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- Havdalah #43: Dance Dance, Brutus, & Happy Mother's Day!
Havdalah #43: Dance Dance, Brutus, & Happy Mother's Day!
13 Iyar, 5785 / May 10, 2025
White Rose RI
May 10, 2025
Hello all, and welcome to Havdalah #43 —
We’re back baybeeeeee, and if not well rested we are at least very caffeinated. May is here, even if it currently seems to consist mostly of drizzle, and I am getting my vitamin D darn it. The world has continued to spin; the pope is currently from Chicago, our government has conducted a new series of terrible actions, and we have brought you a new newsletter to deal with *waves hand* all of that.
(Seriously, the vitamin D, it’s a good idea).
James has the next Act in his analysis of Julius Caesar and politics, and there’s a couple more actions and items in our What’s On to check out, and Fash Watch, as ever, brings a roundup of bullshit in our state.
And finally:
Tomorrow is Mother’s Day! Happy Mother’s Day to any mom in our feed, and for those on speaking terms with your mom, consider this your reminder to give her a call (I currently have it written on two separate white boards and a google calendar). [ed: Happy Mother’s Day, Jeannine! Love you!!! 2nd ed: Happy Mother’s Day Mom, I’ll call you tomorrow!]
Goodnight, and mind how you go —
Katherine (she / her)
PS: We’d like to hear from you! Let us know how we’re doing!
Workers and Renters: Providence General Assembly
When: Saturday, May 10, 12:00pm and every other Saturday
Where: 134 Mathewson Street, Providence, RI 02903
From their Instagram:
Worried about Trump?
Want to defend our communities?
Want a world that works for everyone?
Come to the Providence General Assembly!
Spanish, ASL interpretation and childcare available upon email request
Masking requested and masks will be provided
Direct questions to [email protected]
Rising from the Rubble: An Evening of Performances to Honor and Nurture Palestinian Steadfastness
When: Saturday, May 17, 6:00pm-8:00pm
Where: Southside Cultural Center, 393 Broad Street, Providence, RI 02903
“Join us for a night of Palestinian folkdance (Dabke) performances brought to us by the Sumud & Karameh Dabke Troupes. Rising from the Rubble has been months in the making, with new choreography, honoring the sumud (steadfastness) of the Palestinian struggle. Gaza will rise from the rubble and we pledge to support rebuilding her. All the proceeds raised from the event will go to the Middle East Children’s Alliance which is providing essential services including shelter, food, clean water, medical and psychological aid, and children’s programing in Gaza.”
All ages are welcome.
Light refreshments will be provided .
Tickets (suggested donation of $10/$15) can be bought at the door or online here:
Can Democracy and the Planet Be Saved? A Conversation with Attorney General Peter Neronha
When: Sunday, May 18, 12:00pm-1:30pm
Where: Hope High School, 324 Hope Street, Providence, RI 02906
From the post:
Leading a coalition of Attorneys General from across the nation, Neronha has sued the Trump administration 15 times to protect our workers, our students, our elections, our health care, our scientists, our clean energy, and our Constitutional rights.
In this event co-sponsored by Indivisible RI and Climate Action RI, we'll have a wide-ranging conversation with the Attorney General. We'll ask questions like these:
Are we in a Constitutional crisis, and if so, what are the prospects for ending it?
What is the status of your many court challenges to Trump's illegal actions?
Can RI elected officials like the Governor and legislators do more to protect us?
How does the MAGA assault on democracy and science relate to the growing power of billionaires and big corporations?
Trump has declared war on clean energy like offshore wind, and is trying to bring back coal and offshore drilling. Can this be fought in the courts?
What is the role of mass protest in defending democracy? Other than protest, what can concerned citizens do now?
In order to defray event expenses, the organizers are requesting small donations from those who can afford them.
Event and Ticket Link for Conversation with AG Peter Neronha
Note: This seems like a backdoor campaign event for Neronha for when he starts primarying McKee for Governor, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go and ask him useful and uncomfortable questions. Just a reminder, in 2019 Neronha declined to press charges against the off-duty prison guard who ran a truck into the crowd of protesters at the Wyatt in 2018. Fun guy! Would be nice to know if he regrets the precedent that was set with his fascist collaboration now that he’s appointed himself a leader of the opposition to Trump in the current administration.
ACLU Rights Explainers
When: Up now
Where: Online
The ACLU just released two updated versions of their explainers about your rights when interacting with immigration agents (ICE) or the police. They have them available in 10 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Cape Verdean, Haitian Creole, French, Swahili, Dari, Pashto, and Khmer.
Read and save this material – regardless of your own immigration status – and send to friends and family! Click the link below and scroll to the bottom of the page to download PDFs that you can print, plus the ACLU posted on all their social media platforms (@riaclu) if you want to save and share online.
If you have a specific way to distribute larger numbers of the paper copies, please email the RI ACLU at [email protected] or call them at 401-831-7171. They have a limited supply printed, but will provide as many as they are able.
