Idair's Children

Between when Theamh and Aine get into the Cretid Nation and when Theamh gets herself captured at Greenhaven, so much of the plot of Another Country is about police brutality, protesting, and riots. All of this was based on the Rodney King beating and its aftermath, which happened in 1991 (Another Country was started, I think, sometime around 1998). And it’s the hardest part of the series for me to reread, because I just get mad at myself for how I handled all of it. 

This time around I’ve been trying to be kinder to myself and remember that it was the 1990s and that I was doing work that had to be done so that I could be less stupid in the future. I can see now that one of the things that this section of Another Country did was allow me to work through my own white fragility in a way that wouldn’t hurt people. Theamh has all kinds of culture shock when she gets to the Cretid Nation and spends a lot of time desperately trying to process it fast enough to avoid alienating all the people trying to help her. She’s often not good at it, and Kwenu, Tyrna, and Lara are all really much too patient with her. 

Aine’s vision of Rett Deacon’s murder starts a process which eventually turns into a full-blown riot not unlike what is going on in a lot of American cities right now; and then after Aine and Istria bust Theamh out of Greenhaven they head over the border, leaving the South Corner to burn. Tyrna tells them to go, citing the fact that Theamh is in no shape to fight. Looking back on it now I prefer to understand Tyrna’s dismissal as strategic rather than compassionate. Theamh and Aine are loose cannons whose defiance keeps provoking the state, whose retaliatory violence rebounds not on them but on Tyrna and the people she serves. Of course Tyrna wants them to go home.

So as I have said before, I’m not an outliner. When first writing something, I typically don’t see more than a couple moves ahead in terms of plotting. I can go back later and tie things together better (and TC benefits from multiple revisions over time, including the post-Better To Burn revision in which I retconned what was necessary to retcon about Keanrih’s backstory); but often subplots and whatnot emerge more or less spontaneously. What I am, though I say it myself, good at is taking these unexpected plot points and weaving them into the rich tapestry so that you eventually get a good payoff from them. Mielen’s pregnancy is a perfect example of that. Initially Mielen was introduced, mainly, for character development and exposition; because she and Theamh are old friends, we find out some more about Theamh’s life before the Order through her, and we also get to find out more about Lilea’s extraordinary abilities (which are less flashy and easy to demonstrate than Theamh’s). And of course she’s important as one of the dots that Theamh connects as she realizes that all the mothers this is happening to are apparently wealthy. But the dinner party chapters reward you for slogging through all that with the epic scene of Mielen’s mother Geraine calling scrainnte on Delth in the middle of Ulnach’s dinner party.

When I first wrote this I was mainly interested in the possibiltiies of this dramatic eruption of the real social through the veneer of fake sociality created by the dinner party. Geraine asks her friends to act like a community instead of just a club, and for everyone there who understands the value of community--a group which now includes Theamh, because she’s in the Order--the collective failure to come through for Geraine is sickening and shameful. Ulnach and the rest of the guests, however, care more about preserving politeness and manners and a kind of sinister solidarity according to which people with money each agree to pretend that the others are virtuous. 

Now, of course, it is not lost on me that scrainnte is used, the only two times we really see it being used in WOF, to do exactly what the #metoo movement tried to do: to create accountability for men who engage in sexual behavior which is obviously harmful but which is difficult to address legally. In the case of Istria’s father, of course, he’s violating a direct commandment from Idair and also breaking the law; but Varen won’t allow the law into her house, so Istria turns to scrainnte because that’s accessible to her and the law isn’t. But with Delth, it would obviously be very difficult to prosecute him. Mindforcing is illegal, but difficult to prove especially months after the fact. Because it was the result of mindforcing, Delth’s rape of Mielen involved no violence and she did not openly resist him, which means there’s no material evidence that she didn’t consent. However, everyone in Theamh’s culture understands that people can be mindforced into having sex and that this is wrong; and scrainnte is a tool that communities use to deal with bad actors whose crimes are widely known but who can’t be legally punished. 

All of which makes Ulnach’s refusal to hear Geraine even more despicable. Geraine appeals to her as a woman and a mother--”If it were your daughter you would do the same”--but Ulnach is only thinking about how much she wants this disruption to end. She’s so worried about maintaining her social position, so afraid of being unmasked as “country”--like Geraine, she’s the first in her line to get ‘off the dirt’--that she turns on her best friend. Mielen grew up with Theamh and Theamh was at one point affianced to Geraine’s son Edraw. This is an important friendship that Ulnach has blown up here. But of course she blames Theamh, the “walking social catastrophe,” for accidentally introducing this ugly truth into her world instead of herself for betraying a true and sustaining relationship for the fool’s gold of popularity. 

At the end of that chapter, Theamh and Aine have this conversation:

“These are your people?” she demanded. “This is where you come from?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Your father trades with na Fir mac Lir and your mother won’t answer a townswoman,” she said. “Your people are blaspheming, exploiting, self-gratifying cowards with no sense of compassion or community.”

“Well, you didn’t catch them at their best.”

“That’s what you brought me there to learn.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way, but...”

“This is what wealth does to people.”

“In my experience, yes.”

She stood in thought for a moment.

“Dhiaoc?”

“Yes, Aine?”

“Were you a foster-child?”

I smiled, not without sadness. “No, Aine. I have Athi’s coloring and Mathi’s face. I’m theirs all right.”

There is just...so much Old School Lesbian trauma packed into this sequence. Theamh’s religion refusing to acknowledge her relationship with Istria and excluding her from the service (or trying). The estrangement from her family, which her mother also doesn’t want to really acknowledge. The drama and danger of Ilwath being outed to her father. Parental attempts to ‘cure’ things that don’t in fact need to be cured. And Theamh is there as the mentor I never had, helping Owdan try to adjust. That moment where she looks around the house and says, well, this is going to be OK...”He loved her; and he’d learn.” That really is the story...most of the time. Not always. 

Also: Check out Ulnach trying to make Theamh shrimarbh, and this apparently a Regular Thing! Later events will cast a different light on this; Ulnach has private and specific reasons for believing that Theamh is putting herself on a certain path to destruction by being a shriia, and from Darkness Bright it’s clear that she believes that going shrimarbh woudl be the only way for Theamh to stay alive long term. But...damn. 

I had a conversation with Mrs. P about half an hour ago regarding the attitude toward antidepressants that is on view in this part of the plot. Essentially, it hasn’t really changed: antidepressants work well for some people, but I don’t think they would help me. I already knew people who were on Prozac when I wrote this chapter; in fact, if memory serves, I had just started talk therapy for the first time. I have clear memories of writing the whole Welbin episode in my parents’ house in Maine, after a conversation with my mother in which, fortified by the work I had done in therapy thus far, I was able to see the springs and mechanisms that were moving that conversation in a way I never had before.

First of all, siuilin sets things up so that people who come to consult the shriia have zero privacy, something about which Theamh could definitely stand to be more sensitive. Owdan, Ilwath’s as-yet-unnamed father, gets into it with her and she winds up really going after him in front of other people, and her embarrassign him like that undoubtedly contributes to his taking Ilwath to see the medicals (an idea she actually gives him). So she is partly responsible for what happens to Ilwath later. She switches to sending with Kitth when she realizes what’s going on, but she’s not consistent about it. 

Also, I don’t think Theamh really gets how unusual she is, as a shriia. Like, she knows people think she’s weird, but she doesn’t understand the full extent of it. She really sees it as part of her job to reveal her own truth during these readings, which is not something any of the shriias who trained her typically do. So she makes herself much more vulnerable to these communities than is normal, and that has pluses and minuses.

It’s been a while since I read the story of Sincil and Anron’s wedding. It really brought back my memories of going to all those straight weddings in the 1990s--alone, because Mrs. P made a point of refusing to go to a lot of them--and watching everyone enjoy what we could (we thought) never have. Although Sincil and Anron are techincally a straight couple, they have kind of a queer wedding: improvisational, personalized, focused on the couple’s own vows (made up on the spot). I also kind of enjoyed, in a new way, Idair’s exasperation with both of them. Idair isn’t out to herself; but she says to them at one point, “you don’t know the difference between love and shame?” She shows them why they don’t have to feel ashamed before she’s willing or ready to show that to herself. 

[strumming]

CONN:

Today is gonna be the day that they’re gonna let him off the hook.

Their eyes are open to the lies and they realize that he’s a crook.

You don’t believe that anyone can turn away the truth

But they do now.

Don’t cry, don’t tell me you’re surprised that some politicians let you down.

I hoped for better from these dopes cause I’d rather try to swim than drown.

I don’t believe that right and hope can ever really lose

Not even now

Maybe

They think they’ll be the ones to save him

That after all

They’re his wonderwall

But all the paths they’ll walk today are burning

With every oath that breaks the tide is turning

They don’t believe it, but these awful things they say and do

Help to bring him down

These craven

Hacks won’t be the ones to save him

Cause no one at all

Stops a tyrant’s fall

Today is gonna be the day that they’re gonna throw it back to you.

It’s true, I think you always knew they were never gonna get this through.

You had three million people out the day he said I do.

So where are they now?

I know the road that gets you there is winding.

And every time you fail the tears are blinding.

I really wish they could have taken care of this for you

But they don’t know how

So maybe

You save each other like you saved me

And you can all

Be your wonderwall

Maybe

You’re gonna be the ones that save here

All for one for all

You’re your wonderwall

PLAIDDER: Goodbye, Conn. Thanks for everything.

CONN: Safe home.

PLAIDDER: Ethir, last night I saw Just Mercy, a film based on a real-life case in which a young lawyer named Bryan Stevenson devoted years of his life to obtaining a new trial for an innocent man who was framed by corrupt racist cops for a crime he didn’t commit, prosecuted for that crime by a corrupt racist DA, and given a bonus death sentence by a corrupt racist judge. Unlike most real-life stories in which underfunded young lawyers take on entire power structures, this one actually has a happy ending, and an innocent man who’s spent six years on death row for no good reason is eventually returned to his family. I think you should get a bucket of popcorn and some caffeine-free soda and go watch this movie. You will enjoy it.

ETHIR: But--

PLAIDDER:  I want you to go watch that movie, and then I want you to come back here. And then, when I tell you that Alan Dershowitz got famous in the 1980s for finding a way to get the conviction of a European billionaire who most likely murdered his diabetic wife thrown out and get him a new trial at which he was acquitted based on problems with handling of the evidence, and then gave a dinner party to celebrate which Alan Dershowitz attended and wrote about in his book Reversal Of Fortune which by the way was made into a TV movie in 1990 which I actually to my everlasting shame saw--when I tell you all this, and then tell you that Alan Dershowitz thinks that makes him Bryan fucking Stevenson, you will fully understand my rage. 

ETHIR: All right.

PLAIDDER: In the meantime, can we not talk about how Alan Dershowitz’s narcissism has set fire to the last shreds of our Constitution?

CONN: But that’s exactly what I’m most hopeful about.

PLAIDDER: That...BLOWHARD forgot that he’s not in a damn trial court where the worst he could do to the world is set one rich and guilty asshole free. To satisfy his insatiable fucking ego, that man just burned down the rule of law.

CONN: No, he didn’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He’s actually made things better.

PLAIDDER: This oughta be good.

CONN: All along we’ve been talking about that moment when everyone stops pretending. The moment when people just drop the mask for good and all and they just stop caring about whether people see their atrocities or not. We talked about that in July when that Congressional delegation went to see the detention camps at the border. You must have a clip of that somewhere.

