Appropriation or Appropriate?

Last night, I saw a local, all-white (presumably) production of the 2001 theater adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days, the 1873 Jules Verne novel. I have to say that I did enjoy the play, and was very glad that I went. There were accents and imitations done of people from around the world, which caused some eyebrow raises, but the play does call on only 5 actors to play 42 characters. No matter how diverse a cast, this play will require imitation. Thankfully, no one darkened their skin for any role. 

The scenes in America were both the most amusing - think an Englishman, his French servant, and an East Indian woman encountering perfectly stereotypical white male archetypes from the 19th century - and most troubling. The latter started when the train that the three protagonists are riding is attacked by "the Apaches" and a shoot-out ensues. The Frenchman goes off to save the day with some acrobatics on the locomotive but is also kidnapped by these Apaches. Upon his rescue, he comes bounding onto stage in a giant feathered headdress.

My eyes grew wide with disappointment, but the story went on to tell how the Apaches wanted to make him their "chef" based on his acrobatics on the locomotive, which could be a justification for wearing such an important item.

There are just a few more problems:

• The tribe in the novel was the Sioux, not the Apache's. This speaks to carelessness for the diversity of Native Americans that is all to common.
• The novel is from the time the US was lying to and slaughtering Native Americans constantly. It's not going to paint a sympathetic portrait of Native Americans. This is unfortunate and perhaps unavoidable for the actual novel, but we're supposed to know better now. We shouldn't be perpetuating it.
• The mythology around Natives accepting white people as gods or their leaders does have a tiny bit of historical precedent, but it's old and tired. 

Could this scene have been made in a better way, in terms of writing or costuming? I do not follow the idea that "any representation" is better than none, primarily when that representation just reinforces harmful stereotypes that still pervade our culture. 

So, appropriation? In terms of costume design, in terms of the script, costume design being accurate to the script? I cannot say no. Appropriate, in light of the story? I cannot say yes. 

Nothing is Absolute

The concept of "innocent until proven guilty" works well in a world either without a social hierarchy or where said social hierarchy is codified and universally accepted. Given that the latter scenario, in our particular world, is inherently unjust and the former does not describe our world, I contend that the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" does not work well for our world.

This does not imply that "guilty until proven innocent" works well for our world. We have a whole history of actual events and libraries of fictional scenarios that clearly demonstrate how poorly that system works for us.

The concerns I have are with the word 'proven', the dichotomy in the statement, and the logical inference that creates an adversarial justice system. The framers of our constitution and the patriarchal societies that have created our justice system did not account for, nor care about a single, sexually active woman bringing rape charges against a man she went on a date with who ignored her obvious rejections at the end of the date, then went ahead and raped her, but with lube and a condom. They didn't care about and probably couldn't comprehend many legal situations like this where our standards of proof will easily let a dangerous person walk free.

What happens here is an adversarial situation where one person has every reason to lie, twist words, and manipulate the legal system in order to continue with the status quo. Without the issue of privilege, this case would be difficult to resolve in an adversarial way. The first hurdle privilege puts in place is that our culture constantly considers women 'liars'. Not only does this woman's prosecution have to prove that the accused is guilty, they have to prove that this woman doesn't conform to this cultural stereotype.

The second hurdle is status itself. Criminals typically go for victims of lower status, which is why men rape women or men of lesser status rather than men that they respect. Rapists often try to increase the status imbalance by picking victims from even lower status circles. Frat boys who are seniors in college get freshmen girls drunk to rape them because those girls are both inexperienced and less likely to have known these boys for a long time. High School sports stars will coerce the social misfit to spend time alone with him, then use shame, superior strength, or drugs/alcohol to rape her. The prosecution in either case will have overcome the third hurdle of proving that yes, this well respected person did do something horrible to a nobody.

More research could find other hurdles to add, but as we see over and over again, these hurdles are enough in and of themselves. The adversarial justice system that presumes a verdict that one side must prove false does not work when someone of privilege commits a crime against someone without privilege. I haven't even touched the effect of money on the whole situation, but it should be obvious.

