Hepzibah

Unbinding Your Feet, Part II

2012-02-05T18:55:00.000-08:00

I’ve got a trivia question foryou. Of the 242 countries listedon Wikipedia’s “List of countries by population” how many of them have fewer people than the number of Chinese women married togay men?

I won’t ask you to wait for theanswer. The answer appears to bemost of them. 178 of those 242 countries have apopulation of fewer than 16 million, the number of Chinese women that an AsiaOne article (from which the accompanying Reuters photo is taken) tells us aremarried to gay men.

Now we all know that gay men, manyof them, manage to have sex and produce children with female partners, particularly when they areyoung and live up to macho male expectations that one can copulate withanything that moves, if one puts one’s mind to it, and a number of immobileobjects as well, seen in the right light, with the right music, and the need topop or go crazy.

Some of these men love the womenthey live with. There’s ampleevidence many of them make good husbands and fathers.

The trouble is, among these 16million there are a great many who don’t. Men who would have a much better chance of forming healthy lovingrelationships if they were free to form them with other men. Men who might even make better lovingfathers, for that matter.

Sixteen million sounds like awhole lot of men, especially when you realize the population of the Netherlandsis only slightly over that number, and the populations of Greece, Ecuador,Cambodia, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Belgium, Rwanda, Tunisia, Portugal, to name only a partial list, are underthat number. And the populationsof Austria, Switzerland, Bulgaria – again to name only a partial list – areless than half that number. That’slots and lots of Chinese ladies chewing on the fringes of their pillowcases, ifhuman nature is like what I think it is.

All because we have constructed aworld of one-size fits all, speaking in penile terms.

But it’s not. With a population of over a billionpeople, if the sixteen million women married to bent men had stuck to the fivehundred million minus sixteen million who are not bent, give or take a dozenmillion here or there, the potential for more satisfying sighs in the land ofdragons, brocades and won ton soup would increase enormously, it seems to me.

How much better for the mental health of allconcerned if China could go the way of Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spainand Sweden and six U.S. states and counting in allowing men to marry other menand women to marry other women. And give them a place at the table by supporting and encouraging their partnership,as Hillary Clinton encouraged the world to do recently in an address to U.N. inGeneva.

Heterosexual women of China, cast off yourchains. Gays are a very smallminority of the world’s population. Encourage your gay friends to come out and tell you who they are. Encourage them to marry each other andnot make promises to you they can’t keep.

Tell the Catholic Church and all the otherlousy organizations around the planet preaching that one-size-fits-all messageto go take a hike.

Have your gay men friends over to do yourhair, cook your meals, write your legal contracts, teach your children,decorate your apartment, give you a heart transplant, fly your planes or runyour country. But don’t ask themto share your bed and go boom boom in the night when it’s not what they want tobe doing.

Rise and walk, Chinese ladies. You got your men to stop binding yourfeet. You can make them free you totake this next step, as well.

_____

The State Within: A review

2012-01-30T11:24:00.000-08:00

I get these reminders from time to time that I’m not verywith it in the world of cinema, anymore. If I ever was. Even in myTV addict days, even though I didn’t watch everything that came across thescreen, I generally knew what was going on. But a couple days ago I came across The State Within, a six-hour TV series from 2006 I had never heardof, even though it was nominated for a Golden Globe. I got so drawn in I watched it in just two nights. If I could have stayed awake, I wouldhave watched it in one.

It’s a BBC production. Fast moving and cynical, a perfect combination of intrigue andtimeliness. The bad guys are DickCheney Halliburton Blackwater war profiteer types. The good guys are the folks trying to work within the systemto keep democracy from decaying entirely – or at least slow down the processtill the world becomes sufficiently aware to build a grass roots movement toovercome corruption and government complicity in corporate empire building.

It’s entertainment with a punch. If you are a progressive these days, this series will bejust your cup of tea. If you arean American exceptionalism advocate, this will be the kind of thing to get yourblood boiling. Not a movie forfolks who attend Republican political conventions.

The Netflix reviews reveal how The State Within traces the cultural political divide.

Here’s a sample:

Five star reviews:

This show was well crafted, full of suspense, but required a bit of concentration to keep all of the separate pieces flowing-just how I like thrillers. Well done-maybe one of the best mini-series I have watched.
Now THIS is what films should be, tense, thrilling, convoluted, scary, and all the rest of the terms associated with an excellent story, acting, and production.
Overall its a brilliant political mystery and makes it superb to watch
BRAVO, BRAVO, BRAVO, BRAVO, BRAVO! BBC has said what has for years desperately needed said - all in a concisely packaged , well conceived, beautifully shot series.

No star or one star reviews:

I couldn't even get past episode 1. This is pure anti-American crap.
This is a great show with an exciting plot, typing brilliant British acting, ruined by the British inferiority complex manifesting as shrill, vapid anti-Americanism. I'm just not going to watch a show that goes out of its way to insult my country.

Two of the secondary characters are gay lovers. One is a secret plant working forMI-6, the British CIA, within the British Embassy. His lover is assistant to the American Secretary ofDefense. Since the story entailsthe tensions between the Brits and the Americans, this is a brilliant plotdevice for fanning the flames. Yetthose inclined to criticize the film often bypass the political tensions andget right to the homophobia:

If you like stories that push an agenda, this one pushes. It's one thing to show that two characters are homosexual, but it is quite another to show two men kissing for an inordinate amount of screen time (more than one nanosecond is already too much, thank you). And if you think that most military men,especially Americans, are just killers who shoot first and ask questions later, even if their victim is an innocent pregnant moslem women, then you will also find this politically correct drivel for you. The British are quite good at their "holier-than-thou" attitude. And P.S., we are not "conservative.
Disqusting homo-promo. If you have any moral decency you won't want to waste your time watching this trash.

The acting is superb. Two characters face off – Jason Isaacs (The Patriot, Sweet November) plays Sir Mark Brydon, the British Ambassador toWashington, and Sharon Gless, as Lynne Warner, the American foul-mouthedball-busting Minister of Defence, part Madeleine Albright, part MaggieThatcher, part General Patton, except with more arrogance. Each has a history – Mark helped set upthe dictator in the fictional Central Asian Republic of Tyrgyztan (sounds likeKyrgyzstan, more closely resembles Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan) for the benefitof British and American private corporations who benefit in “nation building”following wars. Now regretting hispart in this he is focusing on putting things right. His character is clearly modeled on a real Britishambassador, Craig Murray, who became embroiled in revealing human rights abuses inUzbekistan, a move which got him fired.

Sharon Gless (Cagney and Lacey, Queer as Folk), as Lynne Warner, plays the mother of a son killedin Afghanistan. She struggles withthe personal dilemma of continuing to defend her husband’s financial interestsin keeping cooperative dictators in power, and dealing with a gradual awarenessthat her son’s death might be connected to these efforts.

The real value of this series, besides its entertainmentvalue, is its power to shine a light on the moral and political consequences ofsupporting dictators for short-term financial gain. It speaks volumes that a full-frontal attack on Americanwar-mongering could be launched by BBC productions. If you have any loyalty left to the empire that America hasbecome, you will want to disassociate yourself from this image of Bush/Cheneyneocon America with its naked imperialist ambitions, and claim the America weremember as kids, personified by Superman, who always arrived in the nick oftime to get you out of trouble. The country that saved Europe first by joining the Second World War,then by the Marshall Plan. Thecountry beyond the jingoism, represented by kind hearts, gentle people, mom andapple pie.

Today the enemies are no longer gangsters and the Russianjuggernaut, but corporate America and the military industrial complex. At least from this Britishperspective. There is at least oneAmerican hero who comes through. She’s a woman and a cop and she has all the good old American virtues ofdoggedness and the will to do the right thing. But it’s touch and go all the way, and, without giving theending away entirely, we end up with more questions than answers.

America is a hard place to be proud of these days. The majority of Americans seem not tocare about the millions of their countrymen without healthcare. Over 80% of Americans acknowledgeopenly that our politicians sell themselves to the highest bidder. Nearly half our kids live inpoverty. One in 100 of us is injail. 1 in 11 African-Americans.

This is not the place for a litany of American woes. But one should not miss the fact that they’re now making movies with Americans as the badguys.

You may want to follow the course of many critics of TheState Within on Netflix and give the moviea one-star rating on jingoistic grounds.

But too many people are going to realize this is worth awhole lot more than one star.

And that means you’re in trouble.

Do read the Craig Murray story, if you get a chance: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/jul/15/foreignpolicy.uk

_____

Where the money goes

2012-01-18T17:15:00.000-08:00

There’s an ABC article today on Romney’s practice of tithing to the Mormon Church.

According to ABC writers Matthew Mosk and Brian Ross, Romney’s family charity, called the Tyler Foundation,

has given more than $4 million to the church in the past five years, including $1.8 million in 2008 and $600,000 in 2009. But because Romney, whose fortune has been estimated at $250 million, has never released his personal tax returns, the full extent of his giving has never been public.

Fine. That’s his right as an American citizen. They do a lot of good with their money.

They also were the main out of state financial force behind Prop. 8. Our state Supreme Court in California determined there was no constitutional impediment to marrying someone of the same sex, and for a short while thousands of couples were able to marry who had not been able to before.

Then that right was taken away. Why? Because of a fear campaign – the gays are after your children, your children are going to be taught gay things in school, your children, your children, your children. One of the oldest and dirtiest tricks the homophobes have ever come up with, to tie in the minds of the uninformed the notion of homosexuality together with pederasty, despite all evidence that child molestation has absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality and everything to do with power and unhealthy sexual fixation of all kinds of people. Mostly heterosexual, because most of the population is heterosexual. The numbers are proportionate.

We in California had to sit here and watch money spill in like a tsunami from the coffers of Mormon churches in Utah. Over two and a half million dollars, 71% of which went to support for Prop. 8. They weren’t the only people buying lies. The Knights of Columbus did their share for the homophobic Catholic Church. But when you consider Utah's population...

According to Romney, “Mormon church authority is limited to the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin.”

Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, BULLSHIT.

This money went into influencing a referendum.

Into a fear campaign to sway an election that resulted in the loss of civil rights granted to a people two states away by their Supreme Court.

Newt Gingrich went over the line recently with that Bain Capital video. He got lots of facts wrong. Bain did some good by shutting down some tired old companies and freeing up money for new ones. But the part about lost jobs was true. And so was the astonishing amount of profits that would have gone to workers but now goes to shareholders.

You’ll have to forgive the fantasy. I see these dollar bills that might have gone to a worker in one of the plants Romney closed down but go to Romney in profits for his accomplishment. Which then go into the Mormon Church. Which then buys time in the media in the battle to prevent gays from marrying.

Not as bad as going into bombs to drop on a third world country. Not as bad as money in the Mafia’s pocket, perhaps. But money that passes through Christian hands that comes from taking away a person’s job and ends up taking away another person’s civil rights.

And we actually have to sit and listen to the voice of Romney on the evening news tell us the province of his church ends where the affairs of the nation begin, and not throw a rock through the TV.

_____

Called and Recalled

2012-01-18T15:31:00.000-08:00

One of the wonderful things about America’s constitutional approach to religion is that any damned fool can get a marriage license and marry you. You just go to the folks at Universal Life Church, send them ten bucks – it may be more now – and voilà, you’re a reverend kind of person.

That’s possible because the First Amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It’s that “free exercise” bit. The courts have determined over the years that that means no government agency can determine how religious bodies should run their affairs and, most recently, in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who can be called a “minister.” And what you can do to that minister.

I’ll go straight to the bottom line. You can fire his ass if he looks at you cross-eyed, and there’s nothing he can do about it. Provided you can establish that your religion does not permit him or her to be cross-eyed. That’s the key. If your church thinks it’s OK to be cross-eyed but only you don’t, you have to let him keep his job. But if the whole church thinks there’s something wrong with being cross-eyed, well, be my guest.

Cheryl Perich worked for Hosanna-Tabor, a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church in Redford, Michigan as a “called” teacher. She led prayers, taught courses in religion, and did other religious duties, in addition to being a normal fourth grade teacher of non-religious subjects.

So what does “called” have to do with it? Well, 1 Corinthians 6:1 reads, “ Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints? That’s the King James version. The Weymouth Bible puts it this way: “If one of you has a grievance against an opponent, does he dare to go to law before irreligious men and not before God's people?”

Now Missouri Synod people take their scriptures seriously. They also divide their members into “lay” people and “called” people. If you’re “called” (by God and the congregation), and if you have taken the required number of courses in religion, you get to wear the title, “Minister of Religion, Commissioned. And that’s what Cheryl Perich was – a “called” member of Hosanna-Tabor.

And if you can be “called” you can also be “recalled” – which Cheryl was when she went on leave because of narcolepsy, came back and found they had hired a replacement, and tried to sue. Sue? They said. “Have you not read 1 Corinthians 6:1-7? You can’t sue and be a Lutheran!

Now I’ve just told this story in a slanted fashion, to show some sympathy toward Cheryl. Let me tell the same story from the church’s perspective. (My words, not a direct quotation, but I believe I’ve got my facts right.)

Cheryl, you were sick and we took care of you. We gave you several months off with full pay. We are a small congregation, and because we needed a teacher to replace you that was a big financial strain on us. On top of that, we combined several grades into one class, so it also took a toll on our eighty students and seven teachers. We hired a replacement because we could not be sure if you were coming back. For us to take you now would mean paying two salaries. And when we told you that, you said you would take us to court. Surely you realize a fundamental tenet of our church is that we handle religious matters internally (1 Corinthians 6:1-7) and do not take matters to court. Your aggressive response suggests to us that we need to recall you from your position.

Cheryl did take it to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as an infraction of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and they took it to court. The first court decided in favor of the church on the grounds of “ministerial exception.” It then went to the 6th District Court, which vacated and remanded that decision, concluding that Perich didn’t qualify as a “minister.” And finally, Case #10-553, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC et al, was argued in the Supreme Court on October 5, 2011 and decided on January 11, 2012. You can read the decision here.

The Supreme Court decided, in keeping with the “Free Exercise” clause of the First Amendment, and with precedent, the government could not dictate what constitutes a “minister” – and how any religious body might discipline such a person.

But what about the conflict with all the civil rights laws? “Ministerial exception,” they said. And they made an interesting distinction, although I don’t know how far this will hold long term. If discrimination is part of a religious tenet, they said (cleverly avoiding use of the word “discrimination”), we have no say in how you apply it internally. If discrimination is practiced by an individual, we do. If the church, for example, says God wants men to be priests and women to take their orders from them, and that is doctrine, a woman cannot sue the church for discrimination. But if a church has Sunday School teachers who are both men and women, and the minister decides on his own to fire a woman teacher because of his personal belief that women should not work outside the home, then she has a case.

In the case in question, the Missouri Synod Church had established that taking things to court was against biblical principles, and anyone threatening to do that would only be demonstrating they were the wrong kind of person to be called to the ministry.

The Court took pains to state this decision was to apply narrowly to this case only, and left open the possibility of another decision if and when circumstances are different.

Conservatives are crowing all over the place. Great victory for religion!

Well yes, it is. Especially of the non-democratic ilk. And it’s a bitter pill to swallow for progressives. The ACLU, for example, an organization I send money to and am proud to be a member of. They, along with three religious organizations, the Unitarian Universalist Association, the National Council of Jewish Women and the Sikh Council on Religion and Education, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State got together to write an amicus brief in defense of Ms. Perich’s charges of discrimination. Their argument was that the so-called ministerial exception should apply to doctrinal issues only, and that this issue had to do with church leaders’ disapproval of Ms. Perich’s attitude and he behavior, and was not based on religious grounds. Which is how the Appeals Court decided. But they did not come up with a convincing explanation of how one would fight discrimination without stepping on the toes of bigoted religious groups that would satisfy the Supremes.

Most Americans, including most Roman Catholics, have long since come to share the enlightenment values of human equality. The majority of them have shed racism, sexism and homophobia. To differing degrees, to be sure, but the tendency is clear and unmistakable. They are way out ahead of their churches.

This decision has got to be particularly painful for the people of good will within retrograde organizations like the Catholic Church. I always think of them first, since they have the most money and use it, as they did in organizing and funding Prop. 8, but what applies to them applies to other groups equally well – Muslims, Southern Baptists, Orthodox Jews – with patriarchal traditions that have members trying valiantly to bring their spiritual homes into the modern world, and they cannot be happy with this turn of events.

One side of the coin is it’s a victory for religion. The other side of the same coin is the churches are being given enough rope to hang themselves with. If they take this “freedom from democratic values” too seriously, they could end up with pews filled with nothing but obedient sheep. Some think that would be nothing new, but they are missing the complex struggles the churches are going through over the question of authority.

I was confirmed in a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church. I left it. In my case, it was because the doctrines became increasingly silly to me as I became aware of how many religious bodies there were with alternate doctrines, equally silly. I left the religion before I left the church, long before I developed a feminist or gay consciousness, which would have made me flee with equal conviction if I had not already done so.

I don’t know what to suggest to those good people who stay to fight from inside. I want to help them, but I cannot see how the Supreme Court could have come to any other conclusion without treading on the Constitution. Churches can change. We saw them change on the subject of slavery, on the issue of who goes to heaven, who gets to take communion and how, on interracial marriage. The Mormons came to accept blacks even though anti-black racism is clearly written into their scriptures. The Christians came to accept Jews as not responsible as a body for the death of Christ despite centuries of church-centered anti-Semitism such as expressed by Martin Luther. It can be done, with or without government help. Don't forget how quickly the Mormons got rid of their polygamy (like racism, also founded in scripture) when they realized statehood for Utah depended on their doing so.

It is also being done in the Catholic Church and other so-called mainstream churches, in effect, but the hard way. Since the only way to oppose false doctrine is to leave the church, that's what's happening. Defections are at crisis level, a crisis that might be averted, ironically, if the government could help these progressive forces.

Under its current configuration, though, if the Court had gone the other way, and done away with the “ministerial exception,” it would bring down the Roman Catholic and all the other authoritarian religious organizations in the land. Every Catholic gay could sue for being labeled “socially disordered,” every Catholic woman would have a case of discrimination for being denied access to the clergy, the only real leadership positions. Much as I would celebrate watching this beast being taken out of its misery, I am not proud of these gut feelings. And I have to admit that a small part of me can still be persuaded there is something noble about those who would nurse it back to health instead.

So I stand with the Court. (No act of courage when the decision is 9-0.) We have no constitutional right to intervene, so we can’t participate in this healing project from outside the membership. The best we can do is agree not to beat the beast to death, like the Marxist-Leninists and Maoists tried to, and allow more heroic folk than ourselves to try to cure its ailments, remove its tumors, freshen its bad breath.

All power to them. Hope they succeed.

_____

No Ordinary Man Need Apply

2012-01-10T18:44:00.000-08:00

Look at what Americans are being treated to on the nightly news these days. Images of the very nice people of New Hampshire telling you they are trying to make up their minds who to vote for in the Republican primary. There’s Romney, the leading contender, a man who got rich shutting down companies and firing people. He’s trying to pass himself off as a job creator, and millions are willing to believe it. Then there’s Newt Gingrich, the man who led the battle to crucify Bill Clinton for sex with a woman who was not his wife at the same moment he was doing the same thing. It’s a toss-up whether Gingrich or Romney is the bigger liar. Then come two men whose strong suits are consistency and who don’t lie. Not so blatantly, at least. With Ron Paul, if you’re anti-war, you can think you’ve found your champion. Until you realize his anti-government notions, if taken seriously, would make it impossible to stop corporate pollution of the environment or pillaging of pension plans. He would also take us back to the time of segregation and argue if the majority of folks want it, it should stay on the books. Then there’s Rick Santorum, whose policies are indistinguishable from the Vatican’s. He would tell an 11-year old girl impregnated by her father that abortion is not an option. He would tell married gay people in six states that their licenses are being revoked. He would encourage local authorities to impose bans on birth control. And the good people of New Hampshire think he’s a fine man.

It isn’t hard any more for me to listen to Rick Santorum. I’ve gotten used to him, and I can console myself with the realization he plays a clown in America’s political theater. His mean provincial catholicism will run dry in short order.

What does bother me is the level of American discourse – first that these people are taken seriously and not laughed out of town by the media. And second, that people can say Rick Santorum is a nice man and completely miss the havoc he could wreak on thousands and thousands of lives.

While all this is going on, over in that other hemisphere, the one where all those socialists live, in this strange and (to Americans) baffling land called the Federal Republic of Germany, there is political discourse going on at a very different level. They are trying to decide whether to kick a president out of office.

While we are starting up the laborious process of electing a person to represent the nation, lead one of our political parties, and be in charge of the government, all simultaneously, Germany is acting out on the belief that these jobs must never be mixed up or performed by people with similar dispositions. The American way leads to impossible expectations. Our Leader has to be part Superman, part Daddy, part Human born free from sin. In most countries with divided roles, the free from sin expectations are placed on the representative of the nation – the Queen in Britain, the Emperor in Japan, the President in Germany. Prime Ministers, or Chancellors, as they are called in Germany, surprise no one when they get their hands dirty. I once thought this separation of jobs was pretty much a peachy keen idea. Still do. But it turns out it only works if the head of the nation really is free from sin. Mess it up and the consequences are pretty dire.

It’s not impeachment they’re facing but the possibility of resignation (Rücktritt) under pressure. If you think Bill Clinton’s adversaries were indignant when the word came out that he had gotten a blow job under the desk in the Oval Office, you ain’t seen nothing compared to the rage the Germans are in over the fact that their President used his office to get a low-interest loan.

OK, I exaggerate for effect. The real problem is that when this information got out, he left a threatening message on the answering machine of the magazine editor about to publish it. Low-interest loan plus media censorship still doesn’t bother Americans as much as a blow job, but it does the Germans. They’re waving shoes out in front of Bellevue Palace, the official residence, having learned the practice from watching Arabs show their disdain for George W. Bush.

Comedians are having a heyday. Talk shows are hauling out all the pundits to twist the scandal every which way from Sunday. And what you hear, loud and clear, is that Germans feel personally insulted. This office belongs to us, they are saying. He has sullied the office of President and in so doing cheapened the reputation of Germany.

This is even more serious than it sounds, because Wulff won the election a year and a half ago in large part due to the influence of Chancellor Angela Merkel and the leading coalition. If he goes, some are saying, her government could fall. Right now, when Germany is trying to manage the euro crisis in Greece, this is lousy timing.

For me, the angry debate is a breath of fresh air. I’d love to see President Christian Wulff move out of Bellevue and Joachim Gauck, the man I would have voted for, move in. Wulff represents the slick modern side of powerhouse Germany, Gauck the working class side that does the dirty work of cleaning up Germany’s lousy 20th century history – and this may be a reason Wulff got the job; people would like not to have to look at that history so much. The reason I say “fresh air,” though, is that the issues are real. Not the empty rhetoric of third-rate politicians, the fratricidal street-fighting of a once-grand old party on the skids, but a debate over whether the Germans can hold on to the dream that their national (not political) Leader is a man unlike ordinary men, and not just another dirty politician.

_____

Missing the Woods for the Trees in Iowa

2012-01-04T11:11:00.000-08:00

The Iowa caucuses seem to have nothing to do with winners. They don’t tell you who’s going to win the next presidential election, or even who’s going to run. They only tell you who the biggest losers are in the campaign to date, including the ones God told to run. Michele Bachmann went down the chute and most Americans are happy to see her go. Ditto the pizza man and that execution-happy governor of Texas.

If you stand far enough away from this rumble you can make the claim that this is democracy in action. There’s something truly appealing about watching folk sit around in diners looking presidential candidates in the eye and smelling their perfume and seeing the dandruff on their shoulders. One of my two favorite moments was watching Romney face what looked like a redneck who turned out to be a gay ex-serviceman who wanted to know why even though he risked his life for his country his legal spouse was not entitled to medical or burial benefits. The other was watching Michele Bachmann face the kid who wanted to tell her that his lesbian moms “didn’t need to be fixed,” even though I think the mom who put the kid up to it should be ashamed of herself.

If this was the whole story of the system of caucusing, it would make sense to crow, as I heard somebody do this morning, “Can you imagine this happening in Syria?”

No, of course, this kind of thing doesn’t happen in Syria, but who says Syria is what anybody should measure democracy by?

I’d like to think that the bright-eyed optimists who haven’t figured out yet that American democracy is on the rocks are right, and that the kind of free-for-all we have just witnessed in Iowa is a sign of the health of our democracy, and not of its corruption. After all, freedom of speech is tested when the most loathsome opinions are expressed aloud, not when current wisdom is asserted in a room full of nodding heads. Iowans who are white and fearful of blacks, evangelical and unused to critical thinking, straight and unable to distinguish between gays and child molesters have had their day. That’s all. It’s not the end of the world, or even of democracy.

Yes but, I want to say. Yes, but…

The already bad taste in my mouth from watching the caucuses the past few months crossed into fully spit-worthy last night when I tuned into two of the very few news programs I normally consider worth watching on television anymore, the PBS News Hour and Charlie Rose. I squirmed through both of them last night. Charlie Rose devoted half of his program to the Iowa Caucuses; the PBS News Hour blew their entire hour.

And on what? On the likes of Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. Gingrich, the guy who would outdo Nixon as imperial president and shut down the Supreme Court. Mitt Romney, the guy who never took a position he couldn’t surrender when the winds changed. Ron Paul, the racist, homophobic, Christian Reconstructionist whose view of the role of government would have black Americans still living segregated from whites. As for Santorum…

Charlie Rose had several of his “usual suspects” on last night – Al Hunt, Rich Lowry, Joe Klein and Mark Halperin – people with an encyclopedic knowledge of the American political scene who can tell you who ran for Senate from South Carolina in 1968 and draw parallels in Iowa between Santorum this time and Huckabee four years ago. You sit, listen and learn on Charlie Rose.

Or so I always told myself. But what did I learn last night from Joe Klein, of Time Magazine? I learned that Santorum is “an honorable man who sometimes says dishonorable things.”

An honorable man? Really? Have we sunk this low, that honorable (“principled” is another word many slap onto Santorum) means nothing more than consistent?

Santorum, this dodo who blamed the exposure of the priest abuse problem on the fact that Boston was a liberal city, would use the power of the presidency to dissolve all gay marriages in the nation. He’d allow the states to make birth control illegal. He thinks the sickest people should pay the highest insurance premiums. He would lead the party of small government to look a teenage girl in the eye who was raped and impregnated by her father and tell her that the laws of her country required her to carry that baby and give birth to it. Are these just things that Santorum says?

These guys sat around tables, both at the PBS News Hour and on Charlie Rose last night without once mentioning that Americans were within shouting range of having this creep Santorum subject them to a religious ideology so alien to their own physical and psychological well-being that for some it would actually constitute torture.

And these talking heads went on and on about the horse race. Nothing about the millions of dollars being spent. Nothing about the lies upon lies the candidates were spreading about their fellow Republicans. Nothing about the fact that in a country where a third of the population lives in poverty we are devoting an entire program to the party of the superrich. And absolutely nothing about the fact that in a country of three hundred million people we were actually entertaining the notion that these were serious candidates we might get to lead us, the world's primary warring nation, for the next four years?

On and on they went, describing the trees, never once seeing the woods.

I suppose I ought to console myself with the idea that if they didn’t stop to consider the misery Santorum could visit on the lives of gays and women, they also didn’t consider that this whole pornographic adventure in Iowa means nothing, in the end, anyway. All much ado about nothing. A media one-ring circus without even make-believe elephants. Santorum polls no more than 4% nationally among Catholics. Only 3% among Republicans. He has all the weight of a fart in a whirlwind.

Not that you’d get that from listening to the pundits last night.

So much for the top of the line in media coverage of American democracy.

_____

Buggery - a brief history

2011-12-30T16:07:00.000-08:00

The Buggery Act of 1533.

It has a nice rhythm to it. da DUDdily da, da DA da DA da DA.

Thought up by ‘Enery the Eighth, I am I am, apparently as a means of getting around the law that said you couldn’t execute monks and steal their property.

Wouldn’t you love to have been a fly on the wall as Henry and his Councillors sat around scheming a way around that limitation?

Henry: Damn Buggers. No way to get at ‘em.
Councillor: There’s got to be a way. Damn Buggers, indeed!
Henry: Right. What do the buggers do that we can get them for?
Councillor: Besides buggery, you mean?
Henry: That’s it! We’ll make it illegal for the buggers to be buggers!

So down came the Buggery Act of 1533, which reads:

...the offenders being hereof convicted by verdict confession or outlawry shall suffer such pains of death and losses and penalties of their good chattels debts lands tenements and hereditaments as felons do according to the Common Laws of this Realm. And that no person offending in any such offence shall be admitted to his Clergy....

That’s really got to smart. First you are sentenced to death. And on top of that you are not allowed to become a clergyman?

Seems Henry was not the first to come up with this. Two hundred years earlier, Philip IV of France (aka Philip le Bel, or Philip the Gorgeous) had pulled this trick on the Knights Templar, to whom he was deeply indebted.

One of the benefits of being king, obviously, is that if you are in over your head in debt to your bankers, you can have them executed.

With Henry, too, it was all about money, and not the story you get from the religious people, who would have you believe the act was a moment of righteousness, when evil was brought down a peg.

Now right away there’s something fishy about this law. Almost nobody seems to get prosecuted by it. The first case didn’t come about for seven years, when one of Henry’s squires, a man named Walter Hungerford lost his head for buggery. But the real reason seems to be that the man he was buggering (if indeed he was) was in cahoots with the enemies of Henry, a bunch of Catholic sympathizers in York.

Another man executed for buggery was John Atherton, the Anglican Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, in Ireland. In his case, it is likely he really was a bugger, although he would most likely have been left alone if he had not been a lawyer as well as a clergyman and sued to regain some of the land that once belonged to the Anglican Church in Ireland, thus pissing off the rich landlords who then conspired to zap him. To put icing on the cake, they charged him with incest and with sex with cattle, as well.

Then there is Mervyn Tuchet, 2nd Earl of Castlehaven, executed for buggery in 1631. Poor fellow didn’t play it all that cool. He brought his chums to the dining table and handed his greedy wife and heirs, who feared disinheritance, a reason on a silver platter for offing him and laying claim to his wealth here and now. He was beheaded on orders of the Privy Council, once a kind of English Supreme Court.

The point is few people care a rat’s backside who or what you diddle with, unless, of course, your diddling can be used as a means of getting their hands on your wealth.

But I digress. Back to the Buggery Act of 1533. What I find so interesting about it is that it was repealed twenty years later by Queen Mary (“Bloody Mary” to her father’s Protestant friends), the Catholic daughter of Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and granddaughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, who were responsible for getting Columbus to America, where gays would one day drink Bloody Marys at their institutional meal, brunch, no doubt in honor of this repeal.

Not that it did much good. A mere ten years later, Elizabeth reinstituted the buggery law when she succeeded to the throne and had her Catholic half-sister beheaded. The fact that in the next hundred years fewer than 100 cases of buggery were prosecuted suggests there was no longer a whole lot to be gained by going after buggers.

And here is where homophobia begins to play a real role. While buggers didn’t get executed all that often, they did frequently end up in pillories, especially if they were Mollies (Molly was the Elizabethan word for nelly queens or female impersonators), where any thug could do them serious harm with stones or brickbats. It’s hard to make the case that the average Joe was out for blood. The law against buggery remained a capital offense until 1861, but the last execution took place twenty-five years earlier. In 1885, the law was expanded to include other sexual acts besides sodomy under the rubric of “gross indecency” not long after the word “homosexuality” came into being.

Most likely it remained on the books because of some deep-seated sense gay sex “per anum” was too yucky to let pass. Until 1967, that is, when all laws in Britain against such goings on among the buggers were finally repealed. Bugger at will.

Unless you’re a citizen of someplace which still conserves these British traditions, like Nigeria, which has been in the news lately over its harsh treatment of gays. At least one poor fellow is concerned that the gays are going to form churches and these churches are going to go to war with the anti-gay churches, and lordy, lordy, what will become of Nigeria?

Or Zimbabwe, where legislation against homosexuality was implemented only in 1995, thus causing terrible embarrassment to President Mugabe’s predecessor, the Reverend Canaan Banana, who went to jail for his buggery habits. Oh, and was kicked out of the priesthood, as well.

