t met any of them besides Eve. Now was not the time that they wanted to deal with introductions, especially considering how American this one sounded. At least it sounded like he was familiar with this whole thing, not jarred by appearing in a walk-in closet in Moscow suddenly, aware enough to suggest a suit rather than ask what was going on. A small blessing.

Valentin finally turned around to see who this person was, only to be much more shocked than they had been since they first appeared in Japan upon seeing the stranger’s appearance.

Oliver had said that one of the others that he had met looked like them. But this was more than just looking like them. Perhaps Oliver had been putting it lightly because he was worried he would overwhelm them. But it was much more than that. It was like staring in a mirror, the only differences being the glasses perched on the stranger’s nose, the different tattoos across the stranger’s arms and bare chest, and the slightly different black underwear. They had apparently caught him in the middle of the exact same state of undress.

They looked identical.

“это пиздец,” Valentin breathed, unable to take their eyes off of the stranger.

“That seems like an understatement,” the other said with a laugh, looking them up and down with a mixture of interest and awe on their face. “You’re the Russian, then, yes?”

“Valentin. So you are my lost twin, it seems,” they said flatly.

“Sterling. And, no, we look nothing alike,” he said, crossing his arms across his chest.

“A joke?” they asked.

“No. I have glasses,” Sterling said, as if that really made then look any less identical. Which it really didn’t.

He were not joking, they could tell that much by their tone. Apparently this Sterling was not interested in looking identical to someone he had a strange mind connection with. Valentin could tell, just from the tone of his voice, that he was the sort of person who had to be special. The exact sort of person who they had never liked very much at all, never had an ounce of patience for.

So instead of focusing on how strange it was to be standing there, looking at the mirror image of themself with only very slight differences, they decided to get him talking about something else. If they were going to be sharing this connection, then it would be for the best to at least try for cordial.

“You are American, yes?” they asked, unable to keep some of the disdain from creeping into their voice despite the effort.

“Yeah, but I haven’t lived in America for nearly twelve years. I live in Paris. I actually have dual citizenship.”

“Well, I suppose that is better than a chance at ending up in America,” Valentin said, voice giving nothing away. In reality, the prospect of ending up with an American, no matter where it was, wasn’t exactly the most welcome thing in the world. It was a small blessing that this American happened to live out of the country. But there was still the danger of him showing up when Valentin was in the White House, or worse, the Kremlin.

“Right. I guess you wouldn’t like that, would you?” he laughed slightly.

“I am certain you feel much the same appearing in Moscow,” they shot back immediately.

“Touché,” Sterling said with a slight laugh. “Like I said, though, you should go with the red suit. You’ll look positively dashing.”

“Dashing,” they repeated. This Sterling fellow felt more like a parody, someone who had heard what French people were supposed to be like and based his entire being off of that. His accent was thick, and distinctly non-French, despite how long he had apparently been living in Paris. He was speaking English, yes, but Valentin was having more than a little trouble understanding his words, even with their inherent connection helping things along.

“Where are you headed?”

“The Presidential Gala, with my wife.”

“Presidential Gala,” he repeated, sounding more than a little impressed with that. They could tell it was the kind of life he might’ve wanted; the glamor, the notoriety, the balls and galas. It all seemed like just the sort of thing someone like Sterling would like. But he was focused on the other half of the sentence. “President as in...Putin?”

Valentin just gave him a look, before turning and taking the red suit from the hanger.

“Fuck,” Sterling cursed, starting a frantic sort of pacing around the walk in closet as Valentin pulled the black button down off of the hanger, to start pulling it on. “Putin. You work for Putin. You’re about to go to a fancy dinner, with Putin. So you really aren’t happy about seeing an American in your closet,” Sterling said somewhere between awe and horror.

“Not particularly,” they replied flatly, buttoning up the shirt.

They were both silent for a long minute, as Valentin pulled on the dark red trousers, tucking in the shirt as they did so. They felt no real need to assuage his more practical fears, the ones they could feel. The worry that maybe they had somehow been involved with everything that happened in America, that they were some terrifying far-right terrorist, whose main goal was to bring down the American government, and help Putin take over the Western world. They felt no need to calm those fears, because they were so ridiculous and far off that they refused to even entertain them.

But they could feel something else, too, in Sterling, and for once, they felt compelled to say something about it. Maybe it was because of everything that had happened with Oliver, maybe it was because of some sort of change that had started within them because of this strange connection, but they could not let him think how he was certainly thinking.

“Just because I work for his administration does not mean I agree with his opinions,” they said, after a minute, breaking the fragile silence.

“Right, but I can’t imagine you’re too happy about having a queer French-American prostitute sharing your mindspace, either,” Sterling said, voice full of skepticism.

They clenched their jaw, but stopped themself from commenting on the prostitute part. What did they say to that, though? It was clear what he was thinking, and they could not blame him. They had spent their entire life with that same fear. They had hidden that part of themself, and still was, in the hopes that if they ignored it, they would not act on it, and there would be no reason for that fear. They had been shot for their dishonesty, for seemingly agreeing with the politics they helped along. For hating themself.

“I am...” they started, pausing for a minute, to figure out exactly what they wanted to say. They still weren’t quite at the point where they felt comfortable with the word that they were thinking of. To say it out loud felt too terrifying. All that had happened between Oliver and them was an enormous step toward that, but this was still something private, something they had not yet fully come to terms with, at least outwardly, and they weren’t sure if that would ever happen. 

So they settled on something slightly easier to say. 

“I am not interested in women,” they said, not meeting Sterling’s steady gaze.

“Oh...oh,” he started, obviously at a complete loss. Whatever he had been expecting, it wasn’t that. “Sorry, I didn’t… it’s just you work for Putin, you know? You said you have a wife. I didn’t realize…”

“We all have to do things to survive,” they said, with a little nod, knowing that that, at least, was a concept that Sterling would understand. There was something beneath the bravado, the vaguely flirtatious persona that he projected. Something that Valentin knew meant that he understood something you had to do things you were not proud of to get by, so that one day you might be able to do the opposite.

Sterling nodded, the look on his face different, more serious than it had been before.

“I understand,” he said, voice soft. “I hope one day it doesn’t have to be like that anymore for you.”

“As do I,” they said, frowning slightly as they looked back at him, the frown mirrored on his face, as if they were looking into a mirror. It was disconcerting, seeing their own pain, their own hope reflected on another’s face that looked so identical to theirs.

They were quiet, again, just standing there looking at each other, as if trying to figure something out about each other, about why any of this was happening, why it was them, of all people.

“I should finish getting ready,” they said, gesturing to the suit jacket and the tie, as if that was going to be a grand task to finish.

“Of course, I was in the middle of something anyway,” he shrugged, apparently pretty confident in their ability to just leave whenever they wanted. For some reason, Valentin believed they would be able to do it, though. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Valentin. Have a nice evening at the gala. You’re gonna knock ‘em dead,” Sterling said, reaching over and giving him a rough pat on the shoulder, a strangely familiar but strangely comforting gesture.

Valentin didn’t have a chance to say anything before Sterling disappeared suddenly, leaving them alone and wondering what, exactly, it was going to be like sharing a connection with someone apparently so like themself, and yet so completely different.

#( sterling moran. ) #( self para. ) #i wrote this and i realize there's no reason to post it bc i could just send u the doc #BUT IT FEELS WORTHLESS IF I DON'T PUT IT ON ONE OF THEIR BLOGS

[weasley-detectives]

Brave and Merida in a Trumped up world

It's a little surprising to me that the Disney fandom went absolutely apeshit over the "Disneyfication" of Merida in their merchandise - something Brenda Chapman even spoke out against, calling it a cheap ploy to sell merchandise - yet there hasn't been any commentary on other Brave spin-offs.

Merida's a Disney/Pixar heroine who, in Chapman’s own words, was created to be a different kind of Princess. Now, I don’t think it makes me a good feminist to sit here and pit Disney Princess against Disney Princess; I think popular perception of the “Disney Princess” is a different beast altogether when compared with the actual source material, which has both positive and negative aspects. But when it comes to Merida the writers intentionally set out from the start to try something new. She has a fuller, rounded figure, a nuanced relationship with her mother, and romance plays no part in her story. You could argue there’s evidence of a romantic interest, but that’s not the same thing as a romantic subplot, and it’s not overt enough that you can say with any certainty. The writers admit the original idea was to have Merida walk off into the sunset with Young MacGuffin, the suitor who briefly catches her attention early in the film, but that epilogue thankfully only exists in the artbook and deleted scenes.

And let me be clear, there's nothing wrong with Merida having a romantic interest. In fact, I came to love that Merida is subtly shown to be a little interested in Young MacGuffin. 

I was watching Mulan the other night with a @pale-silver-comb​ (who is 100% responsible for my newfound love of Disney- well, that and the fact I need bright happy escapist animation as the rest of my time is spent neck deep in miserable politics). We were cackling over the scene where Mulan ogles a shirtless Shang and later wound up ranting over how rare it is to see women checking out guys in films. When women do make their attraction known, they tend to run the risk of being framed or labelled as shameless, or worse, sluts. On the flipside, how often do we see guys ogling girls in media? Yeah, exactly. It's a shitty myth that women don't own their sexuality in the same ways men do. That's one of the things I love about Mulan and Merida as heroines - they're not "strong female characters" (god I hate that term, can we please kill it?) just because they kick large hairy man arse. They're great characters because they are so relatable. They're funny, they're giant dorks, they stuff their gobs, they check guys out, they can be crass, proud, and make mistakes. These are all things women do, but aren't shown to do nearly as often as men are in mainstream media.

I’m glad the Brave epilogue with Merida and Young MacGuffin didn't make the final cut, because the story wasn't about Merida finding romance - it was about Merida's relationship with her mother, and the two of them confronting their pride, opening their minds to new ways of thinking, and admitting their mistakes. The epilogue had no place in Brave’s narrative. To have included it would have harmed the message of the story by adding romance for the sake of romance, rather than for any narrative purpose. But at the same time I don't want to downplay Merida showing even a subtle interest because yay women owning their own sexuality. One of the things that has driven me crazy since I was a kid myself is the patronising infantilization of girls. A crush is normal, you can pretty much get them at any age, it does not mean you’re not enjoying your childhood to the fullest. Fuck that noise. I had massive crushes from the age of 4 and still managed to climb trees, get into fights and battle Captain Hook and Shredder on my T-Rex with imaginary best friend Gollum at my side (what? fuck you we had a bond). That Merida might have had a bit of a crush on Young MacGuffin reinforces for me the fact she’s a character who doesn't want to get married because she doesn’t bloody want to, not because the suitors are conveniently horrible people she vehemently dislikes. I actually find that even more inspiring. So yes, Brave is a great film with a pretty amazing heroine.

Which is why it pisses me off when spin-off writers take something so progressive and shaft it.

This isn't a ship shaming post at all - fandom is a ship & let ship space, ship Merida with her bow for all I care, it's all good. This critique is aimed at crappy spin-offs and I’m taking Once Upon a Time as an example. Now, OUAT isn’t all bad. Sometimes it takes Disney canon and transforms it into something really interesting, progressive and original. Or, well, it used to. Recent seasons not so much. The actress who plays Merida is the only good thing about OUAT's Brave arc. The rest is unbearably lazy (HA! pun.) writing. The gravest injustice has to be King Fergus, who looks like he's wearing a wig knitted from a highland cow's pubes.

Don't get me started on his accent. I’m scottish. No Scotsman sounds like that. Not unless they’re squeedging out an enormous post-curry-hangover shit. I love Fergus, but honestly I was relieved OUAT!Fergus was bumped off before my ears could go on strike.

The suitors are also sexist pigs. Dingwall and MacGuffin don't even say anything, they just play the lazy mindless followers/minions to MacIntosh who’s probably the most unlikeable aspect of the arc. Really says something about OUAT when the original animation, aimed at a younger audience, portrays its characters as more nuanced. In Brave, Young MacIntosh is all bluff- he’s a show off, a sore loser and generally a bit of a prick, but there are also glimpses of genuine empathy. He's also the suitor Merida is openly put off by in the film. So yeah, in Brave, Young MacIntosh is a bit of a lanky fucktrumpet, but he's not anywhere close to being the scabby sexist cockwomble he is in OUAT. This would be fine if it had some sort of clever narrative purpose, but who am I kidding, it’s OUAT. OUAT!MacIntosh is a proper dickhead and there’s no reason for Merida to like any of the suitors, because unlike in Brave, they’re all fucking assholes. And yet the OUAT arc still ends with Merida giving him the smitten googley eyes. Because romance or something. cool.

Another Brave novelisation published by Disney Random House ends with Merida confirming to the reader that yes, she did eventually marry. Well thank fuck for that! My frail girlish heart couldn't possibly entertain the idea of Merida never marrying. Thank you book, you've reassured conservative parents everywhere.

In addition to that bollocks is.. probably one of the worst offenders. I recently picked up a couple of the Merida chapter books by Sudipta Bardham-Quallen, again published by Disney Random House. They're for wee kids, but I wanted to see more of @gurihiru​​ 's lovely art which I’m fully smitten with. The writing isn’t great, but the stories involve challenging enough themes for very young readers. To the author's credit there's a bit of an effort made to retain a Scottish feel to them and there’s a nice focus on female friendships as Merida encounters new characters. It’s a bit cutesy-poo BFFs!!, the kind of thing I hated as a kid, but hey, we need more female friendship stories. The new characters are even quite likeable, so thumbs up there.

