By now, three weeks into Trump's ridiculous shitshow of a presidency, I think there are two glaringly obvious things we need to digest as a country:
1) Resistance is working. The marches, the deluge of calls from constituents, it's working. Betsy DeVos was only confirmed by a tie-breaking vote from the Vice-President because two Republican Senators voted against her. Something that has literally never happened before in a cabinet confirmation.
2) Donald Trump is not who we should be looking at as the real danger. It's the people he's surrounded himself with.
Trump is reminiscent of Poo-Bah from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. Pompous, narcissistic, strutting around like the peacock with the biggest feathers and bestowing important-sounding titles on himself to cover up his ineffectual bumbling. The only powers he really has are to sign things and appoint people, and most of those things he signs must be approved by Congress before they even see his desk. Executive orders are really the only place in which he has any teeth, and as we've seen, even those are subject to judicial review.
It all goes back to his actual official title: President of the United States. He presides over the process of governing, and even his say isn't final; laws he signs can be overturned by the Supreme Court if challenged far enough, and his veto can be overridden by Congress with enough votes. He's not a monarch, no matter how many golden toilets he owns.
And unlike his more shrewd predecessors, he's a complete outsider to the governmental process. He quite literally hasn't got the foggiest clue what he's doing. This is a guy who, despite claiming to be the world's greatest businessman, doesn't even read shit before he signs it (literally failing How to Do Business and Not Fuck Up Royally 101). He gets his advice and strategy directly from cable news, and when something doesn't go his way, he whines like a pre-teen douchebag in a Halo tournament on Twitter. At best, he's a useful idiot to the people with the potential to do the real damage.
Trump is that old codger in the nursing home who will sign anything you put in front of him, just because he likes seeing his signature on things. It makes him feel important. Except instead of birthday and Christmas checks to his grandchildren, it's laws and executive orders and military action approvals that affect millions.
It's hard to describe these kinds of people, who are such malignant narcissists and pure fucking evil on every level, but the only reason they haven't gone full comic book villain and subjugated the entire planet is because frankly, they're too fucking stupid to manage such a task. It's why I don't particularly like the comparisons to Hitler; Hitler was able to do the horrifying, world-changing things he did because he was the triple threat of narcissistic, ambitious, and intelligent. Trump is more like Mussolini. Brutal, charismatic, and an utter fucking moron.
The real dangers of his presidency are the people he's appointed to his cabinet, and especially the Congress that confirmed them.
The President was intended to be a check on Congress' power. They can propose and approve all the bills they like, but unless the President signs them or pockets them for ten days in an active session, they don't become law. Think of the President kind of like quality control and safety inspector at a factory, while Congress is the assembly line. The President's job is to approve the product for distribution, or send it back to the assembly line with a list of reasons why it's defective.
If the QA/safety inspector will rubber stamp anything without actually inspecting it? Then the factory can produce whatever it wants, no matter how defective or dangerous. Trump is the QA inspector who is too busy worrying about his side business to care what comes off the assembly line, and has delegated that task to his aides and cabinet. Which leaves them and Congress with an extraordinary amount of power.
That's the reason why, despite committing multiple impeachable offenses, nobody in Congress has actually made a move to draw up those articles; Trump, being both a narcissistic, attention-starved toddler as well as rock fucking stupid, is the perfect broken valve through which a Republican Congress can pass all the shitty bills it wants. Pence isn't nearly so pliable, having real experience in public office and thus knowing how to read things before he signs them. Congress won't impeach him unless he does something which makes even that kind of a payoff not worth their while anymore.
The people Trump has chosen for his cabinet are right out of the narcissist's playbook. People who flatter him and who think much like he does. He's used to surrounding himself with spineless yes-men who, like the residents of Peaksville, OH, will tell their child overlord whatever he wants to hear in order to keep their jobs. And he fancies the U.S. government to be merely an extension of his business empire. Ergo, he expects the people he appoints to do whatever he says (despite that the opposite is literally the function of the cabinet; above all else, they're supposed to warn the President when a bill on his desk is a bad idea).
These yes-men that Trump thinks he's got in his pocket? Include Steve Bannon, an avowed white supremacist who literally wants to destroy the government. Jeff Sessions, a guy deemed too racist to be a federal judge under one of the most racist Presidential administrations in recent memory (Reagan, 1986). Rex Tillerson, an oil tycoon who was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship and is a close buddy of Putin. These are the people who have Trump's ear. The people he trusts to put stuff in front of him to sign, like the old senile codger he's turning out to be.