PLAIDDER: OK, I found it:

CONN: Their lack of fear, that’s the worst sign. The fact that they don’t fear exposure. The fact that they’re not worried about the rest of the world finding out what they’ve done. Because that tells you that they know they’re protected. And that means they have no reason to stop. Not just that. They have no reason not to make it worse. No reason not to invent new indignities. No reason not to entertain themselves with making more misery.

PLAIDDER: That’s something I’ve always been afraid of. The moment when the state decides it doesn’t have to pretend any more. Theamh is afraid of that moment too–you know–on the magical side. That’s why that battle at Slieve was so important. It forced the corrupt government to go on pretending for a while. As long as they were pretending, there were certain limits to what they were able to do. Theamh and everyone else worked so hard to keep those limits in place.

CONN: You’re right to be afraid of that moment.  

CONN: And you’re afraid that this moment has now come.

PLAIDDER: It has. This is it. 53 Republican Senators--

CONN: Fifty-two--

PLAIDDER: Conn, you are on my LAST NERVE tonight. Fifty-two Republican Senators are about to vote to endorse the idea that the President can rig an election and nobody can do a thing about it.

CONN: No. They won’t be. Because Dershowitz and friends have already retracted that argument.

PLAIDDER: They can’t retract it now. Fox News has a hold of it. The Republican Senators have a hold of it. It’s out there and it’s going to become the new normal.

CONN: You’re not listening to me. THEY WALKED IT BACK. They realized they HAD to walk it back. Because 53 Republican Senators are not ready for this moment.

PLAIDDER: I bet 51 of them are.

CONN: No. That...circus act...that your President calls a legal team has withdrawn that defense because they now realize that these Republican Senators still want to pretend. And where there’s pretense, there’s hope.

PLAIDDER: Yeah, well I just refreshed the WaPo page and we lost Lamar Alexander, so I’m gonna go scream into the night now.

CONN: There’s still--

PLAIDDER: Don’t you get it? These assholes have got together and worked out exactly how it’s going to go down and what will happen is that they will let Collins, Murkowski and Romney vote for witnesses so there’s a 50-50 tie and then Roberts will refuse to cast the tiebreaking vote and there will be no witnesses and the whole thing will be over tomorrow. These people are not taking a stand, they are saving face in the most weaselly way possible. 

CONN: But surely you realize that it doesn’t matter any more whether they call witnesses or not.

PLAIDDER: I DO NOT realize that.

CONN: They don’t have to make Bolton testify. As soon as Alan Dershowitz made that argument, he admitted that your President has done everything he’s been accused of. Everyone saw that, everyone knows that. Anyone who will ever be willing to vote for removal will vote for removal now. And the people who will never be willing to vote for removal will never be convinced no matter how many witnesses you call.

PLAIDDER: So this is it. He gets acquitted. And I SWEAR TO GOD if you say “not yet” ONE MORE TIME--

CONN: All right, I won’t say it.

PLAIDDER: You won’t?

CONN: No. I won’t. Acquittal is what you always expected. That’s is what you always knew was probably going to happen.

PLAIDDER: BUT YOU TOLD ME NOT YET!!!

CONN: MAKE UP YOUR MIND! Or let me go back into the void! I never asked to be dragged out here to this horrible place.

PLAIDDER: Yeah, I’m not gonna watch any more of my favorite characters go through the door to oblivion tonight, friend.

CONN: 67 votes for removal was always an unrealistic threshold. It’s never been done before, I understand.

PLAIDDER: No.

CONN: Trust me when I say this, friend. They overreached. That always has consequences.

PLAIDDER: How can they overreach when they are about to take a vote that will ensure that their party will always have unlimited power?

CONN: That’s not what that vote is going to ensure.

PLAIDDER: Then what will it ensure?

CONN: That your president never gets a second term. And neither will many of them. 

PLAIDDER: Why should I believe you?

CONN: Look at what the Democrats in Congress have been able to do. They dragged that mac na mhada to the brink of removal. Where is your appreciation for Adam Schiff, who got up there day after day and told the actual truth?

PLAIDDER: You mean the “you know you can’t” speech.

CONN: Yes. That and many others. Because the thing is: they DO know they can’t. They definitely know that now. 

PLAIDDER: What does it matter? They will never cross him.

ETHIR: Hey, I’m back.

PLAIDDER: So you see what I mean about Alan Dershowitz.

ETHIR: Actually I saw something totally different.

PLAIDDER: What?

ETHIR: You know that scene where Ralph Myers takes the stand at that hearing and he tells everyone that he lied at that first trial?

PLAIDDER: Yes.

ETHIR: And he’s scared to do it. But once he does it, you can see the whole man come back to life. He’s told the truth and now no matter what happens to him, he doesn’t care, because he’s alive now. I mean you wrote our story but you spend all your time on the shriias, you’ve never really thought about how ordinary people experience the truth. I will tell you, I’ve seen a lot of people lie in court and I’ve seen a lot of people tell the truth and there is no comparison. Telling the truth is magic for us too. It’s...it’s being alive.

PLAIDDER: Anthony Scaramucci, of all people, has said as much.

ETHIR: I wish Theamh could have seen Slythe during the trial. She would have been so proud of her. Still an ordinary woman, but once she caught a hold of the truth again she never let it go. She understood it better than I can explain it. You could see it when you looked at her. I think she knew there was a good chance they would kill her. But it was worth it to her, just for that feeling of being alive. Humans are humans. They need joy. They need to feel alive. 

PLAIDDER: How are you making me cry when I don’t believe EITHER of you?

CONN: It’s like your Nancy Pelosi always says. Patience and time.

PLAIDDER: That was Kutuzov in War and Peace.

CONN: Well she doesn’t say it. But she knows it. She dragged this process out as long as she could safely drag it and what can be exposed has been exposed. Whatever happens tomorrow, you got more out of this than anyone expected. Be mindful of that. And just...be all right. All right?

PLAIDDER: All right. I guess this will be our last episode.

CONN: Maybe not y--

ETHIR: I suppose your...viewers...won’t necessarily know about Slythe’s trial. 

PLAIDDER: A brief summary might be helpful.

ETHIR: She had been accused of practicing dark magic. Her trial was intended to function as cover for the people who were really responsible for corrupting the Order. To make sure nothing went wrong, the Seat voted to change the rules so that magic users could sit on the jury--which we normally don’t allow, for reasons you know, and which your readers don’t care about. This way, they could put enough corrupt people on the jury to ensure a guilty verdict and everything that entailed. 

PLAIDDER: You sound kind of stiff, Ethir. Are you OK? Is it just that I haven’t written you for a while?

ETHIR: Take how Conn feels right now and double that and that’s how bad it feels to me to talk about any of this.

PLAIDDER: I appreciate your being here. So.

ETHIR: Well, I knew the game was rigged. I’m not stupid. But I just thought--I mean their case was terrible. It’s hard enough to get a conviction in a dark magic case even when the defendant’s guilty. And Slythe, you know, she wasn’t like Theamh, she didn’t make enemies. Excuse--

PLAIDDER: I won’t take it personally.

ETHIR: Everyone who knew Slythe at all liked her. And then the way she stood up and denounced them all during the debate--you know--she was riding high, in terms of the ordinary people, she became a very popular figure. So much easier to love than Morat. I thought, I’m a good lawyer and a good speaker and if I just do my job well enough then they’ll just HAVE to acquit her. They’ll realize it’ll be worse in the long run if they don’t. And anyway, she’s my client, she’s a thurking hero already, and a good defense is about the only thing anyone can give her right now that matters. So I went out there and I crushed it. I did, don’t laugh--

PLAIDDER: I know you did, Ethir.

ETHIR: There were more spectators in the courtroom every day. The Cretid repeaters showed up with their cameras. I was RIVETING. Every time I looked over at the finders’ box the ordinary people were just radiating empathy for her. Those dark-hearted bitches sitting amongst them were a different story, but I thought, you know, they have to deliberate before they find. They won’t want to have to show their hand. I suppose they could mindforce the other finders but still, public sentiment--

PLAIDDER: Can we wrap up the summary? Ethir?

ETHIR: Well you know damn well we never got to deliberations. They saw what I was doing and they knew how it was going and they knew they were losing public support. I’d been thinking all along, either they convict and there’s a rebellion, or they acquit because they don’t want that. And they came up with a third option that had never occurred to me.

PLAIDDER: Which was to stage Slythe’s suicide.

ETHIR: Why did you kill her? WHY?

PLAIDDER: I’m sorry, Ethir--

ETHIR: And not even for dramatic effect. She’s just a--a footnote--

PLAIDDER: No. That’s not fair. We don’t see her death but we feel it. It was a war, Ethir. Someone had to die. And given that you fall in love with every shriia you meet, it was probably going to have to be someone you cared about. I’m sorry it hurt you. But our viewers are wondering what the takeaway is--

ETHIR: Well I’ll give you the thurking takeaway: everyone on your side is so excited about how well the House managers are doing and they’re all thinking what Theamh told me before that trial at Mypril--

PLAIDDER: Which was: “Under these conditions they could convict a bowl of soup. Even if the bowl of soup had a really good lawyer.”

ETHIR: No, the other part.

PLAIDDER: OK: “I don’t need you to get me off. I need you to make sure that WHEN they convict me, everyone watching knows I’m innocent.”

ETHIR: Right. Win in the court of public opinion. Well you know what happens when the process is rigged, the jury is corrupt, the government is in the grip of evil, and you’re winning in the court of opinion? 

PLAIDDER: Well--

ETHIR: THEY KILL YOUR CLIENT.

PLAIDDER: Not necess--

ETHIR: When they can’t afford to win OR to lose, they just kill their opponents.

PLAIDDER: All right, but...that only happened once.

ETHIR: If that trial at Mypril hadn’t been broken up, it would have happened twice. I only agreed to represent Theamh because I was in contact with Istria. I went in there knowing I wasn’t going to let that trial finish. I took their tarbhfnaa and I pulled it on THEM. 

PLAIDDER: But in this case...the client is American democracy. Doesn’t that change things? They can’t just...kill it.

ETHIR: They will do their level best.

PLAIDDER: Right about now Conn would normally--

ETHIR: Yeah, he’s not here. I loved the law. I loved it with a passionate love. I watched them corrupt it. I had to live without the rule of law while still being a lawyer. And I am--to use a phrase we’re all picking up from the locals--not OK.

PLAIDDER: At least I kept you out of Redemption.

ETHIR: At least in Redemption it wouldn’t have been my own country doing this to me.

PLAIDDER: You look like I feel, I guess.

ETHIR: I suppose I do. 

PLAIDDER: I guess I have to be the one hoping for better things.

ETHIR: Hope away. 

PLAIDDER: All right, so, for the sake of any readers who may remember this show well enough to care where we are with it, we’re about midway through Season 2. Emma and Snow have returned from the Bad Place, and Cora has followed them and has just faked Regina killing Archie, causing Emma et al. to turn on the partially-redeemed Regina, while actually keeping Archie captive on Hook’s invisible pirate ship. OK?

AINE: I suppose WOF’s plot would also sound pretty stupid if you had to summarize it in one paragraph. 

THEAMH: I don’t think it would sound THAT stupid.

PLAIDDER: ANYWAY! I just wanted to get your reactions to some of the...you know...correspondences.

THEAMH: Oh, you mean the whole reuniting the separated lovers thing? You know, “We will always find each other!”

ISTRIA: “But will we always lose each other? Is that our fate?”

