The Things That Just Never End

The election has come and gone but because we can't ever do something and be done with it anymore, we're still hung up on its outcome. Rather than getting an idea of the landscape of the coming Biden presidency, we're stuck yet again on Trump being a toddler. 

Personally, I think there's reason to be worried but ultimately Trump will back down. To do the kind of thing he's looking to pull off he needs total control over people who have lots of guns and the political cover to use them when you've lost. You can see the personal moves at the Department of Defense as his attempt to solidify his hold over the military but having sycophants in leadership positions doesn't mean that the soldiers will follow orders. There's always going to be a contingent of soldiers who will happily go along with establishing a dictatorship, but whether there's enough to go along with Trump is something I'm rather doubtful of. 

Trump's political cover is also rapidly evaporating. It's one thing for Congressional Republicans to cast aspersions on the validity of our elections, that's just what they do, all the time. It's another thing entirely for them to put themselves in harms way for the sake of a man who clearly lost and will not pay the favor back in anyway. As far as thatgoes, Mitch McConnell did not get to where he is by sacrificing himself on the altars of lost causes. 

 

Even so, Trump is in the best possible position a losing president can be in. He's walking out of office with more votes than any Republican president has ever received, he took 93% of the party vote, and made gains with every minority group. In other words, Trump is in a position to retain near total control over the Republican party for years to come, if he bothered to realize it. But the man is so obsessively focused on his own ego that he can't see the forest for the trees. All he cares about is his image, the projection that he is a winner. He doesn't know how to translate or leverage influence into actual power, he just wants to look good on TV. Dude has the once-in-a-lifetime chance to have every future Republican candidate come crawling on their hands and knees for his favor but he's going to throw it all away because he won't be in the White House anymore. He's such a petty asshole he can't recognize the power that's right in front of him.

 

Per usual, Trump sucking all the oxygen out of the room distracts us from talking about some thing that's actually interesting. In this case, it's how, in a pandemic, depression levels of unemployment, and the most unpopular president in history, the Democrats came out of election night in a worse position than they started. 

Yes, winning the presidency is good, no argument there. But the focus on headline races obscures how hollow the victory really is. 

If every thing goes well, the Senate might be a 50-50 tie, but the party lost seats in the House and failed to take any state legislators. That last one is especially critical, arguably the most important elections on the ballot. The reason is that now that we've had a Census, it's time to redraw the district maps that make up the House of Representative and state legislature districts. So now we're in the position of having to fight uphill in gerrymandered districts to knock off well funded incumbents with a near nonexistent bench of exciting challengers.

This lack of a bench makes winning the presidency near useless. It doesn't matter if you're chief executive if you're effectively crippled in implementing your agenda. 

 

Naturally, there are questions over how Democrats could screw up such a layup of an election, again, and to the surprise of no one, they've decided that the party has just moved too far to the left. Which, honestly is too funny. Blaming Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and Defund the Police as the rocks which the blue wave broke against is classic liberal behavior, even though all were things that Biden and most House Democrats explicitly renounced. Still, the argument goes, the mere existence of these policy positions was enough to sink moderates prospects and that is why any further progressive agenda needs to be heavily reigned in.

What must never be questioned is the message that centrists candidates are running on. We must always assume that running candidates on oil and gas platforms with no investment in renewable energy during a rapidly worsening climate crisis has no downsides. We must also assume that backing police over social protests over their rampant abuses will also lead to nothing but good outcomes. It's good politics to tell your constituents that want you to make the world a better place that their desires are stupid and unachievable.

 

There should be alarm bells going off in Democratic circles right now. They barely scraped a win against the worst president we've ever had and lost ground in all the other areas of government that matter. They're very obviously running out of ideas and strategies to remain an effective political force who can enact policies at any level of government.

 

To close on a positive note, the one good thing to come out of the Biden candidacy is that it is impossible to form a cult of personality around him. The dude is charming enough, but there's a reason he's always been passed over in all his other presidential bids. Hell, even this time he couldn't even manage to get people behind him on his own; it was only when Obama and the rest of the Democratic political machine intervened to clear out all the other centrist candidates so they wouldn't split the vote for Biden. The absence of any popular movement around Biden means that his victory can't be chalked up to anything to do with the man himself.

 

Biden only has his presidency because voters organized themselves and busted their ass to churn out communities to the polls to line up behind his sorry ass. If popular movements can organize effectively enough to get a man nobody really likes elected, then we can do the same for things that are actually worth a shit. There's a reason politicians like Obama see the ideal body politic as one who shows up on election days but spends the rest of the time disconnected gossiping over brunch- things are so much easier when you don't have to deal with the rabble getting upset over their lot in life.

 

Keep getting in trouble, keep being a nuisance, keep making their lives hell. It's the only way any of us will get anything to help  us get by, let alone thrive.

A True American Hero

Columbus day is perhaps the most American holiday we have. The 4th of July and the Super Bowl are its only real competition, sharing with them an overblown sense of mythology and self-importance of American ingenuity, creativity, and heroic conquest we're so addicted to. While Columbus Day doesn't have the same religious fervor as the the other two, it makes up for this deficit by being a complete fucking lie. 

The two big things we're told about Columbus- that he discovered America and did so against a world insisting the Earth was flat- are as real as Santa Claus. The only thing Columbus "discovered" was the island of Hispaniola- modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic - and the fact that the Earth was round was so widely known that it was the primary reason no one was willing to back his expedition. 

