The Rules of the Game - Danse Macabre

A spooky interlude set to Camille Saint-Saëns's 1874 death-themed tone poem.  From Jean Renoir's 1939 classic, La règle du jeu.

Non-sequitur Bonus:  To evoke that after party feeling, you can't beat Confidence Man's 3 AM LA LA LA 

An Engagement with Reality

(Adapted from my side of a dialog with a Green of my acquaintance concerning the above video*)

A recent Minority Report segment touched on a few things I’ve been thinking about and that otherwise hit me as particularly salient re what voting does.  For instance, Sam Seder and I are 100% on the same page about why (given our ridiculously intentionally undemocratic political system) Democrats winning is always a better outcome than Republicans winning: because it relieves the otherwise relentless rightward pressure on the discourse. Bill Clinton didn’t suck only because he was a Democrat.  He sucked because he followed 12 years of Republicanism and preceded another 8 years of it.  (And that was all that was needed to get us in the fucking state we’re in.)  This fact as Sam laid out very well is ignored or misrepresented by Greens and other anti-Democrat voters on the left.  Democrat victories don’t absolve the left from activism but they make activism more liable to accomplish some of its goals.  It’s just a fact.

Beyond that, I thought Emma Vigeland was completely on point about what the task of voting is about.  To wit: “Engage with the fucking reality.”  I’ll be honest, that’s it in a nutshell.  One of two parties is going to win.  One is a major ass disappointment that is not what anyone wants.  The other is an evil anti-majority force that is exactly what the tiniest worst minority wants.  One is ineffectual and obtuse.  The other is laser focused on getting exactly what they want.  That is the choice.  That is the fucking reality we have to engage with.  You are free to vote Green to register your disapproval of the choices.  Either way, on January 20,  American foreign policy continues, but with one of the possible outcomes you didn’t have anything to do with, it continues with a misguided (corrupt even) idealism and ideology, and with the other it proceeds with a plan.  Notice I’m not saying this is good.  But one is better because it can be influenced; the other is hopeless. For those who are letting themselves off the hook for not voting for Kamala Harris because of Joe Biden's accomplice-role in Israel's genocide in Gaza, while I can't fault you for your instinct to punish,† as a way of explaining my own thinking on it, I would like to know how a vote for Jill Stein brings an end to Israel’s genocide if Trump wins. To Stein voting vote shamers of those voting for Kamala Harris, if you can’t answer that, then how will I ever be convinced not to care about the outcome of the election?  You may tell yourself that a vote for Stein is a vote against Genocide, but what good is a vote against genocide if you are convinced that you can't win regardless of the outcome?  Is it worth it if abortion rights are removed across the country, tax breaks for billionaires cut deeper into benefits for the rest of us, the Supreme Court becomes irreparably antagonistic to the non-millionaire majority for decades more to come?

Tell me this Green-voting lapsed Democrats: When you voted for Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Obama were you saying “go ahead, evil neoliberal sham democracy, here's my consent.”?   Were you ever in your life voting FOR the status quo, even when you vote-shamed me for voting for Nader in 2000?  I can tell you what I was thinking when I voted for Clinton—the first time it was “Die George Bush!!” I had registered as an independent by Clinton's second term because of my disillusionment with his first, but I still voted for his re-election as a way of saying “Fuck off Dole, you fuckin’ creep!”  True for Obama I, I was hopeful for change. (and eager to put a knife between John McCain’s ribs).   My point which is getting lost is, voting to me is not about consent.  It’s about engaging with the fucking reality that Democrats winning is better for the people than Republicans winning.  Always.   Sometimes just marginally, always never enough but it’s Always better.  I’ve never in my lifetime known a case when that wasn’t true.  Even in 2000, I voted for Nader but on election night when the outcome was in doubt and for the month after I rooted for Gore.  Because the reality was never going to be Nader brings down the duopoly.  I’m sure I thought I was sending a message to Democrats, but as Sam Seder often says, before the election the Greens are all about their votes sending a message to Democrats (never to Republicans for some weird reason), but when Democrats lose, no Green (least of all the Green candidate) says, “See?  We are why the Dems lost!  Blame us and learn our lesson!  This is the outcome we helped make happen!” Do you take credit for Trump’s victory in 2016?  (Because if you do, shame on you!)  Did Democrats learn a damn thing from the 2016 2% Green vote in Wisconsin?  No they did not veer left in 2020-- when Bernie Sanders won a few too many primaries in a row, they got their shit together and crammed the chronic pathologically unilateral bipartisan down our throats. But it was still better than the alternative. Again, voting is not about my feelings about democracy, it’s about the least harmful one winning.

