will byers stan first human second
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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Origami Around
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if i look back, i am lost
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Jules of Nature
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trying on a metaphor
taylor price
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noise dept.
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macklin celebrini has autism
#extradirty
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@amuzatempo
Artist Daniel Rarela creates “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” memes to stop people from whitewashing MLK
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My single favorite King quote: “Nothing is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and heartfelt stupidity.”
Christian Boomer comics at Christmas: mean-spirited, a downer, whiny, “yelled about red Starbucks cups” energy
Jewish Boomer comics at Christmas: DELIGHTFUL
Note: this does NOT mean “be mean to the bellringer on the street asking for Salvation Army donations.”
This is the wrong season to be talking about it, but literally no adaptation of Christmas Carol will ever top this one stage adaptation I saw in 2018, and it’s 100% because of the first scene of the play
Almost every Christmas Carol starts with the same scene: Christmas Eve, the day before Scrooge is visited by the three ghosts. This is the same scene that the rest of the audience - including myself - is expecting to see
The house lights go out. The stage is dark
A boy is singing: “God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay…”
The sound of wind whistles through the dark of the theater.
“Remember Christ our savior was born on Christmas day, to save us all from Satan’s power…”
The boy pauses. The wind picks up. Somewhere in the audience, a child sounds upset
“…When we had gone astray. Oh tidings…”
The boy’s voice fades away. The wind howls
A church bell rings
The stage lights come on. Fog is floating across the stage. A deacon, two gentlemen, and Scrooge stand in the fog like islands in a sea
Between them is a coffin
The wind howls. It makes the word, “Ebenezer,” in a voice that shakes the floor
The deacon says: “Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God to take unto himself the soul of our departed Jacob Marley…”
“Ebenezer,” says the wind
Scrooge whips around at the sound. Fog coils around his feet
Nobody else on stage hears his name
“…We therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth-”
“Earth,” says the wind
“-ashes to ashes-”
“Ashes,” says the wind
“-and dust to dust”
“Dust” says the wind
“In the certain hope of eternal life through our Lord Christ; who shall change-”
“Change” says the wind
“-our vile body-”
“Change” says the wind
“-that it may be like unto His glorious body-”
“Change” says the wind
A church bell rings. Children are crying in the audience
One by one, the parishioners exit the stage. Scrooge is left alone with the coffin
He says a few words - laughs at his mishearing voices on the wind - and turns to leave
A church bell rings
Scrooge pauses - and turns to look at the coffin
Lights flash. The coffin lid slams open, and the ghost of Jacob Marley, horrible, pale, and screeching, leaps out of the coffin, hands reaching out to Scrooge and howling -
“SAVE YOURSELF!”
Lights flash and the stage goes dark. Children are screaming. Parents are screaming. I’m screaming
The rest of the production was gorgeous, but I still maintain that the first scene was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen attached to any adaptation of Christmas Carol
(Please don’t repost or edit my work. Reblogs are always appreciated. Support my work here: https://www.patreon.com/joshualuna)
CW: Anti-Asian racism, war
When I was a teen, I worked as a summer hire filing Vietnam War records. I couldn’t articulate it then, but as a Filipino America, working there deeply affected me.
Imagery of the Vietnam War is so one-sided that many have been desensitized to the trauma and suffering of Vietnamese people—even Asian Americans ourselves. By that age I had already long been taught to identify as an un-hypenated American, and to root for Rambo and other violent white saviors. So that’s why, when an older white co-worker—who was a Vietnam War vet—suggested my Asian presence was triggering to him, I internalized it by learning to walk on egg shells around him and make myself smaller. It didn’t matter that I was Filipino. To him, I was just another g**k.
The US now recognizes the suffering of the 58k soldiers who died and vets who returned with ailments and PTSD—so common that the term “Nam flashback” is ubiquitous—but that empathy hasn’t extended towards the innocent Southeast Asian lives that were also affected, both during the war and after.
