seeing all the 14-17 y/o queer kids who donât know what v for vendetta isâŚ. u mean the blockbuster film written by two trans women about a masked vigilante who decides to singlehandedly take down a fascist alternate version of england set in the distant year of 2020⌠and his driving force was getting justice for a lesbian who he never met but whose diary he found, who was separated from her wife before being killed by said fascist govâŚ. and it stars natalie portmanâŚ. okay
frankly I prefer the movie over the comic, for three reasons:
1) lewis prothero as a rush limbaugh/glenn beck/bill oâreilly type is both more applicable and way funnier than a 1940s radio propagandistÂ
2) it has stephen fry as gordon detriech, and makes him explicitly gay and pretending to be attracted to evey as part of being closeted than actually attracted to evey and having sex with her while she hides in his home.
3) the movie came out in 2005; that is, only four years after 9/11, while the Iraq war was still in full swing, and while xenophobia and Islamophobia were not just acceptable, but tacitly encouraged by the administration at the time. which makes the following exchange even more poignant and sweet:
Evey: [seeing a book in a glass display case] What is that?
Gordon:Â Itâs a copy of the Qurâan, 14th century.
Evey:Â [shocked] Are you a Muslim?
Gordon:Â No, Iâm in television.
Evey:Â But why would you keep it?
Gordon:Â I donât have to be a Muslim to find the images beautiful or its poetry moving.
just⌠the easy acceptance of it. the idea that a religion that he doesnât believe in and that has been explicitly outlawed in-universe is a source of beauty. Iâm not Muslim, either, but that particular moment really stuck with me emotionally.
ââŚI remember how different became dangerous. I still donât understand it, why they hate us so much. They took Ruth while she was out buying food. Iâve never cried so hard in my life. It wasnât long till they came for me.
It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years, I had roses, and apologize to no one.
I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An Inch, it is small and it is fragile, but it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.
I hope that whoever you are, you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you. I love you. With all my heart, I love you. -Valerieâ
There are people â some in my own Party â who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, heâll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. Iâll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say â almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most â public praise on the Sunday news shows â in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work â just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I wonât be fooled twice.
Iâve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times Iâve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.
As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.
The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population â so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.
The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis â contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.
As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case â but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 â a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.
I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately â and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Hereâs what Iâve learned â the root that tears apart your houseâs foundation begins as a seed â a seed of distrust and hate and blame.
The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didnât arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.
Iâm watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac â and suggests â without facts or findings â that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks â arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too âfemaleâ and ânonwhite.â The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who donât look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.
I just have one question: What comes next? After weâve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities â once weâve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends â After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face â what comes next.
All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we donât want to repeat history â then for Godâs sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.
I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincolnâs Bible: âI do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.
My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We donât have kings in America â and I donât intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions â but in deference to my obligations.
If you think Iâm overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:
It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All Iâm saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.
Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 â just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the ârally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.â It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.
Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the âtragic spirit of despairâ overcome us when our country needs us the most.
Sources:
⢠NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text
If you think Iâm overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:
It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All Iâm saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.
Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 â just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the ârally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.â It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.
Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the âtragic spirit of despairâ overcome us when our country needs us the most.
Please read this manâs description of his dachshund and its most annoying habit
âI have a ridiculous dog named Walnut. He is as domesticated as a beast can be: a purebred longhaired miniature dachshund with fur so thick it feels rich and creamy, like pudding. His tail is a huge spreading golden fan, a clutch of sunbeams. He looks less like a dog than like a tropical fish. People see him and gasp. Sometimes I tell Walnut right out loud that he is my precious little teddy bear pudding cup sweet boy snuggle-stinker.
In my daily life, Walnut is omnipresent. He shadows me all over the house. When I sit, he gallops up into my lap. When I go to bed, he stretches out his long warm body against my body or he tucks himself under my chin like a soft violin. Walnut is so relentlessly present that sometimes, paradoxically, he disappears. If I am stressed or tired, I can go a whole day without noticing him. I will pet him idly; I will yell at him absent-mindedly for barking at the mailman; I will nuzzle him with my foot. But I will not really see him. He will ask for my attention, but I will have no attention to give. Humans are notorious for this: for our ability to become blind to our surroundings â even a fluffy little jewel of a mammal like Walnut.
âŚ
When I come home from a trip, Walnut gets very excited. He prances and hops and barks and sniffs me at the door. And the consciousnesses of all the wild creatures Iâve seen â the puffins, rhinos, manatees, ferrets, the weird hairy wet horses â come to life for me inside of my domestic dog. He is, suddenly, one of these unfamiliar animals. I can pet him with my full attention, with a full union of our two attentions. He is new to me and I am new to him. We are new again together.
