The Power of Myth, The First Act of Violence — “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”

by Gabriel Valdez

“The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.”

– Joseph Campbell, “The Power of Myth”

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”

– bell hooks

These are not mutually exclusive ideas. They share words like “power” and ideas like spiritual pain. Campbell would seem to say you should swallow your pain. Hooks would seem to say the pain itself is unneeded.

Yet reverse these concepts and consider them in steps.

I grew up learning to be a man. I psychically self-mutilated myself. I look upon that demon in me now. What is it? An enemy, or just an entity? Do I reject its very existence, or acknowledge the pieces of itself it buried deep inside my spirit? Do I refuse to acknowledge this part of me, or do I greet the demon when he looms and sit down with him?

It is not the only demon that I know.

My descent is half-Mexican, half-European white. I was born in 1983. My heroes in movies were white men like Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise. If a Hispanic was in a film, he would be the villain. He would be evil, untrustworthy, and bested in the end. If there was a Hispanic woman, she would be a reward for the white hero.

When I stepped outside the door of my house, our media, our politicians, our world, and especially the children who were my classmates reinforced the pride I had in half of my ancestry. The other half? They reinforced the shame I should feel at being Mexican.

These demons are twins, and I wrestle with their shadows still. They each play off the other. Sometimes they win, sometimes I can sit down with them and be a friend. If I can calmly understand more of their nature, I can understand and change more of my own.

In this wrestling, I can open whole parts of myself to those I love, and yet I still protect so fiercely my innermost natures, my most closely-held beliefs. I once protected them from the self-mutilation that was asked of me, and that’s a difficult survival mechanism to break. I protected them from the criticism of half of who I am. It is hard to learn when to stop protecting, or even that I am, so I can sometimes exist too externally in my closest relationships. There’s a guarded cross-section of myself, right over my heart, where it’s difficult to allow vulnerability. I can resent this guarded nature in myself, but at the same time struggle with why the world can’t communicate better with it.

So: What the hell am I going on about?

General Leia has sent her best starfighter to search for Luke Skywalker. That’s what the opening scroll to “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” informs us.

Note that Leia is recognized for the role she played most often in the original trilogy now – a general in a war room, not a princess in a metal bikini.

Her best starfighter is Poe Dameron, played by Oscar Isaac. He’s not done up to look white, as he has been in some of his films. There’s no effort to mask his Guatemalan-Cuban ancestry.

You see, some viewers would sooner see giant slugs with sex slaves on-screen before they’d allow a Hispanic or Black or a woman hero to save the galaxy.

And that’s when we meet Finn, played by John Boyega. As a storm trooper, the First Order makes Finn kill indiscriminately. They demand his violence on behalf of the militarized dictatorship that’s succeeded the Empire. When he displays feelings like hesitance, regret, and empathy, he is sent for “re-programming.”

Finally, and most importantly, we meet Rey, played by Daisy Ridley. She’s a scavenger in a desert wasteland, a woman who stays put in a hopeless existence because she still has hope her family might one day return for her.

How these characters come together, I’ll leave for you to discover. The space battles are wonderful, the visual effects are grand and colorful, the droids and aliens full of life and personality. Yet “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is far more interested in its conversations and the sweeping vistas of its lonely planets. It feels the crucial emotions of the relationships its characters share. It builds a living archaeology of the original trilogy all around them. It makes the myths we saw as children seem as myth to them.

Director J.J. Abrams manages to translate these characters’ inner struggles onto screen while rarely speaking them aloud. A look, a glance, a quick juxtaposition: these are lived-in lives, powered by what spiritual sustenance characters can manage amid fear and loss. These are no longer archetypes bounding about a space western. These are no longer heroes and villains. These are people who stumble across their own story and exist with one foot gently in and one foot squarely out of wanting to take part in it.

As spoiler-free as possible: Later in the film, we are presented with the ultimate moment. One figure is possessed by anger and wrath. The film’s villain, Kylo Ren, is a man who’s carved emotional chunks of himself out so that he can embrace power. He is spiritually unfulfilled, and so rages at the universe around him. He has created a figure of himself, and strives to be closer to this figure, this icon. This draws him further from himself – he is nothing but the external image of who he believes he should be.

