Fictionalized Me

You go to the grocery store. You are surrounded by food but there is nothing to eat.

It is mealtime. You want to eat. Everything in your refrigerator is made of potatoes.

You search your house with a candle and a feather. In the morning, you throw a paper bag into the fire. Suddenly everything you ate last week belongs to no one.

Elijah the Prophet is invited to your dinner party. You never see him show up, but people swear he drank from his wine cup.

The holidays will never end. In fact, you’ve already started counting toward the next one.

You used to eat green beans. But now someone thinks you may make bread out of green beans, so now you can’t eat green beans.

Day five. You believe you will never again eat anything that doesn’t incorporate potatoes in some way. Rice eaters seem like the luckiest people in the world.

You sing a song in what your ancient book calls ‘poorly-written Aramaic’ about animals devouring each other and being in turn devoured. It is a fun song, the children sing along, stamp along, clap along gleefully. One little goat, one little goat. You are screaming the words now. One goat begins a cycle of disorder and destruction which must ultimately end in the intervention of the Angel of Death and then that of God. You are meddling with forces you cannot possibly comprehend. The old words in the language you cannot speak flow unbidden from your tongue, one little goat, chad gadya. 

Everything around you seems dusty, as if it’s been left in a box for a year and only just taken out. Among the piles of carboard boxes, something is stirring.

- someone puts ketchup on a square, flat piece of bread made of flour and eggs. they put cheese on it and bake it. five uncles show up out of the woodwork to tell them that’s not how it’s done. the person does not care.

- you wonder why tomato products taste different. you start to forget the taste of year-round tomato products.

- Krispy O’s crumbs are everywhere

“No one knew!” has been repeatedly disputed and disproven, to the point where the mass narrative of it has become terribly indicative of people’s need to dispel feelings of guilt and shame above all else. Even above telling the truth.

Im p sure the original narrative of “no one knew!” was in part the result of low-level German and Polish bureaucrats seeking to avoid arrest and prosecution, because there was a dearth of specific written orders in regards to outlining the machinations of The Final Solution. Which allowed many to claim ignorance and innocence. But it also has been useful in the reimagining of the allies role in the Holocaust, reimagining their complicit silence and inaction into the shock and disgust of witnesses and good liberators.

Because people DID know. Jan Karski infiltrated the Warsaw ghetto before it was liquidated and witnessed firsthand exactly what was happening to the Jewish people. He was sent by the Polish Underground to the UK carrying a message for the UN titled “The Mass Extermination of the Jews in German Occupied Poland.” He had a direct audience with Roosevelt, where he attempted to provide details of what was happening to compel the allied forces to act before it was too late. This was in 42-43.

In 1944, the New York Times published a story about the Warsaw ghetto uprising WHILE IT WAS HAPPENING. This wasn’t a mystery in the states. People knew about the forced ghettoization of the Polish Jews and what they faced as they fought back.

Lanzmann’s Shoah presents several interviews with Polish onlookers outside of Treblinka who, in laughing and awkward remembrance, explained how they would slash their fingers across their throats at Jewish people arriving in cattle cars to “warn them about their fate.” This was in the early period of the Holocaust, before the mechanized, mass exterminations of Auschwitz.

Also in Shoah, several Polish women and men in villages outside of Sobibor (who smilingly explain that their lot in life improved after the local Jews were rounded up and transported to the death camp) acknowledged that yes, at the time, they knew of the fate of their neighbors. They knew they were going to their death and would not be returning. Which is the only way we can explain how quickly Jewish homes and businesses were taken over by their neighbors and city councils.

“The big ghettos, such as Warsaw, took on a kind of colonial appearance, as rickshaws replaced automobiles (stolen by Germans) and the streetcar service (restricted by Germans). The luster of subjugation attracted German tourists, who often returned home with a pleasant sense of imperial mastery.”

Snyder points to Elisabeth Harvey’s “Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization” for more details about early/prepatory elements of the Holocaust as a purposefully tourist-accessible spectacle.

From the beginning, the Holocaust was driven by publicly visible violence and deprivation, and often was deliberately made as visible as possible because it served as propaganda to a huge cohort of Germans who actively supported the Nazi regime’s actions and in many cases specifically participated in them.

