One of the more troubling debates I’ve had in the past eight years has been over whether Ralph Nader should have run for president. On principle, the answer is, “Of course, he should.” Particularly if you agree that he is a voice of sanity in a political system that is corrupt, dirty and dysfunctional.
It makes it harder to sleep at night, but I have come down on the other side. I think we have no choice but to accept politics as dirty and get real about how elections are won, and do the best we can with the imperfect instrument. When you consider the very strong likelihood that we would never have attacked Iraq if Gore had won, and if you think the argument holds water that Nader greased the skids on which Bush rode into office, well…
If you do buy that argument, I think you have to see Hillary Clinton in the same light. Watching her totin’ guns (metaphorically) and tossing back a whisky and a beer (in fact) to impress Pennsylvania voters she’s one of them and not a champagne-and-brie elitist San Franciscan (why does that always translate into fag?) is enough to make you want to dump your cookies onto the sidewalk.
I hope and pray this is just another media jackoff and it will all pass and Obama will not be hurt. As E. J. Dionne says in this morning’s paper, it was a bad slip to use the words bitter and cling to refer to the bitter folk of the rust belt who cling to traditional verities like religion and the fear of outsiders instead of kissing ass and telling them as politicians are supposed to do that he likes to kill deer as much as Hillary does and tie one on afterwards.
What did he do that was so wrong? He told the damned truth yet again. Brought out into the open the fact that America’s industry has been hollowed out and the working folk of Pennsylvania (and Michigan and Indiana and all kinds of other poor-and-getting-poorer places) are stuck in a downward spiral and ignored by both the Bushes and the Clintons and their globalized economy reasoning. The man was trying to outline the problem. E. J. Dionne put his finger on it. He was too much social analyst, too little politico.
OK, so I’m a champagne-and-brie fag from San Francisco, so I’m mouthing off, you might say with considerable justification, from the wrong side of the tracks here. But what’s giving me serious heartburn these days is the verve with which Hillary is providing Republicans with what they will need to win the election. She’s pulling a Nader.
Nader, at least, had his heart in the right place. Like Obama, too much good guy, too little politician, he at least had principles. Hillary, it seems, in her damn the torpedos desperation, has none other than a faith that a pyrrhic victory is better than none. If she doesn’t win the nomination, she seems to be saying, it might as well go to McCain.
I know she’s caught between a rock and a hard place. I know she has to fight hard and maybe dirty to win. But hard and dirty should not have to amount to stupid. It should not mean destroy the democratic party and its very likely presidential candidate in the process.
As all sorts of people have pointed out in the past couple days, for any Clinton, especially a Wellesley/Yale Clinton with an income of over $100 million in the past seven years, to call the son of a single mother who made his start in the streets of South Chicago an elitist, makes her look wildly hypocritical. Pretending to be happy with guns after her husband worked so hard to control them shows that she actually is hypocritical.
She claims that Obama is looking down his nose at the poor rural sods of Pennsylvania. He should not do that, she says. He should embrace them as equals and not suggest he is any better than they are. And she, in her Annie Oakley persona and her whiskey with a beer chaser doesn’t appear to understand that she’s right about these deerhunters. They aren’t stupid. They can see through her act. And which democratic presidential candidate, I wonder, will they see as the greater condescender?
And all McCain has to do is sit there and watch her do his job for him. “Like she says.” “I’m with that lady.” Right. The Republican, whose party has just had eight years widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots of America, will now be able to say, “Don’t argue with me – my information comes from your own Hillary Clinton!”
And we’ll have four more years of Republican administration. More conservatives in the courts. More religion in the schools. More bailing out of corporate America. More long-as-it-takes troops in Iraq. More tax policies like Alabama’s, where the poorest 1% pay 11% of their income on taxes on things like milk and groceries and the richest 1% pay 4%. More tree chopping in the national parks and oil drilling off the coast. More, more, more of the same.
Of course, she could pull it off. She could win the nomination with these tactics. And the election.
For me that feels an awful lot like putting your entire retirement income up against a toss of the dice.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Sunday, April 13, 2008
The Pope is Coming, The Pope is Coming
I had a love affair in my head with old Papa Giovanni, the 23rd. I loved his homely face. Looked into it and imagined I was seeing a truly spiritual man. Followed his visit to the Regina Coeli prison in Rome with admiration, and had a dream once I was sitting on a patio next to a swimming pool in Castelgandolfo talking about whether it is necessary to be catholic to be saved.
