Cassandra at the Ballet
by Beth Plutchak
The night of November 5th, 2024 election night, my wife and I went to the World Ballet Company’s production of Swan Lake. I love Swan Lake, the music, the costumes, the swans dancing in unison, the plot that makes no sense, with a through line that can lead to happiness or tragedy. Which ending will this version be? No spoilers, please. I love Tchaikovsky. I love the Russian composers in particular because I can hear it, you know. I’m not a musician. I have no musical theory. But, I hear the cold and the longing and not angst exactly but something in between. Something between not knowing what one wants and the certainty that if you get what you want it will never work out the way you hoped. The World Ballet’s mission is ballet is for everyone. They want to make ballet universally accessible. World Ballet chose the happy ending.
So, on November 5th I put the election out of my mind and watched the ballet. I watched the happy ending. On the way home I checked social media and I was transported to the tragic ending. I can admit it now, but I never had any doubts that Trump would win the election. As I saw my white feminist and queer white friends exhibiting increasing hope after Harris accepted the nomination I learned to keep my mouth shut, because I was constantly in danger of saying “the first time Trump was elected.” I heard my Black and Brown friends try to tell White Women, “Pay attention, what you are afraid of has been happening to us for a long time.” I never expected white women to rally around the abortion issue and “save” us. I remember how white women treated women of color during the women’s rights movement that brought us Roe v Wade. I remember the Combahee River Collective Statement. I remember white feminists’ response.
I have spent the greater part of the last two decades working on various projects involving complexity economics as a tool to understand where we are politically and economically and as a tool for moving forward. Things that are incredibly clear to me have been impossibly difficult to communicate (hence Cassandra). One thing that has remained clear is, to quote World Ballet Company, “Art Changes People. People Change the World.”
Politics operates at multiple levels. In an election year we tend to think politics only happens at the ballot box, but it also happens at the level of who determines what policies can be implemented, and before that it operates at the level of what policies we believe can be implemented and at the level of the future we can imagine. The work before us now is how do we change the message, the story line, and make an equitable future imaginable? It’s the long way round and the only way forward.
Where do we start this long way round work? A. R. Moxon released a book last year called Very Fine People | Confessions of an American Fool. This is the most important political book I have read in a long long time. Well as is often said, the best place to start is at the beginning and the beginning of America is genocide and chattel slavery. I don’t know how we come to terms with that as a nation, but I do know that as white people we can and must come to terms with it individually. Moxon lays out a path forward from acknowledgement, to repair, to redemption.
I spent a good deal of last year reading political and economic non-fiction, trying to find the language I need. Books I recommend in no particular order are The Persuaders, by Anand Giridharadas, Re-Enchanting the World | Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, by Silvia Federici, The Dawn of Everything | A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber, The Feminist Subversion of the Economy | Contributions for Life Against Capital, by Amaia Perez Orozco, translated by Liz Mason-Deese, and The Red Deal | Indigenous Action to Save our Earth, by The Red Nation. I followed the bloggers Heather Cox Richardson, A. R. Moxon at The Reframe, and Framelab which builds on George Lakoff’s work. I reread Don’t Think of an Elephant, by Lakoff, and am trying to learn how to communicate through shared morality rather than cold facts. There was a joke circulating through Facebook last year that went like this.
A: If you just provide people with concrete facts you can change their opinions.
B: Actually, they did a study and 95% of people did not change strongly held beliefs when presented with new facts.
B: Well, I can’t believe that’s true.
If white people are willing to do the work that is before us, we will find our way to the necessary evolution of a just world through community. As long as we make excuses for not doing that work we will fail. Until we do that work we will be unable to listen to what more marginalized people have learned and have been trying to tell us about surviving this chaotic post-capitalism we find ourselves in. We will continue to circle in chaos.
But, I’m also supposed to be writing about pleasures here and the pleasures I found were a kind of escapism, a kind of catching my breath by streaming shows that brought me comfort and reminded me of the work to be done. My old standby is Foyle’s War available on Acorn. Christopher Foyle is a country policeman who struggles with morality during WWII. As a German spy puts it to him in the episode "Fifty Ships," “You investigate murder, in a time of war?” I am reminded that the world has been horrible before. (Just to be clear, we didn’t all survive then and we won’t all survive now). The important lesson is that just because the work we are able to do seems small, we are not absolved from doing it.
I discovered the series Deadloch streaming on Prime which was the Queer mystery series I didn’t know I needed. It is set in the fictional town of Deadloch on the coast of Tasmania, an intentional Lesbian community. It both follows the formula of so many British mystery shows and also lovingly satirizes them. And it is a lesson in community building.
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Finally, I watched the first and apparently final season of Kaos streaming on Netflix, starring Jeff Goldblum as Zeus and featuring the brilliant Suzy Izzard as one of the Fates. I started the series because of an interest in Greek Mythology, a love of satire, and long-held crushes on both Izzard and Goldblum. I was unprepared for how Queer affirming and Trans affirming this show would turn out to be. There is such a difference between Queer acceptance and radiant Queer and Trans joy. But, it was Billie Piper’s scattered and resigned Cassandra that provided part of the title for this piece.
In 2024 I have also been trying to understand community building by becoming more active in local queer and sex-positive communities. Our challenge is to make community building expansive rather than closing in on ourselves and perpetuating silos. We must begin with humility, recognition of our own complicity in bringing us to where we are now, and love and joy for the most marginalized among us. While rereading “The Combahee River Collective Statement” it became clear to me that any social justice movement built to combat interlocking systems of oppression must be led by those most impacted, and that white cis women are tasked with making intentional cause against white supremacist patriarchy. It will only cost us (white women) some unearned comfort and in return we may find collective joy and social justice.
Beth Plutchak is an explorer for new worlds, totally dissatisfied with this one. As a young woman she moved to Alaska to live off the land. After the birth of her third child she moved back to Wisconsin in search of some of life’s luxuries like electricity and indoor plumbing. It is in Wisconsin where she works and writes. Her essays on science fiction fandom and intersectional feminism Boundaries, Border Crossings, and Reinventing the Future and her short story collection Liminal Spaces are available through Aqueduct Press. In November 2020 she edited a blog symposium on Complexity. This symposium and her current work on Complexity Economics and Social Justice can be found at the edge-of-chaos. She also posts about these and other themes at beth.substack.com
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