#what if we acknowledge and represent the people who ALSO made up early america and directly influenced it to such a degree that we can | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nordleuchten · 3 years

Text

La Fayette - an American Citizen?

As promised, @msrandonstuff :-)

The question weather La Fayette was an American citizen had for quite a time been the subject of debates - both during La Fayette’s lifetime as well as long after his death. Not only La Fayette’s own status was up for debate but also the legal status of his descendants.

We start off with the fairly simple, La Fayette had been made an honorary American citizen on August 06, 2002 (that is the date where President George W. Bush signed the resolution, the bill however had been first introduced on April 24, 2001, you can find the timeline of the bill here.)

The Congress of the United States has a very detailed (and research-friendly) free online archive. You can read the wording of the original bill here and here you can see the amendments that were made. The speeches and procedures that accompany the bill the day it was passed in the House of Representatives are to be found here.

Here is the text of the resolution for everybody who has no interest or time to go through my jungle of links :-)

Joint Resolution

Conferring honorary citizenship of the United States posthumously on Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roche Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette.

Whereas the United States has conferred honorary citizenship on four other occasions in more than 200 years of its independence, and honorary citizenship is and should remain an extraordinary honor not lightly conferred nor frequently granted;

Whereas Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roche Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette or General Lafayette, voluntarily put forth his own money and risked his life for the freedom of Americans;

Whereas the Marquis de Lafayette, by an Act of Congress, was voted to the rank of Major General;

Whereas, during the Revolutionary War, General Lafayette was wounded at the Battle of Brandywine, demonstrating bravery that forever endeared him to the American soldiers;

Whereas the Marquis de Lafayette secured the help of France to aid the United States' colonists against Great Britain;

Whereas the Marquis de Lafayette was conferred the honor of honorary citizenship by the Commonwealth of Virginia and the State of Maryland;

Whereas the Marquis de Lafayette was the first foreign dignitary to address Congress, an honor which was accorded to him upon his return to the United States in 1824;

Whereas, upon his death, both the House of Representatives and the Senate draped their chambers in black as a demonstration of respect and gratitude for his contribution to the independence of the United States;

Whereas an American flag has flown over his grave in France since his death and has not been removed, even while France was occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II; and

Whereas the Marquis de Lafayette gave aid to the United States in her time of need and is forever a symbol of freedom: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roche Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, is proclaimed posthumously to be an honorary citizen of the United States of America.

Now, this honorary citizenship does only involve La Fayette himself. His heirs have nothing to do with this act. It does however acknowledge that La Fayette had already been made a citizen by the state of Maryland and the Commonwealth of Virginia (they left out the, somewhat questionable, declarations by the State of Connecticut and the State of Massachusetts.) Let us therefor go back to the 18th century and have a look at both of these resolutions. First is Maryland:

The General Assembly of the state of Maryland passed the following resolution on December 28, 1784.

CHAP. XII.

An ACT to naturalize major-general the marquis de la Fayette and his heirs male for ever.

WHEREAS the general assembly of Maryland, anxious to perpetuate a name dear to the state, and to recognize the marquis de la Fayette for one of its citizens, who, at the age of nineteen, left his native country, and risked his life in the late revolution; who, on his joining the American army, after being appointed by congress to the rank of major-general, disinterestedly refused the usual rewards of command, and sought only to deserve what he attained, the character of patriot and soldier; who, when appointed to conduct an incursion into Canada, called forth by his prudence and extraordinary discretion the approbation of congress; who, at the head of an army in Virginia, baffled the manœuvres of a distinguished general, and excited the admiration of the oldest commanders; who early attracted the notice and obtained the friendship of the illustrious general Washington; and who laboured and succeeded in raising the honour and the name of the United States of America: Therefore,

II. Be it enacted, by the general assembly of Maryland, That the marquis de la Fayette, and his heirs male for ever, shall be, and they and each of them are hereby deemed, adjudged, and taken to be, natural born citizens of this state, and shall henceforth be entitled to all the immunities, rights and privileges, of natural born citizens thereof, they and every of them conforming to the constitution and laws of this state, in the enjoyment and exercise of such immunities, rights and privileges.

Interesting piece of legislature, we are now not only talking about La Fayette but also about “his male heirs forever” - keep that in mind for later. On to Virginia:

The Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia, yr. 1781-1786 states for Thursday, December 16, 1784:

Ordered, That leave be given to bring in a bill “for the naturalisation of the Marquis De la Fayette;” and that Messr. Henry Lee, and Turberville, do prepare and bring in the same.

We can read for Monday, October 31, 1785:

Mr. Henry Lee presented, according to order, a bill, “for the naturalisation of the Marquis De la Fayette;” and the same was received and read a first time, and ordered to be read a second time.

We can further read on that day that:

A bill, "for the naturalization of the Marquis de la Fayette;" was read the second time, and ordered to be com- mitted to a committee of the whole House immediately. The House, accordingly, resolved itself into a committee of the whole House, on the said bill ; and after some time spent therein, Mr. Speaker resumed the chair, and Mr. Braxton reported, that the committee had, according to order, had the said bill under their consideration, and had gone through the same, and made several amendments thereto, which he read in his place, and afterwards delivered in at the clerk's table, where the same were again twice read, and agreed to by the House.

The next day, on Tuesday, November 1, 1785, we can read in the Journal:

An engrossed bill. “for the naturalization of the Marquis de la Fayette;" was read the third time.

Resolved, That the bill do pass; and that the title be, "an act, for the naturalization of the Marquis de la Fayette.'”

Ordered, That Mr. Henry Lee do carry the bill to the Senate, and desire their concurrence.

On Friday, November 11, 1785 we can read:

A message from the Senate by Mr. Harrison

Mr. Speaker, — The Senate have agreed to the bill (…) “for the naturalization of the Marquis de la Fayette;" (…) And then he withdrew

And finally on Saturday, January 7, 1786 we can read:

The Speaker signed the following enrolled bills: (…) “An act, for the naturalization of the Marquis de la Fayette."

At this point now we have two citizenships, one of them including his male heirs - so why was there any need for the honorary citizenship of 2002? I let Mr. Sensenbrenner, from the Committee on the Judiciary, who also submitted the amendments to the 2002 bill, explain it:

The Marquis de Lafayette was granted citizenship by the States of Maryland and Virginia before the Constitution was adopted. In 1935, a State Department letter addressed the question of whether the citizenship conferred by these States could be interpreted to have ultimately resulted in the Marquis de Lafayette being a United States citizen. Their determination was that it did not. The State Department provided an excerpt from the Journals of the Continental Congress in 1784 which stated in the Congress' farewell to the Marquis that ``as his uniform and unceasing attachment to this country has resembled that of a patriotic citizen of the United States . . . [emphasis added]'' as proof that the citizenship was not considered to have translated to a Federal level.

Simply speaking, a “state citizenship” does not equal a “real American citizenship”. Nevertheless, two decadents of La Fayette tried to obtain an American citizenship by using the Maryland resolution. Count René de Chambrun in 1932 and Count Edward Perrone di San Martino a few years later – I think the years was 1935 and he was the reason the State Department wrote their letter. As you all can very well imagine, both men were denied. Beside the rather obvious reason for their denial, the descendants were faced with even more legal obstacles. They had to rely solely on the Maryland resolution. That resolution was passed in 1784 under the Articles of Confederation. This set of laws was replaced on March 4, 1789 by the United States Constitution. Some people argue that La Fayette and all his male heirs born up until March 4, 1784 were made US citizens by the Maryland resolution but new citizenships could not be granted to any male heirs born after the Constitution became effective, because the Maryland resolution was passed under the Articles of Confederation and not under the Constitution. Some people argue however, that the Constitution still provides the same legal margin for a citizenships according to the Maryland resolution.

It furthermore has to be taken into consideration, that the term “and his heirs male forever” generally implies that there has to be an uninterrupted line of male decadents and heirs. From father to son to grand-son, great-grandson and so on and so forth. The problem is, that the male line of the La Fayette’s died out quite some time ago. La Fayette himself had one son, Georges Washington Louis Gilbert de La Fayette. He in turn had two sons of his own. Oscar Gilbert Lafayette and Edmond de La Fayette. None of them had any surviving male children of their own.

But these two incidents were not the only times that trouble and uncertainty arose from the States grant of citizenship - far from it. When La Fayette was arrested during the French Revolution by the Austrian troops, he tried to avoid imprisonment by declaring himself an American citizen. Neither the Austrians nor the Prussians bought into that and the Americans were also a bit uneasy about La Fayette’s claim. Later, when Adrienne send her son Georges Washington de La Fayette over to America, she wrote a very “subtle” letter, reminding the American people that her son was included in the resolution from Maryland. Meanwhile, James Monroe, the American ambassador to France at the time, had obtained passports for Adrienne and her two daughters to travel to America as well. The papers were for “Mrs. Motier of Hartford, Connecticut”. Here is the catch; the town of Hartford in Connecticut (not the state itself, only that single town) had declared La Fayette and his entire family as citizen. The passports were made on a very shaky legal ground and Monroe was fully aware of that - but he simple did not care, nor did anybody else. They wanted to help the family and if questionable passports were the way to go, so be it.

So there you have it. La Fayette was made a citizen of the United States only once, but he was made twice the citizen of different States.

16 notes · View notes

thewatsonbeekeepers · 4 years

Text

Chapter 4 – It is always 1895 [TAB 1/1]

TAB is my favourite episode of Sherlock. It is a masterpiece that investigates queerness, the canon and the psyche all within an hour and a half. Huge amounts of work has been done on this episode, however, so I’m not going to do a line by line breakdown – that could fill a small book. A great starting point for understanding the myriad of references in TAB is Rebekah’s three part video series on the episode, of which the first instalment can be found here X. I broadly agree with this analysis; what I’m going to do here, though, is place that analysis within the framework of EMP theory. As a result, as much as it pains me, this chapter won’t give a breakdown of carnation wallpaper or glass houses or any of those quietly woven references – we’re simply going in to how it plays into EMP theory.

Before digging into the episode, I want to take a brief diversion to talk about one of my favourite films, Mulholland Drive (2001).

If you haven’t seen Mulholland Drive, I really recommend it – it’s often cited as the best film of the last 20 years, and watching it really helps to see where TAB came from and the genre it’s operating in. David Lynch is one of the only directors to do the dream-exploration-of-the-psyche well, and I maintain that a lot of the fuckiness in the fourth series draws on Lynch. However, what I actually want to point out about Mulholland Drive is the structure of it, because I think it will help us understand TAB a little better. [If you don’t want spoilers for Mulholland Drive, skip the next paragraph.]

The similarities between these two are pretty straightforward; the most common reading of Mulholland Drive is that an actress commits suicide by overdose after causing the death of her ex-girlfriend, who has left her for a man, and that the first two-thirds of the film are her dream of an alternate scenario in which her girlfriend is saved. The last third of the film zooms in and out of ‘real life’, but at the end we see a surreal version of the actual overdose which suggests that this ‘real life’, too, has just been in her psyche. Sherlock dying and recognising that this may kill John is an integral part of TAB, and the relationships have clear parallels, but what is most interesting here is the structural similarity; two-thirds of the way through TAB, give or take, we have the jolt into reality, zoom in and out of it for a while and then have a fucky scene to finish with that suggests that everything is, in fact, still in our dying protagonist’s brain. Mulholland Drive’s ending is a lot sadder than TAB’s – the fact that, unlike Sherlock, there is no sequel can lead us to assume that Diane dies – and it’s also a lot more confusing; it’s often cited as one of the most complicated films ever made even just in terms of surface level plot, before getting into anything else, and it certainly took me a huge amount of time on Google before I could approach anything like a resolution on it!

Mulholland Drive is the defining film in terms of the navigating-the-surreal-psyche subgenre, and so the structural parallels between the two are significant – and definitely point to the idea that Sherlock hasn’t woken up at the end of TAB, which is important. But we don’t need to take this parallel as evidence; there’s plenty of that in the episode itself. Let’s jump in.

Emelia as Eurus

When we first meet Eurus in TST, she calls herself E; this initialism is a link to Moriarty, but it’s also a convenient link to other ‘E’ names. Lots of people have already commented on the aural echo of ‘Eros’ in ‘Eurus’, which is undeniable; the idea that there is something sexual hidden inside her name chimes beautifully with her representation of a sexual repression. The other important character to begin with E, however, is Emelia Ricoletti. The name ‘Emelia’ doesn’t come from ACD canon, and it’s an unorthodox spelling (Amelia would be far more common), suggesting that starting with an ‘E’ is a considered choice.

When TAB aired, we were preoccupied with Emelia as a Sherlock mirror, and it’s easy to see why; the visual parallels (curly black hair, pale skin) plus the parallel faked death down to the replacement body, which Mofftiss explicitly acknowledge in the episode. However, I don’t think that this reading is complete; rather, she foreshadows the Eurus that we meet in s4. The theme of ghosts links TAB with s4 very cleanly; TAB is about Emelia, but there is also a suggestion of the ghosts of one’s past with Sir Eustace as well as Sherlock’s own claims (‘the shadows that define our every sunny day’). Compare this to s4 – ‘ghosts from the past’ appears on pretty much every promotional blurb, and the word is used several times in relation to Eurus. If Eurus is the ghost from Sherlock’s past, the repressive part of his psyche that keeps popping back, Emelia is a lovely metaphor for this; she is quite literally the ghost version of Sherlock who won’t die.

What does it mean, then, when Jim and Emelia become one and the same in the scene where Jim wears the bride’s dress? We initially read this as Jim being the foil to Sherlock, his dark side, but I think it’s more complicated than this. Sherlock’s brain is using Emelia as a means of understanding Jim, but when we watch the episode it seems that they’ve actually merged. Jim wearing the veil of the bride is a good example of this, but I also invite you to rewatch the moment when John is spooked by the bride the night that Eustace dies; the do not forget me song has an undeniable South Dublin accent.* This is quite possibly Yasmine Akram [Janine] rather than Andrew Scott, of course, but let’s not forget that these characters are resolutely similar, and hearing Jim’s accent in a genderless whisper is a pretty clear way of inflecting him into the image of the bride. In addition to this, Eustace then has ‘Miss Me?’ written on his corpse, cementing the link to Moriarty.

[*the South Dublin accent is my accent, so although we hear a half-whispered song for all of five seconds, I’m pretty certain about this]

Jim’s merging with Emelia calls to mind for me what I think might be the most important visual of all of series 4 – Eurus and Jim’s Christmas meeting, where they dance in circles with the glass between them and seem to merge into each other. I do talk about this in a later chapter, but TLDR – if Jim represents John being in danger and Eurus represents decades of repressed gay trauma, this merging is what draws the trauma to the surface just as Jim’s help is what suddenly makes Eurus a problem. It is John’s being in danger which makes Sherlock’s trauma suddenly spike and rise – he has to confront this for the first time – just like Emelia Ricoletti’s case from 1895 only needs solving for the first time now that Jim is back.

At some point I want to do a drag in Sherlock meta, because I think there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye, but Jim in a bride’s dress does draw one obvious drag parallel for me.

If you haven’t seen the music video for I Want to Break Free, it’s 3 minutes long and glorious – and also, I think, reaps dividends when seen in terms of Sherlock. You can watch it here: X

Not only is it a great video, but for British people of Mofftiss’s age, it’s culturally iconic and not something that would be forgotten when choosing that song for Jim. Queen were intending to lampoon Coronation Street, a British soap, and already on the wrong side of America for Freddie Mercury’s unapologetic queerness, found themselves under fire from the American censors. Brian May says that no matter how many times he tried to explain Coronation Street to the Americans, they just didn’t get it. This was huge controversy at the time, but the video and the controversy around it also managed to cement I Want to Break Free as Queen’s most iconic queer number – despite not even being one of Mercury’s songs. There is no way that Steven Moffat, and even more so Mark Gatiss would not have an awareness of this in choosing this song for Moriarty. Applying any visual to this song is going to invite comparisons to the video – and inflecting a sense of drag here is far from inappropriate. Moriarty has been subsumed into Eurus in Sherlock’s brain – the male and the female are fused into an androgynous and implicitly therefore all-encompassing being. I’m not necessarily comfortable with the gendered aspect of this – genderbending is something we really only see in our villains here – but given this is about queer trauma, deliberately queering its form in this way is making what we’re seeing much more explicit.

Nothing new under the sun

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclesiastes)

"Read it up -- you really should. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before." (A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes)

“Hasn’t this all happened before? There’s nothing new under the sun.” (The Abominable Bride, Jim Moriarty)

This is arguably the key to spotting that TAB is a dream long before they tell us – when TAB’s case is early revealed to be a mixture between TRF (Emelia’s suicide) and TGG (the five pips), and we see the opening of ASiP repeated, we should be questioning what on earth is going on. This can also help us to recognise s4 as being EMP as well though – old motifs from the previous series keep repeating through the cases, like alarm bells ringing. Moriarty telling Sherlock that there is nothing new under the sun is his key to understanding that the Emelia case is meant to help him understand what happened to Jim, that it’s a mental allegory or mirror to help him parse it. This doesn’t go away when TAB ends! Moving into TST, one of the striking things is that cases are still repeating! The Six Thatchers appeared on John’s blog way back, before the fall – you can read it here: X. It’s about a gay love affair that ends in one participant killing the other. Take from that what you will, when John’s extramarital affection is making him suicidal and Sherlock comatose. Meanwhile, the title of The Final Problem refers to the story that was already covered in TRF and the phone situation with the girl on the plane references both ASiB and TGG, and the ending of TST is close to a rerun of HLV. It’s pretty much impossible to escape echoes of previous series in a way that is almost creepy, but we’ve already had this explained to us in TAB – none of this is real. It’s supposed to be explaining what is happening in the real world – and Mofftiss realised that this was going to be difficult to stomach, and so they included TAB as a kind of key to the rest of the EMP, which becomes much more complex.

