Ripley, Alumnus of Woolloomooloo

"I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library

Line up to the mind cemetery now

What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin'

They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em"

 

Rage Against the Machine - Bulls On Parade

_____________________________________________

"It does NOT follow that because a good many of the intellectuals belong to the 97 per cent of the broke--that plenty of actors and teachers and nurses and musicians don't get any better paid than stage hands or electricians, therefore their interests are the same. It isn't what you earn but how you spend it that fixes your class--whether you prefer bigger funeral services or more books. I'm tired of apologizing for not having a dirty neck!"

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here

_____________________________________________

"Could you please explain to me why you do not take tea?"

"Take tea," Jillian sneered. "That's exactly why. You 'take tea.' There's a ritual. Etiquette. It's stupid." She sat forward and pointed to the steaming teapot. "It's a beverage. Hot dirty water in a cup. You pick it up and drink it.

[...]

But I thought your side didn't care about Royalty. Vinny said titles and stuff didn't matter to you guys as much as getting the mission done."
Instead of beckoning the serving Doll, Don King leaned very far forward, reached an uncomfortable and rude distance across the table, and picked up the teapot. With deliberate carelessness, he sloshed tea into his cup, spilling and dripping all over the white lace. As Jillian watched him, he banged down the pot and picked up the fine china cup in his whole fist. He raised it up high, spilling more of it.
"To hot dirty water in a cup!" he shouted loudly. Bunny sort of snapped out of her reverie and leaned away from Don King on the couch, looking slightly alarmed. He put the cup to his mouth and gulped it down, spilling some down his cheeks and onto his shirt. Then he held up the half-empty cup again and bellowed, "To etiquette!"
He hurled the cup backhand, hard, and without a glance at where it might land. It struck a column and shattered against a marble mantle. Jillian stood up sharply.
"What was that!" she demanded.
Don King shrugged. "Me not carin' about Royalty." He wiped his dripping face with his sleeve, exaggerating the slovenliness of the gesture. "Ugly, ain't it? Siddown.

[...]

Just as a mouse cannot choose to be a wolf, a wolf can't live like a mouse. You are so clearly a Royal that it pains me to see how you act. You cannot forever deny the way the Titans made you."

"How?" Jillian challenged. "How am I 'clearly a Royal?'"

"Hundreds of little ways. You act rudely on purpose, but rudeness shocks you."

 

Erfworld, Book 1, Epilogue pp. 20-21

(or, substitute that "Superman's always Superman" speech given by the villain from Kill Bill (what was his name again?))

____________________________________________

 

 

I've not bothered watching Rachel Maddow in well over a decade (damn, how much hair dye and collagen is the old girl absorbing on a weekly basis now?*) but that show is where I acquired my taste for longwinded, awkwardly obtuse segues. I also greatly appreciated her not adopting some down-home folksy demeanor to placate the average consumer. Though I can only assume it a universal feature of media marketing, any objective observer must be struck by the frequency with which American celebrities in particular must reinforce their "average Joe" credentials and affect monosyllabic vocabularies. MSNBC's insistence on urbane (there's that word again) middlebrow stars mixing cocktails instead of chugging beer was, in that context, a real breath of fresh air a couple decades ago.

 

I bring this up now because the conjunction of the World Cup and America's big 250 has flooded channels with one transparently dishonest auto da fe after another. Well-read adults with nary a trace of drool on their chins clapping like toddlers in adulation of braindead jocks' high-kicking exploits and waving flags as fake as the plastic one propped up on the moon. As if TV presenters' usual pretense of caring about baseball and American football wasn't bad enough. (Was I ever meant to believe John Oliver watches wrestling? Please.) But, to reverse that train of thought, if watching some Ivy League starched shirt pretend he's jizzing at the mere thought of the next NASCAR race is awkward enough, try selling copies of The Canterbury Tales at a hot dog eating contest.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, Netflix continues its gradual campaign to improve its brand image beyond zombie flicks and sex comedies. A couple of years ago this came in the form of Ripley, previously adapted in glitzier Hollywood fashion as The Talented Mr. Ripley from the story by the same name, which I've never read and will not be addressing. The newer version's an aggressively old school affair, black-and-white, light on effects and camera footwork and heavy on the location shots, characters and acting. It's... excellent, really, and I say that as a SciFi fan rarely bothering with crime dramas. Among its more memorable aspects: the subtlety of the protagonist's portrayal. Despite his repeated successes, Ripley is clever but by no means a superintelligent criminal mastermind, nor the most adept confidence artist. Many times his pathetic desperation, his mental instability, his obvious lack of any coherent grand design, shine through his otherwise sociopathically blank disinterest in anything but climbing over others.