PLAIDDER: To be honest I do kind of think that given that the show runs for seven seasons, it pretty much is gonna be their fate. The whole ‘waking the pseudo-dead beloved with true love’s kiss’ has already been done so many damn times and yet I fear it will happen with increasing frequency as we--

THEAMH: I’m sorry, you do not have a leg to stand on there. Istri, how many times have we--

ISTRIA: So let’s see...you lose me, you find me, you get taken prisoner, I find you. That’s all just up to Greenhaven. Then you get arrested by those traitors at Lythril’s old castle--

THEAMH: You lose me--

ISTRIA: Trial at Mypril--

THEAMH: You find me. Giant arani fight at Amranth--

ISTRIA: You lose me, you find me. 

THEAMH: I think that’s the last time. So that’s...

ISTRIA: No, no, we’re forgetting about “Homeswept.”

THEAMH: Oh FNAA. Idair’s HAIRPINS. Well I mean can you blame me?

ISTRIA: I cannot.

THEAMH: Yes. You lose me, I lose you, we manage to more or less find each other--

PLAIDDER: All right. Yes. I am a sucker for a good reunion. I mean as much as I bitch about it I actually sort of can watch that story line a fair few times before I get tired of it. It’s nice how reciprocal it is with Charming and Snow. 

THEAMH: Yes, that IS nice. Can I just ask though...why do all the men look the same?

ISTRIA: They don’t all look the same. There are two kinds. The blonde kind is a prince and the dark-haired kind is a dark user’s familiar.

PLAIDDER: Yes, I will say they made the Maerin figure a lot more interesting on OUAT. I actually kind of like both of them, which is strange, because I fucking HATE Maerin.

LYTHRIL: So do I.

PLAIDDER: Yes. Well, Lythril, since you’re here--

LYTHRIL: The reason you can...attach yourself...to Graham and Hook is that their dark users haven’t properly broken them. The bond is in the playful stage, where both partners are capable of enjoying each other. 

PLAIDDER: And...did you and Maerin have...a playful stage?

LYTHRIL: Of course.

PLAIDDER: I’m really glad I didn’t have to write that.

LYTHRIL: It was brief.

PLAIDDER: Well, as long as you’re here...I mean what’s it like for you watching Regina? 

THEAMH: Are you sure these people haven’t been reading your--

PLAIDDER: Yes, I’m sure. I’m very sure. Look, I saw Snow White just like everyone else and the evil Queen freaked me out just like everyone else and Lythril does kind of have the evil Queen’s vibe and that’s the transmission pattern. The film Snow White is the common source. WOF and OUAT aren’t borrowing from each other. I never watched the show while I was writing WOF, and I am 100% certain that nobody on the WOF distribution list ended up writing for a nighttime drama on ABC.

AINE: How can you be sure?

PLAIDDER: Look, I asked Lythril a question--

LYTHRIL: And because it will amuse me, I’m going to answer it: I find watching Regina EXTREMELY frustrating. 

PLAIDDER: Why?

LYTHRIL: It’s a very long list. 

PLAIDDER: Could we have the condensed version?

LYTHRIL: She doesn’t have the commitment. She doesn’t love the work. She doesn’t LIKE being evil.  

PLAIDDER: Oh, I think she does like it.

LYTHRIL: No. It looks that way at first, but then they give her this...

PLAIDDER: Backstory.

LYTHRIL: That simpering little girl with her stableboy lover--that was PAINFUL. There is NO way that girl grows up to be the most powerful dark user in the kingdom. 

TARIC: If I could--

PLAIDDER: Yes, of course, Taric.

TARIC: I don’t think I realized before that I was a...trope?

PLAIDDER: Yes, I did try to keep that from you. I’m sorry--

TARIC: Is that why I’m...you know...simple?

KEANRIH: Oh Taric. You’re not simple. You’re very complex. 

TARIC: No, I mean...not very smart, and not good with words, and generally...not really very interesting.

KEANRIH: Don’t SAY those things about yourself!

PLAIDDER: All right, look, there is this whole thing with girls and horses and even though I never had a horse I did sort of become fascinated with horses for a while and yes, you two were a trope, but so are Theamh and Istria. I mean there were people back in the day who categorized WOF as a Xena a/u. 

AINE: WHAT?!

THEAMH: Aine, just calm--

AINE: THERE IS NO SUBTEXT. THERE WAS NEVER ANY SUBTEXT. WE DISCUSSED THIS EXPLICITLY--

PLAIDDER: Aine, you cannot do anything about what people do with your story. You write, they read, what happens next is up to the gods. My point is: yes, Taric, you are a cheesy romance trope, I am very sorry, but I did do my best to give you the same kind of character depth that I gave everyone else, which is something that definitely DOES NOT happen with Daniel. So you are both the same trope but Daniel is a lot more...trope-y...than you are.

KEANRIH: Also I would never have turned you into a zombie.

TARIC: Thank you.

PLAIDDER: Look, speaking of zombies staggering around heartless, can we get back to Lythril’s take on--

LYTHRIL: Despite all the other fnaa you’ve pulled on me I feel almost moved to thank you for never giving me a backstory...if THIS is what it looks like.

PLAIDDER: Well...to some extent it inevitably does, because nobody’s just born evil. 

LYTHRIL: No, but not everyone has evil thrust upon them. Some of us chose it.

PLAIDDER: Well, Rumplestiltskin--

LYTHRIL: Do not SPEAK TO ME about that BLASPHEMY.

PLAIDDER: Well I don’t think they mean the same thing that you mean when they say “Dark One”--

AINE: Are you SURE they haven’t read your books?

PLAIDDER: YES I AM SURE!

LYTHRIL: She wants to be redeemed? She wants to be a better mother? WHY? Why does she want to be a mother at all? I didn’t want that for a steaming hot second.

PLAIDDER: Oh, you are obsessed with fertility. OBSESSED.

LYTHRIL: Dark magic and maternity are profoundly incompatible.

RENNA: My gleacha they are.

LYTHRIL: Your entire *existence* proves my point. Take Regina out of the Enchanted Forest and she turns into YOU. An idiot who would choose some child over magic and power. I hate Storybrooke Regina. Always weak, and incompetent, and--

RENNA: I was strong enough to kill YOU.

LYTHRIL: You had help.

PLAIDDER: I actually don’t hate Storybrooke Regina’s redemption arc. I mean I don’t know how it’s going to end, but--

ISTRIA: You call that a redemption arc?

PLAIDDER: Oh dear. 

ISTRIA: She doesn’t understand the FIRST DAMN THING about redemption. 

THEAMH: She yells at the screen a LOT when Regina’s on it.

ISTRIA: You’re all hurt when people don’t want to invite you to their parties. Of course they don’t! You ruined all of their lives! And except *sometimes* regarding Henry, you have done NOTHING to live it down!

THEAMH: Like that.

ISTRIA: Redemption is not about getting people to like you. It’s about taking responsibility for the harm you’ve done and trying to undo it. Whether people *like* you again is irrelevant. It’s not about you and what you want any more, that’s the point.

PLAIDDER: Listen, this cannot go on forever, and I don’t want to quit without talking about the hearts thing.

LYTHRIL: Yes. The hearts thing.

AINE: I just don’t see how you can be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that nobody who writes for that show has--

PLAIDDER: For the love of Pete, Aine, in the story of Snow White the evil Queen says she wants the huntsman to rip out Snow White’s heart and liver and bring them back to her and that is where ALL of these chest-punching heart-ripping evil women in black came from.

LYTHRIL: It’s HILARIOUS. Nobody needs THAT many hearts.

PLAIDDER: Well I think she uses these hearts for different purposes than--

LYTHRIL: Every time I watch her or Cora do that I have to pause it because I’m laughing so hard. Where’s the blood? Where are the screams? Where are the broken ribs and the--

THEAMH: Could you not--

LYTHRIL: And this glowing red Lucite thing that comes out--

ISTRIA: I know!

LYTHRIL: That’s not a heart. I don’t know what that is but it’s not...hearts are bloody, they’re warm, they pulse, they’re--

THEAMH: They’re messy. Really, really--

LYTHRIL: That’s the whole POINT of a heart, that’s why people miss them in the first place.  

THEAMH: Yeah, they’re like...that’s where the whole soul/body thing happens, at least if you’re heart seated, and it matters that it’s all squishy and misshapen and--

LYTHRIL: They’re flesh. Hearts are flesh. They’re meat. That’s the point of hearts.

THEAMH: ExACTly!

[high-five begins]

ISTRIA: HEY! Are you both INSANE?

[high-five aborted]

PLAIDDER: Can I at least get your thoughts on Regina’s fashion sense?

[Everybody laughs]

AINE: Who is MAKING all those gowns for her? Who is doing her hair? Where does she get the materials?

PLAIDDER: And why does she lead with her cleavage, even in battle?

LYTHRIL: Oh come on. I have seen your illustrations.

PLAIDDER: What? They’re nothing like--

LYTHRIL: Shriias, back me up here: does she or does she not have me doing everything tits out?

THEAMH: I do have to admit--

PLAIDDER: No! Your outfits are--

LYTHRIL: Very tight. 

PLAIDDER: Well sure but--

THEAMH: At least she’s never drawn you naked.

PLAIDDER: LOOK.

LYTHRIL: I don’t mind. Sincerely, I do not mind being the sexiest woman in this universe--

[confused and vehement shouts of protest from all assembled]

PLAIDDER: All right all RIGHT! There will be NO MORE discussion of costuming! Or hearts! Or competitive sexiness!

CHANDRA: Are we not even going to TALK about Mulan?

PLAIDDER: And another country is heard from.

CHANDRA: You know I heard there was going to be queer-baiting in this show and all through season one I was like, where is it? All the men seem very very straight to me.And then Mulan and Aurora show up and it’s like, oh, I see it now.

PLAIDDER: Yes. Well...

CHANDRA: “I promised Prince Phillip I would protect you and I will fight both of these other hot women to do it!”

PLAIDDER: All right, point--

CHANDRA: Mulan literally holds Aurora’s heart in her hands and actually PUTS IT BACK IN HER CHEST--

PLAIDDER: Sure--

CHANDRA: I mean even those two over there never got THAT close. And then the NEXT THURKING LINE: “Let’s go see if we can bring my useless dead boyfriend back to life!”

PLAIDDER: I did notice--

CHANDRA: You’ve got this intense, smoldering woman in armor staring at you with love beaming out of her eyes and--I mean if you’ve got Mulan, WHO NEEDS PHILIP?

PLAIDDER: You know, some women ARE straight, and--

CHANDRA: Everyone ELSE gets to bring their true love back with a kiss but Mulan and Aurora have to do it through open heart surgery?

PLAIDDER: OK, but the coding makes it more intense and more interesting. Admit it.

THEAMH: You didn’t code us.

KEANRIH: Or us.

PLAIDDER: Yeah, well your story was never published, was it?

AINE: You regret that?

PLAIDDER: No. I really don’t. I honestly don’t know what would have become of all of you if I’d had to really try to make you marketable.

CHANDRA: But that was the 1990s. This was freaking 2011.

PLAIDDER: All right, this has gone on long enough. Are we going to finish Season 2 or not?

LYTHRIL: I think your spawn has doomed us to it.

PLAIDDER: Well...are you enjoying any of this?

LYTHRIL: I enjoy imagining ways to kill Cora.

PLAIDDER: You know, Lythril, we never found out what your mother was like.

LYTHRIL: Thank the Dark One for that.

PLAIDDER: Or if you’d ever been in love, before...

LYTHRIL: Never.

