I can’t tell you how nice it feels to not write about politics anymore. I could, sure, with all the chaos going on right now, but you know what? Nope. Today is cartoon time. For starters, have some theme music from one of them.
Just something about that tune gets stuck in one’s head.
Steven Universe:
Another one of those cartoons with a massive fan-base of all ages, SU has had a mixed reception from the internet crowd based largely on its content, which I will get to in a moment. I’ll be the first to say, the first episode or two did not draw me in. Then the characters started getting development, and I was intrigued enough to keep watching. And anyone who makes it through the episode “Jailbreak” and doesn’t like it (and the best song) has very odd tastes, in my opinion.
Featuring Steven, a permanent optimist of a kid who mostly just tries to befriend everyone including most of the antagonists, and the various characters that revolve around events in his life, you wouldn’t expect the rest of the show to involve crystal-themed alien women, let alone the rest of what comes after.
The writing is quick and well-written, the characters are interesting (mostly – the townspeople-focused episodes are often skippable), there are some good songs tucked away in various episodes. Yes, it fits my theme of shows mentioned so far. And a lot of the same reasons do apply, but not all in the same way.
If I praised shows like MLP for not treating kids like morons, I praise SU for not treating them like emotionally-shallow creatures. Steven Universe has covered a lot of ground from goofy to scary to genuinely unsettling emotional disturbances. Just some samples, while trying to avoid the biggest spoilers:
Steven’s mother Rose died to give birth to him. Her trio of friends (Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl) miss her and more or less adopted him alongside his now-single father. A few threads that come from this story point:
Steven feels like he has to fill the very large shoes of his mother, who was the head of a rebellion against the Gem home-world.
His father, Greg, is one of the most positive single-dad (or even just male in general) role models I’ve seen in a show, and his relationship with Steven feels real and healthy. At first glance he looks like a standard cartoon ‘loser’ type, running a beat-up car wash, balding, and living in a van, but he gets development too, and I like him.
Steven’s three new ‘moms’ aren’t sure how to handle the loss of their leadership OR the birth of her son, and at least one of them is bitterly angry at Greg for years afterward for this happening. They also occasionally fight among each other, but they never once let it come between them and Steven. Again, priorities are shown here, and I like it. Especially little moments like, when going off to fight monsters, Garnet shouts “Steven, wait!” and when she has his attention, she just smiles and says “I love you.” before the trio teleport away.
Later in the show, currently even, the story is revealing that Steven’s mother may have had to do some bad things during the war (go figure), which clashes with his own worldview and everything he thinks he knows about Rose so far.
Steven and his girlfriend Connie have been training with Pearl to learn how to fight and defend themselves – Connie with her sword, Steven with his magic shield. Okay, standard for a kid’s show I suppose. Until they’re forced to actually deal with some of the realities of violence, including one being afraid of her own strength when she reflexively hurts someone at school, and the other having outright PTSD at having to defend himself from someone attacking him in a rage. The two teens start to fall apart, and need some gentle therapy from Garnet (Square mom) to get them to open up and analyze things. You know, for kids!
Two secondary characters are placed in a blatant reference to toxic and abusive relationships, even including lines like “I felt trapped… but part of me misses her, after being with her for so long.” or, most tellingly, “It’ll be better this time! I’ve changed. You’ve changed me.” And there is some fallout from this later, both emotionally and physically, too. It’s a sensitive subject, but I think it’s good for a show all about love and friends and so on to still recognize that unhealthy relationships are a thing, and recognize some signs of them. Another episode touches lightly on the idea of consent and honesty of motives in a relationship, though it’s not quite as on-the-nose as the abuse one.
Oh right, also the nightmare fuel, from chimeric monsters made of bodies and souls fused together against their will to this moment in a dream Steven has, where he opens a door to find his friend, eye-less and gaping, who then weeps ocean-water (which refers to where she’s trapped at that point in the show). Again – for kids!
Steven Universe has been mockingly referred to as “Crying: The Show” – and it’s not entirely wrong. But given some of the things on the list up there, I think it’s good that the show allows for characters to cry just as much as they laugh or tell each other good and bad things about themselves. Kids -should- learn not to bottle things up. I speak from experience when I say it isn’t good to do so.
“Here Comes a Thought” – I found this song especially interesting because it’s basically about ‘Mindfulness Therapy’, something I’ve been reading about lately.
Steven Universe is a show with a lot of themes all tied together, but if I had to pick one to describe it, it’s a show about second chances. Losing someone hurts, but it’s not the end of good things in your life. Enemies don’t have to stay enemies. When bad things happen (see list above), things will get better and healing will come. People whose worldviews clash with yours are still real people, and shouldn’t be dismissed as evil or stupid (there was an episode featuring a stand-in redneck super-conservative uncle, and I was actually impressed that the show -didn’t- demonize him at all. Steven and the others went above and beyond to show him love and a desire to have him around. For a show coming from a fairly liberal background, I want to see more of this kind of thing).
The show also includes people of a huge number of body shapes, sizes, races, family structures, and backgrounds, so almost everyone relate to it.
And hey, the Gems are almost certainly based loosely on an old race from a game I loved as a child, the Jumi. Anyone who has seen my various emails or game names or indeed my profile name right here over the years will likely recognize that term. Just a personal bonus for me. But I’ll leave off here, because I want to save a little space for the second show I’m discussing today!
Wander Over Yonder:
For SU, I left out pages of rambling and descriptions and spoiler-filled complexities. For Wander Over Yonder, things will be a lot simpler! The art is hit-or-miss for people, being an homage to very early art styles from before I was even born, but it grows on you. So do the characters – and even the show’s creator acknowledges that the villain really has the show’s main character arc, not protagonist Wander. Which is great because I love sympathetic, comical villains.
This is Wander.
Wander wanders the galaxy with his best friend. He’s perpetually happy and spends a large portion of the show trying to befriend professional villain and world-conqueror, Lord Hater.
Hater is not happy about this. Most of the show will make you feel like a nostalgia dive back into the days of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. No super deep plot here. The deepest moral of any episode is to ignore “trolls”, which admittedly is a valuable lesson for today’s kids. The second season at least tries for an overarching story-line, but it’s not much deeper. Just with a more competent villain, who Hater immediately develops a crush on (Spoiler: It ends badly, but you do get to see Hater call someone other than himself ‘the Greatest in the Galaxy’, which is kind of an endearing moment for him by that point). But they get a couple great songs in a whole musical episode!
So why am I putting this simple funny little cartoon up with others of more depth and story? Because it makes me happy. No, really, that’s it! Well, kinda. Wander is such an optimist it’s hard not to smile. The writing and timing are good enough to make me laugh a lot. The songs are catchy. Even the one episode where Wander breaks and gives in to being sad after so much tragedy (remember, that competent villain shows up), he makes the point that feeling sadness isn’t the same as feeling despair, and then he gets back up and off they go toward the finale. If I had to sum -this- show up with one theme, it would be ‘Hope’. Wander is hope incarnate, traveling around to make things better for everyone. Hater… not as much, but while he makes a terrible villain, in the end he makes a decent hero. For about five minutes before circling back around to where things began. And I like that, too.
2016 has been a heck of a year for everyone I know. It left in its wake weary emotions, broken people, international conflict and the promise of more to come. In light of all that, I place a very high value on things that can make me smile for a little bit. My cats. My cartoons. My friends and family. Here’s to hoping 2017 is a good year for everyone.
Next time, I hope to write about “Optimism.” Had to get this one done first, though, for obvious thematic reasons. See you all then.
Okay, I put off coming back to this for too long, and then the election happened. So I’ll have to do the cartoons thing next time. And soon, not in a few more months. Maybe this week as well. But there is a ticking time limit of relevance to the immediate, personal emotions everyone is currently feeling and to which I want to speak.
Also, this is the last political post I ever plan to write here. I don’t think I’ll change my thoughts on the final section, and ultimately it’s the only one that matters in the long run.
First, some music to listen to as you skim this: This music makes me happy and calm, and conveys a good bit of what I want to say today.
Right. So. I’m going to put this into a few main points aimed at various people and ideas I’ve seen expressed by them in the last 24 hours.
From the left (and some of the right): “I just don’t understand how this could happen!”
Really? Because I’ve read several very convincing articles, opinion pieces, studies and persuasive arguments for how this could and indeed did happen. Let me offer a few for further interest, because they really were absolutely fascinating to me.
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism – Look, I lean left on most issues, that’s likely clear from how I favored Bernie. But this is a very real, very obvious problem to me. It’s also painfully long, though, so you’ll need some time set aside to get through it. Worth the read, though.
One excerpt in particular points out that in 2008, Obama made a notable observation:
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania,” Obama said, “and, like, a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter…”
Bernie Sanders commented on Trump’s win yesterday, echoing the sentiment above: “Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids – all while the very rich become much richer.”
These are not right-wing pundits, folks. That right there is President Obama and still-wish-he-was-president Sanders, pinpointing one major reason Trump just won. You know how Pennsylvania was key in his electoral victory? Well… re-read Obama’s line up there. Yeah. Turns out that was more relevant than even he knew. When you talk about how Trump’s followers are ‘poor uneducated hicks’, well, that’s because their jobs left, the government ignored them over both Republican and Democrat terms for decades, and they can’t afford things like education without jobs. How dare they be that way?!
Other pieces with interesting and relevant viewpoints:
Colbert here doesn’t hide that he is mostly liberal, politically. He has good fun and pokes fun at everyone, and generally just tries to make people laugh. This piece isn’t funny, though. It’s thoughtful and painfully accurate. We drank the poison, as a nation. We drank too much. (Just watch the first 5:20 or so, after that the scripted jokes return and eh, no one’s much in the mood for it).
The point is… we lock ourselves in echo chambers on both sides. Anyone who agrees with us, great. Anyone who doesn’t is ignorant/bigoted/selfish/foolish, insert your dismissive adjective of choice here. But you know where that leads? It leads to two parties that can put literally any candidate up for the vote, and still convince large portions of the country that the other side is worse. Policies stop mattering. Issues fade into the background. Stop the echo chamber effect. Stop the poison. Recognize that people you don’t agree with are still mostly just normal people, not ignorant animals nor hateful demons. If we can’t do that, as a nation, do you honestly think things will be better in 2020? Or 2024? Or ever?
https://www.theodysseyonline.com/am-not-my-stereotype-an-open-letter-to-democrats – Straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. If Colbert incisively pinpointed the issue of partisan poison, this guy is exhibit A from an emotional perspective. It’s also the flip-side perspective of the first piece up there at the top, as well as a good look at how people tend to be more complicated than the easy party labels allow.
These are just the first three things I pulled off my list of saved pages, because I found them all in the last two days. But none of this is new – I’ve been reading similar articles for months, trying to understand as events unfolded – and there are many more a quick Google search away if you’re really wondering how this became reality. It didn’t happen out of nowhere, folks. There are reasons, and they are far, far more complicated than just “racism” or “ignorance” or “corruption”.
From the left: “I hate you all, you’re all racists and misogynists, etc” First – I get it. This is something a lot of people have good reason to be upset over, to fear and dread and rage and cry. The future is uncertain, and minorities have a lot more at risk than the average citizen in America. So… do it. Weep and rage and be furious that the country has gotten to this point. Get it all out while it’s hot and fresh and awful. But don’t let it cripple you. And don’t let it make you bitter and hateful. Refuse to hate. Refuse to let it touch you, fester inside you, and then spread to others from you. It hurts. It sucks. But take a deep breath and carry on to be the damn change you wish to see in the world.
Many bad people voted for Trump, it’s true – like the KKK. Trump himself has demonstrated that he is a bad person by word and deed (though he’s been trying hard to change that image in the last couple days – his acceptance speech was the most sane and reasonable tone he’s had since the campaign began). But not everyone who voted for Trump is a bad person, nor do they all hate gays or blacks or any other minority. To assume so is both obscenely unhelpful to the nation and its people at this point in time, and patently untrue. They had different priorities, yes, and those have likely contributed to negative future effects on groups like those mentioned above, but if you cannot recognize that different, even self-focused, priorities do not an evil person make, you probably are not ready to cope with the real world and all its shades of gray in any fashion.
Skim some of the links in the first part of this post to see more of how this happened and just how little of it had to do with “Rawr, must oppress the minorities” Captain Planet villainy or ignorant bigotry. Those are severeoversimplifications that make it easier to dismiss some unpleasant and complicated realities. Don’t take that easy way out. That’s another part of what got us here in the first place, oversimplifying to dismiss things we don’t like.
From the left: “#NotMyPresident” Yes, he is. You don’t have to like it. I don’t. Literally, most of America doesn’t. This is factually, objectively true (and would have been for Hillary as well, at least going by favorability polls). But you do have to accept it. That’s how the whole thing works, and it becomes magnitudes more dangerous for everyone if either side fails to respect these lines. Is the electoral college idiotic? YES. Yes it is. But it is still legal and legitimate until dismantled from within the system (a good place to start directing some productive anger, by the by), so it does not matter what the popular vote says. We’ve been through this before fairly recently, friends. This is not news.
