TrophyYvetteGarcia - The Monday Morning Memo

Hi Beagle,

Do you prefer to be called Beagle, Indie, or Intuition?

Nick Grant sees fours in great cast ensembles. Do you see third gravitating bodies with cast ensembles? (Ex.– Martin Crane on “Frasier”)

TTFN,

Yvette Garcia

Your Martin Crane observation is brilliant. Yes, it's the Third Gravitating Bodies found in fictional characters that make them interesting and three-dimensional to us. In the case of Martin Crane, we have an ex-cop with a bum leg that lives with his hoity-toity son. The awkwardness of a blue-collar father living in a big-city high rise with his white-collar son is what causes conflict and creates interest in this character. But it's also perfectly believable since each of us has friends who are unlike their parents. It's a very interesting observation, Yvette. I can see why you were Poky Little Puppy of your Magical Worlds class.

HOWEVER: While you may call me Beagle, Indie, or Indiana, Intuition is my mate, a female, the central character in the wizard's Free the Beagle trilogy. For the record, Indiana is actually my nickname. Intuition calls me Instinct, or Stinc for short. But no one else is allowed to. It's one of the reasons I carry a sword.

“Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily ‘elite overproduction’—the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill. One way for a ruling class to grow is biologically—think of Saudi Arabia, where princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the United States, elites overproduce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.

Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. ‘You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,’ Turchin said.

Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of previous administrations… Trump’s former adviser and chief strategist Steve Bannon, Turchin said, is a ‘paradigmatic example’ of a counter-elite. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people. ‘He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge.'”

- Graeme Wood, quoting Peter Turchin in the Dec 2020 edition of The Atlantic