Every one he asked for money looked at his calculations, saw the he was vastly underestimating the size of the Earth, then sent his sorry ass packing. The only reason Spain backed his play was that they were fresh off the Reconquista and were in the mood to do something bold with their newly minted monarchy. 

So why are we told this fairy tale of a raping slaver who was wrong about everything? In a word, practice. 

By training us to accept this incompetently constructed fake history around one person, it makes it easier for us to accept the much more thoroughly fabricated stories about our own country's founding and subsequent expansion. If we can get used to dismissing Columbus' atrocities as just "how things where done back then," it's not much of a stretch to hand wave the fact that men celebrated for their commitment to freedom owned human beings like they were animals. 

This becomes so ingrained in us that even when confronted with facts like Columbus was stripped of his governorship over the accusations of brutality against the residents of Hispaniola, they're as empty as a twinkie. Likewise, if you point out that abolitionist groups existed in the the late 18th-century, that too spatters like bugs against a windshield. 

 

In this way we become desensitized to the pile of bodies our civilization was built on. "That's just how things were back then" we say, washing the past in uncomplicated guilt to rinse out the messy reality that there were voices of dissent then, too. By doing this we remove the element of choice, that Washington having a set of dentures made from sleeve teeth or Columbus handing out captured indigenous women as sex slaves to his men were all active choices they didn't have to make. 

 

And yet, they did. Because it was comfortable for them to do so. Because they were afforded power and privilege and those they crushed under heel were not. They had the power to treat those beneath as raw material to use up as they saw fit. So they did, simple as that. 

 

We turn all those used up, discarded people into victims not of men, but of History, an unfeeling, impartial, inevitable destroyer of worlds too inferior to survive the ever changing, tumultuous tide of its advancement. This is how the extermination or enslavement of entire peoples goes from a crime to just the cost of doing business.

 

There can't be any judgment of Columbus because to judge him is to judge ourselves. The only difference in our story as a country versus Columbus was that there was never any higher authority to drag the United States in chains to so it could answer for its actions. We have always had to only answer to our own national conscience and we are, if nothing else, an extremely forgiving people when it comes to ourselves.  

 

And so, we continue to celebrate a bumbling, vicious charlatan all the while wondering how everything could go so terribly wrong.

Nothing Fails Like Success

In 218 BCE, Hannibal Barca marched his army in Spain over the Alps into Italy, launching what's now known as the Second Punic War into full gear. For the next two years, he would humiliate one Roman army after another which culminated with the Battle of Cannae in 216 BCE.

If you've ever watched any show covering battles of the ancient world on the History Channel or YouTube, you've probably heard of this battle. It's famous for Hannibal's Carthaginian army pulling off a double envelopment- basically, Hannibal's army was able to completely surround the Roman army. Out of 86,000 troops, only 15,000 made it out unscathed with almost 50,000 dead and the rest captured by the Carthaginians. 

To this day, military historians lose their shit and marvel at the tactical brilliance of this battle, one of the worst defeats ever inflicted on any Roman army, and use it as the jumping off point for alternate histories where Carthage, not Rome, becomes the sole power of the Mediterranean world.

Also, Cannae is why Hannibal loses the war.

Up until this point, Hannibal's strategy revolved around luring the Romans into battle so he could crush them with clever tactics. The Romans, arrogant honor junkies that they were, obliged him without fail. Its only after Cannae that the Romans decide that a man named Fabius Maximus may have been on to something when he said "How 'bout we don't walk into obvious traps that get us slaughtered?" Following his lead, the Roman army avoids any direct contact with Hannibal's forces. For ten years. Ten long, long years with no major battles. 

This was fatal to Hannibal's war effort. The whole point of his strategy was to show the other Italian cities that Rome wasn't as strong as they thought, that if they joined up with Hannibal, they'd be much better of then sticking with their pompous, condescending neighbors. Once the Romans stopped rushing out to die at his feet however, Hannibal had a major problem. 

See, his crossing of the Alps severely weakened his army. He didn't have the numbers or the supplies to lay siege to Rome, which meant he also didn't have the show of strength necessary to convince the Italians to throw in with him unconditionally. All the cities he turned flipped back to the Romans once Hannibal was out of sight which meant he spent years going all over Italy taking back cities he'd already won, then lost, back to his side. 

As any gamer knows, backtracking is a soul crushing endeavor that, ultimately, accomplishes nothing. With no momentum to his side, it was only a matter of time before the war slipped through Hannibal's fingers which, it did when the man who became known as Scipio Africanus beat Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE.

Skipping ahead a few centuries, let's meet Diocletian. In 284 CE, Diocletian was proclaimed emperor by the troops under his command after the last two self-proclaimed emperors died in battle. Now, at the time, the Roman world is going through the Crisis of the Third Century which, as you can probably tell from the name, is a great time to be alive. Civil wars, invasions, plagues, whatever flavor of catastrophe you prefer, you'll find it on offer in the 200's CE.