Then I picked up the second book, The Fire Falls (also written by Sudipta Bardham-Quallen), and cringed. Basically bad Merida and Young MacIntosh fanfic involving some classic tropes like: 'I'm not jealous, I’m just better than all those shameless slags flirting with him' and 'arg he's such an asshole but i'm inexplicably attracted to him though there's nothing to show in the story why I should be!' and my favourite - ‘He’s a bad guy but I can change him!’

Here's my main issue: why is it when a female character shows or says she’s not interested in a guy's advances this all too often becomes a springboard for their romance? Why do these stories have such an obsession with positioning the sexist hyper-masculine asshole as the romantic lead? (I'm sure that couldn’t have any dire implications for the worl-oh fuck). And in Brave's case, when the source material and original epilogue show Merida taking an interest in the big fat guy, why don’t any of the spin-offs build on that? Young MacGuffin also happens to be the only one in the entire film to vocally stand up for Merida’s rights. That’s pretty cool! So why don’t spin-offs celebrate that? The cynic in me says we all know the answer - much like Merida had to be “sexed up” to sell Disney merchandise, the fat suitor had to be swapped out for the skinny. 

Really, in a film that revolves around Merida's frustration that people aren't listening to her, it sort of amazes me that these spin-offs don't realise they AREN'T LISTENING TO HER.

And yeah, obviously I know it seems really silly picking on kids books and OUAT, neither of which are ever going to win awards for great progressive writing, but considering America just elected a vile celebrity as President and populism is on the rise, maybe it’s time we all said screw that academic snobbery and paid more attention to popular media. This stuff is common, these tropes are common, and it’s consumed mostly by young kids who internalise these crappy messages.

I make a big deal of it because these coded messages have a profound effect on us as we grow. These messages tell us to ignore a girl's decision and choice: that when she says 'I'm not interested' what we hear is 'I am'; that the most "attractive" and most "masculine" guy will always be the “natural” choice; that being fat or shy or awkward are inherently negative qualities and will always be overlooked by the loud wanker distracting everyone by waving his tiny hands around.

I'm now a published historian and I plan on publishing children's books in the near future; I work part-time in a bookshop, so I talk to kids about the stories they read, the stories they want to read, and their frustrations with the stories they HAVE read, all the time; I studied child psychology as part of my degree in Social Anthropology: this is why it matters to me and why I know all too well how much these coded messages affect us. I know it from my own experiences as a half-Moroccan kid with a dead father, growing up in a classroom of white kids who all came from middle-class households with two parents. This was all brought back to me when I rediscovered some of my old journals and stories I had written for class where I portrayed myself as being blonde/white and talked as if my dad was still alive, because I desperately wanted to be *normal*. I never got to encounter a character like Merida growing up, and I wish to god I had.

Children's authors and publishing houses have an enormous responsibility to make their readers feel included and heard. They also have a responsibility to challenge toxic ideas - not reinforce them. We have to keep pushing boundaries, not limit them.

#Brave #Disney #Merida #OUAT #Brave disney #Children's fiction #writing #feminism #rants #Weasley rants

[rfhusnik]

Remember:  You’ll Do The Work, And You’ll Pay The Bills

Written By:  Steven Fillmore

              For many years I tried to more or less keep my mouth shut. I got up every morning and went  to work. But, as a recent retiree, I’ve become very concerned about the future of The United States of America. And I don’t think the majority of Americans today realize the potentially perilous position that their dismissive attitude toward illegal immigration will most likely place their children and grandchildren in in years to come.

           And as far as I can see, there are three dangerous points of view now “setting up” America for tragic consequences in years to come. First, there are those Americans who think they’ll be able to keep themselves isolated from the increasing number of Hispanics now living either legally or illegally in their nation. These are the people who illegally pay for various services, such as their children’s education, and build walls around their property, yet don’t want our nation to build a wall to protect its current poorer inhabitants. And by the way, why is it that every time a proposed border wall or border shutdown is mentioned in the media, only negative things are said? Second, there are those who believe God will provide an answer to illegal immigration. And they also believe that the Almighty won’t allow a Hispanic majority to harm or misuse non-Hispanic minorities in the years to come. And then there is that third group which says it cares about the future of the U.S.A. It has grave concerns it says, about environmental issues. But rest assured, environmental concerns will take a back seat in importance to future Americans if those Americans are no longer able to live freely because what once had been a class of illegal aliens now controls their very lives.

           And, in the midst of these future fears, like most elderly white men, I’ve paid a price for the concept of white supremacy, though I never believed in it; and, if the truth be told, often wondered if a fair amount of those who said they believed in it actually did, or were simply using that bogus concept as a tool to stir up some excitement in what otherwise would have been very boring existences. But then, maybe dad was right. He told me I’d amount to nothing someday.

           Yet, with that said, I can’t lie now and say that life has gotten better for white American males over the span of my lifetime – oh no! And it seems that this fact has become especially noticeable over the last ten to fifteen years. And here are some examples of what I mean. Today, America’s heroes aren’t the people who work to keep the nation functioning. No, today we look up instead to such people who are able to enter our country illegally, and then live off the fruit of the labors of this nation’s working class. And today white American males are pretty much automatically held in disdain by many women and members of other races.

           Nonetheless, I’m in a reflective mood today. Thus, I hope I won’t ramble (too much) in this piece. And, let me tell you that this is the last time Steven Fillmore will appear as a writer of these posts. And I’ve informed my city’s mayor, Ralph Hawk, who compiles these writings, of that fact. And Ralph said he was sorry to hear that, but admitted that he can probably find several other people from our city who’ll be willing, able, and probably glad to hold forth here.

           So, anyway, today I’m thinking back to forty some years spent working in this city’s main factory, and how yesterday, a few days after I retired from the workforce, I heard some liberal legislators say that most white males of my age actually wasted their lives. And how did we waste them? Apparently during our working years we didn’t do enough to help socialists, communists, fascists, criminals, drug users, illegal aliens, deeply indebted college graduates, feminists who weren’t living out the full feminist dream, so-called dreamers, gay, lesbian, and transgender activists, animal rights activists, environmental activists - and especially those of that group who want to ban cows and airplanes, as well as pass a number of other asinine dictatorial laws, members of Congress whose vocabulary seems to be limited to the word impeachment, members of Congress who dress as foreigners, and members of Congress who all dress in the same color for special events, just like the brown shirts did many years ago when they conducted their business in a Reichstag that was trending toward Nazism.

           And, of course the American liberal media concurs with that afore - mentioned assessment of America’s working class. And it makes sure that everyone knows that during our lifetimes people such as myself didn’t care enough about the poor and downtrodden; but more importantly than even that, feared what an invasion of foreigners seeking to end what had been the American way of life would do to the legacy and wealth we hoped to leave our heirs.

           Thus, I’m leaving these words as a very troubled soul. I only pray that the youth of America will reject the socialism and near communism which already we see being peddled by most of those who so far have announced their candidacies for president in the next election.

           And we know that a portion of America’s youth will be, and already has been taken in by the ridiculous promises which left-wingers have, and will continue to make. But the postulation that the rich should pay their fair share in taxes is truthful, yet is easier said than done. Few know of, or take the time to learn of how dollars sheltered from taxes often, in the long run, do more for the American economy than do those confiscated via taxation, and then wasted on government frivolities such as conspiracy investigations which investigate the innocent, and allow those who may really be guilty of what’s being investigated to appear blameless, even though those of that second group are probably the same individuals who got the phony investigation started in the first place, and perhaps used America’s highest information gathering unit to aid them in that quest.

           And it’s difficult to leave when it’s known that soon Americans will be bombarded by left-wing campaign ads promoting various presidential candidates. And we know that soon the youth of America will be severely tested. It will have all sorts of financially impossible promises made to it such as: Everyone should have a free college education, airplanes should be banned (can you even begin to imagine the negative impact of this!), cows should be banned – this will do wonders for America’s agricultural sector – especially when the large numbers of Hispanics whom the leftists apparently wish to have enter our country have found the livestock industry to be one of only a very few industries which actively seeks them as workers. And, the list of crack-pot ideas which already have been floated by many potential candidates for president goes on and on.

           Thus, before the snowball of lunacy which no doubt will descend upon us in the months ahead reaches its full speed, I’d like all Americans, but especially young Americans to remember that nothing is ever given away, or accepted in a completely free fashion. A price is always paid; and under socialist and communist leadership, a despised lower working class always toils to benefit bureaucrats, even though socialists and communists tell the masses that the exact opposite is the true experience under their way of life. So, don’t be fooled in the upcoming presidential election. Don’t vote for someone who’ll keep you working to support him or herself, while he or she keeps right on importing more people into this nation who’ll also lessen your paycheck amount through their welfare needs.

           And, as a final sign off here, I want to say that I’m aware of course that the dictatorship of the right (fascism) can be as destructive to human rights as that of the dictatorship of the left (communism). But only people who deserve to live freely will live freely. Ask yourself, “If my car died on the roadway tomorrow, would I simply leave it there, run away to the north, and not care about it anymore? And would I leave others to deal with its obstruction?” Those questions, though simplistic, are probably dually pertinent at this time. First, if something is wrong in my nation, do I simply run away to where other people can take care of me? And second, will I allow myself to be conned by politicians, either young or old, or male or female, who should know that the policies they’re advocating will be disastrous for America, yet pursue them anyway – apparently only to appease their own large egos.

           Anything that’s wrong in a capitalist America can be fixed in a capitalist America. But there are a few facts to be faced. No economic system is inherently fair. Some people will always need to do the blue and white collar jobs that will need to be done. And if those people are forced to labor under a system which takes too much from them and then gives too much to criminals, illegal aliens, or government officials who don’t understand the importance of fiscal responsibility, then the entire society will have serious problems.

           And remember, don’t be intimidated by old or young male or female presidential candidates. All of them have one thing in common; they want to shake their fingers at you and tell you what a bigot and destroyer of the environment you are, and have been, and, especially so if you’re white and male. And remember also, while they’re chasing their socialist dreams, such as giving freebies to non-workers, trying to end the airplane and livestock industries, severely altering the American way of life for the worse, and importing more foreigners who’ll live off your labor today, and perhaps confiscate your heirs’ wealth in the future; you’ll be the people who’ll be doing the work which always needs to be done in any society, be its economic system capitalist, socialist, communist, fascist, feudal, monarchical, or whatever. Yes, you’ll do the work, and you’ll pay the bills, but they’ll continue to devastate America and its way of life.

           And also, you may say this is crazy, and hopefully it will prove to be false, but what will America be like when Hispanics are the majority ethnic group in it? Will they abide by the laws and ways of life which traditionally have been the foundations of The United States of America? Or will they pursue their own agenda, using their majority status to elect Hispanic candidates to national office, including perhaps the presidency, and then use their political power to severely restrict whites and blacks, and, who knows, perhaps confiscate their lands and wealth, and perhaps even enslave them?

[clusterassets]

New world news from Time: ‘We Now Stand at a Crossroads.’ Here’s What Barack Obama Said During His First Big Speech Since He Left Office

Former President Barack Obama gave his first significant speech since he left the Oval Office on Tuesday, commemorating the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth.

Speaking to a crowd of around 15,000 people at the 16th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg, Obama called the South African political leader “one of history’s true giants” and someone whose “progressive, democratic vision” helped shape international policies.

Obama touched on numerous topics ranging from the need to stand up for democracy and believe in facts to the current state of politics, though he never mentioned President Donald Trump by name.

“I am not being alarmist, I’m simply stating the facts,” Obama said. “Look around — strongman politics are ascendant, suddenly, whereby elections and some pretense of democracy are maintained, the form of it, but those in powers seek to undermine every institution or norm that gives democracy meaning.”

“Too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth,” Obama said. “People just make stuff up. They just make stuff up.”

Obama also made a reference to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, saying social media “has proved to be just as effective promoting hatred and paranoia and propaganda and conspiracy theories.”

You can read the full transcript of Obama’s speech in South Africa below:

Thank you. To Mama Graça Machel, members of the Mandela family, the Machel family, to President Ramaphosa who you can see is inspiring new hope in this great country – professor, doctor, distinguished guests, to Mama Sisulu and the Sisulu family, to the people of South Africa – it is a singular honor for me to be here with all of you as we gather to celebrate the birth and life of one of history’s true giants.

Let me begin by a correction and a few confessions. The correction is that I am a very good dancer. I just want to be clear about that. Michelle is a little better.

The confessions. Number one, I was not exactly invited to be here. I was ordered in a very nice way to be here by Graça Machel.

Confession number two: I forgot my geography and the fact that right now it’s winter in South Africa. I didn’t bring a coat, and this morning I had to send somebody out to the mall because I am wearing long johns. I was born in Hawaii.

Confession number three: When my staff told me that I was to deliver a lecture, I thought back to the stuffy old professors in bow ties and tweed, and I wondered if this was one more sign of the stage of life that I’m entering, along with gray hair and slightly failing eyesight. I thought about the fact that my daughters think anything I tell them is a lecture. I thought about the American press and how they often got frustrated at my long-winded answers at press conferences, when my responses didn’t conform to two-minute soundbites. But given the strange and uncertain times that we are in – and they are strange, and they are uncertain – with each day’s news cycles bringing more head-spinning and disturbing headlines, I thought maybe it would be useful to step back for a moment and try to get some perspective. So I hope you’ll indulge me, despite the slight chill, as I spend much of this lecture reflecting on where we’ve been, and how we arrived at this present moment, in the hope that it will offer us a roadmap for where we need to go next.

