Tim Lieder

78.The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty - Last night I saw a play at the Guthrie and apparently all publicly funded theaters must now include an announcement about how we are on first nations land and how we should acknowledge that, but that's it. Just let's mention it and we are doing our due diligence. I didn't hear the Guthrie announcer promote Heart of the Earth school or ask for donations to a legal defense fund or anything about Lakota people who are actually alive. But that's the way Western imperialism works. Mention the genocide but onward to Sondheim.

When I was finished with this book I thought of Israel and the conflicting narratives but I also thought about how almost every middle eastern country has a history of atrocity and it's not exactly complete genocide. There are conflicting narratives where everyone can point to the shitty things that the other side did and then hero worship the atrocity makers who worked for them. The two major characters more or less represent either side even as they are also audience surrogates to explain the world (Nehri is a Cairo thief who accidentally summons a djinn while Ali is an advocate for half-human, half-djinn shafit even as his father attempts to keep things together in the city no matter how many people have to die).

At a certain point, Nehri (ostensibly a half-human/half-djinn character) is seen as the savior of the Daevas who are the more religious who ran the city for centuries while Ali is the advocate for the Shafit and the heir to the ones that overthrew the Daevas. Dara, the djinn, that accompanies Nehri has been a slave to humans for centuries and also known as the scourge because he murdered an entire town of shafits. While the Daevas have their own atrocity narrative. They also love Dara as their hero.

Meanwhile the king of the city is doing some really shady shit to keep the peace. And with all the grievances and long memories of ancestors being murdered he's not wrong.

This is a complicated and fascinating read about complicated and fascinating people and when the Daevas are plotting to take over the town with Nehri at the end, it feels like a happy ending but of course it's more of a sinister ending. Like the ending of Game of Thrones season 1 where Rob Stark is declaring himself the king of the north and everyone is cheering him on - if you know what's coming next and aware of the implications of starting a war and not just reading it as a hero's narrative which is what Martin was going for (using the tropes against the reader).

I immediately ordered the next book. I seriously am tempted to read the synopses on Wikipedia and spoil it for myself.

79.Heller with a Gun by Louis Lamour - Heller means hellion. I was at Convergence and I had finished reading all the books I brought with me. So I needed something else for the plane ride home and the free book room was most decidedly uninspiring. I just think that this Con is winding down and there are just fewer people coming. And I sent my books to a friend who was too ADHD and frazzled to actually bring them to Con (sigh) but my books were up in the free book library. Either way, they brought in books from previous years and there were the standard 1990s science fiction section of a used bookstore - the Dave Eddings, the Jo Clayton (actually that one is a novelty but I don't like her as a writer) and Piers Anthony. Fucking Piers Anthony. I was also trying to find a book with the right size since I was going to take it on the plane with me and I didn't want to stuff my backpack any more than it was stuffed.

So this one would have to do (I also grabbed a Tess Gerritsen book which I'm wary of since I suspect that if I read too many of her books together I might get sick of her. I can see some of the tropes repeating themselves. She does have a talent for catching up the reader on past events without infodumping them) and it was...fine, I guess. It's also short and falling apart. I might not even put it on a local book shelf since it's almost gone.

It has Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn on the cover. Anyhow, King Mabry is one of those gun slingers who is just so damn good at everything (no wonder he gets shot in the head halfway through the book. Don't worry. He gets better. It was a scratch) and a theater troupe is passing through town and he feels like he has to follow them. His instincts are right since the people that they hired to protect them are more inclined to rob them and rape the women.

This is an old school western where the Indians show up speaking broken English and talking about squaws while the lonely men are lonely men and everyone has to tell you their opinion on guns. The first 50 pages are pretty tight and then the Lakota braves show up and they distract from the criminals and then it just gets into this long side plot about which actress is King going to end up with - the one that he fell for or the 17 (almost 18!) year old woman who was raised by a gunslinger. I mean, duh, we aren't exactly rooting for either because this is a boring love triangle.

Seriously, why do the Dystopian YA writers get so much shit for crowbarring in a love triangle when classic Western writers shove it in there and completely fuck up their plot with this shit. It was actually a pretty tight plot until L'Amour stuck in a love triangle. I wonder if that was a studio note? Because the copy I got was a movie so was the book written first or did L'Amour work with the studio in some marketing scheme where the book and the movie come out together?

Either way, it seems fine until it gets padded out with a love triangle, and a useless love triangle at that.