Being a rather industrious fellow, Diocletian decides to solve the problems that have beset his home and put right what has obviously gone wrong in the world. And then, he does. He defeats all his military rivals foreign and domestic. Once that's settled, he carves the empire into smaller districts to ensure any ambitious generals can't proclaim themselves emperor with a sizeable army at their backs like they've been doing for the last 50 years. Diocletian then divides the empire into four distinct districts ruled over by himself, his co-Emperor and two junior emperors who all pursue Diocletian's vision of unity and stability with aplomb. 

With the empire in good standing, Diocletian retired to his vegetable garden in 305 BCE. Less then twenty years later, the system of succession Diocletian so painstakingly crafted will be just as dead he is. 

When Diocletian retired, he forced his co-Emperor Maximian to step down with him. Overall, it was the smart play- Maximian served as a glorified general elevated to serve the imperial will of Diocletian wherever Diocletian couldn't be physically present. As the next five years would show, Maximian didn't have a political bone in his body, so the idea of leaving him in charge of the Empire was an invitation to disaster.

Sidebar: The cliff notes of Maximian's life from 305-310 are as follows: He helps his son Maxentius rebel in 306 after he's left out of the new tetrarchy, Maximian then betrays  Maxentius to take the reigns of power for himself. When that fails, he runs East to his son-in-law Constantine, declares himself Emperor, gets forced out of the declaration by Constantine, tries to seize power from Constantine, fails, then is forced to commit suicide to end the world suffering his foolishness any longer.

So, while leaving Maximian in charge was unacceptable, this only bred a deeper problem that Diocletian seemed incapable of understanding. When Diocletian created the tetrarchy, it was clear that while they were all relatively equal in their authority, Diocletian was more equal than all of them. Removing himself and Maximian created a power vacuum that his chosen successors would spend the next twenty years seeking to fill.

Eventually, Constantine would come out on top then establish Constantinople as the new heart of the empire, which would continue on for another 1200 years. But to Diocletian, the idea that the empire fell back under the rule of one central authority represented nothing but the failure of his life's work. 

It's hard to be too judgemental, though. Because of his reforms, the empire would survive as a unified whole until the Western half fell in 410 CE. His organization of the empire into smaller dioceses would lay the foundation the Catholic Church would use as it spread after the Roman world fell into chaos. His monetary policy would, in part, pave the way for Roman currency to regain its value which made it easier to keep soldiers in line since they were being paid in worthwhile currency again.

When your entire adult life consists of pulling off one miracle after another,  it's easy to think that the rest will just take care of itself. Everything else has worked, so why not that?

But like with Hannibal some 400ish years earlier, Diocletian didn't take into account how his success would change the world he lived in. Having four emperors during a time of crisis is fine- it means all of them have lots of problems to solve all at once all the time. But once the crises passes, all they've got to look at is each other. Who would be happy with a sliver of ultimate power when you could easily have it all?

That's the irony of the whole thing- the tetrarchy was created to stave off the civil wars that plagued the Roman world for fifty years but once the problems of the empire were handled, civil war between the tetrarchs was the only possible outcome.

To bring this closer to home, we go to 1971. Eugene Sydnor, then president of the Chamber of Commerce, commissioned a memo from his friend Lewis Powell. Powell was a corporate lawyer who worked for Philip Morris and was two months away from his nomination, and eventual appointment to, the Supreme Court. 

The result, known as either The Powell Memo or The Powell Manifesto, advocated for corporations to take a more proactive role in protecting their political interests. He suggested that the Chamber of Commerce should hire scholars to make the intellectual case for unregulated capitalism, monitor text books and TV news for unfavorable content, and to use their donations to colleges to influence those institutions to hire faculty more receptive to corporate interests. 

It's hard to overstate the consequences of this memo. All of Powell's suggestions were put in place, which led to the creation of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, among others. Combined with the creation of Fox News and conservative radio, the conservative political agenda veered hard to the right.With the addition of the evangelical right, these principles took on a millennial, religious aspect, with a dash of apocalypse if they weren't pursued.

This didn't go unnoticed across the aisle. Spurred by the humiliating defeat of George McGovern, a new wing of the Democratic party began to form with the goal of moving the party away from its socially conscience, liberal image. The election of Bill Clinton solidified the control of the Third Way Democrats which they still enjoy to this day. 

The failure of all this realignment should be obvious. With Republicans actively hostile to social welfare programs and Democrats afraid of them, when crisis strikes it leaves millions of people in the lurch. So that's why you find both parties sitting on their hands as millions of people risk losing their homes, their health insurance, or just straight up starving as the pandemic rages unopposed. 

How these failures will change us is still up in the air. But you can't have the government abandon its citizens to cruelties of their fate without repercussions. Given how far the idea that enterprise is the only real freedom we have, I don't have high hopes. You can't bind yourself to your neighbor and demand better for everyone in a country that sees solidarity as a communist plot. 

We're told that failure is more instructive than success because it forces us to confront our shortcomings. In this way, failure leads to success as we improve, evolving our methods until we find the combination we need to get what we want. 

But we're never really taught that the inverse is true, too. We never get taught that we have to adapt to the world our success creates. Instead we're taught to expect that the world will stop to bask in our glories, that one success will endlessly breed further triumphs.  

That complacency is a trap. It inevitably leads us to disaster and yet, we've never bothered to learn to avoid it. If we come out of this calamity in one piece, we should probably start. 

Give It All to the Grind

Going back to normal will kill us. 

The belief that if we just go back to the way things are then the pandemic will know it hasn't broken our spirit which will lead to this getting better... somehow is gaining traction as the pandemic stretches on into forever. 