One hundred years ago, Madiba was born in the village of M – oh, see there, I always get that – I got to get my Ms right when I’m in South Africa. Mvezo – I got it. Truthfully, it’s because it’s so cold, my lips stuck. So in his autobiography he describes a happy childhood; he’s looking after cattle, he’s playing with the other boys, eventually attends a school where his teacher gave him the English name Nelson. And as many of you know, he’s quoted saying, ‘Why she bestowed this particular name upon me, I have no idea.’

There was no reason to believe that a young black boy at this time, in this place, could in any way alter history. After all, South Africa was then less than a decade removed from full British control. Already, laws were being codified to implement racial segregation and subjugation, the network of laws that would be known as apartheid. Most of Africa, including my father’s homeland, was under colonial rule. The dominant European powers, having ended a horrific world war just a few months after Madiba’s birth, viewed this continent and its people primarily as spoils in a contest for territory and abundant natural resources and cheap labor. And the inferiority of the black race, an indifference towards black culture and interests and aspirations, was a given.

And such a view of the world – that certain races, certain nations, certain groups were inherently superior, and that violence and coercion is the primary basis for governance, that the strong necessarily exploit the weak, that wealth is determined primarily by conquest – that view of the world was hardly confined to relations between Europe and Africa, or relations between whites and blacks. Whites were happy to exploit other whites when they could. And by the way, blacks were often willing to exploit other blacks. And around the globe, the majority of people lived at subsistence levels, without a say in the politics or economic forces that determined their lives. Often they were subject to the whims and cruelties of distant leaders. The average person saw no possibility of advancing from the circumstances of their birth. Women were almost uniformly subordinate to men. Privilege and status was rigidly bound by caste and color and ethnicity and religion. And even in my own country, even in democracies like the United States, founded on a declaration that all men are created equal, racial segregation and systemic discrimination was the law in almost half the country and the norm throughout the rest of the country.

That was the world just 100 years ago. There are people alive today who were alive in that world. It is hard, then, to overstate the remarkable transformations that have taken place since that time. A second World War, even more terrible than the first, along with a cascade of liberation movements from Africa to Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, would finally bring an end to colonial rule. More and more peoples, having witnessed the horrors of totalitarianism, the repeated mass slaughters of the 20th century, began to embrace a new vision for humanity, a new idea, one based not only on the principle of national self-determination, but also on the principles of democracy and rule of law and civil rights and the inherent dignity of every single individual.

In those nations with market-based economies, suddenly union movements developed; and health and safety and commercial regulations were instituted; and access to public education was expanded; and social welfare systems emerged, all with the aim of constraining the excesses of capitalism and enhancing its ability to provide opportunity not just to some but to all people. And the result was unmatched economic growth and a growth of the middle class. And in my own country, the moral force of the civil rights movement not only overthrew Jim Crow laws but it opened up the floodgates for women and historically marginalized groups to reimagine themselves, to find their own voices, to make their own claims to full citizenship.

It was in service of this long walk towards freedom and justice and equal opportunity that Nelson Mandela devoted his life. At the outset, his struggle was particular to this place, to his homeland – a fight to end apartheid, a fight to ensure lasting political and social and economic equality for its disenfranchised non-white citizens. But through his sacrifice and unwavering leadership and, perhaps most of all, through his moral example, Mandela and the movement he led would come to signify something larger. He came to embody the universal aspirations of dispossessed people all around the world, their hopes for a better life, the possibility of a moral transformation in the conduct of human affairs.

Madiba’s light shone so brightly, even from that narrow Robben Island cell, that in the late ‘70s he could inspire a young college student on the other side of the world to reexamine his own priorities, could make me consider the small role I might play in bending the arc of the world towards justice. And when later, as a law student, I witnessed Madiba emerge from prison, just a few months, you’ll recall, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I felt the same wave of hope that washed through hearts all around the world.

Do you remember that feeling? It seemed as if the forces of progress were on the march, that they were inexorable. Each step he took, you felt this is the moment when the old structures of violence and repression and ancient hatreds that had so long stunted people’s lives and confined the human spirit – that all that was crumbling before our eyes. And then as Madiba guided this nation through negotiation painstakingly, reconciliation, its first fair and free elections; as we all witnessed the grace and the generosity with which he embraced former enemies, the wisdom for him to step away from power once he felt his job was complete, we understood that – we understood it was not just the subjugated, the oppressed who were being freed from the shackles of the past. The subjugator was being offered a gift, being given a chance to see in a new way, being given a chance to participate in the work of building a better world.

And during the last decades of the 20th century, the progressive, democratic vision that Nelson Mandela represented in many ways set the terms of international political debate. It doesn’t mean that vision was always victorious, but it set the terms, the parameters; it guided how we thought about the meaning of progress, and it continued to propel the world forward. Yes, there were still tragedies – bloody civil wars from the Balkans to the Congo. Despite the fact that ethnic and sectarian strife still flared up with heartbreaking regularity, despite all that as a consequence of the continuation of nuclear détente, and a peaceful and prosperous Japan, and a unified Europe anchored in NATO, and the entry of China into the world’s system of trade – all that greatly reduced the prospect of war between the world’s great powers. And from Europe to Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, dictatorships began to give way to democracies. The march was on. A respect for human rights and the rule of law, enumerated in a declaration by the United Nations, became the guiding norm for the majority of nations, even in places where the reality fell far short of the ideal. Even when those human rights were violated, those who violated human rights were on the defensive.

And with these geopolitical changes came sweeping economic changes. The introduction of market-based principles, in which previously closed economies along with the forces of global integration powered by new technologies, suddenly unleashed entrepreneurial talents to those that once had been relegated to the periphery of the world economy, who hadn’t counted. Suddenly they counted. They had some power; they had the possibilities of doing business. And then came scientific breakthroughs and new infrastructure and the reduction of armed conflicts. And suddenly a billion people were lifted out of poverty, and once-starving nations were able to feed themselves, and infant mortality rates plummeted. And meanwhile, the spread of the internet made it possible for people to connect across oceans, and cultures and continents instantly were brought together, and potentially, all the world’s knowledge could be in the hands of a small child in even the most remote village.

That’s what happened just over the course of a few decades. And all that progress is real. It has been broad, and it has been deep, and it all happened in what – by the standards of human history – was nothing more than a blink of an eye. And now an entire generation has grown up in a world that by most measures has gotten steadily freer and healthier and wealthier and less violent and more tolerant during the course of their lifetimes.

It should make us hopeful. But if we cannot deny the very real strides that our world has made since that moment when Madiba took those steps out of confinement, we also have to recognize all the ways that the international order has fallen short of its promise. In fact, it is in part because of the failures of governments and powerful elites to squarely address the shortcomings and contradictions of this international order that we now see much of the world threatening to return to an older, a more dangerous, a more brutal way of doing business.

So we have to start by admitting that whatever laws may have existed on the books, whatever wonderful pronouncements existed in constitutions, whatever nice words were spoken during these last several decades at international conferences or in the halls of the United Nations, the previous structures of privilege and power and injustice and exploitation never completely went away. They were never fully dislodged. Caste differences still impact the life chances of people on the Indian subcontinent. Ethnic and religious differences still determine who gets opportunity from the Central Europe to the Gulf. It is a plain fact that racial discrimination still exists in both the United States and South Africa. And it is also a fact that the accumulated disadvantages of years of institutionalized oppression have created yawning disparities in income, and in wealth, and in education, and in health, in personal safety, in access to credit. Women and girls around the world continue to be blocked from positions of power and authority. They continue to be prevented from getting a basic education. They are disproportionately victimized by violence and abuse. They’re still paid less than men for doing the same work. That’s still happening. Economic opportunity, for all the magnificence of the global economy, all the shining skyscrapers that have transformed the landscape around the world, entire neighborhoods, entire cities, entire regions, entire nations have been bypassed.

In other words, for far too many people, the more things have changed, the more things stayed the same.

And while globalization and technology have opened up new opportunities, have driven remarkable economic growth in previously struggling parts of the world, globalization has also upended the agricultural and manufacturing sectors in many countries. It’s also greatly reduced the demand for certain workers, has helped weaken unions and labor’s bargaining power. It’s made it easier for capital to avoid tax laws and the regulations of nation-states – can just move billions, trillions of dollars with a tap of a computer key.

And the result of all these trends has been an explosion in economic inequality. It’s meant that a few dozen individuals control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of humanity. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s a statistic. Think about that. In many middle-income and developing countries, new wealth has just tracked the old bad deal that people got because it reinforced or even compounded existing patterns of inequality, the only difference is it created even greater opportunities for corruption on an epic scale. And for once solidly middle-class families in advanced economies like the United States, these trends have meant greater economic insecurity, especially for those who don’t have specialized skills, people who were in manufacturing, people working in factories, people working on farms.

In every country just about, the disproportionate economic clout of those at the top has provided these individuals with wildly disproportionate influence on their countries’ political life and on its media; on what policies are pursued and whose interests end up being ignored. Now, it should be noted that this new international elite, the professional class that supports them, differs in important respects from the ruling aristocracies of old. It includes many who are self-made. It includes champions of meritocracy. And although still mostly white and male, as a group they reflect a diversity of nationalities and ethnicities that would have not existed a hundred years ago. A decent percentage consider themselves liberal in their politics, modern and cosmopolitan in their outlook. Unburdened by parochialism, or nationalism, or overt racial prejudice or strong religious sentiment, they are equally comfortable in New York or London or Shanghai or Nairobi or Buenos Aires, or Johannesburg. Many are sincere and effective in their philanthropy. Some of them count Nelson Mandela among their heroes. Some even supported Barack Obama for the presidency of the United States, and by virtue of my status as a former head of state, some of them consider me as an honorary member of the club. And I get invited to these fancy things, you know? They’ll fly me out.

But what’s nevertheless true is that in their business dealings, many titans of industry and finance are increasingly detached from any single locale or nation-state, and they live lives more and more insulated from the struggles of ordinary people in their countries of origin. And their decisions – their decisions to shut down a manufacturing plant, or to try to minimize their tax bill by shifting profits to a tax haven with the help of high-priced accountants or lawyers, or their decision to take advantage of lower-cost immigrant labor, or their decision to pay a bribe – are often done without malice; it’s just a rational response, they consider, to the demands of their balance sheets and their shareholders and competitive pressures.

But too often, these decisions are also made without reference to notions of human solidarity – or a ground-level understanding of the consequences that will be felt by particular people in particular communities by the decisions that are made. And from their board rooms or retreats, global decision-makers don’t get a chance to see sometimes the pain in the faces of laid-off workers. Their kids don’t suffer when cuts in public education and health care result as a consequence of a reduced tax base because of tax avoidance. They can’t hear the resentment of an older tradesman when he complains that a newcomer doesn’t speak his language on a job site where he once worked. They’re less subject to the discomfort and the displacement that some of their countrymen may feel as globalization scrambles not only existing economic arrangements, but traditional social and religious mores.

Which is why, at the end of the 20th century, while some Western commentators were declaring the end of history and the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy and the virtues of the global supply chain, so many missed signs of a brewing backlash – a backlash that arrived in so many forms. It announced itself most violently with 9/11 and the emergence of transnational terrorist networks, fueled by an ideology that perverted one of the world’s great religions and asserted a struggle not just between Islam and the West but between Islam and modernity, and an ill-advised U.S. invasion of Iraq didn’t help, accelerating a sectarian conflict. Russia, already humiliated by its reduced influence since the collapse of the Soviet Union, feeling threatened by democratic movements along its borders, suddenly started reasserting authoritarian control and in some cases meddling with its neighbors. China, emboldened by its economic success, started bristling against criticism of its human rights record; it framed the promotion of universal values as nothing more than foreign meddling, imperialism under a new name. Within the United States, within the European Union, challenges to globalization first came from the left but then came more forcefully from the right, as you started seeing populist movements – which, by the way, are often cynically funded by right-wing billionaires intent on reducing government constraints on their business interests – these movements tapped the unease that was felt by many people who lived outside of the urban cores; fears that economic security was slipping away, that their social status and privileges were eroding, that their cultural identities were being threatened by outsiders, somebody that didn’t look like them or sound like them or pray as they did.

And perhaps more than anything else, the devastating impact of the 2008 financial crisis, in which the reckless behavior of financial elites resulted in years of hardship for ordinary people all around the world, made all the previous assurances of experts ring hollow – all those assurances that somehow financial regulators knew what they were doing, that somebody was minding the store, that global economic integration was an unadulterated good. Because of the actions taken by governments during and after that crisis, including, I should add, by aggressive steps by my administration, the global economy has now returned to healthy growth. But the credibility of the international system, the faith in experts in places like Washington or Brussels, all that had taken a blow.