Trump Administration Play-by-Play Tool for Public Education
When: Up now
Where: Online
The Partnership for the Future of Learning is making an online tool available which aims to demystify the Administration’s plans for the coming months. During his presidential campaign, Trump was open about his plans for dismantling public schools. Even as the campaign backed away from Project 2025, he embraced its proposals to roll back civil rights protections and defund and privatize public schools. Following the election, organizations across the progressive education policy space developed important resources on what these plans will mean for schools and communities. The Play-by-Play includes and complements many of these resources with information on how Administration policies are likely to be enacted, and the steps state and local organizations can take in response.
The Womxn Project’s Bodily Freedom Forever Index
When: Up now, updated every Tuesday
Where: Online
The Womxn Project has put together an index of politicians in RI, showing how candidates did in the 2024 election compared to their stance on bodily freedom. TWP will post weekly reports on Tuesdays, highlighting some of their findings from the BFFI.
They’re also welcoming people to come join them as they organize in each district, creating small hubs. With volunteers, they will keep building a more transparent political landscape with data-informed action and strategy. Check them out if you want to get involved!
AMOR is fundraising for a Central Falls father’s Asylum Hearing
Their goal of $2,000 will help pay case expenses for a father who has been detained for almost 6 months after the Central Falls police sent his fingerprints directly to ICE.
In December 2024, M.A. was arrested by the Central Falls police after an argument with his partner after a Christmas party. The Central Falls police immediately sent M.A.'s fingerprints to ICE. This under-reported collaboration between local police and ICE in Rhode Island is currently landing family members like M.A. and many others into months of detention at the Wyatt and elsewhere.
For his hearing on asylum, withholding of removal and protection under the Convention Against Torture (CAT) hearing in May, M.A. needs funds to pay an expert witness on the country conditions in Colombia, a psychologist to do an evaluation of him for PTSD, and translations of official documents from Colombia detailing his mother's murder.
M.A. has not worked in six months because he is detained by ICE. His partner has the financial responsibility for his young daughter's care.
AMOR’s goal of $2,000 will pay these extra case expenses, including M.A.'s expert witness, the psychologist evaluation, and translations of official documents from Colombia. Funds will go directly to M.A.’s attorney.
This support will additionally relieve what would otherwise be yet another financial burden on M.A.’s family.
All information given below is accurate as of the writing of this newsletter, but the RI Legislature is prone to changing things with little notice. If you want to double check information for a bill, go to this Bill Lookup Page to double check the bill status and meeting information before you go. Put the bill number (no H, no S) in the Bills input field and hit Enter for the most up-to-date information.
Be aware that written testimony submitted to any committee is considered public and will be posted to and accessible on the General Assembly website.
The Freedom to Read Act
Bill Number: S0328 Sub A
Summary: S0328 Sub A promotes free expression and access of information by prohibiting the censorship of library materials and amends current laws to clarify the range of materials considered “indecent” and “obscene” for the purposes of criminalizing the distribution of materials containing sexual content.
Our Position: FOR / IN SUPPORT OF
Current Status: Placed on the Senate Calendar for consideration at 4:00pm on Tuesday, May 13th, 2025.
Note: As this is a substitute bill, the Bill Lookup Page doesn’t seem to be showing it properly; some creativity in googling may be required in finding info on it if they change the schedule.
How to Support this bill:
Write a short statement for each bill, 1-3 paragraphs, explaining why you support the bill.
Include your name, the bill number (S0328 Sub A), and your viewpoint (FOR)
Email written testimony to your state senator.
James (he / she)
“Talk’s cheap / The price of action is colossal”
Brutus forms the centerpiece of this series of essays, for the simple reason that his character is the fulcrum upon which the narrative course of Julius Caesar turns. While the “Great Man” theory is a baby’s understanding of history, it does often hold true for historical dramatization. Brutus, therefore, tends to be one of, if not the most desirable role in the tragedy for actors. His actions (and inactions) by far have the most weight, the most inertia, the most consequence — though, as we will see, obviously not to the exclusion of the actions of others, particularly those who he cannot predict. His outsized influence on the events is not an accident, if we consider him a cautionary tale.
I spent a lot of time in the last essay talking about motivations. This is, again, due to my own sensibilities as an artist, formed by my training as an actor. Brutus, as previously stated, is a bit cloudier than his wily contemporaries with whom we spent time in the last installment. I spoke with my dear friend and colleague Roxanne Fay about Brutus, and her thoughts provided a tremendously helpful starting point for my analysis (note: for quotes used in this piece, when emphasis is mine, it will appear bolded):
“The thought I find myself returning to most often when considering the current time (as well as Caesar's time) is the underlying and all consuming presence of FEAR. It is my personal belief that fear is the single strongest motivator of human behavior. Brutus is characterized as a Stoic, but at what point does he abandon that philosophy because of his own personal fear? It seems that fear of losing power is the key to the action in the play, whether the characters tell themselves it is for the good of the people or not, it can be boiled down to ‘What is best for ME? How do I protect myself and not give up any of the privilege and/or position I have now?’ — even as they convince themselves that they have the good of the people at heart. Good men can be toppled by personal fear.”
