Onion Watch: Done; The Boot, Day 12

[pameladean]

The Onion Watch is over. Both Cassie and Saffron are fine.

I am very tired of this boot, and yet two weeks is really a very short time to be wearing one of these. It's better since I got the shoe balancer. But that can't be worn outside at this time of year. I ventured out yesterday sans shoe balancer, but with a lot of help from Eric. Fortunately, my winter boots have slightly thicker soles than my regular walking shoes, so the imbalance was less. But my hips, back, and knees set up a huge complaint all the same.

We saw "The Last Jedi" so we could stop avoiding spoilers all over; went grocery shopping; had a late dinner at Pizza Luce, splitting an order of roasted Brussels sprouts and a small spinach salad and then going our own way for the entrees; and went back to his house and conversed and cuddled the cat.

We enjoyed the movie a lot, though the sound balance was such that we missed some dialogue, including, almost certainly, some punch lines. It is thoroughly and unabashedly a "Star Wars" movie; not one of the prequels, but harking back in ways great and small to the first trilogy only with a lot more different kinds of people in it. Of course we had a lot of quibbles. I am gobsmacked, however, at the reactions of a certain group who hated the movie. What they are objecting to is so mild, so nearly anodyne, and yet they can't stand it.  If anybody is moved to discuss any aspect of the movie in the comments, please clearly mark any spoilers. And I'm very short on patience with certain lines of argument.

Being outside was fine while the temperature was above freezing, but when things started to ice up I became a paranoid mass of apprehension.

On Wednesday morning, I will get up, and I will not have to put on the boot. The clinic says that if I have no residual swelling or pain, I'm good to go; otherwise they will refer me to physical therapy.  I am hoping very hard for the former outcome. The swelling is almost gone now, but there is still some twinginess right around the ankle bone.

I'm still reading Anthony Price, and wanted to note down one place where history caught him up, through no fault of his own. In an earlier book, Our Man in Camelot, a bunch of younger agents in Price's imaginary intelligence department, Research and Development, are arguing with David Audley about, well, everything; but Frances Fitzgibbon, my single favorite character in the entire series, refers to "the rot at the top" of the Nixon Administration. Audley shuts her down by saying that it was the rot at the top that brought the boys home from Viet Nam.

This line never did sit well with me, but this time, I thought, "Wait, wait, wait, didn't Nixon act to delay the negotiations that would end the war so that his anti-war presidential campaign would not have the wind taken out of its sails, and so that he could get the credit?"  Yes. Yes he did. The tapes were released in 2013. Lyndon Johnson knew what Nixon was doing, but he figured that Hubert Humphrey would win the election, so he didn't do anything. STOP WITH THAT NONSENSE YOU SELF-SATISFIED BLUNDERING POLITICIANS; IT NEVER WORKS OUT THE WAY YOU THINK.

I want to grab David Audley through the page of the book and give him this information. More than that, I want to give it to Frances.

Pamela

Edited to make an errant sentence have some sense in it.

Comments

[rj_anderson]

He couldn't have killed Snoke because Snoke wasn't physically present when the decision was made to fire the weapon, he was only there as a hologram. And the order to fire Starkiller came not on Hux's authority but from Snoke as the Supreme Leader, so if Kylo had killed Hux then some other First Order officer would have taken over and fired the weapon on Snoke's orders instead. Given that it took the Resistance's best pilot and several X-Wing squadrons to destroy Starkiller, and that they could only do that because Han and Chewie and Finn had infiltrated the base to take down the shields and plant bombs everywhere, I'm finding it hard to imagine any scenario in which Kylo working independently could have stopped the weapon.

And Kylo does believe the First Order has legitimacy as a governing power. He's wrong, of course, and entirely deluded to think that they can bring peace to the galaxy by military force, but he bangs on at tedious length about his political views in Alan Dean Foster's novelization (although those clunky bits of dialogue were mercifully excised from the movie). He's a twisted idealist and a religious fanatic, not a cynic.

We both agree he's on the wrong side and has done a lot of horrible things that can't (and shouldn't) be swept under the carpet. But I believe the filmmakers have left way too much questions open about Kylo's agency and culpability and spent too much time showing his inner struggles and doubts for the third movie to simply go, "Oh, he's really just a stock villain that Rey's going to chop in half so we can all cheer and go home." Like I said, he may still die but it's not going to be treated as a ding-dong-the-Sith-is-dead moment. (Especially since Kylo isn't a Sith. Even at his most rage-filled moments we've never seen so much of a flash of the yellow Dark Side eyes we saw on Palpatine and Anakin, which I find interesting.)

[graydon]

I think "Sith" and "Jedi" are customary labels for preferences in interacting with the Force, they're not really things-as-things even as much as a concept like "Earth tones" can be said to be. Someone like Mace Windu was pretty obviously sith by inclination, even though serving as a cultural-institution jedi. (Leia, too, is pretty obviously much more sith than not in their approach to the Force; passion, intuition, and honesty, rather than composure, perception, and compassion.) The historical jedi were hopelessly corrupt through expediency; right-action turned into "what does the Senate want?", rather than what your perception and intuition show you from a state of detachment. The historical sith were hopelessly corrupt through ambition toward control; right-action turns into "my passion is of supreme importance". I don't think that makes being a sith-inclined Force user inherently corrupt; there's presumably a lot of ways to be passionate, honest, and intuitive and an OK space wizard.

Kylo is totally making the "my passion is of supreme importance" error, which is an interesting parallel to Luke (who is doing the same thing, only the passion is self-loathing about error and the possibility of further error). (I think that's an intentional parallel.) So, no, no "turning to the Dark Side" eye-effects, but I think it's legitimately being coded as a Sith way to fail. It's certainly not the jedi error of trying to generalize compassion to the statistical mass.