And a politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment began to appear, and that kind of politics is now on the move. It’s on the move at a pace that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. I am not being alarmist, I am simply stating the facts. Look around. Strongman politics are ascendant suddenly, whereby elections and some pretense of democracy are maintained – the form of it – but those in power seek to undermine every institution or norm that gives democracy meaning. In the West, you’ve got far-right parties that oftentimes are based not just on platforms of protectionism and closed borders, but also on barely hidden racial nationalism. Many developing countries now are looking at China’s model of authoritarian control combined with mercantilist capitalism as preferable to the messiness of democracy. Who needs free speech as long as the economy is going good? The free press is under attack. Censorship and state control of media is on the rise. Social media – once seen as a mechanism to promote knowledge and understanding and solidarity – has proved to be just as effective promoting hatred and paranoia and propaganda and conspiracy theories.

So on Madiba’s 100th birthday, we now stand at a crossroads – a moment in time at which two very different visions of humanity’s future compete for the hearts and the minds of citizens around the world. Two different stories, two different narratives about who we are and who we should be. How should we respond?

Should we see that wave of hope that we felt with Madiba’s release from prison, from the Berlin Wall coming down – should we see that hope that we had as naïve and misguided? Should we understand the last 25 years of global integration as nothing more than a detour from the previous inevitable cycle of history – where might makes right, and politics is a hostile competition between tribes and races and religions, and nations compete in a zero-sum game, constantly teetering on the edge of conflict until full-blown war breaks out? Is that what we think?

Let me tell you what I believe. I believe in Nelson Mandela’s vision. I believe in a vision shared by Gandhi and King and Abraham Lincoln. I believe in a vision of equality and justice and freedom and multi-racial democracy, built on the premise that all people are created equal, and they’re endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. And I believe that a world governed by such principles is possible and that it can achieve more peace and more cooperation in pursuit of a common good. That’s what I believe.

And I believe we have no choice but to move forward; that those of us who believe in democracy and civil rights and a common humanity have a better story to tell. And I believe this not just based on sentiment, I believe it based on hard evidence.

The fact that the world’s most prosperous and successful societies, the ones with the highest living standards and the highest levels of satisfaction among their people, happen to be those which have most closely approximated the liberal, progressive ideal that we talk about and have nurtured the talents and contributions of all their citizens.

The fact that authoritarian governments have been shown time and time again to breed corruption, because they’re not accountable; to repress their people; to lose touch eventually with reality; to engage in bigger and bigger lies that ultimately result in economic and political and cultural and scientific stagnation. Look at history. Look at the facts.

The fact that countries which rely on rabid nationalism and xenophobia and doctrines of tribal, racial or religious superiority as their main organizing principle, the thing that holds people together – eventually those countries find themselves consumed by civil war or external war. Check the history books.

The fact that technology cannot be put back in a bottle, so we’re stuck with the fact that we now live close together and populations are going to be moving, and environmental challenges are not going to go away on their own, so that the only way to effectively address problems like climate change or mass migration or pandemic disease will be to develop systems for more international cooperation, not less.

We have a better story to tell. But to say that our vision for the future is better is not to say that it will inevitably win. Because history also shows the power of fear. History shows the lasting hold of greed and the desire to dominate others in the minds of men. Especially men. History shows how easily people can be convinced to turn on those who look different, or worship God in a different way. So if we’re truly to continue Madiba’s long walk towards freedom, we’re going to have to work harder and we’re going to have to be smarter. We’re going to have to learn from the mistakes of the recent past. And so in the brief time remaining, let me just suggest a few guideposts for the road ahead, guideposts that draw from Madiba’s work, his words, the lessons of his life.

First, Madiba shows those of us who believe in freedom and democracy we are going to have to fight harder to reduce inequality and promote lasting economic opportunity for all people.

Now, I don’t believe in economic determinism. Human beings don’t live on bread alone. But they need bread. And history shows that societies which tolerate vast differences in wealth feed resentments and reduce solidarity and actually grow more slowly; and that once people achieve more than mere subsistence, then they’re measuring their well-being by how they compare to their neighbors, and whether their children can expect to live a better life. And when economic power is concentrated in the hands of the few, history also shows that political power is sure to follow – and that dynamic eats away at democracy. Sometimes it may be straight-out corruption, but sometimes it may not involve the exchange of money; it’s just folks who are that wealthy get what they want, and it undermines human freedom.

And Madiba understood this. This is not new. He warned us about this. He said: “Where globalization means, as it so often does, that the rich and the powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and the weaker, [then] we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.” That’s what he said. So if we are serious about universal freedom today, if we care about social justice today, then we have a responsibility to do something about it. And I would respectfully amend what Madiba said. I don’t do it often, but I’d say it’s not enough for us to protest; we’re going to have to build, we’re going to have to innovate, we’re going to have to figure out how do we close this widening chasm of wealth and opportunity both within countries and between them.

And how we achieve this is going to vary country to country, and I know your new president is committed to rolling up his sleeves and trying to do so. But we can learn from the last 70 years that it will not involve unregulated, unbridled, unethical capitalism. It also won’t involve old-style command-and-control socialism form the top. That was tried; it didn’t work very well. For almost all countries, progress is going to depend on an inclusive market-based system – one that offers education for every child; that protects collective bargaining and secures the rights of every worker – that breaks up monopolies to encourage competition in small and medium-sized businesses; and has laws that root out corruption and ensures fair dealing in business; that maintains some form of progressive taxation so that rich people are still rich but they’re giving a little bit back to make sure that everybody else has something to pay for universal health care and retirement security, and invests in infrastructure and scientific research that builds platforms for innovation.

I should add, by the way, right now I’m actually surprised by how much money I got, and let me tell you something: I don’t have half as much as most of these folks or a tenth or a hundredth. There’s only so much you can eat. There’s only so big a house you can have. There’s only so many nice trips you can take. I mean, it’s enough. You don’t have to take a vow of poverty just to say, “Well, let me help out and let a few of the other folks – let me look at that child out there who doesn’t have enough to eat or needs some school fees, let me help him out. I’ll pay a little more in taxes. It’s okay. I can afford it.” I mean, it shows a poverty of ambition to just want to take more and more and more, instead of saying, “Wow, I’ve got so much. Who can I help? How can I give more and more and more?” That’s ambition. That’s impact. That’s influence. What an amazing gift to be able to help people, not just yourself. Where was I? I ad-libbed. You get the point.

It involves promoting an inclusive capitalism both within nations and between nations. And as we pursue, for example, the Sustainable Development Goals, we have to get past the charity mindset. We’ve got to bring more resources to the forgotten pockets of the world through investment and entrepreneurship, because there is talent everywhere in the world if given an opportunity.

When it comes to the international system of commerce and trade, it’s legitimate for poorer countries to continue to seek access to wealthier markets. And by the way, wealthier markets, that’s not the big problem that you’re having – that a small African country is sending you tea and flowers. That’s not your biggest economic challenge. It’s also proper for advanced economies like the United States to insist on reciprocity from nations like China that are no longer solely poor countries, to make sure that they’re providing access to their markets and that they stop taking intellectual property and hacking our servers.

But even as there are discussions to be had around trade and commerce, it’s important to recognize this reality: while the outsourcing of jobs from north to south, from east to west, while a lot of that was a dominant trend in the late 20th century, the biggest challenge to workers in countries like mine today is technology. And the biggest challenge for your new president when we think about how we’re going to employ more people here is going to be also technology, because artificial intelligence is here and it is accelerating, and you’re going to have driverless cars, and you’re going to have more and more automated services, and that’s going to make the job of giving everybody work that is meaningful tougher, and we’re going to have to be more imaginative, and the pact of change is going to require us to do more fundamental reimagining of our social and political arrangements, to protect the economic security and the dignity that comes with a job. It’s not just money that a job provides; it provides dignity and structure and a sense of place and a sense of purpose. And so we’re going to have to consider new ways of thinking about these problems, like a universal income, review of our workweek, how we retrain our young people, how we make everybody an entrepreneur at some level. But we’re going to have to worry about economics if we want to get democracy back on track.

Second, Madiba teaches us that some principles really are universal – and the most important one is the principle that we are bound together by a common humanity and that each individual has inherent dignity and worth.

Now, it’s surprising that we have to affirm this truth today. More than a quarter century after Madiba walked out of prison, I still have to stand here at a lecture and devote some time to saying that black people and white people and Asian people and Latin American people and women and men and gays and straights, that we are all human, that our differences are superficial, and that we should treat each other with care and respect. I would have thought we would have figured that out by now. I thought that basic notion was well established. But it turns out, as we’re seeing in this recent drift into reactionary politics, that the struggle for basic justice is never truly finished. So we’ve got to constantly be on the lookout and fight for people who seek to elevate themselves by putting somebody else down. And by the way, we also have to actively resist – this is important, particularly in some countries in Africa like my own father’s homeland; I’ve made this point before – we have to resist the notion that basic human rights like freedom to dissent, or the right of women to fully participate in the society, or the right of minorities to equal treatment, or the rights of people not to be beat up and jailed because of their sexual orientation – we have to be careful not to say that somehow, well, that doesn’t apply to us, that those are Western ideas rather than universal imperatives.

Again, Madiba, he anticipated things. He knew what he was talking about. In 1964, before he received the sentence that condemned him to die in prison, he explained from the dock that, “The Magna Carta, the Petition of Rights, the Bill of Rights are documents which are held in veneration by democrats throughout the world.” In other words, he didn’t say well, those books weren’t written by South Africans so I just – I can’t claim them. No, he said that’s part of my inheritance. That’s part of the human inheritance. That applies here in this country, to me, and to you. And that’s part of what gave him the moral authority that the apartheid regime could never claim, because he was more familiar with their best values than they were. He had read their documents more carefully than they had. And he went on to say, “Political division based on color is entirely artificial and, when it disappears, so will the domination of one color group by another.” That’s Nelson Mandela speaking in 1964, when I was three years old.

What was true then remains true today. Basic truths do not change. It is a truth that can be embraced by the English, and by the Indian, and by the Mexican and by the Bantu and by the Luo and by the American. It is a truth that lies at the heart of every world religion – that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. That we see ourselves in other people. That we can recognize common hopes and common dreams. And it is a truth that is incompatible with any form of discrimination based on race or religion or gender or sexual orientation. And it is a truth that, by the way, when embraced, actually delivers practical benefits, since it ensures that a society can draw upon the talents and energy and skill of all its people. And if you doubt that, just ask the French football team that just won the World Cup. Because not all of those folks – not all of those folks look like Gauls to me. But they’re French. They’re French.

Embracing our common humanity does not mean that we have to abandon our unique ethnic and national and religious identities. Madiba never stopped being proud of his tribal heritage. He didn’t stop being proud of being a black man and being a South African. But he believed, as I believe, that you can be proud of your heritage without denigrating those of a different heritage. In fact, you dishonor your heritage. It would make me think that you’re a little insecure about your heritage if you’ve got to put somebody else’s heritage down. Yeah, that’s right. Don’t you get a sense sometimes – again, I’m ad-libbing here – that these people who are so intent on putting people down and puffing themselves up that they’re small-hearted, that there’s something they’re just afraid of. Madiba knew that we cannot claim justice for ourselves when it’s only reserved for some. Madiba understood that we can’t say we’ve got a just society simply because we replaced the color of the person on top of an unjust system, so the person looks like us even though they’re doing the same stuff, and somehow now we’ve got justice. That doesn’t work. It’s not justice if now you’re on top, so I’m going to do the same thing that those folks were doing to me and now I’m going to do it to you. That’s not justice. “I detest racialism,” he said, “whether it comes from a black man or a white man.”

Now, we have to acknowledge that there is disorientation that comes from rapid change and modernization, and the fact that the world has shrunk, and we’re going to have to find ways to lessen the fears of those who feel threatened. In the West’s current debate around immigration, for example, it’s not wrong to insist that national borders matter; whether you’re a citizen or not is going to matter to a government, that laws need to be followed; that in the public realm newcomers should make an effort to adapt to the language and customs of their new home. Those are legitimate things and we have to be able to engage people who do feel as if things are not orderly. But that can’t be an excuse for immigration policies based on race, or ethnicity, or religion. There’s got to be some consistency. And we can enforce the law while respecting the essential humanity of those who are striving for a better life. For a mother with a child in her arms, we can recognize that could be somebody in our family, that could be my child.

Third, Madiba reminds us that democracy is about more than just elections.

When he was freed from prison, Madiba’s popularity – well, you couldn’t even measure it. He could have been president for life. Am I wrong? Who was going to run against him? (Laughter.) I mean, Ramaphosa was popular, but come on. Plus he was a young – he was too young. Had he chose, Madiba could have governed by executive fiat, unconstrained by check and balances. But instead he helped guide South Africa through the drafting of a new Constitution, drawing from all the institutional practices and democratic ideals that had proven to be most sturdy, mindful of the fact that no single individual possesses a monopoly on wisdom. No individual – not Mandela, not Obama – are entirely immune to the corrupting influences of absolute power, if you can do whatever you want and everyone’s too afraid to tell you when you’re making a mistake. No one is immune from the dangers of that.

Mandela understood this. He said, “Democracy is based on the majority principle. This is especially true in a country such as ours where the vast majority have been systematically denied their rights. At the same time, democracy also requires the rights of political and other minorities be safeguarded.” He understood it’s not just about who has the most votes. It’s also about the civic culture that we build that makes democracy work.

So we have to stop pretending that countries that just hold an election where sometimes the winner somehow magically gets 90 percent of the vote because all the opposition is locked up – or can’t get on TV, is a democracy. Democracy depends on strong institutions and it’s about minority rights and checks and balances, and freedom of speech and freedom of expression and a free press, and the right to protest and petition the government, and an independent judiciary, and everybody having to follow the law.

