Category: rants

Shakespeare had a thing or two to say about tyrants

personby Deborah J. Ross
schedulePosted on

What Shakespeare revealed about the chaotic reign of Richard III – and why the play still resonates in the age of Donald Trump

In this circa 1754 illustration, two women scold Richard III in Shakespeare’s play.
Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

by David Sterling Brown, Trinity College

Written around 1592, William Shakespeare’s play “Richard III” follows the reign of England’s infamous monarch and charts the path of a charismatic, cunning figure.

As Shakespeare depicts the king’s reign from June 1483 to August 1485, Richard III’s kingdom was wrought with chaos, confusion and corruption that fueled civil conflict in England.

As a scholar of Shakespeare, I first thought about Richard III and his similarities with Donald Trump after the latter’s debate with President Joe Biden in June 2024. Those similarities – and Shakespeare’s depictions – became even clearer after Trump’s election in November 2024.

Shakespeare’s play highlights the flawed character of a man who wanted to be, in modern terms, a dictator, someone who could do whatever he pleased without any consequences.

In his 1964 essay, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” writer James Baldwin concluded that Shakespeare found poetry “in the lives of people” by knowing “that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.”

“It is said that Shakespeare’s time was easier than ours, but I doubt it,” Baldwin wrote. “No time can be easy if one is living through it.”

A black and white drawing of Richard III.
An undated portrait of Richard III.
Universal History Archive/Getty Images

A villain?

In Act 2, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s play, a common citizen says Richard is “full of danger.”

“Woe to the land that’s govern’d by a child,” the citizen further warned.

Beyond hiring murderers to kill his own brother, Shakespeare’s Richard was keen on belittling and distancing himself from people whom he viewed as being not loyal or being in his way – including his wife, Anne.

To clear the way for him to marry his brother’s daughter – his niece Elizabeth – Richard spread what now would be called fake news. In the play, he tells his loyalists “to rumor it abroad that Anne, my wife, is very grievously sick” and “likely to die.”

Richard then poetically reveals her death: “Anne my wife hath bid this world goodnight.”

Yet, before her death, Anne has a sad realization: “Never yet one hour in Richard’s bed / Did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep.”

That sentiment is echoed by Richard’s mother, the Duchess of York, who regrets not strangling “damned” Richard while he was in her “accursed womb.”

As Shakespeare depicts him, Richard III was a self-centered political figure who first appears alone on stage, determined to prove himself a villain.

In Richard’s opening speech, he even says that in order to become king, he will manipulate his own brothers George, the Duke of Clarence, and King Edward IV, “in deadly hate, the one against the other.”

But as his villainous crimes mount up, Richard shares a rare moment of self-awareness: “But I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.”

Shakespeare’s Richard III and Trump

While the details of Trump’s and Richard’s lives differ in many ways, there are some similarities.

Much like Trump during his first term, Shakespeare’s Richard did not lead with morals, ethics or integrity.

Richard lied compulsively to everyone, as his soliloquys that contain his innermost thoughts make clear.

A black and white illustration of William Shakespeare.
An illustration of English writer William Shakespeare (circa 1600).
Rischgitz/Getty Images

Like Trump, Richard used empty rhetoric to persuade people with “sugared words” – he was not interested in speaking or promoting truth.

Moreover, Shakespeare’s Richard was a sexist and misogynist who verbally and physically disrespected women, including his wife and mother.

In the play, for example, Richard calls Queen Margaret, widow of King Henry VI, a “foul wrinkled witch” and a “hateful withered hag,” thus disparaging her older age.

He refers to Queen Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV, as a “damned strumpet” or prostitute, which she wasn’t.

Additionally, in order to cast doubts on his nephews’ legitimate claims to the throne, Richard spread false rumors about his mother, claiming that she was unfaithful.

A white man and a Black woman shake hands.
Kamala Harris shakes hands with Donald Trump before their debate.
AP Photo/Alex Brandon

For his part, Trump has no shortage of disparaging remarks about women. He once called his Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton “the devil” and characterized former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “crazy.”

Trump repeatedly peppered Vice President Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign with sexist and racists attacks.

He initially refused to pronounce her name correctly and openly mocked her racial identity as a Black woman, even questioning her “Blackness.”

A new day?

Like Trump, Richard III used religion to manipulate and confuse public perception of his amoral image.