The other figure is possessed by loss and disappointment. Rey is a woman who has nothing left, yet is driven by hope, by self-chosen beliefs and convictions. The crushing realities that the universe has made her suffer are experiences that draw her closer to herself. Yet she erases the external. She remains herself. She chooses to be closer to her inner life, no image, no shield, no guarded nature.

Kylo Ren wears a mask, not because he is mutilated visibly like the original trilogy’s Darth Vader. No, he wears it because he is mutilated inside. His pursuit is spiritual self-mutilation. He rages at his demons, making more room in himself for them to reside, multiplying them, mistaking the rage of his own dissatisfaction for power he can turn against others.

Rey is bright-eyed and intelligent, savvy, confident without being cocky. She is introduced wearing a mask. She removes it, and we never see it again. She suffers alongside her demons, accepts them, embraces the calm that arrives from acceptance, the patience she’s practiced through hope, the faith she’s chosen in herself and the convictions she’s embraced – even after that hope’s been dashed.

No “Star Wars” film before this has so succinctly or successfully captured the notions of a dark and light side, of why these things matter as more than simple storytelling devices. “The Force Awakens” makes these things matter.

I’d set “The Force Awakens” as the second-best of the “Star Wars” films behind “The Empire Strikes Back,” if such things must be measured. As a sequel for the original trilogy, it not only succeeds in telling its own story, it also succeeds in having a reason to be told, and in giving the previous films added weight.

Yet “The Force Awakens” is the best “Star Wars” film in one regard. It is the best of these movies off-screen. It is the one that matters. This Christmas, children will take their action figures and Legos and video games or just go outside and grab some sticks. And Rey will save the galaxy by coping with loss. And Finn will save the galaxy by rejecting the spiritual self-mutilation that’s been asked of him. And Poe Dameron will save the galaxy by being friendly and trusting.

They will save the galaxy millions upon millions of times, in millions upon millions of hands. A woman, a black man, and a hispanic man will save it from a man who believes anger is power, while love and sympathy must be carved out of himself to achieve it. And his weaknesses in believing this will be exposed again and again and again.

If play is practice for adulthood, those children will have excellent training. “Star Wars” has always been culturally significant. “The Force Awakens” makes it culturally important.

Children will step out of their door and young women, young blacks, young hispanics all will feel like more than they were before, because now they have heroes in the world’s biggest franchise who represent them fully.

Young men and women of all races may learn that they have fewer demons to face, and better tools to face them. Here’s to children growing up with fewer demons, and being able to accept, face, and understand the ones they still must sustain.

The feature image of Daisy Ridley is from Collider here.

Book of Job Redux — “In the Heart of the Sea”

by Gabriel Valdez

There’s no way to put this simply or without making a really bad pun, but critics are missing the boat on “In the Heart of the Sea.” It’s too many films, they say. It wants to be a seafaring adventure, an epic test of wills between two men, an environmental paean, and an allegory about the pitfalls of vengeance.

Very broadly based on the destruction of the whaling ship Essex by a whale in 1820 and the struggle of its stranded survivors, the story is framed by author Herman Melville’s visit to the vessel’s last living crew member in Nantucket, Mass. Though Melville did base American classic “Moby Dick” on the story of the Essex, this visit never actually happened. It does provide a nice frame story about confession, however.

Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com echoes a complaint many critics have had. He specifically criticizes the film for lacking Spielberg’s famous storytelling notion of “an idea you can hold in your hand.” This is a misreading of the film – it has no interest in being held. “In the Heart of the Sea” is about what choices you make upon facing the fury of God, or the majesty of the universe, or the sublime in nature – pick your preference. That’s an idea that can barely be held in the head, let alone the hand.

Look, I’m as Socialist Pinko Liberal as the next Socialist Pinko Liberal, yet even I have to admit that there’s a blind spot in film criticism when it comes to movies about religion. (Many of them are bad, yes, but how does that make the genre different from any other?)

