I have become addicted to this song. It came out in 2017. According to last.fm, Jinsang of California is “a low-profile beatmaker who specializes in idyllic, slightly dazed left-field hip-hop tracks with elements sourced from dusty soul and jazz recordings.” In this case the dusty soul music sounds to me like it comes from “Float On” (1977) by The Floaters and “Save Room” (2006) by John Legend. But according to WhoSampled.com, it is actually “Float On” (1978), a cover of The Floaters’s song by the Most Requested Rhythm Band, and a rap song, “New York” (2005) by AZ featuring Ghostface Killah and Raekwon (2005), which in turn samples at least Public Enemy. To MRRB’s credit, they add a horn, which for me is what makes this song.
This was the #1 song on the US R&B chart for six weeks in 1977. Yet further proof that music has since gone down hilll. Even in 1977 the Floaters were already becoming something of a hold-over as Black music was turning beige.
Aquarius, Libra, Leo, Cancer
Ralph, Charles, Paul, Larry
Float, float on
Float on, float on
Float, float, float on
Float on, float on
Float, float on
Float on, float on
Float, float, float on
Float on, float on
Float, float on
Float on, float on
Float, float, float on
Float on, float on
Aquarius, Libra, Leo, Cancer
Ralph, Charles, Paul, Larry
Aquarius and my name is Ralph
Now I like a woman who loves her freedom
And I like a woman who can hold her own
And if you fit that description, baby, come with me
Take my hand
Come with me, baby, to Love Land
Let me show you how sweet it could be
Sharing love with me, I want you to
Float, float on (come on, come on, come on)
Float on, float on
Float, float, float on
Float on, float on (float on)
Libra and my name is Charles
Now I like a woman that’s quiet
A woman who carries herself like Miss Universe
A woman who would take me in her arms
And she would say, Charles, yeah
And if you fit that description
This is for you especially
This came out in 1982. MTV put it in heavy rotation, along with other videos Russell Mulcahy directed (“Rio” by Duran Duran, “True” by Spandau Ballet, etc). It went to #17 in the US. It did not chart in the UK.
In 1987 Joel explained the song to his Russian fans:
“This song is about young people living in the Northeast of America. Their lives are miserable because the steel factories are closing down. They desperately want to leave… but they stay because they were brought up to believe that things were going to get better. Maybe that sounds familiar.”
Well we’re living here in Allentown
And they’re closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time
Filling out forms
Standing in line
Well our fathers fought the Second World War
Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore
Met our mothers in the USO
Asked them to dance
Danced with them slow
And we’re living here in Allentown
But the restlessness was handed down
And it’s getting very hard to stay
Well we’re waiting here in Allentown
For the Pennsylvania we never found
For the promises our teachers gave
If we worked hard
If we behaved
So the graduations hang on the wall
But they never really helped us at all
No they never taught us what was real
Iron and coke
And chromium steel
And we’re waiting here in Allentown
But they’ve taken all the coal from the ground
And the union people crawled away
Every child had a pretty good shot
To get at least as far as their old man got
But something happened on the way to that place
They threw an American flag in our face
Well I’m living here in Allentown
And it’s hard to keep a good man down
But I won’t be getting up today
And it’s getting very hard to stay
And we’re living here in Allentown
This song counts as jazzhop or lofi hip-hop. I heard it at an all-night coffee shop on YouTube. It came out in 2020, done by Gesmis, who is from Kutaisi, Georgia. In Greek legend Kutaisi was at the eastern end of the world, the city of King Aeëtes of Colchis, possessor of the Golden Fleece. It stood on the Phasis River (now called the Rioni), the border between Europe and Asia in the geography of Anaximander (-500s) and Herodotus (-400s). In the geography of the Wikipedia (2022) it is squarely in Asia as lies south of the Caucasus Mountains. So the song also counts as Asian.
The Mythic Past, according to Jason Stanley in “How Fascism Works” (2018), is a fascist technique of control. Combined with fascist propaganda and anti-intellectualism, it creates a state of unreality in which fake news and conspiracy theories drive out reasoned debate.
