Mayhem and Emotion

The Sunday Night Reader for 5/15/22

May 15, 2022

I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to say about the leaked Roe v. Wade opinion last week, so I chose to say nothing at all. Which, I hope, reflects thoughtfulness short-term, but is unacceptable long-term. Solidarity is only solidarity if it’s public and active.

Part of what hung me up is the simple fact that I can’t imagine what it would be like to a woman around my age under these circumstances. It’s staggering to think of growing up in a nation where you’re at least being told that your rights, power, and position are expanding. Even though you must know there are so many lies behind that, subtle and unsubtle, there was this codified thing that those lies wouldn’t always be so.

In my failure of imagination, my mind turns to the ways in which this is all of a piece. As with abortion and women’s fundamental rights, the gates are down across the board. The Supreme Court is packed with people nominated by presidents who didn’t win the popular vote. The Senate overrepresents states with smaller populations and dismal standards. State officials make it harder and harder for marginalized people to vote and are routinely setting up structures to subvert the majority vote when it doesn’t go their way.

The conservative movement in America has made it clear that they value their reign over our democracy. The will of the people — 70 or 80 percent of the nation supports a person’s right to control their body and get an abortion — is completely irrelevant to them. They are perfectly willing to put other’s rights under the boot of their will. And the current government, nominally progressive and feminist, is allowing for it.

2.5 Percent

Trans people are not confused; they are trans. The state fighting that, under the guise of protecting them, means they will die at dramatically higher rates than they would otherwise. This isn’t a states’ rights issue. It is a matter of who we love enough to allow to thrive and who we browbeat toward suicide. From an NBC News story on a just-published study:

“Researchers at Princeton University began in 2013 to track 317 kids between ages 3 and 12 who socially transitioned — the first and largest sample of its kind, according to Kristina Olsen, the study’s lead author and a professor of psychology at Princeton.

The results showed that five years after their initial social transition, 94 percent of the study participants were living as either trans girls or trans boys. The remaining youth had ‘retransitioned,’ as the study called it, and no longer identified as binary transgender. Of that group, 2.5 percent came to identify with their birth sex.

The findings come as Republican lawmakers in more than two dozen states have tried, over the last two years, to restrict access to gender-affirming care for transgender minors.” Read more.

Used to be Disgusted. Now I Try to be Amused.

I don’t love that the White House’s collection of thousands of LPs was put together by lobbyists. I do love that it is preserved at a secure, off-site location. Fun story on unearthing a lost record collection. Read more.

Honky Chateau, My Aim is True, Hardcore Jollies, Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols, and More Songs About Buildings and Food — they all made the cut for the RIAA’s White House record collection. The collection hasn’t been updated since 1981, so tell us what you’d add from the previous four decades in the comments.

An Appreciation: Everything Everywhere All at Once

You don’t expect a movie this wild to be so heartfelt, a movie this earnest to be so silly. Deft isn’t the right word, because it’s a sledgehammer from start to finish. But it is expert and confident and 100 percent committed to the bit. The bit, I suppose, is existential maximalism or something. Kung-fu and sci-fi, family drama and immigrant story, hopeful and despairing, broken branch and supple reed, careening among aspect ratios and languages.

Michelle Yeoh is at the center of the mayhem and emotion. It’s rare to see a female character in film who is hard, who has brought up every defense, and who is treated as rational and correct for having done so.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a movie for the moment because it stares into chaos and celebrates a woman who is able to survive it and grow from it.