In the play, Richard stages the equivalent of a modern-day photo op, standing between two “churchmen” with a “prayer-book” in his hands.

Much like Richard, Trump has courted evangelicals and used organized religion to his political advantage, most publicly by selling a “God Bless the USA Bible.”

Trump’s 2020 photo op in front of St. John’s Church in Washington is another example. It occurred during protests over the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed by a white police officer. Police in riot gear used tear gas to force protesters away from the White House; then Trump was escorted to the nearby church along with several administration officials.

As a political leader, Richard III left a legacy in English history as one of England’s worst monarchs.

That legacy includes his decisive defeat in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 that led to his death and to a new era for England under King Henry VII.

After winning the throne, the new king offered a message of hope that suggested England would one day emerge from its time of civil discord:

Let them not live to taste this land’s increase
That would with treason wound this fair land’s peace!
Now civil wounds are stopped, peace lives again.
That she may long live here, God say amen.The Conversation

David Sterling Brown, Associate Professor of English, Trinity College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “Shakespeare had a thing or two to say about tyrants”…

Stories of stories of stories are embedded in Jewish history

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I am supposed to be asleep. In six hours I have to wake up and buy all my fruit and vegetables at the farmers’ market. It’s the last day I can do this and… I’m tired. My body announced that we’re getting another heatwave. It announced this by pushing my mind into fastplay. Then I got excited by my thoughts: I finally had a reason for something that has been plaguing me for decades. This is why I am writing you all this blogpost at an unholy hour when I ought to be asleep. I’m not at all certain that anyone but me will be excited, but I’m very excited, so this is fair. The world is balanced.

Also, I may be entirely and completely wrong about everything I say here. If I am, please don’t just say “You’re wrong” – tell me how and why. (I’m a bit tired of being I’m wrong with no explanation. This is not you, this is the wider public which is full of opinions on all things Jewish right now. Most of the opinions are not nice.)

Once upon a time, in a moment a bit like the one we’re in now, when the rulers of France and its church demanded that all Jews be their kind of Jew, this view was challenged. “Their kind of Jew” was one which supported that particular branch of Christian theology and the rulers and all sorts of related things. By “supporting” some Jews were expected to engage in very specific debates that were not supposed to demonstrate truths, but demonstrate the Christian truths that were important in that moment and place.

The learned Jews of Paris and its nearby regions had little choice but to engage in the debate because, to be frank, Jews were not given a fair go. They were not full citizens with full rights. What they were is complex to explain so I’ll cheat a bit and explain one view of what Jews were expected to be. We were expected to be (and still are, in some circles) the remnant of those who witnessed the coming of the Messiah. We were important as people who had seen. But Jews are fractious and difficult and were a lot more than that, and, for a variety of reasons, the French king became very aware of this. He was a holy bloke, was Louis IX, and he loved showing off his piety. Place an image in your mind of a rather splendid thirteenth century French king. We will return to him.

Now we travel back in time. We will return to Louis IX.

The thing is, Jewish history is often part of the history of the lands where Jews live, but it also goes its own way. When something troubling happens, we respond.

Once upon a time (an earlier time) Judaism had the Written Law (the Torah) and Oral Law. There was trouble. Much change happened. This was when the Second Temple fell and Jews were enslaved and became part of the Roman Empire. It caused many learned folk to ask, “What happens if we lose all these experts who know the Oral Law?” They also asked, “What do we do without the Temple?” There were answers that had already been considered (because we had lost the Temple once before, I suspect), but that’s a different story. Related, but different. Stories breed stories. History is never simple. And Gillian is full of aphorisms today.

The learned folks who maintained the oral law began writing it down. It took a while. A long, long while. About five hundred years.

Not only was there a lot of oral law to write down, but learned Jews are, were, and always will be opinionated, so those doing the documentation added stuff and it was talked about and… the Talmud is the most amazing document. One of the great feats of literature and story and argument and religion, all bound together into a wildly difficult set of books. I was once told that whoever studies the Talmud is learning about humanity, and to me that sounds about right.