George Orwell in “1984”:
“‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
Practitioners:
early 1900s: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, neo-Confederates (all those statues);
early 2000s: The Daily Stormer; the right wing in the US, France, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, India, Burma, etc.
Not mere sanitization: As reported on this blog, countries like Japan and the US love to sanitize their ugly past when it is taught at high school. The Mythic Past does that too, but it goes way beyond:
Red flags: Thanks to the logic of fascist power, the Mythic Past tends to have these features regardless of the actual facts of history:
it is glorious: the country was strong and ruled others, everyone practised traditional values and gender roles, and “we” were on top, whatever we (race, religion, and/or culture) the fascist leaders say they champion. It was all ended by globalism, cosmopolitan elites, and respect for “universal values” like equality. Or by out-group minorities gaining too much power. Either way it fatally weakened the nation.
strong, happy patriarchal families: when men were men and women were women! Men bravely fought in wars, women knew their place and were devoted mothers. Families were not falling apart like they are now as people abandon traditional gender roles. Fascist leaders need to glorify strong patriarchal families – where whatever the father says goes – to make their own hierarchy and authoritarianism seem right and good. What is the Dear Leader, after all, but the father of the nation?
civilization and conquest: in the Mythic Past the country ruled or conquered others, furthered or defended civilization. Because fascist leaders themselves are bent on doing the same sort of thing (imperialism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, etc). Therefore:
exceptionalism: Stanley: “If one can convince a population that they are rightfully exceptional, that they are destined by nature or religious fate to rule other populations, one has already convinced them of a monstruous lie.”
the ugly past downplayed, denied or censored: the country was ethnically pure and good. It has an amazingly unblemished record – despite its love of military solutions and unchecked power.
liberals say the Mythic Past is untrue. And therefore not a good grounding for government policy. But, as Stanley notes: “It is typical for fascist politicians to represent a country’s actual history in conspiratorial terms as a narrative concocted by liberal elites and cosmopolitans to victimize the people of the true ‘nation’.”
The Mythic Past is untrue – thus the word “mythic” – because it has little regard for facts and every regard for supporting fascist policies. Fascists imagine their own designs for the future as a glorious age in the past. The point of history is not to learn from it but use it to concoct a version for poltical gain.
The Chinese have been in America since at least the 1600s, back when California was a way station for the Manila galleons crossing the Pacific. They began to arrive in numbers from 1848 to 1882, from the California Gold Rush to the Chinese Exclusion Act. They were part of a Chinese diaspora in which millions fled the dying decades of the old, corrupt Qing dynasty in China. They went to South East Asia, Australia, the Pacific, the Americas, and South Africa. This post is just about the US bit.
Snapshot:
Location: mostly the West Coast.
Population: over 100,000 by 1880, about 95% male in 1900. Most came from Toishan (aka Taishan, fka Sunning) County in Guangdong province in the south of China. Very few Chinese Americans were then ABCs – American Born Chinese.
Major cities: Chinatown in San Francisco, California.
Language: Cantonese (not Mandarin) Chinese. Most could not speak English!
Religion: Confucianism, ancestor worship, Buddhism, Taoism. Fewer than 20% were Christian – mostly those who had been converted in China by Protestant missionaries.
Government: Were not allowed to become citizens and vote before 1898 (and then only if US-born). They would even lose the right to testify in court or make bail. But they could still sometimes effect change through protest and court cases.
Economy: Chinese-owned businesses (restaurants, laundries, grocery stores, contractors), contract labour (coolies), prostitution, etc. Much of the money was sent back to China, where the dollar went farther and most of their families still lived – US immigration policy did not let most Chinese men bring over their wives.
Timeline:
1834: Afong Moy becomes the first recorded Chinese woman to arrive in the US. Chinese sailors were already a common sight in New York. She became a museum exhibit and later a P.T. Barnum sideshow.
1847: British banks cut off funding to warehouses along the Pearl River in Guangdong province. Trade within the province comes to almost a complete stop, throwing 100,000 out of work.
