I was handed this book on my college campus for free... somehow I didn't see the glaring red flag. This was truly one of the most unpleasant reads of my life, and might even take the prize for the worst book I have ever read.
REVIEW // L'una e l'altra (How to be Both) by Ali Smith, translation by Federica Aceto
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I want to begin by explaining some of the aspects of this book that took me by surprise at first:
1. It is divided into two parts, each telling a different story. The first focuses on George (full name Georgia), while the second imagines a crossdressing woman artist in Renaissance Ferrara. I believe you can read these two stories in any order, or skip one or the other entirely.
2. There are no quotation marks (at least in the Italian translation-I havenât gotten my hands on the original English one yet!), which made reading the abundant dialogue a bit confusing at first.
3. This was recommended to me as a mix of mystery, historical fiction, and contemporary fiction. I donât quite agree with any of these. It is more of a theoretical exploration of the creation and questioning of identity. I suppose you could argue that there is an element of mystery in the stories, but I donât think the plot, including these mystery-like sections, are the purpose of the book. They kind of take a backseat to the questions that arise throughout the novel.
image: Santa Lucia (1472-3) by Francesco del Cossa, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
3/5: I want to begin by explaining some of the aspects of this book that took me by surprise at first: 1. It is divided into two parts, eac
In Lâuna e lâaltra (or How to be Both), Smith asks a myriad of questions which make the audience painfully aware of their presuppositions and biases. Time, gender, and biases are stripped bare and reimagined, reassembled by the author to allow the readers to imagine possibilities beyond those we often restrict ourselves to.
I was on board with this critical view, and I was excited to read a book that broke free of the restraints of traditional novel structures. I had a few issues, however, and however subjective they may be they definitely took away from my enjoyment of this novel. In my opinion, Smith asked so many unrelenting and largely unanswered (or answerable) questions, jumping from one to the other and back from one sentence to the next, that she lost the value and depth of many of the discussions that could have ensued. The theme of the book seemed to be question the binary order of the world that we have created and constrained ourselves to, but she rarely allows herself to rest in the middle ground. To me, this lead to a read that rapidly deteriorated from exciting and fresh to confusing and gimmicky. The mixing of past and present, the lack of quotation marks, the train-of-thought style narration, the questioning of nearly everything the protagonists encounter, and the lack of chapters, among other things, seemed to make the book scream âlook at me! Iâm different!â
Part 1: George
Georgeâs story begins by immediately making us aware of the superposition of timelines that will be occurring throughout this half of the novel. Verb tenses mix and match in every other sentence to the point of making us dizzy as we try to keep up with the whirlwind of Georgiaâs train of thought. On the one hand, this is a fascinating look at the effects that depression and grief can have on a teenager who has just lost their mother. In Georgeâs untethered narration, her mother is simultaneously a memory and sitting in the car right next to her. These overlapping timelines make for an interesting (if at times confusing) read, but I feel that, with the presence of other unorthodox structural and grammatical choices, made it quite difficult for the reader to keep up with the story.
One of the themes in this first section that I found was not taken advantage of nearly enough was the questioning of gender. Georgeâs mother at one point explicitly asks her (as, in the Italian translation, is also highlighted on the back cover), where differentiating between male and female matters. This, paired with Georgeâs preference for a gender-neutral nickname, lead me to continuously question whether Ali Smith was writing this protagonist to be non-binary. I think this would have a been a really interesting trait and further developed the âgray spaceâ effects that Smith pushed throughout the duration of the novel. However, (again, this may be a trait of the Italian translation), all of the synopses, promotional material, and the pronouns used in the book itself marked George as explicitly feminine. Iâm really curious to see what other people thought of this character and if the questioning of gender stood out to any other readers.
Lastly, I was let down by this section as I largely found it be very boring. Iâve seen some refer to it as having an air of mystery, which I definitely do not agree with, and the only time I found myself truly enraptured was when George was learning of her motherâs sort of affair. I also donât agree with the other reviews Iâve seen which heavily criticize George as a protagonist, as I thought that the look into the mind of a teenager who is racked with grief and, in many ways, unable to move on from her life when her mother was still alive, was valuable and interesting, while not exactly my preferred genre.