And make no mistake, “In the Heart of the Sea” is a film about how we come away from facing God. Do we rage at loss? Do we double down on our own narcissism and place faith in our superiority? Is the universe unfeeling and arbitrary, or have we been personally selected out by it? Do we look at what happens around us and respond with the anger of violence and vengeance?

Or do we see ourselves as a speck in the universe, and find beauty in that? When we face the sublime, that which is more meaningful and permanent in nature than ourselves, do we respond with humbleness and respect? Or do we seek to master it? Is ours to master the world around us, or to acknowledge the world around us does not need our mastering it?

Every year, there’s a film that tackles “Book of Job” territory. “In the Heart of the Sea” is a more obvious gambit, and it suffers for its obviousness. Seitz criticizes the movie for not being a darker adventure filmed by Werner Herzog or Terrence Malick. Not to put too fine a point on it, but 99% of all movies would be better if filmed by Herzog or Malick. “In the Heart of the Sea” isn’t even the best “Book of Job” riff about being stranded at sea and facing the overwhelming wrath of God/Nature – that would be my call for best film in the last decade: “Life of Pi.”

That said, “In the Heart of the Sea” is a good film. While it travels fast and feels a bit obvious at points, it is a solid and fulfilling yarn.

There are many of the same problems here that have burrowed into director Ron Howard’s recent films – the “historical” movie that makes 90% of its plot up, the near-complete disinclusion of women, and a misplaced belief that Chris Hemsworth can do accents.

The whale also stalks the survivors for quite a while after sinking the Essex. This never happened. Whaling was huge business in the 1800s and whale oil was somewhat equivalent to the petroleum industry of today. Whales are intelligent animals, and there are several accounts of whales targeting whaling vessels and deliberately sinking them. Whether this was a direct predator-prey response, or the animals had a more complex notion of what was happening, whales did target, attack, and sink whaling vessels on multiple occasions.

The whale here is more akin to the wolves in “The Gray,” the monsters in “The Descent,” or the debris field in “Gravity.” The wolves didn’t act like real wolves because they weren’t real wolves; they were the existential nature of loss and desperation closing in on you. The monsters in “The Descent” didn’t act like real echolocating, underground manbeasts because real echolocating, underground manbeasts don’t exist; they were the demons of a life punished. The debris field in “Gravity” doesn’t care by the end if it’s on schedule or not. It’s coming for Sandra Bullock one more time, physics be damned, because in movie language it is not a debris field; it is the universe breaking a human being unfeelingly.

The whale is the universe, the existential nature of loss and desperation closing in on you. Look it in the eye. It has broken your life. Do you rage against it and lash out? Or do you let the moment pass, and one day become yourself again?

“In the Heart of the Sea” is not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination. But it does have a damn good reason for being. It has no single, simple idea to be held in the hand, but rather one to be gazed at in the night sky, in the flight of a bird, in the quiet whispering of trees, and yes – even sometimes in the raging of the world unfeeling against you.

Does it Pass the Bechdel-Wallace Test?

This section uses the Bechdel-Wallace Test as a foundation to discuss the representation of women in film.

1. Does “In the Heart of the Sea” have more than one woman in it?

Yes. Michelle Fairley plays Mrs. Nickerson and Charlotte Riley plays Peggy Chase.

2. Do they talk to each other?

No. Nickerson exists in the frame story and Chase within the story being told. They are both wives to more plot-consequential characters.

3. About something other than a man?

Not applicable.

With the exception of “The Missing” and Cate Blanchett’s utter domination of her role in what is super-secretly my favorite Ron Howard film, Howard is an awful director when it comes to giving women any kind of leading role in his films (serving as Tom Hank’s bright-eyed, half-his-age, ingenue-of-the-moment in Dan Brown adaptations does not count).

“In the Heart of the Sea” is a film about men, blah blah blah, and yes, it happens on a whaling vessel in 1820, where you wouldn’t find women working…but considerable portions of the film happen before or after the ship and its crew are involved. There were opportunities here. Howard just isn’t a director who’s typically interested in telling stories about women outside of their relation to leading men.