And yes, democracy can be messy, and it can be slow, and it can be frustrating. I know, I promise. But the efficiency that’s offered by an autocrat, that’s a false promise. Don’t take that one, because it leads invariably to more consolidation of wealth at the top and power at the top, and it makes it easier to conceal corruption and abuse. For all its imperfections, real democracy best upholds the idea that government exists to serve the individual and not the other way around. And it is the only form of government that has the possibility of making that idea real.

So for those of us who are interested in strengthening democracy, let’s also stop – it’s time for us to stop paying all of our attention to the world’s capitals and the centers of power and to start focusing more on the grassroots, because that’s where democratic legitimacy comes from. Not from the top down, not from abstract theories, not just from experts, but from the bottom up. Knowing the lives of those who are struggling.

As a community organizer, I learned as much from a laid-off steel worker in Chicago or a single mom in a poor neighborhood that I visited as I learned from the finest economists in the Oval Office. Democracy means being in touch and in tune with life as it’s lived in our communities, and that’s what we should expect from our leaders, and it depends upon cultivating leaders at the grassroots who can help bring about change and implement it on the ground and can tell leaders in fancy buildings, this isn’t working down here.

And to make democracy work, Madiba shows us that we also have to keep teaching our children, and ourselves – and this is really hard – to engage with people not only who look different but who hold different views. This is hard.

Most of us prefer to surround ourselves with opinions that validate what we already believe. You notice the people who you think are smart are the people who agree with you. Funny how that works. But democracy demands that we’re able also to get inside the reality of people who are different than us so we can understand their point of view. Maybe we can change their minds, but maybe they’ll change ours. And you can’t do this if you just out of hand disregard what your opponents have to say from the start. And you can’t do it if you insist that those who aren’t like you – because they’re white, or because they’re male – that somehow there’s no way they can understand what I’m feeling, that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.

Madiba, he lived this complexity. In prison, he studied Afrikaans so that he could better understand the people who were jailing him. And when he got out of prison, he extended a hand to those who had jailed him, because he knew that they had to be a part of the democratic South Africa that he wanted to build. “To make peace with an enemy,” he wrote, “one must work with that enemy, and that enemy becomes one’s partner.”

So those who traffic in absolutes when it comes to policy, whether it’s on the left or the right, they make democracy unworkable. You can’t expect to get 100 percent of what you want all the time; sometimes, you have to compromise. That doesn’t mean abandoning your principles, but instead it means holding on to those principles and then having the confidence that they’re going to stand up to a serious democratic debate. That’s how America’s Founders intended our system to work – that through the testing of ideas and the application of reason and proof it would be possible to arrive at a basis for common ground.

And I should add for this to work, we have to actually believe in an objective reality. This is another one of these things that I didn’t have to lecture about. You have to believe in facts. Without facts, there is no basis for cooperation. If I say this is a podium and you say this is an elephant, it’s going to be hard for us to cooperate. I can find common ground for those who oppose the Paris Accords because, for example, they might say, well, it’s not going to work, you can’t get everybody to cooperate, or they might say it’s more important for us to provide cheap energy for the poor, even if it means in the short term that there’s more pollution. At least I can have a debate with them about that and I can show them why I think clean energy is the better path, especially for poor countries, that you can leapfrog old technologies. I can’t find common ground if somebody says climate change is just not happening, when almost all of the world’s scientists tell us it is. I don’t know where to start talking to you about this. If you start saying it’s an elaborate hoax, I don’t know what to – where do we start?

Unfortunately, too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth. People just make stuff up. They just make stuff up. We see it in state-sponsored propaganda; we see it in internet driven fabrications, we see it in the blurring of lines between news and entertainment, we see the utter loss of shame among political leaders where they’re caught in a lie and they just double down and they lie some more. Politicians have always lied, but it used to be if you caught them lying they’d be like, “Oh man.” Now they just keep on lying.

By the way, this is what I think Mama Graça was talking about in terms of maybe some sense of humility that Madiba felt, like sometimes just basic stuff, me not completely lying to people seems pretty basic, I don’t think of myself as a great leader just because I don’t completely make stuff up. You’d think that was a base line. Anyway, we see it in the promotion of anti-intellectualism and the rejection of science from leaders who find critical thinking and data somehow politically inconvenient. And, as with the denial of rights, the denial of facts runs counter to democracy, it could be its undoing, which is why we must zealously protect independent media; and we have to guard against the tendency for social media to become purely a platform for spectacle, outrage, or disinformation; and we have to insist that our schools teach critical thinking to our young people, not just blind obedience.

Which, I’m sure you are thankful for, leads to my final point: we have to follow Madiba’s example of persistence and of hope.

It is tempting to give in to cynicism: to believe that recent shifts in global politics are too powerful to push back; that the pendulum has swung permanently. Just as people spoke about the triumph of democracy in the 90s, now you are hearing people talk about end of democracy and the triumph of tribalism and the strong man. We have to resist that cynicism.

Because, we’ve been through darker times, we’ve been in lower valleys and deeper valleys. Yes, by the end of his life, Madiba embodied the successful struggle for human rights, but the journey was not easy, it wasn’t pre-ordained. The man went to prison for almost three decades. He split limestone in the heat, he slept in a small cell, and was repeatedly put in solitary confinement. And I remember talking to some of his former colleagues saying how they hadn’t realized when they were released, just the sight of a child, the idea of holding a child, they had missed – it wasn’t something available to them, for decades.

And yet his power actually grew during those years – and the power of his jailers diminished, because he knew that if you stick to what’s true, if you know what’s in your heart, and you’re willing to sacrifice for it, even in the face of overwhelming odds, that it might not happen tomorrow, it might not happen in the next week, it might not even happen in your lifetime. Things may go backwards for a while, but ultimately, right makes might, not the other way around, ultimately, the better story can win out and as strong as Madiba’s spirit may have been, he would not have sustained that hope had he been alone in the struggle, part of buoyed him up was that he knew that each year, the ranks of freedom fighters were replenishing, young men and women, here in South African, in the ANC and beyond; black and Indian and white, from across the countryside, across the continent, around the world, who in those most difficult days would keep working on behalf of his vision.

And that’s what we need right now, we don’t just need one leader, we don’t just need one inspiration, what we badly need right now is that collective spirit. And, I know that those young people, those hope carriers are gathering around the world. Because history shows that whenever progress is threatened, and the things we care about most are in question, we should heed the words of Robert Kennedy – spoken here in South Africa, he said, “Our answer is the world’s hope: it is to rely on youth. It’s to rely on the spirit of the young.”

So, young people, who are in the audience, who are listening, my message to you is simple, keep believing, keep marching, keep building, keep raising your voice. Every generation has the opportunity to remake the world. Mandela said, “Young people are capable, when aroused, of bringing down the towers of oppression and raising the banners of freedom.” Now is a good time to be aroused. Now is a good time to be fired up.

And, for those of us who care about the legacy that we honor here today – about equality and dignity and democracy and solidarity and kindness, those of us who remain young at heart, if not in body – we have an obligation to help our youth succeed. Some of you know, here in South Africa, my Foundation is convening over the last few days, two hundred young people from across this continent who are doing the hard work of making change in their communities; who reflect Madiba’s values, who are poised to lead the way.

People like Abaas Mpindi, a journalist from Uganda, who founded the Media Challenge Initiative, to help other young people get the training they need to tell the stories that the world needs to know.

People like Caren Wakoli, an entrepreneur from Kenya, who founded the Emerging Leaders Foundation to get young people involved in the work of fighting poverty and promoting human dignity.

People like Enock Nkulanga, who directs the African Children’s mission, which helps children in Uganda and Kenya get the education that they need and then in his spare time, Enock advocates for the rights of children around the globe, and founded an organization called LeadMinds Africa, which does exactly what it says.

You meet these people, you talk to them, they will give you hope. They are taking the baton, they know they can’t just rest on the accomplishments of the past, even the accomplishments of those as momentous as Nelson Mandela’s. They stand on the shoulders of those who came before, including that young black boy born 100 years ago, but they know that it is now their turn to do the work.

Madiba reminds us that: “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart.” Love comes more naturally to the human heart, let’s remember that truth. Let’s see it as our North Star, let’s be joyful in our struggle to make that truth manifest here on earth so that in 100 years from now, future generations will look back and say, ‘they kept the march going, that’s why we live under new banners of freedom.’ Thank you very much, South Africa, thank you.

  July 18, 2018 at 01:43AM ClusterAssets Inc., https://ClusterAssets.wordpress.com

#Time #world #news #ClusterAssets #ClusterAsset #Cluster Asset Inc. #ClusterAssets Inc.

[moirailslut]

Responding to: MAKE ME ADMIT STUFF

I'm a nerd and I'm doing it. For no good reason honestly: 1. Would you have sex with the last person you text messaged? That was my boyfriend, so yes. 2. You talked to an ex today, correct? Nope but I decided to look at his facebook for the first time in years yesterday - it was uninteresting. 3. Have you taken someones virginity? Nothing to take. I've been someone's first time and someone's first time with a guy though. I've also been like three girls' first kiss, even though two of them were stage kisses. One of those still used a lot of tongue, though. 4. Is trust a big issue for you? Nope, I generally give people the benefit of the doubt. I was lucky to have a stable-ish childhood. 5. Did you hang out with the person you like recently? Lots! But if you mean romantically, it's been a week since we've been together but we text daily and had a video call for hours last night - we're moving in together this week! There's lots to talk about, it's a big transition for both of us. 6. What are you excited for? See #5! I'm gonna move in with my boyfriend on Friday!!! He's wonderful and thoughtful and the apartment is great. 7. What happened tonight? I... got home from D&D and called my mom? 8. Do you think it’s disgusting when girls get really wasted? I think this question is disgusting and sexist, and that men are generally encouraged by society to be far more disgusting than women, especially when they get drunk (which they are also encouraged to do more than women, as seen in the wording of this question) 9. Is confidence cute? Loaded question - it can be attractive, but it can also be toxic and gross, especially in men who have been trained to believe in themselves at the cost of discounting others and/or reason/safety. I think earned confidence in something you were once unconfident in can be endearing, particularly to those who saw that change take place! Confidence for its own sake can be gross though 10. What is the last beverage you had? Water 11. How many people of the opposite sex do you fully trust? First, "opposite sex" is such an outdated and awful term, implying two inherent genders at some cosmic diametric odds with each other, which is bullshit. As far as my current (increasingly tenuous) male identity meaning you're asking me about trusting women? Ummm, 'how many' is a weird question. Like trust how? I have like 10-15 female-identifying people I'm very close with, but a lot more family members and the like whom I trust very much. This is a dumb question and seems pretty cissexist and heteronormative, as well as supporting this culture of gendered enmity. 12. Do you own a pair of skinny jeans? Multiple. 13. What are you gonna do Saturday night? Sleep, it'll be the day after move-in 14. What are you going to spend money on next? Parking for work tomorrow. Thus question is for kids. 15. Are you going out with the last person you kissed? I'm moving in with him. 16. Do you think you’ll change in the next 3 months? Yes. 17. Who do you feel most comfortable talking to about anything? Probably my boyfriend? Depends on the thing. If it's really anything I guess it's my sister. 18. The last time you felt broken? When hearing people insist all couples argued a lot. 19. Have you had sex today? Only with myself. 20. Are you starting to realize anything? ??? I'll get back to you? 21. Are you in a good mood? Somewhat. This is putting me in a weird place I guess. 22. Would you ever want to swim with sharks? What a curveball. Um, only to see them up close, but likely not. Video is fine by me. 23. Are your eyes the same color as your dad’s? Yes. 24. What do you want right this second? Ice cream and my boyfriend. I'm getting o e on friday, and the other one is in my freezer. Please place them properly to avoid disaster. 25. What would you say if the person you love/like kissed another girl/boy? My turn? I'm ok sharing but I like attention too. 26. Is your current hair color your natural hair color? This was written with teenage girls in mind. Yes. 27. Would you be able to date someone who doesn’t make you laugh? Probably not 28. What was the last thing that made you laugh? Something my mom said? 29. Do you really, truly miss someone right now? One of my dogs moved to florida with my parents 30. Does everyone deserve a second chance? Very vague, generally yes but that doesn't mean you don't deserve to be safe from them. Abusers use this to lure victims back in. Nobody deserves anything FROM YOU. 31. Honestly, do you hate the last boy you were talking to? Fuck no - just many of the other ones 32. Does the person you have feelings for right now, know you do? I should hope so 💜 33. Are you one of those people who never drinks soda? Yes! There are others? I just always hated carbonation. 34. Listening to? Rainbow by Kesha. You should too. 35. Do you ever write in pencil anymore? Yeah, just started to at work lately and it feels so good 36. Do you know where the last person you kissed is? At home with a fever 37. Do you believe in love at first sight? No but ours was pretty fast. And attraction that leads to love is a thing. I did blow my boyfriend within an hour of meeting him in person, but we'd been talking fir a while by that point and in my defense, the internet in my room had gone out. 38. Who did you last call? My mom 39. Who was the last person you danced with? Myself at the train station the other morning. 40. Why did you kiss the last person you kissed? To say goodbye, and that I would see him soon, and that I wouldn't let all the awful things the president wanted to do to him take him away from me, and that I loved him so fucking much. Also, because his train was about to leave but I needed to kiss him one more time. 41. When was the last time you ate a cupcake? Too long ago. 42. Did you hug/kiss one of your parents today? No but I blew my mom a kiss, does that count? She's far away 43. Ever embarrass yourself in front of a crush? All day erry day. It's my natural state. 44. Do you tan in the nude? I burn in clothes 45. If you could, would you take back your last kiss? Fuck no, did you read what I just said about it? 46. Did you talk to someone until you fell asleep last night? Not really. 47. Who was the last person to call you? 💜Babe💜 48. Do you sing in the shower? Where don't I sing? 49. Do you dance in the car? On occasion 50. Ever used a bow and arrow? I rocked at it as a kid, but not in years. I loved the tigers'-eye beads they gave for archery at cub scout camp, so I became an Archery Expert to get a bunch. 51. Last time you got a portrait taken by a photographer? High School 52. Do you think musicals are cheesy? YES, GOT A PROBLEM??? 53. Is Christmas stressful? I give awful gifts 54. Ever eat a pierogi? How is this a question 55. Favorite type of fruit pie? Trick question it's pizza, but I also love most. Blueberry is amazing though 56. Occupations you wanted to be when you were a kid? Archaeologist, artist, singer. 57. Do you believe in ghosts? Only my ghost boyfriend 58. Ever have a Deja-vu feeling? Yes 59. Take a vitamin daily? Am I fucking MOTHER TERESA? God, what do you even EXPECT from me, perFECTION? 60. Wear slippers? Rarely 61. Wear a bath robe? Never 62. What do you wear to bed? Bf is converting me to underwear and a t-shirt 63. First concert? PWR BTTM but they're abusers and broke my heart so let's forget that one and say Regina Spektor 64. Wal-Mart, Target or Kmart? No 65. Nike or Adidas? No 66. Cheetos Or Fritos? Crunchy Cheetos but that's my addiction talking 67. Peanuts or Sunflower seeds? What? I guess peanuts 68. Favorite Taylor Swift song? No? 69. Ever take dance lessons? I got told I could not take a coed bellydancing class once because I was the first guy to show interest and the instructor would have had to have asked the students, which she just decided not to do. She also didn't tell this to my friend (who had asked the teacher if I could come and been told yes) until we were literally walking into class, me in shorts I had just bought for the class. She basically told me it was for the students' comfort which I understood even though I'm queer, but then was like you can sit in and watch maybe? But that seemed even weirder so I just went gome 70. Is there a profession you picture your future spouse doing? Assuming everyone gets married is bullshit 71. Can you curl your tongue? Lotsa ways 😉 72. Ever won a spelling bee? Nah but I've been in the musical 73. Have you ever cried because you were so happy? Yes 74. What is your favorite book? Probably one of the Circle of Magic books but I dunno which one 75. Do you study better with or without music? I don't study well 76. Regularly burn incense? No 77. Ever been in love? Yup 78. Who would you like to see in concert? More queer people 79. What was the last concert you saw? Tank and the Bangas!!!! They were so good 💜 80. Hot tea or cold tea? All Tea (all shade) 81. Tea or coffee? Teaaaaaa 82. Favorite type of cookie? Chocolate chip? Madeline? Raspberry marzipan? Thumbprint? Rainbow? Black and White but only the white side because I'm ✨racist against icing✨? Lots 83. Can you swim well? Sorta 84. Can you hold your breath without holding your nose? Yeah I guess 85. Are you patient? Sorta? 86. DJ or band, at a wedding? Me, in The Best Dress, singing my little heart out 87. Ever won a contest? Yes! Mostly math stuff 88. Ever have plastic surgery? No 89. Which are better black or green olives? Green 90. Opinions on sex before marriage? Sex is great, marriage is problematic, def do the first one first. Also like, this is such an outfated question wtf 91. Best room for a fireplace? All of them 92. Do you want to get married? Yeah but blame Disney for that propaganda. I'm getting over it, my bf is very against the state getting involved in relationships. That said, we might have to get married for dumb legal reasons for his well-being? It's gross and not a fairytale at all