And just like the guy in the nursing home, he's not willfully signing away power of attorney to his eldest child that just replaced all his heart medication with Tic-Tacs; he simply signed whatever he was told to sign. Trump is hardly the danger, here. The real danger is the people around him who know exactly how to play him to do their awful bidding.
Those are the people we need to vote the fuck out in 2018. Provided we still have a country by then.
Statcounter
Monday, February 13, 2017
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
"Princess Mononoke" Is Still a Terrifyingly Beautiful and Chillingly Relevant Film
This month, Fathom Events screened Hayao Miyazaki's 1997 film Princess Mononoke in select theatres to celebrate the movie's 20th anniversary. And I think it's something sorely needed, for a new generation to see this movie. Because if anything, it's even more relevant now than when it was made, current events considered.
While many bloggers have declared Rogue One the movie we needed to see in order to affirm our resistance to oppression and fascism, I would argue that the message in Princess Mononoke is far more comprehensive. While Rogue One celebrates diversity with a great cast and the fight for freedom against a very oppressive (and very white) evil empire, at the end of the day it's still the simplistic space opera of the same stripe as the movies it's a prequel to; the good and bad guys are obvious. You know who to root for.
The world we live in, as much as we would like to believe otherwise, is not so clearly divided. It never has been.
In Princess Mononoke, the title character, Ashitaka, is the last crown prince of a persecuted ethnic group, the Emishi, that was supposedly wiped out five centuries before. In a battle to save his village from the crazed Boar god Nago, he is injured by the demonic presence that had driven the boar mad, and cursed with a demon mark that will eventually consume his body and kill him. As a result, he is ordered to leave his village to prevent the curse from spreading. And with him goes his people's last hope of survival.
As he journeys west, he soon discovers that Nago was transformed from a god to a demon because of what has been happening to the forests; man has been destroying the forests to build forges and get to the iron ore in the ground beneath them, in order to build weapons that they use to hunt the animals that guard the forest. Ashitaka soon learns that what drove Nago mad was rage at the forest's suffering, and the humans that have caused it. His fight is then taken up by Okkoto, another Boar god, who wishes to exterminate the humans and save the forest.
In particular, the humans of a village called Irontown, led by Lady Eboshi, and the men who follow her partner Jigo, a monk who seeks the favor of the Emperor against the local warlord Asano. In Irontown, Ashitaka is enraged to learn of the destruction Lady Eboshi's efforts have caused. But it's tempered by learning that the citizens of Irontown are the most downtrodden members of society. Brothel girls, lepers, etc. Lady Eboshi takes them all in and gives them a place to both feel safe and have a purpose.
But as a result of her destruction of the forest, Lady Eboshi has earned the hatred of the Wolf god Moro, and her three children: her two Wolf pups, and her human daughter San (the eponymous princess), an abandoned child that was thrown at her feet by her own parents when they escaped Moro's wrath. Rather than eat her, Moro adopted her as one of her own. Due to Lady Eboshi's efforts to destroy the forest for its wood and iron, San (and to a lesser extent, Moro) has made it her mission to kill her.
Later on, a plot unfolds between Lady Eboshi and Jigo to harvest the head of the Great Forest Spirit to gain the Emperor's favor. They're successful, but the result is that the Great Forest Spirit drains all life from the landscape while searching for his head. Ashitaka and San return it to him, ending the destruction and repairing the land.
On the surface, the film seems relevant only because of environmental issues. But it's so much more than that. At its heart, Princess Mononoke is a film about the destructive power of hatred, and how we must end the cycle with empathy and compassion for all creatures, not just the ones we belong to.
The four main characters are all foils to each other. Ashitaka represents the best that humanity can be; he wants a perfect solution, for everyone to stop killing each other and to coexist peacefully. As a direct contrast to him, there is Jigo, a self-serving scoundrel who doesn't care what kind of destruction he causes as long as he gets what he wants out of it. In the middle of those two extremes you have San and Lady Eboshi, two sides of the same coin. While San has renounced her humanity, Lady Eboshi completely embraces it, both the destructive and compassionate parts.
While it's true that Lady Eboshi wishes to destroy the forest to get to the iron, she does so because she wants to provide a better life for the people she's rescued. The old and sick, the brothel girls, the lepers...the literal dregs of society that nobody wants to take care of, and that other leaders (like Asano) were implied to be outright purging. As one of the lepers says, she is the only person to treat them as fellow human beings. Despite outward appearances, Lady Eboshi is a kind and compassionate woman...but only toward her fellow humans. She has none of that empathy for the forest or the animal gods that guard it. While she seeks to defend her own home, she has no qualms about razing the home of Moro and San and Okkoto to the ground.