Where did we get our awesome images? The Essex before the storm comes from FastCoCreate. Survivors in the water looking up at the whale comes from The Hollywood Reporter.

So You Don’t Have To — “The Ridiculous 6”

by Gabriel Valdez

In the first five minutes, hell – the first 30 seconds – “The Ridiculous 6” establishes itself as intentionally offensive. The new Adam Sandler movie is a Western spoof, and these first five minutes involve racial slurs, unwanted groping of a woman, and rape threats of her by five men.

Now, the racial slurs might be claimed as “historical accuracy,” but nothing else in the film is concerned with any kind of historical accuracy. More importantly, those slurs are used in ways that aren’t historically accurate. So, there’s really no leg to stand on here, though I’m sure someone will try.

Here’s one of the film’s early jokes:

Attempted rapists call an Apache woman “Pocahotness.” Don’t worry, her real name is “Smoking Fox.” She’s saved by the white orphan her tribe raised. That’s Adam Sandler. His name is “White Knife.” He’s special. Why? Because he’s better at everything his tribe does than they are. He can run at super speeds, throw knives with pinpoint accuracy, and shoot arrows and catch them in his teeth.

Indigenous Americans are posed as warlike and savage. When a white traveler happens upon their tribe’s riverside camp, everyone hollers and brandishes a weapon, including a toddler with a hatchet at the ready. That’s all these people are, the film says: violent, savage, uncultured. Adam Sandler is our window into their souls, and he is better at all they do than they are because he is among them, but not of them.

All the Apache women want him, but they don’t want the actual Apache men they’re with. The white man among them has genetic supremacy, breeding supremacy. Breeding supremacy is the kind of shit we once argued so that we could justify the rape of indigenous peoples. By forcing them to have half-white babies, the idea was we were breeding the genetically inferior parts of them out. It’s “Manifest Destiny: The Fucking Movie.”

There are some jokes at the expense of whites, but the film uses these briefly and early before forgetting them, as if to clean the slate so that it can get away with being profoundly racist toward the Apache and then say, “Oh, but we made two jokes about whites.”

Take Rob Schneider. He plays a Mexican who has sex with donkeys. When we first meet the donkey, it shits all over the wall for 10 seconds. That’s his special power. The donkey projectile shits all over people. Mexicans, amirite?

Poor Taylor Lautner, who actually delivered a decent parkour film earlier this year in “Tracers,” is the leading Native American actor in the film. The first thing we learn about his character is that he’s a virgin (breeding supremacy). Actually, the first thing we learn about him is that he’s mentally handicapped (genetic supremacy). Don’t worry, though, he’ll get a blowjob from the donkey in his second scene while Rob Schneider looks on approvingly and pets the donkey. A Native American actor, a Mexican character, and animal sex. Only the white actor playing a white man looks on disapprovingly.

The joke is that all of these people are White Knife’s brothers from different women. In order to rescue their father, they need to band together and steal $50,000.

Jorge Garcia is next. The Chilean/Cuban actor made famous by being the most charming character in “Lost” here plays a mentally handicapped man who can communicate only in grunts (genetic supremacy). The joke is his mother’s too ugly for anyone to have ever had sex with her (breeding supremacy). Yes, there are two mentally handicapped characters in the film, treated with all the sensitivity of a boot.

Luke Wilson and Terry Crews join on as the final two brothers. Thankfully, Crews gets away without too much racism aimed his way (aside from sexual stereotypes). There’s even a scene where Crews reveals to the others he’s Black, just in case they were thinking of making slurs without knowing. Given the cachet Crews has in the industry, one has to imagine he wouldn’t have done the movie if the same hate was directed toward Black characters.

Others don’t have that sway. Here are the other Apache women named:

Never-Wears-Bra

Beaver Breath

They’ll come across a man in the wilds inventing baseball. He’s got a team of Chinese workers, but they need a team to play against. The jokes contained here are that the Chinese are bad at everything (genetic supremacy), scared of the ball, and they’re short (breeding supremacy). What wit.

The jokes about baseball itself actually work. Because he keeps losing, the inventor makes the rules more and more complicated as he goes. It’s a rare moment of actual wit and creativity in an otherwise profoundly lazy-ass film.