And lest we create the false impression in this terribly abbreviated history of buggery that only the Africans are caught in a time warp, consider too the current focus here and here on Ron Paul’s delight (at least his Iowa campaign manager’s delight) at getting the endorsement of that troglodyte preacher from Nebraska, Phillip Kayser, who still actively advocates the stoning to death of gays.

It really was all about greed, initially. If Henry had been able to keep his greed in check, or if he had come up with some other way to snatch what he wanted from those hapless helpless subjects of his, whose only fault was a desire to keep warm on English winter nights in those cold stone monasteries.

As inheritors of British traditions, here in the US of A, we’ve brought Henry VIII’s brilliant combo alive once more. It’s not just Ron Paul who’s willing to overlook a stone thrower when it is only buggers he’s throwing them at. Virtually the entire list of Republican Party candidates for the job of controlling nuclear weapons and the power to push the red button are outdoing each other going after buggers (nowadays they use the more cheerful term – gays – and they have added women and transgendered folk, who didn't register on Henry's radar, to their number of people to scapegoat with their anti-Buggery attitudes du Jour.

Rick Santorum is perhaps Homophobe-in-Chief. (And if you think the Flying Spaghetti Monster is letting him off scot free, google his name to see his own personal connection to buggery). Michele Bachmann and her husband Marcus (you can call him Molly for short) are close seconds. I won’t mention the others, because, like Henry, it’s likely they have no personal animus, and are only on this trail for reasons of political expediency.

Whether you’re reading history and the fascinating machinations of Henry the Eighth, or tuning in to the Republican caucus race in Iowa, it’s clear the lust for power and wealth and the sanctimonious assumption of the role of Servant of the Lord on Earth is one of the most effective tools for getting ahead since the invention of the wheel.

Henry went for the Buggers. The Republicans go for the Gays.

It's just politics.

Don't worry your little head about it.

_____

The War’s Over – Who Cares?

2011-12-23T13:12:00.000-08:00

I just came across an article in Salon.com that Gary Kamiya, executive editor and one of its founders, wrote a week ago on the end of the war in Iraq. Kamiya articulates so well the absurdity that the United States went to war for all the wrong reasons and ten years later our attitude is clearly one of national shame. We are pretending it didn’t happen.

We followed a third-rate president into war led by neo-con dreams of empire. Two administrations fought it with other people’s children, killing nearly 4500 Americans, beggared the economy with a three trillion dollar cost, denied or ignored the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, played into the hands of the Iranians, probably set back the Arab Spring by many years, and now we’re pretending it never happened.

We have a plutocracy where a democracy once functioned, a Congress that barely one in ten Americans thinks highly of, one of our political parties has become proto-fascist in its thirst for power at the expense of truth and the national welfare, and we’re eating the seed corn, shutting down schools and other educational activities, ignoring the decaying infrastructure, rescinding health care reforms, and dragging our feet on protecting the environment. We’re an I’ve-got-mine, screw-you society where our idea of good news is that it turns out the claim that 50% of Americans live below the poverty line is false. It’s only about 30%.

While the war was going on, Americans at home were going on with business as usual. Police around the country are called in to fight crowds lining up to buy the latest Michael Jordan shoes, the Air Jordon 11 Retro Concord. It might be worth getting pepper-sprayed over, of course, since word is you can then sell them on e-bay for $605.

That example of American lust and greed on the micro level is nothing compared to the macro level where the banks who screwed us all financially now own the government and can get the Federal Reserve to authorize the purchase of nearly three billion dollars (it can’t be “trillion,” can it?) of worthless mortgage-backed securities. Just checked the original article I got this from. It does say trillion. That's got to be wrong. That's the same as the cost of the ten-year war, and the amount of money it would take to make us rich and happy once again, giving all kids a universal education, providing health care, yada yada dream on...

The rich continue to get richer. Dark Chocolate truffles are on sale, 25 for $463.65. Or you can save if you buy 250 for $4,213.86, if you have a big family. Choice of gold or silver gift box. Allow 9 business days to process order. Choice of layout id. Choice of style. Choose a typestyle for your company name.

Marks and Spencer’s $1500 Christmas basket (that’s what it cost in 2007), can now be had for just $1000. Looks like they’re aiming to reach some of us now in the 99%.

And while we go about our business, war facts continue to be ignored. How many Americans can tell you how many war casualties there have been? And how many can go beyond the war casualties to the other, sometimes hidden, effects of the war? Besides those with lost limbs and long-term psychological damage, there are the nearly 4 million uprooted Iraqis, nearly half of whom became refugees outside Iraq, including some 40% of the middle class. It doesn’t include the 360,000 American troops with traumatic brain injuries. And if you dig a little bit into the way the war was conducted, other casualties appear. We couldn’t have a draft, for example. Americans wouldn’t have it. The result is we had to use National Guard forces, thus putting the states at risk in an emergency. And we had to keep sending the same troops back for another tour, which resulted in an unusually high number of suicides and mental disorders.

It’s not that people haven’t tried to get Americans to recognize the harm inflicted on the world in their name with this war, and with their treasure. Ted Koppel devoted one of his Nightline programs to reading the names of 721 troops killed, back in 2004, long before it reached the 4500 number of today. The program was shut down. Censored. Nobody saw it.

But I’ve drawn attention away from Kamiya’s article, which I really wanted to recommend to you.

Let me repeat that link here. The last word, I think, should be his.

_____

A sobering week

2011-12-20T08:53:00.000-08:00

We got some harsh reminders this week that life doesn’t go on forever.

It started for me with Christopher Hitchens. I knew he was failing, but I still took his death like a kick in the stomach. He was a man I took a dislike to when I first heard him talk at a debate on the UC Berkeley campus with the dean of the business school. He had voted for Bush/Cheney and he was in favor of the Iraq War, and the audience, being a Berkeley audience, was probably 90% against him. He seemed to revel in the boos and hisses, and won the debate, in my view. I left that session with so much more respect than I had going in, and that respect has only grown over the years as I have become more familiar with his ideas and his way of being in the world.

He was brilliant. And he was a master of the putdown.

“I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” one of his interviewers once said to him.
“I’m not in the least surprised,” he responded.

A friend of his tells the story of being in a restaurant with him when they realized they were going to be asked to move to make room for a larger party. “You’re going to hate us for this,” the waiter said to them.
“We hate you already,” he responded.

Of Jerry Falwell, he once said, “If you gave Falwell an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox.”

At the same time, he was, in my view, the most articulate of the “four horsemen” of atheism in the English-speaking world, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. These men seem to be riding the waves of reaction to American right wing religion and priestly child abuse and any number of other things nudging people out of their religious security blankets.

Many writers become incoherent when asked to speak, and many speakers are lousy writers, but Hitchens was a master of both the spoken and written language. Read any of his writing, see almost any of his speech events, and you will see what I mean. Listen to his debate with Tony Jones in Sydney, for example. I doubt a better articulation of the folly of religion can be found.

Then came Vaclav Havel, who brought an end to communism in his country without a bullet being fired, and demonstrated that there are places in the world actually willing to be led by playwrights instead of crooks and gangsters. Unlike Hitchens, he was shy and often inarticulate in person. He had trouble looking people in the eye, so scarred was he psychologically from five years in prison and sixteen more under constant police watch. And yet, he held out and remains everybody’s idea of a man of courage.

Then, to go from the sublime – Havel’s Velvet Revolution – to the ridiculous, there was the death of that silly little tin man in North Korea who ran a government based on extortion, starved his people, and made Stalin look good. Hitchens did wonders for your mind, Havel lifted your spirit. Kim Jong Il gave you a taste of bile in your mouth. And he leaves us now with a 27-year old four-star general with a different bad haircut from his father’s and possibly the silliest puffed-up title ever invented – the “Great Successor.” At least it would be silly if it were not so tragic. Look at the juxtaposition of this video of starvation in North Korea: with this one showing public mourning. Or the TV announcer showing the official model for crying out loud. Or this one, of the many models of weeping hysterically in formation.

On a more local level, San Franciscans learned of the death yesterday of philanthropist Warren Hellman. Among his many accomplishments, he saved San Franciscans billions by helping reform the city’s pension system, funded the city’s Free Health Clinic, helped form a new local paper in this age of dying newspapers, and brought Blue Grass to San Francisco bigtime a three-day free concert in Golden Gate Park every year. Free concert.

And finally, more sad news with the death of Cesaria Evora. If you don’t know her music, treat yourself. YouTube has 100 videos of her.

Start with Sodade (or the more “upscale” version she did in Paris. Or this one. Or this one.

The thought she won’t be making more is very hard to bear.

One guy who demonstrates how low the human race can sink. Several others who demonstrate how high they can fly. A sobering week, in both cases.

Stay healthy. Stay strong. Stay connected.

_____

Alex and me

2011-12-17T16:20:00.000-08:00

Do you know my friend Alex?

He is famous for these sayings:

“To err is human; to forgive, divine.” (1)

“A little learning is a dangerous thing.” (1)

“Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.” (1)

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” (2)

We have so much in common, Alex and I.

We were both born in May (me in 1940, he in 1688). We both like poetry (he writes it; I read it), he grew up in Berkshire (England) and I grew up in The Berkshires (New England). He translated the Odyssey and the Iliad, I watch Homer Simpson. And, my all time favorite comparison… He would never go walking without his dog, Bounce, and I never go walking without my dog, Bounce. (I don’t think he had a second dog named Miki.)

Here he is with his Bounce,

and me with mine.

Notes:

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

(1) An Essay on Criticism, 1709 (for the full text, click here)
(2) An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 1733 (for the full text, click here)

Shame, shame, shame on Japan

2011-12-16T19:32:00.001-08:00

For most of my eighteen years as a professor in Japan I taught graduate and undergraduate seminars on culture theory. My focus was on cultures in contact, since my seminar students were largely kikokushijo – students who had lived abroad for many years, many of them taking on non-Japanese identity to some degree and in some cases even losing their proficiency in Japanese as their first language.

I consider it a gift from the gods that my view of Japan and Japanese was largely colored by this experience working with people struggling to find a both/and understanding of personal identity against a still prevalent Japanese view that the more “foreign” ways you pick up the more you betray your Japanese roots.

Japan became my home. If I needed to, I could still go back and live out my life there, so rooted did I become over those many years of life among the sushi-eaters, teeth-suckers, and smiling folk of such extraordinary kindness and generosity. I have a love of Japan that will never die. It breaks my heart that I am going to have to surrender my permanent residence card one day soon, because I have chosen to stay permanently in my home in California.

So please put what I am going to say in that larger context. Just as Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck do not represent the United States of America, the right wing of Japan, which is overrepresented in the Japanese government, is not Japan. At the same time, just as I feel shame to be an American each time I hear the word Guantánamo, or think of the latest defense bill which, if Obama signs it, will make it legal for American citizens to be detained without trial indefinitely – just as I feel shame at times like this, I feel shame at Japan’s inability to recognize the misery it inflicted on its Asian neighbors in World War II. And just as the pope is not the Catholic Church, the jingoist invaders of Iraq are not the United States and Japanese war revisionists are not Japan, these people are speaking in an official capacity, and as long as they do, the people in whose name they speak must bear some shame.

I was recently discussing the inevitable comparisons one finds oneself making between the Japanese and the Germans in processing the dark side of their 20th Century history. De-nazification was not a total success, as recent events in Germany reveal, but the Germans can boast of having at least one post-war chancellor whose actions spoke volumes about the change in Germany since the war. Willi Brandt fell on his knees, overwhelmed with emotion, at the monument to the Warsaw ghetto one day, a gesture, whether planned or spontaneous, that did much to persuade Germany’s neighbors that this was a new Germany. I spoke to a Jew once who told me it was that moment that made it possible to return to Germany to live, and enjoy at last the full benefits of his German cultural home. Where, I have to ask, is the Japanese analogue?

Compare the Kniefall (falling on one’s knees), for example, with the ongoing battle in Korea and China for recognition of the Japanese policy of sexual slavery. An article in this morning’s New York Times, about a monument in Seoul to the women who were enslaved during the war to provide sexual services to Japanese occupiers of their country reveals that this ugly wound still bleeds right up to the present moment.

In Japan, almost invariably, these women are referred to as “Comfort Women,” an insidious euphemism which to this day frames the issue from the viewpoint of the rapist invaders. Even among my sophisticated and enlightened students and colleagues, my use of the term “sex slaves” was considered inflammatory. “That’s not the word we use,” one colleage reminded me with a smile. “We call them (military) ‘Comfort Women (従軍) 慰安婦 (jūgun) -ianfu.’” When I asked him what word he thought the women involved would use, he seemed generally perplexed. “We see things from the Japanese perspective,” he responded. “Do no Japanese see things from the Korean women’s perspective?” I asked him. He said he hadn’t thought about that before, so universal is this term in the Japanese media.

The Koreans have been struggling since 1945 to get the Japanese to recognize the harm done to these women. The official Japanese line to this day is that a) it was wartime (and therefore different rules should apply); b) the motives were good (to prevent rape and the venereal disease that comes from unsupervised prostitution); c) it was a lesser evil than to have randy soldiers get restless and lose focus on the war effort. Never mind that it was systematic rape of an occupied people, and that women were actually taken from their homes kicking and screaming in front of helpless family members.

Official documents presented at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial revealed that in some cases the daughters of Korean dissidents were especially selected for “comfort duties.” Three-quarters of these women died and most of those who survived became infertile due to sexually transmitted diseases or sexual trauma. Some were raped thirty times a day, seven days a week, and beaten in between sex sessions.

For years after the war, Koreans considered the fact of sexual slavery too shameful to broadcast, and a code of silence prevailed. As time went on, though, women began to come forward and demand recognition and restitution. The Japanese response was to deny sexual slavery ever took place and insist these were illegitimate demands for money from a now rich nation. As recently as 2006, Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister from 2006 to 2007, denied there ever was such a thing as sex slavery during the war and insisted South Korean criticism of the lack of mention of sexual slavery in Japanese history textbooks was “foreign interference in Japanese domestic affairs.”

In recent years Koreans have kept up the pressure for an official apology and restitution. Two days ago, they erected a statue of a young girl across the street from the Japanese Embassy as a means of keeping the issue alive.

The Japanese just don’t get it. They finally caved, in 1995, and agreed to set up a billion dollar fund to pay victims still alive. At that time, the number was 234, and this figure would appear to be extraordinarily generous. The women turned it down because the money was to come from private sources. They wanted official recognition, and clearly an apology meant more than money. Today only 63 remain. And the Japanese response?

Chief cabinet secretary Osamu Fujimura called the installation of the statue “extremely regrettable” and said that his government would ask that it be removed.

_____

Hillary’s Hair

2011-12-08T13:18:00.001-08:00

You’ll have to pardon me. I’ve gone all gaga. I’m bouncing around like my dog, who likes to make like a helicopter when she sees me after a long time. (Hence her name, Bounce.)

I’m bouncing for Hillary Clinton and that speech she gave in Geneva on Tuesday, urging the world to do something about the failure to grant LGBT people safety and equality around the world. A first-ever proposal to fight human rights abuses against LGBT people globally. A speech for the history books.

I know this is going to look like raining on our own parade, but hear me out. I want to focus for a minute not on this momentous event, but on Hillary Clinton’s hair.

Once I picked my jaw up off the floor after hearing this speech the first time, I checked out what people were saying about it. I skipped over the Fox Network and Bachmann/Santorum knee-jerk reactions. I wanted to see what ordinary people were saying.

One of the first comments I read was from a gay person wishing she would do something about her hair.

Now it’s possible this comment was made ironically. And I don’t want to suggest this was representative of gay people’s reaction, but gay people are good at deflection and their humor is sometimes deliciously subtle. I’m guessing this comment was made by a person speaking faggotese. Being bitchy is a mechanism of the powerless, and gays do putdowns at the Olympic level. So I know I’m risking missing the point entirely of this bad hair comment, but let me run with it.

I might mention the obvious, that people don’t make comments about men’s hair, but that wouldn’t be true any more. Think Rick Perry, for example. Or Donald Trump. But what I want to do is argue this comment by a gay bitch-queen is not only breathtakingly off the mark, considering what Hillary was doing at the moment for gay people, but also just plain misplaced in its criticism.

To make this great speech Hillary wore a pony tail. Not a Madame Grande Dame hair-do, as Maggie Thatcher used to do, but a friggin' pony tail! If I didn't love her for all the other reasons, I'd love her for that. To me it signalled she has her priorities straight. Serious business now, hair later. And, just maybe, not even later. She’s signalling, whether intentionally or not, that she’s got better things to do right now than take the time to preen.

To be honest, I’ve made snarky comments on Hillary’s hair myself in the past. I’ve often wondered why she can’t find an hour somewhere to have a good hairdresser tidy her up. Her hair really can look scraggly at times.

But Jesus, girls and boys, now? You want to make an issue of that now?

The hair remark was only one of dozens of remarks by her detractors. Rick Perry said fighting against the persecution of gays in Uganda, Nigeria, and elsewhere was worth “not a dime of American taxpayer’s money.” But this is a man who prides himself on the number of criminals his state puts to death. Why should we expect anything else from this lowlife?

Lots of people complained she should have put her own house in order before asking others to change their ways, apparently unaware that no democratic nation can ever be expected to speak in just one voice. The question should be which of their many voices are they using when they address the world – the voice of a leader who threatens war and says things like "Bring it on!" – or a leader who admits we have not lived up to our own expressed ideals and announces specific measures for turning ourselves around.

It's possible, of course, I'm barking up the wrong tree here. It's possible Hillary's choice of hair-do doesn't stem from carelessness or lack of concern. Consider this. When Hillary appeared with Aung San Suu Kyi last week in Burma, the two of them looked like teenage girls who had decided to dress and make themselves up, hair included, to look alike. And that would mean Hillary taking her cue from Suu Kyi, since Suu Kyi has never changed her hair style in years, as far as I know.

In any case, when you see a picture of the two of them together in Burma it makes you think the hair choice was deliberate, and their affection for each other appeared to be genuine. What a high that must have been for both of them. Hillary may still be riding high off that encounter, as I am off her speech in Geneva. What a powerful message she conveyed in making the effort to stand on the same plain as this heroic figure of Burma, a message that would have gone astray if she had gone all Maggie Thatcher or Madelyn Albright for the occasion. How much more elegance these two women had in their simplicity. Maybe she's decided to hang onto that a while.

There's another possibility, that Hillary thinks she looks good in this hairstyle, and all this speculation is based on nothing. But I can't imagine somebody in her position wouldn't have advisors telling her she's too important for a pony tail. I'm going with the deliberate choice explanation, and - pardon me if I repeat myself - that makes me look upon her with even greater respect and appreciation.

If you haven’t actually listened to Hillary’s speech in Geneva in its entirety, please do. It’s a totally different experience from reading the words. Hillary speaks slowly, deliberately, in plain American English. The speech was perfection. Well written, well delivered, unadorned, and from the heart.

If only this were the image of itself America portrayed to the world all of the time.

_____

Reinventing the Wheel

2011-12-04T16:15:00.000-08:00

Here’s another exhange with my cousin Betty.

This morning she sent me the following message about male-female differences and asked me if I agreed. Here’s the message, and my response:
_____

In an evening class at Stanford the last lecture was on the mind-body connection - the relationship between stress and disease. The speaker (head of psychiatry at Stanford) said, among other things, that one of the best things that a man could do for his health is to be married to a woman whereas for a woman, one of the best things she could do for her health was to nurture her relationships with her girlfriends.

At first everyone laughed, but he (sic) was serious. Women connect with each other differently and provide support systems that help each other to deal with stress and difficult life experiences. Physically this quality "girlfriend time" helps us to create more serotonin - a neurotransmitter that helps combat depression and can create a general feeling of well being. Women share feelings whereas men often form relationships around activities. They rarely sit down with a buddy and talk about how they feel about certain things or how their personal lives are going. Jobs? Yes. Sports? Yes. Cars? Yes. Fishing, hunting, golf?

Yes. But their feelings? Rarely.

Women do it all of the time. We share from our souls with our sisters/mothers, and evidently that is very good for our health. He said that spending time with a friend is just as important to our general health as jogging or working out at a gym.

There's a tendency to think that when we are "exercising" we are doing something good for our bodies, but when we are hanging out with friends, we are wasting our time and should be more productively engaged-not true. In fact, he said that failure to create and maintain quality personal relationships with other humans is as dangerous to our physical health as smoking!

So every time you hang out to schmooze with a gal pal, just pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself for doing something good for your health! We are indeed very, very lucky. Sooooo... let's toast to our friendship with our girlfriends. Evidently it's very good for our health.

Forward this to all your girlfriends - and stay in touch!

Thanks to all the girls in my life who have helped me stay healthy, happy, and feeling very loved.

Life isn't about surviving the storm; but how you dance in the rain.

_____

Betty:

No, I don’t agree. Or, more precisely, I feel like the researcher's findings, even if true, could well lead to some wrongheaded thinking.

Whether I agree or not is not the question you should be asking and my answer should make no difference to you. If you have good friendships with women and you find them of higher quality than your friendships with men, what would it matter what some study has to say about whether or how women form friendships? The issue is not how most women can or should do it but what conclusions you should draw from the claim that women make better friendships than men do.

Even if it is true women make better friendships with each other than they do with men, I would hope no one would pass up a chance to form a friendship across the gender line. One needs to recognize that the conclusion is at such a level of generalization that it masks the complexity of life, where life is actually lived. In my own experience, nothing in the world has mattered more to me over the years than my friends, and I would never be persuaded by any study that suggested others have better friendships. For that reason I find the conclusion a silly one. Even if it is true that women in general make better friendships than men in general, individuals all make their own friendships, and how you live your life has little to do with these generalizations, unless you are foolish enough to stop following your own instincts and try to match all your behaviors to the behavior of others.

In my experience, the strongest friendships are formed when two or more people share a life-changing event. Some events, like fighting for your life in a foxhole, are more dramatic than others, but even living side by side and talking across the fence about trivialities for thirty years can build an unbreakable bond, if you’re open to letting one form. The latter example is as life-changing as facing a common enemy. It just takes longer to develop.

I understand there are individuals out there who have deep-seated psychological problems which keep them from trusting other people or seeing the value in other people. I’ve known people I would have to define as evil. And many more who are so totally self-centered I am convinced they don’t begin to understand what friendship even means. But most people I know, male or female, are capable of reaching out to others and trusting them with their lives. Gay men have their “fag hags” (and pardon the political incorrectness, but I’m of a generation that associates that word with some really fantastic cross the gender friendships.) Popular culture is full of male-bonding and female-bonding stories – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Thelma and Louise come to mind. Gender has no claim to ownership here.

After breaking up with somebody I’d been with for a dozen years, I hit a low spot in my life. Eventually, I found myself attracted to someone again. He became aware of my feelings and said to me, “I’m so sorry I can’t return your feelings. I wish I could do more for you.” I said to him, in all sincerity, “If this had happened to me in my twenties, I would be devastated. But it is happening to me in my fifties, and I’m coming from a place of believing I could never love again. You’ve proven me wrong, and given me the greatest gift anybody could give me.” I spent no time at all mourning that relationship that never got off the ground. I reveled in the fact that I was still alive, life being defined by the ability to love. I thought I’d used it all up. To my utter delight, I learned that it can actually grow with time and you can come to realize only the very young and the very foolish worry about finding someone who can love them. The rest of the world gets out there and finds people to love and reasons to love them.

Because that’s how I see the world, this alleged study of how men and women form friendships strikes me as largely irrelevant, and something akin to a lie by omission. The generalization overlooks not only individual differences, which have nothing to do with sex or gender, but also differences in how one responds to the layers of life built on experience.

I hope that speaks to your question.

Now let me turn, though, to a separate issue that your question brings up. I’ve been focused a lot lately on the phenomenon of things going viral on the internet. Don’t know if you’ve been reading previous blogs, but there was the story of the hard of hearing grannie and the lady who called the cops to complain about her loud neighbor playing music so loud “it knocked the plates off the wall.” A whole new phenomenon, the urban legend, has sprung up since the advent of the internet. Most of these stories fall under the rubric of entertainment. People pass them to friends the way they tell jokes to their friends. Others have some kind of didactic value, and I suspect this “head of psychiatry” tale is one of those.

I’m guessing this is an urban legend. (It's an educated guess, because the letter says the head of psychiatry is a man, but the Stanford website says the actual head is a woman.) I have to assume "the head of psychiatry" would not be making claims like this without research, and you didn't give sources for this claim, so I went looking. I found one link after another to affirmations of the alleged study’s conclusions here, here, here, and here. But they are all from women who are chiming in and agreeing from personal experience, not from women who have read the actual study.

Don't get me wrong. I trust that when all these women rush to agree with "the head of psychiatry's" conclusions that they're telling the truth as they know it. Why would anybody want to question this good news?

I know from personal experience that women can bond tightly and wonderfully with each other. I've also read a lot about how women act collectively while men act individually, how women seek to find solutions to problems where men seek to be king of the hill, how women look after the entire brood while men tend to prefer the strongest, etc. etc. It fits our notion of how men are lone warriors above all else while women work on the motherly instinct to protect all their children equally and choose security for all over the success of one or a few. And these are stereotypes all.

This view is stressed on yet another website by a woman who apparently makes a living confirming "the head of psychiatry's" conclusions - no doubt because they resonate so strongly with women and women want to make sure they are building a better life on those same conclusions.

By now I'm intrigued. Why can't I find the actual study? Even if it rings true, why is this beginning to look to me like an urban myth?

I went eventually to snopes.com, of course, the source of the best information on urban myths. There is no mention of this Stanford study, so it can't be confirmed or denied that way. What I did find, interestingly, is a Facebook page with other people discussing going to snopes and finding the cupboard bare.

In this case, one doesn’t need Snopes, of course. It's easy enough to find out who the head of psychiatry at Stanford is. She is Dr. Laura Roberts. One could easily phone the department and ask if Dr. Roberts actually did make this statement and how she drew her conclusions. Their phone number is: (650) 723-6643.

But I'm not going to call. Not just because I suspect they are bombarded with calls from people wanting this story corroborated and don't want to add to their burden, but because I'd prefer to look at the story gone viral from what I think is a common sense perspective. As I’ve said, I think it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. If it inspires you to take a second look at your women friends and value them more highly, there’s no reason to give it a second thought. When it comes to “truth value,” it hardly matters whether it’s true or not and it matters even less whether somebody agrees. Perhaps especially if a man agrees or not.

One last note, though, on the potential didactic value. The older I get the more I marvel at how many times we invent the wheel. Back in the 60s when women’s movements got off the ground, one of the more important messages that came from them – I can’t remember whether it stems from Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir or elsewhere now – was that women are programmed to identify themselves across many world cultures in terms of the men in their lives, and will readily abandon a friendship with another woman if it gets in the way of a chance to hook up with a man. For at least fifty years ago, women in America have been teaching each other to value each other as much as they value any man. And this has gotten easier to do as women have sought and gained the right to work outside the home and access to social resources and the independence they need to live unattached to a male breadwinner. Look to Afghanistan for the monstrous “before” picture. We don’t have a perfect “after” picture, and that would explain why this message resonates so strongly.

This “study,” if it actually exists, has the didactic value of preaching this important lesson once more, that gender roles and relationships are socially constructed and can be deconstructed and reconstructed when they are found wanting. And since most people don’t live their lives on the basic of research data, an urban legend should do that job just as well.

I could dismiss this as just another attempt to reinvent the wheel. But perhaps that's not fair. It's more a reminder that when cultural values change, it can take much longer than a single generation.

_____

What would we do without religion?

2011-12-02T12:27:00.000-08:00

Came across three items in the morning paper just now, all having to do with “values” derived from religion.

Item 1:

Afghan President Karzai just pardoned a woman in jail for twelve years for adultery. (She was originally sentenced to three, but got twelve when she appealed.) She’s been in jail since she was raped in 2009 (being raped means she committed adultery), along with the child she bore as a result of that rape, and Karzai is commuting the rest of the sentence. Not only that, they’re now saying she won’t have to marry her rapist.

We need to go easy on this guy Karzai. He’s a regular Abraham Lincoln.

Item 2:

“I am not a racist,” says Melvin Thompson of the Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church in Pike County, Kentucky. “I just don’t think we should allow interracial marriages.” His church agreed with him and voted nine to six in favor of a ban. A number of people abstained.

That’s like the Roman Catholic Church’s “I am not homophobic. I just don’t think we should allow gays to marry.”

If this line of reasoning is good for the goosey Catholics, shouldn’t it be good for the gandery Baptists?

Item 3:

And let’s not forget the evangelical Lutherans:

As Americans we all have the same civil rights,” Michele Bachmann noted the other day. “That’s really what government’s role is, to protect our civil rights. There shouldn’t be any special rights or special set of criteria based on people preferences. We all have the same civil rights.”

“Then why can’t same sex couples get married,” asked someone in the audience.

“They can get married, [if] they abide by the same laws as everyone else. They can marry a man, if they’re a woman, and can marry a woman if they’re a man,” Bachmann said.

(Men have no right to pregnancy leave, why should women have such a right? Left-handed people should be expected to write with their right hand just like right-handed people do.)

Where would civilization be without the moral guidance of religion?

_____

Happy Birthday, Matthew

2011-12-01T22:00:00.000-08:00

It's December 1st.

On this day in history…

Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama (1955), Ford introduced the Assembly Line (1913), Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met together for the first time (1943), Papua New Guinea gained independence from Australia (1973), construction workers drilled through the final wall in the Chunnel, linking Britain and France (1990), Ukraine voted for independence from the Soviet Union (1991), the Archdiocese of Los Angeles settled sex abuse claims for forty-five of its cases pending for $60 million in 2006. That left five hundred cases still outstanding. And on December 1st in 2008 Hillary Clinton was nominated Secretary of State and Venice was flooded.

On this day in 1935, Allen Stewart Konigsberg was born. He later called himself Woody Allen. Today is also the birthday of Bette Midler, Treat Williams and Sarah Silverman and the death day of Ben Gurion. On this day in 1963, the Beatles’ first single, “I want to hold your hand” was released in the United States. In 1913 the Buenos Aires subway started operations, and in 1918 Transylvania united with Romania, following the incorporation of Bessarabia and Bukovina, creating the modern nation that today celebrates its National Day. Happy Birthday, Romania.

Today is Freedom and Democracy Day in Chad, Fullveldisdagurinn (Self-Governance Day) in Iceland, Teacher’s Day in Panama, Women’s Day in Bahrain and World AIDS day all over the world. Today in 2004 Tom Brokaw signed off for the last time as anchor of the NBC Nightly News.

But for me this is a day for remembering Matthew Shepard. He was born on this day in 1976 and would be 35 years old today if he had not been beaten to a bloody pulp, tied to a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming two months before his 22nd birthday and left to die, because he was gay. His killers, Russell Arthur Henderson and Aaron James McKinney, tried first to use the “gay panic” defense – the argument that one is driven to temporary insanity by unwanted gay sexual advances, but ended up claiming it was a robbery gone wrong. Never mind the logic of robbing somebody by leaving him to die on a fence overnight.

Happy Birthday, Matthew.

We haven't forgotten you.

_____

What were you thinking?

2011-12-01T12:34:00.001-08:00

Sometimes the United States of America parodies itself. Reduces itself to a Saturday Night Live skit.

In this morning’s paper is an article, accompanied by the picture you see here of a bunch of kids in Scottsdale, Arizona posing with Santa. They’re all carrying guns. One of them is an $80,000 machine gun. Another is an AR-15 with grenade launcher.

I don’t remember when I first began noticing how militarized everything around me seemed to be getting. The National Rifle Association is one thing, but this is quite another. In this picture with Santa, the kids are not carrying hunting rifles. They’re carrying weapons intended to kill large numbers of people with a single pull of the trigger.

I blogged yesterday about the challenge to laugh “with” somebody and not “at” somebody, which involves being able to see yourself in folks making fools of themselves at any given moment. The two examples I used were a hard-of-hearing old woman and a woman who evidently never learned self-control. Whether the cause of her problems was a lack of education or just a low IQ was never made clear. The point was the world was laughing at them, and the world includes me. And it took me some time to make the laughing with/laughing at distinction. The instinct was to laugh first and analyze later. Some will say justify later.

