Ruby Bridges is 68. This is not ancient history. Not even close.
I know Ruby. She’s a really nice person. The idea that they would try and write what she did as a girl out of history is shocking to me on so many levels, the simplest of which is just, but don’t they know how lovely she is?
i just wanna talk briefly about the painting in the header image. it’s a famous Norman Rockwell called “The Problem We All Live With.” It was painted four years after the real live event and used a local model instead of Bridges herself, but is obviously a direct reference.
Before this period, Rockwell was known for these kind of “wholesome” Americana type images (which explicitly depicted a white, Christian America) that appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, but a year before the time of this painting, he got fed up with the Post’s bullshit about not letting him get political with his art and left. He got tons of hate mail for this painting. In 2011, Obama had the original installed in the White House for several months and invited Ruby Bridges to view it with him.
To be fair to Post-era Rockwell, some of his work in that period was already left-wing propaganda, even the stuff that looks very different today. Take this well-known Wholesome Americana image of a Thanksgiving dinner:
This is one of a series of pro-New Deal, pro-FDR, pro-Allied “Four Freedoms” paintings, “Freedom from Want.” The others are “Freedom of Speech”:
(This is a real guy who stood up at a town meeting in Vermont and advocated a genuinely stupid and shortsighted position (a “fuck them kids” attitude towards school funding because he personally didn’t have a wife or children, iirc). Which is part of the point since at this time in American jurisprudence unpopular political or religious speech was considered the single most ironclad constitutional right.)
“Freedom from Fear”:
“Freedom of Worship”:
This is World War II-era left-liberalism in America. It looks quaint and conservative today because fundamentally this vision for the country succeeded and is why we enjoy a lot of the rights and freedoms that we have, and that the political hard right would now like to take away from us again.
Middlegame is insane because it is first and foremost about two siblings. It’s about a brother and a sister who should have grown up together but didn’t and that is the first tragedy. After there’ll be other pains but the separation is what hurts them so deeply from the start. Sure, they are Language and Math incarnate but that pales in comparison to the fact that they genuinely love each other and that they should have had those years of growing up together. Every scene where they’re actually together is coloured by the what ifs superimposed on their synchrony and fondness for each other. Above the alchemy and the laws of nature and all it’s just platonic love, because Roger and Dodger —rhyming names and all— can’t do this shit without the other. It starts and ends this way: “I can’t do this without you. Don’t die. This is an order. This is a command. This is an adjuration. Do whatever you have to do, break whatever you have to break, but don’t you die.”
having adhd is like “fuck, it’s half past noon. that pretty much means it’s one o'clock. that means it’s lunchtime. that means it’s pretty much three. that means it’s almost five o'clock, and that means the day is pretty much over and i don’t have time for any of the things i was going to do today :( time to scroll aimlessly through social media until bedtime”
The Locked Tomb kitties for a kofi - I drew Harrow, Gideon, Kiriona, Aiglamene, Palamedes, Camilla, Pyrrha, and Nona - Hopefully you can tell who is who - w -
“Ninth was my name,” said the new arrival. “Ninth was my hearth, and my homeland. Here have I come at your calling. None may return from the River unless he be bidden by blood-rite; tell me, why have I been drawn here?”
Ruby Bridges is 68. This is not ancient history. Not even close.
I know Ruby. She’s a really nice person. The idea that they would try and write what she did as a girl out of history is shocking to me on so many levels, the simplest of which is just, but don’t they know how lovely she is?
i just wanna talk briefly about the painting in the header image. it’s a famous Norman Rockwell called “The Problem We All Live With.” It was painted four years after the real live event and used a local model instead of Bridges herself, but is obviously a direct reference.
Before this period, Rockwell was known for these kind of “wholesome” Americana type images (which explicitly depicted a white, Christian America) that appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, but a year before the time of this painting, he got fed up with the Post’s bullshit about not letting him get political with his art and left. He got tons of hate mail for this painting. In 2011, Obama had the original installed in the White House for several months and invited Ruby Bridges to view it with him.
