The Bauer/Douglas Family (bauerandcompany) wrote in weddedto_sonora, @ 2013-10-22 14:08:00 |
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Current mood: | aggravated |
Practical Politics, Reprise
At Sonora, the library was alternatively bright and gloomy, older-feeling than the rest of the building and generally a refuge from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the school. Alicia didn’t think consciously of loving it, the way she sometimes did of the common room or her classrooms, but it was always there, a safe place and the one place in the school where she thought she stood a chance of ever really being alone, at least for a minute, usually able to see people approaching and move before they got to her if she needed to. It was a place where she had power, too, and where she could work, and the combination of factors made it not so much a favorite place as a necessary place.
The library at the Council was different. The books here didn’t have magic. There wasn’t a total absence, of course – it was inevitable, it was a cultural imperative, and so forth, and wizard-produced texts always had a trace of something more than the strange, alien-feeling Muggle book her father had bought her – but that wasn’t the purpose of the books here. These books were for recording, organizing, referencing, explaining. They did not make terribly exciting reading, by and large, though the more analytical parts of her personality found things to enjoy in some of them nevertheless and she didn’t come primarily for pleasure anyway. She had access to other libraries for that. She came here during closed meetings to work on the final part of her summer program: the paper.
It should have been so easy. The length requirement was not great, and she was a good writer. The problem, though, was in the prompt: Write a paper defending your position and countering opposing views on a political issue of today.
There was, of course, an easy solution: lie. The problem was, she didn’t know what the right answer, the lie her readers would want to hear, was. She hated the thought of putting her name on a document which blatantly took up for a position, and she suspected that if she just picked one and then stressed that it was a theoretical exercise and should not be considered real, that would be interpreted as weaseling her way out of it and marked down. She was going to have to make it sound real, and she didn’t know what her audience wanted to hear, or how it could impact her down the road if anyone else got their hands on the document after she submitted it. Because of all that, a simple paper was turning out more stressful than her CATS had ever thought of being.
Besides, what did she care about, anyway? There were plenty of abstract issues she could talk about at length, but actual issues of the day….She had never had opinions on those before, and was so reading a lot very fast to try to find something going on which she could write something safe about. The big ones had occurred to her first, but they were proving...unsatisfactory.
Her reading, though, kept bringing her back, again and again, to the blood issue, or at least things closely related to it. She couldn’t write about it. She knew that. But in spite of herself, an argument was building up in her head, and for the life of her she didn’t know why others hadn’t already taken it up. She simply adored the idea of selling it to the liberals as (eventually) undercutting pureblood power and to the purebloodists as preserving wizarding culture and reducing breaches of the Statue of Secrecy, and maybe even removing the piece of paper which said their children could not practice magic at home. And then, once they were both taken in enough, the sub-issues could be resolved, and then they could move toward something actually worth having....
The blood issue would be there for a while, though, before they could get to even half so lofty a goal, and she had no idea what anyone would ever have to do about that. It reminded her unpleasantly of that fact, too, while she was reading about the Trace, trying to figure out, for this argument she would never write, how it was established and thus how early they knew about the existence of Muggleborns. As she ran her finger down another page of text, a shadow fell over her book, and she looked up to find herself with the one person she had taken care to minimize her direct contact with as much as possible without being suspicious: Jessica Cohn.
“Working on your paper?” Cohn asked.
“Yes,” Alicia said, smiling politely and hoping Cohn would take this as a hint to go away. They were stuck openly working together now, with the position reshuffling which had gone on last week, but that didn’t make them friends. She wanted nothing to do with what Cohn represented, the world she came from.
“I started mine last week,” Cohn said, sitting down and taking out a scroll to prove this. “I’m writing about the joint interests of Muggleborn, gay, and witches’ rights movements and parallels in Muggle history. It’s interesting stuff.”
“I’m sure,” Alicia said. Henny might have been a help to her, but Alicia wasn’t offering the resource. It wasn’t her place, and besides, the last thing she wanted to do was mention politics to Henny. Plus, while the academic in her wanted Cohn to write a brilliant argument because there was no point to the exercise if it was done poorly, the pragmatist in her was not interested in helping someone who was working directly against the interests of people Alicia loved, and both thus and in other ways against the interests of Alicia herself. “I’m writing about – “ she racked her brains and pulled a topic from the air, based on her long debates with Jasper in the first half of the game – “the balance of commercial and environmental and Secrecy interests in the development of magically-held properties,” she finished.
Cohn glanced at the book open in front of Alicia. “What does all that have to do with the Trace?” she asked.