However, if we want to go deeper we should look at where that quote comes from. I’ve given a few epigraphs to this section to show where the quote comes from – first the book of Ecclesiastes, then A Study in Scarlet. It’s one of the first things Holmes says and it is during his first deduction in Lauriston Gardens. This is where I’m going to dive pretty deep into the metatextual side of things, so bear with the weirdness.

[we’re going deeper]

Holmes’s first deduction from A Study in Scarlet shows that he’s no great innovator – he simply notices things and spots patterns from things he has seen before. This is highlighted by the fact that he even makes this claim by quoting someone before him. If our Sherlock also makes deductions based on patterns from the past, extensive dream sequences where he works through past cases as mirrors for present ones makes perfect sense and draws very cleverly on canon. However, I think his spotting of patterns goes deeper than that. Sherlock Holmes has been repressed since the publication of A Study in Scarlet, through countless adaptations in literature and film. Plenty of these adaptations as well as the original stories are referenced in the EMP, not least by going back to 1895, the year that symbolises the era in which most of these adaptations are set. (If you don’t already know it, check out the poem 221B by Vincent Starrett, one of the myriad of reasons why the year 1895 is so significant.) My feeling is that these adaptations, which have layered on top of each other in the public consciousness to cement the image of Sherlock Holmes the deductive machine [which he’s not, sorry Conan Doyle estate] come to symbolise the 100+ years of repression that Sherlock himself has to fight through to come out of the EMP as his queer self.

This is one of the reasons that the year 1895 is so important; it was the year of Oscar Wilde’s trial and imprisonment for gross indecency, and this is clearly a preoccupation of Sherlock’s consciousness in TFP with its constant Wilde references, suggesting that his MP’s choice of 1895 wasn’t coincidental. Much was made during TAB setlock of a newspaper that said ‘Heimish The Ideal Husband’, Hamish being John’s middle name and An Ideal Husband being one of Wilde’s plays. But the Vincent Starrett poem, although nostalgic and ostensibly lovely, for tjlcers and it seems for Sherlock himself symbolises something much more troubling. Do search up the full poem, but for now let’s look at the final couplet.

Here, though the world explode, these two survive

And it is always 1895

‘Though the world explode’ is a reference to WW1, which is coming in the final Sherlock Holmes story, and which is symbolised by Eurus – in other chapters, I explain why Eurus and WW1 are united under the concept of ‘winds of change’ in this show. Sherlock and John survive the winds of change – except they don’t move with them. Instead, they stay stuck in 1895, the year of ultimate repression. 2014!Sherlock going back in his head to 1895 and repeating how he met John suggests exactly that, that nothing has changed but the superficial, and that emotionally, he is still stuck in 1895.

Others have pulled out similar references to Holmes adaptations he has to push through in TAB – look at the way he talks in sign language to Wilder, which can only be a reference to Billy Wilder, director of TPLoSH, the only queer Holmes film, and a film which was forced to speak through coding because of the Conan Doyle estate. That film is also referenced by Eurus giving Sherlock a Stradivarius, which is a gift given to him in TPLoSH in exchange for feigning heterosexuality. Eurus is coded as Sherlock’s repression, and citing a repressive moment in a queer film as her first action when she meets Sherlock is another engagement by Sherlock’s psyche with his own cinematic history. My favourite metatextual moment of this nature, however, is the final scene of TFP which sees John and Sherlock running out of a building called Rathbone Place.

Basil Rathbone is one of the most iconic Sherlock Holmes actors on film, and Benedict’s costume in TAB and in particular the big overcoat look are very reminiscent of Rathbone.

Others have discussed (X) how the Victorian costume and the continued use of the deerstalker in the present day are images of Sherlock’s public façade and exclusion of queerness from his identity. It’s true that pretty much every Holmes adaptation has used the deerstalker, but the strong Rathbone vibes that come from Ben’s TAB costume ties the 1895 vibe very strongly into Rathbone. To have the final scene – and hopefully exit from the EMP – tie in with Sherlock and John running out of Rathbone Place tells us that, just as Sherlock cast off the deerstalker at the end of TAB (!), he has also cast off the iconic filmic Holmes persona which has never been true to his actual identity.

Waterfall scene

The symbol of water runs through TAB as well as s4 – others have written fantastic meta on why water represents Sherlock’s subconscious (X), but I want to give a brief outline. It first appears with the word ‘deeper’ which keeps reappearing, which then reaches a climax in the waterfall scene. The idea that Sherlock could drown in the waters of his mind is something that Moriarty explicitly references, suggesting that Sherlock could be ‘buried in his own Mind Palace’. The ‘deep waters’ line keeps repeating through series 4, and I just want to give the notorious promo photo from s4 which confirms the significance of the motif.

This is purely symbolic – it never happens in the show. Water increases in significance throughout – think of Sherlock thinking he’s going mad in his mind as he is suspended over the Thames, or the utterly nonsensical placement of Sherrinford in the middle of the ocean – the deepest waters of Sherlock’s mind. Much like the repetition of cases hinting that EMP continues, the use of water is something that appears in the MP, and it sticks around from TAB onwards, a real sign that we’re going deeper and deeper. I talk about this more in the bit on TFP, but the good news is that Sherrinford is the most remote place they could find in the ocean – that’s the deepest we’re going. After that, we’re coming out (of the mind).

Shortly after TAB aired, I wrote a meta about the waterfall scene, some of which I now disagree with, but the core framework still stands – it did not, of course, bank on EMP theory. You can find it here (X), but I want to reiterate the basic framework, because it still makes a lot of sense. Jim represents the fear of John’s suicide, and Jim can only be defeated by Sherlock and John together, not one alone – and crucially, calling each other by first names, which would have been very intimate in the Victorian era. After Jim is “killed”, we have Sherlock’s fall. The concept of a fall (as in IOU a fall) has long been linked with falling in love in tjlc. Sherlock tells John that it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the landing, something that Jim has been suggesting to him for a while. What is the landing, then? Well, Sherlock Holmes fell in love back in the Victorian era, symbolised by the ultra repressive 1895, and that’s where he jumps from – but he lands in the 21st century. Falling in love won’t kill him in the modern day. What I missed that time around, of course, was that despite breaking through the initial Victorian layers of repression, he still dives into more water, and when the plane lands, it still lands in his MP, just in a mental state where the punishment his psyche deals him for homosexuality is less severe. This also sets up s4 as specifically dealing with the problem of the fall – Sherlock jumps to the 21st century specifically to deal with the consequences of his romantic and sexual feelings. There’s a parallel here with Mofftiss time jumping; back when they made A Study in Twink in 2009, there was a reason they made the time jump. Having Sherlock’s psyche have that touch of self-awareness helps to illustrate why they made a similar jump, also dealing with the weight of previous adaptations.

Women

I preface this by saying how incredibly uncomfortable I find the positioning of women as the KKK in TAB. It’s a parallel which is unforgivable; frankly, invoking the KKK without interrogating the whiteness of the show or even mentioning race is unacceptable. Steven Moffat’s ability to write women has consistently been proven to be nil, but this is a new low. However, the presence of women in TAB is vital, so on we go.

TAB specifically deals with the question of those excluded from a Victorian narrative. This is specifically tied into to those who are excluded from the stories, such as Jane and Mrs. Hudson. Mrs. Hudson’s complaint is in the same scene as John telling her and Sherlock to blame the problems on the illustrator. This ties back to the deerstalker metaphor which is so prevalent in this episode; something that’s not in the stories at all, but a façade by which Holmes is universally recognised and which as previously referenced masks his queerness. Women, then, are not the only people being excluded from the narrative. When Mycroft tells us that the women have to win, he’s also talking about queer people. This is a war that we must lose.

I don’t think the importance of Molly in particular here has been mentioned before, but forgive me if I’m retreading old ground. However, Molly always has importance in Sherlock as a John mirror, and just because she is dressed as a man here doesn’t mean we should disregard this. If anything, her ridiculous moustache is as silly as John’s here! Molly, although really a member of the resistance, is able to pass in the world she moves in in 1895, but only by masking her own identity. This is exactly what happens to John in the Victorian era – as a bisexual man married to a woman, he is able to pass, but it is not his true identity. More than that, Molly is a member of the resistance, suggesting not just that John is queer but that he’s aware of it and actively looking for it to change.

I know I was joking about Molly and John’s moustaches, but putting such a silly moustache on Molly links to the silliness of John’s moustaches, which only appear when he’s engaged to a woman and in the Victorian era. He has also grown the moustache just so the illustrator will recognise him, and Molly has grown her moustache so that she will be recognised as a man. In this case, Molly is here to demonstrate the fact that John is passing, but only ever passing. Furthermore, Molly, who is normally the kindest person in the whole show, is bitter and angry throughout TAB – it’s not difficult to see then how hiding one’s identity can affect one’s mental health. I really do think that John is a lot more abrasive in TAB than he is in the rest of the show, but that’s not the whole story. Showing how repression can completely impair one’s personality also points to the suicidal impulses that are lurking just out of sight throughout TAB – this is what Sherlock is terrified of, and again his brain is warning him just what it is that is causing John this much pain and uncharacteristic distress.

This is just about the loosest sketch of TAB that could exist! But TAB meta has been so extensive that going over it seems futile, or else too grand a project within a short chapter. Certain theories are still formulating, and may appear at a later date! But what this chapter (I hope) has achieved has set up the patterns that we’re going to see play out in s4 – between the metatextuality, the waters of the mind and the role of Moriarty in the psyche, we can use TAB as a key with which to read s4. I like to think of it as a gift from Mofftiss, knowing just how cryptic s4 would be – and these are the basic clues with which to solve it.

That’s it for TAB, at least in this series – next up we’re going ever deeper, to find out exactly who is Eurus. See you then?

#tjlc #emp theory #thewatsonbeekeepers #my meta #meta #mine #chapter four: it is always 1895 #vincent starrett #mofftiss #1895 #bbc sherlock #johnlock #tjlc is real

79 notes · View notes

rapeculturerealities · 4 years

Link

MARTY GODDARD’S FIRST FLASH OF INSIGHT CAME IN 1972. It all started when she marched into a shabby townhouse on Halsted Street in Chicago to volunteer at a crisis hotline for teenagers.

Most of the other volunteers were hippies with scraggly manes and love beads. But not Marty Goddard. She tended to wear business clothes: a jacket with a modest skirt, pantyhose, low heels. She hid her eyes behind owlish glasses and kept her blond hair short. Not much makeup; maybe a plum lip. She was 31, divorced, with a mordant sense of humor. Her name was Martha, but everyone called her Marty. She liked hiding behind a man’s name. It was useful.

As a volunteer, Ms. Goddard lent a sympathetic ear to the troubled kids then called “runaway teenagers.” They were pregnant, homeless, suicidal, strung out. She was surprised to discover that many weren’t rebels who’d left home seeking adventure; they were victims who had fled sexual abuse. The phones were ringing with the news that kids didn’t feel safe around their own families. “I was just beside myself when I found the extent of the problem,” she later said.

She began to formulate questions that almost no one was asking back in the early ’70s: Why were so many predators getting away with it? And what would it take to stop them?

Ms. Goddard would go on to lead a campaign to treat sexual assault as a crime that could be investigated, rather than as a feminine delusion. She began a revolution in forensics by envisioning the first standardized rape kit, containing items like swabs and combs to gather evidence, and envelopes to seal it in. The kit is one of the most powerful tools ever invented to bring criminals to justice. And yet, you’ve never heard of Marty Goddard. In many ways she and her invention shared the same fate. They were enormously important and consistently overlooked.

I was infuriated when I read a few years ago about the hundreds of thousands of unexamined rape kits piled up in warehouses around the country. I had the same question that many did: How many rapists were walking free because this evidence had gone ignored?

Take for example, the case of Nathan Ford, who sexually assaulted a woman in 1995. Although a rape kit was submitted to the police, it went untested for 17 years.

During that time, he went on to assault 21 other people, before being convicted in 2006.

And I had another question: How could a tool as potentially powerful as the rape kit have come into existence in the first place? For nearly two decades, I’d been reporting on inventors, breakthroughs and the ways that new technologies can bring about social change. It seemed to me that the rape-kit system was an invention like no other. Can you think of any other technology designed to hold men accountable for brutalizing women?

As soon as I began to investigate the rape kit’s origins, however, I stumbled across a mystery. Most sources credited a Chicago police sergeant, Louis Vitullo, with developing the kit in the 1970s. But a few described the invention as a collaboration between Mr. Vitullo and an activist, Martha Goddard. Where was the truth? As so often happens in stories about rape, I found myself wondering whom to believe.

Mr. Vitullo died in 2006. Ms. Goddard, as far as I could tell, must still be alive — I couldn’t find any obituaries or gravestones that matched her name. An interview in 2003 placed her in Phoenix, and so I collected phone listings for Martha Goddard in Arizona and called them one after another. All those numbers had been disconnected.

Little did I know that I would have to hunt for six months before I finally solved the mystery. I would learn she had transformed the criminal-justice system, though her role has never been fully acknowledged. And I would also discover that Louis Vitullo — far from being the inventor of the rape kit — may have taken credit for Ms. Goddard’s genius and insisted that his name be put on the equipment.

I pieced together dozens of obscure marriage and death notices to try to find her family members; read through hundreds of newspaper articles to establish the timeline of events; and even hired a researcher to dig through an archive of Chicago police department files from the ’70s. Finally, I managed to speak to eight people who knew or worked with her. From these sources, and two oral-history tapes in which she told her life story, I cobbled together what happened.

Back in that Chicago crisis center, Marty Goddard encouraged teenagers to confide in her, and she began to realize just how many of them had been molested.

At the time, most people believed that sexual abuse of children was rare. One psychiatric textbook from the 1970s estimated that incest occurred in only about one in every million families, and claimed that it was often the fault of girls who initiated sex with their fathers. Meantime, it was still legal in every state in America for a husband to rape his wife. Sexual violence that happened within a family was not considered rape at all. A real rape was a “street rape.” It happened to women stupid enough to be in the wrong places at the wrong times.

In Chicago, rape seemed like some sort of natural disaster, no different from the arctic winds that could kill you if you wandered out in the winter without a coat. “Chicago was not a city you wanted to venture out into after dark,” wrote the activist Naomi Weisstein. “Rape was epidemic.” In 1973, an estimated 16,000 people were sexually assaulted in and around Chicago. Only a tenth of those attacks were reported to the police and fewer than a tenth of those cases went to trial; an infinitesimal fraction of perpetrators ended up in prison.

It was a time — much like our own — when millions of people felt that the police had failed them. Chicago was still reeling from the 1969 killing by the cops of Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, while he’d been sleeping in his own bed. The Chicago Police Department was notorious as a brutal, occupying force in black neighborhoods. Citizens’ groups were demanding review boards to reform officers’ behavior.

Amid all that, Ms. Goddard began asking questions that might seem so obvious to us today, but were radical in her own time: What if sexual assault could be investigated? What if you could prove it? What if, instead of a “she said” story, you could persuade a jury with scientific evidence?

A lot of men didn’t like her style. But Ray Wieboldt Jr., heir to a Chicago department-store fortune, did, and in 1972 she was hired as an executive at the Wieboldt Foundation, a charitable family fund that rained down money on progressive causes.

The Wieboldt name became her secret weapon. “I could say, ‘I’m Marty Goddard from the Wieboldt Foundation’ and people would just let me in their doors,” she recounted. And so she Wieboldt-ed her way in to meet with hospital managers and victims’ groups and began asking her relentless questions about rape.

Crime labs did not yet have the ability to test DNA; the first use of DNA forensics would not come until 1986, when British investigators used the technology to hunt down a murderer who raped his victims. But they could analyze pieces of glass, fingerprints, splatter patterns, firearms and fibers. Police investigators could find biological clues to help establish the identity of a suspect by, for instance, comparing blood types.

Ms. Goddard wanted to figure out why — even with all this evidence — no one seemed able to prove that a sexual assault had occurred. She learned that victims usually ended up in a hospital after an assault. The cops might dump a shivering, weeping woman in the emergency room and yell out, “We got a rape for you.” As they cared for the victim, the nurses might wash her off or throw away her bloody dress, inadvertently destroying evidence.

The cops didn’t seem to care. Instead, they would isolate the victim in a room and lob questions at her to try to determine whether she was lying. A Chicago police training manual from 1973 declared, “Many rape complaints are not legitimate,” and added, “It is unfortunate that many women will claim they have been raped in order to get revenge against an unfaithful lover or boyfriend with a roving eye.” Officers would routinely ask women what they’d been wearing, whether they’d provoked the attack by acting in a seductive manner, and whether they had enjoyed the sex. “An actual rape victim will generally give the impression of a person who has been dishonored,” according to the manual.

In the early days of forensic science, the 19th century, rape exams sought primarily to test the virtue of women. A doctor would be called in to examine a woman’s vagina and then report on her motives. Was she a trollop, a harlot, or a pure-hearted innocent who spoke the truth?

In 1868, a British publication, Reynolds’s Newspaper, reported on one such exam. The surgeon “gave such evidence as left no doubt that the prosecutrix could not have been so innocent as she had represented herself to be.” The magistrate “said no jury would convict on such evidence, and he should discharge the prisoner.”

