Into The Black Future
With Pit Stops For The Past & Present
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"Octavia Butler by Katy Horan from Literary Witches — an illustrated celebration of women writers who have enchanted and transformed our world." h/t Brain Pickings.
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Octavia Butler on How (Not) to Choose Our Leaders - Brain Pickings
As I've mentioned in this newsletter before, this summer I've been reading Octavia Butler for the first time and I have been impressed since paragraph one. The plots are fascinating and original, her questions are essential, her voice and style are pitch perfect, and her portrait of human nature is as vile and as promising as it is in real life.
This piece from Maria Popova's Brain Pickings does what Brain Pickings does best with two of Butler's most notable works "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents": it finds an essential element in the work, holds up its lesson against a timely problem/phenomenon, gives us space to see how this all intersects, then pulls in additional fascinating and timely material from other sources in order to further deepen the reflection and provide additional questions and food for thought. I absolutely love her style and as I've said many times here before Brain Pickings (along with Lapham's Quarterly & Madvillainy) are the biggest structural influences on this newsletter in the way they marry a breadth of esoteric/archival sources, a concern with the most pressing problems of the now, a compulsion toward curation, & playfulness.
I love Butler, I love Brain Pickings, I love this piece, and I love everything it links to.
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I still have that planned Afro-Futurism WesRecs feature on the back burner, I swear it's going to happen, but this week I'll add to the Octavia Butler item above with this other great find that sits at the nexus of sci-fi and this country's continually terrifying racial legacy.
I already shouted out the fresh and amazing work of Chris Herod back in WesRecs 38 and the man just keeps coming with the hits. Captioned "Programmatic Expendability" Herod drops this striking portrait of George Floyd as a Star Trek redshirt (aka a sacrificial lamb who dies early in an episode so that the officer class can have their glory while others take the risks and do the dirty work). Haunting.
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Race & Policing
Towards The Reduction Of Harm
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I'll say this for them: these murderous bastards know how to stick to a script. In July 1970 the Police Committee of ACTION (Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes) in St. Louis, MO compiled "as complete as possible a list of persons murdered, brutally beaten, intimidated or harassed in any way by St. Louis policemen" in the 4.5 yrs before then. I randomly found and read it this week and....GOT DAMN. The *only* thing that's changed in 50 years is that we can capture some of the murder and brutality on video. Other than that it is the SAME stuff we see over and over again today. Black people beaten, Black people shot, Black people killed (often while running away, often in handcuffs). Police officers blatantly lying, violating their own official rules of conduct, protecting murderers on the force, planting weapons and impugning the character of their victims. Protestors marching, demanding reforms like a more stringent use of force policy and a more diverse citizens' review board, etc etc. Nothing has changed, nothing will change, this cannot be corrected or reformed. The murders and oppression we see every week are a feature of American policing NOT a bug. I don't want to be doing this in another 50 years. tear it down.
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TW: Sexual Assault
'I didn't think I'd survive': women tell of hidden sexual abuse by Phoenix police - The Guardian
Everything here is truly awful, but also predictable. Whenever any group (police, an occupying army, jail guards, etc) is placed in total control over another, vulnerable, group such that they can detain/harass/punish them with impunity away from cameras or any other oversight people in the vulnerable group will be abused and assaulted. Especially when the members of that vulnerable group are viewed as suspicious/untrustworthy/"bad" by society at large and even more especially when the group in power is the entity responsible for preventing and investigating such abuses.
Is every cop a sex criminal (or a violent racist looking to bash skulls in)? No. But if you were a violent, racist, rapist looking to prey on the most vulnerable members of society with total authority and total impunity which line of work would you choose?
"But what about the rapists?!" is a frequent and understandable gut reaction from people learning about the notion of police/prison abolition for the first time. The fact of the matter is that cops almost never prevent rape (or any violent crime really, they show up after it's happened), cops very rarely solve rape cases (and when they do the victim very rarely experiences any meaningful 'justice"), and cops are quite frequently the perpetrators of rape and sexual assault/harassment. Police need to go.