I really shouldn't go looking for more bad articles about Israel. I really shouldn't. I have enough stupid people on my Facebook feed already. No use finding more. But this is a special case. This is a Hugo award winning author who frequently writes books and articles about how sad it is that we can't get along. She's not an asshole. Most of this article is "boohoo everyone is bad!" and while that kind of white liberal hand wringing is usually well-intentioned enough to forgive the naivete, this particular post had this howler:

In World War II, my grandfather spent much of his time stationed in Germany and France cleaning up dead bodies. Primarily from concentration camps. He hauled the bodies and drove the trucks. He watched an entire people nearly annihilated. Today, when I turn on the television, I’m watching the children of those same people annihilating another people, wiping them off the face of the earth.

Now I am pretty immune to this kind of discourse. It's stupid and the kind of bullshit that high school kids engage in. It's not just anti-Semitic but that's definitely a component. If you don't think that there is a difference between the systematic murder of six million Jews as a way of "cleansing" the world of vermin and a limited land war where a few thousand people died, then yeah, you are a blithering idiot. And if you don't even acknowledge that Gaza isn't even the worst war going on RIGHT NOW in the same 400 mile radius - then you are fucking pathetic.

There really is no reason to argue with the stupid who cry genocide (or the newfangled euphemism of ethnic cleansing) every single time Israel goes to war. Pointing out the genocide that's taken place in the last couple of decades (Rwanda and Bosnia) is a waste of time. There's enough blame to go around and there's enough room to criticize Israel for its actions without giving the "GENOCIDE!!!!!" screamers respect.

But this woman is a two time Hugo winner, a respected member of the SFWA and someone who is praised as being "fearless."

And this particular passage, it's just too wonderful an example of Aryan privilege not to comment on.

But let's back up. If you have friends (or most likely relatives) on all sides of the political spectrum, you have probably been sighing a lot recently in your effort to explain white privilege. White privilege is when you can get stopped by cops and know that you probably will live through the encounter. Your parents do not have "the talk" to you about how to deal with police officers and how to be very respectful because otherwise you could get shot in the back. If you DO get your ass kicked by the cops, then you know that you can sue the police department, even put those officers in jail. You can spend your teen years shoplifting and you will still go to college. Hell, you can walk through any neighborhood in the United States - wearing a hoodie no less - and know that no one from neighborhood watch is going to chase you down and kill you.

This is pretty easy to get. It's not brain surgery. Yet, how many times have you read "well the cop who shot Michael Brown was black" or "you liberals always thinking that you should play the victim card" or "how are the black people rioting any different than the police who shot Michael Brown?" Teeth gnashing, arrogant, stupid self-righteous, completely ignorant bullshit has been coming out of Ferguson.

With Aryan privilege, you can say that your grandfather either helped to murder six million Jews or he was part of the army that killed the murderers and cleaned up after them (but only after everyone gave Hitler a free pass). You can look back at your entire history and think "oh, isn't that SO SAD that some of my ancestors were fucking monsters? Well what can you do?" You don't have the feeling like the entire world is watching you. You don't feel even more uncomfortable when people are praising you and your people because you know that it's just a couple of crazy fucks before that praise turns into hatred and suspicion. Homeless people don't ask you if you've read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as if you are going to think that it's awesome.

With Aryan privilege, you don't have to care about history. You can be completely ignorant about what the Holocaust meant. You can think that "genocide" is just another word for "a lot of people died and it was very sad." You can even blame the victims of genocide for dying or not dying - depending on your viewpoint. Aryan privilege means never having to say you're sorry, because it's not like YOU are Jewish. It's not like YOU are supposed to set an example.

Aryan privilege means you can kill people by the thousands, by the millions. No one is going to say that you're genocidal. Hell, Aryan privilege also means that if there is a terrorist attack in your country, you can do whatever the fuck you want to prevent a future terrorist attack. You can deport everyone. You can put up checkpoints. You can inspect ambulances that are going through checkpoints without criticism (because the rest of the world will actually care when the ambulances carry bombs to murder you).

And the BEST part about Aryan privilege. No one fucking blames you for the Holocaust. You can just go along with your life and there isn't the constant disproportionate criticism. You don't even have to be German. Seems like President Assad of Syria has been cashing in on his Aryan privilege for years now. Thousands die in one day and who cares? You can't blame the Jews and you can't go "oh poor Jews, why are you acting like Nazis" when Syrians are being murdered in ways that might even horrify your Nazi grandfather shoveling those bodies.

I am happy that the SFWA can kick out Vox Day for his racist bullshit. He will never figure out that he has white privilege. Too bad the SFWA responds to similarly anti-Semitic bullshit from Kameron Hurley with a shrug and "isn't she just SO brave" even though her Aryan privilege is just as noxious and just as disgusting.

Edit - I did originally read that quote to say that Hurley's grandfather was disposing of Jewish bodies on behalf of the German army. I now realize that he could have been in the allies and cleaned up the bodies after the war was over. I should not have made the assumption.