1848: Gold Mountain – what the Chinese call California after gold was discovered there. Some struck it rich, but most drifted back to San Francisco where many opened restaurants and laundries. White men considered cooking and laundry women’s work – but neglected to bring their women. That left an opening for Chinese men to make a living. By 1920 nearly half of Chinese workers worked in a restaurant or laundry.
1850-64: Taiping Rebellion in China leaves over 20 million dead.
1863-69: The Transcontinental Railroad built. The part from California to Utah was built by a workforce that was over 90% Chinese. Their experience in China with explosives and building things into the sides of mountains was invaluable.
1885: Tape v Hurley – California Supreme Court rules that the state has to provide a public education for children of the Mongolian race, not just those of the white, Negro, and Indian races. But schools could still be racially segregated.
1885: Rocky Springs massacre in Wyoming.
1887: Snake River massacre in Hell’s Canyon, Oregon.
1892: Geary Act: Chinese Americans have to carry ID or risk deportation. Cannot testify in court or make bail.
1898: US v Wong Kim Ark – US Supreme Court extends birthright citizenship of the 14th Amendment to Chinese Americans.
– Abagond, 2022.
Sources: mainly “The Chinese in America” (2003) by Iris Chang.
This came out in 2018, hitting the top ten in China, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and their native South Korea. It is currently the most watched K-pop song on YouTube with 1.8 billion views as of May 29th 2022. That means there are still people alive today who have never seen it. Some of them even have Internet service. Blackpink (블랙핑크) has six videos with over a billion views. Taylor Swift, to compare, has five, Beyonce has one, “Halo” (2009). Of course, this song pales before “Baby Shark” (2016), with 10 billion views at last count.
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe is the book that, more than any other, turned White opinion in the northern US against slavery, tearing the country apart in the American Civil War (1861-65). Stowe did this by packaging the facts about slavery into a tear-jerker Victorian novel aimed squarely at White women, mothers in particular. And this at a time when it was common for even White women to lose a child – not to the auction block, but to an early death.
Stereotypes: The book spawned two stereotypes about Black people:
Uncle Toms and
piccaninnies
and reinforced others.
But this seems to be more the work of the many theatrical adaptations that followed than of the book itself. Stowe was racist, about both “negroes” (always lower-case) and “Anglo-Saxons” (always upper), and parts of the book seem like a minstrel show, but to her great credit she humanized Black people for a large White audience better than anyone else at the time.
Uncle Tom: People who have read the book say that Uncle Tom was not an Uncle Tom, that he was the hero of the book! This is true. While he was a pious, obedient slave who never bad-mouthed his masters no matter how cruel they were, he gave his life rather than betray two runaway slaves. Black people in White media are often self-sacrificing for the greater good of White people – Sidney Poitier springs to mind – but this time it was for the good of fellow Black people! What a relief! As it turned out, all along Uncle Tom was serving not White people but Christ. The irony is that he took Ephesians 6:5 seriously, the very verse of the Bible that slaveholders most loved to quote:
“Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.”
Stowe never lets you forget that he was a way better Christian than any of his masters.
Use of dialect: Uncle Tom seems to speak in minstrelese – except when quoting Scripture, singing a hymn or giving a stirring speech. Then he lapses into Standard English. Stowe did have Black servants, but Whites got their picture of Blacks mainly from minstrel shows, just like today they mainly get it from television. The incessant minstrelese made the early parts of the book hard for me to stomach. Even the Quaker English in the book seemed fake, especially when compared to “Moby Dick” (1851). Though, to be fair, at least one (White) linguist, Allison Burkette, says Stowe’s use of dialect was accurate.
Based on true events: Everything that takes place in the book is based on something that took place in real life. Which is why nearly all of it takes place in Kentucky (across the river from Cincinnati where Stowe lived from 1832 to 1850) and Lousiana (where her brother lived). Stowe did not want to be accused of exaggeration. Uncle Tom himself is believed to have been inspired by Josiah Henson, whose autobiography came out in 1849, just before she began writing.