#why did i do this #ask #sorta #mal talks #to themself #long post #sorry

[whatwentviral]

The Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act of 2017 was introduced by Democrats in Congress

A rainbow U.S. flag is held up during a vigil for the Pulse night club victims in Orlando. (Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

Democratic lawmakers this week introduced a bill that would ban the practice of “conversion therapy,” treatments that historically have targeted the LGBT community and claim to be able to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act of 2017 was introduced Tuesday by Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), along with Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.). About 70 other members of Congress, all Democrats, have said they support the bill, which would allow the Federal Trade Commission to classify conversion therapy and its practitioners as fraudulent.

“The bill is very simple,” Lieu told The Washington Post. “It says it is fraud if you treat someone for a condition that doesn’t exist and there’s no medical condition known as being gay. LGBTQ people were born perfect; there is nothing to treat them for. And by calling this what it should be, which is fraud, it would effectively shut down most of the organizations.”

Conversion therapy, also referred to as “reparative therapy” or “ex-gay therapy,” purports to be able to change a person’s sexual orientation. Highly controversial, the practice has been decried by dozens of mental health, medical and LGBT rights groups as harmful and misleading. Nevertheless, very few states have passed legislation banning it.

Such efforts emerged as far back as the mid-19th century, when being homosexual was viewed as “either a criminal act or a medical problem, or both,” according to a 2009 report by the American Psychological Association. In 1952, homosexuality was included as a mental illness in the first edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (better known as the DSM), and a variety of approaches to changing one’s sexual orientation was born.

Some therapists used electric shock treatments or induced nausea, vomiting or even paralysis when their patients had “same-sex erotic” thoughts. Other individuals were told to wear a rubber band around their wrist, snapping it whenever he or she was attracted to a member of the same sex. In 1965, Time magazine ran an article with the headline “Homosexuals Can Be Cured.” In it, professor and psychiatrist Samuel Hadden claimed to have successfully changed the sexual preferences gay males who participated in group psychotherapy.

“Over the course of four to eight years, Hedden explained, patients shared and interpreted each other’s dreams, cast aside their ‘flamboyant’ clothes and manners, worked through their hostilities and neuroses, and began dating women,” the magazine wrote in 2015, in a look back to the original story. “Marriages were saved and made.”

Despite resistance from gay rights leaders at the time, these types of treatments continued to persist through the 1960s and 1970s. Meanwhile, psychiatric groups were reevaluating the literature, and in 1973, homosexuality was removed as a disorder from the DSM.

Since then, dozens of major mental health, medical and LGBT rights groups have publicly come out against conversion therapy, from the American Academy of Pediatrics to the National Association of Social Workers. The American Psychological Association found that efforts to change sexual orientation harmed some people rather than helping them, leading to increased distress and depression, as well as negative self-image.

Similarly, a San Francisco State University study found that, compared to LGBT youth who are accepted, young people who experience rejection based on their sexual orientation or gender identity were eight times more likely to have attempted suicide, nearly six times more likely to report high levels of depression and more than three times as likely to use illegal drugs, according to the nonprofit Human Rights Campaign.

“There is no single model because this is not a science, but it’s all incredibly harmful,” said Xavier Persad, legislative counsel for the gay rights group. “It’s a crack science. It’s not based on science. We’ve heard and seen so many things, everything from folks being encouraged to not speak to their mothers and sisters, because somehow that is affecting their sexuality, all the way up until very incredibly inappropriate interactions between therapists and patients in various states of undress.”

Seven states and the District of Columbia have successfully passed legislation to ban or restrict conversion therapy in some way. California was the first to do so, banning the practice outright in 2012; others are New Jersey, Oregon, Illinois, Vermont and, just this month, New Mexico. Though New York does not have an outright ban, the state effectively prohibits conversion therapy through administrative regulations.

“The mere promise that you can somehow change someone’s gender identity or sexual orientation is, in it of itself, inherently deceptive and false,” said New Mexico state senator Jacob Candelaria, who sponsored the new legislation there. As the only openly gay man in the state legislature, Candelaria said he understands how “frightening and stressful” the process of coming out can be, both for the individual and the family.

“Unfortunately what you have is these providers who prey upon that … and make a false promise that if you do X, Y and Z, you can just get rid of ‘the problem,’” Candelaria said.

Conversion therapy for minors now illegal in 7 states. It should be illegal everywhere. Coversion therapy is child abuse by another name. https://t.co/iFdUNpQP0F

Support for conversion therapy remains fueled by conservative Christian groups, and in recent months, some in the LGBT community have questioned whether those groups would hold greater sway during Donald Trump’s presidency.

Earlier this year, Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council, a conservative lobbying group that supports conversion therapy, told ABC’s “20/20” that he felt confident Vice President Mike Pence and other Republicans would support the FRC in fighting the so-called “gay lobby.”

“I see it as unlikely that any sort of legislative — federal legislative attack upon sexual reorientation therapy will … go anywhere,” Sprigg said on the program, adding that he supported only “ordinary talk therapy” and would not tolerate physical abuse. “As a Christian, I believe that the Bible teaches that to choose to engage in homosexual conduct is a sin.”

Pence has been frequently accused of having supported conversion therapy in the past, in large part owing to a 2000 campaign website from when he was running for Congress that stated “resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.”

Pence’s press secretary, Marc Lotter, told The Post in an email Wednesday that such accusations misrepresented Pence’s views.

“Any assertion that Vice President Pence supported or advocated for conversion therapy is patently false and is a mischaracterization of language from a 16-year old campaign website,” Lotter said in a statement. “As a candidate for Congress in 2000, the Vice President’s website advocated that public funding in the Ryan White CARE Act be directed to groups that promoted safe sexual practices in the hopes of reducing the spread of HIV.”

Lotter did not answer a question sent by email about whether Pence would support the new bill seeking to ban conversion therapy.

During her confirmation hearings for education secretary, Betsy DeVos was called out by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) for her family’s alleged donations to groups such as Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian organization that pushes conversion therapy. DeVos said that Franken had mischaracterized her “core” family’s donations and that she did not support conversion therapy.

Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for education secretary, told Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) Jan. 17 that she has “never believed” in gay conversion therapy. (Reuters)

“I’ve never believed in that,” DeVos told Franken. “First of all, let me say I fully embrace equality, and I believe in the innate value of every single human being. And that all students, no matter their age, should be able to attend a school and feel safe and be free of discrimination.”

Lieu, the Democratic congressman, said he was encouraged by increasing awareness about the issue since he authored the California bill that ultimately passed in 2012, when he was a state senator.

“That was the hardest bill I ever did,” Lieu said. “It almost failed in the very first committee. And a lot of folks were uncomfortable with, in their view, getting in the way of the parent-child relationship. And so we did have a lot of initial resistance. But once it passed basically the floor, everyone thought oh, what a great idea.”

He also was heartened when, in 2013, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie became the first Republican governor to sign a state bill banning conversion therapy for minors.

In a statement then, Christie said he had reservations about the bill because he felt the government was limiting parental choice when it came to raising their children.

“However, I also believe that on issues of medical treatment for children we must look to experts in the field to determine the relative risks and rewards,” Christie said. “I believe that exposing children to these health risks without clear evidence of benefits that outweigh these serious risks is not appropriate. Based upon this analysis, I sign this bill into law.”

In a statement Wednesday, Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin applauded the new congressional proposal.

“So-called ‘conversion therapy’ is nothing more than child abuse and those who inflict it on others must be held accountable,” Griffin said. “HRC thanks Senators Murray and Booker and Representative Lieu for their efforts to outlaw this dangerous and inhumane practice. Now more than ever, we must send a clear message to the LGBTQ community — and especially LGBTQ young people — that who you are is not something that needs to be fixed.”

Source

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/04/27/lgbtq-people-were-born-perfect-a-new-bill-would-ban-conversion-therapy-nationwide/

The post The Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act of 2017 was introduced by Democrats in Congress appeared first on What Went Viral?.

from What Went Viral? https://www.whatwentviral.com/the-therapeutic-fraud-prevention-act-of-2017-was-introduced-by-democrats-in-congress/

[billyagogo]

Hillary in Midair

New Post has been published on https://newsprofixpro.com/moxie/2021/01/26/hillary-in-midair/

Hillary in Midair

Photo: Douglas Friedman/Trunk Archive

For four years, Hillary Rodham Clinton flew around the world as President Barack Obama’s secretary of State, while her husband, the former president Bill Clinton, lived a parallel life of speeches and conferences in other hemispheres. They communicated almost entirely by phone. They were seldom on the same continent, let alone in the same house.

But this year, all that has changed: For the first time in decades, neither one is in elected office, or running for one. Both are working in the family business, in the newly renamed nonprofit that once bore only Bill’s name but is now called the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which will hold its annual conference in New York next week.

“We get to be at home together a lot more now than we used to in the last few years,” says Hillary Clinton. “We have a great time; we laugh at our dogs; we watch stupid movies; we take long walks; we go for a swim.

“You know,” she says, “just ordinary, everyday pleasures.”

In the world of the Clintons, of course, what constitutes ordinary and everyday has never been either. So the question was inevitable: Given who he is, and who she is, does Bill, among their guffaws over the dogs and stupid movies, harangue her daily about running for president?

To this, Hillary Rodham Clinton lets loose one of her loud, head-tilted-back laughs. “I don’t think even he is, you know, focused on that right now,” she says. “Right now, we’re trying to just have the best time we can have doin’ what we’re doin’. ”

There’s a weightlessness about Hillary Clinton these days. She’s in midair, launched from the State Department toward … what? For the first time since 1992, unencumbered by the demands of a national political campaign or public office, she is saddled only with expectations about what she’s going to do next. And she is clearly enjoying it.