Even when he is horrible. The most annoying thing Walnut does, even worse than barking at the mailman, is the ritual of his âevening drink.â Every night, when I am settled in bed, when I am on the brink of sleep, Walnut will suddenly get very thirsty. If I go to bed at 10:30, Walnut will get thirsty at 11. If I go to bed at midnight, heâll wake me up at 1. Iâve found that the only way I cannot be mad about this is to treat this ritual as its own special kind of voyage â to try to experience it as if for the first time. If I am open to it, my upstairs hallway contains an astonishing amount of life.
The evening drink goes something like this: First, Walnut will stand on the edge of the bed, in a muscular, stout little stance, and he will wave his big ridiculous fan tail in my face, creating enough of a breeze that I canât ignore it. I will roll over and try to go back to sleep, but he wonât let me: Heâll stamp his hairy front paws and wag harder, then add expressive noises from his snout â half-whine, half-breath, hardly audible except to me. And so I give up. I sit up and pivot and plant my feet on the floor â I am hardly even awake yet â and I make a little basket of my arms, like a running back preparing to take a handoff, and Walnut pops his body right into that pocket, entrusting the long length of his vulnerable spine (a hazard of the dachshund breed) to the stretch of my right arm, and then he hangs his furry front legs over my left. From this point on we function as a unit, a fusion of man and dog. As I lift my weight from the bed Walnut does a little hop, just to help me with gravity, and we set off down the narrow hall. We are Odysseus on the wine-dark sea. (Walnut is Odysseus; I am the ship.)
All of evolution, all of the births and deaths since caveman times, since wolf times, that produced my ancestors and his â all the firelight and sneak attacks and tenderly offered scraps of meat, the cages and houses, the secret stretchy coils of German DNA â it has all come, finally, to this: a fully grown exhausted human man, a tiny panting goofy harmless dog, walking down the hall together. Even in the dark, Walnut will tilt his snout up at me, throw me a deep happy look from his big black eyes â I can feel this happening even when I canât see it â and he will snuffle the air until I say nice words to him (OK you fuzzy stinker, letâs go get your evening drink), and then, always, I will lower my face and he will lick my nose, and his breath is so bad, his fetid snout-wind, it smells like a scoop of the primordial soup. It is not good in any way. And yet I love it.
Walnut and I move down the hall together, step by bipedal step, one two three four, tired man and thirsty friend, and together we pass the wildlife of the hallway â a moth, a spider on the ceiling, both of which my children will yell at me later to move outside, and of course each of these creatures could be its own voyage, its own portal to millions of years of history, but we canât stop to study them now; we are passing my sonâs room. We can hear him murmuring words to his friends in a voice that sounds disturbingly like my own voice, deep sound waves rumbling over deep mammalian cords â and now we are passing my daughterâs room, my sweet nearly grown-up girl, who was so tiny when we brought Walnut home, as a golden puppy, but now she is moving off to college. In her room she has a hamster she calls Acorn, another consciousness, another portal to millions of years, to ancient ancestors in China, nighttime scampering over deserts.
But we move on. Behind us, in the hallway, comes a sudden galumphing. It is yet another animal: our other dog, Pistachio, he is getting up to see whatâs happening; he was sleeping, too, but now he is following us. Pistachio is the opposite of Walnut, a huge mutt we adopted from a shelter, a gangly scraggly garbage muppet, his body welded together out of old mops and sandpaper, with legs like stilts and an enormous block head and a tail so long that when he whips it in joy, constantly, he beats himself in the face. Pistachio unfolds himself from his sleepy curl, stands, trots, huffs and stares after us with big human eyes. Walnut ignores him, because with every step he is sniffing the dark air ahead of us, like a car probing a night road with headlights, and he knows we are approaching his water dish now, he knows I am about to bend my body in half to set his four paws simultaneously down on the floor, he knows that he will slap the cool water with his tongue for 15 seconds before I pick him up again and we journey back down the hall. And I find myself wondering, although of course it doesnât matter, if Walnut was even thirsty, or if we are just playing out a mutual script. Or maybe, and who could blame him, he just felt like taking a trip.â
There is an animal-size hole at the center of modern life. Some of us will search the world to fill it.
[âLove or any deep connection with another person, however brief, does more than just satisfy us in the present. It ripples back in time, repairing, restoring, and renovating an inadequate past. Sincere love also sets off a forward-moving ripple and a resultant shift inside us. We get to the point where we can think: âNow I donât have to need quite so much. Now I donât have to blame my parents quite so much. Now I can receive love without craving more and more. I can have and be enough.â The person whose journey has progressed to that point is ready to love someone intimately.â]
david richo, from how to be an adult in relationships: the five keys to mindful loving, 2002
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