"But there has been little reckoning over one prevalent form of brutality entrenched in the culture of US law enforcement – the epidemic of sexual abuse by the police. Studies have suggested that sexual misconduct on the job is rampant with one investigation finding roughly 1,000 officers lost their badges for rape and other sexual offenses in a six-year period. But it’s likely these cases only scratch the surface of this form of state-sanctioned assault."
...
"Between 2005 and 2015, there were 517 cases of forcible rape by police in the US, according to Philip Stinson, a Bowling Green State University criminal justice professor. An officer is accused of sexual misconduct, the second most common complaint against officers, at least once every five days in the US, according to one analysis.
“When people read a story in the paper about an officer charged with a sex crime, they think it’s one officer, it’s horrible, it can’t happen much,” said Stinson. “It’s not until you aggregate it all that you realize this is a phenomenon. It’s far beyond ‘bad apples’.”"
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How I Learned to Small Talk With White People - The Cut
Being the only Black Person in the office. Been there, done that. If you've made it this long in America you adapt aand roll with it without even thinking about it...at first. These days I'm a little more free.
"I ended up earning my way into one of the nation’s most prestigious and oldest all-girls high schools in the country. I remember vividly gawking every single day my first semester at the world now afforded me. There were club fairs and traditions like marshmallow roast and retreats in serene suburban cottages just outside D.C. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen. That school is my code-switching talking point when I want to connect with white people over anything. I reach there, first.
This is because connecting over other things is charged. Saying the name of the neighborhood where I live — Bloomingdale, which is also where I grew up — is met with loaded commentary about what the neighborhood used to be. It used to be “scary” and “dangerous,” a place (white, they often forget white) people “couldn’t go.” I don’t know if the thought is there’s no way Black women with college degrees grew up there or that I am one of them.
“I grew up there” is typically enough to create an uncomfortable reflection. But I think we have to go beyond that and have people sit with their discomfort instead of staying out of small-talk situations. Why do you feel that way? I grew up with many decent — and some high-earning — Black people when D.C. was Chocolate City. Did you feel more comfortable there when white people moved there?"
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🎵To The Left! To The Left!🎵
On That Commie Pinko Tip
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The Abolition of Work - Bob Black
Some days I can hardly belielve that we all accept (if not demand, and advocate for) full time jobs. We jump through hoops to secure them, put up with commutes/fatigue/arbitrary rules/micro-management/power tripping bosses/angry customers/ and SO MUCH stress & bullshit once we have them, we relegate our passions and dreams to nights and weekends, we drag ourselves out of bed sick, we miss our kids growing up and pay strangers to take care of them as their job, we're aalways on the watch for a better opportunity that might suck less of our soul away while also always looking over our shoulder for the axe, and we spend about 1/3 of the adult time in the one wild and precious life that we get on this planet doing something we would almost certainly not be doing if we had any other way to feed our families, put a roof over our head, and enjoy some creature comforts. Jobs Suck and nobody should have them.
And before you lose your mind I don't mean that we should all sit on the couch and doom scroll through Instagram all day (though having more time to do that or similar without guilt and creeping fear would benefit us all). Of course crops still need to be planted, and healers still need to heal, and somebody needs to design and build bridges but nobody needs to do those things 40+hrs a week, 50 weeks a year, for the benefit of a "boss" or owner for the sole reason that failure to do so means starvation.
Never before have we as a species had more abundance, more wealth, more safety from starvation and wild animals and natural disasters, with more labor saving technology and yet we somehow work more hours a week than hunter gatherers or medieval serfs (we obviously have the benefits of being able to do this in air conditioning with a coffee break or two) but we have much less of a connection to the fruits of our labor, we are way less fulfilled by it, and most of it is utterly and totally USELESS. Every *person* has value but if 2/3 of every insurance, financial services, sales, and legal job vanished tomorrow it would be OK and furthermore those entire formal industries are superfluous once we escape the trap of global capitalism.
