Reading Wednesday
Oct. 26th, 2022 07:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyJust finished: The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. Damn, this was good. Dark as hell, spooky, gory, and atmospheric.
Structurally, the plot is a slasher story: Four young Blackfeet men massacre a herd of elk on the last day of hunting season and get caught. One of the elk is pregnant. They're scarred by it but go off and live their lives, some on the rez, some off of it, and ten years later, the elk returns to life, tracks them down, and brutally murders them. Within the slasher structure is a brilliant metaphor for generational trauma and cultural breakages caused by colonialism.
It's absolutely gripping. TW for not just gory human death but really graphic and horrible animal death.
Currently reading: Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson. This is one of the best portraits of conspiratorial thinking and the deep rifts in American political culture that I've read. It's absolutely heartwrenching and also like a trainwreck, in that it invites you to try to understand why so many seemingly ordinary people believe such a horrible lie, and the way that this lie infects absolutely everything about politics. The way the same people who are so concerned about theoretical harm to children that they now picket schools and libraries for fear that kids might see a drag queen or learn that trans people are humans but refuse to acknowledge the real, almost unimaginable harm that was done to real children by a lunatic with an AR-15. It also just fills me with so much admiration for the Sandy Hook parents and their sheer determination in the face of a well-funded campaign of lies. It makes Alex Jones' eventual comeuppance so much more cathartic too.
It hits home for me too because I was involved in the anti-war movement when America was invading Iraq and Afghanistan, and it was absolutely riddled with conspiracy theorists. I would argue that these people did tangible harm and weren't on our side and allowed in, they would hijack the cause. I was eventually vindicated on that too, but ultimately conspiracism runs so deep in Western European culture (I suppose other cultures too, but I know the most about this one) that short of the kinds of things that Lenny Pozner et. al. have been doing, I'm not sure what the answer is.
Structurally, the plot is a slasher story: Four young Blackfeet men massacre a herd of elk on the last day of hunting season and get caught. One of the elk is pregnant. They're scarred by it but go off and live their lives, some on the rez, some off of it, and ten years later, the elk returns to life, tracks them down, and brutally murders them. Within the slasher structure is a brilliant metaphor for generational trauma and cultural breakages caused by colonialism.
It's absolutely gripping. TW for not just gory human death but really graphic and horrible animal death.
Currently reading: Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson. This is one of the best portraits of conspiratorial thinking and the deep rifts in American political culture that I've read. It's absolutely heartwrenching and also like a trainwreck, in that it invites you to try to understand why so many seemingly ordinary people believe such a horrible lie, and the way that this lie infects absolutely everything about politics. The way the same people who are so concerned about theoretical harm to children that they now picket schools and libraries for fear that kids might see a drag queen or learn that trans people are humans but refuse to acknowledge the real, almost unimaginable harm that was done to real children by a lunatic with an AR-15. It also just fills me with so much admiration for the Sandy Hook parents and their sheer determination in the face of a well-funded campaign of lies. It makes Alex Jones' eventual comeuppance so much more cathartic too.
It hits home for me too because I was involved in the anti-war movement when America was invading Iraq and Afghanistan, and it was absolutely riddled with conspiracy theorists. I would argue that these people did tangible harm and weren't on our side and allowed in, they would hijack the cause. I was eventually vindicated on that too, but ultimately conspiracism runs so deep in Western European culture (I suppose other cultures too, but I know the most about this one) that short of the kinds of things that Lenny Pozner et. al. have been doing, I'm not sure what the answer is.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-26 01:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-26 09:42 pm (UTC)I've often had the impression that conspiracy theories spring out of having a little knowledge, or critical thinking faculties that bend in the wrong direction. Like you know the world is fucked, there's enough evidence of real things that are called conspiracies (try explaining MK-ULTRA to someone and see how crazy you sound), but you don't have the wisdom and judgment to know when something is legitimately true or not. And schools, institutionally, are not set up to teach wisdom and judgment. Or, these days, to tell a kid that actually they're wrong about the thing they believe.
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Date: 2022-10-26 07:16 pm (UTC)Re: *
Date: 2022-10-26 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-26 09:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-26 09:44 pm (UTC)