PLAIDDER: You sure about that?

LYTHRIL: NEVER.

PLAIDDER: Because something did go on with you and Ulnach at scoil, and I go back and forth on what exactly it was, but I will tell you, sometimes in my mind it looks a lot like a Cinderella AU.

LYTHRIL: You’re not going to actually write that, are you?

PLAIDDER: Probably not. See, this is kind of interesting to me as an idea, but if I actually committed to it, I think I would--

LYTHRIL: Because that would be a GREAT way to lose a heart.

PLAIDDER: Well look. We complain, but we’re all having fun here, right? I mean you’re enjoying getting together and making fun of your...counterparts?

ISTRIA: I will admit, it is sort of fun.

THEAMH: It’s better than talking about American politics.

PLAIDDER: What actually depresses me most about all this, Conn, is watching everyone second-guess what the Democrats are doing. Everyone wants to be the one to have found the flaw in the strategy that will have led to the final defeat. This is what frustrates me about the mainstream media--the “good” media, the ones that actually try to be factually accurate and halfway responsible. There’s always this narrative, where for a while one side is up, and then that side is down and the other side is up, and so no matter what’s actually happening, you think you’re winning one week and the next week you’re plunged into despair.

CONN: Our repeater chains really aren’t that sophisticated.

PLAIDDER: I didn’t want them to be. Your country’s never going to have social media; you already have telepathy.

CONN: So this week, the story is the Democrats are down, eh? 

PLAIDDER: Yeah. Knowing that this is the narrative somehow doesn’t protect me from it emotionally. But all week it’s been “what the Democrats should do that they’re not doing” or “what the Democrats shouldn’t do that they are doing” or “why the whole process is broken and our country is fucked up beyond all repair” or...and I’m sick of it. 

CONN: Do you really think they could be doing a better job with this?

PLAIDDER: No. I don’t. This is what drives me nuts. When Pelosi was staving off impeachment, everyone I knew was like, what is this weak sauce, what are they waiting for, he gives proof of impeachability every day, this is what we always do, we keep our powder dry till it’s too late to use it, this party will never do anything right as long as they’re taking money from corporations, etc. etc. etc. Now we’re actually doing it, and everyone wants to talk about why it’s not working. 

CONN: How is it not working? All the evidence--

PLAIDDER: I know. I know. They have no evidence, they have no logical or coherent defense of him, they have nothing, everything during the Intelligence Committee hearings went our way. But to the people who support him, it doesn’t matter what the evidence shows. It doesn’t matter what the law is. It doesn’t matter what the Constitution says. If he does it, it’s right. 

CONN: And you don’t understand that.

PLAIDDER: I have never felt that way about any politician. When it comes to politics, I don’t fall in love.

CONN: Not even with your Mr. Obama?

PLAIDDER: Look, I’m not gonna say I was immune to his magic, or Bill Clinton’s either. But when Bill Clinton was accused of having an affair with a White House intern, I was like, well that’s not implausible. I hoped he was telling us the truth about that, but I was ultimately not really surprised to discover that he wasn’t. Obama promised to close Guantanamo and he didn’t. Obama deported all kinds of people. Obama was fine with undeclared drone warfare. Nobody’s perfect. Nobody’s ideal. Nobody’s a hero.

CONN: None of that stops you from wanting them to be. That’s why you get mad at them, when they inevitably betray your hopes.

PLAIDDER: My point is, Conn, Buttercup came into this presidency with about 35-40% approval and that’s where he’ll be when he finally leaves it, no matter what happens. And 35-40% approval is good enough to keep the Congressional Republicans fawning around him licking his boots. It’s disgusting. It’s depressing.

CONN: Well then why did you want this impeachment, if it doesn’t matter?

PLAIDDER: You can be a real pain in the gleacha, you know that?

CONN: Maybe, but I’m cheaper than your therapist.

PLAIDDER: Yeah, all right. We had to do it. Because you have to do what you CAN do, even if it doesn’t matter. Before you get to the...scary shit...you have to exhaust the constitutional remedies.

CONN: Exactly.

PLAIDDER: If we hadn’t done this, we’d always have told ourselves that was our mistake. Now we’re doing it, and whatever happens, at least we don’t have to beat ourselves up for not having been willing to take the risk.

CONN: And may I remind you that you don’t know what’ll happen.

PLAIDDER: I think I do, Conn.

CONN: You didn’t predict how the shutdown would end. 

PLAIDDER: Yeah, you were closer but you were wrong. They didn’t vote to override his veto.

CONN: Because he realized it was a danger and decided not to give them the choice. If he comes to think there’s a real chance he will be removed, he’ll run. He’s not a brave man.

PLAIDDER: But there is no real chance of his being removed-

CONN: --yet.

PLAIDDER: NO! NO MORE YETS! I AM SICK OF YET! THERE ARE NO YETS IN THIS COUNTRY! WE ARE YETLESS! AMERICA HAS A MASSIVE YET DEFICIT!

CONN: Friend, I can see you’re upset, but let me tell you: you don’t know. Nobody knows. People have opinions but they don’t know. Did anyone know that your Mr. Giuliani was going to go to Ukraine this week to continue soliciting bribes and propagating Russian disinformation while the hearings were going on?

PLAIDDER: NOBODY CARES!

CONN: Your Rep. Matt Gaetz, he of the Great SCIF Sit-In, is on record saying that it’s “weird.”

PLAIDDER: So what. Buttercup will tweet at him and he’ll walk it back.

CONN: But did you expect that?

PLAIDDER: No. No, to be honest, I did not expect that.

CONN: Your Senator Kennedy can’t seem to decide whether he’s all in on the propaganda or not. He keeps going back and forth. 

PLAIDDER: What does that get us?

CONN: Nothing tangible. The report on that investigation your William Barr started into the Mueller investigation is due to be released today. Have you read it?

PLAIDDER: No, they haven’t dropped it yet. 

CONN: Why not?

PLAIDDER: I don’t know, maybe they got held up at Kinko’s.

CONN: You don’t think it might be because they’re desperately trying to massage it into a vindication of Trump’s “hoax” narrative even though they know they can’t?

PLAIDDER: Of course it might be. Or it may be they’re planning to dump it at 5 after the impeachment hearings are over.

CONN: If it’s going to vindicate their man, wouldn’t they drop it now and pull focus?

PLAIDDER: Conn--

CONN: YOU MADE ME RESILIENT. You MADE ME an optimist. YOU made me capable of preserving my faith in democratic institutions and diplomacy through EVERYTHING. Through imprisonment and mindforcing and torture. Maybe I SHOULD stop hoping but I can’t because you made hope unkillable in me. Why are you yelling at me? I am who I am because you need me to be that way.

PLAIDDER: I know. I know.

CONN: And I say, do not throw yourself into a pit of despair just because he has not been defeated YET.

PLAIDDER: All right, Conn. Point taken. 

CONN: They’re doing what you want them to do and what you know is right. They’re going after the king. No matter what.

PLAIDDER: No matter what.

CONN: The consequences will be what they will be. But this was the right thing to do and they’re doing it. Can’t you celebrate that?

PLAIDDER: I guess I can try.

CONN: That’s the spirit!

Mrs. P refuses to believe that Lythril really dies at the end of Redemption. It usually goes about like this:

ME: Lythril dies at the end of Redemption. She is dead. DEAD. Aine ended her.

MRS. P: No way.

ME: In the first draft everyone had the same reaction so I went back and inserted a paragraph specially designed to explain why and how once Aine casts her specter out of the Redemptrix, Lythril is in fact absolutely and totally dead.

MRS. P: Come on. It’s Lythril. She can’t die.

ME: Lythril is not immortal.

MRS. P: But she’s the strongest and smartest and most powerful dark user ever!

ME: Aine casts her and she’s gone.

MRS. P: Lythril found someone else to possess and she’ll be back.

ME: She’s not coming back. She’s dead.

MRS. P: I could see how maybe she would wind up in some kind of Voldemort-type situation where she’d need some kind of new body to return--

ME: IN MY MIND, LYTHRIL IS DEAD. I WROTE THESE BOOKS. 

MRS. P: Come on though. She’s still alive.

ME: Look, believe what you want to believe, but my intention is for her to be DEAD.

PLAIDDER: So I think some of our readers might like to know, before we get into this, that while you were serving as the Ideiren ambassador to the Nation, someone in your embassy decided to create an “irregular channel.”

CONN: Isn’t that a spoiler?

PLAIDDER: We don’t have to get into the details. Let me just ask: in your experience, why do people open up “irregular channels”? If you’re a head of state, and you already have an ambassador whose job it is to advance foreign policy in that country, why would you open an “irregular channel” between yourself and that country’s leader?

CONN: There are two possible reasons you might do that. One is risky but, for better or worse, a fairly common diplomatic tactic. The other is corrupt.

PLAIDDER: Let’s take the first reason first.

CONN: There are certain goals that you, the head of state, might wish to accomplish, but which would be difficult to do through official channels. So for instance, during the IRA hunger strike in 1980-81, there were negotiations to try to resolve it going on between the British parliament and the IRA, through a back channel created by MI-6.  

PLAIDDER: Why through a back channel?

CONN: For the same reason this kind of thing is usually done through a back channel. The government in question wants to be able to say, “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.” So when--as it must--that government DOES negotiate with the terrorists, it has to be done in such a way that the head of state and the party in power can deny knowledge of it. In fact the IRA negotiator was told that if the government’s offer to the strikers was ever leaked to the media, they would deny any knowledge of it. 

PLAIDDER: And at around the same time, Jimmy Carter’s government was negotiating for the release of the hostages in Iran--

CONN: --also, initially, through a back channel. 

PLAIDDER: Why do governments negotiate with terrorists?

CONN: Because you can’t resolve a conflict without negotiation. 

PLAIDDER: I think you CAN--

CONN: You can if you don’t mind killing people.

PLAIDDER: All right.

CONN: My point is: with a lot of acute crises like that there’s a public-facing policy and a private policy. But they’re working *together,* is my point. Everyone has the same goals and everyone’s doing their part to get to the same outcome. The final stages of the Iranian hostage negotiations were done through normal State Department channels. Everyone involved knew what was going on and they were all working together.

PLAIDDER: As opposed to this Ukraine situation--

CONN: Where Yovanovitch was kept in the dark about everything Giuliani and his friends were doing until some of the Ukrainian officials she worked with told her about it. 

PLAIDDER: OK. So that brings us to the second reason you would create a back channel. 

CONN: The second reason to create a back channel is that you want to do something corrupt or criminal and you don’t want anyone apart from your accomplices to know about it.

PLAIDDER: Can you just talk about what “something corrupt” means? I fear an increasing number of Americans are unclear on the concept.

CONN: All right. So. One reason this is confusing is the perception people have, which is not totally wrong, that all politicians are ultimately motivated by self-interest. And many of them are; but there’s a difference between ambition and corruption. It’s one thing to take a course of action because you think it will benefit, or at least please, the people who voted for you, or people who might later vote for you. It’s quite another thing to do something purely because it will benefit you. 

It’s easier to see the difference when there’s money involved. If you’re a head of state and you’re taking people’s tax money out of the treasury and buying yourself palaces with it, people can tell that’s corrupt. 

PLAIDDER: One would like to hope.

CONN: Well, in this case, your president was using people’s tax money to try to buy himself another four years in office. That’s just as corrupt as just stealing that money and putting it in the bank.

PLAIDDER: Because it only benefits him.

CONN: Exactly.

PLAIDDER: And hurts the country he’s supposed to be working for.