Anyway, enough from me on this, everything I'm saying here is stated far more thoroughly (and plainly) here in this dope piece by Bob Black. Seriously, this is so readable and common sensical, I cannot recommend it enough.
I heard a saying a few years ago that has stuck with me since, it goes: How you spend your days is how you live your life. What did you do today? This week? This month? That, whatever it happens to be, is what you'll look back on as "life" on when you're lying in your deathbed. There is no great becoming, this is not a dress rehearsal, you are not preparing to be some other you. You...today...that's your life, and it is one of the most tragic things in the world that so many of us are spending a massive chunk of that time doing something that we would absolutely *never* choose to do if not for fear and need and convention.
"What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a “job” and an “occupation.” Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air- conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Re-naissance to shame. There won’t be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.
The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I don’t want coerced students and I don’t care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure."
Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile, profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although they’d get fret- ful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, espe- cially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when they’re just fueling up human bodies for work."
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The Maps in Mike Davis’s Mind - Knock LA
Nature is talking to us everywhere, and constantly, in every imaginable register and in every voice you care to think of from wind in the leaves to the roar of the surf, to the falling rain. But in our society we tend to only actually listen when it's a tornado or catastrophic flood or a fire covering several square miles. And all we hear is an alarm telling us to get out and contain the situation. And once things are contained well enough so that the rich are once again comfortable and the poor will at least hold off on open rebellion , we go right on back to tuning it all out. It doesn't have to be this way.
"Davis lived in LA during the 1965 Watts rebellion and saw that it was caused by a combination of police violence and institutionalized state racism. When he was writing City of Quartz in the late ’80s, he noted that both these factors were at an all-time high — causing some to claim he’d predicted the 1992 uprising that came a few years after he published. But Davis, a lifelong socialist, simply saw what others refused to see: people crushed at the bottom of the social structure in a wealthy city like LA, pushed to their limits and tortured for generations with state violence, will inevitably revolt. The mainstream has a way of catching up to Davis, eventually, after he’s moved on to a completely different idea."
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"As we climb a couple thousand feet up in these mountains, we’re constantly reminded of fire, whether from the site markers of previous ones or the municipal agencies clearing brush, trying to minimize the body count for the next one. “Right now there’s about 60–70,000 housing units [in the San Diego area] — all of them very upscale — projected to be built in the majority of fire hazard zones. After the fires at the beginning of the 21st century, a measure was put on the ballot to raise taxes to enhance the number of firefighters and equipment. It was voted down. So this is basically a civilization on a suicide mission because of its failure to understand what is a familiar natural process to people who live in other parts of the world.”"
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When the pandemic dropped on us like a bomb earlier this year I foolishly allowed myself to think that among all of the chaos and fear and grief one upside might....just *maybe* be that the crisis would expose the utter absurdity of for-profit healthcare in this country and force even the most heartless/money-grubbing/corporation-beholden US lawmakers to finally see the light and admit the basic common sense need for universal single payer healthcare.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
What a dumbass fool I was. This is America baby. We don't do that shit here. Despite losing 180K lives and being shown in no uncertain terms the utter stupidity and barbarity of tying healthcare to employment (and charging out the ass for it just the same) we are still the industrialized nation with the most expensive medical care and the worst health outcomes and even after a crisis that seems tailor made to show the folly of that we are 100% committed to doing absolutely nothing to change it. These colors don't run!
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The Grand Old Meltdown - Politico
No matter what happens at the polls the Republican party is now and foreseeable future the Trumpist party. It is not a fluke, it is not an anomaly, this is who and what they are. Be aware, operate accordingly.
