modern media, especially modern western media, loves the idea of qin shi huang’s terracotta army coming to life and obeying his every command. but really that isn’t a very pretty ending for a man who burned the heavens in effigy and heaped the ashes into an artificial divine title and artificial pills of immortality. it would be more fitting, i think, for his ghost to still be running around his mausoleum, shaking his clay soldiers by the shoulders, shaking his own corpse, unable to understand why they won’t wake up
i agree with this 20000% it would be the ultimate karmic punishment for a self-important man who put himself above everyone else for his own vainglorious pursuits. put that mercury-eating clown in the ghost town. let him wander his own empty, gemstone-lined streets for the rest of time, locked in a prison of his own making, paved by his own crimes.
but also…it would be extremely funny if the soldiers did come to life…but not in the way qin shi huang expects. they’ve had 2000 years to reflect on their situation and decide they’re Mad As Hell, and Not Gonna Take It. while the emperor might be a ghost, his face lost to history, his un-openable tomb buried under a mountain, locked in the past and unable to move past his own failings in life, his pawns on the other hand are able to live on in the minds and hearts of people. in a way, they’ve taken on a life of their own, and are able to develop their own agency. they may be locked in time and space, but they have been able to see the world, because the world has come to see them.
monty python and the holy pill of immortality (spoiler: it’s mercury)
wait! even better! they come to life and fucking LIU BANG ends up taking charge of them. oh man, several ye olde chinese people would shoot out of their tombs ragescreaming if that happened! it’s perfect!
re: the terracotta warriors coming to life and obeying qin shi huang’s every command shows a very shallow understanding of history. the qin dynasty was overthrown within 15 years of it’s founding. numerous peasant rebellions sprung up the picosecond qin shi huang kicked the bucket. a peasant (liu bang) ended up taking the throne. everyone was absolutely SICK to death of qsh and his tyrannical rule. the terracotta army represented a tiny crumb of that despotism, the majority of workers would have been forced laborers from conquered states. builders were killed upon the tomb’s completion to keep the location secret. having people blindly obey qsh’s every whim would have been antithetical to how history really played out
When I was getting my associates degree I took a Mythology class that I loved. But one of the girls in class was absolutely off the rails conservative Christian which made things… interesting.
The professor started off the class by being like, “Mythology is stories associated with religion.”
This girl. Haaaated that. She was like, “No, Christianity is true. It’s not mythology.” Mythology was delivered in the same tone as someone trying to spit excrement from their mouth.
The professor raised her eyebrows and said laconically, “Yes, most people believe their religion is the real one, that’s part of it, and the stories surrounding religion are referred to as mythology.”
The girl stewed in a hateful sullen rage. I truly don’t understand why she didn’t drop the class but perhaps it was court mandated education. We all expected her to drop the class but she dug in like a tick and derailed discussions as often as she could.
On a different occasion the professor was drawing a comparison between social constructs like gender. The girl raised her hand. The class hushed to hear her announce, “It’s just a fact that women like domestic work and even though men are awful and stinky we just have to love them anyway. It’s biology, we’re just hardwired like that.”
I was sitting next to my friend a baby gay Jewish girl and our eyes met in mutual hilarity while the professor tried to pretend she hadn’t just been stricken with a stress induced migraine while she steered the class away from that landmine.
The next sticking point was a week later when the professor informed us that many mythologies have overlapping events like floods but these didn’t necessarily happen in such literal terms. It was a metaphorical way to process and understand the world.
This girls hand shot up. I watched the professor exercise extreme self control to keep her expression bland before calling on her.
“The world did flood. And Noah saved all the animals. Before the flood all the water was in a dome outside the earth and then the dome broke and the world flooded. All of it.”
The whole class stared at her as if struggling to comprehend the overlap of her acceptance that the world was round while also firmly believing that there had previously been a barrier that held up all of the earths water before god smashed it in a fit of pique.
She raged under the attention, glaring balefully at our astonished faces.
The professor stared at her blankly, unable to form words to such a bizarre belief. I wanted to ask clarifying questions- what they’d drunk before the dome broke, if there were rivers or lakes prior, or did the dome allow some rain in somehow, but then I really looked at her.
She had the eyes of a feral, cornered animal who regarded any deviation in worldview from her own to be a physical assault on her person. Like the professor, I said nothing, and after a wretchedly long pause class moved on.
evangelicals are literally taught to do this, btw. it’s not just a random personal quirk of certain fanatical people, it’s something fundamentalist christians are encouraged to do
they believe jesus/christianity in charge is the natural state of things & schools not explicitly & exclusively teaching christian teachings as history & science = “schools have banned god & christianity”, so they see it as not only a brave act of resistance against a world that is hostile to jesus, but actually part of their mandate to “spread jesus’s message” & reclaim schools (& the world) for jesus to derail any discussion of other points of view.
it’s the same mentality behind films like “god’s not dead”. another example that’s a little older (from the 90s) that i grew up with & lays it all out very explicitly is “america again” by carman (content warning for, like, all of the bigotry)
I remember when a friend explained to me how they were taught about the flood and I’m pretty sure my face went on a hell of a journey.
Their response, “yeah, it’s all pretty much like that. ”
Trump, Musk, and Kennedy are all well known abusers of hard core drugs but they want ¾ of the country to go cold turkey from safe and proven prescription medications. Meds created degreed medical researchers and prescribed by degreed and highly trained physicians. If medication starts getting pulled from from pharmacies and hospitals you can expect big pharma to revolt.
RFK Jr is not a doctor, nor is he a medical researcher, and he is not in any way qualified to review medical data and pass judgement.
It’s also pretty racist the next steps he has in mind:
“‘Treating’ Black youth by making them do unpaid agricultural work isn’t exactly subtle, as far as racist fantasies go. This is why it’s so frustrating to see mainstream journalists, as Reuters did Friday, blithely argue there’s a ‘clash’ between Kennedy’s ‘long to-do list’ and Trump’s alleged eagerness to cut back on federal spending. When it comes to Trump’s fascist inclinations to ‘purify’ a country he repeatedly describes as having ‘bad genes’ and ‘poison’ in its ‘blood,’ price is no object.”
Chad just got roasted so hard he has third degree burns.
In this day that’s already gunwale-high in the kinds of online and political drama nobody of good intent particularly wants to have to put up with, this is the kind of content I’m looking for. 🙂
amhrancas 