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September Shaun ♍🍂🎑🍁🍎🎶

@shauninmpls.bsky.social

"The people have the power to wrestle the earth from fools." Minneapolis devotion/rage, managing editor for hire and all things word-adjacent, musician and music lover, libertine papist. she/her

2710 Posts1196 Follower430 Folgt
huck mason@tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · yesterday

Susan Sontag's 9/16/01 piece in The New Yorker got her crucified but it's one of the few things from that era that aged well. "'Our country is strong,' we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be."

The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy. Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. “Our country is strong,” we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.
September Shaun ♍🍂🎑🍁🍎🎶@shauninmpls.bsky.social · 2d ago

It's a version of this image, which I'm sharing because it is attached to a great little blog post about Howl's Moving Castle (the Miyazaki film, not the novel--I haven't read it and neither has this author) that expresses a lot about how I feel too. kottke.org/17/10/the-hi...

The hidden heart of Howl’s Moving Castle

1. Hayao Miyazaki is our Ovid, a fluent, majestic storyteller with a gift for deep connections and sudden transformations. At the end of his career, he’s rig

kottke.org

September Shaun ♍🍂🎑🍁🍎🎶@shauninmpls.bsky.social · 2d ago

Handing your young adult your credit card as she heads to her tattoo artist is a real cross-your-fingers moment. (I know what the tattoo will be, more or less, but I'm nervous about the cost, which I promised to cover, because it's a "family" tattoo.)

September Shaun ♍🍂🎑🍁🍎🎶@shauninmpls.bsky.social · 5d ago

I've had no real odd jobs so Shortest-lived job: Hotel maid (I sucked) Biggest letdown: Singing for a summer tourist act that shut down before it started Lamest freelance job: Writing a heartfelt thank-you letter from a CEO to his workers in an annual report Surprisingly fun: Retail baker

SarahJSloat@sjane.bsky.social · 5d ago

Happy labor day (USA). What's one of the oddest paid job you've had? Mine was probably as a reader for a medical professor at Rutgers, whose eyes were failing. I read him many academic texts, as well as Samuel Butler's "The Way of All Flesh."

September Shaun ♍🍂🎑🍁🍎🎶@shauninmpls.bsky.social · 5d ago

Truly nuts to say this while sitting at a state fair attended by 100k-200k people each day for 12 days, some of whom have stood well over an hour in line to look at art commemorating fortitude and generosity in the face of evil, plus

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 5d ago

Minnesota US Senate Michele Tafoya defends her comments about people telling her they're embarrassed to be from Minnesota: "I hear it every day ... I heard it 10 minutes ago"

September Shaun ♍🍂🎑🍁🍎🎶@shauninmpls.bsky.social · last wk.

Just because, this is my awesome PaPaw, who was a tough booze-running mthrfkr that once stole a silver creamer set from a hotel (I have it), an auto foreman who could have been an engineer if he'd stayed in school past 8th grade, and about as doting to a granddaughter as a person could be.

An older man in a trucker hat holds a big fish up in his left hand and a bottle of Seagram's 83 Canadian whiskey in his right. He's standing in front of a patch of lake (somewhere in Canada) with a very small fishing boat behind him.
September Shaun ♍🍂🎑🍁🍎🎶@shauninmpls.bsky.social · last wk.

One part of dialect quiz discourse I enjoy is the massive gap between people who say "What the hell do these things have to do with the sun shining while it rains!?" and people who had a MeeMaw or a PaPaw.