The Talmud comes in two versions of considerably different lengths with considerably different material. One was written in what is now Iraq, by diaspora Jews, and the other was written in Jerusalem. Finally, finally, it was written down (handwritten, all those volumes written down then copied by scribes, one letter at a time) and, as far as I know (this is not something I know enough about) determinations were made about what words and thoughts were part of the official document. And so we had both the Torah and the Talmud in written versions, by the end of the early Middle Ages.

That wasn’t the end of it. Jewish culture contains story and discussions and finding a stupid example and using it to teach and a whole bunch of culture at its core. Also bad jokes. I find it very difficult to explain to the highly serious why one festival incorporates getting drunk and also mocking the story of the Book of Esther, but the heart of this sense of humour and the ability to take religion both very seriously and very lightly can be traced back through the Talmud. What happened next followed the general cultural lines of Jewish thought, and takes us right into the Middle Ages.

The Talmud in its modern printed version occupies whole walls of the houses of very highly learned religious people of Judaism (not me, I am not of the Jewish scholarly elite at all). It takes seven and a half years to read it through once in the regular way, at a page a day. It, in its modern version, is probably the longest written work every published. The Talmud is beyond brilliant and beyond stupid and the best way to read it is in discourse (and probably argument) with other people. I don’t know whether to be infuriated to amused at those idiots who share one page of translated extracts and say “Look how foul Judaism is: their holy book says this.” It’s using a few words to hide the whole document.

You can find a complete translation of the Talmud (but not of the one page that misleads) here. https://www.sefaria.org/texts/Talmud

The Torah is the law, and the Talmud is where the law is explained so that we know what to do with it. Medieval rabbis helped us understand how to interpret the Talmud, because placing yourself in front of thousands of pages with no guidance is the sure way to not understand the law.

This is where Europe joins the party. A bunch of learned European Jews gave ordinary Jews (such as myself) technical guides to help with the interpretation. The code breakers that most people know of and may use are the Mishneh Torah, written by Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides 1135-1204) who was wildly controversial when he lived and whose legacy has been profound. He lived in what’s now the south of Spain but was forced to move to Egypt and its environs by antisemites. At the end of the Middle Ages or in the Early Modern era (depending on how you define periods) an easier to read codification was written, first in 1563 by Joseph Caro (living in what is now Syria from 1488–1575, he was actually born in Toledo and thrown out along with all other Jews in 1492) and then annotated for Ashkenazi Jews by Moses Isserles (born in Krakow in 1530). I’ve used the English translation and it really is a codification of the complicated that makes much of the standard part of Jewish law accessible to the masses.

How the Talmud began to be read included more than those codifications. This is where things start to get funky. Also, my timeline is warped.

The Talmud as we know it is not simply what was written by 800, of material that was commonly used for Jewish law and education earlier than that. The Medieval book contained commentaries. The most important one is by one of my favourite rabbis of all time, Rashi (Shlomo Yitzchaki, or Solomon son of Isaac 1040-1105). He was trained in what is now Germany (and if he was born there, he may well have had a secular name as well as a Hebrew name), but most of the work that we know of was done in Normandy. This has a rather important implication for the return of Louis IX, so hold the thought: the most important commentary on the Oral Law was done by a Frenchman.

Rashi’s vineyard helped him earn the money to teach and to study and to write brilliant philosophical, legal and other stuff. He was a genius.

Why do I love Rashi? He gave me proof that young women wore blue eyeshadow to look sexy and how they carefully laced the sides of their dresses to also look sexy. He gives us evidence of hot water machinery and foot braziers and even paper clips. His answers to religious questions incorporated the everyday of his congregants and the general Jewish public. He taught his daughters and they played an important part in the transmission of Jewish learning during his life and after his death. Also, he liked a good pot roast.

Rashi wrote a commentary that was written as part of the frame around the Talmud when it became what we know know it as. His legacy-scholars, the Tosafists, also wrote commentary and that was also made part of the frame. To read the Talmud, then, is to read a chronicle of the thoughts of many major rabbis from the third century to the thirteenth century as a documentation of non-documented Judaism from earlier.

Now we’re back to Louis IX, who lived from about 1226 to 1270. Christianity changed throughout the Middle Ages. By the thirteenth century western Christianity had become very interesting indeed. It accepted Judaism, as I said earlier, within limits. There was much debate of the public sort and Louis decided (with the help of those difficult public debates) that the Talmud with all its commentaries transgressed those limits. It was material that Jews had developed since the time of Jesus and this was not permissible.