“It’s directly tied to Secrecy interests,” Alicia managed again, feeling a wave of gratitude toward her brain, for doing what it needed to do when it needed to do it even if it wouldn't always cooperate with her when she was trying to work in a slightly more systematic, planned way. “Though honestly, I don’t think this one will make into my final product. It’s just for my own edification.”
Cohn shuddered. “I hate that spell,” she muttered. “Ever since I found out about it. It’s like – East Germany, how you doing? Say hi to the KGB for me!”
She made this strange comment in a very high-pitched, fake-chipper tone of voice.
“I don’t know what that is,” Alicia said flatly.
“Stalin? Wizards don’t know Uncle Joe?” Alicia stared, then shook her head. From her tone, she was as fond of her uncle as Alicia was of…well, her paternal uncle, anyway. Uncle Geoff wasn’t too bad, except he regarded her as a kid even though honestly, age-wise, he would be perhaps a little more believable as her older brother than as her mother’s younger one. But where did the eastern half of Germany greeting an obscure acronym come from, and how did they relate to Cohn’s uncle? “Evil Communist dictator?” Cohn tried again.
Communist. She’d seen that word. Oh, yes, that was in that Muggle book. “Your uncle’s the Muggle ruler of Russia?” she asked, wondering how a Muggle had lived as long as the book had apparently been around. Was he perhaps a Muggleborn traitor in disguise? Muggles were supposed to die when they should have been in the prime of life, probably because they were incomplete – unfinished structures naturally didn’t last as long as those which had been made properly. They were not supposed to rule Russia in the sixties and still do so today.
“Wha – no, no,” Cohn said. “No, Stalin’s not literally my uncle – or anybody’s, he’s dead, and he probably killed his sibs if he had any, no. That’s just a nickname he used to have. Sorry, I forget how wizards don’t know so much.” Alicia’s face blazed and she wanted to curse the other girl before she, with effort, forced it down. “He ran a really oppressive state, though, you know, everybody’s spying on everybody, draconian punishments, bundling people off to a mine never to be heard from again….” She shook her head.
“What does any of that have to do with the Trace?” Alicia asked.
“Because they use that to watch everything we do,” Cohn said. “You don’t think it’s weird that it’s on every magical kid? Even the ones who never go near a Muggle? I know they don’t use it to enforce the Restriction on you guys, but they must see every spell your parents, or your parents’ friends, or anyone around you casts.” She made a noise of amusement. “In the Muggle world, they’d just use it to decide which advertisements to send you, something similar’s done all the time by private corporations, but here….”
Alicia sat back in her seat, looking hard at Cohn. “That is impressively paranoid,” she said. “I like it.”
“I don’t,” Cohn said. “I really don’t. I wish I had never thought of it. Because then, there’s all these other spells, too…I mean, brooms and walking are really the only ways to travel in this world that can’t be traced by someone here. I’m sure Crowley would love to be the real head of Transporation. You can keep track of almost everyone, everything they’re doing….”
“Which is probably most of why we don’t have as many Dark wizards around as we used to,” Alicia countered. “Surveillance makes it a lot harder to get away with that kind of thing. Not to mention makes it easier for them to find you and put your foot back on if you botch an Apparition. A strong government isn’t a bad thing.”
“It’s neutral,” Cohn said. “And depends on who’s using it, and what they’re using it for. What happens if a Dark wizard gets in charge of something and uses it to track his Muggleborn victims and their families?”
Sucks to be you was the correct answer. Alicia didn’t give it. Nor did she point out that, in theory, it was perfectly possible to be a Dark wizard and not give a damn about Muggleborns and their families. Power was power; Muggleborns were really, she thought, another issue, if a convenient one. The issues they presented gave a perfect excuse for joining a Dark wizard’s power base, since comparatively low numbers made a lot of people squeamish about attacking other wizards these days, but history showed they weren’t necessary to the process of doing really nasty things.
“That’s why there’s redundant measures and personnel,” she said. “Someone would catch on and probably report it, unless some kind of organization infiltrated everything to the point where they could start a coup, and in that case, well, that would be what the whole government would be switched over into.”
“That’s why I’m saying there need to be greater protections of privacy in the Wizarding World,” Cohn argued. “So the wrong people can’t get access to the wrong information. So no one can have that kind of information. Wizards are too powerful, as individuals, to have that kind of access, especially in a society like this one."