Religion: mainly Judaism, divided into three sects: Saducees, Pharisees, Essenes. And the off-brand Judaism of the Samaritans. For the fashionable or foreign: Greek paganism (idol worship). The Canaanite god Beelzebub seems to have still been in business.
Pharisees, unlike the Saducees, believed in angels, immortal souls, Judgement Day and a Messiah. The Pharisees will soon give birth to two other sects: the militaristic Zealots in 6 AD and the pacifistic Christians in about 30 AD. Modern Judaism comes from the Pharisees.
Government: now a restive part of the Roman Empire. Roman rule is still indirect: the Jewish parts were ruled by means of the Tetrarchy: four vassal princes (three sons and one sister of Herod the Great):
Herod Archelaus: got the lion’s share (see the map above). Despite his cruelty (or because of it) he was never able to bring true peace to his part of Palestine. This will lead to direct Roman rule, bringing a census in 7 AD, Pontius Pilate in 26 AD, and the Roman-Jewish War from 66 to 73 AD (in which the Temple of Jerusalem is destroyed).
Herod Antipas: ruled to the north, including western Galilee where Jesus is from. This is the Herod who will hand over Jesus to Pontius Pilate. He is not the Herod who ruled at the time of Jesus’s birth: that was Herod the Great, his father.
Herod Philip: parts north and east of the Sea of Galilee. He was also known as Philip the Tetrarch because he had a brother also named Herod Philip. He was married to his niece Salome, the one who wanted John the Baptist’s head. She is not to be confused with her great aunt:
Salome I: Herod the Great’s scheming sister. He left her parts of the coast and a bit along the Jordan River.
under direct Roman rule: the Greek and Gentile parts, mainly in the north, like Decapolis.
Currency: a mix of Greek and Roman coins. The Roman denarius (called a penny in the King James Bible) was a day’s pay. It had 3.9 grams of silver and the image of Caesar.
Economy: wine, figs, the Temple of Jerusalem. No major ports, like nearby Tyre or Alexandria. But it was on the main trade route from Mesopotamia and the Silk Road beyond, bringing silks and spices.
History: In the year 63 BC Rome overthrew the Maccabees, the Jewish kings who had ruled an independent kingdom since 142 BC. The Romans put in place a puppet, Antipater the Idumaean, who had no royal or even Jewish blood (though he was Jewish by religion). He was the father of Herod the Great, who ruled at the time of Jesus’s birth, and the grandfather of Herod Antipater, who ruled at his death.
Palestine’s corner of the Roman Empire in 1 AD. Because Rome’s rule was indirect it is not yet in pink but light green. See full map.
– Abagond, 2022.
Source: mainly Danzig HD Mapper on Youtube and “The Land of Canann” (1971) by Isaac Asimov.
This sounds like it is over a hundred years old, but it only seems to go back to 2018. I have heard it on YouTube videos as background music, presumably because it is not copyrighted. I find it wonderful, marvellous and deeply reassuring that a song so beautiful and seemingly simple – on an instrument with only 88 keys – was yet to be played just four years ago.
“Irreversible Damage” (2020) by Abigail Shrier is subtitled “The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters”. The cover shows a little girl with a huge hole where her womb would be. The fearmongering never lets up: the introduction is called “The Contagion” – which strangely echoes Nazi propaganda about homosexuals (which then included trans people). It is published by Regnery Press, which puts out gems like Michelle Malkin’s “In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror” (2004).
The Economistnamed “Irrreversible Damage” a “book of the year” in 2020. Despite the book’s heavy use of transphobic language, it detected “not a drop of animosity in the book”. Even worse, it dangerously repeats its misinformation.
ContraPoints calls it “a transphobic screed of a book”.
Psychology Today, in a column by Jack Turban MD MHS, who unlike Shrier is an actual medical journalist, said it was “full of irresponsible journalistic practices and outright falsehoods.” Maybe worst of all, the book:
“tells parents to reject their children’s gender identity, which is one of the greatest predictors of suicide attempts among transgender kids.”
