ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα...

Emancipated duels. Photo by Pavel Kurmilev

sword: sharpened

sepsis: prevented

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

If you’ll all pardon my Americentrism for a moment, the amount, visibility, and flamboyance of Pride merch available in clothing, home goods, and comestibles stores is a DIRECT reflection of how safe it is to be queer in public in the United States.

How? Simple. Out groups aren’t profitable. If you’re not “acceptable” in the current social climate, big franchise businesses will not market to you. (Prime example - Look how quickly Target dropped all their Pride merch after having been wall-to-wall rainbows every June for almost a decade prior.)

Sure, capitalism sucks and being viewed as an exploitable marketing demographic isn’t a fun concept.

HOWEVER.

The grim truth is that being normalized enough to be considered profitable by corporations IS A GOOD THING in terms of the barometer of social acceptance.

Same thing goes for smaller businesses that throw kitschy Pride events or even just put a token rainbow flag in the window or somewhere inside the shop. That’s a level of acceptance that DID NOT EXIST thirty years ago, and I can tell you because I was there.

The fact that we can scoff and bitch about being an exploitable marketing demographic nowadays means we have made GIGANTIC strides since the 1990s. It also speaks to the fact that the drive and the conversation surrounding LGBTQ+ rights and acceptance are continuing. And getting louder.

You can be cynical about it if you want. But I will take a store that puts out lip-service rainbow merch over a world that pretends we don’t exist any day of the week. Because that will always mean something.

Yet, when they start being included, they are like “well, that’s just capitalism taking advantage of us, so it doesn’t count.” Like, you can’t use your EXCLUSION from something as evidence of general societal marginalization and then claim that once you’ve started to be included, it is politically meaningless. You don’t really get to have it both ways. That’s moving the political goal posts.

I get that we shouldn’t consider Target pride merchandise as like the pinnacle of queer politics or even the pinnacle of queer inclusion. I get that inclusion in capitalist intuitions is a very ambivalent form of social progress. But the truth is, capitalism is a big part of what creates our social reality right now (unfortunately).

Capitalism makes TV shows, and movies, and books, and ads, and greeting cards, and toys, and clothing, and, and…

When every single aspect of commercial social reality excludes queerness, that DOES create a real sense of social alienation. I don’t love that capitalism is responsible for creating so much of our collective social reality. But granting that it does, I think we’re forced to accept that our inclusion in it IS politically and socially important.

The notion that women didn't meaningfully work outside of the home before the 60s is weird and sexist, but it is also classist as fuck.

Women have always been in the workplace. Women often worked jobs that were extremely dangerous, where they were horrifically taken advantage of – not only because they were women, but also because an awful lot of them were factory workers. The image that people have of women in the early 1900s happily staying home to nurture children is a fiction that only makes sense if you completely forget about the existence of poor people.

Yes, it’s easy to characterize Hamlet as a guy who had one (1) job - kill Claudius to avenge his father - and ended up getting functionally the entire cast killed along the way. But that also literally applies to Claudius.

I will give you that Polinius is Hamlet’s bad, and Ophelia is a direct result of that. But everybody else? That’s Claudius trying to kill Hamlet.

- Rosencranz & Guildenstern were carrying letters ordering Hamlet’s death on the down-low (by Claudius). Those letters got reapplied to them

- Laertes was killed by his own poisoned foil. Poisoned by whom? By Claudius, to kill Hamlet with (Hamlet’s blow should have been non-lethal)

- Hamlet was killed by the exact same thing. So… it worked!

- Gertrude drank the poisoned chalice. Poisoned by whom? BY CLAUDIUS. To kill Hamlet with. (And unlike Laertes, where Hamlet does the actual stabbing and the whole plot can be traced back to Polonius’s death, the thing with Gertrude has nothing to do with Hamlet’s Tomfoolery)

- Claudius is killed, yes, by Hamlet - with his own poisoned rapier and chalice! Murdering Claudius wasn’t even on the agenda that day! Hamlet just came out to have a good time!

I am not saying Hamlet and his tomfoolery are blameless. But Claudius’s overkill attempts to off his heir leave a comparable swath to Hamlet’s underkill attempts to avenge his father

The first thing that happens in the play is Hamlet’s dad comes to him as a ghost and says “Clausius killed me. Your Uncle. Claudius. Right over there. Avenge me.” And instead of killing Claudius, Hamlet takes a roundabout route to fact check the ghost and gets everyone killed in the process.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were not working with Claudius. Claudius invited them to cheer Hamlet up, and see why he was acting so oddly, because they were his childhood friends. They didn’t know what was in the letter.

And yeah the poison foil/cup plot was Claudius’ idea but it hinges entirely on Hamlet murdering Polonius. Laertes would never have agreed to it otherwise.

Polonius: Stabbed by Hamlet. Ophelia: Driven to end her life from Hamlet killing her dad amongst other things Rosencrantz & Guildenstern: Hamlet re-wrote Claudius’ letter to order their deaths because he thought they were scheming with Claudius (they weren’t) Laertes: Dies by poison, in a plot he would never have agreed to partake in had Hamlet not murdered his dad. Gertrude: Dies by drinking the failsafe poison. That poisoned cup, and the duel itself, could not have existed if Hamlet didn’t stab Polonius. Claudius: Stabbed by Hamlet. Hamlet: Poisoned in the duel. The duel that would never have happened if he didn’t stab Polonius instead of Claudius.

The entire bottom row hinges on Laertes wanting revenge for his murdered father, all because Hamlet killed Polonius instead of Claudius (even though the ghost explicitly told him exactly who his murderer was). The choice to be skeptical, instead of direct, cost Hamlet eight lives, including his own.

Hamlet’s biggest tomfoolery of all is that, to get revenge for his murdered father, he murder’s Laertes’ father (an innocent bystander), sending Laertes into the same rage and grief Hamlet felt, and giving him reason to agree to a poisoned duel.

my opinion, all of these

deaths are Hamlet’s fault.

Guy whose favorite era of history is the 60s: recent events are literally the 60s repeating

Guy whose favorite era of history is the guilded age: recent events are literally the guilded age repeating

Guy whose favorite era of history is the Russian Revolution: recent events are literally the Russian Revolution repeating