Covidiots

I've shared many times with friends the notion that if I were a German I would be a member of the SPD, the German Socialist Party. It's the oldest political party in Germany. I was drawn to the socialists early on not just because I think at the top of the list of America's problems is the lack of a fair distribution of wealth (on both moral and practical political grounds) but because I so admired the person of Willi Brandt and wanted to be associated with men and women of his stature.

Willi Brandt went way beyond most resistors to Hitler. He actually emigrated to Norway and joined the anti-German forces fighting the Nazis, changing his name from the original Herbert Frahm to Willi Brandt to avoid detection by Nazi agents (he made the change official in 1948 after the war.) He, like Marlene Dietrich and others who actively fought the Nazis from abroad, made many enemies among people who thought resistance to Hitler was appropriate, but still felt that joining enemy forces was unworthy, if not actual treason. (Think Jane Fonda and the Vietnam War.) Despite that resistance from the right wing, Brandt was elected chancellor of Germany in 1969. He had also been mayor of Berlin for a time.

 
What clinched it for me as a fan of his was his "Kniefall" - the time he fell on his knees when laying a wreath at the memorial to the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1970. I remember watching it on television in Japan and being moved to tears. His comment on the act later was, "At the abyss of German history and under the weight of millions of murdered people, I did what people do when language fails." A Japanese leader, I understand, copied the act years later when recognizing Japan's incursion into Korea. He got the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bring east and west together, always with strong opposition from the right. I love it that in America right-wingers would slap the label socialist on him, and miss the irony that this time they'd be right on.

The Socialist Party in Germany ran into some hard times recently before picking themselves up and winning the chancellorship again, with Olaf Scholz, in the last election, albeit in coalition with the Green Party (good show) and the libertarians (not so good show).

I have noted before, also, my admiration for Kevin Kühnert, the young guy who dropped out of college to head up the Young Socialists (Jusos). He's at the extreme left, opposed Scholz initially for being too far right, and advocates such things as not allowing people to own more than one house. He's now a member of the Bundestag for the district of Tempelhof/Schöneberg in Berlin. And here I show my bias. I like gay people who are smart and have an active social conscience. I love it that in the U.S. we didn't stop with Barney Frank, but have now even got a gay man in the president's cabinet. Germany's previous Health Minister was also a friend of Dorothy's.

But I'm getting carried away here. And being LGBT does not always signal a social conscience, alas - consider that Alice Weidel is one of the leaders of the AfD, for example. But I just wanted to endorse young Kevin in passing.

The two actual leaders (I don't know how they divide up the work) of the Socialist Party (it's actually not "socialist" but "democratic socialist" and even Kühnert calls himself a democratic socialist) are Lars Klingbeil and Saskia Esken. I really like these two politicians, as well.

Esken got into trouble last year for referring to the anti-vaxxers and Querdenkers opposed to masking and distancing as "Covidiots" on Twitter and the Berlin Attorney General's office reviewed the charges. They then dismissed them, arguing that as a German citizen she had a right to free speech.

My pro-German sympathies continue apace as long as these people are in charge.

Tokyo recognizes same-sex unions; Chile goes one better

OK. I'll march in the parade.

Why not? I don't want to be one of those glass-half-empty types, people who see the dark side of things before begrudgingly admitting there is cause for celebration and blowing out the happy candles.

At the same time, I can't deny that "a same-sex partner system (sic)" is not something I want to jump up and down over. Much less wait another year for.

The city of Tokyo has just announced that it will recognize same-sex unions, along with five other prefectures (Tokyo is a 'city-state').

And, as if to further call attention to the johnny-come-lately feature of such legislation, Tokyo's governor, Yuriko Koike explains the rationale this way: "It will help alleviate problems in daily life and promote the understanding of gender diversity in Tokyo."

Why do I feel like somebody's offering me crumbs? Why must I stand, hat in hand, like Oliver, and beg, "Please, sir, may I have some more?"

I hear you, fellow LGBT people who have fought so long and so hard to get this far. You want me to be grateful for the progress in this fundamentally socially conservative nation. You want to sing and dance, pop the champagne corks, maybe shoot off a few firecrackers. I apologize if I'm raining on your parade.

When I went to Tokyo for the first time, in 1970, I had to go back into the closet as a gay man. Had to recognize that the (relatively) gay-friendly world I had left behind in San Francisco was not the same world I was coming into. It took a bit of adjusting before I realized Japan was not all that bad. It had, like many places colonized culturally by the Christian West, taken on a homophobia not native to the islands. I remember my minister of the church I grew up in explaining to us once that when he went to Japan with the occupation forces they had a hell of a time convincing the Japanese not to strip in the aisles and get into their pajamas before climbing into bed in the sleeper trains. "They have no shame," he explained, mournfully.

And once the occupation was over, and Japan was free to go its own way again, the homophobia lingered. Today (i.e., 1970) to be openly gay was the equivalent of shouting obscenities while walking down the public streets. Not the worst thing in the world, but certainly not the kind of thing nice people do. Here too, I was faced with being a grouch for pointing that out, though, rather than recognizing that while I was able to be more open about being gay in San Francisco, in Japan I didn't have to worry that if I found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time I might be met by a bunch of thugs insecure enough about their sexuality to want to beat the daylights out of me. In fact, the fact that viewing being gay as little more than bad taste was probably the reason Japan saw no need for what we saw as gay liberation, and the reason it has taken another half century for this day to arrive, when lesbians and gays can be granted a "system" - marriage will surely come in time - for going through life with a same-sex life-partner.