This insight made me realize that the murkiness of Brutus’s motivations actually makes him more instructive for our purposes. Clarity of intention is far from the norm in the world of politics. A liar is a liar; do it long enough and well enough, you become your own mark.
In this essay, we will examine how an ostensibly well-meaning civic leader may deceive himself as to his own objectives and motivations, and thus, how his tactics may pave the way to the very future he wants to prevent.
I had a lot of ground to cover here when I started digging into Brutus. First, I set out to answer the question Roxanne posed above:
At what point does Brutus abandon his philosophy because of his own personal fear?
I eventually realized that this may be a trick question.
Camera Obscura
“A (the?) category of (uniquely human?) sentience. Because of the degree to which it affects perception, experience is the object in one way or another of nearly all humanistic and social scientific inquiry. Because of the degree to which it affects perception, experience is that which is absolutely forbidden to those who undertake such inquiry.”
As Roxanne points out, Brutus is a self-styled Stoic. But what exactly is Stoicism?
At its most basic definition (read: I got this directly from Wikipedia and it suffices):
“Stoicism teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions; the philosophy holds that becoming a clear and unbiased thinker allows one to understand the universal reason (logos).”
Sound familiar? If not, this first deep dive will hopefully refresh your memory. We run into something akin to the Stoic attitude almost every day.
I like to think of Stoicism as the precursor to our contemporary myth of objectivity.
The concept of objectivity appears across disciplines and occupations, and is extolled as a virtue — and at times, weaponized. We’re told it’s a mark of maturity, professionalism, and intelligence (or at least logic). We’re also told that a “lack” of objectivity impugns our capacity for the above. And always, objectivity is invoked with the presumption that it is attainable.
To elaborate on the connections between Stoicism and our “modern” (a risky adjective) ideas of eradicating subjectivity, I spoke with another dear friend and colleague, this one a reporter. He asked not to be identified, so we’ll be referring to him as Tim.
I began by asking Tim how “objectivity” is defined in the field of journalism. He explained:
“Objective reporting is our best attempt to remove ourselves from a story and capture the fullest, most accurate version of the world around us. It’s the idea that we present the most significant aspects of a story, give all the players the chance to comment, show arguments and counterarguments surrounding a topic, and steer clear of language that could be seen as editorializing. Objectivity sometimes works best as an aspirational principle, rather than as a concrete set of criteria every story must meet, every time. Like many aspects of journalism, what is ‘objective’ emerges on a case-by-case basis and needs constant reevaluation.”
Is that even achievable?
“Not perfectly. There’s no death of the author as long as the author experiences the world and reacts to it. Everyone has opinions and biases — especially those of us whose work demands that we know our surroundings. Journalists need to understand the world to talk about it. Because we know, for example, how a bill is crafted and how it might actually impact people’s lives (and maybe even our own), it’s tough to not react when it passes or is shot down. But unless we’re writing opinion pieces, it’s not our place to insert commentary into our reporting. The audience doesn’t come to us for our opinions, they come to us for facts. With that being said, while I think it’s worth striving for objectivity in our reporting, it’s important for both us and our audience to understand that journalists aren’t exempt from the effects [of] social change. Under the new Trump administration, I’ve lost protections on the basis of my identity, just like some of the people I cover. Although it’s not my place to say that in my articles, I can’t pretend my life hasn’t changed. But where can I go to talk about it right now? Not anywhere the audience can see me. That’s frustrating.”
It’s important to note that even pure dissemination of facts doesn’t preclude bias from affecting a story. This is a known hazard of our profession. In a recent article for the Global Investigative Journalism Network, for example, Rowan Philp wrote:
“[Data journalism] experts also [caution] that even technically accurate numbers can also mislead or confuse readers due to inappropriate formats, too many digits in the copy, or the failure to simplify and contextualize those numbers for better understanding.”
You need perspective in order to appreciate context. I told Tim that I have serious doubts about our ability to “remove ourselves” from our work. I see these efforts not as mitigating bias, but as occluding it. This isn’t a simple failure of disclosure – a sticky notion to navigate – but rather, a disguising of the lens.
I think about the cinéma vérité filmmaking style, as seen in the documentary Paris Is Burning. The presence of the director is easy to miss; Jennie Livingston isn’t heard, or if she is, I can’t recall her voice. She is shown once, in the final minutes of the film, laughing with the late Venus Xtravaganza. She’s not clearly identified as the director, though the audience can nonetheless infer it from the fact that this white woman hadn’t appeared previously. Livingston’s thoughts and reactions aren’t provided via narration or moody shots of her brooding over her project. We’re not directly told her objectives. The entire process of making the film, in fact, doesn’t appear at all. There is no comment; there is only witness. We watch her subjects — closely, intimately, even brutally. It’s raw, and that’s part of why the documentary endures. It’s easy to forget Livingston is there. But she is. And so is the camera. And she decides where it’s pointing, and for how long, and at what angle. The film is edited; of course a human must do that as well. In this case, his name is Jonathan Oppenheim. His touch is also present, and also invisible.
