Reading Wednesday

 First books of 2021!

Just finished: The Truth About Stories, Thomas King. This is a print version of King's Massey Lecture series, so I'd listened to most of them already. They're very good;  traditional Indigenous storytelling and meta about storytelling, history, all woven together with anecdotes from King's own life. A bit gets lost in translation, as much as audio isn't my preferred format, these were meant to be spoken, not read, and King is a hell of a storyteller. 

Come Tumbling Down, Seanan McGuire. The latest book in the Wayward Children series, about a boarding school for children who go through portals into magical worlds and get spat back out again with a mess of psychological problems as a result. This one takes us back to the Moors, where Jack and Jill are still locked in their epic struggle. Jill has murdered Jack's mentor, Dr. Bleak, and swapped bodies with her—long story—and is planning to get turned into a vampire, throwing off the balance of power in the land of gothic horror. A desperate Jack, accompanied by her undead girlfriend, returns to the school. She enlists fellow students Sumi, Kade, Cora and Christopher to travel to the Moors with her and stop Jill before it's too late.

This was fun, but I think it suffered from too many characters. It didn't really advance the story of any of the other kids, and Cora and Christopher are the least interesting of the kids. I'd have liked to see more of Kade's struggle as he comes to grips with the fact that he's not going to get to be the Goblin Prince and he's eventually going to have to take over running the school. But still quite good. Jack is probably my favourite character in the series, so I'm always down for reading about her story.

Currently reading: The Audacity of His Enterprise: Louis Riel and the Métis Nation That Canada Never Was, 1840-1875, M. Max Hamon. I'm not in general that interested in biographies but 1) Louis Riel was fucking cool, obv., and 2) this promises to take a very specific look at the politics of the Red River Resistance and Northwest Resistance through the lens of Métis governance and kinship structures. Which is to say that I'm reading it less for the history and for the alternate history/post-colonial future potential, as it promises to not talk about Riel's madness and murder at all and focus on the political strategizing end of things. It's an epic tome though; probably gonna take me awhile.

Vanilla ISIS takes the Capitol

 I'm only reading text, not watching things, but...wow America. Holy shit. That's some photogenic battshittery going on.

In 2001, in 2016 when I was counterprotesting Nazis, I got told off for doing so because they're just fringe, tiny, no one pays attention to them, you just make them look sympathetic by drawing attention to them. I don't like to say I told you so, but this is what happens when you let the far-right get out of control.

As everyone else has pointed out, the DC police absolutely had the means of dealing with this, as we can see when it comes to BLM and any random Black person they decide to use as target practice. They decided to use kid gloves to deal with fascists, and so the fascists were able to get in. They didn't think the Trumpists would score an own goal, but guess what? 

Liberal democracies always think they have a better handle on fascism than they actually do. They  use it to repress the left, and think for some reason that it won't turn on them. America's been on the very thin edge of being a liberal democracy for quite some time, and Americans are typically poor students of history, but there's a certain amount of schadenfreude watching the scorpion sink frogs like Pence and McConnell into the mires of the swamp they crawled out of. Just hoping they don't kill anyone innocent along the way.

Anyway, I think this particular coup attempt will end up being overreach. Right-wing Americans of the more ordinary sort generally aren't fans of seeing cops get injured, and if the cops or the National Guard are genuinely threatened, they'll just shoot these dickweeds. But it's a bad sign of things to come.