Twenty-five cartloads of these amazing books were burned. Twenty-five. Cartloads. Each volume had been written by hand and was worth, in modern terms, at least as much as a good EV.

None of this is my big revelation. My revelation is that I finally realise why Louis felt burning books was so imperative.

He didn’t want to destroy Jews. Unlike some other rulers at other times, Louis had a place for us in his theology. What he didn’t have a place for were culturally-developed, successful Jews who did not fit stereotypes. It’s as if Mr Not-Quite-Bright from next door can only accept Jews who are moneylenders or part of a secret cabal that controlled the world. When his Jewish next door neighbours admitted that he was a schoolteacher and she a lawyer, he could not cope and set fire to their shed.

This isn’t an insight into Louis IX. We already knew this about him. He wanted to world to fit his (occasionally generous but usually religious) world view. What has kept me up far, far past my sensible bedtime is that this means that there may have been more Jews in northern France than I thought and that they must have been culturally amazing. I knew this deep down, because scholars like Rashi don’t just appear out of nowhere and leave a vast legacy of learning and writing.

Late in life, Rashi saw some of those who went on the First Crusade murder many, many people he know. I think we underestimate how much hurt was done because we are so used to the world of Jews being torn apart and Jews being murdered. I suspect I need to visit my first area of specialisation and rethink the culture of Northern France. I did this for Germany recently and … I suspect that France was not a Christian country, but a country under Christian rule. Those books were written by people and studied by people and did not emerge from a vacuum. It was, I suspect, the fact that Jewish life was in an amazing stage of growth and learning that triggered Louis the Pious.

When I finish my current projects (this may take a year or so) I shall return to my intellectual homeland and analyse the evidence I thought I knew. Instead of saying, “There are no Jews in the chansons de geste, so there can’t have been many Jews” I shall look for evidence of growth and change and disruption and sudden discovery. I suspect there may be a novel in this, and if there is, I suspect it may contain fairies. I have Reasons.

Before I can explore those Reasons, though, I need to get my paleography books out and find out just how many people we’re talking about when we’re wondering about who copied those Talmuds and how different Hebrew manuscripts were (in terms of labour and time and money spent creating those manuscripts) were to the Latin and Old French manuscripts I know much more about. Look at the dates. Rashi died in 1105. The books were burned in 1242. I need to do some sums. And more. Much more.

I can’t even begin the research until I have finished all my current projects. This is why I am so kindly giving you my sleeplessness. I am sharing the pain of something I can’t even begin to work on at this moment. I’m a very kind person.

Tech and the Present

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

Back in the late 1990s, when we were all getting used to email and setting up websites and googling was so new it wasn’t a verb yet, the business pages of our newspapers were full of stories that went something like this:

The internet is fun, but how is anyone going to make money off of that?

Fast forward twenty-fiveish years and we have been overwhelmed by the answer: capitalism. Turns out the internet wasn’t immune to being taken over by people who were more interested in short-term profit than in making cool stuff that worked and was useful to people.

This is an even deeper situation than enshittification. Ed Zitron calls it the Rot Economy and he discusses it in great detail here. (Very long and very worth reading.)

So these days we have constant updates that break things, apps that limit your rights in a way that using regular web browsers does not, and devices intended to steal our attention by constantly intruding.

I remain amused by the idea that the young folks are digital natives because they’ve grown up with cell phones and tablets. What they’ve grown up with are devices that have set us up for the worst excesses of so-called AI, ones that supposedly think for you, only they can’t actually think, so they approximate.

And because those young folks are not also raised with the knowledge of how things work, they don’t always recognize the many errors. Plus they assume – because it’s true of everything they use – that everything will glitch all the time.

As I’ve said before, it’s absurd to lump Boomers, who have been using computers for 40 years and include a large number of people who built their own or wrote their own software, with their parents and grandparents who were approaching retirement years in the 1980s and 90s and didn’t have to learn to use this stuff for work.

I may not be great at Discord, Slack, and online meeting multitasking – in fact, I suck at all of those – but I am very good at recognizing when I’m being bamboozled. And a large amount of what’s going on in the digital world is, in fact, bamboozlement.