Cinéma vérité translates to truth cinema. And certainly, truth is there. It’s ugly and beautiful and real and it hurts. There’s no catharsis, no pretty bows or soft falsehoods. Nothing in Paris Is Burning is a lie. But it’s too easy to forget about the camera and who wields it.
When we hide the lens, when we pretend it isn’t there, we risk treating what we see as the default reality. But what we see through the lens isn’t the image: it’s the view.
Tim had this to say about my doubts:
“I think there’s a sense that objectivity equals the big-picture version of a story any journalist could produce if they stick to the outline I sketched: cover the main points, ask the involved parties, make room for pro and con, no editorializing, etc. I think it’s the finer details of a story that betray our different lived experiences more often than not. Our word choices, which quotes we pull, how we frame a story, etc. provide subtle but MASSIVE differences in how a story reads. So while I agree it’s impossible to remove ourselves fully from a story thanks to those finer details, I think the big picture version of objectivity demands a ‘just the facts’ overview that doesn’t care who’s writing it. And again, everything happens on a case-by-case basis. There will be plenty of situations where everything I just wrote won’t apply at all.”
We see this in Paris Is Burning, too. The stories within aren’t fabricated or staged. There’s no I think Coolsville sucks-level editing trickery. It’s obvious that Livingston cares deeply for her subjects, that she tried to approach this project and this community respectfully and in good faith. The big-picture story is intact. It is truthful cinema. But it’s still cinema. We see what we see and hear what we hear because Livingston chose to point the camera at those things and Oppenheim chose to show us those things. The film is as revealing of the subjects as it is of the filmmakers, because the filmmakers are as human as their subjects.
We lose context when we forget that we are standing on the other side of a pane of glass. We lose the opportunity for analysis when we ignore the craftsmanship of the window, the materials used. We lose the opportunity for reflection when we choose not to acknowledge the room we’re standing in, the place from where we look through this window.
Documentaries require documentation, journalism requires reporting. The eye lands, the hand follows. This is always so. This is not a bad thing. But we should acknowledge that production is a process, and a process is a manufacturing. Our reluctance to admit that secondhand experience is filtered through secondhand humans seems to come from a desire for observation to be tamper-proof. It’s not. That doesn’t mean someone is always going to tamper with it, or even that they intend to.
I think this is why I’m more drawn to the confrontational, unyielding, brook-no-compromise, give-no-quarter approaches of journalists like Edward R. Murrow or our local Clark Kent, Steve Ahlquist [ed: our beloved], who proudly claims a methodological lineage of muckraking. At the end of a roundtable discussion this week with Mia Wong of It Could Happen Here, David Forbes of The Asheville Blade defiantly proclaimed:
“There is another way with journalism. Ida Wells was able to detail the extent and horror of American segregation and lynching — and also called for people to shoot the Klan. The modern idea that you have to be detached… [...] there’s a world elsewhere, there’s other ways to do things.”
Something I noted in my conversation with Tim is how often he spoke of appearances. It’s not enough to state the facts plainly; you must “steer clear of language that could be seen as editorializing.” What about your experience, that meddlesome word again, what about when that’s relevant? Where can you talk about that? “Not anywhere the audience can see me.”
This pretense is comforting for those who want to pretend that objectivity is a switch we can flip in our brains, like wipers on a windshield clearing away the blur of rain. But the rain is still coming down. This kayfabe of neutral positionality isn’t just impossible to perfect; it’s also difficult to maintain. As Tim told me:
“I’ve cut myself off from opportunities at and beyond work over fears that revealing my opinions will impact relationships with sources and reduce audience trust. There are other times when speaking openly with people makes them feel safe sharing their own thoughts. No two scenarios are the same, so even the idea of appearing 100% objective, 100% of the time, isn’t a reliable approach. Navigating journalism’s case-by-case variables is part of the gig. Overall, I think it’s smart to default to an unbiased appearance when working, and even when not. But when push comes to shove, I miss being able to express myself without looking over my shoulder.”
Despite this friction, curbing one’s prejudices is tremendously more desirable than becoming an unrepentant propagandist who still claims to be neutral. The expectation of restraint is leagues preferable to the yellow journalism of yore. I’m criticizing the idea of erasing journalistic bias, but I’m not condemning it. I don’t think it’s possible for perspective to be obliterated, only attenuated, but I’m also not suggesting we soak in it. Tim and I agree that objectivity is best understood as an aspiration, a necessary one, though not as one with a rigid definition or universal utility. But this understanding runs counter to what’s been considered traditional best practices for journalists.