You anti-Dem leftists who are still voting Green may think you're voting for democracy, but democracy is not on the ballot.  The truth is if you want to change electoral politics, the odds are pretty good you’re not going to be able to do it within electoral politics.  It’s not impossible but would require a groundswell – e.g., if Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic primary in 2016 or 2020 or Marianne Williamson had won in 2024.  The time for expressing yourself with your vote is the primary.  If you’re not “engaging with the fucking reality” on election day, it may feel good but you’re too late.

My bottom line on this is I don’t care necessarily how or whether people vote if they just keep it to themselves  (Personally, if you don’t want to engage with the reality, non-voting seems a bit purer of an expression to me). But if they are not advocating for the least harmful of the two possible outcomes, they better not be shaming those of us who are actually trying to actively mitigate the outcome.

A post-script about my 2000 Nader vote—I don’t know how I would have voted if I had lived in a swing state.  Probably for Gore, but not necessarily.  I was disgusted with the democratic party.  I honestly thought if Gore lost, so there.  I thought George W was a fuckup who would be a dopey one-term president.  I was obviously not looking at the big picture.  I was not looking at who would be in his cabinet and who he’d nominate to the Supreme Court.  I think we know what Emma Vigeland would say about that.

Truthfully, I don’t care who you vote for—it might be personally meaningful to you to vote Green, and that I think you’d agree is maybe a more immediate effect for you, maybe the sum total of what it does, a good in and of itself for you irrespective of what it means for anyone else, but it’s a different effect from what votes are traditionally supposed to do in an election.  That’s fine.  Here's a proposition, you don't have to apologize for your feel-good vote if  I don’t have to apologize for my nose-holding one.  

~~~~~

*The Green is the one who brought it up.  I was merely responding to his reaction to it.

† There is a precedent.  Anti-war voters punished Lyndon Johnson's Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968 for Vietnam by withholding their votes for him-- and for their protest they got Nixon and Henry Kissinger and escalation instead.

The Mourning Cloak

The Wikipedia Entry for the mourning cloak butterfly (also known as the Camberwell Beauty, the White Petticoat and the Grand Surprise) reads in places like a David Lynch script.

• L. Hugh Newman likened the butterfly's pattern to a girl who, disliking having to be in mourning, defiantly let a few inches of a bright dress show below her mourning dress.
• The larvae and pupae ... respond to disturbances by twitching simultaneously.
• Newly hatched mourning cloak caterpillars can display selfish behavior, such as siblicide, by eating non-hatched eggs.
• Defense mechanisms include loud clicks when the mourning cloak flies away from a predator.
• Mourning cloaks also play dead by closing their wings tightly together and tucking their legs up against their body for protection and holding completely still.
• Mourning cloaks ... join together with other butterflies in a perch and fly menacingly towards their attackers—most often birds or other butterflies.

A widespread species, they tend to be seen in cooler more mountainous climes across Eurasia and North America, but they can be found as far south and outside their range as northern South America and Japan.  Newman, referenced above, observed that sightings of the butterfly in the UK were "concentrated around London, Hull and Harwich" all of which, being ports receiving regular shipments of timber from Scandinavia, led him to theorize that they had "hibernated in stacks of timber which was then shipped to England, and had not traveled naturally."  Newman "raised thousands for release at his 'farm' in Bexley, but none were seen the following spring. Specimens stored in his refrigerator for the winter, however, survived."

They are among the most long-lived species of butterfly.  Adults begin to emerge from their cocoons in late spring, upon which they aestivate -- the summer counterpart to hibernation-- remaining in a low energy and activity state known as torpor to weather the hottest months.  In fall, some migrate, but most remain in place.  Some pollinate, but most feed on tree sap and fallen fruit, or the "honeydew" exuded from aphids.  To weather the winter months, individuals will find a notch in a tree or rocky cliff face or nestle on the ground under bark.  Their ability to survive winter in adult form makes them among the first butterflies to appear in spring.  