Late stage capitalism ate the tech industry and — unfortunately — the internet. Continue reading “Tech and the Present”…

In Troubled Times: Numbing Out

personby Deborah J. Ross
schedulePosted on

I first posted this on December 12, 2016, right after the presidential election. I’m putting it up again as a reminder of how important it is to take care of our mental well-being in troubled times.

I have long understood the dangers and seductions of overwork. I’ve frequently coped with stress by balancing my checkbook or going over budget figures. Or reading and replying to every single email in my Inbox. It needn’t be intellectual work: scrubbing bathrooms or reorganizing closets works just fine. All these things involve attention to detail and (to one degree or another) restoring a sense of order to an otherwise capricious and chaotic world. I come by it honestly; when I was growing up, I saw my parents, my father in particular, plunge into work in response to the enormous problems our family faced. He and I are by no means unique. We live in a culture that values work above personal life and outward productivity over inner sensitivity.

“Work” doesn’t have to result in a measurable output. Anything that demands attention (preferably to the exclusion of all else) will do. Reading news stories or following social media accomplish the same objective and have the same result: they put our emotions “on hold.”

As I’ve struggled to detach from the waves of upsetting news, I have noticed an increased tendency in myself to overwork. It occurs to me that I reach for those activities in a very similar way other folks might reach for a glass of liquor or a pack of cigarettes (or things less legal). Or exercising to exhaustion, or any of the many things we do to excess that keep us from feeling. There’s a huge difference between the need to take a  breather from things that distress us and using substances or activities in a chronic, ongoing fashion to dampen our emotional reactions. The problem is that when we do these things, we shut off not only the uncomfortable feelings (upset, fear, etc.) but other feelings as well.

The challenge then becomes how to balance the human desire for “time-out” from the uncertainties and fears of the last few weeks and not numbing out. In my own experience, the process of balancing begins with awareness of what tempts me, whether I indulge in it or not. Is it something that can be good or bad, depending on whether I do it to excess? (Exercise, for example.) Or something best avoided entirely? (Some forms of risk-taking behavior, like unprotected sex with strangers.) If it can be both a strength and a weakness, how do I tell when enough is enough, or what a healthy way to do this is? Continue reading “In Troubled Times: Numbing Out”…

Such a week…

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

Part of the annual report into antisemitism in Australia was released last week. Also last week (just before I left Melbourne to come home, in fact) a synagogue was firebombed. Thankfully there were no casualties in the attack. But..

I am now facing the deluge of comments one gets after the news was released. So many of those talking about the attack believe it is by “Zionist Jews.” I want to stand up and shout that every single one of these people is a bigot. They’re using the fourth definition to “Zionist” to replace most of the poison inherent in the words they’re using to replace “Zionist”, such as “Jews.” This definition reflects the emotion and hate in the mind of the user. It does not reflect Australian Jews at all. Take my siblings: some support Israel, some don’t, some are quiet on the subject because they believe it’s not anyone else’s business. And one of us (not me) is Ultra-Orthodox and has links to the burned synagogue. None of us have any wish to burn down any synagogue, much less one filled people books we love and people who know members of our family.

I saw walls of Talmud charred to black and it reminded me of the times when (in Europe) supersession saw Jews expelled from their homeland of hundreds (possibly up to 1400) years, and in other places saw cartloads and cartloads and cartloads and cartloads of Talmuds burned. Those burnings were to make certain that Jewish culture and religion was frozen at the time of Jesus, because that was the only relationship with Jews that these particular Christians could handle. Note I said “these particular Christians.” Most contemporary Christians and contemporary Muslims do not condone barbaric acts. They are not the people crying that all Jews need to be deported from Australia, to make way for a return of the old White Australia.

The ‘old White Australia’ is a fiction. “White Australia” is complex but has very little in common with what those shouting think. I want to sit down and teach them some history. Literally, in terms of people, before Europeans came it was not White at all, and when the First Fleet arrived… there were Jewish convicts on it. The members of the public shouting about Australian Jews not being White and not being wanted here has returned, but I’m still told I have White privilege. Most of those telling me I have White privilege and should be deported came from families who arrived here after my own. And the shouts are louder right now.

I can give you the old and new definitions of Zionism if definitions can help you deal. I can also give you a photograph. The photograph is more, fun, so I’ll only give you the definitions if you want them (just ask!).