Part 2: Francesco del Cossa
This section of the book is immediately more compelling. Francesco is definitely a more interesting narrator and the story itself drew me in much faster than Georgeâs. I still had some of the same issues with the first, which is that the grammar and structure choices made the story
harder to read and felt gimmicky after a point. I did greatly appreciate the deeper look taken at the gender of the narrator. While âFrancescoâ is a woman pretending to me a man in order to pursue a career as an artist, the narrator often refers to themselves using masculine pronouns, even when they are merely remembering on a past experience (rather than speaking to someone else and therefore masking their identity). They also confuse George (from the first part of the book) as a boy when they first encounter them, which again made me wish that Georgeâs story had been more vague or questioning in terms of Georgeâs gender. One of my favorite parts of this section was the ambiguity regarding Georgeâs gender and sexual identity.
I have a few conflicting feelings regarding this novel, although I found it to be overwhelmingly well-written, with beautiful prose and next-level world building. Iâve said it before and Iâll say it again: give me a map and a timeline and I will love your book. I decided to divide my review into what I loved, what rubbed me the wrong way, and what I remained on the fence about.
(Iâve noticed I spent quite a bit of space detailed my dislikes, so I want to emphasize that I really enjoyed this book and that I this is one of the most well-written novels I have read this year.)
Loved âĄ
Scroll through the reviews and you will see that this book has received plenty of praise, and rightfully so. Iâm a sucker for world-building, but I think even those who usually skim the lore and history lessons in novels will appreciate the efforts the authors went to in order to create the world around the protagonists. By the time I finished I found that I had learned more from one book than I had from reading some other full series. They are able to fit so much without relying on info dumps, allowing the book to truly come to life.
Secondly, I appreciated that the world was casually LGBTQ+ friendly. It has always bothered me when authors go to the trouble of creating a fantasy world just to make it⌠homophobic. There are a variety of LGBTQ+ characters, and while the authors ensure that their sexuality or gender identity is canon, they avoid using these same characteristics as plot points.
Also, look at the cover art.
image: official cover art
4/5: I have a few conflicting feelings regarding this novel, although I found it to be overwhelmingly well-written, with beautiful prose and
Some spoilers ahead-be wary of SPOILER warnings!
Disliked :(
Iâm not a massive fan of using multiple POVâs, and one of the main reasons I am apprehensive of them is that authors sometimes fail to balance the time the readers spend with each protagonist. This happens to an extreme degree in Mask of Mirrors. We spend 90% of the time seeing the story through Renâs perspective, 5% through Grey, and 5% through Vargo. And yes, these are obviously just estimates, and YES, we also get a couple passages from other characters, but the point stands! I wish we had spent more time developing Greyâs storyline, as both his and Vargoâs character arcs felt rushed and underdeveloped. [SPOILER] After finishing the book, I see why it was useful to show both their POVâs less often in order to leave the ending a surprise for the reader, but I think it would have been much more emotionally impactful if we had been able to follow their stories and get to know them better through more POVâs. [SPOILER END] I wish the authors had either eliminated their passages altogether or inserted more from their perspective-in their current state, they make the book feel unbalanced.
Finally, I think Ren benefits a bit too much from plot armor. I donât dislike her per se, but I did get annoyed from time to time when everything conveniently went her way. Especially at the beginning, so many puzzle pieces consistently come together for the sake of her storyline, and this just took me out of the story. It is only about halfway through the book that we see her begin to face actual consequences, although I would argue that she gets away with a LOT near the end of the book as well. This apparent invulnerability and extraordinarily good luck made her a bit hard to relate to and like, at least for me. At one point she also gets so angry with a couple other characters for lying abut who one of them was⌠but like⌠isnât that her entire plot line⌠that sheâs pretending to be someone else? It was just too difficult in that moment to sympathize with her anger when she was able to get off without any repercussions after her own con. When people did discover that she was lying about her identity, they forgave her almost immediately. [SPOILER] Leato and Giuna both seem to be angry and hurt, but almost immediately Leato gets over it and then is in no position to make charges against her (going back to the convenient chain of events for Renâs con to work) and Giuna never really does anything about it. If anything, she also seems to get over really quickly, and it is never truly a problem for Ren that Giuna found out. If anything, Giuna ends up helping her even more than she did before she learned of her true identity. [SPOILER END] The stakes were set so high for this con but we never really saw any lasting consequences. There was no reason for me to be anxious about Renâs fate because it never felt like she was in any real danger.
