Taggthemage

After some recent trends, I finally decide to read the Harry Potter books. And I came away with something I didn't expect. I came away with an understanding of what makes a generationally beloved classic. It isn't authorial skill. Rowling is certainly talented, but, at least at the time, she was also relatively unpolished, and the series has plenty of rough patches. Uneven pacing, awkward plots, exposition dumps, two-dimensional secondary characters. I could write quite a few lines about what might be fixed. And I probably will at some point. But none of that matters. Because a generationally beloved classic is almost never the best book of a generation. A generationally beloved classic is the book that most perfectly captures what that generation yearns for. Hogwart's School of Wizardry did that for millennials, just as the quest to destroy the One Ring did so for the boomers. Boomers grew up hearing tales of recent history, and the heroism of previous generations, who got us through the great depression, and the great war. Their father, or grandfathers, or both, were heroes. But they were left growing up in the 1950s, a near-ideal time of growth, happiness, and prosperity. Near-ideal isn't ideal. Humans need goals. The boomers were left with no great struggles to fight, no great tasks to do, nothing that could make them feel like they measured up. So they invented something. A new struggle. A moral struggle. They decided that, because the great depression, and the great war, had happened when the institutions of Western Civilization existed, therefore those institutions were responsible. That those institutions needed to be torn down, gutted, and rebuilt in the new Boomer Morality. This was their great quest, what allowed them to imagine themselves heroes. As an added bonus, it allowed them to imagine that the men who fought WW2 were not. They were, after all, adherents of the old creed. When the hippies took to the streets, chanting "fascist scum, your time has come", they meant the very same people who had fought the Nazis. Lord of the Rings dovetailed perfectly into this narrative. Its central struggle, its great quest, is not a martial struggle or a political struggle, but a moral struggle... the quest not to seize an object of power, but to destroy one. Frodo was not some great warrior, or wise wizard. He was an innnocent, whose virtue was moral worth. The young, unaccomplished, and very small man had to resist the temptations of power, and to destroy it, because it was wicked. Is it any wonder that the boomers decided to tear down and hollow out the institutions of society, rather than inherit and incrementally improve them? Even to this day, any younger person who seeks power, wanting to improve the world, is subjected to any number of brain-dead aphorisms about Boromir and the Ring. Never mind that Tolkien never intended any of this. Never mind that the Ring wasn't a symbol of anything. It was a ring. It was evil not because it represented power... it was simply evil because it was made by evil for evil purposes, and possessed a malign will of its own. LOTR, the way the boomers read it, fit perfectly into their worldview, and they imagine themselves perpetual revolutionaries, always fighting the evils of power, even now when they are 70 years old and own everything. Which brings us to millennials. They grew up in the world that the gutting of Western institutions left us. They went to government schools run by characters straight out of a Franz Kafka novel, sent there by parents who inexplicably hated them from the time they were old enough to talk. When they yearned, they didn't yearn for a great moral struggle, or to tear anything down, or to be revolutionaries. They yearned for a society that cared about them, for parents who loved them, for a civilization that saw them as the future, and invested in them accordingly. They wanted to go to Hogwart's. They wanted get a letter by owl, telling them that the reason they didn't quite fit wasn't because they were inadequate, but because they were special. They wanted to be the special ones, the chosen ones, the boys and girls who lived. And that last sentence may sound a bit conceited... until you realized that when they wanted to be special, they wanted to be special in precisely the way that Harry Potter was special, the way that every child in a healthy family is naturally special... not because he is talented or great, but because his mother loved him. This is what saved Harry Potter in the inciting incident of his young life. This is what millennials wanted for themselves. Not to be astronauts and war heroes and rock stars, but to fit into a place like Hogwarts. To be mentored by wise and caring elders like Dumbledore. To be part of a community. To have mothers who loved them. To write a story like this isn't necessarily to understand a generation, because it never seems to happen except by accident. It is, rather, to help a generation understand itself. That's why fan fiction, with visions like this picture, matters. Not because it has so large a footprint as to change the world, perhaps, but because it represents the spirit of an age. It tells us what people want. And if we look carefully, it tells us why.