Mating season begins in early April.  A non-dimorphous species, males compete for widely dispersed females over a broad range by displays of maleness characterized by domination of a desirable territory, a location "that females would want to visit," such as "sunny perches near ravines, wood margins, parks, gardens, lakes, ponds, around stream edges, or canyons in which males can perch and defend for multiple days." In this way, they attract females to themselves.  Females deposit eggs in 3 or more broods in colorful "ring clusters" on the twigs of plants, typically willows or poplars, likely to grow leaves in abundances that will nourish the hatchlings when they emerge as caterpillars. 

According to Wikipedia:

In several European countries with Germanic languages, other than Britain, the name for this butterfly literally translates to "mourning cloak", such as German "Trauermantel", Dutch "rouwmantel", Swedish "sorgmantel", Finnish "suruvaippa" and Norwegian "sørgekåpe". This suggests it is a name which came with Scandinavian or German rather than with British settlers, for whom this species would be considerably less familiar. Other common names include: Czech "Černopláštník" . "Babočka osiková". Polish "Rusałka żałobnik". Russian "Траурница" . Japanese "キベリタテハ" . Chinese "黄縁立羽". 

Having mated and laid eggs in spring and survived the year, the adults then die. 

Memoriana

Graphics above and below are from The Human Toll: Indirect Deaths from War in Gaza and the West Bank, October 7, 2023 Forward - Prepared by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins for the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, October 7, 2024

For many of us, something has changed in ourselves as a direct result of Israel's conduct of its ongoing "response" to Hamas's surprise breach of the Iron Dome October 7, 2023.  In the aftermath of the attack in which 1200 Israelis were killed and hundreds were taken hostage, as tens of thousands of civilian Palestinian bodies piled up within the open-air prison of Gaza throughout the month; as hospitals, schools, homes and apartment buildings crumbled under the force of 2000 lb bombs leaving 90% of Gazans unhoused within a span of weeks and the onslaught continued with unquestioning, ghoulishly apologetical American support and no end to the carnage in sight,  our world crumbled too.  

I remember back in October feeling very strongly that Israel had broken something it would come to wish it had not broken and that broken thing was the compact that we in the west have had (in so many unwritten words) to grant Israel the exceptional license to take reparations in perpetuity for Hitler's holocaust against Europe's Jews in whatever form it deemed necessary in how it conducted its affairs.  We agreed to grant Israel the right to arbitrate the equivalence of anti-zionism or opposition to Israel with anti-semitism.  We agreed to let Israel run roughshod over propriety and precision in how it characterized its enemies, in its right to perpetual victim status regardless of its culpability -- to grant its special pleading the power to erase its cruelty.  We agreed to look the other way as it constructed a separate and unequal life for the Palestinians it walled away, their access to food, water and supplies as tightly controlled as their freedom of movement within the homeland that Israel now occupied-- we agreed not to call it apartheid.  But it did not take the over 100,000 Gazans, the nearly 700 Palestinians in the West Bank and the growing number of killed civilians in Lebanon and Syria that Israel has slaughtered in the past 12 months , to say nothing of the hundreds of civilian Israelis similarly needlessly killed a year ago as mere collateral damage in their country's wars of choice to put the lie to the tales we let ourselves be told about Israeli virtue.  October voided that.  

As a result of Israel's self-exposure, I no longer believe that Israel's project would be rationalizable but for the unfortunate prevalence of odious conservative elements in its government, but rather that its birth out of European racism, anti-semitism and colonialism-- and especially in light of its conduct in the world to secure its dubious future ever since--should doom it.  The current ethno-state should be succeeded by a single state of egalitarian democratic rule for the current citizens of Israel who wish to remain and for the Palestinians that Israel has displaced.  I no longer accede to the proposition that the right of Israel to exist outweighs the rights of Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist in whatever peace they can forge together as equal citizens in that land, from the river to the sea.