[SPOILER?] My last issue, but the one that made me the most upset: why does the two-faced villain always have to be the bisexual character? One of the authors very kindly answered my question on Goodreads when I brought up this issue, (here is the link to that conversation) and while I can see why they made this decision, in the current climate of the abundance of this "betrayer" arc for bisexual character I simply didn't enjoy it. Again, this is a personal issue and since one of the authors is bi herself I am certainly not trying to call them out or anything like that. :) [SPOILER END]
Unsure?
I would tell anyone thinking of picking this book up to prepare for a steep learning curve. You are thrown into a world with different terms and lore, and since the POV characters are already familiar with them (none of the âremote village boy who is ignorant of the ways of the worldâ here) it can be very confusing to keep up with the avalanche of names and politics and history. It speaks to the deep world-building which I appreciate, but, at the same time, it was definitely difficult to get through the first half of the book. I donât see this as a negative because, again, with world-building this intricate, it is necessary for the reader to put some effort into learning the background, and I think the authors did as good a job handling this conundrum as they could.
Lastly, I have a very personal issue that I do not count against the book-I love Giuna, and I really wish we had gotten more time with her to explore her character. She feels very reactive in this novel, only there to serve as plot fodder or build up other characterâs arcs and personalities, but I can sense that she could be so much more. I hope to see more of her in future books!
REVIEW // Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle, #1) by Jay Kristoff
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So Iâm very late to the party, but I just finished reading Nevernight by Jay Kristoff I had such high hopes for this series based off of what people recommending it had told me and what I read about it before picking up. Dark fantasy? Check. Strong leading lady? Iâm here for it. Gays? Itâs literally my only personality trait. Sign me up. Unfortunately, this book fell flat in all those categories. It reminded me a lot of Sarah J. Maasâs Throne of Glass, which made me take one point off of to begin with simply for making me think of Maasâs writing. Overall, I just found the book to be too predictable, with bad writing, exposition, and pacing, and too many parts that just made me ~uncomfortable~.
In case you are not familiar with this novel, Nevernight tells the story of Mia Corvere, a girl who lost her family when she was a child after her father was convicted of treason. When the book begins, she is 16 years old and embarking on a journey to join the Red Church, a school for assassins, so that she may one day be able to avenge her fatherâs death. Along the way she meets a bunch of forgettable characters whose names I canât be bothered to remember and is taught by the most fearsome killers in the Republic. Here she gains many valuable skills, like how to survive being poisoned, how to fight, and how to get big boobs.
+ Side note: by chapter 3 three I started picturing Mia as the crow guy from RWBY and I could not shake that for the rest of the book
I had many issues with this novel that I will try to summarize in some sort of coherent fashion, but to be honest this book sucked the will to live out of me so I donât know how much energy I can put into this review.
image: official cover art by Jason Chan
1/5: So Iâm very late to the party, but I just finished reading Nevernight by Jay Kristoff I had such high hopes for this series based off o
FOOTNOTES
The footnotes were probably the most jarring element of the book for me, and, unfortunately, thereâs a lot of them. Their function seems to be twofold:
(1) they are the form of most of the world-building, explaining several customs, the history of the institutions and peoples Mia meets, and the mythology followed by the people of the Republic.