On the flip side, the same could be said for San. She will defend the forest to her last, but has little compassion for the humans defending their home from her Wolf brothers. The only reason she doesn't kill Ashitaka the two times she has the chance is because he appeared to be on her side; the first human she's met who ever showed her any kind of compassion.
And really, that's what sets off the entire chain of events. Ashitaka's mission from the beginning is to see what's happening "through eyes unclouded by hate." And as a result of sticking to that principle, he not only lifts Nago's curse from himself, but ultimately ends the war between the humans and the forest gods.
And it's not an easy mission. Throughout the film, character after character asks, suspects, and demands to know which "side" Ashitaka is on. His motives are questioned by everyone because he doesn't act in the interests of any one person (not even himself, evident when he breaks up Lady Eboshi and San's fight and carries her safely out of Irontown with a gaping bullet wound). And throughout the movie, his motive is the same; to make everyone stop causing suffering.
But the most important part, and the one that is most relevant right now, is that even when it becomes evident that there is no negotiating and Ashitaka must choose a side, the side he chooses is always the side of the oppressed. San, the Wolves, the citizens of Irontown, the peasants being massacred by Asano's men. When Ashitaka must choose to help one side over the other, he always chooses the side that is disadvantaged in some way.
Where we are as a country right now? We need that. We need more Ashitakas. People who would rather see peace, but when forced to choose a side, will help those who need the extra hand most.
Because what we are fighting is not a war of land or resources. We're fighting a purely ideological war, but with the potential to kill just as many as all the other physical conflicts we've seen combined. Because like forest gods, like Jigo's men, like Irontown, like Asano's men, the soldiers in this war are motivated by hatred. And as Ashitaka demonstrated in the film and as millions before us have demonstrated throughout history, you can't fight hatred with more hatred. The only thing that will accomplish is to perpetuate the cycle of violence, suffering and pain. If you fight hatred with hatred, it will eventually eat you alive.
You conquer hatred with empathy, love, compassion and healing.
That's really what the whole movie is about. In order to break the cycle of war, you must have empathy and compassion for others. Even for others who are not like you. Even for others who are trying to destroy you. No, this doesn't mean roll over and take their abuse, but nor does it mean to strip them of their humanity the way they've done to you. Because if you become what you hate in order to win, then you don't actually care about the cause; you only care about winning.
At the end of the day, equality is not about revenge. Equality is not about making other people suffer as you have. Equality is about making sure nobody else suffers as you've done, that nobody else need go through the same pain and horror and hardship that you've endured. Equality is about leaving this world a better place than you found it.
We must see the world with eyes unclouded by hate. It's the only way we're going to lift this curse.
While many bloggers have declared Rogue One the movie we needed to see in order to affirm our resistance to oppression and fascism, I would argue that the message in Princess Mononoke is far more comprehensive. While Rogue One celebrates diversity with a great cast and the fight for freedom against a very oppressive (and very white) evil empire, at the end of the day it's still the simplistic space opera of the same stripe as the movies it's a prequel to; the good and bad guys are obvious. You know who to root for.
The world we live in, as much as we would like to believe otherwise, is not so clearly divided. It never has been.
In Princess Mononoke, the title character, Ashitaka, is the last crown prince of a persecuted ethnic group, the Emishi, that was supposedly wiped out five centuries before. In a battle to save his village from the crazed Boar god Nago, he is injured by the demonic presence that had driven the boar mad, and cursed with a demon mark that will eventually consume his body and kill him. As a result, he is ordered to leave his village to prevent the curse from spreading. And with him goes his people's last hope of survival.
As he journeys west, he soon discovers that Nago was transformed from a god to a demon because of what has been happening to the forests; man has been destroying the forests to build forges and get to the iron ore in the ground beneath them, in order to build weapons that they use to hunt the animals that guard the forest. Ashitaka soon learns that what drove Nago mad was rage at the forest's suffering, and the humans that have caused it. His fight is then taken up by Okkoto, another Boar god, who wishes to exterminate the humans and save the forest.
In particular, the humans of a village called Irontown, led by Lady Eboshi, and the men who follow her partner Jigo, a monk who seeks the favor of the Emperor against the local warlord Asano. In Irontown, Ashitaka is enraged to learn of the destruction Lady Eboshi's efforts have caused. But it's tempered by learning that the citizens of Irontown are the most downtrodden members of society. Brothel girls, lepers, etc. Lady Eboshi takes them all in and gives them a place to both feel safe and have a purpose.