The only other humor that works:

“Sometimes, the white man speaks the truth. Like, one in 20, 25 times. I believe this is one of those times.” In fact, any of the lines Saginaw Grant says work – he’s the most accomplished comedian here. He gets about three real jokes, two of them aimed at whites. These are the only jokes made about whites in the whole film. That’s fewer instances than Rob Schneider sings about a fucking taco tree.

The pairing of Will Forte and Steve Zahn as outlaws is effective, though very underutilized. Really, a buddy film about their characters and interplay might have been more worthwhile.

That’s all I’ve got on things that work.

There are things that should work, but don’t because the film’s already lost so much trust. The stunt casting of Vanilla Ice as Mark Twain fails. David Spade as General Custer is pointless. Whitney Cummings is essentially used to show off her breasts. It’s all just names on the packaging that get you to watch and wait around for their 30 seconds apiece of screen-time.

Regardless of all this, the film is already dragging inside the first 10 minutes. Most of what Adam Sandler does is stand still, look stoic (read: disinterested), and grumble. Sandler has done anger surprisingly well as a dramatic actor – just look at “Punch Drunk Love.” Yet it’s something he can’t succeed with at a comedic level. That’s especially true at this point in his career, when he’s sleepwalking through so many roles for the paycheck. Whatever manic energy he was able to capture when young has left him. There’s nothing he brings to this that any other comedic actor couldn’t double.

Even without commentary on its negative social value, the film just doesn’t work as a comedy – even in the Adam Sandler style. It’s a shame Crews, Garcia, Lautner (yes, Lautner), and Wilson aren’t used in different ways. Sandler and Schneider are sleepwalking through this. The number of missed opportunities later in the film is ridiculous.

As a satire, it’s non-functional. It doesn’t understand anything more than the most basic cliches of a Western. It has nothing to say and it doesn’t understand what it’s lampooning. Less than five minutes of making fun of baseball – that’s really the only satirical thing that you’re sitting through the film to see.

Your time is far better spent re-watching “Blazing Saddles,” a film that understood its genre, why satire exists, and didn’t struggle with the most basic comedic timing in acting and filmmaking.

Or stick with “The Lone Ranger,” which had so much more to say than critics realized and boasted some beautiful cinematography and action scenes. Or check out Natasha Leggero’s “Another Period” for this style of genre satire done right. Or just watch “Drunk History” for something with a true awareness of how the world sees it.

“The Ridiculous 6” is hands-down the worst movie I’ve seen this year, and I had to watch Nicolas Cage’s Chinese martial arts epic.

Does it Pass the Bechdel-Wallace Test?

If you read my reviews, you know I’d normally give this section a more thorough rundown. “The Ridiculous 6” doesn’t deserve it. There are a few lines shared between women, but they’re all about how desirous they are of Adam Sandler. This film forgets women except during brief moments to make fun of the idea that women have sexuality or to pose women as damsels to be saved from rape and murder.

Trumpalytics: How We Help Donald Trump Metagame Toward Power

by Gabriel Valdez

Hi, Donald Trump! Hi, real poll analytics! Why don’t I ever see you in the same room anymore? Are you secretly the same person?

Trump’s support has repeatedly hit a ceiling of about 35% in Republican polls, right? A full third of Republicans are shouting, “Yay, racism!” From the rest of the Republican field, it seems more like a tepid, “Er, go…go racism, I think. Aren’t we normally more subtle about this?” Which really puts Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in some difficult positions. It should do the same to Ben Carson, but this cycle’s Rick Santorum 2012 is destined to one day become Rick Santorum 2016.

So…America is obsessed with Trump, right? Everyone’s going to vote for him and he’ll win all 50 states, and ban everything but golf and gambling, right?

Here’s the thing. Trump’s support has hit a ceiling of about 35%, and that’s of registered Republican voters. Registered Republicans make up only about 25% of voters. Registered Democrats make up a bit over 30%, and the rest are independent.