It makes sense in its own way. Work is still largely limited but bills aren't. In July, 30% of American households couldn't pay their rent. That number will only increase now that the $600 unemployment bonus is expiring. Add in the eviction moratoriums and student loan forebearences expiring all at the same time, then you're found to have millions of people with a massive amount of expenses they won't have the income to handle. 

Which naturally brings the response "all the more reason to get back to work." Work is a sacrament in this country, the idea that maybe every aspect of our lives shouldn't be tied to our employment is blasphemy most people have a hard time accepting. So it's natural that with school coming up the push to go back to work is also increasing.

 Don't have to worry about leaving your kid alone at home if they're with their teachers, right? It's just how things are done. 

Except, going back to normal will kill us. 

Our case load is already accelerating. It took 98 days for us to get to one million cases. It took us 15 to go from three to four million, and soon we'll be clearing a million cases every ten days or less. If kids go back to school, we'll cross those barriers even faster. 

Kids are uncontrollably disgusting. They touch everything, they don't wash their hands, they pay no attention to any of that shit and there's no amount of plexiglass or deep cleaning that can make up for that. I mean, schools can barely contain the flu when it comes around- there's no world where they can contain a virus even more infectious with any degree of safety. 

So the kids will catch it. And they'll die. Then, they'll spread it to their teachers, cafeteria staff, administrators, bus drivers, crossing guards, who will all spread it amongst their families. And then they'll die.

It's impressive how self-defeating the "open everything up" idea is. By spreading the disease on purpose we drive our hospitals to capacity to the point that they send patients with low survival chances home to die. Not to mention that all the usual, mundane causes of hospitalization are still happening. But if those resources are hoovered up by covid patients then that'll lead to a cascading effect where more people die from normal health issues then usual. 

This is also the point where someone mentions the mortality rate is "only" 1%. Even if we accept that as fixed, that's still three million people. But mortality rates aren't fixed, they're the end result of all the rate of infections, hospital capacities, availability of essential treatment methods etc. etc. Here, our rate is just under 7% (6.8 rounded up, if you want to know), a number which will get worse if we open up with little to no restrictions to limit transmissions.

Which, guess what happens when a country experiences a sudden spike in their death rates?

The economy crashes. Duh.

On some level, I understand why this happening. The government is looking at millions of people losing their jobs, their homes and doing nothing about it. Worse, the government is making a dedicated effort to ensure that misery befalls as many people as possible. 

Faced with the looming disaster, people are looking for a way to feel like they're in control of their lives again. It doesn't matter how bad the decision is because if you acknowledge the situation and do what you're supposed to, you could end up homeless or broke or both within a matter of weeks. 

If you leave people to fend for themselves, they'll do so with whatever justification they can find. Whether it's the line that it doesn't effect kids (which ignores all the adults they can spread it to) or that if only has a 1% mortality rate (which, again, is wrong), all of those are surface level reasons to cover the pure survivalist panic underneath. 

All the government needs to do is pass legislation giving everyone $3,000/month minimum for the next year at least and institute a national rent and mortgage rent freeze. If we did this and dedicated our efforts into enforcing masks and social distancing, then by spring at the latest we could go back outside and eat in restaurants and have all that good consumerist bullshit back in our lives. 

Instead, the government is going to abandon us to our fate as it tries not to trip over our bodies as it goes along its business. 

But hey, sports are back. Who wants to take bets on which football team will have its first player die from covid? 

Passing the Time in Quarantine

As the covid19 quarantine stretches on, it's important to find ways to pass the time. So to take a break from the more serious things, I just want to do a quick run down of some of the stuff I've been watching during over the last few months.

Funnily enough, haven't been watching a whole lot of movies even though we have all the time in the world to watch them. But what I've watched, I've really enjoyed. I watched Mulholland Drive as part of my girlfriend's ongoing quest to expose me to the works of David Lynch. I enjoyed most of Twin Peaks, less of Blue Velvet, and positively adored Mulholland Drive.

Mulholland is definitely the most effective of Lynch's work I've seen so far. Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return ends with an awe-inspiring, surrealist montage that sees Lynch at his best, but in Mulholland Drive we see Lynch maintain a surrealist, dreamy tone for more then an inscrutable set piece or to spite his fans for daring to ask for cohesive narratives. 

For all its turns, Mulholland Drive is straight forward, relatively speaking, and is easy enough to untangle if you pay attention to what Lynch lays out if front of you. What I like about it is how, at heart, its an incredibly human story of longing, passion, regret, resentment, jealousy, and envy and how all of those feelings are born out of and strengthened by each other until we feel like we're drowning so we do something drastic to break free. Its only when we come up for air that we realize what we've done, when we hope against hope that this time, too, the world will scoff at our plans so we won't have to live with the consequences of our choices.

Except, we're never that lucky, are we? Come for the exploration of the misery of existence, stay for the heavenly cover of Roy Orbison.

In other good movies, we also checked out Uncut Gems with Booksmart as a chaser. Gems is perfect showcase of if you give Adam Sandler a project he wants to put in real work for, you're going to get a real performance out of him. Paul Thomas Anderson knew it, even Spanglish has good moments in it. I know he makes movies so his friends can take vacations and get paid at the same time. But it's ridiculous that we're going to throw away someone with actual skill out of resentment for making movies that get him and the studios paid. He played the game more obnoxiously then others for sure, but is that really worth tanking his career so we just get more horrendous shit like The Ridiculous 6?