Why the photograph? The Myer Christmas windows are a feature of the Melbourne landscape at this time of year. This year, the pro-Palestinians marchers (some of them are the same people who want me deported and blame Jews for everything that hurts) protested against them. We all looked for reasons. Maybe it was because Myer was founded by someone Jewish… except Sidney Myer converted to Christianity. Maybe they hate all people who have Jewish ancestry? That’s the purity of blood notion, used to hurt those who could not shake off their Jewishness enough in Early Modern Spain and Spanish territories. If you’re not familiar with this long moment in the history of the Spains, look up ‘Torquemada.’  Jewish ownership of business? Myer is not owned by Jews. This means that either the Christmas windows themselves are deeply offensive (and aimed at children, therefore problematic) or those protesting them are idiots. I’ll let you decide:

 

The Irwins looking at parrots in the Australian Outback, Myer windows 2024
Melbourne, December 2024

In Troubled Times: Facing the Problem Squarely

personby Deborah J. Ross
schedulePosted on

Back in 2016, I posted a series of blogs entitled In Troubled Times. Today it seems fitting to remind myself that I survived then and will survive now. These thoughts are from Monday, December 5, 2016.

A few days ago, John Scalzi wrote in his blog, Whatever, “…the Trump administration and its enablers are going to make a mad gallop out of the gate to do a whole bunch of awful things, to overwhelm you with sheer volume right at the outset.”

Pretty shocking statement, huh? That was my first reaction. My second was that Scalzi is very likely correct. All the signs are there…all the signs that in my panic-stricken moments, I want to ignore so hard they go away.

My next reaction was to surrender my mind to a gazillion chattering monkeys, each with her own idea of What Must Be Done Right Now. I can work myself into a downright tizzy in no time this way. Not only that, I can paralyze myself with too many alternatives and no way to prioritize them, jumbling actions I might take with those that are impossible or unsafe (crazy-making) for me.

Any of this sound familiar?

It’s all based on a false choice. I don’t have to either prepare now for the logically impending “awful things” or play ostrich on the river in Egypt. But in order to see other, saner alternatives, I must first evict the Monkeys of Panic so I can regard the situation calmly.

We’re in for some hard times, and knowing that is a relief.

At first, it seems counter-intuitive to say that acknowledging we are in for some dark times comes as a relief. The relief is because instead of nebulous fears running rampant, bursting into exaggeration and melodrama at every turn, vulnerable to any sort of fact-free hype, I’ve stepped away from the emotional storm. I’m facing the problem squarely, as my tai chi teacher used to say. We’re in for some tough times, and likely there will be a whole slew of bad news in the early months of 2017.

When I’m no longer trying to deny or distort the way things are (for example, Trump’s cabinet choices and what is known about them, or what he has said he will or won’t do) I not only become calmer, but better able to see things I might do, alone or in solidarity with like-minded folks.

This is based on a simple truth that in order to act effectively, I need to be sane. I can’t be sane if I’m bouncing off the walls at every headline on social media. I could, of course, disengage entirely from social media and refuse to read or listen to any sort of news. But I don’t want to do that. I want to stay engaged, but in a mindful way. I want to know what I’m up against. Once I stop fighting the reality of what that is, I free myself to use my energy and time in productive ways. I don’t know exactly what form these tough times will take, but I don’t need to prepare for every twist and turn. I can trust my ability to respond appropriately and creatively.

 

Living in Margaret Atwood’s Future

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

Cover of the first edition of The Handmaid's TaleHistorian Timothy Snyder keeps telling us “Do not obey in advance” even as more and more people appear to be leaping up to kiss the ring (or perhaps a part of the anatomy) of the grifter now apparently headed back to the White House in the ultimate triumph of the January 6 insurrection.

This week in his newsletter he is looking at Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in a three-part series. The third should be available the same day this post appears; the first is here and the second here.

In the first part, he critiques The New York Times’s summary of the book on its current trade paper bestseller list (where, I am glad to note, the book, which first came out forty years ago, has appeared for 139 weeks). The Times’s 16-word summary reads: “In the Republic of Gilead’s dystopian future, men and women perform the services assigned to them.”

His whole piece is worth reading, but he sums it up here:

Christian Reconstructionism is now at the edge of power in the United States, and the attitude of the relevant people towards the female body and indeed towards rape is an essential element of what is happening and what is likely to happen.  Both-sidesism, prudery, and euphemisms are keeping much of the media from bringing this story together in time.  We will need clear language in general, and this novel in particular, to see the whole picture.  I will develop this in two posts to come.