Why hasn’t Trump been able to catapult himself over that ceiling of 35% among Republicans? Because of his ridiculous negatives. His unfavorable rating consistently hovers near 60%. We’re talking about a candidate who might not even be able to win the presidency in an up-down referendum wherein he’s the only candidate.

Furthermore, if you look at the polls being made of Republicans thus far in the cycle, most of them are of any adult or registered Republican. Most of them are internet polls. Most of them are not of the most accurate metric polling can offer: likely voters in live phone polls. These are voters who vote regularly, and Trump’s support among them has been lower by anywhere from 6-10 percentage points throughout most of the campaign.

Why avoid live polling of likely voters when it’s the most statistically accurate metric? Because people click on Trump. I’ll click on him, you’ll click on him, we’ll all click on Trump just to see what crazy, racist, deport-my-born-and-bred-U.S.-citizen-ass bullshit he comes up with next. We click on that bastard like there’s no tomorrow, and that means more ad money for the sites being clicked on. We’ll hang on channels showing him, and that means higher ratings for the networks being watched.

Among likely voters in live phone polls, Trump has never crested 28%. Despite little opposition, his ceiling is fairly established. Why would he struggle to increase that number when other candidates who are polling lower wouldn’t? They aren’t saddled with his negatives. As the Republican field narrows, candidates like Rubio and Cruz (or even dark horses like John Kasich and Chris Christie) will absorb far more of the voters freed up when other candidates drop out.

That doesn’t mean Trump can’t win the GOP primary if the Republican field fails to winnow down. It does mean that, in order to win, he needs most of the 14 candidates still in the race to stay in the race without giving ground through most of the primary cycle. There’s a better chance of that than in most primary elections, but it would still be fairly unprecedented.

Why should all these metrics matter? If Trump is hammering out a maximum of 28% of Republican voters, and Republican voters make up 25% of all voters, that means Trump is polling a whopping…drum roll, please…7% of likely voters. Ooh.

We all wonder why polls are so inaccurate. They really aren’t, if you know which ones to pay attention to and how to read them. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox have no interest in presenting them accurately, giving context, or teaching people how they work. They spit out statistics, no matter how misrepresented, so that others will repeat them ad nauseum. In recent years, there are fewer and fewer independent pollsters. Most now have a patron, and that patron is always in the form of a news network, a newspaper, a think tank, or a PAC (political action committee). The shape of the kinds of polls we take has changed according to what these patrons need to drive their story lines. That’s how we end up with months of coverage about future presidents Herman Cain, Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Santorum.

These organizations have an interest in creating the most exciting story lines, the ones that’ll make you click on their sites, change to their channels, or share an interview that goes off the rails on YouTube.

Yes, we should continue protesting the ugly things Trump says. What he says encourages and endorses hate crimes, racial violence, and sexual violence. We need to speak out against it, but not just in regards to Trump. What much of the Republican field says encourages these same things.

But we shouldn’t freak out, and we shouldn’t buy into much of the information being sold us about the shape of this election. We should educate ourselves about polls. If you post a news story about a poll, have you clicked on that poll and actually looked at the questions being asked? Do you know if a poll’s questions are worded in a leading manner? Do you know how the poll was taken – online, automated phone, live phone. Was it of all adults who responded, registered voters, or likely voters? Was a particular demographic relied upon to supply answers? Is the sample size even realistically viable? Chances are, you don’t know any of those things when you post a poll, so why are we posting them as if they’re facts?

We’re so quick to post articles about how Americans are getting less education, about how we’re understanding less and less by generation, about how facts are becoming more malleable than they once were, about how specific groups of people are being less represented in our history books. Polls and the story lines created off them are all this in a nutshell, but we post them as if they are fact. We need to stop thinking that we are immune to understanding less and relying on fact less. We have our blind spots, and we succumb to them just as much as a Trump voter might.

We are no better, and we are no worse, but we can’t keep posting these kinds of things without understanding them, and then pretending they’re real representations of how this country thinks. That doesn’t just feed into the networks’ narratives, it feeds into the narratives of people like Trump. It feeds into the narratives that give him more air time, that lets him cause more damage, and that feeds his campaign.