Anyway, watch Uncut Gems. It is a stress inducing experience that throws you right in the middle of life as a gambling addict. The thrill of a bet paying off, the despair when it doesn't, and, underneath it all, the irresistible pull to keep going back for more. I can understand if it isn't your cup of tea, but it's still worth checking out at least once.

And, you'll need a relaxing movie to come down with. And for that, I Booksmart will do just the trick. Directed by Olivia Wilde, Booksmart is the last night of school coming-of-age story like Dazed and Confused or Superbad, but with girls. That twist helps the movie feel like a fresh new take on a well established genre all on its own, but the movie doesn't just rest on that alone. The uber ride with their principle has one of my favorite jokes in movie history. Beyond all that though, the movie works better then most gross out teen comedies because unlike most, it wears its heart on its sleeve from the beginning and doesn't feel like they have to hide it because having emotions is gay or whatever. Cutting to the chase saves everyone so much time, time the movie wisely spends on jokes and satisfying character arcs.

But, you gotta make room for trash, too. Aquaman fits that bill really well, albeit surprisingly so. Jason Momoa is still incredibly charming as the lead, the movie as a visually popping color palette which is a welcome relief from the visual slop of the Synder movies. The movie is unfocused, changing genres almost every half-hour, the romance between Momoa and Amber Heard is pitiful to watch since what chemistry they have comes overwhelmingly in their platonic moments with the soundtrack doing its level best to force the romantic aspects.

Mostly, I appreciate the movie for being a prime example for why superhero movies should be animated as a rule and live action only by exception. The underwater scenes in this movie are hilariously bad. It's so awful that they gave Patrick Wilson and Wilhem Dafoe short hairstyles so they'd only have to animate the flowing hair of two characters at a time. I mean, compare the underwater scenes from The Little Mermaid to anything in Aquaman and tell me why do we have to wait another ten years before live action CGI capabilities catches up to what 2d animation could do thirty years ago?

It won't happen, obviously. Americans are too conditioned to view animated works as kids shit except in extraordinary circumstances. That unimaginative way of doing things pigeonholes what is considered an economically viable  medium to tell our stories so even though everyone is starting to get sick, with good reason, of superhero movies awash in obvious CG fakery, the bias against animation means you won't see the push to tell these stories in the way that they'll be most effective and compelling so, that's cool.

For the real garbage though, the silver screen provides. And there's no one who does entertaining garbage like Shonda Rhimes. She's built a primetime empire with Shondaland on ABC and after watching two seasons of Grey's Anatomy and How to Get Away with Murder, it makes sense why she's been so successful.

Grey's Anatomy is a fascinating watch because it tries to capture the real world feel of ER and the tragicomedy moves that Scrubs pulled off so well. And it faceplants, hard, on both of these fronts. The voiceover is so heavy-handed that any pathos it wants to delivered is crushed by its self-serious, armchair philosophizing tone. The jokes are rarely funny, mostly because the show is so committed to the soapy serious feel of being a serious show about serious people with serious problems to work through.

Also, so much of the conflict in this show just doesn't matter. Like, at all. For one arc, Meredith Grey is competing for a medical research prize and needs permission to use something from an old, Spanish doctor. As these things go, it turns out the original patent holders daughter is an old friend of Meredith's mother who we come to find out co-developed the technique that made Meredith's mother famous. All she asks for is that Meredith rename the technique to reflect this fact and she'll let Meredith use her patented technology free of charge.

It's a simple enough request, but Meredith refuses. She has a lot of long talks with people about how she shouldn't have to pay for her mother's sins or why she shouldn't throw away her mother's legacy so she makes the decision to potentially sabotage her own research to keep her mother's name clean. And then there's a sexual harassment revelation about the man ran the foundation who provides the prize required all the women who settled their accusations against him to withdraw from competing for the prizes his foundation put on. Meredith's sorta godmother was one of those women, hence why her mother covered up any of her involvement and took sole credit for a revolutionary procedure.

After all this comes out, Meredith does what her godmother wanted from the beginning and everything just... goes on like nothing happened. The show is an exercise of Drama created via drama of the high school variety; it's never ending, borne out of stubborn pride or easily fixed miscommunications if anyone bothered to just tell each other anything. But that's what makes things so palatable, for all the drama, there are rarely any stakes. All the dramatic escalations come so fast and so often that they just pass over you like a wave but in a soothing, background noise kind way.

Which makes How to Get Away with Murder a testament to Rhimes talent for variety. If Anatomy is the fake fireplace you turn on with a light switch to pretend you have warmth, Murder is a man on fire jumping into a pool of kerosene. There are so, so many things wrong with show that I have a hard time believing everyone involved isn't in on what a trashy mess it all is. Everything related to the legal aspects of the show feel like the staff googled a term or procedure, read a paragraph about it, then made everything else up. Literally every episode the team commits at least one crime connected to their defense they build for their client and it's honestly amazing. You're supposed to feel like Annalise Keating is a complicated woman who will do anything for her clients, but I genuinely believe the show doesn't know the depths of awful they've taken her to.