Elsewhere in the world, wonderful things are happening. @nayibbukele is now in a very strange position, almost a historically unique one. He is simultaneously a democratically elected leader and an absolute dictator. And El Salvador is simultaneously a democracy and a dictatorship. He is a democratically elected leader, whose administration came to power in a free and fair election. And that administration wields power with the just consent of the people of El Salvador. But is also dictator, because the consensus in support of him is so overwhelming, his mandate from the people is so total, that he has a completely free hand to set Salvadorean policy as he chooses. And his choices have done nothing but strengthen that mandate. Imagine, for a moment, being a Salvadorean right now. Imagine knowing that, while your nation is not the greatest, richest, or most powerful on Earth, it is led by a man who, should you suffer harm or danger on foreign soil, will gather his men in their thousands, and send them forth with fire and sword to save you, or to avenge what cannot be saved. Civis Romanus sum. I am a Roman citizen. This phrase was once a strong guarantee of safety and fair treatment throughout most of the known world. Not because Rome ruled everywhere, but because Rome would avenge its own. In a stroke, Nayib Bukele has elevated soy ciudadano Salvadoreño to a similar status. Can you imagine an American president, elected by securing the support of an opaque and fraud-ridden political machine, making the same promise? Can you imagine him making good on it? Can you imagine a United States senator representing the native American citizens living in the state that sent him to the senate house, instead of Silicon Valley, or Wall Street, or some foreign nation with deep pockets, or a consortium of H1-b slavemasters? There is a lesson here, and it is a simple one. The rules matter less than the character of those in office. A democratic republic which elects corrupt bureaucrats is a nation ruled by liars and thieves. And the dictatorship of a just and unselfish man is a nation ruled by a just and unselfish man. The only real purpose of a "system" of government is to place power in the hands of wise men of good character. If the system does not do that, it has no merit, regardless of its form, or philosophy, or reliance on checks and balances. If you brought Diogenes and his lantern to Washington DC to search by daylight, how many wise men of good character do you think he would find?

One of the amusing things about women is that one will walk past a conversation that isn't about her, has nothing to do with her, and immediately interrupt it to say "Hey everybody! This does not sexually arouse me! In fact quite the opposite!" And then she'll wonder why everyone seems to find that response incoherent. It's only funny, however, until you truly understand why it's happening. Then it's kinda... existential. Pick up a popular book, written by women, for women. At random. We all know that the odds are it's going to be porn. In fact, it's gonna be porn about the medium-height, slightly clumsy, brown-haired protagonist girl being kidnapped and ravished by a werewolf pirate billionaire warlord. And if you're wondering what "ravished" means, it's like rape, but sexier. So what's going on here? Why are modern women so porn-brained, and simultaneously so contemptuous of every actual male within their line of sight? This actually all fits together quite neatly. Women are not lying. They are telling us the truth. They are telling us exactly how they feel about all the things they see. They're just not very good at introspection. So they don't know why they feel that way. If we read their werewolf rape porn, we can immediately see what turns women on... men who have power over them. And the reason that women are reading werewolf rape porn is that actual men who have power over them are in short supply, and there's not enough to go around. Desperate for male dominance, they are mainlining a hypernormal stimulus in fictional form. This is also the reason women don't care about any harm they are doing to men with their newfound political and social power. To them, any man who doesn't have power over them, and especially a man who they have the power to hurt, is viscerally disgusting. He is an unperson, useless to them, and they don't care what he is experiencing. This is why they try to hurt men in the first place. Because they resent the fact that they can. They want us to be powerful, invincible, untouchable, and they lash out in frustration when we aren't, seeking to punish us for being vulnerable instead. Funny thing is, it's not even their fault. This is genetic programming, after all, not a choice. Ovaries want what they want. The bit they don't quite understand, however, the bit they haven't thought through, is that this doesn't work with the whole "equality" thing. A man can be more powerful than you, or he can be an equal. Can't be both. And, of course, men really do have power over women. Not only are they unable to defend themselves against us, they need us to feed, clothe, shelter and protect them. If we were collectively willing to take their civil rights away again, we could do so immediately. Women's rights exist only when and where men say they do. In the book 1984, which many women will be unfamiliar with because it doesn't contain any werewolf rape, George Orwell describes a process called "doublethink", which is defined as "sustaining two contradictory ideas by not ever thinking about both of them at the same time." In this case, the two ideas are "make me equal to you in power throughout society at large", and "have so much more power in our personal relationship that I am unable to hurt you no matter what I say or do". Eventually, men are simply going to have to come to a consensus over what to do about this, and decide which of these requests to fulfill. We can either be liberals, and accept perpetual female contempt as the price of that, or we can be vilified as reactionaries, but have women love us again. What is never going to happen is that you are never going to get a majority of women to see the contradiction here, and agree that this makes no sense. Which means we are going to have to make this decision on our own.