(no subject)

[selenak]

Postscript to yesterday's entry: crossoverman linked artwork for the Lord of the Rings film starring the Beatles that never was, which ranks from funny to amazingly creative, and started my day with a smile. Which was good, considering.

Like everyone else who heard the good news, I am delighted that Catherine Tate and David Tennant will play Beatrice and Benedick. It's the ideal Shakespeare play for them, given their wonderful comic timing and chemistry. (Also I can't help having flashbacks to the Chain Reaction interview where Catherine was teasing David about the lack of logic in Shakespeare.*g*) Whether not I'll be able to afford going to London to see them is yet in the stars, but hooray for the theatre-going world anyway nonetheless!

Good news is needed since both the fannish and the real world can be incredibly depressing. A particularly obnoxious brand of Snapefen are at it again, complaining women of colour have no business identifiying with Lily because, being pretty and academically successful, she's not representative of a discriminated against minority, and how dare anyone accuse young Severus of racism anyway, etc., etc.
....

(And the repeat lesson from this, other than priveleged ignorance: the only thing more unforgivable in a female character than to come between a popular slash pairing is for a female character to turn the fandom woobie down.) (Female characters who come between a slash pairing and turn the fandom woobie down: prepare to be virtually lynched on a regular basis.)

Yet all of this seems minor when compared to such real life horrors like the shooting of an Arizona congresswoman and six others. As virtually every article I've read about the shooting mentions: Giffords was named as a political campaign target for conservatives in last November's mid-term elections by the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. Palin had published a "target map" on her website using images of gunsights to identify 20 House Democrats, including Giffords, backing the new healthcare law. Gifford won by a narrow margin, seeing off opposition from a Tea Party-backed Republican candidate. In an interview after the office vandalism, Giffords referred to the animosity against her. "We're on Sarah Palin's targeted list," she said, "but the thing is, the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. "When people do that, they have to realise that there are consequences to that action."

I can hear the cries of "unfair" already. And of course moderate (I always hesitate to use the term "liberal" because it really doesn't mean to the rest of the world what it means to the US) papers are as eager to point out this connection as conservative papers are to declare that no one called for anyone's literal death and that at any rate the targeted Ms. Gifford was against gun laws, too. From my transatlantic personal perspective I can only say that one of the things that struck me was that I was shocked but not really surprised. Because both violent political rethoric and in tandem euphemisms have become so the the rule during the last decade. When torture isn't really torture but "stuff happens" (tm Rumsfeld), when health care is described in terms of "death panels", with the constant use of apocalyptic language to describe one's political opponent, news like this really aren't that surprising. Just awful. And without any prospect of staying unique.

Comments

[jesuswasbatman]

People who claim that Spike is the oppressed black man or that Children of Earth is a vile piece of homophobia that should be burned: I disagree with them but they at least have their hearts in the right place.

People who try to argue that Potterverse blood prejudice is rational, justified, or not the moral equivalent of real-world racism: ewwwww.

[selenak]

It's not like the books (or films, for that matter) are very subtle with the real world racism parallels. No you can argue about depiction of characters and how successfully arcs were executed at your hearts content, but denying that in the Potterverse there is a blood prejudice at the best of times and active persecution when things get dire is wilfully blending out one of the pervading premises of the story. And don't get me started on the awful rl implications of "no pretty and smart character can represent a discriminated against minority".

[jesuswasbatman]

Was it tasteless of me to think that the quoted bit in the JF post about how Lily was pretty, loved and nobody could tell just by looking that she was from a minority could have been written about a 1920s European Jewish character.

[selenak]

I tried to avoid that particular comparison in order to avoid Godwin's law, but yes, I was thinking it, too.

[jamalov29]

The news about C.Tate and D.Tennant in that play are squee worthy . I was thrilled ( like a great number of people online!) to read the article. I hope to go in July but in case it doesn't happen, we can be assured that there will be accounts on lj.:)

[selenak]

*crosses fingers for you and me*