Freckles & Doubt

When the first US election results started coming through on Wednesday and the trend became apparent, I shut down my browser and retreated into re-reading my Sookie Stackhouse collection, on the grounds that I felt sick and have absolutely no emotional bandwidth and I didn't want to know. This didn't stop me feeling sick all day, and today I am still nauseous and miserable and despairing. They fucking did it. Despite his whole being and actions demonstrating in eye-watering technicolour exactly what he is, they re-elected that sweaty, corrupt, senile, imbecile, rapist, fascist dickhead, and the next four years, at least, probably longer, are going to be unmitigated hell. Trump's first term and his entire election campaign are basically a giant cautionary tale screaming "Don't Create the Torment Nexus" in letters of fire, and what did they do? created it. Again. Deliberately. Fuckers.

Except. While I am grief-stricken and angry and despairing and alienated in exactly the same way I was in 2016, a central reality is now much clearer. I cannot, really, blame the American people for this. Quite apart from being perfectly aware that more than half of Americans are as aghast as I am, and voted against that excrescence very hard with both hands, two other important things are evident.

One: the vast majority of people who voted for him, or who chose not to vote as an ill-thought-out "protest", did so because they have been systematically lied to by a right-wing media and/or right-wing social media misinformation exploiting their poor media literacy and inability to think critically. Both of these are themselves the product of several decades of systematic and politically-motivated undermining of the American education system. The right wing has been all too quick to realise that they will never stay in power if everyone has valid information about the candidates, parties or policies, so a horrible majority of people voting do so based on their steady diet of misinformation, marketing spin, distraction, uglification and outright lies. Billionaire-owned media conglomerates drove the election juggernaut in whatever direction they pleased, and since "right-wing billionaire" is a redundancy, liberal values being fundamentally incompatible with making obscene money by whatever means necessary, that direction was firmly in the direction of "corrupt self-serving oligarchy". Which may also be a redundancy. The Harris campaign was, as far as I can see, brilliantly run, they did everything right, and Harris was a stunningly valid candidate; Trump flailed around doing everything wrong and visibly continuing to be the Torment Nexus, and it didn't matter, because the significant people-reaching chunk of the right-wing media reported whatever the hell they wanted to report. It was sickening, and screamingly frustrating, to watch it happen.

And two: this election was stolen. Even if no-one uncovers widespread ballot-tampering, which Jesus fuck I hope someone does, this was not a free or fair election. Quite apart from the manifest insanities of the electoral college system, the American electoral landscape in the last decade or two has been characterised by widespread voter suppression, gerrymandering, ballot station inequalities and other fuckwittery designed to suppress the vote of the kind of people most likely to vote left. The whole American electoral system is an edifice of corruption and bias, which the right wing has been warping to their own ends for longer than I care to think about. It's probably marginally more fair than an African dictatorship, but it's much less honest about it.

The worst thing about re-creating the torment nexus is that its giant, destructive tornado is self-sustaining. With Trump in office for another term, both of the above will get worse, making it increasingly unlikely that a left-leaning candidate will ever be elected again. There will never be a free and fair American election without electoral reform and, failing the systematic firing squad execution of significant tracts of billionaire, massive innovations in media truth-telling requirements. The second Trump term is going to do exactly the opposite at mach fuck speeds and with gleeful, vengeful spite. Hell, if Trump manages to enact half of his misbegotten plans for the country, African dictatorships nothing, the US will actually be a dictatorship in short order. A fascist one.

And while really American politics are not my business, really they are: the US affects all of us, its media and culture and politics have global impact even above its economic and military power. What Project 2025 means for human rights is terrifing; every person, queer or trans or non-white or female, who suffers as a result of this fuckwittery, affects me because it is vindictive, unnecessary pain applied to the commonality of being human. Possibly even more importantly, given we all need basic food and water and air before we can even apply human rights, we're at a tipping point in gobal warming trends, and the next few years could be vital for reducing emissions. The Trump administration is planning to, oh, I dunno, grab one of the vile list at random: shut down the agencies monitoring climate change so they'll shut up about it and allow big business to get on with raping the environment without disturbing their profits. A second Trump term could, quite literally, destroy the world, if they go about it with any efficiency - our only hope is (a) resistance from the rest of the country and the time it will take to dismantle the safeguards the Biden administration has put into place, and (b) the fact that ultimately the far right can't find their own noisome flabby self-centred butts with both hands.