How we determine what is funny is culturally determined. Values change, and nothing marks cultural gaps the way humor does. Taku looked at those two examples and asked, “Is there something wrong with Germans that they laugh at people like that?” Non-Germans often see German humor as slapstick. I argued that there was nothing particularly German about laughing at the hard-of-hearing or at a crazy lady, that it was modern culture which all modern people share. Differences that once existed among people of European culture have fallen away, and we are all much more like each other and getting more that way all the time.

But this picture of kids with Santa holding guns popped off the page at me this morning as if to remind me not to go too far with that generalization. It’s hard to imagine the people of any other modern nation, European, Asian, or otherwise, coming up with the idea that it’s “fun” to have your picture taken with Santa holding a grenade launcher.

I get e-mails all the time with sloppy sentimental stories of “our heroic boys” fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, pictures of the flag waving and people with their hands over their hearts and a military band playing. Eisenhower’s warning clearly went unheeded, and the military industrial complex was allowed to take control of the culture.

If you doubt this, look at the faces on these kids. They’re smiling. Only Americans smile like that.

Back during the Vietnam War I went to an anti-war rally in Japan featuring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, held in a large arena near an American military base. Halfway through their act, some guys stopped the show shouting, “If you don’t fight them in ‘Nam, you’ll be fighting them in your own back yard.” My friend, a Welshman, loved it. “Great act you Americans put on.”

“That wasn’t part of the show,” I told him.

“I’ll never understand how Americans think,” he said.

I thought of him this morning for some reason. And I heard the granny voice in my head (the one I want to foster before my hearing goes) saying,

“What on earth were you thinking?”

_____

Laughing at Grannie and Crazy Aunt Christine

2011-11-30T15:37:00.000-08:00

Schadenfreude is the word for the kick one gets from watching somebody fall down the stairs. But what’s the word that describes the mixed feelings you have watching a fellow human being look foolish and sympathetic at the same time? When you laugh at somebody you know could be you?

I sent round a YouTube piece yesterday of a 99-year-old woman calling the cops to find out if the big storm that had hit overnight had affected her daughter in another city, whom she hadn’t heard from. (For the English, see below.) It was clear she was worried.

She was also hard of hearing, and the poor cop at 911 couldn’t make her understand there was nothing to worry about. With each new “eh?” the situation got funnier and funnier until I was rolling on the floor. I had to e-mail the link to friends.

I don’t know whether the fact that the piece was in German had anything to do with it – I think the situation should be obvious despite a language barrier (and I provided a translation) – but I got back some interesting responses, all sympathetic to the old woman. Doesn’t social services provide hearing aids? Doesn’t this make you sad? Don’t you realize this could soon be you? Nobody else so far has found it amusing, much less rolling on the floor funny.

That makes me think that I’ve done a good job surrounding myself with friends with a greater sense of decency than I have myself. Always nice to be able to pat yourself on the back for your ability to select people of character as friends.

But what am I to do with my gut reaction, which is to laugh. Even now, just thinking of that interaction and hearing the cops laughing in the background brings a smile to my face. I’m just going to have to admit I like to laugh at people’s weaknesses. If I laugh at others when they’re down, I’m inviting them to laugh at me when I’m down. So be it. We’ll go through life this way. We all end up dead and gone. My goal is to go with a smile on my face.

I came across this YouTube video, incidentally, while checking out the story of a woman named Christina Zehnbauer, in Mannheim, Germany. The story never traveled outside the German-speaking world, evidently, although it was big news for a while inside. It involves a woman who calls the cops to complain her neighbor is playing his music so loud that her “plates are flying off the wall.” The cop does a masterful job of calming her hysterics, and the call ends well, with the two of them laughing together, as he promises to send a car around to investigate.

The problem is, somehow this conversation got out and found its way onto the internet. One of Frau Zehnbauer’s neighbors told her about it, and next thing she’s got a lawyer and is suing the cops for insulting her civil liberties.

These bare facts do not tell the real story, however, which is that for a brief while Frau Zehnbauer was the talk of the nation. TV channels picked it up, one of Germany’s most famous cabaret comedians goes to meet her with TV reporters recording the event, and Frau Zehnbauer goes along and plays smoochie-smoochie for the camera with this most famous of her many fans. The uploaded YouTube 911 call (it’s 112 in Germany and most of Europe) is picked up everywhere. Children memorize it and recite it. A rock group uses it as lyrics to a song.

And for a while everything Frau Zehnbauer does is national news. The power company turns her lights out, and cameras are there to film her plight. She has a fight with her ex-husband and all the neighbors – and all the cameras – are there as witnesses. A neighbor claims she was injured in a fight with Frau Zehnbauer and the cameras film the reconciliation. Her sister-in-law with the same last name complains her life is hell. She is featured in another video titled “Frau Zehnbauer against the world.” and the camera films her reconciliation with the entire neighborhood she has pissed off – including Mr. Ellenburger, the man she originally complained about who was playing his music so loud the plates were “flying off the wall.”

If you speak German, what may well first tickle your funnybone is the fact that Christina Zehnbauer is speaking in dialect. Germany, like many places, has a history of snobbery about regional dialects, and they are often used in joketelling for the added bumpkin effect. When Christina Zehnbauer shouts to the rooftops in Kurpfalz Dialect (the area around Heidelberg/Mannheim), it’s funny. Never mind this may be a woman in distress.

Bülent Ceylan, the comedian who shows up at Frau Zehnbauer’s doorstep with a rose in his hand and cameras turning, is also from Mannheim, as it turns out, and in one of his TV appearances he goes into character as Harald, the local who is incensed at the way people make fun of people from Mannheim just because of the way they speak. The skit is hilarious because the reference is to Christina Zehnbauer. And the TV special is clearly squeezing every ounce of humor out of the situation it can, making the story into one of “love at first sight.” Ceylan, like most comedians, who reserve the right to laugh at absolutely anything, makes fun of Christina, but you have to believe she is enjoying the limelight. And he’s totally charming, and I’m not so sure I wouldn’t enjoy being in Christina’s place at the time.

If I had stopped with the original telephone call to 911 gone viral, as most people would, I would have simply enjoyed the laugh and moved on. And probably I should have. Amusing situations seldom bear analysis. Unfortunately (or not), in this era of YouTube videos, a whole bunch of other videos have been uploaded of Christina making a fool of herself as well. I watched in fascination, until I realized what I was looking at was a troubled soul living on welfare, unable to run her life with any sense of balance. She has no off button, lets invective fly at will, and is capable of turning half the world against her every morning before breakfast and the rest by noon. She has two daughters who suffer from her excesses, and who have lost a whole lot of dignity with Christina’s “fifteen minutes of fame” – only this time it was notoriety and weeks, not fifteen minutes. To watch it all is to stop laughing. And maybe even start feeling a little sheepish.

And if you didn’t feel sheepish watching a fellow human being self-destruct, maybe you would when you read that Christina Zehnbauer died this week of unknown causes. They think it was a heart attack, but she was only 47. I’ve searched for the reason, but find only one local paper, the Wormser Zeitung, with even that much information. It looks like she’s yesterday’s news, and we’re all moving on.

In a totally unrelated event, I happened across an essay by a Lutheran minister on the subject of the ethics of one of America’s most outspoken sex columnists, Dan Savage. Savage breaks all the rules of our traditional sources of cultural authority in religion, which places sex at the center of morality and paints virtue in terms of sacrifice, celibacy, and control. Savage’s ethical code is focused on honesty, trust and an acceptance of human appetites which must be accommodated. Needless to say I’m with Savage. For me, sexual loyalty is way down the list of virtues, and honesty is at the very top. Perhaps that’s why, as I’ve reflected on the plight of Christina Zehnbauer and the grannie worried about her daughter, I’ve decided I’m going to continue to laugh heartily and without guilt when faced with human failure. If I can do that with my own failures, why should I not do the same with the failure of others? To laugh in someone’s face is usually unkind, and you have to be sure you’re laughing at yourself when you see another’s fumbling and not kicking someone when they’re down. But as I age I recognize more and more each day how dignity falls away in time. The solution is not to pretend something isn’t funny when it is. The solution is to recognize you don’t have to be dishonest when looking at the human condition in its entirety.

I’m not suggesting that sympathetic laughter is the only laughter I would allow myself. Derision and ridicule are honest responses to arrogant fools. I feel no guilt deriding the Roman Catholic hierarchy for their hypocrisy in claiming exclusive control over the definition of morality. And I feel no reason not to ridicule the likes of Newt Gingrich when he speaks of family values.

But I also know smiling while watching old people shuffle and cup their ears is not derision or ridicule, but a way of recognizing we’re all on the way to losing it.

And we might as well go down laughing.

For transcript and translation to Frau Zehnbauer 911 call, click here.
For transcript and translation to Grannie call, click here.

_____

The Reductionist Game

2011-11-27T15:54:00.000-08:00

I just got another of those letters from a cousin whom I hold in great esteem. She’s a dear lady. Only today, unlike on many days when she reveals her warm and gentle nature, she has her head where the sun don't shine.

Here’s the letter she sent me, with the one-line comment, “I have to agree with this!”

Some Belated Parental Advice to Protesters

Call it an occupational hazard but I can’t look at the Occupy Wall Street protesters without thinking, “Who parented these people?”

As a culture columnist, I’ve commented on the social and political ramifications of the “movement” – now known as “OWS” – whose fairyland agenda can be summarized by one of their placards: “Everything for everybody.”

Thanks to their pipe-dream platform, it’s clear there are people with serious designs on “transformational” change in America who are using the protesters like bedsprings in a brothel.

Yet it’s not my role as a commentator that prompts my parenting question but rather the fact that I’m the mother of four teens and young adults. There are some crucial life lessons that the protesters’ moms clearly have not passed along.

Here, then, are five things the OWS protesters’ mothers should have taught their children but obviously didn’t, so I will:

• Life isn’t fair. The concept of justice – that everyone should be treated fairly – is a worthy and worthwhile moral imperative on which our nation was founded. But justice and economic equality are not the same. Or, as Mick Jagger [2] said, “You can’t always get what you want.”

No matter how you try to “level the playing field,” some people have better luck, skills, talents or connections that land them in better places. Some seem to have all the advantages in life but squander them, others play the modest hand they’re dealt and make up the difference in hard work and perseverance and some find jobs on Wall Street and eventually buy houses in the Hamptons. Is it fair? Stupid question.

• Nothing is “free.” Protesting with signs that seek “free” college degrees and “free” health care make you look like idiots because colleges and hospitals don’t operate on rainbows and sunshine. There is no magic money machine to tap for your meandering educational careers and “slow paths” to adulthood and the 53 percent of taxpaying Americans owe you neither a degree nor an annual physical.

While I’m pointing out this obvious fact, here are a few other things that are not free: overtime for police officers and municipal workers, trash hauling, repairs to fixtures and property, condoms, Band-Aids and the food that inexplicably appears on the tables in your makeshift protest kitchens. Real people with real dollars are underwriting your civic temper tantrum.

• Your word is your bond. When you demonstrate to eliminate student loan debt, you are advocating precisely the lack of integrity you decry in others. Loans are made based on solemn promises to repay them. No one forces you to borrow money; you are free to choose educational pursuits that don’t require loans or to seek technical or vocational training that allows you to support yourself and your ongoing educational goals. Also, for the record, being a college student is not a state of victimization. It’s a privilege that billions of young people around the globe would die for – literally.

• A protest is not a party. On Saturday in New York, while making a mad dash from my cab to the door of my hotel to avoid you, I saw what isn’t evident in the newsreel footage of your demonstrations: Most of you are doing this only for attention and fun. Serious people in a sober pursuit of social and political change don’t dance jigs down Sixth Avenue like attendees of a Renaissance festival. You look foolish, you smell gross, you are clearly high and you don’t seem to realize that all around you are people who deem you irrelevant.

• There are reasons you haven’t found jobs. The truth? Your tattooed necks, gauged ears, facial piercings and dirty dreadlocks are off-putting. Nonconformity for the sake of nonconformity isn’t a virtue. Occupy reality: Only 4 percent of college graduates are out of work. If you are among that 4 percent, find a mirror and face the problem. It’s not them. It’s you.

I wrote back.

Dear [name deleted]:

You say you agree with this article by Mary Beth Hicks of the Washington Times. I don’t. Let me tell you why.

It’s one of the best examples of missing the woods for the trees I’ve seen in a long time.

To start with, look what she’s done with this now global phenomenon called “Occupy Wall Street” – she has reduced it to the worst features of some of its least representative members – the whining self-centered smelly folk who provide the media, always looking for the outrageous and the controversial, with a demon to glom onto. The thousands of people protesting the abuse of power in the United States are reduced to people with “tattooed necks, gauged ears, facial piercings and dirty dreadlocks.”

Where in this “report” is the big picture, the full extent of what the movement represents and who all is involved?

I won’t pick apart her arguments one by one. Others have already done it in the commentary to her article.

But just let me say this. Ms. Hicks’ putdown of this cry for help in America is no different from watching a power-hungry bureaucrat turn back an application for food stamps because, contrary to the rules, it was filled out in pencil. Or a plea from a mother wanting her child out of jail because her English is ungrammatical. We often miss the injustices done by people claiming the high ground because they know how to make reasonable arguments and focus the story on the mud on a fireman’s boots while he tries to keep your house from burning down.

The right wing in America is pulling out all the stops trying to discredit the OWS movement, to hide the fact that money has so thoroughly corrupted our political system that there is widespread and increasing consensus that there is no reason anymore to work within the system. To help the democrats and work within the system, they believe, is no longer a viable option. Democrats too, they say - and I think the evidence isn't hard to find - write legislation on the basis of who pays them, not on what is good for the country.

Life isn’t fair, says Ms. Hicks. Kids should accept that. Really? We should accept without a whimper that between 1979 and 2007 the wealth of the richest 1% of Americans increased by 275% at the same time as the bottom 80% saw their wealth decline? And since the Supreme Court has decided there can be no limit to secret contributions to officials by wealthy corporations, we no longer have recourse to the usual channels to fix this inequity. Banging pots and pans (what Ms. Hicks dismisses as a “civic temper tantrum”) has become all that’s left.

It’s true that ultimately one cannot make changes just by making noises. Ultimately these cries of protest will have to be translated into action. The cries are not the solution. But they are the wake-up call. Ms. Hicks is blaming the alarm clock for not getting out of bed and going to work. She’s blaming the young for not being clean and polite. Fine, but while you're nodding your head in agreement, be careful you're not still nodding when she blames the unemployed in a time of 10% inflation, for not working. And when she ignores the 10-12% figures when stressing on the 4% figure for college graduates, as if college kids should take their money and run and not see the plight of those is worse shape. One wonders why she would go to this length to twist and filter facts to make an argument.

I wondered why, until I realized she was writing for the Washington Times, the right wing Washington newspaper, which historian Thomas Frank of Harper's has called "a propaganda sheet whose distortions are so obvious and so alien that it puts one in mind of those official party organs one encounters when traveling in authoritarian countries." Hicks is endorsed by the likes of Michelle Malkin and touted for being on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club.

Mary Beth Hicks is the voice of the folks interested in keeping the wealth in the hands of America’s superwealthy, the republic of the people, by the people, for the people, be damned.

Hope you’re well,

Your cousin,

A.

_____

Matches to Kindling

2011-11-22T11:45:00.000-08:00

The UC Davis story has staying power. In fact, it may still be growing. The headlines in this morning's San Francisco Chronicle read "UC Davis chancellor tearfully apologizes" and has a picture of Chancellor Linda Katehi, looking like she hasn't slept in 48 hours, being escorted by two burly guys to her car. And the online edition, SFGate, has a picture of the pepper spraying incident attached to the story of the “tearful” apology four days later.

Poor woman. You have to wonder if this isn't being overdone. But the rage has to go somewhere. Earlier there was a picture of her walking to her car at night past students lined up, watching in stone-cold silence as she passed. The paper called it a "perp walk." There are pictures everywhere of signs, "Resign, resign!" Interesting that both the chancellor and the police chief are women. How times have changed.

Charlie Rose had two especially interesting interviews on last night, one with Dov Seidman, and the other with David Brooks. If you go in the next couple of days, this link will work. After that, you can still find the interviews, one more fascinating than the other. Seidman's going around giving big corporations lectures on being ethical. Brooks is talking about how government is broken but the country is very healthy because, he says, "Americans still trust strangers and can build organizations” while most of the world is still wary of outsiders." Interesting social analysis, even though most analysis on that level often misses the devils in the details.

One of them mentioned the power of single individuals to either change the world or represent change of some kind, thanks to the internet and the fact that things regularly go viral now. And nothing illustrates that better than this Davis story. Davis is a kind of out of the way school, very much a country cousin to UC Berkeley and UCLA. Known for its School of Veterinary Medicine and its Department of Viticulture and Enology (and how many of those do you see around?) A place that suggests earthiness, and calm and steady hard work. Now you hear people criticizing the administration for forgetting its educational purpose and being all about management and control. They're taking a beating.

I just got off the phone. It rang before 9 o’clock this morning and it was somebody from the DCCC – the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the folks working to get Democrats into office nationwide. I usually hang up quickly, sometimes complaining about telephone solicitations, usually asking them to take my name off donor lists. The last time somebody from the DCCC called I went on at length about how I’ve decided not to send another nickel to political campaigns as long as the system stays broken. This morning the young lady was way ahead of me. “And just who’s going to fix it?” (she stopped before she actually said, “Mr. Smarty Pants.”) We talked a full fifteen or twenty minutes. Not smart on her part if she’s serious about fund raising. But in the end, she got fifty bucks out of me, not because I’ve changed my mind about the broken system, but because I couldn’t not reward a bright eyed young woman who talked about daily arguments with her grandparents who feel as I do about the failure of the system in the United States. I immediately regretted it, when the next item in my inbox was a solicitation for funds from AlterNet. “Please support AlterNet’s coverage of OWS,” it says. Precisely the kind of thing I told the woman I wanted to send my pocket change to, instead of things that keep the system going.

In the end, my small contributions won’t make any difference, except that they do hold off despair and cynicism for another day. The letters to the editor are filled with complaints about how smelly and stupid and destructive the occupy movements are. And they all miss the point, which is that things are stirring and there’s no telling where they will go. The cops with their batons and their pepper spray are already iconic images of the system gone wrong.

Now I’m wondering if the rage can lose Ms. Katehi her job, or if it should. I know the buck has to stop somewhere, and too often it stops before it gets to the top. But on the surface of things, it would seem counterproductive to push Linda Katehi aside.

I just checked her background. Turns out her full name is Pisti Basile "Linda" Katehi-Tseregounis, and she’s fourteen years younger than me. She was born in Athens and was raised on Salamis Island, which, I am told, was mentioned by Homer. She’s an electrical engineer and computer scientist, holds nineteen U.S. patents and has authored some 650 publications. Doesn’t sound like one of the bad guys. But she may take the blame. Particularly when it gets out that her salary is $400,000, paid directly by California taxpayers. The same ones that send their kids off to college to study winemaking and to research leukemia in cats.

The images of two UC campus police forces, one at Berkeley, with police punching kids in the gut with their batons, and one at Davis, with the vivid color of red pepper being sprayed directly into kids’ eyes, were matches to a pile of dry kindling.

There’s so much to this story of unrest in America.

_____

Working, working

2011-11-16T15:13:00.000-08:00

Are all these Occupy Movements working? I think they are.

To say that right now, as they are closing down encampments in Oakland and San Francisco as well as in Zuccotti Park in New York and elsewhere, may sound unduly optimistic. But I really think they are.

Yesterday I blogged a quick impression of the goings on at Sproul Hall at the UC Berkeley campus and the start of the march down Bancroft to downtown Berkeley. I’ve said before that I think this movement is too big and complex for neat and tidy summaries, so let me continue with some more pieces, without tying them together, necessarily.

After my snapshot of the happy crowd yesterday getting their start at Telegraph and Bancroft I note with pleasure that by later in the evening they had swelled to five thousand by police estimates, up to ten thousand, by organizer estimates. They remained peaceful, and focused on information exchanges after they had circled back, including a speech by Robert Reich on the steps of Sproul Hall, made famous around the world by Mario Savio, and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. Reich’s message was that when the Supreme Court can make corporations equal to citizens we all lose, and when there are tuition increases as sudden and as steep as there have been recently, equal access to information and to power disappears. The threat to democracy is the same now as it was then. In that moment Reich became the voice of the Occupy movement.

It’s part of the story that those steps were officially named the Mario Savio steps in 1997 and everybody who gathers there today gets to stand on his shoulders. Today the events in Berkeley are part of a larger movement centered in New York, even though the heart of the protests here are the radical increases in tuition at UC and California State University campuses.

While this was going on, a man at the Haas School of Business, a five-minute walk away, pulled a gun out of his backpack and a cop shot him. He died in hospital a short while ago. Unlike the killing last week at the BART station near Occupy Oakland, this story didn’t even make the front page of this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle. (It was there, but on page 14.) As with the Oakland killing, there doesn’t appear to be any connection with the protest march. Just random acts of violence, the Oakland one apparently a gang related thing, the Berkeley one apparently a nut case. Nothing new there. Just more evidence of social decay.

Among the information being generated – whether the Occupy movements are responsible for this consciousness, I can’t be sure, but it seems likely – is the heightened awareness of how many of our leaders are in the 1%. Mayor Bloomberg, for example, the man shutting down Zuccotti Park. And Nancy Pelosi. The paper this morning reported that her family has assets of some $43.4 million, and that includes holdings in Alcoa and Dow Chemical Company, among other big corporations.

I sent Nancy Pelosi $50, and have a thank you note with her alleged signature to show for it, when the health care bill passed. Now I’m seeing her in the same light I see Diane Feinstein. She’s another local democrat who does so many things I admire. But they both work for the system and the system is revealing itself to be not just broken, but for all intents and purposes, unfixable. The fact that Diane Feinstein’s personal fortune was a mere $23 million in 2003, but by 2005 was, by some estimates, as high as $99 million may be no reason to rank her with the greedy bankers of Wall Street, but we’re wondering now. How does this system work, where her husband gets award after award for being a philanthropist, but the state she represents is about to stop educating many of its children and taking care of many more of its poor.

I know she’s fighting a good fight – and so is Pelosi - to turn this around, but as we move into the Occupy Wall Street era, when the argument that if you’re rich you earned it has started to make people’s blood boil, we’re going to want to hear a lot more people asking the kinds of questions Steve Croft of 60 Minutes just asked Nancy Pelosi. 60 Minutes ran a piece this week on the way Congress has made it possible for its members to do insider trading legally. She may have a better answer to the question than she was able to come up with at the spur of the moment, and I’d rather be governed by a philanthropist than a Scrooge, but the questions of wealth distribution are beginning to take shape.

After years of battling with my friends who voted for Ralph Nader, years of arguing our system leaves us no choice but to vote for the lesser evil, I’m no longer buying the argument. Like many who represent the heart of the Occupy Movements, I see the valiant efforts of Feinstein and Pelosi as ineffective. It’s not that the system once was equitable and has now become inequitable. It’s that when everybody was moving on up the inequities were masked. Occupy Wall Street has forced us to look at the system, and we’re beginning to see more clearly it was broken all along.

It’s an unanswered question how many people have started seeing the superrich in a new light, and asking questions they haven’t asked in a while, but it’s clear that’s just what’s happening. Money, like fire, is both necessary and a two-edged sword, and I think maybe the fact that Diane Feinstein’s wealth can go from $22 to $99 million in two years suggests the country is burning down.

Look almost anywhere and you find more evidence. Behind the scandal at Penn State is a story not just about child abuse but about big money and a university defined not so much as an educational institution but as just another piece of corporate America.

Occupy Wall Street may not be the only reason for this sudden focus on the corruption of big money and America’s plutocratic government, but it's got to be the main reason.

When the nice young man from the Democratic Central Committee asked me why I had not sent in my contribution to the party this year, I was able to tell him I’m not a Democrat any more. I’m with the Occupy movements, I told him, hoping to take our political life to a higher level of effectiveness. He gave me a good argument. You need clear goals you can implement, he said. Right, I said. And your implementable goals are...?

OK, so it’s pretty much all consciousness raising at the moment. But it feels like the right path, at least. America’s two-party system doesn’t seem to be taking us anywhere.

Every day I see criticism of this attitude in letters to the editor. Like the folks in the coffee shop yesterday asking, “Do they even know what they want?” “What ARE they after, anyway?” Lech Wałęsa spoke out yesterday and offered the advice that you can’t just ask questions, you have to provide answers. He says his Solidarity Movement that began at the Gdansk Shipyards worked because they had a plan and Occupy doesn’t.

But what he is missing, I think, is the fact that by the time he got Solidarity started the will to fight the tyranny of the Polish leadership and Soviet imperialism was already there and well developed. His supporters had watched their colleagues shot and killed by gunfire raining down from helicopters.

The American situation is radically different. Americans are just beginning to realize how fat and lazy and uninformed we are. We are still coming to terms with the fact that what we learned about our great democracy in high school simply isn’t true. Sometimes it’s harder to fight the naïve than it is to fight the tyrannical. And it gets even more complicated when you see how naïve the Occupy folks themselves can be, with their insistence on a complete lack of a power structure, for example. Warren Buffet is making their case, and so are, I suspect, Pelosi and Feinstein, whom I just sort of scattered some anti-glitter on for possibly not the best of reasons.

Dig a little deeper for detail and some interesting things show up. The fact that a judge ruled that the Boston Occupy could not be shut down, for example. Or the fact that one of the Occupy cities is Salt Lake City, of all places. Or the fact that in Berkeley a city councilman sent out an e-mail urging Berkeley citizens to support the Occupy movement. And then it turns out that an Oakland city councilwoman tipped off the Oakland demonstrators about Monday’s police raid on their encampment. Support is coming from a broad front, including from within the system, in other words.

Stay tuned. Occupy, despite its name, isn’t about territory; it’s about an idea, and it’s pretty clear the time for that idea has come. They’re being dismantled at the moment, but they’ll be back. Have a look at their website, if you have any doubt. And at the other places in Spain, Germany, and Belgium where the spark has been kindled.

_____

Piano, piano

2011-11-15T16:21:00.001-08:00

Gorgeous day in Berkeley today. Temperature in the high 60s. The mood is copasetic.

I walked up to campus because I got an e-mail from one of the city council members urging people in the community to show their support for the students rallying today, and hell, when government calls, I answer the call.

As I approached the campus I expected to hear some crowd noises, but all I saw was people going about their business. There was in fact a crowd in front of Sproul Hall, but the mood was festive, not angry. How can one be angry on a day like this, with the sun shining down. New England has been without electricity for a week, but we’re still running around in T-shirts.

I took a few pictures of the signs and the crowds and settled in for a coffee and a scone. When I want to guilt myself, I describe myself as somebody who, when the revolution comes, will be complaining either that there’s no public transportation to take me there, or that it’s late, or that there’s no bus stop right in front of a coffee shop.

Two students were at the table next to me. They were using words like hegemonic and commodify, but they were discussing philosophy, not politics. When the crowd paraded by, they stopped what they were doing. One of them commented, “Do they have an agenda? Or are they just angry?” The other one answered, “Who knows what they want. I think they don’t even know what they want.”

It was hard to keep my mouth shut. Here were two students who evidently had so much money they didn’t seem to realize, or care, that most of the signs had to do with a 60% tuition raise. They were dead wrong. The students knew exactly what they wanted. They wanted to pay a whole lot less for their education. And how dare you use words like hegemonic and be so friggin clueless?

They left before I could poison their coffee, and a woman sat down with earphones in her ears. Good, I thought. I can get back to my reading. But she didn’t seem to notice I was reading. “What’s the protest all about?” she asked. “Did something happen?”

God, another one, I thought. How are we ever going to fix the world with everybody so damned detached. I explained that this was both a protest over tuition hikes and a march of solidarity with the Occupy movements now spreading around the world. Turns out she was a professor. And her question said more about her fear that there might have been more violence than that she was as clueless as the philosophers.

I walked home and apologized to the dogs for not taking them with me. Don’t want them anywhere near an unruly crowd, but today they would have been completely safe.

So often I get angry that people aren’t angry. When Harvey Milk was killed and we marched down Market Street with candles, I remember a guy standing and watching the mass of folk march by, shouting, “Where is your rage? Where is your rage?”

That was not a time for rage. It was a time for sadness.

And today was not a time for rage, either. As city administrations move to clear out the Occupy Movements because they have in large part been hijacked by violent outsiders, and as people in the Occupy protests themselves work out the next steps, this little corner of the world did its thing in a very slow and peaceful way. A little protesting. A little sign carrying. A whole bunch of smiling faces. A couple conversations in the coffee shop. And then home to feed the dogs and think about dinner.

Piano, piano, si va lontano. Easy, easy, if we’re to go a long way.

No bottom line

2011-11-11T11:45:00.000-08:00

I've been confused a lot lately. For weeks now I've had my nose in one book after another about the Ratlines, the escape routes the Nazis used to get to South America. At first I thought I was going to find more grist for the mill in my anti-Vatican kick - they seem to have been major movers in aiding ex-Nazis and Ustashi. But now I'm rattling around in my head wondering how hard it must have been for anybody trying to find a middle ground between fascism and communism. And the more you know about the British and American efforts to help the ex-Nazis, the more the Vatican comes off as just another player. The "real story" remains elusive.

I've also just watched City of Life and Death, a Chinese movie about the Rape of Nanking, and am struggling with how to set up the "real story" here too. There is overwhelming evidence of Japanese nationalism so vicious it puts Japan in the same category as Nazi Germany, Pol Pot and Rwanda. But how much of the story should be mitigated by the fact that its chief narrator these days is Communist China, where truth routinely serves the power structure without even an apology. I've pretty much decided the story is essentially true (because I've heard Japanese eye-witness stories), but I'm bothered nonetheless by attempts to embellish it and milk it. What are the facts? Is this about a few sadistic military officers? About a genocidal policy? About reprehensible Japanese cultural values? So much of this story continues to be elusive.

And now, on a very different level, those of us living in the Bay Area (and anybody else looking on, as well) are being asked to evaluate the confusion of the Occupy Oakland Protests. Don't get me wrong. I'm not comparing American civil disobedience to genocide. But there is a parallel in the confusion, even chaos, even with all those cameras running, and the bottom line remains elusive.

I complained to no one in particular yesterday [What was the message, anyway?] that the message of Occupy Oakland - and thus the larger message of Occupy Wall Street - was being lost because of thugs on the one hand and overreactive police on the other. I woke up this morning wanting to take that piece down, feeling as I always do when I tell a story that lies by omission. I don't think I got any facts wrong, but everything I said was second-hand from local media reports, and I don't trust local media a whole lot. I might have thrown in a few caveats here and there.

What really bothered me was that I think I left a bunch of false impressions - that the thugs and the cops are equally culpable and that the violence on the part of both are the real story of the moment. They are the real story. But they are only part of the real story.

I met a Berkeley cop not long ago at a dinner party and was seriously impressed. I had imagined his work to be something like an airline pilot's - hours of boredom interspersed with sheer terror. "What do you do most of the time?" I asked him. "I like to make arrests." Great, I thought. A power-hungry fool.

"I go for the drug dealers," he said. "They're actually quite stupid. Easy to spot. They use certain intersections, and I ride a bicycle so I can come up on them before they figure out what's happening, and get them off the street. It's like graffiti. You stop it quick, and keep the volume down and that's the only way to keep it from getting out of hand."

OK, so I was wrong. Not a bad guy. In fact, quite a good guy, if you're going to work in black and white.

The media dash from one controversy to another and blow it up. If you get your news from television you get blown-up news. Manufactured stories, like the suggestion that Michele Bachmann was ever a serious contender for the Republican nomination. Most people know but we all need reminding that the truth is not at the extremes, nor is it in the middle. Sometimes one side is largely but not entirely right, sometimes there is no right, only perspective, and often the real truth of the story is in the complexity of narratives, including the contradictions.

That would seem to be the case with what's going on at present. Taku is focused on the mess at Frank Ogawa Square. He hates it that Frank Ogawa's good name is being trashed as folks try to rename the place Oscar Grant Square, for the kid killed by a BART cop when the cop pinned him down on the ground and got his taser mixed up with his gun. Taku focuses on the fact that Oscar Grant, while he certainly didn't deserve to die, or even be roughed up by the police, was fighting on the train, and was actively resisting arrest. I think Taku's Japanese pride is hurt this guy should take Frank's place. Small matter, but part of the story.