 

The more comedic such moments concern his stumbling attempts to pass as classy. More than a matter of knowing the proper protocol, his intrinsic suspiciousness, over-eagerness, shiftiness, all betray the degenerate gutter rat he really is and always will be underneath all his pretense.** All but the most naive sense something off about the guy. You can hear a similar artificiality in real life in the stilted pretense of respectful speech adopted by cops, all the sirring and the vee-hickle and other polysyllabic posturing so alien to the average flatfoot's mouth that he'd sound more natural reading microwave instructions.

 

It brings my mind around to junior high. For a couple of years I had been gradually drifting farther from my classmates' reliance on slang*** and mindless beat-fillers like "like" but not until 8th grade did I make a conscious decision to avoid the word "cool" - and you'll notice I generally still do, aside from the occasional very pointed interjection. Reliance on terminology expressing no quality of its object, animal calls reflecting only in-group belonging, is not just pointless but open vandalism disrupting thought. Clarity matters. Expressiveness matters. To some.

 

This would have come shortly before Bulls On Parade started rocking the airwaves, and I have to wonder if those Ragers have ever or will ever admit that it was their very own audience that removed the books. "The public stopped reading of its own accord" a savvier observer predicted forty years earlier. As I reached high school, another of those thought-terminating cliches began circling pop culture, one that should still sound familiar: "dead white men." A mighty coalition of the Malcolm-X-worshipping inner city blacks championed by Rage Against the Machine, of feminists, of New Agers and comfortably suburban Asian kids giving teenage rebellion a tentative chance before settling into a lifetime of filial piety, joined by every white kid rebelling against nothing more substantive than homework, all decreed they had nothing to learn from "dead white men" because by the sin of whiteness or of maleness or their most inexcusable deadness, such speakers could not possibly have said anything of relevance to our modern breed. Who needs existentialism, the Bill of Rights and nuclear physics when you can run an entire society on Maya Angelou quotes? Oh, wait, she's dead now...

 

I'm not merely trying to point out the continuation of such rhetoric into the present-day circus of identity politics, but to convey the decline was a long time coming. Certainly since before my own generation. What should have been a break with the authoritarianism of the past, with militarism, with religious brainwashing, with wage slavery, became a myriad piddling dictatorships courting corporate sponsorship and enforcing their own rigid hierarchies of sex or skin color and straining to erase all culture beyond their insipid slogans. Modern revolutionaries have long revealed themselves as not Gavroches but Defarges, driven not by pluck and benevolence but a rudderless animalistic aggression redirected to targets of opportunity "like the flame of a blowlamp" to quote another dead white man. Their intersection with education and intelligentsia has left a wasteland in their wake, a locust swarm of grievance studies departments and diversity consultants and feminist math curricula gleefully completing the work of right wing defunding and religious pressure in destroying both universities and lower education.

 

Both supposedly opposing sides are eager enough to fabricate their own history. The old gilded revisionism painting tidy images of heroic settlers sweeping across an empty American continent scattering a few unworthy savages and kindly giving a home to African extracts was ridiculous in its own right, sure. But what's the point of replacing it with a farcical monster story in which the only crimes in history are those of Europeans and men are descended from apes but women are descended from heaven and drag queens first landed on the moon in Malinese spaceships? Or whatever the fuck they're cooking up next. There is no more honesty in limiting thought to declarations that George Washington Was A Slaveowner than in claiming the Civil War was about "states' rights" and leaving it at that.

 

There you have the horseshoe effect of the tyranny of the majority, whether expressed in pledges of allegiance to god and country or to believe women and yaass queen. Regardless of whether they facetiously claim to support tradition or minority rights, unions or free enterprise, the real enemy of the rabble is always logic, truth and above all intellect. Because, much like honest Tom, they can't fake nobler faculties. And we live by the mind. Mental incompetence poisons everything.

 

You can despise the foppish antiquated claims to noble pursuits, deny any inherent superiority of theater or opera over animation or video games, yet still must acknowledge the nobility of superior plays or games. Are they more original, complex, incisive, challenging, provocative? You can deny any inherent superiority of a particular race but have no place denying the nobler achievements of representatives of that race. Are they more honest or insightful? You can deny whatever authority professors might have once derived by social rank, but not the regal manifestation of expertise in a particular field. To do so is suicide. Such expertise upholds your entire existence, from the most mundane material goods around you to the leashing of hired thugs from killing you for sport.

