can't let politics touch my memes

Thinking about how many times I’ve heard the words “music used to be ABOUT something.” Thinking about all those gotcha jokes where the set up is “if that was my son, why i would” and the punchline is that they’d love him, right, because it’s funny we are at risk of being traumatized. Thinking about this quote I read today about disrespect - that there’s plenty of people who think respect means “accepting as the absolute authority”. Thinking about religious trauma and the “battle for the soul of the nation”.

Irving Berlin released “Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil” in 1922, nearly 100 years ago, and it was a direct “fuck you” to white Conservative Christians having a tizzy fit about the immorality of Jazz, especially Henry Ford, who had written a whole goddamn treatise the year before saying: “Popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation**. The mush, slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.” OH NO NOT SLIDING NOTES! HEAVENS TO BETSY! OH MY WORD!

The lyrics to “Pack Up Your Sins” are as follows: 

Oh, I got a message from below ‘Twas from a man I used to know About a year or so ago Before he departed He is just as happy as can be I’ll tell you what he said to me He said, “If ever you get heavy-hearted

Pack up your sins and go to the devil in Hades You’ll meet the finest of gentlemen and the finest of ladies They’d rather be down below than up above Hades is full of thousands of Joneses and Browns, O'Hoolihans, Cohens and Bradys You’ll hear a heavenly tune that went to the devil Because the jazz bands They started pickin’ it Then put a trick in it A jazzy kick in it They’ve got a couple of old reformers in Heaven Making them go to bed at eleven Pack up your sins and go to the devil And you’ll never have to go to bed at all

If you care to dwell where the weather is hot H-E-double-L is a wonderful spot If you need a rest and you’re all out of sorts Hades is the best of the winter resorts Paradise doesn’t compare All the nice people are there They come there from ev'rywhere Just to revel with Mister Devil Nothing on his mind but a couple of horns Satan is waitin’ with his jazz band And his band came from Alabam’ with a melody hot No one gives a damn if it’s music or not Satan’s melody makes you want to dance forever And you never have to go to bed at all

Do you sense a theme?

Of course, Lil Nas X totally put his own spin on things to make it specifically about eschewing Christian morality in favour of embracing queer liberation, which is fucking fantastic! But it’s batshit insane to see the actual governor of South Dakota practically accusing Lil Nas X of personally ushering in the beginning of America’s moral decline, as if he’s some sort of gay pied pier leading all the good children away from God, when actually this is LITERALLY THE SAME BASIC THEME OF A NEARLY 100-YEAR-OLD SONG PENNED BY THE SAME COMPOSER WHO WROTE “WHITE CHRISTMAS,” “EASTER PARADE,” AND “GOD BLESS AMERICA.”

It’s just completely manufactured outrage about celebrations of otherness that have genuinely been around forever. These people don’t actually believe it’s going to threaten their way of life, because if these songs really had that kind of power, they wouldn’t still be here bitching about it after all this time. They just can’t stand to see anybody else enjoying being anything but them. 

Anyway, here’s a 1938 version of “Pack Up Your Sins” that features a 21-year-old Ella Fitzgerald on vocals absolutely crushing it: 

1) This tweet comes after a thread that starts like this :

2) Goes on to condemn the carceral framework of immigration policy as a whole :

3) And as for the tweet screencapped by op, it’s a response to this :

So here’s what AOC, quote-unquote “cannibal”, is actually saying in that tweet :

- no immigration facility should be carceral

- immigrant children who come in the country alone (which is a situation which has always existed and. will. always. exist.) and/or children who’ve been torn apart from their families should be taken care of in (separate) facilities which need to go through a tougher vetting process

- none of these facilities should be sub-contracted by the gvt

- and some facilities which have had problems in the past should maybe just be closed

- all of these solutions should be short term before a deeper reform can occur.

ALL. OF. THESE. ARE. VALID. AND. PERFECTLY. NORMAL. POINTS. TO. MAKE. NONE OF THEM ARE IN CONTRADICTION WITH AOC’S EARLIER TWEET.

Seriously some people have this idea that advocating for radical reform means you’re exempt from thinking about the meat-and-potatoes day-to-day inner workings of any policy. You’re all for immigration ? Great, me too. How do you plan to house migrants when they arrive ? What kind of facility would you need ? Who would run it ? How do you survey and vet the people running it ? What extra services do you need to provide for immigrant minors who come in unaccompanied and need to be protected in a country they don’t know ? And how do we deal with the damage already caused by the current system ?

AOC is absolutely not saying, as the framing suggests, that “concentration camps” would be fine with a few tweaks. She is saying that such a system is not okay and that deep change is needed, while providing concrete solutions to the most pressing issues with the current way the system works. These two statements are not incompatible.

First of all, your doctor has a waiting room full of people with health concerns. You have an illness that is probably contagious. You know you should stay home, rest, and drink water. Your doctor can do nothing for you except tell you to stay home, rest, and drink water. But instead of doing that, your employer is forcing you to bring your contagious illness to your doctor’s waiting room full of health compromised people.

Secondly, health is so subjective it’s literally impossible for doctors to give exact ranges of time. Like, if you have any specific strain of influenza (the flu) you might be sick for 3 days or you might be sick for 9 days, your doctor has no way of knowing. Plus your doctor can’t even tell which of the several strains you have, or even for sure IF you HAVE influenza and not one of the other thousand reasons you could have a fever and not feel well. Like, your doctor could find out, but it would be expensive, and a waste of time and resources, when no matter what the lab finds, the treatment is 99.999% of the time going to be stay home and rest and drink water. There is literally no way to give an exact and accurate time to your employer, and nothing your doctor can do to help you.

Lastly, by making your doctor their little enforcer, the employer is treating the doctor like some kind of junior high hall monitor, instead of a highly trained professional with better things to spend their time on. 

But here’s the thing: that’s probably not true at all.

Pretending it is discounts the harsher, scarier truth: that even decent, well-meaning people can be radicalised by dangerous, hateful, predatory groups, and given enough time they can become truly hideous versions of their former selves.

It can happen to me. It can happen to you. It can happen to any of us, given the right mix of circumstances. And over the past few years, we’ve seen it happen to one of the most famous children’s authors of our age.

This isn’t to apologise for her behaviour or rehabilitate her into some former activist who is still worthy of saving; it’s to contextualise her recent descent into TERFdom compared to her previous political stances she’s openly held. She was probably never going to be a staunch ally for equality and diversity, and yes, a lot of the HP series were very problematic in retrospect, but she could very easily have gone the other way and at the very least turned out to be less of a bigoted shitbag she is now. The fact that her politics in late 2000′s/early 2010′s were similar to so many people who are now activists and organisers for queer, BIPOC and vulnerable communities should tell us to be all the more careful about radfem ideology and transphobia in progressive spaces. 

It’s comforting to say “we should have known in hindsight that she was always going to become a TERF, the early signs were all there!” but that’s also not true. We have to recognise that the toxic ideology, the active harm she chooses to participate in, was a deliberate choice; this was a path she chose to go down, not one that was pre-determined for her. It’s also an easy way to separate ourselves from being critical of radfem influence; “JKR was always a right-wing bigot and that’s why she became indoctrinated with radfem bullshit. I’m not a right-wing bigot, therefore unlike her, I will never fall for radfem bullshit.”