The US dropped more bombs on Vietnam than it did in all of WW2, but didn’t stop there—it also dropped 2 million+ tons of ordnance on Laos for 9 straight years (making Laos the most bombed country per capita in history) and 2.7 million in Cambodia as part of its “Secret War.” Two-thirds of Vietnam’s 3 million+ deaths were civilians. If that wasn’t enough, they’re still dying today. Since the war ended, nearly 40k have died from unexploded bombs and landmines left behind, and 67K more have been blinded or maimed—together that’s double the number of US war deaths.
While PTSD is a serious issue, “Nam flashback” suggests that the pain of war for American vets lives in the mind and that the physical threat is buried in the past. But for Vietnamese, Lao, and Khmer victims of America’s relentless bombing, the threat remains buried in the ground they live on. International law requires the US to clean up unexploded ordnance in Southeast Asia, but the US is skirting responsibility. As a result, cleanup is estimated to take hundreds of years at the current rate. (It’s worth noting the US war in Afghanistan is creating similar conditions as we speak.) Similarly, the US largely ignores the 20-30k Amerasians fathered and abandoned by US soldiers in Vietnam—legacies of US sexual plunder—and the enduring impact of Agent Orange, which is so destructive it altered the DNA of Vietnamese survivors and gave their children debilitating deformities.
It’s not hard to understand why Filipinx have an affinity for our SEA neighbors—we also experienced war and genocide at the hands of the US in 1899, which is sometimes called “The First Vietnam” because it set a precedent for US intervention/exploitation in the Southeast Asian region. But on a personal level, I saw the inherited legacies of war in Southeast Asian refugees—whose Asian American kids were my high school classmates. Their existence was all but criminalized, pushing them towards teen pregnancies and gangs, and putting them on the school to prison to deportation pipeline.
So in discussing the Vietnam War, it’s not enough to talk about US vets. We must also recognize the PTSD and continued terror that Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians victims experience, and acknowledge America’s racist institutional animosity towards Southeast Asians (abroad and in the US) that persists today.
Note: All of the information and stats talked about here are from publicly available sources. Also, please be respectful to Vietnamese people and remember to call the war by its full name (“Vietnam War”) and not shorthand it as “Vietnam.”
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ERASE the idea that America saved lives by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan from your minds. ERASE the idea that it was anything more than a political move to scare Russia and also to satiate US curiosity as to the true ability of nuclear weapons. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not military bases. They were heavily populated civilian cities chosen precisely bc the U.S. wanted to see how many people an atomic bomb could kill in one go. Japan was on the verge of surrendering, the U.S. literally wanted to test out their nuclear weapons on people that they deemed disposable. That is it. If those bombs were dropped by any nation other than the US veryone involved would have been tried as war criminals.
Also erase the idea that America was the hero of WWII and got into the war because they wanted so save people. They couldn’t have cared less about the victims of the Holocaust, proven by the fact that they turned away so many shiploads of refugees that went on to die at the hands of Nazis.
“the us wanted to see how many people an atomic bomb could kill in one go” oh really? Source your bullshit, asshole
i left out sources bc i figured most tumblr users know how to use google but ok
- Report produced by the U.S Strategic Bombing Group (employed by Truman) to survey the air attacks on Japan concluded that:
“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” - page 52-56
- Dwight Eisenhower future president and then Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces also said:
“I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to [the then Secretary of War] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” - page 380
- Admiral William Leahy, one of the highest ranking officials in the US army during WW2 wrote of the usage of the bombs:
“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. […] My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.” - page 441
- General Douglas McArthur, another high ranking US official in the war:
“[When asked about his opinion on bombing Japan] He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” - page 70-71
- On September 9, 1945 Admiral William F. Halsey commander of the Third Fleet publicly quoted as saying:
“The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment… . It was a mistake to ever drop it… . [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it… . It killed a lot of Japs.” - online source
- The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, speaking to President Truman:
“I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon [the atomic bomb] would not have a fair background to show its strength.” - diary of Henry Stimson which can be found online here
- Even those deploying the bombs questioned the decision to drop them on civilian cities:
“I thought that if we were going to drop the atomic bomb, drop it on the outskirts–say in Tokyo Bay–so that the effects would not be as devastating to the city and the people. I made this suggestion over the phone between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and I was told to go ahead with our targets.” - online source
- Lewis Strauss Assistant to the Navy Secretary James Forrestal on the locations of the bombings:
“I remember suggesting […] a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our redwood… I anticipated that a bomb detonated at a suitable height above such a forest… would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. […] Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation.” - page 145
So to recap:
A lot of American generals were against using the bomb as they felt it served an empty purpose.