Your betters will not share your worse interests. It's funny, football wasn't my favorite thing growing up, but I used to like it well enough. Maybe it's because I had a child's tastes, but maybe it's also because matches used to have their results printed in newspapers or be reported play-by-play over the radio. Less pressure to entertain the lizard brain. A match from the '80s or before was a more sedate, well-considered, polite affair. The more widely and constantly they got televised, the more yokels the sport needed to please all at once, the more it shifted toward faster, more violent gameplay approaching the lowest common denominator of a monkey brawl, ignoring more and more risky or injurious plays and outright cheating which would once have gotten players thrown off the field or off a team, in the interest not of the contest itself but of a limbic payoff for the customers. Your excitement bores me.

 

And what is academe, after all, but in the words of another one of those dead white men "a modern school where football is taught" - ?

 

A spectator sport. Buy a ticket and yell some slogans.

 

 

____________________________________________

 

 

 

* Just goes to show wolves can be catty too. Still, is it too much to ask that at least our lesbians age gracefully? Or do all roads lead to Sunset Boulevard?

** Okay, let's say the word we're all thinking at this point: Trump. But I did not want to further derail a long post.

*** Thankfully "dude" was more of a Bart Simpson catchphrase at the time. Thanks for nothing, it didn't stay that way.

Hoist by Disown

They set the show last night visible (mostly) from my window. So I sat with the light off in my pajamas in my recliner and for once attended. In spirit. Guess I can make an exception for their big quarter-millennium bash. Can't say it reawakened any patriotic sensibilities in me. Mostly it dragged my mind back to the start of the nineties, and my other abandoned patriotism. With the Wall down, goods flowed quickly into the collapsed market, both in the form of large predators like Coca Cola or IBM and a general sprinkle of moral perils previously reserved for those with Party connections, fireworks among them.

 

Well, it was more fun than digging light bulbs out of trashpiles and smashing them against the pavement. Just as noisy but sneakier. Felt destructive. Felt powerful. Boom. When you're nine, that counts for a lot. Though fancier rockets were out of our reach, proudly brandished by our dads at New Year, street market stalls quickly flooded with firecrackers cheap enough to buy with pocket change. Tiny little matchstick ones. Even at that age you couldn't miss how derisively low-quality they looked: the flimsy, featureless, misaligned faded yellow paper casings, the lopsided caps, the one in ten or so that didn't light or go off. You heard the occasional horror story about some boy losing a finger, or at least a fingernail (those things were hella weak) but as it never happened within my schoolyard group, we never paid it any attention. Did get a little thrill whenever one popped half a second too early. Which was often.

 

Toss' em outside classroom windows to break up lessons. Toss 'em at stray dogs. Toss 'em into an underpass for a bonus echo. Make sure adults are out of sight first. Maybe get rewarded with some "you crazy kids" screaming from the geriatric contingent. For a couple of years, before kicking cars to set off those newfangled alarms came into vogue, those little yellow terrors dominated the soundtrack of city life. Later I belatedly realized (when hearing one go off still, occasionally) that I'd stopped thinking about them. I wanted a hand-held video game. Monochrome liquid crystal displays the size of your thumb had just hit the market. Tetris blew down instead of up. That was new.

 

Fireworks are a ridiculous holdover, aren't they? A relic of the gas lamp age, when the industrial production of noise and colour lingered just out of reach of the common man. When you needed Gandalf to stop by if you wanted a show more complicated than Bilbo's speeches. Now, your lawnmower can drown out their noise. Any video billboard cycles through more flash and pomp in five seconds than an entire fireworks display in fifteen minutes, and many of them in fact recreate such ritual displays of martial prowess symbolically. Your car's controls are more precision-engineered than the explosion pattern in the sky. For monetized noise, even boomboxes were obsoleted by earbuds. Your phone can treat you to infinitely more colorful displays. The LCDs are no longer monochrome.

 

Ritual is a weird, often offensive, concept.

 

Still, I will admit, I did sit and watch the ones last night.