My proposed solution is to do away with an adversarial justice system and instead set up a system with the goal of ascertaining the truth. The accuser and the accused would have representation, but so too would other stakeholders. No judgement could be made by a single person or body of people, but instead must be demonstratively true based on all possible evidence and probability. Stereotypes and privilege will always be examined in every case, and the rules of logical argument will always apply to the final decision.

Nothing is perfect either, but a system with a goal of determining the truth through collaboration will probably find it more accurately than one that pits people against each other.

Socialism, Society, and America

I'm angry, I'm always angry unless there is something distracting happening to mask the anger. Today, the anger is about everyone's apparent glee about a Florida millionaire adopting a neighborhood with his riches and helping it out. I don't want to rain on the parade, but more than that, I've learned that raining on the parade subjects me to all kinds of anger from those who have yet to grasp the things I find to be self evident.

1. We are social beings and the only solution to our problems will be to work together.
2. America has been poisoned by decades of anti-Communist propaganda into thinking that any collective effort will lead to totalitarianism.
3. Individual efforts, while excellent for making dents in large problems, only go so far, and certainly not far enough.
4. Monied interests will always want to keep their money.

Ugh, I'm sure the list could go on longer and longer. I could get into how tribalism and racism are at the root of many of our struggles - sexism is there too, but it manifests slightly differently. People think Obama is getting crap because he's black, and yeah, that's happening, but he wouldn't have an easier time if he was white, because he's a Democrat. Anyone who thinks he would be riding high if he was white have forgotten the Clinton administration. And don't even talk to me about how the media would be treating him. Back in the 1990's, we were just starting the "both sides" rhetoric, and now it's so culturally ingrained that no one can even mention that one side might be wrong without adding useless equivocation. The nation has been gaslighted by reactionary monied interests for so long now that we no longer know right from wrong. Well, some of us anyway.

Sigh.

I know there are people out there who get it, and I'm actually somewhat hopeful, but damned if I'm not angry. Because these people who now get it were staying home in November 2010 when they could have prevented all this shit from happening in the first place. It was spring 2011 when people finally woke up, and by then it was too late. TOO LATE.

We got screwed with gerrymandered districts in 2012 because too many people didn't get it, too many people were convinced that their vote didn't matter, that nothing mattered, that because Obama couldn't make manna come down from heaven that it was "time to give the Republicans a chance". FUCK THAT! Republicans HAD their chance, they've had too many chances, and each one sucked, but you wouldn't know, because the people who should be telling you are living in the both-sides fallacy.

Then there are the people who were barely paying attention who all wonder "where it went wrong". They think that there was a time in America's past where we had it right, a time when we all cared about each other and things were great. Even intelligent, savvy people who have paid attention fall into this trap, but the truth is, the individualistic, screw everyone mentality is a CORE AMERICAN VALUE. Every single non-Native, not-descended-from-slaves person in this country came here to make it on their own. They left families, left towns, or left countries to "be free" from their old society. Then when they set up society on the east coast, some of them left to be even more "free" to go west and really live on their own. No, our past was not a socialist paradise, our past was a ruthless, cutthroat, dirty, dangerous, horrible hellhole that people somehow managed to survive long enough to have children in.

Even the period of time after WWII wasn't great if you weren't white or male, and even then, it still wasn't that great. It was a blip on the horrible history of our country, a random, uneven blip of sort-of okayness for some people that's gone now. We remember it as so great because the popular narrative of the time paints it that way, but millions of white men lived with untreated PTSD, raising kids with an iron fist, like their father did. Millions of women were frustrated and bored, full of resentment that they couldn't place. Millions of black people weren't much better off than they had ever been in this nation. Shit was bad, shits always been bad, and if we want to improve this shit, we have to get over the paranoia about working together. We have to literally go against every fucking thing that brought our ancestors, or ourselves, to this rock, and get over it. So I'm angry, angry about the bad rep socialism gets, angry about the failure of society, and angry about the reality of America.

