I've been tearing through the work of Terry Pratchett for the last few months. I've become a huge fan bordering on disciple. He's so charming and so understated. He waits for you to get lulled into a false sense of high fantasy satire then BAM. He dumps a bucket of ice cold humanity all over your head and you love him for it.
America has had a rough week and I think I have just the thing. A proverbial mug of calming tea with a bitter aftertaste. I'm only a few hundred pages into Jingo (city watch) and from that title you can guess where it's going. It's about being good police in a time where citizens are taking up arms for selfish, deluded, causes. It stares racism down and laughs in it's face the way only the English can. So polite... yet so brutal. It's helping me through a difficult time in the American south and I'm going to shut up now and let it speak for itself:
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly
depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was
anyone's fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one
of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them.
No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of
Us. It's Them that do the bad things.
-Terry Pratchett
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