Taku's in tune with 75% of locals who now think Occupy Oakland protesters need to be cleared out so local business owners can get back to business, the city can stop paying cops overtime, and give downtown a chance to get off life support. Where my shoe is pinching is the need I see to keep Americans talking about the inequities and the evidence our Congress is a high-priced whore working almost exclusively for lobbyists and other big money. There's no middle ground. No compromise between Taku's focus and mine. We're looking through different lenses. Both stories and others besides all need to be told and left for still others to sift through. Occupy Oakland is not Occupy Wall Street, either. If Oakland goes, it does not signify that time for OWS has run out. That time should come only when talk about inequity has turned to action against inequity.

The fact that Oakland lives with out-of-control crime and homelessness is an on-going one. I just read that as many as half the folk camping out at Ogawa Square may be homeless, and that allegation has convinced the majority of folk in Oakland that it should be shut down. Maybe they're right, but should that be the reason? Maybe the cost of keeping it going is too counter to the original intent of calling attention to inequity. But what do we do now with the spin-off stories, the rogue trigger-happy cops, the drugs, the homeless?

How many people actually know that the killing that took place right next to the protests the other night was passed off as "routine" in this city? The fact that gang members met another gang member with guns and shot him dead in cold blood at the 12th St. BART Station is routine here. You do know, maybe, that the full name of that BART Station is 12th St/City Center, by the way. And consider this question. Is it worse that it's happening in City Center and not out on International Boulevard in the ghetto? Is it better?

How many people know that up to half the people sleeping in the protesters' tents are homeless? And for them it's a step up from sleeping on the streets. We've got to clean this place up, says Mayor Quan. And the people of Oakland agree. And you would too if you actually went down there, as Taku did the other day. He came away saying, "I think the average protester is going to leave pretty soon anyway - the stink is so bad."

What are we to do now? I like the attention to broken America they're calling for. I never liked sleeping in tents and am sure as hell not going to do it now, particularly if I'd have to share the place with all night drumming and stench, but this is our way of banging pots and pans, and if we don't bang the pots and pans, we'll go back to business as usual where 100% of the Republican candidates for the presidency still argue we should take even more money from the poor and give it to the rich, and the PBS news hour thinks we should somehow treat Republicans with as much respect as we do Democrats.

The story isn't in the middle. The cops are not all good nor all bad. Things are real bad and we need to keep attention focused on the fact things are real bad, but we also need to face the fact that part of the story are guns and stench and things that can not easily be summarized. It's a time for story-telling. Everybody get in there and tell stories. Of good cops and bad. Of stinking people and heroic efforts. Never mind the idiotic things written on the sign of the guy marching next to you.

We depend on journalists and analysts to sum things up for us, to sift through the flood of information and tell us what's relevant and what's not. There's an entire industry of pundits working full time at that sort of thing.

But this experience of trying to make sense of the Occupy Wall Street protests and the confusion you find in dealing with the chaos they have engendered suggest to me this is a time to set the pundits and others claiming expert knowledge aside.

With all the cynicism and despair, all the mistrust of those in authority, all the if-it-bleeds-it-leads media stories, all of our own limited attention spans, I think this is a time to keep the stories coming. And if you've got contradicting stories to tell, tell one today, the other one tomorrow. It's a time of considerable chaos. Chaos, like depression, is usually thought of as negative. But it doesn't have to be. If you know how to use it, it can be a time for shaking loose some ossified misconceptions. Forget the bottom line, the neat summary, the real story, the greater truth.

Tell the whole story.

_____

What was the message, anyway?

2011-11-11T01:45:00.000-08:00

So much to say about the Occupy Movements. Don't know where to start. It's like the Civil War in our household (OK, so that's a bit of rhetorical excess....) Taku sees it one way, I see it another.

Taku is angry Oakland is so filled with violence, and can't understand why the people who seem to be getting it in the ear are the small business owners around Frank Ogawa Plaza. What's their message, anyway, he wants to know. I'm trying to focus on the value of the Occupy movements for getting the country talking at long last about the collapse of American democracy. I've waited for years for Americans to get out there and start banging pots and pans, and now it seems to be happening.

But nothing seems to happen in this country without violence. In Oakland, it's the thugs. And to some degree the cops. At least one cop that got it all wrong when he hit that Iraqi vet, former Marine Scott Olsen, with a tear gas canister. Fractured his skull. Not like he won’t recover or anything.

Oh, right. Then there was Kayvan Sabeghi, another vet, whom Oakland police beat up and lacerated his spleen. And then denied him medical treatment for eighteen hours. His crime appears to be that he was trying to walk home from the protests.

Oh, yeah. One more. A cameraman was shot in the face because he was filming the cops. Don't know yet how he's doing.

Now the news comes out that somebody was shot and killed last night. But it's good news. Apparently just another gang killing that had nothing to do with the Occupy movement. Just happened to be in the same place. Thank God it was just an ordinary murder.

Meanwhile, five miles north here in Berkeley I was out walking the dogs yesterday when I saw those damn helicopters hovering again. Hate it when that happens. That unrelenting noise, and it doesn't go away. It's as bad inside the house as outside.

It was only when I turned on the news that I learned that an Occupy Berkeley protest has started up to match the one a straight shot down Telegraph, just below where it runs into Broadway, where the cops are giving the thugs a run for their money distracting the media's attention away from all the "we are the 99%" folk.

At least here in Berkeley we have a clear message, right? Students are pissed we have trillions of dollars for the wars, billions for banker bonuses, but tuition has gone up way past the ability of the average Californian to pay - up to 16% a year in increases for the next four years.

Our cops would not make the same mistake as the Oakland cops, right? We don't have the same problems as downtown Oakland. We don't have thugs causing violence.

Unless you see it the way Margo Bennett sees it, of course...

"The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence," UC police Capt. Margo Bennett said. "I understand that many students may not think that, but linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest."

See? Violence everywhere.

Guess that explains why the cops had to start beating the kids with their sticks.

You've seen the video, right?

All that violence just makes the cops mad, apparently. It distracts from the message.

It's hard to make the point that something's wrong with the system when the system is so wrong you can't get to the message.

_____

Every Day – a review

2011-11-07T13:33:00.000-08:00

Every Day is listed in Netflix under comedies. It has Eddie Izzard in it and some funny moments, but if you rent it for laughs, you need to be prepared to watch the story of a dying old man with a rotten disposition threatening to pull a family apart with his needs. It’s the story of Ned, a New York TV script writer (Liev Schreiber) whose hard-driving boss (Eddie Izzard) keeps him from attending to crises at home, where his wife Jeannie (Helen Hunt) is dealing with a father (Brian Dennehy) who needs 24-hour care, an overtaxed career and two kids with growing problems. The story starts slowly and you might be tempted to chuck it out as just another contrived domestic drama for TV. But stick with it. Despite the bumps in the road, it turns out the story is a comedy, not for its laughs but for its embrace of life and demonstration that at some of us, when we pull together, can make things work - comedy as opposed to tragedy.

The acting is excellent. Even the minor characters – Robin (Carla Gugino), Ned’s seductive co-worker, and Nathan (Skyler Fortgang), the younger son, are great to watch. The only real flaw, I think, is the overdone character of Ned’s boss, where you suspect the deliberate outrageousness was written into the script just to provide Izzard an opportunity to do his thing.

The most interesting aspect of the story for me is the treatment of gayness. Jonah (Ezra Miller) plays a remarkably well put-together teenager and older of two sons. He is out and getting full support from his mother. His father, however, who writes scripts on demand of all manner of violence and perversion, and who might be expected to be super savvy on sexual matters, turns out to have some deep-seated problems coming to terms with his son’s sexuality. On the surface, he’s simply overly protective. But one touching moment in the film is when Ned (the father, remember – not the son) “comes out” to his boss – who is a flaming gay himself – as a man with a gay son, and admits he has been hiding that fact from everybody for six months, giving illustration to the claim that homophobia is the last of the major American bigotries to fall.

Ned’s failings as a husband and father lead much of the plot. There’s a scene where Jonah plays on his overprotectiveness when Ned tells him to get off the computer because it’s 10 o’clock and time for bed. Jonah responds, “Well give me five minutes to say good-bye. I don’t want to be rude to a priest.” There’s another where Ned doesn’t like the way Jonah is dressed and tells him he looks like a hustler – against the protestations by Jeannie that their son is old enough to know how to dress for a dance. “Would you allow him to go out dressed like that if he were a girl?” Ned asks. Jonah comes back down with one of his father’s sweaters. “That’s better,” Ned says. Then, as soon as Jonah leaves, he turns to his wife and says, “Do I look that gay in that sweater?”

The fears and character flaws and the stressfulness of dealing with a difficult dying parent give the comedy an edginess and the slowly revealed richness of each character’s character lift it above the ordinary. I’d give it three-and-a-half stars on the Netflix scale – and because they do not give you in-between options, I went with four.

Not a must-see. But a good go at the movies.

93 minutes. 2010.

_____

Prowling about the world

2011-11-05T14:04:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, and my world was divided into them Catholics and us Protestants, I used to attend mass every morning during lent with my Catholic friends. Not because I was becoming Catholic, but because it was a lot of fun to get together before school, have breakfast and start the day with something vaguely illicit.

As a shrink told me some time back when I was talking out some of my childhood memories of religious indoctrination, "You've smashed the idols of religion, but you're still carrying around the molds they came in."

I went to an Episcopal Church every Sunday my first couple years in college. It was the perfect blend of Protestantism, where my head was, and Catholicism, where my heart was. What they lacked in bells and whistles they made up in language. Like the delicious language of the prayer of confession:

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.

There is no health in us! No kidding. That bad. What a tidy summary of the message that we are evil creatures, worthy of self-loathing. Beautiful Elizabethan English. And words that can kill.

Back in high school, though, when I was going to mass at St. Joseph's Catholic Church, what struck me as powerfully as "no health in us" were the words of the prayer to St. Michael that followed the mass:

Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle; be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray: and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.

I couldn't get over this image of ghosts "prowling about the world" trying to get hold of my soul and drag it down into hell. I was intrigued by the thought there could be unseen evils at every turn, and that hell was a real place and I might go there to burn. It was one thing both Protestants and Catholics agreed on, after all. With such consensus, where was an insecure teenager to turn?

The prayer to St. Michael was removed from the Catholic service less than ten years later, but the image of demons is with us to this day. In fact, it made a big splash just last week when The Pilot, the official voice of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Boston, and America's oldest Catholic newspaper, printed a comment on October 28 by Daniel Avila, a policy adviser to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), suggesting that gay people were being controlled by Satan and these very same demons we've been talking about.

The real story is not about some whack job who believes in trolls, though. The real story here is what happened next. The Pilot retracted the story with a statement by Avila, assuring readers he was not speaking for the Catholic Bishops and apologizing for causing "hurt and confusion."

For some, that will be the end of the story.

Oops. Misspoke. Sorry. Didn't mean it. Let's move on.

But in reading through a number of retellings of the event, one item caught my eye that most reports missed. Terrence Donilon, spokesman for the archdiocese, issued one of those "It's not that you're not supposed to say it; you're just not supposed to get caught" statements. Donilon criticized the publication of Avila's view. But then he assured readers that Avila would continue to write for The Pilot, even though he committed what The Pilot is now calling "a theological error." And praised Avila for his passion and commitment to the church.

The story has now gone viral. Google News lists 627 articles on the topic as of this writing, and theologian Bill Lindsey has taken time to post a list of sources of opinion and to follow the threads in the hierarchy to the likes of Oakland bishop Cordileone, head of the U.S. Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Marriage, which reveal the insincerity of Avila's apology and the church's rush to disassociate itself from his opinions. True, technically we're into hating the sin and loving the sinner these days, but Avila was - and remains - very much an insider, and this view of demons is not anathema. On the contrary, exorcism, defined as "the religious practice of evicting demons or other spiritual entities from a person or place which they are believed to have possessed" is listed in the official Catechism of the Catholic Church as a "sacramental" (not quite a sacrament, but moving in that direction). Paragraph 1673 is worth citing in its entirety:

When the Church asks publicly and authoritatively in the name of Jesus Christ that a person or object be protected against the power of the Evil One (sic) and withdrawn from his dominion, it is called exorcism. Jesus performed exorcisms and from him the Church has received the power and office of exorcizing. In a simple form, exorcism is performed at the celebration of Baptism. The solemn exorcism, called "a major exorcism," can be performed only by a priest and with the permission of the bishop. The priest must proceed with prudence, strictly observing the rules established by the Church. Exorcism is directed at the expulsion of demons or to the liberation from demonic possession through the spiritual authority which Jesus entrusted to his Church. Illness, especially psychological illness, is a very different matter; treating this is the concern of medical science. Therefore, before an exorcism is performed, it is important to ascertain that one is dealing with the presence of the Evil One, and not an illness.

Note the wiggle room there at the end. OK, so maybe gays are not possessed. Maybe they're just ill. Either way, there's something powerfully wrong with them, and all our moves - to remove their civil rights, to keep them from marrying and/or adopting kids, to have standing of any kind in the community, individually or collectively, are justified.

There are two ways to condemn people. One is to stand and face them, point a finger, and denounce them. A more effective way is to create an atmosphere in which condemnation hangs in the air, and you let others do the work of condemnation for you.

Avila just demonstrated how that second kind of demonization works. He speaks out. Reminds catholics who know their catechism that there are such things as demons. The church then comes in and speaks about Avila's "passion for the church." Slaps his hands for being so naughty.

Then puts him back to work.

Mission accomplished.

The demonization of gays has been renewed for another season.

Update: Looks like Avila has now resigned. Mission not accomplished after all. How 'bout them apples.

_____

Anna Bolena - a review

2011-11-03T09:37:00.000-07:00

Everybody knows that Enrico the 8th had six wives. And that he divorced them one after the other. Or cut off their heads. Which he was able to do because he told the Pope of Rome to stuff it and started the Church of Inghilterra.

Many people also know that Anna Bolena was Enrico’s second wife, the one who followed Catarina of Aragon, whom he divorced in 1533 because she couldn’t bear him a figlio, which might have kept La Famiglia Tudor in business.

Problem is, once Enrico had developed the habit of getting rid of a wife, there was nothing to keep him from doing it again, so Anna lost her head, and Enrico went on to Giovanna Seymour. She died after only one year in office, but that’s getting ahead of our story. We’re really only concerned with Anna Bolena, played by Anna Netrebko, Enrico, played by Ildar Abdrazakov, and Giovanna Seymour, played by Ekaterina Gubanova.

I know it might strike you as out of the ordinary that such illustrious English characters as Enrico, Anna and Giovanna should be played by Russians, but such is the splendor of this brave new post-cold war era, and we should all be mighty thankful for it. Those Russians sing so beautifully they make you want to cry.

This latest MET performance of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena isn’t all Russian. Sir Richard Percy, Anna’s true love, before she got ambitious and realized she could get Enrico to bump off Catarina, is played by Stephen (nice English name) Costello (OK, not so English.) Stephen/Percy also has a voice to lift you out of your seat and howl with delight. (See the link to the trio, below.)

If you don’t know these names – I didn’t – you might want to get to know them. Ildar Abdrazakov, according to the Nezavisimaya (Independent) Gazeta, has a “velvety voice, full sounding, ideally pure, with an almost tangible aroma of vibrato (now there’s a turn of phrase) that filled the entire auditorium: how could this not drive you insane?” OK, that was a bit excessive, and not about the Anna Bolena performance, but about a Verdi Requiem he did back in St. Petersburg – did I tell you that Ildar is an “honored Artist of the Republic of Bashkortostan? – here’s a picture of one of its architectural splendors. But it gives you an idea of what a bear he is and how he can sing.

Don’t believe me? Have a listen. Here he is singing the memorable aria, “Desta si Tosto” (“Oh, did you just get up already?”) with Anna and Percy. (All YouTubes are from the performance in question, by the way.) Even if you don’t have time for the whole of it (and you’ll kick yourself around the block if you miss that trio), have a look at those costumes. They brought in Jenny Tiramani to do the costumes, and she’d be taking six or eight curtain calls, if I had anything to do with it. Such a feast for the eyes. Jenny was Director of Theatre Design at Shakespeare's Globe Theater for ten years, so she knows how to dress the 16th Century. Which you will get a taste of, if you go to her Facebook page.

But back to the Russians. I don’t want to neglect the third one, Ekaterina Gubanova, also, like Ildar, of the Mariinsky, who plays Giovanna. Here she is in that meeting with Anna in one of the more dramatic scenes in the play, where wife #2 learns that her best friend is going to be wife #3, and curses her out before forgiving her. (It isn’t Italian drama if it doesn’t give you emotional whiplash.) It just doesn’t get any better than “Seymour, mia rivale.”

Watching Anna Netrebko do this performance was a joy from start to finish. I love her voice to death, and it has bugged me no end to hear people talk of her as lacking in trill ability or unable to hit a high E-flat. What they are missing is the way she has grown from the young ingenue she was when Valery Gergiev found her working as a scullery maid (OK, I exaggerate, but I’m doing opera here, so give me a break) and launched her career. To get an idea where she is today, check out her web page. Everybody’s going gaga over her. “Reigning new diva of the early 21st Century” says Associated Press. “A virtuoso singer of endless versatility,” says Town and Country. And drop-dead gorgeous, just to put some icing on the cake. Even The New York Times wants to “bathe in her luscious sound forever,” demonstrating that music of this quality makes fools of us all.

Anna Bolena has two notable features as an opera. Besides the fact the music is so gorgeous, I mean. It was written by Donizetti as one of a trio about the queens of England (along with Maria Stuarda and Elisabeth) to see how many singers he could get to sing themselves into exhaustion. Beverley Sills once admitted, I read somewhere, that singing Donizetti took ten years off her career. And, unlike many operas – Trovatore, for example – that have plot lines that make you roll in the aisles, this one has a real-life story to it you can relate to. Unfortunately, from start to finish, it’s all about Anna’s road to the executioner’s axe, so the entire cast is standing around for three and a half hours looking like somebody’s about to have their head chopped off. But look on the bright side. You get to see Anna lift her long hair to the side in the last scene and walk directly into the darkness with her neck exposed, and then you see the executioner come down out of the sky with his axe, just as the lights go out and the audience rises to its feet shouting bravo, bravo, bravo all around and please do it again.

People are comparing Anna Netrebko’s performance of Anna Bolena at the Vienna State Opera last spring with this one. Some say Vienna had better staging, and I didn’t see it, so what do I know, but I’m a MET fan through and through and I thought this one by Robert Jones did the trick for me. It was designed for scene changes without the curtain coming down, so you see trees lowered down from above and suddenly there are dogs on the stage and people are not in the bedroom but out hunting. Cool stuff.

David McVicar, the Scottish director, who Wikipedia informs me is one of the 100 most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain, directed the piece. Can’t he just be among the 50 most influential gay people? But I digress. Watch him, if you like, talking about this performance. (You’ll hear Anna Netrebko tell you how hard the role is, as well).

Things have really changed. Opera used to be for the super elite. Today, thanks to this wonderful technology called simulcasting – and let’s not forget YouTube – it’s much more accessible. Hell, even Gayle what’s her name – you know, Oprah’s best friend who has her own show – is out there getting Anna Netrebko to talk about her boobs.

Too much information, I know. Best to get back to the real thing. Here’s a last look, at Anna singing “Coppia Iniqua.” (To hell with both of you, oh iniquitious couple). She’s gone mad by this stage (it’s opera, after all), and it’s only minutes before the head comes off, but consider that this lovely lady has been singing her heart and soul out for three and a half hours at this pace when she gets to this final piece.

And marvel.

Just sit there and marvel.

And go to Netflix and reserve this MET performance if it ever comes out on DVD.

_____

How do we tell the good guys from the bad guys?

2011-10-31T14:00:00.000-07:00

For the past several weeks now, I’ve been slogging through Unholy Trinity, a book by Mark Aarons and John Loftus that was originally published as Ratlines, that documents the role of the Vatican in helping thousands of Nazi and Ustaše genocidal killers escape to South America after the war.

I want to save a review of the book, and the whole story of the church’s role in fighting (or not fighting) first the fascists, then the communists, for another day. For now I just want to tie it together with two other pieces of information that caught my attention this morning. One is a review by Glenn C. Altschuler of Alan Wolfe’s latest book, Political Evil: What it is and how to combat it. The other is a blog entry on Alice Walker, by theologian Bill Lindsey.

Wolfe’s point in Political Evil, if I’ve understood it right, and if the reviewer has done the book justice, is that our inclination to set the world up in absolute black-and-white terms leads us away from justice and keeps us from finding political solutions to conflict. By his frequent labeling of America’s enemies as “evil doers,” George W. Bush got us nowhere. And in a separate example (not Wolfe’s), our demonization of Milošević in Serbia blinded us to the genocidal policies of the Croatians against the Serbians, which we ought to have considered more carefully in understanding the recent breakup of Yugoslavia and the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. Or, to say it more plainly, the war crimes of the Croatian Ustaše are not cancelled out by the war crimes of Serbians under Milošević.

The importance of context should not be minimized, if the ultimate goal is reconciliation, not blame. One needs to know the whole story, in all its detail, in order to know what we have to work with in building a solution. And “if we're not careful…” Wolfe is suggesting according to the review, “…and we don't temper moral absolutism with ethical realism, we're likely to become smug and self-righteous. We may well forget that foreign policy ‘is always about politics and that politics demands flexibility.’”

Ah...but, I want to add, is “flexibility” just another word for moral cowardice?

Because my mind is still filled with the claims made in Unholy Trinity – namely that Pius XII and the official church remained largely silent while the Holocaust was going on, and then further abused the memory of Jewish victims of the Nazis by arguing the utilitarian ethical argument that letting the killers go free (nay, helping the killers go free) was necessary in the fight against communism, the purportedly greater evil – because those events are still fresh in my mind, I can’t help but filter Wolfe’s argument in favor of “flexibility” through the more black-and-white lens used to judge the church (and other institutions) in Unholy Trinity.

The problem with political institutions is that they cannot act as moral agents, since they inevitably find they have a higher obligation to self-preservation. Israel is an apartheid state with a brutal policy toward the Palestinians, and it’s not the racists among the Israelis one gets angry at, but the “good folk” – those who have built the only democracy (for Jews, anyway) in the Middle East, because they have let the tribe (and the rest of us) down. Jews taught the world about justice. If Israel is being held to a higher standard than its neighbors, it’s because one remembers that fact, and feels let down to see it betrayed.

In similar fashion, one knows that the church not only claims to be the embodiment of the love of Christ, the builder of schools and hospitals, an agent of charity, compassion, generosity and kindness, but actually is, in many of its manifestations. It is also a vicious institution governed by a Realpolitik which led it to support the fascists of Croatia, merely because they were catholic, against the orthodox Serbians, their neighbors. The church was behind the Intermarium movement, a force that wanted to build a third political reality among the catholic nations of Eastern Europe, to stand between fascist Germany on one side and Stalinist Russia on the other. An arguably worthy political goal. But one that would require moral compromise. And just as Palestinians feel a sour taste in their mouths when they hear Israel tout itself as a democracy, Jews and others may feel disgusted when they hear the cherry-picked information about how Pius aided the Jews of Rome – as if Klaus Barbie, and Adolf Eichmann got to South America entirely on their own power and resources, and if the thousands who escaped justice were of no concern anymore.

So what is the “real story,” one wants to know. Were the pope and his bishops the bad guys or weren’t they? The point is that in any great ethical dilemma involving large numbers of people, there is almost never going to be a line drawn beneath the list of good deeds and bad, so that one may add up the columns and reach a conclusion “the church (or any other entity) is innocent” or “the church is guilty.” In a court of law, one reaches a verdict of guilt or innocence, but in real life it’s always going to be a mixed bag and we’re going to be talking more about degrees of guilt or innocence and whether there is responsibility to begin with. There are no bottom lines.

Which brings me to Alice Walker and her book, The Color Purple.

When I read Bill Lindsey’s account of the role the book played in his life, I wanted to tell him that the book (the film, actually) had had a powerful impact on me, as well. I had heard somewhere that when she was criticized for being so hard on black men, in The Color Purple and elsewhere, her response was “You tell your story, and I’ll tell mine.” I seized upon it as an excellent rule to live by, especially when people try to simplify complex moral situations with bottom-line conclusions that would force you to say what you don't believe - that in the end, if there's more good than bad, then we'll call it good. I had included that quotation without attribution in two of my own blog postings, one in 2004 and one in 2005.

In preparing to write this article this morning I googled the quotation to tie down the attribution, and, to my chagrin, the only articles that came up in response to the quotation were my own. Either Alice Walker never made that remark, or the book or film review I took it from is not accessible without digging deeper. I’m confident I have not misquoted her – it fits her work perfectly as a womanist writer and her courage in telling her story, damn the torpedos. But if anybody knows where it came from, I’d appreciate being made an honest man.

My point is only that in struggling in my assessment of Unholy Trinity and the church’s guilt in letting/helping genocidal killers go free, I have reached the same conclusion here that I came to in teaching a university seminar in ethics for a dozen years or so, when students would invariably ask me, “Well, which one of these many systems you’ve told us about – religious (Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas), Kantian, utilitarian, virtue ethics, Rawles’ theory of justice, situational ethics - which one do you hold to?

My answer was that right and wrong, in my view, is neither absolute, nor relative, but negotiated. I hold that while one has to make decisions for practical reasons in politics and law on the basis of codes carefully worked out over time, one never stops the consideration and reconsideration of those codes as time and new information and changes in cultural values come to play in giving us lenses to see the world through. That may sound relativist and postmodernist. It may sound like one value is as good as another and there is no objective position from which to make form a final conclusion. But that would be a misinterpretation. What it does mean is that our moral conclusions should be guided by the greatest possible inclusion of life narratives. We’re well on the way toward making that a universal starting point. A mere couple hundred years ago most of the world lived by the divine right of kings. Today we see the world moving slowly but surely toward universal democracy and the goals expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The church's claim of infallibility is one of the great absurdities of history. The case against it is simply too strong. Its errors have been too numerous and of such enormity as to be unforgivable. It can have the credit it deserves when it lives out its mission of charity, but the majority of its own followers have come to reject its claim to exclusivity in matters of truth and morality. It was not merely wrong during the ages of the Crusades and the Inquisition. It was wrong when it kidnapped Edgardo Mortara from his Jewish family after his catholic nurse had him baptized and refused to give him back. It was wrong more recently when there was active participation by some of its clergy and failure to speak out on the part of the rest, when war criminals made their way on funds laundered by the Vatican Bank to places where they would not have to face justice. And when it repeated that pattern of criminality on the part of some and cover-up on the part of others in the child-abuse scandal. And it is still wrong today in other ways, such as in its destructive take on human sexuality and the place of women in the world.

People persuaded that life is “nasty, brutish and short” can take heart. As long as there are people to tell their stories, as long as we have people to remember the Holocaust, and people like Alice Walker to remind black men that while they have just cause to rage against racism, they do not have cause to foster sexism, as long as we have books like Alan Wolfe’s Political Evil to remind the George W. Bushes of the world that the assumption of self-righteousness does possibly as much harm in the long run as do the workings of allegedly evil people, as long as we have journalists with magnificent obsessions pointing out the clay feet of our hallowed institutions – that’s how long we need not surrender to total cynicism.

My friend Harriet once told me she hated documentaries because they were invariably about what’s wrong with the world. She preferred comedies and escape literature. We shared so much, but parted company on this issue. I take heart from books and films about the miseries of the world because they demonstrate there are people who have not sold out or gone to sleep. As long as they are on the job, and as long as people tell their stories, no matter how horrific, I thought – still do – we have reason to look forward to better times. If the whole world some day starts dancing to “Look on the Bright Side of Life,” that’s when I’ll cash in my chips.

_____

CLOSE MORE SCHOOLS

2011-10-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

There’s a picture in this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle showing some kid crying because his school’s closing down. Well, boo hoo. Who says kids call the shots around here. Stick him in another school. Hell, make one big central school in the middle of the city and make all the kids go there. We can increase class size to between 50 and 100 and assign a cop to each classroom to keep kids in line. There’s too much vandalism anyway. It will be a whole lot cheaper in the long run, and a hell of a lot more efficient.

I’m tired of hearing people complain when we close down schools. Some people have no sense of reality. So Oakland had a meeting last night to announce that it was shutting down five elementary schools. Big deal. We’ve got wars to complete, and elections to get ready for. Wonder how much money was wasted calling that meeting. They could have just announced it from the mayor’s office.

Where is the election money to come from if we don’t shut down some schools? Rick Perry’s war chest against Romney starts at $15 million and is apparently up to $17 million in the last quarter, depending on which sources you use.
Obama’s come up with $70 million in just the last quarter. USA Today has another set of figures.

And that’s chicken feed compared to the money it costs us to keep America free. The Iraq war has cost us $800 billion so far and the total cost when all is said and done will be in the vicinity of $4 trillion, more than the entire cost of World War II. And that’s only because Obama is wussing out, as Michele Bachmann says, and surrendering all our gains in Iraq, that land of ingrates. If he were to do it right, it could be another bunch of billions.

And if that were not bad enough, also on the front page is the news that the Occupy Oakland movement is in trouble because some bad guys have infiltrated the peaceniks. Well, what did you expect? The whole idea began with people thinking they had a right to protest in the first place. Probably got that notion from going to one of those lousy Oakland schools they’re now shutting down.

And that money isn’t all that we need to close down schools for. The average net worth of American families now is only about $120,000. But the average net worth of American congressmen is $912,000. It doesn’t come cheap to keep the ruling class in there ruling.

These are smart people. You know they’re smart because the ten richest members of Congress all voted – 100% of them – for the Bush tax cuts. They know that the best thing for everybody is to give more money to the rich so they will create more jobs for the rest of us. OK, so that hasn’t been proven by the events of the last thirty years, but that’s the problem with Americans, isn’t it? They never think long term.

We’re well on our way to success. Can’t stop now.

So you screamin’, bawlin’, whinin’, moanin’, cat-callin’ parents and teachers at that meeting at Oakland Tech last night boo-hooing because we’re closing some schools on your lazy-ass kids, get a grip.

Get some perspective.

Get your priorities straight.

All together now, say it with me, “CLOSE MORE SCHOOLS! CLOSE MORE SCHOOLS!”

_____

Why blog?

2011-10-22T17:03:00.000-07:00

I am very fortunate in having a number of thoughtful literate friends to correspond with. Many who have written in response to something I have put on this blog have expressed themselves so well I have urged them to start blogging themselves. I've had this discussion a number of times. Just today I tried again to persuade a friend to offer his thinking more broadly, and he came back with the usual objections - I don't have anything that would interest anybody, I find blogging narcissistic, I don't have the time or the inclination to edit and don't want to look like an ignoramus, etc. etc.

I wrote back. Since what I have to say to him I would also like to say to a number of others as well, I've decided to post my letter to him, removing, I hope, all references to things he might not want to share.

Here's the letter. Let's assume he's Russian and he's from Krasnoyarsk. He's not Russian and he's not from anywhere near Krasnoyarsk. But it will do:

Dear Svyatoslav:

There are so many ways to spend your time well, gardening, eating, napping, looking up the history of Bessarabia on Google. I can see why you feel there are no good reasons you should tear yourself away from productive activity to assemble your thoughts in writing. Have been there myself with the thought that it’s far too arrogant a move to make for anybody with high ambitions to humility. Why would I do such a thing to my friends? And why would I do such a thing for people who don’t know me from a tree, either?

I do it for two reasons. First off, I learned a long time ago that I was a terrible thinker. I read somewhere that Bertrand Russell sat down and figured out everything he had to say about mathematics, then simply wrote Principia Mathematica at one go, without once going back and changing anything. Whether it’s true or not, it’s not the way my brain works. I wrote a couple term papers like that in college, but for the most part I never know what I think until I actually say it or write it down. Now, whenever I stew over something – a decision, or just a way of looking at things – I write, and inevitably decisions get made before I’m finished writing, mushy notions separate themselves from clear notions, and I get a whole bunch of “aha!” moments, sometimes in rapid succession. Things I know I would never come up with just lying in bed and contemplating the rotten state of affairs in these interesting times.