I think I was in love with the man. I was twenty years old and really screwed up sexually and lost and clueless and very much drawn to the Catholic Church – although sufficiently grounded in Protestantism to ever quite make the jump. I have wondered long and hard how it is one can fall in love with a roly-poly old grandfather type, but that is a topic for another day.
I was in Rome in 1960 and ran into a priest at the American College who managed to get me a ticket to Easter Mass at the Vatican, and I somehow got in right up close, just to the left of the altar. In front of me were a gaggle of Irish nuns who swooned every time he looked our way. When he elevated the host in our direction, one of them actually fainted and fell off the bench she was standing on. I was grateful to have Giovanni back in full view.
That was before Vatican II, and I had no clue what was coming, both in my life and in the life of the Church. I would come out as gay and come to look upon the Church with ever more hostility, as homophobia in the world around me lessened and as the Church hardened its stand. I began to read Hans Küng and people like Gary Wills who were resisting orthodoxy and papal authoritarianism within the church, but insisting the church still merited their love and affection. And horror stories, like Michael Walsh’s book on Opus Dei, angry histories like Susan Zuccotti’s Under His Very Windows on the failure of the Vatican to do the right thing for the Jews, or the story of Edgardo Mortara, the little Jewish boy kidnapped by the same pope who launched Vatican I and declared himself infallible. And more sober accounts of crisis like Peter Steinfels’ A People Adrift.
My celebrity fascination didn’t stop with John XXIII. I was at a gay pride march once in San Francisco with a contingent from Santa Cruz. After the parade we all gathered around a table in a coffee shop, about thirty of us, heady from the experience of the parade, almost elated. For some reason the conversation got around to John Paul II, possibly because he had just been made pope.
Without thinking, I said, “What an interesting man!” I didn’t get past those four words. Somebody immediately jumped down my throat, and the rest jumped in after. I never in my life saw a crowd turn like that. The pope! Not even the antichrist could generate such venom.
It was groupthink of the first order. I wonder how many of these men, if I had been having coffee with them alone, might have gotten to the point of separating out the man who fought both nazism and communism, who was interested in theater in his youth, and who later would be raced to a hospital after being shot in Vatican Square by some nutball Turk. But I never got the chance, so great was the hostility, and I was never quite able to regain my standing in the group thereafter.
For me it’s kind of like the commentary about what a fine fellow this George W. Bush is. How much he makes you feel like one of the boys, teases you, makes you want to kick back and have a beer. And then he goes and puts a country through a paper shredder, opens it up to terrorism while claiming to be the world’s only true leader against terrorism, does a Mugabe-like job on the U.S. economy, the environment, human rights...
There is a difference, though, for me. I can’t stand the sight of Bush. Don’t like his looks. Don’t like his style. Don’t like anything about the man, but I fall in love with Angelo Roncalli (John the 23rd), develop an arm’s length respect for Woytila, and for the life of me, I can’t help looking at Ratzinger and seeing a kindly professor.
I am surrounded by friends who grew up in catholic schools and see their childhood indoctrination as pure poison. I live out every day wishing the ground that is eroding under the gaybashers would erode just a little faster. I know Catholics, Mormons, and Evangelicals all argue one should “love the sinner, hate the sin” and think that stance suffices to distance themselves from the bashers. But they’re wrong. They remain powerful enablers.
One does well to be cautious of those who see sin in you you know is not there, especially when they organize into an institution, which then gets control of the press, the schools, the minds of those who live by bumper sticker principles. Ideas regarding birth control, the role of women, homosexuality, are social constructions – cultural conceits which evolve over time. This man coming to town wants you to believe this is not the case.
The New York Times headline reads: “Hard-Liner With Soft Touch Reaches Out to U.S. Flock”
Flock?
Has anybody noticed the world has changed, and the metaphor of the loving shepherd tending his sheep has given way to words like sheepish, herd mentality and like sheep to the slaughter? The metaphor doesn’t work well any more because the culture has changed. The dichotomy of the authoritarian father/shepherd and the innocent child/lamb is yielding, if oh so slowly, to greater individual responsibility for one’s own beliefs and actions. It’s a lonely place. But it’s an adult place.