Wishes

I wish I could make you understand what it is I'm going through, but it isn't really that hard to explain. I guess. I'm depressed. Nothing is as it should be, even though everything is fine, sort of. I'm overweight, overwrought, over everything. Nothing is that interesting to me at all, and to hear people gush over it like it was is like nails on a chalkboard.

I wish for a million more wishes. I wish to lose a pound of body fat from not my brain every week for two years or until I'm at 13% body fat, whichever is sooner. Second wish, I want to keep it off for the rest of my life. Third wish, I don't want to lose any random body parts to accomplish this. I don't care if I still have depression at this point, because at least then, people will give a shit about how I feel, and people won't hate to look at me, or at least I won't hate to look at me.

But genies in bottles aren't real, wish granting magical creatures are fiction, and I'll never get to lose the fat that won't go away. The best I can hope for is to lose about 30 pounds, but it won't stay off. I just wish I could have a surgery to remove abdominal fat, or maybe that fecal transplant from a thin person so I can digest food more effectively. But I have no idea how to get into that, and no idea how to find a weight loss doctor who isn't a quack, or even how to do it while I'm completely overwhelmed by my job. While I'm completely overwhelmed by doing 20% of what I'm supposed to do with my life.

Waiting for Something Big

I'm just a single person with an occasional double-digit view count. This blog isn't indexed by the search engines and I rarely link to anything. Yet I still have this blog where I air views and feelings that might be best kept private. It's a way of putting things out there in a literal sense without being as out there as I could be. It's like going into a lonely alley at 5am and giving a speech. Maybe a homeless person or early-morning commuter will hear a line or two, but they won't actually care.

I've been quiet about this opinion because it's wrong to have it and the consequences of getting what I want are bad for a lot of people, even for me. But goddamnit if I don't want the United States to go over the fucking cliff right now. We keep getting right to the edge, then get pulled back a few inches, only to start going toward it again. We never have the a-ha moment we need, we never "get it", we never realize that the stupid actions that half of our country does is causing this calamity because mommy keeps saving us from ourselves.

I'm tired of it, I'm so fucking tired of it at this point. We need shocking because prodding isn't working. The corporate media structure needs to be dismantled, we need universal healthcare, we need to stop spending so much on the war machine, we need a higher minimum wage and unions for service workers, we need to raise the capital gains tax and taxes on the highest marginal incomes, and we can't get there because the decision makers think everything is "okay" the way it is. So let's just do it and get it over with. Keep the government shut down, default on our debts, crash the fucking stock market. Let's burn this motherfucker down so we can get some real change going on here.

But I hate myself for saying this, and I hate myself for thinking this. I know that the loss to my measly 401k is nothing compared to the losses others will face. I'm not talking about losses faced by millionaires and billionaires - they won't go hungry or homeless - but I do care about the 95-98-99% of us who will still take a massive hit. I worry about the people who will go hungry and be homeless when the economy crashes. Collateral damage is ugly, but in my most honest of opinions, I think it is the only way out of this mess.

Let's hope I am wrong.

The World is a Strange, Ugly, Horrible, Beautiful, Scary Place

I'm not sure what I can do now. There are so many things happening around me right now, so many horrible things going down and so many misconceptions right next to me that I'm lost. I have an opportunity to share the things I've learned with people who need to know them, but I'm suddenly afraid.

The conversations I have online and with my friends come from a place of mutual understanding. We take it as a given that all people are born with rights, with dignity and the possibility to succeed, but they are born into circumstances that might stop them before they start. The circumstances might stop them before they are even born. I know that I'm where I am because of the privilege of my skin and my place of birth, not just because I'm smart and work hard. I was allowed to be smart, and people noticed my work, and now they reward it. There are many more people like me that aren't where I am now.

I see the future and it looks like the past, but which past? I'm afraid of re-living dark days, afraid of shanty towns in my own country, people suffering needlessly. I'm within the top 10% of earners in this country, but I can barely imagine living on less at this point. How do the rest of us do it?