Saying what I think works too, but writing actually works much better, probably because it slows me down and forces notions out in a linear fashion. And because I have no expectations of order or organization when I speak, but, having taught writing for so many years, I do have such expectations when I write.

I also have a tendency to bullshit myself. I live dangerously close to the Sea of Delusion. And when the bullshit comes off my fingers and just sits there on the page, I can see it, often (perhaps not often enough), and strangle it before it grows too big and gets away from me. Writing keeps me from wandering too far into those territories I really want to avoid, where the line gets lost between reality and imagination, and where assumptions go unexamined.

Writing is thinking. Everybody who wants to keep the brain alive reads. But unless the thoughts that come in response to reading get aired, the brain never actually gets challenged. If people really want to keep the brain alive, they will write, as well. Not just record things, but actually write. Creatively, imaginatively.

If you were lucky, somebody got you to keep a diary of your comings and goings as a kid. If you were lucky, somebody then told you there was something even better you could do, move beyond an account of events to a telling of stories, observations, complaints, examinations of the world around you. I never taught a writing class where I didn’t insist students keep a journal to supplement any class assignments, a place to capture the fugitive thoughts that interfered with the focused thoughts required of assignments. And of all the things I was ever complimented on as a teacher, probably the most rewarding was the gratitude I got from students who discovered what writing could do for them.

People often say you write diaries for yourself and you share your journals with others, but I see the distinction slightly differently. I see a diary, like a log, as something you do when the world requires you to keep track of things, and a journal as a means of recording the things that really matter, whether they matter to others or just to yourself. Everybody needs to show some self-respect at regular intervals. For me, writing is the single best way of saying to yourself that you respect yourself. You cut through the false modesty, the notion that “little ol’ me has nothing to say” and simply say what’s on your mind.

Of course you have something to say. You weren’t born yesterday. You’ve seen a lot of things come down the pike. Get them down, if only to remind yourself who you are.

And if you’re doing it right, I think it will become obvious to you that much of what you write simply to help yourself think has some practical use outside yourself, as well. Out there are people who think as you do and will really appreciate finding a person working on the same issues, and it won’t matter all that much which one of you is further down the line. Sharing of like-mindedness is essential to keeping from despair at times. Its value should never be underestimated. And sharing in order to provoke argument is, if anything, even more valuable. If you want to sum up what’s wrong with the America we live in today, it is that nobody seems to know how to argue anymore. People preach, or they talk to win points, not to help themselves and others clarify or correct misunderstanding.

Blogging is the internet extension of journal keeping. It’s more than an extension, obviously, because it puts greater emphasis on sharing. What’s so good about blogging is that you don’t need to share with anybody who doesn’t want what you have to offer. You just put it out there. People pick it up or they leave it alone. Some people read you regularly. Some read you once, decide you’ve got nothing they want, and never come back. Others dip in now and again, write and tell you what you should have said instead, suggest things you ought to be focusing on, or simply write to say, “Amen.”

I’ve found that I write a whole lot more when I’m struggling to make sense of something, or when I can’t stay focused on what I’m reading. When I’ve got a good book going, or more than one at a time, I go silent for sometimes weeks at a time. There’s a line between blogging and writing professionally to a deadline. I could never do the latter. Not that I don’t read opinion pages of regular columnists with great interest, but because I think there is something to writing only when the spirit moves you.

It took me time to figure out how to blog. I read blogs that are highly polished, by people for whom form is as important as content. I do fuss over spelling and I edit to get the right word, but I decided a long time ago I would just let things come out as I think them. The result is my writing is terribly wordy, repetitious, often contradictory. Sometimes I start off on one topic and wander to another. Since my primary purpose is thinking aloud, I don’t apologize for that. I’ve told people who ask about my blog that they should never apologize for using their delete button.

Some bloggers are highly focused. One friend blogs on the political situation in Japan. Another is a catholic theologian who has a number of regular readers who write back. Their discussions suggest they are a closed circle, sometimes, but outsiders can watch ideas take shape and the commentary is always greater than the sum of its parts. And my friend admitted to me just today that he sees blogging very much as a collaborative writing activity. I don’t get a lot of commentary, so I can’t call what I do collaborative writing, but I do get lots of responses through e-mail, and I value these messages.

I write more about gay liberation issues than about other things, but I don’t want to limit myself to just one topic. As I say, I think people should write what they are thinking, and blogging, for me, is staying alive and involved. Even the theologian I just mentioned sometimes writes family history and recipes. I read those with avid interest, as well. My point is only the blog can be whatever it turns out to be. You don’t need to spend a lot of time planning before you start writing.

You’ve got a way with words that makes your writing jump off the page. Your challenge, if you start blogging, will be to make sure you don’t give in to the temptation to be clever, but let what’s clever in your brain come when it will. Fear not. It will come out. You don’t have the power to contain it.

I share your revulsion (I don’t think that’s too strong a word) of the self-promoting, narcissistic stuff lots of people put out on YouTube or Facebook. I know why you don’t get anywhere near that bandwagon. But just blogging your thoughts is not the same as self-promotion if you keep in mind that, try as you may, you can’t get into the minds of others, and will never know whether they find what you say worth reading or not. I suggest giving up entirely trying to answer that question. You don’t want to overestimate your own wisdom, but don’t assume you have nothing to say, either. Just put it out there. When somebody finds it worth repeating, they will pass it on. When you’ve been silly or mundane, unduly alarmist, or when you’re just plain wrong, they will pass you by. Your job is to put it out there. Once it’s out there, it’s not yours anymore. It belongs to anybody who picks it up.

Many’s the time I’ve sent out notification of a blog and gotten not one response. If you have smart folks in your circle of friends, they will have lives. I’ve got friends who don’t hide the fact they see my blogs as repetitious rants. They’re still friends, and I pat myself on my back I have the kind of friends who are unafraid of telling me what they really think.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve written something that has provoked an argument. Sometimes people who write back make me change my mind. That’s the way it’s supposed to go. Sometimes I come back and engage in a back-and-forth that can go on for days or weeks. I get up every morning hoping I will find one of those. Often I realize I’ve been badly misunderstood and misrepresented. That goes with the territory. People don’t read carefully. They read to quickly confirm or deny their own thoughts much of the time. Sometimes I get to correct misunderstandings. Most of the time, of course, I never know how well I’m understood, or whether I am appreciated. Sometimes I hear from total strangers who have had things passed on to them. Those are very rewarding.

But even when nobody writes back, I’m OK, since, as I said, I write primarily to clarify my own thinking.

I urge you to give it a try. Set a few rules. Decide, for example, your ground rules will be “Never apologize, never explain.” Or that you are “Not responsible for misspellings or awkward phrasing, or for partial understanding of complex issues.” Maybe you will have to write a number of blogs first before the rules you want to go by become clear to you.

If it makes it easier, come up with a number of categories like “Saying the nastiest things I can possibly think of about Michele Bachmann,” or “Life in Jokeland/Oakland,” or “Memories of my earlier life in Krasnoyarsk.” You know, wherever you find the shoe pinching. Put it out there, and tell a select number of people you trust with the information. Let them pass it on and the list of readers will grow. Or not. Remember, this is about preventing hardening of the brain plumbing, not about teaching the world to fly.

Count me in as your first guaranteed regular. I’ve been doing it for some time now already, and can make that promise with confidence.

With lots of affection and an equal amount of respect for your writing abilities,

A.

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Putting faces on the 1%

2011-10-21T13:14:00.000-07:00

Those pesky lefties, like my friend Ed, are at it again. Churning up the waters with all this class war yada yada.

Ed sent me two links this morning, one to the news that Walmart has decided to cut the insurance benefits of its employees, and one to an article about six people who inherited a total of 93 billion dollars of the Walmart fortune.

Turns out if you only work at Walmart between 24 and 33 hours a week, under the new belt-tightening rules, your spouse will get no benefits whatsoever. If you work there part time less than 24 hours a week (four hours a day, Monday through Friday, and only three on Saturday, say) you get no benefits for yourself, either.

This is America. Who says you have a right to benefits? What are you, in a union?

Look at it from Walmart’s perspective. They’ve got more than two million employees to keep track of and Walmart would not be able to show a $16 billion profit this year if it worried about them all.

I know, I know. You’re going to tell me there would be no $422 billion in sales if the employees were not at their jobs, but that’s no excuse. In this day of high unemployment in the American market economy, if an employee has to quit to take care of a sick spouse, there’s always another one who will apply for the job. One has to work the system, after all. And fair’s fair. Other companies don’t do much better, most of them. Why are you picking on us?

The inherited fortunes of Christy ($24.5 billion), Jim ($21.1 billion), Alice ($20.9 billion), S. Robson ($20.5 billion), Ann ($3.3 billion), and Nancy ($2.7 billion) may seem like a lot, but a billion dollars doesn’t go nearly as far as it once did. And although they inherited their money, and didn’t work for it, if we had not allowed Bud and Sam Walton to give this money to their kids, they might have operated out of Mexico and put those 2.1 million Americans out of a job. Ever think of that?

What are you, a democrat?

OK, so they put their competition out of business, destroyed the downtowns of thousands of towns across America, took their manufacturing base to China, made the taxpayers of the states where they located their stores carry the burden of benefits for their employees like educating their children and paying for their emergency room visits. OK, let’s say they had used some of that $93 billion that went to the kids for employee benefits, you know human nature. Give an employee an inch, he’ll take a mile.

Why are we even listening to this criticism from socialists?

American values.

Just imagine a world without American values.

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The Mischief Makers

2011-10-19T18:29:00.000-07:00

Now they’ve gone and done it. They being the Evangelical Republicans and Maureen Dowd. They’ve tossed the doodoo right directly into the fan. We’re actually looking at religious doctrine in the context of the next presidential election.

First came Perry’s man, this guy Jeffress. He runs one of these giant megachurches with thousands of members, part of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant Church in America, formed originally when the Baptists of the South didn’t want to go along with their Northern brethern in getting rid of slavery. Right up there with Henry VIII ripping his national church away from Rome so he could kill a few of his wives in the contest for most ignominious beginnings.

Jeffress, when he's not Mormon-bashing, can actually be quite affable. But, as a visit to the Mormon Center in Salt Lake will show you, Jeffress has no trouble getting traction when he needs it among his fellow evangelicals. Mormonism is a whole lot cheaper than Disneyland, but provides the same fantasyland experience, and they too, like the Lutherans, Anglicans, Southern Baptists and a whole lot of other folk, have shady beginnings. Their scriptures tell you people of color are cursed, men should marry lots of wives, the Garden of Eden is in Missouri, Christ spent some time in North America and when you die you can become a god and have a planet of your very own.

Jeffress conveniently ignores the Mormon claim that all that stuff is history and Mormon doctrine can turn on a dime when it’s politically expedient to do so – just as he conveniently ignores the fact that his own church was founded on some pretty shitty values.

True, a lot of Mormon B.S. has not been discarded. Like their conviction that Jesus was Satan’s brother, that Anne Frank is a Mormon (because we baptized her after her death), that God appeared in the flesh once alongside Jesus in the flesh – two separate bodies, that the Hebrews came to North America on little boats – and so did Jesus – although word has it he came by air.

Anybody can see instantly that these are wiggy beliefs. Not sensible ones like God makes women suffer in childbirth because she listened to a snake instead of him – and the snake once had legs, but now crawls on the ground in punishment for his actions. Or that he, God, wanted a sacrifice to himself, but the usual lambs or camels of the day wouldn’t do, so he took human form and sacrificed his own self (how come all these centuries the church blamed the Jews, or Judas? Were they not just carrying out God’s plan? – so God sent his only-begotten Son…) before coming back to life. Mary’s conception was “immaculate” (i.e., God blames the billions of children of Adam and Eve for thousands of years for sins their mother and father, but not they themselves, committed when they couldn’t control their desire to have knowledge God didn’t want to give them, but he made an exception and allowed Mary to be born herself free from sin so that when God (who obviously plans ahead) was ready to find a pretty lady to reproduce himself with she’d be not only a virgin when she gave birth but free from sin as well. And she went bodily into heaven. How much time have you got? The list is long…

If you ever decide to learn Japanese, there is a useful phrase right up there with please and thank you and can you please point me to the bathroom, without which you will make an ass of yourself in Japan. Repeat after me, “Ah, so desu ka?”

“Ah, so desu ka?” (dwell on the “so” and slap a look of delighted surprise on your face) means “Oh, is that so?”

You use it every time you strike up a conversation with new people. You even use it with old familiar people, certainly with neighbors across the fence, and absolutely with all people in authority. Its sociolinguistic meaning is, “I hear what you are saying and you will never ever hear from me that I think you are full of crap because I am well brought up and know to smile and pretend interest and convey the impression that what you have just said has enlightened me and made my day.”

Japanese people developed social skills way before most other people. All people who live close to others in small villages learn these skills. In America, by way of contrast, we still bash about with the mistaken notion that our real opinions on things are worthy of expression.

Gay liberation couldn’t get off the ground for years in Japan, not because Japanese think they should interpret the Bible to say gays should be stoned to death, but because they perceive that the topic of what people do with their weenies is not fit for the salon. You can’t have a revolution with people who think it’s impolite.

We had a bit of that here, too, actually. We Americans, like the Japanese, had a kind of distinction between “tatemae” (the “truth” that it is socially acceptable to express” and “honne” (the “truth” that matches your actual thoughts and feelings) and until recently we pretty much stuck to it in the national discourse. We didn’t remind Catholics that their pope enabled 30,000 Nazis and Ustashis to escape to South America after the war. At least not at political conventions. We didn’t tell Lutherans we had come across the writings of Martin Luther who advocated burning Jewish synagogues and attacking the Jews with "sulphur and pitch." We spoke instead of “complexity” and “changing with the times” and spouted silly little aphorisms like, “You go to your church and I’ll go to mine,” and had a tacit understanding that “I won’t comment on your bald spot if you keep quiet about the space between my front teeth.”

The world of completely insane varieties of voodoo is manageable only when we focus on the stained glass windows and the schools and hospitals and Mozart’s Requiem and the kindness of old Sister Agnes. Only if you keep a lid on the ugly truths of how many ways there are to tell the story of an imaginary friend who lives in the sky and, as George Carlin said it,

...who watches every thing you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things that he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever 'til the end of time...but he loves you.

The church people I knew as a child avoided people like George Carlin as much as they could, and when they couldn’t they would pronounce he was a man “probably too angry for his own good.”

We need our drugs. Our conventions that make no sense. Our grease for the wheels that make the world go round.

We simply can’t have people discussing religion on a stage at a political convention. Much less in our newspaper of record.

It could lead to somebody actually revealing our deepest social secret, that we live at peace with religion for the most part only because even the religious among us don’t take the doctrine seriously. We all pick and choose, call Judaism the religion of justice, Christianity the religion of love, Islam the religion of peace only because we’ve whited out all the information in the sacred texts to the contrary. And because we’ve seen what happens when other cherry-pickers pick the nasty bits to dwell on.

We had a deal, in America. We didn’t bring up certain things in polite society.

Unfortunately, the fundamentalists are not highly schooled in the social graces and didn’t get the word. They once kept their handwaving and hallelujahing to themselves and didn't scare the horses. But this is the new America and they've come into the mainstream. They’re appearing at political conventions with the social equivalent of wearing bowling shirts and scratching their crotches while toasting the bride. They’re talking about the actual religious dogmas espoused by the institutions to which their political opponents swear allegiance.

That’s really dangerous. Just as the approval of interracial marriage led us to believe gays ought to be able to marry, and letting gays marry will lead us to sex with animals… (I don’t believe this – I’m just trying to get into the fundamentalist frame of mind to make an argument.) Just like doing one thing leads to another, like sex among Baptists leads to dancing and bingo leads to adultery, life is just one gigantic goddam slippery slope.

Unless we put this religious stuff back in the box, there’s no telling where the slippery slope will lead to.

A discussion, maybe, of the United States as a money-grubbing killer of people around the world who do not serve the interests of our corporate directors.

You get my drift. You see the mischief we could get into.

_____

Things go better with Tchaikovskim

2011-10-17T01:49:00.000-07:00

When I lived in Japan I spent an inordinate amount of time talking about living in Japan. I’d get together with my friends on weekends and one of us would ask, “Do you think we made the right decision coming to live here?” I kept that up for some twenty years before I bailed out. And they’re still doing it.

And now I’m asking the same question about living in Berkeley. We live six blocks from the Oakland city line and I met an Oakland cop the other night at a dinner party who I asked about the latest political flap where mayor Jean Quan fired the police chief because he wouldn’t follow her party line. “If you had any idea how many seriously dangerous criminals there are roaming the streets of the city, you’d run like hell,” he said. I got the feeling it’s not just a policeman’s perspective. There’s stuff seriously wrong with this place, and much of it has to do with our inability to deal with poverty and crime and with our belief that we have enough money to fight unjustified wars, but not enough to give every American kid the kind of access to education that might help head off this misery. Rent Waiting for 'Superman' sometime.

But don’t get me started, as they say.

Taku bought a beautiful vine some time ago. A passion fruit. It grew and grew and grew and before we knew what happened it had completely taken over the loquat tree in our back yard, and then jumped over and taken over the neighbor’s trees, as well. For the longest time we didn’t do anything about it. It had such beautiful flowers and I used to just go to the window to stare at it. Taku had to shake me out of this vale of ignorance and remind me if we didn’t pull the vine off the trees, they would die.

So we finally got around to hiring a handyman who worked like a team of oxen pulling this vine down. Hours, it took him, and when he was done we had a mound on the back patio that covered more than half of it. I spent so much money on the handyman I decided we had to finish the job ourselves, so Taku and I spent the day (he took maybe two breaks in eight hours; I took twenty-five) stuffing that damn vine into plant debris bags. What a day’s work. Taku could barely stay awake that evening, and I got exhausted just feeling his exhaustion.

It didn’t help that I had woken up some days ago with a kidney stone and had Taku take me to emergency where I wailed the whole day through except when the drugs knocked me out or except when I was doing things with my body no person with an ounce of dignity ought to be caught dead doing. Good news is the stone appears to have passed and the day in hell was but a 24-hour sojourn. Not that I didn’t use it as an excuse to take naps for several days afterwards.

So there’s my existential state, living in Berkeley. Crime, sirens, thugs, loud student parties, overgrown vines, kidney stones, disillusionment with the world at large and the United States in particular. What’s a guy to do?

The answer is to walk up the street till you get to Zellerbach Hall, walk in and say you want two rush tickets to hear Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra do Tchaikovsky’s 2nd and 5th Symphonies, thank you very much.

Then walk across the street to the coffee shop that does fancy shmancy dinners on concert nights, have some polenta with crimini mushrooms and a glass of white before settling into the orchestra seats you’ve snagged for fifteen bucks (senior, rush - Taku paid more) and surrender yourself to this glorious music by a passionate Slav my gay chauvinist friends always want to lay claim to despite the fact he probably viewed his sexuality the way I view kidney stones.

But why be distracted by such nonsense. There you are, sitting in row 7, looking at this bunch of gorgeous young men and women – some actually appear to be in their 30s, pulling their bows across their violins and cellos and making me forget all about plant debris and crime and democracy gone off the rails. I have never enjoyed a concert more.

My mind went back to army days, when I was at the Russian Language School. It helped that I had read conductor Valery Gergiev was a friend of Putin’s and godfather to his son. Never mind that he has ardently denied that. It helped that the people to my left and right and front and rear were all speaking Russian. I was a few feet from a stage filled with world-class artists from the Kirov Theater in St. Petersberg, and they were beautiful men and women and they were making such beautiful music I never wanted it to stop.

At the language school there was a prince of the Romanovs. He had the tremors. Whether it came from drinking too much – we were sure that was the reason – or whether it was a nervous disease, the poor man vibrated constantly. We began calling him Shakey Jake. Young people have always been cruel, and the man deserved better. But we never underestimated him. We laughed when Minnie Mouse would curtsey at him and call him “prince” and make him scowl and look like he was about to swat her one. She was the wife of the Russian Orthodox priest and would go on endlessly how happy people were before the Bolsheviks took over and disturbed the peace.

Shakey Jake was an expert on Tchaikovsky, and by the time I had been there nearly a year I was able to enjoy his lectures, even in Russian. Didn’t do all that much for my music appreciation, but I got off on the fact that the world was in the middle of a cold war and here we were listening to somebody who was related to the Czar somehow and he was telling us about one of these composers I loved at the time and making it sound as if he had known him personally.

The thoughts just kept coming. The music flowed, and I studied the faces close up of kids not even born when I was listening to this Romanov prince tell me about the composer of this music they were now playing. They could be dying in Afghanistan or Chechnya, but they weren’t. They were playing beautiful music in Berkeley, California. Shakey Jake might have lost his head when his relatives did. Instead, I got to watch him walk across the campus at the Monterey Presidio, always wearing a blue blazer and an ascot, always looking like he might fall down at any minute. But safe to grow old and lecture about his great love, Tchaikovsky.

Пётр Ильич Чайковский. Tchaikovsky. The name ends in –ski. That means it’s an adjective, even though it’s a proper name. That means it’s declined like an adjective. I love the music (of) Tchaikovskovo - I know some secrets about Tchaikovskom – have seen a memorial (to) Tchaikovskomu – would like to go on a picnic with Tchaikovskim. And that’s only the singular guy. If he’s with his brother, or that other composer named Boris Tchaikovsky (no relation), there are other endings. Like the house of the (three) Tchaikovskikh.

I sat there surrounded by Russians and remembered musing about how brilliant Shakey Jake was that time when I was sitting in his audience and grooving on the fact that he could reel off a bunch of Russian composers' names in the dative - Tschaikovskomu, Shostakovichu, Rimskomu-Korsakovu, without a declension chart in his hand, and how when he went from Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka in the nominative to Mikhailu Ivanovichu Glinke in the dative he knew how to switch from masculine adjectival endings to feminine noun endings at the last minute for Glinka/Glinke and never skip a beat.

And I sat there last night and I marveled at how I remembered not a word about the content of that lecture nearly fifty years ago on Tchaikovsky, but I do remember marveling at Shakey Jake's ability to handle the grammar of his native language, and then I was reflecting on how I could reflect in a nanosecond on what a tragic world we live in that Russians who looked so beautiful and played even more beautifully could have ever been anybody's enemies – and in the next nanosecond how I could remember a thought so impossibly trivial after all these years, when I realized Taku next to me, who wasn't even born then, was now sleeping through some truly gorgeous stuff and missing the fact that the first violinist's bow was coming apart and how happy I am to be alive now, post kidney-stone, in this crime-ridden city only a fifteen-minute walk from where the Kirov Orchestra, now the Mariinsky, could play such beautiful music and make me feel all's right with the world.

Now this is, of course, 2011 and you don't need to go to Zellerbach to hear Valery Gergiev conduct the Mariinsky. You can go to YouTube. It ain't live, but it's lovely all the same, and remember while you watch this man's funny hand movements that he's a brilliant pianist and that may explain it. Remember also that there was once a Cinderella type working as a janitor at the Mariinsky who somehow found her way to Gergiev, who became her voice coach. Her name is Anna Netrebko, and if you've never heard her sing, you don't know love. Just get a small idea of her, if you don't know her already, singing "O mio babbino caro" or Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Pie Jesu.”

And that man right there up on the stage tonight not twenty feet away from me with those fluttering hands helped make that happen. Watch this trailer. And maybe this one, too.

Some days are just better than others.

_____

Heading North on I-95

2011-10-04T12:18:00.000-07:00

The latest crapola viral e-mail that landed in my inbox, thanks to a well-meaning and very dear member of my family, has to do with Florida’s new plan to test welfare recipients for drug use. "Hooray for Florida," the message crowed. "I-95 will be jammed for the next month or so........Druggies and deadbeats heading North out of Florida..."

Like most of these right-wing pieces, it’s designed to make your blood boil. And low on factual information. First off, it claims that Florida is the first state to do this. It’s not. It was tried in Michigan. But that’s the least of its misrepresentations.

According to an Associated Press report last week, about 2.5% of those applying for welfare in Florida are actually using substances. The true number is slightly higher, since 2% refused to take the test, but that number still pales in comparison to the 6% of Americans over the age of 12 who use drugs. In other words, welfare applicants are less than half as likely to use drugs as the average American.

One of the arguments Florida’s Governor Rick Scott uses to justify the testing is that it will save the state money.

But would it? There are some 2000 people on welfare in Florida at the moment. 2.5% of 2000 is fifty people. Does it really make sense to test 2000 people to find out which 50 are using drugs? It would appear cost effectiveness is in a race with abuse of civil liberties to see which is the greater reason for calling this a bad policy.

Why would anyone single out an entire class of people for testing? Why should the 97.5% of people on welfare be subjected to such treatment when they are already on the down and outs and have few resources to fight back with? Is this not a clear case of “unlawful search?” The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and Warrants shall not be issued, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Because they have no political clout, like all people without the money to buy power, they make great scapegoats, and there is never a shortage of politicians willing to feed the mob and keep the fear of evildoers alive.

At the same time, there are organizations like the ACLU that will fight back. The ACLU has already filed suit. And how much will it cost the Florida taxpayer to fight this suit in court? And has anybody stopped to check what happened in Michigan when they tried this? I’ll tell you. It was struck down in 2003 by a Michigan appeals court.

Laws like this one that claim to punish bad guys are covers for politicians who want to look tough. When you dig beneath the surface, you realize the claim that they are saving taxpayers money turns out to be bogus, and in fact, these punishment-based policies are often very costly indeed.

But there’s another reason to reject this law – the smell test.

Ever notice how easy it is to scapegoat? Something wrong with having all these illegal aliens? Punish them. Never mind the guys giving them jobs. Punish the ones who can’t fight back.

This is no different. This is the same old story making the rounds once more. Back in the early 90s we were passing laws to punish women on welfare for having too many children. And then riding around in Cadillacs on their welfare money. Or so the popular understanding went – a complete lie, but one which showed up behind the poll numbers favoring “getting tough” on criminals and other evil doers. Nobody stopped to ask why if you had to choose between an occasional abuser of the system and cutting off some child’s food, one would want to punish the abuser.

I’m not making an excuse for abuse of the system or saying abusers should get off scot free. But jumping on a bandwagon to get “deadbeats” on the highway out of town is bumper-sticker sloganeering. So much easier than doing the homework of digging out the details, so you have half a chance of addressing the problem effectively.

But who's got time these days to do homework? It's quicker and easier to show a bunch of losers the highway.

_____

Letter to Timothy

2011-09-27T14:03:00.000-07:00

News Item:

NEW YORK – The nation's top Catholic bishop (Timothy Dolan) issued a stern challenge to the Obama administration's decision not to support a federal ban on gay marriage, and warned the president that his policies could "precipitate a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions."
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Dear Timothy:

Hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but I think you’re a shit.

Let me see if I’ve got this right. You say “(T)reating gay marriage as a civil right would lead to discrimination against believers…”

Really, Timothy? Did you really say that?

That’s right up there with an opposition to teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution because it would lead to discrimination against believers (sic) of the Genesis version.

You’ve got a right to believe I’m no damn good, and I’ve got to give you free rein because you’re a “believer”?

You want to stand on my foot, but if I cry ouch, it infringes on your right to stand on my foot?

You’ve got balls, Timothy. I’ll give you that.

Can you say “chutzpah”? From the throat, Timothy. Not shutzpah, like that other idiot, Michele Bachmann, says it.

Think, Timothy. Think. The way things work in this country is that one person’s rights end where another person’s rights begin. You remembered that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around. Maybe you can remember this bit too.

Man, Timothy. For those who want to see the church self-destruct, you’re a dream come true.

God, what an idiot you are.

_____

Two Speeches

2011-09-23T16:27:00.000-07:00

I watched Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu address the United Nations General Assembly this morning. I listened to both speeches in their entirety. How different things look when you see international politics at this personal level, as a struggle between two men fighting to be heard.

Most of the time, for those of us not personally invested in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, each news item that captures our attention comes across like a recurring toothache. You want a quick fix and at some level, you’re tempted to sweep it all away with “a pox on both your houses.”

But then, every once in a while, you see the human side of the conflict up close, and you know the struggle cannot be dismissed so cavalierly. That’s what happened at the UN yesterday. I found myself giving both these men my total sympathy, in turn.

I once heard Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem for almost thirty years, put his finger on what makes this conflict so difficult. “When you go to a marriage counselor,” he explained, “one of the most common tools the counselor has for getting at the root of your problems is to ask you to role play each other. You, the husband, take the wife’s perspective. You, the wife, take the husband’s perspective. What usually happens, almost from the start, is that one person says, ‘Wait a minute. That’s not what I think. You’re misrepresenting me!’ and you can begin to repair the relationship.”

The problem with Arabs and Israelis, Kollek said, is that they don’t have that problem. Both sides see the other’s perspective perfectly clearly. They just don’t agree. There is no place to build on, no misunderstanding to correct.

That might be oversimplified, but it rings true and helps me explain to myself why, try as I may, I just cannot take sides in this issue.

That means I sat down to listen to the two addresses yesterday with what I think was an open mind. OK, not entirely, actually. I was leaning more toward the Palestinian argument, and I was persuaded that Netanyahu was simply stalling for time and not acting in good faith. That view is all over the place, incidentally, including in the September 26, 2011 issue of The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town.” That article resonated, because for some time I have been paying attention to Israeli friends making the same point and I had an anti-Netanyahu framework already built up to hang that information on.

But when I listened to Netanyahu, I found his arguments powerful, his fears credible, and his ability to marshal the facts of history masterful. He came across not as a right wing ideologue, but as a man of powerful convictions worth taking seriously.

I also listened with some emotion to Abbas, and when he was done, I was ready to vote instantly for recognition of Palestine.

The cynical response to this is readily available, of course. Both men are politicians, with vested interests and strong powers of persuasion. I have always suffered from an inclination to take the perspective of the last book I read, favor the latest cause that captures my attention. For that reason, I have stopped giving to charities on the spot and I try to wait 24 hours before responding to people who say things that make me angry. When I can.

And for that reason, I listened to Abbas first. It wasn’t just because he spoke first. It’s because I wanted to give Netanyahu a fair chance. It worked. Tomorrow I may go back to knocking Netanyahu, but today I am impressed.

The non-cynical response is that I simply got another close look at two incompatible world views. Two good men espousing two legitimate claims to truth who simply have trouble being good together. I can certainly be faulted for all the gaps in my knowledge about the history of the conflict. But I’ve listened to Israeli friends tell me what it’s like to have to put gas masks on your children and I’ve listened to Palestinian friends tell me what it’s like to watch your community dismantled before your eyes, and I find it very hard to see a moral high ground.

I spend a lot of time with Jews in my close chosen family. I know what being Jewish means to them. I also grew up among Irish and Italians in New England and know how inseparable language, religion and culture can be from one's personal sense of identity. I don’t have it. I am strongly identified with Germany and with Japan, almost took on German nationality at one point in my life and still today hold permanent resident status in Japan. But I am not German and I am not Japanese. Nor am I American, except by default. When I was leaving to live in Germany in 1960, I caught my grandmother crying. "Don't cry," I said. "I'll be back in a year."

"I'm not crying because you're leaving, I'm crying because you're repeating my mistake. You're going to live your whole life in one place yearning for another, and your life will be hell."

She was wrong about the hell part, but right about the cost of not being totally grounded in place and national community. I feel real pain when I think of the disasters in Japan. I feel real pride when I see how Germany has transformed itself. And I feel real shame in recent years at what America has become. And none of these feelings define who I am or make me belong more or less to these three places on the planet.

So I see life through a very different lens from the one Israel-identified Jews look through. I love the English language. I hate to see it used badly and I would hate to see it go. But I know I could live in another one if I had to. I have absolutely no loyalty to my Caucasian race, and would be perfectly happy to have children carry on my name with black or Asian features. Or take a different family name, for that matter. I don’t understand in my gut why one has to have a Jewish state. Why one has to marry Jewish (marry Italian, marry Japanese). Why one has to live in Israel, other than that’s where one calls home.

