(no subject)

Trolling around and kind of starting to catch up on the FL, since I've been not really in an internetting mood lately.

Thoughts inspired by lenadances' post on civil disobedience, a topic very near and dear to my heart.

While I'm generally not a very patriotic rah-rah American, there is a kind of golden sheen in my head around the US Constitution that has been there for quite some time. The boy and I kind of poke fun at each other sometimes because I can have very un-American sentiments at times but have this shining ideal of the Constitution in my head while he in general thinks America is great but is leery of majority rule. And it's not that I think majority rule is this awesome thing. It's that I'm so in love with the idea of this document with checks and balances written into it, with a Bill of Rights too. I know it's not the only document out there like that, but it's the only one I studied in any sort of length (heh, yeah, in my school in Taiwan nonetheless! My govt. teacher made us read the whole thing). And I do think it's greater than the Declaration of Independence, because it's a living document.

I don't know, it sounds geeky in words, and much of it is tied up with the movement against slavery and the civil rights movement. When I was a kid, Martin Luther King was one of my heroes, and one of the few whose writings I can read and still greatly admire. "Letter from Birmingham Jail" makes me tear up every time. But it's just this idea, his "I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law." And I very thoroughly believe that. I read those little Scholastic books as a kid (and those Scholastic biographies) and was amazed and awed at the thought that so many people participated in sit-ins and protest marches that there were not enough jail cells for them.

Under the cynicism about America, I am a gooshy idealist at heart.

Is it presumptuous to feel a sort of awe because it feels like something like that is happening now because I am not actively participating in the movement or putting anything at risk for it? I always have this nidgy feeling that comes about when talk of any issues dealing with race (or sexual orientation, in the current matter) comes to bear because there is always a part of me that wonders if I am pre-empting something that belongs to other people. Do they have more right to it than me? It's from having done too many slash arguments and too many EAS readings on nationality and identity, I suspect, the result being the voice in the back of my head always commenting, great, this movie has a homosexual couple portrayed in a fashion that has them being a couple who just happens to be homosexual. But the heroine is still straight. What does that say? Etc.

And yet, in a sense, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement did a great thing for me too. Those people fought that battle in a sense for me and for all the other people who were not and are not the racial majority. I'm guessing the interracial marriage laws were there mostly to prevent black-white marriages. It's totally naive of me, but I guess up till now I never consciously realized there was an actual law against interracial marriage. Considering who I date now, it's a rather scary notion. And whoever repealed that law, the people who helped with that have given me something, fifty years later.

So that is all from me, because I am tired now.

Grant, Tracy - Daughter of the Game

Very intense book about spies during the Regency, a marriage and the consequences of secrets.

I've read melymbrosia's comment that the book twisted various Regency conventions and showed a darker side of the era, but not having read many Regencies or knowing much about the era itself, I really can't attest to that.

Charles and Melanie Fraser are a happily married couple who met during the Napoleonic wars, living well in London while Charles holds a seat in the Parliament. Their son is kidnapped one day, which eventually leads them on a wild chase for a legendary ring to meet the ransom demand.

The book has more plot twists that I could shake a fist at, almost all of them unanticipated (although eventually I managed to partially guess one of the villains of the piece). The first big reveal is a jawdropper. The Very Big Secret comes out in the first few chapters, and the consequences of it and of keeping it through seven years of marriage resonate throughout the book. Thinking of this from a romance point of view, or even from a general thriller/suspense point of view, it's very nice to see that even after Grant gets her big moment of surprise with its revelation, she allows it to keep affecting Melanie and Charles, not just dropping it like a moot plot point.

That's what I liked the most about the book, the underlying examination of a marriage and of what holds it up or tears it down, the examination of childhood pains and the real effects of secrets in a way that most romances brush off. It is a Big Secret plot in a way, but Grant gets away with it because there's a very good reason the secret was kept for so long and a very good reason to finally have it out in the open.

The part I didn't like as much was that by the end, it felt like there were almost too many plot twists and big reveals, so I was almost rolling my eyes at some of the last of it.

Bonus: some twisty sexual politics, if one stops to really think about all of it.

Links:
- coffeeandink's review
- rilina's review
- pocketgarden's review

Angel 5x15 A Hole in the World

( Spoilers )

More politics

So. For the first time ever, I have written a letter of petition. Via the ACLU free fax service, granted, but I actually wrote a bitty thing, didn't use their form letter, and hopefully did not sound unintelligent. This is weird. I don't do politics at all, nor have I ever written any sort of postcard or mail to get shows I liked un-cancelled. It feels a little like one small voice yelling out in the wilderness, "Please don't do this!"

Now to really register to vote.