(2) they allow for the narrator of our story to interrupt with comical one-liners or cryptic foreshadowing
In my humble opinion, both of these are unnecessary and stupid. The interruptions come off as crass and immature and make the other more textbook, boring exposition come off as a joke, especially when it is dealing with sensitive or serious topics. There is one that explains this brothel called the Seven Flavors, which the footnote explains refer to âBoy, Girl, Man, Woman, Pig, Horse, and, if sufficient notice and coin was given, Corpse.â Now, on its own, this passing mention of pedophilia, bestiality, and necrophilia could very well contribute to the world building and tone of the novel, but when placed side by side with the childish, joking tone of the âcue the violiiiiiiiinsâ or, regarding the acoustics of a room, ââŚthey were, as it happens, exceptional. Falalalalalalaaaaaaaaâ, come off as way too light-hearted for the topic at hand. Maybe Iâm being way too sensitive, but Iâm pretty tired of authors using serious topics as off-hand remarks as a lazy way to make their world daker and grittier. Plus, these footnotes were just so incredibly cringy that I would recoil from second-hand embarrassment every time. They resemble the things I wrote when I was 14 and trying (and miserably failing) to be funny. Also⌠there are way too many of them. While at first I appreciated the attempt to deepen the lore of the story (Iâm a sucker for world-building), after a while it became evident that the author was just forcing information down our throats without taking the time to actually weave the lore and background into the story itself. It came off as a very lazy way to force exposition.
OVERLY FLOWERY LANGUAGE
This story is BRIMMING with similes and metaphors, like every other sentence is some overly complicated way to describe something that could have been presented in three words. When you include so many metaphors/similes/etc., they begin to lose power. They should allow the reader to extrapolate more meaning and emotion from a sentence, but if the book is bursting at the seams with them, they become increasingly ordinary, to the point of losing all of their luster. One prime example appears on page 30:
âIt was a bucktoothed little shithole, and no mistake. Not the most miserable building in all creation. [here there is a footnote about some other inn/brothel] But if the inn were a man and you stumbled into him in a bar, youâd be forgiven for assuming he hadâafter agreeing enthusiastically to his wifeâs request to bring another woman into their marriage bedâdiscovered his bride making up a pallet for him in the guest room.â
So first of all what the fuck is that supposed to mean? That whole paragraph is a fever dream. Letâs begin with âbucktoothed little shitholeâ. Bucktoothed? Really? What does that mean. Please, someone explain to be right now what a bucktoothed building is. Is it uneven? Is it awkward? Is it half-finished? Is one side longer than the other? Did they do a bad paint job that only covers on side? Are the windows askew? Is the door too big for its frame? We already know from the paragraph above that it is âdisheveledâ as well, so why the need for another weird phrasing of its appearance? We then move on to that whole JOURNEY of a sentence, where the inn is compared to a man being cuckolded. That is the most insane tale-can you imagine running into someone in a bar and that story being the VERY FIRST thing that runs through your mind??? I know Iâm focusing way too much on this stupid paragraph, but basically what I am trying to get at is that even though we spend half a page talking about how bucktoothed and disheveled and cuckolded this building is, we get
no actual physical description of it. Imagine if Kristoff had just written that it was a run-down, ill-kept building that looked as worse for wear as its owner did. Done, one sentence. Great. Letâs move on. Instead, we spend so long reading these absolutely batshit descriptions that ultimately tell us next to nothing. Flowery language is placed over actual context. You may think that a description this long and complex means that this inn is a significant or recurring setting in the novel. Nope. Itâs not. Mia leaves and thatâs that. The reason that Iâm focusing so much on this objectively irrelevant paragraph is because it is so representative of the biggest issue I have with the writing in this book. There are so many unnecessary comparisons that function only to make the author feel clever rather than add anything to the story at all. Itâs very Ă la 2010s Tumblr.
THE (IN MY OPINION, BAD) WRITING
For the first half of the book, we are constantly being TOLD things rather than being SHOWN things. With the exception of one of the teachers cutting off Miaâs arm, we rarely see the ruthlessness that the assassins are so feared for, but we hear about it in nearly every other sentence Where are the consequences? I think this book would have been way more enjoyable if there were actually consequences to the charactersâ actions. The inclusion of the weaver and the weird vampire guy completely remove any tension regarding the fate of the central cast. When Mia had her arm chopped off, I was shocked, and pleasantly surprised. How was she going to overcome this unexpected obstacle in her training? Then a couple pages later, its reattached with absolutely no lasting consequences. All of the initial tension and shock value of the loss of Miaâs arm is entirely removed because of the two incest-y siblings. Their entire purpose for existing is just to undo all damage to the main characters. Then suddenly, out of the blue, Mia is willing to take on a ton of consequences and completely throw away her chance at becoming initiated in order to avenge her family just to save Tric from receiving like one punishment??? Like why?? As an aside, the only moment I truly enjoyed was when Ash fucking stabbed Tric to death. I assume that when the readerâs favorite moment is one of the central charactersâ death, it does not bode well for their reception of the book.