The book is highly misleading. Shrier seems to come with the facts – interviews, statistics, scientific studies and all that. But it is all one-sided, supported by anecdotes and twisted facts. The science is either cherry-picked or misrepresented. The medical and scientific consensus is dismissed as “gender ideology”.
Even the cover is misleading: the actual cases of irreversible damage reported in the book were done on adults, not on girls, and certainly not on little girls.
Transphobic bubble: Shrier has plenty of interviews quoted in the book and she herself has done plenty of media interviews since – but almost the whole time she is talking to transphobes!!! People like Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Jordan Peterson, but most especially, at the heart of her book, parents who oppose the gender transition of their trans sons. She thinks their sons are deluded – and calls them by their deadnames and she/her pronouns – but comes to this conclusion without ever talking to them! It is all based on parent report. As is the Lisa Littman study the book is largely based on.
Note that “transphobe” is itself a loaded term, like “gender ideology”, but the fact remains that Shrier is getting only half the picture. If that.
It is like writing a book about Black people based on Stormfront or Fox News. If she wrote a book about runaway slaves in 1855, she would have mainly interviewed slave owners and blamed the increase in runaway slaves on “abolitionist ideology” or drapetomania.
The argument of the book: Troubled teenage girls are getting swept up into a transgender craze being pushed by Tumblr and YouTube on the Internet and spread by “peer contagion”. It is the new anorexia. Meanwhile doctors, teachers, and scientists are being cowed by trans activists into supporting “gender ideology”. Gender transition is practically being forced on these hapless girls, leading to high rates of regret – because anecdotes!
Maybe parents would like to believe this instead of taking the trans identity of their children seriously, but it does not seem to be true in the vast majority of cases.
– Abagond, 2022.
Update (June 2nd 2022): As bad as Regnery Press is, it was never owned by a neo-Nazi, as an earlier version of this post stated. I had mixed up Henry Regnery with his nephew William Regnery II, who used Richard Spencer as a mouthpiece. Sorry for the mistake. Henry was on the American First Committee, which opposed war against Nazi Germany, but as far as I know he was never anything more than hard-right. In any case, the Regnery family sold the Press in 1993. Thanks to Lemmy for catching this mistake!
“Jane Eyre” (1847) is a romance novel by non-Asian writer Charlotte Bronte. Have you ever wanted to be a governess in a creepy old mansion with someone screaming in the attic in the middle of the night? Or fall in love with a rich man with a mysterious past? Then this is the book for you! It was a bestseller not only in its own time 175 years ago, but it is still in print and widely regarded as one of the 100 best novels in both the US and its native UK.
I first read it years ago when I was young and naive. The plot seemed cliched and the characters cold. I was later informed that the cliches were the genre conventions of Gothic romance novels and that the coldness was “Britsh reserve”. Oh.
I read it a second time in2022, this year, finishing it on Valentine’s Day. It has been much improved. The cliches and coldness I took as a given: love among the reserved and secretive British. And I have since lived much more of life, some of it strangely Eyrean, and have read the Bible. Had I been familiar with the the Book of Common Prayer too, maybe it would have made even more sense. It and the Bible were part of the cultural literacy of the not-yet-post-Christian Anglosphere back then. Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” (1863) plays off of both.
Bronte’s view of religion and the clergy, despite being a pastor’s daughter, seems clear-eyed.
I like it way better than “Pride and Prejudice” (1813) by Jane Austen. It makes Jane Austen look like warmed-over soap opera that is more about money than love. Austen lacks the poetry and darkness of Bronte. From chapter 21 onwards, “Jane Eyre” leaves Jane Austen in the dust.
But “Jane Eyre” itself is out-Bronted byanother Bronte, Charlotte’s sister Emily, in “Wuthering Heights” (1847). I read that first – it easily makes my top ten – and so my expectations for “Jane Eyre” were way too high. But I seem to like “Wuthering Heights” better than most.
“Jane Eyre” most reminds me of “Rebecca” (1938) by Daphne du Maurier, which seems to be the 1900’s answer to “Jane Eyre”.
