The Best Imitation of Myself

Re: The Odyssey, someone on--Bluesky, maybe?--mentioned that I wrote "Troy in Fifteen Minutes" back in the day, and I would like to point out that that post is 22 years old. Just in case you haven't sustained any psychic damage today.

"here's my original character, Man Who Sucks But Loves His Daughter Very Much" and it's a guy who worships at the altar of patriarchal violence and the woman he uses as an excuse and an effigy to absolve him

well i think his daughter should tell him to kill himself

Something about the bastardization of the story time and time again proves that nobody in power really cares about the people who would resonate with King’s Carrie White. A girl so ugly and repulsive she’s been removed from her own story. The societal need for women and girls to be constantly perceived as attractive is what fuels a fair amount of her torment in the book, but that person isn’t even allowed to exist on the screen. We cannot empathize with her; it isn’t allowed. It’s fascinating to me.

One thing I’m still pissed at Bernie Sanders about is turning a generation against the Democratic Party. Every piece of social progress in the last 80 years, from Social Security to Medicaid to Medicare to integration to the Civil Rights Act to Title IX to Roe v. Wade to labor rights to environmental protections to public health protections to Obamacare to Obergefell, all of it directly or indirectly powered by the engine of change that is the Democratic Party. And then Sanders comes and says this whole apparatus, which he had no hand in building, is corrupt and needs to be completely replaced. Now we have countless young people who think Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the same partly because they were told that an engine of change and an anchor of stagnation and oppression are equally bad because they were fed the lie that no one in the Democratic Party does anything to improve their lives.

Nothing makes me more embarrassed about my age or generation than BernieOrBust/StillJill/NeverHillary supporters who are basically doing the GOP’s work for them and refuse to acknowledge it. As much as I hate the ageist bullshit I see Baby Boomers come up with, I can see why they think so many millenials need to get their head out of the clouds or don’t know how the real world works when I see the way people my age talk about politics. Like, I know it’s bullshit and I still don’t blame baby boomers for getting mad that young people think they know everything. Because fun story: my university campus is very liberal and very politically active, and during the last quarter there most students strongly supported Bernie Sanders…except for most of us in or connected to the Political Science Department (so Poli Sci majors, International Relations majors, certain other ‘bureaucratic’ majors, etc.) We also loved Bernie, but we all pretty bluntly said we were voting for Hillary and thought she’d be the best President. Most of us were pretty blunt about how “as much as we love Bernie’s message of change, we think Hillary can actually accomplish more of it in the real world”. We were basing our decision on our studies of politics, of what kinds of change have and have not worked in history and why. This support for Hillary, even with our love of Bernie, came from a place of deep understanding of how politics work, of why certain policies or political goals fail, and what various political leaders’ real powers and challenges are. We were called “over-educated elites” because of this.

Nixon, fucking Nixon, signed the core of the ecologic protection laws.

I don’t have a problem voting for “political insiders” because *they freaking know how the sausage is made.* I want a goddamned professional in the job. Wanting an “outsider” strikes me like saying, “I don’t want a surgeon that went to some hoity-toity university and is friends with the the department head! I want some guy who learned how to remove appendixes by pulling himself by his bootstraps and learning by trial and error!”