In other words, sexual-assault forensics began as a system for men to decide what they felt about the victim — whether she deserved to be considered a “victim” at all. It had little to do with identifying a perpetrator or establishing what had actually happened.

Even in the 1970s, the forensic examination remained a formality, a kind of kabuki theater of scientific justice. The police officers wielded absolute power in the situation; they told the story; they assigned blame. And they didn’t want to give up that power.

Ms. Goddard’s insight was that the only fix for this dysfunctional system would be incontrovertible scientific proof, the same kind used in a robbery or attempted murder. The victim’s story should be supported with evidence from the crime lab to build a case that would convince juries. To get that evidence, she needed a device that would encourage the hospital staff members, the detectives and the lab technicians to collaborate with the victim. On the most basic level, Ms. Goddard realized, she had to find a mechanism that would protect the evidence from a system that was designed to destroy it.

EVEN AFTER MONTHS of searching for Marty Goddard, I hadn’t been able to find her, or even figure out the names of her family members. But I did manage to track down Cynthia Gehrie, an activist who’d been swept up in Ms. Goddard’s crusade.

The two women met at a gathering for anti-rape activists in 1973 and soon they were strategizing over lunches and dinners, notebooks by their plates. At the time, Ms. Gehrie worked a day job at the A.C.L.U.; she was so impressed by Ms. Goddard that she volunteered to be her sidekick as they figured out how to force men in power to reckon with the rape epidemic.

Their timing was excellent, because 1974 was the year that everything flipped in Chicago. Women who had once been ashamed were now speaking out.

In October, a delegation of suburban women gathered before the members of the Illinois General Assembly. One described how she’d tried to fend off a sexual attacker with a fireplace poker. After the assault, she had carefully saved the bent poker and handed this piece of evidence to police detectives. Then, she recounted through tears, the police returned the poker to her straightened out. The idiots thought she had wanted them to fix it.

A mother stood before the committee and said that her little girl had been molested on her way to kindergarten. The police were already familiar with the attacker, a pedophile who had infected at least one child with venereal disease. And yet he was roaming free.

A nurse at the meeting explained how medical staff handled rape cases — and in the middle of her testimony, announced, “I am a rape victim myself.”

A few days later, about 70 women from a group called Chicago Legal Action for Women, CLAW for short, flooded into the office of State’s Attorney Bernard Carey, and plastered the walls with messages like “Wanted: Bernard Carey for Aiding and Abetting Rapists.”

The rape problem had suddenly become Mr. Carey’s problem, and he desperately needed to look as if he had an answer.

A movement was beginning — an awakening, like #MeToo. The fact that many of these activists were well-off white women forced politicians to pay attention. Black women in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods were most at risk of sexual violence, but their stories rarely made it into the newspapers, and rape was all too often portrayed as an affliction of the suburbs. Throughout her career, Ms. Goddard would wrestle with this disparity and try to overcome it. In 1982 she told an Illinois state legislative committee that “the lack of services on the South and West Sides of Chicago where a majority of our black victims reside” was “totally disgraceful.”

Now, though, in the early 1970s, she had just one obsession. She was determined to convince Bernard Carey that the problem could be solved, if he only had the will to do it. One day she showed up unannounced at his office and to her surprise, he welcomed her in. “I don’t know what the answer is,” he told her. But he had a new plan: He was going to let women like Ms. Goddard help figure out the rape problem for themselves. He appointed her and Ms. Gehrie to a citizens’ advisory panel on rape. Their mission: to investigate the failures in policing and suggest sweeping reforms.

Marty Goddard finally had what she wanted: permission to get inside the police departments.

With her new investigative powers, she headed to the Chicago crime lab building to ask police officers what was going wrong. Years later, she described what she had learned there in the oral history tapes. The cops blamed hospital workers, saying: “We don’t get hair. We don’t get fingernail scrapings.” The slides weren’t labeled, and they’d been “rubber-banded” together so that they contaminated one another. “So there goes that. It’s worthless,” the detectives told her.

The problem, she realized, was that no one had bothered to tell the nurses and doctors how to collect evidence properly.

What if hospitals could be stocked with easy-to-use forensic tools that would encourage medics, detectives and lab technicians to collaborate instead of pointing fingers? Gradually, these concepts solidified into an object: a kit stocked with swabs, vials and instructions.

Somewhere along the way, Ms. Goddard had befriended Rudy Nimocks, an African-American police officer who had handled incest cases and been horrified by what he’d seen. Ms. Goddard and Ms. Gehrie described Mr. Nimocks as a mentor. (He would be in his 90s now; I made multiple attempts to reach him without success.) According to several sources, Mr. Nimocks warned Ms. Goddard to proceed carefully. He told her that she should take care not to challenge the men in the crime lab directly. And he said that she’d need Sgt. Louis Vitullo, the head of the microscope unit, on her side.

Sergeant Vitullo was a scruffy cop-scientist, with a lab coat pulled hastily over his rumpled shirt and the pale, haunted look of a man who spent hours peering at murder weapons.

One day, Ms. Goddard found Sergeant Vitullo at his desk, introduced herself, and presented him with a written description of the rape-kit system. She must have been blindsided by what happened next.

“He screamed at her,” according to Ms. Gehrie. “He told her she had no business getting involved with this and that what she was talking about was crazy. She was wasting his time. He didn’t want to hear about this anymore.” Ms. Gerhie said Ms. Goddard called her minutes later to vent about being thrown out of Sergeant Vitullo’s office.

“Well, that didn’t go so well!” Ms. Goddard said wryly.

As far as Ms. Goddard knew at that moment, the rape-kit idea had just been killed off.

INVENTION, ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN — these are not just technical feats. They are political acts. The inventor offers us a magical new ability that can be wonderful or terrifying: to halt disease, to map the ocean floor, to replace a human worker with a machine, or to kill enemies more efficiently. And those magical abilities create winners and losers. The Harvard professor Sheila Jasanoff has observed that technology “rules us much as laws do.”

When it comes to sexual assault, there are many inventions I can think of that help men get away with it — from the date-rape drug to “stalkerware” software. More striking is how few inventions, how little technology and design, has been devoted to keeping women safe.

Think about our public spaces, and how much they reinforce the power of men. If you grew up as a girl, you were taught to map out potential sexual attacks when you walked through any city. A hidden doorway, an empty subway platform, a pedestrian bridge with high walls — such places pulse with threat.

In my high-school driving class, the instructor lectured us about the dangers that lurked in empty parking lots. “Ladies, you don’t want to be fumbling in your purse if someone jumps out of the bushes,” he said, and suggested that we hold the car keys in one hand as we hurried to the car. Even as a teenager, I remember thinking how crazy this sounded. If there were rapists lurking everywhere, couldn’t the grownups do something about that?

I learned that the streets did not belong to me. Nor did the stairwells or the empty laundry rooms at midnight. I still remember the sense of defeat my first week as a college student on a pastoral Connecticut campus in the 1980s. I’d been aching to explore its tantalizing forests and hidden ponds. But then the freshman girls were herded into a lecture hall, and the head of public safety told us that if we wanted to walk from one building to another at night, we should first call the escort service that squired females around and protected them from rape.

“No way!” I thought.

And yet, at that time I was struggling to understand — and forgive myself for — having been molested as a small child. And though I never did use the campus escort service, I also never felt that the campus was mine.

But this is not how it has to be. It’s entirely possible to create public spaces and tools for everyone. Our environment and technology can foster a sense of equality and pluralism.

At the same time that Marty Goddard was trying to reinvent forensic technology, the disabled community was radically transforming the design of cities by pushing to make streets and buildings wheelchair-accessible. A wheelchair ramp does more than just allow someone to roll into a building; it also sends out a message that the people in those wheelchairs are important and worthy of dignity. This is the power of invention.

You can see why the idea of a rape kit might have been offensive to Sergeant Vitullo and other police officers. Like many of the great technological ideas, this one blasted through the assumptions of the day: that nurses were too stupid to collect forensic evidence; that women who “cried rape” were usually lying; and that evidence didn’t really matter when it came to rape, because rape was impossible to prove.

Now here was this proposal for a cardboard box packed with tools that would allow anyone to perform police work.

Despite his original reaction, Sergeant Vitullo mulled over Ms. Goddard’s idea. He must have found it intriguing. He studied the plans she’d shown him. And he began to see the sense in it all.

One day, Ms. Gehrie told me, Sergeant Vitullo called up Ms. Goddard and said, “I’ve got something to show you.” When Ms. Goddard arrived in his office, Ms. Gehrie recalled, “he handed her a full model of the kit with all the items enclosed.” Sergeant Vitullo had assembled a prototype for the rape kit and added a few flourishes of his own. And now, apparently, he regarded himself as its inventor.

Another friend of Ms. Goddard’s confirmed this story. Mary Sladek Dreiser, who met Ms. Goddard in 1980, told me that Ms. Goddard always praised Sergeant Vitullo in public. But in private, she described him as a petty tyrant who would “only go along with the kit if it were named after him.”

The rape-kit idea was presented to the public as a collaboration between the state attorney’s office and the police department, with men running both sides...

..and little credit given to the women who had pushed for reform. Ms. Goddard agreed to this, Ms. Gehrie said, because she saw that it was the only way to make the rape kit happen

In the mid-1970s, while still at the Wieboldt Foundation, Ms. Goddard began working nights and weekends to found a nonprofit group called the Citizens Committee for Victim Assistance. The group filed a trademark for the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit in 1978, ensuring that her creation would be branded with a man’s name. For years afterward, the newspapers called the rape kit the “Vitullo kit.” When he died in 2006, an obituary headline celebrated him as the “Man Who Invented the Rape Kit.” His wife, Betty, quoted in the obituary, said that her husband was “proud” of the rape kit “but he didn’t get any royalties for it.” The obituary hailed Mr. Vitullo as a pioneer in a new form of evidence collection that transformed the criminal-justice system. There was no mention of Ms. Goddard.

Even if her name wasn’t on it, Ms. Goddard finally had permission to start a citywide rape-kit system. What she didn’t have was any money to create the kits, distribute them, or train nurses to use them. She had to raise all those funds through her nonprofit group, which represented survivors of sex crimes.

This seems strange. After all, state governments covered the cost of running homicide evidence through the crime lab, so why should sexual assault be any different?

And yet it was. And it still is.

Money problems have always haunted the rape-kit system. Testing a rape kit is expensive; today it costs $1,000 to $1,500. Except in the highest-profile cases, police departments have often pleaded underfunding, and let the kits pile up. That’s why victims themselves have had to bankroll crime labs. In the past decade, groups like the Joyful Heart Foundation have helped raise millions of dollars to test rape kits. The money sometimes comes from bake sales, Etsy crafts and feminist comedy nights.

Fundraising was even harder in the 1970s, however, when most foundations wouldn’t give money to a project with “rape” or “sex” in its title. And so Ms. Goddard had to resort to finding money wherever she could. This is where Hugh Hefner enters the story.

Chicago was built on soft-core porn, and Mr. Hefner was one of the city’s most prominent moguls. Men in suits sidled into his clubhouses for three-martini lunches, celebrities swanned into his mansion for glittering fund-raisers, and a blazing “Playboy” sign scalded the downtown skyline.

Mr. Hefner regarded the women’s liberation movement as a sister cause to his own effort to free men from shame and guilt. And so his philanthropic Playboy Foundation showered money on feminist causes. In the early 1970s, for example, the Playboy fortune provided the seed money for the A.C.L.U. Women’s Rights Project, which was co-founded by a little-known lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In the mid-1970s, Ms. Goddard applied to Playboy for a $10,000 grant (the equivalent of about $50,000 today) to start a rape-kit system. And she got it.

Her collaboration with the Playboy Foundation turned out to be a surprisingly ideal one, in large part because Ms. Goddard had a friend on the inside: Margaret Pokorny (then known as Margaret Standish). Ms. Pokorny brainstormed all kinds of ways to support the project that went beyond the big check. For instance, she recruited Playboy’s graphics designers to create the packaging for the kit. And when Ms. Goddard needed volunteers to assemble the kits, Ms. Pokorny came up with a creative solution: old ladies.

“I’ve got this great idea, Marty,” Ms. Goddard recalled Ms. Pokorny saying. “Everybody just loves the Playboy bunny and these older women, they want something to do.” So one day a horde of them showed up in the Playboy offices, swilling free coffee as they assembled sexual-assault evidence kits.

In 1978, Marty Goddard delivered the first standardized rape kit to around 25 hospitals in the Chicago area for use in a pilot program she had designed — “the first program of its type in the nation,” according to a newspaper article.

The kits cost $2.50 each and contained test tubes, slides and packaging materials to protect the specimens from mixing; a comb for collecting hair and fiber; sterile nail clippers; and a bag for the victim’s clothing. There was a card for the victim, giving her information about where to seek counseling and further medical services.

The New York Times, which described the initiative as a collaboration between Mr. Vitullo and Ms. Goddard, said that the “innocuous looking” box “could be a powerful new weapon in the conviction of rapists.” The Times noted that one of the most important features of the system was deceptively low-tech: “Forms for the doctor and the police officers involved are included, as are sealing tape and a pencil for writing on the slides. Anyone who handles the box must put his or her signature on printed spaces on the kit’s cover.” There would be a paper trail that showed how the evidence had traveled from the victim’s body to the crime lab.

By the end of 1979, nearly 3,000 kits had been turned over to crime labs. One of them had been submitted by a bus driver who’d been abducted and raped by 28-year-old William Johnson. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison, and the Vitullo Evidence Kit was credited with winning the day in court.

By now, Ms. Goddard’s friend Rudy Nimocks had been promoted to head the sex homicide department. He told The Chicago Tribune that the new system had improved evidence collection. But perhaps more important, the kit worked magic in the courtroom. “In addition to the kits being very practical,” he said, “we find that it impresses the jurors when you have a uniform set of criteria in the collection of evidence.”

In other words, the rape kit, with its official blue-and-white packaging and its stamps and seals, functioned as a theatrical prop as well as a scientific tool. The woman in the witness box, weeping as she recounted how her husband tried to kill her, could sound to a judge and jury like a greedy little opportunist. But then a crime-lab technician would take the stand and show them the ripped dress, the semen stains, the blood. When a scientist in a lab coat affirmed the story, it seemed true.

Ms. Goddard had invented not just the kit, but a new way of thinking about prosecuting rape. Now, when a victim testified, she no longer did so alone. Doctors, nurses and forensic scientists backed up her version of the events — and the kit itself became a character in the trials. It, too, became a witness.

That’s another reason Ms. Goddard may have been willing to trademark her idea under Sergeant Vitullo’s name. It was as if in order to invent, she also had to disappear. The rape kit simply never would have had traction if a woman with no scientific credentials had been known as its sole inventor. It had to come from a man.

The word “technology” is part of the problem. It’s a synonym for “stuff that men do.” As the historian Autumn Stanley pointed out, a revised history of technology taking into account women’s contributions would include all sorts of “unimportant” inventions like baby cribs, menstrual pads and food preservation techniques. Sometimes the only way that women could navigate this world was to let a white man in a lab coat become the face of their radical ideas, while they themselves shrank into the background.

During World War II, for instance, a team of six “girls” figured out how to operate the world’s first all-purpose electronic digital computer, called the ENIAC. In 1946, one of them, Betty Holberton, stayed up half the night to ensure that the computer would ace its debut in front of the newspaper cameras. And yet she and the others were treated like switchboard operators, mere helpers to the male engineers. Ms. Holberton went on to invent and design many of the essential tools of computing during the 1950s and ’60s almost invisibly, while her male colleagues were celebrated as geniuses of the age.

Ms. Goddard, certainly, had mastered the art of vanishing. Her friends and collaborators from the 1970s had lost touch with her, and were just as flummoxed by her disappearance as I was. But they remembered her in vivid, disconnected flashes. I often felt that I was spying on her through keyholes into other people’s minds.

“She made miniature rooms,” Margaret Pokorny said, describing how Ms. Goddard spent hours with tweezers and tiny brushes constructing fairy-tale interiors inside of boxes. The rooms were scattered all around Ms. Goddard’s apartment, as if a dollhouse had been dissected.

From Cynthia Gehrie, I learned why Ms. Goddard might have been so driven to escape into Lilliputian fantasies. Ms. Gehrie told me that in the late 1970s, her friend had flown to a resort in Hawaii for a vacation and returned to Chicago a different, and broken, person. “I was raped,” Ms. Goddard had told Ms. Gehrie, pouring out a harrowing account of how a man had abducted her.

“He drove her to a remote location,” Ms. Gehrie said. “He taunted her with the knife. She told him she would do whatever he wanted. Finally, he drove her back to the resort. She was astonished when he let her go.” Ms. Gehrie can’t remember whether Ms. Goddard reported the rape to the police, but she’s always wondered if her friend’s prominence as a victims-rights advocate had made her a target. The attacker had won her trust, Ms. Goddard said, by pretending to be a supporter of her cause.

In one obscure interview I found, Ms. Goddard herself mentioned that rape and the scars it left on her body. And, she said, the attacker had infected her with herpes.

I was heartbroken for her, and more determined to find her than ever. By now she had become “Marty” to me — I could think of her only as a friend. I surmised, from the string of addresses she’d left behind, that she had been spiraling into poverty. She would have been 79. Was anyone caring for her? I felt less and less like a journalist chasing down a story. What I really wanted was to save Marty Goddard before it was too late.