So yes, I'll march in the parade. And yes, I'll toast the progress. And yes, I'm delighted to see Japan take a step closer to Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Uruguay in recognizing the right for same-sex couples to marry. Some of these countries have less than full equal access to the institution of marriage in some parts of them, but all of them show Japan there is more they can do to give lesbians and gays a way out of second-class status as citizens of a democracy.

In the meantime, yes, I'll march in the parade. I'll carry a sign. I'll look on the bright side and stress the fact that not only are there more ways to achieve civic equality than we are currently taking advantage of, there are indications that we're on our way to getting there. And we should not surrender (I'm obviously addressing myself here) to the temptation of snarking over what isn't to the point that we miss what is.

One day in 1861 Russia was a country made up of large numbers of serfs. The next day Tsar Alexander freed them. At one point in the history of the United States people of color were slaves. Some day in the future, legislators will stop trying to remove their right to vote. Things take time.

photo credit

and P.S., while I was focusing on these small steps in Japan, a bigger story was happening across the big blue waters in Chile: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/world/americas/chile-gay-marriage.html

The anti-vaxxer plague

One of my Bill-friends (I have several of them) just sent me a link to a Guardian article on the German and Austrian weakness for what I call homeopathic silliness, and others call thinking outside the box. It's worth a read.

The past couple of weeks I've been preoccupied with the news from Germany. The number one topic is Covid and the number two topic, what will the new government be like, usually ends up centering on Covid, as well.

In my personal life, I find myself fighting despair over all the evidence that Americans, to an alarming degree, have surrendered to fear, circus, and conspiracy theories, and I have looked to Germany to pick my spirits up. Their approach to science and truth has long been a counterbalance to American folly, for me. That is no longer the case. I now find myself reflecting over and again on how similar the two populations are.

In the midst of this struggle to juggle each new piece of insight into German and American behavior and thought, I am deeply saddened by the fact that I've lost a friend over my approach to taking things in. He insists Americans are fools, plain and simple, and there is no such thing as an honest politician. I've lost his friendship over protests that he focuses too little on the donut, too much on the hole. I persist in thinking - it's my reaction to despair - that we should live by the metaphor of the blind men and the elephant, that none of us ever see the whole picture. And I conclude from that that we can be our own worst enemies by believing we know more than we do, that we need to keep nuanced thinking at all costs, and not throw in the towel prematurely on what appears to be ingrained folly as a national characteristic.

This is a philosophical orientation, and it's based on faith, something I rail loudly against much of the time. I don't like ideological thinking, but at the same time I recognize I cannot rid myself of the notion that the insane, the Republicans, the Christian nationalists, the white supremacists - carve out whichever section of the population you will, are running the asylum. My friend's ghosting of me is ironic. I actually agree with him much of the time. We're all doomed if we go on like this!

Particularly discouraging is the fact that while I want to focus on the John Lewises and the Pete Buttigiegs and the Stacey Abramses and all the many politicians standing up to American political folly and not let the Ted Cruzes and the Rand Pauls and Ron De Santises stand in as representative, I feel the left has pulled the rug out from under me. In the U.S., our tendency to tout individual rights over collective responsibilities is a chronic disease.  A co-morbidity with the Corona virus, this anti-vaxxer ("I got my rights!") nonsense. And in Germany, particularly in Saxony and Thuringia, where they are still fighting the ghost of intrusive statism, the mistrust of government spills over into mistrust of science. Otherwise decent, smart people are ignoring what I take to be common sense medical advice. They are not listening to the clear consensus. Even as Angela Merkel is celebrated and praised for her "steady hand" and "desire to get everybody around the table" she's criticized for inaction in preparing the country for the pandemic. One can't win for losing on that front.

And what can we do other than stand by and hope we continue to survive long enough to gain even more benefit of hindsight. Those who listened to the business sector and opened things up at the earliest sign the pandemic was waning now have egg on their face. They are now justifiably criticized for failing to realize a drop in the number of Covid cases was only seasonal and would rise again, and opening up too soon would lead to disaster. We know that now from the German example. But, as Merkel is fond of reminding us, "You can't do much without a majority."

Watching the debates on German television, watching politicians and social analysts rage at each other over their different approaches to fixing things, is heartbreaking sometimes. We simply lack the ability to see the future, and we make bad policy all the time. It's not that the Germans are stupid for being anti-vaxxers, as so many of them are; it's not that Americans are stupid for not being able to see that collective responsibility is as important as individual freedom. It's that the human race is lousy at long-term thinking. The chief freedom of democracy, I've always believed, is the freedom to be stupid. We see that in that marvelous assertion, "I disagree with you totally, but I'll fight to the death for your freedom to express yourself." But at the moment, in a life-and-death situation, we see the advantage of enlightened, as opposed to democratic, rule. It's a time to be smart, not a time to be free.

Let me restate that. It's time to remind ourselves that our right to swing our fists stops at the end of your nose.