Category: Culture and society

The loss of our prehistory

A few long time ago (a little over 12 years to be whatever) several geek websites posted a link to a site where photos of a sci-fi convention called Westercon from the 1980 event were posted. The people in the photos were so 80s and earnest and lo-fi that you couldn’t help but be jealous of them and the time they were living in. The geek sites posted additional links to other relevant parties who had valuable/interesting additions to the conversation or who had actually lived through those halcyon days, and each site had their own discussion threads where yet more links were posted and memories from those who had actually been at that convention were retold. It was one of those moments that, meta-wise, made you wish you were a sociologist 200 years from now because there was just so much those photos and discussions revealed about a certain group at a certain time in history along with how they themselves remembered that history.

Continue reading The loss of our prehistory

Survivor’s guilt

The pandemic was good to me.

I thrive alone and so, even as the wife was not in her best place like most others in the world, though I was distraught by what the global “We” were going through, I could deal. Even before the pandemic I worked from home and spent many non-work hours in my office doing non-work things. Not necessarily a very guy thing but just a very introvert thing. I actually have fond memories of the isolation because within that isolation there was, without a better phrase to express it, a warm online camaraderie of artists who gave their time to create that warmth.

The 11th of this month was the four year anniversary of the start (as I noted here when it started).

Continue reading Survivor’s guilt

Witness–The Indictment II

A lot of feelings.

It echoes my previous assessment for the NY-related indictment:

This is definitely more substantial. I mean, logarithmically more substantial. Watched MSNBC as soon as we heard, which was maybe an hour, hour and a half after the fact and watched it until midnight. Thoughts:

  • How can the commentators have anything to say?! He crimed so obviously that elaboration is redundant.
  • And yet… they actually had much that was insightful to say.
  • Who else was in the conspiracy? That is a fascinating aspect.
  • Jesus Christ espionage?!?!?
  • Venue of Miami is a ballsy move. T’s home turf and Jack Smith went there instead of NYC/Washington. Ball-Sy. He is very confident of what he’s got.
  • There is no defense and his lawyers are clowns.
  • Sad day for our country because it suggests the presidency is a corruptible figurehead? Fuck you, it’s a happy day. Recently Claire McCaskill said of Pence’s, and those other asshole’s, rehabilitation tour: you don’t get a pass. Where were your morals when you were next to this corrupted man and you said nothing? Again: Fuck. You.
  • The defenses that his lawyers were presenting, at least in the press, were comical. “It’s not a crime because the documents were copies and not the originals.” I. Fucking. Love. That.
Yes, those are Biden Inauguration glasses.

We watched three or so hours of MSNBC and were not disappointed. I still have many questions about aspects that are not clear in my head, but it helps to get a basic framework of understanding. Side Note: Stephanie Rhule has more legal and incisive acumen than I knew. I may need to watch more of her.

The facial expressions of all involved were hilarious.

Processing…

Witness–The Indictment

Running a long string of failed tests with a coworker and there’re only two tests left. Looking hopeless. As test T-minus-1 is running, he sends me the AP news and I reply “if this test works I’m going to pass out.” Lisa had just poured a drink minutes before the news because she’s leaving for a long weekend in Baton Rouge tomorrow and it’s her First Friday. It’s my coworker’s wedding anniversary. It’s my niece’s birthday. Top story on Reddit before the news was the celebration of the birthday of a Redditor’s grandmother’s 100th birthday.

And Mother Fucking Trump is Mother Fucking Indicted.

Credit where credit is due: the first thing my coworker said was we need to drink Manhattans tonight.

6:00 PM

Much like my interaction with my brother on Victory Over Fascism Day (when the election was called for Biden), celebration can be simple:

(Side note: I was thinking this morning about what my next compositional work would be and it often goes to write-what-you-know, and thus for me to such life-changing events as Those Four Years or The Year of Pestilence or The Year of the Flood (personal) or Our Burgeoning Civil War. Ultimately, I’ve done this before and so must find another inspiration no matter the intrusive resonance of these events.)

OMG same building where the Central Park Five were arraigned in. Jesus Fucking Christ this is beautiful.

Please, please, please, take out a full page ad and do that GoFundMe thing.

7:30 PM

I can’t, can not, focus on a depressing endgame with this. The indictment is not a guarantee but it’s a move forward and, more important at this point in these hours after the event, a move forward that can be celebrated for how far it’s gone.

Joy Reid is speaking with a (Jewish) Lawyer. Oh my, how do you respond as a Jew, or as anyone but you-know-what-I-mean, to the DeSantis references to “Soros-backed-investigations”?! Often I think about Those Four Years and how it was a master class to me, as a White Male, to appreciate what black people and Jews and LGBTQs and whoever, go through, and just how much I’m not prepared for it and how much I now look to them to give me insight into how to survive. How to survive mentally. How do you survive the garish lawlessness? I’m not sure I can justify it logically, but Those Four Years made me feel as if justice had become not only meaningless but anarchic. And yet I’ve always appreciated empathetically the anguish that minority or marginalized groups must go through. They experience it from birth to death. Trump’s decisions absolutely never affected me, but they were such a surfacing and normalization of the ideas that were so completely repugnant, that I felt that they affected me (again, I say this without the naivety of an oblivious white male).

8:00 PM

I am told of a “perp walk” and as much as we salivate for the “perp walk” I also understand the need for circus-less-ness. Jesus Christ the security that will be needed.

I won’t be able to find it, but I often think of Tom Nichols’ essay on how Trump has made us all lesser socially and lesser morally. I want the worst for Trump. I want the greatest pain for him. And I hope I can facility the worst for his followers. I think of myself as a humanist and humane and my desire for cruelty to another is discomfiting morally. But maybe I think too charitably of myself when I’ve also often said “It’s always OK to punch a Nazi.”

“I really agree with you on this one, Bart.”

8:20 PM

And maybe this is the day that moralists and those who are moral realize that it is always OK to punch Nazis.