CONN: Right.

PLAIDDER: So how does this answer the question of why they had to smear Marie Yovanovitch instead of just recalling her?

CONN: Well, first of all, Yovanovitch is obviously not going to get involved in something like this. Leaving aside questions of personal integrity, she is experienced enough and smart enough to know that the whole thing will blow up in the faces of anyone involved. 

PLAIDDER: Right. So they have to get rid of her. But why doesn’t Buttercup just recall her, in that case, and put in someone else?

CONN: You’re assuming that this whole mess was masterminded by a single person. A single intelligent person.

PLAIDDER: Yes. I am. Always a mistake with this crew, but I keep making it.

CONN: Your president wasn’t just gratifying his own corrupt desires here. He was also being played by Ukranians who wanted to gratify their own corrupt desires and used him to do it; and also by--

PLAIDDER: Vladimir Putin.

CONN: Perhaps not directly or personally, but yes. The smear campaign against Yovanovitch not only removes her from that post, it ensures she’ll never have a high-level post in this administration again. That’s what Lutsenko and his corrupt friends want. It also means there’s no American ambassador to Ukraine--because ambassadors have to be confirmed by the Senate, and support for Ukraine is one of the few things both parties can agree on, and they would want to make sure whoever went into that post was actually good at their job. That benefits Vladimir Putin.

PLAIDDER: The same way another four years of Buttercup destroying America would also benefit Putin.

CONN: Right. The same way that the overall destruction of your State Department benefits Putin. 

PLAIDDER: And the smear campaign also contributes to that.

CONN: Yes. It will mean fewer people like Yovanovitch are willing to work for this administration under any circumstances--because now they know that this could happen to any of them. 

PLAIDDER: So Buttercup has these two things that he wants. But a lot is going on here that’s much more about what Putin wants or what Yovanovitch’s Ukrainian enemies want or what Giuliani’s two goons want.

CONN: Exactly. Your president thinks he set up this back channel to get what he wants. But in fact he’s just being played by other, smarter people trying to get what they want. And that’s why they want to keep him in that job. So they can keep using him to advance their own agendas.

PLAIDDER: No puppet, no puppet, you’re the puppet.

CONN: What?

PLAIDDER: Never mind. 

CONN: No, really, what are you talking about?

PLAIDDER: Back in the old days, we used to call a country that was nominally politically autonomous but in fact actually controlled by the Soviet Union a puppet regime. Buttercup’s presidency is turning the US into Russia’s puppet regime. You really cannot imagine how that feels to someone who remembers the 1980s. But anyway. You were explaining how Buttercup abusing his power for personal gain isn’t the only or even the worst thing that’s happening here.

CONN: No. Because he’s also creating more opportunities for other corrupt people to get what they want. That’s the thing with an irregular channel. You’re basically creating an infrastructure for corruption. Once you’ve built it, anyone can travel through it.

PLAIDDER: Ironically, after eleventy hundred Infrastructure Weeks, this back channel is the one highway he’s actually built.

CONN: Can you answer one of my questions now?

PLAIDDER: I’ll try.

CONN: Who is Kim Kardashian?

PLAIDDER: Oh my God. 

CONN: Is she a head of state?

PLAIDDER: NO! No, my God, she is not a head of state.

CONN: So why was Ambassador Sondland discussing her with your president on that phone call from Kyiv?

PLAIDDER: Just to get this straight for our viewers...you are asking me why, when Gordon Sondland called the President of the United States on an UNSECURED CELL PHONE in a RESTAURANT in Ukraine to tell him how Zelensky had agreed to give him everything he wanted during a meeting where career diplomats were NOT ALLOWED to attend or take notes and that Zelensky “loves [Buttercup’s] ass” and will do anything Buttercup wants--why, after Buttercup talked to Sondland about this SO LOUDLY THAT HE COULD BE OVERHEARD BY PEOPLE AT THE TABLE, which let’s remember is a table in a crowded RESTAURANT, they then went on to discuss the matter of A$AP Rocky’s arrest in Sweden on assault charges with an equal amount of urgency and discretion?

CONN: Well apparently it has something to do with Kim Kardashian. 

PLAIDDER: You are referring to this passage: “During the course of the phone call from the restaurant, Sondland also consulted with Trump on another matter of importance to the president at the time: efforts to free the American rapper A$AP Rocky from jail in Sweden at the request of reality television star Kim Kardashian.“

CONN: I am.

PLAIDDER: I am sorry to have to tell you, Conn, that Kim Kardashian is the star of a TV show entitled Keeping Up With the Kardashians. 

CONN: Is...is it a news program?

PLAIDDER: NO IT IS NOT A NEWS PROGRAM!

CONN: So she’s...not a journalist.

PLAIDDER: No! She’s a celebrity!

CONN: What’s she famous for?

PLAIDDER: For being famous!

CONN: I don’t understand.

PLAIDDER: NEITHER DO I! 

CONN: Isn’t there something she must have done at some point to become--

PLAIDDER: Yes, there was, but honestly Conn, I don’t want to talk about it. You have been through enough and so have I.

CONN: But what has she got to do with American foreign policy?

PLAIDDER: NOTHING! Don’t you understand? This is what we are dealing with here. We are dealing with a man who 'reads’ Kim Kardashian’s Instagram but can’t sit through the presidential daily briefing. We have elected as President of the United States someone who is more concerned about whether Kim Kardashian thinks he’s done enough for A$AP Rocky than he is about whether Ukraine will be annexed by Russia. I mean I don’t think you can really fully appreciate this, Conn, because nobody in either Ideire OR the Nation is LIKE THIS.

CONN: Not even the Chowderhead?

PLAIDDER: NOT EVEN HIM.

CONN: Wow.

PLAIDDER: Conn...you’re taking this all very seriously. I think maybe you need a break. Look, Mrs. P is reading Redemption again, why don’t you just go back to your embassy and hang out in the earlier chapters for a while?

CONN: Oh, sure. I’ll just go back to my cozy little embassy and my ugly yellow sweaters and my tea and my friendly banter with Spindern, shall I?

PLAIDDER: I guess...I mean I guess this version of you can’t forget...

CONN: No, I cannot. And so...I mean it was bad enough for me dealing with a shadow foreign policy being promulgated in secret by my one subordinate. This poor Marie ni hOabhanobhaitch was being suborned from above and around as well as below. You can’t fire someone who doesn’t work for you. 

PLAIDDER: Especially when you don’t actually know what they’re doing.

CONN: It makes my blood boil. Being an ambassador is thurking hard. 

PLAIDDER: I know. I mean, I honestly think that for the duration of Redemption you were the hardest working man on the island. 

CONN: Since nobody works harder than Aine.

PLAIDDER: Indeed not. I want you to know I’m even more proud of you now than I was before, now that I’m watching this mess unfold. You were a really good ambassador.

CONN: Since you say it.

PLAIDDER: You WERE. It’s true you did some things that weren’t, strictly speaking, entirely above board or explicitly authorized...

CONN: That’s part of the job. That’s why they have a human doing this job instead of just negotiating everything via email. You’re there, you’re on the ground, you know more than your superiors do. I knew what the Seat’s goals were when they sent me, and I worked to accomplish them. And I didn’t tell them 100% of how I was doing that, because it wouldn’t have helped anyone for them to know. There’s always stuff that happens in back rooms, off the record. That’s not what’s horrifying about all this.

PLAIDDER: So speaking as an ambassador who was not corrupt, could you explain for our non-ambassador readers some of these ambassa-dos and ambassa-don’ts?

CONN: All right: first of all, DO have a clear idea of what your diplomatic mission is and what your goals are. And then DON’T do things that will undermine those goals.

PLAIDDER: So, for instance, Marie Yovanovitch’s diplomatic mission...

CONN: Well, here’s what it says on the website of the US Embassy in Ukraine:

“The United States established diplomatic relations with Ukraine in 1991, following its independence from the Soviet Union. The United States attaches great importance to the success of Ukraine’s transition to a modern democratic state with a flourishing market economy. U.S. policy is centered on realizing and strengthening a democratic, prosperous, and secure Ukraine more closely integrated into Europe and Euro-Atlantic structures.”

Put in slightly less...

PLAIDDER: Diplomatic?

CONN:...obscure language, the goal of the official diplomatic mission to the Ukraine was to stop Russia from taking the place over and thus rebuilding the former Soviet empire under new management. To keep Ukraine an ally of the US instead of a Russian puppet. Basic geopolitics. I mean you could argue about the wisdom of all that but that’s Congress’s job. As the ambassador, it’s not your job to set the goals; it’s your job to pursue them. 

PLAIDDER: Right. 

CONN: But here’s the thing. Marie Yovanovitch was carrying out the official mission. Nobody told her that there was a completely different unofficial mission to Ukraine being led by your Mr. Giuliani. That information was shared, evidently, only with this Kurt Volker and this Bill Taylor and this Gordon Sundland. And if you look at this group of shadow diplomats you realize they all have one thing in common--

PLAIDDER: They’re all men.

CONN: All right, two things. One, they’re all men; two, none of them are ambassadors.

PLAIDDER: Well, I mean...they’re diplomats, aren’t they?

CONN: Yes. But any diplomatic mission to another nation is led by the ambassador. All these other people--the envoys, the charges d’affaires--the ambassador outranks them. They take their orders from the ambassador. At least they’re supposed to.

PLAIDDER: So who did they put in as ambassador to the Ukraine after they fired Yovanovitch?

CONN: Nobody.

PLAIDDER: What?

CONN: Nobody. There is no ambassador at that embassy now. It is being run by William Taylor, the charge d’affaires. Better known to you as the man who texted Gordon Sundland telling him he thought it was crazy to hold up security aid over help with a political campaign. 

PLAIDDER: Isn’t Gordon Sondland an ambassador?

CONN: He’s your ambassador to the European Union. He was never the ambassador to the Ukraine. He shouldn’t have been doing ANY of this.

PLAIDDER: But I thought Kurt Volker--

CONN: Kurt Volker was an envoy. A part-time, UNPAID envoy. 

PLAIDDER: That’s weird.

CONN: ALL OF THIS IS WEIRD! But that’s what happens when the REAL mission is something that can’t be acknowledged in public. The REAL mission, led by the REAL ambassador, your Mr. Giuliani, appears to have been to use the power and the purse of the United States to force the new president of Ukraine to fabricate evidence that would shore up a clutch of baseless conspiracy theories which would then allow your President to tilt the next election in his favor by smearing, not only his most likely political opponent, but all of the government agencies who provided the evidence of Russia’s interference in your last presidential election. 

PLAIDDER: And you can’t put that on the website.

CONN: No you cannot. You cannot be seen to be pursuing those goals at all, because they are THOROUGHLY CORRUPT. They do not advance ANY foreign policy objective. They only benefit one man, viz., your president. That’s what corruption is. When you just say, thurk it, I don’t care about the thurking mission any more, I don’t care about my thurking country, from now on all I care about is me. 

PLAIDDER: So they had their official ambassador pursuing the official mission, and then they had their corrupt mission...and I guess really this whole house of cards started falling when they decided that the official mission was getting in the way of the corrupt mission. 

CONN: Exactly. 

PLAIDDER: Thanks for explaining that.

CONN: You’re welcome. Now. Can you explain something to me?

PLAIDDER: I will attempt it.

CONN: Why, of all the people who could have been chosen to lead this important though entirely corrupt diplomatic mission, did your president choose Mr. Giuliani?