THE THEMES
TW: rape-y subjects
The author seemed a little too keen to include rape and sexual assault in his story. Mia withdrew her consent in the sex scene in the very first chapter, and even if you read it as consensual (which I do not), it is described as incredibly unpleasant on her end. Tric is the result of a rape, which is brought up several times throughout the story. Further, Mia is constantly facing harassment from men. I understand that this is frames the idea that the world she lives in is misogynistic and ruthless, but there are other ways to push that idea through other than constantly putting in her in those situations. As in, this didnât need to be the ONLY way we explored this subject. Beyond the uncomfortable propensity for sexual assault, I also very much disliked the sexualization of the 16-year-old main character. Oh. My. Gosh. Mia is CONSTANTLY sexualized. Every single damn character makes comments about her body, how hot she is, how much sex she potentially has. It is so weird and uncomfortable. I feel the need to reiterate that she is SIXTEEN. There is, however, a focus placed on the power Mia can gain from seducing her targets. Girl power? Not to me, really. The issue I have with this is the idea that a woman has to be overtly sexual in order to be considered powerful. This is something that we can see in many female assassins and supposedly powerful female characters in fiction (like Black Widow) especially those written by men. Now, there is nothing wrong with using oneâs sexuality as a weapon, and Iâm certainly not saying that a strong female character cannot be sexual, but the idea that a sixteen-year-old girl is shown having her body painfully modified to
be more desirable, and in a graphic sex scene with another character, in order to for the reader to read her as liberated and powerful does not sit well with me. I donât really feel like this aspect of her training should be relevant to the overall story. I wish the time that Kristoff had dedicated to hammering into our heads that Mia is a femme fatale to developing her Darkin powers instead. The way she is written now feels more like she is a faux strong female character written for a male audience.
Secondly, Mia is fully written as âthe plain-girl-who-is-actually-prettyâ. This whole trope bothers me IMMENSELY. YA is full of girls who are described as plain, forgettable, or ugly while their physical descriptions are just the dictionary definition of conventionally attractive. It seems like a way to market off of girlsâ self-consciousness while still being able to market the main character as a hot heroine in official art. And there is, of course, the issue of Miaâs boob job Readwithcindy (just âwithcindyâ now!) did a whole video about this so I wonât get into it much just to repeat what she already said, but I agree that the idea of a 30-something year old man including this completely unnecessary detail regarding the sexualization of teenage girl, who we have ALREADY seen in a rape and being sexualized by other men in the story, made me really, really, uncomfortable. I highly recommend you go watch her video, as she touches on this in way more detail. [ Cindy's video ]
RATING
Worldbuilding: 2/5
A lot of thought obviously went into the world-the mythology, society, and politics are well-thought out. But the way they are introduced is annoying and bland. It seems like the author put a lot of effort into constructing this world but realized a lot of it would be left out of the book, so he crammed it into footnotes instead.
Tone and writing style: 1/5 for first half, 3/5 for second half
The tone of the first half is all over the place, like it doesnât know if it should be dark and gritty or comical and immature. Footnotes and character dialogue ranges from lighthearted and crass to seeped with themes of torture and sexual assault. It is jarring, to say the least, and often feels like the author doesnât take these ideas of rape or violence seriously. There are so many instances where the scene is tense or gritty, and Kristoff is actually writing it pretty well, Iâm enthralled and on the edge of my seat, and then Mia or some other character (or the footnotes) throw in some stupid comment or make the same âMia is such an asshole lolâ joke for the billionth time and completely ruin the mood of that scene. The second half of the book moved much faster and was helped with way better writing, but it really did not do enough to make up for the horrendous structure of the first half of the book.