AoW4 Factions, 20

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

________________________________________________________________________________

When giants got introduced, I couldn't help playing up the comparison of my ruler to his subjects' size. And what could be funnier than a bunch of little frogs hippity-hopping around their dear leader? Making them evil and carelessly murderous would pair well with an imagined, slightly incompetent sibilance to their chanting, punctuated by random hops. I also wanted to try combining shadow's ice and necromancy with chaos' fire. It went... not great. Still, little frog mages hiding behind my legs blasting enemies with random temperature gradients were both amusing enough and aptly chaotic, and if it lacked synergy at least this odd couple pairing was flexible.

The Warm-Blooded Equations

"Now that we know for sure they're telling lies when they say

Noone gets hurt and therefore nobody dies

You know it's hard to believe anything that you hear

They say the world is round"

 

Garbage - Metal Heart

____________________________________________

"But when the Great Horde attacked our homeland in my grandfather's day, we moved into this region in force. We pushed the Vaegirs back, and made their fortresses our own.
Of course, you know how things go. My father's generation were hard warriors from the cold lands across the mountains, but this generation all has houses in the town and great estates and spend time as much trading as they do practicing archery. The next generation will grow soft on Velucan wine and will lose their lands to the next batch of illiterate hill-raiders to come over the mountains, just you watch. It's how things always were, and how things [will?] always be."

 

Baheshtur, one of your Tartar companions from Mount&Blade: Warband

____________________________________________

"Weary had a block of balsa wood which was supposed to be a foxhole pillow. He had a prophylactic kit containing two tough condoms 'For the Prevention of Disease Only!' He had a whistle he wasn't going to show anybody until he got promoted to corporal. He had a dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony. He had made Billy Pilgrim admire that picture several times.
[...]
The corporal found the dirty picture of the woman and the pony in Weary's hip pocket. 'What a lucky pony, eh?' he said. "Hmmmm? Hmmmm? Don't you wish you were that pony?' He handed the picture to the other old man. 'Spoils of war! It's all yours, you lucky lad.'
[...]
Billy was mildly curious as to what could possibly have been kept hidden in such a place. The clerk leered and showed him. It was a photograph of a woman and a Shetland pony. They were attempting to have sexual intercourse between two Doric columns, in front of velvet draperies which were fringed with deedlee-balls."

Pages 18, 24 and 90 of Slaughterhouse Five

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Once upon a time, there was a story. Actually, it was in the August 1954 issue of Astounding Magazine, to employ the more dignified precision befitting Scientifiction. But in getting an itch to re-read The Cold Equations now, I was unpleasantly surprised to find its Wikipedia article devoting all its commentary space to nothing but negative reviews and open attacks declaiming such things should not be said! Interestingly, for something published in '54 and considered a classic and added to the SFWA's best stories list in 1970, Wikipedia's critic reviews start in '77 and then jump straight to the '90s and 2010s. Back to why later, but mark that discrepancy. Moreover, the most valid point of critique makes no appearance: that it's poorly written.

 

Even by SF's lax wordsmithing standards as the no-frills genre of ideas, The Cold Equations is filled with dull, uninformative descriptions, unrealistic dialogue and repetitive restating of redundant rehashing. Oh, to have been an assistant editor at Astounding seventy years ago and taken a thesaurus and a pair of garden shears to that weedy typescript! But editing still saved it, its hard-hitting main point owing most to that magnificent bastard John W. Campbell's refusal to accept trite feel-good moralism. I'll leave you to read a synopsis, or better yet seek the story itself (come on, it's just 20 pages, you'll live!) and move spoilerly on to the unjustified criticism.

 

The standard bitching runs that nobody would engineer a spacecraft with zero margin of error in its fuel or other reserves so as to crash if it takes on an extra passenger. Very well, maybe it's not zero. Maybe you've got ten (or eight) kilograms of wiggle-room for your carry-on luggage. Make it twenty, keep the change. That still won't carry a teenage girl. Or, give it more leeway, maybe it can! Maybe the designers specifically feared some moron would march aboard and designed it with that many kilograms to spare... and then two extra morons march aboard. You'll still have to draw lots and space one. Or maybe it's just one really fat chick! Gonna start filleting her so the main bits can live? Or hey, maybe, maybe! -- the design couldn't even take one full-sized human and the pilot had to be a horse jockey who fasted for three days before embarking! Do you see how straining to move the goalposts absolutely misses the point? You will faceplant into an implacable physical law somewhere, and that's where the story is. One pilot and one stowaway make a good concise core cast.