Through the 1980s, Ms. Goddard kept fighting for the rape-kit system despite her growing exhaustion. It was “one incident by one incident by one incident,” she said later. “Imagine how many years it took us to go from state’s attorney to state’s attorney to cop to detective to deputy to doctor to pediatrician to nurse to nurse practitioner” and train each person who interacted with the victim and the rape kit. “I felt I had to save the world, and I was going to start with Chicago and move to Cook County and move to the rest of the state. And there was something in the back of my mind that said, ‘Gee, maybe the circumstances will be such that at some time I can go beyond the borders of Illinois.’”

She was right. In 1982, New York City adopted Ms. Goddard’s system because “its effectiveness was demonstrated in Chicago,” according to The New York Times. Within a few years, the city had amassed thousands of sealed kits containing evidence, and the system was putting rapists in prison.

Ms. Goddard had envisioned a kind of internet of forensics at a time when the internet itself was in its infancy. The idea was to standardize practices in crime labs everywhere and encourage police departments to share data to catch perpetrators who might cross county and state lines. And she had personal reasons for grinding away at the problem, for making it her obsessive mission. The man who had brutalized her in Hawaii still walked free. She knew this because she’d seen him, she told a friend at the time.

She had been walking to the attorney general’s office in downtown Chicago when her attacker materialized out of the crowd and locked eyes with her. It must have been a waking nightmare. Had he been stalking her? Had it been a chance encounter?

I don’t know. She was under an extraordinary amount of stress; maybe she was mistaken. I am working from fragments — from bits and pieces of her friends’ memories. What I do know is that Ms. Goddard began to drink; that she depended now on cheap sherry to dull the pain. She was dragging herself from city to city, evangelizing for the rape kit, sleeping in dive motels, giving everything she had until there was nothing left.

In 1984, the F.B.I. held a conference at its training center in Quantico, Va. Expert criminologists flew in to discuss a new system that would detect the serial killers and rapists operating across state lines. But to the dismay of Ms. Goddard, who attended the conference, the country’s top lawmen demonstrated little empathy for victims.

“So, this one man gets up,” a professor known as an expert in sex crimes, Ms. Goddard remembered later. The professor flashed slides on the screen, a twisted parade of naked female corpses. He made little effort to protect the identities of the dead women. Ms. Goddard was horrified at the way he “couldn’t wait to show the bite marks on the breasts” of one victim, as if to share his titillation with the audience.

That kind of attitude might have gone unremarked at a police convention, but there were lawyers, victims’ advocates and nurses at this conference and they “didn’t appreciate it.” Just as dismaying, this so-called expert described “interrogating” women who’d been raped, as if they were the criminals.

“I went nuts,” Ms. Goddard said. She gripped the arms of her chair, “saying to myself: ‘Calm down. Don’t say anything.’”

AFTER THE PRESENTATION, Ms. Goddard approached one of the organizers and said, “Something’s wrong here, and I really object.” Working on the fly, Ms. Goddard gave a presentation about her pilot project in Chicago, explaining how the rape-kit system worked. Afterward, “two guys from the Department of Justice” approached her and asked her to replicate her program all around the country. She was finally given enough funding to travel to more than a dozen different states and help start up pilot programs.

“I don’t know how my cat survived,” she said of those years. “I was gone all the time.”

She was tired out. And “so many people were downright insulting.” They’d ask her why she was an authority on forensics: “Are you a cop? An attorney?” Ms. Goddard was drinking heavily. She began to step away from her prominent role in criminal justice. She moved to Texas, and then Arizona. And finally she faded from public view so thoroughly that I believe she must have decided to disappear.

Her friend and former colleague Mary Dreiser kept in touch. But one day in about 2006 or 2007, Ms. Dreiser was distressed to dial Ms. Goddard’s number and discover it had been disconnected. Ms. Dreiser’s husband, a lawyer, asked a detective to find Ms. Goddard. She turned up in a mobile-home park in Arizona. “She was happy I had tracked her down,” Ms. Dreiser said.

By the time I started searching for Ms. Goddard a decade later, she had moved out of that trailer and her most recent listing suggested she lived in a dumpy apartment building alongside a Phoenix highway. That phone, too, had been disconnected, so I’d assumed that she had moved on once again, perhaps to a nursing home. But just in case, I called up the building’s management office and asked if the people there could tell me anything about Marty Goddard.

“Unfortunately, I can’t,” said the woman who answered the phone. There were rules about protecting the privacy of residents.

But rules are meant to be broken. So I called back. “Listen,” I said, “just hear me out.”

I then plied the woman in the management office with a brief — and, I hoped, heart-melting — tribute to Ms. Goddard’s genius and her sacrifices.

It worked. “OK,” she said, “let me check into it.” Hours later, she called me back. Marty Goddard had indeed lived in their apartment building, she said, then paused.

“And I’m very sorry to tell you that she passed away.”

The news walloped me. Ms. Goddard had died in 2015, at the age of 74, but there had been no obituary. No announcement. I’d searched for pictures of headstones, remembrances, funeral announcements, and I’d found nothing. This woman who had done so much for the rest of us. How could this be?

Paradoxically, at the same time as Ms. Goddard was fading from sight, her name no longer in the papers, the advent of DNA forensics was giving the rape kit a new kind of superpower.

In 1988, a court ordered Victor Lopez, a 42-year-old repeat felon accused of violent attacks, to submit to a blood draw. He would be the first defendant in New York State to be linked to a crime through DNA analysis — and the case would prove the dazzling effectiveness of this new tool. The DNA test showed a strong match between Mr. Lopez’s blood and the semen collected from one of his victims. Mr. Lopez was convicted of three sexual assaults and sentenced to 100 years in prison. One juror, John Bischoff, told The New York Times that “the DNA was kind of a sealer on the thing. You can’t really argue with science.”

When Ms. Goddard began her work, crime labs could establish only a fuzzy connection between a suspect’s blood and the swabs inside the kit — for instance, by showing that the blood type was a match. But now, DNA markers could reveal the path of a perpetrator as he left his semen or blood at multiple crime scenes.

Starting in 2003, several women across the country accused a man named Nathan Loebe of sexual assault, but those accusations had never stuck.

After the Tucson police received a grant to test a backlog of rape kits, they discovered that DNA from several of the kits matched Mr. Loebe. Rape-kit evidence revealed the pattern of his attacks, and last year he was sentenced to 274 years in prison, including for 12 counts of sexual assault.

But DNA testing was expensive. Compounding that problem was the sheer success of the rape kit system: Victims now felt encouraged to report their assaults and submit to exams, which meant that police departments were flooded with evidence.

And so, just as the rape-kit system began to succeed, police departments strangled it. They began hiding away thousands of untested rape kits deemed too expensive to process.

New York was among the first cities to set up a rape-kit system, and almost immediately it fell behind in processing. It amassed a huge backlog — 16,000 untested kits by the year 2000. The women (and some men) who submitted to rubber-gloved exams did so because they hoped against hope that the police might actually catch a perpetrator. Little did they know that their evidence could be thrown in a warehouse — or even in a trash can.

In 2000, Paul Ferrara, the director of Virginia’s crime lab, said that backlogs were growing all around the country and “cost lives.” The year before, the Virginia Beach police had had to release a rape suspect because potentially incriminating DNA couldn’t be processed quickly enough, and the suspect went on to murder a woman.

It is striking how much Ms. Goddard’s trajectory mirrored that of her invention. In the early 1990s, just when she might have risen to national prominence, she drifted south. She retired, though she was only in her early 50s, and eked out a living with some help from friends. By the 2000s, she had sobered up and spent her days clipping newspapers, tracking the issues that she most cared about. And then — this part hurts my heart — she pursued a degree in forensics at a local community college.

Ms. Goddard had founded sexual-assault forensics, and yet she now lacked any of the bona fides required to be recognized as an expert. Nothing came of her studies, and she never really worked again. Ms. Goddard herself had been warehoused.

I know all of this because just a few months ago, I finally cracked the case of why and how she disappeared, thanks to some clues I found in the announcement of her brief 1966 marriage in a Michigan newspaper. Working through a chain of obituaries and phone records and small newspaper items, I tracked down a number for Scott Goddard, who I thought must be Marty Goddard’s nephew.

One day I cold-called him and left a message. It turned out that he was the right Scott Goddard. His father had died in a freak accident in 1980, and after that, his aunt became like a second mother to him. “When I was 9 or 10 years old, she took me to the Grand Canyon. And I remained close with her for her entire life,” Mr. Goddard said.

He told me that his aunt — who’d always been so busy, so engaged — had turned into a hermit in the 2000s. She withdrew into her trailer in the mobile-home park, with her newspaper clippings fluttering everywhere, surrounded by the miniature model rooms she still loved to build. She was vanishing, shrinking down to nothing.

“When she passed, I inherited about 50 boxes of stuff,” he said, including a tiny toy chest filled with dolls for the doll children to play with.

He told me that when he was a boy, his aunt had taken him through the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago — a place she visited many times. Here they had lost themselves in those perfect shadow boxes, peering into, say, a Georgian dining room with crystal wine glasses, like fragments of diamonds, arranged on a silver tray. Beyond the chandelier and the French windows, a painted garden beckoned, with a lily pond and trees wilting in the summer heat, and paths you could follow into even stranger dreamscapes. You could imagine opening up one of the postage-stamp-sized books to hear the crack of its gold-leaf spine and read the secrets contained in its mouse-print text.

I can’t tell you what drove Marty Goddard into her dioramas. People around her tended to believe she wanted to escape into her imagination. But I think maybe she was exploring the dark magic of ordinary things, the way the most forgettable object can be converted into evidence. Some underwear, a pack of cigarettes, the note scrawled on the scrap of paper — how strange it is that any of these furnishings of your life could one day be used to reconstruct your own assault or murder. I wonder if she was building tiny crime scenes peppered with clues, if somehow she was leaving a message about what had happened to her.

Mr. Goddard told me that about 2010, “depression started to set in,” and his aunt became a furious alcoholic. Her once steel-trap mind wandered. Worse, she raged and accused, believed friends plotted to kill her. “In the last few years, she alienated most of her family and friends,” he said.

THE RAPE KIT WASN’T DOING SO WELL EITHER. In 2009, investigators toured an abandoned parking garage that the Detroit police had appropriated for storage and where officers had been dumping evidence for decades. In the dank building, with pigeons fluttering over their head, the investigators wandered past a blood-stained sofa and a bucket full of bullets and shells. In one of the parking bays, they found the rape kits — what would turn out to be a trove of 11,000, most of which had never been tested. Some of the kits had been collected as far back as 1980. The victims ranged in age from 90 to one month old.

It wasn’t just Detroit. Investigators in cities around the country had begun to open up their own warehouses, and they too discovered towers of untested rape kits.

By 2015, the backlog of untested rape kits in the United States had grown to an estimated 400,000.

In 2016, the Justice Department announced a new sexual assault kit initiative and $45 million to tackle the backlog. More than 25 states have committed to testing warehoused evidence. Despite the government funding, the cost of these initiatives still largely fell on women’s groups and the victims themselves, who organized dinner parties, Facebook charity drives and comedy shows.

So far, the efforts have paid off. Five states and the District of Columbia have cleared their backlogs. Testing thousands of kits has led to a bonanza of DNA identifications and hundreds of convictions. Scientists are also using rape-kit data to show that there are more serial rapists than we ever suspected. In one study of rape kits in the Cleveland area, researchers found that more than half of them were connected to other cases.

In other words, when a victim decides to go to all the trouble of driving to an emergency room and submitting to a rape-kit exam, it’s because she believes that her attacker will rape someone else. And quite often, she’s right.

When Ms. Goddard died, she asked that her ashes be thrown to the winds in Sedona, Ariz., along the red cliffs. Old friends like Cynthia Gehrie and Margaret Pokorny didn’t even know she was gone. She left behind those boxes of tiny furniture. And, also, a nationwide forensics system that might never have existed but for her.

Writing this, I dreamed of one day seeing one of the original kits displayed in the Smithsonian, among the parade of great American inventions. Mary Dreiser told me she might have saved one of the kits distributed in 1980. I asked her to hunt for it, and there it was, in the back of a closet, yellowed after decades in storage. The kit was emblazoned with the logo of a female face, as if to declare that this — among all the man-made objects in the world — had been created by and for women.

Today, a new generation of inventors are figuring out how to speed up the testing of rape-kit DNA, to improve the design of the kits, and to draw new insights from sexual-assault analytics. This story of feminist technology is still unfolding. Half a century after Marty Goddard answered the calls of teenage rape victims, survivors and their advocates are assembling a vast net of evidence, and it is tightening, ever so slowly, around the perpetrators.

#history #rape kits #goddard

138 notes · View notes

mrmallard · 3 years

Note

18 and 33

18: rant about your favorite musician

So I was bullied pretty badly as a kid at school and at home, and there was a period of time where I was drowning in a sea of age-appropriate content that felt extremely condescending and fake - it wouldn't ever engage with the idea of being sad or depressed in a serious and nuanced manner outside of the token "you're sad now but things aren't so bad!" message. Most adult media I had access to at the time, mostly shitty early-00's action movies airing on TV, was very vapid and about as thematically hollow as the age appropriate stuff. Nothing really represented me and made me feel heard, nothing validated what I was going through and the negativity I was feeling towards others and myself.

As a 12 year old, I found the media which finally validated the depression, hurt and general violent negativity that existed within me due to all of my negative experiences.

And that media...

was End of Evangelion, an anime movie in which the apocalypse happens in an immeasurably bizarre and fucked up way, where there's a bunch of overt giant robot violence but also very alarming and grounded person-to-person violence, and where the ending is unendingly bleak.

I then found the Mountain Goats through a show called Moral Orel when I was 16, and I lamented the fact that I hadn't found them before I found one of the bleakest anime movies of all time to cope with what I was going through. Because my Evangelion fandom ultimately did me a lot of harm - and while I was a stupid kid at times in how I engaged with the Mountain Goats (sending John stupid asks on Tumblr like a fucking asshole), there was a much more resonant catharsis that came with the music I heard, and it facilitated healing over time rather than escapism and outright nihilism.

I feel like had I found them earlier, I could have negated some of the harm I did to myself - like Tallahassee came out when I was 6, and I was pirating music all the time on LimeWire from 13 onwards. There's a hypothetical past where my music piracy led me to find the Mountain Goats way earlier than I eventually did, and it would have changed my life forever.

The Mountain Goats laid out a template for how I found all of my other favorite bands. There was the initial hook - the prerequisite "No Children" and "Old College Try" from Moral Orel - followed by immense overplay, followed by branching out into their other music. Once the connection has been made to a strong base of starter songs, I then get interested in listening to full albums, which is where I find the second wave of songs to latch on to after the first wave gets overplayed. Rinse and repeat until I've exposed myself to all of their music. TMG was the first band to facilitate this process, and I've done the same thing to every "core" musical act I've listened to since.

What I like about the Mountain Goats is that they're not afraid to broach difficult subjects? The Sunset Tree is a masterpiece in this regard, there's a level of vulnerability on that album that you don't get from most other artists - the closest equivalent I can think of is A Crow Looked At Me by Mt. Eerie, about the singer's wife dying of cancer.

There was a part of me that used to approach The Sunset Tree with a lurid voyeurism, a desire to validate my own pain by engaging with the pain that the album puts out there - but now when I hear songs like Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod, I'm capable of seeing a broader picture and having more than just the desire to be validated by listening to another person's trauma. I would consume media like this to feed an unending hunger, but now I take it in bite sized portions and stay mindful of what it represents outside of my own experience.

One thing I want to talk about is John's early work, because when I started listening to the band I couldn't stand the lo-fi stuff. The whirring sound gave me a headache. But over time I've built up a strong base of his earlier material, even stuff he considers an old shame, that I absolutely adore.

The first "going to" song, to my understanding, is Going to Chino. And if you haven't heard Going to Chino, I recommend it - it's silly, it's overwrought and it's passionate. You'll never hear a more earnest commendation of a town's access to the 60 freeway in any other songs on earth. There's also Minnesota, which to this day might be John Darnielle's most romantic song. He acknowledges that he's a different person than when he started making music and he prefers to move forward as opposed to living in the past, but there's a lot of power in songs like No, I Can't or Yoga, regardless of how far removed he becomes from the self that made them.

My favorite song might be From TG&Y, because it hits on a very personal note - engaging in self-destructive behaviour to cope with a town that's sucking all of the life and goodness out of you. I've only ever drank to excess, but there's something very relatable about feeling how run down you are after a bender, having this awful manky taste in your mouth the whole time as you shift from place to place, and having this impulse of needing to run away and start a new life before this way of living kills you.

There's a lot of myself wrapped up in the Mountain Goats, and whether they're the primary band on my radar at any given moment or not, I can always spare a few words about how they make me feel.

33: what do you think about a lot

I think a lot about queer people in the past and how they've able to live their lives. I'll give you three examples.

Lately, I've had this pet idea about the anime/manga series Ranma 1/2. I haven't seen or read it, but I do know that it's about this young guy named Ranma who is afflicted with a curse or the like that results in him changing gender depending on the temperature of the water that gets dumped on him.

Ranma 1/2, from what I've gleaned, has resulted in a few gender awakenings - if I'm not mistaken, I think Dan Shive was one of those people, who went on to create the webcomic El Goonish Shive which deals with gender in a similar way at the start before taking more of a serious turn as the comic goes on.