The next morning the “scrubbing parties” began. Members of the Austrian SA [the Nazi paramilitary], working from lists, from personal knowledge, and from the knowledge of passerby, identified Jews and forced them to kneel and clean the streets with brushes This was a ritual humiliation. Jews, often doctors and lawyers or other professionals, were suddenly on their knees performing the menial labor in front of jeering crowds. Ernest Pollak remembered the spectacle of the “scrubbing parties” as “amusement for the Austrian population.” A journalist described the “fluffy Viennese blondes, fighting on another to get closer to the elevating spectacle of the ashen-faced Jewish surgeon on hands and knees before a half dozen young hooligans with Swastika armlets and dog-whips.”

Admittedly, that’s from the Anschluss period, which usually is framed as preparation for rather than the enactment of the Holocaust. That said, Snyder lays out the clear historical case that from those kinds of specifically public humiliations to later attempts to incite pogroms in conquered territory emerged the ideas of ghettoizing, then starving, and ultimately systematically killing Jews.

Hey Guys! So Marvel is out of control. The fact that they gave this asshole a voice to turn Steve Rogers into a Nazi is horrifying. It’s also worth noting that he’s the asshole behind the whole “M-Word” thing from Uncanny Avengers. 

and now, they’re having Magneto team up with Hydra. No, shut up, I DON’T CARE if it’s just a media plug it is horrifying and I am disgusted. There is no reason to even tiptoe around it, this is wrong and it needs to stop. 

SO HERE’S SOME CONTACT INFO FOR MARVEL. Please write letters, e-mails, tweets, call if you’re able because fuck you, Marvel. Tell Marvel This Is Not Okay.

You Can Use This Form to submit feedback through the Marvel Site

And here through the Disney site

Call the “General Help” Phone Number at 212-576-4000.

Axel Alonso, Editor in Chief at Marvel: [email protected]

Spidey office: [email protected]

****X office: [email protected]

****Heroes office: [email protected]

Hulk, Ultimate & All Ages office: [email protected]

[email protected]

Media Relations V.P. through Dan Klores Communications: [email protected] 

Send letters to the Corporate Headquarters:  Marvel Entertainment, LLC 135 W. 50th Street New York, NY 10020

President Dan Buckley: [email protected]

Twitter: @JoeQuesada, @AxelAlonsoMarv, @StanLee, 

This is the number listed for Isaac Perlmutter, senior executive of Marvel, who immigrated from Israel : 1-212-576-4000

The last time Spencer pulled this crap, I commented to a friend on twitter I was disappointed by some of the supportive things a much beloved (by fandom) writer had said to him. I referred to her only by her initials, didn’t @ her, but within minutes she was quote tweeting me, full of ‘how dare you’ fury.

me:

Unlike The Last Airbender, Prince of Persia, Ghost in the Shell, Gods of Egypt, and Doctor Strange, The Great Wall is not inserting a white actor into a role meant for a non-white actor. This is an original story by Chinese director Zhang Yimou (famous for Hero and House of Flying Daggers), filmed in Qingdao, China, and featuring one of the largest Chinese casts ever.

Did you only see Matt Damon in advertising? That’s because the Chinese people involved with the film know that Americans will recognize an American actor. This is targeted marketing. If you actually look at the cast, Damon co-stars with Chinese actors Andy Lau, Jing Tian, Han Lu, and more.

The Chinese film industry is trying to break into the American market by featuring a prominent American actor. Don’t boycott The Great Wall for attempting to appeal to American audiences. Matt Damon’s entire purpose is to lure Americans into the theater for Jason Bourne and expose them to Chinese actors already well known in China.

A similar example to The Great Wall is the upcoming action-comedy film Skiptrace starring Jackie Chan and Johnny Knoxville. A Chinese actor and a white actor are co-starring and the film involves a road trip from Mongolia to Hong Kong. If you’re still displeased with Matt Damon, go see that.

College costs:

Bernie:  Free.  Hillary:  Significantly cheaper than currently, free for those who need it.  Trump:  Defrauded poor and working class people for 10s of thousands of dollars of tuition.

Minimum wage:

Bernie: 15   Hillary:  12-15  Trump:  Imported undocumented workers and underpaid them to work on his projects.  Currently makes his clothing line in China for tiny wages.

Foreign wars:  Bernie:  Probably not.  Hillary:  As prudent.  Trump:  NUCLEAR FUCKING PROLIFERATION!!! NOW!!!

Immigration:  Hillary and Bernie:  Path to citizenship.  Trump:  THROW THEM OUT! BUILD A WALL!