In the first episode, they have Annalise take her entire first-year law class to an interview with her client while the client tells them all detailed aspects of the case. As this video points out, none of those students are lawyers or employees of Annalise, attorney-client privilege doesn't apply to anything Annalise's client said. Later, Annalise sneaks an illegally obtained piece of evidence into the record by lying about its chain of custody, saying that they didn't include it in their discovery to the prosecution because she just assumed her client's previous counsel included it in their discovery pack.

This doesn't even touch the crimes Annalise and her student employees commit independent of their cases. The murders and coverups are so extensive, involve so many coverups, that Annalise is basically Saul Goodman without the self-awareness.

The one unequivocal thing I can say about that show is that Viola Davis is a goddamn hero. She takes the ludicrous situations she's handed on the page and through sheer force of will turns it into something compelling. Her ruthlessness and vulnerability are the nuclear reactor that powers the show but also the danger that if she ever collapses, everything goes down with her. It's a stellar performance and I can't think of anyone who could've come anywhere close to carrying this circus on their shoulders so easily. 

Honestly though, bad as both of those shows are, they are still nowhere near as infuriating as Sword Art Online. I wanted to like this show, I really did, because its premise is so goddamned promising. The anime is about this game, Sword Art Online, that's an MMORPG in the vein of World of Warcraft, without elves, orcs, or magic. When the players login on the game's launch day, they find out that they can't logout of the game and, if they die in game, they'll die in real life, too. Oh, and, if anyone tries to take the VR headset they all put on to play the game, they'll be injected with a poison that will kill them anyway. The only way to escape, is to clear all 100 floors in the game, proving themselves worthy in the designers little psychodrama.

Why I like this premise is that it opens up a lot of potential to explore the fact that humans will adapt to pretty much any condition and carry on life as normal. And the anime does touch on this, a little bit. There are villages on the lower floors made up of people who aren't all that good at the game and just want to spend time fishing, building relationships, and making a home for themselves in the circumstances they've been dealt. There's also the potential to explore how, as the floors get harder and harder, the pool of players with the skills necessary to clear them and get everyone home dwindles, making the possibility of ever leaving further and further remote until the question becomes "should we even try to leave?"

Again, the anime dips its toes into all of these conflicts and themes, but it suffers from what can only be described as "I'm the writer and I'm bored with this" disease. Right as the heroes clear the boss of the 75th floor- which mopped the floor with them and killed about half of the party- the despair that things only get harder from here starts to set in, leaving us at just the right nadir for season 2 to pick up from. Instead, what happens is that the main character figures out that the developer wouldn't be sitting on the sidelines watching everyone play the game, and deduces that he's actually masquerading as the leader of one of raiding guild most of the players work for. Sounds like a cool cliffhanger, right? Finding out that the boss is actually the guy who made the game and can change the rules on a whim, making the chance of escape seem even more impossible and out of reach?

Except... the season ends with the main character and game designer fighting in a duel that kills them both. The hero lives thanks to a resurrection item he collected and gave away earlier in the story, and hurray, everybody goes back to life as it is.

It'd be bad enough if things ended here but no. We move on to the real world to introduce a love triangle, huzzah. But not just any love triangle, that wouldn't do at all, oh no. This triangle is extra special because it involves the main character's sort of but not really sister, who's been in love with him for years. Isn't that tragic, isn't it heartbreaking? What's more, she doesn't even know it's him because she thinks she falls in love with a different person because most of their interactions happen in the new VR game that's exactly like the first except everyone can fly and they all look like fairies. Imagine how crushed the not-sister is when she finds out that the man she thought she could abandon her illicit love for was in fact, her own not-brother all along. Does your heart not ache for her? Is your vision not blurred by the tears welling up in your eyes as the not-sister sacrifices herself (but not really) so her not-brother can finally meet up with his virtual love in real life?

Wait, hold on, I'm being told that none of this is very moving at all and is just a massive waste of everyone's time. Every body carry on, nothing to see here.

There's a third season, which introduces a new game where everyone has guns instead and we didn't finish it because holy shit is it so much worse then what came before and that is saying something.

To end on a good note, I decided to check out later era Miles Davis and gave A Tribute to Jack Johnson a listen. I felt stupid afterwards because I don't know what took me so long to give this album a spin because it's everything I love about music rolled into one package. The album was a soundtrack to a documentary about Jack Johnson's life, and was taken from two sessions in February and April 1970. The album consists of two 26-minute tracks and it was an absolute joy to spend an hour listening to this.

The music is driving, restless, brooding on riffs until the band has come at them from every possible angle before they move on the next. Like most of Davis' fusion output, there's no formal structure to the songs, the band moves from one improvised theme to another as they feel the need to, with Davis's trumpet cutting in and out as he's needed. It's not everyday you feel the need to talk about the political aspects of instrumental music, but it feels appropriate here- you can feel the restlessness brought about by the struggles of Johnson's life plus the fallout of all the assassinations at the end of the 60's bleeding leading into the cynical edge of the 70's. It's all there without a word and, for me anyway, is proof all over again that music itself is its own voice, if you just listen to it.

I can't recommend this album enough although it is with the caveat that if you're not familiar with Miles' music, don't make this the first thing you listen to. You gotta ease your way in to something like this, it's not an easy listen and it's not something you can just have in the background while you pay attention to other stuff. If you're new to Miles, start with his 50's stuff like Birth of the Cool, Bag's Groove, 'Round About Midnight, and Kind of Blue. Then you should move on to the second great quintet albums in whatever order you please, there's no bad option as far as that goes.