Saying this is no different from the widely-condemned comments by Trump about “maybe” not accepting the results if he lost. You can’t have it both ways – for democracy to work, we all have to accept even results we don’t like. Any attempts to the contrary are counterproductive at the least, and bordering on treason if someone should take it any farther than speaking and protesting per the first amendment.
…and yet now there are protests in many major cities and many more college campuses. Some are already doing things like blocking interstate roads, ignoring police directions to stop doing so, and causing moderate amounts of income-and-property damage which is nigh unavoidable whenever large, angry groups gather. Signs like ‘Time to Revolt’ are carried at some of these events, which is where the line from 1st Amendment to danger starts to be uncomfortably crossed. …Apologies for the swearing meme, mom. If ever it was warranted, this election year is it.
Update (11/10/16) – There are incoming reports of windows being broken, etc. Come on, people, this is what I was just talking about not doing! Be better than this! Don’t become exactly what you feared.
As I said above, do it. Be upset if you’re upset. Be angry, be sad, feel what you feel. But accept that we all have to work within the system or much worse things become possible. It’s a broken system, sure, but if you completely abandon the system the moment it doesn’t go your way, why shouldn’t someone else do the same and declare themselves emperor instead of president? Yeah, that’s not a road any of us want to go down. Play by the rules until the rules change, or lose the very important protections some of those rules provide. Protest to voice your sentiment, but keep it peaceful – and remember that peace includes avoiding things like blocking traffic and vital infrastructure. People have died when such things blocked ambulances and the like. Be passionate, but also be smart about it.
Fair note – it is only a very small subset of left-leaning voters that are participating in this – numbering in the thousands, but that is still a tiny subset. Don’t demonize a whole group for what a tiny part of it does, especially in a nation that prides itself on independence and individuality (this goes for any other group, as well. Hint hint). Note also that Obama and Hillary are both urging acceptance of the results, themselves. They understand the rules.
From the right: Celebration of Trump winning I haven’t actually heard this one much. Even most conservatives in my circle of interactions don’t like Trump. Few that I know even voted for him, but even those who did aren’t really celebrating the best of what they see as two bad options – mostly voting for supreme court positions and the like, and very unhappy that Trump is their only option that isn’t the opposite side entirely. Once again, this two-party system sure is grand, huh?
But for anyone celebrating his out-of-the-blue win against 98% odds given by most of the polls… remember that he lost the popular vote. Remember that more than half the country, including large portions of his own party, very strongly object to many of the things Trump has said and done (being fair, this was also true of Hillary. Neither had an actual majority of the American people behind them). He has a lot of work ahead of him mending those fences, building new bridges, and convincing the world that he’s not the man he ran his campaign as, if he doesn’t want to be crippled for the whole term – even with Republican control of House and Senate. Remember that the Republican party leadership alsodidn’t want him. Don’t assume they’ll play along nice and neatly now. He stepped on a lotof fingers this year.
The intra- and inter-party divisiveness didn’t just go away with the election’s end. But frankly, we need to bridge that gap now more than ever. Sitting in our respective corners complaining about the other side being idiots is a large part of what got us into this mess. Repeat after me: People with whom I disagree are not always my enemy. They are not inherently stupid or ignorant. They have different beliefs, perhaps different priorities or concerns or fears, but they are still people. The moment you lose sight of that, you’ve already lost any hope of changing hearts or minds. And that’s on you.
For the many Facebook posts by friends and family I see going by saying things like “There’s no hope.” And expressing moments of terror, anxiety, uncontrolled crying, and the like – what calm, logical reassurance I can gather for myself and offer: I must mention – as I write this, it has come to light that Trump’s appointment to the head of the EPA is a climate change denier, or more accurately not a “denier” but someone who believes the threat is vastly overblown and of little concern. This is not a promising start, for me or many others. I genuinely hope he carefully considers the rest of his cabinet selections and later Supreme Court appointments.
Looking to the slivers of hope that are left to us – Trump may not be as blatantly out-there as his run seemed to suggest. Certainly, his words since the win have been given as if by a whole different man. One almost rational and unifying in his words and tone, if still often framed in an uncomfortable way – such as promising to protect the LGBTQ community… from (implicitly Muslim) “hateful foreign ideologies” (actually a legitimate concern, but still an uncomfortable way to describe Islam given his past statements about Muslims in general)… and then pausing… and thanking the crowd, as a Republican, for cheering for the idea of protecting that community. It was… unexpected, to say the least. I have a cautious hope that this is the man who will step into that revered office and pick up the weight of a mountain of duty, rather than the absurd, hateful clown that pandered to the worst darknesses inside humanity for months prior. I hope this. I don’t yet believe it, but I hope, and right now we need hope.
Also consider some of the things pre-run Trump said: (imgur post)
In a 1999 (yes, that long ago) self-written opinion piece: “Let’s cut to the chase. Yes, I am considering a run for president. … Unlike candidates from the two major parties, my candidacy would not represent an exercise in career advancement. I am not a political pro trying to top off his resume. I am considering a run only because I am convinced the major parties have lost their way. The Republicans are captives of their right wing. The Democrats are captives of their left wing. I don’t hear anyone speaking for the working men and women in the center.”
In a Larry King interview 8 days later, when asked why he would be leaving the Republican Party if he ran: “I think that nobody is really hitting it right. The Democrats are too far left…. The Republicans are too far right. And I don’t think anybody’s hitting the chord, not the chord that I want to hear, and not the chord that other people want to hear, and I’ve seen it.”
And finally, this doozy of a quote was also from his opinion piece: “The second reason I’m considering a run is Patrick Buchanan. He has the virtue of plain speaking, but he often says stupid things–the latest example being his comments questioning whether the U.S. was right to stop Hitler. His arguments are repugnant. Yet they were initially met by deafening silence from the professional politicians. It took three days for Elizabeth Dole and John McCain to react. This underscores the central problem with contemporary politicians: They are so concerned with winning votes that they cannot even find it in themselves to immediately denounce a man who winks at barbarism.”
If that last quote wasn’t a direct theme of his presidential campaign 16 years later, I don’t know what is. Like, just… wow, the thematic tie-in is so blatant, I suspect he re-read his own article and decided to prove it to the world this year. There may be some truth to the idea that he is still a New York Democrat at heart, and that the entire insane campaign was a masterful show of pandering and divide-and-conquer tactics. The man who gave the acceptance speech yesterday certainly sounded a lot more like the Trump of 16 years ago than 6 months ago.
In short, I don’t like Trump personally, neither what he’s said nor what he’s done. Even if it has been all an act (to be determined), it was a deplorable one that caused real pain and fear, incited real hatred in some people following it. But I do have some small hope that the weight of his new role may change him to be a better man, responsible to all of his nation’s people, not just half. And maybe, somewhere deep down, he still remembers and believes those things too. Let us hope.
A final plea to everyone that reads this, here or shared elsewhere: If you read nothing else on this page, read this, please. Read it twice. Take it to heart, because it’s way more important than anything else I have written or will write in the future. Read it in the pleading, heartfelt tone in which I mean it.
I don’t care who you voted for, or why you disliked the other option. Be good to each other. What Makes America Great isn’t… and has NEVER been… the government. It’s the people. Whatever laws may pass, whatever changes may come, please, be kind to each other. Find empathy for people different from you – physically and emotionally and philosophically. Find it in yourself to treat them like humans instead of ‘the enemy’. Left or Right, atheist or deist, black or white or anything else… we’ve got to pull together to get our country out of the rut we’ve fallen into. Half of the country won’t manage it. Can’t manage it. If a drowning person can only use one arm and one leg to stay afloat, they’re not going to last much longer. Especially if that arm and leg spend most of their energy keeping the other ones pinned down and ineffectual. We need to rebuild, emotionally before physically. And we need to do it together, America.
Don’t hate. Don’t. Don’t do it, not even once, not even a little. I’m talking to both sides on this. Don’t justify it, don’t let it in, don’t let it harden your heart, don’t let it spread. Don’t rush to unfriend everyone that voted differently to preserve your echo chamber. Do what you can to quench fear and anger and foster hope in their place. Love thy neighbor. Regardless of who they are or what they think politically. Love has to win, or there are no winners at all for us. Take care of those who need it, protect those at risk, comfort those who fear and do not let others suffer if you have it in your power to prevent it. Turn your anger (on the left) into action to make things better, to fix a broken system. Turn your newfound power (on the right) into a tool that benefits the nation as a whole, and heal the deep, bleeding wounds of which we’re almost dying right now. Trump won’t make America great again. Hillary wouldn’t have either. It was never in their power to begin with. It’s in ours.
We have one chance to turn a dark time into light, America. Let’s do it together.
—————–
I cried just a little as I finished writing this. Those that know me know that I don’t do that… pretty much ever. I hope that the ten of you that read this at least understand that this last bit came from the heart in a way little else can. Next time: Childrens’ cartoons. Thank god.
Right, so… this was going to be a post about happy things, and I still have two of those planned for the near future, but recent events in the US political realm have irritated me enough to vent on here a bit. And then follow it up with what I’ve found out about a possible productive alternative to the ‘lesser of two evils’ bit that has me feeling sick at heart. You’ve been warned, so bail out now if you’re one of my friends that’s keeping their heads down and avoiding this kind of thing. Enjoy this image of a kitten on your way out.
THE RANT:
Right, so. First the venting part. Pardon any language to follow (sorry mom). This has been building for a while and I need to get rid of it all so I can let it go and feel at peace again for a while. If I write anything else on politics this year, it won’t be until November. I’m so very tired of it, as I think most of us are.
The campaigns on both sides have been nothing short of a shit-show circus of late. Both sides have had constant ammunition to fling at the other. Both had significant portions of their voter-base alienated to the point of walk-outs at their own conventions. Both are some of the least popular candidates we have ever had. No matter who wins this election, the statistical majority of the country will be unhappy with the result. How sad is that?
Trump continues to spurt ridiculous ideas only to walk them back quietly a day or two later in interviews. He continues to emphasize the absurdly-expensive and impractical wall idea (despite that most illegal immigrants DO NOT get in that way, but by overstaying legitimate visas). He continues to appeal to anger and fear in a way I find both genuinely sad and terrifying. Not everything he says is wrong, but he is deliberately appealing to the darker parts of humanity and I know we can do better as a nation and as a species. I don’t even think he believes in half the things he says, but he’s pandering and playing the game, and he’s outplaying everyone else on the field – the other Republican candidates and Hillary both. He’s even making plays for the Bernie voters now, though I can’t imagine more than a few of them being able to stomach the values dissonance voting for Trump would entail.
Nonetheless, he’s pulling in more party unity than Hillary has, for reasons I’ll look at momentarily, when I’m done with this cathartic little rant.
See, Trump is not alone in absurdity and idiocy. All those conspiracy theories about how the Bernie supporters were being suppressed, and his campaign undermined? Welllllll… recently Wikileaks released ~20k emails from top DNC officials, some of which confirmed bias and even media collusion to undermine Bernie and redirect the narrative in favor of Hillary. On top of the constant appearance of sketchiness from the Nevada caucus to New York and others shutting down voting locations (mentioned in at least one of the aforementioned emails, in fact), this has further damaged public faith in the system in general and the DNC in particular. “But Bernie wasn’t even really a Democrat, of course they didn’t support him!” you might think. Or, “Parties are private organizations, so they can do as they like and don’t have to be completely democratic!” To which I would respond by directing you to Article 5, Section 4 of the DNC’s own charter:
“In the conduct and management of the affairs and procedures of the Democratic National Committee, particularly as they apply to the preparation and conduct of the Presidential nomination process, the Chairperson shall exercise impartiality and evenhandedness as between the Presidential candidates and campaigns. The Chairperson shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process.”
And if an organization cannot follow its own guiding charter, why should I trust them at all? What do they stand for, if not the rules set out to guide the organization in the first place? The current media/Democrat narrative is attempting a diversion, saying that Russia is trying to influence our election, but… I don’t really care if the leak came from Santa Clause, the actual content is apparently true and the DNC isn’t even denying it. Whose fault is it really, the whistle-blower or the person who did the thing being revealed? If those emails hadn’t been written, they wouldn’t be there to be leaked. How telling is it that this transparency had to come from outside the US?
Oh, the DNC apologized for the bias, sure, but that costs them nothing now and frankly comes across as being sorry they got caught, more than anything. The head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schulz, resigned… but was then hired on by Hillary the next day, along with a 100% positive statement about Debbie’s leadership and excellence in guiding the party process along, and a promise that she would support this woman, Debbie Wasserman Schulz, in her bid for re-election. I don’t believe DWS should be crucified for what I believe were well-intentioned but morally-questionable decisions (nor was she alone in the apparent corruption of the democratic process, and others should be held accountable as well), but hiring her on and making such a statement was nothing short of a huge, neon-glowing middle finger to the Bernie supporters already feeling disenfranchised by the whole mess. In addition, it reeks of a public display of “Oh, you got caught manipulating things for me? Here, let me show everyone how nice it is to be on my good side” – because if Hillary let someone who publicly helped her hang out to dry, her other sponsors might wonder if they can really count on her mutual support when she’s in charge. I can’t say for sure whether or not that’s actually the case here, but appearance matters in politics and she of all people knows that. ALL the Democrats had to do was run a clean campaign and this would be in the bag. Sanders supporters would have a lot less reason to detest Hillary if they didn’t feel cheated – at least somewhat justifiably – at every step along the way, now confirmed by the above emails. Trump would have no chance, with his own shattered party support. Instead, it’s just a constant stream of questionable morality, suspiciously broken systems, and subsequently disenfranchised voters.