Over the last few decades, journalism has been in the midst of seismic (and public) paradigm shifts. One shift, more recent, that Tim and I have discussed in the past is the profession’s reckoning with what it means to be “unbiased”, and whether subjectivity can truly be overcome — or if such efforts come at the expense of marginalized voices, which are unduly and disproportionately seen as more inherently susceptible to bias.
Journalists who work at “established” or “legacy” institutions, or who are used to their neutrality being taken for granted by virtue of having little to no personal stake in the stories they’re covering, are less likely to question their own assumptions. As Mia Wong put it:
“[...] the reason [trans women are] fucking here right now is because the person who got to write about trans stuff was fucking Jesse Singal, who is a cis man whose only qualification was that the thing he previously wrote about was men who fuck other men who don’t consider themselves gay! And because he was the person who got to write all of the trans coverage even though he’s just some fucking cis dipshit — he’s now the guy who’s being cited in fucking legal cases for ages and ages for why you should restrict trans healthcare.”
Ironically, this fealty to a conception of objectivity as a concrete quality someone can possess actually makes people less likely to do the work of unpacking their biases, and as Wong points out, that oversight has far-reaching consequences. Tim mused:
“As journalism diversifies, new perspectives come in to challenge the idea that there was ever a definitive, universal answer to the question, ‘What is reality?’ Our role is to capture reality, and everyone’s reality is different. We’re at this crossroads where we can acknowledge that our lived experiences as reporters are totally different, but we haven’t struck down the soft requirement to keep those differences under wraps. I don’t know what happens from here, especially as the broader culture seems to be lurching to the right. I worry we’ll feel even more pressure to separate our personal lives from our work or, worse yet, see less diversity in the field as a means of keeping the profession acceptable to this brave new world.”
This fear is well-founded.
In the same discussion with Wong, Forbes warns:
“[...] in this kind of, what I kinda call ‘the quiet purge’, which I think has been escalating in recent years [...] I mean, we’ve got trans journalists who used to write for national magazines living out of their cars now. That is the reality we face.”
This isn’t pruning bias; it’s narrowing which perspectives are permitted by pretending those more powerful or fortunate don’t have any.
We see this everywhere. During his first term, Trump accused Judge Gonzalo Curiel of being biased because of his Mexican heritage — of course implying that only a white judge could be impartial. WPATH, currently under attack from the second Trump administration, has long been lambasted by trans people as a gatekeeping measure primarily managed by cisgender medical professionals. In the same It Could Happen Here episode, Mira Lazine of The Free Radical talks about her interactions with the world of nonprofits:
“There is a huge disconnect between even [...] wealthier trans people writing about an issue versus those who are in poverty. [...] Most of the [non-profit] folk who were writing these reports [on poverty and job discrimination rates in the trans population] or who were doing the press releases and stuff like that… You could just kind of tell that they maybe did not have quite the same experiences as, say, trans people who’ve been homeless, trans people who’ve had to drive themselves to medical care because they couldn’t afford [an ambulance], trans people who have had to go without food because [they don’t have] enough money. And it’s almost like a lot of people who didn’t have to go through this stuff intellectualize it more. They see it as like these abstract numbers and they know it’s bad, but they don’t have the individual connection. Even many of the non-profit folk — a lot of their friends, even, their social circles, are all going to be on average [...] more wealthy, more stable, they have family to back them up, they have plenty of options. [...] There’s just a disconnect, you know, whenever [I’m] reaching out to folk who won the birth lottery a little bit.”
The stratification of experience limits access to platforms, which restricts the public’s access to perspectives, which in turn alters the overall project of knowledge production:
MIA WONG: “[...] part of the way that class plays out in the trans media you see is like [...] the people with the biggest platforms tend to be trans people who were already doing okay, because those are the only people who can afford to fucking do this [...] The raw class dynamic of all of this just does not get talked about.”
DAVID FORBES: “This class dynamic does shape the type of trans coverage you see, too, quite a bit. [...] We did some reporting one time on the city of Asheville spending over $1 million to the Salvation Army. [...] But that piece was reported very differently from if it’d been reported by, say, a trans journalist who’d been very well off their entire [life] [...] A lot of us [reporters] in our co-op have either been close to or been homeless before, and so we were able to bring the experience of knowing that if you are a trans homeless person, the Salvation Army isn’t letting you in, or is one of the worst possible shelters you can end up in. And that piece was written and read very differently because we were drawing from that on-the-ground experience.”
The lack of experiences – the lack of perspectives – reduces context and understanding, not bias or opinions. Dan Stone, a historian, alludes to this in the introduction to his 2023 work, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History:
“Only a few scholars have combined scholarship with the emotions; all too often, scholarship erects a barrier against feeling, forgetting the reasons that the Holocaust demanded our attention in the first place.”