 

So let's not pretend sincerity in those engineering quibbles. Fans would normally have no problem accepting that a frontier setting uses bare-bones equipment, Conestogas with no spare wheel, or that the shuttle is a purpose-built machine with a very limited scope, used in an emergency solely by trained personnel. Those D-Day landing craft don't look particularly sea-worthy to me either, but hey, they did their exact specific job well enough without worrying whether any divas wanted to take one cruising. Ay, there's the rub. The same audiences cheering openly or at least sighing in self-righteous approval for male sacrifices (remember the ending to Titanic? why didn't she make some room for him on that coldly equated raft?) revolt when the tables are flipped. Females' aristocratic privilege must be preserved. But an overentitled bimbo's hauteur is, to borrow an idiotic modern phrase for once in proper context "just a social construct" fed by her betters' willingness to bow to her demands until she believes trespassing signs don't apply to her, accustomed to smiling and giggling her way out of any trouble. Godwin and Campbell merely placed her in a situation where that illusion dissipated, and drove home the point with every repetition that had the stowaway been male, the pilot would have readily shot him without argument.

 

Here we come back to Wikipedia's critical summary, with opposition to The Cold Equations seeming to increase the more society has been feminized, the more that demented entitlement grew to dominate our social mores until even the fundamental truism that the laws of the universe do not bend to your whims (no, not even if you're cute and nice) became anathema to modern narcissism.

 

Well, if you don't like that, for the love of fainting couches stay away from one Cyril Kornbluth. And most of the public have. Though very much an honorable peer of golden age SF, his is not a name frequently mentioned among the field's greats. At least not these days. I had of course read The Marching Morons, but did not remember until picking up a short story collection now that he was also behind The Little Black Bag, loosely set in the same universe and a lauded classic in its own right. So I kept going. His writing is most obviously, most deeply marked by WWII, with questions of the application of power and violence, and the distaste and necessity for such, cropping up again and again, in more direct or more fanciful ways. If you'd like the more brusque culture shock version, sample Two Dooms, and keep that fainting couch handy.

 

Not that he was by any means a one-trick-pony. You could try The Silly Season for an immersive take on the mercenary mindset of journalism, even if much of its period jargon has fallen into disuse since the heyday of late-industrial "wire" networks. The Rocket of 1955 is a cynical couple-page flash-fiction smirk toward the chest-puffing can-do attitude of the early space race - one having regained its relevance with Musk/Bezos and the like's corporate parasitism of the space program. Shark Ship is an especially memorable, if slightly disjointed, musing on censorship, perversion and the potential of hijacking both instinct and civilizational values.

 

But there's a certain brand of Kornbluth yarn spun along The Marching Morons' spindle, which belies fantasies of human nobility, human progress and the virtue of naive benevolence, the type of SF apt to be written by bitter war veterans and perhaps most famously brought to the public's attention by Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Try The Luckiest Man in Denv if you want military-industrial complex power fantasy human interest. Try The Adventurer if you want a classic plucky downtrodden rebel pulling himself up by his bootstraps.

 

But especially try The Only Thing We Learn, the tale of a mighty space empire celebrating its rich and noble cultural heritage. After the first few pages I thought I'd gotten the gist of the story, some ultraconservative, might makes right, macho glorification of ruthless warmongering, the only civilian, the only intellectual in the flashback being after all a fat, drunken boor. Lucky I didn't toss it aside. Turns out there's plenty reason to let yourself go and give up once you see clearly the arc of history leading your society to its demise. I found myself re-reading the set-up and conclusion. The "winners" are explicitly no better, no mightier or more deserving than their victims; conversely the rich and noble heritage is a gilded revisionist slant on the undeserving. *

The linking tragic flaw here is intellectual dishonesty, misapplying artificial, ossified ethics intended not to address problems but to maximize the speaker's grandstanding, to polish useless sidearms. Again, the civilized do not lose for weakness or fundamental incompetence, but for refusal to face reality. In The Cold Equations, that reality is hard vacuum and gravity. In Kornbluth's various stories it is more often the human animal. He acknowledges, occasionally (which is more often than most) that human behavior operates by animal rules, that it repeats itself unto stagnation and self-destruction, that we are not beautiful and unique snowflakes, that the vast bulk of the species is a subhuman herd of marching morons. That mentalities are physical properties of the physical world, not negotiable social niceties. And any workable solutions to whatever intrigue you find yourself plotting or plotted into will have to be based in observation of such reality, not well-wishes and prosocial platitudes. Crooks, liars, tyrants, slaves, parasites and marauders, all are no mere aberrations which can be stamped out by heroic opposition. They are logical outgrowths of animal nature and opportunity, and will continue arising until either the latter, or better yet the former, are eliminated as roots of the problem.