PLAIDDER: *sigh*

CONN: Oh dear. This is going to take a while, isn’t it.

PLAIDDER: So it’s like this. Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of New York City in September of 2001. When the Twin Towers were destroyed on September 11, Giuliani became an American hero. And to some extent, legitimately. You can’t imagine the kind of shock it was. We hadn’t had an attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor in 1941. Nobody had ever imagined this, nobody had ever planned for it. Our President at the time--who is now, regrettably, only the SECOND worst president of the past half-century--utterly failed this test. He froze like a deer in the headlights, then disappeared from public view. Rudy Giuliani was out there in the spotlight doing his job, leading his city through something no mayor of New York had ever had to deal with. Even some New Yorkers who hated him for other reasons at least felt reassured that he was on the case and would get them through this. 

CONN: I’m very surprised to hear it.

PLAIDDER: Of course you are. Because I don’t know what happened, but at some point in the past eighteen years Rudy Giuliani became a decomposing husk within which the remnants of his former self have turned into a festering ball of insanity and corruption. He and Buttercup go back a ways because they were both big men in New York in the 1980s and they got to be friends. So Giuliani was one of the relatively few big-name Republicans willing to stump for him in 2016, before anyone believed he would be elected. And during that campaign, Giuliani just...abased himself. I mean Buttercup went low, he went lower. He just...I mean...he crawled, he toadied, he literally slavered. It was disgusting. But it earned him Buttercup’s favor. And I do not know why--I do not know why, Conn--these men who abase themselves before Buttercup seem to become consumed by some passion that I cannot call love but which seems to have some of its features, including infatuation and recklessness and a willingness to sacrifice one’s own good for the good of the beloved. I mean I’ve never seen anything like--

PLAIDDER:

CONN: Friend, are you all right?

PLAIDDER: Sorry, I’m just realizing that I have in fact seen this before.

CONN: Where?

PLAIDDER: This is how all of Lythril’s minions feel about her. They can’t really love her because she would never return it. And they know she will erase them if they ever displease her. And yet they fawn on her and obsess over her and try to outdo each other in their self-abasement and devotion to someone who definitely will never see them as equals, or even really as human. They do not protect themselves from her. They just render themselves up to her entirely, and she destroys them, and they just...love it.

CONN: It’s simple enough, friend. 

PLAIDDER: Really?

CONN: They worship her power. They love power and they know that she wields a kind of pure, irresistible, unadulterated power that they can’t handle. They can never HAVE it; but they want to be as near to it as they can get. 

PLAIDDER: Maybe that’s it. Buttercup is their dark user, and they’re the minions.

CONN: Well this is why I printed out this photo of Marie Yovanovitch. She’s not a minion. She knows what corruption is and she decided to fight it instead of serving it. We diplomats, you know, we can’t be shriias. But we have our own code. We have our own bright and dark. You know, with maybe more gray area in there than you would be happy about. But still. In all this, you find the light where you can. And why not set it up here where everyone can see it?

PLAIDDER: All right, Conn. But please. I beg of you. Help me clean up the remains of your last twelve Nauchtian breakfast stacks and then let’s go for a walk or something, all right?

CONN: All right.

PLAIDDER: OK. “Electability” is something people talk about as if it is some kind concrete thing. In fact, “electability” is ‘real’ in that it can have real-world effects, but it is not ‘real’ in that it is not based on any material givens. Electability is a product of the collective imagination. It is self-creating, self-sustaining, and (sometimes) self-defeating. You become electable when enough people believe that you are electable. Anxiety about “electability” is a real problem in Democratic primaries, because it leads people to vote for whoever’s considered the most “electable” candidate instead of the one they want. Then, when the most “electable” person wins the primary, everyone’s depressed at how middle of the road and boring and Republican-lite they are, and they don’t turn out, and that’s how you get things like Buttercup winning that fucking election.

CONN: And Biden was supposed to be your most “electable” candidate?

PLAIDDER: Yes. Because he was an old white man who stood next to Obama for 8 years.

CONN: Your country truly is a magical and bizarre place.

PLAIDDER: I know. Anyway, what was beginning to happen before all this came out is that perceptions of “electability” were starting to change. The fact that Elizabeth Warren’s events are drawing large crowds has led people to start wondering whether she might actually be “electable.” This has led to her rising in the polls, and to Biden dropping--because people who liked her all along but thought she wasn’t “electable” are now starting to back her. I think her campaign managers understand this. They have been working very hard to create “electability” for her and it seems to be working.

CONN: So in your country, people won’t vote for their candidate if they don’t think that candidate will win.

PLAIDDER: Not everyone, but--

CONN: Thus ensuring that their candidate doesn’t win.

PLAIDDER: Friend, if you will allow me to quote “Waving Through A Window” from the musical Dear Evan Hansen, liberal voters in this country have learned to slam on the brakes before they’ve even turned the key.

CONN: I don’t understand any of that sentence.

PLAIDDER: Ironically, Buttercup’s election has sort of broken the electability thing, because now people are like, well fuck, ANYONE can be electable.

CONN: But this show is about impeachment...?

PLAIDDER: I’m coming to that. I think all those public opinion polls they did showing Americans didn’t support Buttercup’s impeachment worked the same way. I think people said they were against impeachment because they thought too many other people were against impeachment. As long as they thought impeachment didn’t have enough popular support, they didn’t want to support impeachment either. Because they thought that if impeachment really WAS that unpopular, impeaching Buttercup would only screw up the 2020 elections. But, like, half of those people with whom impeachment was supposed to be “unpopular” were people thinking, I so fucking WANT this guy impeached but not if it’s gonna cost us the House in 2020. In fact I think that impeachment hasn’t really been “unpopular;” it’s just that too many people thought it was impossible.

CONN: But you don’t have any evidence for this.

PLAIDDER: I do not. But I do know that some early polling suggests that now that it looks like it’s actually going to happen, impeachment is suddenly becoming more “popular.” Here’s one by Politico/Morning Consult showing a 7 point jump in people who want Buttercup impeached. Democratic support for it has increased 13%--but Republican support for it has doubled (from 5% to 10%, but still) and now 39% of independents also want him impeached.

CONN: That’s one poll.

PLAIDDER: Five thirty-eight has more.

CONN: They say it’s all still preliminary.

PLAIDDER: Dude, which of us is supposed to be the optimist here?

CONN: Friend, I am EXPLODING with optimism at this moment, but not because of polling. Or because of what’s happening with “impeachability.”

PLAIDDER: All right then, what lit your optimism fuse today?

CONN: You have forgotten something very important in this art of the possible.

PLAIDDER: All right, what?

CONN: Your president’s enablers, cronies, and craven toadies need to believe that it’s possible that his power over them might come to an end.

PLAIDDER: OK, so electability, impeachability, and...

CONN: Let’s call it destructability.

PLAIDDER: I like it!

CONN: I think your president’s destructability index is on the rise. I think it will only accelerate from here.

PLAIDDER: There’s no polling for that.

CONN: No. But if you look at the stories coming out now, you can clearly see that people who have been tolerating this monster for years purely out of fear of the consequences are starting to imagine a world in which he is no longer in power. And they would like to enter that world without having been utterly despoiled of their dignity and self-respect.

PLAIDDER: I wouldn’t have thought they still had any.

CONN: Friend, the number of people in the world who are as completely solipsistic and thoroughly amoral as your president is very small. Most people care something about the good opinion of their fellow-humans, even if it’s only their families and friends. It’s one thing to go along with a corrupt regime thinking that nobody will ever know about the thousand little compromises you made and the scores of presidential evils you concealed. It’s another to lie awake at night thinking about what will happen when the man you’ve been servicing has been brought down and now everyone who helped him is going to be dragged through the mire.

PLAIDDER: But is anyone really imagining that, apart from people like you and me?

CONN: Well, there’s already been one resignation. You don’t resign over a scandal if you still trust your boss to protect you. Also someone is telling the press about the calls with Mohammad Bin Salman and Vladimir Putin which were also stored on that classified server--presumably in hopes that someone else will be held responsible for it.

PLAIDDER: I kind of want to know how that Jamal Khashoggi conversation went, but I also kind of really, really don’t.

CONN: Steve Schwarzman, one of these “unofficial” envoys that your president seems to have used so much, is now contradicting your president in public--because he’s afraid of being drawn into this. Your Secretary of State has been subpoenaed. John Bolton appears to have been involved in all this--he’s just left on very bad terms. Meanwhile, your president is wildly flailing around looking for people he can throw to the wolves--starting, amazingly, with his own vice president. Which was bad strategy, because everyone ELSE watches that and says, “If the boss has already turned on his #2, he will CERTAINLY turn on me.” And so they’ve started to turn on your president, pre-emptively.

PLAIDDER: Because mostly people follow the strongest.

CONN: Yes.

PLAIDDER: But nobody REALLY knows who’s the strongest.

CONN: Exactly.

PLAIDDER: So people who stop believing he’s the strongest, stop following him.

CONN: Correct.

PLAIDDER: And if enough people stop following...

CONN: Then those 35 Republican Senators who have always hated him will throw him onto the pyre and act like they’re the ones who saved the country from him.

PLAIDDER: Well. I guess we’ll see.

CONN: YOU will see that I am correct.

PLAIDDER: Yeah, maybe.

CONN: You want to bet against me? Just to make it interesting.

GILL: Impeachment. This is the thing that happened to this “Bill Clinton” that I’m supposed to have been based on.

PLAIDDER: Yes. But you see, it’s also a thing that ALMOST happened to a guy named Richard Nixon that neither of you have ever heard of.

GILL: I still don’t understand.

PLAIDDER: Our...president...has just admitted that he abused the power of his office to force a third party to dig up dirt on someone who was quite possibly going to be running against him for president. 

GILL: And?

PLAIDDER: And that’s Watergate. For 40 years now every political scandal has had “gate” attached to it, in honor of the Watergate scandal. But this is actually the only scandal since Watergate that actually deserves that suffix. Because this...president...has just done EXACTLY what the House was prepared to impeach Nixon for back in 1974, only in a MUCH WORSE way. All this time everyone’s known that this jackass should be impeached but they’ve been afraid to do it because so much of this stuff is unprecedented and because this...asshole...has been using his power to gaslight everyone into thinking well, maybe this ISN’T really an impeachable offense. But here is something that everyone knows, from history, actually IS an impeachable offense and furthermore is serious enough that the prospect of getting impeached for it forced that son of a bitch to resign.

CONN: And so as soon as that became clear...WHOOSH! The fire of union!

PLAIDDER: Because now, by impeaching him, they’re not repeating the Clinton impeachment, they’re repeating the Nixon one. That’s what Pelosi and friends have been worried about all this time. When the Republicans impeached...let’s say, your namesake...

GILL: This Clinton.

PLAIDDER: Yes. When they impeached him, it was over a single instance of perjury, in which he lied about the fact that he had drawn a 22 year old intern into a sexual relationship with him. 

GILL: I thought they impeached him over the sex.

PLAIDDER: No. Technically, the High Crime and Misdemeanor at stake there was his lying about it under oath.

GILL: But your president lies--

PLAIDDER: Exactly. Exactly. But, you see, the Clinton impeachment was clearly politically motivated. The Republicans wouldn’t accept the fact that they’d lost the White House, so they investigated Clinton until they turned up something they could use. This, by the way, is exactly what Buttercup’s defenders are always saying the Democrats are doing now.

GILL: Which they actually are.