I don't do anger: I'm bad at it, I default to self-blame way before I will ever direct rage at even a worthy object. With this election outcome I am surprised to find that I am despairing, but I am also fucking incandescent with rage. We should be better that this. We are, as a race, better than this. The re-invention of the torment nexus is being driven by a tiny, disproportionately overpowered group of self-interested self-satisfied sociopaths, and I have never in my life wished so fervently for the death of specific human beings. I hope they all die in a fire. If they have their way they might, as the world burns.

Whew, one of those half-year blogging hiatuses again, funny how they creep up on me. I think remote working, and the concomitant ability to not leave the house or speak to actual humans for days at a time, is actively reducing my general communication skills. Or, in other words, the pointer on the Isolate-O-Tron has dipped from "Hedgehoggy Hermit" to "Homicidally Misanthropic", a considerable drop from its pre-COVID standard levels of "Awkward at Parties/Disinclined To Leave the House". I always did have to arm-wrestle myself, best of two falls out of three, to force my own attendance at any given social gathering. Now I've apparently kiboshed the wrestle at the outset by stealing my own elbows. Metaphorically speaking. Physically they are still more or less attached. I mean, I can still type, so have no real excuse.

All of the above, incidentally, not to cast any aspersions on the generally much-appreciated virtual presence of anyone who still does drive by this venue occasionally to see if I'm burbling. Virtually you are all lovely and much less likely to make the Isolate-O-Tron's needle quiver, and I really have no excuse for abandoning you.

I am driven to resume blogging, characteristically enough, by the burning need to record for posterity a particular dream I just had. My sleep patterns are a mess again, mostly because I've just had a month-long run-in with a particularly epic case of 'flu, and went off both the antibiotics and the decongestants only a couple of days ago. Since the combination of meds was making me sleep 9-hour nights like a particularly coshed dormouse, going off them has led to those happy evenings lying in bed for hours at a time with eyes wide open like the millstone eyes of the tinder-box dogs in the fairy tale, feeling the sleepless seconds drip by with equal parts horror and despair. Insomnia is a bitch. And when I do actually sleep, it's lightly, and with interruptions, and I wake up earlier. Hating the universe in general and everything in it in particular, see "Homicidal Misanthropy", above. But I do, in all that disruption, remember far more of my dreams.

Said dreams characterised themselves, a few days ago, by degenerating into actual nightmare, with far more gore than I am wont to experience, dream-wise. I blame the Queen, for dying. Because the generally sad and laudatory nature of the media and social media responses are giving me ingrowing postcolonial irritation and the tendency to mutter darkly about hypocrisy and jingoism and denialism about the current parlous state of the British economy, culture, political landscape and royal family (racism, sex scandals, legislative meddling and black-market cash deals, oh lord). Which is all filtering into my dreams, causing me to dream the following:

• a darkly threatening forest setting at night, occupied by:
  
• several small/innocent children, and;
  
• a team of servants, tasked with nobbling the above for the consumption of:
  
• the Queen, characterised for these purposes as:
  
• a Fallout robobrain robot, which looks like:
  
• this:


• except with the Queen's head attached in place of the glass dome, and the additional, horrifying detail of:
  
• an unnaturally large mouth, opening unnaturally wide to reveal:
  
• rows of enormous, long, jagged, horrifying teeth, with which:
  
• she proceeded to bite off some poor child's arm, lots of blood and screaming, and I woke up.

I do not like this monarchy. It is skraaaaatched. As are my sleep cycles. I should add, also for posterity, however, that playing injudicious amounts of Fallout 4 is (a) satisfyingly apposite to the current state of global geo-political meltdown, (b) satisfying to the general state of homicidal misanthropy, as I wander around with a maxed out plasma rifle and sniping skill taking down deathclaws with single headshots, and (c) apparently colonising the dream landscape.