 

Boy, that's a tough sell these days!

The standard-bearers of modern fantasy sold to the past generations in their youths, the Nimonas and Wesleys and Harrys and the like, proclaim a far more upbeat message: act as stupid as you like because you're special and the universe will reshape itself to suit your tantrums, and social influence is everything. That insanity is itself a matter of physical science, of ape hormones and kin recognition instincts and codependence. You could've addressed it. The naked ape simply decided to look at its own navel instead of looking at itself in the mirror. When reality does hit, you may find yourself forced to reach all the way back to the greatest generation for a dose of smelling salts.

 

"I wish I wasn't flesh and blood

I would not be scared

Of bullets built with me in mind

Then I could be saved"

 

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* For a bonus, notice how closely the old rebels match anglophone ancestors. For another bonus, I'd bet someone at Games Workshop decades ago was a Kornbluth fan. The self-assured militaristic pomp of The Only Thing We Learn's armada matches too closely the 40K Imperium of Man, and the rebels pilot a fair suggestion of Orkish kludges.

There Wolf's Jalopy

Last week it occurred to me to look and see if Google Maps photographed my car parked in street view. Not that I haven't used street view extensively ever since they implemented it, and I've looked at my parents' house on it, travel destinations, my old grade schools (holy shit, so many massive metal bars on their windows now!) and other stuff. But I don't do vanity searches, and it sort of never occurred to me to indulge in this variant until now, either. But maybe I'm weird.

 

I almost "get" the concept of vanity searches now, seeing myself represented in this objective, disinterested compendium. Sure enough, there my ride sat, in my usual parking spot, jammed up against the curb as I usually park it subconsciously trying to avoid others in this as in all respects. There's a sort of validation in seeing my influence on physical reality thus captured. There, see? I really do exist!

A republic, if you can keep educating it

"When I was a kid, one time I had an old-maid teacher that used to tell me, "Buzz, you're the thickest-headed dunce in school."  But I noticed that she told me this a whole lot oftener than she used to tell the other kids how smart they were, and I came to be the most talked-about scholar in the whole township.  The United States Senate isn't so different, and I want to thank a lot of stuffed shirts for their remarks about Yours Truly."

 

- the villain from Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here

____________________________________________________

"And your body is a temple
And the temple is a prison
And the prison's overcrowded
And the inmates know it's flooding
And the body politic is getting sicker by the minute
And the media's not fake
It's just very

...

   ... 

inconvenient"

 

Amanda Palmer - Drowning in the Sound

____________________________________________________

"they could have disposed of you as quietly as flushing a dead mouse down a toilet. But they didn’t. Why not? Because they knew their boss didn’t really like for them to play that rough and if he became convinced that they had (whether in court or out), it would cost their jobs if not their necks.”
Jubal paused for a swig. “But consider. Those S.S. thugs are just a tool; they aren’t yet a Praetorian Guard that picks the new Caesar. Such being, whom do you really want for Caesar? Courthouse Joe whose basic indoctrination goes back to the days when this country was a nation and not just a satrapy in a polyglot empire of many traditions … Douglas, who really can’t stomach assassination? Or do you want to toss him out of office [...] and thereby put in a Secretary General from a land where life has always been cheap and political assassination a venerable tradition? If you do this, Ben - tell me what happens to the next snoopy newsman who is careless enough to walk down a dark alley?”

 

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

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Funny how "Trump Derangement Syndrome" has fallen into disuse compared to his first term, as our news cycle and talk shows both are saturated more than ever with his sickening presence. Which, for a consummate narcissist, is very much a case of throwing Br'er Rabbit into the briar patch. You might say our reporters, pundits and comedians are not merely trying to spite him but bringing his crimes to public consciousness, as is their role in society. But even his actual crimes are rarely emphasized for their worst harm caused. Does he hate illegally imported Mexicans? Bad, but you'd still have a government if that were the only issue. Realistically, you could fire every wetback over Rio Grande again out of a circus cannon and, some messy hedges and a severe strawberry shortage aside, both countries would survive just fine. But the methods employed by the Republican Party, the random hooded street thugs driving around in unmarked vans disappearing random pedestrians off American streets? The paramilitary abduction of minors from their beds in the dead of night and zip-cuffing them as leverage against their parents? When the government throws due process and equal protections out the window, then you're into banana republic dictatorship tactics. But then, the last couple of Democratic administrations were already gleefully ignoring any process in declaring the entire male half of the population criminals by birth and promoting the racist rhetoric of identity politics, so let's not pretend you weren't always headed in this direction.