Taxes:  Bernie:  Deep tax increases on the wealthy (and middle class).  Hillary:  Some tax increases on the wealthy.  Trump:  Cut’em.  Cut’em all!

Racism:  Bernie:  Solving income inequality will solve racism.  Hillary:  we need a good plan to increase opportunities to minorities beyond solving income inequality.  Trump:  Yeah, dun care.

Sexism:  Bernie:  Solving income inequality will solve sexism.  Hillary:  Full support of all equal rights issues.  Trump:  Ladies, all your vag are belong to me (no fatties).

Gun control:  Bernie:  Mayyyyyybbbie, if you convince me hard enough.  Hillary:  Yep.  Trump:  Shoot’em if you gott’em.

HILLARY.  GOD I LOVE HER SO THANK YOU FOR GIVING ME THE CHANCE TO TALK ABOUT HER.  

I must confess that some of my love for Hillary Clinton is borne out of a feeling of protectiveness, because she gets so much shit for stuff that is either a) untrue or b) so blatantly rooted in misogyny it’s amazing people think it’s okay to say out loud.

But before I get into why I love her, I want to take a minute to address the common criticisms thrown her way.

1) She’s too conservative.

Well, first of all, when she was a senator she voted with tumblr’s beloved Bernie 93% of the time.  Second of all, when she was First Lady she spearheaded an attempt to pass Universal Healthcare, something that is still seen as a progressive dream in the US over two decades later.  In fact, the main criticism of her as a First Lady was that she was *too liberal* and *too idealistic.*  She took an absolutely brutal beating from all sides in her eight years as First Lady, so when she ran for public office she recalibrated (only slightly, because again, her differences with Sanders are pretty negligible) and having learned her lesson from the backlash to her attempt at healthcare reform, she moved towards more incremental policies.  She still supports raising the minimum wage, criminal justice reform, gun control, paid family leave, and the right for all women to decide when (or if) they want to have children.

Considering the fact that the Republican Party wants to dismantle banking regulations, overturn the legalization of gay marriage, ban abortion, and keep “conversion therapy” legal, I think she’s got a long, long, long way to go before she’s anything resembling conservative.

2) She gave speeches at Goldman Sachs and therefore must be incredibly corrupt.

Except giving these sorts of speeches is very common amongst the political elite and the fact that she spoke to Goldman Sachs does not mean she’s somehow beholden to them any more than the fact that her speech the American Association of Travel Agents means she will ban price comparison websites for travel.  She got paid– very well– because that is how you make money when you’ve reached her level of politics.  You don’t have to like it, but it’s how things work right now.  Acting like this is a unique flaw for Clinton is disingenuous at best. 

3) There’s just something about her– she’s untrustworthy.  She has to be hiding something.

This one is the most infuriating, because Hillary has been in the public eye on a national level since 1992.  Republicans have spent thousands upon thousands of hours investigating her for various supposed wrong doings, and they have discovered…that her husband had an affair with an intern and she had a slightly-shady email account.

That’s it.  Whitewater, Benghazi, all of it– it’s a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  If she really was the criminal that the Republicans (and some Bernie Bros) imagine, she’s a goddamn supervillian because her life has been under a fucking microscope for a quarter of a century.  The “Hillary is untrustworthy” narrative arose out of the GOP’s completely unhinged need to hate her for everything, so every time a liberal repeats that disproven canard remember that you just made Rush Limbaugh smile.  (And if you do, I hope you can live with yourself).

In fact, Politifact rated her public statements as true, mostly true, or half true (she is a politician, after all) 72% of the time.  For comparison, Barack Obama is at 75%, and tumblr’s darling Grandpa Bernie comes in at a whopping…72%.  And her percentage of statements rated straight out true is 23%, while Bernie’s percentage of true statements stands at all of 13%.  

That’s right, motherfuckers: she tells the straight out truth more often than Bernie, but yet people cling to this “she’s a liar” narrative because it gives them an excuse to dislike her.  

And why do they dislike her?  Well, consider the fact that her approval ratings go down whenever she runs for office, only to rise again once she has the job.  Oddly enough, the American people like her when she is doing her job, only to turn on her rather violently when she dares to reveal even the tiniest sliver of ambition.  Go ahead, look at that and tell me that this need to dislike her is not rooted in an ingrained bias against women with ambition.  I dare you.

But now let’s move onto why I like her.