But as a result of her destruction of the forest, Lady Eboshi has earned the hatred of the Wolf god Moro, and her three children: her two Wolf pups, and her human daughter San (the eponymous princess), an abandoned child that was thrown at her feet by her own parents when they escaped Moro's wrath. Rather than eat her, Moro adopted her as one of her own. Due to Lady Eboshi's efforts to destroy the forest for its wood and iron, San (and to a lesser extent, Moro) has made it her mission to kill her.
Later on, a plot unfolds between Lady Eboshi and Jigo to harvest the head of the Great Forest Spirit to gain the Emperor's favor. They're successful, but the result is that the Great Forest Spirit drains all life from the landscape while searching for his head. Ashitaka and San return it to him, ending the destruction and repairing the land.
On the surface, the film seems relevant only because of environmental issues. But it's so much more than that. At its heart, Princess Mononoke is a film about the destructive power of hatred, and how we must end the cycle with empathy and compassion for all creatures, not just the ones we belong to.
The four main characters are all foils to each other. Ashitaka represents the best that humanity can be; he wants a perfect solution, for everyone to stop killing each other and to coexist peacefully. As a direct contrast to him, there is Jigo, a self-serving scoundrel who doesn't care what kind of destruction he causes as long as he gets what he wants out of it. In the middle of those two extremes you have San and Lady Eboshi, two sides of the same coin. While San has renounced her humanity, Lady Eboshi completely embraces it, both the destructive and compassionate parts.
While it's true that Lady Eboshi wishes to destroy the forest to get to the iron, she does so because she wants to provide a better life for the people she's rescued. The old and sick, the brothel girls, the lepers...the literal dregs of society that nobody wants to take care of, and that other leaders (like Asano) were implied to be outright purging. As one of the lepers says, she is the only person to treat them as fellow human beings. Despite outward appearances, Lady Eboshi is a kind and compassionate woman...but only toward her fellow humans. She has none of that empathy for the forest or the animal gods that guard it. While she seeks to defend her own home, she has no qualms about razing the home of Moro and San and Okkoto to the ground.
On the flip side, the same could be said for San. She will defend the forest to her last, but has little compassion for the humans defending their home from her Wolf brothers. The only reason she doesn't kill Ashitaka the two times she has the chance is because he appeared to be on her side; the first human she's met who ever showed her any kind of compassion.
And really, that's what sets off the entire chain of events. Ashitaka's mission from the beginning is to see what's happening "through eyes unclouded by hate." And as a result of sticking to that principle, he not only lifts Nago's curse from himself, but ultimately ends the war between the humans and the forest gods.
And it's not an easy mission. Throughout the film, character after character asks, suspects, and demands to know which "side" Ashitaka is on. His motives are questioned by everyone because he doesn't act in the interests of any one person (not even himself, evident when he breaks up Lady Eboshi and San's fight and carries her safely out of Irontown with a gaping bullet wound). And throughout the movie, his motive is the same; to make everyone stop causing suffering.
But the most important part, and the one that is most relevant right now, is that even when it becomes evident that there is no negotiating and Ashitaka must choose a side, the side he chooses is always the side of the oppressed. San, the Wolves, the citizens of Irontown, the peasants being massacred by Asano's men. When Ashitaka must choose to help one side over the other, he always chooses the side that is disadvantaged in some way.
Where we are as a country right now? We need that. We need more Ashitakas. People who would rather see peace, but when forced to choose a side, will help those who need the extra hand most.
Because what we are fighting is not a war of land or resources. We're fighting a purely ideological war, but with the potential to kill just as many as all the other physical conflicts we've seen combined. Because like forest gods, like Jigo's men, like Irontown, like Asano's men, the soldiers in this war are motivated by hatred. And as Ashitaka demonstrated in the film and as millions before us have demonstrated throughout history, you can't fight hatred with more hatred. The only thing that will accomplish is to perpetuate the cycle of violence, suffering and pain. If you fight hatred with hatred, it will eventually eat you alive.
You conquer hatred with empathy, love, compassion and healing.
That's really what the whole movie is about. In order to break the cycle of war, you must have empathy and compassion for others. Even for others who are not like you. Even for others who are trying to destroy you. No, this doesn't mean roll over and take their abuse, but nor does it mean to strip them of their humanity the way they've done to you. Because if you become what you hate in order to win, then you don't actually care about the cause; you only care about winning.
At the end of the day, equality is not about revenge. Equality is not about making other people suffer as you have. Equality is about making sure nobody else suffers as you've done, that nobody else need go through the same pain and horror and hardship that you've endured. Equality is about leaving this world a better place than you found it.
We must see the world with eyes unclouded by hate. It's the only way we're going to lift this curse.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)