It wouldn’t take much for me to espouse the view that since religion leads us to such irrational decisions, we should simply refuse to let it jerk us around. We could play king of the world, for all I care, put the Jews and the Arabs of all religious backgrounds together on the land and say, “There. There’s only one sandbox. Play nice, or get out. Go live in America. England, any number of places where people are happy to have you. Make a go of it and stop squawking, or leave.”

Arguments like that one were not unusual back in the day when I would stay up late at night in college bull sessions, and I’m sure I held that view at one time myself.

But I have come to understand that my lack of connection with the kind of race and ethnicity identity markers some take seriously but I call accidents of my birth is not a value to espouse. It gives me not moral superiority but one perspective among many. And if others feel they are Jewish, or Muslim, or Japanese to the marrow in their bones, I see that it “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” to let them use that lens rather than mine. In fact, I am now inclined to want to pull up a chair and say, “Tell me more about what the world looks like from where you sit.” If I am to have a right to call ethnicity irrelevant, others, I think, ought to have the right to take it seriously.

I am troubled by Zionism, the nationalism of the diaspora. I can imagine what it must feel like for a Palestinian to have to contend with the argument that the right to the land Jews feel is also a right to exclude. But I can also feel the pride of Jewish accomplishment that is today the State of Israel. At each pass, each go-around on the issues, I always seem to end up unable to take sides.

It struck me, listening to those two men yesterday, that I was watching the equivalent of two tectonic plates rubbing against each other. We were looking at the workings of an earthquake, and the best we can hope for is that we have built on enough solid ground to survive. Abbas could not be persuaded to hold off any longer. He knows he has the world on his side. Many times his remarks were cheered by a packed house. And when Netanyahu spoke, on the other hand, it appeared the house was half empty. The signs of how this event is moving are clear.

It looks like Obama is going to veto the application for statehood, and the U.S. is going to fall further back into pariah status, along with Israel, as the world sees us more and more as a nation who speaks of democracy with ever decreasing credibility. We invade Iraq on false premises, we openly ignore the Geneva Conventions, we train the troops used by Latin American dictators at the School of the Americas (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), then refer to them as “freedom fighters.” And now, many in the UN will maintain, we’re going to add another shame to the pile – failure to recognize the legitimate claims of the Palestinian people to statehood.

We think of ourselves as the good guys, but the facts reveal that view is overblown. Israel seeks international recognition as a beleaguered state, but it can’t explain to the world why their settlement of occupied territories makes them good guys, either. It was never a defensible policy. And now, it appears that time has run out.

Nigeria, apparently, is going to join the veto, and at the moment it would appear the tiny state of Gabon holds the key vote to whether Palestine becomes a nation. How ironic that the fate of a nation could hang on such a tiny thread.

When nationhood comes, it is possible that Netanyahu’s worst fears will come true and they will shoot planes out of the air taking off and landing at Ben Gurion airport, and we will all cluck and say, “See, they’ll never change, those Middle Easterners. Probably should have stuck to our guns and defended Israel.” It is also possible that the Palestinians will do their new nation proud, and this fear of attacks on the cities and airports of Israel will be shown to be paranoia.

We have been ruled by fear for so long. We’ve been duped into thinking we have enemies called “terrorists” and that we have to remain on a permanent war footing. Israel has more reason to fear than the U.S. does, but they too might make a leap of faith. Netanyahu spoke to the UN almost in a scolding tone. With justification. But being right about the UN’s past failures is of little consolation now. When faced with what looks like historical moment, does one really have a choice?

There are indications that overcoming fear may be the new zeitgeist. Here in the U.S., the mind-numbing ignorance of the Tea Party and the cowardly decision of the Republican Party to play into it rather than stand up to it is bound to backfire. The Republicans may very well implode before the 2012 election giving Obama an open road to reelection. Not because he deserves to be president for another term (maybe he does – I can’t decide on that issue, either), but because the Republicans are eating each other alive at the moment.

I’m going to guess that Netanyahu is wrong, that Israelis will not have to fear the same kind of killer authority in the West Bank they do in Gaza and Lebanon, because others will stay involved, and Israel will not go it alone. Abbas has not enjoyed the popularity Arafat did, but the more he starts looking like a founding father, the more we might expect him to grow in stature. His administration is not Hamas and his fledgling nation will not want to lose the international support it has today by lobbing rockets at planes at Ben Gurion.

It seems to be a foregone conclusion that the UN will accept Abbas’ proposal. If you don’t believe me, watch the speech. But watch Netanyahu's speech as well and listen to him point out the failings of the United Nations, and hear his frustration, knowing he's swimming against the stream. Netanyahu is by far the more effective speaker, and not just because he speaks in native-speaker English and Abbas sounds long-winded by comparison. (There are two YouTube links to the Netanyahu speech. Both cut off the start of his speech, unfortunately. I suggest starting off on the second, which has more, and then switching to the one from the Fox Network, which has the better sound quality.)

If this were a public debate being judged by neutral observers, Netanyahu's superior articulateness and attention to factual detail would win the day. But against an idea whose time has come, cleverness, it would seem, is no match.

The tragedy for the United States is that Obama seems to feel he cannot avoid vetoing it. America, the first nation to recognize Israel on May 14, 1948, will now be remembered as the first nation to not recognize Palestine in 2011. The connection to the Arab Spring is unavoidable. In both cases, we appear to be on the wrong side of history once more.

A recent BBC poll of 20,446 persons in nineteen countries showed that 49% are in favor of Palestinian statehood, 21% opposed. Even in the United States, those figures are 45% in favor, 36% opposed.

We're arguing now over when and how, not if.

And, if the applause Abbas got in the UN is any indication, it's no longer even an argument.

_____

The hidden cost of fear

2011-09-12T12:47:00.000-07:00

I happened across a documentary last night called The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández. Hernandez was a student from a border town in Texas who kept goats and was out one day keeping predators away with a 22 rifle when he was killed by a team of four marines on patrol.

If you didn’t know before that we now have our military patroling the border looking for bad guys – drug smugglers, mainly – you do now.

In addition to the death of the Geneva Conventions, the commitment to see somebody as innocent until proven guilty, the right to privacy, and laws against torture, we can now add the death of posse comitatus as a victim of 9/11. That’s the law passed in 1878 which prohibits members of the military from exercising powers that maintain "law and order" on non-federal property.

Instead of finding organizers and sponsors of terrorist acts and prosecuting them as criminals, we have personified the abstract notion of terrorism itself, and made it “the enemy.” And since this putative enemy is a non-person, it will never put up a white flag, never negotiate, never surrender. This means we have effectively put ourselves on a war footing from now till the end of time. Because we have no leaders any more, but only people who manipulate and are manipulated by the masses, we have nobody who can break this pattern without being labeled a traitor and a coward and ignored.

The tragedy of Esequiel Hernández is another illustration of how when you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail. If it were not a story of how the Marines got away with murder, it would be tempting to call it a Keystone comedy. Four guys, assigned to a border town where nothing is happening, sit for hours in heavy gear and camoflage in 100 degree heat in the desert, bored senseless. Because they are trained to search and destroy, they sit and they wait for their chance.

Along comes a local kid with a 22. Because the Marines are camoflaged, he can’t see them. Because he’s a Texan with a gun in the desert, he takes potshots at things. Because he happens one time to shoot in their direction, they decide he’s a drug smuggler trying to kill them and they fire back. Hernández most likely never knew what hit him. He certainly never knew why somebody would show up out of nowhere with the intent to kill him.

I hope this story catches on. Your first instinct may be to view this as a tragic accident. And maybe you will join the Bill O'Reilly, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld crowd committed to the ideology that America has to have these shoot-first priorities. Maybe you too will want to say simply, "accidents happen." But an accident is something you can't see coming. When we condition people to kill, prime them to see enemies as any person with a gun, and actually give the order to "do what is necessary," we're not talking about an accident. We're talking about setting ourselves up for a fall.

I think we need to consider the consequences of priming ourselves to see the whole world as a nail in need of being hammered down. Watch the whole program. Or at least go to the website of the Drug Policy Forum of Texas, which is working to keep the story alive.

There are at least two aspects of this story worth noting – one, the human tragedy of a senseless killing, and two, the evidence that we have become a people caught in a web of significance of our own making. We have given in to fear and a nationalism that approaches tribalism, and lost sight of the values we insist we are fighting for. We have become an empire with a military, and we use that military to maintain the national narrative of ourselves as victims under fire. They, the bad guys, are after us, the good guys. The Marine who pulled the trigger and killed Esequiel Hernández was found innocent. The other three defended his action by asserting American freedoms exist only because of the heroic efforts of our military.

We are face to face with a leap of logic of devastating consequences. Our soldiers fight enemies so that we in America can have our freedoms. (The Swedes don’t have freedoms? The South Africans, the Thais, the Italians?) Even if the enemy they fight is not really an enemy, to call a soldier to account for killing an innocent is to attack our heros and saviors. As somebody from the FBI pointed out, if the killer had been an FBI agent, he’d be out of a job and very likely serving time for manslaughter at the very least, but because he’s a member of our military, backed up all the way up to the Department of Defense, he’s hands off.

You don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

I remember a conversation with a Russian woman once, back in the 60s. She had lived through the Second World War and was going on about how naïve American women are. “All this ridiculous feminism,” she would say. “All these attempts to get your men to take out the garbage, to take care of the kids, to be sweet and gentle and soft!” Her face turned ugly. “If you had lived through the war, had known enemy soldiers knocking down your doors, you would not be asking your men to be gentle and soft. In Russia, when a man beats his wife, she takes it as the price to pay for having the means to fight off the Nazis.”

I suspect most Russian women today do not think like that anymore. Times have changed in Russia.

And times have changed here, as well. Here we don’t excuse wife-beating.

But we do seem to be building a justification for it that might fly.

–––––

Veritas vos liberabit

2011-09-10T08:59:00.000-07:00

Veritas vos liberabit. The truth shall make you free. That’s the motto of Master’s School of West Simsbury, Connecticut.

Nice, don’t you think? Lofty. I just loves lofty.

They are an educational institution. Their goal is to “educate from the inside out.” “Uncovering the unique design (sic) of each student,” they say, “is the greatest joy of the dedicated teachers of The Master's School.”

Don’t you believe it.

The Hartford Courant carried a story two days ago of a young woman named Rachel, who was booted out when she let it be known she was a lesbian. Booted, as in if you don’t go we will make you go.

Christians. You gotta love’em. They do so much good. Like run schools and hospitals. Train up the children in the way they should go, so that even when they are old they will not depart from it. Unless they’re lesbians. Then don’t train them. Show them the door.

We got our rights. We don’t have to take just anybody. Christ, after all, wouldn’t take anybody. He’d know how to show this young lady the door. Didn’t he say, “Let the children come unto me. Except the lesbians. Don’t let those damn lesbians in. I hate lesbians. I am Christ. I think lesbians suck.”

May not have the scriptures exactly right. Probably ought to check it out.

What is especially loathsome about these so-called Christians is that they do this to children. These folk may not be the same folk broadcasting the Big Lie that gay people are into children, so I don’t want to paint them with the same brush. But they take children in before they are old enough to have any awareness of their own sexuality, most of them. They watch them, help them grow. And when their sexuality develops, if it is not the proper “Christian” cookie cutter sexuality, out they go. “We have judged you, girl, and found you wanting. You are not one of us. Get thee hence.”

Such a poetic phrase, “Get thee hence.”

So Elizabethan sounding. Like the King James version of the Bible.

Must look that chapter up, where Christ says to the lesbians gathered to hear him preach, “Get thee hence, Lesbos! Piss off. Make like you were never here. In my father’s house are many mansions, and outside in the yard, there’s a doghouse. You can use that.”

I could look it up, of course. But I don’t have to. I have this nice Christian school to reveal the word to me instead.

Kind of makes you want to be a Christian, doesn’t it.

_____

Future Shock and Some Free Associations

2011-09-03T19:49:00.000-07:00

Ever get that feeling that the Buddhists are onto something and that we're all part of one great big single universe? The feeling that everything is somehow associated with everything else? That underlying every little thing is a single foundation and that sooner or later this six degrees of separation thing will kick in and we'll find the connection? I had that feeling for a while this morning as I was poring over the news and reading things at random. Things that were not supposed to be related somehow seemed connected.

Reminded me of what I had read the other day about how we were so wrong about the Neanderthals. We used to think they were a separate life form from human beings, but now we know we're carrying their DNA. All these years I thought Neanderthals died out before humans came on the scene, except in Oklahoma and parts of Texas, but now I learn that between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago grandpa Neanderthal was making whoopie with grandma Homo Sapiens, and between 1 and 4% of our genome came from grandpa. That may explain why in this country we have both people like Martin Luther King, who dreamt of a world where children are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin and people who want the government to keep their hands off their Medicare.

A lot of these curious associations I'm talking about are associated with some form of future shock experience. For example, this morning I found myself fascinated by a remarkably clear photo of Mars. Now how did they manage that, I wondered. Obviously, they’re getting good at this.

Then my eye goes to the credits. It’s a "Xinhua/Reuters Photo."

Xinhua?

You mean like China?

Working with Reuters?

When did that happen?

And then I remembered when I was glued to the news about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, my adopted country, and couldn’t get satisfaction from the American news agencies, I turned to Al Jazeera. They were doing a bang-up job. NHK, the BBC of Japan was too, but that’s to be expected.

Turning to news sources in the Arab world and China is now part of today’s reality. And it can cause major future shock to somebody of my generation. And it comes not only from noticing how inadequate western sources of news can be at times, and how good the Arabs and Chinese have gotten lately, but at the kind of things they are covering. Here's another Xinhua photo, this time of the new Japanese prime minister and his cabinet, looking straight out of the late 19th century. Modern China covering Modern Japan. Future shock.

Japan never ceased to blow my mind for its interesting juxtapositions. The high tech and the primitive, for example. In 1970 when I first went to Japan I didn't have a flush toilet. But I had a fancy fan to ventilate the place out built into the plumbing. And even a mere five years ago I heated my house in the winter with kerosene space heaters you could program to turn on in the morning and off at night. With childproof buttons. And an automatic turn-off mechanism for when there were earthquakes. And a battery operated starter.

You had sensors for your train passes so sensitive you didn't have to take them out of your wallet, but could just walk by the wicket and they would open the barrier for you. All this stuff to give the foreign traveler mega future shock, and then they dress up in coat and tails, like the guys who surrendered to MacArthur with their top hats and all which they picked up from England when Victoria still believed there was no reason to make laws against lesbianism because women wouldn't do that sort of thing. Still standard today for special occasions like being introduced to the Emperor, or whatever they were up to the other day. photo.

Notice, though, that they don't smile when they have their picture taken. It would make them look like they weren't serious.

Photo by Xinhua, by the way.

Then I happened upon the news that Sweden is worrying about an invasion from Denmark of tanuki(狸).

I always thought tanuki existed only in Japan. (You didn’t see the association, did you?) Turns out they are all over North America. It was Hermann Göring who released four of these animals, not native to Europe, back in the 30s. They now number in the millions.

I also always thought that tanuki was translated “badger” but I’ve just learned it is actually a “raccoon dog.” Learn something every day.

They have managed to keep them from coming over from Finland, but they might conceiveably walk across the bridge from Denmark. Or swim. They’re really good swimmers. They’ve got cojones.

That’s the Spanish word for testicles. The non-technical one. Bollocks, the English say. Balls, say the Americans. And it’s “Golden balls (kintama)” in Japanese.

In Japan there’s a kid’s playground rhyme that runs

Tan Tan Tanuki no kintama wa,
Kaze mo nai no ni,
Bura bura

which, translated into American English, runs something like

The rac- rac- raccoon’s balls,
even though the wind has stopped
they still dangle dangle.

It’s sung to the tune of the Baptist hymn, “Shall we gather at the river?”

If you commit the words to memory, you can go to this YouTube video
and sing along.

Meanwhile, back at Xinhua, there's this article about a quarter of a million people in the streets in Tel Aviv and another 40,000 in Jerusalem marching to protest the gap between the rich and the poor in this land of kibbutzim and socialism and sharing.

Imagine that. China, land of first creeping now galloping capitalism and wealth on the coast and poverty inland has a world-class news agency now telling their people about people in other countries marching against wealth inequities.

Israel (I know you didn’t see this association) and I share a birthday. Israel, which has what's got to be the world's most beautiful national anthem, which sounds like Smetana’s Moldau in a minor key (associations), was born on my eighth birthday, a day I will always remember, because I associate it with the fact that we had just gotten a TV set. We were the first in our neighborhood and I knew in an instant I was going to become an addict.

Today I’m trying to keep abreast of what’s happening in Israel because I still remember so well the excitement I felt soon after coming to San Francisco and watching the Six-Day-War on television and listening to Abba Eban and feeling such pride in that little country I shared a birthday with. And an association with television.

Today a lot of that enthusiasm is diminished, and I associate the disillusion with the same disillusion I feel for my own country. Both countries I associate with dreams and the failure to reach those dreams at the moment.

Another thing Israel shares with the United States, besides the fact that its rich are getting richer and its poor are getting poorer is that both countries are undergoing enormous changes in attitudes toward gay rights. They’re way ahead of us in some ways. They have had rights for gays in their military for some time, for example, and gay pride marches in Tel Aviv and all that. But they also have religious wackos telling us gay people make God unhappy and ought to die, or just go away, or something. At least only a few extremists still call for stoning.

Mostly, they are accommodating, even if they don’t like it. For example, in Israel there's at least one rabbi taking an "if you can't beat'em, join'em" attitude and marrying gays to lesbians, telling them to be fruitful and multiply through artificial insemination, and have sex outside of marriage, it's OK, but only if you're really really gay." But if you’re straight, sex outside of marriage is not OK.

You gotta love the accommodation.

Gay stuff continues to provide future shock everywhere you look. In Britain, (and with a nod to Japan’s Liberal Democrats, by the way – associations, you see) a former police chief named Brian Paddick, who married a Norwegian man not long ago and is not happy that his marriage was downgraded to a civil thingie when he returned to London, just won the British Liberal Democratic Party’s nomination for mayor in London. If he wins, London will join Berlin and Paris as European capital cities with gay mayors.

And how’s this for future shock: Fox News has posted an op-ed piece advocating same-sex marriage.

I’d say that’s kind of sublime.

Just like the news that, after upsetting the Anglican Church by appointing Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, bishop of New Hampshire, the Piscalopians have done it again and nominated a married lesbian to be bishop of New York.

Of course where there’s sublime, you know the ridiculous can’t be far behind. The harshness of Soviet ruthlessness continues on, for example, more than two decades after the fall of the wall, as a one-armed man is fined the equivalent of two months of his pension for applauding at a street demonstration in Minsk, and that reminds the locals of the time the deaf/mute was arrested for shouting anti-government slogans not long ago.

And the marines in Afghanistan are being told not to fart.

Things change. Some things, like the gap between the rich and the poor, get worse. Other things, like the progress of gays and lesbians toward dignity and freedom from religious bigotry, get better.

And when the world lets you down, there are compensations. Like having a former student become a friend, move to San Francisco, and convince me, using his chihuahua Iggy as an illustration, that I ought to reconsider my reservations about little dogs, thereby opening me up to the richness of life with Miki and Bubu.

That's Miki, there on the left.

And Bubu (Christian name, Bounce) on the right.

And there is my friend Takashi with the latest member of his growing family.

Not so bad, sometimes, living here in the future.

_____

Fundamentalism as the Source of Homophobia

2011-08-31T20:09:00.000-07:00

This graph is from the Atlantic Wire. We've been aware of this information for some time now - that disparagement and demonization of gay people comes overwhelmingly from religious sources. But now we have more precise figures. And we need to make some important distinctions. It's not "religion" that makes one homophobic. It's fundamentalism.

The majority of Catholics and the majority of "mainline Protestant" church people have no problem with gay marriage - by more than a ten percent margin. (And I believe a greater percentage yet of Jews have no problem with gays, although those figures are not shown here, and the divide is between the Jewish equivalent of “mainline” – Reform and Reconstructionist Jews on the one end, and fundamentalist, literalist Orthodox on the other.) Also missing from this chart is the fact that Roman Catholicism is divided into two camps, the traditionalist, authoritarian hierarchy-focused (Vatican I) Catholics who are the most homophobic, and those seeking to restore charity, not power, as the central focus (Vatican II). But even when the two are averaged, as they are here, it is clear which camp is in the majority.

Among Protestants, the real resistance to seeing gay people as normal, healthy people stems largely from a literalist, cherry-picked reading of scripture that ignores divorce, and says nothing about spousal abuse or adultery when discussing "traditional marriage," but zeros in exclusively on gay people.

How screwed up is that?

I need to point out that the tables deal only with same-sex marriage, and not attitudes toward gays in general. But gay marriage has always been the final step in gay acceptance. When you ask people about gay rights, most people now agree there should be no discrimination in the work place - that's one end of the spectrum, and gay marriage is the other. It's not precise, but it's fair to say if people believe gay people have the right to marry, they believe in all the "preceding" rights, as well. As the figures show, people unaffiliated with religion approve of those rights almost three to one.

One source, Wikipedia, gives these figures for 2001, a full decade ago:

• 76% of the general public think that there should be laws to protect gay and lesbian people from job discrimination,
• 74% from housing discrimination,
• 73% for inheritance rights,
• 73% favor sexual orientation being included in the hate crimes statues
• 70% support health and other employee benefits for domestic partners,
• 68% support social security benefits, and
• 56% support GL people openly serving in the military.
• 47% support civil unions,
• 46% support adoption rights.
• 39% support same-sex marriage.

The bottom line, that the percentage of "OK by me" voices in favor of the right of gays to marry has jumped from 39% to a neck-in-neck tie in ten years, well, I'd call that progress.

Just one thing, though.

I'm with those who argue a citizen's rights ought not to be up for grabs, so we should not get too hung up on social attitudes, as much as we want to celebrate movement in this direction. Ultimately, it's for the Supreme Court to determine whether there is a constitutional reason for limiting marriage to non-gays. This is not a debate over whether to build a new sewer system. And remember, in 1958, when Gallup first started polling attitudes toward interracial marriage, 94% of Americans were opposed. It took the courts to turn the tide, and when they did, people followed.

But I'll say it again. It's nice to know that slowly but surely attitudes are changing dramatically.

_____

Who’s In, Who’s Out

2011-08-31T15:03:00.000-07:00

Ernesto Cardenal, the ex-priest, poet and liberation theologian from Nicaragua, was featured on the News Hour last night and I have been thinking about him all morning.

This tends to happen when the subject of liberation theology comes up. It has always fascinated me how much these folks get under the skin of those who run the official Catholic Church. Even the hierarchy’s most adamant defenders must have trouble explaining what’s wrong with liberation theology and its assertion that the poor really ought to be the starting point for Christian theology. Even if you don’t agree with it, I mean. Even if you think the Resurrection is the starting point, or the Eucharist, or some other “mystery” as these leaps of imagination are called. But for me, the real mystery is how successful Christians are at ignoring Christ’s focus on the poor.

I remember a conversation with a priest years ago. I asked him if he wasn’t embarrassed by the Crusades and the Inquisition. “No,” he said. “What embarrasses me is not the mistakes of the past. It’s the lack of humility in the church in the present. We think we’ve made all the mistakes we’re going to make and everything we do today is right. It’s the infallibility doctrine that embarrasses me.”

I liked this guy. Father John, his name was. I was sixteen, and in the hospital in Nova Scotia for a month alone and away from my family. He used to come over from the college where he worked and visit “the boy from ConneKticut,” as he pronounced it. I was still a Christian at the time, and interested in god talk, and I must have seemed ripe for conversion. He knew his visits were the highlight of my day. The only thing I had to look forward to, actually.

I was pretty strongly grounded in a religious tradition that might have been better labeled protesting than protestant, very much an active verb, not a descriptive adjective, however, and not all that convertible, actually. We were still actively angry at what the Catholic Church had done to Christianity, and to me it was as if the nailing of Martin Luther’s 95 theses on the church door at Wittenberg had happened just a few weeks or months before. Still, if anything would have cut through that resistance, it would have been this man’s natural humility. His focus on the love and compassion of Christianity, not the doctrine.

Father John still pops into mind from time to time. Being able to discuss great ideas at that stage in my life is a memory I still treasure. I would love to know if he’s still around, and what he thinks about the exoneration of Galileo, the child abuse scandal, the hardline stance on women and gays. And I’d love to ask him about liberation theology. Something tells me I know where his heart would be.

Why do so many children live in pain and die in agony? Why does God make the lame walk again but never make an amputated limb grow back? Why does God have some people born in Saudi Arabia where they grow up Muslim and others in Tibet where they grow up Buddhist? Why do priests have no shame wearing jewelry and dressing in fancy vestments when the man they say they follow allegedly said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God? I had lots of questions.

For reasons I can no longer remember, I got interested a few years ago in Hans Küng. It may be that I read somewhere the Vatican had taken away his right to teach because he had questioned papal infallibility, and I remembered Father John. In any case, for several months I wrapped myself up in his two volume autobiography – then read his book on infallibility and several others of his as well.

That brought me into the world of dissident theologians in the Church, and I went off on what some of them were up to, as well. Leonardo Boff, in particular, the Brazilian theologian who, like Küng, was silenced by Ratzinger for his criticism of the hierarchy. Ernesto Cardenal is only the latest of many to feel the sting of the official church for their protesting ways.

Cardenal differs from Küng and Boff, though, in that he has achieved considerable fame as a poet, and I’m developing an interest in his ability to combine art and poetry with history and politics.

I’m also fascinated with how men like these take defeat. Küng, I note, remains inside the Catholic Church despite all efforts to kick him out, and has dedicated his life to ecumenism, to bringing all Christians back under one roof. Boff has written over sixty books and his awards continue to pile up. Cardenal is compared to Ezra Pound and Pablo Neruda. None are worse off for their expulsions. In fact, they seem to wear their expulsions with pride. (In Boff's case, he withdrew after he was "condemned to 'obsequious silence'," taken back after protest, and then threatened with expulsion again.)

Cardenal is not the only Latin American priest I have devoted some time to. The one who captured my attention the most would have to be Christian von Wernich. [See past bloggings from 2007 here and here. The second of these is about Garino Olaso Zabala, a priest beatified under the watch of Ratzinger, despite the fact he had participated in the torture of a fellow priest. ]

I had made a close friend with an Argentine back in the 70s, during the time of “El Proceso” as the dictatorship in Argentina was called, the one that lasted from 1976 until the junta was booted out after they lost the Falklands War. Today I consider him and his family part of my chosen family, and in 2007 I went to live with them in Buenos Aires for several months. While I was there Christian von Wernich was put on trial. von Wernich, like Zabala, was accused of participating in torture, and for the same reason – an alleged greater good. (You gotta love that Christian ethical system, utilitarianism.) In von Wernich’s case, it was fighting communism.

Argentina had evolved sufficiently to be able to deal with its fascist past. I was reading Página 12, Argentina’s leading leftist press every day, and had followed through on the writing of one of its founders, Horacio Verbitsky, who has documented the story of the dictatorship, including von Wernich’s participation, so when von Wernich’s case came up I was primed, and, because the trial was televised, I followed it from start to finish.

As detail after detail came out, I felt sicker and sicker at the revelations of the church’s participation in this period of Argentine history. Just as priests in more recent times were found guilty of child abuse and then shunted from parish to parish by church officials, when the dictatorship ended, von Wernich was given a new identity and hidden by the church in a parish in Chile. To the very end, the church defended its position. It and it alone had the authority to decide the fate of any of its members. Civil notions of justice be damned.

All this got churned up yesterday when I listened to Cardenas tell of his expulsion from the church, and watched him shrug. No matter, he said. I was meant for the contemplative life, not for saying mass and baptizing children.

Maybe so. But that’s a wise old man’s take on the situation. He’s letting the church off the hook by embracing his fate. The church might have said to him, “Why don’t you sit over here, where you’ll be more comfortable.” Instead, they said to him, “There’s no room in here for you. Get out and don’t come back.”

Contrast that with the fact that Christian von Wernich still celebrates mass to this day in Marcos Paz prison, near Buenos Aires.

He was convicted as an accomplice in the murders of seven members of the Peronist guerrilla organisation Montoneros, of 31 cases of torture, and 42 cases of deprivation of freedom during Argentina's war on its own citizens. Two years later, the court of appeals upheld the verdict of genocide. von Wernich was the first Roman Catholic priest ever to be charged with such a crime, to my knowledge.

Jorge Bergoglio, Buenos Aires Archbishop from that time to today, has declared this to be “a case of political manipulation by the court in La Plata,” and continues to defend von Wernich. The dictatorship’s state terrorism, he says, was needed to combat "Marxist" guerrillas. Bergoglio was made a cardinal in 2001, and is known to be “papabile” – eligible for election to pope. And, as cardinal, he was among those choosing the pope when Ratzinger was elected, and could have a say in the next papal election as well.

Bergoglio’s not alone in this school of thought. He had good company in Marcel Lefebvre, for example, the founder of the Society of St. Pius X. Lefebvre too supported the Argentine junta, and the Pinochet regime as well. Lefebvre was sanctioned for his work with the society and when directed by the pope to stop consecrating bishops, he ignored the order, stating the pope didn’t have the authority to give it. One of those bishops was Richard Williamson, who later became infamous as a holocaust denier. Check out their stories if you have time. (Williamson later went to Argentina, but was kicked out for continuing to deny the holocaust.) The point is these men were later received by the current pope back into the church. Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany, but not in the Vatican, after all. There’s room for everybody.

Well, almost. Not Küng. Not the liberation theologists. Not priests like Boff and Cardenas. They no longer have the authority to give you the body and blood of Christ, to baptize your children, to forgive your sins.

For that you’ll have to go to somebody like Christian von Wernich.

_____

Family Tragedy

2011-08-28T17:55:00.000-07:00

Laugh out loud story of the week has got to be this guy Hinkle, in Indiana.

Phillip Hinkle apparently went on Craig’s List and found himself a male companion to rent for an evening, offering $80 and a nice tip if he was satisfied. When the guy showed up and found out it was Indiana’s District 92 representative in the state’s House of Representatives he was dealing with, he decided to call the whole thing off. Hinkle got mad and the guy called his sister who came and rescued the poor 18-year-old and phoned Hinkle’s wife to tell her to call her now angry hubby off.

A great story for the scandal sheets. Picked up by the gay press, of course. And the not so gay press.

And the details have made it into Hinkle’s Wikipedia page.

To wit,

Though Hinkle co-sponsored a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, in 2011 he was identified as the man who paid an 18-year-old man for "a really good time" in a hotel room. The man stated that when they were in the hotel room, Hinkle "grabbed him in the rear, dropped his towel and sat down on the bed — naked."[4][1] Several of his fellow GOP lawmakers debated whether Hinkle should resign.[5] Governor Mitch Daniels called the situation a "family tragedy".[4]

I’ve been having a debate with a cousin of mine lately over whether all this gay stuff should now fall under the rubric of "who cares." She, being a reasonable sort, thinks it should. Who cares, indeed?

Well, I think the people of Indiana should care for starters. This guy Hinkle, if you look up his voting record, has argued that Indiana should not only pass legislation that would ban gay marriage. He’d like to ban “any relationship ‘substantially similar to marriage,’” as well.

As for Hinkle’s little adventure, well you gotta love the Bill Clinton logic. “We didn't do anything. We just talked baseball and commented on the view.”

And it follows, ipso ergo flopso mopso, as the day follows the night, that I'm totally innocent. Like the T-shirt says, “I’m not gay, but my boyfriend is.” Or, in this case, the guy down on his knees in front of me.

Once again (how many times, Lord, how many times?) what we have here is a fine family man, member in good standing at St. Christopher Catholic Church, and republican politician (oh dear, did I contradict myself?) taking family values seriously and working on legislation to prevent gay marriage. Not only gay marriage, though. Did you get that "any relationship 'substantially similar to marriage'" bit? No domestic partnerships. Nuttin'.

Nice piece of work, this guy.

And while we're on the topic of Indiana Republicans (ah, yes, remember that guy who couldn’t spell potato?), what's with this Governor Mitch Daniels and his take on the situation as a "family tragedy"?