Those who agreed with its usage completely disagreed with dropping them on cities.
Truman went ahead and had them detonated in two highly populated civilian cities anyway. Two cities that had remained mostly untouched by regular bombings throughout the war precisely bc of their lack of value to the Japanese war effort.
Draw your own conclusions.
I hope y'all know that this is common knowledge to everyone of every other country
Never Forget the Reign of Terror waged against Muslims in the nearly two decades following 9/11.
Kent State University
“The Kent State shootings (also known as the May 4 massacre or the Kent State massacre)[3][4][5] were the shootings on May 4, 1970 of unarmed college students by members of the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio during a mass protest against the bombing of Cambodia by United States military forces. Twenty-eight guardsmen fired approximately 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.[6][7]”
“There was a significant national response to the shootings: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed throughout the United States due to a student strike of 4 million students,[10] and the event further affected public opinion, at an already socially contentious time, over the role of the United States in the Vietnam War.[11]”
Student strike of 4 million students! Let’s do that again lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
Don’t forget that basically half the country thought the students deserved it…
Another picture from Kent State.
But it was not just Kent State, eleven days later Mississippi Police fired 150 rounds into a dormitory at Jackson State College, killing 2 and wounding 15 black protesters.
Btw half of the students killed at Kent State weren’t even protesting, they were just there
What in the absolute fuck
When the Irish guy has known about this since he was like 8, but it’s suspiciously hard for Americans to learn about…
BIG DISCLAIMER: i was 9 when 9/11 happened, so this might be more about my own crystalizing tastes than anything else. i think it’s a pretty darn good theory tho and other people have validated it.
BIGGER DISCLAIMER: i am not saying that country music prior to 9/11 was free from nationalist, racist, misogynist undertones - i just think that these themes became more the norm!
MY HOT TAKE:
with very few exceptions, including goodbye earl, before he cheats, and daddy Iessons (side note - all women!) 9/11 ruined country music. around 2014 onward we’ve got margo price, sturgill simpson, jason isbell etc., who are making country music great again (wink), but those folks are mostly considered “alternative” country. the mainstream country music for well over a decade now is a glut of trash performative patriotic / working-class-but-not-really lab-crafted budweiser-sponsored nonsense that has managed to sound rebellious (or has convinced its fans that it sounds rebellious) without ever actually questioning any power structure. so much so that artists who ACTUALLY criticized the government were literally blacklisted for nearly a decade (the dixie chicks)
pre-9/11 country music, though not perfect or ideologically pure by any stretch, did not have the raging american flag painted truck boner that comes to mind for a lot of people who say “i like everything except rap and country”
SPECIFICALLY, toby keith’s “courtesy of the red, white, and blue (the angry american)” (2002) literally destroyed country music. it was a direct answer to the 9/11 attacks and war song in support of the invasion of afghanistan. the lyrics read like a disjointed feverish email chain letter forwarded from your great uncle sprinkled with glittering american flag gifs and heavily saturated pictures of bald eagles. the entire song is lifted from an estimated 248 peeling bumper stickers collected from rusted trucks on cinder blocks in overgrown yards, cut up and arranged to fit a catchy, formulaic tune that is almost certainly the background music playing in george w. bush’s head at all times.
“we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the american way and uncle sam put your name at the top of his list and the statue of liberty started shakin’ her fist and the eagle will fly, and it’s gonna be hell, when you hear mother freedom start a'ringin’ her bell”
country music and the new country musicians that toby keith paved the way for became so pro establishment and so unquestioningly nationalistic that, again, the dixie chicks who went against this grain were blacklisted by the industry and received death threats from country music fans. hell, there are folks who STILL froth at the mouth at the mere mention of the dixie chicks.