The Democratic party, and Hillary in particular, are calling for unity, but it’s only words, only lip service. Their actions, as noted above, are blatantly saying they don’t really care if the progressive portion of the party supports them or not. The icing on this cake was the selection of a vice president even further to the right than Hillary, as opposed to a slightly more progressive option that might have pulled in some of the disenfranchised. So the short version is, “I don’t actually need you or care what you think, but if you don’t vote for me you’re voting for someone even worse.” Both sides are pushing that latter bit, in fact.
So here we are. Those of us out in the middle, or disenfranchised from either/both parties, are left with a difficult, unpleasant decision to make. It feels like standing on the median of a highway, trying to decide if I want to be hit by a truck going left or one going right, while each truck tries to convince me the other side is worse. “Voting for third parties is not only wasting your vote, if the other side wins it’s YOUR fault!” is something I hear a lot. It’s my fault if Hate-mongering Trump wins if I write in someone other than Hillary, or vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnston. It’s my fault if Crooked Hillary wins because I don’t vote for Trump.
You know what? No. No! I reject your convenient, blame-passing version of reality, hypothetical person made up for the sake of this point (I have both heard and read this exact sentiment repeatedly, but I’m not here to call out anyone in particular). That bullshit is an argument made solely to let you effectively have more than one vote for yourself. You’d be making your vote and mine, if I agreed with your fear-mongering. And I’m tired of this ‘lesser of two evils’ mentality that drives our broken two-party system. If that’s all you ever go with, your standards inevitably spiral downwards and you end up where we are today, with the two most unpopular candidates we’ve ever had. I’m not apologizing for demanding a higher standard than “somewhat better than Trump” from my politicians. I expect better from strangers on the street, let alone the person leading our nation into the future.
If Trump wins and Hillary loses? I posit that it isn’t because of Bernie-Or-Bust, or third parties, or anything else like that. No, I think it’s because:
The DNC deliberately undermined the faith of many voters in a system we (admittedly, naively) thought was sacrosanct, or as close to it as can be in politics.
Both the DNC and Hillary’s campaign showed outright contempt for Bernie supporters along the way. Most of what you heard on major news outlets was about a vocal minority of Bernie supporters acting up, but what you heard a lot less about was how, in the last several months, labels like “sexist”/Bernie Bros, “racist rich white boys”, “Sanderistas” and worse have been thrown around frequently and everywhere online. Is it any wonder that a call for party unity after such bitter treatment isn’t very successful? Especially given the later actions described above suggested that HC’s campaign doesn’t really care if they can pull in the Bernie supporter crowd at all.
Early on, Gloria Steinem said that girls were just supporting Sanders because “that’s where the boys are”. Madeleine Albright said there was a special place in hell for women that didn’t support Hillary. Albright at least did apologize later, but… seriously…
In short, the DNC and Democratic party in general have put up a candidate that I do not trust and cannot in good conscience vote for without feeling like I’m betraying what I believe in. And they did it while conveying a sort of condescending pity at those darn racist/sexist/plain naive Sanders supporters. And I’m far from alone in that feeling.
Caught between a man who says detestable things, yet likely believes in nothing he says, and a woman who says a lot of the right things but I can’t believe much of what she says, it is a terrible choice to have to make. Let me be clear here: I think Hillary would make a better president than Trump. I believe she has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, while Trump would cause severe damage to our international reputation and add even more vitriolic anger to our political divisions. The status quo is probably better than that. Bernie supporters may also recognize a small victory in the Democratic platform adopting several of the points he was pushing for so strongly – though again, there are trust issues so those platform promises are to be taken with a heaping pile of salt. I also recognize why Trump appeals to some. I covered it in a post a few months ago, though I think it is explored in better detail than I’ve managed in these two articles. Check them out if you have a moment. The second one ends with some spot-on recommendations for the left that I really hope take place.
I also don’t think either candidate is actually ‘evil’, but I do think they’re both untrustworthy panderers who are pursuing personal power and acclaim first and foremost. Trump is basking in all the attention (and again, I don’t think he even believes most of what he says, based on interviews and comments in his past record. The man has flip-flopped with the best of them), and Hillary has been swimming in the sea of political corruption so long that I don’t think she even sees it anymore. She’s played the game so long that the status quo feels acceptable, when what we have right now is flawed, corrupt, and dysfunctional on so many levels.
So now what? Well, this is where the rant ends, and my constructive thoughts begin.
ANOTHER OPTION:
To begin with, let me say this – if you live in a swing state, the following sadly isn’t really true for you. You will have to make a decision between one of the two main candidates or you really will be helping the other win, because your votes are some of the only ones in the country that actually sway the outcome directly, due to the Electoral College.
For the rest of us, those who live in states that are strongly Red or Blue, the fact of the matter is that voting against the majority will have no effect whatsoever. Excepting Maine and Nebraska (who should go by the previous paragraph), Electoral College votes are winner-take-all. Take a look at polls for your state. Is it, say, 75% in favor of one party? Well, no margin of error on that poll is going to surprise everyone on election day. That is statistically nearly impossible. Even if the party you like slightly more is the dominant one, you are still free to do as you want with your vote because again, statistically, most voters will stick to the party line.
As such, you are actually free to vote for someone other than Trump or Hillary, if the above conditions are true. The two most well-known options this election year are Gary Johnson (Libertarian) and Jill Stein (Independent), though you could technically write in anyone. They absolutely cannot win the election, but you can and should consider voting for them. Why bother then, you may ask? Well, there is an interesting little reason I recently discovered.
According to the Federal Election Commission, “New party candidates (nominees of parties that are neither major parties nor minor parties) may receive public funds after the election if they receive 5 percent or more of the vote. The amount is based on the ratio of the new party candidate’s vote to the average vote of the two major party candidates in that election.” You know that checkbox on your taxes that says you want to divert 2-3 bucks to political campaigns? This fund is where that money goes. What this means is that getting at least 5% of the POPULAR (not Electoral!) vote would enable the Green/Independent parties to claim money from a Federal fund pool that the two major parties already have access to, and have significantly more far-reaching campaigns. Exact numbers vary, but I’ve seen estimates suggesting roughly tripling the funding Gary Johnson has from ~3 million to almost 10 million. The 5% milestone means a LOT to these small parties, and based on this Wikipedia page (check the bottom chart), hasn’t been hit since the 90’s – and only rarely in the last century.
Will getting 5% of the popular vote cause a third party to suddenly rival the two primary parties in the US? Hahahaha, no, of course not. Will it cause them to crumble and fall apart? No, though both sides seem to be doing that to themselves with gusto already, right now. What it will do is provide a little more leverage and influence to them, a bit of that ‘incremental progress’ Hillary believes in so strongly. Maybe someday, a couple decades down the road, 5% now becomes 15%, then 30%, as the old parties fracture and struggle. We’re already seeing major fragmentation, especially on the right. It’s happened before, in many countries and at many times. Even here in the US, the two major parties have changed to a completely unrecognizable degree over time.
This election cycle, we’ve seen the cracks in the system exposed and many have lost faith in the US’s democratic process (and that’s not even touching absurdities like the Electoral College itself). I say, at least consider this alternative. If you’re anything like me, maybe you’ll find it more palatable knowing that you voted productively without having to vote for someone you don’t trust or find ethically unsound.
Next time I’m writing about cartoons. Promise. And there will be more pictures, with bright colors! And ironically, after today’s post, the topic I plan to write about after that (unless I merge them together) is “Optimism” and what it means to me. So much irony. So much.
Bonus round: The Two Main Third Party Candidates Summarized!
First, let me just say that if you’re voting, please do your own research on the options to find the best one for you. However, I recognize that many people, including myself, probably don’t know a great deal about the available third party options, and since I just suggested considering them, I figured I’d offer a few quick summaries to at least let folks know where to start, based on your previous political leanings.
Green Party: Jill Stein
Abortion: Entirely pro-choice. Pro stem-cell research.
College Debt Crisis: Basically what Bernie said. Too much debt, too much privatization and taking advantage of students, crippling a generation.
Drugs: For the legalization of marijuana, believes it will reduce crime rates to legalize and officially regulate.
Economy: Feels we are in a crisis, not recovery. Against bail-outs.Energy: Time to become less oil-dependent, strive for renewable energy urgently.
Gay Marriage, etc.: All people deserve full civil rights.
Gun Rights: For regulations, particularly focusing on providing mental health services and background checks in more circumstances.
Health Care: Obamacare/ACA wasteful (10x more so than medicare), “neither affordable nor caring”, favors single-payer
Israel: Start holding all parties accountable between Israel/Palestine.
Patriot Act: Should be repealed immediately, is a gross violation of US citizens’ rights and 4th Amendment.
Shorter still version: Bernie-lite. Left leaning all around.
Abortion: Insurers shouldn’t have to cover it, is against stem cell research, but abortion should be allowed by a woman’s choice until “fetal viability”.
College Debt Crisis: Stop or restrict student loans entirely – they are causing tuition rates to skyrocket in a vicious cycle.
Drugs: For the legalization of marijuana, believes it will reduce crime rates to legalize and officially regulate.
Economy: National debt is obscene and unsustainable, is bankrupting us. Strongly against bail-outs.
Energy: Work toward alternative fuels, accepts global warming but does not believe in punishing carbon emissions with taxes. Favors nuclear energy.
Gay Marriage, etc.: Favors civil unions, okay with gay marriage but believes government should have no role in marriage at all. Not their place.
Gun Rights: Supports gun ownership rights, feels laws restricting guns are ineffective.
Health Care: Obamacare lower prices just isn’t happening. Obamacare was unconstitutional and should never have happened. Federally-managed healthcare is “insanity”. Favors state-level management if anything.
Israel: Cut ties with Israel, become very hands-off internationally in general. Stop trying to solve everyone’s problems, it usually makes things worse and at high cost.
Patriot Act: Let Patriot Act expire, it violates citizens’ rights and 4th amendment. Additionally, disband the TSA.
Shorter still version: Moderate, slightly right-leaning on some issues, left on others. Extremely anti-big-government and very strongly believes the US government should be much less powerful and involved internationally and internally.
Music of the Day: To Zanarkand (FFX) – It’s a late-night post, so have a piece that goes well with a calm mood and musing about identity.
So, in a very roundabout way, I was going to build up to this topic starting with the post about musical naming – absolute versus programmatic naming, etc. As I mentioned there, that post was originally going to be a more general post about the power of naming. That, then would lead into this musing post about “Identity”. I got a bit off track by following the other track – musical theming into Undertale’s music, which I didn’t actually explore as much as I intended to either.
So the short version is, welcome to the chaos that is my brain. It all made sense in my head.
There’s also a whole bunch I could write about current politics, but I’ve discovered that getting into those topics, even just reading articles about them, gives me uncomfortable side effects up to and including headaches. Plus, I already share my views with my mother and my one politically-invested friend, so I figure I’ve hit my main audience with those anyway. End result – I’m going to avoid outright political posts for a good long while. I can sum up all of my thoughts about them with one sentence, though: “I wish people were nicer to others, even/especially when they don’t agree on things.”
Now that I’ve wasted a few hundred words on things unrelated to my topic, let’s dive in! Identity. Talk about a complex topic. Thousands of years of philosophy and science still haven’t yielded a satisfyingly thorough concept that fully captures what a ‘person’ is. And when you spend as much time alone and awake late at night as I do, you have lots of time to ponder things like “Who am I?” and subsequently “What does ‘I’ even mean?”. I am given to understand that questions like these could also stem from doing copious amounts of drugs, but in this case no, it’s just the night owl thing. In any case, this post will be a surface-scraping light touch on the topic, as I think through this one piece at a time in hopes of forming at least a bare-bones framework for exploring both what makes a person A person, and what makes a specific person THAT person. I’ve prepared nothing in advance, and intend to mostly avoid using previous philosophical work on the subject because that feels like cheating in a mental exercise like this.
First, though, a quick word on what Identity is NOT, yet for which it is often confused.
Identity is not (just) your opinions. They may affect it or be affected by it, but you should be able to change your opinions and views when confronted with convincing evidence. As CGP Grey said in his excellent video on the subject (please watch ~20 seconds of that video on the subject, starting at that link) – opinions should be like tools you carry around in a box. Hang on to them when they are useful but you should always be able to discard them when something better comes along.