I understand Daniels came to power on the strength of the 2010 republican sweep. And he capped state property taxes at 1–3% of their value, and this led to a budget shortfall, which led to major spending cuts on essential services. And that he got stronger abortion laws passed and state funding withdrawn from all healthcare providers who offered abortion services. All this while lowering corporate income tax rates. None of this affects families, of course.

Family tragedy, my ass!

_____

Coming Out – Still a Big Deal

2011-08-27T10:53:00.000-07:00

I got into a fit of organization the other day. Went through my closets and storage and put a little order in my life. One of the things I found myself doing was untangling a bunch of telephone cords. How did I every collect so many?

That came to mind this morning when I came across a YouTube video of a young soldier. He’s 21 and he’s gay and he’s coming out of the closet.

Not all the way. He speaks, and you see him talking with his hands, but you don’t see his face. He is beginning to reveal his secret to his friends, but will not show his face until September 20th, when the DADT policy is officially reversed.

Most of you, I suspect, will find this terribly boring. Who needs another coming out story? Who needs a long drawn out coming out story, especially?

But there is something terribly touching about this. It’s one guy to whom this is a major life event, and he reveals in a nutshell how the world has changed and how young people live in a different media environment from those of us who still keep miles of land-line telephone cords in storage.

The reason I stuck with this young man (besides an esthetic appreciation for a well-built male upper body, I mean) is that I am fascinated with what a profound cultural phenomenon this sea change in attitudes toward homosexuality is and how powerful the forces of condemnation have been that even now, after all the progress in gay liberation, a young man’s coming out is still a big f’ing deal.

He’s from a conservative family, he says. Right. People from liberal families have it easier. That’s not rocket science. But just look at what this says about the thousands of folk only today getting rid of the onus of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. While one half of our nation moves comfortably now through the process of demystifying and mainstreaming their gay friends and neighbors, the other half is still sturming and dranging all over the land. If that doesn’t tickle your sense of the absurd, your absurdity meter is probably overdue for a checkup.

Watch it if you have ten minutes some time. Appreciate the cuteness. Or marvel at the laboriousness. Or perhaps the big ego. That was my first reaction. A big ego.

But after watching, I don’t think so. I think it’s more about being young and finding yourself. And I was struck at how night after night I watch the PBS Evening News Hour and end up aching at the photos they show at the end of the program of all the 21-year-olds who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There you see only their heads. Here the head is missing, but he’s still alive. It’s an image of a young man not dying but just beginning to live.

And using the latest technology to do it.

The brave new world of YouTube. I hear and read that young people today are flashing each other, posing online, having sex on video and sharing it with the world. There’s something off-putting about that. Something you know you don’t want your own kids to do. It feels like they’re falling down somehow.

But this use of the new online networking media is different. This guy is coming out. Getting up off the floor.

And he’s symbolically bringing the army, the navy, the air force and the marines with him.

The army is coming out. Now that’s a big deal, actually. Polish your champagne glasses. On September 20th, this young man is going to show his face. We all should join the party.

http://gay.americablog.com/2011/08/youtube-gay-military-sensation.html

_____

Al-Saadi’s Wallpaper

2011-08-26T08:08:00.000-07:00

I had a friend back in the day (he’s still my friend, but he’s not like this anymore) who used to want to believe gays were everywhere, and that made him a hilarious bore. “You know, I think X might be gay,” was one of his most common conversation starters. “Brad (not his real name),” we used to say, “You think the damn fire hydrants are gay.”

This was back before coming out of the closet was commonplace. Most gays, with good reason, were still super cautious about who they revealed their sexual persuasion to (always loved that particularly silly expression), and most revealed it to absolutely nobody.

That shame – let’s call it by its proper name – was held in place by the folks who today are saying things like, “We don’t hate gay people; we just believe marriage should be between a man and a woman,” or “There’s nothing wrong with being gay; it’s acting on it that’s the problem,” or “We should hate the sin, but love the sinner.”

Fortunately, like the anti-Semites of yesterday – who remembers when Jews couldn’t join country clubs or move into certain parts of town – these nice-guy homophobes look less like the Ku Klux Klan every day. There is progress. Coming out is in and every day some other football player or stockbroker gets tagged as “one of them.”

Yesterday, the news was that Tim Cook, Steve Jobs successor at Apple, is gay. And that’s dandy, say the gay liberation shock troops, who want every gay in the world identified as such, “so that children can grow up with proper role models.” And that’s nobody’s business, say the nice people who believe homosexuality is all about sex, and it’s not nice to talk about sex. And that’s really a bore, say most of the rest of the folks who would simply like to get on with making a living and getting the weeds out of their garden.

Remember when there were no black people in Hollywood? And then there were? Remember the black people in the balcony in the movie To Kill a Mockingbird, every one presented as a kindly mother or grandfather? Remember how long it took before the pendulum swung and there were black villains?

Gays are like that. They’re still being presented as really cool guys. Hilarious sense of humor. Great sense of style. Wish more straight men were like that.

So every time somebody says the Tim Cooks of the world need to be pressed into service to demonstrate to gay kids that there are no limits anymore to being both out and successful, somebody else throws in some line like, “Well, actually Tim Cook is a bitchy queen who is quite vicious if you get on his wrong side.” And that’s fine. People are simply shaking these stars of the moment down into normal folk.

The decision to close down cell phone service at BART made national news recently. BART police had killed a homeless man coming at them with a knife, and that was too close to the last killing to escape notice. People stormed the platforms, and BART shut down cell phone service for safety reasons. A huge First Amendment protest followed. The Bay Area transit agency's chief media spokesman, Linton Johnson, then got nailed by Anonymous, the group leading the protest, for being gay. Well, to be fair, not for being gay, but for being caught with his pants down in a gay bar. Johnson’s Johnson was showing, evidently. And what did BART do about it? Came out 100% behind their employee. BART employees might lose their job over their decision to shut down the phones, but not because they like to dance naughty.

Now, in this morning’s paper comes the news that in the looted apartment of Moammar Gathafi’s son, Al-Saadi Gathafi (that’s the now official spelling of Gaddafi), they found a gay porno tape, Boyz Tracks. Yeah, I checked it out on Google and then on a guide to gay porno sites and couldn’t find it. But AP usually gets its facts straight.

One porno tape does not a gay make, obviously, and let’s not forget that the number of real gay men may be less than the number of men who are curious. Remember my friend Brad, the one who thought even the fire hydrants were gay? Another of his lines was “At the right time, in the right space, there are precious few men who aren’t at least a bit curious.”

As these stories spin their way through the gay gossip press, their very ordinariness now suggests the gay liberation train is, if not pulling into the station right on time, at least heading for it at a respectable cruising speed. Eat your heart out, homophobes.

And Al-Saadi, by the way, that wallpaper and couch? OK, so it's a tent, not wallpaper. But still. What were you thinking?

_____

Fear the wrath

2011-08-14T22:35:00.000-07:00

There are several reasons the official Catholic Church gives me heartburn, the main ones being that:

1. They have defined homosexuality as a “disorder” and would limit sexuality to reproduction, if people didn’t tell them to fuck off;
2. They have structured the world so that men come out on top, and women on the bottom;
3. Their arrogant insistence they are the sole arbiters of truth seems to know no bounds;
4. They have made sexual behavior, not compassion or justice, the central focus of morality.

The pope is planning a state visit to Germany next month. If the pope were not such a dick, nobody would give a damn about his comings and goings. But as his letter telling every bishop in the world to hide all knowledge of priest abuse made evident, he can, from time to time, and right before your eyes, turn into a complete dick.

And as was demonstrated when his representative in San Francisco, Bishop Niederauer, acting on the pope’s orders, talked his Mormon friends in Utah into helping him launch Prop. 8 to remove civil rights from Californians, it’s clear the man can do great harm well beyond what should be the limits of his reach. The man can really ruin your day. He bears watching.

Although this is his third trip to Germany as pope, it’s only his first official state visit. For that reason, he will start in Berlin, on Thursday, the 22nd, where he will shake hands with its gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, with Germany’s Protestant Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and with the federal republic’s Catholic but divorced and remarried president, Christian Wulff. All folks on their way to hell, in other words.

He will say mass at the Olympia Stadium, which lives on in infamy since Hitler was embarrassed there by the African-American sprinter Jesse Owens in 1936. From there, the former head of the Inquisition (the institution was renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1965) will travel to Erfurt, the capital of the state of Thüringen (Thuringia, if you prefer it in English), where he will cost the taxpayers half a million euros per hour for the eleven hours he’s in town. Because this pisses some Erfurters off, they have organized into a group known as Heidenspaß statt Höllenangst (Having a ball beats the fear of hell) and applied to authorities in Erfurt for permission to protest the pope’s visit on the 23rd and the 24th.

I used to get Thüringen and Tübingen mixed up. Tübingen is in the West and it is where Catholic theologian and thorn-in-the-side to Ratzinger, Hans Küng, once invited Ratzinger to come teach with him at the university there. Since then, Ratzinger has forbidden Küng to teach any more because of his tendency to want to open up the church and let too many people and ideas in. Küng landed on his feet and has now devoted himself even more earnestly to ecumenical efforts, working to bring all Christian folk back under one roof. Ratzinger holds out that that’s not possible unless they all swear loyalty to him and the Roman hierarchy and accept its teachings as the sole path to heaven. So imagine my surprise to read that in Erfurt Ratzinger is scheduled to participate in an ecumenical service with other Christians. Assuming it’s not already too late, with the church on the skids in Germany, Erfurt would seem to be a good place for that. It’s the seat of a great Catholic cathedral, the one where Martin Luther was ordained, and it’s also the place where he went to university. Ecumenism is definitely not one of this pope’s goals, though, and it’s likely this is just one more lip sync number he does to show good will.

The diplomats are hard at work. He is meeting with Jews on the first day and with Muslims on the second day (he’s got his priorities straight, in other words) and you can be sure he has been warned not to repeat the mistake of a previous visit, when he described Islam as a violent religion.

From Erfurt, the pope will go to Etzelsbach, Lahr and Freiburg im Breisgau, that wonderful part of the country with names like Dingling, Kippenheim (kippen = tip over), Schlauch (garden hose), Sulz (cured meat in gelatin), and Kappel-Grafenhausen.

Relative to the number who will turn out for these large-scale circus events, where the pageantry will no doubt be interpreted by the media as an outporing of affection for this German pontiff on his first official visit to his Heimatland, the number of protesters is likely to be pretty small. But the number of the pope’s fans, whatever it is, will not be able to mask some important facts about the disillusionment inside the church and the ever increasing opposition externally. From inside the church, polls show trust in the pope is at a new low of 29%, and faith in the church is even lower, at 21%. 180,000 German catholics left the church in 2010, 40% more than in 2009. 80% of the church is clamoring for reforms, and so far Ratzinger has shown himself to be a hardliner holdout against change.

That’s actually understated. Benedict is head of a hierarchy working full time to try to undo many of the reforms of Vatican II, which sought to spread the authority of the church more evenly among the “ecclesia,” another word for the “body of believers,” or the church at large.

Many of those 80% inside the church have banded together for more effective action, often with links to catholic organizations internationally such as Call to Action , which an American conservative catholic website calls “the mother of all dissenting groups,” or Voice of the Faithful , an organization of over 30,000 started in response to the child abuse scandals, or We Are Church. Nor are these faithful entirely lay folk. The German organization, Nackte Sohlen (Bare Feet), calling for real changes, is headed by members of religious orders.

Because the pope is officially the head of a theocratic state, many troubled by official religion are downright hostile to the pope’s visit. Volker Beck, head of the Green Party, is protesting his visit to the Bundestag. And he’s not the only one.

Since 1875, Germany has had a church tax, deducted from one’s income along with taxes to the state. For years, most people went along with it, even if they stopped going to church, because it seemed like too aggressive an anti-church statement to de-register, and it required active steps to take your name off the rolls. Since around 1990, however, groups such as Der Internationale Bund der Konfessionslosen und Atheisten (International League of Non-Religious and Atheists): have become more visible, and a campaign was launched in November of last year, named the Kirchen Austrittsjahr.de (Year of Leaving the Church) campaign, sponsored by the Giordano Bruno Foundation, a group of outspoken secular humanists, and the Bund für Geistesfreiheit Bayern (Union of Free Thinkers of Bavaria). Then there’s the Bündnis gegen die menschenfeindliche Geschlechter- und Sexualpolitik des Papstes (Alliance against the misanthropic sex and gender policies of the pope) abound. They have a rather neutral sounding website, http://www.derpapstkommt.de/, (the pope is coming), compared to the organization mentioned previously, Heidenspaß statt Höllenangst (Having a ball beats the fear of hell) with the website http://papstabschaffen.blogsport.de/ (Get rid of the pope).

Have a look at their website, actually. Scroll down and you’ll see two videos. I’d skip the first one, Whatthefuck.blogsport.de and just watch the second one on YouTube. It features the pink Spaghetti Monster. The message at the end, by the way, “Fürchtet den Zorn des rosa Spaghettimonsters (Fear the wrath of the pink spaghetti monster)” is more my cup of tea.

_____

Minamata Revisited

2011-08-09T15:56:00.000-07:00

I wonder how many people remember Minamata. That town in Kyushu where the Chisso Corporation released all that mercury into the water between 1932 and 1968? Where even though they discovered it was killing and maiming people as early as 1956, it still took the government twelve years to make them stop? And where it only stopped because some outsider – in this case, an American photographer named Eugene Smith – made the dirty secret public? Where they poisoned the rivers with mercury and got away with it because they were corporate entities and government officials know who butters their bread (or in this case pickles their cucumbers)?

The more you dig into that story, the more you lose confidence in the whole human race. Eugene Smith was attacked by a Chisso employee and never totally recovered. Local people shunned the victims and that led to victims keeping quiet. Outsiders came in and ran lab tests, the company itself sponsored research, and then both sat on the results for ten years while the polluting continued. All this was justified much as the right wing in America now justifies dismantling the environmental protection agency in order to keep jobs – by which they mean, of course, keep dirty corporations afloat. The loss of Chisso as a local employer was simply too high a price to pay. They were too big to fail.

Because they sat on information that would have prevented the spread of such environmental pollution practices, a second plant, this time in Niigata, was found to be causing the same kind of pollution in 1965. This time the plant was not the sole local employer and lacked the power to make the truth disappear. As a result, the connection came out and this caused people to want to go back and reopen the research in Minamata. That’s the good news. The bad news is law suits are still pending today, over a half century after the crime against humanity was first exposed.*

Then there is the example of Midori Juuji – Japan’s “Green Cross” Agency, a private pharmaceutical company, despite the suggestion it might have something to do with the red cross. When I hear someone on the right speak of government incompetence, and insist the private sector and the free market and deregulation is the way to go, I want to grab them by the scruff of the neck and force them to read the history of the Midori Juuji.

Midori Juuji was originally founded five years after the end of World War II as a blood bank, and many of its original founders were members of Japan’s Unit 731, the unit that performed medical experiments on 10,000 Chinese and Koreans to develop biological warfare weapons. Limbs were amputated to measure the length of time it took to die from blood loss, vivisections were performed, female prisoners were injected with syphilis, and on and on – all in the name of a scientific approach to winning the war. In order to get life back to normal, General MacArthur decided not to prosecute these guys in 1948 and they went back to business as usual.

Some of them founded Midori Juuji and business as usual included persuading Japan’s hemophiliacs that their HIV-tainted blood was safe, well after they were in possession of information to the contrary. Nearly half of Japan’s hemophiliacs died as a result.

I remember the shock I felt when I began getting involved in Japan’s efforts to deal with the AIDS crisis back in the early 90s at discovering the degree to which government agencies were involved. Focused as I was on analysis of cultural behavior, I understood in principle how a Confucist paternalism could be channeled into cultural practices, but seeing it nose to nose was another thing. I remember once having a doctor refuse to speak to me directly: he would speak only to his nurse and his nurse would talk with me.

Over and over I began to take note of how often when people in authority made questionable decisions they routinely took the utilitarian argument that it was for “the general welfare,” or “the greater good,” in places where I would have expected them to observe the rule of law or some individual’s civil or human right. Japanese defended the practice of doctors telling family members of a cancer diagnosis, rather than the cancer patient himself – on the grounds “it might make him depressed and give up the will to live.” If I left something on a train I would almost always get it back – that was the good news – the bad news is I would get scolded. The train management felt it had an obligation to teach me to be a better person. Signs in parks in America cite the city ordinance for not being a jackass. In Japan, the sign is apt to say something like, “Let’s love the flowers.” Everywhere you looked you found evidence that one lived not as an individual among individuals but as a member of society with social obligations governing your every decision. And that meant surrender to authority, if you were at the bottom, and overreaching authority if you were at the top. And a fear of not being able to read the social signals at the bottom and a fear of taking too much individual responsibility at the top.

Much of the time outrageous paternalism (to our non-Japanese eyes) stayed at the level of anecdotal evidence of cultural difference, and we always concluded, after exchanging such stories, that we had the obligation as anthropologists (even if we were only very amateur anthropologists) to take a relativist position on cultural values, and not impose our own.

This all broke down, of course, when you began to sense there were times when paternalism was used as an excuse to mask cowardice and greed. When what it was all about, in the end, was not some local cultural oddity but universal human weakness.

All these memories are back with me today because I just finished reading in The New York Times an article by Norimitsu Onishi and Martin Fackler, who reveal that Japan has done it again. They have been withholding information, it turns out, on the degree of the severity of the nuclear fallout following the disaster at Fukushima. Bureaucrats in Tokyo, “operating in a culture that sought to avoid responsibility and, above all, criticism,” are now exposed as having lied by omission. And they are defending their decisions as having been made with the best of intentions – to keep the country from panicking.

This is a story to watch. There’s no telling what will come of this. Change comes slowly most of the time to Japan. It’s possible nothing will come of this. But cultural values do change, and one of the ways of researching cultural values is to see what happens in cases of cultural conflict or in moments of stress. What once was touted as Japanese cultural practices, the refusal to accept personal responsibility, the acceptance of authority, may turn out to have been merely holdouts from a more innocent and pre-democratic time.

Democracy now has a firm hold in Japan, and one can hope Japanese will exercise their rights to make demands of their political leaders.

Of course, there’s a third possibility. They could dumb down and begin believing, as Americans do, that the world is whatever we choose to see. Japanese may not go the route of insisting Darwin was wrong, and the world is only 6000 years old. Or that Obama, not Bush, began the first stimulus package, probably because he was born in Kenya just as you know when Santa Claus comes down from the cross and sees his shadow we know we’re going to have twelve days of Christmas. But they could easily come up with another form of tailor-made reality, parallel to ours.

The tragedy in Japan continues to unfold, and every day I ache a little more for what’s happening in my adopted country – I still have not found the courage to give up my permanent residence, my Japanese “green card.”

I wonder. Can they find a way to hold these lowlifes responsible?

There’s an interesting sidenote to the story. Naoto Kan, Japan’s current prime minister, whose career is now on the skids for not managing the disaster (his popularity is at about 18% at present), is the guy who finally stood up to Midori Juuji and exposed the complicity of the Health Ministry’s Abe Takeshi in covering up the HIV-tainted blood scandal.

Plus ça change…

*Correction: A friend just informed me the Chisso case was finally settled in March of last year. The point can still be made it took half a century, but I apologize for not checking that fact before posting.

AM
_____

Love is So Yesterday

2011-08-08T16:55:00.000-07:00

There has been no escape in the past few days from news about the Tea Party victory over sanity and the Democratic Party’s complicity in murdering the baby that was job creation in the crib. If government policies were a baseball game, the score would be something like tax relief for the rich 10, education 1. A professor of mine in the 60s once joked that he could not support those of us looking for careers in the great War on Poverty, because “there’s no money in it.” Today, those looking for ways to put people back to work, wanting to extend unemployment benefits or provide tax relief for the folks on the bottom find compassion is not the in thing these days. It’s an “I got mine” world out there. You guys, well, you guys are not my problem.

This lack of compassion seems to be part of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. I was just reading a commentary on recent events by a catholic theologian whose writing I have been following lately. His complaint is that faith communities, liberal as well as conservative, seem to have “gutted the love ethic” and replaced it with a slavish surrender to obedience to authority.

It prompted me to write this response:

Someone once said if you asked members of the three abrahamic religions the first word that came to mind when they thought of God, for Jews it would be justice, for Muslims submission, and for Christians love. When I was a kid, living in a Christian environment, it was a truism that “God is love.” But some time ago channel surfing one day, I happened to tune into Pat Robertson’s 700 Club just as he was saying, “Christ came in love the first time, but the next time he will come with the sword.” I don’t know how many evangelicals take that idea to its logical conclusion, but the number isn’t small.

It’s not just the authoritarians running the Catholic Church who treat the Sermon on the Mount as quaint and largely irrelevant; the entire religious right is populated by people with compassion fatigue, if they ever had it to begin with. It’s the zeitgeist. It’s what enabled Catholics to team up with Mormons and Evangelicals to launch Prop. 8 in California and embrace reverse-Robin Hood Republicanism. To many a politicized American Christian, God is about anger and condemnation, not love. When I was a kid and I met a person who identified as Christian, the first question I wanted to ask was “Catholic or Protestant?”. Today, a more salient question would be “Love Christian or “Obedience to Authority Christian?”. In the Catholic Church you can ask “Vatican II Catholic” or “Vatican I Catholic” and get pretty much the same breakdown.

It’s a nostalgia for a time that never actually was, a sad longing for moral certainty, a magic diet for those who don’t want to exercise their thought processes. It’s what happens when you become more concerned with your own soul than the welfare of others. You make certainty and acceptance your gods, and love goes out the window. It’s ironic that the pope and the bishops claim to worry so much about the threat of the modern world to church doctrine. It’s making obedience the chief virtue and leaving love out in the cold that has made the church so unappealing to the modern world. If the churches made love central again, I have no doubt that many who have wandered away would find their way back.

_____

David and Goliath – A Same-Sex Love Story

2011-08-06T18:26:00.000-07:00

Here in America, where wacko religion and the political right have joined forces, we are subjected to a daily diet of nonsense claims – that America was founded as a Christian nation, that hurricanes are brought about by lesbianism, that it’s only right that a governor of a state like Texas (I know, I know – there is no other state like Texas), should use his time and energy and the taxpayers' money to organize a national day of prayer.

As Australians like to remind us – “we got the prisoners; you got the Puritans” – lucky Australia. When some people think religion, they think peace and love and charity and forgiveness and nursing and teaching and smiling a lot. When Americans think religion, we have to deal more often with hellfire, self-righteousness and condemnation. Here in the USA, the Bible is a hammer in search of a nail.

While things have gotten incredibly much better for gays, this hammer still comes down on gay heads more than on most other people's. If some of us want to hit back, you shouldn’t have to ask why. Virtually all of the homophobia in the land is traceable to organized religion and the inculcation of the notion that non-reproductive sex is a direct affront to a wrathful God.

How is one to respond to the soul-killing influence of authoritarian hierarchical Catholicism and reason-free evangelical Protestantism in this country? How does one fight back against these bastards?

One source of comfort for me has been to look out at what is happening in other places in the world. Fortunately, American religious provincialism is not the only way to go.

I take enormous pleasure in tuning in from time to time to what is going on in Germany, where the fight for gay rights and against religious oppression appears, at least in my eyes, to be a tad further down the road. Let me give you one example.

Unless you are gay and or German-speaking (and maybe even if you are) you may not know the German comic artist, Ralf König.

I first came across Ralf König back in early gay liberation days in the late 70s when his gay characters with their Knollennasen (potato-like noses) were a rare treasure, wonderfully cutting edge, clever, hilariously funny. König’s talent as an artist was exceptional. Particularly appealing was his “take no prisoners” attitude. While most of us were wishing the drag queens would cool it (because we thought “they were giving us all a bad name”) König was in your face with graphic images and a total absence of euphemisms.

König has since published some forty books. Some have been translated into fourteen languages and are available in seventeen countries. Here's a YouTube about him in Welsh. Two of his books have been made into films. One of those films, available online in its entirety on Hulu, is Der bewegte Mann, (Maybe, Maybe Not, in English). It has the added benefit of a soundtrack by Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester.

But I digress…

In a recent interview Ralf König says a young woman asked him recently why he continues after all these years to be so gay-centered. Isn’t it time he took a been there/done that attitude and spread his wings. And he has done just that. Recently he has branched out and is spending more time on another interest of his – bashing religion. He’s been so good at it that he has even been invited to join Germany’s Giordano Bruno Foundation, a group of leading thinkers, artists, movers and shakers dedicated to making it acceptible to speak out against religion in a country that still taxes you to pay the salaries of catholic and protestant clergy and to maintain the churches.

König appeared in Düsseldorf not long ago, a city which is 32% catholic, 19% Lutheran, 4% Muslim and 45% “Free of Religion”, to address a group of atheists who have organized to fight back against the church tax.

They meet once a month and every year actually have an ‘Enlightenment Service’ as opposed to a regular religious service. This year, as part of that service, they invited König to read several of his comics aloud.

König’s appearance is evidence that not only has religion receded in Europe generally, as LGBT rights have come to the fore, but the gloves have come off, and gays are letting the church and their sacred cows have it right between the eyes for their centuries-long homophobic policies. What is particularly noteworthy is the way the mainstream is beginning to throw their support behind gays in ever more concrete ways, as straight audiences become far more comfortable with gay humor than ever before, enabling gays and non-believers to join forces to fight back.

Düsseldorf is hardly alone in growing its “religion-free” population. In Dresden recently a “religion free zone” was organized alongside the national “church day” celebration in June. Seven of the German states, Hamburg, Berlin, Brandenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern have non-religious majorities. In Saxony-Anhalt, where Martin Luther was born, only 19.7 percent of the population is Catholic or Protestant.

Those with religious beliefs (30% of German youth in their teens and early twenties believe in a personal god and another 19% believe in some kind of supernatural power) are outnumbered by atheists (28%) and agnostics (23%).

Gay culture has moved into the mainstream here in the States as well. Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City has been made into a musical, Glee is one of the best things going on television, gay characters are now routine in soap operas, the presence of a lesbian talk show host like Ellen is old news. But few of these programs and personalities have taken steps yet to expose the harm done by religion to the gay community they represent. They work hard to entertain, and remain cautious about taking on a political stance, and religion continues to get away with murder. Apparently we still lack a critical mass of folk willing to take them on.

How much longer will it take, I wonder, before we find the courage to do the kinds of things they’re doing in Germany. How about it? Can we have a Giordano Bruno Foundation USA? Can we populate it with leading thinkers and artists and people from the business world? And then can we have them invite gay comics to poke fun at the church and at religious belief?

Can we?

Please?

P.S. Here’s a sample of what Ralf König is up to these days. Here is a YouTube video of him reading his version of David and Goliath from a non-biblical perspective. It’s in German, but I’ve provided a translation, and if you copy it into a word file, you can put it in a separate window next to the window with the YouTube, and follow along in English.

Hope you get the same charge out of it that I did…

_____

Tomorrow is another day

2011-08-03T15:00:00.000-07:00

I have spent hours in the past two days reading about the Tea Party victory and commiserating with friends about what has happened to the optimism we had when Obama came into office. Hours trying to make sense of how and why the democrats couldn’t do anything but give in to the muggers or help toss the entire global economy into a tailspin. I tried to write about it but I just couldn’t come up with anything to say. When I started in, I realized I was simply spouting the leftist line, that the right is crazy and Obama has no balls, and I immediately trashed what I had written and went back to reading other people’s commentary, hoping for some new insight and perhaps some suggestions for lighting a candle in the darkness.

There are reasonable people who are not totally pessimistic. Unfortunately, they seem to come across the way Robert Rubin did last night on Charlie Rose. Rubin was Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, you may recall, and somebody you can assume would be way more knowledgeable than the average pundit. He was, actually, but if I had to sum up what he said, it would be that things will be all right “if both sides can learn to work together.” Sure. And the war will end if both sides will simply lay down their arms. And the crime rate will go down if people stop stealing and mugging.

This only added to the feeling of helplessness that came when I realized we had in power people willing to sink the economy in order to prove their power and to assure the rich continue to get richer as the poor get poorer in this country. Their argument is that you should take from the poor and give to the rich, because to do anything else is to steal from the entrepreneurial class, and thus cripple the job creators. The economists I look to for advice, Robert Reich and Paul Krugman in particular, argue the opposite and most informed commentary zeroes in on evidence to the contrary. Rubin, for example, points out that the right went ballistic when Clinton wanted to raise revenues, but Clinton, unlike Obama, got his way, and that led to the greatest period of prosperity in modern American history.

Today, people in thrall to the free market fundamentalists, folks like Grover Norquist (and their dumbhead hangers-on like Sarah Palin, Allen West, and Michele Bachmann), still insist “trickle down” will work – despite thirty years of evidence to the contrary – because that serves the interest of the superwealthy who have given up any pretense of willingness to share a national society, a community of folk from the land of the free and the home of the brave, a commonwealth.

That’s the norm in this country now, evidence on one side, ideology on the other. And, to twist the knife, we are told by the ideologues that fact-finding is just another ideology, so we’re even.

The stock response to the taboo of pointing out the greed that runs America these day is the charge that one is “fostering class warfare.” But that’s sloganeering and name-calling. There is that pesky evidence that we have become a nation of rich getting richer as the poor get poorer, so here we are again with evidence on one side, manufactured truth on the other.

No one ever has all the evidence, obviously. Most of us are limited when it comes to economic theory and we are all capable of falling for the temptation to believe what we want to believe. But some of us at least know there’s no shortcut, and we have to continue to struggle for more evidence, less ideology. We just need to find the willpower to dig for more and better information.

The media are now largely useless, in that they are far more about generating controversy and setting up two sides without regard for imbalances in factual information. But there are fortunately other sources, and one can seek them out over time. And one can always hope that with things this bad, people will develop better bullshit detectors. And who knows, there is a possibility we will not fall prey to more Tea Party candidates in 2012, and might get a congress that can right this wrong.

Then again, of course, it might be just as hard to right this wrong as it now seems impossible to right the wrong the Supreme Court did in granting corporations the power they need to maintain the wealth of the land in their hands. After all, when you approach a person with a gun and suggest we all sit down and talk reason, the person with the gun – particularly if he has been known to use it – has the upper hand.

Frankly, I don’t see how we get out of this mess, short of some kind of rioting in the streets that wakes Americans up and gets them to the polls to vote the right-wingers out. No all that likely, given that rioting in the street generally leads to more votes for right-wingers. Democracy is painfully slow. It takes an eternity to get informed, then vote, learn you’re being misled and vote again. Meanwhile we sit helpless at the evidence that our government and our economy are broken, and we are next to powerless to do anything about it, given the inherent flaws in democracy – people get lazy when they have enough to eat, people are easily duped, they prefer bread and circuses over justice and equality, and altruism is rare in a politician.

Still looking for the bright side. How about this idea?

If the right is right, and eliminating all taxes on the rich will force government to get leaner and meaner and cut entitlements at long last that are unfair, and if giving money to the rich will indeed generate more jobs, then we will all have to write notes of apology to the likes of the Koch Brothers, and sit in the sunshine that has come over the land. And if the right is wrong, and eliminating taxes means that future generations of Americans get a lousy third-rate education (and the very poor get none at all), and if research and development in America crashes and alternative energies and economies based on environmental protection are developed exclusively by competitor nations like China, and if the corporations beggar the middle classes so that they can’t afford their products anymore, and if the poor get desperate and we have to spend even more money on guards for our gated communities, and if Obama’s health care plan gets dismantled and even more Americans go bankrupt when they get sick, and if the wealth gap increases, so that the top 1% go from owning merely 50% of the wealth of the nation to 75% of the wealth, maybe then things will change.

That’s the worst case scenario. We’re moving in that direction, but we’re not there yet.

But we will get there if we don’t turn things around, and how are we to turn things around if people don’t wake up to what’s happening? Does anybody see any evidence that people in the future will be different from people today? We call ourselves a democracy, and that means each citizen has the right to vote, regardless of how uninformed he or she is. We can never get better than the average Joe, and the average American believes in a God who looks, thinks and acts like a white male Republican, and an even greater number of Americans believe in extra-terrestrials than in God.