(my subject line, by usual processes of free association, is David Bowie, "Time").

oh gods we have a new COVID variant, and various apparently science-heavy sources, including this one seem to suggest that its jolly little spike proteins have mutated madly enough that current vaccines may not, in fact, slow it down any. Which is creating a horrible, leaden, despairing sense of déja vu: the advice quoted in that article is "go back to March 2020 precautions". I was enjoying the sense of comparative safety in being fully vaccinated: I had my hair cut, and had plans for importing a gardener and a plumber for necessary operations. This is horrible. And I am wincingly aware that it's putting SA in the news in an extremely negative sense.

I'm staggering around a little exhausted today because I was, weirdly enough, participating in a "women in fairy tales" panel as part of a UK-based online storytelling event until about 10.30 last night, which had me both stressed and buzzed enough that I didn't come down enough to actually sleep until nearly midnight. I have done absolutely no research or teaching for two years, since the exigencies of running faculty remote processes take up my time and energy to the exclusion of all else; it was lovely to dip my toe in the water again. The weird upsides of COVID and everything being online being what they are, the panel included speakers from the US and UK as well as me, and the audience was all over the world. Apparently the US was sunny, Cape Town has been unseasonably rainy for a few days, and the UK was locked in a snowstorm, so go global warming. But I found myself apologising, in the greenroom before we started, for SA's latest unhappy contribution to the current catastrophe. Could have done without that, really.

In an unprecedented move blindsiding everyone except anyone with a brain who's been watching Trump in the last four years, MAGA goons today attempted to occupy the Capitol, in order to disrupt Senate ratification of the election results in favour of Biden. Two things about this.

One: cruising through my various social media feeds today, I am struck afresh by how much we seem to be living in a clichéd and not very well written science fiction dystopia.

Two: the attempt to disrupt congress and force an electoral decision in Trump's favour appears to have been half-baked at best, conceptualised by idiots as an idiot gesture, and fizzled without achieving anything except unnecessary death and destruction, and to unnecessarily underline the extreme and terrifying fragility of American democracy as a system, and the depth and ferocity of the country's social divides. Which, frankly, could happen to anyone, nationally, and has been exemplified all over the globe in the last hundred years or so, see badly written sf dystopia, above.

But the pointless gun-toting posturing of the invaders is in the event an irresistible parallel to the delightful video I actually wanted to post today, whose wantonly inept robots exemplify all of the above flailing futility with considerably more innocence and charm.

Yesterday was a public holiday*. Owing to the featureless slide of pandemic days spent working from home, I had completely forgotten about this, so I staggered out of bed at a quarter to eight as usual, placated the cats, watered the garden, sat down at my desk and cleared my inbox before realising, an hour later, that I needn't be working, actually. Apparently the pandemic and attendant socio-cultural wossnames is capable of delivering pleasant surprises occasionally. Pleased, I spent the rest of the Day of Reconciliation peaceably slaughtering raiders and supermutants in Fallout, so at least I was on theme.

Other tiny silver linings to this year's horrible black clouds: working from home means I am actively and somewhat more effectually druiding than usual. The giant granadilla vine in the big box died a few months back, which I honestly don't think was me, the neighbour's spirited attempt at Audrey II died at the same time, so I am darkly suspecting a granadilla-fancying disease. Possibly COVID. In the spirit of battening down the hatches in an apocalypse, I tried planting veggies again, which worked appallingly when I tried it when I first moved in here (I killed tomatoes! tomatoes are unkillable!), but which has seemed to benefit from the continuous attention. I now have broad beans, and spring onions, and fancy dark-leaved lettuce! One bean plant randomly died for some reason, I think something gnawed its feet off, I shall cautiously put a baby tomato into the gap and hope.



* Day of Reconciliation, which is, if you think about it, a bizarrely edgy and blood-soaked sort of commemoration, representing as it does two opposed military achievements: the Afrikaner victory over the Zulus at Blood River, and the founding of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC's armed wing in the struggle years, and its subsequent campaign of bombings etc. Which didn't, I have to say, create nearly the body count of Blood River. I find the duality of the date to offer rather an odd notion of "reconciliation". More of a meaningful nod, with aggressive eye contact, from the new dispensation to the old. And ritualistically and slightly threateningly remembering war doesn't seem to me to be a good basis for peace, really.