Once you've worked your way through those, then you should be ready to take the plunge and give yourself over to the experience of A Tribute to Jack Johnson. I know it feels ridiculous getting what's basically homework to listen to an album but, you do need that context to understand what Miles uses his music to do and how his approach to doing it evolved over the years as he kept questioning and exploring every avenue of expression he came across. Plus, you get to listen to some of the greatest music ever recorded, so, what are you really missing out on?

The summer is going to get bad. Please, resist the urge to act like things are dying down or we're going back to normal, and stay as safe as you can. Peace out, and I'll see you on the other side.

Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 3

The last season of Avatar: The Last Airbender had a monumental task in front of it: how to effectively tie up the war in as grand a fashion that outdid everything else they'd already done. For the most part, they succeeded and are one of the few shows to acconplish that feat. However, the show makes uncharacteristic blunders that lead to the grand finale feeling unearned, which has caused no amount of controversy among the fans ever since the episodes aired. 

But we'll get to that. Let's focus on what the show did well and for that, we have the lovely concept of the filler episode. 

For those of you who don't know, filler episodes are episodes in the series that don't have any relation to the main plot. They're usually used for wacky, one-off comedy villains or beach episodes with low stakes, easily resovable conflicts, and little consequence. Used effectively, however, they can be explorations of character and themes that otherwise couldn't be done because of plot demands. 

What season three essentially does is split itself in half with two segments of filler arcs- one where the Gaang explores the Fire Nation before their invasion of the Fire Nation capital with the second half comprised of the Zuko field trip episodes. 

This works extremely well for the show as a whole because it allows us to explore the Fire Nation as it exists beyond the trappings of its army while also giving time to deal with the burdens of Katara's team mom characteristics and Sokka's insecurity of being the one normal guy on a team of master-level benders. The work done in these episodes are why people remember the characters of the show as fondly as they do, they do the actual meat-and-potatoes work that give the bigger, spectacular moments their heart and weight. 

All that said, the show fumbles the balance between the individual episodes and the larger plot demands in the back half of the season. Namely, it's decision for Zuko to withhold the information about his father's plans to burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground throws everything off, leaving the four-part finale as the weakest written episodes in the series. 

I can understand the choices behind withholding that information until the very end; dropping a bomb like that threatens to overshadow every other conflict and can make the stories in the field trip episodes feel irrelevant- who cares about a random ship captain when the world is about to end? The Zuko field trips are some of the best in the entire series so I don't blame the writers for wanting to make sure that their crown jewels were overlooked because the audience was focused on something else. 

However, doing things this way means that when you do reveal the endgame, you have a much smaller time frame to deal with the characters to process, then attempt to counter whatever the evil master plan is. It's a thin rope for the show to walk with such an enormous load on its back. 

The burning of an entire continent is simply too big, too horrific on scope, to deal with in just four episodes. Every one scambles to do something, anything, in the face of such a genocidal ambition so the finale feels rushed, underdeveloped, and arbitrary. These are the last things you want the conclusion of your narrative to feel like, especially one the has such careful setup along the way. 

To be clear, I don't think the concept of energy bending is a bad one. Having the hero kill their way out of their problems isn't as mature a storytelling technique as its made out to be, especially in a show where one of the core underlying themes is that trying to resolve conflict by escalating violence only perpetuates that conflict under new, brutal terms. 

Devising a third way out of this based on a deeper understanding that all things are connected, that the separation of people's, nations, and elements is an illusion, isn't bad writing. On the contrary, it's how the show fulfills its premise that compassion and empathy are ultimately the tools to defeat the roots of violence. 

No, the thing that ruins this idea is how little time Aang spends looking for it. On top of that, he doesn't earn it or discover it himself, it is simply handed to him at the last minute. Then, right when he needs it most, he gets pushed into a rock that removes the block keeping him from going into the Avatar state, allowing him to use the new technique gifted to him a half-hour before he needed it. 

It's all just very convenient, which, behind being boring, is the second worst sin a story can commit. Every thing in the finale happens because it must happen, there's no time for anything else so everything's good now, yay. 

So how could they avoided this? First thing, is Zuko spills the beans much, much, sooner. To be specific, it should happen in the same and Aang learn the true roots of fire bending. It could be an end of the episode stinger of "Good thing you know all four elements now, you'll need it when the comet comes and my dad literally burns the world to the ground."

Even if you're worried about this threat overshadowing the arcs in the individual episodes, that, too is easy enough to avoid. It wouldn't take much to establish that this news has driven Aang into a panic-induced isolation from the group as he tries to figure out what he's going to do. As for why Sokka and Katara would pick this time to run off on their own, well, if you found out the world could end in a matter of weeks, wouldn't you want to tie up as many of your loose ends as you could?

Sidelining Aang like this let's us know he's obsessing over the problem so when we do get his direct deliberations in the finale, it's with the sense that he's been doing this for weeks, cycling through his past lives looking for something, anything, which will allow him to keep his soul and save the world at the same time. 