Stone doesn’t see subjectivity as grit in the sensitive instrument of historiography. He sees it as something that enriches our interpretations of history. It may, in fact, even be a load-bearing necessity of the entire discipline. Later in the book, he speaks about how “a change in sensibility, away from thinking about genocide only from the perspective of the perpetrators” has enhanced historians’ understanding of the Holocaust:
“A new focus on the victims of the Holocaust means that the writings of survivors, especially the survivor historians and the survivor accounts that they helped to collect, are newly in the sights of scholars, curators and educators.”
(Jarring to read how appallingly recent such an “innovation” is, isn’t it.)
It feels petty to bring this up at a time when ideas like reality, truth, and facts are contested territory, and especially for the purposes of a fucking essay series on Shakespeare. Surely I could be focusing my efforts elsewhere, somewhere more productive, definitely somewhere more pertinent for this particular moment. Salient though that concern may be, I promise there’s a method to my madness.
Brutus, The Stoic
“You’ll never stop talking of the people / as a rough and formless mass / Why / Because you live apart from them”
The expectation of objectivity is not constrained to journalism, as I’ve demonstrated. The affect – and input – of the fabled unbiased, neutral party is highly sought. Our leaders will wear this mask when pathos is not convenient. We will wear that mask when we feel it is prudent. And Brutus wore this mask even when looking in the mirror, though he called it by another name.
I return once more to the earlier question: At what point does Brutus abandon his philosophy because of his own personal fear? I am forced to conclude that he doesn’t abandon it. But neither does Brutus overcome his fear. Rather, Stoicism is crucial to his ability to mask that fear.
His fear, his self-interest, his power: all of these are concealed and therefore, unaddressed. Brutus fools himself into believing that he is an unbiased actor because his motives are unscrutinized — and as Tim pointed out, a good-faith attempt at truth requires constant reevaluation. It is through the fallacies of Stoicism that Brutus mistakes his fear for judiciousness, power for responsibility, and self-interest for the best interests of Rome.
We see this capacity for denial in his famous monologue from Act II, Scene i:
Our course will seem too bloody, Caius Cassius,
To cut the head off and then hack the limbs,
Like wrath in death and envy afterwards;
For Antony is but a limb of Caesar:
Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius.
We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar;
And in the spirit of men there is no blood:
O, that we then could come by Caesar's spirit,
And not dismember Caesar! But, alas,
Caesar must bleed for it! And, gentle friends,
Let's kill him boldly, but not wrathfully;
Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds:
And let our hearts, as subtle masters do,
Stir up their servants to an act of rage,
And after seem to chide 'em. This shall make
Our purpose necessary and not envious:
Which so appearing to the common eyes,
We shall be call'd purgers, not murderers.
And for Mark Antony, think not of him;
For he can do no more than Caesar's arm
When Caesar's head is off.
Brutus is arguing for a moderate approach to assassination after Cassius has proposed the additional murder of Marc Antony. Antony being Caesar’s ally, this is a shrewd (if mercenary) tactic that Cassius has suggested, but one Brutus sees as akin to a massacre. Brutus’s concerns are not exclusively ethical, however. He is also asserting that this is pragmatic.
Brutus knows that the conspirators will have to answer to the people of Rome. It’s not enough that Caesar be eliminated — he must be eliminated elegantly. Once again, we see the significance of appearance and performance in the project of objectivity. Stoicism seems to conceive of truth only as a self-conscious image.
Brutus ultimately contradicts himself here. We must make this assassination dignified, civilized, anything but what it is. Instead of taking responsibility for the deed, Brutus tries to disown it. In effect, he hedges on its necessity, the very necessity he is relying on to justify the action after the fact. Why does his reason fail him?
Unlike Cassius, Brutus lacks continuity between his tactics and his stated goals. His desires are opaque and inscrutable to himself, and this severely handicaps his ability to work towards his Objectives. Without acknowledging that he is Motivated (in the Stanislavski sense) by the preservation of power, he cannot acknowledge his true stake in the conflict. Instead of reasoning away his fear of losing status, he rationalizes it.
His perspective privileged, Brutus (like many in power) believes his logic infallible by virtue of how utterly default it surely must be. Therefore, what is good for Brutus surely must be what is good for Rome and her people. You can see this in his familiar attitude that he's the only sane man in the room.
This is not to say that Brutus has no sincere worry for the Republic. He does! That worry coexists with his worry for himself. But the latter, left uninterrogated, is obscured by the former. His Motivations, when aligned, compel him to act decisively: Caesar is assassinated, because the alternative – Caesar crowning himself king – endangers the welfare of the people and simultaneously the interests of Brutus.
But when the interests of the Romans and those of Brutus are at cross purposes, Brutus chooses what benefits himself at the expense of democracy. Then he uses his identity as a Stoic – a logical man! A benevolent man! A patriot! – to launder his self-defeating choice.
There is no unbiased thinker. There is no universal reason to find. Perspective is inescapable. Deluding ourselves otherwise serves only to self-indulgently idealize our efforts. And that self-righteous delusion has a price.