“It feels great,” she says, “because I have been on this high wire for twenty years, and I was really yearning to just have more control over my time and my life, spend a lot of that time with my family and my friends, do things that I find relaxing and enjoyable, and return to the work that I had done for most of my life.”

Relaxing, for a Clinton, especially one who, should she decide to run, is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in 2016, does not seem exactly restful. The day before we speak, she was awarded the Liberty Medal by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia—presented by Jeb Bush, another politician weighted with dynastic expectations and family intrigue, who took the opportunity to jest that both he and Clinton cared deeply about Americans—especially those in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

Afterward, Clinton stepped backstage, a red-white-and-blue ribbon around her neck pulled taut by a saucer-size gold medal. “It is really heavy,” she said, with that plain-home midwestern tone she deploys when she wants to not appear the heavy herself. In the room with her were some of her close advisers—Nick Merrill, a communications staffer and acolyte of Hillary’s suffering top aide, Huma Abedin; and Dan Schwerin, the 31-year-old speechwriter who wrote all the words she had spoken moments ago. Local policemen with whom Clinton had posed for photos milled about behind her.

Outside was the usual chorus accompanying a Clinton appearance, befitting her status as the most popular Democrat in America: news helicopters buzzing overhead and protesters amassed across the street who raised signs that read benghazi in bloodred paint and chanted antiwar slogans directly at her as she spoke at the outdoor lectern.

Though she was officially out of the government, it was not as if she could leave it, even if she wanted to. That week Clinton had met with Obama in the White House to discuss the ongoing Syria crisis, and now Obama was on TV that very evening announcing a diplomatic reprieve from a missile attack on Syria—a series of decisions that Clinton had lent her support to every step of the way. “I’ve been down this road with them,” she tells me the next day. “I know how challenging it is to ever get [the Russians] to a ‘yes’ that they actually execute on, but it can be done. I think we have to push hard.”

Clinton has taken a press hiatus since she left the State Department in January—“I’ve been successful at avoiding you ­people for many months now!” she says, laughing. She is tentative and careful, tiptoeing into every question, keenly aware that the lines she speaks will be read between. In our interview, she emphasizes her “personal friendship” with Obama, with whom she had developed a kind of bond of pragmatism and respect—one based on shared goals, both political and strategic. “I feel comfortable raising issues with him,” she says. “I had a very positive set of interactions, even when I disagreed, which obviously occurred, because obviously I have my own opinions, my own views.”

Hillary Clinton receiving the Liberty Medal in Philadelphia, September 10. Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine

The killing of bin Laden, she says, was a bonding experience. Obama’s Cabinet had been split on whether to attempt the mission, but Clinton backed it and sweated out the decision with the commander-in-chief. “I’ve seen the president in a lot of intense and difficult settings,” she says, “and I’ve watched him make hard decisions. Obviously, talking to you on September 11 as we are, the bin Laden decision-making process is certainly at the forefront of my mind.”

The statement cuts two ways—praise for her president and evidence of her deep experience in and around the Oval Office—including the most successful military endeavor of the Obama presidency. As a Cabinet member, she says, “I’ve had a unique, close, and personal front-row seat. And I think these last four years have certainly deepened and broadened my understanding of the challenges and the opportunities that we face in the world today.”

Political campaigns are built of personal narratives—and it works much better if the stories are true. The current arc of Hillary’s story is one of transformation. Being secretary of State was more than a job. Her closest aides describe the experience as a kind of cleansing event, drawing a sharp line between the present and her multiple pasts—as First Lady, later as the Democratic front-runner in 2008, derailed by the transformative campaign of Barack Obama but also by a dysfunctional staff, the campaign-trail intrusions of her husband, and the inherent weaknesses of the fractious, bickering American institution that has become known as Clintonworld.

At State, she was the head of a smoothly running 70,000-person institution, and fully her own woman, whose marriage to a former president was, when it was mentioned, purely an asset. And now that she’s left State, Clintonworld is being refashioned along new lines, rationalized and harmonized. The signal event of this is the refurbishing of the Clinton Foundation, formerly Bill’s province, to accommodate all three Clintons, with Chelsea, newly elevated, playing a leading role. The move has ruffled certain Clintonworld feathers—a front-page article in the New York Times about the financial travails of the foundation as managed by Bill Clinton brought sharp pushback—but most of those close to the Clintons acknowledge that to succeed in the coming years, Hillary will have to absorb the lessons of 2008. Currently, it’s a topline talking point among her closest aides.

“She doesn’t repeat her mistakes,” says Melanne Verveer, an aide to the First Lady who then served in the State Department as Hillary’s ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. “She really learns from her mistakes. It’s like, you want to grow a best practice and then always operate on that. She analyzes, ‘What went wrong here?’ ”

Of course, if Hillary’s future were to be an author, or a pundit, or a retiree, learning from mistakes wouldn’t be an issue. But other outcomes, where executive talents are prized, seem more likely. I ask Clinton the question that trails her like a thought bubble: Does she wrestle with running for president?

“I do,” she says, “but I’m both pragmatic and realistic. I think I have a pretty good idea of the political and governmental challenges that are facing our leaders, and I’ll do whatever I can from whatever position I find myself in to advocate for the values and the policies I think are right for the country. I will just continue to weigh what the factors are that would influence me making a decision one way or the other.”

Clintonworld, however, speaks with many voices­—albeit many of them not for attribution. Some of her close confidants, including many people with whom her own staff put me in touch, are far less circumspect than she is. “She’s running, but she doesn’t know it yet,” one such person put it to me. “It’s just like a force of history. It’s inexorable, it’s gravitational. I think she actually believes she has more say in it than she actually does.”

And a longtime friend concurs. “She’s doing a very Clintonian thing. In her mind, she’s running for it, and she’s also convinced herself she hasn’t made up her mind. She’s going to run for president. It’s a foregone conclusion.”

When president-elect Barack Obama asked Clinton to be secretary of State, they had a series of private conversations about her role for the next four years. What would the job entail? How much power would she have? How would it be managed?

Or to restate the questions as they were understood by everyone involved in the negotiation: What would Hillary Clinton get in return for supporting Obama after the brutal primary and helping him defeat John McCain?

Though she had ended her losing campaign on a triumphal note, gracefully accepting the role of secretary of State and agreeing to be a trouble-free team player in Obama’s Cabinet, the 2008 primary loss left deep wounds to her core staff—at least among those members who had not been excommunicated. They would discuss what happened during long trips to Asia and Europe, sounding like post-traumatic-stress victims. “The experience was very searing for them, and they would go through it with great detail,” says a former State Department colleague.

Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine

The problems of that campaign were crucial to how Clinton would decide to lead the State Department. In accepting the State job, Clinton insisted on hiring her own staff. In addition to her top aides, Huma Abedin and Philippe Reines, she enlisted stalwarts of campaigns and administrations past: Maggie Williams, Cheryl Mills, and Verveer, who have been with her since her days in Bill Clinton’s White House. Among Hillary’s inner circle, this is viewed as a returning lineup of all-stars who were iced out of her campaign by a five-person team led by Patti Solis-Doyle, a group who in their telling became the agents of the campaign’s troubles. “They’re the A-team,” says a top aide. “They weren’t the B-team that got elevated. They were the A-team that got deposed by [Solis-Doyle].”

The 2008 campaign was seen by many as an echo chamber, closed off from the best advice, and the lesson for Clinton was clear: “The takeaway is, ‘Don’t only listen to five people,’ ” says the aide.

When she arrived, Clinton did a kind of institutional listening tour at the State Department. “She felt like she was too closed off from what was happening across the expanse of the [2008] campaign,” says a close aide at the State Department, “and that became a hallmark with the leadership in the State Department, and it served her incredibly well.”

To keep things operating smoothly, she hired Tom Nides, the COO of Morgan Stanley, who’d contributed heavily to Clinton’s past campaigns. Even Nides was wary of the Clinton drama he might be stepping into. “I had heard all these stories about the Clinton world and what all that meant and ‘Did you really want to get wrapped up in that?’ ” he says. But he reports that “all of the stuff did not exist at the State Department for the last four years.

“The relationship between the State Department and the White House and the State Department and the Defense Department was probably the best it’s ever been in 50 years,” he adds. “That starts from the top. No drama. And that was started by her.”

Among Hillary Clinton’s greatest hits at State were the new focus on Asia, pushing for the overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, and building a coalition for strong sanctions against Iran. But she also saw the job as a kind of reformatting of the State Department itself to prepare for the longer-run issues. “I’d been told that it was a choice that had to be made: You could either do what had to be done around the world, or you could organize and focus the work that was done inside State and the Agency for International Development, but I rejected that,” says Clinton. “I thought it was essential that as we restore America’s standing in the world and strengthen our global leadership again, we needed what I took to calling ‘smart power’ to elevate American diplomacy and development and reposition them for the 21st century … That meant that we had to take a hard look at how both State and A.I.D. operated. I did work to increase their funding after a very difficult period when they were political footballs to some extent and they didn’t have the resources to do what was demanded of them.”

Clinton’s State team argues that Clinton was a great stateswoman, her ambition to touch down in as many countries as possible a meter of how much repair work she did to the nation’s image abroad. Along the way, she embraced with good humor a parody Tumblr account, Texts From Hillary, that featured a picture of her in the iconic sunglasses looking cool and queenly. “She insisted on having a personality,” says Jake Sullivan, her former deputy chief of staff and now the national-security adviser to Vice-President Joe Biden. “And on stating her opinion.”

For foreign-policy critics, some of this could look like wheel spinning. The major critique was that she didn’t take on any big issues, like brokering peace between Israel and the Palestinians, or negotiating the nuclear disarmament of North Korea. And the suspicion was that she didn’t want to be associated with any big failures as she prepared for 2016. She was, after all, under the tight grip of the Obama White House, which directed major foreign-policy decisions from the Oval Office.

“Whatever one says about how [Secretary of State] John Kerry is doing,” says the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, “he has nothing left to lose. You can see he takes risks. He’s plowing into the Middle East stuff when people are saying this isn’t going to get you anywhere. Hillary never would have done any of this stuff.”

Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine

Her former staffers argue that she managed a host of important, if underrecognized, global flare-ups along the way, from freeing a dissident in China to brokering the easing of sanctions against Burma. “She helped avert a second war in Gaza by going out and pulling off that cease-fire,” recalls Sullivan of the deal she hashed out between Israel and Hamas after a week of fighting, “which holds to this day. And you don’t get a lot of credit for preventing something. Those are things that you aren’t going to measure how successful they are for another ten or twenty years.”

At the same time, Hillary used her tenure at State for a more intimate purpose: to shift the balance of power in the most celebrated political marriage in American history. Bill Clinton was an overwhelming force in Hillary’s 2008 campaign, instrumental in vouching for Mark Penn, the strategist whose idea it was for Hillary to cling to her war vote on Iraq and to sell her as an iron-sided insider whose experience outweighed the need to project mere humanity. Bill also freelanced his own negative attacks, some of which backfired. Because his staff was not coordinating with Hillary’s, her staff came to regard him as a wild card who couldn’t be managed.

But not in the State Department. “Not a presence,” says a close State aide. “And I don’t mean that just literally. But not someone who was built into the system in any way. He had a very minimal presence in her time at the State Department.

“It’s kind of jarring when she says ‘Bill,’ ” this person adds, recalling meetings with Hillary Clinton. “Well, who’s Bill? And then you realize that she’s talking about her husband. It happened so infrequently that you were kind of like, Oh, the president.”

Part of it, of course, was logistical. Though they spoke frequently by phone, Bill and Hillary were rarely in the same country. By chance, their paths crossed in Bogotá, where they had dinner together—then, owing to their massive entourages, returned to their respective hotels. “Love conquers all except logistics,” says an aide.

“I could probably count on one hand the times she came to a meeting and either invoked his name or suggested something that Bill had said,” says Nides. “I probably did it more about my wife telling me what to do.”

Hillary might have left the State Department unsullied by controversy if not for the Benghazi episode, in which the ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three other consulate staffers were killed in an attack on the U.S. consulate. The NATO intervention in Libya was the most important foreign intervention of her tenure, and a seemingly successful one, but the lack of security in Benghazi and the confusion over how the incident occurred set off a heated Republican attack on Clinton’s handling of the disaster, and she was roasted on the cable-news spit for weeks. In January, she took responsibility for the deaths of the four Americans before Congress—while also questioning her inquisition, snapping at a Republican congressman, “What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.”

Benghazi will be the go-to bludgeon for Republicans if and when Clinton tries using her experience at State to run for president. It is a reminder that Clinton, despite the cool, centrist façade she has developed in the past four years, is only a misstep away from being a target of partisan rage once again.

Regardless of the facts, Republicans are liable to use Benghazi as a wedge to pry back her stately exterior, goading her into an outburst, once again revealing the polarizing figure who saw vast right-wing conspiracies and tried ginning up government health care against the political tides of Newt Gingrich.