Identity is not (just) your social or political alignment, nor which sports team or nerd fandom you support. They may influence it, but you, YOU as a human being are not a ‘Democrat’ or ‘Republican’ or a ‘Cubs fan’ or a ‘Whovian’. These things may influence your behavior over time, which may be argued to be part of an identity, but these are all just external categories we use to sort people into groups that are more likely to get along.
Similarly, identity is more than your sexuality, race, age, gender, religion, etc. All of these things may, again, influence what you say, do, and believe, but are unhelpfully limited as complete definitions for identity.
Not even getting into the very-relevant Nature versus Nurture aspect here – that would be a whole other massive post, at the very least. Suffice to say, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle of that mess.
Obviously I don’t expect to find an actual answer to this question. Every aspect of this topic, even including the ‘not-included’ points above, has more gray area than a newspaper landfill. That’s why it’s a good mental exercise! Let’s start with the easy stuff!
Summary: “Who we are is defined by our definitions.” (This is silly, yes.)
The fact of being who or what a person or thing is, OR
The characteristics determining this.
Points in favor:
This is easy to understand and functional for everyday conversation.
Points against:
It does not define its own definition for our purposes – what is a person? You can’t use it in a definition of itself, so personal identity still isn’t captured here.
Implications:
If we can’t find a satisfactory way to capture the essence of a person’s identity, we have the ‘backlighting’ plan as a backup. Essentially, we can define a person by their characteristics, the shadow they cast on existence in general. It remains to be discussed what characteristics this would encompass.
Rating of Usefulness: 1 out of 5.
This argument for defining identity leads to a bit of circular reasoning, but that’s fine – I didn’t expect a dictionary to solve a problem that has bothered humanity for thousands of years anyway. It’s just a good starting point.
The Physical Form:
Summary: “Who we are is defined by our physical body.”
Really, we’re just a skeleton army wearing armor made of meat. It’s kind of metal to put it that way.
Why not really start with the most obvious aspect of a human being – the body.
Points in favor:
It is arguably the most ‘real’ aspect of a person – it has mass, dimensions, every part of it can be identified as a certain mineral/chemical/substance. We can break it down and understand it through science.
It’s what we see of others, it’s the filter through which we experience the world via our senses, so surely there is an argument that who we are is defined at least in part by the actual physical space in existence that we occupy, from which we observe the rest.
In an earlier post, I posited that human beings are, in essence, collections of information. Everything about us can, ultimately, be broken down into information – how many cells we have, where they are located, how each segment of RNA coordinates with another, how each neuron in our brain triggers in an incomprehensibly complex code that translates to our conscious and unconscious workings. Technically, all of this, from chemical reactions in our brain to the length of our fingernails, falls under the category of ‘physical form’. Our identity at any one point in time could be considered a snapshot of the physical/chemical/electrical states of every atom in our bodies. This would likely even recreate things like emotions and memories, as indirect effects of an instant’s chemical interactions.
Points against:
If someone gets a leg blown off by a land mine, are they a different person? Are they LESS of a person, diminished somehow by a physical change to their structure? I feel that few people would say this is the case (“You’re no less of a person for having a disability!” is a common theme in support for people faced with such challenges.).
Second, say there is an individual who is both blind and deaf. Do you only exist if that person is touching you? Obviously this is absurd to ask – of course you do, whether they know it or not. You’re the same person. So we can safely say that what you look like or sound like isn’t an integral part of the definition of ‘identity’, because you still exist when those things aren’t factors.
Third, there is an old thought experiment (“The Ship of Theseus”) that relates to this, which I will now brutally ruin through paraphrasing: Say you have a boat, we’ll call it Awesome Boat A. As a hobby, you decide it would be fun to build your own boat from the pieces of your old boat. So you hack off chunks of the hull and patch them onto a new frame. You yank out parts – the engine, the steering wheel, the floorboards, and start installing them in the right patterns. Is this new boat – Awesome Boat B – a new boat, or is it still Boat A because it has all the same pieces in the same places? At one point in the process you’re going to have two half-finished boats side by side. When does Boat B stop being Boat A and become Boat B? At the conceptual stage? When more pieces are in B than in A? When B is finished and A no longer exists?
I would lean toward Boat B being its own boat as soon as the first piece of it is placed with an intent to make it into a new, separate vehicle, but there really is no “right” answer, and your own answer may affect how you view the concept of identity.
(The actual Ship of Theseus experiment is about replacing parts that are worn out one by one until all parts have been replaced – is it still the same boat, or not? If not, at what point did it change?)
Implications:
If the physical form is part of a person’s identity, losing a limb means losing part of their existence – or at least a changing of it, because ‘different’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘lessened’.
Of course, if you accept that, you have the problem that a haircut would do the same thing. In fact, so would letting your hair grow out at all, or shedding skin cells. Any sort of physical change must be accounted for as a change to your identity.
Rating of Usefulness: 2 out of 5.
This is still an unsatisfactory answer, because I – like most people – place more importance on a person’s actions, thoughts, personality, etc. Though as noted above, the physical form could technically also contain emotions and thought patterns as an indirect, mechanical byproduct. But we’ll explore the mental side of things in a bit, because there is a logical difference between the parts sitting idle and the consciousness that results.
Moreover, I personally find it morally repugnant to even suggest that a disability means someone is somehow deficient as a being. At best I can accept that different physical configurations will have some level of influence on the next category, or an individual’s ability to perform certain actions within it. So for me to find a definition I can be comfortable with, I’ll need to keep looking.
In the end, though, physical forms are too fluid and mutable, literally never static at any point in time from conception to decomposition, and many of the changes are undetectable by outside observers or even the individual in question. So this is a night-useless definition of identity for practical purposes.
Motives, Actions, and Words:
Summary: “We are defined by what we do (and why, as a potential add-on).”
Folk wisdom tends to say that a person can be known by their actions, by keeping their word, by the things they do when no one is looking. After all, who we are in the dark is perhaps the truest reflection of ourselves behind the shows we put on for societal observers. And the shape and extent of the impact and subsequent ripples our actions make on the world probably defines us better than our physical shape.
Points in favor:
This makes sense from a human perspective. It’s highly utilitarian and a big part of how we get through our lives every day. Someone who pets and feeds and loves a puppy is, usually, a “better” person than someone who drowns a puppy. Outside actions can signal inside values and help us predict future behavior by that individual. Someone who keeps promises is inherently more trustworthy than a habitual liar. Whether this is the ‘true’ definition of identity is irrelevant to the fact that it is a useful definition.
Points against:
Someone can say they believe one thing and indicate the opposite by their actions. We call them a ‘hypocrite’. So for this definition to work, there have to be multiple states (True, where words and actions align, and False, for hypocrisy). There ALSO has to be a value judgement, because if Hitler says he hates minorities and proceeds to be Hitler, his words and actions align but they are terrible by virtually all moral measurements. So we have True-Good, True-Bad, False-Good (rare but possible), and False-Bad. However, all of this operates on the assumption of a consensus moral spectrum, which is demonstrably not universal across all cultures and time periods. So as another layer of complexity, the above four states vary in what constitutes each by the society in which you are operating. Again, highly functional for day-to-day life, but uncomfortably complex and ever-changing for a platonic definition of identity. Plus, ends versus means is its own entire branch of philosophy I don’t want to get into here.
And then there are motivations to consider, in the cognitive land between stated beliefs and actual actions. If a kid gives a homeless person a dollar because they feel good when they help those in need, and a second kid gives a homeless person a dollar entirely out of guilt, does it matter? This definition (motives) would imply it does, but the only person aware of the difference would be the giver. From the view of the homeless person, there is no difference. So then the difference in identity is internal. But if the same person had stolen a dollar from the homeless person instead, the difference would be both internal AND external, which means our definition fluctuates and that’s not very satisfactory, logically. And what of doing something “bad” for a good or at least ‘necessary’ cause (almost anything done by any military could be lumped in here – killing ISIS to stop them from killing others, etc.)?
Finally, it could very easily be argued that all of this is just a subcategory under the final section I’ll be looking at below, the mind/consciousness. Which means this is just another way of looking at a fragment of that point instead.
Implications:
As noted above, for this definition to work, we would have to accept that identity is an internal thing – it doesn’t matter if the outside world sees a difference, what matters is your own thoughts and motivations.
Additionally, we are different in different settings. I know I say, do, and feel different things in a funeral setting (“It’s sad that someone’s story is over.”) than I do in an academic setting (“I hate papers”) or an ice cream social (“I wonder if it’d be rude to leave after ten minutes.”). If we accept actions/words as characteristics of identity, we have to accept that we all have a wide array of identities that we wear like outfits or masks, swapping them out for the appropriate occasion. And I think you could make a pretty good argument for that point of view.
Finally, between nature and nurture, nurture is by far the stronger contributor to the end result, if this is the definition of an identity. It has been pretty conclusively shown that most of our values and the actions that stem from them are built on a foundation of our previous experiences as well as the social mores of our time and geographical region.
Rating of Usefulness: 3 out of 5.
This definition has too many holes still, and fluctuates far too much to pin down a universal definition of ‘identity’. There is something to be said for its everyday utility, but it is clearly only a part, not the whole. So we’ll keep looking. Next up…
Consciousness:
Summary: “We are our mind – thoughts, emotions and memories, rather than our body and its interactions.”
I mentioned earlier that the physical form technically included things that contribute to emotions and the like. While science has done its best in explaining how different chemical and neural interactions result in a wide array of emotions and reactions in the human brain, we’re still only barely scraping the surface of how a self-aware consciousness arises from those interactions. Consciousness is more than taking in input and outputting the correct response. It’s a huge, huge leap between a computer that can respond to stimuli both immediate and recorded in memory, and a mind capable of imaginative creativity, appreciating music, seeking meaning in a seemingly uncaring universe…
We have a mind capable of thinking about itself in the most meta way possible. We’re doing it right now! It is the seat of all thought and, surely, it must have a say in an individual’s identity. As a bonus, our consciousness interprets the signals from our physical form, triggers our words and actions, and processes and rationalizes our motivations. It touches on all of the other definitions we’ve looked at in one way or another.
Note: I’m going to go ahead and lump “a soul” in under “consciousness”, because many people that use the term, use it interchangeably here… and there is really no hard evidence I can use to explore it separately in its own section, so this is the best I can do for that also-complex topic without writing a thesis paper.
Points in favor:
I think if I polled everyone I know as to what makes a person who they are, by far the most common answer would be a variant of “their mind/consciousness”. We (most of us) see and hear the world from up in our head, we process our thoughts, rationalize our decisions, feel our emotions, all in our minds. Whatever incomprehensibly complex machinations result in our self-awareness, we ARE self-aware and that is how we are able to examine ourselves.
Moreover, your stream of consciousness is YOURS. Only you are able to experience it, from your unique point of view. Someone sitting next to you will have a similar but still ever-so-slightly different stream of inputs and outputs between them and the rest of existence. This is a solid point in favor of your consciousness being your unique identity as a being.
Points against:
Because, as mentioned, we have only a rough grasp on what actually enables a consciousness to arise from a mess of proteins, chemicals, and electricity, this is kind of a cheating answer – we still don’t know what a consciousness IS in its essence, only what it does from our point of view. We’re back to needing definitions to make other definitions. This is why nobody likes your ideals, Plato. Just saying.
Implications:
If someone survives heavy brain trauma but is forever different afterwards in their personality, emotions, etc. (which has been well-documented), we have to accept that the consciousness at least derives from the physical form, and can be altered by altering said form through physical or chemical means.
If someone is physically alive, but shows no brain activity (clinically “brain-dead”), by this definition they no longer exist. That person is as gone from the world as if they had been hit by a car and died. This implication makes many people uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, either.
Questions: If this is true, then when cessation of consciousness occurs during deep sleep or a severe concussion, do I cease to exist? Where does my consciousness go when not active? How does it come back? Is there a transitory point between not-being and being, at some point in the waking process? What are dreams, on that spectrum? Sure, these are philosophical ponderings more than scientific ones, but they are interesting to consider.
Rating of Usefulness: 3 out of 5.
This one feels the most right, and I think most people would agree. It’s still a bit of logical cheating, though, and some of the implications are deeply disturbing.
Summary:
It’s late, and you’re probably tired of reading my gradual stream-of-consciousness unfolding of a question with no good answers, so I’ll keep this relatively short.
A while back, I wrote about a game called “The World Ends With You”, and how the takeaway lessons included this:
“…you are defined not only by what you are, but also by what you are not. Black and white, positive and negative space, the way concepts and lives fit together and demarcate where one begins and another ends.”
I think the best answer we, or at least I, can take from tonight’s musings is that identity is defined, nebulous though it be, by our boundaries. Equal measures of what we are and are not, how our actions connect with or affect other beings. Our edges may be ever-changing, but there are edges and that’s the best way to find them. An individual’s existence is like a rubber band, flexible and elastic and shapeless on its own, but given shape by stretching it over pins like a friendship here, a book we read there, a fond memory of family in the past, a hopeful goal for the future… We can’t affect all of the pins. Some we’re born with, others are relics of our past experiences, and so on. But… we do have some say in where we place new ones, and where we want our edges to shift toward next. Who am I? I still don’t know, but I’ll keep working on figuring it out.
