Regarding the current governmental crisis, consider this:
“Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.
[…]
Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action?
[…]
In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”
To be sure, what the robber demanded of me – my money – was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.”
Today is the 150th anniversary of Quantrill’s Raid, when pro-confederate raiders from Missouri burned Lawrence KS & massacred 164 men & boys. To this day, there are memorial stones marking where men & boys were gunned down. One is a block from my house (we live in the Old West Lawrence neighborhood, which was pretty much the entire town back then).
It’s hard to commemorate the Lawrence massacre, when you realize that neo-confederates, Quantrill’s successors, now run the state. They don’t bother to raid and burn any more — they just cut funding, chopping the legs out from under any community they disapprove of, or pass restrictive laws preventing any progressive social agenda.
150 years later, and we’re still fighting the confederates… and they’re winning.
Recently, Felicia Day posted a video outlining her plans for a second series of shows for her Youtube channel, Geek & Sundry. If you haven’t already seen it, take a few minutes to watch, above.
I’ve been mulling over this for a few days now, because the whole “we need to re-own the word Geek” part of it really kinda rubs me the wrong way. I hemmed and hawed about unpacking that in any really public way, knowing that this would have me seen as publicly being “against” Felicia Day, a monolithically popular figure in online geek circles. But I found that I was genuinely curious if it was just me, or if other people felt the same.
The whole angle strikes me as very similar, ironically, to the whole “fake geek girl” outrage. The idea that there are “Real” geeks — by definition — who need to somehow “take back” the term, away from the non-genuine users, who only use it as a marketing label; a category by which consumers are classified.
I’m sorry — but Geeks aren’t Rebels. Some are, sure. But despite the protestations in the video, Geeks have pretty much *always* been defined by their entertainment fandom — and it was their love of those things that made some of them outcasts, as the “popular kids” ostracized them. What came first, the chicken or the egg? The nerdy love of comic books and Star Trek, or the outsider status that came with that love? But to claim that it is the Outsider, the Rebel, etc. that marks the “true” geek is uncomfortably close to the cries of the guys who are bitching that attractive girls can’t been geeks because they didn’t “suffer for it.”
Another thing: the idea that “Geek” is being commodified by some outsider group (especially ironic coming from somebody trying to market videos to the same audience) is a massive ball of hipster bullshit. Geek is mainstream because geeks are now in positions where they are creating and decision-making in entertainment — they’re producing stuff that interests them, which is attracting the like-minded. Combine that with the aggregating and communication ability of the internet, and it means that what might be a small subculture in a particular school or town is suddenly and inescapably seen as a fairly large national (hell, global) interest group.
…and let us not forget that geek stuff has always been popular, sometimes massively so (Star Wars, anyone?). The main difference is now people are comfortable with identifying with the label. (Everybody loved Star Wars in 77/78, but few would’ve called themselves “geeks.”)
Geek is about loving stuff, and sharing those interests with others. It doesn’t matter if you came to it early, suffered through bullying because of it, or just walked into it yesterday because you played “Bioshock Infinite” and really dug it. It’s all good, and the tribalist crap of “re-owning” the word, of attempting to define what makes a “real” geek, is really disappointing, especially coming from a high-profile person whom many view as an ambassador of the culture.