In the second essay, he makes this point:

The Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale is not a purely invented world based on the law and culture of one religion or another.  It is a well-drawn post-America.

Prof. Snyder thinks this book is important to understanding where we are today and I certainly don’t disagree, though perhaps the most disturbing thing about what an accurate picture it paints of where we are is that the country did not take appropriate steps to head it off.

We can all argue about what those steps should have been, but I’ll leave that to others. I’m tired of dishing out blame. I’m more interested in fixes.

Alas, The Handmaid’s Tale, while an excellent description of one of the places we could be headed (the others being a utopia for certain tech bros and no one else or just the grifter’s unparalleled corruption accompanied by significant foreign influence) is not the best book for fixes. Continue reading “Living in Margaret Atwood’s Future”…

Travelling from Australia

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

People are asking me “Are you going to Belfast next year?” and “Are you going to Seattle?” and “Will you return to Germany?” and “Do we get to see you in person in Baltimore?” I always explain to European friends and North American friends that the airfares are large and more and more often they reply, “Well, it’s difficult for me, too.” And it is.

Yet the obstacles appear, to me, higher than they were.

I wondered if I was shouting about fire when it was merely a match that was burning. I know that my recent trip was difficult because I needed more physical help than I could afford. Several friends stepped up and made it happen, but there were too many times when I was nearly stranded with no recourse, simply because of the health issues. I still have nightmares about 5 moments that were well-nigh impossible.

For any future trip that takes more than 8 hours, I will need help at the other end and along the way. I have to accept that I cannot do things alone easily, even things that look perfectly straightforward to other people.

Shouting at me, “Get a scooter” when I’m struggling at a science fiction conference does not help, and (what happened a lot in Germany) someone walking by stopping to pick up my bag and get it over the hump or up the steps helps immensely. Neither of these are standard for any trip, but they’re what I experienced. Five times in one day in Glasgow I was told to get a scooter or a wheelchair, when, in fact, if I’d done that I’d have been unable to walk at all long term (or even a few days after).

This is not the first time that strangers and friends alike wanted to treat me in the way they thought chronically ill and disabled people should be treated and not consider (or even ask about) my actual circumstances. Because I can walk a little, most friends would say, “Come with me” and leave me at the other end with no thought that, since I had not planned to get to that place, I had no way of getting back in time for programme or for transport: I have to plan.

All this means is that I have to plan more when I travel. I need to be able to see what I can do and then achieve it.

I had to cancel visits to key sites in Germany because the world and my health simply did not permit it.

I had to cancel a half day at Glasgow because there were problems with a room for the panel I was on. All I needed to do to make everything work, was to sit. Not to sit and move and sit and move and sit and move – just to sit. Standing had fewer after-effects, so I stood and awaiting until the re-assigned room could be replaced with something else and the missing computer could also be replaced. All this happened, and was a miracle of reorganisation, but I had not sat when I had planned to. I could have done it on a panel or in a lounge chair, but intermittent movement with that particular pain meant that after that panel, I missed everything that didn’t take place in a single comfortable chair. I was not even able to walk back to the hotel and lie down. I was very lucky that afternoon because a friend stayed with me and we had a lovely evening and she got drinks and found mutual friends and… listened and paid attention to what I was saying about what I could do. She also made sure I got safely back to the hotel at the end of the evening, which was not a given because my direction sense fails when I am at that point of pain. Also, she did not treat me as a charity case, but as a delightful friend and who she was happy to spend time with. This friend resulted in there being no sour taste in my mouth from my incapacity. She’s wonderful. I did miss 8 hours of programming I had intended to enjoy, however.

All these are reasons for being careful how I travel, not avoiding long-distance travel entirely.However, I’ve now acquitted all the grants I was given to get to Europe. I took a moment to do some calculations after the last form went through.

In future, I don’t think I can get further than New Zealand without financial help. The recent trip cost the equivalent of 45% of my annual income. That was without adding enough assistance to make the trip at all comfortable, (which is what I was unable to do this time) and I’m still paying physically for the return journey. I could only pay that amount with help from the friends I stayed with and from the bodies that gave me grants, and, if I wanted an equivalent trip to anywhere in Europe or North America for a conference or for research without as many problems, it would cost me 60% of my annual income.