"On Capitol Hill, several House Republicans berated a member of their leadership for defending the integrity of the nation’s top infectious disease expert amid a raging pandemic; one of them, days later, accosted a young Democratic congresswoman on the steps of the House, allegedly calling her a “fucking bitch,” while another one, who had proudly refused to wear a face covering around the Capitol, contracted Covid-19. Things weren’t much sunnier on the Senate side, where one Republican touted a new investigation that would “certainly help Donald Trump win reelection” while his GOP colleague concluded that a separate probe exonerated Trump’s campaign of wrongdoing in 2016 when it did precisely the opposite. Meanwhile, as party operatives worked feverishly to win ballot access for Kanye West, a bipolar Black celebrity who could ostensibly draw votes from Joe Biden, emerging victorious from at least three GOP primaries were congressional candidates who have expressed support for QAnon, the psychotic conspiracy theory that accuses Democrats and Hollywood elites of trafficking and cannibalizing young children. Given a chance to disavow this nascent movement, the president pleaded ignorance and, along with other party officials, embraced these candidates, even the self-described “proud Islamophobe” who has fantasized about immigrants dying en masse."
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"The spectacle is unceasing. One day it’s a former top administration official going public with Trump’s stated unwillingness to extend humanitarian aid to California because it’s politically blue and Puerto Rico because it’s “poor” and “dirty.” The next day it’s Trump launching a boycott of Goodyear Tire, a storied American company that employs 65,000 people, for one store’s uneven ban on political apparel in the workplace. A day later it’s Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, getting rung up on charges of swindling donors out of money for the private construction of a border wall, money he allegedly spent on yachts and luxury living. It was just the latest in a string of arrests that leave Trump looking eerily similar to the head of a criminal enterprise. What all of these incidents and so many more have in common is that not a single American’s life has been improved; not a single little guy has been helped. Just as with the forceful dispersing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park—done so he could hold up a prop Bible for flashing cameras—Trump and his allies continue to wage symbolic battles whose principal casualties are ordinary people."
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"Overlooked is the real possibility that Trump could win. That Biden has not built a runaway lead despite enormous advantages—chief among them, the president’s poor playing of a terrible election-year hand—speaks to the effectiveness of Trump’s slash-and-burn mentality. Even as he has failed to win over a majority of voters, he has succeeded in giving them pause about his opponent. It is no small irony that while Trump’s party has no big ideas of its own to peddle, he relies heavily on the bold progressive plans of the left to caricature Biden—all while the Democratic nominee distances himself from ideas like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal."
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Joe Kennedy III Is a Spoiled Rich Kid Who Feels Entitled to the Senate - Jacobin
As far as journalistic political hit pieces go this one is pretty damned great.
Look, I'm from Massachusetts. The Kennedy family name still means a lot there and will continue to for some time. I have a fondness for the legacy in the same way that I passively/reflexively root for the Red Sox in the playoffs or shit on the travesty that is Manhattan red clam chowder (...c'mon, the very idea is disgusting). Back in college before the financial crisis, and 2 decades of war, and the Tea Party, and birtherism, and Trayvon, and MAGA, and graduate student loan debt, and paying out of pocket for health care, and a whole lot of reading, young mainstream center-left liberal Wes would probably have voted for JK3 on sheer name recognition and youth alone. I'm happy the world smacked some sense into me before the happened.
If February 3, 2008 was one of the worst days of your life and you still live in MA, vote for Ed Markey this Tuesday.
"Kennedy’s victory was supposed to be a cakewalk, the inevitable triumph of youthful dynamism over an ossified incumbent who first entered politics in the early 1970s. This, at any rate, was the script many expected the contest to follow — not least the thirty-nine-year-old grandnephew of John F. Kennedy himself, who has struggled to offer any compelling reason for his challenge, a difficulty born of the fact that there isn’t one."
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"With a brand consolidated around the candidate’s youth (or rather Youth™) the campaign had in theory the perfect vehicle for an easy victory in the erstwhile Kennedy heartland. A run for president, similarly leveraging the family crest and little else, would probably follow in due course."
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"Though a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Kennedy voted against its proposed budget two years in a row. In 2018, he backed a House “Blue Lives Matter” bill intending to make it a federal penalty of up to ten years for assaulting a police officer — a charge criminal justice advocates say is often used to silence victims of police brutality. As recently as two years ago, he could be heard complaining about the decriminalization of marijuana."