Turn the tables.
Love the man. But don’t let the doctrine destroy your appreciation of the absurd, your embrace of the imaginative, your admiration for wisdom in diversity, or your love of life.
I think I was in love with the man. I was twenty years old and really screwed up sexually and lost and clueless and very much drawn to the Catholic Church – although sufficiently grounded in Protestantism to ever quite make the jump. I have wondered long and hard how it is one can fall in love with a roly-poly old grandfather type, but that is a topic for another day.
I was in Rome in 1960 and ran into a priest at the American College who managed to get me a ticket to Easter Mass at the Vatican, and I somehow got in right up close, just to the left of the altar. In front of me were a gaggle of Irish nuns who swooned every time he looked our way. When he elevated the host in our direction, one of them actually fainted and fell off the bench she was standing on. I was grateful to have Giovanni back in full view.
That was before Vatican II, and I had no clue what was coming, both in my life and in the life of the Church. I would come out as gay and come to look upon the Church with ever more hostility, as homophobia in the world around me lessened and as the Church hardened its stand. I began to read Hans Küng and people like Gary Wills who were resisting orthodoxy and papal authoritarianism within the church, but insisting the church still merited their love and affection. And horror stories, like Michael Walsh’s book on Opus Dei, angry histories like Susan Zuccotti’s Under His Very Windows on the failure of the Vatican to do the right thing for the Jews, or the story of Edgardo Mortara, the little Jewish boy kidnapped by the same pope who launched Vatican I and declared himself infallible. And more sober accounts of crisis like Peter Steinfels’ A People Adrift.
My celebrity fascination didn’t stop with John XXIII. I was at a gay pride march once in San Francisco with a contingent from Santa Cruz. After the parade we all gathered around a table in a coffee shop, about thirty of us, heady from the experience of the parade, almost elated. For some reason the conversation got around to John Paul II, possibly because he had just been made pope.
Without thinking, I said, “What an interesting man!” I didn’t get past those four words. Somebody immediately jumped down my throat, and the rest jumped in after. I never in my life saw a crowd turn like that. The pope! Not even the antichrist could generate such venom.
It was groupthink of the first order. I wonder how many of these men, if I had been having coffee with them alone, might have gotten to the point of separating out the man who fought both nazism and communism, who was interested in theater in his youth, and who later would be raced to a hospital after being shot in Vatican Square by some nutball Turk. But I never got the chance, so great was the hostility, and I was never quite able to regain my standing in the group thereafter.
For me it’s kind of like the commentary about what a fine fellow this George W. Bush is. How much he makes you feel like one of the boys, teases you, makes you want to kick back and have a beer. And then he goes and puts a country through a paper shredder, opens it up to terrorism while claiming to be the world’s only true leader against terrorism, does a Mugabe-like job on the U.S. economy, the environment, human rights...
There is a difference, though, for me. I can’t stand the sight of Bush. Don’t like his looks. Don’t like his style. Don’t like anything about the man, but I fall in love with Angelo Roncalli (John the 23rd), develop an arm’s length respect for Woytila, and for the life of me, I can’t help looking at Ratzinger and seeing a kindly professor.
I am surrounded by friends who grew up in catholic schools and see their childhood indoctrination as pure poison. I live out every day wishing the ground that is eroding under the gaybashers would erode just a little faster. I know Catholics, Mormons, and Evangelicals all argue one should “love the sinner, hate the sin” and think that stance suffices to distance themselves from the bashers. But they’re wrong. They remain powerful enablers.
One does well to be cautious of those who see sin in you you know is not there, especially when they organize into an institution, which then gets control of the press, the schools, the minds of those who live by bumper sticker principles. Ideas regarding birth control, the role of women, homosexuality, are social constructions – cultural conceits which evolve over time. This man coming to town wants you to believe this is not the case.
The New York Times headline reads: “Hard-Liner With Soft Touch Reaches Out to U.S. Flock”
Flock?
Has anybody noticed the world has changed, and the metaphor of the loving shepherd tending his sheep has given way to words like sheepish, herd mentality and like sheep to the slaughter? The metaphor doesn’t work well any more because the culture has changed. The dichotomy of the authoritarian father/shepherd and the innocent child/lamb is yielding, if oh so slowly, to greater individual responsibility for one’s own beliefs and actions. It’s a lonely place. But it’s an adult place.
