The Orangutan Story

Murders in the Rue Morgue: Dupin Solves a Gruesome Murder

The Orangutan Story by winchysteria

my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?

wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.

background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.

so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—

then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”

some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.

much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.

so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.

my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. the panel moderator suddenly stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:

WE! DO NOT! TALK ABOUT! THE ORANGUTAN!

People are crazy. Spend time working with anything and you are going to cultivate a set of beliefs about that thing and if you encounter someone who disagrees with your carefully cultivated set of beliefs, well, everybody else better stand back because things are going to get hot.

Via Bayou Renaissance Man who provided a link to a series of screenshots. I don't like this so I decide to run them through an OCR program to extract the text. I'm thinking maybe Google Lens will do this for me, but no luck, so I go dig up an online program that does a reasonable job. I take the extracted text and compile it into one text file . . . and then I realize I could have just searched for the story and probably found the original, or a close relative, and what do you know, I did and here it is.

 

Will Rogers - The Ropin' Fool

Will Rogers - The Ropin' Fool
Will Rogers Memorial Museum
Just because. 

Checking the date, I noticed the copyright date in the intro: MCDCCCCXXI which Thomas's Roman numeral converter tells us is 1821. Someone stuck an extra C just after the M. Take it out and you get 1921.

Words of War

China's aircraft carrier, the Liaoning with other ships during a drill at sea. © AFP

We start with a few words about real estate and investing:

“Buy land. They ain't making any more of the stuff.” - Will Rogers

Moving on to politics we have:

Politics is and always has been a blood sport.  If you're not prepared to take it on at that level you have no business getting involved in it. - Karl Denninger

Combine those and you get:

The whole history of international relations is about one side establishing borders and another trying to cross them. Both literally and figuratively. There has been no century when borders have remained immutable, at least in the spaces where international politics were concentrated at the time. And it is clear that redrawing the dividing lines has never been without the use of force, sometimes on a very large scale. - Fyodor Lukyanov

 

Rational Prepping

In the show Long Way Round, Scottish actor Ewan McGregor and relative nobody Charley Boorman (and a cameraman) rode motorcycles from London to New York.

Adaptive Curmudgeon is preparing for what's coming down the pike:

I haven’t written much about my Quixotic initiative to “get my mechanical shit together”. I’m still working at it.

I don’t like pro-actively fixing things that aren’t 100% fully dead! I prefer to use my equipment ruthlessly until it’s very worn out. When a machine finally gives up the ghost I don’t immediately replace it. I go without for as long as I can.

This year is different. Reluctantly, and with a tear in my eye, I’ve pried my wallet open and bled money to fix shit like there’s no tomorrow.

There’s a reason for this, in the Bidenverse there is no tomorrow. I mean that rationally. Don’t wait for tomorrow because nothing will be cheaper and more convenient tomorrow than it is today. Conditions like 2019 won’t recur for years or decades if at all; so don’t wait for them. You’re in “the good old days” right fucking now! For the next few years the time to do things is immediately and the time to build your savings has passed. (As always, show moderation.)

It’s a fact, or at least a reasoned projection, that shit will cost more in the future. That’s the exact definition of inflation.

Adapative's story explains the connection between inflation and the picture.

France Financed the American Revolution

Throwing Money Away

Today we have a little history lesson:

The US is about to go full Louis XVI by Simon Black

On September 3, 1783, after nearly a year of excruciating back-and-forth negotiations, all sides had finally gathered together in Paris to sign a historic peace agreement.

It was a pretty important peace deal. Because the Treaty of Paris, as it is now known, is what formally ended the American Revolution, and when Great Britain legally recognized the United States as an independent nation.

The treaty was signed in Paris because France had been a major supporter of the US war effort. And just as soon as the ink was dry, French King Louis XVI ordered his finance minister to prepare an accounting of exactly how much money France had spent on US independence.

The result was nothing short of astonishing—more than 1 billion livres.