It’s absolutely not a definitive answer, and it’s really only a personal one because you may have different views on any of the above definitions. But it’s a decent conceptual model, reduced to just above the point of absurdity. I’ll hold onto it while I look for a better one. Plus, I’m sleepy so this post has to end. Cheers, all!
Music of the Day: Hardest boss’s theme, in an upbeat piano-only remix. This tune gives some Undertale players PTSD fits. There are going to be several music bits to listen to in the post itself, and I hope you give them a listen because they’re really good stuff! I’m putting the incidental but fun ones in the first section and working plot-relevant themes into the second section.
Obligatory spoiler warning: Do not scroll down if you don’t want to be exposed to spoilers – and Undertale is much, much better if played without prior knowledge. You’ve been warned! I didn’t even make the image below, it already existed on the web!
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So… here we go! Undertale. Where to begin? I’m trying to avoid making my blog just be a review of cool games, but I think I’ll have to start with a quick section raving about this one. One thing though – I don’t like this post much. I don’t feel like I can do this game proper justice even with this full post, though – I’ve written and re-written this and still I’m not satisfied with it, but I want to move on to other topics finally so I’ll just go with what I’ve got. Undertale is really just a great experience, and I don’t know that any sort of textual dissection can convey the whole thing properly. It evoked feelings in me that I haven’t felt from a game since I was a kid in the 90s.
Part 1: Disjointed Raving in a Positive Manner
Creator Toby Fox’s game took the internet by storm in late 2015, spawning insane amounts of fan art and music remixes and memes, and I eventually gave in to the hype and checked it out for myself. Side note – it’s very common to resist checking out over-hyped things even if you’re not a hipster. Don’t, at least in this case. You’re only making yourself miss out on something that’s popular for good reason. Undertale is simultaneously a send-up of and a love letter to the RPGs of old, in the SNES era. In particular, it has many parallels to cult classic Earthbound, which makes sense considering Toby Fox previously made one of the most popular hacks of that game on the web. Nonetheless, it stands on its own strengths and an abundance of cleverness.
Mixed media visuals – At first the graphics seem like a blend of NES and SNES-era pixelated sprites, but poking around reveals a wide range of art styles, color palettes, and in one case a jarring pseudo-realistic character that works very well in clashing with the game world into which it no longer fits.
Maybe you had to be there. The music really adds to it.
Musical tricks – many of the excellent music tracks (seriously, a high point of the game) are inter-related. A slow, moody track in a cavernous area is actually a drastically slowed down variant of the one that plays during the climactic conflict of that area. Each character has a leitmotif theme that fits them wonderfully and often the battles themselves feel like they’re flowing in sync with the music. Check out the bits of music interspersed in this post for samples!
An exceptional sense of humor behind the game’s writing. I haven’t smiled and laughed throughout a whole game like this in years.
A unique battle system – if turn based RPGs bore you, this might be more your thing – enemies’ turns become a sort of bullet-hell mini-game, with a wide variety of effects and variants to keep it from getting stale.
Your icon is the red heart. Don’t touch anything else! Have fun with that.
A call-out to the famous Opera scene from Final Fantasy VI, which older gamers will likely find very amusing. Especially as the lead role is taken by a boxy, homicidal computer TV show host (who later transforms into a robotic glam-rockstar). It’s just that sort of game.
Yes, the game window renames itself to ‘The Musical’ for this scene. See the next point in the list.
The dev thought of everything: Characters respond to things you wouldn’t expect, including some quirks to be mentioned in the next section to do with saving/reloading. There are dozens of characters walking around with clever quips or call-outs to other games, there’s a cell phone with multiple friends you can call on every screen for flavor text or hints, and there’s even a playable ending in which you can walk back through the entire game and talk to everyone for new conversations or observations… even down to several inanimate plants. That stick that is your starting weapon? Throw it in a battle with a dog-type enemy and it runs to fetch it! Depending on how you play the game (and who survives till the end), there are several ending variants. Also combines with ridiculous amounts of foreshadowing hints. This list could be its own full length post, though. Moving on!
Characters that are simultaneously walking clichés and really, really well-done versions of those tropes. Remember, tropes aren’t necessarily bad. The monstrous humanoids of Undertale demonstrate this wonderfully as you fight and/or befriend them:
The skeleton brothers Papyrus and Sans – Classic Red Oni/Blue Oni pairing, with Papyrus’ goofball antics and enthusiastic optimism comparing to Sans low-key affability – except when he’s suddenly the most dangerous individual in the game.
Pseudo-parental figures Toriel and Asgore – more on these two later, because they’re connected to some of the most emotion-tugging moments of the game. Asgore is also literally the king in the mountain, and his leitmotif theme is called Bergentruckung, the German word for exactly that term.
Undyne, the blood knight of the cast – She just loves to fight! But she’s also not evil – in fact, in one path of the game, she’s the hero.
Muffet – Basically a spider-girl straight from the Tim Burton movie of your choice, with a super catchy ear-worm of a theme song.
Dr. Gaster – He’s not even in the game, only obliquely mentioned a few times and hidden deep in a few other game files. And maybe a couple low-probability random creepy occurrences that only add to his mystery. The fanbase is still figuring things out about this enigmatic figure.
Flowey. Just… read on, to see about this smiling little flower character.
And several others, but you get the point.
Okay, cutting myself off there. Long story short – Undertale is a really well done game on all fronts, with special emphasis on the music and writing. But I left out the main pillar of the game’s cleverness, the thing that the whole game is based around:
To demonstrate what I mean, let me lay out a quick step-through of the game’s opening segment and how it sets up the tone of the rest of the game. If you really do not care a bit about the content of the game, skip to part 3 now. You’ll miss a few tidbits but still get the summary of my thoughts on the game. For the rest… I’ll limit the images to keep this from being novel-length. Sorry in advance!
The game starts with your protagonist – a small child – falling into a cavernous underground realm. Miraculously landing on a pile of yellow flowers – which will be persistent iconography through the entire game – you find yourself alone in some crumbling ruins. Proceeding forward will have you run into the first non-player character (NPC), Flowey.
And then there’s THIS jerk…
Flowey is much more important than you would expect for what is essentially a smiling, talking flower. But here, all he does is greet the player and enter into what appears to be a tutorial mode – a very common method for modern games to explain their mechanics and systems, so players are used to this kind of thing. He pulls you into a battle screen and shows you how it works, encouraging you to pick up the ‘friendliness pellets’ on the screen.
Of course, they’re not friendliness pellets, they’re damaging ‘bullets’, and the “tutorial” is a farce. There were a few hints during the conversation, so the typical player will either pick up on this and not play along, or fall for it once and be at most mildly surprised. Flowey suddenly gets a little creepy and a lot threatening, either way, and loudly espouses that this is the way the world works – dog eat dog, everyone for themselves, kill or be killed.
Enter the overprotective maternal figure Toriel (affectionately termed “goat-mom” by fans), who shows up and frightens Flowey away (he burrows and disappears, just go with it). If Flowey was a fake tutorial, Toriel – it’s even in her name! – is a mockery of real ones. She literally holds your hand through the first ‘puzzle of the game’, walking you very slowly along the safe path through a room of spikes. Things continue in this vein for a while, as you learn more about the world of Undertale, and then she starts up a second ‘battle tutorial’… this time, introducing the idea that you don’t have to fight. Undertale offers players the option to use a variety of talking and action options in the battle menu (which changes for every single monster and encounter in the game), and through clever use of them you can spare them. If you can’t, you can try to flee and escape the fight yourself.
So the game has introduced two ways to play at this point – you can fight things, or you can actively avoid fighting. Moral choices aren’t particularly new or unique in modern games, but it’s a cute quirk and the battle conversation options are often entertaining.
Toriel then she asks you to stay put for a while while she goes ahead to do some things, giving you a cell phone so she can check in on you every few minutes. She will, too, if you stay where she leaves you, but most players will quickly get bored and wander along forward on their own, getting into easy battles and figuring out easy traps and puzzles, and meeting a few random NPCs along the way who give tips and world-building for the player. For example, one NPC mentions that to ‘Spare’ some NPCs you need to weaken them first with a few rounds of combat before trying to end the fight peacefully with the MERCY command. Remember that.
Skipping ahead, you eventually reach Toriel’s home, which is surprisingly nice and homey for being lodged in ancient underground ruins. A few more things happen, and it becomes clear she doesn’t intend to let you leave the ruins into the rest of the Undertale realm- the world is too dangerous for a human child, and full of monsters that hate humans (humans being the ones who sealed them underground, you see). If you persist in trying to leave, she stands in your way and insists you aren’t strong enough to survive outside, and she will prove it. And so an unfortunate battle begins, to the the tune of “Heartbreak” (below).
(Heartache – Toriel’s fitting theme, in which the player is forced to realize things just got serious and they have to fight someone who has been only kind and protective to them.)
Here is where Undertale plays you, plays most people, pretty hard. Obviously from what you know so far, you want to SPARE her, not FIGHT. She’s overprotective (for good reasons) but definitely not evil. So you choose MERCY. Nothing much happens. You try to talk with her, but she’s not changing her mind. You might even try MERCY a few more times, getting little more than an ellipsis in response… nothing is working. Okay, fine, it’s a puzzle fight. Thinking back, you remember that NPC who told you “Sometimes you have to weaken an opponent before you can spare them.” and logically assume that was a hint for this encounter, so you set about doing so and use the FIGHT command a few times. All the while, Toriel is launching flurries of magic and fire your direction on her turns. If you get low on health, her attacks will all arc around you and deliberately miss, though – she’s making a point, not killing you.
So you’ve reduced her health to nearly half, and take another swing – and it does ten times as much damage as previous rounds, instantly killing her. Well, not instantly. She has time for a quick verbal response to make sure the player feels extra bad about killing goat-mom. The only logical thing to do here is to reload your game from a previous save and try again. Eventually, you’ll figure out the puzzle and get past her without killing her, but the game has already played on the expectations created by the many other games you’ve played to give you a good emotional blow to your confidence.
Toriel, still alive this time around, lets you pass but cautions you to avoid ASGORE(all caps and red text for emphasis in-game too), the monster king, because he needs to kill one more human to break the seal holding the monsters underground. In the next room, Flowey shows up again, and calls you out on it. Yes, even though you loaded your save, he knows if you killed her. He knows you -can- reload and save, because he could too before you came along. and points out that you’re still a murderer and that the world is still all about “kill or be killed.” Sure, you got around it this once, but sooner or later you won’t have a choice. Then he’s gone again, and you’re off to the rest of the underworld. The game remembering things between saves comes up in a number of incidental ways throughout the game, like characters wondering why you’re so familiar when you meet them “again” after reloading, but it’s central to the plot around Flowey.
Skipping through the whole middle of the game, you meet and either fight or befriend the cast of amusing characters, from the incompetent-but-optimistic Papyrus who really just wants a friend and believes there’s good in you even if you kill him, to the nerdy royal scientist Alphys. I couldn’t do this part of the game justice if I tried, anyway. The point is you have to choose whether to kill or spare every monster, named or incidental, along the way. If you kill things, you grow in strength over time, becoming more durable and able to strike harder. Few things last more than a couple blows anyway, so it’s pretty easy to overpower most challenges. The Pacifist route is harder because while you still get a bit of gold for defensive gear, you never grow any stronger and it gets easier and easier to die while trying to figure out how to spare this new encounter. Most players will be on the neutral path after trying each method a few times to see what they prefer, the first time through the game.
So you reach the end. You encounter Asgore, and he turns out to be… basically Goat-dad. Toriel -was- his queen once, it turns out. Asgore is extremely polite and really, really hates that he has to do something awful for the sake of freeing his people – he has to kill you to break the seal. Cue another powerful musical theme, Bergentruckung, which at least to me very effectively conveys tragedy (in the dramatic sense) and regret and most of all that this is the deciding moment of the whole story. Making matters worse, the first thing Asgore does is shatter your MERCY button. There will be only one survivor, this time, even if neither party wants to fight.
(Bergentruckung – Asgore’s theme, in which you are forced to realize that sometimes things can’t work out well in the end, because two good intentions can directly conflict.)
And so you fight. And you probably die a few times, which brings up an interesting side note that makes things a bit more painful – the voice that the player has heard on the Game Over screen till now, encouraging them to continue, to not give up? It’s Asgore’s voice. He’s been cheering you on from the background the whole time. So you reload and go back in to try to kill the genuinely nice guy again. Ouch.
Eventually, you win. It’s actually possible to spare him at the last moment, with a visibly cracked and somehow repaired MERCY button, but in his moment of vulnerability… Flowey shows up and kills him anyway, transforming into a monster by absorbing the other human souls Asgore had already collected. The game glitches and shuts down, and when you open it up again, Flowey is running things. He destroys your save in front of you, and proceeds to save over it to trap you in his little private hell for you and kill you over and over. Then you have to fight Photoshop Flowey, who contrasts to the simple pixel art-style terribly and is a ridiculous fight in every sense, with him saving and loading constantly to jerk you around the screen and into his attacks. Undertale loves to mess with the player.