Pacing and structure: 1/5
The first half of the book really drags on. Once we arrive at the school, there are constant jumps in timeline, marked with periods when a thousand things happen all at once and the plot moves forward at a dizzying rate, and others when the characters just seem to be going about their daily lessons.
Concept: 3/5
I found the overall idea of the books to be very interesting, even though it is certainly not the most original or unique concept for a YA fantasy book. The issue is that the potential is squandered with a poor execution.
Characters: 1/5
I truly did not care about any of the characters. The token mean girl, the bumbling nice-guy-who-is-definitely-the-love-interest. too many of the characters just sat nicely within their tropes, doing nothing much to pique my interests. I think my favorite overall was Mister Kindly.
let's talk about the recent book twitter drama around Lauren Hough and her response to Goodreads reviewers!
What are your thoughts on this issue? Should reviewers leave one star ratings even if they haven't read the book? How does this differ or relate to "cancelled" books like The Black Witch or Blood Heir?
Hmmm. I mean, just because the army as an institution is flawed and damaging doesnât mean everyone in it is a terrible person. To paint every single veteran with the same brush is reductive and to make light of the debilitating mental disorders many have just seems wrong. Like yes, fuck the military as an institution completely 100%, but blaming disabled ex-front-line infantry maybe isnât the best direction for our anger, perhaps.
A lot of veterans are poor people who were intentionally targeted by scouting programs coming to their schools starting at age 13, and most of them are worse off coming back than they were to start with⌠letâs be courteous to folks with PTSD
I thought people on this godforsaken website at least understood this one basic principal, but apparently not, so let me make it crystal clear:Â
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO BE SELECTIVELY PROGRESSIVEÂ
You can hate Ann Coulter. But if you suggest that she deserves to be raped, you are a misogynist.
You can hate Woody Allen. But if you say heâs part of a Jewish conspiracy or joke about putting him in an oven, you are an antisemite.
You can hate Michael Vick. But you call for him to be lynched or call him the N-word, you are an anti-black racist.Â
You can hate Caitlyn Jenner. But if you misgender her, or make comments about her genitalia, you are a transphobe.Â
And you can hate the military. But if you deliberately try to trigger veterans with PTSD, you are an ableist piece of shit.Â
You do no get to pick and choose which people to treat fairly when it comes to acknowledging and combatting prejudice.Â
Not liking a person is not a free pass to disregard anti-prejudicial words and actions. Either you respect marginalized peoples as a whole (even if you donât like an individual), or you donât respect them at all. There is no middle ground.Â
If anyone really like, agrees with harassing veterans with PTSD or anything similar, unfollow me right the fuck now. I donât want you following me.
You donât have to like the military, itâs massively fucked up but y'all needs understand that most people in the military are victims of propaganda and are usually poor or part of a minority who are taken advantage of in order to join.
They offered the ASVAB at my HIGH SCHOOL. They CAME INTO MY SCHOOL and said âIf you guys take the military aptitude test, you get free donuts and you miss the first half of the day.â They brought in hot dogs.
They brought food to a place where half of us were in poverty if not more, and they said, all you have to do is take a little test and youâll get a snack, you donât have to come in to school on time (an extra full hour of sleep that morning!). So we did. By the hundreds.
My younger brother, a year behind me in school, scored âthe highest weâve ever seen in the whole damn state, son,â and for the next. Three. Fucking. Years. They harassed him. He got phone calls from every goddamn branch of the military. People would show up at our house at random, trying to recruit him. Theyâd tell him horror stories about how much better it is to enlist than be drafted (as if thereâd been a draft in our lifetime!). They called our Mom at work. They sent recruiters to talk to our stepfather, whoâd been in the Army, to try to get a handle on my brotherâs weak points.
THREE FUCKING YEARS OF THIS.
My brother is the second child of six. My brother was thirteen by the time he had his own pillow for the first time. My brother was hungry all the time, dizzy from hunger some daysâand oh, sidenote, my mother, stepfather and father are all abusive assholes whoâd as soon hit you as look at you.
Guess what year my brother graduated?
If you guessed âMay, 2002,â or âalmost immediately after 9/11,â ding ding ding ding!