My ranking (with the Goodreads rating in parentheses):
Wuthering Heights (3.88)
Jane Eyre (4.14)
Pride and Prejudice (4.28)
Rebecca (4.24)
All four make the list of the top 100 novels in both the US and UK. All of them are good.
Film and television adaptations: The BBC adaptation of 2011 is the best one according to my sister, a huge Austen-and-Bronte fan. It pretty much turns the book into soap opera: the plot is preserved, mostly, but not the poetry. And it is way too sunny! It is like they either did not read the book or did not go to film school. But so much of the book takes place in Jane Eyre’s head (and heart) that it is a harder book to put on film than Jane Austen’s behavioristic, dialogue-driven books.
Favourite line: “A true Janian reply!”
– Abagond, 2022.
Sources: Etsy, which had a picture of the same Signet paperback edition that I first read.
The Rising Star flag with 50 stripes: US flag in the style of the Japanese imperial flag. As seen on reddit.
Welcome to Asian American History Month 2022! On this blog it will run from May 18th to June 18th. Hopefully I will be able to write some posts on Asian Americans and the Asia/Pacific. They make up most of the world, but it is a part of the world that I do not write much about. Third time’s a charm!
Some ideas I have:
Awkwafina
Blackpink
al-Khwarizmi
Korematsu v USA
Hong Kong
Taiwan
Korea
Japanese Americans
Hmong Americans
Chinese Americans
Chinese Americans in the 1800s
Chinese Americans in the 1900s
Yellow Peril
Africans in China
China in Africa
Anna May Wong
Charlie Chan
Austronesian Expansion
Belt & Road Initiative
Black women, Asian men
“Chinese food”
Chinese technology circa 2020
Dalits
Narendra Modi
BJP
Davon Neverdon
Dinesh D’Souza
Fareed Zakaria
50 Cent Party
Gangnido
Great Leap Forward
LA Riot of 1992
New Guinea
Nikki Haley
permanent war
Plantation Hawaii
Rock Springs Massacre
Rohingyas
Sinicization
Xi Jinping
Xi Jinping thought
Zhao Rugua
Zionism
Here are the posts I have done so far (to be updated throughout the month):
(none so far)
In the comments below, tell me what you would like to see posts on. If you like any of the above ideas or have ideas of your own, please let me know. Thanks!
a Bushmaster XM-15 semiautomatic rifle, the sort used by Gendron.
Ruth Whitfield (left), Pearly Young and Aaron Salter Jr.
Payton Gendron (2003- ), a White American gunman, killed 10 and injured 3 last Saturday afternoon, May 14th 2022, in upstate New York at a Tops supermarket in a Black neighbourhood of Buffalo. All but two of the victims were Black. It was shown live on the Internet for a few minutes before the feed was cut.
The dead:
Celestine Chaney, 65
Roberta A. Drury, 32
Andre Mackneil, 53
Katherine Massey, 72
Margus D. Morrison, 52
Heyward Patterson, 67
Aaron Salter, 55
Geraldine Talley, 62
Ruth Whitfield, 86
Pearl Young, 77
Gendron drove for three and a half hours in his parents’s car to get to the place with “the highest black population percentage and isn’t that far away,” according to a 180-page online manifesto that is almost cetainly his. Buffalo is 37% Black. His home town of Conklin, also in upstate New York, is 1% Black.
The police confronted him in front of Tops, with bodies lying on the ground. He pointed his gun to his neck but police still managed to take him alive – a courtesy not always extended to Black men, even when unarmed or back turned.
The gun: a Bushmaster XM-15 semiautomatic rifle (pictured above) with the N-word and “14” written on it. The 14 is short for the 14 Words, a neo-Nazi slogan:
“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Even though he threatened to shoot up his high school last year, he was still allowed to buy a high-powered rifle after police were sure that he was not sick in the head.
The motive: as the manifesto put it:
“To show to the replacers [= non-White people] that as long as the White man lives, our land will never be theirs and they will never be safe from us.
“To directly reduce immigration rates to European lands by intimidating and physically removing the replacers themselves.
“To intimidate the replacers already living on our lands to emigrate back to their home countries.