It’s more disturbing than this really conveys. The music screeching along doesn’t help.
Even if you win, the Neutral ending isn’t a happy one, nor is it satisfying. Flowey chews you out for a while if you were pacifistic up to this point, or smugly acknowledges a kindred soul if you did a lot of killing along the way. Then he drops a hint that maybe things will play out differently if you play a full pacifist run and befriend all the main characters, including going back and getting to know Alphys better, since that section is over quickly and with less interaction than the rest. End Game 1.
Okay, fine, lots of games have multiple endings and usually the ‘best’ ending takes some work. So the player tries a pacifist run (or if they were pacifist up to the end the first time, reloading from right before Asgore saves a few hours and still counts), and goes back to Alphys. After some hijinx, the game goes from silly and mostly child-friendly to a sudden very dark tone, as the player stumbles across a secret lab filled with horribly disturbing amalgamations of creatures and other secrets.
All those cutesy dog-type enemies? Not so cute when merged into one horrible creature with a hole for a face.
Secrets like the experiments that created the amalgamations, and some implications that Flowey was one of the results that escaped. Secrets like what happened to Toriel and Asgore’s son, who got sick and died and was the reason they parted ways – and suddenly it makes a lot more sense why one was overprotective of and wanted to adopt a child, and the other was so reluctant to fight you.
Ultimately, this all leads up to a few things. First, one of those great scenes where all your friends show up to support you in a moment of need. I LOVE those scenes, they get me every time, in every game or movie or book that pulls it off. Second… all your friends are absorbed by Flowey. Who is actually Asriel, the lost son of Toriel and Asgore, after the experiments to save him went awry. Well, sh-t. So, third, you enter an amazing parody of the traditional multiple-stage final boss battle which is required of all RPGs. It also has amazing music:
(Hopes and Dreams – Asriel’s fitting theme, which is the best one of these and you should listen to it even if you haven’t listened to the rest. It is aptly named.)
Hopes and Dreams. The song above is aptly named because… you can’t actually lose this fight. Even if you die, you see the simple words “It refused”, watch your soul mend instantly, and you do – you refuse to die. Your ‘ACT’ button is eventually replaced with a SAVE button, as you regain control of things, only instead of saving your game you start to save the souls of your friends, freeing them from Asriel one by one… until his frustration and rage are breaking down into tears and he’s just begging to understand, to know why he can’t win even now, and the last person you SAVE is Asriel himself. It’s totally absurd and sappy and I love it, and I’ll tell you why in the last section.
What can I add to this? Saving people with the bonds you built with them previously. Just… yes.
This gets you the happy ending, in which everyone but Asriel gets to move on out into the world. Asriel can’t come but wishes you all a happy life. At the last, he asks you, the player (not your character, you the player)… don’t reset the game. Don’t save over this. He knows you can, he’s lived a thousand lives through saving and reloading before, but he’s asking you to just let everyone be happy now, at last. I’ll be honest – I did. Because I couldn’t bring myself to play the third path of the game, the Genocide route.
Genocide means killing all the monsters. Not just the ones you encounter, no, you actually grind through each area until monsters stop appearing and you only get eerie music and “but nobody came…” instead of battle events. See, most moral-choice games make both sides fun. Often, being evil is even more fun – the Dark Side gets to shoot lightning in Star Wars, after all! But in Undertale? You already win effortlessly almost all the time, and the fights take longer and longer to find before you can move on. It isn’t fun. It’s NOT. FUN. In a game you play for fun. Worse, the two hard bosses you fight (Undyne, heroically trying to give the others time to escape from you, and Sans, for killing his brother) are absurdly, hair-tearingly hard, especially the latter. And the whole time he’s beating you, he’s asking you why. Why did you do this? A few characters, including Sans and Flowey, point out that the only reason to erase a happy ending and then kill everyone despite it not being fun is completionism, “To see everything”, which is a common thing among gamers. And it forces the player to consider if, maybe sometimes, seeing everything isn’t the point. It isn’t fun and it feels bad to do it, at least to me… and so I didn’t.Which is rare for me because I’m exactly the kind of person this was aimed at – I collect things in games, I try everything just to see it. But not this time.
(But Nobody Came – The sound of a dead world. One YOU killed. Awful. And incidentally, it’s Flowey’s goofy intro theme slowed down several hundred percent.)
As a side note, if you do complete the Genocide run, it taints your file forever. The game loads to an empty blackness. If you wait long enough you can “trade your soul” to recover the file, but this has negative repercussions too – if you ever get the good ending again, the one you traded your soul to takes over and it is implied that they kill all your friends as the ending closes. Yeah. Feel good about that completionist tendency now, jerk. Oh, and if you thought “Fine, I’ll just watch the bad route on Youtube!” Well, Flowey’s first conversation in Genocide runs calls out people who looked up videos of the run online, calling them cowards and worse who want to see the suffering without going through it themselves. And he might have a point…
Part 3: My Thoughts (or, Dear lord he’s finally done rambling)
So that’s a whole lot of words and irrelevant plot details to say that A: I like Undertale and B: It’s because it’s clever and emotionally touching in a lot of ways, with a touch of C: Forcing a bit of player introspection along the way. But there’s one more thing about Undertale that plants it squarely in my short-list of favorites, and upon a bit of that introspection I realized it’s a theme running through nearly all the things I like, and indeed most of the shows/games I’ve posted about here. One of my upcoming posts will explore it further, but for now: Undertale is a game of hope, of optimism.
Undertale reinforces time and again that there’s always another way. That those who oppose us can become allies and even friends, and they aren’t usually ‘evil’ to begin with, just acting on what they believe to be right. That the world doesn’t have to be “kill or be killed”, or a zero-sum game where one person winning means someone else has to lose. That together we are more than the sum of our parts, as people with bonds of friendship. That with enough effort and persistence through suffering, we can achieve that happy ending for everyone. That even people who have done awful things can be redeemed (Especially this one – I can think of three examples, including the player, off the top of my head).
We live in a world with a lot of ugly things in it. A lot of hate. A lot of lines drawn to separate “us” from “them” and feel superior to the other side of whatever divide we settled on. Not everyone gets those happy endings, even if they’re good people or do all the right things. That’s why, sometimes, I like to be reminded of hope. Of optimism. It’s not about this flawed world we live in, the way it is. It’s about the world as it should be, and trying to make it a little more like that every day. If that’s an endless, fruitless struggle, well… I’d rather we all fight that fight than each other, and I’d rather we do it together than give up and accept the ugliness as something that will be with us forever.
Thanks, Toby Fox, for the refreshing reminder to keep that hope alive. And also for the good feelings. I like those too.
One more for the road, mixed off the main theme of the game itself:
Music of the Day: Monody – found this a couple weeks back and can’t stop listening to it. Haunting and catchy all at once.
Just a nice quick post today, sharing a random assortment of things from around the internet that are useful or interesting in some way. If anyone ever, ever tells you that they’re bored, it just means they don’t know what’s right at their fingertips online.
Useful:
Goodreads: If you read as much as I do, Goodreads is going to be pretty useful for keeping track of which books and series you’ve read, and for suggesting new ones based on your ratings of them.
Wolfram Alpha Calculator: This site is just incredible. Ask it things! It can answer anything from “How tall is the tallest tree?” to “How many eggs would fit in the sun?” to “How many calories are in a cubic light-year of butter?”… or compare/contract companies/stocks, tell you the odds of a given hand in poker, track the exact location the International Space Station is flying over right now, show you a starmap of what someone in New York would see if they could see the stars at a certain time, and a ton of other things. It’s just a really cool website.
Color Blender: Ever try to figure out just the right shade between two other colors? This tool takes the guesswork out of it! Great for graphic and web design.
Soundrown: One of many similar ‘white noise’ sites, Soundrown lets you listen to things like ocean waves, rainfall, fire crackling, or even a blend of multiple sounds at your preferred volume settings. Handy for when you need to drown out distractions or just relax inside your own head.
The Wayback Machine (Archive.Org): As useful as the internet is, it’s not always as permanent as it might seem. Websites can disappear overnight, taking with them all of their content. The Wayback Machine provides a way to recover some of that content, or just to visit nostalgic sites from your childhood that may not be around anymore. It’s not perfect and has trouble with image files due to how they are usually stored on separate servers, but it’s still good to know this exists!
Snopes.com: Snopes should be mandatory training for anyone who creates a social media account (or forwards emails a lot). They do a great deal of fact-checking to confirm or bust those posts you see constantly about how this politician is secretly in the KKK (usually traced to an internet image board as a joke) or that kid went missing and needs you to SHARE AND LIKE to spread the word (probably happened in the 90s if it happened at all). If there’s even the slightest chance that what you’re posting could in fact be a bunch of nonsense? Do a quick search for it on Snopes, for your dignity’s sake. As a bonus, your friends and family will appreciate the vastly-diminished flood of junk posts and emails coming their way. Also good for identifying email scams, so copy-paste a few lines of that email to see if it’s legit!
Fun:
The Cutting Room Floor: You may have gathered that I enjoy video games, and have for a long time. Just as football has its statistics and rivalries and history, so too does gaming. For those interested in the minutiae and quirks of games past, sites like The Cutting Room Floor are a great way to kill a few hours. This one identifies and summarizes everything that was cut from a game before it was launched – usually content left on the cartridge or disc but unused in the game itself. Some really interesting stuff here, if you poke around!
Ancient DOS Games: Speaking of games past, I’ve recently been playing ADG here in the background while I work, and it’s brought back a lot of memories of games from the early 90’s – some of which I’d forgotten entirely. It’s been a fun, nostalgic trip full of those “Oh hey, I’ve seen that before!” moments when my brain snaps to attention. I’m pretty sure every DOS game I played has shown up on this playlist at one point or another. If not, then the very similar Lazy Game Reviews certainly covered it.
Silk: A simple but elegant art-making site. Combine this with the white-noise site above or your favorite music on Youtube for a relaxing afternoon!
That’s all for now. If I can’t keep this kind of post short, I can’t make -any- post short.
Man, after all that political stuff, this will be refreshing! I’d say it’ll also be shorter, but I can’t even type that with a straight face anymore. Just… no.
Today, I want to write about something called creative intent. Other common terms and subterms include artistic intent and authorial intent, and while I’ll take a moment to look at each, my focus here will ultimately be on how it pertains to the world of music. There are two reasons for my choice of this topic, this week:
It was one of those concepts that I never gave a second thought until a certain music class in college, and after learning it there was a whole new dimension to music/art to appreciate.
For my next major post, barring distractions, I plan to write about Undertale. It’ll make sense when I get there.
Incidentally, this overlaps with a previously-started draft of a post from last year about the power of naming. I may still do that eventually because it covers a lot, but the last part of this post will touch on it. So what am I going on about? If your education was anything like mine, you probably groaned a fair bit in high school when the teachers insisted that whatever you were reading – from The Great Gatsby to Moby Dick – was a metaphor for some other thing. Sometimes, the symbolism was readily apparent (Dante’s Inferno, Pilgrim’s Progress, Frankenstein, etc.), and I had no issue with it. Other times, it felt like they were really reaching, grasping at straws, anything to justify a dry, clunky narrative as something more important (I may be an uncultured heathen, but by the third essay on what the green light in The Great Gatsby represented, I was ready to write in ‘Kermit the Frog’ and be done with it). I know from speaking with peers past and present that I am not alone in resenting many ‘classics’ because I was pushed to squeeze multiple layers of symbolism out of an otherwise enjoyable story.
With literature, there’s a bit of a bonus, too – sometimes, the author themselves actually writes about their authorial intent while still alive. Interestingly, for every author who deliberately put in the symbolism, another says they were just writing from life experiences or telling a story, and people jumped on whatever patterns they found buried in the text.
One key takeaway here – humanity is a symbol-loving, pattern-hunting creature. Our entire language is symbolic – letters and combinations form sounds that somehow mean things, describe shared concepts, tell stories. We can find symbolism in nearly anything, with a bit of time and lateral thinking. And the important thing here, to me, is that whatever that interpretation is… I don’t think it’s wrong. I don’t think it can be wrong, if you recognize a metaphor for something in your own life or world buried in fiction or history. Multiple exclusive interpretations can coexist with no problem at all! The great thing about art, written or otherwise, is that the viewer/reader/listener’s interpretation of the art is every bit as important as the author’s original intent. This may be why I resented being told what classic books meant – I was really being told what other people, usually not even the author, interpreted them to mean, while my own interpretation didn’t match up. Which would be fine to learn about, except we were also graded on whether we ‘got’ their interpretation. And of course, a bad grade for disagreeing with other subjective interpretations doesn’t sit well. But grades and scholastic incentives are a rant best saved for another day.
