[sssibilance]

Dammit, tinsnip, now I wanna to a John Donne “songfic.”  Poemfic.  Whatever.

Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann’d,
My mine of precious stones, my empery ;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee !
To enter in these bonds, is to be free…

Sounds a little Cardassion, eh?  EH? EH?

[tinsnip]

Right? Right? The joy of claiming, of possession, the happy knowledge of that permission already being granted, with a healthy dose of sex is fun!

Ah, Donne~~~ Come sit by me and tell me about God and how nice my bum is~~~

[sssibilance]

Here’s some of the crazy-ass theory I’ve been working on.  Donne wrote this using the geographical/cartographic/exploratory conceit at a time when the British and other European nations were embarking the true beginnings of their explorations off the continent - and the beginning of imperialism, which brought with it the modern definition of race, genocide, white supremacy, and general white people dickery.  (I figure you know this, I’m just setting things up.)

Now, Donne isn’t, as far as we know, a dicky white supremacist imperialist, but does exist in the culture, and he treats his mistress as an object, linking misogyny and imperialism, which still go hand in hand today.  He is the discover of unmoving, unresponsive land, with no reference of note to the people already there (Native peoples, or his mistress).

The Cardassian occupation of Bajor is a pretty nice parallel to white imperialism.  The a Cardassian rhetoric holds the Bajorans were beter off being occupied, even benefited from him.  Dukat likens the Bajorans to his children.  Rapes, genocide, labour camps, torture…right from the imperialist handbook. 

And so, although Donne wasn’t sailing ships of murdering Native people, his words are a product of an imperialist culture, and I have a little headcanon that that Cardassians would LOVE this stuff.

While I’m ranting, the Federation isn’t imperialist, but does have some weird white privilege parallel going on.  Bashir insults Kira by calling work at DS9 “frontier medicine,” the Federation push their ideology and brand of peace and democracy all over, and have a holier-than-thou attitude, even though as Quark once points out, Humans in particular are vicious as hell.  Bashir circa Season 1 is totally oblivious to the privilege he has as a Federation citizen, a Human. So, even good, naive Bashir has hurdles to jump and things to educate himself on, and so I sort of imagine Garak loving this poem, and Bashir going “wait, I’m not a piece of land…ohhhh.”  AND THUS GREATER UNDERSTANDING AND SEXY TIMES THROUGH JOHN DONNE’S SEXINESS.

[tinsnip]

Yes. Yes, yes. Go thou. Write it beautifully. Fascinating parallels that keep Bashir from sleeping at night because oh, God, what if Garak’s right? What if he is no better? And what's better got to do with anything anyway? And why does he keep thinking about Garak's hands?

Charming~