When asked for her prescription for partisan gridlock, Clinton sees an opportunity not unlike what Obama saw in 2008. ­“People are stereotypes, they are caricaturized,” says Clinton. “It comes from both sides of the political aisle, it comes from the press. It’s all about conflict, it’s all about personality, and there are huge stakes in the policies that are being debated, and I think there’s a hunger amongst a very significant, maybe even a critical mass of Americans, clustered on the left, right, and center, to have an adult conversation about how we’re going to solve these problems … but it’s not for the fainthearted.” For now, Hillary’s strategy is to sail above these conflicts, mostly by saying nothing to inflame them. “I have a lot of reason to believe, as we saw in the 2012 election, most Americans don’t agree with the extremists on any side of an issue,” says Clinton, “but there needs to continue to be an effort to find common ground, or even take it to higher ground on behalf of the future.”

At the Sheraton Ballroom in Chicago last spring, Bill Clinton appeared before an eager crowd of Clinton groupies at the Clinton Global Initiative America, a special conference focused on domestic issues and set in Hillary’s hometown. Onstage, the former president looked older than in the past—thinner, stooped, more subdued, his hands trembling while he held his notes at the podium. Haloed in blue light, he spoke about the “still embattled American Dream” and then introduced his wife as his new partner in the foundation, the woman who “taught me everything I know about NGOs.”

Her appearance made for a stark contrast. When she emerged from behind the curtain, she appeared much more youthful—smiling, upright, beaming in a turquoise pantsuit; she received huge applause and a standing ovation that dwarfed the response to Bill.

On her first major public stage since leaving the State Department, Hillary told the crowd that the foundation will be a “full partnership between the three of us,” including her daughter, Chelsea. But this was clearly Hillary Clinton’s show. That week, she had launched her Twitter account, complete with a tongue-in-cheek description of her as a “glass ceiling cracker,” her future “TBD.” Clearly, her foundation work, as important as it is to her, wasn’t everything. And Chicago was a perfect site for the start of this new chapter. It was where she was from, the launchpad for her career in politics and early-childhood education and women’s empowerment, what she called the “great unfinished business of this century.” “When women participate in politics,” she said, “it ripples out to the entire society … Women are the world’s most underused resource.”

If you wanted to read her speech as an opening salvo for a 2016 run for the presidency, it wasn’t hard to do as she talked about all that she’d learned as she traveled the globe. Whatever country or situation they found themselves in, “what people wanted was a good job.”

The rechristening of the foundation marked the first time the Clintons had come under the same institutional roof since the nineties. For Hillary, it made sense, because she didn’t have to compete with her husband for donors at her own foundation. It would also allow her to warm up donors for future initiatives—like, just for instance, a 2016 campaign. Two days later, the family would appear together onstage, a picture-perfect photo op of what Bill Clinton called “our little family.”

The Clinton Global Initiative, in addition to its work combating poverty and aids, is a kind of unofficial Clinton-alumni reunion, with friends and donors dating back to the early years in Arkansas. Sprinkled around the ballroom in Chicago were the old hands, from Bruce Lindsey, the former deputy White House counsel and CEO of the foundation, to newer faces like J. B. Pritzker, the Chicago hotel scion who was national co-chair of Hillary’s 2008 campaign and was now raising $20 million for an early-childhood-education initiative.

The Clinton network has always been both an asset and a burden. Terry ­McAuliffe, the longtime Clinton ally now running for governor of Virginia, has raised millions for the Clintons at every juncture of their careers. Then again, he’s Terry McAuliffe, the guy who left his weeping wife and newborn child in the car while he collected $1 million at a fund-raiser, then wrote about it in a memoir. “You can’t change who these people are,” says one former Hillary adviser. “It’s like any other trade. You’ve got the good, and there’s a lot of good. And you’ve got the noise.”

To harness some of the noise—what some Clinton people called “the energy”—a faction has converged around the Ready for Hillary super-PAC started by a former 2008 campaign aide named Adam Parkhomenko. Launched early this year, it has appeared to many observers to be an informal satellite of Hillary’s larger designs for the White House, but her aides say it’s a rogue operation of questionable benefit. “There is nothing they are doing that couldn’t have waited a year,” says one. “Not a single fucking thing.”

Regardless, Clinton veterans like former campaign strategist James Carville have come out supporting the super-PAC, as has former White House political director Craig Smith, Bill’s old Arkansas pal. Supporters argue that the super-PAC has Hillary’s tacit approval, especially given the involvement of Susie Tompkins Buell, a prominent Democratic donor who is among her oldest and closest friends. “It offers supporters the all-important link to click on, plus places to convene in both the digital and physical worlds,” says Tracy Sefl, an adviser to the super-PAC. “And although some perhaps just can’t quite believe it, Ready for Hillary’s name really does convey the totality of its purpose.”

One supporter of the super-PAC, who didn’t want to be identified, acknowledges that “there’s a danger there of her again becoming the front-runner. And, too, the existence of it raises her profile and puts more pressure on her to make a decision earlier than she might otherwise want to make.”

On some level, the network is almost impossible to control—Clintonworld is bigger than just the Clintons. “People do things in their name, or say they just talked to Hillary or to Bill, and the next thing you know, they’re doing something stupid,” says a former aide of Hillary’s whose interview she sanctioned. “You take the good with the bad. Hopefully, the good outweighs the bad.”

The biggest question among Hillary’s circle concerns Huma Abedin, currently chief of Hillary’s “transition office” and formerly her deputy chief of staff in the State Department. Abedin began as an intern for the First Lady in 1996, when she was 20 years old, and is, of course, married to former congressman and mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, of sexting infamy.

In the midst of her husband’s scandal, Abedin stepped down from her full-time job for a consulting contract and moved back to New York to take work with Teneo Holdings, a consulting firm and investment bank run by Bill Clinton’s longtime consigliere, Doug Band. This gave Hillary cover while also keeping Abedin plugged in. “It’s business as usual,” says a Clinton insider. “Keep your circle of advisers small, and then you structure things in a way that makes it economically possible for your close advisers to sustain themselves.”

But business as usual can be a giant target for enemies: Abedin has since become the subject of an inquiry, by a Republican congressman, into her dual consulting roles, looking for potential conflicts of interest while she served in a sensitive role in the administration. Then came a second episode of Weiner’s sexting this summer, blindsiding the Clintons, obliterating Weiner’s mayoral ambitions, and greatly complicating Abedin’s future with the Clintons. With Weiner’s ignominious loss and parting bird-flip, “Huma has a choice to make,” says a close associate of hers. “Does she go with Anthony, or does she go with Hillary?”

Leaving the Clinton bubble is almost unimaginable for those who’ve grown up in it. According to a person familiar with the conversations, Abedin has struggled to reconcile her marriage to Weiner with her role as Clinton’s top aide, traumatized by the prospect of leaving her boss’s inner circle.

In a sense, the Weiner scandal is a ghost of Clintonworld past, summoning sordid images of unruly appetites and bimbo eruptions, exactly the sort of thing that needs to be walled off and excised in a 2016 campaign. Former advisers from State say any future campaign will take a page from Clinton’s relatively peaceful past four years. “In contrast with reports of disunity in the 2008 campaign,” says Kurt Campbell, “the State Department was operated with a high degree of harmony and collegiality.”

The secret to realigning Clintonworld has been there all along. Since she received her master’s from Oxford in 2003, Chelsea Clinton had tried out different career paths, first in business consulting at McKinsey & Co., then at a hedge fund run by donors to her parents, and finally as a correspondent on NBC, with a few university postings sprinkled in. Chelsea has grown up in the Clinton bubble, the princess of Clintonworld, and getting outside of it has sometimes been difficult. She tried her hand at developing her “brand” on TV, but then, two years ago, stepped in and took over her father’s foundation, a return to the fold that portended a lot of changes. She became vice-chairman of the board. The foundation hired white-shoe law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett to perform an audit and review of the foundation’s finances and operations. And this summer, she installed a friend from McKinsey, Eric Braverman, as CEO.

Chelsea’s arrival was a clear if unspoken critique of Doug Band, who’d long been Bill Clinton’s gatekeeper in his post-presidential life. In Chelsea’s view, the foundation started by Band had become sprawling and inefficient, threatened by unchecked spending and conflicts of interest, an extension of her father’s woolly style. In 2012, a New York Post story suggested impropriety in Band’s dual role, forcing Clinton to put a bit of distance between himself and Teneo.

In a report this summer, the Times claimed the foundation operated at a deficit and was vulnerable to conflicts of interest related to Teneo Holdings—which telegraphed the message that there was a new sheriff. Chelsea, says a Hillary loyalist, “has taken a chain saw to that organization. She has not allowed these old bubbas to deal with this.”

Naturally, some of Bill Clinton’s staff at the foundation were unhappy with Chelsea’s arrival, especially the decision to include Hillary and Chelsea in the name of it. In a move that suggested intrafamily conflict, Bill Clinton stepped out to defend his comrades, insisting that Bruce Lindsey, the former CEO, who had suffered a stroke in 2011, would continue to be “intimately involved” in the foundation and that he couldn’t have accomplished “half of what I have in my post-presidency without Doug Band.”

Hillary Clinton says her daughter’s entrance into the foundation was an organic extension of everything the Clintons have ever done. “It sort of is in the DNA, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” she says. “She’s an incredibly able—obviously I’m biased—but extremely well-organized, results-oriented person, so rather than joining a lot of other groups, on which she could pursue her interests, she thought, I want to be part of continuing to build something I have worked on off and on over the years, and I really believe in it. I was thrilled to hear that.

“She comes by it naturally, don’t you think?” she adds cheerfully.

Chelsea is now the chief Bill Clinton gatekeeper. At HBO, where Martin Scorsese is making a documentary about him, Chelsea has been involved from the start and is weighing in on the production.

As the various staffs of the three Clintons come under one roof, in a headquarters in the Time-Life Building in midtown Manhattan, there are dangers of internecine conflict. “It’s all people jockeying for position,” says a person with close ties to the foundation. “This is an operation that runs on proximity to people. Now there are three people. How does all that work?”

For Bill Clinton to acknowledge flaws in his institute and relinquish control to his daughter and wife was a new twist in the family relationship. People in both Bill’s and Hillary’s camp are quick to emphasize that Bill Clinton is still the lifeblood of the foundation and its social mission. Chelsea’s arrival is ultimately about preserving the foundation for the long term as he gets older and winds down some of his activities. But the subtext of the cleanup operation is no mystery among Clinton people. Bill’s loosey-goosey world had to be straightened out if Hillary was going to run for president. “She doesn’t operate that way,” says one of her former State Department advisers. “I mean, she has all sorts of creative ideas, but that’s not how she operates. She is much more systematic.”

As part of the shifting landscape in Clintonworld, Bill Clinton got a new chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, one of the group of African-American women—including Maggie Williams and Donna Brazile—who have been close advisers to the Clintons over the years. A former policy aide at the American Federation of Teachers, Flournoy’s arrival last January was viewed by insiders as Hillary’s planting a sentinel at the office of her husband.

Bill Clinton is also a legendary politician, a brilliant tactician who won two presidential elections and reigned over the most prosperous years in America in recent memory. Some make the argument that he single-handedly won Obama reelection with his extraordinary takedown of Mitt Romney at the Democratic National Convention last year. The trick, say Clinton advocates, is to manage him effectively on behalf of his wife. “To the discredit of whoever is running a campaign, if that happens and they don’t use Bill Clinton—use his strategy, use his thoughts, take his dumb ideas and his great ideas and make sure they’re used effectively—they’re a moron,” says a person close to Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps this is where Chelsea comes in. After years of expectation, she has emerged from her chrysalis, a new power center, her father’s keeper and, maybe for Hillary … a shadow campaign manager.

In Clintonworld, wheels are turning, but no one wants them to turn too fast. Last spring, in a panel discussion at the Peterson Institute, Bill Clinton blew up, telling people to stop speculating on her presidential aspirations. It was too soon. Says Nides, “If you have every person you know say to you the following: ‘You should run for president, Madam Secretary, I love you, Madam Secretary, you’d be a great president, Madam Secretary,’ she nods. And she understands the context of that.”

Hillary is well aware of these dynamics. “I’m not in any hurry,” she tells me. “I think it’s a serious decision, not to be made lightly, but it’s also not one that has to be made soon.

“This election is more than three years away, and I just don’t think it’s good for the country,” she says. “It’s like when you meet somebody at a party and they look over your shoulder to see who else is there, and you want to talk to them about something that’s really important; in fact, maybe you came to the party to talk to that particular person, and they just want to know what’s next,” she says. “I feel like that’s our political process right now. I just don’t think it is good.”

So all the activity and planning and obsessive calculation that go into a presidential campaign take place behind a pleasant midwestern smile. Her time at State indeed transformed her—as did her 2008 campaign, and her time as a senator, and as First Lady, and on and on. Now she contains multitudes, a million contradictions. She’s a polarizing liberal with lots of Republican friends, the coolest of customers constantly at the center of swirling drama. She’s hung up on a decision over whether to run for an office she (not to mention her husband) has coveted for her entire adult life. She’s a Clinton. And what a candidate she’d make in 2016. But if that’s where she’s going, she’s not saying. “I’m somebody who gets up every day and says, ‘What am I going to do today, and how am I going to do it?’ ” she says. “I think it moves me toward some outcome I’m hoping for and also has some, you know, some joy attached to it. And I think it would be great if everybody else [took the same approach], for the foreseeable future.”

Of Hillary’s dreams, that one seems unlikely to come true.

Hillary in Midair

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