 

But the media have certainly sped up the process, haven't they? Diverting attention. Throwing a fit and obsessing for days or weeks over every single one of the Trumps' distractions like renaming everything after themselves, staging bum fights on the White House lawn or hammering down the walls of what is, in an objective summation, a building, a propagandistic symbol, a Versailles, Forbidden Palace or Sublime Porte to glitz yokels, and not in itself the functional institution it should represent. But the tax he wastes on every single triumphal arch in his own nonexistent honor is peanuts compared to the billions destroyed every day by the corruption running rampant with the destruction of protections against corporate fraud, of public services, plus multiple industries' subversion by and open bribery of government officials, especially the Trump crime family itself, plus the warring for military contractor profits, and for a cherry on top the proposed tax-funded bankrolling of insurrectionists against his own government. You think he's given up on that?

 

Tell me, instead of frothing at the mouth about Epstein, of every competent professional thrown out of a government position to be replaced with some subliterate hick whose only virtue is taking marching orders from the "republican" cartel. Or every department budgeted into nonexistence, and the myriad ways I'll be getting poisoned, run over and thrown out of my home as a result of the government no longer governing. That's the stuff that'll kill you. Literally. Like, a bullet through your head from a knuckledragging thug handed license to kill in the name of establishing a theocratic dictatorship. And that's if you're lucky enough to find them in too much a hurry to have their fun with you. Pointing out where the murderous thugs are lurking? That would be relevant information.

 

But it'd be boring. Everyone knows nothing gets social media channel hits (or sells rap albums) like starting a feud, beef, inconsequential but highly visible slapfight. Preferably one that goes on forever, so both sides can keep posturing as heroes of their respective cause, rioting regardless of whether the home team wins or loses.

 

There was a sudden moment of clarity back around 2017-18 when newscasters discovered, en masse, that the best way to mock Trump is to let him speak for himself and merely repeat his mindless gibbering with the same dignified, deadpan seriousness they'd adopt in reporting a bus crash. "The President issued an official statement declaring the terrorists having recently murdered scores of innocents are... bad dudes, very bad dudes." I had assumed, somewhat naively, that this approach would generalize to our entire political discourse and at last drive into full consciousness the monstrous gulf between what a statesman should be and this overgrown babbling infant pointing a gun at our heads.

 

But it was already too late. The tribal virtue-signaling outrage machine was already in full swing and every criticism could only be voiced if it doubled as championing the privileges of those self-appointed superior breeds among us, the rich in melanin or poor in testosterone. Thus the media, from YouTubers with thirty followers to the biggest names in television, settled into a cozy, mutualistic relationship based on the old comedians' running gag that even if the wrong candidate wins, their profession also wins by being fed more material. Once the public lost all standards, it's all advertising. Once the public stopped caring that they're putting subhuman cretins in charge, insults are no longer inconvenient to those selfsame empowered cretins. So long as they're facile, so long as they merely reinforce the major players' ability to bleed their fanatical followers.

 

So feed the newsies easy headlines to blurb. Knock down a monument, insult a war veteran, grope a debutante, and they'll ignore you looting the public coffers. After all, since the country started electing movie stars, the presidency has been more and more of an entertainment product, a freak show distracting from the depredations of corporate investors. And media's sole remaining purpose is to sell tickets to the show.

 

I did not declare the '24 election the end of the world merely for one incompetent and crooked house-flipper's rise to power, but because it demonstrated his brand of capitalism is how the voters choose to do business. Lie for the hell of it, cheat at every opportunity, mug grannies, take bribes, hire thugs to murder anyone who stands in your way, then rush to church to have all your crimes washed clean for declaring belief in a fairytale. What does one charlatan matter after he's installed a million just like him in every position of power? Except, perhaps, more competent in their villainy.

AoW4 Factions, 19

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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I wanted to make some bugs. I made some bugs. Other than the hive mentality I was weirdly uninspired by them. Imperialists, adept settlers, etc. made for explosive early expansion. Powerful, but not my style. Never played them again.