And of course, visual mediums are also open to the concept of artistic intent. Modern art is often ridiculed for being over-priced in the eyes of the average person, who boggles at the idea that a random hunk of oddly-shaped metal cost three times what his or her car did to install in a park. Then there are the artists who I feel must be cynically taking advantage of the modern art movement, displaying fecal matter and blood coated with deliberately-obscene images. I can’t know their mind for certain, though, and that’s a hard thing to accept. None of us can ever be 100% sure of the workings of another mind. Usually, not even our own. Nonetheless, almost any modern artist will tell you that there is meaning and emotion behind their work, and I respect that even if I don’t feel the same emotions on my end.
Nor is the concept limited to static art forms. Movies, for instance – some are the movie equivalent of clip-art and napkin scribbles, but others reach down and touch some deep part of many viewers, elicit tears, anger, make us feel things. I linked a speech from “The Great Dictator” a few weeks back that I feel has that kind of impact, but even kids’ movies can carry that added weight for the right watcher – “The Croodz” probably hit a lot of fathers very hard with its window into a dad relating to and taking care of a family in a changing world.
And now we finally reach the meat of this post, music, and it has a completely different slant on ‘intent’ because most of it is, in fact, aural rather than written. What is written? The name of the piece! And there are actually two opposing schools of thought on this idea that you’ve probably never even considered before. They show up most blatantly in classical music, where there are no lyrics to push the intent to the forefront in blazing neon letters.
In classical music, compositions tend to follow one of two naming schemes:
Absolute – The music exists for its own sake, removed from any deliberate symbolism. Usually, ‘absolute’ pieces get a number for a moniker and that’s it. For example, here is Brahms “Symphony No. 3.” A listener could certainly put their own symbolism to it while listening, but it comes with none attached – only the music in a purist form.
Programmatic – The music represents something, and the name often informs the listener and thus affects the ensuing interpretation of the music. Examples include Vivaldi’s “Winter“, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy“, Orff’s “Carmina Burana” and Grieg’s “Morning Mood“. Some of these (especially that last one) have become so firmly attached to their symbolism that hearing them in a movie or show automatically makes most people think of what they represent. Other times, a song isn’t as well-known but the name alone explains everything you need to know, as with “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” (A threnody is a lamentation for the dead). It’s not pleasant to listen to and it’s not supposed to be. But it conveys the artistic intent behind it well enough. The other note I want to bring up here is the concept of ‘leitmotif‘ – pieces of music that play any time a certain character or group of characters is involved, or in the background of a set location. This usage originated in opera but today it is used very heavily in movies and games.
I cheated a bit to put Carmina Burana up there, because to most people, that name means nothing. The music itself is probably still recognizable and tied to some memory from a movie in their past. But this brings up an interesting point, and the first of the quirks I wish to explore in musical artistic intent: Language barriers, and how intent crosses them more effectively than literal meaning does.
The ‘Music of the Day’ link up top is a song entirely in Japanese. Assuming none of you speak it (nor do I), that would seem to reduce it to, at best, pretty-sounding noise. Maybe you pick up a hint of wistfulness from the tone, but probably not much more. Even the name included in the clip is misleading, in fact, because its original name wasalong the lines of ‘The Unstealable Jewel’, referring to something precious that can never be taken away. Now, go here and scroll down to the English translation of the lyrics and skim over them. They read more like poetry than lucid, completed thoughts, but in the context of their source, they make a great deal of sense and make one feel sadness for a person who knows someone important was once in their lives but has vanished… and the person intends to keep looking for them for as long as it takes. A poignant song about loss and determination to keep going despite it. Learning what the lyrics meant, even in a rough fashion, changed my interpretation of the song and more importantly it added an entire new level of enjoyment layered over the initial appreciation of the sounds. I also wanted to note the transfer of intent across languages and cultures. I find it pretty amazing, personally.
Two more quick quirks to touch on – more to inspire a bit of contemplation than anything else – because each person has to decide for him- or herself what they conclude on the matter. If anything at all, because it’s not a black and white thing.
If something doesn’t sound like music, but the artist says that it is music, what is the end result? Experimental composer John Cage’s 4’33”(that’s the actual name of the piece, as well as its duration) was met with controversy for obvious reasons – it is comprised of nothing but silence, or perhaps just the environmental sounds heard during the not-playing-instruments. He considered it his most important work, and viewed it as both the culmination of his view that “any sounds could constitute music” and very likely also as a reflection on Zen Buddaism, which he studied around the same time this piece originated. So… if he intended it as music, and at least some of his audience respected the artistic intent enough to appreciate the statement of the piece… is it music? Is there some platonic definition of true music that could answer such a question (not to my knowledge)? Who decides then, the creator or the interpreter? I’m still not sure, but given the way my mind works, the answer is probably somewhere around ‘both’ with a shade of ‘neither’.
On the other end of the spectrum, what about something that sounds like music to an average listener but is adamantly NOT music according to the creator? The Islamic Call to Prayer sounds very melodic to most Western ears, but is considered ‘elevated speech’, scripture to be recited as beautifully as possible because it is sacred, but not music (different sects have varying levels of strictness on the permissability of music in general, but it is widely accepted that this artful speech is a different art form from music). So then, if the creator of the sound says it is not music, but it sounds like music to the listener, who decides? Is there even an actual ‘decision’, if it sounds like music to your mind, or would rejecting that idea just be a form of denial? This one has the added factor of diplomacy and cultural acceptance involved, because it would be highly offensive to insist that it was music to a devout Muslim who believed that to be an immoral or worldly taint on the recitation of holy words.
So there it is, a wall of words exploring artistic intent and how it can add interesting layers of meaning, of richness and of depth, to various forms of art. And this is really just scratching the surface, but I try to limit these posts to the length of a short novel and no more. Still, if it intrigued anyone who reads this, I hope you spend a little time thinking about this next time a certain bit of music plays during a movie, or you argue with a friend over what a book really meant. I don’t often use words like ‘personally enriching’, but this kind of thing comes close.
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Undertale warning: You may have noticed that I didn’t really dive into games very much in the list of other media mentioned. Beyond the music of the day, and a mention under leitmotif, anyway. Rest assured, I believe games are (or at least, can be) an art, but that too is a whole separate rant. Actually, it may be a whole book. I’ve given a fair bit of thought to writing one eventually. We’ll see if that comes to anything. That said, next time I write a major post (there may be a smaller one of interesting internet things first), I will be writing about UNDERTALE, and the whole game plays very firmly into my views in that area.
To that end, a spoiler warning: IF YOU HAVE NOT PLAYED UNDERTALE AND THERE IS EVEN THE SLIGHTEST, TINIEST CHANCE YOU EVER WILL, SKIP MY NEXT POST. No, really, bookmark it and come back after you’ve played through it. It’s not a long game, even if you’re thorough (and you should be). It is a completely different, far better experience if one goes into it blindly, and I’m going to be spoiling vast swathes of the game in that post. I will also start that post with a warning, as is internet-polite. Two warnings, if you count that it is going to be just full of TvTropes links.
Music of the Day: Just something both relaxing and upbeat. Can you tell I pick the music after writing the post? I needed something happy to listen to after this!
So… here’s the thing. I don’t like talking in-depth about politics, barring very rare, one-on-one discussions with people I trust, like close friends or my mother. Outside of that, I either avoid the conversation or skim lightly over common ground I may share with whoever I’m with at the time. Moreover, I grew up in a relatively conservative household, and statistically people tend to become slightly more politically (or at least fiscally) conservative with age for a variety of reasons. I mention this for reasons of background for the rest of this post.
Finally, I’m a fairly cynical person who has seen enough of the bad parts of humanity that I don’t consider myself much of an idealist when it comes to those in power in any part of the world or period of history. For years my teenage self would say things like “Dan Quayle for president!” and the like, because mostly the government felt like a force of nature more than something you could really influence – you were along for the ride and, at best, you could hope to get some entertainment value out of it, and the occasional point to gripe about among friends. It didn’t seem to matter which party took office, the status quo changed less than either side claimed. The more I learned about the American political system, the less I liked what I heard – the electoral college system being a prime example of its ridiculousness. Lobbying efforts, which could accurately be called political bribery in most cases, only added to the disillusionment.
That’s why it’s weird that, for the first time, I actually genuinely care about this election. I could write a post for each candidate (at least the top handful that are relevant) at least as long as the one I did for Trump. Much longer, for Hillary and Bernie, I’d bet, and I like both of them more than I like Trump. To be fair though, that’s a bar set so low scientists believe it carbon-dates to the Mesozoic era. I kid, I kid! In fact, carbon dating is not very effective in dating most metallic objects.
But I really don’t want to write a bunch of posts about politics. It makes me uncomfortable, even if it’s important to contemplate and research. Plus, it might irritate people I consider friends, and I prefer to do that in person. So instead, I’m going to mash all of those potential posts into a couple bulleted lists here, to get it out of my system, and then write about non-political things for a while because it’s more fun. Apologies in advance if I upset or offend one of the roughly five people whose opinions matter significantly to me! Also apologies for how long this turned out – amusingly, I originally hoped to do a quick post and be done. Silly, silly me. I don’t even have the energy to proofread it now, after finishing.
Without further ado, here are some pluses and minuses for some other candidates:
Hillary:
Better than Trump. I’m sure she’d do an ‘OK’ job at most of the Presidential responsibilities. I just don’t trust her very much, nor do I think she’s particularly likely to change the status quo much. For some, that’s a good thing – probably why she has the majority of the over-65 vote, for example. For others, that’s a solid mark against her. She’s not my favorite, but I can see why others would choose to vote for her. The first point below is also a very important one to many people.
+Lots of experience in politics. Decades in various roles, including Secretary of State. Almost certainly, Hillary is the most experienced politician running for the position on either side of the party line, in fact.
| She is a woman. On the one hand, yes, I’d love to see a woman become president. Certainly in a fair world it would have happened long ago, by simple odds (roughly 50-50, give or take). On the other hand, I don’t want her to become president -just because- she’s a woman; I want her to be more than a symbol. Former (and first female) Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s recent “special place in hell for women who don’t help other women” comment annoyed me and many others (including many women in the Democrat camp, according to comments and interviews I’ve seen about the web), BUT I feel I should say a few things in defense of a woman who is generally well-respected for good reason:
She did apologize for the comment today, saying both that it was the wrong time and context for such a comment and that she did not mean to imply that someone should vote for someone solely based on their gender. She showed her diplomatic tact in dealing with this and I applaud her for it.
It’s hard to imagine for my generation, for whom the idea of a female president isn’t particularly outlandish or hard to imagine, what it must be like for someone like Albright. She has lived through times where women had much, much more limited rights and roles… to see the potential reality for a woman to become the president. That’s powerful emotional stuff, and something a long-time feminist like Albright must feel very passionately about. Given that, I can understand and forgive an impolitic comment on the subject.
-Lots of experience in politics. Will very definitely continue to work within the system that hasn’t done super well by the majority of America lately.
-Really unpleasant campaign and debate tactics, plus blatantly calling in a number of political favors from various groups. I know it’s common political practice. If you haven’t picked it up from the tone of my writing, I am not fond of many common political practices.
-Very apparent lack of authenticity – everything about her feels/looks/sounds manufactured by a committee for mass appeal, and unfortunately for her, she’s been really bad at convincing the younger generation she ‘gets’ them. One of many examples: “Her” (campaign team’s) sad attempts at tweeting “How does your student loan make you feel? Tell us in 3 emoji’s or less.” Really? Speaking as one of the target demographic, this stuff comes across as really condescending pandering. Both Obama and now Sanders have resonated with the younger crowd much better than Hillary, and it’s causing her much grief lately.
The youth thing is especially notable because, this election, Millennials (defined here as those born 1982-2000) finally outnumber Baby Boomers. Now, not all of them can vote yet, or will vote even if they can, but it’s a pretty significant landmark – what this demographic wants may or may not occur this election, but they’ll only become more influential in the next election, and the one after that… and that brings us to Hillary’s opponent.
Sanders:
Okay, first, look at this guy. Just look at him. Does he look like someone likely to draw almost 90% of the under-25 voters in the early caucus events? Or… basically any young people at all? He looks like an angry old man who might live under a bridge and yell at passing clouds, except for the suit. But he has done something no one really expected to happen – he’s given Hillary an actual challenger, and he’s done it by capturing the young voter crowd to an extensive degree.
+He’s extremely genuine – where Hillary seems calculated down to her smile, Bernie comes across as very sincere, very much himself, and I’ve seen little to contradict that – who he is in public appears to be the real Bernie Sanders. Rare in politics, and in general.