“So you’d prefer anarchy to order because order could be exploited?” Alicia asked, with a slightly twisted smile as she remembered her argument with her stepfather in week one. She could just imagine how pleased he would be to know his position was also being, somewhat, with elaborations, embraced by a Muggleborn girl. Gramma Alma’s reaction was, given Alicia’s own irritations with Jeremy, even more amusing to picture. “I used human sacrifice as my example the last time I had this conversation with somebody, since he was arguing that government was useless because the great families rule everything, but – seriously? Take away those powers, and people will use whatever magic they want, whenever they want, and then what about your Muggleborns and people? Actually, forget them – what about your Muggles? Do your really see that ending well? The system’s not perfect no matter what you believe, but I think it’s keeping the peace as well as it’s likely to be kept.”
Cohn looked at her oddly. “So, you talk about the usefulness of the government on just a regular basis, then?” she asked.
“Well, you’re talking about it with someone you barely know, so….”
Cohn shrugged. “True.” She shifted in her chair, either from discomfort at realizing what exactly she was doing or just to get more physically comfortable as she planned not to do the smart thing, which would be dropping the subject. “Well, I definitely don’t believe in anarchy, and I definitely, definitely don’t believe in the – I’m going to say pureblood, since I don’t feel like the double meaning of the word great - families running anything, not as families and just because they’re purebloods. But the right people need to be the ones in power, and to keep them good, they need to have some serious limits on their powers.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Alicia said with a laugh, deciding not to even go into all the complications of just using the word ‘pureblood’ as a blanket definition with this girl. There were all sorts of purebloods who could use the word with some confidence, but they didn't have anything like the same agendas a lot of the time – the old-but-socially-mid-ranked families tended to be the politicians, for instance, while the truly powerful just threw around money and influence, as she understood it, while really playing their own games between themselves, the middle families, and the up-and-comers on the side, while the up-and-comers scrambled for money and decent connections while trying to play everyone else off each other. And then there were the Muggleborns and lower-ranking half-bloods (when the line even changed was debatable; Alicia knew there were plenty of people who would agree that, as a third-generation witch on her father’s side and with a much longer line on her mother’s, she would even technically qualify as a pureblood herself, something she just had to find amusing because it was that or crying), who either kept their heads down and got by or else made things worse for their entire group by getting political about it. “There are no ‘right people,’ everyone’s going to work for themselves and their own groups. Humans aren’t that good, and the ones who get into politics are even less good than others. Either you run for office, in which case you’re egotistical to start with and going to become, if you aren’t already one, a self-serving jerk, or else you take over, in which case you’re egotistical to start with and are going to become, if you aren’t already one, a self-serving jerk.”
“That’s one opinion,” Cohn said pleasantly, with an air of superiority which made Alicia want to curse her again. “Hobbes would probably like you, and…maybe Rousseau, I’m not sure, you kind of left the door open to people at least starting with good intentions. You should look them up sometime,” she added quickly, no doubt deducing that Alicia was about to reiterate that she didn’t know what something was. “I’m more with Rousseau, myself. It’s the culture that’s the problem, and it can be changed for the better.”
Alicia could hardly disagree with that. She had lots of problems with the world, ones she would settle for sliding past or at best, if it became possible in the future, legislating against, but would really like to just remove at wandpoint. “I can hardly continue a conversation when you won’t define the terms,” she said coldly, trying to ignore the irritation of hearing about something she didn’t know. She was not going to follow that into reading presumably Muggle works. Though, Thad did work in the Muggle Studies section in school, so she could make an argument for precedent allowing for knowing the enemy to combat his ideas, she would bet quite a lot that Thad had read some of it while he was there, it was inevitable….She shut that line of thought down. She and Thad were in very different positions, and she had enough to do without risking suspicion for even knowing who Muggles were. She just hoped no one else had even seen them talking here.
“So look it up,” Cohn said, now sounding almost…playful? “But for now…thanks.”
Alicia did not quite keep herself from starting to physically recoil, even though she was not sitting that close to Cohn. The thought of doing her a favor, and of being tricked into doing a Muggleborn a favor…. “For what?” she demanded.
“Saying something interesting,” Cohn laughed. “I was just going to suck up to you to see if you’d throw some sympathy my way and, you know, give me some perspective of running Sports or throw me a bone when we vote on the preliminary budgets. This was better.” She smiled. "So thanks. See you." She stood up and walked away, leaving Alicia sitting, stunned.
Only for a minute, but a minute too long. By the time she thought to bundle up a paper and throw it in her direction, she was already gone. Scowling, Alicia got up, picked it up, and went back to her seat. At this rate, she'd be pulling stunts like Crowley's note about Grant's mother's alleged affair with a Muggle woman soon, and in addition to not being that stupid, she didn't have time, since she was now planning to keep reading like she was reading but also to really do the research for that very boring-sounding paper about property allocations. That was something reasonably safe. That was something that wouldn't ruin her life.