this tweet hasn’t left my mind once in the two years since it’s been posted
everyone shut the fuck up and listen. i love decadence, i love filth, i love perversion; i love depravity and deviance and hedonism. i love corruption, i love the obscene. i love debauchery, i love all things sordid, i love the thrill of scandal. i love reveling in being a sicko. it brings me closer to god
idk who needs to hear this rn but suffering is not noble. take the tylenol
One time when I was younger I was refusing to take headache medicine and my mom said “the person who invented that medicine is probably so sad you won’t let them help you” and now every time I find myself denying medicine I just imagine the saddest scientist making those big wet eyes like “why won’t you let me help” and whoop then I take the medicine
One criticism often levelled at republican movements, particularly here in the UK, is that getting rid of the monarchy and all its associated pomp, pageantry and ritual would be a terrible loss to our national character.
This is a simple failure of imagination: we already *have* significant ritual-of-rule based around symbols of royal authority that have and need no direct interaction with the monarch.
Mace Republicanism answers that criticism by committing to the monarchy as a self-referencing symbol, by calling for hereditary monarchy to be abolished and the monarchy to pass to the Mace itself - a sovereign in shining steel and burnished brass, immortal and unbiased.
We can keep as much ritual as we want, and in fact it would allow us to establish new ceremonies. Consider an MP found to have acted against the public interested, sentenced to a Smiting with the Mace. A poker-faced Maxifer in an outfit that somehow manages to be uncomfortably severe and needlessly embellished marches up with much swinging of legs, extends both arms, and takes up the Person of the Sovereign; with a flourish they turn to the knave to be smitten, present the Mace, and lightly tap the subject on the shoulder. This is widely understood to be a powerful symbol of disgrace.
Abolish the Monarchy; Anoint the Mace.
I was just a little bit too old to really get into it by the US release of the first Harry Potter book, so I never read those books until quite recently (2016) and I was really surprised when I finally read them. I thought Harry Potter was supposed to be like, this model for nerds and outcasts, but instead he’s a dumb jock who’s famous for being famous. And he wants to be a cop (which is at least consistent).
There’s something really off-putting and mean about it. It’s “ethically mean spirited” as Ursula Le Guin remarked when asked her impressions of the series, and a better writer might have been able to take that and Say Something about the hierarchy of life as teenage, but JKR is just not able to think through the implications of anything she writes whether that’s the antisemitic implications of goblin bankers, why Dumbledore sent Harry back to his horrible family instead of placing an anonymous tip to muggle child protective services, or why Harry Potter’s shit for brains attitude is always, always rewarded and what that tells her more impressionable audience.
Five years ago, I couldn’t figure it, but with what we’ve learned about JKR’s politics in the mean time, it makes perfect sense.It’s not just that Harry isn’t particularly bright that’s troubling, but the fact that he treats his friend who isn’t a dullard as a pain in the ass, except for when he needs to exploit her book smarts for something because he didn’t fucking study.
He’s the kid who doesn’t do the reading, acts disengaged through most of the class, but then when the big test comes around he’s cribbing off whatever sap is willing to put up with his shit, whether due to insecurity or pity or some combination of the two.For all the faults in her writing on a structural level, JKR has a very specific world view that comes across very clearly without making it superliminal a la Ayn Rand.
Fundamentally, her world view is shaped by being a lower middle class Briton who resented the class system while also idolizing it. It’s the Chris Hitchens disease (not the one that killed him, the other one). She hates power and is fascinated by power. A very fraught relationship.
So instead of making Harry this special boy who upsets the order of the Wizarding World with his otherness, his arrival is actually celebrated and makes him an instant sensation because it represents a return of normality and order. She wants to make him a rebel, but she can’t actually have him challenge power in any way because power is constantly valorized in these books. His biggest ally is the headmaster of his exclusive private school (or would it be a public school in British vernacular?). So instead she makes him a cut-up and a delinquent who’s misbehavior is constantly hand-waved by everyone, except the one hard-ass professor who absolutely has Harry pegged except that professor happens to be a former Nazi so we can’t really sympathize with him, no can we?
The whole thing is a fantasy for suffering lower middle class British kids who dream of secretly having a peerage even as they resent the class system for all the opportunities it’s denied them and doors its slammed in their face. It’s an extremely British point of view and it’s not really surprising most American readers are oblivious to it, but at the same time it’s weird that more critics haven’t pointed it out.
This point of view perfectly unites the three main political causes Rowling has taken up: empire fetishism, austerity politics, and TERFism, all hallmarks of middle class British social climbers. Rowling has of course made it long ago, made it far further up the ladder than Hitchens ever did, and is fantastically wealthy beyond the dreams of many of the peers she once might have envied (and maybe still does). Still, the basic grubby insecurity of the class position she lived in for years before her big break remains, which explains a lot about how she sees higher taxes as some kind of personal affront, above and beyond what even many rich people born into money would see them as.I think it’s also crucial to look at JKR in terms of where she existed fiscally and socially when she wrote Philosopher’s Stove and where she did by Deathly Hallows. Philosopher’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets focus far more on Harry’s internal experience of the clash between his Muggle and wizard existences. That clash remains in the other books, but it becomes more and more artificial; Harry’s assimilation into the wizarding world parallels JKR’s assimilation into wealth, fame, and power (not perfectly, obviously).
The author of Chamber of Secrets presents house elf slavery as an unequivocal evil, but by the time she became the author of Goblet of Fire the implications of widespread slavery in wealthy wizard households became far more problematic to who JKR saw herself to be. The author of Goblet of Fire wasn’t able to condemn the various things that house elves symbolize about modern Britain because she was now part of those things. The author of Deathly Hallows couldn’t even bear Kreacher hating Harry; so Kreacher went from being someone who bought into pureblood supremacy to someone whose support of purebloods was nothing more than loyalty to the ideology of those who treated him well.
Again and again throughout the middle books of the series, the society of British wizards is shown to have clear, gaping, structural flaws. But as JKR became increasingly wealthy, she began to profit from the clear, gaping, structural flaws in the real world that her fictitious one paralleled. The injustice in Chamber of Secrets of Hagrid’s expulsion fifty years ago and his imprisonment during the book itself is very different from the injustice Harry faces in Order of the Phoenix, where he is able to escape from being framed unscathed and the consequences he suffers afterward are purely social; he is not treated to the same systemic injustice Hagrid received because JKR could no longer acknowledge those systems in the way she did previously.
This is a really good addition, which I rather missed having lost interest in the series half way through Goblet of Fire (for reasons that are alluded to here).
thanks monster high
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