I like her because Hillary is fucking smart.  

Her policy proposals are interconnected, because she understands that raising the minimum wage will help single mothers, and that tackling substance abuse in the US cannot be done without criminal justice reform.  She knows that racial issues in the United States are a symptom of a larger problem that penalizes people of color and is committed to multifaceted solution that takes into account the fact that poverty and racism are interconnected and you can’t fix one problem without addressing the other.

I like her because Hillary is tough.

I don’t mean “tough” in the macho sense of the word.  I mean she has been a walking target for the GOP for twenty five fucking years, and she hasn’t folded.  Every single thing she wears, haircut she gets, and food she eats gets scrutinized and more often than not, mocked.  I personally wilt under moderately-severe criticism and I am in awe of her ability to face down people who think she should be hung for treason with hardly a wince.

 I like her because Hillary gets shit done.

She’s a dedicated public servant who took a bruising primary loss in 2008 in stride and accepted a position in Obama’s cabinet, and her approval ratings as Secretary of State were almost unbelievably high. And here’s where my protectiveness of her comes in:  Hillary has proven herself over and over again to be qualified, competent, and dedicated.  People who have met her consistently describe her as a kind, thoughtful person, and as someone who has heard her speak in person I can say that she is an engaging, inspiring speaker.  And yet people keep complaining that she’s boring, or awkward, or lacking an element of charisma that can’t be defined. 

You know what I think? I think Hillary is the proverbial hall monitor running for student body president.  She knows the principal and all the teachers, she knows exactly what policy changes are possible and how to go about getting them made. She’s done her homework, researched her positions, and diligently laid out her case for why she deserves the position.

And then the fun stoner from the art department walks up to the podium, announces that he will make the cafeteria serve pizza every day, and walks away to thunderous applause.  Never mind the fact that lunch menus are dictated by federal policy and there is absolutely no way for one student to change that.  Never mind the fact that it’s only one half thought out policy that won’t really, truly change the way the school is run.  It sounds good, so people start looking for reasons to dislike her and justify why they won’t vote for her.  They know she’d be great at the job, but…she wants it too much.  And when the stoner is legitimately defeated, some of his worst supporters decide to vote for the racist jackass who punches kids with disabilities and drives a pick up truck with Confederate flags all over it instead (or write in something clever, like Seymour Buttz) because they really, truly can’t handle the fact that a woman might not just be qualified for a powerful position, but that she actually has the audacity to want it.

Did that last paragraph sound a little personal to you?  Good. It should.  I was that hall monitor (and eventually student body president, although there was no stoner opponent and while my high school had it’s fair share of racist jackasses, none of them bothered with student government).  I know, on a very tiny scale, the garbage truck of crap that comes with being a woman who takes a leadership role.  Navigating that is difficult, but Hillary has been doing it for decades without breaking a sweat.

I am also a woman who has agonized over every goddamn word in this response because I know that by being a woman with an opinion on the internet, I’m running the risk of getting an absolute avalanche of shit dumped on me.  So I carefully chose every link to support my argument because if there’s even one tiny flaw in my logic, every single thing I said will be entirely discounted.  Women don’t ever get to be good enough– we have to be perfect, or there’s no point in trying.

And there’s no doubt about it– Hillary is not a perfect candidate.  She has positions I disagree with, but then again, so does Obama.  There’s plenty of legitimate criticism out there, but so much of it is wrapped in this misogynistic bullshit that boils down to “she’s not behaving the way I want a woman to behave” that it’s nigh impossible to separate the two.

But honestly, if someone reading this still isn’t convinced:

You don’t have to like her, you just have to vote for her.  Chances are, you’re never going to actually meet her, and if you do, it’ll be a handshake on a rope line and nothing else.  She’s not your mom, your cranky aunt, or your mean fifth grade teacher.  She’s not going to be your boss or your neighbor.  She’s running for President of the fucking United States.  And the alternative– and make no mistake, my friends, there’s only one alternative outcome here– is a misogynistic, racist windbag who brags about his desire to bar entry to this country based on ethnicity and religion.  He openly idolizes brutal dictators and lashes out like a toddler up past his bedtime when he’s challenged even the slightest bit.  He is an unhinged maniac who should not be in charge of running a gas station, much less the country, but those are your choices.

A competent, smart, thoughtful, dedicated public servant.

Or this motherfucker. 

So yeah.

ilysm: i love you so much