Participation and Stories

I was reading up on the remarkable life of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade when I found myself in a November 26, 2019 Vulture interview with Margaret Atwood. Here is Atwood on the topic of "gender traitors," participation and stories (my bold):

MOLLY YOUNG: Many women have an emotional response of revulsion, a kind of “gender traitor” response. Is that a naïve reaction to someone like Ivanka Trump or Kellyanne Conway?

MARGARET ATWOOD: What is naïve? Going back in time, looking around at Hitler’s entourage, there were a lot of women in it. Of people who participate, there are usually three motives. The first is they’re a true believer; No. 2, opportunists — this is the only game in town; therefore, we’re going to play this game because that’s the only hope of advancement. And the third is fear: “If I don’t do this, I will be punished in some way. I will be excluded, I will be killed, I will be jailed, I will be disappeared.”

In really thorough going totalitarianism, fear is a big factor. In the America of today, it’s a factor but not as large a one. I don’t think we’re poisoning people with radioactive tea, but you would lose your job, be unable to get another one. You’d be blacklisted. That has certainly happened in this country. Those things are not to be discounted or sneered at, because they motivate a lot of people. And you don’t know what you would do until those are the choices offered to you. So are they wrong to be disapproving? No. Are they consigning these people to the category of nonhuman? That would be a mistake. Because this is human behavior. Usually it’s a bell curve, like everything else. Somebody who became an instrument of the totalitarian regime, had that opportunity not been offered, would probably have been an insurance salesman or running a vegetable store or something like that.

There’s four kinds of stories: extraordinary people in extraordinary times, extraordinary people in ordinary times, ordinary people in ordinary times, and ordinary people in extraordinary times. And if you wanted peace for life, you should vote for ordinary people in ordinary times. Handmaid’s Tale is ordinary people in extraordinary times. The book is. The television series is turning that ordinary person into an extraordinary person. And that too has happened. For instance, history of the French Resistance. There were two of those instances. One was called the Alliance. The Alliance was run by a woman who never got caught. It’s a pretty cliffhanging story. A number of her friends did, and they were killed. They almost got this woman, but, due to her size, she wiggled out through the bars of a window, ran away, and hid out.

Passe-partout

A sunny day last week when I visited the People's Co-op Bookstore. I didn't notice the window until I was inside. "What happened?" I asked, and was told someone broke it. But that's all they knew.

Violence against bookstores feels different compared to violence against other stores. Different because bookstores house ideas, beliefs, attitudes, opinions. But shoe stores and plumbing stores do that too, no? During Kristallnacht, it was any store owned and operated by Jews. The politics of the PCB centres those with left-of-centre ideas, beliefs, attitudes, opinions...

If it was anger that broke the window, what lay behind that anger? A libertarian capitalist broke the window because they don't like anarcho-socialism? An anarcho-socialist broke the window because the bookstore wasn't anarcho-socialist enough? Maybe it was more personal than that? Just what is it that people do to each other that makes them want to break things?

You Were Always On My Mind

Sun's so low now. When it's out, that is. Which reminds me: garage needs cleaning.

Altamont Free Concert

This Friday marks the 50th anniversary of the Altamont Free Concert, held at the Altamont Speedway 50 miles east of San Francisco. The concert featured performances by Santana, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and "surprise" guests the Rolling Stones, whose organization took over the concert from its initiators and host, the Grateful Dead, who ended up not playing in protest after a drunken motorcycle club started pushing people around during the Airplane's set. There's more to the story, some of which can be found in Free Concert (2011) -- a transcription of everything said from the stage during the Stones set (as captured by the Maysles' Brothers and Charlotte Zwiren in their film Gimme Shelter, 1970).

It is worth noting that the only time peace was observed during the musical performances came during the Flying Burrito Brother's set. Here is a recently unearthed tape of what the Burritos had to say:

Summer Friends

The morning of November 27th was cold enough to finish off garden stalwarts the fuschia, the lobelia, the geranium and (pictured above) the begonia.

Room With a View (1908)

Forster's end-stage Victorian "social comedy" (middle-class Brits holidaying in Italy) asks if the English heart is "cold" or simply "undeveloped."

"The luxury of self-exposure kept [Lucy] almost happy through the long evening. She thought not so much of what had happened as of how she should describe it. All her sensations, her spasm of courage, her moments of unreasonable joy, her mysterious discontent, should be carefully laid before her cousin [Charlotte].  And together in divine confidence they would disentangle and interpret them all.

'At last,' thought [Lucy], 'I shall understand myself. I shan't again be troubled by things that come out of nothing, and mean I don't know what.'"
                                                                                    -- E.M. Forster

Image: Grand Canal, Venice, 1908, Claude Monet

The Little Things

I am taking greater pleasure in the little things, like taking off my shoes before entering someone's home. A gesture of respect, a way to keep the dirt out, but also the exercise I get from it. Another is my morning multi: not just the pill and its alleged goodness, but the glass of water I take to get it down. We are told that we never drink as much water as we should be drinking, though most of us know we are mostly made of it.

photo: William Anders, Apollo 8 (12/24/1968)