9/11 killed outlaw country - how can you sing the praises of law breakers when your main circuit consists of singing to troops? there are some great classic country songs critiquing the police state - especially from johnny cash and merle haggard - now country music artists hold fundraisers for FOPs. new country music is basically in-law country music.
you don’t have to write a pro-bush patriotic anthem to be part of this post-9/11 ruination. playing meaningless songs about living in the heart of (read: white) america, eschewing the city (read: not white), and cracking open a cold one with the boys for “authentic” country music is also important to the war effort.
there’s a progression of themes here:
post 9/11 top tier: war anthem, vocally patriotic, directly used as pro war propaganda; which paved the way for: “things used to be so much better” thinly veiled racist laments, good for campaign ads; which paved the way for meaningless party anthems - attempts to make things “like they used to be” and craft a reality that neither the artist nor listener likely ever experience.
that brings us to what most people think of today when they say they hate country music: the country party anthem - “tiny hot gal in tight jean shorts who can drink beer like the guys, she doesn’t like beyoncé Like Other Girls, oh she’s so into me and my truck, i’m gonna take her fishing after i finish sowing my corn - sung by a guy who’s never touched a tractor” - has overtaken the tragic, done me wrong, despairing country ballads of tammy wynette, george jones, and even up into pre-9/11 contemporaries like reba mcentire and george strait. you didn’t necessarily have to be country to relate to their pain. now you have to perform suburban redneckness to enjoy luke bryan.
when was the last time you heard a sad country song?
after 9/11, cowboys (whether or not they had ever been near a cow) weren’t allowed to be sad anymore (no more done me wrong country), and they certainly weren’t allowed to question authority (no more outlaw country). partying hardy became the most important American Thing and if you don’t sing about that, our Enemies Will Win.
so - understanding that country music has always had bad stuff, and that like any genre it suffers from commercialization, 9/11 DESTROYED COUNTRY MUSIC. and toby keith gleefully helped destroy it.
for some further evidence of the decline of country music, please listen to the dixie chicks’ “long time gone” which is an indictment of the industry (i believe it was written before 9/11 but my point still stands - the genre was on the decline and 9/11 was the major cultural event that hastened the decline).
maybe i am a curmudgeon - almost every generation of country music has had its own “country music is not what it used to be” anthem, but i really think something distinct happened with 9/11.
Can confirm. Alan Jackson and Toby Keith, the blacklisting of Dixie Chicks, literally the only singer I can think of that ever spoke out against anything from 2001-2010 was Johnny Cash. I’d also say that the uber-patriotic stance lead to the shiny, vapid County Boy® nonsense that lead to so many of the solo artists all sounding and looking the same.
Johnny cash wrote an entire album about the destruction of Indigenous lands and of Indigenous people, Kris Kristofferson has been an activist most of his career working closely with the UFM, Woody Guthrie was a social justice advocate and union activist, Dolly Parton has tackled explicitly feminist issues even in the 60s and has been an avid supporter of her lgbt fans, Willie Nelson made Farm Aid to try and help farmers in danger of losing their farms due to mortgages keep them and is also an avid supporter of LGBT rights as well as marijuana legalization, Lorettea Lynn wrote about birth control in the 70s and had her song banned, i could go on!
When in the correct hands, country music is a powerful medium, but post 9/11 it’s been handed off to apathetic white men who have turned it into the most useless genre of music out there.
I think about this post a lot for some reason.
the express ticket to h*ll they’re getting
I think so many of us were too young to understand this like truly too young to really grasp what he was saying but now I’m an adult adult and I can see it and people took it as a joke but this is absolutely serious
And they were just up there.......laughing...... they’re never gonna reach heavens gates
It took me a while to realize that this was a Democratic debate. The fact that Obama, Clinton, and Biden are all standing up there laughing while this man was talking about people dying in a lost war on foreign land, separated from their loved ones. They all just stood there and laughed, and look at what the Obama administration did. Look at the things that those three people allowed to happen. This is the type of stuff that the Biden administration will try to sweep under the rug, and we can not let that happen.
This was twelve years ago. I’m sure a lot of us were not only underage and unable to vote, but too young to understand the full scale consequences of what was being debated. If you want to hold the Biden administration accountable (and you should) then we can not let these kind of things go unpunished.
i could keep adding to this all day