Disappointing as it is that the show didn't stick the landing cleanly as it could have, it's still a masterclass in long-form storytelling, with character and theme development as pretty much any other classic you could name. For all the nitpicky quibbles, the show is still one of the best to come out of the mid-00's, and I think it's worth watching start to finish at least once, just to experience it for yourself. 

Oh, right, Korra is better, go watch that if you can find it.

This Little Piggy Went "Weeeee"

Earlier this week, free-speech advocates across the political spectrum started raising alarm bells at the news that Google had cut right wing magazine The Federalist from its online ad revenue. Google later clarified that no, they didn't do that, they just threatened to do so if The Federalist didn't shape up their content around the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests. 

To be honest, I have complicated feelings about this. On the one hand, I agree that the threat to demonetize an entire site gives Google de facto editorial control over not just the content the website produces, but also how it moderates their commentators as well. That is a massive cudgel to have on hand and naturally looms over every decision every content creator makes while they're using Google's platform.

On the other hand, though, this whole thing is hysterical and I think The Federalist deserves everything that's happening to them.

Like most rightwing outlets, The Federalist is a rag who's only purpose is to push the Republican political agenda at any cost. It was cofounded by Meghan McCain's husband and is funded by... nobody knows who. Given that its brethren The Daily Caller, Breitbart, and the YouTube channel Prager University are all funded by billionaires who have no problem operating at a loss, it stands to reason that a similar situation brought The Federalist into existence. That their response to "Where does your money come from?" is nearly always a riff on "We aren't legally required to disclose that," is nothing but a vote of confidence in the editorial and journalistic independence from that fundings source. 

The reason I find all of this so funny is that like any rightwing rag worth their salt, The Federalist is all in on the power and sanctity of the free market. In their minds, all government regulation is a jackboot on the neck of free entrepreneurs who would be usher in a Galtian paradise if only the resentful, freedom hating government bureaucrats weren't standing in the way. 

As far as the tech world is concerned, the deregulators have gotten their wish. There are very little rules or pressures on tech companies which have allowed Google, Facebook, and Amazon to grow to monopolistic proportions. What these companies couldn't compete with, they bought and now it's virtually impossible to go anywhere or do anything on the internet that doesn't involve one of those three companies. (Think about it- how many things have you skipped a sign up process for and just tied it to your gmail or Facebook account?)

Because of all this, the internet is an unregulated hellscape that is more and more being brought under heel by an ever diminishing board of directors. And The Federalist was fine with this. Domains and ad sharing programs are essentially private property which the owners can do with as they please. 

At least, until they became victims of their own ideology, that is. See, once Google threatened to cut The Federalist off, they suddenly gave a shit about whether or not it was a good idea to give ultimate discretion of what or what is not publicly acceptable expression. Google isn't bound by the 1st amendment so it has no obligation to allow speech it doesn't approve of to make money off their platforms if they deem it bad for their business. 

Furthermore, this episode should be an example of The Federalist's ideology in action. To elaborate, The Federalist engages in speech that its fellow market participants find objectionable and no longer wish to associate themselves if The Federalist continues behaving that way. At this point, The Federalist can change its behavior to conform to the market's demands or, it can continue as it currently is and risk losing out on their revenue streams. 

As the market giveth, so it taketh away. For other people, not them, obviously. 

All snark aside, this is something I worry about all the time. The adpocalypse on YouTube sent most historical, political, and current events channels scrambling for revenue as YouTube demonetized their channels in an effort to make sure the advertisers only had their products associated with "noncontroversial" content. 

Likewise, the amount of control Google exerts on its search result algorithm is staggering. It gives the company the ability to eliminate all but the most mainstream information and entertainment sources so if you want to find something off the beaten path, you're going to already know where to look because Google sure as fuck won't tell you. 

People have this idea that, because social media is so prevalent and makes us so publicly available, that all the content on the internet exists in some kind of public square with all the inherent constitutional protections that implies. That's wrong, on every possible level. 

Every where you go on the internet is proprietary in some way. Think of it like walking into a store- you're on private property with the understanding that being there obligates you to buy or at least pretend you want to buy whatever's on sale. And just like a private business can throw you out of you get unruly, so too can Google, Facebook, Twitter et al. put you in the corner until you learn to behave. 

Who could stop such runaway behavior? Who could lay out rules that provide user protections to the denizens of the internet. But with how hollowed out our regulatory agencies have become, the FCC couldn't come up with or enforce the kind of comprehensive rules we need even if it wanted to. 

As one of my favorite sites likes to say, if your business depends on a platform, you don't have a business. But how to you survive that when literally every step of internet transactions pass through someone else's platform? Amazon can ban you from selling products on their site, YouTube can demonitize or delete your channel at will, and Google can adjust its algorithm so even if you get ad revenue, your site will be so pitifully low that you won't be able to generate any revenue for yourself. 

Even if you try to get paid "directly" by donation or subscription, Patreon and PayPal can freeze your account or again, lock you out of it entirely. No matter where you go, someone has to let you through the door which means every step of the way, someone has the power to cripple or end your flow of income. 

Like I said, I don't care what happens to The Federalist- that they're getting churned up in the libertarian market dystopia they want everyone else to suffer through but remain exempt from is nothing to cry about. They're scum, propagandists who, if they're lucky, might one day rise up to the level of dog shit they obviously aspire to. That we all risk getting dragged down with them into that corporate hellscape though, is something to worry about and we should work to save the internet from that fate before it's too late.