If there’s one success in Trump’s campaign, it’s that he’s the only candidate who understands this. This is the metagame Trump plays, and this is how we feed it. By pretending he’s a front-runner, he becomes more viable in the minds of voters as a front-runner. By pretending the things he has to say, good or bad, are worth listening to, the things he says become more interesting in the minds of voters. By pretending that he’s a serious politician, he becomes a serious politician. The emperor has no clothes, but we are all so convinced he does that we share it as fact, as something impending, as a main attraction instead of a side show.

Without understanding the nature of the stories we post, all we do is drive Trump’s most advantageous narrative – that he is a serious candidate. We’ve done it enough that we’ve made it true, and by doing so, we’ve aided his campaign.

We can oppose the things he says without being afraid of him, without treating him seriously. I’ve written a good amount on polls and how we read them. People always ask, “Why does it matter, they’re just polls?”

Because we share them as fact and treat their realities as fact without bothering to understand them. That makes their realities our own. That means our political reality is now one that helps Trump, even when we oppose him.

Their Desperate Arsenal: Beasts with No Leashes

by Vanessa Tottle

The gall of them:

The gall of some little bitch with a bowl cut, son of some proud lineage of death in South Carolina.

The gall of a Chicago cop who treated his trigger finger like that of a Ferguson cop or a Cleveland cop.

The gall of a man in a movie theater with a gun and the anger to use it.

The gall of Roseburg, Oregon. The gall of San Bernardino, California. The gall of Houston, Texas. This is the 355th mass shooting this year.

The gall of a man who once lived in a town called Black Mountain, like a beast from mythology. We best not return him there, in the fog of a cabin lonely in the woods where police will hear a man has hit his wife and shot at dogs and do nothing because that is the purpose of living in the fog of a cabin lonely in the woods.

Dear Colorado Springs,

Here’s my body, dictate it.

“No more baby parts,” he said.

We fight a war of remembrance, the names too many. Across the nation, victims will be remembered for their relation to others, for cruel fates, for last moments spent wanting to be a child again hiding under covers.

I want to hide under the covers. I don’t want to be saddled with memory now.

“No more baby parts,” he said, like a Fiorina or a Cruz. Like a Rubio or a Trump.

We tell the shooters this: I swear to God I will forget you. I swear to God I will forget you. I swear to God I will forget you.

Yet I can’t. We strive to keep terrorists out, but their sponsors hold debates on CNN and say that women bleed too much to ask questions on national TV, that a woman’s body is given too much freedom, that we must be kept, or dangerous if escaped, or shot if dangerous, or forgotten if shot, or meaningless if forgotten, so why spend so much time on women at all?

They are beasts with no leashes, they are footsteps coming closer in the hall outside with the lights off. Hiding under the covers won’t prolong what comes next. I know.

Which is more dangerous, the gun or the camera? The gun points one at a time. The camera points 45 million men with guns in the U.S. alone.

He once lived in a town called Black Mountain, like a beast from mythology, and beasts beget beasts, and to return these beasts to myth is to make them myth, is to beget beasts, is to hide under covers at night with the lights off and footsteps coming closer in the hall.

We are not crafted of hiding under covers. We are not crafted of anticipating our own pain. We are not crafted of covering this over with Star Wars and Christmastime and ‘It will get better: because.’

We are made of voices, all. Support what they hate. Support feminism with a fury. Support freedom of religion for Muslims and Christians and everyone else. Accept and offer asylum for refugees, whether victimized by ISIS across oceans or a man with a fist who lives in your own town. Ban guns and fucking mean it. Get the KKK out of our police departments. Haul everyone you know to vote.

We can ignore them endlessly, we can hide under covers endlessly until the day it’s not our problem anymore, and the young look up and see us hiding under covers and think it must be a good example to follow. Or we can make them obsolete. And we can make them obsolete.

“No more baby parts,” the gunman said. Just body parts.

To him, that is all we are.

We are crafted out of so much more than that.

 

For more:

“Their Desperate Arsenal: Isla Vista and the War at Hand”

“Silent All These Years – American Terror Story”

“If Only She’d Had a Gun”