Before bed—which is increasingly the only time my daughter talks to me—she was asking me about geopolitics, which I dread. I am a reverse copy of my father and he is roughly a reverse copy of his father and I don't want to reverso my daughter again. The more I tell her the more she'll rebel, but I'm a Samarajiva and asking me a question is like ringing a dinner bell. I can't help my self, oh well.

Akka

Akka asks me why America (she actually uses my term White Empire, God help her teachers) is the way it is, and I say that's all they know. They came up by putting other down and that's the only way they can go. There is no reverse gear on imperialism, it's die or grow (get rich or die trying, to quote the latter-day griot). America itself was a zero-sum game—steadily zeroing out the natives—and that's been their mondus operandi since their war upon the globe (WWII never ended for colored people, doncha know). It's genocide or bust for them, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

I tell her, in a way she might understand, that there are two ways to get ahead in life, using the metaphor of school. One is by studying hard and doing her best, and the other is to kneecap the competition and do your worst. For example, there are two kids ahead of her in class and she could try harder, or just trip them up instead. This boggles her mind, as it should, but this is broadly how the American model of development should be understood. They had to destroy existing civilizations to create themselves, and the libertarianism must be constantly watered with the blood of innocents. Thus they fracked the Middle East to keep them from ever getting power from energy, and keep everyone else tied up with two-faced liberal democracy to keep them from ever claiming sovereignty. It's a zero-sum game, though they're increasingly dividing by zero. Does this make sense? It sounds stupid and deranged to by daughter, but it is what it is.

The American version of White Empire proceeds not so much by occupying places directly (though there are military bases aplenty) but more by keeping places to preoccupied fighting themselves or fighting each other that they don't have to do so much fighting. Only a few countries survived this divide and conquest (Iran, Cuba, China, unoccupied Korea, Russia, by the skin of their nuts) and America is still trying to hammer them for their temerity. What they mean by 'authoritarianism' is simply independence. I don't say all this, but you get the jist.

Thambi

Thamba (her younger brother) is a simpler sort, he just wants stories, preferably with explosions. So since they were children I've been telling them an alternate version of Batman, where his parents were killed by cops and he became a communist vigilante. Now this Batman has morphed into full-on Sinwar, digging tunnels and fighting the Penguin (capital), the Riddler (liberals), and the Joker ('Israel' I guess). I haven't thought this out yet, the boy just pulls it out of me as much as I try to wriggle out.

So I tell him how Batboy, when he was young, had his parents killed by the 'Israelis' and grew up an orphan, assembling things in the junkyard and barely going to school. How he often can't go to school because the soldiers set up checkpoints, until Batboy learns to tunnel around them. And how he proceeds to blowing up tanks and getting beaten for his troubles, slowly forming an army of Batmans, of poor vigilantes, not rich a reactionary like the American source. He likes this story so it goes on. My children actually have no idea of the ‘real’ Batman, I suppose that will be quite the surprise some day, when they find out that Batman is not, in fact, Palestinian. But not today, he needs to go to sleep also.

Bedtime Stories

Bedtime stories, allegories, confessions and digressions. In that liminal time there's subliminal programming, but you never know what children will believe, or how they'll turn out. Will they receive or will they reject? I don't think parents know what they're doing, and parents change as much as children do. I think of my own childhood. My parents subscribed me to Misha magazine (from the USSR), my father took me to watch Black Panther and I listened to Wobbly (IWW) music. What did they expect, really? Your kids learn from you at a certain point in your life, and carry that trajectory forward even if you turn around.

What do I expect from my own children? I expect them to sleep, I'm not thinking that deeply, I just want to get back on my phone. I don't actually try to indoctrinate my kids, I'd honestly rather they just pass out immediately, but they ask me questions and I answer honestly. At the same time, I obviously have a deep sense of right and wrong (though I've been wrongly rightist before) and I try to impart this as impartially as possible.

But you have to be careful with children. Sometimes they'll rebel against you, you can't pull on the sprouts too hard. I know that I've become very different from my parents I know, or perhaps they've become different, or perhaps the world has just changed and we're the same moral creatures responding to different environmental conditions. I don't know. And yet my kids treat me like I know everything. But it's really them teaching themselves, using me as honestly reluctant support. I don't even want you to wake up. Just go to bed already!