But I have this idea in my head about early Ranma 1/2 fans writing stories about Ranma coming to terms with being a woman, and deciding to find a way to break the curse in a way that would leave the character as a woman. I wonder if there's anyone who tapped into their transness back then through their Ranma fandom, and whose journey is documented in their work.

It's like, there's people back then who Get It. Who came into their own in a time where the concept of gender transition was less accepted than it was now. And that's my people - geeky fanfiction writers. I want to know that there are people who found an innate truth to them, and who were able to be happy.

Another example I want to talk about is Robert Reed, who played Mike Brady on the Brady Bunch. I care deeply for Robert Reed. From what information is the most easily accessible about the man, he was apparently a pretty angry guy at times - he wasn't proud of his role on the Brady Bunch, and he'd get into arguments with the producer of the show. He was a closeted gay man playing the most sanitized TV dad in America, and if that news ever came out, it would sink his career and the entire show along with it.

But he was a good man. Notably, the producer of the Brady Bunch would tolerate his outbursts because his instincts would usually turn out to be right. And while he was upset with the material, he was never abusive to his co-stars. A bunch of them speak fondly about him to this day - he'd take the kids on day trips and stuff, and became something of a mentor and father figure to them. You don't hear wholesome stories like that from the 70's any more, but by all accounts Robert Reed seems to have been a decent man.

Robert died of colon cancer, but at the time of his death he had HIV as well. He was an incredibly private person - the only reason we know that he's gay is because he called Florence Henderson a week before he died to let her know and to get her to tell the rest of the cast. Apparently he kept in touch with her for years, and he saw fit to let everyone know before he died.

My understanding is that he had a partner at the time, though I'm not 100% sure. I hope Robert Reed had love throughout his life, y'know. I hope he had people who he loved and was loved by in return. I'm sad that he lived his whole life in the closet, and I hope he was able to find comfort and fulfillment in the relationships he did have in his life.

The last example I want to talk about is David Hyde Pierce - Niles from Frasier and the professor from Treasure Planet. I learned a while back that he had come out as gay in the late 2000's, getting married before Proposition 13 went into effect in California. I saw a topic about him on GameFAQs recently and I wanted to bring up that he was gay and married, but it had been a while so I googled him again to get my facts straight.

Not only is David Hyde Pierce still married, he's been in a relationship with his husband since 1983.

It means so much to me because people break up all the time in Hollywood. Whether it be the stress of the outside world gawking at them all the time, or the vice and excess of the entertainment industry corrupting people over time, or just falling out of love ala Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman - relationships in Hollywood don't last. And you don't hear much about gay celebrities and their love lives unless it becomes a point of controversy, ala Elton John's adoption issues or George Michael getting outed.

But the entire time David Hyde Pierce was on Frasier and doing voiceover - for all intents and purposes, at the top of his career - he was in a relationship with a man he'd already loved for a decade beforehand. And they continued to be together until gay marriage became legal, at which point they married each other, and they're still married to this day.

I'm really happy that they've been able to go the distance. May we all have what they have one day.

#long post

6 notes · View notes

carewyncromwell · 3 years

Video

youtube

“Good evening, all -- I hope the start of December and the holiday season finds you in good spirits...

“In light of this occasion, my...‘mundane,’ as she calls herself, has given me special access to this ‘Askbox,’ so that I may converse with, debate, and maybe even educate her ‘followers’ on aspects of this lovely season...I suspect because she -- having appointed herself some sort of guardianship over me -- knows that Christmas is my single favorite time of the year. She says that you may consult the tag ‘Bat Comments on Christmas!’ for more such content.”

I don’t understand half of the terms she’s used about this whole thing, but I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it soon enough. I’ve got more than enough time to figure it all out...

“Today we start with a marvelous history lesson on a most exciting tale -- the time that Christmas was actually banned in England.

“From the beginning, Christmas has been a holiday split in two, expressed in both religious and secular traditions. As I’ve mentioned previously, the Christian church’s ‘Christ Mass’, meant to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, swallowed up a lot of traditions from older pagan holidays like the Roman Saturnalia and the Celtic and Germanic Yule, in an attempt to get people to celebrate their savior, rather than other gods. The Church knew that just putting their holiday on the calendar alone wouldn’t be enough to persuade people to celebrate it, so Christians tried everything they could to try to ‘adapt’ the old traditions to suit their needs. From the start, though, the peasantry really didn’t cooperate with this -- they were fine with calling the holiday ‘Christmas,’ instead of something else, but they were going to have the same amount of fun as they always had. And so Christmas over the years remained bawdy, chaotic, loud, profane, and distinctly unlike the traditional, pious image Christian churches had wanted to promote.

“Eventually it got to the point that many Christian institutions tried to distance themselves from Christmas all together. Up until recently -- namely, the 20th century -- Christmas was actually considered a lesser religious holiday, with Epiphany, the holiday representing Christ’s baptism, being treated as the more important celebration. Some branches of Christianity -- including a very rigid, conservative type of Protestantism called Puritanism -- even believed that Christmas was sacrilegious. The Puritans took the Bible so seriously that they read every word literally and believed anything that wasn’t explicitly written down in it was non-canonical and should be discarded all-together. In the mid-1600′s, the Puritans amazingly managed to accrue enough power in the English Parliament to make legislation, and one of the very first things they did was -- you guessed it -- ban the feast of Christmas.

“For those of you who, like my mundane, are American, you may have heard the story about the British forces led by General Cornwallis playing the song ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ on the fife and drum upon surrendering to George Washington’s militia at Yorktown. Although I cannot confirm or deny this particular factoid, not having been present for the actual surrender myself, I personally agree with most historians in that it’s likely to have been a myth propagated by the Americans later. I must acknowledge, though, that if it were true, it would be a rather amusing choice for our troops to have played in the direction of the rebels -- for the tune itself is actually a protest song, all about when England’s Puritan-led Parliament made celebrating Christmas illegal. The words themselves express the English people’s opinions regarding the new law rather well --

“‘Command is given, we must obey, and quite forget old Christmas day: Kill a thousand men, or a Town regain, we will give thanks and praise amain! The wine pot shall clink, we will feast and drink, And then strange motions will abound. Yet let's be content, and the times lament -- you see, the world turned upside down!’

“ -- in short, ‘yes, we’ll follow the law and not call it Christmas, but we’re still going to go about doing all the old traditions anyway.’ You say we can’t sell Christmas pudding? All right, we’ll sell figgy pudding instead -- same recipe, different name. You say we can’t bake Christmas pies? All right, we’ll bake mince pies -- they taste just as good, no matter what you call them. And the more you complain, the more we’ll write and sing songs about how awful it is that you kept us from celebrating the birth of Christ. England overall was so unhappy about the new law that the King himself decided to reinstate Christmas, to quell their displeasure. And so in a huff, many Puritans decided to hightail it off to the colonies in America, in the hopes that they could create ‘a new Jerusalem’ that wouldn’t be infected with the scourge of Christmas.”

[Bat’s lips spread into a very broad, fanged grin.]

“To their credit, they partially succeeded -- at least until America saw how much fun we Brits were having and got besotted with Christmas themselves about two hundred years later.”

[The vampire bursts into handsome, joyful laughter.]

((OOC: Bat’s in control of the Askbox this holiday season! Feel free to tag me @carewyncromwell or send Asks regarding Christmas/other winter holiday topics, so that Bat can comment on them. I have allowed him access to the Fourth Wall, so you can also send him things that are not explicitly 18th-19th-early-20th century Christmas too, and he’ll be able to comment on them! ^.^))

#bat comments on christmas!#bartholomew varney #christmas #history #roleplaying #honestly this song is the most passive-aggressive thing I totally love it XDDD #and yeah it sounds NOTHING like the tune from hamilton #what the heck lin manuel? LOL

12 notes · View notes

processproductionsophielindsay · 3 years

Text

LORNA SIMPSON

Lorna Simpson, The Water Bearer (1986)

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/02/arts/design/02lorn.html

Lorna Simpson, Guarded Conditions (1989)

https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/book_report/representing-the-black-body-lorna-simpson-in-conversation-with-thelma-golden-54624

Lorna Simpson, Necklines (1989)

https://mcachicago.org/Collection/Items/1989/Lorna-Simpson-Necklines-1989

Lorna Simpson Wigs (1994)

https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/lorna-simpson-wigs-1994/

Childhood

Born in Brooklyn in 1960, Lorna Simpson was an only child to a Jamaican-Cuban father and an African American mother. Her parents were left-leaning intellectuals who immersed their daughter in group gatherings and cultural events from a young age. She attributed their influence as the sole reason she became an artist, writing, "From a young age, I was immersed in the arts. I had parents who loved living in New York and loved going to museums, and attending plays, dance performances, concerts... my artistic interests have everything to do with the fact that they took me everywhere ...."

Aspects of day-to-day life lit up Simpson's young imagination, from the jazz music of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, to magazine advertisements and overheard, hushed stories shared between adults; all of which would come to shape her future art. The artist took dance classes as a child and when she was around 11 years old, she took part in a theatrical performance at the Lincoln Center for which she donned a gold bodysuit and matching shoes. Though she remembered being incredibly self-conscious, it was a valuable learning experience, one that helped her realize she was better suited as an observer than a performer. This early coming-of-age experience was later documented in the artwork Momentum, (2010).

Simpson's creative training began as a teenager with a series of short art courses at the Art Institute of Chicago, where her grandmother lived. This was followed by attendance at New York's High School of Art and Design, which, she recalls "...introduced me to photography and graphic design."

Early Training and Work

After graduating from high school Simpson earned a place at New York's School of Visual Arts. She had initially hoped to train as a painter, but it soon became clear that her skills lay elsewhere, as she explained in an interview, "everybody (else) was so much better (at painting). I felt like, Oh God, I'm just slaving away at this." By contrast, she discovered a raw immediacy in photography, which "opened up a dialogue with the world."

When she was still a student Simpson took an internship with the Studio Museum in Harlem, which further expanded her way of thinking about the role of art in society. It was here that she first saw the work of Charles Abramson and Adrian Piper, as well as meeting the leading Conceptual artist David Hammons. Each of these artists explored their mixed racial heritage through art, encouraging Simpson to follow a similar path. Yet she is quick to point out how these artists were in a minority at the time, remembering, "When I was a student, the work of artists from varying cultural contexts was not as broad as it is now."

During her student years Simpson travelled throughout Europe and North Africa with her camera, making a series of photographs of street life inspired by the candid languages of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Roy DeCarava. But by graduation, Simpson felt she had already exhausted the documentary style. Taking a break from photography, she moved toward graphic design, producing for a travel company. Yet she remained connected to the underground art scene, mingling with likeminded spirits and fellow African Americans who felt the same rising frustrations as racism, poverty, and unemployment ran deep into the core of their communities.

At an event in New York Simpson met Carrie-Mae Weems, who was a fellow African American student at the University of California. Weems persuaded Simpson to make the move to California with her. "It was a rainy, icy New York evening," remembers Simpson, "and that sounded really good to me." After enrolling at the University of California's MFA program, Simpson found she was increasingly drawn towards a conceptual language, explaining how, "When I was in grad school, at University of California, San Diego, I focused more on performance and conceptually based art." Her earliest existing photographs of the time were made from models staged in a studio under which she put panels or excerpts of text lifted from newspapers or magazines, echoing the graphic approaches of Jenny Holzer and Martha Rosler. The words usually related to the inequalities surrounding the lives of Black Americans, particularly women. Including text immediately added a greater level of complexity to the images, while tying them to painfully difficult current events with a deftly subtle hand.

Mature Period

Simpson's tutors in California weren't convinced by her radical new slant on photography, but after moving back to New York in 1985, she found both a willing audience and a kinship with other artists who were gaining the confidence to speak out about wider cultural diversities and issues of marginalization. Simpson says, "If you are not Native American and your people haven't been here for centuries before the settlement of America, then those experiences have to be regarded as valuable, and we have to acknowledge each other."

Simpson had hit her stride by the late 1980s. Her distinctive, uncompromising ability to address racial inequalities through combinations of image and text had gained momentum and earned her a national following across the United States. She began using both her own photography and found, segregation-era images alongside passages of text that gave fair representation to her subjects. One of her most celebrated works was The Water Bearer, (1986), combining documentation of a young woman pouring water with the inscription: "She saw him disappear by the river. They asked her to tell what happened, only to discount her memory." Simpson deliberately challenged preconceived ideas about first appearances with the inclusion of texts like this one. The concept of personal memory is also one which has become a recurring theme in Simpson's practice, particularly in relation to so many who have struggled to be heard and understood. She observes, "... what one wants to voice in terms of memory doesn't always get acknowledged."

In the 1990s Simpson was one of the first African American women to be included in the Venice Biennale. It was a career-defining decade for Simpson as her status grew to new heights, including a solo exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1990 and a series of international residencies and displays. She met and married the artist James Casebere not long after, and their daughter Zora was born in the same decade. In 1994 Simpson began working with her grandmother's old copies of 1950s magazines including Ebony and Jet, aimed at the African American community. Cutting apart these relics from another era allowed Simpson to revise and reinvent the prescribed ideals being pushed onto Black women of the time, as seen in the lithograph series Wigs (1994). The use of tableaus and repetition also became a defining feature of her work, alongside cropped body parts to emphasize the historical objectification of Black bodies.

Current Work

In more recent years Simpson has embraced a much wider pool of materials including film and performance. Her large-scale video installations such as Cloudscape (2004) and Momentum (2011) have taken on an ethereal quality, addressing themes around memory and representation with oblique yet haunting references to the past through music, staging, and lighting.

Between 2011 and 2017 Simpson reworked her Ebony and Jet collages of the 1990s by adding swirls of candy-hued, watercolour hair as a further form of liberation. She has also re-embraced painting through wild, inhospitable landscapes sometimes combined with figurative elements. The images hearken to the continual chilling racial divisions in American culture. As she explains, "American politics have, in my opinion, reverted back to a caste that none of us want to return to..."

Today, Simpson remains in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York, where in March 2020, she began a series of collages following the rise of the Covid-19 crisis. The works express a more intimate response to wider political concerns. She explains, "I'm just using my collages as a way of letting my subconscious do its thing - basically giving my imagination a quiet and peaceful space in which to flourish. Some of the pieces are really an expression of longing, like Walk with Me, (2020) which reflects that incredibly powerful desire to be with friends right now."

Despite her status as a towering figure of American art, Simpson still feels surprised by the level of her own success, particularly when she compares her work to those of her contemporaries. "I feel there are so many people - other artists who were around when I was in my twenties - who I really loved and appreciated, and who deserve the same attention and opportunity, like Howardena Pindell or Adrian Piper."

The Legacy of Lorna Simpson

Simpson's interrogation of race and gender issues with a minimal, sophisticated interplay between art and language has made her a much respected and influential figure within the realms of visual culture. American artist Glenn Ligon is a contemporary of Simpson's whose work similarly utilizes a visual relationship with text, which he calls 'intertextuality,' exploring how stencilled letters spelling out literary fragments, jokes or quotations relating to African-American culture can lead us to re-evaluate pre-conceived ideas from the past. Ligon was one of the founders of the term "Post-Blackness," formed with curator and writer Thelma Golden in the late 1990s, referring to a post-civil rights generation of African-American artists who wanted their art to not just be defined in terms of race alone. In the term Post-Black, they hoped to find "the liberating value in tossing off the immense burden of race-wide representation, the idea that everything they do must speak to or for or about the entire race."

The re-contextualization of historical inaccuracies in both Simpson and Ligon's practice is further echoed in the fearless, cut-out silhouettes of American artist Kara Walker, who walks headlong into some of the most challenging territory from American history. Arranging figures into theatrical narrative displays, she retells horrific stories from the colonial era with grossly exaggerated caricatures that force viewers into deeply uncomfortable territory.

In contrast, contemporary American artist Ellen Gallagher has tapped into the appropriation and repetition of Simpson's visual art, particularly her collages taken from African American magazine culture. Gallagher similarly lifts original source matter from vintage magazines including Ebony, Our World and Sepia, cutting apart and transforming found imagery with a range of unusual materials including plasticine and gold-leaf. Covering or masking areas of her figures' faces and hairstyles highlights the complexities of race in today's culture, which Gallagher deliberately teases out with materials relating to "mutability and shifting," emphasising the rich diversity of today's multicultural societies around the world.

3 notes · View notes

howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 3 years

Text

Atrocities in Nicaragua: In 1981 the Moonies sponsored a news conference for Contra chief “Chicano” Cardenal

The Pittsburg Press December 20, 1982

By Katherine Ellison

... The Coalition for a Free World [formed in 1981] was organized by CARP, the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles. Dan Fefferman, CARP’s national president in New York, describes the group – founded 28 years ago in South Korea – as “a Reverend Moon organization, but not a Unification Church organization.”

“CARP is legally separate from the church, and primarily educational.” Fefferman said.

Both former Moonies and police, however, contend that CARP is a major recruiting arm of the church.

Local events sponsored by CARP members and, more recently, the coalition have included twice-monthly political discussions, a May flag-burning ceremony in front of the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco, a march last year [1981] to honor visiting then-President José Napoleón Duarte of El Salvador, and a September [1981] news conference with militarist Nicaraguan exile José “Chicano” Cardenal. [who was at that time a Nicaraguan contra chief – he lost his role in the CIA shakeup of the Democratic Nationalist Force in 1982.]

Mike Cardone, a member of both CARP and the Unification Church, said he has been trying to unite two rival Nicaraguan exile factions in the San Francisco Bay area.