Maybe that’s where we should start. We should remind ourselves we are not a democracy. Take the rose-colored glasses off. We are a plutocracy. We are governed and our minds are largely controlled by the super-wealthy for the benefit of the super-wealthy. Some of us aspire to democracy, but I don’t see us getting there anytime soon. We’re like the Soviet Union in that way. We are like spiders caught in a web of significance we ourselves have made. We’re not living in a democracy any more than they were communists. They simply aspired to communism, just as we aspire to democracy sometimes. We had no trouble spotting the gap between their aspirations (which looked to me a whole lot like Christianity – “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs”) and the corruption of those ideals. Why can’t we spot the gap in our own neck of the woods? The fact, for example that our Christians, instead of turning the other cheek and sharing their cloaks, are actually enabling the plutocrats to rob them (and the rest of us) blind. They are more concerned with telling the world that sex is dirty than they are in making room at the table at lunchtime. Talk about corruption of an ideal.

Time to call a spade a spade. Democracy? In your dreams. Trickle down? Read your history. Christian nation? Pure bullshit.

I want to think positive. I just don’t know how. I want to say things like, “Well, when you’ve fallen down, you can always get back up,” or “Nice thing about being down, the only place to go is up.”

But at the moment, I can’t stop thinking we may be only half way down the slide.

The space metaphors aren’t working.

Let’s try time.

Like “Tomorrow’s another day.”

That’s it.

See? I can be as positive as the next guy.

_____

Pride and Shame in Latvia

2011-07-26T14:09:00.000-07:00

I used to march in Gay Pride Parades. I have vivid memories burned into my flesh of those first few times, some forty years ago, when I walked with a mixture of fear and elation, when I looked nervously at the hate-filled faces on the sidelines and tried to focus on the smiling faces on the sidelines instead. Of fighting back tears when straight friends got into the parade and walked with me.

How things have changed. I don’t march any more. And it’s not just my age and my tired feet. America’s pride marches used to be victory celebrations. Now they’re mostly just parties. And I find myself mumbling, “You kids go ahead. Enjoy. I’m going to sit this one out.”

What a rush of memories comes when I see there are places on the planet where those pride parades are only now beginning to form, and where “pride” still has fresh new significance.

We talk now, whenever the topic comes up, of a sea change in attitudes. The sexual shame and repression which authoritarian Christians and others still mistake for morality is still in the air, but authoritarianism is on the skids of late. People are laughing at Michele Bachmann’s ignorance, despite the media effort to rile us up with the fear she might be a serious political figure. The Irish Prime Minister, in one of the most catholic places on earth, has described the Vatican as “a culture of dysfunction, disconnection, elitism, and narcissism.” And then there’s New York. Just the sound of “New York” brings a smile to my face.

How easy it is to become complacent. If bad things aren’t happening to us, they aren’t happening. One risks being a bore. With all those gay folk getting married in New York, with Focus on the Family’s bark getting fainter by the day, with the announcement yesterday that Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell will end officially on September 20, you do feel like a bore sometimes in pressing gay rights as an issue.

But it is, and it’s clearly going to be a long time before the fat lady sings. Some group known as New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms has filed a suit to overturn the New York decision. And A UCLA law school report just out claims a third of gays and lesbians are still closeted at work. There’s still work to do.

What prompted this particular reflection, though, was something going on outside the United States. There is a new documentary from Latvia about to be shown at gay film festivals in Philadelphia and New York. It has the awkward title, Homo@lv. It shows the courage of people only now daring to go into the street and declare a right to be. And facing openly and publicly a vicious thuggish homophobia. That they are showing courage is an understatement. As late as 2010, three quarters of the Latvian populace is still outspokenly homophobic, and not only do the marchers appear to be without police protection, the “good Christian folk” of Latvia appear to be running interference for the thugs. It’s an old old story. “If you didn’t act like that, they wouldn’t want to beat you up.”

We are focused at the moment on the tragedy in Oslo, the work of a cold and calculating paranoid schizophrenic. Much of the discourse revolves around such things as the foolishness of the early assumption this was an Islamic terrorist and the need to avoid the trap of allowing the pendulum to swing to the other extreme. And just because Anders Breivik is mentally deranged doesn’t mean he doesn’t represent a common fear of the other.

The mobs of homophobes in the streets of Riga say more about the sickness within than a lone killer can. They are the storm troopers of a cultural force that rises out of fear of the other. (The –phobia in homophobia is not a mistake, as is often claimed). The fear comes out in less overtly violent ways in Marcus Bachmann’s gay aversion therapy, in the church’s insistence that homosexuality is “disordered”, in the news that one third of American gay workers are in the closet. But it is a fear all the same. One that would go away if they turned the lights on.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a difference between a thug and a lady who smiles and tells you she loves you when she wants to save your soul. One requires the help of the police; the other requires greater vigilance and the willingness to engage to expose the falsehoods. They are not the same thing, exactly.

But there is a common thread. You can see it in the Latvian chant, “Pride brings shame on Latvia.” “Pride” has been twisted by the mob into a bad word. Latvian gay folk chose the English word clearly to tie their movement to efforts in English-speaking countries, but you can be sure the crowd knows what it means. “We don’t want no stinkin’ pride.” How like the way socialist (one concerned with “the least of these, my brethern”), liberal (one focused on freedom and openness) and progressive (one seeking to make things better) have been turned into words to be spat out, words to describe the “other”, the “not-us”, those who would tear down the family and Western Civilization.

Watch the video and tell me what you see, besides the obvious fact that the world is getting smaller. An effort at long last to bring dignity to the lives of gays and lesbians in Eastern Europe? Or a reminder that this long Wagnerian opera is only in its first act?

Have a look at the trailer.

Lesbiešu un geju tiesības ir cilvēktiesības!

_____

Hachiko: A Dog’s Story - A film review

2011-07-14T14:16:00.000-07:00

Hachiko: A Dog’s Story, a 2008 film starring Richard Gere directed by Lasse Hallström somehow passed me by until yesterday. Possibly it’s because my love of dogs went into the red zone recently. Like anybody who has lived in Tokyo for even a brief time, I know the name and the story of the original Hachiko well, and I’m certain I would have made a point of tracking down this American spin-off. I’m glad the time finally came.

Hachiko, the original, was an Akita dog taken in by a Tokyo University professor in 1924. Akitas are known for their strong loyalties to a single individual, but Hachiko seems to have been unusual. Every day for a year he followed Professor Ueno to Shibuya Station and came back again to meet him when he came home. In May of 1925, the professor suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and didn’t show up at his usual time. Hachiko nonetheless went back every day for nine years at the usual time, almost to the time of his own death in 1935.

Hachiko is a national legend in Japan. The exit at Shibuya Station is even called the “Hachiko Exit” and there is a statue of Hachiko marking the most common meeting spot in the city. If you are tempted to leave because the person you are waiting for is late, you imagine the guilt you would feel over leaving after a short time when the standard set by Hachiko is nine years.

The American film is a remake of a Japanese film, Hachiko Monogatari (The Story of Hachiko), the top grossing Japanese film (¥2 billion) of 1987. It was reset in a small town New England, but the story line was maintained, with the ending tidied up. Hachi returns for ten years until his death.

Since the film has been out for some time, and has over 1700 reviews on Netflix, it is unlikely I can add anything that others have not already said, but there are times when audience reactions are as worthy of analysis as the film they are reacting to. Marx says one’s world view is determined by one’s relationship to wealth. If you can allow me a ridiculous trivialization with this comparison, one’s view of Hachiko will almost surely be determined by one’s relationship to dogs. Real dog lovers are likely to ball their eyes out and give it five stars. It's hard to be objective if you've ever experienced the love of an animal, especially if you've known one that goes crazy at the sight of you. The rest of the world will then face the second great divider, a widely-held conviction that emotional issues are less serious than intellectual ones, and the view that, while one engages the brain better when emotions are excluded, any straight-on engagement with emotions is by its very nature manipulative.

This shows up in the Rotten Tomatoes reviews. The gap between professional movie critics and the audience at large could scarcely be greater. Of the 24 film critics who reviewed it, 14 liked it, 10 didn’t. That’s a pretty low 58% positive rating. Of the over 9000 individuals who reviewed it, however, 85% liked it. Similarly, on Netflix, the average rating of the nearly half a million viewers who rated it was 4.1 out of 5 stars.

Viewer after viewer spoke of a flood of tears. Whether it’s the silent loyalty of a creature who cannot speak, or the fact that there is no buffer between the death of the lead character and the sense of loss you feel by putting yourself in the dog’s position, rarely have I seen a presentation of grief so starkly depicted. Many reviewers resent this, understandably. One complains, how could the genius who made such winners as What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, The Cider House Rules, My Life as a Dog, and Casanova, be reduced to making the film equivalent of Hallmark Cards? And what of the heartthrob of An Officer and a Gentleman playing a grown man with a tennis ball in his mouth trying to teach a dog to fetch?

That depends, I think, on whether you believe Hallström is simply letting the highly sentimental material do the work, or whether it actually took talent to get the viewer to take a dog’s point of view. I see the same warmth of treatment here I saw in Gilbert Grape and My Life as a Dog, and would argue there is much more than mere tear-jerking going on.

There are other criticisms to be made of the work. I found the scenes of the professor in the classroom stilted and unconvincing, and many other family interaction scenes stagey. I am sympathetic to dog lovers who objected that the dog was portrayed too much like a human being – being given the freedom to roam after the loss of his master, for example, rather than being confined so he could be cared for.

At the same time, I would give Hallström some poetic license here, since his goal was to foreground the stirring story of absolute loyalty, and not to provide a tutorial on dog-rearing.

Grief and loss are not well dealt with in our culture. We shun things we fear might make us cry or feel bad. I find that tragic. A way of cutting oneself off from the richness of life.

Don’t rent Hachiko casually. Pick a time when you’re able to give free rein to your emotions. Expect to cry. Many sentimental folk will tear up early on at the cuteness of Hachiko as a pup. Many others will say to themselves, when the professor dies and they are still dry-eyed, that they have met the challenge not to cry and emerged victorious. But just you wait.

Once you go through the experience, you will be in a position to ask yourself whether it is possible to deal with any emotional experience without feeling you’ve been manipulated, and whether there isn’t something quite dishonest about that. You don’t want to believe a movie should be rated highly because it makes you cry. But isn’t it also be true that it shouldn’t be disparaged because it does, either?

_____

Les chagrins de la vie

2011-07-13T22:37:00.001-07:00

I know this sadness is only temporary, but…

My sister Miki and I overheard our daddies talking the other night. They didn’t know we were listening.

In the space of one hour, we learned that

… Catholics and Mormons had ganged up on them and made it impossible for them to marry in California;

… Betty Ford had died;

… some people think there is no global warming and the world is only 6000 years old;

… the top 1% of the country controls a third of the nation’s wealth, the top 20% owns 85% of the wealth and the bottom 80% only 15%;

… my daddies’ noses only capture a fraction of what Miki and I can smell, and their ears only a fraction of what we can hear;

Democracy is failing before our eyes, the free press has sold out to Rupert Murdoch, bookstores are becoming a thing of the past, nobody can spell anymore, and Netflix has decided to double its rates.

Once we ate puppy food and didn’t give a hoot about the fat content.

Now our daddies have switched us to an adult doggie diet, and nothing will ever be the same.

Where does the time go?

Why is life so short?

_____

Lying by Omission

2011-07-09T16:06:00.000-07:00

The folks down at the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) have quite a knack for making you laugh out loud sometimes.

If you go to the website of this organization leading the battle to keep same-sex marriage from happening around the country, you will see a lead which says, “NEW POLL: 57% of New Yorkers reject same-sex marriage.” I don’t know how long they intend to keep this “information” up, but it’s still there as of today, July 9, 2011, no doubt, to aid in justifying their efforts to kick all the legislators out of office who helped pass New York’s same-sex marriage rights law.

The curious thing is, if you look at the results of other polls, you find the opposite result:

Poll	Date taken	% in favor (% against)
Gallup	May 5-8	53 (45%)
CNN	April 9-10	51% (47%)
ABC	March 10-13	53% (44%)
Pew	Feb. 22-Mar. 1	45% (46%)

In other words, all other major polls available show the tide has turned and Americans willing to share their opinions with poll takers are now either in favor of same-sex marriage by a clear margin or at least at a statistical tie.

So where would NOM’s statistics come from?

It only took a minute to uncover the source of the misinformation. It’s true that 57% of those they polled answered "agree" to question #6: “Do you agree or disagree that marriage should only be between a man and a woman?” 32% disagree and 11% answered “Don’t know/no response.”

But then look at the very next question - #7 – “May I know your age, please?” and look at the age distribution of the people they polled:

7%	-	18 - 39
15%	-	40 - 49
31%	-	50 - 59
38%	-	60+
9%	-	no response

Only 7% are in the age group that other polls reveal approve overwhelmingly of same-sex marriage, and 69%, over two-thirds, are in the age group where most of the disapproval shows up across America.

Nowhere on the face of the website is there any indication the poll was adjusted to reflect this age difference. If you tried day and night to find a better example of a lie by omission, I doubt you'd come up with one. In fact, claiming 57% of New Yorkers are against same-sex marriage is a lie by commission as well; it's 57% of a group selected to represent those known from previous experience to be against same-sex marriage.

Never mind that the rights of citizens should not be decided by majority opinion but by rights established in the U.S. Constitution interpreted through judicial review. As we all know, policy can be established by all three branches of government, by executive order, through legislation, and as a consequence of judicial review. And it can be done both at the federal and state levels. And which of these many sources has authority is a question we tackle on virtually a daily basis.

Because popular opinion in much of the country has lagged behind the growing consciousness on the part of gays that they will get recognition of their rights only when they demand them, and because liberals are less likely to go to the polls than conservatives, NOM’s best means of maintaining a national homophobic ideology has been to try to urge that policy be established by public referenda. And in years when no elections are taking place, to try to discredit the decisions of courts and legislatures by showing how much they are at odds with “what the people want.”

The problem with that is that people change their opinions. What do you do then?

NOM’s strategy has been to try to tie the right to marry to good healthy child-rearing (as if that were the norm among heterosexuals), which they falsely claim is not possible for gay parents – when all studies show the exact opposite is true. NOM also uses fear by slogging away at the old canard that gays are a danger to children and that children will be taught, horror of horrors, that having same-sex parents is OK. And if you listen to Maggie Gallagher, you will hear the inference that this implies opposite-sex parenting is not OK, as if it were an either/or proposition.

NOM has come to be known as a center for deception.

No one should be surprised at this latest effort to twist the facts to serve their purposes.

But couldn’t they be a little less clumsy about it?

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Not a bad day for news, all things considered

2011-07-08T11:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning the papers were full of gay related news items, one quite ridiculous, and the rest positively sublime. Just got around to catching up with it all.

To start with the ridiculous, there is the sad tale of the good intentions of New York State Assemblyman Joseph Lentol. Assemblyman Lentol, who represents Brooklyn’s 5th District, decided to give fifty bucks to his church. To Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish School, to be precise. The money was returned. Not that the school is rolling in dough, mind you. Even though Lentol is a parishoner at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel parish, he is also is one of the guys who voted for same-sex marriage rights in New York this past month, and Brooklyn’s Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio says he doesn’t want his money.

You’ve got to wonder where the line is on this sort of thing. Pepsi-Cola rots the teeth and guts of millions of children around the world each year. But you can bet your bippy when they gave five million bucks to Save the Children last year, Save the Children didn’t send the check back.

Maybe if Bishop DiMarzio were running Save the Children he would have.

What an image we get of the catholic church these days. Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown of the catholic front organization, the grossly misnamed National Organization for Marriage (NOM) are on their way to jail, if there is any justice. And a bishop punishing one of his parishoners for following his conscience and making a decision the majority of American Catholics would agree is the right one. Oh, and by the way, not only is Lentol’s money no longer welcome in the parish, Lentol isn’t either.

Fortunately, the likes of Bishop DiMarzio are losing their grip on the church, as an editorial in the National Catholic Reporter two days ago reveals. And the NCR is hardly a lone voice, as a marvelously articulate Catholic theologian I’ve been following has demonstrated.

And now for the sublime.

I’ll just list them as I found them. They’re all so good there’s no point in trying to rank them.

First off, Alan Colmes is spreading the good news of the work of that heroic Republican, Fred Karger, who is running for president. Never mind the oxymoron you get when heroic is followed by Republican. Have a look at what Karger is up to.

It’s not surprising to find a Republican with money. What is very satisfying, though, is to find one putting it to such good use in fighting for dignity and equality, and against the goals of NOM. More on Fred Karger in a minute.

The loss of Proposition 8 in California was heavy and some of us have been down in the dumps about it the past couple of years. Now, it turns out, there may be an unexpected silver lining and a delicious irony here. Apparently, the failure of gays to hold on to their rights in a public referendum, even though the courts, the legislature and the majority of Californians were behind them, demonstrated to the court that there was just cause to see gays as a group without a lot of power – and that helped weigh the legal argument in favor of treating gay rights cases at the level of “strict scrutiny,” which made it easier to demonstrate discrimination.

This didn’t slow down the folks at NOM, of course. They went right to work fronting once again for the Official Catholic Church – in Maine this time – to sponsor another misinformation campaign, and once again, they were successful. Maine gays and lesbians lost their opportunity to marry.

And this is where Fred Karger comes in. Fred fired up an effort to reveal the money laundering practices of NOM which led to an active investigation by the state’s Attorney General and the Maine Ethics Commission. If these folks make the case against NOM, Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown of NOM could actually end up in prison. Not a shoo-in case, unfortunately, because the state would have to demonstrate their intent to break the law when they decided not to report where they got the $1.9 million they used to fight marriage equality in Maine in November 2009. Maine still has an election law which requires donors reveal themselves, you see. Maggie and Brian work better in the dark and have sued the state of Maine to let their donors remain anonymous. I haven't read the catechism cover to cover, but I can't find lack of transparency in the index.

Maggie and Brian have also sued 23 states to invalidate all of their election laws requiring transparency in donations to causes, and are now threatening to spend $2 million to defeat the four Republican State Senators in New York who voted for gay marriage just now. Assemblyman Lentol, if these sharks have their way, may have been just an appetizer.

They are on thin ground, actually. Fred Karger filed complaints in California after Prop. 8 went through and that led to the Mormon Church being slapped with 13 counts of election fraud. Apparently some 70% of the money to decide the fate of Californians came directly from Mormon church folk in Utah at the behest of their church leaders. And it gets better. Today it appears they have been shot down again, this time in Minnesota.

As Fred says, look at it this way. If Maggie and Brian lose on gay marriage, they can always turn their attention to the growing divorce rate, something famously missing from their “save marriage” efforts to keep people from marrying.

Next, I caught PBS’s Talk of the Nation in progress while I made a quick run to the post office. Moderator Neal Conan was interviewing New York Times writer, David Coleman, about his new book on "coming out." I missed the intro, so I assumed he was talking about being gay. After a minute or two, I realized they were talking about a book he had just written about coming out as a member of AA.

The problem is that he broke the rule that members of AA adhere to strict anonymity, and Coleman was defending his actions by making the point that a) he wasn't outing anybody else - just himself, and b) this rule made sense when the shame of being labeled an alcoholic was severe. Now, increasingly, it's being considered a medical problem, as is mental illness, and "coming out" actually improves the chance of success in overcoming alcoholism, because you get community support when you do.

“This is a little like gay was, not so long ago,” says Coleman. “I’m a gay man too, and I’m very out about that.”

While being an alcoholic is a negative, being a recovering alcoholic is a very positive thing in the culture these days, and the interesting part of this whole thing is that coming out as gay is now the model that is taken for granted as a plus, a nice example of how “gay = OK” has arrived in the culture and found a safe home.

Then, back at the computer, I came across the happy fact that the Justice Department may actually have meant what they said when they agreed to act on the assumption that DOMA was unconstitutional. They just filed a brief in San Francisco federal court on behalf of a woman demanding insurance benefits for her wife. DOMA says no. The Justice Department says DOMA shows “animus” toward gays – there is no other federal benefit to anti-gay legislation – and thus it should go. And don’t forget that judiciary hearing coming up of “S.598, The Respect for Marriage Act: Assessing the Impact of DOMA on American Families." introduced by Dianne Feinstein in March. It already has 25 Senate co-sponsors.

There’s more. Next came the news that a federal court issued the order we’ve all been waiting for for years, that Don't Ask/Don't Tell law should now be fully rescinded and there must be no more expulsions from the military on the grounds of homosexuality. Even though Congress rescinded the law last year, it has taken this long to get the courts on board, apparently. But the time has come. Maybe. It turns out there’s another appeal possible. But it would have to be pursued by the Pentagon, and that is not considered likely, since the Defense Department has already announced it will not pursue DADT cases. Once the Pentagon says it’s time, then the military still has 60 more days to implement it and it’s done done done. Twenty years ago already, retired Colonel Margarete Cammermeyer came out. Come September, we should be in line with the 90% of the military who, when polled, avowed they couldn’t care less.

Not a bad day, all things considered.

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Power and Spirit - A Review of Michelangelo Revealed

2011-07-03T12:09:00.000-07:00

I happened upon a fascinating program on PBS last night entitled Michelangelo Revealed: Angels, Demons, Artists and Intrigue. I’m a Johnny-come-lately here. It has been aired before. But I want to recommend it all around.

The documentary plays out like a mystery or detective novel. It’s got good guys and bad guys, and while the bad guys win, the good guys come across as greater than life. It has much of the suspense and intrigue of The Da Vinci Code, with which it has been compared for its attack on the church. The difference, though, is considerable. Michelangelo Revealed has a much better claim to authenticity, and where The Da Vinci Code ridicules, Michelangelo Revealed shames.

Michelangelo Revealed should appeal to everybody with even a passing familiarity with Michelangelo, and with art history. And to lovers of Italy. What I found riveting, however, was the revelation that Michelangelo was a member, or at least a close associate, of a group of catholic reformers working inside the church of his day to head off the excesses of hierarchical corruption. These people, known as The Spirituali, shared the basic view of Luther and Calvin that the way to heaven was through faith alone, and not through good works and contributions to the church.

Those following closely the struggle within the church today between conservative forces who focus their energies on maintaining centralized power, and progressive forces seeking to broaden the base of the church to include the entire body of believers, will have no trouble seeing a parallel between Pope Paul III and John XXIII on the one hand, and Pope Paul IV and the popes who succeeded John XXIII and have tried to turn back his Vatican II reforms.

Paul IV, the former Cardinal Carafa, used the Inquisition to hunt down his arch enemies, Cardinal Pole and other Spirituali, and even went after Michelangelo, cutting off his pension. To survive, Michelangelo went so far as to resculpt some of his sculptures which had revealed his sympathies with the progressive faction seeking internal reform.

It comes as no surprise that there is controversy over the views of the program’s director, Fabrizio Ruggirello, producer Marco Visalberghi, and writer, Vania Del Borgo. While I’m not in a position to speak to their veracity, I am sure others will. What they have delivered is a close look at the conclusion of art historian Antonio Forcellino that Michelangelo was a reformer within the church, and was punished for it. He’s commonly portrayed as a favored son of the church and of Pope Julius. Here, he is the victim of a harsh crackdown on religious dissent.

This may be old news to a few church insiders, but it’s pretty flashy stuff to the rest of us. The publicity is almost certain to displease the church’s right wing. How this story figures in future discussions of the modern church and its attempts to influence politics in America and elsewhere, remains to be seen.

Don’t be put off by the unfortunate title of the series, “Secrets of the Dead” and the creepy music of the intro, which might indicate you’re about to watch some sort of horror show. You are, of course, but the horror is the abuse of power of the conservative church hierarchy, not some ghoulish force that lives in the dark of night.

The struggle that continues today has been toned down. There is no Inquisition, no torture on the racks, no book burning. There is banning, as Hans Küng and other dissident theologians can tell you about, but at least they no longer live under house arrest. The ideology of the power-structure hard-liners is reflected in the insistence on clerical celibacy, on the subordination of women, on an attempt to limit all human sexuality to reproductive sex, define abortion as murder, and, until very recently, to protect the dignity and power of the bishops by hiding the child-abuse scandals around the world, rather than surrender authority to larger non-religious sources of justice.

We sometimes forget there is another church beyond Official Vatican – the 80 to 90% of the church that doesn’t follow its strictures on birth control, the Catholic governor of New York and the majority of New York Catholics who brought about the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples this week, the Liberation Theologists and others who insist the work of the church should be primarily pastoral, not political, and those working with people of other faiths and people outside the faith to foster universal human rights. They will see a forerunner in Michelangelo, who had his own copy of the Bible in Italian, a crime he could have been put to death for.

Traditionalists will want to argue this is just more church-bashing. Others will see it as an opportunity to dwell a while on the life and work of one of the greatest artists of all time, and an attempt to put history right. Still others, inside the church and outside, will see it not as church-bashing at all, but as the story of a man who loved his church and used his talents to make it see past the corruption to the reason the church was founded in the first place.

The program is available here in its entirety, at least at present.

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The Withering Away Hypothesis

2011-07-01T14:59:00.000-07:00

For the longest time now I’ve run hot and cold on Barack Obama. I fell victim to the American illusion (if not the world’s illusion) that the person who sits in the Oval Office runs the world, and find myself bristling constantly over the fact that he doesn’t run the world the way I want him to. Lately, I’ve been pissed off at him for declaring that his views on same-sex marriage are “evolving.” I was delighted to note that Dan Savage attended a function at the White House recently wearing an “Evolve Already!” button.

But being an admirer of Dan Savage as an articulate spokesman on the left side of the gay liberation team doesn’t mean I can’t also admire Andrew Sullivan on the right side. And I think he has just made a point that should go a long way in helping gays and lesbians, and others as well, obviously, to calm the beast within that rises up every time Obama seems to fall short on fulfilling our superhero dreams.

It’s a daily frustration to watch him act as if he had any common ground with his Republican opponents, who have shown their top priority, even ahead of the national welfare, to be the destruction of the Obama presidency so they can reclaim power in 2012 and beyond. And to watch him further the goals of a corrupt capitalist system and an imperial foreign policy.

But on the social issue where the rubber hits the road for me, the dreams of LGBT Americans of getting out from under the dead hand of religion, Andrew Sullivan has given me second thoughts on Obama’s strategy of wait-and-see.

Way back when the issue of same-sex marriage first came up, I didn’t understand why everybody failed to see an obvious solution. In many modern states, both states with a clear separation of church and state, like France, and states where the two are still tied together, like Germany, people have figured out that the most practical way to proceed is to view marriage as a civil contract, quite independently of anything the church may have to say. It’s the state that regulates who gets the kids in the event of a divorce, who is responsible for whom at the end of life, who pays the mortgage. The state puts the contract together, enforces it at the behest of its signers, and oversees the dissolution, if dissolution becomes necessary. And if the church wants to “sanctify” these unions, that’s not the state’s business. Go to city hall to sign on the dotted line, go to church in the white dress and do-si-do to Lohengrin to your heart’s content. There is absolutely no need for conflict. All this talk of discrimination goes up in smoke, if they choose not to sanctify you because you’re left-handed.

What we did in the U.S., unfortunately, was grant to clergy the right to act as agents of the state, and we’re still swimming in the muddy waters that lousy decision created. We gave the clowns an inch and they took a mile. Now, all over the land, we have to listen to jumping jack religios (“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!”) who have persuaded themselves marriage is a religious institution that harks back to the Garden of Eden, without bothering to enlighten us on whether that theocracy was Methodist, Episcopalian or Quaker. And unaware, apparently, that the church didn’t start meddling in marriage until the Council of Trent, when it took away the right of religious to marry, which eliminated competition in inheritance rights, and forced the laity to marry in the church as a means of getting better control over their private lives.

Unfortunately letting the church believe they have the right to marry is a bed we made in America, and a bed we have to lie in, until (oh, dream on) we some day recognize that we don’t have to live forever with grandma’s furniture.

Another bed we have to lie in is our federal system and the distribution of rights between the federal government and the governments of the various states. This one I would not want to chuck out, actually. This one feels good. Even the part which says marriage is an issue for the states to determine, and not the federal government.

In the history of states’ rights, there have been issues where you want the feds to step in – ending segregation being the classic example. If Eisenhower had not sent troops to Little Rock in 1957, and federalized the Arkansas National Guard, who knows how many years or decades longer justice would have been beyond the reach of black Americans.

But Obama is following the argument that the right of gays to marry, while it is still about civil rights, is not of the same order of urgency as giving blacks a decent education, and satisfying as it would be for gays to get their due here and now, changing hearts and minds will ultimately assure a long-term solution. The sea change has taken place and the future is clear. Equal rights for gays is on the way. But as the one step forward, two steps back history of gay rights in California and Maine demonstrate, the struggle is messy and it seems to leave both sides bloodied. Better we should maintain the present course, these go-slow advocates insist. Let states reach their own decisions on a state level, whether through referenda, legislation, or court orders, over whether to allow gays and lesbians to marry. By moving more slowly, they give more and more people time to become convinced the arguments against the practice are built on the sands of prejudice and ignorance, and opposition gently dies a natural death. More and more conservatives, like David Frum, are coming around. Why fight enemies who are going to lay down their arms anyway?

When Prop. 8 went into effect, and Californian gays and lesbians lost their right to marry, the case went to the courts and it’s still in the courts two years later. As soon as one side wins a battle, the other side starts collecting funds for the next battle. And each new battle further entrenches the opposition.

In contrast, as straight people get to know gay people, opposition to gay people drops. As straight people get to know married gay people, opposition to gay marriage drops. And it doesn’t reappear. When you knock the opposition down, he gets up again. But when his will to fight has withered away, he no longer even needs to be defined as an enemy.

This is not to say, however, that this will happen automatically. On the contrary, it requires that gays and lesbians and those who support equal rights for gays and lesbians continue to provide time and money to keep the pressure up at the state level. It’s just that it’s far more likely that people will meet their neighbors and change hearts and minds at the state level than at the federal level, where we are at the whim of the likes of Justices Thomas and Scalia.

While I may have embellished Sullivan’s argument, the line of thinking is his. It’s an argument that asks us to think in terms of long-term solutions rather than quick fixes. His point is that while governors can throw themselves whole-heartedly into civil rights of citizens to marry on the state level, as Cuomo did in New York, because marriage is controlled by the states, presidents need to limit their actions to issues at the federal level, no matter how strong the temptation to micromanage and do the right thing at the state level.

Problem is, it’s also an argument which asks us to delay justice for long-term solutions, and that has never felt right. It asks the present generation to sacrifice itself for future generations, and that has never been pretty.

I am not 100% persuaded by Sullivan, so strong is my sense that I’m not getting any younger and justice for gays has been too long in coming already. But I am persuaded, for now, at least, that gays ought to maybe stop with the demonizing of Obama over his apparent foot-dragging when it comes to gay rights.

Consider this. Michele Bachmann and her quite possibly homosexually inclined husband Marcus, two provincials from East Jesus, Minnesota, are now capturing national attention as contenders for First Woman President and her First Man. Michele, a leading voice in the “small government” Republican Party, would take away from states the right to grant same-sex marriage, with an amendment to the Constitution, extending the disgrace of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and writing discrimination into law. Marcus has declared that gays are “barbarians” who need "to be educated…(and)…disciplined.”

On Obama’s watch, on the other hand, we have seen (to use Sullivan’s list) the HIV travel ban eliminated, legal support for DOMA withdrawn, and Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell removed, so that, when fully implemented, gays and lesbians will have the right to serve proudly and openly in the armed forces.

To impatient gay liberation advocates, and I still count myself in their number, Obama is far from ideal. But let’s not inflate the rhetoric so that we’re talking about the “lesser of two evils.” The Bachmann types on the right are evil, if you will (“provincial” is adequate for me – I don’t need to call people evil.) But even the most bitterly disillusioned gays and lesbians cannot justify calling Obama evil. And that’s probably because he’s almost the perfect antithesis of these provincials from rural Minnesota.

If you live long enough, you may look back at Obama and wonder at his ability to keep his eye on the long-term solution.

Or not. As I said, justice here and justice now has a very nice ring.

But this is not a clear-cut issue. It’s an issue where both sides can differ without rancor.

And P.S. Minnesota need not be ashamed it has provincials. What place doesn’t? Minnesota, remember, also produced Garrison Keillor. And Walter Mondale. And Eugene McCarthy. And Kate Millett.

And Judy Garland.

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