BROWN FEET. THE FEET ARE ALWAYS BROWN. Four years ago, and now, they're brown.
Children lay face-down on green camping mats, but no packages of Jet-Puffed or Honey Maid or Hershey's, classic American childhood staples, are nowhere in sight. Present instead are large sheets of Reynolds wrap, silver and shiny like a housewife's wedding ring. A woman in an advert grins overenthusiastically holding a huge box of Reynolds wrap, her hands cupping either end of the box like she's describing how big her husband's dick is. I guarantee you a woman did not make that ad. There's a webpage that's titled: WOMEN IN JOURNALISM NEWSPAPER MILESTONES. It's short. Thirteen women are listed between 1739 and 1976. The author of the article is named Bill. In a different advert, in another decade, a boy stands in a yellow rain coat holding Reynolds wrap next to his dog. The boy is pleased. Of course he's pleased: rain boots protect his feet and he splashes in puddles with his beloved dog. I call the woman "woman" and the boy "boy." Most of the people who read this will assume the invisible, default word in front of those words: white. We don't have to specify.
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For the last few months I've been slowly trudging my way through George Orwell's 1984. I say "slowly" not because the book is bad (it's excellent) but because I'm a slow reader with a full-time job, a part-time weekend job, and a busy social calendar. I'm privileged, in every way--too busy managing my life to read a book. A book that I should have read years ago, particularly with my graduate thesis on dystopian literature, because Zamyatin's We was unquestionably (now, I see) not enough. It doesn't matter that it inspired 1984; the thinly veiled protest essay that is We does not quite engage like Orwell's classic. I'm not a fan of reading books just because they're classics--why should I read books by dead white guys who've never had a life like mine?--but I started reading 1984 for a reason I don't usually pick up books: because it was a classic, and I felt I should. If my work is dystopian, I should know dystopias. Particularly the book that everybody mentions when you say, "...and I don't mean The Hunger Games."
Today I saw President Trump (I, like so many of my fellow Americans--comrades?--flinch when I combine these words together) say he's putting an end to the war on coal. I watched him do other things, too, other times: brag about sexual assault, attempt to block legal residents from entering the country based on how they looked, destroy native American land, encourage violence. In grad school, as part of my thesis work, I read The Handmaid's Tale. It is one of the most prominent dystopic works written by a female author, and I was obsessed with it. One of my grad school professors said that the third-grade girls we taught loved death and found it all very romantic, and I suppose the same was true for me as a third-grader: death was horrible, unfair, and poetic. While growing up I was particularly obsessed with mass, systematic, nonsensical murder. Serial murderers, the Holocaust, the mysteries of Roanoake. Haunted spaces with too many violent deaths to be comfortably explained; the dead planet of Miranda in "Serenity;" the purple Kool-Aid leaders who poisoned entire cities. The slave trade, the FLDS. Today I saw Trump supporters comment on how The Handmaid's Tale is anti-Trump propaganda. |
PART OF THIS COMPLETE BREAKFASTBlog not recommended for sober consumption. |