+He’s an idealist. He wants change, lots of it, and isn’t deterred by naysayers saying “It’s not possible” or “It’s unfeasible”. As Obama’s “Yes we can” faded into “Maybe we can?”, it’s nice to see a new (old) person with the light in their eyes that says “I still think things can change.”
| He’s a ‘Democratic Socialist’. Okay, look, ‘Socialist’ is apparently a scary word to a lot of people, and many more seem to confuse it with ‘Communist’. Many facets of our society are already socialist in nature, and not just the controversial ones like Medicare, unemployment insurance, or social security (all of which which more than 80% of the country oppose cuts to, across both parties). How about… the existence (not the actual value) of a minimum wage? The mail system? Police and fire departments, roads, libraries, garbage collection and landfills, wars, the pentagon, national defense and the military itself, public schools, prisons/jails, public parks and beaches, national monuments, public snow removal from major streets, public street lighting, the sewer system, most zoos, the Food and Drug Administration, the Peace Corps…? The list goes on for several dozen more significant items, at least. All of these are, in part or whole, socialist by definition. You may not care about some of those, but I’d bet you wouldn’t want to lose most of them no matter who you are, anonymous internet person reading this. The question is not whether the US is a socialist country – we crossed that line long ago – it is only a question of degree.
|He’s old. He’s technically the oldest candidate running, yes, but Hillary’s within 6 years and Trump is within 5 of Sanders. Given the clean bill of health reported by his doctor, I don’t see this as a major issue. Maybe if he runs again in four years? Stress sure hasn’t been kind to Obama during his term.
-He’s overly focused on certain things. Yes, money in politics is bad, wall street should be reigned in, and a lot of changes need to be made to higher education economics. However, during the next four years, the US will still need to deal with the rest of the world. How will Bernie deal with Putin? With the Middle East? This is not his strong suit and he has little to no experience in it. A very significant concern.
-The most valid complaint about the aforementioned socialist thing – where will the money come from for Bernie’s changes? Okay, his health plan thing will probably be cheaper than current insurance costs for families making less than 200k a year (the exact numbers vary by source), but some of his other proposed changes will certainly be tougher to mitigate.
-He is going to face a lot of opposition. There are those that question whether he could accomplish anything with conservatives and even some liberals stopping whatever changes he might try to enact. This will challenge anyone who becomes president, as things are right now, but Bernie is obviously more extreme than the rest.
Ultimately, it comes down to this: I don’t think Bernie will succeed – the system is heavily tilted against him even becoming the Dem. nominee (superdelegates are such a silly thing), and if he somehow did become president despite that, he’d face opposition from factions within his own party, let alone the Republicans. But I -want- him to succeed, and if not him, then someone like him next election. I would rather have someone who will -try- to change things for the better even if it has a small chance of success than someone who has already accepted the inevitability of (or even benefited from) the systems we have today. I’d also be content paying more in taxes if it meant having a functioning medical system I could count on in an emergency instead of legally-enforced long-term gambling against insurance companies that are incentivized to do as little for me as possible. One can dream.
I would just say to ask yourself – do you feel like the way things have been going for the last 20 years, between various presidents and the congress and all, have served you and yours well? Most of the people I talk to on a regular basis have said no. Satisfaction with our government as a whole is reaching new lows. Maybe shaking things up with a riskier and more extreme set of changes isn’t a bad idea. All I know is that, despite significant flaws noted above, Sanders would have the potential to make this the first election where I wanted to vote FOR someone instead of feeling like I was trying to pick the least-bad option available.
Republicans:
To be entirely up-front, I need to do more research on the non-Trump Republican candidates. I don’t feel qualified to comment on them for the most part, but here are a few quick bits:
I don’t really like Ted Cruz – fiscally he’s not awful, but socially he plans to push for a number of things that reflect poorly on him in my eyes, and he’s only marginally less over-the-top on Mexican immigration than Trump – wall included, according to a 2012 comment. He’s also against Net Neutrality, which has been a hot topic for the last couple years and one I personally care about as well. One good thing is he doesn’t care for Common Core in education, which I don’t feel is particularly effective either.
Kasich appears to be better than Cruz, to me, though I still disagree with him on several points. As the Republican candidates go, though, he’s definitely among the most moderate and seems to have demonstrated a willingness to compromise ‘across the aisle’, which is a significant point in his favor.
Carson has said some crazy stuff. Just… yeah.
I feel bad for focusing so much on the ‘big three’ in these two posts, but right now they’re what’s all over the news. I’ll focus in more when the Republican field narrows to a couple definite options. Right now it’s still fairly up in the air.
Final Takeaway:
I don’t envy whoever ultimately wins. I do wish them well and hope that they find a good way to steer a divided and unsatisfied nation into better things, both internally and internationally. If you disagree with anything I’ve said here – good! Having opinions and researching them further is something everyone should do, and I recognize that this isn’t a right-vs-wrong thing (except Trump…). It shouldn’t even be a right-vs-left thing. People have different experiences and different desires from their government and their nation that would lead to them voting for different people. Don’t call someone on the other side an idiot without even trying to understand where they, as a fellow human, might be coming from to be as they are. Name-calling and reducing the ‘other’ to an easily-dismissed group of morons demeans us as a whole and only contributes to the toxic divisiveness that currently runs rampant in American politics. I don’t think that’s done any of us much good, do you?
P.S. Next time I’ll write about video games or music or something, promise! That’s enough serious stuff for a while and enough politics for a much longer while. If you’ve read this far, you deserve a break. Enjoy this picture of a kitten dressed as a fancy pirate.
Music of the Day: Not music at all, but a speech, because I felt it amusing to preface a post about Trump and American politics with one of the most moving appeals to humanity in film. Fair warning – it’s an impassioned speech, so turn down your volume a bit.
As I sit here tonight, occasionally refreshing the tab tracking the Iowa Caucuses, I figure it’s as good a time as any to post something relevant. On the Democrat side there’s a margin of less than 0.1% with 85% of the votes in, between Clinton and Sanders. That’s a tight race, and I think there’s a lot to say about what it means for a more radical character like Sanders to have this much support – especially looking at the extremely strong direct correlation between youth of voters and support for Sanders. Young people are voting more. Depending on who you are, that will either please you or frighten you, but it’s a fact regardless.
But that race isn’t the one I’m watching most closely tonight. Trump appears to have just lost the Republican caucus by several percentage points as I start this post, but I doubt anyone believes that’s the last we’ll see of him. He’ll stay on this hype train as long as he can just for the attention, if nothing else.
So, I want to talk about Trump. Specifically… the things that make him appealing. Whether you agree with him or not, it’s undeniable that he’s pulled together a surprisingly large support base that rivals Sanders’ crowd for passion toward their cause. That passion has been frightening at times, as videos surface of a rather ugly mob mentality that Trump himself encourages at some of his events, but it’s there, and it’s important to know why even if – perhaps especially if – you don’t support him. Odds are? Someone you know does. You should try to understand why, if you hope to discuss it with them. You can’t just go in saying “Trump is disgusting, he’s basically early Hitler!” …even if there are parallels to be drawn there. Even if you’re pretty sure that a world where both Trump and Putin run superpowers is a world about to end with a nice nuclear glow. That’s not how you convince anyone of anything. Do yourself a favor by diving into the head-space of someone who sees Trump as a light in the darkness that is the American political landscape. This post is my attempt to do the same, so feel free to muse along with me.
First, and most obvious, Trump offers something people all over the political spectrum crave – he’s an outsider and he’s blatantly bucking the system. I’d be lying if I said I felt no small satisfaction at watching the Republican National Committee squirm and scrabble to try to get Trump under control. One of many quotes from early on in Trump’s race: ‘“If Donald Trump elbows out Carly Fiorina, for example, that would be a real tragedy for our side,” said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean.’ The Democratic side has had some similar issues with Sanders and the DNC. Viewed by an American public that is largely in a state disillusionment with ‘the government’, these are the ‘Kingmakers’. The people who sit on high and decide who should or shouldn’t be allowed as options for the common people to vote on, usually favoring those who will benefit the political elite most, financially or otherwise. Obviously, it’s a little more complicated than that, but there’s also some truth to it – without the support of these organizations, a candidate’s campaign could easily struggle to get any momentum going at all. They have a scary amount of power over the early stages of the electoral process.
And Trump bucks that. He has his own money, his own brand – he doesn’t need or want the support of the RNC. And that both scares the heck out of them and pulls in masses of voters that are tired of a system that seems rigged in favor of itself and no one else. So that’s point one: He represents beating a system that many people are really, really tired of, in both parties.
Second, Trump offers an appeal to nostalgia, safety, and hope to his supporters. (Admittedly, there’s less ‘hope’ involved if you’re a minority in any fashion, but those groups are pretty clearly not Trump’s target audience.) In a world where it’s extremely common to read online or hear on TV about how America is in decline, or worse, are the bad guys for international military or political actions, is it really surprising that a large number of people are pushing to support a man who says “It isn’t so. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be.” Trump’s ‘Make America great again!’ slogan is a little trite, but it still hits that little twinge for people. The older ones that remember a time (maybe the 50’s? I don’t know.) when America was an unquestioned superpower and, more importantly, the internet didn’t exist yet so it was rare to get any perspective on America’s actions that didn’t come from our own sources. Certainly it was rare to hear America decried as a villain by anyone who wasn’t obviously a radical communist. Obviously.
The younger ones are pulled in by the dream of an America that isn’t falling apart on the inside – whose infrastructure isn’t drastically underfunded; whose healthcare and insurance system aren’t fractured and often dysfunctional; whose social security system and general economy are on shaky ground at best; whose government often seems to run itself with its own interests in mind rather than the people it ostensibly serves; whose education system isn’t struggling along and still lagging behind much of the modern world, or whose most famous stereotype is being ‘fat and dumb’ Americans. It’s hard to blame them for wanting that, isn’t it? Rare is the national populace that doesn’t carry a certain national pride, but in recent years it’s become almost a faux pas to be ‘proud of being American’, and that can sting. So there’s the second point: Trump appeals to a lingering, wounded national pride that never quite died off but became a lot harder to justify in recent years.
If you are making an appeal to a friend or loved one that plans to support trump, you can’t ignore this facet of Trump’s appeal. Don’t ask them to give up that pride, don’t suggest it’s misplaced or misguided. Instead, find ways to quietly but insistently suggest that Trump’s offer is a false one – do they want to be proud of a country that kicked out all the minorities, or the ‘melting pot’ of historical fame? The one that rejects all refugees out of fear of terrorism? Or the one that is willing to face that risk because of the lines on the Statue of Liberty’s tablet? There are things to be proud of, underneath the shabby and faded exterior of American life… or at least, there could be, if we want to work at it.
…and then we come to the third point, and this is both the subtlest and the scariest of Trump’s appeals. Because the third thing Trump offers is a place to lay the blame. It’s no secret that the economy has been rough for the majority of Americans in recent years. The housing market crash didn’t help most of us, either. Students struggle to pay off debt while simultaneously paying into a social security system they’re told won’t last long enough to help them when they get older. The news is full of terrorism threats and school shootings. Unemployment, though improving in some areas at long last, is still a very significant problem and there are a hundred applicants for every opening.
In short, things have been rough, and when things are bad, the first, instinctive reaction of the human brain is to figure out what’s causing it. It feels -good- to blame something, because A: Then you can focus on a specific, tangible target and fight back, hoping to improve the situation and B: Then you know it’s not yourfault. The problem is that we are not particularly picky about where we place the blame, by our nature – the first convenient block that vaguely matches the mental hole gets jammed in there and we don’t have to look any further. Trump is doing that. Half of his speeches, if you boil them down to the very essence, come down to “I know who to blame, and with your support, I can get them back and fix this.” Mexicans and his whole stupid “build a wall and make them pay for it” comment were only the most blatantly ridiculous example.
This one’s tough, because it takes a certain level of self-awareness to recognize this very human reaction. Everyone does it, often without consciously thinking about it – our day to day lives are full of the blame game, because it helps us control our own moods and feelings to a degree. So when it comes to Trump… he’s offering something that most people want, on some level. The problem is, he’s (ironically), not very discriminating in his discrimination. He finds the hot buttons to push and the easy targets and he rolls with them. This makes for a nasty, nasty combination when it meets his aforementioned tendency to deliberately thrash a crowd into an angry mob-mentality. That’s how lynchings happen, folks. There are hungry, destructive fires that we should not feed, burning inside us, and Trump feeds them and then fans the flames downwind and to hell with the damage it does.
This is the scariest thing about Trump… because like every other deal with the devil, he offers something we want and gives it to us in the worst possible way. Whether you are Democrat, Republican, Moderate, or apathetic about politics… I hope you recognize that even if you want the (entirely reasonable) things above – beating a rigged system, feeling okay about feeling okay about America, or just a tangible target that can be isolated and fixed to improve life here… Trump’s way is not the right way. He appeals to a dark, ugly, dangerous part of us that will always be part of humanity, but is the polar opposite of what allows us moments of greatness. It is the part of us that destroys instead of creates, pulls us backwards instead of spurring us forwards, and cuts ties instead of binding new ones between people and between nations.
I’ll keep this one short, since it was mostly just a test to make sure my account still worked. I plan to get back to writing on here sometimes. I know, I’ve said that before, but hey – it’s my digital journal thing, I don’t have to defend myself! 😛
That said, I could use an outlet these days, so I made a resolution to resume blogging this year. The past 1.5 years have been an odd mix of writer’s block and constantly thinking about things I could write about, then losing the motivation once I sat down at the computer. So… here goes! Again!
Oh, and I’m experimenting with themes/site layouts because the old one had such a narrow text column it made long articles wayyyyy too long. I loved the colors but it required a heck of a lot of scrolling.
Under Cerulean Skies 