One, represented by Cardenal and with U.S. political headquarters in Miami, includes ex-members of deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza’s national guard, who are currently carrying out raids into Nicaragua from bases in Honduras. That group, the Nicaraguan Democratic Front, reportedly has been receiving clandestine aid in Honduras from the Honduran military and the CIA.

The other group is led by dissident members of the Nicaraguan Sandinista government who have repeatedly refused to deal with Somoza’s ex-followers, the Somocistas.

Describing the intent of the Coalition for a Free World, Cardone said: “We’re trying to create a platform where (the exiles) can express their ideology – we’d like them to have a clear idea of how and why we’re fighting.

“We’re not promoting violence,” he added. “I mean, granted, (Cardenal’s) got an army. But what are his motivations, his ideals? The guy’s coming from somewhere, and we want to help him explain to the American public what his problem is.”

_________________________________________

Inside the League – The shocking exposé of how terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American death squads have infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League. by Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson.

page 247 “... former contra chief José Francisco “Chicano” Cardenal (who lost his role in the 1982 CIA shakeup of the FDN [Nicaraguan Democratic Force] )”

page 233 “CAUSA [a Moonie organized front group] also turned its attention to the Nicaraguan exiles. In a Tegucigalpa safe-house in 1983, contra leader Fernando “El Negro” Chamorro told one of the authors that CAUSA had first approached him the year before, offering to help “unite the contra factions” [who were fighting the legitimate government of Nicaragua].”

_________________________________________

In 1985 the Washington Times sponsored a fund for the Contras who committed atrocities, and trafficked drugs to the US

_________________________________________

Nicaragua rebels accused of abuses

The New York Times March 7, 1985

A new report by a private group asserts that over the last three years, rebels from one of the organizations seeking to overthrow the Nicaraguan Government have engaged in a pattern of attacks and atrocities against civilian targets.

A preliminary draft copy, made available here, gives details of 28 incidents that it says “have resulted in assassination, torture, rape, kidnapping and mutilation of civilians.”

Four of the 28 incidents were chosen at random and witnesses were independently interviewed by The New York Times. These interviews seemed to verify some of the details in the report.

The new report, prepared by a three-member team headed by Reed Brody, a former New York State Assistant Attorney General, is based on interviews conducted in Nicaragua between September 1984 and January 1985. It is to be officially released in Washington on Thursday.

The findings are similar to those in a report issued today in Washington by Americas Watch, a private, non-political organization that monitors human rights in the Western Hemisphere. At the same time, the Americas Watch study cited human rights abuses by the other side, noting that there had been violations by the Nicaraguan Army. But it said that there had been a “sharp decline” in such abuses by the Government since 1982. The reports are being released in advance of what is expected to be a heated debate in Congress over United States financing for the anti- Sandinista rebels prior to a vote later this month. President Reagan has asked Congress to renew $14 million in financing to the insurgents, whom he has described as “freedom fighters” who are the “moral equal of our Founding Fathers.”

One Rebel Group Cited

The allegations of killing, rape and kidnapping described in the Brody report seem to apply only to the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, which is based in Honduras and is most active in the northern part of Nicaragua. No charges of atrocities were made by witnesses against the other main anti-Sandinista military force, the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance, which is dominated by disgruntled former officials of the Sandinista Government.

With the help of the Washington law firm of Reichler and Appelbaum, which is representing Nicaragua in its lawsuit against the United States in the International Court of Justice, Mr. Brody’s group was able to obtain official cooperation in arranging interviews with victims of rebel violence.

The follow-up interviews of the witnesses were conducted by The Times in Spanish, in the presence of relatives. No Nicaraguan police, army or other Government officials were present, and none of the interviews were arranged through official channels.

Law Firm Proposed Study

Although Mr. Brody says he disagrees with Reagan Administration policies in Nicaragua, he says he undertook the project out of personal, not political, interest. At the same time, he acknowledges that the release of his report during the debate over renewed aid to the rebels “is not unintentional.”

Reichler and Appelbaum, the law firm, originally proposed an independent study and arranged for Mr. Brody’s participation.

One of the witnesses, who was quoted in the report and later was questioned by The Times, described an early morning attack that he said came as he was on his way to pick coffee at a cooperative farm north of here.

Along with about 30 other volunteers, the witness, Santos Roger Briones, 16 years old, said he was was traveling in a Government-owned truck early last December. Nearly a kilometer ahead was a pickup truck carrying armed soldiers who had been supposed to protect the unarmed civilians from rebel attack.

Suddenly, Mr. Briones recalled, the dump truck was peppered with rifle, machine-gun, grenade and rocket fire. Many in the truck were wounded. Those who could jumped down and ran for their lives.

Played Dead

“I was hit in the foot and was covered with blood, so I lay on the ground, pretending to be dead,” said Mr. Briones. He said he remained motionless as men in blue uniforms robbed him of his boots and wallet. “Then the contras came and cut the throats of the people who stayed on the truck,” he said, using a Spanish term for the rebels.

“When they were finished, they set the truck on fire,” he added. “From where I was lying, I could hear the groans and the screams of those who were being burned alive.”

All told, 21 civilians ranging in age from five to 60 were killed, 8 wounded and one kidnapped in that incident, which is discussed in the Brody report.

Both the interviews with The Times and the report itself indicate that the distinction between combatants and noncombatants is not always clear in Nicaragua. Civilian vehicles sometimes offer rides to hitchhiking soldiers in uniform, and farmers, workers and students in civilian dress often carry arms for what they say is self-defense.

Recurring Patterns Cited

Unarmed victims of the guerrilla attacks said in each case that they shouted that they were civilians as soon as the firing started. In some instances the shooting stopped, they said, but in other cases it continued.

The witnesses interviewed by The Times described several patterns that they said enabled them to identify their attackers as rebels. There were constant references, for example, to blue uniforms with shoulder patches reading “F.D.N.,’’ the Spanish initials for the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, as well as repeated mentions of Chinese-made AK-47 machine guns and a type of Belgian-made rifle that the Nicaraguan Democratic Force uses.

Witnesses also spoke of tents, knapsacks, and boots with “U.S.A.’’ printed on them, which they took as proof that their captors were rebel forces and not Sandinista troops trying to pass themselves off as insurgents. Another characteristic, the witnesses said, was the constant use of a word meaning ‘rabid dog’ that the Nicaraguan Democratic Force uses to refer to Sandinistas and their supporters.

An Abduction Described

Each of these patterns was mentioned by Digna Barreda de Ubeda, 29, who told of an ordeal at the hands of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force that began in May 1983 with a visit to her uncle in Sapote, north of here. She and her husband were abducted at gunpoint by men claiming to be officials of the Ministry of the Interior investigating counterrevolutionary activities.

Once outside of the town, however, the men identified themselves as members of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force and began to beat her 50-year-old husband, she said. The couple was marched to an encampment commanded, Mrs. Barreda says, by men called “Poison” and “The Vulture.”

Mrs. Barreda said she made no effort to hide her pro-Sandinista sympathies. She is a member of a Christian peasant self-help group that works closely with Sandinista groups and also belongs to the official Nicaraguan Women’s Association; her husband fought with the Sandinistas during the insurrection in 1979 that ousted Gen. Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

“There were 50 or 60 of them in the group, and over five days they took turns raping me until each had had his chance,” said Mrs. Barreda.

While she was being raped, said Mrs. Barreda, other soldiers standing by stabbed her with bayonets in the legs and side. During some episodes, she says, her husband was forced to watch.

Mrs. Barreda said that during her five days as a captive she witnessed the torture and murder of a peasant acquaintance who had been kidnapped by the Nicaraguan Democratic Force in a separate incident.

“They asked him if he loved the revolution,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Yes, I love the revolution, because it has given me land, which is more than Somoza ever did.’

“So they started to gouge out his eyes with a spoon,” she said. “Then they bayoneted him through the neck.”They finished him off with a burst of machine gun fire,” she said.

Mrs. Barreda said the soldier who was told to set her free raped her again. She said her husband was released shortly afterward.

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/07/world/nicaragua-rebels-accused-of-abuses.html?searchResultPosition=2

_________________________________________

In 1985 the Washington Times sponsored a fund for the Contras who committed atrocities, and trafficked drugs to the US

In Bolivia, Moon disciple Tom Ward and the former Hitler SS Officer, Klaus Barbie were often seen together

How Sun Myung Moon’s organization helped to establish Bolivia as South America’s first narco-state.

Sun Myung Moon organization activities in Central & South America

Robert Parry’s investigations into Sun Myung Moon

Sun Myung Moon: The Emperor of the Universe, transcript and links

Sun Myung Moon makes me feel ashamed to be Korean

1. Moon’s first son wrote a letter saying his father was a fraud. 2. Ashamed to be Korean 3. Sun Myung Moon: “Women have twice the sin” 4. “Japanese blood is dirty,” Mrs Gil Ja Sa Eu said 5. Moon’s Divine Principle Theory Applied 6. Sun Myung Moon’s explanation of the Fall of Man is based on his Confucian ideas of lineage, and his belief in shaman sex rituals. 7. The establishment of a worldwide government under Moon 8. Sun Myung Moon in 2012: “There is no Mother” 9. Moon’s words on Hak Ja Han, Justin Kook Jin and Sean Hyung Jin 10. Hak Ja Han married “God” in January 2012. Moon was furious. 11. The Sokcho Incident – the removal of Hyun Jin from the succession 12. In 2018 Hak Ja Han was questioned about the Sokcho Incident

#contras #Nicaragua #atrocities #Ronald Reagan #Sun Myung Moon #Moonies #Unification Church #Hak Ja Han

3 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 3 years

Text

WandaVision Episode 6 Commercial Explains What They’ve All Been About

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article contains WandaVision spoilers.

In an already odd show, the commercials on WandaVision take an extra step into weirdness. While we know it’s part of the sitcom-within-a-show premise and is seen by those able to watch it, nobody has actually acknowledged or questioned them. Each one feels like part of the era the episode is copying, but they’re each cryptic and unique.

WandaVision episode 6, “All-New Halloween Spooktacular,” features the fifth commercial so far. It’s easily the most alarming. While the other four commercials have had references to major Marvel characters and moments — especially in regard to Wanda Maximoff — they have always played it completely straight. Outside of maybe the actress’ awkward waiting in the Stark ToastMate 2000 commercial, these have been almost interchangeable with actual commercials from those times.

Not the commercial for Yo-Magic, though. Told in stop-motion animation, a little boy is marooned on a cartoonishly-small island, moaning about his hunger. An EXXXTREME surfing shark pops in and talks about how he doesn’t get hungry thanks to snacking on Yo-Magic. He hands the yogurt to the kid, leaves, and normally we’d be left with a fine example of a commercial representing the early 2000s.

Instead, the kid can’t open the yogurt. He chatters in place, but he can’t quite grab the tab and pull. Like his body won’t let him. Eight days pass as we see him struggle and gradually waste away until he’s left as a skeleton. The box is shown again and the shark narrates, “Yo-Magic! The snack for survivors!”

Pretty grim to put on the Disney+ superhero show, but okay! So what could it mean?

Wanda’s Trauma

All the commercials have appeared to be tied into Wanda’s backstory, specifically her trauma. The toaster suggested the Stark bomb that killed her parents. HYDRA and Von Strucker brainwashed and experimented on her. Lagos was the place where she accidentally killed off a bunch of innocent people when trying to relocate a human bomb.

Much like the Lagos commercial, the Yo-Magic commercial seems to deal with Captain America: Civil War. In the aftermath of the explosion, Wanda not only has to live with her mistake (survivor’s guilt), but she also has to remain at Avengers HQ indefinitely. Vision is there to keep her company (the crab, perhaps?), but she’s intimidated to stay and she’s too petrified from her own fear and the fear of others to go against it.

Eventually, she does leave. She teams up with Captain America and aids him, only to be captured. Later on, we see her in a special prison. An island prison. While her allies are able to talk smack to a visiting Tony Stark, Wanda is dead-eyed and sits alone in her cell, wearing restraints to keep her from moving.

The Trauma of Others

Due to the placement of this ad compared to the rest of the episode, we can understand the boy’s chilling lack of action. Wanda can control everyone in Westview, but her mental and magical bandwidth can only do so much. Many people on the outer edges of the town are all but extras, forced to either stand still or loop their mundane actions like a living animated gif.

The Yo-Magic kid is the same as the housewife in the midst of putting up her decorations, gesturing again and again while a tear rolls down her cheek. We already know the mental stress being inflicted on these people, but this commercial could very well be their grisly fate.

Wanda appears to be playing The Sims with thousands of people and these people are doomed due to neglect and lack of free will. Unless somebody does something, they too will waste away and die.

The Hidden Treat

“Snack on Yo Magic!” indicates that someone or something is feeding off of Wanda’s deal here, or perhaps she is channeling the mystical energy of someone even stronger than herself to keep The Hex alive.

If it’s Mephisto or even Nightmare who is behind this, it’s likely they made a pact with Wanda. We shall have to wait and see what might have been promised in exchange for help with the resurrection of Vision and the manipulation of Westview.

The Infinity Stones

While Wanda’s trauma has been in the forefront of fans’ minds, there’s also the theory that each commercial coincides with a different Infinity Stone. Episode 7 will presumably give us the sixth and final commercial, meaning one commercial per gem.

Already, we have a toaster commercial with what resembles Vision’s head. There’s emphasis on the “forehead,” which is the Mind Stone. The watch commercial is naturally the Time Stone. The Hydra Soak soap takes the form of a blue cube, much like the Tesseract/Space Stone. The paper towels are wiping up red liquid and the Reality Stone’s base form is red liquid.

That leaves us with this child, reduced to a skeleton and fated to spend the rest of time alone in a desolate land. Sounds very reminiscent of the Red Skull, who is cursed to spend his existence on the planet Vormir, guarding the Soul Stone.

I suppose that makes him the Soul survivor.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

That just leaves us with the Power Stone. We’ll see which 2010s commercial pastiche that lines up with soon enough.

The post WandaVision Episode 6 Commercial Explains What They’ve All Been About appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3aYy7TD

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

1 note · View note

keiyokoi · 3 years

Text

Reflection “Essay” #2

Hey everyone! I just wanted to take some time this week and talk about something that I think is extremely important, so buckle up, because this piece is kind of long.

Activism is something we encounter in our everyday lives, whether it be in social media, the news, or something ordinary like laptop stickers. Most recently, Black Lives Matter was under the spotlight (as it should) in the wake of America’s track record of police brutality and George Floyd’s death. Unfortunately, the movement that was fueled by public outcry and outstanding shows of allyship in the early summer months has largely vanished.

The voices of many celebrities and influencers on platforms Instagram and Twitter have gone silent, moving on as the news turned away from BLM protests despite the thousands of people that continued to rally around the country and the world. As we wrap up election season and move into December, what the US is focused on now is the soon-to-be former POTUS and other political news. (My point is that the world of media has largely deemed BLM “no longer relevant” despite the ongoing struggle BIPOC folxs continue to face even after thousands of protests nation AND worldwide.)

To all the people who posted black squares with the hashtags #BlackoutTuesday and #BlackLivesMatter, where are you now? Where is the support, the public outcry that had been so loud in June? Why do civil rights only matter when they’re relevant in the media, when you can score easy clout from it?

I’m sure most of them had their hearts in the right place, but the fact remains true that they fell victim to ‘ally theater’, a term that Anderson and Accomando credit Princess Harmony Rodrigez for coining. The two authors go on to say, “The concern here is about activists who focus on performing an identity for an audience of disadvantaged folk rather than doing the hard and often unseen work of social change.” (P 713) and “To get out of the surface-level ally theater loop, white people need to challenge other whites about racism—even when no one else is watching.” (P 714) in their article The Pitfalls of Ally Performance.

That’s where many people fail the first step of being an ally; they mistakenly believe that for a month of sparse posts concerning awareness, they gain the privilege of being an ally. They forget that allyship is a title that needs to be earned. It’s not enough to play activist for a month and then move on with your life—to be an ally, you must continue to be an activist, even if that’s something as simple as shopping at BIPOC small-owned businesses instead of Amazon. (Here’s a little help for those of you who don’t know where to start: 42 Black-owned beauty brands to shop at instead of Sephora, and 108 Black-owned businesses you can check out.) You have to acknowledge the hard work of POC the exact same way you praise white celebrities and influencers for being ‘woke’. A fantastic example is Harry Styles.

For the 2019 Met Gala, Styles showed up to the red carpet in heels and a sheer black Gucci blouse. This made fans go nuts; they praised him for being a camp icon but glossed over equally stunning outfits like Billy Porter’s golden, winged ensemble (who was carried in on a litter!!! by SIX MEN!!!) or Lena Waithe’s suit. This year fans ran to social media again, this time to gush over the photo spread of him in a dress, thanking Styles for ending toxic masculinity (yes this was a Tweet I read with my own two eyes), congratulating him on defying gender norms, and completely forgetting about others who did it before him.

Male and AMAB (assigned male at birth) non-binary stars like Billy Porter, Jared Leto, Ezra Miller, and JVN are only a handful who’ve appeared in public in dresses and/or skirts before, making it unfair for people to heap gratuitous praise onto Styles’s photoshoot. I’m not trying to bash him or anything and I think that cover was gorgeous, but you can’t be an ally while you idolize Harry Styles for wearing a dress but ignore POC/queer folx who did too.

Now, the second topic I wanted to address: a second helping of fake allyship, this time in the corporate realm.

