(no subject)

[chocolatepot]

Hoo boy, what a week. I basically spent all of yesterday on Twitter ... watched the video of the car plowing into the crowd and the other car. I don't think it's sunk in with some people that the stereotypical Civil Rights Era non-violent protest is not going to work, because our institutions and government are not opposing the violence to the extent they need to be. In many ways they're supporting it. What a huge, awful mess this is.

This evening I started watching The Living and the Dead, a Victorian Gothic/paranormal/timeslip series starring Colin Morgan (who has really grown up since Merlin), on Amazon Prime. The sleeves are generally too small for the 1890s and one character overflows her corset in a really painful-looking way, but it's quite well done, story-, acting-, and set-wise.

Edit: Here's a thing, my dad found out from his BFF that we can have Italian citizenship if his grandfather wasn't naturalized before my grandfather was born. The 1930 census says he was naturalized and the 1920 one says he wasn't (my grandfather was born in 1924), and I've never been able to find naturalization records for either my great-grandfather or great-grandmother so I think that might have just been one of those census mistakes, so it could happen. And then I could get a job in the EU.

Comments

[an_english_girl]

I don't know if you meant to crosspost this to LJ? It hasn't, anyway.
Awful mess is right -- do take care!

[chocolatepot]

How weird! Thanks for letting me know.

[lavinia]

God, yes, I am also spending way too much of my day on twitter, watching the news unfold. Like yesterday afternoon when I came back from lunch to find DJT's "I am a Nazi/Klan sympathizer" press conference wrapping up, and promptly lost the next three hours.

What you say about nonviolence not working worries me -- not so much because I'm pearl-clutching over violent tactics as I'm worried about how eagerly DJT and Sessions will use it to call the "alt-left" a terrorist org and prosecute accordingly. I do think there will be more violence in some form, but it is goddamn necessary because we must FIGHT BACK AGAINST NAZIS. It's so freaking essential.

Another silver lining: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/mayors-taking-swift-action-to-avoid-becoming-the-next-charlottesville/2017/08/16/cef677ba-829c-11e7-902a-2a9f2d808496_story.html

[chocolatepot]

I'm really glad that a lot of mayors are taking statues down. Hopefully that will forestall more violence! ... Although I could see white supremacists rioting in front of town hall as well. But then, maybe police would actually be effective, if they were defending municipal authorities, i.e. their bosses?

They could probably "justify" calling BLM, Antifa, and everyone who turns up to a counter-protest terrorists even if they never threw a punch, with the way that the media (particularly conservative media, of course) covers everything. Honestly, we're so far past the edge of reason right now. When I think about how the Civil War has essentially been smoldering in this country ever since it happened (and was of course starting to be lit at the Founding), I get very pessimistic that all we can do is quiet it down enough to put a bandaid on again to pretend that the US isn't fundamentally built on racism for another fifty years; everything post-Civil Rights era that we saw as the country getting better was just festering in all these racist souls. Which is a huge bummer, sorry.

I have never thought so much about historiography, longue durée, and theory of history as I have this year. :|