PLAIDDER: The difference, Gill, is that Buttercup actually is unfit to hold this office in every measurable way. He’s constantly abusing his power--not just in this phone call, but in every action he takes as President. He lies like he breathes. He upended the FBI and the Department of Justice to try to stop the Mueller investigation. He fires everyone who displays a shred of integrity or an ounce of loyalty to anything other than himself. He encourages foreign governments to bribe him by using his hotel properties. He embezzles taxpayer money by directing government entities to use his hotel properties. I cannot even list all the ways in which he has proved that he acts always and only in his own interests, even when that goes against the interests of the country he supposedly governs. He illegally blocks money that Congress has appropriated for things he doesn’t want to do or redirects money that Congress appropriated for some other purpose. He refuses to obey the law whenever it contravenes his needs, desires, or even whims. He has corrupted the entire Department of Justice and turned the Attorney General of the United States into his personal defense lawyer. He accepted help from fucking Vladimir Putin in the 2016 election and NOW--as a fucking SITTING PRESIDENT--he is actively soliciting help from Zelensky in the upcoming 2020 election. And that’s just the illegal stuff. Do not get me STARTED on the profoundly immoral things he has done with this office and to this country. He is not a president. He is a mob boss. He richly deserves to be impeached, and now at last he will be.

CONN: Look at you, drawing up the articles of impeachment already!

PLAIDDER: Every right-minded citizen of this country has had their own personal articles of impeachment drawn up for at least a year now.

GILL: I feel your pain--

PLAIDDER: Please let me never hear you say that again--

GILL: --but this seems very risky to me. They’ve already released the transcript of the phone call; and they’re right, there’s no explicit quid pro quo.

CONN: Oh friend. Do you think a man as practiced in extortion and bullying as this gleachinai is would be stupid enough to use the if-then formula? He blocks their aid, then calls--

PLAIDDER: REGARDLESS! Holding up the aid that Congress had voted to the Ukraine--for ANY reason--was ILLEGAL! He doesn’t get to DECIDE whether he disburses that aid or not! He is supposed to EXECUTE the laws that Congress passes, that is why they call it the fucking EXECUTIVE branch. He is not supposed to LEGISLATE. That’s not how this works. THAT’S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS.

GILL: I think you should maybe go to commercial, stranger, you’re getting very excited.

CONN: Clearly, you’ve never watched a single episode of this show.

PLAIDDER: Fucking with that aid money is IN ITSELF an impeachable offense! We don’t even need to GET to the question of whether he did it as a quid pro quo. 

CONN: Right. Just like the fact that he asked a foreign head of state to go after his political opponent is impeachable in itself, whether or not he ALSO bribed or extorted him to do it.

PLAIDDER: Thank you. I only wish we’d done this sooner.

CONN: I don’t.

PLAIDDER: And now we come to it. You’re about to tell me that Pelosi has been playing seven-dimensional Dubh Solus all this time, aren’t you?

CONN: Yes I am.

PLAIDDER: Oh Lord.

CONN: I kept saying, not yet, not yet. And would you listen to me?

PLAIDDER: No.

CONN: No, you would not. Look. Your people don’t exactly have the concept of linn shanghlaim, but your Nancy Pelosi has been in politics all her life. She knows the fire of union when she sees it. And she also knows when she doesn’t see it. The Mueller investigation did not light that fire. Even if there hadn’t been all the chicanery around releasing the report, the fact that it was so inconclusive just threw water on everything. But she let him think he was winning. Because she knew that if he did, he’d do something worse and more dramatic. And now he has. 

PLAIDDER: But Conn...linn shanghlaim is supposed to include everybody. It’s supposed to cut across existing...well, you don’t have formal political parties, but let’s say factional divisions. But there are no Republicans on fire right now. It’s 199 Democrats and Justin Amash.

CONN: I know. We cannot expect miracles.

PLAIDDER: But Pelosi did! She kept saying she wouldn’t do this until she had bipartisan--

CONN: Friend, do you seriously believe that she ever thought for a moment that impeachment would have bipartisan support? She works with those people EVERY. DAY. 

PLAIDDER: Well then why--

CONN: Because waiting for this “bipartisan support” which was never going to appear allowed her to delay impeachment indefinitely UNTIL the right moment came along. Which is this one.

PLAIDDER: You can’t prove any of this.

CONN: Look at the results. Instead of dragging a bunch of reluctant, scared, misgiving-filled people behind her into an impeachment half of them don’t want, she’s barely one step ahead of a charging horde, all lit up with the fire of union. This is going to be unstoppable.

GILL: But isn’t thing going to play into your president’s hands? He’s supposed to love conflict, and drama, and his people are always saying impeachment is a political winner for them, and--

CONN: Gill. Friend. Stop. You’re embarrassing yourself.

GILL: I beg your--

CONN: LOOK AT THE RESULTS. For months now, Congress has been demanding documents and testimony and what have you and this administration’s response has been, sue me for it. Word gets out that impeachment is actually in motion and what’s the first thing that happens? The transcript of that call has been released. The whistleblower complaint is maybe going to come out tomorrow. What does that tell you?

GILL: That they’re scared.

CONN: Yes. It tells you that impeachment was the ONLY thing this crew ever took seriously. It’s the ONLY thing that was ever capable of forcing them to obey the law. They never wanted this. They feared it. That “it helps us politically” stuff was pure tarbhfnaa put out by his minions to stave it off. 

PLAIDDER: Pelosi also said that’s what he--

CONN: Because she was ALSO trying to stave it off. It was convenient for her to pretend to believe their tarbhfnaa as long as she didn’t think the time was right. But she never did. 

PLAIDDER: So she lied to us.

CONN: Friend, not all good women are shriias.

GILL: Now THAT’S the truth.

PLAIDDER: Oh boy.

CONN: Watch her and learn, Gill. Watch and learn.

PLAIDDER: Well, we’ll all be watching. It’s time to wrap up this episode of This Fucking Impeachment...but there will be more!

CONN: WOOOOHOOO! HYA GLEACH! HYA GLEACH! HYA GLEACH!!

CONN: Nothing about your president seems magical to me.

PLAIDDER: Yes, well, that’s the Ideiren point of view. But what Chandra’s talking about is National. It is in fact the only kind of magic in your universe that originated in the Nation.

CHANDRA: I always thought it was all bullshit. I mean...my family definitely tried to annihilate me with it, and here I still am--

PLAIDDER: All right, let me explain what I mean by ‘magic’ in this context. 

AINE: This should be interesting.

CONN: Shriia! I didn’t know you’d be here.

AINE: Neither did I.

PLAIDDER: Like I said. I don’t even call them; they just come. Anyway. I had an old friend over for dinner the other day who was talking about what we call “the magic of the theater.” Now, when I say that I’m usually being ironic, but he seems to really believe in it and to be honest I’m not totally sure that I don’t. A lot of contemporary performance theory is based at some distance on the idea of theater as a ritual which at some point in the distant past was efficacious.

SONNIA: Effiwhatnow?

PLAIDDER: And welcome to you too, Sonnia. 

AINE: “Efficacious” means that it actually makes something happen. So, take haons linn.

SONNIA: You mean that weird thing you do at five in the morning.

AINE: To you it’s a weird thing I do at five in the morning. To me and to the rest of my people it’s how we help create the world. To you it’s a ritual the same way, I don’t know, brushing your teeth is a ritual. To us, it’s efficacious. It keeps the world together. I can skip it under extraordinary circumstances once in a while and things will be all right, but that’s only because other shriias will be doing haons linn somewhere else. If we all stopped doing haons linn...the sun wouldn’t rise. The whole world would just stay dark, forever.

SONNIA: Really?

AINE: Yes, really.

SONNIA: So what explains the fact the sun rises in the Nation?

AINE: It rises in the Nation because we’re all on the same island.

SONNIA: What about Dubhinis? There’s no shriias in Dubhinis.

TYRNA: Don’t you wish.

PLAIDDER: Hello, Tyrna, thanks for joining us.

AINE: Don’t be hard on her, Tyrna, she was raised to believe--

TYRNA: I know what she was raised to believe in.

SONNIA: So you do haons linn.

TYRNA: I don’t. That’s an Ideiren thing. But we do other things to keep our world together. Despite what you hear from Chandra’s people--

CHANDRA: They’re not my people any more--

TYRNA: --the Nation is not the center of the universe. The Nation only continues to exist because the rest of us are building the world around it. 

SONNIA: That’s nuts. The world is real, whether--

TYRNA: Nobody’s saying it’s not.

PLAIDDER: Well, I kind of am. I mean, your world isn’t actually real. It’s created. It’s created by me, you know, with the support of the people who read it. And that means Tyrna’s absolutely right. I wouldn’t have created this world just to write about the Nation. On the other hand, I couldn’t, or at least I didn’t, create Ideire or Dubhinis or Plenana or any of the other islands without also creating the Nation.

TYRNA: Why the hell not? 

AINE: Tyrna!

PLAIDDER: No, she’s right to ask. Of all the places in your universe, the Nation is the one most like the place where I come from.

CHANDRA: That’s...really depressing.

PLAIDDER: You’re telling me. 

CONN: Weren’t we talking about the magic of the theater?

PLAIDDER: Yes. Yes we were. Anyway, so my friend’s idea of the magic of the theater is this: You have a vision of something you want to make happen. The thing does not come into existence at that moment. You have to work to make it happen. You find other people and you share the vision with them, and you find a place, and you find a lot of other stuff, and eventually the thing that you imagined becomes real--so real that other people can see it. This is an ordinary process that goes on all over the place all the time. But when you think about it, this is actually kind of what magic is. You imagine something, and that makes it real.

SONNIA: I’m not getting any of this.

AINE: I think we’d better move on. I spent months trying to move Sonnia past this stage and it never happened.

PLAIDDER: And then what I said was--and this was before all of THIS happened--there’s a passage in one of the Little House books where Pa explains the railroad the same way. The engineers imagine a railroad, and then everybody goes out west and works 24/7 and digs dirt and pounds steel and eats pancackes and gets paid because of something that’s just an idea, that doesn’t exist at all. It’s a really interesting passage--it’s in By the Shores of Silver Lake, I think. 

CHANDRA: Of course the real magic there is--

PLAIDDER: Imperialism and capitalism, yes. But that’s my point. This having a vision and making it real thing is a lot of fun and I think, mostly, good for people in the theater, as long as the Vision-Haver is, you know, a clueful and compassionate person who cares about the human consequences of their magic. But there’s nothing inherently good about this process of making a vision real. It can be bad. It can be really bad. It can be REALLY. FUCKING. BAD.

DAPHIE: Like...

PLAIDDER: Yes. Exactly.

SONNIA: I don’t know what she’s--

PLAIDDER: Daphie’s whole novel is about me trying to understand one particular kind of very bad magic. I was trying to understand how a thing like the shooting at Decalon High is imagined and then how it is made real. Over and over, oftener and oftener. It seemed to me as if every evil vision, every malicious imagination in my world had collaborated to create this thing. I wrote...I don’t even know how many hundred thousand words went into that novel. Let’s just say the problem and the solution in Redemption are about three times as complicated as they are in any of the earlier novels. And when I look back on it, I can only see one thing about that explanation that I think is really true, that I think is still true now.

CONN: Which is what?

CHANDRA: Stupid racist magic.

PLAIDDER: Bingo.

CHANDRA: “Bingo”?!