I love June, but it’s also a mentally exhausting month queer individuals who are sick and tired of fake allyship. Cisgenderists crawl out of the woodwork to whine about ‘straight pride’ as if they don’t have enough of it, influencers capitalize on Pride’s popularity to promote their brand, and large corporations break out the rainbow merch to make a pretty penny off the same people marginalize the other eleven months of the year.

June is for people like me to celebrate our identities together, whether it be at a public Pride event or in the privacy of our own homes. It is not for big businesses to slap rainbows on their merchandise and boast false claims of LGBTQ+ support when corporations like Walmart and Starbucks have done nothing at all to support the message or the mission of Pride.

Building an Abolitionist and Trans Queer Movement With Everything We’ve Got by Bassichis, Lee, and Spade writes “transgender and gender-non-conforming people are repeatedly abandoned and marginalized in the agendas and priorities of our “lead” organizations” (P743) and I couldn’t agree more. The fact of the matter is that under this capitalist regime, queer individuals are just another tool for the privledged elite to take advantage of.

Mega corporations claim to be on our side for a month, playing at queer allyship with rainbow beer cans and happy ads that feature more rainbows and scripted proclamations of LGBTQ+ support, but disappear just as quickly come July.

Certain celebrities tweet during Pride, garnering the applause of the public and cause people across social media to ‘stan’ celebrities that post “Happy Pride!” just for the shallow allyship it grants them. And it’s so normalized for public figures to post all month long about Pride, and suddenly stop in July that we don’t question it.

Donald Trump occasionally preaches about his support of the queer community (which we all know is a joke) and how he’s “the first president to openly support the LGBT community” despite the fact that he gutted LGBTQ+ legislation and his terrible track record concerning queer folx. If he really was a queer ally then why, as Bassichis, Lee, and Spade say, is there “ no inheritance, no health benefits from employers, no legal immigration status, and no state protection of our relationship to our children.”?

That’s why I want to put the spotlight on a game called The Last of Us: Part II. It’s a post-apocalyptic survival horror game so it’s the last place you’d expect to find LGBTQ+ representation, but the main character is a lesbian who has a (Jewish) girlfriend and has an Asian (not white!!) transman, along with another character I strongly believe is aromantic and/or asexual. Their character arcs tie into the story well despite many fans calling out the game developers for pandering to the queer community, and the exhilaration I felt when I saw myself (mostly) represented in a character (who was voiced by an Asian transman!) is unparalleled.

They didn’t have to include any LGBTQ+ content or accurate representation, could have left the main character’s sexuality presumably heterosexual, but they went where most bestselling games don’t, because they’re genuine allies. They brought in voice actors who were Black, Asian, and Latinx to voice characters who were Black, Asian, and Latinx.

That’s what we need more of, not trendsetting celebrities and people who say trans rights just to feel better about themselves.

4 notes · View notes

charliejrogers · 3 years

Text

First Cow (2020)

It’s impossible for me to write about First Cow without thinking that this movie is some sort of sublime cross-over between Joaquin Phoenix’s worst nightmare and joyous fantasy. Running at odds with his oddly emotional anti-milk Oscars acceptance speech back in February 2020, First Cow is a love letter to the power of milk in the realm of baking. The sweet, sweet udder juice provides the very backbone of a community’s happiness and two men’s livelihoods. But, where Phoenix’s nightmare turns to fantasy, the universe gets justice. No milk theft shall ever go unpunished! Move over, Herman’s Hermits; it’s not just “No Milk Today,” it’s no milk ever!

My kidding aside, I was pleasantly surprised by First Cow, though truthfully I’m not sure exactly what I expected besides knowing it was a movie set in nineteenth-century America. Acknowledging my own biases and knowing ahead of time that the director was a woman, I was surprised by how decidedly male this film was. There are really only three female characters of note throughout the whole film, and none of them have prominent speaking roles… in fact the only one who does speak English merely serves as a translator for men.

I wonder in what way the director, Kelly Reichardt, sees herself as fulfilling that role in making this film. That is, in choosing to deliberately make a movie about the nineteenth-century fur trappers in the harsh, male-dominated world of Oregon Territories, Reichardt wanted to highlight an aspect of the dominant “alpha” male society that is most certainly experienced by males but is rarely commented on, largely because it is considered female. I’m talking, of course, about love. I doubt there are viewers of this film who would disagree with my assessment that the two male protagonists shared a love for one another, but I’m sure many would categorize that love as merely representative of “deep friendship” or “platonic” (in the layman’s sense) at the most. While I’m not going to sit here and necessarily argue that the two characters shared an erotic love and I do not think that is the intent, I really do believe characterizing their relationship as merely “two great friends” would be received by the pair as a great insult. The two share the type of relationship seen among men that is rarely seen in the media save for war movies where “brotherhood” is a dominant theme. Outside of war, it’s a relationship that is largely reminiscent of the beautiful love seen between Midnight Cowboy’s Joe Buck and “Ratso” Rizzo. It’s the sort of sacrificial love that dominates the thoughts of Christian scholars. Still, it can be easily misinterpreted as erotic love. What I think Reichardt does beautifully is develop the love between the two carefully so you see it organically develop such that by the time we get to the final scene, we are unsurprised by one of the two character’s sacrificial acts of love.

The key scene, as I mentioned, comes at the end, but it’s noteworthy to mention that the pair’s ultimate fate is made plainly clear in the first few minutes of the movie. The movie starts (almost paradoxically) with an epilogue of sorts. We’re in the modern day, and a woman is exploring the forests of Oregon when her dog stumbles upon some bones that (with a little more digging) reveals two skeletons lying next to one another, like two lovers lying in bed. The best reason I can think of as to why Reichardt includes this epilogue before the rest of the film is because as soon as we the audience realize that two males are the most dominant couple in the film, we more readily anticipate and are more open to seeing love develop before our eyes.

So accordingly, after this brief pre-movie epilogue, the film jumps backwards in time to the nineteenth-century where we meet Otis “Cookie” Figowitz (John Magaro), the cook for a trapping company who is runs a little out-of-step with the rest of his crew. It is embodied in a visual motif that is repeated often throughout the film. We will have a shot of either of the two main characters, Cookie or his eventual companion King Lu (Orion Lee), doing something quiet in the foreground while characters perform some other more exciting activity in the background which in any other movie would take center stage due to the inherent spectacle. But it’s clear that Cookie is a more sensitive soul, he enjoys his time in the woods collecting mushrooms, and he does not have any interest in violence whatsoever. But that does not mean he isn’t without courage.

Early in the film, he comes across King Lu, a Chinese immigrant who is on the run after killing someone to avenge the killing of one of his good friends. Notably, when they first meet, King Lu is completely alone, hungry, and naked. While it isn’t addressed specifically, it is implicit in King’s and Cookie’s first meeting (and during other character’s subsequent interactions with King later in the film) but racially hostile undertones almost threaten to undermine King’s and Cookie’s initial friendship. Yet, like the story of the Good Samaritan, Cookie puts away his initial feelings of racial bias, and goes out of his way to clothe King with a blanket before allowing him to speak any further. Cookie grants King with a great deal of dignity, and goes one step further, offering to smuggle him among the various bags and supplies on his travels, knowing full well that if the rest of his crew find out that Cookie was hiding a “Chinaman murderer,” that he’d be in deep shit.

Cookie and King separate after this initial meeting, but upon reuniting later in the film, they never separate from one another until the very end. In what is the most puzzling choice in the film to me is Cookie’s initial decision to join King for a drink at King’s home. The two reunite in a trapping fort bar after a fight breaks out and the two are the only customers not drawn outside to enjoy the spectacle (the outsider/outcast motif returns). However, just before the start of the fight, one of the primary instigators of that fight requests for Cookie to watch over his infant whom he had brought to the bar. Therefore, when King asks Cookie to join in at his home, he is also asking him to abandon this helpless infant. The image of the baby swaddled in a basket recalls the previous imagery of King swaddled in the bags and supplies within which Cookie was smuggling him. And ultimately Cookie does abandon the baby for King, and in joining King for a drink at his home, never actually leaves. The two begin living together. So I’m not sure of the significance of the baby. Is it that Cookie had the choice between two “new lives,” one a literal new life of someone else and the other, in King, a chance at a new life for himself? Or is it simply just to serve as foreshadowing that in following King, Cookie is opening himself up to a life of indulgence where the concerns of others are less important than his own happiness?

As for the latter question and the plotline that develops around it, it really serves as a bitter critique of American capitalism and the American dream. While we love to tout the “by the bootstraps” myth, this movie serves as a simple morality play about how no matter what, pursuing the American dream means ripping somebody off for your own benefit. In this instance, it means Cookie and King nightly sneaking onto the property of the leader of the trapping fort and stealing milk from the only cow in the area in order to essentially have a monopoly on baked goods and make a pretty penny. Now, we can sit and debate about the morality of “owning” a cow, and whether Cookie and King are even doing anything immoral since it is preposterous to own an animal! Or I’m sure there are those (Joaquin Phoenix) who think Cookie and King are just as immoral for taking ANY milk from a cow as the man who owns the cow in the first place. This is not the time to discuss animal rights. But it is notable what the cow, too, has had to suffer in order allow for Cookie and Lee’s successes. She was initially transported to the trapping fort along with a mate and her calf, but both died en route. She spends her time tied to a tree and by the film’s end locked up within a small cage.

In sum, the love that Cookie so beautifully shared with King at film’s beginning does not seem so equally shared by the pair in regards to their relationship with others. And in their pursuit to become successful capitalists in a system rigged against them, they ultimately hurt some of those around them, most notably titular cow with whom Cookie has almost romantic relationship with, which in some ways makes his treating her as little more than a literal cash cow so egregious, even if he cares deeply for her.

Hence the morality play. I don’t have to spell it out for you what might happen if two people repeatedly rob the same person in the same way again and again and again. But even if we as the audience agree that the cards are stacked against Cookie and King from the start in their attempt to become independent, to achieve the American dream, the film never pretends that they are acting as virtuous agents. In the end, though, they get their redemption even as they receive punishment. King is given a chance to abandon Cookie outright who in an attempt to flee their pursuers has become badly injured. King realizes he can just take his riches and run. But he doesn’t. He decides to lie next to his dearly beloved companion. While he could not have predicted what would be the fatal consequences of this decision, he knows that sticking with Cookie in his current state will only cause him trouble. But that’s where the beautiful sacrificial love that defines this pair comes in. Whereas many will view this film and remember it as a cautionary tale about the American dream, I will forever remember the realistic love of brothers shared between these two wayward men.

***(1/4) (Three and one fourth stars out of four)

#first cow #john magaro #orion lee #kelly reichardt #milk #joaquin phoenix milk #joaquin phoenix #herman's hermits #no milk today

3 notes · View notes

thinkveganworld · 4 years

Text

CIA -Who Runs the Country?

These are portions of an article I wrote a few years ago on the fact that certain CIA officials’ believe CIA should run the country. It’s based on work by the late journalist Robert Parry. Parry was a Newsweek correspondent from 1987 to 1990. He was also at one time a reporter for PBS Frontline and and author of “Lost History” and “Fooling America,” (1992) among other books. He was editor of Consortium News.com and won the George Polk Award for National Reporting in l984, and the I. F. Stone medal for journalistic independence in 2015,

Who runs the country? High level CIA officials have said the CIA, and not the president or other elected officials, should run the country and world affairs. (This is still the prevailing attitude among many CIA officials.) In his 1991 book, “Trick or Treason,” Parry interviewed old-time CIA officer Miles Copeland. Parry discovered that Copeland strongly supported George Bush, who was CIA director in 1976, but distrusted Jimmy Carter because he found Carter’s idealism contemptible. Copeland told Parry: “The way we saw Washington at that time (1980) was that the struggle was really not between the left and the right, the liberals and the conservatives, as between the Utopians and the realists, the pragmatists. Carter was a Utopian. He believed, honestly, that you must do the right thing and take your chance on the consequences. He told me that. He literally believed that.” Parry writes: “With those words, Copeland’s voice registered a mixture of amazement and disgust, as if he were talking about a hound dog that wouldn’t hunt. To Copeland and his CIA friends, Carter deserved respect for his first-rate intellect, but only contempt for his idealism.” Copeland and his CIA friends supported George H. W. Bush in part due to Bush’s year as CIA director. Parry writes: “That, plus Bush’s schooling at Yale, a primary CIA recruiting ground, and membership in secret clubs like Skull and Bones, made the president a trusted figure to CIA veterans. I had been told that ‘Bush for President’ signs had been plastered on walls all over the CIA in 1980. Copeland was so personally impressed with Bush’s year as director that the CIA old-timer founded an informal political support group called 'Spooks for Bush.’” Another retired CIA man, Patrick E. Kennon, expressed the CIA’s view that CIA should run the country. Speaking about democratic elections in his 1995 “The Twilight of Democracy,” Kennon says: “Those societies that continue to allow themselves to be administered by individuals whose only qualification is that they were able to win a popularity contest will go from failure to failure and eventually pass from the scene.” The book describes Kennon’s typical CIA-man view: “Why have the most successful governments disdained the ideals of America’s founding fathers in favor of the sometimes cruel efficiency of authoritarianism? Because, Kennon asserts, the world has become so complicated, and the pace of change so rapid, that only highly trained, anonymous technocrats invested with enormous authority are capable of guiding a nation’s affairs. To trust unskilled politicians, vulnerable to corruption and ignorant of the most basic rules of governing, with the fate of a nation is, in Kennon’s view, the height of folly.” Both Kennon and Copeland repeatedly express contempt for democracy and idealism and support for a CIA-run country. Robert Parry writes that Miles Copeland shook his head from side to side in dismay as he lamented: “Carter believed in all the principles that we talk about in the West. As smart as Carter is, he did believe in Mom, apple pie, and the corner drugstore. And those things that are good in America are good everywhere else.” Copeland stated, “Carter, I say, was not a stupid man,” but added Carter’s greater weakness was that “he was a principled man.” (One problem with that theory is CIA has a long record of overthrowing democratically elected governments, lying to the public to involve us in illicit wars, torturing even our own citizens and many other egregious deeds. They may be coldly efficient technocrats, but they’re not known for their humanity.) Copeland said that during the Iranian hostage crisis, neither the CIA nor the Iranians wanted Carter to get credit for the release of the hostages. Both the CIA and the Iranians preferred Reagan get credit. Copeland insisted there was no formal CIA deal with the Iranians but just “a mutuality of interests.” When Parry asked Copeland how the CIA and Iranians came to agree to deny the hostage release to Carter, Copeland “only assured me that there were people deep inside the intelligence community who understood what had to be done for the good of the United States. He called the professionals 'the CIA within the CIA.’” Parry hoped to interview Miles Copeland in the future to ask which individuals of the “CIA within the CIA” passed on hostage messages. He wanted to ask why Copeland’s CIA friends were so sure the hostages would be released after Carter’s defeat. Copeland died on January 14, 1991, before Parry had the chance to do a follow up interview. When CIA representatives like Copeland and Kennon say the CIA is more qualified to run the country than are elected representatives, do they take into account the many CIA atrocities, including assassinations of democratically elected world leaders – atrocities that have become a matter of public record, acknowledged by CIA officials? When Copeland and Kennon speak of CIA concern for “the good of the United States” or protecting U.S. citizens, do they take into account the CIA’s own admitted abuses of U.S. citizens, including the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA program? Copeland spoke to Parry about controlling public opinion in Iran, about turning the crowds around, shifting public support from one dictator to another. Copeland said because Khomeni’s supporters in 1979 totaled a million people, the CIA couldn’t shift public opinion. Copeland said, “You don’t turn a million people. You can’t do it.” He said the CIA might have saved the shah from the Khomeni supporters except for Carter’s despised idealism. To Copeland and his CIA friends’ disgust, Carter criticized the shah for using torture and murder to keep Iranian citizens down. Copeland said: “There are plenty of forces in the country we could have marshaled. We could have sabotaged [the revolution]. But we had to do it early. We had to establish what the Quakers call 'the spirit of the meeting’ in the country, where everybody was thinking just one way. The Iranians were really like sheep, as they are now.” The CIA doesn’t confine its contempt for average citizens to Iranians. Apparently the CIA also sees American citizens as “sheep” and American public opinion as something the CIA must “manage” for the good of the country. Robert Parry’s “Fooling America” shows how the Reagan-Bush-era CIA pulled out all stops to control public opinion and the American press regarding Iran-Contra. Walter Raymond, Jr., served as the CIA’s chief propaganda and disinformation specialist before moving to the National Security Council in 1982. As top CIA officer assigned to the Reagan White House, Raymond helped manipulate public opinion by portraying the Sandinistas as “black hats” and the Contras as “white hats.” Parry writes: “As for the questionable legality of a CIA director assisting in a campaign to influence the American people, Raymond explained that [CIA Director William] Casey undertook those actions 'not so much in his CIA hat, but in his adviser to the president hat.’” Raymond, Copeland and Kennon typify the CIA view: Democracy should be superseded by a CIA-run government (complete with torture and assassinations), and the American people are “sheep” to be manipulated toward that end.

32 notes · View notes

thefloatingstone · 5 years

Note

The whole “they’re just evil” is ableist too though. It’s basically saying well, we thought they were mentally ill, but no, they’re just evil. Similar to how people will say “you’re not depressed, you’re just lazy.” And the whole “evil child” trope can be dangerous. Some child abusers “justify” their actions by framing their neurodivergent (mentally ill, mentally disabled, autistic, etc) child as being evil or unnatural. “creepy” behaviours in movies are common in ppl that are neurodivergent.1/2

I think what it comes down to is that the horror genre is about intent in its subject matter.

