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Bioshock Infinite a look back...

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The Ghost of a Flea5/30/2013 9:35:08 pm PDT

So…Columbia in 1912 is like the South in the 1960s?

[Sorry.]

As to the issue of “proper” revolution…I hate to put it this way, generally by the time revolution becomes a cohesive force for overturning a government, it’s way past when folks who are already traumatized (and sometimes were born into a world of ongoing traumas) are going to be able to rebel but not misrule. Part and parcel of this is that individual rebels are rarely formed by deep intellectual appreciation of politics, government, or morality. Be they guerillas or local militia, they’re usually motivating by wanting to stop being hurt and/or do some retaliatory harm. And even the ones that have cohesive ideas about what comes next end up butting heads with those of differing views. When the fighting’s done, there’s a whole other scramble that begins because most folks have no vision of what comes after.

The American Revolution is unusual for a bunch of reasons…and I don’t want to sound snarky, but…one of them is that the people rebelling hadn’t really had the boots taken to them compared to, say, what the British did to their Irish subjects or their non-white colonial subjects. Even the “rebels” initially viewed their actions as protest rather than revolt. They hadn’t been deprived of wealth, education, and opportunity for generations. They hadn’t been subject to arbitrary violence and/or sexual exploitation. They hadn’t been instilled with an ideology that marked them as lesser and undeserving.