My subject line is T S Eliot, weirdly, the one oddly rhythmic and rhyming bit in the middle of "Burnt Norton" which I've always loved, and around which I once wrote a largely unsuccessful science fiction story which was rejected, with a very nice note, by an sf magazine.

This is definitely an apocalypse. Global pandemic. Global warming. Plagues of billionaires. California is on fire. America is tearing itself in half while the Orange Menace sets about blatantly stealing the next election. The UK has vanished up its own Tory-privileged arsepipe. And, oh, yes, Cape Town had an earthquake. Just a little one, offshore about 2000kms south of us, but I was lying in bed reading Witcher fanfic at about a quarter to nine last night, and thought, odd if that's thunder, it's barely raining. Long, distant rumble, either thunder or someone starting a bad-tempered Harley Davidson somewhere offstage. Other Capetonians reported feeling actual vibrations, but I didn't, and the cats barely noticed. It seems fitting for 2020, frankly. At this stage I wouldn't feel particularly surprised at an alien invasion or a meteor strike.

My current movie diet is alternating wildly between disaster movies and the entire Studio Ghibli back catalogue. (For the record: The Cat Returns is weird.) And my reading and gaming habit has retreated firmly into fae realms and is refusing to leave. Amalur is beautiful and consoling, while still allowing me to beat up monsters and baddies to a satisfying extent. Toby Daye, the Seanan McGuire series, is considerably darker but still pleasantly distracting, and every time I grab another in the series off Kindle I am pleasantly conscious that I am feeding Seanan's cats. Finally, in the Department of Musical Hypterfixation, The Amazing Devil are, what, alt-folk? progressive folk? at any rate, occasionally a bit hit-and miss, but when they miss are only mildly pretentious (the curse of prog anything), and when they hit, are sumptuous, textured, catchy, emotionally throat-punchy and lyrically both witty and real. I am constitutionally incapable of listening to "Wild Blue Yonder" only once, if this was old school that bit of the cassette tape would be all stretchy and worn.

Well, my long years of hopeless fangirliness are certainly coming to a middle, which, it turns out, is useful amid the current geo-political ramifications. Clearly all these years of internet addiction, geekery and hanging out in fan spaces have been conspiring to prime me for the cultural moment in which it is essential to have a working understanding of the term "k-pop stans" in order to parse one aspect of the latest American political melt-down. Also, "#JUNGKOOK is the bat signal now".

(For those lacking the specific cultural context I have painstakingly acquired over years of dedicated frivolity: k-pop is Korean pop, which has a huge, vociferous, global, mostly young and female fandom with a highly communal concentration on Twitter and Instagram; a "stan" is an ultra-fan, or also a verb - to stan, to be slavishly devoted to/approving of. The Dallas police, hiss spit, incautiously advertised an app where you could submit videos of protestors doing naughty things, whereupon the k-pop fandom descended en masse and flooded it with fan videos, forcing it to shut down. They have followed a similar process in overwhelming nasty Twitter tags like #whitelivesmatter and other alt-right bullshit, flooding out the hatespeech so you can't find it among the joyous memes, videos and images of their k-pop idols. K-pop idols tend rather decoratively to the young male androgynous end of things, which I have to say must steam the homophobic right even further, heh. The most recent tweet I've seen was someone invoking the #jungkook hashtag to direct k-pop fans to spam Trump's twitter for his birthday. I live in hope.)

I am digesting my political news largely via social media, mostly Tumblr and Twitter and their wayward provision of links, and my curatorship of my feeds means I have a very left-leaning view of America's current horrors, but even so I am reeling slightly. It looks awful out there, in a bleakly inevitable sort of way, and I hope those of you who are unavoidably domiciled in the US are keeping safe, and sane. And that all this awful gives rise to something hopeful in the way of reform. And more instances in the k-pop category: people finding common ground in the unlikely Venn diagram overlap of hugely disparate groups whose point of coalescence is rooted in love for something rather than hatred.

#black lives matter.

This apocalypse is weird. A small three-person brass band has just wandered down my road, tootling tunes; from the joyously loud clothing I would judge they are Minstrel Carnival remnants. I am not sure what they were trying to achieve, as lockdown and social distancing suggest no-one should be popping out of their houses with donations; it may be simply another manifestation of the same thing that led Italians to improvise opera off their balconies. In the dark times there will be singing about the dark times, apparently. I shall try not to read the fact that their first choice of song was "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" as an omen of some sort.

