I’m an A+ member because there can never be too many queer women using their voices.
Last night, ten Republican candidates — fourteen if you count the undercards — duked it out on CNBC’s stage, largely to our horror. This debate was ostensibly centered around economic policy, and most of the questions were focused on that subject (with some notable exceptions — fantasy football???). However, the content of the debate itself was all over the road, including discussion of whether climate change is real, “PC culture,” Donald Trump’s wall and its proposed “big, fat beautiful door,” and whether Marco Rubio’s book is available in paperback (it is). It’s hard to know what to take away from the evening. Trump wasn’t as dominant a presence as he has been in past public performances; many hoped that Ben Carson would be forced to clarify his confusing and seemingly contradictory platform, but he largely did not. As is virtually always the case, only a portion of what was said on stage was remotely true — check out the fact check here. Rubio, Cruz and Christie are being tapped by many media outlets as having standout debate performances, but the fact that all three are being talked about rather than one frontrunner is telling.
Anyhow, I don’t think that there was much revealed about any of the candidates that’s really new information for anyone, so here’s what I think the candidates should dress up as for Halloween.
The Top 10 Republican Candidates as Horror Villains Based on Their Performance Thus Far
What rings most dangerously prophetic about Salem is the ideology that suggests imagining the most helpless and vulnerable in our communities as the most powerful, in a kind of 1984-esque doublethink that provides a rationale for causing as much harm as one wishes to that group. The kind of doublethink that would allow Samuel Parris, for instance, to believe that Tituba could be imbued with all the powers of supernatural evil and hold the life of his niece and many others in her hand, while at the same time believing that she was literally his property and could not even lay claim to the powers of full personhood.
Clearly at least part of what’s at play is a radically reimagined rhetoric of power and victimhood, one that allowed Parris (and a village) to see themselves as being victimized by a woman who was entirely at their mercy, and was without the barest legal or social measure of recourse to protect herself from harm. It’s notable that Tituba seems (from what we’re able to understand about her through the veil of hundreds of years of racist, sensationalistic history) to have understood right away what kind of manmade devil was really on the loose in Salem. She understood, for instance, well before anyone else did that those who confessed survived.
Who Is It That Afflicts You? On Witchcraft and Survival In The Salem Village
The point, I guess for me, is my friend’s rapist who saw virtually zero repercussions despite video evidence showing what he did to her; “experts” claiming that the death of Tamir Rice was “reasonable” on the part of the police officer who shot him. If that isn’t evidence of supernatural power — the power of whiteness, the power of male privilege, the power of state authority, the power of rape culture — at least as much as Cotton Mather finding a “witch mark” on someone’s scared and shaking body, what is? I’m thinking of how there’s mountains of hard evidence that Planned Parenthood has never “sold dead baby parts,” and is in fact just a beleaguered healthcare provider, but there are still many in power who have the ability to roadblock them over and over regardless. Is that not a kind of malicious witchcraft? I’m thinking of how many major names and national leaders are products of secret societies, Skull and Bones or Scroll and Key, what have you. These are men (and they are all men) who we know essentially for sure crept around in crypts having solemn ceremonies and laying down in coffins to later be inducted into immense power, and have for generations — yet it’s feminists that Pat Robertson famously claimed practiced witchcraft.
But what rings most dangerously prophetic about Salem is the ideology that suggests imagining the most helpless and vulnerable in our communities as the most powerful, in a kind of 1984-esque doublethink that provides a rationale for causing as much harm as one wishes to that group.
http://www.autostraddle.com/who-is-it-that-afflicts-you-312929/
This article is so good! And this quote sums up so much of what confounds me about our culture. Why do we do this? How do we keep getting away with it?
(via reindeerbee)
If you can shoot Martin [Luther King Jr.], you can shoot all of us. And there’s nothing in your record to indicate you won’t, or anything that would prevent you from doing it. That will be the beginning of the end, if you do, and that knowledge will be all that will hold your hand. Because one no longer believes, you see—I don’t any longer believe, and not many black people in this country can afford to believe— any longer a word you say. I don’t believe in the morality of this people at all. I don’t believe you do the right thing because you think it’s the right thing. I think you may be forced to do it because it will be the expedient thing. Which is good enough.
James Baldwin via the #BlackLivesMatter: A Longform Reading List | Autostraddle
We tend to leverage the trials as a framework for understanding punitive measures — Arthur Miller’s allegory with The Crucible was criticizing the harsh and unwarranted punishment of HUAC; when a celebrity accused of sexual misconduct complains they’re the target of a “witch hunt,” they mean that they’re being castigated unfairly. But what rings most dangerously prophetic about Salem is the ideology that suggests imagining the most helpless and vulnerable in our communities as the most powerful, in a kind of 1984-esque doublethink that provides a rationale for causing as much harm as one wishes to that group. The kind of doublethink that would allow Samuel Parris, for instance, to believe that Tituba could be imbued with all the powers of supernatural evil and hold the life of his niece and many others in her hand, while at the same time believing that she was literally his property and could not even lay claim to the powers of full personhood.