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"On September 1, Democratic voters in Massachusetts can reelect a cosponsor of the Green New Deal or send a third generation Habsburg prince to the United States Senate. Let’s hope it’s the former, and that the Kennedy clan is handed the humiliating defeat on home soil it so richly deserves."
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Things Read
Worthwhile Words
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Greg Priore examines a book in the library’s Oliver Room in 1999. (Sammy Dallal / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP)
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The Inside Story of the 25-Year, $8 Million Heist From the Carnegie Library - Smithsonian Magazine
Having worked in an academic research library for 8 years I had some feelings about this one. This guy stole $8 Million worth of rare books, and permanently destroyed more than that, depriving the world of countless irreplaceable artifacts and he did it over 25 years and....he still had trouble paying for his kids' private school education??? What was the point of it all?
I'm a prison abolitionist so I don't advocate for incarceration for anyone but it's worth noting that this dude used his trusted/privileged position at a university to steal/destroy millions of dollars worth of one-of-a-kind historical treasures over 2.5 decades and he got 3 years house arrest and 12 years probation. George Floyd was alleged to have passed a fake $20 bill and he got choked out in the street while begging for his life. What a world.
"In the spring of 2017, then, the library’s administration was surprised to find out that many of the room’s holdings were gone. It wasn’t just that a few items were missing. It was the most extensive theft from an American library in at least a century, the value of the stolen objects estimated to be $8 million."
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"Just about the only thing that keeps an insider from stealing from special collections is conscience. Security measures may thwart outside thieves, but if someone wants to steal from the collection he stewards, there is little to stop him. Getting books and maps and lithographs out the door is not much harder than simply taking them from the shelves.
While other cultural heritage thieves have gone to great lengths to avoid calling attention to their acts—stealing items of low value, destroying card catalog entries, ripping out bookplates, bleaching library stamps from pages—Priore took the best stuff he could find, and brazenly left the library stamps in, as the library would see when it began to regather the books. Despite this cavalier approach, he was astonishingly successful, more successful than any insider book thief in memory."
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‘The Bed That Saved Me From the Taliban’ - BBC News (2019)
I don't really have a greater point to make by including this here, it's just an incredible story. This Greek pilot working for an Afghani airline spent almost 40 hours making a series of calm and collected decisions in the most harrowing circumstances imaginable that ultimately spared him from certain death. Just incredible.
"I went out on to the balcony. I could see a man on the ground covered in blood and I could hear gunfire coming from inside and outside the hotel. I realised how lucky it was that I wasn't in the restaurant at that moment and said to myself, "OK Vasileios, you have to do something in order to survive.""
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"I heard gunfire from a pistol, one shot, and I thought that in the next few seconds I was probably going to die. I thought about my family, the faces of my children, and the good and bad moments in my life.
The door was left open and the gunmen were coming in and out all the time. Then they started opening other doors on the fifth floor. Just across the corridor from me was an air steward and some other pilots that I'd worked with. Sometimes I would hear their cries before they were executed. Sometimes nothing."
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"Don't concentrate only on work, stressful and bad things in your life. Concentrate instead on creating good moments and being around good people, because life is so beautiful.
I really realise that after Kabul - life is extremely beautiful. And, believe me, I enjoy every moment."
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“This Plane Is Not Going to Land in Cairo”: Saudi Prince Sultan Boarded a Flight in Paris. Then, He Disappeared - Vanity Fair
Ibn Saud, the founder and first king of Saudi Arabia had 45 sons. All 6 kings of the country since his death in 1953 have been sons of his. Only 2 of those 6 sons that have become king have had the same mother. As you can imagine, this sprawling family tree combined with massive wealth, a major national role in global politics, and the basic human drive for power and influence have led to quite a bit of family intrigue. Egos and suspicions are smashing into each other at every turn and things can get ugly. Here's an instance of that. Super fascinating, this reads like Game of Thrones and Tom Clancy combined.
