TITLE? WHAT TITLE?

Well, we were explaining to a friend who was unfamiliar with the Odyssey why my partner found Matt Damon such a baffling choice for Odysseus, one reason being like… look at him. That is not a twisty turny man. That’s just some dude trying to get home, probably to watch the Red Sox game.

But then our friend asked, who DOES have a face in Hollywood that fits what we would prefer? Who just LOOKS like a twisty turny man?

I was stumped for a moment, but my friends, now I have it.

Daniel Ings - also known as Lyonel Baratheon in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and Freddy in The Gentlemen

THAT man has a twisty turny face, unlike Matt Damon. He looks like he’s got three schemes backing up the one he’s currently working on and there’s no guarantee any of them will work. He also can pull off pathos even while you feel like you can’t trust him as far as you can throw him.

Person who focused on it in undergrad: yea I’m a bit of an expert on that field; it was my major

Person who has done at least some graduate level work on the topic: yeah I specialize in [subsubfield]

I am a Holocaust historian, I am Jewish, and I’m part of the 3G survivor community. Judaism is fascinating in terms of memory construction, because our history is deeply intertwined with our liturgy and observance. This leads to many Jewish individuals considering themselves experts on Jewish history, when actually they’re conversant in a very specific, highly curated version of Jewish memory.

As a Holocaust historian, this becomes more acute because people with survivor grandparents assume that having those bonds and receiving their relations’ memories makes them well-versed in those histories. No, it makes them well versed in receiving their grandparent’s memories.

And that’s fine. That’s important. But memories aren’t the same as history. And when we receive our descendants’ personal histories, we are receiving their MEMORIES, shaped inevitably by lack of context, time, and trauma. Or to put it differently, we are receiving their primary source documents.

And that’s important. We need primary sources; without primary sources we would be literally unable to practice history. BUT, the practice of history requires that we interrogate primary sources within all aspects of their context, not accept them at face value.

This can became really messy when you study the history of your own minority identity group. In those circumstances, the experiences of y/our ancestors become a mythology that a large portion of y/our group accepts as fact. But then, when put under the scrutiny of critical historical interrogation, a lot of those agreed upon truths can be exposed as myth, and not fact. And that’s when y/our identity group turns on you.

A notorious example of this are the multiple versions of Tosia Altman’s death. The parts everyone can agree on:

-the attic of the celluloid factory where Tosia may or may not have been hiding in caught fire, potentially because someone didn’t dispose of a cigarette correctly, or because Tosia was heating ointment to treat the wounds she’d received in the fall of Mila 18 and the fire got out of control

-she jumped from the attic

-the Gestapo showed up and cleared the scene

-she was dead

That’s where the similarities end. Some say she was already dying from smoke inhalation when she jumped. Others say she was gravely injured and close to death on account of burns, wounds sustained in the fighting, and injuries from the jump. Some say she died immediately after the jump. Some say that she was alive after the jump, and then arrested by the Gestapo, and taken to the hospital where she was either: interrogated and denied medical care until she succumbed to her wounds, or tortured to death.

Here's what my response would sound like: "I was in my seventh grade French class. We were learning how to count, when the phone rang. It was the front office saying that my mom was there to pick me up. I was excited because we hadn't talked about an early pickup. As I gathered my things, Steven B. said 'a lot of people are being picked up early today.' When I got to the front office my mom looked upset, and the office staff looked like they were trying not to look upset. In the car, she told me that two airplanes crashed into the WTC towers. I pictured two small, single-engine planes, and didn't quite get it. At home, I went up to my room and played with my dollhouse. It was all anyone really talked about for the next few months, but it took me years before I was able to fully grasp the events. In college I interned with the 9/11 Museum in Manhattan, and that experience overrode a lot of my ability to recall what I thought and felt in the months following 9/11/01."

That "testimony" is quasi-useless if you don't take into account such issues as age, maturity, parenting, and the impact of time/memory on recall. Now when I try to remember the actual day of, or week of, or month of, all I remember is what I wrote above, and a discussion in English class about how it looked like that scene from Independence Day, all interspersed with imagery of "jumpers," which I only encountered when I was 19; nearly a decade AFTER the events took place.

Bc so many ppl focus on the idea of telling A Trusted Adult, but even a well-meaning individual can fuck up and let abuse fall through the cracks or not know what to do

Whereas if a child tells LOADS of adults AND other kids, there's far less opportunity for an abuser to do damage control

Consistently telling their story and spreading it around disempowers the abuser to control and coerce the flow of information, or to utilise gaps and weaknesses in systems of reporting or welfare to isolate the child

Corporation stole your life's work? Well if there were UBI you wouldn't mind!

Robot stole your job? With UBI you wouldn't need your job!

Not enough help for disabled people? If we all had UBI that would replace disability payments!

Corporations conglomerating into a few huge unregulatable cartels which hike up the prices of everything forever? Just tax them and do UBI!

Like, yes UBI would certainly help those problems. I'm not at all saying it wouldn't.

But if we do not actually fix society in a few key ways, we're going to end up right back where we are now.

For instance, if we had UBI nationally (instead of just in test areas), these big colluding megacorporations would simply raise the prices of everything to recapture the money. The only limit in the money they extract from us right now is how much we have. If we had more, they'd take more, and monopoly gives them the ability to do that efficiently.

UBI isn't going to hire a special ed teacher in my kid's school or make your apartment ADA compliant.

UBI shouldn't be a consolation prize for destroying a job someone loved. Humans like to work, and we like to benefit from our own work. I do not want to have my industry demolished to be done worse by a word salad machine, and be compensated by a check.

And of course, with corporations so huge they can buy politicians, they will soon vote the taxes down and UBI back out.

We need, for starters:

robust anti trust

money out of politics

regulations that protect ordinary people without a lawyer