thoughts on Dukat and Garak both believing what they’re told, and on the past as a poisoned cookie

(Aka: cosmictuesdays is on fire tonight.)

Hannah (cosmictuesdays): This reminds me how part of Dukat’s tragedy is he can’t separate himself from the narrative he’s crafted.
peach: yusssss.
peach: ahh?
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): The Bajorans didn’t care about him; they’d have attacked ANY Cardassian prefect of Bajor.
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): Dukat took it personally.
peach: mmm. that’s true.
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): Someone else - who might in fact have abolished child labor and suchlike - would have been able to see that. How it’s not about the individual so much as it is the position. Sure, they’d have been angry about it, but they’d have seen it’s not them specifically.

peach: /nodding
peach: that’s really goddamned fascinating!
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): “After all I did for them!” versus something along the lines of, “There’s nothing to be done for it, is there?”
peach: oh, dukat
peach: wow, that’s really quite wild
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): It’s quite something to ponder, how Dukat is so, well, wrapped up in his own narrative.
peach: i wonder when that started to happen?
peach: as a kid even?
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): Going by how much society shapes us, I’d say it began in early childhood and went from there.
peach: encouraged by his parents? ignored? denied
peach: ?
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): Born to privilege, born during the Occupation, told he’d do so many great things, told so many great things about Cardassia.
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): He believed every word.
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): As did Garak, who was told similar but different things.
peach: oh, gosh. hannah. there’s a story there. a reflective piece. something very juicy there…
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): It’s all yours, if you’d like!
peach: maybe someday. whew!
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): Hmm. In “Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking” the author looked back on the propaganda of her and her mother’s childhoods, what was shown and how, largely through the cookbooks and agricultural policies because she’s a professional food writer.
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): I wonder how Garak would talk to Essim about the Cardassia that was.
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): There’d be records of how things were run back then. Intact records. Old schoolbooks. Novels that were contemporary accounts of life.
peach: oh WOW
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): And now I’m thinking of this one book I haven’t read, “The Irony Tower”, about Soviet artists during and after the fall of the USSR - I read a little bit of an interview, where the author talked to someone who was watching old propaganda.
peach: ah?
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): He says, but you were sent to the Gulag when these were made, because of the philosophies these are broadcasting. And you’re watching it for fun now?
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): And she says, but it was my youth.
peach: ooooooof.
peach: you’re on fire tonight, hannah. my brain is burning.
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): In “Soviet Cooking” she described that nostalgia as “poisoned madelines.”
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): Garak thinking of something rotten that still, somehow, filled your mouth perfectly.
peach: oh, my.
Hannah (cosmictuesdays): “It was my childhood,” he says to Essim.