Hello, good evening, happy Friday. It was a bit of a rough week for me, personally, and so here is another evening edition. But I guess we are also deep enough into the pandemic that “lunch breaks” are sort of eroded from their former esteemed status, anyway. And I know that many of you enjoy reading on Saturdays. So, I hope you’ll forgive the continued delays.
This week we saw this President achieve another historical milestone - he is the first President in history to be impeached twice, and indeed to be impeached more times than he has won elections. In fact, he has been impeached as many times as he has lost the popular vote. Incredible! He surely deserves it.
Other than that? Uh, I don’t know, our country is falling apart, it’s been almost a year since I had a pint at my favorite bar, I have friends I haven’t seen in almost a year, I am very obviously falling into the point of the pandemic behavioral loop where I go through an existential crisis again. Whatever. Onward.
You know how you get to Carnegie Hall, don’t you? Practice.
This week we are going to talk about Nazis in the military. This section’s header is obviously a quote from Inglorious Basterds, one of the greatest films of all time. If you have somehow never seen the movie, you are a blessed and innocent soul, go watch it immediately, I am so thrilled for you. Experiencing it for the first time is an absolute treat. And while it is, obviously, a movie about (an alternate timeline in) Nazi Germany and therefore involves a military force that is entirely composed of Nazis, the United States military in our real, actual, current timeline contains way more Nazis than anyone should really be comfortable with.
Just to whet your appetite and show you that I’m not fucking around, here are several articles about the subject. It is extremely well-documented that the modern military is full of Nazis, it is like an extremely open secret, anyone who denies it should not be taken seriously. In fact, declassified files reveal that the U.S. actually collaborated with Nazis. Oops!
All of this is relevant, of course, because it turns out that one of the dipshit terrorists who sieged the capitol - and indeed one of the egregiously stupid fuckers who brought zip-cuffs, seemingly intending to kidnap and/or potentially commit violent crimes against (Democratic) members of Congress - is a military veteran:
As insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol this week, a few figures stood out. One man, clad in a combat helmet, body armor, and other tactical gear, was among the group that made it to the inner reaches of the building. Carrying zip-tie handcuffs, he was captured in photographs and videos on the Senate floor and with a group that descended on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office suite. In a video shot by ITV News, he is seen standing against a wall adjacent to Pelosi’s office, his face covered by a bandana. At another point, he appears to exit the suite, face exposed, pushing his way through the crowds of demonstrators.
A day after the riots, John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School, notified the F.B.I. that he suspected the man was retired Lieutenant Colonel Larry Rendall Brock, Jr., a Texas-based Air Force Academy graduate and combat veteran. Scott-Railton had been trying to identify various people involved in the attack. “I used a number of techniques to home in on his identity, including facial recognition and image enhancement, as well as seeking contextual clues from his military paraphernalia,” Scott-Railton told me. Brock was wearing several patches on his combat helmet and body armor, including one bearing a yellow fleur de lis, the insignia of the 706th Fighter Squadron. He also wore several symbols suggesting that he lived in Texas, including a vinyl tag of the Texas flag overlaid on the skull logo of the Punisher, the Marvel comic-book character. The Punisher has been adopted by police and Army groups and, more recently, by white supremacists and followers of QAnon. Scott-Railton also found a recently deleted Twitter account associated with Brock, with a Crusader as its avatar. “All those things together, it’s like looking at a person’s C.V.,” Scott-Railton said.
Brock was later arrested and charged. The affidavit cites Ronan Farrow’s article. And a tip from Brock’s ex-wife. All of that is believable. Unbelievable, though, is that he was released on home confinement. From the AP:
Weimer read a termination letter from Brock’s former employer that said he had talked in the workplace about killing people of a “particular religion and or race.” Weimer also read social media posts in which Brock referred to a coming civil war and the election being stolen from President Donald Trump.
Oh, and that stupid fucking “shaman” is a veteran too.
What frustrates me about so much of this is that it’s so extremely predictable. Of course there are Nazis in the military, of course they finally engaged in their first coordinated violent action, of course they were prepared to murder members of Congress, of course the vast majority of them will not face consequences, of course those shitheads who do face prosecution are getting massive leniency. It’s exhausting.
The United States has established itself as a might-makes-right player in world politics and the Commander-in-Chief’s attitude has been clearly extremely supportive of Nazis from the very beginning. But this problem didn’t start with him, and it will outlast him, and reducing the Nazi problem to a “this specific President problem” is the kind of analysis that got us here in the first place.
What I think you should be concerned and vigilant about is that guys like Larry Brock aren’t rare oddities or outliers. They aren’t - at least not anymore - at the fringe of American politics. They are front-and-center, they are a (loosely) coordinated force, they are a real and tangible threat to our democracy. This specific brand of bullshit has become extremely pervasive. (Each of those links is worth reading, too.)
I don’t have a solution for this. I wish I did. I mean, we should absolutely significantly cut military funding and implement strong anti-fascist policies throughout the military, including anti-terrorism teams designed to identify and cut the ties and access of individuals who support Nazi bullshit, but that is mostly just a stopgap. Fixing the conditions and the mentality that led to the spread of these ideas, that’s a much harder task.