Without grants it’s just not possible. That’s easy to explain. What is not easy to explain is that many non-academic programmes and some academic programmes are pulled together at the last minute in these days of everyone working with too much pressure. If I’m not giving an academic paper or on programme, I cannot claim that amount on taxes. If I do not know about programme early enough, that adds $1,000-3,000 to the total cost of the trip because airlines play games with last minute travellers who need to arrange things carefully so that they don’t hurt for weeks. That brings the cost potentially to over 55% of my income if I go the route that hurts, and over 70% if I plan to hurt much less.

I will miss everyone, but I can’t travel long distances under these circumstances, however much I adore being with people and researching and discovering amazing things and listening to brilliant people. Also, the next person from Europe or North America who claims the same experience will be sympathised with, because over 45-70% of one’s income for one journey is quite scary.

If anyone has solutions and would like to see me in person, I would love to talk. In the interim, please just say “I’m sorry – I wish you could do these things” rather than telling me “I suffer just as much as you” while planning your next trip.

Post-Election Rant

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

I am, by nature, an optimist.

By that I do not mean that I emulate Pollyanna. (Do kids still read that in this day and age?) Nor do I agree with Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide that things are all happening for the best in “the best of all possible worlds.”

While I am well aware of the many negative things in this world, I have tended throughout my life to assume that we will muddle along and things will work out more or less all right. There will be suffering and great evils and progress will be uneven, but we will stumble forward.

The election has shaken my optimism to its core. I don’t seem much path for muddling forward after that.

Dave Karpf, a professor of political communication and a very interesting thinker, had some good observations on the day after the election. His thoughts aren’t particularly comforting – “I did not think American Democracy was in any way perfect, but I did believe we were at least better than this” – but they’re in keeping with my own and also not big on trying to fix blame on political decisions.

His focus is the future and his answers are bleak, but he does think the country will eventually come back. He observes, “This will get very bad for a great many people, and many of the effects will be locked in for decades.”

I don’t have decades. I look at the same things he’s writing about and think “this is the rest of my life.”

Continue reading “Post-Election Rant”…

Presidential Ambitions

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

Back in my pre-teen years, when I first started paying attention to politics, I thought I might want to become the first woman president of the United States.

That was about the time when my parents started encouraging me to consider law school. I remember traveling through Texas on vacation at one point and asking my father who he knew in the county we were in who could help me get elected governor (governor being a stepping stone to the White House).

When I got out of law school, the state representative seat for my parents’ district was open and they wanted me to move back home and run. I thought about it, but in the end decided against it.

While it was a labor-liberal district in those days, I would have had to ignore racism while soliciting the (mostly white) union vote and would also have had to pretend I loved the appalling development going on as Houston continued to sprawl.

Which is to say, if you want to be elected to public office in this or many other countries, you’ve got to compromise on something. And while I’m actually pretty good at working together with other people in good faith to come up with something we can all live with, the kind of compromises that involve my basic values are much harder for me to do.

I am very glad I made that call back then. I was still lurching around, trying to figure out my way in the world. Politics would have been a path, but I don’t think it would have made me happy.

And I don’t want to be President of the United States.

Presidents are the front person, and while they do their best to put people they can work with in key positions, they really have to trust that the people doing the core work are approaching it in a way similar to what they would do in that job.

Also, they inherit decisions made in the past, particularly on foreign policy. A new president has to tread with care around relationships with other countries and their advisors may well be telling them to do things they don’t personally agree with, but don’t see any way to change.

If I were in that job, I would never get a decent night’s sleep because I’d wake up at 3 a.m. every morning second guessing myself or cursing the fact that I had to do something I really didn’t want to do because of a lot of decisions made twenty years ago.

What gets me are all the people who do want to be president. I don’t mean the actual politicians with a shot at the job, the people who have spent their lives in various elected offices and see the chance to advance once again. Those are the people who really like the political life, the ones who don’t wake up second-guessing themselves, who don’t mind asking people for money, who really like political games.

No, I’m thinking about the people who run as third party candidates, not to mention the individuals with no organization who just decide to run. Continue reading “Presidential Ambitions”…