All my hopes are pinned on 2014 right now - Republicans are so far past the light that they think they can read in the dark. I've got money to shield me now, but it is little solace. I can't pretend the world is alright just because I am. I was raised a hell of a lot better than that.

Intersectionality vs. Being Human

I read yet another screed on intersectionality in feminism that both made sense and irritated me. There is this assumption in a lot of the talk about intersectionality in feminism (which I don' see cropping up in conversations about racism, it's only the women who leave things out, I guess) that individual feminists should talk about the issues of all women whenever they talk about feminism. White feminists talk about the things that affect white women. Cis women talk about what affects them. Straight women are all about talking about dating issues in heterosexual couples. Western women talk about being a woman in America or Europe. And of course they do, because that is what they are, that is their experience. A black cis hetero man still experiences racism and still has things to complain about. A white cis hetero woman, likewise, has issues. Privilege doesn't even out oppression.

I get the complaint that most articles and talking about feminism is coming from a straight, cis, white, western perspective. I get that annoyance that they are the ones getting the big writing deals and having their voices and concerns heard. I get that they sometimes - or even usually - don't acknowledge other types of women, much less talk about the issues facing them. I get it, I really do, because there is something I've left out, maybe two, three, or more somethings. Two because being obese isn't seen as a 'real' disability and three or more because I don't remember every piece of identity all the time either.

One of the things feminist articles - especially those regarding the issue of dating or men hitting on women - is that all women are thin. When a fat woman pokes her head up and says "I wouldn't mind being hit on every now and then", she's told that she really wouldn't. And like clockwork, she backs down in the face of all of the thin/normal sized women's stories of creepy guys not leaving them alone. But as a fat woman, I can say that I don't mind being hit on now and then because it happens a lot more rarely than that. I've had people call out to me on the street. In New Orleans in March, a guy a block away started swinging his arms. When I got closer, he indicated that he wanted a hug. I shook my head and smiled, but I didn't feel creeped out at all. Being bigger than the average male - same average height, more average weight - I am not really afraid of them. In fact, I actually do feel flattered when people call out to me on the street, and I don't give a shit if the guy intended it that way or not. It is my feeling to have.

But I would never begrudge a thin, normal sized woman her feelings about those situations either. I think their experiences are important to understand and those issues are important to talk about. Sure, I'd like to read more about how fat women experience sexism (and without the concern trolling about our health, please). Intersectionality is important, but I can't stand the comments about how this article or that article didn't touch on this type of person or that type of person and therefore their feminism is oppressive, unwelcoming, racist, homophobic, anti-trans, and everything else. Nothing can be everything, so take it for what it is and write your own article that does talk about those kind of people.

Mental Illness is Hilarious and Wrong

There is this article going around about people getting bad customer service because they are bad customers, and I do not doubt the premise. I've seen people be rude, condescending, and arrogant with servers and others in the customer service industry. I've heard stories from people who thought they were getting bad service, but from the events of the story, I could tell that the person was a dick. But this article, in my opinion, does not describe one of those people. Instead, it describes an incident of a woman, disappointed with a mistake in her order, yelling at a service worker.

Others read this and are quick to yell back at this woman for being unreasonable, but having been someone who overreacted to situations, I see it differently. My immediate assumption is that this woman is having significant stresses in other parts of her life andor may have mental illness. She may have been suffering from low blood sugar on account of not having eaten for a while which is a possible - nay probable - reason for why she choose a fast food drive through for her meal. Low blood sugar makes the mind do silly things and think things are right when they really are wrong. Another factor is that an ingredient that she did not want was added to her order, and she could have good f*cking reasons for not wanting that ingredient, like an allergy. She may not have the resources to cope with her mental illness or blood sugar issues, she may not even have the intelligence to understand that is what is happening, and she put some strain on the staff of this restaurant and caused a scene, but she doesn't deserve this criticism from strangers on the internet.

I really hope that the next article I read about an example of a customer behaving badly isn't such an obvious example of someone with untreated mental illness.