The ONLY REASON my brother didnât join the military, in the end, is that his girlfriend at the time said âIf you enlist, I will never speak to you again.â Her dad was a military man, and he was also an abusive shithead, so in her head the two were inextricable. But if sheâd said âgo for it?â Or if she hadnât said anything at all?
Something like half of the males in my fucking graduating class enlisted.
It was better than starving.
And a great number of those are dead now.
I hate the US military industry. Iâm disgusted by the things our military does. But by god I donât blame our veterans for what was done to them.
Rich people donât enlist.
The ones who join the military are the ones who are hopeful that for once theyâll know that theyâre getting a meal, not just today but tomorrow too.
Itâs also changed dramatically from what it used to mean, to be military. My dadâs generation, even mine (as middle Gen X), and enlisting was a doorway to the middle class. You do your four years, or six, and you come home, get a VA loan for a decent house in the suburbs. Maybe go to college on the GI Bill. Youâre walking back into civilian life with a solid skill set in some hireable area. And you go from being the middle child of a carpenter and a night nurse in backwater GA, to someone with a college degree, a good house, and a decent life. Or you go from being the fourth of six children from mountain Tennessee to a good house with a family and a job managing a bank.Â
My point is that for a long time â outside of the draft-years of Vietnam â the reason we didnât need a draft was in great part because people wanted to enlist, because the long-term benefits outweighed the short-term sacrifice. But when you have a conflict like Vietnam, or the Iraq War, where the sacrifice is questionable and the benefits to survivors are pretty much nil, then yeah. Youâre reduced to this kind of harassment shit, and you lower your standards so people with drug convictions or criminal records or lower scores on the entrance tests can all get in, are pressured to get in, because anyone with any other means to access that middle-class lifestyle are going to take that alternate route.Â
The sacrifice-to-benefit ratio has been decimated by the Republicans for the past twenty years, and then they want to go to war and canât seem to figure out why a) enlistment is at an all-time low, and b) they have to harass, trick, even bribe young people into enlisting.
When I say this is not the military I grew up with, thatâs probably not entirely correct. For the most part, the military is probably not changed a huge amount. But what has changed radically is that the life you could have, opportunities the government offered you in exchange for your service â what you get now is the barest scrapings of the opportunities given to my uncle, my father, and my maternal grandfather that let them move from rural lower class to suburban middle class.
I am lukewarm on the military itself; Iâve seen good and bad in my life. Iâm absolutely disgusted by the military industry and the beltway bandits who get rich off the backs of their wars in places we canât even pronounce. But I am most disgusted by the politicians who wave flags, talk about patriotism, and then refuse to fund even the barest of benefits for those who serve.Â
Remember this guys? âSupport our troops, bring them homeâ
Support doesnât stop once theyâre discharged. These are mostly young kids coming from lower class backgrounds who now have mental and/or physical problems. They didnât go in for the glory, they were preyed on by recruiters because they didnât think they had any other options. We need to make sure that they have the help and support to properly transition back to civilian life.
The amount of our homeless population that are veterans is just shameful. And purposefully triggering someone who has literally been to war, thatâs even more shameful.
Tumblr: talking about a fictional character I donât like is a trigger, men saying hello to me is a trigger, other peopleâs religious symbols are a trigger
Also Tumblr: shoot fireworks off by veterans with PTSD to really stick it to the Bush administration
Italian anime openings are probably the most underrated key aspect of Italian culture. Even people who study Italian language and culture at university donât know anything about Italian anime openings. How do I explain to foreigners that very few things bring Italians together: food, the World Cup and Italian anime openings.
This probably needs a better explanation: Italy is the Western country with the highest distribution of Japanese anime series, which have shaped the childhood of Italians since the 1970s. Italian anime openings are unique because theyâre actually original songs purposefully composed for each anime that ever aired on television, and they used to be sung by the same two singers every single time. Sometimes they do concerts where they sing Italian anime openings, and you can find plenty of grown ass people who still remember the lyrics after all this time.
Letâs please not ignore the fact that Cristina DâAvena recently released two albums with her anime openings sung with some of the major and hottest Italian singers and bands?
2087
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