Note to self: If you survive an ambush by your family where you're lured to a location, attacked, and left partially paralyzed do not wait a few years and then once again antagonize that same wing of the family before getting on a plane that they've provided when everyone in your security detail has a funky feeling about the whole thing.
"But little things seemed off. One member of the prince’s entourage was a recreational pilot, and Saud couldn’t keep up with his small talk about 737 pilot training. The captain’s plane had a crew of 19, more than double the usual number of staffers. And the crew was all men, some a little burlier than you’d expect. Where were the leggy European blondes who were fixtures on Saudi Royal Court flights?"
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"Sultan’s staff was dumbfounded. Some had been around the last time he criticized the Al Saud and found himself on a Royal Court plane. Then, it had led to kidnapping and a lifetime of health problems. How could the prince even consider getting on the flight?"
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"The crew members looked more like security officials than flight attendants. “This plane is not going to land in Cairo,” one of Sultan’s staffers warned.
“You don’t trust them?” Sultan asked.
“Why do you trust them?” the staffer responded. Sultan didn’t answer. But he wavered until Captain Saud offered to ease his fears by leaving 10 crew members behind in Paris, as a good-faith gesture to show this wasn’t a kidnapping. That was enough for the prince."
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How Did the Internet Get So Bad? - The Nation
I got a computer and internet in my house in 1997, the summer before 8th grade. It was a 14k modem dial-up connection, AOL of course (v2.5 IIRC). It took at least 2 minutes just for the computer to turn on, then another wait before you could actually get online. Truth be told I was initially more fascinated with Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia (and the MindMaze trivia game included therein) than I was with surfing the web because...I didn't really understand what the internet was. Back in the day if you logged onto AOL (crossing your fingers in the hope that maybe "You've got mail!" even though you never did because you were 13 and didn't know anyone that you didn't see at least once a week) you were presented with opportunities to visit their own walled-garden AOL created/operated areas dedicated to things like "news" and "sports" and "games" or else hang out in AOL chatrooms or talk 1:1 via AOL instant messages. For the first 6 months I thought that *was* the entirety of the internet and I was amazed by it. I almost had a heart attack the first time I discovered a URL address bar and a search engine (Lycos?) that allowed me to really get out there and see what's up.
So much has changed since then. Everything is faster, and looks better, and the devices got smaller, and they don't need to be connected to a wall, and I use apps just as much (if not more) than websites, and my money is online, and my jobs are online, and my friends are online, and the vast majority of my waking life is spent online and just damn. It's all moved so fast that sometimes it seems like we haven't had time to think, or ask questions, or reflect on how this has happened, how it's changed us, and who has benefited. I'm glad someone is trying.
"In this way, her book is structured as a kind of people’s history of the Internet, a bottom-up chronicle of online expression and digital environments that prioritizes the textures and cultures of the Internet’s demos. It’s a project rooted in a sense of optimism about the power of the user against the sort of massive corporate might on display in AOL’s campaign. “Infrastructure is power, but it is not the law,” McNeil writes, “which means there is still an opportunity for users—as individuals and collectives, and working with government bodies—to hold platforms accountable.”"
...
"By the end of Lurking, we’re in the present, and McNeil has hit an angry, polemical stride. “In this book I have tried to maintain a consistent tone of criticism that is not openly combative,” she writes, “less ‘this is wrong’ than ‘isn’t it interesting how wrong this is,’ but I have found it next to impossible to maintain this distance when it comes to the topic of Facebook. I hate it…. The company is one of the biggest mistakes in modern history, a digital cesspool that, while calamitous when it fails, is at its most dangerous when it works as intended. Facebook is an ant farm of humanity.”"
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"At its most persuasive, McNeil’s book reminds us that life online, structured from the beginning by private interests, only heightens the inequalities of life off-line. A better and more equitable Internet would, like Lurking, begin with the premise that every user is a person, something our existing platforms have consistently failed to do. The past few months have only made it clearer that market-based solutions can’t build the better and fairer health care or justice systems we badly need. They won’t build the healthier and fairer Internet we deserve, either."