However, whatever its imperative, the mini-concert has just been somewhat heavy-handidly suppressed by a truck full of police, who bundled the musicians into the back amid considerable shouting and brandishing of hand sanitiser. Thereby, may I add, aiding the dissemination efforts of the coronavirus considerably more than the simple musical trio ever did. Presumably this is a lockdown enforcement, but it seems like an overreaction.

Even micro brass bands appear to make me cry. Although that may be the apocalypse talking.

This is an absolutely fascinating article which talks about the current decline in sexual activity among young people globally. It's a thoughtful and reflective analysis, rife with stats which are very telling: increase in the average age at which young people first have sex, decline in teen pregnancies, decline in dating and marriage rates. The anecdotal reports of attitudes are also interesting - a sort of general malaise, with respondents, rather than being wildly angst-ridden about not getting laid, merely delivering a resounding "meh". The general feelings seems to be that sex, and sexual relationships, are hard work, and possibly not really worth it, and who has time anyway?

This fascinates me, if for no other reason than for over a decade now I've been teaching a segment on virtual sexuality within a third-year course on the history of the erotic, and despite consistently positive student comments about the course, have watched sign-ups drop to under half of the levels they were at when the course was first offered. I don't know if South African youth follow the same trends they do in the West and Japan, but I suspect they may, at least among the educated middle classes I see in the university context. I think it's a complex set of pressures which is giving rise to the decline, and I would imagine that general anxiety levels under our current terrible geo-political ramifications are probably co-equal causes with the rise of more abstract forms of online sex expression, porn and fanfic among them.

And the prevalence of virtual sex-substitutes is not, I think, a harbinger of doom: if nothing else, it suggests that virtual connection or virtual eroticisim can be sufficiently "real" and satisfying to the participant that they engender a reduced need to seek them out in the flesh. (I can testify to this myself. I have been single for over a decade now, and it's a comfortable state in which friends, internet interactions and fanfic embed me sufficiently in society and culture and a notional erotic that I'm not lonely, I feel connected and I really don't want or need to change anything).

More than that, though, I see this decline as having the potential to be weirdly positive, because the "meh" of relationship reactions outlined in the article must, I think, quite heavily implicate shifting gender norms and the rise of a more enlightened feminism among women. It's a sign of cultural growth, actually, for large swathes of heterosexual women to have reached the conclusion that no relationship is actually a hell of a lot better than a bad relationship. And a bad relationship is very likely to be one with one of the large swathe of male partners who have not contrived to rise above the misogynistic conditioning of their culture in order to offer something like equality of emotional labour. (The article's description of horrendous male expectations of sex learned from porn was chilling). The article mentions at one point that dating and sexual activity levels among lesbians don't, in fact, seem to have dropped in any equal sense, which seems significant.

I mean, I can see the whole post-Freudian landscape having quite healthily undermined bad relationships across the board simply because modern psychology encourages us to seek individual happiness without requiring us, as previous generations were required, to subsume our own needs to the cultural expectation of the relationship. But the fact remains that that kind of emotional self-sacrifice has always, always been more heavily demanded of women. It's almost inevitable, that relationships will decline in the face of women's realisation that by culturally accepted definitions relationships are so often bad and unfair, and particularly unfair to women. We have the tools to realise this now, and we're mad as hell and we're not gonna take it no more. Participation is, at least, something more within our control than actual male behaviour; female cultural capital has risen enough for awareness, and for women to make the decision to abdicate involvement, even if it is not yet high enough to actually change the game.

There is, of course, another level entirely on which a decline in sexual activity in young people feels potentially apocalyptic; if not Bowie's drive-in Saturday future from my subject line, it feels as though we might, in fact, be drifting into Tepper's version in Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Leaving aside genetic manipulation by benevolent-if-marginal Elder Races, a disinclination to procreate makes sense when current evidence suggests that the biosphere may not survive to support our children; our overpopulated and rapaciously destructive culture may be self-sabotaging in sheer self-defence.