Brutus, The Honourable
“You let yourselves be dragged into the Revolution / knowing nothing about its principles”
“Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.”
Honor, too, is a notion inextricably wrapped up in appearances.
Like objectivity for Stoicism, we have our own contemporary analog to honor: respectability.
I think it’s important to note that honor is not integrity. Rather, honor is bound up in status, a kind of social currency in which class (caste) and reputation together formulate a figurative credit rating. The overlap between honor and integrity can be found in etiquette, good works, and honest dealings. But integrity is who you are in the dark, when no one is looking. Honor, as I said, depends a great deal upon appearances. When I say credit, I do mean it.
It’s in this way that one may act respectably, even honorably, but still without much integrity.
We’re seeing that a lot right now.
From Ned Resnikoff:
“Part of what makes it so disturbing when institutions like Columbia University or The Washington Post capitulate to Trump is that these places are the traditional strongholds of mainstream respectability. And while Trump may be powerful, he is not respectable; even as he crashes through the political and legal norms that hold the republic together, one might expect a bit more resistance from the longtime guardians of those norms.
But maybe respectability is the mortal vice leading some of these institutions astray. Because where the first Trump administration broke the rules of the old order, the second Trump administration is working to create a new one before our very eyes. What ‘respectability’ means under this new order is very different from what it meant under the previous one. [Hannah] Arendt tells us ‘it was precisely the members of respectable society, who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values for another.’
Respectability is, in fact, why they were so fluidly able to swap out the old system of values. To be respectable is to be known for your adherence to the prevailing rules; any attempt to exercise independent judgment in evaluating those rules is only to risk your respectability, and much more besides. And if that is the cost, then who can do otherwise than collaborate?”
I have a confession to make:
I’m not into musicals. I’ve always been way more into plays, which you can probably tell from all the Shakespeare. But I do think Sondheim’s Into the Woods is one of the best works of theatre that exists. My favorite part has always been “Your Fault / Last Midnight”. Probably because the Witch has always been my favorite character. She’s without shame, without apology. Honor and respectability are utterly trivial fictions. Do not bother the likes of Bernadette Peters with such trifles. There’s no duplicity, no pretension. She knows what she is.
I consider this number the true climax of the show. After listening to the four leads descend into squabbles and blame games, the Witch finally shushes them. What follows is a brutal, unrelenting dressing down in which Cinderella, Jack, Red Riding Hood, and the Baker are all reminded how they helped pave the path to their current predicament:
“Told a little lie
Stole a little gold
Broke a little vow
Did you?
Had to get your Prince
Had to get your cow
Had to get your wish
Doesn't matter how
Anyway, it doesn't matter now”
She mocks their preoccupation with whose “fault” it all is and exposes them for who they really are: selfish, unremarkable people with neither the guts to accept responsibility of their own follies, nor the stomach to do the ruthless, ugly thing and give Jack over to the Giantess (and certain death) to save their own lives. It’s hard not to see a little Cassius in her. It’s hard not to admire it.
It’s widely acknowledged that the fatal mistake of Shakespeare’s Brutus is allowing Marc Antony to live, or at the very least, to talk. From Act III, Scene i:
“Mark Antony, here, take you Caesar’s body.
You shall not in your funeral speech blame us
But speak all good you can devise of Caesar
And say you do ’t by our permission,
Else shall you not have any hand at all
About his funeral. And you shall speak
In the same pulpit whereto I am going,
After my speech is ended.”
Brutus knows that to openly denounce Caesar as a tyrant will throw into question the legitimacy of Caesar’s political appointments, including his own. If he hopes to hang on to his power, there is a delicate line to walk. He advocates for moderation of the truth in favor of something a little more “nuanced”. He stipulates Antony include mention of his benevolence for good measure. Perhaps predictably to everyone (except Brutus), this magnanimity doesn’t read as benign and the gambit backfires. Civility, after all, doesn’t prevent civil war.
Something crucial I think I should clarify: there is more than one way to be the Naive. The Naive can respond appropriately to the moment, as Brutus did, but fail to follow through on consolidating the victory. The Naive can also be someone who runs their mouth, like so many Democrats, but when it comes time to act, all they have to offer are words, words, words. When you need the Naive to disrupt, they will only protest. When you need them to act, they will only perform. When you need them to exercise restraint, their maneuvers will be imprudent, even superfluous. When you need them to exemplify integrity, they will flaunt corruption. When you need them to break unjust laws, they will appeal to authority and fall back on procedure.
Or, to quote another theatrical genius with a last name that starts with S:
THE WITCH: You’re so nice. You’re not good, you’re not bad, you’re just nice.
This is the ultimate difference between Cassius and Brutus: the Cynical is adaptable, while the Naive is inflexible. When I speak of the Naive, I don’t define him as necessarily a figure of inaction; rather, he is a figure of incoherence. His impotence comes from his cognitive dissonance, behavioral inconsistency, and lack of self-awareness… in other words, his hypocrisy.