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Things Seen
Peeped Recently By Wes
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Jeffrey Veregge’s Marvel Variant Covers Honoring Indigenous History Are Absolutely Incredible - TheMarySue.com
These are so cool.
TMS: How important is it to you as an artist to bring your own heritage and history into your work?
VEREGGE: It is very important. I grew up in a world that saw Natives mostly as the stereotypes seen on TV and Film. We were almost always the villains and the visual representation of Native American culture looked a lot like dime-store kitsch, so any opportunity like the one Marvel has provided to share a contemporary voice from Indian Country are important steps in showing the world that we are alive, thriving culture that wants to be a bigger part of today’s global society.
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If you remember last week's WesRecs I got really invested in the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster for a hot minute. Not sure if it's related but this week I turned my attention to the 1912 expedition of Royal Navy officer Robert Falcon Scott and his doomed quest to lead the first team to reach the South Pole. Scott and his men scarified everything to make it where no one had gone before only to discover once they got there that a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen had made it there less than 5 weeks before. I can hardly imagine the crushing disappointment that must have been. The preparation, the excitement, the hardships endured, all of it would be worth it to have your name go down in history and to receive the undying adulation of your country. You put yourself through all that (the cold, the frostbite, the hunger, the loneliness, etc) and then when the goal is just in sight, at a distance you see a pile of rocks that you tell yourself is just a swirl of piled up ice and snow blown by the wind, and then as you get closer and closer it gets harder and harder to deny that it is indeed man-made and that everything you've worked toward for years has come to absolutely nothing, all the suffering was for nothing, all the separation was for nothing. And then, after you've accepted this unacceptable defeat you *still* have to battle through horrible conditions and starvation and delirium just to make it back to civilization, and then... you don't...and you freeze to death in a tent after having written goodbye/eulogy letters to the wife and mother of the men who trusted their lives to you on a mission that failed before paying an even stepper price. Damn.
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Things Made
By My Own Hand
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I think 2020 can just go ahead and have a seat now. Truly. RIP my dude. Wakanda forever.
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Word of The Week
Up That Vocab Game
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Unreconstructed, adj.
[ uhn - ree - kuhn - STRUHKT - ed]
Originally U.S.
Meaning: Designating a native or inhabitant of the Southern states not reconciled to the defeat of the Confederacy in the American Civil War (1861–5) and opposing Reconstruction afterwards; (later more generally) stubbornly maintaining the beliefs, values, and practices traditionally associated with the antebellum South. Now chiefly historical.
Origin: un- prefix1 + reconstructed adj., originally after reconstruction
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Somebody Said This
Words To Admire
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A few years ago I read the memoirs of Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell. I was taken by this quote (and many others). The night of this week's NBA player strike I was looking for a cryptocurrency wallet key I thought I’d written down in the same notebook. I’m still locked out of the wallet but this quote is timely af. For those who can't read my wonderful handwriting:
"One of the limitations that white people in this country face is that their biases are so seldom challenged. All the major news media, left, right, and center, regularly shock me - and, I suspect most other Blacks as well. I regularly read articles that make me think, 'Wow! Where is this guy coming from?'"
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Fun Facts
Trivia To Bend Your Brain
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- Your chances of surviving cardiac arrest is significantly lower if you live above the 3rd floor. This is due to delays and difficulties experienced by first responders trying to reach you such as elevator malfunctions and delays. Living in the 25th floor or above reduces your survival rate to essentially nothing. If you're in the penthouse don't feel too bad though as the survival rate for any out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is less than 15%.
- You will (or already have) turn one billion seconds old about two thirds of the way between your 31st and 32nd birthday.
- Approximately 3% of the total value loaded onto gift cards in the U.S. goes unredeemed each year. This adds up to $3 Billion dollars.
- Mike Illitch, the founder of the Little Caesars pizza chain paid Rosa Park's rent for the last 10 years of her life.
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