The reason I like horror is because when horror is done well, it represents very clearly the fears and paranoias of the era the movie was made in.

Early horror movies (before the hayes code) had a LOT of subtext where the big fear usually was caught up in sex in some way or another. And not in an exploitative way. Movies like Cat People and Dr. Jekyl and Mrs Hyde are to do with young people who are engaged and, because it’s the 30s, are not sexually active with each other yet, but they WANT to be. And a lot of early horror has to do with sexual repression.

And then you have zombie movies which came into their own after Night of the Living Dead in 1969 and became a genre in the 70s. Zombie movies being a cultural fear of losing control of yourself and getting assimilated into a group which is slowly devouring your way of life. This can be a metaphor for immigrants, other religions, a change in social climate and old societal structures no longer being embraced by the younger generation (Zombie movies became super popular in the 70s, after the Vietnam war which was extremely protested by the younger generation, as well as racial tensions in the US rising as African Americans were coming more freely in society following the abolishment of America’s segregation in the 60s)

But some horror movies deal with fears which are universal and not contained in one one era. The fear of death is a big one but rather vague in of itself. And when framed in a movie can be rather shallow (like a slasher movie) or very deep and complex (like Jacob’s ladder or Masque of the Red Death). Other universal fears are things like war, home invasion by a criminal, being hunted (either by an animal or another human), the unknown (this often taking the form of “evil” in terms of ghosts and demons and possession etc etc), one’s own body succumbing to disease (which is where body horror comes from) and the loss of control of oneself (this is where mind control and possession and other dehumanising tropes are used, although these can cross over into the trope of cultural tension. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is all about loved ones being replaced with unknown enemy creatures and was made (twice) during the US’ cold war with Russia)

One of the great universal fears is the concept of not being in control of one’s own mind. It doesn’t matter if you’re neurotypical or have a form of mental illness, the core concept of losing yourself to your own mind is a horrific one (and I mean this in terms of the concept, not the reality) so I feel horror movies that deal with this trope WELL, understand how to channel that fear into an effective story that resonates with its audience, regardless of who they are. However, this is VERY different than the much easier and lazier method of just claiming a bad guy is “crazy”. Because the neurotypical audience will still nod and go “yes it is very scary to think of people being crazy like that or even of myself losing my mind. That is a scary thought.” but it does NOT use the trope with the complexity and depth it needs to properly express that dark fear.

The other great fear, and one used FAR less frequently in horror movies simply because it is disturbing, is the innate fear parents have that a baby who they wish to love could have “something wrong with it.” not out of stigmatism, but because (most often) parents wish for the best for their children, and the concept of a child having a problem the parents can’t fix is terrifying. This is where movies like Eraserhead come from, however it also ties into the fear of mental illness.

There is also the thing that having mental illness within the bad guy character gives to horror but which is not only reserved for mental illness, and this is where the “evil” explanation comes from; and that is the horror that comes from the idea that a bad person is not someone you can recognise in the street as a threat. That you cannot see someone and immediately go “oh well they have horns so I KNOW they’re dangerous!” but that threat and danger and harm can hide in the nicest, kindest, most ordinary looking people. In modern times we now know you don’t need mental illness to be a threat and look normal, but I feel this is why mental illness is often used.

This brand of horror is also very important because it asks the audience “what is the difference between the person in the movie doing terrible things, and you, the audience member, who probably assumes themselves to be a good person?” Mental illness is a good answer to this because it gives the audience the uncomfortable thought of “if I had the same mental struggles, would I be doing terrible things like this too? What makes me “a good person”? Am I any different than the bad guy at all?”

Horror is a good genre because it shines a light on fears and insecurities and paranoias of human beings. Either culturally, or psychologically. And I feel the problem is that so often complex ideas and reasons BEHIND the horror is lazily boiled down to “oh well they were just crazy. That’s all.” which makes the audience not have to worry about it because “oh of course. They’re just crazy. Not like me. I’m not crazy at all.”

But this is…. this is bad writing :/ and as the previous post said (if you are the same anon) it is the using of the trope in a lazy way which reinforces itself as harmful. And you often see this in cheap horror movies who are NOT trying to say something about humanity’s deep rooted fears, but just want some teenagers to scream in the theater for 90 minutes at some fake blood and a “scary bad guy”.

I agree that modern movies should not reinforce bad stereotypes of mental illness as we often see in badly written lazy horror films, but I don’t think it’s a topic that should be untoucheable in terms of story telling. Because I feel then we deny a huge part of the human psychology.

hmmm…. how do I put this…..

Ok maybe this’ll make more sense.

Silent Hill 2 is a game where the entire subtext and plot is about depression. Without it being a plot point in any way, the game feels like it is trying to EXPRESS depression. And it expresses depression in the form of horror visuals both in terms of monsters and scenery. Depression is never mentioned and nobody talks about the symptoms of depression (not counting Angela’s suicidal thoughts but that’s not really the point here). Silent Hill 2 is a story about depression and fatal illness and suicidal thoughts. It is a game about the horror of those feelings… And you could even easily say the game even features a character with depression who is a murderer… but the game is not presenting depression as an “explanation”. But it is a game ABOUT depression. Through its visuals, sound design, atmosphere, music, it all builds together to present itself AS depression.

And I feel we need stories like that. It presents mental illness in a horrific light… but it’s… it’s different, you know? And I feel having the ability to tell horror stories about mental illness is important because then we can have stories like Silent Hill 2, which in a weird way becomes comforting if you’ve ever experienced depression. It’s like you go back to Silent Hill 2 when you’re in a depressive state and you just feel…. a little better? like “yes…. this is the emotion I am feeling. This is what it’s like. Somebdy else understands it, and this story resonates with me. And I am not alone.”

I know that is a completely different thing than what we were talking about regarding “bad guy characters in a horror movie have mental illness” but I feel it’s an important point…. because Silent Hill 2 is literally about a guy who killed someone and has a mental illness…. the difference is he’s not framed as a bad guy, but as sympathetic. WITHOUT condoning his actions.

And as for “evil” like “oh he’s not crazy he’s just evil”, I understand what you mean but I think of it more regarding either tied to religious beliefs which is a more personal fear and varies depending on who the person watching the movie is…. or the evil which is like…. Ted Bundy…. and I don’t really want to talk about that because it legit makes me incredibly uncomfortable.

(also Horror is AMONG my favourite genres or sub genres. But it depends on the film. But it’s a genre I legit am fascinated by, enjoy depending on the film, and have watched and read and own WAY too many books about).

A big function of horror movies is to acknowledge the fears humans carry within us, as well as the darker sides of humanity as a whole, and horror movies gives us a way to confront that, and not simply try to ignore it while it festers away in the back of our minds.

So it’s difficult because you can’t say “you can’t make a horror movie about x” because it ends up being more harmful than good…. but at the same time reinforcing stigmas that hurt oppressed groups is also something which should NOT be done.

This is why I tend to judge horror movies on a case by case basis X’D and also consider context, era, country of origin etc etc.

And it’s why I’m talking about this topic in such long posts. Because I feel it’s a complex problem.

But I fully agree we need a public ed campaign in teaching people about the context in which older horror movies were made and to understand how to be critical of their themes while still being able to be entertained by them.

….I didn’t even go into how monster movies like King Kong and Creature from the Black Lagoon are about cultural paranoias about people from different ethnicities and cultures “coming to steal our women”, and why you are seeing a lot more “monster fuckers” these days as our culture is slowly learning to be more empathetic to “those who are other”. Like…. I didn’t even go INTO that part of it.

…..I like horror u guys.

#C-Puff answers #Horror tropes #Anonymous

39 notes · View notes

quirkycombatants · 4 years

Text

Spoilers: Noburu’s Backstory

So I usually don’t tell people the whole truth about my muses, or give all the details about their backstory, because 1. they tend to be super long, and 2. it makes it easier to react more naturally to things when they’re not considering information they don’t have. This prevents bias, but also metagaming. In any case, I felt that enough threads have been done the last few days that it was time to put down Noburu’s actual backstory, with explanations of how and why he is strong, and how and why he is the way he is.

Major spoilers lie below.

First, let’s talk about Noburu’s family. He claims he does not have one, save for his brother and father, who abandoned him as the false heir, and will one day return to slay him for his weakness. This, Noburu believes. He believes this completely. It is also a lie.

First, his brother. Noburu never gives details on his brother; not his looks, not his fighting style, nothing. Only that he is stronger than Noburu and the favorite of his father for having a quirk. In truth, his brother does not exist. Noburu is an only child, and his brother is not real.

Noburu has dissociative identity disorder.

To quote WebMD:

Dissociative identity disorder is thought to stem from a combination of factors that may include trauma experienced by the person with the disorder. The dissociative aspect is thought to be a coping mechanism -- the person literally shuts off or dissociates himself from a situation or experience that's too violent, traumatic, or painful to assimilate with his conscious self.

Research indicates that the cause of DID is likely a psychological response to interpersonal and environmental stresses, particularly during early childhood years when emotional neglect or abuse may interfere with personality development. As many as 99% of individuals who develop dissociative disorders have recognized personal histories of recurring, overpowering, and often life-threatening disturbances or traumas at a sensitive developmental stage of childhood.

Dissociation may also happen when there has been persistent neglect or emotional abuse, even when there has been no overt physical or sexual abuse. Findings show that in families where parents are frightening and unpredictable, the children may become dissociative.

It is now acknowledged that these dissociated states are not fully mature personalities, but rather they represent a disjointed sense of identity. With the amnesia typically associated with dissociative identity disorder, different identity states remember different aspects of autobiographical information. There is usually a "host" personality within the individual, who identifies with the person's real name. Ironically, the host personality is usually unaware of the presence of other personalities.

Incorporating all that, Noburu’s brother is his second personality. It is the personality that allowed him to cope with the killing that he did during his childhood years in the underground arenas. Consider the details that Noburu gives about his brother:

Noburu’s brother is stronger than Noburu. Noburu’s brother is more brutal than Noburu. Unlike Noburu, who doesn’t like to kill, Noburu’s brother kills willingly and readily, and without remorse. Noburu’s brother is more emotional than Noburu.

In truth, Noburu’s brother is the repressed personality that covers the parts of Noburu that allowed him to survive in death matches. Noburu, forced to kill and do so to survive, separated himself from what was occurring. His ‘brother’ is thus responsible for all the blood shed. The deaths that Noburu caused he associates with his brother.

There’s another aspect to it. His brother is ‘strong’ while noburu is ‘weak.’ His brother is ‘powerful’ while Noburu is ‘careful.’ He is the opposite of Noburu, because Noburu has defined himself as the peaceful one, the one who possesses no malice towards anyone, while his ‘brother’ possesses only the urge for violence towards others.

In truth, Noburu’s brother does not actually have malice towards others. But that will be discussed later.

Noburu’s brother is Noburu. But the brother was a coping mechanism, and something that was encouraged to develop by Noburu’s father. It was specifically cultivated, in order to be controlled, because his father feared what would happen if the secondary personality consumed the main personality. Thus, the rules for his brother coming out, unknown to Noburu are:

In the arena, when you must defend your own life, or when you must defend something so precious that you cannot live without it.

It was his father’s belief that this would keep him safe; after all, it would keep it contained to the arena, and it would ensure that his father would be safe since he was something that Noburu would be unable to live without.

This would be his ultimate mistake.

Noburu was never meant to become attached to anything other than his father. He was never meant to feel anything like attachment towards anyone or anything. In reality, he became attached to a dog that would come by to where Noburu was kept by his father. Noburu understood that this animal would be killed, but it showed him affection, which was new to Noburu. and so he began to value the dog, and was careful to keep it away when his father was going to come around.

When his father found it, he attempted to make Noburu kill the dog. Noburu refused. His father then decided to kill it himself. This activated the last part of the indoctrination: defend something so precious that you cannot live without it. To Noburu, this dog was so precious because it showed him something unique, and thinking it was entirely unique in doing so, he could not live without these feelings of affection.

Thus Noburu killed his father.

Noburu does not believe he has done this. To him, both his father and his brother are alive and merely waiting to return to kill him. But Noburu, under the guise of his ‘brother’ slew his father. His father of course, had a quirk, that part Noburu is accurate about. His father’s quirk really was the ability to see into the future up to three seconds at all times. Which means that Noburu had to fight in a way which made it impossible for that quirk to stop him.

This brings us to Noburu’s strength. Noburu is quirkless. But Noburu is also a superhuman. It will also explain how Noburu’s ‘brother’ is stronger than he is.

Noburu’s father, realizing that noburu was quirkless, did in fact attempt to overcome this problem. But he did not try to ‘force a quirk’ as Noburu believed. Instead, he attempted to make it so that Noburu would be able to enter the ‘fight or flight state’ instantly.

In Japan, this is called ‘enormous strength during a fire,’ but in America it’s usually referred to as the ‘emergency state.’ Basically, think of how when their child is in danger, a mother can somehow lift a car to save them. Think about how when a person fell out of a plane without a parachute, they somehow survived with other minor injuries. Think about how the original marathon was ran by a man who then died as soon as he declared victory. The truth is that our bodies have limits, because otherwise we would destroy ourselves through exertion. We learn this as children and keep it to this day. For example, the density of a human finger is the same as the density of a carrot. We can easily bite through a carrot, but biting through a finger would be hard for most people. Why? Because our brains are conditioned to believe that we should not do one and easily do the other.

But there’s more than psychology to this. There’s biology too. To do the things in this state, the brain floods the body with endorphins. It then begins breaking down the base proteins that your body stores for emergencies. This is extremely dangerous, because your body is not meant to break down these proteins normally or even regularly. This is how people, even on the point of exhaustion, get a sudden burst of energy to act. It is the last gasp of your body.

Noburu’s father aimed to make it so that Noburu could act in this state at will. In truth, he got close. Noburu’s ‘brother’ naturally exists in this state. It is a state where he is stronger, faster, more lethal than a normal person. But it comes at the cost of his rational thoughts; your body cannot focus on rational thought while it is doing everything it can to survive.

There is one other thing which explains Noburu’s strength, even while he is not in this state. And that thing is myostatin. Myostatin is a natural protein that is produced by the body in order to inhibit muscle growth. Without it, muscles would grow endlessly without end. There are many examples of animals that lack this, and who end up with giant muscles. When working out, our bodies intentionally limit myostatin, and that allows us to gain muscle mass.

But Noburu’s body lacks the proper amount of Myostatin. However his body, rather than grow to extreme sizes, has compressed his muscles. This is why, if you were to compare Noburu with someone of equal height, he would probably weigh somewhere between 100-200 lbs more, though the reason isn’t entirely obvious.

Noburu, from the day he was born, has muscle fibers that are naturally elastic and dense, along with dense bones that are harder and more durable than normal. This is a result of his muscles being forced to endure intense amounts of strain.

This is why Noburu’s father put him through the training he did, and why he didn’t simply remove him. It is true that Noburu’s father wanted an heir. But Noburu’s father considered Noburu his real heir.

When Noburu was born, he weighed over 20 lbs, though was no larger than normal. His birth killed his mother, because Noburu was too strong and caused exceptional bleeding when he was being born, and she was not being born in a hospital.

Noburu, by virtue of birth, was a superhuman in a world of quirks. He was quirkless, but that didn’t matter. He had his powers by virtue of the old way, naturally. He would be considered a superhuman in a normal world. But he is not in a normal world, and so he seems normal.

But Noburu’s strength, reaction time, and durability are many times greater than a normal person’s. This was why Noburu’s father trained him as he did, and why Noburu’s father was unable to kill Noburu despite seeing three seconds into the future. The three second headstart didn’t matter, because Noburu could move faster than he could react.

But killing his father to protect something precious was the final break that caused him to need two personalities. Noburu was ‘weak’ so he had a brother who was ‘strong.’ Noburu was ‘calm’ while his brother was ‘violent.’ And because Noburu had killed his father, he was ‘wrong’ because he was not the ‘heir.’ Thus, he waits for ‘punishment’ for being ‘wrong.’ He is ‘guilty.’ And his brother and father will return to kill him. But he cannot stop growing stronger, because he cannot allow anyone else to deliver punishment to him.

Noburu’s ‘brother’ is a lie. His father is dead. But he does not believe this. Instead, his body and mind have undergone extreme trauma, which has created the ‘brother’ personality that contains all of the times he was forced to kill. It is the ‘stronger’ personality, because Noburu considers his ability to simply kill to be stronger. It is also the personality that formed when Noburu was on the edge of death by his father’s training, to get him through that terrible situation. Thus the ‘state’ of being near death, that state where the body has increased strength and speed to survive, is linked with his ‘brother’ who can achieve that easily.

Noburu is thus the ‘weaker’ brother who relies on martial arts to overcome differences in strength. But his ‘brother’ is actually the one who relies on pure strength. ‘Noburu’ is thus his body and mind’s ‘limiter.’ He is the result of the coping mechanism.

All questions about how he exists, how he can be as strong as he is despite being quirkless, and how he can use the techniques that he can, can now be explained. Noburu is the personality who has jettisoned his ability to feel most things, because the last time he felt affection it resulted in him killing his father. He had fear and anger removed from his mind by his father’s training. He has survived, through a combination of natural genetics and training by his father.

Thus does Noburu’s true story become clear.

#ooc #Headcanon #noburu things

7 notes · View notes