PLAIDDER: It’s...oh, never mind. Look, about fifty years ago Jerome Bixby was trying to understand the magic of war and he wrote a script for a show called Star Trek called “Day of the Dove.” And in that episode, there are these energy beings that feed off aggression. So they try to bait all the people on this one ship into fighting each other, so they can feed. The individual Starfleet or Klingon people think they want war but there’s actually some force out there making them want it, making them do things, imagining a war and then making it happen. And it’s remarkable how durable this idea is. I mean you could link it back to Tolstoy and War And Peace, where he tries to understand a thing like the war of 1812 and takes all those thousands of pages to prove that none of the historical explanations for it matter worth a damn. The war happened because Providence wanted to move people from west to east and this was the way Providence found of making that real. Or in season 2 of Stranger Things, they start calling the monster the Mind-Flayer and everything gets tentacly and it is weird, it is REALLY weird for me, how much that damn thing looks like an arani--like the biggest fucking arani ever--

AINE: I hate arani.

PLAIDDER: Yes! I hate them too! They are the nastiest fucking things in the ether apart from the kraikk, and as with the Mind-Flayer and those pumpkin patch death vines and all of these things are metaphors for whatever it is out there that keeps making humans hurt and kill each other when clearly, clearly, that is not what most individual human beings want or what most of them would do if they were free.

TYRNA: Says you.

PLAIDDER: All right. Says me. 

TYRNA: You want to know what I think?

PLAIDDER: Sure.

TYRNA: Put whatever metaphors you want on it. Under the costume it’s always greed. Just people grabbing what they can get and then trying to kill anyone who looks like they might take it from them. Throwing the whole world out of balance. I keep trying to right the balance and it’s like water in a sieve. A hundred women like me couldn’t do it. A thousand couldn’t do it.

CHANDRA: All right, greed, definitely, but like...I mean...the cruelty. The cruelty isn’t just about greed. Sometimes the cruelty actually interferes with the greed. People have a choice between them and they choose cruelty. 

TYRNA: I never said your magic was efficient. It’s been pretty efficacious, all the same.

CHANDRA: But why the cruelty? I mean that’s the question that’s kept a dozen of my therapists up at night. Cruelty beyond monetary gain, cruelty beyond utility. Cruelty as...as, like, a god unto itself.

TYRNA: Cruelty and greed are both lusts and they’re limbs of the same tree grown from the same rotten root.

PLAIDDER: So anyway...what I said was, if theater is magic, then, fascism is magic too. Someone has a vision. He calls out to other people. Other people share that vision. Then they make it real. And it’s hideous. That’s what--I mean, Rhinoceros.

CONN: I beg your pardon?

PLAIDDER: This old French play where everyone turns into rhinoceroses. No reason, they just do it. Because something’s making it happen. It’s not called magic, it’s called absurdism. But it’s the same thing: why the fuck is this hideous transformation taking place? Why can’t anyone stop it? I mean I think the arani and all those metaphors Tyrna is quite rightly impatient with--it’s our way of representing the just--fucking--irrationality of it all. It starts to seem at some point as if nobody really WANTS this, it’s just happening because the thing that’s making it happen is too powerful to stop. Like, an arani doesn’t have an agenda. It just grows. That’s all it does. It has no brain and no intelligence, it’s just an empty bag of guts with filaments hooked into a hundred different heads. It can be manipulated by an intelligent and powerful human...to a point. And after that it just...feeds. This image that we have of this monstrous indefinable thing that makes us do horrible things to each other--I mean--we made it real. We MADE IT REAL. We keep making it. First it’s newspapers then it’s phones then it’s radio then it’s television now it’s the internet. And THAT MAN goes out there and fills up this arani with his--he goes out there and does his--

CHANDRA: Stupid racist magic.

PLAIDDER: People in my country mostly don’t believe that curses are efficacious. But they are. If you’re powerful enough, you can curse people. If you’re the president of the united states, you can call down evil on someone, and the evil will materialize. He says the words--and they’re stupid, stupid words--but they still have power. They suggest images to people who hear them. And then people go and make them real. And then he can say it had nothing to do with him. Because there is no material, no evidentiary, no objective chain of causation. But everyone knows he’s doing it. Everyone knows. Regardless of what they admit. They know that his stupid racist magic is killing people. In El Paso. In Dayton. In Gilroy. He’s imagined a world in which white men are omnipotent and he’s making it real.

AINE: Trying to make it real.

PLAIDDER: Aine, it *is* real, don’t you understand, it’s real in a way that much as I love you you can never be.

CONN: If that gleachinai is doing magic then he’s not the only one. There are other visions in your country. There are better visions. People share them and work at them and some of them come true some of the time. You know that. I don’t understand why you say that this is the only kind of magic your world has. It isn’t.

PLAIDDER: But stupid racist magic just keeps killing people and I don’t understand why it just keeps getting stronger and more powerful and--

TYRNA: BECAUSE IT HAS GUNS.

PLAIDDER: OK, I get that, but--

TYRNA: Do you though? I don’t think you do. There’s nothing magical about any of this. Yeah, words have power, even when idiots use them. Because the idiots HAVE THE GUNS. All of this nonsense keeps happening in your country because nobody has taken the guns away from the idiots.

PLAIDDER: It’s very hard to take a gun away from an idiot.

TYRNA: Honey, what about me or my backstory would ever make you think that I do NOT know that?

PLAIDDER: Nothing.

TYRNA: Damn right. Yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard watching idiots ruin the world. It’s a crime and a shame. It’s unfair. But none of that is a new thing for me, all right? I’ve been fighting stupid racist magic all my life and I will tell you this. You want the balance restored, you have to take some guns away from some idiots. Now when is that going to happen, in your world?

PLAIDDER: Well, Tyrna, it could be said that your whole universe is the result of the fact that it is easier for me to imagine demons and monsters and devils and people shooting fire out of their hands than it is to imagine the government of my actual  country actually taking guns away from idiots.

TYRNA: Wow.

PLAIDDER: Yeah.

DAPHIE: It isn’t always idiots.

PLAIDDER: Daphie...

DAPHIE: Jarad wasn’t an idiot.

PLAIDDER: I know. But some idiot made it easy for Jarad to get a RAF. I mean I never even explained how that happened, because in my own world that’s not an extrarordinary event. Like, of course he could find a RAF when he wanted one, that’s how things just are. I was...when I wrote your book, I was...not interested in that part of it. I was chasing all these other explanations, because that was what we all did, back in the aughts.

CHANDRA: So...I mean...what. You...regret the whole...our whole story?

PLAIDDER: No, no no. I just feel like...well, it took me a long time to accept the fact that actual problems are sometimes less interesting than fictional ones. Like, the fact that a problem is hard to solve doesn’t mean that its solution is fiendishly complicated. Sometimes the solution is really fucking simple. Too simple to entertain people. Too simple for narrative.

CONN: Is this, like, a two-hour special or something? It’s already gone on way longer than normal.

The senseless and brutal violence that has increasingly become a part of American life haunts all of WOF, even before the series gets to Redemption. It’s there from the beginning, in the lurers. Theamh and the other shriias spend a lot of time fighting the lurers, you know, with fire. But for what the lurers represent, the most important thing Theamh does at Dunta is to stand up there and tell people that the violence is going to end here. 

Obama tried to do that, after Newtown and after the other shootings after Newtown. It was not efficacious. I don’t blame Obama for that. Righteous anger in the face of evil was not something he could do authentically.

When I imagined a shooting survivor in Daphie in Redemption, I didn’t imagine her as someone who could do that. Daphie was an inspiration through her actions, but by the time Redemption starts she’s already lost control of the media narrative about her, and she was literally never able to speak about it, because of her mother’s magic.

No currently serving politician is capable of doing it. None of them, at any point on the spectrum. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has sometimes come close. He represents the Newtown survivors.

I feel like someone finally got up and gave that speech. Someone got up and said what had to be said so that the tide could turn. And it was a high school student named Emma Gonzalez. 

PLAIDDER: So what actually is a “deal”?

CONN: When two or more parties agree to exchange one or more things with each other for their mutual benefit, that’s a deal. If I have fifty Amstian Red sheep, and I can’t afford to feed them, and you’re a wool dealer and you need fifty Amstian Red fleeces TOMORROW but you can only find twenty in this market and the prices asked are highway robbery, and we meet up at a tavern, you might say, look. I’ll pay you market price for the sheep if you will do the work of shearing them for me. And I might take that deal because I’m worried I’m not going to get a better offer and if they go all patchy and pink they’re not even worth half of what I paid for them. You get the fleeces, which you want, and the sheep, which you don’t want but which you figure you can sell on later, after all you’re a dealer. I get the sheep sold, which I want; I also have to throw in a lot of free labor, which I don’t like, but my sweat is cheaper than just about any other currency you could ask for. Everyone gets something they want and everyone puts up with something they’d rather not. You maybe come out of it a little better because you can sell the sheep separately; but I get out of a tight spot and that’s worth something to me. That’s a deal. 

PLAIDDER: And so...what does it mean to go around all day saying “I make the best deals”?

CONN: Number one, it means you’re a fool.

PLAIDDER: Why?

CONN: Because you always want the people you’re dealing with to think that THEY make the best deals. They will never agree to a bargain if they think it favors you. Nobody wants to be taken. Especially not Nauchtians. Half the art of negotiating is making people think they’re winning when they’re not. Of course I don’t know how many deals I made, thinking I was winning, were actually better for the other party. But as I said: as long as everyone gets something, it will all more or less come out even in the end. 

PLAIDDER: So what do you call it when the parties agree on conditions, but then one party refuses to honor them?

CONN: We call that a swindle.

PLAIDDER: And what do you call it when one party threatens to punish the other party if he won’t agree to your terms?

CONN: That’s extortion. 

PLAIDDER: Come on. Don’t tell me you haven’t--

CONN: Look, you can basically do two things in negotiation, you can offer the other side something they want or you can make them afraid of losing something they need. But all this “deal with me or I’ll ruin you” business...you can try that once. If you make good on the threat, then you make enemies of all the other players, and they band together against you. If you don’t make good on the threat, nobody pays any attention to it the next time you make it.

PLAIDDER: How much is diplomacy like dealing?

CONN: Diplomacy is about negotiation but it’s not really about transaction. You have a state of affairs you are trying to maintain, or a state of affairs you are trying to bring into being, and you are constantly on the lookout for ways to make that happen. It’s not as simple as dealing. It’s not, oh, I have some Marshlands prisoners and you have a public relations problem, let’s swap. You keep a lot of things in motion and you have to monitor all of them and keep looking for the moments when you can move one to change the others. It’s more like playing dubh solus, actually.

PLAIDDER: You know that dubh solus is so complicated it’s impossible to actually play, right?

CONN: Have you tried it?

PLAIDDER: No.

CONN: Then you don’t know, do you?

PLAIDDER: I hate strategy games.

CONN: Well, then I don’t know how you write me.

PLAIDDER: Sometimes I wonder. Do you have any advice on how we should deal with...

CONN: I don’t think anyone should ever deal with that man. He cheats everyone who tries it. If he were a dealer in Naucht we would deal with it by starving him. Everyone deals with everyone else until he goes out of business. Sometimes it doesn’t work; sometimes people allow themselves to be bought, for whatever reason, and used as intermediaries, and the cheater survives. But what you have in charge right now is not a negotiator. Negotiation is about getting the most you can get with the little power you have. That’s where the skill comes in. He has all the power your government has to offer and can’t secure cooperation from a single adversary. There’s something wrong with that picture.

PLAIDDER: Thanks, Conn. How do you like your portrait?

CONN: I’ll tell you what: if you let me get away without answering your question, I’ll tell you all of my Rules of Negotiation.