To put that number in context, the French Treasury’s entire annual revenue only amounted to around 200 million livres.

So they had basically sunk FIVE YEARS worth of their tax revenue fighting someone else’s war.

Granted, Britain was still one of France’s main rivals. And the French did not care for British King George III.

But the American War was simply too costly, and France had already been on very shaky financial footing well before this point.

Louis XIV had nearly bankrupted the country a century before. His successor, Louis XV, had to drastically slash expenses and could barely hang on financially.

Then, in 1774, just prior to the American Revolution, Louis XVI became king at a time that France was rapidly deteriorating.

You’d think that with so much economic turmoil at home that he would have focused on his own national interests… and, in lieu of money, weapons, and ships, he would have instead sent the royal thoughts and prayers to America.

But no. Lucky for the United States, Louis XVI courageously fought the American Revolution down to the very last French taxpayer.

Only after the war did Louis finally take stock of the situation and realize the truth: America was in a much better position. Britain was bruised but still powerful. Yet his own France was nearly bankrupt and desperately in need of cash. Not exactly a win/win.

Louis XVI was King, but his powers were limited; he was beholden to the legislature, called the Estates-General, and he couldn’t simply decree new taxes without their consent.

The King did, however, control the tax collectors. And Louis made sure they had every authority to coerce, harass, and intimidate money out of French citizens.

French tax collectors had the authority to walk right into people’s homes unannounced, conduct surprise inspections to look for hidden wealth, and walk away with whatever money or property they felt would satisfy the peasant’s tax bill.

This is actually a pretty common theme throughout history: governments that are on the ropes routinely resort to plundering the savings of their citizens.

Several ancient Roman emperors, in fact, from Diocletian to Valentinian III, famously sent ruthless tax collectors to harass their citizens and steal their wealth. Several ancient Chinese dynasties did the same thing. So did the declining Ottoman Empire.

Significantly ramping up tax collection efforts is typically a hallmark of an economy and empire in decline. 

Please remember that the French Revolution started in 1789, just six years after the Treaty of Paris.

Simon goes on to talk about the Inflation Reduction Act and the effect it is likely to have on the US economy (not good). I like his conclusion:

Taxes ultimately represent the government’s ‘slice’ of an economic pie. So when a country is prosperous and an economy is strong, the government’s slice continues to grow because the overall economic pie is constantly getting bigger.

But nations in decline don’t see it this way. For them, the pie is shrinking. So they think the only way to increase their slice is to go after other people’s crumbs.

History shows this is absolutely the wrong move. Raising tax rates, inventing new taxes, and recruiting armies of tax collectors only makes the pie shrink even more.

Their efforts, instead, should be focused on making the pie bigger. But they don’t think that way.

Bear in mind this is all brought to you by the same people who are shoveling your tax dollars out the door to Ukraine $50 billion at a time. It’s very ‘Louis XVI’ of them.

All of these trends—the cannibalistic surge in tax authorities, the anti-productive regulations, the economic scarcity mentality—are all hallmarks of an empire in decline.

The situation is NOT terminal. It is NOT irreversible. But it is reason enough to have a Plan B.

All Lies, All the Time

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Bucha, Ukraine, April 4, 2022 [Marko Djurica/Reuters]

Good piece about propaganda, freedom of the press and the war in Ukraine:

Western media and the war on truth in Ukraine by Marwan Bishara, Senior political analyst at Al Jazeera 

Therein I found this little nugget:

Even today, as US Special Operation Command covertly deploys special forces across Africa to fight “shadow wars”, it blatantly preaches “free and transparent press”. One does not know whether to laugh or cry.

I didn't want to include a picture of Zelenskyy, but that is the pic that heads the Al Jazeera post and I was too lazy to look for something else. Zelenskyy is either extremely stupid of extremely corrupt, and given the amount of money that is pouring into Ukraine these days, I suspect the later.

Optical illusion - Video Short

This will *CONFUSE* you! 😵‍💫
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