I do know that naming and shaming Nazis is extremely effective. Maybe not as effective as collecting their scalps, but this isn’t a Quentin Tarantino movie. Letting their employers know they’re jubilant supporters of terrorist insurrection does the job.
And now for something completely different!
God, that fucking sucked, right? And it kind of feels like it sucks all the time. If only there were some way for us to collectively express our deep dissatisfaction with our conditions, and perhaps also some hope for the future. Wait a second:
When I woke up last Friday morning, I realized I had several messages. All of them were links to a TikTok video of several guys singing a song, a sea shanty from the 19th century called “Wellerman,” using TikTok’s duet feature.
It was not the first sea shanty I’d seen on TikTok. It wasn’t even the first performance of “Wellerman” I’d seen — in the past month or so, spurred by a Scottish musician named Nathan Evans and others, sea shanties have become increasingly popular on TikTok and then shared widely on other platforms. “Wellerman,” the song that’s gotten especially big in the past few days, has now been remixed and performed by other singers, and other sea shanties have started to pop up. My favorite addition is the sea-shanty reaction video, particularly this one, which has the caption “when I hand my brother the aux”:
Indeed:
If you have no fucking idea what I’m talking about, please, click through to the article, there are embedded videos. You will learn the words to Wellerman, and you will love it, and soon may the Wellerman come / to bring us sugar-and-tea-and-rum! One day, when the toungin’ is done / we’ll take our leave and go. Meanwhile, I guess we’ll keep working - for forty days, or even more. (P.S., check out The Longest Johns.)
Comeuppance
This story just has an absolutely remarkable lede, and I would feel bad if I didn’t share it with you:
Audrey Ann Southard spent years helping kids find their creative voices and strengthening her own.
The Spring Hill vocal coach and piano teacher sang like an angel when she posted videos of herself crooning Norah Jones’ Don’t Know Why or belting out Memory from Cats, and when she went to Sicily in 2012 for an international music competition, she won.
That led to a showcase on a stage inside New York’s Carnegie Hall.
More recently, Southard used her powerful sopranoto scream at police officers that they should “tell f--king Pelosi we’re coming for her! F--king traitorous c--ts, we’re coming! We’re coming for all of you!” She was part of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Also the kicker is very good. It’s a good piece the whole way through, really.
20/20 Vision
This joke would have worked better if WandaVision had come out in 2020 as planned, but whatever. The first two episodes of WandaVision released today on Disney+. If you somehow don’t already know about it despite Disney’s absolute onslaught of an ad campaign, wow, that is incredible! But the short summary is that Wanda Maximoff aka Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olson) and The Vision (Paul Bettany) are living a sitcom life, with each episode progressing through time - the first episode is an incredible tribute to the Dick Van Dyke show, for example. And also this is a Marvel Cinematic Universe property, and The Vision was killed as part of the events of Infinity War and Endgame, but WandaVision is happening as part of the contemporary timeline… so something is going on. It’s a sitcom-mystery. It’s a little weird. It’s extremely good. I watched both of the episodes this morning, I am thrilled to enjoy it as a little weekly treat.
The Vision has a storied history beyond the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though. And in fact one of my favorite “super stories” of all time is The Vision by Tom King. The New Yorker reviewed it in 2018:
A Marvel comic released in 2015, for a twelve-issue run, “The Vision” won an Eisner Award, the comic world’s highest honor, last year, and was recently published in a deluxe hardbound edition. On the back cover, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has spent the past couple of years writing the latest print version of “Black Panther”—and who, Marvel has just announced, will also take over “Captain America”—declares, “ ‘The Vision’ is the best comic going right now.” It’s high praise, but perhaps still not high enough. Even in an era when our pop-cultural skies are more jammed with Zeitgeist-powered superheroes than ever before, “The Vision” goes down as one of the great comic-book stories—an examination of the limits built into each of us, a superhero tale not about saving the world but about simply fighting to make sure that you, and your family, fit into it.
It is a story that truly lives up to the “graphic novel” categorization. It will only take you a few hours to read, if you are diligent, but it will sit with you for much longer. I first read it some years ago, and it has been on my mind regularly ever since. There is so much going on.
I am especially excited about WandaVision because The Vision is so goddamn good, and the show elicits some of the themes of the novel. I love that Kevin Feige is willing to take some risks in service of great storytelling, I love that everyone involved is seemingly as stoked about it as I am, and I love that we’re starting to see popular media embrace the wider and weirder stories that have formerly been relegated to “nerd-only” formats. I hope the MCU takes the opportunity to explore the same themes that The Vision does. And, in any case, you should go and read it, so you can explore them yourself.
I tell you hwat
Mel Magazine interviewed some propane salesmen. They insist they are not like Hank Hill. I will let you be the judge of that. Click, read, you know you want to:
For a show that ended over a decade ago, it’s had quite the afterlife online, but I had to wonder if people in the propane business are as fond of Hank Hill as the rest of us are. Are they okay with the fact that their profession has become central to a joke that began in 1997 and will seemingly never die? Are their daily lives filled with people saying, “I tell you what” and asking about what “propane accessories” they sell? Or, conversely, do they somehow identify with Hank Hill?
Well, of course, I had to find out.
Snow day
It’s a thread, click through:
You deserve some good animal content
Have a good weekend.