From NPR platforming Steve Bannon; to Democrats cooperating with colleagues they publicly condemn; to Republicans who have staunchly opposed Trump from the beginning but still retain party membership; to the scores of liberal organizations and newer grassroots initiates chanting that the revolution will be non-violent; there is either a lack of consensus around the threat or a lack of coherence within the response. Is fascism actually here, or are we playing with plastic lightsabers in the woods? Was Caesar really ambitious, or was the crown just a joke? Where is the sense of urgency in these “urgent times”? Do we want to be right, or do we want to win? Do we want to appear good, or do we want to die?
Margaret Killjoy has some blunt things to say about the incongruities:
“I don’t have a problem with nonviolence, not inherently. For some, nonviolence is a tactical choice. For others, it’s a moral imperative. The thing is though, the lackluster ‘nonviolence’ promoted by some protesters is at best simply a lack of courage and a refusal to look earnestly at the stakes, while at worst it is essentially collusion with a fascist state. [...]
False nonviolence is far and away the predominant type of nonviolence in the US (and I suspect ‘the West’ more broadly). False nonviolence does not challenge the status quo, but instead bolsters it.
Where actual nonviolence says ‘violence would be justifiable in this situation, but here we are practicing nonviolence in order to highlight the cruelty of our enemies and challenge them on a moral level,’ false nonviolence says ‘the violence of the status quo is more justified than the violence of those who fight it.’
Perhaps the easiest way to distinguish actual nonviolence from its toothless lookalike is that actual nonviolence is usually illegal while false nonviolence brags about its law-abiding nature. [...]
We have no reason to believe that being law-abiding will save us.”
Neither will the Naive. Brutus, while acting nobly, is not motivated by noble desires. In the end, his priorities will always reveal themselves. His actions, even when they benefit the people, are borne of a class-based paternalism that is indicative of his true loyalties; his fidelity is not merely to the political system of Rome, but to the larger imperial project that ensures his supremacy.
So too is it with our Naive contemporaries. The failures of Brutus and liberals to adapt are inevitable because they do not want to evolve. The honor and Stoicism of Brutus and the respectability and feigned objectivity of most Democrats are the trappings of inflexibility, a resistance to any change that might threaten their hegemony. But we cannot entirely understand how their positions are maintained – or what led us and the Romans to this pivotal moment – without looking at the context of the dying world the Naive hopes to preserve, which is what we will be exploring in the next essay.
Needle Drop: “Brutus”, The Buttress
Alert Reprint: Police Vehicle Information
In the wake of recent ICE abductions, AMOR released vehicle information in connection with activity on the 5th of May in Central Falls and Pawtucket.
We are boosting this information so that our readers can be vigilant and help prevent future abductions in their communities. Vehicle descriptions are as follows:
Dodge Chrysler, Plate # 78473 (no color given)
Ford Explorer, Plate # 1MF813 (gold)
Ford Explorer, Plate # 1MR 707 (charcoal gray)
Ford sedan, Plate # 1LE252 (red)
Ford Edge, Plate # 1HS895 (black)
Nissan Murano, Plate # 379199 (black)
Nissan Titan, Plate # 1LW807 (no color given)
Dodge SUV, Plate # 1MJ516 (no color given)
Nissan Pathfinder with a Maine plate (no number or color given)
Chevy SUV, Plate # 913 993 (black)
Hyundai sedan, Plate # 1LL314 (black)
Chevy Impala sedan, Plate # 322115 (charcoal)
Dodge Grand Caravan LV, Plate # 78473 (no color given)
Chrysler Pacifica, unmarked (gray)
(Plates are from Rhode Island unless marked otherwise)
If you see one or more of these vehicles in your neighborhood and you fear they may be connected with ICE or CBP activity, please call AMOR’s Defense Line at 401-675-1414.
News Round-Up: Local
Woonsocket City Council passes a bill that would prohibit camping on public property (Steve Ahlquist in RIFuture.news, April 22, 2025)
Protesters gathered outside RI Hospital in support of a Providence man tasered and detained by ICE (Steve Ahlquist in RIFuture.news, April 24, 2025)
They don’t need a warrant (Luke O’Neill for Welcome to Hell World, May 8, 2025)
Op-Eds
The end of protest (Andrew Lee for In Struggle, April 28, 2025)
Another way out: Doing what’s right isn’t all about what’s legal (William C. Anderson for Prism, April 29, 2025)
Video Recs
Notes on Vanishing (Lily Alexandre, April 30, 2025)
Pod Recs: It Could Happen Here
Robert’s Guide to The Next Six Months of Danger and Resistance (April 24, 2025)
Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #14 (May 2, 2025)
Who We Talk About When We Talk About Borders (May 5, 2025)
Trans Journalism in the Era of Trump (May 6, 2025)
Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #15 (May 9, 2025)