Turn the tables.
Love the man. But don’t let the doctrine destroy your appreciation of the absurd, your embrace of the imaginative, your admiration for wisdom in diversity, or your love of life.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
The Wheels, They Grind Exceeding Slow
Came across several news items in the past couple of days which suggest marriage equality is on track. Just moving agonizingly slowly.
Least encouraging, but not entirely unsatisfying, is an interview in the latest Advocate with Barack Obama. The interviewer asks him if he shares the view of so many that civil unions are sufficient, that gays don’t need to push for marriage. Barack’s answer is right on. He references Martin Luther King’s “justice delayed is justice denied” quote. “I’m very mindful of Dr. King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, where he says to the white clergy, "Don’t tell me to wait for my freedom." He then goes on to remind people that Kennedy did not push to repeal the anti-miscegenation laws, suggesting things have to take their time.
So what is it, Barack, I want to ask. Now would be nice but maybe later? Even though later means not now? "Not now” is always a very bitter pill when you sense the time has come at long last.
But reading through the tone he takes in the interview, I am persuaded once again Obama is the man for the job. This would appear to be a good sample of his skill in not giving you what you want and making you appreciate he has other fish to fry. No small feat.
There was good news in New York recently, where an appeals court vacated a law passed last year which barred New York from recognizing same sex marriages registered out of state. This puts New York in the running for full marriage equality as they have in Massachusetts. And neck-in-neck with Iowa, where it has been approved by the legislature but is currently hung up in court. And possibly Connecticut, where a decision is imminent. And hopefully California, where the decision is due in early June.
Spitzer had introduced a marriage equality bill into the New York State Legislature, where it passed the Democratic controlled Assembly but failed to be taken up by the Republican controlled Senate.
Meanwhile, here in California, we read the good news that Arnold the Governator has come down on the side of marriage equality this time by stating clearly that he would oppose a state amendment to outlaw same sex marriage in the constitution. Such a constitutional amendment, if passed (unlike on the national level, it requires only a majority), could potentially overrule a Supreme Court decision that gays have the right to marriage, if they come to that decision. The misnamed “family defenders” are out in force already, not waiting for the decision.
But so are the marriage equality folk, God Bless.
Damn, it would be nice to have this struggle behind us.
Least encouraging, but not entirely unsatisfying, is an interview in the latest Advocate with Barack Obama. The interviewer asks him if he shares the view of so many that civil unions are sufficient, that gays don’t need to push for marriage. Barack’s answer is right on. He references Martin Luther King’s “justice delayed is justice denied” quote. “I’m very mindful of Dr. King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, where he says to the white clergy, "Don’t tell me to wait for my freedom." He then goes on to remind people that Kennedy did not push to repeal the anti-miscegenation laws, suggesting things have to take their time.
So what is it, Barack, I want to ask. Now would be nice but maybe later? Even though later means not now? "Not now” is always a very bitter pill when you sense the time has come at long last.
But reading through the tone he takes in the interview, I am persuaded once again Obama is the man for the job. This would appear to be a good sample of his skill in not giving you what you want and making you appreciate he has other fish to fry. No small feat.
There was good news in New York recently, where an appeals court vacated a law passed last year which barred New York from recognizing same sex marriages registered out of state. This puts New York in the running for full marriage equality as they have in Massachusetts. And neck-in-neck with Iowa, where it has been approved by the legislature but is currently hung up in court. And possibly Connecticut, where a decision is imminent. And hopefully California, where the decision is due in early June.
Spitzer had introduced a marriage equality bill into the New York State Legislature, where it passed the Democratic controlled Assembly but failed to be taken up by the Republican controlled Senate.
Meanwhile, here in California, we read the good news that Arnold the Governator has come down on the side of marriage equality this time by stating clearly that he would oppose a state amendment to outlaw same sex marriage in the constitution. Such a constitutional amendment, if passed (unlike on the national level, it requires only a majority), could potentially overrule a Supreme Court decision that gays have the right to marriage, if they come to that decision. The misnamed “family defenders” are out in force already, not waiting for the decision.
But so are the marriage equality folk, God Bless.
Damn, it would be nice to have this struggle behind us.
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