“To agitate the political enemies of my people into action, to cause them to overextend their own hand and experience the eventual and inevitable backlash as a result.
“To incite violence, retaliation and further divide between the European people and the replacers currently occupying European soil…
“To add momentum to the pendulum swings of history, further destabilizing and polarizing Western society in order to eventually destroy the current nihilistic, hedonistic, individualistic insanity that has taken control of Western thought.”
Great Replacement Theory, aka White genocide, is what all this is based on. As the manifesto explains:
“Millions of people pouring across our borders, legally. Invited by the state and corporate entities to replace the White people who have failed to reproduce, failed to create the cheap labor, failed to create new consumers and tax base that the corporations and states need to have to thrive.”
No longer a fringe belief: Although Gendron was mainly inspired by Brenton Tarrant, the New Zealand mosque shooter, Republican blowhards like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens push versions of this theory. According to an AP poll that came out last week, 42% of Republicans now believe in replacement theory.
This is my favourite emo rock song. It came out in 2006, when MySpace was still a thing, going to #1 in the UK, #9 in their native US. They are from New Jersey. MTV was so impressed with the music video that in 2017 they named it the “Greatest Music Video of the Century”. How could the remaining 83 years of the century possibly top it? Only time will tell.
Colleen Atwood was the costume designer for the music video. As you might imagine, she has worked with Tim Burton and Disney. In fact, she is working on Disney’s live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid”, due out next year in 2023. Her work has appeared here twice before: she worked on Disney’s live-action “Dumbo” (2019) and Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” (2010).
Samuel Bayer was the director. He sticks to rock videos, so he has only appeared here once before: “Stupid Girl” (1996) by Garbage. But will probably appear again when I inevitably post “Zombie” (1994) by the Cranberries.
As a father, I love the opening words of the song.
When I was a young boy, my father
Took me into the city to see a marching band
He said, “Son, when you grow up would you be
The savior of the broken, the beaten and the damned?”
He said, “Will you defeat them? Your demons
And all the non-believers, the plans that they have made?
Because one day, I’ll leave you a phantom
To lead you in the summer to join the black parade…”
When I was a young boy, my father
Took me into the city to see a marching band
He said, “Son, when you grow up would you be
The savior of the broken, the beaten and the damned?”
Sometimes I get the feeling she’s watching over me
And other times I feel like I should go
And through it all, the rise and fall, the bodies in the streets
And when you’re gone, we want you all to know
We’ll carry on, we’ll carry on, and though you’re
Dead and gone, believe me, your memory
Will carry on, we’ll carry on, and in my
Heart, I can’t contain it, the anthem won’t explain it
A world that sends you reeling from decimated dreams
Your misery and hate will kill us all
So paint it black and take it back, let’s shout it loud and clear
Defiant to the end we hear the call
To carry on, we’ll carry on, and though you’re
Dead and gone, believe me, your memory
Will carry on, we’ll carry on, and though you’re
Broken and defeated, your weary widow marches
On and on, we carry through the fears (Oh, oh, oh)
Disappointed faces of your peers (Oh, oh, oh)
Take a look at me, ’cause I could not care at all
Do or die, you’ll never make me
Because the world will never take my heart
Go and try, you’ll never break me
We want it all, we wanna play this part
I won’t explain or say I’m sorry
I’m unashamed, I’m gonna show my scars
Give a cheer for all the broken
Listen here, because it’s who we are
I’m just a man, I’m not a hero
Just a boy, who had to sing this song
I’m just a man, I’m not a hero
I don’t care!
We’ll carry on, we’ll carry on, and though you’re
Dead and gone, believe me, your memory
Will carry on, we’ll carry on, and though you’re
Broken and defeated, your weary widow marches
Do or die, you’ll never make me
Because the world will never take my heart
Go and try, you’ll never break me
We want it all, we wanna play this part (We’ll carry on!)
Do or die, you’ll never make me (We’ll carry on!)
Because the world will never take my heart (We’ll carry on!)
Go and try, you’ll never break me (We’ll carry-)
We want it all, we wanna play this part (We’ll carry on…)
Abagond 
